#162 Leif Babin - What Leadership Looks Like in the World’s Deadliest Warzones

Speaker 1 This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize Pick is making sports season even more fun.
On Prize Picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be right.

Speaker 1 And right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use.
Pick two or more players, pick more or less on their stat projections.

Speaker 1 Anything from touchdown to threes, and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePicks, Prize America's number one daily fantasy sports app.

Speaker 1 PrizePicks is available in 40-plus states, including California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe, and secure.

Speaker 4 Download the PrizePicks app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

Speaker 4 PrizePicks, it's good to be right. Must be present in a certain six.
Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and

Speaker 3 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance. Business owners meet Progressive Insurance.

Speaker 3 They make it easy to get discounts on commercial auto insurance and find coverages to grow with your business. Quote in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

Speaker 3 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers. Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 6 Laf Babin, welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 5 Thanks for having me, Sean.

Speaker 6 It's an honor to have you here.

Speaker 5 It's an honor to be here. It is.

Speaker 6 And,

Speaker 6 man, we've got history together. We went through Buds together.
I'm sure we'll get into some of that. But,

Speaker 6 man, I just

Speaker 6 I've been following you for a long time, man, and what you're doing. And you're just putting out amazing stuff.

Speaker 6 And I think you're a great example for veterans and SEALs coming out of the teams and anybody coming out of the military. You know,

Speaker 6 we both know

Speaker 6 it's a big struggle for a lot of people. And to have

Speaker 6 good examples to follow and

Speaker 6 good leaders like yourself,

Speaker 6 it's just, it's really cool, man,

Speaker 6 what you've accomplished and what you've done after the teams. And

Speaker 6 I just, I want to commend you for that.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Sean. That means a ton to me.
That means so much coming from you. And I'm so proud of you and your success and

Speaker 5 the powerful voice that you have been for so many great stories

Speaker 5 and how you've represented

Speaker 5 as a teammate, how you represent the SEAL teams, how you represent the veteran community.

Speaker 5 And it's great to reconnect with you. It's been way too long.

Speaker 5 And man, I was thinking about all the history that

Speaker 5 we had through our time together in Buds and what a great time that was. Like what an incredible time

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 our class and what people went on to do, and the combat that you saw, and so many others saw, and were a part of.

Speaker 5 But just

Speaker 5 can't tell you how excited I am to be here with you. And I'm proud of you and all that you're doing and honored to call you a friend.

Speaker 6 Thank you, brother. Feelings are definitely mutual.
And like I said, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. So, but

Speaker 6 everybody starts off with an introduction here. So

Speaker 6 let me get to yours.

Speaker 6 Laif Babbin, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, served 13 years in the Navy, nine of which were in the SEAL team's several deployments to Iraq with the infamous task unit Bruiser.

Speaker 6 You are the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Extreme Ownership. the number one New York Times bestseller, Extreme Ownership, How U.S.
Navy SEALs Led and Win, and the number one national

Speaker 6 bestseller, The Dichotomy dichotomy of leadership with Jocko. You are the co-founder of Echelon Front and currently serving as president.

Speaker 6 You're the recipient of the Silver Star, two bronze stars, and a purple heart. You are a husband, a father to three kids, and a Christian man.

Speaker 6 Am I missing anything? I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit.

Speaker 5 No, that's it, man. I think being a husband, father, and a Christian, I think are the most important aspects of that entire bio there.
I I think those are the most important jobs I've had. And

Speaker 5 I was lucky enough to serve with some incredible people,

Speaker 5 you know, like yourself going through training and then on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 And I'm just honored to be able to share some of those lessons learned with others around the world and to see people that can take and apply some of the leadership lessons that we learn on the battlefield and their lives.

Speaker 5 I'm humbling and mystified about how, you know, just how far and wide that has spread and the impact it's had. And

Speaker 5 it's incredible to me to see that. And that's kind of what keeps us going.
That's our mission of why.

Speaker 5 And I get to honor the teammates that I lost and talk about their legacies and all that they did and how they lived.

Speaker 6 We have a lot to dive into. We have a lot to dive into.
And

Speaker 6 so in the interview, I want to, that's what I want to do. I want to cover your life story, your time in the teams.
I mean, I've heard,

Speaker 6 I wasn't there, but I've heard a lot, a lot of amazing things about tasking at Bruiser. I had, you know, several friends that we went through buds with that wound up serving with you and under you.

Speaker 6 And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 once again, I just,

Speaker 6 you hear a lot of shit about a lot of people, you know, in the teams and

Speaker 6 especially officers. And,

Speaker 6 man, I've just,

Speaker 6 you always come like highly recommended. And your guys just, you guys fucking love you, man and it's it's really cool to see that you don't see that in a lot of

Speaker 5 in a lot of platoons i don't think not like what i hear about yours and so um i can't wait to dive into that but that's the highest compliment you could ever pay me man and uh i i love i love those guys i do anything for them and uh it's it's uh just the honor my lifetime was to was to serve uh serve with some awesome awesome teammates

Speaker 6 so we have a patreon and Patreon is our,

Speaker 6 they are, it's our subscription network and they are our top supporters. A lot of them have been with us since the beginning.
And one of the things.

Speaker 5 I'm proud to be a member.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Thank you for being a member.

Speaker 6 They will be ecstatic to know that you're in there. But so you know,

Speaker 6 I offer them the opportunity to ask each guest a question.

Speaker 6 And usually I only pick one, but for you, there were a lot of good questions. And so I think we're gonna we might do three here first question is from

Speaker 6 charlton clark

Speaker 6 what are three words that encapsulate a powerful leader and why

Speaker 5 three words that encapsulate a powerful leader and why

Speaker 5 I think the three words,

Speaker 5 the three most powerful words are, it's my fault.

Speaker 5 It's my fault. And I think as a leader, recognizing that you are responsible for everything that your team does or doesn't do,

Speaker 5 just as a dad, you know, or a spouse,

Speaker 5 you're responsible for everything that your family does. And I think that understanding this concept that we call extreme ownership.

Speaker 5 Man, our ego is such a powerful driver in the world. And it wants us to point fingers or cast blame or make excuses or say, hey, look at that guy over there.
He's more successful than me.

Speaker 5 Well, he got lucky or he got this break or he started with some advantage that I didn't have.

Speaker 5 Instead of actually, and when you do that, what you do is you don't actually take action to correct the problem, to actually implement solutions to fix that going forward. And so.

Speaker 5 I think when you accept ownership for every single thing that happens in your world,

Speaker 5 every single thing that impacts your mission, then you could actually take action to solve problems, constantly learn, constantly grow, constantly improve.

Speaker 5 And I think that that makes all the difference.

Speaker 6 Man,

Speaker 6 that's great advice. Thank you.

Speaker 6 Stephen Casey, what is the most significant leadership principle you have seen that is essential, but has problems transitioning or translating from the military to civilian situations?

Speaker 5 That's a great question.

Speaker 5 I think

Speaker 5 initially, I thought that this concept that we call cover and move,

Speaker 5 which is teamwork, right? We're working together as a team. You and I are trying to move across the street under fire.
You're laying down suppressive fire so I can move.

Speaker 5 And then when I get across the street, I lay down suppressive fire so that, you know, so that you can move. Like we're covering and moving.
We're leapfrogging. We're mutually supporting one another.

Speaker 5 You know, when Jocko and I first launched Echelon Front, our leadership consulting company, we went in to talk to a corporate.

Speaker 5 a business and uh

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 we thought man should we even talk about this concept like how does does that even apply? And, you know, we're talking, this is a gunfighting tactic from the battlefield.

Speaker 5 And the moment that, you know, the senior executive team is telling us how, you know, the sales team and the production team, you know, are like, they're not on the same page and they're blaming each other and they're pointing fingers at each other.

Speaker 5 And the marketing team is saying, well, the sales isn't selling that. And the sales team is saying, well, marketing is not actually setting us up for success.

Speaker 5 You got a bunch of finger pointing, a bunch of blame casting. And we say, okay, let's talk about this concept of cover and move.

Speaker 5 And they said, hey, that's exactly what I need you to teach to my team. And so it's really just the recognition that it's not about you.
It's about the overall team and the overall mission. And

Speaker 5 that applies to your family. I mean,

Speaker 5 when you see

Speaker 5 your wife or your spouse, it's like...

Speaker 5 struggling or frustrated with the kids or something that's going on on the home front and you can say, hey, okay, those school applications are taking a long time and you got a bunch of stuff on your plate.

Speaker 5 Why don't you let me just take that off your plate? I'll take that. I'll run with it.

Speaker 5 That's cover move in action. You can actually, you're working together as a team, mutually supporting one another in order to accomplish a mission and win.

Speaker 5 And I think initially we weren't sure how that would apply

Speaker 5 in the civilian world. And it absolutely does.

Speaker 5 I think one that's harder to apply is what we call our fourth law of combat, and that's decentralized command.

Speaker 5 Decentralized command is a, you know, the, the, obviously something you're familiar with being in the military. It just simply means that everybody leads.

Speaker 5 And I think a lot of times when you talk to a, you know, a leader that wants to control everything, they want to do everything, obviously that doesn't work on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 And that's one of the strength of the SEAL teams and special operations units. You've got thinking shooters.

Speaker 5 I mean, even going through buds together when you were 18 years old, you're a smart, capable, talented individual that just because I'm the officer and I'm in charge, like I need you to be able to step up and make calls.

Speaker 5 I need you to be able to solve problems. I need you to be able to move the team forward in a positive direction.
I can't make all the calls.

Speaker 5 I can't, you know, if you're just sitting and waiting for me to tell you what to do, that doesn't work. So

Speaker 5 that's a concept that's hard to get across in the civilian world. People say, well, I don't trust my team or, you know, they don't have a strong relationship.

Speaker 5 So we help them work to build those relationships. It's all based on the strength of relationships.
It's built on trust.

Speaker 5 When people understand not just what to do, but why they're doing it, you know, what we call commander's intent, the military, the purpose and the goal and the end state.

Speaker 5 But oftentimes now we start to see leaders when in the civilian world, they'll release the authority, they give people ownership and they kind of let people run with stuff.

Speaker 5 The problem is they get too detached. They get too far away.
And so it's always a balance, right? It's a dichotomy and you're getting pulled in different directions.

Speaker 5 So you want to be detached as a leader. You want to step back.
You want to let your people step up and lead and run with a plan and execute the plan, give them ownership of the plan.

Speaker 5 But you can't be so detached. You can't be so detached that you don't know what's going on.
You're too attached from the challenges and problems. And then you can't actually support your team.

Speaker 5 You can't guide your team. You can't actually step in and help them.

Speaker 5 You know, if you're not even familiar with the challenges, or you can't see when they're getting off track and you maybe need to help redirect them.

Speaker 6 When you're talking, I'm just curious, this is a personal question. When you're talking about, when you're relating stuff back to

Speaker 6 Ramadi or gunfighting scenarios,

Speaker 6 because it sounds like you guys kind of do that,

Speaker 5 how quick,

Speaker 6 I mean, how fast do civilian types wrap their head around what you're teaching them when you're using those analogies

Speaker 5 pretty fast pretty fast usually um i think initially some people will think

Speaker 5 i guess i can put it this way the the biggest excuse is that i think the biggest excuse that any of us give ourselves me included is that it's harder for me than it is for other people And so, yeah, Sean's maybe experienced some things on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 Well, how does that really apply to me? Or, hey, you've done some things in your life and you have some good lessons learned, but that doesn't really apply to me. I have a different situation.

Speaker 5 Instead of keeping an open mind, instead of saying, oh, what can I learn from Sean?

Speaker 5 What does he experience? How can that apply to my world? What lesson can I take and apply to that? And

Speaker 5 before Jocko and I wrote the book, Extreme Ownership, I'd have a lot of that. Businesses would say things like, well,

Speaker 5 how are you going to translate this to the business world?

Speaker 5 They would say that over and over again. Tell me how you're going to translate these combat leadership lessons to the business world.

Speaker 5 And I think once they read Extreme Ownership, they realized that the hardest part about combat leadership is it's not about planning, executing missions under fire.

Speaker 5 It's not about maneuvering troops with bullets flying over your head.

Speaker 5 The hardest part about a combat, the hardest part about combat leadership is getting a diverse group of people with different skill sets and different agendas and different perspectives to work together as a team to accomplish a mission.

Speaker 5 And obviously that applies to any team in any situation.

Speaker 5 It's people. It's actually getting people to actually work together as a team, put their own egos and their own agendas aside and put the mission first.

Speaker 5 And I think that's what makes the SEAL teams great. Certainly the best units in the SEAL teams have that, right?

Speaker 5 They put the team and the mission before anything else.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it's not about them as an individual, right? It's about the team. They're going to sacrifice for the team.
They're going to sacrifice for their brothers on that team. And so I think that

Speaker 5 when people realize that that's how these concepts translate, it's just about getting people to work together as a team to mutually support one another to accomplish a strategic goal.

Speaker 5 That applies to everything, everywhere.

Speaker 6 Makes a whole lot of sense. That's good to hear that they can comprehend it

Speaker 6 that fast.

Speaker 6 That's really cool.

Speaker 5 We do have people that push back.

Speaker 5 We'll come into a company. I was with a company a few weeks ago and they

Speaker 5 were

Speaker 5 there was half the room of several hundred leaders were female executives. And these lady executives, some of them were pretty skeptical.

Speaker 5 They told me afterward, hey, I was pretty skeptical about how this applies to me, how we were going to take these

Speaker 5 leadership concepts and apply them

Speaker 5 in our world.

Speaker 5 And they came up and said, this absolutely applies. We need more of this.
Wow. And so I think once people are just willing to open their mind, they realize that

Speaker 5 every problem that you face in life is a leadership problem.

Speaker 5 Your frustrations with your spouse, your frustrations with your kids, your friction points in the community, the frustration you have with your boss or the people on your team for not doing what you want them to do or the people outside of your immediate team that you depend on for support.

Speaker 5 These are all leadership problems.

Speaker 5 And I think once we think about those problems as leadership problems, then we can start to apply leadership to the point of friction, as the Marine Corps would say, to get those problems solved.

Speaker 5 But you see that what might seem like a hopeless problem actually is a solvable problem.

Speaker 5 problem interesting if you're my my boss and you're micromanaging me uh and i'm feeling like sean just needs to get off my back i'm being micromanaged and uh

Speaker 5 that's i feel like i'm in a hopeless situation well sean doesn't trust me what can i do about that he just needs to back off and and trust me let me do my job but if i realize that actually

Speaker 5 I control that situation,

Speaker 5 if I take extreme ownership of that situation and realize if you're, if what I'm feeling is micromanaged, you're asking me questions about what's going on.

Speaker 5 Well, that's because you care about the situation if i and you don't have enough information you need some more information so i start to take action to push more information your way to build a better relationship with you to talk to you about what what i'm doing and why i'm doing it to get some guidance on you so that or to get some guidance from you so i understand the strategic goal and that we can be aligned and if we do that then then i can get that problem solved all of a sudden you're like hey life you got it good to go Let me know how you want to do this.

Speaker 5 And so those check-ins become less frequent.

Speaker 5 And so what seems like an impossible situation actually is easily solvable the moment I put my ego in check and the moment I actually take ownership and I start to lead up the chain of command and apply leadership to get problems solved.

Speaker 6 Wow. That's great advice.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Buckle up because the biggest Black Ops ever is available now, Call of Duty Black Ops 7.

Speaker 2 With three epic game modes across co-op, campaign, multiplayer, and zombies, it's pushing the franchise into bold new territory.

Speaker 2 The all-new co-op campaign lets you play solo or with friends as you infiltrate Avalon, a high-tech stronghold on the brink.

Speaker 2 At launch, jump into 18 explosive multiplayer maps with exciting fast-paced movement. If you're looking for some undead action, the round-based zombies mode is back again with a twist.

Speaker 2 You'll fight through hordes of zombies as you drive the new wonder vehicle named Ol Tessie and wield a brand new wonder weapon. Black Ops 7 doesn't just evolve, it reinvents.

Speaker 2 If you thought you knew Call of Duty, get ready for something even bigger. Call of Duty Black Ops 7, available now.
Rated M for mature.

Speaker 2 Sore arches, pinched hose, and aching knees? Does that sound familiar? Brunt's boots were designed to end all of that. These aren't sneakers pretending to be work boots.

Speaker 2 They're built tough with real protection that stands up to the demands of the job. Brunt lets you try the boots on the job with free shipping on every product.
And it's not just boots.

Speaker 2 Brunt also makes high-performance workwear like durable pants and weather-resistant jackets that keep you protected and productive in any conditions.

Speaker 2 Join over 500,000 hardworking people who've already made the switch. With temps dropping and the holidays coming it's time to treat yourself or the hardworking man in your life to real comfort.

Speaker 2 Skip the throwaway gifts and get him something built to last. Brunt Workwear.
Our listeners get $10 off their entire order with code SRS at checkout. That's bruntworkwear.com and use code SRS.

Speaker 2 Order today and let them know you heard it here on the show.

Speaker 6 All right, Leif. One last thing.
I got one gift for you.

Speaker 6 Last one, I promise. And then we're getting to your story.
But just a little something for the ride home. Those are Vigilance League gummy bears.

Speaker 5 That's awesome.

Speaker 5 I've been looking forward to sampling these.

Speaker 6 I'm right on. Well, now you got some.

Speaker 5 Outstanding, man. I appreciate it.
Thanks, brother.

Speaker 6 You're welcome. But, all right, Lafe, we're going to, like I said, we're going to go into your life story.
And

Speaker 6 I have a feeling this is going to get really heavy. And

Speaker 6 think people are going to get

Speaker 6 a lot out of this episode. And so once again, I just want to say that I've really been looking forward to this.
And so

Speaker 6 let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Speaker 5 I grew up in a small town in southeast Texas in the piney woods called Woodville, Texas. And it was an awesome community to grow up.
And it was a small town, about 3,000 people. We had two stoplights.

Speaker 5 We had two dairy queens, which made us, I guess, big time at the time. But

Speaker 5 it was just a great place to grow up. You know, there was, if you wanted to go to a fancy restaurant or a movie theater, you had to drive more than an hour away.

Speaker 5 But I loved it. I mean, I spent all my childhood playing in the woods,

Speaker 5 playing some kind of combat, the woods, throwing spears at each other, building forts.

Speaker 5 People sometimes asked me if we played cowboys and Indians. We actually were in.
We were all Indians all the time. Everyone, no one wanted to be a cowboy.
Everyone was an Indian.

Speaker 5 And so we were, we were the Native American warriors out there patrolling the woods, setting booby traps for my mom to like fall in in our backyard.

Speaker 5 And we lived in a great neighborhood with just kind of woods behind the neighborhood. And we were just constantly in the woods playing and

Speaker 5 out from like sunup to sundown. My mom had a whistle that she would blow.
And we had to be within hearing distance of the whistle, which was...

Speaker 5 I pushed that pretty regularly, but you could hear that whistle. We'd come back.

Speaker 5 And I grew up in a great household. My mom and and dad were loving, wonderful parents.

Speaker 5 They really took their job seriously as

Speaker 5 my dad was the town dentist.

Speaker 5 And he had a busy job. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and then a part-time school teacher and school librarian.
But they really just poured into me and my brother and three sisters.

Speaker 5 We had a big family and they just took that as their primary job is raising us

Speaker 5 upright.

Speaker 5 You know, the proverbs, train up a child in the way he will go and when he's older, and not apart from that, I think they took that very seriously and really set an amazing example for me, you know, as a mother and dad and just were constantly there to support me.

Speaker 5 And I was my, always my dad's like fishing and hunting buddy. Really?

Speaker 5 He had friends that he'd hunt with, but we spent so much time together on the lake, on the ocean, you know, fishing and hunting out in the woods.

Speaker 5 And it was an amazing place to grow up. And I didn't fully appreciate the town of Woodville and the community until after I left school.

Speaker 5 I went off to the Naval Academy and when I was really deployed overseas

Speaker 5 because the amount of care packages that would come in from not only my family, but friends and just members of the community.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was stuff that we would share with the rest of the task unit because it was so much stuff that was coming in.

Speaker 5 And it just, you know, there were some great communities across the United States, but it was, it was.

Speaker 5 It was just a quantitative measure of just how awesome that community was to grow up in and just how supportive and patriotic and amazing. The church was a big part of our life growing up.

Speaker 5 We started going to the First Baptist Church of Woodville when I was in third grade. My dad became a deacon there and church was mandatory every Sunday.

Speaker 5 When I started being a little wild man, you know, in my high school days and partying a little too hard, my dad would come in and drag me out of bed and saying,

Speaker 5 you're going to church, boy. Here we go.

Speaker 5 So then we get home from church and it was put on your working gloves and working clothes and i remember trying to push back and saying uh hey dad uh aren't we supposed to not work on the sabbath and he said this isn't work son this is fun yeah so we'd be out chainsawing brush and clearing land we grow up on a

Speaker 5 when i was about 12 we moved to uh some acreage kind of out in the woods we lived in a neighborhood before that with woods behind it like i mentioned but then uh it was it was uh constantly just working to clear that place and you know keep it nice build build fence and repair fence and clear brush and it was just an awesome way to grow up.

Speaker 5 It was, it was an amazing community.

Speaker 6 Five kids.

Speaker 5 Five kids in my family.

Speaker 6 Where'd you fall in the birth order?

Speaker 5 I was the second.

Speaker 5 My sister and I are very close. We're 16 months apart.
So

Speaker 5 she was, she was, she'll never let me live down that she was in those 16 months. I guess she lived a lifetime of experience that she's older nicer than me.
And then I have a twin brother and sister.

Speaker 5 My parents went to have three.

Speaker 5 They had me and my sister. Then the third child was twins.

Speaker 5 My brother and sister are fraternal twins. And then they had a surprise about eight years after that, my baby sister.

Speaker 6 Nice.

Speaker 5 Nice.

Speaker 5 I was the only one that served in the military. I always wanted to do that.
My dad had been

Speaker 5 in the Army and then in the Air Force. And so I spent my first couple of years at Ramstein Air Base.
He was stationed there as an Air Force dentist.

Speaker 5 And I was the only one that went to the military with my five siblings. But for me, that's all I ever wanted to do was be in the military.

Speaker 6 What'd your dad do in the military?

Speaker 5 was a, he was a, uh, he was in the National Guard

Speaker 5 and in the Army. And then, uh, and then he was, they, they paid for his dental school and he served his, his, uh, I think four years

Speaker 5 after dental school. So he was stationed at Ramstein for, um, I think for three of that.
Right. My first kind of six months to, we came back when I was three years old.

Speaker 6 Wow. I lived there too when I was a kid.
Okay. My dad was in the army too, as a pharmacist.
Wow. Our upbringing is

Speaker 6 very similar. I never knew that.

Speaker 5 That's awesome.

Speaker 6 Yeah, been it. Yeah.
But

Speaker 6 are you tight with all your siblings? I am.

Speaker 5 I am.

Speaker 5 They're a great family and we all keep each other in check. And but yeah,

Speaker 5 they're a wonderful family. Everybody's got kids.
We have a huge, I think my parents have 17 grandkids. Holy cow.

Speaker 6 That's awesome.

Speaker 5 18 to

Speaker 5 two or three, I think.

Speaker 6 That is awesome.

Speaker 5 So it's it's a it's a pile of cousins. Every time my kids, you know, go, it's, it's magical and they scream, why can't we live in Woodville? Every time we go there and just run around the woods.

Speaker 6 That's awesome, man. Does everybody in Texas?

Speaker 5 Everybody's in Texas.

Speaker 6 Nice, nice, nice.

Speaker 6 What were, what kind of, were you a star athlete or anything like that growing up?

Speaker 5 I played, you know, I played probably like a lot of people. You know, I played soccer and baseball and basketball.
I was horrible at basketball. I realized that wasn't my sport when I

Speaker 5 got a rebound. I think that was in fourth grade or fifth grade.
And I immediately shot, I shot the basket, scored a goal for the other team. I was like, basketball is not for me.

Speaker 5 So when I started playing football, like seventh grade, a tackle football was like everything.

Speaker 5 And in small town, Texas, it's, you know, we'd have 3,000 people in the town and we'd have like, you know, probably nearly that many people at the game, you know, on Friday nights.

Speaker 5 It was just a, it was an awesome thing.

Speaker 5 I loved it, man. It was the closest thing to suiting up, you know, and, and gearing up for combat,

Speaker 5 you know, that, you could do, I think, in the civilian world. And it was, it was a super, it was, it was a fun time.
We had our, in our high school,

Speaker 5 the, uh, the, the head coach, our head football coach,

Speaker 5 Coach Melvin Houston, he'd been there for years, awesome guy.

Speaker 5 uh and and he was a real mentor to uh so many people on the team particular for some of the star athletes who were raised in homes that maybe didn't have a have a father there um he was an incredible guy and his wife was also the uh was the

Speaker 5 choir director. So all of us, like the entire starting lineup in football was like in choir as well.
It was mandatory. He was in track.
So we all ran track also to kind of keep in shape.

Speaker 5 But, you know, we had, we had some of the star football players that are like marching in the band at halftime. Everyone kind of did everything.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 5 And it was just, it was just a fantastic place to grow up. Awesome community.

Speaker 6 Very cool. What?

Speaker 6 What got your interest in the military?

Speaker 5 I can't ever remember wanting to do anything else. I mean, from the time that I can remember wanting to do anything, I wanted to be in the military.

Speaker 5 I was painting my face and crawling through the, you know, the backyard jungle. And, and it was, I just, I wanted to be some kind of combat leader.

Speaker 5 I had a little stint where we had these F-4 Phantoms that would come fly over from some of the bases in Louisiana.

Speaker 5 I remember a couple of like B-52, like treetop level flights that were pretty awesome. So there was like a small stint where I was like, oh man, maybe being a pilot would be cool.

Speaker 5 But then I quickly went back to like, no, I want to be a, some kind of a ground combat leader in some, some capacity. And then when I was like in probably,

Speaker 5 I was probably in junior high school when I started hearing about the SEAL teams and the

Speaker 5 Marcinko books

Speaker 5 came out. I read Rogue Warrior.
You probably read it probably about the same time I did.

Speaker 5 And that was, that was one that really, I started reading about the SEALs in Vietnam and learning about the Rung Sat special zone and, you know,

Speaker 5 Cameron Bay and Nabe and all these places that our SEAL forefathers were operating out of. And I was just smitten with that.
And then the movie Navy SEALs with Charlie Sheen came out. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 And while I was in high school, and it just, that kind of cemented it for me that I wanted to be in the SEAL teams. And so

Speaker 5 I wanted to go to the Naval Academy to pursue that dream.

Speaker 5 And so I put in a package for the Naval Academy. I put in a package for West Point as well.
And we had a super strong West Point alumni association in Southeast Texas.

Speaker 5 And one of the head guys, he was a Silver Star recipient from the Korean War. Amazing guy.
He was really close friends with my grandfather. And he was a big advocate of West Point.

Speaker 5 He was a West Point grad. And he was pretty heartbroken when I chose Navy.
But I chose that because I wanted to be in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 And my dad and I did a lot of fishing growing up on the Texas coast. There's fantastic inshore fishing, offshore fishing on the Texas coast.
And we were going out on the Galveston jetties.

Speaker 5 And I remember just watching all these,

Speaker 5 I'd accepted my appointment to West Point because I got picked up in like, it was like January of my senior year.

Speaker 5 And so I'd accepted my appointment. And I still hadn't heard back from Navy.
It was like,

Speaker 5 and finally in like late April, when I was graduating in May, I finally

Speaker 5 got accepted to West Point. Or I'm sorry, I got accepted to Navy.
So I'd already accepted my appointment to West Point. I finally got an appointment to the Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 And so then I was was like, man, what do I do now? Like, I don't know what I want to do.

Speaker 5 The alumni network told me, they said,

Speaker 5 they said,

Speaker 5 the West Point Alumni Network said, they said, all right, you got a decision to make here. Dwight D.
Eisenhower went to West Point. Jimmy Carter went to Navy.

Speaker 5 I was like, man, that's a tough one.

Speaker 5 You're putting it on me.

Speaker 5 That was a stunning statement. But I was out fishing.
My dad had a little center console fishing boat. We were out there trying to catch some speckled trout and redfish on the Galveston jetties.

Speaker 5 And I remember looking at these oil tankers. You know, the Houston ship channel comes in through the Galveston there.
It's one of the busiest ports in North America.

Speaker 5 And just watching these different tankers come in and all the different flags, you know, sail from around the world. And I just remember turning to my dad and saying, I'm going to go to Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 I wanted to be in the Navy and I wanted to be in the SEAL teams. That was the purpose.
And after four long years at Navy, I did not get selected for the SEAL program.

Speaker 6 Damn. You know, it's why did you, I know you said all throughout your childhood you wanted to be a leader in a ground unit, but why, I'm just curious,

Speaker 6 why didn't you go the enlisted route? Why did you, why were you hell-bent on the academy?

Speaker 5 Man, that's a great question, John.

Speaker 5 I, uh, there are many times as an officer when I was sitting in a tactical operations center and when I was, you know, when we were passing out the PowerPoint Ranger patch, you know, 3,000 hours,

Speaker 5 you just,

Speaker 5 where I was like, maybe I should have enlisted in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 I definitely questioned it when I graduated from Navy because when I didn't get service selected, I,

Speaker 5 you know, and man, they made the right call, to be honest. Like they, they only took 16 guys out of the Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 And there was a prior enlisted SEAL in my class.

Speaker 6 So they took 15 guys.

Speaker 5 And, you know, there was 200 people that went out for the screener. It was probably 80 guys that graduated from the screener.

Speaker 5 And probably 40 or 50 of those guys could have gone and done really well, any of them. And so they only took 15.
And I was not one of those 15. And that was based on my.

Speaker 5 grade point average, which was atrocious.

Speaker 5 I was part of that half of the class that made the top half possible.

Speaker 5 And I had a terrible conduct record because when you get a midshipman that was two years older than me who was kind of barking orders at me and telling me what to do,

Speaker 5 I let them know that I was not too pleased about that.

Speaker 5 I was pretty strong-willed and hard-headed, as you know, me to be. And

Speaker 5 I think that that didn't serve me well there. So I had a conduct record.
I got in much of trouble.

Speaker 5 And so I wasn't selected. But actually it was the best thing that ever happened to me because my time in the service fleet was awesome.

Speaker 5 I was instantly thrown into a position of responsibility and leadership.

Speaker 5 And I served three different deployments on two different ships,

Speaker 5 got to sail all over the world and see some amazing things, work with some incredible people.

Speaker 5 So what was

Speaker 6 it? Go ahead.

Speaker 5 What I was just going to say, to answer your question, I think what my parents were pushing me to like go to college first.

Speaker 5 And that was probably a bigger factor, but it was, it was a,

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 5 Like there were, when i when i got service selected uh out of uh for the for the service fleet out of the academy i was like man i probably should have listened to the navy so um i but it was it was i think my parents just kind of encouraged me to go to college i was interested in the naval academy you know i was interested in having a degree under my belt if i hadn't gotten one of the academies i would have gone to texas a m and been on the the corps cadets there in the rtc program um so i i think that was probably more their their

Speaker 5 encouragement than anything else right but there's certainly times that i regretted regretted that. And what I loved about the SEAL teams was, you know, man,

Speaker 5 while the college degree

Speaker 5 might have separated officers from enlisted at some point, I mean, the post-9-11 world, that wasn't even the case, you know, for a lot of guys.

Speaker 5 Brian Bill in our buds class who had an electrical engineering degree, probably a way better GPA than I ever had, you know, and so many guys that I served with, like you, you know, were just super smart guys,

Speaker 5 you know, and were way smarter than I would ever be. So it was, uh, there wasn't a lot of differentiation it was just simply like like a different role interesting interesting

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 6 so i didn't so they're recruiting right out of the academy i didn't i didn't realize there was that much but 200 people tried it roughly 200 people trying out that's well that's pretty stiff competition what

Speaker 6 so when you found out that that you didn't How did they tell you you didn't make the cut? Do you find out immediately?

Speaker 5 They announced it's like service selection night. And so they kind of they announce you.
And and so I had put my first choice was naval special warfare. My second choice was marine ground.

Speaker 5 I was like, if I can't be in the, you know, a SEAL, I'll go be a Marine infantry officer. Maybe I can try to go, you know, force Force Recon and, you know, that, that route.

Speaker 5 And, uh, and then my third choice was service, service warfare of the ship drivers. And, um,

Speaker 5 So when they, they, they basically like just, you know, you, they, you distribute a piece of paper that gives you the service election with all the, you know, the seniors, the firsties there.

Speaker 5 And you're sitting there in like the wardroom on, you know, and it's, it's,

Speaker 5 I, I saw my best friend and roommate, just his head just, you know, he was, he was really disappointed to not get served. We were both going out for the, you know, the SEAL program.

Speaker 5 That's what we wanted.

Speaker 5 And so when he didn't get it, I didn't get it. And we were right there in the room together, sitting next to each other.
You know, it was an encouragement, you know, to keep going.

Speaker 5 And, and, and, um, but again, it was the best thing ever happened to to me i loved my time in the service fleet and i wanted to be a seal the whole time but i instantly i flew out to i went to about six months of of school in in um rhode island and then i flew out and met a ship and we were enforcing sanctions against the um against iraq back before you know before uh before the war kicked off uh so these were the u.n sanctions that had been in place since the persian gulf war and and so i got to work alongside uh seal seals would go take down these ships our boarding team would go alongside and and take over the ship and then just vector them over to a holding area it was super cool man we had you were i forgot you were on a boarding team correct i remember right yeah we did dozens of boardings yeah

Speaker 5 how did how did you get involved in that they just the ship just selected me to be a part of it i was lucky enough to to be uh be a part of that and it was it was really it was a neat thing to be able to see and do and and i think just being able to navigate a ship across the world was uh

Speaker 5 um it required a lot of responsibility. I mean, we were the officer of the deck.

Speaker 5 You were in charge of the ship when the captain's asleep in his stateroom at nighttime, or if, you know, if he's elsewhere, you were responsible for the entire well-being of that ship.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's massive responsibility on your shoulders.

Speaker 6 What kind of ship were you on?

Speaker 5 I was on a destroyer, DD-972, USS Oldendorf. I did two years on that.
We had an awesome, you know, wardroom of great officers and the enlisted sailors were outstanding that were on that thing.

Speaker 5 And it was just a great leadership opportunity for me. I learned a ton of lessons.
I learned in a ton of things wrong.

Speaker 5 Came in kind of this strong-willed Inson and got shut down, realized like, look, I need to rely on my experienced

Speaker 5 chiefs and sailors to actually lead this team and learn from them.

Speaker 5 And so I got to see like what good leadership looks like. It's not the person that's barking orders at people.

Speaker 5 It's actually being the silent leader that listens to the team and lets them run with things.

Speaker 5 And then I went to a different ship, FFG 38, USS Kurtz.

Speaker 5 I did about a year on that uh there as a training officer uh so i did the first ship i did two deployments to uh uh the persian gulf um i kind of transit that you know uh indian ocean you know pacific transits and then uh and then i did a western pacific uh uh deployment with uh with the kurtz the frigate um both of those were great experiences and uh awesome group and and i got selected um

Speaker 5 probably halfway through my time at uh being on the that second ship, the USS Kurtz.

Speaker 5 I got selected this was September 2001 and I got selected finally on my second package that I put in for the SEAL program

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 so right as September 11th happened wow and and so we knew this was you know real we knew we were going to war I knew after buds we're going straight to a you know to a

Speaker 5 to a SEAL platoon and deploying overseas and and so probably by the time that you were you know going uh going through your boot camp and and just starting your navy journey um i was uh for me uh it was interesting because some of the sailors you know there's so many sailors in the fleet with a 70 80 attrition rate that didn't make it through buds i remember one of the sailors is a great great guy um asking me like you know hey you got selected you know for buds how far do you think you'll make it to the program you know and i thought i thought that was a crazy question i was like all the way through the program like why why would i be even going if i didn't think i could i was going to make it all the way through you know i think you know in his mind having gone there and not made it through it just was like impossible to make it through the program and and I think I was so appreciative of the experience you know when I got to buzz and you and I are going through buzz together it enabled me to to uh to think about what it took to actually get there, all the effort that it took.

Speaker 5 And I had some amazing people that pulled so many strings for me, you know, to write letters of recommendation, to to train me and prepare me and get me ready, you know, physically and stuck their neck out to to get me selected out of you know dozens of people that applied um and and so i was never gonna do you know let them down anyway and and it gave me it gave me uh some some great perspective man i didn't realize you got picked up in september of 2001 where where were you where were you when the towers went down i was on duty the pierside in uh san diego at 32nd street naval station aboard the uss kurt so i was the duty officer and um and uh we were just you know, everybody was just waking up in the morning.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, obviously that's, you know, six, six in the morning, you know, on the West Coast when nine o'clock, you know, when it went down and

Speaker 5 on the East Coast. And I got a call from the

Speaker 5 incoming duty officer who was listening to the news on his way into work. And he said, hey, a plane's just hit the World Trade Center.

Speaker 5 And I thought, I'm thinking it's like a little Cessna sightseeing plane or something, you know, that got too close. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 5 So I went in and we turned on the news in the wardroom. And I turned on the news and I'm sitting there watching like, man, just smoke going out.
And we just watched

Speaker 5 on live TV as the second plane hit. And we knew instantly, this is an attack.
Like this is real. We're at war.

Speaker 5 And it just was changed everything.

Speaker 6 Wow. Wow.
And so you were selected right after that or right before that?

Speaker 5 I don't remember the exact date that I found out that it was, it was right around then.

Speaker 5 And I can't can't remember if it was just before or just after,

Speaker 5 but I know I got the news like like in September of 2001. And

Speaker 5 so it was,

Speaker 5 I knew this is real. And I was lucky enough.
I had a great commanding officer on board the USS Kurtz, and he was kind enough to send me TAD over to SEAL Team 5. And so I was TAD to SEAL Team 5.

