Jocko Podcast - 274: Being the Best. Can You Handle The Cost of Going Against The Grain? Is it Worth It? Tony Herbert, "Soldier"

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:04:20 - Tony Herbert, "Soldier"2:31:09 - Final thoughts.2:48:27 - How to stay on THE PATH.2:59:12 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 274 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. All right, so the last podcast, 273, we were with Anthony Herbert, Tony Herbert, also known as. And we started off his journey from a kid growing up in Pennsylvania. So if you haven't listened to Podcast 273, go listen to that right now. He tried to join the Marines at 14. 14 years old, credit.

Eventually joined the Army at 17, off to the Korean War, went from private to master sergeant. All kinds of heroic actions suffered all kinds of wounds, shot, hit with frag, white phosphorus burns, and also bayoneted multiple times, including one bayonet stab that broke off in his chest. He, in the Korean War, served as a platoon leader, even though he was just a young enlisted guy.

And eventually at the end of that podcast and at the end of that part of his life, he was pulled off the battlefield, one of the most decorated soldiers of the war sent on a morale. It was basically a morale tour. And first got flown back to the White House, met President Truman.

And then basically went to London and Antwerp and Brussels and the Hague and all the other European allies that were fighting alongside America in the Korean War. Along the way, he met Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. She encouraged him to go to college. He kind of agreed.

One of the quotes he says in the book is he agreed because he was already the youngest master sergeant in the army, and he said, what am I going to do? Sit around the Enlisted Man's Club telling stories about Korea. So he was sort of not over it, but he realized that he had kind of done what he was going to do. So he ends up getting assigned as an ROTC instructor at a high school in Denver because he liked to ski.

Goes to the third Ranger class that ever happened. He was in. He ends up getting married to his hometown sweetheart, Mary Grace, starts going to college. Then he gets out of the Army, then starts going to college at the University of Pittsburgh. While he's there, he writes a book called Conquest to Nowhere, which was his first book about the Korean War,

which he later rewrote, which we covered. when it was rewritten, it was called The Making of a Soldier. That was podcast 273 for the most part. Worked at a steel mill at night while he was going to college. And then eventually commissioned as an officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Shout out to the 228 Iron Soldiers. All right. So then he goes, so then he's back kind of in the Army.

And he gets some warnings that the Army's different now. You know, the war is over. both the good people got out. We just left with people that shouldn't even be in the army. He got those kind of warnings, but he stayed in. He loves being a soldier. He wants to be a soldier. Goes to the Basic Army Infantry Corps.

Wins nine out of ten awards there, including the leadership trophy, which is the leadership trophy is awarded by the other students. Like the other students select who deserves this leadership trophy. then he gets assigned as a ranger instructor and he starts he starts in the mountain phase and so today we're going to be reading so the first book that we covered we covered a little bit so he's written two books well i guess he's written three one was conquest in nowhere that one got rewritten as the making of a soldier that was the bulk of what we read last time this time we're going to read from his second book primarily and it's just called soldier just called soldier and lots of lessons learned but as I mentioned in the first podcast in two 73 there's some serious lessons learned about life and things get really crazy when he goes to Vietnam as a battalion commander and we will get there all right so here we go going going to the book Soldier written by Anthony B. Herbert.

And he says this, teaching young men the essentials of mountain climbing, combat and survival was more of a learning experience for me than for them. I began discovering things about the resources in me as well as the way the army was moving. I was an alternate instructor at first assigned to teach cliff descents on suspension traverses.

I took it seriously. It was dangerous business if you didn't. The ropes to be used for traverses, which were one inch in diameter and 900 feet long, cost the army about $300 each. I had set up two of the traverses on a 60-foot cliff the day before a new class was to begin, and that afternoon I went out to inspect the ropes.

One of the criteria for determining the quality of the kind of rope that was the presence of a tiny colored strand running all the way through its core. I inspected the first traverse, and found the strand. But the second rope didn't have it, which meant that I simply couldn't approve its use. The strand was an indication that the machines used to put the hemp together

into a strong enough cord had worked the way they were supposed to. If the strand wasn't there, something had gone wrong and the rope might be faulty. I went back to my quarters and wrote an unsatisfactory report on the rope and then went to the chief instructor and told them of my findings. The army paid good money for that rope and you want to throw up. it away, he argued. We're not going to do that, Herbert. I explained what I had found, or rather what I had not found. Strand schmand, he said. You go out there and test it again by going down the traverse. If it holds you, it's okay. This is kind of a strange safety check, right? Go ahead and

risk your life to see if it's going to work. I returned to the cliff and went down the traverse. So he does it. It held. It was supposed to be sturdy enough to support a Jeep. I went back and told the captain and he ordered me to conduct the class the next day using the rope. I filed the unsatisfactory report and went to bed. The next morning, as we stood at the top of the cliff, I ordered the class into two lines. The captain nodded his approval from nearby. One group would use the traverse made of the rope I'd inspected and approved. The other would use the traverse of the rope I'd inspected and rejected.

A young corporal in the second group stepped off. The rope snapped and he fell 60 feet to the rocks below. I went down quickly on the other traverse. His body was so broken, it almost crumbled in my hands as I lifted him into a Jeep and sent him to the hospital. The captain had seen what happened. He left the scene running up over the hill. The students were nervous. They said they weren't going through with it.

I made them a little speech on courage and reminded them that they'd all known that Ranger training included risks. It seemed to work. We spent the rest of the morning learning how to use the traverse. There were no further accidents. And at lunchtime, I went back to base where Colonel Byerly, and the captain asked me how the kid who fell was going to be. He'll be dead on arrival, I said. Don't say that, the captain said.

You can't say that. How the hell do you know? Because I'm the one who put him on that Jeep for the hospital. He'll be dead on arrival. The phone rang. It was a hospital calling, and the captain came back to Birely and me with a strange look on his face. The hospital says he was dead on arrival, he reported.

It was quiet in the office. Finally, the captain said, I was responsible for the accident. I realized that, sir, and I'll stand whatever comes from it. I said, you're responsible, you know, he said. You're the one who's responsible. I know, sir. I know, I answered.

So I'm sure it's pretty obvious why I decided to pull out that particular quote because that is 100% accurate. Obviously, he's taking ownership for what happened, but it's not just lip service. If you don't think something is right and you execute it, it's on you. It's on you. A little bit more from Ranger School. And this book, look, this book is for almost 500 pages long.

And obviously I'm not reading the whole thing. There is so much good information. And I'm just, I tried to parse it down to some key points along the way. But this is a, this is a book that is packed filled with knowledge. And I try and bring out as much of that as I could some of the war stories that I don't even go into There's there's all kinds of combat scenarios that I don't even go into Just an incredible book Fast forward a little bit here I didn't develop any really sophisticated theories about teaching and I still haven't

What seemed to be important was that the teacher know what he was talking about and be able to show as well as tell One of the fallacies in army training these days is that kind of experience is no longer part of the tradition. Kids are taught combat techniques by men who, through no fault of their own, of course, have never spent a moment in combat. And we wonder how it is that we turn out soldiers like Cali. Talking about Lieutenant Callie, Milai Masker. What seemed most important then, and still does, was that the students realized that the army and war are not really games at all, even though they might seem that way at times, especially when you hear someone of the bar room tales,

or when you hear some of the bar room tales of the way it was at Inchon or that night in the May Kong Delta. I saw so many army teachers who were trying to make up for the times when they had been down at the bottom of the heap, when they had been the ones taking orders. They played games with their men, building their egos with nitpicking orders that produced nothing.

but dissent and rancor among the men. So often I found it that way in the military. The rules and the regs and the juvenile cover-ups and the children's games, it had nothing to do with creating a system of discipline or building soldiers. It was simply an ego game. Again, I think it's quite obvious why I, you know, I'm talking about this. This is something that we all have to watch out for. You get put in that position of authority.

You got to watch out. You got to watch out. Some good opportunity for you to pump up your ego. Make them do some stupid stuff that doesn't make any sense. And we'll do that all day long. If you let your ego run the show, that's what you're doing. And by the way, it creates, what do you say, descent amongst the troops. All right.

So what he does in the next kind of stages of the books, he gets stationed in Germany. He kind of creates this provisional ranger platoon. He becomes the commander of the provisional ranger platoon. 1962, he gets promoted to captain. He's deployed to Africa. He's deployed to the Congo in Africa, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, the Persian Gulf, deployed to Bahrain, all in the 60s. And there's all kinds of good stories in the book about these different situations that he's in. He's doing some kind of clandestine type operations.

He's, it's just, just a, you know, borderline spy scenarios going down, working with the CIA, interacting with the CIA, intelligence services and this kind of stuff. So he does all that. 1966 goes back to being a Ranger instructor. It starts working towards his master's degree in psychology. He gets a degree in 1968. He gets offered a slot at war college.

but of course he doesn't want to go to war college not yet anyways he wants to go to Vietnam and there are a bunch of reasons obviously he has always felt that he wants to be a combat leader and he sees an opportunity to lead he also has never worked with helicopters at the level they were used in Vietnam

so well so he said quote I wanted to know I wanted to go I wanted to see I wanted to fight asks his chain of command, hey, can I please go to Vietnam? And he does. He ends up getting orders to Vietnam. He wants to be a battalion commander because by this time he's been promoted a few more times. He wants to be a battalion commander.

But he doesn't show up immediately in Vietnam as a battalion commander. He has to pay his dues first. And the way he pays his dues is my becoming the Inspector General of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. So Inspector General. What's an Inspector General? The Inspector General, their mission, the Inspector General mission is to, quote, provide impartial, objective, and unbiased advice and oversight to the Army through relevant, timely, and thorough inspections, assistance, investigations,

and training to promote and enable stewardship, accountability, integrity, and efficiency. Also, good order and discipline and enhanced total Army readiness. That's what an IG, have you ever heard that term before, IG Inspector General? Yes. You have? Yeah. Where'd you hear it?

What movie? I don't remember. It might have been like MASH or something like this. Okay. Okay. I was trying to think of a good way to explain all those things. And have you ever seen police movies where they have the internal affairs? Oh, yeah.

That's kind of, I think that's a good comparison, right? It's somebody that's kind of. We're inspecting us like our team. Yeah. Right? It's not, hey, we're out inspecting, looking what the bad guys are doing. We're looking at what we're doing as good guys. We're making sure we're doing the right things.

Internal affairs, or they came off as kind of like, that wasn't a good thing when internal affairs is involved. It's kind of like they're investigating some bad stuff. Yeah, yeah. Something bad happened. Yeah. Inspector General comes out, I don't know, just hits me as something more like, hey, almost like a compliance officer, like kind of like. like, hey, just to make sure everyone's kind of doing the right thing, it's not like, it seems like they're kind of on your side still.

Okay. No. Well, let me, let me phrase that. If you're doing the right things, they're on your side. If you're doing the wrong things, just like internal affairs. If you were doing all the right things and internal affairs came along, you'd be like, oh, cool, they're here to keep people straight. If you were, if you were a criminal or you were, if you were corrupt, right, what,

Training Day, your favorite movie. Yes, sir. But is there, is there internal affairs in training day? No. So there should have been, right? You got, there should have been someone tracking, hey, what's going on? Where's this money going? Where's this, you know, where are these reports?

Why aren't this? Yeah, like in the whole scenario for sure, but probably not in the movie for giving that particular storyline. But yeah, yeah, overall, for sure. Yeah, that's that guy. What's Denzel Washington's character name in that movie? Do you know? Alonzo.

Okay, Alonzo would be not a big fan of internal affairs. No, sir. Although he was such a mover and so manipulative, he might have had some internal affairs people that were on his side. Yeah, he kind of did imply that, not internal affairs necessarily, but kind of like he had some people inside kind of backing his moves when they're talking about getting drug tested and stuff. There you go. There you go.

So that's what the IG is. And look, you know, I was in the Navy for 20 years. Obviously, I saw some IG inspections go down. Or the IG would get called in, like maybe someone's, some ammunition goes missing for an extent. It's not the kind of thing where something happens one time, and the command would just kind of handle that. But if there's some kind of an ongoing problem,

maybe someone's falsifying travel claims or something like that. Yeah, okay. We're bringing in the IG who's going to give an unbiased look because, you know, maybe the commander's wrapped up in it or whatever. Yeah. So, okay, so they're not just sort of around all the time or nothing like that. You call them in for specifically. Okay.

And the other place they could get used is, let's say you work for me and I'm a tyrannical jerk. You could then reach out to the IG. Check. So you could reach out to the IG sort of through a anonymous, you know. Yeah, that makes sense. email or something and say, hey, this guy, Jocko, is verbally and physically abusive. That's a good tip, by the way. To his subordinates.

So there you go. Or his peers. So this guy shows up as the IG. Now, now, like you said, it seems like they would be on our side, right? Yeah, that was my misinterpretation. I thought Inspector General was sort of like just another guy who's there or another department kind of that's there all. the time that's kind of like, oh, hey, by the way, guys, you guys are kind of slacking over here, so let's tighten that out.

We're all good kind of a thing. So if you were doing the right things for the right reasons, you'd have no reason to fear the IG. But if you were doing some things that were shady, you might not be very welcoming or you might be scared of them. And the IG is obviously, it's a weird role to play, right? Because you're looking at your team and you're sort of, you can end up in a situation where you're accusing you.

your team of doing things that are wrong. So it's a weird dynamic. And so he shows up as the IG for this brigade. And this is the thing about Anthony Herbert. Seems like a very, what's the word here? He's like a straight shooter, right? A straight shooter that a little bit of black and white, a little bit of like, hey, right and wrong.

Good or bad, good or evil. He seems like he's got that kind of a personality. And actually, you can go watch some of his interview. There's interviews of him on YouTube and you can see some of them. But you're going to start to see that. And that's sort of in the first one. When I did cover the beginning of this book just to talk about his upbringing, you know, he's a church-going guy. He's, so he's kind of, he's kind of.

of a he's very straightforward and right or wrong that's what the personality comes across for the most part to me and so this IG you know he's gonna kind of he kind of comes out of the gate swinging he kind of comes out of the gate swinging and here we go he's checking in to this guy he's checking in with this guy who's a who's a lieutenant colonel who they call the mayor of on K, you know, some outpost over there in Vietnam, the guy is the commander of the brigade's support battalion. So he's checking in. And the guy's saying, you know, I can get you this, I can get you that.

But then he says, I expect some cooperation from you in return, he added. Like what? I asked. Well, like talking things over before they go to the general, he replied. Most things never even have to reach his ears if you and I cooperate. You know, Herbert, sort of. things ourselves trust each other get along and keep it all in the family see where this is going I stared at him and said he had to be joking I realized almost

instantly he was not I'm supposed to be an IG I said he seemed not to have heard launching instead into a lengthy recitation of his immense responsibilities as the man in charge of the Barak the Brigade's rear area headquarters everything at on K was under his purview he said men slas where he told them to sleep and took their meal wherever he assigned them and enjoyed themselves in his clubs and theaters and bought from his post exchange It suddenly dawned on me that here was a senior lieutenant colonel Supposedly a professional soldier who was bragging about his job as a building officer a task generally reserved for a second lieutenant in the states and usually for a not too keen second lieutenant at that he rambled on and on about the scope of his influence and I tried hard to look interested and concerned

Finally he stopped. It was my turn. Look, Colonel, I understand your position and if you'll just assign me a room and a mess. I'll be glad to cooperate. I said he smiled and relaxed in his chair, but you have to understand my position too, I added now he was staring. I'm an IG. So I work for the commander who, by the way, is General Allen, not you. Since I work for the general, I'll report to the general and if that isn't a satisfactory Or a range arrangement for you well then you can talk it over with the general and maybe the two of you can work something out more suitable His jaw line straightened noticeably in the meantime if you're finished I have a lot of work to do I concluded he looked ill is there anything wrong? I asked rising from the bed no not at all he said rather glumly Also rising I have some things to do myself I nodded open the door to the outer room and He left the place was quiet until the sergeant spoke you just made an enemy sir he said from his desk a real dangerous enemy I walked into the outer room real dangerous sir real real dangerous I repeated repeated smiling slightly yes sir he he's okay sir he said

cheapously when he noticed my grin no kidding sir he's really bad news I took some papers from his desk and looked at him so am I serge I asked I said and I'm not kidding either You see where this is going, right? So you can see where this is going. He's forming an antagonistic relationship with a guy right out of the gate. And, you know, I talked about this on EF online the other day. We, you know, we talk about take the high ground or the high ground will take you. But when you're on the high ground, you have to be careful that you don't, that you don't launch.

attacks on other people from a position where you feel like you're superior to everybody else. You are in a superior position. This is known, right? When you're on the high ground, you're in a superior position. But let me tell you this, when you start to launch attacks with the attitude that you're superior, you're giving up some of the high ground. So, and this is what's really, what's really a hard line to walk in this book. And as I try and talk through this, I'm not going to do a good job of it.

