Jocko Podcast - 261: Learning Does Not Stop. Ever. Life and Leadership w SEAL Master Chief, Steve Ward

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening0:07:45 - SEAL Master Chief, Steve Ward3:01:14 - Final thoughts and take-aways.3:20:33 - How to stay on THE PATH.3:47:46 - Closing GratitudeSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 261 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Being in the teams is the best job in the world. Probably heard me say that before. The best job in the world. Why do I say that? Why do I say that? Well, first of all, the job itself, which consists of shooting machine guns,

jumping out of airplanes, blowing things up, scuba diving, running around in the woods. It's just a freaking awesome job. So you got that. On top of that, you got this mission, the mission that you're focused on. You're on a mission to protect America, to protect democracy, to protect freedom, to protect people. and in order to do that, kill bad guys. Because you're supposed to do all that protecting.

In order to do all that protecting, you've got to kill bad guys, which as a kid and really as a man for that matter. That's what me and my friends always wanted to do. And I'm sorry if that doesn't sit right with you or if you think I'm some kind of a monster because of it. But that's the reality. So that's another reason why the job is awesome. But the last thing and certainly not the least thing. In fact, the best thing about the job by far is the boys. The boys, the guys you get to work with.

They're awesome. And contrary to popular belief, there's no cookie cutter format that represents a guy in the seal teams. The guys come in all shapes and sizes. They come from all different backgrounds. And it should be noted that not all of them are good guys. There are some knuckleheads for sure. There's some egotomaniacs. There's some guys that really aren't part of the team.

There's some guys that look out for themselves. There's guys that don't help out. There's some guys that don't care about the mission. There's guys that put themselves above the team. So there's some of those types running around, and that's true in any organization. But as a whole, the boys are pretty legit. They're hardworking. They're tough.

put the team first, they get the mission done. And they have fun while they're doing it. And you can count on them, which is an underrated thing, right? You can count on them. And I was lucky enough to work with a ton of those guys during my career. I was leaving Ramadi. So it was the end of my last appointment. And I was leaving Ramadi.

And another task unit came in to take our place. And they were coming into a complete and utter firestorm of sustained combat and look we had all been deploying a bunch over the years since 9-11 and this was 2006 sort of the end of 2006 and so guys knew what it was like to go on combat deployments but this particular combat deployment that we had been on in the battle of romadi was significant we had a lot of casualties and these guys that were coming to replace us I mean I knew that they were coming into something that seals hadn't deployed into in a long time and look I'm not saying

that seals weren't deploying into dangerous places they were but kind of a known scenario like that it'd been a while and so I felt horrible actually I felt horrible for the new task unit that was showing up to replace us because I felt like we had learned so much much there and we had gotten good at our jobs and we I felt like we were leaving this other task unit in a bad spot and I was worried about them and worried how they would survive well I knew a few other guys a few other guys I knew and and that gave me a level of comfort one of the guys that I knew was the senior enlisted guy of the task unit a guy named Steve Ward

one of the good guys and I I kind of knew him tangently over the years because I had turned I turned over with him in Baghdad a couple years earlier he'd been in a leadership position in a platoon at team five and to run a bunch of operations and done a great job and I'd gotten a solid turnover from him so that was awesome and it just made my comfort level go up that someone was coming in that was humble enough to listen and learn not just from me, not just from tasking a bruiser,

but also from the Army and the Marine Corps and who is also smart enough and knowledgeable enough to mix in that knowledge and that experience with humility and make sense of the whole crazy situation, which is what he did. And when Steve came back from that deployment,

which was a hard deployment for them, We ended up working together, actually truly working together for the first time at Traydet, the training command. He took over the land warfare training cell as the senior enlisted advisor in that training block. And we ended up spending a lot of time together training and preparing seals for combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And it was a, it's hard for. you'd even say it was a challenging job. Yeah, it was a challenging job, but it was so critical and it was so rewarding

to be able to work with the young frogman and pass on the lessons learned to the next generation so that they could go out there and take the fight to the enemy and keep themselves safe, as safe as they possibly could. And I eventually retired out of that job and Steve carried on in his career

He went on to more senior positions of leadership and continue to deploy over and over again in support of the war on terror Until a few months ago when he finally retired And since them we've been working together again Still still actually training leaders this time for leadership in the business world But we're back at it and it is an honor to be working with Steve again and and it is an honor to have Steve here on the podcast to tell us about his life, his experiences, and his lessons learned. Steve, thanks for coming all, man.

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Jock. You were one of the guys in the beginning when this podcast kind of kicked off that was giving me reports from the field that you were in the game listening to it. Yeah, me and Gardner were going back and forth. You know, some of the books you covered early on, like the last hundred yards. I was like, damn, how can you not get on the net? listen to that for, you know, a couple hours. So it was good. Yeah. And here you are sitting in the,

sitting in the chair. Let's go. Let's rock and roll. Let's talk about where Steve Ward came from. Yep. So grew up in Sacramento, California, small town. My mom and dad were divorced. So I'd go see my dad in the summer months and my sister and my mom and I. We all grew up together in Sacramento. I graduated high school in 91. What would you? Slow your role, bro. I got a list of cover, man. Come on. So what'd your mom do for a living? So she worked at Davis College.

She was like an administrator there. And then what about your dad? Where was your dad? So my dad, he was an air traffic controller, so he kind of bounced around the U.S. Spent a lot of time in Florida, Puerto Rico up in Washington. So did you see March your dad growing up?

Yeah, in the summertime. Me and my sister would go out and see him for anywhere from two weeks to 30 days at a time. So it was good. Well, as good as it could be. So you just breeze through like, oh, went high school and then graduated. You were about to be in the Navy.

Did you play sports? Yes. So played baseball, soccer and football coming up. Any good? I'd say I was an average athlete. Nothing special. I wasn't consistent. I had good, like for baseball I had times when I was doing good,

and then I'd get in a slump and wouldn't do so good. Slump due to bad attitude? Slump from, I'm trying to think of a good way to word this here. Slump from not, I guess, being good enough. You know, like you get, so I was a pitcher. I played baseball. I played pitcher and I played outfield. And I'd have some times where I'd get up there

and my friends would be cracking jokes at me. You're gonna beam the first batter. You're gonna beam the first batter. You're gonna beam the first batter. First pitch, I beam the first batter. I'm like, damn. You can't crack jokes up on the mound because you just hit somebody with a baseball.

So, you know, didn't pan out too good for me. So my junior year, I kind of quit baseball. And my freshman year I started playing football. And I really enjoyed football. Contact sport, hard, like a lot of hard work goes into that. So I enjoyed football, finished that up my, you know, senior year. I played all four years. In soccer, I kind of quit playing that when I was probably like around 13, 14 years old.

What were your friends doing when you weren't playing sports? Getting in trouble. Getting in trouble. So sports, you know, I was probably like, I wouldn't say a bad kid, but I was definitely off the path. Seventh, eighth, the ninth grade, not good things for me. I got, I was picking up trash on the side of the roads. I was on probation, just doing stupid shit.

For what? Just nothing. Care to repeat on the net. Just, what do they call that, delinquent activities? I was a delinquent, and it wasn't my friends, it was me. I was a guy that was like, when my friends came around, I was the guy instigating and kind of leaving the charge on doing. What kind of music were you listening to?

I just whatever, like country, rap, rock, it didn't matter. Just didn't matter. We had the old AMFM radio. There's nothing going on, yeah. There's a different time. Yeah. You were limited to what you could actually hear. Yeah.

Was it a small town? Yeah, so I grew up actually in West Sack. It was definitely a small town. Okay. So, yeah, small town, smaller high school. I went to a high school called River City. It was small. Did they have wrestling there?

They had, they started a wrestling program, I think, when I was in about 10th grade there. I didn't wrestle. I played football, and I stayed away from basketball. Yeah. How was your grades? I'm willing to venture. Not good. They were not good.

I passed high school by the, you know, barely passed high school. So it wasn't good for me. I didn't pay attention, had good teachers, always giving you good advice. I was just not into learning. So you were a little bit of a troublemaker, right? Do you think when you were being a troublemaker, do you think you were doing it for attention? Do you think you were doing it for the thrill? Do you think you were doing it for adrenaline?

Like, why do you think you were doing it? I think when I was a truck, which I was, I think of a lot of it, what I was doing to sort of prove to myself and my friends that I was like tough like type things like I don't care I'll do this like that kind of thing when I think back

as to why I did dumb shit which I did plenty of I think that's why a lot of it was like to prove that I was a quote and I'm putting in big air quotes here tough because the stuff I was doing was by no stretch of the imagination

tough yeah I'd say I fall in that same category trying to prove something just doing and I got adrenaline rush out of doing those dumb things and it took a long time to get out of my system. So you said that was mostly six, seventh, eighth, ninth grade? Seventh, eighth and ninth, yeah. By 10th grade, were you kind of a little bit more squared away?

Turn in the corner, yes. Yep. Did you feel, did you have some run-ins with a law that kind of straightened you back out? Probation and picking up trash on the side of the road. Kind of squared me away real quick. You got to wear the little orange vest. You're in the van with all the rest of the delinquents. You're on the road on Saturday and Sundays.

Not a good situation. Not a good situation. So then you barely graduate high school. At what point did you think about joining the Navy? Or did you think about the joining the Marine Corps, the Army? Where was the situation with enlisting in the military? So I remember one of my high school teachers told me, hey, you got three choices when you get out of high school.

And he's kind of mentoring us. None of us know it at the time, but he's like, hey, you can go to college, which I highly recommend. You can get a job or you can join the military, or you can do a combination of one and two. And that kind of always stuck with me, you know, and then as I started going to college, like, man, I don't want to learn. I wasn't ready to learn. Wait a second. So you just skipped right two year in college. So when you, when you were still in high school, you didn't join the Navy or join the military while you were in high school.

Correct. He gave you the three options. Job, college, military, you chose college. Yes. First. Yep. You thought, all right, did you have any freaking vision of any kind whatsoever? You're just like, no, sign up for whatever classes they signed me up for.

Yeah. So I just signed up for the basic general education stuff. You know, went for a full semester and then dove into the second semester. And that's where, like at one point, I don't even know how the recruiter wound up at our door. But the recruiter wound up on our doorstep. And I started talking to him. Where's the doorstep of what? Your house.

Of the house. So, you know, you go through and I was like, yeah, this is. something I think I might be interested in. Because your mom called the damn recruiter and sent him over there. Oh, she was kicking him out of there. Oh, really? She was not having any other recruiter. She told him, get the hell out of here.

No kidding. Was your mom a hippie or something? No, no. She's a farm girl. She grew up on a farm. Yeah, she just didn't, she didn't want me joining the military. But you talked to him. I talked to him and...

Was he a Navy recruiter? Navy guy, yep, Navy recruiter. Did you have any inkling? Did you have any parents, grandparents, anything about the military? that you understood? Yeah, so my grandfather was in the Army, and he was, he never went, he was around the World War II era,

but he never went in Serb. You know, he got stationed out in Alaska somewhere, and then my dad was in the Air Force. So I had some small touch points there with some cool stories of, you know, grandfather being in the military, he's talked about throwing his grenade, and the sergeant was telling him,

that was the best throw ever type thing. And then my dad was in the Air Force. Your grandfather was getting told you're going to beam the batter with that grenade. Yeah, whack. So then, so the guy, the recruiter talks to you, and at this point you realize college is like a waste of your time? Yes, I'm done with school.

I didn't enjoy high school and I definitely wasn't enjoying college at that point. Which college was it? I was just called Sac City Community College. So you were living at home during this time? Yes, yep, living at home, working part-time, going to college. What was your part-time job? Man, I don't remember what it was. I had a couple jobs growing up.

Like I worked in a bunch of different little restaurants, being a bus boy, being a dishwasher, move furniture with a guy named Craig, who's a great family guy. And so we'd get on the road, he worked for Outlight furniture, and we'd be trucking on down to L.A. with furniture on the back of his big old 18-wheeler.

It was actually a good job. It was hard work, but it paid good money. It was paying $10 an hour back then. That was good money. You were kind of the man with $10 an hour. I was the man with $10 an hour. Yeah, and that was a lot better pay than the Navy paid. I'll tell you that back then.

So how'd the Navy recruiter convince you? He was just like, hey, come in, give this a go man and you know so I went through did all the as vab testing he's like right we can get you in uh in June time frame and what what job were you signing up for because you didn't list did you know about the seals at this point no I didn't I never I didn't know what a seal was so I just I was signing up to go to the regular Navy to go on a ship to figure life out yep little that I know I was about to get after some bathroom cleaning so so what like job did he sell you on He didn't sell me.

He was just like, I mean, so I had, I grew up with some friends and they, you know, a lot of people were getting in trouble. People were doing drugs, all that kind of dumb stuff. So I just knew I had the best option for me at that point in my life was to get out of Sacramento and go try something different. So the job, I didn't even know what I wanted to do. Did you go to, did you go UD undesignated? Yes.

Oh, damn. Yeah. So I was in, you know. So for people that don't know, like in the Navy, you have a job. It's called your rating. and your job is, you know, you might be a welder. You might be a technician or an engineman that's going to work on engines, or you might run a weapon system.

And they have names for all these different jobs. But if you don't have a job, they call it, and I remember this from boot camp. It was a threat. They'd say, you keep this up, you're going to go to the fleet, UD, undesignated. It means you have no job, no skill. You're just going to go in there. So that threat that I got told was actually what you got signed up for. Go to the fleet UD, undesignated.

Sign me up. I'm ready to roll. Get me out of sack. Yeah. Get me out of here. So you rolled into boot camp? Yep. Rolled into boot camp.

Finished up in, I want to say, right around October time frame. So I went to boot camp. When did you go to boot camp? In July 1991. Okay. And then did you go to Orlando? No, no, here in San Diego. Oh, you went to San Diego.

That's right, West Coast. Yep. So you went to boot camp, and you just went to boot camp. It was eight weeks? I think eight weeks. So you went to eight weeks of boot camp, and then to the fleet. Yeah, eight weeks of boot camp. Then I went to semen training because I was going to work in deck department.

That was my own designated. I was going to be, you know, a semen. So got trained up for three weeks there and then showed up to a ship sometime, and I think November, December timeframe of 91. Bro. Yeah. Hey, Jocko,

it's not that funny. That's crazy, dude. You must have done good on your ASVabs. That guy didn't try and make you into like whatever, some other rates. We could get more.

No. That's crazy, dude. Well, that's in, so that was probably my first lesson learned in life. Hey, pay attention in school so you score good on your ASVAB, so you have options,

right? Hey, when you're in high school, you don't, I didn't, I really thought about that. Hey, I just need to make it through. But in life, you're going to be given some test. Whether you're going to go work in a fire department, a police department,

you're going to go in the military. And so the better educated you are, the more options you're going to have available to. And I didn't do so good, so my options were limited. Yeah, that's the one thing I always try and explain when parents asked me about kids and, like, what the, and I think one of the biggest things you can do for a kid besides getting them into Jiu-Jitsu is making them realize that their actions today have impact on the rest of their life. Absolutely. Because we get little kids, and when I say little kids, I'm talking me when I was 23, right?

What I'm doing right now is going to impact where I'm going to be, right? And so how can you expect a 13-year-old or a 15-year-old? And you know, girls might be a little bit smarter than boys as possible. It seems judging from my own children. Anyways, let me phrase that because I don't want to generalize. In my personal family, it seems like my daughters are a little better at connecting what they're doing right now with the future than my son, who just doesn't do it as much. So, yeah, that's a good point when you realize that what I'm doing right now as a kid and is not just kids, what I'm doing right now as a human is going to impact the way my life goes. And you might end up in the fleet, UD.

D. D. Getting after it. So you do eight weeks of boot camp, three weeks of preps, semen prep school, and then boom, you go to a ship. Yep. What was that wake-up call like? It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad. It was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. In what way? Yeah, it just, it was a lot of hard work. You know, so when you show up in deck department and you're an E2, you're getting every, you know, you're getting all the assignments that are not fun to do.

You know, you're cleaning bathrooms, you're painting the ship, you're chipping paint off the ship, you're just doing all the things on ship maintenance. And so you're eating some humble pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while you're doing this. It gave me a chance to kind of grow up a little bit. It was good. It was hard work. I had to roll the sleeves up and get dirty.

Yeah. You had time to reflect. Yeah, time to reflect. What were you thinking about when you were reflecting? I was, so when I'm reflecting on that, I'm just like, hey, man, can make the best out of this situation. So I had one of my buddies that I went through boot camp with. We wound up on the same ship, Chris.

And me and him just always had competition. We got put in the same deck department. And every assignment they gave us, we're like running up and down them stairwell ladders. Oh, dang. Competing assignments coming back. Like, hey, what else do you got from me? You're like, hey, you knuckleheads, that's supposed to take you to lunchtime. We're like, well, we're done.

Give us more. That's awesome, man. So it was fun. We made the best of it, you know. And we had some good, some good, leadership on the ship and some bad leadership. You got to, that was my first exposure to kind of what right looks like, what bad leadership looks like.

So it was good. And you're taking down all these data points and you're storing it in your head, you know. And probably one of the biggest things I took out of that assignment is we had guys that were super knowledgeable, just very good. Like we had a BM2 and he was super good at being a BOSMA. He knew everything, how to tie all the ropes, all the maintenance. He knew everything. And he was squared away.

Hard worker looked out for his guys. you're like, that's a dude I want to be like. You don't always talk about echelon front. Hey, modeling the correct behaviors. That dude was modeling all the right behaviors. Busted his ass, did good things, and he was getting promoted while I was on that ship. So you're like, ah, data point. That's what

right looks like. Same thing with a handful of the chiefs that were on that ship. Just good solid dudes. They weren't afraid to roll their sleeves up, get in there with the guys, and get to work. You're like, all right, check. Mental note on that. So then how long was it when you were in the fleet

until you heard about the teams. Yeah, so we had a couple guys that didn't make it through seal training. They showed up, came friends with those guys at some point, and they told me all about, you know, basic on-water demolition seal training. And I was like, damn, that's something I'm interested in. So I started training up. They told me kind of all the things you need to do to be successful. They took me over to the obstacle course, showed me all the tricks on how to navigate that thing,

a lot of technique. In the meantime, I was getting my application together and submitting everything. So when I hit the two-year mark on the ship, I'd had my application back. I was approved to go to seal training, and everything was dialed in as tight as it could be. No matter what I was going to have to do two years on that ship. So you weren't even close to your two years yet, and you already had your application in? I would say I had it in right around the probably 13, 14-month cycle. So you owed whatever those months were another year or something like that, 10 months left?

Yep, yep, something like that. Before they'd release you. Yeah, and the cool thing was. You know, we had two, my division master chief was an E9, obviously. He was a good dude. And then our CMC, our command master chief of the ship was a good guy. And they're like, hey, man, you work hard, you stay out of trouble. We'll make some phone calls.

We'll make sure that you get a shot at going to Buds. And they didn't have to do that. You know, they could have been like, hey, pack sand, Jack, you want to get off the ship, get out of the fleet and go to some other program? That's not helping us out. They didn't do that. They looked out for me, you know, working hard, staying out of trouble, being a good person, and all those three things were good.

You know, so again, it was kind of like reinforcing good behaviors. So always be thankful of those guys. And then the guys that showed up that had been to buds, what kind of impression did that give you? Did you? Because there's a weird thing that somehow you have to think that you can actually do it, right? Yeah.

Or, you know, like for me, I was like, oh, I can do this, which is a really arrogant thing to think, right? It's arrogant to think most people. quick, but I'm going to be able to do it. Yeah. I wouldn't sure where I was going to shake out on the whole thing, to be honest with you. I didn't, like, run long distance and growing up.

You know, we did a lot of sprints in football, and I wasn't good with pull-ups. So pull-ups I definitely sucked at, and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do the amount of pull-ups that are needed to done. So I just started working hard on my pull-ups, got on a good running program, got on a good swimming program.

Those guys taught me how to do the side-stroke. And so, you know, I'd just get up early in the morning and knock all this stuff out. go in and either do a weightlifting program and then do my cardio at lunchtime or vice versa. And every now and then those guys would come over and be like, hey, dial this in, work on this, look at that. So I was mentally and physically prepared for first phase on what to expect because these guys had given me so much information. Did those guys talk about what happened to them?

Yeah, so one of the two of the guys, one of the guys made it past hell week. another guy was in second phase and he got dropped for a pool comp and then the other guy he was he got up right around the third week mark or four week mark in first phase and he got injured and he got rolled out

the guy got dropped for pool comp in second phase yeah and then what did you say the other one was the one guy made it past hell week and something happened when he was waiting a class up for second phase and they dropped him and then the third guy

he made it I think to like week three or four and then got hurt or quit I think he, well, he said he got, right, right, yeah. So, you know, no one ever quits. Yeah. Yeah, no one ever quits. So you had a pretty good idea of what you're going into. Yep.

Because, like, I can tell you I didn't have anybody that I didn't know anyone that went to seal training at all, you know, because I was in the civilian world. So for me, I didn't know what pool comp was. I didn't understand anything. It was just a blank, open nothing and do nothing. But you had a decent idea of what was going to be coming. Yep. Yep.

I good. I was physically and mentally prepared for first phase. Did you get your pull-ups squared away? I did. I actually went in a little better with my pull-ups. And you know the deal. When you show up and you start classing up, you're starting from scratch again.

So now you're, from where I came in, I was coming back down with, you know, my run times and swim times and all that stuff. Meaning you were in better shape than what was required. Yes. Yeah. Which is the way you freaking should try and get there. Yep, yep.

So you show up to buds. Did you get what you expected? Yes. Yeah, it was full benefit. So it was good times. What class were you in? I was in 194. So we classed up, I want to say, right around January of 1994.

What did you have the, did you have problems with anything? In buds? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So first phase, first phase and third phase were those came a lot more. natural to me. You know, I grew up hunting and fishing and shooting guns and doing all that fun

stuff. So third phase wasn't bad. First phase I was mentally prepared for. Second phase, I'd never scuba dived. I never did any diving. And for me, that was the hardest phase. You know, I actually failed a couple events in there. Like I failed pool comp the first go round. You know, and then when I did my retest, I passed it. And then like every little thing, you know, you're doing ditching darn, you're doing all these little things with scuba tanks and going down and doing stuff. Like, I was jacking it all up. And for me, my learning stuff, I really have to digest, you know, what it is I need to do and kind of like visualize it.

And things were on a quick tempo for dive phase. So it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't good for that. Did you feel like you're on the bubble the whole time? When I failed pool comp, I was like, all right, damn, I'm not going to make it through this, man. You know, you're on the wall of shame. That doesn't help either. You're like looking at bricks and like, geez, you know.

I failed pool comp too. Yeah. Yeah. I had our ops guy from Traynet, our, ops war an officer from Trayette put me through. Pool comp. Savage. Yeah.

He just. Well, you know what's crazy with pull comp? Like, I'm going through, and in my head, I had the procedures down, and I thought I did good. I'm like, I'm down there tying the whammy not doing all this shit. And I'm like, I'm cool, calm and collect. I'm going through the procedures. And the instructor just yanks me up by the tanks. He's like, you failed to get on the wall.