Speaker 5 I went over there. I helped out wherever I could, you know, on the administrator side, but they assigned us to a senior chief.

Speaker 5 and uh he was all he did with me he just trained us all the time and and so we we for like six straight months before i went to buds uh i was i was spending most of my time over at till team five just training and preparing uh and some of my friends were there who had helped pull some some strings you know for me to be there in fact that very same seal who'd got service selected um

Speaker 5 and uh no kidding yeah he got uh uh

Speaker 5 yeah he he he had got picked up just the year before uh so they went through the year year before that you and I went through Buds together.

Speaker 5 And he was just there as a new guy, assisted platoon commander. And so, man, he'd take me out for runs.
I would, the runs that he took me on were harder than anything we did in Buds.

Speaker 5 Like I would puke my guts up.

Speaker 5 And as a result of that, I never, I was a, I was a horrible runner. That was the thing I probably struggled with most.
And

Speaker 5 I didn't fall back in the runs in Buds just because, you know, thankfully I hadn't had that opportunity.

Speaker 6 How long was it?

Speaker 6 How long was it after you got the word that you showed up at Bud's?

Speaker 5 We classed up,

Speaker 5 241 classed up in April of 2002. So

Speaker 5 that was,

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 it was pushing six months of kind of prep and training.

Speaker 5 And I knew that when I got picked up, like that was the last time

Speaker 5 I was already a lieutenant JG.

Speaker 5 And I knew I was going to make lieutenant at the four-year mark, which if you remember, I put that on at first phase.

Speaker 5 I got quite the

Speaker 5 promotion party, if you remember,

Speaker 5 the beatdown.

Speaker 5 But yeah,

Speaker 5 I knew that was like the last shot. So I was already training for it.
I was already preparing for it.

Speaker 5 But I had about six months of people that really, and it's so hard to train when you're underway on a ship, as far as running and swimming and doing the thing. You just can't do it.

Speaker 5 So well, so it was just awesome to have, you know, my commanding officer and the senior leadership on that ship support me me and be excited for me.

Speaker 5 And on my previous ship, I mean, they wrote super powerful letters of recommendation as well, you know, that enabled that to happen. And if I didn't have the seals that were pulling for me

Speaker 5 that wrote me a letter of recommendation, you know, and more than anything probably was Admiral Smith, who was a retired SEO Admiral.

Speaker 5 His son, Adam and I are friends. And

Speaker 5 he had,

Speaker 5 our close friend who's still serving, I won't name him,

Speaker 5 you know, was probably my my biggest advocate, amazing guy, and pulled so many strengths for me, trained with me, got me ready, you know, connected me with Adam and then Apple Smith.

Speaker 5 And Apple Smith wrote me a just incredibly powerful letter of recommendation

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 if people hadn't pulled those strings for me, man, I would have never, never even had the opportunity to serve.

Speaker 2 You maintain your gear so it lasts. And your skin's no different.
It's the first thing exposed to the elements every single day.

Speaker 2 Caldera Lab is built to help repair and protect your skin so you can look and feel your best every day.

Speaker 2 Caldera Lab creates high performance skincare for men by combining cutting edge science with powerful natural ingredients. It absorbs quickly with no greasy mess.

Speaker 2 You guys know I'm a stickler for clean ingredients and Caldera Lab really delivers on that.

Speaker 2 Each product is backed by science, built for impact, and thoughtfully formulated with safety and sustainability at the forefront. I know, I know.

Speaker 2 Guys don't have time for a skincare routine, but Caldera Lab makes it easy with four simple steps that actually work.

Speaker 2 There's the clean slate balancing cleanser, the eye serum that helps reduce dark circles and fine lines, the base layer that's a deep hydrating moisturizer, and then There's the good,

Speaker 2 a powerhouse serum that has over 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop to help reduce signs of aging. Take care of your skin like you take care of your gear.

Speaker 2 Go to calderalab.com/slash SRS and use code SRS for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab.com/slash SRS.
These statements and products have not been evaluated by the FDA.

Speaker 2 These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition.

Speaker 2 My days don't slow down. Between work, the gym, and time with the kids, I need eyewear that can keep up with everything I've got going on.
And that's why I trust Roka.

Speaker 2 I've tried plenty of shades before, but these stand out. They're built for performance without sacrificing style.
I've put them through it all, on the range, out on the water, and off-road.

Speaker 2 They don't quit. They're lightweight, stay locked in place, and are tough enough to handle whatever I throw at them.
And the best part, they don't just perform, they look incredible.

Speaker 2 Sleek, modern, and designed for people who expect more from their eyewear. No fluff, no gimmicks, just premium frames that deliver every single time.

Speaker 2 And that's why Roka is what I grab when I'm heading out the door.

Speaker 2 Born in Austin, Texas, they're American-designed with zero shortcuts, razor-sharp optics, no glare, and all-day comfort that doesn't quit.

Speaker 2 And if you need prescription lenses, they've got you covered with both sunglasses and eyeglasses. One brand, all your bases.
ROCA isn't just eyewear, it's confidence you can wear every day.

Speaker 2 They're the real deal. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out for yourself at roca.com and use code SRS for 20% off site-wide at checkout.
That's R-O-K-A.com.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 6 what do you, what is it, what does the selection look like for

Speaker 6 an officer to get into buds? What do they,

Speaker 6 what's the selection process look like?

Speaker 5 I think the billets, I think there's 24 billets at the Academy today.

Speaker 5 And I think there's something like that

Speaker 5 for all of like ROTC.

Speaker 5 And then there's like a handful.

Speaker 6 So they take 48 a year.

Speaker 5 Something something like that. I don't know what the numbers are.

Speaker 5 I have to double check that.

Speaker 5 I think that was it for a while, but it's highly competitive, right?

Speaker 6 Interesting. So they only take 48

Speaker 5 is something like that.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Program. Yeah.
Don't quote me on the numbers of that because it basically,

Speaker 5 but it's it's it's very highly competitive.

Speaker 5 Um and then there's a handful of of uh of officers that come in um like our mutual friend Travis that will you know come in with it with a uh officer candidate school billet um

Speaker 5 and you know who went through went through buzz with us and and

Speaker 5 they'll uh

Speaker 5 there's just

Speaker 5 it's very competitive as an officer so you're you're training with people like

Speaker 5 um

Speaker 5 i mean i i was competing at the naval academy with you know the the the the captain of the water polo team like I was never a competitive swimmer. That guy's going to destroy me.

Speaker 5 Somebody was on the cross-country team, somebody's on the triathlon, you know, a on the triathlon team.

Speaker 6 They got to be looking for more than that, though. I mean,

Speaker 6 they can find physical fitness anywhere. What are they looking for specifically in an officer?

Speaker 6 I mean, you, because it sounds like you weren't even, no, no offense, but it doesn't sound like you were a superstar athlete at the Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 I definitely was not.

Speaker 6 Problems running. You weren't a swimmer, you know, and then you have all these guys that were.
Maybe that's not why you got picked up. I don't know.

Speaker 6 But I mean, they have to be looking for more than athleticism.

Speaker 5 That was a part of it. I think it was a major factor.
I think they're also looking for grade point average. They're looking for,

Speaker 5 you know, student leadership opportunities. I was never a student leadership because I was always in trouble for something.

Speaker 5 So I think,

Speaker 5 you know, there's just,

Speaker 5 I mean, I wouldn't trade it. My time at the Naval Academy was awesome.
I really enjoyed my experience there.

Speaker 5 There were some.

Speaker 5 There was some negative examples, right, that

Speaker 5 showed me like the leader that I didn't want to be as well. And I think that's always the case, right?

Speaker 5 I think, I think good leadership is rare no matter where you are. But there also were some amazing leaders there who poured into me and set a great example.
And frankly, Sean,

Speaker 5 I wouldn't trade that for anything. I mean, the fact that I didn't get service selected for the SEAL program, I had to work as I had to work my ass off.
I had to, I had to train.

Speaker 5 I had to go out and build relationships. I had to stop feeling sorry for myself and making excuses because that would have been easy to do, right?

Speaker 5 Well, this person knew that person or this person got picked up or that person happened to, you know, make better grades than me or this person is a better athlete, you know, and that shouldn't be what it's based on.

Speaker 5 I can make all those excuses. What I had to do was before I even understood this concept we now call it extreme ownership.

Speaker 5 I actually, I had to take extreme ownership to say, if this is what I want to do with my life. I'm going to have to actually do the work to make this possible and, you know, to open the door.

Speaker 5 And I, when I put in my very first lateral transfer package, so I had to get fully qualified as a service warfare officer.

Speaker 5 And so that took me about a year and a half on my first ship. You know, man, that's a huge qualification to get, right? You have to study.
You have to prepare. It takes a long time and effort.

Speaker 5 And when I finally got that qualification, I put together, I met every requirement possible.

Speaker 5 And I put in a package that I thought was a strong package, didn't get service elected.

Speaker 6 Wow. I got turned out again.

Speaker 5 And that was crushing to me. I thought, man, what, this, you know, this is,

Speaker 5 and I, I, I,

Speaker 5 the senior officer, he was a captain at the time and he was the chief of staff over at WARCOM, the Naval Special Warfare Command. So very senior officer.

Speaker 5 And I reached out, just tracked down his content info, scheduled a meeting with him and went over and sat down to talk to him. And I said, hey, sir, I'm, you know, Lieutenant J.G.
Badvin.

Speaker 5 I want to be in the SEAL teams. This is what I want to do.
I think I can contribute to this community. What do I need to do to make this happen?

Speaker 5 And he told me,

Speaker 5 he said, he was like,

Speaker 5 No one has ever scheduled a meeting like this with me. I think that shows a lot of initiative on your part.

Speaker 5 Keep trying, you know, get your scores better, get some better, you know, get, go get some strong letters of recommendation, put it in a package again, and I think you'll do better next time.

Speaker 5 So I think just

Speaker 5 we call this concept default aggressive, that problems aren't going to solve themselves. Like you actually got to go solve problems.
You actually have to make things happen.

Speaker 5 Things aren't going to just fall in your lap. Like you've got to go make it happen.
And that applies on the battlefield. It also applies anywhere in life.

Speaker 5 And the opportunities, I think it's real easy for us to look at people and be like, well,

Speaker 5 you know, that person got lucky or this person just stumbled upon that or this person had that door open for them.

Speaker 5 And more often than not, man, people make their luck through hard work, you know, disciplined preparation, effort, all the years and years of effort behind the scenes that people don't see.

Speaker 5 And so I think that to me was a tremendous life lesson of like, hey, this isn't going to happen unless you go and do the work to make it happen. And that required training.

Speaker 5 you know, being the best service warfare officer I could be.

Speaker 5 I knew that like instead of complaining about not being in the SEAL teams, if I i wanted to be in the seal teams the best path for that for me was to be the best service warfare officer i could be and uh and there was i mean people would say things that well you don't want to be they won't want to let you go you know if if you're you know if you're too too critical for a member of the team that's total

Speaker 5 right you gotta the the better that you are on your team the more the higher you perform the the more that your leadership is going to want to write you a strong letter of recommendation right the more that people are actually going to want to take care of you and help you out so the more i could contribute to my team you know that happened to be a ship uh that I was assigned to, the better it would be for me.

Speaker 5 I, you know, going and building relationships with people, reaching out to folks that could write powerful letters of recommendation, you know,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I think for anything in life, like it's the opportunities are not going to come your way. You got to go make things happen.
You've got to be default aggressive. And

Speaker 5 it's, you know, again, if you wait for problems to go away on their own, they just, they generally get worse. You know, so I'm thankful that happened.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Speaker 5 And I can tell you, Sean,

Speaker 5 years later uh after i was serving as a a senior you know executive for in the business world we'll call it right at the operations officer and executive officer position and i was frustrated with the employment of seals or lack of employment with seals in in combat at the time uh and i would get super frustrated about things that were way above me in the chain of command there i can remember at least three different occasions where I jumped in my truck, I drove across the Coronado Bay Bridge, I went over to 32nd Naval street uh i went over to 32nd street naval station which is where all the ships in san diego are and i walked out of one of those piers and i looked across at the coronado at naval amphibious base where the seal teams are and uh and i remembered what it was like and it was it just put that all in perspective for me wow like you know this is uh i can't ever forget what it was like to be over here wanting to be there and wanting to do anything i could to get over there so no matter how frustrated i am um i'm in the seal teams and i got to do the best i can and and and uh impact the people around me, um, you know, and try to try to make whatever, you know, happen to be assigned, try to make life as good as I can for those people that I'm with.

Speaker 6 Wow, that's interesting. So you would go back to what you couldn't wait to leave to reset.

Speaker 5 Just to give me perspective on what it was like, like to remember what it was like to want to be in the SEAL teams and not be there.

Speaker 6 Man, that's cool. That's cool, Lave.

Speaker 5 So.

Speaker 6 Correct me if I'm wrong, but at breakfast,

Speaker 6 I think we had a discussion where, are you mentoring junior officers in the SEAL teams or junior officers that are wanting to go to the SEAL teams?

Speaker 5 When I got back from my second combat deployment to Romani, I took over the junior officer training course.

Speaker 5 And so for two years, I ran that training program for every single SEAL officer that graduated from BUDS.

Speaker 5 So before they go to Buds, before they go on to the advanced training, the SEAL qualification training, they would go through a four-week classroom week-long field training exercise.

Speaker 5 And so, I'd been through that program.

Speaker 5 That's where you and I broke off together, right? After we graduated, Buds, and then you went on to SEAL qualification training. And

Speaker 5 so, I went, you know, the officers from our class went to

Speaker 5 SEER school and some other schools. And then we went to the junior officer training course together.

Speaker 5 And so, I got a chance to run that four years later. And I got it was a great program when I went through it, but I think

Speaker 5 it was focused on trying to help you understand how it was organized. And what I got to do was really,

Speaker 5 I think, try to revamp it to

Speaker 5 just try to set those leaders up for success, you know, and

Speaker 5 to help those leaders be ready for the most difficult combat situations that they might come up against.

Speaker 6 We'll get into more details with that at a more appropriate time in the interview. But

Speaker 6 the reason I'm bringing it up is

Speaker 6 what are you looking for in

Speaker 6 junior SEAL leadership?

Speaker 6 What are some of the top attributes that you've identified that

Speaker 6 great leaders inside of naval special warfare all seem to have?

Speaker 5 Number one, humility.

Speaker 5 Humility is the most important quality in a leader. And the reason I say that is because, look, if you don't have an ego,

Speaker 5 You don't care about winning, right? You just mail it in. You don't care about outperforming the other, you know, other people or doing well.
Like ego drives us to be successful.

Speaker 5 So you got to have an ego. But so often ego is the, the,

Speaker 5 it just,

Speaker 5 it just absolutely destroys

Speaker 5 people. It destroys careers.
It destroys teams. It destroys relationships.
It destroys lives. And when people can't put their ego in check, you just, you can never get better.
You can never improve.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think, you know, the biggest lesson that I've learned in life through some extremely humbling combat operations

Speaker 5 and then beyond is that it's be humble or get humbled. And anytime that I'm feeling like, oh, I got things figured out.

Speaker 5 Oh, I've got a, you know, oh, I'm ready for, you know, for the worst case scenario life might throw me, man, you get humbled and you get put in check. So I think that humility is

Speaker 5 number one, the most important quality, because without humility, you can't learn from anybody else. You can't, you can't, you can't get better, right? You can't evolve.
You can't adapt or innovate.

Speaker 5 You can't listen to other people's ideas or learn from them in in any capacity.

Speaker 5 And worst of all, you can't look yourself in the mirror and conduct an honest self-assessment, a brutally honest self-assessment, because that's what's key.

Speaker 5 If you can't do that, there's no way you're ever going to improve. What's required is an honest self-assessment of like, okay, I need to do these things to improve.

Speaker 5 I need to do these things to actually fix myself going forward. Okay, these might be my strengths, but these are my weaknesses.
I need to work on those, you know, to get to get better.

Speaker 5 Hey, we might have gotten lucky on that comet operation, but if, you know, we better be prepared for that worst case scenario next time in case we don't get so lucky.

Speaker 5 And so I think number one, humility.

Speaker 5 Number two, ownership.

Speaker 5 And that goes right along with each other, right? If you're going to point fingers and cast play and make excuses, it's right there with humility. The driver of that is ego.

Speaker 5 But oftentimes, the reason I say ownership is because if I'm going to wait for you to solve my problem, like that problem is not going to get solved.

Speaker 5 So let's say you and I have a conflict and we don't see eye to eye on something. You know,

Speaker 5 I could say, well, Sean just, you know, I don't like the way Sean talked to me, you know, or Sean needs to come apologize to me or, you know, Sean, that's Sean's fault for not seeing the world from my perspective.

Speaker 5 Or I can actually take ownership of saying, you know what, Sean, there's some reason that Sean disagrees with me on this.

Speaker 5 Let me actually learn from his perspective. Let me actually take ownership of fixing this problem by taking some action.

Speaker 5 uh you know to to to actually get his perspective and see his perspective on things uh and see what i could have done better to to better communicate you know what what my perspective was and ask more questions so I could see the world through his eyes.

Speaker 5 And so I think those things are super critical. Teamwork is a great example of that, right?

Speaker 5 If you're just about yourself and you can't actually put the team at the overall team and the mission first, I think

Speaker 5 that's not someone's going to do well.

Speaker 5 And particularly in high-performing organizations, whether you're talking to like a SEAL unit or a special operations unit or a SWAT team, or frankly, like a super high-performing sales team, you know, in the corporate world, a lot of times you'll talk to them about the concept of cover and move and teamwork and they'll say, oh, hey, we're doing awesome.

Speaker 5 We're doing awesome, you know, but our admin department sucks and supply sucks and they're not getting us what we need.

Speaker 5 You know, hey, the senior leaders up in their corporate high target, they don't know what's going on down here.

Speaker 5 And so they, they, and what you realize is like they, they, they think about teamwork within just their immediate team, not about the other teams that they actually depend on to be successful.

Speaker 5 So, you know, when you start realizing like, hey, I need a better relationship with the admin department so that we can get paid, so that we can actually get the paperwork taken care of, so that we can actually do what we need to do and focus on our job.

Speaker 5 You know, I need a better relationship with supply so they can give me the tools that they, that they, that I need to be successful. I need a good relationship with my chain of command.

Speaker 5 Probably one of the biggest lessons I learned from Jocko is not having a good relationship with your chain of command doesn't help you. And it certainly doesn't help your team.

Speaker 5 So you've got to build a good relationship with your chain of command to make sure you're aligned with them, make sure they understand,

Speaker 5 you know, what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it and why you, you know,

Speaker 5 and they have the information they need to better support you and make better decisions. So I think when you're looking at humility, ownership, teamwork, I think those are crucial things.

Speaker 5 Discipline, I think is something else. You know, if you have people that

Speaker 5 are not disciplined, I mean, I, I, I think about somebody

Speaker 5 in our bloods class, like Brian Bill, you know, for instance, who

Speaker 5 probably wasn't born great at everything. And right, that guy was so, he was the only guy in our entire bloods class that was first time every time in

Speaker 5 die face, you know, through the pool competency test, which is, you know, if you don't know what a pool comp is, it is miserable, right? Where they're tying your hoses and knots.

Speaker 5 And, and, uh, and that was. That's a terrifying test, right, for so many people that, you know, even people that are comfortable in the water.

Speaker 5 And it was, we had so many rollbacks for the previous, you know,

Speaker 5 class, as you know, you know?

Speaker 6 I was one of them. Yeah, you were one of those.

Speaker 5 It was, and, and the stories you guys told us, it was like terrifying, you know? And so

Speaker 5 I think that Brian was the only dude on that wall this first time, every time. Why is that? Well, he was, he just, he was methodical in his preparation and it was, he was disciplined.

Speaker 5 And that enabled him to be successful in everything he's trying to do. So I think somebody, you know, it's great to have some innate qualities and natural abilities.
And those things are great.

Speaker 5 When you can combine natural ability and discipline, that's unstoppable.

Speaker 5 But, you know, hard work is going to beat natural ability over time if you've got somebody who's disciplined and is going to put in the work. So, you know, I think those are the qualities

Speaker 5 that I think apply not just to a SEAL leader, but I think to any leader in any situation.

Speaker 5 You know, somebody who's humble, somebody will take ownership, somebody who's a team player, it puts the team first, and somebody who's disciplined. Man, that's great.

Speaker 6 That's great to hear. Thank you.
I got a ton of questions, but I'm going to save them for the leadership section. But so let's get back to Bud.
So you

Speaker 6 show up to Buds. We're classing up in April of

Speaker 6 2001? 2002. 2002.
2002, correct. And so what, I mean, what was it like for you walking in the compound as a, as a, as a, as a Buds candidate, Buds student?

Speaker 5 Man, I might have been different from a lot of us. I loved it.
I thought it was awesome.

Speaker 5 I mean, to me, just having the, not that you weren't, certainly we were walking on eggshells all the time, right? Any, and I remember afterward,

Speaker 5 particularly as the class officer in charge, right, as the senior person in the class, it didn't matter what happened, right? I don't think I failed a single room inspection the entire time.

Speaker 5 Actually, I did, we had one spot inspection in die phase that I failed. And

Speaker 5 me and my roommate failed. It was like one, but every other inspection I passed, every other personnel inspection I passed, which was unheard of.
And yeah, I got beaten.

Speaker 5 I was the first guy to get beaten every time, right? Because you're just anybody in the class feels that you as the leader are responsible.

Speaker 5 And so you're going to pay the man for it. That was just part of the game.
You know, I embraced that with a sense of humor.

Speaker 5 So there was, you know, there was, it took a couple of years to be able to walk on the grinder before you're kind of like, who's looking at me?

Speaker 5 You know, you feel like you need to be running and calling Cadence.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 by the way, they don't call Cadence across the grinder anymore, man. It's, I missed that.
That was so, that was so freaking cool.

Speaker 5 Like just to my left, to my, you know, just yelling at our class as we came across the grinder.

Speaker 5 For me, just knowing the history of that place, you know, knowing not only through the SEAL teams, but for our underwater demolition teams, our frogman forefathers before

Speaker 5 them,

Speaker 5 and knowing all of that took place right there.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's Coronado, Naval Amphibious Base. I mean, this is where the, you know, the guys that were going out and swimming up on,

Speaker 5 you know, beaches like Iwo Jima, you know, and

Speaker 5 Guam and Saipan. I mean, just amazing, amazing history.

Speaker 5 And I just, I thought it was awesome.

Speaker 5 And, you know, checking in, I mean, you know, for guys like you that were class ahead of me, you know, initially it was like, you might as well have been there for 30 years of experience, right?

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 I'm just showing up and you don't know like what to do.

Speaker 5 I quickly like just try to just have a sense of humor. I remember they, they, I walked into the indoc office, right? Those first few weeks that they used to call in Indoc, the indoctrination.

Speaker 5 uh before you started first phase and and one of the instructors was uh

Speaker 5 was like babbin

Speaker 5 just walked up and

Speaker 5 was like, hey,

Speaker 5 they had like their coffee mess there and they had like this fancy coffee. And I came for the fleet.
There's no fancy coffee.

Speaker 5 Everybody's, these chiefs, you know, the fleet are drinking like black tar coffee that was, you know, reheated coffee from like five days ago. So they had this like fancy coffee mess in there.

Speaker 5 And they had a, they had a pile of like sugar cubes. I mean, and it was probably like,

Speaker 5 I don't know, 50 of them. He's like, how many of those sugar cubes? You know, can you eat at once, Babbin? I'm like, all of them.
I just like shoved them all in my mouth, you know?

Speaker 5 And yeah, just, I think from that on, I just, I just tried to, you know, just have a good sense of humor about it. And

Speaker 5 it was, yeah, to me, I thought it was, I mean, it was the quality of people that that we got to serve with there was, you know, I think in that post 9-11 era of people that, you know, like you that are like enlisted in the Navy.

Speaker 5 This is what they want to do. I'm going to go serve my country in a time of war.

Speaker 5 You know, it was, it was, it was just incredible, man. And, uh, and I just, I wouldn't trade that for anything.
It was awesome.

Speaker 6 What about the intimidation factor? Were you intimidated

Speaker 6 coming in, checking in there?

Speaker 5 Totally, man. Of course.
You know, I mean, you're kind of like, do I make eye contact with people? Do you not? You know, you're trying to just figure that out.

Speaker 5 You know, and

Speaker 5 we talk about, you know, the dichotomy of leadership, right? You've got to try to find that balance. You got to be confident, but not cocky, right?

Speaker 5 And I said humility is the most important quality of a leader. So you've got to have some confidence, but you also, you can't be cocky.

Speaker 5 And I think just trying to find that balance was like, you know, knowing that like the instructor staff, that

Speaker 5 some of the guys that would, you know, say, I hate officers and give us a hard time, you know, more than anything else, they ended up being my favorite instructors.

Speaker 5 And they just, you know, even though they dished out the worst physical punishments and pain,

Speaker 5 they were just, they were awesome. And,

Speaker 5 you know, some of those guys who, who,

Speaker 5 you know, were like looking to give the officers a hard time uh you know i one of the things i loved about indoc too do you do you remember the the officer belly flop contest off the the the high dock oh yeah

Speaker 5 oh yeah off like the 15 football that was so awesome and it just you're like okay if i'm gonna do this i'm gonna win like i'm going all into this thing i'm gonna make it so painful i'm gonna like knock the wind out of myself and somebody's gonna have to like haul me to the side But that to me was like, it was, it was fun.

Speaker 5 I think you just try to, you know, try to make the best of it. What was the

Speaker 6 usually everybody I know has some type of,

Speaker 6 you know, they're worried about a hang-up in buds, whether it's the pool comp or the 50-meter underwater swim or the two-mile swims or whatever it may be.

Speaker 6 Mine was the 50-meter underwater swim was the first one. I was really nervous about.

Speaker 5 How'd you do on that?

Speaker 6 Crushed it.

Speaker 5 I think that was hard. It was easy.
You know what was crazy? So we, I'm sure you watched the Discovery Channel like

Speaker 5 50 times i did too and and and they what i realized later some things like hell week

Speaker 5 they like they really can't show you just how hard hell week's going to be right so like it's i thought hell week's way harder than you know that i'd even envisioned it could be just kind of based on watching that show but some of the other things like the ocean swims the cold water like the underwater swim they were i realized they were focusing on people that were struggling and so it made it look like it was impossible so yeah i mean they i thought the 50 underwater system was like no factor, you know.

Speaker 5 But some of the things that, that, that kicked my ass, man, were

Speaker 6 before though, before we did them, what were you worried about?

Speaker 5 What was your biggest fear? I worried about it. I sweated every single evolution.
No, okay. Every single one.
And, and I had a friend tell me that, sweat every evolution.

Speaker 5 Like, just, just, you, you, you better be worried about preparing. We're going to spend our weekends prepping, planning.

Speaker 5 Um, we were doing stupid stuff too, like like pool comp in each other in like the, you know, know, in the, in the, uh, in the like local like apartment complex pools, you know, and like civilian diet rigs that we rented from the local, like stupid stuff, like dangerous stuff.

Speaker 5 If you're listening to this, don't, uh, or watch the list, don't do that. That's stupid.
You know, you're going to AGE yourself.

Speaker 5 You definitely need a diet master in there to make sure stuff like that's not going on.

Speaker 5 But we were, we just tried to sweat every evolution. I was, I was worried about the runs because I had struggled with runs.

Speaker 5 And I found the runs were like, the runs were hard. i mean they definitely were you know all out spread for um but i don't i don't think i i don't think i got in the goon squad even one time um

Speaker 5 that was also because our our good friend and classmate seth stone uh had made the egregious error of marrying one of the uh buds instructors yeah

Speaker 5 i forgot about that so we the officers would get regularly pulled out and just beat on for that and then the entire class would get beat on and then wherever stoner was we call him seth we call him stoner but wherever stoner was in the lineup of the runs if you remember they would just find him and be like goon squad here on back and he he would just embrace it you know and and uh just start barrack crawling the goon squad everyone's just getting beat on and and uh everyone else is like circling up but uh

Speaker 5 You were a good runner, right? You weren't, I don't think you were in a goon squad.

Speaker 6 I was a good, that was the one thing I was really good at.

Speaker 5 Yes, Ronnie. Yeah, I remember you being a good runner.
The swims for me, I was like one bad swim. Our mutual friend, who I won't say his name, but we got put together.

Speaker 5 It was another officer and he was not a great swimmer and I was not a great swimmer. So we were like one bad conditions away from failing the swim.

Speaker 5 I think the only swim I feel was the ones where they forced us to wear like the new fins. Remember that one? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. And like half the class failed

Speaker 5 because we had to wear these new pins that were supposed to be so much better. And we all went back to the old school, like World War II, like

Speaker 5 duck feet.

Speaker 6 Duck feet. yeah.

Speaker 5 But it was, that was one where I was, I wasn't a fast swimmer. I'm not going to go for a while, but

Speaker 5 I knew I was kind of one bat swimming away. But I think one of the hardest things for me

Speaker 5 that I didn't anticipate was drown proofing. People thought drown proofing was easy.

Speaker 5 Did you have no problem with drown proofing?

Speaker 6 I thought drown proofing was easy.

Speaker 5 So many people did. Drown proofing was horrible for me.

Speaker 6 No shit. That was hard for you.

Speaker 5 After we did like, you know, bouncing off the bottom was fine. But once we had to do like the traverse, you know, with your hands and feet tied and my heart rate got up.

Speaker 5 And then I started doing the flips.

Speaker 6 So just for the audience that doesn't know what drownproofing is, basically what they do is they tie your feet. They tie your feet together.
They tie your hands together behind your back.

Speaker 6 And you start off just in the deep end, right? Bouncing up and down. kind of getting a rhythm into breathing.
Then you have to float. Then you have to swim.
Was it 100 meters?

Speaker 6 You You have to swim 100 meters with your hands tied behind your back and your feet tied together. And

Speaker 6 it is challenging. It is.
The swim is definitely challenging.

Speaker 5 Well, I've struggled with it and I was really struggling with it. And one of those buzz instructors who was the meanest instructor, you know, when it came to officers and just hammering them,

Speaker 5 he just pulled me aside and put me in like...

Speaker 5 He put me in like the four foot section. It was like,

Speaker 5 he's like, hands and feet tied.

Speaker 5 You're going to do your bounty in the four-foot section. And he just like left me there.
And then he moved me over to the, to the, you know, nine foot section.

Speaker 5 And it was, it was like a, it was just like a progression. And that really helped me.
And then actually

Speaker 5 one of the other instructors, remember, we had to like, you were supposed to, so after you do the, that, you know, you, you do that traverse, then you were supposed to like, you do like a flip and then go down and grab the mask.

Speaker 5 And then you bound, and you were supposed to, you were supposed to do like three flips and then like five bounds. And then that was the end of the test.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 one of the instructors on the side was like,

Speaker 5 I think I was probably 30 flips in. He was like, Again, again, again.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And finally, finally, that same instructor that helped me out came over and was like, Babin, you're good, get out of the pool. And so it was, he uh, he kind of helped me out.

Speaker 5 But I mean, you knew you were going to get the full benefit on it, like no factor. Yeah.
Um, and uh,

Speaker 5 that was

Speaker 5 so that that to me was harder than I thought it was going to be for whatever reason. And then life-saving was

Speaker 6 life-saving was harder, too. Pick in the ass, man.

Speaker 5 The smallest instructor we had,

Speaker 5 I, for, so if you remember, we had our, our, uh, you had your unconscious victim for the, I don't think life saving is like that anymore.

Speaker 6 What do you mean it's not like that?

Speaker 5 I don't think it's like a pass-fail evolution like it was. Like, I don't think you can get kicked out of the program.
Remember for us, like, if you didn't pass it on, oh, yeah, I remember.

Speaker 5 You got kicked out. And so the, the, the unconscious victim, I got the smallest Buds instructor we had.
He was like probably 150 pounds. He was the unconscious victim, which means he's laying there.

Speaker 5 I just grab him haul him across the pool. And then the

Speaker 5 very next one was,

Speaker 5 if you remember this instructor who had started at,

Speaker 5 he had played starting linebacker at Arizona State University.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah, I remember him.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 man, he was an awesome instructor. I loved it.
But he, he kicked my ass.

Speaker 5 Like, I, I swam over to him and realized like, he's like, save me. And I, I grabbed him.
I think it took me. Was this Scotty Walker? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, we could say his name. He's in the Buds thing.
Yeah. He's in the 234 thing.

Speaker 5 So I don't know if you can say, yeah, Scotty was, Scotty was hilarious, but he, he just like attacked me underwater. And

Speaker 5 it was, it was a giant wrestling match.

Speaker 5 He probably weighed 250.

Speaker 6 I was like, I remember watching that guy when we were doing log PT pick up.

Speaker 6 the fucking log by himself and just start running up the berm with it. And I was like, holy shit.

Speaker 5 I remember that too. And we were, were, we were all like, dude,

Speaker 5 that is, that guy's an animal. And I got, I remember,

Speaker 5 it was probably, it felt like, it felt like a 20-minute evolution for me to get him to the side. I don't, it probably wasn't near that long, right?

Speaker 5 But I finally get him to the side and I crawled out the combat training tank just outside and I just puked my guts up.

Speaker 5 And then I just, and I crawled back in there and it was like the next one, the next one, the next one. So that was, that was a tough evolution.

Speaker 5 But it was awesome. I mean, you also knew that like,

Speaker 5 what was cool about that is there's nobody that I can't save. If I can scave, if I can save Scotty attacking me, you know, under those conditions and this monstrous human

Speaker 5 and I could get him to the side and fight him the whole way, like I could save anybody.

Speaker 5 And just the training program itself was just awesome.

Speaker 6 Do you remember, do you remember when Ben

Speaker 6 Do you remember the armpit hair tactic? that Ben created?

Speaker 5 I do remember that. I had forgotten about that.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Genius move. That was a genius move.

Speaker 5 I, uh, I don't think that I, uh, I don't think that I, I can't remember if instructors shaved their armpits for that or if they uh if they stop, but it was uh he, I remember he had, what did they call that victim?

Speaker 6 You had like the the passive victim, you had the unconscious victim, you had the one that's going to fight everything you do, basically beat the shit out of you as you're trying to save them.

Speaker 6 And I think it was, I think it was Pranger. Was it Pranger?

Speaker 6 Ben went out to save, to save Pranger, and he just reached all the way around his chest, grabbed a big handful of armfit hair and just yanked it. The instructor was like, I'm good.
I'm good.

Speaker 6 And what a genius move.

Speaker 5 Dude, I remember instructor Nave had me, and I didn't even know what a triangle choke was. He had me in a triangle choke on the bottom of the 15-foot section of the combat training tank.

Speaker 5 I'm like trying to go underwater to get away from him. And he just like locks me up in this triangle.
I'm like down on the bottom.

Speaker 6 Man, man. That was crazy.

Speaker 6 When did you find out you were going to be the class OIC?

Speaker 5 So in NDOC, I was the senior guy. I was the only officer

Speaker 5 for a little while. We had a few officers that ended up getting rolled back.

Speaker 5 So I think I was the, there were 18 of us in Buzz Class 241 that like.

Speaker 5 started with 241 and made it through in one shot. I think I was the only officer from that group.
And

Speaker 5 the rest of our like 44 guys that graduate, you know, were rollbacks. And man, thank God for you guys.

Speaker 5 Cause when you got rolled back in the class, like y'all were, y'all brought in this, like, okay, we've been here before. We understand how to prep for these things.

Speaker 5 Because at the time, we didn't, other than the Discovery Channel show, you don't even know what's coming, right? The schedule's secret.

Speaker 5 You can't, it's not like you can walk in and ask the instructors that, you know, so

Speaker 5 that was, that was massive. But I, we had several O's that were like rolled in.
And so I think when

Speaker 5 you got rolled into the class,

Speaker 5 that was,

Speaker 5 I got, there was a senior officer who took that role through Hell Week. And then shortly after Hell Week,

Speaker 5 he got rolled out. And so then I became the senior officer again.
So most of the class, I was the, I was the senior officer.

Speaker 6 What did that, I mean, what did that feel like for you to be the OIC of,

Speaker 6 I mean, that's a lot of induced pressure. I would imagine.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, I think

Speaker 5 it instantly,

Speaker 5 luckily, I'd learned the lesson of like, hey, I can't do everything. I'm here to rely on my

Speaker 5 teammates to make this happen, right? I need to use my senior enlisted leadership. You know, if I'm running around trying to count everyone, right? That doesn't work, right?

Speaker 5 You have to have a, and if the LPO, the leading petty officer is doing that, that doesn't work. We need squarterly boat crew leaders.

Speaker 5 You know, you need people in those boat crews that are helping those boat crew leaders out. This is how decentralized command actually works.

Speaker 5 And so I think it was

Speaker 5 that to me was like the thing that I was, you know I would get uh sometimes people would come up with ideas and say hey let's go ask the instructors if we can do this we can do that and you know people wanted to kind of try to cut corners I was

Speaker 5 you know I think I know I frustrated some of the class sometimes when I was like yeah we're not gonna we're not gonna we're not gonna expend the leadership capital on something like that we're gonna just show up when they told us to do it you know we're not gonna ask if we can come 50 minutes later right we're gonna like like it's not it's not worth it and i think for people that at that time i know some sometimes particularly some of the o's and bo crew leaders got frustrated with me, you know, with some of that stuff.

Speaker 5 But you have to just, I think, really prioritize like what you're going to push back on, what you're not.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we had a phenomenal class. I mean, it was awesome.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I mean, you joining our classes was one of my favorite stories of the whole thing, man, with the whole week kickoff. Yeah.
Yeah, that was

Speaker 5 awesome.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I got rolled because I failed the first phase exam. Genius move, Sean.
But it all worked out.

Speaker 5 Everything happened for real.

Speaker 6 It was an awesome class. And

Speaker 6 I do think my most memorable experience in Buds with Laf Babbin was the O-Course wrestling match when I got a little too far out in front of my skis and

Speaker 6 challenged you to

Speaker 6 a wrestling match. I didn't come out on top.

