Jocko Podcast - 115: Into the Fire, and Beyond the Call of Duty, with Medal of Honor Recipient, Dakota Meyer

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:21 - Dakota Meyer. 0:11:00 - "Into The Fire", by Dakota Meyer. 0:23:35 - Deployed to Iraq. 0:26:35 - Deployed to Afghanistan. 3:01:54 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:12:50 - Support: JockoStore stuff, Super Krill Oil and Joint Warfare and Discipline Pre-Mission, THE MUSTER 005 in DC. Origin Brand Apparel and Jocko Gi, with Jocko White Tea,  Onnit Fitness stuff, and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, and Jocko Soap. 3:40:37 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 115 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink Good evening echo good evening War is different for everyone who experiences it on One end of the spectrum there are some people who deployed to a safe area and protected by Concrete and steel and barbed wire and their job which is definitely a important part of the machine but it just doesn't require them to be put into direct combat And then with a little luck because of that situation They can easily complete a wartime deployment with little or no contact with the enemy

whatsoever, but they did their part and we are thankful for that on the other end of the spectrum on the other end of the spectrums there are some people that end up in Anything but a safe area They end up in the belly Of the beast They are called on to do more than is required and much more than could be expected and that situation also creates a spectrum Some men find it to be to be to be a spectrum and that situation also creates a spectrum

some men find it to be too much and instincts of self-preservation take over and they go into survival mode and they cower and they hide and they give up and they wait for the inevitable but others do what they can they try to do their duty they put one foot in front of the other and they reload their weapon and they try to keep firing And that's the middle of the spectrum and then at the far end of the spectrum There are those men that step up and go forward across the threshold Really across the threshold of life and they go into the fire and into the flame and toward the unknown and toward death not to save themselves but they disregard their own safety and their own life to save their friends

their brothers and their comrades in arms and then beyond even that almost off the spectrum there are those men that take that step across the threshold of life and death over and over and over again not because they were ordered to not for a metal not because of some manufactured set of ideals but simply because that is who they are and I'm honored to have one of those men here with me today a son a father an American a United States Marine a man by the name of mr. Dakota. Dakota, welcome to the podcast and thank you for coming on.

No, thank you so much for having me. I'm telling you, I'm honored. I'm honored. All right. As we normally do, let's start from where you started. Tell us a little bit about Columbia, Kentucky. Yeah. You know, it's a small town.

You know, I grew up in Columbia, Kentucky. You know, I grew up in the first half of my life. my mother and ended up going and living with my father and you know I didn't didn't come from money didn't come from anything nice you know I ended up living my father I'm adopted on my father's side and you grew up on a farm you know it's just just uh just I'm you know I'm a simple guy it's a simple it's a simple way of life you know what I mean and that's that's just how we grew up we you know my dad you know he always instilled in me and you know my I have to give you know so much credit to my father and my grandfather I mean

I'm like, you know, I mean, they just, they instilled so much in me of what's right and what mattered, you know. You know, we're talking a lot of your childhood was, and I wrote down these notes, farm work, football, and females. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, I told you, I'm simple. Yeah. That's it.

You know, there's not much else. In Columbia, Kentucky, though. And, you know, you wrote a book. The book is called Into the Fire, and that's where I'm getting some of my information from. And I would say that in the early descriptions, the way you describe yourself, not exactly Mr. Sensitive is what we were dealing with back then.

No, not at all. You know, I was no, I wasn't sensitive. I was just a hard-headed kid, you know, set in my ways. You know, my dad just instilled it in me. My dad instilled it in me. My dad is a man who doesn't, He doesn't care of the social status. He's not a, you know, and I watch it from him, and he's just a hard, hard guy.

You know what I mean? And so there's not living in a house of two men, right? You know, me, just my dad. Yeah. There's not very many feelings. There wasn't a real nourishment to your sensitive side. There was not much nourishment. Yeah.

There's one part of there you're talking about you're in a football game and you jack up your elbow real bad. And so the coach got you in the locker room or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I was sitting in the locker room, and I mean, I had carried the ball probably 18, 19 times the first half, and I go in there, and my elbows are, like, just jacked, right? I mean, you know, just, we were just getting pounded. And I remember sitting in there, and the coach, like, hey, don't come out next half, right? You know, you just look, you know, because it was a JV game, and he's like, you know, don't come out next half.

And I'm going to tell you something. My dad seemed that I didn't come off when we were warming up for second half. And, I mean, he came in there, and that was not acceptable. But one thing my dad taught me is you start it, you finish it. Check, check. Now, what happened to that football career? Would you get some, you did get some legitimate injuries, right? Yeah, yeah, no, I got, you know, I banged my knee up real bad on my sophomore year, between my sophomore and junior year.

Never really recovered from it, you know. And so, I mean, I could have went and played somewhere. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say I'd had full scholarships or anything. But I could have walked on somewhere, you know, probably played outside linebacker or, you know, a strong safety. But, you know, I just, I was going to go play football, and I had planned on that. I'd been through the clearing house.

I mean, I'd done everything I needed to do to go, and, you know, my senior year, and I just ended up going the Marine Corps route. Now, I've talked a few times down here about the effectiveness of the Marine Corps recruiting program, which they have, like, the best recruiting numbers, but they spend the least on recruiting of any of the military service branches. And it sounds like you got rolled right. into that. I did. They got me. They got me. Let me tell you something. They, uh, they got me, you know, but, but I, but I, but I think, look, I, you know, the product's the product with

them, right? Like, you know, you're either, you're either going to be a Marine or you're not going to be a Marine, right? Like, you're, you either have it in you or you don't. Like, it's not, you know, they just, they just know how to talk to their own, right? And I think that's what they're so good at is, is that they know how, they know what would have fired them up. And so they say the same thing that would have fired them up. And so they say the same thing that would have fired them up and if you bite on it, then you're the type of person needs to be a Marine. If you don't, they don't want you anyway. You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's a perfect way to put in it. And this is 2006. 2006, so, again, this is something I always have to remind myself and I'll remind everyone else while I'm at it is, you know, when I joined the Navy in 1990, there was no war going on, right? There was no war going on. It was just, you know, peacetime. And you're joining in 2006.

We're at war in two different countries. and 2006 things are not going well they're a little quiet in afghanistan at that time but iraq is full bore i mean that's when i was in romadi it was a real hard fighting was taking place and all on bar province the rest of iraq was pretty bad so you know for you you know you're going and you know you're going to go to combat i mean that's just like kind of a given yeah i mean i um i don't know that i ever really

understood that though until i was in you know what i mean i think that uh i don't think it ever really hit me um I never really, I didn't really join. I can't sit here and give you some Motto story that I joined to go, you know, the advantage 9-11, right? You want to hear something that's jacked up? Yeah. Is I joined in 1990, and I had the opposite view for it, which is, I didn't know there

was no war going on. I was 100th century. I was going to go, oh, it's all. The SEAL's got to be doing things all off. They're doing stuff we don't even hear about. That's what my attitude was. And here you were staring at war in two different zones. And you're like, I don't know if it was really happening.

Well, you know, because it could be, I mean, honestly, I did, I know what sounds dumb but I mean like I you know by that time we're five years past it yeah and people had already got used to it right it was no longer like oh shit right you know in in like the population you know and just you know the average civilian right it wasn't you know because it they've been doing it for what five years yeah and so you know I didn't really think about it I you know I honestly and you know I joined I you know I wanted to go infantry I wanted to fight but I didn't really I don't think it ever really hit me until I got into boot camp you know And then I really started understanding what.

And when you were going through boot camp, at that time, basically every drill instructor must have been coming back from the battlefield. All of them. Yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, everybody, especially in a school of infantry. Oh, okay. Day to all. Every one of them had been in the shit.

Yes. They were in, yeah. I mean, everyone, I've been in the shit. Yeah. You know, even my recruiter, my recruiter had just got back from Fallujah. Dang. Yeah. And he'd been in the shit.

Yeah. Dang. Yeah. So with that, I'm going to take it to the book right now because, you know, I think I was never in the Marine Corps. I'm pretty sad about that sometimes. But I have, like, read so much about the Marine Corps over my life and hung around with so many Marines

and work with the Marines so much. So whenever I get to Marine Corps boot camp, it, like, strikes a romantic side of me. It just wants to at least get a little taste. And you did it really fast, which is great. But here it is, and it's just like exactly what we're going to the book. Again, this book is Into the Fire by Dakota Meyer. And here we go.

So it began. Close haircuts to strip away your old identity. Exercises to prove you're not half as strong as you figured. Simple tasks to show you that you're mentally weak. Drill instructors who mock your attempts to look tough. It's right out of the movies, but it never stops. Yeah. And there you go.

You know what's coming. How many times did you watch Full Metal Jacket before you went in? A ton. Yeah, I mean. A ton. You know exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. Does that even help?

No. It's just still. No, you could, I mean, you know, like, during boot camp, it was the hardest thing I'd ever been through. But when I look at everything I did in the Marine Corps, it was the easiest thing. Yeah. That's the same thing with Buds. So, first of all, when I went through Buds and I didn't know anything about Buds. No one knew anything about Buds is 1990.

when I joined the Navy didn't know anything about it and and so I always think that the guys that are coming in now You can basically watch the entire bud you can watch the whole thing. You know what it they they the students eventually captured the schedules Yeah, and so they'd actually know what's coming and You know you know how many people it keeps from quitting? None. It's still the same attrition Yeah, okay, so it's gonna suck really bad and now you know it you didn't know it before Yeah, you even know when it's gonna end Yeah, yeah, all right Back to the book the second month is the turnaround when they build you back up

Sergeant Brady made me a squad leader meaning he yelled at me for the mistakes of the other 10 recruits that was all right he had his job I had mine you bust it through you get to graduation day which was obviously awesome and then it's I spent the next two months at SOI school of infantry only 15% of the Marine Corps and the army are in the infantry in today's military there are more Combat pilots and infantry squad leaders. Dang. Yeah.

Ah, man, that's crazy. 15% of the Marine Corps and the Army are infantry troops for the ground. That's a interesting figure. In Vietnam, and I was talking about this with Laif and with actually the whole Echon Front team the other day. I'd heard this somewhere. I heard it from Hackworth that in Vietnam, the height of the Vietnam War, there was a little over 500,000 troops on the ground, and it was only 10% of those troops that were, you

infantry units that were on the ground in combat. Yeah, you know what I find so interesting about that fact and that stat when I looked at it. You know, like I didn't understand it obviously when I was in. But, you know, what I look at it is, is to understand like how much it truly, you know, as the warfighter, you know, I think we take for granted so many times of what it really takes for us to be able to do our job effectively. I mean, you take, you know, I mean, it takes, you know, 85% of the organization just to support that 15%. To put you face to face with the enemy. Yes.

There's got to be another, yeah. I mean, you look at 8. 10 to 1, 15 to 1 or something like that. It's crazy. 10 to 1, that's got to put you up there. Yeah. But that's what works. And that's, well, here we go.

Breaking down a little bit of what the Marine Corps is like. A Marine squad is comprised of three, four-man fire teams. Everything you do is a rifleman revolves around that four-man team. One man carries a weapon more powerful than those of the others. But that's a minor point. In the field, you don't do anything without those three other guys. You don't shit, sleep. Eat or move without the other three knowing about it.

Yeah. A Marine squad with those three fire teams is like a boxer with three arms. One arm jabs with bursts of fire to keep the opponent off balance while the other arm loops around the left hook with a third arm ready to follow up wherever there's an opening. If one arm is wounded, the other two can keep fighting. Fire to pin down the enemy, maneuver to finish them off. Fire maneuver, fire maneuver, fire maneuver.

And I always have to point this out. extreme ownership, but you know, this is cover and move. This is what I always talk about the fundamental. That's the fundamental gunfighting tactic. Yes. Fire and maneuver. I was called a cover and move. So you get done with SOI and you head out to the third Marine regiment in Hawaii.

Yeah. So how is that when you're checking in? Yeah. Well, we pulled in and as soon as we pulled the bus in, the seniors, you know, they're all, at all just got back from Hadith of the Triad and had a hard deployment. They got the shit kicked out of them. And so we pull in and there's no empathy there. And so we pull in and they're throwing beer bottles off the deck and they are all hammered. It's in the middle of the night. And, you know, so it's like, welcome. You know, but it was awesome. I was honored to be out there.

And then how long did it take for the sniper billet to open up and for you to get that? Yeah, so it was, I think it was like around February. So I got there in October, so September, October, so I got there in October, November, so November timeframe. I think I got to Hawaii, October, November timeframe, and then it opened in January, February timeframe. Is it hard to get a sniper bill? Did you get lucky? Being a new guy getting a sniper village? Yeah, so I did. So I was actually the youngest sniper in the Marine Corps in 2007. So what happened was, is I had ran the endoc. So you have to run an end dock to be part of the platoon. So you come in and then you're on probation.

So you run a huge end dock. You come in, you go on probation. And then you start, you know, usually you were going deployment. And then after deployment you go to school. Well, they had a couple school slots open up. And they basically gave me the option of you can either go home on pre-deployment leave because we were heading Iraq. You can either go home pre-deployment leave or you can go to sniper school.

How old were you? I was 18. How many milliseconds did it take you to make that decision? Oh, yeah. I said I've been with my family for 18 years. I'm all good. Oh, man. That's awesome.

And then Marine Corps sniper school, that's a hardcore school. Yeah. And 50% attrition rate. Yeah. We had seals in it with us. Yeah. And then, you know, our early seal snipers, you know, and I don't know the full. I'll bring a sniper on.

here someday that knows the whole history of the SEAL sniper program, but it's deeply rooted in the Marine Corps sniper program, deeply rooted. Just like all of our training is rooted in the Marine Corps Scouts and Raiders. There's a lot of crossover in those early days, but the Marine Corps sniper program, now everyone's going to think, that's a civilian's going to think, like, oh, you're sitting on a gun shooting, but that's not really the hardest part, is it? That's like 5% of the job. Like, it's like the, it's, I would say, I would say it's less and that you know it you know i mean you got i mean the the communication piece of it the mission planning the i mean there's so much i mean you you literally you literally are the uh you know the commanders

the battalion commanders trigger finger you guys do heavy stocking right oh yeah that's just a gut check with and how much did you weigh at this point uh probably about 180 okay 18 and it's where do you guys do your stocks uh so we we're in hawaii so i went to hawaii sniper school okay and we do them out in the cahoos out and just dripping sweat oh laying in the crawling stalking is terrible crawling for four hours and going 35 meters yeah i mean just like you know you know you start off you got a thousand meter lane you know and they put an observer up and they're using the best glass there is and they're sitting on this truck and uh you have to you have to move up and you got to get within, you know, at a certain distance and whatever they tell you,

and then you got, you know, you'll have to veg up and whatever you take the shot. You can do whatever. You know, you just, you take a shot with a blank, okay, and then they come over and so they put a walker on you. And then they try to walk, you know, back and forth. They try to find you and say, see you or anything, then, you know, you lose. And then you got to take a second shot while they're you know because that walker gets within the vicinity of you and like it's like 10 or 20 meters and then you take a second shot and if they see anything then you you know you you you fail too so it's you know yeah what's a walker so basically they bring a guy out who is like who you know has like a stick or something and they can see him and then they try to say so they go okay i think i see him here

so i need you take left three steps and then back four steps they try to walk him on you gotcha This will be interesting. When they get to you, do they say, sniper at your feet to the guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to say it, sniper at your feet. That's the same thing that they say in the seal sniper school. Yeah, that's what they say.

They get there and they go, okay, sniper at your feet. Yep, you're busted, you fail. Three steps left, two steps up, sniper at your feet. Yep. And they'll say, nope, you know what I mean? So there's the crossover. That shows you that stuff is rooted together. And there's a guy by the name of Skinta,

who was one of your instructors, you were one of your instructors, right? Yeah. And here's a, going back to the book, Skinta told us about a sniper team in an Overwatch and a half-constructed building in Ramadi in 2004. It was a warm, dull day, and after several hours, they dozed off and never awakened.

Insurgents sneaked up and shot all four Marines in the head. They left behind a high-powered M-48-A-3 and its excellent Schmidt and Bender scope. Over the course of the next year, they allegedly killed two more Americans before a Marine sniper took them out and recovered the rifle. Skinta hammered home his message, know every aspect of your job, and never, never let down your guard. If you slack off or you take things for granted, you die.

He, I had a lot. Look, I was fortunate to have a lot of people around me that influenced me. I mean, I'm nothing special. I'm a product in my environment. I'm a direct reflection in my leadership. I'm so fortunate. But I'll tell you right now that what I did that day was because of him. was because of the mentality that he instilled in me of knowing your job knowing it and obsessing with it and knowing every aspect of it and knowing everybody else's job around you and then when you know your job and you know what's right you do that you don't worry about what everybody else says yeah the the non-commissioned officers that again they're saying guys that raised me in the

seal teams have such a huge impact and what what i also found interesting about this was this story about these snipers when I got to Ramadi in 2006 we heard this exact story and you know it was another thing that made us more paranoid and made my guys more paranoid being out there and we actually had thought I didn't this as 2004 we thought it happened a little bit later and closer to our deployment but yeah man just just a nightmare yeah yeah another little commentary from you here back to the book shooting another human being was a math problem You were either right or wrong with no subjective in between decided by someone else. I liked problems that were black and white life or death before taking a shot at a target 1,000 meters away you had to calculate the effects of the light air at altitude Wind humidity angle of fire cartridge velocity and gravity you had to align the target the background and terrain the weather the noise and the weapon You had to work in concert with others at the same time the target enemy was figuring out how to kill you combat was a zero-sum decision-making played for the highest stakes live or die and 31 people started the course and 13 people graduated yeah so that that should tell everyone why that sniper designation is so damn hard to get it is because it's no joke and there's usually

at any point in time there's not there's usually around 300 school trained snipers in the Marine Court any time really dang yeah that's In my task unit, which is about 40 seals, we had 13 snipers. Yeah, it was so awesome Killers, killers. I got lucky. You know, I got lucky. The stars aligned. Okay, so now you're trained up, and then in 2007, you deploy, you deploy to Iraq. I did. First deployment. How pumped were you? I was pumped. I just got out of school trained sniper, man. You know, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go turn the heat up, right? And where we were going was actually a bad spot. I mean, we were in karma. And it had been bad, but it was like, we were part of that surge. And when we got there,

we took some contact once, and it just like the water faucet turned off. You know, you go from streets that you were fighting down to next thing you know, you mean, you could walk down with no gear. And so what were you guys doing, just doing patrols? We were doing a lot of dwell ops. Which is what? We would go out, basically what they were, the theory on this was, we would go out off the fob and stay like four or five days in a house and you know um you know we would get hit by indirect fire uh you know some but i mean but i was only there for like 45 days and then you got what hitting the hand with a what a spider i got bit on the right hand my right hand by a spider and uh actually suffered severe nerve damage loss the movement my last three fingers and uh they kazivacch you for

this yeah or medevac'd you back to germany yeah so they sent me to al-asad and tried to fix it there. I did, they rushed me in. I had two surgeries in Camp Fallujah. And then, um, they, they moved me to outside and they sent me back to Germany and I was there for like 25 days in the hospital in Germany. Trying to save your hand, basically. And then they sent me home. And then I was having to do occupational therapy to get, you know, to get my fingers back. They wouldn't move, you know. When, were you back in Kentucky? No. I was back at Hawaii. Okay, back to Hawaii. Yeah, back in my unit. And, but you did have a little bit of Kentucky with you there in the form of bourbon. Yeah, a lot of it.