And I was like, damn, seriously? Like, I'm going through trying to think of what I did wrong. I'm like, I thought I was good, you know, but I didn't know if they were playing games with me or what, but I went over on the wall. I was like, shit, I don't know if I'm going to make it. That guy that failed me, who's a great guy, but when he, same thing, he had me down there.

I was down there. Pool comp was 30 minutes when I went through, and I know they shortened it at some point to 20 minutes, but when I went through was 30 minutes, and he just, what he did was, was he just, he ripped my mask off, and then he just started doing like a bob, and he would bob down, he would come down,

he would just knock the regulator out of him. my mouth. And then he'd go back up and I would grab the regular and I put it back in. I'd clear it and then he'd knock it out again. And he did that for 19 minutes. Damn. And then I just kept replacing it and every one of those breaths was a nightmare because you're trying to get the water out of there, swallow some of the water and then get a breath and then boom, he'd knock it out again. And you can't defend yourself. You can't protect yourself and you can't panic. So I just kept doing it. And then at 19 minutes he just comes down and gives me the thumbs up, come to the surface. and I come up and I'm like, I feel fine.

And he goes, he goes, you didn't look comfortable down there, you fail. And I was like, okay, so I guess that's that. Roger that. Yeah. What's a whammy knot? Like they just tighten this complex knot. It's like multiple knots and one knot. Okay, so it's not like a specific like methodology or is it just like a generally speaking jam up?

So during this evolution called pool competency, also known as pool comp. They want to make sure that you are beyond fully comfortable in the water. You will not pass this if you're not comfortable in the water. Zero percent chance. So what they do is they cause problems. So you have these old school scuba gear on like Jacques Cousteau style stuff. These big hoses, one hose goes in and one hose comes out and they're just like rubber hoses. And they start taking these things.

And first they start off, they knock off your mask. They rip off your fins. They pull your regulator out. And then they start pulling your regulator out and then like undoing your thing. And eventually they pull it out and put it behind you. Pull your regulator behind you and tie it in a knot. You got to take your gear off, pull the rig over your back, untie the knot, start breathing again, put everything back on in order, following the procedures. As soon as you get it back on, boom, they hit you again.

And so they keep doing this. And eventually they give you what's called a whammy knot, which is a knot that you cannot get out. It won't come out. So now what you have to do is ditch your rig, which means you have to take it off, you have to lay it on the bottom of the pool, you have to take your weight belt off

and place it on top of the tank so they don't float. Then you have to kiss your manifold. You'd kiss your manifold. Oh no, you request permission to go up. They give you permission. You give them a thumbs up. They give you like an okay thumbs up. Then you kiss your manifold,

and then you blow and go to the surface. What do you kiss your manifold? You literally, the part of the scuba tank is called a manifold. It's where the regulator kind of comes out of. You kiss that. Like, why? I don't get it. Because those are the procedures that you're following.

Okay, like you got to follow those directions. You kiss your manifold. Right? Did you have to kiss your manifold? Yes. So you kiss your manifold and then you blow and go, which means you're not going to give yourself an air ambulism by the air expanding your lungs. And you go to the surface.

You blow and go to the surface. You blow and go to the surface. When you get to the surface, you give a thumbs up and you say, I feel fine. And they either say, you know, good job. You passed or they say, you looked uncomfortably, you failed. Which for me, they said you looked uncomfortably, you failed. And then for Steve, they said you looked uncomfortably failed.

I would say, though, one thing that's different about me was I did good on everything else. So when I failed pool comp, I was like, oh, God, like, this is it. I can't, I'm going to fail. I was super sketched out. Yeah, not me. That wasn't my first time failing. So you, like, failed, like, ditching dawn and buddy breathe.

I was good on the buddy breathe. Ditch and dawn and something else. I don't know what else I felt. It was, like, three things. It wasn't good. My buddy breathe partner was a freaking wrestler from Iowa. He was a beast of a guy. He was a total freaking panic in the water.

This dude would take the freaking buddy breathe from me because you're using one set of scuba tanks. He would take it and just breathe. off of it for like a long time. And then I'd be like, hey, you know, like give him a single like, hey, bro, I'd need that right now, you know, and so he'd give it back to me. And as soon as I took one breath, he'd be like, you know, giving me the signal, he needs more. But you, but you passed the second time.

Yep, passed it, made it out, made it, made it in the third phase. And then third phase was uneventful, easier, you know, you're just doing a lot of running, swimming, and shooting. So it was, that was a lot easier than second phase for me. And running, you were good. Running good. I had all my run times down before I went into buds. I wasn't so concerned about run. I was just worried about kind of getting injured. Swimming? What about the open ocean swims? Good to go. No factor. No factor. Did you, you were honor man? Yeah, yeah. So I swam- And you were fire in the gut? Yeah, so the way they- Impressive, dude. Yeah, the way they've worked it is I think we voted the fire in the gut before the honor man results came out, you know, and the class voted that for me. And I was like, all right, that's awesome. And then they're like, hey, Ward, you got honor man.

and I was like all right check roger that um well the reason I say that's impressive is the honor man is usually somebody that's like it does really well in all the events like running swimming o course and the fire and the gut is usually a guy that like doesn't it's a guy that had to kind of gruel through it and gut through it to pass yeah like in my class it was jeff higgs who had hypothermia multiple times like five or six times and he just he he he showed back up to Buds even though they kicked him out. He showed up the class in his dungarees and just kept doing it. So he got firing gut, like, of course.

And then Honor Man was Keith Camero. He's a total stud athlete. But for you to get both those, that's pretty freaking... Yeah. So... How did you even get that? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. It didn't feel like it, you know. Were you one of the leading guys? Were you an E4 at this point? So yeah, I'd made E4 off the ship before I went to Bud. So I showed up the buds and I was in E4 already. Were you the class leading petty officer? No, no.

No. a second class nurse no we had a second class in there and I think eventually we had a you know he got the guy uh original lPO he got stress fractures and um had real bad shin splint so he got rolled out and another guy came in and now he took over the class helpio stuff so what was hell week like for you hell week i'll tell you what hell week wasn't it wasn't as bad as i thought it was going to be it sucks for everyone i had enough gas in my tank i think i could have went one more day but you know You know, it was manageable. Yeah.

It was manageable. We just had a guy on who ended up in SF, but he went to Buds, and he didn't make it through buds, but he said Buds was really, really hard. You know, he was like, he goes, if you're thinking you're going to go there, you're going to get what you ask for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for me, Hell Week was kind of cool because I wasn't the best runner. I wasn't the best swimmer.

And so it was, like, hard for me. Like, I had to put out super hard to pass those evolutions, and I had the fear of failing. Yeah. And Hell Week, there's no time limit on, there's no time limit on the evolutions. Just keep going. And I'm pretty good at keeping going. That's a good thing I'm good at. Just keep going no matter what.

The one thing I remember about Hellwick is, you remember when we're doing Steel Pier? That was one of the coldest points I'd had in my life. You know, they were hosing us off on that thing, and it felt like my damn hip flexors were going to pop off. We're doing flutter kicks. Then they'd pop us in the ocean. And the ocean had to been around 60 degrees, but the ocean was way, warmer than still beer. So you're in there and you're like, oh man, this is great.

Keep us in the ocean for a little longer, you know? And they'd pop you back up there and back and forth. And, man, I could barely walk when we got off of that damn pier. So the peer evolution in Hellwick was horrible. And then the instructor was just wrenching down on that rope. When you're carrying the boats to and from child, that shit sucked. You mean wrenching down on the rope so that the thing is pulling down on your head? On your head, yes.

Yeah, I thought my little neck was going to snap off there. Were they jumping from boat to boat when you were in? we had instructors in our boat. I don't remember him jumping to another boat, but we were carrying them around. Instructors were jumping from boat to boat. Damn. And like I remember hearing my freaking neck bones just grinding.

Yep. And I was like, this doesn't seem like it's good for me, but oh well. Yeah. So honor man and firing the gut guy. And of course, you check into team five and no one cares about any of that.

No one cares. You're like, hey, new guy, grab, go clean the shitters. You're like, damn, I thought I got away from these shitters. They're following me everywhere. And you checked into Team 5? Yep, checked into Team 5 in August 1994. And then back then, you know, we started to go through STT,

so they pop you in a platoon and you start doing your platoon workup, but you also got to detach from your platoon and go over and go through sealed tactical training. Oh, no kidding. So, okay, so, but your platoon workup started? Our platoon workup, we, it was almost, we were a couple months before starting the workup, but we were broken off and going to SDF. and the Patoon had just started some things when we had finished up. And you went to the group STT, didn't you?

No, team, I think, no, it was just the team. Just your team? Okay. Just our team. Yep. I thought they had already combined because eventually they combined where every guy went directly to a group, well, not directly, but everyone went through STT together for a while. They still do now, but there was a time when they started.

I thought they started around that time. So with you as just guys from Team 5? Yep, yep. Was it run by Team 5? It was run by Team 5, our training. Yeah, that's the same thing that I did. And did you have any idea what your job was going to be? No.

I got, you know, put in the Batoon, and initially I was an A-dub guy in there, and I worked in air. The problem I had with A-dub is I was left-handed. And we'd had one of our guys in training, and he's like, hey, man, the dude's left-handed. Why do you guys have them shooting an A-dub? because you know all the rounds or the brass and the link yeah link are going out to the right which is going right across your field of fire and then you're in your face and stuff so like hey put them on rear security so got on a rear security for that first platoon and then worked in there and dabbled around and first lieutenant and ordinance what kind of platoon was it just a spec ops

platoon yep yep so we were deploying out to a little island out there on the pacific Did you, how was, how was like your platoon leadership? The first platoon was not good. So I got to see, hey, what wrong looks like, you know. And it was kind of funny. Like it was a classic case of, you know, our OIC was a good dude, but I think he was too smart for his own good. And he was a little more concerned with PT and being in good shape,

and he was a phenomenal athlete, like one of them triathlet guys. but it came at the cost of showing up to dive evolutions on time. It came at the cost of being a good tactical leader down on the ground, which is what everyone's hungry for. So I think he kind of lost a lot of our guy's respects, and he was kind of hard-headed, you know, that classic, I'm smart and everyone else type thing. So it didn't go over good.

And it was just a, it was weird, you know, it was weird. And I didn't realize how, you know, trying to find him a good way to wear this. It wasn't an ideal patoon. You don't realize that until you get into a really good patun. For you, you didn't know anything different. Correct. So for you, that's just the way a platoon was.

Yep, yep. And the scary thing about that is you get such a big impression made on you by your first platoon. Yeah. That if you're not careful, you can think that other platoons are jacked up because they're not like your first platoon. Yeah. You know, you're so impressionable. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was, it was interesting. So there was a huge difference between my first platoon and third platoon I did. We were like the best platoon at the team. And it felt good. Like the leadership was dialed in. They were balanced out. Our platoon chief was squared away, well respected. He was good tactically.

He was good administratively. Like, that's the dude I want to be like. That was in your third platoon. That was my third battune. You know, my second battune was better than my first. Still a lot of room for improvement, you know. And were you rear security? Did you move a deployment or something now?

Yeah, I moved up to a point man at some point. I think my second battoon and third battoon, I was running point. Running point. You're tall for a point, man. I know. How tall are you? Yeah, um, six two. Yeah, because you have a dub written all over you too.

They find out you're left-handed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what were you, you know, just to give people a reminder, this is the 90s. So we don't have a lot of assets. Nope. We don't have a lot of money. Nope. We don't have, we're not really doing any real missions.

barely. You know, some guys like Gardner went to Somalia, but that was a real rare occurrence. Yeah. So what we would do is train, get ready, go on deployment kind of party. It's kind of like what the scene was. Yeah, that was kind of funny because when I showed up to the team,

Gardner was already in there. He already had a couple of platoons on his belt. I'm on the damn quarterdeck watch, and this dude has a long name. He's still in, so I won't say his name, but he had a long name, and I'm like, tension in the Team 5 compound. Someone's so, you know, reports of the quarterdeck, and I butchered his name.

Well, who do you think's calling me on the damn phone, you know, Gardner? And he was a hard case, man. Hey, you effing new guy, say his name right. And I was like, man. That's a pretty good Gardner invitation. Yeah, it was. And I was like, damn, I'm not getting out of the compound tonight without getting taped up and throwing in a damn mill van, you know.

Yeah. So, but. So this was 90, yeah, because at that time, actually yeah at those years you were starting to get a migration to team five from like for instance from team one if people wanted to leave team one if they didn't like the stalog and so there's a whole like gang of guys that went down to team five i remember that to just get yeah to have some freedom no fun one yeah no migrate down the street they were coming on down the street migrate north garter gardner was always at team five so he would but he was just like wow what i want more like

Why would I want to be over there where there's a bunch of rules that you have to follow? Yeah. Oh, Carter was funny, man. Well, you could always find Gardner out when we were doing, working in the desert because you just look for some smoke. Oh, look for fire. Look for fire. There's Gardner. He's lighting some shit on fire. Gardner guy. So you do your third platoon. And then what? What are you thinking? What are you thinking about your life at that point?

So what year is it? So this is, I finished my third platoon in 99. And so I was going through a divorce, had a kid, and I was like, hey, I got to hit the reset button. So I talked to our Massachusetts chief, our CMC. I was like, hey, man, he was like, hey, we want to bring you in here and be the training cell LPO. And I was like, hey, man, I got a lot of baggage right now. I need to break contact here, go reset. So I got orders over to our special boat team at the headquarters element.

And I got put in their training cell. We were basically setting up operational readiness exercises just like we used to run. It's just like we used to run. Yep. And so you went, just so everyone understands, you went from, instead of being a teen training cell, which you're going to be gone all the time doing training trips, you go to a boat training and then the ORE training,

so you're going to be home a lot more. Yes. Yep. And so at that point, I was ready to go back to school. So as soon as I got there, I was already enrolled back in college on like a one-year, I don't know what you'd call it, but, you know, they have the military program.

So I was going to school Saturday and Sunday to knock out all my upper-level units from my bachelor's degree, and then I was working on my lower-level units at the same time. So I wanted to finish up my degree in about three years. And so I'm there going into the training. We're home, away trips every now and again, and it was good, man. I had good leadership in there, these, you know, the special warfare combatant craft crewmen, them dudes are squared away.

And so I got to learn a lot about the boats. And that playoff, or it helped me out later on because you're really learning, you know, hey, how far can these things go? Load capacity, all those key tactical things that matter when it comes into a mission planning process for training or for a mission. Yeah, and what's good is you start to relate those to helicopters and aircraft and vehicles.

And so it gives you a better sense because as a young team guy, I was really lucky I was a communicator. I was a com guy. So I was always involved in the planning more than my peers, right? The point man might plan the end, you know, the route.

Yeah. But like, I was like, okay, here's what we're going to, here's what we're going to do for communications during the insert. And then once we're on target. So I was more involved in planning, which was super lucky. And then I did ARGs where I was working with the Marine Corps and working with the big Navy. So once again, what's the distance that this helicopter can take us to insert us?

What's the distance that we can get with our boats? What's the distance that our ribs? Yeah. Once again, the boats, how far can they take us? What's their capacity? So I was very lucky that I got that opportunity because, Once you realize how to plan with assets, it's a big, it transfers to all different assets.

Yep. Makes you smarter across the board. Yep. Yep. So all that was good. So while I was there at the boat dead, I was like, hey, not much going on in the 90s. I was kind of like ready to punch out of the military.

And so I started putting in my application for the CHP, California Highway Patrol, went through all the interview process, all the testing, got my letter of acceptance, and I was kind of just on standby. going to transition out. And then in August of that year in 2001, I made chief, I don't know how the hell I made chief that, you know, I wasn't expecting to put it on. It was like a total shocker, you know. And then in September 2001, 9-11 happened. I was like, all right, shit,

I'm staying in, man. We've been waiting a long time to get in the base. I've been training for whatever. If we had been seven years. Seven years. Yep. Yep. So, you know, from there, I worked with the CMC over at Team 5 to get back there. And he's like, hey, I got a Patoon Chief slot open if you want him. I was like, hell yeah. You rolled right into a platoon chief slot. Yep. After September 11th. Yes. So I went back to the team. I left like a few months early TAD to go back to Team 5 until my orders could catch up and then got over there and like I think right around

January, February timeframe, we started forming up our platoon getting ready for a 12 month workup cycle. So you called the CMC at Team 5. Yep. And said, hey, bro. Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say I was saying, hey, bro. The other match chief I had with me at the boat debt, he was my second platoon chief. And he's like, hey, I'm working with Jimmy over here at Team 5. You want to, they got a spot open. You won.

I was like, hell yeah, I want it. Dude, my point is like, man, build some good relationships with people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Build some good relationships with people because that pays off, you know? And that means how do you build good relationships? Not by kissing ass, by working hard, by doing a good job. That's how you build good relationships. When I checked into Team 7 after September 11th,

It's actually like, whatever, two years after September 11th, the CEO there, which, first of all, the D. Taylor, who I was friends with, sent me to the next deploying team. So when I left, I had to go to college for a seaman admiral program. When I left college, I went to the next deploying team. That's not luck, bro. And then when I got to the team, the commanding officer, who I had also worked for in the past, fired a platoon commander and put me in as a platoon commander, whatever, three months before deployment.

Damn. That's just, you know, that's based on my past performance. Yep. And relationships for sure, but the relationships are built on the fact that I worked hard and was trustworthy to get the job done. Yep. So you never, plus you just never know who you're going to be working with. No. You know, don't burn any bridges, man.

Don't burn any bridges. Yeah, and just going back to what you're saying there, that your credibility in the teams is everything, your reputation. Yeah. You don't want to have a reputation of being a, you know, a jockass. A jackass. A jocko-cook. Yeah.

Cuckoo for coquess. You don't want to be that. Yeah. And your reputation is a, I don't know what the word to describe it. It is a heavy thing that sticks with you. I should say it's a sticky thing. It's a sticky thing. And if you have good reputation,

it'll stick with you. If you have a bad reputation, it'll stick with you. It can take people years to overturn a bad reputation. And interestingly, it can also take people years to ruin a good reputation. Like a person with a good reputation can make mistakes and people like, oh yeah, don't worry about it. It's Fred. You know, Fred's good to go.

Or a person with a bad reputation can make one little slip up and people are like, you got to be kidding me. We need to get rid of this guy. Pull his trident. Get him out of here. Yeah. And I hate to say that because right, right, That's like what that's like political and all this stuff

But it's just the reality of the situation and there's there's a reason for that Because look human beings are gonna mess up, but if you I guess the difference is you have a good a good person with a good reputation They earn that reputation by consistent good performance Yeah, and eventually that reputation stands on its own and therefore if they make a mistake Which everyone's gonna make mistakes when they make a mistake when they make a mistake which they will people go, ooh, you know, like, guess what? You know what? They've done a hundred good things.

That's how they built that reputation. Now here comes a bad one. All right, we'll carry on. Whereas if you've done a bunch of bad things, and now you do something bad, you're good. You don't have any leg to stand on. Yep, yep. You're screwed.

So that reputation thing, it's everywhere. It's everywhere, but man, in the teams, it's a big thing. Yeah. It's a big thing. It's damn near everything. It's damn near everything. It's damn near everything.

Your rep. So you roll in, now you're a platoon chief at Team 5. Yep. Getting ready to deploy. Yes. Yep. At what point do you realize you guys are going to Iraq? We didn't know until probably January 2003.

So we're, you know, I'm there. I get there in October 2001, January, February, 2002. we start our 12-month-long work-up cycle. And it's going through, and it looks like, hey, we're going into Iraq. You know, no one really understood the scale of that thing, how big it would wind up being, how many years it would wind up being, you know. So when they told us, hey, you're going over, we're like, hell, yeah, man, this is awesome. Because you, like everybody else in the teams, was worried that there would be a three-month war,

and you'd miss the whole thing. Exactly, exactly. Which is so hard to explain to people, especially now. that we've been at war for almost 20 years straight. Yeah. It's hard to explain to people how much it meant to go to war when there was no war going on. Yeah, it was everything.

Like, you were just like, man, this is going to be awesome, you know? And everyone's getting prepped. You don't know, you know, like, I don't know what to expect. Everyone was thinking they had chemical weapons, you know. We were going through all kinds of mop drills with our CBR gear and just going through everything. Are you guys were getting everyone tuned up so we were dialed in? And you're looking at the freaking mop,

uniforms. Hell yeah. And it's like got a elastic draw string at the waist. And like you're thinking, wait a second. This is supposed to keep me alive. Ain't happening. Whatever. Let's rock and roll.

Did you ever think that? Do you ever take that charcoal freaking light laden suit and be like, hey, how wait, you're saying this thing's going to save me? It's got some elastic drawstring around the ankles and that's supposed to keep me good to go. Yeah. That mop suit didn't have a good reputation. Dude, for sure.

It was lacking. I don't know what the U.S. government paid for those mop suits and what level of security they provided us, but I don't have a lot of confidence. I guarantee it was a lot. And the gas masks, dude, like one of the chances. Yep. But that's what we were getting told we were going to do.

And not one single guy said, no, because I did one op where we moped up because we thought we were hitting a target that had alleged. some whatever chemical weapons and you know what everyone did everyone got jocked up everyone put those gas masks on everyone put those stupid freaking uniforms on i'll tell you what we had quite a few missions when we got over to iraq where we were going around with some of those three-letter agencies looking all over the place seeing what was around and everything we saw was uh was old it was like it'd been there left you know nothing new at all you know um as far as cbrr cbr yeah shit like all the facilities and everything was like nothing's been here for a long-ass time.

So all right. Well, let's, so you get done with your workup, you find out you're going to Iraq in January and you guys are going on deployment in like April or something? Yep, yep, April timeframe. So Team 3 was already over there and just going back to your relationships piece.

We had a couple guys on the battoons that were dialed in with some Team 3 guys. And they started sharing information, you know, back and forth. Hey, here's what's going on. Here's what to expect. So that gave us a really good idea on what we needed to, to prep for.

And so right around April timeframe, we deploy over to Kuwait, and we're staged in Kuwait waiting to go into Iraq. Team 3 is, I think, wrapping things up at that point, and we might have already turned over with them. And we're actually in Kuwait for a handful of weeks there. I want to say right around three weeks. And we actually did our first op out of Kuwait into Iraq on 53s. Yeah, that sounded like a crazy op.

It was good. It was a good shakeout. Nothing happened. But we planned for 96 hours. We went through all of our helicopter rehearsals, you know, and it was a big op. We loaded up those, our DPVs, Desert Patrol vehicles, and we went in with a big package.

What was your mission? To go take down the dam. Oh, to get control. Hadith? It wasn't Hadith. It was somewhere up north, Mukerrim. Okay. Mookerium dam.

So we went up there, and it was a long-ass flight in there, and we're all jacked up on the catnep. You think you're going to get in the shit, you know, and we're flying there. We got our E&R plan laid out in case a helicopter gets shot down. We got our mop gear with us. And we're roping down all 53s onto the dam. With our CBR gear, you look like, you know, Michelin Snowman coming out.

Were you masked up when you fast roped? We were not. The game plan was secure the dam, get everything set up, get everything cleared, and then they had some tunneling systems in there because it was a dam. They wanted us to go inside the tunneling system, see if there's any, you know, weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons in there. So once we secured the dam, which, took a little while because you don't really think about how big a dam is on the inside.