Speaker 5 Dude, that was so awesome.

Speaker 5 So we show up to the O-Course

Speaker 5 and uh we show up to the obstacle course. And you know, if you don't know anything about the Buzz obstacle course, it's a notorious obstacle course.

Speaker 5 These things have been around for a long time. All these obstacles are named.
And before even CrossFit or these kind of high-intensity, you know,

Speaker 5 interval training was even a thing,

Speaker 5 the O-Course was that, right? You're going to do seven or eight minutes of like max put out effort, you know, when you're done with that thing. And then you add the soft sand runs and, you know,

Speaker 5 to the to the demo pits and back.

Speaker 5 You know, know that's a mile and a half down mile and a half back um and then and then uh uh and then add a ruck you know ruck run you know uh in that soft sand on top of that for third phase so we were out there for that evolution and i can't remember what happened like our something got screwed up the schedule got screwed up i know i had clear the proctor we're supposed to be there but the instructors never showed up and of course

Speaker 5 there's nothing worse than like bored bud students standing around so somehow it started with these wrestling matches that were going on and and we had some wrestlers in the class so people were calling each other out like

Speaker 5 WWE SmackDown style. And I remember like, I was just kind of like trying to stay above the fray, making sure, you know, because it's in the sand.
We didn't want people's head hitting rocks.

Speaker 5 Or, you know, obviously at this point, you get injured, right? You're going to be rolled from the program and potentially don't even graduate. So I wanted to try to prevent that.

Speaker 5 I was trying to stay above the fray.

Speaker 5 all of a sudden you know i got sean out there you like walked out in the middle it looked it looked like apollo creed from the rocky movie i want you you you were like babbin i want you and like just challenging me i was like okay i guess i got i got no choice here so ma'ams they they like drew a ring in the sand like kumite and we had a big rest of the match that was that was awesome i think it was probably more of a stalemate than anything but yeah yeah i i stuffed the table i'm pretty sure you choked me out well i was uh i think i just held you in place until it was like okay let's move on to the next everybody got bored but dude you're my favorite story from you was that hell week experience because you know we were no one knows it's kind of like combat right no one knows um

Speaker 5 hell week was i think it was the fifth week for us going through first phase so we've been in five weeks of in doc we've already been in four weeks you know of first phase at that point and i think we started our class

Speaker 5 um

Speaker 5 we started with 193 guys

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 then i think we started with uh

Speaker 5 i think we started uh

Speaker 5 we started hell week with 101 guys. So our automatically was just getting already a bunch of people had quit, right? It's getting whittled down.

Speaker 5 And I remember those numbers well because it was so you're already losing a bunch of people in those first few weeks. Now, hold on.

Speaker 6 Let me just, I just, 193 guys at one one day or 193 guys in NDOC?

Speaker 5 193 guys in NDOC. Okay.
It's what started with Buds Class 241. That's what classed up the original class.

Speaker 5 Now, some of those guys left, others got rolled back in, you know, the the numbers are kind of switched around. And by the time we were in, we were about to start Hell Week,

Speaker 5 we had 101.

Speaker 5 So we'd already lost, you know, guys, a lot of guys had quit, a bunch of, you know, injuries, things, people enrolled, things like that.

Speaker 5 But you, you were a brown shirt rollback, which is like that, that coveted brown shirt was, was, had to be awesome, right? You'd made it through, through Hell Week.

Speaker 6 And so we, if you don't remember, right, they actually took our brown shirts and gave us the white shirt back.

Speaker 5 Well, and I think that's what's so I know people who I know people who in the previous previous years have been given a chance. They screwed up something in Buzz

Speaker 5 in dive phase or third phase and were given a chance to go back and start day one. And they're like, no, thank you.
I won't do it.

Speaker 5 They turned down a courier in the CL teams because they were not willing to go back. And so once you've made it through hell, I mean,

Speaker 5 Hell Week is

Speaker 5 as close to combat as you're going to get.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was designed by Draper Kaufman and his staff at Fort Pierce back in World War II, you know, for the, for the naval combat demolition units that were hitting the beaches at Normandy and,

Speaker 5 you know, and blowing up all the opportunities. These were the first waves at Omaha and Utah, and they were trying to create as much mayhem as possible for them.

Speaker 5 And so they tried to combine all this training down, you know, weeks of training into just five continuous 24-hour days.

Speaker 5 These guys, you know, up all night, no sleep, explosions going off everywhere chaos and mayhem and just like combat nobody knows how they're going to do until they get in that situation and i remember just reading the bible having bible study um me having bible study totally man and buds totally yeah wow andrew paul and i on our team uh and several others you know we got issued those bibles yeah those those those little buds bibles that were uh you know in iv translation and and uh in the in the camo i still have that one man and we

Speaker 5 were reading from Judges about the story of Gideon and the story of Gideon, who's this reluctant warrior.

Speaker 5 Like the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and says, hey, you're going to go fight the Midianites. And Gideon's like, what are you talking about? I'm the least of my family.

Speaker 5 I'm not even the biggest and strongest guy in my whole family. You know, Midian is so much stronger and more powerful than Israel.
Like, what are you talking about? I can't do that.

Speaker 5 And, and the angel continually assures Gideon that, and he says, uh, some translation, it's, it's,

Speaker 5 it was, you were a mighty warrior and God is with you. And

Speaker 5 those are just such powerful words, you know, in some translations, it's God is with you, mighty warrior.

Speaker 5 And it's, you know, Gideon is this reluctant warrior. And of course, he is empowered to, he, he.
calls out to Israel. Thousands of people come to the call.
You know, he has thousands of

Speaker 5 Israelite warriors that have answered the call. And God says, that's too many.
People aren't going to believe in the miracle of this. So he like whittles it down to just a few hundred.

Speaker 5 And Gideon goes and destroys the Midianites with just a few hundred warriors,

Speaker 5 you know, through the power of God. And

Speaker 5 so it was, we were reading that verse. And in fact, Andrew Paul and I, like,

Speaker 5 during hell week,

Speaker 5 you know, when, when, when in the darkest hour, you know, like the second day, like Tuesday night,

Speaker 5 you know, and probably the largest number of quitters, I remember quoting that verse to Andrew, you know, him quoting to me. Like it was in the middle of it.
In the middle of it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 I said,

Speaker 5 I told him, you're a mighty warrior. God is with you.
Now

Speaker 5 go get back under your bow. You know, so like, those things are, those, those verses were super powerful to make it through.
But even then, like, I'm nervous.

Speaker 5 Like, I didn't, I didn't sleep at all, man, you know, prior, prior to hell week. Um, like, like most people probably didn't.
You probably didn't before your first hell week.

Speaker 5 And what's crazy is you guys at 240 had like the worst hell week of all. I remember it was like I was, I was was going into seal team five because i was tad there before we classed up

Speaker 5 actually maybe i was already an indoct i can't remember but i was scraping the ice i scraped the ice off of my windshield that was 239.

Speaker 6 the 239 i would love to take credit for that but i can't but that was class 230.

Speaker 6 i remember watching that and it's like

Speaker 6 It's fucking snowing in San Diego right now and these guys are in the water. And I was like, holy shit.
And I remember watching like all these badass guys just like quitting, quitting.

Speaker 6 Okay, I guess I'm not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 5 I remember going to 240. You guys had a huge amount of guys that got pneumonia.

Speaker 5 I think it was a particularly miserable one. It certainly wasn't the June hell week that we had, which the water wasn't as cold.
The weather was as cold. It just meant we ran more, you know.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 you definitely went through a tough hell week for sure in 240.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so. when you got assigned to come back and that brown shirt, you, so you get a white shirt, you know, you got a white shirt, you make it through hell week, you get that brown shirt.

Speaker 5 I mean, this is a super coveted thing. We're all looking at, you know, you and, you know, the guys that have made it through like, oh man, those guys made it through hell week.

Speaker 5 And we're talking, you know, the vast majority of the, the 70 to 80% of the people that don't make it to training quit during hell week.

Speaker 5 And so when they took away your brown shirt and like sent you back, you know, as a white shirt, and I just remember like, I was in awe, man, of like the attitude that you had. You were like,

Speaker 5 all right,

Speaker 5 this is what it is. Like, we're going to do it, you know, and

Speaker 5 I'm going to go through this thing. I'm going to be a team player for 241.
I'm going to tell them what I know. I'm going to support the team.
And, you know, we're all up nervous, man.

Speaker 5 We've been up, you know, for nights on end. Everyone's kind of freaking out.
We're reading these Bible verses. They're trying to like strengthen each other.
And

Speaker 5 right as they kick off, you know, they come into the tents and they have an amazing way.

Speaker 5 I think I hadn't slept for easy 24 hours prior to that, just as I was able to kind of relax enough to like fall asleep for, you know, 10 minutes, right?

Speaker 5 They come in, all of a sudden the blank fire is going off, bell fit machine guns and grenade sims are being thrown. And

Speaker 5 I remember running out there and we had, we had instantly had quitters from the team that had been thinking about it. It got to their head and they're, they're already ringing the bell within minutes.

Speaker 5 And we're running out to the grinder. We're running around.
And I remember them calling you out by name.

Speaker 5 and getting and pulling you out of the class and uh and uh and then and then giving you your brown share back and now you got the support.

Speaker 5 Uh, and it was, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw, man, because there were so many people who would have been like, No way am I doing that?

Speaker 5 I just did, this is supposed to be the toughest military training in the world. You're going to make me go through it again, and like that's what you were willing to do.

Speaker 5 And you were a team player the entire time.

Speaker 5 And then, even as a brown shirt rollback, man, you were checking on us, you were looking at us, you were like, Hey, guys, you know, you were just strengthening us, giving us some encouragement.

Speaker 5 It was freaking cool, man. And uh, and I remember later you gave me some photos of all of us just like we look like just, you know, just

Speaker 5 disaster, like wet, sandy, all like contorted on these colours. Cool and, you know, three days in when we get like our first chance to sleep for 45 minutes or an hour or whatever.

Speaker 5 And, you know, you, but you were

Speaker 5 taking photos for us, like just helping us out, looking out for us. And it was, it was awesome, man.

Speaker 5 It just was a, it was like the consummate team player and the person that's going to put the mission first. And you were like, hey, they're telling me to do this.
Cool. I'm going to do it.

Speaker 5 And even you were, you were willing to to go into that with such a great attitude. And you could tell the instructor staff was like fired up by that.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the respect and admiration that they had for you to be willing to do that. And you were like, because I don't, how much you, you were, it wasn't immediate, right?

Speaker 5 Like, it was, I mean, you were running around on the grinder.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we did the whole, I think we did the whole break.

Speaker 6 They we did the whole breakout, and then they, they, they called me and uh, the other two gents out

Speaker 6 first, first surf torture

Speaker 2 For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, and they stand by their values.

Speaker 2 Patriot Mobile has been a great supporter of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them.

Speaker 2 Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without the compromise.

Speaker 2 When you switch to Patriot Mobile, you're choosing more than a wireless provider. You're supporting a company that stands for American values and that proudly honors our veterans and first responders.

Speaker 2 Their 100% U.S.-based customer service team makes switching easy. Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade.
Their team will help you find the best plan for your needs.

Speaker 2 Just go to patriotmobile.com slash SRS or call 972-PATRIOT. Get free activation when you use the offer code SRS.
Make the switch today. PatriotMobile.com slash SRS.

Speaker 2 That's patriotmobile.com slash SRS or call 972 Patriot.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so it was, we were probably 45 minutes or hour of like solid physical beatdown. At this point, you probably are 100% convinced that I was to the entire next five days of no sleep.

Speaker 6 Because Holcomb had actually told us, like, they're probably going to pull you guys out. We're like,

Speaker 6 like right before. And we're like, all right, whatever.
And then I remember seeing him and break out. And I was like, they're not fucking pulling us out.

Speaker 5 And like, he was just playing mind games with funny.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 But,

Speaker 6 well, thank you for saying that, man. I will say.

Speaker 6 I think the thing that sticks out the most,

Speaker 6 and you were a great fucking leader, by the way. i really uh

Speaker 6 i've really looked up to you you know going through buds and i mean

Speaker 6 and uh i had a a terrible mistake in third phase right before right before we were done on the island i had an ad

Speaker 6 with a blank round and uh

Speaker 6 talk about a

Speaker 6 one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire fucking life. And

Speaker 6 yeah, I had an AD is an is an accidental discharge.

Speaker 6 And I just remember getting called out immediately. And I was like, fuck, man, we're like a week away from getting out of here and we're done and I'm probably going to get kicked out.
And

Speaker 6 I don't know what the conversations were, you know, behind the scenes. I never asked, but I just.
I always respected you for not making,

Speaker 6 for not making more of a thing out of of it. And

Speaker 6 because it could, man, that's, you know, when you make a mistake like that, it's,

Speaker 6 you feel like the entire world's crashing down, you know, and

Speaker 6 I've never even talked about it before.

Speaker 5 I haven't thought about that in a long time. Yeah.
And, you know what, though, Sean, like to me, like it was

Speaker 5 failure is the best teacher. And I think that those are the things that

Speaker 5 I can't imagine that that helped you as a shooter and as an operator, you know, as teaching tactics, you know, down the road you know those kind of lessons learned and and the the weight and pressure after all that you've been through you know i'm weighing on you but for um you know you were always like exactly the kind of person that we wanted in the seal teams like like exactly the kind of person i wanted i remember at one point the instructor staff going through hell weeks saying like who's not performing your boat crew like who's you know always they're always trying to solicit like info and i i'd always be like me i'm not i'm not performing you know i wasn't going to throw guys from the bus or things like that and then you but you, you start to realize like, hey, they're,

Speaker 5 they,

Speaker 5 they want good people to serve in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 And if, if you don't want somebody, if you wouldn't want somebody on your platoon, you know, if you wouldn't want to want to go to war with somebody, then that's like you owe it to the SEAL teams to like.

Speaker 5 These guys should be weeding out the program, right? That's what the program is actually for.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so I think that was somebody like you were always an absolute standout performer, always somebody to put the team first.

Speaker 5 And I mean, to me, like, you know, I don't think that was ever a question in any of the instructors' minds. And, you know,

Speaker 5 and everything I could say positive about you was always said, man, because you were a go-getter. You got things done.
You're smart. You're capable.
You're talented. You're innovative.

Speaker 5 You're a hard worker. You're a physical put-out guy all the time.
And you absolutely the kind of guy, you know, that

Speaker 5 I wanted to serve in the SEAL teams with, that other SEALs would want to serve with as well. And frankly, my hat's off to you, brother, because I was 26 years old, man.
I was an old man.

Speaker 5 There were a couple of guys,

Speaker 5 our leading petty officer and a couple of the

Speaker 5 our non-commissioned officers. But

Speaker 5 man, I was, I had 26 years of, you know, maturity experience for you to do that as an 18-year-old, you know, to have the maturity to train and the discipline to actually train

Speaker 5 and to put out and to be able to make it to Trinity Brook. I don't think I could have done that at 18, man.
So, I mean, that's, to me, that's, that's what I loved about the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 It was always about the guys and the quality of the people that I got to serve with and

Speaker 5 guys like you, man. And that's, that's what I love most about Buds is like, hey, we might be getting beat on.

Speaker 5 This might be physically punishing, but we could look at each other and just laugh about how ridiculous this situation was and

Speaker 5 how funny it was or how much we were actually suffering. And, you know, that's the best of the SEAL teams, man.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. I'm with you, man.
And,

Speaker 6 and, you know, like I said, your reputation preceded you and went with you everywhere you went. And so

Speaker 6 moving out of buds, I mean, where did you, we all get a dream sheet.

Speaker 6 Where did you want to go?

Speaker 6 What team?

Speaker 5 I wanted to be on the West Coast, you know, just because I'd been stationed in San Diego. My friends were out there.

Speaker 5 spent some time on a ship during a midshipman cruise in Virginia Beach. And I just, I like San Diego.
You know, I'd gotten to know it better. And my closest friends were there.
So

Speaker 5 I think I'd put West Coast SEAL teams and I got server selected or

Speaker 5 I say server selected. I got selected for, I was going to be sent to SEAL team one.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 excuse me.

Speaker 5 So I got sent to SEAL team one and

Speaker 5 I had orders to SEAL team one. And

Speaker 5 that was a problem for me because in their rotation, like as you know, I put on lieutenant in buds.

Speaker 5 And so I was already a senior guy. What that was going to do was

Speaker 5 I was going to start as a one-time platoon commander. So I would have had, I wouldn't have the experience of being an assistant platoon commander under my belt.
And that was a problem.

Speaker 5 I was going to, like, instead of, you know, having a full workup cycle and deployment as an assisted platoon commander, which would give me some experience in the SEAL teams and give me some perspective,

Speaker 5 I just didn't think that was. good for me.
It wasn't good for the SEAL teams. And so luckily, I had some good friends.

Speaker 5 It was my same, my same friend that was at SEAL team five and several other friends friends that were there. They went in and talked to the executive officer and commanding officer at SEAL Team 5.

Speaker 5 And they pulled some strengths from me and got the D Thether company some new orders. So I went to SEAL Team 5 and as an assistant platoon commander.
So even though I was a lieutenant,

Speaker 5 I got a chance to be a platoon commander. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Speaker 5 And I'm so thankful for my friends that were there, for the senior leaders that were there that pulled strengths for me and made that happen and really opened some doors for me.

Speaker 5 So So we got a chance to go through

Speaker 5 and got a chance to serve with some of our mutual friends, Ellie, Elliott, you know, from our Buds class,

Speaker 5 who may be,

Speaker 5 Elliott may be the most senior, the most significantly wounded living SEAL like through the GWAT era.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, who got wounded in Ramadi and

Speaker 5 TBI, you know, and

Speaker 5 lost his leg, wheelchair bound, like, like, you know, significant injuries, but uh just an amazing guy, man, and such an awesome dude. And um, always loved stories from buds.

Speaker 5 I pulled strings to get him over to SEAL Team 5 and try to stack the applicant. He was coming out of the 18 Delta

Speaker 5 combat medic course, Special Forces Combat Medic course and all our corporate went to.

Speaker 5 But it was it was great to be there with Elliot, some of the guys that were in classes just before us and behind us.

Speaker 6 We'll get into deployment cycles and everything that happened, but just real quick, I mean,

Speaker 6 when you pinned your trident on,

Speaker 6 you'd been passed up, you didn't get selected two different times, one in the academy, one a couple of years after the academy. Then you make it through straight with no hang-ups.

Speaker 6 I mean, who was your first phone call when you when you passed Buds, when you got through?

Speaker 5 My first phone call was to my dad, my dad, mom, who were praying for me the whole time and knew that's what I wanted to do. And,

Speaker 5 um, you know, just wanted to thank them for their love and support, you know,

Speaker 5 and all the, all the prayers. And,

Speaker 5 and, uh, that was,

Speaker 5 uh, I think my dad has since got, you know, disappeared, but he had a voicemail for me after, after hell week that I called and left for him, you know, too, as well.

Speaker 5 But that was, it was a proud moment, man. And, and

Speaker 5 getting that, uh, getting that trident. Um, and you and I, you know, we didn't get pinned together because that was at SQT during the time, but

Speaker 5 I remember, remember well, Ty Woods, who was, you know, our instructor at steel qualification training that it probably pinned your trident on the chest just like it did for me

Speaker 5 as well, man, that we later lost in Bogaza. He was an awesome guy.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah, that

Speaker 5 blood pinning ceremony was something that we had a full on Navy investigation on.

Speaker 5 I had to answer all these questions.

Speaker 6 Oh, man, really? Yeah.

Speaker 5 And they were like, you know, this can't happen.

Speaker 5 This is hazing and and that's so they the an officer was like like uh doing an investigation and i was like i was like i was like i wasn't hazing like this is completely voluntary this wasn't hazing in any way shape or form like i saw that as that i saw that as a ritual that was like this is what i wanted to be a part of and so i asked him the investigating officer was like hey did you did you get your trident bend on he was like

Speaker 5 oh that was a different oh shit it was a seal yeah i was like that was a different time i was like there was no hazing whatsoever took place

Speaker 5 ah that's awesome man That's awesome.

Speaker 6 Well, you know, I do have one other question.

Speaker 6 I had no idea you guys were studying the Bible and buds. And, you know, I think, I think,

Speaker 6 at least for me, faith in general kind of dissipated into nothing

Speaker 6 for a very long time until recently. And I'm just curious, did you,

Speaker 6 did that stick with you throughout your entire career?

Speaker 5 Man, I've fallen so far, Sean. I've stumbled, you know, as much as anyone out there.
And

Speaker 5 I'm glad I had the foundation, you know, built in me. I think,

Speaker 5 and by the way, man, you, you're, it's, I love that you share your faith with people. I think that's an incredible thing.

Speaker 5 I don't know how people who have been through dark times in their life make it through without faith, man.

Speaker 5 People ask me, how is it that you're doing okay?

Speaker 5 You know, and I think knowing that there is a creator that's in charge of the universe, that has all things planned out and has a plan for each one of us, right? That to me is everything.

Speaker 5 And knowing that you can screw everything up and all you have to do is simply just ask for forgiveness

Speaker 5 and strive to

Speaker 5 follow the righteous path as best you can, knowing that we're all going to fall short of the mark, you know, but that's all it takes. And I think

Speaker 5 that to me is

Speaker 5 everything. And

Speaker 5 it's...

Speaker 5 I think, thank God that was instilled in me at an early age. I didn't realize or fully appreciate that.

Speaker 5 I went to

Speaker 5 the public school. I went to a private school at a small like three-room log cabin schoolhouse until I was in like fifth grade.
And then I went to public school in a small, you know,

Speaker 5 East Texas public school. And then before my junior, I transferred to a public school, or I'm sorry, a private Catholic school in the bigger town of Beaumont.

Speaker 5 It was about an hour away in Southeast Texas.

Speaker 5 And so,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it was

Speaker 5 the the level of education there, I think, was going to open some more opportunities for me.

Speaker 5 It was probably easier to get accepted into the Naval Academy, you know, as a result of that or one of the service academies. But it wasn't until I started going to school

Speaker 5 and, you know, I was going to school in the, the Catholic school was outstanding school. We had a religious class every semester.

Speaker 5 And I was going to school with kids that had been in a religious class every

Speaker 5 from kindergarten on, you know, and I remember, so this is my junior year and it's my first ever like religious class because in public school, we didn't, we didn't have that.

Speaker 5 Um, but I went to you know, Sunday school every Sunday with them, the uh, First Baptist Church at Woodville.

Speaker 5 I was involved in the youth group, and we were constantly my dad would study the Bible and talk about it at home. It was constantly something that we referenced and talked about.

Speaker 5 And uh, and so I remember the teacher in high school in this, this uh, uh, at Monsignor Kelly High School asking, like in the the um

Speaker 5 in in the uh um spiritual class there, like, uh, what is how did the israelites get to egypt and and i was like

Speaker 5 you know i just i was kind of looking around the room i was ready for somebody to jump in and i was like i was like i just raised my hand and and um

Speaker 5 and i thought i talked about joseph the coat of many colors and you know his brothers sold him into slavery and then you know he's uh which is an amazing story from the bible right joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers that are jealous of him he goes his brothers think he's dead he goes to egypt years later um there's a famine in the land of canaan his brothers bow down before him and are asking for you know for food supplies um and and and

Speaker 5 what he says to him is that you know what you use for good you know

Speaker 5 what you uh meant for evil god chose to to use for good and so all the israelites come and so they they uh and they start to become um you know populous in egypt they they eventually have 400 years of slavery uh that results from that in egypt until moses leads them out and i I was kind of looking around the room like, well, everyone knows the answer to that question.

Speaker 5 And afterward, people were like,

Speaker 5 dude, like, how did you know that?

Speaker 5 And I was like, I was like halfway paying attention in like Baptist Sunday school, you know, like getting kicked out because I was bad and, you know, cutting up and punching people in the back of the head.

Speaker 5 But I realized like, like studying the Bible was

Speaker 5 that that had been ingrained in me. That that's something my, my, my family did.
That's something that we did in church and in my youth group, like opening the word, studying the word.

Speaker 5 and i'm so thankful for that that foundation um that that was built to me i mean there's times when i strayed very very far you know from that but i i thank god that that always has brought me back to like the truth right always understanding that there's forgiveness for anything and uh and and that all it takes you know is to uh is to recognize your own failures and flaws that none of us are actually good enough you know, to achieve righteousness on our own.

Speaker 5 And only through the blood of Jesus can we do that. And that's all it takes.
So that to me is, I've shared that with many people when I talk about it.

Speaker 5 You know, we don't lead an openly secular organization at Echelon Freud, but I think there's so many foundations that are biblically rooted, right?

Speaker 5 When it talks to being humble, I mean, you know, you can't study scripture and not realize like.

Speaker 5 abject humility is like, is like continually the theme.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 the proud will be humble and the humble will be exalted. And that's throughout the

Speaker 5 scripture, and particularly in the New Testament.

Speaker 5 But I think the idea that

Speaker 5 if we got to take ownership of our problems, we're never going to actually be good enough. And that's what prevents us from

Speaker 5 achieving salvation. So that to me, I think to me, faith is everything.
And I think having that foundation

Speaker 5 that's built in

Speaker 5 study of the word. I try to be like the

Speaker 5 Paul talks about the noble Bereans who after he would preach to them in the synagogue, would study the word to see if these things were so.

Speaker 5 So, right, you hear something in a sermon, you hear something from a pastor, you hear something from somebody in the world.

Speaker 5 We would actually search the word, open up the Bible, study scripture, make sure that that actually is the truth

Speaker 5 and that

Speaker 5 it's open for any of us to study and know. But I just, you know, it's been really cool to hear about your spiritual journey.

Speaker 5 And I thank you for sharing that because I think for so many people out there, they're trying to find some answer, you know, in the secular world.

Speaker 5 They're trying to find whether it's fame or fortune or money, you know, power or followers on social media, whatever it may be. And they're never going to find that, right? We all know that

Speaker 5 that doesn't lead to happiness.

Speaker 5 And I think being grounded in that,

Speaker 5 by the way, have you ever been to the Palace of Versailles?

Speaker 5 I don't think so. So the Palace of Versailles, I got a chance to go to France this summer just before the 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasions.
And I did a Go Ruck event there.

Speaker 5 We did the 80-kilometer ruck, you know, about 50 miles. It was brutal, man.
19-hour get-some evolution, but awesome to do that with a Go Ruck team.

Speaker 5 But we went to the Palace of Versailles and my wife and I took our kids there. And

Speaker 5 we had a nanny there that came and helped us with the kids. And she did some great reporting there.
And the Palace of Versailles is probably the greatest monument

Speaker 5 to the idea that that money and power and fame and fortune cannot buy you happiness. It is the most magnificent place you could ever go, like golden gates.

Speaker 5 And I mean, this was the seat of power, right, for the, you know, for the, for the French kingdom.

Speaker 5 From Louis XIV, who was the sun king at the height of France's power, one of the most powerful people in the entire world, you know, all the way through Louis XVI, who eventually...

Speaker 5 you know, he and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were led to the guillotine.

Speaker 5 And I think one of the reasons that happened is because I don't think they had a clue what was going on outside the palace, man.

Speaker 5 It is, I think they were, they're surrounded by people who you can walk around these amazing gardens and this incredible, just ornate

Speaker 5 palace that would have just eclipsed. It's mind-blowing to think about the power and fame and fortune and influence and, you know, that was going on.
The reality show, right?

Speaker 5 TV at the time that everybody wants to be a part of. And you just sense that it's probably the most miserable place you could be, right? You can't trust anybody.
Everybody's got their agenda.

Speaker 5 Everyone's trying to, you know, to undermine the other. And it's

Speaker 5 it's, I think it's just a living monument to that. I think it's worth going and worth seeing

Speaker 5 for that. But it's, again, just leading us back to the faith of like, what buys you happiness, right? It's, it's the, it's the, the, the, the proud will be humbled and the, the humble will be exalted.

Speaker 5 And only through recognizing my own.

Speaker 5 failures, abject failures and flaws and weaknesses, you know, can I actually find salvation, you know, through

Speaker 5 Jesus?

Speaker 5 And I hope that's something that others can turn to and

Speaker 5 see because

Speaker 5 that is how you find peace in this world.

Speaker 6 I'm not like extremely wealthy or anything,

Speaker 6 but, you know, I'm working towards it. And so

Speaker 6 doesn't the Bible say something like a rich man has like a fucking

Speaker 5 It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 What do you think about that? Yeah, these are, those are great questions, man. I think

Speaker 5 Abraham

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 very wealthy, right? I had massive herds.

Speaker 5 So did Isaac, so did Jacob.

Speaker 5 Joseph became second only to Pharaoh in Egypt, you know, the most powerful empire of the time, you know, and the day.

Speaker 5 I think

Speaker 5 God, I mean, Job was, you know, was given tremendous wealth, right? And that's one of the things that was taken away from him when Satan was trying to

Speaker 5 get him to curse God. So I think there's, I think God,

Speaker 5 I think God gives us, I think, as long as you remember that

Speaker 5 it belongs to God.

Speaker 5 It belongs to God. And so you can choose that to do good with it, you know, or you can choose it to be selfish with it.

Speaker 5 I think God has given you the means to

Speaker 5 help people.

Speaker 5 And I think I kind of like Dave Ramsey's take on it. You know, when you have like the,

Speaker 5 you can't help your, you can't help anybody else out, right?

Speaker 5 If you came to me and you're like, hey, Leif, I'm having trouble paying my bills and, you know, I might lose my house here if I can't pay my mortgage.

Speaker 5 And if I don't have my own finances in order, like I can't help you.

Speaker 5 I can't do anything for you. So like I need to, if,

Speaker 5 if I have my finances in order, then I have the ability to actually have the means to help you.

Speaker 5 It enables me to help other people. So I think

Speaker 5 when it becomes the object of worship as like, no, no, I want more money. It's money for the sake of money.
I think that's where it becomes a problem. And when you know that it's all,

Speaker 5 man, it's all like, it's just all dust, right? It's, if you can't take any of it with you.

Speaker 5 And I think when people kind of hold that up as like, this is what success looks like. I think you do have to be careful that it's,

Speaker 5 there is,

Speaker 5 you know, i think that jesus talked about the jewish culture of the day was like hey if if someone was poor well that means that god like you know they did something bad if someone was rich then god had blessed them they did something good and jesus uh threw that on its head like that thinking is not true at all in fact when his disciples uh had asked him you know when he encountered a blind man you know who sinned this man or his parents and jesus said neither uh this man is blind so that god could be glorified and then he healed him you know so i mean i think it just throws out the idea that like, you know,

Speaker 5 bad things can happen to us at any time, right? All of this can be,

Speaker 5 you know, can be given and taken away. And I think as long as you use the means that are given to you for good, you know, to help those in need, to help others in need.

Speaker 5 And I love what you're doing that, man, with like the veterans advocacy groups

Speaker 5 and bringing people into the fold, like not working yourself, right?

Speaker 5 So you can actually help people and get them into the fold so they can get taken care of and get the benefits they deserve, you know, through the VA.

Speaker 5 I just think, I think those things,

Speaker 5 using the platform that you've been given for good, man, like that's,

Speaker 5 that's, that's, you've been given this platform for a reason, man. God has placed you in that position for a reason.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And you, you can choose to use it for good or ill, right?

Speaker 5 And, and when you share your faith with people, when you try to help those in need and try to actually reach out to those that are struggling, you in hard times, like you're using it for good, man.

Speaker 6 And that's what I think has been so awesome about seeing your success man thank you yeah it's just something uh i don't know man i think about it all the time because

Speaker 5 because

Speaker 6 you know i want to

Speaker 6 i want to set future generations of my family up to

Speaker 6 so you don't get pushed around you know what i mean i in my opinion is is you you

Speaker 6 you create enough wealth to where you can't be fucking pushed around anymore. And that's like something that's really important to me.

Speaker 6 I don't want, I just, I just don't want to see, look, you see all these fucking families and everybody's getting pushed around, man, pushed around in their beliefs.

Speaker 6 You know, you see it in, you see it everywhere. And

Speaker 6 it just like from the, I mean, it just looks like the people that don't get pushed around are the ones that work themselves up to be. to be wealthy so that they, you know, they they can afford to

Speaker 6 you know what I mean pull their fucking kids out of school and put them over here and and uh

Speaker 5 I think there's definitely something to that man right I mean if you if you become uncanceable you know yeah like uh where somebody somebody they're trying to put the pressure on you um you know and you could say like bro I'm not gonna do that you know or hey I'm gonna oh I yeah that might be a big paycheck

Speaker 5 but I'm not actually going to take that sponsorship because I don't want you dictating what I get to say.

Speaker 5 No, I'm never, i'm never i'm never like that well i think that's what's been awesome man that's what's driven the success of your show man i mean there's no question in my mind about that like you get to you get to talk to people you want to talk to you don't pull punches you don't like you know you say what you want to say and i think uh

Speaker 5 um and not that you're not smart about it or professional about it you know but i think there's um

Speaker 5 uh

Speaker 5 I think the self-censorship, man, that you were talking about with Joe, you know, on the Rogan,

Speaker 5 Joe Rogan experience was like,

Speaker 5 that's the worst of all, right? We're like, oh, I shouldn't say that because

Speaker 5 someone doesn't want to say that. I mean, I just think it's, I think that's the kind of thing where I think there's enough people

Speaker 5 pushing back on things now where that pedal is starting to swing back, where people are like, yeah, we've had, we've had enough of that.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think so too. I mean, is that something you think about, though, building when you're building your business?

Speaker 6 The wealth stuff and what the Bible says about totally man.

Speaker 6 What was the passage again? The camel

Speaker 5 uh it's easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle is the is the passage that jesus talks about now there's some controversy about whether or not he's talking about a an actual geographic place or an actual needle himself like what and then he was asked about it his his disciples are asked about it he says he's saying it's not impossible and there clearly are many many you know um

Speaker 5 uh

Speaker 5 many examples of uh wealthy people including joseph of Arimathea, who was a wealthy man that Jesus was laid in his tomb. Nicodemus, who was one of the Pharisees and

Speaker 5 Jesus called him the teacher in Israel

Speaker 5 in John, where he comes to Jesus by night and asks, like, you know, how do you get to heaven? You know, how do you be born again?

Speaker 5 And so those are things that

Speaker 5 these are believers that were wealthy in positions of power and use their power for good.

Speaker 6 Interesting. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's something I always think about.
And I know Jesus is,

Speaker 6 you know, all about

Speaker 6 family.

Speaker 6 And so if the goal is to, you know, protect your family with it and everybody around you, then I just don't see how it could be bad. But, you know, I don't know.
I get wrapped up in these little.

Speaker 5 I struggle with it too, man. I struggle with it too.
You know, as we started to gain some success as well. But I mean, the cool thing is like as you're,

Speaker 5 I mean, you've got a growing business, right? You're, you're, you're employing people, like you're, you're creating livelihoods for people. You're,

Speaker 5 um, I think that's, that's huge, man. That builds our economy.
And

Speaker 5 you're promoting, you know, the, the sponsors and those companies, you know, that, that employ people. I mean, those, those things all have huge impacts.
So you got to, you can't lose track of that.

Speaker 5 I think we live in a society where

Speaker 5 you kind of get demonized, right, of like success. Yeah.
And you shouldn't be apologetic for it. I think you should be, again, confident, not cocky, right?

Speaker 5 Like you confident knowing like, hey, this is what I'm supposed to do. This is, God's given me the opportunity to do this.
I'm going to use this platform for good.

Speaker 5 And then I'm going to help people in need. If I see someone in need, I can help them.
Cool.

Speaker 5 I'm going to absolutely help them.

Speaker 5 And I'm going to use that, the means that I've been given for good. And I think also, again, knowing that like ultimately our faith is not in money or savings or even our.

Speaker 5 firearm stash as much i hate to admit that in our house right there our faith is in the almighty creator of the universe who's in charge of all things man and uh and even if he lost everything right it like job did um you know he's still on the throne he still has a plan um and uh that's that's that's that's where your faith lies you know it's a lot of people looking for that right now a lot of people looking for that it's really uh

Speaker 6 it's cool to see you know how many people are coming to the word but um well late let's take a break and uh when we come back we'll pick up at soul team five

Speaker 6 i know everybody out there has to be

Speaker 6 just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us.

Speaker 6 And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world.

Speaker 6 And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter.

Speaker 6 And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA Targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad.

Speaker 6 She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show.

Speaker 6 And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing.

Speaker 6 And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief.

Speaker 6 So it's going to be all things terrorists: how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to.

Speaker 6 And here's the best part: the newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you.

Speaker 6 It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.
But

Speaker 6 like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up.
Links in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.

Speaker 6 All right, Lafe, we're back from the break. You're getting into, you're getting ready to check into SEAL Team 5 as a brand new guy, but in 03.

Speaker 6 And so let's just talk about, you know, what that experience was like checking in.

Speaker 6 Let's go to day one.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was awesome. Walk across

Speaker 5 the quarterdeck there at SEAL Team 5. And we were in the old kind of Quantit huts, you know, then.
And

Speaker 5 we ended up building like a new building that was all kind of fancy. And some of those old Quant huts have been out there since the World War II, you know, underwater demolition team days.

Speaker 5 But it was awesome. I knew a bunch of people at SEAL Team 5.
It was great to be a new guy there.

Speaker 5 There was a bunch of pie pitters there. There were people that were just,

Speaker 5 they had just come back. I checked in in,

Speaker 5 we came back from Alaska, our Winter Warfare training trip, which I did in August of 2003, which was actually miserable. It was like 40 degrees and raining on us, you know, for a lot of the time.

Speaker 5 But we had a great time up there, you know, on the thing. We awesome fishing.
And we came back. Excuse me.
We came back from

Speaker 5 that. And I immediately went on like an elk hunting trip with my dad and my brother.
We went up to the mountain to Colorado and

Speaker 5 went and pursued some elk with our bows. And then I came in, I checked into SEAL Team 5 and the guys were just, a couple of people had just come back, but the team was deployed.