I was drinking. I was a drinker. You started getting after it a little bit. I did. Even a little bit too much. Yeah, too much. You know, I started, you know, it was hard. It was hard coming home and knowing my teammates were still over there and knowing that my unit was still there and I wasn't part of it, you know.

And then did you go, did you have to go back? Or you came back to the States like on leave? No, no. After your hand was hurt? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I came back to Kentucky. Got it. Yeah.

And you hung out there for a while. And actually, you lost a couple friends. at that time period, didn't you? I did. Gosh, it was terrible. Just tragic situations? Yeah, it was terrible. You know, I had the guy, you know, actually, you know, his name's on my chest, and we played

football together. And he had called me. I was leaving the hospital, and I was coming home that weekend. And he had called me, he had called me right before I was on the way to the hospital and said, hey, man, we're going to go to this football game. You know, we're going to watch my little brother play, you know, all that. And I got a call as soon as I was leaving the hospital. And he had had a wreck and got killed.

Yeah, a close, close friend. And I lost another friend. She got killed in December. Dang. Not exactly what you want to go home on leave for, man. That's harsh. No, no, no. But, you know, it's just the way it goes, you know.

Yeah. And then, so you spend that time at home, you go back, you rejoin your baton. And this is when you find out that they want volunteers to go help out in Afghanistan. Yeah, so we had built up. I was back probably a year, year and a half, went to Mount Sniper School. and, you know, I became in charge of my own team, we got meritlessly promoted. I was a Lance Corporal leading a five-man team

with a sergeant on it, you know. And, you know, I ended up taking, like, I had the worst, like, I got, like, the newest guys. They gave me the newest guys. And we ended up being the general support team, so we moved all the way up to the platoon and ended up being, you know, one of the best teams in the platoon. And, yeah, so we're out at 29 Palms

doing our final training up to go back to Iraq. And this was when nothing was going on in 2009. I mean, they weren't letting you leave the wire, right? And we had no mission, so it kind of sucked, right? And they came and said, we need five volunteers, go to Afghanistan. And I said, what's the mission? They said, we don't know, but we just need five bodies. And I raised my hand and said, yeah, I'm ready to go.

Again, like how many milliseconds to take that decision? Zero. And so what you were volunteering for, you find out later is an embedded training team? Yeah, an advisory team. Explain what that's all. about so an embedded training team is where they take uh you know they take different ranks and different skill sets of marines and they put them or you know whatever you know military unit and they put them together and they they embed them with uh you know uh an afghan unit you know so we were embedded with

80 afghans a whole uh not a it was a company and so that's that's we just lived we did everything with them we did everything from you know teaching them weapons tactics and and uh you know um Shooting shooting. I did the changeover for the NATO weapons, right? So we took them from the Soviet to the NATO weapons. And that's another key factor that we need to bring up to talk about in that gunfight. So we were teaching them on that, qualing them all on that, you know, everything from everything. I mean, we did everything with these guys.

And then did you do any kind of workup before you went over? Yeah. So was it with that team, your actual team that you were going to deploy with? Yeah. So we did. We did a workup with them. You know, I just left 29 Palms. I go back and we train for like a month or two in Okinaw, Japan with this new team.

And then we head back to 29 Palms. And then we go from, well, we went back. So we went to Bridgeport, and then we came down 29 Palms. We did all our mountain stuff at Bridgeport, all our mules and all that stuff, you know, packing. And then we came down and did it, ended in 29 Palms. And then we headed over. And that was with that four-man team. Yeah, with Lieutenant Johnson, Gunny Kinnifick.

and Doc late and myself. I'm going to talk about those guys a little bit here in the book. Lieutenant Mike Johnson's four-man team at Monty. This is where you end up, a place called Monty, which is 10 miles north of another fog called Joyce. Lieutenant Johnson, sunny and smiling with an easy laugh, but completely professional with the highest standards.

I'd climbed mountains with him in California, of course, and I knew he was as strong physically as he was mentally. Staff Sergeant Aaron Kennefic was a personnel specialist with eight years expertise in administration, so his job was to bring some order to the Afghan personnel procedures and pay records. Doc Layton or Corman would provide some basic medical care to the Afghans and the villages, but his primary job was to be ready in case any advisors or Afghan soldiers were wounded. I had a job, too. Lieutenant Johnson put me in charge of tactics, operations, and weapons training. Before each patrol, I approved of the Afghan scheme of maneuver,

inspected the radios and guns, coordinated fire support, and planned an emergency escape route. This was far easier than planning the sniper missions I had been trained for. So you were kind of the most tactically savvy guy in the group being a sniper, already deployed to Iraq? Yeah, no, I was. And what prepared me was my training that I deal with my team, you know, my sniper team.

I mean, look, I had, you know, people, thought I was crazy. They thought I was crazy the way that I was training in my platoon before you're like, we're going to Iraq, we're not going to do anything. I'm like, I don't give a shit, right? Like I'm, I was still learning tax at and I was still learning, you know, satcom and I was still learning HF and I was still learning how to learn crypto. I mean, I wanted to know every aspect of every part of the job. I was learning every, I was going over to the, to the BAS and learning, you know, all the medical stuff that I could. And I was, you know, I mean, everything I could do, like if I could get just a little nugget of knowledge and better myself in

every aspect I was doing it and so yeah so when I got over to this team I mean you know I I was the only tactical guy in there you know and yeah and it was you know they they were they when it came to the tactics when it came to making sure that the weapons were ready when it came to making sure that the vehicles were ready that that the that the that the you know that the the the jammers were working that you know if anything that mattered in the patrol it was on me was on you yeah The trucks were loaded. And the reason that the Marine Corps put the teams together like this is because,

well, that they're trying to develop the whole Afghan army, every aspect of it, not just the tactical side, but they want, like, the administration so that the people can start getting paid on time and the organization, so they got the lieutenant in there. And at the same time, they want to help the villagers, so they put a corpsman in there to do medical work. So that's kind of just if anyone's thinking, why the hell would you put together a team like that?

It's because the people that are supposed to do the fighting are actually supposed to be the Afghans. right and and in in the team is there to support them help them train them and get them yeah and that's that's the mind that's the theory right the theory is that you train you train them and they do the fight and you're just there to advise them right um but it never works that way in iraq and one of the things that i pointed out many times was you know what kind of you you're you want to develop a relationship with with a group right and and now

you say okay we're going to train you but when it come time to do something daniel you you guys just go by yourselves that's not you're not building a relationship you're you're you're in fact you're going backwards no it's yeah it's the same way so you get there and you start doing you're just kind of going on patrols you're going on patrols with the with the afghan army company it was kind of interesting you know because I was kind of the high strong one on the team you know like I was like the one that always was you know we need to be ready to fight you know I don't know how many arguments I got into with some of the the the leadership in in teams you know because we we were 21 man team but we were

broke into four-man elements and spread out, you know, in this area. And I don't know how many times I got into arguments with people in the team of, you know, hey, this is how we need to do it. We need to stay up. I mean, I was trying to train them. I was doing stuff of, you know, trying to train them to do IVs at night with, with nods. And they're like, why the hell are we doing this? You know what I mean?

Like, and a lot of people, you know, look down on it. And, and I said, I'm going to prepare to fight. And they said, you know, we're not, you know, so many times leadership got on me. We're not going over there to fight. We're going to advise. And that was the mindset. a lot of this, now I'm not going to say my team, but a lot of the team. And, uh, and it showed. Yeah. Yeah, you know, for everyone out there that's wearing a uniform right now, man, be ready

for the worst case scenario all the time. Be ready for it. You know what I tell him is, I said, you know, Lieutenant Johnson was a, was a, a com guy, satellite guy, Doc Layton was a blue side corpsman, and Gunny Kinnifick was an S-1 guy. You know, and I always wonder, Do you think that they ever thought they'd be in one of the deadliest battles in Afghanistan? Do you think they ever thought they didn't? You know, you don't know where you're going to be at, but one day you're going to be tested. Yeah. And you better be ready.

So you guys are rolling out on these patrols. Here's a good kind of aspect of what you see on those patrols. And you called the army, the Afghan army soldiers. Ascars, am I saying that? Yeah, they're called Ascars. Ascars. All right, here we go. Back to the book.

When we walked into some hamlets, you could feel something was wrong. When kids threw rocks at you, you knew what the parents were telling them. Sometimes the Ascars grabbed the kids soccer balls and sliced them apart. This didn't win any hearts and minds, but it did stop the rocks. Whenever the elders hurried through the ceremonial tea, though, I'd watch the Ascars. When any soldier senses danger, he crouches down a few inches to make himself less of a target. When the Ascars did that, I went on full alert. Hafez.

Am I saying that right? So his name's Fasel. So I had named him Hafez in that to protect him. Got it. He's here in America now. Okay, well, good. Hafez was our lead interpreter, and we quickly learned our best warning system. A 37-year-old Sergeant Major retired from the Afghan army,

Hafez had served in Kunar for three years with advisor teams. The Afghan soldiers distrusted him because he refused to support their never-ending schemes to skim off the Americans. So he's your most trusted advisor. Interesting that you point out how when soldiers sensed danger, and I was telling you about JP, my elite sniper and one of my two platoons and T.U. Bruiser. And when he came on the podcast, I described him walking through the streets.

And I, because like I told you, man, I didn't think JP was going to live because JP was too brave for his own damn good. Yeah. But when I, you know, I'd be watching, I'd be like holding security and watching a patrol go. and you'd see you know I'd see guys moving with that little crouch because everyone's expecting that the shooting's going to start and I'd see JP man walking with his head up and his chest out like ready to get something yeah man it's nice to be 23 years old and not think you can die so that's my brother JP and the other thing that you know when you're in these foreign countries when we were in Iraq you're in Afghanistan the the locals we can't tell the difference between we really can't tell the difference between a good by and back and back Now, you learn some sense of it where you go, okay, that guy looks shady. And you're probably pretty accurate, but a guy like Hafez, he's going to know. No, you're going to know.

Instantly. He was the unofficial fifth member of our team inside of Hamlet. If he shook his head at us, we knew it was time to forget the tea and get out. So how much good, how much, how often would you go into a hamlet and people were cool and all good and drinking tea? You know, most time. I mean, most time, look, I mean, look, I, I, like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, You know, the people there want it to be better. I mean, they live in the shit.

Yeah. They live there. They want it to be better. You know, they're just caught in a bad situation. It's not a, it's not a simple equation. You know, there's nothing simple about the life that they have to live. You made some friends going back to the book in the hills along the Pakistani border. No Afghan military or civilian had much of anything.

I think practically every American soldier or Marine tried to help in some way. We purchased candy and trinkets in the markets to give the kids. I soon had two little buddies, boys about 10 or 11. They'd hang around the main gate yelling, Maida, trying to say your name, when they saw me. At first I'd buy them Cokes and then started sharing my care packages from home, soap, candy, peanuts, gun, gum. Maybe a decade from now, some kids remember that some Americans were kind to them,

even when their older brothers were shooting at them. Maybe not. You don't help out because you expect something in return. So you're a human being, man. Trying to take care of some kids out there. I think this is getting into your first sort of legit. We'll call it combat. And you're taking some small arms fire.

I'm going to the book here. Staff Sergeant Kennefic was standing outside a bunker about 100 feet from me. Meyer, we're under attack yield. Technically, yes. But the shepherd, there's some shepherd out there. But the shepherd was shooting without poking his head up to aim. He had one chance in a thousand of hitting us. A second harmless burst followed the bullets cracking more than 10 feet above our head.

Call for Artie now. Staff Sergeant Keneffect yelled, holding the radio out, head set out towards me. Oh, nice. Staff sergeant soon-to-be gunnery Sergeant Kenefic needed the lowly corporal's help. I trotted toward him, stopped, assumed parade rest postures, armed lock behind my back, chest pushed forward in the wide open and pasted a respectful expression on my face. What does the staff sergeant wish the corporal to do? Another burst from the AK.

This is no time to be a smart ass, Meyer. A few more rounds, still way too high. I'm locked at parade rest. Aye, staff sergeant. He balanced the headset considering whether to throw it at me. Meyer, hurry up. He had started calling in the artillery mission, and when I got to him, he was asking me,

what do I say now? Left 100, drop 200, I said. He repeated it on the radio. What now? He asked, fire for effect, I said, should be dead on. Okay, fire for effect, he repeated over the radio. And that's it. You hit the guy, but it's funny that you, even in that situation,

you were talking about being kind of a wise ass when you're a kid. You're still a wise ass. Yeah, you know, the thing about Kenneth was, me and him were butt in heads real hard at that time. You know, we were butt in heads. You know how some people would just take over, like he took over and tried to make up for his lack of, you know, nothing against him. He wasn't in a combat. I mean, it wasn't his job, but what he tried to make up for and the lack of his combat knowledge was his authority, right?

And so, you know, he had kind of pissed me off pretty bad about, you know, asking me to do, you know, you need to stand a parade dress. Like he was all big on it, right? And it's like, we're on a cop. Like, you know, you still need to, you know, customs and courtesies, right? And so, like, I used that situation to make a point. You know, he just kind of pushed me over the edge. But after that, we were.

Yeah, that's what kind of broed you guys out. Yeah, it broke us. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. Great. You had some good Afghan soldiers, and I know you were talking to me

about them, early one guy that by the name of Dodd Ali. Here you go. He was fun to talk to, open, friendly, and fearless. We'd sit around talking and asking questions of each other like kids in middle school,

learning as much as we could about each other. He proudly cleaned his saw five times a day and absorbed every tip I gave him about shooting. He was the most disciplined ASCAR on base. That's why we gave him the saw in the first place. So you had a good relationship with that. Yeah, I mean,

I had a good relationship. ship with all my Afghans. I mean, I, I, I, I, I, at least two meals a day with them. Um, you know, usually I didn't eat breakfast with them. I would eat it over at the, uh, over at the, uh, you know, the Chahaw. Um, but I used, you know, that was my, that was my policy. I mean, every night, I eat dinner with them every single night, I would eat dinner with my Afghan soldiers. Mm-hmm. Because I was no better than them. Yeah, man. You know, sometimes I hear, I hear people, you know, people that don't understand at all what was going on in Iraq or Afghanistan. They'll you know

We were you know America was occupiers and how could you do that? And it's like I always remind them like we were fighting alongside the Iraqi soldiers fighting alongside the Afghan soldiers Yeah I mean spilling blood Yeah, I mean we weren't I mean just because it was Iraq and Afghanistan war We weren't fighting Iraq and Afghanistan We were fighting with them

We weren't fighting against Iraq or Afghanistan Yeah we were fighting next to them You know we were helping them against the same enemy Yeah you know so many people missed that point man And it's a it's an important point to be missing. It's a it's a big fact. Man, I hear that and it just turns my stomach, man. Now I kind of joked about that first situation being your first combat.

And now you had legit your first kind of trial by fire. Yeah. You're at combat, you're at the outpost at cop, Monty, and you're under attack. You actually got some wounded. Some Ascars are wounded. And you're, you're going back to the. Where's staff sergeant kenefic? I yelled Doc Layton pointed toward the northeast tower get over there and stay with him. I yelled Suicide bombers sometimes rush the wire trying to take an infantile with them as they evaporated in a red flash without

hesitating Doc late and ran down the stairs across the open space and into the tower with staff sergeant kentifik two or three seconds later a rocket slammed into their bunker exploding into pieces an afghan worker huddled there beside the sandbags smoke rolled out of the tower they're gone I yelled to Johnson not believing what I had just seen I resumed firing it's all you can do the best first aid at that point was to return fire Johnson worked the radio Fox 3 1 Fox 3 1 this is Fox 3 staff sergeant Kenneffick Doc Layton come on answer up we kept firing but it seemed unworldly now we were on automatic Lieutenant Johnson got on the radio again 3 1 Fox 3 1 this is Fox 3 staff sergeant Kenneffatheck dot Layton

come on man answer up then finally Yeah, yeah, this is 3-1, we're good. Ten minutes later, our attack helicopters began strafing runs, low, rumbling burrs like a giant burping. Incredible firepower of those lovely birds, enemy fire ceased, attack over. Johnson and I ran over to the bunker as Staff Sergeant Kennefic and Doc Layton stumbled out. The four of us sat on the bloody sandbags in the growing dust talking about it. Their eyes were slightly glazed and wide, wide open. Lieutenant Johnson, Staff Sergeant Kennefic, and Doc Layton weren't infantry.

They had considered that by coming to Afghanistan they might die, but it hadn't kicked in until now. Now they had heard the screams and seen the blood. Everybody soot covered, understood now that if we went home together, it might not be alive. The Ascars were cleaning up the bloody mess, not six feet from us, taking away the ripped up body of their friend. We mumbled some stuff. All of us were too embarrassed to talk about our feelings, but we knew what we were all thinking.

This shit was for real, and there were only four of us. We'll be there for each other, Doc Layton said. The surfer dude surprised me. He had said the one thing that made any sense. Yeah, that was the Sunday before. So Gangesgal was on a Tuesday. That was September 6th of 2009. It was a huge rocket attack.

I mean, they were dialed in. It was terrible. Like, I can remember it as if I was there. It was terrible. How many rockets do they fire? I think we had nine that hit 107s that hit dead on, like nine that hit just inside of not the whole base, but just my Afghan base. That's probably this, you know, where we're at right now is probably bigger than that. It was terrible.

And that was a wake-up call. Oh, it was for all of us. I mean, it was for all of us and it was for them. And, you know, I'll never forget, you know, I'll never forget talking. I mean, we finally sit down and talked about what do we do if we lose one of it. You know, what do we want? And gosh, it was so real. And, you know, I'll never forget, Kennefic.

I had medevacked out a guy, a wounded soldier that day. And he was putting me in for a bronze star. And I never forget. we were just walking through in the uh in the little hooch and he said uh and where we lived at and he was just you know kind of joking a little bit later on that day he's like hell mire you know the way shit's going for you and as unlucky as you are he goes you'll probably be in for a medal of honor before this deployment's over with and uh it's just crazy yeah so that's two days before you guys head down to gongagall we'd actually got the call that night that we were supposed to go to gangagal on the

And they ended up pushing it right to the eighth. So we left the next day. You talk about it a little bit here. Ganjigal lay two miles north of Joyce and we drove right by the mouth of the valley. Ganjigal sounded like the name of an Irish town full of smiling faces and friendly pubs. I could see a few of the larger compounds far back on a hillside nestled against steep ridge lines. Bad place, Hafez muttered. Bad people.

So you're getting right away getting told that. No, no, I mean, we were told instantly. I mean, we were told like, I mean, we, I mean, yeah, there was no doubt. Now, one thing that I think made you feel more, a little bit more comfortable you talk about in the book, historically the Taliban had not sprung ambushes from inside villages. So that wasn't discussed at the briefing. Plus, we were going in with 90 Afghans and 15 advisors with a platoon from 132 deployed behind us in a quick reaction force. This shows us this show belongs to the to our Afghan counterbarts Fabio am I saying that right?

