Jocko Podcast - 268: You Make a Difference... But Only if You MAKE A DIFFERENCE. With Leif Babin.

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:05:14 - The Squad Leader Makes a Difference.2:23:38 - Final Thoughts2:29:48 - How to stay on THE PATH.2:44:11 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 268 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And also joining us tonight is Laf Babin, a good evening, Leif. Good evening. Good to be here. All right. I can't say it like Echo can, though.

Well, I don't know. You put your own spin on it, right? I mean, that's hard. It's hard. When he gets warmed up. It just does it so well, though. I mean, the bar is high. Thank you.

We were backstage. at the first Jocko Live. Actually, it wasn't Jocco Live, it was in New York City. Oh, yeah. And someone said something to you like, oh, are you nervous? And you said, well, a little bit.

And then, well, okay, I'm trying to craft the conversation. Maybe that didn't happen the way you're looking at me. I didn't happen. Somebody was talking to you and somehow you rehearsed your lines. No, no, no. What was it? It was, Ty was making the video. And you were like, you know, I'm over here going over what I'm going to say.

And no, that was me taking a nap or something. I think it was just in passing, Ty was making a video. Okay. You were doing nothing, like you were doing whatever you're doing. And then I was just saying good evening on the side to be funny, I guess. Because that's your job. What's funny is I jammed that up. Did you?

For which one? For that. For 160 in New York. Yeah. When I say good evening, I was like, good evening. Like I jammed it up. I think. Isn't that weird?

You have one job. You have one job. But is the pressure greater on you to get those words right? Exactly right. Since they're limited? Exactly right. Well, what was crazy about that? Well, it was like, you didn't know what I was going to talk about.

No. And the only person that knew what I was going to talk about was me. And I knew I was going to go out there and talk about Seth. And it was going to be like as hard of a thing as I could possibly have to go and talk about. And so you're all kind of. Hey, you know, cool. This is a crowd. It'll be fun.

And I'm sitting there thinking, how am I going to get through this? Yeah. And then I do get through my part. And then you screw up your part. Well, thankfully, in a way, I screwed up my part before you did your part. Okay. So, you know, I knew something was kind of, I don't want to say off because it wasn't off, but something was a little bit different when you rolled on, like when you came onto the stage.

Oh, that's when you. Wait a second. But something's different right now because I didn't know what was going on at that time. Yeah. But which is weird. I didn't give you any heads up at all. No, sir. You did not.

What a savage. Savage. Hey, man. It's real. Yeah, you did that to me at the Jocco Live in Austin as well. No heads up whatsoever. And then you're reading, you know, reading Seth's words and talk about us working together and stuff he'd written about me that I never even, you know, heard, heard before. And it was, I was like, ball of my eyes out in the back.

Actually, you came up to me afterwards and you go, you go, how about a heads up next time? And I go, sorry, bro. You go, I was openly weeping. And I was like, dang, that's rough. Yeah. Well, so anyways, let's hear your good evening one more time, Lave. I mean, what do we got? Good evening.

There you go. I mean, everyone always likes the Lief Bab and Texas Batman thing that you, yeah, you've got going on, right? I guess you can just gargle rocks or yell and scream over the sound of gunfire. Do you remember when we were in South Africa on the radio? I do. Have you ever shared that story with anyone in your life, particularly the person that you're married to? We're on this radio show. It's a big popular radio show in South Africa.

And, you know, we're getting interviewed about leadership and we're talking. And these females are calling into the show and they're like, that man's voice is amazing. I can't do a South African's voice, but it was pretty funny. Wait, is that public, that interview? It's on YouTube, right? It might be. Yeah, I think I saw that.

It was pretty funny. I remember you guys being in South Africa on that radio show, and it's on YouTube. Okay, well, there you go. We can look it up. There you go. We can tag it. Wait, what do they say? We'll put that in the show notes.

I would say that, but I know that there's a limited chance of you putting anything in the show notes. What's the show notes? I don't know. It's on the podcast. You know, you can put. On YouTube, the description part. Description, but also people do that on, do you know, when people put a podcast on iTunes, for instance, you can put links in there, Echo. Yeah.

You can put them in the show notes. So people say, oh, link it in the show notes. All right. So I'm not making any remote promises about anything being in the show notes. Yeah. I guess you can use your Google fingers. You want to see Laif getting complimented by the ladies of South Africa, or let's say some of the ladies in South Africa. It's on YouTube.

It's out there. All right. So now that we've gotten through that, let's get into the subject of the night. The subject of the night is the squad leader makes a difference. The squad leader makes a difference. And with decentralized command, which is the fourth law of combat leadership, this. is undisputable it's undisputable that the squad leader makes a difference because with decentralized command everybody leads you want everybody to be a leader and lately I've been

talking about the fact that the purest and highest form of decentralized command is actually culture and if you have a strong culture inside of an organization then the people in the organization at any level can make decisions based on the culture of the organization. Just based on the culture, they can figure out what to do if you have a strong culture. If it's we take care of the customer. Think of how many decisions you can make if you know, hey, our culture is to take care of the customer. You can make all kinds of decisions. If your culture is, we have the highest quality.

We make the highest quality product. Oh, should I cut the corner here? No, you shouldn't. Should I get a little cheaper material to put in here? No, you shouldn't. We make the highest quality product, which means that culture drives decision-making. We have the best value. We give the best value.

What was that mean? We're going to try and maintain that low price. We can make decisions. You know what? We can shave off a little bit of money there, and we can get a better value for our clients. So you can make all kinds of decisions with that. and the military has culture too and units in the military different units in the military right down to the platoon level have a culture that can also drive decision making it can drive good

decision making actually and it can also make it can also drive bad decision making right if you have bad culture it can actually drive bad decision making so real obvious example bad culture is a bad culture of blaming others, of not taking ownership. And if you're not taking ownership, you have a culture where nothing ever gets fixed. That's what's happening. So if our culture is to blame everyone else, we're not going to improve. We're not going to get any better, obviously. Again, if we have a culture where we're cutting corners, eh, don't worry about it.

That's when accidents happen. If we have a culture where we're looking out for me, right? I'm not looking out for for jaco well then we're not covering moving for each other I'm not there to cover move for someone that needs help if I've got a culture of micromanagement guess what no one's gonna have any initiative because the culture isn't we'll sit around and wait and get told what to do so you can see how these cultures drive bad decision-making of course culture can also drive a good decision-making right with with good culture if you've got good culture if you've got good culture if

you've got a culture of ownership, if everyone in your team has got the culture where, hey, we take ownership, we solve problems, guess what? That culture is going to drive people to say, hey, you know what? That's my fault. Let me fix it. So we want that culture of ownership. We want the culture where people don't cut corners. We want the culture where people look out for their teammates.

We want culture where people are empowered and they make things happen. So it's real obvious how powerful culture can be. And I think sometimes people think about culture as, is like non-quantifiable. Well, you know, they have a good culture. But what does that really? What does that produce? What does that give you? The reality is if you have good culture, it is extremely powerful.

It's the highest form of decentralized command and decentralized command is extremely powerful in its own right. So then the question becomes, okay, how do we actually create culture? How do we do that? How are we going to create culture? And the answer is, if you think about it for a little bit, the answer is that you create culture the same way that culture has always been created. How does culture get created? We have to tell the story. We have to share this story.

We have to explain what we've been through, what we've done together, who we are, what our history is, what we stand for. and actually and actually why we stand for that. And if you can carry on that story, if you can tell that powerful story, you can create a culture. Now, we can't just make the story up. We can't just, we can't just fabricate a story. Actually, no, we actually can.

You actually can just create a story almost out of thin air. And if you use that story, If you use that lie to replace the story and you tell that lie for long enough, it becomes the truth, right? 1984. That's exactly what that's the whole premise of 1984. We control, he who controls the past, controls the past, controls the present, who controls the present, controls the future? No, who controls the present controls the past, controls the future. Whatever order you want to put those in, if I can convince you that this is the story, this is the history, this is where we came from, I can manipulate you.

the culture. So it actually can be done. But that takes like a massive kind of universal propaganda machine to make that happen. And I think the better way to do that and what we should do and what good leaders do is to base the story that develops into our culture, based that obviously based in the truth. That's the most powerful way to create a culture. is to tell that truthful story, to hold up those examples from the path, from the past, those values that got us to where we are, those heroes that stood for those values. You tell that story and that becomes the culture. And one of the strongest cultures that I've ever been around is the culture of the United States Marine

and they do it in a bunch of different ways. But what we're going to talk about today is a shining example. It's a shining example of how to create culture because they have a manual. They have a manual. The manual is called The Squad Leader makes a difference. Think about this black belt move. They make a document that's called the Squad Leader. makes a difference so obviously they want to have decentralized command they want

their squad leaders to step up and lead so they make a whole manual that's called the squad leader makes a difference and it goes further to set the culture inside the document itself because in this book the squad leader makes a difference which is subtitled readings on combat at the squad level and it's from the Marine Corps war fighting lab Which is a legit name for something at Quantico. This thing was put together in 1998 by a couple lieutenants. M.M. Obaldi.

I have no idea how to pronounce your name. I apologize. And A.M. Otero. So these guys put together this manual. And you're going to see that what it is actually doing is telling these stories and building a culture of decentralized command where everyone is a leader and the squad, leaders can make a difference. Leif, I was thinking, when you were at the Naval Academy, what examples, how was that culture? Like, when you looked at the Marine Corps, did that culture permeate into the young Laif Babin

brain and pull you in that direction a little bit? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we had some outstanding not commission officers, Sergeant Major that ran our PT and he'd come running by at 4 o'clock at the morning. and yelling for the brigade of midshipmen to get up, you know. And it was, yeah, just there was, there was a lot of that. In fact, I remember on parents' weekends. So you go through like the plebe summer, which is so you just show up to the naval camp.

It's kind of boot camp in the Naval Academy. It's we call it Plebe Summer. So you show up and they're running all these midshipmen to boot camp. You're kind of going to that boot camp style. And toward the end of that, your parents show up for parents weekend. And they can visit for a few days and see you. and then they take off, but he was, he was like talking to the parents.

He was like, who hears from Maine? And so, you know, a few people raised their hand, like, oh, yeah, he's from Maine. He's like, I'm from Maine too, the main part of Parris Island. And he just starts laughing. It was just, you know, that was certainly instilled in Austin, and everyone has to go through, you know, whether you're going to be a ship driver in the Navy

or submarines or fly airplanes or whatever, you have to go through, you know, at least a two or three week program that's kind of like OCS down in Quantico. I mean, they do it at OCS in Quantico for the Marine course. You get a taste of that regardless. And so that whole thing of every Marine arrivalman and putting folks through that was very appealing to me. And I went there because I wanted to be a seal. But certainly Marine Ground was my second choice, which I did not get selected for.

Dang. Two things. Isn't it interesting the way that just saying that this guy would run by at 4 o'clock in the morning just makes you think good to go? That's number one. And when I was going through officer candidate school, which is also run by, well, the Marine Corps are the general instructors. And we were going for a run. And every day we'd run through like a officer, real officer housing where the officers that were stationed in Pensacola lived. And, you know, every day we'd be singing cadence

And then you'd go through there And you'd have to get quiet. And they would just do like a quiet little cadence Just to keep you in step. And then you'd get through and then you'd start singing again. You know, it'd be four or five o'clock in the morning or whatever. So one time we got this, this one drill instructor, wasn't my normal drill instructor.

This other drill instructor took us for a run. And he was new and he was all kinds of fired up. And so we get to that area and he like gets real quiet. And so, you know, he's saying whatever the cadence was. And then all of a sudden, And he sings as the cadence. He's like, get out of the rack, like quiet. And we're all like, get out of the rack.

And he's like, get out of the rack. And we're like, get out of the rack. And so we're five o'clock in the morning, run by all these officers' housing. And by the end, we're just, get out of the rack. And just screaming. And that was a good time. And I was like, hmm.

So that's what the Marine Corps does. That's what the Marine Corps does. They make a human being say, I'm from Maine, the main part of Paris. Island that's what the Marine Corps does and we must salute them for that so this book is one of those things right when I'm on my when I'm on my trail trails through the world I stumble upon these things this is one of those things I saw that title I'm like you've got to be kidding me what is this so the squad leader makes a difference reading on combat at the

squad level volume one and by the way this is volume one I have not been able to find volume two, three, four, five, or six. So maybe these guys got sent somewhere from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and didn't ever make another one. But let's get into it. Here's the forward. In combat, sometimes when I read these things, I think every single thing that I'm about to read, I just read it and stop.

This is one of those things. So in combat, the actions of individual leaders affect the outcome of the entire battle squad leaders make decisions and take actions which if which can affect the operational and strategic levels of war well-trained squad leaders play an important role as combat decision makers on the battlefield leaders who show initiative judgment and courage will achieve decisive results not only at the squad level but in the broader context of battle. Without competent squad leaders, capable of carrying out of a commander's intent, even the best

plans are doomed to failure. So, you know, you hear about the general and the colonel and the captain and even the gunnery sergeant. You hear about the Marine Corps leadership. And yes, they're outstanding. but when you're a corporal and you read this you think you know what I got to get mine too think of how awesome that is and and from a from a you know from a business perspective how how how how do you what story do you tell your employees what story do you tell the people

that work inside your organization what story do you tell them do you tell them that that they are decision makers. Do you tell them that their judgment and initiative will drive results at the strategic level? Do you ever tell you to team that? That's how you set the culture. You know, as you're reading that, I'm thinking about as a student of history.

And I love reading history books. And obviously, you know, you've done some amazing books here on the podcast. But we always talk about it from the big, you know, the commander, the general. You read, you know, Julius Caesar maneuvered. His team or Alexander the Great did this or Napoleon did this or Patton moved his army here.

And he might have been making some overall decisions. But the army that's moving is the front line leaders out there, the squad leaders that are executing that and making it happen. And I love the way we do that echelon front. Our definition of leadership is everybody is a leader. And you said something recently that I hadn't thought about it in that way, but we're, okay, who is actually a leader? if you interact with humans in some way and actually need them to go in a direction and work together and provide a resource or support,

then you actually are a leader. And I think when you see yourself that way, I mean, the most powerful armies in the world, the most powerful teams, companies in the world, are going to see themselves. Everyone sees themselves as a leader, able to solve problems and make things happen and move the team forward in the direction they need to go.

Yeah, and that's one of the best things about this podcast is that I get, I get to read books, not written by the general, not written by the admiral, but written by a rifle, one of Napoleon's riflemen or a machine gunner in Stalingrad. Like that's, that's who we're hearing from. And what's, what's powerful about that is then you get to see, you get to know, you get to learn how that leadership is perceived by the troops on the front line. I mean, that podcast that we did about Stalingrad where you, they were hearing Hitler talk about them being gone. They were still there. They were surrounded.

They were fighting for their lives. And they were hearing the broadcast of Hitler saying, it was a great sacrifice. And they stood to the last man. They're like, we're still here. What are you doing? Give us help. Give us support. Let us, let us break out.

No. And you realize, oh, those people on the front lines, they do. They make such a big difference. And if you set the culture correctly, they will have even more impact. It goes on. This publication illustrates how bold, imaginative squad leaders impact the outcome of a battle or campaign. The historical examples here represent some of the cases in which squad leaders were able to change the course of history.

