Jocko Podcast - 149: Fields of Fire. James and Jim Webb. United States Marine Corps.

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:12 - Jim Webb Sr.  2:58:26 - Jim Webb Jr.  3:18:59 - How to Stay on The Path. 3:49:31 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 149 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. All my life I've waited for this. Now, I've joined you, and your losses are a strength to me. I ache, and yet I know that Alec wretched with pain on the dust road that went to Corinth. I breathe the dust, and yet I know that Grandpa, Breathe the gas that made a hero out of Pershing.

I flinch when bullets tear the air in angry rents. And yet I know that father and three farmer boys at Pickett's charge felt a cutting edge that dropped them dead. How can I be bitter? You are my strength, you ghosts. And I have learned those things, those esoteric, skills and knowledges that mark me as one of you that loose bowled piles of shit Too much shit from overeating plopped randomly around the outer dikes of a vill mean trouble Catching the aroma seeing the groupings watching flies dance lazily

Rejoicing in their latest fetid morsel that bends the low grass in a muddy glob like a bomb of cow dung Trouble. I can tell from the crack of a rifle shot, the type of weapon fired, and what direction the bullet is traveling. I can listen to a mortar pop and know its size how far away it is. I know instinctively when I should prep a tree line with artillery before I move into it. I know which draws and fields should be crossed online, which should be assaulted, and which are safe to cross in column. I know where to place my men when we stop and form a perimeter. I can shoot a rifle and throw a grenade and direct air and artillery onto any target under any circumstances.

I can dress any type of wound. I have dressed all types of wounds. Watered protruding intestines with my canteen to keep them from cracking under sunbake. Patched, sucking chests with plastic, tied off stumps with field expedient tourniquets. I can call in Medevac helicopters, talk them, cajole them, dare them into any zone. I do these things, experience these things repeatedly, daily. Their terrors and miseries are so compelling and yet so regular that I have ascended to a high emotion that is nonetheless a crusted numbness.

I am an automaton, bent on survival, agent and prisoner of my misery. How terribly exciting. And how to what purpose will these skills serve me when this madness ends? What lies on the other side of all this? It frightens me. I haven't thought about it. I haven't prepared for it. I am so good, so ready for these things that were my birthright.

I do not enjoy them. I know they have warped me, but it will be so hard to deal with a life empty of them. And there are the daily sufferings. You ghosts have known them. But who else? I can sleep in the rain, wrapped inside my poncho, listening to the drops beat on the rubber like small explosions.

Then feel the water pour into rivulets inside my poncho, soaking me as I lie in the mud. I can live in the dirt. Sit and lie and sleep in the dirt. It is my chair and my bed, my floor and my walls. this clay and like all of you I have endured diarrhea as only an animal should endure it squatting a yard off the trail and relieving myself unceremoniously

naturally animally deprivations of food festering open sores worms heat aching crotch that nags for fulfillment any empty hole that will relieve it who would appreciates my sufferings who do I suffer for and that right there is a excerpt from a book That is called Fields of Fire and it was written after the Vietnam War by a Marine who served there in this book paints a picture of of combat and in fact it actually does more than that because a picture I know a picture supposed to paint a thousand words or say a thousand words but pictures don't always properly convey thoughts and emotions

You need words to make that happen and and this book really captures all of it horror fear disgust love hate indifference The chaos of combat the sorrow of loss heroism and of course in all that human nature and as I always say about this podcast while yes it is about war and it's about leadership and it's about atrocities and it's about struggle it is most importantly it's about human nature and on top of that the incredible power of the human will and this book Fields of Fire gives us a very close examination of human nature in all of its glory and of course in all of its horror as well and the book was written by a man by the name of James

Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam recipient of the Navy Cross former secretary the Navy former senator from the great state of Virginia he's written a bunch of other books ten I believe he's written and produced movies all kinds of stuff on top of that he's has five children if I'm correct one of those children Jim also served in the Marine Corps and it was actually whose time in Ramadi overlapped with my time in Ramadi where he served as a as a 311 rifleman as a member of the one six Marines and also as a radio men in Stapletoon so it's awesome to read these books and know their history and it's even more awesome and an absolute honor to have with us here

Today, the author of the book, Fields of Fire, and also his son. So, sir, thank you for coming. Jim, thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you for having us. I was kind of wondering, because you know, James and Jim, and I decided when I was trying to figure out what to call you guys, I figured I'd call you, young Jim, Jim, and I'd just keep calling you, sir.

Just call me Jim and call him Young Jim. know that it's easier so yeah I can't thank you guys enough for for coming all for coming all the way out here from the East Coast and and to come on this and for me to revisit Fields of Fire which is just a a book and we'll get into that a little bit later it's an iconic book about not just the Vietnam War but really about war and the wave laid it out and again we'll get into that a little bit but I also wanted to talk to you and really get some of your backstores as well and your upbringing you know we always try and start with the guests kind of

talking about where they came from and what their background was and you have a lot of that actually laid out in your memoir so I was going to ask if it's cool to call this a memoir but there it says it on the cover a memoir I heard my country calling and I guess what one little section of this that stuck out at me and I think you know obviously let you expand on it But I'm going to the book. So again, this book is called, I heard my country calling. And here we go. Back to the book.

When it hurts, just grit your teeth and take it. Don't you ever back down. Never start a fight, but if somebody else does, never run away. If you run from a bully, you will never stop running. But if you fight, he won't risk coming back at you again. Stand up. Fight back. Mark him.

Give him something to remember every morning. when he looks in the mirror then even if you lose you win and by the way if you ever run from a fight I will personally beat your ass and you go on my father was not exactly a mellow guy he did not spare the rod but he taught me early that there is no substitute for moral courage whatever the cost and that the ultimate duty of every leader is to take care of the people who rely on him when otherwise they would be forgotten or abandoned courage in the face of those above you and loyalty to those below you were my father's inalterable standards the only true way to measure the

worth of another human being so there you go those are some those are some standards your dad laid out for you he was a tough guy he was a tough guy you know i listening to you read the um the excerpt from fields of fire, I was just thinking about how long it has been in the journey that I've had since I wrote those words in learning, I think we were talking about this last night, learning how to write by writing this novel. Writing a novel was an act of will for a lot of different reasons. And one of the things when I think about growing up and our family was that my dad was a leader. More than anything, he was a leader. And, you know, different families have different conversations when you're sitting around the dinner table.

But his was always. You know, he would talk about different issues, but it was always, how do you lead? How do you motivate people? One of his slogans was, you can make people do something or you can make people want to do something. And so in a nutshell, you know, learning from him, you know, he was a career military. person he enlisted in World War II, became a bomber pilot, B-17, B-29, Zin was in Berlin airlift when I was very young and was transitioning into jets for the Korean War and the air pressure in the cockpit blew out, the jet blew his ear drums out, he got grounded.

I'll never forget that day when he came home, when he couldn't fly anymore. We were getting ready from to walk into the door and my mom says, it took your dad's wings away. Don't ever mention it. He walked in, and he was still wearing his wings. Once you qualify, then you don't take off. And so first thing I said to him was, hey, dad, they let you keep your wings. He said, go upstairs. But then he was a pioneer in the missile program, still didn't have a college degree.

He put the first Atlas in for the Air Force. And one of the great things to observe as a teenager was when they gave him the command of an Atlas, Thor Scout Jr. Missile Squadron, the success rate on the Atlas at this time out of Vannaburg. We had opened up Vandenberg.

It was an 85,000-acre wilderness when I first went out there in the 8th grade. But the success rate in that squadron was 11%. And he made it 100%. 12 out of 12 successful launches. And I'd go with him

out to the pads, you know, went out in 16, 17, and watch how he dealt with his people. Wait, you just trumped, because I always talk about how I bring my, I used to bring my son out to the training grounds and let him shoot machine guns and stuff, but your dad brought you out and let you shoot missiles.

Let me watch. You just trumped me as the dad. You know, you could back then, you know, I could go sit in a blockhouse like a thousand yards away from where one of these atlas was going up. But watching how he treated his people. And on a, you know, he'd been deployed a lot. When he went back into the middle, he got rifted at the end of World War II because he didn't have a college degree. When they brought him back in, he was either deployed. or stationed at bases that did not have military housing for three and a half years.

And we were up in St. Joe, Missouri, where I was born. My father's family had come in from the Appalachian Mountains and ended up in St. Joe. My mother was from East Arkansas. She had a very tough life, early life. Three of her seven siblings had died of childhood disease. The kinds of things you don't even see anymore, like her sister that was nearest to her, died of typhoid fever. When's the last time we've seen in America with typhoid fever?

So we were up in St. Joe Missouri. My mother had four kids by the time she was 24 years old, and my dad was gone, and she didn't know hardly anybody in St. Joe Missouri. We didn't have these family assistance programs like they do now, and it's been one of the great privileges of my life to try to put those into our military. So my grandmother moved in. She was living out in Arkansas, I mean from Arkansas to California, to California. California and came back up and lived with us for several years.

And there was an iron hand in the house. But, you know, my dad would come back. He'd leave Friday night, get off work at one point at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. Drive 380 miles one way every weekend. No interstates. You know, drive all night, Friday night, show up. We never knew what time Saturday morning, but he'd be in there with my mom Saturday morning. Raise hell.

Friday afternoon. get in the car and drive back. But his example taught me more about the axioms of leadership than anything I learned anywhere else. And being able to apply it in the Marine Corps, which, you know, was one of the great prides of my life, was really an extension of what he'd put on the table day in, a day out. And, you know, Jim got to know, son Jim, got to know his grandfather, my dad, very well. We spent a lot of time fishing, hunting. We're an outdoor family. And we've had the same kind of a few thousand hours of discussions, I think.

You could very easily say that the passage you read would qualify as the 11th commandment in our household growing up. It's passed down to him and then passed down to me. Very, very, very simply, never walk away from a. fight, or never start a fight, but never walk away from one, never quit, and you'll be judged how you treat those around you. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been, uh, it's, it's a lot of me, my entire life. And it's, that's, that's awesome. I know, And we talked about this a little bit last night because I would have guys that are concerned that, hey, I'm not around and I got two kids and I'm doing another deployment. And, you know, I always would tell guys, look, guys have been, I don't know what you call it in, you know, Viking years or whatever, but I don't know if they called it a deployment back then.

But guys have been going on deployment and leaving their families for thousands and thousands of years. And that, to me, is an example. It's it's that you might not be there to directly influence your kid on a day-to-day basis, but the when when a young man looks up or a kid looks up and sees, hey, this is what hard work is, this is what commitment is. This is this is what sacrifices and they can emulate that you don't have to be there every day to instruct him in every single little thing that they do and I mean clearly both of you are examples of that you can turn out just fine even if dad isn't around every night. Oh, you know, when I was really, uh, when I was really young, and he was deployed on the Berlin Air Lift. I used to go to bed every night with a picture of him on the runway on the flight line that Air Force Public Affairs had taken with him and his first sergeant of some visiting general. I still had that picture over my desk today.

But that was, you know, that was, good night, dad. And you look at that and you gain an understanding of what it means to serve and what your country is all about and, you know, serving your country and those sorts of things. The one thing I would say is my dad really didn't want me to go into Marine Corps. From the job that we were just talking about, you know, when he had the missile squadron, he had gone to night school for 26 years. He graduated from college my senior in high school.

He immediately was deep selected for colonel. And then they sent him to the Pentagon to do legislative affairs, and it was the McNamara era. And he would just go crazy about the wheel. kids who were running the Vietnam War and we would have these long discussions about, you know, you're just going to be meat. You know, you're going to be meat. The Marine Corps is a political football. Don't do it. His line was, go in the Navy, stay on the ship, eat ice cream. And then, you know, when I went in the Marine Corps, it was like, oh, man. And then when my brother went into the Marine Corps, my brother was a Huey pilot in the Marine Corps, it was like, my boys are Marines. You know, going back to your childhood a little bit, you talk about how you moved around a ton growing up. I mean, it sounds like your dad was a little bit of a habitual house mover. Even when you get somewhere, he would move, you know, you're talking about you, you were in

England, you lived in three different houses. And it seemed like everywhere you went, you would move around a lot. And one of the things you say about that in the book is, I'm going back to the book here. I not only learned how to read a room, but by my... necessity became an acute observer of subtle body language of each new tribal circle in each place I learned valuable distinctions that helped me to develop skills and insights that carried over into leadership challenges during during my later life in order to lead people you must first motivate them in order to

motivate them you must understand them in order to understand them you must be able to grasp not simply their words but the emotion behind their words the same words and gestures can have vastly different intentions in Alabama and and Southern California and Nebraska and sometimes even within the same town. I learned to be a receiver of information as well as a careful broadcaster. Absolutely. You know, and first of all, with my dad moving, I think the longest we ever lived in a house was like 17 months while I was growing up, you know.

Part of it was that, you know, the Scotch Irish tradition, the Ulster Scots that settled Appalachian Mountains and then spread further west. And, you know, they like to say, you know, you haven't, you don't stop moving to you've lived in at least two or three houses or something over the mountain that you haven't seen yet. And, yeah. And he did that literally. Yeah, we got, you know, the post-World War II military was, you know, it was still sort of reseating itself in terms of having large standing military and where the missions were going to be with the space program. all this stuff, missile program going on. So, yeah, we, by necessity, moved a lot.

But then, yeah, we'd get in a house, Amarillo, Texas. We lived in Amarillo, Texas, one year. We lived in three different houses. You know, I saw one down there on Sunset on Sunset Street. We're going to move in that house. And my brother and I, we lived on the back porch, you know, with the windows rattling, you know, et cetera. You guys were destined to either become Marines or start a moving company.

Oh, really? So then. There was an upside. There was a downside of that, and that is, you know, academically, like I went to, I think, nine different public schools in five years at one point, three different schools in eighth grade. No, you know, continuum in the academic curriculum. When I started in the eighth grade that was in Santa Maria, California, when they first opened up Bannemberg, they tested the whole class. They took four of us, they put us in a different room. It was like the beginning of GT, you know, or whatever.

You know, you're going to be like an experiment. You're going to grow it academically at your own rate. By the time I got to one, two, three, like the fifth school in Nebraska, I was on non-college prep, work release, get this guy out of here. You know, and I ended up, you know, like, they let us go an hour early and I went to work. But I could always take a standardized test, and that's really how I was able to get into the, the, the, you know. scholarship program that later led me to go to the Naval Academy, but the most important lesson from all of that was I was able to see such a cross-section of America, first in the military. You know, the military was the first institution in the country that was racially integrated. You know, we had a totally different

environment than if I had grown up in East Arkansas or somewhere else, but also so many different communities. And you walk in and you're the new guy, and you read the room and you figure out where the problem is, but you also, as, you know, from the quote that you read, you learn that a big part of leadership is knowing what motivates people and understanding that different things motivate different people, not only culturally but individually. And so sort of figuring out what, you know, what a person is thinking when they are saying certain things do, what body language means, et cetera. And you translate that into the combat environment, particularly in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War

when I was there. And we had an incredible cross-section, particularly of the working side of American society. By that time, I'd been a boxer for eight years. I'd been around a lot of African-Americans. My hero, when I was in high school, it was African-American, incredible fighter, went to the Olympics in 1964. But the Hispanic communities, California, the farming communities, the southern, you know, the southern mentality of which my culture derived. And so when you look at a problem, we look at a potential problem. You know, I got cat ones, I got cat fours in terms of, you know, the testing scores of people out there.

you learn how to how to listen and then how to make decisions and how to preclude a lot of problems that were going on we had racial problems in the in the military writ large during that period our society had these problems I never had a racial problem in any unit I commanded did you now one of the things that while you were jumping from school to school that was problematic although you were learning this stuff about human nature and the way people are You know, in one part of the book here, you say from the time I was 10, my dad had challenged me to read a book a week. And if that did not remedy my restlessness to try and read two books a week, read, read, read, he urged me. And I had, including poetry, fiction, history, and anything I'd get my hands on that was about sports or the military.

You read that much as a young kid? Constantly. And that really saved me in terms of the differing standards and whatever in the schools that I was. going to. And the other thing that my dad and I would do from the time I was very young was had poetry contests. You know, he was a big, big reader too. And so, you know, all the way through his lifetime, we would do that. When, you know, up until, you know, very soon before he passed away, we would go every summer. We'd get the males and the family of the different generations, get a fishing camp in Minnesota for two weeks, and hang out, build a fire,

goof around, catch fish, clean fish, talk, talk, talk. And my dad and I would always, we'd do Kipling, or we'd do the British and the Irish poets. And, you know, one of us would give a line and another would give another line to see who really remembered, you know. I always knew when I was in high school, when he was wanting to go up to Minnesota, even at that point, because he He would go and start talking to my mother. This one poem called Do You Fear the Wind? Do you fear the force of the wind, the slash of the rain? Go face it and fight it.

Be savage again. I'm going to go cold and hungry like a wolf. I'm going, okay, I think we're going to Minnesota. That's awesome. Yeah. And you also say in a book, I knew and as I had always known, that I was born to be a soldier. Growing up, you know, we were, and still are an outdoors family, hunt, fish, shoot. You know, I taught Jim from the time you was six, Jim started shooting when he was six years old.

I got my first rifle when I was eight years old. It was a part of a long-going tradition from the pioneer days, you know, here's your rifle. I loved being in the outdoors. I loved all of the mechanics of that part of the world. And, of course, at that time, post-World War II, you turn on a TV in a weekend and you've got victory at sea and, you know, air power and all these shows. And I loved military history. I watched this stuff and I said, I'm going to be a soldier. And I didn't know at that time, really, it was a close call in high school.

Would I go an army or would I be a Marine? I wanted to do that. and when I got to, I didn't know what college was. It was not part of our family heritage at that time, you know, directly going to college and figuring out what school you should go to and those sorts of things. So I remember when I was 14 years old, I went to my dad, and I said, Dad, I want to be a soldier. He said, go to college. I said, what are you doing college?

He says, you're going to be an engineer. I said, what do engineers do? He said, they invent things. I said, I don't want to invent anything. I want to see stuff. That's right. I want to go in the woods. I want to leave people.

And so I found out that the Navy had this ROT scholarship, this first scholarship, full scholarship program. Because I could not have gotten the Naval Academy out of high school. My grades weren't that great. You know, the other things I had in place, I think. But the Army did not have an ROTC scholarship at that time. They had a program where after two years you could get a full. scholarship, but you only had a partial at the beginning. So I applied to the Navy scholarship program. At that time, you took a standardized test, and anybody who passed a standardized test

got into the interview process, and you could go make your case. So I went with the school, it was heavily military kids in the school. We had 12 people from our school who passed the test and got into the interviews, our valedictorian, a salutatory, and a salutatory, and All-state basketball player, all-district football player, and me. It's like, hey, pump your gas. Come see me fight. And I really lucked out because the two interviewers, the first one was a Mustang commander who had seen me fight, just totally by coincidence.

The name was Commander Lasseter. He says, you know, where have I seen you before? It wasn't me. And he talked about, what do you want to do? I said, I want to do this. This is what I want to do. He says, what are you going to do if you don't get it? I said, I'm going to be here next year.

