Jocko Podcast - 284: Staying Dangerous In Spite of Age. UDT SEAL Team, Vietnam, Iraq-Frogman, Warrant Officer Bill Pozzi

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:04:42 - Bill Pozzi2:30:42 - Final thoughts2:36:29 - How to stay on THE PATH.3:08:56 - Closing GratitudeSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 284. With Echo Charles and me, Jocker Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Anybody home? Right from the very threshold of our mungalow reached us a hoarse voice of an elderly gentleman. The voice woke us up at high noon

of our first day amid the date palms of the settlement outside Saddam's palace somewhere at the outskirts of Baghdad. Hi guys, this greeting that followed sounded a bit warmer. Our shared English proved to be good enough so we were able to freely exchange greetings with our visitor and learn what he wanted from us or rather, as it turned out, what that older feller could do for us in our Iraqi reality. My name is Posey, Bill Posey, and I am the boss here. He introduced himself to us clad in an American uniform. pants and a brown t-shirt in case you need anything lads just bring me the list and I'll take care of it That was how Bill Posey greeted us at one time he might have been a strapping lad indeed

But in spite of age he lost nothing of his military appearance and his advanced age only dignified him He brought us a box full of batteries in this climate they run out no time guys and you'll Generally operate at night each of you must have a large supply that He explained putting the box on the table. That is how I remember my first encounter with Bill Posey. Our visitor turned out to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Navy SEALs to serve in combat in that legendary U.S. Navy unit. His vast experience and involvement impressed people, and he used his age to his advantage. Bill Posey's knowledge on military bases, how they work, like ours in Baghdad, seemed unlimited.

Bill Posey volunteered with the U.S. Navy at a time when most young American males did their best to steer clear of military service. Some of his civilian friends even faked injuries or feigned joint problems, fearing fit-for-duty opinion of the draft board, which would have meant an unwanted conscription. But no wonder, in the late 1960s, Indochina was the scene of the brutal Vietnam War. and after all, not every young guy had a warrior's soul. During his service in the UDT underwater demolition teams in Vietnam, Posey, with other UDT men and seals, took part in many combat missions in patrols. In later time, he also secured the landing of Apollo 12. But when he volunteered to the first Gulf War in 1990, the medical board rejected him,

saying he was too old for further duty. However, in 2003, he deployed to Baghdad. He built the camp infrastructure from scratch, took care of our supplies, and he was also an expert on our vehicles. And he was a very generous man. He raised money on the base for a Catholic orphanage in Baghdad, but he also remained a warrior until the last days of his service, including taking part in combat operations. The guy was devoted to the fight and to his teammates throughout his entire career.

No wonder then that our base in Baghdad was named after him, Camp Posey. Camp Jenny Posey, to be exact. Bill Posey had a daughter who was also in the service, but in the Army. He said that since the commanding officer desired to name the base Camp Posey after him, he humbly let it be named in honor not of him, but of his daughter. Hence, the full name of our base was Camp Jenny Posey. And that right there was an excerpt from a book, which is actually called Camp Posey, written by Polish Special Operations Soldier from the Grom named Naval Polska.

And this part of the book about the Polish Special Operations Unit, working with seals in Iraq, this is the book that I talked about when I had my brother Tom Drago-Zeran on here for podcast 276 and that book by Naval Polska is called Camp Posey and as you heard Camp Jenny Posey was named after the daughter of the Vietnam era frogman warrant officer Bill Posey who fought in Vietnam recovered the Apollo 12 space capsule and who ultimately built Camp Jenny Posey in Baghdad and did combat operations with the seals and the Grom in Iraq. And we are lucky enough to have this legend here with us tonight.

UDT, SEAL team, Vietnam, Iraq, Frogman, and legend, Warren officer, Bill Posey, he's here. Warrant, Bill, thanks for coming on. Commander, it's always great being here. I thought you weren't going to call me Jocko. And now you're calling me commander. I guess I wasn't supposed to call you Warren. You know, old habits die very slowly.

