Jocko Podcast - 200: Are We Doing Everything We Are Capable of? With Jim Sursely

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:44 - James Sursely.   1:40:18 - Final Thoughts and Take-aways. 1:43:23 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:03:20 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 200 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. In the morning, after my swim, I sit down and have a cup of coffee and think, Jim, you're the luckiest guy in the world. And that is a quote from a man named James Sersley, a man who served his country as a soldier in the U.S. Army. So he volunteered for the army and then volunteered to go fight in Vietnam, a man who made incredible sacrifices and who faced incredible challenges, challenges that would overwhelm most people.

And yet he carried on. And he proved and is still proving that the human will is stronger than many of us ever realize. And that if you have the right attitude, you can look at a harrowing situation and still call it lucky. And it is an honor to have this man with us tonight to talk about his experiences and how he has overcome so much adversity

Mr. James Sersley, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here, Jacob. Sir, honor to have you on. And I apologize that the fact that you had to travel all the way out here from sunny Florida to sunny San Diego, but I'm honored that you were able to make the trip. I'm honored to be here. Again, thanks for asking. And I like to start at the beginning about, you know, just where you came from, where you grew up.

And I think we're talking about Minnesota, right? We are. Somehow you cover up that accent pretty well. Well, I've been living in Florida since 1971, so I'd hope I'd get rid of some of that. So you grew up, what was the family situation growing up? What'd your dad do and whatnot? My dad was a barber in Rochester, Minnesota, and my mother, for the most part, was a mother and a housewife. And worked a little bit of part-time when I got into my teenage years, along with my older sister,

was also a couple years older than me. And what's Rochester, Minnesota like? Well, Rochester, Minnesota's home in the Mayo Clinic. So, I mean, it's probably that's the biggest thing in town. And IBM, but it's rural, southeastern corner of Minnesota. Just a great bunch of patriotic Americans is what I was accustomed to growing up. And your dad served, if I'm correct, your dad served in the Army Air Corps? He did.

It was a radio operator on B7. and B-24s during World War II. Now, how much did he talk about that when you were growing up? You know, not really a whole lot. I think the biggest thing that I experienced with him was he had a foot locker that he brought back home. And I can remember probably as a nine or 10-year-old kid trying to put on that stuff and have the jacket drape all over me and the pants too big and huge boots and everything else. But he never really said too much about it other than, you know,

where he experienced training in different parts of the United States and that type. the thing. But he was a, you said B-17 radio operator? And B-24. And B-24. So was he doing the missions into Europe? He did not do, he never left the United States. Okay. Because when he, when he finished whatever training he had, they made him a trainer of other radio operators. Got it. So he was lucky. Well, yeah, otherwise there's a good chance you wouldn't even be here right now. Exactly. Yeah, those are the, those are the guys that we're doing. If you did 25 missions, you got to go home. but there wasn't too many people that got to go home. So when you were growing up, I mean, going to high school, what was it your, what were you into growing up?

Football, basketball, and baseball, and girls. I'm not sure which one was the greatest priority. And were you any good? I mean, I was starting full back on a football team for three different, you know, sophomore, junior and senior year. And probably could have gone to college, but I wasn't. wasn't exactly the greatest student in the world. So I did make myself eligible to go on to college. You were focused on studying female anatomy at this point.

That's correct. Yep, that'd be a good interpretation. So were you planning to go to college? Were you thinking about going to college? Were your parents edging you towards college? My parents really never said too much about that. My older sister was already two years into college at that point. My thing was if there'd have been a place where I could have gone to play football,

but I didn't have to go to school, I'd have been the first one in line for that location. Yeah. And as I got closer to, you know, finish school in May of 1966, and as I got into September 66, I kind of thought about it, and I said, you know what I might do is I might just join the military, do three years in the Army, come back home, use the GI Bill and go to school, wherever I wanted to because I knew the Army would get me a GED just about as quick as I got in there. So that was kind of some of my thoughts as I got ready to join the military.

So what year were you set to graduate from high school? Is that 1967? No, no, 66. So May of 66, you started saying to yourself, all right, when I get done, I'll just, I'll just join the Army. Well, and I don't know if I even really did that. I mean, it's probably even more simple than that. I don't know whether I was a forward enough thinker to actually be in that direction. I actually drove by the post office in downtown Rochester, Minnesota. There's one of those signs that were on a spring, and it had Uncle Sam, red, white, and blue in the big top hat, and his finger was pointed right at the windshield of my car, and it said, Uncle Sam needs you.

And I circled the block, went in and talked to the Army recruiter, not really with any great intentions of joining, but just to kind of see what that process was all about and what maybe I could do if I did join the Army. When that recruiter saw you come through the door, he was thinking something completely different. He said, I got this guy. Well, yeah, they were probably tremendously in need of warm bodies at that point in time during the Vietnam era, for sure.

So this is 1966. So how much were you aware of what was going on in Vietnam at this time? How much were you watching the news? How much were you seeing as far as the Vietnam War goes? Because it had definitely escalated by 1966. I mean, I had one of my friends who was a pilot in Vietnam, but he was in the Naval Academy. And 1965, they said they didn't even talk about Vietnam at the Naval Academy at all.

It wasn't until they got close to the end of their senior year that they started going, oh, there's a war going on. But by 1966, it had absolutely escalated. And so what were your thoughts? Were you thinking, hey, this is, if I go in, then I know what's going to happen. I know I'm going to be going to war. I mean, there was some discussion with fellow classmates. And I went to a parochial school, and there was a bigger public school that was there in town.

And a lot of those guys were talking about, let's all go in on the buddy system, whether the Marine Corps or the Army or something. And I didn't want to have anything to do with that. I mean, that was my answer to everybody that ever raised that proposition. But we were aware of what was going on and probably as you'd pass through the living room, your parents would have the television on. You'd see it on the 6 o'clock or the 10 o'clock news. So you knew there was activity going on, but it wasn't like it didn't scare me, but it also wasn't attractant to send me down to the Army recruiters.

So after that first visit to the Army recruiter, after Uncle Sam called you out as you drove down the street, At what point, so you go to see him and how much longer was it before you signed the dotted line? Well, I went home and talked to my parents about it. And it's kind of one of those things where I think they probably really focused on the news much more than I ever did. And I mean, the first thing that I mentioned about the possibility during the Army, my mother was in tears. I'm sure because of what you see on television. My dad, having been former member, the military, was not quite that.

way but just said hey you know you know there's the Navy there's the Air Force there's a lot of different possibilities why don't you give that some thought and I just kind of told them if I did join what I thought I would want to do and that was to be like a mechanic that was something that I enjoyed doing on my own with vehicles and motorcycles that we had so I mean I never thought about joining to be a combat soldier and you know I probably gave myself about two weeks had a little bit more discussion with my parents and that's probably when I decided to go down and join. Again, I was 18 years old, so it wasn't like I needed permission to join. I could have done it

on my own. And that's basically what I did. So did you, you were into cars then? Did you have your own car? I did. Did you have multiple cars? Had two cars and a motorcycle. And what were they? A 1957 Chevy, a 1964 Chevy and a Yamaha 250 motorcycle. So you're at you girls. Did I mention girls? You did a little bit, yes. And nothing about the Navy, the Marine Corps.

Did they give you a contract in the Army where you were going to become a mechanic? Did they do that back then? They did. Okay. So you knew right away, hey, you're going to go in. We're going to make you a mechanic. And that sounds like a pretty good plan. Right.

Especially because I'm just thinking like when I, joined the Navy, all other prospects in life didn't seem as cool as that. They didn't seem, you know, when you said you wish there was a place where you could just go and play football, well, I wanted a place where I could just go and play Commando. And there was a place like that. It was called the Navy. That's how I ended up joining. And it seems like, yeah, I don't know. I'm not saying I didn't have any other options, but it just seemed like such a good option for me. It's so simple and straightforward. And that's actually one of the things that I liked about the was when I joined nothing else none of my previous life mattered it was just here you go here's

what you have to do so so did your did your mind shift at all about your decision when you showed up to boot camp no okay and I think really because you know when I reflect on that now and look back that there was a lot of guys who never left their hometown never done anything when they got drafted and I don't know what, 40% of the people in my basic training unit were probably drafted, didn't want to be there, never had any intentions of being in the military. It also scared the living crap out of them. I mean, there was people that cried half the night, all night in basic training. You know, they were away from home for the first time.

They weren't physical type of people to start with. And it was just extremely difficult to watch a lot of that while I went through basic training. Wow. So where did you go to basic training? training? Fort Polk, Louisiana. Now, were most of the kids that you went through boot camp with? Did they send them, were they kids that were from that area? Did you go to boot camp like regionally, or was it people from all over the country? People from all over the country. I think your induction and where you go for basic training in the Army at that time depended on the timing of when you

got drafted or when you joined. Could have been to Fort Stewart, Georgia. I think there were places out here in California where they actually had basic. Fort Lewis, Washington, Head Basic, all over the place, Fort Dix, New Jersey. So you're in there with people that have been drafted. You said 40%. I think roughly at that time. And there's, I mean, this is where people start doing crazy things just to get out, like, you know, wet their bed or whatever, sleep walk and all this kind of thing,

so they just would get out of their service. Did you see that kind of thing? We had three guys that actually went AWOL and stayed underneath, one of the, those elevated wood frame World War II barracks for three days. Because even if they'd have got out from underneath the barracks, they wouldn't have known how to get out of Louisiana to get back where they were from. So people brought them food for three days, and then they finally decided to surrender. And that's the other interesting thing about, so this is 1960, this is still 1966.

And so the anti-war movement wasn't in full swing yet, was it? far as just open hippies in the streets and those kind of things, that wasn't really happening in 66, was it? No, more like 68 and 69 is when it really got cranked up. So these kids that were coming in, they were just horrified about what was going to happen. And I don't know whether there was even a fear of going to Vietnam. If it was just a fear of being away from home, the physicality of basic training, and people screaming and hollering in your face and everything else. I mean, I think that's what scared them more than.

anything else. You know, that's one thing that they can never put back in the bottle is these days, well, first of all, it's all volunteer. But second of all, we've seen, when I joined the Navy, I had seen, you know, military boot camp movies since I was born. I mean, we just knew every little trick and anticipated everything that was going to happen. And it seems like if you were a kid from wherever and you got drafted and you'd never left home and then you show up and you got some drill sergeant going nuts in your face. Yeah, that's totally different. That's, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a shock to the system. And that was before you could play that card, I guess, that they use now. You know, there's a timeout card in a lot of different branches of the

military where you can go over and make a phone call and call your congressman if you want. If you're being mistreated, you can call home and report it. Well, they used to say over there, we'll take you to the phone booth, but I'm not sure you'll ever make it back to the unit. So, but you were, you're an athlete, you were a three-sport athlete, you were used to working, and so it wasn't a big deal for you to go through, and you, and you volunteered to do it. Right. So you get done with boot camp, and then what's next? You must have to go some kind of MOS school, learn your trade, right? I stayed at Fort Polk, Louisiana for wheeled vehicle repair school. And that was another, I think, eight weeks or seven weeks. And then after that, they decided I was a

pretty good mechanic. So they sent me to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for track vehicle repair school, which was everything that the Army owned that had a track on it, you know, self-propelled howitzers and armored personnel carriers, tanks, you name it, anything that had a track on. it. Did you enjoy all that? I did. Yeah, like I have a nephew that he just loves all kinds of big machinery, you know, he just, anything that, any caterpillar, any big piece of machinery, he just loves it. And I could see him joining the army to be a tank repair man. And then, so how long is that school last? Another eight weeks. And at this point, are you, I mean, with the war going on, are you starting to be more aware of possibilities of where you could end up?