You know, if you, you know, if I don't get it this year, I'll be here next year. And we, you know, we talked about working through high school because I worked all through high school. And he would come after this. He'd come over. I was packing groceries at the base commiss there. He'd come by and say hello. And the second interviewer was a Naval Academy graduate who had graduated in the bottom two-thirds of his class. and from South Dakota, and he was saying,

we don't, we got enough brains in this world. We need leaders. And he threw examples out, you know, like things you're not supposed to be able to solve. You probably know this from different interviews you went through in your time in the Navy. So he goes, we got all this mud in the Mississippi River. What are we going to do about the mud in the Mississippi River? And I said, Commander, I've been thinking about this. I said, look, you know, here's what.

you do you shut that river down for eight hours a day and you run a big uh like a screen through there like a filter big filter on on a rotator uh and on each end you put like a car wash you know with the sprays and so you run you run the filters through and you spray the the mud out and you put it in a culvert and you get a truck under there i said captain that's topsoil send it back up and you know sell it back to the farmers so you said i know okay And so I got this scholarship. And when you, when you, you mentioned fighting and you mentioned boxing. And, you know, that you mentioned it a couple times.

And well, obviously, I like fighting. And one of the things, I mean, I always saw, I'm more of a jiu-jitsu player, but the things that jiu-jitsu teaches you about life and about everything, really. And I know a lot of those similar lessons come from boxing. You had a nice little, nice little thing about boxing in here. And I just wanted to throw it out there before we jump. Too much further because you know boxing stays with you through your through your Naval Academy career and whatnot But um here we go back to the book boxing and the rough-hewn world in which the sport resided taught me valuable lessons about human struggle and the thin line between success and failure

In the ring you quickly learned that life was not always fair and that it's not always offer you a face saving time out when things were going badly Once the bell rang you were out there by yourself exposed for all the world to see until it rang again No excuses no sitting out for a couple of plays just because somebody hit you so hard you couldn't see straight And your toes felt numb when You know my kids would compete in Jiu Jitsu a lot when they were little and and I would see these kids We'd go to these tournaments and the jiu jitu tournaments are very popular Especially out here in California at that time and they're popular everywhere now but I would notice that when a kid loses you know because my kids played all kinds of sports whatever

soccer and basketball and this and that the kid if the team loses the soccer game the kids you know they walk off the field when a kid loses a jiu jitsu match and this is just not just my kids but like 90% of kids when they lose that jiu jitsu match when they're six years old when they're seven years old they're gonna start crying and you know it made sense to me instantly there's two parts of it that makes sense to me number one they're by themselves there's no one to blame it's not anyone else's fault of team it's just them and number two when you get beat in a come in a combat sport it's there's there's a primal thing that you just realize you got beat by another

human being in this game and and it's not a game and so it's it's like you said it's like there's no there's no way out of it and for me those lessons that people take away from combat sports are extremely important and it's the things that you just talked about right here Absolutely right. On a number of different levels. And one thing about, well, first of all, one thing about judo and jiu-jitsu, is when I was a kid, I used to read a lot, and I read a lot about Asian history, and you learn the Japanese philosophy behind it, which is to take your opponent's strength and use it against him. It was just kind of a different thing than boxing, but I've always thought about that. You know, and in other areas of my life, I've thought about that.

And in terms of boxing, you know, you never know who the judges are. You know, you're absolutely right. I mean, nothing is worse than losing when it's just you out there. If it wants a team out there, you know, you've got people you can pat on the back and whatever, but it's just you or is one of the great fighters. in Omaha when I was fighting, used to say it's just you and another guy and all that smoke. So you learn to deal with, and you know, when I say, you know, you may perceive unfairness. You know, you're all right, you know, I think I won that fight.

But you can't talk about it for the rest of your life. You just say, all right, you got to swallow it and you got to say that was that. And the other thing is you have to prepare. You know, when you say, I'm going to, you know, like 15, 16 years, I could be fighting in front of 3,000 people, you know, Omaha is, and then I have a lot going on in the winter and it was cold and they'd come into the Coliseumina and watch, and they're good fighters, you know, really, Omaha had good fighters in fact, including a professional stable as well. But yeah, I'm going to be in front of 3,000 people and I don't want to look like an ass, you know, and so you put it on yourself. You put, preparation on yourself, which actually is a great learning tool for being a writer. You know, you may think you're working hard, or you may think you're just passing the time, but when the book comes out, you're going to be exposed to all these reviews and that sort of stuff, you know.

And also, it's kind of interesting because I was just talking to a friend of mine who is in the government right now, who was a very fine football player, and we were comparing, he was talking about how hard it was to deal with a certain individual because he'd been a wrestler, and he didn't understand how, you know, you get the team around you to solve these problems. Well, you know, you learn to step forward and take responsibility for solutions, you know, if you're in an individual sport. I mean, probably more than any other kind of a sport, you know, it's like, all right, this is what I believe, and this is what I'm going to fight for.

And if we lose, we lose, but this is what we're going to do. And in my life, combining that with the Marine Corps. you know, where you are responsible for the lives of other people and you have to make decisions that affect other people. There couldn't have been better training for any other leadership situation I've been in. When going back to where you got selected for this scholarship program, one thing you said is here, nobody's going to outwork me. Absolutely.

I remember the day I got that, you know, because I just said, okay, I'm going to wrap myself a little tighter here. You know, somebody up there likes me. I remember that when I, you know, when you got the, the letter from the Navy in the mailbox, if it was a thin little letter, you know, it was a no. You know, and I got the packet. And I remember it was cold. I got that packet. And I went, I did this, you know. And I am going to bust my tail, you know.

And then it came, all right, back then it was like there were 51 schools that had these programs, and you listed the top six in order, and then yes, no, yes, no, will I go to these others? And I'm sitting in Omaha, Nebraska, freezing. I'll go anywhere. And then I put down the six warmest schools. I did not know the University of California from the Man in the Moon, but I said, University of California sounds warm, and I put it on the top, and I got into, University of California. I mean, they didn't have their Nebraska quota that year or something,

I don't know, and had a great time there, did very well in the military program, and my Marine Corps, the Marine Corps officer in the program said, you really should go to the academy, you know, and so did my dad. My dad saw how much fun I was having down there, and he said, we need to lock this boy up, you know. So you applied then for the Naval Academy while you're at USC. And was that, were you surprised to get in there? Well, I think, first of all, I had ranked first in the leadership programs at Southern Cal. And I got strong recommendations. Major Unterkoffler was the Marine, and my Lieutenant Colvern was the naval instructor,

and they both wrote strong letters for me. and I had to get letters of recommendation from high school. And, you know, when I was in high school, I did really well in the literature programs, even though I've got put in dummy English my senior year. You know, and, you know, we were like, what did you do last summer while they were studying the great artist? But the woman who was my teacher, she saw how much I loved to write and read and this sort of thing. And so she wrote me a wonderful letter. And then, you know, I was on the presidential appointment side, which was active duty military.

And I think they took, I can't remember now whether they took 50 or 75, but they took a certain number from the country. And I got in. So, you know, the Naval Academy is a, is a story unto itself. You have one section. And I obviously didn't go to the Naval Academy. Of course, I worked with a ton of people over the years that did. but I thought that this little story well I just thought it might capture some stuff about the Naval Academy and I'm gonna read this going again this is still from the book I heard my country calling after din I reported to the room across the hall where the four who had joined evening come around towards its end took turns beating me with a cricket bat touch your toes I aye sir I would lean over and touch my toes they would hit me swinging the bat as if taking batting practice for

slow pitch softball game I would then come to attention and resume my brace which is standing at the position of attention beat army sir did that hurt Webb no sir touch your toes aye aye sir the bat would connect again beat army sir did it hurt no sir okay touch your toes aye aye sir the blow would come I would straighten up again beat army sir did it hurt no sir after they had each hit a couple of slow pitch home runs and it apparently stopped being fun and their exuberance diminished one of them finally told me that if I would simply admit that it hurt they would stop beating me but for all I knew even this guarantee could have been double-think if I told them it hurt would I really

be allowed to leave or would it just bring yet another lecture in another round or worse yet did they really want to send me back across the hallway I had already dealt with Doctor no pain before dinner I did not want to survive the cricket bat only to go back to the Toothpick which was another torture they were putting it through the pain actually left my body or maybe it was merely my brain's reaction as I would later find out with Marines who were wounded so severely that their nervous systems became overloaded and shut down so that they could not feel any pain I had I had detached myself from the moment it was as if I was watching myself from another room did it hurt web No sir just tell us that it hurt

idiot did it hurt I could hear worry in his voice somehow the very abuse that they were now weary of perpetrating had inspired me by refusing to lose I felt that I was somehow winning no sir touch your toes another blow beat army sir behind me I heard them discussing that the bat had split lengthwise on my ass all right get out of here web I aye sir so yeah What year was this 1964? Yeah. Naval Academy was a different place, needless to say, than it is now.

When Bob Timberg was writing his book Nightingale song, we discussed that incident. And one of the comments he made was he, meaning me, was not particularly bitter about it, but he could still give me the individual's names. and I still could, I'm not going to. But, you know, the Naval Academy at that time, you know, the pendulum swings in terms of indoctrination and where education fits in and what type of education, et cetera, et cetera. But this class, a class of 1968, the pendulum in terms of plebebe indoctrination had swung very far, and it was by company, really.

They were like tribal systems were 36 different companies. And some of them were relatively loose and some of them were really, you know, actually we had two companies in my class that ran out, physically ran out more than half of their plebs. And these are people who were highly screened. I give some details in the book about the number of class valedictorians, varsity athletes, eagle scouts, etc. Which actually, when people have asked me, you know, what's the great benefit you got out of going to the Naval Academy? I mean, one thing I said is, well, I knew that I could achieve among these people who had achieved in different ways in high school than I had. I learned, you know, that I could compete and that, you know, I was on the right track, attitude and everything. But this class, I think we started with 1350, and the first week or two of a plea year, when some people resigned, they allowed new increments to come in just for a very short period of time.

So let's just stick with 1350. I think we graduated 841. We had the highest attrition rate of any post-war Naval Academy, post-World War II Naval Academy class. And there were some really people who would have been fine officers who were run out for one reason or left. And that time period, too, coincided with the very beginning of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, a lot of different, you know,

things that were tearing the country aside. I can remember coming back from boxing practice in the summer of 1964. We had to know the, one of the rates when you went down on the tables was to know the three top news stories of the day. And they're on the front page with the Gulf of Tonkin incident off of the coast of Hanoi, the picture of the CO, and we were like saying, okay, I think this is really going to happen. The year that I graduated in 1968 was the the worst year for American casualties. And it also was the year where in April, Martin Luther King

was killed. In June, the night before we graduated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. It was just and, to back it up, the Tet 68 offensive happened right before Martin Luther King was killed. So that it was just boom, boom, boom, the last year. And different people reacted in different ways. But I I think the majority of the people that I was with there during that period, it gave us a real seriousness of purpose. We knew where we were going. It wasn't going to go away, particularly for the Marine Corps. We all knew that we were going.

And so by the time I graduated, there was no doubt in my mind where I was going to go. It was one of the reasons why on first class cruise, you know, at the Naval Academy, it used to be, after your first year, you cruised with the enlisted folks. You know, I lived with the snipes on a CVS after my first year. That was a great learning experience, too, by the way, to see how hard those guys worked down here. They hardly ever saw the light of day. They were a trip, too, in a living spaces. I remember when they, you know, that we had like six or seven midshipmen in this big living space. And, you know, they're giving us the dirtiest job they could give us, you know, get down into villages and scrub, whether we've saved this for you, et cetera.

And I said, whatever they want me to do, man, I'll do. And so I remember the day they accepted me, we had this first-class petty officer who was kind of like the guy there. And they had one wall lockers, four-by-four wall locker where they kept all of them. there are different types of books and other supplies. And they added, okay, Webb, come on over here. And they gave me the combination to that locker. And then they broke out a bottle of booze, and they sent a boot up to the mess hall and scored a can of apple juice.

And we came back and we said, okay, you know, you're all right, Webb. And after my third year, because I knew I was going to Vietnam, I said, I didn't like maybe to see the med. So I signed up for a med cruise and got on the Saratoga, USS Saratoga. And I think as I wrote about it in this book, we graduated the morning after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 began. And so we went to, we flew to road to Spain, then out to Suda Bay Crete, where the Saratoga came in to pick us up. And they had just met a VAC the USS Liberty. The hangar deck was littered with casualties of the USS Liberty. And when we, you know, we took the small boats out and started bringing our gear in and got to the hangar deck and there were Marine Guards around them, they said, do not talk

any of these people. And, you know, we went up to our, there's about 48 of us that were on the Saratoga. We went up to our living spaces and that was an incredible cruise because the Soviet Navy had just broken down into the med, and we were playing games with them the whole time. They cross-decked the Liberty casualties into the America, which took them into Athens. But it was, you know, constant air ops on that carrier while we were there. Incredible learning experience. Yeah, that's, if you have, seeing air ops on an aircraft carrier, the first time that I saw it, I was, it's, it's insane. It's what it is.

It's insane. And that's just normal life on a carrier. And you know the difference, same thing talking about my dad and the missile squad, the difference back then and now was I had a little 8mm movie camera. And, you know, after evening meal, I could go sit on the flight deck and take pictures of flight ops. You know, now, you know, for safety reasons and whatever other reasons, you can't do that. But I've got some great shots of some of the, you know, the RA5 taken off of those things. And we had spads on there. And that whole cruise, we had an A4, they said with a nuke on it and the front right catapult

because of the situation that was going on in the Middle East. So, yeah. This is, I thought, pretty pertinent here is you're at the academy. And this is what you're talking about right now. But going back to the book, as the Vietnam War gathered intensity, the leadership of the brigade began posting pictures and biographies of alumni who had been killed or missing in action on a large board in the middle of the rotunda just inside the main entrance to Bancroft Hall the pictures and short Biographies were taken from the Lucky Bag the class yearbook from the year that each alumnus had graduated

The board on which the notices were placed was large perhaps eight feet high and four or five feet wide At its top was a boldly lettered inscription To those who went before of us before us as the class of 1968 neared graduation the to those who went before us board had become two boards and then three a high percentage of the alumni listed were either Marines or naval aviators many of their names and faces were familiar to all of us more than a few included friends and some of these were especially close so the That's a reality for everyone there, especially because in 1964, that wasn't happening.

And then you go to 1968 and you're filling up this board. You walk by it every day and look at that, you know, you look to see what the new faces are. And the classes of 66 and 67 in the Marine Corps were hit very hard, potentially 8. Yeah, and I think I wrote about this, but I think one of the toughest moments, of that period of my life was when I was the brigade administrative officer. And so, you know, my job, which wasn't much of a job, was to go to the main office, clear out all the correspondence in there, sort it out, pass it to the rest of the brigade staff, et cetera.

And one of them was bringing the casualty reps to the brigade first lieutenant who kept the board on. And without even knowing it while I picked them up, I picked up the casually report. one of my good friends. And you graduate from the academy, and it's time to go to, time to go to the basic school and learn. And I've talked a bit about the base school. I've had Marines on here that went through it.

Brian Stan, and he gave us pretty good details on the basic school. But obviously at this time for you, I'm just gonna go to the book for the Marines combat and overseas deployments were unending the greatest burden fell on the privates and Lance corporals fresh from boot camp who populated the lower ranks of the rifle platoons and the lieutenants just out of the basic school who commanded them The basic school which we called TBS was now starting a new class of 250 lieutenants every three weeks In pre-Vietnam days TBS had taken 30 weeks to complete as Vietnam accelerated the time a new lieutenant spent at TBS was reduced to 26 weeks and then to 21 but true to the traditions of long-held disciplines of the core this reduction took place not by cutting the quality or the

content of the curriculum but by rather by lengthening the number of hours spent in class and in the field every work week almost every week TBS companies worked late into Saturday evening they spent a high percentage of their time in the field and a large percentage of that time was dedicated to night maneuvers and Bivouacs our company was given the day off on Christmas working late into the evening of December 24th and assembling on the tarmac for a field activity at 0 630 in the morning of December 26th within a month of within a month after finishing TBS the infantry lieutenants among us would be boarding military flights to Travis Air Force Base

California to report immediately for 13-month tours in Vietnam as individual replacements in infantry battalions that were already engaged in sustained heavy combat. Well, of course, let me say something about basic school at that time. That's probably the best school I've ever been to. As I wrote, the course got condensed in its time, but not in the quality of what they were preparing us to do. On the one hand, the Marine Corps had dropped the 60-millimeter mortar out of its arsenal after the Korean War. They decided that they didn't need it with more artillery, close air, et cetera. They learned early in the Vietnam War that it was a valuable weapon. They put

the 60-mike-mike package back into basic school. So, actually added a tactical package into the basic school curriculum. They cut out some of the... dress and ceremony stuff. You know, they did, they did take that stuff out. Not all of it, but some of it. But we worked six days a week, and we worked, yeah, we worked on the 24th and the 26th of December. We worked on the 31st and the 2nd of July, I mean of January. And, you know, it was, I think the intensity actually helped prepare us. Some of the great friends in my life are people that I met in basic school. We were constantly together, and by doing this every day, you know, intensely every day, you've got a better feel for what you actually were going

to be required to do. The interesting thing about basic school, one of the reasons I say it was the best school I've ever been to was it was educational, it was practical, and it was looking toward the future. For instance, any weapon system, and we, we, we, we, we, learned every weapon in the infantry battalion in basic school. They would teach it to you in class. Then you would walk out, assemble, disassemble, familiarize it, and then you would go shoot it, every single weapon. My first day, my first night as a rifle platoon commander, I took the platoon that I just picked up into a night move, night ambush, and hit a North Vietnamese unit with a 51-com machine gun, used every supportive.

arm in the Marine Corps except for close air. A very first patrol. Did all the on-calls, et cetera. And, you know, that was basic school. So. Did they go out, how did they run problems with you in the field during the basic school? Would they take you out on patrol? Did they have opt-for players that would attack you?

Planes, we ran close air. There weren't any planes attacking us. It's the same thing. Oh, no, no, no. I said role players. So when you were doing a patrol in the basics school, how did you simulate and how well did they simulate it? Some of it was a walkthrough.

You know, you would start with the walkthroughs. First of all, we had really talented combat experienced instructors. and all of our our platoons or a company is broke down in five platynts

alphabetically you know you know how that works when you're sort of at the end of the alphabet you know we got the worst gear

we got the lasting line for everything and I can remember one night we were getting dismissed during a company formation and one of the

was a former enlisted Marine in our platoon we were Roberts through Zell or something, you know, and he just started yelling, this fucking zoo! And from that point, for a lot of times when we'd march,

we'd go zoo, zoo, you know. But we had, you know, our staffed platoon commander had been seriously wounded as a rifle of platoon commander in the 5th Marines. You know, all of our staffed platoon commanders had been in,

in combat. There were a lot of talks, you know, those sorts of things. But then on the tactic side, you'd go out, you'd learn it, you know, you'd learn it in class, you'd go out and walk through it, and then you'd have aggressors. You know, a lot of these were SDT, called SDT aggressors, which were enlisted Marines just back from Vietnam, who just loved to mess with the basic school lieutenants. The big problem, and the greatest surprise, I have to say, in moving into combat, the big problem was if you were, say, for this exercise, if you're the platoon commander on this platoon in the attack exercise, you've got 49 other lieutenants sitting there saying, no, but I'm not going to do it that way. No, look, come on, man. No, that's no, which you don't need to be online. We need to be in a wedge, you know, or, you know, you need to do whatever, whatever, whatever, you know. And I'll never forget the first. feeling of actually commanding a rifle platoon in combat and being on the move and I just said, hold it up and everything just stopped. You know, that word just right now. I got, boom. I mean, when it was everybody stopped, you know, and I went, wow, this is pretty good.

But, you know, there were, there were things that could have been taught better. The one thing is one of the things that I am very proud of in terms of the way that we did operate in Vietnam. I had a lot of leeway to innovate. That's kind of been lost, I think, in the history of it.