There's a lot of shit going on in there. Is this a one platoon up? This is, so we had our, like a platoon plus. No, we had Patoon Plus. We had our Patoon, our mobility element, and we also brought in some STV above us, which was good. They'd already been there and they'd cleared a ton of ships, small, you know, a little, what do you call the little boats out there?

Dows. Dows, they cleared a ton of dial. So these guys had already had some reps on their belt. So we were excited to get them on the opera. of those but yeah we went in there uneventful cleared it checked the tunnels nothing there then we you know waited there a couple days and then we uh pulled out but that that's a that's like a big that's the big mish that we were planning for in the 90s like that type of thing yeah like hey here it is yeah you're gonna helo in this is the big mish and plus that was your first combat operation yes

yep it was a big deal it felt good to get that under our belt in the mid and we we um it was a good shakeout for planning because you know you're over there going through the 96 hour planning cycle um a lot of good lessons learned first time using 53s on a mission like that um so it was good you know and one of the things i jacked up was me and another guy our medical guy who scored away duty stayed in the teams for a while but we roped down and we had our cBR gear strapped on our sides and so as we're coming down we got that damn molly pack you know you got to weave it in and out of the nylon. I didn't weave mine in and out like I was supposed to.

So I went through a couple, but I left like the bottom undone. And I don't know if I hit the wheel or the skin of the aircraft, but that thing, that damn thing came popping off. Of course, I had my MVGs in there. Oh. The helo, you know, and the backpack goes over the side. Same thing with the other cat that was with me. We think that we're able to wash, you know, put it into the river and stuff.

And everyone always talked about, hey, it's not a big deal. You can, you know, write it off as a combat. But it's a combat loss. That's what everyone was talking about. You know, like, all right, I guess it's not the big of a deal. Combat last. I was like, dude, the skipper was not happy. The combat loss right off was not a thing.

Well, what's really not a thing is trying to do a night clearance without nods, without night vision. We white lighted everything then. Okay. So back then we're coming up on the dam. We're white lighting it and then even the clearance on the inside. So you were lucky. In that respect. What do you mean?

You said you lost your nods, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm saying you're lucky that you didn't need them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, that is accurate. Because that would have freaking, you'd have just been blind walking around, waiting to walk into a wall.

Yeah, it wasn't. You got to just buddy along with somebody. Yeah, it was a good lesson learned from me, especially being in the two-in-chief. Did you, that little Molly weave? How many Molly weaves did you make? Like two? I think I had about three in there.

I think there was around five. And I just left out the last two and snapped it in. Snapped her in. Yeah, snapped her in. Get her done. She's good. Not so good. Not a good situation.

And the skipper was pissed. Oh, he was hot, man. I was on the mat with him. Like, he's, you know, calling me to task on that one. Yeah, luckily, like I said, you had a good reputation. Like, if you had a bad reputation at that point, that would have really sucked. Yeah. Yeah.

Would have really sucked. Yep. So that was your first big Mish, and then what, but that was out of Kuwait? That was out of Kuwait, yep. Then what happened? Then we moved up into Baghdad. We had a little camp setup out there out of, we called Camp Posey. You know, we had a, I don't know if you know, Posey, but it killed a warrant officer

Vietnam, dude. Yeah, yeah. Good, like good stories. The best, man, the best. And we had another guy. We called them Ranger, and those two dudes came in. They helped build out the camp. You know, we took a Ranger with us on quite a few missions, good dude.

And then we just started operating out of Posey into Baghdad. We were right there at the Baghdad International Airport. And what I was impressed with looking back, what I am impressed at looking back is you guys were freaking super proactive in getting missions started. Like you guys were super proactive in forming relationships and getting the intel that you needed from various sources and starting to do a lot of operations.

Yeah, we set the foundation for you guys. Because you guys came in and did like four times more than what we did. But we were definitely laying that foundation. And one of the things we had, our task unit, senior enlisted leader, he was dialed in and he came from Damnick. And so he had a lot of good relationships. And, you know, Damnik was over there at that point. And so he was tied in with a lot of the three-letter agencies, which opened up the door with quite a few missions, shared intelligence. So that really helped set that foundation for us.

And then from there, we were starting to get, you know, some good missions. And hell, even if you're getting one mission, you're like, all right, we're good to go, you know, because you think, We all think we're going to be out of there within six, seven months. Like the whole thing shutting down. Yeah. But obviously it didn't. Yeah. So what was your, you guys got in some gun fights too?

Yeah. What was the first one? Like, what do you remember? Our first shootout was kind of funny. We were dialing in our standard operating procedures for a shootout, which we hadn't done. Like, you know, we went through training. Training was good, but it was nowhere near the level that, you know, we provided our guys once we got over to trade it. It wasn't anywhere near that.

So we identified a few of the gaps we had. And we developed, we brought in the platoon, we brought in guys with experience, and we developed our standard operating procedure for what we're going to do inside a house if we get in a shootout. And it was basically suppressed fire, cover, crash maneuver. Using a cover and move,

we're going to deploy some crashes. Someone's going to be suppressing fire while all that's happening. So on this particular mission, we went in and the house, the guy marked for us, was the wrong house. We didn't know that. On imagery, everything looked dialed in tight in the market.

It looks good. We go in, breach the door, so we've gone explosive. So now the neighborhood's starting to wake up. We clear the house. I kept everything on the clock. We clear the, you know, two-story house in under two minutes. Then we get the call on the net. Hey, reset, the actual target house is down the street.

So we reset, reconsolate. You know, one's on the left, two's on the right. Gear check, you know, sensitive equipment check. Everyone's good. Come back out of the house. Grab our wood ladders. Patrol back down the road. and the right house is marked.

And we go up there, and it was the right house. It had a double security screen door. We go explosive on it. We got a failed breach. So now it's turning into a big construction project. Guys are up with the quickies. And not to mention, just so everybody knows, like, after you hit the first house,

everybody in a two-mile square radius knows what's happening. And if you're in that neighborhood, you know exactly what's happening. So if you're a bad guy in that neighborhood, you are now alert and ready to be attacked. and you're prepping. Yep. Exactly.

So now we've got a fail breach. We're on the outside of the structure. The preachers are working through, getting through that heavy security screen door. We're kind of raking windows. We're deploying crashes in there to keep people away from the front door. We finally get entry.

Clear the first floor. Everything's good. We're dialed in. And back then, we always pressed into our guys. Hey, you make the call. If you stack on the stairs, you're the number two guy. You got three or four more guys behind you. Make the call and go up the stairs.

We don't want to just have this lag period where you're waiting for me or the OIC to make a decision tell you what to do, decentralized command. So the guys stack on the stairs. I'm right there. I just came out of the kitchen area. They start moving up the stairs

and there's a young kid upstairs with an AK-47. So he's like 10 feet away and he's just full auto. Gak, got, got, cock, ca, ca, ca, ca, and our guys are on the stairs are trying to return fire, but the volley's just all around our dudes, man. I'm yelling at the guys, get back down here. They come back down the stairs. and then we go through our shootout procedures, which paid dividends. They worked.

We couldn't get at the guy because the guy's on the second deck, and now we're down below him. So there's no way to get the direct fire. So our guys are exposing themselves a little bit trying to get an angle here. Guys are deploying crashes. We deployed about five, six crashes. There's no more gunfire. We're like, all right, check.

We're going up. So, you know, we go up the stairs. The kid had actually dropped his gun. We clear the second deck. There's freaking smoke everywhere. So it was just, I mean, we're gagging. there's so much smoke in the house. Go up there, the guy's not there.

We're like, where the hell will this guy go? And our guys go out on the deck patio, and they're clearing, and now we're looking really hard. Like, where is this guy? And the kid is a young kid hiding behind curtains, and, you know, the guy's there. And then, boom, our guy's muzzle strike the guy, get him into the center of the room. We cuff him up, and that was that. So.

Anyone get hit by him, by the bad guy? No, so we, you know, our guy heading up the stairs first, the first guy, up he had a grazer over his MVGs it actually hit his mount but he didn't get hit it was like it was a total pulp fiction pulp fiction scenario boom boom boom yeah like he had angels on his because that could have been a bad night we got two three guys hit and that one ball and no one got hit we we were extremely lucky how many how many rounds do you think the guy shot one mag or two mags did he get a reload no no no he didn't get a reload i think he got a full mag off somewhere in between 25 and 30 rounds damn dude yeah from 10 feet yeah yep

Close. I mean, I don't know how he, you probably missed because he was on full auto. You know how those things get? You're just bouncing all around when you go on full auto. And the dude, you know, the guy was just a total douchebag that shot at his dude.

He's like, I love George Bush. I love Coca-Cola. And you're like, you just shut up, man. So yeah, we cuffed him up. And that was emotional when you're getting shot at that close and you're dealing with a bad dude that just tried to kill you, you know, those emotions get jacked up pretty high. We had some good teammates there.

I mean, I wanted to kill the dude. But we can't do that, you know, as much as you want to. It's not going to be good. But we got them cuffed up, took them over her to our detention facility. And, you know, the guys did good that night. And they did good because of the training, the talkthroughs that we did, going through the checklist, going through multiple rehearsals. Every time these missions came up, all that panned out.

All that worked in our favor for that one. event for that one shootout that all worked for us you know having having contingency plans which is that what you guys had and it's what you know we have all kinds of contingency plans i mean every i ad every immediate action drill that we do is a contingency plan like oh if we get shot out from over there this we're going to do we can shot up from over there's what we're going to do so having those contingency plans it just makes it so that you don't really have to think decentralized command just works everyone knows what's due they know what the objective is they make it happen and so you can make very little call very You can give very little direction and things still will proceed the way they're supposed to.

Yeah. What about your next gun fight? So our next one, I think, was our helicopter. So we'd gone in after this guy and he shot an RPG and killed an army guy. And so we were going in after him. And so we came in, we did quite a bit of helo work that deployment. So we came in with our helicopters and our game plan was to, you know, land on the X. assault the building and get grab the guy and go and he was out in this uh think he was actually out

in falusio romadi so there were some palm groves out there so on insertion we come in and in the helicopters went to the wrong house you know and our m bg's back then they're kind of they're not good so we could see how that so we we set down and we're like this is not the right house get back up they get back up do one orbit come back into the right house land us we dump off clear the building everything's on a billful we get the bad guy now as we're going through all the sensitive side exploitation. We're trying to grab as much as we can on this guy. You know, we get a report as we're breaking out that, hey, there's two or three armed guys coming your way in through this Palm Grove. So the helicopters were a ways out, but we had a gunship overhead.

And so we set up a quick hasty perimeter, little footh shook, and we're going to wait to see if these guys came into us. Well, they never came into us. They sent something was wrong, and they bagged out. So we get set up in the Palm Gros, when we're calling in the helicopters at this point to come pick us up. And as we're setting up the perimeter, you know, someone calls out over the radio, hey, man, there's a tracer fire that just went by. And no one else had seen it. There's one dude paying attention in his field of fire, sees one round come in. And so he calls it out. So we kind of go on hyper alert here. We're waiting and we're watching. And as the heloes are coming in, this dude, they were probably like 300 yards from us. They start opening up with AAA fire

over our LZ. Now, the only thing protecting us at that time is we had a Palm Grove. And the LZ's here and the house is somewhere over here. So this tracer fire is coming over the Palm Grove. And the issue we had is like communicating this back up the chain. We had our tasking and commander on the ground with us on this one. And some people just didn't see this shit. Some people didn't see the tracer fire coming. And I picked it up pretty damn quick once the guy called it out. And you're like, holy shit, that's a good volley of fire. We're going to get a helicopter shot down if we're not careful of her. So anyways, the helicopter comes in, picks up the package, grabs our headquarters on it. They bounce out. And then we just go over to our secondary LZ, which

was, you know, pretty easy. But it was very uncomfortable knowing that, hey, you got AAA fire coming over the top of you, you know, one of these helos get shut down. This is going to be a long night, especially out here in this rural area. We didn't have any backup. And then what was your opt tempo like? It wasn't bad. It wasn't like we were going out digging targets every night.

But we would, we got a point there where we were going out at least twice a week, I'd say, once or twice a week. Yeah, more like twice a week. But in between that, we were doing other stuff. Like you're doing mobility stuff. You're going to do a little bit of sniper stuff here and there, which was good. And then just going back on decentralized command,

you know, the other CQC or close quarter combat shootout we had, you know, our guys were going up to this house. And, man, there's freaking telephone wires everywhere, man. And you know how that is. You're like, there's no rhyme or reason. Why do you guys live with this? Just wires dangling. You know, and we've got to hop over this damn gate, you know,

to get to this house. So we literally like 30 or 40 wires. Yeah. Like you could be just total mayhem wires. Yep. And we, we planned for it. We actually picked it up on the imagery. We're going through our rehearsals and we're like, hey, there's wires everywhere.

As you're coming over at this spot right here, be careful. Don't get your nods hit on them. Don't, you know, we got to be quiet. So we start going up and over. We get the entry team over and actually we had our full squad into the courtyard because the distance from the gate to the actual house was a lot. And it was a big house. So we needed assaulters up front.

So we get up front. and the entry teams going through, you know, our breacher's going through laying the charge on the door, going through all the procedures. And the next year you get this, bang, bang, bang,

doors, rounds are coming through the door. And so, you know, our breacher, we borrowed him from another platoon. He was dialed in, good dude. You and Leif know him. But so he's laying the charge and he's using his cover right. If he's in the center of the door,

the dude's getting shot with a 45-cow pistol. But he's off to the side, using his covers like he's supposed to, sets the charge. Our guys, our other guys, holding security, they go through our standard operating procedures. They're waking the windows. They're shooting in through the window to get the person away from it,

and they're dumping crashes in to keep the person away, kick them out away from the doorway. So boom, we blow it, of course, there's a propane tank there, so the whole damn doorway catches on fire. So now we can't, you know, we've got a failed breach area. We can't get in. The door's open, but there's just this massive propane fire going on. So we've got to go to our secondary door,

you get over the secondary door, and these dudes got a damn drop bar on there. So, I mean, it took us forever to get in. It was a shit show. We get entry into the doorway, and there's like a family of eight people sleeping in there. And they're like, they're still sleeping. Like, how is it possible?

We just blew in your door. There's gunshots going on, and you all are still, like, physically seeping. Like, zombies, you know? So anyways, we got on there to clear the building. That sounds so unbelievable if you haven't been to Iraq before. Like, you can't explain things like that. Yeah.

You can't. You can't explain things like that. No. To get an explosive breach, a failed breach, shotguns going off of fire and the team, the freaking family just racked out. Yep, they're racked out. Yeah, they were zombies, man.

Did you ever catch the guy that was shooting through the door? Yeah, it was actually the, I think it was one of the guy's wife shooting through there. And she's like, hey, I thought you were looters. You're like coming in to rob our house. We're like, yeah, no, we're not looters, you know. But anyways, we got that situation all squared away. That's a rough.

Well, when I say that's a rough one, That's the kind of mission where things can go really sideways. Like if you start fragging that room, which you could easily do to say, look, we just got shot at. I'm throwing some frag grenades into this room. And actually, you know, you got a family, eight-person family,

and they're getting blown apart by frag grenades because the woman was trying to defend her house from looters, which again, may sound like a crazy story, and it could also be the absolute 100% truth. I don't know. I'm not going to try and replay the situation that you live through, but that could be legit. Yeah.

And you have no idea when you're out there. And that would have been horrible. Yeah, it'd been a freaking nightmare. Yep, yep, yep. Any other big missions that you guys did? Didn't you guys do like some, some like SA7 recovery on or something? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, I forgot about that one.

So we were out, we went out there, you know, working with some other intel people out there and they're like, hey, we're going after some of this sensitive stuff here. You know, anyways. So we went and hit the, this farmhouse. We got good air coverage overhead of us. No one's there. The place is a ghost town. We start going through our sensitive side exploitation. And man, it was like a gold mine. You know, the perimeter around it was just this big huge cash. And so we found a truckload of,

you know, S-A-7 and S-814 missiles, a ton of RPGs, rocket propell grenades, and launchers. And so things started getting a little spicy around the areas. We're calling a little bit of fire support and we actually had to turn that over to an army unit who came in the next day during daylight and they started going through the field and it was like right i mean it was like radio it was like enough shit to outfit a damn army you know um so that was a that was a good off nothing happened but we found a lot of stuff so you know you leave there feeling pretty good about it and that so that's that was a good that was a freaking great deployment for you guys especially in like whatever 2003 that that deployment was pretty freaking epic oh man we love

there and we're like we're the man we're never coming back here again yeah because no no no no no it never thought you'd be back there again no no and it was good and so the one thing we did that was really good with our Patoon that we learned from the team three guys when we relieved them is we shared information you know I was back with you know your old your brother there at team one communicating everything I had back to him hey here's what we're doing here's what worked here was here's what didn't work here's some things to think about with mobility and you just try to share as much information as possible that way the next guy's coming in

they know what to expect and they can adjust training coming at a high level ready to rock and roll I know when you guys came in you guys did I don't know four time four or five times the amount of missions we did for that deployment yeah well you you guys were pushing a lot of information back to us I know you guys were feeding my platoon chief

and my platoon chief was already like a mobility kind of mobility dude and so he was just amped bro we were doing freaking uh freaking tire change drills like NASCAR like a Pit crew. I mean, it was just like it was on. But here's the funny thing. We were, we were on an ORE prior to that deployment.

So like maybe three months before going on deployment, we were on an O.R. We did our ORE shipboard. And we went and we were doing hydrographic reconnaissance of Red Beach up at Camp Pendleton with lead lead, live and slate, dude. Like it was the world hadn't caught up. Yep. Right? The world hadn't caught up yet. And thank God, you know, like after that, we were, we found some.

Humvees we borrowed Humvees from like the CBs or something and started running up running you know training ops down at like the old NTC the old naval training center where they had a bunch of old old buildings that were all dilapidated but we started running little ops in there with our you know and our task unit commander had actually been in Iraq on the push up so he had some experience our task unit SCA had also been in Iraq on the pushup so he had some experience which was awesome and they're both great guys. So we were, and we were just going off

of the reports of how you guys were doing stuff. And we were just like, okay, this is what they're doing? Cool. This is what we're doing. This is what they did.

This is how they rigged their vehicles. Okay, this is how we're going to rig our vehicles. So that's kind of what we did. And then I know you and I did a turnover. And wasn't, we did it like Bahrain, right? Yeah,

Bahrain. That's where I was at. We had a platoon left up there and our mobility element was left up there. And we came back a few weeks early out of Bahrain just because there was enough room to bring everyone in. So,

yeah. So we sat down, did an awesome turnover with you guys, with you and your OIC. Yep. Who's a freaking great dude? That was awesome. And I was kind of, like, I knew who you were. Yeah.

Just from, I guess, being around. But then that was when I was like, that's when I first really remember getting a working. Like, you know, I might have seen you at McPe's or something. You know, you know, but the first time I ever actually got a working, I think that was the first time I ever did some kind of working. I think that was the first time I crossed with you.

Yeah. Yeah. Always hear you the name. out there. I mean, I was roommates with Taco and Taco had nightmare stories with you and Chris. He's like, those guys, man. They need to quit beating us up. We were

we were hostile on the seals, yeah. We had the gang mentality for sure. For sure. So what did you do when you got home from that deployment? So got back off that deployment and there was another platoon chief slot open so that seems he was like, hey man,

the guy that was going to come doesn't look like he's going to come. You want to do another one? I was like, Hell yeah, I do. So then, you know, started form up another platoon, got a bunch of new guys in, new OIC, and started another 12-month workup cycle. Dang. You got freaking two platoon chief slots. Yep.

Yep. It was awesome, man. That's the best job in the world. The task unit spot is good with the platoon chief slots a lot. Oh, yeah. Platoon chief. I mean, I always say like E-5 in a platoon. I was just talking to some guys the other night that were E-5 awesome student.

I was like, hey, you're good, man. E-5 and a platoon is an awesome place to be. And it is. It is. It's an awesome place to be. And hopefully you reach a point where you go, I can take care of those awesome guys. And that's when you go, okay, I'm going to be an opio

or I'm going to be a platoon chief or I'm going to be a, you know, if you go the officer route, you can try and go that officer route. But at some point you realize the best thing I can do as it, to be a good E5, to take care of the other few E5s, means I got to get promoted.

I got to take care of them. And the best way I can do that is to increase my rank a little bit. Yeah. So I have a little bit more sway. Yep. We don't have to do dumb shit. Yep, yeah. You know, I'm complaining about my boss.

You know, you can only complain so much before you got to actually do something about it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's rare that someone gets to do platoon chiefs back to back like that. I mean, it's rare that a guy even gets to do two platoon chiefs, slots. That's freaking rare. Yeah, we're getting better at it now. That's good. That's one of the things that I know with the headquarters level they're really looking at.

You know, before our rating really took control over, hey, you can only do You got to move out. Another guy's got to move in. And they started looking at that because, you know, we had, we were losing quite a few tactical leaders. Like their guys are getting fired. Why are they getting fired? Hey, they need more seasoning.

Yeah. Hey, let's grab, let's keep two, three guys that are doing really good to keep that, what's the word I'm looking for? Continuity. Continuity at the team. And these are dialed in people. You know, you can count on them and move it forward. So we've gotten better with that over the last 10 years.

So those guys, it's common now. your top two or three guys to stay of the team. Even if they pick up senior chief, they're going to stay in that Patoon Chief. Yeah, that's awesome. Yep. That's awesome. And so then you do another workup.

You must have been freaking dialed now. You're doing a second Patoon Chief workup? The second Patoon chief was way easier than the first. Hell yeah. The first one, so I didn't do a Patoon LPO, so I was sucking on a fire hose. Okay. You know what I'm saying? Hell, yeah, you were.

Yeah, so, you know, setting up the Patoon, there's just. And you had never worked in training either. Nope. Not a team. See, I'll tell you, man, my whole, you know, that's probably, you know, my first three platoons, the leadership strategy tactics we were talking about, my first three platoons, I learned these certain things, right? And I wrote about it in leadership strategy and tactics. But where, that was like where all these seeds got planted.

Yeah. But I'll tell you what, you want to know where the fertilizer and the water came from on those seeds. It was working in training cell at SEAL Team 1, where I was a single in, enlisted E5. And you know what trip I went on? Every freaking trip there was. I taught everything. I would volunteer for every course.

We would go teach land warfare. Then I'd teach diving. Then I'd teach CQC. I'd just do it. And I was the main instructor on any of them. I was just a guy that was out there like, I'll go on that trip. Oh, I'll go on that trip.

And that's where those little seeds started to come to fruition. And the biggest thing was when you're instructing, and you know this now that we worked in land warfare. When you're watching iads or you're teaching iads, you are de facto detached. So you're watching and you can see and you realize how easy it is when you're detached. And when you realize how easy it is when you're detached and you go, wait a second, if I'm in there, I just need to take a step back and see what the hell's going on and that can make a good call. So that is where I learned so much.

So for you have to not done that, definitely had to make your first platoon chief go around a little rough. It was hard. I got lucky like the R. sister Patoon, that Patoon chief was dialed in. He'd done all those things. He was on like seventh Patoon. I was doing my fourth at the time. And so I leaned on him.