But just because you're right doesn't mean you're right. And you're going to see this over and over again. I mean, this guy is a like morally, at least he appears to be. And again, there's some controversy around everything we're talking about. He certainly appears, if you read the words that he writes in this book, he certainly appears to be a morally upstanding human being that, and look at what he did. Look at his heroic actions from the last podcast, what he did in the Korean War. This guy is willing to sacrifice for his brothers in arms.

He's an incredible soldier. And you're going to see how much his men, how much his men loved and revered him, which is awesome. But he's on that high ground and he's, this is, this is what he's doing. He's on the high ground and he's looking down on others from the high ground. and when you do that they don't like it people don't like it doesn't feel good

yeah that's interesting what you what would you how did you just put it like you just because you're right doesn't mean you're right or whatever just because you're right yeah

there's got to be a better way to say that it's like just because you're right doesn't mean you should smack people and if it doesn't mean other people are going to think that you're right yeah just because you're right doesn't mean you're right

or what you said to actually does sound kind of cool. I feel like that should be the quote. I used to get into little debates, whatever, with my brother. I think I told this before, where, you know how he is. He's the kind of where. There's no, we understand getting in debates with your brother. Yeah, yeah, he's down for the cause, and he goes hard.

But anyway, so we'd get into these things, you know, sometimes against my will or whatever. And so finally I came to the conclusion that I said, hey, what you're saying is like right, is right. but what you're doing is wrong. Yeah. Like I see what you're saying. You're saying all the correct stuff. There's all true stuff. It's all factual and all this stuff.

But what you're doing right now is wrong. Like you can't like force people into debates. You can't like. So it's kind of the same concept essentially, you know, where it's like, yeah, this guy is taking the, he's doing the right thing. You know, he's right. He's doing the right thing. But what you're doing kind of right now in a big, and essentially in a bigger picture. It's just a bigger picture in play.

Yep. And look, there's a, there's things that are universally morally wrong. So there are things like that Well, almost universally morally wrong There's things that you can say That is not correct. That is not right. That should not happen. When he starts, he's getting into some of this stuff early on.

Look, you're right. Colonel Herbert, you're right. But you're not going to make this easy. And if you, and if you run around just slapping people from the high ground what you're doing is you're you're you have to get off the high ground to slap people you're coming down off the high ground to slap people and well we're going to see how this unfolds um fast forward a little bit uh within a few weeks i realized that

the desk sergeant had been worth listening to he had it pegged pound for pound the brigade was garbage discipline was lax the troops were slovenly disrespectful and sluggish mentally as well as physically it was obvious that in Anke, at least there were no match for either the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese regulars. As the sergeant said, they preferred pot, two to one. But marijuana was only an expression of deeper, more serious failure. At Anke, the troops wore what they damn well wanted to wear, including beads and bracelets. They capped their teeth with different colors, red, blue, and gold.

And they called the hierarchy motherfuckers and printed fuck the green machine on their jewellers. jackets and hats. Some of them wore earrings, a few sported nose rings, and the battle flag of the Confederacy flew for many of the bunkers. The sergeant was right about nobody giving a damn too. Almost everyone looked the other way. Anke was a staff in headquarters post crammed with chairborne commando types. In any other war, it would have been ridiculous, but not in Vietnam. Every careerist who could wheedle his way or was over there drawing combat pay while the citizens back home were getting bled for the bill. The troops knew best what to call it, a humbug.

The 173rd was the largest brigade in Vietnam, with over 10,000 men attached to it. It was, according to the manual, a combat brigade with absolutely no dead weight. But it was a humbug. There were five so-called combat battalions in the brigade, and not one of them had more than 600 physically present for duty. out of a total of 10,000 men, there were no more than 3,000 at the battalion level, which means that some 7,000 were assigned to support roles, steakhouses, pizza huts, clubs, headquarters, the generals mess, artillery, engineers, etc. Even among the approximately 3,000 at the combat battalion level,

not all were looking, not all were outlooking with their rifles. Some were, of course, but the battalions had their own rear areas, just like the brigade, with their own steakhouses and their own clubs. Each battalion was composed of five companies, one of them a makeshift outfit responsible for heavy weapons, which left four companies for walking. No company in the battalion of brigade had more than 75 men physically present and ready to go. Thus, each battalion fielded about 300 combat troopers, except that each battalion assigned one company to guard its base of operations each day.

That left a maximum of 225 men available for the field or 1,125 on the brigade basis. And that would have been on a good day with everybody out and everybody with a rifle. But everybody didn't carry a rifle. Some toaded radios. Some stayed back and typed. Some worked in company supply. Some were fireflies. The daily helicopter resupply lifts.

And some were just plane screwed off. So on an average day, the 173rd Airborne Brigade could feel a plurricular. field approximately 800 men. If all of its battalions were out, in the year I was in the brigade, all the battalions were never out simultaneously. We field less than 800 out of 10,000 troops in the brigade. On a countrywide basis, it meant that out of 500,000 men we had there, at the peak of our involvement, less than 50,000 were engaged in the business of fighting in the field. And that figure applies only if all the other outfits were doing as well as the 173rd, as General Westmoreland like to say the 173rd was the cream of the whole crop it wasn't that our kids

didn't fight well in the field it was just that so damn few of them ever got there we had a 500,000 man army fielding less than one infantry division in did in World War II or in Korea on paper we were hell on wheels the reports had a column for it in the field and on paper it was 98% or more every day I've filed those reports myself and they've filed those reports myself and look truly magnificent. All the guys at the steakhouse in the field. All the guys at the club in the field. The general's orderlies in the field. The lifeguards at Esther Williams swimming pool in the field. Stunning, absolutely stunning. And from time to time I found myself inclined to go along with it. It was so mesmerizing that when I later took over a battalion myself, I added

another column to my reporting procedure just to keep things straight. As in the grass. I called the new column. It was no joke. It was necessary. And ass in the grass means you're actually in the field. You can see this guy, he's going hard in the paint. And again, I'm reading from the book. I'm not, these, I don't, we're going to get to sort of some of the push back against this stuff.

But we have to, we have to take him for what he's saying. Well, we have to, let me rephrase it. We have to listen to what he's saying. He goes on here, I soon discovered that almost all the problems that, any level of the brigade were either the direct or indirect result of piss poor leadership. Being an IG, so he's got this attitude and he's the IG. Is he going to be making friends? What's your prediction?

Being an IG was an extremely educational experience. I was spending about 20 nights a month with ass in the grass troops, blending as well as I could, taking every opportunity afforded me to discuss tactics. I found that one of the best ways to get to know any particular outfit was to accompany its men on an ambush. Generally, they were a disgrace. So this is interesting. I guarantee, and I don't, you know, I don't use that word very often, he shows up as the IG. And what does he do?

He starts going in the field all the time with the troops. Because he's that kind of bro. You know, he's that kind of brother that's just like, oh, I'm in the army. We got troops. I'm going in the field. So that's what he starts doing. And as he's going out on patrol, well, this is what he finds. The fault was obvious.

poor leadership and more specific absentee leadership few of the ambush patrols I accompanied included a senior or non-commissioned officer the enlisted men had humped all day long and carried their load and then at night they were expected to stay awake and cut it again the next day they took their sleep where and when they could get it on patrol and for what most and for the most part the company commanders didn't know what the hell was going on or worse just didn't care it was their fault but the real culprits were at the higher level battalion commanders who wrote out the procedures almost verbatim from the Fort Benning operations and training handbook,

passed them down to their subordinates and let it go at that. They were covered. The procedures had no relationship to the realities of combat. And you've got to remember the colonel that originally told me about this book, this guy is the same kind of vein as Hackworth. He's coming at you. And he loves being a soldier and he loves his soldiers. but he's got no love he's got no love for the upper chain of command you can as you can see

field standards which apply to combat conditions are important and those were the criteria I applied as I walk through B companies area and then he's getting into like actually being out there a good soldier wears even the most ragged gear well even in the field he is trim neat and tight with pockets buttoned and no loose or hanging straps or webbing he does not wear sunglasses he keeps a clean face and clean weapon and clean ammunition, these kids didn't cut it. The reason I could only conclude was poor leadership. Leadership's the most important thing on the battlefield. Good or bad. It was strictly a matter of leadership.

He's talking about going on patrol with a couple different companies. Take the contrast I found between B Company and C Company. It was the same battalion, same area of operations with approximately the same number of troops and the same kind of mission. Yet while B Company was a mess, C Company was strapped, strategic, tough, and ready around the clock. They were airborne, man, all the way. One night I went along in a platoon-sized patrol commanded by a young lieutenant. It was like clockwork, like beautiful Swiss clockwork. We moved quietly, paused for a silent C-Rat meal and drifted off further into the brush to set up shop. Nobody

smoked. Nobody talked. Charlie Company and its Lieutenant Webster were hunters. And as I sat tight against a palm tree that night, I felt good about being out there with them. They had a purpose. Just before dawn, Webster received orders. This is such a good lesson. Just before. Before dawn, Webster received orders to drift back to base about 12 miles away. Helicopters were unavailable, he was told, so orders were to foot it back and bring along the Murmites, the thermal food containers that weighed about 30 pounds or where clumsy is held to carry. Webster stared at me in the early morning light.

It's stupid, he said. But it's an order, I replied, playing it straight. He looked at me steadily and then made up his mind. Yeah, he said. Well, fuck them. We're not carrying no goddamn cans back through the bush. He turned to his radio man. Passed a word to get rid of the garbage cans and all.

We're going to take a hike, so keep it light and don't leave anything for Charlie. The radio man turned to leave, and Webster stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. The first fucking noise, somebody gets it in the mouth, he warned, and then turned to me. I'll take the gig and the ass chewing. Webster had a real outfit because he was a real leader. He had a good reputation, and he earned an even larger one by the time we left. The captain in B Company and Webster and C Company both had the same raw material yet one was running a sloppy sad ass show that couldn't cut it The other was commanding a tough tight combat ready and combat able outfit

The difference was leadership So there you go that's a freaking classic case of you get told to do something stupid. What's the good leader do now? He could have had that argument Maybe said like hey you really want me to carry this stuff and That's just a big pain in the ass. And he says, you know what? There's a colonel here. Fuck it. We're not doing that.

That doesn't make sense. He says this. If a legitimate study is made of that war, most Americans will be stunned to learn that we killed a hell of a lot of our own people. Once again, a failure directly traceable to poor leadership. All it took was the sound of a booby trap or the sighting of movement, and we were prone to just open up to fire to the jungle and brush in every direction

without any idea of who might be on the right or left or behind. her head. We did it over and over again to ourselves. Here's an example he gives. Once again, we had killed one of our own. In this particular case, he had caused his own death, it was said. He was a young lieutenant out on his first patrol. According to the report, he had set up the ambush and then left its perimeter to establish security, which was completely asked backwards, but nevertheless, the way he had been trained by the U.S. Army. When I was in Ranger school at Fort Benning, I had seen the example set dozens of times without any criticism. Training, bullshit.

We had too many damn academics. We trained not only with blank ammunition, but with blank attitudes as well, using instructors who had gone through the same kind of blank training men who, in their wildest dreams, could not relate to a real combat patrol because it had never been part of their own experience. The Army claimed the instructors were combat veterans, and some no doubt were, but most had merely been in combat zones. Because of that kind of training, the young lieutenant was dead. The report detailed how he had gone out from the patrol's main body to position the outpost

people himself, just as he had been taught, and then headed back through the deep jungle and at night alone toward his main group. In the daylight, moving through brushes hard. At night, it's a formidable task. When his men heard movement to their rear, the report related, they called him on the radio. At least he had enough sense to take it along. So they got an ambush set up. He goes to set some security out.

Now he's walking back and the guys that are in the ambush hear noise. So they call him up and say, hey, you know, we hear noise behind us. And what does the lieutenant say? He says, cream him. And they did. He was dropped in his tracks. schooled, trained, ranger, airborne, and he had ordered his own execution. I tried to console myself by thinking that anybody so goddamn ignorant deserved to die, but it didn't work.

I knew he had been trained by guys like me, not me personally, but by senior personnel like me. It was our fault. I tried to imagine myself doing what he had done even several years earlier, and I couldn't. He was worse than untrained. He was badly trained. He had no business being out there in charge on his first patrol, and his battalion commander couldn't be held blameless either. It was sickening. We were the healthiest, wealthiest, supposedly best trained soldiers in the world.

Our army had the finest raw material of any country. We had the equipment and the experience to do better. We fought like a bunch of amateurs. I shoved my coffee aside and looked around the talk. There were white cloths and flowers. on the tables and paintings on the walls. It was ludicrous. I grabbed a chopper back to Ankeh,

and on the way constructed the rest of the night's pitiful drama. The dead lieutenant was from a little town in Pennsylvania, not far from where I had grown up. A telegram would soon arrive, and the middle-aged mother would collapse on the couch in the living room, while the father tried to console her through his own tears.

I imagined myself walking into the room and standing at the end of the couch, looking down on them and saying that I had killed their kid the vision passed and I was grateful that he wasn't one of my men and I wouldn't have to explain it even to myself We had much much too much whatever the reason was the nature of war the difference in the attitudes of the personnel the abundance was overwhelming The Red Cross for instance came up with 15,000 individual Christmas packages for the 10,000 men of the 173rd He's kind of going on a rant here about just what that giant logistical and rear echelon footprint was like Sergeant Wren, the motel. They have a motel. The motel manager told me and Booth that the tab for the brigade's entertainment ran close to $200,000 a month.

So there's all this stuff is going on. And look, he accounts for a lot of this stuff that he's investigating with the IG. There's stealing going on. There's fraud going on. There's rape going on. Sexual harassment, sexual assaults and murder and prisoner abuse. People going AWOL. There's all kinds of criminal behavior happening.

He goes into this one. The records of the steakhouse and pizza hut were equally shocking. Tons of meat were unaccounted for, along with thousands of prefixed pizzas and truckloads of liquor and beer. Three years later, Congress would be pulling the cover. off what would become known as the club scandals. It would involve generals at the very top and the very top sergeant of the whole army, Sergeant Major Woolridge, whom General Westmoreland himself had handpicked as the U.S. Army's first top kick.

Even then, the army would be trying to sweep it under the rug. It was in our brigade that the investigation which led to the scandal started. Our investigation launched at General Allen's request. The lines were being drawn and the IG shopping. was no longer sloughed off in dinner conversations. It had become a power and I had become for some of my comrades in arms the enemy. Fast forward a little bit. He's looking, remember he went there as the IG, but he's supposed to get a battalion

and become a battalion commander eventually. It would be the third battalion and I would get it in April. He said, this would necessitate an extension of my tour so I could get in my six month minimum of command time. But it would be worth the extension, he said. the present commander of the third battalion would have six months in by April, which was another anomaly of the Vietnam War. It mattered not that a commander was doing a great job or a crappy job. Six months was the magic number.

Officers got their tickets punched in six months and then got the hell out to some other assignment to work on another credit or get another coupon certified. General Westmoreland had said it a long time before when I was a major that the Russians were very envious of the way our officer corps was getting tremendous. combat experience in Vietnam and even then I knew it was bullshit it takes a commander a couple months to become acclimated to his responsibility a couple more to get going and then he's gone it was crazy besides we were losing in Vietnam a fact which the U.S. Army officers corps seemed not to want to recognize it would have been better to have fought the whole goddamn war with a hundred honest-to-god commanders than a thousand of the half-ass combat leader types we were producing.