And at Group 1, where I was at a lot of the time, we really respected you and your ability to lead and your ability to push things through. So you were a legend at Group 1, not Bill Posey. I was only a legend of my own mind. Well, sometimes I got in trouble for pushing things through, but it was okay. So let's start at the beginning. I mean, this is a pretty awesome story for you to spend so much time in the teams and so much time just keeping the brotherhood on the path. But it started, you grew up in California, right? Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. And what was the situation there? You know, when I grew up, it was after World War II. We were the first part of the baby boom. So it was really nothing but optimism, especially in Southern California, because, there was nothing here. There was hardly any people, especially in the Los Angeles area, so everything just blew out of the ground. And it was an amazing place to be there. You know, we could surf, the freeways went in, so some days we could surf in the morning and then

get an afternoon lift ticket up at Big Bear and ski in the afternoon. How can you beat that? Live in the dream. Yeah, you could surf, you could ski. They had beautiful women. I mean, what more does a man want? I mean, it's the place. My kid, my son, as soon as he got his driver's license, he was on that mission. And it's a lot easier now. Even though the traffic's worse, guess what? They got night skiing up there. So he's like, oh, surfing in the morning, going night skiing at night.

On the same plan. So you mentioned the baby boomers. So what about your dad? Was your dad in the military? Yeah, my dad was in the Navy. He came from Victoria, Texas to Long Beach, and he was on a ship called the USS Cummings. and he was stationed out of Long Beach and then did the South Pacific.

He met my mother in Southern California. He took my mother after he married her to Victoria, Texas, and said, this is where I want to go. And she says, no, we're not going to Victoria, Texas. We're staying in Southern California. No air conditioning that time. So it was rough. Total game change.

Yes, sir. So what was your dad's war experience like on the USS Cummings? He was a gunner on the deck of the ships, and he was a boatswain's mate, so that's what he was. did and he was in a couple of big battles there and they didn't sink him so that's good so he he had a very positive and my mother also who worked for the navy had a very positive idea of the navy and that kind of bled over to me so and then what did your dad do after the navy could did did he get out after the war yes sir got out after the war and immediately went to work for the telephone company for

40 years but was a lineman or what was he doing there guy that climbed a pulse. Just getting it. His whole life. So he was a very good guy and a very hard worker. Really a hardworking guy. So I tried to be as much as like him as possible. The week before he died, he was 82 years old, and he was climbing a ladder on a second story painting the eaves of his daughter's house. So I'm in 82. That's pretty good, yeah? Not no slow doubt. I guess we know where you got your genetics from. Yeah. So then you're growing up, and this is like just prime kind of prime America.

Yes, sir. You're in Southern California. You got surfing. Where are you going surfing at? You know, we did it all up and down the coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego because it was easy to do. And gas was like 29 cents a gallon, so we could do whatever we want to just leave early in the morning. And there was hardly any crowds, especially what? really changed surfing was the type of material they used in surfboards. So originally they used

an epoxy. Well, originally it was balsa wood, but that was before my time. But when foam came out, they had the foam, but it was a polyester foam. And if you wanted to resonate, you would have to either put tar or paper over the surfboard blank. So it was very difficult to do. And you always had voids where the resin went down into the surfboard material and you had a void. So when the polyurethane came out, that revolutionized the sport. Game change. Yeah, it was easy to do, much stronger, much lighter. It changed the sport of surfing.

So what years were you in high school? What year did you graduate from high school? 65, 61 through 65. And so you're going to high school, and, I mean, Vietnam hadn't started yet until just barely probably just starting to hear about it in 60. Yeah, no, it was going okay then, and everybody thought, well, we can kind of tiptoe around it and do other things to avoid the work because nobody wanted to go because, you know, the draft was on, and it was a different type of military. So typically, if you were drafted, you were drafted in the

Army, very few people into the Marine Corps, none in the Navy or the Air Force. So you would go into the Army, you would go to Vietnam, and you would come back in a plastic bag. So it wasn't a good deal. They just didn't think it through, and it wasn't a good deal for draftees. So when you're going to high school, were you thinking about the military as you were going to high school? No, not at all. We're thinking about how we can avoid the military.

It was a negative sense rather than positive. And you were kind of like a motorhead, right? Yeah. I always turned to wrench. From the time I was a little kid, I was always building cars or building different things. so I was really happy in that world. So give us, I mean, give us the highlights. What was the prize?

What were the beauties? Well, I had a low-budget, low-ditch car. I had a 55 Chevy with a 31 Ford front end on it, the axle and everything, with a 348 and a Muncie four-speed. So I thought I was a cat's meow on Tweety Boulevard. We had this street called Tweety Boulevard where everybody cruised, right?