I'd ask him 100 million questions on things. And he always gave me good guidance, man. Yeah. Dano, good dude, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So then you get done with that one. Yep.

And now you're going through it again and now you're kind of like, I'm like, this is easy day. You're dealing with the same issues. I got all my standard operating procedures in place. So for every block of training we're doing. Plus, you're a freaking combat. vet. I'm a combat vet.

You're kind of the man. I'm ready to get after it. Yeah. So it was way easier, man. Way easier. You know, you're always going to have those same personnel issues

and now you know how to deal with them. You know what Wright looks like. Yeah. And then what was that? Then you were going back to Iraq again? Yep. So we wound up back over, you know,

you guys came in in late September 2003. We went back in September 2004. And a place was just a disaster. Roadside bombs all over the place. I mean, you know the drill. Four fighters all over the place. It was a shit show. Yeah, that was the end of my first deployment.

It was when we went and got Yacubi, which was Sotter's guy, and that set the whole freaking thing into just a total mayhem. Yep. And we saw that. We saw the, like, it was a radical change. Yeah. Because before that, like in what would be, in March of 2004, It was kind of like, okay, we'll go do a mission.

In April, we were, you could look out and you'd see smoke and fire and vehicles burning. Like it was totally, it was a very different scenario in that one month period in April of 2004. Damn, yeah. And it just got worse from there. Yeah, and then by the time you guys showed up. Yeah, it was a disaster. I remember, and we were doing the PSD mission, so we weren't doing our typical direct action. But we got in there in my platoon, we got split up.

we're in squads now supporting other platoons because you need X number of people to protect these guys. And one of the good things that the headquarters element did is they rotated guys out for a sniper mission. So if you're a sniper qualified, you come on in. And so we covered down within our PSD elements and guys would go out and do sniper stuff. So I was lucky I got to get out there on Haifa Street a couple times. Were you a sniper? Yeah. Yeah, I was a sniper. Yes, I went through sniper school in 98. And that was back. when it was out at KOLINGA and stuff. And when I got back off of that deployment,

and I went to work for Mark. He was running the sniper course, so I did a couple instructor, you know, courses with him. So it was good. And that helped me out for, you know, the 2003 deployment, 2004, the 2006 deployment, you know.

But I remember getting out on Haifa Street and it was the first time we're out, and we did sniper work in 2003, but there wasn't nothing going on. Everything was under control. And I remember going out there and we're supporting an army unit. They're doing a clearance.

So we come in, dump out of the Bradley, set up in the buildings. We got all our sectors covered. And like there's this moge in an apartment building with an RPG, launching RPGs at Apaches that are in the area. And like, you know the deal. Like you don't shoot a rocket from a room. That's not a good practice, right? You're going to jack yourself up.

He's just in there getting after. And like so the Apache's coming and they're just like, go, go, go. And they just take the dude out. And you're like, holy shit. ship man this place is not good totally different and then you come out for extract the brads are coming in to polis out and like there's rounds coming in at you we didn't deal

with that in 2003 2003 we had the upper hand you know you're operating at nighttime but we had the upper hand with what we were doing so it's just it was different and at that same time at 2004 you had Phantom Fury out there and Fallujah going off you know you had good dudes supporting that and that

was just I remember looking up on the jock screen and the Marines are going through and doing a clearance nighttime and there's like grenades getting chucked out and the Marines are just going in and getting after it I mean they're carrying like 25 mags in there yeah and going building by building you're like god bless the Marine Corps man these dudes are like badasses and we all wanted to be there like hey switch with us man come do the PSD thing we want to be out there doing what you're doing but so anyway so you know phantom fury just died down like hey we want to send a a sniper

element up to Samara and so like Laif got chosen to be OIC and I was like hey they selected me to come in there with Lief I was like cool put our 10 man 11 man team together went up to Smar and we thought we were going to get after it you know it was go time it was go time we were going to get some and it was uneventful man nothing happened we set up damn near we were out in the streets every damn day said nothing man and it was just you know they the guys were going after they're real cage it was like civilians you don't know what your enemy looked like they'd come in set an IED you didn't even know they said it and they'd be out of there how many how much did you

How much time did you spend on Haifa Street? Not much. I'd say I probably got out there about six or seven times total for that. And I was only in Iraq for 90 days during that time period. And then you rotated out to the Pacific? Yep, yep, over to P.I. Yep, Guam and P.I. And the PSD was, look, it was a hard mission and everything, but relatively uneventful

because that's what it was supposed to. So at that time, seals were providing security for the top seven. Something like that. authorities in Iraq and, you know, in charge of keeping them safe and did an awesome job. Yeah. But that, in doing an awesome job, means there wasn't action, thankfully. Yeah. Because action probably would have been a giant 2000 Palm V-bid that would have killed everybody

or something crazy like that. Yeah. In 2004, that was the first time I really started seeing the, you know, the truck bombs, the car bombs they were building. And, I mean, they built them, you know, this. They put so much explosive. of Zememem that the damn springs and shocks would break on them. You know, they'd be trying to get on base and they're like jacked up.

Yeah. Yeah. Not good. So, but that, but that wrapped up another deployment for you. Yep. And, and then, so then what, then what'd you do? So then stayed at Team 5. I made, uh, senior chief in 2005, picked up a task.

Dude, you're making up for going to the fleet U.D. Yeah. I mean, you're making rank quick. Yeah, man. Yeah. Were you making rank quick for on average, above average? It seems like you are. Yeah, so I would say probably above average up to Chief.

And then, you know, I got passed over the first time for Senior Chief and then made it the second time. Rightfully so. You don't want guys to make rank too fast. You want guys to really understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, which takes time. It takes a lot of reading, takes repetitions. And I think when I put on Chief, I was undergunned, you know, with my training and my experience. So it was good that I got passed over my first time for Senior Chief. You know, so anyway, so I made Senior Chief in 2005 and then picked up a task unit.

And, you know, from there we started working up to relieve you guys. When did you guys know that you were going to relieve us? I would say right around March, April timeframe of 2006, right when you're deploying over. So we got there. Yep, right around that same time frame. Yep. Yep, they're like, you guys are going to come in behind these guys and replace them. At what point did you guys start tracking like, what was?

happening. You guys started getting hot and heavy in what May June time frame? Yeah, in April time frame. April time frame. Yeah, like as soon as we got there, it was getting crazy. It was right around then. And like we, all of us were just kind of thinking, hey, it's going to be like a Fallujah style clearance.

And Fallujah went pretty quick. Yep. It went pretty quick. You know, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of good work being done. A lot of people getting killed, U.S. soldiers getting injured. we thought it was going to be like that. We didn't know it was going to be what it was. We hadn't gone up against that type of enemy before.

Yeah, well, we thought it was going to be a Fallujah type thing too. And we talked about this on the unraveling with Daryl Cooper that we, well, that's what we got told. When we got there, they're like, hey, you guys are going to, we're going to do Fallujah. And we're like, thank you, thank you. This is going to be because Fallujah at that point was a real high watermark for for just awesome crushing kinetic operations by the Marine Corps. And there was seals in their support, and they did a great job.

So we were thinking, okay, like, it's on. And it's going to be whatever. It's going to be two weeks or three weeks, maybe a fighting and we'll get cleared through the city. But it ended up not going that way. It ended up being that there's a smart move by the prime minister who was a Shia to recognize that if,

if the Shia army, which it basically was a Shia army, went in there and did this type of crushing kinetic sweep through Ramadi, which was most, which was Sunni, it would have set up Sunni versus Shia civil war. And so he said, we're not doing that. You're going to find another way to do it. And the other way to do it was a counterinsurgency, was going into the neighborhoods and trying to pervert, preserve the infrastructure and trying to keep the civilian populace as safe as you can as you do it and yet at the same time do battle with these insurgents. So that's what that's what we ended up doing. And I always wonder what it was like for you guys once we started taking a lot of casualties

and once we started losing guys, you guys must have been like a little, a little nervous about coming. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely, man. No one had been through, you know, that amount. of combat like for us at that point like heavy combat you know we had a our group Commodore he was out there with us doing our you know ORE what do they call the final battle problem and he's like hey man you guys are going to Ramadi standby there's a lot going on there it was like I mean a lot going on there and and I think things really hit

home for us like I remember Cali coming back when he was shot and like you look at these saying you're like okay that's manageable like hey he's shot he's coming in through it looks like he's going to be okay and then shit really hit the fan for us when mark was killed we're like holy shit this is we're going into something that we like you know we hadn't been in before um so we had like we dialed in our training you guys were giving us information telling us everything you're doing what's working what's not working we had some hard conversations with our operators, hey man, like someone's going to get wounded. Someone might get killed. Like we there's some of these things we can't control. What we can do is our rehearsals,

trained to this, make good decisions on the battlefield to reduce our casualty levels. But we're going to be shot at. Someone's going to get hit. That's coming. And at the end of day, it's going to be us standing here that's going to kind of get us out of this shit. So we got to run a tight game. We've got to be tight with what we're doing. And the guys understood that. You know, the guys understood that. but it's different when you get on the ground and you got a lot of rounds coming at you, you know. Yeah, you know, it's, I'm trying to think of a way to explain the difference that in my mind that you got. Like, it seems like, but prior to that point, most of the times when guys would go out, even when guys would go out and get wounded or guys would go out and no one had been killed in Iraq yet, but even in Afghanistan, it was like, it was a mission, right?

It was like a mission, an isolated mission where something had happened. And then once that isolated mission is over, it's like you reset the clock. And now, okay, we're in a different, it's a different mission. And so it's almost like you do get to reset the clock. But in Ramadi was like you were in the same game and the clock was freaking ticking the whole time. And so you guys knew that you were just going to come and get in the game. And it wasn't going to be one mission. and it wasn't going to be three missions.

It was going to be mission after mission after mission after mission, and it was going to be as many days as you were there. And yeah, I remember you guys showing up and I remember actually briefing your task unit and literally saying, you guys are going to take casualties, which was the, it was a thing I was thinking to myself, do I say that?

Is that a bad attitude? Is that a negative attitude? Is that a self- fulfilling prophecy or is that just the fucking truth about what's going on yeah and I would rather have you guys thinking okay this is the truth and if we can avoid it great but we have to be ready and we need to do everything we can but we got to be ready for it yep yep I remember you guys were telling us man we had we had our go bags ready so someone gets injured or our standard operating procedure in place with who's going with the guy that's injured all of our passports

IDs everything we're in the bag someone gets injured boom they're getting on the helo with the injured guy they're pushing out, you know, at least getting them over to Germany. So we were definitely in the right mindset. You know, in our first op out there, you guys helped set that up out there at Firecracker. Oh, yeah. And that was a good one with the Marine Corps up. We set you guys up at Firecracker for your first time. We're like, hey, you guys are going around Race Cracker.

We'll just call this operation Firecracker because there's going to be some shit going down up there. God. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good first shakeout, you know, and the Marine Corps is up there. You know, the colonel that was running the Marine Corps. I forget his name. Yeah, yeah.

He's just a good. Outstanding. Good leader. Just good, like, good dude, man. So we set that up. And, you know, our guys, our snipers killed a few guys on that one, which was good. You know, and I just remember, I was a Humby out in the street, and he's pulling security down from us. And the dude starts, you know, gets little bit of an RPG.

And, like, the Marines are. dumping out of it and they're doing cover, move drills, getting back, and they're taking small arms fire and we're a position where we can't, you know, the enemy's in dead speech, we can't even do anything to support them. They come back and there's a couple, like, smaller mortars that came in that day, you know, didn't hit our building, but they were out in front of us there. It wasn't too bad. They were small.

But it was a good, it was a good shakeout for us. Like, hey, a little confidence builder whacked a couple bad guys. No one got injured. These are all good things. And then you guys started rolling. Then we started rolling in our first, I was on that mission. The next mission we did, I was not on. And our guys went up down the street, I think, from Falcon.

And they're setting up Overwatch positions. And, you know, I think they're in the morning time and grenades come in. You know, I think they had one or two grenades come in. They yoke grenades. The guys are diving down the stairs. And we had two guys get fracked from those. And from that point, it was like, all right, you know, we knew we were getting into. but then it's like now it's real.

Now our guys are getting injured. We knew we're going to get wounded. Now you got two guys wounded with frags. And their injuries weren't bad enough. They had to get medevacked out. So they stayed with us, you know. And it took them about three weeks to heal up and they were okay. And that was like your second op?

Yep, yep. That was like our second one. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, throughout that thing there, you know, one of the things I realized, this is further down the road. But we did this river op and we're going to support,

setting up a combat outpost and we're using the Marine Riverine unit. And those guys were awesome. Yeah, they're awesome. But think how funny that is like, hey, the Navy's supposed to deliver the Marines. Yeah, now the Marines are delivering us.

And they were good dudes, man. They were dialed in. They were squared away. So they take us down river and we had all of our deconfliction up. Hey, here's when we hit this point in the water, call up to the security, Army security checkpoint up ahead,

make sure everything's dialed in, went through all the procedures and there was obviously a disconnect. So we get close to where we're going. And we can see the security position off to the right. And it's on a two-story building. And we get that, and we're like, that's not good.

That's a round coming over our head from the security position. And then we're like, hey, light your strobes, do your shit. And then the boat starts speeding up a little bit to get us to shore. And like, now we're all pissed because we just got a shot at. And then we get the, like, frickin tracers are coming over us. We're like, fucking get us to the shoreline, man. So we get to the shoreline and we're done. dumping out at that point it's a full on dude I just got chills because because when you start

talking about you're receiving fire from friendlies it's a freaking horrible and then it's a full on no we're not shooting back yeah but then it's full on they think we're moog in boats coming down the river and it's just kakak kak kak kak we're dumping off in the toolies and I'm I'm freaking hot man so I'm dumping in the side of the toolies and we learn from you guys hey de-conflict that with your white star cluster so I had old trusty right here you know and as I'm going to the shoreline I'm popping this thing out weapons flying all over the place and I'm yelling at the AOIC. I was like, hey, freaking call back there and get this shit deconflicted now. And I'm pissed.

I'm yelling at him. I'm yelling at him. He's like, what the half do you think I'm doing? What the half do you think I'm doing? I'm like, fucking hurry up, man. And so we're yelling back and forth. I'm popping up the white star cluster. And of course, as soon as you get the white star cluster up, the shit stops.

But I couldn't get to that damn thing fast enough. By the time I got it, I had it out in probably like less than 30 seconds. Dude, 30 seconds, a long time to be receiving fire from American machine gunners. Yeah, we were all sucking mud, man. So it was a good lesson learned. One of the things with Romani is when you go into a high-stress environment, there's multiple units in the area. The likelihood of you having a blue-on-blue just go up drastically.

You know, you've done a lot of podcasts with the Vietnam shit. So when you're in those type of environments, you've got to have your deconfliction down. You can't do it. enough really yeah and you know another thing I've been thinking about is from a leadership perspective a thing that I've been talking about all the time is is like if if you if you work for me and I come to talk to you I got to understand what your perspective is like I got to understand that so that I can like okay he's reacting like this because of that and and even more in depth than that I got to kind of know what

your freaking story is so I can't just know your perspective I got to know what your story is like oh this This is Steve. He's been here for 20 years. He's done a good job. He also is known for having a bad temper. He also has some trouble at home right now. So I got to know this stuff.

Yeah. So that I can assess like, okay, what approach am I going to take? What reaction am I going to get? Well, guess what? When you're in a combat situation, you better think about the perspective of the people that you're working with. Yeah, yeah. Because guess what?

You take a kid that's 18 years old. He's scared shitless. He doesn't he he's freaking sick of being on this post. He's afraid he's going to get killed. He's not being briefed by his seniors. He's tired. He's pissed off. He's got an itchy trigger finger.

And what do you think this guy's going to do? He's going to shoot at you if you don't make it clear what's happening. So it's important to remember that. You when you you have to understand other people's perspective and understand what their story is and then you need to account for that. Somehow. Otherwise, bad things happen. And like, that's a nightmare, man.

Like, if those, those, those, those, there's no protection on those cirque boats. Oh, I mean, you're, if that, if one, one iteration of fire hit those circ boats, you'd have three, four guys dead, wounded, whatever. Yeah. Maybe more. Yep. I mean, you got 10 guys in a boat. Damn, it's a nightmare. Yeah.

Yeah. It wasn't good. And just talking about perspective, I know the army guys, there were a couple units there. that, you know, they'd been there for like eight months. I want to say like eight months. And then they get the call. Hey, you're going to stay like three more months. Oh, yeah.

And them dudes are war out, man. I mean, they're pulling security out front. They're taking round, RPG rounds. They've lost two of their friends, three of their friends, four of their friends. They've seen VBIDs go in. They've heard rumors about boats. I mean, yeah. And look, the Army guys and the Marines that were there,

the most professional badass dudes ever, ever. But there's a lot of them. Yeah. And if you have, look, you can have a platoon of 40 guys and 39 of them can be the most squared away guys you've ever met and can understand everything and become cool and collected. But there's going to be one person in there that's not. Yeah. Yeah. And once one person starts shooting, bro, it's a real problem to get.

It's a real problem if you think other people aren't going to start shooting as well. That's what we literally get trained to do. Oh, if there's a contact start shooting, help your buddy. Yep. Yeah, not good. Understandable, but not a good situation. We definitely could have done a better job on that with us. Yeah, it wasn't good. We were lucky no one got hit on that one. Yeah. We had one other blue-on-blue that I know about. I'm convinced there was probably quite a few blue-on-blues going on that you just don't know. there was because I was I was we talk about this with the brigade commander all

time there was one there was usually one blue on blue per day yeah per day but that that wouldn't get reported and there was one blue on blue per week that actually got reported yeah of like hey we were taking fire from this unit at this time most of them was like hey get those guys shoot fire she's fire you know that's friendly position like that happened all the it happened once a day yeah once a day you know, usually at night. But the most harrowing example of that was there was a blue-on-blue between Humvees. Like one Humvee at night saw another Humvee and started shooting at it.

And there wasn't no moose that had Humvees. Like at least a boat, the boats weren't super common to be in the river. Even the Marine Corps boats, they weren't super common to be in the river. So if they rolled out, someone goes, oh, wait a second. I don't know what this is. This might be Moogh boats. Let's shoot them. But a Humvee, like that's how itchy the trigger fingers can get.

and you got to understand people's perspective, man. We were so freaking paranoid about that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't a good feeling, that's for sure. Jeez. And there's nothing you can't, like, what are you going to do? Shoot back? Nope.

Like, you can't do that. No. You've grabbed that damn white star cluster and get to take fired off, boy. Damn. Yeah. We had one of the blue on blue. We were out there and we were down there by Grant, cop grant. And we went to the unit, deconflicted everything.

And, you know, our guys went out. there and we're getting set up on a rooftop and like damn come on man yeah you know what wasn't good but um those high stress level areas people are getting wounded and shit people are going to see different things um it's out there it's real you got to be careful yeah when layf and i wrote extreme ownership like we didn't plan to write there's three chapters in there that are just blue on blue chapters yeah out of 12 chapters yeah so a quarter of the chapters are about blue on blue like that's didn't think about that but that's what the reality of the situation was those are some of the scariest you know what's crazy is when we went back to trade at and we incorporated our laser gear oh yeah

people found out how easy it is to have blue-on-blue just to your point with perspectives like we drew that out and it was awesome to draw that out in training um yeah so you know after after those handful ops, we had, you know, we had November 19th. And so this is putting us, you know, right before Thanksgiving. And we had the whole task in it out. And so we had, you know, our crickador guys are up in the Papa Suckers. Our, our platoon is down, we're down past Grant. I think we're down past ground in that area. We're about eight blocks from those guys, half mile, mile, something like that. Maybe Juliet. Yeah. Juliet Sector. Yeah. I don't remember all the sectors, but man, we're out there and things are going good in like 8 o'clock in the morning. We're set up. We've got mutually supporting positions with our platoon. They got mutually supporting positions with their platoon. Things are good. And I remember the first thing I was like, all right, this is going to be a shit show in here. You know, we had a car going around with the hazards on. So they're signaling in the area. Hey, man, U.S. troops are in there. But they didn't know where we're at. We didn't have any, you know, loopholes. We didn't pound out any brick or use explosives. So they had to have.

a hard time figuring out where we were throughout the whole day. But as we're sitting there, things start heating up. You know, hey, there's maims over, two streets over, and they're all consolidating one area. Hey, they got weapons. And then, you know, hey, it's coming. We're going to get, we're going to get in the mix here. And so like around 11 o'clock, we started calling in for our Gimlers on a guided multiple launch rocket system. And we started getting that ready commensurate and coordinates to bring in rockets because there's different requirements. That wasn't coming from off the rails from the air so it was easier to get it approved and so as we're doing that you know we got a call over the radio you know that you know our other unit from corrugador's hit

and we didn't know how bad they were hit but you know the a oIC came on was like hey man eliot's hit he's in bad he's in bad shape and so is joe you know and we're like oh shit man and you know they're taking them down to the cash and shit which wasn't good and we're like everyone just got a sick feeling to their stomach you know um but we didn't know what it happened until after we got back but we're like shit is he going to make it he's not going to make it but you know those guys were in a position they started taking light fire and as they're taking light fire you know they had rooftop jump jumpers in remoddy they'd get as close as they could and they dump grenades right on top of your position so the first thing that happened is they had a grenade dumped on their position and

elli it gets sliced in the damn wrist pretty bad so you know they're collapsing off down off the rooftop and we had explosives up there so the guys are clacking off explosives to you know move the rooftop jumpers away from from their guys so as they're collapsed down into, you know, on the bottom floor, everything's still alone in control. There's a light volley of fire. They're calling to the other sniper supporting element, A, we're hit. We're going to call in an extract. As they're calling an extract, you know, the Iraqis come out and our unit comes out to get in the Bradley's, and, you know, they're hit with some type of white phosphorus explosive device. And I did a lot of analysis on me,

what that was at a roadside bomb, what was it? It can never determine what it was. But, you know, killed, I think, three Iraqis wounded two. Our two guys, our two seals were hit, critically injured. You know, so now they're pulling everyone back into the house. The Bradley's are getting out of there because it's just a total shit show. The other units fighting their way down the street to get in a position to help these guys out by this time. In long story short, you know, everyone's in a bad position.

And Elliot was such a good dude. He's sitting there telling dudes, he's cool, calm, and collect. He's got shit burning. on him, you know, burning through his camys and he's telling guys what to do to how to patch him up and do all the shit, and he's jacked up. You know, and Joe, he had his legs kind of blown backwards on his lower extremities. So it's a complex situation. You know, outside still heated up, injured guys on the inside, dead guys, our own dead guys, Iraqi troops out on the street, guys fighting their ways back down. It's like as bad as a situation as you can conjure up, right?