Speaker 5 So Iraq war had just kicked off. And so, you know, SEAL Team 5 had taken over from Team 3 that had done kind of the initial takedowns of the

Speaker 5 oil platforms off the coast. And then SEAL Team 5 had really gotten to the mix with the DAs, right? The direct action missions, the capture-kill raids.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they started using vehicles and and and jumping in you know using those vehicles as like their mobility element i think they initially had to borrow vehicles from the national guard unit uh because we didn't have the capability in the seal tubes at the time and and so that became like i came back and the guys that were coming back from that deployment that started trickling back you know over the um

Speaker 5 uh

Speaker 5 in in the fall were were highly experienced. I mean, they had more experience than any SEAL unit since Vietnam at that point.

Speaker 5 So it was really cool to learn from them and talk about the real world experiences that they were, you know, that they were, they were getting. And

Speaker 5 it was just a lot of great mentors, a lot of open up notebooks and asking a lot of questions.

Speaker 6 So what, I mean, what was,

Speaker 6 it's just such a different experience than, you know, from what I experienced. I mean, you're, you're going, especially going to Team 5.

Speaker 6 I didn't know that they were the kind of the first ones out the door doing it and in Iraq.

Speaker 6 And so, you know,

Speaker 6 as a lieutenant, an 03,

Speaker 6 I mean, we've already discussed the fact that you were going to have to do a platoon commander, which means you're in charge of everyone in the platoon, for those that are listening.

Speaker 6 And you're able to finagle your way into kind of an AOI, or not kind of, an AOIC slot is what it sounds like. So second in charge.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 from your words, you're getting ready to lead men who have

Speaker 6 the most experience out of the entire

Speaker 6 SEAL team organization, all of Naval Special Warfare since Vietnam. I mean,

Speaker 6 what is that like for, to walk into that, you know, with,

Speaker 6 I mean, a junior guy right out of SQT. I mean, we basically, yeah, we're SEALs, but we really don't know shit, you know, and we haven't really experienced anything other than training.

Speaker 6 And you got these guys coming back who you just mentioned, capture-kill missions.

Speaker 6 They're getting after it.

Speaker 5 It was very intimidating, man. I, when I graduated Buds, you know, when you and I, you know, I graduated Buds together, you know, we felt like, hey, we just graduated Buds.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, we're ready to go take on the world, right? Then you start going into SQT, SEAL qualification training.

Speaker 5 You start getting some of the fundamentals of close quarters combat and land warfare and, you know, maritime operations. You realize, well, man, there's a lot I don't know.

Speaker 5 And then you start getting that first workup. You're like, I don't know anything.

Speaker 5 I know absolutely nothing. And then I deployed to combat.
You know, I deployed to Iraq. And when I was leading my first combat mission, I was like, I know absolutely nothing at all.

Speaker 5 Like, it's even less than nothing. So, it definitely was very humbling.

Speaker 5 It was cool, though, because there was,

Speaker 5 you know, I think just realizing that, like, hey, I can learn from these guys. Let me talk to them.
Let me let me understand what they

Speaker 5 know.

Speaker 5 And I think everyone was trying to get in the, you know, into the war effort. Everyone got a chance to, you know, everyone wanted a chance to go forward and be in the fight.

Speaker 5 And for me, like right off the bat,

Speaker 5 our very first training block was

Speaker 5 the

Speaker 5 very first training block was the assaults block. And so we started going through and learning that and doing our close quarters combat.
And then we did our visit board search and Caesar block

Speaker 5 shortly thereafter that. And it was.

Speaker 5 That was,

Speaker 5 I had had a bunch of experience boarding ships, as we talked about, you know, in the Persian Gulf. So I'd climb down these ships onto a, you know, climb down the Jacobs ladder, right?

Speaker 5 The rope ladder and the plastic rungs that you lower,

Speaker 5 you know, from the side of the ship. I've climbed up and down those things a thousand times.
And in my very first

Speaker 5 VBSS training block, we're doing some hook and climbs from the 11-meter ribs, you know, from the special boat team.

Speaker 5 uh detachment that took us out we're 13 miles off the coast of san diego and we're boarding the duty oiler right it's like 800 foot long uh uh a u.s navy uh service ship uh this is the ship that like the other is that's refueling the you know the navy warships and the carriers and uh and so we're 13 miles off the coast of san diego and um we're doing the hook and climbs uh you know climbing up that little caving ladder just as if you as you've done and i remember i was about to walk off the the deck.

Speaker 5 I was like the first down on the ladder to climb back down onto the rib. And we had a guy that was driving the boat.

Speaker 5 They clearly had a new coxswain at the helm. Like he was somebody who was having a tough time.

Speaker 5 And you remember what it's like when you're climbing up that little, you know, caving ladder and you're getting, your boat's going, you know, left and right, like, you know, are moving out, hauling out from the ship.

Speaker 5 Like it's treacherous as you're trying to climb up the 25-foot freeboard and you're bouncing up and down on the waves.

Speaker 5 And so we kind of complained about it, you know, the others, I can't drive the boat and people were kind of complaining about it, but no one, no one said anything. I didn't say anything.

Speaker 5 And so I'm about to climb down. So now the caving ladder, we climbed up.
We cleared the ship. We took down the bridge.

Speaker 5 And so now we're going going to do another run and they threw the the the jacobs ladder over the side this big heavy you know rope uh ladder with the plastic rungs this is now admin right we're just climbing down back onto the rib so i'm climbing down this thing and right before i go one of the trading detachment instructors that's running the training says don't be scared babbing he made some comment like that i'm like whatever you know i just i just like like uh I was like, man, I've done this a thousand times, dude.

Speaker 5 I walked out. So I get down to the bottom rung of the ladder right at the water line.
The waves are going up and down. The rib comes in.

Speaker 5 As the rib is about to hold out from the side of the ship, I go to step on, or as the rib comes in, I'm about to go step onto the ship and the rib hauls out probably 10 or 12 feet from the side of the ship.

Speaker 5 And I went right down in between

Speaker 5 the rib and the ship. And

Speaker 5 it would have been fine. And I had positive flotation on.
We went and did our dip test at the combat turning tank, you know, just like we're supposed to. We have positive flotation on.

Speaker 5 Man, if not, I'd have been 2,000 feet on the bottom, you know, off the coast of San Diego out there.

Speaker 5 But it was,

Speaker 5 I go, I got my leg wrapped up in the painter line. Oh, shit.
So now I'm getting dragged upside down underwater by this 800-foot-long vessel. And

Speaker 5 I mean, I didn't know what to do. I mean, this was, they're going like 12 knots, which is a lot of pressure, you know, if you're underwater.

Speaker 5 And my leg is like suspended, but my body's like underwater. I got my helmet, body armor, you know, radio, all that that stuff on me.

Speaker 5 Luckily, a weapon shape, not a real weapon, uh, because I ditched that, you know, as soon as I could. I was trying to get to my, you know, my little scuba bottle, the He's bottle.

Speaker 5 That got just ripped away by the force of the water. So I couldn't get to that.
The rib comes in and just, and, and they're trying to rescue me, and they just smashed me between the rib and the ship.

Speaker 5 And luckily, I had, if I'd had a, if I'd had a Pro Tech on, a plastic helmet, I'd have been killed. Almost certainly would have smashed my head.

Speaker 5 Man, it, uh, I had my Kevlar on, and so it, it, the, the boat smashed my nose. It just kind of like filleted my nose open.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 the rib realized they can't help me. So they just kind of hauled off and they were sitting probably 200 yards off the, you know, off the quarter, just kind of just, no one knew what to do.

Speaker 5 The guys on the ladder didn't know what to do.

Speaker 5 And I'm, you know, I'm trying to reach the water. Every time I tried to get my hand, I would just get ripped right back down by the force of the wave.
So

Speaker 5 I within probably, you know, it felt like an hour, right? It probably was two or three minutes, but it I very quickly realized like, I'm not going to survive this, man. This is, this is over.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it just happened like that. And it was, I just remember thinking, what a stupid way to go, man.
This is like, this is so dumb. You know, I've done this a thousand times.

Speaker 5 And luckily, some heads up guys on the ladder, my teammates above me on the ladder, they realized. you know, climb back.

Speaker 5 They climbed back up the Jacob's ladder and they everyone was kind of just wondering what to do. And they started, one guy was like, hey, let's hold this thing and they started hauling it in by hand.

Speaker 5 And they lifted me. I mean, that was a massive feat of strength and very heads up, you know, for them to do because it was a contingency that they hadn't really even thought about.

Speaker 5 And so they started hauling the ladder in. And as it lifted me up out of the water, the painter rope popped free off my leg and I floated down the side of the ship.
Damn. And

Speaker 5 I mean, I could see just blood pouring down my face.

Speaker 5 The rib,

Speaker 5 so the rib driver, the left-me-to-rib comes over to pick me up. I just float right down the side of the ship.

Speaker 5 I'm kind of in the stern wash, you know, as they come pick me up.

Speaker 5 And they, they, their faces were white. I mean, they were like eyes this big.
I must have just looked

Speaker 5 blood just pouring everywhere. And I, I, I probably looked especially crazy, Sean, because I had a gigantic smile on my face.
I was laughing because I was so, I was so happy to be alive, man.

Speaker 5 And I did not think I was going to live through that. And I was, I was stoked.
And actually, Elliot Miller was the corporate on that, man. Elliot treated me and

Speaker 5 was keeping pressure on my face, took me to Balboa, you know, where they got me stitched up. I sat out for another couple of weeks till the stitches healed, you know, and

Speaker 5 got our got our go plats on.

Speaker 5 Holy platform.

Speaker 6 So how did you, how did you, how did you gain the respect of the, of the guys, of the seasoned guys coming back from combat?

Speaker 5 Man, I don't know if I did a great job. I'll tell you, I learned, I made a lot of mistakes.
And as I said earlier, like mistakes are the best teacher.

Speaker 5 And I think so many of the, you know, when you ask me, like, what are you looking for in a leader?

Speaker 5 Humility is number one, because I think so many of the mistakes that I made, particularly early on, were when I was really trying to prove myself, you know, when I was like, I need to show people that I'm a competent leader and I need to show people that I know what I'm doing and I'm in charge of this or, you know, that.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I made all kinds of mistakes like that, you know, instead of actually what you need to do is show people that you're humble. What you need to do is show people that you can listen.

Speaker 5 What you need to to do is show people that you can lean on the most experienced people. Um, we were lucky.

Speaker 5 We had a super squared away crew in our first platoon, uh, Siltoon Vi Bravo platoon, and and uh, they were awesome, man. Like, it was a great crew of guys.

Speaker 5 We had a stellar crew of new guys, and we had some experienced guys that just come back from combat. And uh,

Speaker 5 it was uh,

Speaker 5 and uh, we had a

Speaker 5 we had we we had a uh our platoon was was tough as nails, man, because our physical training coordinator was Dave Goggins, who was

Speaker 5 all our training. And Dave is exactly

Speaker 5 who you see Dave today, man. You could always tell our platoon because no one had any skin on their shins because we were constantly climbing ropes, doing

Speaker 5 hundreds of pull-ups and running like crazy. And he organized all the PTs.
And it was good, man. It was a good time.

Speaker 6 I'll bet it was good.

Speaker 6 With that guy running it. Holy shit, man.

Speaker 6 Well, when did you find out? So you check into Team 5.

Speaker 6 We talked about that. When did you find out where you're deploying to?

Speaker 5 We were all fighting to go to chance, you know, to get a chance to go to Iraq. And we learned that we were going to get surged, you know, forward with,

Speaker 5 they were going to combine.

Speaker 5 We were going to be part of SEAL Team 3's deployment. So they took some of the platoons from Team 5 and split them up.

Speaker 5 And so the plan was to go half of that to Iraq and then half to the Pacific Theater, you know, to run JSAT with our

Speaker 5 uh, partners. Um, and uh, so we knew we were going to go to Iraq, uh, first of all.

Speaker 5 And then all of a sudden, the uh, you know, SEALs got handed the personal security detail mission for the top five interim Iraqi officials.

Speaker 5 I don't know, did you get, did you get tied up in that for your uh, first of all? We did.

Speaker 6 Well, not for my first one.

Speaker 6 You know, we talked about my first one at breakfast. When I went to Baghdad, we did, we were tapped, the whole team was tasked with it.
And

Speaker 6 we had a very

Speaker 6 just a really fucking cool OIC. And I don't want to say his name because I don't know what he's doing nowadays.
He might still be in. But

Speaker 6 he started farming us out to, he started farming us out to conventional units and who are having problems with

Speaker 6 the IED stuff going on. And so

Speaker 6 they sent us, he got us into all these different locations helping training and going on operations with with conventional units, primarily army units.

Speaker 6 And we would do like a mini workup training course on

Speaker 6 sniper operations, take the guys out and then

Speaker 6 get rid of the problem, you know, kill the bad guys. And, and, uh,

Speaker 6 and so we, I never had to do any PTS or PTS, PSD personal security details in Iraq because he had farmed us out.

Speaker 5 That's awesome, Doug. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, I can't tell you that. I mean, having done a bunch of that on that first deployment

Speaker 5 for a few weeks.

Speaker 5 And then on our second deployment to Ramadi, just seeing, you know, so much of that war was a defensive war, right? For those guys that were, you know, when the enemy's 70 to 80% of

Speaker 5 attacks are IEDs, you know, roadside bombs. And when there's nothing to shoot back at, you know,

Speaker 5 and you don't even know who placed it there and you're losing guys and you're hauling your dead and wounded comrades out of the street.

Speaker 5 There was nothing, I think, more powerful, you know, for a morale booster than, you know, for those conventional units that know the soldiers and Marines that were out there in the streets running those convoys, knowing that they had frogmen on the high ground, snipers that were.

Speaker 5 that had their backs, you know, and were covering for them so they could move. I think it was, it was phenomenal to be able to do that and support those guys.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I think it was, it was, it was just game changer, You know, and if you think about every bad guy you eliminated, right, is more soldiers and Marines are coming home to their families as a result.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I don't think we did near enough of it. And some of the people that criticized us, you know, later of like, that's not a special operations mission.
I was like, man, you.

Speaker 5 You don't know what you're talking about, man.

Speaker 5 These are Americans that are getting killed. Like, whatever we can do to try to help win this thing and help more of them come home to their families is what we're going to do.

Speaker 6 It was awesome, man. I mean,

Speaker 6 you know, not only the operations that we did, but we ran into, and several of these, I've talked about this before, and a lot of the guys, a lot of the conventional guys that we worked with emailed in saying, hey,

Speaker 6 I was the 18-year-old that got that kill that day or

Speaker 6 thanking us. And we ran into,

Speaker 6 I think it was,

Speaker 6 I think it was the 10th Mountain guys that we worked with.

Speaker 6 They were the first ones we got

Speaker 6 co-located with.

Speaker 6 And we ran, and they were the last ones that we saw. We ran into them at the Chow Hall at the end of the deployment.
And

Speaker 6 one of the sniper teams that we had trained and taken out came up and they were like, hey,

Speaker 6 we've killed X amount of more bad guys. We have not had any.

Speaker 6 casualties since you guys put us through that. And we just want to like, all of our equipment's different.
They've changed everything.

Speaker 6 They took all the recommendations that we had and implemented just about everything. And it was just cool to see, man, like the impact after you're gone.
You know, like we went there.

Speaker 6 These guys were getting blown up like every day.

Speaker 6 We killed the guys in the first 12 hours, I think.

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 then moved on to the next unit and ended like to run into those guys three or four months later, whatever it was and and to see them like still doing the job effectively probably even more effectively and and taking zero casualties when they were every other day i was like

Speaker 6 this is fucking cool man you know i mean to i mean how many how many guys are still walking around

Speaker 6 today

Speaker 6 that would have been killed had we not gone there and trained with them. And then they have kids and their kids will have kids.

Speaker 6 I mean, you're when you, when that kind of shit happens, like you're not just saving a life, it's, it's an entire fucking line of lineage, you know, that is going to be roaming the earth because

Speaker 6 16 guys from a SEAL platoon went and trained with that unit and brought him on a real world operation. And it's cool to think about, you know.

Speaker 5 That's awesome, man. That's outstanding.

Speaker 5 And I think you sometimes, you know, when you, when you think what, what it's all about and like, you know, all this loss of life and, you know, friends that we lost and families that have been destroyed, you know, and in the wake of it.

Speaker 5 And, and even those guys that are seriously wounded as well, right? Lives are changed and altered forever. Um, it's really good to remember that, man.
It's good to remember the impact of that.

Speaker 5 I think it's a little bit like that, you know, it's kind of like it's a wonderful life, right?

Speaker 5 With the, with George Bailey there and getting a chance to see like, you know, what it would have been like if you didn't do that stuff, right?

Speaker 5 And, and I think, uh, uh i think it's a good reminder man of of the impact that it has um and it's uh

Speaker 5 it's just it's so much bigger than us like for me like i was going to do everything in my power always right to help try to try to bring as many americans home as we could do everything we could to do as much damage to the enemy as we could um and uh and i think that's that's just an obligation that we all have.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so for me, like it was, I was, I was lucky enough. We got assigned that security detail mission and the team right before us had been given it.

Speaker 5 And man, that was, that was not what we wanted, as you remember. But I think Blackwater came in with like a bid.
It was like $100 million per, you know, per guy.

Speaker 5 And the Bush administration said, negative, that's too expensive. SEALs, you got it.

Speaker 5 But I think the seeing that like, you know, two of those guys have been assassinated, you know, in the months prior to the SEAL teams taking over it.

Speaker 5 And so when this is like a no-fail mission we have to keep these five interim iraqi government officials alive i loved one of the guys that passed down to to me you know for the previous seal team said uh you know we know there's bad guys looking at us we know they're going to try to you know they're going to try to take us out at some point our whole goal is just to make them say not today not today they look at us not today and we're going to be you know we're going to be a hard target they're going to look at us not today we'll try somewhere else we'll go hit some softer target somewhere and uh and i thought that was something that always stuck with me um And

Speaker 5 the SEALs did that amazingly well, right? I kept all those guys alive.

Speaker 5 It was frustrating for me as a, as a, as a, I got to go out with the detail every once in a while, but most of the time I was assigned to the tactical operations center.

Speaker 5 So I'm in there as the, as the liaison officer,

Speaker 5 you know, just tracking their movements and kind of setting up their logistics.

Speaker 5 Not what I wanted to do, but it was a job that needed to be done. And I felt like I was probably the best guy, you know, to be able to do it for my platoon and help them and support them.

Speaker 5 Learned a ton, you know, about about passing information back to the talk and how they can best support you um and luckily i had a great uh executive officer um uh who uh who sent me out um he tasked 12 of us a bunch of us from uh

Speaker 5 uh you know from salt team five uh salt team eight uh got a chance to go uh go and and uh be a part of um some sniper operations up at samara supporting the uh the big red one first infantry division up there um

Speaker 5 you know didn't see a lot of come got shot at a few times kind of small little teams kind of you know going through the city little four six man teams and climbing up on rooftops and trying to do the yeah sneaky frog mess up it was pretty fun you know we engaged a few guys i think we had one confirmed kill from that and you know a few probables but uh we definitely disrupted the the the the ids that were being laid and the the mines were being put in the street and it also gave me an appreciation

Speaker 5 You know, obviously, I love the SEAL teams, man, and I'm so proud of the training that we went through and the guys that we served with.

Speaker 5 But when I flew up to Samara

Speaker 5 and it was funny, we left Baghdad. We had 12 guys with us.

Speaker 5 It was like 82 degrees on the taramac in Baghdad. We land in Samara after a couple of other stops.
It's nighttime. It was 39 degrees.
I had five guys with no warmies. Yeah, bad.

Speaker 5 And it was like, so we're trying to piece together this stuff. We're living in this like burned out, you know, building.

Speaker 5 And I didn't realize, you know, our guys are complaining about the, you know, Baghdad and they're eating at the Al-Rashid, you know, hotel with the ice sculptures and stuff.

Speaker 5 And I remember jumping in a, you know, we're rolling around these up armored vehicles and, you know,

Speaker 5 and it was a lot of times in and out of the green zone. Obviously, there was dangers.
I mean, people were trying to attack the guys. I'm not saying the risks were

Speaker 5 limited, but I remember sitting in the cab of a big like five-ton truck. There's like, you know, quarter-inch steel plates welded on the back.
They didn't even have doors on the cab.

Speaker 5 was it was an arkansas national guard unit and they're giving us a ride from the airfield over to like in in the in the the downtown city center where there's an oda team we were gonna stay with them and i'm talking to this this you know arkansas national guard soldier i was like man you kind of hanging it out up here i know uh he's like oh man this baby i've been it's like this baby's eating about 14 RPGs at this point.

Speaker 5 Yeah, she's my good little charm. And I was just like, man, here we are, like these dudes around here are roughing it, right?

Speaker 5 They're in the fight. They're getting attacked all the time.
They don't have near the equipment that we have. They don't have near the training that we have.
And that to me was like,

Speaker 5 I'm going to do everything I can to help every American that's on the ground here in every way that I could possibly can.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I thought you were going to say he looked at you and said, I'm not the one hanging it out. That's your vehicle.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 6 but yeah, it was pretty bare bones there at the beginning. But,

Speaker 6 but

Speaker 6 when did Elliot get hurt? Was it this platoon?

Speaker 5 It was the next platoon. So

Speaker 5 he stayed in that same platoon. I rotated to a different platoon in SEAL Team 3.

Speaker 5 We ended up getting rotated out of Iraq. So we went up to Samara for like

Speaker 5 three weeks. Then we came back, did our turnover, and then we did the relief in place between the squadrons.
And so we got sent to the Pacific Theater.

Speaker 5 So we went around doing the JSATs with the World Thai SEALs and the Republic of Korea SEALs and

Speaker 5 spent a little time at Okinawa. You know, just

Speaker 5 I got I got to see a different theater, got to train a little bit, spent most time in Guam surfing and partying and

Speaker 5 basically we just trained like madmen the whole time and got in really good shape

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 were itching for a chance to go back.

Speaker 5 So I came back with SEAL Team 5 and luckily my commanding officer at SIL Team 5 at the time, he said, you're going to SEAL Team 3. And I was so pissed about that, Sean.
Like, I was like,

Speaker 5 these are my guys. I want to take over this platoon.
I want to be their platoon commander. And,

Speaker 5 you know, he was detached from this. And he said, look, you're already senior.

Speaker 5 It's important that you'll be six months ahead in the workup cycle.

Speaker 5 You know, that you deploy so that you'll be eligible

Speaker 5 for promotion down the road. And this is best for your career path.
And I was like, I pitched a fit about it, man. I was like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 5 I was the kind of argumented pushback type. And he was like, nope, it's happening.
You're going to SEAL Team 3. And

Speaker 5 thank God he did that, man. Cause I love those guys at SEAL Team 5.
They were awesome and still some of my closest friends in the world.

Speaker 5 And they relieved us in Ramadi.

Speaker 5 But thank God I got a chance to go serve in Task Unit Bruiser and SIAL Team 3. And so I showed up at the end of that deployment.
I came back, did a little, you know, got a little bit of

Speaker 5 a leave and then went straight to SEAL Team 3, checked in as the platoon commander, got assigned as charter platoon.

Speaker 5 We heard about this guy, jocko willink who was our our uh platoon our our uh task unit commander he was in charge and and i had heard about jocko i'd never seen jocko i didn't know anything about jocko um what did you hear about him i heard he was pretty intense uh i heard he was a uh my platoon chief uh tony afrati was a phenomenal phenomenal seal uh

Speaker 5 and uh i i think probably

Speaker 5 one of the best SEAL chiefs that one of the best platoon chiefs that the SEAL teams has ever produced. Okay.
Like, like phenomenal battlefield leader. Wow.

Speaker 5 I'm talking like, hey, we're taking massive fire from that building across the street. Give me two guys on me.
Let's go.

Speaker 5 Wow. And I'm like, he is absolutely the guy that you want in a gunfight, you know?

Speaker 5 And so he was like, he was like, you know, he had a reputation. Tony, everyone loved Tony.
He'd been around for a long time. And

Speaker 5 he'd been busted down like, you know, multiple times for, you know, shenanigans.

Speaker 5 And, you know, just old school, you you know teams teams and and uh uh and so here he is in the platoon chief he's like he's like trust me jocko is the one guy that we want as our task to commander i was like all right um and then when uh so when jocko jocko had been the admiral's aide um so he got assigned as the admiral's aide and he gets he he he comes over and when i met him for the first time you know seth stone our brother from uh you know from buds he was the delt platoon commander so we we were platoon commanders together we had a bunch of guys from our buds class in there you know as well i knew a ton of these guys i've been been deployed with Hill Team 3 just before this.

Speaker 5 So I got to meet Chris Kyle and some of the other guys, just prior to that. They'd been in Baghdad doing a bunch of sniper ops on Haifa Street and supporting the Fallujah offensive that went down

Speaker 5 while we were deployed

Speaker 5 in

Speaker 5 the fall of 2004. And so now we're here in the spring of 2005, standing

Speaker 5 up the task unit. And so Jocko shows up.
And

Speaker 5 I was like, man, this dude looks like an axe murderer.

Speaker 5 He doesn't smile at us. He just walks up like just mean mugs, like, hi, I'm Jocko.

Speaker 5 Like no smile whatsoever. And like just walks away.

Speaker 5 And dude, you remember Stoner, like, you know, who's, it was an emotional guy, man. I love Stoner so much.
And he was like.

Speaker 5 That dude hates me, man. I can see it.
You know, he's like, and

Speaker 5 I was like, hey, man, listen, I hear he's the guy that we want. I was like, let's, we knew he trained jiu-jitsu.
You know, we knew he just got his black belt.

Speaker 5 Um, you know, he's a big jiu-jitsu guy. Like, we knew he had a ton of operations.
You know, he'd come from SIL Team 7 as a Potokie Manor. He had a bunch of operations that

Speaker 5 he'd done. And so he probably had as much experience as anybody in the teams at that point.
And so I was like, hey, man, come on. Let's just, let's work hard.
Let's train jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 5 And after a couple of months, like, Seth and Jocko ended up being like super close, bro. So,

Speaker 5 in fact, I think, you know, it was

Speaker 5 Seth was probably the little brother that Jocko never had, you know, to Jocko.

Speaker 5 But Jocko was like,

Speaker 5 he set the tone for our entire task. We had an awesome crew of pipe hitters there, man.
They were, they were excellent. They came.
They were just coming back from Iraq. A lot of

Speaker 5 experience. You know, Chris Kyle was our lead sniper appointment man.
And

Speaker 5 he had a ton of experience coming from Fallujah, coming from Haifa Street, and some of the other places in Baghdad.

Speaker 5 And then the new guys that we got in were

Speaker 5 studs too, man. You know, we sent them to schools.
It was an awesome team. And,

Speaker 5 but Jocko really set the tone for our entire team and of like, hey, right away, he was like,

Speaker 5 right away, he was like, we're not tasking a Bravo. We're tasking a bruiser.

Speaker 6 And I was interested.

Speaker 5 So, you know, we had three task units, A, B, C, right, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and the phonetic alphabet. And I was like, I thought that was weird for like 24 hours, like.
tasking a bruiser.

Speaker 5 And then like 24 hours later, we're like, we're tasking it, bruiser.

Speaker 5 So like, it was was actually,

Speaker 5 I learned later, this is something that he got from

Speaker 5 a book by

Speaker 5 a U.S. Army, a retired colonel named David Hackworth called About Face.
And if you haven't read this book, it is a phenomenal, phenomenal book.

Speaker 5 Hackworth joined the Army when he was a...

Speaker 5 He lied on his paperwork, enlisted when he was 17 to try to make it into World War II, just missed World War II, but was brought up through the ranks

Speaker 5 as, you know, I'd learned from all his mentors who had just, just, you know, defeated the Germans and Japanese in World War II. And then he served in Korea and was eventually, you know,

Speaker 5 commissioned as an officer, made it up to colonel,

Speaker 5 multiple deployments to Korea, multiple deployments in Vietnam. I think he was the, when he died,

Speaker 5 he died in the early 2000s. I think it might have been while we were deployed to Iraq that first time.
And I think he was the, he was the

Speaker 5 the highest,

Speaker 5 the most decorated like living soldier at the time.

Speaker 6 Wow. I'm at like

Speaker 5 crazy, crazy awards, but like they call him like Mr. Infantry.
And so much of he changed the names of his units.

Speaker 5 Interesting. Yeah.
To give them like a personality. So,

Speaker 6 you know, I'm going to, I'm just going to.

Speaker 6 Task Unit Bruiser is like a legendary unit. And you just, you don't hear,

Speaker 6 look, there's no other, there's no other task unit that

Speaker 6 has a call sign that I'm aware of. You hear people talk about task unit bruiser all over the place.

Speaker 6 I don't know a whole lot about it other than the reputation, but I mean, it seems like you guys have really created or did create

Speaker 6 like some type of

Speaker 6 like very strong culture in that platoon.

Speaker 5 The culture was massively strong, you know, in Harper platoon, charter platoon, and delta platoon, Seth platoon, you know, and the entire task in it. And,

Speaker 5 you know, there's two 60-man steel platoons and a five-man helper quarters helmet that Jocko was in charge of that we started out with.

Speaker 5 And he set the tone right from the beginning, like, we're tasking a bruiser. We're going to work harder than everybody else.
We're going to train harder than everybody else.

Speaker 5 We're going to be ready for the worst case scenarios, you know, on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 And that, that was the culture of our team. And what's interesting about Jocko is you look at him and he's got this like super stern kind of look to him.

Speaker 5 But he, he actually, and even though he didn't smile at us for the first couple of months that we were together, in fact, the first time we were, we were all training jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 5 We'd come in at five o'clock in the morning, train jiu-jitsu. He'd lay mats out in the in the high bay at SIL Team 3.
It was mandatory for all the officers.

Speaker 5 And we had a bunch of enlisted guys that would come in and train too.

Speaker 5 And you could tell us at officers call, you know, the morning meeting, because you'd say, you know, if you said like, hey, Lee, for ASEF, like everyone would kind of turn their head, like their whole body, because the mats are all like jacked up because we're like cranking on each other and hurting each other and everyone's going just full bore level 19 berserker mode but the first time that i realized that jocko was like actually you know not super serious all the time like i'm demo he's like demoing a jiu-jitsu move at five o'clock in the morning we're in the high bay he's like he's like babbin get over here you know he's like grab my hand yeah

Speaker 5 My other hand.

Speaker 5 My other hand. And he's like, bow to your sensei, bow to your sensei.
And I'm like, wait, that's Napoleon Dynamo. He's quoting Rex Kwando from Napoleon Dynamo, but he's doing it with a straight face.

Speaker 5 And he's not like, he doesn't even smile. And I'm like, okay, this dude's joking around.
So like, that was the first time I got to see, you know, Jocko,

Speaker 5 who's totally, like, totally jokes around all the time, you know, like, and is obviously professional when he needs to.

Speaker 5 But what I think what Jocko did for us was, I think, channel like aggression and guys that wanted to go get after it into like

Speaker 5 he

Speaker 5 really taught me to be what we call, and I actually call him for the silent leader.

Speaker 5 Like, that's what good leadership looks like. Like, you would look at someone like Jocko and think, Jocko's in charge.
Jocko's a prior enlisted SEAL.

Speaker 5 Jocko's got more combat experience than anybody else here. So he's going to dictate everything and run everything and tell you what to do.
And he did the complete opposite.

Speaker 5 It was, he said, hey, here's the goal. Why don't you come up with a plan and tell me how you want to do it?

Speaker 5 And it was, it was the first time that I saw like we'd roll out on operations. Well, he doesn't say anything.
He's letting the team run it.

Speaker 5 So I realized that's what I need to do as a leader is let my team step up and lead. And so when my team is leading, now I can look up and out, right?

Speaker 5 Every leader should be trying to look up and out down the road.

Speaker 5 So instead of me solving the immediate tactical problem, I'm thinking about the next step or the next step or the next step beyond that.

Speaker 5 You're thinking about the long-term strategic problems, you know, down the road. And that's what every leader should be trying to do.

Speaker 5 And, you know, Jocko also, he used what we call the indirect approach, which is, you know, instead of saying, hey, listen,

Speaker 5 you know, me, I had one platoon under my belt, didn't really have, I had a handful of combat operations. I had zero DA missions, right? Capture kill raids at that point, zero.

Speaker 5 Seth had done a couple of them. You know, I'd done a handful of sniper operations.
Well, I didn't have any, I didn't really have an experience.

Speaker 5 And, you know, but instead of, instead of saying, you know, for us, when, when, when the training detachment instructors, who obviously drive a very high standard of performance, when they would say things like,

Speaker 5 hey, you guys are good to go. You met the standard.
You know, we're out here at land warfare. Okay, your patrol is good to go.
Hey, your immediate action drills when react to contract. And, you know,

Speaker 5 those are good to go. Hey, you guys can take it back to the camp.
Instead of Jocko saying, like, you knuckleheads aren't as good as you think you are. Combat's harder than you think it is.

Speaker 5 You know, we're going to keep pushing the standard even higher. We're going to do this again.
He actually, he actually just called us over and he said, hey, Lave Stoner,

Speaker 5 Do you think we're ready for the worst case scenario on the battlefield?

Speaker 5 And we looked at each other and we're like, no, man, no, let's do another run.

Speaker 5 Let's do another run after that. Let's do three more runs.
And it was us doing it. It was, if we'd have said yes, he would have been cool.
Sounds good. Let's go back to the camp.

Speaker 5 But he, he just, and he would ask us an earnest question, right? A question that he wanted the answer to

Speaker 5 and let us reveal the truth of ourselves. And I think it's such a powerful leadership concept instead of, you know, this works on your kids, right?

Speaker 5 This works on, this works with your spouse, with members of your community, with your team at work, anywhere in life. When you can ask someone a question and

Speaker 5 allow them to reveal the truth to themselves instead of trying to just bash them over the head with the truth, because what good is telling people the truth if they don't listen?

Speaker 5 But when you can ask someone a question like that, now it's, it's not Jocko saying, do two more runs and everyone's complaining about it.

Speaker 5 It's actually me saying we need to do two more runs so that we're ready for that worst case scenario and talking that over with my platoon so they understand it as well.

Speaker 5 And I think there was, that was the kind of culture culture that became part of the team of like, hey, we have to be ready for the absolute worst case scenario that we might come up against.

Speaker 5 And so I think that was, it was a culture of always striving to do better. And immediately, I think what I set our task unit apart was

Speaker 5 in my previous task unit, it was kind of like most SEAL task units where we had some really talented people. We had some experienced people.
We did some things well. We did some things not so well.

Speaker 5 But the things that we didn't do well when training detachment would say, hey, you should improve on this, there was pushback you know we were kind of like ah

Speaker 5 i'd like to see them do better yeah like we're good to go we'll play the game and just get through this and get overseas and a tasking to bruiser wasn't like that it was we were our own harshest critic it was it was really critiquing ourselves and when these training instructors said hey look your head counts are taking too long you need to figure out a way to be more efficient we're like absolutely let's let's figure this out let's work on that um

Speaker 5 And we were our own harshest critic. We're always trying to get better and improve all the time.

Speaker 5 And that became the culture of the team, whether you're a brand new guy, you know, that was trying to contribute in some way to, you know, managing your fire team, you know, all the way up to me as the platoon commander to Jocko as the task of the commander and figuring out ways to be more efficient and effective all the time.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the strength of the SEAL teams, right, is always. that innovation,

Speaker 5 like always trying to get better in what we're trying to do, always trying to improve and seeking inputs from everybody, no matter if they're in a leadership position or if they're simply just

Speaker 5 a shooter, you know, who's in charge of just themselves and their piece of the mission. I think when you've got a, when that becomes the culture of the team, you know, that makes all the difference.

Speaker 5 You've got a team that's constantly improving, constantly learning, constantly growing. We made all kinds of mistakes in Tasking and Bruiser.

Speaker 5 We screwed all kinds of stuff up, but we learned from those mistakes and we would implement solutions to try to fix them and prevent them from happening going forward.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 are we ready for the worst-case scenario? That is a

Speaker 6 tough question.

Speaker 6 Was there ever a yes?

Speaker 5 I don't think so. I think we were honest enough with ourselves, right, to know like, hey, man, I've never been in the worst case scenario.

Speaker 5 So are you ready for it? Like, are you going to be ready for it? And I, I think, you know, when you show up to something and you're overtrained, like, hey, we didn't train that hard.

Speaker 5 Cool. It's easy, you know, it's easy.
Like that's no fact. Like that's what you want it to be.
You know, if you can make training harder than actual combat, like that's, that's the way that's awesome.

Speaker 5 That's ideal. Um,

Speaker 5 you know, and that's one of the lessons that we brought back to Ramadi, you know, with us, you know, after we deployed.

Speaker 5 If you'd asked me,

Speaker 5 if you'd asked me, uh, as young Lieutenant Lafe Babbin, Charlie platoon commander, tasking and bruiser,

Speaker 5 hey, Leif, are you going to be in, you know, do you think you'll get in a blue on blue, like friendly fire situation?

Speaker 5 And I told you like that happens to losers who don't know how to plan and execute missions. and

Speaker 5 you know the book extreme ownership like that's chapter one that's chapter one the very first major combat operation that i was a part of massive blue and blue massive blue and blue issue and and and and you know we talked about before like the idea that like we had to if we didn't take extreme measures to mitigate the risk of that happening like it was absolutely going to happen particularly in the urban environment where there's it's confusing with so many different units that are out there particularly with our seal snipers that were going out under under cover of darkness beyond the forward line of advance.

Speaker 5 And you've got, you know, U.S. tanks and Humvees and units that are coming into an enemy-held area and they're getting shot at by enemy fighters.