Did I just say a squad leader changed the course of history? Yes, I did. In each case, the squad leader had to make a quick decision without direct orders. Act independently and accept responsibility for the results. Short lessons are presented at the end of each story. These lessons should help you realize how important your decisions are to your Marines and your commander. In combat, you must think beyond the squad's level.

You must develop opportunities for your commander to exploit your every action must support your commander's intent You must be competent in the combat skills required of a combined arms leader You are the primary warfighter of the Marine Corps Boom freaking legit I think about how often like how different that is is right from a culture of centralized command, where the senior leaders are like, we know the front line troops just don't get it.

They don't know what's, they don't understand. And then the front line troops are like the guys up in the ivory tower, you know, the senior leaders, they don't get it. They don't understand what's going on here. Versus it, you know, where people are just sitting around waiting to be told what to do versus the team that's actually empowered to step up and lead and make things happen. And that team is just unstoppable. Unstoppable.

Here's some quotes that this thing. starts off with the most brilliant plan depends for its tactical execution on the squad leaders poor squad leaders may ruin the best laid plans first rate squad leaders often save badly devised plans the squad leader is the sole level of command that maintains direct contact with the men who do the actual fighting it follows then that the squad leader is to be trained as a tactical commander and as an educator of his men. That's interesting because, you know, when we talk about span of control and on the battlefield, you know, you can have four, five, six guys,

and you can pretty much control them. You can make things happen. You know, when you've got four, five, six guys, maybe seven, it starts getting really wonky at eight. But that's because you can see them. They're right there. You can move four feet. You can grab Laif and say, hey, move a little further forward.

You can actually just make things happen through direct supervision. So that's very important to remember that these squad leaders are the ones that actually have the contact to make things happen. You go up one level, you go from the squad to the platoon. Well, that platoon commander can't get to that kid over on the left flank. He can't get to that machine gunner up on that knoll. He's not going to be able to get there. He's not going to be able to make it happen.

And that's why as you grow, you have to get better at the laws of combat. You have to get better at decentralized command. You have to get better to keep things simple. You have to get better at prioritize next year. You have to get better at cover and move because you don't have that direct control anymore. You can't just use your force of will to make things happen to go grab a guy. You need to get over here. It doesn't work anymore.

Continuing on, the IDF, this guy is Israeli. The IDF squad leaders are trained to command independently in the field. modern armies operate in small dispersed formations. All levels of command must be trained to think and act independently. Modern weapons which provide small groups of men, greater firepower, and flexibility of movement, call for a high standard of command at all levels. And this is something that we've been able to walk through. And I apologize that it hasn't been chronological in nature.

But when the machine gun came, we had to start using decentralized command. because if we're all bunched up together, we're all going to die together. So that's when World War I, towards the end of World War I, we started getting decentralized command and started having the squad. Like, you're not going to be with me anymore.

Hey, Leif, when we go on this mission, I'm not going to be able to give you any guidance at all as the company commander because you're going to be 400 meters away. We have no radios, and you just are going to have to make things happen. You have to know what we're trying to make happen, and you've got to go do it on your own.

So this idea that, you know, when you saw the red coats, right, line up and we're going to march together. That's the old way of war. I mean, the Romans, the phalanx, like all the old formations of war. It was like, we're all together. We can just maintain good control over this big group easier because we're all co-located. And modern warfare brought us to, hey, I'm not right there. We launched on this mission and I might not see you again until the mission's complete So the people that are out there leading have to know what they're doing why they're doing it

They have to understand the commander's intent and they have to take initiative to get to that goal And he follows he concludes this with the squad leader therefore The squad leader is therefore to be trained technically as an officer not as a corporal And that's from Yigal Alam, who is a field commander in the Israeli Defense Force. And he actually was a scout with the Brits in World War II, fought in Syria, fought in Lebanon, founding member of the Israeli strike force. So some experience. First, they kicked this whole thing off. And this was actually a big shocker to me.

They kicked this off by talking about Corporal Alvin York, United States Army. Right, so I expected this to be all Marines But the Marine Corps is awesome and they said hey these are awesome examples of where a squad leader made a difference and we're gonna use them France 1918 the Muse Argon offensive Was the last important battle of the first world war on the night of 25 September 1918 over one million American soldiers moved up to relieve the French forces on the front line lines. The American advance that ensued swept easily through the first two lines of German

trenches and then progress slowed. Facing stiff resistance, the reserve division was called up. Corporal Alvin York served as an infantry man in the 82nd division. York's company started across a valley at 6 in the morning. As they began to move, the company came under heavy fire. From behind a hill, enemy machine guns mowed down the first wave of advancing. Americans. No one knew where the deadly fire was coming from, so York's platoon sergeant decided to take the platoon on a mission to find it. The platoon found a gap in the enemy lines and circled to the rear where they thought the machine guns might be. The group of Americans stumbled across two German litter bearers whom they followed back to the headquarters of the

machine gun battalion. The Americans walked right into the German machine gun command post, opened fire and the Germans immediately surrendered. Upon hearing the fire behind them, the Germans that were dug in near the command post swung their weapons around and began firing at the Americans. Caught in the open in a hail of automatic fire, the Americans instantly took casualties. Corporal York took aim at the nearest machine gun

about 25 yards away and killed the man behind the gun. He continued to fire each German who popped his, head out of a foxhole. After watching his troops being massacred by this lone sharpshooter, the German major in command yelled to York, if you'll stop shooting, I'll make them surrender. Work on your marksmanship, people. Work on your marksmanship. Within minutes, the remaining American troops had captured 90 German prisoners, but they were behind enemy lines. Corporal York took charge and quickly organized his platoon. He decided to move back towards friendly positions

straight through the German lines. York ordered the German prisoners to carry back the American wounded. Every time the group came upon a German position, York told the captured German major to order the troops to surrender. The well-disciplined German soldiers never questioned the order,

and by the time York's small band reached friendly lines, they had acquired 132, German prisoners. In their wake, York's platoon left 35 deserted German machine gun positions and a significant gap in the German defenses. This gap which York had created was a vital element to the success of the division's advance. This advance gave momentum to the American forces and contributed to the success of the offensive.

Phenomenal. Here's the lessons. Corporal York was quick to exploit the opportunity. which had been created. He realized that his actions would affect the outcome of the battalion's advance and made decisions which supported his commander's intent. His strong situational awareness guided him in taking action which had decisive results. You know, when you think, even what I think, when I think of World War I won soldiers.

I definitely envision someone that's much more obedient than what we have in the modern all-volunteer military today, right? You've got someone that's, hey, I mean, I would say the whole world was more obedient, right? You had a much more stringent class structure in America. You had the much further separation between the officers and the enlisted. And so for this kid to be like, oh, I got this. It's incredible. It's incredible to show that kind of initiative.

And I think the fact that it was in World War I is even more incredible. Think about what would happen if he was just standing around waiting to be told what to do in that situation, though, which is what so many leaders we work with think is the right call. Like, you should just wait to be told what to do and then do, you know, carry on orders without question. And he would just be standing there waiting to be told what to do and they would fail. And maybe the whole offensive fails as a result. Instead of someone who actually understands the why, understands the commander's intent and the purpose of what they're trying to do and can take the initiative to go make things happen. Yeah, you know, I often say, and I wrote about, I don't want yes, man, right? I don't want someone that's just like, yep, hey, sounds good, Jocko, sounds great.

You know, you want someone that's going to push back and like, hey, I don't agree with that. Wait, what about this? Take that one step further is like, I want someone that's just going to figure out what to do and go freaking execute it, right? That's what we want. That's what we're trying. That's what we're trying to grow. That's what we're trying to develop in our support and leadership, is that they are going to

look, even look beyond, even look beyond what I can see and say, oh, I bet if I did this, it would be a good move. And maybe they're batting 80%. I'm good with that. I'd rather have somebody batten 80% on 80% good moves that took initiative and made things happen. And 20% of the time I got to go, oh, life, hey, hold what you got, man. Don't go over there yet.

Much rather have that initiative. But that's something you've helped me with as well, though, with, because I think it's a hard thing for a lot of leaders to accept is like, well, you know, we got to come up with the right solution. We don't want to make mistakes. We want to move forward. And when you're, you're like, listen, 80% solutions ago, 80% solutions ago, we're never going to have a perfect plan. So let's let's get the plan as close, you know, in a good direction and then execute and execute and execute and execute and have the initiative, be default aggressive. I think, I think that's, I know it can stifle me and I've struggled with that. And I'm not executing because I'm trying to

get it to the 97% solution. Like, listen, 80% solution, start moving things forward, execute. And I think that's very empowering to think about that. You don't have to have the perfect plan. Yeah. You got to just go. Yeah. Very liberating to be like, oh, yeah, I don't care about that.

Hey, well, we might not be. Oh, yeah, I don't care. You know, we, well, what if, you don't care about that. That hill over there? Yeah, get there. Well, do you want me to have a logistics? No, I don't care about that. Well, do you want me to do it in the daytime?

I don't care. Well, do you want, no, I don't care. I don't care. When you should get that hill. Okay. But let's do it. The point I'm making here, though, is, you know, even whether it's echelon front or working together, it's asking a bruiser,

you know, there can be something like in my mind where I'm like, hey, you know, Jocco's really good at this. And I got to make sure that Jock, you know, has, like, this is the right plan. And it's going to meet every single thing that, you know, he wants to do. So you start putting these self-imposed restrictions instead of like, when you're like, hey, man, 80% solutions go, bro, let's execute.

And that's, it's super liberating to think about it that way. And you realize like, hey, what I thought, you know, I've got to get this thing perfect. So, you know, Jocco's like, yeah, that's good. I actually don't. And I'm actually, I'm actually failing if I'm not executing. And I'm sitting here trying to come up with a perfect plan. Yeah, there was some report you were trying to get. And you were like, hey, you know, I haven't gotten you this report because I can't quite figure out this little detail at the end to make sure that it's 100%.

And I just, I, I'm just not getting it to you because I don't want it to be inaccurate. And I don't want to have you like pissed. And I was like, bro. Actually, I remember exactly. I said, have I ever sweated you for the details on anything in the past 15 years? And it was funny. You kind of, you tilted your head a little bit and you went, nope. And I was like, why do you think I'm going to start sweat these little like literally in,

meaningless, meaningless details? you're like, Roger, I'm an idiot. Cool. Got it. So no factor. And that's a, that is a great example though, because here I am stewing about trying to put together a multi-page report. And you're like, hey, bro, just send me a, just just say, hey, I don't have the, I don't have all the information yet. Here's what I think we're doing. Here's kind of the general, you know, direction we should go. And as soon as you said that, I was like, just another reminder. It's self-imposed restrictions. And it's really, it can cause all kinds of problems. Yeah. And obviously that means I'm doing a back.

job of you know telling you what the parameters are of success you know if I'm like hey can you tell me what these numbers are you're like cool yeah but it's gonna take me three weeks to dive into all these details if I was like hey and I you know I was like dude I just need a like ballpark where we at okay got it because I can give you that in 13 minutes but you know it's the it goes back to some of that implied implied commander's intent right because the implied commander's intent is that when I ask for something, I need that thing, right? Hey, you know, when Jocko asks for something, because he doesn't ask for much, when he

asked for something, he must want that thing really exact. The implied intent is that I want, the implied intent with me is basically I want perfection, right? That's a complete implied intent. And for some reason, Echoes never really picked up on that implied intent. No. No, that's actually not true. If I think about it, like the way, there's been some things where I've seen, I've found out

after the fact what you did. to reach a level of as close as a human can get to perfection on something, where I've been like, hmm, I didn't expect him to do all that, but he did it. So that implied level of perfection just from my own stupid personality is like enough to make someone say, I better get this right before, you know, we go forward. And that sucks. And I talked about it at Gettysburg. I was like, you've got to think about what your implied, what your implied commander's intent is.

And if, especially if you're going to ask them to do something that's outside that normal implied commander's intent. And, you know, we talked about it with General Lee and some of his, some of his subordinate leaders that, hey, General Lee was about kicking ass. So we're moving here. What's General Lee going to want me to do? He's going to want me to kick ass to go forward. But he said, hey, you know, don't. go forward right now but they get that word they're like yeah but it's generally I'm gonna go get some and they messed things up so you got to pay attention to that

implied commander's intent that just your personality has your own personality has a has a culture to it and you got to pay attention scary that was a that was some rare praise for for Echo Charles said we got to note that down take a well-deserved well-deserved obviously thanks both Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm thinking like the first time we ever went to like travel to do the podcast and you had like a, and I expected, I was like, I had my fingers crossed, my toes crossed, my ears crossed, hoping that, you know, all this, quote, all this equipment showed up and we'd be able to, you know, we have some guests come in and it's going to be there, you know, the time is valuable and all this stuff. And I'm like thinking, oh, I hope this. And yet you had it all, you know, in the pelons. case.

Yep. Everything was there. I was like, hmm, right. Squared away. As it were. Which is not,

you know, maybe what everyone expects. Maybe some people have a different implied scenario. All right. All right. Next one, Sergeant Henry, and that's,

I haven't even said this yet, that's what this whole manual is. It's just anecdotal one-page stories where the squad leader makes a difference. Sergeant Henry Haniken, U.S. Marine Corps, Haiti, 1919, following serious rebel uprisings, the United States began a prolonged occupation of Haiti in 1915. Charlemagne Peralta was the leader of the rebel army known as Kakos. The second Marine brigade spent several months in unsuccessful attempts to topple Charlemagne's group.

Henry Hannocken, a sergeant in the brigade, devised a bold plan to separate. Charlemagne from the bulk of his troops and ambush him. Sergeant Hannigan sent one of his most reliable men to become a member of the Keiko's band. In a short period of time, the infiltrator had earned the outlaws' trust. Then Sergeant Hanneken had his spy feed the Caicos location of a Marine unit that was vulnerable to attack. I don't talk about putting the bait out there.

Sends a little spy in there and says, hey, there's going to be these Marines. They're going to be vulnerable to attack. Spine, soon returned with information of a rebel plan to attack these Marines, as well as Charlemagne's location during this attack. On 31 October 1919, Sergeant Hanneken led 22 local militiamen in an attack on Charlemagne. Disguised as rebels. This is, you know, this is freaking getting it. Disguised as rebels, Haniken and his unit moved through several guard posts and boldly walked into the unsuspecting rebel camp. When he was within 15 yards of, you know where this story is going?

It's going right where you want it to go. When he was within 15 yards of Charlemagne, Sergeant Hannequin drew out his pistol and shot and killed the rebel leader. In the firefight that followed, dude, in the firefight that followed, the small raiding party captured the rebel position and defended it from a series of counterattacks. The Marines who were the target of the rebel attack had been warned by Sergeant Hannikin of the impending strike and were well prepared for the rebel attack. The rebels were thoroughly defeated. The morning after the action, Sergeant Hanneken reported his exploits to his commanding officer. His commanding officer, you know what he was doing.