And there were, I mean, some letters I wrote back to officers that I knew talking about, you don't really, you didn't, you have a patrolling package over here, and you got a platoon and an attack package over here, but really what we do all the time is we patrol, then we assemble,

then we attack, you know, or if we're going to go into a built-up area, as from the section you read, the excerpt you read from Fields of Fire, you know, I know when to go online, I know when to put my troops on, I know where to put my guns. That didn't come from basically school. The separate entities did. We connected it in the reality of what we were doing. And I'll tell you, there's a long line. We're getting a little ahead of things, but there's a long line of things that the young leaders in Fifth Marines had done before I got there and also in what I was able personally to do as a rifle platoon and particularly as a company commander. One of the things we saw, and I wrote an article about this concept when I got back from Vietnam, was that the Marine Corps fire team, this is simple and small, but it really is, you know, institutionally

important. The Marine Corps fire team was four Marines. It was built around the BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle.

It had been put into place in World War II because at the beginning of World War II, the Marines only operated in squads, like 11 Marine squads. And they found

that a squad who couldn't control directly control, 11 people. So they went into the triangular concept with the, you know,

the, four marine fire teams. But the problem with that was if you took two casualties, you don't have a maneuver element. And it is built around an artificial notion because the M-16 could be fully automatic. You know, I kept some M-14s in my platoon as well. So what the young leaders in the Fifth Marines just sort of over time to start a doing was cannibalizing the third rifle squad. And so in our rifle platoon, instead of having three rifle squads and then a gun team

attached from this notional weapons platoon, we put the rifleman into two squads and then brought the gun team in as the third squad for the triangular concept. And that just kind of happened, you know. And no one told us to do it. We just said, you know, you can't, with the casualties. casualty flow that we were taking, you just couldn't do it any other way and be effective with fire teams as maneuver elements. We moved at night, constantly, Fifth Marines, we moved at night. We were known for moving at night. We walked when we moved. The helicopter assets

in Vietnam for the Marine Corps were scarce. The H-46 was built to standards from amphibious carriers, amphibious assault ships. So they were built to deck space and, you know, for amphibious assaults, but then when you get into continuous ground operations, they just weren't enough of them, and they were very vulnerable to ground fire. So in areas where the Army would have been, you know, picking up with a, you know, a Huey, you know, getting breakfast and getting on the Hueys, and I'm not running them down. This was a great concept, the air mobile concept. and moving in on areas, we walk. We had, for a long time, we had two H-46s for our entire sector during the day,

you know, resupply or medevacs, whatever. So we had a lot of walking. It taught you how to fight at night, but also when something happened, the casualties were high because your, you know, asshole to belly button when you're walking along, you know. if you hit it, you know, it was not an uncommon practice. They get a booby trap, an IED go off and you get an ambush on it at night. You know, your people are packed in, et cetera. But, and 60 Mike Mortar, I decided, there were people who taught us as a company tactics in basic school.

The 60 millimeter mortar is the company commander's personal weapon. So I decided when I was a company commander, I would get sent, and I liked this, I would get sent, you know, way away, at the edge of our battalion's sector, kind of operating independently. But I'd fire sometimes 600 rounds a day. And I'd send a rifle platoon in to secure an area when we're on the move, you know, became a combat patrol to get a new spot, send a rifle platoon in, secure the area, take a resupply, have them drop a pallet. I was going to ask me a hump in 600 rounds. No, no. See, that was the tradition beforehand.

Yeah, you can hump maybe 40 rounds, you know. But I'd have them drop a pallet in. I'd have them build two sandbag parapet areas for the 16. We kept two. The T.O. was three. We kept two. And I'd use them for prep fires. I'd use them for H&I's.

You know, and my guys got really, really good. Yeah, the mortar teams, I've been out in the field with the Marine Corps when they, you watch those guys set up on fire mortars, you know, just in training. And it's ridiculous how good they are. It's an awesome thing to watch. It's a beautiful thing to watch. Yeah, the reason I kind of dug in a little bit about the training, because when I came back from my last deployment to Ramadi, I took over the training. And so it was, it was all that. That's all I was trying to do was getting guys ready for what they were about to face.

And we had, we had this incredible opportunity. You know, we had this, you ever heard of Miles Gear? Yes. Yeah, so we had something that wasn't Miles Gear. It was like Miles Gear, but it was infinitely better. It was super high-speed, multi-million dollar system, had little speakers on your shoulders. So when you were getting shot at, you'd hear snaps from these little speakers

or you'd get mortared and there'd be explosions going off in your ears. It was, it was awesome. No, we didn't have any of that. They actually had the very beginning of that concept when we went, live fire early on where they had targets would pop up and hit you to the target that was the most sophisticated we get

And what I found with live fire was Live fire because when I came in It was all we did everything live fire And that was the big deal and we still we never got away from Live fire but we added to it This whole force on force training Where you're going against guys with either with lasers or with paintballs And that was infinitely more realistic because the paper targets never

maneuvered on you and same thing when you had the guys returning from Vietnam who were maneuvering on you and you're at the basic school I had all my seals that had just come back from combat deployments and they were the guys that were going against the platoons that were getting ready to deploy so it's uh it was awesome and I would get the feedback I would get was always hey it was it was actually easier in combat you know minus the the actual death but the the threat of actual death the maneuvering that would happen you know they were used to maneuvering against seals who were badass and now They're maneuvering against someone else.

It's not quite as, you know, in the game. And also, the enemy doesn't know our tactics as well as we know it. So my guys would know the tactics that was going to be used against them. So it was awesome. But it's just when you talk about showing up in Vietnam and your first patrol, you're going out and you're in that and you handle it, that's a complete testament to the quality of that training because it's freaking crazy. You know, I think we were talking about this last night, attitude development is the key. everything, you know, and getting your mind right in terms of what you're going to do, and knowing the assets that are available.

And, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about this, too, you know, in terms of what I was going to face. I had one really terrific mentor who, when I graduated from the Naval Academy, I spent like two months as a drill officer with the new class coming in before reported to basic school. And I was a battalion drill officer. There were six of us. There were six battalions. I got the Marine Battalion officer who had just gotten out of the hospital from having been wounded in Contean.

It was a company commander, Alpha-1-1. And he was terrific. Bill Stenson was his name. And, you know, he'd been shot. He'd been blown up. And he was like so easy. I mean, no bullshit, easy. And easy as a leader.

And so the other five drill officers in my class, they got their own office with their battalion officer and stenciling goes, why do you need an office? So you're a lieutenant now, you get an office. Why do you need an office? Why don't you just sit in my office? So I sat in his office and every day it was like, you know, talking back and forth, you know. I'd go out and I'd do, you know, once I'd go do my four miles and do all my stuff and he'd come back and he'd say, what are you doing?

And that's all I'm getting ready to go to Vietnam. He says, you want to know what it's like in Vietnam? He said, I'm going to take you out tonight and we're going to get really, really drunk. And I'm going to keep you up all night. And then tomorrow you're going to work. And that's what it feels like. And he did. You know, the next day I was like, oh, man, please don't talk so loud, sir.

And then before I left, one of the things I talked to him about before I left for basic school, I said, what did it feel like to get shot at? And he goes, don't even think about that stuff. I mean, it's just, you know, forget about that stuff. Just do your job, you know. And that was the very first thing I thought about when I took that patrol out. I could hear a stunts and going, just don't. I don't even think about that stuff, you know.

I'm going to take it to the book here for a minute because, well, this is the chapter called Hell in a very small place. And it talks about exactly what you're saying here. So back to the book, from the day of my arrival as platoon commander with dying Delta, we had been engaged in continuous combat operations. Intensified in recent weeks by a series of unpredictable, vicious firefights. Despite a steady flow of individual replacements, the numerical field strength of our rifle company had been reduced by about half over. the past three months this was an equal opportunity battlefield we lost Marines through every possibility that infantry combat offered including gunshot wounds from several different caliber weapons and all kinds of shrapnel large caliber rockets rocket

propelled grenades RPGs different sorts of hand grenades 61 and 82 millimeter mortar fire recoilless rifles plus landmines of every size from a grenade to large caliber artillery shells rifle platoons were largely made up of young both officers and enlisted by 1969 the vaunted ranks of the career and staff NCOs who historically been the backbone of the Marine Corps were showing the the effects of four years of heavy combat in the infantry battalions that impact was both visible and profound within a few days of my within a few days my platoon sergeant the fourth

Marine to hold this key position in the past three months would leave us a severe case of ringworm covering his torso including his entire crotch area front and back my first platoon sergeant had been hit by a booby trap while maneuvering one segment of our platoon onto a ridge line during an extensive firefight suffering suffering shrapnel wounds in his hands and arms and stomach area blowing off pieces of his fingers and slicing his bladder the second platoon sergeant had served with us for a couple of weeks and then was sent by the company commander to another unit the third had picked up his third purple heart after being hit by an RPG and thus had been rotated out of Vietnam

The fifth on his second Vietnam tour became sick of the constant combat and suddenly decided to leave the Marine Corps and our rifle company when his enlistment expired toward the end of this very operation In practical terms this turbulence intensified the relationships between the platoon commanders and the squad leaders as daily life and death tactical decisions would need need to be made in these relationships I often ended up being the oldest and most wizened voice at the age of 23 I was now on my fourth platoon radio operator who within weeks would be shot through his elbow ending his days in the Marine Corps two months before in April I had lost two radio operators in one day the first shot through that the hand by the enemy by an enemy sniper

as he held the receiver of our PRC 25 radio in the middle of a fire Firefight. Luckily for our platoon, if not for him, his hand had partially shielded the radio's handset, which survived the bullet. Otherwise, we would have been isolated, surrounded by hundreds of mobile and highly adept enemy soldiers. On combat patrols that ranged far away from our company headquarters, the tactical radio was our sole means of communicating our position and to call in artillery support in medevacs.

This, of course, was why the enemy loved to shoot at it. hour later the second radio operator been blown off his feet hit below the knees in both legs by a booby trap as we assaulted a ridge radio operators did not have much luck in my platoon by the time I left the platoon I had gone through six two of my original three squad leaders had been killed one by an enemy rocket and the other from a gunshot wound to the chest the third had been shot through the lung and in the liver during the onset of an enemy ambush although grievously wounded he had survived the firefight and was later medevac to a Navy hospital ship and so it had been for the officers who

had initially staffed our rifle company the first platoon commander had been killed three weeks before the second platoon commander had been lightly wounded less than two weeks before and within the next few weeks would suffer a serious gunshot wound in his upper thigh a bullet narrowly missing it an artery. I had been lightly wounded and would be seriously wounded a month later. Well, let's set the stage. Let's start the final couple of days in basic school because one of the most important, wasn't a speech, but one of the most important speeches that I had listened to during my preparation time was given that. There was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who was assigned to the basic school

who asked to talk to the infantry lieutenants. We had, I think, somewhere in the 70s of our 243 who finished basic school were assigned to the infantry. And this guy was highly respected. He had been an enlisted Marine rifleman on Iwo Jima. He had been a platoon commander in Korea, recipient of the Navy Cross, and had just finished commanding battalion in Vietnam.

And he said, I want you to understand something. Vietnam is the hardest war the Marine Corps has ever fought, not simply because of the casualties, which, by the way, ended up being higher even than World War II, if you combine killed and wounded, more killed in World War II, but because of the living conditions that these Marines are facing. This excerpt you were reading was sort of in the middle of an operation. In addition to those types of experiences, people rarely understand in America, the America of then, and particularly the America of today, what it was like to be in the Marine infantry in Vietnam, particularly all of them, but particularly out in Guangzhou.

province where we fought the Marines fought in five provinces in in Vietnam in quang tree which is where Kaysan and up next to the DMC to attend which is where Hui was quangnam west of Danang where we fought in kwangai when in Kwangtin was also a province then it's not a province now but a plurality and almost a majority of the Marines killed in Vietnam were killed in Kuanong an province. And I can't give you a really major battle. I mean, there are some operations that are notable in sort of Marine Corps lore, but no one on the country would even recognize them. These were squad, platoon, company-size engagements. And where the, the,

constant, constant combat activity. And where the Marines operated were usually outside of anything. We didn't have tents, we didn't have barbed wire, we didn't have cots, we didn't have electricity, didn't have hot food, didn't have clean water. It was an extraordinarily rough environment in terms of hygiene, potential disease, and just the wear and tear put on human bodies. So you put that on top of the combat side and then on top of what you had mentioned earlier, which is the constant flow of people through the apparatus that was the combat unit and the political tensions in the country. You put all that together.

You have a very, very tough environment where the Marines lived and also where the young leaders operated. So, you know, when I'm taking over a rifle platoon in that area called Annwa Basin, I'm just off the plane. You know, I graduated from basic school at 10 days travel, 10 days proceed, a little bit of leave, get on the plane, go through Okinawa for, you know, to kind of get your time zone straight. And then I didn't even know what regiment or what division I was going to when I hit Vietnam. We got to, actually on Okinawa, they decided which division you were going to go to. Okay, we're looking at the casualty flow.

You guys, you're going to the third Mardiv. You guys are going to first Mardiv. And then when you got to Donang headquarters of the first Marine Division, they would kind of sort us out to which regiment we were going to. We got a regiment. They said, okay, you're going to first battalion. They said, Delta, Delta needs a platoon commander. and get on a convoy, take off. The company had been through some serious combat in the previous days.

I think they had five platoon commanders in the previous five or six months. So dying delta was the... Where was the nickname? Is that like a derogatory? Was that just Gallo's humor? We kind of liked it. We just got a deadly dying delta, you know, or dog-tired delta. whatever, but you're constantly on to move.

And, you know, I'm new, and they're justifiably, they're going, oh, man, here, we've got a new guy here, now what? And there's always in the realm of leadership the relationship that you have to put into place. And you don't, you know, some people like to say, like to say, okay, when a lieutenant comes in, you can be like the observer for a while and go along in a patrol and watch. rarely did those people ever fully take over their platoon. You're either ready or you're not ready. And so I picked up my platoon, I got them on a side of a hill. I explained, you know. Did you insert into the field to take over?

Did you go right into the field? Oh, yeah. They were on the move. They were on the move from Liberty Bridge to Henderson Hill. On a company move, the convoy passed by. I jumped off the convoy. I'd talked on a radio to our company commander, you know, before. And I didn't even get three days in ANW.

Usually had three days in ANW for familiarity. He said, this guy's class ornamented in basic school, get him out here now. And so I took these guys over. I had him on the side of the hill, and I said, you know, this is Bob Timbergen, and his booked a Nightingale song, called this an audition for a fragging. I said, all right, I'm Lieutenant Webb. You call me Lieutenant or you call me, sir. And this is what I expect.

And I laid it all out, you know, and one of the things. things I said, which I think is very important when you're when you're leading anything. I said, I want you to know something. Anything you tell me, I will believe. Anything. You tell me the sky's brown, I will believe you. And if you lie to me, you're dead meat. And so there was like, what hell is this guy think he's doing, you know? And then we went out that night, you know, and I sat down, I planned it. We moved to the new perimeter. I went in and I called my squad leaders together. Is that a company size perimeter? Company size perimeter. I got my squad leaders in. I said, we got a night out. We got a night out. I, we got a

Night Act, and we're going to go here in a, I think was a Fulox, you know, got their input, listen, listen, listen, always listen. You know, being a commander doesn't mean you know all the answers. It means you know how to make a decision, you know, and how to follow through. And so I figured out, I listened to them, I figured out a place where we would go. I had a really terrific squad leader who was actually acting platoon commander that afternoon. And set a series of on calls, you know, you know, basic school. taught you, went out that night, walked in, you know, walked into a situation, used all the,

you know, the supporting arms, did our, did our thing, and that was put to rest, which was actually a good thing. And then the other thing, which I think is so important, you know, when you say, know your people, know, you know, what's the leadership? Leadership is knowledge. Know your people, know your job, know their job, and know the next job, because you never know when something's going to happen, you're going to have that next job. And it's character. And part of character is consistency and humility before your people. And as you mentioned from what the excerpt about my dad, moral courage.

There's different kinds of courage. Moral courage is sometimes you've got to take the hits. You've got to lay out what you believe is right and you've got to stay with it. And, you know, vision. In other words, even taking over a rifle platoon, you know, they knew fairly quickly that I knew what I was expecting, even though I hadn't done it yet. But knowledge of people and listening to people. I would go in about the first, you know, month or so that I was a,

I would take three hours to set my lines in every night, sit down in every fighting hole, talk to every one of my marines, and you find out, as you know, you find out really interesting things about maybe simple things like somebody hadn't gotten paid or somebody got married and had a cue a lot and it's not going to his wife. Nobody's taken care of just simple things, you know, and then, you know, then the bonds move from there. You, you just to reiterate the conditions, because I pulled out this section in here where you talk about the conditions. And just to reiterate what you're talking about, going back to the book here, and in the rifle companies, we spent endless months patrolling ridgelines and villages and mountains far away from tents, barbed wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what we could fit inside one's pack which after a few

Humps usually boiled down to letter writing material towel soap toothbrush poncho liner and a small transistor radio due to casualties and disease during this period in the war relatively few Marines would actually survive a full 13-month tour as members of rifle companies in the bush of the basin we moved through the boiling heat carrying 60 pounds of weapons and gear causing a typical marine to drop 20% of his body weight while in the bush when we stopped we dug chest deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets we slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hooches and when it rained we usually took down our

hooches because wet ponchos shone under illumination flares making great targets sleep itself was fitful never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed daytime patrolling with nighttime ambushes listening posts Foxhole duty and radio watches ringworm hookworm malaria dysentery were common as was trench foot which in Vietnam was called immersion foot when the monsoons came respite for was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at Ann Hoy for four or five days where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night. That was your break time.

Anwa, yeah. They called it Little Dian Ben Fu. They're, you know, because... Yeah, they had a sign that's actually said that, right? Welcome to the Little Dian Ben Fu. And, you know, to... At least they kept their sense of humor. Tovert, you know, you know, people gallows humor is what gets you through, that kind of stuff. And to sort of set the tone of the, on the tactical side, you need to remember in terms of what was happening to the country at this time. This was a war that had been going on and had its controversies. But hundreds of people were dying every week, still, every week.

I brought this, and I know we're not on TV, but I brought this. There's a people can watch the video. You know, you're welcome to keep this and make copies that if you would send it back to me. But this was the cover of Life magazine June 27th, June 27th, 1969. Average week during this period, this was the period of Hamburger Hill, etc. 242 Americans died that week. Two of Marines are in that. But in the post-TET 69 period, which was April,

May, we were losing more than 400 Americans dead a week, you know, even though the war had, for the Americans in casualties had peaked in 1968. The three worst years for combat for Americans of Vietnam were 67, 68, and 69. They're like the top of the bell curve. We had in 69, I think we lost twice as many Americans killed as have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the entire war. And, you know, the American people supported this, and I've always believed in what we were attempting to do, however screwed up it got. But if you're out here in the Enwale Basin, the one thing that a good rifle platoon or company commander or battalion commander learned was how to adapt, how to adapt. You couldn't rarely, you could rarely plan operations, you know, sort of like Mike Tyson

said about being in a fight, everything's great until the first time you get hit, you know. On any given patrol or day in the N1 base, particularly in Arizona Valley, you could hit, you know, some idiot with, not idiots, maybe some smart, smart individual or small group of people with a couple of grenades, or you could hit a main force Viet Cong unit, which was heavily North Vietnamese, or you could hit a large force, large force, North Vietnamese. We fought in May of 1960, we fought with the 90th Regiment in the Arizona Valley. It went on for eight days and eight nights. We had a North Vietnamese division in base area 112, right off from where we were, the mountains started up into Laos, with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that sort of thing. We had a very fine of Viet Cong regiment, which was, you know, rather rare than an independent regiment, the first VC regiment.