Well, you would hear people talking about it. And some of the people that I took the track vehicle school with were people that had been in the military for a year, a year and a half, two years were already E5. Or some of them actually even E6, who had had the wheel part of it, but never the track part. And I think they were kind of merging those two MOSs. So that's why they were training in both categories. Did you have any guys in those schools that had already been to Vietnam? We did not. Not in either one of those schools, but I did.

My first assignment was to the 24th Infantry Division in Germany, and there were Vietnam veterans in our unit in Germany. So you wrap up your school, and that's your first permanent duty is over in Germany. And you show up there, which has got to be a good time. It's pretty decent. So are we in the 67 yet? Yep, we're in 67. So, 1967. How old are you?

19. 19 years old, and you get stationed, where in Germany? Augsburg. Did you drink any beer while you were there? A little bit, yeah. I think everything right outside the gate, just like the military bases here in this country, all the pubs are right outside the gate.

And you're 19 years old. You're the richest human being in the world, because you got that, whatever, were you to E3? Or E4? $97 a month is what I paid when I joined the Army. I quit $150 a week job to get $97 a month. But I got all the clothes and free food I wanted. Yeah, I was looking at one of my pay stubs the other day for when I first joined the Navy.

And it was, I want to say it was like $700 a month or $642 a month. And I was looking at it going, dang, they really, they got me pretty good, didn't they? For a month. But you're in Germany. And what's your job there? I mean, you're working on tracks like you were supposed to. That's what you're doing. Well, I did a little bit of that, and what the assignment to do

was run the TI Bay Technical inspection on all the vehicles. You know, having been around the military, every vehicle has to have a logbook. All the logbooks have to be up to date with repairs and maintenance on them. So my job was to sort of ferret out what needed to be done, making sure the driver took care of it. And if not, then we sent the rest over it with a workhorse. over to the regular mechanics and they'd replace or fix something that was damaged at that point.

Now, are you doing any time in the field at this point? We used to go to Grafenvere, Hohenfelds, while flicking and do training out that way. So you'd go out and do a big exercise, and when you would do those exercises, would you be, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you, would you be, uh, one of the crew on any of the tracks? Or would you be standing by to repair them? Only standing by to repair them. Because the motor pool was battalion motor pool. and it was big enough that you were, you know, you had the full contingent of mechanics,

welders and everything else. And then how long did you spend in Germany? I spent about eight months in Germany before I volunteered to go to Vietnam. Now, at this point, you said you did have guys that had been in Vietnam and they were with you. And what was the feedback they were given you? Well, I mean, they weren't negative. about it. They weren't trying to make it overly scary. I think they were realistic and honest about it.

But I think one of the things that when I look back at that now, they were okay and they were alive. So, you know, maybe it's really not that bad. Yeah. But I mean, if it had been somebody that had been seriously injured, maybe he'd be going, maybe I need to think about this a little bit more. Yeah. I mean, I was kind of determined to go in the reason that I was because I felt like when I was in Germany, I felt like I had a civilian job with a green uniform. I didn't figure I was being utilized or I was using myself to the best of my ability. I joined because I wanted to make some kind of a contribution. You know, it wasn't a John Wayne kind of story or anything that big, but I just didn't feel

like I was accomplishing that there. The first sergeant talked to me about it and said, you know, you need to think about this. I'm going to give you three or four days. Talk to some of the guys that have been in Vietnam. Because, I mean, I think he'd been, and it wasn't anything. He just wanted to rubber stamp and put you on a plane and send you back and get you ready to go. He was really a genuine kind of person who felt like, hey, make sure this is what you want before we actually signed the paperwork and send you on. Yeah, there's also different people have different experiences in war.

And I know in Iraq, there was places in Iraq where the living conditions were better than most, than much of the living conditions that I experienced in my normal life in America. And then you go 10 miles away or sometimes even three miles from that point and you're outside at some forward operating base. And it's really dangerous and really hard living conditions. And it just depends on where you are. And I think the other thing you were just talking about, I think they call it Survivor's bias, which is the only. people that we get to talk to. Like it happens with businesses. You know, someone says, oh, I did this with my business. And that's why I'm a multimillioner now and everyone says, well, that must have worked. So I'll do it. What you don't get to talk to is all the people that they tried that and

it failed. So yeah, from your perspective, you're hearing from guys that were in Vietnam. And like you said, I don't want to say they had a good time, but it wasn't that bad because they were coming back to be able to tell you about it. So you thought about it for a few days. What were you seeing on the news at this point? You didn't see much news at all. when I was in Germany. I mean, I don't know whether I ever watched a television all the while I was there. And were there any, like, intel reports? Were there casualty reports?

Were you seeing? Like, I remember for me in Iraq, I was always paying attention to how many people were getting killed every month. I mean, I tracked that all the time. And, you know, you'd see those numbers creeping up and they crept up and they crept up. and I paid attention to that. Was that something that you were looking at thinking, well, hey, that could be me? Never saw any or never heard any reports of that at all.

I mean, I think there was information shared that people were dying in Vietnam, but there wasn't any statistical paperwork that actually would bear out all those numbers. So you talk to the first sergeant. He tells you give it a few days, you give it a few days, and you say, yep, I'm still in. I want to go do this. Did you, when you go volunteer, what do they do? Are they assigning you to a specific unit?

Are they just shipping you off to Vietnam and you're going to sign when you get there? That's what happens. Your replacement troop. See, basically, I think when Vietnam first got started, whole units went to Vietnam. But as time went on, everybody became a replacement troop. Somebody would rotate out tomorrow, another guy would come in.

Three days later, another guy would come in. Three days later, another guy, I'd rotate, month, you know what I mean? It just went on that way all the while I was in country. So how long did they give you to prepare? Did you do anything different to prepare? How long did it take from the time you said, hey, I want to go, yep. And then how long was it before you left?

It was about two weeks before I actually got orders that came down from battalion or brigade. Went home on a 30-day leave back to Minnesota during the month of February of 1968. and then I reported to Fort Lewis, Washington on the last couple days of February, 68, was in country by March the 1st, 68. Did you fly over on civilian aircraft? I did. With stewardesses and- Franof Airlines, if I remember correctly, which is not even in existence anymore.

What was it called? Braniff. Braniff Airlines. And that was, what about saying goodbye to your parents? Was your dad nervous? Was your mom a disaster since she was already sad when you joined the army in the first place? It was pretty hard on my mom. And, I mean, I think it was difficult for my dad, too,

because I'm sure they probably both thought I was just absolutely crazy for volunteering to go. I mean, I could have stayed in Germany, ran out my three years and got out of the military, but I just couldn't see myself doing that. So it was difficult for him. So civilian flight, you get over there. what you know again talking about movies and we all see the movies and you know I watched all those Vietnam War movies growing up and you they always have the iconic scenes of the new guys in their fresh camouflage uniforms getting off the bird and there's the the hardened veterans

that are heading home after a year of combat and and they look like they've been through a year of combat did you did you see that I did Yeah, they were actually loading planes on the same location that we were offloading. So just exactly like you described as what took place. Did anybody talk to you about anything? Anybody say anything to you? I mean, usually they're kind of giving you just a thumbs up and they're a great big smile on their face because they know they're loading the burden going home.

So they're happy to be getting out of there. And the attitude with the guys that you were with, you know, you already talked about the draftees in boot camp that are freaking out. Was there any guys now that are heading to Vietnam? And some of those guys probably just got out of advanced infantry training or whatever, and had been in the Army for whatever, four months. Yeah, four months and then maybe a 30-day leave at home and on their way to Vietnam. And again, that same kind of situation.

And I think there, whether you joined the Army or you got drafted, I think there's still that fear, even though that's what you signed up for if you enlisted, There's that fear of the unknown that you've gotten off this plane and what's going to happen next. It's weird because there's the, I think a lot of this, your attitude goes a long way because there's definitely people and times and myself included where I would think there's nothing's going to happen to me. Like it'll happen to anyone else. I've talked about this before. Like I always feel if I'm on a commercial airline and it's,

blows up in the sky that I'm going to live. Like, I'm going to grab the seat cushion or something. I'm going to figure it out. So there's that kind of stupid ignorance that I know I had, especially when I was younger, like nothing was ever going to happen to me. And I would see that in my guys, you know, when I was older. I didn't go to war until I was, you know, older. And I saw some of the guys that you could tell.

They didn't think anything was going to happen to them. And I had other guys where you would swear in their mind they had, a target on the back of their head every step that they took. And so you get a drastic difference between people's attitudes. Did you see that between, did you see that with different guys? And what did you think yourself? I did see that same thing. I don't think that's changed any from Vietnam to the generation that served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I think that mixture and that percentage is probably still the same all the time. certainly a lot of people who had a certain MOS, but maybe they had some other kind of a job in the states would say, well, I might be 11 Bravo, which is a grunt, but I'm not going to have to do that because I was the company armor and I'll be I'll be running, you know, distributing weapons and stuff like that. But you'd see them out in the field sometime later. They'd be hump in the bush with the 65 pound pack on their back. So, I mean, I think there was a certain fear, but a certain courage is, well too that I think most of the people that I ever served with displayed. And I think even the guys that got drafted came to the resolve that, you know, look at it. I'm here. I might as well

make the best of this. There's no sense in complaining or whining. And let's just go ahead and get our year in, get my two years in in the military and get it over with and I can go home. So, I mean, I've always said that the people that I served with were tremendously courageous and extremely brave individuals. I never saw. anything that I would ever be afraid to serve alongside of that person. That's powerful. That's the American, that's the American servicemen right there. Because even what I was talking about, guys that I knew that would, and I had friends

that would verbally, you know, they'd say, I'm not feeling good about tonight, man. They would say that stuff. And guess what? They'd get on their gear and they'd go out night after night. And I actually have to give them more credit because sometimes I think, we're going. I think I'm going to be fine. It doesn't take me that much courage to overcome that. And here's a guy that has that feeling night after night.

But like you said, every time night after night, they're getting their gear on, they're going out and doing their job. How did you get assigned? So now you show up. This is just, this is like, this is what the army has the reputation of the big army. Hey, you're a piece, you're a, you're a cog in the machine. you give them your, I mean, how did that process work? Well, you get to Vietnam, you do a three-day in-country orientation where they teach you all about snakes and bamboo vipers and all that crazy stuff and what not to do and pungy stakes and all that.