He was just out there getting after it. Hanekin's actions had routed more than a thousand outlaws, killed their leader, and virtually shattered the entire bandit resistance movement in northern Haiti. For his actions, Sergeant Hanneken was awarded the Medal of Honor. I mean, what up? Talk about taking commanders intent and just running with it. default aggressive to the court right there.

That is like the riskiest bunch of actions, right? Hey, I'm going to set these guys over here as bait. I'm going to sneak in there. We're going to get dressed up as rebels. By the way, when I get in there, I'm just going to shoot this guy the first chance I get. I wonder had he had some direction or approval from his commanding officer if that would have gotten approved. Yeah. No, that's that's too risky.

Don't do it. That may have happened. You know, every time I talk to Tilt, I'm like, Tilt, I'm sorry if I was in charge, man. I don't know if I would have improved any of your operations. I'm going to go 24 miles into Cambodia with four other guys and we're going to sit around and wait to get attacked by a freaking division of NVA soldiers. Okay, cool. Let's do it. You know, as I think about that, though, a lot of people, obviously you can be too aggressive, right?

You got to be default aggressive, but not not too aggressive, not reckless. And it sounds like they mitigated the risk. They needed to. Obviously, it was successful in that regard. But I think what a lot of leaders miss is, and really we got a lot of scrutiny on our pretty bold and aggressive operations in Ramadi back in 2006 is that by being default aggressive, you can actually mitigate risk. So by going into areas where the enemy, there were insurgent neighborhoods that no one else could get into, they had no U.S. or coalition forces presence. they had no expectation we were going to be there. So we'd show up in places that would catch them off guard.

We had the initiative they didn't. And it sounds like that's exactly what happened in that situation. And I think some leaders, you got to think about that. Look, you can actually mitigate risk by being default aggressive and something that, you know, you were all about in tasking a bruiser. And I think we utilized our advantage. Were you in the Chow Hall, in the Camp Mark Lee Chow Hall, like early in deployment when our commanding officer was talking to me?

And he says, you know, what about all these guys with IEDs? Because I was telling them that we were going to be going on patrols and it was going to be very dangerous. And he said, what are you going to do about these IEDs and these guys that are putting IEDs in the ground? And I go, we're going to kill them. And that was my mitigation plan, which is a very good mitigation plan. Get in a position where you can kill those guys. So your Overwatch team sets up and you got people patrolling. You kill the bad guys.

And he was like, sounds like a good plan, right? And yes. And that's an example of how are you going to stay safe by being aggressive? That's absolutely true. Well, just, okay, take the ID threat as an example, right? If we're patrolling to an area where they have no expectation we're going to be there, the locals are out on the street. I mean, we're actually much safer from IDs than we are if we're rolling down the main route

where they're expecting it to U.S. forces to be. And I think that's a great example. And in our CO's mind, it's like, how do we do this? This is dangerous. and I think actually thinking, it's actually less dangerous to be super aggressive and to be someplace where they have no expectation versus them sitting back and waiting the ideas where they know we're going to be. Lessons. Sergeant Hanneken displayed outstanding initiative. That's the understatement of the year.

And tactical proficiency. Okay, maybe that's the understatement of the year. In devising and acting upon a plan to defeat a large rebel force, his plan supported the brigade, the brigade's mission in Haiti. Sergeant Hanneken accepted great risk, but displayed the courage and nerve to see his plan through. his bold action achieved decisive results. With a small band of men, Sergeant Hannigan was able to defeat a larger rebel force by adhering to tactical fundamentals. His 22-man main effort attacked the enemy center of gravity, the rebel leader.

Without leadership, the rebel force quickly disintegrated. Sergeant Hannigan used the elements of surprise and deception to execute his attack. Surprise is one of the most important tactical fundamentals and was essential to this tactical undertaking. Sergeant Hanekins' actions illustrate how tactical decisions at the squad level can impact the operational and strategic levels of war and can ultimately affect U.S. policy. Sergeant Hanekins' attack greatly affected the balance of power in Haiti, lessening the turmoil in the country. It was a major step towards ending the rebellion on the island. So there you go.

It's a strategic move. And we always try and point out to companies that your frontline troops can have a negative strategic impact or a positive. strategic impact. And that's even more accentuated in this day and age now that we have social media and you can have one employee at one of your stores either do something horrible and really damage your reputation or do something heroic and really help your reputation. So do you have you in place the culture that's going to drive those frontline people to do something heroic or have you got a culture where they're going to be driven to do something horrible? I don't know.

on you. Your team. The prospect of surprise is always the surest guarantee of victory. That's from Von Melenthen, who's a World War II general. He wrote the book, Panzer Battles, which we haven't gotten to

yet on the podcast. We'll get there. No tactical action should ever be undertaken without the element of surprise. Speaking of Germans, this, here, I already thought this book was going to be about Maria.

and now we already have Army Marine. I certainly thought it was going to be about Americans. This is about a German. So the Marine Corps' attitude is wide open. Sergeant Wenzel, German Army, Belgium, 1940. The German plan to invade France included the invasion of Belgium and Holland. The French had not defended their border with Belgium, leaving it open to attack. The Belgians, however, had constructed a series of forts along the canals throughout the countryside.

The most formidable of these was even a male, manned by 1,200 Belgian soldiers. The powerful guns of even a male commanded the eastern approaches to the Belgian border. If this fortress was not eliminated, the German army would have significant difficulty crossing the Belgian border. Sergeant Wenzel was a member of Germany's parachute forces. Must have been rad being a parish trooper in World War. War II. You're the cutting edge of tech. I mean, what? A few years earlier, it wasn't even idea that you could huck a person out of a plane with a piece of, with a freaking piece of cloth above them and they'd live. And here they are just doing assaults. This one, they weren't

paratrooping actually. On 10 May, 1940, his paratroop company daringly landed on the top of even a male in gliders with the mission of silencing the guns of the fortress in order to allow the German army to capture bridges to the east. When Sergeant Wensel landed atop the fortress, he realized his commanding officer's glider had not made it to the objective. This left Sergeant Wensel in command of 80 parachutists. In four-man teams, the Germans used flame throwers and special-shaped charges to attack each gun turret. Sergeant Wensel commanded his unit from a captured pillbox. The situation became tenuous when the Belgians prevented the German reinforcements from arriving by blowing the bridge on the main route.

of the ground attack the paratroopers were caught off the Belgians were also calling artillery on the Germans and enemy infantry could be seen preparing to counterattack the paratroopers and as I was reading this I was like wait a second enemy who we're talking about they're talking about the Belgians Sergeant Wensel continued to lead the parachutists for three more hours as each Belgian gun position was eliminated after the sun had set Sergeant Wensel linked up with German forces from the east even a male had fallen Sergeant Wenzel's actions allowed German forces approaching from the east to advance unmolested across the canals. With a force of 80 men, he had subdued 1,200 of the enemy. The defense of Belgium was broken, and the German army was able to rapidly defeat Belgium and move into France. The northern wing of the German army rapidly outflanked the French army and brought about a defeat the French forces in a mere six weeks. For his heroic actions and outstanding leadership, Sergeant Wenzel was almost. awarded the Knights Cross.

When you think about 80 men beating 1,200, I was sitting here in my mind, I'm thinking, like, how do you even do that? But then you have probably heard me say, don't dig in, don't get in a position where you can't get out of. Well, if you set up a fort where you're all in bunkered positions and all of a sudden the enemy gets in there

and they can maneuver really quickly and you're stuck in this pillbox or you're stuck in this gun emplacement, while the other while your bad guys the people that are trying to kill you are running around and sneaking around and can get free fields of fire because you're stuck in this box that's that's that's in my mind how it happens i but you do have to recognize that even a male was probably the most impregnable force fortress in the entire world You're talking monster. It was like, I think, 200 foot high walls along the ground. Crazy. I mean, so they probably felt like completely safe.

No factor. There's no way that Germans are coming. But I think what's crazy, you know, we talk about the element of surprise in that situation. The Germans knew they were coming. I mean, there was an attack coming. Obviously, the Germans knew they were coming. They had every expectation. Even the Belgians knew that they were coming.

I'm sorry. The Belgians knew the Germans were coming. So the Belgians, they didn't have the, the Germans did not have the element. I'm going to surprise there because the, but they didn't know the manner in which the attack was coming. And I think technology played a key role because I believe that might have been the first use of gliders in combat ever, if I remember that correctly. It was certainly one of the first, if not the first. And so they didn't have the expectation that they could land on top of this fortress. It was also the first use, I think, of shape charges as well.

That was an invented or brand new technology. So they felt safe in these giant casons of concrete and steel. And I think what an amazing victory of just being default, aggressive to the core, hitting them. Even when they expected that the attack was coming, they didn't realize the manner in which it was coming. And I think they just overwhelmed them with now they're in the fortress and we felt safe. What do we do now? Yeah. And I think, well, the technical, I guess, definition of surprise.

Because, you know, in Jiu-Jitsu, right, you know you're going for an arm lock. you know you're going for an arm lock. You know, you know, I'm trying to tap you out, right? You know I'm trying to tap you out. You know I'm trying to tap you out. So I'm grabbing your neck and you're, you know I'm trying to grab your neck and boom, I go for your arm, right? So it's a surprise.

Even though you know I'm trying to tap you out, I'm still going to surprise you. It's like a similar thing, right? We know we're going to get attacked, but what are these weird, quiet wing things coming from the sky? And why are they filled with people? 80 people versus 1,200. That's freaking insane.

Lessons. Sergeant Wensel realized that it was his responsibility to complete the mission after his commanding officer's glider failed to land on the fortress. How's that guy feeling afterwards? He's like so, uh, well, if he was still alive. Yeah, if he was still alive. He worked with the existing plan and took advantage of the element of surprise that his airborne landing had given him. Taking charge of 80 men, Sergeant Wensel showed out sending leadership and courage as he commanded the against the fortress for three hours against great odds Sergeant Wenzel's understanding of the plan

allowed him to shoulder the burden of responsibility of leading the assault force. He clearly understood his pivotal role in the invasion of Belgium and his actions fully supported his commander's intent. Sergeant Wensel's company level raid permitted a regimental river crossing, which in turn allowed the German army to rapidly pour into Belgium. This eventually led to the fall of both Belgium and France. So there you go, totally pivotal moment. One thing I wanted to say it, I don't disagree with you very often there, but yeah, it would, from a personal perspective, you're like, man, I'm so bummed, that wasn't there, wasn't able to lead that. But actually, from a leadership perspective, you should be absolutely stoked. Oh, yeah, yeah, that your frontline leader stood up,

made things happen, got the job done, even without you there. And obviously, that's the real testament of leadership that it's about the mission, it's not about you. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, the, on a personal level, of course the guy's bombed on a professional level, he's totally stoked. And yeah,

obviously on a personal level, you're like freaking totally stoked that your frontline troops got the job done while you were, you know, while you were in some vineyard somewhere drinking wine.

I will say, as a couple of times that I was acting tasking a commander and tasking a bruiser while there was some huge operation going on the most of Charley Patoon and Del Poutine and you were out in the battlefield.

I was like, this is not fun. See, that's what I'm like. On a personal level, I'm extremely bummed. That's what I was getting at. Says here, ends this one of the quote, it is not the big armies that win battles.

It is the good ones. That's Field Marshal Maurice de Sacks, which, born in 1696, podcast 110, we covered his book. And he's got a weird background. He's all kinds of things. He was like Polish and German and French and served in the Imperial Roman Army,

but he wrote that book, I think it's my reveries on the war. It was a good book. Podcast 110. He's got the title Field Marshal, though. That's pretty cool. Check. Remember we had a,

in Taskin, Bruiser, we had a Captain Obvious. And so he was kind of over the top with like the obvious comments. So we promoted him to Admiral Obvious. And then it kind of went beyond that. I was like, what sounds even cooler or bigger?

So he became feeling. Marshal obvious. There's only been, I mean, as far as I know, at least in the, in the US Navy, there's only been one field marshal of the obvious. Which is a big promotion, you know, it's a big promotion. It's almost like a five star. It's beyond, is it beyond? That's not quite a five star, but it's definitely, you are definitely putting out some obvious stuff. You don't want to be field martial obvious. Not a compliment. By that, it's weird too because you think when you got when you caught, you know, Captain obvious, right? When you catch that nickname, you're going to start maybe paying attention, right, putting yourself in check. When you get promoted, what was the next promotion?

When you get promoted to Admiral, obviously, you're like, all right, this is definitely got to stop. I got to just, just bite my lip a little bit more. Still don't quite pull it off. Guess what? Once you're field marshal, I think once you field marshal, own it, right? Own it. Hey, I got a real couple obvious points to point out. Sergeant Rubarth, back-to-back German Army, France, 1940.

In the spring of 1940, the German Army. invaded France as the campaign campaign progressed the 10th Panzer division was directed to cross the Muse River and continue to attack toward Paris the French realized that the river provided a natural obstacle that could be used to halt the advancing Germans Sergeant Rubarth the leader of a squad of assault engineers which was attached to the German 69th infantry regiment the Germans were the Germans controlled the east side of the river and the French were dug in on the west the French defenses included artillery and machine gun bunkers all along the river. After a violent stuka air attack, Sergeant Rubarth squad attacked with infantry. As his rubber boat reached

the far shore, Sergeant Rubarth's squad attacked and destroyed the nearest bunker. On reassembling his squad, Sergeant Rubarth realized only two boats had successfully crossed the river, leaving only his squad and one infantry squad on the west shore to create a breach in the French defenses. How many people were supposed to go? Assault engineers. I wonder how many boats they actually had. Only two made it. Okay.

Undaunted, he ordered his unit to attack another bunker with grenades and a satchel charge. The French soldiers inside surrendered and their white flag was replaced with German colors. This drew cheers from the Germans on the far side of the river and demoralized the French defenders. Sergeant Rubarth then advanced and aggressively took two more bunkers, creating a mere 300, meter gap in the first line of French defenses. More German forces then followed him across the river. After receiving a fresh supply of ammunition and four more men, don't worry, you got four more men.

Proceed. Sergeant Rubarth continued his attack. And as enemy artillery started raining down on them, Sergeant Rubarth moved his squad quickly so that the artillery fire could not adjust to them. His squad overtook three more bunkers and broke through the second line of enemy positions. The second line of enemy positions. After seeing several of their bunkers blown up, the French forces assumed that they were being overrun. Their spirit crushed.

The French began to withdraw. The action became a route as the advancing German pursued. Germans pursued the French forces. For his achievement, Sergeant Rubarth received a battlefield commission to lieutenant as awarded the knighthood of the Iron Cross. When I think now, thinking to that last one and this one, let's face it, you got a small number of guys and you just start going ham. just start attacking and people aren't expecting you to do that right they don't expect they see two boats show up they're like oh whatever and then all of a sudden their bunkers getting you know shape charge on it and you're getting jacked up going and moving quicker than these people that are in these

static positions this is maneuver warfare right this is like the beginning of maneuver warfare I can move and you can't just think of that think of that and then think of it from a leadership perspective think of it when you say this is what we need to do And now you've just dug into your position. You can't move anywhere. And Malaf says, hey, Jocko, I know that's what you want to do. But what about, you know, what about this over here with these other clients? And I go, we're sticking to the plan, right?

