#257 Jocko Willink - Commander of SEAL Team-3 Task Unit Bruiser aka "The Punishers"

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Speaker 5 Jocko Willink,

Speaker 6 welcome to the show, man.

Speaker 5 Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Speaker 6 It's an honor to have you. It's an honor to have you.
I can't believe it took this long, but

Speaker 6 here we are. And

Speaker 6 seriously, man, I've been watching you for a very long time. I mean, I've heard about you when I was in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 6 And, you know, even though we've never met, I just want you to know that I have a tremendous amount of respect for you.

Speaker 6 And a lot of the guys that I went went through buds with served with you, under you. And man,

Speaker 6 you just have a reputation as a leader that is unmatched. And I just want to say it truly is, man.
It's an honor to be sitting across from you today. So thank you for making the time.

Speaker 5 Well, I appreciate it. I was very lucky to learn from some really great people and be surrounded by a bunch of awesome, awesome dudes.

Speaker 5 And awesome to see what you're doing these days, getting after it for sure. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 yeah, so everybody starts with an introduction here.

Speaker 6 Jocko Willink, a retired Navy SEAL and Silver Star recipient, commanded the SEAL Team 3's task unit bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq, the most highly decorated special operations unit in the entire Iraq war.

Speaker 6 I did not know that until today.

Speaker 6 Number one New York Times best-selling author, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt. You also own an MMA and fitness gym in San Diego.
You're an OG podcaster with over a billion views.

Speaker 6 Host of the presidential special, Above, Below, and Beyond, celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, which is streaming now.

Speaker 6 A business titan with everything from leadership consulting to American main clothing and supplements to a soccer club in your portfolio. Husband to Helene and father of four.

Speaker 6 Most importantly, you're a Christian. And, you know,

Speaker 6 Jago, every year since I started this, I started this in Christmas of 2019.

Speaker 6 And, you know, we were still at war back then.

Speaker 6 I guess we are kind of still right now, too, but

Speaker 6 meaning like, you know, Afghanistan, the same war that we were involved in. And, you know, when I started this, it was it was.
pretty much all for veterans. And

Speaker 6 I wanted to make the biggest episodes, the Christmas and the Thanksgiving episode, because I remember what it's like to be deployed overseas, sitting on your ass, or maybe not sitting on your ass, but without your family on Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Speaker 6 And so I always make it a point every year to bring something inspiring, motivational, somebody that everybody that can look up to. And

Speaker 6 you're the perfect man for this year's Thanksgiving episode. So I just want to say thank you again.

Speaker 5 Yeah, appreciate it for all the guys and men and women that are overseas right now. Yeah, I did some deployments during those timeframes, and it's always a good time to focus on work a lot.

Speaker 5 So you don't have to think about it very much because you're missing out.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 I thought if it's okay with you, I thought maybe we could open this episode with a prayer. Sure.
Perfect.

Speaker 6 Jesus, I just want to say thank you for having Jocko here today. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 we're going to release this on Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving is just a holiday that's full of love, family, and friends.
And

Speaker 6 both Jocko and I both know,

Speaker 6 as well as a lot of people, that a lot of people are not able to enjoy those

Speaker 6 things on Thanksgiving for whatever reason, whether they are first responder, police officer, and they're out or they're in the military and they're deployed, or Maybe they just have a lot of loss and not a lot of people around them.

Speaker 6 But whatever those reasons are, we want this episode to reach them,

Speaker 6 to bring them joy on Thanksgiving and just something that they can look forward to. And hopefully, they can take something out of this.
And that's also just for everybody in general.

Speaker 6 I know this is going to be an extremely powerful episode. There's going to be a lot of life lessons in here and just little nuggets that people can take with them and better their life with them.

Speaker 6 And that's what we intend to do here today. So

Speaker 6 please, please make that happen. Amen.

Speaker 6 But,

Speaker 6 all right, Jocko.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 6 got a couple of things to crank out here before

Speaker 6 we start the big interview. So I got a couple of gifts for you.
One of them,

Speaker 5 the famous.

Speaker 6 Famous Vigilance League gummy bears legal in all 50 states, Syl. No funny business.
It's just candy. I know you're not a big sweets guy, but maybe give them a try

Speaker 6 on the flight home. So

Speaker 5 thanks, man. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 I have another gift for you. This is from my friends over at USCCA.

Speaker 6 And they wanted me to give you a lifelong membership. So basically what USCCA does, you're a concealed carry permit holder, which I don't know if you are in California.

Speaker 6 If you're not, I know Newsome, I can maybe make an introduction.

Speaker 6 But no, if, look, bottom line, if you ever have to defend yourself, your family, your friends, if you ever have to get into some type of an engagement with a bad guy, these people have your ass.

Speaker 6 They're going to take care of all of the

Speaker 6 legal fees and coach you how to get through it. And they're a huge fan of yours.
And so I just wanted to present that to you.

Speaker 5 That's awesome.

Speaker 5 When you go through the concealed weapons, the concealed carry course in California, the state-mandated one, most of the course is them telling you what a problem it's going to be if you ever have to use your weapon.

Speaker 5 So it's nice to have these guys as backup, man. Thank you.

Speaker 6 You're welcome.

Speaker 7 And then last thing before we move on here, I have a Patreon account.

Speaker 6 It's a subscription account. A lot of these guys and girls have been with me since the very beginning when I was doing this in my attic, and we've turned it into quite the community.

Speaker 6 So what we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. This is a good one.

Speaker 6 It has to do with leadership. This is from Nick Farrell.
Looking back at your career now, what was your greatest flaw as a leader? What advice would you have given yourself as a young officer?

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, for me, fortunately, I didn't have to experience much time as a young officer because I was a prior enlisted guy.

Speaker 5 But when I look back at my career, one of the biggest things that I noticed

Speaker 5 is that I never really cared about

Speaker 5 what guys,

Speaker 5 what happened after the teams. For me, it was just about the teams.
And I didn't really think about it for myself. I didn't really think about it for anybody else.

Speaker 5 So, you know, for a guy, like, for instance, I never gave anyone any financial advice.

Speaker 5 I never said, hey, you might not want to buy that brand new F-350 Super Duty that's $70,000 and you're going to spend your whole re-enlistment bonus on it. You should.

Speaker 5 probably do something else with that. And I never really did that and never really encouraged anyone to get an education.

Speaker 5 You know, when someone came to me about getting an education, education, I'd say, do you want to go to sniper school? Do you want to go to breacher school? You know, we got you.

Speaker 5 And so I was very, very focused on the teams. And, you know,

Speaker 5 that's just the way I was. And

Speaker 5 I recognized when I retired that there is something after the teams. And so I wish I would have paid a little bit more attention to that, especially for the guys that I was responsible for.

Speaker 5 And I didn't do a great job of that.

Speaker 6 So you're saying,

Speaker 6 in a nutshell, you would have taken more of a stake in their personal lives to watch them succeed. Yep.
Interesting. Do you feel like, do you,

Speaker 6 I'm learning a lot of leadership lessons right now. And do you feel, and I do that with,

Speaker 6 I would say, the majority of my team, I take

Speaker 6 a great interest in their personal lives because I want them to succeed. Do you feel, but there's a caveat to this that I have learned

Speaker 6 throughout doing this.

Speaker 6 Does that blur the lines?

Speaker 6 No. It doesn't blur the lines of leadership.

Speaker 5 No, and again, look, as far as their personal life, if a guy was having problems with his marriage or problems with his kids or something like that, I would do whatever I could to help him out with that.

Speaker 5 But I'm saying, as far as planning outside, planning life outside of the teams, I just didn't, I didn't think much about it.

Speaker 5 And so, and, and even if a guy was having a problem with his wife or with his kids, my focus would be, okay, how can we get that fixed so you can go on deployment, so you can get back to being in a platoon, which is what

Speaker 5 everybody wants to be doing anyways, most of the time.

Speaker 6 Gotcha. Gotcha.
Well, thank you for that.

Speaker 6 Let's move into your life story. So I want to do a life story on you.

Speaker 6 It's going to be a long one. And there's quite a few rabbit holes that I'd like to go down with you.

Speaker 6 And I want to use this interview for, I want to learn a lot about leadership for myself. So I know I have a lot to work on.

Speaker 5 You and me both.

Speaker 6 But where'd you grow up?

Speaker 5 I grew up in a small town in New England on a dirt road. And both my parents were school teachers.
Pretty normal. My mom taught English and my dad taught history.

Speaker 5 And I was not interested in either one of those things.

Speaker 5 So I was kind of a rebellious kid.

Speaker 5 you know, nothing totally out of bounds. You know, I liked, I had a lot of energy and probably a lot of aggression.
And so

Speaker 5 it, you know, I was kind of looking to get out of that town as soon as I could when I was growing up. And that's why the military is a nice opportunity to do that.
Siblings?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I got an older sister and a younger sister.

Speaker 6 So you're a middle child.

Speaker 5 Yep, middle child.

Speaker 6 No shit. I was not expecting that one.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Well, and yeah, I forget what the middle child is supposed to be like.
Am I not like the middle child?

Speaker 6 I wouldn't consider you to be a middle child. But

Speaker 6 there is

Speaker 5 what's the characteristics of the middle child?

Speaker 6 I don't know how to articulate that.

Speaker 6 I think that the characteristics of a middle child would be bouncing around a lot from thing to thing and

Speaker 6 trying to find your place.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, I found my place.

Speaker 5 I know you did.

Speaker 6 I know you did.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 What were you into as a kid?

Speaker 5 You know, I wasn't really great at any sports. You know, I played soccer and basketball.
I wasn't really good at either one of them. I was okay, but not, definitely not great.

Speaker 5 I liked music. I liked hardcore music and heavy metal.
And that's where I spent a lot of my time listening to hardcore music and heavy metal when I was a kid.

Speaker 5 Surfed, luckily, skateboarded.

Speaker 5 Went to hardcore shows in New York City when I was a young kid, which was amazing. And,

Speaker 5 you know, that kind of

Speaker 5 scratched my rebellious. I've always been a little bit of a rebellious kid.
And so that kind of made me feel like I was scratching that itch.

Speaker 5 And I just related to it, you know, I related to the first time I heard like heavy music.

Speaker 5 It sounded right to me.

Speaker 5 As opposed to a lot of the, you know, other music that was out there, you know, like pop music, I just didn't, it didn't sound right to me but hardcore and heavy metal sounded right to me and

Speaker 5 and there was a lot of that

Speaker 5 kind of

Speaker 5 push yourself also like a DIY ethic of hey we you got to do stuff yourself if you want to if you want to

Speaker 5 do something if you want something you got to go make it happen and that that stuck with me for sure when did uh when did jiu-jitsu start for you my first platoon oh it didn't start until your first platoon okay yeah jiu-jitsu was not even remotely a thing when I was growing up.

Speaker 5 It wasn't like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was completely unheard of. This is in the 80s.
In America, there was no Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It wasn't even in the magazines yet.
It was nowhere. So that

Speaker 5 wasn't until my first platoon where I got introduced to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Speaker 6 What about wrestling?

Speaker 5 Didn't wrestle.

Speaker 5 Oh, shit. My high school was too, my high school didn't even have a wrestling team.

Speaker 6 How big was your town?

Speaker 5 Graduated with 85 people in my class. Yep.

Speaker 6 It's like where I grew up.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 5 Small town.

Speaker 6 What got your interest in the military then?

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 do not remember actually wanting to do anything else. The only thing I ever wanted to do, as far as a job goes, was be some kind of commando.
And I collected little soldiers when I was a little kid.

Speaker 5 I had the the

Speaker 5 the British commandos from World War II.

Speaker 5 I had a little air fix set, one 30-second size of British commandos, and they had Zodiac boats and they had kayaks and they had, you know, the black watch caps on.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I thought that that was the coolest thing.

Speaker 5 And eventually I figured out that you could have that as an actual job.

Speaker 6 Very cool. Very.

Speaker 6 I want to go back real quick to the rebellious. Why do you think you were so rebellious?

Speaker 5 I don't know. I don't know.
I think part of it's like psychologically, right? You, I think all kids will have this.

Speaker 5 You have to rebel against your parents at some point because you have to get out of there. You have to leave them.
And so you kind of create friction so that you can release.

Speaker 5 So I think that was part of it.

Speaker 5 And I also think I just looked around at the world and just,

Speaker 5 you know, had the angst of a young teenage child. You know, you got a lot of testosterone flowing through your blood and you just want to fight and get after it.

Speaker 5 And that's kind of, that's kind of what I did. Were you a troublemaker? i was i was a borderline troublemaker but also

Speaker 5 like i i didn't drink didn't do any drugs um there was a whole like sub-genre of music called straight edge music which i wasn't fully into that but straight edge music is like no drinking no drugs and but i was close enough to it that i

Speaker 5 that's the way i heard that messaging of

Speaker 5 you know drinking and drugs were bad that's kind of a weak thing to do And so never did,

Speaker 5 never did, never drank and never did drugs in, in high school. How would you rebel?

Speaker 6 Would it be violence?

Speaker 5 Yeah, going to hardcore shows, listening to punk rock music, listening to hardcore music, shaving my head, you know, getting in fights, just that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 That kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 Where did Christianity get rooted into you?

Speaker 5 So I was, you know, we went to a church growing up. We went to St.
Michael's church and probably

Speaker 5 did

Speaker 5 maybe

Speaker 5 three to five years of that where, and, you know, when you look back, you know, people go, where do you get your values from? And I think that's pretty much as

Speaker 5 an American. That's where our values come from.
You know, it's like, that's what you're hearing. And

Speaker 5 so that's probably the time. Well, that's, that's the time where I was going to church.

Speaker 5 And, you know, you're going to, you're going to absorb those values.

Speaker 6 Do you, I mean, did you, do you feel like you had a strong faith as a kid or did that come later on?

Speaker 5 For where I'm from, that's just kind of normal, man.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 5 It's just, it's not some

Speaker 5 big deal. Gotcha.
It's like, this is, this is, this is what you do.

Speaker 5 And like I said, when you get, you know, I always talk about the fact that you learn a lot when you're, you, you get a lot of your DNA when you're in your first SEAL platoon platoon because it's all new and so it imprints on you.

Speaker 5 And I think that's just growing up. You know, you go to church, it's imprinting on you, and that's where, that's what stays with you.

Speaker 6 So let's move back to the, the moving into the military. So

Speaker 6 what drew you to the SEALs?

Speaker 5 Man,

Speaker 5 I had a friend that

Speaker 5 did the Army program. Used to be able to go and join the Army Reserves.

Speaker 5 And in between your junior and your senior year you'd go to boot camp and i had a friend that did that and when he came back he told he told me this story and i've joked about it because i don't know if it's true or not

Speaker 5 it's probably not at least it's not totally true but this guy told me that when he was in boot camp they were out on this track they were out in fort benning and they're look they're they're out there doing morning pt or something like that and there's a guy with cami pants on combat combat boots, a t-shirt and a rucksack and a ponytail, and he's long hair and a ponytail and he's running around this track.

Speaker 5 And this friend tells me the story that he asked the drill sergeant, he said, drill sergeant, who's that? And the drill sergeant, without looking back, just keeps looking forward and goes, Delta.

Speaker 5 And then my buddy goes, Drill Sergeant, is there anyone that's tougher than Delta? And the drill sergeant, without looking back at him, just says, SEAL T

Speaker 5 And so I heard that story, dude. I'm a freaking young kid.
And, and, and that was it, man.

Speaker 5 Now, again, you know, I'm, I'm, I don't even know if that actually happened, but you want to know where I first started thinking about the SEAL teams. That was it.

Speaker 5 And like I said, I grew up in the water. So knowing that the SEALs worked in the water, you know, I surfed as a kid up in Maine, which was awesome.
And so just having that tie to the water.

Speaker 5 And then the SEAL teams were stationed. I figured out that the SEAL teams were either in San Diego or Virginia Beach, both of which were cool places in my mind.
And so I said, that sounds awesome.

Speaker 5 Join the SEAL teams and get stationed either in San Diego or Virginia Beach. You can surf and do commando stuff in the water.
Like

Speaker 5 it's a literal no-brainer to me. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Did you look at it? Did you look at any of the other branches or you were just like, I'm going to do that?

Speaker 5 You know, of course, the Marine Corps is always tempting for a young kid because the Marine Corps presents such an awesome image and they're such an awesome unit

Speaker 5 but i i saw the seal teams as

Speaker 5 again it just fit with everything that that i thought about being a

Speaker 5 military personnel would be would be that what age did you enlist

Speaker 5 18 18 yeah what did your parents think uh i think they were pretty happy were they really yeah yeah because i was you know it's like you have a plan that's a i love the military the military gave me everything the The Navy gave me everything.

Speaker 5 But initially, what they gave me was a plan. This is what you have to do.
If you do these things, you're going to be successful. And you get a blank slate when you go in there.

Speaker 5 No one cares what your background is. No one cares who your parents are.
No one cares what grade you got in high school. They just, this is what you got to do.
And so, yeah, my parents were stoked.

Speaker 5 My dad did say,

Speaker 5 he said, you're not going to like it.

Speaker 5 And I said, why not? And he said, because you don't like authority and you you don't listen to anyone else. And of course, since I knew everything, I looked at him.

Speaker 5 I said, hey, you know, dad, it's not like that in the SEAL teams. It's a team and there's no bosses.
You do everything together. So that's how ignorant I was.

Speaker 5 But yeah, you know, pretty, pretty ignorant going into the military, you know, not growing up around it. My, my dad got kicked out of ROTC, as a matter of fact.
Oh, I know.

Speaker 5 My grandfather was in the army.

Speaker 5 He was a 20-year army guy, but I didn't know him very well. He died when I was about 10.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 didn't have a lot of military information and just thought that the SEAL team sounded like a good fit for me.

Speaker 6 And you joined in, was it 90? 1990. 1990.
What was going on in the world in 1990?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so,

Speaker 5 well, the Gulf War, the original Gulf War, the build-up for the Gulf War was starting. And that's where I was...
thought I'd be going. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I was pretty stoked about that. Right on.

Speaker 5 Because Panama had happened in 89. Yeah.
And that was another thing that made me think,

Speaker 5 wait a second, these guys are out fighting and dying for our country, and I'm not doing that.

Speaker 5 This is embarrassing. So how do I get in? Who are those guys? And how do I go join them?

Speaker 6 So you enlisted 18, 1990,

Speaker 6 go to boot camp.

Speaker 6 Where do we go from there?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I was

Speaker 5 really stoked when I got to boot camp, you know, because again, for me, it was like blank slate. Here we go.
I had one buddy that rode on the bus with me

Speaker 5 who was, he looked at me and he goes, Are you going SEALs? And I said, Yeah. And he said, Me too.
And so we just, we just hit it off real quick. And he had been through college already.

Speaker 5 He had, he had knowledge, you know.

Speaker 5 He understood more than I did. I think he had a mentor that was a SEAL.
And so, but he, he, we broke up real quick and he ended up making it through maybe a class behind me.

Speaker 5 And he ended up, you know, as a master chief in the SEAL teams, but just a great dude.

Speaker 5 You know, he wrestled in college, just a great guy. So, you know, went to boot camp.
And then,

Speaker 5 again, I was super,

Speaker 5 you know, just so

Speaker 5 open-minded to like what was coming and happy about being there and just stoked to go to Buds. And then showing up at Buds, it was like

Speaker 5 the best thing ever.

Speaker 6 Yeah, man. Did you, I mean, I'm, did you have, did you meet an actual SEAL at all before you?

Speaker 8 No shit. Nope.

Speaker 5 So you showed up. I saw one in boot camp

Speaker 5 and I just saw one in boot camp. And I think it was a guy that I met later who was getting reprocessed.

Speaker 5 He had been out of the SEAL teams for a while and then he'd coming back in and I kind of recognized him because, you know, I saw one seal when I was in boot camp, and I recognized him later.

Speaker 5 And I talked to him, he's just a super chill guy, but in my mind, you know, he's this seal, so you think he's you know, the coolest thing in the world, yeah. Damn,

Speaker 5 but no, I never knew any seals before I joined.

Speaker 6 So, how was it showing up for Buds for you?

Speaker 5 It was awesome.

Speaker 6 Were you intimidated?

Speaker 5 I mean, I would say not really. I wasn't really intimidated,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 I definitely didn't know much about what was going on.

Speaker 5 When I showed up,

Speaker 5 there was a poster in medical. They had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster in Medical, but they'd crossed out Texas Chainsaw Massacres and they replaced it, said Bud's Pool Comp.

Speaker 5 And they put like a snorkel or whatever, a mask on the kid.

Speaker 5 And I didn't even know what pool comp was. You know, I didn't know anything about it.
And I was, hmm, that's interesting. I wonder.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I guess they didn't have

Speaker 6 any of the documentaries or any of that kind of stuff out.

Speaker 5 Nothing. So I wasn't really intimidated, but I was just excited, man.
I was just excited. And, you know, like I said, I wasn't the fastest runner.
I wasn't the fastest swimmer.

Speaker 5 I wasn't, I wasn't really that good at anything in particular, but I wasn't that bad at anything in particular either. And I was young.
I could recover quick. I was fired up.

Speaker 5 I was very used to the cold.

Speaker 5 But, you know, you're meeting guys that are total studs. You know, you're meeting guys that are D1 athletes and whatever.

Speaker 5 I had an Olympic alternate in my buds class for gymnastics. Like, how fast can that guy do the old course compared to me? You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 5 And some D1 water polo players and, you know, just the whole, the whole nine yards. And I was just young and just fired up to be there, stoked.

Speaker 6 How many people were in there? Do you remember?

Speaker 5 I don't really know. Probably,

Speaker 5 I don't know. A couple.
I mean, 150. I actually don't know.
A lot of people. I'd have to look at it.
But

Speaker 6 how did you? I mean, did you measure yourself up against

Speaker 6 the people that you were seeing when you showed up? Like, oh, fuck, that guy's going to make it. That guy's not going to make it if that guy made it.

Speaker 6 You know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 5 There was a couple guys that, you know, seemed like studs that quit.

Speaker 5 The gymnast that I was talking about, Olympic gymnast or Olympic alternate gymnast quit. I had a D1 water polo player that quit.

Speaker 5 I had,

Speaker 5 there was definitely some studs that quit. And I realized, oh, there's a wrestler from Iowa that quit.
Not, not, not the college, but he was a stud.

Speaker 5 So yeah, I realized that this isn't all about, you know, what your athletic background is because it's about being cold, wet, miserable, and suffering.

Speaker 5 And if you don't like that, you're going to have problems.

Speaker 6 Did you have any problems?

Speaker 5 I failed. I failed to run.
I failed to swim. I failed an O course.
I failed pool comp. I failed like everything.

Speaker 5 When I went through, if you failed something twice, you got rolled.

Speaker 5 But if you failed something once, you could stay with the class.

Speaker 5 And so if you failed two runs, you got rolled. And then if you failed one in the next class, you got dropped.
So I only failed one of everything.

Speaker 5 And some of the ones were, you know, like there were some swims that pretty much almost everyone in the class failed because the tide or the current or whatever.

Speaker 5 There were some runs where a lot of people failed because it maybe wasn't quite four miles.

Speaker 5 Maybe a little over. Yeah.
Yeah. It was a little over.
But so I failed a little bit of everything, but not enough to get me rolled. And I stayed with my class the whole time, made it through one shot.

Speaker 6 How did you deal with failure?

Speaker 5 Just just.

Speaker 5 tried to go harder. You know, I failed a run.
I paced myself on a run, which I wasn't fast enough to pace myself. I needed, for basically everything that I did in Buzz, I just need to go 100%.

Speaker 5 And probably, I don't know, my third or fourth run in first phase, I was kind of like, oh, I'll try pacing myself. And so I went at a pace and I just was wrong and failed.

Speaker 5 And so I never paced myself again on those runs. I just ran as hard as I could because that's the only thing I wanted to do, man, was get through that training and be a SEAL.

Speaker 5 So I just put out hard, and that's that's how I overcome. I overcame failure just by pure just

Speaker 5 aggressive hard work man.

Speaker 5 I failed pool comp

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 me and my one of my buddies we got this shouldn't even be legal, but we got

Speaker 5 we got dive equipment from dive phase to practice with but we wore it in the dip tank.

Speaker 5 So we were

Speaker 5 we were pool comping each other in the dip tank on a weekend.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 got through it on Monday, you know? So,

Speaker 6 so for those that are listening, pool comp is an exercise that you do in second phase. It's open circuit diving, and it's one of the more strenuous weeks that you go through in Buds.

Speaker 6 A lot of people fail.

Speaker 6 A lot of people say that pool comp, it basically beat the shit out of you underwater with tanks on.

Speaker 6 A lot of people say that pool comp is

Speaker 6 the last major hurdle that you're going to have to pass to get through buds yeah so

Speaker 6 but how did you i mean how did you deal with the mental stress did that affect you at all or was it was it the physical stuff or was it both

Speaker 5 man i had fun you know i'm not and i'm not saying it wasn't hard like how weeks hell weeks hard you're it's cold wet miserable but

Speaker 5 i mean

Speaker 5 I wasn't really mentally stressed. I was kind of having fun.
You know, I enjoyed it. Like,

Speaker 5 man, you're going to get to be a frog man. Yeah.
You know, I'll do it. I would have done whatever they told me to do.
Like, I think there's some people that show up to buds

Speaker 5 that they would rather die. And I was definitely in that category.
So,

Speaker 5 you know, and I think they figured that out. You know, I think they figured out with guys.
They go, yep, this guy, we're not going to break this guy because they'll try, you know.

Speaker 5 But eventually they go, yeah, we can maybe hurt him physically, but we're not going to break him mentally.

Speaker 6 So for somebody that's going through Buds right now, would you have any advice for them? Or what would your one piece of advice be?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I tell people this one piece of advice all the time. Don't quit.

Speaker 5 Love it. You know?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that statistically is right because the vast majority of people that make it through buds, they quit.

Speaker 5 They don't get performance.

Speaker 5 If you get rolled for a run, you're going to have six weeks to get better at running.

Speaker 5 You can pass the runs. If you get rolled for swimming, if you get rolled for pool comp, you're going to get good at pool comp for the next six weeks until you start up with your next class.

Speaker 5 What did you do for those six weeks? You practice pool comp over and over and over again. So the people that don't make it, generally speaking, quit.

Speaker 5 So if you don't quit, you should be in a pretty good spot. So don't quit.

Speaker 6 That's a good point.

Speaker 6 So where do you go after buds?

Speaker 5 Got done with buds and I went to SEAL Team One.

Speaker 6 How was that? Did you pick one? Yes. Why did you send you one?

Speaker 5 Well, I didn't pick one, but I picked West Coast. And, you know, I was going to say this when you talked about being intimidated showing up to Buds.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I was kind of like, well, not really, because it's a big game and it's, you know, get wet and be cold and do push-ups. It's kind of fun.

Speaker 5 But when I got to SEAL Team One, I was definitely, it was intimidating going to SEAL Team One. I was definitely,

Speaker 5 the atmosphere for a new guy at SEAL Team 1 was

Speaker 5 intimidating.

Speaker 6 I've heard the stories.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 it was definitely intimidating.

Speaker 5 We went, myself and two other new guys were checking in to the Master Chief. We're standing outside of his door in our uniforms and parade rests, and he calls us in there.
We go to attention.

Speaker 5 We walk in. We're standing at attention.

Speaker 5 And he says,

Speaker 5 He says, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Everyone here has been to Buzz.
It doesn't mean shit. Get out of here.

Speaker 5 Cool. So then the next, we had like all the new guys

Speaker 5 assembled together. And that master chief came in and said,

Speaker 5 he said, don't be late.

Speaker 5 Don't forget anything.

Speaker 5 And keep your mouth shut and your ears open.

Speaker 5 Those are real, that's really good advice.

Speaker 5 Don't be late, don't be light.

Speaker 5 And keep your mouth shut and your ears open. And that's the way, that's the way it was.
You know, that's the way it was. Keep your mouth shut, keep your ears open,

Speaker 5 and try and absorb everything that's going on. And again, this is 1991, man.

Speaker 5 Like the Gulf War that I thought I was going to be in, that they were reporting that there was going to be 30 or 40,000 casualties was over in 72 hours. I missed the whole thing.

Speaker 5 So this is just a peacetime organization. And even with that, it was pretty, pretty intimidating to walk into.

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Speaker 6 Real quick, I just want to go back to Bud's graduation. I mean, it sounds like the majority of your childhood, you wanted to get into the military.

Speaker 6 You found the teams, which, you know, is the, if not one of the best, you know, soft units to be in.

Speaker 6 I mean, what did it feel like for you to graduate?

Speaker 5 You know, back then we didn't get our trident or anything. You know, we just, you just graduated and you still had a lot of hurdles to overcome.
I was always pretty paranoid.

Speaker 5 You know, you asked like when I failed something, I was very paranoid about failing, not wanting to fail.

Speaker 5 And so even going to, knowing that I was going to SEAL team one, knowing I graduated buds, it felt good, but it didn't feel like I had completed the journey at all.

Speaker 5 It felt like, okay, now you got to get through SEAL tactical training and you got to get through your, your board with the, team.

Speaker 5 So I didn't have some

Speaker 5 elevated feeling of I made it.

Speaker 5 I never really got that feeling in my 20 years.

Speaker 6 Gotcha. Gotcha.
All right, back to team one.

Speaker 6 I mean, so you get into team one.

Speaker 6 What kind of team guys are there? What have they been through? I mean, we're in peacetime. We talked about Gulf War.
You know, that was pretty short.

Speaker 6 What kind of experience was in SEAL team one when you showed up?

Speaker 5 Other than a couple Vietnam guys,

Speaker 5 there was relatively speaking almost no experience, almost no combat experience.

Speaker 8 No shit. Yep.

Speaker 5 And so it was kind of weird because the way we trained,

Speaker 5 you were training for something that no one really understood.

Speaker 5 And as much as the Vietnam guys passed down as much as they could, but it still was like

Speaker 5 you didn't really know what it was you were training for. And that made us train very, very hard because it seemed like combat was this unfathomable,

Speaker 5 tough thing. And so we better train as hard as we possibly could.
And we thought, we hoped and prayed that we would get to do one mission. You know, that was

Speaker 5 the hope. And the prayer was maybe we'll get to do one what we used to call a real world mission.
Yeah. You know, real world mission.

Speaker 5 We would hope and pray that we would get to do some real world mission. And we trained as hard as we possibly could.
Everyone was very, there was a lot of

Speaker 5 team one was very,

Speaker 5 they called it Stalag Team One.

Speaker 5 And there was another name for it, but it was very strict.

Speaker 6 I've always heard no fun one. No fun one.

Speaker 5 Yep. They had a bunch of names for a bunch of names for no fun one, stalag team one.

Speaker 5 And yet, in my first platoon, the older guys would say, team one, it's not just a number, it's an attitude.

Speaker 5 Which, again, now that I, you know, when I got older, but I was young, dude, I was like, that's a real thing. Like, this is, this is our attitude.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, we literally had haircut inspections every two weeks, uniform inspections with our camis. Like, it was, we had command PT every day.

Speaker 5 Everything was very professional. And

Speaker 5 that's how I fit in well with that you know and or i should say it fit me well because i liked the military and that's what we were doing that's interesting considering you don't like authority yeah

Speaker 5 yeah

Speaker 5 i think maybe at this point i had recognized

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 this was

Speaker 5 this was

Speaker 5 that professionalism was part of the job for me, you know, for like that that level of professionalism that i saw was that was what we were supposed to be like that was the job so

Speaker 5 i bought into it man

Speaker 6 you know go it sounds like

Speaker 6 when you went to one when you got into the teams it sounds maybe maybe

Speaker 6 similar to what guys might experience today. You know, you've got a lot of past experience.
It sounds like when you came in, it was a little bit of past experience with the Vietnam guys.

Speaker 6 But I mean, you know, the GWA guys, it's every day there's got to be more and more guys, you know, retiring, calling it a day, moving on with their lives.

Speaker 6 And now you have this younger generation that's coming in that,

Speaker 6 you know, isn't

Speaker 6 they not doing, I don't know, maybe they are doing a lot, but I don't think they're doing a lot. I don't think we got a lot of guys in Ukraine.

Speaker 6 And so, you know, I mean, do you think it's, are we in a similar similar time today?

Speaker 5 It's a very similar time. It's a very similar time.
I tell those young guys now, I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years.

Speaker 5 And the way you just expressed that,

Speaker 5 I would have never expressed that

Speaker 5 because I was having a freaking great time. We were training hard.
We were jumping out of airplanes. We were, you know, diving and shooting machine guns and blowing things up.

Speaker 5 And like, that's what we were getting ready, getting ready, getting ready.

Speaker 5 And so I understand the expression because now, of course, we all look back like, gosh, how could you wait around for 13 years? But that's what it was. That's what we lived in.

Speaker 5 That's the water that we drank. That's what, and so it was, hey, this is what we're doing.
And by the way, you're with an awesome bunch of guys. We have fun.

Speaker 5 Everything is like super professional and also super fun.

Speaker 5 You know what it's, it's being in a seal platoon, man. Yeah.
There's, I don't, I would rather, if I could just, heaven for me would be just like seal, seal platoon, seal platoon forever.

Speaker 5 That's what we're doing. And we go to war, cool.
We go train, cool. That's what we're doing.
It's the best job. And so

Speaker 5 I didn't, I didn't know enough to go,

Speaker 5 I can't believe I got to go on deployment again. No, I wanted to go on deployment.
Oh, there's nothing happening? Cool. We're going on deployment.
We're going to go to this country, that country.

Speaker 5 We're going to work with these groups, that group. Maybe something will happen.
And if it doesn't, we're still going to be out here doing our best. So I didn't, I

Speaker 5 didn't,

Speaker 5 I had a good attitude the whole time. Like it was exactly where I wanted to be.
Being in the Silk Platoon was just as good as it gets, man.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I guess, you know,

Speaker 6 I could totally see that. I mean, I guess that attitude probably came in with my generation when we came in.
It was, it had,

Speaker 6 I mean, I joined in 2000, July of 2001.

Speaker 6 And so by the time, actually, like two days after I graduated boot camp, the towers went down. So I knew,

Speaker 6 I guess I didn't know.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's a different level of frustration, right? Where if your country is at war and you joined the teams to go to war,

Speaker 5 if you're not going, yeah, there's going to be that's going to, that's going to be angst, right? That's going to be problematic for sure. And, but when there's nothing going on,

Speaker 5 just I didn't, I didn't know enough to be frustrated about it. Yeah, we're having a good time.

Speaker 6 I mean, I think that would come in too. I mean, is I mean,

Speaker 6 I think that attitude comes in as well when you

Speaker 6 you see platoons go out and do something and you haven't yet. And then that creates, you know, I don't know if jealousy is the right.

Speaker 6 I mean, yes, it definitely creates jealousy and maybe some discontent throughout the community. But so where did you go? Where was your first deployment?

Speaker 5 First deployment was to Guam, and this is where I got introduced to Jiu-Jitsu. How did that happen?

Speaker 5 There was, we show up in Guam,

Speaker 5 and this is after our workup so we're there and we're sitting in our platoon hut one morning and this master chief comes in this old master chief like he had to be at least like

Speaker 5 39 years old or something like that but he looked like an old man and he's old lanky old guy and he says who wants to learn how to fight

Speaker 5 And I'm like, I don't know what this old guy thinks he's going to teach me, but me and a few other guys, new guys, we raised our hands and, all right.

Speaker 5 So we went to the Navy base, had like a judo training mat,

Speaker 5 and he told us to meet him there at a certain time. And this guy's name was Steve Bailey.
He was an awesome master chief in the SEAL teams. And he was a Muay Thai fighter.

Speaker 5 And he had been training Jiu-Jitsu with the Gracies

Speaker 5 in Torrance in the late 80s. So he was like.