Whatever gave the notion we could build a better mousetrap in six months, it was a pipe dream and what was worse was that the leaders, quote, the, the quote leaders we were grinding out would be not an asset but a detriment in a big war, should one come. Then they would be considered experts and the delusion would cost us plenty. So you go there, your battalion commander for six months, you get you get your, you, get, your box checked, and then you're out. And by the way, now all of a sudden, you were a battalion commander. So that means what you say is gold.

Another thing he's got to deal with. Fragging. Fragging, the deliberate attack on a non-com or an officer by an enlisted man or men was not unknown in the 173rd. One sergeant over in the signal section had made the mistake of raising hell with a trooper about the cleanliness of his area. The man wired a Claymore mine outside the sergeant's room, aimed it right through the wall, of the switch at the switchboard went to a phone and called his victim the sergeant lost both legs There was a fracking in second battalion two with seven wounded They tried to get Nicholson with explosives and on another occasion they tried to blow up his tactical operation center

One of the men in second battalion had reportedly blown himself to bits with a Claymore mine but my investigation Failed to corroborate this It had been in his hands so here's a guy with a Claymore mine and his mind and it his hands. That was certain, but there were two men in a nearby bunker handling the controls of the mine when it went off. The victim had left the bunker to retrieve the mine at the request of the other two, and somehow they said the circuit had been completed. I wasn't a real detective, but even though two company commanders swore it was accidental, I did sign my report with a recommendation that the criminal investigation division check into it. They never did.

Fourth Battalion had a genuine insurrection. Herb Matsuo, the executive, the battalion executive officer told me an old colonel living in an air-conditioned trailer to become sort of a father figure for the riffraff in the battalion. No kidding, Tony, Herb said. He's actually pulled all the freaks in around him and made a personal bodyguard outfit with weapons and all. And the old geezer is dumb enough to believe they're responding to him. The colonel called his men the mafioso. So they're going to cause serious trouble, Tony. They're the worst kind of people we have over here.

They're killers, and I'm not joking. You better get word to General Allen before it's too late. I think I might be kind of confused. So fragging is what? Fragging is a term where it's what it means is you got an officer or you got a senior enlisted person that you don't like and you kill them. Okay. So that's a thing.

There you go. There's two examples. they put it in movies in Platoon. You've seen Platoon, right? No. What? I know. Heresy.

I know. Are you serious? I am serious. I have never seen Platoon. Okay. Well, go assignment. Go watch Platoon. Yeah, okay.

So, okay, it's in movies. Yeah, there's a lot of things in movies. But it's seen, that seems really weird. Obviously, that doesn't happen nowadays. Well, you'd certainly hope not. I mean, I've never heard of a case of fragging now, but yes, in Vietnam, it absolutely, like, there you go. There's cases of it right there.

So imagine this. You are a young, 21-year-old, 19-year-old, 18-year-old person. You don't believe in this war. You don't like it. You don't want to die. And in comes, you know, Lieutenant Rambo. That's like, we're going to go out. We're going to take the fight to the enemy.

And you think you're going to get killed. Yeah. And he's going to charge you with being a coward or whatever. You're killing people. That's what's happening over there. So you're going out on a combat operation. You get into a firefight. Oh, young lieutenant happens to get shot.

Yeah. I guess on training day technically that's what he did or was trying to do. Where it's like, yeah, you know, we're going to see if this guy's going to play ball with us in our group. He doesn't. and then he sets them up to get killed. Yeah. That's a, well, yeah, that's a fragging. It tries to do anyway.

Yeah. It's a real thing. Dang, real thing. It's a real thing. There's another, he's doing an investigation of a company that got creamed, he said. So this company took massive casualties, and he's talking through it what had happened with, he's about to talk through with General Allen. It had been marijuana.

I took it back to Alan and he didn't like it one bit. The company had been creamed and there wasn't a single dead enemy. I suggested that we write it up as a lesson learned, one that even a nitwit trooper could understand. No one individual had been at fault. I reasoned it had been marijuana. And as bad as that was, it would serve as a valuable purpose. It would serve a valuable purpose as a combat lesson for the living.

Marijuana and guns don't mix. The general was staring. at me when I finished. You must be mad, I said. Sir, do you realize what you're asking, he said, walking over to his window for another glance at those goddamn flowers? This guy had flowers like planted outside of his window.

Can you imagine what you've just suggested? Those were American kids. Two captains and a hell of a lot of American kids are dead. He threw up his hands and discussed and sat down at his desk. And you want me to tell higher headquarters and their families that they were on dope. Not dope, sir. marijuana and we don't have to say that everyone was on it just point out that the reason

they had they had they had their asses creamed he stood up again i'll have to think about it for the time being just keep it to yourself understand i stood up i understand sir he sat back down again and i will consider it later i read about a company's fate in the stars and stripes and in our own brigade newspaper the sky soldier the two accounts were nearly identical the company had put up one hell of a fight, but it had been overrun by a numerically superior force at a substantial cost to the enemy. It was one more glorious chapter in the glorious history of the 173rd Eric Bourne Brigade. The official accounts of that night on the hill were a goddamn discredit to every mother's son

who fought worth a lick in Vietnam. The general no doubt believed it saved some face. I never mentioned it again. So, you know, you get like, this is mass coverups, right? And no lessons learned, by the way. So that lesson learned doesn't get passed on anybody. The story of A company's heroism and gallantry was published about the same day that Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Ross Franklin joined the brigade as a replacement as the deputy commander. Franklin had graduated from West Point in 1949, won a distinguished service cross in Korea.

His head was completely hairless. He shaved it. He looked like a badass combat commander. He was impressive, no doubt. And his teeth sparkled. They say he's a breath of fresh air, Abbott remarked. So here comes this guy Franklin. And I think he's the most decorated officer from his class at West Point.

This guy, Franklin. And that's from Korea. And so you'd think, you know, if you were a decorated, highly decorated veteran from Korea and I was a decorated, highly decorated veteran from Korea, there's a good chance that you and I could meet and be like, hey, bro right on right like we could just be you know have this kind of unified past right sure what else could happen to feel a little bit threatened some competition you could have some ego scenarios right we could have that competition between you and me and i think i'm a little bit braver than you my my medals are a little bit made of mat whatever yeah well unfortunately no it ain't it ain't

It ain't going to be browing out. Here we go. How about a briefing, he finally suggested. And don't pull any punches, Herbert. When I finished, he had one question. We're that bad, huh? We're worse, sir, but you'll see it for yourself. And it's not because of the caliber of the troops either.

We have the finest top sergeants I have ever known in the Army, and we have the healthiest, toughest privates you can find anywhere. But the worst general he said, not really, I said, Alan is okay. Then leadership, sir, I said. And then as he nodded, I related every last error I had seen in the brigade. When I finished, I attributed them all directly to lack of leadership. How do you mean that, Herbert? Franklin asked.

It was precisely what I wanted him to ask. The troops are ragged ass because they have no one to emulate that they respect. Men are dying because leaders don't care enough to lead. It isn't Allen in particular, although he's included. But the real problem is at a much lower level at the level of the battalions and the companies. If I followed regulations, I'd be recommending courts marshal for every last battalion commander I've seen in this brigade and I've seen them all. They write policy books, have their men initial them, and then try and correct any violations after they occur. Nobody leads by example. They command from 1,500 feet up in a chopper, and they wear a spit. shine boots like they're on parade while their men hump through the bush with their asses half out of their trousers everybody plans big but nobody sees to it but their that their plans are carried out our lieutenant colonels fight their battalions on paper as if they were chess pieces on a board he's that's herbert the office was definitely quiet until he spoke what do you recommend herbert well since you asked kick a couple battalion commanders in the ass get

them out of their birds and onto the ground. Make them spend a few nights out with their units and don't permit them the right to transfer the men they consider bad news. Forced them to get off their asses and lead. And then we'll have a brigade. That's exactly why I'm here, Herbert, he said. Sir, to lead, he said. That's why the brigade is getting a new general to lead. General Pierce is damn sick of Alan and his entire hodgepodge. He walked to the door. Things are about to change, Herbert, for the better. He stepped out into the darkness. I slipped the files back into the cabinet and sat down for a moment to think about it. Maybe he was going to make a difference I'm used.

Maybe as Abbott had told me, frankly, it would be a breath of fresh air. So off to a good start. We'll do a little bit of broying out. Then we have Brigadier General John W. Barnes took over the 173rd, thus making a complete change command that, as Abbott had said, was supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to that part of Vietnam. So then things start to go sideways. There's a little incident that goes down.

The next day I was summoned to LZ English by Franklin, the new deputy commander of the brigade. You're a no good disloyal son of a bitch, he said, for openers. What are you talking about? I asked. You insulted one of my battalion commanders. One of your battalion commanders, I repeated? Yes, God damn it. One of mine.

No sense in trying to lie out of it either because your ass is going to swing. I was dumbfounded until he finally explained that he had heard of. about the call from Northington to General Allen. And Northington said, you suggested that call, Franklin said. You did it without permission. What do you think I should have done? I asked, come to me. That's what, for what reason?

Because I'm the commander. That's why, he said. And all along I thought General Barnes was the new top man in the brigade. My eyes were wide, but I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice. I knew damn well I was treading on very thin ice. You, sir, are not my commander. The general is. You can tell.

That's just like a bad move. He exploded and the breath of fresh air was gone forever. I was, he said again, a no good son of a bitch and a disloyal liar. I had continued, he continued, tried to sink Angel and others in the brigade for my personal gain as the IG. General Barnes stepped out of his trailer and Franklin hailed him. General, do you know what this colonel of yours did, he said, shoving his finger into my chest? He illegally warned General Allen of an investigation we had talked about. So things are going sideways.

Yeah, and that it was sort of the real, like I didn't even cover the thing that he did because it was like it was almost nothing. I called Ed Northington who had been Allen's aide. It was now in his new job and asked him if he had heard about the investigation. Is it general in trouble? No. That's what he did. He like basically gave a heads up.

and but it was like a little bit outside the chain of command so uh general or sorry colonel franklin freaks out fast forward a little bit he is in hawaii with on leave with his wife mary grace mary grace finally asked him about vietnam a royal screw-up i said you're anti-war tony herbert no that's not what i mean i mean i'm just disgusted by what i've seen happening to the army I said she looked puzzled I had already told her about getting battalion command and though she knew it meant that I would be more vulnerable to injury or death than I was as an as an as an I as an I as she'd always taken my career she was proud she said but now she looked bewildered as I talked about some of the things I had seen this war is not only killing our

people it's ruining our army the whole damn show is run without leaders and we're losing really losing. We talked the rest of the afternoon and finally she asked about what would happen when my Vietnam tour was finished. Wait till you hear this. I said grinning. You're going to quit? She said throwing some sand my way. Right, Colonel Herbert? Wrong, Mrs. Herbert. I've got orders for the command and general staff college at Leavenworth. Oh, Tony, that's great. And after that, I'm going to try and finish my doctorate. Maybe then I can really contribute something to the Army. Fast forward a little bit. I kissed Mary Grayson, lay back in bed staring out at the ocean through the glass doors at the end of our room. I thought about them all night and about the

years that had passed and the things that had happened to all of us. Now it was 1968 and I was 38 years old. I had a wife and daughter and I had killed one hell of a lot of people and watched a lot more suffer and cry and die and now Ma was gone and pa and sister Irene. You are what you are you dumb-ass Lithuanian. I thought that night as the moon illuminated the far end of the room. You are what you are. and what you always wanted to be. A soldier gets back to Vietnam. And I'm just going through so much of this book. Like, I'm just skipping so much.

There's so much detail in here about all these different things that he's dealing with, these relationships that he has with Colonel Franklin and General Barnes and how these things are just going sideways. And he gets to this one point. Take a look. Take a look at this and please read it all before you come. comment, Ray said, handing me a file folder. The investigation had been handled by Major Henry Boyer, the executive officer of 2nd Battalion. I flipped the cover sheet and

turned to the first page. A three inch by five inch color photograph stared at me. It was a picture of a Vietnamese male lying on his back in what appeared to be a shell crater. His face had been blown away. In guilt beneath the picture was engraved, Peace on Earth from the peacemakers, C Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade, or something to that effect. I glanced at Ray. C Company of Second Battalion, he said. I turned the page and read it through. Well, he said, I put it down on his desk.

It's a cover-up. You're damn right, it's a cover-up. And little old Paul here is not going to be caught in the middle. You know what Franklin wants? He asked without waiting for me to answer. Franklin wants it swept under the rug. There are exactly 50 cards out like that, and he wants them gathered and covered.

And what if that's not possible? Well, then I guess we just have to put the burden on Christ. He said, referring to Captain Christ, the company officer of C Company. So like, it's just big cover-ups going on. Make this go away. No one, everyone's worried about their career.

All right. Through all, through all this chaos, and he's been the IG at the 173rd. And you don't think he's going to get a battalion because he's kind of created these bad relationships, but he ends up getting tasks, getting awarded, getting tasked, getting charged with taking over Second Battalion. So he's going to be working for the guy that has hated him as the IG.

As I walked back to my sack that night, I decided to use the next 24 hours as prep time. I wanted to work out the Second Battalion in my mind. I laid down and began. In the States, you might be able to go in and take your time with changes, but not in Vietnam. In the States, you could look around for a bit and maybe take a couple weeks before actually making a change,

but in Vietnam it was a different story. Take your time in Vietnam and men died or lost legs or arms or eyes. So I had already been looking. And thanks to my opportunities as an IG and Kotra's help, I knew about as much as anybody could know about the 2nd Battalion. And it all boiled down to one primary conclusion. Like the entire brigade, the 2nd Battalion was fat in every area except combat. The solution was to trim.

And he goes on about how he's going to get rid of people or move people into more combat roles because there's all these people that are not doing combat. Fast forward a little bit. I didn't like the way Nicholson had handled the men who were on the way home. Frequently, they would come back to the rear as much as 30 days before they were scheduled to depart. That was a bunch of crap. I had learned my lesson in Korea. Rotation had been established and tigers became pussies.

So what he's talking about there? And we covered that in the last podcast. In World War II, when you went on deployment for the war, you went on deployment for the war. You were going to get to go home when the war was over. And Korea is when they started, hey, you're going to deploy for a year. You're going to deploy for a year and then you get to go home. Well, what does that do? Well, according to him, it turns tigers into pussies.

They had hung back and played it safe until we wised up and came up with a new policy. He who fought up front went home up front. I didn't have the authority to establish that policy in Vietnam, but I did have the authority to decide who came back to the rear and when. I could make sure that a man kept his ass in the grass until seven days before his departure date, and I was determined that the battalion would start rewarding achievement rather than failure.

Under Nicholson, the last battalion commander, if a guy wrapped a sergeant in the mouth or if he refused to fight, he came back to the rear, sat on his arm, ass waiting, drinking, seeing shows, smoking pot, and screwing everything that wiggled downtown until he was court-martialed or given an article 15, at which point he would pay a small fine for his vacation of several weeks or months. Then he went back to his unit and did it again. But not with me. Every mother's son was going to hump it and carry his share of the load, just like the few already out there. There were other, so that's that's the, uh, that's the, uh,

secondary consequences that you've got to think about or unintended consequences that you got to think about. Hey, if Echo Charles, you know, punches his platoon sergeant, well, we're going to send him back to the rear. And what's he going to do at the rear? Get drunk, you know, smoke pot, get a vacation, have to pay a small amount of money. Then you come back right out and do it again because you don't want to fight. We're actually giving you what you want. Yeah, it's kind of like the kid, the teenager, right, with the video here. He is like, he gets punished and sent to his room, but then, In his room is like video games and magazines and, you know, all this stuff.

His phone, internet, yeah, all this stuff. So he'll go, you know, when things get tough in real life, you know, go mow the lawn, I don't know, whatever. He'll act up and get sent to his room. Yeah. Yeah. That's why the punishment, the modern day punishment with kids, with teenagers is phone. Yep. Take away your phone.