We had the Q83 main force battalion operating out of the Arizona Valley, and then you had a lot of cats and dogs. And the other thing was this area had basically been written off by American war planners in terms of the politicization, you know, they're bringing them into the South Vietnamese government at that time. They categorized villages, Intel categorized villages, A through E, in terms of loyalty to the South Vietnamese government. A was totally loyal. E was totally on the other way. And then they had category five, which was politically hopeless, just forget it. And by 1958, you know, the country was divided in 1954, a million people came south, including my wife's entire family.

Not very many went north. Basically, cadre went north, and they trained. And starting in 1958, they started moving back into central Vietnam. The Ho Chi-Men's idea was to, or whoever was doing his planning, was to cut off central. Vietnam first, Annam. And so you had these assassination squads move into this area. And by 1961, they were killing 11 government officials a day. And that was by John Kennedy's account when he decided to start increasing our troops there.

So the villages had had their fights, beginning 58, heavily 58 to 6. 62 that time period and those who were staying with the communist basically had kicked out the people who weren't. A lot of moved to Danang and some of them later to Saigon. So out where we were, I say this because operationally, the populated villages that we operated in, they had big family bunkers, they were very, you know, they were stoic when we went through. Their people were up in the mountains.

We had no illusions that they were going to be moving to our side, at least during the, you know, I never thought the war was going to end the way that it did, but at least during the period that we were there. We were chatting about this a little bit before, but I wanted to call out this one point from the book. Almost every Marine who has ever fought in close combat can relay us stories of short rounds, stray rounds, misdirected shots, accidental discharges, and other chaos resulting from friendly fire. Mortars, artillery, and airstrikes can easily wander from their intended targets, sometimes due to map error and other times because of human error. Historically, friendly fire incidents during mobile, close combat operations make up about 10% of casualties. Intramural firefights can break out among friendly units that misidentify their fellow infantrymen, particularly while moving through enemy terrain at night.

And you got one incident that you call out the CH-46 helicopter. approached the perimeter ready to drop our day's load two Huey gunships circle overhead flying for cover the high highly vulnerable resupply helicopter which would soon be hovering above the battlefield and slowly descending into the small dirt clearing we had scraped out to make a landing zone at the center of our perimeter the strobe light flashed showing the pilot where to land but circling in the weed beds one of the gunships mistook the strobe light for the tracer bullets of an enemy machine gun the Huey immediately powered toward us in a low attack line

that came in just above our heads strafing our weary beleaguered perimeter perimeter its machine guns spitting out hundreds of 762 millimeter bullets I had just climbed a small sand dune to urinate at an empty spot away from the perimeter of poncho hooches and radios of my platoon command post the Huey's machine guns sprayed back and forth inside our lines kicking up a trail of dust spots just below my feet as I stood in the open after one past the Huey was finally waved away back into its circling defensive laps around our perimeter exposed as we were it seemed a miracle that only one Marine a radio operator near the strobe light in our company command post was hit taking a bullet in the stomach well I that's one

among among many and when you're when you're fighting so so close And actually, that incident occurred not too long after an arkelite strike. We were doing the BDA on an arc light. It's one of the great ironies, if I may digress just a little bit, because I think it's important to point out that in our operational concepts, we never used B-52's north of VIN. We never, until 1972, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. And when I go back, I've been back to Vietnam 28 out of the last 29 years.

I speak Vietnamese. You know, we still have our disagreements, but, you know, I go back there. And when I first started going back to Vietnam in the early 90s, everybody wanted to talk about that eight days. Everybody, you know, when they did this. And they were living under the illusion that they were withstand. American air power when we had these light aircraft like John McCain's aircraft coming in and, you know, making the runs when if somebody had made a different decision, I mean, the war's a war. If somebody made a different decision, things might have happened differently. But we did

use arc lights on the area that we supposedly were trying to salvage, you know, Gonoid Island. You know, we lit that place up. We were, uh, our, our company was, I think, three clicks away. when that arc light landed and I was holding onto the ground moving to the right and to the left, you know. How many pounds of bombs would get dropped there and run us? Oh, I've got some statistics in there, but just thousands and thousands of pounds of, you know, three B-52s would go over. And actually, I think in there I put the number right. But, you know, so, but to the friendly firemen,

incidents and how close it was, you know, we, the way that we would mark our areas, when you're on close air in that environment, you know, this isn't about the helicopter hitting our guy that was, you know, mistaking the strobe for a machine gun round, but in general, you always run your airstrikes parallel to your lines because you don't want them to drop short, you know, and drop on you. So they have to make a run. You know, we put airspace. We put air panels out usually. Sometimes we pop a smoke, but it's better with air panels during the day. And so they'd make a run before they'd drop. And so they'd say, okay, no, you're too close. No, you're not or whatever. And we had one, during this period where we were fighting the 90th

regiment out there in the Arizona Valley in May, we were running an airstrike against It's an NVA unit in a tree line about 400 meters away. And we had F-4s coming in. You know, and F-4 is a fighter. It's not a bomber. I mean, we use them for bombers. So the F-4 pilots, they're coming in at, I don't know, 450 knots, whatever it is, and they're looking out the side of their window to see what's on the ground.

So we were running the F-4s. My platoon actually was – we had a rear security in the perimeter while they were doing this. And they made their run, and then they came on the second round. run and the F4 dropped on us. And actually, it bounced right outside our perimeter. And then, you know, I'm like, what the hell? I hear it going right over the top of us. So I turned around.

I start, you know, I want to go into the company's CP and ask them what the hell is going on. So I'm walking through the scraggle of bushes, and I got all these Marines running the other way. And this thing had bounced. And we called the snake and nape. You know, the snake was the way. like a kind of a propeller would break out of the tail to arm it when you drop it. And luckily, the tail had broken off of this bomb when it hit.

But, you know, I turned around and these guys, you know, I see this thing flying through the air. I thought it was a body. You know, it was this green thing flying through the air and going down to where the CP, and I'm going in and all these guys are running the other way. And that bomb had landed on the pack of our 81's FO artillery radio operator. I mean, it was a packboard. Dead center. If that thing had gone off, curtains, you know.

And the other thing is night moves, you know, where one of the things you learn is when you operate like the Fifth Marines did is always be responsible for the person behind you, not the person. person in front of you. If you lose the person in front of you, stop. Don't try to catch up with them because there were a number of friendly fire incidents where someone would get lost, try to catch up, end up on the flank of the main unit, and you'd have an intramural firefight. Luckily, we didn't have that happen in my company, but it happened in the Fifth Marines. So you stop. If you can't find, see the guy in front of you, stop. And then if you can't see the person behind you, then you retrace the exact route that you've been on to go pick them up. So, you know, there were lessons that were learned and put into place.

Yeah, we always talk about the fact that, and Laif was my buddy's platoon commander with me, he and wrote books with me, but he was saying, you know, if you had asked him before we went to Ramadi, if we would have blue-on-blue, you know, fratricide situations, he'd have been like, oh, there's no possible way. And me, same thing, you know, like, it seemed like, especially in the SEAL teams, it was like, oh, that's never, that will never happen. It'll never happen. And sure enough, I mean, in that book, in our first book, we happen to write about three different, I mean, there's 12 chapters and three of them concerned friendly fire. Because you had to be more concerned about, well, not more concerned about you, but you had to be at least as concerned about deconfliction. And, you know, we would hang, we would hang, you know, giant aircraft panels. Once, once my guys would take. a building for a sniper overwatch position oftentimes if there was any question about where they were they'd hang giant air panels right out the way right as soon as they started shooting in the enemy knew where we were we wanted to make sure that the friendlies knew where we were just as

bad so yeah the the the the friendly fire problems that happened but when I came back and I started running training I would induce those and and and they happened to a hundred percent of the platoons that I put through training a hundred percent of them had had blue on blues you know with paintball or with the laser tag system that we used because it's it's one of those things no one thinks it can happen to them you know the other the other part of that to be really frank here in the the areas where we were operating you you you'd done we'd send night acts out every night you know you you can move we moved every three four days new perimeter um you'd send out listening

posts and listing posts and ambushes after dark. And, you know, you've got Marines out there, they don't really know where they are. You know, I mean, they don't have a map, you know, two or three people in a platoon has a map. And sometimes they aren't out where they're supposed to be or they think they are. And sometimes, you know, if you get somebody who's getting a little flaky, you know, who'll say, well, we don't have to go out there. Well, let's just go sit in this bomb crater here.

And they had an incident before I got to the company where there was a fire team that was sitting in a bomb crater about 50 meters outside the lines. And a guy stood up at like two in the morning and take a leak, and the Marine on the line shot him. And, you know, the guy who shot him ended up being a chaplain's assistant. I mean, you live with that the rest of your life. And by the time I got to be a company commander, I put something into place, which was very very, effective. And that is, the first thing I would do is I would send out my night axe when it was still light. And I would send them what I called a day pause. The listening post out to an outpost further away. The ambush to a site, I would have them walk by the site where they're,

you know, quietly check it out and then go to a pause like 100 meters away, whatever. So, and then when it got dark, they both were moving into known terrain. You know, the LP coming back toward the perimeter, so they had a sense of security there. The ambush, having researched the, you know, the ambush and moving back into it. And then I would mortar their daypots. And the first time I did that, I had an ambush out about clicking a half away. And they call me and they go, be advised, you're dropping mortars on us. I say, you are not where you're supposed to be.

be, dude. What are you going to do if you hit something? You know, what are we going to we're going to really drop rounds on you, you know? So it got everything real straight. When in doubt, drop mortars on your people. Make sure, well, if I'm hitting you with a mortar, you're not where you're supposed to be, and it's going to get a lot worse if you get hit out there. Oh, man. That'll solve that problem. You talk about, you know, I walked, this is back the book, I walked every square kilometers, of those ridges and rice fields I fought many of those villages I was wounded there and here is where I and my fellow combat veterans stand on one side of a great impassable divide with the rest of the world on the other yeah because every one of us knows that if our luck had run out or if someone among us had made one inadvertent mistake we could have died there no question you can be that's one

thing about, you know, I've heard you talk about IEDs before, you know, I would say 25 to 30 percent of our casualties were IEDs. Most of them were gunshot, a lot of shrapnel wounds, but with an IED, there's nothing more demoralizing or booby trap, as we call it them. And the, particularly if you're moving at night, the casualties are large, and there's nowhere to put your anger, you know. And if you're on, and if you're on, On the outside of that, you go, whoa, you know, that easily could have been made. You can be 100% right and still be dead. We had one device on a night move.

Every member of my platoon stepped over it on a narrow trail. I was walking fourth Marine in the column. And the last, we had a brand new guy. I put him on tail in Charlie. It was a company move. Actually, you named Battalion, but it was a company move. and it was some branch on the trail or something and a kabum and you know there were 19 casualties and an ambush after that so yeah for those of you that aren't in the military when you're moving at night especially pre-night vision then the only way you can do it is you have to be closer to the person in front of you because you got to be able to see them and so what that does and and you'll be within within being able and sometimes when it's really dark you'll be able to touch the person in front of you so therefore if someone hits a booby trap or an IED or an IED or where you get ambushed, the casualties are increased dramatically because you're just altogether.

And to add one thing about Ramadi on that is, I think when we got there, they had 140 known IEDs on the board at any given time. And there were a couple different incidents. One in particular that sticks in my mind was when we were putting in the 17th Street security station. A friend of mine's platoon was out providing external security with gun trucks. and I guess his truck sat on an IED all night and then right when they were about to move it went off and took the front of the truck with it. Luckily nobody was killed.

But it's nothing you can shoot back at. You can't really prepare for it. Yeah. Sometimes you got to get lucky. We had the similar thing where we were going to a combat outpost and a convoy of just, you know, our seals heading to a convoy or heading to a combat outpost. when my point man or lead driver or someone said hey I think there's something ahead of us in the road

stops the vehicle I'm actually watching him he gets out looking underneath the vehicle with a flashlight to look and see I'm thinking myself hmm this doesn't seem good didn't identify anything we roll through we get to the combat outpost and then a couple hours later the dagger clearance team came through and found a triple stack you know 120 millimeter mortars that would have killed everyone in that vehicle for sure and if not a few others So sometimes it's better to be lucky than good and for those you out there if you think you're on an IED Maybe not the flashlight approach Yeah, absolutely not Quietly walk away Yeah, I've I had I did that it was a my first deployment to Iraq

I'm standing there and my EOD guys were doing a target hit and I my EOD guys find a A booby trap and it was in a plan or box outside perfect spot where a where an assault team would stack up and There was a little plant and it was filled with a two or three 60 millimeter mortars that were rigged from the house and so my you know D guy found it was just you plug it into the wall and it goes off so there was and there was actually a little hole cut in the curtain so the guy could actually sit there and watch and when we rolled up boom and so he found the wire he saw it went out the window followed it out there finds the booby trap and I'm standing there

watching him you know disarm this booby trap and he looks over his shoulder and he says you might not want to stand here And I was like, that's a good point. I'll be somewhere else. Yeah, you know, they, in this area of Vietnam, they could become accustomed to a lot of our operational decisions. You know, we like the high ground. We like to get a spot where you can see some of these rice patties

were like a mile wide, you know, and if you want a place where you can have visuals and also provide, you know, potential supporting weaponry for people crossing and patty, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, they picked these out, you know, and we had one hill, Hill 11 in the Arizona Valley, where, you know, we'd send, when we'd be getting these terrain features, the thing you'd do is you'd send a platoon to sweep it. You know, when you first get up, sweep it, secure it, not just for booby traps, but, you know, for putting your, your, your other units in. The platoon swept it with second platoon.

They found a mine. Lude the mine. I left, I was going to put my lines in, and I didn't want to bring my platoon up on that hill with having found the mine. So I left the rest of my platoon on the bottom hill, put an air panel on McGarvey's head, my radio operator.

He said, do not move. I want to see where you are? I brought my squad leaders. We were clearing lanes down into where we were going to put our Marines. And I heard this kabum, and I look up behind me, and someone had moved these people up to the top of the hill. I turned around to see a guy flying through the air with a big artillery room. And I saw McGarvey and running with his arm hanging by a shred. He was standing behind him, so we had casualties on top of that hill.

Pretty messy after a lot of other things we'd been through. And then the next morning, our 81's FO, we set up our perimeter, got mortared that afternoon, and he rolled over the next morning, and his elbow went down. And he reached up, and it was like a little piece of C-Rash and cardboard. He peeled it, covered with mud, like, you know, like plastic surgery, so nothing lifting. fitted it up and there was a one seven five artillery round with a pressure release detonator on it that he had slept on all night if he had just rolled over a little bit i think they found 15 booby traps on that on that one hill eventually so what a nightmare um and i guess what a good job on him on getting a sound night sleep and not rolling over i think he's probably woke up on the

middle night on that one of your times thinking about how lucky he was he was a good job on him on I'm lucky you Um Here's you're talking you talk a little bit about the overall Kind of the overall I guess the overall occurrences that were going on We're beyond what's just sitting right in front of you So here we go but something else was going on it stem from the reality that on any given day

Three different wars were being fought in the basin The first war involved conventional combat against North Vietnamese army regulars and main force Vietong Soldiers The second war was the daily challenge of an insurgency dominated by a long-term war of attrition aimed at driving American public opinion and troop morale against our own involvement in Vietnam at the beginning of what became known as the American War communist leader Ho Chi Minh men famously predicted for every one of you we kill you will kill ten of us but in the

end it is you will who will grow tired the third war focused Was a focused and precise form of domestic terrorism at this point in our history America's top leadership had yet to fully grasp the power and impact of a type of terrorism that went well beyond the traditional notions of military insurgency Nor did the South Vietnamese government ever find a way to completely counter it. It was a largely invisible war of terror and seduction was taking place daily among the rural populace designed to discredit the South Vietnamese government and to drive a murderous wedge between the people and the government and you go on to talk about Bernard Fall and his book you know he's a French author who wrote a bunch of books spent time there wrote a book called hell in a very small place and he warned the Dick Van am I saying that right

Dick Van Dick von or moral intervention cadres these were groups and what they were doing was the violent act for psychological rather than military reasons which is the source of the success of the Vietnam and the Dick Vonn will simply go on murdering village chiefs youth leaders teachers and anti-malarial teams thus isolating the Saigon government from the countryside and you describe one of these situations There was no warning From around that unseen bend the air suddenly belched and erupted quick explosions piercing our ears and reverberating like an unseen blast of wind My adrenaline surged I counted three quick bursts of rifle fire and then a wump of three grenades

The entire platoon became animated tense picking up the pace to a jog as we strode toward the noise Within a few heartbeats a young Vietnamese wild-eyed and gasping for breath collided on the trail with the point man of the platoon Instinctively the Marine tackled the young man and held him on the ground we did not know it yet but there had been two others after its attack the the assassination squad had split apart we would not capture the other two more regrettably we would not be able to kill them the district chiefs meeting had not lasted very long we were the first Marines to reach the hooch I quickly deployed my platoon in defensive positions around it in case there was a second attack then I stepped inside the shadowed blood-soaked room. My platoon Corman and my radio operator came with me. Within minutes our company's chief Corman stepped inside, having jogged down from the command post on Henderson Hill. Their unit one medical bags would soon be empty of battle dressing in tourniquet.

Together we began the ugly business of triage, separating the dead from the near-dead and the near-dead from those who might be medically saved. Inside the hooch, my hands, arms, trousers, and boots had quickly become covered with blood. We pulled the dead outside, lining them up in the field as if they were already under markers in a cemetery, then covered them up so that the feasting flies might find some other place to linger. We had a problem with flies on the battlefield. They buzzed everywhere into our food and onto our open sores. On an earlier morning, I had counted more than a dozen floating inside my canteen cup as I heated a mix of water and sea ration hot chocolate foolishly I had bitten into them thinking they were chunks of

chocolate we carried out the wounded on the dirt floor of the hooch we had found them wriggling and turning like worms among each other as they had sought to escape the ankle deep syrup of blood and innards I noticed the district chief's young deputy deputy who stood out from the others due to his fancy clothes blown backward into a family altar by the blast he was frozen in death with one arm raised in the air as if he were trying to catch the grenade that had killed him that hand was gone nothing but the top of a forearm remained its white tendons sticking out randomly like unspliced electrical wires I'd approach an old woman who was leaning back against a mud wall with a stunned look on her face her jaw had dropped

and her eyes stared unbelievably at nothing I thought she was merely in shock I pulled her arm immediately recognized the lack of muscular response of the dead I took a closer look and saw that she had taken a square nickel-sized piece of shrapnel in the middle of her forehead just above her eyes and so on as I waited in the muck it did not get any better this was the war we were losing perfectly summarizing Bernard Falls observation on this morning the Viet Cong were not asking for anyone's support they were asserting their control for all of the bombs we dropped many of them so randomly that they killed people that They killed the very people we were trying to help and for all the for all of us enemy soldiers we killed our leaders did not understand the cold Focused violence perpetrated by the other side They had deliberately killed a room full of their own people a violent act for psychological rather than military reasons as a warning to end

everyone in the basin that it was a crime punishable by death to even attend a political meeting hosted by the other side. True. Let me, let me, see if I can, I can go back to the three points that you read about and just elaborate a little bit. There were three wars in any given day. I've talked a little bit about it earlier. on the straight conventional side, unit against unit, there's no question we defeated those forces.