Speaker 5 what right now would be considered considered like a mid-level white belt in jiu-jitsu and he just lined us up and just tapped us all out over and over again.

Speaker 5 It's hard to explain to people how little

Speaker 5 we,

Speaker 5 how little human beings knew about fighting in 1992 before the UFC. Like, no one even understood the guard or the mount or the rear naked choke or the chimera or the armlock.

Speaker 5 It was, it didn't even exist. It wasn't, it wasn't even.

Speaker 5 It didn't even exist, man.

Speaker 5 And so this guy, you don't even know that he's passing your guard. You even know what the guard is.
You don't know that he's mounted because you don't even know what the mount is.

Speaker 5 You don't know that he's taking your arm. You don't, you have no comprehension of what's happening.
And so, he just annihilated us.

Speaker 5 And to me, I just thought to myself, This, whatever this freaking guy knows, I will do whatever I can to learn it. And so, we started training with him.
That was my introduction to Jiu-Jitsu.

Speaker 6 Wow, he just stuck with you ever since. Yeah.
So, how long has it been since then?

Speaker 5 Well, that was in 1992, 1993.

Speaker 6 So wow, so what, 20, no,

Speaker 6 holy shit, 30, yeah, whatever, 33 years, is that right?

Speaker 5 Something like that. Wow.

Speaker 8 33 fucking years.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there was something that I recognized very quickly that it was,

Speaker 5 I had to learn this thing, this stuff.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And now you're a black belt.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yep.

Speaker 5 So that was my first platoon. We go to Guam, and this is 93.

Speaker 5 There's,

Speaker 5 you know, we go and do exercises. We work with other, you know, host nations.
Again, I'm having a good time.

Speaker 5 You know, we're training hard. We're, we're partying hard.
We're doing what kind of like young SEALs do.

Speaker 5 But, you know, there's no war going on, except for.

Speaker 5 There were some things that were happening in Somalia.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 there were some guys on board ship

Speaker 5 from the East Coast and the West Coast that did some kind of operations in Somalia. Then they went from the ship to go do these operations.
Now,

Speaker 5 SEALs, back in the 90s, no one wanted to go on the ship, right?

Speaker 5 And so I got back from that first platoon and me and a few of my buddies, we were like, hey, We know what we did in Guam, which was nothing.

Speaker 5 And we know what the guys that were on the ships, they went to Somalia. Let's go on the ships.

Speaker 5 And so me and a few of my buddies from that first platoon that I'd gone through BUDS with and we'd done that first platoon, we volunteered to go on a shipboard deployment.

Speaker 5 And everyone's like, what are you guys doing? We're like, that

Speaker 5 seems to have the best chance. So that's what we did.
We did, we volunteered for what was called an ARG platoon on the East Coast. It's called a MARG platoon.

Speaker 5 We volunteered for the ARG platoon and we went and did a shipboard deployment, which for me was awesome because

Speaker 5 we had a lot of assets to train with. We worked very closely with the Marine Corps, which was awesome.
We did a, you know, we trained, we did like their shooting package with the force recon guys.

Speaker 5 We trained with them. We did shipboarding with them.

Speaker 5 We did stuff, a lot of stuff up at Camp Pendleton after our own workup. And I also got to learn and understand the structure of the Marine Corps and how they operated, which gave me an insight onto.

Speaker 5 conventional forces at large and what they were doing, interacting with the Navy. It was very, very beneficial for me.

Speaker 5 I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon. For whatever reason, they didn't have a primary comms guy.

Speaker 5 And I had gone to comm school, as a matter of fact, on the East Coast, the SEAL commschool on the East Coast, which was awesome. And so then I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon.

Speaker 5 So now I'm the primary comms guy in my second platoon, which means I'm sitting with the officers during planning. I'm, you know,

Speaker 5 learning how the communications work, learning about contingencies, learning about loss of comms plan, learning about QRFs.

Speaker 5 Like I was learning things that I wouldn't have been learning if I had been a machine gunner.

Speaker 5 So I got very lucky that I was a comms guy and I had volunteered to be a comms guy.

Speaker 5 And the reason I had volunteered to be a comms guy was my third day at SEAL Team 1, I had quarter deck watch back when we used to stand watches. And the officer of the deck, which was another SEAL,

Speaker 5 said, hey, new guy. I was like, hey, sir.
And he said,

Speaker 5 If you want to be on every mission, be a comms guy because

Speaker 5 no matter what the mission is, you will get to go because if you know how to work comms.

Speaker 5 And the next morning when we woke up, I went up to the comms shack and I said, Hey, I want to be a comms guy, which again, no one had ever volunteered to be a comms guy.

Speaker 5 So I volunteered to be a comms guy. And then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon, and now I was the primary comms guy in my second platoon.
And then probably

Speaker 5 one of the most influential things of my life happened in my second platoon.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 there was actually a couple pretty pivotal moments. The first one was

Speaker 5 we had an assistant platoon commander in my second platoon. His name was Alton Lee Grizzard, and he was

Speaker 5 an absolute freaking stud.

Speaker 5 He was the quarterback at the Naval Academy. He was record-setting.
Like he broke Roger Stahlbuck's records at the Naval Academy. He was a complete charismatic guy, fun,

Speaker 5 nice,

Speaker 5 charismatic, the whole nine yards. And I was really good friends with him, really good friends with him.
And

Speaker 5 he got killed. He got murdered.
He got murdered? He got murdered in a murder suicide. So

Speaker 5 you can go back and look at the news on this, but.

Speaker 6 What is a murder suicide?

Speaker 5 Meaning a guy.

Speaker 6 Suicide by a cop or something like that?

Speaker 5 No, he was. He was.

Speaker 5 There was a guy from the Naval Academy, another guy from the Naval Academy who was a sub-mariner who had been dating a girl from the Naval Academy, who I think was a surface warfare officer.

Speaker 5 They had been dating. They broke up.

Speaker 5 Grizz had been like hanging out with her. And this guy showed up at the BOQ, the Bachelor Officer's Quarter on

Speaker 5 Coronado, banged on the door. And Grizz opened the door.
And the guy shot Grizz, shot the girl, and killed himself. Holy shit.

Speaker 5 And so,

Speaker 5 really heartbreaking, terrible scenario. And

Speaker 5 I was really good friends with him.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we had had, he was one of the first people that had a video camera, like a normal person with a video camera. And we had made this video.
We were down in

Speaker 5 Panama doing jungle warfare training. And we'd gone out and there was this song

Speaker 5 that said, Whoop, there it is. You remember this song?

Speaker 5 And so, he had filmed, we were hanging out with these Panamanian girls, and these girls were saying, Whoop, AEA, because they didn't speak English.

Speaker 5 And we were just like into, you know, parting with these girls. And

Speaker 5 he had taken this video and he'd shown his dad. And his dad was a warrant officer in the Navy.
And his dad, he had grown up in Japan for the most part.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so Grizz had showed this video to to his dad of me and him, you know, with these Panamanian girls laughing in a bar saying, whoop, AEA, because we were just laughing.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 when we go to, they had a big service at the Naval Academy because he's a hero at the Naval Academy. And I met his dad and, you know, his dad recognized me.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, I told his dad

Speaker 5 because he had told me, because I said to him, I said to him one day, I told his dad, I said, you know, I said to your son one day, I said, hey, you grew up in Japan.

Speaker 5 like you're going to a Japanese high school. How did you learn to play football?

Speaker 5 And he said,

Speaker 5 my old man taught me.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 as that happened,

Speaker 5 you know, I got, I was very,

Speaker 5 you know, obviously we're all, we're all broken up from this, but I don't know what, I don't know, I wasn't behaving properly. And my

Speaker 5 run-in mate from the SEAL teams, who I went through buzz with,

Speaker 5 I went through SCT with,

Speaker 5 I did three platoons with this guy. I was in training cell.
And this guy was my roommate the whole time. Just like my

Speaker 5 running mate.

Speaker 5 And he pulled me aside and he was like, hey.

Speaker 5 Grizz didn't, you're not the only one that lost Grizz.

Speaker 5 And I thought to myself,

Speaker 5 he's 100%

Speaker 5 right.

Speaker 5 And what it made me aware of is that the way you perceive yourself is not going to be accurate all the time. And you have to be very cautious in the way you behave because

Speaker 5 you think you're behaving a certain way. But other people's perception is going to be different.
And there's a really good chance that their perception is more accurate than your own.

Speaker 5 And that struck me. And this guy was, you know, this guy was my best friend.
And he's telling me, like, hey, bro,

Speaker 5 you're not the only one that lost Grizz. And I'm acting like I was, like he, like I was the only one that lost Grizz.
So it made me aware of that. That,

Speaker 5 again, just the way you perceive yourself is not the way other people are going to perceive you.

Speaker 5 So we go through that. How do you, hold on.

Speaker 5 This is,

Speaker 6 how do you find, how do you today, I mean, that's a big fucking lesson.

Speaker 6 I would take that as a big lesson. It was a huge

Speaker 6 lesson. So how did you, moving forward from that, how did you, how do you find out how people are perceived, are perceiving what you're projecting?

Speaker 5 I think it's, generally speaking, they're going to perceive you. My assumption is that what I'm doing is viewed viewed as negative.

Speaker 5 My assumption is that if I'm doing something,

Speaker 5 the assumption is it's viewed as negative. And so if you assume that what you're doing is being perceived as negative, it keeps me in check from

Speaker 5 behaving in a way

Speaker 5 that is going to be perceived as negative. I mean, to the best of your ability.
I'm not saying, you know, of course, just like every other human, we're all going to slip up, but

Speaker 5 recognizing that, like, man,

Speaker 5 and I think, I'm so thankful that my, that I was, had a good enough relationship with this guy to, to tell me that, because otherwise I never would have, you never would see this disconnect between how you're perceived and what you think you're being perceived as.

Speaker 5 And it was something, I wasn't like I thought to myself,

Speaker 5 oh, here's how people are seeing me. I was just acting the way I was acting, but it was being perceived in a way that I didn't mean at all.
It didn't have any intention.

Speaker 5 But I could see as soon as he said it, I go, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
You, you, you, you, you need to look at yourself.

Speaker 5 You need to detach from, you know, the sadness and go, oh yeah, what does it look like? What is it, what does it feel like?

Speaker 5 Never mind what it looks like because their perceptions are not wrong. Like I said, their perceptions are right.

Speaker 5 Oh, I had this video. His dad recognized me.
I must, you know what I mean? Like that's all, that's all bad stuff. And I didn't recognize it until my buddy let me know.

Speaker 5 And I was very, very grateful. And it definitely made me recognize that,

Speaker 5 yeah, people's perception of you is not what you think it is. And that's, if, if you're not careful, you can really get yourself a bad reputation.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 obviously, as you know, reputation in the SEAL teams is everything. You know, your reputation in the SEAL teams is everything.
So I was just very thankful that he gave me that heads up.

Speaker 5 And then,

Speaker 5 again, what made this platoon very impactful for me, Shield Team 1 Alpha Platoon,

Speaker 5 we had a platoon, our platoon officer, our OIC,

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 pretty much a new guy who had LAT transferred from another part of the Navy, and he had come in as our platoon commander,

Speaker 5 which is no big deal, right? It's really no big deal. Like officers don't have a lot of experience.
It's not that big of a deal. They listen to what you have to say.
They listen to the platoon chief.

Speaker 5 They listen to the LPO and they figure it out. Except for this guy, didn't really want to listen.
And so

Speaker 5 it ended up causing some friction in the platoon.

Speaker 5 He,

Speaker 5 you know, is one of those guys where, again, he probably didn't realize how he was being perceived.

Speaker 5 And he was being perceived as arrogant, being perceived as conceited, being perceived as not listening to the rest of the platoon, including the platoon chief.

Speaker 5 including the platoon LPO.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he was dictating, you know, like, this is how we're going to do this. And this is the way it needs to be, and just wasn't listening.
So it's problematic, but you know, we're, what are you going to do?

Speaker 5 Carry on. Well, then we had a, we were at a desert warfare training and he presented some plan to us and it was a bad plan.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the LPO

Speaker 5 had like had enough of it. It was like,

Speaker 5 sir, this plan is stupid. And, you know, since the guy had a big ego, they got in each other's faces.
And then the, the OIC takes a swing at the LPO.

Speaker 5 Do we split them up? Yeah,

Speaker 5 which again,

Speaker 5 we've seen plenty of inter-platoon fights. I mean, it's a thing.

Speaker 5 It's almost like its own sport, right?

Speaker 5 But when there's this much tension and negativity, it's a problem. And so we got done with that.
And we

Speaker 5 go back and we kind of had like a platoon meeting without the platoon commander. And we told the platoon chief, like, we don't want to work with this guy.

Speaker 5 Platoon chief brings it up the chain of command, and we have a we request captain's mask, like not official, but we want, we request to go talk to the CO.

Speaker 5 So we go into the CEO's office, and the CO like lines us up,

Speaker 5 you know, from the chief on down, and he goes down the line, like, what's the problem? What's the problem, what's the problem? And we're all saying the same stuff. This guy is arrogant.

Speaker 5 He doesn't listen to us. It's his way or the highway.

Speaker 5 And we get done.

Speaker 5 And the CO says,

Speaker 5 you know what this sounds like to me? This sounds like a mutiny.

Speaker 5 We don't have mutinies in the Navy. We're not going to have a mutiny at my SEAL team.

Speaker 5 Guys, go figure this out.

Speaker 5 Cool.

Speaker 5 We walk out of the office, and the CO was a good guy who started to pull the thread.

Speaker 5 You know, once we left his office and talked to the training cadre and figured more about the guy's reputation and talked to the guy himself,

Speaker 5 and he realized like two or three days later, he fired him. And so, big win for the E-5 Mafia.
We're all fired up that we get this guy fired.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we

Speaker 5 proceed. And now we get our new assignment for our new platoon commander.
We find out who our new platoon commander is going to be. And our new platoon commander is a legendary SEAL

Speaker 5 who I had never met him, but I had heard his name. Everybody kind of heard his name.

Speaker 5 He had been a prior enlisted senior chief.

Speaker 5 So he went up all the way to senior chief he was at udt he was a plank owner at damneck he was at sdv he was at a boat team he was at team one he had done everything in his career everything you could possibly want as a in a leader he had combat experience from grenada so everything that you could want as a leader he comes in and and

Speaker 5 I'm thinking everyone's like fired up and I go hold on a second guys this is this is happening for a a reason. This is because we're a bunch of mutineers that got our last boss fired.

Speaker 5 And they're sending this guy down because he's going to crush us and like get us in line.

Speaker 5 And so when he shows up,

Speaker 5 this guy,

Speaker 5 I'm expecting, you know, a six foot five, 270 pound beast.

Speaker 5 And this guy shows up and he's like five,

Speaker 5 eight

Speaker 5 and maybe 150 pounds. And he looks like he's about, he's like the oldest guy I've ever seen in the SEAL teams, which was probably like, you know, 37 or something like that.

Speaker 5 Gray, graying hair and all the whole nine yards.

Speaker 5 And he walked into our platoon space. And I'm like, who is this freaking? This guy's supposed to be the legend.

Speaker 5 He walks into our platoon space and he says something along the lines of like, hey, I'm sorry to hear about your last platoon commander. But I'm not worried about it.

Speaker 5 I'm just looking forward to working with you guys.

Speaker 5 And right there, like the fact that he didn't come in and say, you know, I'm taking over, I'm in charge. There's a new sheriff in town.
He said, I'm looking forward to working with you guys.

Speaker 5 And I realized, oh, this guy is different.

Speaker 5 And then that afternoon, he's taking out the garbage, you know, sweeping up the platoon space. He's taking out the garbage.
I'm like, whoa.

Speaker 5 That's a new, that's, that's not just a new guy's job. That's like a new guy that's in trouble's job.

Speaker 5 And then a couple days later, we had our first training mission. And he put me

Speaker 5 and my running mate in charge of the mission,

Speaker 5 which

Speaker 5 was awesome and crazy. Like from, you know, hey, here's the mission.
You guys figure out how you want to do it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he just put that responsibility and gave us ownership.

Speaker 5 And so that

Speaker 5 guy,

Speaker 5 you know, when I was watching him and as I went through that platoon, he was just awesome and he made our lives awesome.

Speaker 5 And, you know, when you're, when your SEAL platoon is your life and your SEAL platoon is your religion and you have a guy like that take over and the contrast between the guy that was arrogant and didn't listen to us and held on to all the power himself, I learned so much from seeing that contrast between these two guys.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 as time went on, that's

Speaker 5 that guy left me with a lot of, a lot of lessons. And

Speaker 5 one of the most important lessons that he taught me was

Speaker 5 we were working with the Marines. Like I said, we were in Arg platoon.
So we were ships

Speaker 5 off the coast of San Diego. We're doing like the Marine Corps workup with them.
For Marine Corps workup, they got to do beach landings. Red Beach up at Camp Pendleton.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 before the beach landing goes down, SEALs, back in the old days, we went out with a lead line and slate like World War II and did a hydrographic reconnaissance and that is a gut check of an operation especially in a big sea state especially off camp pendleton in whatever month it was it's cold giant waves we're in our you know zodiacs it's such a gut check of an operation it takes five or six hours to do you're freezing the whole time And you take a, you know, a lead line and a slate.

Speaker 5 So you take a lead line and you dip it in the water and it's got little markings on it to show you how deep the water is.

Speaker 5 And then you have this slate on your arm where you're writing down how deep the water is. And you do this whole, your whole platoon is doing it at the same time.

Speaker 5 And it's just a gut check. And we get done that night.
And then you have to take all the, all the slates with all the information on them and you bring them back to the ship.

Speaker 5 And then the cartographers, which are the guys in the platoon that like take all that information, they build a chart to give to the Marine Corps. And we go through all that.

Speaker 5 And then that day, early morning. We then go out and mark the beach lanes.

Speaker 5 So we swim across the beach again and we set up the beach lanes and we mark them for the Marines and and the Marines come in and land.

Speaker 5 And so now it's like 48 hours of continuous operations, freezing cold, gut check.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we get done and get a few hours into the beach landing. And the Marine Corps decides that they didn't like their landing.

Speaker 5 And so they said, we didn't, you know, we've, we missed our timeline. We didn't bring the vehicles in the right direction, whatever the problems they had.
We're doing it again.

Speaker 5 We're reloading the ships and we're doing it again, which is like mammoth and ballsy for the Marine Corps colonel to say, like, hey, I didn't like it. We're doing it again.
This is massive.

Speaker 5 So we reload on the ships and we start the whole thing again.

Speaker 5 And we go out to do the hydrographic reconnaissance and we're in our little boat pool. You know, we launch from the big ships.
We go on the zodiacs. We get to the point.
It's been all night.

Speaker 5 And we're getting ready to get in the water. And we're in our little boat pool.

Speaker 5 And again, we just did this 48 hours ago. And someone in the platoon, it wasn't me, thank God, someone in the platoon says,

Speaker 5 are we really going to do this again?

Speaker 5 And the platoon commander just quietly says,

Speaker 5 he says, well, you know, we don't have to.

Speaker 5 But would that be the right thing to do?

Speaker 5 And not another word was said. We got in the water because

Speaker 5 you have to do the right thing. You're a frogman.
You're a SEAL. You have to do the right thing.
It's the hard choice right now. We just did it 48 hours ago.
There's been no shift in the sand.

Speaker 5 There's been no obstacles put in. But this is what we do.

Speaker 5 And for me, that statement, is it the right thing to do?

Speaker 5 Stick with me for the rest of my career. And this guy,

Speaker 5 you know, I remember getting towards the end of that platoon.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 again, when your platoon is your life

Speaker 5 and somebody makes it that good.

Speaker 5 And that was

Speaker 5 the first thought that I had about trying to become an officer because I said to myself, this guy made life so good

Speaker 5 for

Speaker 5 me and these. 16 guys in this platoon.
Someday, if I can, I want to make life good for 16 guys in a platoon.

Speaker 5 And that was the very first thought that I had of following his path. And that's what I did.
That's what I eventually did. I followed his path, and I did, always did my best to emulate him.

Speaker 5 And, you know, never be as good as him, but I always did my best to emulate his leadership.

Speaker 6 Do you think he knows this about you?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 6 Can I ask what his name is?

Speaker 5 I'd rather not say. Okay.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 he's

Speaker 5 well known in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 6 That's pretty cool.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 5 He has no, you know, he's very low profile. Very low profile guy.

Speaker 6 That's even cooler.

Speaker 5 Yep. Yeah, I mean, the best of us are, right?

Speaker 6 You know, I'm just curious.

Speaker 6 When you make a switch, you know,

Speaker 6 how fast did you see morale

Speaker 6 recharge, you know, in that platoon when you saw the leadership change and when he came in and said, I'm excited to work with you overnight overnight and like that fast instant instant

Speaker 5 yep and that was just

Speaker 5 instant

Speaker 5 and then that deployment

Speaker 5 you know again we were on board a ship

Speaker 5 we were actually

Speaker 5 we were actually

Speaker 5 staged off the coast of Africa when the Rwanda genocide was going on and

Speaker 5 we were

Speaker 5 like

Speaker 5 planning to go and getting our gear ready. And of course, we never went.

Speaker 5 This is where, you know, the face that you made earlier that were you went, like, that's how, that's the first time I felt that of like, wait a second, there's,

Speaker 5 I think it ended up being 800,000 people slaughtered in 100 days. But we were there.
We were off the coast and we didn't do anything. Why didn't we do anything?

Speaker 5 Well, what had just happened in Somalia a year prior? It was blackhawked down. It was like, yeah, they they were not willing to take that risk.
We did the same thing.

Speaker 5 There was a couple missions we got spun up for in Somalia and had our gear loaded, had 40 mic mic. I remember loading out 40 mic mic for the first time for real and being like, oh, yeah, we're going.

Speaker 5 And we didn't go. So that was probably the first time that I felt that level of frustration of,

Speaker 5 you know, why, why aren't they sending us? Like, we can help.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's the way it was, you know,

Speaker 5 definitely a letdown.

Speaker 6 How did that platoon end?

Speaker 5 That was it. You know, we went on deployment.

Speaker 5 I think we spent, we spent some ridiculous amount of time because they call them gator squares, which is when you're just going around in a circle off the coast of, we did gator squares off the coast of Rwanda or off the coast of, not off the coast of Rwanda, but off the coast of Kenya for several months.

Speaker 5 And then we did Gator squares off the coast of Somalia for another period of time. And then we went up into the Persian Gulf because at some point,

Speaker 5 I think it was this platoon. There was something going on.
Like Saddam had pushed troops, moved troops, or something going on. So we went up and did Gator Squares in the Persian Gulf for a while.

Speaker 5 So I think we were at sea like

Speaker 5 174 days out of 180 or something totally interesting like that. Yeah, just riding that ship, lifting all day, shooting off the fan tail.
Again, did we have fun while we were doing it?

Speaker 5 Yeah, dude, we had a blast. We had a blast.

Speaker 5 Also, in the couple of days that we were not on the ship, I met my wife.

Speaker 5 How'd you meet your wife? We went into Bahrain for like

Speaker 5 some training and

Speaker 5 the boys, we went out and I met

Speaker 5 my wife, who was a stewardess at the time.

Speaker 6 Really? Yeah. How'd you make the approach?

Speaker 6 Oh, man.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 squad two had spent a couple days. They went off the ship before us.

Speaker 5 And squad one still had some, whatever we were doing, some work to do.

Speaker 5 And so when we flew into Bahrain, because we flew to Bahrain, and we didn't know what Bahrain was. I mean, a country.

Speaker 5 But we didn't know that Bahrain at the time was like the Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf, meaning they had, it was like somewhat westernized. They had bars and stuff like this.

Speaker 5 And so when we, when squad of one,

Speaker 5 when we landed in the helicopters, squad two is like running to help us move our bags and stuff. We're like, what's going on? And they're like, there's girls here.
There's bars here.

Speaker 5 And one of my, one of my buddies who was very, a very shy type dude, he was in squad two and he tells me, yeah, you know, there's these girls here. There's these two girls.
I've seen them each night.

Speaker 5 And like, I know you're going to go and you're going to go talk to them. And like, they haven't even given me the time of day.
And I was like, bro, if there's girls, you know, I'll leave them alone.

Speaker 5 They're yours, you handle it.

Speaker 5 And so, we go to a we go to this bar. I know you're gonna talk to them, yeah, yeah.
Oh,

Speaker 5 I look across the bar, and there's this like shockingly, uh, stunningly beautiful girl with blonde hair and uh, like a white, freaking skin-tight, gorgeous outfit on.

Speaker 5 And so, I saw her, I just walked over to her. And, um, yeah, this is the embarrassing part: is uh,

Speaker 5 you know, when you're on a ship back then, there there wasn't internet

Speaker 5 and so we had a limited number of video cassettes there's no dvds no streaming and one of the movies that we had was ace venture a pet detective and so we had i had watched that movie at this point like hundreds of times and uh i walked up to this beautiful blonde girl And

Speaker 5 I said in like a Jim Carrey style, I said, you must be Aphrodite's goddess of love.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 she

Speaker 5 looked at me like I was an idiot and then laughed. And, you know, we started talking.
But that was the,

Speaker 5 I don't know whether it's more embarrassing that I said it to her or that she fell for it. I'm sure she's pretty embarrassed that she fell for it.
But yeah, so we ended up, you know,

Speaker 5 having a long distance relationship. And, and, um,

Speaker 5 but that's came home from that deployment and, you know, go in another platoon.

Speaker 6 Right off the bat.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you know, this was, this was the 90s, you know, just go on deployment, go on deployment as much as you can and hope that something happens. And so, so that's what I did.

Speaker 5 Just went back into another platoon, did another ARC platoon.

Speaker 5 So right back into the ARC platoon. New leadership.
Yep. Got a new platoon commander,

Speaker 5 got a new platoon chief, new platoon LPO, and all good dudes. You know, this was just, it was just...
Good time. Team 1 was a great team to grow up in for me.

Speaker 5 Other than that one officer, everyone else was just good, good people and everyone was just hardworking frogmen, you know, it was good.

Speaker 6 Anything significant on deployment three?

Speaker 5 You know, the only thing I can say was cool about that third deployment was that

Speaker 5 we did some, we did like, and I have some, I think we did one shipboarding, like a real shipboarding. And I think we ran some security operations means, And again, this is how desperate we were.

Speaker 5 We locked and loaded our weapons and drove our ribs around like the boats, the shit, the Navy ships. And I was kind of fired up.
You know? Yeah. This is literally

Speaker 5 to me it was real. We locked and loaded our weapons and then we did one shipboarding that was

Speaker 5 real. And again, in the 90s, I was freaking stoked that I got to lock and load my MP5.

Speaker 5 Because we used MP5s back then. Nice.
Yep. Got to lock and load my MP5 and

Speaker 5 board a ship and get control of the vessel and turn it over to the authorities.

Speaker 5 And it ended up, it wasn't even like a, it was just some weird situation where they were making some kind of a distress call, but people thought they might be,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it might be a hostage situation. And so, or, or some kind of, maybe not a hostage situation, but some kind of, they didn't know what was happening.
What kind of ship was it? Some random.

Speaker 5 It was a foreign ship. Yeah, yeah, just some random,

Speaker 6 you know, like a marisk or something

Speaker 5 smaller it was a pretty it was it wasn't that big they're probably they're probably uh

Speaker 5 moving dates or whatever whatever kind of produce from one of the arab countries it was nothing it was literally nothing i'm i'm like bringing it up because it's funny that i was excited about it and that's kind of how naive and and into the teams i was did you board it yeah how'd it go Cool.

Speaker 5 We took it over.

Speaker 6 What happened happened when you took it over?

Speaker 5 Just walked up.

Speaker 6 They were like, oh, we're not in distress.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we figured out that they weren't in distress.

Speaker 6 But we are now.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that we stressed them out. They were actually thankful.
I think they had some kind of problems, you know, some kind of problems with their engine or something like that.

Speaker 5 So we showed up and, you know, it was a non-opposed boarding. But, you know, we got to hook and climb on a, you know, we put our little

Speaker 5 water ski ladder. Like we had little water ski ladders.
We just hooked it on and climbed up. It was cool.
Right on. I was happy.
Happy to do something for real. You know,

Speaker 5 that's one thing

Speaker 5 the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard, one thing that's cool about the Coast Guard is no matter what's going on in the world, the Coast Guard's doing real stuff.

Speaker 5 You know, the Coast Guard's always doing saving people. You know, the ocean is mean.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 So if there's a war going on or not, if you're in the Coast Guard, you can still do some really impactful things. Of course, now they're doing all kinds of drug interdiction, too.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I love that. Have you seen that video that those guys that jump on that damn submarine and open it up? Oh, no, I haven't seen that.

Speaker 5 It's

Speaker 6 it's fucking awesome, all right. It's fucking awesome, girl.
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Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 6 So when do you, when did you move over to two?

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I got done with that platoon and I went into training sale at SEAL Team 1. And when I was a training cell at SEAL Team 1, again, I'm still like single and I taught everything.

Speaker 5 You know, we just, we do everything. Do land warfare, taught diving, comms, CQC.

Speaker 5 We'd just teach everything because we just didn't, we didn't have anything else to do. It wasn't like, hey, what do you want to do this week when you're home?

Speaker 5 No, I'll go to an island or I'll go to wherever to go make stuff happen. So I stayed in that mode.
And then again, from my second platoon, I had,

Speaker 5 there was an officer program that was called the Seaman to Admiral program. And it was started by a guy named Jim Borda, Admiral Borda.

Speaker 5 Who, if you know anything about him,

Speaker 5 he killed himself.

Speaker 6 I didn't. I don't know anything about him.

Speaker 5 So this is, again, there's all these weird threads through people's lives, but one of the weird threads through my life is that

Speaker 5 one of my biggest mentors and heroes is a guy named Colonel David Hackworth. And Colonel David Hackworth was a, wrote the book about Face, and he was a Korean War veteran and a Vietnam War veteran.

Speaker 5 He was one of the most decorated Army soldiers.

Speaker 5 And he, when he retired, he had retired because during the Vietnam War, he did an interview where he said, If we don't change the way we're fighting, we're going to lose.

Speaker 5 That's basically what he said.

Speaker 5 And he got drummed out of the army for saying that because he was a colonel, he was a senior officer. He was the first senior officer to speak out against the war

Speaker 5 and the way we were fighting it.

Speaker 5 And when he got out, he, you know, he kind of wrote books, but he was a little bit of a journalist and a little bit of a, you know,

Speaker 5 yeah, kind of like a journalist. And he reported that Admiral Borda

Speaker 5 was wearing a V on his Navy commendation medal. So a Navy comm with a V.

Speaker 5 And he said he didn't rate it because a V is an award for valor. And, you know, like that's a big deal.

Speaker 5 It doesn't stand for valor. It stands for combat distinguishing device, but it's a V.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that story came out and Admiral Borda. killed himself.

Speaker 5 But prior to that happening, Admiral Borda had started a program called the Seaman Admiral Program because Admiral Borda was a prior enlisted guy. And so he wanted to offer that to other troops.

Speaker 5 And so they started this program. And it was 50 sailors from the U.S.
Navy

Speaker 5 would get selected. And I heard about the program.
And actually, one of my officers said, hey, they've got this program coming out. You should do it.
And I did it. And

Speaker 5 I didn't get picked up, but I got slated as an alternate, which was

Speaker 5 no, there were no alternate spots that opened up because everyone took it. But I was an alternate, so I knew I had a decent chance.
And

Speaker 5 the guy actually sent a note back to my commanding officer that said, make sure this guy applies next year. And so I applied again the next year, and I got picked up for that program.

Speaker 8 No shit.

Speaker 6 I'm just curious. I mean,

Speaker 6 a lot of us know, you know, where the story's headed into Ramadi, but, you know, maybe the knowledge wasn't there.

Speaker 6 But, you know, I mean, now, you know, actually, maybe it was there because this was after your second platoon or during your second platoon.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that, you know, officers,

Speaker 6 you join the SEALs to go to war. That's what you wanted to do.

Speaker 6 Now, leadership package is presented to you. You take it.
Did you know, you know, that you would have more time in a combat role as an enlisted guy than you would as an officer?

Speaker 5 If

Speaker 5 yeah, at that juncture in my career and the way the teams were, this is 1998.

Speaker 5 It, you know, I had done three platoons, so I maybe had an LPO and a platoon chief left.

Speaker 5 So I basically looked at it as, oh, instead of doing an LPO and a platoon chief, you're going to do an AYC and an OIC. Gotcha.
And so it wasn't really,

Speaker 5 didn't really make that much of a difference to me.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 when guys ask me now, like, what, what should you do? Or what, you know, if they say, hey, I want to go in the SEAL teams, what should I do?

Speaker 5 I mean, my career couldn't have gone any better. Like, it was great.

Speaker 5 But to your point,

Speaker 5 if you want to do the trade of being a SEAL, then you should enlist.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 5 That's just how. Why did you?

Speaker 6 decide to take a leadership role.

Speaker 5 It all just boiled back to working for that platoon commander that made

Speaker 5 life in a platoon awesome. And I thought if I can make,

Speaker 5 if I can make platoon awesome, if I can make life awesome for 16 guys in a single platoon, I'm going to do it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah, that was it. That was it.

Speaker 6 The damn good reason.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 6 So when did you go?

Speaker 5 I went to officer candidate school in 1998.

Speaker 5 Yep. Early 1998.
I went to officer candidate school. And,

Speaker 5 you know, that was, you know, you're pretty much, we had, we had a decent number of prior enlisted guys in my class, but most, most of them, I'd say 70% of them were kids out of college going to OCS.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, I show up there. I'm a SEAL and the drill instructors, they're Marine Corps drill instructors down at OCS.
And

Speaker 5 great.

Speaker 5 Great interaction with the Marine Corps drill instructors. You know, I became the class president, which seemed pretty obvious, I guess.
But

Speaker 5 most of the class presidents are only class president for like three days in the first few weeks because they just they're just firing them but i became class crash president and i just stayed so i was a class president and then um went through ocs you know folding underwear

Speaker 5 literally with a ruler they have a ruler no yep um

Speaker 5 yeah so you know graduated from ocs and then went to team two Did you learn anything significant in OCS?

Speaker 5 Yeah, you know,

Speaker 5 leadership was a cool leadership challenge, going to OCS and

Speaker 5 being the class president. You make things happen, and

Speaker 5 it was cool to work. You know, it's, it's,

Speaker 5 people are,

Speaker 5 and this is another thing that, you know, I've learned along the way:

Speaker 5 people aren't going to be perfect and they're going to make mistakes, and I'm going to make mistakes. And

Speaker 5 as long as their intention isn't bad,

Speaker 5 then,

Speaker 5 you know, I get it. And also,

Speaker 5 you know, to ask someone to perform

Speaker 5 like or behave

Speaker 5 in a way that they have to surmount their innate like habits as a human being, it's a lot to ask of someone. So

Speaker 5 when someone gets mad, when someone gets frustrated, when you see someone's ego come out, when you see someone look out for themselves,

Speaker 5 I kind kind of understand that that's the way people are and i i'm not going to be mad about it i understand that people get you know there's there's

Speaker 5 people do crazy things man people do crazy things and i understand

Speaker 5 and i think that going to ocs was one of those things i said yep there's kids were trying But kids were also doing things where you go,

Speaker 5 I see what he's doing, man. He's worried about this test and he's looking out for himself right now.
And I get it. I get it.
And I think just a little bit of

Speaker 5 understanding other people's perspective. It was good for me to continue to be able to understand other people's perspective.

Speaker 5 Because if you don't understand other people's perspectives, you're going to be very judgmental.

Speaker 5 And if you're very judgmental, you're going to have a hard time interacting with other people.