Yeah. It's brutal. My kids, like, if I say that to my kids are like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Squares them away quick. You ever seen Ozark? I have not seen it. Okay, so it's like, anyway, I don't go too deep into it, but basically they're put over simplifying it. They're running from the drug cartels.

So they're trying to leave. They're trying to disappear. And so it's like two kids. One is 12. One is like, I don't know, 16, 17, the girl. And then the two parents. So the parents are like, hey, we got to go. we're changing our identities and all this stuff.

So here, give me your phone. The girl just starts flipping out. And it's kind of one of those things where, yeah, man, like some, especially kids, well, it depends on who you are, but a lot of times kids are so attached to that phone. Oh, yeah. Like, it's such a big deal. It's the social thing. Like, you know, when I was a kid, you know, you would get grounded, right?

Which meant you couldn't see your friends. Yeah. You couldn't see your girlfriend. You couldn't see your bros. Like, you were grounded. Well, nowadays, like you said, you can send it to the room, but you're still going to hang out with your friends because you're going to be on Snapchat, right?

That's what's going to be happening. Yeah. So sending them to a room doesn't really, it's not really grounding them. The way you ground them is you've got to get that device. Get that phone. Get that phone. There are so many kids that are mad at me right now for putting out this word.

Hey, what's Article 15? It's, if I'm your commander and you do something wrong, then you can be punished under the uniform code of military justice, the UCMJ. Article 15. Article 15 means that I can dock your pay, I can reduce your rank, I can apply punishment to you. Now, you have to opt. You can say you can accept the UCMJ or you can say,

I want a court martial, in which case you're going to get a lawyer, and you're going to get a jury and all that kind of stuff. So Article 15 is going to be lesser. It's a little bit of a gamble sometimes, depending on, you know, what you did. Because you could say, you know, if I'm your boss and you did something wrong, people might be telling you, just, dude, just take Article 15.

And, you know, Jocco's pretty lenient. You know, he's pretty, or people might be like, you don't want to do UCMJ. You don't want to go Article 15 with Jocko. He crazy. He's gonna throw my buck at you So it's kind of like what Like a

I guess not like a plea bargain then Because you know Not like a plea bargain It's just accepting your fate Gotcha With what your boss is gonna Your boss has the The authority

Article 15 UCMJ to say Okay echo Charles He stole a piece of gear From the platoon We're kicking him out of the platoon Well he's gonna go to UCMJ So you go to you go to Me

I'm your boss and I say okay you stole gear we're taking your trident you have to pay back the money I'm busting you down and rank and you're going to go to the brig for 30 days there you go now you could let's say you didn't you thought you didn't steal it and you you won't want to make a case you could say I request court martial in which case now we go to cart marshal now you get a lawyer that says he said he was just borrowing that gear right and everyone knows that that you're lying so that's the kind of similarity to going to trial kind of you know how guys like No, I'll take the plea. I'll go to trial.

So in that case it is. Except for you don't necessarily know what the bargain is. Right. So it's not like a plea bargain. It's almost like a blind plea. It's a little bit of blind. Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of blind.

But it sort of is a little bit of like, hey, look, I know I kind of did this. I'm throwing myself at the mercy of the court. Yeah. Hey, boss. I screwed up. I'm sorry. Hit me. Yeah, like pleading guilty essentially in a minor kind of way.

Because, you know, you're kind of, it's up to the judge. I was like, okay, you're putting it. You're throwing yourself, kind of that, kind of throwing yourself at the mercy of the court. So what is, forgive me, by the way, I'm deviating. What are you, and I've heard this, I hear you guys say this all the time, taking your Trident. What does that mean? You're not a Navy seal anymore? Yeah.

Just straight up. You can't get it back. You can't go through the whole deal. Yep. Yep. It's kind of everything, right? Not kind of. That's everything.

But you're still in the Navy, though. You can still be in the Navy. But that's not your jam if you're a seal typically. It's not your jam. I remember there was a guy that stole a pair of sunglasses. From who? From like another person guy. Yep.

They had his, they had a captain's mask the next day for a little article 15, took his bird, he was gone. Like that. I was, I was a pretty new guy. Because if you were a thief in the teams. Oh, yeah. It's brutal. Yeah. You are going to get crushed.

Yeah. Like you will get, there's, there's, you can leave anything out in the seal teams. You can leave a freaking diamond, uh, uh, encrusted knife. Yeah. And no one will touch it in the teams. You don't, we don't steal anything in the teams. Yeah. And that makes sense.

I mean, especially like, especially when you're like a cohesive or supposed to be cohesive team, you know? Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. You're going to steal something. Yeah. That's like nuts.

Unheard of. And he still serves his sunglasses, too. I mean, dang. I know. Especially when you get issued sunglasses. Hey, supply guy, I need new sunglasses. And I don't even know what all the circumstances were behind it. Because let's face it, we all have Oakley's back.

Yeah. We're all wearing the same sunglasses. So I don't know if a dude had some engraving on there or scratched his name into it, whatever. But man, this guy was gone. And that makes even less sense when you think about it. Because it's not like you're not going to wear them. What are you going to do? Just steal them and put them in your.

your house under your pillow or something like this you're gonna be wearing them around who knows maybe there was other things that I didn't know about I was a new guy I didn't know anything they're just like hey don't steal shit I'm like cool got it look it's like we're not stealing in the seal teams it freaking pissed me off on time when we oh one of my first shipboard deployment and a guy stole I had my gear out and a guy stole a knife yeah they wasn't from my platoon but just somebody on the ship maybe it was a Marine maybe was a Navy guy I I don't know.

Oh, they didn't find him. No, we never found him. But same thing. Like, what's this guy going to do? He's going to hide that knife and then take it home and put it under his pillow. Like, he's not going to be able to use it because we'll see him. Yeah. And then we'll throw him off the ship.

Yeah, man. Yeah, and that makes sense. You even hear about a guy stealing from someone else on the team. It's like, bro, yeah, no one's messing with that guy anymore. Bro, we had a guy's name. I forget his name. He stole a video game systems, like a super name. Nintendo or something like that from one of the guys in the dorms who was on the football team both of them

And they were like it was weird because yeah my friend His name's Davey he's the one who got it stolen from him He was like looking around for his like you know you're just confused It's not like something gonna steal your whole video get out of your dorm room and he lives in the same dorm too So it's like what do you set it up four doors down? That's what I'm saying so it was just gone So he was confused and then after what's like no someone stole this you know so they You know, they went through the thing and they were like dusting for Prince, which was like, you know, that doesn't matter because everyone comes in and out of the dorm. So it just doesn't, didn't even matter.

But I think Davey was suspicious of this guy. I don't know if he became suspicious or he was already suspicious. So he was sauce. He was sus. And he went to his room and just was like, you know what? I'm going to get to the bottom of this thing. And he was like, no, what are you talking about? All mad or whatever.

It became his big thing. And then he looked and in the dorms, there's these beds. Right. The beds are like, and you can like take, there's like a drawer under the bed and all this stuff, right? You know, everything got to fit. Got to fit in the door. So he pulled out the drawer of the bed and like took, you know, you can take out the drawer. Uh-huh.

So he unhooked it and like took it out and boom, there it was. Davy did that? Davy did that to, yeah, the guys. It was a call out essentially, but you know, when you call somebody out, you better get the stuff because you're going to look dumb. He must have been super suspect then. Yeah. He was like, because that's weird too. Imagine accusing someone, right?

Yeah. But also you can kind of tell. Well, yeah. Looking at someone, you can tell. Yeah, and consider. You can smell it. You can smell the freaking lies. Yeah, and usually, but and consider even, I mean, I'm sure it's like this in the military too, where you kind of consider who could or had the opportunity or whatever.

And if they did, what would they have done? It's like, oh, he could easily. Well, I wasn't Freddie at freaking practice the other day. I come home and when my shit's gone. Exactly, right, yeah. So I think there was that kind of going on as well. And then he had some circumstantial evidence. Then he read his face and probably.

So they arrest him straight up. Everyone was like, oh, my God, I can't believe this even happened. Like, why would you do that? It just wasn't computing for a lot of us. And boom, they arrested him. He was in jail. So this guy, oh, I remember his name. I don't want to call him out.

It's too mean. But he, so he calls the coach. Like, you know, when you're in college, let's face it, like you get it. into some sort of thing. You say, hey, coach, I'm in this thing. Like, what can we do to sort of, you know, work it out? So he calls the coach.

And he's like, hey, this is what happened. I'm in jail. I think you need to get bail out because he didn't live in Hawaii. He was from the mainland. So it's like, you know, it's hard. He's like, anyway, he calls the coach. And the coach, you know, he hears the story and he goes, rod in there.

That's what I like to hear. I can say, Dave. That's what I like to hear. Don't like thieves. No. Don't be stealing. Don't steal. Otherwise, you're going to get UCMJ, Article 15.

All right. Going back to the book here, there were other things running through my mind that night. Tactics, for instance. The infantry maxim was just a slogan, and I wanted it to be in practice. Find them, fix them, fight them, and finish them. But it simply wasn't being used. I wanted to change that. Find them.

Use reconnaissance and intelligence. The reconnaissance platoons being used as a special ambush unit rather than for reconnaissance. The battalion had to have eyes and ears. Its area of operations was bordered on the east by the South China Sea and on the west by a string of mountains running north and south. From those ridges a trooper with binoculars could see in most cases all the way to the sea, but it wasn't being used. Fix them. Fire and maneuver. One pins them down with fire while the other runs up around the rocks and comes in from the

flanker from the behind. Fire and maneuver have always been the key to infantry success. But in Vietnam, we were just calling in artillery and backing off to wait. The next day, we would go in and pick up the pieces, and generally there weren't any except for the women and kids who hadn't had the sense to make it out of the area. Fight them. Close with and destroy the enemy, the military enemy. Kill them or capture them, but emphasize prisoners because they give information that leads

to more prisoners. Dead men are just dead men. Capture them if possible, but if not, finish them off for good. I lay there in my sack that night, trying to put it all together in my mind. Where I had been and what I had done and how I got to where I was at that very moment in time and space. I was alive, I decided, because of two things. Shear luck and not forgetting. I attributed it to nothing else, but I knew that the presence of mind had a great deal to do with one's fortunes.

I also knew there were some things beyond anybody's control. They just happened regardless of planning or preparation or skill or courage or cowardice. I went to sleep thinking about all that. The next day, I poured over my battalion plans again. And when I hit the sack, the next night, I knew I was ready as I'd ever been. I slept well. So I'm going to jump through some of this stuff right now. This is where he starts.

He takes over the battalion. He starts squaring things away. He starts going on operations He's still having It's not an overnight process It's not like the battalion Oh, there's a new commander Like we're good to go now

Everything's perfect It's not like that And as he's starting to dig into the He's going on some ops He's starting to dig in to try and find out How to get the Get the platoons moving in the right direction He's got

He sits down to talk to one of One of these lieutenants He's talking this Lieutenant and the lieutenant kind of eat this lieutenant doesn't want to go in the field doesn't want to go in the field And he's trying to figure out why and the lieutenant says you know not with this particular leader And he says why not? And he's kind of doesn't want to say anything. He's finally says tell me and he and then he says he opened up he had been a platoon leader and his group had policed up a detainee From a village that had reported the details to a CEO over the company net the Paltuna began to tie up the the detainee for extraction, when the CO called back, the lieutenant told me.

The CEO said, what they had out there was a KIA, a dead dink, a body count of one, to which the lieutenant replied that he did not have a dead person but a detainee in reasonably good health. So he says, no, what we have is a dead dink killed trying to get away. The lieutenant continued. So what did you say? I asked. Well, I told him the guy might be a civilian. And what did he say?

He said that wasn't hardly possible because once he's dead, he's a dink, which in fact was about the only way it was played in Vietnam, regardless of what a person might have been before he was killed afterwards, he was a dink. Very damn few people ever reported killing a civilian regardless of how unavoidable the death might have been. And very damn few dead civilians failed to be included in body counts. It was time to stop the lieutenant, though, before his narrowly. went beyond the point of no return. I held up my hand. Do you understand? Did that make sense?

Because I know I jumped into the story. So basically, this young lieutenant is there. They have a detainee that they've captured. And he calls his company commander and says, hey, company commander, I got a captured individual. I got a detainee. You know, what do you want me to do? And the commanding officer calls back and says,

you don't have a detainee, you have a killed in action. And, you know, the term dink, obviously. this is a slur and but it doesn't just mean it means enemy that's what they're saying if you kill someone they're enemy wait so is he implying that you should he should kill him yep yeah and he's about that's what he's he's about to get to that part and and colonel herbert says hold on yeah and he he says hold it i cautioned him sir look before you get too far there are some other questions but first you have to realize that if you say what i think you may be going to say I'm going to have to report it.

Therefore, it's only fair, in fact, by the regulations, in fact, it's required by regulations and the UCMJ that I make you aware of your rights. Do you understand? Yes, sir. Well, then let me ask you this. Do you understand your rights under Article 31? Yes, sir, I do. Well, let me go over them again for you anyways.

You don't have to say anything. Anything that you say can be used in court. You can stop right now or you can continue or you can have a military counsel right here while you do talk if you wish. And that's it in a nutshell. Now, do you want to go on? Since I've gone this far, for Christ's sake, Lieutenant, at least think before you answer my next question, okay?

Okay. Was the execution in fact carried out? Yes, sir, it was. Now, Lieutenant, here comes the big one, and let me state again that you neither have to answer nor are you expected to answer just because I'm your commander. If it's going to incriminate you, I want you to understand that part for sure.

Do you? Yes, sir, I do. All right then. Who actually did the killing? He started to answer and then stopped abruptly. Sir, I prefer not to answer that one right now if it's okay with you. That's your prerogative. You keep this to yourself until I get back to you. Do you want to put it in writing? I think I'd better do that. Good, he said. I said handing him a pad. Bring it back when you finished and forget about going out with C Company right now. It can wait. Obviously, bad situation. He starts to run it up the chain of command. Who does that include Franklin? What does Franklin say? What the hell kind of commander are you? He asked, it's none of your business.

What occurred before you assumed command? I'll back it up with an investigation. I said, there'll be no investigation, says Franklin. It's required, sir. I, God damn it, Herbert, I'll handle it. I said I'll handle it and I will. If anything is done, it will be done with the, the general's approval and it will be done by me.

Can you understand that much? I understand, sir. Do you want a statement from Major Boyer? I want nothing until I'm ready, which means I don't want anyone discussing it either. So while he's dealing with all this and while he's continuing to create friction, and again, there's so much of this,

and there's so much in this book, so many good lessons. Here's a lesson. He's talking about planning and how he plan. Because he's still leading troops. They're still doing all kinds of. of operations. He says this to his troops. I want you all to come up with the plans and recommendations I told them and I meant it. Hell, I didn't profess to be an expert in anything. And by the way,

if you're a leader, just write this whole thing down. I didn't profess to be an expert in anything. I was the dumb son of a fine coal miner and I could use all the help I could get. If anybody came up with a brainstorm, I damn sure wanted to hear about it. And that includes suggestions for a commander raid on Hanoi from Doc Talley, I concluded. I really wanted to listen to them, because if a man makes a contribution to a plan, he has a material interest in making it succeed. So the trick is to forget about taking credit for ideas

and to persuade others that they are their own. Take notes. I talk about that very thing all the time. He also says, I thought out everything and tried not to waste words or time. Frequently may have appeared to have been spur of the moment response, but it was generally prepared. Even though they were volunteers, as all paratroopers are,

the grunts were by nature different. They were not career men in the same sense that officers and most of the senior NCOs were career men, and they were not sensitive to opportunities for promotion or self-aggrandizement. But because individuals are aggressive and competitive, By nature the grunts did require an opportunity to express those instincts or in a word a chance to operate I knew the grunt hell I was one of them a promoted grunt to be sure but still a grunt I'd been an enlisted man over half my entire career

I had fought as one and been wounded as one and I understood what made a grunt tick because I knew what made me tick I'd also been fortunate enough to gather enough psychological insight to comprehend them and myself even more deeply and thoroughly at the same time gaining enough military experience to recognize that they were the best raw material in the world. They were bigger and healthier and more intelligent and better educated than any soldier the U.S. Army had ever had the opportunity to use before, and they were superior to any soldier any other country was getting.