And then I'm sure that while you're there, they're working on who needs a track vehicle mechanic or who needs infantrymen, whichever the case may be. And they just put me on a plane and flew me up to the night, or actually to flume me to chew me, July on that one, and then helicoptered me to L. Z. Baldy out in the middle of nowhere. And that's how I got to the unit I served with. Now, as you're getting further and further away from civilization, did the hair on the back of your neck start to stand up straighter? Well, I'm probably a little bit on the crazy side, and I think the curiosity factor I was okay with, you know. I mean, I'm like you're talking about. I've never felt like, I'm not going to say I've never felt fear, but I've always just been excited about what's going to happen next. I never worried when I was in country about dying.

That thought never crossed my mind. I just felt like if I did what I knew to do and use the experiences that I had, everything else and applied them the way you're supposed to have is going to be okay. So you're rolling into LZ Baldy. Whereabouts in Vietnam was that? That's in the I-Corps area, closer up to the DMZ. It's about 17 kilometers southwest of Danang. And so is it a pretty remote location then?

Called the Quasan Valley is our area of operation. I mean, a lot of Viacong, a lot of NVA in that area, especially in 68 and 69. And how big, how big was that, was the, forward operating base that you were staying at. How big was it? Not very big. I mean, battalion headquarters. So it was all in.

And then, so you check in there, you land on your airplane, you land on the helicopter, get out of the helicopter, and then what happens? Well, I go to F-Troops company headquarters, report to the first sergeant, tell him who I am and what I am, and the first sergeant called everybody's son. So he said, son, I told him I was a track vehicle mechanic. If he point me in the direction of the motor pool, I'd go report to the motor sergeant. He said, son, we really don't have a motor pool here in Vietnam. He said, there is a guy that runs the maintenance department.

He's spec 5 so-and-so. And he said, you'll see him at Chow tonight, but you'll be at machine gunner on a 113A1 and we'll make sure you get a toolbox. So if anything goes wrong while you're out there, that's your job. job to fix them. So there's the wake-up call. You know, I fought in the Battle of Armadi in 2006, and you know what vehicle we used for casualty evacuation?

A one-one-three's. Yep, the exact same vehicle. So that's what you got assigned. You got assigned to a 113, which is an armored personnel carrier, made out of aluminum, if I'm correct. I'm not sure. Probably. Wouldn't be a bit spry.

And they're very, they're like a, they're basically a box with tracks. That's basically what they look like. Exactly. There's a box with tracks on them. They're not huge. They're not as big as a tank. How many people you think they hold? Maybe.

You could probably put eight or ten on the inside. Yeah. We used to, our joke about armored personnel carriers was how many people can you fit into them? One more. So that's what you get assigned. So now you realize, okay, there's no motor pool here. There's no, that's not happening. He says you're going to be a machine gunner on one of these one-one-threes.

So who are you checking in with now? Are you? Well, when my unit, my platoon was out in the field and they came back in for Chow that night, that's when I was introduced to the LT and the platoon sergeant. And then, I don't know, they just picked a track that was short one guy, and that's the one I went to. And how many tracks did you have in your platoon? Nine.

Wow, that's a pretty big platoon. Well, it's 18 M60 machine guns, 950 caliber, and 1-106 recoil-less rifle. So it's a lot of firepower. Yeah, that's that's serious business. I didn't think they had that many in one platoon. And so then, okay, so now you settle in, and what kind of missions were you guys doing? Well, when I originally got in country, they called him Search and Destroy. And then I think somebody in Washington decided we need to change it to search and clear.

it didn't sound quite as disastrous if you called it searching clear, but the mission was exactly the same thing. You still went out, checked all the villages, checked all the people, anybody that was out working in the fields, looking for cashes of rice, looking for weapons that were hidden in different villages and that type of thing. Sometimes you'd have intelligence reports that would send you somewhere where maybe they had some information that there was something bad going on.

Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn't. the area of operation that I actually worked in was exactly the same one mili was in my area of operation we called it the pinkville on our map and I think lieutenant callie's thing it happened three weeks or four weeks after I got in country or something like in third week in March or maybe around the first of April you know you you're familiar with that story and then but you guys did you guys hear anything about it I think we heard a little bit about it, but communication back then was not the same as it is today. I mean, obviously, nobody had cell phones or anything like that.

You didn't have pictures or any information. We just knew there was a lot of people in that village, and it was, I mean, it was a sizable village for as remote as it was. Most of them were just all rice farmers that were out there, so all they do is harvest rice and carry it to market. But we'd been through there a number of different times before and after. or the actual Mila massacre. And I think the thing that was interesting about Vietnam was for villagers, if I used an interpreter to ask somebody a question in a village

about would they rather have the NVA in charge or would they rather have the Americans or the South Vietnamese military in charge? And they were really always reluctant to answer that question because I don't think there was a good answer they could give me. You know, if they answered it one way,

it kind of meant they were Vietnamese NBA sympathizers and if they answered it the other way then that meant they were totally opposed and they would support us but we know that wasn't the way it happened either. They were just trying to go rice and stay alive. So I mean if we would leave them

alone and the NVA would leave them alone they'd be the happiest people on the face of the earth but it didn't happen that way. We didn't abuse them but the NVA abused them all the time. Not only for the rice but you know for shelter and everything else. What was your opt tempo like?

So how long would you go out on a mission for? I mean, probably a standard time is about 20 to 22 days at a time. And then we get resupplied in the field with Chinooks for fuel and for water and food and everything. So this forward operating base that you were out, that you were out of when that platoon came back, they'd been out for a long time. They'd been out for. And on that particular one, I don't know, but I would have to guess they probably were at least a two-week period. a time. Once you went out and you started through the area of operation, usually didn't come back

until you covered the whole thing. But you guys are living, do you have, do you have dismounts with you or is everyone on, is everyone in the platoon traveling inside the track and sleeping inside the track and you got water? I mean, what's like the daily routine like? Well, you get up and fix breakfast, you know, fix some coffee or some sea rations. And, uh, you know, easy to carry it because you're armored personnel carriers. Weight didn't make a whole lot of difference to us. We'd have somebody would fix this, somebody would fix the coffee. We'd all kind of share the meal together because you didn't have any food that came out to the field very often.

And we just sit down maybe the night before that morning with the LT and go over what the daily operation was and fall out with a milar cover on the map sheet and a grease pencil and, you know, go through the checkpoints throughout the course of the. the day. You know, if you faced any difficulties, you know, just faced it head on, returned fire, called in artillery. Maybe you'd get a call in infantry unit to be pinned down. Nice part about being armored personnel carriers. You could move real fast, lay down a lot of suppressing fire and let them back out and save them. We did that for Marines as well as United States Army. Then, and then this is just what you do. This is just the,

day in, day out. All day, every day. And during the nighttime, you stay, you know, you stay on watch, but you're in a perimeter somehow. And circle up just like wagon trains in an old Western television program. Yeah. Like John Wayne and the guys. And then everybody would stay up on the track.

There'd be two-hour segments from 10 to midnight on down to 6 o'clock in the morning. You'd rotate every two hours. And you'd just be, you know, you'd have Claymore's out and set up your perimeter defense and everything, you'd call in debt cons so that you had positions available for local artillery could drop stuff real quick if you needed to have it. Now, it seems like it would not be a great move for the VA, for the NBA, to attack, you know, this, you guys. I mean, how often did they attack?

Never. Well, I was there. But I think the big thing is, is that one of the things you have. going for you is you have the speed of movement that you could travel with an armored personnel carrier. So there really wasn't any way that they could pattern you and go set up in front of you or follow you fast enough to be, even if they probably walked through the night to get you, which might have been possible, but it never happened. I just don't think they ever tried to do that.

When they had enough infantry units and Marines that were in the area, and they were walking slower and their movement was slower, That's who they would set up on. And then you guys would utilize your firepower to go help out. If some infantry unit called for help, you guys would roll in and lay down the thunder, which you guys most certainly had. That weapons package is no joke right there. Wow.

Well, when you talked about it before, when we rode two machine gunners, the hatch was always open on an APC. And two machine gunners sat on the back on that hatch with a gun. out to the right and left. Of course, the turret was in the center with a 50 caliber, and you never got down inside. I mean, only if maybe if you were taking fire, you'd get down and get behind the M60, but you stayed up on top all the time. Because I guess if you were ever going to hit a landmine, which is, you know, something that happened quite often, you didn't want to be down inside with stuff exploding from that explosion. You wanted to be on the top

and maybe get blown clear of it. So was that the biggest threat to the tracks was get hit in some kind of landmine? Or an RPG rocket from a woodline. The, yeah, I mean, obviously in Iraq and Afghanistan, really, I mean, I can really only talk about Iraq from my experience. But, yeah, obviously the roadside bombs were what they did. That was what they did and they did it well. And, you know, the bigger vehicles. that we got, the bigger bombs they built.

And so when it started my first deployment, we were in Humvees with, we literally didn't have doors on our Humvees. We actually turned the seats to face outboard so that we could present our weapon and that we could present our front plate of our, of our body armor. And then eventually we put, we weld the doors together and put steel doors on. And then by the time I got back to Iraq, we had armored Humvees. And then after that came the big giant mind resistance. vehicles and the whole time the enemy just kept building bigger and bigger and bigger bombs but we were

always we were oftentimes not always but we were oftentimes channelized on roads because of bridges or because of because of just being in the city whereas you guys did you guys you guys with tracks in the jungle or you know you guys could just go wherever you wanted to is that right pretty much so the biggest thing that we had to do, and I mean that was the number one thing in part of the training with you, Drove where you were commanding a track, was you never take the same stream crossing twice. You track the vehicle right directly in front of you. You never get outside of the lead tracks, tracks in the ground. And we'd stay in the patties or around the patties as much as possible because they weren't very likely to put a landmine in the rice paddies.

It would be on the road or the edge of the road. or maybe on a rice betty dyke but we never never went in that direction very often either and what was your what was your leadership like you know your your young lieutenant platoon commander what was he like what was your platoon sergeant like what did what was your interaction with those guys like and even your vehicle so who was in charge of of your track was he was a young e5 probably 21 or 22 years old at that time and the leadership in my platoon the platoon leader was a great first lieutenant. And I mean, it was one of those things that I learned very early on. The best thing that I could do for the first three or four months was just shut up and listen and watch

what was going on and follow the lead of the people that really knew what was going on. The platoon sergeant was that same kind of a person. The different with the platoon sergeant was that he was probably in his 30s. He was married. He had children back home. So I don't think it was as easy for him to be a strong leader and a strong decision maker because I think that was on his mind a lot. The LT was not that way and everybody that we served with was not that way. I don't know if I know anybody else that I served with for 10 and a half months that was married other than most of the platoon sergeants or the first sergeant. So they have that in the back of their mind. they're thinking about, you can sense that they're maybe leaning a little bit towards

trying to stay alive and trying to take less risk. And you, you know, too, how that works is that's not always the best person to have for a leader. If you're not tuned in 24-7 while you're there, you're in trouble. You know, that's the only way to survive. You have to be conscious of every fly that lands on your food. You know what I mean? You just get that heightened sense of awareness that it's probably lucky you can even go to sleep when you lay down at night because the adrenaline is pumped so much all day long. Yeah, something else that I always felt, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but I always felt that if you were thinking about other things like family, that was going to make you less aggressive.

and as far as I can tell, if you're not aggressive on the battlefield, that has a higher probability of getting you killed than if you're aggressive. I think that hesitation is a bad thing. And look, I'm not saying, and I used to try and make this clear all the time. I'm not talking about, you know, being hyperaggressive and running to your death. That's not what I'm talking about. But if there's something going on and you're nervous about making a move, that's not a good thing. to have happening.

