Jocko Podcast - 242: There are Things Bigger Than You. Do Whatever It Takes to Establish a Winning Mentality Not Just For Yourself. W/ Marine Sergeant Major, Justin LeHew

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:24 - Gunnery Sgt. Justin LeHew 3:52:53 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 4:09:13 - How to stay on THE PATH. 4:30:49 - Closing Gratitude.  Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 242 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to gunnery sergeant Justin D. LeHugh, United States Marine Corps. For extraordinary heroism as amphibious assault platoon sergeant, Company A, First Battalion, Second Marines, Task Force, Tarrul. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 23 and 24 March 2003.

As regimental combat team 2 attacked north towards Anazaria, Iraq, lead elements of the battalion came under heavy enemy fire. When the beleaguered United States Army 507th maintenance company convoy was spotted in the distance, Gunnery Sergeant LeHugh and his crew were dispatched to rescue the soldiers. Under constant enemy fire, he led the rescue team to the soldiers. With total disregard for his own welfare, he assisted the evacuation effort of four soldiers, two of whom were critically wounded. While still receiving enemy fire, he climbed back into his vehicle and immediately began suppressing enemy infantry.

During the subsequent company attack on the eastern bridge over the Euphrates River, gunnery sergeant LeHugh continuously exposed himself to withering enemy fire during the three-hour urban firefight. His courageous battlefield presence inspired his Marines to fight, a determined, foe that allowed him to position his platoon's heavy machine guns to repel numerous waves of attackers. In the midst of the battle, an amphibious assault vehicle was destroyed, killing or wounding all its occupants. Gunnery Sergeant LeHugh immediately moved to recover the nine Marines. He again exposed himself to a barrage of fire as he worked for nearly an hour, recovering

casualties from the wreckage. By his outstanding display of decisive leadership, he was a unlimited courage in the face of heavy enemy fire and utmost devotion to duty. Gunry Sergeant LeHugh reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service. And that is a citation about one episode in one moment. Marines life and it doesn't explain everything in that Marines life nor does it explain everything about the Marine Corps But it does give us a glimpse Into what Marines do and what our

American servicemen are capable of, but it's only a glimpse and you know these these citations throughout the military when you when you go to different military bases and I've been into many, many military bases around the country and around the world. These citations of heroic awards, oftentimes they're posted in various places around the base, on the walls and the classrooms, on the quarter decks. And throughout my career, starting as a young, young kid,

I would stop and I would read through these, these citations and I would always wish to myself, I would always wish that I could meet these men and I could talk to them and I could learn from them and I could see what they were what they were really like. And with that in mind, it is an absolute honor today to have that opportunity

as Sergeant Major retired Justin LeHugh is joining us to share the experiences that he had and the lessons that he learned in his service and in his life. Justin, honor to have you here. Thanks for coming out. It's honor to be here with you today, Jaco and you too echo. I, um, every time I get to talk to somebody and just learn from their experiences and man, I've had the opportunity and I know we were talking a little bit about this, you know, the opportunity, some of the people that have come on this podcast is just unbelievable to capture their lessons, you know, from guys that were on Tarawa or Iwo Jima and just incredible. And it's an honor for me to sit here and be able to capture some of these

lessons for people, not just, not just soldiers, not just Marines, but just people so that we can learn. Let's start at the beginning. Let's start at where you came from. So you were born in Columbus Grove, Ohio. Is that right? Columbus Grove, Ohio, a small little farm community, about 2,000 people. I don't think it's been up or down of 100 over the past 100 years that is up there. It kind of was like any Norman Rockwell painting that you would ever see. It was a great place to grow up. When I was younger. It was a place you didn't lock your doors. It was a place where parents told you to be in by the time the streetlights came on. It truly was, like the fabric of America. You grew up playing Little League Baseball, Pony League Baseball. You grew up knowing every kid in the two schools that were in

town because it was kind of like a little Northern Ireland. It was either Protestants and Catholics. Wasn't anything else. It was kind of those two choices. And for grades, one through eight, there was the Catholic school that was on the other side of the railroad tracks, and then there was the public school. And then you knew by sports and by your neighbors, you knew everybody. And it didn't matter if it was K through 12. You knew the kindergartners because you were to school with their brothers and sisters. And it was a really tight, very hardworking community.

Now, is that where your dad and mom were from originally? No, my dad was from a place called Front Royal Virginia, right at the northern end of the the entrance to the Skyline Drive that was right there. And then my mother was from Columbus Grove, Ohio. And my dad was in the Army, drafted in the Army, and was on June 6, 1944, part of the 29th Infantry, as I believe one of the older PFCs at the age of 28 coming out of the front. Oh, he was definitely an old PFC.

Oh, he definitely was, Jaco. And he came out of the front end of that LCVP at that fire, the German 352nd overlooking the bluffs of Omaha Beach, and then made it live all the way to St. Lowe and all the way to the end of the war. And when he got back, he took a job in Baltimore, Maryland at the Chrysler Corporation, and my mom's brother happened to be working there. And so he kind of started going back to Columbus Grove, Ohio, on some little excursions. And there was quite a difference between mom and dad. There was like 15 years. difference. So dad was a farmer and this was a farm community. So he would come back and then he would

help work the Snary family, whether it was small farms, whether it was help Mr. Snary or anybody else drive his busing firm. He would do all that. And when he'd be out there telling a thing, my mom, who was about five or whatever when they first met, used to bring lemonade out to the guys working in the field. And he was just joking with her one day and he said, when you grow up, I'm going to marry you. Then he went on to not do that. He went in the infantry, drafted. He came back.

And while he was working in Chrysler in 1947, he took a lunch break. And he was walking in downtown Baltimore, and he was not fulfilled at that job. And he said, I saw a snappy guy in an army-looking uniform, but he had different patches that I'd never seen. And he put this sign in the street, and I said, come inside and talk to me about the brand-new yet. United States Air Force. And my father went inside. He talked with the recruiter, and the recruiter asking, so was there anything during the war that you never really got to do? And he said,

I always wanted to go to Japan. We thought we were all going to be going to Japan after that, and I just wanted to see Japan. And the recruiter said, well, if you sign with the Air Force today, I promise you, I think we can send you to Japan. And we've all kind of heard these stories. Yeah, there's an important part of that. I promise that I think. I promise that I think we can send you to Japan. Absolutely. He never went back to work for Chrysler. Two weeks later, he was sitting in Yokohama Harbor in the United States Air Force. Wow. And then he was in there all the way through the first slot in 1964 as basically a 50-year-old advisor into Vietnam. He came home and he said, I've got five kids. I'm over the age of 50. And I got these other responsibilities. And this might be a younger person.

person's war that came in. What when how much debriefs, how much, yeah, how much do you talk to you about D-Day? Nothing. Not at all. My father passed when he was 13 when I was 13, unfortunately. So it was right about the time when probably your life is getting really questionable about where you want to formulate your life going through high school and probably that time when you kind of need your dad there that was on that. And he passed away. That was 13. My mom raised me. You know, in the house. I have two older brothers, two older sisters. Both of those sisters have passed away already that were there. And between us boys, there was nine years apart, between a spread.

So dad was pretty busy over a long period after he came home from surviving the Normandy invasion. And that's exactly where he kind of, when I was 13, he said, look, I'm going to give you one thing. He said, I'm responsible to you until you're 18. It was announced. And there's no mistake, Jack. My dad loved all of us. So this wasn't this tough love or anything. He said, look, I'm responsible to you to your 18.

And he said, then you're going to be responsible to make a life for yourself after that. And you have some choices they're going to be presented. He never pushed the military. He never dissuaded me from the military to do that. Maybe those questions would have came when I was 14, 15, and 17. that was around there. I really wish he would have been around when I was, you know, a 22-year-old sergeant after Desert Storm or sitting on seawalls in Okinawa wondering how to lead troops and how to do

different things. And you're sitting here with your father that retired as a master sergeant through three wars and came out of, you know, and survived the Normandy invasion. I think the guy probably knew a little bit about survival and leadership and able to do that. And you kind of just looked around and said, you know, now mom's not here, dad's not here. He was right. He said, you're responsible to make your choices and you're responsible men. It was after that. And he felt it was his job up until that time period to make sure that when he spent me out when I was 18, that I could handle what it was that the world was going to throw at me at 18.

At what point? So you played baseball in high school. Your dad dies when you're 13, so you're going through the high school years with no dad. Are you playing sports, good student, paying attention in school, rebellious? What was your, what was your child? childhood. I'm playing sports. I'm an absolutely abysmal student that was on there. My wife laps at me all the time because in the basement of the house is two to three thousand books. And I can't ever remember reading really a book the entire time until I went in the U.S. Marine Corps. I only read books because the teacher said it was on the curriculum. But I had also found that the difference was I understood the difference between teachers. And I also understood the difference between reward and punishment. And reward and punishment was, if you don't make the

grade for here, you will not be able to play the sport that you love over here. If you don't want, if you want to wear your hair like you or whatever, no, you're going to cut this, you're going to be a gentleman, you're going to get a nice clothes for these events and that. Because if you want something, you have to do this in order to get that, we're not just going to let you slough through life. And I really did love playing baseball. So my teachers would still. start hanging that over my head. And they would say, you know, if you don't make the grade on this next test or whatever, I'm going to have to go tell the coach and the coach is going to.

And I really look back and I love the moral and ethical upbringing in that high school that basically, I can't answer if that was a way for everybody, Jacko, but it was for me. And it was getting snatched up by somebody to say, you better start towing the line or else I'm not going to put you on that field. And if I don't put you on that field, this is what it's going to cost. us. And that was the reward and the punishment. The reward was you can continue to do what you love. And the punishment was not that we're going to take away something from you personally of what you love. We're going to show you how much your absence is going to hurt us that is over here.

And that was displayed to me in that small little town before I ever set foot on the yellow footprints in the Marine Corps. And I believe set a phenomenal foundation for military service. Did you have any chance of playing like college baseball? Absolutely not. I'm going to tell you, Jack, I was like five foot six and like a hundred pounds it was on here. I remember having a scout come by one time because we're in BFE and in Northwest Ohio. You know, those were city kids. Those were people got scouts in Cleveland.

Those were people in Cincinnati, Dayton, you know, these larger division schools. If we had a really good kid that was playing in that area in the whole county, that kid was probably going to be good enough to get a scholarship to a lower level school to play somewhere. But we didn't come from a long line of people that were playing with the DiMaggio's and everybody else. And I can distinctly remember one time the guy saying, hey, that Liu kid playing it like his second baseman, that kid's got a million-dollar glove, but he's got a $25 bat. And when you size up your options, if that's saying,

this is what's going to take to continue to invest in this in order to do this. And I had appropriate coaching. I wouldn't say that we really took individuals and kind of took them over there to groom them for that. Basically, what that high school did was kind of groom you to at least get out in the world and be a success. It wasn't a production facility to spit out professional athletes. So did you start looking at college or did you know that you wanted to go in the military? I knew I wanted to go in the military. Maybe it was because no one of my brothers and sisters went.

My dad didn't talk about it. I kind of looked up to my dad as being just what a man is. I mean, he provides for his family. He works hard every day. He doesn't just lay around in the rack each morning. He gets up even in retirement. He disappears. And then he comes home at the dinner bill at 5 o'clock,

and we talk about what happened in life, and that repeatedly was there. I don't remember arguments with the parents in the house. I don't remember anything. I do remember each Sunday he would disappear for about two hours. And I found out later my dad would go to the VFW every Sunday for two hours. And now having been through a lot of the things that I have been through, when you're talking about psychoanalization,

you're talking about therapy, you're talking about medications, you're talking about PTSD, you're talking about things like this, you're talking about a generation of guys where every single able-age male went to war. They either had to tread water for four days when the USS Indianapolis were sank to stay away to save their brothers

and we're at the anniversary of that right now. They were either guys that assaulted the beaches at Iwo Jima and watched their entire high school classes wiped out in a single invasion wave to do that. But somehow these were also the men who came home and built America

to what it is today. And the VA wasn't what it was. I can't ever remember 17 or 18 bottles of pills lined up ever at the house. I can't ever remember seeing the man ever take a single thing. But I think I know why I went to the VFW for two hours on a Sunday.

Because when he walked through that door, he was with people who lived the life that he had lived, that no amount of explanation to anybody who didn't live that life was going to ever understand. No amount of therapy talking to somebody. I think the therapy truly was. He sat next to a tank crewman. He sat next to a Marine. He sat next to a sailor. These were also farmers, business owners, and everybody else that was there making a life.

for me to play ball, making a good living for that. And I think they sat there. They had some drinks. They talked about good times. They talked about bad times. They looked each other in the eye every week and then said, hope to see you next week. And then they walked down that door, back to their families,

and did the same work ethic until they died that went out of there. And it was truly an amazing work ethic that I got to watch, at least for 13 years, of this habit and routine of a man. that's still 50 plus years old sitting in a rocking chair, but he burst out of a rocking chair every now and then and be like, how many pushups can you do? And I'm like, where did that come from, Dad? He's like, well, let's knock him out.

And I barely had ever seen him lift weights to do anything else. All of a sudden, this guy in a white t-shirt and some jeans, it still stinks of the back shed, something kicked off in his head. And he sits right down there, and he said, you know what? You've been sitting down there for about two hours in front of that TV with your hands on your face and everything else because there's only one TV in the house. I'm the closest to the TV because I have to turn the channel that's only got 11 of them up there.

You were the remote control. I was the remote control. And whatever he would see or that, it was amazing because he would just drop down and you'd say, you know what, while you're down there or anything else, let me show you some other things you could probably be doing rather than just lay there. And it wasn't any of these epiphanies of telling me to read Gulliver's travels or any of this other stuff. It was just these little snippets along there that really for a 31-year career served me well. At the times that I didn't understand them, they were made aware to me at the times that I needed them. Yeah, I think when I look back at my life and I see some little lesson, and I do a lot of parsing the lessons that I learned. And at the time, it was like, I barely, I wouldn't have been able to tell you an hour after I learned some lesson that I just learned a really important lesson.

But when I look back 25 years or 30 years or 35 years and I go, oh yeah, I remember when that happened and that left a mark. And I didn't realize it at the time. But I used that and applied it again over and over again for the rest of my life. At what point did you hear about the United States Marine Corps? age of 17, I want to go into military, need a parent's signature. My mom is there. I have now grown up to be probably one of the most loyal airmen who could have ever served in the Air Force because that's what I wanted to do. So I signed up for the U.S. Air Force. And I took a ride down to Columbus, Ohio, about two hours away. Some of the first times I've ever been to a big city like that. And especially on your own, And I went in and did the swearing in with the Air Force, and they pulled me back out. And then they brought us back in

because there was like two swearing ins, and we went through the medical check at the MEPs and everything else. And I'm like, I'm on my way. And the room opens up, Jocko, a major. I'll never forget it, because I can still see, on that Air Force uniform, I can still see the gold oak leaves, even before I knew what a major was.

He asked for everybody's attention, And he said, is there a Lou Hey, Lee Hall, Lope? And I was like, this is the biggest, this is the shortest name that gets effed up the most of like anything, right? And I said, I figure he's talking about me. Pick my hand up. He said, I need to talk to you outside. And he took me into a room that was smaller than this. And it was kind of like, I don't know what's about to happen in this room, but it's just me and him.

I can still see a swab bucket sticking in the corner. This was not a professional office. And he just said, I'm really sorry. I pulled you out of there. He goes, we made some mistake on your paperwork. And I said, well, what is that? And he goes, we put a different number on your medical paperwork, and we should have put another number.

And he said something about ones and twos. And I said, I don't understand. What does that mean? He goes, well, it means that we tested you and put it, that you had color vision. And he goes, unfortunately, you're colored blind. And I said, what does that mean? Nobody's ever told me that. And he goes, well, what that means son for the Air Force is of the 402 jobs that were available to you in the

United States Air Force, there's now only two available. And it's not the one that you wanted to do. And I said, what are those jobs? Can I ask? I really still want to be in the Air Force. And I'll never forget this. I was going to be what was known as an aircraft armament system specialist, because I figured that Air Force don't have infantry. So let me load the planes, let me do whatever we have to do to crew these planes to get them in there. And he came back and he said, the first one is Airframe Specialist. And I said, what is that? And he goes, well, basically they give you a rubber mallet.

And any time the aircraft comes back and it's got dense in it, you just kind of go out there and beat the dance out of the aircraft. He didn't sell the job, Jock. Because these guys make bank on the outside. He probably could have sold me on a career. with a rubber mallet that said, you're going to make a lot of money on the outside. Didn't sell it. And then the second one was, I will never forget.

He said, pharmacist. And I looked him and went in and I said, aren't those pills all different colors? I might kill somebody to do that. And he said, then I'm sorry, we can't enlist you in the Air Force. My mother was the biggest fanatic of the Air Force there was, that was here. I'm sitting in Columbus Grove, Ohio.

I can't tell my mom. I mean, this comes back to, you're talking about moral and ethical courage and everything else, and you're a man and all this, and you're sitting here like, I ain't telling my mom that this just happened. So I wandered around Columbus, Ohio at night in the city I've never known. I disappeared from the MEPs. They kind of put an APB out on a missing potential recruit that was out there. And then my mom calls, and the Air Force is kind of like, well, we can't find him. We're sorry, we lost her son.

And she said, you better get it down there and start looking. And I kind of went out and started actually, not kidding, you talking to bums on benches that night, kind of like, how'd you get here, man? Did you try to get in the Air Force too? And they told you know. And it was so dangerous, just this farm kid wandering around. And, you know, I could have been killed in any moment. Finally, I walked back over the Meps.

All hell breaks loose. They get me back in. They tell me sit you. Sit your butt right there and don't go anywhere. And I'm kind of in this row of chairs with nothing. And I'm sitting there feeling sorry for myself. I'm thinking my life, so I don't know. You asked me before about, were you thinking about college?

Did you do this? I didn't even take the SATs and the ACTs because I'm kind of a person that I'm going to put my time towards the things that you can do. I'm not going to waste my time on something that I don't believe that I'm driving towards a path to do. And the teachers, because I wasn't a good student, really wasn't pushing me to go take those SATs and ACTs. I think they were pushing me to start bailing hay on the outside of town for the next 25 years. Something to do that. And as I was sitting there feeling was hard for myself, one of the last times I've ever done that in my life. I saw a person standing in front of me with blue trousers and a red stripe running down.

and he said exactly this. He goes, what the hell is your problem? And I remember saying some bullshit came out of my mouth about something. And he goes, I don't know where you come from, but that's not how you talk to a person. You'll get on your feet, son, when you talk to me. I hadn't heard nobody talk to me like that in years. I wasn't around long enough for my dad to tell me to do that.

So I stood up, Jago. And then I was staring straight at his name. take this, gunnery Sergeant Spihar. I didn't even know what a gunny was at that time. And he looked at me and he goes, you look like somebody just killed your favorite dog. What happened? And I told him.

And he said, look, you're attached to the Air Force. I'm not even supposed to be talking to you right now or that. But do you mind if I give your number to the Marine recruiter that was up near the house? He saw an avenue of approach. Absolutely. I got back up to home. Monday shows up. mom answers the door

there's a snappy Marine standing there big smile on his face Staff Sergeant Craig Cochran Good morning ma'am Can I talk to you about you and your son About the Marine Corps? My mom said you're too late My son already joined the Air Force

Because I'm still a coward I can't tell her And Jack I'm sitting right in the house Watching this happen Boom my mom just goes back to work Doing that same time Tuesday Persistence pays off

Tuesday he came back to the same house ma'am can I talk to you about great opportunities for your son or everything else in a Marine Corps and she goes I already told you he joined the Air Force Wednesday now mom's probably kind of figuring out something's up opens the door up when I go and I never heard my mom cuss anything else like that and this little five-foot-four lady said that's the damn problem with you charheads you don't listen I already told you he joined the Air Force. Goodbye.

Slam the door. Thursday was the day it changed my life. He didn't walk away from the door. And my mom turned to me and said, what the hell did you do? And I said, you better let him in the house. Sat at a table just like this, three and a half hours. I'm 17, Jacko.

I still need the lady's signature. We get there, and we didn't have to do better. fit tags, we didn't have to do anything. This is an avenue. I want to be in the military. This door is shut. This door is now opened. This is what I'm going to do. And my mom had said, do you know how the Marines live? Her brothers were Marines in World War II. Everybody, all their brothers were in the war. And she said in the Air Force, she showed me this really cushy life. You're going to have the greatest base housing, the best BXs, the best everything else. You know, this is what I want for my little boy.

And I wanted none of that. And that's not what I wanted in the military. I wanted the hardships. I wanted the grooming. I wanted whatever the military gave my father. Because I looked at that as the key to this was a huge part of a life that I never knew about him. So I'm going to go and seek out that answer on what that gave. Came in, signed it.

She's got tears in her eyes. she says is this really what you want i said yes this is what i want she signed it and he said when he graduates he's all yours and she looked right to me and she goes you're going to get everything you ever asked for and more and she goes all i can say for you you better harden up yep after that my mom became like before there was ufc and everything else my mom turned into a different person magically in front of me this woman who cooked for all of us and made the beds and did all this other stuff in a very feminine nature, now took on the role of a father that I didn't have. And she now started exposing me to the stories that she was with growing up

with your father, going through Vietnam, going through Korea, going through this, you're going to be an NCO. Watching my mother tell me how to be an NCO. This is what's going to be required of you in the first year, the second year, the third year. And then the day she put me there, She says, it's going to be hard. But if you quit, don't you ever come back to this house? She goes, just don't quit. That was it. Put me on the bus.

Sent me down. A few weeks later, I think it was 11 at the time, Jocko. She became the best flag-waving U.S. Marine Corps mom that you ever, as they all do when they see their baby in the uniform into that. And she would hold the rallies for the entire town to help the Desert Storm troops and pack all the boxes. You just kind of saw this part of your mom that you never saw growing up that opened that up to the leader she really was too. And then you found out in life, you thought you were putting all your chips in this one leadership basket when in all reality men, you were putting your chips in an unbalanced bet because the real person who was really balancing that out, it was a team effort.

and that town, my family, everybody else taught me before I knew what that was that in life you have to learn to work as a team. You have to learn to be a good teammate to somebody. And it doesn't matter if that's in the military. It doesn't matter if that's bailing that hay on the outside of town is. People want to work for people that they want to show up every day and it's a pleasure to be around and they want to have a productive person and they want to have a good teammate. That was the foundation, and that's how I ended up in the Marines. It's kind of that everybody, there's millions of people in uniform, but it's a weird, every American story is not this clear line that goes straight to the recruiter, to battle, to the Medal of Honor, to something like this.

It takes this really weird nexus, and I think that's really the greatness of America. That's what makes us the strongest fighting force in the world, that nexus. How was, so how much of a shock to your system was boot camp? First week like anybody else, you're really evaluating the decisions that you just made. And you're sitting here and it's kind of laughing. You know, today it's not a laugh at wanting to be in a COVID environment or anything else. But you would kind of wish the drone instructor had a mask on or something. When they're getting in your face and you're doing whatever.

But the best thing was, it was the routine that I saw my dad, and it was also the expectation was laid up front by the drone instructors that came out and gave you through that drone instructor creed, if you do this, this is what you will get. And if you want to do that, we demand this from you to be part of this team.

And I was sitting on the quarterdeck at first day, I knew I was in the right place. And I knew that in a really weird way, everything happens for a reason. You are where you're supposed to be in life at certain points in your life that may not make sense to you at all, but it's not up to you to make sense. If you believe in the bigger collective and a higher power that moves the chess pieces or the chess pieces, I think there's somebody else that looks at everybody's life and somebody on the outside is looking seven moves where you can't look on where eventually at the 20 year, the 30 year, the 40 year,

the influential 50-year mark if we put you through these trials. Here's what we're going to demand back for that. And I could feel that day one. I felt this is professional. I'm in the right place. And every single day you got better at something. And every single day, you were told that you were the worst at being something. And you need to get better tomorrow at doing this.