Even with our training shortcomings, and there were, by God, plentiful, the grunts in Vietnam were still the best trained men around, as well as the best fed and best to Moreover, I think I recognized something that must have slipped by most of the brass, including Westmoreland and later Abrams, that the length of the hair on a man's head wasn't nearly as important as the caliber of the brain inside. I knew that the grunt was a man just like me, and that he was entitled to the same respect I myself demanded. His dignity was sacred.

It could never be changed. The commander could scream and rant and rage and curse like a sailor, but he could never encroach on the trooper's dignity. If the leader attacks his trooper's dignity, the trooper has but two alternatives to fold up, roll over, and die or strike back. I was determined to follow the pattern that had worked for me in the past, to allow my men to make at least as many of the same kind of mistakes as I had made, and God knows I had made my share and more, to deal with them honestly, to express admiration, respect, love, patriotism, and my own conviction that he represented with all my faults, with all its faults, the greatest country in the history of civilization, and the mightiest combat arm this universe ever assembled under a single power,

to persuade him that had not really been equipment and mass production that won World War I, World War II, and Korea for us, but rather blood, guts, courage, know-how, and a steadfast devotion to a cause. Respect to your people. I laid out the strategy for my battalion. It was some lousy war when a piddling battalion commander had to lay out a master strategy,

but that's the way it was. Hell, nobody else laid out anything for these men, either from a national or an international perspective. I owed it to them to give them some kind of purpose and a reason at the battalion level at least. Got to know why you're doing what you're doing. And he's saying, even hearing that fast forward a little bit in fact the whole damn u.s army in vietnam was crazy

the generals westmoreland abrams peers rosson dupu richardson ewell ramsie and the rest were all working on the premise that they were the best and that whatever problems we were having were the fault of the commanders at lower levels not my fault bullshit bullshit the major leadership problem in Vietnam was the generals and the rest of the senior officer corps the colonels the lieutenant colonels and the majors the captains lieutenants enlisted men weren't to blame the generals were has beens or never bends from world war to vintage who had paper images built up by the public information people so again you know we're we're we're reading this book and really he's placing the blame on everybody else, which is not good, but he's telling what it looks like from his perspective.

He says about those generals, they walked and talked like leaders and wore ribbons and uniforms, so it was only reasonable that back in Washington they were regarded as leaders and were listened to. If you were in the military, you must be a great leader. Right? We still have that. Anybody that was in the military must be a great leader. It's like, I wish it was true. It's not always true, unfortunately.

again he wasn't just talking this guy's not just a talker this guy's not when he's talking smack about these other leaders he's not just talking smack and saying oh they're not leading he's leading he's actually leading there's all kinds of stories in here here's one i crossed the yard they're out on a mission i crossed the yard to the bunker and nailed myself up against its outer edge chew hoy i shouted using the name of the program we had set up for leniency in return for immediate unresisting surrender. Chewoy! As always, there was no response. I waited, then stepped back and fired two quick rounds into the sandbags around the doorway.

Then stepping back against the wall, I lifted a grenade from my belt. The old woman on the porch screamed, and there was one hell of a scuffling inside the bunker. They tripped all over each other, coming out hands first. Chewoy, chew hoy, chew hoy, me, chew hoy, chew hoy, they were shouting. I figured you were. I mumbled to myself. There were three of them. Two in khakis and the wounded guy stripped down to his shorts.

I nudged them toward warden. Keep them covered, I said. I'll get the bunker. I'll get it, Sir Schmidt, he said, trotting across toward me. God damn it. Keep that group covered. I shouted. I'll get the damned bunker.

We all get paid by the same people. I don't think it was bravado. It was just that I had learned years before that if you wanted to be followed, then you had to get your house out and lead by setting the example. If I expected other people to go down inside bunkers and holes after the enemy, then I had better be ready to do it myself. This time it was my turn. I kept my rifle in front. Someone shouted, grenade, and the others hit the dirt. I dropped the one knee holding my head down low in front of my shoulders.

I saw the guy break out of the bush out of the bush with another grenade in his hands. I squeezed twice on the trigger and watched the rounds slam into his chest, driving him up against one of the palms, bouncing him off into the bushes. Two of our men had been hit by the explosion. I didn't remember even hearing the grenade detonate, except vaguely perhaps. That's how unimportant grenades were, for me at least. I'd seen them all over the world, and it'd used them, and it had them used against me over and over. I did not respect them as a weapon. They were charges.

They blew up and out. Lay one at arm's length, stay down flat, and the worst you would do was give you a concussion. Run, and you got some shrapnel in your ass. watch him I said and turn to Luray that grenade came from the building You take that side and I'll take this one I turned the muzzle of the M16 West and followed it around the building I heard Leray fire just then a grenade exploded and I got the building just in time to see Leray kicking away The reeds and dragging the body from between the false walls the guy had been wedged into a section about the size of a bird cage

Leray nudged the bloody the bloody body with his foot a loser sir he said said quietly, gently with that same catching his voice that you hear in the movies just before tears, a goddamn loser dink. He rolled it over gently. The guy had been a real trooper, and he had tried to do just as he had been told, just as so many of our kids had been told and would have tried had they been in his place. Uncle Ho would never even know the poor bastard was dead, nor did he've given a shit if he had known.

Like those on our side, he was just another statistic. We left him there in the dirt. We started back down the trail at a trot. An outright run was out of the question because more than likely if you broke out of the bush running, you were a dead ass. Even at our speed, it was more than a few seconds before we reached a large grassy clearing.

The American lieutenant, the advisor, was on my left as we entered the clearing and the rest of were standing around in no particular formation. Across the clearing, I saw one man, a Vietnamese, holding the young girl's hair with his left hand bending her head back bearing her throat his right arm was around her neck and a knife in his right hand was dug deeply into her flesh beneath and to the left of her esophagus all he had to do was pull and she was gone one of the children was hanging on to her pajamas screaming and the other child's face was being steadily squashed into the sand by the foot of another Vietnamese soldier. The child was suffocating. I shoved the American lieutenant out of the way and shouted something,

staring at the guy with the knife in the girl's throat. He was staring at me too. And these Vietnamese, these are South Vietnamese soldiers, and the first person that he pushed out of the way was an American advisor. So he comes on this scene in this, in this clearing. And there's an American lieutenant, he pushes that guy out of the way, these Vietnamese soldiers that the American lieutenant was an advisor to, all this is happening.

So these are South Vietnamese soldiers. With the young girls? Yep, holding the knife to this young girl's throat. So this is an ally. So this Vietnamese soldiers staring at Herbert with a knife to the girl's throat, back to the book, with great ease, he pulled the blade across. Her blood spurted and gushed down the front of her pajamas, and she dropped to the darkening sand, pulling the child with her. It took no more than a second from the instant he moved the knife until she crumpled in a lifeless heap.

Her baby still screaming, still pawing at her legs. Her killer jumped back into the group of Vietnamese, pulling with him the guy who'd been suffocating the child. I should have shot them on the spot while I could still identify them. The rest of the detainees were lined up against the bushes. Four of the men were already dead lying off in the grass to my right with their heads blown away a Vietnamese soldier was parading up and down in front of the survivors waving a pistol I noticed that one of the four dead men was the stud we had captured in the hut I felt myself go empty something drained from me in that moment that you that I have yet to replace you dumb son of a bitch I scream grabbing the American lieutenant by the by his shirt in that instant I was only a flick a a a flick away from killing him it passed I calmed and turned him loose just what the hell did you let happen here lieutenant

He was only an advisor. He said there they were only doing a job They knew their business guerrillas weren't protected under the Geneva accords they were following orders Oh God I thought a big badass American who had never killed anyone in combat or captured a single prisoner legitimately had played hell with these poor devils big badass all-Americans American boy. God, I was frustrated. I raised my hand to slap him clear across the area. I lowered it. You get all your scrap together and then get the hell out of here. I screamed at him. Sir, I have a job. I glanced down at the four dead men and over to the woman's body. Not anymore. You don't, Lieutenant. He was staring at me with what seemed to be disbelief. I moved as near to him as possible without touching. Now get your people out of here. Out of here, I said quietly and calmly.

You're finished here. The rest of this, like the charge of you. will take care back at base. So he witnesses this, this atrocity and gets back to base, runs it up the chain of command. Tells it to Franklin, Franklin, he tells Franklin what happens. Franklin finally asked what had happened, and I told him every last story detail right down to the blood leaping from the girl's throat. Herbert, you're a goddamn liar, he said.

I shared him I wasn't lying. There are other witnesses, sir. Then you're exaggerating, he said. Did the American, did the lieutenant take part? Yes, sir. He was in charge. He had assumed responsibility from Sergeant Warden. But did you see him do any killing?

No, sir, I didn't. Then you're a goddamn liar. There were no U.S. personnel involved, he said. God damn it, Herbert. You're always coming in with these wild-assed exaggerated stories trying to make trouble. What the hell is wrong with you? You're getting carried away. Maybe you're getting too old a day or two.

So they start going through, and what's really interesting about this book is they have like the actual documents from this guy warden. I Sergeant First Class warden during the period of 14 February. That's Valentine's Day, 1969, was a platoon sergeant. So he explains what he saw happen. And you can get this book and read those documents. Then this happens.

a day or two after the St. Valentine's Day massacre, which we just read about, a black trooper named White refused to go into the field and offered his refusal loud and clear out in the battalion street where he could be heard by one and all. You're going out, White, just like everybody else, I told him. Like hell I am, you son of a bitch, I ain't fighting for no whitties. Right, White. You're going to fight for your country or for your dollars or for anything else you can think of but by God you're going like hell I am he said taking off his glasses and slamming

them against the ground they were unbroken he stepped on them and ground them into tiny pieces now you bastard he said I ain't going because I can't see I shrugged and laughed at him so I'll have you put on a listening post guys with bad eyes always do better at night you dumb son of a bitch he laughed you don't understand you send me out there and I'll desert no you won't white because out there baby ain't back here. You leave the guys out there and you're on your own. I tapped him on the chest.

But listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. You go AWOL out there and make it back here and I'll give you a bronze star. And even if you don't, I'll see to it that you get a purple heart. Out there, when you're on your own, you're anybody's and everybody's meat. If VC or NVA don't get you,

the locals will. You are money and they're all bounty hunters. I'll cut out as soon as I can, get back then no you won't because you either straighten out here you either straighten out there or when the company returns you'll be transferred to a unit that replaces them he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out another pair of glasses he was swaggering away he's swaggering away toward the helicopter big guy big bad guy you'll get yours baby the best i could do is hope that the best i could hope for would be that he would do a good job it was his only chance if he didn't cut it

he was going back out with the next unit just as I had promised. It was the only way. Reward the right response and do everything you can to get it. Most of the time it worked. With white, it didn't. So just to kind of debrief that, we heard earlier about his policies. He doesn't want to punish people for acting badly.

So if this guy with his old battalion commander acted this way, he'd get, okay, you're in trouble. you need you know you go stay in the barracks and you're going to go to you know UCMJ and whatever but he's not going to go fight which is what he actually wanted so his deal is not only are you going to go fight but if you don't do a good job when this when this platoon gets back from this mission you're going out with the next platoon until you do a freaking good job he performed poorly in the field just as he vowed he would and I had him held at the gate when his unit came back.

I had asked Childers, which is his senior NCO, to get the very best trooper he could find to guard White until the replacement unit he was going to join came out, someone who wouldn't scare. And he came up with PFC Schnelling. Don't take any crap from him, I told Schnelling, and watch out. The unit coming out will pick him up.

That was it. Except that Schnelling drilled him through the head and killed him right outside the gate. White had some words, and Schnelling had paid no attention. White had made a threat and then gone for his rifle. He got it to his shoulder before Schnelling squeezed the trigger, and the MP at the gate had seen and heard it all, thank God. It was that cut and dry.

Schnelling had done his job. I brought in the criminal investigation division people. They questioned everyone, took statements, and that was it, except that later in the day I had Schnelling into the office. A crowd of White's friends gathered outside chanting, we want Schnelling, we want Schnelling, he killed a brother, he killed a brother, we want Schnelling, we want Schnelling.

Freaking nasty. And this is like horrible. So again, just to make sure everyone's tracking, he puts, the guy comes back, White comes back, hadn't done a good job. So he's got him standing by for the next platoon that's going to go out. While he's standing by, Herbert puts a guy to guard him, this guy named Schnelling.

Schnelling's out there guarding him. White makes a move. Schnelling kills him. Luckily, there's a witness, which is the MP who had seen and heard it all. So now they're in the office of Herbert and there's a crowd out front of White's friends saying, we want Schnelling, we want Schnelling. He killed a brother. He killed a brother.

And here's what Herbert does. I reached over and picked up my M-16. Look, Schnelling, you are now a spec for. So he promotes him and says not because you killed a man, but because you didn't fail to do it when it was your job. Now, about that out there, that's up to you. I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd walk out there and end it right now. I'd pick out the biggest mouth out there and walk up and explain the facts.

Tell them that you just made corporal. And if they don't clear out, you might take it into your mind to try for sergeant. I jacked around into the M16 chamber. I'll cover you from up here. And if anyone so much as raises a weapon, I'll drop him. That's the least I can do. I shrugged. He stepped through the door and walked over to the group.

I could not hear what he said, but they dispersed, and I never heard White's name again. Which is sad, too, that a man could die and snap, just fade out of people's minds and disappear. Gnarly. Want to talk about some leadership challenges? That's, like, insane, right? Oh, yeah.

That's insane. Yeah, I mean, Does this kind of stuff still happen like now? No. Yeah, it just seems so almost like Wild West-ish. Oh, yeah. That's that section right there, like that's an insane. The whole thing is freaking crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that is crazy. I mean, like there's so many elements too, you know, where it's like, all right. You, you know, you have a friend, he gets straight up just killed, but, you know, and it's like, it's hard. it's one of those deals where you kind of got to take sides a little bit or whatever, right? If you're in that mix or whatever. So your guy, your friend, your brother gets killed by another guy.

So it's like, all right, we got to seek vengeance. This is obviously out of line. Obviously not part of this. You know, we're all in the same team. Where are you going to kill this guy? No matter what happened, it's kind of like you didn't have to kill him. It's easy to be like you didn't have to kill him or whatever. So, yeah, of course, so they want vengeance.

They want justice. They want like all this stuff or whatever. And they kind of have a point in a way. Especially if they don't know the whole thing, they kind of have a point. Yeah. Well, you're also, let's face it, there's a huge assumption that the lone MP is just of the big witness, right? This one, I mean, what if Schnelling's friends with the MP? He says, hey, I got this issue with this guy.

Or, hey, we just had beef and I shot this guy. You got me? And he's like, yeah, I got you. I saw what happened. He shouldered his weapon. Right. One guy. One is one guy.

It's, it's, that's what makes. It's such a freaking nightmare. And then, okay, and then it gets worse. So where, you know, he's like, hey, this is what you should do. This is what I would do. It's crazy. Go out there, let him know. And the thing is, bro, that's not going to, I mean, of course, it worked, right?

But we don't even know what he said. We don't know. In the moment before he went out, bro, that's not going to work. Brother, these guys, like, they want to kill me. I already, you know, I already killed. They're got, like, we're at war right now where there's a war within the war going on right now. Here's what, here's the only thing that makes me think, well, how it turned out, you think, well, I wonder if his friends were kind of like, look, we know White and White

was kind of like, maybe he, you know, maybe they knew what type of person he was. And they knew that he was close to the ragged edge or whatever. Yeah. But God, I don't even know what to say about this. Like, it's just a freaking nightmare. This whole book is freaking crazy. Like, when you Look at what we just read. You got this freaking soldier killing another soldier. You got the woman getting her throat slash. There's four other people executed. It's madness.