Speaker 5 And when you're in a leadership position and you're having a hard time interacting with other people, that's not going to be good.

Speaker 6 Why did you

Speaker 6 why did you go to two?

Speaker 6 I'm just curious why you went East Coast versus West Coast when you could have

Speaker 6 reintegrated back in with your old guys.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean? At the time, the officer community, if you went from enlisted to officer, they made you switch coasts.

Speaker 6 Gotcha.

Speaker 5 And I wanted to go to the East Coast because I hadn't been out there. I'd spent all my time in the West Coast.
And so, and team two, I came from team one.

Speaker 5 Team one was the traditional team on the on the west coast,

Speaker 5 and the east coast from my friends that I knew out there was the same way. Team two was the traditional team, it was the old school team, you know, and that's where I wanted to go.

Speaker 5 So, I got got to go to team two.

Speaker 6 How was it as an officer? I mean, what is it like walking through those doors as a prior enlisted guide now as a as a

Speaker 6 junior officer?

Speaker 5 It was pretty much this,

Speaker 5 pretty much the same, you know. Um,

Speaker 5 when i was

Speaker 5 an e5 or an e4

Speaker 5 you know i worked with like i said i was the uh primary comms guy in my first platoon i had a really good relationship with my platoon commander my second platoon good relationship with my platoon commander and then when he got fired i had a good relationship with the guy that took over so and and i didn't

Speaker 5 it seemed like good good guys

Speaker 5 they would just treat you like you know like mutual you know. So I never really had a huge difference between the way I saw other people or the way,

Speaker 5 you know, I always just saw myself as another team guy.

Speaker 5 That's, this is my job. You know, when I was a comm guy, my job was to make sure the radios were good.

Speaker 5 When I was an officer, it's like, okay, I got to make sure that the plan is good, make sure we have contingencies.

Speaker 5 Like there were other things I was going to be in charge of, but I'm still just a part of the machine that's going to take care of this. And if one part of the machine fails, the whole machine fails.

Speaker 5 So it was fine, you know. And, you know, team two was great.
I had a

Speaker 5 bunch of good guys there, and

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 And there was, um,

Speaker 5 like you hear about the differences between the East Coast and the West Coast, and

Speaker 5 there were team guys.

Speaker 5 You know, there were, there were team guys that lived in Virginia as opposed to team guys that lived in

Speaker 5 San Diego and a bunch of great dudes.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 ended up almost immediately deploying to Germany.

Speaker 5 The chief of my second platoon was the master chief in Germany. And they had been calling back for ops support.

Speaker 5 They wanted a JO to go over to Germany to help with ops support. And he told me this later.
They were in like a morning meeting and they said, yeah, we finally got ops support coming.

Speaker 5 from

Speaker 5 from the beach.

Speaker 5 And they go, well, who is it? And they go,

Speaker 5 it's an Ensign Willink.

Speaker 5 And the ops officer is like, what are you talking about? They're sending us an Ensign. Like, we need an Ops guy.
And the Master Chief goes, hold on a second. What's that guy's name?

Speaker 5 He goes, Ensign Willink. He goes, We want this guy.
And so I showed up.

Speaker 5 And again, there's my old platoon chief, who was like a great guy who had a great relationship with, like, awesome friend of mine. He's the command master chief.

Speaker 5 And so I show up and develop a great relationship with the commanding officer there and the executive officer there. Just and the ops chief there became awesome friends.

Speaker 5 It was just great, you know, just great opportunities and work with these guys that are, again, man, just dedicated to the teams, you know, just dedicated to the teams.

Speaker 5 And I think that's the main thing is, you know, you get guys that

Speaker 5 the best, the good guys, their commitment is to the teams. And so you got a bunch of guys that are just committed to the teams and want to do a good job.
And that's so went over to Germany and

Speaker 5 we actually like did some little mini deployments from Germany

Speaker 5 that were really cool and learned a lot. And my, the skipper was a great guy and

Speaker 5 he ended up, you know, becoming the officer detailer later, which, you know, again,

Speaker 5 it's beneficial. And

Speaker 5 the

Speaker 5 SEAL Team 2 executive officer, again, developed a great relationship with him.

Speaker 5 Just a good guy that,

Speaker 5 you know, I was a hard worker. And that he moved from group from unit two.
So I was with the XO in Germany, and then he becomes the XO at Team Two.

Speaker 5 So like

Speaker 5 when I get back there, I immediately get back put into a platoon. So I do a platoon at SEAL Team 2 and a strike platoon off the aircraft carrier.
Right on.

Speaker 5 Right on.

Speaker 5 Which was, again, working with a lot of assets and going over and doing VBSS over in the Persian Gulf, which again, at the time was a real thing.

Speaker 6 Did you get a lot of leadership experience as as the opso in Germany or or was that kind of just

Speaker 6 you know getting you ready?

Speaker 5 As far as leadership of troops no but understanding of the bigger picture yes

Speaker 5 because the guy that I work for there again he's a friend of mine and just a great guy

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 he he had you know, a lot of experience himself at the time, right? Not experience like guys have now, but at the time he had experience.

Speaker 5 And like there was one time we were, we were on a big exercise, a big joint exercise, and we, we like

Speaker 5 put together a talk, tactical operations center. What's interesting about this is, man, you think of a talk now, like you think of what a mobile talk would look like now.

Speaker 5 I'm not kidding. Well, I put together a mobile talk and I was the like the the ops officer for this operation, this training operation.
And I had the talk in my backpack.

Speaker 5 It was like three radios, two maps, some magic markers, some pens. Like, that's what we rolled with.
And that's what we set up, you know, that's what we did.

Speaker 5 But there was a time where there's a platoon in the field and there, there's multiple elements that are getting ready to do target hits.

Speaker 5 And we're waiting for like a pro word from this platoon that's supposed to be set up. And

Speaker 5 we're waiting. And I go, sir, can I pimp them for this pro word? And he's like, give them another minute.
And I was like, Roger that.

Speaker 5 And 45 seconds later, the guys passed the pro word. And it just reminded me that, like, those guys out in the field, you got to listen to what they're doing.

Speaker 5 You got to give them the benefit of the doubt. And that's what my boss was telling me.
Like, hey, those guys got, they're not sitting in the talk right now.

Speaker 5 They're not, they, they, they're making decisions. So just good experience from that perspective.
And seeing, you know,

Speaker 5 the way the, the SOC worked was good.

Speaker 6 So when did your, I mean, if this happened, which I think it would happen, when did, you know, as enlisted guys, we always have a lot of gripes and bitches and shit like that about, you know, the leadership.

Speaker 6 And so, you know, kind of where I'm going with this is when did your mind kind of expand and realize,

Speaker 6 you know, what the O position is and, okay, like there's a lot more to this than I ever gave it credit for as an enlisted guy. Yep.

Speaker 5 That happened.

Speaker 5 It happened on that deployment, right? And I think where, I think what was good was I was bilingual,

Speaker 5 meaning I spoke two languages.

Speaker 6 Well, I mean, Mustangs, prior enlisted officers have fucking tremendous amount of respect in the enlisted man's eyes.

Speaker 5 So since I was bilingual and I could speak two languages, and I had to learn the officer language, but I spoke, I was fluent in e-dog language. I mean, I was completely fluent.
I was e-dog mafia.

Speaker 5 If you go talk to anybody that was at SEAL Team 1 in between 1991 and 1998, I was a made man in the SEAL Team 1 E5 Mafia, 100%. There's no one that would ever deny that.

Speaker 5 And so I spoke fluent E5 Mafia language.

Speaker 5 And then as I started to learn the officer language, what I think I was able to do was translate what was happening with the officers to the e-dogs, which I think a lot of times gets missed, to this day gets missed, because

Speaker 5 it really is two different perspectives that are happening. And there's a lot of things that happen at the officer level that don't ever get told to the e-dogs.

Speaker 5 And that does create frustration and angst amongst the troops because they don't understand what the hell is going on. And when that happens, man, they get pissed.

Speaker 5 And I got pissed when I was, you know, when I was an e-dog and we weren't being told what was happening, we're freaking pissed. You know, I tell this one story where we were on the ship.

Speaker 5 This is my third platoon. And we got told, hey, you guys are going to launch your Zodiacs off the ship.
We go, cool. So we drag all the stuff upstairs.
It takes an hour and a half.

Speaker 5 Got to bring the fuel up, which means

Speaker 5 you got to notify the fire party and they got to set up all their stuff so you can bring the fuel up to the top deck. So you can launch the boats inside the ribs.

Speaker 5 And two or three hours into this, they're like, actually, you're going to launch off of the well deck. Oh, bring everything back downstairs.
Another two or three hours.

Speaker 5 Later, they say, oh, you're going to use helicopters. Now we got to break all that.
So we're getting whipped around the whole time.

Speaker 5 And this is, by the way, someone just saying, oh, why don't they use the helicopters? Okay, cool. I'll tell them.
And they think it's just like this, but it's not.

Speaker 5 So I always remembered what it was like. I also always remember, you know, when I was in STT, SEAL tactical training, we had to walk in every position in the platoon.

Speaker 5 So sometimes you'd be point man, sometimes you'd be the PL, sometimes you'd be the radio man, sometimes you'd be a machine gunner. And I remember

Speaker 5 luckily or unluckily for me, we did a long patrol and I was rear security. And I had no idea where we were.
I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea where we were going to stop again.

Speaker 5 If we got contacted, I might as well have just like started running around like a chicken with my head cut off because I didn't know where the rally ports were.

Speaker 5 I didn't even know where the target was. And I hated that feeling.
And I always said to myself, I am going to make sure that I keep the guys informed of what is happening. That is so important.

Speaker 5 It gets dropped all the time because you get focused on like, well, hold on, how much longer to the next? This is the platoon commander talking. He's only talking to the plant man.

Speaker 5 And so now when he stops talking to the rest of the platoon, they lose track of what's happening and it's just a cluster.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 even as an enlisted guy, I realized that

Speaker 5 you have to

Speaker 5 make a concerted effort to explain to the guys what is happening. And if you fail to do that, they'll have no idea and you won't know that they don't know.
And that's a disaster.

Speaker 5 So now when you move me up into this officer position, Now I'm saying, oh yeah, I bet the platoon has no idea what, why they're having the Hilos move to this position or why why they're being told they have to stand down from this operation or because they don't.

Speaker 5 They don't get told, oh, the chargé de affaires in this country just said that we can't do it. And here's the risk that they aren't willing to take.
They just hear, hey, it's a kank bird.

Speaker 5 And they go, so we just spent four hours doing this and now it's just nothing. But they don't understand why.

Speaker 5 And so it's incumbent upon the leadership to make sure that everyone in the chain of command understands not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it and why these changes get these changes happen.

Speaker 5 Because as you know, these changes happen all the time. They happen all the time.
And so, yes, I think that one of the things that I had the capability of doing is I was bilingual. I talked E5

Speaker 5 and eventually I learned how to speak officer as well. And I could also bring the problems at the E5 level to my boss and explain to them in a way that they could understand

Speaker 5 that, hey, when you tell my guys,

Speaker 5 we're not allowed to explosively breach anymore, let me tell you what that means.

Speaker 5 And then they say, oh, okay, well, I didn't understand that. Thank you.
Or when I get told, hey, you need to have this number of Iraqis with you, friendly Iraqi soldiers with you on every operation,

Speaker 5 I need to explain to my boss what that means on the ground. And if you have a good relationship, which I always had a good relationship with my boss.

Speaker 5 So when I would, I would explain something to my boss, my boss would listen to me. My boss would, because also I wouldn't complain about stuff.
Like I wasn't going to complain.

Speaker 5 If I was going to my boss and telling them that something didn't make sense, they would listen to me because I would only say it if it was true.

Speaker 5 And so I just developed that good amount of trust with my chain of command and

Speaker 5 it would work out well. So yes, as I got

Speaker 5 into that officer role, I started to see, oh, okay, I can understand why. Oh, if the troops would have known that it was the

Speaker 5 Commodore of the ARG that now wanted to use helicopters because it's something they have to get checked off the box before they're allowed to go on deployment, if the guys understood that, they'd be like, Oh, yeah, well, we got to get qualities done too.

Speaker 5 And this is the quals that they got to get. Cool, let's make it happen.

Speaker 5 But a lot of times, you know, we fail as leaders to let people know. And then when I got to

Speaker 5 in the platoon at SEAL team, too,

Speaker 5 again, now we're on a strike strike aircraft we got a lot of assets we're we're with you know a carrier air group which is a an awesome like projection of power unbeatable projection of power but we're a little cog in that machine and helping the the platoon understand what we're doing why we're doing it was beneficial why do you think that the

Speaker 6 Maybe they are doing it, but they definitely weren't doing it when I was in.

Speaker 6 Not to, I mean, it seems like

Speaker 6 with with what you just described, prior enlist, Mustangs, prior enlisted going to officer, I mean, that's that could alleviate a lot of communication issues within the military.

Speaker 6 Why do you think that they aren't, if they aren't,

Speaker 6 motivating people, enlisted guys, to become officers? Why aren't they, why aren't they giving more billets? I mean, this, this seems like a,

Speaker 6 it could be a key component to a

Speaker 6 250-year communication issue.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 There are,

Speaker 5 you know, it's, it's with prior enlisted officers,

Speaker 5 some of the best officers I ever worked for or worked with were prior enlisted officers. Some of the worst officers I worked with were prior enlisted officers.

Speaker 5 So I think it's more of an educational thing and more of an understanding that explaining to people that, hey, man, this communication that goes up and down the chain of command is, it needs to happen.

Speaker 5 It's a real thing. And when your platoon is complaining about something, you should listen to what they have to say because they're doing it for a reason.

Speaker 5 And of course, if you're asking me if they should take more prior enlisted guys and make them into officers, absolutely. That's awesome.
I wish they would do that all the time. It's a great move.

Speaker 6 Anything significant on the strike deployment or the MARC, excuse me?

Speaker 5 It was a strike deployment. It wasn't a MARC, but it was, you know, it was cool.
We did VBSS overseas. Again, this was like when doing VBSS was as real as it gets.

Speaker 5 Get to lock and load your weapon and board a ship and get control of the ship. And it's

Speaker 5 as good as you could hope for.

Speaker 5 We took down a big Russian ship,

Speaker 5 which was at the time was like on CNN.

Speaker 5 Wait, what? We took down, there was a Russian ship that was smuggling oil. And so

Speaker 5 we boarded that ship and got control over it and turned it over to the authorities. So, you know, that was kind of a cool op to do in the 90s.
you know. In the 90s, some things that

Speaker 5 aren't that big of a deal seemed pretty cool.

Speaker 6 What year? So what year is this?

Speaker 5 That was a millennium deployment. So we were on, we were deployed 99 to 2000.
It was like the winter of 99, 2000.

Speaker 6 Where were you when September 11th, 2001 happened?

Speaker 5 So I get home from that deployment and I have to go to college because I didn't have any college. And again, this is why they changed that whole officer program that I did.

Speaker 5 I was a, I was in E5 at SEAL team one. I went to 13 weeks of OCS, no college.
And then I went to

Speaker 5 SEAL team two as an officer. So it was awesome.
But when I got done, they're like, yo, you, you don't have any college. You have to go to college to be an officer.

Speaker 5 And I was like, oh, no, I don't need to go. I can go when I'm already online.
I'm already doing the job. And the officer detailer was like, no, no, you have to go to college.

Speaker 5 So I went back to San Diego to go to college, University of San Diego. And I did that primarily because of jiu-jitsu.
I knew I was going to be,

Speaker 5 I knew I was going to be having some time during this three years of going to college. So I went back out to San Diego.
So I get my own training, get with my old training partners and stuff.

Speaker 5 And then, so I got back out there in 2000. And I'm in the middle of college when September 11th happens.
And when September 11th happened,

Speaker 5 my commanding officer

Speaker 5 or the commanding officer of Unit 2, who I was deployed with as an ops O,

Speaker 5 not the Ops O, but as an ops J-O,

Speaker 5 he was the detailer and I was friends with him. And I called him and I said, can you please get me back to a SEAL team right now?

Speaker 5 And he said, Jonko, this war is going to last a long time.

Speaker 5 Finish college. And I said, sir, I can finish when I can do online, like whatever.
And he goes, finish college. This war is going to last a a long time.
And I didn't believe him at all.

Speaker 5 But he was right.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I always want to make sure I make this point. He told me later that everybody called him.
Everybody that wasn't at a team, everyone called him. I was just one of the other guys that called him.

Speaker 5 It wasn't like I was extra motivated and I was just as motivated as everybody wanted to get back to a team.

Speaker 5 And so he sent me, when I finished college 2003,

Speaker 5 again, like awesome. He sent me to SEAL Team 7.
SEAL Team 7 was like the next deploying team. I got to SEAL Team 7, and my old XO from SEAL Team 2 was the commanding officer.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he welcomed me aboard. And then a week or two later, he fired a platoon commander and put me in charge.
Oh, shit.

Speaker 5 And so.

Speaker 5 And we were slated to go to Iraq.

Speaker 5 And we left, I don't know, a few months later. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Actually, probably quite a few months later because I graduated in like June, July, showed up at the team, and we went on deployment in September.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 that's,

Speaker 5 you know, good relationships with people, work hard. And,

Speaker 5 you know, he had a platoon commander that wasn't doing a good job. So he put me in there.

Speaker 6 This was in 2003. 2003.

Speaker 5 Eternally grateful. Yep.

Speaker 6 So were you on the invasion?

Speaker 5 No. So SEAL team.

Speaker 5 SEAL TEAM 3 did the invasion. SEAL TEAM 5 had kind of established Baghdad, and then I went in and relieved them.

Speaker 5 How was it? It was the best thing ever.

Speaker 5 It was awesome. I mean, and there was a...

Speaker 6 So you've done basically

Speaker 5 five deployments? Yeah, so this was my

Speaker 5 fifth deployment. No, my

Speaker 5 No, this was my sixth deployment. Sixth deployment? Yes, this is my sixth deployment.
Yep.

Speaker 6 I mean, dude, what's it feel? I mean, five fucking deployments of, I mean, you did some stuff, but now you're... Yeah, yeah.
9-11 happens. We've invaded Iraq and you're in fucking Baghdad.

Speaker 6 I think you're in Baghdad.

Speaker 5 Yes, I'm in Baghdad, and I'm in heaven. Yep.
I was

Speaker 5 totally stoked.

Speaker 5 And for, so there was actually like, there was a, I had a sister platoon at SEAL Team 7

Speaker 5 and they went to Baghdad and then we replaced them in like, or we kind of like, it was weird. We kind of replaced them within weeks.
Like we started augmenting them and then kind of replaced them.

Speaker 5 And after a little while, like after a month or so,

Speaker 5 we were the only platoon.

Speaker 5 We were the only SEAL platoon in Iraq. Holy shit.
For a short period of time. And so, you know, we were just doing, you know, what the Team 5 guys had established.

Speaker 5 And then my sister platoon at SEAL Team 7 had kept up the pace. And it was just, you know,

Speaker 5 Baghdad's squat is pretty much what it was. It was get intel from various sources, find out where an enemy was located, and then go get them.

Speaker 5 And we, we had a lot of targets and we got to do a ton of it. And it was,

Speaker 5 it was like what it was what we all joined the teams to do, you know? So it was awesome.

Speaker 6 Do you remember your first operation where you had an engagement?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Actually,

Speaker 5 the first time I left the wire in Baghdad,

Speaker 5 the troop SEA

Speaker 5 was a friend of mine. Like we were E5 mobsters at team one.

Speaker 5 And he had been there for like a month. And so we show show up and he goes,

Speaker 5 there was like a mortar attack or something. And he was like, hey, go take your platoon and go like check these roads in this place.
And

Speaker 5 we went out, you know, we went out the wire and like checked these roads and drove to here, drove to there. And then we came back.
And

Speaker 5 he was like, you good? And I was like, yeah, yeah. He was like, that was just kind of a shakeout.
And I was like, good call, dude.

Speaker 5 You know, like, it was him saying, hey, like, there's nothing, there's nothing going to happen.

Speaker 5 Like, we're going to, we're not sending you on a wild goose chase, but, you know, go to these couple points and check them for whatever.

Speaker 5 So it was just a good break-in of, you know, getting the guys, getting the platoon, getting the vehicles loaded up. Went out, drove around outside the wire.

Speaker 5 That was kind of the first time leaving the wire with my nods on.

Speaker 5 The first time we got shot at, I was in a Humvee and I'm looking at the Humvee in front of me. And I'm like, I see like sparks.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, why, why, why is someone smoking? Like, why is someone flicking their, throwing their cigarettes out of the vehicle? And I'm like, oh,

Speaker 5 those are bullets, aren't they?

Speaker 5 And sure enough,

Speaker 5 one of the guys,

Speaker 5 one of the guys got caught like a ricochet in the head, totally good to go. It like entered his, went through his skin and then like kind of wrapped around his skull.
And

Speaker 5 but he was fine. You know, we, we, we still took him to Charlie Med, but and then, you know, we

Speaker 5 that was kind of like the first time, and we got, you know,

Speaker 5 that deployment was relatively chill.

Speaker 6 Um, I mean, what's that feel like, though? I mean, five deployments, you join to go to war when you're 18,

Speaker 6 don't see any.

Speaker 6 Now you're in charge of your platoon straight after college, after 9-11, and you're fucking leading a platoon

Speaker 6 into battle in Iraq.

Speaker 6 I mean, that's fucking,

Speaker 6 did it even hit you? Was it surreal at the time, or are you just so in it? You're like, all right, this is the deal, let's go.

Speaker 5 I knew.

Speaker 5 Like, I knew.

Speaker 5 I think I'm very lucky because I was older, you know, I think I was, what, 33, 32 or something like that point. So I knew how rare this was.
I thought the war was going to be over in a couple months.

Speaker 5 Like, I was very, very grateful for everything that we got to do. And I knew that every night, every night I was, you know, like

Speaker 5 playing the Super Bowl game every night, you know, like that's what I felt like. I was very grateful the whole time.
And,

Speaker 5 and I had a great bunch of guys, great bunch of guys like that were just hard charging. And

Speaker 5 just, it was awesome. It was, it was great.
And we, we did a lot of direct action missions, you know, and so we did, We kind of got close a couple times

Speaker 5 to the idea of sniper overwatching.

Speaker 5 We did it a couple times,

Speaker 5 but it kind of left an imprint of my mind of what capability we had.

Speaker 5 But we were primarily just a DA force, and we would just roll out and hit targets. And I mean,

Speaker 5 it's.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't know if there's anything else I can say to make it, for me to explain how happy I was.

Speaker 5 But that to me was just the most awesome thing.

Speaker 6 What about the pressure? I mean, I've always thought about, you know, I mean,

Speaker 6 I always felt a lot of pressure just going out the door, you know, do the right thing, you know. But I mean, what is the pressure like?

Speaker 6 And you don't really have any other reference because you hadn't gone on. any kinetic operations until this point.

Speaker 6 But I mean, what is the pressure like as an officer leading 16, 20 guys into battle at the beginning of a war where there's not a lot of lessons learned, there's not a lot of new tactics developed yet?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 The pressure I felt was just wanting to do a good job, you know, not wanting to do anything, not wanting to,

Speaker 5 I wouldn't say not make any mistakes because I was not a risk-averse person, you know, like I recognized that. If you roll out on an operation, things can go wrong.

Speaker 5 And I understood that and I understood that risk.

Speaker 5 So, but yeah, you know, you, you, you worried about guys getting wounded. You worried about guys getting killed.
Um, a little bit of a very distant idea to me, guys getting wounded or killed.

Speaker 5 It could happen, I thought, but it was, man, this is early in the war. The IED threat was relatively small.
We would

Speaker 5 drive very aggressively at night on nods. We got ambushed a few times, but it would like

Speaker 5 no factor. RPGs going over the, you know, lucky.
RPGs going over the convoy, you know, machine gun fire going between vehicles. Like we, we, we got, we got lucky.
God's a frogman.

Speaker 5 But it was still a little bit distant to me that

Speaker 5 someone could get wounded or killed. It was there, but not,

Speaker 5 we, we really dominated the battle space. Like coalition forces dominated the battle space.
And so I didn't have that much of that kind of pressure in my head.

Speaker 6 What about the pressure of

Speaker 6 winning your men over?

Speaker 6 Winning their trust. Winning.

Speaker 6 I mean, you want to be the fucking leader that everybody wants to follow into battle. You know, that stuff, I would imagine, has to be going through your head.
Am I making the right calls?

Speaker 6 How do my men, I mean, we talked about perception earlier, and that's a conversation I want to bring up, you know, more towards the end.

Speaker 6 But, you know, I mean, are you worried about the guy's perception of how you're leading

Speaker 5 these guys are my bros and these guys are my friends and

Speaker 5 when I took over that platoon we were

Speaker 5 the first like the first

Speaker 5 maybe the first or second thing we did was a nighttime OTB in San Diego pilot recovery training operation so

Speaker 5 I had done three shipboard deployments, man. I know how to do over the beach.

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 we go over the beach and one of our boats like

Speaker 5 capsizes or die or the motor dies i forget which i think it just the motor died

Speaker 5 and we're we get the pilot and we come back and now we got a down boat

Speaker 5 and um

Speaker 5 the guys who when i took over the platoon Some of the guys were kind of friends with the old officer. And so there was a little bit of that.
And some of the guys didn't like the old officer.

Speaker 5 And so there was a little bit of a friction, right?

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 i so this boat's down and the guys like we're in a perimeter and the guys like dude we got to call admin we got to call the trucks down here and get this boat towed back and i was like we're not doing that and they're like well what are we going to do and i go this is what we're doing and i gave them the plan and i

Speaker 5 i put on my fins and

Speaker 5 and took the boat and i was like hey guys i'm gonna you guys are gonna paddle this boat they're like they're looking at me like i'm crazy like paddling a boat through the surf, like this is buds.

Speaker 5 And I said, we're going to, and as soon as we get like deep enough, we'll set up a tow line. And we did have a good tow, long tow line.

Speaker 5 And I remember I put, beatered my weapon into the boat and I got in the water. And I'm keeping the bow into the wave so we don't flip over.
And then we get the other boat comes in. I get those lines.

Speaker 5 secured and then they start towing us out and then the guys drag me back into the boat but like one of the guys in that platoon was like, after you did that that night, like, we were doing anything for you.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 I kind of, they had kind of said, like, oh, we got to call admin. And I was like, no, we're not calling admin.
We're going to make this happen. But there was all kinds of stuff like that.

Speaker 5 Like, you step up and do the, do the right thing. And yeah, these guys are my friends.
You know why these guys listen to me? Because I listen to them. You know why these guys treated me with respect?

Speaker 5 Because I treated them with respect. You know why they trusted me? Because I trusted them.
And when you, that's what you do. That's, that's how it is.
And that was the attitude that I had.

Speaker 5 Well, I wasn't really concerned about that. These guys were my guys, and I trusted them.
They trusted me.

Speaker 6 And you didn't know any of them prior to you coming into that platoon.

Speaker 5 I knew the platoon chief. Yep.
The platoon chief was another, you know, team one E5 mafia guy from back in the day. So it was great.
It was great to have that instant connection.

Speaker 5 But I don't believe I knew one single other person in that platoon because I'd been out on the East Coast and then I'd been in college. So I don't think I knew once the sister platoon,

Speaker 5 my sister platoon,

Speaker 5 my old running mate, the guy that told me, hey, you're not the only one that lost Grizz, he was the LPO in my sister platoon.

Speaker 8 No shit.

Speaker 5 And I got to do some ops with him. Nice.

Speaker 5 Which was as good as it gets.

Speaker 6 Nice.

Speaker 6 What would you say your most memorable experience of that deployment is?

Speaker 5 There were a few things that happened where you

Speaker 5 like

Speaker 5 there was the CPA in Najaf was being overrun.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we needed they needed QRF. Najaf is five hours away by Humvee.

Speaker 5 And they need a QRF.

Speaker 5 And they called us. And I'm like, hey, there's like three other units.
between us and Najaf.

Speaker 5 And they're like, I don't know, but you guys are going. And

Speaker 5 I remember my the SEA of that troop, who, like I said, was the guy that was like, hey, go on this mission, which was kind of for no reason. He was a, he's a great friend of mine to this day.
But

Speaker 5 I came out of like the talk and I was like, hey, guys,

Speaker 5 load up all the rockets, load up all the ammunition you can fit in the trucks. This is what's happening.
We're going to QRF. We're going into Joff.
CPA's been overrun.

Speaker 5 And we, 20 minutes later, were jocked up. And that guy, that guy hugged me.

Speaker 5 And I was like, hmm, this is interesting.

Speaker 5 Because he was, he usually went with us, but he wasn't going with us. And so he like hugged me.
And I was like, hmm,

Speaker 5 interesting. Long story, no big deal.
We got the Najaf. The, the QR, they didn't need a QRF.

Speaker 5 The,

Speaker 5 I think, I want to say Blackwater actually came in with their Hilo. Is that what that?

Speaker 6 I was wondering if that's what that was. It was.

Speaker 5 So we went down there. We spent the night, didn't do anything, and then drove back.
But, you know, I remember thinking, hmm,

Speaker 5 that's interesting. I'm getting this hug from my bro.
We ended up doing, towards the end of the deployment,

Speaker 5 there was one of Sadr's, Mukhtar Sadr was the leader of the Shiites in Iraq.

Speaker 5 And we,

Speaker 5 coalition forces, had been targeting him for months. Our whole deployment, he was being targeted.
But

Speaker 5 they didn't want to hit him because they didn't know what the reaction would be.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 just before we were going home,

Speaker 5 we got tasked with hitting one of his top lieutenants.

Speaker 5 And it was a big operation, a lot of visibility on it. And we went down, and that was also, I want to say that wasn't the jaw.
Yeah, that wasn't the jaw. We went down, we captured this guy.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 when we came back,

Speaker 5 it was kind of, once it got out, it was kind of the beginning or one of the triggering points of the true insurgency in Iraq.

Speaker 5 Like I woke up that morning and there was like, you could look out on the, from our base and you could see like fires from the highways, vehicles were being ID'd and stuff.

Speaker 5 And it was, it was the beginning of the real formation of the insurgency, which I wasn't really quite 100% sure on.

Speaker 5 But you could see something was changed. Something just changed and you could feel it.

Speaker 5 And I don't think America was ready for that. We weren't.

Speaker 5 You know, we'd already made all kinds of mistakes, you know, standing down the bath, the bath soldiers and the army, sounding down the Iraqi army.

Speaker 5 Like all, we made all kinds of mistakes out of arrogance as a country.

Speaker 5 But I don't really don't think that we saw like, oh, damn,

Speaker 5 this is about to get really, really bad. And that was in the spring of 2004.
And that is truly when things started to spiral. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 6 Well, Jocko, I know it's getting ready to get heavy with tasking or Bruiser.

Speaker 6 Let's just take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll pick up right here.

Speaker 5 Let's do it, man.

Speaker 2 A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now.

Speaker 2 And it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence.

Speaker 6 the division.

Speaker 2 I partnered with this production company called Ironclad and we're doing an eight-part audio series on PSYOPS, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a psyop on its own people.

Speaker 2 And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen.

Speaker 2 You can head over to psyopshow.com, order it today. I think you're going to get a lot out of this.
Who's pulling the strings?

Speaker 5 Who's pulling them?

Speaker 6 All right, Jocko, we're back from the break. It's about to get real heavy here, but

Speaker 6 this is where you go to SEAL Team 3, take Task Unit Bruiser is the Task Unit Commander, correct?

Speaker 5 Not quite.

Speaker 6 Not quite. Because

Speaker 5 as I'm finishing my deployment

Speaker 5 with SEAL Team 7,

Speaker 5 my commanding officer, again, who is my ops officer in

Speaker 5 Unit 2, my

Speaker 5 executive officer at SEAL Team 2, now he's my commanding officer.

Speaker 5 And he says, the last thing I do as a commanding officer is I'm going to make sure that you become the Admiral's aide.

Speaker 5 No one wants to be the Admiral's aide, of course, because,

Speaker 5 you know, it's an administrative job.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 there's a reason why he wanted me to go be the Admiral's aide. And it is because at that point in time, at that moment, I was going to come straight off the battlefield.
You know, this is 2003, 2004.

Speaker 5 There hadn't been that many platoons gone over there. I'm going to go straight off the battlefield and work directly for the admiral.
And that's what they want. They want somebody that has

Speaker 5 fresh combat experience that can tell him

Speaker 5 what is happening.

Speaker 5 And I, you know, I did all kinds of excuses and tap dancing to try and get out of it, but uh, it was, it was happening. So, and and you know, it's part of it is it's very

Speaker 5 outstanding professional development because you're going to see things that you would not see

Speaker 5 without doing it.

Speaker 5 So, I, that's what I get. I get home uh from deployment and I check in to be the Admiral's aide.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 it was definitely a wake-up call because,

Speaker 5 you know, we always, we had a thing was if avoid wearing a uniform at all costs. If you have to wear it, make it perfect, right? That was kind of like a thing at SEAL team one.

Speaker 5 And I was really good at avoiding wearing a uniform. Like I didn't like to wear a shirt at work, you know, as little as possible.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the first trip I went on with the Admiral, I think I had four uniforms with me. Like khakis for the Pentagon, camis for Fort Bragg,

Speaker 5 dress blues for a ceremony, and civilian clothes.

Speaker 5 That's like one trip.

Speaker 6 Damn.

Speaker 5 So I check in to be the Admiral and,

Speaker 5 you know, it was definitely an eye-opener of what's happening in the community and what's going on and what's happening at that

Speaker 5 level.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was, yeah, a massive learning experience. And again,

Speaker 5 you know, I had the E5 Mafia language down.

Speaker 5 Now I learned the officer language and now it was learning, I don't know what to call the next level up of officer language, but it's like

Speaker 5 flag officer language.

Speaker 5 Because for that year, I was in the Pentagon. I was, you know, and you'd be, it's weird when you're an aide, it's kind of like you don't exist, but you do.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.

Speaker 5 My boss was a great guy. He was,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 just a great guy, nice guy, cared about me a lot. But like when you're in a room with a four-star general, like, the aides are kind of these subhumans in the back, but you're listening to everything.

Speaker 5 You're seeing everything. and so it was a very educational experience as to what's happening at those levels you know you're going to meetings at the pentagon um jsock

Speaker 6 like just really educational a lot of inside baseball going on

Speaker 5 yeah and you know for

Speaker 5 for us in the seal teams

Speaker 5 we don't realize often how much visibility we have, especially back then. Look, I guess now it's pretty obvious we have a lot of visibility.

Speaker 5 But back then, you know, you wouldn't think that an E5 in a SEAL platoon doing something dumb on Liberty

Speaker 5 would

Speaker 5 get a phone call

Speaker 5 to the Admiral from

Speaker 5 the vice CNO or the CNO or the SEC nav. Like these things are a big deal.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so that's what I learned. I learned the amount of scrutiny that we're under.

Speaker 5 The SEAL Team 5 guys,

Speaker 5 they had a,

Speaker 5 someone in that platoon uploaded digital pictures of their deployment to a website that was supposed to be secure that got breached. And so these pictures went out over the internet.
And

Speaker 5 the pictures, so I'm there when the CNO is calling the admiral to ask him about each of these individual pictures. What is going on in these pictures?

Speaker 5 And implied in that was like, what is wrong with your troops? Example, there's an image of a guy, an Iraqi guy. He's being held by the jaw and he's got

Speaker 5 a pistol. to his head with a flashlight in his eyes.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 CNO is like, What is going on in this picture?

Speaker 5 And the Admiral hits the mute button. And I'm like, Sir, they don't like to have their picture taken.
So you got to face their picture to the camera. You got to face their face into the camera.