And it was the longest dead-end street in the world, and everybody would cruise on it, and, you know, you see all your girlfriends, and, you know, it was really good. I mean, it was like, I don't know what that movie was with Ron Howard, but, I mean, it was much more fun. Was it diner? No. God, I can't remember that movie with Ron Howard. I know the one you're talking about. And it was in the 50s, and it really looked good in the movies, but the 50s were really better than that,

because it was the optimism of the 40s and the 50s that America can do it all. We can do it scientifically and our lives will be forever better and they'll never be a downtime. Because my father was a Depression era kid, right? And they had completely different values than we had in the 50s because we thought there was no end. I mean, we could do whatever we wanted. Nobody in my family, extended family in Texas and in California, had ever been. been to college. Nobody. So I tell my father, when I graduate from high school, he says, well, I want you to go to work for the telephone company. It's a great job, and you can work the

job for 40 years, right? I said, Dad, I'm not going to be hanging from some telephone pole in south central Los Angeles. That was a specialty because you could get so much overtime. And I said, I'm not doing that. He says, you know, you're really not very bright. I don't think you're going to make it in the college. Well, he was right there, but, you know, what can you say. Did you play any sports or anything in high school? Yeah, I did the good seal team sports. I played water polo, swam, and did cross-country and track. So it was real good. It was really kind of prophetic doing those sports and be able to do, you know, SEAL team or UDT at the time. What kind of music were you listening to? You know, typical Southern California Beach Boy,

Jan and Dean. I tell I'm a school teacher now, and the kids have a lot of problems now. I mean, they have a lot of interpersonal problems, right? And I tell them about my experience, and they look at me, wow. I mean, it was the greatest, in my opinion, the greatest time ever to be alive.

Well, since you work with kids now, like, what's the difference? I mean, I was thinking from, you're talking about cars, right? Yes, sir. And when you have cars like a 195 car, that's a car that any, well, most people can look at and fully understand what's happening. Absolutely. It's simple. There's no magic to it. That's right. And now you open up the hood of a new car.

Just like you're pointing a book. If you make it simple, everybody understands, right? And it seems like the cars back then, if there was a problem with it, you could pretty easily identify what the problem was and be like, oh, it's a carburetor or whatever. And we just get that thing fixed. But now it's hard to even tell there's so many complications inside of a car that it seems like kids these days also are faced with all these different complications as opposed to, hey, you know, this is what we're going to go surfing and then we go to Big Bear. We're going to go skiing. That sounds like a kind of things you want to deal with as a kid. Right.

Now they're dealing with social media, peer pressure, and all this other crap. Yeah, it's a much harder life. It's much more difficult. And I see a lot of these kids in my line of work being really strong. stressed out by other kids, especially the girl-on-girl situation where one's chiding or bullying the others, you know. And the beauty of it is, and I don't know if you experienced this in your high school, but the beauty of it is, if we were mad at somebody, we go out in a parking lot and duke it out. Not that I was a big fighter because I was as big as round as a pencil, you know.

But I mean, but that's hot, you know, that fight, that fist fight in the parking lot, and I don't want my kids at school fist fighting because I'd get fired, but that little fight in the parking lot really earned respect from your peers and it taught you, hey, I can't be badmouthed in these guys because he's going to sucker punch me and straighten me out. So, but they don't have that now. You know, and I've been at my high school for eight years and I've never seen one fight. Wow. It's just a different mindset. I'm sure at your high school, was there a fighter to me? fights. And not to mention you get into a seal platoon and there's like a fight every 14 minutes. You need it or not. Yeah. Someone's getting hit. Someone's getting choked. Someone's getting pommeled.

That's just the way it is. So you grow up there in Southern California, kind of just straight up living the dream. Yes, sir. Sounds outstanding. And I got a job when I was 15 and a half in a grocery store and everything was unionized in. So I started. started at 90 cents an hour, which was big money for a 15-year-old kid. So I was able, some weeks when I was a senior in high school, I made more of my father who had been at his job for 20 years, right? And so I could buy so many car parts. It was unbelievable. Never saved a dime. Was I smart? Had to save 10% of that. I'd have been living in San Diego right now. So you, as you're getting ready to graduate, you know you're not going to college.

No, I went to college for two years. Oh, you did? Yeah. Okay. I went to college. And college was very difficult then because everybody was trying to cheat the draft. So classes didn't have 25 people in it. They had 50.