It's madness. Under what circumstances do you slid a girl's throat? Because obviously the girl's not military, nothing like this. Yeah. I mean, you know, oh, she's a VC sympathizer. That's, you know, probably what their claim was. Yeah. Yeah, I guess.

I will give you no circumstances if that's what you're looking for. Well, I shouldn't say that. You know, you could obviously be in some kind of a hand-to-hand combat scenario where you've got a enemy fighter that happens to be female. Could happen. With her baby. Okay, yeah. I mean, there's, okay. In this scenario, it makes no sense whatsoever.

In this scenario, Herbert's saying, look, that's a freaking war crime. That's what he's saying. That's what's weird too like Herbert He's you know Like on the Like he's a what I say earlier He's like straight-laced guy right He's like a straight-laced guy

And so when he sees stuff like that It's unacceptable to him And that's what's about the About the guy white getting killed He's not the car Herbert's not the kind Remember in Korean War They go hey burn down this village

He's like I'm not going to do it They bring that up And that's kind of why I focused on some of that stuff when we did the last podcast, you know, he had had this, he mentioned that they had the first black replacement showing up. And he was like, we didn't, you know, we don't, the troops didn't care.

If you did a good job, we're good. He talked about the fact that he was raised by that doctor that was like, hey, all these people in the world, they're people like you. They're out there hunting, trying to feed their families. So he's seems like he's this kind of straight-laced, for lack of a better word, good person. Man, I'd like to sit down with this dude. He's not alive anymore.

But I know you haven't seen the movie Platoon. You should watch it. It shows a lot of chaos and mayhem. But all these things that you read, all the books you read about Vietnam and all the movies that you see about Vietnam, Like it's all wrapped up in this in these scenarios that are just freaking insane I mean one of your soldiers kills one of your other soldiers After you say hey you you got to go out it's like nuts And then you're thinking well look then you're thinking is it worth it like hey I this guy white

I could have just said all right fine you're not going out right fine you go I'll put you on KP duty you can go peel potatoes you know what I mean? I And then what happens to the battalion? Then other people are like, well, I don't want to go out either. Yep. So now what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of could be viewed as like, yeah, man, that's like, that's how it needs to be almost.

Yeah. It could be. This is why you've got to be very careful about painting yourself into a corner. Yeah. Right? You got to be very careful about painting yourself into a corner in life, especially from a leadership position. If you paint yourself into a corner, you're painting it in that corner. There's no moving.

There's no moving. So for me, as I look at this, like, okay, I got a guy that doesn't want to go out. What can I get from him? What can I do with him? How can I talk to him? And again, we don't know any of the history of the guy. We don't know how bad of a soldier he was. We know his behavior was.

I mean, obviously, he's calling his commander like a son of a bitch and all this stuff. So he's not, you can tell he's not down for the cause. Not down, no. Right? So why is that? How do we build a relationship with that guy? and there's some guys that are totally overboard, right? They're gone.

Like you're not going to get him back. Was he there? And if he's there, why are you actually having him out on patrol? But if everything to you is kind of black and white, you're sort of like, hey, this is what everyone, this is what you're going to do. And you have no, you paint yourself in that corner and you have no way out of it. Going back to the book, I should never have had any problems in Vietnam because it was an infantry war, infantry and helicopters. with a different quality of commanders, the helicopters could have played a very important role

in commanding control. The unfortunate fact was that the commanders kept their butts glued in the seats in the birds. I don't think I can overemphasize the weaknesses inherent in this. From 1,500 feet up, war was simply a lot of little guys in green running here and there shooting up the landscape. The bird men, he's talking about the commander's fast word a little bit.

The bird men may have been commanding. anders in the technical sense of the word, but they weren't leaders and the grunts knew it. Down there was their world. It was a ground war, an infantry exercise, and as infantry, we could have won it. Man for man, we were better, and we could have won it with less than half the people we had there. All we had to do was get rid of the wasted headquarters, chaff, get rid of the PXs and the steakhouses and the clubs and the massage parlors and the pools and the pizza houses and the commissaries and get down to fighting an infantry war we had the training and we had the men who

could have done the job the problem was not only a lack of command leadership but a lack of distinct mission we didn't have one before I got there we didn't have one while I was there and we never had one after I left but an army requires a mission it desperately needs to some direction towards a specific goal it was all charts and graphs for us with machine technicians like the West Point engineers running the show I don't think we have to be conditioned to kill we need no training to destroy we'll built for that killing comes easy establish no rules and leave a vacuum and one what you end up with are me lie and Kuloy the absence of policy and mission was a policy in

itself need to need to know what the freaking mission is by the way in war freaking absolutely i guess well in your normal life yes absolutely in your business in your job yes and you know what the freaking mission is fast forward as we continued to score every night franklin began to increase his visits to the field finally he made it a point to be on hand personally to personally count the bodies and I found myself as his constant escort guiding him from one dead man to the next and standing by while he snapped photos. It was another syndrome. The guys that didn't kill anybody were the ones who broke their asses to get a picture. What the hell? It would probably have been the same way with Indian scalps if we had cameras back then. So Franklin is out there kind of coming

out there and he goes through a bunch of this stuff. There's a guy named Grimshaw and we're going to hear his name later. One of his company commander, Grimshaw said a dead VC is a dead VC and a dead NVA is a dead NVA and a dead VCI is a dead VCI Except of course when killed by the second battalion Then they're only dead if Franklin touches the touches his toe to them and they better be wearing a uniform and have a weapon What the hell was I trying to do Franklin asked I had to be an ass to move to right rifle companies that distance in the dark Why they might have opened up on each other if either of them had become discharges And besides, he said it was one big waste.

We could have taken them all in a court and search and saved all the inconvenience. So meanwhile, while all this stuff is happening, the brigade is keeping battalion scores. They're keeping scores to figure out who's the best battalion. Who's the best battalion? Who's the best battalion? They keep track of a bunch of different things. Enemy killed an action body count. enemy prisoners of war, enemy contacts, enemy weapons captured,

number of AWOLs. So who's absent, how many people you got absent without lead? How many article 15s have you done? Meaning how many times have you punished somebody? How many delinquencies have you had? How many malaria cases do you have? How many reenlistments do you have? How many special courts do you have?

And then they take all these different numbers and they put them into like one final number. So here's how. the numbers shake out basically they shake out that second battalion so Herbert's battalion is winning in all categories it's not even close for enemy killed in action it's uh the other battalions are 14 429 and 36 second battalion has 84 so more than twice as much as the next battalion for enemy captured listen to these numbers eight zero zero and three how many does the second battalion have

90 for enemy contacts it's 34 27 37 60 and second battalion has 66 for enemy weapons captured it's 15 11 3 and 17 second battalion has 57 so there's not even it's almost like it's not even close for absent wisdom without leave so this is this should you want the low number here it's 14 24 26 and 24 and 24 and what is second battalion have eight they only have eight people that have gone AWOL. For Article 15s, the numbers are 39, 56, 57, and 52. What does Second Battalion have? 24. For delinquency reports, 17, 9, 11, 10, Second Battalion has five. Malaria, they're all the same. Reenlistments, listen to this, reenlistments, the numbers are zero, zero, 40, and zero. No one wants to freaking stay in. What does Second Battalion?

Italian have 53. So the total score and they have whatever they have this way of making all this into one number. Second battalion for this particular month, this is February 1969, has 420 points during the lead. And then the other ones are 180, 145, 70 and 20. I mean, just combat ineffective, right? And they're and by the way, this is, so they're getting graded by Franklin and and Barnes getting graded and they're crushing second battalion under Herbert is absolutely crushing everything but the hits just keep on coming there's some military intelligence interrogation rooms that are on their little base and Herbert pays a visit I walked into one of the rooms and back and knocked lightly on the door one night who's there Herbert just a moment sir

someone answered and second later the door swung inward. Sergeant Carmody greeted me. Come in, sir. I squeezed past him and closed the door behind me. Inside, in addition to Carmody, where Captain Bowers, a Vietnamese man, and one of the honeies the wild cats had captured in the morning. She was seated to my left in a chair against the wall,

just off the corner. Carmody was standing to her right, my left, and the Vietnamese man was sitting just off my right foot, facing the girl in the chair, their knees only a couple inches apart. Captain Bowers was just behind the Vietnamese man sitting in a chair and leaning over the Viet's shoulder the girl was moaning and trembling Find anything out? I asked turning to Carmody She claimed she was out picking water bug sir

He said and laughed what patrol where was it headed? What about what about the patrol where was it headed? Carmody turned to her and asked something in Vietnamese she shook her head He hit her with the back of his hand raking it down along her face you're a fucking liar, he shouted. Blood began to rush into the long abrasion on her cheek. It began to happen in a rush. I turned to Bowers thinking he would say something. Carmody said something in Vietnamese. Bowers nodded to the Vietnamese man in front of him and touched his shoulder with his hand. The girl screamed. I glanced down and saw for the first time that there were wires from her body to a telephone between the Viet's knees. He was cranking it.

I grabbed the wires and yanked damn near lifting the Viet up with them before the wires separated from the phone. It clattered to the floor. Are you crazy bowers? I yelled. So just so you understand these telephone machines that you can power them by cranking them. This is an old school like telephone. And so that's where they have these. They're basically electro-shock, electrocuting her.

Are you crazy bowers? I yelled. Sir, what the hell kind of crap are you pulling here? I go get O'Cain. Sir, Major O'Kane says, I don't give a damn what he says. You go get him, I said. I turned to comedy and knocked this off until this thing is settled. Bowers left in Carmody, the Viette, and I followed him out of the hall, leaving the girl alone in the little room.

In a moment, Bowers return. Major O'Kane isn't here, he said, where the hell is he? He's gone down to Brigade, sir. And behind him, through the open doorway, I saw the Major getting into a Jeep. I left to and walked down to Franklin's office where, not surprisingly, O'Kane was still deep in conversation with the deputy commander. Franklin sigled to me to hold up until he was finished. When O'Kane left, Franklin called me in and immediately began screaming. We were right back where he left off.

You son of a bitch, he ran it, you dirty rotten son of a bitch, how many times have I warned you to stay the hell away from, am I or have your tap cut off? It seemed like the time for accuracy. Four times, sir, I said. Did you understand? Yes, sir, but I understand torture too. I don't give a shit about that. I, sir, God damn it, Herbert, don't you sir me?

I gave you a director or did you understand it? Yes, sir, but they were torturing a Vietnamese. Did you personally see them torturing this girl? At least he knew it had been a girl. Yes, sir. They U.S. soldiers? No, sir, this Vietnamese. God damn it, Herbert, how many times must I explain the rules of land warfare to you?

Over here, what the Vietnamese do is none of our damn business. But, sir, the guy was cranking this phone generator while Bowers was, who was cranking the generator? This interpreter, I guess. And was he Vietnamese? Yes, sir, but and was Bowers cranking? No, sir, but then God damn it, that's the end of it. O'Kane said, that's all there is to know. He lifted his hand and shook his finger.

One more goddamn interference, Herbert, and you're all washed up at M.I. Understand? No, sir, I don't. Carmody was, did you see Carmody crank the phone? No, sir. Did you see any U.S. crank that phone? No, sir. Then what's your bitch?

It was the first time I had to really compose a sentence. For one thing, I told him. It was a violation of U.S. Army directives as well as Geneva. and the rules of line warfare. And for another I finished, it just is an army. Oh, you son of a bitch, he said, you're so goddamn righteous. You never did anything like that, right? No, sir, I haven't.

He slapped the girl in and you never have, huh, Herbert? Is that correct? That is correct, sir. I, but you saw a Carmody slapper, huh? Yes, sir, I did. And so all at once, you're the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Is that correct, Herbert? No, sir, I know, sir, I know, sir, I know, sir.

I tell you what you are, Herbert. You're a disloyal and you're maybe getting kind of old. You just can't stomach it anymore. What the hell is the matter with you? Look, he said with relative benevolence in his voice, let me explain. These are the enemy. Even you must be able to understand that, right? These are the guys who killed your buddies.

Whom did she kill, sir? God damn it. I'm talking about the enemy in general. He said raising his hand. Let me put it this way. They're VC. I decided there was no sense in carrying out this farce any further. And we were supposed to be soldiers.

And we are supposed to be soldiers, sir, American soldiers. I want to make a charge. I'd like to charge? Charge my ass. You've already made a charge. And now it's an investigation. And I'll take care of that. Not you.

You just be able to back your mouth with sworn verified testimony. Sure, I said, sir, anytime. Yeah. So, again, it's very strange. Not very strange. but you can see this guy he seems to be trying to do the right thing, but man, he's making some enemies. I guess a big part of is me trying my best to look at it from all or more than just Herbert's perspective.

And you kind of got to admit when you think about it where, you know, when like, okay, when you're in a complex situation and you have like a goal, and then you have all these rules sometimes those rules do get kind of looked over some of them on a smaller level, right? And sometimes it can be more efficient. Meanwhile, you got this guy

who's kind of by the book and most people are, most people, I'm pretty, I almost want to say everybody's not going to be by the book 100% of the time. Okay. In one way or another. Yep.

And you get a group of people and they're carrying out a goal, whatever. Yeah. And it's working and it's working out. Okay, well, that's an assumption. Yeah. Because it doesn't, because let's face it.

If we just look at how well the battalions are doing, his battalion's doing the best and he's kind of flying the righteous path. Yeah, yeah, fully. And yeah, this particular story aside I'm saying in general. Okay. And then you get whether it be a new guy or just somebody there who's always like, how should they, not in micromanaging. but like nitpicking on certain things

and it kind of jams up your whole approach to what you're doing. Sure, it could be better or not or whatever. But it becomes kind of a nuisance, you know? Well, okay. I mean, I see what you're saying. But let's remember that this guy is witnessing murders, tortures, sexual assaults, which I didn't really cover,

rapes, which I didn't really cover, but they're in here. He's seeing all kinds of horrible, shit this isn't somebody this isn't all these people are kind of bending the rules to get the job done this ain't that yeah fully and that's what I'm so and that's what I mean so and that's what I mean just what you said like people bending the rules to get the job done kind of a thing right we we understand that yes and he understands it right remember the guy that got told hey bring back the mermites on your patrol and and and the guy says this is stupid and Herbert says well it's an

order and he says fuck them remember that part he's down with bending the rules if the rules don't make sense right yeah fully and uh and yes that is true and we got a good bird's eye view of the whole deal for sure but the guy this guy that he's talking to who's right yeah Franklin from his perspective he might be looking at it as hey we're bending the rules to get the job done he might be genuinely feeling that he might be he might be now what you have to fall back on is you have to you have to fall back and this is a tough one you have to fall back not only on what is the right thing to do but you also have to bounce that off of what is legal oh yeah okay so for the young leaders out there especially military leaders but this applies to

anything this applies to business because look there's things there's things you do in business where oh there's the right thing to do and then there's the wrong thing to do and then there's the legal thing to do. That's true. Yeah, criminal. And then, yeah, there's the criminal thing to do. So when you're doing something, hey, listen, I can explain this, you know, the, the, the CNN test.

Have you ever heard of this before? Look, if I can go on CNN and say, hey, this is why I made this decision and you don't feel shame because of what you did, that's definitely part of the test. The other thing you've got to remember is what is legal? because if you let, and this is something you can tell your employees or your troops, you got to remember about what's legal. Because someone that should steer, because look, if you're, let's say you're in a platoon, you're out on a target and you find somebody that's killed Americans, right?

They freaking kill, they have the bodies. And you catch them. with the bodies and with the freaking bloody knife. There's almost no one that would say, oh, okay, I don't feel like killing those bad guys. Right. There's a guy with a bloody knife. You see them killing Americans.

To say, hey, do the right thing. A lot of people are like, I don't know what the right thing to do is. We kill that guy. We execute him. You have to remember that that is not legal. You are not allowed to do that. So you have to get your people to understand that, regardless of how you feel,

it's not just a CNN test because that kind of passed the CNN test. Hey, I showed up. This guy had killed a bunch of Americans and we freaking, I shot him. And you can, that's the way it is. And I feel no shame because of it. You pass the CNN test, guess what?