Speaker 5 You know, it just the idea that like that is absolutely going to happen unless you take massive steps to mitigate the risk of it happening. And

Speaker 5 it was just one of those things where like, I just realized that combat is so much harder than I thought it was ever going to be.

Speaker 5 And those things can happen so much easier than you ever thought it could be. And once you're in it, you can't just

Speaker 5 peek your head. You know, if you're taking effective fire, man, you can't just peek your head up over the wall and say, hey, who's shooting at us? You know, like your head's going to be gone.

Speaker 5 That's going to be the end of you. So

Speaker 5 if you're getting suppressed,

Speaker 5 man, that's all you can do.

Speaker 5 And I think it's,

Speaker 5 you know, we had, we had such a close call in

Speaker 5 that first situation where we had about

Speaker 5 that whole squad of my guys

Speaker 5 on that operation.

Speaker 6 Let's rewind real quick. so this is your first operation that was the first major operation first kinetic operation of the deployment

Speaker 6 let's just walk what were you guys doing what was the op

Speaker 5 yeah if you will maybe it's better to back up to talk about what it was like to arrive in ramadi and and um you know and and start there um

Speaker 5 when we were we were we were we thought we were going to go work with the

Speaker 5 you know with the ictf you know in baghdad and and do the the uh this high-speed Iraqi commando unit that probably had the most training, right, of any, any, uh, um, any uh Iraqi unit out there.

Speaker 5 Um, and that's what we thought we were going to do. We're going to do the go do these kinetic operations.
It was going to be super fun. We were excited about it.

Speaker 5 Everyone left to go on the pre-deployment leave. And while we were on pre-deployment leave, we got a change of orders.

Speaker 5 They decided to consolidate the two different squadrons that were deploying, and we found out we're going to Ramadi. So at the time, Ramadi was

Speaker 5 just a violent hellhole. I mean, it was the, it was, uh, it was, it was

Speaker 5 a city of 400,000 people. It was the capital of Anbar province.
Uh, and it's a fraction of the size of Baghdad.

Speaker 5 I think the whole greater area of Baghdad has something like two and a half or three million people, you know, in Baghdad.

Speaker 5 There would be more significant attacks, right, or enemy attacks that happened in and around the city of Ramadi, this small city of 400,000 people, just a few miles across the city center.

Speaker 5 There would be as many or more attacks in Ramadi on a daily basis if there weren't many.

Speaker 6 Why was Ramadi such a strategic location?

Speaker 5 I think it was after the, it was in the heart of the Sunni triangle, right? And it was the largest, it's the capital of Anbar province, which is the Sunni capital. So this is where the

Speaker 5 Saddam's kind of base of support and operations were.

Speaker 5 So I think there was a lot of support for Saddam and the insurgency that came out of there. I think after the Marines smashed Fallujah in 2004,

Speaker 5 many of the fighters that were there fled and went to Ramadi. And so, you know, from like late 2004 into 2005, Ramadi was

Speaker 5 just really the most violent place in Iraq.

Speaker 5 Zarqawi, you know, who's the leader of the of al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time, had declared that Ramadi was the capital of his caliphate, and he was going to establish the capital there in Ramadi.

Speaker 5 There was something like 3,000 to 5,000 insurgent fighters that controlled most of the city.

Speaker 5 And when we arrived in April of 2006,

Speaker 5 it was, man, it was,

Speaker 5 I think I landed on the ground. It was like April 3rd, 2006.
It was, it was instantly,

Speaker 5 it was apparent that this was a very different deployment than the one I've been on previously. And I've been hearing about Ramadi.

Speaker 5 You know, we, you know, you'd hear every day in the news, you'd hear like, you know, three U.S. soldiers killed in Ombar Province or two Marines wounded in Ombar Province.

Speaker 5 And most of those were coming in and around the city of Ramadi.

Speaker 5 I think Anbar Province was accounting for something like 70% of U.S. casualties in Iraq at the time throughout most of 2005 and 2006.
And most of those were coming in and around Ramadi.

Speaker 5 So it was just a violent terrorist stronghold. And when we got, when we arrived there

Speaker 5 right away, I mean, even in Baghdad, like there's, you're flying around in a helicopter and, you know, like if you flew over Ramadi in the daytime, like you're getting shot down out of the sky.

Speaker 5 Like no one was doing that.

Speaker 5 So it was, it was like vehicle convoys and it was

Speaker 5 every single week there were memorial services going on at the camp.

Speaker 5 It was, there were U.S. Marines and soldiers getting wounded or killed almost every day.
Damn. Almost every day.

Speaker 5 And multiple times I remember there would be like a call of a loudspeaker for like like a

Speaker 5 mass like blood drive, you know, come get give blood, you know, for a mass caching situation that was happening. I mean, there were people killed on base in the chow hall with mortars in the base,

Speaker 5 you know, before he even left the base. And when we were driving, so the SEALs were working out of a place they call Shark Base.
It was like an old like Republican Guard effort.

Speaker 5 And after Mark Lee was killed, we renamed it Camp Mark Lee, but it was kind of on the edge of Armati, like right on the Euphrates River.

Speaker 5 And in order to get there, you had to try to drive off the main camp. And it was still kind of behind the walls of the camp.

Speaker 5 um but uh but there was there was a uh you would drive through what they called the vehicle graveyard and the vehicle graveyard was you know these these these vehicles that would hit ids humbies tanks bradley fighting vehicles uh they would they would drag these these twisted burnt hulks and just they would just leave them out here in this kind of you know it was just kind of a kind of a junkyard area and uh man it was a powerful reminder of what was out there waiting for you every time but you're going you're going to uh

Speaker 5 you know, you're driving past that every single time you're launched on an operation, driving to that vehicle graveyard and just knowing that those twisted, charred hunks of metal that used to be a vehicle, you know, almost all those had, you know, soldiers or Marines that were killed or wounded in them.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 then, you know, the gates were like a, it was a, it was a M88,

Speaker 5 which is like a, it's basically like a tow truck for tanks. I mean, these things weigh, you know, a tank weighs 70 tons, you know, an M1 Apros tank.

Speaker 5 And that's what they had blocking the gate because it was such a threat of like a, you know, massive IED threat coming in and people would be attacking the camp. And I've been on the ground for.

Speaker 5 Probably about a week there. We turned over with a crew from SEAL Team 2, outstanding crew there.
And they had built awesome relationships.

Speaker 5 They'd trained a bunch of the Iraqi units and they were doing a ton of operations.

Speaker 5 But it was kind of mostly on the outskirts of the city because there was no U.S.

Speaker 5 presence inside the city except for the Marine bases that controlled and the 101st Airborne 1st of the 506th battalion that controlled

Speaker 5 Task Force Red Courier control like the eastern part of the city. And the Marines from 38 Marines controlled the

Speaker 5 main route to the city that was called Route Michigan. And about every kilometer, the Marines had a base there.

Speaker 5 And even still, even though we controlled that road, That road throughout our six-month deployment there was overwhelmingly the most heavily attacked road in all of Iraq. It had seven to 10

Speaker 5 on average in every any 24-hour period. This is a road that we controlled.
So like the U.S. forces control that road every kilometer, there's a Marine or Army checkpoint.

Speaker 5 And so, I mean, it was just, it was non-stop, you know, combat that was going on all the time. Nasty.

Speaker 5 And when we showed up, it was just, it was, I was just in awe of the soldiers and Marines that were there and the fight. There was a, there was a National Guard unit that was on the ground.

Speaker 5 And seeing these National Guard, you know, the National Guard, man, they, they they they don't have they have a fraction of the training and equipment that we have um this was the 228 the 2nd brigade 28th infantry division the iron soldiers based out of pennsylvania and uh and they had they had national guard from really all over they had some utah national guard and vermont national guard uh pennsylvania national guard um and these guys had you know they're part-time soldiers uh and

Speaker 5 They they had many of them had been on the ground for over a year at that point. And I mean, these these guys were hardened combat warriors.

Speaker 5 And sometimes they'd, I'd show up and, and the SEAL team two, you know, would introduce us and they'd say, you know, they'd look at us and our high-speed little 10-inch barrel M4s and our gear.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we had better night vision and lasers and stuff like that. And they're looking back at us like, oh, man, look at, look at that.
Look at the SEALs.

Speaker 5 They've got, you know, these guys have all this cool gadgetry. And I, I just, you know, for me, Sean, I was like, man, this National Guard soldier.

Speaker 5 you know, who's probably 19 years old, has fired more rounds through his weapon and his year here than all of us put together are ever going to fire in our entire careers.

Speaker 5 And I mean, they were just in the thick of the fight the entire time.

Speaker 5 The Marines that were manning the

Speaker 5 checkpoints through that city, and particularly the ones at the government center, that was Kilo Company, 38 Marines. awesome unit of Marines.
We worked really closely with

Speaker 5 their Lima company, Kilo Company and

Speaker 5 India companies. And man, they were freaking awesome.
And the government center was taking an OPVA, which is named after like the Veterans Administration

Speaker 5 building that was, it was like an Iraqi Veterans Administration building, I guess,

Speaker 5 under in the Saddam era. But those two, they would, they'd get hit once a week by

Speaker 5 50, 100 insurgents attacking from three different directions, hitting them with, you know, a dozen belt-fed machine guns at the same time, lobbing mortars in, a super accurate mortar fire, and then somebody trying to drive a 5,000-pound V-bed into their position.

Speaker 5 I mean, it was, it was every week

Speaker 5 for them. And so we just, you know, when we showed up there, it was like, man, how can we help these guys? What can we do to help in any way that we can?

Speaker 5 And so we just decided to get to work, you know? So what was the work?

Speaker 5 The work was, what can we do? You know, what is our part of this mission? And

Speaker 5 for us,

Speaker 5 it was number one seal swipers, just like the work that you were doing. We can take our guys.

Speaker 5 We can take a pretty small group and right away we we were told there was the red areas on the map that were like don't go there these are al-qaeda this is al-qaeda and iraq battle space and if you go there you're all going to get killed nobody can even come recover your body um and so we realized like hey that's enemy safe haven like is there a way that we can get into these safe havens and and mitigate the risk of being overrun you know by 100 enemy fighters and so what we what we did was uh we started kind of on the edges of the city you know pushing pushing in with some of the Marine and Army patrols with setting up sniper overwatch position.

Speaker 5 We'd go in undercover darkness, set up on the rooftops of buildings in the windows where they wouldn't be expecting us to be.

Speaker 5 And, you know, if you were in a bad area, they had no U.S. presence before.

Speaker 5 I mean, all of a sudden, when the, you know, first call of the prayer goes down and, you know, the sun rises and the city's moving around, I mean, you got.

Speaker 5 You got enemy fighters moving around with RPGs and Belfast machine guns and starting to coordinate attacks on, you know, nearby friendly patrols and outposts.

Speaker 5 and it was just a shooting gallery for the the snipers so you so you could actually

Speaker 6 sit in an op

Speaker 6 in an area that was black and see the enemy combatants forming up to go outside of that area to to engage and uh ambush u.s forces definitely multiple times yeah

Speaker 5 many many times and and uh in the daytime Well, we'd be in there, we'd sneak in at nighttime and try to be hidden as best we could, you know, in a position.

Speaker 5 And what we did, though, is we adjusted, you know, the, the, my idea before of a sniper mission was like a little small, like two-man, four-man element, six-man element.

Speaker 5 Man, these elements, when you're going in there, we had to have, you know, we would go in with a 30-man element.

Speaker 5 and lock down like a four-story apartment building, particularly, it didn't start, you know, initially we started working on the outside edges of the city. And then once the U.S.

Speaker 5 forces started establishing these combat outposts, they'd build a forward operating base right in the enemy health neighborhood, a permanent form

Speaker 5 outpost that they could work out up, bring Iraqi soldiers with them. Oftentimes, what we would do is be the first U.S.
troops on the ground for that. So we'd sneak in undercover of darkness.

Speaker 5 And the ID threat was the biggest threat. So, how did we mitigate the risk of that? Well, we would foot patrol.
So, I'm going to throw everything on your back.

Speaker 5 We're carrying Carl Gustav, you know, shoulder-fired rockets. We're carrying 40-millimeter grenades.
We're carrying

Speaker 5 multiple belt-fed machine guns. Every squad, multiple belt-fed machine guns.

Speaker 5 Um, because we had to be ready, you know, we, we would take the minimum force that we would take using was at least a squad of SEALs because that way I at least had two fire team elements that could bound.

Speaker 5 And if we're going into a super hot area, it would be double that. Um, it'd be like a whole change size or even more.

Speaker 6 So you, so you guys are running 30-man teams and would those teams

Speaker 5 so, so maybe 18 or 20 of those guys would be SEALs plus EOD. You know, our bomb, our EOD bomb technicians were phenomenal

Speaker 5 and were absolutely, you know, part of our, critical part of our team, just like the ones you worked with. And we had some awesome shooters too, man, that could do both.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they're, they're,

Speaker 5 so we also had, we'd also, sometimes we would plus up with squads from

Speaker 5 confessional army units or marine units as well, just because we wanted to have some more Americans out there with us. And we don't, we'd always have Iraqi soldiers.

Speaker 5 So, you know, we might have 12, 15, 20 Iraqis with us. I did not,

Speaker 5 look, those guys were out there risking their lives. I did not count on them in the gunfight.

Speaker 5 So, you know, when it was, we saw that too many times that when, you know, if you've got 100 enemy fighters trying to overrun your position, like you are, the only thing that's going to save you is Americans.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the things that saved us was Americans with Belfett machine guns. Those machine gunners carrying the,

Speaker 5 you know, the Mark 48, you know, 762 Belfett machine gun and the mark 46 you know 556 belt machine gun those guys saved our lives over and over and over again just be back attacks um preventing us from being overrun if we're on if we were on a patrol um with our iraqis you know if we're getting attacked like enabling us to be able to keep the enemy's head down so we could get off the street land down cover fire from us um i mean i just

Speaker 5 I talked to those Vietnam SEALs about how much they love their machine gunners, you know, that were carrying the stoner machine gunners and the M60s, you know, back in Vietnam and how that would enable them to push deep into Viet Cong territory where nobody could come get them.

Speaker 5 And the only QRF, you know, a lot of those Vietnam guys had working in like the Rung Sat and places like that in the, in the, the, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam was like another seven-man SEAL squad.

Speaker 5 And they had some, you know, maybe some,

Speaker 5 um,

Speaker 5 they had SeaWolf, you know, the helicopters that were supporting overhead and some aircraft. But those machine gunners kept them alive.
And it was the exact same thing for us and Taskin and Bruiser.

Speaker 5 Those machine gunners like Mark Lee and and ryan job and and all those guys carrying the heavy belt pit machine gun jake our our mutual you know buds classmate man he was those guys were awesome and uh

Speaker 5 you know carrying so because you're full patrolling in every time and so they're carrying massive heavy weight um and

Speaker 6 real quick let me i want to get into some specific examples of how they how effective the the the aw the automatic weapons guys were but from let's let's look at a bigger picture real quick so from for ramati

Speaker 6 what was the overall mission, not just of tasking a bruiser, but what was the overall mission?

Speaker 6 Was it to infiltrate and occupy

Speaker 6 the city and take it from AQ, Al-Qaeda?

Speaker 5 That's a fantastic question, man. I think what's interesting about it is

Speaker 5 never did I see a time where the generals in Baghdad or someone from the Pentagon came and said, here's your mission, Ramadi. And so the guys in Ramadi figured out what that mission should be.

Speaker 5 They were close to the problem.

Speaker 5 And the brigade colonel that was in charge, you know, the colonel and his staff that were in charge of that National Guard unit,

Speaker 5 they got

Speaker 5 relieved by about a month into our deployment by the Ready First Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division.

Speaker 5 And those guys brought in. tanks and firepower, but they brought in a perspective on that as well about what that mission should be.

Speaker 5 Colonel Sean McFarlane was the guy in charge and his staff were just, they were phenomenal, phenomenal man and uh we uh we love that national guardian too those guys were outstanding but the the the the ready first brigade combat team is who i spent the bulk of that deployment with you know helping them many of the marine units and the uh that uh task force red curry he that won our first airborne unit those guys stuck around as well for for much of that our deployment um and uh but they they they what they realized was the the mission ramadi was to stabilize the city, secure the local populace, and ultimately lower the level of violence.

Speaker 5 That was the goal. That was the goal.
And I think if you,

Speaker 5 you know, I think for so long, if you'd asked the SEAL, if you'd asked me, you know, my first opponent, like, what's your, what's the SEAL mission

Speaker 5 in Iraq? What are you trying to do? I said, kill bad guys.

Speaker 5 And I think something that Jocko really recognized is like, look, either U.S. forces win in Ramadi and we all win.
or U.S. forces lose and we all lose.

Speaker 5 And it doesn't matter how many bad guys we kill or capture. It doesn't matter how many operations we conducted.
If U.S. forces lose here, we all lose.
So what we have to do is help U.S. forces win.

Speaker 5 And we understood that that was the mission, was to stabilize the city, secure the local populace, lower the level of violence. And we realized our part of that was to

Speaker 5 take a small element that was very heavily armed. And I say small, right? It might have been as many as 30 guys if you're locking down a four-story apartment building.

Speaker 5 And many times we tried to put two elements in that were mutually supporting one another because there's nothing stronger than mutually supporting overwatch positions with interlocking fields of fire.

Speaker 5 I mean, that's how you're going to defeat an enemy that way outnumbers you when they're trying to come and attack your position.

Speaker 5 When your other, that other position could cover a move, you know, cover for you, and you can cover for them, you know, as well.

Speaker 5 But we, that's how we mitigated the risk of going into some of those areas.

Speaker 5 And we knew that we could take a fairly small group of guys with a lot of firepower, carrying the shoulder-fired rockets, carrying the belt-fed machine guns, you know, carrying the 40 mic mic grenades, you know, J-Tax with aircraft supporting us overhead.

Speaker 5 We had our artillery battery. The artillery battery in Ramadi fired, I think they fired over 5,000 rounds

Speaker 5 from their 155 batteries. So

Speaker 6 when you're going out with 30 guys, are you breaking them up into 15 two-man teams and putting them in different locations? Sometimes seven, four-man teams and it's all

Speaker 6 in one location.

Speaker 5 Sometimes. But what we typically would do,

Speaker 5 I like to be in multiple locations so we can mutually support one another. We also found, though, that

Speaker 5 we teamed up a lot of these operations, we were the very first U.S. troops on the ground.
We would even go in and do some reconnaissance in the area.

Speaker 5 And as frogmen, right, the river, the Euphrates River runs right through Ramadi. And there's a Habaniya Canal kind of breaks off from there as well.
So we had access to much of the city.

Speaker 5 And there was a badass Marine boat unit there called the Dam Support Unit.

Speaker 5 They had these Cirque boats, these small unit riverine craft, I think it stands for, but it kind of like a rib, kind of like a combination between like a rib and a soccer

Speaker 5 and uh so we teamed up with those guys man they would they would we'd sneak in there at night time totally blacked out um and uh you know night vision and they just drop us off of the bank no one have any idea we were in there no shit

Speaker 5 you guys would do a water insertion at night did a ton of them to do a reconnaissance to what find your find where your sniper hides and oops are going to be find out where they would be do a reconnaissance of the area you know engage id layers which we often did um and then we would use that as an insertion platform, go in there at nighttime, jump off on the beach, full patrol in, so we could set up a sniper, you know, that our sniper hides.

Speaker 5 And so we would oftentimes take down the buildings or buildings near those buildings that would eventually be the

Speaker 5 combat outposts. So

Speaker 6 would you insert guys they would infiltrate the OPs and then the rest of the team would come and link up later? Or would you ex-fil back out of the

Speaker 6 the

Speaker 5 location that you're at and then get the rest of the team and then go back in sometimes we did reconnaissance missions where we'd go in and kind of just probe and do a little recon and then come back and kind of use that as part of planning you know obviously you have to hit multiple buildings that don't know exactly where you're going try to go into different areas and do some misdirection stuff um but uh usually what we would do excuse me usually what we would do is is an insertion method would we would we would go in there and set up in the sniper hide and try to get in position before the first call to prayer you know So if we could get in position by, you know, by daylight, then we would start to like, we would want to try to get some long access looks down some of the

Speaker 5 main avenues of approach.

Speaker 5 And then usually we would be, so we would wait until oftentimes the, you know, the first, some of the, some of those larger operations, you're talking over a thousand soldiers and marines on the ground, 50 tanks, dozens and dozens of heavy,

Speaker 5 you know, engineering vehicles. I mean, they were trucking in 70,000 sandbags to

Speaker 5 multiple semi-truckloads of

Speaker 5 Jersey barriers and Texas T barrier, all these giant concrete barriers to try to concertina wire rolls to reinforce these positions because you know you're going to get attacked.

Speaker 5 I mean, they're coming.

Speaker 5 And that's usually where we could really help those guys is so we would set up and cover for them as they infiltrated. And there were multiple times.
I remember like, oh, okay.

Speaker 5 So you would, so you would know, I'm just trying to wrap my head around the the overall mission so so you would know where the conventional units are setting up then you would conduct reconnaissance around that specific area find the best vantage points and then and then set up the ops well sometimes we would conduct a reconnaissance provided to the the conventional units to to maybe recommend made a recommendation on where they could set up you know um okay or take them with us you know on those reconnaissance missions and then we would plan that thing out um and we became like their go-to uh as far as like you know they realized the effectiveness of SEAL snipers and what we could do for them,

Speaker 5 you know, to disrupt attacks because, you know, they're super vulnerable, right? When they're trying, before there's any, they're just out there in these neighborhoods, they're getting shot at.

Speaker 5 You've got, you know, hundreds of enemy fighters that can muster and start attacking their positions.

Speaker 5 And so our snipers were able to disrupt those attacks over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 But a lot of times we'd be sitting in a position and you'd see like the mind clearance element and their big like MRAP, you know, those V-Haul vehicles.

Speaker 5 They were the only guys that had them at that time. We would ask for them and nobody else had them.
But you'd see them slowly like on white lights, like digging IDs out of the road.

Speaker 5 And there was to the one of the first major operations we put in,

Speaker 5 I mean, they cleared, they cleared dozens of IDs out on that road.

Speaker 5 I mean, like a, just to tell you how bad things were, there was a route that was coming down off Route Michigan, that main road that I said was statistically the most heavily ID road.

Speaker 5 A couple months before we moved into that area, right before we deployed, the Marines had tried to push down a road into where we ended up putting a combat outpost.

Speaker 5 It was called Route Sunset, and they'd hit something like 13 IDs in less than 500 meters. So, I mean, it was just, it was, it was constant.

Speaker 5 You couldn't even get into these areas. And so we're just, we would watch those guys clear.
And so it took like four or five, six hours for them to clear all the way down.

Speaker 5 And we wanted to make sure that IDs weren't being in place, you know, on top of that.

Speaker 5 And so then all of a sudden, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, you know, those troops are coming in, you know, and Humvees.

Speaker 5 And man, I remember this one time we were sitting in the sniper hide in what was going to be the buildings that would become the combat outposts. And we're on the third story.

Speaker 5 And I'm looking over the side. And I got that mind clearance element.
I mean, they got this, it was called the dagger was the call sign for the vehicle. And they got this huge like arm that's like,

Speaker 5 I think they call it the buffalo was the vehicle.

Speaker 5 And they're like digging. It's just this big robotic arm that's like digging in the dirt.
And this, this robotic arm got like blown off like every night. You know, they'd like replace it.

Speaker 5 And I'm looking down there and I could see these like projos. And I mean,

Speaker 5 I'm looking over the rooftop. I'm like,

Speaker 5 I was like, this is all of a sudden it occurs to me that like, if that thing goes off, I mean, these are like one in five five rounds. You know, like that thing's going to take my head off.

Speaker 5 You know, my face is going to be gone. I was like, if I could see the explosive, it could see me, I need to get back behind the rooftop.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's like right there, like at the base of the building at her head.

Speaker 5 And then we found a bunch of them too, like on the,

Speaker 5 along like the creek we were patrolling across as the army went and burned, burned out the vegetation later. And they dug like, I mean, they found eight or 10 IDs in there.

Speaker 5 We were like patrolling all of them.

Speaker 6 These things are just everywhere.

Speaker 5 And then from the combat outposts, once we had that established, so then we could push out deeper into enemy territory. And so initially the army would say like, hey, we want you here.

Speaker 5 in in this building so that you can cover our guys. And, you know, you're looking 360 for 100 yards in all directions, you know, for blocks.
It's, it's, all you can see is U.S. soldiers and Marines.

Speaker 5 Like, I can't even engage anybody. Like, so, so we talked him into it.
And luckily, Jocko would kind of explain why we needed to do it. And we pushed about 300 meters outside the perimeter.

Speaker 5 And they were worried about us getting attacked. But we pushed 300 meters outside the perimeter, set up in a big four-story apartment building.
I wanted to go in a different direction.

Speaker 5 Chris Kyle was like, we need to go there. That's the apartment building.

Speaker 5 And luckily, I was

Speaker 5 at least humble enough as a leader.

Speaker 5 I made all kinds of terrible mistakes, but at least humble enough to listen to the guy that knows who he was talking about to say, okay, cool, let's do what Chris wants to do. Thank God we did that.

Speaker 5 Cause I mean, we had

Speaker 5 over the next 48 hours, we disrupted like all kinds of attacks on that combat outpost. And that was just kind of the model for what we did over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 You'd see like a dozen enemy fighters that are trying to like rally.

Speaker 5 to to and they know they're they're going to attack the combat outpost which you can't see or or you get you know right as the sun comes up, mortars are landing dead center of the combat outpost, kills a soldier, wounds three others.

Speaker 5 And the soldiers can't even shoot back, right? Indirect fire is coming from kilometers away over blocks of, you know, the city. And

Speaker 5 you can't even see the launch point. And so our cybers are able to engage, gauge guys loading mortar tubes into the back of a vehicle, you know, from 600 yards away.

Speaker 5 So it was that kind of element where like those soldiers, when they started hearing like the 300 windmac, you know, it was like three enemy fighters engaged with 300 WIMAC.

Speaker 5 I mean, you would just hear like they were,

Speaker 5 they were so stoked about it. They knew that like we were up there on the high ground, you know, to protect them and help them out.

Speaker 5 And as a result, I mean, every single time we called them, um, because when we were deep in enemy territory, like we got, we got vicious, they always figured out where we were.

Speaker 5 Sometimes it was like sending like unarmed kids through the neighborhood, knocking on gates. I mean, you know, all the standard stuff.
And they knew we weren't going to engage that guy.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 they wanted to figure out where we we were at. So

Speaker 5 it would, we just adopted the Marine tactic from 38 Marines: like, it became an overt fighting position.

Speaker 5 So, if you didn't have an urgent surgical casualty, like, you weren't going EVAC because that's what they wanted you to do.

Speaker 5 You were going to be in the streets getting ambushed, having IED clacked off on you, you know, or having multiple machine guns engaging you while you're patrolling out.

Speaker 5 So, we try to wait till undercover of darkness if possible.

Speaker 5 Yeah, sometimes we didn't do that because if I was felt like I was in a position that was not very defensible, if they attacked us,

Speaker 5 like if they could get, if we were on, we had rooftops, but all the rooftops were kind of equally, you know, high or even higher around us and they might have the advantage over us.

Speaker 5 So there were a couple of times we had to make the tough call. It just, you know, it's kind of like the, you make the least bad decision you can, right?

Speaker 5 Or you're like, hey, man, I know we're going to get attacked, but we can move fast on foot. We can do some misdirection

Speaker 5 and we can get back to the base. And it's going to be better than allowing them to set up a massive attack on our position where they have all the advantage.

Speaker 6 So I think

Speaker 6 we've done a fantastic job of painting what Marmati was like back in 2006. And so let's rewind back to your first kinetic operation with the blue on blue.

Speaker 5 Yeah, man, even before that, when the guys hit the ground, the very first, like I've been in Advonce, I've been on the ground for like a week. Everyone arrives.

Speaker 5 um and so they they're they're just offloading in the camp and we got in there's like a massive multiple uh

Speaker 5 um like multiple unit like well-coordinated enemy attack on the camp we're talking like so every single seal is on the rooftop of the camp just dumping fire across the river um

Speaker 5 and uh

Speaker 5 that was like the first the very first uh one of my guys who was who's our probably our most senior machine gunner um he'd been it was his third deployment to Iraq.

Speaker 5 He'd been a machine gunner, you know, every time. He'd done a bunch of assaults, done a bunch of uh capture-kill raids, you know, those direct action raids.
And he, he was like,

Speaker 5 this is the first time I've ever fired my machine gun. I mean, he'd been on the ground for like three hours, you know.
Are you serious? I mean, how many hours? Shot like 500 rounds off the rooftop.

Speaker 5 So, yeah. So we knew like, this is going to be different, you know.

Speaker 5 And then that first particular, the first major operation, first of all, I was so pissed at jocko for this because he was a i i was i had to be acting task unit commander for that because um

Speaker 5 and it was the right call man it was the right call but i like i want to obviously wanted to be out there with my guys on the battlefield

Speaker 5 and uh a bunch of guys they the the army this was the 101st brigade or the 101st airborne division um this was the uh the first of the 506 task force red curry and this i mean they they live that the the the celebrated band of Brothers tradition, you know, from the book that Stephen Ambrose wrote in the HBO miniseries.

Speaker 5 This was the first of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment. Awesome, awesome unit.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they just had phenomenal soldiers, incredible leader,

Speaker 5 their battalion commander.

Speaker 5 They were asking for help. They were doing some operations, pushing in what was called the Malab district.
It was a really, really bad area.

Speaker 5 And so our guys went out there and set up a position. We had, you know, our job tasking from the combined joint special operations task force.

Speaker 5 You know, that was the Green Beret Colonel in charge of all the special operations at theater at the time. Was everything was going to be by with and through Iraqi soldiers.

Speaker 5 So we were we were tasked to train and fight

Speaker 5 company and battalion size elements of Iraqi soldiers. Like that was literally our tasking.
So that's what we were there to do.

Speaker 5 And obviously that was was an ODA mission. It was a little bit different for SEALs to kind of adopt that.
But we took with us, we took Iraqi soldiers with us on every mission.

Speaker 5 And the SEALs, SEAL Team 2 guys before us had done a great job of training those guys up and trying to mitigate some of the risk of their training.

Speaker 5 But that's what our guys were doing on that very first mission. They sent, we had an element of SEALs that was going out as combat advisors to the Iraqi soldiers.
And we're talking like

Speaker 5 100 Iraqi soldiers on the battlefield, you know, with like a dozen of our guys and some of the Army, the military transition team and some some Marines that were with them.

Speaker 5 And then we had two different SEAL sniper teams that were going out there along with some Army sniper teams. And so they went out onto the battlefield.
They briefed where everybody was going to be.

Speaker 5 You know, everything, the plan made a lot of sense.

Speaker 5 I'm kind of tracking this mission. I'm watching their COD ops and I'm listening to it on the radio.

Speaker 5 And it was pretty clear that like all hell kind of broke loose on the operation.

Speaker 5 And we expected it to, because in the Malab district, this was like, and this is our very first major operation as tasking a bruiser. So Jocko felt like he needed to be over there there

Speaker 5 located with the battalion leadership so he could kind of be the liaison officer to manage that as the command and control with all his different elements out there.

Speaker 5 100% the right call to be able to do that. So Jocko's out on the battlefield.
But instead of being, you know, with there's all these different multiple SEAL units out there, he's co-located with the

Speaker 5 battalion staff from Task Force Red Curry. He, you know, try to try to manage that.
And

Speaker 5 we have this report of like a massive enemy attack that goes on. So our SEAL sniper element is reporting the attack.

Speaker 5 And then all of a sudden we also get a report that, you know, there's a report

Speaker 5 that the insurgents are attacking the Iraqi unit that's out there.

Speaker 5 And there was there was some there were some issues I won't get into on the communication side, you know, as well, that kind of broke down

Speaker 5 passing communications.

Speaker 5 But Jocko's out there on the battlefield. He shows up there.
He knows that his guys are in trouble. They're calling for heavy heavy QRF, right? They want tanks.
That means they're in a dire situation.

Speaker 5 They feel like they're about to be overrun. And so Jocko shows up there, the command and control element.
He moves up, sees the, the, uh, um, ang, the, the Anglico officer, right?

Speaker 5 The, the uh, air naval gunfire liaison officer that's, that's there to coordinate an airstrike on a building. There's red smoke marking where the enemy is.

Speaker 5 He knows that his, the, that, the sniper team is in there somewhere or should be close by.

Speaker 5 And, uh, and so he just, he, he, he's kind of trying trying to deconflict what's going on.

Speaker 5 Um, and he went up and kicked the gate open. And, uh, and it was Tony, my platoon chief on the other side was like, um, and realized like, this is a blue and blue situation.

Speaker 5 So, and no one understood what was going on. This was, um, meanwhile, I'm, I'm moderating the radio on the other side of the city.
I'm getting traffic passed back to me.

Speaker 5 Um, there's a there's a huge spin up on this, but all of my guys that were in that sniper position, that was, that was a squad of my guys that were there. and um

Speaker 5 uh it was um they were all convinced i think that they were about to die i mean they they they they had moved they they moved out to a sniper position under cover of darkness they realized that where they were was not a good and defendable position they didn't have visibility on where they needed to to see uh to cover the road that they were supposed to cover for the soldiers and the iraqi uh the u.s army soldiers iraqis that were moving down that road so they moved position across the road and they weren't able to pass that that information for for

Speaker 5 a series of reasons, a breakdown in communication. Then the Iraqi soldiers were out of sector.
So they were supposed to, it was supposed to be like hours before they were clearing.

Speaker 5 Well, some of the Iraqi soldiers, I think, decided like, hey, we're going to get killed if we're out here. Let's get this thing over with.

Speaker 5 They like rushed to the furthest point away, you know, from the friendly,

Speaker 5 you know, outpost, Camp Corrigidor, and then tried to rush back. And so they were out of sector.
So all of a sudden, you know, as our sniper team is setting up, they zip-tied the gate to the

Speaker 5 and they're setting up. And, you know, it's just starting to get light.
So like first call the prayer goes down. So night vision doesn't work, you know, but you can't really see.

Speaker 5 And all of a sudden they've got somebody, you know, creeping by the window with an AK-47. Like they see the unmistakable sign of AK-47, like they engage that guy.

Speaker 5 And they didn't realize it was an Iraqi soldier that was out of sector.

Speaker 5 So the Iraqi soldier, you know, they,

Speaker 5 that guy gets killed. Several others get wounded.
The Iraqis engage back. Um, the Iraqi gets dragged back.

Speaker 5 They call in for fire support because they're thinking, oh man, there's al-Qaeda insurgents are holed up in this building. And man, we, we got this on video.

Speaker 5 Uh, there's an embedded, um, there was an embedded reporter, I think, from Stars and Stripes with the

Speaker 5 unit, the ANCO unit. They, they pulled up a Humbi and they dumped probably, they probably dumped 300 rounds of 50 cow into the building.

Speaker 5 And our mutual friend Matt, that that we were in buzz with is on the rooftop and uh and i mean got all he could do is just take cover rounds are coming to the rooftop like one round luckily it went through the concrete wall enough to slow down like hit him in the face and like embed it up under his cheekbone are you he said he was burning it but he like grabbed it and pulled it out of his face and like threw it threw it down on the roof um

Speaker 5 And so these guys are like, man, we're about to be overrun, right? They're calling for that QRF. And they're thinking, man, these guys, this is, they're bringing it.
This is our first major operation.

Speaker 5 So they're calling in for tanks and fire support. Outside, they're calling in for tanks and fire support.
So a tank pulls up.

Speaker 5 When Jocko gets up there, before we kick the gate open, there's a tank with their gun trained directly on the building where my guys are holed up.

Speaker 5 And they're just all kind of hunkered down trying to just take cover and not get their head shot off. I mean, you can imagine, right?

Speaker 5 There's 50 Cal rounds coming, you know, and Belfed, you know, 762 coming right over your head. All you can do is just bury your face and try to take cover and return fire as best you can.
And

Speaker 5 they think they're about to get overrun.

Speaker 5 And then, on top of that, not only were they going to engage with tanks, they're coordinating an airstrike.

Speaker 5 So the Anglo Co, you know, the JTAC, right, the air controller, he's coordinating an airstrike that's about to just demolish this entire building.

Speaker 5 So I'm going to be able to wiped out our entire squad.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so this was the lesson from that of like just how easily like we thought we had taken every step possible to mitigate the risk of that happening.

Speaker 5 And so meanwhile, I'm back at the Tactical Operations Center. You know, we're monitoring radio reports.
We're hearing that, you know, we've got wounded SEALs. And

Speaker 5 I know it's one of my guys. I know it's

Speaker 5 Matt at this point,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 then we're hearing that it's friendly fire. Right.
So like, okay, what's going on? Man, all of a sudden, word spreads like wildfire, right?

Speaker 5 The webby, like instant, you know, chats are going on across the,

Speaker 5 you know the the every every talk of like friendly fire friendly fire like what's going on what's going on and and um so i mean there's there's like massive scrutiny on this operation you know right away and i remember i jumped in the truck all i know is that matt you know my brother our brother we went through buzz with that i've done you know the this workup cycle with is in my platoon i was his platoon i know he's been shot in the face i don't know what that means i don't know if it means his head's gone you know i don't know if he's gonna die so i jumped in a truck drove across the base to Charlie Mett, that was a medical facility.

Speaker 5 And I went to pick him up. And man,

Speaker 5 they put him on a morphine drip and

Speaker 5 patched him up and gave him some antibiotics for infection. And when I was talking to him, you know, obviously he's kind of out of it, right? He's got some morphine.

Speaker 5 But he's like, man, they brought it. Those guys brought it.
It's like they were going to overrun our position. He's like, I thought we were all going to die.
And he kept saying it over and over again.

Speaker 5 And I was like, Matt, I was like, Matt, it was friendly fire, man. It was friendly fire.