And it would make, when I would have guys that I could see were thinking about other things, it would make me nervous that they were going to hesitate when they needed to move or needed to make something happen. I agree 100% because we experienced a lot of that. And the only thing I would do when I got to a position where I was an E5 or eventually became an E6 was to identify those people and try to utilize them in some spot. where they weren't going to get anybody else killed. That wasn't always real easy to do,

short of actually sending him back to the rear area and not let him come out in the field with us. But if you were short of people, you didn't have that option very often either. So you were an E4, were you an E4 when you got in country? I was. And then you got promoted to E5. Right.

Did that change your position in the track at all? It took me off the machine gun and put me behind the 50. That's good. Did you, and then did you eventually make E6? I did. And did that change your position again? At some point did you become like the vehicle commander?

I became what was called the field first sergeant, what they called six alpha in the army. I was on the command track out in the field with the company commander and then two other machine gunners on our track. So did you leave your platoon to go and be with the company commander? I did. and what's your job when you're in that position? Well, basically everything you do for the daily operation, you're kind of in charge of or overseeing everything. Because keep in mind now we've got not just my third platoon out there,

but the second and the first might be with us or they might be off on an operation of their own. Sometimes two platoons that go out together and one would go a different direction. So you had to be cognizant of where everybody was, all the time and what they were doing and any difficulties that they were having. And it was a brand new company commander who did not have any Vietnam experience. So then it was almost like having to train the CEO once he got there.

So I think the fact that I got assigned to that track was what the first sergeant felt enough confidence in me that I could do that and not be a jerk to him or not worry about him being a captain versus me being an E6. I mean, that part never bothered me anyway. I never paid much attention to that. How long had you been in Vietnam when you got moved to that assignment? I had been in country about eight and a half months. So that was, that's like perfect then.

You got a, you know, your experience and the company commander didn't have any experience. I know I always had a, I had a, I had a, special vehicle. In a Humvee, the vehicle commander sits in the basically the front right passenger seat and you're the one that's supposed to be kind of directing the vehicle and

I would always have to do other things because I was either an assault force commander or ground force commander or whatever so I always had I always took the best smartest driver so that I didn't have to worry about him you know and it's kind of the same relationship. You know he knew

that hey he needed to handle all the stuff going on with the vehicle. But that's like the way the military does things. The military does things like that right there, where they take the new company commander that doesn't have any experience and they give him a guy that can help advise him in a positive way to make sure he doesn't, for lack of a better word, screw anything up. I thought it was a very enjoyable process because, I mean, I didn't intend to be a career soldier. So I mean, I just knew that I had X number of time, amount of time, days, months,

whatever it was. But I've just always felt like if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. I'm sure I didn't have all the answers, but I also knew who to talk to, who'd still been around even longer than I had. Some guys who had extended been there 14, 15 months already, you know, and had a great deal more experience than I. I would ask. I'm not afraid to get information from somebody. I mean, that knowledge could save a lot of people's lives, and that's a big part of what I felt like I was responsible for.

Now I'm responsible for the whole company, which is, you know, I don't know, 210 people, I guess, at that point. Now, you mentioned that the enemy was not outright openly attacking you, but you guys were responding. What was the casualty rate? for F Troop while you were there? I mean, just in terms of how often were you guys taking casualties?

And I know I looked at there's a really good website that you guys have from F Troop in Vietnam. And it in, why have the numbers written down? In 1967, so before you showed up, there was four people from F troop that were killed in action. in 1968, so the year that you were there, that number went up five times. And according to that document, it said that there was 20, 20 men killed in action in 1968. So that is some heavy contact. I mean, that's more than 10%. That's more than 10%.

That's not counting wounded in action. That's all killed in action. So even though you said the enemy wasn't attacking you very, often. You guys must have been in some significant enemy contacts to be taking those kind of casualties. Well, and I think most of those that I'm familiar with were all landmines, and they were landmines for people on the vehicles where it blew the M113 to pieces. I mean, the reason we had a new company commander in the fall of 68 was because the company commander had directed a new driver to do a stream crossing that we knew you shouldn't cross a second or third time.

And it blew, they hit a 500 pounder. And, I mean, it just killed all four people on the track. And it blew the captain off. He was riding on the driver's hatch that was open, blew him clear, but injured him seriously. That's why we ended up with a new company commander. And then Jim Starkey was from San Jose, California, was a real good friend of mine, was killed in April of 1968 shortly after, you know, like six weeks after I got in country. But he was just one of those guys that loved girls and played sports.

So immediately became a great friend. That's one of the horrible things about the one-one-three. And it's really the same thing with a Humvee. They built those things to have a low profile. Because when you're talking about tank battles, what you want to have is you want to have a low profile. so that you can hide behind, you can take the vehicle and you can sink it into a depression. You can get behind some kind of a terrain feature and not get shot at. The problem with designing vehicles with an extremely low profile is that they have no ground clearance.

And so when there's a landmine underneath them, it just, it just wrecks those vehicles. And that's why the new vehicles, the mine resistant vehicles, they're super, tall off the ground, they have these big V-shaped holes that literally deflects some of the power of the bombs at the enemy plants. So that's one of the problems with these one-one-threes is there's not much ground clearance on them. And so when they get hit with a mine, it does catastrophic damage often. And so that was what you guys, that was the major threat from the enemy was hitting these bombs. Yeah, and I would have to guess. I mean, I had never heard that number before that we lost in 1968, but I would have to guess it may be two or three of those

might have been small arms fire and the rest were all from their vehicles being blown up. How did that grate on your nerves? The landmine explosions? Yeah. Well, again, you still just do everything to the best of your ability. You have to track that vehicle in front of you. Now, obviously, if you're the lead track, and that changes periodically, but you know, you're in greater jeopardy that you could hit something because there's no way in the world that you can, you can't go out and do, you know, mine detectors and stuff. You're out in the middle of nowhere.

You'd probably get shot off the track trying to run detectors, and you would just running through it. But most of ours were not that kind of explosion. They were more bad choices by people. who thought this time it's going to be okay. And you just can't do things that way. It's never going to be okay. It's always going to be bad. And if you think that direction,

you'll usually be safe 90% of the time. And like I say, when the captain made that decision, my best friend from Waxatchee, Texas, Chris Wendler, was his driver. And Chris would have never crossed that stream as his driver. but he had a replacement because Chris was back home in Texas on a 30-day extension leave. And I mean, I've asked Chris that question over all the years. You know, would you have crossed it?

He said, but Captain Davis probably would have listened to me, but he probably wouldn't listen to anybody else because Chris had a great deal of experience striving for him. That's one of the misconceptions about the military. And it's really one of the misconceptions about leadership is, is the last thing that I want as a leader is to have a bunch of yes men that are just going to do what I tell them to do

because I told them to do it. I want people that are going to say, hey, Jock, I don't know if that's the best idea or hey, we should do this a different way. And people don't think that that's going to happen in the military. That's what you want. You want that kind of environment inside the military.

And the good thing is, that way when I would make a call and guys would execute, I knew it was a good call because no one gave me any pushback. Because believe me, I had a relationship with my guys. If I was saying telling them to do something stupid, they'd say, hey, boss, we need to go on hold right now and figure this out. There's got to be a better way.

So that's the way that's how I make good decisions. Not because I'm great. It's because I got a bunch of great guys working for me that are going to tell me, hey, that's not the right call. And that's a classic example right there. You know, if Chris, who had the experience and had the wherewithal to say, hey, boss, we don't want to cross. right there. It's not a good call. Let's just go 10 meters down, mix it up a little bit. That's the kind of thing where that would save lives. And the other thing that you just talked about, this is another thing that people get really surprised about is even, because we work, I work with a lot of companies and

businesses and people say, well, you know, my guys get complacent, get complacent with things because, you know, there's, there's, it's not combat so people get complacent. And I always have to explain. people get complacent in combat too. You go on your 14th patrol on a row in a row and nothing's happened for the last 13 patrols and you think, oh, you know, we can cross here or we don't need to we don't need to pack extra ammo or I don't need to carry that extra radio battery because I haven't needed it yet. And when you cut those corners, when you get complacent, that's when these horrible things happen. You cannot get complacent. And all those, all those servicemen out there right now,

servicemen and women, don't cut corners. Don't do it. You got to hold the line. And if you see people cutting corners, call them out. One of the biggest things that some of the infantry units used to do was get complacent and not put claimors out

when they set up for the night. And just like you mentioned, it might have worked 12 or 13 times before, but the one time you decide you're going to leave it in your pack, that's exactly when Charlie decides, to come through the perimeter. Not that he knew, but you weren't prepared. That's the guaranteed way to get attacked.

Don't set up Claymore's. Every time you set up Claymore's and you're prepared and everyone stand and watch correctly, that's how you don't get attacked. The minute that someone slacks off, yeah, that's what sends you going sideways. Now, you mentioned the draftees that pretty much when you were there,

once you guys were in country, once you were doing your job, did you, could you even, tell the difference between who's a draftee and who wasn't? Only if you would ask them if that was the case because there was no other identification to anybody. But, you know, again, I say this, because in 10 and a half months period of time, they were still the most courageous and brave people that I've ever served with. I think they resolved all that draft stuff and I don't want to be here before they got in country or right after they got in country because they were,

they were not complacent at all once I started to work with them. Yeah, I had to, um, a retired general who is who is what a David Hackworth's company commanders in Vietnam and I asked him about the draftees and he said he couldn't tell who was a draftee and who wasn't and and I always you know I hear a lot of people ask me about again this is getting into the business world people ask me about what it's like to or you know how how do you handle these millennials and I always bring up people like Hackworth who says, Hackworth said he loved his draftees. I mean, I don't think you can get a harder workforce to deal with

than someone that was drafted to Vietnam that doesn't believe in the war, that doesn't want to be there, and who can lose their life doing this job. Okay, I get it. The millennial might like looking at his phone or whatever, but that still is a completely different deal. But if you have good leadership and you explain to them why it's important

and you get them involved and give them ownership, they'll step up. And you're another, example of someone looking at me and saying, hey, the draftees, if they knew what was going on, we couldn't tell who is who. And that's, again, a testament not only to good leadership, but it's a testament to American soldier and what we do here. When you, you said you got shifted into that new job with the company commander at eight and a half months. Are you starting, you know, and we said this a little bit, not as much as you guys,

not as much as I hear about it in Vietnam, but we might have had this creep into our head a little bit of the idea of, you know, you got short time and it's almost time to go home. And did that start creeping into your mind at all? At eight and a half months, or was that too far away where you're not even thinking about it yet? I honestly never gave it any thought at all. I mean, I knew what my rotation date was,

but a lot of guys actually made what was called, a short time calendar. That's a bad idea in my opinion. Never, never did that at all. So you just, every day was a new day, you're going to do your best job. And if you're doing what you're doing, that's the best you can do. And that's one more thing. I wanted to say this, because again, we got young folks in the military out there.