Speaker 5 And the light is so that you can illuminate the camera. You can illuminate the picture.
That's why the closest flashlight you got is his pistol. That's what he's doing.
Boom.

Speaker 5 Admiral tells him what's going on.

Speaker 5 Next picture.

Speaker 5 A guy with a sandbag over his head, cuffed, blood coming out of the sandbag.

Speaker 5 What's going on with this picture? Hey, sir, that guy resisted. He got subdued.
He probably could have been shot, but our troops are disciplined. And instead of shooting him, they captured him.

Speaker 5 They had to subdue him. They used minimum force required.
And now they've got him handled. And now they take a picture of it.

Speaker 5 So, like these little things where I realized that's the level of scrutiny we're under.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's why, again,

Speaker 5 when I became became a troop commander, being able to translate and explain to the guys what is going on and what the visibility is and how much it matters what you do

Speaker 5 as an E4, as an E5 in a SEAL platoon, it has a strategic impact for

Speaker 5 the nation in some cases. And that was really clear with like Abu Ghraib.

Speaker 5 but also for the SEAL community. And if we are not professional, we don't get work.
And that's not,

Speaker 5 I'm not saying that for the benefit of the SEAL teams. I'm saying that for the benefit of the country because SEALs are good at what we do.

Speaker 5 And if we're not getting jobs that we should be getting because of

Speaker 5 these kind of ancillary actions, it's bad for the country. It's bad for our warfighting capabilities.
So I learned a lot about that when I was, when I was the Admiral's aide. And

Speaker 5 there's another, there's another couple of huge cases. There was,

Speaker 5 there was, you know, I got to hear about what was happening from a legal perspective. Like there were some guys that

Speaker 5 shot someone.

Speaker 5 This wasn't SEALs. This was army guys, regular army guys, conventional army guys, shot someone.
in south of Baghdad somewhere. And I don't quote me on the story, but they had planted a gun on him

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 they were going to jail, like they were under trial for murder.

Speaker 5 And I just would hear that and go, What were these guys thinking? You know, why would they be doing this? And the immediate answer is,

Speaker 5 well, because they're afraid they're going to get in trouble, right? Oh, they're afraid that the ROE didn't allow them to shoot this guy, and now they're trying to cover it up.

Speaker 5 The reality of this scenario is the ROE,

Speaker 5 if someone is,

Speaker 5 I'm trying to think of the exact terminology, reasonable certainty that they're committing

Speaker 5 hostile intent, not a hostile act, hostile intent. So if I think you're going to do something and I'm reasonably certain of that, I can shoot you,

Speaker 5 whether you have a gun or not.

Speaker 5 And yet we have guys, this particular case, these guys were getting in trouble because

Speaker 5 they planted a gun. They didn't need to do that.
So that was like another just learning about how much scrutiny the military.

Speaker 5 So, like, I initially saw, like, oh, there's the, the, the SEAL teams is under scrutiny. But then I realized it's not just the SEAL teams.
There's a lot of scrutiny on everything that we do.

Speaker 5 And the Abu Ghraib scandal

Speaker 5 that caused so many people

Speaker 5 that fueled the insurgency so much. And I saw that it fueled the insurgency.
So what a couple, you know, 18, 19, 20-year-old privates were doing in a prison fueled the insurgency.

Speaker 5 And the al-Qaeda took advantage of it. They propagated those pictures.
They propagated those pictures from Team 5. Like, that's what happens.

Speaker 5 And so, I guess I realized how the tactical actions of our units, SEAL teams, Marines, Army soldiers, has a strategic impact. And

Speaker 5 we have to think about what we're doing.

Speaker 6 That is something I never thought of.

Speaker 6 Where does the scrutiny come from?

Speaker 5 I mean, it's the law of armed conflict, right? It's like the Geneva Convention, the law of armed conflict.

Speaker 5 There are people that are in place to make sure that we are conducting war in a forthright and just manner, if there is such a thing. You know, can we go back to the quote from

Speaker 5 Apocalypse Now?

Speaker 5 you know, handing out charges for murder around here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500. You can take that approach, but it's not going to help you.

Speaker 5 It's not going to help you.

Speaker 5 There's rules and we have just got to follow the rules. And if the rules don't make sense, then you got to raise your hand and say, hey, these rules don't make sense.
And I did that.

Speaker 5 For instance, and I brought this up earlier, breaching.

Speaker 5 So when I first got to Iraq, that first deployment, we're breaching. every door, of course, right?

Speaker 5 Well, so is everybody else. Everyone's just breaching the hell out of everything.
You're going to enter a building, you breach the door because it gives you a tactical advantage, right?

Speaker 5 So guys, civilians were getting injured by breaches. And eventually they said, hey,

Speaker 5 no more breaching. No more explosive breaching.
Done.

Speaker 5 So I get this word. And, you know, I talk to my guys.
No more explosive breaching. And, you know, what's their reaction going to be? Not good.
Totally not good, right? Hey. And it's exactly what,

Speaker 5 it's exactly what you would think it would be. Hey, wait a second.
You want us to be at more risk. You don't care about us.
You don't understand what it's like down here. This is a problem.

Speaker 5 You don't understand the battlefield. Screw you.
That's basically the response.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 and I'm thinking the same thing, right?

Speaker 5 But now am I thinking, wait a second, does my boss want to put my guys at risk? What do you think? Really? Does my boss want? No, no. Actually, no, I don't believe my boss wants to do that.

Speaker 5 There's got to be something else going on. Hey, boss, what's the deal with explosive breaching? Why are we being told we're not allowed? Why are you telling me we can't explosively breach anymore?

Speaker 5 And he's like,

Speaker 5 here's what's happening: here's the amount of casualties from breaches. Here's the civilians injured by breaches.

Speaker 5 Here's, you know, the number of breaches that are happening every night in Baghdad or the surrounding areas.

Speaker 5 And the civilian casualties are so high that

Speaker 5 the generals are saying don't do this anymore.

Speaker 5 And I said, okay.

Speaker 5 Now,

Speaker 5 boss,

Speaker 5 if I'm going on to a target where the intel represents a higher probability of there being some kind of resistance on the target, can I breach? And he's like, well, what do you mean?

Speaker 5 I said, well, if I get this intel that says that they're expecting them to have bodyguards or they expect there to be IEDs, can I use breach explosive breaches to mitigate that risk?

Speaker 5 And he's like, yeah, that makes sense. And that's what we did.
And that's also when we started doing callouts, which which initially guys were

Speaker 5 doing call outs? Yeah.

Speaker 5 All the way back then. Yep.
We started doing that. Holy shit.
I did not. We started doing call outs.
And it was like we were figuring out how to do it. Okay.
What are we going to do?

Speaker 5 Because from my perspective now, all right, so I'm not going to explosively breach this door.

Speaker 5 So we're not going to really have the element of surprise that we want because we're going to be sitting there with a sledgehammer.

Speaker 5 or what even a lockpick is or you know anything is going to make noise we're going to alert them that we're there so now i've got guys in the stack or waiting outside this building.

Speaker 5 They're not behind cover. This is a problem.
How can we mitigate that risk?

Speaker 5 Well, since we have to wake them up to breach the door anyways with a freaking sledgehammer, let's just get a little safe distance, set up our vehicles, and wake them up and say, hey, you got to come out.

Speaker 5 And that's exactly what we started doing. And then, so what we ended up with was a good variety of tactics.

Speaker 5 of sometimes we do a call out, sometimes we just mechanically breach the door, and sometimes we explosively breach the door.

Speaker 5 But all those things were a result of me talking to my boss and then talking to the guys and saying, guys, here's why we can't breach.

Speaker 5 This is bullshit. Oh, okay.
Well,

Speaker 5 we can't.

Speaker 5 Oh, there's a huge, super high risk. Explain that risk to me.
And they explained to me, you know what? I agree with you guys. Boss, we're going to explosively breach tonight.
Boss says, cool.

Speaker 5 My boss never told me no.

Speaker 5 So those kind of things,

Speaker 5 I think, again, where we get into the, hey, do it, just do what I'm telling you to do, both up and down the chain of command. I don't want my, I want my guys to resist me.

Speaker 5 I want them to say, we should be able to explosively breach. Okay, tell me why.
And I should be able to look at my boss. Here's why.
And by the way, if my guys explain to me, hey,

Speaker 5 we should explosively breach and here's why. And I explain it to my boss and my boss says no.
Okay, do I have an argument?

Speaker 5 No. Okay.
Well, then how can I mitigate this? Well, Well, I can mitigate it by not stacking my platoon up in front of the door or outside the building and doing a doing a call out.

Speaker 5 So, those kind of things I think could get lost when it comes to communicating up and down the chain of command.

Speaker 6 I got a question for you. I mean, earlier when we were talking, I can't remember at what point we brought this up, but we were talking about leadership.
I believe

Speaker 6 you had just gotten through OCS. Anyways, you had said that

Speaker 6 trust your guys, and that's how they trust you. Right.

Speaker 6 And so

Speaker 6 big proponent of that.

Speaker 6 How do you just trust your guys? I mean, do they have to earn your trust or do you give them the trust and let them fuck that up or give them the opportunity to fuck that up?

Speaker 6 I'm asking because

Speaker 7 for my own

Speaker 6 learning.

Speaker 6 I want to learn from you.

Speaker 5 The way you do it is a little bit of trust at a time. So if you started working for me, I wouldn't be like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight.
Why don't you take lead on that?

Speaker 5 I'm going to sit in the talk.

Speaker 5 I've never worked with you before and I'm just going to let you go take lead on a mission. No, it's like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight.
Can you run external security for me?

Speaker 5 Or can you clear this back, you know, outhouse with your fire team? And you're like, cool, got it, boss. And you do it.
You do it well.

Speaker 5 And then the next time, hey, you're in charge of external security. And the next time, hey, you're in charge of vehicles.
The next time, hey, you're in charge of the breach team.

Speaker 5 So it's like, I'm going to give you a little more trust each time.

Speaker 5 And then then you keep making good calls maybe sometimes i have to tighten you up like hey what were you doing going to clear this other building that wasn't part of the target yeah but i saw a guy over there but i don't care about that but you didn't tell me yeah but i didn't have time well what if we have a blue on blue because this

Speaker 5 oh good point

Speaker 5 so you know you learned a little bit i took a little bit of risk maybe a little bit of a little bit outside the zone so that's what you do just a little bit of trust at a time you build it build it over time but i have to trust you and actually what's funny is i thought where you're going with that question is if my guys are telling me like we need to explosively breach this target

Speaker 6 do i have to trust them and the answer is yeah well i mean then you get a guy like me that works for you and we have to explosive breach every single fucking time how do you trust me yep and then i go hey hey sean

Speaker 5 If we do another one of these explosively, explosive breaches, we're probably not going to get approved for our next missions.

Speaker 5 And you go, what do you mean? I said, well, they've had a bunch of collateral damage.

Speaker 5 They've had a bunch of people in the in the Baghdad General Hospital that are wounded civilians from breaching charges. And we're just going to get told no.

Speaker 5 So now what are you going to do? I'm telling, I trust you, but do you trust me?

Speaker 5 And okay, well, that makes sense, Jocko. Okay, can we mitigate it? How can we mitigate it?

Speaker 5 Well, we could do a call out. We could throw flash crashes through the windows.
Like there's a bunch of ways we could figure out ways to mitigate things.

Speaker 5 But if I don't talk to you and you don't talk to me and I don't explain to you what's happening, how can we expect to be aligned? It's just not going to happen.

Speaker 5 And so that open-mindedness and having good relationships with people is what it's all about. And by the way, this extends to like the other units that you work with,

Speaker 5 right? The other military, Army, and Marine Corps units that you work with. You've got to listen to what they're saying about their AO because that's going to have an impact as well.

Speaker 6 Makes sense.

Speaker 6 Makes sense.

Speaker 6 Man, I can't believe you guys were doing call-outs back then.

Speaker 5 How would you do it?

Speaker 5 Set the vehicles in either usually an L-type scenario, you know, so we'd be able to see the black side of the building, but we wouldn't set ourselves up in an envelopment.

Speaker 5 And we'd get on the radio and say, hey,

Speaker 5 you're surrounded. You know, our TERP would do it.
Hey, you're surrounded. Come out.

Speaker 6 How would that work? Would they come out?

Speaker 5 Usually, yeah.

Speaker 8 No shit.

Speaker 5 Occasionally, there would be no one there.

Speaker 6 What was the ultimatum?

Speaker 5 I don't know if we ever even reached an ultimatum. I think we had a couple where there was no one home, and we eventually breached, which again, which is a good escalation, right?

Speaker 5 I guess, depending on how you look at it. But if they wouldn't come out, and now when we explosively breach this thing, we'd explosively breach it like big.

Speaker 6 So there were some very valuable lessons in the Admiral's Aid slot.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.
And again, even that first deployment to Iraq,

Speaker 5 these kind of conversations, you know, these kind of things, understanding what my boss was having to deal with.

Speaker 6 Do you, do you feel? I mean, it sounds like you, it sounds like you had a great relationship with him, but it.

Speaker 6 What I want to ask is,

Speaker 5 how is it?

Speaker 6 I've always expected my leadership to have more experience than myself. And so you're showing up

Speaker 6 at a slot to be the aide for the Admiral with more combat experience than the Admiral has. That's an assumption.
Maybe he was a Vietnam guy.

Speaker 5 I don't know. No, it's a correct assumption.

Speaker 6 I mean, how, how...

Speaker 5 By the way, my commanding officer, remember I said I was the only platoon in Iraq for like a month or two.

Speaker 5 When my skipper showed up, he was no combat experience.

Speaker 5 And you know, remember what I was saying earlier about like,

Speaker 5 I understand.

Speaker 5 You know, like, I don't expect my boss who's never been in combat before to be able to roll in and start telling me what's what.

Speaker 5 And I understand he's going to ask me some questions about some things that he doesn't understand because he doesn't understand. And that's okay.

Speaker 5 Like, oh, sir, let me explain to you. Why don't you come on an op and you can see what this looks like?

Speaker 5 Like that kind of attitude, as opposed to which is really easy from a judgmental perspective, to say,

Speaker 5 why the hell are you in charge?

Speaker 5 Or, hey, I'm trying to run operations down here and you're asking me a bunch of questions. It's like, hmm, no, actually, come on down.
Let's sit through our brief. Tell me what you think.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I guess that's what I'm, I mean, I've had both leaders too. And I think I've always paid a lot of attention to how

Speaker 6 my leadership approaches me with with with with certain issues and are they open to

Speaker 6 are they open that's really it are I mean when you have a leader that comes in with a with a

Speaker 6 little to no experience I mean that it's it's

Speaker 6 once again how are they going to project that are they going to project that and lean on us or are they going to are they going to fucking hide from their inexperience and and

Speaker 6 you know what i'm getting at and and and and present like an over-inflated,

Speaker 6 over-inflated bullshit confidence. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And so how do you deal with that? It's like, hey, boss, that sounds like a good suggestion. Let me let me bring that to the boys and see how we can make that work.

Speaker 5 You know, it's like, what am I supposed to say? Boss, you haven't been here as long as I have. You don't know what you're talking about.
Where's that going to get me?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So it's like, hey, boss, it sounds like a good suggestion. Let me get with the guys and let's figure out how we can implement that.

Speaker 5 Hey, boss, I was talking to the guys and I just want to go over a couple things. There's a couple of secondary and tertiary effects are going to happen if we do what it is you were saying.

Speaker 5 It's going to cause this and it's going to cause that. I'm good.
We got to mitigate this one, but I just want to let you know that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 5 Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 5 How do you recommend? Oh, here's what I recommend, boss. You see what I'm saying? So, again, if I don't listen to him, he's not going to listen to me.

Speaker 5 If he, if I don't put some trust in him, he's not going to trust me.

Speaker 6 Makes sense. Makes sense.

Speaker 6 So, how does task unit bruiser come about?

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 yeah, I do that year at

Speaker 5 the Admiral's office. And then the next billet is to be a task unit commander.
And a billet opened up at SEAL Team 3. And so SEAL Team 3, here I come.

Speaker 6 Can you explain what a task unit is to the audience?

Speaker 5 Task Unit is the old name. Now it's called the troop, but it's the old name for two platoons combined together with a little headquarters element above it.
So it's about

Speaker 5 36 guys, but it really can be anywhere between 30 and 50 or 70. You know, it's, it's, it's,

Speaker 5 I think people are always surprised that the variables inside the military, like an infantry company can be 80 guys or can be 280 guys. You know, there's a big variation.

Speaker 5 But generally speaking, a task unit is two platoons or a troop is two platoons with between 16 and 20 guys in each platoon.

Speaker 6 And so you are tasked with leading the task unit. Yep.
Two platoons.

Speaker 6 Man, I just had so many

Speaker 6 friends slash

Speaker 6 Bud's classmates that were in that. I mean, Cowie,

Speaker 6 Mark Lee,

Speaker 6 Laf Babin, Seth Stone, I think I don't want to mention his name. He might still be in there.
Andrew Paul, a fucking ton of them, man. I think Melendez, maybe was Mario Melendez with you guys.
But

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 6 A lot of these guys. Plus a lot more enlisted, but I don't want to say all their names because I don't know who's in and who's not anymore.
But

Speaker 6 this is where,

Speaker 6 man, you is.

Speaker 6 Your guys just have. all positive things to say about you.
I've never heard anything negative about you from anybody that you've served with. And that is,

Speaker 6 that is fucking incredible.

Speaker 5 Yep. I've worked with some awesome guys, man, for sure.

Speaker 6 And you guys seem really tight. And that is cool to see, too.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was a great crew of guys, man. Great crew of guys.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's almost like you took your task unit with you into your business career.

Speaker 5 Yeah. There's a lot of those guys that

Speaker 6 are in there.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 I don't know where to start with this. So I'll let you start.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for me, it was,

Speaker 5 you know, I thought that this may be,

Speaker 5 this could be getting towards the end of my operational career.

Speaker 5 There were some couple other options that may play out or not. But at this point, you know, just for me, this is

Speaker 5 just an awesome opportunity, you know, an awesome opportunity.

Speaker 5 And I love the SEAL teams. And

Speaker 5 to be be a troop commander, tasking a commander for me was just

Speaker 5 awesome. I was, again, I guess I find myself

Speaker 5 struggling for words when it for me to be able to describe

Speaker 5 the things that I've had in my life, like being a platoon commander in Iraq when there's one platoon in Iraq.

Speaker 5 Like, this is just, this is like if you played football your whole life and you get to go to the Super Bowl, you know, or you, you get, you know, you, you are in a rock band and you get to play Madison Square Garden.

Speaker 5 That's what it was for me. This is the only thing I ever dreamed of doing.
The only thing I wanted to do was be in the teams. And now I'm in the teams.
And now I'm

Speaker 5 getting to be in charge of some team guys. And

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 it was awesome from the word go, you know, showed up. And

Speaker 5 I stole a lot of stuff from Colonel David Hackworth. And

Speaker 5 one of the key components that I stole from David Hackworth was he would rename the units that he would take over. So when he was in Korea, he took over Fox Company, he changed it to Fighter Company.

Speaker 5 When he was in Vietnam, he was in charge of the 439th, which was called the Hard Luck Battalion, and he changed it to the Hardcore Battalion.

Speaker 5 And he did that even with each of his subordinate elements. He would change their name to something cool.

Speaker 5 And so when I took over, Task Unit Bravo was the original Alpha Bravo Charlie, and I took over for Task Unit Bravo. And the first thing I did was change the name to Bruiser.

Speaker 5 And it's totally unofficial. And

Speaker 5 I just went with it. And that's what we got.
So

Speaker 6 where'd you come up with Bruiser?

Speaker 5 Had to begin with B.

Speaker 5 And there was an old band friend of mine had called The Bruisers. And I was like, hmm, that's too easy.
So there we go.

Speaker 6 Right on.

Speaker 5 Bruiser coming in hot. And I mean, let's face it,

Speaker 5 it's a pretty good theme.

Speaker 6 It is a fucking damn good theme.

Speaker 5 It's a pretty good theme. And that's, again,

Speaker 5 just something that I took from Colonel David Hackworth, and it does have.

Speaker 5 I've worked with all kinds of companies now, you know, at Echelon Front.

Speaker 5 And there's so many companies that have told me that their sales team gave themselves this name or their concrete team gave themselves a name. Like this happens all the time now.

Speaker 5 And people report back that, yeah, man, it has an impact.

Speaker 5 You're not just Team Alpha or Team Bravo. You're tasking a bruiser.
Let's go. Right on.
Right on.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 did you know you were going to Ramadi when you took it?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 We didn't know where we were going at first.

Speaker 6 Anywhere? Or anywhere in Iraq?

Speaker 5 So there was one task unit that was designated to go to Iraq, and that was Alpha. And Bruiser and Charlie,

Speaker 5 one of us, one of those task units was going to go to PACOM,

Speaker 5 meaning no war.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 my commanding officer and Master Chief, they brought us all back. They brought the headshed from each task unit back.
And they said, hey,

Speaker 5 we,

Speaker 5 if you want,

Speaker 5 we can take and we can split up the task units so that whoever hasn't been to Iraq,

Speaker 5 we can all put them in one task unit and they can all go to Iraq. And then the other guys that already have been to Iraq can go to

Speaker 5 PACOM, which is the fair fairy, right? Like when the fair fairy shows up to try and make everything fair. And

Speaker 5 the fair fairy. Yeah, I was.
So I had my opinion, but I went back and asked the guys because we were just starting our land warfare. And I said, hey, here's what they're offering.

Speaker 5 They're offering for us to split up and guys that haven't been to Iraq can go, or we stay together and they send whoever performs the best to Iraq.

Speaker 5 And I kind of smiled. And they're all like, hell yeah, let's go.
So it was, you know, a little bit of a competition to see who goes to Iraq. And, you know, we were all very hard working.

Speaker 6 Sounds like it. I mean, fuck, man, so many legends.
Chris Kyle, Eli Crane's in there.

Speaker 5 I mean, Eli wasn't with us.

Speaker 6 Oh, he wasn't? Mikey Mansoor. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, wow.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Bunch of,

Speaker 5 and, and, you know, a bunch of guys that, whose names people don't know, um, who are just awesome guys. And I think

Speaker 5 so. Tony Afrati,

Speaker 5 he's the, might be the one guy that I, we were E5 Mafia team one,

Speaker 5 me and Tony. And I'm trying to think if I knew anyone else in there.
I might have known the,

Speaker 5 I think I knew who the other platoon chief was, another good guy, I think, but we weren't ever at the same team, but I knew him. But other than that, I don't think I knew one single person in there.

Speaker 6 What do you think your, what do you think your reputation was for them?

Speaker 6 What did they think they were walking into with you as their task unit commander?

Speaker 5 I mean, Tony knew me. I mean, he knew exactly who I was.

Speaker 6 So he got the word out.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, Tony,

Speaker 5 Tony's as hard as they come. And Tony had an outstanding reputation and had an outstanding reputation.
And so, you know, he knew me.

Speaker 5 And so that was that.

Speaker 5 And, you know, my platoon in Baghdad had done a lot of stuff. And so we, you know, had a lot of experience at that time.
You know, at that time, it was a lot of experience. And, you know,

Speaker 5 like I said, I was an enlisted team guy for eight years.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 at a minimum,

Speaker 5 you couldn't lie to me about what the radios could or could not do. You couldn't lie to me about like basic team guy stuff.
You had to tell me what was what.

Speaker 5 Had to tell me the truth about stuff.

Speaker 6 When did you find out you were going to Baghdad?

Speaker 5 So.

Speaker 6 Or not Baghdad, excuse me, Ramadi.

Speaker 5 So I would say

Speaker 5 about

Speaker 5 halfway through the the workup

Speaker 5 they said all right you guys bruiser's going and look bruiser's going to back

Speaker 5 bruiser's going to Iraq we're like yeah

Speaker 5 so we were planning to go to Baghdad and work with the ICTF which the Iraqi counter-terror force I went on advon actually as a matter of fact and

Speaker 5 I went and did some ops with those guys and saw what they were doing and started the turnover with their task unit commander. And that's what that was like kind of

Speaker 5 a very looked like it was going to be an awesome deployment. Like those guys had a good force that they were working with.

Speaker 5 They had a good op-tempo. They had just had good stuff going on.
So it looked like that's where we're going. And

Speaker 5 when we, when I got home from that PDSS,

Speaker 5 they wanted to align all of because the east and west coast were both in Iraq at the same time.

Speaker 5 And yet

Speaker 5 the west coast had had Western Iraq, except for they had an element in Baghdad. And then the East Coast had

Speaker 5 Eastern Iraq, except for they had an element in Ramadi. And you can already see this doesn't make much sense, right?

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 as the two commanding officers were getting ready to deploy, they talked about it and were like, wait a second, why do we have

Speaker 5 our forces kind of

Speaker 5 disjointed west coast you take western iraq that's like fallujah habaniyah ramadi east coast you take baghdad which includes the ictf and then the other stations that they were had

Speaker 5 and it makes sense you know like there's no two ways about it

Speaker 5 and uh when i heard that i

Speaker 5 i was on i wasn't on leave but my guys were on leave pre-deployment leave. Like we were that ready to go to Baghdad.

Speaker 5 And my skipper called me to the office and said, hey, what do you think about going to Ramadi?

Speaker 5 And I was like, I knew exactly what was going on in Ramadi. I mean, the Intel reports were very clear that Ramadi was a total, total war zone, total disaster, and it was

Speaker 5 the worst area in Iraq. And I said, yeah, Roger, that.

Speaker 5 And I tried to

Speaker 5 inside, I was like, oh, hell yeah.

Speaker 5 Outside, I said, well, sir, you know, there's a couple more things I need. And I bargained to get like a few, I bargained to get a few more people.

Speaker 5 I bargained to get like some computer stuff that we needed for our, you know,

Speaker 5 for our communication stuff. And he was like, Yeah, I can get you that, I can get you that, I can get you these other people.
And I said, I'm in. And that was it.
Going to Ramadi.

Speaker 6 Did you know this was going to be this was it as far as kinetic deployments?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 5 Yep. I mean,

Speaker 5 there was

Speaker 5 sustained

Speaker 5 fighting

Speaker 5 every day.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 there was

Speaker 5 soldiers and Marines getting wounded and killed every day. And this isn't a big area.
Ramadi is not a big city. It's small.

Speaker 5 IEDs were totally out of control.

Speaker 6 So you had a pretty good idea what you were walking into. 100%.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Well, not 100% because, you know, there's still some things you're going to learn, but I knew,

Speaker 5 i knew what was happening i was again thankfully i had done that deployment to baghdad i had you know experience as a as an enlisted seal

Speaker 5 working for the admiral like these are all things that helped me understand

Speaker 5 as i got as i i was just a little bit ahead of the power curve you know what i mean just just enough ahead of the power curve you know

Speaker 5 did you ever get rolled back in buds Yes.

Speaker 5 I didn't get rolled back in buds, but you could tell the guys that got rolled back, they were like, okay, like pool comp, they know what's coming, they're just a little bit ahead.

Speaker 5 And that's how I felt like I was going into Romatios, just ahead enough to know, like, okay, I know what's coming.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I told, you know, once the tasking was on the ground, I'm like, this is going to be

Speaker 5 a historical deployment. How do you, which is a big statement.
That's not a small statement. I don't, didn't throw that word around, but

Speaker 5 I knew.

Speaker 5 I knew.

Speaker 6 How many guys did you you have that had experience?

Speaker 6 Like actual experience?

Speaker 5 Every guy

Speaker 5 that wasn't a new guy had been to Iraq.

Speaker 6 You had a lot of new guys, I think.

Speaker 5 We had a decent amount of new guys. We had a decent, it wasn't overwhelming, but we had a solid, probably normal average number of new guys.
Okay.

Speaker 5 Three, four guys per platoon, new guys, something like that. So not overwhelming and all great guys.

Speaker 6 I mean, if you know what you're walking,

Speaker 6 let me ask this. How many guys on your team or in your task unit had an idea of what they were walking into?

Speaker 5 I don't know if anybody did.

Speaker 5 I don't know if anybody did.

Speaker 6 How do you prepare these guys for that?

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 just telling them what's happening.

Speaker 5 You know, you put the SIGAX, the significant activities, which are basically enemy attacks, briefly at SIGAX in the last 24 hours, and then you brief them the SIGAX in the last seven days, and then you brief them on the SIGACS in the last month.

Speaker 5 And it doesn't take a rocket scientist because in the last 24 hours, there was three guys wounded, one guy killed, you know,

Speaker 5 38 enemy attacks. And you think, whoa, that's a rough day.
But then you realize it's every day for seven days, and then you realize it's every day for seven months. Fuck.

Speaker 5 Or for a month, and then that's how it's been. And just before we showed up, like

Speaker 5 the 3-8 Marines had had a terrible

Speaker 5 about a week where they had lost

Speaker 5 four or five guys in that week before we showed up. And they'd lost a couple more before that.
But,

Speaker 5 you know, that's

Speaker 5 that's what we're getting into.

Speaker 6 Who are your tasking at? Uh, excuse me, who are your platoon commanders?

Speaker 5 Laif Babbin and Seth Stone.

Speaker 5 Yeah, my brothers.

Speaker 5 Yeah, two guys. Um,

Speaker 6 You didn't know them before.

Speaker 5 Didn't know them.

Speaker 5 Met them.

Speaker 5 And two guys from the Naval Academy. Neither one of them got selected out of the Naval Academy.
They both had fought their way back from the fleet to get to the SEAL teams. Both of them from Texas.

Speaker 5 Both of them surfed.

Speaker 5 Neither one of them had much experience at all.

Speaker 5 But they were, dude, they just they wanted to be good. They wanted to be good team guys.

Speaker 5 And they wanted to, they wanted to fight. They wanted to fight for God and country.
And

Speaker 5 they were tough. They listened.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they were, couldn't, couldn't ask for

Speaker 5 better guys to work with, you know, for the, for the two platoon commanders.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, it's funny because Laif will tell the story about when I met those guys

Speaker 5 and how, A,

Speaker 5 I didn't smile to him and I wasn't nice to him. And B,

Speaker 5 Seth thought I was going to fire him. And I hated him.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it's actually true. Is it really? It's actually true.
Not that I hated them, but that

Speaker 5 I might fire them. I didn't know who they were.
I didn't know what their attitudes were. I didn't.

Speaker 5 I didn't have high expectations that they were going to be, you know, successful or good. And so,

Speaker 5 and you know what? This is another thing I stole from Hackworth. This is exactly what Hackworth would do.
Hackworth's like, yeah, when I meet guys, I don't know who they are.

Speaker 5 I don't know what they're going to do. I'm not going to become friends with them because if they're not capable of doing the job, I'm going to get rid of them.

Speaker 5 And so, yeah, there's a reason why I didn't like bro out with them when I first met them because I will fire them if they're not going to do their job correctly or if they're more concerned about themselves than they are about the platoon.

Speaker 5 And if you're more concerned about yourself than your platoon, you will not work for me. You will not work for me.
And I will do everything I can to get you out of the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 luckily and thankfully, those guys didn't have an ounce of that in them. You know, they wanted to take care of their platoons.
They wanted to fight.

Speaker 5 That's what they wanted.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they did.

Speaker 5 Who are your chiefs?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 the one chief is

Speaker 5 Seth's chief, and he's not in the public light.

Speaker 5 And the other chief was Tony Afrati. And Seth's chief was

Speaker 5 a great combination with Seth, hardworking guy, and

Speaker 5 a good compliment to Seth. And then Tony, Tony Afratty was Laif's chief, who again, he was E5 mob with me at SEAL Team 1.
And

Speaker 5 like, just

Speaker 5 a stud, dude. I mean, honestly, he's

Speaker 5 on the platoon list that you form up for the apocalypse, like Tony's.

Speaker 5 He's on the top of the list, you know, because he's not going to back down.

Speaker 5 And he's, and he's great. You know, there's a situation when we were in, um,

Speaker 5 going through workup

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 I was watching Tony and Lafe, they were getting ready to do some training op, just a real simple training op, you know, target, like a, like an iteration training on a target assault or something like that.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they're sitting there in the, you know, in the sand, you know, with the freaking sticks.

Speaker 5 And Tony tells him like, hey, hey, sir, we should come in from here, set up a base over here, move through here, rally point over here.

Speaker 5 That's what we should do. And Lafe's like, hey, that sounds really good.
Why don't you tell the guys?

Speaker 5 And Tony goes, I think it'd be good if it came from you. And I was like, damn, dude, that's a professional.
He's trying to elevate the platoon commander.

Speaker 5 Instead of him being like, I want to show these guys that I'm the real guy in charge. Instead of doing that, he elevated Leif.

Speaker 5 Just in that little moment, that's one little, one little moment in time where you see a guy that's like a real, true professional whose ego ego is totally out of it. He wants to have a good platoon.

Speaker 5 So, yeah, just epic. And, you know,

Speaker 5 since I was, you know, I'm good friends with Tony.

Speaker 5 I grew up with Tony.

Speaker 5 And so we had a great relationship.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 5 Do you

Speaker 6 before we go to a Marathi, I just want to ask if there was, how did you address your team when you knew that's where you were going? What was the, well, how did you tell them?

Speaker 5 Stand by to get some, boys.

Speaker 5 Yeah. It's weird.
There was a, there was a time earlier because I knew that Ramadi was the worst place. And I had said at some point,

Speaker 5 like, we're going to end up in Ramadi. I had said that.
Like, I kind of knew it. And so the guys were tracking.
The guys knew what was what. And.

Speaker 5 Bro, the idea.

Speaker 5 You know, it's like I had a guy named Dean Ladd on my podcast who is a marine officer in world war ii and like he's going into tarawa and they're the threat brief that they're getting for tarawa is like totally out of control you can see it the japanese are dug in they got mortars trained on the beach they got machine gun pillboxes the whole nine yards and tara was tiny And I asked him the same kind of probing questions that you're asking me of like, well, how did you, you know, how did you feel?

Speaker 5 And I was like, well, were you nervous? Were you scared about getting wounded or killed? And he goes, that always happens to the other guy. And that's exactly,

Speaker 5 you know, that's how I felt. That's how I

Speaker 5 can just about guarantee you every guy in Tasking to Bruiser, when they heard we were going to Ramadi, was like, hell yeah. Every single one of them was like, hell yeah.

Speaker 5 Nothing bad is going to happen. We're going to go and kick ass.
That's what we do, which is exactly what you want.

Speaker 6 Fucking awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 5 We're frogmen, dude. This is what we do.
This is an opportunity, you know,

Speaker 5 the

Speaker 5 storied legacy

Speaker 5 that the guys in Vietnam built, that we got to, you know, get to walk around in Coronado with a trident. I mean, not, you're not walking around, but guys know you're a SEAL.

Speaker 5 You go into a McPhee's on a Thursday night, which I'm sorry you missed out on.

Speaker 5 But back in in the day, you go into McPhee's on a Thursday night, like you know, you're a badass, and I didn't do anything to earn that. Nothing.

Speaker 5 I got to live off the reputation of the guys that came before us. So, to have an opportunity, get some of that back, yeah, that's a that's a

Speaker 5 huge uh opportunity and it's a heavy weight.

Speaker 5 We got to hold the line, yeah.

Speaker 6 So, you get to you get to Iraq, Iraq. You're in Ramadi.

Speaker 6 Let's talk about day one.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so we were on the PDSS

Speaker 5 or no, the Advon, right? So a few of us came over on the Advon

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 everything I had read about what was going on there, it was going on there. And, you know,

Speaker 5 what day it was, I don't know, but we were going to a memorial service, like almost out of the the game.

Speaker 5 And again, what was what was

Speaker 5 what

Speaker 5 left a mark was I could tell in the memorial service that this was a routine.

Speaker 5 Like it wasn't an ad hoc thing. Like I'm looking around and I go, this is not an ad hoc thing.
I've been in the military for at this point, 15 years.