Speaker 5 It was friendly fire. And I probably said, I'll probably say it was friendly fire probably six times before it like sunk in.
And he was like, what?

Speaker 5 And it was like,

Speaker 5 he couldn't believe it. You know, he couldn't believe it when I said it.
And

Speaker 5 so I think that right there as like, you know, our commanding officer flew out. We had an investigating officer that flew out.

Speaker 5 It was. We were so fortunate to not lose any of our guys on that.
And it was horrible that we lost an Iraqi soldier on that.

Speaker 5 We took up a big collection for his family and tried to do everything we could, you know, for him. There were a couple other Iraqi soldiers wounded.

Speaker 5 Luckily, they recovered, you know, from that, but it was so close to being just absolutely catastrophic. We're talking, you know, wiping half my platoon out.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 then, you know, when people were looking like, what heads are going to roll over this? What heads are going to roll? Who screwed this up?

Speaker 5 This is friendly fire. This is the worst.
This is the cardinal sin, the cardinal sin that you can commit. X-ray platoon in Vietnam, right? That had a friendly fire incident.

Speaker 5 And this is is the worst case scenario that can happen.

Speaker 5 And so we had a big debrief. And our commanding officer, our commanding master chief, were sitting in there.
The investigating officer, who was our JAG, was in there.

Speaker 5 People are wondering, like, who's responsible? Like, who's, how did this happen? Who's responsible for this thing? And we knew it was probably some heads were going to roll over.

Speaker 5 And Jocko stood up in front of the task unit. We're all in there.
And

Speaker 5 he said, whose fault is this?

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 man, they were, you know, the radio that stood up was like, man, I didn't pass the traffic on where we moved location. I should have made sure that got passed.
That's my fault.

Speaker 5 You know, the SEAL that engaged the Iraqi soldiers said, I didn't get proper PID. I thought that was

Speaker 5 an enemy insurgent. And I engaged him before I had proper PID.
That's my fault.

Speaker 5 I should have made that happen before. I mean, over and over, the guy with the Iraqi soldiers, you know, who had been combat advising them said, this is my fault.
Those Iraqis were out of sector.

Speaker 5 And we just went around the room, around the room. And Jocko was like, no, it's not your fault.
I'm like, no, it's not your fault. No, it's not your fault.
He's like, this is my fault.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm the task unit commander. Everything that happens to this task unit is my fault.
I'm responsible.

Speaker 5 And we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Speaker 5 And just to watch that happen, like the power of extreme ownership in front of everybody in the task unit, you know, our respect for him was already high, man. And it went through the roof after that.

Speaker 5 I realized and like, and our commanding officer, instead of, he actually left there, he had greater trust in Jocko and in task unit Brewster because he knew that we were going to take steps to make sure that it didn't happen again.

Speaker 5 And we did prevent it from happening again.

Speaker 5 Friendly fire happened, probably

Speaker 5 friendly fire would erupt, but it never became catastrophic. We were always able to manage it.
We could, you know, we could stop it before

Speaker 5 anybody was killed or wounded. And it was always a constant threat, but we took massive steps to mitigate the risk.

Speaker 5 And in fact, even I... And even

Speaker 5 some of the guys,

Speaker 5 some of your

Speaker 5 steel teammate brethren that plugged into our team, they were an awesome crew that came out and joined us. And they were kind of jokingly calling me the rocket man there for a little bit because

Speaker 5 I had these two flares on my back. We had a white flare and a red flare.
You know, a white flare was

Speaker 5 a red flare was send QRF. A white flare was like ceasefire.

Speaker 5 And so those were signaling devices. I was like, man, I want that with me all the time, just in case that we have that happen.
I'm going to carry that thing, those things around on me.

Speaker 5 That's ultimately my job is to prevent this from happening.

Speaker 5 So we implemented lessons learned at every level of the team we we took massive steps to mitigate it from happening and and uh when it did happen you know like oh we get we get some rounds over our head we instantly had the radio comms and we had a good comms check with that you know the tank that was shooting at us we could get them to cease fire you know we're marking our positions ceasefire sometimes we'd throw a freaking giant you know vs 17 day glow orange signal panel, you know, half the size of this room over the side of the building and let every insurgent know where we were at just because

Speaker 5 that was better than taking you know one 20 millimeter main gun rounds, you know, in deep position uh because the threat of that was significant every time. Damn, wow,

Speaker 6 wow, you know, I heard you talking.

Speaker 6 Um,

Speaker 6 I heard you talking once, I think it was with Jocko about getting shot in the chest

Speaker 6 in the plates.

Speaker 6 Can you run through that?

Speaker 5 Yeah, man, that was uh the darkest day of my life.

Speaker 6 I'm sorry, man.

Speaker 5 That was August 2nd, 2006, man. We lost Mark Lee.
And

Speaker 5 Ryan Job had been wounded right before that. And

Speaker 5 yeah, I took a round. I think it was a ricochet, you know.
Otherwise, I probably would have killed me, split my spine in half, you know.

Speaker 6 What were you guys doing?

Speaker 5 We were, it started as a big...

Speaker 5 basically just a coordinate search operation into what was called the J-Block sector of Ramadi. And so after we'd established those combat outposts, outposts, we'd push sniper overwatches out and then

Speaker 5 we would push

Speaker 5 patrols with the Iraqi forces out, you know, to try to patrol into the city, engage with the local populace, show them that we were there to actually support them, talk to them about where the insurgents were.

Speaker 5 You know, these were the Marine Corps calls them census operations of kind of just showing the local populace that like we were here to support them.

Speaker 5 You know, that was that stabilize the city, secure the local populace part, which paid huge dividends down the road, you know, to ultimately lower the level level of violence. And

Speaker 5 the Anbar Awakening

Speaker 5 came out once, but all that started with breaking the back of the insurgency, like really lowering

Speaker 5 their military capability.

Speaker 5 But what we would do is

Speaker 5 push patrols out with the Iraqi soldiers and the military transition teams that they were assigned to them. And we put cyber overwatches out there.
And we had a bounding Overwatch that was in a

Speaker 5 sniper position covering.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 an awesome unit from the this was from

Speaker 5 this was from the task force bandit

Speaker 5 team bulldog. So this was this is Bravo Platoon

Speaker 5 first

Speaker 5 It was Bravo Platoon 1st Battalion 37th Armored Regiment of the 1st Armored Division.

Speaker 5 I mean, this is a, this was a unit that had been in the Ardennes, you know, for us in the Battle of the Bulge and World War II, like historic unit, incredible group that we built some awesome relationships with.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we, by the way, we couldn't have done any of these operations without these soldiers and Marines. You know, we push into these areas.

Speaker 5 The only reason that we could do that, the only reason that we could push so deep in enemy territory is because we knew that the soldiers and Marines were going to mount up in their tanks, mount up in their humvees, and come to our rescue and aid.

Speaker 5 And they did it over and over and over and over again, all the time.

Speaker 5 And we had just an incredible working relationship with those guys. And I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for them.

Speaker 5 And so we supported them as well. When they asked us to do things, we helped them.
We put in cyber overwatch positions. And so we were pushing our Iraqis deeper into enemy-held areas.
And

Speaker 5 as we were clearing through an element of the J-block, we'd done probably, I don't know, six or eight operations like in this area, kind of pushing deeper, deeper in.

Speaker 5 And Ryan Job was one of our machine gunners, amazing guy, incredible guy.

Speaker 5 And well, the kind of guy that I don't know how long it took him to get through buds, but it was a long time.

Speaker 5 He was one of those guys that was never going to be the best athlete, was just absolutely tough as nails. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 was just a stud,

Speaker 5 you know, awesome machine gunner,

Speaker 5 super strong man of faith as well, you know, and hilarious.

Speaker 5 But he was the machine gunner basically holding security for Chris and the sniper team that was on the rooftop as we had this kind of bounding Overwatch.

Speaker 5 And I was with the Iraqi element that was moving forward through the streets. And we were about an hour and a half or two hours into that operation.

Speaker 5 Again, one that we conducted many, many like that before. And all of a sudden, I mean, we hear a, we hear a

Speaker 5 shot ring out. I mean, you can hear the impact of it, you know,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 I hear, you know, our most experienced, our most complete experienced guy was Chris Kyle, but awesome, awesome teammate and tremendous sniper,

Speaker 5 saved lots of lives on the battlefield. And man, I could just hear in Chris's voice.
Man, he's like, we call Ryan's nickname was biggles

Speaker 5 and uh he was like biggles has been hit i need a corps and the rooftop now

Speaker 5 and uh man i could just i could just hear the in his voice you know how horrific that was um

Speaker 5 and i literally been talking to him you know both those guys like 30 seconds before that right just walked down the stairs you know to to to try to you know we're going to organize our team and kind of push out to the to the next building before we take the rooftop there um

Speaker 5 and man we get you know so we go rushing back up to the rooftop And

Speaker 5 Mark Lee, who was

Speaker 5 rolls right back up there, another awesome machine gunner, just an incredible, incredible guy, steps right into the very position that Ryan got shot, like right in the position with his belt-fed Mark 48 machine gun and just starts laying down suppressive fire,

Speaker 5 knowing that like we're going to get shot back, you know, at any moment.

Speaker 5 And we got up to Ryan, you know, Ryan had been

Speaker 5 hit in the face

Speaker 5 and just a single, single shot hit him in the face um you know you could call an enemy sniper around you could call just a you know he obviously was not your average like spray and pray you know insurgent somebody that had some good side picture trigger squeeze engaged him hit him in the head um and man it just it just looked horrific i mean he's you know he's his eyes gone like his holy half his face looked like it's missing you know how blood looks man it's just so i i just i ran up to him i just grabbed his hand i was like is he conscious

Speaker 5 when i rolled up to him he's just he's just laying there and i grab i grabbed his hand i was like hang in there brother we're gonna get you out of here and i i didn't believe that for a second man you know like it just looked that good was there was no chance um

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 you know meanwhile mark and and is standing there laying down suppressive fire right over the rooftop wall where he just ryan just got hit other guys stepped up there too are laying down suppressive fire you know we're getting the we're calling in the cazavac vehicle the corner and rolls up there and is is working on him that corner was johnny kim or you know just a phenomenal guy in there going to work

Speaker 5 on Ryan. And miraculously, Ryan like sits up.
He like sits up and says, I'm okay. And

Speaker 5 the blood was kind of going down his throat, right? So he has to kind of sit up to kind of clear that. And we get under his armpits.
We're getting him down.

Speaker 5 So the Kazavak vehicle, you know, we had a M113 armed personnel carrier down there, you know, for Kazavak. And so we get Johnny,

Speaker 5 our corpsman, and we got, you know, guys under each shoulder of Ryan. We're getting an asscor off the roof.
And he walks off the roof really by his own power, like down the stairs.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 just incredibly, incredibly tough, you know, human being. And

Speaker 5 we found out later that Ryan got hit

Speaker 5 when he was in the hospital. They had all this shrapnel in his face and they were trying to figure out what exactly happened.
Because I thought the round just impacted him, you know,

Speaker 5 but he,

Speaker 5 we realized that like there was a, there was a round impact on the receiver, right at the base of the receiver where it meets the butt stock for his Mark 48 machine gun.

Speaker 5 And we were an hour and a half into this operation. He was,

Speaker 5 you know, it's 117 degrees. You know, it's miserably hot.
We're pairing all our gear and water. I mean, Ryan must have been sweating profusely.

Speaker 5 And, man, just like... the awesome teammate that he was, the awesome machine gunner was, Ryan was on that machine gunner.

Speaker 5 He was on that machine gun looking down the sides of his weapon, ready to provide cover fire.

Speaker 5 And if he he hadn't done that he would have just taken his hat off you know that round would have just taken his hat off so um like that saved his life um

Speaker 5 and uh we unfortunately we didn't figure out to later it was it was two weeks later that we realized that uh that uh

Speaker 5 the the the shrapnel had severed his optic nerve to his good eye and he was going to be blind as a result of that

Speaker 5 um And so I didn't know how it was going to go at the time. We evaced Ryan.
You know, we sent our corporan with him.

Speaker 5 We pulled back to the you know we pulled back to the base um and august 2nd we've done multiple operations in this area we've gotten tons of gunfights in this area there were definitely a lot of insurgents but there was something different about august 2nd like this was probably i think it was the largest single like engagement of any of the the bat the the the engagements that made up this like you know, eight or nine month like Battle of Vermadi.

Speaker 5 And the insurgents were just coming out of the woodwork, attacking the soldiers that were out there clear. So we had one sector.
They were clearing another sector. After Ryan got hit, we pulled back

Speaker 5 and went back to the,

Speaker 5 we foot patrol back about a kilometer to the to the base, kind of refitted.

Speaker 5 And the soldiers were like under attack, man.

Speaker 5 And they asked us if we could help them.

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 you know they were getting attacked from these different positions uh so we loaded up in in badly fighting vehicles and we rolled back out you know into the into the city um and it it was,

Speaker 5 man, there was so much going on that day. Like for guys like Mark Lee, for all the guys that were in charge of the platoon, like they knew they were going back at it in the teeth of it.

Speaker 5 Like we've just seen what happened to Ryan.

Speaker 5 And our brothers in the Army needed our help from Team Bulldog there.

Speaker 5 Nobody hesitated for a second, man.

Speaker 5 Jocked up in their gear, reloaded mags, refitted with grenades, loaded up into those uh those brads and we we rolled out no shit to hit those target buildings no hesitation no hesitation man those guys did did everything i asked them man unbelievable courage um we had

Speaker 5 the the firefight was so bad that day man we had like i think for uh the company commander's name is is uh mike bidem is a close friend of mine he's retired now main gun mike we called him he fired over 50 main guns from from the his tank throughout his his uh time there.

Speaker 5 and um i don't know how many people have done that since like the world war ii era man 50 main guns but uh he was uh he was a phenomenal guy i think every i think just about every tank and bradley fighting vehicle out there was uh you know we would use the term winchester they're out of ammo like they call it black when the tank's out of ammo like they they shot every single main gun round that they had damn in that engagement and uh that is some serious shit it was it was uh

Speaker 5 it was it was right in the teeth of it man and so i think for for me you know i talked quickly over with tony my platoon chief i was like look if we're going to hit a target where we got bad guys that are shooting at us you know the best thing we do is soften it up you know first so um we had the uh we wanted to go in and try to stay off the street we knew we had at least one sniper out there so we wanted to try to use armor you know to get into the to to to these areas um and so we had those the bradley fighting vehicles and the tanks just blast these buildings man before we went into them um and then smash to the walls uh and and lower their lower their ramps, you know, before we engaged.

Speaker 5 We hit one building.

Speaker 5 The insurgents had already like pushed out of it. That the, you know, the army told us, hey, we're getting engaged from this building.
There's a surgeons in that building. So we loaded back up.

Speaker 5 We hit it. We hit another building.
And in the second engagement, as we went into that building, man, the building was on fire as we went in there.

Speaker 5 Like a main gun round had already hit the building and just blasted it open.

Speaker 5 There were, as we started moving into the building and clearing through the building, we took fire from the opposite end of the hallway and

Speaker 5 Mark was killed. And somewhere I was hit in that gauge, but I heard the gunfire ring out.
I stepped out

Speaker 5 into the hallway, got hit, and I just grabbed one of our guys who was in the hallway. It was clearly a hot hallway with bullets and ricochets flying.
I'm trying to push him across

Speaker 5 the hallway, just to try to get him out of the line of fire. And

Speaker 5 I heard the man down call. Mark was 20 feet away from me when that happened.
And

Speaker 5 know, guys came, came

Speaker 5 as more assaults were poured in the building. Like, they, they cleared the rooftop.
And, and, um, it was, uh, it was,

Speaker 5 it was the absolute worst day of my life, man.

Speaker 5 Um, and I think the fact that I got hit, you know, just in between the plates and, um, I mean, I knew I'd been hit, you know, but then the guy that I pushed into that room was like,

Speaker 5 Hey, Leif, you're bleeding, you know, just blood always looks like more than it is, right? It was my whole inside of my, you know,

Speaker 5 inside of my vest was soaked and it was just like trickling down you know you could just hear like the tap tap tap tap like blood on the floor and and uh but there just wasn't time to even think about that man you know i it was mark was down that we moved up to him got the cornin on him got him casavaced um

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 for whatever reason like i thought there might be some hope you know mark was unconscious when we got to him i thought there might be some hope to him man but he'd been he'd been hit in the head he was killed instantly and um mark was just such such an incredible, incredible warrior, man.

Speaker 5 And he was doing exactly what I asked him to do, you know, which was

Speaker 5 engage enemy insurgents. He was he was moving down a hallway, stepped up right into the doorway to,

Speaker 5 you know, to engage enemy insurgents that were shooting at us from the building next door, man, and

Speaker 5 sacrificed himself for me and the rest of the guys that were coming in there. And he was.

Speaker 5 I mean, just like Ryan, just the most incredible teammate, just the just absolutely hilarious, strong as a, just, just strong as an awesome, incredible athlete, but just the, the kind of, just representing the absolute best of the SEAL teams, you know, and,

Speaker 5 and I would do anything, Sean. I'd do anything to trade place with him, man.

Speaker 5 Um, I got lucky, you know, for whatever reason, I got, I got lucky and some ricochet hit me and, you know, they patched me up and and

Speaker 5 and I, you know, there'll never be a time when I go up to Fort Rosecrans Cemetery. see Mark's grave there.
I don't wish that was me lying on the ground there, man, and not him. And

Speaker 5 I think that's one of the hardest things

Speaker 5 that I could have never prepared for, right? When these guys that you love and would do anything for,

Speaker 5 it's the ultimate dichotomy as a leader. It's the ultimate dichotomy, which is to

Speaker 5 love your guys and want to do anything for them and be willing to trade your life for them if you could. And yet.

Speaker 5 sending them out on missions where you know that they they might get injured or killed.

Speaker 5 And I think it's,

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 it it was something that I tried to pass on to the next generation of SEAL leaders that I, you know, just the reminder of like what's at stake. And

Speaker 5 we would do a memorial run

Speaker 5 every junior officer training course that I put through. Like we'd park our vehicles down at Dog Beach and Ocean Beach.

Speaker 5 And we would run, it's five miles uphill all the way to Fort Roche Grand Cemetery.

Speaker 5 And we'd go pay our respects to where Mark Lee is buried and Mikey Montsour, our teammate in Delta Platoon, who was killed about a month later, and pay our respects there and just

Speaker 5 remind these young leaders about what's at stake, man, and then the burden of leadership. And

Speaker 5 I think for me,

Speaker 5 there'll never be, like, it's a burden that never goes away. You know, it's a burden that never goes away.

Speaker 5 And I think what's, as a man of faith, Mark was a tremendous man of faith and

Speaker 5 he had wanted to be a pastor and he had gone to the master's college to study to be a pastor before he decided that he wanted to he wanted to join the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 And I remember quoting scripture and talking about

Speaker 5 there was a time when we were out when

Speaker 5 we were engaging targets and we were talking about like the worst case scenarios, these mangy Iraqi dogs that are like, you know, these kind of junkyard dogs that are running around.

Speaker 5 Like the worst case scenario is that these mangy dogs are like chewing on you out in the street. Right.
And we talked about how this was, you know,

Speaker 5 that in the Bible, there's, there's numerous examples of that, where like the prophet Elijah, you know, in Jezebel, who's trying to kill him, the prophets of Israel, that the dogs are going to chew on Jezebel.

Speaker 5 When David and Goliath, Goliath says that he's going to give David's body after he kills him to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. And

Speaker 5 we were talking about this with Mark, right? This idea of like, of being a warrior on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 And and uh i remember sharing those scriptures you know with mark and talking about his faith and and how powerful that was for him um and i know i'm gonna see him again one day and i look forward to that day man he's uh he was an incredible man and uh

Speaker 5 and ryan job you know three years after the surgery uh on i think it was the 20 second surgery to repair those wounds that you know when he was wounded um we lost him you know from complications with that surgery as well and uh like him like just like mark ryan was an awesome man of faith.

Speaker 5 You know, he came back from that deployment and being blind to him was like an inconvenience. You know, it was,

Speaker 5 he, he, he climbed 14,000-foot mountaineer, totally blind

Speaker 5 to this awesome organization called Camp Patriot.

Speaker 5 I know, I know a number of SEALs that attempted it and were unsuccessful in their summit attempt, you know, with, with, with their sight, you know, and all their limbs. And

Speaker 5 we, he asked me to go on a hot, I was the spotter for him. And He shot this world-class bull elk using this little camera system.
I mean, Ryan was just a phenomenal guy.

Speaker 5 He married his longtime girlfriend. They were expecting their first child.

Speaker 5 And, you know, when that happened, it was just

Speaker 5 a tremendous, tremendous loss.

Speaker 5 But I know that Mark would have wanted us to keep going, right? To keep operating, to keep doing what we were doing, to try to make a difference there.

Speaker 5 And I would talk to Ryan on the phone and Ryan would tell us to keep going in those operations. Keep doing what you're doing.
Keep going out there.

Speaker 5 um keep getting after it uh do everything you can you know to try to bring more soldiers and marines home to try to win this thing in whatever capacity we can and and uh

Speaker 5 and uh

Speaker 5 man i just i'm just so thankful and fortunate and honored to have been able to serve with guys like that you know who were willing to lay down their lives um

Speaker 5 and and ryan one time told me he's like it doesn't make me a hero just because i got shot in the face i'm not a hero that doesn't make me a hero because i got shot and i told ryan that what

Speaker 5 what what made him a hero is not that he got shot it was the fact that he knew that he could get shot at any time that he that he could get gravely wounded or killed and yet he jocked up in his gear and he rolled out all those operations over and over and over again and he did it for me did it for his teammates he did it for the teams he did it for the soldiers and marines that we were trying to protect he did it for the innocent iraqi people that were out there living under this brutal reign of terror and fear you know that Zarqawi's henchmen in al-Qaeda and Iraq, later ISIS, you know, ruled over them

Speaker 5 with.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I know Mark, Mark was a hero for the same reason, man. Mark was a hero for the exact same reason that he was willing to do that over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 And I just think it was, it's the honor of my lifetime to be able to have served alongside heroes like that. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And be able to tell their story and share their legacy.

Speaker 6 Damn, life.

Speaker 6 that's heavy that's heavy i'm sorry i had to go through that man

Speaker 5 we're gonna see him again one day sean yeah i look forward to that day yeah

Speaker 6 yeah you know when i first checked into 240 at buds mark was the mark was my my headmate

Speaker 6 man i didn't know that i didn't get to know him um terribly well but um i am very thankful that i got to meet him and and uh

Speaker 6 he

Speaker 6 gave me the ins and outs of Buds.

Speaker 6 What a great guy.

Speaker 5 I didn't realize that you guys, I guess I should have known that because I didn't put it together for several months in a Charlie platoon as he started to come.

Speaker 5 He joined our platoon and started working with us.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that wasn't in our initial workup. That was just, that was several months before we deployed.

Speaker 5 But somehow we put it together like he knew Brian Bill. So I realized that he had been to buds previously yeah um and

Speaker 5 and uh and those guys had you know brian was one of the guys that had trained with him they'd lived together in virginia beach and you know they they brian was one of the guys that encouraged him um and i'll tell you what man as destroyed as i was um he brian bill um

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 as close to Mark as you could be. And Brian wasn't close to a lot of people, man.

Speaker 5 But he was very very close friends with mark lee and we talked a lot about brian and you know obviously i was close to brian and buds and was a was was a friend of his through that time

Speaker 5 and when we came back man i was i just was

Speaker 5 just

Speaker 5 my soul was crushed my soul was crushed man from losing mark and ryan being blind and uh

Speaker 5 and particularly knowing that i had some minor wound man it was like it patched me up and i'm going back to work you know like it was like why couldn't that have been me Why couldn't I have been killed and not Mark?

Speaker 5 Why couldn't I have been blatant, not Ryan?

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, luckily, I had a, I had a great commander in Jocko who pulled me aside and said, hey, man, we don't have a crystal ball and we don't know when that stuff's going to happen.

Speaker 5 And if we did, we wouldn't go on that operation. But we can either choose to do nothing.

Speaker 5 you know, and take no risk, or we could do everything we can to try to make a difference here, to try to save American lives here. And that's what Mark would want us to do.

Speaker 5 That's what Ryan is telling us to do, You know, to encourage me to keep going, man. And that support from Jocko was immense.

Speaker 5 But I remember sitting in the mission planning space as we're just kind of all reeling from Mark's loss.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 at this point, we didn't know Ryan was going to be blind.

Speaker 5 I knew it was grave.

Speaker 5 I knew he was wounded badly. I didn't even know if he was going to like out of the woods as far as making it at that point.

Speaker 5 And I got a call from Brian Bill, who was in Baghdad, with SEAL teammate. And he said, hey, man,

Speaker 5 I heard about what happened.

Speaker 5 And I just want you to know, like, I'm going to go home. I'm going to take care of the family.
I'm going to take care of Maya, Mark, Mark's wife.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm going to be there for Mark's mom, Debbie, and his family. Like, don't worry about it.
I know you guys are going to tend to operate. Like, I got this.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 man, I can't even tell you how much that meant to me.

Speaker 5 He never questioned a thing. He never like said, what, what happened? What are you guys doing? Like, all the emotions that you might

Speaker 5 expect.

Speaker 5 He just said, hey, man, I'm here. I'm here to help.
And gave up what was an awesome deployment, you know, for those guys.

Speaker 5 You know, he bagged that doing a bunch of great operations to go and support Mark, man. And it was,

Speaker 5 that was the kind of guy that Brian was. And

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I can't even tell you how much that meant to me, man. Just getting that call in like the darkest hour in real life and like a teammate just putting his arm around you.

Speaker 5 And, you know, because that was one of the hardest parts. It's like, hey,

Speaker 5 I, we're here. Like, the deployment's continuing.
Operations are going on. I want to go back.
You know, I want to be able to talk to Mark's family and support them and be there.

Speaker 5 I want to be with Ryan's family. And, and yet, you can't do that, right? There's still operations going on.
So, just knowing that teammates like that,

Speaker 5 you know, we're doing that was, that was, I'll never forget that, man, for Brian. That was just, I think, a real testament to the man that he was.

Speaker 6 How long was it after that that you guys were on the next op?

Speaker 5 We

Speaker 5 we had a stand down

Speaker 5 and uh because we just we needed it man we'd been going hard we'd been going hard and uh

Speaker 5 delta platoon uh working across the city out of camp corrigidor was going to be on the um

Speaker 5 they were going to launch an operation like the next day

Speaker 5 and um

Speaker 5 and seth stone called jaco said hey we're going to roll this 24 24 hours

Speaker 5 um

Speaker 5 and so uh he and jocko said hey man you can still still go on the op. And Seth was like, look, I think we need to roll this 24 hours, right? Everybody needs to decompress.
Everybody's emotional.

Speaker 5 You know, and so

Speaker 5 that was an important thing for us, I think, just to realize like we need to, we need to allow our guys to decompress. But we, we had a memorial service for Mark.
And

Speaker 5 man, it was so, guys drove down the most dangerous roads in Iraq. You know, our teammates came from Felujah and Haditha and

Speaker 5 from across the, you know, the Ramadi down that, you know, Route Michigan, that that deadly road, you know, to come pay their respects.

Speaker 5 And we had an awesome memorial service where we said goodbye to Mark. And then 40 hours later, we jocked up in our gear and we rolled back out.

Speaker 6 Do you want to talk about the service with Mark or do you want to keep that between the platoon?

Speaker 5 I think we all just said our goodbyes, man. You know, we all just did our best to honor him.
And, you know, four guys had gone back with Mark to escort his,

Speaker 5 you know, earthly remains home and be there with his family and be there for the memorial service

Speaker 5 for that. And I think

Speaker 5 it was an amazing turnout, man. Soldiers, Marines there, Iraqi soldiers.

Speaker 5 It was just the kind of person he was, man.

Speaker 5 He was the best, man. He was.

Speaker 5 I've never seen anybody who could use humor in the darkest situation, like to just drop a joke or like a movie quote, you know, and get people laughing and like get him, get him just to kind of shake things off.

Speaker 5 Like he was,

Speaker 5 he just was,

Speaker 5 yeah, man, he was awesome.

Speaker 6 You guys took a lot of losses. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 the world is very volatile right now. And we're going to get involved in some more stuff.
There's not a doubt in my mind, the U.S.

Speaker 6 and so.

Speaker 6 You know, for the future generations that are going to go through similar experiences as what you just described, you know, what advice do you have

Speaker 6 for them?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, our losses, you know, every time I think I've seen some combat sean, I read about, I read about Marines at Iwo Jima. You know,

Speaker 5 I got a chance to visit Normandy this summer, right? And I'm standing on the beaches of Okinawa and

Speaker 5 the beaches of Utah.

Speaker 5 I've been on the beaches in Okinawa as well,

Speaker 5 you know, when I was deployed there back in the day.

Speaker 5 But just being there in Normandy kind of opened up my eyes to some stuff, like some of the inland fighting campaigns and things that were happening. I mean, you realize the kind of losses that

Speaker 5 military units have sustained over the years.

Speaker 5 You know, you go to the battlefield like Gettysburg, you know, or some of the battles around here, you know, in Tennessee that are not far from where we are now.

Speaker 5 I mean, just massive, massive loss of life that did eclipse anything that I've experienced.

Speaker 5 And I think what I can just, you know, what I can say is like, what's helped me is number one, faith, man, knowing that like

Speaker 5 God has a plan for you,

Speaker 5 you know, and the survivor's guilt that that's so easy for any of us to carry with us

Speaker 5 is

Speaker 5 like

Speaker 5 God has a plan. And so I think you got to lean on God for his plan.
We don't know what that plan is. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow.

Speaker 5 We don't know what he has in store for us, but just trusting in him for that plan, leaning on faith

Speaker 5 and knowing too that like, you know,

Speaker 5 taking extreme ownership of situations, debriefing, learning lessons, even if it's things that, you know, on August 2nd, the enemy fought in a way that we hadn't really expected them to do.

Speaker 5 Like they brought it, they attacked in huge numbers. And that was, that was a different,

Speaker 5 that was, that was a different tactic, right? The enemy is going to adjust tactics. So you got to debrief.

Speaker 5 You got to learn lessons to apply that stuff going forward to make sure that you try to prevent those things from happening again.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think more than anything else, I think it's about taking care of your people, man.

Speaker 5 Like, like you, your responsibility as a leader goes way beyond, way beyond just looking out for them in the time that you serve with them.

Speaker 5 It is about looking out for them and their families, like for the duration of your life.

Speaker 5 And I will feel that way about the guys that I serve with. And as long as I'm breathing, man, like there's nothing I wouldn't do for them.
You know, there's nothing I wouldn't help them out with.

Speaker 5 And sometimes, you know, you lose touch with people and you haven't talked to them in a while. And maybe people forget that.
And I think it's important to reach out to people and remind them of that.

Speaker 5 It's important to check in with people. It's important just to

Speaker 5 be thinking about

Speaker 5 how you can continue to support them because it goes way beyond just in the immediate aftermath of some horrible situation like that.

Speaker 5 And it's not just about showing up and paying your respects at their gravesite.

Speaker 5 It's about checking in with their family, checking in on their kids, you know, reaching out to your teammates, asking them how they're doing,

Speaker 5 letting them know that you're there for them, man, and that you're all in this thing together and no matter what.

Speaker 5 And I think that's, you know when you go to a battlefield like gettysburg um there's there's memorials all over that battlefield and that's what it's for man people put their hands up just like in normandy there's memorials all over there people people the veterans that survived those battles go there and they put their hands on on on those memorials and they remember their lost teammates and they and they support each other and they help each other and i think that's something that that goes way beyond just the time and service that you have with people um it's lifelong and even beyond that

Speaker 6 thank you for sharing that, Leif.

Speaker 6 I know it's been heavy for you, and I just, I appreciate you going through that, man. And

Speaker 6 let's take a break.

Speaker 6 All right, Leif, we're back from the break.

Speaker 6 Once again, I just, I really appreciate you digging deep and

Speaker 6 sharing those stories

Speaker 6 because,

Speaker 6 one, I think

Speaker 6 it's extremely important

Speaker 6 for those guys to live on, you know, through stories. And two, it's a very, very important piece of history that

Speaker 6 I'm just honored to be able to document here with you today. So.

Speaker 5 Well, I appreciate it, man. I'm honored to share it.
And anytime I get a chance to talk about,

Speaker 5 you know, the teammates that I lost and honor the legacy of Markley and Ryan Job, I think it's

Speaker 5 I'm happy to do it, John. And I appreciate you.
I appreciate you passing it on. I think

Speaker 5 there's so many lessons

Speaker 5 that we learn from that. And I think

Speaker 5 for me,

Speaker 5 I think some Americans, though, need to understand, like,

Speaker 5 sometimes people will come up after I speak about leadership and I talk about Ramadi and I talk about Mark and Ryan and Mikey Mossur, you know, and

Speaker 5 Davis Life and our sister platoon, another phenomenal team guy.

Speaker 5 awesome machine gunner, you know, just like Mark and Ryan. And people will come up and be like, I'm sorry, man.
Like, I'm sorry you went through that. And

Speaker 5 I think it's important to say that,

Speaker 5 like, we had some dark days in Ramadan, man. I think the, you know, the, the, it's, it's kind of cliche, right? The Charles Dickens

Speaker 5 Tale of Two Cities, right? The best of times. It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times. But I think it's important to say that, man.
Like, I would trade those dark days for anything.

Speaker 5 I would trade the days when we lost Mark and Ryan and when Cowie was wounded and when

Speaker 5 we lost Mikey Montsour. I could could trade those days for anything.
But most of those days were some of the absolute best days of my life.

Speaker 5 And knowing that we were working with an awesome crew of warriors, that we were out there fighting against an evil enemy,

Speaker 5 making a difference and have an impact and making sure more soldiers and Marines came home with their families as a result.

Speaker 5 And I think that's something that I think a lot of Americans have a hard time.

Speaker 5 You know, we kind of live in a day sometimes where it's like, well,

Speaker 5 you know, is there really good in evil? Like, yeah, there is.

Speaker 5 There absolutely is.

Speaker 5 And I think when you see the kind of savagery that the, you know, the precursor to ISIS, the al-Qaeda in Iraq, what they're doing to innocent people, just the butchery and torture and rape and murder and just horrific, horrific stuff.

Speaker 5 And I think when you know that you can make a difference in the world and rid the world of some of that evil,

Speaker 5 then it's a it's a great thing, man, to do everything you can in that regard. And I think, I think America needs to remember that.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And so most of the days that I served there were some of the best days of my life. I wouldn't trade for anything.

Speaker 6 Is there anything else on this deployment you'd like to cover?

Speaker 5 No, I mean, I think that's, I think just knowing that we,

Speaker 5 you know, there were so many lessons there, like so many things that like that I thought I was ready. You know, I thought like, hey, we, you know,

Speaker 5 combat was so much more difficult than we thought it was going to be. And

Speaker 5 we were just humbled like on every single operation. Like something didn't go right.
The enemy does something you hadn't planned.

Speaker 5 You know, you thought you deconflicted that so that all the friendlies knew where you were. And next thing you know, you're taking 50 cal, you know, rounds right over the top of your head.

Speaker 5 You thought everyone knew, you know, what the position was because they could see your marking device and come to find out that they can't see that, you know, when they're looking through their tank sites.

Speaker 5 I mean, just so many things like that. It was just over and over again of those lessons that we learned.
And

Speaker 5 I think probably the biggest lesson

Speaker 5 that I learned is that it's, it's not about you, man.

Speaker 5 It's not about me. You know, it's not about Charlie platoon or our SEAL unit.
And that's one of the lessons I tried to pass on as I went to take over that leadership training course.

Speaker 5 And, you know, one, one example of that is like, you know, when we first joined the SEAL teams, right, it's you're training to operate in a SEAL squad or a SEAL platoon.

Speaker 5 And it's just you, right? And you have assets that are supporting you.

Speaker 5 And obviously, you know, if you're at JSOC or, you know, there are times when you've got a whole bunch of assets that are supporting just a special operations unit like that.

Speaker 5 But on the battlefield for us, we would have,

Speaker 5 you know, there might be, there might be two aircraft all of Anbar province-wide. So if you're going to like...

Speaker 5 declare troops in contact so that the aircraft would be over your head and you could utilize them just in case you might need them where you're pulling them off of a you're pulling them off of a marine squad that's penned down and maybe has guys are going to bleed out and die, you know, or maybe they get overrun or maybe these soldiers that are in this horrific situation.

Speaker 5 Like you're, you're pulling assets away from them.

Speaker 5 So I think that really was, you know, that really for me was an eye-opener of like, it's not about me or my platoon or like, it's, it's, we're part of the overall team, the overall mission.

Speaker 5 And, and, uh, and, and so we got to share assets, right? We got to share resources. Like we got to actually contribute to the overall success of the mission.
Um, I think sometimes

Speaker 5 teams get focused on like what they're doing, you know, but I think Jocko really kind of pulled me aside and helping me understand that like this is

Speaker 5 not about us and how many operations we do or how many bad guys we kill or capture. This is about, you know, are U.S.
forces winning or losing? Like, are we going to be successful

Speaker 5 as a nation here? Our coalition partners are not. So I think that was one of the biggest lessons to bring back.
That's interesting.

Speaker 6 For us. I've never heard it put that way, to be honest with you.
It's always always been about the unit.

Speaker 6 I think that's what pulling assets. Let me, let me refer.
It's always been what assets can we get, not we're pulling them from these, these, these units. And

Speaker 6 unique perspective.

Speaker 5 Well, every, everybody, I mean, look, you should be trying to get as many assets as you can, right? Like, if you've got an AC-130 gunship, use that thing, right?

Speaker 5 If you've got helicopters, use that thing. If you got tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, whatever assets you can have, that's great.

Speaker 5 But I think when you start to one of the things I, the, one of the, um,

Speaker 5 this, this is my favorite thing to do with, uh, when, so it was a, when I, when I came back from that deployment from Ramadi,

Speaker 5 they, they, they sent me to the center and someone decided to put me in charge of the junior officer training course.