And they didn't do it in a touchy-feely way, which, Then I found out, you know, in life right up front, you don't have to love people to get them to do this. You know, don't be in love with them. You can love those troops. You can do that. But this harsh training and this systematic approach that has produced a product for the American people that spits out this professional fighting man and woman on the other end. Just get on the conveyor belt. And if you stay on the conveyor belt, we're going to make you bigger, faster.

stronger, you're 114 pounds, you get to eat three plates of chow today. And as a matter of fact, see Jocko's chow over there, you get his chow too, or you get his chow, because they will pack 60 pounds on you by peanut butter and jelly and bread or whatever. At the same time, they'll shave 80 pounds off of that guy in 11 to 13 weeks to where they get this product that is malleable once it gets to the field. And their job wasn't to make a combat ready marine. It was to make a United States Marine.

Then they put you on that conveyor belt to the next generation. And those guys are the warriors at either the School of Infantry or the Amphib Kruman School or whatever they're going to do to train you to be your specific job. And then I loved the fact that the Marines would break it out and not try to do all this like, let's not teach everybody everything in an eight-hour class today. Let's focus on this razor-sharp thing. And then we're going to practice that for this week. Then once you've somewhat got to a level, nowhere near the level of mastery that we believe you can shoulder something else,

let's now add this to the plate the next week. And then before you know that, you got three stripes up cross-rifles. And they give you a squad of Marines and say, now what we just did to you, we want you, this is the payback. We gave you this. We now demand this from you. You now take that. and make them into the little Steve Austin's their ear. It was beautiful.

Did you know what your job was going to be when you enlisted? I knew I had a opportunity to be in four jobs. And it was tanks. It was Amtrak's. It was field artillery or it was a combat engineer. It was called a Combat BC option. Had four jobs into that. And then by about the 17th day of boot camp,

you take this other classification test. and then they kind of take those skill sets and then they according to whatever is there and I just happened to be a really great swimmer that was in the pool and I didn't know that that was going to get me anything else but when the decisions all laid out

they said look look you swims like a fish in the swim tank we're going to put him in amphibious tanks that are over there and it was just like full metal jacket the tail end the platoon is still there nowadays a majority of them all know what they're going to do

It was still on the quarter deck with the proverbial gunnery Sergeant Hartman having you stand up and say, sir, yes, sir, probably you. And this is going to be your job. And he said, amphibious, you know, amphibious tractor crew and something like that. He said, Amtrak's on there. I said, aye, sir, sat down. They went to the next kid. Infantry, whatever. I'm sitting here.

Like, I got screwed. You're going to the grunts. That's what I'm going to do. I said, I'm going to be at some depot loading trains, man, for the next four years. Because I thought that's what an Amtrak was. It was a train. I never knew that it was an amphibious tank. I didn't even think that was an option.

And then when the drum instructor showed me the photograph and everything else like that, you are where you're supposed to be. So then you go to what, amphibious track school? Was right here at Camp Del Mar, California. Yep, absolutely. And unfortunately, you know, a shout out to all of our brothers and that that are going through some hard times today because one of those same amphibian tractors were lost last night in the training evolution. And somewhere out here off the Pacific coast, and right now we still have, at last record, about six Marines that are still missing that are in that. And that's the danger of the business

of the everyday business of doing that kind of work. And prayers go out to their families. I remember what every one of those is like. I mean, tonight, the absence of a news void or anything else for the past 24 hours, when you don't know if you're not, Your kid was one of the ones, but you do know they're in that unit, and the unit's blacked out, and they're in River City, and nobody can say anything, and you just want to hear confirmation of this. And then these people, unfortunately, are going to sit right in front of the news media, and they're going to start feeding off of whatever bits and pieces that they can do.

It's tragic. But as you and I discussed before, Jacko, it's the cost of doing business to maintain a ready state in the United States military. And that was the job that I was given. Yesterday, I got to go up here to Camp Penn. I was back in the area to actually go and reopen a museum that I had a hand in creating in 1996. It was called the Landing Vehicle Tract Museum for World War II in Korea. So it's the predecessors of those guys out there on the 15th Mule right now. And we reopened, reopened a beautiful museum.

that had LVT ones and twos that were at Tarawa and Saipan and all the way through Korea with LBT3Cs. And being a young sergeant, I was one of the last people that drove those last generation working vehicles into that Kwanzaat, where they still sit today and parked them. And yesterday was an absolutely a joyous occasion for that same community that hours later are now sitting here on that debit tragedy of doing that. a wave of emotions going back from one side to another of happiness to sadness to back to happiness. It was like that every day that you climbed in those vehicles. Yeah, one of the things about working in the water, and this is something I used to tell guys, is every time you do work in the water, it's a real world mission.

Because you make a mistake out there, the ocean has no mercy. And it's a dangerous, dangerous environment. and, you know, I was always, you know, you know, you talk about you ending up in kind of the perfect place. I always felt like that. Every damn day, I felt like I was in the perfect job. And one of the things that would make me think that was, you know, I did two art deployments out here on the West Coast. We worked hand in hand with the Marines all the time, but, you know, we'd be launching our zodiacs or our ribs off the side of the boat. And, you know, they would be launching AAVs.

and you know the you look at it's kind of like it's kind of like looking at a bumblebee fly right you look at you that thing you go that thing's not not going to flow that's right how is that going to work and then you see it and you go wow that's awesome but you know how tall is an AAB 10 feet 12 feet 14 feet tall and then you see him in the water and there's a few feet sticking up and the rest of it is underneath and um you know you just can't help but think that every time you look at him you know you think man I I hope that's going to go all right, especially when there would be rough seas. And those things would... So every time you do waterwork, it's a real world op. And what was crazy about yesterday, you know, it's summertime here in Southern California. It's beautiful. The beaches are beautiful. And I woke up this morning and saw the news.

And I just thought to myself, you know, it's a sickening feeling that you get. Because we're all here. And it's a, like I said, it's a sunny, beautiful day in Southern California. And it's, you know, going to be... It's a horrible day for the Marine Corps. But like you said, that's what everyone in that job does to maintain readiness. There's a risk to maintain readiness. And of course, the risk to maintain readiness is minuscule compared to the risk to not maintain readiness and not be ready to defend the country.

What year was this? So did you enlist in 1998? 1988. So 88, 89, I was over there at track school. And then at what point, so now we start brewing up for Desert Storm. Where were you when we started brewing? Where were you when Saddam invaded Kuwait? I was actually in South America.

I was at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And I was down there doing some Unitas deployment. that was in South America, so August 2nd kicks off, and we're somewhere on the other sides of the Straits of Magellan going around the thing, and one of the first naval ships to be porting back in Argentina. So, you know, excitement is happening. Everybody wants to do that.

And then you kind of get the battle order, and then you realize you're not part of the battle order. Everybody else is starting to go towards Southwest Asia. you're still going to finish what you're doing because that's the mission that you're required to do. And that was another great learning lesson at that age of you are where you're supposed to be at that is your drive, discipline, desire, motivation was everything.

You wanted to be there. That's why you did this. That's why you did that. But as you just said, about maintaining a balanced force and a state of readiness, you can't rob from one theater to do another theater on an impulse that has not presented itself to do that. And of course, when you're down in the well deck

or you're in the birthing areas down below and you're only an E3 or an E4, the news is what people tell you the news is that day. And the news for you is get your weapon and get on post for the next six hours and do your job and then let people start talking up here about what's going to happen and you'd watch that formulate. The best thing was roughly we pulled back in,

in just prior to Christmas that year. And when I got back to Camp Leung, North Carolina, this ramp, we call it, this field of amphibian vehicles that are usually about 200 or 250 of them sitting out there, was none sitting there, because they're already on ships end of the war. So now the depression creeps in,

that you're the rear party. Congratulations. And we came in, we parked them, dinner after ops, the battalion commander at the time, met us when we came in off of the ship. And he had brought us into the hangar, dropped all of our gear, and he said, here's what's going on. And that's what I really respected. He gave you the time, the mission, the place, he gave you exactly, don't worry about what you're hearing in the news. listen to me and I'm gonna this is real and he said I want you guys to go home as you just came off of a six-month deployment I want you guys to take Christmas and he said this on January 3rd I'm gonna be standing back in this

hanger if you want to go to combat you be here it almost sounds like something out of Kelly's heroes when you think about it like okay do I have to tell anybody or clear this what no one it's kind of like go go home get your plane takes get out of here. And the best thing was after that was also the worst thing. I go, when you actually look to the left and right every day and you have that trust factor, this well-oiled unit and you live with these people and you do that, it's a lot of times when you're driving towards the mission that you don't believe is going to result in combat, the cohesion of that unit is missing something a little bit more than when you know that you're going to go in

and be responsible to possibly be the person that brings somebody's father or somebody home to do that. And it wasn't presented that way to me when I was a PFC or Lance Corporal. It was kind of, we're just going to go on this float and you'll get a ribbon and people come back. You go out and the next year it'll come in.

Desert Storm made a reel that was on that. But what had also made it real was there was only seven of us that showed back up in that aircraft hanger on January 3rd. My platoon sergeant was one of them. And a guy that I respected retired as a sergeant major that was out of there. A couple of NCOs, a couple of us troops that were inside of there.

And that was it. And they put us on a truck. And the rest of them, we went back up to the barracks. And they said, you have four hours to pack your stuff. And your gear you're missing. You'll take it down to there. And you just kind of saw a different thing. Were people's EAS up?

You do. You have orders. I mean, how many people were in your battalion? You have orders, EASs, you have everything going on at that time. But you also have the difference of somebody being presented with the thing of you're going to war. You're not going to the vacation that's over here now. You're going to war. And that is what I have always told people.

That's the first punch in your face in life. And you have to do something. and you're going to go left, you're going to go right. A lot of people don't want to continue to get punched in the face, so they learn the skills to prevent that from happening. Some people have to continue to repeatedly get punched in the face, for they do this, but some people react differently after that happens. And I still say, you know, I don't know if that makes you a bad person or whatever,

because I don't know what's going on in your life. But there was a lot more of us standing here a couple of weeks ago when this happened, and now there's a lot less of us. they're standing here, actually doing that. And true to his work, we packed up, got on a thing, we were on a plane, and we were some of the last people to land right before Desert Storm kicked off at the end of January. So did you deploy us? What kind of unit did you do?

Combat replacement. I deployed. You're not even basically right now deploying knowing whether you're going to do your job. You're going to be a combat replacement because you don't know if the war, you're not even basically, the war by the time you get there, so are you going to be kicking off? So were they taking volunteers to be combat replacements? Is that what that was? You didn't have a choice. If you volunteered and you were sent to Southwest Asia, you were needs of the Marine Corps once you got on deck. It just worked out for me very well that there was still

a shortage of people in my job career field to do that. So I got put in a tent, briefed. We all got separated and then we got sent throughout to Saudi Arabian desert to report to these units. And this is just a couple of weeks before the invasion is going to kick off. The unit that I got put into, Jocko, was I was one of only two active duty Marines dropped into an all-reserved unit. Wow. And that was an eye-opener. They're wearing the same uniforms.

Sometimes they believe in a different thing. and and it's not again it's not bad it's like it's just the way it was yeah and the reality was two weeks lash this whole thing up stay in the desert train whatever you have to do and then you're going to be in charge of blowing these breach lanes that are going and for the assault forces to go up into into the Kuwaiti invasion and I can remember being taken into a tent kind of for a brief, and it really wasn't a brief, the chaplain kind of came in. And, you know, the prayers start happening.

This was the night basically before you're going to go and cross the breach lanes. And they said at that time, they said, everybody is standing in this tent, we're not going to bullshit you. We're expecting 82% casualties tomorrow when we went through that. And I don't know if there was a fear in what they had said, or there was a fear in, you guys have already done the big blue arrows and red arrows and war gaming or whatever to come up

with that thing. That's not just an arbitrary number that you all came up with. And I'm, you know, Joe shit the ragman standing here going, get in the middle of the desert. And then that was it. You got sent out to your unit. Best of luck. Hope you see you on the other side of the breach. And boom. And then the 100-hour war goes. Just so everyone knows, normally we try to do a little bit better when we're planning missions to think that we're going to have an 82% casualty rate. And I was going to say that earlier, you know, so I got in the Navy in 1990. And so as all this stuff was brought up, the thing that will always stick in my mind. And so I was, you know, going through boot camp and whatnot. They were saying there's going to be 40,000 casualties in the first, I think it was 40.

I remember watching CNN and here. Here's the, you know, whatever talking head was on there, whatever, you know, retired Army or retired Marine Corps colonel, I don't remember. And they were going back and forth with these numbers and what they were predicting because of chemical warfare and the resistance that they were going to meet. They were expecting 40,000 casualties in the first 24 to 48 hours, which is, I guess, right in line with 82%. And I was, of course, thinking, well, I'm going to get, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to,

you know, in my freaking whatever 18 year old idiot mind, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I won't miss this because they're going to need, I don't think I knew the term replacement, but I was like they're going to need more guys. They're going to need me. They're going to need me and I'm ready to rock and roll because that's what you think like when you're young and stupid. And then, so then what did it look like? What happened on the push? Well, when you kind of quantify that in your head that was there at large open expanses of just wide open desert. that is on there. The number was more of a reality to me because I kind of knew the history of what my career field had had since it was enveloped in 1941 and 42, and when it was

delivering the infantry onto the objective. There was no ship to shore movement here. So you're just in the objective from A to B, and the objectives are supposed to be crossing the flaming tank ditches that Saddam Hussein had rolled all these things in because I believe at the time they were talking this is the fourth largest army in the world. Battle-hardened army that just fought for 10 years with Iran. With Iran. A million casualties or whatever. Absolutely.

It was there. And then you're kind of sitting here going, okay, you get through the breach lanes. You sit there and I will remember one of the most powerful things outside of 2003 of seeing a U.S. force cross the deserts in Iraq. One of the most powerful things I've ever seen in my life was sitting on the opposite side of the breech lanes with the hatches at what we call combat lock. So it only gives you enough to see out of it, but enough to save you from fragmentation or anything else that's coming in and having the night vision that is of quality of 1991. So it looks like a big fish ball and everything in the driver's seat. But hearing the waves of B-52s come over

to pound the target made my heart pump more than anything in my life up until that point because you heard the rumble before and this was what you had heard like in world war two they sent thousand plane raids into germany with b-17s b24s things that i've been blessed to go out and find these crews now that it went on IPs and didn't come home for all those years um these these B-52s, wing-tip to wing-tip, and then you see what an arc light rate can do. And then you just hear, the bombs hit, and the whole sky turns to fire. And that's where you're going. And it's kind of like, you know what, that's where I want to go.

And that's where everybody is loaded up here wants to go. And that was always the greatness of, you know, whether it's the seal teams, whether it's the tank team, whether it's the infantry rifle squad or anything else. Men and women that I grew up and trained to the left and right on were the people who always wanted to run to the sound of the guns. And there's something different about those people. And it doesn't make them different in a weird way. It makes them very different in the fact that you really are,

you're really proud that you knew people like that in your life. You're really proud that those were the people who were there at that time period. that said, you know, put the right hand in the air and said, send me, I'll go. And then you look five or six guys down going, I never thought you'd even be here. Like, I can remember, like, you can't even tie your own shoes or to do something. Then the best thing is when the bullets start flying, you find out that's the American kid that's dragging his buddies 100 meters across a thing that was here. And you see people just step up and being presented as a young man at 21 at the, at that time period to see that much awesomeness,

to see this is what your country can, when it puts its mind to it, this is what your country can do. And even in your head, you're like, no, this is what my country can do when they're still on the leash. I can only imagine what this country can do when they're not on the leash.

Because you know, we don't train and we don't do a thing. It's, you know, in our schools and that that fights a Chinese wave of total war and a Genghis Khan War. And the United States still does train its individuals to positive identification of a target. You're just not going to go in to do this to a village without this. Now, whether that happens or not, that's part of the individuals that make that choice after they get there. But it isn't the way that they were trained that they went up to that.

And I was lucky to be part of the units that were really fluid. when they went in there to do that, and within those first 48 hours, we kind of knew what was going to happen, because we would be driving, as we're driving north, all we just kept seeing is lines of Iraqis on each side of the road. They had already dropped their weapons. There wasn't large firefights. They had the tank fights out near Kofji with Liyar. Eighty-second airborne had a little action that was going up there. But for the most part, the 100-hour war. of the Blitzkrie War was basically overwhelming, getting the enemy on the horns of a dilemma where they cannot react to what's being thrown at them. And then they just get so scared, they just throw their stuff. And I think predominantly they threw their stuff

because they were in somebody else's country. Big mindset change when you train your troops for the 2003 invasion. And I don't believe a lot of leaders at the time learned from the lessons in 1991. I believe in the ground war operations. A lot of people that were still around, that were in higher levels to plan those mission things,

actually thought that they were still going to fight. When the Iraqis see this awesome power come at them, they're just going to drop their weapons. They're going to do what they did in 1991. There is a reason, and I'm very proud of the inflicting the most amount of casualties on the enemy and bringing the most amount of my people home in doing that. It's for the simple fact,

is on a 30-day boat ride in 2003. Those boys didn't land the rack. They moved ammunition from the front of the ship to the back of the ship. We would move up things and put machine guns off of the aft fan tails. We would kick buckets. You would train until people were just exhausted. And when they laid in the rack at $20,00 at night, 05, you're up. You're PTN.

You're doing this. Get the boxing gloves. You're going to get punched in the face in the well deck before we get over here. and it's not going to be Lance Corporal against Lance Corporal. No, it's going to be plus or minus 10 pounds that we're inside of here. You're going to do this, but also this is bowling the ring. This isn't that white collar leadership thing that basically sends the troops out to beat each other up

while they hang out in the cheese mess. No, staff sergeant, gunny, lieutenant, we're all in the ring too. And we're all in the ring going. You're next. Come on in. You got 30 seconds. Blow the thing. wear it out. Where's the next one coming from? And you would watch people go, they're am trackers.

I've never seen that. These guys are training like combatants. Like they are expecting close quarter battle. They are expecting this. Because the end result, Jacko, it was, it's pretty easy to throw your hands up when you've invaded somebody else's country and just say, oops, my bad, I'm out of here, man. Leave me alone. We're going into their backyard. They got nowhere to run. I don't think they're going to be so apt to throw their weapons down or anything else, nor would somebody in Nebraska, Ohio, or anything else on an abating thing. So the mindset was different. Some ways had to be harsher, you know. So the 100-hour war, I mean, how did that wrap up for you?

Wrapped up with rolling up into Kuwait. War is over. Who wants to go home? I don't. we're looking for people to stay on a working party afterwards. Why? Extra combat pay. Extra everything for a young person.

I'm not married. I would just rip off the case of the MRE carton because you didn't have to, in the letter, didn't have to have mail. You just sign on anything there. Just say, Mom, I'll kind of be home when I get home. And I stayed an extra six months that was in there. And I went down to the port of Al Jubeo and backloaded all the American equipment on the black bottom shipping, and then also all the Iraq war trophies that came out,

which was BMPs, ZSUs, anything else, agricultural inspections when you're younger are a way of life. So you're out there cleaning that stuff to get all that grid off before it goes on that American ship to get back. But the best thing was how you were treated and the autonomy that you got being an NCO was there wasn't anybody there any day telling me what to do. It was you knew your job. Here's your mission. Each morning you get up, you got to move this equipment from here to here, which was 19, 20 miles down to a thing sometimes. You learned how to drive tanks, LAVs. You learned it because you were cross-trained to move all this equipment, which gave you a different skill set.

And then at the meantime, they put you over a place called Camp 15, had this gigantic swimming pool. You got a room to yourself, and you're living high on the hog. I get that. And then every couple of weeks, they had contracted a ship down south that was a cruise ship for the American troops to do R&R on for like three days at a pot. And you could drink. You had to check your uniform before you went on the ship. No one was allowed to use ranks, nothing. And there's like 2,000 people on the ship pier side in rain.

That's like here's your three days R&R, like it's China Beach. with no beach, no nothing. You're not going anywhere. But these were exposed to you. It was kind of like making more money, more autonomy, learning multitude of skills. I think I like this until somebody knocked on the door one day and said, time's up, bud, you got to go home.

And we went back. And then at the tail end of that, you kind of get put back into this post-war thing that I had not seen. And I'd heard stories of it from Vietnam. of times up. There wasn't a transition for these guys. There wasn't hardly anything. It was going to like, we brought on well over 250,000 Marines at a time when we only had, oh God, 120,000 before that war, and then plus the reserves and all this. And I just watch guys that

volunteered. Now that they're back there, it's Monday, you're out of the Marines on Friday. Go to the admin center, go to here, go to everything else. And you know as well as I do, Jack. A lot of them wanted that. Just get me out of here. Thanks. And there were other people that were kind of asking, can I stay and do this?

You need a thing. And the answer to that, when we usually demobilize from war is, no, I'm, thank you for your service. I need you to transition back out in a civilian society. So we watched our numbers completely get depleted. And then you watch the wear and tear on all those vehicles when they came back home. So you go into this post-war rebuilding period. and you figure Somalia is right around the corner.

And you knew, at what point did you just realize you were going to be doing 20 or 30 years in the Marine Corps? It was when I went to the first professional course that the Marine Corps ever sent me to. And when I got back from the war, things in peacetime are different. And you know what I'm in about in 2007 time frame. when we're fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, up at any Marine base, and you can probably attest to this into teams, you were coming or going, and you'd see your buddies passing through bases, and one of you was coming from, the other one is going,

and there is no one to two dwell. It's seven in, five out, seven in, whatever the rotations were at, and that was the rate that was going. It's nowhere near that now. Well, it was definitely nowhere near that in 1992, 93, 94. It was now kind of, okay, I've been to South America, I've been to Okinawa, I came in to do all of this, just what I'm going to do, and I'm going to get out. I've kind of, I want to go be a hard helmet diver. I want to go do some things like that.

And my leadership came to me, Jaguar, I said, you got four months left in the Marines. We don't know what to do with you. And you talked about that before, you know, whether it's fleet assistance programs or something that these short-term billets are out there, this guy came in. And he goes, I'm going to send you to this professional NCO school. And I'm like, it's a waste of time when I'm getting out to the money. He's like, just go over there for 30 days. Do me a favor. In other words, he's got to build a team that he's going to have.

And he can't trust that he can't rely on you. somebody else has to learn your job now, Justin, because you're not going to be here. Okay, so I'm confident you can do your job, but I can't count on you in four months. Now get out of here and let the corporal now learn how to do your job. And it was pretty cool. And I went over there and I saw something like I'd never seen. It wasn't a bunch of grease monkeys. It wasn't a bunch of hours working, 17 and 18 hours.

It wasn't anything. It was in uniforms. and it was learning all these other professional things. Nobody was really teaching you on the jump seat of amphibious tractor because you just had to work to do the job done. So I got rolled up, being the bad student, I was. I got rolled up within the first week, and it's kind of like, bro, come in here, what's your problem?

And I know you've got a short time and everything else, but you're here. So that means you'll give 100% while you're here. Thank you very much, got that. And then he took the time. This is why I'll never forget. He took the time that other people would not take. When I told you I was a bad student in high school, I could have been a better student in high school. And I'm not blaming the teachers. The ownership is me on that. I could have applied myself better. I could have done this. But I will tell you, there were courses that I applied myself in more because the teacher actually cared. And they actually didn't just ring the bell and say, we'll see you tomorrow. And if you had problems, it would be like, can I hold you after class and I'll let the next teacher know you're going to be a little late.