But, you know, they get things under control. They call in another quick reactionary force. They load these guys up. And, you know, and that's when we get the call over the radio that those guys had been hit. Meanwhile, over in our sector, things are starting to heat up. And so we're spinning up aircraft. We're trying to get our Gimlers in position to start launching. And, you know, our guys are out there, you know, laying down to made up fire

and launching a few Carl Gustav Rockets into some positions down there by us. But it was just a, you know, shitty day for us. You know, obviously the whole task, you know, was hit hard on that wasn't good yeah and i mean elliot is probably one of the most severely wounded seals from the iraq war yeah yeah he's i mean he's he's a freaking warrior yeah but he he he took a heavy hit that day yeah yeah and you know in elliott's story you know that guy never quit he never gave up on life and um you know he's going through physical therapy and and And him and his physical therapist fall in love.

And Elliot marries her. They get married. They have kids, which is just awesome. You know, I've seen Elliot a handful of times over the years. You know, it buds graduations and stuff like that. You know, just sucks that shit happen to, man. Yeah, and Laif was super good friends with Elliot. And, you know, obviously we had just all high-fived on the tarmac and said goodbye.

And then the next thing that Laif's doing, he's down at the burn center. you know, trying to give support to Elliot, you know. It's freaking, freaking rough, man. That shit took the win out of our cell for the whole Tashenna, you know, because you're just wondering, like, what the hell is going to happen? So now we've got two guys wounded with frags. You got Joe and Elliott with what they got going on. And then actually the first week we were there, you know,

we had Jimmy left over from you guys. He got a shot. He gets a grazer across his nipple. So, yeah, things are starting to start. stack up man you know and elli was a unknown we weren't sure if he was going to make it or not yeah and i left october 21st and that was november 19 so you guys had only been on the ground without us for under a month yep yep and you had all this already stacked up yep yep yeah we and not to mention in a way you are riding in already with the mental thought of all of our casualties and our lost guys

You know, so you already know that this is just the way. Yeah, yeah. We had, you know, so we get past November 19th. We're kind of reworking, and things are starting to change at that point. I can't remember if it was November or December. But, you know, we had one of the tribes out there. They had Al-Qaeda come in, and they killed a couple of their tribesmen, and they were like F. Al-Qaeda, we want to come over to the, you know, U.S. side.

And that was a big tipping point out there at Corrigador. I forget the name of the tribe out there, but the guys went out there and they're meeting up with the shake and their local guys, and it was a weird situation because at that point, those guys were dropping mortars on Corrigador. So there's this friction like, I'm freaking helping these dudes out.

They want to join us now. They're just, you know, the other day, they're dropping mortars on us, you know. So that was interesting. And then December time frame, we'd set up, I think it was right before Christmas. We're up there around. racetrack and the Marine Corps is doing a big huge push in through to clear out that whole area.

That area was still pretty much contested when you guys were there. And that was an area we'd operate in quite a bit. And so we're out there for like, I don't know, three, four days. And this is right before Christmas time. We think we're going to be out there past Christmas. And a couple of events there, like the moves, they were so good at using dead space. You know, I remember we're on a two-story building. We got Marine Corps snipers in position.

We're in position. We're spread out. And I go to use the bathroom. and I'm looking out this window and there's a tank down in my corner and a dude slips out a dead space with an RPG and like Muzh, boom, he clacks that thing off

and under three seconds, melts back away. And you're like, even if I was on my gun, I don't think I'd have had enough time to shoot that guy. We had a couple close calls in that area. You know, they had some snipers in vehicles and so it muffled the sound.

You couldn't tell where they were coming from, you know. And when, you know, I took a damn shot in through our position, right at the 12 o'clock. So, you know, we got our loophole set up and around 7-6-2 by 54, big one, punches all the way through the wall,

right at the 12 o'clock position. So the guy's dead center trying to get into our hole where we're at. And I just remember thinking, damn, man, that's, whoever shot that, that's a good shot. That's not, you know, some JV dude making that shot. And as I've got to tell the story,

I forgot about this one, but we had our country boy, well, Charlie, he's out now, so I'll say his name on the net. But Charlie, we're on the, this is all in this three, four day period. And we're on the rooftop. And it's the same day that I take that round

and through the 12 o'clock position. And there's Mouge doing a center peel down the street. Damn. And so like I'm here. Charlie's position is over here with his crew. And we got a pilot up overhead. And he's like, hey, you got some, you got bad guys coming down the street towards you.

And, you know, Charlie's just a good old country boy. He's like, Roger that, you know. He's like, frag out. he dumps a frag and it like hit I don't know how he does it he throws a frag in the blind throws it down on the street it hits in between where these moosur at

and the pilot's more excited than anyone he's like it's our direct head that's our direct head and I'm like talking to Charlie what did he's like I just pop my grenade and throw it out there you know it's like Roger that dude you guys you guys were getting aircraft overhead inside the city yeah we you know on the day

Elliot got hit we had a I don't was a 14 or 15. Oh, okay, fast movers. Yeah, fast movers. You weren't getting helos, were you? No. Yeah. I don't remember having any heloes forward.

They'd be too slow. They'd get shot down. Yeah, the heloes wouldn't come in for us because of that reason. They didn't want a freaking black hawk down scenario unfolding. Which would have happened. Yeah, the Apaches came in one time, and they left them didn't come back. Yeah. They got lit up like it was crazy.

It was a crazy amount of volume of fire. We were putting it in a combat outpost. and they came in, they said they wanted a sport, and they flew in, and it was like, it was freaking crazy. Yeah. They flew away and didn't come back. Man, things were so confusing over there. I remember being out there in positions,

and we had, you know, these two young ladies, and they're doing clothes. They're hanging clothes, and then this other, what looks like, a lady comes out there, and she's like laying clothes out. But the third person that came out late, they're just looking everywhere.

They're looking for us. And it was a dude just like, a woman you know they got the garb over their head so you can't even tell but he's constantly looking look and looking the girls are giggling because it's you know it's kind of funny of them I was like it took me a long time to put that a that picture together what transpired and I couldn't do it while I was in the field you know I was like it was just weird I'm like all right that had to been a dude trying to find our positions dressed as a woman and these dudes were just they were

cagey man we're out there in the Papa sector on another mission and it's me another dude and we're set up in the hole. And I remember I'm looking in a guy's looking at looking directly at us, but he's got like a three or four year old girl right next to him. But he's looking in our direction. I'm like, that shit ain't right, but he's got no gun. He's like two, three hundred yards away. I'm keeping my eye on him, watching, watching, nothing happens. Me and the other guy rotate out of the hole. He gets in there and shit five minutes after he gets in the hole. We just started, you know, kak, kak, kak, kak, into the hole, man. And like, I'm yelling like, dude, roll out of there. You know, and he rolls out. But they're

shit flying everywhere you know and we're like damn that was close lucky that dude didn't get hit you know yeah but that guy was spotting with his daughter yeah if it even was his daughter yeah or yes spotting with a child spot he grabbed out and said yeah yeah hold my hand come over here boom yeah and if the guy had a gun I'd have felt comfortable taking the shot but he doesn't have anything so you're just like is this just more weird shit going on over here there's so many weird things going on it's hard to piece it all the weird inexplicable things that are happening all that are happening all the time and they're all look freaking crazy suspicious yeah I mean we had a ISR asset one time over going to fly it overhead like is a fast mover or something and

he's like hey we got we got a vehicle pulling up like we got a vehicle so there everyone's looking at this vehicle I'm looking at this vehicle on the ISR screen and like it's this looks super suspect they're stopping they're looking around they get out you know open the trunk all right oh they're opening the trunk open the trunk you know everyone's on this mode and then are they reaching and they're reaching and reaching They're pulling something out. They're pulling out an object right now. And sure enough, like, everyone's all excited

and thinking this is like, we need to drop a bomb on this thing. And sure enough, they got out of jack out of the thing and jacked up their freaking car and changed the tire and put it all away and left. And like they tracked them, they left. They weren't, it wasn't like a setup, you know? And man, it's so difficult to decipher what's really happening.

And you get better at it. Yeah. But it's a tough war to fight, you know. Yeah. It's a tough war to fight. You know, like, I know when we turned over to you guys, you always talked about, hey, it was a good, shoot, bad result. Hey, what they're doing is lined up with the enemy procedures.

You build the story and you make the best decision you can with what you're looking at. And sometimes just to your point, it's actually legitimate, but you don't know that, you know. Yeah, well, that was something I learned and stole from the first of the 506th. Because we had, or they, we, when we first got there and we were over with them and they had some, one of their guys shot and killed somebody and they were, like the person was out, I forget what suspicious activity they were doing. But it was like they were digging a hole on the side of the road. And they shot, killed the guy. And then they sent a team out there to inspect. And he was whatever, you know, he was planting a plant. I don't know what he was doing. But it was something that it was not the activity that, that the shooter, thought it was. Yeah. And I was talking to their ops officer and he was like, hey, you know what? This is a, this is a good shot, bad result, meaning that our soldier was following the proper

rules of engagement. And it turns out that the result of that shot is bad, even though the shot was good, the result was bad. Yeah. And, and, you know, it bothers me so much when I hear people talk about, you know, these, the U.S. military, you know, causing all these civilian casualties, man. we go through such great lengths to prevent civilian casualties and put our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marine

at such risk to prevent those civilian casualties from happening, but it does happen. That's the reality, like, it's going to happen. And that's why if you're going to go to war, you better be ready for that. You can't go to war thinking, oh, yeah, don't worry, we won't kill any civilians. It's like, you know, if you go to war,

you're killing civilians. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I know in the other deployments I did over there, we started doing a lot of collateral damage assessments before we did anything. I don't remember doing that when we were in Ramadi, because we weren't really dropping bombs

and there was mostly just ground units handling business, you know. But anyways, that became a factor later on for sure. Everything was a CD, you know? Yeah, I mean, even when I relieved you in Baghdad, we started looking at collateral damage in terms of like breaching. Yeah. Like, okay, we're going to breach this building. What's the collateral damage?

Could we hurt someone? Can we, are we going to ruin this? You know, how many, how many windshields are we going to, or how many windows in this neighborhood are we going to blow out with this explosive breaching charge? And what good does that do for our overall strategic mission here if we're the assholes that come in every night and blow up everyone's house and windows, right? All of a sudden, we're not cool. So sometimes it was like, oh, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't explosively breach. and how are you going to execute the mission?

And what risk does it put the troops at? Because the safest way to do a direct action mission is to explosively breach the shit out of them. Shock everyone in the building and like, okay, cool. So there's other tactics that we had to develop to mitigate the risk. But what I'm saying is we were taking risks for sure to try and mitigate.

And not just us. When I say we, I mean the U.S. military at large mitigates risk of civilian casualties by risking our own casualties. That's what we do. And even as much as we mitigate them, we can't mitigate them all. And civilians are going to die.

So you need to think about that. So when you guys had that horrific incident with Elliot and Joe, then what? How did the rest of the deployment? And I know that you guys, so one thing that's really positive is, and part of this transition, I don't even know if you knew this.

So we were doing everything we could, could we we we that whole sons of ambar and that whole thing started when we were there and and and then the other thing we were trying to do is we were trying to get the Iraqi police force built up and we just started to get it built as we left and so you guys got the benefit of the Iraqi police force all of a sudden the local Iraqi police force was respected they were manned they had they understood the neighborhoods. They were tribal. Most of the guys were tribal guys. And so all of a sudden, over a very quick period of time,

the violence went down a lot. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember the police became a huge factor. I think it was late January, early February for us. They came in, they were setting up their own police stations and combat outpost. But man, them dudes were targeted by AQ. I mean, they had the head police chief.

They're trying to car bomb him and his entire family. And they eventually got him. But it was rough, and it definitely settled down everything. I would say by the, you know, mid-January to February somewhere in there is where things really settled in good. Where, hey, the attacks are going way down. You know, we're still getting the occasional IED. You know, they had an Army Civil Affairs. They're going down to Fricking Falcon and boom, they hit an ID, killed all four people.

Oh, yeah, that was Travis Patrick Quinn. And he was a freaking epic guy. And that was a major McClung, the female Marine Corps officer who was just, because they were there when I was there. They were both just freaking awesome, awesome people. Just awesome. Unbelievable. That was such a freaking horrific situation. It's horrible.

Yeah. It's absolutely horrible. But things definitely died down there towards, you know, January, February timeframe. It was in a good place. Yeah. Then you redeploy. You came back to America. Came back to America and boom, I'm going to work for Jocko Willing and training.

Rolled into trade debt, man. And that was awesome. Yeah. That was awesome. Did you volunteer to come there? What happened? How'd you end up? Yeah, so before deployment, I know I was working with our group CMC and they were doing team level detailing.

So he came in. He's like, hey, man, what do you want to do? I was like, well, hey, I want to stay out. I want to stay in the area. And he's like, well, what do you think about going to trade? I was like, keep me in the area? He's like, yeah. I was like, hell yeah, I'll do it.

So Roger that, man. And I was looking forward to it, you know. And, you know, the guy I relieved over there, BG, he's just a good dude, smart. And I think he set up a good foundation with what he had. So I inherited a really a good product. Yeah. He was doing good shit. Yeah, no, it was legit.

And then when you showed up, it was awesome. And then, I mean, what was your experience at trade at, like, in terms of, see, now this is interesting. You know, I told you that, like, the seeds of my experience and knowledge were watered heavily and fertilized heavily. But I was young. So now you get to experience this in a much, in a much more powerful environment because the training we were conducting was so much more advanced. Then, and also you were more advanced. And you were a combat veteran of multiple combat tours. And you were a senior enlisted guy.

So, man, it was just. It was awesome. It was a good experience. But I'll tell you what I went in there, and I'm like, holy, it's different when you're responsible for a live fire range versus you're going through a live fire range. And so there was a lot to that. You know, the most stressful thing for me during land warfare was doing all the live fire training because there was definitely a lot of opportunity for someone to get injured or wounded.

You know, you know what I mean? And so it was good. And getting up there and teaching these things, you just learn so much more. I mean, the pipeline should be, we need guys in instructor positions, but you need them a bud, you also need them over it or trade at. If there was a way to split that to where they do 15 months,

it buds, 15 months in trade, it would be ideal. There's just, it's not practicable, you know. But going to trade, it was an eye-opener. And I really started, you know, I'd say around 2003, 2003, 2004, started reading quite a bit. I never heard of the last 100 yards. You know, we didn't have a portal with libraries.

We didn't have guys going around. If you went in a training show, you might see it. But I really started building up a good reading block. And I remember talking to you when we were at Trade It and we were reading, I think I just went through the maneuveral warfare handbook. And I was like, man, I'm thinking these things. And then you read it and it reinforces what you were thinking. So now your confidence just goes through the roof. And I think one of the things we did good in NSW continues to do.

this is developing our future leaders. I mean, think about when you and I came up. There was no portal. There was no, none of this stuff. We've got stuff hanging. Hey, you want to be a good tactical leader? Go read your doctrine. Go read these books here.

And that is going to boost you up. And the guys that are hungry, they're going to go in there and read it. The guys that are, you know, a little bit laxadaisical and they don't want to do it, they're going to meet the minimum standard. But you definitely need to have something out there to where, you know, your high performers are hungry. Give it to them so that they can become a, you know a better leader so i think we did that good but just going back to land warfare i think

you know the stress levels they were high during live fire training the field training exercises we did were just badass we're building you know little woodhuts all over the damn place on those ranges and uh i think the guys you know i mean shit we had a thermal camera out there at one point and we're videotaping the guys coming in so they come back and go through their debrief we're going this is what you all look like here's what we're telling you here's what you look like and the people see what they look like oh damn check roger that you know and they're making some adjustments but i thought it was good i was definitely learning a lot while i was there i wish i had had done that um that assignment earlier on in at least a team five

training so it would have it would have boosted me up a lot you know would you see what did you notice from the i mean the crazy thing about it is you get to it's the best lat i i i truly think this i think that that land warfare training is the best leadership laboratory in the world. I think that's it. I don't think there's a better leadership laboratory where you can see leadership in action. I really don't because you get the whole dynamic.

And someone might be say, well, you know, in some business or in some, you know, bureaucratic situation or some boardroom, you get that part too because you've got the mission planning that's taking place. And there's no gunfire going on during the mission planning, but you get the stress

and you get the people that have to make decisions. You get the team arguing with each other and you get the different personalities that are coming out. And so you get to watch all this. And you get to learn and you get to see how people react and you get to see human nature over and over and over again. And you get to see one platoon do it.

And then you see another platoon. Do the same thing. The same. I mean, we had all those little pet nicknames for all the different maneuvers that we knew that our mooges was going to do. And we, so you'd see a platoon go through the octopus. You'd see a platoon go through the cornucats. You'd see a platoon go through the corner of death, right?

You'd see the trail of tears. You'd get to see how they would react. And you'd see what a good leader would do. And you'd see how that would turn the platoon. And all of a sudden, they'd be able to get things together and survive and make it happen and do a good job. And you'd see bad leadership. And you'd go, well, these guys are just, it's going to be a suffer fest. And so that leadership laboratory was just unbelievably powerful.

and really it was it was powerful for for us as instructors because we were detached and we got to watch it look the troops obviously get a ton out of it too but getting to see it over and over again was just ridiculous amount of learning one of the things i i really respected about land warfare you got to see people's true character when they're coming through there they're up late at night you're under a lot of stress, whatever you're thinking in your head or whatever type of attitude you have, good or bad, that's coming out. And you really get to see what you're working with with your platoon, you know. Yeah.

And that's a good precursor because when you go to combat, if you end up going on deployment and you end up getting in real combat, you're going to see that. That's the only place that's going to come out even more. Yeah. Is when you go into combat, people start acting crazy. Like, and I'm not talking about, hey, in a gun fight there. No, I'm talking about on a day-to-day basis, you start seeing what their character is. Do they want to operate?

Do they want to hide? Do they, like you get to see, start to see all that stuff. And you'll see it. You'll see it out in the desert in training. You'll see people start to crack. And you'll also see people step up. And you'll see people start to lead. And you see people that are tough.

And when you see those good leaders coming through, and look, the good leader could be anyone in the platoon, from an E5 to the platoon or the task unit commander, or anyone in between. You have one good leader or two good leaders in there, and they're going to do a good job. They can be countered by bad leadership. So you can have a good leader that gets countered

by someone that's an ego jackass. And that ego jackass can actually ruin everything. Sometimes if you just have one good leader, that's the LPO of one platoon. And he's a really good solid leader. He can carry the whole task unit. Now, if you put a jackass senior chief in there, or a jackass chief or a jackass lieutenant,

he can override two or three squared away leaders because he's a knucklehead and doesn't want to listen and wants to do everything his way and wants to let his ego run the show. It's a freaking disaster. Yeah, well, we saw, it's funny, we saw quite a few good leaders come through.

Probably the most rewarding thing having guys come through trainees are coming through, they're just starting out as a unit. They're figuring some things out if they haven't been through another block and they come in and the growth that you see that you're providing as instructors, you know, as a cadre, as a unit. And you see them start here and by the time they finish after that three, four weeks,

they're up here. 100%. The growth is tremendous. And guess what? The heart of the training, the heart of the training, the more the guys appreciate it. The more growth you have, right? That's what I physically saw happening with our formation. Yeah, because it was miserable.

Yes. It was freaking miserable. It was freaking hard. when you're carrying out, I mean, we, if a platoon did a bad job, they'd have 12 down men. They'd be carrying out 12 down men for three or four kilometers before they can finally get a helicopter in there to pick up and take the wounded. Then they still got to walk, the rest of them got to walk out.

Like when you got your ass kicked, you got your ass kicked. And it would sometimes, you know, that was another big difference. When a leader, when the leadership in the task unit or in the platoon would say, would come back and say, hey, we screwed up, we better fix it. Oh, man. Yeah. They would fix it.

If they came back and said, oh, trade at's cheating or trade at, this is, this, this training is unrealistic. If they said that, they wouldn't improve. Yeah. And they just fall apart. Yeah. But when they say, hey, we spent too much time on target or, hey, we didn't cover and move.

Yeah. Or, hey, we didn't give the priorities correctly. Or we didn't have, when they came back and said that and recognized it and fixed it, they'd come out and a good task unit. By the end, our trade at guys couldn't keep them under wraps. Like they would get the trade guys would get their asses kicked. Because there's 40 of the back, I mean 40 of the platoon guys. So they could freaking, when they would do good cover and move, you can't stop them.

No. They're unstoppable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what I always tell people. Hey, man, the people that utilized the laws of combat did good. Cover and move. Kept things simple, good communications across the board, prioritized and executed, stayed detached from what was going on.

and the guys that utilize decentralized command where they're allowing fire team leaders and squad leaders to make decisions at their level because you can't be everywhere as the boss making these decisions. You've got to train your leaders up, put up some guard wells, get them to where they need to be, and then you let them start making decisions, you know?

And that's probably like one of the most beautiful things with land warfare. Guys are going out there, they're learning these things, and they're slowly building their confidence, to where when they get to the field training exercise week and they start making some of these decisions, then it's even that much more of a confidence builder, you know? It's weird because you can, you can, I mean, look, I would explain this stuff,

ad nauseam, right? Adnauseum. I mean, I would explain it and explain it. I'd say, look, you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this. But sometimes, man, it would just take like it happening to someone. Yep. And being, and me sitting there like literally running over to a fire team leader. and saying, hey, what are you doing?

Those guys are freaking running right now. You got to get them down. You got to put down a cover fire for them. And them going, oh, wait a second. I get it. And then you'd see this light come on, or I'd run up to a freaking task unit commander and be like, where do you want everyone to go right now?

What do you want everyone to do? And he'd say, we need to get out of here. Okay, what direction? I said, are you going to be able to move everyone out of here? No. Can you think your fire teams can start moving? Yes. Tell them where you want them.

to move. Just tell them all and they'll start making it happen. And you could see the little like all of a sudden the little light would come on. But sometimes it would just take that like you have to live, you almost have to live through it. In some cases, some guys would be like, yeah, got it. Cover move. Check, got it. Because you learn cover and move day one or day one in the teams, you learn to cover and move. You better freaking cover and move. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it took a guys a little while to figure out how to utilize the train correctly. You know, because the terrain was a factor. Rockies, small waddies,

uneven terrain, which was hard to maneuver, and especially when you got a down man. There was something there, too. Terrain? Terrain is the next level, right? The next level is, oh, I don't just know how to cover and move.

I just don't know simple. I just don't know, prioritize and execute. I don't just know decentralized command. I know how to utilize the terrain to my advantage. That's the next level up. That's the next level up. When you realize, oh, I can get a little high ground. Oh, there's a little dead space.

Oh, there's a ravine over here. I can get the guys out. That's the next level. And we tried to teach it in that method. You start off doing I ads in a flat spot. And then all of a sudden you start to use terrain. But when the leadership, when the whole task unit, when a fire team leader knows how to use terrain,

And then all the fire team leaders know how to use terrain. All of a sudden, we're in a whole different spot. Yeah. We're in a whole different spot. So, yes, the terrain is so freaking critical. Yeah. Wow. Get a little bit of high ground.

Yeah, we had guys down in that micro terrain doing good things. Yeah. Tough, stuff on the body. And we had, I mean, we had rangers out there helping us, which was awesome. Dude, those guys, they brought a lot. And the rangers we had out there, they had all. kinds of, both of them came from leadership assignments within their Ranger unit and they had a lot of reps, man.

They brought a lot to the table. They had all kinds of good info, man. We were eating it. We were just like on standby. Keep it coming, keep it coming, keep it coming. It's always, it's one of the worst, one of the bad things, one of the worst things about the SEAL teams is we don't come from an infantry background. Yeah.