Yeah, Fabio. Fabio said we advisors will stand off to the side and let them talk with the elders We're not in the lead we're assisting that made no sense I thought considering who is doing the briefing and who is hearing it We were into the tactical lead even if we claimed otherwise That's a little political thing Yeah, I mean I I I think it's an ignorant thing. Well, I think it's an ignorant thing too, but the reason it happens...

No, no, no, of course. I mean, technically we fail under... So, I mean, technically the way that this works, as crazy as this sounds, I was working for... Like, my commander was the Afghan commander. Whatever the Afghan commander told me was what I was supposed to do. Right. I mean, I'm saying that's a political thing for us to say politically,

look, the Afghans are running this operation. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, that, you know, but that... If you remember what I said a little bit earlier about, you know, hey, we're not going to do the fighting. I mean, you know, that's the mentality of the leadership of the team. Yeah. Yeah.

Not good. And as you just said here, that made no sense, I thought. And you were a corporal. How old were you? I was 21. 21 years old. And you're looking at this going, hey, man, this doesn't make any sense. We're the ones that are sitting here briefing it.

You know, we're the ones that know how to call for fire. Yeah, I mean, and I brought, well, I mean, first off, first off, the Afghans can't even talk to anybody that calls for fire or the helicopters. I mean, they don't even have any comms with them. They're on HF. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, so the three main factors that I brought up in the brief, and I brought up

that, look, we're only, everybody's going in, we have over 12 different moving elements between the OPs and different teams inside this patrol, all on one frequency. I brought that up. I brought up the fact that we didn't have direct. air support is on 15-minute strip alert, and that's in Jalalabad. So all, and, you know, so they were taking as if the birds would be there within 15 minutes. I said, that's not what 15-minute strip-al-al-al-er means. They're up off the ground, 15 minutes, and then they still got 90, probably 60 minutes to get from Jolabad to us. And so, you know, that was the other factor than the other thing that I brought up

was, why would we put our snipers 2,000 meters away from the village? Outside of their effective range of their weapons. There you go. But here's what I was told. I'm an E4 in the United States Marine Corps. What do I know about mission planning? And that's why I was taken out of the team. Check. So when you talk about getting taken out of the team, explain how that went down a little bit. So you got your four-man team. Team Monty. Yeah, team Monty. And so what they did was is, you know, they had, there's like, they would put the teams, you know, you would go with your Afghans in here to do their part. So our team was supposed to go to the back of the village, cover the backside of it, and then we were going to search a couple houses up there for a machine gun.

And while the meeting went on. And they took me out of the team because I brought up those concerns. And, you know, they kind of took it as me going against orders, questioning their authority. And they replaced me with Gunny Johnson. So I just have to say this right now. So I talk about this all the time, man. If you're in a leadership position, you don't want yes, man.

You don't want yes, men. You want the corporal that says, hey, boss, I don't understand why you do that right now. And if your answer to your subordinate is because I said so, or you're an E4, be quiet, or you're an E5, be quiet. If that's what your answer is, that means you don't have a real answer. That means that what you're doing is probably wrong. So surround yourself the best people you can have on your team, the people that are going to question what what it is that your plan is and if they question it and you can't don't have a good logical answer and your plan doesn't stand on its own two feet well think about it and reassess it and take some advice from down the chain of command on how what we could do to change this plan up yeah i mean it was look they're complacent you know that's that's the type mentality that you have when you don't expect to go get your ass handed to you that's why you need to expect to get your ass handed to you every day

And train like it. Yeah. You know, I, I used to, when I was running training, we trained for worst case scenario all the time. It was like worst case. I mean, you know what? And it, it was, it was insane. Like, we had great, we had great financing for our training. So the training was awesome.

We had mayhem going on. We had paint balls and we had laser, this multi-million dollar laser tag system. We had role players and it was awesome. And I wanted mayhem. And we had, we would put guys down and you'd have to carry them out. And it would be like a, it'd be mayhem. And sometimes guys go, this is kind of unrealistic, and what are the chances of this really happening?

Yeah. And I'd be like, look, if this doesn't happen, great. You don't ever have to worry about it happen for real. But if it happens, you'll be ready for it, at least as ready as you can be. Yeah. So you get pulled off the team. I got pulled off the team,

and my job was going to be to stay with the vehicles. So, like, basically we were going to drive vehicles in, park the vehicles, and that was the other thing I said. I said, this is dumb. Why would we leave our up-armored guns a couple miles away? And they said, you ready for the response here? You ready?

Well, Dakota, because we want to go into the village clandestine. You have a 90-man patrol. Yeah. Yeah, that's not going to happen. Just to paint a picture for everyone, basically there's a deep ravine, walls on either side. at the top of the ravine, it kind of splits into two other ravines and there's kind of villages on both sides of that.

Yeah, it splits into two. It's kind of like two valleys inside of a big valley. Right. And on the right-hand side was another bad valley, but we were going in the left-hand side when that was Gangeshaw. And, I mean, this terrain was built to fight.

It was built to fight. I mean, they had trenches in it. There were trenches in it that they used to fight out of. I mean, it's nuts. And obviously you're walking up the valley which means automatically you're in the low ground which is not where we want to be ever All right now you the one of the guys you were gonna be working with In the Hummers was Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez Chavez here we go back to the book I sought out Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez Chavez our motor transport chief

I known him for five months he didn't stand on rank and we traded stories about growing up on farms he had grown up on a ranch in Mexico having a similar approach to life rod and I had become friends he was in the eighth grade when his family moved to Texas where he learned English played football earned good grades and roped cows and rodeos our team called him hot rod he laughed a lot bragged about how smart as two daughters were and kept all our vehicles in top condition rod this mission is fucked up if the shit hits the fan i said we're going in my team's walking point and they'll get cut off we have to go in and get them out. And he looked back at you.

Devil dog, Rod said, say the word, and I'll do the driving. Yeah. That's legit. He's the man. He is the man. And continuing on, you say having some sort of contingency plan now, I walk back to the advisor headquarters and brief Lieutenant Johnson. By the way, Lieutenant Johnson didn't want you out of the team either, right?

He wanted you to stay with him. We're pissed. He knew that you. should be with the team. If things get hairy, I said, I'm coming in. Rod will drive. Radio your coordinates and get down to the wash, fucking climb in and we'll haul us back to the main body

because they were going to be exposed on the far end of that wash. Yeah, so everything that I did was planned out the night before. Check. Everything that I did was planned out the night before. And it was all in our team. I mean, I told them. I mean, I told them, I said, you know, you say the word and I'll head in there. I don't care.

and I'm coming to get you. And, I mean, we had this all planned out. Like, all they had to do was get to the road, and I would be there. Continuing on, back to the book. In the talk, a report about Gondrigal had come in via Brigade Internet. A special forces team reported that 32 fighters were moving from Pakistan to reinforce Gondrigal. Half an hour later, the video feed from an unmanned aerial vehicle showed a man with a mortar tube on his back entering a known safe house, two kilometers north of Gondagal village. 10 minutes later, four more men entered the same house.

So you're watching this. So here's the crazy part. Nobody told us. Oh, so you didn't even get that report? Nobody told us. Check. And I got to point out to everyone, I'm obviously skipping giant chunks of this book,

and there's an awesome amount of detail that Dakota goes into in how this is going down, and I'm kind of hitting the wavetops to get the story there. Okay, you don't even get that intel, but it doesn't matter because the next day, I guess where you're going into the valley You got a guy with you named Swenson. He's in charge of some border police some Afghan border police is that right? Yeah So Swenson's border police turned to Hafez when the lights went out Dushman he said am I saying that right Dushman doucheman Dushman which is another term for enemy for enemy Dushman they said we must turn back

So they're already freaking out. Yeah, yeah. So they, I think that they were, like some of the police had already knew they had leaked it. Oh, tipped it off? Yeah. They had leaked. Or they had information one way or the other.

They had leaked when we were coming in. They had leaked a plan. Yeah. So I think that that's why they were trying to bail out, in my opinion, was because they knew what was already there. Yeah. Got it. And just before 5 in the morning,

Rod and I heard gravel crunching on the trash. So now you're actually in position. You dropped off the guys. And now the Afghan team with some of the advisors, including Team Monty, are heading up the valley, and you're waiting at the bottom end of the valley. Yeah, I'm sitting back at the trucks, and they're going into the valley. And at this point, now everybody's leaving the valley. Yeah, this part, just before 5 in the morning, Rod and I heard gravel crunching on the trail. Men, women, children, sheep, and goats suddenly hurried by our trucks heading out of the valley.

pre-dawn always brought the first sing-song called a prayer followed by people scurring about and this is just you knew right then right oh 100% that it's on no 110% yeah no doubt so this you know just for anyone that's listening that isn't putting two and two together here there's a village with a bunch of civilians in it and the civilians all leave and they take their animals with them they take all they take everything that's worth anything with them so they know that there's it's on going back to the book as lieutenant johnson approached the first row of houses erie radio back to garza that he and lieutenant roula were heading toward the house of an emma one of the village elders seconds later an r pkg streaked in from the east followed by a burst of

pkm a russian made machine gun that shoots a hefty 7.62 millimeter cartridge it started tearing up the ground in the adobe walls as the men took cover among the terrace walls more pkm fire came in from the northeast joined by a ks at a ks at a ks at a closer range enemy fighters were crouched inside the houses and below the windows of the schoolhouse on the southern ridge they were hiding in the alleyways and dug in behind the stone terrace walls to the east they had a dozen fixed positions and were shooting downhill with the sun behind them yeah they knew what they're doing yeah this is um again um do any kind of anybody with any kind of military knowledge whatsoever when you read that paragraph or that that does two

paragraphs right there you see that you are in a in a horrible horrible scenario multiple enemy machine gun positions in elevated coordinated attack horrible and here's your thoughts back to the book I waited for the firing to die down but it didn't the chaos of the RPG explosions P-cam machine guns Aks and M-16s increased I heard the report of a recoiless rifle basically a hundred pound shoulder or tripod mounted cannon and a sure sign of a planned ambush as the douchemen Don't lug that over the hills for an exercise then I heard the crump crump of their mortar shells There was a wide babble of voices on the command radio

Advisors yelling at each other to clear the net no one was taking charge there was no central command I was pacing around frustrated Being out of the fight and not being able to help so you'd seen enough of like little firefights that would be a little burst of fire and then people are going to run away. Yeah, I mean, you know, like they're going to just, they, they blow their load, like right in the beginning and then, you know, they don't have enough. Like, they're not able to, like us, resupply. They don't sustain anything. This was endless. And then you mentioned this earlier and again, just to kind of point out to people so they, so they understand what you were talking about. You said, hey, there's going to be 14 different maneuver elements? 12, yeah. 12 different maneuver elements, and they're all on the same

net. Now, what that means is they're all in the same radio. frequency so picture this you you're trying to have a conversation on the phone but so are 12 other people 11 other people all trying to have a conversation on the phone at the same time yeah with their with their with their nerves while their rock chaos is happening yeah and so this is what you end up doing is actually on a phone you have a better chance because a phone will kind of kind of let some of that traffic through but when you start stepping on each other on the radio it just cut each other off and you can't hear anything

thing. That's exactly what happened. And the other piece of it was it's not just that. It was all that one frequency. Everything had to be relayed through those snipers. Oh, because they were in the elevated high ground. To get back to the, could you, did you have direct comms with the guys in the ground? Yes, I did, but I'm saying like to get to the command. So if you like, you know, and the big thing I brought up was, was, you know, what happens if you're calling in a medevac and you're calling in a call for fire? Yeah, you're trying to, that's like trying to call the fire department and the ambulance and you're trying to call them at the same time like you got to you got to separate him actually that's not a good example it's trying to call the ambulance and an

active shooter and trying to maneuver all that stuff happening at the same time yeah back to the book soon both ridgelines were sparkling with fire as the Ascars and Dushmen engaged each other with rocket propelled grenades smoke and shrapnel filled the air Swenson he's he's on this is Highlander 6 he yelled over the din forward a four to four line of troops pinned down at x-ray Delta and heavy enemy fire request immediate suppression fire kelo echo will adjust so he's trying to call fire you're back and you and and Rod says what do you think rod said if the Dushman caught around the rear

I said and close the back door they'll catch our people in a fire sack this is deep shit they got to get out of there the way to break up an ambush is to hammer it with heavy fire the Humvee gave us armor mobility and a heavy gun we would roll in and bring team Monty back to the location of the command group I grabbed the radio and called Fox three lieutenant Fabio no reply I tried Fox six Williams and then Fox 9 first sergeant Garza no one replied I was calling for permission to enter the valley asking for it from anyone who would answer finally Fox 7 Valdez up on the northern ridge answered on the net Fox 3 3 your request

to enter the valley are denied. Fox 9 says you are to stay at your present location. And again, I'm throwing out a bunch of different names here. These are all the different leaders that are out there on these different 12 elements. And when you read the book for yourself, you can kind of catch and understand

exactly what was happening there. But basically what was going on was your calling, who would ever would answer to get permission to drive up the valley and go give a hand. Yeah, I was trying to get permission. I put down the handset and sat there Listening as a dozen advisors tried to talk over a single radio channel.

It was sheer bedlam. This is bullshit, Rod. I rechecked the ammo belt in the Mark 19. Rod sat in the driver's seat. You ready, Rod? Give it a few more minutes, Meyer. You'll fry for this, he said. He was right.

I'd get sent home for disobeying a direct order. There was no question in my mind about that. I was already on thin ice with Garza, Fabio, and Williams. So I sat there frustrated listening to the shooting, flexing my hands on the grips of the Mark 19 and breathing hard. I tried to calm down maybe the battle sounded worse on the radio than it really was Son of a bitch inside the tactical operation center at Joyce so Joyce is a couple miles away And the tactical operation center is where they're running this they were supposed to have

Kind of a situational awareness of everything that's happening and they're supposed to be able to supply fire support So that's when we're talking about the tactical operation center at Joyce that's what it is Captain Aaron Harding was a senior officer on duty from midnight to 8 in the morning the battle captain he had been in Afghanistan for eight months but had rarely controlled fires and certainly not and certainly none like this as artillery stood by at Joyce a few miles away and at a Sadabad a few miles away Harding asked for more and more information from the men on the long table who was requesting the fire missions was it Shadow 4 Highlander 5 or Fox 3 what had they heard from Fox 6 who was presently in

charge the Marine advisors or the Afghan army did the ground commander know where all his troops were had they double check the grids of the k e's he asked question after question at joyce 120 millimeters millimeter mortars were fired for fired 15 minutes after Fabio requested the first shell though struck within 50 meters of the enemy position the next flurry of shells was on target that would be the only effective my fire mission of the entire day this is a One of the things that you're going to get more into. We actually recently talked about the battle in the Idrang Valley,

and those guys would absolutely 100% have been overrun, and what saved their ass over and over again was artillery and fire support. That's the biggest advantage that we have on the battlefield as Americans. 100%. And your team is calling for it. The advisors are calling for it. And they're not getting it. Yeah, we're not getting it.

I mean, they shut it down. And to try to give the benefit of doubt here, right, of why they shut it down, I totally understand it. But it goes back to the one thing I said, right? I mean, they probably couldn't figure out who the hell was calling what and where what was where. I mean, I don't know that I could have confidently fired around. But part of it was because of the layout of everybody on one frequency. You know, it goes back to that initial problem. Like, I don't know if I could have fired around.

Now, am I pissed that they didn't fire around? Absolutely. Like it was wrong. It was wrong for the reasons they did it. But, you know, the confusion was so chaotic in the beginning especially. But I can tell you this, that if they had got the rounds, it had broke the enemy. And, you know, again, to advance your point of giving the benefit of the doubt, if they have no idea where friendlies are, they could have fired rounds on friendly forces as well. Well, exactly. And then, you know, they'd have been accountable for that.

And I'll tell you, that's a hard decision to make to possibly, you know, Fratricide, blue-on-blue is, in my opinion. That's the worst thing that can happen in war. And so what these guys are being asked to possibly do is risk a fratricide. Yes. Which in their minds and most, probably a lot of military minds, I think mine included, well, it's It's hard to say, what's better? You know, risk fratricide or risk getting overrun. Now, if we know for a fact people are getting overrun, then you're like, okay, we'll risk

fracturide. And that's why that happens sometimes where people say drop that bomb no matter what, but to say, I'm not 100% sure people are going to overrun, but I'm still going to take the risk of fratricide. At this point, that's probably why they're holding off. It is in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah.

And they get to a point where they call the danger close rounds and try and take responsibility We'll get there Back to the book the enemy above the enemy above Work their way around the edges the valley shooting downhill the Taliban machine gunners tracked in on one askar then another than another It was a killing ground They're all over the place Swenson was thinking to himself I may not make it out of here If you hunker down and don't shoot back you will surely die The other side gains confidence and rushes forward in the frenzy of combat soldiers act like sharks

They sense weakness and circle in picking off the wounded and the defenseless slowly the douchemen were closing in from both sides of the wash so they were ready oh let me tell you something they were good they were trained they had gear you know they had they had plate carriers they were taking the uniforms off our dead guys um you know they put kevlars on shit they were good still trying to get fire support here Swenson had identified enemy positions at four grid positions there are two basic ways of calling in artillery you can give the grid coordinates of the target or the Kilo echo number for a grid and adjust after the initial round or you can give your

own location and a compass bearing to and distant to the target the second technique is called a polar mission provides the guns with the locations of both the friendly observer and the target tell the talk I'll send it polar Swenson radio decaplin it's on me give them my initials I'm making the decision not them assuming accurate fire the US mortars were less than two miles away the only target endangered by the polar plot was the enemy by sending his initials Swenson was taking full responsibility if anything went wrong if a friendly soldier or civilian were hit the burden rested squarely on Swenson not with the talk in the rear The talk responded to the polar request by asking again for information that was impossible to provide where were all the friendly troops? What was the forward line of trace of the friendly the units was everyone accounted for were any civilians endangered Kaplan told Shadow the relay team above the him tell the talk that's that it's

critical I repeat critical we have advisors pinned down the talk denied shadows fire mission furious sergeant Summers at Shadow 4 pressed back against the talk the main element is being hit from the north east and south all elements are engaged I repeat all elements are heavily engaged we need fire missions now the NCOs inside the talk were doing their job and the artillery and mortar crews wanted to oblige yet it seemed to sergeant summers that every time he relayed a fire mission the talk asked him 20 questions a second string was running the show here and not well in firefights it's not unusual for 200 to 2,000 artillery shells to be fired over

the course of the first hour of the battle at Gonjigal when men lay trapped and dying the talk at Joyce allowed only 21 artillery shells to be fired Since World War II forwarded observers had received artillery fire under the rule of silence is consent When an observer called for fire the mission went by radio to the operation center and to the guns Silence by the op center constituted consent for the guns to fire in the 21st century with computers making instant firing calculations Within two minutes shells could be hitting the target But beginning about 2006 sergeants and sergeants at and lieutenants on the front lines were trusted less.