When I was talking about, hey, some people are afraid, some people aren't afraid, some people think it's going to happen to them, some people think it'll never happen to them. Look, wherever you are on that spectrum, What I can say is this. There's things that you can control and there's things that you can't control. And as you're going into combat, before you go into combat, train hard, be prepared, know your weapon systems, know your immediate action controls. Then that's the best you can do. You've done everything you can to take control over what you can control.

Once you're in combat, there's some things that you're not going to be able to control. And if you worry about those things, it's actually, accept, it actually negatively impacts you. If you're worried about things that you can't control, if you're worried about what's going on at home, if you're worried about all those things that are going to take away your aggressiveness, take away your awareness, take away your attention. Those things are going to drag you in the wrong direction. So don't worry about the things that you can't control. It's okay to be afraid too. Like, hey, if you're scared, guess what? It's normal. You're going into a hard situation. It's normal. You're going to be, you're going to feel that. You're going to

feel your gut, it's going to feel, what do they say? Butterflies in your stomach. That's normal. It's okay. It's no big deal. That's what people feel. You don't need to think you're weak because you're feeling that. You're just going into survival mode.

You got butterflies in your stomach because your blood's drawn away from there because you want to focus on other things. It's a positive thing. So don't worry about those things you can't control. Focus on what you can't control. And if you're, if you're feeling a little bit afraid, good. That means your mind is in the right place. aware and you're in a hyper sensory mode so you can survive out on the battlefield. That's what's

going on. What was the, what was going on with the mission where you got wounded? We'd been out on a searching clear for that whole day. I mean, probably had been out in the field for six or seven days at that point. I had picked the night logger position. We set up that evening about five, 30 or six o'clock. We were supposed to get resupply and get, get hot chow that night brought out by helicopter. And so what I was doing was once the platoons got set up on the perimeter and our command track was in the center of the circle, I went out to check the Claymore's and all the perimeter defense

to make sure that everybody put out what, I mean, because I just did that before. I don't know whether that was my responsibility as in my new position, but I probably slept much better knowing that I had checked it. And that's when I stepped on the landmine was checking the perimeter. And what do you remember about stepping on the landmine? I don't remember it blowing. I remember going up in the air and I remember coming back down.

I never lost consciousness, you know, from the explosion. But when I laid on my back and the medic came over and I'd known the medic for seven or eight months and tears were running down his face. And he was telling me I was going to be okay. I knew it wasn't real good. not what you want to hear from the medic huh at what point so then what happens you're well i mean i i laid there for a little bit while he's trying to do stuff the interesting thing that happened with my my explosion was all powder there was no shrapnel to it whatsoever must just been a bag of of he you know so when it blew it actually blew in a gigantic ball of flame and it partially cauterized my arteries that were

exposed and probably actually saved my life at the same time that amputated both of my legs and my arm because I didn't lose consciousness and he wasn't forced to do tourniquets and all kinds of other stuff to try to save me. So, you know, whatever time I spent on the ground, then dust off helicopter and about a 12-minute ride to the 95th of the vac and that's kind of the way that one worked. He didn't even put tourniquets on you? Didn't have to. So you lost both legs, you lost your arm, he didn't put turnicits on anything. Right. That's crazy. It burned shut. Wow.

Yeah. And were you burned anywhere else on your body? Some, you know, down my chest and under this arm because most of the blast came up the left hand side. That's what saved my right arm, I guess. Did you wear, were you wearing a flack jacket? No. How often were you guys wearing flack jackets?

When you were on the track and rolling. But just out walking around generally didn't. You know, you wouldn't even, you'd roll up your pant legs because it was so hot. You'd just wear a T-shirt. and carry your weapon. So 12-minute flight, and where did they take you? To the 95th of Vak in Denang, Evac Hospital. And were you still conscious at this point?

No, I lost consciousness on the flight because I knew I went into shock because it felt like I was going to freeze to death as soon as the chopper lifted off. And then I remember maybe a little bit of consciousness when I first got to the 95th VAC. Don't know exactly what they did there, but it was a real slow night,

so it wasn't like there was a lot of cats, and they didn't have to triage. You never know how that might work out either if they have to pick and choose who they're going to work on. So they just took me right in and, you know, got me right up on the table to begin with and went to work. Did you know, did you know while you were conscious that you lost your legs and your arm? The only thing I remember is when I was laying on my back out in the field after the explosion was I reached down with my good arm and I could touch this stump is long enough that if I'm laying on my back, I can probably touch it, but not all of the way to the end. So I felt like I still had this leg. I couldn't reach the other side. I didn't know how badly damaged all of this was. Didn't know that until I actually got to Japan quite some time after, you know, the EVAC hospital and a bunch of surgeries in Japan. So when they, when you, so when you lose conscience, they put you in a medically induced coma? They didn't do that when I was at the 95th of vac in Denang, but they did it shortly after I got to the 106 general. in Yokohama, Japan, and I was unconscious from the 14th of January of 69 to the 15th of

February of 69, 31 days. 31 days, that's a medically induced coma. And then you wake up and you're in Japan. And what kind of a shock was at when you woke up? Well, I mean, I really didn't know for sure exactly where I was when I woke up, but, you know, I mean, it doesn't take you too long to figure out because the nurses are all coming around. And they would actually straight up ask you, do you know where you are? You know, so if you didn't, they'd tell you.

And, you know, that was more, for me to spend five weeks there was highly unusual. Normally, all you did was come through the 106 or Camp Zama in Japan for the Army. And they'd stabilize, make sure you were going to be strong enough to make the trip back across the Pacific to get back to the States. And I think they just, once they got started with me and on any surgeries, I think somebody just made a decision, let's just do all of them right here. Let's not worry about waiting while we've got him in the position that we have him in, let's just keep him there and go in and out of surgery. So, I mean, I'm actually probably pretty fortunate that they did. And then, you know, like a week after I came out of the coma, they try to feed you regular food, but I'll guarantee you that when

you haven't eaten for five weeks, nothing looks. real good. It doesn't taste very good either. But I did regain enough strength to make the trip back across the Pacific. Went to landed in California at Travis Air Force Base in California and spent the night and then went on to Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. That's where I did the rest of my rehab for another nine months. So when you figure out that, you know, you lost both your legs, you lost your arm, what are you thinking at this point? I mean, there's a lot of stuff. When I got back to the States, I actually got sick, whether an airborne thing or whatever it was.

And I mean, I was to the point where not only could I not eat whole food, but I couldn't even really drink hardly any liquid. It wouldn't stay down either. So they kind of estimate I went from 220 pounds before the explosion to about 150 after the explosion. And then from the time they put me on the plane in Japan and sent me back to the States, they figure I probably weighed about 135 pounds. And then after I got sick at Fitzsimmons, until I actually started being able to eat again,

I weighed about 95 or 98 pounds. So I think, did they share some photos with you? I did. Yeah, I saw some pictures. And that one is kind of a scary, I mean, it's kind of an Auschwitz-like-looking photograph, I guess, is the way I describe it. Right.

Yeah. And when you were going through that, are you thinking, I mean, is it that you can't hold your food down? Is it that you don't have an appetite? I think it was probably a combination of a lot of things, but they think I had some sort of a virus or something that, you know, because I'd really only been back to the states for 30 days in an almost a two-year period. time, something that I picked up summer could have even been in the hospital in Japan. Because, I mean, I ate food for a week in Japan before I got on the flight back to the States. And when I got back to Fitzsimmons, I was just sick. I mean, I couldn't horrible sick, enough to lose like 40 more pounds.

That's, that's crazy. Now, did you get like the phantom pain and your limbs and stuff? For the first five years, it's really pretty bad. I mean, because it's like you still feel like you have those limbs, like you feel like you need to scratch behind your knee or scratch, you know, your hand is itching, that type of thing. It's almost like you're bowled up in a fist where your fingernails are pushed into your hand type of thing. And little by little, I think, as those nerve endings recede from the surgery and the amputations, a lot of that relaxes and changes. I don't get that at all anymore, but I mean, it's been 50 years now. So when you get to the Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center to start your rehab, I mean, at this point, there must have been not too many guys that were in worse shape than you are at 90 pounds and sick and missing three limbs.

I mean, you must have been comparatively. And the reason I say that is because, you know, with the moderate advances with combat trauma and how quickly we can medevac guys off the battlefield. and we get guys that are in horrible, suffering horrible wounds, but they're able to survive because the medical advancement that we have. But for you, it was like a miracle through the type of blast. I mean, because if that would have been any other type of blast, the chances of you being alive are very slim. So when you got there, what were the other guys thinking?

I mean, there was two other triple amputees that were already at, Fitzsimmons at the time. the orthopedic wards were full of single leg and double leg amputations because I mean that's exactly what took place in Vietnam all the time, not much different than Iraq and Afghanistan, where we've watched a lot of young guys come back with multiple amputations. So, I mean, I think you cared for one another is where you got your support. I mean, the hospital staff did everything they possibly could. They were incredible, doctors, nurses, you know, AIDS. AIDS, whatever it was. But actually another triple amputee was more beneficial to my survival, someone who'd been there

for two months, three months, or four months before I got hurt, you know, then you could at least you could emulate and say, you look, if this guy can make it, I can make it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, but I think I'm going to be okay. I'm going to be alive. And then how long, how long was that rehab at Fitzsimmons? That was nine months total because I got discharged from the military. on the 22nd of November, 1969. And that's occupational therapy, working with a prosthetic arm,

making sure that you can use it and function with it. I had prosthetic legs, walked in the parallel bars, but it's not anything you're going to use the rest of your life. And even if you fast forward today's modern limbs with computers in them and everything else, it still wouldn't work for a triple amputee in my condition. And you wouldn't be able to function the same way that I do today to be able to get out and go and do things and be aggressive. If you had to worry about trying to put those things on, deal with them all day long, worry about falling somewhere, not being able to get back up.

So, I mean, it was a real easy decision for me in like October, early November 69, that we'll just put those in a trunk someplace and have great memories about walking in the parallel bars. So you were done with rehab in nine months. Well, really, once you heal, and if you're not going to do anything further with prosthetic legs, and they need a bed because they're still killing and injuring a lot of people in Vietnam in November of 1969, you know, you got to move on. Something's got to happen. So, 1969, this is at the height of, like, anti-war protests and what? Woodstock was in August of 1969. Are you paying attention to that? Is that entering your world at all?