Finally, and, you know, people, during the war, we're talking about the body count, the body count, the inflated body count, etc., etc. In 1995, Hanoi admitted they lost 1.4 million soldiers dead. 1.4 million soldiers dead. We lost 58,000. The South Vietnamese, I really want to say something about because I think they have been disrespected by history. They lost about 250,000 dead. And so we did our job.

That was our main job. The second war you're talking about the guerrilla war, I think we did well, but we could have done better. One of the things that Bernard Fall talked about was how our... Our supporting arms, we used, we heavily used artillery, mortars, and these sort of things. And in the villages, it seemed kind of random. And the communists were very focused, you know, not on the battlefield, but how they used stuff outside the battlefield. They were very focused on who they were after in addition to, like, showing that they could meet up with us.

But even on that war, I mean, we adapted. And in that area that I operated in, you know, by the time I'd been there for five months, I understood the tempo of that place. I understood where they were, where they had been. I could anticipate them. And we did some, I think, some really great things by the time I got to be a company commander out there in terms of knocking them off balance, keeping the morale of our troops up, showing them that we really could go where they were and we could figure out what they were going to do.

The third was the key, and I want to say a couple things about that. First, the South Vietnamese, the motivation of the South Vietnamese, I think, has been misunderstood. I didn't understand this when I was in Vietnam. I understood this a lot better when I got back from Vietnam. I started working with the Vietnamese community here after 1975, helping them understand the political system that they were moving into. You know, they came here. They were organized into community groups.

They knew that, you know, they were going to put the future into their kids, you know, from day one. It was like, you get a job, you know. But meeting with them, get a job, get your kids in school. The next generation is going to succeed. But also, they were able to explain in a way that I never got out there where I was about what, it was they were trying to do. And how, you know, if you could, the communist approach to this was very Stalinist. Ho Chi Minh was, he may, he may have been a nationalist, but he studied the commenter in Moscow for like seven years. He knew the tactics that were going to be used to

eliminate the opposition, the Vietnamese opposition, and to also put the markers down. The South Vietnamese never found a way to totally respond to this, and they were constantly getting their leaders. They had a lot of corruption. The culture is a Mandarin culture. There's a lot of corruption in the culture at large when you get people in positions of power. It's a very big temptation in the Mandarin system. But they were saying, despite what I mentioned earlier about the assassination program, that were not fully understood in our country.

They were saying, the people who opposed to the war were saying, the South Vietnamese are so corrupt. They won't go out there. You know, we have a district chief in Dunang. He lives in his villa. He has a great life. He won't go out to the Anwa Basin. And so our company commander, who part of his first tour,

he had done as a pacification officer working with him, he said, we're going to get him out here. We're going to get him out here. We're going to protect him. And they found out about that. And as I wrote in the book, I mean, they killed 17 of their own people in one little room and the district chief and his aid, you know, just to send the signal. That signal was well understood, you know, by the people in these areas.

And what we were doing was not as well understood, even by ourselves. One of the most interesting moments for me was when I had a, I was toward the end of my tour, I had a Marine who was getting court-martialed in to Nang for hitting an NCO. You were not in my company anymore. But he said, I'm getting court-martial. I called on his landline, I was a regimental three shop. He said, I'm getting court-martial, and I don't have a lawyer I can talk to. coming and help me. I said, all right, I got permission to go into Danangelo. So I went to

the Three-Maff headquarters. They had this great dining hall, you know, that you had to try to get to. So I went over to the Three-Maff, had dinner, and I went into a bar, and this woman, it's Vietnamese woman, who was working behind the bar, and she had a black diamond sewn into her auze. And so she was, you know, she saw me, I'm all droopy, you know, and she was, you know, know, mustache, my boots are blonde, definitely, my hair's a little long, I definitely don't belong in three-math headquarters. She said, you're from out there. I said, yeah, she said, where are you? And I said, I'm in Anwa. And she says, I'm from Dialogue, which is, was the major town at the eastern corner of the Arizona Valley. And she said, you're doing so much good. You know, I went,

really? And she said, you know why I wear this? She said, they killed my entire family. She said, in dialogue, her father was a police officer. They came in at night. They killed everybody. She was shot. Everybody but her was killed. Her husband was in Arvin. He had just been killed. She said, you know, we, you know, we can go places now. We couldn't go three years ago. You know, you are winning. And, you know, it's the first time anybody had ever, ever said that to me. And another comment needs to be made, and that is that the South Vietnamese leadership, the military leadership, my age, there were a lot of really fine leaders in there.

And even David Hackworth, you know, who said, you know, this North Vietnamese flag is going to be flying over Saigon by 1975. I also said emphatically to me when I was interviewing him, if you'd gotten, these people into position, they would have, they would have, I'm not going to say, they would have won, but they would have survived. South Vietnam would have survived, like South Korea, survived, West Germany, survived for an eventual better solution. So they, they have been, I think, you know, libeled in, in terms of the competence of, of a lot of their, they're really good leaders and people, and soldiers and Marines. And that's, and that's from your perspective,

were you doing joint patrols with them? Well, here's the interesting thing. One of the reasons that the combat temple went up in early 69 was that Nixon had been elected president. The communists were very smart at keying in their military operations to our politics. 64, Gulf of Tonkin, 68, knocked the president out at 68, 72, the Easter offensive, which your Colonel Reader was that his name was talking about so eloquently in one of your shows. and they wanted Nixon. Nixon was going to meet President Tew in Guam in June of 1969, and they wanted the Americans to say they're getting out of there. I don't know that.

I couldn't sit there when I was over there going, yeah, this is what's happening. But so late April, All of May, Hamburger Hill, and 90th Regiment, you know, the place lit up, 450 people dying. But Nixon announced Vietnamization. It's been mocked. It should not have been mocked. In the Arizona Valley, we hadn't seen South Vietnamese out in the Arizona Valley. And then I was out there as a company come in.

They brought a ranger unit out, and it kind of got waxed. And we actually moved in to their perimeter, and they were jumping on the helicopters to get out. And then they sent a unit, well, the 51st Arvin regiment out there. And these guys were good. I mean, I would have operated with them any day. And I've got, you know, many, many friends who were Arvin in Vietnam, who will talk to you about what happened when the Watergate Congress took over. You know, when Nixon resigned, and then, you know, the anti-war Congress came in,

and one of the first substantive votes they took was to cut off all supplemental appropriations to the South Vietnamese Army. There was, there was no reason for that. Well, our forces weren't even on the ground over there. And at the same time, the North Vietnamese refurbished, and they attacked them when they were repositioned. They had to reposition. I have a really great friend, you know, who, when I was listening to your show, they were talking about the American who had spent nine years as a prisoner of war, Lecao, who's here now, spent 12 years on the battlefield, was a regimental commander at age 28 recipient of their Medal of Honor, and in 13 and a half years locked up, five years on a conics box.

He was down to two artillery rounds per tube per day when he was trying to reposition his forces when this thing hit. So it was a very complicated war. I'm not trying to like, you know, re-imagined what was happening, but I'd always thought that the end result would probably be kind of like what you see in Iraq to sort of a slow down and sort things out rather than what happened. While my mother slept so fitfully and so fitfully dreamed, I was hit by two enemy grenades while clearing a series of well-camifled bunkers. The bunkers were built inside a bamboo thicket at the edge of a murky stream bed. The first grenade peppered me lightly on the face and shoulders. The second detonated behind me just after I shot the man who threw it

and a second soldier who was inside the same bunker. I was hit in the head, back, arm, and leg. The grenade's concussion lifted me into the air and threw me down a hill into the stream. I still carry shrapnel at the base of my skull, and in one kidney from the blast but the square quarter-sized piece that scored the inside of my left knee joint and lodged against the bone of my lower leg would eventually change the direction of my life having for months repeatedly seen far worse among many of my Marines I did not pay a great deal of attention to my wounds medevacked into alhua and I was treated for several days at the battalion aid station Some of the shrapnel in the back of in my head back and arm was removed and some was left to work its way out naturally as my skin healed over time the scars pushing shrapnel out onto the surface I returned to the bush as soon as possible but the leg wound went deep into the joint and had not completely healed in the muck of the rice paddies and the filth of the basin Vils it soon became infected

I did not know it at the time but the infection was moving into the bone causing permanent septic damage and then you go to in August your company executive officer he let you know that there's a billet opened up for force service regiment on Okinawa and for those people that don't know what is this is like a plush billet and here you go if I accepted the assignment for me the Vietnam War would be over within weeks and an assignment on the quaint and gorgeous island of Okinawa would give me several months to decompress from battlefield combat before I returned home life's gambols are sometimes settled in

mere moments weighed against years of previous thought and decades on the other side where one might reflect on the wisdom involved in a sudden decision I listened to the executive officer and fought inside myself pressing the radio handset against my face as I leaned against an old grave in the middle of a desolate village those Those few seconds became, as they liked to say in the Marine Corps, a teachable moment. But I could not say yes. After all the years of preparation and months of hardship that I had endured with one infantry battalion in this small but violent section of a seemingly never-ending war, I could not simply

walk away. Bonds formed on the battlefield are often as unbreakable as the strongest family ties. In a word, I felt obligated. Like my father, service to country, defined myself respect. More to the point, I loved leading infantry Marines. With a gritty Elan, they faced the gravest dangers. They took the greatest risks. They absorbed the highest casualties.

They had the fewest creature comforts. But they also stood face to face and toe to toe with the enemy every day. And they answered in their honor to no one. Taking a deep breath, I finally said, no, and stayed in the bush. In September, I was given command of dying Delta. No complaints. You know, during that time, I had served under four battalion commanders. and three regimental commanders.

And as you know, I mean, I'd say majority of the people who go through this experience know, there are a few bonds in your life tighter than the people that you have served with under extraordinary circumstances. I once wrote in one article. I don't say I would trust my life to these people because I already have. and I knew I knew what I was doing. You know, I knew the terrain. I felt like I belonged there. There's a scene in fields of fire where Snake, the squalier,

they're getting ready to go on an operation. He goes and sits on a bunker, looking out across the paddies at the fog pouring down the mountains. And says, you know, yeah, this is where I belong. You know, and my third regimental commander, who was a real piece of work, named with Noble Beck, pulled me in. He found out I had two Purple Hearts as an officer in the bush, which was against the division order. And as he said, when I left Vietnam, he said, this guy came in with tears as big as horse turds in his eyes. and you know

the greatest job I've ever had is being a rifle company commander just enough independence to really be innovative but still totally connected with your people and I've been very privileged in my life to be able to maintain contact not only with the people that I, many of the people that I served with

but also with the operating military and I learned When I was in law school, that's where I finally ended up, because I needed to figure I need to screw my brain on and figure out the rest of my life. I found out that I could make money by writing. It was like the pure formula here. I could actually get people to pay me to indulge my curiosities. So I was able, among other things, to be with the military, our military. in a lot of different places.

I was in Beirut in 1983 when I covered it for PBS. And actually, I left right before the building blew up. I stop every year, October 23rd, and think about that. That was a good battalion, First Battalion, Eighth, Marines. You've been around this long enough, if you can smell a good unit, and you can tell a bad unit, and they were a good unit, they were well-led. I was able to be in Afghanistan. you know, as an embed over there,

been able to spend time working on veterans issues, spent five years in the Pentagon. So you can take this sort of, you know, affiliation and camaraderie and have it still help in other things you do in your life. So that was it, right? When the colonel brought you in and he just said, look I don't care you're going home you're you're out you're not going to stay here

anymore and there was no I I I said or butts about that no there was not you know he soon as he found out I had two purple hearts and I I was on the regimental in the regimental three shop from the last two months and then came home and then I started you know my situation with the the joint and my leg started acting up after I got home and by the way you You wrote this whole book and you spent, I think it was a half or maybe a quarter of paragraph or maybe three sentences talking about you attacking enemy bunkers, throwing grenades in, getting wounded, fighting on.

That's what you received the Navy Cross for. And, well, I just wanted to point out that that's, that takes humble to a new level for you write this book and give yourself a sentence or two. You know, when I decided right fields of fire, I was in law school, there was a very important concept that stuck in my mind and it's still there. And that is that the people who went over and interrupted their lives, a lot of them just spent one tour in the Marine Corps went home, have never been fully appreciated. I've never been fully understood, you know, and what they did, getting that down, you know, the environment in which they served. And, you know, there's a, when we talk about courage, there's physical courage, which is maybe shooting somebody in a bunker. There's moral courage, which is standing up for what you believe in and having the courage to say it to those above you.

And sometimes you have to say it to those who are below you. No, you got to do this. That's all there is to it. And then there's what I like to call Daily Courage. You know, and Daily Courage is taking a hand God dealt you and doing something with it. You know, like Tom Martin, who was one of my squad leaders, he's now passed away. He was an interesting ear for me in the bush. He had been in Vanderbilt University

was in favor of the war. I was in a debate on the war and this guy who supposedly was going to Canada and turn around and said, if you think this is such a great war, why don't you just go serve in it? He enlisted, so he was a very, very smart, knowing guy could, you know,

when things would get down, he'd come and talk me about different stuff. Then he got shot. And he used to keep out, you know, everybody had this zippo lighter, you know, with your slogan on it. And his slogan was, life is not enjoying a good hand, but learning to play a poor hand well. And that takes daily courage.

We had in our platoon had two triple amputees, one died before they got him out of Vietnam. But Dale Wilson was the other one, the Silver Star recipient, one of the most positive people I've ever met. If you met him, you wouldn't, you would know that he had lost an arm, but you wouldn't, you know, he'd be leaning on a cane, you wouldn't be able to tell he'd lost one leg up by the thigh, or above the thigh and the other one down below.

And it takes Dale Wilson 15 minutes to get out of bed. That's daily courage. And never, never complains. He'll, you know, he'll say, well, I was going to be in the NFL. What else did I be doing here? MacGarby, arm blown off, might blow the shoulder, went out and got a tattoo, said cut on dotted line. When I ran for the Senate, when I decided to run for the Senate nine months to the day before

the election, zero money, zero campaign staff, I just said, I'm going to do this. The first guy called was McGarvey. He was the night manager of Tutsi's Orchid Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee. And I said, man, I need somebody I can trust, you know, 24 hours a day. you got to be my driver. He says, I got one arm. I said, I don't care. You're my driver. He quit his job, moved into our basement for a year. And, you know, I couldn't have done it without him. Great, great friend of Sun Jims, too, by the way. So that's daily courage, you know. And that's, you know, that's really, when you look at the ramifications of that place, and having people understand, you know, how this was in many ways positive for our country, too. that's my goal.

So you're in law school, and you know, you've mentioned this a couple times so far, but at some point you decide, okay, I'm going to start writing. Why did you decide to write a novel instead of write a book of your own experiences? And I mean, I know, and I'm going to get into it a little bit. I mean, clearly there's a major amount of crossover, but is there a specific reason why you said, you know what, I'm going to write a novel instead of a memoir? Well, there's two things.

I started writing my last year in the Marine Corps. I was put on the Secretary of the Navy staff when I was on this medical hold and I you know as as we discussed earlier as an avid reader I loved I loved to write I was writing from my job I wrote three magazine articles in that year one of them was very controversial it was about the roles and missions of the Marine Corps how they were on paper an amphibious force and they were doing all these other things and it did it make a difference in my bottom line would you better believe it makes a difference there's not one Marine Corps there's not one Marine general on any of these J staffs anywhere except that, you know, if the Navy gives them one, and the Marine Corps wasn't even represented when they decided that that was their mission. It was the Chief of Naval Operations. And I was 25 years old, and I got in big trouble. You think I got in big trouble in some of these other things I've written?

You know, the chief of staff of the Marine Corps was calling me and the talking to me, and the Commandant ordered a counter article to be written about what I had said because they were being accused in a JCS of, you know, wanting to start some sort of a campaign. So I learned the power of the written word. And then I wrote my first year in law school, I started looking at Micronesia. And what's going to happen after the Vietnam War? What should the United States basing system look like in the Pacific? And I was reading a lot of World War II stuff.

And, you know, Rommel in the desert was, you know, fighting from what he called the interior position, you know, logistically shortening logistic lines, being able to hit the Brits when they were after them and hit the Americans when they were after them. And I said, we need to develop an interior position in Pacific Asia, and that's Guam Tennian. I got really kind of into this. I wrote my first book, actually, about that. It went out and worked for the governor of Guam doing a study. So then I'm saying, I'm listening to the stuff that people were saying about those who served.

I think I met three people in three years in Georgetown Law School who had been in combat in Vietnam. 1,800 people student body, same age group. Something was wrong. and I actually was sitting in constitutional law class when they were debating the War Powers Act and it got to be very vicious on the people who served there and all the stuff they'd never said to my face they're saying to each other in this class I'm going to holy shit that's what they really believe and I started writing the last chapter of Fields of Fire sitting in constitutional law class and then as I wrote it you know the first time I wrote this book seven times cover to cover

in an engineering degree you know and and I'm you know I'm you know I I never went to a creative writing class. I started reading the people I thought were the greats in a different way, not for enjoyment, but for structure and these sorts of things. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Graham Green, the British and the Irish poets, etc. So the first time through, it was sort of like just, you know, it was a very good catharsis. And then I got to the point where I said, no, I've got a piece of literature here. every one of these characters is a little bit different, and it is an escalating moral drama

in terms of how they are reacting to operating in this particular area. And so the power, the literary power of the novel was more important than me telling I was there kind of story. It had a universality to it. And Ted Purdy, who came in to help me on this, who had, quote, discovered Leon Euros, was Edern Chief of Putnam at one time, just really encouraged me to stay with it. And I'm very lucky that I did because the book survived, you know, 12 rejections and everything else and it's still out there. No, so, and honestly, I kind of answered that question for myself.

And I think when people read it, they'll figure out why you did it because it does. It has this power to it that you couldn't have done just writing your own story. Even though your own story is very similar and has probably parts that are just even more impactful, but the way that this ties together. And this is like the iconic novel, and I will say about Vietnam War, but really, like you could put this over just war. And you got these characters in it. You know, you already talked about one of them. You got Snake, who's like the street smart kind of badass Marine. You got Lieutenant Robert E. Lee Hodges, who's the lieutenant.

You got the senator, who's this Harvard kid that thought he was going to play the French horn in the Marine Corps band, and he ends up in the basin. You got Catman, who's the Mexican Point Man. You got the Terp, the interpreter, as we called him, Dan. You got a cannonball, flaky, bagger, rabbit, gilland, baby cakes, Sergeant Austens, and all these characters. And, you know, as I read this, it was just, you know, I probably read this 10 years ago or something, maybe 15 years ago. And when I read it again, I mean, it's just infinitely, I mean, just because I'm older and I understand things more, I guess, I hope. But just the way that each one of these characters, and here's something that I realized, as I was reading this book, First of all, we know these characters.

Like, these characters, they exist in real life, they exist in combat, they exist in the SEAL teams, they exist in the Marine Corps, they exist in the Army. I met all these characters. They're all out there, and they're all out there. I work with businesses now. They're in those businesses as well. They're in, these are human beings. And, and that's incredible. And then you put them in this, you know, again, I'm interested always in learning about human nature, but you put this in this environment that is what you've talked about.

This environment is gonna reveal human nature in incredible ways and you just Capture so much of it and I mean I want to take a look at when when Hodges kind of arrives in Vietnam and he sits down with Major Otto so here we go this is Fields of Fire going back to the book major auto the battalion executive officer sat behind his field desk and examine Hodges record book he was young for a major in his early 30s he seemed pleasant enough the Hodges who had expected a hatchet-faced ravining warrior after hearing of the major's background Otto had been a company commander during his first tour and was highly decorated his right forearm was gassed with a six-inch purple trough left by a bone-shattering

machine gun bullet and yet he had the inquisitive sensitive demeanor of a brooding scholar he smiled casually to Hodges so You think you're ready? Hodges stood at a loose parade rest in the musty heat of the tent. He was scheduled to attend three more days of regimental indoctrination school, but he had not found it helpful, and he had learned to hate the dust-filled boredom of Anawa. Yes, sir, I'm ready.