Speaker 5 Um, and so uh I was happy to pass on whatever lessons I had there, but we spent four weeks in the classroom and a week-long field training exercise.

Speaker 5 And the thing that I loved to do was I would play the part of like an army company commander.

Speaker 5 And I use like main gun Mike, the guy I talked about earlier, as like, this is, you know, he's got tanks, he's got assets.

Speaker 5 So, so these SEAL, you know, these junior officers, they're leading a squad, you know, on the, onto this training battlefield. They got to come up with a plan.

Speaker 5 They got to come brief me on what they're doing and what support they need from me. And so they'd come up to talk to me about their mission.
And I would just be like, hold on, what you got, man?

Speaker 5 I got some guys. We're actually activating QRF right now.
So stand by. And I would just have them like stand there

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 and just just to to realize that like hey uh these army units that you're working alongside like they

Speaker 5 that that company commander is in charge of 200 soldiers

Speaker 5 and a dozen tanks like he's got a lot of stuff going on you're not the only thing that's going on so if you're showing up there thinking it's it's all about you and and uh hey my big office that's happening um and i got to witness that with a special operations unit i was standing right there next to uh a company commander when a special operations unit rolled in the theater

Speaker 5 rolled up there, handed him like the GR, you know, the

Speaker 5 GRG and said, hey, here's what's going on. And they actually were blocking the exits to the combat outposts.

Speaker 5 And the company commander's like, hey, man,

Speaker 5 I got troops out of the field right now. You got to get your vehicles out of here.
I got to be able to use these tanks.

Speaker 5 And it was kind of a rude awakening for that special operations unit to be like, oh.

Speaker 5 There's other stuff going on around here. That was my big mission.

Speaker 5 So I think that was what I tried to train those junior officers is just to pass that on to them you know it's not that as a leader you don't try to get every asset that you can for your team but it's that you realize that it's about the overall team and the overall mission um and and so if you are hoarding assets you know or you are focused on yourself like there may be things that you're doing that could negatively impact others you know who are also trying to carry out their mission and we're all in the same together so um i think looking up and out for a leader and uh and thinking about others uh and those other units that you got to operate you know in the same battle space with is crucial.

Speaker 5 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 6 Before we move on to the rest of your career, I want to go back. And I wanted to ask you, what did you receive the Silver Star for?

Speaker 5 I received the Silver Star for that horrible situation, August 2nd, 2006. And

Speaker 5 I don't know if I've ever publicly said that before, but I asked Jacqueline not to write me up for that, man. Really? Yeah.
I was like, I don't want to reward for that.

Speaker 5 This is the worst day of my life, man. I traded for anything.

Speaker 5 Mark got killed. Ryan's wounded.

Speaker 5 i don't want to work for that man we we did the best that we could in a horrible situation i'm proud of my platoon and how they responded in the worst situation imaginable um you know to get the building clear to call in air support you know to to uh get cash evacuation all the things that they did um under the worst situation you know imaginable um but i was like i don't want to work for that and uh for whatever reason he decided to

Speaker 5 that uh that it was deserving award and he wrote me up for him so i accepted that award as a as a recognition for the my team charlie platoon and what they were able to accomplish do you feel that there's anything you could have done to prevent that

Speaker 5 i think that

Speaker 5 when you lose guys on the battlefield like that like i will rethink that for every moment of my life you know i i know you were going to say that and that's why

Speaker 6 as tough of a question as it is

Speaker 6 have you found anything you could have been different? Or is it a never, is it a never-ending thing where you will always look for what you could have done different?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think that

Speaker 5 I think that there is, you're constantly thinking, man, what if I had done this or would I have done that? Or would have done this?

Speaker 5 And that's where I think Jocko's guidance, you know, is my task at a commander and saying, like, man, we don't have a crystal ball.

Speaker 5 Like, if you'd have known that stuff was going to happen, you wouldn't have gone on that op. You'd have launched that operation, you know.

Speaker 5 And I think the tough thing for me is like, you know, is realizing like, I can't, you know, we've got the army out there that needs our help and they're in the worst situation of in, they're in the worst single engagement of like the entire Battle of Vermont that lasted for nine months.

Speaker 5 Um, you know, that killed

Speaker 5 94 guys, you know, in I think 94 guys killed in action in the 228, the National Guard unit.

Speaker 5 And I think 98 total guys killed in the Ready First Brigade Combat Team.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 of all the combat those guys saw, like this was like the worst.

Speaker 5 You know, or this was the single like hottest day of, you know, gunfire and

Speaker 5 mayhem and enemy attacks. And so I think for me, it's the recognition of like I, you know,

Speaker 5 when somebody needs your help, you know, I think you do everything you can to help them.

Speaker 5 And I try to mitigate the risk that we can control, you know, by riding in Bradley fighting vehicles so that we were behind armor and not out in the street getting shot at by snipers, by smashing through the walls, by softening up targets with 25 millimeter chain gun

Speaker 5 rounds from the Bradley fighting vehicles and

Speaker 5 main guns from the tanks, you know, before we actually enter those buildings.

Speaker 5 But there's, there's just never, it's just a burden that never goes away, you know, and I think, I think you, you just, you have to do the best you can in the, with the information that you have, you know, and I think there's, uh i would trade the trade that day for anything to do something different to bring mark back or ryan back um

Speaker 5 and it's something that will always be with me you know um i think sometimes too when you're on the on the battlefield that the

Speaker 5 if you're conducting operations like there's no

Speaker 5 the the expectation that you are going to be able to be in significant combat sustained combat over time without taking casualties,

Speaker 5 it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, I remember a question our commanding officer asked us, like, you know, with any,

Speaker 5 with any operation that you go on, you know, you should ask yourself, like, is it worth it? You know, is it worth the loss of one of your guys?

Speaker 5 And, you know, as we thought about that question, like, I can answer that question right now. No, it's not.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't trade my guys for.

Speaker 5 I wouldn't trade my guys for Osama bin Laden, you know.

Speaker 5 I wouldn't trade my guys for Zarqawi. I wouldn't trade any single one of my guys for any of these

Speaker 5 insurgent terrorist savages that were fighting.

Speaker 5 But that's not the right question to ask. And I don't think it's any different than, I don't think it's any different than a,

Speaker 5 if you had to ask a company commander at Omaha Beach, Like, would he trade one of his soldiers for Adolf Hitler?

Speaker 5 I think he'd have said no. I think he'd have said no.

Speaker 5 Of course not. Like, this is my soldier I care about.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to trade that guy's life.

Speaker 5 But they were willing to make the sacrifice because they realized that

Speaker 5 establishing a foothold in Fortress Europe was the key to being able to defeat Nazism so that we could live in freedom around, you know, across the globe and maintain our way of life.

Speaker 5 And so I think it's the same thing, right? If you're looking at,

Speaker 5 if you're looking at a mission like that,

Speaker 5 it's never going to be worth, like, you're never going to make that trade. But

Speaker 5 the trade is that you do the best you can to try to have the most impact that you can. And in the time that you have, and you got to mitigate the risks that you can control.

Speaker 5 And I think that's all you can do as a leader.

Speaker 5 And I think sometimes the lesson learned is that combat is dangerous, man. It's dangerous business.

Speaker 5 And if we don't have the will to kill, if we don't have the will to kill the enemy, and if we don't have the will to sacrifice America last, then we shouldn't be in combat in the first place.

Speaker 6 Leif, I just want you to know I don't take that question that I asked you lightly. I asked it because

Speaker 6 there's going to be people in your shoes. There have been many people in similar situations.
And, you know, just

Speaker 6 your answer alone might save somebody's life.

Speaker 5 So.

Speaker 6 Thank you.

Speaker 5 Well, I'm happy to share that, man. I think, you know, for every leader, right, we gotta, we gotta take risks.

Speaker 5 There's no combat operation without risk, right? There's no, you can't do anything in life without taking a risk,

Speaker 5 but you got to mitigate the risks that you can control, right? You don't want to run to your death, right, with your hair on fire. And

Speaker 5 I think trying to balance that dichotomy, right, of being aggressive, but not being reckless is crucial for every leader out there. And it definitely made me think, you know, deeply about that.

Speaker 5 In fact,

Speaker 5 there was a follow-on time where

Speaker 5 we had some aircraft overhead that saw like some armed insurgents like run into a building.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 after losing Mark and

Speaker 5 losing Ryan,

Speaker 5 we were going to look at alternatives to try to hit them in a different way. Instead of even if we smashed that building with tanks and blasted it, we weren't going to run into that building.

Speaker 5 We were going to make some adjustments. So I think every leader has to make, has to learn the lessons that they can,

Speaker 5 lessons that they learned. And I did a poor job, I think, of even letting my guys know of even some of the, some of the ops that we turned down.

Speaker 5 I've talked to some of the, some of the guys I served with in Charter Platoon that were like blown away that we turned down operations because we looked at it. The risk versus reward wasn't there.

Speaker 5 You know, we're like, no, we're going to focus elsewhere here. It's, that's, it's too risky.
And I think the. you know, the chances of mission success are limited.

Speaker 5 So we're not going to take the risk there. And some of them never even knew that, you know, that we were,

Speaker 5 that we were doing all we could to try to mitigate those risks, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. But you're not going into combat without taking risks.

Speaker 5 And if we're not willing to take risks, man, it's we ought to not even be there in the first place. And I think that's the kind of thing, like the idea that we can

Speaker 5 go to war without taking casualties, you know, it's just, it's, it's just not true, man. It's not true.
And, and I think that's more than anything.

Speaker 5 I wish that we had leaders who have been to war who understand that so that they can think very deeply about whether or not those risks are worth it.

Speaker 6 You know, at breakfast, we had

Speaker 6 a small discussion about, I guess there had been some controversy about the special operations mission that you guys were on, and

Speaker 6 people were saying

Speaker 6 wasn't special operations missions because you were operating and gunfighting in the daytime. And so I wanted to just give you the floor on that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there was all kinds of criticism, you know, like that. I've certainly been the victim of the armchair quarterback stuff.

Speaker 5 I mean, that's going to happen, right, when things go wrong and things go bad. Um, and I understand that.

Speaker 5 I think that's a function of people just, I think, not understanding what we were doing and why we were doing it. Um,

Speaker 5 and uh, and I think I could have done a lot better job of instead of getting angry or frustrated with people of just kind of explaining that, you know, and talking about why we did what we did and the impact that it actually had.

Speaker 5 Um, and yeah, I think uh

Speaker 5 you know

Speaker 5 casket and bruiser killed a lot of bad guys.

Speaker 5 And a lot of those were Chris Kyle, our lead cyber point man of Charter Platoon, was, you know, was the ringleader of that, like who did a tremendous amount of damage to the insurgent fighters there, disrupted dozens and dozens of attacks on soldiers and Marines and our own guys and Iraqi troops and saved a lot of lives, man, and had some huge impact.

Speaker 5 And when we were in the

Speaker 5 the squadron after action brief, you know, when everyone's standing in there, all the senior officers non-commissioned officers are in there, kind of talking about the lessons learned.

Speaker 5 Someone stood up and asked Jocko, um, hey, you guys were out in the daytime for a lot of this stuff. You know, do you think that's a special operations mission? And Jocko explained that,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 99% of the enemy fighters that we killed were during the daytime, you know, and he said, killing bad guys is a special operations mission. That's a question.
And I think this is exactly right.

Speaker 5 Like, it's, this is you know i think sometimes um

Speaker 5 as special operations units we need to be innovative and i think you can be conventionally unconventional sometimes of like oh we can only go out when it's nighttime we can only go out when we have like the you know the uh well what happens when you have a target that shows up in a marketplace in the middle of the daytime like we have we have to be able to ask for those targets right we have to be able to figure out ways to um

Speaker 5 you know to to to do things where people aren't expecting if they're expecting us to come at nighttime

Speaker 5 under cover of darkness every time. So I think our best special operations units are constantly innovating and adapting ways to do things like that.
But I looked at what we were doing in

Speaker 5 Ramadi. We were going out.
A lot of what we were doing was under cover of darkness, and that was going in at nighttime, setting up, remaining over day when the enemy was actually out,

Speaker 5 when they had freedom of movement,

Speaker 5 when they were actually running around the streets, because they knew we would dominate at nighttime and aircraft could take them out and

Speaker 5 they knew we owned the night. And then trying to patrol out under cover of darkness at nighttime.
But there was,

Speaker 5 I think that, you know, taking a fairly small group of guys, a lot of firepower, going in deep in enemy territory in a place where people couldn't get, supporting the conventional units that were then coming in, you know, in behind us en masse, I think is very closely equivalent to our forefathers from the underwater demolition teams, the naval combat demolition units, right?

Speaker 5 These were the first guys on the beach

Speaker 5 taking the risk

Speaker 5 that were hitting the beaches in landing craft like Higgins boats, naval combat demolition units or scouts and raiders.

Speaker 5 And then in the Pacific theater, the frogmen, right, the underwater demolition teams, they were out there doing the reconnaissance,

Speaker 5 opening up the way,

Speaker 5 blasting holes in the

Speaker 5 coral reefs and obstacles

Speaker 5 so that the Marines and soldiers could land. And I I think that's a lot of what we're doing.
And there was a shift in World War II where

Speaker 5 those underwater demolition teams, the UDT, went from daytime

Speaker 5 or nighttime to daytime operations.

Speaker 5 Nighttime, they were trying to do nighttime. They thought it was safer.
And they shifted to daytime because they thought, okay, well, initially they thought it was too dangerous.

Speaker 5 But they realized that when they got these little frogmen swimming around, even with the Japanese pillboxes blasting at them with mortars and artillery and machine guns, most of the time these guys wouldn't be hit.

Speaker 5 And it was only, I think there was only a handful of UDT men that were wounded or killed throughout the entirety of like daytime, like beach reconnaissance operations.

Speaker 5 So they were able to do it and mitigate the risk. And they also were far more effective in the daytime.

Speaker 5 And so I think that was what we were doing.

Speaker 5 uh in the daytime was i think very similar like to just the making that shift and then it was the opposite in vietnam you know where the in the vietnam war when when um

Speaker 5 seals

Speaker 5 you know were were going out in the daytime initially, right? You're chaining the Vietnamese frogmen and that's kind of how the mission started.

Speaker 5 And now all of a sudden we're going to start into some kinetic operations when nobody went out at nighttime because Charlie owned the night.

Speaker 5 You knew the Viet Cong were out there patrolling, setting movie traps, setting up ambushes.

Speaker 5 And I've talked to some of those Vietnam SEALs who made that transition and realized like, okay, the enemy's out at the night in the nighttime. We've got to shift to being out at night.

Speaker 5 And the conventional units thought that was crazy. They thought you were going to get a bunch of people killed.

Speaker 5 But the SEAL tees were able to have massive impact for such a small unit on the battlefields because they went out at nighttime.

Speaker 5 They went into areas that nobody else could get into, and they did a lot of damage to the bad guys. So I felt like what we were doing in Ramadi was very much in the spirit of

Speaker 5 the SEALs in Vietnam and those same underwater demolition teams in World War II.

Speaker 6 Great analogies. Great analogies.
And so

Speaker 6 you get home.

Speaker 6 Let's wrap up Taskin of Bruiser deployment. You get home, you move into this leadership course.

Speaker 6 What's the time frame here? How fast did you change it?

Speaker 5 I reported in, I think it was like February 07.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so we got back end of October 2006.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we, I mean, I basically spent a couple of months at SEAL Team 3, turned over and then went to the center.

Speaker 5 And we,

Speaker 5 and so I, I just, I took over the course.

Speaker 6 Did you want to go over there?

Speaker 5 I was ready for a very different role. I was ready for a break.
I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to see, you know, did I want to get out? I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

Speaker 5 That was a heavy deployment, man. And

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 so I wasn't seeking that role. Somebody decided that that was a good place to put me.
And

Speaker 5 what was cool about that is

Speaker 5 I loved it, man. I loved every second of it.
It was, it was awesome. And the best job in the world is being a SEAL platoon commander.
There's no better job in the world than that.

Speaker 5 The next best job, I think, was teaching that junior officer training course. It was, you know, I had some, you know, the, the, I got to see,

Speaker 5 it was, it was an amazing leadership laboratory. I got to see different officers that were coming through that training.
We had prior enlisted SEALs coming to the training. We had,

Speaker 5 you know, we had guys coming out of OCS that had been in the civilian world. And now all of a sudden they're in the Navy.
We had people coming out of RTC programs.

Speaker 5 We had people coming from the Naval Academy. We had people doing inter-service transfers from the Marines or Air Force or Army that would come to that program.

Speaker 5 Also put some special operations or some Air Force special operations officers through there and some Norwegian Marine Jaegers that came to that program as well.

Speaker 5 So I just got to see a bunch of different

Speaker 5 people, a bunch of different styles of leadership.

Speaker 5 And it really solidified for me like what works and what doesn't work because I'm putting them all in these challenging situations and seeing how they react to things and and so it really solidified like this is what works and this doesn't work and uh and so it was it was awesome to see just the um it was a it was a phenomenal learning experience for me i think if you really want to know something well you need to teach it you know i'm sure just like when you started teaching tactics you know it all of a sudden you got to people are going to ask you questions you have to be able to know things from different angles you have to be able to to think deeply about things and how you might react to certain situations and and with different variables and so um that i think really solidified my thought process and thinking about leadership.

Speaker 5 And of course, the first thing I did was bring Jocko over to give what we call the Jocko brief,

Speaker 5 you know, kind of his lessons learned and

Speaker 5 seeing that over and over again. And I got a chance to bring in Vietnam SEALs.
And

Speaker 5 one of my most favorite things was bringing in the most outstanding

Speaker 5 senior and junior enlisted SEALs that I work with and having them talk about the officers that they respected and liked and admired and the ones that they didn't and what the difference was and give their perspective.

Speaker 5 And so I think that's something as an officer, you don't often get to see that or hear that.

Speaker 6 What were the major differences?

Speaker 5 Many of the ones I talked about, humility, people that were humble, willing to listen.

Speaker 5 You know, I think

Speaker 5 there were,

Speaker 5 I think the people that wanted to try to act like they have it all figured out or have to show people that, you know, I've got something to prove.

Speaker 5 I think that number one is that that's what pisses everybody off, right? When you got somebody that's not humble, that thinks they know everything. Nobody likes that.
No one likes to know it all.

Speaker 5 It doesn't matter what you, what experience you have. We used to joke,

Speaker 5 we had an acronym for wee weeb,

Speaker 5 which was when I was in Baghdad.

Speaker 5 And then it became weir when I was in Ramadi, you know, and so like when people are like dropping these, like, well, when I was there, like, you know, when I was here, when I was this unit or that unit, you're like, look, man, that's not, you know, that's not the way to lead, right?

Speaker 5 I think asking people questions, helping people understand, you know, the truth for themselves, like I, like I mentioned before, is

Speaker 5 the way to lead.

Speaker 5 And so I think, I think that's what really rose above is people that were humble, people that were willing to listen, learn.

Speaker 5 I think, and then the fact that people were going to like look out for the team and the mission first. It's, it's amazing to me.
I remember the first time I heard the term servant leadership.

Speaker 5 And I was like,

Speaker 5 what does that mean?

Speaker 5 And the idea that like a servant leadership means that, you know,

Speaker 5 yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to look like I'm here to serve the team. I'm here to, they don't work for me.
I actually work for them. I'm here to help them.

Speaker 5 I'm here to put the team and the mission first before myself. And I thought that was kind of a crazy term the first time I heard it.
I mean, obviously, that's what good leaders do. That's great.

Speaker 5 If you're a servant leader, that's awesome. But I just thought that was weird that it was even a term for that because.

Speaker 5 It's like the worst leadership ever, right? If you're going to look out for yourself, if you're going to be one of these ticket punchers that's going to be like, hey, I'm all about me.

Speaker 5 I'm going to put my needs and my wants, you know, before the

Speaker 5 team or the mission.

Speaker 5 And I think that's, that's just, that's terrible leadership. No one wants to work for someone like that.

Speaker 5 So those are, those are things that kind of, and then obviously somebody that just puts out, somebody that's going to try hard, somebody's going to have a sense of humor, you know, somebody that's going to hold the line on things when it actually matters.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 let some things slide when it doesn't.

Speaker 6 How do you, this is a personal question about leadership. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 5 how do I, I gotta,

Speaker 6 there has to be a line

Speaker 6 between you and your guys.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 how do you keep, how do you keep,

Speaker 6 let me rephrase this.

Speaker 6 You know, it sounds like your leadership style and,

Speaker 6 you know, the conversations that we had at breakfast. And I mean, you were really fucking close with your guys.

Speaker 6 Like

Speaker 6 very, very close relationships,

Speaker 6 very personal relationships, it sounds like. And so, how do you

Speaker 6 maintain that respect as a leader

Speaker 6 at the same time as

Speaker 6 as getting so personal

Speaker 6 with your guys.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 6 as a business owner, I found that that line can be very tricky to navigate.

Speaker 5 It's extremely tricky. And that's a fantastic question, Sean.
I think this is the million-dollar question, right?

Speaker 5 As a leader, you have to be close with your troops, but you can't be so close to them that...

Speaker 5 one becomes more important than the other or more important than the overall team or the overall mission that they forget who's in charge and i think there's uh that's a real fine line because it's different for different people right i mean there's the seal teams you know i came from the fleet where it was i was gonna you know i was instinct babbin or lieutenant gig babbin you know it wasn't this like first name basis we worked with a lot of the soldiers and marines that they were like that um whereas we're on a first name basis you know uh my charter platoon i was lay lieutenant that was my you know like like yeah i'm a lieutenant but i'm laying like that that's you know everyone's on a first name basis i'm sure your your platoon was like that you know your platoons were like that as well and uh

Speaker 5 but it's so the line's a little more blurry but i think it's different for different people when you realize like

Speaker 5 hey guys we got to knock this off and like get focused on what we need to do so we can get this done um and if people aren't paying attention then you know like okay i'm a little too close okay i've uh you know i i need to I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to maybe create some degree of separation, you know, here in some way.

Speaker 5 So you gotta to be close with the team, right? I think the, you got to know your people. You got to understand what motivates them.

Speaker 5 You got to understand who they are and what they do and what their skills are and what their strengths and weaknesses are and how you can help them, like where, where they want to go in life,

Speaker 5 what you can do to like, to set them up for success. And I think that's crucial, you know, for any leader to know.
But you do have to like find that balance.

Speaker 5 And I think for me, as the O as the AOIC, right, the assistant platoon commander, you're like one of the boys and you're not quite the OIC. You're not the platoon commander in charge.

Speaker 5 That was, it's a big step up, I think, from, to go from AOIC to OIC. And all of a sudden, like you're in charge.
And

Speaker 5 I realized I probably crossed that line,

Speaker 5 you know, with particularly guys that I gone to buds with and I was, you know, or I've been in SQT with and I had very close relationships with.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we'd go out drinking and partying and hanging out. And you realize like, oh, okay, I have to.

Speaker 5 Like, there's, there's, I'm going to have to create some degree of separation here. Maybe it's, maybe I go out and, you know, spend some time with them.
Like, all right, guys, stay out of trouble.

Speaker 5 I'm, I'm, you know, I'm gonna, uh, I'm heading back. Uh, but I think, I think it's just trying to create that so that they, you're close with your troops.
You're true, you're close with the team.

Speaker 5 You understand them. You know them.
They know you. They know you care about them.

Speaker 5 And, uh, but, but you're not so close that, that one becomes

Speaker 5 you know, more important than the other or the good of the team or that they forget who's in charge. I think that's a, it's a tough balance, uh, but it's it's different for different people.

Speaker 5 So, you have to just, I think if you're aware of it, you know, one thing that John and I say with dichotomy leadership is even just the awareness that there's this dichotomy that exists and you have to find the balance is one of the most powerful tools you have as a leader because then you can start to monitor it.

Speaker 5 Hey, am I too close? Am I not close enough? You know, and then and then you can start to find balance, and you're never going to be perfectly in equilibrium.

Speaker 5 It's always kind of constantly trying to make adjustments all the time.

Speaker 6 Okay,

Speaker 6 makes makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 5 Do you,

Speaker 6 did you ever vent to your, to your guys

Speaker 6 frustrations?

Speaker 5 I was probably the chief hater red drinker in Tasking the Bruiser for the while.

Speaker 5 Just if you remember the old Dave Chappelle,

Speaker 5 the Chappelle show, the player haters ball was one of my favorite episodes.

Speaker 5 And remember, they just held up pictures of people and they would just like, they sit around and go hate, hate, and just like make fun of them. And

Speaker 5 I would just throw shade at my chain of command, you know, and talk about. I had a great relationship with Jocko.
Like, we love, we all love Jocko. Um,

Speaker 5 but you know, the next level up in the chain of command, our commanding officer and staff, they were always asking for paperwork. And, you know, look, they were good people.
I liked them, but they

Speaker 5 they would, they would pile a bunch of paperwork requirements on them. Like, I don't have time for this stuff.
We're out here trying to fight the war. I don't need to be doing that stuff, you know.

Speaker 5 And then, you know, you get questions from, you know, the siege siege of Sotif in, you know, 80 miles away.

Speaker 5 Um, and, uh, you know, the, the, the jag officers asking, you know, about, you know, the rules of engagement and just making sure that all everything was followed, you know, precisely.

Speaker 5 And, and you, you start to, uh,

Speaker 5 it's really easy to get frustrated and get emotional and push back on that. And I'm lucky that I had, you know, Jocko to

Speaker 5 to to ask me is like, hey,

Speaker 5 does it help you to not have a good relationship with your chain of command?

Speaker 5 And I was like,

Speaker 5 no, it actually doesn't. And worse than that, actually, it actually hurts my team.

Speaker 5 Because if I don't have a good relationship with my chain of command and they don't trust me, well, they're not going to approve our operations, right?

Speaker 5 They're not going to give me the resource I need.

Speaker 5 They're certainly not going to be, we're not going to be the go-to unit that they choose to go action of,

Speaker 5 you know, a target if they're going to pick one platoon out of the entire team.

Speaker 5 It's not going to be us, you know?

Speaker 5 and so

Speaker 5 you know we when i would vent sometimes uh

Speaker 5 jocko would kind of just allow that and then just ask some questions to kind of turn it back around to kind of think about like what could we do to actually lead up a channel command like what is our commanding officer and staff what do they want do they want us not to be successful they want us to win they want us to win so if they've got questions about what we're doing about how we're mitigating risk, I haven't pushed enough information up their way.

Speaker 5 If they're, if they don't understand

Speaker 5 why why this mission is important and they're questioning that mission, I need to actually push some information to them and talk to them about why we're doing this, pick up the phone and call them and talk them through it.

Speaker 5 And then the, you know, the JAG at CJ Sotaf, we were writing these like really basic, like engaged military age mail, you know, with an AK-47.

Speaker 5 And the JAG is like, well, every, you know, senior male of the household is allowed to have like one AK, you know, within their home. If you remember, they had, they were allowed to have one firearm.

Speaker 5 It was like their, their second amendment, because a lot of people didn't have access to banks. And so they had their valuables in their home.
And that was how they defended their valuables.

Speaker 5 So the JAG is like, hey, this is,

Speaker 5 is it illegal for them to have an AK? And, you know, meanwhile, I'm like,

Speaker 5 are you kidding me? This guy's shooting at us, you know, and you're questioning my decision, but I didn't write that in the report. So that's why he had some questions.

Speaker 5 And the moment that I put the hater aid down, stopped like, you know, hating on the chain in command and, and, and telling them they just need to back off and let us do our job and realize like, oh, I need to push more information to the chain.

Speaker 5 And we started to think, okay, what does a Jag?

Speaker 5 He's never sat behind a sniper rifle. He's never looked through a 22-power night force scope.
You know, he's, these, these snipers are operating with incredible discipline, man. Incredible discipline.

Speaker 5 I'm talking, you know, watching hundreds of people walk in front of their sniper scope and they're engaging enemy fighters. And we're talking about like with minimizing collateral damage in a way.

Speaker 5 Sometimes these, sometimes these savages would use like human shields, like children, like hold them in front of them and try to run across the street with their RPG, you know, and snipers like Chris and Tony and others were like able to able to drop those guys and not injure the children.

Speaker 5 I mean, amazing in a way that nobody with a machine gun is going to be able to do that. Nobody with a Bradley fighting vehicle 20 millimeter chain gun is going to be able to do that.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 I was very proud of our snipers and the discipline that they were using. And I realized that the problem was we weren't describing it in a way that that that

Speaker 5 that articulated to someone who had never been there, you know, what we were actually seeing.

Speaker 5 And the moment that we started doing that and putting that into our shooter statements, man, they were like, awesome. That's great.
Keep doing what you're doing. What support do you need from us?

Speaker 5 So, you know, I think so often we feel like we're in a hopeless situation, you know, if we're getting scrutiny from our chain of command.

Speaker 5 And if we take ownership and actually just lead up the chain, it makes all the difference.

Speaker 5 And I realized, you know, when I was venting to my guys and kind of throwing hate, you know, at the Siege of Sodaf or at our task group that was 30 miles down the road in Fallujah.

Speaker 5 All that does is just undermine my authority as well. Like that never helps you.

Speaker 5 If you're going to just throw your chain of command under the bus,

Speaker 5 that just undercuts everybody in the chain of command if you do that. It's not good leadership.
And the best thing you could do is to say, hey, listen, understand this is frustrating.

Speaker 5 Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put this paperwork together.
We're going to get this done. We're going to send it to our chain of command because they need this information.

Speaker 5 And we're going to do this so we can build a relationship with our chain of command so that they're going to support us, you know, where we need it.

Speaker 5 And so when you can talk to your chain of command about the realities of it, you don't have to just, you don't have to like just sugarcoat something that doesn't make sense, you know, like, hey, this, they're telling us to do this stuff.

Speaker 5 It's not fun. It's a bunch of extraneous work that we have to do.
We're going to have to put in a bunch of extra hours.

Speaker 5 Maybe you have to stay long, you know, stay late or stay over the weekend or whatever.

Speaker 5 You don't need to, you don't lie to the team, right? You don't say like, oh, this is great. We're going to do it.
Like they're going to see right through that.

Speaker 5 What you have to do is tell them the truth, tell them why you're going going to do that, and then help them see that you're building a relationship with the chain of command.

Speaker 5 You're, you're putting some leadership capital in the bank so that you're not pushing back on everything.

Speaker 5 So that when it, when it comes time to really push back on the things that matter, you're able to.

Speaker 6 What, how much of your decision-making process and

Speaker 6 the reason that you made certain decisions did you share with your guys, if any?

Speaker 6 Did you ever feel like,

Speaker 6 I mean, these are personal questions that I'm asking for myself

Speaker 6 as as a guy running a company. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 I feel the need to

Speaker 6 explain some of the decisions that I make to my guys.

Speaker 6 I don't necessarily know if I should be doing that.

Speaker 6 And so I'm just curious, you know, what

Speaker 6 do you do?

Speaker 5 I think it's absolutely the right call.

Speaker 5 You know, this idea of like 100% transparency, not everybody needs to know everything that you know. You know, you would spend all your time trying to communicate things to people all the time.

Speaker 5 That's that's not a good use of your time as the owner of a company. But if

Speaker 5 that's one of the biggest lessons and the most humbling lessons that I brought back with me,

Speaker 5 I wrote an entire chapter about that in extreme ownership.

Speaker 5 It's chapter 10, leading up and down the chain. So I talked about leading up the chain,

Speaker 5 but this is leading down the chain, which is I don't think you can,

Speaker 5 I I don't think you can do it enough to explain why we're doing what we're doing.

Speaker 5 Because I think when you kind of think people get it, you know, leaders will think, well, they, maybe they get it like seven out of 10.

Speaker 5 Like, no, they get it like three out of 10, maybe one out of 10, maybe zero out of 10.

Speaker 5 And your job as a leader is to connect the dots between the hard work that people are doing and the overall success of the mission. And

Speaker 5 And it's because they don't see it, right? They don't see it when they're out there in the grind, you know, every day.

Speaker 5 You got got to constantly help them see how what they do contributes to the overall success of the mission and how it's going to ultimately benefit them as well.

Speaker 5 So I don't think as a leader, you can remind people of that enough. And I mean, I planned

Speaker 5 so many major operations to go and take areas of that city back.

Speaker 5 And we were the lead element on the ground with this, you know, a thousand soldiers and Marines and all the tanks and everything we talked about.

Speaker 5 And when we got back, Jocko put this slide together. He was tasked with going and giving a brief to like the, I think it was the chief of naval operations, you know, the senior admiral in the navy.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he put the slide together and they showed the map of Vermati.

Speaker 5 It showed the red areas that were al-Qaeda battle space where when we'd arrived, we've been told, don't go there, you're all going to get killed.

Speaker 5 And then it showed these blue circles going in with these combat outposts, the U.S. outposts that went in.

Speaker 5 And then it showed like, and each one had like what our SEAL involvement was and how we supported them. And then it would have like yellow and green kind of expanding out.

Speaker 5 And you, and, and, and he put this, it was like a building slide,

Speaker 5 you know, on a Microsoft PowerPoint slide. And so the map overlay with this building slide.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 before he went to brief, just because Jacqueline's a great leader, he always was like, Hey, man, take a look at this. Tell me what you think.
Um,

Speaker 5 and he played that slide for me, and I was like, Damn, dude, like, that's what we freaking did. Like, I never put it together like that before.

Speaker 6 Wow, never.

Speaker 5 And it was,

Speaker 5 um,

Speaker 5 I planned and led every, every single, almost every single one of those operations that are the blue circles that are going in. Like we were the first boots on the ground for these, you know, support.

Speaker 5 I was intimately involved in the planning for these things. Some of them were weeks in planning, you know.
And

Speaker 5 when he saw my reaction to that, he was like, he, I had never put it all together. Cause, man, I'm coming back from Modi Pen.
We lost Mark, we lost Ryan.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm like, man, I know we made it, like, we certainly had some impact there, but did we have any lasting impact? Like, should we, should we have done what we did?

Speaker 5 Like, all these questions, right, that I'm constantly running in my head all the time. And when he put that together, I was like, that's what we did.
That's what we contributed.

Speaker 5 We, we contributed to take that city back.

Speaker 5 And, and you, you can see it in the combat outpost knowing that hundreds or maybe a thousand soldiers and Marines for each one of those blue circles are going in. Um,

Speaker 5 you know, that, that these are people that

Speaker 5 dozens of them might have not come home with their families otherwise, you know?

Speaker 5 And so when you, when you start putting putting that together, what's cool about that, Sean, is, you know, we all split up and kind of went our separate rays.

Speaker 5 And I have had the chance over the years to pull some of my guys together and show them that slide.

Speaker 6 Do you still have that slide?

Speaker 5 I do have that slide.

Speaker 6 And I'll put it up on screen. Absolutely.

Speaker 5 And it will be,

Speaker 5 it was when I show them that slide, they say the exact same thing. Damn, dude.
I had no idea that's what we did. That's cool, man.

Speaker 5 And so I think it's a reminder that like, you can't do that enough as a leader.

Speaker 5 And it's one of the most humbling lessons I learned of like, if I had just taken the time to take a step back, remind people about what they're doing, how the impact. You know,

Speaker 5 our mutual friend, Jake, you know, that we went through Buds with was a machine gunner for us. I remember him telling me,

Speaker 5 you know, he's like, man, I'm just carrying this machine. And he's carrying this 600 round loadout and his machine gun.
And we put, I mean, we put optics on those machine guns because they needed PID.

Speaker 5 They weren't using like the ACOG to shoot the gun with it. We needed a PID a target.
So, I mean, it's getting heavier, right?

Speaker 5 With all this gear you're putting on, it's probably weighs 20 pounds, you know, and you're carrying

Speaker 5 600 rounds. Each of those hundred-round boxes is what, seven and a half pounds.
They're carrying push, you got helmet, body armor, water, you know, all this stuff.

Speaker 5 They're patrolling multiple kilometers to get in, you know, some of these areas, particularly in the rural areas outside the city when we were doing some of that work.

Speaker 5 And I remember Jake coming to me and being like, dude, I'm just a security detail for Chris and the snipers, man.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I was like,

Speaker 5 man, I have just failed him as a leader.

Speaker 5 I was like, Jake, when we get attacked, which is pretty much every operation, and we have three dozen enemy fighters trying to overrun our position,

Speaker 5 we're not beating back that attack with a bolt action rifle, bro.

Speaker 5 We're beating back that attack because of you and your machine gun. And that machine gun has saved our lives over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 We could do none of this without you carrying that heavy firepower. And then we talked a little bit about,

Speaker 5 I was like, how many times have you like shot your loadout? You know, your entire loadout.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he was like, I don't even know. Like, I don't even know.
Like, he didn't even know. And it was interesting because

Speaker 5 I talked to some of the Vietnam SEALs.

Speaker 5 And.

Speaker 5 some guys that were machine gunners, including Mochi Martin, who's a phenomenal SEAL. If you remember Mochi,

Speaker 5 was just a legendary West Coast SEAL, six deployments to Vietnam.

Speaker 5 Amazing guy. And he was telling me, like, we were just talking about like how many, how many times they actually changed the belt on their machine gun, their stoner, you know, their M60.

Speaker 5 And it was like

Speaker 5 in his six deployments, he was, he told me it was just a handful of times. Like, you know, they would break contact and they would break off.

Speaker 5 And I was like, well, how many times did you guys shoot your, you know, like your entire loadout of belfed rounds you're carrying? He's like, I don't ever remember a time doing that.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, Jake and our machine gunners did that, I mean, like almost every every single operation we went on.

Speaker 5 So I think I had, I did not help him understand just how important he was for the mission and how he was contributing to the mission.

Speaker 5 We couldn't do any of this without all the work the snipers were doing and making precision shots is not possible without those belt fed machine gunners.

Speaker 5 You know, guys like Jake, guys like Mark, guys like Ryan and Mikey Montsour that were out there, you know, carrying that heavy equipment. So every leader, I think, has to do that.