You know, and you had begged the instructor to take you into the class because if not, if you went below 12 units, then you're open fodder for the draft. So I always tried to take 15 or 18 units just in case I had to back out. So I went to college because I wanted to be 21 when I went to the service so I could drink legally. Right? So that was my goal to be 21 and to be in the service. I thought the drinking age was 18 back then. No, not in California. Not in California.

In Texas it was, but not in California. When I joined the Navy and the drinking age was 21, but at the E-Club on NAB corn, auto, you could drink at 18. But you couldn't drink at the trade wins. God. The team bar. You couldn't go to the team bar, right? If you couldn't go, a SEAL team guy, not in a team bar?

You were thinking way more strategic than I was. Strategic thinker. I mean, come on. So you get done with, so now it's, so you graduate high school in 1965. You go to two years. What college did you go to? Compton. And you're studying what?

Are you studying anything? Auto mechanics. Oh, so you're just getting into it. Yeah. I'm trying to prefer. affect my ability to fix things. Are you racing cars? Yeah.

Well, I mean, just street racing. Illegal street racing. And what car are you driving now? Did you graduate from the 55? No, no. The 55 Chevy took a lot of different engines and different drive train setups and stuff like that. So it was good for me.

And then at what point did you start thinking, all right, I'm not going to be able to, was it, did you make it to 21 before you got, before you joined the Navy? So you made it to 21? No, in 1966, I joined a Navy because the draft was closing in. As they needed more men, you had different steps. So if you were married, then you avoided the draft, even if you were going to school. But you weren't willing to make that kind of crazy commitment. You weren't that desperate yet.

I mean, that. Yeah, you weren't willing to go that distance. You know, when the women in Southern California at that time were incredible. And you grew up where women always took the pill. Well, that's not true because the pill came out in the early 60s, but nobody took it for a while. So when the pill came about, it was a whole new different social scene. And, you know, everybody got their jihad on, if you know what I mean.

And so it was very fruitful to be a young man and a young woman in Southern California in 1965. And so you're getting your jihad on. And then, so at what point are you, did you say you joined the Navy? Yeah, we joined it. In 1966, the draft was closing in, and everybody had tried to get into a National Guard unit or a reserve unit. So there was nothing left because everybody of draft eligibility did that. So I went into the submarine reserves, which was the least desirable of any reserves.

because you had to go into submarine. And so I did that. And that proved my gateway to go into SEAL team. I'm going to tell you the little story if you wouldn't mind, Commander. So I'm on this ship and I'm turning a wrench, right? I wanted to be in the engine room because I wanted to see how those, you know, diesel motor was probably 15 feet long. And it was a real good learning experience because I learned a lot of things about diesel.

But the problem is you couldn't take a shower in the sun. submarine because there was no, in the showers they had potatoes because there was no room. We had about 85 people on the submarine. There was no room for anything, including the shower. So you were out to sea for two weeks at a time, and as an engineman, you were really greasy, and you could wash yourself, but you couldn't really get yourself clean. So you get in your rack and you put your face on your pillow, and, you know, you wake up in four hours for your next gig and your face is so greasy that your your face slid off the pillow right

and I didn't like to be greasy I didn't mind muddy or dirty but greasy it's it's not good you know and you had pimples on your face and this is the worst part so we used to go to a bar down here in san i can't remember the name of the the boat bar and you'd walk in and people would smell you before they would see you because it was a snorkel submarine where the boat snorkeled to recharge the batteries and it permeated everything with diesel fuel. So you smell like diesel fuel. So people would, you walk in the bar, people would sniff and say, oh my God, where did this guy come from? And you're perfectly clean. I mean, your skin's clean, but you just stink like diesel fuel, right? So after, you know, a little while on that submarine, I went to the Cobb, the chief of the boat, and I said, cop, you know, I'm really not a quitter.

This is a volunteer service in the submarine. I want to go to the Army. The Army's good because I can sit in the mud, and the mud you wash off and you don't stink, right? So you're in the Navy Reserves at this point, but are you active? But you're active after duty. Yes, sir. So you join the reserves. you go through boot camp.

But you're active duty. But you're active duty. So you don't have any break. You're straight up. When you joined, you joined. No, you had as long as you wanted to kind of fake it in the reserves, but usually it's a two-year gig. So that's why I joined.