It just doesn't work. Whereas I'm like, hey, this is where I'm at right now. What do you guys think? This is where we're at right now. But we might have to flex. That's all you need to say. That's all you need to say is, hey, I have an open mind. That's all you need to do.

It's have an open mind. present your idea with an out, right? Take your position, but give yourself an out. That's all you need to do. So you can maneuver a little bit. I think that mentality, like from a defensive perspective, you know, I know, Claudevitz talked about the defensive position being, you know,

the strongest. And your mentality is like, you know, you're giving all the momentum, all the initiative. And I think particularly when you're in a fortress, where it's even a male or, you know, these positions, they probably had no expectation that someone could be inside their fortress out. We're totally safe here.

We're totally good to go. We have the advantage. And so as soon as that happens, I mean, that doubt starts to creep in. Like, man, you know, you're done. They've lost all morale. People are ready to surrender. People are ready to retreat. I think that's, there's something about just being on the advance that gives you, I think,

all the advantage of the world. Did you, when I was talking about, the fact that they raised the German flag and that helped morale. I had a vision of a certain American flag going up in random buildings over the city of Ramadi sometimes. I don't know what you're talking about, boss. I mean, that was very helpful for morale. I can neither confirm or deny that the American flag was running up.

Well, you know, you talk about, hey, we're going in there and, you know, we get approval for these missions. Like, you know, we're going to be a sneaky sniper overwatch. We don't want the bad guys to know where we are. A couple of times we just had to run the old stars. shrines up in the middle of the city and say we're right here bring it and uh we did get uh in fact dave burke called me on the radio to pass good deal dave good deal day call me on the radio to pass the word to us in one particular position that hey there was some troops massing and i was like

bringing on this is that that's exactly what we're hoping for mass attack bring it on good morale for the troops i don't know if that could have gotten it was like plausible Deniability for Jaco is tasking a commander there. We didn't exactly run that one up for approval. Well, I guess there was some indication because well, since we're putting ourselves on a report here, we weren't, you weren't allowed to fly an American flag, period.

And we did have American flag on Camp Mark. 24-7 all the time. Affirmative. So maybe my implied commander's intent was if you got to run up the stars and stripe if you got to run up the stars and stripes make it tall make it tall and have a lot of machine guns

and pointing in all directions which we did check lessons Sergeant Rubarth clearly understood the importance of rapid crossing of the river the commander's intent at all levels from squad to division was to cross the river quickly in order to maintain the momentum of attack

A delay at the river would have given the French time to strengthen positions closer to Paris and possibly hold the German offensive. So that's a really good simple example of commander's intent to say, hey, listen, the commander's intent of this operation is we have to get across this river as quickly as possible. And now everybody in your division knows we're going to get across this river. That's the goal. And I'll do whatever I've got to do to make that happen. That's a very nice, clear example of what a commander's intent is. Now, everybody. Now, everybody knows what we're trying to do.

And if something changes, the enemy does something I don't expect, guess what? Cool. I'm going to adapt and I'm going to get across this river. I'm going to take as many of my guys with me as I can. Taking on the role as the main effort of the German attack, Sergeant Rubart's displayed outstanding leadership, shouldering the responsibility of creating a breach in the French defenses. Though greatly outnumbered on the far shore, the squad followed their courageous

and decisive leader. Sergeant Rubart's bravery and judgment allowed him to succeed, despite being isolated, and under attack by French artillery. Sergeant Rubarth did not wait for reinforcements, but continued to attack the enemy deciding that rapid action was necessary. This is where action versus inaction, right? Action versus inaction. What was I saying yesterday when we were recording EF online?

I was like nine times out of ten. Action is better than inaction. This is an example. Now, is there a case where perhaps it would be better to wait for reinforcements, but I'll tell you what, here's the deal. If you take action, you know what? We got enough guys. We're going to push. We're going to go. Maybe you get stopped. Maybe you meet heavy resistance. Now you know that. Now you know you actually can't proceed. But if you go and you're like, hey, actually, we just took another bunker. Let's take another one.

You take small steps. You go forward. You take action. And then you learn from the feedback. If the feedback would have been, hey, we just tried to take another bunker and we got schallacked. Okay. Well, we're not going to move anymore. We're going to wait for free and Forcements fine what should your default mode be be aggressive make it happen his actions created an opportunity which his commanders took advantage of by pouring forces through the breach and decisively defeating the enemy sergeant rhubart's actions contributed directly to his battalion's crossing his divisions attacked and the eventual defeat of France five weeks later far better it is quote far better it is to dare mighty things to win glorious

triumphs even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor that neither enjoy much nor suffer defeat because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat and that's teddy roosevelt medal of honor cuba his son medal of honor utah beach all right next up the marine corps brings it we got we got sergeant john basilone u.s marine corps guadal canal 1942 august 1942 the august 1942 the The 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal and countering stiff resistance from the Japanese defenders. Sergeant John Bazelon served as a machine gun platoon sergeant in support of Company C. First Battalion, 7th Marines.

On the night of 24 October, Sergeant Bazelon's platoon occupied a key position in the battalion's offensive perimeter on a jungle ridge. Just past 2130, the Japanese began a ferocious attack. In the dark, rainy night, intense fighting followed, and soon the machine gun unit on Bazelon, right was overrun by screaming Japanese soldiers hurling grenades and firing rifles. At the same time, Bazelone's machine guns started running low on ammunition. Bazelone knew that the enemy that had broken through on his right were between him and the ammunition dump, but he decided that if his gun teams were not resupplied, the positions would fall.

Sergeant Bazelone took off his heavy mud-caged boots, stripped himself of all unnecessary gear and sprinted down the trail. After returning with several belts of ammunition, he set out for the unmanned machine gun pits to his right, knowing that those heavy weapons were vital tools in the defense of the ridge. When he got back to the gun positions, he found two unoccupied machine guns jammed and ran back to get one of his own. He ordered a team to follow him. After Bazelon's gun crew reached their destination, he immediately put them into action. Baselone lay on the ground and began repairing one of the damaged weapons. Once the gun was repaired and loaded, he got behind the gun and began engaging targets. The fight raged on and Japanese bodies began to pile up in front of the machine guns.

At one point, Sergeant Basilone had to direct his Marines to push back the piles of bodies to maintain clear fields of fire. Several more times during the night, Sergeant Basilone made trips back to the command area for desperately needed. ammunition. Eight separate attacks were sent against the Marines that night and Bazelone's platoon fired over 25,000 rounds. They were credited with killing an estimated 300 enemy soldiers playing a major role in thwarting the Japanese attack. This successful defense reestablished the perimeter of the first Marine division, protected the vital airfield, and led to the conquest of Guadalcanal. the first island taken from the Japanese for his initiative resourcefulness and leadership in

defense of the Ridge Sergeant Bazelone was awarded the Medal of Honor lessons tactically Sergeant Bazelon understood his role in the defense of the Ridge and the intent of the company and battalion commanders his machine gun served a pivotal role in the company and battalion defense line plan he took numerous actions necessary to ensure his battalion's success. This included making the decision to weaken one position in order to fortify an adjacent unit's position to his right. Sergeant Bazelone exhibited great leadership during the defense.

He went to great lengths to provide his unit with whatever tools were necessary to maintain the defense of the ridge. His courage and braving enemy fire to deliver ammunition set an example for his Marines. Unbelievable. It's interesting When you think about their low on ammunition And his decision is I'm going to get I'm going to go personally get the ammunition

And I can see a couple factors playing into that decision One of them being If we don't have ammo, we're all going to die So it doesn't matter You know, I could send another guy But And I could stay here to try and help, you know, maintain our position.

But without ammunition, we're all going to die. So the number one thing we need is ammunition. And these guys know what they're doing. They got this. But without bullets, we're going to get overrun. I am going to do this. That's, it's an interesting thing because, you know, sometimes leaders got to say, okay, this is what's going on.

Here's the absolutely critical task. And I'm actually just going to go do it right now. because if it doesn't get done, we're all doomed. Taking off his boots. That's a hard thing for me to think about because my feet are soft. Man, I think every time we turned on Baselon Road, you know, up there at Camp Pendleton going to our ranges and training, you just think about, you know, the exploits of John Bassel. That's incredible.

You know, I think the other thing, too, to think about here is these other, These other illustrations we're looking at, I mean, obviously amazing illustrations of a junior leader, you know, squad leader stepping up and making these calls. But, you know, the previous ones in World War I and two, you were talking about, you know, look, vicious fighting. Obviously, people are dying and being, you know, shot and blown up or band-ed or whatever, but those particular charges, bonsai charges like that in Guadalcanal, like there's zero quarters going to be given.

So you're overrun and, like, everyone's going to get killed. And I think, you know, I think. that was, it's a different situation, you know, and I think a lot more desperation there. You can't just throw up your hands and surrender like the Germans did to Sergeant York, Corporal York in that particular situation. Yeah, I mean, I almost didn't even make it past the sentence in the dark, rainy night, intense fighting followed, and soon the machine gun unit on Baselon's right was overrun by screaming Japanese soldiers hurling grenades and firing rifles. Just dark. And what, When you're in dark, and especially in a jungle like that,

and it's dark outside, and then you shoot your gun, and now you've seen the muzzle flash, like you can't see anything now. Like it's dark, it's black. And so now the only thing you're hearing is screaming Japanese, they're throwing grenades, which again is ruining your night vision. You're seeing muzzle flashes, you're shooting back

at muzzle flashes, freaking just horror. Just horror. Yeah, that's some unbelievable heroism there. I think you're hitting on a good point, though, about the prioritized and execute piece. And I think, you know, we generally would say leaders don't want to be down on the details. You want to be detached. But, you know, to your point, if you, in the prioritized and execute, if I don't go do this now, none of it matters. We have to do that.

And it's the existential priority. Yeah. If we don't execute this priority, we will not exist anymore. It's an existential decision. And there's only, you look, and he probably looked, said, you know, I got this guy. He's working that gun. He can do that. There's one person that could actually make this happen right now.

And it's me. I'll be back in seven minutes with some ammo, fellas. Bazi. Next up, Sergeant Jacob Pavlov, Russian army. Stalingrad, 1942. In the fall of 1942, the German 6th Army was pushing into the Russian city of Stalingrad. The Russian strategy was to draw the Germans into the city and fight them from building to building.

Sergeant Jacob Pavlov of the Soviet 13th Guard Division was called into his battalion map room in order to do recon a four-story house in order to develop a company plan to attack the building. That night, Sergeant Pavlov selected three men from his squad and set out on the reconnaissance. So, hey, go into a recon to this building so that we can do a company-sized 150-man assault on this building. When the four-man team reached the objective, Sergeant Pavlov realized that the house was occupied by only a few German defenders. He decided to seize the house immediately with his small team. He quickly devised a plan and within minutes had attacked and taken control of the house. Using captured German machine guns and their own Tommy guns, Sergeant Pavlov led his men in fighting back wave after wave of German counterattacks. The next night, Sergeant Pavlov sent a messenger back to his battalion.

By morning, his group was reinforced with 16 men, three anti-take rifles, two mortars, and more machine guns. His defensive preparations continued. He directed the placement of a minefield around the building. He ordered his men to take out the interior walls of the building to allow freedom of movement. He posted sharpshooters and observers in the top of the building and fortified his command post. A 200-yard trench was dug for resupply. When the German... That's a lot of things to get done.

Digging a 200-yard trench is no joke. What is that digging a 200-yard trench? And posting sharpsortters and removing the walls inside the building so you have better freedom of movement. This guy was not playing. When the German sent larger armored forces against him, Sergeant Pavlov improvised new tactics to fight them. This is beautiful. Due to the limited elevation of the German tanks, Pavlov sent his machine gunners to the top floors and his anti-tank crews to the basement. From these positions, his men put accurate suppressing fire on the German infantry while destroying the army of the armor.

So a tank gun can only go so far up and so far down. Apparently they couldn't go far enough up to hit the roof where the machine gunners were and couldn't go far enough down to hit the anti-tank weapons. Pavlov's house proved to be a key Russian position in the battle for Stalingrad. The building's height allowed Pavlov's observers to call accurate arms. artillery fire in any direction and snipers chalked up hundreds of kills from the attic. Upon finding his objective, this is the lessons. Upon finding his objective lightly defended, Sergeant Pavlov ignored his orders and used his initiative to take the house by surprise.

This key decision fully supported his commander's intent. Now, what's interesting about this is we dig in a little bit. If I was sending you, Leif, to go and do a recon of a building that we were going to attack tomorrow with 150 men, I might not even cover the contingency. We might not even cover the contingency of, hey, if there's no one in there, just take it. Like, because you're not expecting, if you're expecting to need 150 people, you're not expecting that four people. So you might not even consider that, hey, and by the way, if there's light resistance,

just take it. Because even light resistance with four guys going into a defended position, it's going to be heart. All you need is one person with a machine gun at the end of a hallway and you got real problems. So the fact that he just said, I think we can, hey, right? And get it done. And, and there's no radios. There's no radios. They're not calling up and saying, hey, hey, hey, Jockle, this is life. I took the building, send reinforcements. No, you're just there. We said he sent a messenger the next day, 24 hours later. After you hold station for 24 hours. With four guys. That's, that's crazy. that's that's the power though of the commander's intent you know and understanding the why and i think

if you and certainly i mean the culture in the soviet army at that time was was pretty centralized uh you know as far as decisions to be made so i i can't imagine that he got briefed for that contingency i think that's highly unlikely so someone just to be like hey but think think about what happens here though if he goes back you know he goes back and says hey there's only you know it's the only light resistance there. We can attack now. And maybe by the time they plan their attack and 24 hours later, it's reinforced and there's 200 people there, you know, instead of a dozen or whatever it was.

So that's, uh, that's pretty amazing initiative to say, okay, what they actually, what we want to do strategically is take this, this key piece of terrain and I'm going to take it right now because there's the initiative. Here's, there's the opportunity in front of me and, you know, to seize the initiative. That's, that's incredible. Let's get it. That's Leroy Jenkins just showed up in Stalingrad. Leroy, Jenkins.

But think about that, though, from a perspective, leaders, they don't, you think that you don't want your people to do that. I don't want them to go too far. I don't want them to get too aggressive. I don't want to, you know, you wait for my orders. And so there are plenty of leaders who would be upset with a squad leader like Pavlov executing on something like that. Instead of actually saying,

that's awesome. And if I had a bunch of path loves, we're going to win this thing. It's going to make all the difference. I used to tell the task unit commanders, and then I'd tell the whole task unit. But I'd pull the task unit commander aside, and I'd say, hey, there'd be chaos going on,

and they wouldn't be getting anywhere. They'd be bogged down. They'd be getting shot up with paint, but all those problems would be happening during training. And I'd say, imagine if each one of your fire team leaders was doing something smart to move you, where you wanted to go. Imagine how easy things would be.

And they'd look at me like dumbfounded because they'd know that's true. Like, let's face it. If a fire team leader goes, hey, we got a wounded guy, we need to move him. And the boss just said, we're moving south to the rally point. If we all know we're moving south to rally point, every fire team can start to make that happen.