Speaker 5 I know what it looks like when you throw together a ceremony in the last minute and you get in there and you do something. This was not that.

Speaker 5 I'm looking at like the setup where they have the memorial crosses. Those things are not, those things are used.

Speaker 5 I'm looking at where the preacher's talking from. I'm like, oh, he's delivering remarks again.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 that's the, that's the, my first memory of Ramadi was that, was going, yeah, these guys.

Speaker 5 You know, we're showing up here. These guys from the 228

Speaker 5 under Colonel Gronsky, they've been here for 14 months. They've taken, they've lost almost 100 guys.

Speaker 5 They've

Speaker 5 taken hundreds and hundreds of casualties.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we need to do what we can to help them.

Speaker 5 That was my attitude. I was like, we need to help these guys as much as we possibly can.

Speaker 6 Damn.

Speaker 6 And I'd like to, I just want to remind the audience, I mean,

Speaker 6 your task unit, the most decorated SOF unit out of the entire Iraq war.

Speaker 6 That's what we're walking into.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 We had, um,

Speaker 5 for some reason, we had 13 snipers. And I say for some reason because that wasn't normal.
You know, both the platoon chiefs were snipers.

Speaker 5 We just had, we were overloaded with snipers, which was a real blessing.

Speaker 5 And that seeing, remember I talked about being in Baghdad and we did a couple operations where I kind of caught a glimpse of what we could do with snipers, like a little glimpse.

Speaker 5 And when I saw what was happening there, I thought to myself, oh,

Speaker 5 I think I have an idea of what we can do here.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the turnover with the guys from Team Two, great bunch of dudes.

Speaker 5 It was like there was areas where,

Speaker 5 and the same thing with what the coalition forces were telling us. The 228 was like, hey, this area here, you can't go there.

Speaker 5 It's, it's not passable areas. You know,

Speaker 5 there are too many IEDs to go down there, period.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 we knew, I knew, I knew it was going to be a fight. Because it was all around us.
You know, you go, we lived. It's another weird thing.
It was like growing up watching war movies.

Speaker 5 It was usually like good guys are over here,

Speaker 5 bad guys are over there. You go over to fight the bad guys.
Like, okay, World War I was trench warfare. Even the trenches seemed like they were a little bit far apart.

Speaker 5 And Ramadi was like, oh, the other side of this wall right here, there's bad guys.

Speaker 5 It's like the other side of that wall, there's bad guys. And when you go out the gate, you go out the gate and there it is.
You're in it. You're in Ramadi.

Speaker 5 And, you know, there were people killed on Ramadi, you know, for mortars, rocket strikes and stuff like that. So it was all around you.

Speaker 6 How big was Ramadi? I never made it.

Speaker 5 Right, like four miles across. That's it.
Yep. 350,000 people, roughly speaking, of civilians.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Camp Ramadi was a pretty big base because it was a former Iraqi army base. That was a pretty big base.

Speaker 5 And we had our little annex to that base right on the Euphrates River, as Frogman should be.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 within, once the whole task unit showed up,

Speaker 5 like the night the task unit showed up, there was like a coordinated attack on various bases, ours being one of them.

Speaker 5 And like every guy in our task unit, the first night that they showed up and Ramadi was on the roof of our building, just getting after it.

Speaker 5 Oh, shit. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So that was kind of a good welcome to Ramadi as well.

Speaker 6 Okay. So you're not in the middle of some big base.
I mean, it's, you go on the rooftop and you can engage.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Wow.
Yep. Yep.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And we did.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Day one.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And it's funny too, now that you mentioned it, the the Commodore at the time,

Speaker 5 who was the detailer that I asked to send me back to a SEAL team ASAP, who is the commanding officer when I was in Europe. So this guy's a a friend of mine.
And before we left,

Speaker 5 to a speech to the whole team, and I harass him about this to this day, he's like, hey, the chances are none of you are going to shoot your weapons. Like this is a different time and all this stuff.

Speaker 5 And I think I sent him an email or a webby thing. And I said, hey, sir, we've been here for 48 hours.
Every single guy in my task unit and some of the techs have engaged. And he was like, yeah, Roger.

Speaker 5 Great guy.

Speaker 5 Great guy.

Speaker 6 So what was the mission set?

Speaker 6 Was it very specific or was it always something different?

Speaker 5 It ended up being pretty specific, and that is

Speaker 5 setting up sniper overwatch positions in support of

Speaker 5 the Army elements on the ground. That's kind of one.
We did do direct action missions with our Iraqi counterparts. We did the Overwatches with Iraqi counterparts.
And we did,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 clearance operations, patrols to contact, reconnaissance missions, demo raids. We kind of got full spectrum frogman activities.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It was

Speaker 5 the 228, who is the brigade that was on the ground when we got there,

Speaker 5 they had pretty much secured the outskirts of the city. And so there was just starting to initiate the idea of pushing into the city.

Speaker 5 And it seemed like, and as a matter of fact,

Speaker 5 while my guys, before my guys arrived, we were getting word that one of the courses of action was a Fallujah-type clearance of Ramadi.

Speaker 5 And so now I'm like, oh, it's completely on, right? It is completely on.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 Maliki, who is the president,

Speaker 5 just been elected,

Speaker 5 he said,

Speaker 5 I don't want to do that type of assault on Fallujah

Speaker 5 because it'll cause

Speaker 5 a separation between the Sunnis and the Shias, and this will be a civil war. Is there another way to do it?

Speaker 5 And so this is where when the 11AD showed up, which is the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, ready 1st Brigade, when they showed up,

Speaker 5 they had a plan that had been used in northern Iraq. at Tal Afar

Speaker 5 to clear the city like a small section at a time. And that's what we ended up implementing.

Speaker 6 Do you think that was the right call?

Speaker 5 Yes. Yes.
I do. I do.
Because

Speaker 5 it would have caused so much destruction in the city

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 it would have caused mass civilian casualties, displacement of people. It would have been very problematic had we done a Fallujah-type clearance of Ramadi.

Speaker 5 So, and I think there actually would have probably been more casualties had we done it that way on the U.S. side.
Certainly on the Iraqi civilian side, it would have been, it would have been rough.

Speaker 5 So, I thought it was a good plan.

Speaker 6 What was the first operation that you took your task in and on?

Speaker 5 We started doing some, like, almost immediately, some small DAs and stuff like that. Like, I remember the first DA that LAIF was going on.
And this was,

Speaker 5 we had a,

Speaker 5 when we first got there, the first couple weeks, we we were still under command of SEAL Team 1. So my skipper hadn't taken over yet.

Speaker 5 So I had taken over the Ramadi task unit Ramadi space, but my CEO wasn't in charge yet.

Speaker 5 And so my goal was to do as many missions as we could for the SEAL Team 1 CO so that my CEO would be like, Jocko knows what he's doing. And that's what we did.
And I had a good relationship.

Speaker 5 I had known the CEO from SEAL Team 1. And And when he came out and I met with him and I kind of presented the case and explained to him what I saw and how we were going to operate, he was just,

Speaker 5 we got along great. And so when I started running up, you know, missions that we were going to do, he was, he was approving.

Speaker 5 And that was very cool. And we got very aggressive out of the gate.
And like, but I remember Leif's first direct action mission.

Speaker 5 And he.

Speaker 5 He may have never done a direct action mission before. And

Speaker 5 I'm the task unit commander, but this thing was was pretty close to the front gate. And I'm like,

Speaker 5 he can, he can go do this thing. And so he's putting together the plan.
And there's like a lot of stuff to organize.

Speaker 5 And he came to me and he's like, hey, bro, he's like, I don't know if we're going to be ready for this. And I'm like, bro, you're going to be fine.
You're totally good to go. You got this.

Speaker 5 And he was like,

Speaker 5 you know, he trusted me, man. And I trusted him.
That's why I was going. But he looked at me like with that kind of like, like,

Speaker 5 okay, if you say so type thing. And he went out and did it, you know, and it was was all good to go.

Speaker 5 So we ran some missions like that. And then what happened was

Speaker 5 when I met the

Speaker 5 colonel, Colonel Gronsky, this is before the 1180 showed up because you're asking about the first missions that we did. So I had put

Speaker 5 Tony Afrati had taken a little sniper element with some Marines and him and some SEALs and a couple of Iraqi soldiers out to this area where the the Marines had been IED'd and lost Marines in early April.

Speaker 5 And so Tony went out there there in Overwatch for 48 hours or something like that, 24 hours, 36 hours, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. I go to meet the brigade commander.

Speaker 5 And as I'm going to meet the brigade commander, I'm walking through his talk, like this is out of a movie.

Speaker 5 I'm walking through his talk and they're announcing like through the radios that the SEALs just engaged two IED emplacers

Speaker 5 at this location where that IED had taken place.

Speaker 5 And I walk into his office and he goes, are those your guys? And I'm like, yes, sir. And he said, I need you over in Eastern Ramadi.

Speaker 5 And I said, Roger, that, sir.

Speaker 5 Let me get it fixed. Let me get, let me get it together.
And, you know, we chatted and he explained to me what was going on.

Speaker 5 This area called the Malab District, run by the first of the 506 Band of Brothers,

Speaker 5 outstanding army unit i mean just as awesome as it gets they were in control of this or working to get control over this place called malab district and they were just getting annihilated with ieds i mean it was absolutely horrible and so

Speaker 5 went back and i put together a crew

Speaker 5 and to go over to eastern ramadi and

Speaker 5 conduct a massive

Speaker 5 clearance with them.

Speaker 5 So we're over there for a few days. We're getting to know the Iraqi troops.
We're planning this big giant operation.

Speaker 5 And again, bro, when we're in the SEAL teams and we think of a big operation, we think of like a task unit, right?

Speaker 5 Maybe a task unit plus a company of Rangers or, you know, a company of maybe a platoon of infantry guys. When I say big, bro, I'm talking like

Speaker 5 thousands.

Speaker 5 Not thousands, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

Speaker 5 soldiers.

Speaker 5 So we're planning this operation and it's weird. So see now we're talking about what is the headshed doing? Like,

Speaker 5 so in Ramadi,

Speaker 5 the leadership had

Speaker 5 figured or made a decision that they didn't want any battalion-sized operations

Speaker 5 conducted in Ramadi. But this clearance was going to take that whole battalion plus to get it done.

Speaker 5 And they run it up the chain of command. Hey, we want to do this battalion sweep of this area.
And it comes back, hey, no battalion-sized operations.

Speaker 5 And so they said, okay.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 we took and broke up this battalion-sized operation into like multiple smaller operations that were company plus sized operations. It's a little bit of a shell game is what I'm getting at.

Speaker 5 But it was the mandate that had come down. And the commanding officer of the battalion said, okay, that's the mandate we got to meet.

Speaker 5 Here's how we can, here's how we can maneuver around that and still accomplish the mission.

Speaker 5 So that's what we ended up doing. And

Speaker 5 this is, this is the, you know, you're talking about the first major operation. So this is the first major operation that we're doing.

Speaker 5 We're planning to sweep a certain section of the city first thing in the morning. Then we're going to reset, do another section of the city, then do another section.

Speaker 5 What do you mean by sweep? Clearly.

Speaker 6 You're talking about like route reconnaissance, scientists.

Speaker 5 I'm talking the iraqi soldiers with the u.s army but primarily the occupied iraqi soldiers in in the lead are going to enter every building whole in a area

Speaker 5 it's a clearance operation okay meet with the people see if they have weapons talk to them about get atmospherics and then go to the next building and go to the next building and go to the next building

Speaker 5 So as they do this, they know that they're going to get attacked.

Speaker 5 So in order to interdict the attacks, and they also know that once you clear a street of IEDs in a matter of hours, they come out and we called it reseeding the IEDs, which is, it happens so much that they have a term for it.

Speaker 5 It's reseeding the IEDs. So, they know that if we clear

Speaker 5 a road and get rid of the IEDs, the enemy will come back in and put IEDs.

Speaker 5 So, when we put together this plan,

Speaker 5 I have a group of SEALs that are going to go with the Iraqi soldiers to help them and do C2 for their clearance operation.

Speaker 5 And then I have two elements of SEALs that are going to go out, and one of them is going to overwatch one of these long access roads, and the other one's going to overwatch a shorter access road, but also

Speaker 5 the Ramadi Soccer Stadium, which is a staging area for the enemy.

Speaker 5 And then I am going to be with the company commander, who's an awesome guy, Joe Claiburne, crazy, crazy Joe Claiborne. I'm going to be with him because he's helping C2

Speaker 5 and the Iraqi soldiers with elements of his company.

Speaker 5 There's a lot going on, man.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 5 So we launched pre-dawn, and this is another thing.

Speaker 5 Pre-dawn operation.

Speaker 5 And we had done, Stoner had taken guys out with Claiburne, with Joe Claiburne, like a few days earlier. And he had

Speaker 5 gotten a big gunfight. And when they came back,

Speaker 5 I was standing at the gate waiting for him when they came back. And I, you know, he's like totally impressed.
And I walk with him to his battalion commander.

Speaker 5 And this guy, this company commander, Joe Claiborne, who's been in Iraq for four or five months at this point, he's lost two guys. I think he's had a bunch of guys wounded.

Speaker 5 I think at that point, like 20% of his guys have been wounded or killed. And he goes to the battalion commander and he says,

Speaker 5 I want SEALs with me on every operation I do from here on out. From one engagement with my guys,

Speaker 5 he was impressed. And

Speaker 5 we were, I mean, I was overwhelmingly impressed with him and his guys. They were outstanding.
But that's how much we hit it off with these guys.

Speaker 5 And I've told him since that was the best compliment I've ever got in my life. Was

Speaker 5 when an Army Company commander goes and tells his battalion commander, I want SEALs with us on every operation we do from here on out.

Speaker 5 After just getting in a major engagement.

Speaker 5 So now you fast-forward forward a few days and

Speaker 5 we're going on this mission. And as we're driving in, it's

Speaker 5 eerie.

Speaker 5 And what the Mooje would do is they would light tires on fire.

Speaker 5 And so you're rolling into town. It's black smoke everywhere.
There's fires burning. Very, very eerie as we roll in.
And I have already have my sniper elements had inserted at this point.

Speaker 5 And one of of the, they were inserting on the mine clearance vehicles. So it's a pretty sneaky little operation.

Speaker 5 You know, the mine clearance vehicle goes by, it stops to clear a mine, but then some seals get out of the back and go set up an overwatch position. Very cool.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 they're in position.

Speaker 5 The one by the soccer stadium is in position. The other group gets in their spot.

Speaker 5 And the building that they had selected was not the way it looked like it was going to look on paper or the way it looked on the overhead imagery.

Speaker 5 They didn't have a good view of this long axis road that was going to be utilized for the clearance, which was bad because it was going to get cleared and then it would be hours before the op started.

Speaker 5 And now we'd have possible IDs getting reseeded. That's a problem.
Didn't want that to happen.

Speaker 5 So that element decided to move.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 now there's a lot of time compression. The sun's starting to come up.

Speaker 5 And we're like, as they realize the sun's coming up, they're like, oh, we don't have good visibility of the road that we need.

Speaker 5 That's our, that's, that's their commander's intent is to watch this road. They can't see the road.
They decide to move.

Speaker 5 As they move, they go into a building that is just outside the limit of advance.

Speaker 5 And I'm sorry for civilians that I'm talking in military jargon, but there's a point where the clearance operation was supposed to stop.

Speaker 5 And so they're on the other side of, it's a road. It's like, okay, the clearance operation, they will not go past this road.

Speaker 5 So now,

Speaker 5 as things start to develop, I've got my guys, my sniper element over by the soccer stadium, they're starting to engage enemy.

Speaker 5 The

Speaker 5 seals that are pushing through,

Speaker 5 they're starting to encounter experience resistance and they're starting to engage. With my little element, starting to engage, so there's a lot of enemy fighters out there.

Speaker 5 And at some point,

Speaker 5 one of the Iraqi elements,

Speaker 5 which

Speaker 5 I don't know why they did this,

Speaker 5 or I did not know, no one knew that they were going to do this. They had decided that they were going to set their own cordon around the area that was being cleared.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 by themselves, they ran from where the clearance was taking place all the way to the limit of Advance Road.

Speaker 5 And they went across it to enter the building and set up

Speaker 5 an overwatch position for themselves.

Speaker 5 That's where my guys were.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 one of my guys, and again, there's so many little details that go into this, but we had seen, they give us Intel pictures, and the Intel pictures have body armor and helmets and AK-47s and chocolate chip camis that the enemy has.

Speaker 5 So we know that the enemy can be wearing body armor, chocolate chip camis, helmets, and we know they carry AK-47s.

Speaker 5 So one of my guys is in that Overwatch overwatch and

Speaker 5 they're looking out the bottom floor and they see a guy with an ak-47 again it's like not quite nods time it's the worst time of day dude

Speaker 5 and the guy sees a guy with an ak-47 maneuvering through the courtyard which they had zip-tied the courtyard shut so this guy had actively entered the courtyard and was now maneuvering and

Speaker 5 my god shot him

Speaker 5 obviously looking back,

Speaker 5 this was one of those Iraqi soldiers that had run up there.

Speaker 5 So now

Speaker 5 him and his Iraqi soldiers, and there was a small Marine element that had gone with us, an Anglico element, had gone with these guys because the job of the Anglico is to keep track of the frontline trace of where friendly forces are.

Speaker 5 So they see these Iraqi soldiers run off and they follow them because they're freaking awesome Marines and they're doing their job.

Speaker 5 So now they get up to where this, where this guy is, where this small element is, and they're like, what's going on? They're like, hey, you know, broken English, the whole thing.

Speaker 5 One of our guys went in that compound.

Speaker 5 He got shot.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so then what do they do? They all start shooting. So what we end up with, now we're entering the blue on blue.
This is a blue-on-blue

Speaker 5 happening. And

Speaker 5 as

Speaker 5 my guys in the Overwatch position are now returning fire at the Iraqis that are dumping down rounds trying to get their guy out of the courtyard.

Speaker 5 The Iraqis call

Speaker 5 for the QRF.

Speaker 5 So now a QRF launches to go down and it gets to that corner.

Speaker 5 50 caliber machine gun puts it on the

Speaker 5 Overwatch, my Overwatch position. And again, this Overwatch position is Iraqi soldiers and SEALs

Speaker 5 and starts engaging. with 50 Cal into this Overwatch position.

Speaker 5 As this is happening, now

Speaker 5 my guys call the heavy QRF,

Speaker 5 which is tanks.

Speaker 5 And as this happens, I look at the company commander, Joe Claiborne. I'm like, hey, those are my guys calling QRF.
Let's go. Like, follow these tanks down there.
Roger that.

Speaker 5 So we

Speaker 5 kind of break contact over here and we pull out onto that main road, Farouk Way is what it was called. And as we're driving down this road,

Speaker 5 I'm looking and i see the tank and i see red smoke

Speaker 5 which is what what we use for emergencies and i see the tank and i'm i i just as soon as i looked around i didn't know exactly what was going on but i knew something

Speaker 5 my gut instinct was telling me there's something something is wrong

Speaker 5 so I get out of the Humvee and I'm with my SEA, who's a great dude, and I

Speaker 5 look and I see the gunny sergeant from Anglico. And I'm like, what's happening? And he goes, there's moose in that building right there.
He goes,

Speaker 5 he's like, we're going to call for fire. Like, we got to take him out.
I'm like, okay, stand by. Cause I didn't feel comfortable.

Speaker 5 And looked at my

Speaker 5 like SEA, gave him like the head nod. And he like got on my, gave me the squeeze.
And I started walking up. And as I'm walking up to this compound,

Speaker 5 I see a white

Speaker 5 on the ground on the door. I see a white zip tie.

Speaker 5 And I'm like,

Speaker 5 my guys are in here. And I kicked the door open.
And when I kicked the door open, I saw

Speaker 5 platoon chief, Tony Fratty, standing there.

Speaker 5 And he's like stoked to see me because they called the QRF. He's thinking I'm the QRF.

Speaker 5 And I go, what happened? And he said, hey,

Speaker 5 guy was coming through the courtyard. We engaged him.
And then they brought it.

Speaker 5 And I looked at him, I said, it was a blue on blue.

Speaker 5 And he looked at me like

Speaker 5 totally

Speaker 5 confused.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he said, can we get the guys out of here? I said, yeah. And we had a 113 was down there as a Kazavak already.

Speaker 5 So got the SEALs and the Iraqi soldiers that were in there, put them in the 113 to get them out of there. And Tony stayed with me because Tony's like,

Speaker 5 there's a reason why I said Tony's like top of the list because Tony just got 150 rounds shot at him through a 50 cal. By the way, one of my other guys, Matt Hasby, he got fragged in the face.

Speaker 5 He was so, had so accepted his death. It was wild.

Speaker 5 But Tony, through all that, was just like, hey, I'm staying with you, boss. I'm like, check, no factor.
Those guys go back.

Speaker 5 And I went up then to the company commander.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 same thing. I looked at him.
I said, hey, that was a blue and blue. And his same look, like, what? And I said, it it was a blue and blue.
And he radioed it in.

Speaker 5 So, and by, as soon as I saw that white zip tie, I had figured out what had happened.

Speaker 5 You know, I was like, oh, and I saw the building from the map where my guys were supposed to be, where they were originally planning to be. I knew that I was at the limit advance.

Speaker 5 Like, I knew what had happened. And talking to that Anglico guy was like, yeah, the Iraqis pushed down here.
And I was like, oh.

Speaker 5 So we finished the clearance, you know, because that's what you do. Like, there's still a mission going on.
We finish the clearance. And

Speaker 5 as we finish the clearance, we then

Speaker 5 we're now like

Speaker 5 some elements stay out there, but the bulk of the clearance force is now going back to base. I go back to base and

Speaker 5 myself and the company commander go to the same battalion commander that he had just told you he wanted SEALs with us on all of his operations. And this battalion commander is one of the best guys,

Speaker 5 but seriously, one of the best leaders I've ever met. And

Speaker 5 he looked at me and he looked at Joe and he's like, What happened out there? And there was a giant battle map, like literally wallpaper. And I just walked through it with him.

Speaker 5 I was like, hey, sir, I had an element here, had an element here.

Speaker 5 My element moved to here. This Iraqi element pushed down.
He goes, they went past a limited advance. My guys

Speaker 5 didn't know who they were, engaged them. them.

Speaker 5 They called the QRF.

Speaker 5 My guys got engaged by the QRF. My guys called the heavy QRF.
I came down and made the connection. And he was like,

Speaker 5 and this guy was, you know, he'd been in Vermont for six months as a battalion commander or five months or whatever it was at that time. I guess they got there in December.
Yes.

Speaker 5 It would have been like four or five months. He was just.

Speaker 5 Awesome. And he was like, okay.

Speaker 5 He's like, we learned from that. Don't let it happen again.
We got another mission to do.

Speaker 5 And I was like, Roger that, sir. And so we went, rejocked, went out again, did a whole nother operation, got done with that clearance sector.
And again, now everything's, you know,

Speaker 5 we didn't have any more of these things happen. And then we came back, did it again, boom, rolled out.

Speaker 5 So we end up doing clearances the whole day, engaging all kinds of enemy fighters, the whole nine yards.

Speaker 5 And then I get back once the last mission is done, because these were daytime operations, you know, other than us inserting at night, once the sun was setting, the Iraqi soldiers can't clear it at night.

Speaker 5 So it's a daytime operation. That's why.

Speaker 5 Then I get back and I open up my

Speaker 5 field computer. And

Speaker 5 needless to say, I had some emails and some texts. you know, the webby texts to explain that, hey, stand down.

Speaker 5 Investigation is commencing as to what happened. And I'm like, yeah, Roger that.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 we

Speaker 5 consolidate and we go back over to

Speaker 5 Western Ramadi, Camp Ramadi, Camp Mark, what we end up calling Camp Mark Lee. And now I'm getting ready to debrief.
And my skipper sends me an email like, hey.

Speaker 5 We'll be out there tomorrow. Be ready to debrief.
And now I'm trying. So now one Iraqi soldier's dead, multiple Iraqi soldiers wounded, and one of my guys wounded, blue on blue.

Speaker 5 Dude, it's a freaking nightmare.

Speaker 5 It's a nightmare.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I spend the next however many hours

Speaker 5 trying to figure out

Speaker 5 who is to blame for this.

Speaker 5 My assumption is someone's getting fired, right? Because you can't have a blue on blue and no one gets fired.

Speaker 5 My assumption is someone's getting fired. So that's kind of the question: who's getting fired?

Speaker 5 So I go down the list of like

Speaker 5 the element leader that was in charge of the Iraqi soldiers.

Speaker 5 Guess what he didn't do? He didn't keep control of those soldiers and let them go down and leave the limit of advance.

Speaker 5 The radio man that was in charge of that element that moved positions didn't tell me or anyone else where he was going. He just did it.

Speaker 5 Shooter shot a guy without doing a good PID.

Speaker 5 Like, I went down the list and was figuring out who was to blame. And there was something in my gut that felt

Speaker 5 so disgusted by my thoughts.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I was probably, you know, a half an hour away from when the CL arrived.

Speaker 5 And I couldn't figure out why I felt so disgusted in this debrief.

Speaker 5 And it occurred to me like a giant slap upside my head that

Speaker 5 the reason I felt disgusted is because I was trying to blame people for things that were my fault.

Speaker 5 Because this operation, like every operation, when you are the senior leader on the battlefield, you're in charge of everything.

Speaker 5 And every one of those mistakes that happened are because of me.

Speaker 5 They're because of me, because I failed as a leader to convey how important it was to pass your location. I failed to convey as a leader how important the limit of advance was.

Speaker 5 I failed to convey how important it was to keep control of those Iraqi soldiers. Those things are my fault that that's happened.

Speaker 5 Not any one of those guys.

Speaker 5 And so when the commanding officer showed up, and the command master chief and the investigating officer, and they're sitting there in the room

Speaker 5 with my wounded guy who's got his head bandaged up. It's Matt Hasbre.
You know, Matt, right?

Speaker 6 Matt was my swim buddy in second phase.

Speaker 5 So I'm looking at Matt in the back. I mean, it's only a miracle that he's alive, right? He had 50 cal punching through the roof.
He's laying there.

Speaker 5 He drew out his pistol so he could like fend for himself as he got overrun.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 and I will say, with that moment when I realized why I felt disgusted, I felt so relieved. Like, oh, you're an idiot.

Speaker 5 This is you. And I felt, okay, this is you.
This is what you did. You're in charge.
You're responsible. And this is what the leader does.

Speaker 5 And so I went in the room and, you know, I asked that question, whose fault was this?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 there was a pretty good moment of silence. And

Speaker 5 then someone chimed in. Well, hey, it was my fault I did this.
And I was like, no, it wasn't your fault. And then the radio said, no, it was my fault.
They said, no, it wasn't your fault.

Speaker 6 The whole team was in there.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Everyone in task unit Bruiser was in there. And the Command Master Chief and the skipper and the investigating officer.

Speaker 5 And I went around the room and asked, you know, whose fault is this? And everybody,

Speaker 5 you know, whether it was they wanted to blame the Iraqis, whether they want to take ownership themselves. everybody was chiming in on whose fault it was.
And then I said, no, it wasn't your fault.

Speaker 5 It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault.
There's only one person to blame, and that person's me. And that is the truth.

Speaker 5 That is the truth. When you are in charge of a team and something goes wrong, it is your fault.

Speaker 5 And then I said, and here's some things that we're going to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again. And I started talking about time and space deconfliction.

Speaker 5 I started talking about how we were going to overly signal. We went through some protocols.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 that was it. And, you know, my boss,

Speaker 5 who I already had a great relationship with, and the master chief, who's a great, you know, legendary master chief, he, you know, those guys,

Speaker 5 my, my relationship and trust with them went up in both directions because

Speaker 5 they understood

Speaker 5 what they understood what had happened.

Speaker 5 They understood that I understood.

Speaker 5 And I think, you know, if they would have,

Speaker 5 they would have been in their rights to say, hey, Jocko, you're done.

Speaker 5 Or they could have fired anyone in that long chain of command.

Speaker 5 I would have protested with my own

Speaker 5 job if they would have tried to fire someone else besides me. But,

Speaker 5 you know, I had a good relationship with them. They understood how complicated it was.
They saw these little things. There's a million other little elements I can tell you about.

Speaker 5 Like the fact that Matt Hasby, who was getting shot at with a 50 caliber machine gun, which you'd think, hey, dude, you're getting shot at with a 50 cali. That's an American weapon.

Speaker 5 Like, that's not common. Well,

Speaker 5 12 hours prior to this, he was in a sniper tower. And he got engaged with a Dishka, 12.7 machine gun by the enemy.

Speaker 5 And he was, he told me he was literally up there thinking, I can't believe these guys of the Dishka found me again.

Speaker 5 Because otherwise, if you think you're getting shot at with a 50 cal, you call ceasefire, you throw red smoke, you do something to stop it. He had no idea.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 that's, you know, to

Speaker 5 the credit of my command master chief and my commanding officer. They listened to me.
I listened to them. And

Speaker 5 we carried on. And that was a very

Speaker 5 rough way to begin the deployment.

Speaker 6 Do you have any idea how much credibility was boosted within you with your team that day?

Speaker 5 I don't know,

Speaker 5 but I can tell you that you and I have both sat in rooms where some officer blamed someone else other than themselves. And you and I both know that that is disgusting.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's what disgusted me. The fact that I was even having those thoughts, you know, part of it was me trying to truly figure out what happened.

Speaker 5 But part of it was like, oh, yeah, this is you trying to look for someone to blame. There's no one to blame.
You're in charge.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 the guys in the troop, the guys in the task unit, like

Speaker 5 these guys, I'm not a hard person to figure out. I'm not maneuvering in some way.

Speaker 5 I am who I am. And

Speaker 5 those guys knew that.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 I think I would have lost a lot of respect. I think I did what they probably expected I was going to do.
You know,

Speaker 5 maybe some of them were pleasantly surprised, but I think most of them knew me. They didn't, you know, I think I would have been a,

Speaker 5 it would have been, we would have been very out of character if I'd have gone in there and blamed someone else. That's not, that's not how, that's not how it works.

Speaker 5 You know, again, this goes back to that platoon commander I had. You know, that guy, he was responsible for everything.
And we screwed something up, even when we screwed something up.

Speaker 5 Even when one time, one of my friends got in trouble, like on Liberty,

Speaker 5 and he wasn't even there.

Speaker 5 He wasn't even there. And he's like, Yeah, you know, I should have seen this coming.

Speaker 5 I was like, check.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 when things go wrong, you better take ownership of it.

Speaker 5 And they certainly went wrong in that scenario.

Speaker 5 And, you know, there's another, the Commodore of Group 2 at the time,

Speaker 5 who was a guy that was a legendary,

Speaker 5 legendary leader in the SEAL teams. And he

Speaker 5 had been a Marine in Vietnam, and he had come in at the tail end of Wei City.

Speaker 5 And I don't, I can't remember if I talked to him or if he emailed me.

Speaker 5 But he said something along the lines of, hey, Jonko, I don't know if you know about me. Yes, I know about you, sir.

Speaker 5 I was in the tail end of Way City in Vietnam.

Speaker 5 I saw he, you know, he was one of those guys that made it very clear that he was not in the Battle of Way City, but he showed up there afterwards, or he's at the tail end of it. And he said,

Speaker 5 he rattled off the percentage, like a third of the casualties in Way City were fracture side.

Speaker 5 That's just one battle. It's like this complicated stuff.

Speaker 5 And it was the first, he was, he let me know, like, okay,

Speaker 5 this stuff, this is war. And by the way, the Army, like that battalion commander, Blue on Blue was a part of Ramadi.

Speaker 5 You know, we think of in the SEAL teams, and we think of Blue on Blue, it's like you're getting kicked out of the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 Like, if you and I are running around with Sim and I shoot you, there's a decent chance I'm getting kicked out of the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 Like, that's how much of a mortal sin it is.

Speaker 5 And the Army

Speaker 5 and the Marine Corps, they were like, it's just like,

Speaker 5 we have to mitigate it as much as we can but if you can't

Speaker 5 it's it can happen this is part of it it's part of it and it's a horrible part of it and look we

Speaker 5 we had other blue on blues that potentially could happen we had shots fired

Speaker 5 but we never had it escalate like that one did and that's because we learned a lot of lessons from that one and we prevented all kinds that never escalated at all, that never happened.

Speaker 5 But, you know, it's one of those, it's funny. We, we, in Extreme Ownership, Lafe and I were writing our kind of chapters independently.

Speaker 5 And it ends up, there's three chapters in there that are about blue on blue. One of them was Chris Kyle with a PID on a guy with a scoped weapon.
And

Speaker 5 he's telling Lafe, like, hey, I got a guy with a scoped weapon in this building. Is there any friendlies in that building? And Lafe's calling.

Speaker 5 the company commander, hey, do you got any friendlies in this building? And the guy's like, no. He said, we got a guy with a scope weapon.
He's like, kill him.

Speaker 5 Because there's snipers that are killing Americans.

Speaker 5 And Chris like didn't quite feel comfortable. And Leif was like, hey, he's saying we're cleared and

Speaker 5 goes back and forth. And finally, Leif's like, hey, we don't feel comfortable taking the shot.
And the guy's kind of pissed. And this is a great company commander.
Guy's kind of pissed.

Speaker 5 And he's like, okay, well, we'll go clear it.

Speaker 5 And Lafe's like, Roger, we got, you know, we'll tell you what we see.

Speaker 5 And a few minutes later, the army goes to assault that building, but they come out of the building that they were going to assault.

Speaker 5 There was a, they didn't know we miscounted the buildings or they miscounted the building. I forget what it was, but that right there.

Speaker 5 Man, if Chris, Chris could have shot one of the friendlies, but you, we had to be so careful about these engagements. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And then there was another one that I wrote about where we had a element, sniper element on a rooftop, and there's a Bradley fighting vehicle on an intersection.

Speaker 5 And he calls back like, hey, we got, we see bad guys on the building of building 48J or whatever the building was. And the company commander's like, you got any guys on that building? I'm like,

Speaker 5 hold on. I'm like, because it's, you know, multiple guys with scope weapons on top of a building.
I'm like, do me a favor.

Speaker 5 Have the Bradley count the number of buildings he sees till he gets to that target.

Speaker 5 And he's like, what? And I go, please.

Speaker 5 He's like, okay.

Speaker 5 He says, all right, hey, whatever, dash one, count the number of buildings you see before you get to that target building. Guys, like, what? He said, count the number of buildings.

Speaker 5 Counts the number of buildings. Come back.
He said, hey, we misid'd the number of the building. It's actually building 32.

Speaker 5 Like, yeah, we got friendlies on that building. Do not engage.
So that's what we were dealing with a lot. And there was cases in Ramadi of people engaging Hum Vs.

Speaker 5 Like, there's probably no vehicle in the world with a more distinct silhouette than a Humvee.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we had guys,

Speaker 5 there was soldiers and Marines that engaged Humvees because of the confusion and chaos of the battlefield.

Speaker 5 So that's how we started off with a massive lesson learned.

Speaker 6 With a lesson learned like that, and you took ownership of that, I mean, and this is, this is advice for

Speaker 6 future leaders in war. I mean,

Speaker 6 how do you brush that off and get your head back in the game?

Speaker 5 well what are we going to do to prevent it you know like we got lessons learned and

Speaker 5 you know i think when you're shooting head plates and you miss one if you start thinking about the one that you just missed you're going to miss two more

Speaker 5 and i think that's a really important thing to be able to do with other factors in your life of hey look this happened it went bad

Speaker 5 We need to fix it. We need to fix it and we need to move on.
If you live in the past on stuff,

Speaker 5 you learn from it, but you can't, it's like I say about when, when you, with, with losing people,

Speaker 5 if you lose someone, like your friend, your, your parents, your brother, your sister, whoever, someone close to you dies,

Speaker 5 you got to remember them, but you can't dwell on the past. You can't just, you can't just be there forever because then you're not moving forward.