You know, we're not soldiers. We're not infantry. where, so we don't have that skill set. And you can get lucky and you can get brushed up against it. I got, I got at least brushed up against it doing args with the Marines and being like, okay, I at least understand what an infantry platoon is. Because if you were a regular seal, new guy, you don't know what the hell an infantry platoon is.

You have no idea. You think a platoon is 16 guys, you know, in a platoon. But, but yeah, so in the Army, you have that infantry background. in the Marine Corps you have that infantry background. It's so helpful. So having like Rangers out there with us, who were freaking great guys, by the way. And they bring that infantry background.

And they were stoked too. They were freaking loved. They loved our training. Yeah, they were awesome. Both those guys had a lot of reps in Afghanistan, if I remember right. And I know where the one guy came in and he was really tightening up our helicopter procedures.

Just, you know, he covered so much. You're like, damn, I didn't even think about that. You know, all my deployments were to Iraq at that point. But yeah, good dudes, man. Did you read about face back then? Oh, yeah. So I read it when I got to trade it. You know, you had that as your Bible.

Damn, what was the guy's name? I had them in here. There was another colonel that he's got a page on four, page four something in about face. But the guy was just a beast. Oh, Glover Johns. That's him, man. Dude, that guy had so many good nuggets on the page and a half he had.

But I remember reading through that, page 402, Hapworth, and he just has some nuggets in there. He's got like 15 things that he covers, you know, strive to do small things well. Be a doer and a self-starter. You know, the one that I always hit home with me, because I think it's so true is, what is it, the two, you know, in order to be two good characteristics of a leaders, you've got to be a good communicator, and you've got to be a good writer. And the writing piece comes into play as you start moving up

and you're upper level leadership and management positions because you're writing evals for the guys. And I remember being at Trade It and you were kind of like, hey man, if you guys bring me an eval and the thing requires minor or requires major surgery,

I'm only going to be able to do so much to it to make it better. But you bring me an eval that's dialed in pretty damn tight, I'm going to get it over the line. It's going to be a beautiful piece of work. It's going to be a piece of art. And you were getting into people's shit on it.

You were not a happy camper because there was like all these evils coming in. But it's so true when you think about it. Hey, how do we take care of our people? A way is into our evaluation system, making sure the right people are getting promoted and through awards. Those all require some type of writing skill. Bro, one freaking series, one year of evaluation is probably the first year that you were there. The shit that you guys turned in. And I had no choice.

I didn't get him until too late. and I just had to do nine days in my office, just rewriting every single one of them. And that's why the next year, early, I said, hey, everyone, write me the eval for your best guy. And then I brought you guys, you were in this group, right? I brought you guys into the conference room and posted them up on the screen. I made you guys read your sentences to me.

And you guys were just like, you know, like the very first sentence. that each guy read it would just be like, this blah, blah, just a shit sentence. And I'd be like, all right, how does that sound? Like, not good. But that worked so well.

Because then everyone realized, oh, I should actually read this stuff. I should actually read it aloud to myself. I should actually see if these sentences make sense. And it just helped everybody so much. It helped me. Because now you guys were all turning in squared away stuff, which then I could,

what, what did you say, turn into a piece of art? I don't know if I could quite go that far. I believe, in quotations, a piece of art. Jockle Willink. We got an artist on the net over here. Glover Johns from Hackworth, too, and he wrote a book called The Clay Pigeons of St. Low,

which we covered on this podcast. And it's written, it's hard to tell, because he wrote it in the third person talking about himself as if he was a different person, but it's about him. Then it's a great book, and it gives all kinds of leadership lessons as well. One of the things I want to camp out

real quick on Hackworth. One of the things is I was reading through that book, and it took me, I think, six months to get through it. It's a big book. But it really reinforced. You know, when you're coming in as a leader at any level, and you're new to that leadership assignment, you're always uncomfortable.

So you're trying to figure out, am I making the right decision? And when you're going through and you're reading some nonfiction that pertains to your field, your field craft, it just reinforces what you're thinking. And I remember after reading about face, the maneuvered word for handbook, I came out of it. I was like, damn, a lot of these decisions I was uncertain about, it reinforced that

I was making the right decision. So how do you become better? You read that stuff before you get in those leadership positions. And who's responsible for distrowing that out? The leadership. You know, if you're in a leadership position out there, what are you doing to develop your future leaders? You have people that want to take your job.

What are you doing to develop them? And you look across the world, like we got COVID everywhere. You can get in a car accident. Who's the next person in line that's going to be? to take your job. Who is that person? And what are you doing to develop them? You know, we've gotten way better over the years in the military and NSW doing this.

You think about that. That's pretty powerful, you know? Yeah, dude, JP sent, because I gave JP a copy of, at least I think I gave it to him. Anyways, he got a copy of the new edition of About Face with the Ford and everything. And so he's like, sending me highlighted passages. And he's, and he's not happy. Yeah.

And he's like, bro, I cannot. believe that you didn't make me read this when I was a you know when I was 23 or 22 and I'm like dude I'm sorry like I'm a horrible leader because there's so much information in there oh man yeah and I just ripped it off wholesale wholesale just ripped it off and it's like why didn't I share that yeah and and part of me was I just didn't think team guys had any desire to read anything you know because most team guys didn't most team guys are like brum beer you know what I did with my about face when I got back over to when I got over to team seven I gave it out to one of our younger tactical so that's

like here he's like that's a big book I'm like yes you need to read that and then when you're done with it you need to pass it on to someone else do you think you read it I don't know man it's such a big book it's such a big book I don't know it's good and here's the thing we always talk about making hard calls you look at those decisions he made in there Those were, he was going to be hated. He knew that going in. He didn't care. He knew what the right thing to do was.

He made the right calls. And you know, he wind up saving a lot of lives with his guys from it. Yeah, well, see, there's a little nuance there in what you said. He had to make hard calls. He knew that he would be hated in the short term. He knew that there would be resistance. Yeah.

But he knew in the end he would be admired and he would be loved. Yeah. Because he would be able to keep his guys alive. And he knew that that what would shine through is the fact that he cared about as men. Yep. That's what would shine through. And believe me, when we had General Mukayama on,

I was so not really worried, but like going into it. Here I'm going to meet a guy that worked for freaking hack. And what is he going to say? Like is he going to be like, well, you know, hack would made himself out to be a little bit more than he was or hack talked a good game, but that really wasn't the guy. He was air. I didn't know what he was going to say.

Yeah. But dude, he was just 100%, 100% Hack was the man. And he was a company commander when Hack was a battalion commander. I mean, that's the leadership. Wow. So, you know, what, you know, and I said, did you know who Hack was? He goes, everybody knew who Hack was. Damn.

And like that attitude. Yeah. And I said, you know, how did you, what was it that made? He goes, everything, like the way he's carried himself. the way he looked, the way he had his hair. He was like he had his head shaved and he just looked like this guy's just freaking squirt away from day one.

But so you're going to make, because one thing I don't like, and Leif and I have talked about this on the podcast is someone thinking, well, you know, I'm in charge, so I'm going to be hated, and that's okay. It's like, no, that's actually not okay. If you're hated by your troops,

that's a freaking problem. That means you're doing something wrong. for your troops to take over a unit or take over a team or take over a position and say, all right, we're going to start making some adjustments. Now, one thing that's different to in Hacks case when he took over the 439th is he took over a disaster, a known disaster. He had to come in there and kind of swing the hammer a little bit. Oh, he had to bring out the flamethrower.

Yeah. He had to do some barbecue. He had to do some barbecue. But he also eventually, you know, anyone was. would do anything, you know, like talking to General Mukayama. Those guys would do absolutely anything for hack, anything. And even the freaking, even the draftees would do anything for Hackworth. Like they loved them.

Yeah. And it's kind of like you said earlier. When people go through hard training, they appreciate it and they love the training more. When you are disciplined with your troops, when you're hard on your troops, they respect you. Yeah. And they respect themselves. And you start to get this camaraderie that you need. You know, I think of hackworth.

I think of a, like you said, a dude showing up right. haircut, right uniform, just everything he's communicating lines up with his actions. And the guys just had to be like, damn, does this guy do anything wrong? You know what I mean? Does he slate what's going on with this dude? And when you look at that, you're like, hey, my margin of error is going to be small because this dude's doing everything he's saying. Yeah.

You know, it's powerful. Leadership by example, right? That's how you got to roll. 100%. Uh, what, anything else from trade at? No, man. Oh, it was all good. Christmas in the desert?

Christmas in the desert. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember Nyland, man, we were wrapping up. And we had a, it was a good run. The troop came through, good energy levels, and we're getting ready to go home. And you came and you said, that wasn't bad guys. And I was like, all right, let me put that through my enlisted decryption device up here. What Jocco is, good job, have a good Christmas.

He loves you all. And you're like, oh, go, cook, you gave a little chuckle out of there. So I got you kind of being Huggy Bear there right before Christmas. The spirits were good. So I said that wasn't bad. That's as good of a compliment as you're going to get out of me. Yes. Yeah.

I had to translate it for him. But yeah. Let's check. Maybe compliments weren't my strong point. They were not. I got some recordings of some of those debriefs. Do you really? Somebody's hooking me up.

One of my buddies, he just texted me a couple weeks ago. He's like, hey, somebody gave me recordings of your debriefs. He's like, you're going to want to hear him. I'm like, chat. I remember being on Target out there, and this unit was maneuvering. I forget what Seifon we're at, but one of the guys' communication is so long. Hey, I need you to grab your guys and move to the mountain like in Black Hawk down. You're like, what the hell?

Why don't you, you know, what are you talking about, man? It was just crazy talk, you know. Yeah, I would just hit record on my voice recorder during those things and play it. back for people like listen to yourself i think hey you need to keep your stuff a little clear more simple clear and concise i was keeping it simple oh really listen to this here's you telling your troops peel right hey i need everyone to blah blah blah blah blah freaking ridiculous yeah yeah freaking totally ridiculous yeah yeah that's crazy so then where'd you go yep so after that headed back over to uh or headed to team seven and at that point it already made master chief so i was going and there's the

ops, master chief, senior enlisted guy. And then I got pegged to do, so I went back there in what, October 20, 2009, October 2009, just finished up the Senior Enlisted Academy. And they're like, hey, this big one, they're trying to pump as many people as they can over in Afghanistan. So I got hit with a joint individual augment, headed out to a small outstation out in Afghanistan. I was the senior enlisted leader out there, which was a good experience. It was the first time at that point where I really worked in a joint environment. So my boss was a full bird colonel. He was SF dude.

Good guy. I learned a lot from him. He'd been in like 32 years. He was prior enlisted and he worked his way up to the ranks. Just a salty old dog. And then we had, you know, the Army Air Force, Marine Corps out there, everyone. And then we had, you know, quite a few military officers from different countries. You know, we had Afghanistan and a few other surrounding countries in there.

And our primary goal was to fusion intel. And then, you know, we had some reconnaissance platforms up overhead and, you know, they were doing their stuff in some other countries. But it was good. And that was the first time I really appreciated our Special Forces Unit. And I was working with another senior enlisted leader. He was in another country. And he's like, hey, man, here's what we got going on.

And me and him would communicate back and forth, you know, like once or twice a week. he's like hey I got my SF battalion we're training up this he's like here's our numbers and I was like hey wait a minute you guys have this many you know ODAs over there and you've trained up you've man training equipped 2,000 of these soldiers he's like yeah and I was like holy shit dude that's a big deal man that's like our formation NSW in action over there you know yeah like by that you mean all of the west coast seal and all support in action yeah and so these guys are trained training up these guys and they're going in and they're fighting the Taliban and he's got his ODAs doing it. I was like, holy shit, that's pretty badass, man. So it was a good deployment, like not much going on outside the wire. The area I was in was actually like, yeah,

I was like, cool, I just got out of an island. Then I go over there and I'm like, damn, I'm back in an island. The terrain is exactly the same. There was some hub hub about us losing our desert training facility. Someone else was going to take it over. And I made this slide show. Did I ever show you that? I made a solid. I made a solid, slideshow and it was pictures of Afghanistan and pictures of our desert training facility side by side and you literally couldn't tell the difference and I was like you've got to be kidding me if you think that this isn't the greatest training site for for us to have yeah yeah yeah so anyways that was a short deployment at that point I'm the ops master chief but I'm deployed come back six months later

I got home right before July and then as I'm back of the team the team the team going through unit level training. And then we're prepping up for our deployment in a March time frame. And that was a weird deployment. Like we winded up, some of us wound up back over in Iraq. And so this is 2010, 2011 time frame now. And we're breaking down Iraq. Yeah, we're also, yeah, we're waiting for our four patoons

that are still in San Diego to get over to Afghanistan. And they're going over to do village stability operations. So get over to Iraq and that, you know, that deployment. It was a long one. It was like eight and a half months long. A lot of, you know, the unit we were working with had all the bells and whistles. And it was good, man. So a lot of good things happening.

Our guys wrapped up quite a few bad guys. And it was a good learning experience. It was a first time I was in, you know, a professional jock setting where you're actually seeing everything unfold in real time, all the assets you can imagine. You know, and our guys did some good targeting. They got a couple bad guys have been. after for four or five years. So it was good.

Then came back off that deployment and then took over as the team, you know, command master chief. So explain what a team command master chief is. Well, our primary job is to initially is to set up the batons. You're working with the, you know, the top five of the team,

the commanding officer, the XO, your operations department, you know, the senior listed in there and the ops boss. And your primary functions are manning, training, and equipping, a SEAL team and you're the senior enlisted leader and tactical advisor to the commanding officer. Your primary goal is training up all these.

You're not training, educating and training, you know, your, your platoon chiefs and tasking it, senior enlisted advisors and junior officers. And so you take over this position and you start building platoons. Yeah. And I always used to say about platoons, let's say there's a magic number. Let's say the number, number is 20. Yeah. In your top four in a platoon, so your LPO, your assistant platoon commander, your platoon commander, and your platoon chief, that number's got to equal 20 when you add them all together.

Yeah, yeah. So that means if you have a platoon chief, that's like a 16 because he's just a badass, cool. You can give him a platoon commander that's like a two and a LPO that's a one. if you have a platoon chief that's like a, you know, maybe a six, you got to give him a platoon commander that's maybe like a seven and you've got to even it out. What you don't want to do is make sure, first of all, you got to make sure that the number gets to 20.

Because if it doesn't get to 20, you're going to have issues. Then you've got to compliment strengths and weaknesses. You know, if you've got a guy that's got a bunch of tactical experience, but he's horrible at paperwork. Well, cool, you know, put him with a person that's good with paperwork. So there's a lot of balancing in there that you need to do. Absolutely. And I know our 20, when we formed up the team in 2010, we went with some heavy

patoons with the idea we're going to go back in Afghanistan. And one of the things with our training and deployment schedule is that there's a lot of lag time in there. So things are always changing. And I was like, man, when we get back and I'm forming up the team, I want to make sure just to your point, all these patoons are balanced out. You know, when you go heavy in some patoons, that means you're going to be light in the others. And that comes at a cost.

And really, what I wanted was you got however many patoons you have at a sale team, you should be able to pick up any one of those patoons and snap them in no matter where. You know, where you're going, what the mission is. They should all be pretty balanced out equally with experience in the platoon, leadership. Yeah, you're, check. And here's another thing to be careful of, to watch out for. you're trying to get to 20 Don't

Build a platoon with a leadership Level 40 Yeah Because it's probably not going to work The way you think it is What you're going to end up with Is a bunch of big personalities Like you take the strongest possible OIC

The strongest possible chief The strongest possible LPO and the strongest What you're going to end up with is people That they all want to freak And stab each other in the back They all want to be the guy They have such be egos

and it just turns into a nightmare. So building the stacked platoon leadership is generally not a good call. And even if it happened, if you actually had such exceptional individuals that they actually did work well together, well, then you're, it's bad that you have them all together because like you said, now you're not balancing out

the rest of the teams because you should take those exceptionally. Because for a level 20 individual leader, actually, for, For a level 17 individual leader to work with another high performing leader, that other leader needs to be a 20. Yeah. Because the person that's a 20 instead of a 17, the difference between a 17 and a 20 is that 17 can subordinate their ego. That's the difference. Because when you take two people that are 18s, they're missing quality that they don't have is that they don't know how to work with other people and subordinate their ego.

That's what gets you to at freaking level 20 yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the balanced out patoons are key for the entire team. It's goodness. And you think about it. So if I'm bringing in a platoon and, you know, we really spread out our guys with two and three patoons because those guys are developing the next set of leaders below them.

You know, the platoon chief and LPO and everyone's got to develop the other guys too. But those guys have the most impact. When the leadership's gone, they're the guys that are around. And they're showing them what Wright looks like. So we crossed decked, you know, quite a few guys, got everything balanced out good. And overall, you know, our deployment was uneventful for that. We went over to CENTCOM. And we were on standby to standby.

You know, that was after Benghazi and happy. So the new normal was, hey, be on standby in case there's a crisis in there. If a crisis comes up, we want to have special operations posture to go handle an embassy-type event. And it was good. So for that deployment, we winded up, you know, in and out of the embassy quite a bit, which was good because I was like, oh, I've never been in an embassy before. So you're talking directly to the ambassador. Whole new world. Yeah, and you've got to be professional.

You've got to have your suit on. And, you know, you can't drop any F bombs out there. Yeah, it's a whole new world. Yeah. So it was a really good learning experience, although nothing happened. I don't say this. We got postured, you know, we had a unit over into a neighboring country. in that country was, you know, they were going through a withdrawal process.

And our unit still stayed in position, but we were going to reinforce that unit. So we were staged. We had to stage. So we brought in the aircraft, which, you know, we're going through a full-blown rehearsal. Like we're thinking we're going to launch our guys. And, you know, my biggest takeaway from that to point was like, hey, these relationships we have with the embassy, they matter. Because all we had to do was call up there because we had a tight relationship.

And they tell us, hey, here's what's going on. ambassadors working with the prince and the prince and they're going through this whole thing do we want to launch out of here do we not want to launch out of here um so it was good you know it was boring but it was a good learning experience yeah and for for people that don't uh really know too much about this world there there can be and usually is a lot of tension between the state department which is the ambassadors and whatnot and the military yeah because the state department wants to solve things diplomatically. Yeah.

That's what their life is, right? And the military, we think we can solve things militarily. So there's tension. Yeah. There's often tension between those two sides. But if you remember that, hey, we all have the same goal, right? We all have the goal of stability and security and overall peace. So if we understand that and we're working towards the same goal, let's figure out the best way to go about it.

And those tensions, hopefully we can overcome. Yeah. Because they can cause to, they can cause them really. bad things to happen. You know, there can be times where the military should be used. And if the relationship was good, the military would be used. Yeah. And there's some times where the military shouldn't be used.

Yeah. And if the relationship is bad, the military gets used even though it really shouldn't be used. Yeah. So once again, forming good relationships is just freaking critical. No, absolutely. Especially in that environment, more so than ever, you know. Hey, going back into when we were forming up, you know, one of the first we did is, you know, grabbed in our goat locker, you know, our enlisted formation,

E7 to E9, and we went through roles and responsibilities. And the CMC I had at the time when I was my task unit, when I was a task unit senior list advisor, he'd went through, and I don't know how much you played into the roles and responsibilities he developed, or if they crossed or what, but he went through every position. So I'd already had something that I'd kept for, geez what is this uh four years now four or five years later and i've got it and i go through and i'm tweaking the verbiage in there to fit to you know to art to our era our time right you got it yeah and so go through roles and responsibilities for what the goat locker and our tactical level leaders hey here's my expectations as a leader and we had your jocco brief on there so i had a little

reading folder on our drive here's what's in there read this shit it's going to make you a better leader and i think for the most part our guys did like we didn't have too many missteps for that for that workup cycle and deployment you know things were relatively contained you know like no cookie shit no big events yes setting expectations is definitely solid and in the in the seal version of the jaco brief there's a slide that was roles in responsibilities by person yep like task unit commander here's what you're doing and I went right on down the line and I'm sure you guys had to adjust it to but the point is And the reason I don't give it really in the civility,

because I don't give it, I don't give roles and responsibilities part of the brief. Yeah. Because I don't know what the roles and responsibilities are in this construction company or in this manufacturing company or in this financial company, right? It changes, it shifts. But in a seal platoon, in a seal task unit, I knew what the rules and responsibilities were. And listen, and here's something I used to explain.

Like, if you're the platoon chief and you're supposed to be the person that's handling the tactical situation. Okay. If the officer is supposed to be looking at the next move that we're going to take, hey, listen, chief, if your officer is not capable of doing that, you better get your LPO trained up so he can handle the tactical situation so you can go and figure out what you're going to do next. So we have to be able to not just do like our specific job, our role and responsibility.

But if we have to, inside of our platoon, we might have to say, hey, you know what, chief, you handle this over here. You know, if I got a chief that's not super dynamic on target and I got an LPO that's a badass, I'll go, hey, hey, LPO, you're going to be, you're going to be responsible for this stuff. You're going to be responsible for the assault. Chief, you're going to be responsible for the marshalling. Yeah.

Okay, cool, got it. You're like, that's okay. It doesn't matter. Now, don't let your ego get in the way because the chief, oh, I'm supposed to be in charge of the assault. Cool. You're not good at it. Yeah.

Of course, I'd be much more gentle about it. What I would say is, hey, you know, well, the thing is, I want the OPO to get some experience. So we're going to let him handle some of these right now and see how he does. And in the meantime, you can just kind of handle the marshaling over here, you know, with the AOC. But yeah, those roles are responsibility. So the fact that you laid those out early, let's everyone know what the expectation is. Let's everybody know where you stand, right? Let's everybody know, like, hey, I don't put up, I'm not going to put up with this.

I'm not going to put up with that. I'm not going to put up with the other thing. If you're out of line, you better come and tell me what's going on. If I get blindsided, you're going to be problems. So all those, all those things, absolutely. Like, that's a great point. Setting those expectations of what you need, what you want, what your standards are. You set those out of the gate.

It's going to align people real quick. Yeah. And then you model them. You got to model them. Yeah, yeah. You got to do what you're saying. Oh, yeah. If you're not, you might as well just freaking just not even put out the word.

If you're going to say, hey, everyone be squared away and you're going to act like a jackass, just don't even put it out. Yeah, it just clears everybody else to do that shit. Dumb move. And then what? And then what? So finish up that deployment, come back, and then I go and work at our headquarters for our Forest Master Chief, which was an awesome guy at the time.

I learned a truckload from him, which I'd be able to use for my next two positions. And so at the headquarters element, you know, what I have on here, let me just go back one real quick. The headquarters element was good because it was the first time I'm outside of that sealed team, you know, whether it's training or just seal, you know, mission. You're up at the headquarters element. You know I was in the same office you were, but I'm working for the force. You're working for the admiral.

So it's very similar line. Did you do? How long did you work there for? right around less than a year and a half. Got it. But it was enough. You're ready to get out of that after 12 months. But here's what I would say.