And that was one of the things that would help move a task unit from centralized, command to decentralized command just that little conversation which I had dozens of times hey we what do you how do you think it would be if every one of your fire team leaders right now was doing something that you wanted them to do that was good that was moving them towards your goal how how do you think that would affect you right now they'd be like it would be very helpful and I'd be like yes it would be why don't you tell them all what that overall goal is right now you're in a perimeter everyone's everyone's within 50 meters you could actually just yell it out right now

We're moving south the rally point alpha. Let's go. Okay. Cool. Maybe one fire team leader looks at another fire team leader and says, hey, I got cover. You bound back. All right. That's eight guys moving in the right direction.

Some other fire team leader goes, hey, we're good. We got dead space. Let's move. Okay. That's another four guys move. You just need to think that way. You need your team to go out and make things happen. But they can only do that if they know where they're going.

I watch you have the other side of that equation as well, you know, which is something we talk about a lot of Eschlam fraud. And that's when we would see the recognition in these young leaders of the power of leadership. And whether it was a fire team leader or a squad leader or a machine gunner. A machine gunner who wasn't in charge of anybody else. And they're standing out in the street in this, you know, this mount town, the urban, urban, you know, training environment. And there's paintballs flying around and explosions going off in total chaos. and that was so much like the leadership

laboratory that you always talk about was just an incredible thing to watch and when I was out there you know in my last command as a senior leader just observing my team and being there with you as your mentoring and training folks and walking up to some machine gunners saying hey

what's going on right now they're like I don't know what's going on someone does to make a call this is ridiculous what do you think you should do right now we should get that building over there. Why don't you make it happen?

I remember I'd get the blank stare of like, wait a second. You're telling me that I could get people to go over there and they look at me and kind of tilt the head and say, I'm going to get in trouble if I do that. I can't do that. Actually, no one is doing anything right now. I just walked by your

platoon commander and he was sitting there talking to your task unit commander about spaghetti for dinner because they have no idea what's happening. And if you don't make something happen, no one's going to be eating anything tonight because we're going to do this over and over again. But you would ask the question, like, hey, do you think your task at a commander want you to be sitting out of the street getting shot right now? And the answer is, of course not. Of course they don't want.

They're tied up with some of their problem where there's spaghetti dinner or whatever it is. But once they recognize the power of leadership and you encourage them to make that call and they're like, hey, fall back in the building. And now all of a sudden you got leaders at every level that are stepping up and making things happen. So you having both of those conversations with the leaders. Both ends. To encourage their junior folks to step up and make calls. And then with the junior front line troops that are executing, and then you actually have decentralized command that's out there making things happen.

It's a powerful, powerful tool. Decentralized command. Sergeant back to the book, Sergeant Paffloff showed exceptional leadership skills while defending the house. He organized and led an effective defensive position for over six weeks. he showed tactical improvisation and skill as a combined arms leader. Sergeant Pavlov's actions show how one leader's action can contribute to an overall battle. His platoon-sized defensive strong point became the key position for his battalion,

which in turn became the main effort of the division. It's better to be, it's better to be on hand with 10 men than to be absent with 10,000. That's from Tamer Lane, a Mongol, emperor. That would uh, that would be a gangis Khan or Jenghis Khan. What, that Mongol emperor?

No. It's not him. Is it not? It's not him. It's not him. I don't even actually know if those two were related. But same area of the earth. That's for damn sure. And apparently

both of them are like kicking ass. What was, what was, what was What was Genghis Khan's real name? I can't think of it right now. I thought it was. No, it's not it. I got to go back and review the book. I read a few years ago.

You're right, it does begin with like a T. It was a T. And they made some kind of a movie about it. Echo, maybe you could help out here. There's a movie about it. Dude, that's a week for neither one of us to be able to call that right now. I got to research that for sure. More discipline, go.

But I know that that's not him. All right. Sergeant Thornton. British Army, France, 1944. Vital to the success, I like I said that, Leif just pounded something like I need to remember that name. Let's bring the clarity. Vital to the success of the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe

was the capture of valuable bridges inland of the beaches. This was to be done by parachute forces the night before D-Day. If these bridges were not taken, the German army would be able to counterattack the landing forces and push the Allies into the sea. Just after midnight, in the early morning, hours of 6 June the fifth parachute brigade of this British six airborne division landed in Normandy one glider company was tasked with the vital mission of seizing and holding the

Pegasus Bridge which crossed the cane canal and secure the east flank of the British landing beaches if this bridge was not secured the Germans would be able to launch a flank attack into the exposed left wing of the British invasion of forces after seizing the in a daring assault the company established a defensive perimeter facing east towards an intersection at 0132 tanks of the first panzer to engineer company with infantry support crept toward the bridge as the lead element of a German counterattack the only this is a good story the only anti-tank weapon available to the platoon covering this approach was a small piaat rocket manned by sergeant thornton the paratroopers were fearful that a tank attack could not be stopped Sergeant Thornton lay hidden in a pile of equipment knowing the limited range of the Piot and the vulnerability of his platoon's position

he decided to wait until the tanks were a mere 50 yards away before firing. Thornton fired the Piot gun and scored a direct hit on the lead tank. The round penetrated and caused a magnificent explosion. Shells inside the tank began to cook off creating a fantastic light show. the German company commander was mortally wounded as he tried to flee the burning Hulk.

The display and numerous explosions acted as a beacon for other paratroop forces lost in the dark. They converged on Pegas's bridge, believing that British forces had come under severe attack. The second German tank immediately reversed course. The lieutenant in the tank reported that the British had occupied the bridge in force and were equipped with six pound anti-tank guns. the German commanders decided to wait until daylight before launching another attack. As morning approached, the Allied forces were able to land on the Normandy beaches and protect from a strong German counterattack. The German delay allowed the Allies to build up combat power on the beaches and rapidly strike inland. The invasion of France and the drive across Europe led to the defeat of Germany in less than a year's time.

So some lessons here. Sergeant Thornton knew that his Piat gun was the only defense the paratroopers had against the German armor. He decided to hold his fire until the lead tank was danger. close lowering the Germans into a trap. This is legit. That is badass right there. You got to think what's going through that guy's mind. I mean, just being in close proximity to tanks and Iraq, 50 yards away.

And just that noise and knowing the power of that thing. And you know, his guys are like, dude, what is he waiting for? Yeah. And you got that thought going through your head of like the caddy shack like, Noonan. Like, don't miss. Yeah, you got one shot. You got one shot.

To quote the Great Echo Charles, all you can say is, dang. Yeah, that's a tough one. That is legit. When Sergeant Thornton's round hit the tank and set off a chain of events, which helped ensure the success of the D-Day invasion, the British were able to reinforce and reconsolate in the dark. The Germans decided not to risk a night attack against strong unknown forces. The burning tank itself prevented the Germans from approaching the bridge.

With the bridge in British hands, the paratroop company held an entire Panzer Regiment at bay. Damn. If that Panzer Regiment had been able to penetrate into the Normandy Beach, had the ally invasion might have failed. The company's pivotal position supported the airborne division's mission and allowed the British landing forces to free access to the beaches. One shot potentially shaved the left flank of the Allied invasion. One shot.

Saved the left flank of the Allied invasion. And there's a comment here. Attackal success is only really decisive if it is gained at the strategically correct spot That's Von Mulkey which we haven't done him yet, but we got him in the books all right so while I was reading that I thought of something so I was talking about the fact earlier that when we got to modern warfare when we got machine guns we started to de-sexual centralized command because now Laif's squad is a hundred yards away from me so that way we have some dispersions that way we all we all don't get killed at the same time so that way I just got to

say hey like Laif here's our objective you got to go make it happen so now when you're talking about going in right like you're going into gliders and it's in in Band of Brothers when you're watching the gliders come in you're going in the dark you're hitting you're just you're just going to be alone when you hit the ground that's what's going to be with what you're going to be with whatever for 22 other guys. That's what you're going to be. Who knows where your commander is going to be? You're freaking flying in the dark

where you're jumping out of an airplane. What's your grouping? How many people are you going to be close to? So, they have almost no communications. So what we have to do is we have to make sure that everyone understands the commander's intent. Everyone has to have some kind of objective.

So the more we got to this modern warfare, the more decentralized command was and the more importance there was on commander's intent. Then what happens? Then we start getting radios. Right. So now all of a sudden, Haley, if you go there, I'll call you. I'll let you know what to do when we get there. Or if you get into trouble or if it's not what you expected. Give me, make calms.

So now of a sudden I'm allowed to D, or I'm not allowed, I naturally ease towards taking the stress off of the commander's intent because I figure, just give me a call when you hit the ground if it's not what we expected. So when you think about, if you're going to freaking launch gliders and paratroopers into France for D-Day, you got to expect, they're going to hit the ground, they're going to have no idea where they are, what to do, they're going to have no communications with you. They better, let me rephrase that. They're going to have no communications with you when they hit the ground.

They are probably not even going to have communications with more than five or six people when they initially hit the ground, maybe 10. You know, maybe if it's in a glider, they're all together, but they're going to be isolated. So they have to understand the commanders intent. Otherwise, it just stops right there. But as soon as we get radio communications, now it's like, okay, well, you know, when you hit the ground, check in for the objectives. Or, you know, if you're not sure where you are, give us a call and we'll, so all of a sudden, Commander's Intent becomes less important. And then you get to, less important if you, if you can make radio comms.

Less important if you can make radio comms. So then you get, you fast forward, you know, to Vietnam where maybe now every platoon has a radio. Right? Every platoon has a radio. So now, well, we at least can control that. Then you fast forward to the 90s. Like even when I first got in the teams, we might not have a radio for each guy in the platoon. There might be like four guys don't get a radio. Hey, make sure you stick with one of the, you know, because you're doing like a shipboarding. You're like, hey, if you don't got a radio, make sure you stick with somebody that does. But now pretty much, we don't need to even know anything. By the time we get to the teams in the 2000, we've all got radios.

We've all got radios. So, so now I can control more. Laf, tell me what's, hey, give me a status update so I can tell you what to do next. And then you go to the 2010s. All of a sudden, I got a blue force tracker. I got a video of what we're doing. And you can see where now we're becoming we're going away from decentralized command and moving closer and closer to more micromanagement because the technology allows me as the leader to move those chess pieces as I see fit and it feels comfortable it feels more comfortable to do that of course we know it's wrong because for me to be like layf give me a status upright date so I can give you you know your next move oh well my status update oh yeah jaco we're getting

flanked right now what do you want me to do oh I want you to oh Leif just got shot why because he didn't react quickly enough because he's sitting there waiting to be told what to do so what we're seeing now is a tendency to move more towards centralized command because we have the technology to facilitate centralized command I'm not saying it's right I'm saying it's bad it's wrong but if that's the reason that it's happening we're starting to see more and more micro management because we have the technology that facilitates it. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about, you know, I'm thinking about the training

that you ran was, you know, which was the best freaking training in the world when you were the officer in charge of training detachment, you know, here for the West Coast SEAL teams. And, you know, your instructors were, we're out there to teach, to teach people how hard it was going to be, particularly in the urban environment, you know, in a combat situation, how easily you can get in blue-on-blue situation, how easily things. to go chaotic, how easily you can't actually make comms on the radio, you know, or the land warfare environment, exactly the same thing and distances or ridge lines in the way or whatever it may be. Because it seems that way in theory.

You know, it seems that, oh, in theory, we just talk to everybody in the radio. Give me a call. Hey, just radio, we'll get to here and we'll deconflict. Oh, great. And then when you realize like, hey, that's not going to work if we can't make comps. You talk about shipboarding. That's a great example. Like, hey, I'm down in the engine room and there's a whole bunch of steel between me and you

up on the bridge. I got no comms with you whatsoever. And if we're thinking that like, hey, I just made a call on the radio and everyone heard me. And I tried to do that. I mean, you taught me that. And one of the biggest lessons for me, you know, as we've talked about here and, you know, podcasts, you know, years back is trying to put out, you know, a message over the radio. Hey, everyone do this, do that. And you were like, use verbal commands.

And that was one of those things. Like, not everyone is hearing me on the radio. They're in the middle of doing stuff. There's people that are on the third story and they're talking through a bunch of walls and they may not even be hearing your transmission. So this illusion that I'm communicating, you know, is, it's a total illusion because it's not the reality. And if people don't have commanders intent, they can't execute. And there's no substitute for that at all. And we see that now, right?

In the business world, as leaders send out an email or, you know, hey, I told everybody what to do. They should just read their email. Like, hey, are you guys in the field on their email 24-7? They're in the middle of doing stuff. By the way, they got 14 emails at 6 o'clock in the morning. And you think that they're going to take that one from you and be like, oh, especially if you're the kind of leader that sends out, hey, just checking in with everyone, let no one on what's going on. Like, no, don't send me checking emails. You're going to email.

If I'm emailing you, there's a reason for it. You need to open it up and read it. That means I'm not going to email you 12 times a day. I'm not even going to email you three times a day. When you get an email from me, it's important. If you set the precedence that I'm going to send you a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter, guess what? Same thing with coming up on the radio. Hey, I actually need, hey, anyone's got another Humvee we can push back in this area?

Can I get two more guys? I'm just talking on the radio, talking on the radio, talking on the radio. Eventually no one's listening to you anymore. We worked with a company recently where they're running a plant, and the plant is being managed from a couple hundred miles away. were in like a command center. And they lost power. So they lose power.

And all of a sudden, like, hey, they got no comms at all. Everything has to be done on site. You know, and if you don't understand commanders to 10, if you don't understand what those procedures are, I mean, you've got to have those contingency plans in place. And I think that was what was so awesome about seeing that at, you know, at trade debt when you were running things, is you're instilling those lessons of like, okay,

this is why I've got to make sure that my junior leaders, my squad leaders, you know, can step up and make calls. Because if, regardless of the technology that we have, we're going to fail if they can't. Yeah, there would always be the troop coming through and they'd say, well, I'd say, well, how are you coordinating that? They were like, oh, we're just going to get on the radio and when it's go time. And I'd be like, what if you don't get comms? And they would kind of look at me puzzled.

And if you make your plan, this is the, this should be the fifth law of combat. The fifth law of combat is if you make your plan and it's based on making community, radio, communications with some other element and your plan relies on that, it will not work. It will not work. It is going to fail. You've got to have, you know, secondary tertiary forms of communication that overcome the radio. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about the image of you standing on top of a Humvee at entry control point three on the far side of the canal when we had all this danger of

snipers around there and we knew that this was, there was sniper activity and they're like, no one actually peeked their head above the big Hescoe barriers. Jocko's standing on top of the Humvees with his tape antenna, you know, extended to like six or eight feet above his head to make comms with me, you know, as I was, we were forward in, uh, in an Overwatch position. And, and even then it was, it was, it was a recognition of like, hey, we, we're, it's going to be really hard to talk on the radio, um, you know, and, and you, you, you didn't, you put yourself at risk to do that.

But if I didn't have commanders of 10, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I could, rely on that to have you make the calls for me, you know, from a distant position. I wanted to say one thing about this. And you talked about, you know, the power of the flag. And we talked about in that previous, you know, the Germans that run up the flag and the French were demoralized. Nothing more demoralizing than a giant burning tank hole. You know, the hole could that tank just burning there. All the, all the others could see. And that was obviously, incredibly demoralizing in this particular situation. And I think when you've...