You can still go to, you can still go to jail. It's legally wrong. So as a leader, what you have to do is you have to sort of merge all these ideas into one final thought. And you have to. to take the fact that, hey, what, this is not legal to do this. This is not legal to do this. Now, there's other, we could come up with scenarios where doing the legal thing still isn't the right thing.

And it's actually wrong. It's wrong to do that. And sometimes you may have to break that rule. But what we're talking about here is they're doing things that are not legal. Yeah. So regardless of how you feel, you're doing something that is not legal. on a very, in a very big way, these aren't minor charges. These are war crimes scenarios, which, right?

This isn't like, hey, we bent the rules. We left some freaking mermaids out in the field. Right. Which is pretty easy to argue, right? Hey, listen, my guys were already tired. If we're going to carry these things, it was going to bog us down. We had a better chance of getting ambushed. It was going to be a problem.

I left them. Okay. Got it. That's not war crimes. Yeah, fully. So there's a difference. Yeah. Yeah.

There comes a point where it gets like you just can't defend certain things. You know, and most, yeah, especially when you're talking about like, you got to remember, though, it's not even just that you can't defend him because if I roll up and I find an ISIS fighter that killed three people, you can defend that all day. You can defend. Oh, yeah, I saw him, and I shot him. He killed three Americans. I saw him doing it.

Yeah. You can defend that all day long, but it's not legal. So now you've got to deal with the ramifications, whatever those are. Yeah, yeah. You ever seen the movie Cobra? No. Come on. Sylvester Salon.

Cobra. I have not seen it. Dang. All right. I'll watch Platoon. You watch Cobra. No. Not deal.

So there's a part in the beginning where this psycho guy takes over the supermarket or whatever, right? And Cobra is kind of one of these guys. He uses excessive force, you know? Kind of like demolition men. Same actor, by the way. Sevesta Salon. Either way. So Cobra ends up killing this guy.

Right. And then the press comes, not CNN, but the press comes. And they're trying to interview. Cobra. And they're like, he's like, hey, did you have to kill him? You know, did you have to die? Or did you, you know, he has a right to live and all this stuff or whatever. And he's like, yeah, he's, you know, did you use excessive force and all this?

He's like, yeah, he used everything I have. And he's like, hey, you know, like people are protected, you know, are entitled to protection by the law or whatever. And he says, so he grabs the reporter and unraps or he uncovers like one of of the bodies, right? And he's like, you tell that to his family, huh? He passed the CNN test, is what I'm saying. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

I think it was legal, too, though, technically. It depends on the situation. It was like borderline, so, yeah. I don't want to go into the movie what happened, you know, to get Cobra off the hook or nothing like that. But nonetheless, that's the CNN test, is you'm saying? Yeah. No, that, so the CNN test is, but it's not a,

it's not a unilateral test. That just because it passes the CNN test, it's okay. That's what I'm trying to explain to young leaders. It's not just the CNN test. It's the CNN test plus it's the legal test. Is what you're doing legal or is it illegal? And if it's illegal, there are going to be repercussions, even if you pass the CNN test.

So as a leader, you've got to pay attention to those things. And what you have to do is keep your troops out of trouble. It's incumbent upon you to keep your troops out of trouble. Because they might be reacting emotionally. And you're the one that's supposed to rein them in and make sure that they're not getting, not doing things that are illegal. And I'm not saying those things aren't deserved.

You know, you find somebody that just killed three Americans that ISIS member deserves to die. We get it. Not legal. Yeah. Not allowed. So where did these guys in? And my original point was like Franklin, maybe to him it was he was quote unquote, like I said, maybe bending a few rules or turning a blind eye to just small, minor things.

And the means kind of justified the end scenario. And yeah, I agree. I think that's true. Right. But remember, we're sledding a girl's throat. Yeah, yeah. We have to leaders have to lead their troops to make sure that they are not just doing the right thing. that they're not just passing the CNN test,

but they're also doing what's legal. Otherwise, there's going to be repercussions. That's just the way it is. That's the reality. Back to the book. When I remember the folly of it all now, I rationalize a bit and tell myself that there wasn't enough time to be fully sensitive

to the finality of death. For instance, to say that it had not been a very important day because the second battalion had but two NVA kills now seems ludicrous. It was a damn important. important day for those two dead men. When even just one man died or got his fingers blown off or his legs shattered or his hearing impaired or his eyes bloodied and blinded, it was one hell of a costly battle, especially if you happen to be the guy who got it that day. It's something

generals and presidents can never understand, only mothers, fathers, brothers, sons, daughters, and wives. Maybe if I were a general or a president who never went to war with his men or who never risk paying the same price, maybe I'd want to convert the whole damn show into a statistical table to be read solemnly by some broadcaster every Thursday night. Generals and presidents are fine for explaining to all of us those things that we ought to be willing to die for, but when the war is over, all that's left are statistics, and the generals and the presidents are always among the living. If anything has happened to our country as a result of the Vietnam War, it is that our national infection with the sickness of the numbers game.

We reduced the blood and the suffering and the death and destruction to mere ciphers. And in doing so, we reduced our own souls. Numbers don't die. People do. Columns of figures don't disintegrate in the explosion of a bomb. human beings do. Statistics don't bleed. And if you make your war a war of numbers,

you will have no trouble sleeping. Most generals and presidents slept well. So this stuff is continuing on and another mind-boggling plot twist. On April 2, 1969, Barnes gave me a letter of commendation from General Connors, who had replied, General Pears as the commander of the first field force victor. He also handed me a letter from Peers which had come all the way from the states. Peers was quite complimentary and Barnes added that

the second battalion was the best in the brigade and that I was the best battalion commander he had personally ever known. So that's Franklin's boss. Then he handed me his own letter of commendation, the score sheet for the brigade, which again listed the second battalion as the top. Battalion and the official IG report which listed the second battalion as the tops in the brigade He also assured me that I would very soon begin reaping the awards Rewards for my efforts as he called them He said the distinguished service cross was being prepared and the general already had a verbal assurance It would be approved

He's getting some love I went back to the battalion and sat down with warm iceless bourbon my god what was happening two months of nothing but crap and now all this in one day maybe things really were going to be different maybe the brigade was going to shape up with less than two and a half months ago sweetness and light were in the air and there were signs that everything was going to be okay but something else nod at me i had reported eight atrocities or war crimes or whatever the hell they wanted to call them the abuse of the detainees at on k the three torture incidents, the murders, the looting, the alleged murder of a young lieutenant,

and the alleged execution of the detainee in the custody of the hero lieutenant. If I could get those things cleared up, I'd really be up to date. And I knew I'd better get my statements down soon or I'd have to get them in writing from back in the States, taking time out of the command in General Staff College at Leavenworth. And I didn't expect to have that kind of time. So, yeah, this all comes really clear right now. I went down on the morning of April 3rd, so the next day to talk to Franklin about them. Sir, I jokingly said when I entered, your best battalion commander of yesterday would

like to have a talk with you today, okay? Sure, Herbert, come in, he said, have a seat. I sat down where he indicated. It was the only chair in the room. What's on your mind? The eight allegations, sir, the atrocities I reported. I want atrocities he interrupted. What the hell are you talking about?

Atrocities. Eight, sir. And I took them off one by one, counting them on my fingers as I went. Sir, I'm going home in less than two weeks. And most of the other witnesses have already gone. I'd like to get my part wound up now while I still have time and things are going kind of slow. God damn it, Tony, he said. The investigations are ongoing.

What more can I do? The next morning, when I reported, Barnes was behind his desk and Franklin was in the chair to his right. It was quick. Colonel Herbert, the general said, I'm going to replace you as the commander of second battalion. I felt the blood drained from my head. Replace, sir, you mean relieve?

Not relieve, Tony. Replace. I'm giving you a maximum efficiency report and sending you to Saigon. It hit me like a ton of rocks. Is it over the allegations I've made, sir? Franklin leaped to his feet screaming. That's right, you son of a bitch. you and your goddamn lies about Beecham and Crouch and all the rest, that poor lieutenant,

and every other one of your damn lies and exaggerations. So, clearly they were buttering him up. Hey, you've done great. You're our best battalion. We'll give you a maximum efficiency report like you're the best guy. How about you just freaking keep the old mouth shut about these allegations? And then when he brings them up again, they realize, he's going to stick to his guns.

I felt cold and empty, then a wave of relief swept over me. And calm said, and I stared at Franklin as though he were an insect. And I tried to speak as deliberately and as coolly as I could. I'm not talking to you, sir. I'm trying to speak to my commander, General Barnes. It stopped Franklin's ranting, and he gave me the chance to turn back to Barnes. Sir, the very least you owe me is a complete investigation to see who really is telling the lies and exaggerating. The general had his head down over his desk, scribbling on a piece of note paper.

Colonel Franklin has already investigated all your charges, and I'm satisfied, he said, reaching out and handing me the note. You'll be out on the landing zone in one hour. There are two planes leaving for Saigon today. You be on one of them. Your records will be ready for you in Saigon or Anke when you get there. You report to Colonel Lou Ashley in Saigon. It's on the note. Sir, I said, I have a battalion. I've signed for over a million dollars worth of material and equipment.

I just can't clear out in an hour. Franklin broke in. One hour, Herbert. One hour, you'll be picked up under arrest and taken out by the provost marshal. One hour, Barnes said again, I saluted. Don't do me any favors with the efficiency report. I intend to see you all again. So even though they said we're going to let you out of here with a good evaluation, he's saying don't even. This dude does not play, bro. As I walked back to the battalion, I told myself it was important to remain calm, cool, and collected. I knew I had them both, just as long as I didn't blow it. They had gone far beyond their authority in removing me without any grounds for relief. I was convinced by then that it had to be something

more than any allegations of atrocities. Hell, everybody knew about them anyways. Somebody else would be bringing them up again and soon. If they thought that by getting rid of me, they were also getting rid of the shame of what it occurred, that they had got it under the rug. They neither understood me nor the Army. At that point, I still had faith in the system. I walked over to the talk. Ernie had most of the officers gathered in the briefing room.

He had already told them. Look, I began. There's no time to screw around. You know I've been given the boot. That's why I wanted to talk to you all right away. I've only got about 15 minutes more before I have to get out of here. but I wanted to take some time to thank you and get the chance to shake as many of your hands

as I could before I have to go. There were some protests and a few remarks about quitting. I stifled that quickly. The Army has a system of military justice and rules and regs, so none of you needs to go off half-cocked and try and take things into your own hands. Nobody quits either. Just keep thinking about the battalion.

That's what's important, not me. If you quit, you're letting down not only me, but every last one of those grunts out here. They have to stay. They can't quit. You can, but many of them need you. And the guy who replaces me is going to need you. It's not going to be his fault what happened to me.

So stick with the battalion and stick with him and stick with them, I said, waving toward the boonies. I started shaking hands. In the landing zone area, men all along the ground were lined up, pulling off smoke canisters of every color in the rainbow. There were maybe 100 men out there and 100 smokes. It was their honors, smoke. When the troops were coming back after a kill, they buzzed the field with a smoke on each skid. And when one of their own left, they lit one to five,

depending on how well he was liked, plus his reputation as a fighter. And I was looking down on at least a hundred of them, knowing all the time that nobody was that good, but choked up with appreciation nevertheless. I waved and they waved back. the pilot banked the ship again and I sat against the wall rigging and wiped my eyes we landed in sagon a bit before nine o'clock that evening and although I shouldn't have been feeling like a

bastard on father's day I didn't although I should have been feeling like a bastard on father's day I didn't I was relieved in more ways than one I suppose I reasoned that if Barnes and Franklin had hated me that much I was better off out of the outfit I had the marbles in my pocket they had nothing to fall back on but their own lies and falsifications. I knew I had been lucky. I could have had accidental kills of women and children or other non-combatants and they would have had me had the marbles in their pockets. I could have ranked second or third on the IG inspection. I could have had a high court martial rate or accident rate or a large number of Article 15s or delinquency reports from the military police or any one of a number of other things that could have

been used against me. But I've been lucky. Frankly, I'm used. I have. I had. had let Franklin, I mused, had let his personal dislike for me get the best of him. It had forced him into a premature confrontation that I was bound to win. I was bound to win. Well, it was not that clear cut. It was not that clear cut at all. And the book goes on and it goes into a lot of detail. and there are all kinds of further accusations and counter accusations.

And they end up making sworn statements against Herbert, including him, leading the killing of civilians. So they start making accusations against him. And this is, and again, these documents are in this book. That's one of the things that makes this book so good is it's got all this actual documentation here. They recommend revoking his orders. They recommend removing his opportunity to lead or be in command again. General Russ, who's the overall decision maker on the case, agrees with the accusatory statements, kills Colonel Herbert's career. So the idea that he

was bound to win? No, actually doesn't work out that way. Colonel Herbert fights it. He fights this. Spends a bunch of his own money. And then he goes on the offense. Because he wanted investigations before. Now he goes on the offense. Charges, brings charges up against Colonel Franklin. 14 separate specifications, including failure to report murders and torture. He does the same thing to General Barnes, failure to report war crimes on multiple occasions.

So he's going on the offense. It gets national publicity. It's in the news. The lead investigator for the army, this guy by the name of Major Carl Hensley, according to the book, and I hate to say that. I'm just, because I don't know what the truth is.

According to the book, this guy, Major Carl Hensley had told Herbert, like, look, we believe you, you're right. We can win this thing. And then he kills himself. Kills himself with a shotgun. You can look that one up. It's in a New York Times press briefing major Carl Hensley, suicide.

Ends up, all the charges are eventually dropped against both Barnes and Franklin. Colonel Franklin eventually relieved from his command for throwing a Vietnamese body out of a helicopter in Vietnam. And again, this guy was the most decorated from what I could. finding research most decorated officer from his West Point class, 1950. 1991, by the way, Colonel Franklin convicted and spent five years in prison for a securities scheme, scam. Swindle to about 100 people out of millions of dollars. So there's like a, you know, you see these questionable characters, characteristics. So all the charges, so imagine this, all the charges against Barnes and Franklin get

dropped. But Herbert is not charged with making a single false statement. So all these things that he had said, he never gets charged for making a false statement, but the charges get dropped. He goes kind of public, does a bunch of interviews. Eventually, he's retired, or he retires. You know, he's done with the Army. He gets, eventually he gets interviewed on 60 minutes by Mike Wallace. And this is freaking crazy. So they have, and I've tried to find this, haven't been able to find it, but I read about it. They have Herbert getting interviewed by Mike Wallace. He kind of tells his story. And then out of the other room, they bring Major Grimshaw, who is part of the unit, who comes out and says, yeah, look, I worked for Herbert. I know Herbert. I respect Herbert, but what he said isn't true. So now

who he's supposed to believe? So Herbert, sues Mike Wallace and 60 minutes for liable. It's a 13-year court case. It's a 13-year court case eventually gets all the way to Supreme Court, and Herbert loses the case. Herbert eventually, he became a clinical psychologist and also a police psychologist dies of cancer, June 7, 2014. Just a

The whole thing is a Travesty And I guess the best thing we can do is What can we learn from it? What can we learn from it? I would say the obvious lesson here is Put your ego aside and build relationships with people. Now you might say well,

these people are doing wrong Okay, so what good do you do When you just form an antagonistic relationship? Do you have more influence? over them or less influence over them. You have less. So if you can build a relationship with people, now listen, this is, again, this is so freaking hard.

This is what makes leadership hard. If there's people that are doing things that are immoral, illegal, unethical, okay, what are you going to do? You can do what Herbert did, stand up to him and guess what? He gets fired. Now he has no influence over the situation. Because if you think, like, you have to stop it. That's my moral obligation to stop this stuff from happening.

Did Colonel Herbert stop it from happening? No. Instead, he's gone. He has no more influence. Who took over his battalion? Some yes man, when a Colonel Franklin's, you know, boys that came in and started towing the party line. So, freaking disaster. It's just a disaster. You get the high ground. Great. You got the high ground. And then you, and then you, uh, uh, look down on people. And you get an antagonistic relationship with them. Yeah. And there's all, there's all. All this stuff is documented. You got to read the book. And I'm sure we can have more discussions.