Hey, you're having some problems doing this or that. And they would take this time, even if it was just a small period of time, it was time they didn't have. And I learned how to appreciate the biggest thing that you can do to somebody, if you disrespect them in life, is to take away their time because it's something they can never get back. That's it. and I knew she didn't have the time to do this, but she took the time. I became a better student in that class.

I didn't become a great student, but I did what I had to do to continue to make mission that was on there to graduate. I applied the same thing, even after what the Marines taught me, I applied that side. I regressed Jock because I wasn't being challenged. And when I went to that school,

people started challenging me the status quo was not good enough. You're better than this. Why are you doing it? Why are you getting out? What are you going to do when you get out? People didn't even ask that that were in your own unit. It was like, you've made your choice, so go right ahead.

You don't even want to talk to me about if I'm going to go to college or what we're going to do. And then you find out, you know, not all units are the same. And then you also find out when you have goals and things that you want to do, don't let what the perception is of that adjust the goals and the accomplishments that you want to do in your life because people are different and one platoon

and the other platoon have the basic same things. It's the leaders and the people in them and make it different. And that is exactly what I saw on this course. So I didn't study. I just became a straight marain and I would turn in my thing and they'd be like, you want to know your grade, you got 102. How do you even get an extra two points? It's because you did this and

this, it went above and beyond for that. It was the first time that somebody said, you'd make a really good instructor. He said, you have caring, compassion, concern for another human being, very young age to do that, what you think? And they made me reach into this box. They said, I want you to pull out, first thing you're having that box. Pulled it out was a coat hanger, and the instructor stared at me and he goes now I want you to teach me about that coat hanger for five minutes and he said this he goes what did I say I want you to teach me about the cone hanger for five minutes he said did I say five minutes and five seconds did I say four minutes and 30 seconds he goes you have a 15 second window to fall inside that thing now go

and I taught him how to jimmy locks I taught him how to hang clothes I taught him out of everything else and when I was done and put the code hanger on there was four minutes and 49 seconds there was no clocks or no watches in the room it was understanding what the parameters were it was understanding they gave you a task a condition and a standard and then you went to that and said I think there's going to be a repercussion if I don't come in within five minutes to do this 105 points handed over and by the time it was there all the instructors pulled me back in that room and said, why are you getting out? This is what you could be. I walked away from

that school and re-enlisted in the Marine Corps and then stayed for the next almost 30 years because people invested in you. So then what was your next job after you? That school was like an NCO school? It was an NCO leadership school. It was an NCO leadership school. And then I became an Amtrak instructor right out here my first time in Southern California. One of the best two years of my life. I'm in Southern California. I'm not at Camp Lejean, North Carolina that is there. And I'm in Camp Del Mar on Camp Pendleton,

which is right in the boat basin on the beach with everything. So if there's a place to be in Camp Pendleton, that's the place to be. And this was before the gigantic First Marine Expeditionary Unit moved in there years later and that. So this is just a small, it was like being over on the Naval Amphid Base. at that time period. Okay. I don't even go to the exchange over on North Island. Those flyboys and I can stay over here.

We got our own little piece on the amphib base to do that. That's what Del Mar was. And that's where I learned to be a lead above my pay grade. Learn to learn the job above you, know the jobs below you, but always know the job of the person that's above you that was on that. And that was the first time that I was truly required to really give back. the skills that I thought the Marine Corps had given to me. And that was for a two-year period up there.

And then what was the next billet? I wanted to be a drone instructor. And I remember my drone instructor when he gave me that Amtrak thing. He said, there's going to be two of you come back to be drill instructors. And I can remember I wasn't one of them. Meaning he wasn't looking at me when he said that. But in my head, I knew I was going to be one of them and did whatever I could do to do that. So now I'm in Southern California.

I'm kind of liking it. And MCRD San Diego is right down here near the Naval Training Center. I want to go be a drone instructor. So I came down here from 96 to almost 2000 to push about eight cycles, recruits through here on 62-day training cycles with small breaks in between. As a drone instructor, a senior drone instructor, and then became an academics instructor teaching history for the U.S. Marine Corps. over there and you are where you are. I went down to dental one day just on a routine

check and saw this moment in dental and was just like man I need it I got teeth problems. My teeth wasn't hurting or nothing and as a drone instructor I go you can probably understand you don't have any time. I mean it's it's 19 and 20-hour days 62 straight days somebody's got to be with those recruits the entire time to do that sun up, sun down, then you've got to be on deck even staying there throughout the night when they're there and it's a really restricted environment. I look for every opportunity I could do to take a few recruits down to dental to do that. And quite frankly, you know, 22 years later, that one was my wife.

And she was working down there. She was in the Navy as a dental technician and a reservist at that. I finished out my tour of duty down here to do that, and she goes and works at fourth tank battalion at Miramar for the U.S. Marines. And this was when women didn't do that. It was here. And I had told her, if we're going to be doing this, you're not going to like what I have to tell you. Because even though the Marines and the Navy are naval services, unless you become a corpsman, I'm probably never going to see you. because you'll be on the blue side navy for the most time.

And my wife was seven years older than I was at the time, and that school was going to hurt. And it was right up at the hills at Camp Pendleton, and she threw her hands up and volunteered to become a fleet Marine Force corpsman. Went up there through the pack on her. She got her FMF device. I did her studying, all that stuff that was in there. I also poured the blood out of her socks and her boots on the hikes and helped pack her frame so that it didn't shift around on her back and do some things up there.

And I remember the instructor was giving me a call saying some of them, they need to make this next hike. Some of them are having a harder time that was on here. And I got to go up there and didn't tell her the last participant on the hike. I showed up off the drill field, came it up, didn't know I was there so I could watch the trail of tears that was going up the hill to do this. Because selfishly, you know, I also knew from my own family, not only would she be a phenomenal corpsman for the Navy and the Marines, I also knew she needed to get over that hill for what we needed if we were going to have that. And I also knew how much of a pride thing when you thought you'd never be able to achieve that because of all those excuses that were packing up for your own self. You need to get over this hill.

And she got over the hill. and she stayed with me for the rest of the time in the Marine Corps. We would slap hands as I would come out of combat, and she would go back into combat. And the hardest job that I had was about 2007 when I had to stay back for seven months and play Mr. Mom to a 13-year-old daughter going through those daughter kind of things of, boy, you were a tomboy about five months ago, and we like to do this,

and now you got makeup, now you have this, and mom's not here to deal with this. So it was an interesting time. Yeah, that is an interesting time, I'm sure. It was quite a leadership challenge. So you did drill instructor, and then you did that until 2000? I did, and then we went back out to Camp Lake Carolina for a tour. Back out there, I kind of always liked to rotate coasts that were there

and also rotate overseas, kind of get a more well-rounded thing, because we kind of grew up in communities where people were. said they were either on an East Coast tour, they were West Coaster, so they did this, and I had the rare opportunity to kind of circumnavigate the globe and do all those. So that took us all the way up to the invasion in 2003. Where were you on September 11th? On September 11th, I was at Camp Lejeune, and we were doing a non-commissioned officer of the quarter board that morning, and we were outside and somebody had ran outside

and just said you never could believe this some jackass just kind of flew a plane in a World Trade Center and everybody thought it was like a Cessna or something that was here. Me too. It was no news.

Everybody just kind of went about their way and that's kind of weird. And then the world changes. It's later when these kids run out of the company office and we're all out in the parking lots going, that was no Cessna and a second plane has just seen. hit the other tower that was in there. And instantly, everybody, there was no one questioning.

If you remember, Chaka, there was no one. It was the light that just came on in the darkness when the second plane hit as we're under attack in the United States. So for the next week, you don't know where that's coming from. So it can't imagine what we were in charge of security and start to get ammunition and machine guns out of buildings that normally you're not drawing ammunition and machine guns and you're getting war stock and then you're putting machine guns on top of barracks roofs looking for air cover you're stringing concertina over every road possible to prevent what would then be known as v bids coming in because you don't know where they're coming from and you just kind of stayed there at work for five days trying to figure out everything that was

going on and everybody kind of glued to the one TV that's in the company office or wherever it's at, trying to get the news that they can get. So you said you were working base security. Were you in a battalion? I was in an operational battalion. Okay. And basically at the drop of a hat, we had to figure out the MPs can't just secure everything. And now it's get to the armory, get the heavy weapons, get this. Okay, where's the ammunition at? Do we need grenades? Do we need all this? And you're trying to go through this whole thing and get the nods up. attack could come at night,

and you're basically writing the book because there's no book that's written. Did you feel like after you got back from the first Gulf War that maybe after, you know, another six months goes by, maybe another year go by, did you feel like the Marine Corps, the U.S. military was in a state of basically,

you know, we're really not going to have to fight another war? I mean, the whole world just saw what we did to these guys over here. I know I had leadership that would straight up tell us that. You know, listen, the days of you guys are never going to do a direct action mission. It's just not going to happen. And then on top of that, we had technology. So it was, why would we send you guys to do a direct action mission when we can put a

T-LAM and a 10-digit grid? Why would we have you guys go do a special reconnaissance when we can fly a drone over? We have satellite imagery that can tell us the same thing. So, you know, I will tell you, I never bought into that. You know, I always thought and hoped that, you know, I would, I would be called upon to do what I was trained to do. But it certainly was hard to, you know, and we were off the coast of Somalia. So we saw that happen. So maybe you'd get the feeling that maybe there would be some sort of a, you know, what we used to call the big mission.

You know, we'd get some one mission. In fact, a lot of our training was, you know, our full mission profiles, oftentimes were around like, hey, this is a mission. This is a mission. There's a situation and you're going to do this mission. You know, when we worked with the Marine Corps, it was always like, hey, you know, this could be a big. It's going to last a long time. But as far as just the mentality of the SEAL teams was very much, hey, we're probably going to, you know, you're going to do one mission, if you're lucky.

If you're lucky, you're going to do one mission, whether it's a special reconnaissance of one thing or some kind of a direct action on a ship. or a hostage situation, and that was kind of it. Did you feel like that attitude was around in the Marine Corps, or was there just, is there enough kind of institutional knowledge in the Marine Corps that people say, yeah, hey, you know what, it's peaceful right now, but it's a cycle and it'll be back again? No, because a lot of the people that are involved in that cycle gets out. And whether they're at a leadership level to influence that,

your staff and COs and your younger junior officers that were involved in a major conflict in 1991, there's a large probability that over 60% of those guys 10 years later are not going to be wearing the uniform to be able to train that mentality into another mindset. But what I actually did see was the military was very conflicted at that time because you still had, the wall may have been coming down in Europe and everything. else, but we had aggregate forces all over the world, and all of a sudden you started seeing mission sets diminish that we used to be. There used to be the jungle schools, and then you'd have the jungle experts that want to learn how to do that. Well, the focus wasn't so much on that.

Then you'd have the mountain warriors that went into the mountains, like the 10th Mountain and everybody else, but the 10th Mountain, that's their job. But we have other smaller forces all throughout the military that go to Bridgeport, or they go to Fort McCoy, or they go to ADAC or they do those. And you watch those start to collapse of where we wasn't, we wasn't going to Norway the way we were doing. We wasn't doing these mission sets that we were doing. And then it was, it was large scale. Now it's going to be desert because after 1991, then Somalia happens right there. So there's more of a Middle Eastern focus that's now shifting into this whole training paradigm that's there, mixed in with these humanitarian missions like Haiti and everything else

that's happening. So you've got forces all over the place. And the funny thing is, I really truly do hope that in places in the government and in higher places in uniform above and beyond where you and I ever achieved to be at, you really do hope that that mentality did not sip in and they started to promulgate it down to do that because that would just tell you that the people that were relying on to know the most about the business of doing warfare don't know as much that we actually believe that they do because if everything in the context from 1775 all the way up to present day of America is a blueprint for what is going to happen in the next 20 to 25 years. And it is undisputable in a training environment to actually think that we are not going

to be fighting another large scale more rare at this time period, while in between that time period are going to go and fight in four and five other shitty little engagements around the thing. The Somalia, the Hades, the Grenadas are going to happen. And those are going to be compartmentalized. Not everybody gets to go to that party. And then you got to keep your motivation up. You got to train the troops and say that that's that unit's mission this time. Ours will be coming. Ours will do that. If you are going to make a career of a lengthy career in the U.S. military, you are going to go to war. And there are other services that are going to go parts and pieces, maybe before you. But you've got everything from 1775 to 1783. And then there's your big one. And then all of a sudden,

roughly about the years of 1800 to 1805 with the Barbary pirates and all that. We have compartmentalized little things about there. Then all of a sudden, War of 1812, and that happens, everybody's going to the big one. 1820s, we're fighting insurrections with Indians. You're fighting a different kind of warfare. It's that insurgent, small warfare again that's here. And then all of a sudden somebody pops in and starts going, we're going to Mexico. Everybody's going to Mexico City.

Then you compartmentalize that. Then you get 1861 to 65. The whole show goes to town. Following that, 60s and 70s. Then you hit the Spanish-American war that comes in. Just after the Spanish-American War, World War I kicks off. Banana wars happen after that. We start learning how to develop an amphibious doctrine throughout the Pacific.

Guys like Pete Ellis are out there saying that the Japanese are going to strike in the Pacific. We have people in jungle training like Chestery Puller and all those. learning these jungle skills in Nicaragua, in Haiti, and all these small little wars at that time period. And then we come out of the small wars period, 1941, 1945, where the United States is in the big one. Everybody goes home again, put the uniforms up, ruptured duck goes on the sleeves, let's go start working to Chrysler. Holy shit, the Pusan perimeter. And we're down to about 100,000 truce because we let everybody go home. get them all back out there, 51 to 53.

Then you're starting back into the Dominican Republic and these small little things, 58, and then Vietnam hits and runs all the way from the early years of 61, all the way to 75. Bad mindset comes out of there. People are tired. A lot of the NCO Corps leaves, the trainers lead that's on there. And then we rebuild this force of small wars in the 80s again, Grenada, Lebanon. Bay route bombing happens. The first terrorist action

targeting the United States military in centuries happens at that because it was an act of war by the Japanese on December 7th, but that wasn't an act of war. That was a truck bomb going into a marine barracks that killed 243 people when they were sleeping that was in there. Kind of roundabout way gets to what you were talking about.

I go, it's when you start letting things down, rules of engagement are different. You can't fire until fired a pawn You're in a police action. You're not in a designated war. And then you get through Noriega. You roll right into the desert storm. There's your big one again. You roll right into the Somalis, the small wars. And then we've been fighting ever since in the major wars and also the small ones. I believe our small war period started again roughly about the 2008 time period. Because if you actually look at that clock and I just knew out. 20 to 25 years this nation all has to mount up and go fight somebody. Everybody on a bigger scale to do that, all the way since 1775. And then in the next 20-year period, we have to reposition, we have to rebuild, and we have to spite these smaller little compressed areas around the things

and prepare for the next one because history tells us the next one is eventually going to happen. And if that's going to be an invasion of in-shan, of which what you were saying is there are certain skill sets, let's take the amphibious warriors that we have out there today, you know, they've been being told now that there'll never be another scale of D-Day. They'll never be another scale of this. And you know what? To an extent, you have to weigh where you need to put those forces now

to where you need to put those forces somewhere in the future. and at the same time, maybe a fire down here on one of our LHAs and a few other things. It just got taken offline when we've been running those ships ragged for about the past 20 years, too, in and out of dry docks and everything else. It puts us probably in one of the most invulnerable times, again, prior to 1941. We've been fighting for 20 years. We've been recycling that equipment. We've been throwing people into the breach 7, 8, 9, and 10 times.

we have sons and daughters that are now fighting the same war that their fathers and mothers went in. The resilience of the American people is strong, but it's going to be tested. It's going to be tested very soon.

I was up in Montana a few weeks ago and I was doing this archery shoot a bunch of people from all over the country and you're out in little small groups and I'm seeing a bunch of military guys and they're saying what's up and I get to this one spot

and I see this guy coming over to Hill and he's, I don't know, maybe he's 28, 30 years old, something like that. Got long hair, beard, a scrappy looking guy and he sees me, his eyes light up and, you know, he's got the big smile on his face and comes over and he says,

he says, hey sir, awesome to see you, Semper, kill and you know so we talked a little bit he's the Marine Corps the whole nine yards and I'm you know you're out there walking these mountains and I'm thinking of myself that guy you we're always going to have to have that guy we're always going to have to have that guy if anybody ever thinks that you don't need that soldier or Marine that's gonna mount up and go to wherever they get sent and take that mission and risk their lives

and kill the enemy. If you ever think that we don't need that guy, and it just gave me great reassurance, because he's out of the Marine Corps, but he's out there, and that's something we need to make sure that we always have. And I think it's part of our instinct. I think it's part of being an American. But if we ever decide that maybe we need to dispel that attitude from our society, we're heading down the wrong road, in my opinion.

Because the world, look, the world's a nice place when you live in America. But America is not the world. And there's evil out there. and there has to be people that have the attitude that when the call comes, they'll go and they'll go and handle that problem. You know, two really good, you'd said with that. You said one earlier, when you were getting at people were developing and utilizing modern day technology as the basis of not having to send a man or a woman into a fight,

whether we're going to put AI in aircraft, whether we're going to do that. I'm a firm believer in a go that all of that is about. an Adel Enhancer. That is not what you build the platform on. The man and the woman is the platform that you invest in and you build. You build the resiliency into them. You build the determination, the strength, the warrior spirit, the fight, you put that into them. And it doesn't matter if it's 20 years old, I think it's even better when they hear that fire coming out of somebody that's 50 and 51 and everything else. And you talked to some guy that came across the beach as at Tara with it's 94, and they're crisp, clear, and concise and as a day, and they're basically looking at you going,

don't screw this up on your watch, man. We held a line on our watch. And I believe generationally, we all have a responsibility to do that. Make no mistake, war will never become so advanced to where you can hold a piece of ground without putting a person on that ground to hold that piece of ground in that battle space. You can cover it by fire. You can cover avenues. You can cover large swathas that are out there. But if you want to go down and actually get at the business of what war is related to, you are going to have to put a man or a woman in a battle space to control that from the ground. This is exactly why we use forward air controllers that are out there. You don't fire missions onto something that you don't lace a target. You don't have that in. We don't drop dumb bombs.

from B-Semitism anymore, and just because people believe that we have laser-guided munitions and all this other stuff, or as the naval threat is becoming the A2D2 standoff distance, and they don't want to fight in the littorals because they don't believe we have to drop Marines into the littorals that much anymore to swim those infantrymen ashore that is on that, and then the nation might start making ships that don't have well decks in them anymore, and it takes that capability off of the table to do that, because you and I talked before, Ospreys, helo envelopes, a lot of these platforms, that's the solution that's here. You know what?

The battleship was the solution to the aircraft carrier was a solution to the battleship. The toys are not what makes the fight in the injury. The fight comes from the heart, and it comes from how you grow the next generation to utilize the enhancements that you're going to give them. And you give them the best enhancements that you possibly can to do that. But you do not put an enhancement on the battlefield that cannot be employed by somebody tactically that doesn't have the resilience and the knowledge to control that rules of engagement. I will never forget I went to a combat resiliency conference before I was getting out of the Marine Corps and I had to get up and I had to talk and We had everybody from the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Navy, the Navy, everybody the one that I was very most interested in.

It wasn't the combat resilient. from us as Marines because you're in the six-foot fight with somebody or the teams that are going to go in and they're going to throw dogs and they're going to hit on target. They're looking at watches. We got this much time on the ground. We have to get A, B and C, tertiary targets, primaries. We get everything here and you're making those calculated things. No, the average person, when we don't, that carries the rest of the military, there are supply troops and everybody else who does that. But when I heard an Air Force lieutenant colonel say one of the biggest problems they're having right now is the common resiliency of the mental fitness of their drone pilots, I kind of sat up in my seat. And they explained it as it's one thing to be standing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and you're having a six-foot fight and you're doing that and there is that risk that is involved into that, right? then you go, you do your mission, you do your direct action, you come back, you debrief, you do your equipment, you do that. You get cocked and reset because you're still in the zone because I'm in Iraq and I'm in Afghanistan.

And he said, we kind of wasn't prepared and I know we're more prepared and I believe they're totally prepared now. Because this was years ago at the infancy of when we're going to have enlisted drone pilots. We're going to start flying drones out of these cans out of places in the United States. to where these people show up to work in the morning, get a debrief on a thing, do a battle handover, and then flying its own missions and predators and that, that at the end of the day, somebody puts a board up like they did in Vietnam and go, well, we had five today. It walks out of there. And then you get back in your car, your wife calls you and says, can you pick up Burger King on the way home?

Yeah. And then tomorrow morning, at 8 in the morning, you're going to go back in that box again. and it's not a game. Those are lives on the other side of that. And that is the evolution of warfare that I believe that you have to prepare the person for when you put that on to shoulder that responsibility and not take away that because of the technological enhancements

you and I are talking about. It scares the world. It doesn't matter when they hear that there is a SEAL team that just hit something. The team's usually gone. By the time the news is there and they find out that that encouraging just happened in a place in the world that nobody was looking, it strikes the hair on the back of somebody's neck, okay?

America's still watching. They have this capability that's out there, whether it's Delta, whether it's anybody. It's on that. But make no mistake, the world knows America's really serious. When a young Lance Corporal or a PFC in the Army with a bayonet on the end of the rifle wades ashore and stands on a piece of sand, and then they have a battalion that's coming behind them, that makes more than people's hair on the back of their neck stand up. It says that we ain't going to get rid of these guys anytime soon,

and if we don't behave, I hate to see what else they're going to throw inside of here. So you are spot on that ngo of saying that it is always going to be the person. And I mean, that's right back to that mindset of Teddy Roosevelt, the man in the arena. Today it's the man and woman in the arena because their lives are out there on the line to do that, whether it's blue lives, whether it's military lives or anybody else. But to have that mindset, we can never lose the mindset of fielding people who want to be in the arena. How long did it take for you to get your, for your battalion to know that you guys were going to spin up and head over? In 2003, we were on leave. We got called.

I was putting a unit that we only had a few months to train up until the last. that time period so we kept them in the field latched them together we kind of went on leave and we called off a leave and said that everybody else for the most part's going to fly over but we need you to take your tracks and get on the ships and you're going to ride the ships over that was here and we rode one of the last trips of the USS Portland it was pretty awesome I wouldn't I always love the smaller ships than the bigger ships I mean they ride differently and that that's a little bit weird but the camaraderie with the Navy crew that you have on a small ship, especially when you're driving amphibious tanks and everything else is the first people,

other than the ship's captain, the XO, and the CMC and that, that you check in on there is, you always check in with the mess chief, make sure that guy's got his stuff squared away, right? You check in with the building chief, show them where they're at. The third people is all the damage control people and everything else on the ship that has the machinery that can help you fix the equipment that's in that well tech, whether they're brazers, whether they have welding capabilities, because some of the best people I've ever seen in my life, they can turn a piece of sheet metal into something

is a sailor in the U.S. Navy. And it's their home, and they've got nowhere else to go. So they do the most resilient things, to patch things, to weld things, to do what they have to do. And there's a lot of times I have to go inside of there and go, you don't know me from Shianola, but I don't have a welder out here right now or that.

Can you come down here and braze a three-inch thing that's on this armored vehicle? Yeah, and it's pretty cool. You throw them a coin, you throw them a K-bar, something for some great work. Because it's a people business. You build assets and camaraderie that way. You don't build an adversarial nature by being the Marines that show up on the ship, and they put everybody on water hours because the Marines take showers that are five minutes long or anything else.

You just kind of, you know whose house you're in. And you build that rapport because they're going to war, too, and they have a mission. and you're really and their mission isn't just to drop you off they tie into a bigger mission they're kind of hoping in that camaraderie that they see you come back and to be looking at your naval brothers to go when you get pushed ashore and go we'll be here we'll be here when you get back we don't know what we're going to be doing we'll be here uh the Portland wasn't there because that thing was poured out of decommissioning just to get us into the thing of the fleet Is that an LPD?