Oh, I see what you're saying. You're talking about this particular where he hit this tank with the P.I. Yeah, he hit the tank with a rocket. All of a sudden, you know, the tank explosion, it's a big fireball. And clearly that was a massively demoralizing thing for the German forces there, which turned it around for the Brits. But I think, yeah, running up flags is great. Blowing up tanks and having a burning...

vehicle and for all to see like oh i don't want that happen to me yeah the reason it took me a second there is because the times that american tanks got blown up in romadi and it would take you know 24 hours to get a 88 down there to drag them out and that was freaking demoralizing too you know and we talked about the vehicle graveyard but just knowing that they're going to get some the enemy's going to get theirs and it's freaking horrible it was incredibly demoralizing it tried it to drive down, you know, route Michigan and see some burned out a hole of a vehicle on the side of the road. But the good news was on our side, it was also very demoralizing, you know, when the bad guys could observe their buddies laying out in the street after some seal snipers put them in the dirt.

Yeah. And that was pretty demoralizing as well for them, which we took some pride in. Chuck. Next, Sergeant Stephen Gregg, U.S. Army, Italy, 1944. In August of 1944, the Allied offensive in Italy was stalemated. An amphibious landing at Anzio was executed in an attempt to outflank the German defenses and capture Rome. The landing units became stalled on the beachhead allowing the Germans to reinforce their defenses. The day after the landing L Company of the 143rd infantry was moving north towards Rome.

The Germans were waiting in ambush and the company was quickly pinned down by enemy fire, realizing that the fire was too heavy for the medics to tend to the wounded, Sergeant Greg, a mortar man, picked up a 30-caliber light machine gun and advanced on the enemy position. His measured accurate bursts suppressed the enemy long enough for the casualties to be evacuated. Unfortunately, Sergeant Greg ran out of ammunition and was captured. While Sergeant Greg's captors took cover from incoming American artillery, Sergeant Greg grabbed the machine pistol and fought his way back to friendly lines Sometimes I'd pause because I'm thinking about these things in a little bit deeper level like picking up a 30 caliber light machine gun which it says light machine gun a 30 caliber machine gun is not light and just advancing on the enemy position

That's just awesome and then you picture this guy we start getting hit with artillery and all the captors and hide and he's like oh check you little babies watch this grabs a machine pistol fights his way back the front lines the next day the Germans counterattacked L company or sorry the next day the Germans counterattacked L company was ordered to hold the line on a hill capture the day before acting as a forward observer observer sergeant Greg directed over 600 rounds onto the enemy until he lost communications with the mortar section knowing how important the mortar fire was to the defense, Sergeant Greg took the initiative to find out what had happened to the phone line. Upon nearing the mortar section, another soldier yelled that the Germans

had seized the mortar position and were dropping rounds on the Americans. Sergeant Greg assaulted the Germans, taking two prisoners. He quickly put the mortars back into the fight by gathering up a handful of American troops and teaching them how to fire mortars. OJT. L Company held the line. Sergeant Greg's bravery initiative and situational awareness contributed to his unit's successful defense. The defeat of the German counterattack led to the Allied breakout from the beachhead and the eventual capture of Rome. That's just a solo op right there. That's crazy. The solo operation.

I'm having to go check out. I'm going to go find out what's going on with this phone wire. Oh, wait a second. There's some Germans with our mortars. Cool. What do I do? Oh, I attacked them. Give me a 30-cal machine gun.

Let's get so. Sergeant Greg displayed keen situation. These are the lessons. Sergeant Greg displayed keen situational awareness during combat at ANCO. While acting as a forward observer, Sergeant Greg realized the importance of his unit's role in the company defense and did everything in his power to keep the mortars firing. So this says he realized the importance role. Like he realized what was going on. There was no one told him, we better get those mortars up.

He realized it and made something happen. When ambushed, Sergeant Greg displayed the bravery and decisiveness to take action, his individual attack. on the Germans lifted the pressure on his unit and allowed the wounded to be evacuated. Sergeant Gregg's leadership abilities and strength of character allowed him to take a handful of Americans not under his command and train them while under enemy fire. Sergeant Greg's improvised section maintain the supporting fires, which were so critical to the company's defense. Action.

That was just the common theme. Action. Look, they talk about initiative. That's good. They talk about understanding the commander's intent. but actually taking action is what we need to do. In the book called Extreme Ownership, when we talked about prioritized and execute,

one of the things that I had told Stoner was, you know, wrote it on his thing, relax, look around and make a call. And what's interesting about that is when I wrote that, there's a part missing. There's a part missing to that. So when you get into a situation where there's a lot of mayhem going on, what you need to do is relax, you know, take a breath,

look around, actually observe what's happening, and then make a call, right? Make a call. Now there's a part that's when you line that up with the Oudaloupe, it almost lines up perfectly because observe, orient, decide, and act. We got relax, which is like, all right, look around, which is definitely observe. and then make a call is decide. The thing that I didn't say to Seth was act. And I would have said execute.

I would have used the word execute. I didn't put that on the windshield for him. The reason that I didn't put that on the windshield for him is because when you tell a seal platoon to do something, nine times out of ten, it's going to get executed. When someone says online, the word gets past, they get online. When someone says peel right, they get online, they peel right. When someone says strong right, strong left, when somebody makes a call, it gets executed.

And his platoon was executing stuff. It was him that needed to make a call. So that's the piece that I didn't tell Seth because I didn't need to because it wasn't him that was going. He was going to make the call. His platoon was going to execute. And believe me, they did. You know, when he would make a call or when someone would make a call, they'd execute. That's pretty normal.

It's very normal for a seal platoon. It's very seldom that a seal platoon, when they get told to execute something, that they don't do it. If you make a call, J.P. Donnell is executed. People are going to. Yeah, you picture you've got 16 J.P. to Nels or even if you got five J.P. DeNells and some other guys, shit's going to happen. It's going to happen. So when I wrote that for Seth, it was about him.

And the execute part, I didn't have to say anything because I knew if he made a call, it was going to happen. That's a that's a big assumption for a lot of for it's a big assumption for us as individuals and it's a big assumption in a normal team right. Look I knew Delta platoon at that time and like I said most steel platoons quite frankly they will execute as we just said but that's not always common and it's something that you should we should actually add if you're going to say hey if when there's things happening relax look around and make a call the next thing should be execute

because there's people that make calls, there's people that make calls in businesses, there's people that make calls in dynamic situations, they make a call. But if you haven't trained and been, been, for lack of a better word, programmed that when you hear a call, you're going to execute, there's oftentimes when the execution doesn't happen.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because I was thinking about this, because every one of these things, the common thing, is that somebody's taking action It's not someone's making a decision. They're making a decision too, but they have to act. And even when Dave talks about the Oudaloupe, you know, he says that the most important part of the Oudolup is action. It's action. You've got to take action.

If you don't take action, look, you can observe, orient, decide all day long. If you don't act, it doesn't matter. And same thing with relaxed, look around and make a call. Hey, you can relax and orient yourself and observe what's happening and make a call. But if nobody executes that call, you're dead in the water. So these things are all about actually taking action. It's a great observation because that's the breakdown for a lot of leaders. And we see that all the time.

You know, with a decision gets made and we're working with a company. And, you know, they've got a problem performer and they've done everything they can to train and mentor them. And they, okay, we're going to have to actually make the decision to let them go. And then you come back and talk to them six weeks later.

And decision got made, but they never executed. And the performer's still there. And then it takes six months. months or nine months to get that done. And it's so much harder to do then. And all the damage has been done. And I think that's a great observation to me because it's a, you know, you can make a decision, but if you're not actually executing it and it doesn't, it gives you, you're setting yourself back. You're losing the initiative. You're wasting, you know, momentum. You're giving your

competition a leg up. And, you know, to your point earlier, like nine times out of 10, action is the best thing. Yeah. Take action. Take an interstep in the direction. You need to know, you need to go. And it just gives you all the advantage of the world. Yeah, and occasionally you could get a platoon where they're not, you know, they don't have that, they don't have that attitude where they're like, okay, a call's got made and we're going to go make this happen. Occasionally you would get a platoon like that. And then it would be, hey, when you hear that call, you got to, you got to go get on that. You got to make that happen. You got to execute.

Like I said, Delta platoon didn't need that. They just needed Seth to freaking relax, look around and make a call. Once the call was getting made, they had experienced guys in there. And like you said, you got some, you got some J.P. Dnells and some other freaking guys that are going to make things happen in there. It's no factor. Action. Next one, Corporal David W. Lamb, U.S. Army, Korea, 1951. In October, 1951, G Company, 23rd Infantry Regiment was battling for Hill 520 of Heartbreak Ridge.

The company had been withered by repeated fights with the North Korea. reinforces. Corporal Lamb was acting platoon commander of the third platoon of a unit of about 20 soldiers. So we got the freaking E4 out there acting as a platoon commander. Following heavy bombardment and supporting fires, Corporal Lamb's platoon made a direct assault on Hill 520. Upon nearing the enemy, Lamb's platoon was halted by enemy fire and began taking casualties. Lamb called back for reinforcements. Lieutenant Dana, Gaino gathered his first platoon and moved towards Lamb's position. Gaino's platoon began to take casualties and halted when the young lieutenant was killed.

Private High stepped into the role of platoon commander and rallied his platoon. While under fire, Corporal Lamb directed the use of supporting fires and planned a new route for the enemy attack for the company attack. After a bitter fight, the two platoons breached the enemy defenses. During the assault on the position, Corporal Lamb was wounded. Private High was now the main effort of the attack. He directed the remaining soldiers in taking out the bunkers in the enemy defenses using grenades and flame throwers. Three hours after the attack had set off, the enemy position was secured. Corporal Lamb's leadership had pulled his platoon and the remainder of G Company forward through the withering fire into the enemy's position.

The attack pushed the enemy off Hill 520, an important step in removing resistance from heartbreak. Ridge. You know, it's interesting a lot of times tell leaders, you know, you should have, if you've got seven or eight direct reports, you should have two or three of those direct reports that are ready to step up and take your job. And here you've got a private. You know, this guy is a freaking private. And he takes charge and makes things happen. That's next level, right? Hey, it should be, imagine me saying, hey, look, you got your direct reports and all your direct reports, your eight direct reports, you should have two people that are ready to take your job. And by the way, in their direct reports, there should be five people that are ready to take your job.

That's impressive. And if you made that your goal, that the people, not just your subordinates, their subordinates, there was people that were there, there were two levels below you in the chain of claim that were going to step up and take your job if it need be. Imagine how effective and efficient those individuals would be. freaking awesome. Like you talk about it all the time. Every leader should be trying to work themselves out of a job. And I think it's so hard to do that because our egos get involved.

You're like, well, I want to be the one that makes a calls. You know, but you insisted on that. I know you'd learn that from Delta Charlie in your time in the SEAL teams. And putting, like, Ryan Job is our most junior ranking guy as an E3. And we put him in charge of running an entire assault,

like planning and executing that assault. And he did good. It was, it made him so much of a greater contributor because he understood the challenges of leadership. He understood how he could best support, you know, the overall team and then what kind of information we needed to make decisions. And I would have never done that without your encouragement.

And in fact, I think I pushed back on it a little bit. You're like, hey, why don't you let, who's your most, you know, why don't you let, why don't you let Biggles run this? And I was like, are you sure about that? Are you like, he's brand new? And you're like, yeah, just let him run it. He'll see what he does.

He'll do fine. Yep. And that's the crazy thing right there, right? It's like, he'll do fine. And he'll do fine. Yeah, totally fine. He'll do fine. He'll do fine.

It's like even when we run FTCS is like the FTCS trading program for civilians, I don't know how we had this talk or when it was, but the overall, the overall, the overall meaning of the talk was, was like, they'll be fine. Like these civilians that got 45 minutes of training of how to assault the building, they're actually going to do fine. It won't be that big of a deal. Look, is a seal platoon better trained?

Yes. But I'm saying the general idea of what they're doing, it's going to be fine. It's going to be enough to work with. And so someone like Biggles, who is like in the platoon and is going through the workup and understands things, it's like, he'll watch this. He'll do it. He'll do it fine. And, you know, he'll make the same, he'll make, you just did it.

Laif Babin, the platoon commander from the Naval Academy, you know, you just did it. And you made four mistakes. And Biggles is about to do it, and he's going to make five. It's not like Leif just did it, and he made one mistake, and Biggles is going to do it, and he's going to make 80. No, it's like, it's like, comparable. I make seven mistakes, and he made three. That's, yeah, yeah. It's like that crazy.

And the thing that you mentioned about how much more it, opens up somebody's brain when they get to see like all that when you're in charge of all. And this is exactly, you called it. This is what Delta Charlie did does. Hey, you're in charge this. You're running this. And all of a sudden, instead of me looking at this little tiny sliver of the plan and the sliver of the execution, I'm looking at this whole big thing.

And so I see so much more. See how things are interconnected. That was such a powerful, am I going to use this word? Yes, I am. Life changing. Life changing. for me to have the vision and to have my boss say, you're gonna run this and get to run it

and see all these things that I'd never seen before and be like, and then the next mission, by the way, I'm back to just being a radio man, but I can see all the connections. I know the importance of the job, I know that I know that this would help my boss. I know that this would help the other squad leader. I know that I should talk to this guy about,

it just makes you infinitely better. That was a really powerful lesson that I learned from you and saw the impact. And I think that if leaders can just simply put their ego in check and realize just to your point that you had with those SEAL platoon commanders and tasking commanders, think if you had 16 or 40 of those guys out there who can see that vision,

you're thinking about not just their task, but how can they can help the overall mission and the intent of the purpose that you're out here, you know, trying to accomplish. It's just absolutely life-changing and game-changing. And that team is just, they just dominate. No, there's no stop in that team. They just crush everything.

Some lessons. Corporal Lamb displayed tremendous leadership abilities. His fellow soldiers benefited from his competence when he assumed command of the platoon and led a company-sized attack. When the time came for him to command at a higher level, he was able to shoulder the responsibility. Tactically proficient Corporal Lamb had learned the necessary skills for commanding a platoon in combat.

Check. He was able to coordinate supporting. fires with his company commander. Direct actions, direct the actions of other platoons and inspire the men under his command by his personal leadership. His knowledge and ability met with the success on the battlefield.

By the way, I got a text from Tilt the other day. And it was after he listened to a podcast with Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave. Yes, good deal, Dave. And Good Deal Dave was telling, you know, talking about calling for bombs, calling for fire, calling for fire,

in Ramadi and I don't know the number of times that Dave was on the ground to drop bombs but you know it was a lot yeah it was a lot and then Tilt listened to it and Tilt was like hey really like listen to your

podcast with Burke let him know that I got to call some fire too only I was an E4 when I did it and and and it is you could not you could not compare

the amount of times that Dave Burke dropped bombs in his entire career, including training. You could not compare that amount with the amount that tilt dropped on one operation, one operation, where he's sitting at night

for 12 hours with continual close air support. Tilt will make you feel like a baby. Yeah, I don't think you're, I don't think you're measuring up to, I don't think you're measuring up to that in any way, shape, or form. But look, that's, you know, we talk about humility,

and I think that's, anytime I think I've done something or we saw some combat, you know, and you start reading books. I mean, every single one of these, of these illustrations here. I mean, it just blows away, you know, anything that I saw or did. It's incredible.