We're watching it on the ward in the day room and probably just getting a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of it because we're all sitting around. We're all Vietnam combat soldiers, you know, on the ward. So, you know, I think some people actually talk about maybe we should go to Woodstock. I don't think anybody did, though. But did you feel like, like I know that,

our treatment from the wars from the wars that we've been in in the last couple decades you know we've had great treatment from for the most part we've had incredibly incredible treatment from not just from well from from people from normal citizens you know that it's thank you for your service it's thank you for what you did regardless of whatever their political beliefs are as well it's like most people say hey we know that you were doing your job and and that's thank you did you feel that or did you feel like it was did you get the negative feedback that we often hear about from vietnam bets i never got any of the negative personally i know a lot of people who did and most of that was people who came back uninjured who got off of that same transport at travis air force base or or up at fort lewis washington to move to a civilian aircraft most of them would change out of their

military clothing into civilian clothing so that they couldn't be recognized or wouldn't be readily identified as being returning from Vietnam. The only thing that I ever really experienced that I didn't know this until after I got to Fitzsimmons was Lowry Air Force Base used to be right in downtown Denver. And that's normally where the transport would have brought me would have been to Lowry. But because they were having protesters outside the gate at Lowry Air Force Base, they landed in an old World War II field called Buckley Field outside of Denver, and the protesters never knew where that was at. So then they'd load you on the hospital bus and take you right to the hospital. Luckily, the protesters weren't smart enough to figure that out. So you get done with this. You get discharged from the Army. That's it. And now what's your

plan now? Didn't have the faintest idea. I wish I could tell you. I'd really thought that went out in a big way. But I mean, I think you're kind of still in a form of survival mode at that point. You know what I mean? Each new experience, I mean, getting in and out of the shower, getting on and off of a commode, feeding yourself, putting clothes on, wondering if you're going to be able to drive again, are the things that are paramount in your mind at that point, because you know, what it takes to do stuff out there in the world. And, I mean, I would go to physical therapy, I'd go to occupational therapy.

I'd come back to the ward, and I'd be thinking about things, and my Catholic upbringing in Minnesota and the Bible and things that take place. I'm waiting for something outside my hospital ward window, like a burning bush or a bolt of lightning, and there's going to be a revelation. Jim Sersely, this is what you're going to do for the rest of your life. It never happened. It didn't come. So, you know, now I'm still praying, but I'm actually getting angry with God at this point because I'm not getting any answers. And maybe he's answering things, but I'm not smart enough to recognize it. I don't know.

But I think what I actually did at that point, which I think is my survival and what allowed me to move forward with me, my life was I surrendered. I just said, I said to God, here's the deal. Your job is to take care of a vision or things that you have in store for me for the rest of my life. My job is to do occupational therapy, physical therapy, and maybe as new guys come in, my job is to help inspire them to realize that there's still going to be a life beyond the injuries you've sustained. And I mean, it's not like you did that one day and the next day it was perfect. You know, it was still a process. Every day you'd have to kind of go through that little bit of surrender all the time until you finally just came to the conclusion that if you just relax, do what you're supposed to do, everything else is going to be okay.

And it truly turned out that way. So that when you were going to occupational therapy, is that when you're, are you still at Fitzsimmons? when you were talking about that. Right. And so now you're helping people out. You get this kind of point in your life where you say, okay, I'm going to do my part. And I'm going to let God handle his part. I'm not going to worry about what he's going to do with me.

I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do right now. You do that for nine months. When you get done at Fitzsimmons, where do you go? I went back home to Rochester, Minnesota, and stayed at my parents' house. and I remember specifically the chief of physical medicine said to my mom when they were there, said, now, whatever you do, when you get him home, I don't want you to wait on him all the time because that's the worst thing you can possibly do. And you know, they're explaining that to your mother and you're 21 years old,

and she knows this guy's full of shit because I'm going to go home and just baby him like he was two years old. So I sat on the couch for, I mean, not every day. but on the couch and I tell her to bring me the remote and change the channel and get me a Pepsi and do all that kind of stuff. And finally about 30 days into it, I said something to her one day and she said, why don't you get off your sorry ass and get it yourself? And I said, Mom, I just can't believe it took you 30 days to give me that response. You melted it as long as you could. I did. I said, well, I don't know if you knew it, Mom, but I overheard the chief of physical medicine tell you that. So I had to use it.

So then once, so you're living at home and what did that, what did that look like? It's kind of a scary experience because you're going back to an able-bodied world, even though the male clinics there in Rochester, Minnesota, there's still streets don't have curb cuts, buildings are not level to the ground. Every building doesn't have an elevator to get you to the second floor. The Americas with Disability Act didn't come into play into the late 70s or early 80s. So, I mean, it wasn't like anybody had to do anything to accommodate disabled people. There were not a lot of disabled people on the street out in public, either working or going to school or anything else.

There was a system off to the side, I think, for disabled people. But I think Vietnam veterans came back and were vocal and pushing. and just decided we weren't willing to accept that as being the standard and that's not what I want to do for the rest of my life. So primarily I came back and I started a junior college. And then at least when you're in school, there's vet groups at school. So you had that sharing again. I mean, if I had difficulty getting from one location or another, I could holler at somebody. They'd give me a push to my next class or carry books and I'd push whatever.

So I mean, little by little you realize, you've got to swallow a little bit of pride, and you may need that help at times if you're going to get back into civilian life, if you're going to be part of it, and if you want to join the human race, that's what you're going to have to do is accept some help and some guidance along the way, so that's what I did. And little by little, that just gets better every day and every week and every year. So what did you start studying in school? Well, I wanted to be a CPA until I actually got to all the those big long ledger sheets and they said, oh my God, really? I don't want to do this for the

rest of my life. So I just changed to general business. General business. And then you graduate from junior college? Graduated from junior college. Went to what's now called the University of Central Florida. It was called FTU at the time, continued towards a business degree, but did not finished and get a degree, but I finished about halfway through my senior year. And then what did you do? I went to work. And what did you go to work doing? Well, I've been a real estate agent for 40 years in Florida.

And then I'm also a real estate investor, and I have a small roofing company. So straight from school, you must have started to delve into real estate before you decided you were going to leave school. I had actually the guy, I knew the guy real well. own the real estate company. And he had asked me, because they had a van, which a lot of, you know, people with wheelchairs use, we would carry his real estate signs out, the bigger ones and smaller ones than I would drive, and he would put up the signs. He was fairly new in the business, too. So I think that just sort of got me excited about what he was doing. And he would say,

you need to go get your real estate license. I said, yeah, when was the last time you bought a house from a guy in a wheelchair missing two legs in an arm? He goes, I don't worry about it. never even notice. I mean, that's just the kind of guy he was. It sounds like he was right. He was, absolutely. It doesn't take arms and a leg to explain to people that this thing has a bathroom, central air and heat, three bedrooms and all that kind of stuff.

Usually most people are pretty intelligent unless you're blind and they can't see it, they can pretty well figure out what it is. My pointing those things out doesn't make them want to buy it. What it is and where it is is is usually why they buy it. And that was is that is that what you ended up doing for your whole career? You said you've been doing it for four or you did it for 40 years or I got my real estate license in 1978 and then courses is part of selling things deals come along that are worth owning so I would buy him kept them for rental property and still have all those today.

Nice moves. I got to ask you this because you know a lot of a lot of vets listen to of this. What did you see in terms of alcohol and drugs, especially when you're in rehab, when you're coming out of rehab, what did you see, what was your attitude, how did you avoid going down the path of where people end up, you know, either addicted to alcohol or addicted to drugs? You know, and that's kind of a good question because there was a lot of that. There were a lot of guys, especially alcohol because you could just go off the base and go someplace in the evening.

The drugs, I think they were a little less likely to give you more than you actually needed during the Vietnam era. That was my experience. And my father was an alcoholic. So I'm sure probably in the back of my mind, the use of it or abuse of it was probably something I was conscious of all the time. But that never really looked like that was a great alternative path. I mean, I thought that was fairly easy to recognize that that wasn't good. And I'm not critical of anyone that chose that because everybody's psyche and the way they're handling things at that time. The difficulties are going through were just being out in public missing two legs in an arm. Maybe you need to be high to do that. I never felt that way. I didn't

feel like I needed to explain anything to anybody had to put on any particular performance or heirs to make people accept me. If you didn't accept me, I'm okay with that too. You know what I mean? That was fine because I'm just going to do what I need to do for my survival and for me to move forward. And I had a lot of support from family and friends that allowed me to be that way. Man, I wish I could spread that word to basically everyone, you know, not to worry about what other people are thinking, do what you're supposed to do. at what point did you at what point did you

link up with the with the DAV well the DAV initially gave me what they call a complimentary membership all Vietnam era veterans that were injured got that that was in 1970 and then I moved from Minnesota to Florida in March in

1971 and my wife at the time said what are you going to do about that membership in the DAV? and I said, you know, I really hadn't given it much thought. I was busy with the job that I had moved there for. And I don't know, she looked it up, I think, when I said, well, there's a chapter in Sanford. So I actually started going, welcome me with open arms.

It was a nice friendly group of people. And, I mean, it was a great, great relationship with them. And I needed that. So maybe she was even smarter than I was to recognize that. It's nice to be able to go back and associate with other disabled veterans because you're actually there to lift that person up and bring them along and they're there to do the same thing for you. If you can be an inspiration great, if not maybe you can be inspired by somebody that's there. So that's my initial strong involvement on the local chapter level was in Sanford, Florida, Seminole Chapter 30. and then just stayed involved constantly.

I mean, you know, we're 50 years this year. DAV is going to celebrate their 100th anniversary. I'm going to celebrate my 50th anniversary of being a member of the DAV. Now, you mentioned that in that whole thing, that you got married at some point. What year was that? I got married in February in 1970

to a young lady that I met in the community of Denver, Colorado. So that was, that was why. you were at Fitzsimmons? No, I was home. Okay. Met her when I was at Fitzsimmons. Got married back in Rochester, Minnesota. Got it.

And then did you, you ended up having kids with her? Two children, two boys. We're now 44 and 45 and 43 years old. That's awesome. Then you moved up through the ranks of the DAV, correct? Well, I did a lot of stuff in the local chapter. Then I got involved on the department level, which is what we call our state organizations, became an officer in the state, went through all the chairs,

and became a department commander, and then obviously people who had been in the national organization before recognize it. Maybe I could be a national officer. Asked me if I would consider doing that. So in 1999, I initially got elected to what we call the fourth junior vice commander, the beginning of your working your way up to be a national commander. So now we're talking 1999. Where were you on September 11th, 2001? I was home in Apopka. And what did that, when you saw that, I mean, obviously you must have heard the war drums like everybody else.

What were you thinking? I mean, almost unbelievable to begin with that that could ever happen here on American soil. And then I don't know where I was to. originally, but then my wife had hollered to me, and the plane was at the second building by the time I got in front of the television. And, I mean, we knew it was real. I mean, it's a shock to think that anything like that can happen in two buildings full of people. Just unbelievable. Now, did you immediately, I mean, we were in Afghanistan by October, were you thinking to yourself where there's war, there's going to be wounded? And the deep.

AV and you're, you know, you talked about how much it helped you to meet somebody. That was a triple amputee. Two months before you, three months before you, they didn't even have much experience with it, but it was enough to make you say, okay, if they can make it, I can make it. Did you think to yourself, here we go again? I don't know whether I ever came to that conclusion that early on, but as you know, it didn't take long before we started getting wounded back. And as long as I was a national officer, I always asked if I could go up to D.C. and spend a day or two so I could go through Walter Reed and spend time visiting young men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

So I look forward to having that opportunity to do that. And one of the guys, I mean, this is fast forwarding some, but a young man came back, got injured in September of 2004, and he was also a triple amputee, lost both last. legs and an arm. And because of the HIPAA laws, you had to go through and get permission to visit people in the hospital. Well, he had originally been on our list, and then he'd scratched the DAV off of that because they were kind of getting tired of politicians just coming and doing photo ops with seriously injured vets. So he kind of thought that's what it was. Well, we were visiting another young guy that was a single leg amputee on the physical therapy ward, And he was in a bed maybe 15 feet away.