I wished I would have done that position earlier on, probably like as a chief or a senior chief. But what does Wright look like? Where does it fit in? The training, I think, would have priority because that's going to set you up tactically. But going up there, you're like, holy cow, your aperture just opens wide up with actually how things work. you know, with seal

platoons going over into Afghanistan into Iraq, how all that stuff works. Do you want more gear? Here's the process to procure the gear and you're going through all that. And one of the things the guy I worked for did is he was up there and he laid out initiatives. Hey, here's the initiatives I want to get over the line.

And then I was the guy, you know, when he's on travel back at the Black Palace, trying to move these things forward as quickly as possible. without missing anything. So it was a good experience. And the guy worked where he'd had over 30 years and he'd bounced around.

He was a good dude, man. Yeah. I learned a lot from him. Yeah, well, you're right. I did work. We worked in the exact same front of the call it the front office. And for sure, when you start to see, you start to see how small of a role, right?

Like you're small. There's like the whole military. That's the first time when you get a taste of, Like, did you go to the Pentagon? Did you go on travel with your boss? I went back to Socom. I didn't travel that much with those guys. Yeah, so I was going to the Pentagon, bro.

The Pentagon. Yeah. I was, I was, you know, sitting in the back of the meeting with Socom, you know, over and over again. And hearing the word being put out and seeing the, seeing the handwritten notes from the Secretary of Defense. You know what I'm saying? Like all of a sudden you realize how big this machine. is. And that puts things in perspective for you. And yes, you learn a lot about, you know, how to make things happen and how, well, not how to make things happen, but how things happen.

And then you can at least provide some level of influence on trying to hopefully make things happen yourself. Because that's a B. Understanding it makes all the difference in the world, because now you know how to navigate it. And you also know, like, there's no point getting frustrated about this thing over here because I can at least explain to the troops, hey, this is why this is happening. I know it seems crazy. But guess what? The money that's getting spent for weapons right now Was actually allocated five years ago.

Yeah, yeah. And so if you're going to be mad about it, that's fine, But it's not going to help. Yeah, yeah. And that was issues. I remember we were getting gear three, four years later That was designed for the previous three, four years. And it was already obsolete.

You're like, I don't need, I can't even use this stuff right now, you know. But it was good. And I remember being up there in 2015, and I think that was when you and Laf sent your first published copy of extreme ownership up there for approval. Oh, yeah. Well, there wasn't a published copy. It was probably like a manuscript.

That's what it was. So I got me a copy of that. Oh, really? Got the early one. I got the early one. So I read through it. I didn't know what to expect, you know. And back then, everyone's going, hey, man, people are on their net writing books.

I'm like, oh, let's see what Jacques-O and Laper write about here. A little courtesy copy. And I remember picking it up and I read them. I'm like, damn, this is really good because the way you guys translated into the business world It was just, you know, it made sense, you know. And plus, you recognized it all. Yeah. From the Jocko brief, which is, you know, basically where it all came from.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your guys, the way you wrote it, the position on it was from a humility standpoint, which people are going to appreciate that. So it was good, man. Yeah, no, that was a big obstacle to overcome mentally. Yeah. You know, like, for me, it was massive. You know, I can't speak for Laif.

But like for me, I mean, we just talked, opened this whole thing up about talking about reputation. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you know, you can, you can destroy your reputation by becoming that guy. Yeah. We wrote that book and, you know, and that's, that was horrible. That was a horrible experience to go through. It was like walking into the unknown and you can't, look, and you can't. Look, when you write a book,

it is not a humble act, right? Like there's no, there's, it's like saying, hey, I'm going to go freaking, uh, uh, start a podcast. Get a designer suit. Yeah, or start a podcast. Hey, I'm going to go get a designer suit. But it's not for, it's not for me.

Yeah. Like it doesn't work. Or hey, I'm going to start a podcast and talk a bunch. Like, what do you got to talk about, dude? So to say you're going to write a book or you're going to start a podcast or you're going to put a spotlight on yourself is basically what you're doing. That's, that's what I'm saying. Right.

When you write a book, you're putting a spotlight on yourself. Look at me. Yeah. And there's no, it doesn't matter what that book says. Yeah. At least at the initial impression. Like, you, you are putting a spotlight on yourself. And I hated that.

And it was really, it was hard to overcome that. Yeah. But then you think, here we are working with these civilian companies. Yeah. And they are being able to move forward and execute better. and execute better. And it's like, you know what? The stuff that we learned

is probably worth teaching. Yeah, yeah. The stuff that we learned is people need to hear it. And then one of the, the admiral, you know, I kind of had that kind of conversation with him. And he says, he said,

he goes, you know what, Jocko? We are quiet professionals. We are not silent professionals. Wow. And some of the stories need to be told and some of the lessons need to be taught. And the way you're doing it is the way it should be done. And that was real, you know, obviously that was about as much reassurance as I could get.

And then, you know, just having friends that read the book in the teams and were like, bro, legit. And then same thing with the podcast. Like when I started, bro, when I started with the podcast, when all my friends started like, calling me like dude that podcast was sick and everyone like that's when I was super stoked you know because you feel horrible uh and you feel like you're shining a spotlight on yourself and what I realized was that people saw that I was actually trying to shine a spotlight not on me but like on the community not even just our community but the army the the Marine Corps like every every one

that is out there working hard is where where the spotlight was trying to be shined. It's just that I happen to hold it. And it's pretty sketchy to pick that thing up, bro. Think about this. Think about if there were podcasts going on in the 90s when we were coming up, where we could learn and go and get information on books to read and lessons learned from people that were in Vietnam that are talking, hey, here's some things we jacked up.

We had a blue-on-blue. I wish I'd have done this. Here's what I did as a leader that was jacked up. I wish I would have, you know, came over and talked to echo on this thing. I mean, how much better would we have been? We didn't have, we had shit. man, we had nothing. And that's,

believe me, I think about that all the time. I mean, even when Mike Thornton came on, and we did a full debrief, I was like, I was in the SEAL teams for 20 years. Yeah.

And I never got that debrief. I never read that debrief, never saw, didn't know all those lessons that he learned. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, wait a second,

that's so wrong. I felt horrible. Yep. And so, you know what now, it's like, oh, you can bring on,

Roger Hayden because Roger Hayden taught me stuff. But how is a new guy going to learn about Roger Hayden and his lessons? Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's not even just lessons about hey, cover move or hey, keep it simple. It's lessons about, hey, when this happens, when you lose a guy, when you get a guy badly wounded, when you get somebody that's, you know, acting a certain way, when someone's losing in combat, like all those lessons. Yeah, yeah. Being able to learn them is freaking so powerful.

It only helped people out in the future. It's good. I mean, when I had James Webb on, who was, you know, Naval Academy, Marine Corps, Navy Cross, you know, Secretary of the Navy. But when we got done, and I mean, he wrote the book, Fields of Fire, incredible book. And it's sort of the book that all Vietnam movies, are based on.

Every movie about Vietnam is based on that book in one way or another. And that book is a thinly disguised autobiography. But when we got done, we walked out and he was like, I never got debriefed like that. No one ever debriefed anything that I did in Vietnam like that. Wow.

And he goes, you know, I wrote, there's some stuff written down in some library in the 12th floor of the Pentagon, you know, row 17, Alpha, he goes, no one's ever

going to read that. And to be able to debrief like that, it's, yeah. He's like, thank you. And his son

was in freaking Ramadi. Wow. Wow. So, yeah, there's a, I'm, I'm,

I'm, I meet Marines and Army guys and team guys all the time. They're like, oh yeah, episode,

this episode, this freaking awesome. Because just what you just said, we didn't get that. opportunity to be able to get the debriefs from people and hear these lessons. And it's so we're so lucky to be able to do that. It's a powerful learning tool. You know, a lot of things we do just to your point in the military translate right over

into the business world for everyone to learn from, you know. So then what did you get done? You got done with Warcom. Yeah. So got done with Warcom and went over and at that time we were doing rotations with the combined joint special operations task force. Task force that goes into Iraq and then, you know, they deal with the siege of SOTA, you know, they're in charge of the maneuver elements.

Yeah, so basically this is a group that's in charge of all the special operations in a area, in this case, Iraq. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so went up there and I think we had, you know, you're working with all these other countries and they're reporting to you. We're working together as one big team, one big unit. I think we had in between 800 and 1100 people with the SIGA SOTF. And guys are dispersed everyone. And this is a point in Iraq where ISIS has a foothold up in Mosul.

And we've got, you know, it was the first time I actually worked with Marsock. We had their M-SOTs and their M-Soc out there along with the 05 headquarters. They were up north. And we had our NSW unit and they were co-located with us there in Baghdad. And so it was a good experience. You know, and we're figuring out, hey, how are we going to take down-bub? Mosul. You know, there's been several rotations before us where everyone's just waiting. One of the Rack is going to want to do it. One of the Rack is going to want to do it. And that came to a head on our deployment, which was good. And so finally, we get approval. Guys come in there and...

So what years is this? This is 2016. 2016. So, you know, guys going there and start clearing out Mosul. You know, and at some point, you know, one of our seal units rotated out, and Jay and his formation rotated in, which is awesome. Jay's team. was awesome. Him and his commanding officer did a great job building that out. You know, they were, it was, you know, one of the best SEAL teams I'd seen. So it was good. Anyways, they come in and start clearing Mosul. Me and my boss, we push up to Erbil, and then out of Urbiel, we were running a small jock out of there.

So we were co-located with, God, I forget, the C-Joc. And the C-Joc was the one who could clear airspace to drop ordinance. And we needed to be co-located to be co-located. located with them to help deconflict in case anything got snagged up. So anyways, there was a lot of connect fighting in there going on at that point. But a good experience, we're working with, I think, seven or eight different countries. First time I've been inside a C. DeSoto working like that, and you're up in the upper leadership and management position, you know, taking on everything that's going on.

I'm trying to provide my boss with the best advice I can on, you know, what I recommend. And, you know, and the boss I had back then, he's an admiral now, but he was just squared away. Just even-tempered guy, people loved him. The other countries loved him. Like, hey, where'd you get this guy? I'm like, that's my first time working. But he's dialed in.

He had a great reputation, you know him. So it was a good deployment. You know, probably the things that weighed the most on that deployment is I'd never really been a part of a ramp ceremony to where you're like, you're leading this thing. And we had one of our warrant officers, and this was our first ramp ceremony. And so we had a pilot that was shot down. I want to say it was 2006 time period, and his remains were never recovered.

And our warrant officer went off this, and he's working with a shake. And the shake's going, hey, we got the remains if you want them. And they start doing negotiations. And then shakes like, hey, we want this amount of money, and our guy is going back and forth. And just a point up front I want to make is when you assign the right person, you know, the right talent to that, to what you're trying to accomplish, you can get a lot over the finish line. And I'm saying that up front because there was other agencies that had worked with

this shake to try to get the remains back. They couldn't get it over the finish line. But here was a guy who never done this before, the right temperament, the right attitude went in there and was playing a little hardball with this guy, played a little softball over here, and he got it over the finish line. line. You know, we wanted up, you know, you know, negotiating with a shake. We got the remains back. We went through our ramp ceremony back here, and then we got the, you know, the remains back to the U.S. so, you know, that officer could be properly buried. And he was a, he was a pilot that had been

shot down. So it was powerful. It felt good, you know, felt good. And then we had a few other ramp ceremonies. We know, we lost, this was one of Jay's EOD's Bubbers, but he was hit, you know, up there in Mosul with an IED and he was killed and so we did a ramp ceremony from and brought him back and we had one other guy and I want to I'll tie this back in Ramadi but the third guy we had he was you know he's doing some stuff in another country he was hit hard he was killed and we brought him back to us and it was like the night before Thanksgiving back in the U.S. and in Ramadi we were operating right before Christmas and you know, the siege of soda commander pulled us out and we were pissed off. We were like,

what the hell, man? We were planning on being here and through Christmas Eve and through Christmas. And the siege of soda commander back in 2006 said, hey man, I don't want to report back to anyone's family that their son was wounded or killed, you know, before Christmas. And then here we are, you know, damn near 10 years later in Iraq and this guy gets killed right before Thanksgiving. And his family's over with the other family or his wife and kids are over with their family. and they got to get notified. We're coming back here, going through all our procedures to make sure everything's tight,

and he's getting his proper respect before we send him out. But those things, like, when you're putting an American on an aircraft in a casket with the flag draped over, man, it's a gut punch, man. It sucks. It sucks, man. It's something I never, you know, wish upon anyone. And it really hits home to you, you know, not good. How long was that deployment?

That was a six-monther. And the Iraqis took massive casualties on that department. Before we left, they were like the special unit we were working with, and it trained up over the years. The SF actually trained them up. I think we had a hand in the pie somewhere in there, but they were dialed in. They were the best unit that the Iraqis had,

and these guys had a lot of pride, but they were like over 800 casualties when we left. And it was just, it was, I mean, ISIS was no doubt. joke over there, man. They were, they were barbaric, brutal. And, you know, there's a, there's a fraction of, of people where you think you're going to come in and you're going to talk some sense into some people like that. You're not, you're not talking to them. And if they get a hold of you, it's not going to be good for you. You're going to get your head chopped off. And that's the type of, that's what, that's what we're dealing with over there. And those,

you know, that unit that our guys were working with, they laid it all out there. They're going in there for their country for Iraq to secure that city to make it a better place. And man, they took heavy casualties. I mean heavy casualties. You know, the truck bombs they built from 2004 to 2016, they up-armored them in 2016. So when they're coming at you, there's not a good way to defeat them. You need some type of missile system or rocket system coming in on top, or you need some type of a resting device to where you can stop the vehicle from coming at you. You know, we had some good penetration with some of our heavy caliber weapons. We're stopping them, but it was hard.

It was not easy. And they'd hide them underneath, you know, vehicle or carport entry points, and you wouldn't be able to tell what it is. And next thing you know, that big, huge, you know, truck bomb is on the move. And there's uparmored all over the place, and there's just a small window that they can look out. And guess what? If they come off the seat or anything happens with a seat in their adjustment, the thing's rigged to just blow. So as soon as it hits something, the whole thing's going up.

And man, we just remember watching CTS units, this damn thing would be coming. You'd be trying to call in an airstrike. But you got like a minute and 30 seconds to clear airspace overhead to get bombs down on targets. It's like it wasn't going to happen. So you had to be able to handle business as a tactical unit on the ground to take this thing out. You know, we'd give these guys rockets in ship, but it, they would. weren't effective. So it was a super complex and frustrating environment, you know, took a lot of casualties. Yeah, I know Jason was saying that, you know, at a certain point, they were thinking

that the Iraqi unit that was doing the majority of the fighting was just going to run out of guys. Like they just were going to, they were just going to all be dead or all be casualties, which was, which was freaking scary. And I was horrified, you know, when he was telling me that. And I was hearing some of that while you guys were actually over there. But at the same time, even though it kind of horrified me, at the same time, I also was, this is going to sound wrong, but I was happy to hear it because what it told me was that the Iraqis were fighting. And when we were in Ramadi, the Iraqis, some of them would fight, but it definitely wasn't, they weren't looking to take massive casualties to try and take a city back. like they didn't care that much. And they would run away.

We had a whole battalion. A whole battalion of Iraqi soldiers said, yeah, we're out. We had one entire company disappear. Like there was a strike on one of their checkpoints, and they all just bailed. That was that. So to hear how hard the Iraqis were fighting and they were taking it to ISIS

and that they were staying in the fight, that was just freaking, that was just, it was awesome to hear that. It was so horrible to hear that they were taking casualties, but it was great to hear that they had found the will to fight and that they were unified and fighting courageously to liberate other Iraqis inside their country from these actual savages

that are doing the most, committing the most heinous atrocities imaginable. And it was awesome to hear that they were fighting like that. And it was also, you know, when, when ISIS decided to, you know, wear a uniform and put up flags, it was like right on. Let's see how this works out for you. Yeah. Freaking legit. And then what?

Then what? So finish up with that deployment, get back off of that. And then that's when I rolled over to group one. And so, you know, started, you know, I got a good six month of getting saturated with group level stuff. And, you know, at the group, you're responsible for all, you know, four West Coast SEAL teams and three other commands. So you got roughly right around 1,800 people or so. And your primary function there is manning, training, and equipment.

So I'm working directly with the team command master chiefs. On some occasions, they're commanding officers. And so you're in a position of a lot of influence at that point. You know, and I'm directly working with our Commodore on our initiatives and moving the mission forward. and you're also dealing with whatever sort of equipment, like trying to get equipment for the guys, just the whole nine yards.

And overall, responsible for their training. Did you go out to the desert during that time? We're out there a couple times. Damn, bro. And it's so it's weird. It's different. When you're up at that level, when you come down in, it's never the same.

Yeah. It's never, you know, you're the guy. You're the guy. Then it's like, hey, I'm coming in there to see this. And you're like, hey man, you guys might want to tighten this shit up over here, you know. But it was good, you know. Damn, who was there? I think Jay, yeah, Jay was at trade at the time.

So it was good. So Jay was always there as a right hand man I had out there. And we had a good crew of a team committed master chiefs. And one of the things we started doing back in 2015 with the force I was working with, the force command mass chief, is he started implementing a screening process. So we were basically going through a hiring. to make sure that we were getting the right leaders in at the master chief level

to take over some of these command positions. And it's not perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than where we were. We also started implementing in, you know, Patoon Chief and Task Unit Senior List Advisors and Visors screening, and that was developing, so it's getting better as we move forward. Bottom line is, you know, things are getting better.

You're moving things forward. That's what you want for a better formation. You know, and just going back to Warcom real quick, One of the things I realized when you're up there, you know, when you're down in the troops, you're just like, give me my gear. I want to go to war and do all these things. And people talk a lot of shit about everyone above them.

And here's the deal with the people that are above you. I'm you. I'm you. I was the E5 talking that shit, saying all those things. And guess what? I moved up positions, but I moved up in positions to take care of people, right? And so there's a lot of kooky things that come out. You're the guy behind the scenes squashing these things,

you know, to make sure that our people are taking, care of. And I always had a buddy that was, you know, he was a hard case. And he's like, hey, man, why don't you ever say this? Won't you, you need to stand up and say something about that? I'm like, hey, man, I'm handling that shit behind closed doors. I'm not going to come here in open form with the commander and disagree with them in front of all these people, man. That's not, that's not smart. I'm getting nowhere. Yeah. But if I come around the backside here, do a little flank, plant some seeds, you can have a lot more influence that way. So anyways, you're always going to get that shit with the hard cases you know what I'm talking about yeah and then how long was that tour so that was a

two-year tour you know and I wanted to finish up my career there and and and and towards the end you're like I mean what what were you thinking what was on the horizon and what was your decision-making process to to decide to punch punch yeah so I punched right at like the 28 and a half year mark so I could have gone another year and half but man I was out of juice and one of the things people talk about is hey you know when it's time to go and man I was in that position and we had some high profile cases out there and they just wear on you man you know they just wear on you and even before that happened I knew it was time for me to go I'm like all right I'm going to do this position it's time for me to to move out of here I don't think I had anything left to add value to the mission in the organization

I was topped out with my leadership capacity and we have plenty of guys that go out there and do the the T-sox you know the theater special operations command and that's a high level of influence those were action arms in the operational areas and I was like man I just don't see myself going and working at that level. You're working with general officers, with admirals. And I was like, man, I just, and I was up at Warcom, kind of got a little bit of a taste of that. And I was like, that's just not me.

And we need people to do those positions. Hell, we had quite a few East Coast guys going into those T-Soc positions, and you need them because that's a huge, a high level of influence that we have in NSW. If you have your guy in there, he can help influence some outcomes, which is super important. But I was definitely maxed out of gas, time for me to pack up and go home. And one of the things that always comes to mind with me is in 2003,

you know, we had Posey out there, our Vietnam guy. Good dude, man, just good family guy. Vietnam had more stores you can imagine. But he was like, man, Steve, you guys are stronger, faster, smarter than we ever were. I was like, damn, what's he talking about? And then I look back, you know, 28, you know, 15 years later, whatever it was. And I'm like, these young guys that are coming in, they're hungry, they're smarter, they're stronger than I was, they're faster than I was, meaning, hey, the community's in a good spot. We've got our next generation coming up and through our ranks, doing good things.

You know, one of the things one of our head leaders for the Navy put out, Mick Pond Stevens, he said, hey, work hard, stay out of trouble, and be a good person. That's all I'm asking the formation to do. The entire Navy, that was his mantra. Work hard, stay out of trouble, be a good and decent human being, be a good person. And I never knew what the hell he meant by stay out of trouble. And then, you know, as you start moving up in these positions and you have high profile cases and things going on, they can bring your entire community down to its knees, meaning it's hard to move initiatives forward.

It's hard to focus on what your actual job is because you're dealing with, you know, in JP, you're dealing with court marshals, all those things weigh on you, and it's never good. And my boss in 2015, our force, he hammered it home to me, and it made sense. He said, hey, Steve, we've got to protect the mission. We've got to protect our credibility. Credibility that's built in other people's blood. It was spilled in other people's blood. We've got to protect that at all cost. And he's like, it's hard for us to protect the homeland if our credibility's damaged and we can't get employed overseas to wrap up bad guys and i was like yeah check that shit makes sense um so yeah yeah well that's it's the same thing as a reputation right yeah

community has a reputation and you've got to do everything you can to protect that reputation yeah because if you're if you're yeah just that's just what you have to do yeah yeah and you do your best you do everything you can to protect the reputation i mean that's just what you got to do you know man any other echo you got anything said something about a firecracker earlier like a firecracker scenario

or whatever and you were like oh you got the firecracker like right off the bat or something like that it was a nickname it was the nickname for an area in Ramadi that was north of route Michigan and it was this little road that wrapped up and around it was called firecracker and the reason it was called firecracker was because

there was a lot of bad shit going on. There was a lot of fire, a lot of fire cracking off. As you said. Interesting. Okay. And that was like your first... That was our first operation in Ramadi.

Dude, that's a welcome to Ramadi situation right there. Damn. Yeah. It was good. That was good. That's all I... Freaking crazy. Anything else, Steve?

Any closing thoughts? No. That's it. Right. All, man. Well, thanks for coming on, man. Yeah. Oh, you know what?

I'll say one more thing. At one point, probably you were like six months out from retiring, and you said, I have three courses of action for what I'm going to do when I get out. Eschelon front, echelon front, echelon front. And I was like, right old man, freaking awesome. Which is a rip-off from the Marine that I covered the book on the podcast, where when he was getting ready to graduate from the basic school. and they had to fill out what they wanted to do,

and this was in 1967. They had to fill out what they wanted to do in the Marine Corps, and he put one, two, three, infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander. It's like, that's what I'm going to do. I was like, project to that, all right? Guess we're going to execute on this thing. So it's freaking awesome.

Thanks for what you did to the teams, for the teams, obviously, for America, obviously, and for freedom. And I know we had an awesome time working together in the past. I still, I just, when I drive at night, whenever I drive at night, especially out here in California in the desert, I'm always thinking I'm driving back from the desert,

from our desert training facility, and just with just totally amped, because I wouldn't be able to sleep, because I'd be so fired up for the teams and for the boys, and I'd be like, just amped driving back, knowing that we made some freaking guys ready for war. So it was awesome working with you then, and awesome working with you again right now, man.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be on with Eschelon Front. It's awesome. Can I say one thing real quick? Yeah. Hey, I'd like to thank my wife, Allison. She's put up with me for all these years. She was prior military, good Southern girl from Arkansas,

and she runs a tight game. She keeps me in line. So I love with all my heart. She's an awesome person and my kids. I love you guys. Right on, man. Awesome. Well, Echo.