Speaker 5 So I think it's the similar activity here from my standpoint is like, okay, like, this is what we did wrong. This is the lessons that we learned, and here's how we move forward.

Speaker 6 Did you feel any type of reluctancy to

Speaker 6 address your men

Speaker 6 as their leader again after that?

Speaker 6 Immediately after that?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 Man,

Speaker 5 I was really close with these guys, you know, up and down the chain of command.

Speaker 5 These guys had, we did a a workup together. They've seen me in every different type of scenario.
They're not like,

Speaker 5 these are, these are my brothers.

Speaker 5 And we're in great relationships, you know, so I wasn't.

Speaker 5 I, if I would have blamed one of these guys, I would have been ashamed to show my face.

Speaker 5 You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 they were more like,

Speaker 5 hey, this wasn't your fault. Like, yes, it was.
Like, they've tried to re-explain to me.

Speaker 6 You know? Well, the other thing is they're all thinking, he's got our fucking back.

Speaker 6 And that's really

Speaker 6 definitely one of the most important attributes of a good leader is knowing that your guy, your boss, has your fucking back. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yes, it is absolutely. And.

Speaker 5 You got to know that they have your back.

Speaker 5 And this is, you know, this is one of those things where it turns into, or you have to watch out.

Speaker 5 Because if you work for me and your impression of me that I give you is that no matter what you do, I'll cover for you.

Speaker 5 Now we get into a bad zone. Because you have to know

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 if you do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical,

Speaker 5 I'm not going to have your back.

Speaker 5 Now, if you explained to to me what happened and what went wrong and you had a, what we, what we learned from the army, which is a good shot, bad result, 100%,

Speaker 5 100%.

Speaker 5 But if you are doing things

Speaker 5 that are illegal, immoral, or unethical,

Speaker 5 you need to know that I will not have your back. And even something, even, you know, even this isn't that extreme, but like I would tell guys,

Speaker 5 Hey, you get a DUI.

Speaker 5 It doesn't matter what I do to your back because you're, it's going to be in the system and you're going to get in trouble, and there's nothing I can do about it. Like, there's nothing I can do.

Speaker 5 Like, I can go and be a character witness and tell you, tell the Commodore how great you are, but the Commodore is going to go, Oh, yeah, you had a DUI, you're getting, you're getting uh busted down, and you were playing here from your platoon.

Speaker 5 And I have, it doesn't matter how much I have your back. That's what's happening.

Speaker 5 So, yes, you're right. But as a leader, you've got to put those parameters up to make sure that guys understand

Speaker 5 what the left and right lateral limits are. And they can be big,

Speaker 5 but they're not infinite. And that's why I need to know that you have my back.
Because if you're out doing something that you shouldn't be doing, what are you doing to me, man?

Speaker 5 Because I am going to, you know, I'm going to take the fall as well. It's not like I'm just going to be like, oh, no, he did it.
Because I am responsible.

Speaker 5 You do something stupid or you do something illegal and you get rolled up, I'm going down too, as I should, because I let it happen.

Speaker 5 So, yes, 100%. And these guys knew that these guys knew that that is how we have to operate

Speaker 5 and luckily for me like i said i did that tour as the admiral's aide

Speaker 5 i understood what what those left and right lateral limits were i understood that very well

Speaker 5 and that was a real blessing because there were no

Speaker 5 there wasn't really any ambiguity about that.

Speaker 5 If you do some something that's outside the box,

Speaker 5 I will not have your back.

Speaker 5 Anything you do inside the box, and like I said, it's a big box, a big box. I got you.
But you better be doing good things, at least with the best intent.

Speaker 5 And are mistakes going to happen? Yeah, man. They are going to happen, especially in a combat zone.
Like, are civilians going to get killed in the combat zone? Yes, they are.

Speaker 5 Are the wrong breaches going to happen to the wrong building? Yep, they're going to happen.

Speaker 5 There are things that are going to happen.

Speaker 5 And I will have your back

Speaker 5 as long as your intent was good, as long as you were doing the right thing for the right reasons all day.

Speaker 5 And yeah, my guys knew that for sure.

Speaker 5 And I knew that with them.

Speaker 6 How was it working with Chris Kyle?

Speaker 5 Great.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It's great.

Speaker 5 He was a very dedicated sniper.

Speaker 5 He was a wise ass.

Speaker 5 He was funny as hell.

Speaker 5 He was a shit talker

Speaker 5 in like a good team guy way.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he was

Speaker 5 just a great guy to have on a platoon. Yeah, man.

Speaker 5 Like you'd see him and Tony looking at imagery for hours, trying to figure out what building would be best, looking at the angles, looking at the distances, look at the long axis.

Speaker 5 Like, that's what they did.

Speaker 5 And, you know, he was good, man.

Speaker 5 He was good. He would spend, you know, a long time on his gun

Speaker 5 in sniper Overwatch positions. And he would set himself up for some good positions.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 Like, he would set himself up on some long axis positions where he can see four or five blocks. And meanwhile, like a new guy sniper might see half of an alley.

Speaker 5 So, but he earned that position, you know, he earned it with his patience and his

Speaker 5 and his discrepancy. Like he was, he was very, very good.
He was good as it gets.

Speaker 6 Was he good at passing on wisdom?

Speaker 5 Yeah, you know, I'd say I was a little bit out of the line of fire of him passing on wisdom because I wasn't a sniper. Gotcha.

Speaker 5 But,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 he'd pass on some hassling to these new guys. I can tell you that.

Speaker 5 The funny thing is, you know, they, um,

Speaker 5 he liked to do, this is weird, but he liked to do like pranks

Speaker 5 like a, like a

Speaker 5 grade school kid. Like he would prank people, do funny stuff.
Like, that's, that's what he's like.

Speaker 5 So he wasn't that, you know, in the movie, they make him out to be like super serious all the time and all this stuff. And he was actually just a funny, great guy to be around that brought a lot of

Speaker 5 brought a lot of entertainment with him, you know, a lot of entertainment. Right on.
And we had, you know, and we had a good crew of guys that was, you know,

Speaker 5 that's a SEAL platoon, man. It's a SEAL platoon.
I was, I guess, there's SEAL platoons where they're not

Speaker 5 like having fun and

Speaker 5 ribbing each other and, you know, being brothers.

Speaker 5 But I was never in a platoon like that. I was always in a platoon that was freaking awesome to hang around.
And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 when I was a young SEAL, what did I do on the weekends? I went to the team.

Speaker 5 You went to the team on the weekends. Went to the team on Saturday and worked on your gear.

Speaker 5 Went to the team on Sunday and worked out with your buddies. That's all we did.
That's what we did because there wasn't anything else.

Speaker 5 And once I had a family, I had to like at least take a little bit of time.

Speaker 5 But even then, I was my family was second to my platoon, to my task unit, to the teams.

Speaker 5 I would love to tell you that I'm embarrassed to admit that or that that's not the right thing. But when you're in the SEAL teams, I think that is the thing.

Speaker 6 That's the fucking way it is, man.

Speaker 5 That's the way it is. And, you know, God bless my wife, who was just like a saint, but she handled the family stuff.
And I handled the war stuff.

Speaker 5 Were you married at this time? Yep. So going to Ramadi, I had

Speaker 5 three kids at that time.

Speaker 6 You had three kids.

Speaker 6 How are you handling deployment? I mean,

Speaker 6 how many deployments had you done married with kids and or with kids? Two.

Speaker 5 Well, no, one. Three.
Three.

Speaker 5 So my daughter was born. My oldest daughter was born the day before I went on the strike deployment at Team Two.
She was born and I left. Never changed a diaper.

Speaker 5 And then while I was in college, I had two more kids because I was home.

Speaker 5 And then, um,

Speaker 5 and yeah, I mean,

Speaker 5 I was, I was in the SEAL teams, man.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 we go on deployment, we go to war, and

Speaker 5 you want, you want to be with your kids, but you're not going to be with your kids in the SEAL teams. It's not a good, it's not a good family environment.
Now, if you have a strong family,

Speaker 5 you know.

Speaker 5 Men have been going, you know, on some form of deployment since the beginning of time.

Speaker 6 You said this at breakfast and I fucking love this.

Speaker 5 I mean, because I hear sometimes people like, oh, you know, the father's got to be around. Like, I wasn't around.

Speaker 5 You know, and a lot of dads weren't around. And they raised some awesome kids.
And so, yeah. Guys have been going on the hunt, on the sea voyage, on the crusade, whatever you're going on.

Speaker 5 Men have been going on that stuff for a long time. And

Speaker 5 the kids understand that, and

Speaker 5 the moms understand it, and they raise warriors.

Speaker 6 How long have you been married?

Speaker 5 I think 28 years.

Speaker 6 What is the secret to a successful marriage?

Speaker 5 There's a couple, but number one is marry like a pretty awesome woman.

Speaker 5 And then, you know, just apply the principles of leadership to your marriage. You know, it's the same principles that

Speaker 5 you want your wife to listen to you, you better listen to her.

Speaker 5 You want your wife to trust you, you better trust her. You want your wife to respect you, you better treat her with respect.

Speaker 5 You want your wife to care about you, you better care about her.

Speaker 5 You do, if something goes wrong, you better take ownership.

Speaker 5 So that's worked out great for me. And my wife's a saint.

Speaker 5 My wife's a saint.

Speaker 6 I'm sure she is.

Speaker 5 You know, when you were asking me about

Speaker 5 the pressure on my first deployment to Iraq.

Speaker 5 And I told you that I didn't really feel

Speaker 5 this, you know, wasn't.

Speaker 5 the

Speaker 5 idea of someone getting wounded or killed was kind of

Speaker 5 a little bit of a distant thing in the back of my mind.

Speaker 5 And in Ramadi,

Speaker 5 it was front of mind.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 when you see that many casualties happening,

Speaker 5 like on a daily basis,

Speaker 5 there is

Speaker 5 the odds are going to catch you.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 of course, do you hope, am I fatalistic?

Speaker 5 Because that was my thought process, maybe,

Speaker 5 but it was also just numbers, man.

Speaker 5 It was just the numbers. You just look at the numbers, and every day, every time you leave the wire,

Speaker 5 there is a chance.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 it's a daily basis. And listen,

Speaker 5 the Army and the Marine Corps are

Speaker 5 just making the most incredible sacrifices.

Speaker 5 You see it. You go to their memorials.
You hear it on the radio. That's one thing that was, you know, you'd hear it on the radios.

Speaker 5 You'd hear, hey, there's 1k heading back to Camper Matti, heading to, or three wounded heading to Charlie Med. Like, you would hear these things.
It's just constant.

Speaker 6 This is daily.

Speaker 5 Daily.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 and you know, I try and give as much

Speaker 5 admiration to the Army and the Marine Corps

Speaker 5 who

Speaker 5 fought so hard in such terrible conditions.

Speaker 5 And that's what they were facing every day. And that's what we were facing.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we had

Speaker 5 the blue-on-blue happen

Speaker 5 almost pretty quickly thereafter,

Speaker 5 Cowie got wounded bad.

Speaker 5 And, you know, Cowie's just a stud.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he's in Charlie Med. He's all doped up on morphine.
The doc pulls me aside and he's like, hey, I don't know if this leg's going to make it.

Speaker 5 Roger.

Speaker 5 And Cowie, like, I,

Speaker 5 you know, bend over to like hold his hand. And he's like, the first thing's out of his mouth,

Speaker 5 let me stay.

Speaker 5 Damn.

Speaker 5 So that's the kind of guys you got, you know.

Speaker 5 Let me stay.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you know, this is

Speaker 5 once the 11AD shows up with Colonel McFarland, later General McFarland, you know, that's when we start pressing in to the city.

Speaker 5 That's when we start supporting these combat overwatch, or the, yeah, these combat outposts being built in the city, which is a huge construction project.

Speaker 5 And there's a time period when they're building these combat outposts in the city that they're extremely vulnerable because they're doing a construction project in the middle of the war zone.

Speaker 5 And so what can we do to help that is we can set up sniper overwatch positions. And when the enemy would maneuver in to attack them,

Speaker 5 we would kill them. And it was actually General McFarland,

Speaker 5 he wrote in an article.

Speaker 5 It's like those combat outposts being built were bait.

Speaker 5 You know, he didn't put them out there as bait. He put them out there on the grand strategy of taking over the city.
But it's like a salt lick.

Speaker 5 You know, you start building this construction project in the middle of downtown Ramadi, the insurgents are absolutely going to attack you.

Speaker 5 And when they do,

Speaker 5 my guys

Speaker 5 would be in an offset position, 200 meters away, 300 meters away, 400 meters away, looking down a long axis avenue of approach where the mooge would come. And they'd kill them.

Speaker 5 And it was,

Speaker 5 you know, an ideal setup. for us.

Speaker 5 You know, it was when we started doing this, like this, the amount of

Speaker 5 the amount of scrutiny

Speaker 5 for the 11AD, for General McFarland, you know, he was getting scrutinized on the amount of combat that his guys were getting, the amount of casualties and the amount of killing that he was doing.

Speaker 5 He was getting that scrutiny

Speaker 5 from the meth.

Speaker 5 And I was feeling the same thing.

Speaker 5 And it was always like, please come see.

Speaker 5 Come and see. Come and see what's happening here.

Speaker 5 It doesn't take long to figure out and thankfully you know they did you know i had the the siege so to commander who's a great guy at the time came down visited the you know the commodore visited the socom commander visited you know general general brown the socom commander he came to see us in ramadi we got 35 seals bro he's in charge of all of the world of special operations he came to ramadi to see what we were doing to talk to the conventionals make sure that they were getting what we needed so there was a lot of of eyes on what we were doing and part of that was because of the amount of people we were killing and

Speaker 5 part of it was because they were very risky operations

Speaker 5 can i i want to ask a question

Speaker 6 you'd been studying this you'd been studying ramadi since before you got there it's you know seals have what year and a half workup you started studying sounds like i think what did you say maybe you maybe found out six months into workup workup that you were going to Ramadi?

Speaker 5 No, we didn't know we were going to remati until like a couple weeks before. Okay.
Yep

Speaker 6 Well, you're talking about doing dailies weeklies monthlies of

Speaker 6 troops in contact casualties. You've studied you've you've studied this fucking battle space.
It's very obvious it's hot

Speaker 6 Why are you why would anybody be under scrutiny for the amount of combat that they're seeing when they want you to incrementally take over a fucking city?

Speaker 6 That makes zero sense to me. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 5 And again, it wasn't just me and Special Operations. General McFarland was feeling the same thing.

Speaker 5 And again, just like General McFarland had a great relationship with the MEF commander, I had a great relationship with my commanding officer.

Speaker 5 And so when I explained to him what was happening, you know, we started probably a few weeks, like three weeks into these sniper overwatches that we were doing. This is early in deployment.

Speaker 5 And we'd killed, I don't know how many, probably,

Speaker 5 I don't know, 10, 15 something,

Speaker 5 mostly IED in placers.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I talked to my headquarters and they're like, hey,

Speaker 5 you know, you're killing these IED emplacers, but the IEDs haven't gone down yet.

Speaker 5 And I said, hey, sir,

Speaker 5 the average insurgency, according to the counterinsurgency manual, last seven years, it's been three weeks. Can I get some more time to work? And he's like, yeah, check.
But yeah, I mean,

Speaker 5 well, you know what it's like. You know what it was like for a SEAL rotation at the time.
You know,

Speaker 5 you went to Iraq, right?

Speaker 5 There's not a lot of

Speaker 5 direct enemy contact.

Speaker 5 And there's not a lot of killing most of the time. You're doing DAs.
They they don't want to fight.

Speaker 5 Do they get killed sometimes? Yes. But most of the time, they don't really want to fight.
So they surrender and you capture.

Speaker 5 The capture-kill part is mostly capture. For me, on my first deployment, it was almost all capture, killed very few.

Speaker 5 Well, now you're in this zone where there's an enemy that are, like I said, like us going to a salt lick.

Speaker 5 They are maneuvering through the streets, and we're in

Speaker 5 locations with tactical advantage that we selected with long axis down multiple roads, you're going to start killing a lot of enemy fighters.

Speaker 5 And it was abnormal. It was abnormal.
And so, you know, the scrutiny came, but I welcomed it. It's no factor.
You know,

Speaker 5 we had to have guys sign a shooter statement for everybody that we killed. There was like a sworn shooter statement.
And at first, guys, like, oh, you know, why we got to do this? It's like, hey,

Speaker 5 because in five years or 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, someone's going to come back and say,

Speaker 5 this person died here.

Speaker 5 Who did it?

Speaker 5 And we'll say, either, oh, yeah, that was us because this is why, or no, that wasn't us.

Speaker 5 So, I'm again

Speaker 5 luckily for me that I had

Speaker 5 seen the

Speaker 5 the officer side of things, I understood that. And I was able to explain it to the guys.

Speaker 5 Explain it to the guys, like, hey, there's a reason we're seeing this scrutiny. It's because we're killing a lot of bad guys.

Speaker 5 And the chain of command needs to make sure that we're doing the right thing for the right reasons. We are.

Speaker 5 And they see that. And

Speaker 5 we got such great support from the Siege of SOTAF. from my chain of command, from the

Speaker 5 special operations chain of command for sure. Like I said, General Brown came out.
And by the way,

Speaker 5 the Army and the Marine Corps was like epic.

Speaker 5 You know, I

Speaker 5 had the colonel that was in charge, General Sean McFarland had him on my podcast. And, you know, like, you can tell it was as good as it gets.

Speaker 5 And so, yeah, there's scrutiny because you're killing a lot of bad guys. And there's also scrutiny because these are risky freaking operations.

Speaker 5 And, you know, a big one was going out in the daytime.

Speaker 5 Why would you give up the tactical advantage of going out at night, which we have, because we got night vision, we got lasers, a whole nine yards. Why would we make that mistake?

Speaker 5 Well, there's a bunch of reasons. You know, there's a bunch of reasons.
Number one, our mission from the Siege of Sotaf was to train and fight company and platoon-sized elements of Iraqi soldiers.

Speaker 5 So that means we are supposed to train them and go and fight with them.

Speaker 5 Company and platoon sized elements, not special mission units, not DA units, company and platoon sized elements of infantry soldiers. That's what we're supposed to do.
That's what our task was.

Speaker 5 We put together some scouts. We put together some special mission units, but that was our task.
They don't have night vision.

Speaker 5 They didn't even have flashlights. We used to give like a fire team.
of Iraqis a flashlight.

Speaker 5 So for them to do a clearance operation at night night was like just a non-starter. So, that means they're going to go out in the day.

Speaker 5 Well, since we're training and fighting them, guess who's out in the day? We are. So, now, since I got my guys out in the field during the day, I want to protect them.
So, what am I doing?

Speaker 5 Overwatch positions. What time is it? Daytime.

Speaker 5 And by the way, we killed 99% of the enemy was during the daytime. Because at nighttime, the enemy came out a lot less.

Speaker 5 So, that, and again,

Speaker 5 one of the big mistakes that I made was I never really explained that outside of my chain of command. Like, so to the teams at large,

Speaker 5 most of the guys go, what are we doing? Oh, here's what we're doing. They go, oh, cool, cool.
Occasionally you get a guy like

Speaker 5 that doesn't know what was happening, doesn't know how bad it was, couldn't conceive a reason to go out in the daytime. or couldn't conceive how it's possible to kill that many enemy fighters, bro.

Speaker 5 They are everywhere.

Speaker 5 And so I should have done a better job of communicating that aspect of things,

Speaker 5 but I didn't really recognize it because my chain of command,

Speaker 5 they knew, and most of the, you know, the people that were around me that were actually talking to me, they would be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. We get it.

Speaker 5 Like I said, including the chain of command on both the special operations side and the conventional side.

Speaker 5 But you're going into these areas

Speaker 5 and the Army's taking casualties, the Marine Corps' taking casualties. And I know that at some point we're going to take casualties.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the,

Speaker 5 we, you know, we, like I said, we had a couple guys wounded. Cowie was wounded bad.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 on August 2nd,

Speaker 5 that's when Ryan Job got got wounded severely.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, he was shot in the face. And I know when you had, when you had Leif on the podcast,

Speaker 5 Lafe gave you a pretty detailed description.

Speaker 5 But you had, you know, a guy like Ryan Job, who

Speaker 5 I had his parents on my podcast.

Speaker 5 Just,

Speaker 5 man, you can't, you can't even describe just what a

Speaker 5 what a

Speaker 5 being of light.

Speaker 5 You know, just

Speaker 5 tough,

Speaker 5 funny.

Speaker 5 Like, we'll literally do anything for you.

Speaker 5 Just as good as they come.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he gets shot.

Speaker 5 Thankfully, he

Speaker 5 had his weapon right up in his cheek while where he's supposed to have it.

Speaker 5 You know, three hours into a clearance operation operation on a rooftop, and he still is a disciplined machine gunner. He has his weapon up in his cheek.
Well,

Speaker 5 a single shot

Speaker 5 hits his rifle, hits his machine gun, and

Speaker 5 hits him in the face, and just devastating damage to his face. And

Speaker 5 relief, you know, they caz a vacuum,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 this kind of initiates

Speaker 5 one of the larger

Speaker 5 battles in the Battle of Vermati was on August 2nd.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 Leif and his guys go back to Cop Falcon, which is a combat outpost. And we have a great relationship with the 137.
And Leif's great friends with their company commander, Mike Baima.

Speaker 5 And I'm great friends with Colonel Todesco.

Speaker 5 And now

Speaker 5 they're starting to take heavies out there in the field. It's a big gunfight, and Leif gets Brian Kazavak.
And

Speaker 5 it didn't look good,

Speaker 5 although he did stabilize.

Speaker 5 But, you know, Leif did not think he was going to make it

Speaker 5 for a bit.

Speaker 5 And these guys are back there and

Speaker 5 the army, our brothers in the army, said, Hey, we were taking contact from some of these buildings. We think this is where these insurgents are.

Speaker 5 Can you help us?

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, Lath called me on

Speaker 5 the radio and he's like, Hey, here's what's happening.

Speaker 5 The army needs our help.

Speaker 5 They want us to go hit some buildings.

Speaker 6 And I'm like,

Speaker 5 You good? He said, I'm good. I'm like, Execute.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they went out to hit those buildings.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's already, like I said, one of the biggest battles. And, you know, Lath and Tony and, you know, Tony was the platoon chief down there.

Speaker 5 And just no, no hesitation from any of the boys. Roll out.

Speaker 5 They softened up the target with the Brads, you know, 25 millimeter chain gun. And

Speaker 5 I think they went in the first building and cleared it. The second building, they go into

Speaker 5 and they take fire from an adjacent building. And

Speaker 6 Mark,

Speaker 5 Mark Lee,

Speaker 5 who's another guy that's

Speaker 5 just all good,

Speaker 5 like in his

Speaker 5 whole being, in his soul, he's good

Speaker 5 and he gets shob killed

Speaker 5 and uh

Speaker 5 i was actually i was in the talk and i'm watching this happen

Speaker 5 watching this happen and i see

Speaker 5 i see

Speaker 5 them carrying on ISR. I see them carrying a guy out.
And

Speaker 5 one of the guys in the talk goes, Maybe it's an Iraqi. And I actually knew that it wasn't because I knew that Laith didn't have any Iraqis with him.
So I knew it was one of our guys.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 Laith gets back to

Speaker 5 Cop Falcon.

Speaker 5 He calls me up and he told me what happened.

Speaker 5 He said, We have one KIA. And I said, Who? And he said, Charlie, one four.

Speaker 6 I'm sorry, man.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 got their guys together, you know, and

Speaker 5 came back to base

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 you know, I mentioned General Brown

Speaker 5 had came to visit. He came to visit on August 2nd.
That was just when the scheduled visit was.

Speaker 5 And he came to the flight line

Speaker 5 for the angel flight.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 earlier that morning, you know,

Speaker 5 one of the Marine elements that we we worked with from 3.8, there was a 4th platoon, I think it was Lima Company, and

Speaker 5 Tony and Laif, and those guys had done a bunch of operations with them and gotten to know them. And

Speaker 5 they're a system platoon commander or their platoon commander.

Speaker 5 You know, he was kind of broing out friends with Tony because Tony's Tony, you know.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, it's weird. I heard this story from both guys at a later time, but

Speaker 5 when

Speaker 5 Tony gets up there and he sees the platoon commander from 4th Platoon, and he's like, dang, they must have heard about Mark.

Speaker 5 And the platoon commander told me later that he saw Tony and he said, dang, they must have heard about Joe.

Speaker 5 Because that morning, Joe Thompson from 3.8

Speaker 5 was killed.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 SEALs, Marine, and Army, we stood there on that flight line to load those boys up to go home.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the war doesn't stop.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that is a that was a shortfall for

Speaker 5 the SEAL teams out of the 90s. You know, you think you do an operation, and when you know, when the operation's over, it's over.

Speaker 5 And if you lose a guy, well, it doesn't really, I mean, it matters, but the operation's over. But

Speaker 5 we never really thought about that.

Speaker 5 And guess what?

Speaker 5 The Army and the Marine Corps they understood that. We had to learn that immediately.

Speaker 6 how are you holding it together?

Speaker 5 I had to focus on the job.

Speaker 5 Um,

Speaker 5 you know, I had to focus on work.

Speaker 5 We did the memorial service.

Speaker 5 Um,

Speaker 5 told some stories about Mark at the memorial service.

Speaker 5 We were in Vegas, and he was like a maniac, dude. Just hilarious.
He's gambling.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he would, like, I'd walk, I'd walk through the casino and I'd see him gambling. He'd be like, hey, sir, when are the new Cadillacs coming out? I'm winning big over here.
Like, he was just that guy.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 or if you're playing blackjack with him and the dealer would bust, you know, he'd yell out, everybody's a winner. And he'd get the whole casino saying that stuff.

Speaker 5 So we got to tell some stories about mark

Speaker 5 um

Speaker 5 and then i also remember that day

Speaker 5 seth he had an operation plan on eastern ramadi

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 this was like the day mark got killed before the memorial service and he and he sent me like a webby which for those of you who don't it's like text messaging

Speaker 5 sends me a webby he's like hey we're

Speaker 5 we're not going to do this operation tonight. And I was like, Hey,

Speaker 5 you're good to go, man. Like, I understand that, like, chain of command.
Don't worry, I got it. Like, you're clear to go.
And he's like, He's like, No, no, we're not going to do it.

Speaker 5 And I said, No, no, you're cleared. Like, you can do it.
And he called me on the field phone. He's like, Hey, bro, I don't want to take the guys out right now.
I was like, oh,

Speaker 5 got it.

Speaker 5 He's like, guys aren't in the mental state. We need 24 hours.
But

Speaker 5 again, for Seth Stone to be so in tune with his guys, recognizing like they're not in a good psychological position to go out. So he calls me up and tells me like it's a no-go, like that's leadership.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's just devastating, man. It's devastating.
Because,

Speaker 5 again, Mark, you know, we didn't, it seemed like Ryan was going to live, you know, and we didn't really know he was going to be blind yet, but it seemed like he would live. And,

Speaker 5 but Mark,

Speaker 5 you know, this is,

Speaker 5 again, just a terrible,

Speaker 5 undescribable loss. And when you talk to the army guys, too,

Speaker 5 it hit all them

Speaker 5 because

Speaker 5 we were getting after it. you know and like i told you earlier when when when something happened there on the radio like everyone would kind of hear it.

Speaker 5 You might not hear it directly, but if you're in my platoon and

Speaker 5 you'd hear reports,

Speaker 5 and if I'm an army guy and you're my platoon sergeant and I hear, oh, we just got mortar an hour ago, and then I hear on my radio, hey, SEALs just took out, or it's like TU Ramped engaged three mortar men with mortar tubes with three rounds of uh seven or 300 wind mag resulting in three EKAA.

Speaker 5 Bro, I'm going right over you. I'm like, like, hey, the SEALs just whacked those dudes.
And that happened a lot.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, we had been very lucky.

Speaker 5 And we had been very lucky for months.

Speaker 5 And so, talking to the army guys, you know, when Mark got killed, it was like the invincibility was shattered.

Speaker 5 But the war does continue.

Speaker 5 And so we stood down for

Speaker 5 like

Speaker 5 a day,

Speaker 5 did the memorial service the next day,

Speaker 5 and then

Speaker 5 we got our gear back on.

Speaker 6 Fuck, man.

Speaker 6 As a leader,

Speaker 6 what do you say to your men?

Speaker 6 For them to keep it together.

Speaker 5 I told him the truth,

Speaker 5 and that was that I did not know what to do,

Speaker 5 except for one thing:

Speaker 5 work.

Speaker 5 And I knew that

Speaker 5 every day that we weren't doing our job,

Speaker 5 there were going to be soldiers and Marines that were going to pay the price for it.

Speaker 5 And I knew 100%

Speaker 5 that what Mark would want us to do

Speaker 5 would go.

Speaker 5 Go. Go and fight.
And by the way, Mark's brothers are Marine.

Speaker 5 And by the way, Ryan Job's brothers are Marine.

Speaker 5 Like, you don't think that they want us to go out there and do everything we can?

Speaker 5 Seth Stone's brother in the army. Like, this is...

Speaker 5 We, we,

Speaker 5 there was only one thing to do.

Speaker 5 Do I know, did I know how to mourn? Did I know how to say the right thing about loss and death and life and all those things? No.

Speaker 5 I'll tell you what. I told them exactly.
I don't know what to tell you. All I know is what I know how to do.

Speaker 5 And that's work. We're going to go back to work and we're going to take the fight to these mooch and we're going to kill as many of them as we can.

Speaker 6 With as much loss as you've experienced up to this day, would you have

Speaker 6 changed anything?

Speaker 6 Would you have told them anything different?

Speaker 5 Maybe.

Speaker 5 But I don't know that

Speaker 5 there's anything else to do in a situation like that.

Speaker 5 I could tell them what we were talking about earlier, like remember, don't dwell, and that kind of stuff. But

Speaker 5 these are, these are,

Speaker 5 you know, we're all

Speaker 5 very focused at this time on what's happening.

Speaker 5 Very, very focused on what's happening. And so I don't know what the broader, you know, life

Speaker 5 impact of

Speaker 5 that, you know. Could I say some philosophical thing? I don't think so, man.
I think I actually said the philosophical thing.

Speaker 5 We're going to get back to work. We're going to get our gear on.
We're going to lock and load our weapons. And we're going to go do what we're supposed to do because we're frogmen.

Speaker 6 I can't think of anything better to say, to be honest with you.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 We're frogmen.

Speaker 5 This is what we do. This is who we are.

Speaker 5 This is what every one of us signed for.

Speaker 5 This is it.

Speaker 6 Do you want to talk about Cowie?

Speaker 5 Well, Cowie,

Speaker 5 he was home, man.

Speaker 5 Cowie, you know, like I said earlier, he said, let me stay.

Speaker 5 And I was like, bro, go heal up.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, he wasn't going to heal up.

Speaker 5 Not in four more months or five more months.

Speaker 5 Dude, he took a freaking armor-piercing round to the femur.

Speaker 5 There was chunks of leg gone. Like, it's a miracle that he kept his leg.
Props to the

Speaker 5 Charlie Med, the docs that worked on him, and all the people at Walter Reed or wherever else, Bethesda, like they kept his leg, man.

Speaker 5 But, you know, it was terrible for Cowie because then Cowie wasn't there, you know. And dude, he wanted to be there.

Speaker 5 You know, he wanted to be there. He would have given anything to be there.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 then, you know, you get Leif, Laif,

Speaker 5 the same responsibility

Speaker 5 that I talked about when it comes to taking ownership of things. Well, there's Leif, man.

Speaker 5 And Laif is taking ownership of having one of his guys severely wounded and having one of them killed.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 me too.

Speaker 5 Like, this is us.

Speaker 5 I approved all these operations. I came up with this whole damn idea.

Speaker 5 And LAF called me. Can we go?

Speaker 5 And I said yes. LAFE came up with this idea, and I said yes.
And this is on us.

Speaker 5 That's the way it is, man. That's the burden of command.
That's the way it is.

Speaker 5 And LAF was devastated, of course.

Speaker 5 LAF was completely devastated.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 when he talked to me about it, you know, he said something along the lines of, like, I don't know,

Speaker 5 I don't know if I made the right decision in going back out there.

Speaker 5 And I told him there was no decision to make.

Speaker 5 That's not a decision. There are Army brothers that have gone out over and over again to pull us out of bad situations.

Speaker 5 And these fellow Americans are asking for our help.

Speaker 5 That is not a decision.

Speaker 5 That is what we do.

Speaker 5 That is what we do, and we do it every time.

Speaker 5 You ever talk to Vietnam guys? Vietnam guys, if it was a platoon in trouble or a down pilot, they were going.

Speaker 5 Same thing with the Sea Wolf pilots, by the way. SEAL platoon in trouble, they're going.

Speaker 5 That's what they're doing.

Speaker 5 And when our Army brothers are asking us for help,

Speaker 5 we go.

Speaker 5 That's not a decision. That is duty.
That is being a frogman.

Speaker 5 And I also told him if we had a crystal ball and we could tell when something bad was going to happen, of course,

Speaker 5 we wouldn't do that thing, whatever that thing was, but we don't have a crystal ball.

Speaker 5 And combat is inherently freaking dangerous.

Speaker 5 And Leif understood that.

Speaker 5 Leif understood that. It didn't make it any easier for his soul, for his heart that was broken, but he understood.

Speaker 5 He understood that that's what Mark, you know, when I was talking to Mark's mom the other day,

Speaker 5 and Mark has had a huge impact now. America's Mighty Warriors, like

Speaker 5 an incredible organization that's helped out so many, not just SEALs, but other people.

Speaker 5 And she said, you know, she said, you know, if I could talk to Mark and Mark had a chance to go back and

Speaker 5 not

Speaker 5 sacrifice his life on that day, but none of this other stuff would have happened,

Speaker 5 he wouldn't come back.

Speaker 5 I'm like, I know.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 this is what we do.

Speaker 5 This is what we sign up for.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's part of being a frogman.

Speaker 5 And look, we had some, you know, we had

Speaker 5 the 80s and the 90s.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 man, like, there was nothing going on.

Speaker 5 And Mark was the first, you know, Mark was the first SEAL killed in Iraq. And again, you'd like, why? Well, look at the battle space, man.

Speaker 5 Look at the battle space. It was a complete war zone.
Why did the 11AD lose that many guys?

Speaker 5 Why did the first of the 506 lose that many guys? Why did the 137,

Speaker 5 Why did the 38 Marines like just losses?

Speaker 5 Why? Well, it was a freaking war zone, man.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the war didn't stop.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 it was back to operations.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's what we did.

Speaker 5 Got our gear back on, locked and loaded our weapons, and back to the field. Back to conducting these operations.

Speaker 5 You know, and

Speaker 5 as far as what did we change, we honestly, there was, after that one, it was like

Speaker 5 we were so used to the city, you know.

Speaker 5 My first deployment to Iraq, we went all over the place. We went all the way from Najaf down south, all the way to Hadith up north.

Speaker 5 We went east of Baghdad, west of Baghdad. We went out to Ramadi.
I was all over the place.

Speaker 5 This whole deployment, I only left Ramadi one time to go to Balad for one meeting the first three days, four days of deployment, and I was back in Ramadi the whole time. So we knew what was going on.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 so

Speaker 5 we continued to push.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the

Speaker 5 every one of those guys, night after night, day after day, jocked up, getting in a Humvee, driving past the damn vehicle graveyard that had 75 or 100 destroyed vehicles in it from IEDs,

Speaker 5 out again, out again, out again. The Army, the Marine Corps, and us.