Think so? Good. They need you out there. Lost another lieutenant last night. The major watched him closely. Yes, sir, I heard. Yeah. good old dying Delta they'd like to call themselves deadly Delta Otto chuckled he had a

beaten tone in his voice as if he had seen the ritual so many times it had lost its meaning deadly dying Delta Hodges watched him dripping with sweat in the dark heat outside a Jeep rumbled past leaving a wave of red dirt that seeped underneath the tent flap like a creeping frog in the distance an artillery battery an artillery battery an artillery battery fired a mission towards the Arizona territory the major swiped at a fly then lit a cigarette as an afterthought he offered one to Hodges no thank you sir Major Auto side you'll learn he dragged deeply on the cigarette frankly studying Hodges Yeah dying Delta you're not ready lieutenant the only reason I'm telling you is I don't want you to panic when you get out there and find out Nothing in your entire goddamn life will have prepared you for the bush not a damn

thing yes sir do you know what I mean no sir Jesus Christ the major dragged again on his cigarette deadly Delta yeah they really caught the shit last night I watched it it was almost embarrassing to admit he still felt uncomfortable about the irony of sitting on a bunker and watching someone else's war auto lean forward absently rubbing the purple gash on his forearm well what kind of person do you think goes through that shit day in and day out lieutenant because that's what it is shit and that's the way you take it every stinking day some something piddly ass or something heavy this isn't world war two we can pull you out

to Australia and parade after a month of fighting nope and it isn't 1965 when we first came into Vietnam we would send a company out on a two-day operation then bring the men back for hot chow and liberty yeah that's right liberty lieutenant in denang then we started week-long operations then it was a month now well we just leave them out there all the time it's more convenient the major offered Hodges a small challenging smile they go wild lieutenant and there's nothing you can do about it you'll go wild too wild as hell you spend a month in the bush and you're not a marine anymore hell you're not even a goddamn person there's no tents no barbed wire

no hot food no jeeps or trucks no clean clothes nothing you're an animal It gets so that it's natural to squat when you take a shit. You get ringworm and hookworm and gook sores. You roll around in your own filth. You forget how bad you smell. Dead people, guts in the goddamn dirt, miserable civilian. It all gets sort of boring. You cry when your friends are killed, but a new friend comes on a helicopter a few days later.

And the dead friend becomes enshrined, a martyr to friendship. teach the new friend about him and you all remember him it's very romantic it doesn't sound very romantic that's after a month or two but lieutenant when you do it for six or nine or even longer by Christ you'll never shake it the bush gets in your blood and you hate anyone who hasn't fermented in his own stench for months or stood inside a dirt hole all night waiting to kill a man who's trying to kill him first Major Otto scrutinized Hodges. Oh, yeah.

I've done a lot of thinking about it. That's something a grunt isn't supposed to do. He chuckled again, a sort of dry bark. But what else can a man do in Anhoa? Oh, and it becomes an oasis. You like Anhoa, Lieutenant? I hate it. You'll like it when you get back from the bush.

I guarantee. So, what kind of person can take it for months on end? Hodges felt uneasy. He'd expected the major to wave the flag and talk about Iwo Jima and then send him aboard the resupply helicopter with fire in his heart. Someone who is very dedicated, sir. Either that or someone who is very crazy. Well, there you are. That's in a nutshell.

You just hit the nail on the goddamn head. That's been a long time since I read that book. Yeah. That, I mean, it's the iconic conversation between the new lieutenant and the executive officer. You just nailed it. I guess I'm lucky I wrote that when I was 28. No, I wanted, there are a couple things here. When I started, I said, I am not going to write this book unless the third,

guy down in the third fire team says this is true. This is real. I mean, you know, true, real, however you want to put it. This is real. And that was my guidepost in terms of all of the combat sequences and this sort of thing is, you don't want to go through this and have it be dear author. I love you, signed author, or the way I wish it had been, or, you know, the way I would like to present it. I remember when the book came out, There was a Marine three-star general who had been very helpful when I was trying to help one of my former Marines who had been out in this area, and I sent him a copy of the proofs. And he summoned me, I was working on the hill. He summoned me to his quarters and eighth and I, and he said, this could be a primer on Marine Corps tactics, but these were not my Marines.

And I went, he was a colonel when he was over there. And I said, sir, I don't know what to tell you. that's as honest as I can be. And they were my Marines. And I don't have to try to make it Iwo Jima to give respect to the people who were there. But I'll tell you what, I walked out of that meeting with him thinking, oh my God, you know, this is going to be really bad if, you know, the Marine Corps turns on me for writing a book about Marines. And then there was another two-star General Schultz who had been a battalion commander and been on Taylor Common. He was with third Marine Division, but he'd been on Taylor Common down here.

He read the book, and he called me. He read it on a C-130 from, you know, Andrews to Pendleton. He called me, he said, this is the book. This is the book. I said, will you send me a letter, sir? And I said, he sent me a letter. And so when I had this little, you know, a command visit to General Wilson, who was the commandant,

when the book came out, I'm going, boy, I'm not really nervous about the General Wilson was a hard ass, you know. So I got in to see General Wilson might give him a copy of the book, and I said, and this is what General Schultz thinks about it. And over time, you know, it's been mandatory reading and the Commandant's Reading List for decades, and I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten from read, particularly Staffing Seos.

You know, when I was in Beirut, you know, as a journalist there at 83, there was one gunnery sergeant who came. and he told me, I have read your book 11 times. It is a text on, you know, on leadership, if you really read it. And at the same time, the important thing also is if you're, if you're going to write a novel that lasts, you want that universality. As you say, this doesn't just Vietnam, it's just isn't my experience. And so it really is a very carefully drawn moral drama. And, you know, some of these passages are read, I haven't heard of many years and I still remember because I've written some of these 25 times, you know, the one you

start off with, I knew the words. You know, I knew the words that were going to come out of your mouth. So that is, you know, that was my intention with the book. And, you know, what can I say? It's still out there. You know, it's as honest as I can be. And I know, as, you know, there's a lot of rough spots in this book, but I don't have to put it any differently. One other thing I will say is the dialogue, it may be from having benefited from living in so many different places and whatever, the dialect is, you know, carefully accurate in like seven or eight different American dialects and the way they say words. Yeah, for sure. No, you nail that and it's very clear that, yeah, you know these people.

You know that you were able to capture it. You also did a great job obviously of capturing some of the just straight combat and I'm gonna go here Just to one little situation suddenly there were loud explosions across the river the northern compound literally erupted Recoriless rifles flashed and boomed again and again their explosions raising clouds of dirt inside the compound Machine guns and small arms hammered at the Marines the two-platoon perimeter fought back red and green tracers interlaced careening into the black air making weaving patterns in the night the artillery battery on the bridge compound reacted it turns its guns north and lob dozens of projectiles across the river seeking to silence the attack new bright flashes hazes of dust grouped

around the northern compound then a moment of anticipatory lull goodrich knew what was about to happen he wished he could tell them in the bridge compound he wished he could dig a hole in the dirt and come back out in California watch out he groaned inwardly too afraid to cry oh shit here it comes right now an avalanche mortar rounds time from a dozen tubes to land together on the southern compound then just above the stranded team the deep pops of heavy machine gun goodrich listened to himself whimper he could not stifle it it seemed to him a scream that would give them all away but he finally realized it was no more than a scratchy whispering wine the bridge compound's

defenders were caught unaware having to feel like spectators in the northern compound's furious defense bodies went flat inside their bunkers seeking cover from the mortar barrage as they did streams of sappers poured through the outer wire sliding pipes of Bangalore torpedoes to clear pathways through the concertina for a moment they were unnoticed the explosions they created blending in with the mortars they broke through both sides of the J-shaped hill just at its hook tossing satchel charges of explosions into the nearest bunkers Half of the bunkers on the artillery side unmanned as their defenders had helped with the fire missions on the north compound were quickly taken by the NVA.

The rest of the perimeter swarmed with creeping, dashing sappers. Two bunkers were lost just down from third platoon's last position. The sappers manned the bunkers after killing the occupants with satchel charges and provided a beached head on the lines. A stream of shadows poured into the compound between the bunkers. The first cell of NVA that raced past the bunkers burned an entrance. with a whooshing flame-thrower. It ignited the corner of a nearby tent and drew bright red answers

from a host of rifles fired from nearby bunkers. There was no second whoosh. Its trigger manned and its mate lay dead beside low smoulders from the torch-lit tent. Another sapper team quept quietly into the center of the compound and encountered two almost identical bunkers. In its haste, it demolished the chapel,

leaving the command center bunker unscathed. After the chapel exploded in detonation that raised a bright flash and leveled the bunker in a smoking heap another fierce mortar barrage shook the hill the North Vietnamese would attempt to take out more bunkers consolidate then retreat through the brakes in the they had made in the wire speedy's gun teamed cringed in the stream bed unspeaking wincing as the gun cut loose again its explosion seemed to be so close that one could reach up a hand and lose it to a bullet each man knew that if you were made an unword an untrude

toward move revealing himself in any way the whole team would not last five minutes nowhere to go nowhere to hide yeah well you know one of the uh have you read anton mire anton myers books i have not once an eagle i have not when we when the actually i think i have read once an eagle yeah it's a great great book you know when when uh when we sent the proofs around on on uh the old you know, Prentissal didn't quite know what to expect. You know, the book had been rejected by 12 publishers. Nobody wanted to see this side of it. And the editor-in-chief of Prentissal, John Kirk,

had been a naval aviator in the Korean War. He was a Harvard graduate, which I thought was kind of interesting, because when he asked me to come and talk to him, he asked me to meet him at the Harvard Club. You know, Goodrich is the Harvard goof, you know. But he said, I think this can be the great novel. You know, he said the great novels of different words go against the grain of prevailing orthodoxy. And he made a deal with me.

He said, you know, I'll give you $5,000. You've been working this for four years. They give you $5,000. I'll print 5,000 copies. But I will put your book on the cover of publishers weekly, and I'll send you on a major tour. And I said, you know, done. And he said, actually, the draft he had only had like a five-page epilogue on Goodrich. And he said, I'd actually like to see more of Goodrich coming back.

I said, would you like the 28-page version, the 35-page version, over 62-page version? Let me look at that. I gave him like the 30-page version back. But then they started sending the book around before publication date for advanced quotes, and he got a torrent of them. And one of the advanced quotes that I treasured the most was from Anton Meyer. He had been He also was a Harvard guy

But he'd been a Marine in World War II Had been on either Guadalcanal or Iwojima Was Wounded And wrote once an eagle which Is a marvelous book It's kind of America's I haven't read that America's Port War and Peace is like a thousand pages long

But he You know he took One character Well actually two characters But from before World War I all the way into Vietnam, although we didn't call it Vietnam in his book. And, you know, one of them was a, you know, a Nebraska farm kid who was enlisted and, you know, and he got a battlefield commission World War I.

And the other was a, you know, West Point guy who punched all the buttons exactly right. His name was Massengale. The other one was Sam Davin. But he wrote really good combat scenes. And I loved his book. and he sent, when he sent, he sent this long, advanced quote on this book, and I just, of all of them, I went, wow, you know, he said, here at last is the real story of those who are in Vietnam, you know, devoid of histrionics, et cetera, et cetera, and, you know, et cetera.

But that, you know, when you read passages like that, I think of, you know, people like him, reacting to this gamble, you know, at the time. Because there was nothing out like this at the time. No, this was the first revisionist novel. And I'll tell you, when I went on my tour, I'd spent a year and a half on, I was working on the House Veterans Committee, developing what I,

was sort of a factual basis for discussion on the Vietnam War. You know, how long did people really serve? How many were draftees? How many were volunteers? What was the makeup of the casualties, you know, and those who served, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just trying to lay the whole thing out year by year? So I went out and the shows that I did, that's what I wanted to talk about. You know, I would talk about this other stuff.

But there were, you know, I had some real moments. And also, by the way, had been representing a so-called war criminal pro bono from my first year in law school, who I represented for six years. He committed suicide halfway through. I cleared his name, I finally for six years. But that wasn't very popular out there. But I was on a radio show in Boston, and in the middle of the show, this guy stopped. He said, I can't hold us back any longer.

Don't you consider yourself to be a murderer? I went, no. And actually what I said ended up being the intro in the American Rifleman's shot or whatever. I said, no, man is by nature a violent animal. and society puts restrictions, you know, like, let me give you ABC here, you know, society puts restrictions on how that violence is used, and I don't consider myself to be a murder anymore than, you know, a police officer, okay? So, and I had, I was on Good Morning, Boston, and the woman of producer was so nice to me, et cetera, and right before I go on the show, she said, we used to hate you guys. I said, what? She said, no, really.

I mean, hate you. And I went, oh, thank you for that. I'm now going with the screaming wolf here, you know. And it's interesting because I did a show in, I think it was Cincinnati, which was a TV show. Speaking about the passage you just read, right, a little further in that passage, there is a sequence where there's an enemy soldier who is trapped in the wire. And he's all, you know, like kind of blown away, and he starts yelling, Chuhoy. Toohoi, Chuhoy, Choohoi, and somebody yelled, shut up and shot him. And this woman who was interviewing.

She says, how can you put that in a book? You know, somebody who was trying to surrender who was shot. And I said, well, look, you know, this is the reality of what was going on. She says, I want to put that to a vote. And she asked the viewers, how many of you agree with them? 94% of them agree with me. I think, gee, I think maybe we're starting to get somewhere here. You know, not, you know, not the lionizing, shooting, wounded soldiers.

But, you know, I mean, reality is reality. It is indeed Once you touch them Then it's different You know And speaking of reality Being reality And this is

To kind of point out Some of the reality That's in this book I got one more thing I want to read from it How'd you like to stay in On Okinawa Sir?

That's right The Major smiled Jesus Lieutenant I thought you would have jumped over the desk by now I'm on the level We just had a bill It opened up

Over at Special Services Recreation Officer A lieutenant rotated early on emergency leave. He had less than 90 days on his tour, so he'll be reassigned from the states. I have the authority to fill the billet from the transients who've been in country already. Your ideal. Combat time, hospital time. Would you like it?

The major jibed him, grinning, good duty, lots of free time. Stick around, Hodges, will turn you into a whore-mongering drunk. A simple yes, and the war would be over. But so would everything else. and for the first time he confronted the truth yes major thank you sir and the rest of his life would be anti-climax there was nothing on the other side what does a man do when his war is over wondered Hodges except keep fighting it all expectancies then lived and if not fulfilled well at least confronted The bald red hills with their sandbag bunkers, the banter and frolic of dirt-covered grunts,

the fearful intensity of contact. It was too deep inside him, and he had not yet done enough to be free of it. He suddenly felt superior to the major, a creature apart, capable of absorbing combat's horror without asking for quarter. Down south, his men were on patrol, or digging new perimeters, or down. dying and he was nothing if he did not share that misery. He stared deep into the Major's face, enjoying the one moment of nobility that his months of terror had allowed. Thanks, Major.

But I didn't come halfway around the world to referee basketball games. The most powerful and telling scene, or one of the most powerful in telling scenes in the novel is the way that I originally ended it. which is with Mitsuko taking her son to Camp Hanson. And she's, on the one hand, she's trying to, you know, to build some positive feelings in him about the father he never knew, and the price that he was paying for being half American in the Okinawan society. And she says, was this, he says, you know, she takes him to Camp Hansen, you know, because he can, she can see the Marines there, he can see the Marines in there. And he says, what's was a good thing?

Them I like them? Then I'll be a warrior. You know, and that's like, whoa, you know. And then when I was in the Senate, this was very ironic, we actually had a situation on Okinawa, which was an exact replay. where I was able to help a family, a Marine, who had deployed through Rock and found out that his fiancee was pregnant, and they arranged for them to be married on the phone. And they had immigration issues and kid issues and all this stuff. And my counsel, Trevor Moe, was when he was handling us, I gave him a copy of Fields of Fire. It's an amazing coincidence. Speaking of Sons, I want to go here back to I heard my country calling talking about as you were heading off to Vietnam. I would soon drive west heading for California where Barbara would rent a house across the street from my granny. and I would catch a flight to Vietnam my parents would clear their quarters at Andrew

Air Force Base and then head south to stay for a while with my dad's longtime friend Bud Caldwell as they adjusted to the unknowns of retirement that awaited them in Florida Alpha had just begun Omega was not so happily done in less than 20 years our lives had traveled full circle I was now the one who was leaving my dad was the one being left behind there was nothing left to say it was time to go we rose from the years worn couches and began to say our final deliberate understated goodbyes we slowly made our way toward the front door of the farmhouse the radio in the dining room began playing Danny Boy sung by Johnny Cash I'm not sure that anyone other than

God himself could have arranged the sweet sorrow of that moment Johnny Cash was my favorite singer. Danny Boy, emblematic of our long-held Scots-Irish heritage of military service, is perhaps the greatest song ever written about the painful anguish of a father, watching helplessly as his son marches off to war. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, from glen to glen and down the mountainside. The summer's gone, and all the roses falling.

Tis you tis you must go and I must bide But come ye back When summer's in the meadow Or when the valleys hushed and white with snow Tis I'll be here In sunshine or in shadow O Danny boy Oh Danny boy

I love you so It was the first and only time I ever saw my father cry Yeah And then 30 odd years later you're sending your son into the Marine Corps

the Iraq War is escalating because this is what 2003? I joined in early 2005. So yeah it's full escalation mode at this point and you're going through the same thing. That's harder going through it.

I think it's harder having a loved one gone than it is being gone emotionally I think you know my dad was gone a lot I never expected that he would react that way you know and then when you know when Jim was gone you know it was hard for a lot of reasons partly because I was out there campaigning part of the time and this was a very private thing to me I'm a father. I refuse to talk about it other than in general terms. But he was able to call every now and then and send emails and that sort of thing. And actually, that made it a little

harder, you know, because you're getting a bit in a piece here. Yeah. We had, just as an anecdote, I got to make like, I think, three phone calls from Vietnam when you get back in Enwa. you know, on these Mars radio stations where you have three minutes. You're standing on it. You've got three minutes and you say something. You go over and then they talk on the other hand. So I go, hey, hey, mom, I'm here in Vietnam. Over?

Over where? Well, I got to go now. But, you know, getting some of the bits and pieces of what's going on. And, you know, Jim was very, very well read and smart about that region. So he was seeing things even as a Lance Corporal that a lot of people weren't. That was tough. and then, you know, truly waking up every morning and not knowing if your kids alive.

You know, I mean, that's the unknowns bother you. The unknowns and the partial knowns bother you more than actually being there, I think. But yeah, it's very hard, but it's also our family way. You know, and so when he came back, it was, I'll have to tell you a funny story. they got extended on the search. You know, 1-6 got extended on the search.

Doing such a good job, we got to stay longer. Yeah, and I think there was a lot of fistfights going on at that point. There were? And Jim's never back down from one of anybody. So I finally said to him an email, all right, when you get back, anything you want. And he says, Yankees and Red Sox, Fenway Park, May 19th. And we have a great friend, and I got a lot of great friends from South Boston.

and big Marine Corps community up there. The guy Tommy Lyons, who ran the veterans programs up there, he got tickets. And not only that, but Jim and one of his company mates who was from Boston, they got off the plane at Logan, and there was the State Highway Patrol waiting for them and like a squad car or whatever. I don't know what it was, but they had the sirens going coming to Fenway. and yeah, that couldn't have been any better. Hey, Jim, so how old were you when you were like thinking yourself, all right, I'm falling in my dad's footsteps?