Yep. Small little as sweet pea. It was called, you know, and it's kind of sitting about 17,000 feet below the waves. And it's one of those things. It's just a great little ship from a great city that was out there. I mean, the USS Portland's that held that name before that, these were ships that were in Dewey's battle line and everything before and the naming of these ships and these cities.

And when you were talking about, do you think that people sometimes lost their way on what they were doing? you know, like the naming of naval ships, and you look around the world, and you see the Invincible, you see different things that are out there. One that builds pride in your own ship that was here. More importantly is when the enemy kind of sees a flotilla coming at them and they see the names of these ships that are actually coming, that leads to a mindset of the people that are on that ship and a country behind that ship. So when we're sending the Roosevelt's out, are we're naming these cities.

And right down to these little LSTs that were called Barber counties and Harlan counties, and these were produced to represent these Americans who were the fabric of our nation along there. And then you just kind of see how that name we can get over here. Where is this at? And how are we naming these things that are on here rather than, you know, my wife and I chuckle,

Jocko that's on here. And I try to reduce my amount of cussing. over the years. It's not so grandfatherly when you're out there. But on the screen and the TV, I grew up with the recruiting of the U.S. Navy, right, seeing the posters of stripped to the ones that sailors throwing depth charges saying join the U.S. Navy, showing this, brownwater Navy boats going in there and doing business on the enemy, Tiger Stripe Camas, you name it, that was doing this. And then here for a while, while, you know, we've got, it's not a job, it's an adventure, we have this, we have this.

And all of a sudden you start, the troops start talking. It's kind of like, what is our identity right now? Am I the Pepsi generation? Am I the, join the Navy, see the world generation, am I that? You know, the Marines are the Semperfidelis. We didn't promise you a damn Rose Garden type generation. And we don't jockey with our message, like a lot to do that. But the best thing that I have seen in maybe years is I heard a rumble in my house because I'm hard of hearing so the volumes up. I heard a rumble and I saw an aircraft carrier come from the right sand side of the screen with a full battle lineup across the top of that and it cruised across that thing and the house was like rumbling. I yelled to my wife like, baby, you get down here,

your commercial is on, right? She runs down. She's laughing at me, Jocko, and here comes this thing. the white caps coming and it's rummowing and you know the commercial it's here and then at the same tail end of that it's like the united states navy a global force for good and i just looked at her and i said we wouldn't be married for 22 years if i got us all freaking jocced up to like like do some stuff tonight and then it's kind of like okay baby you ready we're we're going to get this and then this is how we're going to drop the ending on this thing i said it probably wouldn't be your husband for the past 22 years. And you know what? I loved it. I loved the messaging that it had that was on there because the messaging, the politically incorrect messaging, they should have came on in the United States Navy.

We will completely destroy your way of life at the same way of this. And then things like listing the battle things of saying, this is just one. We have quite a few more of these. And then more importantly is, once again, you don't make it about the machines. You make it about the person. And when people start seeing recruiting officers that actually have the resilience and the fighting thing, I've seen America's Army come out. They're actually really good ones. They've got some door kicking things. I mean, they're actually targeting like we want infantry

people. I haven't seen that for a lot of years to do that. And it's awesome. And you still see Naval Special Warfare commercials out that are targeting a generation of the next generation that has to go forward and do these things. I'm not sold on the fact I go that we should be selling a lot of skills that are on there you know

that's a recruiter's job let's get them into the recruiter let's kind of pump them up let's get them to that but I also know that I had one of them say Justin we don't want to scare anybody that's on there because we've got to get people to come to the door and I said the right ones will come to the door

the other ones you'll do a little bit more work for but you'll find them in those high schools and you'll do another thing but if you're getting scared by a commercial i don't think i want you here yeah it ain't sorry it rattled that's exactly right i don't want you here so how early for the invasion did you guys get to um the staging point uh we landed and we moved about a 30-day movement up into our t-aas our tactical We're on there, so we landed in Kuwait to move a good way of land. We didn't low boy. We didn't do a lot of those.

You're driving up into a lot of these positions to do a couple of weeks of training. It was there, but we only learned the mission that we were going to have to take those bridges down. We didn't know until we actually got up physically to the tactical assembly areas. What month did you guys set sail to have in January? And then we landed in the end of February. So we were on the ground and started making our movement on February 18th and 19th up into the northern portion of Kuwait just below the border. So both these wars for you, you showed up very short, didn't have to sit around in the desert like everybody else for nine months or 11 months. You're the man.

I was Dennis Rodman in a thing when somebody's, you know, you're eating the cheeseburger saying you get your sweats off. They're about to walk on to the thing. Yeah. We're about to play the world champions. Hey, can you come on over here right now? Absolutely. Dang. So you got up there, you said February 18th? Got up there in February. We offloaded in February in Kuwait, and then we made the march up in to the northern portion of Kuwait to stage where we're going to go through the breach lanes into Iraq.

And then going into this, how did the attitude compare to what you experienced in the first Gulf War of your fellow Marines? The attitude was absolutely, there was no problem getting any Marines to do anything. the problem keeping them from doing something. Because they still had the Twin Towers burning in their head. You still have people in your platoon that were in New York when that actually happened. And it joined the Marines a couple of years later. So they were kids that were 70. That was the catalyst to make them Marines.

And you have that fight of you did this. And that was the energy that was going in as we, you know, some of us who were here the first time, knew that we were going to be back there again because people had always chastised or whatever or armchair quarterback George Bush's decision on should he have just pushed the troops up into Baghdad and knocked out Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the mission was get him out of Kuwait, put them back in their own house and then he pulled back. We kind of, I kind of knew when I was running enemy prisoners of war in the backs of those ham tracks in 1991,

a lot of those kids didn't want to be there, but the older warriors did. and their lieutenant colonels and their senior NCOs that had been through the Iran War and everything else, the look that they had on their face was, trust me, man, this is not over. These kids that are in here don't have the fight and didn't grow up with that, but my generation's still around.

And I can still remember a lieutenant colonel sitting in the back, and I remember how dumb I was. Because I had a knife on the top shoulder of my flack jacket so I could get to it. But I was sitting on a camionette against engine panel so I could watch everybody in the crew compartment. But I remember my weapon at the time wasn't like in a condition one weapon with it on fire. Wouldn't even been, it would have been conditioned one on safe.

But you're in close corridor and you have a long rifle in here. And that's the ignorance that you have as a kid. You feel you're protected. I have this. They don't want to fight anymore. but I also looked up in out the cargo hatches and my platoon sergeant had the weapon station turned all the way to the back with the thousand that depressed into the back of the newel and the other E7 that was in this hatch was leaning and riding the vehicle backwards with a burrata and was in overwatch of me down there in other words they probably wasn't so scared of me because they were probably scared those crazy guys will fire into the back of you and kill even at the risk of killing one of their own.

So we didn't have any problem. Holland. Going into that, training that mindset that we're going into their backyard this time with the greatest Marines that we could put forward on the field of battle at that time and all the other cohesive forces going into there. There was not a mindset other than let's just get this show started. Did you think, look, I know you said that you thought, hey, we're going into their, we're going into their territory now.

this is actually where they live, we're probably going to see more resistance. Was that widespread or did a lot of people think, hey, man, we, you know, we're probably looking two weeks at the most. I know. I was worried about that, which is a weird thing to say, but I was thinking because I was not over there and I was thinking, yeah, I'm going to miss this. This is going to be over in a few weeks, or at least it could be. What did you see?

We talked about that in training earlier. Different units trained to a different mentality that was here. I can only speak to the one that we trained to. We trained to be there to basically prevent the Iraqis from ever being able to do this again to somebody else at that. And it wasn't going to be a 1991. It was not going to be there just going to throw up their hands and they're going to walk away to do that. But I'm not telling you not that other people were like that, that you saw in training areas or you didn't see putting in the hours and the reps and the sets that it actually took to lay the maps.

and talk to history and kind of really ingrained that mindset into somebody. It was overall, the Marines had the mindset, subunit levels that were on there. It always goes back to whatever the commander, whatever the ownership is going to make a focus of training at that time period, because you can have the higher authority that basically says, we're going to go in and we're going to do this mission. But the people that you train, eat, sleep, breathe with, that put that into you is normally, not the chief in naval operations or the common on the Marine Corps. It is your lieutenant, it is your lieutenant, it's your gunry sergeant, it's your chief petty officer, or it's

your guy on your left and the right. So I couldn't have had a more cohesive unit that went in for the short amount of time that we did because I all do believe that they didn't believe this was going to be a two in a queue, man, and we're out of here. I think they actually were very fearful when they kind of knew the major thing is to now take this guy out. And we're going to do it in such a manner and such a speed that was out here, that we're sitting there with these vehicles. They're left over from the end of Vietnam when they were brand new, going, we're going to push them across the desert, sometimes at night, sometimes with no maps, sometimes broken down, and you have to leave that one back with a crew to fix it.

And then they have to travel 80 miles to catch up with the rest of the crew, and they're out of radio range. So at night, you're just kind of looking at the tracks that you can follow. to try to catch up, and then you call in these radio things to get within that radio range, and you don't even know if you're driving through a bazillion minefields or anything else that is out there. That's focus. When the invasion kicked off, what were you guys doing immediately? Were you guys rolling up on, what was that, was that March 20th? Yeah, we were already in position and rolling and refueling.

We kicked off on about March 19th. and started to track up because you're talking hundreds of miles that was in there. And again, fixing things along the way, whatever you have to do because the thing was push, push, push, push, push. You can't stop. You can't do this. Which really bonds to that whole thing we were talking about like the USS Indianapolis. You know, it was maintain radio silence.

Keep pushing. Keep pushing. Don't give away positions. Don't do whatever you have to do, right? Get to the end of the result. And we started topping off and refueling. about the 21st. It was kind of the invasion load for the fuel. We've already loaded with ammunition. You already loaded with everything. The 22nd rolls into there, and you instantly know the call is the 23rd is going to go into the city.

And then that's when you've already rehearsed that your position to take a certain bridge. Here's your mission. And here's the time and date stamp that you have to be accomplished by, whether it is setting off at 0.4 in the morning to get to a bridge by 0.8. so that you have somebody that is here. So did your battalion get tasked to take Nazaria? Yeah, the entire task force. It was called ironically Task Force Tarawa. And Task Force Tarawa was First Battalion Second Marines. And that was completely away in its own task force.

And that task force was to secure the bridges of Nazaria so that the entire First Marine Division and the Army and everybody else could pass through that city all the way up the route and make a straight shot up to Baghdad. So that's why they needed those bridges. What was the intel telling you about the resistance you were going to face? The resistance was about 500,000 people inside of a city. So it was a large major city at the time frame.

It was bracketed by the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal that was on that. And at the time, there was small units, and it was a headquarters of the Iraqi Fedaheen that was down there. So we kind of knew more of your fanatical fighters were going to be inside of that area. area, the 51st mechanized division was down there, and we still knew that Iraq still had a will and a means to fight. So they still had these capabilities that they could probably put a good hurt on you. But we still had the capabilities that nobody was foreseeing the buzz saw that was going to happen when we crossed over those bridges that morning on the 23rd. Are you debriefing your platoons, like out in the field? or are you in the assembly area?

How's the word getting transmitted to the troops? You're already doing the pre-briefs that are out there in the days leading up to that. Once we got, everything else is kind of on the move. At one time, I've got six different radio nets that are going on inside of my helmet, a little box down here that I can switch between battalion, tack one, tack two, fires, anything else.

While you're still maintaining your communications for your intercoms for your vehicles, you're still maintaining tactical control of your own people in relation to the battle that was on there. And once the things are rolling, there was no time to just stop and say, we need to get everybody back together and talk about what we're about to do tomorrow. So you already had the whole thing pre-greens. We already had the pre-brief that was there. And then you go across the bridges.

What was the first indication that, oh, it's on? The first indication it was on was even before we got the bridges. because all of a sudden that morning we found out and started hearing calls that there was an army unit that had made its way into Nazaria. And they had went up across one of the bridges that we were supposed to do on, the southern bridge, made it across the northern bridge all the way what's now known as Ambush Alley. U.S. 507th Maintenance was there and just managed to take a wrong turn. Captain Troy King got the unit on the northern side. They kind of figured out we're off the path of where we're at and figured at the time the best path was to cut the shortest distance again to try to get back to where the convoy they had turned that. They'd made that wrong turn. So the greatest thing was when we first started hearing that we've got Army vehicles on fire sitting in front here, blood weapons laying all over the place. And we are the north, we're the spearhead of the entire. Nobody's supposed to be in front of us. So to hear over the radio, what do you mean there's a an army unit. Are they engaged? Are they not engaged? No, the first vehicles start calling,

which are the tanks back, and they're rolling past these burning vehicles, and they're fuel trucks and their convoy trucks. It's not a combat convoy that was on there. And they're pushing, and they're just relaying those positions that are back here. So now the generals, colonels, everybody else is getting these fragmented stuff back here. They're all trying to figure out what's going on and I get a call to go up and start figuring out what's going on up there. Take another vehicle. I grabbed another vehicle and started pushing as far as we could. And at first I heard it's about a mile and a half somewhere up the road where the tanks had said they may have seen some soldiers on the side of the road. We passed the burning vehicles that were there,

all shot to pieces, and then we just kind of kept driving up the road. road and saw nothing. And then I got up to the forward line where the M1 Abrams tanks and 8th tank battalion and Major Bill Peoples was in charge of that. And I drove the M-track down into the side, sent the driver over near the tank. The tanks, main guns are engaging. T-62's in the field. Everything, this is getting real. Main gun over-pressure blasting. You can't get a hold of them. their mission fixed that's here, got on the ground, quined up the side of the tank, got on the back of the gunner's thing,

and grabbed the gunner's helmet off the top, which I believe kind of startled him a little bit because they are actively engaging troops that are in the field and started to ask him. I mean, he looked and was like, what do you come from? I said, did you see some soldiers? And he said, a little bit past the burning trucks

and not far behind from where we're at, in between that area, we saw some soldiers that may be a few hundred yards off in the areas. And thank you very much. My feet did not hit the deck. He looked enough to see me start to climb down the side of that tank to jump off. And that's about this high that was here to get back to the vehicle. And when he saw me jump off the tank, that main gun fired and was like the best roller coaster ride I've ever had in my life because the overpressure it's just like arched your back and I got back up I'm laughing he's laughing that's up there give him a thumbs up run back to the thing tell the drivers they're somewhere in here now we're in Indian country it's out here they're engaging that way we've now got artillery positions there

and getting set up to start firing into the city and start doing the prep you're starting to see helicopters start to come into the into the air and then we couldn't see any soldiers. So we started weaving the vehicles, Jock, back and forth, like you drive down some country road, trying to find something in the ditch. It was here with two vehicles, and eventually my driver yelled, and he said, I see somebody over in the field, and I looked over there, and it was a soldier waving her hands up.

It was a chief warrant officer that was in there. We pulled the vehicles over inside of there, and I tell people to this day, I go because they've caught a tremendous amount of heat for being the unit that had people captured and wandered into this or whatever else. I get credit a lot for being the individuals that went out there and saved the individuals and triage and this here. For that maintenance unit that was on the ground when we got there and put troops on the deck, they did the best job that they could possibly have done with trying to treat their own casualties.

One individual specialization where I've had four gunshot wounds. A big boy, I think if it was me, I wouldn't have lived. The shots where his were at were arms, upper arms, legs, and I just remember him having this calms in thing. And when I stopped over, he just looked up and he said, I never thought I'd be so happy to see a Marine in my life. And we said we're going to take care of you. And we started ripping T-shirts, bandages.

Corman were there. They had made like a little 360-degree perimeter. Specialist Miller was awarded the Silver Star out of that unit for defending those parameters that were here out of that maintenance unit. So this whole kind of stick that they get that they didn't fight, they didn't do this, they were just a maintenance unit that wandered in. Their training kicked in. They did the initial things that were out there, sent the other group. over to the other little wagon wheel that they had another individual set up into there.

And I can just remember looking at grubbing thinking the calmest, here's this guy, he's just, boy, he's on point. Thank you for showing up. Saving, he's not howling, he's not screaming. And then we have one of the other ones that's missing part of the back of his foot that's over there. We get them in. We get back down south. Tanks are still engaging in pushing north.

We get enough time to just kick them out of the vehicles, Jocko. at the first, like, ambulance I could find. Because at this time, there's no aid station set up. There's nothing. So you get them back there, drop them, because I got a convoy to get back up here. And instantly, we dropped them right there, fell back into the battle line,

and started moving in on those bridges into Nazaria. And the first bridge we hit was a rail bridge. And the first thing that I heard was that there was a van coming, and there was an RPG gunner hanging out the side of the van. And we saw the first shot and yelled sagger, sagger, sagger, which was the cue to the armored vehicles to start driving erratically to try to evade a rocket attack.

Now, when they did that, I knew everything was going to be okay. I did. Because instant willingness and that confusion and they're hearing all this chaos going on, their helmet, and they're listening still for the key words and the reactionary things, they're not going, where's that coming from? They just start doing what they're trained to do, that short amount of time. Move across that railhead, nothing's sitting, move over the southern bridge, and it was eerily quiet.

Moving over the southern bridge of the Euphrates River was eerily like nothing was going on. I don't know if you tuned it out in the city, but it was like there was no firing going on. It was eerily quiet moving into there. and then I was sitting on top in the center of that bridge and the forward part, now I'm the last vehicle. So there's about 13 other AVs. They're staggered in front of me. And about eight seconds into that feeling the entire world.

Exploded. Rockets, mortars, coordinated RPK machine gun fire on corners of the bridges and everything here. I'm yelling over the thing to the first section leader that's the first vehicle at the bottom. you need to push and get us off of this bridge that's down there. We get down and off the other side of that bridge, and those vehicles start moving into these herringbone battle positions.

And now they need to drop their infantry because we are on our objective. We still have other units that have to pass through this objective to get to their objective that are up there. And using situational awareness in the manuel field, I still to this day can't remember seeing another armored column roll feet away through there because you're so focused on what you're doing in that area. And now they're calling out RPG gunners. They're calling out mortarmen on the top. You're seeing the RPGs flip and hitting the road. Some of them are duds. Some of them aren't duds.

And then you have to disembark the infantry. The infantry gets out there and this is like something that was, I can only imagine this is what Custer felt like. When you got a 360 degree and it's coming from everywhere and you can't figure out what the main part of this, whether it's artillery that's coming in on you, whether it's forward observers. There were people watching the battle. And I go, they were just sitting up there drinking tea with their family on these verandas that are just watching and you're sitting here going, is that a spotter? Is that somebody, I mean, the guy looks like he's 70, but I don't know right now. And a lot of guys are then asking you, are we authorized to return fire to do?

this because that was probably the biggest thing that happened in Nazaria was the epic scope and scale of it. You would think that people were itching to pull the trigger. It was quite the opposite. They were really running the rules of engagement and saying until I get some real positive ID or something like this, I'm not just going to sling a 50 count into this building until I have a reason to do that. And it was a really short time until we were given a reason to do all of that and more, whether it's 40 millimeter grenade launchers, 50 cows, laying 60 millimeter mortars on direct fire, down avenues of approach. It was every range you had ever been on all packed into one that was there, and it was that way for a solid straight eight hours. And nothing led up.

There wasn't a breather. There wasn't anything that was in there. The supply chains aren't going to come up to you because they know what's going on up there. So at the times this is all happening, the tanks are a pretty big signature. All of a sudden, tanks run out of gas really quick. When they're burning through that, tanks start pulling out of the battle position because you can't get the fuel in to refuel the tanks there in the city. The tanks are now going to leave the city.

So if you want to talk about your heart going down into your stomach, is when you see those bad boys start rolling the opposite way, and you're left with thin-skinned vehicles because our Amtrak's, on that deployment cycle, we didn't have enough time when we got the deployment order, Jacko, to get the bolt-on armor to put on the outside of vehicles. So our vehicles, at the thickest point, was two inches of aluminum. We didn't have the applique. We didn't have the enhanced armor that was in there.

And then the Humvees still just had cloth doors. And they had that ghetto armor, as we called it in 2004 and five, and armor plates and all that were the product of what we learned back then to do that. And as they're going, the tanks go that way. And now the fight is in a 360. And we're about an hour and a half into that. Don't know what's going on at the other northern bridge. Don't know what's going on on the outskirts of town

where our third maneuver unit was supposed to be on the outskirts of town. And that had the commander in the third maneuver unit on the outskirts of Nazaria. They kind of tried to do an end around with these command vehicles. And they got into this Iraqi cesspool bog that was no, no, it's a shit dump. It was a, and an armored vehicle, it looks like it's sand on top. First one launches into there, sinks all the way down, it can't get out. And one Abrams goes in after it, it's gone. Command vehicles go in, it's gone.

And you're talking about now we're thermiting engine compartments and everything, because we're going to have to leave these vehicles inside of these cities. This is the blueprint that wasn't supposed to happen. or this is what how many hours into it are you right now this is two this is two into that are you have you already taken casualties at this point at that point none in my immediate area and then right after that is when i was faced in opposite direction uh firing a turret and kind of a rear word thing to keep the iraqis back from this avenue of approach and we saw an ambulance coming at a high rate of speed up the thing. And I can remember what the C was on the

side and all this. And myself and another vehicle, Alpha 311, was sitting on each side of the spread. And this thing just kept coming, kept coming, kept coming. Closing the distance, 200 meters, and I kept telling them, just call it out, call it out. We did. You're usually not supposed to do a burst of warning fire to do that, but this is the first stages of combat. And this is kind of an ambulance. It's also at the same time kind of a V-bit that's coming this way because some of us did remember Beirut. A few things that were like that

when we were younger. It gets to about 75 meters. Game on. And we lit into that thing and that vehicle careened off and stopped and pounded into a wall. The whole cab lit red that was on that. And as soon as it smacked into that wall, that back hatch

opened up and six black clad Iraqi Fedaheen fully armed of the teeth fighters came out of that back of that vehicle and started running across the street. And they're, you know, now it's, my God, now they're going to use ambulances. Now they're going to do this. Now you're really into this. And it's all in that two-hour window, right? And then you're talking about rules of engagement, rules not of engagement. You're an 18-year-old kid that's out here as Gunnery Sergeant. Do I, am I authorized a shoot? Something like that? Or am I going to be charged with some kind of, whom it's after here? Amen.

And this is what we have to do with this time to keep the family alive. And when they jumped out with weapons, it was just like that. Every avenue approach. You would see a mass. You would look up on verandas. You would see people come out and fire rockets down the road to try to skip them into tanks. And then you'd see them disappear. And then a few seconds later, you'd see somebody come out on a top veranda again,

kind of put their head around about 20 seconds later. person, now that person's a spotter for the person that's underneath. And you just got to watch the Marines calculate all that at the rapid rate and start to deduce this is what's happening. Can I do this? Can I not do this? Here's what I'm going to do. And then my driver yells, hey, boss, look at these dumb ass going the wrong way. And it was kind of this little Georgian kid, 19 years old, loved him to death, PFC Sasser. He's looking right at the road. And what he saw was an Amtrak going the opposite direction.

And the first thing I can remember thinking, Jacko, was don't let that be one of mine. Because I didn't tell any of them to go that way to do that. And then when the clarity happens, you look, and the RPG gunner at the top materializes 50 feet above, that Amtrak, he fires a rocket down into the top of that Amtrak, and then it blows the back end of the Amtrak open, and then you see an Iraqi RPG gun or walk right out in the middle of the street, take a knee, and fire the second rocket right into the street troop compartment, which is a

completely coordinated effort of an attack. These aren't just a bunch of insurgents that are there. And then you see that blew open. The next thing you see is a U.S. Marine fall out on fire. and I could tell it was one of ours. He still had his communications cord and helmet attached in the back of that. And it's all surreal at that time. You don't have sights and sounds. You don't have it. It just kind of and you're in this vacuum watching all this happen.