Speaker 5 And then when you can put it in the middle of the moment.

Speaker 6 You're just consistently empowering your guys every chance you get.

Speaker 5 Well, I think the lesson is that I wasn't doing a good enough job of, I did not do a good enough job of taking a step back and realizing like, hey, they don't know that.

Speaker 5 And they don't know that because I'm not telling them. That's what you did.
That's the lesson I brought back is like, I got to do a better job of telling them, of letting them know what they're doing,

Speaker 5 why they're doing it, the impact they're actually having. What's the strategic impact that they're actually having?

Speaker 5 So, you know, I think when you've got people on your team that are in the grind, you know, they're head down, they're doing a thankless, you know, what seems like kind of thankless work, you know, whether it's editing videos or posting social media clips or, you know, scheduling travel for podcasts, whatever it may be.

Speaker 5 It is, um, it is absolutely imperative that you constantly remind them about how important their job is and how what they do contributes to the overall success of the mission and how that ultimately is going to benefit them, you know, down the road as your team continues to grow and expand.

Speaker 5 And I think it's every leader's job to do that.

Speaker 6 Man, Man, there's some great advice in this one. Thank you.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 6 after the, after the, the, I'm sorry, the, the, the, the, the leadership, what was the unit? What, where did you, I'm sorry, um, after the next,

Speaker 6 after your next station.

Speaker 5 So I went back.

Speaker 5 I taught that junior officer course for two years and tried to teach, you know, those junior officers everything I wish someone had taught me before I went into a tough combat situation. And

Speaker 5 then I went to uh the uh

Speaker 5 the director of training um

Speaker 5 was uh was was an awesome leader who came to me and said hey why don't you come be my operations officer over at seal team one and and um

Speaker 5 that was uh

Speaker 5 he was that was keith davids who was our uh just

Speaker 5 just uh stepped down as our naval special warfare admiral he was a phenomenal leader and was an awesome guy to work for so got a chance to um got a chance to go and serve with him as operations officer uh at Seal Team 1, did another deployment to Iraq, supported some guys in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 we sent guys to multiple locations around the world, but

Speaker 5 I was pretty frustrated on that deployment, man. Like sitting in, you know, we did a,

Speaker 5 the theme was to like, I had said for all our guys in Iraq, we were trying to embrace mediocrity and like not operate a bunch so that we could try to pull our guys and move them to Afghanistan where the fight was going pretty hot and heavy.

Speaker 5 That was 2009 and 10.

Speaker 5 And so things were kind of just ramping up for like the,

Speaker 5 you know, the Marine push down into Marja and Helman province and some of these big operations that were going on in kind of the Taliban strongholds

Speaker 5 in Helmand and Kandar province. And

Speaker 5 we didn't do a good job of embracing mediocrity because we did a ton of operations.

Speaker 5 But I don't think a single SEAL

Speaker 5 on that operation or in Iraq, we captured a bunch of bad guys and disrupted some terror cells. And guys did great work, man.
We had an awesome team.

Speaker 5 But I don't, we didn't have a single SEAL fire's weapon in anger in Iraq on that deployment. And

Speaker 5 meanwhile, it just was Marines are getting blown up all the time, you know, soldiers getting killed

Speaker 5 in Afghanistan. And it was very frustrating to me, you know, that every time we tried to say like, hey, we can send more guys to Afghanistan.
We can support

Speaker 5 the conventional units. And they're moving into these villages and Taliban stronghold areas.

Speaker 5 We can do what Taskina Bruiser did for the, you know, for the Army and Marines in the urban environment um just it from the high ground you know on the race lots with with seal snipers and we would constantly get told like no demands to go for more seals what changed

Speaker 5 i think it was the force cap

Speaker 5 um you know president obama approved like the surge the surge numbers there um and i think there was just a i think there was some there was a force cap limitations hey well we'll surge forces there but we're only going to serve x number of forces so people are tracking everybody that's there

Speaker 5 and frankly i don't know that there was a lot of appetite in our senior,

Speaker 5 in our senior leaders.

Speaker 5 I think there was more of a, there was kind of a,

Speaker 5 an argument going on that we should be more on the kind of the find fix and let the kind of host nation forces do the finish piece.

Speaker 6 You know, it was a really interesting time. I mean,

Speaker 6 I had no idea you were, you were sending guys down to Marja.

Speaker 6 in Helmand at the time and I was down there, contracted for the agency. We had a safe house, get hit.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I remember the

Speaker 6 it was supposed to be the biggest offensive, the second biggest offensive force of the entire global war on terrorism since Fallujah.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they had amassed a ton of Marines down there to do this push. And then I remember when the ROEs came out for the military that they were, somebody could shoot at you and drop their weapon and you

Speaker 6 you could not engage them

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 you know i just i remember hearing that and and thinking like

Speaker 6 holy shit you just chop the fucking legs out from every

Speaker 6 marine

Speaker 6 down here that you want to conduct this massive offensive force with

Speaker 6 and it was just

Speaker 6 it was it was mind-blowing to me like talk about demoralizing your fucking people.

Speaker 5 I can only imagine, Sean, there's, there's no way you can win, right? It's what I talked about before, right?

Speaker 5 If you're going to go to war, man, you got to have the will to kill the enemy and you got to have the will to die. And, and I mean, there's, this is what it takes to win.
And I think the,

Speaker 5 you know, my frustration was that we didn't, we couldn't, we couldn't get hardly anybody involved in it.

Speaker 5 So, you know, we had one troop that was working out of Kondahar at the time and they kind of got split up

Speaker 5 and tasked to some different provinces. And we had some guys that did did some great work there, man, and

Speaker 5 made a difference. You know, it made an impact for sure.

Speaker 5 They did awesome, awesome work, did a bunch of combat operations and killed a bunch of bad guys and opened up some areas that the Taliban had kind of controlled before and

Speaker 5 enabled freedom of movement for U.S. forces and kind of pushed the white space back around some of those bases where they kind of

Speaker 5 kept people in where they're attacked the moment they get off of base. But we couldn't get more people there.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we only had a handful of guys that supported some of the Marines pushing into those areas.

Speaker 5 And the whole time, like, you know, the, there was just a pushback with the Naval Special Warfare. And, and, um, I just felt like

Speaker 5 to me, that was probably the, the number one driver, you know, our, our friend Elliot, that, um, a month after we left for Mahdi got blown up, um, coming out of a sniper overwatch position.

Speaker 5 He'd been wounded. The, uh,

Speaker 5 one of the insurgents had crept up near his position and literally like rolled a grenade through a loophole. So he's sitting there on a sniper weapon and they push a grenade through the loophole.

Speaker 5 They like snuck up, like somehow jump from rooftop to rooftop, push the grenade, grenade goes off, wounds him in the arm.

Speaker 5 So as he's getting Kazavaked, you know, they called in the Bradley fighting vehicles and as they're getting Kazavak, they clacked off a big ID on him. And

Speaker 5 I think it like ripped an Iraqi soldier in half in front of him and blew him up, you know, really bad. He lost a leg.

Speaker 5 I think there were white phosphorus shells, Willie Pete shells. So like

Speaker 5 horrible burns on his body. And

Speaker 5 yeah, man, he just was like,

Speaker 5 man, Ellie's just as good a dude as there is, you know, just an awesome, awesome team guy. And we'd serve together till team five and been to Buzz together, served together till team five.

Speaker 5 Then I turned over with him. I remember

Speaker 5 seeing him and my close friends that were now relieving me, you know, as we went home.

Speaker 5 And I remember seeing him in the turret of a 50-cal, man of the 50-cal in a turret of a humvey about to make the push across down that horribly dangerous road, Route Michigan, that was the most heavily ID road in all of Iraq.

Speaker 5 And he was like all smiles, like fired up, you know, and I was just, man, just, just said prayers to, you know, protect these guys and look out for them. I knew what they were up against, you know.

Speaker 5 And I think it was November 19th, like he, he got injured. And one of the other SEALs got injured, like, like,

Speaker 5 thought he lost both his legs, like just, you know, was like blasted on his back.

Speaker 5 And then I lifted his legs up in the air, but his like his tib fib is like like he's got double compound fracture so like all he sees is like his stumps and he lifts his legs up they're like hanging down so I thought he lost his legs and that guy thank God ended up recovering and had you know these titanium inserts in his legs look amazing amazing guy um but Elliot was in was in real bad shape man and uh

Speaker 5 I uh so I spent a bunch of time with him uh when he came back to the States

Speaker 5 and he went to

Speaker 5 Brook Army Medical Center which is the primary burn care facility

Speaker 5 center for the

Speaker 5 military. And just seeing some of the guys who were in the ICU there and coming out of Iraq at the time was

Speaker 5 a horrific, horrific thing, man.

Speaker 5 Just knowing like, you know, you see these soldiers, Marines with like their faces burned off and no fingers and like no ears and noses and lips and stuff gone.

Speaker 5 And just, and many of them still are like, you know, they're, they're making the best of it, man. You know,

Speaker 5 they're happy to be alive and they're, they're continue on their lives and and it was

Speaker 5 it was man those those guys were just just heroes man just heroes just awesome uh their their attitude on life and uh but it made me wish that we'd put a lot more of those insurgents in the dirt than we did and we did everything we could um but then when i you know as i was serving i would go over and elliott then went to uh

Speaker 5 He then went to Balboa Naval Hospital. And so I was going up there and visiting with him.

Speaker 5 And I'd see a bunch of of those Marines that were coming in, coming in from Hellman Province and Conroe Province and places like Sangin and, you know,

Speaker 5 Marja and, you know,

Speaker 5 legs gone, arms gone, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And to me, it was, I think that was kind of the final straw for me of like, man, this is, we can help these guys. And,

Speaker 5 you know, we're not being allowed to do it for political reasons, whatever those are, whoever's responsible, you know. And,

Speaker 5 you know, I felt like it was,

Speaker 5 that was, that was probably the final straw for me of like, you know, I think it's time for me to probably get out. Yeah.
Do something different.

Speaker 6 How was it getting out for you?

Speaker 5 A lot of people were struggling with that. Hard.
Like I never wanted to do anything else, you know.

Speaker 6 And did you met your wife yet?

Speaker 5 I did. I met her.
She put up with a final deployment for me. We were dating.

Speaker 6 So she, so you married her in service?

Speaker 5 Well, we didn't get married until right as I left. Okay.
So

Speaker 5 we

Speaker 5 got engaged right as I got back from my last deployment. So I was like, you know, we're going to put it to the test, see how she does to the deployment.

Speaker 5 But we had met at the SEAL Warrior Fund event, you know, which is the

Speaker 5 big fundraiser for the SEAL teams in New York City

Speaker 5 in October 2008. So the financial world had just melted down.
And yet we still had some very patriotic Americans there giving money to support SEALs and their families.

Speaker 5 It was,

Speaker 5 it was, it was, Elliot was there for that. Ryan Joe was the speaker for that.
In In fact, I don't think I would even have spoken. I don't think I would have attended if Ryan Job called me and said,

Speaker 5 dude,

Speaker 5 if you're not going to this, we're never talking again.

Speaker 5 So he was the speaker. He gave an amazing speech,

Speaker 5 you know, and they handed him the speech like the night before. And he's like, hey, knuckleheads, I can't read.
I'm blind. Someone's going to have to read this to me.

Speaker 5 So you're going to have to, you know, give me the speech. But he, yeah, he, he gave a fantastic speech, man.
And we were all there because

Speaker 5 the Montsor family had wanted Mikey's teammates to be there.

Speaker 5 Mike had received the Medal of Honor for jumping on a grenade to save his two teammates on either side of him and

Speaker 5 our teammate and Delta Platoon.

Speaker 5 And so the Montsora family had

Speaker 5 asked that Mikey's teammates be there. They flew a bunch of us out there.
And

Speaker 5 it was amazing. I sat right next to Mike's mom, Sally, who's

Speaker 5 as I met Jenna for the first time, at this pretty red-haired girl. I was like, what's her deal? I I want to get to know her better.
And, uh, I told her that we had, you know, she worked at Fox News.

Speaker 5 I told her that Fox was on

Speaker 5 our tactical operations center. She's like, well, if you guys want, come by, I'll give you a tour.
And so we, I brought me, Seth Stone, and another one of his guys

Speaker 5 by who were like the biggest, like, want to be lady killers ever.

Speaker 5 And they were just spitting game at everybody from the, the, you know, the, the, the interns to the, you know, to the, um, to the anchors and,

Speaker 5 and, and Jenna, who's just put them up, just put everybody in her place, like didn't take any of that stuff from anybody.

Speaker 5 And then I took her out that night, like I talked her into coming and meeting us for a drink. And I took her to meet Elliott.
She met Elliot and

Speaker 5 was instantly loved Elliot and

Speaker 5 was fast friends with him.

Speaker 5 And so the

Speaker 5 rest was kind of history there, man. But that was, that was another contributing factor for me certainly to get out.

Speaker 5 I mean, I had, you know, we had been dating two and a half years on the opposite sides of the country. I was stationed in San Diego.
She was in New York City.

Speaker 5 Closest the Navy was going to get me was the Pentagon. I had zero interest in being a staff officer at the Pentagon.

Speaker 5 And so I was like, it's time for me to move on.

Speaker 6 What was it about her that got you?

Speaker 5 Man, she's beautiful. She's smart and she's got an amazing heart.
And

Speaker 5 she asked me

Speaker 5 within like

Speaker 5 two minutes, three minutes, like she probably learned more about the SEAL SEAL teams than anybody. Like, you know, people might like, oh, you're a SEAL.
Like, oh, that's, that's cool.

Speaker 5 Like, oh, that's really neat. Or, oh, I'm so annoyed.
You know, like people, you know, that, that, uh, might say something like that. But she was asked, she was like, how do you guys train exactly?

Speaker 5 You know, how often do you deploy? And, and where, you know, what is, what's, what's the training like? And, you know, how are you organized? Like, she asked all these just like interesting questions.

Speaker 5 Um, and uh, and I was like, I'm definitely want to get to know her better. And

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 yeah, man.

Speaker 5 I just, I knew right away, I texted, I texted somebody when I was leaving New York City of like, I just, I just, I just met the future Mrs. Babbin.

Speaker 5 Girls in the phone book, yeah.

Speaker 6 Right on, man. How long have you guys been married now?

Speaker 5 13 years.

Speaker 6 13 years? Congratulations. What is

Speaker 6 the secret to a successful marriage?

Speaker 5 Man, the secret to successful marriage is extreme ownership. It's extreme ownership, man.

Speaker 5 Because it's also, it's the most important place that you can apply these leadership concepts we've been talking about.

Speaker 5 It's also the hardest because you're so emotionally tied to someone, you know, and your ego is evolved.

Speaker 5 And like, and I could tell you that when I start pointing fingers and casting blame and making excuses, my wife reminds me that I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership and I should start taking some.

Speaker 5 So she definitely puts me in my place.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, Jack, but all the things that like any team needs to be successful, right? Cover and move.

Speaker 5 We talked about is like this is, we got to cover and move for each other on the home front with the kids, with work, like around the house, you know, whatever it is.

Speaker 5 We got to be able to cover and move for each other. We got to communicate in a manner that's simple, clear, concise.
It's not that, hey, I, you know, she asked me to do something.

Speaker 5 I need to give you some read back to make sure that I understand, you know, what it is that I need to do.

Speaker 5 I need to ask for some clarification.

Speaker 5 I need to make sure that, you know, just because I asked her to do something, she'll put something out in the morning, like, okay, this kid, the kids need to be here, here, and here, you know, and then she thinks that like, that doesn't all process in my brain, right?

Speaker 5 I got to write it down. I have to reference it.

Speaker 5 So prioritize and ask you. There's going to be a billion things going on at the same time, you know, for the family.
We got to be able to pivot and be flexible and shift to emerging priorities

Speaker 5 and stay detached, particularly from our emotions when somebody's like, you know, had enough, like the kids, you're kind of, you know, they got you at wits end and you're frustrated to be like hey babe i i got the kids i got this i'm gonna take them out for a little bit you know just i don't need to ask what she needs me to do i don't need to ask her where she needs me to help i can just step in you know and then decentralize come in i think if we all kind of understand

Speaker 5 we understand like what's the goal what's the goal we're trying to do um and i think when we do that that uh that enables us to to to we can all work together toward that goal you know she may she may do something that's slightly different than i might have wanted it done or i might have not thought about it doing it in that way.

Speaker 5 But if it gets us toward the goal that we're trying to accomplish, if it helps us to raise, you know, some

Speaker 5 patriotic, God-fearing, competent,

Speaker 5 kind-hearted children, you know, that are going to be good members of contributing members to their society and community.

Speaker 5 That's what we want, man. That's what we're trying to do.
So

Speaker 5 I think. letting some things go.

Speaker 5 Sometimes you're like, you do these little pet peeves, you know?

Speaker 5 I think that's the most important thing of of like, okay, if she's doing something that's annoying me, it's not her fault. It's actually my fault.

Speaker 2 It's my fault.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's, I need to, I need to figure out a way to like take ownership of that and like fix that.

Speaker 6 Great advice.

Speaker 5 I think that's, I think that's the key.

Speaker 6 Let's move into your transition into civilian life.

Speaker 5 How

Speaker 5 was that for you?

Speaker 6 Did you find it? I mean, you know, there's no secret.

Speaker 6 There's a suicide epidemic going on in the veteran community, a a lot of addiction, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of drugs, a lot of womanizing, a lot of,

Speaker 6 I mean, it's just, it's, it's really a nasty time in a lot of our lives. And I'm wondering if you experienced any of that.

Speaker 6 A lot of depression, a lot of resentment, a lot of anxiety.

Speaker 5 Certainly, I think I experienced some depression, anxiety.

Speaker 5 I think when all of a sudden

Speaker 5 the thing that I had always wanted to do in my life is like now behind me, you know, and now what? You know,

Speaker 5 and I think

Speaker 5 that's a freaking hard thing, man, you know, to do for anybody.

Speaker 6 Do you feel like you wrapped a lot of your identity into being a SEAL?

Speaker 5 I don't know if I wrapped my identity into being a SEAL. I loved it.
I mean, I just, I just thought it was the best job in the world, you know?

Speaker 5 And even though it's, look, it's not this, it's not without frustrations, right?

Speaker 5 It's not that it's as I, as I got further up the chain of command in the seal teams you get further away from the guys you like to be around and the the job that you like to do so i mean i just an example that i was at the the i was at the special operations task uh task force like headquarters and we were in ramadi um just down the street from camp markley we'd named the shark base camp markley and then uh and and so the what had been a former kind of uh intel base was was uh was named after mike monsoor so i was at camp mike monsoor working out of there and man, there was,

Speaker 5 you know, I think we had 180 people at the at the Special Operations Task Force headquarters. And I think there were like six SEALs there.

Speaker 5 You know, so it was, and we were great people there, all performing an important function.

Speaker 5 But it was, you're just getting further away from the guys you like to be around and the things you actually like to do. So

Speaker 5 I think, you know, when you, you, you're completely removed from that, right? When you get out. And so then it's like, okay, now what?

Speaker 5 And I was going to do, like a lot of people do, just go back to school because it's kind of a transition and you know there was you can get paid you get a you get money through the post 9-11 gi bill and so i was going to kind of follow that path and for whatever crazy reason i decided i was going to go to law school and i had some people help me out because my grades were atrocious in college but pull some strings and like get me into law school and like you know uh i was accepted to fordham law school in new york city um

Speaker 5 and uh And so it was just right down the road from where my wife was living at the time. And

Speaker 5 so we just got married. And

Speaker 5 man, I started this like two-week kind of academic enrichment program, they called it, which was like the, for the people that had been out of school like me or didn't make good grades like me. And

Speaker 5 so they,

Speaker 5 as I started it, I just realized like, man, I had zero in common with the other students in the class.

Speaker 5 And as we started to study law cases and things like that, I'm like, I don't think this is what I want to do.

Speaker 5 You know, and this is a three-year program. I have to spend three years doing this.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 And then Extortion 17 happened, you know, and,

Speaker 5 you know, the largest loss of life in a single incident in the history of the SEAL teams. Helicopter shot down.

Speaker 5 Brian Bill, you know, Derek Benson, both in our buds class, awesome dudes, you know, both lost on that. I knew another handful of guys that were on that too, as I'm sure you did.
And

Speaker 5 Brian Bill had just been at my wedding a month before that. You know, it was just crushing, man.
It It was crushing. And

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I mean, he actually like finagled the deal. He stayed to like go to like a jump master school so that he could like stay late, go to the wedding.

Speaker 5 And then he like flew, you know, flew overseas to, you know, to meet his, meet his unit. And,

Speaker 5 you know, it was just horrible, man. And it was just a reminder of something that you and I both know, right? Which is life is too short, man.
You can't waste a day of it, man.

Speaker 5 You can't waste a day of it. So I immediately deferred law school.
I was like, I'm not going to spend three years going to school.

Speaker 5 And so then it was like, well, now what I do. So I go into deferred law school.
I'm like, I don't have a job. I'm not employed.
I don't know what I want to do.

Speaker 5 You know, I had people offer me some positions in like the finance sector. And I went in and like, saw what they were doing, you know, the traders.

Speaker 5 And, and I was like, I don't care how much money they make. Like, I,

Speaker 5 I would rather, I would rather uh shear my testicles off with a rest of these poor cane scissors than sit here in front of this like you know training like it just wasn't what i wanted to do you know and uh

Speaker 5 it was um

Speaker 5 and so

Speaker 5 we went out to this little place down the way had some good margaritas and and i was sitting there with my my wife jenna and and she says well what what are you gonna do now you know i was like i have no idea she said well what is it you love to do like what are you passionate about and um I said

Speaker 5 SEAL platoon commander is the best job in the world. Like that was the favorite job of the entire world.
I'd do that over again in a second if I could, but I can't.

Speaker 5 And even if I, even if I could do it, I wouldn't be deployed to Romani. You know, like there's no, there's no,

Speaker 5 I can't go back and relive that again. But as she kind of asked me that question, I thought about it.
I was like, the next best thing was teaching leadership to those junior officers.

Speaker 5 That two years that I spent training those junior officers, putting 130-something SEAL officers through training and trying to pass on all the lessons I wish someone had taught me.

Speaker 5 Like it was incredibly rewarding to see those guys grow as leaders, take on that, you know, the lessons that we learned and apply it, get better.

Speaker 5 And then I see them go forward, go, you know, places that I didn't deploy or didn't have any combat experience with, like Afghanistan, they would come home and say, this, this was game changer.

Speaker 5 Thank you for teaching us. Hey, you taught me this leadership concept.
I applied that. It made a huge difference.
You know, we focus on building these relationships. It, you know,

Speaker 5 opened up all kinds of opportunities for us.

Speaker 6 These guys all kept in touch with you.

Speaker 5 A bunch of them did. A bunch of them did.
Yeah. You know, I've lost touch with some of them, but it was awesome, man.
It was so rewarding to see that. And

Speaker 5 to know the lesson that we learned and that we paid such a heavy price for, you know, tasking a bruiser were being passed on. And

Speaker 5 so when I said that, my wife said, call Jocko, start a company. So I did.
And we launched a company that became Echelon Front.

Speaker 6 How'd the conversation go?

Speaker 5 Let's Jocko.

Speaker 5 Let's start a company. He He just said, let's

Speaker 5 start a leadership company. He said, Roger, that let's do it.

Speaker 6 Well, what was he doing at the time?

Speaker 5 He was working for a mortgage company and teaching leadership for that mortgage company and kind of helping them kind of in their process.

Speaker 5 And they kind of, they basically like carved out like a, you know, I think they made it.

Speaker 6 Jacobo Willink was working at a mortgage company.

Speaker 6 Interesting.

Speaker 5 He learned a ton about leadership, right? And how it applied to the business world. It's all the problems that they were having, you know, from the inside.

Speaker 5 And so from that, he taught me a ton about what he learned, you know, from there. I thought Echelon Front was my idea, Sean, for about a year and a half.

Speaker 5 And then I realized that just like this is Jocko's way, like about,

Speaker 5 about, Jocko retired in October 2010. So about a year before I left active duty.
And

Speaker 5 he was, I went over and was like cleaning out his cage. I did.

Speaker 5 I was like, I was like, man, it's a, you know, it's a sad, it's going to be a sad day in the Jocko Le SEAL teams here, you know, when you get out. And he said,

Speaker 5 I forgot about this conversation. We had a conversation and he was standing in his office at training detachment, you know, and he said,

Speaker 5 he said,

Speaker 5 what would it take to bring you on board to start like a leadership consulting business?

Speaker 5 And I threw out some number that I thought was like gargantuan, right? It was like barely, you know, barely six figures. You know, it just seemed like

Speaker 5 it seemed like the most gargantuan number in the world compared to my like Navy paycheck. And

Speaker 5 so he had planted that seed like probably a year and a half before we had that conversation.

Speaker 5 And I forgot about it for a long time.

Speaker 5 And that's kind of Jocko's way to write that indirect approach of like planting the seed.

Speaker 5 He wasn't like, hey, remember when I said that? Like he doesn't care who gets the credit. Like this is this is what good leadership looks like.

Speaker 6 That's cool, man. And so how did it develop?

Speaker 5 It developed the very first year I made less than half my Navy paycheck. And I was like, this thing is never going to pay the bills.
And thank God, my wife had a great job.

Speaker 6 What was the original plan?

Speaker 6 What were you guys doing at the very beginning?

Speaker 5 The plan was to teach leadership.

Speaker 5 The plan was to teach leadership the same leadership concepts that I taught in that junior officer training course, the same leadership concepts that he taught when he was running training detachment.

Speaker 5 To who?

Speaker 6 To companies?

Speaker 5 To anybody that wanted to talk about leadership.

Speaker 5 Just to back up a little bit, the first epiphany that I recognized that leadership applies everywhere.

Speaker 5 There was a company that did an off-site to San Diego, big corporation, kind of in rapid growth mode. And they had had like a, so they had a leadership off-site San Diego.

Speaker 5 And somehow they got connected to someone at the SEAL team, like one of, one of the junior officers that I put through training, and he was one of my,

Speaker 5 he was one of my,

Speaker 5 he'd been an assistant platoon commander, then it was a platoon commander. And, and, and he said, hey, this company is going to come by.

Speaker 5 Um, there was a retired, his, I think it it'd been his former, like,

Speaker 5 his, the, the CEO, because he was a lateral transfer from the surface fleet like me.

Speaker 5 So he'd been on a Navy ship and the commanding officer of that ship had retired and was running this kind of leadership consulting business.

Speaker 5 And so he was bringing this team of, I don't know, 10 or 12 executives by.

Speaker 5 And so he's like, hey, will you come and talk to them about the stuff that you taught us in the junior officer training course? And I was like, well, how long is that going to be?

Speaker 5 He's like, I don't know, man, 20 minutes, whatever, you know, something like that. Just short.
Just, you know, put out some, share a thought, answer a question or two, you know, that's about it.

Speaker 5 And so we went in there and

Speaker 5 I talked a little bit about,

Speaker 5 I talked a little bit about leadership and like what we were trying to teach these, you know, the, the, I mean, even just like putting the team and the mission first, right?

Speaker 5 It's not about you sharing resources across the entire organization. They just started firing questions.
And we were in there for an hour and a half of just non-stop, like questions being fired. And

Speaker 5 I didn't know anything but the military. I mean, like you,

Speaker 5 I went to the Naval Academy out of high school. And so I was 18 years old.
I never knew anything about the civilian world other than part-time jobs that I worked in high school. But

Speaker 5 it was the first epiphany for me of like, hey, everything that we learned here applies. And the world needs this.
The world needs leadership. Leadership is the solution to people's problems.

Speaker 5 They don't know that. They don't know it.
And what we understood is that leadership is a skill. It's a skill that we're not born with.
It's a skill that we have to learn. And

Speaker 5 you're not, just like you don't know how to play the piano when you're born or drive a car or,

Speaker 5 you know, shoot a basketball or wrestle or whatever it is. Like you have to learn that stuff.

Speaker 5 You might have some innate abilities that give you an advantage over others, you know, that may give you a leg up on others. But if you're not willing to learn the skill, you're not going to improve.

Speaker 5 You're not going to get better. And I think leadership is exactly the same way.
And I witnessed that over and over again when I was teaching that course because I saw

Speaker 5 leaders who might have what you might think are a lot of

Speaker 5 innate leadership qualities that would be important, right? Like they were charismatic.

Speaker 5 They could, you know, they weren't nervous to stand up in front of a room and present an idea or talk to their team.

Speaker 5 And then you had other leaders that were super introverted, like didn't want to, you know, like were terrified to stand up in front of a group and present an idea.

Speaker 5 And of course, I made them do that all the time, you know, to try to get them used to that.

Speaker 5 But what I realized is that even people that you might have think have all this advantage with these innate qualities of charisma or, you know, they're kind of a,

Speaker 5 you know, loud, you know, person that kind of people gravitate toward or they can engage with people. And

Speaker 5 if that person wasn't willing to learn, if that person wasn't willing to humble themselves and get better and apply, you know, and take ownership of mistakes they made and apply the skill of leadership going forward to improve, like they didn't get better.

Speaker 5 They struggled. And some of them actually got fired and maybe even had their birds pulled and left the teams as a result.

Speaker 5 And yet I watched leaders who

Speaker 5 were terrified to stand up in front of a group, like super introverted, like the quiet spoken, kind of soft spoken types, maybe didn't have any of the, what you might define as an innate quality that might give people an advantage in leadership.

Speaker 5 And they did awesome. I mean, they were phenomenal.
As long as they they were willing to learn, they were willing to improve and they were willing to get better all the time.

Speaker 5 And I'd see those guys go,

Speaker 5 some guys who struggled in the field training exercise portion of that, that

Speaker 5 course that I ran. And

Speaker 5 I would see them get better and then and watch them go out on the battlefield and do amazing things, man, and have their guys talk about what an extraordinary leader they were and how they made, you know, just how they saved lives or, you know, were able to build relationships or vector resources.

Speaker 5 I mean, just incredible stuff. And

Speaker 5 so that to me, it was the recognition of like every everything that we learned applies, you know, to people in the corporate world, in the business world.

Speaker 5 We work with people in the nonprofit sector, in the education space, you know, first responders. We do a ton of work with first responders.

Speaker 5 And anywhere that people want to talk about leadership, I think we, we take the lessons that we learn and we talk about how it can apply.

Speaker 5 And I think we totaled it up last year, at the end of the last year, we've worked with something like 1,600 companies and organizations over the last

Speaker 5 1,600?

Speaker 6 No. Wow.
How many of those? You know, we talked about a lot of the

Speaker 6 SEALs that went through the leadership course with you. You'd heard from, you know, after later on in their career about what worked.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 do you get a lot of that in the civilian world as well?

Speaker 5 We do. We definitely do.
And it's super rewarding, man. It's our why, right? It's sometimes when you're in the grind and you're traveling and you're gone from home a lot.

Speaker 5 And I'm always thankful for the opportunities that we have. You know, it's amazing to see.
I mean, even after, you know, we're pushing

Speaker 5 this month marks the

Speaker 5 ninth anniversary of the publication of Extreme Ownership.

Speaker 5 And the following book, Dakami Leadership that was published in 2018 has now been

Speaker 5 re-released. But there's still people driving the sales of that book through word of mouth.

Speaker 5 People are.

Speaker 5 reading it, buying five copies for their team, buying it for their, you know, their kids, buying it for their family members.

Speaker 5 And that kind of word of mouth of like, hey, this has been impactful.

Speaker 5 And it's been amazing to see that, that, and when people come back to us and tell us that, you know, extreme ownership saved their marriage, you know, when they were blaming their wife for all their problems and, you know, the wife blaming their husband for all their problems or, you know, having issues with their kids and, and, um, or they're.

Speaker 5 were frustrated at work that they were in a hopeless situation and didn't feel like they had any influence on the organization, didn't think that their leaders cared about them.

Speaker 5 And, and they were able to start to take ownership of those problems and lead up with chain of command.

Speaker 5 It's amazing to see. It's amazing to see

Speaker 5 the impact that has. And it's just humbling and mystifying to me, man, to see how

Speaker 5 those lessons continue to be applied. And I just, it's, it's, I'm blown away by it over and over and over again and about how people are taking and utilizing this.

Speaker 5 And it's, it's not me that's doing it. It's not Jocko's doing it.
We just shared some lessons learned that they actually have to apply it. That's the hard part.

Speaker 5 You know, I can share some concept with you that can, then, that can help you,

Speaker 5 but it's, it's up to you to actually put put your own ego in check have an honest assessment with yourself and actually you know implement a solution to get problem solved going forward and i think you know for us probably the best thing that we do is just help people realize what winning looks like what does winning look like you know is is it what does winning look like for you um

Speaker 5 and when you start to think about that from a detached perspective

Speaker 5 It's not about how much money you make, right?

Speaker 5 It's not about proving that you're right.

Speaker 5 You know, if you're in a conflict with someone, it's actually about

Speaker 5 building the strongest relationships that you can, you know, with people and having the most impact in the world that you can and spending time with the people that you love and care about most, you know, that that's most important.

Speaker 5 And so I think when we can get people attached from their emotions, kind of put their ego in check.

Speaker 5 And like if you and I have a conflict at a company and we're, let's say we're fighting over resources and we're two department heads. I want those resources.
You want the resources. You know,

Speaker 5 I'm in there like lobbying to have the resources taken away from you.

Speaker 5 You know, or some case that may be so, it may be, we'll see conflicts that get created so bad that we might have to only, we can only communicate with through like mediated email by HR.

Speaker 5 This is what happens. Wow.
You know, with human conflicts, and you're like, wow. It's crazy.

Speaker 5 When you can help someone say like, hey,

Speaker 5 is it important? Is that other department important for like what you're trying to do in your department?

Speaker 5 Like, yeah, it is. Okay.

Speaker 5 Do you think it's important that you have a good relationship with the the leader of that department like

Speaker 5 yeah it probably is you know and so like when you when you can't communicate with someone except through mediated email by hr does that do you think that makes you look what does that look like to everybody else as a leader you know when you can when you can help them start to reveal the truth what's the chairman of the board thinking about what's the ceo what's the senior executive team thinking about you like how's that

Speaker 5 Do you think you're ever going to get a chance to be promoted up the chain?

Speaker 5 You know, if you can't actually get along with people and work alongside and build build a friendly coalition so you guys can actually cover and move for each other mutually support one another so that the team can win and when you get people to start to think about leadership like that and they realize like oh you know they're looking at this little tactical victory of like i'm trying to get the best of this person you know that i'm going to demand that that i get the resources from them and that's what winning looks like and it's really the opposite right what if i care about the team like

Speaker 5 I should be in there lobbying for you to get the resources. Like, hey, you know what?

Speaker 5 Sean, we got some limited resources here your team needs these resources more than my i i think my team could probably do without until we can get you know more resource available i'm going to give these resources to you we're going to build an awesome relationship man i'm going to help the team win that's i'm i'm showing everybody i put the team and the mission before myself or my team and our own interests and uh and it's like this is what it takes right to to if i want to be a winning a member of a high performance winning team like that's the attitude i gotta have and and when you when you start to just get people to see like what winning actually looks like,

Speaker 5 it's, it's often very different than,

Speaker 5 you know, you got to, if you can put your emotions in temp, put your ego in check, it just, you, you free your mind.

Speaker 6 Man.

Speaker 6 You know, this

Speaker 6 sounds like a lot more of a, uh, a lot more than just a leadership training course. Sounds like a, a, a way of life.

Speaker 6 And, uh, that can help you with all aspects, you know, what you're going through with your family, with your business, wherever, wherever, in the military, doesn't matter.

Speaker 6 Sounds like these aspects apply to, to every,

Speaker 6 every aspect of life. And

Speaker 6 that's really cool that you guys put that together.

Speaker 5 I appreciate it, man. It's honored to be able to share that.
And

Speaker 5 it's,

Speaker 5 it's, it's, it's, like I said, it's humbling.

Speaker 5 It's humbly to see how many people have taken and utilized that, you know, but if I can help even one person out there in some way to not make the mistakes that I've made as a knucklehead leader, to not lead with ego or try to prove that I know all the answers.

Speaker 5 I think that to me makes all the difference

Speaker 5 of the

Speaker 5 it's in life, right?

Speaker 5 It's be humble or get humble. That's the way it is.
So

Speaker 5 happy to pass those lessons on.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Well, Leif,

Speaker 6 you know, we're wrapping up the interview now, and I just

Speaker 6 I just want to say,

Speaker 6 you know, it really was, man. It was, it was great to reconnect, and

Speaker 6 but it was a real honor to to have you here, to share what you shared with about everything, man, especially, you know, the

Speaker 6 your darkest day. I mean, I really commend you for how you handled that and

Speaker 6 how you described

Speaker 6 the guys that have passed.

Speaker 6 Man,

Speaker 6 you're just a hell of a guy, Lath, and a true leader. And I appreciate you.

Speaker 5 I wish I was better, Sean. I wish I was better, man.
And I think

Speaker 5 I'm just on the path, you know, trying to learn from my mistakes like everybody else. And I hope that people can take those mistakes and learn from and apply going forward.

Speaker 5 It's an honor to be here with you, brother. I can't, I'm so proud of.

Speaker 5 all that you're doing in the world, man. You got such an important voice on so many topics that, you know, other people aren't willing to tackle or take on.
And I couldn't, I couldn't be more.

Speaker 5 You know, we were joking earlier before we started this. I've never guessed when we were working together in buds with 18-year-old Sean that

Speaker 5 you would have the wardrobe with so many

Speaker 5 sport coats out there to put on. But it's awesome, man.
And so proud of you. Love, love what you're doing.
Keep doing it, man. You're making a huge difference to the world.

Speaker 6 Thank you, man. And

Speaker 6 just for the record, I personally learned a ton about leadership talking to you today.

Speaker 5 And so thank you, man.

Speaker 6 God bless.