Earliest I could think. There was two things I wanted to be, professional baseball player and a Marine, both at the same time. And when I was 13, a good friend of mine, we were warming up for a baseball game, told me that could not happen. And so it became kind of a binary choice. But the Marine Corps was always at the front. my dad had a rope hanging in the backyard the entire time we were growing up I think it was one day he came home I don't know how old I was but I climbed it got back down and asked if I could be a Marine and his reaction was that I needed to get some sort of organized athletics immediately

need to wait 10 years and when you were when you were going in Ramadi so you had paid attention to what was going on in Ramadi and you guys knew you were deploying there I mean the 3-8 had done an awesome job and they take I mean I mean They'd obviously taken a ton of casualties, as had the whole 1-1-A-D and the 228 before them. And the 3-8 actually overlap between the, you know, they were there, just like the first of the 506. They were there between when the 228 left. The 38 stayed, the first of the 506 stayed, some of the other battalion stayed, I think. But so you guys both knew how bad Ramadi was when you were heading there.

Right. and it's uh that was we go back to when we were announced that we were going there um you mentioned last night there was some rumor that we were going to go on a booze cruise there was going to be a reward for our battalion having done some seriously good work in falusia and in afghanistan and there was a fairly i don't want to say it was dejection because that would sound wrong but it was

kind of a whoa moment because we had heard what was happening to three eight and they were in a serious fight and all the units that had been there before them had been serious fights. And I tried to get as much information as I could about the place that I was going to be going. And there wasn't much written quite yet. There was a little bit about 2-4, one of the first units, marine units in there that was in print. But in terms of press reports, they were an eye-opener. I believe there was an embed with 3-8 where they were detailing an average day of patrolling of these guys. hopping walls and talking about the average time to contact from leaving wherever you were

was about five minutes. And it was an eye opener. And I was a boot at the time. And one of the things that I would do would be get on Ogreish or LiveLeak. And I wanted to find some way to rationalize, you know, the TTPs of the enemy. Could I like could I see what they were setting up when they're videotaping these complex attacks, the IED strikes? and there was really no way to do it. You get a 30-second clip of a gun truck getting hit or a complex ambush, and eventually one of my friends at the time, Cliff Collinsworth, he's passed, you know, laid into me one night about doing that.

It's like, you're not going to learn a damn thing. You're just going to get wrapped up in a ball, knock it off. And I took his advice and just played video games. But it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, It was interesting trying to get mentally prepared for it. And I remember before we deployed, I was in a hotel room with him. And one of the things that stood out, and as you've all these things going on, as you know, where particularly it's your first deployment, you know, your family is trying to be there for you.

There's a lot of emotions flowing around. And he said, you know, if you survive. And that woke me up in a big way. I had never thought that was going to be even a question. and it was something that was relayed to me by not only my own father, but by someone who had been through his own very serious combat experience. And as I try to kind of rehash all this in my head, I was brought back to a book that you reviewed on Vietnam a couple podcasts ago

where this new lieutenant was talking about getting ready to leave. And, you know, how he was, eating his meal the night before. And there was absolutely no desire to be, to have the meal, to be involved with it. His mind was somewhere else. And the night before I deployed, my cousins lived in Jacksonville. My dad took us out, I believe it was sharpshooters. And it's a burger joint.

Favorite thing in the world, cheeseburger. Every year of my birthday, my mom would make a special meal. And I'd always ask for a cheeseburger. and I got a bacon double cheeseburger and basically just stared at it. And all I could think about was where I was going to be in 48 hours and how the world around me there was just going to keep going on. And it was a very interesting period.

Although he did make me famous a couple months later because the next morning we're getting ready to go out. And once again, Dale Wilson was there, triple amputee. He actually walked up to our barracks room the night before we deployed. you know, walk up to the second or third deck. Nobody could tell you was triple amputee, hung out in the barracks with my dad and us for a bit. And then in the next morning,

getting ready to go on the bus. And somebody, I guess it was whiskey or moonshine? You're on the radio. Whiskey. And did going away shots in the parking lot. And there was a nice picture of it. A couple months later in Iraq, My company First Sergeant pulls me aside.

There's a New York Times article, apparently, about it. Really? Yeah. I should have researched better than we could have read that on the podcast. It was a mention. It was anything crazy. But he's like, oh, really, web, drink it on the job. It's like, uh.

I tell you one of the tough moments when I talked about being able to communicate. When I was campaigning for the Senate, and this was like a couple weeks before the election, um, Jim called me and he just had three guys in his unit were killed. And so I'm in this car, you know, getting ready to go to a football game, a big football game down in the Norfolk area. And I get that information, you know, and I'm like, what do you do? You put it in a box. You bury the box. You go do your thing, and then you can come back and pull the box out.

But, you know, getting that, and that's it, you know, like two or three minutes and then walk in on and having to do like two or three hours saying hello to people. and not mentioning anything and whatever. That was really hard when he was gone and when I was going through that. Let me ask you this. Kind of a critical question. As a dad, I'm going to come at you right now. So if my son was getting ready to go on deployment,

I don't know if I'd say if you survive. I'm not sure I said that. You did. Is that something? I mean, I could see why you'd say it to, you know, as I'm sitting there trying to think about, why would I tell my son that? The reason I would tell, if I was to tell my son that,

it'd be because I would want him to stay sharp and on point the entire time and not take it for granted and realize what's at stake. So that might be. I don't really remember the context in which I would have said that. But, you know. I mean, that's exactly how I took it. Yeah. It stripped away all aspects of the relationship except Marine to Marine.

And I've always been very cognizant of my dad. experience and reputation the Marine Corps. And it was a very clear message that, you know, this is going to be different. You're not special. And you'd better pay attention. So you might not remember saying it, but it sounds like some good advice. I'll keep that one in my back pocket. There are a lot of words going back and forth when he was getting ready to ship out.

And from your perspective, having grown up like with such a with such a focus on leadership and your family and the tradition in your family and shown up as a Lance Corporal inside of a platoon and having more awareness than the normal Lance Corporal would have because I'll tell you, I mean, if I'm picturing myself when I'm 19 years old,

if I was a Lance Corporal, I would have been a normal Lance Corporal. I would have been, you know, I wouldn't have had this sort of elevated look at things. I mean, even having read your dad's book over and over again and just that level of understanding how did that how did that set in your platoon?

How did that set with you? Were you ever looking at your boss thinking, looking at your platoon commander thinking, did he listen to you? Did he talk to you? Did he know who you were? Did he, was there anything like that? They all knew.

I think the best or the most amount of time I kept that off the skyline was two to three days. No matter which unit I was at boot camp, I got pulled out and paraded around. And it wasn't until I started asking questions. This was before they actually. kicked off the training. They're like, hey, this is, this is Web's kid. But I think it put an extra, like extra demand, particularly once I hit the fleet Marine forces for humility,

because I could have, you know, all the informal training, if you like, in the world, and it was world class. But at the same time, I'm walking into an environment where I have not been there and done what these guys have done and I need to listen. And, and when, when the opportunity presents itself, you know, then the practical application of what I had learned growing up would be there. But until you earn your stripes, you're nothing. And I think I'd put an extra layer on him. No question about it, particularly among the officers, you know. And the thing is, Jim has really, really been smart and thoughtful about that part of the world. So he had a, you know, He had a lens on what was going on that a lot of people at his level didn't have.

Did you, okay, here's another question that I'll throw at you. We were talking about a little bit yesterday, but, you know, and I covered Chesty Puller and Lou Puller on this podcast, number 121 and number 122. If you haven't listened to him, go listen to me. If you don't know that story, you should know it. Everyone should know it. But, you know, Lou Puller got severely wounded as Chesty Puller's son. You know that that's another thing that would just I can't imagine the because you were friends with Lou Puller Yes, it was and you know you told me a story yesterday about you and him arguing about the draft

And his his thoughts about that and I can't imagine that at some level You're thinking yourself well I know how I feel I know I'm patriotic. I believe in service But this is my boy. That's a hard choice everyone has to make. You know, Lou Pillar, by the way, I don't think – we had a lot of debate, but I never really got into an argument with him. I want to say that clearly because he is such a decent, basically gentle guy, you know. But we certainly – you know, we certainly had our disagreements about policy and service and wars in general, I think, by the time he and I were hanging out. He was a really, really fine guy.

My, you know, for me, Jim going into the military, it's a part of a family tradition. You accept the risk. There's an article I wrote for Parade Magazine years ago about a father still tending the grave of his son in Arlington. I used to walk by it all the time. It is one of the most beautiful stories about father and son and duty and whatever the father was wounded in World War II. and his son was wounded three times and killed in Vietnam, went back from Okinawa and was killed. It was called the Price of Duty.

And I actually mentioned Jim was really young when I wrote that piece. But I mentioned, you know, he had already said he wanted to be a Marine. You know, so you don't want to take away from someone what they believe that they should do personally for the country. So I totally respect it. And he just got to put your hands inside a bobsled, you know. And you also, I know we've been at it for a while, but the one other thing I wanted to ask you about is I talk about Hackworth a lot, and I know you interviewed him and spent, you spent like a week with him on Australia? No, I actually, I was, yeah, I was thinking I would get the gig to go to Australia, but we met in Hawaii, which is not a bad second place.

I spent about a week with him when he was, you know, I guess people who listen to you know his backstory, but when he was deciding to come home from Australia after his exile for a number of reasons, and his book had not yet come out. And Prairie Magazine could not review books, but I went and did a feature, a long feature, one of the longest pieces they've done on him. and, you know, read about him beforehand, talked to people, knew him, and then got to know him pretty one. He kept up with him for years, actually. And he was the kind of soldier that if you are going into a bad place, you want to be with. You know, he was the real deal. And he had a hard time at the end for a number of reasons that I pointed out in the article. I phrased it in a certain way.

And my article, you know, I think it was a quote from one of the people who served with him that, you know, the army disappointed him and he just decided to declare war on the army. But he was a soldier. And yeah, I thought a lot of him in that part of his life. Yeah, well, some of the stuff you told me, and I read that article in Jim, thanks for it for it. And I had actually read it before. But I hadn't made the connection. You know, I didn't look at the author's name. I apologize.

I just pulled it up, read the article. I didn't make that connection, but I should have. You know, obviously, thanks to both of you for coming on and thanks for your service. And we'll put the links to buy these books. And there's a new version coming out of Fields of Fire? There's an anniversary, a 40th anniversary edition that they've put out already in the Kindle Forum, and it will be out by, say, December in the paperback. It's no different other than there's a short essay in the front that I wrote and, you know, dance the cover up a little bit.

Glad to know it's still in print. It's been a while. Yeah, and it's in print, and there's lots of, I'll just say there's lots of books and movies and series and TV shows that, I don't know how to say this, but they reflect, certainly reflect some of the characters and some of the goings on inside the books. I'd love to see Fields become probably a TV series. I wrote a proposal a year ago on it, and we, you know, it's Hollywood's funny. You know, when I was working out there a lot, I think they were registering close to 40,000 screenplays a year of the Writers Guild, and they were making 260 movies.

So, you know, you get to that final cutoff, it's pretty competitive, but I would like to see that. Well, it's been a pleasure being with you. It's been a great conversation. Yeah, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I would maybe propose this and I know it's a long trip so maybe next time I'll do the trip but we've done this once before we did it with the novel Musashi which is told people we were going to do it and then once everyone had the chance to read it we came back or I came back on and I had a friend of mine Tim Ferriss who was an Asian studies major at Princeton and had lived

in Japan and studied judo and we went through the book and kind of you know parsed it apart But if you'd ever like to do that, let me know. Right, thank you. Come back on and we'll go through it and pull, you know. I didn't, you know, I like to talk about leadership. The leadership lessons inside Fields of Fire are phenomenal. Just the pattern recognition of knowing what kind of people you're dealing with. And you can learn a lot of that just from the book.

But I'd love to hear about, you know, how you got to some of those characters. One of my, one real obvious character is Austin, Sergeant Austin, who's like the, by the book Marine. that's hey it's my way or the highway and and just the way you know just the way that Hodges kind of handles him and and and there's a certain there's a conversation that they're having and you can see Hodges is pushing that pushing back up against him a little bit and then he decides oh you know I'm not going to push back any further because I'm going to create a relationship with this guy and we'll get him along the way but those little subtleties that you

put in this book are our phenomenal leadership lessons one one one small point on that because I probably should have mentioned it earlier in terms of one of the motivations in writing it is there there was so much out there demeaning things that happened in Vietnam without a comprehensive understanding not only of Vietnam but of warfare in general that I felt like it was important to to create characters that could give context to how some of these things happen you know that's what with Sergeant Austin how to you know you know the The numbers, you know, when I was in law school in writing this, everybody was getting fragged.

You know, and I remember I had a really good friend who was a World War II veteran who was needling me one day saying, tell me about fragging. I said, screw you. I was raised on stories of a bad lieutenant in World War II having 10 seconds once the ramp dropped on the landing draft before somebody was going to get him out of the way. And he said, well, I shot a lieutenant. I don't know if he was, true or not, but, you know,

there are leadership lessons in the book, and there are also, and Austin's one of them, I mean, how do you create positive environments? If you look at where these people had been at the time that he was coming in, doing the, you know, the pre-Vietnam junk on the bunk, which was probably essential to developing an attitude of discipline when you didn't have this stuff,

but, you know, somebody, you got, 1.3.3.7 million people over the 500,000 people in Vietnam at the time, a lot of them from pretty rough backgrounds. And, you know, there are ways to motivate them, you know, and then there are ways when things go the other way. There's ways to get yourself fragged. Well, again. That didn't happen often, but it was not, it did happen, you know, at times. Yeah, yeah. And it's probably always happened.

It has. In some form or another. Yeah, that's why it's important to be a good leadership. Important to be a good leader, especially when the people that you're leading have weapons. Absolutely. So, well, again, that's one of the many multitude of lessons that are in the book. And, again, we'll put them on the website so everyone can get them and you can educate yourself. Jim, you got any final thoughts?

Anything else to say? No, just thanks for having us. It was incredible. Just listening to you to talk back and forth. It's amazing. Well, it's been a real pleasure Well, thanks for coming on Obviously, it's an honor

To have you on And I think anyone that's going to listen to this Or anyone that does listen to this And you're going to hear from a lot of people that do listen to this They keep their Their minds open, keep their hearts humble As you both have talked about today You guys have said an incredible example

For people to follow And thanks for coming on It's been an honor to talk to you And we appreciate most of all your service to the country. And yours. And you're the way. Thank you.

Thanks. And at this time, our guests have departed the studio. Awesome to have them on, an honor to sit and talk with such men. And it's just an honor to be able to do that. Incredible story, incredible books. And get them. The books will be on the website on joccopodcast. under books books from episodes books from episodes is what the technical name is cool yeah

um I think everyone can learn from those books if you read them speaking of learning speaking of teaching and whatnot echo Charles maybe you could teach us how to you know get after a little bit harder sure first I will um okay shift gears to do jjjjjj Jitsu obviously seems obvious seems obvious yeah and I think you're in the same boat where you default to jiu jitsu as like a solution or a way to look at things even earlier today we're talking about true it is yeah it is it is a default way to well I've talked about it before the fact that it's a thread that ties a lot of things together it's comparable to a lot of things it's a struggle life is a

struggle. Yeah. Business is a struggle. Combat is a struggle. All these things are a struggle and you have to learn to deal with them and they all have threads in them that are the same. So yes, I do refer to Jiu-Jitsu from time to time. If you don't like that, go start your own podcast and don't talk about Jiu-Jitsu.

Dang, bro. Wait, are you saying me? Shoot. If I don't like that, brother, who you think you're talking to? Okay. I'm just making sure. I remember, back, I'm remembering it right now, that you refer to Jiu-Jitsu as the solution to something.

Humility, that's what it is. Well, that definitely. If you want to work on humility, use Jiu-Jitsu as the answer. That'll help you. Anyway, while you do that, you're going to need a ghee because you're going to do both ghee and no-gee. So when you get your ghee, no question, go to origin, main.com to get your ghee. That's where you get it, 100%.

Yep. No doubt. No doubt. And you can get rash cards there if you're going to train no-gee. You don't have to use a ghee in Jiu-Jitsu. You can. I recommend that you do. And if you're wondering if you should do to gee or no, you do both. That's just the way to go.

They both will help each other, and they'll both useful. But you can get rash guards if you're going to do Jiu-Jitsu with a rash guard, which is a good thing to do because it doesn't get all caught up in your opponent's toes. Yes. There's not too many things in life when you're worried about your opponent's toes. In Jiu-Jitsu, you are a little bit worried about your opponent's toes. Yeah. And you're on toes, by the way.

Yeah. And you can use the rash guards for other activities, such as surfing. Cycling. You don't cycle. I know, but I hear good things. Okay. Okay. Yeah, well, I guess you can wear them for cycling as well.

And spats. Don't forget about spats. Spats, which is essentially compression pants, we'll call them. But they're essentially a rash guard for your legs, for your other 50% of your body. Oh, as Dean Lister would say. Check. Plus they got t-shirt they got clothes and we're making more clothes at origin we are making more clothes at origin Yeah, it's like full on underway. Yeah standby denim. Yeah, I called Pete the other day and you didn't get yours yet no your jeans and that was really the topic

Oh, I'm sure you were right critical about that one So yeah, we're gonna make it all close keep just keep paying attention to that and we'll get them out Supplements we got some good supplements things that will help you in all aspects of getting after it yeah for instance help your joints with joint warfare help your joints with krill oil help your cognitive and physical capacity yes with discipline yes and there's actually so discipline we just made a new form of discipline so there's the discipline powder drink cool here's the problem with the discipline powder drink I'm getting ready to go into a meeting

and I'm gonna be in there for two hours and I want to get like a little bit of a cognitive bump yeah you know what I'm saying a little bit of a sure a little a little bump yes and I don't maybe want to drink a thousand or drink 500 milliliters of water whatever a bottle of water I don't want to drink a bottle of water because I'm then you know biologically what's going to occur in 45 minutes if I pounded a bunch of water yeah I'm gonna have to quit stop and use the head yeah not quit but I'm gonna have to stop for a moment and use the head which I don't like no So made one you know some pills a capsule actually a capsule so boom it's got the it's got a little caffeine in to get it. It's got some new tropics in it get you a little bit of a Does it does it have more caffeine than the regular? No

Okay, so literally discipline on the go. Yeah, it's discipline on the go. Yeah Discipline on the go. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I have mine took some good. Oh, you got yours? Oh, yeah Oh, check. I don't I mean obviously I don't go Not obviously, but I don't go into many meetings J.P took someone. JP took some and he said like a text to me and Pete and Brian. He was like, I just give the best speech ever. Yeah, well, okay, so that I don't feel fired up when I...

Well, JP feels fired up anyways. Right, so this is just like enhancement. You can tell JP going on stage, everything's clicking for him. Oh, you know he's fired up. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So that's Disblen go. About Mok, the Mok train. Yeah, Mok train big time. Stay on it. If you're on it.

It's kind of hard to get it. The problem of the mulk train is you just, it ends up just being sort of. It's kind of a dessert. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, the idea that protein powder is, it's either it tastes good or it's good quality. That's it.

That's sort of it. That's a dichotomy that used to exist. Used to exist. The, the gap in that dichotomy could not be crossed. Yeah. Could not be brought together. It has been brought together. Been brought together.