And the vehicle comes to a rolling stop on its own power because you can see smoke coming out. Every hatch, it's on fire, and then you can see troops laying in their hinges. And I can just remember the infantry is engaged, but I can just remember that nobody's kind of running near that thing right now. So I yelled in the back to my dock, grab your unit one kit, and come with me. And Alex Velazquez from Puerto Rico, great little kid, first time in combat. He grabs his stuff. He runs out the back.

I got no helmet. I got it because you're throwing everything off, right? and we get out there, we run to the vehicle. And the first thing I see is half the leg of a Marine laying at the end of the vehicle. And I remember picking it up, there's nothing else to do, and you're like, Doc lay this off the side because maybe there's people here alive.

You know, in your own way, you're trying to think maybe this can be reattached or doing that. And I still remember the picture of my head of him standing there holding this leg, amputated leg and combat trauma of a Marine and this look on his face like, oh my God, what's going on. And then we went into the back of the vehicle. The back of the vehicle, Jaka was completely collapsed in, and this is a 26-ton vehicle. So the top of these cargo hatches,

they need a few Marines on a good day to open them up, and these are imploded into the back of the vehicle. And then you have to remember inside of the vehicle, you have no shortage of about 1,000 Mark 19 grenades. You have boxes of hand grenades, the infantry. You have boxes of hand grenades, the infantry, you couldn't sit in the back of a U.S. combat vehicle going into combat in 2003 and actually put your feet on the actual deck of a vehicle because there was a subdeck. And the upper deck was all the ammunition that was laid across there. So not only are these infantrymen on a regular day packed in like you and I talked about before. Now their knees are to their chest. They're sitting on top of a powder keg.

and it's just nothing but cordite and pitch black. And you can't see and you start feeling. And I just started walking through, Jago, from Marine to Marine. And I would see a Marine and I'd move up and try to feel, shake, check for a pulse, whatever, because they're just all mixed in together. These cargo hatches had also imploded and bent them all into L-shaped positions, when they collapsed on their backs. So even if you have the average Marine, let's just say a buck 80 that is out there, you had another 60 pounds of kit on top of that kid and all of his weapons and everything else.

It's a mess. And as we're moving through there, I'm looking back and telling Doc, he's triaging people. And I could look back and Doc was feeling for a pulse and I would tell Doc, forget it, go to the next one, he's dead. because Doc couldn't see the side of his head that was missing that I could see. He could only see the other side when he came through. And now I figure, Jacques, everybody's dead. There's not a single living person that's inside of here. They could have survived this.

Then you just start hearing all the stuff ricocheting off the outside of the vehicle. You still see the rocket trails that are flying behind because they're now. This is a large target right in the middle of the thing. magnet to magnet and they're aiming everything they can for it and I just figured first of all we need to get as much weapons as we can we need to zero the radios out we need to get the crypto out of here we need to do that and started to go up because I figured I was asking for a thermite grenade because if I couldn't get the radios out or whatever you can drop a thermite and burn them and this is what we're going to do because we may not have to leave this here

which is one of the saddest things. You don't leave the dead wounded comrade behind, but in the middle of the fight, you have to do what you do to survive. And also get the materials you have to do to carry the fight to the enemy. And you cannot quit because even if you're tired, cold, wet, and hungry, somebody else is more tired, cold, wet, and hungry, anything else is you.

You're talking 136 degrees or anything else. We're already in the fight where Marines have already sucked through all their canteens of water are there camelbacks to do that. The water's hot already, as you know, it's not chilled water. And they're in it. And I stepped into the middle of that and dropped down on my right knee trying to get through, and I heard a man gas for air. It was who I was stepping on that was here.

And it turned out to be a corporal by the name of Matthew Juska. And that was a vehicle, and a Marine that was in a completely, different unit. They were charged with taking the northern bridge where we had the southern bridge. So now in your head, how did they get here? How were they back down here to do this? And you find out what had happened at the northern bridge. When they got along that northern bridge, they were hit with Iraqi artillery fire. They were hit with that. And then they were also the unit that were hit by the A10 strafs that were up there and had all this madness going on at one time.

These vehicles that we were now seeing coming back in, they were the vehicles that were loaded with casualties trying to get back south of the city to do what we had done with the 507. And then the Iraqis were picking them off just like they did the 507th when they came back into the city.

Debrief the A-10 friendly fire situation that unfolded is, you know, from what you know about it. Well, when it was actually happening in Jagger, we're at the Southern Bridge, So it's pretty distinctive when you can hear an A10 come over, and it makes a pretty distinctive sound as well when those cannons are actually going off,

so you know they're in the area. Now, the northern bridge, and that where it's happening is probably about another one and a half, two miles up Ambush Alley. And what we can assess is there were actually survivors in that track that I was in, that were also crew members that were in the front. So I was able to garner after, we coherently were able to get some people to talk.

Wasn't the casualty I pull out of the back, and it really wasn't the two guys that were inside that was there. Another Amtrak had called out and said a second vehicle was here, and they're trying to get us to come help them up at the Northern Bridge. And he was saying what was happening at the Northern Bridge. And the open source that you can find, the redacted after action, it's online that was here was basically what had been happening was when they got forward to the northern bridge and they were hit with this multiple things and they're calling airstrikes that were

coming in. The forward air controller was the fact is supposed to actually be having eyes on the target and the fact did not have eyes on the target that was at that position and he was co-located in the with the command element that was back. in the city. And when the A-10s are coming in, the A-10s are getting grids that there are no U.S. vehicles forward of a certain position. Kind of like when we got the call for the Army. What do you mean the Army is up there to do that? And then they're getting confusing calls of vehicles are coming back in to the city, which I'm assuming at that if I'm a pilot or anything else and I'm seeing armored vehicles coming back into a city. It may be an enemy.

me reinforcements, it may be something like that. But at one period, whatever it was, Jocker, they were given the clearance to fire. Fire on the vehicles that were north of that city. And when they came in, call signs were gyrate that is on there, and they came in and made their first run and their first strafing run. They made a couple of those. And then they flew back off, up to the level in the stack to start coming back around and to do that again. and they made multiple runs on those vehicles that were up there. So the vehicles that you can see online, the vehicles that you can see there, the ones that look like they're completely gutted and split open like a can opener,

that shows all the aluminum melted on the outside of the things. That wasn't from Iraqi small arms fire or anything else. It was like that. That was the Marines that were in the mass confusion at the northern portion of the bridge, holding what their battle position was trying to figure out where this enemy fire is coming from, calling in the air to help out with that enemy fire, and then that enemy fire in the middle of the Fratricide incident happens to fragmerines that are in that mass confusion.

You know it was later because, you know, they fired depleted uranium rounds. And when you see the aftermath of all these inicles and depleted uranium rounds, they leave a nice little melded. Looks like the Terminator. When the Terminator shot in the head, you see the bullet hole go through Arnold Schwarzenegger's head, and then you see the metal go back. It just kind of peels out.

It's like that. And you can see these cavernous things that are sitting inside of there to do that. But at the same time that you're down at the South, you don't know, Jacker. That's going on. You only find out with the luxury of history now, but you also knew by the time

it was about five, or six o'clock when you were able to get up to that northern bridge, you instantly were getting the feedback from the troops on the ground on what happened here and seeing, you know, their homes are gone. Some of them are their gear is still on those vehicles that are there. They only have the ammunition that's on their back. They don't know how they're going to survive. They got each other that's up there and they're in a battle position and they're defending and holding their perimeter. And then back in the city, we are now still trying to figure out what is going on with these vehicles. We find this individual, and we get him in the vehicle, and we have him taken back over to the back end of an Amtrak.

And when I say this individual Marine, this individual Marine was the largest Marine that was in that company. He was 240 plus pounds. He was about 6 foot 5. and overall with all of his gear weighed well over 300 some pounds. And, you know, I'm at the time pushing a buck 60. Doc is pushing even less than that, and we're in the back trying to dislodge a 300 plus pound individual that's in the back of this with all this equipment mixed in.

And I can see when he's bent in the L-shaped position, Jacko, his head is split from the base of his neck all the way to the top where you can see his entire cranium into his head. So what I did was we yelled for some more Marines. We kind of made a daisy chain. I held on to him as much as we could. The company first sergeant came in, got some more Marines. Doc held on to me.

We started cutting as much equipment as we could and started daisy chaining this big boy out of the back of that. Because you had to make a decision at the time, if I leave him here he's dead, if I move him, he's dead. In my head, that's what I'm thinking, because I see the trauma that he has on him. And I know the type of injuries in these places. We're talking about spinal injuries.

We're talking about head injuries. And you don't have the means with the rockets and everything else to stabilize spine boards and all this. So you had to make a decision. We're yanking him out. And the decision was made at that time. I'd much rather, if it was me, somebody yanked my ass out of here

to where I can get back to some medical treatment. And Doc and I, and the Marine, ran him across the intersection under fire, placed him into a back of another vehicle where Doc started to treat his head injury, and then I had ran back out in the street to tell him there's more. So I went back to the vehicle again. I still have to do the weapons, still have to do everything else inside the vehicle. And then I also hear that somebody had moved some casualties to a house right across the street. And some Marine machine gunners were yelling and they kept pointing. I think they're down that way. And I went to

into this house, Jago. I don't have a weapon on me that's here. I do have a nine mill that's on that, but long guns and out and the back. And I come into this house. And what I see in this house is I look to the left and the side of the room and I see three individuals. And one of them gets up and he's gray from head to toe and he has a communication helmet on his head. And he is burnt. The back of his leg is partially missing. Some other things there. He's got some burns and some trauma. And this kid was named Corporal Vasquez. And Corporal Vasquez, I knew was a crew chief in that other unit at that northern bridge. And I looked over against the wall and the other two crewmen that made it out of those hatches were leaning against the wall.

And they had their uniforms on. And remember, everybody's in mop conditions. So you're fighting in full mop floor. This isn't like going to gas chamber just to go to training one day and then you strip out all your gear. You're in mop for days and you're fighting in that charcoal suit on top of all this stuff in that 130 degree with no water anymore

for these hours. And they're sitting against that wall and I can still remember seeing the blood out of their eyes their ears. You could tell they were concussed and they were sitting there and Coppavazquez

comes up and I just told Vasquez, I'm going to get you out of here. And he said, I don't want to go anywhere, Gunning. He said, I can still fight. Now you're sitting here having the wounded, protect the wounded or anything else, and went outside the door, picked up, and they were on the ground that were here, came back in, racked around, and put Corporal Vasquez after I patched up his wounds, I put him in the doorway. And there are still Iraqi voices in the back of the house.

I figured there's probably five or six rooms in the house. They're in the back. But the Marines are right in the street on the outside of the room, and you have access to the back end of the house if I put you in this axis on this doorway. I'm going to go get some help. Racked around, put his arms, and said, I'm going to come to the right.

Don't shoot anybody coming from this direction. somebody coming from the left-hand side. This is an unsecure facility. You know what you have to do, a Marine. And he said, Roger, that. Went back out, grabbed some more Marines, some more weapons, come back in, got those three, moved them to the vehicle as well.

Now you're sitting here having to make the decision, you've got to get back on the radio to at least let your commander not assess the situation. And Captain Mike Brooks was a phenomenal infantry company commander on the ground with the boys. And he's watching this all happen. So he knows we have casualties. He knows that we have very serious ones.

He also knows that we have an M track. It ain't going anywhere that's got U.S. equipment and all this stuff in here. And he also knows something is going on at the Northern Bridge that allowed all this to happen down here. And this is what you're talking about, you know, as that commander, right? you're also been told you will hold that bridge and you are the guy on the ground hearing

all this happened now. I've got to get people out of here. I've got to find a way to get reinforcements up to here. I've got to find a way to help to survive. You know, in a firefighter, nobody cares who the President of the United States is they care about who's on their left and their right. They care about

the promises they made to people. I'm going to bring your son home or I'm going to do that as a commander. But they also know, I got a mission. My mission is a smaller part of a bigger picture that's here. And he did phenomenal. And we assessed the casualties and we knew damn well. We can't have any vehicles leave in this position. And who in the hell is going to fly a helicopter in here? It is an intersection where it's than Black Hawk down when you watch it. And just at that time I relayed the casualties and I heard to come over the net. We got an inbound bird. It's going to come. A CH-46 is going to come in the top. Kind of looked up in the air.

We need to get the casualty away from here to provide a more safer landing zone for that helicopter, which is about 150, 200 meters down a road. We start loading up the casualties. The other Marines that are there, some other Marines, and we start running them another 150 meters in an opposite direction to a clearing where we believe we can get helicopters. in. And then we're going to mark that clearing. And one of the problems was in the rapid pace of the movement of all this, one of the things that we never really did, Burst, was like an aerial

signal plan for medevacs. You know, you know nine lines, you know everything else, but what color smoke? Where are you going to throw it? What are you going to do? Green smoke to the grunts means different than green smoke to helicopter pilot. It's on there. That's what happens. The officer runs up and he says, do we have any color smoke grenades? We don't. So we have like these pyrotechnics. Give the pirate Texas, he fires a pyrotechnic. It bounces off the thing and it kind of just disappears and doesn't do anything. And it's one of those things where we're now all laughing, even in the middle of chaos, is like, come on, man, that's what we had to do. And he's sitting there with this rocket looking at me. And he goes,

and I just started laughing and he started yelling around and someone got a purple grenade purple small he pops this thing we see the helicopter start to come in one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen

that thing flares it comes in and it's in a slide about 75 meters above our head and he sees that smoke pop and he instantly stops his slide and then he sees smoke pot back in the middle of the intersection where we just took the casualties from and sees green smoke over there

and he slides back into that intersection and puts the helicopter down right next to the burning Amtrak and his thing and drops the ramp. Now it's on the ground. Crew Chief kind of walks out when we start making a run toward that because I had found out that the Marple Smokement don't land here. This is a dangerous thing and he saw that pot. And he said the green was over there, right?

The grunts didn't throw that green to mark that landing zone. They were throwing it to shift fires and do what they had to do. And he slid that and put that right down. This Marine Gunnery Sard walks out the back like John Wayne. I'll never remember it. I mean, like you could really tell he's got to know what's going on, but he doesn't really know what's going on. And he's kind of standing on the ramp surveying the kingdom that's here,

and we're all running to the back. casualties are in, and this is fitted with litter kits in the back of it. So it's called in for it. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't when it was above there. They were doing that. As they're hearing it, we have Marines and we have to get them out. So they're up there in the air and they're doing that. That thing flares down.

And the first Marines that we get on top of there, bless the gunnery sergeant's heart, he kept yelling. I need you to put them on the top rack because he needs to fill his bird his way. And I'm sitting here like we've been in the streets. We've got no juice. We've got nothing, man. You don't realize how dangerous this is. And I said, brother, there are RPGs here.

You need to take these Marines. And he said, RPGs. Are you shitting me? Just put them down. We'll take care of them. And we started running. And like I said, bless his heart. Now it's not the top rack.

Now let's get him to where we're at. he has situational awareness. And one of the most heartbreaking and proud things I've ever seen in my life, though, is when he took ownership of that and made a decision because he knew lives mattered. He's relaying it to the pilot that is up there. Without a gunner's belt, that, he's sergeant, Juska was the last Marine we laid on the ramp, the biggest one, the one with the cranium, with everything else.

That helicopter, he said, drop him. I got him. As soon as I got off the back of the helicopter, the helicopter lifted off. And the last thing that I had saw when I looked up was just as legs hanging out the back of the helicopter with blood dripping off of his boots. And that gunnery started holding him in the helicopter

with his own life that may have been pulled out the back of that helicopter or something because he said, I got him. And when somebody says, I got him, and that's another man, another Marine, and the conversation, you got him. That go back to the business that you need to do. And then somehow, at that time period, we find a second, Taco to get against the wall, myself, H.N. Velasquez, the corpsman, and another Marine that was here. And thank God, somebody threw us a canteen that had about a half full of water between all three of us, because I could feel, tunnel vision happened and when I sat down at that wall and the lights going out and I could only

imagine across the battle line that was everybody that that was happening to and we're still another hour and a half or whatever from that position still being maintained. Captain Brooks ran over to me the time and he said look I've got communications with the unit that's coming in behind us they're right on the other side of the bridge. They've reported they're at the bridge. So this is going to be a battle handover. He's saying, I need you to make sure that everybody gets a ride. He goes, we're going to push up to the northern bridge

and we're going to help those Marines. Roger that. Everybody gets a ride. That means it's Kelly's heroes. Lay on top of the cargo hatches. Safety is the wind. It doesn't matter. You hold on to the side.

You're getting out of here. But you got to make sure you have everybody. As we're doing this, the tanks show up. And when the tanks came back, you could just see the Marines like Santa Claus just showed up on Christmas Eve. And they started pulling into positions. They're starting to take fire, the perimeter, run over to a tank, jump on the tank again. And there was a second story window that I can remember that had red windows in it. And we were taking a lot of fire from there and just went over the back of the tank on the tank phone and said,

Second level windows, red windows, take the top of that building off, would you? My pleasure. Wham. One round through that, no more red windows, no more fire from that area. And then that's when it kind of started to die down because you could see the Iraqis probably thinking reinforcements. They're right over the bridge. They're coming. Now the tanks are here.

Now everybody gets a ride, including on those tanks. Now we just heard or saw what happened on Ambusch alley of those vehicles coming through there. We just saw the rockets coming off the tops and the rooftops of buildings. Jagger, we're now going to make a run for a mile and a half of that to get to that northern bridge and go through that gauntler. So once we got a thumbs up that everybody, every swing in American was there that was on that, just gave the order. Tanks stay in the front because they can swivel the turrets to the left. on the right side, an AV only has a turret on the starboard side so you can't shoot over the driver

station. So trim the AVs and the turrets to the right. AVs are going to cover the right-hand side of these buildings with their Mark 19 grenade launchers and their 50 cows, and then the tanks are going to swivel and cover the left-hand side, and we are just going to go 45 miles an hour up that thing and just lay lead the entire way so that no more RKG3s come off the buildings, something that, I mean, it almost reminds you like what you'd see in Stalingrad. I thought Molotov cocktails are coming next. This is what's going to come off into these hatches to do that. And we just took levels off of those. Kept those all down, got up to the northern bridge. And then we got the northern bridge, assessed that, bolstered the defense on that northern bridge.

We now held the southern bridge. We now held the northern bridge. We reassessed everything for about a day that was up there and then we figured we got to push on out to the western intersection because there's two bridges that are on that side over there and start basically having control of all the bridges on that city and then within the next 48 hours that's when the entire first marine division was stacked up on that southern bridge and the greatest thing is standing on those bridges watching what looked like the bridge or ramagan watching the american army just come through with vehicle after vehicle on the way to back like that, dad, and that feeling at the time of success of we did, but, you know, hold until

relieved. That's that age-old American. That's that, that's General McCullough telling people nuts. That's your generation of doing that and saying, you know, so I get a little testy. You know, when people try to claim that this generation is, you know, the millennials, and they will never hold up to their forefathers. Yeah, every generation has jackasses. that are out there they do. But every generation have the ones that matter too, that know when the chips are down,

they really rise up and they rise up the occasion. And we are lucky to be associated with a lot of people like that. All the way through those battles and that battle kicked off when you started to come in. And then, you know, unfortunately, we're still putting people in Arlington and that today. Still holding to that truth. The overall, I was, I think the numbers are you guys lost seven of your tracks in, is that right, in Nazaria? 18, 18 Marines killed? Eventually it was 19 that was on there. I put them all.

We have everything that's on here. I've carried that for over almost 29 years. That was given to me as a young troop. It was a map case. Leftover from Vietnam that was on that. And those are all the guys from Task Force Tarawa that were on that day. The rank that my wife pulled off when I got home off my collar that I was wearing in the street that day, which started black and it has no black left on it that was here.

That was the rank that she pulled off my collar when I survived the cemetery fight in the Jaff in 2004, First Battalion, Fourth Marines, and then that was the rank when I got home. she pulled off my collar when I brought first recombatian home out of the Yazidi Mountain Range and that up at the South Sanjar Mountain Range. So that's the Marines from 2003. That is Jessica Lynch's column of the soldiers that are memorialized on there that had given their lives that day. And then on the backside of there was the Marines from BLT-1-4 in the cemetery fight in 2004. What was the once you guys got relieved?

What was the next thing that you guys did? We had to pull out of that position and we went up to Al-Qut. We were basically going to stay out near Al-Mara in that sector that was over here. And we went up to Al-Cut to reinforce. It was out of Al-Cut. We pushed all the way out to the border in Al-A-Mara. We did a counter-offensive against the 51st mechanized division.

that was actually mounting a counteroffensive. But when we were actually in the city and we were still running, Jock, about the 26th that was in there, the supply trains had still not come through. This is three days. So the Marines that were missing their gear, what we had ours do is,

if you have two, you only need one, therefore give one to your brother. Throw it out behind the vehicle in ponchos. canteens, backpacks, whatever you can do to give the guys who just lost their gear and all those things something to live with. And then we're down to less than an eighth of a tank of fuel on each of these vehicles that are overlooking the Saddam Canal back into the city, and we're preparing for what we hear is a 2,000-man counter-offensive that is going to come by boats and by armored vehicles

that's coming out of the center of the city. In order to maintain the radios in the AV, you have to have the AV run to charge the radio systems that are on there. We're down to about an eighth of a tank, so you'd shut your vehicle off for a while. You'd only charge it up, run it for about 10 minutes to keep the radio fills, so it doesn't drop the fills in the radios. Then you shut them back down to conserve Nass. You're down to there's no MREs. There's nothing. You aren't drinking the water in the vehicles,

and this is what I love about armament, that people just don't know. Jago is, it's horse, gun, and man. You always take care of your ride first. You take care of your weapons first. You take care of yourself last. That doesn't matter if you're a ground pounder, you're a team need, it doesn't matter.

It's the same thing, just a different concept, apply it a different way. You don't drink the horse's water, because the horse needs the water to still survive. So the water as the vehicles are overheating in all of this, you can't drink the vehicle water out of the five gallon water cans because you gotta cool the radiators down

to keep the vehicles going. So you kind of start sharing what looks like, I don't know, like a shaving cream, like a shaving cream lid full of water just to get a little bit of water and continue to do that. split down one MRE between seven individuals, start hacking that thing apart to whatever to stretch that out. And then you're sitting in there on watch and you're not on 50%.

It's 100% because this is a counteroffensive. We heard they're coming. And the most glorious thing happened is one, they didn't come. The reason they didn't come is because the Marine artillery put 900 rounds, I believe, into that city that night in this. parking garage area or that they were supposedly massing and did just a battery for effect that was in that that completely crushed that counteroffensive in the middle of that city. Because it would have been a hell of a fight if 2,000 of them started swimming into that battle position after the Marines had been about three days down on food, water.

You're still on ammunition. You know, you only have the ammo that's still left that you brought across with you the first time. So I learned tricks of the trade along the way, Jagger, to help people like that. You know, that's why, you know, history is important. Like you said, looking at citations on buildings and learning about and saying, I want to meet that person. I don't know why I want to meet that person, but something tells me I want to meet that person. I grew up with stories of Hill 488 and Howard's Hill,

and Jimmy Howard in 1966 takes a Marine Recon Patrol of, 19 pool above the Kaysan operating base and in search for three days. And within hours, Howard is completely wounded. He has to crawl from position to position because he can't use his legs with a radio to continue to repel an NVA regiment that is heading towards that firebase. And he stays on top of that hill for days. And as a running low on ammunition, Jimmy Howard tells his boys, throw rocks at the enemy. one you're like that's the mindset that's the killer instinct the mindset we were talking about you know what

it's also the resilience because he told them when they're like throw rocks are you crazy he said the enemy at night will think it's a hand grenade and they would jump out of the way and you can kill them with a single shot rat to conserve your ammunition genius and he said they were making single shot kills all along the perimeter every night holding that perimeter And then when 27th Marines came in three days later, Howard refused to be medevaced off of that hill. They were calling danger close within 50 meters on that hill, everything. And they repulsed that entire mission, 18 recon Marines, and pushed them back. Howard only said he would get on the helicopter when the last one of his Marines was found.