The High Command believed the grunts were too quick to call in fires that endangered civilians, resulting in an embittered population that supported the insurgency. The solution was to apply a strict new rule. Two months before Gonjigal, General Stanley McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan, issued a directive that forbade the use of artillery against or near any structure likely to contain civilians unless the next higher-head Quarters commander had approved that ended silence's consent the high command had shifted decision-making from the battlefield to the staff Swenson was not trusted to make the hard

decisions instead officers in the talk with a confused idea of the battlefield had to decide whether to honor his requests for fire yeah and that's where my problem comes in right is you know if the doctrine is that you I give my initials I take the responsibility well then follow the doctrine yeah you know that's there's where they went wrong in and I'll tell you something else that you know you talked about

how confusing it was over the net and clearly it was obviously very confusing how long would it take to verbally explain the layout of this whole situation it would take a very long time it would take an extremely eloquent person

who had the time to kind of compose himself and sit there and try and explain it that's why you make Kilo echoes that's why you have these pre-planned fire positions so that you don't have to think anymore yes we can direct fires and and what instead of having to communicate what the situation on the ground is what you communicate is this is what we need and this is where you need to put it yeah I mean that's 100% it I mean that's 100% it is you know you could never first off you could never relay all that information there and and guess

What? And at the end of the day, it was irrelevant to what they were needing to do. Yeah. And also by the time you, if you could relay it, by the time you related, it would be different. Because what are you going to tell everyone to sit still for a minute while I explain where you are? That doesn't work. That's why decentralized command is so important on the battlefield. This is the exact reason why decentralized command is so important on the battlefield. When you centralize command people and people that actually are there that need to be able to make decisions, make things happen, can't do it. Yeah. And by the way, how do you over? A situation like this how do you overcome a situation where? Okay, you're my subordinate. You work for me and I don't I don't want you to be able to have the ability to fire because I'm afraid you're gonna hurt civilians How do I solve that? The way to solve it is not to say no, I don't give you that authority The way I solve it is they say okay Dakota let me explain some things to you

We need to protect the civilian populace. We need to make sure we don't damage any infrastructure to the best of our ability I want you to understand how strategically important that is Do you understand? Let me put you through some scenarios. What if you were hearing this happen? What would you do? What if you were hearing this happen? What would you do?

I train you and I build trust so that I can decentralize the command. That's how you overcome it. You don't overcome it. It's a shortcut to try and centralize and it ends up getting people killed. 100%. Going back to the book, Fox 3.1, Lieutenant Johnson finally came up on the radio. We're pinned down in a house. Receiving accurate fire from the next house.

We have to get out of here. He was caught off by others pushing to use the same frequency three or four advisors were trying to talk stepping on each other I could hear the strain in their voices the lack of crisp borders the frantic yelling of men who were pinned down After a few minutes Fox three two staff sergeant Kennefic tried to pass his location on the grid to Fabio I can't shoot back Aaron said because I'm pinned down they're shooting at me from the house it's so close Grid three two this is three three radio staff sergeant Kennefic Repeat your grid repeat your grid or you you radioed to Kennefic repeat your grid So he faded as he was trying to tell you his grid

Nothing after that but static and garbled voices That broke it from me I had promised my team I would be there as far as I was concerned My command element wasn't in command Twice I had heard Shadow say that air would be on station in 15 minutes nothing happened how long do you do nothing? I while your friends are fighting for their lives. Fox 7, this is 3-3. Sitting here is stupid. We're going in.

Rod and I were on the net with Valdez. There was no dispute among us. It was about 0,600 time to move. I was the vehicle commander, so the fault lay with me for disobeying orders if I arrived in the valley and discovered that the command group had the situation under control.

I knew there was a good chance I'd be sent back to the estates in disgrace. When I shouted the Ascars to follow us, they look confused. Up on the north outpost, Valdez grabbed the senior Afghan sergeant. The sergeant radio to the Afghan drivers clustered around our truck, urging them in Pashto to follow me. Mortar shells were following a football field away to our west. The enemy knew our trucks were somewhere on the path, but uncertain just where.

The explosions made the Ascar's jumpy. Just the same, some of them jumped into two Humvees and roared into a position behind us. Rod, let's go, I said. He put it in gear. Now, by that time you start actually going into the valley. And as you're going in, by that time, several Ascars were stumbling out of the battlefield, some bleeding, a few without their rifles, all exhausted. Where Americani, I yelled, dost, dost.

The Ascars pointed up toward the village. So as you're driving in, you're seeing guys fleeing the battlefield. I mean, it was like, it was terrible. Like, as we go in, you're just seeing these guys come out. And it's in Ramadan, so they won't eat or they won't. drink any water and they're coming out of this battle and they're just like you're not even close to the valley yet and they're coming out of this battle they don't have any weapons on them they're just broken they're bloodied they're they're been shot they've just i mean you're carrying

each other and you're just like what are we going into somewhere behind us was a u.s army platoon it seemed to me to be a time for them to make a move they were the quick reaction force our insurance policy. Valdez was on the radio arguing with Dog 36, the quick reaction Army platoon commander. Dog 36, this is Fox 7, Valdez radioed. You need to get in there, man.

Fox 3-3 is to your front and a Humvee. Drive east until you link up with him. Fox 7, this is Dog 36, said the lieutenant. Our vehicles are too big for the mission. We were driving on a footpath that was barely wide enough for our home v. Valdez came up with an alternative. Dog 3-6, this is Fox 7. I understand. Drive forward until

reached the Afghan vehicles, use them to get into the fight. There are people out there dying. The platoon leader said he had to wait for clearance from the talk at Joyce. Yeah. What kind of vehicles did the QRF have? They were in MRAPs. Okay. God, I mean, how awesome would it be to have an MRAP roll into this situation?

Yeah, and I don't think they could have. The road wouldn't held up. Too small. Yeah, because they ended up coming in in one of those, it looks like a tank, but it's on wheels. And it ended up flipping over off the, all. the bank but they look at the end of the day we had ton of humbys women we just brought in 90 people sitting right there they could have jumped in the humvees and came the helicopter ops center called back saying the retasking of the birds had been canceled because Lance had not

called his own brigade headquarters to ask permission and because another mission north of gongergal was of higher priority so one of the guys in the in the op center had actually said You know what, screw it. I'm calling for Helos. But he hadn't called the brigade and run through the proper chain of command, and they shut him down. Yeah. So here we go. More than an hour into the fight, the situation was as follows.

Team Monty was trapped in a house, and the U.S. and Afghan commanders were pinned down by shooters closing in on them from three sides. The north and south observation posts were under fire. The Ascars were caught in the open with nowhere to hide. Rod and I hadn't reached the wash. The one-three-two quick-reaction platoon was not quick-reacting. The Tocket Joyce was paralyzed, preventing artillery support, and the helicopter gunships had not arrived. It was a perfect storm.

That's just, there's absolutely, there's nothing else that can go wrong right now. It's a perfect storm. It is the absolute perfect storm. Swenson wanted a massive artillery barrage. Because the douchemen didn't have overhead cover, artillery airbursts would send millions of lancets raining down toward them hundreds of shells had to shake the mountains and roll thunder down the valley the douchemen were zealots but they weren't crazy once artillery began exploding overhead gunmen with AKs wouldn't get up and run forward in the open yet the talk refused to fire at gonjugal only a few miles from camp joyce unleasing a barrage in your own backyard wouldn't win any applause at higher headquarters the directive from the high command was so clear do not employ air to ground or indirect fires against residential compounds defined as any structure or building known or likely to contain civilians unless the ground force commander has verified that no civilians are

present. It's terrible. And I mean, you know, and there's that, you know, that rule right there is written so impossible. You know, what do you do? I mean, the village you're getting shot at, so you run through there, you're a civilian or you're shooting? You know, I have to look. I have to look. do like a full review of the ROEs or the specific directive, but, you know, normally the self-defense thing trumps everything. Well, usually, and that's what I always say, right? I always talk about ROEs, and, you know, ROEs will say, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, but then at the end of it, it always ends.

It says, or hostile act, hostile intent. But it's all by interpretation. I mean, it goes back to the commanders. I mean, you know, I don't blame the ROE. that Stanley McChrystal put in place for what happened that day. I blame the people, the leadership, who was incompetent to make a decision. You know what I mean? Like, it's like nobody wants to just own it and take accountability and take responsibility and say,

you know what? I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do. They want to be able to say, well, I didn't do it because, well, this is the order. Come on. Come on. You know, if you're in a leadership position, Take responsibility. Yeah.

You got to do the right thing. That's the bottom line, and that's what makes leadership hard. And sometimes the right thing is to break rules. Sometimes the right thing is to not follow orders. Sometimes orders are wrong, and you shouldn't follow them. And Napoleon said, if you're in charge and you get tasked with something that's wrong and you execute it, you're culpable. It doesn't matter if you get ordered or not.

sometimes you break the rules going right back to the yes man thing right and I guarantee I guarantee the intent of Stan McChrystal putting this ROE in place wasn't to deny guys that were pinned down by enemy fire but again how are we communicating it

and are we putting the priorities in place correctly so that everybody knows yeah I mean you know when it's put out in an email it's kind of like it's as dangerous as you interpreting me a text. I mean, everybody looks at it different. Yep. And you know what?

That's why things like commander's intent are so important. So, if I know what it is, like you're, if I know what it is that you want done and my job is to get it done and you give me parameters to do it within, I'll stay within those parameters and I'll get the job done. And I'll come back to you and I say, hey boss, I had to bend the rules a little bit here, but I got the mission done. Or I might call you back and say, hey, I'm getting ready to break the rules to get the mission done. Do you want me to break them or not? Yeah. All right. Back to the book.

Shadow, the Army outpost on the Southern Ridge replied that the talk at Joyce said the fire mission was too close to the village. Too close to the village, Lieutenant Johnson said, if you don't give me these rounds right now, I'm going to die. Try your best. Shadow replied, knowing the talk wouldn't fire. try your best try your best from the tone of shadow's voice I knew he was on the verge of complete rage he wanted to strangle the officers in the talk at Joyce I felt the same way this couldn't be happening we were on the same side we weren't Marines or soldiers we weren't Americans or askars we were one lone group fighting desperately to stay alive the villages

villagers weren't our friends this was a war and my team was on the verge of dying whose side was the talk on radio call after radio call Swenson kept requesting smoke finally around 0 630 the talk of Joyce permitted four white phosphorus rounds to be fired into the southeast backside of the village too far away to conceal my team those were the last rounds fired during the battle at about 0640 the talk at Joyce forbade any more artillery support citing garbled communications incomplete calls for fire procedures and a lack of situational awareness on the part of those trapped in the valley so there's the there's the reasons from their perspective um garbled communications

incomplete calls for fire procedures and a lack of situational awareness on the part of those trapped in the valley meanwhile during this time you've been moving up grabbing bodies coming back and here we go again as we move forward for a third time the talk had finally ordered the army platoon dog 3-2 to move forward they pulled in behind us with a platoon leader and a Humvee with an anti-tank tow missile on the roof the toe made no sense to me but the truck was equipped with a 240 machine gun behind them were 20 US soldiers and four heavily heavily armored vehicles you rolling with me lieutenant I was confirming what I took for

granted I'll scout the route first before I bring my platoon in the terrain may be too tough he refused to put his soldiers into the Afghan vehicles I could understand that okay I go first I said you cover our six the Afghans will be behind you as we bounced forward I heard team Monty again come up on the radio we're under fire Lieutenant Johnson said we're surrounded so now you're heading back in yeah yeah and I yeah my whole goal was just to get them you know was to get them to the road and And yeah, I mean, that was their goal. If they could get to the road, they could get in the vehicles.

They were good. So I was trying to push. I thought that they had took over a house. Right? I thought they had pushed into the village and took over a house. Strong point of a house. And that's what I thought they had done. And I lost communications with them.

That's what I thought they had done. You know, when Kenefic was trying to give that grid, I was trying to write it down. Because I knew if I could get that grid, I know where they were at. I could plot it. I could be there and go get them. And, you know, the one part I don't talk about in there

is probably the hardest part to the whole deal is is that the first trip that I made in, I was probably 70, 60 to 70 meters from them. There's still a lot. So you're in the valley now. You're with a group of guys going back to the book here. A bullet had entered Westbrook's neck near the shoulder blade and ricocheted downward A dangerous but not fatal wound.

Swenson applied quick clop powder and a bandage to seal off the bleeding. The fight had been raging for over 90 minutes and the chain of command throughout Kuhnard Province was on alert. Procedures for releasing helicopters had been unsnarled and two OH 58 Kiwes were en route to the valley. At 0715 they contacted Swenson. Highlander, this is Pale Horse. The PC pilot command radioed.

What do you need? Pale Horse Swenson replied, I am under heavy fire from the village and the hills to the east and on both sides, request immediate suppression while we pulled back. The Kiowa Squadron had been in Kunar for ten months. The pilots knew the terrain and the enemy habits. They intended to swoop in low and criss-crossing strifeing runs, deliberately swerving and cutting back at odd angles. They didn't care whether they hit the douchemen. They wanted to force them to crouch down and cease firing. The aerial tactics would allow the command group to pull back westward to draw down under Under reduced enemy pressure As Swenson moved he called for a medevac Shadow radioed back to that the talk wanted questions answered before calling for one

Is he army or marine? Shadow said Swenson cursed Major Williams was more diplomatic This is Fox six Williams radioed. It doesn't matter his service. He's US. There was a Cause, then shadow reluctantly radioed. Repeat. Talk needs to know if he's Army or Marine. It's in the regulations. Yeah, it was, um...

You got a guy calling for Medevac, and you're getting asked, hey, is the person that needs, is the casualty Army or Marine Corps. Yeah. And it really did matter to them. It really did matter to them. You're saying it mattered? I'm saying it to who was asking. They really...

Their decisions were. based off of who it was. At this point, you're, I think you're, you're going back and forth, going back in the valley, getting bodies,

helping wounded, coming back out, you're under fire the whole time. Rod is getting after it with you. Sometimes you have some U.S. people with you. Sometimes you don't. And again,

these are things, you have to buy this book and get these details out of it and read it so you understand the full magnitude of what we're talking about here. Going back to the book,

Hafez left the command group to sort itself out, helping a wounded Ascar, was headed back west to the operational release point when I had stopped them. I need you to come back in with me. I can't find them without you, I said. Hafez was married recently. He was wounded and exhausted.

He could now go home and have a life. If today is my time to die, then I die. so he's rolling with you he rolled with me the whole time again to all those people out there that well i guess i i should just say for the people out there that have a hard time understanding what's going on overseas um you know here's an afghan soldier that is now going to risk his life to help an american marine go and find his friends yeah because we were brothers back to the book Shortly after we headed again down the valley we bumped into another group of wounded Ascars

Rod recognized the first sergeant who was dripping blood down the right side of his trousers He was waving his arms be begging us to stop for Ascars hobbled over and threw themselves into the backseat Splashing blood all over the place we drove them back to the collection point The first sergeant was blubbering begging us not to go back in I was a little rough shoving him out of the truck I was running out of time and patience Once we dropped them off we gunned it back down the track We were getting to a place where we couldn't turn around and couldn't dodge and weave the art as the RPG smoke trails came at us We could get pretty stuck in here rod yelled the truck had very little traction and absolutely no cover

Then I guess we'll die with them. I yelled back What else could I say so we weren't going back? Rod shifted into low gear and we bounced forward You I noticed this throughout the book you have a hard time like anytime you saw wounded guys you were like all right well we got to make another trip now we got to make another trip even with those wounded afghan guys like you want to go help your guys but at the same time you see these guys you're like are getting the truck and we'll take these guys back yeah got a big heart bro got a big heart i mean look you know i didn't just lose um i didn't just lose uh four guys that day i lost 10 guys because i lost six afghans i lost 10 brothers

you know what I mean I mean those guys were just as close to me my Afghans were just as close to me as any Marines I ever served with and that's why they're joining you to go back in there and fight that's exactly and that's why I'm alive today

I mean that's the relationships that I had with them and the brotherhood that I had for them with them is why I'm alive today I mean they are incredible human beings so you're driving around in here Back to the book, only rod's skill at the wheel was preventing me from being hit again and again.

Bullets make different sounds when they pass by you. The cracks of bullets breaking the sound barrier mean they're high, maybe five or ten feet over your head. The bullets that snap close by your ears are the real killers. A few losing power and slowing down made a low buzzing sound. Strange though it may seem, I wasn't scared or angry. I was beyond that. I didn't think I was going to die. I knew I was dead.

There wasn't anything I could do about it. I wasn't a thinking human being. I had gone elsewhere. I wasn't firing the machine gun. I was the machine gun. Rod wasn't driving the truck. Rod was the truck. I had melded with my weapon.

I was no more human than a five-foot machine gun I was embracing. We were locked together, metal and flesh. Without that 50 cow, I would have quivered like the Hascars, helpless in the storm. But with that weapon, I felt transported. I had something to do until the blackness came. Yeah, I just kept, like the bullets were hitting inside the turret. They had elevation on us. And so they were hitting inside the turret.

And, man, you could hear them coming by. And I just, I remember sitting there. You know, because if you get down, I mean, you know, your instinct is to duck down the turret. but you do that they'll overrun you i mean they're running at the truck so yep you duck down they're full sprint and you're never going to come back up you know what i mean and um i just kept waiting for a bullet i just knew it was just going to hit me in the face i just kept waiting for a bullet to hit me it lights out like i just i just there was no doubt in my mind that i was going to die zero zero doubt but i was going to make this son of a bitchy

earn it they had it to do check I wasn't paying attention to the Afghan soldiers rod and I planned to keep driving east until we obliterated until we were obliterated or we found my team suddenly with no warning five or six askars who were lying in a terrorist about a hundred meters away leapt up and race towards our truck when was one was shot back and pitched forward wham a second man went down screaming wham a third then a fourth and a fifth I'd never seen anything like it five men down in five seconds there was so much screeching and shooting that I could couldn't pick out the location of the weapon that had shot them to deliver such lethal grazing fire the machine gunner must have been hidden only a few

hundred meters away with a clear line of sight in his bipod firmly anchored yet whoever shot those men didn't raise his gun sights and stitch me I knew he was looking at me but I couldn't see him there was nothing I could do he let me live not one of his rounds even struck our truck I can't explain it we used to call the truck's bullet magnets yeah they are i mean it's like the ripest target and a freaking you're the turret gunner you're like the the icing on the cake you're the cherry on the icing on the cake yeah because that truck gets over if they take the gun out that truck doesn't come out of there it's over ran oh hell yeah yeah but you know even though it's a bullet magnet i mean you know

just like right there i think that kind of paints the picture i mean it's the it's the it's the only chance you have right I mean you're you're out I mean that's how dialed in they are it's it's I mean I was literally watching guys people feel the term miracle around yeah all the the time like the fact that you right here there's five guys within you know spitting distance from you and they all go down and you're the the most prime target and you don't get shot man you want to talk about helpless the most helpless feeling you got is watching guys trying to get to you and just getting mowed down. I mean, you want to talk about helpless.

And you don't even know where it's coming from. I mean, you want to talk about helpless is watching another human being run directly at you to get help. And you're just watching them just go down, one after the other, after the other. Can you imagine it, dude?