So he called the officer over that was with us and said, who the hell's that guy? He said, well, that's the guy who's going to come to visit? And he goes, oh, hell, I'll see him, you know, because we were one and the same. So my wife was with me on that trip as well, too. So we went over to the bed when we finished with this first young man and talked to him a little bit. And it's not a matter that you're going to be doing any great and wonderful pep talk. it's kind of just more a matter of explaining, I'm just exactly like you are.

I've been in that bed. It was back in, you know, 1969. I've been through a lot of difficulties, but you're going to be okay, you're alive. His mother and his fiance were standing at the end of the bed, and my wife was talking to them. And I truly believe that she was probably more inspirational and more informative to them than I ever was with him

in that one initial meeting. He'd have to, we'd have to see each other multiple times as he started to grow a little bit and get out of bed and get into a wheelchair where he pretty well understands it is going to be okay. It is going to be better. And today, which is, I don't know how many years ago,

is that 25 or something? Maybe more than that. He's college educated, got a wife, two children, hugely successful. And, you know, I could probably say, well, part of that was my inspiration, but I think part of that was the grit he was raised with a kid from Michigan as well, too.

He was probably going to be okay no matter what happened. But, you know, to see him do that makes me feel extremely good that the younger generation is picking up on that and they're moving forward and getting along with their lives as well too. Yeah, no, that's... Yeah, that's unbelievable.

I mean, obviously, you might not feel like You may feel like he would have done it anyways, but, you know, anything that you do in life, when you see that someone else has done it and you know it's possible, I mean, that's so much of the battle right there is just knowing that something can be done. And for someone to look at you and see that you got kids and you got wife and you got business and you got damn apartment complexes and whatnot and you carry on for someone that's however old 19, 20, 23 years old. and say okay I've been putting this rough spot but I can but I can do this he did it if he did it I can do it that's a man that's that's that's that's worth its weight and gold um is there anything that that we can do to help out the the DAV anything that that that just people that are listening to this show that that recognize the the benefits that the DAV provides, what's the best thing for people to do to support it?

Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of different things in their local community. There's opportunities at local chapters. There's a department level donations to our national organization that allow us to continue to do great things every single day. I think the numbers we're talking about right now is we provide service to over a million veterans every single year. and it may not be the same service of service work when the claims representation. It might be transportation to and from VA medical centers for guys that don't have a way to get there for their doctor's appointments.

We might be volunteers in hospitals. We can use help in all those areas from the American public. So the website is DAV.org. They're actually quite high speed on their social media. They have Twitter, which is at DAVHQ. They have Instagram, which is also at DAVHQ, and then they have Facebook, which is just at DAV. And anyone can get on there. They have pretty good, you know, it's pretty simple to figure out how you can help, how you can volunteer, how you can donate to that awesome cause.

And, you know, I started off this podcast with a quote from you when you were talking about how long. lucky you were. And even just before we, before we pressed record today, you were, you were explaining, you were just saying to me, you know, you've had this life that you wouldn't trade any part of it. And I think anybody that's, that's listening to you, seeing you talk, hearing you talk, to have that attitude and maintain that attitude, that is, that is the most powerful thing that a person can have. For you to be in the situation that you were in 90 pounds lost both your legs lost your arm and to get up and move forward I mean that that mentality is It's it's it's unbelievable. It's it's it's miraculous and it's and it's inspirational

When you look back now do you ever feel? Do you feel like this was the way it was meant to be? I'm meant to be? I'm be? Well, I think because of my faith in God, I believe that nothing happens to you that he doesn't think you can handle. That's the way I prayed my entire life is not. I don't pray so that I wake up tomorrow morning and I've got two legs and an arm. I pray that I have the same opportunity tomorrow that I had today or maybe something more I can do tomorrow, not so much that I'm asking for something. So I think really truly the best thing that I can say is my injury is from the neck down, but my ability to continue on is from the neck up. It's the way you think and what you want to do is again from the neck up.

If somebody said, well, how in the world can you have a roofing company? Well, that's real easy. I don't get on the roof. I mean, that doesn't look like that'd be a whole lot of fun. It's easier for me to get customers do the estimates and do the money part of it and hire people that do the work. But I never looked at that and said, well, you can't do that if you're missing two legs and an arm. Sure you can. You can do anything if you're missing two legs and an arm.

Anybody out there, RDAV members or anybody that sustained any form of an injury that wants to give up, I'm just here to tell you, you don't need to give up. Don't ever give up. There's a challenge out there. just accept the challenge and move forward. Well, I don't think I have anything else to say after that. You got anything else that's the floor is yours. I just want to thank you again. I know we did at the beginning of the podcast,

but thank you for the opportunity for allowing DAV and me to come as a representative to be on the program with you. I hope we got millions of people out there that heard the podcast or will hear it in the future and that they'll remember that the DAV is if they're a veteran it's there for them and their family independence if they're a member of the american public that would just like to reach out and do something to help their fellow disabled veterans you can get old to davd.org just like you mentioned before we would welcome the opportunity that you would come to us and offer to help well i'm sure that uh folks will definitely do that and i know you're thanking me for for

for having you out here, but this is, it's an absolute honor for me to be able to sit here and talk with you. And thank you for coming on the show. And thanks for sharing your experiences. And more important, thank you for your service, for your sacrifice. And not just what you did, you know, in Vietnam, but for what you've done with the DAV and what you've done to help, you know, my generation of warriors who have suffered greatly. and who are able to look at you as a mentor and as an inspiration so that they can do exactly what you said, which is never give up and keep moving forward.

So with that, thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for everything. Thank you, Jack, and we appreciate it. And with that, Mr. Sersley has left the building. how does that man not change your attitude about just about everything that you do on a day to day basis yeah oh yeah big time and he said something that kind of this is real small but i was like this is different when you're talking about um how or when he was talking about how he didn't drink and do that and his dad's alcoholic so that's like that's not just oh yeah i just didn't

But the way he said it was this. He was like, I knew that that wasn't a path I was going to go down. Right. But then he said, and I want to kind of let, I'm paraphrasing, obviously. I want to let everyone know that you don't have to give up or something. He said, he didn't say, don't give up like this big thing. It's like, oh, he said you don't need to give up. Yeah.

Kind of thing. Because it, in my mind anyway, it seemed like giving up seems like such a viable option, you know? Yeah, for sure. And he's like, oh, no, you don't need to do that. Yeah. You don't need to do that. Like, kind of like, no, you can actually do this other thing kind of thing. Like he made it sound so casual, but almost like, hey, it's almost like he reversed it all the way back down to the bare decision making of it, you know, rather than like, oh, this hard battle or whatever.

It's hard battle, 100%. But that's not what he was focusing on the way he said it. That's what it sounded like. Yeah. I was like, oh, man, that's kind of an interesting sort of way to present it. Yeah. You don't need to give up. Sometimes we stop record too because he just told a really cool story about the fact that his first sergeant was telling him, hey, if you stay in, you get a $10,000 real enlistment bonus and a brand new Corvette, which you can order here will get delivered to your house for $5,500.

And you know what he said? Hey, hey, listen, first sergeant, there's people here trying to kill me if I'm good. I'll buy my own Corvette when I get home so you know and that's when you when you hear a guy like him you just realize that there's so much more that we're capable of overcoming and and he's saying he's lucky and it's just if he's lucky to be here we're all lucky to be here we and what we need to do is make sure we take advantage of the opportunities that we have Getting our attitude straight being on the path staying on the path. So echo Charles Speaking of the path. Yes. What can we do? Well as we always Talk about first Jiu Jitsu we can do Jitsu. We're at Victory MMA in the main where we call this

Corridor we call it a corridor we're in the Kind of lounge this is the lounge area oddly enough. I have to admit that I have a lounge area in my gym right? I have to admit that I have a lounge area in my gym, right? Instead of having more squat racks. Just in case you got a lounge. Yeah, I got a lounge area. This is the Echo Charles lounge area. I prefer to call it the recovery area. Okay.

So anyways, we've got nice couches. Yeah. Unless we're here. Yeah. And yes, so this is where we can do jih Tudos. More mat space here, by the way. Side note. Yeah.

More jiu jih Tis. We got a lot of jih Tisibility going on here. Yes. You can pretty much do jiu jitsu a lot here. Yes, sir, you can. With a gig. You know what else you can get here? Origin geese.

Yeah. You can come here to Victory MMA in San Diego and get an origin geet right here. And if that's a far trip for you, guess what? You can go to origin main.com. You can get an origin geese. Yep. You can get an origin rash guard. You can get origin jeans.

And guess what you can get? Why can I easily guess you can get boots? Because guess who just got their boots? Oh, did you get your origin boots? Yes, sir, I did. How sweet are there? Extra sweet. It's kind of crazy, right?

When you look at those boots and you think we just started that process and I'm throwing that we out there. I'm taking like, I'm throwing my name in there. Yeah, you did not make this boots for me. But we got a made. Yeah. Like American people got a made. Pete, the crew, the folks up there. It's awesome.

So yes, origin main.com. You can get all kinds of clothing. T-shirts, hoodies, all that. And supplements. Important supplements. Critical supplements to stay in the game.

And if you don't think they're critical, try not taking them. Yeah, it's not a good idea. Joint Warfare, cruel oil combo, my suggestion. Yeah.

Recommendation. Strong. Reclamation. One more thing we've got right now. So we have discipline in a powder form. And it's sort of like a pre-mission, cognitive,

and physical enhancement. So we just came out with a new flavor. the new flavor is called Jocko Palmer It's 50% ice tea 50% lemonade And it's really really really good It's in fact it's all I'm drinking right now Unless I'm having a discipline go in a can

Wait so the one you have the Jock Palmer That's the powder one It's not discipline go it's discipline go It's discipline. Yes and Discipline go in a can Jocco Palmer is coming Okay

We're going to cover all the bases We also got DAC Savage. What is that? That's Dakota Myers. Dakota Myers custom, wait, no, no, no, wait, better. A signature. Signature from Dakota. What?

Flavor. The flavor is called cherry vanilla, which if you know anything about flavors, that's basically a Dr. Pepper. Okay, so it's, so Dak Savage is, the name of the flavor of discipline from Dakota Meyer that tastes like Dr. Pepper. Dakota Meyer signature. Signature flavor. So anyways, that one's coming out soon.

Jack Savage. And we also got Molk for your protein. Or you can call it protein or you can just call it dessert. I prefer to call it dessert because that's basically what it tastes like. Would you ever, in this thought flashed in my head last night, almost not going to I'm going to admit it, but I'm going to tell you because I've known you for a long time, so I trust you. So I had a little thing of leftover Rocky Road ice cream. It was my son's birthday a while back.

So you figured why not give him a bunch of, you know, sugar? Well, there was a lot left. We didn't eat that much. But so I busted it out. Left it on the counter. Kind of ate some and sort of forgot about it. It, whatever. It melted.