And they found him dead in death struggle with two. two NVA soldiers who were trying to drag him off the top of that hill. And the infantry marines refused to leave until they got along with Howard's boys, and they put him on the helicopter with Howard. One Medal of Honor, four Navy crosses, 13 silver stars, and everybody on that hill was multiply wounded to do that and held their mission. Food, water, rations, all depleted.

I knew things like that, and I grew up on things like that. And I had a knowledge of on my time and on my generation on my watch. Their generation could do that. This generation can hold that line to do that too. And in those times when those individual young kids are scared and they do that, to show them the resilience of people who wore their uniform or held their positions before and then to say you have a legacy, this is what Americans do.

And you'll do that for that. It gives you amplified fighting power. It's almost like on a video game when you see your life force start decreasing. Now you know you don't have food, you don't have water. Well, let's not start thinking about the things we don't have, and let's start focusing on the positive things we do have. And then that just, the food, the water, and that goes down this way. But your pride, discipline, and everything else starts counterweighting that

to where you still feel like regardless, come on, man. It doesn't matter. Whatever you got, bring it. At what point did you guys leave Nazaria? It was for good. We actually came back down that way. But for good, not long after the teams came in and was able to secure Jessica Lynch out of the hospital, which is roughly, I think, March 30th first time frame is when we had done and accomplished all of that,

everything out at the other bridges as well, and then started to have to pull out of there on the way to out on the way to out could. How much longer did your did this deployment last for you guys? Not long. We were in country until about the middle of May that was on there and it was kind of like first in this time it wasn't last out. It was kind of like first end and you guys got chewed up and held your line. So let's get you on back down south. We had to the vehicles were so shot up jaco we couldn't swim them back aboard the ship. So we had to load all the vehicles. vehicles into black bottom civilian shipping and drive them in. So we made a trip all the way back on the USS Saipan, I believe it was.

I may be wrong about that. It was an LHA, but we didn't have our equipment. We didn't have our machinery. So the rigorous training regime that we had on the way over on ship was not so rigorous on the way back. You know, a lot of card plan, a lot of award writing, a lot of things that you could be able to do that you did. So, and then we went back through Rota, and we came back in and offloaded all that equipment. We were kind of back home by the middle of May. It was on it,

not middle of May, but June, June time frame. What was the, you know, adjusting, I mean, you're coming back, losing so many guys. What was the, how did you handle that with the families when you guys got home? What did that, what did that look like? Well, I'll tell you, the, you've seen we were soldiers once and young. It was here and when Halmore's wife asked to deliver telegrams and she takes ownership saying, you know, give those to me and I'll walk around and I'll do that. Casualty assistance in 2003 had not became what it is now. It wasn't, you know, chaplain doing this, kind of the way that Caco calls are made now. My wife didn't hear from me because I had a rule in the platoon,

and I go that the leadership were the last ones to get the Eridium phone to call anybody. Every single person gets to call first. Once the last person is called, bring me the Eridium phone we call. They handed around. On March 17th, we're pulling out. And at about one in the morning, that night,

my staff started knocks on the hatch. He says, I need you to come out here, Gunny. And I stepped outside the entire platoon was standing there. And he says, they want you to make your phone call. They've all managed to make their phone call home. So I dialed the phone and I talked to myself on the answer machine at the house because my wife wasn't home.

They were at Walmart or something like that. She said that they ran into the house right as I was cutting off in the thing. And then she did not hear from me until April 23rd the first time. And I had went through a battle position about 60 miles south of where Nazarea was at. We heard that there were AVs, another AV unit and they had parts that they could do and I needed hydraulic parts. and a lot of other things. Went down there, and when I got in the compound, one of my best friends was in charge of that unit.

And it had like a Mars phone, it had everything else that was here, and I'm like, oh, my God. And there was 150 people online that was out. There was no internet. There's nothing what we have now, right? And he just got me out of the thing. And he just looked, and he said,

I'm so glad to hear. I heard about what you're doing up there. He said, you look like shit, man. I said, well, nice to see you too. I love those kind of conversations. And then he just grabbed me and he said, you're not standing in here, go the front line. Call your wife.

Right up the front, not a single one. There's 150 people. Said, why is that? I mean, I was still singed from head to toe. They could see the difference that was here. Walked in, called her, and I got to talk to her and say I was kind of okay. But, Jaco, my wife and daughter found out where I was at,

just like people did in the eye drain. Valley in 1965 in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They did not know we were at. We were mission secret in River City the whole entire time. We took our vehicles and put them on the ship. And before we did that, we did the combat lane markings on the sides of the vehicles, and we knew that. And then we kind of had a family day where the families could come down to say goodbye. My daughter would always come down and play around the vehicles. They are sitting at home on March 23rd, and they see the news come on. And it shows burning Amtraks in Nazaria.

And the ticker across the bottom says United States Marines taking heavy casualties in Nazaria, Iraq. And the vehicles that they saw, my daughter yelled for mom to come into the house. And she said, I know where dad's at. And she goes, there's her dad's vehicle markings that are on the side of that, on that news flipping that was there. And then I asked her, I said, what was it like after that? And not knowing the rest of the night, she goes, nobody answered the phone for weeks. Nobody went outside their house. You didn't want to have anybody come to your house.

You didn't want to know. She said, because you would hear that, you know, seven or eight houses down the road, so-and-so's husband was just notified that they're not coming home. And then over in the next housing area, so-and-so's, it was not going to come home. And then they don't know if you're coming home. this is a whole month later and they know every single day you know it's like America

watching the Vietnam War eating dinner every night I know my son's in there I know my husband's in there and I know am I going to see them again and then you don't hear from about a month later I can only imagine so the hardest thing I've ever had to do in life I go never compares

to the mental anguish of somebody sitting there not knowing whether or not the person that they love is going to come back home or not, which I believe had a very huge driving force jocco into my second career on what I did when I hung that uniform up. And then you guys get home. Are you now, did you just roll right into another workup? What I did is we start patching everything up and rest and refit. I get orders. I get promoted. It's out of that. Now I become a first sergeant in the Marines. and I was sent out to the West Coast.

And I was waiting around on an Amtrak unit for a while when I got the call. And they said, congratulations, you're now our first sardin. And the difference in the Marine Corps in the first sardin, that now opens up the opportunities for you to go anywhere. It's a leadership role. So now you can go to the infantry, you can go the airwain, you can go anywhere else. And I wanted to stay in ground combat the entire time. So I requested to go to the infantry.

And I said there was a battalion working up for deployment right now, First Battalion, Fourth Marines. There are about 20 miles north of where this is at. And before my Sergeant Major could tell me whether or not I had orders, I kind of war-gamed it and said I already called that Sergeant Major to see if he had a slot, and they have a slot open. Can I pack my stuff? Made a few phone calls, packed my stuff, went up with First Battalion, Fourth Marines,

and then started kind of the infantry career that then blossomed into a reconnaissance career at a much older age out of that. And I kind of got that perverse wish, you know, other than being a drone instructor and other than spending a couple years in school, being my own Amtrak instructor that was on there, I spent an entire 31 year in U.S. Marine Corps in ground combat from private all the way up to Sergeant Major. I would not have changed a single day of that. It doesn't matter if you crawl out of bed backwards. It doesn't matter if you have to have your wife help put your boots on certain days because of certain pain. I've never changed any of that pain in age to change any of that career path along that line. So that's how I ended up back in California, packed them up, brought them back out there,

went with First Battalion, Fourth Marines, and we were supposed to do a regular float that was out there, and our Mew got set right into take a battle space. And that was a six-month float that turned into, I think, 14 months. You guys went. You guys went. We just kept getting extended. So we started on ship and we were just supposed to do.

Like a normal Westpac? Yeah, like just a normal, like we're seeing out here right now with the 15th, the 11th, the 13th thing you do. One month out of there, you're going straight into Iraq. You're going straight into the Anbar province. You guys are going in to take Najaf in this battle space from the U.S. Army. And I remember the first of the, Alpha Company, first of the 14th, the 25th infantry, the tropical lightning. was in there in that battle space and they had moved down. They were up around to Crit and they kept moving them down and that.

And they moved them in there and we moved in to take the battle space. And once you hold battle space, you don't hold, you don't leave until it's secure. And that six-month deployment turned into like 11 months, 12 months, 13 months. So in my, I was on deployment in 2003, 2004, probably the last minute, that we did the last significant mission that we did was we went down to Najaf and we captured Sodder's top lieutenant and that that really caused some well it's it sent things out of control and we you know we were executing the mission you know it was one of we'd been looking at solder the whole time there was there was a

lot of hesitation to go and get solder worried about what would happen and so I think it was an attitude of, hey, you know, we don't know if maybe it's the best call to go get solder. Let's see what happens if we grab one of his boys and giddy up. That's what we did. That was in early April. We went and did it. Mayhem broke out and, you know, Sodder City who turned into total chaos. Najaf erupted.

And like a, you know, I feel. feel awful. Look, we went home, you know, so that was it for that deployment for me, and this ends up, and just, you know, the way things connect, it ends up for you, you're in Najaf, and you guys end up going through that city and some, you know, some tough fighting. Yeah, actually, when you go in the city and you're doing, you're working with the ING, the 405th, 4004th, the Iraqi National Guard, and you're sent there to train them up and you're doing that. And then you're actually figuring out every day that we give you a bunch of weapons tomorrow when we do the weapons count, where's all your weapons at? It doesn't take

a genius to figure out right now while you're training a battalion that has an attrition rate or a desertion rate the following day after they're trained. And then you continue to do that is the point of like lunacy. I think it's the definition of doing that. So then you don't start doing that. You start building them as much as you can into these resilient things. You back up the police. stations, but more importantly, when we took over the battle space from the Army, it wasn't that the Army didn't have the fighter, the equipment that do that the rules of engagement for them were when we would do the left seat, right seat rides, they would tell you exactly where everybody's at. Here's where Sider's house is. You don't want to go by here. Here's Kufa. This is

a little flare-up. If you want to know we're all hiding, they're in the cemetery over there, and then you look on the maps on the wall, and those are called exclusion zones. You are not allowed to go inside. Those are holy cities. Those are holy things like this. And I can remember Colonel John Mayer, who was just sitting there at the table one day, and he's like, well, don't take a genius to figure out where they're at. Where all the reds at? And then the Army left when they left.

We developed kind of a battle plan to encroach upon those areas with tactical, probes to make sure to draw them out because the police stations and other plays that we were reinforcing were real close to this around there, real close to Kufa, real close to Saiders areas. One, you're putting them in check on the chessboard to do that while you're still maneuvering your elements. And then August 5th was a typical day. We were up late that night the night before, and August they start doing a run on an Iraqi police station that's right across the street from Revolutionary Square. And my people happen to be in the city, in these platoons, in these reinforced police stations. And then before you knew it, the call came over.

Again, Black Hawk down. We've got a UH1 that's crashed in Revolutionary Square. Now need to move in to do the crash site. And it's just you're sitting there going, you're watching the dominoes fall again. Now they're overrunning a police station. They're taking more aggressive actions, and then finally, the most blessed thing outside of just sitting there getting mortared for no reason whatsoever going, is this going to be somewhere the same? Get on the phone, and the commander and everybody else is. The only exclusion zone now is the mosque that's in the center of that. Prepare the forces, we're moving in to the cemetery, and we're going to prosecute these things. Jockle, again, it's 1,600 in the afternoon.

temperature on the ground is 130, you're away from the fob 14 miles with all whatever you have and now you just got an order the order is we want you to push 1400 meters through that cemetery by tomorrow morning because I have a rifle company of 162 Marines

that are here and I don't have any machine guns because they're out at the fob on FOB security because nobody thought that this battle was going to kick off so they're up on post post two, post three. The recon platoons not being used.

They're just over in their tents that are here, and we're in the city. And we start pushing in on August 5th, within a matter of 100 yards, of mausoleums, crips, no roads, anything else like this. And the road, the only road was the one that was at your back that you just crossed to get in there.

So that's your supply line. If you lose this, we're going to lose something. and all of a sudden you start getting people getting shot from behind that are moving through this because 1,400 meters, you can't move that fast. Matt Morrissey, Craig Hunter looked at me. What do you think of this? We pushed as far as we could that night and then through the center of this gigantic cemetery is this thing called the diagonal road.

And back in the 80s or 90s, Saddam Hussein thought it'd be. cool to take a bulldozer and plow through some of these graves of like people he didn't care for too much and make this road through there as a big FU to them I'm in charge. We got our backs to that road and made a tactical decision this is where we're going to hold the line tonight because now I can bring tanks into that road. Now we've just leapt 50 yards onto the field. We don't need this one. And now we can actually start bringing the more reinforcements and load them up onto here. So we're sitting on that diagonal road in these crypts all night fighting this, this operations from you couldn't know where you were at, you're getting mortared, they're dropping

on with 82s, they're walking them on top, and then you're just kind of sitting there, and then you're going in and out and throwing frag grenades down into the crypts as you're passing them, and then at times, kind of like a tunnel rat in the nom, you're also following this stuff because those catacombs started connecting underneath that cemetery with these individuals. So you're stripping off things, you're stripping off armor, smaller guys. You're racking a pistol, you're doing a round, you're launching a grenade, you're following that. You know, you got people coming up to the chest, whatever you have to do, and then you're leapfrogging all the way through the cemetery to get to that and hold that line.

And then that night, we really didn't know what the situation was. And we had an adjacent platoon get mortar drop right on their CP. So I ran down through the cemetery, Lieutenant Lewis, a few other ones, blinded that's on there. There was some other ones that were killed in the blast. And this is at night, and then all of a sudden we're trying to figure out, I wonder where we're at. So somebody came up with a great idea, which I believe was the forward air control, or we're going to get a pilot to buzz the cemetery. they will never lay off of a target like that.

So when that pilot comes through, they're firing red tracers out of those weapons. When that moment came down about 200 meters, blazing whatever 100 knots that was on that, it looked like something out of Star Wars coming up there. Red tracers were everywhere, back front, front, and it was kind of like that comment

that Chesdy Puller made, and it was like, well, good. We know where they're at, you know, they have us surrounded, and now we can fight in any direction. You kind of know where you're at. And then we were in that position on the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, fighting through that position. The next day I lost Lance Corporal Wells from a sniper right through his collar

that was on there. So I believe it was a dragging off from what I could see because the collar is only made for fragmentation, as you know, not to stop a direct round that was coming through. But we had to carry that out and get him out of the cemetery. then we get pulled back out, rest and refit, this kind of fight continue to happen, the probing continued to happen, the nighttime patrols back down into the cemetery, now other reinforcements from other units from DeWanilla and all that are all collapsing onto what is kind of now the pre-Felousia, because the same one started to move up north in November to take care of that. And this goes on, and then that leads us to our very weird connection that you just mentioned. Soder before of being on August 10th and getting a mission with an Army Delta unit to go in to

take Sotter's house in one area and then the Sotter school was in another section and Mass Sardin and force went into the school and the hopped up insurgents were at the second row of the school and they started rolling Egyptian grenades down the ladder wells at the troops coming up and fragged the troops that were coming in. We get the call that we now have wounded Marines inside of the solder school into this middle. And we pull into position, a platoon sergeant, a Todd Boydston, one of the best infantry staff sergeants

I've ever seen, is standing there on this intersection of this corner. And there's this long access of this wall, and this building is inside of here. There's another access that's here. and these Marines are bleeding out inside of here that just was hit with the Egyptian grenades rolling down the ladder well.

Rolled in, got the assessment of what that situation was, and we didn't know, you know, you don't know what you're going to see on the inside. It's about 100 meters away down there. And so I just told Todd at the time, okay, here's what we're going to do. Put the machine gunners on the corners of this direction. The road's about maybe eight feet wide

from wall to wall. We know where they're at. It's down there. I'm going to run down the axis and hug the wall on this side because what kept them from doing that, Jacker, was in the building, overlooking that road was a sniper that kept the Marines from being able to evacuate the wounded out of the house. Another coordinated effort to trap them inside the lower aspects. So kind of on my mark, I'm going to run, hug the wall that's here,

and I'm going to get in, and hopefully the guy's going to shoot and miss. The machine gunners are going to see where that came from, and they're going to kill that sniper or fix that position in the building, long enough to keep his head down to get in, triage, assess, and then tell him on the video on the PRR, we're going to throw a hand grenade because our hand grenades sound differently than theirs do. Big, large, womp, the thump. We're going to throw a hand grenade.

When you hear the hand grenade go off, I'd have the machine gunner, shift to the left wall and continue to still lay lead into that building, we are going to bring the casualties hugging the right wall about eight feet away from them of where they're at and get these guys out of the building. That action on hoping probably from flash to bang within a 12-minute period, in and out of not pre-coordination before. First sergeants aren't supposed to be door breaches or something that actually does that, But at the time, you just kind of think, I'm really kind of the most expendable person here.

You have a job, you have a job, you have a job, you have a job, you're doing your job. I just rolled up into here. I bring you food, water, chow, ammunition, and everything else. And primarily, the job is to get them boys out of life. So you just want to do. Work like a champ. One of the things picked it up and showed me a few years ago. I had no idea that the company clerk had filmed the entire thing from the hood of the Humvee that was on that.

and a blogger that was out there named Funker. One of the 40 picked that up and posted that that was online a few years ago. And it's time of the year again. It's kind of one of those things. It's really hard to watch, but you're happy that everybody, we didn't lose anybody on that. The Marines did on that one. The Army did.

The Army Special Forces team lost their Master's Sergeant when they went in, and they took it meaning going into that and came out. Yeah, that's actually posted on YouTube, that whole snobes. scenario. And you said he filmed everything. He filled almost everything because at one point, he must have been getting some stray rounds because he drops the camera and takes cover for a second before he gets back up to get the rest of it. Yeah, he's a, he's a funny cat. He's a really good, every marina rifleman, every marina rifleman. I mean, he was an infantryman. It was a company clerk, but by God, when the round hit over his head or whatever, I've had a good look at that

one time and had a good laugh like you did of the camera drops for a while. He knows. He needs to pick it back up and stabilize that. You know, you also told me a little bit about when you guys were clearing some of those underground spots and you had, I think you said it was a Lance Corporal rolling into one of these situations, ends up in a hand-to-hand combat with an insurgent. What happened there? This is on August 25th. We're now getting the, we're now preparing for the assault on and around the Amomali Shrine.

there's an NFA of 400 meters. It's around the shrine, but we're now going to push with infantry and Amtraks and make this big push and kind of drive them into the shrine and contain them that was in there. And then every night, bring in the spooky gun ship to circle that and contain them even more. Beautiful.

It was. It was beautiful. So on August 25th at roughly about 2230 at night, we inserted a infantry, a couple of infantry companies. in 1st Battalion 4th Marines. Charlie was mine. Alpha and Bravo were the other two. Bravo wasn't on the initial insert,

but Alpha was off to our left. And we go to the top, and we are tasked with inserting the infantry into this place. It's like a three-story hotel. And it looks like something you would have seen in Beirut, blasted and everything else in there. So it's the critical position

that holds an intersection that allows us, observation down these long axes to get access to the Amomali Shrine. 2230, my second platoon enters the first layer of the building. PFC Ryan Cullen Ward is one of the first men in the stack. He goes in the longer half and he sees an opening on the right-hand side when he goes in and now he's under night vision. He's fully loaded out and he looks to the right and he sees even in night vision and in Insurgent coming out of the basement of the hotel with an RPG on his shoulder walking up the stairs

Cullen Ward holding a grenade that's fracked already getting ready to prep and throw that was here That instantaneous thing kicks over so wait so he was going into the room and he was ready to huck a grenade But he wasn't ready to do it that way he was so yeah but he had the grenade in his hand Pin already pulled and he's ready to go because they're gonna frag the room that's around the thing Somehow, he gets that off in a way, has a situational awareness to still bring it in the direction they're supposed to go. And he rolls right, starts down that stairs, makes it about three steps, slings his rifle behind him, jumps off the top step, tackles the insurgent with the RPG, rolls down another flight of steps into that basement, and then all you could hear is that insurgent screaming when coming. Ward was taking a bayonet to him in moral combat in a dark basement while he's got

MBGs on his head, 19 years old, kills the insurgent, brings the RPG back upstairs, and then goes on to continue to clear the building with the rest of the squad. We were in the building from the 25th to the 28th by the time that the recon platoon that came in after us, a very good friend of mine, retired master gunry sergeant Brian Yarlum, brought this platoon to in, they came in and then went down in and cleared the rest of the basement. Not only was that one dead insurgent down there, there was another insurgent that wasn't there with Cullen Ward because he was cowering behind a ladder well watching his buddy get killed by a U.S. Moraine, and then he got taken out by the recon platoon that came in on the backside. Surgicly did that because Cullen Ward's

platoon is now going up the ladder well to chase the other insurgents up to the third level and they're pinning them up there or squad automatic weapons and everything else did their job. And they cleared that entire so element. And it's the same time you're on the radio right outside I go. And you're hearing we just took a casualty. You're hearing we just lost Cullen Ward because he just went that way, right? And you hear the screaming and that's going on here. And then you're hearing another Marine just fell down the elevator shaft that was here. And it's an old burned out elevator shaft that still got rebar sticking out of it. And Lance Cole Washburn was stuck down there on that rebar.

He's on nods as well. I mean, you're looking down a dark elevator shaft. God, I thought within two seconds, I just lost the first two Marines that just went into the building. Both of them survived. We're out of there. We got him, Washburn out of the elevator shaft. Cullin Ward went on to do some more great things in the fight all the way through the 28th.

And then roughly about the 28th is when Al Saunders. came in and brokered the supposed peace deal that called for the ceasefire. And then that day was surreal. Because then we had this, in a matter of two hours, we had to then watch everybody take their rockets and donkey carts and move them across the street. And you can't shoot anybody. Here's what this is.

So you set up these roadblocks and these things. And you're just watching them move their weapons. from one side of the city to the other, and you still know this is something that's going to have to do something about this. But then we had people who were actually detainees, and they showed up with news media. And in the regular Iraqi tone that you would always hear

when you had some women to the mix and they start screaming and pointing and everything else, the news media starts saying, you know, there's the murderers, There's the people who desecrated our bodies. And what are you talking about? So they'd come over, and what I didn't tell you before, Jocka, was the dead bodies that were in the building, never left the building.

Because for the next couple of days, Marines couldn't get out of the building because of the snipers. They kept them in the building. So it was very dangerous to expose your head or anything else to do that, and we'd maneuver through these channels out there. and it was making the Marine sick. These bodies were just decomposing, two of went in the basement, a couple of them upstairs and all that that was here. And it got to the point where I walked past a battle position one day

and saw a Marine with a green skivvy shirt around his face wet, and it had probably 500 flies on his face on that thing from those bodies. And I had called over to, again, Colonel John Mayer back at the, I had requested like 20 gallons of gasoline. And he asked me, what are you doing with the gasoline? And I'll burn them. I can't burn them anywhere. And thank God, he goes,

whatever you do, man, don't burn them. Right? Because he probably had more of a top-level view of maybe what that would have looked like if it was here. I don't know. But I still have the problem. You're not going to give the gas. Problem still exists.