Speaker 5 It's the way it was.

Speaker 5 Fuck, man.

Speaker 5 Jaco, what was your...

Speaker 6 What were you awarded the Silver Star for?

Speaker 5 Well, it's just this deployment.

Speaker 6 The whole deployment?

Speaker 5 Basically this deployment, yeah.

Speaker 5 How did the deployment end?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 we were.

Speaker 5 We continued to push operations. We continued to

Speaker 5 eliminate enemy fighters.

Speaker 5 We saw the beginning of the Anbar Awakening, which was an incredible process that took place.

Speaker 5 And again, General McFarland and I talked about it for a long time on the podcast I did with him.

Speaker 5 But the local populace began to turn against the insurgents, which was the goal.

Speaker 5 And as this happened, we started seeing, you know, intel would come in that there's enemy fighters in this area, or there's an enemy fighter in this area, or there's a group of ID makers over here. So

Speaker 5 we started pushing. When I say we, like coalition forces, we started really pushing and taking it to the enemy.

Speaker 5 We had

Speaker 5 one, we

Speaker 5 had

Speaker 5 started really pushing some good operations and

Speaker 5 eliminating a lot of bad guys.

Speaker 5 And we were getting towards the end of deployment.

Speaker 5 And, you know, again, man, I'm talking about, I'm just talking about my guys,

Speaker 5 but

Speaker 5 there are so many stories. You know,

Speaker 5 there was so much loss there and so much heroism there. You're hearing one person.

Speaker 5 I've had a bunch of guys on my podcast that were everybody from brigade commander, company commanders, battalion commanders, and gunners and medics to tell tell their little tiny part of the story.

Speaker 5 Their little tiny part of the story. You know,

Speaker 5 the brigade reconnaissance element,

Speaker 5 Dan Pinion, he was like the sergeant major, and like they had the heaviest casualties of any group, any company-sized element.

Speaker 5 He has a guy named Marquise Quick

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 jumped on a grenade to save some of his other teammates. And

Speaker 5 like it, it kind of just happened and almost got overlooked. And they're trying to get him the Medal of Honor now.
But that's one, that's a one. And I didn't know about that.

Speaker 5 I didn't know about that until he came on my podcast and told me about it. And I didn't know about it.
So my point in saying all this, man, is I'm giving you like a little fraction of my view.

Speaker 5 And I had 40 SEALs in Ramadi. Ramadi.

Speaker 5 And I just want you and everybody to know that there were

Speaker 5 companies and platoons from the Army and the Marine Corps that were out there all day, every day, and they were taking the fight to the enemy.

Speaker 5 And they did an outstanding job, and they suffered insane casualties

Speaker 5 over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 And I've tried to tell as many people as I can about that. There's a reunion coming in Texas, January 16th,

Speaker 5 2026, the 20-year reunion of Ramadi.

Speaker 5 It's January 16th and 17th. But I hope that as many people that were there can go to that.

Speaker 6 That is fucking cool.

Speaker 5 Yes. And it's, it's, General McFarland is leading it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 there was just so much heroism in that city.

Speaker 5 And to be able to witness some of it with my guys and with other groups, it was just,

Speaker 5 it was just, it was, it was, it's amazing to look back on.

Speaker 5 So much sacrifice and such, you know,

Speaker 5 such

Speaker 5 incredible Americans.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 it's.

Speaker 5 It's humbling to think about.

Speaker 5 And so, as this deployment for us

Speaker 5 is now starting, we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And one of the things that I

Speaker 5 did on my last deployment, I always figured I never would tell someone, like, hey, this is the last op, because I think that's like bad luck. I didn't want them to freak out.

Speaker 5 I didn't mind bad luck, but I didn't want everyone else to feel bad luck. So, we were getting kind of towards the end of deployment.
And

Speaker 5 Seth, who, you know, is just

Speaker 5 incredible. And he's out there and he's in Corregidor, leading his guys.

Speaker 5 And they do

Speaker 5 an operation in support of the 1st of 506,

Speaker 5 who again, can't say enough good stuff, can't say enough good things about the 1st of the 506th, the battalion commander, their company commanders,

Speaker 5 their company sergeants, their e-dogs. I mean, just

Speaker 5 awesome.

Speaker 5 And I think part of this is when you get into like a real fight like this,

Speaker 5 dude, everyone is just like wants to help out. And if you can help out,

Speaker 5 I'm thankful.

Speaker 5 And Seth and his guys had been out there with the first of the 506 for pretty much the entire deployment for them.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 they plan an operation,

Speaker 5 set up two Overwatch positions, mutually supporting Overwatch positions, down in the Malab district, South Malab district.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 Seth

Speaker 5 was in one Overwatch position, and the other Overwatch position got attacked.

Speaker 5 Got attacked. They were getting attacked through the morning, you know, like RPGs, small arms fire.
Things were starting to escalate.

Speaker 5 And somebody through dead space,

Speaker 5 like got close enough to throw a grenade and threw a grenade. And

Speaker 5 Mikey Montsour, who, again, just

Speaker 5 as solid as they come, man. As solid as they come.

Speaker 5 He

Speaker 5 saw the grenade,

Speaker 5 yelled out grenade.

Speaker 5 The way he was positioned on that rooftop,

Speaker 5 he was the one that could have gotten away from it. He could have left his guys exposed.
But um

Speaker 5 instead he jumped on it

Speaker 5 um the other guys were wounded bad though

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 called over to seth and

Speaker 5 seth um assembled his guys left his iraqis there left their gear there just brought their you know their primary kit

Speaker 5 rolled over

Speaker 5 fought their way to that position, and then, you know, got that under control, organized, and

Speaker 5 got them Kazavaked out

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 got back to base,

Speaker 5 Camp Corregidor.

Speaker 5 And then Seth had to take

Speaker 5 some of his guys that could still function mentally back to get the Iraqis and back to get the gear. So, you know,

Speaker 5 Seth just just stepping up.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was the battalion commander.

Speaker 5 He called me up and told me,

Speaker 5 hey, he told me, because I could hear what was happening over the radio.

Speaker 5 But once they were out of the field, he called me and he said,

Speaker 5 He gave me a sit rep on the guys.

Speaker 5 One guy was like pretty good to go. Two guys were wounded.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 they were going to get mede-vaced. And he said he didn't think Mikey was going to make it.

Speaker 5 He said they were doing CPR on him.

Speaker 5 And he didn't think he was going to make it.

Speaker 5 And he was right.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 it was,

Speaker 5 I mean, immediately,

Speaker 5 I immediately knew that he had jumped on the grenade. And

Speaker 5 I talked to the guys once they got to Germany.

Speaker 5 the guys that had been Kazavak.

Speaker 5 And they told me, you know, and they were like sending me sketches of what happened immediately. And so

Speaker 5 it was like

Speaker 5 about as clear of a Medal of Honor

Speaker 5 action that you could think of.

Speaker 5 And luckily, like I said, for

Speaker 5 Dan Pinion and his guy, Mark

Speaker 5 Marquise Quick,

Speaker 5 they were in the middle of deployment.

Speaker 5 You know, for me, we were almost done.

Speaker 5 So started putting

Speaker 5 started putting that award together

Speaker 5 and um did you write that award

Speaker 5 Seth did and he got the input from

Speaker 5 Mike

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 Doug who were like

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 Benny who were the guys that were saved

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 yeah he he put it together he started writing it and then I mean I chopped it

Speaker 5 edited it or whatever but

Speaker 5 yeah it was

Speaker 5 you know and talking to Mikey's sister it's like I mean many conversations over the years but one of the things that always stuck with me was she was just like it was not a surprise

Speaker 5 meaning like that's Mikey this wasn't a surprise You think he's gonna, what do you think he's gonna do?

Speaker 5 Save his teammates or save himself?

Speaker 5 We weren't surprised by it.

Speaker 6 It's fucking incredible, man.

Speaker 5 Yep. I mean,

Speaker 5 the families of those guys are just all just amazing people.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, that

Speaker 5 maybe a day later,

Speaker 5 Seth had to come to, he needed to come talk to me about something. And, like, I remember they

Speaker 5 to get to, from Camp Corregidor to Camp Ramati was down route, Michigan, which was like

Speaker 5 not a good place to drive down.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he came to see me, and when he did, the uh

Speaker 5 the battalion commander sent us section, sent him a section of tanks

Speaker 5 to make sure it'd be alright, you know.

Speaker 5 And that's, you know, that's why that bond with those guys is so strong, you know.

Speaker 5 Just being in that battle space with those guys,

Speaker 5 what they would do for us was just so like

Speaker 5 you could just tell that they were

Speaker 5 they cared about us as much as we cared about them. And

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 they put Mikey Monsours on the first of the 506 on their memorial wall. The guys that they lost, he's one of them.
Wow.

Speaker 5 And now at this point in the platoon, in the deployment, you know, we were,

Speaker 5 that was September 29th.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we were kind of running low on guys, man.

Speaker 5 But we

Speaker 5 kept doing whatever we could do.

Speaker 5 Guys from Team 5 showed up

Speaker 5 and, man, they were fired up, man.

Speaker 5 And I remember telling those guys,

Speaker 5 like to their task unit, their whole task unit,

Speaker 5 you will take casualties,

Speaker 5 which is a horrible thing to say.

Speaker 5 And I'm looking at them and it's like, as you're looking at them, you're like, I don't know if they really believe me.

Speaker 5 And those guys, God bless them, man, they went to Mikey Monsour's funeral. They went to Mark Lee's funeral.
But they had just gone to Mikey's funeral.

Speaker 5 They were showing up maybe a week or two later, like their advon.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 But they were, man, they were

Speaker 5 fired up.

Speaker 5 And we turned over the best we possibly could with those guys. And you know so much.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 you just can't like download enough information.

Speaker 5 I remember I was like, I don't know, maybe this before Mikey got killed, but we were doing some big clearance operation and I'm like ended up in some rear security while we're doing clearance, but we had done the clearance.

Speaker 5 Now we're moving back. And I'm in this, you know, just like a nug

Speaker 5 because I'm out there, but I'm out there

Speaker 5 kind of just to be out there.

Speaker 5 You know, Leif and Tony have got it, but I'm watching as the platoon is like moving through the streets. And you think, these freaking guys are good right now.
Like, it's,

Speaker 5 it was a very awesome thing to be witness to.

Speaker 5 And the reputation, you know, that we had earned was, like, I, I could see it. I could feel it.
The way the Army treated us, the way the Marine Corps treated us, it was like.

Speaker 5 It was awesome.

Speaker 6 It's fucking incredible, man.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 6 I have to say, it is fucking incredible. I mean,

Speaker 6 the deployment that you had, the losses that you took, the action that you saw, the lives that you guys took. I mean,

Speaker 6 it's a fucking hard deployment. And

Speaker 6 I just want to commend you and all of you guys, man. I mean, you know, from

Speaker 6 an outsider looking in, you know, you see, especially nowadays, I mean, we were kind of talking about this this morning. I mean, you see a lot of,

Speaker 6 you just see so much of fucking animosity within the veteran community. It's a real fucking shame.
And,

Speaker 6 man, like

Speaker 6 the tasking of Bruiser guys, man,

Speaker 6 you guys are fucking tight. I mean, I'm not aware of any.

Speaker 6 You guys just seem really tight. And,

Speaker 6 you know, to have an employment like that

Speaker 5 with

Speaker 6 that kinetic

Speaker 6 the loss that you guys ex have experienced and

Speaker 6 the respect you know that your guys have for you and that you have for them is

Speaker 6 truly fucking unmatched

Speaker 5 yeah it was uh it was an honor and it was the boys you know um i've never seen anything like it when uh You asked me if I kind of knew what was happening in my first deployment.

Speaker 5 Like I was in, I was in Baghdad. We were doing DAs.
And I was like, yeah, I knew. And on this deployment, I really knew.
Like every day,

Speaker 5 I knew that every day this was, this was going to be, this was the highlight of my life. This was the most thing.
This was the most,

Speaker 5 this was the highlight of my life. I knew it every single day.
I knew

Speaker 5 every time I went out, every time I saw the boys off, I knew that this was the

Speaker 5 most important thing I would do in my life was this. this.

Speaker 5 And, you know, one thing that I leaned on

Speaker 5 because, you know,

Speaker 5 there's the whole political aspect of this thing of like, oh, why were we there?

Speaker 5 What was it worth? All that kind of thing. And one of the things that the brigade commander said to me as I was leaving,

Speaker 5 and, you know, he, we had a

Speaker 5 four-minute

Speaker 5 brigade meeting

Speaker 5 of a 30-minute brigade meeting. He spent three minutes talking to me

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 kind of saying, Hey, this group of SEALs is leaving us. The Tasking of Bruiser guys are gone.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he presented me with this wooden tank

Speaker 5 that they had made, like a little cool little sculpture of a wooden tank, which, by the way, the guy that was in charge of getting those tanks made was one of the brigade staff who was killed in combat.

Speaker 5 But he said,

Speaker 5 he said, your guys

Speaker 5 kept hundreds of my soldiers and Marines alive.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 when I got home

Speaker 5 and I talked to

Speaker 5 Mark's mom

Speaker 5 And I talked to Mikey's mom

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 talked to Ryan's mom.

Speaker 5 That's the one thing

Speaker 5 that I felt I could indisputably tell them about their sons.

Speaker 5 Politics, Iraq, al-Qaeda, whatever.

Speaker 5 Your sons made sure that hundreds of American soldiers and Marines

Speaker 5 were able to go home with their families. And by the way, those soldiers and Marines made sure that my SEALs

Speaker 5 were able to come home to their families.

Speaker 5 Because the Kazavaks and the QRFs and the fire support was all them every single time.

Speaker 5 And tanks, they lost nine main battle tanks. So you think you're doing okay? Like, I'm happy they sent Seth Stone down to see me in a section of tanks, but we lost nine tanks when we were there.

Speaker 5 And those guys sent those tanks out, and those Bradleys out, and those soldiers and Marines over and over again

Speaker 5 to

Speaker 5 support my guys, Kazavak my guys,

Speaker 5 extract my guys, fire support for my guys over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 And the fact that we were able to repay that in some way, killing IED in placers, killing mortarmen, killing RPG and

Speaker 5 machine gunners, enemy.

Speaker 5 It's at least,

Speaker 5 I know that that's meaningful. I know it's meaningful.

Speaker 6 Thanks for sticking with me on that, man.

Speaker 6 You want to take a break?

Speaker 6 Sure. Let's take a break.

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Let's get back to the show.

Speaker 6 All right, Jocko, we're back from the break. Nice shoot, man.
Oh, right on. Nice shooting.
But

Speaker 6 so we're wrapping up Task Unit Bruiser's deployment. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 one thing I wanted to ask

Speaker 6 is,

Speaker 6 and I think, you know, throughout the four or five hours I've been interviewing you,

Speaker 6 I think I know, but I'm curious what your perspective is.

Speaker 6 Why do you think that your men have such a deep respect for you as a leader?

Speaker 5 You know, it's what I said earlier. You know, I treated them with respect.

Speaker 5 I listened to what they had to say.

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 put my trust in them. And when you give those things to people,

Speaker 5 they give them back. No, it's not a guarantee.
They could be a nefarious bad person, you know, and that happens. But those guys,

Speaker 5 they were just,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 it's what the teams for me was always supposed to be.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 what it was.

Speaker 5 You know, that was, that, that was, that is the teams to me. When I think about the teams,

Speaker 5 best job ever, best guys ever.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 all my platoons, I had like just

Speaker 5 great

Speaker 5 people.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 yeah, I think,

Speaker 5 you know, kind of,

Speaker 5 I,

Speaker 5 everything for me was kind of a bonus. Like, you know, I enlisted in the Navy when I was 18 years old, you know, and now I'm an officer.
Hadn't even been to college. Like, that's a pretty cool bonus.

Speaker 5 And now I get to lead troops in combat. That's a pretty cool bonus.
Now I'm in

Speaker 5 Iraq. That's a bonus.
And tasking a bruiser in a in an incredible

Speaker 5 war zone,

Speaker 5 it's just all a bonus. My point in saying all that was,

Speaker 5 it wasn't like I was going to be admiral. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't, I wasn't going to be admiral.
Well, I mean, I guess I could have been admiral, but I wasn't, that wasn't my goal.

Speaker 5 That was never, that was never really something I thought too much about. My career was really

Speaker 5 about just being

Speaker 5 with the platoons about the fucking job yeah

Speaker 5 yeah

Speaker 6 and same reason you joined yes

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 I get it you know that's another thing when I was when I was the admiral's aide I saw what the admiral did you know and

Speaker 5 it was he had a great attitude about it you know on September 11th I think he started his job in the Pentagon as an acquisitions officer

Speaker 5 And one thing he told me, he said, when September 11th happened, I checked into my job as the acquisitions officer.

Speaker 5 Last job in the world I wanted to do, you know, because he joined, he probably got in the teams in 1976 or something. No Vietnam.

Speaker 5 I don't think he, no Gulf War. And now this big war starts and he's in the Pentagon doing acquisitions.

Speaker 5 And he said, you know what, Jocko? I said, this is my foxhole. And I'm going to fight.
And that's what he did.

Speaker 5 And I think that attitude, regardless of where you are, you know, sometimes I get people that were in the military and they didn't deploy to combat and they're like borderline, ashamed about it.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, hey, man, you signed that dotted line and you did what your country needed you to do.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you know, thank you for your service.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 yeah, for me, I think that I really just love the teams.

Speaker 5 And the teams,

Speaker 5 man every day was was awesome

Speaker 6 why did you decide to separate i mean i think you kind of just said it but

Speaker 6 the reason i'm asking jocko is you know to have um

Speaker 6 and i mean this in the best most respectable way

Speaker 6 it is a real fucking shame

Speaker 6 for the SEAL teams for the Navy for the United States to

Speaker 6 lose a leader like you.

Speaker 6 And so,

Speaker 6 you know, there's a lot of frustrations. I think you know, there's a lot of, there's always has been, there always will be, right?

Speaker 6 There's a lot of frustrations, but especially, especially in the last eight years, you know, there's a lot of frustration

Speaker 6 within, you know, the military ranks. I hear it.
I'm sure you fucking hear it all the time too. And,

Speaker 6 you know, it seems like

Speaker 6 the best leaders,

Speaker 6 in my opinion, always wind up leaving early.

Speaker 5 It can definitely happen. I mean, we do have some amazing leaders in the SEAL teams.

Speaker 5 But, you know, for me personally, so I get done with

Speaker 5 that task unit. I come back.

Speaker 5 The admiral who, you know, I had worked for was still in charge. And, you know, he, he, he met me on the plane when we landed.

Speaker 5 And he told me later that he's like, when he got on the plane, because he got on the plane, like the plane lands, he got on the plane, his family are outside.

Speaker 5 And he said, when he saw me on the plane, he was like, oh, like,

Speaker 5 uh-oh.

Speaker 5 Because, bro, we, we were, you know, we were in the game.

Speaker 5 And, you know, at a certain point, you...

Speaker 5 you don't care about anything else. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 And I was definitely at that point by a long shot.

Speaker 5 And, you know, of course,

Speaker 5 respectful to the Admiral and said hi and thanks for coming. And, and I got off and I saw my family.
And he said, when I saw your family, I was like, oh, he's going to be fine.

Speaker 5 And so he, he also said, what do you, what do you want to do?

Speaker 5 Like, it was awesome.

Speaker 6 You know, and he,

Speaker 5 when, when Mark died, I talked to him. When Ryan was wounded, like, he was, he was just awesome, supporting.

Speaker 5 And again, my whole chain of command, you know, the Commodore, the Admiral, my commanding officer, like everyone,

Speaker 5 the senior enlisted guys, because I knew all the, all the senior enlisted master chiefs as well. And everyone was just very, very supportive.
And so when I got done with that deployment, he

Speaker 5 said, where do you want to go? And I knew where I wanted to go because

Speaker 5 Ramadi was not over yet. And we saw like like a glimpse of change, but they did some of the heaviest fighting after we left.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 I knew because I was in training cell at SEAL team one. And when I was in training cell at SEAL Team One, I learned so much and it was so

Speaker 5 important.

Speaker 5 I realized how important it was to train. And then having my guys,

Speaker 5 Lafay and Seth, and the rest of the JOs and the e-dogs, like

Speaker 5 bringing them up in the teams, I knew that I needed to do that for more guys.

Speaker 5 And so I knew that the one place that I could do that was going to trade at.

Speaker 5 And so I said to the boss, the admiral, I said, you know, I want to go to the trade at.

Speaker 5 And he said, cool. And he gave me orders to trade at.

Speaker 5 And when I got there, it was exactly, you know, what I...

Speaker 5 and what I knew it was. You know, I knew that we had guys and, you know, we got home

Speaker 5 October 21st

Speaker 5 or when we left Ramadi October 21st. The guys from team five that are depicted in the movie Warfare that happened November 19th.
So

Speaker 5 you know we had just left and those guys got blown up and yeah Elliot and Joe you know got severely wounded

Speaker 5 which was horrible. But I knew that that's what I need to prepare guys for.

Speaker 5 And I knew that there was no better place to do that than trade at and so that's what I did I went to trade at and, you know, it really turned out to be even better than I thought it was going to be.

Speaker 5 Because now, now I have so much context in my head about leadership, about

Speaker 5 combat leadership, about the big army, the Marine Corps, the Navy,

Speaker 5 the battle space, everything from CQC to

Speaker 5 recons.

Speaker 5 Just every type of operation that we could do, I kind of, I felt pretty good about. And so I went in there and started teaching, you know, started teaching the leadership and started running training.

Speaker 5 And it was, it was awesome. It was awesome to be a part of.
It was awesome to,

Speaker 5 yeah, awesome to be a part of. And it was, it was a little weird too.

Speaker 5 Like

Speaker 5 we'd be doing mount training, urban training, and I'd be watching and I'd see like some new guy standing in the middle of the street. And I would get like a, like a sick, like knot in my stomach.

Speaker 5 And I would like go over to him and like, bro, get out of the street, man. You're going to get shot out here.
And like, I really.

Speaker 6 Fuck, man.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was definitely,

Speaker 5 you know, it was, it was a perfect place for me to be because I cared about the guys more than anything. And I just had a bunch of experience with this exact thing that everyone was going to do.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you know, that's what I did. And when you asked me about why I, why I ended up retiring, so I showed up there and I was probably at like

Speaker 5 17 years or something like that.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's just, okay, this is what we're doing next. Do this for a while.

Speaker 5 And then I started.

Speaker 5 There was one thing that

Speaker 5 I didn't like when I came home from deployment.

Speaker 5 When I was gone on that deployment to Ramadi,

Speaker 5 when I left

Speaker 5 on my first, sorry, my first deployment to Iraq, when I left, my son couldn't crawl. When I got home, he could crawl and he could walk.

Speaker 5 So I was like, hmm, that sucks. In Ramadi, which was, and I also, you know, of course, you miss all the holidays, whatever.
But then I, when I got home from Ramadi,

Speaker 5 he could swim.

Speaker 5 I remember asking my wife, like, who taught him how to swim? And she's like, oh, it was, you know, one of the lifeguards down at the base. And I'm like, dude, I'm a frog man.

Speaker 5 And someone else taught my son how to swim.

Speaker 5 That sucks. So that was like a little deposit in the back of my head.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I was at trade edit. And just, you know, we're gone all the time at trade edit.

Speaker 5 And as I started to,

Speaker 5 and I got, you know,

Speaker 5 I had the luckiest career ever. I got deep selected to 04.
Like I

Speaker 5 very, you know, everything had always gone well for me in my Navy career from,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 being selected for the Seaman Admiral program in the first place, which was probably because I was Sailor of the Year at SEAL Team 1 when I was in E-5. Like, I'd

Speaker 5 been doing, I was on a very good trajectory.

Speaker 5 But I also looked at it and I was like, okay, what's my next billet?

Speaker 5 And you started looking at the billets and like,

Speaker 5 there weren't jobs that I was super excited to go do.

Speaker 5 And then I was thinking, well, okay, what's after that job? And it turned out when I measured it out, I was about seven years at that time from

Speaker 5 being a like a SEAL team CO.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 now, fast forward a little bit, because I'd come home from Ramadan the War cycle, but now it had started to like draw down.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, man, I could hold on for seven more years.

Speaker 5 By that time, I was like, five more years. And then what will I be doing?

Speaker 5 Okay, but I love the teams.

Speaker 5 But what about these people that live in your house?

Speaker 5 You know, who are these people that live in your house?

Speaker 5 And why

Speaker 5 don't they really

Speaker 5 know you?

Speaker 5 So I just did the ran the numbers mentally on what that was.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I just decided I'd done 20 years.

Speaker 5 I'm going to go focus on my family. I did not focus on my family when I was in the SEAL teams at all.

Speaker 5 The teams was,

Speaker 5 I was married to the teams. I was married to the teams and my wife and family came second.
And that's not...

Speaker 5 I think, I needed to give something to them. Maybe if I'd been more balanced, you know,

Speaker 5 maybe I could have sorted it out, but I wasn't very balanced. I was in the teams and I love the teams.
And I felt like, yeah, if I can't give the teams everything,

Speaker 5 then it's probably not

Speaker 5 going to be the best thing.

Speaker 6 Do you still battle with that decision?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 I do.

Speaker 5 I.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Oh, shit.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 When did you retire?

Speaker 5 2010. Fuck.
15 years.

Speaker 6 15 years. You're still battling that decision.
Yep.

Speaker 5 Why?

Speaker 5 The teams gave me everything.

Speaker 6 You gave the teams everything.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there's nothing better than going to work in the the teams.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 you and I just got all giddy going out to dump some rounds out there. You know what I mean? You and me were kind of like in a different like we were like a couple kids out there.

Speaker 5 And you and I used to do that all day, every day until we were sick of it.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know?

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 yeah. And it was hard because I, you know, I had to go tell my chain of command.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it was hard for me to go tell the admiral,

Speaker 5 go tell the commodore, then, and then tell my teammates.

Speaker 5 You know, that sucked

Speaker 5 because you're a quitter, you know? And I was not a quitter, but now I'm going to quit. When I left team one,

Speaker 5 you know, they used to say, if you got out of the teams, you're a quitter, right? And I said,

Speaker 5 when I left team one, I said, Because I was an enlisted guy and I was going to become an officer and I said, hey, the only thing worse than a quitter is a traitor.

Speaker 5 And I'm not going to the dark side, you know.

Speaker 5 But yeah, quitting the teams was, was

Speaker 5 bad.

Speaker 5 But at the same time, I,

Speaker 5 you know, I remember cleaned out my cage the last day. And I had a great, you know, I had a great time at Trade Et.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, it was,

Speaker 5 that's when Ryan, Ryan Job, who had been wounded so bad, he, he died from complications from his medical stuff. You know, that was while I was at Trade Et.

Speaker 5 And, you know, again, that was one of those things where it was really, it almost like hooked me back in, you know, because just knowing that Ryan, you know, he's another guy. Like he was blind, bro.

Speaker 5 And I talked to him on the phone. He's like, can I come back?

Speaker 5 He wants to come back to Ramadi. He can't see.
He wants to come back to Ramadi.

Speaker 5 Like, this is the kind of guy that I'm going to abandon right now to get out of the Navy and do some other whatever, like nothing else matters.

Speaker 5 So that was,

Speaker 5 you know, another thing that kind of almost hooked me. But again, I'd go home and see my, see my kids, see my son.

Speaker 5 You know, you have a, you know, three daughters, or yeah, I had three daughters and one son at this point. You go home and see them and they're like, oh, what's your name again? Or who are you again?

Speaker 5 Like, that is an equal thing that's starting to pull. How old was your oldest?

Speaker 5 She was born in 1999.

Speaker 5 So she was 11. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And my youngest doesn't even like,

Speaker 5 no.

Speaker 5 My son can remember because I would like

Speaker 5 he was at, he was on training trips as a young kid. That's like a little kid.
He was hucking grenades and shooting machine guns and paintballs and all that stuff. So he remembers all that stuff.

Speaker 6 Did you have a tough time integrating in with your family?

Speaker 6 Not really. Did they have a tough time integrating with you?

Speaker 5 Not really.

Speaker 6 That's good. You don't hear that very often.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I always left my work at work. You know, I always tell like police officers and military people, like, take your uniform off when you go home.
Don't leave it on.

Speaker 5 Take it off and put on a pair of, you know, for me, it's flip-flop surf shorts and a t-shirt and be in that mode as opposed to keeping your uniform on. So I felt like it was pretty,

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 Another weird thing that always freaked out, like Leif and Seth, is I never swore in front of my family. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I would, and, you know, meanwhile in the teams, you know, every third word was an F-bomb. And I'd come home and just never swear.
Because it was almost like I had a,

Speaker 5 you know, like a mental deviation when I went home and I was that guy. And then at work, I was the team guy.

Speaker 6 Man, I wish I could do that. Maybe I can.
Let's try harder. But

Speaker 6 I mean, did you struggle with, did you struggle with the transition? I mean, we both know a lot of guys struggle with the transition. Did you have any plan when you got out?

Speaker 5 I didn't, didn't really have. My plan was to surf, train jiu-jitsu, and hang out with my wife and kids.
That was my plan.

Speaker 6 It's a good plan.

Speaker 5 And, you know,

Speaker 5 and then

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 opened a jiu-jitsu gym. So I figured I'd be able to teach jiu-jitsu.
and hang out, surf with my kids, surf. And that's what my plan was.

Speaker 5 Probably about six months before I retired, I had a friend that owned a big company and he asked me to come and talk to his executive team about leadership. And I knew him from jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 5 I was like, yeah, cool.

Speaker 5 And I went up and I

Speaker 5 gave

Speaker 5 like the kind of leadership brief that I gave to the SEAL platoons.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think in his mind, I was going to get up and be like, you need to do push-ups or whatever.

Speaker 5 And all of a sudden, I'm talking about decentralized command and taking ownership and prioritizing executing all these things. And then they start Q ⁇ A and they start asking me about leadership.

Speaker 5 And I'm answering all these questions. And by the time I got done, he's like, I want you to talk to every division I have in my company.
And I was like, well, I'm retiring.

Speaker 5 And, you know, and he's like, I will pay you. And I was like, well, he's like, oh,

Speaker 5 let's make a deal. And I said, okay.

Speaker 5 So I started going around talking to all of his divisions. And at one of those divisional meetings, his, the CEO of the parent company was there.

Speaker 5 And the guy came up to me afterwards and said, I want you to come talk to all my CEOs. And he owned like 45 or 50 companies at the time.
And I went and did that. And then it just started happening.

Speaker 5 And I

Speaker 5 eventually

Speaker 5 was getting like business, you know.

Speaker 5 And Lath had gotten out of the arm of the Navy. The Army.
Lath had gotten out of the Navy. And he was like

Speaker 5 kind of considering going to law school, I think, at the time. And his wife was, you know, gainfully employed at Fox News.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, I was like, hey, man, I need some fire support over here. And he's like, want to do a leadership company.
And I'd kind of talked about it with him before because

Speaker 5 when I started talking to these civilian companies, I realized that everything I had learned about leadership applied

Speaker 5 to all leadership. It wasn't unique to combat.
It was, it was leadership was leadership. And once I realized that, I realized that I had something that would be useful for a lot of people.

Speaker 5 And so then, like I said, it just grew word of mouth. And from there, this is kind of how all this stuff eventually happened.

Speaker 5 Because as Lafe and I would talk to different companies and they would come up afterwards and be like, hey, do you have this stuff written down anywhere? Do you have a pamphlet you can give us?

Speaker 5 And so we wrote it down. And then I want to,

Speaker 5 I think one of Leif's wife's friends or something was a literary agent. Was like, this could be a book type thing.
And so we wrote a book proposal. And

Speaker 5 yeah,

Speaker 5 the book agent shopped it around. And one of the people, I think the third, fourth, fourth or fifth person at St.
Martin's Press was like, well, we'll take it. And so we wrote the book.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, the book came out and it was

Speaker 5 really did well. So.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it did.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 It did really fucking well. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Man.

Speaker 6 And then, I mean, you've created, I mean,

Speaker 6 I think I counted seven businesses. I'm probably off.
But am I off?

Speaker 6 You got the podcast, Extreme Ownership, the Kids Book, which is going to be a movie. Origin,

Speaker 6 Jocko Fuel.

Speaker 6 Fuck, what am I missing?

Speaker 5 Jocko Publishing.

Speaker 6 Jocko Publishing. Yeah.
The soccer club. Yeah, yeah.
The Jiu-Jitsu Gym. There's a.

Speaker 5 That's true. Yeah.
That's true.

Speaker 6 You lost count.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I look at it and people ask me about this. So

Speaker 5 the podcast thing, you know, I went on Rogue, I went on Tim Ferriss's podcast. And when we got done, he said, hey, dude, you should start a podcast.

Speaker 5 And then I went on, Joe Rogan heard that podcast and was like, invited me on his podcast. And this was 2015.
Like, podcasts weren't really a thing yet.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you're, you're, you are an OG podcaster. Yeah.
I mean, way before anybody even knew what the hell it was.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think, I think the numbers at the time, there was about 15% of the population of America was listening to podcasts. I don't know if it's 100% now, but it's pretty much everybody.

Speaker 5 But I went on Rogan in the middle of Rogan show. He's like, you should start a podcast.
Of course, Rogan tells that to everybody.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 he told me that. And I said, well, so I got Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, like two massive podcasts, are telling me I should start a podcast.
So I talked to my my buddy Echo Charles.

Speaker 5 I said, Do you know how to do this? And he said, I'll figure it out.

Speaker 5 And then next day he came back and he's like, All right, I know how to do this. And I said, Cool.
He said, Can I be on it?

Speaker 5 And I said, What are you going to do? And he said, You be Jocko, and I'll be normal. And I was like, Okay, cool.
And so that's how the podcast started. And then once the podcast started, it was just,

Speaker 5 you know, people would ask me about like what kind of

Speaker 5 supplements I used. And I was like, Well,

Speaker 5 here's what I would like to use, you know, and why don't I make what I like? And then people would ask me about jiu-jitsu geese. And

Speaker 5 my, there was a company up in Maine, you know, New England, where I'm from. And this guy Pete was up there making jiu-jitsu geese 100% American.
I was like,

Speaker 5 get those kind of geese because those are American-made. And I ended up linking up with him.
And Origin kind of took off, and Jocko Fuel kind of took off. And it was just,

Speaker 5 yeah.

Speaker 5 And then the kids' books were somewhere in there. You know, I

Speaker 5 there's,

Speaker 5 I went, I was trying to get my son. My son was not like a reader, right? Was he a little kid? So I went to try and find him like something that he might be interested in, right?

Speaker 5 And I picked up this book, and it was like a pirate book. And I was like, cool, you know, pirates.
What young boy isn't going to be into pirates. And I read this

Speaker 5 book

Speaker 5 and it was the lamest, weakest, most pathetic pirates ever.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to read this to my son. And I just decided I'll write my own books for kids.
And so,

Speaker 5 and the idea of the first warrior kid book was just like immediately in my mind.

Speaker 5 The whole thing, like start to finish. I had the whole thing in my mind almost immediately.
And it's a real,

Speaker 5 it seems obvious, right? Like, there's a kid, like all kids, who

Speaker 5 can't do any pull-ups, doesn't know his times tables, doesn't know how to swim, and he's getting picked on by the school bully, right? That's

Speaker 5 you go to anyone, any kid in the world, they've got one of those problems or a problem like those problems.

Speaker 5 And so I put those problems in the book, and then I brought in a character, Uncle Jake, who's a SEAL,

Speaker 5 who is going to come stay with, you know, the family for the summer. And he's going to teach this kid how to fight, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to study, and how to swim.