Maybe we will. Maybe we'll find somebody that was there that knows more about it. Look, there's two sides to every story, too. I mean, you pointed it out. You know, were they just trying to get the job done? Was he exaggerating some of the stuff? I don't know. I don't know.

My original take was this. that this guy is like a hack. My original information that I got was this guy was a hackworth type individual. That was from Colonel Howell. His Herbert had worked for his grandfather. Right. So this is like the closest to where to get right now

that we can go off of. I don't know. I don't know. I know that leadership is a freaking challenge. I know that. And this book proves it. I hate this feeling. go Charles

Mm-hmm. They're kind of empty feeling. Yeah, sure. Don't like it. Yeah, and so... I don't like when I can't really identify the truth. I can't.

I don't like it. Yeah. And that's kind of why I did think about that where thinking about the other people's perspective, you know? And with that, kind of, you kind of think, like, how did, how did, let's say that the guy is, like,

all wrong. Like, because, Let's face, according to the story, it kind of sounds like they're almost like corrupt almost. Where they're like, hey, who cares, you know, kind of thing. So it's like what? So what? We just have a straight up corrupt military. Is that what you're saying?

That's absolutely what he's saying. Yeah. So we know on certain terms he's saying that. Yeah. But a normal person. Which is horrible for us to think that this entire division or this entire brigade at a minimum was corrupt. Yeah. And that's what I'm thinking.

But the reality is like, so these aren't like bad people. Like most people aren't just bad people who are just like destined for corruption or whatever. It's almost like you kind of got to consider how did they get there? Like why is it like that? It's not because they're just these evil people who finally got their position of power and now can just exploit weakness and nothing like that. But you take and you put all these factors in place like the fact that, hey, if you go do this tour, you're going to get promoted. You're going to get more money. You've got to go do this.

And when you get over there, well, what's the best way to get a good evaluation? You get a good evaluation by doing what everyone else is doing. You know, you don't want to stick your head up and be the one that draws a bunch of attention. So if that's what we're doing, you know, it's an expression that you use. You use this expression, that's what we're doing. You know, like you'll say, oh, I thought that's just what we were doing. Yeah. You use that expression sometimes.

Well, that's a normal thing for people to feel. Look, that's what we're doing. Okay, that's what everyone else is doing. I'm all. Okay. If we're going to let the Vietnamese kind of run and do whatever they want, if that's what we're doing, cool. I don't want to be the one that's drawn a bunch of attention to myself.

It ain't about me. So I'm just going to kind of sit back and let it happen. So people get into that mode and you lose vision. Here's the other thing. Like how much confidence do you have in yourself to say like, hey, everyone here is wrong. Everyone here that's letting this happen is wrong. Yeah. You know, how do you not feel like, wait a second, there's, you know, a brigade of 5,000 people here and everyone's kind of down with what's happening and I'm the person that's not?

Yeah. There's something wrong here. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe there's something wrong with me. Yeah. And you get the momentum and the inertia of, you get the inertia of, hey, hey, we're going to get a new battalion commander soon enough. Don't worry about this guy. He'll be gone.

He's only going to do to be here for six months. what are we trying to do? Make money, right? We can run these little scams and make some money. We just want to have the time passed so I can move on. I can just be done with my job. Trust me, that's a real thing, even in today's military. Like, have you ever heard the zero defect?

Zero defect model where it's like, oh yeah, we're going to promote someone that has had no mistakes. So if you're over on deployment, if you're in Iraq or you're in Afghanistan, and you want to get promoted and there's a mission to go do and you get to decide whether you go do that mission or not do you think you should do it or not oh yeah got it yeah so if you don't basically if you don't take that much action you don't won't make that many mistakes you know and you can have the zero defect record you have the zero defect record I went on deployment I did four missions they all went well get a bronze star go home get a good evaluation and we're good to go yeah or I'm gonna go over there I'm

gonna do a hundred missions every single one of those missions is a freaking challenge and by the way if you're doing four missions you can kind of handpick you do 10 missions you do 20 missions your handpick okay this one's like not bad not a bad area we've got really good intel looks good all right go we'll go ahead and execute this one right if you're gonna do a hundred missions you're going okay look this one's a little bit more high risk but we're gonna It seems like it will make an impact, we'll go execute it. There's a tendency.

Well, it's not a tendency. There's a possibility that you say, you know what? Look, I don't want to have anyone get hurt. I don't want to have any bad, you know, I don't want to have any negatives on my evaluation. I just want to get my job done and move on. You know, I want to punch the ticket. So you end up doing 14 missions.

And you did your job. Good for you. And now you get your ticket punched and you go home and everyone's good. And by the way, when you get home, guess what everyone says. Hey, he did it. He was a company commander. He was a battalion commander.

He did a job. He's a combat experienced veteran, as he said. Right. So now you're kind of on a pedestal a little bit. Yeah. Even though you really don't know anything. So what I'm saying is the system even more so in Vietnam was all set up where, hey, get over there.

Keep your mouth shut. Go with the flow. Fit in with the crew. Yeah. And that's why Hackworth had such a freaking issue with it and so did Herbert makes sense so almost like they should maybe think about and I'm saying this with complete ignorance by the way but they should change the little system to be to have you know like diving you've watched diving like um I don't know Olympics or whatever

diving right like platform whatever they have they have uh the scores and the difficulty level and the difficulty level exactly right so you get a score for difficulty level and if the difficulty level is low bra you're not going to get a high score you know yeah yeah it's true And that's fine. Again, the system is really, it's very easy for the system to fall back into a zero defect mentality, a risk-averse mentality. Because look, I could go on deployment tomorrow. And circumstances could be that there's just not a lot going on. And so we did four missions, not because we weren't aggressive, but just because there wasn't that many missions to do.

And so I'd come back and you can't look down on me. You can't say, well, Jocco only did four missions. I did all the ones that I could. I was aggressive as I could possibly be. We only did four. You go on deployment. You could do 100 missions, but you only do four. You come back, because I did as many as Jocko.

We're good to go. And I'm the overall leader. I wasn't there. So I'm looking at it go, hey, ECHO did four. Jock did four. Hey, these guys are equivalent. We're good to go. Move on.

Meanwhile, you were super risk-averse, didn't take any chances, really didn't impact the battlefield. And you're going to get the same recognition. So it's a very difficult thing to do. do it's a very difficult thing then you can see you can see that Vietnam just got so wrapped up in this this careerism of hey go do your time keep your mouth shut get you know go with the flow yeah and that's that what the one of the missions that we're doing okay we're doing that kind of mission cool

oh got it we got guys smoking pot no one really seems to notice that okay well we guess we're smoking pot like it's just bad across the board yeah and a lot of it has to do with what is our mission What is our mission? What means we want? Yeah. What means we want? If you don't even know what means you want, how are you going to, you know, if you went on a football field and you didn't know what, if you didn't know how to score a goal, what would you do?

Yeah. What would you do? You wouldn't be able to do anything. But as long as you know, hey, here's where you're trying to get to. Okay, got it. Give me that ball. Move it a foot down the field. I'll move it a yard down the field.

I'll move it an inch down the field. You're at least know which direction you're moving it. If you get told, hey, go out on that field. No one tells you where the end zone is Right? No one tells you So what are you gonna do? So as a leader you gotta take that into account You gotta make sure people know what the mission is

You gotta know what the strategy is and you better know why you're going to war And you better make that perfectly clear when you're going check Empty feeling sorry don't like it All right, so what else can we do? This is just a freaking... Well, speaking of empty feelings, I have... One, two, three cans of empty... Two and a half cans of empty discipline go.

So I'm going to take this opportunity to tell our people what Discipline Go is. I'm glad because I'm just... I had some too, but I still feel empty. Still empty. All right, thank you. It's all good. Well, okay, I won't start with Discipline Go. How about that?

We'll just talk about Jocco Fuel in general. Okay, look, we're on the path. We're learning stuff. lessons hard and easy by the way obviously we're hoping man yeah well you know how they say like there's hard lessons like the hard lessons are the ones that are learned like the best yes true he who suffers remembers yeah there you go yeah so boom so we're on the path right we're looking for lessons we're learning from lessons learning from lessons from others that's one of those efficiency things.

Yeah. There's some great leadership lessons in both these books. That's for sure. Like that thing about planning, if you let your team come up with a plan, they're invested. They have a material interest

in seeing the plan succeed. That right there is gold. Read those books. Look, you come away feeling empty like I did, let me fill in that hole a little bit. There, I just did. I just filled in my own hole in my heart from getting to the end of this book

by saying, hey, if you let your team come up with a plan, they have a material interest in making the plan succeed. There you go. I feel better already. Me too. So, yes, nonetheless we're on the path.

And through that path, a lot of people know about the path. They don't walk the path. I saw that meme today and stuck in my head. But when we do walk the path, we may need assistance. Assistance through, whether it be mentorship, guidance,

or supplementation. As far as supplementation goes, we have Jocco fuel. So we got stuff for our joints We got stuff for protein We got stuff for our brain And we got stuff for our immunity That's it, right?

Check More or less What about just getting stronger With some milk Yes, that's the protein That's the additional protein Oh yeah, so and here's the thing I was thinking about something else

I understand fully Well here's the thing Here's the formula for getting strong Could you tell I was like not with you Yeah Okay I'm just making sure I'm very used to that dynamic

no usually I'm paying attention to what you're saying well depends on what you mean by usually but true you know anyway the formula for getting strong that if you sense that for me it should be a nonverbal cue to talk fast and kind of rap yeah I thought

that in the beginning but now you don't care yeah it's just whatever you don't care I'm very used to you have no material interest in moving this conversation long which is fine let's just say I have a material interest but it's very small nonetheless the material formula for being strong is three things the correct

exercise the correct rest in recovery and the correct fuel nutrition slash fuel slash food if whatever yeah mok is part of that last part the fuel for getting strong is you so yeah mok will make you strong as long as those other two things are in place as well sure anyway go to jr. Jucklefuel.com for all these things. Score. Score some supplementation for this path that we are walking, not just knowing about it. You can also get it at vitamin shop.

You can also get it at Wawa. Well, you can get the discipline go drinks at Wawa. If you need some energy, then you can go to Wawa and get some. And also all these things, this is kind of cool. You're going to want to get, you're going to want to get them and have them there when you need them. So you want to subscribe. And if you subscribe, you get free shipping.

And shipping can be expensive. Yeah. You know, it's, yeah, I think the main benefit, aside from the discount for sure, is you not having to think about it. You can think about other stuff now. That is a definite benefit. So you're getting paid basically to do something that's already good for you. Yeah.

It's a double dip. You're right. You're right. Rotation of justice. So getting paid, you know how they say a penny saved is a penny earned? That's it, right? Yep. It's the kind of thing.

It's more of a framing thing. Okay. Not to go too deep on framing. Please don't. But if you just said, you just said you're getting paid to do something healthy. Yeah. In a way, right? You are.

So if you subscribe, you're getting paid to do something that's good for you. Yep. Which is awesome. Yeah. Check that out. Joccofuel.com. Also, we got a bunch of jiujit stuff if you are into

Jiu-Jitsu, which you should be by all accounts. You should be into Jiu-Jitsu. Go to origin at USA.com. You can get jiu-s-suff, but if you're, let's say you haven't gotten into J-Jitsu yet you're going to, but you still need clothing for your body.

You need jeans. You need boots. You need T-shirts. You need hoodies. Sure. You need hats. Well, there's a lot of benefits to hats. That's what we'll say.

Yeah, you don't wear a hat ever. Pretty much. Anyways, you can get all that stuff. American made. Made in America. Yep. Made in America. Yeah.

OriginUSA.com. Check it out. Also. Jocko has a store as well. For more of those shirts and hats, hoodies, what not. Shorts, by the way. Shorts, yes. Which I'm wearing right now.

Oh, yeah. Defcore shorts. Oh, yeah, all day. Hardcore ricondo shirt. That's what I'm wearing today. Yeah. In honor of Colonel David Hackworth. Yes, sir.

Check. Yep, that's a good one. Yeah, a lot of stuff on there. I say it's to represent while we're on the path. That's what you say. And that is true. Every time. But there's a little bit more to it.

You got to find out for yourself. Also, we have a subscription situation on there, too, for a little bit different types of designs, a little bit more creative. We enlisted John Bozac, who just happens to be, maybe not happens to be. This is all for a reason, but he is the illustrator for the Way the Warrior Kid series. And Mike and the Dragons.

And Mike in the Dragons. And some posters as well. Anyway, this is a good artist. We enlisted him for some of the designs on this subscription shirt situation called the shirt locker. Check. Anyway, look into that. If you like that, hey, man, get that.

jaco store.com is where, that's that we got you can you can subscribe to this podcast or the other podcast we got a got jocco unraveling got a few new episodes of that out they're savage grounded podcast which we haven't done in a while but warrior kid podcast we got some new those new of those out if you want to you can check all those out you can subscribe you can also join us on the underground the u g jaco ug jaco underground dot com little alternative podcast we've been doing some Q&A on there from people that are on jocco underground if you want to subscribe to that go to jocco underground dot com it costs $8.18 a month if you can't afford that it's okay we don't want to exclude you because you're

having a financial rough spot if you want to hear what we're talking about you can go to you can email assistance at jocco underground dot com Yep, also we have a YouTube channel, video version of this podcast. Also, we have excerpts on there. So you can be enlightened in the event of you missing a certain concept of whatever. You know, we try to post those regularly. So, yeah, you can check those out. We're verified, too, by the way, on YouTube.

Proud of that? Did you ever get that thing? Were you supposed to get some thing? I don't know. Like a plaque or something? Oh, yeah, yeah, the play button or something. I think that's when you get to a certain amount of subscribers. I did not get it, no.

How many subscribers do you have to have? There's different plaques. I think you get one. I could be wrong. Like after 10,000 or 100,000, and then after a million, if I'm not mistaken, and then after 10 million subscribers. How many do we have?

We broke the threshold of 1 million, so technically we should have two play buttons somewhere. Somewhere on here. I don't know. I've got to double check my play what? Play button. Oh, buttons. I have trophies.

Anyway, yeah, we have a YouTube channel. How about that? Okay, accepted psychological warfare. We got an album with tracks where I talk about overcoming a moment of weakness. We got Flipside Canvas.com, Dakota Meyer, putting out things that you can hang on your wall that look cool. Books, a bunch of books. Soldier, which is the book we covered today. The Making of a Soldier, the book we covered last podcast.

They're both by Anthony Herbert. Final Spin. It's a story that I wrote. It might be a poem. I'm not sure. You're going to have to check it out yourself. It's available for pre-order right now. I'm sure the publisher's like, well, there's probably only going to be, you know,

we'll probably only sell 50 of these. So we'll print 50. If you don't pre-order, don't be mad. Pre-order so you can get that first, that dish. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, the Code, the Evaluations of Protocols, Disimperimper's Freedom Field Manual, all the Warrior Kid Books, Miking the Dragon, About Face, Extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership.

I have a leadership consultancy. It's called Eschalonfront. You can go to Eschlonfront.com for details if you want us to help inside your organization. We have online training, eFonline.com. We've got a bunch of live events, including the muster, 2021. Go to Extreme Ownership.com if you want to come to one of those. We've got EF Battlefield. We've got FTX.

If you want to help service members, active and retired service members, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate

or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. And if you want more of my drawn out orations, or you'll need more of Echoes questionable queries, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the gram,

and on Facebook. Echoes at Equit Charles. I am at, Jocka Willinkin, thanks to all the people out there in the service of our nation around the world. And just try and remember that the enemies outside the wire and try and keep the egos in check and support each other. And to our police and law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service, and all first responders out there every single day, thank you for doing what you do so that we can do what we do. And to everyone else, listen, antagonistic relationships do not help you in life.

They don't help your mission. They don't help your team. If you don't agree with somebody on something, find something that you do agree on. Build bonds instead of breaking them. There is enough in the world trying to rip us apart. Fight that. We all win in the end. And until next time, this is.

This is Echo and Jocko. Out.