Yeah, it's just, you know, it's... They were good. that day. You get this call from Valdez. They're coming at you. I can see them closing from both sides. They're swarming you. In front of our truck, I saw

a few guys sprinting across the wash from left to right, heads low. I don't think they saw us coming up behind them or if they heard the truck engine over the din of the gunfire. They scurried too quickly for me to get off a burst. Glancing to my right, I looked smack into the eyes of five or six men in dirty man dresses, crouched alongside

a drainage dish, not 10 meters. away when I gaped them they ducked down like they were playing hide and seek it took me a few seconds to realize that they were spreading out to seal off the open end of the horseshoe valley zip locking the frozen ascars inside a fire sack rod and i had blundered into their rear so they were about to they're about to surround everybody so that's what they were doing there was a trench and they were closing it they were closing the gate and and we that truck you happen to be there to be right in it yeah fire sack is a doctrinal term actually

Which means you're surrounded and you're gonna shoot into the sack and kill everyone We're bouncing over the rocks no faster than a man can run when a bearded doucheman clutching an a Okay leapt out of a ditch and sprinted after us like a man trying to catch a catch a bus My gun almost wouldn't swivel low enough to shoot him the barrel was tilted down as far as it could go I fired into his chest and he went down like he'd hit a glass wall a bullet doesn't blow a man back like in the movies Either he stumbles on or he falls dead this man fall fell dead Rod was yelling at me maybe I was hypnotized for a second by the death there was a guy trying to open the right door I couldn't depress the 50 Cal that low I can't get him I yelled the gun won't go down low enough

It takes the brain 12 thousandths of a second to react to danger my mind was a complete blank I had fired so many thousands of rounds that I didn't think what I was doing once you've practiced a motion long enough it becomes second nature some researchers researchers call it expertise induced amnesia athletes call it being in the zone I call it self-preservation I grab my M4 leaned out and shot the guy four or five times in the shoulder and neck it was like shooting a zombie there was no shock power in the little five five six millimeter bullets he fell to the ground I pivoted back to the 50-cal and grabbed the spade handle the weapon my hands and my eyes were working as a trained unit independent

of my brain man sight picture shoot man sight picture shoot you don't really look at the target the enemy remains out of focus you concentrate on the sight picture man sight picture shoot i hit one or two guys next to the truck and the others ducked back into the ditch valdez came back on the radio rod watch your front rod was focused on keeping traction in the loose gravel if the truck got stuck even for a moment we'd be toast he looked ahead to see a bearded hatless man in his mid 30s dressed in a brick red man jams with a green chest rig full of ammo running toward the truck and firing an AK out us from the hip hold on homie rod yelled he hit the accelerator the truck hit the man squarely in the chest there was a bump and then another bump under the

tires holy shit rot rod yelled I just ran over a guy back up and do it again I'd been shot in the elbow a bleeder that did no real damage the bone was fine in a fight adrenaline deadens the pain I did a little rapping and got back to shooting the more fucked up things got the more rod and I started laughing He was staring away from RPG streaming at us and laughing and I was shooting the big gun and laughing definitely crazy but your emotions have to go somewhere The enemy fire slackened on us as the Kiwa's darted around They were like a steel umbrella over us a few minutes later pale horse came back on my net 3-3 were Winchester will be back in 15 mics Winchester meant they expended all their amher

They were too light to carry much and they'd been shooting at targets wherever they looked the firing picked up We were again the pinata I climbed down from the turret and talked to talk to Rod and Hafez We had started with six ammo cans. We were now down to one. I had fired more than 2,000 rounds Guys we need a new gun. I said it was three steps forward two steps back as we turned I saw an Ascar Freit crawling feebly toward the road. We stopped and I hopped out a Pk am machine gun was tilling the ground around around So I dodged back and forth until I reached him one Kiowa out of ammo hovered above me and distracted the enemy ignoring the RPG shells Exploding in the air I turned the ascar onto his back hit by three rounds in his upper chest and neck he was gurgling and drowning in his own blood

I rolled him on to his side and he died before I could pick him up Yeah, like you can see I kind of circle things that I'm gonna read yeah and I just was like circling giant chunks so people can understand what I mean I know that people aren't going to understand really the the kind of chronological evolution and maybe the mechanics of what was happening but I want people at least to understand until they read this book themselves the freaking situation that you were in which was beyond mayhem yeah you know you talk about training like to the worst case scenario I always had done the same thing and this was worse than any worst case scenario that I could have ever, ever dreamed up of, of ever being in. It was the worst of any situation.

I could have never sit here and you said, give me the worst thing you could just come up with and I could have never done it. I could have never, I could have never done it of just, I mean, you just, I mean, it's just like, I mean, I just felt like everybody was dying. Like, I mean it was just I mean there were like literally there were bodies everywhere I mean you couldn't turn around and look and there not be a body somewhere

and you just pretty much figured you were going to be joining them soon enough no I did I mean there was no doubt there was no doubt in my mind I wasn't making it out of there and you know I walked in that day and this just shows you how ignorant I was like when you talk about your buddy who was kind of like puffed the chest up right that was me i literally i'm i'm going to tell you i'm going to just tell you how ignorant i was i walked in that day and i i i there was

not a situation that i was ever going to see that i couldn't get us out of there wasn't one there wasn't one and it was like you know it was like god showing me just how small it was you know you got take. I mean, these these Afghan soldiers, I mean, they were my buddies. You know, and part of the problem, what was... How long into deployment was this? Supposed to been nine months. And how when did this happen? When did this happen? We got there in July, August, September. Yeah, so this is like two or three months into deployment. Yeah, and part of the problem was we'd just done the NATO transition and they were using weapons systems that they weren't used to. That shoot a smaller round. Yeah. Yeah.

lot but they weren't used to these weapons they weren't even used to emfor's I mean and M4s are so much more fickle M16s M16s yeah M16s are well even more so than an M4 M16s are so much more fickle than an AK they must have been cursing them damn it M16s oh they were I mean they were oh yeah I mean they you know that they would have something go wrong and they would just drop the magazine I mean I mean they would just yeah so There was so, like, I'm telling you, if you say everything, like we had just, so we just hit Ramadan, so none of them were drinking water, none of them were eating. We had just, I mean, you look at every factor to this.

It was the perfect storm. We had just transitioned. This is the first mission, first or second mission that we had ever went on with all NATO weapons. I mean, you look at all these factors, and it was, it was perfect. Had you ever worked with the QRF before? Have you done enough with them? Not that one. I was used to the ones

up near where we were at. But you hadn't done no interoperability with those guys before. No, and they got shut down so after the talk learned that it was Marines,

they got shut down all support stopped. All support stopped. Sometimes I got nothing to say and that's one of them. I can't even comprehend that. Yeah. Back to the book.

We turned left out of the wash onto the narrow track, back to the casualty collection point i looked around for major williams he was sitting off to one side wounded and in shock there were four or five vehicles and at least 20 ascar's milling around these were our afghans we'd come down from monte together i glanced hopefully from the group from group to group hafez was asking if they'd seen lieutenant johnson they say lieutenant's back in ganjigal hafah said the team didn't make it out shit somewhere farther up the wash my team was fighting to stay alive I'd promised to get them and Rod and I had the only gun truck willing to and able to go in

I climbed down from the turt and ran over to the ascar he'd taken a bullet in the thigh and he was slowly bleeding out I kept a stack of tourniquets in my med pack and knew how to apply them I wrapped the tourniquet around his thigh in my frustration I twisted it extra tight and he screamed hafaz tell him to shut up I said herding is better than dying if you're a grunt you'll come face-to-face with horrendous gore you have to to steal yourself to seeing mangled bodies and smelling blood. Doctors and nurses cope with screaming and suffering every day. I had dressed out dozens of deer.

You learned to disassociate from the task when you're pulling out warm guts or cutting off slabs of dripping meat with the blood sticking to your hands. You went through something like 15 tourniquets? Yeah, at least. Quite a few vials of morphine. A couple needle decompressions. MPAs. Quite a few NPAs, nasals.

The Kiwaias had rearmed and come back on station, directing us toward another wounded. Like it or not, we had been pressed into ambulance business. The Kiowa commanded by chief warrant officer Yasserian Salano. A good name for a guy in a crazy war had been a marine grunt before becoming an army pilot. His bird was easy to talk to, and he directed me where to go, sometimes hovering so low. I could just about reach up and touch his skids. He was covering my rear area when I got out of the truck. The pilots were fearless.

Knowing my team was lost, they were running search patterns 20 feet off the ground so they could identify each body. Damn. Yeah, I mean, and he did that, like, you know, they were, so his commander, he was having problems with his commander. And the guy who was leading those birds, you know, because they fly in two birds. And so the, but when I told him that it was Marines missing,

like he dropped down and covered me the whole time you ever meet him yeah yeah yeah he's incredible i just seen him um i seen him like around thanksgiving yeah he he is an incredible human being just so everyone knows like just because you're in a helicopter does not make you safe at all especially a kaiwa like maybe you're a little bit safer in apache because you've got some armor i don't know how much how much armors in akawa is zero right they look like little and i don't know how much many his bird was shot to shit no kidding yeah yeah yeah it was shot to pieces i climbed up a terrace wall and followed the contours of the field around a corner to find a body lying face down on the man's hands were green gloves with the fingers cut i knew before i even rolled him over that it was dod ali my closest

afghan friend he was due to take leave in a few weeks he had left on brad terms with his mother who was sure he would be killed finally after two years She had relented and invited him back to the farm for a visit. He'd been hit in the face. When I looked at his dull eyes, I lost my concentration and knelt there for a moment, oblivious. He was a little guy too small for his body armor. He and I had rigged up two tourniquets to hold the body armor in place close to his chest. I knelt down to untie the turniquets.

I needed them for other guys, and I needed to get the heavy armor off him. so I could carry him to the truck. I felt a tap as something hit my left shoulder. It didn't register at first. It was like I had been hit with a light stone. I glanced up to see a tough-looking Afghan with a long black beard glaring down at me. He was wearing a dirty gray man dress,

a flak jacket, and an Afghan army helmet. He was pointing an AK at my head, gesturing for me to stand up. In broken English, he was telling me to drop my rifle. Come, he said, waving the barrel of his AK in my face. I couldn't believe that I'd screwed up so badly. All I could think of was that my head would be sought off and held up on TV.

No way. I'd die right where I was right now. I had been dead for a few hours anyways. The borrowed time was up, that's all. My rifle was resting on my left thigh pointing in his direction. The stubby grenade launcher was attached to the... underside of the barrel I raised one arm like I was going to surrender and pulled the trigger of the launcher with my free thumb the 40 millimeter grenade shot forward two feet to his armored vest it didn't explode instead it knocked him back stunned him with the with the breath slammed out of him he staggered back and fell on his side for a few seconds I thought the blow had killed him no such luck I pushed myself erect as I pushed myself erect he drew in a big breath and stirred I kicked at his face

losing my balance and falling on top of him we were both on the ground wrestling Afghan tribesmen have legs like steel from climbing mountains all day all their lives so I had to keep his legs off me I pinned his elbows and blocked his reach for his AK I was pushing my helmeted head into his chest so he couldn't gouge at my eyes any second I figured that grenade would explode and both of us could stop worrying about any of this I pawed the ground with my right hand and found a rock the size of a baseball I clutched it and swung by blindly up at his face the blow stunned him before he could recover I pushed off of his chest

lifted the rock high in my right fist and smashed it down like a hammer breaking his front teeth he looked me in the eyes the fight knocked out of him his head not moving we both knew it was over I drew back my arm and drove the stone down crushing his left cheekbone he went limp I pushed up on my knees and I hit him with more force the blow caved in the left side of his forehead I smashed his face again and again driven by pure animal rage that's close combat obviously when you're killing another human being with a rock yeah yeah it's real um you know i just i just remember his face you know and uh i mean look i let me just state this up front first off i feel no remorse at

all. But I think it was at that point to where it humanized it. Does that make sense? Like, it humanized the fact of taking another person's life. Like, I would remember the look in his eyes when he knew he was going to die. And at that point, like, you know, obviously I didn't think of it then. But, you know, when I still see that face, I still think about, you know, he was a father. There was somebody at home that wanted him to come home, just as bad as somebody. wanted me to come home. You know, whether you agree with his beliefs or not, people don't agree with their beliefs, you know,

but at the end of the day, he believed in his beliefs just as much as I did. We're both human beings. We're both fighting for a cause that neither one of us can see that we both just believe in. And it had to be one of us. And my guess is, and you can, maybe I'm wrong, but my guess is the reason he didn't just straight kill you,

you is because he had you, had the drop on you. And having you as a trophy in an orange jumpsuit would have been much more impactful for him and their cause. Yeah, I mean, he could have easily, it would have took him no time to get me across the border. We were right on the border. That's what he would have done. He would have took me across the board. He'd sold me. And he would have been a hero. He'd probably been promoted in whatever network he was in. I mean, he would have been the man. And I was worth a lot more to him alive than I was dead. But then on the backside, I mean, I've questioned it so many times. Like, you know, was it that or was it maybe he was trying to bluff me, he didn't have bullets.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Like, you know, there's so many times in this whole battle that I just wonder, like, why? Why not me? You know, I mean, war, and I guess you could apply us to all life, but it becomes very clear at war. It's like inches, millimeters, you know, what, what, sure, you could say you got missed by, by a round, by a foot, a couple inches. But when you take that back to a person's weapon, you got missed by a millimeter, a meter of aim. That's what it is.

You could have got, you could have got missed by a gust of wind. Literally. You could have, you could have been missed by the wind picking up. So while all that's going on, back to the book, Highlander was the radio call sign for Captain Swenson. He was trying to gather reinforcements. He pulled aside the lieutenant in charge of the quick reaction platoon, mount up Swenson's and told him, you're no help back here. We need your firepower.

I can't, lieutenant said. The talk says we're to cover the vehicles. Swenson grabbed the lieutenant's 50-watt radio and called the Joyce. The talk told the platoon to move into the valley. Swenson, Fabio, Rod, and Hafez then hopped into an undamaged Humvee to drive back in. But the platoon did not follow. Instead, the platoon leader again called back to Joyce

and somehow received permission to remain in the rear out of the fight. Yeah, it was frustrating. It was frustrating. It was frustrating that, you know, and I met that guy a few years ago. We ran into, we were in the same meeting. It was frustrating. Every bit of it was frustrating.

It was so, I mean, every single bit of it was unnecessary and frustrating. I started the day with 14 or 16 tourniquets. I used them all. I put four on one guy who'd lost his left arm and his left leg below the knee. He survived. One Ascar shot in the next sounded like he was slurping through a straw. There was nothing I could do except listen to him, strangled to death. At 1.2 F-15's roared low through the valley, opening their afterburners to create a hell of a lion's roar.

The pilots wouldn't drop any bombs. Yeah, I mean, you know, usually, but at this point, you know, the only show of force ever works is, I mean, they had so much momentum at this time. I mean, it was like momentum, right? So it started out as fighters, like as fighters that came across the border. And then what it turned into was when they seen that we weren't getting the support and when they seen that we weren't, they seen that we, We weren't getting control of the situation and fires weren't coming. They escalated and they gained momentum. Well, everybody else joined in.

You take, so you had the guys that showed up to fight, and then you have the opportunist of the villagers that turn into fighters instantly because they have the upper hand. And so they start gaining momentum of more people fighting you every single minute. Because all they got to do is pick up the gun off the dead person. Literally, I mean, there were literally women running through the village with like these bowls. and you know you look at him you know you well you know you know you know you know you know she's just a woman with a bowl running rocket comes in she drops a bowl and it's

full of grenades and ammunition the women were running up and re-supplying all these guys the kaias kaiwas were still supporting you back to the book inside the villages the army pilots ran astonishing risks to find my team a kaiwa would swoop down toward the compound flare back at rooftop level and putter down the alleyways at 20 miles an hour, allowing the pilots to peer into every backyard and into every window. As the day grew hotter, we gradually cleared the valley of casualties. Over 30 wounded or dead were evacuated.

We watched a Solano, the lead pilot, brought his Kiowa down to a few feet above a trench and hovered there. Highlander, we spotted five bodies. I'd heard all I needed. I jumped out the door and sprinted across the field to, the right opening some distance before Swenson yelled at me I ignored him knowing he'd be right behind me a P.m shifted me shifted to me when I was halfway across the terrace I hopped over a terrace wall and fell into a deep well-constructed trench I landed next to Gunny Johnson and my heart stopped he was lying on his back with his arms

outspread his eyes open but never to see anything again on this earth A few feet further on, I came across the body of an Afghran interpreter who had traveled with our team. I felt sick to my stomach. I knew what I would see next. Lieutenant Johnson lay on his back with his eyes closed. He looked peaceful despite the entry wounds in his right shoulder. Doc Layton lay on top of him with medical supplies scattered around. I rolled him over.

Doc had taken a three-round burst in the right cheek. Off to the right, Staff Sergeant Kennefic was lying face down his GPS with a busted screen clenched in his left hand. His mouth was open and full of dirt. I think he was yelling out his grid location, the numbers I heard over the radio four hours earlier when he was shot in the back of his head. The team was wiped out. Their bodies were stiff and cold. Most of their gear was gone, weapons, helmets, radios. The 240 machine gun was missing, but Lieutenant Johnson's pack was filled with link ammo.

No one had fired the gun I was supposed to be carrying. I had never believed it would end like this. My mind refused to accept what I was seeing. Hour after hour, I'd imagined them hold up inside a stone house shielded from RPG blasts, exchanging gunfire with a douchemen who knew better than to rush them. Swenson was standing above the trench We were taking random incoming And he was watching for movement among the houses He talked into his radio for a few seconds

And bent down and picked up some of the team's gear He didn't say a word He left me alone with them I hoisted the staff sergeant over my right shoulder He was heavy and I fell once He landed on top of me I got up and carried him to an Afghan truck Carefully tucking him into the open bed

I stood there for a minute, suddenly beat, as I turned away from the truck. Hafez put his hand on my shoulder. The Ascars say you carried out there dead. Now they want to help you. Five or six of us returned to the trench while the damn PKM kept shooting at us. I carried Gunny Johnson back. The Ascars took Lieutenant Johnson and Doc Layton. Swenson lugged back the rest of the equipment.

after six hours it was over and I felt empty as a balloon without air hafez took me aside they've gone to a better place he said don't cry the Ascars will take it as weakness no way I was going to cry but at that moment I didn't feel like killing anyone either I wasn't angry or bitter just deflated and exhausted as though I'd run a marathon and couldn't remember why I wanted to do it I was too damn tired to stand still taking fire we left the valley in a convoy of about four trucks rod stopped near the casualty collection point where we talked with Captain Kaplan and Captain and Corporal Norman who had walked down from their observation posts staff sergeants Valdez and Miller radio that they were coming down from their perch to everyone was accounted for we had shuttled in and out of

the valley five six or seven times that morning depending on which one of us you asked it was all a fog no senior American officer or pursuit force had come forward from Camp Joyce captain Swenson said he would try to wrap things up half as and I climbed into the back of an Afghan truck carrying my dead brothers I held staff sergeant Kenefic with my left hand and Lieutenant Johnson rested on my right arm as we bounced down the track we passed villagers returning to Gondagal Some started to laugh pointing at my dead friends I reached for my rifle

Don't half as said holding my arm Not worth it When we arrived back at Camp Joyce I walked into the battalion aid station to get body bags Major Williams rushed up and clutched at my body armor Tell me they're not all dead not all of them They're all dead I said removing his hands I walked outside where my friend Sergeant Charles Bocus was waiting.