I was talking to my friend. Terry, aka Big Sexy, last night. Is he on the mulch train? No, that's the thing. I might as well have just made a commercial for it. Because you know how you start talking about it? Then you start saying, yeah, and you get yourself kind of fired up about it. You know, that's what I was doing.

Anyway, he was like, hey, man, I got it. It's good. Well, hopefully it gets on the mulk train. Yeah, hopefully. Mint chocolate chip, my personal favorite, peanut butter chocolate, Dave Burke's personal favorite. Good deal, did. Vanilla Gorilla.

technically named not directly for Laf Babin, but certainly associated with Laf Babin. And he said the other day that he mixed it up, and he was like, well, he's like, hey, that vanilla gorilla. He was pumped on the vanilla gorilla. Amen, good. And then there's the darkness, which is just pure chocolate. Yes, pure chocolate.

In my household, the darkness is ascending to mint, chip, chocolate levels. Because it has like a dark chocolate taste. Who's, who's, who's? Oh, it's here. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Interesting.

I still add peanut butter in it, by the way. I should mention that. That I could understand. But also, you know, we also just came out with Warrior Kid Mulk. We got strawberry and chocolate right now. They have a little bit less protein. I mean, because if your kid's eight years old, you should hopefully get protein from natural food.

sources the problem is sometimes they don't get enough we got some protein in there got vitamins in there got some probiotics in there because we know Timmy he hears about probiotics he gets fired up and this is the amazing thing they are delicious they are just freaking delicious yeah and so in my house the strawberry kids milk is just getting crazy I as soon as I tasted the strawberry kids milk I sent Brian a text and said make Adult warrior kid mulk immediately now. So he's got that comment oh right adult strawberry Yeah yeah yeah yeah adult strawberry and I called it strawberry quick the other day

That's where your brain went. Yeah, because it tastes that good It's it's it literally tastes like strawberry quick yeah the chocolate's damn good too Yeah, but anyways that's a warrior kid. This is the only drink is the only thing that you got with your kids that you want your kids to have it as bad as they want to have it There's no other thing in the world that's like that. Yeah. This is it. Maybe the Warrior Kid books. Yeah.

Yeah. It's possible. I was drinking Mountain Dew the other day. Straight up. What is up with you? Bro. Just a savage. Bear with me.

Why are you doing that to yourself? Nonetheless, I was. And I came to kind of this realization. You're fired. I'm telling you. Okay. So, all right. So bear with me.

You know, I'm not pounding Mountain Dews every. day. I'm not saying that. But as I drink this... Slipper slow. It is a slippery sound. As I drink this Mountain Dew, you know how you kind of like reflect. Yeah. On things. And so I'm like, okay, what am I drinking? It tastes good. I like my... I've always liked Mountain Dew since literally the first time I tasted one of the kid. And so I'm like drinking it. And I'm like, you know what I'm drinking right now? It's liquid candy is what I'm drinking. Literally like, you know, you know, like a jolly rancher or one of these, you know, that kind of candy. They make

And so you know that kind of candy Consider this exact flavor this exact flavor not more sweet not less sweet this exact Mondeau flavor as a lollipop or Jolly Rancher it would fit it would be like yeah And I'm just drinking the liquid form of it literally that's what I'm drinking did you finish the can Well it was one of those small cans did you finish it yeah I was eating sushi you know it is like it's the whole deal wrong story nonetheless that's what it is But there's no reason for this anymore because now we have milk. Yeah and you can kind of to consider the difference right where the you know your kid if they're like how I was

and you see the Mountain Dew as a kid you're like I want that Mountain Dew but the parents like no do you we don't drink Mountain Dew why don't you drink why don't you drink Jock White Tea instead bring a can with you well it's you know I have a bunch of it's a long story you know and we're working very hard on the whole situation but nonetheless it happened and you know we're gonna move on but if you're a kid you want the Mountain Dew I notice now it's Mountain Dew it is up there with cotton and important that's how you said the tea it's not a silent tea nonetheless if this so you compare the scenarios kid wants a mountain do it's like yeah of course

you want them on it tastes good but the parents like no we don't drink Mountain do that yeah that's crap that's liquid candy you know that we're not doing that it's not healthy for us but the kid wants the mulk boom parent yes every all time every time parents are like hey do you want some more milk yeah yes I do actually check cool Good. So that's that's origin main.com for all that stuff. Yeah, a lot of good stuff on there. Also, we have a store Jocko has a store called Jocko store. Anyway, there you can get also get rash guards some cool shirts if you want to represent discipline equals freedom a few designs on that one. Yeah, there's some designs on there on that store in general. So yeah, man, check them out. If you want to get something

Get something. Trucker's hats. My wife said something about Jocco. store and then my youngest daughter said you have a store and I said yeah and she says where is it on the internet man virtual yeah virtual Jocko store yep it's called Jock store tell them let your friend know but yeah some good stuff some hoodies on there as well hats as Jocko said trucker and flex fit but yeah go on there and you know if you want something if you like something get something good way to stay on the path and represent at the same time boom do you represent When you're does it help you stay on the path? I think so yes there's a there's quite a few people that feel

When they put on the uniform right in the game you know it's a classic Art typical part of the hero's journey is they're getting their gear on yeah suiting up you know they're suiting up Yeah, that's part of the deal watch a movie what do they show that whether it's a soldier getting his boots on lock and loaded his weapon You know in the movies when they open up like the war Oh yeah, big time. Like in Mikey and the Dragons opens up the war chest, right? Yeah. In...

Commando. Commando. Gearing up. He gets onto the shore. The final battle scene, right? He gets on the shore. Oh, yeah, it was like a whole montage. Boots, bulletproof vest. You know, I don't know if it was bulletproof.

I don't know. Doesn't matter. He's zipping it up. Yeah. I think that vest was more just, you know... Just dope. Just... The grenades on it.

Just Hollywood 100%. They paint the face with the thing. Well, you know that charcoal that they paint their face with. Oh, man. It's come to candy paint, yeah. Yeah, bro. I'm telling you, it's suiting up. So, yeah, because of that, yeah, you can get suited up,

and then you feel like you're getting in the zone for whatever it is you're about to go do. Because you got that shirt that says, get it up. Yeah. Well, big time. Yeah, when you get a new rash guard, you're that much more compelled to go train. If you... So this is a thing that starts when you're, like, six years old and you get a new pair of shoes. It just lasts your whole life.

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, actually the shoes, that's a good example because remember when you're a kid, I don't know, you might be different. But I think most of us when we're kid, you know when you got the new shoes. Yeah, yeah, you feel like, I can go to school. I can go faster. I want to, well, yeah, you're thinking functionality, which I dig, by the way. But you get the new shoes, the new Chuck Taylor's.

The half red, half green ones. You ever had those? No. Anyway, we had those. And so you buy them or you get them, whatever from your parents. And you're like, can't wait to just wear these to school. Oh. And like everyone's going to see them and all this stuff.

So compared to if you don't have new shoes, do you really want to go to school? Sure, maybe, maybe not. But with the chucktail or the new shoes, you will want to go. That's how. Same thing with the gym. The same thing with anywhere. If you got some new clothing to represent with big time. Check.

Do you wear dry fit is, I think it's what it's called? You wear dry fit, right? In what? Like a shirt? Way. It's called dry fit for like working out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, we don't have any of that.

We need to. I know that's what I just thought of that right now. You just thought of that. Here's the thing, I knew that before because you, I think you and some people early on said that. I'm working on, we're working on it. We're working on at origin that we can make dry fit, not compression, like loose fit, right?

Loose fit, quick dry, that's what we're making. Yeah, that's what you're talking about. I gave me a pretty dope red one at the muster, and I was like, I don't wear a dry fit at all. I put it on, I was like, dang, I like it's good. So boom, it's kind of on my radar now. Yeah, well, I think you measure most shirts by their sleeve size. So I think must have some small sleeves and you were stoked.

That's classified. Anyway, also stay on the path. Keep stay on the path. Keep yourself on the path by subscribing to this podcast. I know it seems obvious. But sometimes when people are new, they're like, oh, yeah, cool podcast. In fact, or a year in that trial period. Because there are certain podcasts that all be like,

hey, I hear good things. I'm going to go listen to it. And I only listen to it like at the gym or something like this or under certain circumstances. And I'll forget, you know, like I won't listen to it at other times. So come back to the gym or something like that. I go, oh, let me find that podcast. And you got to kind of do the search or whatever. You just subscribe.

So I can see that scenario being the case. You see what I'm saying for people? Because, you know, how we'll always say, of course they're going to subscribe. Seems obvious. It's obvious. You don't have to tell people to subscribe. They're either going to subscribe if they like it or not. But sometimes you do forget there are circumstances, what I'm saying.

So here's a reminder. While you're subscribing to this podcast also subscribe to the warrior kid podcast we have some more warrior kid podcast episodes coming I apologize that they're taking long it is my fault for not being more squared away Prioritizing better and working harder but I have some almost ready for the release Also while you're looking at warrior kid stuff you can check out Irish oaks ranch.com and get some some warrior kids soap from a American-made soap from a 13-year-old kid that is raising goats getting the milk from the goats and turning it into soap Yeah, good soap too by the way on a farm here in California a lot of people don't know that California is

massive agriculture and farming so you can support that with a little warrior kid soap Also don't forget about the YouTube while you're subscribing you can subscribe to the YouTube channel Jocko podcast where you can Watch these podcasts on there if you want to see us if you want to see Jim Webb and James Webb You want to see what their reactions are and see what they look like you can subscribe or you can go to the YouTube and check it out You can also see echoes enhanced videos which he is quite proud of I'm proud that you use the word legit Well they are legit. I will give you credit when credit is due and they they enhance the message Functionally

Sure. Like being able to read the words. That's functional usage. So it's not just, is not just effects for the sake of effects, which I probably wouldn't call legit. Sometimes I do throw some of that stuff in there. Sometimes when walls are exploding, that might be a little bit beyond. But sometimes he goes a little too far. Let him know.

Let him know if his videos are a little bit much. Yep. He learns, it's like the guy that learns something. And they learn the cowbell. They get a new cowbell for the drum set and they put it in through the whole album. It was just cowlip. What's a cowbell? It's a cowbell.

I mean, but people use it in music. Occasionally, it should be used sparingly. So it's a actual cowbell? Yeah, it's a cowbell. Okay. Thing, or more like a bong. Okay. I can't really do the noise.

Sure, but they're, because in, especially drums, actually all instruments, really, they have like names for, you know, like high hat. Yeah, there's the name of the drum. I know, but see what I'm saying though, that's like a name for a drum. Like if you've never seen a drum or never heard of a drum, someone says, hi They'd be like I know what hi means and I know what hat means But hi hat is the name for you see what I think I thought that was the same deal for cowbell No no no it's it's act now they make I mean I don't know what the cowbells look like in

1850 yeah, but this has definitely been cleaned up and modified so it's a cowbell Look or thing but it's for your you know you don't you don't go to the farm store to buy a cowbell for your drum set Yeah, okay go to the music store and you say I need a cowbell I understand and then you start using it in every song and you think everyone wants to just hear that cowbell yeah yeah because you like it and there's a whole skit on saturday night live about the cowbell okay i was just gonna one of the patches that guys had in t u bruiser that eventually got banned one of the patches was more cowbell based on the saturday night live skit gotcha okay and i always did actually wonder about that more cowbell where that now you know you never know what you're gonna learn also psychological warfare

that's an album with tracks where you can stay on the path and we're making another one and it's coming out soon and that's it on that. Good. Also, if you want to vary up your workout, get more workout gear. Go to onet.com slash jaco. Also, they got some good immunity stuff

that I actually took. It reminded me because I just took some felt a cold coming on. Shroom tech immune. It's a good one. You like that one? I very much liked that one. Never let me know.

Before you travel, take that. Nonetheless, there's a lot of quothic. stuff on there and information that's another one that like you can get caught up in a bad way but it's a good resource when you want to vary up your workouts do some new workouts kettlebells even that that club workout which I would highly recommend looking into what to do don't just pick that thing up and start getting nuts might get you might jam you on you also got jocco white tea which tastes delicious and it's good for you I say again taste delicious And good for you. That seems to be the theme if we're gonna put something in our body

We want it to taste good yes and we want it to be good for us jocco white tea and there's no doubt that it's good for you because it's it's the only product The only product that I've ever heard of where an 8,000 pound deadlift is guaranteed a hundred percent Yeah never failed me too so get you some of that get your deadlift up also we got some books Of first of all the books we read today and and James Webb's James Webb has 10 books that he's written The two that we covered today will both be on the website Fields of Fire and Then I heard my country calling these are the two books I read today He also mentioned a book called the Nightingale song which is a great book and we'll put that one on as well Did you hear me? Yeah, nightingale song nightingale song. Yeah, great book. It's about the

The Naval Academy guys that graduated with Jim Webb and what they did they all had a huge impact on the Navy and on the country and it's well the this particular group that he talks about so we'll put that book on there as well because it's a great book and perhaps I'll cover it at some point obviously for books we also have way of the warrior kid and mark's mission if you know kids get them these books and it'll get them on the right path of of going in the right direction of doing the right things it's just going to be it's it's going to help kids out the feedback that I've gotten from around the world and yes I've gotten feedback from around the world by around the world I mean Australia New Zealand I've gotten a whole package of letters from a classroom in New

Zealand of kids that are on the path so if you read a book imagine you read a book and you're seven years old nine years old and you decided that the book was good enough that you were gonna try and find the author who lives on the other side of the world and write him a note and say thanks because I'm on the path now that's the book right there way the warrior kid in Mark's mission also discipline Equal equals freedom field manual this you know what this is Christmas time you get to Christmas this book is a gift it's a gift for people that you know that you want to help if you have an enemy don't give it to them because in your enemy's gonna get on

the path probably come back and whatever defeat you 18 months and they'll be jacked and they'll be focused and they'll crush you or or yes you're right or they could if that well I guess if they're it depends on their level of malevolence in their soul. Because if they have a little bit of good in there, you know what they're going to do? They're going to read that little part about laughter wins. They're going to see that the light is going to overcome the darkness.

And maybe they'll come back to you in 18 months and like, hey, I got you something. Boom. We're not enemies anymore. We're moving in the right direction. By the way, do you want to train? By the way, do you want to jack some steel? By the way, do you want to go out and eat some steak? Because I'm down.

Yeah. So that might actually be the move. Yeah, that could be the move. Nicely done. I like the way you think that audio book is not on audible it is on iTunes Amazon music Google play other mp3 platforms extreme ownership first book I wrote with my brother Laf Babin that's taking the principles that we used in combat and then applying them to business and life and then we followed that up with another book called the dichotomy of

leadership another New York Times best seller which is super cool and all that but whatever let's face it what we wanted to do was write a book that actually expanded and made people better leaders feedback we're getting on that one is that's what it's helping people do the little the little nuances of extreme ownership that are that are harder to handle and harder to master this book will help you do it the dichotomy of leadership available everywhere appreciate everyone getting that of course now we have Mikey and the dragons It is coming out

November 15th I'm trying to get as many printed as I can right now because you all ordered a lot of them So thank you and It's about a little kid who's scared of everything and he finds a book and in the book the king is dead in this village In this kingdom and there's a prince that's gonna have to stand up and fight So that's what he that's what he that's what He does the prince has to stand up and fight but he's scared because he's only seven So that's that little excerpt from it a little expert excerpt I do a little expert

I do a little excerpt the king had always been so strong and brave and protected the kingdom from the dragon cave The dragon cave was just over the hill and filled with scary creatures that were ready to kill Horrible dragons of every single type who thought people in the kingdom were especially ripe the people thought the dragons had breath of fire, and that the dragon stood 20 feet tall or higher. They thought the dragons had sword-stopping scales and powerful, long, razor-sharp tails. But the brave king never let the beast around. He stood up and fought and held his ground. And as long as the king had been the king, none of the dragons could do a thing. Yes, the king always kept the dragons at bay by going out bravely into the fray. It seemed without fear the king would go fight. He'd beat the dragons

and come home at night. But now that the king had died and was gone, there was only one person to fight and carry on. But that person wasn't big or mighty or strong. In fact, he hadn't been alive that long. Now the person who had dragons to chase was just a little boy with a smiling face. Yes, the person that now must stand up and be bold was just the little prince. who was only seven years old. So there you go. Of course, the villagers are worried if this little kid's gonna be able to do it.

And, well, get the book. You'll find out what happens when he goes up to Face the Dragons. And by the way, you guys put this book to number 17 on Amazon of all books pre-release. That's crazy. So you guys called me out.

And I'm printing as fast as I can. And the good news is I'm printing more of these first editions. So the first edition. editions is going to continue I'm going to print as many as I can and get it out and get it to you everyone hopefully by Christmas appreciate it for the support against against the big boys yeah speaking of big boys you remember how you used to talk trash about the publishing company try to be all conservative and look at you know yeah yeah I was I was conservative yeah and I was

too conservative yeah I didn't realize how much people were going to get after it and I got texts from my buddies that are saying I just ordered 10 copies I just ordered 14 copies I just ordered 19 copies for every kid in my extended family yeah man and I'm like that's awesome I will get them printed as fast as I can I pulled out all stops and I'm making it happen hey you know what it's my fault I should I should order more yeah I should order because those exact things that you said about yourself were the exact same things you were saying about the publishing company yeah yeah I didn't know how people were going to get after it.

Well, you just said that about the publishing company. They don't understand. Maybe I, apparently I didn't understand. We all don't understand. I should have taken my own advice. Now we do. Now we know. There you go.

The books are being printed as fast as I can print them. See, that's what I like about you. So, apologize for that. It's my fault. I should have taken my own advice. And, well, now I'm getting after it. Yes, yes, you are, sure. We'll get them out there.

Printing a ton more. Also, Eschlon Front, leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do at the Eschelon Front team. Me, Laif Babin, J.P. Dinell, Dave Burke, Flynn Cochran, Mike Sorrelli, and Mike Baima. So if you need help in your organization, call us. Call us now because we are booked up. So if you are thinking about doing this in the future, call now.

Escalonfront.com. Go get on there and we'll hook up. Also, muster 2019. We got Chicago and Denver Dates aren't completely locked yet But check extreme ownership.com For the information and to Find out when it is live and when you can book

And make your reservations All the musters have sold out And this one these will too So get on it early EF Overwatch as well We're connecting spec ops and combat aviators To companies that need leaders So

the military produces trains and tests in combat environment leadership and we're taking those leaders those experienced leaders and bringing them into the civilian sector eFoverwatch dot com if you want to get on in the game on either side so whether you're a spec ops or your combat aviation and you're looking for what your next mission is going to be or your company that's looking for experienced trained leaders to come and help you out folks that understand the mentality of extreme ownership and what we do at echelon front go to eF overwatch.com and if you want to keep discussing these things with us we are available on the interwebs on Twitter on Instagram and on dad fishie book echo is at echo Charles and I am at

Jocko Willink and thanks once again to James and Jim Webb for their service and for joining us on the podcast to share their lessons learned. It was an honor to be able to sit and talk with them. And thanks to everyone else that has served or is serving in the military around the world out there holding the line.

And also thanks to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, correctional officers, Border Patrol, all the first responders, everyone that is out there doing what you do for us on the home front thank you for what you do every day and to everyone else that is listening thanks for listening thanks for supporting thanks for spreading the word it is much appreciated and in the book Fields of Fire one of the main characters Hodges in part of the book he quotes an old him an old

him that he's thinking about in his head and that old hymn says time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away they fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day so there you go a little reminder a little reminder to all of us that time is fleeting time is short and we only get so much so don't wait around don't put it off instead get up and yes get after it after it and until next time this is echo and jocco out