Speaker 5 And that's the first book. And

Speaker 5 it,

Speaker 5 you know, the feedback of all the, you know,

Speaker 5 of all the things that I'm currently doing,

Speaker 5 getting feedback from like a 10-year-old kid that says, writes me a letter and says, I did my first pull-up.

Speaker 5 or I got an A on this math test, or I started training jiu-jitsu and I did my first competition. Those are the most epic things to receive.

Speaker 6 I love that, man. Yeah.

Speaker 5 There's.

Speaker 6 That's awesome.

Speaker 5 Yeah. There's not a lot of, oh, there I should, shouldn't say that.
There is a lot of guidance out there in the world right now.

Speaker 5 Not a lot of it is good guidance. You know, and so the values that kids should be receiving, in many cases, they're not receiving.
So I tried to give it to them in a fun way.

Speaker 5 They're funny books, but they're powerful too.

Speaker 6 When did the first one come out?

Speaker 5 I think it was 2017 because

Speaker 5 I was almost done writing it as Extreme Ownership was coming out. Okay.

Speaker 6 That's pretty cool, man. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 You're touching a lot of people. I know you know that.

Speaker 6 I would venture to guess that you

Speaker 8 it's hard to it's hard to

Speaker 6 it's hard to grasp that.

Speaker 6 And, uh,

Speaker 6 but you're a huge motivation for me. And, um,

Speaker 6 I hear about you all the time. And, and it's, man, I just, I just,

Speaker 6 it's fucking cool what you're doing. You're pumping a lot of good into the world.
You're pumping a lot of what people need into the world, whether that's adults or children.

Speaker 6 And, and, um, man, there's just, there's just, um

Speaker 6 there's just that that many

Speaker 6 great role models for young people to look up to these days, and you're one of them, and that's fucking cool.

Speaker 5 Well, like I said, I had some great role models in the teams

Speaker 5 and left me with some,

Speaker 5 you know, especially the guys that I lost. You know, those guys were just

Speaker 5 great,

Speaker 5 great role models.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 sometimes people ask, like, if having kids made you more nervous about going to war. And for me, it didn't.
Like, I felt like happy that I had kids. And

Speaker 5 Mikey and Mark, you know,

Speaker 5 they didn't have kids, man. And

Speaker 5 it's, you know, it breaks my heart. And luckily, Ryan, you know, Ryan, before he died, his wife got pregnant.
And that's just awesome to see. But, you know, passing on what example those guys were.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the character in this book right here, the Warrior Kid book, the main character is named Mark.

Speaker 5 And there's another book I wrote for kids called Mikey and the Dragons. And clearly, the main character in that book is named Mikey.
And so those guys, doing my best to make sure that,

Speaker 5 you know, people remember them and learn some of those things that represent their values of what they were like as people.

Speaker 5 So it's an honor to be able to share their memories and

Speaker 5 make sure that their names are never forgotten.

Speaker 6 And this is turning into a movie.

Speaker 5 Yes, it is. Yes.
The movie has been filmed

Speaker 5 and it will be coming out next year.

Speaker 6 That's awesome. Congratulations.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's

Speaker 5 a

Speaker 5 pretty interesting experience to see. And a pretty awesome experience.

Speaker 6 Is it an animation or? Nope.

Speaker 5 It's real people.

Speaker 6 No, are you in it?

Speaker 5 I am in it. Yep.

Speaker 6 Fuck yeah, man. That's awesome.

Speaker 5 I'm in it, but I don't play Uncle Jake. Uncle Jake is played by Chris Pratt.

Speaker 5 So, and you know, Uncle Jake and Chris Pratt, Chris Pratt's just

Speaker 5 such an such a great guy.

Speaker 5 Oh, he's an unbelievable guy. Just

Speaker 5 the first time I met him, I was going to UFC with

Speaker 5 Jack Carr.

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 some of the other actors from the terminal list. It was like the promotion for the terminal list.

Speaker 5 I didn't know, I didn't know Chris Pratt at all, but I'm kind of like going and, you know, I'm like, oh, you know, we're going to meet this Hollywood guy or whatever. And

Speaker 5 just super humble, super nice, super cool, self-deprecating humor and super charismatic. Like, there's a reason why that guy is who he is, you know, funny, charismatic, just cool.

Speaker 5 And so I was really, really stoked. And what happened was he had, we were, we were kind of connected on

Speaker 5 through Jared, who was training him to get him in shape for Terminal List.

Speaker 5 And while he was training him, he was giving him Jocko Fuel.

Speaker 5 And so he really liked the taste of Jocko Fuel and how it impacted him, got him in shape for that movie. And then he also was like wearing Origin clothes because he's a patriotic guy.

Speaker 5 He wanted America made, because now Origin makes jeans and t-shirts and hoodies and boots and we make everything. And he wanted to support America.

Speaker 5 And then he had a little break in between work, movies, and he was talking to his business people. And they're like, hey,

Speaker 5 you know, you need to find some more sponsors and this kind of thing. And he goes, you know, why am I out looking for sponsors when like I like Jocko Fuel and I like Origin?

Speaker 5 Why don't I connect with Jocko? Because he met me one, you know, I met that guy. He seemed nice enough or whatever.

Speaker 5 So he called me and he said, hey, man. And I was like in the mountains and he said, hey, do you want to do something with Jocko Fuel and Origin? And I'm like, hmm, sure.
You know, it's pretty awesome.

Speaker 5 And so we ended up connecting on that. And as our business teams were working through the business deal to kind of figure out what that looked like,

Speaker 5 I had

Speaker 5 been starting down the process of making the movie with a guy from Hollywood

Speaker 5 who had walked into his kids' bedroom and his kids were doing push-ups. And he's like, what are you, what are you guys doing? They're like, we want to be warriors.
We want to be warrior kids.

Speaker 5 He's like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 5 He gave the kids,

Speaker 5 gave their dad, this guy, Ben Everard, the book and said, like, we want to be warrior kids, like this guy. So he reads the book and he's like, oh, I got to get this turned into a movie.

Speaker 5 And so he, friend of a friend of a friend, searched me out, came to my gym.

Speaker 5 And I had been offered like to buy the movie rights to Warrior Kid, I don't know, like maybe four or five times, but that's a real weird thing anyways.

Speaker 5 But he came down to my gym and set up a meeting with me and said, I want to talk to you about this. And he like got the vision, saw the vision.

Speaker 5 So he and I had been, we'd gotten the screenplay written from a screenplay writer named Will Staples. So we kind of started moving.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, I'm talking to Chris Pratt about Origin and Jocko Fuel, right?

Speaker 5 And Ben is like, you got to get Chris this script.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, dude, I am not giving Chris the script. I'm like, I'm not doing that.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 he was like a friend you know i'm not like i mean i at the time i didn't know him that well but he was a like a friend and i just you didn't want to ask him for bro i don't want to ask him you know how many people these these hobbies could you just could you yeah yeah hey can i so i just didn't i'm like i'm not giving it to him well my business team had told his business team yeah well you know jonkos he's making this movie and they're like well what movie is he making well why don't we know about that and then he was like making a kid's movie blah blah blah blah and they're like, Well, where's it at?

Speaker 5 Well, he's got the screenplay. So, they give my business team gives his business team the screenplay and they read it.
And they're like,

Speaker 5 Okay, this is good. And they gave it to Chris's film manager, and it's a woman named Julie.

Speaker 5 And I found this out later, they called Julie Dr. No because she says no to everything.

Speaker 5 And so,

Speaker 5 but she got this script and she read it.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 when I met her for the first time, the first time we, the first big meeting we had about trying to make this happen,

Speaker 5 she was in the, in the room and she, she met me. She was super cool.
She's like, my dad listens to you, or my husband listens to your podcast. My kid listens to your podcast.

Speaker 5 Like she was, she, she knew kind of the background. And

Speaker 5 she said, I got done reading this script. I wiped the tears from my eyes.
And I sent it to Chris and said, you better make this movie. No shit.

Speaker 5 And then Chris said, he said, yeah, I read the script and I was like, okay, we're going going to do this.

Speaker 5 And then I wish it was as easy as I just said it because then, you know, the cool thing is, Chris and I shook hands. We're going to do this.

Speaker 5 And that handshake encompassed origin, it compassed Jocko Fuel and it encompassed the movie. And two guys, we shook hands.
And that handshake

Speaker 5 held

Speaker 5 the whole thing together because

Speaker 5 Bro, you get into this Hollywood and lawyers and ownership and it was crazy. But that handshake and, you know, him being a good person and a man of his word and me being a man of my word.

Speaker 5 And despite all the chaos, we got through. And now Chris is like a part owner of Jocko Fuel, a part owner of Origin USA.
And he plays Uncle Jake in the movie Wave the Warrior Kid.

Speaker 6 That is awesome, man.

Speaker 6 That's a hell of a story.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I can't wait for it to come out.

Speaker 6 When does it come out?

Speaker 5 Sometime next year.

Speaker 5 You know, it's, it's weird, but the way they make movies

Speaker 5 and the time it takes for them to then edit and assemble it and then the

Speaker 5 advertisement of it, the marketing of it takes months and months. And so, you know, they want it to be released in a big season, you know, because they think it's going to be a big movie.

Speaker 5 I've seen it. You know, not a fully edited version, but I've seen it.
And it's,

Speaker 5 it's awesome.

Speaker 5 it is awesome. Congratulations.
It'll make you laugh. It'll make you cry.
It'll, it's really powerful.

Speaker 6 Very cool. Yeah.
Yeah. Man, that's what I'm talking about, man.

Speaker 6 I mean, everybody, I don't talk to anybody that's happy about what's going on in Hollywood, what's being pumped into the theaters, what's on Netflix. Nobody.

Speaker 6 And so to see like something like that, you know what I mean, come out, that's like,

Speaker 6 I mean, that's a feat in itself, you know, and so, and then, and then, you know,

Speaker 6 congratulations.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.
It was, um,

Speaker 5 you know, Skydance eventually came in. It's Skydance and Apple.
And you're right. It's a movie that we haven't seen this type of movie in a long time.

Speaker 5 You know, the kind of movie that's going to, you know, leave that impact on, on. And it's, I'm telling you, like everyone in the family,

Speaker 5 the parents will love it. The kids will love it.
Yeah. It's.

Speaker 6 Old school family good entertainment. Yep.
That you're probably going to learn something from. Yes, indeed.
So, yeah, kudos to you.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about Origin.

Speaker 6 That's a fucking awesome company.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it really is, man. It really is.
And, you know, growing up in New England in the 70s and 80s, and this is when everything was being sold overseas,

Speaker 5 all the big corporations just took and gutted all the American factories, literally took the machines out of them and sold them overseas and started making stuff overseas so that they could.

Speaker 5 make more money for the corporate headquarters. And it just gutted

Speaker 5 a lot of New England. It gutted a lot of the Southeast.
You know, the big textile mills just got annihilated. And I mentioned this earlier, but

Speaker 5 when I had the podcast and I was talking to people about jiu-jitsu a lot and people were asking where should I get a jiu-jitsu gi?

Speaker 5 And I had seen this company origin, this guy Pete Roberts was up there and he was making these geese in America, 100% in America.

Speaker 5 And so I started telling everyone, hey, if you got to get a gi, get an origin gi. And I started trying to reach out to him to see if like I could meet him or find out what's going on.

Speaker 5 And I had never heard back from him. And finally, I was on a Facebook Live one day

Speaker 5 and somebody asked me, hey, what kind of gi should I get? And I said, yeah, get an origin gi, go to origin. I think it was origin Maine at the time, originmaine.com.

Speaker 5 And those, that guy makes stuff in America. And I said, and by the way, if anyone here can find that guy, I think I said his name is Pete.
Tell him I want to talk to him.

Speaker 5 And a woman that was on that, who I since got to know, named Sarah, like used her contacts and got in touch with him and said, hey, there's this guy, Jocko. He wants to talk to you.

Speaker 5 He's got a huge podcast.

Speaker 5 And Pete says, what's a podcast? Because he's up in Maine. That's awesome.
So eventually we link up and we have a conversation.

Speaker 5 And I can see, you know, he's just a patriotic guy that's trying to rebuild manufacturing in America. I flew up to Maine.
We, same thing.

Speaker 5 As a matter of fact, we had a steak and we had a handshake and we teamed up. And basically you had, he had this ability to manufacture,

Speaker 5 and I had an ability to talk to people. And so those two things together were like a perfect storm.
When we joined forces, I want to say there was like six employees at Origin making

Speaker 5 it,

Speaker 5 it was something like 100 garments a week. And right now we've got almost 500 employees and we make like 15,000 to 20,000 garments a week.

Speaker 5 So it's a totally different ballgame.

Speaker 5 And it's awesome because

Speaker 5 we had lost the ability to manufacture in America and the corporations just lied

Speaker 5 because they'd say we can't do this in America. They would literally say we can't make this in America.
We can't do that. This is America.
Are you telling me we can't make things in America?

Speaker 5 This is what, this is how, this is how we won wars. This is how we won World War II.
We made stuff in America. So don't tell me we can't make a pair of jeans in America.

Speaker 5 just like they've been saying for the past 10 years that we can't make any of these electronic components in america well look who's coming back now right so it's an awesome company got

Speaker 5 you know we're going to continue to grow it's hard it's very hard especially because we're so strict about american made

Speaker 5 so you know you got to get the cotton where's the cotton coming from where's the literally everything literally everything the zipper the boots these these rivets everything that with the sole everything the thread is 100% made in America.

Speaker 5 And if we can't find a component that's made in America, we either make it ourselves or we'll find someone that we can convince to make it.

Speaker 5 Wow. You have to do.
You have to hold the standard. And it's good to see.
Other people are coming back to America now. Good.
Good. Bring it back.
This is what we should be doing.

Speaker 5 This is how we rebuild our country. This is how we rebuild America.
And if we don't have the ability to make things, to be self-sufficient, we will lose.

Speaker 5 so it's a huge part of

Speaker 5 it's a huge part of me of how I feel I can give back to what this country's given me

Speaker 6 you definitely lead by example that's for damn sure you put your fucking mouth where your money is and that's awesome it's hard to find these days yeah well I mean that's literally what you just said

Speaker 5 We put all of our money back into these businesses. All of it.
You know, now we have four factories. Like we, we put all of it back in there and we bet on it.

Speaker 5 You know, this is, this is where we put our, our soul is into these companies because we believe in them and we're patriotic. We love America.
We love the people we work with.

Speaker 5 And this is what we have to do.

Speaker 6 Once again, congratulations. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And then out of that spawned docko fuel

Speaker 5 because, you know, one of the guys at Origin, Brian, he had worked in the supplement industry and

Speaker 5 he was like, hey, you know,

Speaker 5 we can make supplements. We do jiu-jitsu.
And they had like made some supplements before.

Speaker 5 And do you, how would you feel about making supplements? And I said,

Speaker 5 if we can make them

Speaker 5 good

Speaker 5 and healthy, yes.

Speaker 5 Look, I've been over, I've been overseas drinking Red Bull and Reddit and Rip It and whatever freaking tiger's blood they were giving us over there.

Speaker 5 And that stuff's just not healthy.

Speaker 5 And so I didn't, and I, you know, we talk about people that, we talk about like veterans, you know, you were mentioned veterans that are, you know, I know you had some friends that had some bad experiences with drug addiction, alcohol addiction.

Speaker 5 Bro, I have friends that were drinking five, six, seven, eight monsters a day. That's totally, that's, that's horrible.

Speaker 5 And so. We started the Jocko Fuel and, you know, we just kept things as clean as we possibly could.
And,

Speaker 5 you know, believe it or not, there's a market for it. Believe it or not, Americans want to be healthy.

Speaker 5 And we probably timed it very well because as COVID came out and people got more concerned about their health,

Speaker 5 people were paying attention.

Speaker 6 Is that the latest flavor?

Speaker 5 That's one of the latest flavors. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Can I try it? Dude, yeah, yeah. There you go, man.

Speaker 5 It's a little iced tea lemonade.

Speaker 6 Iced tea lemonade.

Speaker 6 It's pretty damn good. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And it's

Speaker 5 no artificial sweeteners.

Speaker 5 We had to, this is the extent that we go. So when you make a drink like this, you've got to put preservatives in it so that it has shelf life.
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 5 Well, those preservatives, as you might imagine, may not be too good for you. And I wanted to figure out a different way.
And so Brian figured out a way to pasteurize it.

Speaker 5 In other words, you like basically cook it. So anything that could be in there that would interfere with its shelf life won't be in there anymore.
It'll be dead. No shit.

Speaker 5 And so we had to find a line.

Speaker 5 We had to wait like nine months to get a company that, you know, bottles these or cans these to put a line in to pasteurize them so that we could make them as healthy as possible.

Speaker 5 That's like what we're doing across the board. And

Speaker 5 yeah, that's what we're doing, man.

Speaker 6 That's awesome, dude.

Speaker 6 You know, we're kind of wrapping up the interview here, Jocko.

Speaker 6 But,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 originally I had reached out to you several months ago and I had saw a tweet that you put out on X about our mutual friend now, Braxton McCoy, about the land grab.

Speaker 6 And,

Speaker 6 you know, like I had mentioned, we had never met, but I've always been watching you from afar. And that tweet basically, all you said, I think is

Speaker 6 pay attention to this guy. So looked him up, paid attention to him, saw the sale of public land, and I was like, fuck it, let's bring him in here.
Maybe we can have an impact on this.

Speaker 6 And, you know, collaboratively, we did.

Speaker 6 It got pulled. Yep.
And a huge deal, man.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Thanks for doing that.

Speaker 6 It's my pleasure. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And thanks to Braxton.

Speaker 6 That guy. What a guy.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 6 What a dude. Yep.

Speaker 6 But,

Speaker 6 But, you know, I just, especially ever since COVID, you know, I think, whatever, everybody knows, you know, things aren't, things aren't going great. And

Speaker 6 you're just always

Speaker 6 a voice of reason, a stoic, a voice of reason that makes a lot of sense. And

Speaker 6 so I just want to ask you, you know,

Speaker 6 what are some of the top things on your mind on what's going on in our country and what are we doing wrong? What do we need to get back to?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 I think there's a lot of amplification of emotions and ego that happens through online platforms, so through social media, right?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 when that happens, when you're not interacting with another human being, but you're interacting with a... you know, a fake human being or a bot or someone that you can't actually see or talk to

Speaker 5 and someone that it's very easy for you to say, oh, this person's bad, or you just ignore what their perspective is, which is what I talked about, whatever, how many hours ago we started this thing, is understanding other people's perspectives and knowing that people see the world differently, man.

Speaker 5 Like, and there's a reason that someone sees it that way.

Speaker 5 And instead of just saying the way that they see the world is bad and the way I see the world is good or the way they see the world is wrong and the way I see the world is right,

Speaker 5 saying like, oh,

Speaker 5 it's interesting that they see the world that way. I wonder why.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 as I've said this whole podcast, if you listen to what other people have to say, they're going to listen to you more. If you say, shut up, you're wrong.

Speaker 5 They're never going to listen to a word that you have to say.

Speaker 5 But if you say, hey, what makes you think like that?

Speaker 5 And they explain it to you. And instead of you trying to figure out where they're wrong, try and figure out where they're right.

Speaker 5 And in most cases,

Speaker 5 in most cases, there'll be some kind of common ground. In most cases,

Speaker 5 hey, are there some people that are just evil? Yeah, if you're ISIS or you're like a communist,

Speaker 5 it's probably going to be hard to find some common ground.

Speaker 5 But if you're in between those, and I mean, I've,

Speaker 5 I mean, I guess, like I said, you can say ISIS,

Speaker 5 but most people, you can say, oh, you got family, do you want your kids to

Speaker 5 have a nice place to live? Almost all people will say, yeah.

Speaker 5 Almost all people will say, yeah, well, I want them to, you know, be healthy.

Speaker 5 So at least we have that common ground.

Speaker 5 Now,

Speaker 5 so if we, if we look for that as opposed to looking for all the reasons why I should hate you and you should hate me,

Speaker 5 that's not beneficial.

Speaker 5 So, and I think social media amplifies a lot of that. And also social media is not real, right? And so people will say, our country is so divided.

Speaker 5 Yeah, on Twitter it is.

Speaker 5 But I talk to people, I travel all the country.

Speaker 5 have a leadership consulting business.

Speaker 5 I work with companies of every description, Energy companies, with people out on oil rigs, construction companies, with people pouring concrete, finance companies in New York where they're doing deals for billions of dollars,

Speaker 5 and everyone in between.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the vast majority of people that I meet are like, what are they focused on? Oh, yeah, they want to take care of their family. They want to do a little bit better at work.

Speaker 5 They want to make some more money. They want to be healthy.
Like, that's what people are doing.

Speaker 5 And it's very strange that we forget about that.

Speaker 5 And, and as I travel around the country and I meet all these different people, I see people that they have common goals,

Speaker 5 they have common goals. And if they have the same common goal as me, how we get there,

Speaker 5 you know, we'll try and figure out the best solution. And I don't

Speaker 5 see a lot of that. You know, if you say something that I disagree with, I hate you.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's

Speaker 5 that's doesn't that doesn't bode well, but like I said, I think for the most part

Speaker 5 that's online now. Look, you can go show me, we can go look at riots in the streets of people that are you know actively trying to hurt other people.
Like, okay, yep, you're right.

Speaker 5 That's there are there are people that are out there on the fringes for sure,

Speaker 5 but that's a small group. There's 350 million people in America.
You want to show me a

Speaker 5 riot that has 3,000 people in it? Yeah, that's bad. But

Speaker 5 it's not America.

Speaker 5 and so i would say

Speaker 5 open your eyes open your ears listen more try and understand other people's perspectives try and figure out where you can agree with them

Speaker 5 which can be difficult

Speaker 5 but usually you can

Speaker 5 and if you

Speaker 5 can listen to what they have to say and ask earnest questions about what they believe, a lot of times you can figure out, oh yeah, there's some common ground.

Speaker 5 I understand them a little bit better now. and maybe I can,

Speaker 5 maybe I can move a little bit, and maybe I can help them see something that I see because

Speaker 5 they actually want to hear my perspective now.

Speaker 5 Barking at people and trying to shove your perspective down their throat might feel good at the time, but it doesn't change any minds.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 6 it's a great perspective.

Speaker 6 Do you think this is happening because of the absence of the human connection? Because of social media?

Speaker 5 Social media certainly amplifies it.

Speaker 5 But also,

Speaker 5 it's the way the algorithm is constructed.

Speaker 5 The algorithm is constructed. When I see something that makes me emotional,

Speaker 5 I share it. So your goal is to post something that makes me feel emotional.
What's the easiest emotion to trigger in me? Anger. It's definitely anger because it's hard to pull at my heartstrings.

Speaker 5 You don't really know me. You don't know what, like, maybe if I had a dog that I lost, but you don't know that.
Or maybe I had, you know, whatever something happened to me in my past.

Speaker 5 And, oh, that, thank you for sending me that. It's good.
Makes me, you know, connect with these emotions. That's hard to do.

Speaker 5 But how hard is it to make me mad? It's not hard at all. You know, I'm a military guy.
You can, you can figure out 20 things out of the gate, right?

Speaker 5 Figure 20 things out of the gate. That can make me mad.
If I'm a normal person, if I'm a normal, you know, military military person, or if you're, if you're a normal, what is it?

Speaker 5 You can tell me 15 things right now that will make a conservative mad, and you can tell me 15 things that will make a liberal mad.

Speaker 5 And so if you want to get reactions, make people mad. And so that's what the algorithm is set up for.
And when you make me mad, I share it.

Speaker 5 If I have a strong opinion about it, I share it. And so that's what the algorithm does.
It just amplifies strong emotions. And strong emotions aren't a good way to make decisions.

Speaker 5 And the strong emotions become polarizing.

Speaker 5 And so when people are polarized, they're not listening anymore. And everything I just talked about goes out the window.

Speaker 6 There's been a lot of talk about, I mean, I see it all over your comments section. There's, I mean, there's fucking hashtags about a Jocko for president.

Speaker 6 I mean, do you, do you see yourself ever getting involved in U.S. politics?

Speaker 5 I certainly hope not. I don't, I don't, I don't really have any desire to do that.

Speaker 5 And I don't, I think that, I mean, I think that

Speaker 5 I guess it just depends. You know, because every time you think that things will settle down, the pendulum will go swinging back in the other direction and back in the other direction.

Speaker 5 So I certainly hope not, man.

Speaker 5 I don't like politics. I don't think I, I don't think I would like to do that.

Speaker 6 I don't think you would like to do that at all.

Speaker 6 You know? But I think that's the problem.

Speaker 6 Because everybody that's in there, there's nothing else they'd rather be doing than sitting on their fucking ass on the floor of Congress or the Senate or

Speaker 5 hire.

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, hopefully we get some of these term limits and things like that because career politicians are definitely

Speaker 5 problematic.

Speaker 5 But, you know, who knows? That means they have to vote themselves out of a job. What are the chances of that?

Speaker 5 Slim to none.

Speaker 6 Slim to none.

Speaker 6 but um you know you get the warrior kids series movie coming out

Speaker 6 the up and coming generation is generation z they get a lot of shit

Speaker 5 you know i'm what are your what are your thoughts on gen z what do they need to be looking out for what's your advice to them yeah i think when i look at it and i forget gen it's actually i think gen a gen alpha is now I want to say those are teenagers right now.

Speaker 5 Okay. So it's like Zen Alpha, Gen Alpha, and then Gen Z is sort of above them, maybe 20s.

Speaker 6 You think that's right? I think Gen Z is

Speaker 6 they're entering the workforce and are already in the workforce.

Speaker 5 Yeah, man.

Speaker 5 Biz America.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 you can do,

Speaker 5 you can, can you do anything you want? Nope. No, you can't do anything you want, but you, you have a lot of opportunity in this country.

Speaker 5 I was talking to a kid the other day, and

Speaker 5 I was just like, man, he's

Speaker 5 in the fire department and you know like there's a salary cap in the fire department right

Speaker 5 and I said hey man

Speaker 5 like save your money

Speaker 5 figure out something else you can do you in the fire department you've got time to do other things what do you do in your spare time

Speaker 5 right there I already know you're not doing much

Speaker 5 So what can you do? And I kind of said, you know, like we're at my gym and I said, look, see all this? I go, all this was just like an idea at some point.

Speaker 5 Just a little tiny idea with no true value whatsoever.

Speaker 5 Nothing. And here you are in a gym.
And that's the same for everything that I have in my life. Everything was just like nothing.

Speaker 5 But if you

Speaker 5 apply it and you execute on it,

Speaker 5 now all of a sudden they start to grow value. And so,

Speaker 5 you know, it's always surprising to me that the opportunity that we have in this country. So are you going to get it given to you? No.

Speaker 5 Is it going to take hard work? Yes. Will you have setbacks? Yes, you will.
Yes, you will.

Speaker 5 Enjoy it.

Speaker 5 Enjoy it. Like, this is what,

Speaker 5 here's a Gen Alpha Tour term, lore. You heard this word? Lore.
No. So like creating lore.

Speaker 5 So you're, if you look at when you have problems, those problems are how you create lore about what you did with your life.

Speaker 5 The kind of thing you can tell your grandkids, the kind of things you can tell your kids. Hey, this is what happened.
Oh yeah, I remember, I remember

Speaker 5 when I had my wife and my four kids in a 934 square foot house. That's lore, man.
My kids are kind of fired up for that. Like, there was two girls sharing a bedroom.

Speaker 5 I took the converted garage and split it in half.

Speaker 5 One for my son and one for my youngest daughter.

Speaker 5 That's what we're doing. That's cool.
At the time, would I have rather had some mansion? Sure. But that wouldn't have got me no lure.

Speaker 5 So when you go through challenges, you face things in life, look at it as an opportunity to make some lore for your existence. It's going to be a struggle.

Speaker 5 But with America, if you work hard, you will be rewarded.

Speaker 5 And you're going to, look, it's not like a guarantee.

Speaker 5 But if you work hard,

Speaker 5 you have to make sure you're playing the right game too. So I had this conversation with a guy, actually two guys consecutively a few years ago.
And

Speaker 5 they were both hard workers in two totally separate industries. Two hard workers working very hard and not able to get to where they wanted to go.

Speaker 5 And they're putting in, you know, 50-hour week, 60-hour week, 70-hour weeks, like really getting after it.

Speaker 5 And I said, hey, listen, if that's what's happening, you got to check what game you're playing.

Speaker 5 Because if you put a lot of effort, the example I use was soccer and basketball. If you put a lot of effort into basketball,

Speaker 5 how many points can you score in a game? 30, 40, 50? You get 50 points in one game as an individual player. If you're playing soccer, how many points can you get in a game?

Speaker 5 Maybe one or two.

Speaker 5 So if you realize that you're not getting the points that you want to get, you might have to say, I need to get into a different game. So you have to be smart.
Hard work isn't rewarded solo.

Speaker 5 You have to also, you know, detach, look around, and say, Okay, is this game that I'm playing the right game to get where I want to go? So you have to keep that in mind, too. But this is America.

Speaker 5 If you play the game and you play the right game and you play it hard, you're going to end up in a good spot, which is all we could ever ask for.

Speaker 6 Another great point. Another great point.

Speaker 6 Last question.

Speaker 6 If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would they be?

Speaker 5 I would say,

Speaker 5 first I'll give you the easy shot: JP Denell.

Speaker 5 Next, I'll go

Speaker 5 Debbie Lee.

Speaker 5 And then I'll go

Speaker 5 Johnny Clark. Johnny Clark.
Who was a Marine in Vietnam, and he was a grunt.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 our special operations guys

Speaker 5 get a lot of credit. Well deserved.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 sometimes, oftentimes, And I tried to give as much credit as I could today to our conventional Army and Marine Corps brothers and sisters that fought.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 they don't often get the credit that they deserve. And Johnny Clark wrote a book called Guns Up

Speaker 5 when he got back from Vietnam. And he got wounded three times.

Speaker 5 The third time he got wounded, when he finally got pulled out, he had lost like 40 pounds, 35 or 40 pounds, patrolling in the jungle

Speaker 5 for 14 days, 17 days, 20 days at a time.

Speaker 5 And he just, he's an incredible guy. It's a legendary book in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 5 You know, I got to shout out guns up. I did that

Speaker 5 event for the Marine Corps birthday up in Camp Pendleton. And I was able to get a guns up.
Semperify, happy birthday. Semperify, guns up.

Speaker 5 But Johnny Clark, just an amazing guy and has had a really really incredible voyage in his life that

Speaker 5 I think everyone would be blessed to be able to hear his story. And I think that it would give a lot of people credit.
You know, we've

Speaker 5 I had the honor of bringing a lot of the SOG guys into the forefront for the things that they did in Vietnam. And most certainly, you know,

Speaker 5 the most epic guys.

Speaker 5 But I always want to remember these

Speaker 5 grunts, the infantrymen.

Speaker 6 Thank you for saying that. And by the way, you did a fantastic job giving those guys credit.

Speaker 6 I talk about the exact same thing on here a lot about those guys never get the credit they deserve.

Speaker 6 You talk a lot about special operations nonprofits. And it's like, yeah, great.
We got another one. We don't fucking need anymore.
These guys need them.

Speaker 6 You know, and

Speaker 6 so it's pretty fucking cool you're doing that. And, and, uh, that, that actually is a segment that I planned on covering, but it slipped my mind is the SOG guys.

Speaker 6 I mean, I started interviewing this year

Speaker 6 a couple of Vietnam guys and got inspired from what you and John Strykermeyer are doing over there. And, and, um,

Speaker 6 and, you know, and, and, and, for me, I mean, those guys, that is, that is the generation that motivated me, that made me want to, want to

Speaker 6 serve the country, go to war, and ultimately become a SEAL. And I was,

Speaker 6 man, those guys are fucking something, aren't they?

Speaker 5 Yeah. As I've told John Stryker-Meyer and I've told the rest of them, like, as

Speaker 5 a task unit commander,

Speaker 5 I wouldn't have approved any of those missions.

Speaker 5 I was like, yo, you're going out where? Wait, across enemy lines, you got three Americans and four Vietnamese, and you're going out there into wherever

Speaker 5 with no ground support.

Speaker 5 You sure about that? But those guys were in a different, a different breed. Yeah.
And God bless them all, man. They were just epic.
And like I said, the infantry grunts in Vietnam,

Speaker 5 they were...

Speaker 5 what they suffered through. And, you know, it's a small percentage of them, right? Just like, just like any of these wars, there's a small percentage of people that fight them.

Speaker 5 There's a lot of people in the military. There's a small percentage of people that fight those wars.
And the grunts

Speaker 5 in Vietnam, you know, even

Speaker 5 Hackworth, who was in,

Speaker 5 he was at the end of World War II. He didn't really fight in World War II, but he was there for the end of it.
Korea, like full-on in Korea and Vietnam.

Speaker 5 And he said that the Vietnam soldiers had the worst conditions, which is... coming from a guy that was speaking from a place where he could make a statement like that.

Speaker 5 So the grunts grunts from Vietnam, Johnny Clark, guns up. Yeah, if you could, I'm sure he'd be honored to come on here and share his story of

Speaker 5 his life, which is, like I said, it's an epic story. Right on.

Speaker 6 We'll reach out.

Speaker 5 Well, Jocko,

Speaker 6 thank you again for being here, man. And

Speaker 6 like I said, man,

Speaker 6 thank you for taking that trip with me today. I know that was really fucking tough.

Speaker 6 But, you know, at the beginning of this, we prayed that this would reach the right people and that this interview would touch a lot of people.

Speaker 6 And it's going to, man. And

Speaker 6 you're just a hell of a guy.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 super thankful that we connected.

Speaker 5 It's an honor to be able to share these guys' stories. You know, again, not just my guys, but the...

Speaker 5 the whole team that was there. And, you know, again, I talked about me talking about these little fractions of guys, small group in Ramadi that was my guys.
And there was all kinds of those guys.

Speaker 5 But, man, you talk about there was guys all over Iraq, there were guys all over Afghanistan that were in terrible situations, suffered through so much, and they sacrificed for what we have and what we're,

Speaker 5 we have the opportunity, and that opportunity is based on the sacrifices that these men and women have made.

Speaker 5 And,

Speaker 5 you know, you asked me right before a break,

Speaker 5 right as we took a break, you were like, you okay?

Speaker 5 And I said, yeah.

Speaker 5 And I did a podcast with a guy named Tom Fife.

Speaker 5 And Tom Fife was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And he got a purple heart in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Speaker 5 And I was talking to him, and we talked about World War II, and he got commissioned for Korea. And by the time he was in Vietnam, he was a battalion commander.

Speaker 5 And we were talking through the different types of missions, and all good.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 we got, I just was curious about

Speaker 5 what the operations were like. And I ended up saying, you know, well, how many casualties did you take as battalion commander?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 he got choked up.

Speaker 5 And I was sitting there watching him, he got choked up. And I was like, oh, this is

Speaker 5 50 years ago.

Speaker 5 And he's getting choked up thinking about his guys.

Speaker 5 And that was a moment for me that I realized that's okay.

Speaker 5 And I think

Speaker 5 we've been told

Speaker 5 that there's something wrong with us, but there's not.

Speaker 5 Like, you get sad. when you think about your friends.
It's okay.

Speaker 5 You get a tear in your eye when you hear the national anthem. It's all right, man.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 you sometimes spend a little too much time thinking about something that you went through, it's okay.

Speaker 5 And I think it's important for

Speaker 5 us, our generation of veterans, to recognize

Speaker 5 you went through some tough stuff. Think about it sometimes.
It's hard. And that's okay, man.
That's okay. Thank you.

Speaker 5 Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

Speaker 6 God bless you, man.

Speaker 5 Back at you.

Speaker 6 Happy Thanksgiving.

Speaker 6 Appreciate it.