Bocus said, I'll give you a hand. We walked back to the bodies. Sergeant Major Jimmy Carbello. The top enlisted men at Joyce hastened up and put his hands firmly on my shoulders trying to steer me away. You don't have to do this devil dog. My guys will make sure it's done right. That wasn't how to end it. If I had died, I'd want Lieutenant Johnson Staff Sergeant Kennaffects.

Staff Sergeant Kennefect to put me in the bag. I'll finish it, I said. Bokas and I carried the bodies next to the freezers. Take off their battle gear and dig through their pockets, marking items for shipment to their families. I take a Chevron from Staff Sergeant Kenefic and attach it to my dog tags. Funny, we had started out not liking each other a thousand years ago. We clean them up as best we can,

wiping the blood and dirt off their faces taking off their field gear straightening out their camouflage uniforms and placing each in a black body bag we marked the name at the head drape an american flag over each bag bow our heads in prayer and drive them out to the helipad gonga gonga was one of the deadliest small arms battles of the afghanistan war we lost five advisors in addition to to team Monty army sergeant first class Westbrook had died of his wounds eight Ascars were killed and 13 seriously wounded by rifle machine gun and RPG fire enemy losses to small arms were probably of a similar number there were no IEDs no bombs and very few artillery shells bullets caused most of the casualties Gondagal was a mountain fight from an earlier century and it's a fight from an earlier century. But,

but some things don't change. That's a fact. Yeah, it was, gosh, you know, I say it, and I don't think people understand it, but, you know, I might have not physically died that day, but I died right there next to them.

I mean, you talk about, you know, I mean, it's one thing to lose one person, but everybody, I mean, it's, I mean, I mean, that's the worst case scenario. You're living it. You know, I mean, you're literally, you don't even have anybody from your own team to put your dead on the bird, you know. And, you know, how old are you at this point? 21.

21 years old. 21, 21. You know, and I don't know if it talks about it in the book, you know. After I did that with my teammates, I went straight from there and I went to the Afghan side. And I did it with all their guys too. And usually what they do with their guys is they just call the families and they got so many days to come get them. And I wasn't allowing that. I went back and I took body bags up there and we gave them the exact same respect that we gave my guys.

And we put them in the freezers until their families came and got them. and you know I didn't go I didn't go start worrying about my stuff until we had taken care of all the all the guys you know and it's just it was it was a long day there's a long day and I mean you do you're just like okay you still have a job to do yeah so I don't know if it talks about it in there but that you know They tried to put me on the helicopter with them to go back to Boggham and then wanted me to fly home to do the ramp ceremonies and wanted me to fly home with them. I actually put them on there and I told them I would be right back

and I knew those birds had to take off because the PJs weren't going to sit on the flight line very long. And I just made sure that I knew that they took off before I got around anybody else because, I mean, they were dead. I mean, I still had guys that still needed me. and they didn't need me anymore. And so I, you know, I just, you know, I knew my Afghan soldiers needed me. They needed to see that they weren't alone. They needed to see that we're in this together, you know, and that was what, that was what mattered to me, what the guys I still had left.

How did the Afghan, your Afghan soldiers respond to this whole situation? You know, sometimes in Iraq, there'd be a, a mass casualty like this and we'd lose a whole there was actually in romadi we lost a whole battalion they all they all left yeah they quit yeah what were your guys did how did it affect them i mean they stuck it out you know they stuck it out um they did i mean i'm telling you they they are some of the most incredible human beings ever seen you know we come in and deploy we're there for a certain amount of time they live it forever and uh they responded i mean they you know they got their shit together um and i mean we were back in the fight three days later

you know and they don't get they don't get they don't get the response they don't get to support we do you know they don't get i mean they don't get anything we get you know what i mean and and it's just you know but we but we stuck together you know they helped me they helped me get through it um and i hope i helped them but i think the most incredible thing was it was at that point that that they brought me into their I was accepted as one of them you were one of them yeah and that was probably the most rewarding piece of it to me you know was that I had finally proven myself to them that that I was one of them and deployment wasn't over yet and you know there was more fighting to be done going back to the book army an army

A convoy had been ambushed north of Monty. Lieutenant Kern, Captain Bryant, the company commander were on their way to assist. I looked at Colonel U, who nodded an agreement. Minutes later, you, Bacchus, Staff Sergeant Richards, and some of the colonels guys that came with him, a dozen Ascars, and I were headed out the gate. And basically what you run into is there's a huge kind of, what did somebody hit an IED? Is that what had happened? No, they ambushed one. beside this and what they done, they blew the jingo trucks up and blocked the road so that,

you know, they intertwined those jingo trucks in between the U.S. convoy, and it's so stupid. And so the jingo truck is blown up, and it's blocking the road. So guess what happens the rest of them? They're all sitting. And you can't go around it because it's about a 250-foot drop-off into the Kuhnard River on the side. So they're stuck on the side of this, and I've been listening to it on the radio for a long time. And I knew they were going to get slaughtered. I knew that you weren't just going to sit there and they had buttoned up. So that's what you were talking about earlier. You buttoned up and you wait. Well, now they're going to maneuver on you. And that's what they were doing. And that's what they were doing. So the guys in

the jingo trucks had jumped out. And I kept asking over the radio, you know, because I could monitor. And I kept asking over the radio. And I could see the smoke from where I was at. And I kept asking over the radio as a clip platoon. And I kept a combat logistics platoon. And I kept asking over the radio how many rounds have you fired because I was afraid they were going to get low on ammo zero so that's when you rolled out you get out there and this is three days after gangagal km's and AKs were hammering down on this mess with little return fire would be crazy to drive into that tangle of vehicles is it bocus or boccus focus yeah bogus was on the mark 19 on our truck he couldn't shoot because of the angles of fire richard stayed in the driver's seat while i advanced on foot

by bounds into the wreckage. Our Ascars ran forward with us, but their light M16s didn't impress the Taliban machine gun crew. I was quickly pinned behind a disabled truck. Looking up, I could see the P-Cam was shooting from a thick stone house 200 meters up slope. I exited to have a targets, I excited to have a target so close. I fired about five shells from my grenade launcher before my common sense kicked in. What am I doing? I thought I'm outmatched by a machine gun, but there's an army Humvee sitting next to me with no one in the 50 Cal turret you run over there man your 50 Cal I yelled We're logistics came the muffled reply we don't fight some supply guys can't wait to get into the action But not this gang I wasn't worried though wild man Kerr would soon have air on station

Bodies were scattered all over the road all civilians lying face down next to me alongside the army truck was a skinny teenager in a t-shirt Bleeding from shrapnel his chest in his left arm he was a pathetic sight sprawled on his back in his filthy brown shorts an orange tip needle protruding from above his heart and a plastic stopper shoved above his left nostril he didn't weigh as much as I ate in a day his hands and feet were uglier than the dirt from his efforts to crawl out of the line of fire he wasn't old enough to grow a beard but he had a full shock of black hair not a bad looking kid once he was cleaned up at the aid station and had some ice cream he'd be okay I felt good in fact I was pumped I'd applied dozens of turnicits but this

the first time I had smelt death hiss out and that's because you needled him down and I didn't cover that part you had a sucking chest wound and you you gave him a decompression I had saved a human being a poor scrawny kid Eking out a living by driving a banged up truck past known ambush sites What do he even would he eventually join the Taliban and betray an American convoy I had no idea Sure some of the villagers at Gondagal had been real pricks, but why should I hold it against this kid? I ran Back down the road hoisting up another wounded truck driver and carried him back then I stopped to check on the skinny kid I wanted to pat him on the shoulder to make myself feel good for my supposedly wonderful deed Only he was dead

He had bled to death from the wound to his left arm the crew in the army truck had let him bleed out not five feet away because he was an Afghan and they were afraid Damn it the Afghan drivers were all huddered together in a ditch by the river the ambush had been sprung about about 90 minutes earlier by now they had pissed themselves dry and had nowhere to go I bang my rifle on I bang my rifle butt on an army truck yelling to the soldiers to open up at least give me some water for those poor bastards I shouted a sheepish medic got out of the truck with several bottles of water and his med pack and ran over the ditch I knelt there looking at the bloodstained stains from the kid right beside the truck door I banged on the steel door again it opened to crack Fuck you, I said to the captain inside.

As the traffic jam was sorted out, Colonel U and I walked back to our Humvee. The dead kid lay on the hood, and rather than ride to base with a corpse between us, we wedge the body in the trunk. Sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you want to cry. Before dropping a shell down a mortar tube, the gunner levels the bubbles on his sight. If he loses the bubbles, then the tube is pointed at a crazy angle. after gonjigal I was losing the bubble

so investigations take place there's actually you know accusations and excuses and one of the terms that that was in there that was it was being said that there was

poor battle management yeah and you're talking to a psychologist on site at this time and you know that's some of the support you were talking about that we might have that an Afghan kid in the Afghan army might not have and it was a feat was it a female yeah captain Katie cop and she was

making some assessments yeah back to the book it's true I didn't feel connected with others the Ascar's were smoking hash jabbering on their cell phones and wandering around and flip-flops the American soldiers were playing video games stuffing themselves at dinner and laughing too loudly at nothing we weren't fighting a war we were holding a few acres of dirt while the war swirled all around outside our barbed wire There were douchemen in every valley drink tea with the villagers pay forty dollars for a chicken We were in Kumar to fight. Let's get it on That was my attitude the psychologist insisted that I go back to the states for treatment

No thanks as a captain. She had the rank to make a recommendation stick, but she wanted my agreement So she challenged me we would play a game of ping pong if I won I could stay I lost by one point she was very good and she really was worried about me and cared about me i knew that it was my time to go home a ping pong game was she like a legit ping pong player no i thought i had her um you know it was only you know it was either you know i i um it was probably best i went home I would say if it wasn't If I didn't go home I

I would have never came home You know I was just getting well and tighter And tighter I mean I was You couldn't tell me You couldn't tell me I was not I wasn't

I wasn't command like you couldn't You couldn't tell me what to do You were out of control I was I was out of control. Yeah. I mean, you know, I wasn't doing anything, anything, nothing, you know, immorally unethical, right? Like, nothing I was doing my job.

But as far as, like, commanding me, you couldn't. You were going to do what you were going to do. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was, you know, I was at the point to where I had no, I had no, I didn't trust my command. I didn't trust anybody. I didn't trust anybody. I mean, I was a one, you know, not a one man. I was a three-man operation, right?

I mean, I was a one-man, I was a one-man record crew, right? Like, I was, I mean, I was going to do, you weren't going to tell me anything. I mean, there was, it was pretty bad. I mean, I was fighting, you know, fist fighting. How much longer was it that you actually lost the ping-pong match and got sent home? I lost it right a couple days before Thanksgiving. Okay. So it was like you were there for another, what's Thanksgiving?

No, end of November. And we fought our ass off. That whole time. The whole time. It was, it was, we fought her asses off almost every single day and sometimes three and four times a day. Well, that momentum that you talked about in the valley. They built it.

It keeps coming, right? It keeps coming because right after that, they overrun Keating. Right after, I mean, it's all that, all of it, you know, they just built so much momentum. And they were hammering us. I mean, hammer us every day. And, you know, it was pretty bad. So you get sent home. Here we go back to the book.

When I got home in December, I felt like I landed on the moon. Everyone around me was excited about football, Christmas, and other normal things. I was looking at the clapboard houses and the cars thinking, man, that's so flimsy. They wouldn't give cover worth shit in a firefight. It was an exposed feeling. And where were my machine guns? I found my old pistol and kept.

around like a rabbit's foot but I miss my two 40s and my 50 cows something awful it seems weird I'm sure but I really just wasn't buying that there wasn't some enemy about to come over the green hills and I felt so unprepared I wouldn't be able any good to protect anybody I was soon sent off to Fort Thomas Kentucky for PTSD therapy maybe that would settle me down and let me get some sleep and stop feeling so depressed and angry at every little thing Some guys really go nuts when they come back and I wasn't in danger of that but I could feel the kind of crazy things that maybe got the better of them You're over there long enough and under such constant battle stress that it resets all your settings the way

Way into the red and they're very hard to set back the main thing knowing was that I didn't get my friends out as I had promised I'd spend a good part of my 21 years being pretty critical of other people who who failed at their responsibilities. And now it was all coming back on me in a big dump truck. Every day the psychologist urged us to step back and identify why we were experiencing negative emotions. In other words, take a minute to really be conscious

of the emotion instead of just letting it seep in. Don't let your mind stay in neutral. Watch your thoughts. And by the way, I'm hitting this stuff pretty hard because a lot of people that listen to this podcast are thinking these things right here. I think that's an important part don't let your mind stay in neutral watch your thoughts Refusing to get out of bed or go to work or smile at others are all decisions

Find the reasons those decisions and turn negative feelings into positive actions It's not enough to identify why you're feeling bad it's about having the character to do something positive to take up that space Don't wallow in your misery which is just selfish childish self-absorption It was all good stuff all I ever need is a good operating manual. So are you getting some good instructions? Yeah. No, it was, you know, I can't say that the PTSD center helped me,

but what it did is it educated me. It educated me on why I was feeling the way I was and what it was. And then, therefore, that helped me deal with it, right? It kind of like, you know, you know, kind of like how you know a diet that works for you, you know like you can look in the mirror or how you feel after you eat it right yeah it's kind of the same thing like it educates you on why your body's doing this or why you're having this reaction you know and and that it's normal and it's just you know and this is why it's doing it and this is how you help counter it right and that was kind of that was kind of what it did for me it didn't

I don't think it really it didn't it didn't fix anything it just educated me on what the problem was. So you could start to identify the problem. Yeah, so I could identify the problem. I could identify why I was feeling this way and then, you know, I could make decisions based of how I could. Was it, when you look at the root of that problem? Yeah. Was it that feeling of like, hey, the promise that you made was I'll get you guys out. No, I mean, no, I mean, the facts of the facts are like here's, I get so frustrated with people who want to like, like, I'm a factual guy. Like, you know, I mean, I, I'm, everything to me is black and white and, and I'm, and I'm, I'm a back base.

Like, I went in that day to go get my teammates out. I failed. I failed. There's no, you can't jump around it. You can't ignore the facts of what happened. I failed. I failed miserably. And so, you know, if you tell you, if I tell myself I didn't fail, I lie in lying to myself.

So for me, you know, I failed. I was tested and I failed and now I have to figure out what to do with that and that's part of it you know and that and that's where I get so upset about like you know the counselors or whatever right is no well you didn't fail no no no like as soon as they say that to me

I'm done I'm done because no that's I'm not going to lie to myself I fail and now I need to deal with it I need to deal with it you know I can't lie and that's and I mean look I mean it's I always say the equivalent to try to make people understand like how I feel about it in the situation is

it would be like you inside of a house and your family's there and the house catches on fire and you end up getting out thinking that maybe they're all out and you can't get back in there and they all burn to death that's kind of the equivalent of it and you know

so I just have to deal with it and you know I deal with it the best I can every day I learn from it I try to turn it into something good but at the end of the day

I still failed and you know that's that's the way it goes after my two months at the clinic my enlistment term

was in fact coming to an end it didn't take a genius to see it, I'd be be end up behind a desk, so I chose not to reenlist. I love the core, so it hurt. Before joining the core, I had three concussions, mononucleosis, and an operation on my right knee. When I mustered out four years later, I'd added two operations on my right hand, a right rotator cuff operation, a fourth concussion from an RPG, a dislocated shoulder, and two herniated discs from clumsily lifting the dead and wounded. One vertebrae had given way in Gonjigal when

picked up an Ascar and slipped in the bloody mud under him I have no idea when the second vertebrae went out during the battle I had that nick in my arm from a bullet or shrapnel but that hadn't been anything I was in deep a decent shape for construction work I figured the PTSD clinic I returned to Kentucky it was the winner of 2010 and I warm myself up by slipping back into hard drinking each night I hadn't seen an active duty grunt in months Fabio and Rodriguez Chavez were due to to receive the Navy Navy crosses at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, but I couldn't get enough time off to fly back east.

Were you working construction at this point? And your boys are getting Navy crosses. You can't get time off from work. Swenson and I had been recommended for the Medal of Honor. We knew, though, that the award was usually downgraded upon review. When I drank, which was too much, I'd laugh at the absurdity. I had screwed up big time. My achievement was losing my brothers the Marine Corps would come to its senses and I'd never hear another word from another devil dog

I had no idea what was in front of me and I didn't care I couldn't take a walk Turn on the TV or read a book to distract my mind the emptiness of my life was the dark all around me with nothing to see in any direction Four years ago I'd left the farm for an adventure in a new beginning the Corps had shaped me and and I had arrived an out of Afghanistan confident I'd do well in combat sure enough up at Monty I had emerged as the young gun every day brought fun danger against the back drop of spectacular mountains it was fun stuff shooting thousands of rounds not losing many people and seeing the damage you inflicted there was no weapon I couldn't handle and my team trusted me to get

them out of any hot spot my cockiness put us in but when it counted most I wasn't with them they weren't trained to do my job gunny Johnson didn't spend every day behind a 240 staff sergeant Kennefic wasn't comfortable with weapons or ankles of fire Doc Layton wasn't a fighter and Lieutenant Johnson didn't adjust fire missions we aren't worried we know you'll get us out if anything goes badmire well I didn't lieutenant I was a load of worthless shit not there when you needed me around three in the morning I pulled my truck into the driveway of a shop owned by my high school friend Derek Yates and cut the engine. I turned on the cab

light and fished out my cell phone. It wasn't right to burden my dad, but I wanted to connect one last time with someone. I pecked out a text message to my friends, Ann and Toby. They had known me since I was a toddler, but they didn't know me that well, did they? Here I was back where I had started with an aluminum bracelet with two days. names on each wrist that's what I had done with my life lost four brothers I I reached into the glove compartment where I kept my Glock I always kept a full magazine with a round chambered in the pistol block doesn't have a safety you pull the trigger and the weapon fires and squeeze the trigger in the chamber as you can imagine I sat there quite sobered up and in double shock

suicide is terminal self-revolution I was mixed up but I knew my team would be disappointed in me staff sergeant Kennefect would give me hell which is where I would be bad ending that was not going to happen but who had unloaded my pistol right on the spot I knew who had done it have I ever talked to that person about it no I put away the pistol and drove home. That night, I experienced no sudden change of direction in my life. I didn't know where I was headed in the future, but I knew quitting wasn't right.

Not that night, not ever. No, I had never told anybody about that night until it was published in the book. and I just you know I just felt like it was important to the story because I didn't want people to read the story and then just think that it was all okay when I came home I didn't want to give them that perspective and there's so many guys out there that write these books

of the crazy shit that they do but they never talk about what what that crazy shit does to them yeah they never talk about that And so what happens is, is people read that, and they're like, holy shit, that's crazy. I could never do that because I deal with problems. And it's like, yeah, we all do. And, you know, I had to put it in to, I wanted people to know that I'm just a human.