Oh. But it's in the, what do you call? I don't know if it's a pint, the bigger one. Half gallon. Half gallon. Half gallon. Yeah. Coming in hot.

So I'm like, all right, whatever. You get yourself on milkshake. Involuntary milkshake. That's exactly what I got. So I'm pounding this Rocky Road ice cream milkshake out of the container, by the way. It's nighttime. Nobody saw. But I'm pounding marshes.

There's little marshmallows in there, little nuts. What's in Rocking Road? Like almonds or not almonds? Walnuts? Yeah, I want to say. Some kind of nuts. Yeah, nuts. Yeah.

And, uh, marshmallows. Yeah. And they're all soft now. Anyway. It was not bad. It was good. Did you put milk in there? But I'm thinking, no, I didn't.

See, I could have. But it was sort of what it did. But what if you put marshmallows and nuts in milk? You could do that. It'd kind of be the same thing. I don't like marshmallows, by the way. Yeah, I don't either. I don't like marshmallows.

I don't like any marshmallows except, let's face it, whatever those kinds of marshmallows are that are in lucky charms. Remember when you were a kid? Oh, yeah, those things. When I was a kid, I was all about those lucky charms. And the crazy thing is, it was just normal. you just Saturday morning this is a thing it used to be a thing

cartoons Saturday morning that's what that's what kids did yeah those lucky charm is marshmallows though they're kind of odd because like I mean I guess hey if you dig them I dig it but those the dehydrated ones when you eat them you get that you know that like nails against the chalkboard feeling when you chomped those dehydrated mushroom you don't have that

I probably haven't had any of that since I was in Iraq it's right the last time I had some lucky charms like there was some box in the whatever yeah I don't know man I was like you can't dig it What about cinnamon toast crunch? I think that cinnamon toast crunch back in there I think that was like the weakness cereal.

Oh, you know this is bad, but it's good. I think we might have just gotten off track because we're talking about Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Crunch. Oh yeah, that is not on the path. What are we even talking about? Milk. Additional protein tastes delicious. And for kids, instead of feeding your kids cereal

or Rocky Road ice cream, give, if you would have told your son, hey, that's your birthday, here's a strawberry milkshake. Yeah. And you gave him strawberry milk. You'd have been totally pumped and healthy and stronger. Yeah. When you didn't do that.

Don't forget about Jocco White T as well So Check it out origin main Dot com Yes Also Jocko is the store It's called Jocko store

And this is where you can get And I know we are Me saying this again It feels like hey everyone knows But here's the thing Not everyone knows So anyway Jock has a store

It's called Jocco store Jocco store This is where you can get T-shirts Discipline equals freedom If you want to represent While you're on the path There's a new t-shirt

by the way. Yes. Discipline equals freedom. It's a, I call it, I don't even know what I call it deaf. Discipline equals freedom.

Because it has an X, you know, the X over the D that's layers right there. It is. I'm not going to disclose what the X is for. Some people know.

Some people know already. Actually, on Twitter, someone was like, hey, I see you did the, and he explained what it was. Oh, this guy knows. Nonetheless, yes. New shirt,

discipline equals freedom. It's on there. A javis on there. Yeah, truckers hats. Flex fit hats Beanie's on the way I sweat like we were out of beanie's for a while You don't need to say that like that's a big surprise

That we ran out of something Because you don't do a good job of keeping up stocking it I don't do a good job of explaining you how important it is So it's my fault no but we are doing we When people put me up hit me up on social media and say Oh there's oh yeah there's eight things I want to get in the store And there's none of them there and I go it's my fault No no no I tag you and say it's my fault it is my fault

No it's my fault but we collectively We're doing a lot better And the beanies are on their way There was a thing There was a little curve Little that we had to Kind of maneuver and get the beans A little bit

A little bit yeah But unless we're getting it sorted out Okay They will be available Jocco store.com Good place to get stuff Also subscribe to the podcast If you haven't already

Echo thinks that you may not have I have faith in you That you subscribe to the podcast Yes Don't forget about the Warrior Kid podcast also also subscribe to that one is working on some new ones yeah we are for a while we don't forget to get some warrior kid soap from irishoaks ranch.com young aiden has sold sold his 1000th bar of soap that's entrepreneurship man yeah and even just as impressive as or maybe even

more impressive of the fact that we has his own business because when I was 13 because that's when he started when he was 13, right? Or 12. No, 12. Yeah. So when I was at, yeah, and I was 12, too. Yeah. What was your business?

Buttons. What about buttons? I used to sell buttons. Like, not for your shirt, but you know the pins. Oh, yeah, yeah, like a pin that says vote for Pedro. We had the old school. Well, my mom did the little button maker. Yeah, you buy all the little raw supplies for like a tonne.

Dude, the echo fans are going nuts right now because you're saying button over and over again. Anyway. So I used to, we draw, you know, you make the design. Designs for what? The button. Button, the button. Oh, there you go. Anyway, and you clamp it and you make the button, you know, and people wouldn't make custom

one. And I'd sell them for like 75 cents or something like that. They cost a dollar each, but it's all good. No, it's like a dollar for the whole raw material. You made buttons too. No. Nonetheless, I was like, yeah, that's cool. And it is cool to have a little business where.

But Aiden's making, bro, let's face it, man. Someone goes without their budget. It's like, who cares? But soap, that's like, you can't just make soap, you know? You got to know how to do that stuff. And then he's making soap from actual goat's milk that he raises. Yeah. So he's way advanced, man.

Irish Oaks Ranch.com. Stay clean. Also, we have a YouTube channel. Do you want to see what everybody looks like if you care? I dig it if you don't. But nonetheless, you want to see the video version of this podcast. That's where you go. Jocco podcast.

Jim has a good voice. Yeah. Doesn't he? Yeah, yeah. Like, he, that's a powerful voice. Yeah. Yeah, you can tell he was like a break. He said he was what, 220.

Yeah. And that was in 1960, whatever. 1969. Guys weren't as big as they are now. Yeah. But you can tell you big. When you shake his head, he's like, like Dean Listerhands. Yeah.

So, you know. Psychological. Oh, that's a YouTube channel. YouTube channel. If you want to see what Jim looks like. Yep. And if you want to see Echo's enhanced videos where he's starting to work with CG high now.

So now. I think they're going to be enhanced, enhanced. It's just going to get stupid now. There's going to be things going on that no one could imagine. You know what's funny is I don't like CGI and I generally don't like any movies with a lot of explosions in them. And that is like your thing. Yes, sir. So there's going to, if you, it's going to get to a certain point where we're no longer like going to be able to work things out.

Yeah, yeah, we're going to have some problem. But hey, look, I think I'm going to make it work. I think so. Okay. Put it this way. I won't do all explosions in CGI. Okay. Maybe I will.

I don't know. But let's just say that that's not the concrete plant. We got psychological warfare as well, which is an album with tracks where you can get a little. Little hitter. Oh, did you just say hitter? You were on the Theo Von situation. It was good. I enjoyed it.

Did you listen to it? Not the whole thing. Just a little excerpts that, you know, have been put out. But yeah, they influenced me. Yeah, man, I said it. Hitter. You didn't say Mulk Hitter today. No.

Get that one scoop. So if you need a little psychological hitter to get you through a moment of weakness, you can check out psychological warfare. Or if you need an alarm clock for your iPhone or your Android phone, you can put psychological warfare on there and I will personally wake you up in the morning every morning. Don't get mad at me if you are married to someone that's doing this. Not my fault. I do not take ownership. I'm running away. All right.

So yes. also flipside canvas speaking of dakota meyer dack savage he uh has got a little company where he makes we'll call it artistic hitters the joke already played out okay cool uh yeah check it up flipside canvass com to get things graphic designs to hang up in your house so that you can stay on the path Also, I've written a bunch of books. The next one that's coming out is called leadership strategy and tactics. And it is available for pre-order right now. It is a field manual of how to lead, pragmatically how to lead.

Actual instructions and actual field manual on how to lead. Also have Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three. Get those books for every kid you know and the library and the school. Because every kid should be reading those. hear that at least once a day. Someone tells me every kid should get issued these books. I agree. Why? Because we all wish we had the way the warrior kid books when we were kids. We didn't have them and we suffer the consequences. Don't punish the children of the world.

Get them the books. And also if you got a younger kid, get a Mikey and the Dragons. Which by the way, somebody bought the flipside canvas, Mikey and the Dragons poster. and said that this was the this was the what they read with their son before the sun went on deployment So it's like oh yeah overcome your fears that doesn't that's not only for kids Mikey and the dragons get that book read it and the discipline equals freedom field manual How to get after it The audio version is on iTunes and mp3 things extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership the first two books I wrote with my brother layf These are all the leadership principles that we talk about all the time on this podcast for your

business and for your life. Check those out. Echelon Front. That is our leadership consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership. If you need help with your company, go to Echelonfront.com. We have EF online if you need to get additional training, which you do. You can't get complacency with complacent with your leadership. attitude. So get EF online, interactive online training to keep you honed, to keep your leadership skills

honed. Check out EFonline.com. If you've got a big company, this is another one. This is the reason we created it originally is so that companies with 38,000 employees can get everyone in their company aligned when it comes to leadership. So check out EFonline.com. We have one more muster left this year. It is in Sydney, Australia. We are not going to go back to Sydney, Australia for a long time. So if you want to come check us out, and we're also not going to go to Perth, and we're not going to go to Brisbane, and we're not going to go to anywhere else in Australia. So if you're like, oh, well, I'll just wait until they come to my hometown in Australia. We're not even going to your hometown in America, if you're in America. It's not

happening. We're not a rock band on tour. We're not playing every club. We can't do it. We don't have the time. So if you want to come to the muster in Sydney, Australia, it's December 4th and 5th, go to Extreme Ownership.com. Every muster we've done has sold out. So register early. We also have EF. Overwatch. So if you have a company and you want spec ops or combat aviation leaders coming into your company to help with your leadership, then go to EFoverwatch.com and find one of those leaders to come into your company. And if you have comments or questions or answers for us, you can find them on the interwebs.

You can find us on the interwebs. We are on Twitter. We are on Instagram. And we are on Facebook. For the disabled American veterans, they are B.HQ on Instagram and on Twitter. And then on Facebooky, they are just at DAV. And Echo is at Echo Charles.

And I am at Jocko Willink. And once again, thanks to Mr. Jim Sersley for sharing his story with us. And I am, it's such an honor for me to be able to talk with such men and women who have given so much. And yet they continue to give. And to all the other veterans out there, to those that have served and those that are serving, and those that are holding the line as we speak, thanks to each one of you. you for fighting for our freedom and to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service

and all the first responders each of you work so hard and give so much to keep us safe here at home so thanks to all of you as well for your service and to everyone else out there you just heard another example of what the human will is capable of and even when facing the most unimaginable challenges even when ripped apart by a bomb the will to live and the will to fight and the will to overcome is unstoppable and what that what that makes me wonder makes me wonder what are we capable of what are we capable of if we summoned the kind of will that jim sursley has are we doing everything right now that we are capable of doing are we reaching our potential how much more could we do how much more could we do there's only one way to find out and that is

to step up into the breach to put yourself out there every day and do everything you possibly can to get after it and until next time this is echo and jocco out