What do we need to do? grab blankets, shove Vaseline up in his noses, put everything else, the corpsmen start doing that, and then we taco these dead bodies into these things, put the machine gunners and people on the roof to pin the snipers down, and run those dead Iraqi bodies across the street and put them in a house, John. When I put them in a house, so this is another thing that I don't really like to tolerate about all these people that they try to paint U.S. troops as they're just barbarians. put them in the house, pulling them in the humphous, and actually when they put them down inside the house,

I said, face their heads towards Mecca. They were fighters. They were, you know, people call them shitheads, or they were hopped up, they were in Serger or whatever. I have a little bit of a respect of another human being. I may not believe in what you're doing, but he picked up a rifle. He did whatever he was going to do for whatever that guy believed in

and was trying to kill me. And on the field of battle, we just got one up on them that was here. So put them inside of there, turn them, cover them with this pile of rocks that was there because the wild dogs start to go through there. And then over the next 24 hours, that's all you heard all night, was the wild dogs beating their head to get into that building to start tearing at the bodies. Then the next morning, these same Lance Corporals that you're seeing that made you start that

in the first place, you're seeing them just go like, would you look at that? And you see a dog roll down the street like with a foot hanging out of its mouth like it's nobody's business, right? And then this news media is here. And all of a sudden these dogs have torn at those bodies. Now the story is the Marines mutilated the bodies. They allowed the dogs to desecrate them, bye, bye, bye, rolled up and told them, through the interpreter, you look at the way their heads are facing. those individuals are dropped there out of respect at their own lives these individuals took them across and put them in the chattering stopped you know i go it just stopped the instant we knew and then we went about one of them started pointing about a hundred yards away interpreter comes up what's he saying he said we're missing a body he's over there i'm like how does he know he's over there probably because he was with him when that guy was killed walked behind him

another rock pile 100 meters away, dead and surgeon, laying right over there, because he was probably spotting or something with him. These kids were 17, 18 that was on that, popped them in the ambulance, pulled them off down the street, you know, international incident circumvented by kind of not desecrating or not doing what you're, you know, a lot of people may not even blame you. Got an animosity, you're amped up, you're doing this, but you trained them differently to say that, you know, these kind of things in the past only actually emboldened the culture when you do that

to somebody to fight them even harder. Imagine somebody coming in and mutilating your mother or doing something after that and you believe that that's going to suppress you in an amount of hatred to not want to go and do whatever you can to do that. So all those little steps along the way of 162 guys of a rifle company,

you know, you watch a band of brothers and then you're sitting here going, man, in 2004, I wasn't part of the five-oes parachute infantry, but I had the best damn Americans and Americans were seen since that time frame in this city. Once that peace deal, I don't know what else to call it, a ceasefire deal was brokered,

what was the rest of that deployment like? It was now just going through the city and doing reparations payments through the city and we would set up things on a Monday that was probably even more dangerous than combat because they you'd bring them to the same place, same day, same time they would line up, you'd be driving through the city and you'd do talk and knocks on there. Are you claiming any damage that the Americans did on your house?

Or did you lose a son in combat? Did you do something like this? Then that's where you find out how they fabricate multiple death certificates and they're trying to get money from the Americans. And it was just, it was a lot of that. It was then a lot of going back into the town to then again say that, you know, we don't want to fight. Meaning if you, we'll give you a fight if you want it. But let's kind of get back to doing what it was that we were here to stabilize this and help you out.

And then this is the beginning, you know, of what turned out to be that led into you in Ramadi and the Sunni language and everything else. I mean, this is the infancy of the next two years, like you had said, Jago, I'll call it a peace deal or whatever, because more casualties and sustained combatant, a greater level happen immediately after that in the next two years all throughout that region. And it didn't stabilize it. It was there. And it's still not stable today. Yeah. You get home from that deployment and what's next? Is this when your recon career starts?

This is when I like to say that I got to serve in a reconnaissance unit. Being a Marine in a reconnaissance unit was one of the proudest Marines, not being a recon marained. Because just because you're in somebody's unit doesn't mean that you're the person that's the cat's butt that's inside of that. And I didn't go as a Lance Corporate to do selection assessment. I didn't go through the things that those guys had to do. I was a first sergeant that was happy to be in the infantry, but that master gunnery sergeant I told you about in that recon platoon that was just sitting out on a bob doing nothing,

along with my machine gunners, and that's how I found them, went out of that city when we were running casualties, and 14 miles away was the 11th Mew headquarters out of a place called Fob Duke. I rolled into Post 1 all the way to the CP, And when we sent the casualties over to get treated at the main BAS, I was there, I always taught the Marines, if you ever take a vehicle back to the rear, you do not bring it back to the front empty.

Ammunition, food, water, whatever you have. So the same guy that filmed the thing, Corporal Chris, that was in there, washes the blood out of the vehicles, he does the things. He goes over the KBR representatives, which were actually really great. there was no, hey, do you want 12 apples or anything else? The guy would unlock an entire ISO container and go, you take what you want. And then just sign off the whole ISO container or whatever, whatever they had to do. But it wasn't, you can't have this, that, fresh fruit.

Whatever you can do, get it back in there, it rolls up. I go over in the main CPE and I get called up there because somebody finds out, I just brought casualties back in here. We're going to go back into the city. and when we made that 14 thing with a shot-out windscreen, Chris, who is not a Humvee driver or a licensed Humphi driver, right? I told him, get in the vehicle and get ready to drive and had four flat tires on run flats.

And he spun that vehicle around on that diagonal road so I could load Lance Corporal Brooks with a sucking chest wound on August 6th into the back of that vehicle. Bypass the forward casualty collection point, because this kid's got a sucking chest wound, so I laid on Brooks in the back of the vehicle and told Chris to drive that vehicle like he stole it. Because he used to be this kid

that had one of these little souped-up Subaru's, and he'd go up to Los Angeles on his free time and maybe do some street racing and some things. So it's kind of knowing your Marines in their off time, how it benefits the skills that you can have. I know you can drive. Get in there. He calls off, and we get in there and drop the casualty.

I get called over. because I call my gunnery sard and it's on the fob that's left back with my weapons platoon and said, go over to this other unit, tell them I need the machine gunners, tell them they're going to need to put people up in those things to do this, and we're taking our machine gunners and we're going back in the city with these guys. I knew I'd be there about an hour. All that machine guns came out, loaded up, we're all rolling in the city. Before we rode out, I took him out, went back into the city, Jacko, had.

had to make another run that was back out. And somehow a lieutenant colonel that was up with the Mew headquarters had come in. And he had said, if that SOB gets back on here again, I want to see him before he goes out. Love him to death, Lieutenant Gron Johnson. I walked up in there, still covered one from head to toe. And he was carrying like an MP5 on his back. And he grabbed me, got real close. and he was like

First Sergeant LeHugh you get us over here and we're like 40, 50 people in a CP and he goes how do you reduce the strength of this fighting position

that's out here took those machine guns that was off here to do that and I was just standing and I'm like I need machine guns that are down

these are my boys they're on here I coordinated with this other unit to do that they're going to watch these posts they've been standing guard before They're over here to do that, right?

And he just kind of looked at me, kind of shook his head. He's an infantryman and was like, and then just gave me a really big hug and said, best of luck when you roll out of here down in that city, man. You do what you've got to do. We'll take this care of it. And then he yelled, topping the lawns.

If you ever do that again, I will make sure that you're not going to be in the Marines. Because he did, in the end, the right thing. is done in that chaotic situation that is there that's laid out before you. You don't have hours. You don't have things. It's reactionary. You're saving. You're losing lives to do that. Pretty beautiful thing. And then how did that lead to you getting attached to the recon unit? The guy that was the guy remembered you? The guy remembered me getting him out of the tent and saying,

I need a provisional rifle platoon to beef us up down there. And the recon officer and the gunnery sergeant came up and said, we'll do that job. Just get us in the fight. We rolled them out, made the request, recon mounts up. They end up being a provisional rifle platoon and a recon platoon attached to us. I'm their first sergeant. We get done with that entire thing that was there, Jock. I get back up.

We're done with the deployment. I get a phone call from first recont battalion. You ever thought about coming to RECON, Sear? Like, yeah, because that's what I wanted to do when I came in, but they also told me when I was a Lance Corporal. Because after you get in, even if you're an Amtrakker, you can try out. You go do that. But you couldn't if you were colorblind.

So I couldn't do that. So it's one of those things where you find a way. And it might not be this year, might be some year. That was the way. Said absolutely. Sergeant Major gave me a call. He said, show up down here. a pool deck about 315 in the morning.

Bring your PT shorts. Bring your things down here. Get in the pool, do some things, run a PFT that was over here. Do a little bit of an interview. Brought some people down in. And at the tail end of the thing, he said, how'd you like to be a first sergeant here at Recount Battalion? Said, I'd absolutely love that job.

And he goes, okay, consider it done. Go back up. I've already called your Sergeant Major up there before you even said yes. You're going to come back here. Went up to First Battalion, Fourth Marines. Same thing. Back my stuff. went down there and spent from the year of 2005 to 2010 as the first sergeant for Company A, mostly, that was there.

We stood up a company of Delta Company that was of Vietnam existence. This is when the force recon platoons that were MEP assets were then put back down into battalions, so they start showing up the tier. We're building a pretty good force. Then about 2007, I got asked to stay on to be the Sergeant Major of that unit. and was a sergeant major from 07 to 10. Up in the Sinjar Mountain Range, operating out of Al-Assad.

It was there. Control on the rat lines coming up with the Azidis. Had some really good mission sets that were out of there, about the eight and nine time frame. And then what did you do when you were done with that? Once I was done with that one, I went back to be the sergeant major for about a year at the Amtrak Schoolhouse.

I grew up in as a kid. that was there and then got a call asking me to pick a job because they wasn't going to leave you there and they presented me with a couple options and they asked me what i wanted i said i want to be a regimental infantry sergeant major and they said good to go pack your stuff you're going to go to hawaii to be the third marine regiment and i'm like you can be kidding me mad you have a fifth marines you got the southern because at the time this regiment didn't have this really good and people didn't know this history uh but i had asked for for it because go in my head that regiment with aviation assets, engineering assets, Amtrak

assets, most infantry regiments don't have those organic to their own thing. Then you have the 20, you have the air wing that's out there at K-Bay as well. That's your lift capacity. That's all that. You own Kanahoui Bay is the Marine Regiment along that. I figured, and now we're doing this repivit to the Pacific, and we're posturing on the keeping the Chinese at bay. We're negotiating to open up Australia as more training areas. I'm like, my God, you are where you're supposed to be. How'd you like to be in charge of like the biggest strike force in the middle of the Pacific that's out here?

I think that's a pretty good deal. One less infantry battalion than the rest, and they cover the most ground that's out there in the Pacific from northern China all the way to Darwin. And one of the best fighting regiments, it's stored. They're the China Marines. They had operations in China, fourth Marines, with the China Marines. But third Marines has quite a legacy.

And a legacy that goes back to Raphael Peralta, a legacy of these battalions going in out of Afghanistan and Iraq, because when larger battalions got longer dwell ratios, when you had one less battalion, in a regiment that usually has four that's in there plus what they have and you have three systematically they have to deploy more that goes out so now you're kind of in charge of a regiment that's got one of the highest deployment tempos and also like the highest divorce rate

in the entire United States Marine Corps because they live in paradise but they're never there you know the families are on that island but their loved ones are out training and to do all your training in Hawaii you have to leave Hawaii to do it so on dwell time like you had said before dwell in dwell dwell for some places in their backyard is dwell and other places when you can't train in your backyard you have to fly to california fly to the big island fly to do different things like that all your dwell time then turns into training time then so how long was that tour that was uh about two and a half years and where is that what is what did that bring you after that they brought me up to a two star coming

at Training and Education Command for the U.S. Marine Corps out of Quantico, Virginia. And that's where eventually we figured finished out of up there. That was, was that 30 years? That was it 30 years. At what point did you start getting involved in history flight? About 2000, 17 time frame. We got a package in the Marine Corps from, an honorary Marine. It was a guy named Mark Noah. And we'd started reading through this package.

And the general officer that I worked for was the guy that originally did the nomination when he was in charge of the second Marine Division. And he was now the TECOM commanding general. This comes in, and General Dunford is going to make this man an honorary Marine. He wants us to do the ceremony. So we go over at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Mark Noah and his family comes up. We host them for a couple of days. And then we do the honorary Marine ceremony. And at that time, the Marine Corps had bestowed that honor to less than 100 people in their lives. It was a pretty big deal.

I didn't know when he did. And I started reading this dossier. And it was an individual who was a pilot, still a pilot for UPS. And he used to run this aircraft thing at Flu B. 24s or a B-25, a couple of AT-6 Texans, some other things like air shows around the nation, with some other pilots. And they started lifting these veterans and hearing these veteran stories. And his father was in the military, and it goes on and on.

And he starts funding some of these search and recovery type things with some of the money that they're getting from that. And then the housing industry kind of crushes the airplane ride industry and things like this. When people can't pay their mortgages, they don't want to. to spend money to fly on an aircraft to do that. And so he kind of recocks and he starts doing some research and finds in his research comes across a thing that says that in the Pacific Island campaign in Tarawa, the Marines had had 541 people roughly killed and they were left on the island that were out there and a majority of them were never recovered.

And then as he starts researching more and more and more, he finds out this happened in other places and he can't believe what he's seeing. So he starts kind of making inquiries research and he starts doing this. And all the way through 9, 10, 11, 12, he starts making trips out to Tarawa on his own funding in his own time. And he goes out there and in the early years it was as it was as easy as people displaying macabre bones on their front porch at Tarawa and saying, And, you know, we told people 25 years ago that these people were here. They just never came and got them. And then she would say, like, but they're mine now because they've been here.

And you could tell that they were Caucasian by the bones, everything else that was on there. And he starts taking those first two, turn them over for identification. You start doing that. You start doing the investigating and getting more and more. By the time that I had went up with Mark Noah at that thing, he had repatriated. and located, I believe at the time, at least about 70 Marines that were lost and sailors. Also had recovered a bomber crew that in 1944 had taken off from the runway and kind of made it just over the lagoon and crashed into the lagoon.

And then had also done some work in Europe on some bomber P-47 sites, a few other things. And I found it really fascinating because this is something. thing all the way back since I was teaching history in the Marine Corps. And I told you before about what my wife had saw in 2003 in this feeling of this family, you kind of, you know you're done with this mission, but you know you have a calling to do another mission. And the door was kind of clear to me. And I even wrote on my transition paperwork in the Marine Corps. My wife laughs. Everybody else, you know, I don't know what I want to do. I'm going to do this. And it said, fly and be part of a search and recovery afterwards to try to locate missing men and bring

them back home their families didn't know how you're going to do that didn't know what you're going to do and then I picked up the phone after I transitioned out of the Marine Corps and just gave Mark a call and we had a nice conversation for about five minutes he goes there you out of the Marine Corps came up I said absolutely he said you'd like to come down I'd like to talk to you came down to Key West for a little bit of a meeting came back and we started this operation I've been doing for about two years. And it's a great relationship, a great group of individuals that are military, civilians, scientists, world-renowned archaeologists,

EOD experts, military medics, you name it, the repertoire to do that, that are just passionate Americans that are going and researching over 78,000 missing cases that are still left out there, trying to get at some closure to fulfill America's promise of we don't leave our dead and wounded. If we know what we're at, we're going to go and get you. We may not be able to get you at the time the fight is actually happening, but dead or alive, you're coming home.

It's a promise we all made it fighting. Everything you and I had just talked about in the past hours, and I go, my generation was very easy to go into a fight knowing that I was not going to be buried in some foreign dirt nation that was somewhere else. in the world because the person on your left and right was going to make sure that wasn't going to happen. Just like when we went out there in the middle of burning Amtrak in that street, it was not an option to leave those Marines to have their bodies drug through streets or to have anything else like that, not on my watch. And to find out the gravity of this is over all these years, that did happen in places. And the iteration of the United States going out and having this honorable mission to go do that,

It was like, I want to be a part of that. How can I fit into the paradigm of doing this? And that was about 2018, kicked off at that time period, and then just offered up Mark, hey, I'll do an assessment of the organization. And I just found out this passionate story of how many people, what they were giving up to go and do this. And I said, I'll give you an organizational assessment. And he kind of said, what's that going to cost me?

I said, nothing. Give me 30 days. I'm going to fly to all the fighting positions. I'm going to get to know the people that's here, everything. I'll come back and I kind of give you a little, here's what's working, here's what's not working. Here's a perspective that's not so close to the boat. You do this. Came back.

And he turned around and he said when I delivered that, and he said, yes, and I paid somebody almost 50,000 hours to do that one time. And you know what they told me at the end of the assessment? So what's that? Mark, he said, if Mark Noah ever wants to stop doing this, then this mission will be over. And he goes, I paid somebody money to do that. Came back, gave him a breakdown, organizational structure, how to couch things into situation reports that where people can do that because you're coming from the government.

So you're actually writing reports that other people that's in another organization can actually see and they kind of understand. And you're not so far off the course. And then it was just utterly amazing. I went to a funeral. and when I went to a funeral, the first funeral was for a funeral by a name of Tech Sergeant Carlson. And he just happened to be the Alpha Company platoon sergeant for first battalion, second Marines,

a landing force from second assault amphibian battalion that was second amphibian tractor battalion, which was my job on the 23rd of March of 2003. And that was the first individual that was identified when I was here. So it was an Amtraker. They got to attend the amtrakker of a guy who did his job on November 20th and lost his life on 1943, leading the first assault wave and the first LVTs that were ever used in offensive combat. And then to be able to be a guy in 2003 that was part of Task Force Tarawa that was named after those guys. My wife, I put her on the USS Tarawa to go to war.

And she just looked. And even before I met Mark Noah, my license plate on my car as early as 2010, I go sit, Tarawa, across the back of the plate, before I ever knew that this was what I was going to get into after I hung up this thing. It's just amazing that I don't think that's happenstance how that happens. No. Certainly not. Have you gone to Tarawa yet?

Absolutely. About five times now. Went to Europe last year. So last year in March, we recovered a lost row called the missing row D of Cemetery 33 that on TAR was called the Maine Marine Cemetery. Now, Tara was only about 800 meters wide by about a click and a half long. It's not a very thing on the island of Basio down there. Every ounce of that is habitated.

Now, there's huts, there's everything else built on top of these. And years ago, the cemeteries, the Marines did the best thing they could to bury and record the things. And then they had to then go to the next island to fight, load up on the next ship to fight, the thing like that. Turns it over, airfield expansion starts going, and then the cemeteries and that start moving around that island. And then roughly in 1946, America has this big thing in the American Grave. registration unit and they're sent around the world to try to recover as many lost people in 1946 as they can. And they get this mandate and they visit Tarawa.

They get some bones and they bring it back. They do that. But there was still 541 people they couldn't find. It was out there. And that's airfield expansion. Now it's encroachment of the islanders coming back and they're built on top. So you can see this mess just magnifies itself. And after so many years of looking for this row, in January of the past year, not this past year, but in 19, we had a weather storm go through and blew down a building in an area that we were looking to remove the building from.

And when it did, it opened up an excavation opportunity that didn't exist prior to do that. And that is where we had located Row D. and Rodee eventually turned into 33 United States Marines by the time of the end of that bulldozer row was recovered that we're missing. PFC, Athens, as I told you today, even in the tragic times it's happening out in the Pacific and that, the bright point that was here is I got a text from my people

right before I walked in to talk to here, and one more Marine out of that trance line was just identified and published by the DOD today from a defense POWMIA accounting. agency. So that's another promise fulfilled to an American family that we don't leave our dead and wounded by fine. We'll go and we'll do what it takes to do this. And so I go out as many times as we can. The archaeologists go out about six-week rotations. They come back for about four weeks. They go back out. It's in there. And systematically, we were hoping, for the next five

years, to process that entire island to the fullest extent possible, because there's still roughly approximately 400 that hasn't been identified. But Jocko, the whole organization has recovered over 337 sets of missing American remains. A hundred and thirty must have been positively identified. The other moans are in the possession of the DNA labs and that. So these are going to be more success stories each week, each month, of all the moons that are already in there. And then on top of that, you have operations in Europe. You have operations in the Philippines.

You've got the U.S. government in Vietnam. You've got everybody out there doing what they can. And then we as a private organization augment the skills that the U.S. government out there. 78,000 people, probably a lot of naval casualties, as you know. You probably got roughly 28,000 that are able to be accessed that are here. And if you're talking about a recovery rate of the government at about 200 of those a year on their own, they're going to be doing this for hundreds of years, and they're never going to be able to catch that. And these things, whether it's forestries, whether it's city development, whether it's anything else,

you have the loss is going to happen each year to where possibly some of these areas that you could have recovered a previous year are not accessible. year or two from now. So you're always racing against time, and especially with the World War II generation, you're really racing against their own time, meaning we have a young rifleman named Wendell Perkins that Zatar was a survivor and a veteran, and we had the great privilege a couple of months ago, and it was covered here on Memorial Day nationally, of locating Wendell's two best friends. at Wendell had to leave on that island. And he survived, and Wendell is living a happy and successful life up here, dealing with COVID like everybody else is.

Whereabouts is he? Wendell right now is in here in California, up in Northern California. And we're going to be able to hopefully do some live feeds for each of the services that are coming up as COVID restrictions lift so that Wendell can do. digitally attend the funerals for both of his best friends. Well, that's awesome. And obviously, if this COVID lifts and we get a chance, we'll fly up to where we're absolutely love to talk to Wendell.

I know you and I were talking about Dean Ladd and how awesome that was to sit there and talk to him. And I guess he didn't quite make it to Tarawa because Dean Ladd got gut shot on the way in. But, yeah, I mean, obviously, we'll do whatever we can to. to have the opportunity to talk to him and anybody else, you know, because these are, these are the, you know, you're out there trying to capture the, or trying to recover the physical,

but we can capture the stories, you know. Absolutely. That would be awesome. Now, is this, this is a charitable organization? It is. It is. Yes. Absolutely.

This is a 501C3 that just happens to have a contracted partnership limited for Tarawa with the government that is there. We prosecute other cases around the world, accepting donations. We accept different cases from people to do the research for those against what the knowledge is that's out there, help these families along. And then we actually look and take the historical documentation, lay it against kind of a cold case that is out there, take the time, take the resources that you have. And in certain cases, we will actually take on missions of family members or something that are,

You know, kind of they would like to donate and they want to make sure that the homie is going towards, you know, the Burma hump or they went over to certain things that are like that. But it helps augment. We have a burn rate. I go at $10,000 a day to try to locate these. That's just for one day for two teams to exist to try to find these American heroes on Tarawa. And that is just operations on Tarawa. If you expound that out to doing crash sites in Europe, looking for boys in the Casarine Pass for anything else on that, that just greatly increases the cost rates that are up there. And time, equipment, security of U.S. remains like we have in this COVID time period on Tarawa, and just going out and raising what you can to do what you said, you know,

how can you put a dollar value on a it's one of those things you look around and you're just like we made a promise to people years ago um i can only imagine what it was like to get a telegram the western union telling you on christmas eve that your son's not coming home uh which many of our veterans from taro where their families got that on december 23rd they just happened to show up at the house to do that merry christmas right or or the sullivan brothers or something like this that isn't here And that's a bad telegram to get. But the telegrams that really break my heart is roughly the telegrams that you can see in the National Archives from like 1949. And those are the telegrams that were sent to families that said, not only has your son been killed and he's not coming home, but we're no longer looking for them. I can only imagine being a mother sitting there reading four years later. after writing letter after letter after letter to hap Arnold or to whoever would listen can you give me some whereabouts of my boy can i have some fine where are they at and we have we have these telegrams you know that go to these service leaders like hap Arnold and they're very nice and it says thank you very much the life insurance was received and thank you for the pleasantries and all this

but the bottom line is where's my boy at? You haven't answered that. And then these families went for decades, never getting an answer on where their boy was at. So to be able to be a U.S. Marine, to go back to the island at Tarawa, to stand over top of a unit, and watch the excavation and the detailed thing

of the systematic processing of 120 centimeters down, roughly about the water line and then you see the skeletal remains start to come through and you see the boots on the individual that are still from the good year rubber company that are on there that they're still there and then you see the gun belt that's still there that says that that was a BAR gunner he was a rifle one and to hear my young archaeologist that are out there when you're saying I wonder if that guy was 27 or he's 29 or whatever they're telling you by looking and reading these bones.