I'm no different than them. And I felt like that I couldn't put in the, if you want to call it, good stuff and not put in the bad stuff. It's I'm sure there's some psychologist that could figure something out about this But you got to the point right And you made the decision clearly Yeah

And you came out the other side By the grace of God And whoever knew you well enough to figure out That they needed to make sure you didn't have a loaded gun But that's a message for anybody That feels like they're in the same situation You felt like you were in which is that this not gonna get any better is like okay Come out the other side man come out the other side

And it was like I mean like you said it's not a sudden change in direction But you but you knew That you couldn't quit I always like to say that you know Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere and sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find yourself and, you know, I mean, I had no idea where my life was going. I made a deal with myself, you know. I had sat there and I had said, if I'm going to keep living this life this way, rack it back and get over with. But I said, if I ever put the car and drive, I'll never look back.

And I sit there, I'm not going to lie to you, I'd probably sit there for five, ten minutes. and I had done it at my buddy's shop because I knew he'd be there at 8 o'clock in the morning and he could just find me. And I put in drive and I just never look back, you know. You know, and it's, I'm lucky, I'm fortunate that the gun didn't go off, right? But, you know, I think that, you know,

you always got to hit that rock bottom, you know. I think that And that was for me That was it That was the rock bottom And it you know It changed it And

I mean again I just want to stress this as much as I can Because believe me I hear from people Especially from veterans That are walking this line man They're walking this line And if you're walking that line

Hold it Listen It's not worth it. I mean, it's not like, you know, I had to change, honestly, I had to change the way that I looked at life. The only problem there was was me. You know, instead of just facing it and saying, hey, look, I want to fix this problem. I was blaming everybody else for my problems. And what I had to do was, I had to say, you know, okay, if, you know, if the things that I seen were so bad, I've seen what freedom cost firsthand. That's what's got me there. So if anything, I have more reason than anybody

else on the face this planet to go out and make the most of my life because I've seen it firsthand of what it costs. So instead of walking around and feeling, you know, I'm not feeling sorry for my teammates because they're in a better place. They don't feel anymore. I'm really just feeling sorry for myself. And then by doing that, I'm wasting the sacrifices that they make. I'm wasting the sacrifices that they made on my behalf. And I had to change the way I looked at it. Instead of using it as my excuse, I had to use it as my fuel.

And that's a choice. That is a conscious choice. You wake up every day and you decide how you look at the situation. You decide what you do with it. You decide whether you use it as your excuse to hold you back or you use it as your easy valve of hiding who you are

or you use it as your fuel to go out and be the best that you can be. You decide that nobody does. Nobody else does. You do every day. And it is a conscious choice. I mean, I still deal with it, but I still make the choice. That's awesome. That's awesome.

And anybody that's listening, like I said, anybody that's listening that's walking that line, there you go. Make the right choice. Make the right choice. Make the right choice. Make the right choice. And you know what the right choice is. Yeah, and I mean, you're talking about how much, and I feel this too, like every day. How much am I letting down my friends that didn't come home if I'm not doing everything I can to take advantage of the gift they gave me to be sitting here right now?

Right. I mean, any day that I don't want to go on and push on for myself, I can look down and I'll bet you anything. I got four reasons right here that would switch me one day. They would switch me my worst day to have one more day. You know, and I just, you know, I'm not okay with letting their sacrifices be wasted. I'm not okay with watching anybody else waste them, so why would I be okay with letting myself waste them? Another thing I want to say is, like, walking that line, I want to say this and get it out there. It's normal.

It's normal. It doesn't mean you. you're weak. It doesn't, I want to get that, that stigma out there. You know, I want to get that off the books is, it's, it is a normal, like, I don't understand why, why it's okay in our society or in, in the military. A guy breaks his leg. Okay. Do you go make him run tomorrow? He puts a cast on it. He, he, he rehabs it. It's the same thing with the mind. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. You go in and you watch. The people you have to worry about are the ones that go watch their close friends and they watch human beings and they watch this evil and people die

and suffer and don't have a reaction. Those are the ones you have to worry about. It is a normal reaction to a not normal situation and it's okay. It's okay. It is 100.000. It is 100.000. It is 100. 10% okay absolutely man absolutely as you we mentioned quickly you know there was some buzz possibly about about you getting the Medal of Honor and but you know how it goes like it was all I didn't believe it I never I never had any idea you know you hear talk about it Silver Star Medal of Honor Navy Cross whatever right I didn't care I didn't I didn't I I promised the last thing that I ever thought about was an award an award that's the last thing well it gets approved and going back to the book when the president hung that metal around my neck

I felt glum I couldn't smile and I said nothing I gave no remarks and avoided the press as a Marine you either bring your team home alive or you die trying my country was recognizing me for being a failure and for the worst day of my life the Marine Commandant General Jim Amos and General Joseph Dunford attended the ceremony throughout the years after Ganjigal the Marine Corps leadership has provided consistent support not just to me but to all who fought there the top Enlisted man in the Marine Corps sergeant major Mike Barrett twice came to our farm to meet my dad and granddad and to encourage me There's no such thing as a former Marine 50 years after they have left active duty Marines still sign emails to each other with SF Semper Fidelis always faithful Of course we have among us those who fail themselves their family and society

The fact remains though that the Corps expects every Marine to live by a set of core values in turn a The Corps keeps its side of the bargain. You could not ask anything more of an organization than that. The Medal of Honor given in the name of the Congress of the United States of America symbolizes the courage and determination of our entire country. And speaking of the country, you were in New York. I was in New York City at the Twin Tower site, Ground Zero, with Gunny Joshua Peterson, Someone I knew from my first days in the core.

We were greeted by hundreds of police, firemen, construction workers, Wall Street guys and suits, city officials, and the families of the fallen. Meyer, I can't believe this scene, Gunny Peterson said. Make sure your ribbons are squared away. We stood side by side. Two grunts and sharply ironed khakis waving like we had won an election. I thought of my sad, fumbling meetings with the family of Team Monty, the families of Team Monty, when I couldn't think of much to say. I was alive and their loved ones were not. Now here I was standing before a monument for 3,000 dead.

I saw some big iron workers and hard hats standing off to one side. When the ceremony ended, they sneaked me in onto a work elevator. Up we went to the top of the ride where we then climbed wooden ladders until we couldn't go any further And there weren't any guardrails I stood there looking out at the most beautiful country in the world trying to make sense of my feelings This was where it had all started so many good people lost the people had been working here and the people I had known who had not gone blindly into uniform They had reasoned why a Americans do that but they had gone ahead to do and to die an iron worker

Handed me a silver marker and I wrote on a girder for those who gave all for those who gave all and That wraps up the book and talking about wards and what you hear and what happens and all that and I wanted to say this as well as well as Well on the battlefield on that battlefield and on every battle there are acts of extreme Valor that no one will ever know about I'm talking about an infinite number no one's ever know about them and it's important to know this that our military men and women don't do what they do for medals or ribbons they do what they do because they love freedom because they love America because they love their comrades in arms and that That right there is why our country thrives in battle.

Not because of technological advances, not because of superior weaponry, not even the size of our military. It's because of the bond that is shared between warriors. That is our real strength. And Dakota, that's something that you represent in spades. I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. And sharing this incredible story,

and I know it's not only a story of you, but it's a story of all the men American and Afghan as well that rode into battle with you that day and showed once again what it is that makes America a place of of hope and of freedom

it's because of men it's because of individual men that in their heart and even in the face of death actually live actually live the ideals of this great nation not only in their words but in their actions

in the way that they live and in the way that they die they're incredible you know I mean you're exactly right like I mean there's so many stories that are I mean people have done so many stories of people doing such incredible stuff and

you know it's it's literally out of the love of another human being it's literally out of the love of another human being it's literally out of love of making the world a better place. That's really all we do. It's all we do.

I mean, we join. Nobody joins, okay, to go just shoot people or fight. They literally join to try to make the world around them a better place. Whether it's passing out aid, whether it's rendering aid to a civilian or to, you know, know a fellow American or whether it's taken out the bully that's inflicting fear in that place everything that we do is to try to make the world just a little bit better that's it you know as I was reading about when when you got back to your team you could see I mean just from the

way the guys were laid out you know staff sergeant was trying to get comms and trying to pass grids and Doc was working on the boss I mean everyone was trying to make things happen and who knows what those moments were like

you know but there's moments of there's there's heroism there that we're never going to know about no I mean I mean 100% I mean Doc Layton was rendering aid you know what stopped them was because Fazelle was with them what stopped them of getting to the road was Lieutenant Johnson got hit and Gunny Kinnifick

and Gunny Johnson were on either side providing security while Doc Layton worked on him and that was the Medivac we heard called in from Gunny Kinefic was trying to call that medevac in for Lieutenant Johnson. And, you know, but they weren't going to leave him behind. Even more, even more of not leaving him behind,

they weren't going to just throw him over his shoulder and get him out they were going to try to fix him i mean what do you say i mean what do you say i mean you know that right there i mean that right there's everything i mean you take that you take i mean there's so many actions i mean i've watched people do such incredible things such incredible things that just make what i do i mean And, nah, you know, no, it makes me look like I, you know, I've done nothing. I've seen it, you know, people are incredible. Well, again, man, I can't thank you enough for coming on. Oh, thank you.

On the podcast and hanging out and being out there and kicking ass and talking smack to people. I like that, too. Did I miss anything? Anything else? No. No, I mean, you... I think you covered it all. I think we might have covered it.

I think you got it. I think you covered it. You know, Echo? Yes. You got any questions for the man over there? No, usually I come up with some lighthearted question, but, man, I'm out of words, to be honest. We took that little break. Yeah.

And Echo's like, man. He's like, I just keep... He's like, I'm sitting there thinking to myself, this really happened, man. And I'm like, yeah, I told, I gave, I give echo heads up sometimes. You know, I say, hey, man, it's going to be a heavy one or whatever.

And I was like, told him this afternoon, I'm like, hey, man, it's going to be a heavy one, you know, standby. And, you know, we're downstairs when we were taking that break. And he's like, man, all this really happened. And I said, yeah, and you know who happened to the guy we're sitting in the room with and his friends. Like, that's what happened.

So you know early on when I started this podcast I'd be reading a book from night from World War I Yeah or I'd be reading a book from World War II or Vietnam or whatever and I'd like after by I don't know how many podcasts But like seven or eight podcasts I was like hey I just want to stop for a second And remind everybody that the the characters That I'm talking about in these books these characters they're not characters in a movie they're they're people They're they're humans and this stuff that we're talking about really happened to these people so again it's obviously having you sit in here and I was talking to you about when when Colonel William

Reader was in here and you know you're like you're reading stuff that happened to him he was tortured he was mock executions he had he had he was locked in a bam a two-foot tall bamboo cage in the jungles in Vietnam and he's He's got his legs and shackles and he's trying to sleep and he's getting woken up by the rats that are eating the wounds in his legs. And it's like that that's just inconceivable. Yeah. I mean. And it happened.

Yeah. I mean, and that's, you know, I hear stories like that and it's just, you know, that's real people. Yeah. These are real people just like us. Yeah, and in in in honestly man. I mean, I'm sure you saw me like sometimes You know I'm getting I get emotional when I read your story, but why do I get emotional when I read your stories? Because I'm thinking of everything I've been through thinking my my friends and I'm just like it's Man, you know, it's it's real and and and for those of you people that are listening to this and I talked to I addressed like the veterans out there A bunch today

but you know to those of you that didn't have the opportunity to serve for whatever reason you know if I could relate something to you it's like yeah these these people these lieutenants these sergeants these staff sergeants man they're people man they're people yeah they're just they're just people yeah they're just people I mean that's they're just people they're just and you know and I think that that's kind of what makes it hard for society of is that they see so many of these movies and they read these books and you know they read it but what they don't understand is that somebody lived it you know and I think that that's a perspective that you always have to remind yourself of is that yeah you're reading it and but

somebody lived it you know yeah then you can to see you know on the news like oh yeah the Medal of Honor ceremony and the pictures you know of you getting the and you know you see the president putting it on it's like wow that's so great or whatever and what you don't what we don't see you know people who haven't served is like what really happened to talk to arrive at that one quote unquote glorious moment where you get the medal oh my gosh thank you you let's go party or so i don't know something you know like it's this it's like dang bro did yeah people think it's just so great you know and uh like i i despise everything that metal stands for

for me you know mean not anybody else but i you know when i put that metal around my neck to me it's literally here's the stamp to show the world how bad i felt here's the you know that's why I don't wear it I don't wear it because you know it's the worst day of my life and

I lost everything that day I lost not just my team I lost my career in the Marine Corps I mean everything that I wanted to be was gone within one day and you know and then I get recognized for it You know, so not only do you have to live with it, but now you have to live with it in the face of the nation.

Well, from that perspective, from my perspective, looking at that, for one thing, the metal, yeah, I mean, it was put around your neck, but I believe that metal represents everyone that was with your team. Yeah. And you might have gotten the metal put around your neck, but it's it represents that story is going to be told over and over again And your name might be at the top of the list, but every name is going to be on that list everyone's going to know and I mean obviously I can't imagine the burden that comes with that metal that you live with But at the same time being able to have that have your brothers or remembered, I think, that it makes it worthwhile.

And that's the piece of it, you're right. I mean, so on the selfish, you know, what I just said was on the selfish side of it, right? That is for me. That is the only reason I did accept the medal was because I want my teammates to live on forever. I want people to know who they were. Because the day that I stopped speaking their name is the day they truly die. and I have an obligation that as long as I can still breathe, that their names are still need to be told.

And so that's what that metal allows me to do. And it is their metal. I mean, it's for them. But, yeah, I mean, you know, you don't, it's just, it goes against, you know, and I think the one thing, you know, that it's so hard for us to wrap around is how many times in your train. training. How many times did you set, like when you were training guys and this and that, how many times did you ever set them up for when they did everything that they could, they failed? A, to be honest with you, when I was running training, I did that all the time. Yeah. I'm not kidding. I mean,

you can talk to anybody that went through training when I ran it. It was, it was just mayhem. And it was, you were going to, you know, you were going to carry out bodies. You had 16 guys in a platoon. You were going to be carrying six bodies out and you're gonna be carrying them for four kilometers to a helicopter extract which wasn't gonna show up and you're gonna have to go another six it was It was brutal yeah and there was times there was times where I'd kill every single you know training I'd kill every single seal because they were not doing what they were supposed to do they were making mistakes or the leadership wasn't stepping up I did that all the time Yeah, I did it all the time I mean I can't I I came back from Ramadi where my guys were some really bad situation

And I wanted everyone to be ready for that man and like that was it was I mean I was not I mean I came back from employment got put a put in charge of training. It was awesome. It was the best thing that I ever could have done for me and and and I I thought it was the best thing I could do for my teammates. Yeah, was to be like okay. We're gonna make this training hard really hard and and and so Probably not you probably thought I was gonna say never but man when I was running training and and And that's awesome. And I had many guys that came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and would say like, yeah, hey man, we got hammered hard in this situation and we were ready.

Nothing as bad as your situation. But, yeah. But the mentality of it is, you know, there are some situations you're not going to win. There are some situations where you show up and you're not going to win. and that's against everything that we believe and everything that we're taught. You know what I mean? That if we do our job and we do it right

and you still lose, it doesn't make sense. Well, that's something I've told many guys is, man, you can do everything right. You can make no mistakes, and you can still get killed, you can still lose, you can still think, you know, there's decisions that you make on the battlefield, You say if you say okay go left you can go left and everyone could be great and it's the best decision ever

You could say go left and everyone could die and it's the worst decision ever There's there's things that you can control inside of combat so you prepare and train as hard as you can And and the other thing you do is you get the leadership in the situation in a mentality That they're not gonna put themselves this is like if my guys plan something that was stupid I'd let him ex I mean this is in training if they came up with a dumb plan They were gonna execute that plan I wasn't gonna stop them and they were gonna get slothed So they'd learn some lessons But that's why that training is so important and it's important in everything

100% 100% I appreciate you having me on Yeah man, thanks for coming on brother. I think so much man is awesome You're the man yeah, right I do not accept that from you You are the man all right echo yes talk about something good sure chill Oh, cool a little bit Okay, we're in the main. Okay, so we'll shift gears kind of a rough transition and I'll let you know that we're like three hours plus right now So you could talk quickly if you want if I want please Mm-hmm see how I kind of recommend that well I feel like me in Dakota

We have some catching up to do you guys been talking so you know I might drag this a little bit no Okay, so origin main This is where you get Jocko supplements krill oil joint warfare. It's for your joints for your joints. Yes important supplement yes important supplement yeah also he has one called discipline the cognitive and physical enhancement supplement pre-workout pre-mission so it's called it's a good one also at origin may it's origin main dot com main the state not like the main one yeah yeah I like it yeah it's good um you got geese on there for jiu jitsu you train jitzer right I do yeah so if you get the

Origin geese those are all made in America everything in origin all made in America Get you an origin geese and you got to represent some American Yeah, I like it Yeah from the threads from the cotton by the way they grow the cotton in America not the kind they import the the fabric and we assemble them that everything from seat what is it from seeds to seeds from From seat from dirt to shirt dirt to shirt dirt to shirt Dirt to shirt pretty good right yeah it was good I liked it They got some rash guards on there. Spats.

Yeah. You don't know what spats are. You know what spats are? No. Yeah, we didn't really either. We had to kind of get there. We had to research it. Arrived at spats.

Here's the bottom one. They're spandex, they're tights, basically. Compression gear. Do you train it, do you train at 10th planet? Jiu-Jitsu? Some. So you've seen dudes down there as plain. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Yeah. Because 10th planet's all about them. Oh, yeah. They're all about the spats. They're all about the spats. I was worried about it. Compression. I was worried about using the word spats because I didn't, it sounded like maybe it was some kind of like, let's just say.

It sounded kind of girlish, like some girl, like a girl would be like, oh, I'm going to wear. Like spanks. Like I'm going to. Like I'm going to. What are those? Because it sounds like spank. I don't know. What's that?

Yeah. Spanks are real tight. Like the, like it's kind of like. It's essentially compression gear. It is. It's compression. Yeah. Like so like I.

So like I. Yeah. Okay. To compress. They should be, they should be illegal. I figured out somebody. It should be illegal because it's like. selling oh it's it's false advertising I was on we were on like some kind of live

broadcast and someone spats is comes from what soldiers cavalry soldiers in World War I wore like leggings and they were called spats and I was like okay it's cool we'll we'll say it now yeah I like it yeah they weren't really even leg in they're just it's like this lower you know that lower part that covers the boot yeah it's that right up that is not spats that's something else what are those things called Did you ever do honor guard? You had to wear those things?

No. I think they were actually called leggings. Wait, so we're unclear about what spats are. I know what spats are. I mean, I am. I'm unclear. Very unclear. Well, because in football, you tape your shoe and your ankle.

That's spat. So I just, you know. I like it. Hey, you know what it works. It works. It does, right? Yeah. See?