I will say this, though. I talked to, I talked to, you know, a couple of Vietnam SEALs that are outstanding. You know, folks, they had some awesome experience and had served as SEAL machine gunners in Vietnam. And they talked about being in some gun fights. And, I mean, these guys, I mean, amazing, you know, incredible people who had awesome experiences. Our forefathers that created this legacy, you know, for us in the SEAL teams. And we were talking about, you know, seal machine gunners, you know, and how, man, it was really cool. See, our belt-fed machine-gators kept us alive and how awesome they were.

and we were talking about like how often, you know, so I asked, I asked one of them, a good friend of mine, like, hey, how many times you have to reload your machine gun? He's like, oh, man, maybe a couple times. I was like, well, how many, I mean, you must have shot your whole loadout a few times, you know, a bunch of times. He was like, now I don't think I ever shot my whole load up. And I was thinking, like, dude, our steel machine gun has shot their entire 600 round,

load out, and then maybe four or 500 more rounds that everybody else was carrying, like, all the time on so many of those. Yeah, the I had the same conversation with with well I had this exact same conversation with one You know badass forefather Vietnam seal who was a machine gunner in Nam and He said the same thing. You know he was like he I think he said he's like yeah. We got in six firefights But that's what I also learned is that much like current seal deployments you could have one seal deployment in Vietnam where you go to a certain a o and the enemies act in a certain way and it's freaking like daily craziness and they were doing what they oh yeah they they do since they would do squad operations so they go every other night your squad my squad your squad my

squad and they would do operations all the time so it's also um you know based on the particular ao that you know that you know that you were in remoddy the guys that were over in another city you know whatever not not that far away some of those guys didn't didn't i don't know if they got firefights so or maybe they got you know two or three so it's one of those things where I hate to use this word but you got to get a lucky with your a.O you know and then of course you're gonna make your own luck next up sergeant Stephen Bouchard U.S. Marine Corps Vietnam 1967 in July of 1967 1st battalion 9th Marines took part in Operation Buffalo designed to defend the border between North and South Vietnam known as the demilitarized zone.

During this operation, the battalion was ambushed by an entire North Vietnamese army regiment and took very heavy casualties. The 1st and 2nd battalion's 3rd Marines were sent to rescue 1-9 and stabilize the area. Sergeant Bouchard served as the right guide for 2nd Platoon A Company 1-3. The platoon's mission was to clear the area where 1-9 had left their dead. As A-company moved out of its positions, Second platoon came under heavy shell fire. The platoon commander was wounded and had to be medevacked.

The platoon sergeant took command. The NVA began firing from bunkers in the far tree line. The platoon sergeant froze with fear, leaving the platoon without leadership. Sergeant Bouchard unhesitatingly took command of the platoon and played an important role in the company's subsequent actions. Sergeant Bouchard's strong leadership pulled the platoon through the horrible task of retrieving the corpse, of 1-9 while under enemy fire. While manning a defensive position, a breach in the battalion line was created

between Bouchard's platoon and the adjacent B.Campany. Bouchard's platoon counterattacked into the breach and sealed off the NVA who had infiltrated the perimeter. His unit then made contact with approaching forces wearing marine gear. Sergeant Bouchard ordered his Marines

to hold their fire until the figures had come into within hand grenade range. At that time, Bouchard decided to open fire on the approaching soldiers who were NVA wearing stolen gear from the dead of the 1-9 Bouchard's tactical actions broke the enemy attack and the Marines went on the offensive Sergeant Bouchard remained in command of second platoon until the unit was ordered to pull out a 1-3 was the last unit to leave the battlefield before B-52 strikes leveled the area Sergeant Bouchard was both willing and able to take responsibility of leading the platoon.

His tactical skills allowed the platoon to play a major role in the company's combat operation. Sergeant Bouchard was able to take charge by being decisive. We recorded a whole thing yesterday for EF Online on being decisive. The squad leaders did not respond to the platoon sergeant who was too fearful to lead. Sergeant Bouchard took decisive action and was not afraid to make tough decisions and carry out difficult tasks and once again what do you do?

He took action. Taking action. His decision to open fire on the individuals in marine uniforms required decisiveness and acceptance of responsibility. Sergeant Bouchard led his platoon by example. Many Marines were devastated by the sight of the Marine dead left behind by one nine.

Sergeant Bouchard's capable and firm leadership held second platoon together. And that right there, I mean, it's just devastating. You know, we talked about how much it hurt to see an American tank burning in the streets in Ramadi. I mean, can you imagine your platoon is now out there just recovering body after body after body of your fellow Marines? I mean, it's a, it's a nightmare.

And obviously, they didn't go into it too. much and I'll have to do some research and if I can find any more information about this, but you know, they clearly mentioned it here. Many Marines were devastated by the site of the Marine dead left behind by 1-9. Realizing that his unit had to be at the right place at the right time in order to make a difference, Sergeant Bouchard led a counterattack to plug the gap in the lines between A&B companies. This platoon level tactical action secured the company flank and prevented the battalion from being split and overrun. And there's a quote here from the German army that says it's better to have a good sergeant in command than a bad officer.

We'll take that one. That's a great quote right there. Corporal Lester A. Tully, U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam, 1968. The 1968 Ted Offensive took American forces in Vietnam by surprise. Way City, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam was quickly overrun by the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, given the mission of relieving. the first Arvin Division command post, G Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, advanced on foot through the city. The first Arvin Division CP was located at the northern corner of the citadel, a historic fortress. G Company's route of advance would take them right through the citadel.

The company advanced along Highway 1 with second platoon in the lead until it became necessary to cross a bridge over the Perfume River. Just as the lead squad crested the center of the span, an NVA machine gun placed in a fortified bunker opened fire. The company was pinned on the bridge and the lead squad took multiple casualties. An M60 was set up to counter the NBA position, but the team leader was killed moments later. As sparked flew from enemy rounds hitting the bridge structure, Corporal Tully decided to take matters into his own hands. Corporal Tully was second squad leader of second platoon. On the bridge, his squad was located directly behind the lead squad. Assessing the situation, Corporal Tully decided upon a course of action that would allow his company to advance.

Realizing that his squad was protected from fire and was the nearest to the enemy, Corporal Tully charged up a walkway and threw a grenade into the enemy position, killing five NVA and silencing the position. The company followed Corporal Tully's squad, crossed the bridge, and advanced upon the citadel. As the company neared the citadel, it met heavy resistance from northern Vietnamese army regulars. While forced to withdraw, Gulf 25 clarified the situation around the citadel. American commanders had gained a much-needed clearer picture of how strong the enemy was in Way City. Now the American commanders could concentrate on what to do rather than wondering what was going on.

that's a you know we used to set up the the old barricaded shooter down a hallway this is just an awful one a barricaded shooter down a bridge and what are you going to do you got downed men on that bridge because you think oh well i'll just jump off the bridge and we'll be okay what about your wounded friends up there so you can't just abandon it it's a nightmare what's up with a what's up with a grenade killing five nva that's a that must have been a that's a tight shot they must have been closely groomed I mean like way tightly grouped that's a well well thrown grenade that's a well thrown grenade I always love that that that they you know the I guess yeah the the the American grenades being like baseballs Baseball side and the Germans they couldn't they couldn't hang because they play soccer and so they you know what a potato masher grenade is? No, you ever seen a a grenade with like a long stick on one end of it. Yeah, like on red don't. Yeah, so that's called a potato masher

because it looks like something you'd mash potatoes with. But the reason that it was created was you can use it like with leverage to throw further. Yeah, yeah. Because you can't kick a grenade like it's a soccer ball. So they couldn't throw it. Like American, you take an American kid, man, come on. He's going to take that little baseball-sized grenade

and huck that thing, strike. He's going to put it into a machine gun pick, kill five people. Some accuracy. Freaking awesome. Yeah. If you remember from Easy Company with the 2506, the Band of Brothers, if you've seen the television show, read the book. But remember Buck Compton was a All-American catcher for UCLA's baseball team. He was apparently direct line drive hitting German soldiers with hangaried.

That's so freaking epic. That's so epic. I was a when I was going through STT like the what became SQT So you know the the get done with basic seal training and you show up at a team and then they put you through training And we we we went through a grenade course which was just run by team guys But we were throwing pineapple grenades Straight up pineapple grenades the crates were marked 1947

What's the pineapple grenade? Like that your dish looking grenade It sort of looks like a pineapple It's got the little like spikes Spikes on it Yeah it's like like a quad pattern Oh yeah It's just like a stereotypical grenade

Oh yeah like okay What you look like if someone's gonna get a tattoo of a grenade Right right right that's what they get Okay so the and then what then the kind of modern grenades That's just the round one It just yeah it just looks round But that that those pineapple grenades So we go up there and

This is just dumb team guy stuff So we start throwing these grenades and like A bunch of them are not working because they're whatever at that time, like 50 years old or something crazy like that. So we're hucking these grenades and the chief that was running the training who it was a freaking like badass team guy. Matter of fact, Tony mentioned him because he died. But his name is Tim Farrell. And so we're throwing these grenades. And when they would.

So if you threw a grenade and it didn't go off, the protocol was shut down the range. call EOD. EOD can come out there, whatever, in five hours, and you're going to sit there for five hours waiting for them to show up. So Tim Farrell didn't want us to miss training. So he's going out on the range. He'd be like, he'd give it like whatever, a few minutes. And then he'd take another grenade, another freaking old rusty pineapple grenade. He would go out, pull the pin, set it down next to the one that was the dud after he went

out there to look for it. That's ballsy. Set it down and then run back. I jump into the pit. And dude, I'm a new guy. I'm like, damn, dude, this dude's a badass. Like, this guy's crazy.

But that's, you know, that's how. If you're out there running a hand grenade range, just don't do not. Do not do that. Do not do that. Not advisable.

Like I said, dumb team guy stuff. Freaking, real dumb. Those pineapple grenades, though, you know, the M67, which is the modern round grenades we use,

that, the frag pattern is, It's so much, the frag is tiny. It breaks up into those little, little small piece where the pineapple garries got those big old chunks. And that's what the, that's what the insurgents had in Ramadi. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, they have those, they have those Russian ones that are more cylindrical. Yeah. They're cylindrical and they still have the grid pattern on them. Yeah, we were covered a bunch of those out of that, that one moss that we cleared with Iraqi soldiers. Imagine that. Wait, you guys don't use,

all their weapons there. So you don't use the pineapple grenade? at all no more long time no dang that's kind of the iconic look yeah that's what I'm saying if you're gonna get a tattoo of a grenade you're gonna get that one most like I've never seen anyone with the M67 grenade tattoo have you I haven't yeah because it's kind of round right it doesn't quite have the kind of boring yeah unless you're hocking it yeah yeah unless you're using it yeah yeah yeah a little bit yeah I'm okay I remember some of those some of those pineapple the Russian pineapple grenades were those things were heavy

A lot more weight to them. A little more oomph to them. For sure. It seemed like most of, well, like you said, the frag was heavier. You know, like just the metal was heavy. I don't know what the explosive weight was off the top of my head. They're definitely bigger. They make a big boom, I can tell you that.

So there's different sizes of grenades or no? Yes, there are. Like, so, well, you mentioned that the grenade killed however many guys in one shot. That was more a statement of like, That must have been a hell of a shot. And the guys must have been close together because a grenade is a very small explosive. I mean, it's a small thing. Five meter, five meter kill radius on it.

Yeah, so it's. Yeah, if they're all cruising together, boom. Here's a note for Echo Charles, though, the movie master. Yes, sir. So the, the, the five meter kill radius for M67, our hand grenade, a frag grenade is the same. It's the same kill radius for a golden egg, which is a 40-millimeter grenade that you shoot out of your, your M-203, grenade launcher or the old school M79s that we carried

and unlike what you might see in the movie Commando when you when you shoot a 40 millimeter grenade the building doesn't blow up and we had several times where it just it fragged people and they run off and it's a common

misconception no there's a common misconception that actually is true and Commando is actually factually the proof that it does do that well all I get to say is I tried that many times. And as an officer, you know, my job is to stand back and and high port my weapon and be detached.

But that also means that if I'm in the back, I can shoot some 40-millimeter grenades. And we've shot quite a few of those things, which was awesome. I remember you often coming back with empty bandaliers. So wait, on Predator, not to go too deep. No, no, no, dude, let's go.

They started. Totally did start it. Remember the scene on Predator, Jesse Ventura, Blaine. AKA Blaine says, I don't have time to bleed, right? Remember that part? Yeah. It's like, hey, you bleed. And then the guy, poncho said, okay, do you have time to duck?

Exactly. He came out, shot, is that the 40 millimeter? That's a 40 millimeter grenade. Yeah, he had an M2 or 3. So he's launching that into the unlike, like, look, it would definitely keep guys heads down. And if we did have, we had a couple guys that scored some direct hits with a 40 millimeter grenade, which is, if you take one of those in the chest, it's game over for you. That was pretty epic. But there is, what doesn't happen is like you saw a predator where you launch a 40-millimeter, a 40-mic-mic-mic into a bunker and like a giant explosion happens and six guys go flying 10 feet in the air in all directions.

That doesn't happen. That was pretty disappointed. Did you see my Instagram post where I said, hey, people are parking in front of my driveway and then I shoot the cars? Yes. Is that a 40-millimeter? I mean, I guess. I thought you had a rocket. Wasn't that a rocket?

I don't remember. You know the big, I think like six of them fit in there? Oh, you know what? You did have you had the street sweeper. There's a street sweeper 40 millimeter grenade, which the Marines had. The Marines had some and they're heavy, but it's pretty awesome. It's just a cylinder. And so, yeah, you can just launch a whole bunch of, it's basically like a gigantic revolver with 40 millimeter grenades in.

That wasn't real? It was real, but I don't look at the tag, what do you call the instructions or what? whatever the name. I did shoot some vehicles with 40-mite, Mike. It does create quite an explosion. And if you can ignite the gas, you know, then it will catch on fire. There wasn't a gigantic explosion that happened,

though. That was a little disappointing. For that, you got to call it a good deal, Dave, with the bombs. Yeah, there's just not that much explosive inside. I mean, you know, like how big an M-80 is? Yeah. I mean, think of how big an M-80 is.

Well, then think of how big a grenade is. I mean, I can just kind of multiply that. And, you know, you're going to get some, something similar. Do you remember that they gave us the thermal barrack 40 mics? I do remember that. Which create a much larger explosion and supposed to kill people with the overpressure. And they gave us a bunch of several cases of them.

And that was supposed to last the entire deployment. And we shot every single one of them on one operation within about a one hour period, which was awesome. That was awesome. but what was also additionally awesome was I got an email follow-up. And they said something like, hey, we're wondering if you've had a chance to utilize, because they were testing, they were testing them. We were wondering if they've had a chance to, if you've had a chance to use any of these thermobaric grenade 40 millimeter grenades and have you had a chance to fire any of them yet?

And I was like, I was like, hey, LA, have you, you shot some of those? how were you? He goes, I shot all of them. I go, how were they? You're like, they were awesome. And I just wrote back, work good, send more. I think I asked for more of them.