Yes, sir. Speaking of getting after it, speaking of being awesome, what do you think we can do to become more awesome? To strive. Strive for awesomeness? At the very least, how about that? There's some podcast we did from some ancient warrior. Shaking the world with your awesomeness.

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, that's a big step. Go ahead, striving to shaking the world. You see, I'm seeing. Like, that's kind of a big step for sure. So let's start with striving. Cool. Good.

All right. Well, hey, in your path to strive for awesomeness or in the event that you're just straight up trying to shake the world with awesomeness, hey, look, you might need some supplementation. Okay. Let me, let me start this by Steve. You know, you listen to the podcast. Yes.

How often do you listen to this part of the podcast? What percentage of time? I'm probably 50%. 50%. 50% you hang on. I hang on. Or is it just you can't hit stop on your freaking iPhone, so you just have to roll with it.

It's like stuff. There's so many new products coming out. You've got to listen to it to kind of go, all right, is there some new line coming out here? I'm not tracking. Oh, check. It's true. He makes a good point.

So he's saying 50%. My guess is he's kind of rounding up to be nice because he doesn't want to be like harsh to echo Charles. That's cool. All I need is 1%. That's right. Man, he's over 50. Shoot, that's 49.

Here's what I know. I just got a text from JP and Dave Burke. They want to know if you're going to talk about their discipline and go. Some sour apple sniper. You mean good deal, Dave? Good deal, Dave. JP just tracking on it. Like tracking that Steve's here and then sending, taking the time to send a text to say,

hey, make sure you talk about sour apple sniper. Okay. Dave wants to make JP jealous. So you got to mention Dave's afterburn or words. Okay. No problem. We're on it fully. These two guys are just breaking in the game.

That's all, man. That's how. And I dig it. Either way, before we get to the discipline or discipline, go, which are, you know, they're kind of different, but kind of the same. We're talking about joint supplements. This is important because you don't want to think about this kind of stuff while we're trying to, what, shake the world with, you know,

awesomeness or strive or whatever. You know, you don't want to think about your joints. You don't want to think about your immunity, getting sick, all this kind of stuff. So you take these supplements. Joint warfare, joints. Super cruel oil, joints. vitamin D3 immunity and general health by the way vitamin D3 is good for a lot of stuff

all kinds especially at this moment in time in particular we're talking about factual information about the glory of the vitamin D it's true absolutely true also a cold war immunity supplement keep those in mind so you don't have to keep the other stuff in mind well yeah that's what I you've you've finally gotten through to me it's only taken 200

And 60 episodes of Now I understand that you're like oh it's good to To not have to think about your joints bothering you Yes that's a good thing that is a good thing so now I understand We don't want to wake up and be like I hope my joints hold up today in the workout or whatever You see what I'm saying? Yes You just want to go into the workout warm up if you got it done as they say exactly right Also we have something called discipline to supplement

for your brain, for your body, for your whole thing. Really? Your life, man. Your life. Powder. Take discipline powder instead of coffee. Try that. Good call.

It could be something, that's what I'm saying, as far as the routine. Also, discipline go, which are and, or should I say were capsules to begin when? They are capsules, yes. Except you're on the go, see what I'm saying? Yes. You did that. They're very popular at Eshlam Front. Can I see something on the discipline go capsules?

So I've been using that stuff. And so when I'm going in and I'm doing a speaking engagement. That's why they're so popular. I take two. And here's the deal. Like when I'm communicating, when I'm not taking that stuff, it's like I'm going down the highway and I really have to think hard about the words I'm going to communicate. It's like the words are in off the shoot off a street.

When I'm on the discipline go, the words are right there on the road. I'm going 60 miles an hour. You're like, boom, boom, boom, boom, clear, concise communications. And I don't know what's in it. but it definitely clears up your mind. It clears up your mind. It works. You got to get,

I'm telling you, if you're a boss, you got some things going on, a meeting, a high speed meeting, you're talking to people, it helps. I promise you,

it helps. I wouldn't say if it did. Yeah. No, that's why, that's why an echelon front where we get up and we have to, not only we have to speak,

but we got to take questions, interpret questions. We got to come up with answers and solutions. And so the team is always like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to, I want to bring the A game.

Right? Yep. How do you ensure you bring the A game? Take a little discipline go. Yeah. And then if you have like a little more time or maybe you want to enjoy that a little bit more. You can get a can of discipline go. Yes, which is what you mentioned, right?

Many flavors now. Shoot, the flavor roster getting big over here. So most recently, after burner orange. Good deal, Dave Burke. Boom. Before that, sour apple sniper. JP did know. What are they competing with each other?

Oh, good Lord. There's some competition. Before that, Jaco Palmer, which by the way, which by the way, Jaco Palmer, Jock Palmer is not,

Jock Palmer, what it is, is it's 50-50, iced tea, lemonade. That's what it is. Some people were thinking it was pomegranate because we also have Jock-Pomerate

white tea. Yeah. Which you probably remember, Steve. Tell us about, that's the origin. and story right there at an island me rolling into those briefs with that big old plastic uh uh protein shaker with freaking with with pomegranate tea which i would get from wherever and then i'd just sit there in the front row and they'd give their brief and jacked you just taking notes

they'd be like all right you'd give your points or actually like you know whatever the the front line instructors would give their points and then you'd give your points and then be like you'd be like Got anything boss? And I'd be like, oh. Is there caffeine in the? There is. Just a little bit. Yeah, that's a little bit.

That's why the whole thing. Yeah. So speaking of caffeine and just a little bit, yes, Jocco Palmer, that was the one before that. And then before that was what? Who's the first signature? Oh, Dax Savage was the one. The first signature was Dax Savage.

Yeah. Dakota. Is that your go-to? What's your go-to? I like the Dax Savage. And I like the story behind Dax Savage. Yeah, dude. He's a monster bad.

If you can just get a little, if you can have a little bit of mentality of Dakota, then your whole, your whole being is better. Yeah. No offense to JP and Dave. I mean, I want to have their mentalities too. But let's face it, it's Dak Savage. It's freaking Dakota. We're kind of in the game.

Dakota's kind of take, do you, did you drink Dr. Pepper when you were a kid? I did not. Because that's kind of the, yeah. It's kind of the flavor, apparently. It's tasty. Yeah. It's tasty. Yeah, that's my wife's favorite.

Yeah. Which, what do you think of that, Dakota? I see you tracking on my wife. You tracking? Tracking on my wife, Dakota. Yeah, so that one's kind of a sour apple sniper is, I'm going to say if you have a little bit of a sweet tooth, probably sour apple sniper is your go-to.

It's true. Jocco Palmer is, if you like iced tea and lemonade. Yeah, that was my favorite before the orange. The orange is your favorite. Currently my favorite. Yeah. Yes, sir. But hey man, you know, to each their own and you know, we're going to move forward.

So what this is though, discipline go in a can energy drink, health energy drink, healthy energy drink. No, health drink in the form of an energy drink. Yeah. It's been hard to figure out what to call it. Whatever you were just saying, Steve was pretty legit about just going down the road, finding words. Everything's in focus. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I know what your feeling is. Yeah.

And that's what makes like the can so good. Because you know how like let's face it. You're just doing whatever during the day, whatever we do during the day. And you're like, oh, you know, I'll grab a water. I'll grab a juice. Grab a soda sometimes, some of us. No. This, this exactly right, though.

This is like you can grab it. No, you don't get the bad parts of soda. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, if you're going for a water, cool, man. Do it. But if you're grabbing like a Red Bull or I shouldn't say any particular brand. But if you're grabbing a.

soda or an energy drink. I'm just saying you're going to pay a price for that. You're paying a price. You're paying a price with your health. Yeah. And with this, discipline, go.

It's paying you a price. You would think that somebody would have already made an equivalent, right? You would think that. It's real obvious. Hey, I'm going to make something that makes you enhances your performance, but it's actually good for you. You'd think somebody would have done that.

Why didn't they do it? Number one, cost too much. And now they're not making, they're not maximizing profits at the freaking cash register. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And number two is hard. Yeah.

It was hard to do because we had to, instead of just throwing a bunch of chemicals in there, so it wouldn't go bad, we had to pasteurize it, which no one does. Yeah. So there you go. And not only that, hey, well, how are you going to make it taste good? Well, we'll just put a bunch of chemicals in there that are bad for you, but it'll make people taste good. And we don't care about the people that we're serving this to. So we'll just let them drink poison.

We'll just let them drink poison. What did we do? We said, no, I was like, no, we're not doing that. we're going to sweeten it with something real. It's monk fruit. So that's why it doesn't, even that doesn't seem like a lot of barriers to entry, right? Like, hey, we're going to pasteurize it.

We're going to put, we're going to sweeten it naturally. We're going to only put healthy ingredients in it. You'd think that those bars to entry aren't that high. You'd think someone would have done it, but they didn't. They didn't do it. So we did.

Amen. Like I said. Now everyone else can get in line. As far as getting in line goes, For sure. Also, speaking of tasting good, milk,

superior protein in the form of a dessert. So, you know, such a good dessert. Yeah, very much so. So Brian,

I don't even know if I'm supposed to say this, but Brian sends my son and me, I'm more of a secondary thing, but sends my son milk bars. Oh,

yeah. Right? I don't know if they're still in the experimental stage or whatever. The version that you're getting right now is pretty close to a done deal.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, it's one of those things where yeah man if you want a dessert like milk is the dessert and it's super as far as like um you know how like sometimes you're like oh i need a dessert but i you know i'm on the past so i'm gonna have a dessert substitute or something like this you're saying you had those out i thought those were out already most bars yeah i was eating something back in uh december last year we were we were in the experimental phase well they were tasty then yeah they've

gotten better wow they've gotten better so it's been hard man it's been really hard there's a It's the same kind of battles you're fighting with the, like with making the drink and how do you actually keep it stable? There's more. There's, well, not more, but there's different things in play trying to make a bar. How do you keep it stable? How does it maintain its texture over time? What happens when it's sitting on the shelf for two months? There's a bunch of things to deal with.

So we find, in the version that you're getting right now, Echo, we finally figured out how to overcome all that and do it naturally and make it taste good and have the right flavor profile and stay stable on the shelf. So it's been a long road. It's been a road that we almost backed away from. And you know me, I'm not one to, D-O-R. D-O-R, as they say. Sure. Yeah, but either way, yes, milk, protein,

in the form of dessert, not a dessert substitute, by the way. Just simply dessert. Straight up. Where do you get all this stuff? Origin main.com. Originally, originally. Originally, it's many other places to get it.

But before we go there, Okay. Let's go here. Jocko white tea. You mentioned the pomegranate white tea. Jock white tea. That is available. We're not just talking about Jocko used to drink white tea.

Now he doesn't. Br. Drinks even better white tea. I had it today. Yeah, remember you still drink it in that big jar? Mm-hmm. Bring the big jar.

Oh, I used to bring it even back in the day. Like a crazy person. Yeah. Yeah. Unless, yes, that's available as well. At origin main.

com. Also at the vitamin shop offline. What do you call it? like brick and retail retail yeah boom vitamin shop go get it also the discipline go cans are at wawa in florida currently yeah and by the way if you live in florida and you've been and look i i asked and said hey please this is the mission we want to we want to go into the full chain of wawa we needed to go hard in florida we needed to go in there and clear shelves well you all that have been clearing shelves thank you keep going we're on the path

to victory. Don't let up. That's true. Keep getting after it. Because you know why? Because people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Maryland, they're counting on Florida. It's all eyes on Florida.

We got a rock and roll in Florida. We're on the right path. Don't let up. It's true. And the thing is, again, I said before, it's kind of a big deal,

though, to go and get like an energy drink or whatever, and it'd be legitimate and healthy for you. It's crazy. It's a huge deal. You don't even really have to think about it. But in my case, you just went back. I mean, we were talking about that 15 minutes ago,

but we're talking about it again. That's cool. I don't think I'm capitalized, not capitalized. I broke down the entire thing about the bars and the thing we got to do and how hard it was. That wasn't good enough. But not about the price you pay when you drink an energy drink or a soda or something like this. That price you pay versus the price that you don't pay.

That's a big deal. I didn't think I maximized the, how should I say, the communication of the, that big deal. Check. I think I have now. Okay.

Also at origin main.com is American made stuff, jujitsu stuff, geese, rash cards, some, some athletic stuff. Let me ask you a good question. Can you wear a ghee when you go to the grocery mart? Grocery mark. Yeah, well, as far as grocery marks go, yeah, sure. I mean, you could technically. Advisable?

Well, you know, I'm not going to sit here and advise that. But, man, if you're going to do it, go ahead, do that. Okay. Was there something that we could, where that would be more acceptable. Sure. Like what? Maybe some jeans.

Ah, there we go. There we go. Maybe. I don't know, but maybe. Yeah. But where can you get American-made jeans? You know, it's very hard. How should I say?

As far as options go, there are not as many options as, you know, one might hope. But thankfully, yes, I am here to tell you at origin-made. com, you can get American-made denim jeans. You know what? You probably are thinking, if you're an American,

you're probably thinking about like iconic. I'm going to say three words. Iconic American jeans. And we all know there's a few brands that fall into that category. They've been around for a long time. I've been around for a long time. I got news for you. Your iconic American jeans, they're not American.

They're not American. Brutal. So if you want to get iconic American jeans, I'll tell you where you go. You go to origin, mane.com, and you get yourself some iconic American jeans. We're bringing them back. Yes, sir.

Yeah, good work. They're doing some good work over there at origin. Speaking of good work, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocco Store, obviously. So jocco store.com, that's where you can get your discipline equals freedom, shirts, hoodies, hats, a bunch of stuff on there. Really cool stuff in my opinion. See if it's your opinion, too.

JoccoStore.com. Oh, also, we do have a T-shirt. club kind of creative designs. Can you come up with something else to call this besides t-shirt club? Yeah. Okay, please. I have that capability, sure. I don't know. T-shirt

platoon. T-shirt brigade. T-shirt gang. We'll just say, you know what I'm saying? You rolled right into the something that like, you know, my 11-year-old daughter has a roller skating club, right?

You see where I'm going with this? Tighten yourself. Oh, bro. Hey, it's a working title, and we're doing our best over here. Nonetheless, this is what it is. It's a subscription-based situation where you get a shirt, new shirt, every month. Creative designs. Anyway, check that one out, too.

If you're interested, boom, do that. Good for a gift, too. By the way, there you go. jocco store.com. Also, oh, wait, wait, we have other podcasts. You didn't even mention this. podcast. Well, we're on this podcast. Okay. We do have other podcasts. Oh, guess what? The podcast you're listening to it's a podcast. It exists. Yeah, we already do that. We don't got to mention that.

Okay. So yeah, uh, yeah, subscribe to all these different podcasts, Jocko podcast, Jockle unraveling podcast, grounded podcast and Warrior Kid podcast. Check those out. Leave a review. Sure. Because they're funny. If you leave a review, make it entertaining. Put some layers in it. It's appreciated. Yeah, past reviews have been pretty impressive. You know what I haven't done for a while is read reviews, like, online or repost it. I got to do that. Those are awesome.

It's true. I'll do some of that. Also, we have a YouTube channel, video version of this podcast. You know, you want to see what Steve Ward looks like, handsome guy, I would say, as far as handsome guys go. But nonetheless, if you want to see what. Thank you, OK. And you're welcome, of course. But nonetheless, yes.

and we have some excerpts on there. You want to, you know, watch slash listen to those. That's what you can get on the YouTube channel official, by the way. We got it. YouTube.

Boom. Also, psychological warfare. If you don't know what that is, it's an album, Jocko's album with tracks, not music album. Not yet. Not yet.

We're working it. Yes. Boy. Anyway, it's an album with tracks of Jocco, helping you through a moment a weakness. Like if you're going to skip the workout, there's a little track on there that help you not skip the workout, put simply, that's what it is.

Flipsidecanvus.com, speaking to Dakota Meyer, he's got a company where he prints cool stuff to hang on your wall. That's all you need to say. Check that out, flipsidecanvus.com. Got a bunch of books. We talked about one of them today. We talked about a couple of them today, but about Face by Colonel David Hackworth. Highly recommended. There's a new version that has a forward in it written by me. You know how freaking stoked I was to do that, man? That's awesome. Did I tell you that how that happened?

No. They were, so it started selling again, kind of like when I started talking about it all the time. And so they eventually pulled the thread and tried to figure out why it was selling. And they eventually figured out it was selling because we were talking about all the time on the podcast. And they wrote me and said, hey, do you want to write,

we're going to re-release it. Do you want to write a blurb for the back, which is like a little quote, like, hey, this is a great book. And I wrote them and said, I'll write, can I write a forward to it? And they'd be like, you want to write a forward? And I said, hell, yeah, I'll write a forward to it. Most forwards are about 500 words. If you Google, like, how long should a book for it be? Should be about 500 words.

My forward for this is 5,000 words. Yeah, it's like, a freaking, because I just went off and explained how I found it, what it meant, you know, all these, the lessons. I learned from it. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been awesome. So if you want to check out that book about Face by Colonel David Hackworth, then go ahead and check that out. Also, leadership strategy and tactics field manual. So good.

You just had a company that told you what? They just said, yeah. So they'd already, they read extreme ownership and their leadership team has them. They have the dichotomy of leadership. And I was like, hey, do you guys have leadership strategies and tactics? and they one of them purchased it and they're like yeah they're inbound we got them for the whole team and the beautiful thing with it is is you got an issue you can find it in that book with a good solution and it might not be a hundred percent solution for your situation but you can take that

formulate it and utilize it that's the beauty of that thing yeah that's powerful that's exactly what i had in mind when i wrote it was can you look up in here okay let me go i'm having a problem with my subordinate. How do I do? What do I do? You know, I'm having a problem with people getting on board with the new plan. What do I do? And just be able to look it up in there, find the solution.

The beautiful thing about it is you don't even have to tab it because the answers are up front. Hey, you're having this issue. Flip to this page. And in one to two pages, you find your answer. You read through it, digest it, boom, implement it. So easy. Check. The code, the evaluations, the protocol.

If you need some guidance on where to go, look in the military, we got told, hey, you're slacking a little here. You could do a little better here. But we go through life without an evaluation of ourselves. How do you expect to know where to go? Get the code, the evaluation, the protocol. Get the discipline equals freedom field manual. New version, bigger picture of my head. Therefore, you know, obviously better.

Another 35 or 40 pages of writing in there. Ideal. I'm going to say it. I don't like to throw that out there, but kind of an ideal gift book, right? It's not just like, oh, I went to the bookstore and I randomly found this book over here called whatever. It's like, I got something with a little substance. It's a little bigger. Looks cool.

Looks cool. You could put it on a table and just have it be there. And if you read it, you're doing even better. Yes, sir. What up? So I got this. You gave me a signed copy a few years ago. Oh, yeah.

I'm just trying to see what the difference is. Oh, yeah. Well, the difference is there's about 40 extra pages of where I wrote more stuff. Gotcha. More information. So there's that. And then also there's a way of the warrior kid for field manual, which is what your kid wants for Christmas. That's what your kid wants for Christmas.

Because all these lessons that we talk about, look, you can learn them when you're 40 after you read freaking leadership strategy and tactics. Or you can learn them when you're seven. and you can go through life understanding these things. You can end up in a much better place. So what are you going to do with your kid? You're going to put them on a path to mediocrity? Mediocrity. Are you going to put your kid on a path to being average?

Are you going to put your kid on a path to blame other people and be a victim their whole life? Or are you going to put them on the path path to be a warrior kid and step up? I'll tell you what I recommend. Way the Warrior Kid for a field manual. Go ahead and get some of that. also weigh the warrior kid one, two, and three. Mikey and the Dragons. Oh, you know what kids have to deal with?

Being afraid. And it's not just kids. But why not learn at a young age how to overcome fear? Get Mikey and the Dragons and also extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. The OG books. Did I say OG? Yes, sir. Yes, I did.

We also have Eschalon Front. It's our leadership consultancy. it's Steve's with us now on the team. How long you've been on the team for? March. Officially March. I've been, you know,

ever since I got out, I've been kind of shadowing Dave and some of the crews. So if you want to, if you want to work with us, if you want help aligning your leadership, if you want to learn the lessons that we learned, if you want us to come in

and help your leadership get aligned. Help find where the friction points are. Help figure out where you can be more efficient as a team. Go to Eschlam Front. We solve problems through leadership. We also have EF online, which is where we solve problems through leadership online. And we're on there all the time. So if you want to, if you want to come on there and you want to ask me a question, you want to ask me a question. You might think, how could I ever ask Jocka question? It's easy. You go to EF online. You can ask me a question. I'll be sitting right there. You want to ask Steve a question about how he handled a certain situation, how he organized platoons, how he put teams together, how he handled these leadership challenges, go on to eFonline.com, and you can ask Steve a question. He's literally be sitting there. So check that out.

EFonline.com. We have the muster. We're scheduling the muster for 2021. Go to extreme ownership.com for details. We have EF. Overwatch. If you want people that understand these principles to come and work at your company, go to EFoverwatch.com. And we have people that we're transitioning from the military to the civilian sector, and they'll

come to your company and work. And if you want to help service members, active and retired service members, their families, gold star families around the world, check out Mark Lee's mom's mom's organization. Mama Lee, she's got a group called America's Mighty Warriors. And if you want to donate or get involved, then go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. And if you, let's say you just desire anguish and pain in your life. in your own life. We can give it to you if you want it.

We can give it to you. If you want more of my mundane discourse, or you need more of Echo's unfathomable phraseology, and you can find us on the interwebs. On Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the gram, and on Facebook, Echo is at Equitralz, and I am at Jocka Willink.

Where are you at, Steve? I'm at Steve Ward, 194, Steve Ward 194 On Instagram On Instagram At Instagram Steve dot Ward 194

Is that all works At Instagram Do you post Do you post anything? I'll probably will Here soon It's hunting season Have you posted

Have you posted anything? No What are you hunting for? Ducks Hell yeah Right on It's fun Yeah

And it's good living It's good living It's good living Not as good eating as elk or deer. But you're going to get what you can get. We'll get what we can get. Check. Yeah, Steve, man, thanks for coming back on.

We're coming on. It's frigging awesome and appreciate everything. Everything, man. Everything. And thanks to all of our other military personnel right now out in the world on watch. As Steve said, you all are smart. harder and stronger and faster and more well equipped and better trained than we ever were. So thanks for holding it down.

Make sure you train up the people underneath you. And for our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service and all first responders, well, thanks for protecting us here at home. And to everyone else out there, you know, Steve talked a lot today about setting a good example, modeling the right example. And you also notice that almost every phase of his life he talked about learning and how he learned.

Well, I would say that's part of that good example is don't ever stop learning. Don't ever stop growing. Don't ever stop trying to improve. You can only do that if you stay humble. So stay humble. Listen. learn and lead and also make sure that you keep getting after it and until next time this is Steve and Echo and Jocko out