Who knows? Nonetheless, Origin has some spats. Some compression gear rash guards. It's all made America. Good stuff. Origin made. Go on there Check out all their stuff

If you like something Get something Also for the kettlebells That I have Train it On it Planet, yeah On it, you know the kettlebells

Primal bells Yeah Got the whole set Yeah He's very proud of that Whatever you see the smile And he was like Yeah

You know primal swelger No Oh yeah What's that Primal what Swelts Swelger? Yeah

You got check him out He works out down it on it Like he's a big kettlebell guy Okay boom Yeah, sounds well

Sounds appealing me Swoldier Swolder Okay That's right Swoldger Boom So he

Yeah so anyway Onet dot com Slash Jocko That's where you get The kettlebells You want to get the whole set Like me Or

you know Or other stuff Like I said If you Actually I said this before You want to vary up your workout Make it more interesting Jocko likes boring workouts

That's cool too But if you want to make more Interesting Get the mace Get you know Some more what do you call like more creative

yeah the maze fitness equipment yeah on it dot com slash jocco's good spot also when you buy the book

into the fire Dakota Meyer don't worry I got it listed on our website joccopodcast.com by episode by the way along with all the books

that we go over on this podcast boom just click through there take it to Amazon shop continue doing shopping if you want good way to support also

subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already Stitcher iTunes Google Play Spotify I just learned what Spotify was today me too

I'm not even 100% sure I know what it is yeah it's some kind of music feed thing but we're on it yeah we're also on Alexa you have Alexa

I never heard of her okay it's Amazon Echo oh well you can ask it to play jocco podcast. No way. Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to buy one just for that. You just be like Alexa play Jocko podcast. And then it says, playing the latest episode of Jocko podcast. Yeah, yeah. And you go, yeah. That's so cool. And you always say, do you have Alexa? That's like saying, hey, do you have, or you should go buy a Siri.

You can't buy Siri. Siri comes with your phone. No, no, no, no. No, you can buy Alexa. No. You cannot buy an Alexa. You buy an. Amazon Echo. No one calls it that, though. No one talks about that. Maybe they should because that's the correct thing. We don't want to confuse people. No, no, no, you do want to confuse people. No, no, no, no, you do want to confuse people. We're talking about Alexa. I know that. All right, if you're going to dig in on this, I'm going to let it go. The thing is, it's Amazon Echo. Believe me, I know. It's a tube, an intelligent tube. Why does it have to be all about you?

Yeah, that's what it comes down to it. He's, man. That's not his name. That's what it is. Okay, good. Look how happy. Jock, give me a little love. Give me a love. Get that Amazon Echo. Yeah, let's get that. And then you ask Alexa.

So essentially, Alexa's in the Amazon Echo. What if I wanted to ask Echo? It won't, it won't respond. You can call me out whenever I'll respond. Amazon Echo will not respond to the name of Echo. Alexa lives in Amazon Echo, just like Siri lives in your iPhone. There's nothing living in my iPhone. It's a machine.

It's artificial life intelligence. Nonetheless, subscribe. you haven't already also subscribe to YouTube we'll have the video version of this podcast and excerpts on there as well and enhanced excerpts as well if you're into that subscribe YouTube

if you're into YouTube also Jocko has a store it's called Jocko Store just like it's called Jocko podcast Jock store because it's a store I like it created me called Jocko I'm not that creative

if I had a badass name like Jock Dude, your name is Dakota. Come on, man. I know, everybody thinks it's like a girl, though. Oh, really? Is that a girl's name Dakota? Yeah, Dakota Fanning. Oh, yeah.

Like, I pick up the phone and they're like, ma'am, and I'm like, uh, no. I didn't even know there was a girl's name Dakota. Yeah. Well, sorry, man. Yeah, it sucks. Do you like a girl named Sue? Is that why you turned out so badass? Yeah, yeah.

That is awesome. Like Johnny Cash. Yeah, there you go. I kind of feel like when it came down to Jocko to name his own. own store and stuff he was all cool but when Amazon names their thing echo it's like you know you guys kind of turned on me a little bit see messed up no I was on your team

no no you kind of called me out remember at that moment nonetheless hey man I dig it either way jocco store dot com this is where you can get shirts discipline equals freedom good shirt is a good shirt and when I say the good shirt it's the shirt with jaco's head on it says good backwards so when you look in the mirror he's telling you good you know I like that

it's pretty good right I'm gonna get one I got you. I got you one too. You too nice. I got you too. Alexa will take care of you. Sorry, man. That doesn't even make sense of the job. Nonetheless, there's some rash cards on there, some hoodies, some hoodies, some hats, patches. I got to restock the patches. I restock everything on there. The patches. Yeah. Hey, look, I'm trying over here. And there's a system in place now to restock automatically. Am I correct? Well.

Okay. I'm not correct. Correct. Okay, forget it. Depends on what you mean by automatically. I just mean things will be in stock from now on. That's what I mean. We'll just say more often. Bro.

We'll just say it better. You had one job. You had one. Okay. You know what? Forget it. Actually, he's got two jobs. Make videos and keep the store stock.

Yeah. How's he doing? O for two? You like that? You guys are having fun there? Okay, cool. JoccoStore.com. That's the website.

the website. Anyway, I'm not saying goodbye something. I'm saying, look, check it out. If you want something, get something. Good way to support. Also, good way to support. Psychological warfare, support yourself. You know, in your campaign, we call it a campaign against weakness. Makes sense. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, we liked it too. So it was suggested to us.

You know, those days where you kind of don't feel like it, right? And who better to ask for a little assist on those days than Jocco? Right? In theory, good theory. I mean, I agree. So boom, now we have this album with tracks. Jocko tracks telling you to get, how to get past moments of weakness that may come up. Waking up early, skipping workouts, you know, diet stuff, all that.

Works pretty good. That's badass. 10 for 10 results. You'll never skip a workout. So I made this. Echo was like, asked me a question one time. Like, why do you not skip? How do you not skip workouts?

And I was like, oh, I just boom, boom. Yeah, when you don't feel like that. Yeah. And he's like, dude, I need to record that. And then he just, like, asked me a bunch of random questions. And then we made it into a recording. And we put it on iTunes for sale. It was the number one spoken word on iTunes for, I think.

I think until your book came out. I think 11 months. It finally got knocked out of number one spoken word by when I released this book, Discipline Equanim Field Manual on iTunes. as a spoken word album so I'm just saying it's like so random yeah yeah it's not him say ro rot do this it's not not I just talk like I'm not a yeller yeah you don't seem like a yell you don't have to yell yeah you don't have to yell I just tell the guys hey I mean obviously you got to yell on the battlefield you got to yell people so they can

hear you that's one thing but yeah I mean I always just tell guys if you have to yell at someone and you've really screwed something up as a leagery you know if I got to yell at you or if that's like your thing yeah yeah nonetheless it's So yeah, very effective, like, if you, he'll be like, there's this one called sugar-coded lies. Right. And it's about like, you know how like when you're at work. You were talking about the good video. Yeah.

Right? Oh, yeah. So this is the same thing, but it's like a track you can get. You can get, actually this, the Dispmento's Freedom Field Manual album, has good on there as a track. Just a track, boom, there you go. So you can put it in your whatever. Yeah.

You can set. So, and because I had people going, you should make an alarm clock, you should make alarm clock. So when you did the album with tracks and when you could use that. thing as an alarm clock so when people ask me for alarm clock I'm like go get the albums there's three albums now yeah by the way three albums yeah psychological warfare and this one is in two different albums you really only need the first album of discipline equals freedom field manual for the for the audio yeah you can get well there's there's well if you want the knowledge parts that's that's the second

video the second the second album yeah you didn't know I was over here so this is where this is where echo started hammer hammer me because you know when they list you they list like psychological warfare and then they have to list who made it and it was art artist jaco willing no no no no I'm not an artist I just put I'm just speaking I'm just saying words that's not art no no no you're an artist you know so full on right I know you didn't know that man I never I never I never looked at you and said wow I don't come across at the artist that's some artist artsy guy nonetheless very effective very effective good way to

support too by the way check also on Amazon through Alexa if you want you can order jocco white tea Amazon and and by the way I don't know if I'll give you some jocco white tea and the reason I'll give it to you isn't I don't care if you like tea you might you might hate tea but what this tea does is it's a guaranteed it's guaranteed to give you an 8,000 pound deadlift it's scientifically proven over and over again double blind double blind placebo tested right there jocco white tea eight thousand pound deadlift um yeah so you got that yeah also books the books um yes

get into the fire by dakota mire and bing west get it through our website it's it's an awesome read man we we we we we we covered less than 10% of the book today you only understand 10% of what the whole situation was by listening to this podcast get the book support the podcast support Dakota learn about what these brave Americans and Afghans went through way the warrior kid There's a book I wrote for kids why because who's what kind of kids what kind of books were kids reading? I know because I got four kids my kids were reading books about lame people that were being encouraged to be weak. Yeah Instead of like hey, you know what it's okay to actually get after it and try and be smarter and try and be stronger.

So if you want your kid to be smarter and stronger and eat healthier and work harder, if that's what you want, get the kid, Way of the Warrior Kid. If you want to make your child weak and undisciplined, that's cool. You can buy any other book for a kid, and that's what you get. And that book did good with people. And I wrote another one. It's called Way of the Warrior. kid too it's called Mark's mission and it's got a whole new genre of issues that

Mark has to face with his uncle Jake uncle Jake comes to help out young Mark would you call him more advanced issues they are slightly more advanced let me tell you which one of them one of the one of the one of the issues that young marks are marks in sixth grade now in book two he he loses his temper sometimes and he gets in trouble at school for hucking a paper machet pumpkin at another kid's head and it deflects off his head and Hits the teacher in the face. Oh man He gets he gets sent home from school last day of school

Anyways he has to learn to control his temper just like all kids do and I know this because I got kids and I know this because I was a kid and you remember when you were a little kid and you lose your temper and you dumb stuff even when I say little kid I'm talking like 23 years old Yeah, I was like sure I was like say Yeah, I do you know what I'm talking about Don't worry I got you come get you a copy His uncle in the book is a is a seal was a seal and he comes to stay with him for the summer and helps him square away these little problems he's got it yeah yeah so that's what that one's about he also learns about working hard he gets a job starts a business he's 11 years old has his own business mowing lawns and pulling weeds that's way the warrior kid and way the warrior kid to mark's mission you can also get speaking of which warrior kids from irish oaks ranch there's a young warrior kid 12 years old business owner he makes soap from goat milk right here in California on his farm Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, well it seems like well how are you too how does you even why are you talking about this? He got in touch with me and said I want to make good

Soap do draco soap and I was like well who are you he's like I'm a 12 year old kid named aiden I live on a farm I'm starting a business I figure you might want in on the action jaco And I was like, hey, what, dude? I'm in. Let's do this. Make some soap. You might want it on the action. He offered me a piece of the action.

I was like, oh, I guess I'm in, man. Warrior kid getting after it. And so, yeah, you can order that soap at Irish Oaks Ranch. He's dot com. It's, you know, no big deal. Soap Empire, right? What is, like, Johnson and Johnson probably started off making soap. Ivory soap.

You think ivory soap doesn't have some good? profitability. Yeah. And the only difference is, the only difference is this kid's starting at 12. You guarantee Johnson Johnson didn't start at 12. No, no. This kid started 12. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Get on there. Just order some of it. He'll have the kinks worked out before he can even drive.

Yeah, yeah. He's all over it. I mean, I'm telling. He's manufacturing soap. Think about when you were, I mean, let's just, let's just get all of our own loser. I don't even know about his potty train on the table. Our own loser selves out on the table here. What were you doing?

when you were 12. Yeah. Right. I was like smearing buggers on my sister's. I was still eating dirt. You know what I'm saying? I was still eating dirt. We're just talking losers.

I mean, I was eating dirt. I didn't know what soap was like. Like, I was still, I was eating dirt. Yeah. I made up the slogan too.

Simple slogan. Simple slogan. And it's actually a great slogan. You know what it is? Jaco Stope. Stay clean. Oh. You got to admit it.

I mean, you got it I mean, you got it It's a good slogan. The good slogan. Stay clean. I don't know. I don't know how you came up with that. I'm telling you.

Jocco soap, stay clean, right? Man, same way he came up with Jocco store. Yeah, Jocco store. Real, unreal creative when it comes to them names. Also, hey, another book, Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual. If you need to get on the path, stay on the path, be on the path, move further down the path. If you're having trouble getting after it in life get the book this one equals freedom field manual and then don't just get the book and read it you have to actually do something that's in it

But it's pretty clear it's a field manual echo claims to know all about field manuals my favorite kind of manual Yeah you actually know about field manuals Go it's a field manual that tells you how to get after it so you can do that the audio version of that is not on Audible you can't find it there Why? Because you couldn't Cut it up into tracks, which is what you all asked for. It is on Amazon music, Google Play, iTunes as an MP3. Also, extreme ownership, the book that Laf Babin and I wrote, that's about combat leadership. Actually, every topic that we talked about today when it came to leadership and organizational issues, it's all things that are inside extreme ownership. Get that. And it's not just about war, but it's about life. It's about business. And on top of that, we have a leadership and management consulting company. It's called Eschalon Front.

We solve problems through leadership. Every problem that any organization has can be solved through one thing and one thing only, leadership. That's it. So if you got problems, call us Eschalon Front. Me, Laif Babin, J.P. Danelle, Dave Burke, Eschlonfront.com. Of course, also, we have the muster. It's a leadership Gathering

It's a leadership gathering Seminar Conference Gathering And that's what we do We get together We have all kinds of leaders come We present we talk about issues

We give pragmatic Actual tactics and techniques On how to lead people If you want to like come to a conference And get all happy and Clappy and make hugging promises to the guy that's sitting next to you, don't come to this

conference. That's not what this conference is. We're not singing and dancing at all. We talk about how to lead. That's what it is. So if you want to learn how to lead, come to the muster. There's only two of them in 2018. Only two of them.

One of them, Washington, D.C., May 17th and 18th. One of them, San Francisco, October 17th, that's it. We're not going to What's name your hometown? Columbia, Kentucky. We're not going to Columbia, Kentucky for the muster. We couldn't find a, we couldn't, we couldn't, we couldn't,

your barn wasn't big enough to hold it in. Can we expand it? Yeah, I'll work on it for next year. Work on it. We actually did one in Austin. If I'd known you at the time, you would have been there. Yeah, awesome. And let me know if you want to come to one of these.

But we're not doing it in Columbia, Kentucky. Oh, wow. We're not doing it in, what's another random place? Oh my koi hoi we're not doing it in Hawaii if you want to come you got to come to one of those to Register by the way they've all sold out we've done four of them. They've all sold out this one's gonna sell out to Register extreme ownership.com and We okay we raise the prices Once we hit a certain date why do we do that? Why do we raise the prices once we hit a certain date?

To make more money? No, I'm just kidding No, we actually don't want people to do that because what the reason we do is we want to incentivize a People to register early so that we can block enough room order enough food plan Plan correctly get the venue set up the right way so we're trying to make people come early So we it's actually a pen it we're penalizing you for being slow prefer procrastinating Yes procrastination you're gonna pay that's right oh it's a procrastination penalty I like where you're coming from Yeah, that's good if you wait you pay I'll take credit for that we like people that get after Don't put that is one of a joccur

Okay, okay? You'll get credit. You'll get credit. I think you'll get a percentage because you were running off my lead and I get a little cut I like it. All right. So that is that and until the muster If you have questions or feedback for us, we are we are ready to receive on the interwebs on Twitter on Instagram and on Dash Facebookie Boa echo is at echo Charles and I am at Jocco Willink and do Dakota is on the interwebs in a big way in a big way on Twitter at Dakota underscore Meyer that's how we linked up by the way via Twitter it is I can't believe you responded to me it's so cool and I'm like I can't believe you said something to me a couple little kids on Instagram Dakota Meyer oh 317 sniper no just

oh 317 Dakota Meyer that's that's Instagram on Facebook Sergeant Dakota Meyer You can just look Dakota Meyer And it pops right up Because you're kind of the man You have a podcast I do You have your own podcast

It's called owning it Owning it with Dakota Meyer Now you kind of took that From my Buck Extreme ownership No big deal I did take a little slice of that That's cool You have

Dakota Meyer.com is another place So like I said that's why I said You're all over the interwebs Because clearly you are all over the interwebs You got a YouTube channel Yeah I got a YouTube channel What's that called? It's just Dakota Meyer

So I've got the YouTube channel just Dakota Meyer. Where my podcast goes up, it's on Own the Dash. Own the Dash. What does that mean? So, you know, Own the Dash comes from a poem. Linda Ellis had wrote called The Dash. And, you know, I felt like people in America just needed something to hold on to. And, you know, so I always look at what is success and how do I want to be remembered?

And that's kind of like a big thing for me. So Linda Ellis wrote an appointment and talked about how, like, at a funeral, you know, a man stood to speak. and he referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning, you know, with the date, the person was born the day he died. And really those are the only two days in your life that you don't make any decisions or have any control of. And everything else, what matters is that dash in between?

And so how are you going to own your dash? What is your dash going to look like? Because you can control that. You can control what that dash looks like, how, you know, how fulfilling it is, how selfish it is, how giving it is. I mean, you control it by your decisions every single day. And what do you want your dash to look like?

How do you want to be remembered? Because it doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how whatever you did, the empires you built. What matters is how you changed people's lives. And that's how you're remembered. And where your true success in my mind is you'll be defined will be what people say about you at your funeral. And so that's where it comes to me is, is own the dash. It's where the idea of it came from.

So own your dash. And you do public speaking as well? I do. I do public speaking. I go around and do you. Get in there and talk to businesses and teams. Yeah, you know, I come in, talk to businesses, teams, give my leadership principles of, you know, what I believe to make success. You know, listen, I'm simple, though.

But, you know, what I feel like, you know, my life, I talk about my story and kind of what happened to me and then I come around and I, what does that mean to me, right? What does that mean? Like, you know, every story without, every story or experience that you go through that doesn't have a meaning afterwards. is a wasted experience. And so I talk about that. And I just, you know, do a lot of public speaking. I just want to inspire people. I'm like, I just, you know, I just want to, honestly,

I just want to change the world. No big deal. Just want to change the world. That's it. No, I just want to change the world. Awesome, man. That's it. Awesome.

Did I miss anything else? No, I don't think so. I think that's everything. Yeah. Anything, any other projects, anything else that everybody needs to know about? No. Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you having me on. That's an honor to have you on.

Echo, you got anything else? No, thank you very much for coming out. Thank you. Clothes and thoughts, Dakota. You know, listen, I got a lot out of this podcast. I got a lot of, you know, just hearing your perspective. And, you know, I just want people out there to know that, you know, I'm no different than anybody else. The only difference is opportunities that's been put in front of me.

and you know I appreciate you having me on well man it's obviously an honor to have you on thank you for your thank you for your service both in the Marine Corps and what you continue to do now to try and help people and just change the world which is what you're trying to do now which is awesome and it's been a true honor to have you on again you know to be sitting across the table from you and knowing what you've been through and to see where you are now is is awesome and it's it's my honor to be sitting here and of course to all the service men and women on the battlefields around the world doing what must be done to protect us thanks to all of you and finally to those service members

that made the ultimate sacrifice who gave the last full measure for us thank you may you rest in peace and know without question that we will never forget and until next time this is Dakota Meyer and echo and jaco out