The only thing that was different is that they were much heavier because they're a lot larger and the explosion is much, much more powerful. So a little closer to what you might expect. Gotcha. But you got to account for that in the trajectory because where you're aiming it. Yeah, where you're aiming it is they're falling like, you know, 50 meter short. Yeah, that's kind of hard to dope in. on Camp Mark Lee

just rolled out and dope in your 40 mic That's crazy All right The lessons from that one Corporal Tully Knew the mission of the company

Was to relieve the first Arvin Division headquarters When the company was halted by fire He took decisive action In support of the commander's intent To free up the movement of the company So the mission can be continued

Corporal Cully acted on his own initiative. Being the second in the company formation, he was in the best position to evaluate the situation and take advantage of the opportunity developed by the point squad. So what we have here, again, we've got somebody that's in a position. They're not the leader. This isn't the gunnery sergeant. This isn't the platoon commander.

This isn't the company commander. This is the squad leader who takes action and makes a difference. And look, we saw this kind of thing all the time. And we were lucky enough to work alongside the Army, work alongside the Marine Corps and see, you know, not just from our own platoons, not just from Charlie and Delta platoon, see our young E5s and step up and make things happen. We got to see things like this. We get to see things like this all the time.

All the time. You got to think about how young these guys and experience these squad leaders are as well, too. And as we're reading hearing those stories, I'm thinking about a young squad leader that we worked with from 3-8 Marines, Lima Company, named Joe Thompson, Corporal Joe Thompson. And we did probably a dozen operations with Corporal Thompson and his squad. And we learned a lot from those guys. I mean, they had been in Ramadi for several months prior to us and had fought through some of the most difficult and dangerous neighborhoods. And he was, he was 21 years old. So here he is in charge of a squad of Marines, leading those Marines, a beloved squad leader, stepping up and making calls, supporting the chain of command, you know, and just executing and getting things done.

And I had so much respect to be able to work with a Marine like that. And tragically, Corporal Thompson was killed on August 2nd, 2006, the same day that we lost, Markley, the same day Ryan Joe was shot and blinded. And we lined up next to those Marines from 3-8, Lima Company, and we put both Joe Thompson and Markle on that Angel Flight at the same time. And I remember the silence of all the Marines next to us as our seals from Chartero Between carrying those, our brothers in body backs and putting them on that angel flight as they took off and just the glow of that helicopter going around as they took off to fly those guys home. And what a loss. I mean, just seeing how crushed those Marines were losing their brother and this beloved squad leader.

And I was just thinking about us as we're hearing those stories, it's hard to imagine that these guys, how young they were. You know, a guy like Corporal Thompson, 21 years old. And with all that, you know, with just limited life experience and yet in this massive position of responsibility that are playing such key roles and whether or not their team succeeds or fails. And just my hats off to all the squad leaders out there. And what an honor to work with a guy like that. and to reflect on the impact that he had on all the Marines that he led. Yeah, that was, I'm thinking that's probably a pretty good place to stop for today. We got some more, we got some more things to cover.

And it's important to remember that these guys, you know, the guys that we're talking about in this book, when you're talking about Corporal Thompson, when you're talking about Mark, You know, we talk about how they make a difference on the battlefield and make a strategic impact, but their actions and the way they lived and the example that they sent definitely have made a difference in the way that I think, in the way that you think, and the impact that they had, not just on the battlefield, but to see an example, to be examples of what a leader is. And more important, what a person can be. Like I said, we'll pick this up on the next one.

But from these stories that we heard already, you know, I kept referring back to taking action. And these squad leaders, they take action and they make a difference. And that applies to us as individuals. our actions make a difference our actions that we take as people make a difference not just on the battlefield not just in business but in life so step up take action and make a difference all right echo charles it's been a while but i need some help over here yes sir once you talk for a little bit all right Well, I did talk about taking action, which I agree with, obviously.

Well, we're going to start small. How about that? As far as taking action goes. So the best action that we can take is to improve our physical health. Starts there. This is essentially the foundation for pretty much all other action when you think about it. Okay, I was feeling like obviously I was getting a little bit. bit emotional there. I'm done now. You can stop talking.

Okay. We're trying to cool down. I think I'm cool. Okay. Good. What I was going to say is we got to start small. Okay. We're not all, we're not all dressing up like rebels, you know, with our friends going in and shooting the rebel league. We're not all doing that. Okay. Okay. Jack. That was epic though. Most of us are just kind of, you know, just going day to day with our lives and tactically and strategically and strategically trying to do the right thing, right? Starting small. Best way to take action or the best thing to do is to maintain or improve our physical health. Let's just say it's a great place.

It's definitely a great place to start. Yes, sir. We like it. Yes, sir. Can't argue. No, can't. So improving physical health takes what I used to call beat downs. You've got to beat down your body a little bit, varying levels of beat downs.

Check. We all worked out today. Affirmative. Some of us plan to work. Did it all work out? Did you not want to go out today? No, bro, not yet. I'm working out later.

That's all I'm saying. See what I'm saying? Okay. He was saying, Echo was calling me out earlier for not throwing around the Hyundai, uh, the, the, the, the hondo kettlebells. Leif, you're, you've been in town for two days. Would you be more consistent if you work, with your workouts if you lived in San Diego with me?

Or like near me. 100%. A check. Sometimes I'm like, I wonder if Leif really was to show up at my house at 5 o'clock at the morning. Then you get there. Well, how do you feel when you get there? How do you feel once you're working out? How do you feel once you're done? It's the best. It's the best. And luckily I got I got an early CrossFit class that I usually hit at 530 in the morning. Get up at 430, stretch out. And that's in dripping, dripping springs. CrossFit second wave. Yeah, awesome. Plug coming at you.

CrossFit second wave. Awesome, Jim. How many classes do you have? Four or five a day. Yeah. Outstanding coaches. Oh, damn. Four five a day. Great. great instruction so what after here's a question I have a question for you okay straight up you know like okay okay okay so you know what you just said like life would you do you think you'd paraphrasing would you make workouts if you live in San Diego right so the whole accountability you know early workouts okay when he's gonna get his but yeah so you have this thing where and this kind of me just assuming where you know when you have a workout partner you're way less like

to skip workouts, right? So for you, you might think of yourself. You're like, you know, it doesn't apply to me because, aren't scripting workouts, hell no, kind of thing, right? But do you believe that that's a sound theory? I do believe it's a sound theory. Yeah, it is, right? Yeah, it is.

Yeah, so I'm not going to be. Yeah, so when Jock was like, all right, I'll see you at five, it's, you're going to be there. You're going to get some. Yeah, makes sense. But, yeah, so through workouts sometimes, you know, you got to beat down your body so you can recover, you know, and through that, beat down recovery,

We may need a little support. So we'll start with the joints funded another foundational concept your joints on your body track so that some supplements we got a lot of supplements For pretty much everything so joints is joint warfare super cruel oil These things maintain your joints so you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff so you just worry about the workout making it to the workout In Leif's case and you know and pushing hard again in Leif's case I like it. So here's what we're gonna do for Leif yeah He's going to get some good sleep, maybe take some of that hypnosis, then he's going to wake up, maybe have a little discipline hitter to get to the workout. He's going to have joint warfare because his joints are going to be functioning well with krill oil.

Yes, sir. That gets him through that gets done. Guess what? He's coming at it. Some mok going to rebuild with the protein activity. Boom. Easy money. And then he's got a roll in here for the podcast.

Cracks open a discipline go. By the way, pretty soon. pretty soon one life babin is going to have his own signature we're working on that hey um if you want any of this stuff this is we just started this we're trying to do a better job of helping you help yourself so if any of this stuff that you want you subscribe to it at origin main.com if you subscribe to it we will ship it to you for free That's what I said. I said what I said.

That subscription is awesome. I've, over the last couple years, like the joint warfare and krill oil, that is the super krill. If I don't take that stuff, I feel it. It's a problem.

I absolutely feel it. There's no question. It makes a difference. So that subscription of it just shows up. You're never out. It's awesome. I love that. And also to like,

okay, so consider this, which is something you don't really think about the joint warfare and the krill oil. You don't go, like through the day thinking oh can't wait to take my joint warfare like it's not on your mind until it's time to take it so like mok sometimes you can be like hey i can't kind of can't wait for that milk later you know i'm feeling that right now it's just different you're saying so when you

get into the red zone as far as supply of the joint warfare it's like oh you can kind of understand how you'd get there you know but when you have the subscript man that problem's kind of avoid it it's true though, you know, for that kind of stuff. So you can get it at Wawa. By the way, you can get the drinks at Wawa. Whole East Coast, by the way, we're in. We're in, whole East Coast. Everyone that helped us by, everyone in Florida that helped us by going in and clearing

shelves is much appreciated. And you did it. You did it. You got Wawa full chain. Whole East Coast. No matter where you go, you see a Wawa, you can go in there and get yourself some discipline go. Also, vitamin shop, you can get it there.

So that's cool. Yes. Also origin, main.com. Origin mane.com. You can get American-made geese because we're training jujitsu. Yes. You get American-made geese, rash guards, you can get, that's cool when you're training. We can't wear geese in the street.

You can. Not considered, not considered what? Appropriate. Appropriate. We want to wear jeans. Yeah. Okay, cool. We got American-made jeans.

American-made jeans, American-made boots, t-shirts, hoodies, hoodies, just all kinds of American-made gear. It's true. Speaking of gear, Jocco has a store with gear. jocco store.com. This is where you can get your discipline equals freedom gear. Your good gear. Your standby to get some T-shirt gear.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, a good way to represent apparel-wise while you're on this. Your hardcore ricondo. Oh, gear, yeah. Hardcore Recondo all day. Yes, all available. Like I said, jocco store.com. Also, we have a little, what's called,

what we call the shirt locker. Go ahead. You don't like how I said it. Well, I don't know why you made it this weird thing, but we have the shirt locker. Yeah, see what I'm saying, though? Like, yeah, you didn't like how I said it. The shhurt locker.

You totally called it weird. Well, because it's like the hurt locker. Is it saying? I see what you're doing. Anyway, okay. Either way. It's what you get a new shirt every month. Did you put like little tags in those that says deaf on it?

You like that. Yeah. You like that, don't you? Later. The details with that one. There's some details in there. Yes. There's some layers in there as well.

Anyway, so these are cool design ideas. Did you steal that idea from Lulu Lemon? I thought it was Lulu Mellon. I don't know. I don't know. No, I didn't, though. No, the answer is no. Okay.

Well, it looked way cooler. Well, there you go. So you're good. Either way, yeah, look into that. New shirt every month, cool, layers, designs represent. Subscribe to this podcast. Subscribe to the Jocko unraveling podcast. Daryl Cooper's in town, by the way.

We're going to be recording. Grounded podcast. Talking to Dean Lisch, trying to get moving on that Warrior Kid podcast. I know. I told you when I finished my last book and got it turned in, we'd get cracking on that. So that was two days ago. Another deadline.

Also, we have the underground, the Jocko Underground.com. If you want to get a little bit more amplifying information from the underground, you want to see something a little bit of what's going on behind the scenes. You can go to the underground. We have a bunch of stuff going on there. We're doing this podcast on there called Jocko Underground. It costs money. It costs money because we don't want to have sponsors. Look, I know it's hard enough to listen to us.

talk about this stuff right now. Imagine if we were talking about something that we actually didn't like. It would suck really bad. Yes, sir. So we only talk about things that we actually use, that we actually own. That's what we're doing. We don't want to have somebody else hold us hostage with their many. $8.18 a month.

Or if you want to, if you can't afford that, it's okay. Email assistance at jaco underground.com and you'll get taken care of. So if you're feeling a little bit angry, what are they doing? Well, first of all, this podcast is the same. As long as it can be this way it will be. But if you can't afford it, it's okay. We want to help. Have you explained the 818?

No. Because I've had quite a few people ask me that. We haven't yet. We're not ready to put the word out yet. No. One person that I can remember, guess the exact one. But that's sort of it. Layers.

Layers. We got YouTube. Subscribe to see Echoes legit videos, where he has one of considered one of to be the best. assistant directors in the world who really kind of guides the the whole tone of the videos that's me yes sir so you're welcome but you know what I'm humble that way I just let him I let him kind of take the credit for the videos psychological warfare a bunch of album a bunch of tracks on there flipside canvas dot com Dakota

mire making stuff we got books we got a bunch of books we got final spin a story a novel a poem I'm not sure you're gonna have the judge for yourself. It's available for your order right now. Leadership strategy and tactics field manual. The cold evaluation of protocols. Discipline equals freedom field manual. Way the Warrior Kid, four, field manual. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three, Mike in the Dragons, about faced by Colonel David Hackworth. And of course, of all those books that I've written, the ones that Laif actually thinks are the best are extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership. So you can get those to, which we wrote together.

Eschlon Front, that is our leadership consultancy, where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. We have EF Online, which is, that's why Laf's out here. We just recorded four new sections for EF Online, where we go on this particular course. We are going deep into the, into the principles that are in extreme ownership, because you read about them and you start applying them and you need to. some help and need some adjustment. These are like advanced courses on those fundamental principles. And then we're very soon we're going to have, we're going to have those available for all 12

chapters of extreme ownership. We got an hour long plus of content in each of those courses that match each chapter. It's going to be going to be awesome. And there's quizzes. And then we do we're doing live stuff all the time on there. So if you got a question, you can come and ask us. That's eFonline.com. By the way, if you really want to see Jocco get animated, EF online, live. I have fun, man. I have fun. He brings it. I have fun.

That's what I do. We have the muster in 2021. Those have kind of changed, but go to extreme ownership.com if you want to come to a live event. We've got also the FTX, which is field training that we talked about a bunch today, how these guys are learning about leadership. You want to go through that? Come to our FTX. That's what it is. And also we have EF Battlefield, where we will take you on a guided tour to learn the leadership.

lessons from the Battle of Gettysburg. So check those out. EF. Overwatch, where we are placing executives into your company that have experience from the military, that know the principles that we talk about it all the time. Go to EF.Overwatch.com. And if you want to help service members active and retired, their families, gold star families, well, a good way to do is check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization.

And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. And if you want to, if you just feel the need to listen to more of my protracted presumptions, or you need to hear more of echoes unavailing articulations,

or Laif's tiresome tales, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the gram. And on Facebook, Laif is at Laif Babin. On the gram, on the gram, Ram Laif is at real Lafabin because you don't want to get the other Laf Babin. Yeah, the unreal one.

Echo, that would be kind of cool if you were kind of unreal. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocka Willink and thanks to all the folks out there in uniform, especially the squad leaders. The squad leaders of the world, you make a difference in keeping the world safe and to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. and all first responders, thank you for making a difference by keeping us safe in our worst times. And to everyone else out there, remember that no matter where you are, no matter what is happening, no matter how outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched you might be at any particular moment, you make a difference. But you only make a difference if you make a difference.

your actions matter your effort matters your tenacity matters so don't let off the gas and don't wait for someone else to handle it for you don't accept your fate if you don't like it take action you make the difference and you make the difference by taking action and of course by getting after it and until next time this is laif and echo And Jocko. Out.