This kid was 18 years old. The sutures on his head are not closed enough. Here's how you look at this. It's here. And you sit there and you watch them and they're like, you've never been in the military. What are you doing out here on the Iowa to Tarawa? And you found in all these travels,

you've got military, civilian, PhDs, hunters, Republicans, Democrats, blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, you say. It's this organization that, you know, in today's day and age with all this polarity can come together like this to perform this mission to fill the void of 76 years and provide closure and bring that back to reinforce that promise that dead are alive we're going to find you and we're going to come back and have a collective unit like that know those were units like I see the pride in your eyes when you're talking about the team and you see that feel and write about the same thing on this side they ain't wearing a

uniform in one nation, but the service that they chose to perform for the nation in a crappy fourth world infested little island in the middle that doesn't look like Tahiti or Fiji or anything else like that. My God, Matt, they are where they're supposed to be. Man, it's just awesome, awesome. I know we've been sitting here for quite a while. I want to wrap up, but before we wrap up, I just want to go through real quick. You sent like some bullet points to me just of of kind of some reflections of some principles that that guided you you know and and and still guide you and I just wanted to kind of just just go through them real quick here because when I read them each one of them you know as I sat sat there silently reading my email

I was just kind of sitting there nodding my head saying yep yep number one whatever it takes Number two, savage action and aggression in combat and in life. Number three, in total combat and warfare, you will get punched in the face. Number four, no excuses, don't have a victim mentality. Number five, never leave a fallen comrade behind both in and out of the military. Number six, moral and ethical leadership both in and out of combat. Number seven, take total responsibility. Number eight, always in the fight and never out of it.

Number nine, do what it takes to build the best team. Number 10, accept blame and shoulder burdens. Number 11, set your ego aside for the good of the collective. number 12 establish and reinforce a winning mentality on and off the battlefield number 13 be part of the solution not part of the problem number 14 leadership is about people and getting the best from them and from yourself number 15 be a man or woman of character number 16 live honorable and valorous life. And number 17, not for self, but for country.

Some things don't really even need further discussion. And that's what I liked about that list. As I read through it, like I said, I just nodded my head. Unbelievable guidance from your life, from your 30 years in the military, from your heroic actions and not just your own heroic actions, but for all the heroes that you saw around you. And to me, that's what this is about. You know, you set in this example,

you put in these words, and you continuing to live a life of service to go out there and bring home these heroes. I'll leave it to you for any other closing thoughts you might have right now. Yonko, I think it's been an honor and privilege, really a professional pleasure. to spend this time today with you and Echo discussing what may be common to some people just isn't common to everybody that is out there and your podcasts and the impact that those podcasts do have.

The amount of people from all different walks of life that kind of tune in to this platform and this voice that is out there in this time right now, especially in the trying time that we have now, it's these reinforcing principles that we're talking, you know, you and I and echoing out, we didn't make these up. You know, I didn't wake up and have some 17-part epiphany of doing that.

It's, you know, it's really rare to have a, you know, a unique thought these days. Because when you actually then, reach back into the context of history, you normally find somewhere along the line what you're actually saying has been either done or displayed or you can actually find a mentor or somebody out there that leads and acts the same way that you're talking. Then you kind of find out for people that's on the podcast that are, well, you know, I've never been in the military or Muslim. And you find out it wasn't the military, and a lot of times it taught these things that was here.

You find out when you look around at the goodness of your whole life, and if you look at the context of your lifeline, rather than the best years of your life was these years or these years, if you look at there all building blocks on the entire timeline of your life, you find out that that teacher that wasn't in the military that taught you this is what you learned here, that coach that was hard on you here, that taught you here. The mother that you thought was making dinner

was actually married to a soldier for 26 years. So even though that soldier's not here, I might have picked up some of the leadership things from your old man, so you might want to listen because maybe it looks like me doing it, but maybe I heard it from somewhere else. And you feel that responsibility from generations and that.

I've watched that, and I've listened to that through these podcasts, whether it's from kids and children, there's always something here because it really reinforces what we have been discussing about today. And it doesn't have to be this traumatic, fallorous or a grievous incident that's in your life that defines that's who your life is. No, you performed in those incidences because of the conglomeration of who you were in the Constitution that made it up at that period. And it allows you to overcome those instances, just like

overcoming COVID, just like overcoming a car crash, just like overcoming anything else in life. I believe this provides resiliency and tools for people. They may not identify with podcast number 176. They may not identify. They may not even identify ever with a whole podcast. But there's something that somebody can take out of each little one of those in a place. it to their own life, I believe in the context of overall, it builds a better person. So I thank you for the opportunity to be able to come here and do that. And it was my pleasure to be here. My pleasure for every single day to wear the uniform and the cloth of our nation.

We're a pleasure to be able to just have a conversation amongst two warriors today. I'm probably a little more aged or whatever that is on that. But it really is. And these are healthy. And you're providing a platform for people to do that. And also tell the story. The story of these American nutrients that have been lost for generations, the average person does not know that story, Jock.

The average person on the street out there still has no idea that we have 28,000 missing people. We have 78,000. We can probably get about 28,000. but they also sometimes come up to me going, I really appreciate what it is that you do, but I didn't serve in the military and it doesn't affect me or that. But within like a five-minute conversation

of anybody that tells you they didn't serve or they didn't have a connection to the military, you can take almost anybody in this country, whether you're an immigrant or a national or anything. And within a five-minute conversation, you can expose to them that somewhere in their family line, somebody had to fight. They had the same blood inside of there. Whether it's a restaurant in little Italy right here, whether it's coming over on the boat, it doesn't matter. They had to fight to get to that.

And then a lot of times, they just didn't know it. But a lot of those people had to do it in a uniform, too. And then all of a sudden, the light comes on. And then you find out they're like, well, yeah, I did have an uncle that was in Vietnam. Now did you think about it. And then the connecting file gets there. And when the conventing file gets there. And when the connecting file was there, pride, discipline, desire, motivation, it transcends that uniform. And you get that passion, and then it's never about the money. Never about the money. It is about fulfilling that promise. The same promise that we make those men and women today in that uniform swear to each other.

It allows people like you and I that don't wear the uniform in the cloth in the nation anymore. It allows me to sit back at night and say that if they still follow the code, they still build them the same way and put them on the conveyor belt to do that, they're going to spit out the best American fighting man and woman the world is still ever seen. And don't anybody ever forget that. It's not just guys jumping out of planes in 1944 or coming out of landing craft. Those things out there today are the most lethal things that you can put on the forget. battlefield. It's the United States. Somebody wants to test the borders or somebody wants to poke us or try to do that. You keep poking the bear. It's on there. You keep poking the bear. Just watch the eagle fly over, take a dump on your head. And when the eagle does that, boom. We bring a lot of things

behind that as well. Don't know what else more to say, John, because it hasn't been already said, except thank you. It's been my pleasure today. Well, you know, thank you for coming on. More important, Obviously, thanks for your service. Thanks for what you did for the country, for the Marine Corps. And like I said, thank you, thank you for continuing to serve by working to bring these heroes home. And truly living up to the words, Semper Fidelis. Thanks, Justin. Thank you.

And with that, Justin LeHugh has left the building. awesome honor to be able to talk to him and another reminder that we all have more work to do more work to do to continue to be better more work to do to live an honorable life to stay on the path echo charles what he got for us just stay on the path well we're going to so to know that we're on the path. That's a big one. Before, though, before I go into that, it's hearing like his story. Actually, a lot of these stories or whatever,

but this was for some reason, maybe because it was like so long and it made me like contemplate the whole time, where it's like a reminder for us who didn't go to war, you know, who's not in the military necessarily and we just kind of, you know, we're cruising here. And, you know, that thought

that's like, dang, all that was going on. Like, that's what I, you know, because you say the dates and you're like, oh, I remember what it was. was doing in 2003. I remember that. What I was doing. And you kind of flashed to, man, that's what he was doing at that time.

And you kind of make that little comparison. And it's, man, it's a big eye opener. Especially when you drill down to it, not, hey, that's what he was doing in August or in March. But when you say, oh, on that day, at that moment in time, he was going into a blown out AAV trying to recover bodies under fire. Like that's what he was doing at that moment.

Yeah. So yeah, it's definitely something. Definitely when you get even more specific with it. Yeah. And it's the broad one is the same way. You think, oh, oh, in 2003. What was Equator?

What was I doing in 2003? And I was here. I was hoping I would get to go over, you know, and he's in the battle of Nazaria. You know, it's so. And, and you know,

you need to take that, one step further and it's like right now there's people out holding the line and there's people prepping to do an operation there's people doing operations and you know it's not just military operations either but there's you know there's someone that just found out that you know they've their kid has cancer like there's all these things are happening right now and you know the big thing and we talked about it briefly is that an AV just apparently was lost off the coast of California here and I was very similar thought pattern, you know, this morning for me. I see that in the news and I mean, I've been out there right next to these AVs doing work with them.

I know that the weather's good. It's a sunny day. It's a beautiful day. This is Southern California and amongst all that. You know, it's a nightmare for those Marines and that unit and their families. And it's just, yeah, really makes you think about where. where you are and what you're doing and are you on the right path? Yeah, fully.

So, yes, so make the most of it, you know, kind of, kind of that old thing, make the most of it. Every once in a while, you know, like you'll get injured, like something that'll take you out. Like for, you know, like a month, like a month or more recovery time or whatever. So that for that month, you can't really do certain things, if not, like a lot. a lot of things. And then when you finally heal up and are able to do it, you have that like appreciation for just everyday stuff. It's like that's kind of like thinking about these things I found like kind of just

rejuvenates that appreciation. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. You know, also I don't think I mentioned this during the podcast, but for if you want to support the recovery. of these fallen heroes go to historyflight.com and then they also have an Instagram page which is at history

flight so you want to support some of these awesome efforts that are going on well that's how you do it so yes staying on the path for ourselves and the people around us because that's who it affects fully you know we want to keep ourselves in shape um and keep ourselves capable doing that we're working out we're trying to stay healthy. It's not a 100% thing. I dig it. You know, 80, 20, 90, 10 kind of situation, ideally, in my opinion. But anyway, on the way, you will need supplementation. So, Jocco fuel. What is Jocco fuel? So I, when I said Jocco fuel one time, I remember saying it and thinking, oh, Jocco fuels like seems like an individual product the way I said it. So let me clarify. Jocco fuel is a collection of supplementation elements.

So this part, we already know, super cruel oil, your cruel oil with some antioxidants in there. Joint warfare for your joints. So your joints are going to take a beating, you know, varying levels of beatings when you're working out. You're doing different workouts, Jiu-Jitsu, all that stuff. So this is why this is important. Supercrow oil, joint warfare.

And also we have vitamin D for immune system, big deal. Also cold war for your immune system, still. a big deal. So yes, these are all part of Jocko fuel including in or as

should I say additionally milk protein in the form of a dessert meaning it's the best tasting protein

mix you'll ever have I think that's proven double blind placebo. I'm on a little peanut butter little peanut butter

chocolate kick right now because I had to that is a good tasting I mean it is a good tasting

do you add extra peanut no Why don't? I just, as is. I do sometimes. I'm feeling a little bit more peanut buttery. Nonetheless, I dig it 100%.

And that's what that is. Also, discipline. Discipline. Powder mix. This is for your brain and your body, by the way. Powder mix. Cans. R.T.D. cans.

And discipline go pills. New flavor out. Straight up. Out. Sour. sour apple sniper and it's important to note that this is J.P. Donnell's signature. Right. Because he's a sniper. Yeah. Yeah. So what's your what's your assessment of the flavor? Good. Not as sour as I anticipated, but it could have been one of those deals where I'm like I open it up. I'm like, ooh, I'm getting ready for the sourness. You know, so maybe I over. Yeah. Over expectations were off. Yeah. But, but good, but delicious. Pete. Pete just said to me, it just said to me, it just.

just went into first place in his book. No kidding. And he said the reason why. He said it's sweet. Yeah. He said he got that little, he's got that little, he's got a sweet tooth. Yeah. I understand.

That kid's choking down baklava's and wippy pies. He's just, he's just getting after it. Yeah. That does make sense. And it is good, though, in that way. It's just not as tangy or sour as I thought. Yeah. So, but it does have some sweetness to it.

If you got that sweet tooth. If you got that Pete Roberts, sweet tooth. I like, yeah, it's freaking legit. Right now, Jocco Palmer's in the lead. I think so. Continually for me. But Pete Roberts just pushed it. But my kids are mostly Dax Savage.

That could just be in support of Dakota. Yeah. But that one has the sweetness as well. The Dax Savage one. I don't know. I taste that. Yeah. For me, there's sweetness to it, but it's not, it's not, it's not as sweet as sour apple sniper.

Is it? I can dig it. It's been a few weeks and I've been pounding the Tropic Thunder and the, the, the, the, the, chocolate Palmer one so much. I'm going to have to go revisit it to evaluate accurately. What I think. Nonetheless, they're all good. And, hey, we're going to have differences of opinion. I like, I prefer not maybe not strongly, but I prefer a little bit of the tanginess.

in this kind drink. Yeah. I prefer that. My personal preference. Check. Well, if you want to get any of these supplements, then you can go to origin, mane.com. You can go to the vitamin shop,

and you can pick this stuff up. And it does actually support the podcast. And it supports the podcast, and you know what else it supports. You know what else it supports. Sports America. Sports Americas, we're out there not only making supplements, also making things for you to wear on your body.

So you may need to wear something during jiu-jitsu, right, while we're grappling. We're not going Greek, like the Greek naked wrestlers. You see the pictures back. You see the statues back in the day. We're not doing that. No, sir. We're not doing that. No, we're wearing clothing.

So we're wearing rash guards. We're wearing bagu. T-shirts, jeans, boots. All of it, not just made in America, but formulated from the ground up, every thread, every rivet. It's all American, 100% building a little self-reliance back into our country.

We're going to have to rely on other countries. It's not a good thing. So go to origin, main.com, if you want any of those products. And yet, you know what, they're American Made. They're also the best. Yeah. The best things that you can put on your body. Yeah, I feel like you're, you know, not to say you're actively neglecting this, but,

but they look good. You see what I'm saying? They fit good. They look good. I know you're not walking around saying, oh, how's the fit on my gene? You're not asking your wife, hey, do these jeans make, you know, my hips look nice or Whatever. I'm assuming you're not.

Make my knees looks good. Or what have you. I'm assuming you're not doing that. So I will attest to that. Yes, these are functional, of course, made in America. Of course. But they look good too. Hey, look good, feel good.

Feel good, look good. That's cool. Some of us are over here thinking we look good. Cool. I'll let you hold. That unlock. I'll be over here getting after it. Anyway, origin, main.com.

Yes. Also, speaking of clothing, Jocko has a store. So this clothing, if you want to represent discipline equals freedom, the attitude of good. But when things go bad,

there's some good that comes out of it. It's true. You're the one who told me that. It's true. Anyway, you want to represent these things. Go to jocco store.com. Check out the shirts. There's t-shirts on there,

hoodies, hats. We've got some new. board shorts. Are they up yet? You can have to check. Jocco store.com. There's also a new t-shirt that you're wearing. Yes.

For some reason, you're wearing it before I'm wearing it. Amen. Even though it's a stretch for you to wear that t-shirt. How do you like that? I bias on action. What is that bias for action? I like it.

So you're wearing kind of the ultimate t-shirt, the hardcore ricondo's t-shirt. Yeah. Yeah, you know what's good? I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, man, that's a good. That's a good idea. for a shirt, for sure. And then when it came out, I put it on, I was like,

ooh, back to that looking good thing. I feel that I look good in it. Oh, I thought you were going to say it made you feel like, oh, you know, I'm in the game, but instead you just were looking at yourself in the mirror again. Yeah. Okay, cool. Like I said, that's your gig.

So does this look, does this shirt look good on me? I'm not looking at your shirt. All right. You're not. Okay. The shirt's cool. That's all you're getting out of me. Carry on.

Hey, I'll take it. Anyway, jocococococon. If you like something, get something. Good spot. Subscribe to this podcast. There's a bunch of different ways you can subscribe to it, do it, and then leave a review. This is according to Echo Charles. The cool thing is if you leave a review, I actually read the reviews and there's a lot of them, but they're awesome.

So that's cool. Appreciate it. And don't forget that we have some other podcasts as well. We've got the Unravelling. The Jocko Unravelling Podcast actually is the full title. Sure. Because in order to make it mine, well, I just put my name on it. And then no one can say like, you took my name.

No, I didn't take your name. Your name isn't Jocko, is it? So Jockenravelling. Right now we're releasing on this feed. Soon it'll be on a separate feed. We got the grounded podcast. We got the Warrior Kid podcast. We got Warrior Kid soap from Irish Oaks Ranch.com where you can get soap so that you can, for the love of God, you can stay clean.

YouTube, you want to tell them about YouTube? Sure. I know you're quite into that. Well, we're all into that from time to time. So, yes, you want to watch the video version or have the video version playing, playing in the office, in the gym, in the house, whatever, connected to surround sound. Boom, you're right in the middle of the conversation physically, visually, all that stuff. Anyway, we have a YouTube channel.

That's the point. We also have excerpts on there. So, you know, you can share them with. your friends and it's more likely your friend is going to watch a two minute up to you know you know varying levels of length videos then maybe a four-hour podcast from time to time okay some people some people don't have the wherewithal or the time well at that at that moment you know like you send me a link right you're like hey check this out for you need to like check this out is three and a half hours yeah and i look i'm sort of the gas station right now so

So maybe, you know, maybe I'll check that later. You can watch a two-minute video just pumping gas. You're done with the video. It's over. Technically, yeah. You can take the information with it, maybe apply it. Exactly right. You won't have the depth of knowledge, though.

No. You can apply it quickly, but you want to reinforce it. That's why when you are cutting your lawn, you listen the whole thing, or you watch the whole thing while you're doing dishes. It shouldn't take you two and a half hours or three and a half hours to do dishes. But maybe over a week, you're watching it, you know, it takes you 20 minutes, consolidate some time, three meals a day. you can get there.

Yeah, technically. Thinking through things. But like I said, though, if at any given moment you get sent a three-hour video versus a two-minute video, it's more likely that you're going to have the time to watch a two-minute video, so it increases the likelihood of someone actually watching it. That's the benefit of an excerpt, whatever that excerpt may be. So that's why these excerpts exist. See what I'm saying?

Fair enough. I'm just saying if you, and this is why you should share an excerpt. If it resonates with you or someone you know that or might resonate with someone you know, this is why you share it because if you, okay, there's an excerpt about, I forget the title, but it's about how you feel versus how you behave, right? I think it was something about hangary or something like that. Remember that one? It's oldie, but good.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Nonetheless. So it's basically if you're frustrated on the inside or whatever, you don't have to act frustrated. You know, how you feel and how you behave should, you should separate. those things you should behave as good as you can anyway so a lot of people that's a good valuable information what if you shared that with three people around you and they shared that with two people around them they shared that with four people around them and see everyone around you is behaving correctly whether they're frustrated or not frustrated you're actually

having a massive impact in the entire world is what you're saying at the end of the day yes so that's the benefit and this goes for any concept so there's a lot of excerpts out there's what I'm saying so I'm saying check them out on that YouTube channel you know if you got a moment do it it's good Also, psychological warfare. This is an album with Jocko tracks on it. Many tracks for many different scenarios in those scenarios are moments of weakness that you might incur. Is that a good word? Is that the correct word incur?

I'm an incur. It's an okay usage. Okay, boom, there you go, incur. You get like a C. Okay, good pass. Incur a moment of weakness. You want to invoke Jocco to help you. Not yell at you or nothing like this.

Help you. Just listen to one of those tracks. the appropriate track for that particular weakness moment. Boom, he'll help you right across the bridge. Super easy too, 100% effective rate, by the way. Also, if you want to have a visual kind of reminder, the visual help, go to flipsidecanvasat.com, Dakota Meyer, American-made, graphic art.

There I said it. Yeah, it did kind of seem like you were not actively avoiding. The word art. It's weird. It's weird. I don't know. I have a weird relationship with the word art. Yeah, I could see it. Yeah.

But it is art and artistic too. Yeah. Well, anyways, if you want some cool graphic art, go to flipsidecanvus.com. If you want a book, if you want a book, I got a bunch of books. One's called The Code. Once called Leadership Strategy and Tactics,

field manual. Once called Way the Warrior Kid 1, 2, and 3. Mikey and the Dragons. Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual and extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. A bunch of books talking about leadership. Reinforcing the ideas that I talk about here. If you're an adult, teaching those ideas to a young kid, get after some of those. Also have a leadership consultancy called Eschalonfront where we solve problems through leadership.

Go to Escalonfront.com for details. want me to come and speak at your company or you want me to do a virtual meeting or you want someone on the echelon front team that you've heard on this podcast to get on a call with all your people and talk to them don't go to a speakers bureau don't do that go to ashlonfront dot com just the other the the speakers bureau is just a middleman we don't need it this is what we do for a living so go to eschaton front We're onfront.com and we'll hook it up. EF online.

We're doing a lot of virtual stuff right now. One of the things that we're doing virtual. We did online training before. We're doing even more now. I am live on that thing all the time. If you want to talk to me, if you want to come and ask me a question, go to EF online, attend one of the online training, live seminars. We're talking one, two, three times a week.

I'm on there. The rest of the team is on there. You want to have, you want to talk to me. Let me know. Come and get it. That's what we're doing. EFonline.com. Also have the muster,

which is a live gig, September 16th and 17th, in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. Go to extreme ownership.com if you want to come. They've all sold out,

so these are going to sell out too. We haven't even released the video yet. I saw the video today, though. Good job. Good job with that one. Also, EF Overwatch, if you need leaders in your organization,

We have experienced battle tested leaders. EFoverwatch.com. If you're in the military, go there. We can link you up with companies. If you're a company and you need that leadership, go to EFoverwatch.com. Fill out the appropriate information for yourself. For charities, like I said, historyflight.com.

If you want to support the recovery of these heroes around the world, Also, they have at History Flight on Instagram. So check that out. And then, of course, we got Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom and her organization, America's mighty warriors.org. She does all kinds of things to help service members, whether that's medical treatments that they couldn't get through military channels, whether it's things that they need while they're over on deployment,

whether it's Gold Star families that need some kind of support after they've lost their loved one, She does all kinds of things like this. So go to America's Mighty Warriors.org if you want to get involved or if you want to donate. And if for some unknown reason, you just feel like you need to hear more of my disproportionately dallyallyallying discourse, or you feel like you need more of echoes confiscated, conceptualizations, then you can find us on the interwebs on Twitter, Instagram, and on Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocka Willink. And thanks once again to Justin LeHugh for coming on for sharing the lessons with us. We thank you for your service, and we absolutely wish you, Godspeed, in your mission today to continue to bring home our fallen countrymen.

A solemn thanks to all that have fought for our freedom but did not return. And of course, thanks to all the servicemen and women who are out there today, holding the line, training to hold the line, taking risk to hold the line to protect our freedom. Thanks to all of you. And to the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrols. and Secret Service and all the first responders, thank you for holding the line and protecting us here on the home front. And to everyone else out there, you can learn a lot. I learn a lot from a man like Sergeant Major Justin LeHugh.

Try to heed his advice, his advice to do whatever it takes, to initiate savage action and aggression, to establish a winning mentality and to do things not for yourself but for your country there is something bigger than you so go out there and get after it and until next time

this is Echo and Jocko out