And then when I was 21, it worked out my time schedule perfectly, right? So then you were activated. Got it. And then you went, was submarine boot camp actually different than regular Navy boot camp? No, it was up at Hunter's Point in San Diego. San Francisco, and the Marines would drill you, and they tried to instill discipline, and it was like a nine-week school. It's because you went to boot camp, but you only learned about submarines. Because you're a detriment when you go on that diesel summary, you know, summaries from World War

II, not nukes, but diesel boats. And if you don't, if you turn the wrong valve, it could be the wrong, you know, it could be all over for the entire summary. You've got to know what you're doing when you're not submarine. So we went to that boot camp and then the next summer. Did you not put two and two together on one event if you're on a submarine? Because I wasn't the sharpest tool of the shed,

but I knew there's one thing. God bless the guys that are on submarines. Oh, absolutely. Look, I've spent probably my whole Navy career probably spent a month on a submarine total, maybe a month and a half. And it doesn't take much to figure out that it's a special, it's a different breed of human being

that goes on there and can deal with it. Because you're in a, confined space, you know, there's someone that sleeps in your bed when you're not sleeping in your bed, hot racking. Right. Yeah, it's called hot racking, Echo Charles. So this is the deal. Echo, they only have so many beds. They have more people than they have beds. So when it's your turn to go to sleep, someone, you share a bed with someone or maybe two people. So you get to sleep for six hours. And then when you get out of bed, someone else is getting into your bed. It's warm. Right? So this is just, it's not normal. It's not normal. It's not. And we, and they're just a, just a, greasy as you. Oh, man. Not greasier. Yeah.

And everything is confined, you know, and you literally don't see the sun. And so it's a, so I'm just wondering, you didn't think to myself, oh, well, I'm going to be on a freaking aluminum can underneath the ocean for months at a time. Maybe that's not the right deal. But that was just, you know, all my friends, most of my friends joined the submarine reserves. And so then they went on the summer. Marines. So that's just the way it was. Anything to avoid the Army. How long did you spend on in the submarine service? A month and a half. Not long at all. Not long at all. So after a month and a half of

smelling like diesel and being stuck under water, you went to the chief of the boat. Right. Went to and that's where I cut you off where you went to him and said, said, all right, I'm done. You know, I just, I just don't like it. And I'm not the right guy to be this, you know. And he says, Posey, do I have a deal for you? He says, you go down and take this test this afternoon at 12 o'clock, and you can be a SEAL team guy. And I said, well, nobody knew, because this was 1967. Nobody knew what it meant, right? What SEAL team was? And I thought, well, SEAL team, well, they have SEALs. I thought, what? Seals. And I said, well, does that mean that you train seals and to do tricks for recruiting. And he says, they'll explain it to you. So I go over to

a part of the base and they put a hard hat outfit on me. And the first test was to drop you over the side of the ship in the bay and you walk around on the bottom of the of the bay for a half hour to see if you're claustrophobic. And so they dropped me over at the side and they, you know, I walk around for a half hour in the mud. You walk through the mud. And this is in the old school, like what is it, the Mark 8 dive helmet thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, it was real old school. It's real old school. And so he did that. And that was part of the examination. Yeah. With, did you have the big ass lead like boots on the whole nine yards? Yeah, yeah. And you couldn't, you had to shuffle the boots, not walking them.

So all of the sediment that's been. there for 150 years. I mean, you took one step and you couldn't see for the next five minutes, you know? So they had me walking around. What else did they do with you? Oh, then they pull you up, and I said, hey, I pass the test. Where do I go? What do I do? And they said, well, you have to take the other test. And I said, oh, okay. And nobody knew what SEAL team was, right? So I talked to the guy there, and he was a dive guy. And I said, well, what's SEAL team? He said, man, it's the greatest. You go down to San Diego,

you lay on the beach, you are a lifeguard for Marines who make marine landings at Camp Pendleton, right? And you have a girl under each arm, and in each hand, you have a beer. And the Navy buys you beer. He said, really?

The Navy buys you beer. Yeah. And these girls, They're gorgeous. They're wonderful down in San Diego. I said, man, that's the life for me. That's what I want to be, right? So you didn't know because there's no internet.

There's no books. I think men with green faces with this first book, if I'm not mistaken from World War II. And I checked that out of the library, and that didn't, you know, you didn't know what you got there. So you just didn't know, which was, I think, a plus. Where were you stationed when all this was happening? Long Beach.

Okay. So then they transfer me to San Diego, and I go to the team area the Friday before training starts, and I go there and Oliveira, I don't know if you ever heard of him, he's my proctor, and I show up at like 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and he says, where are you been? I said, well, they just brought me in the bus here. I don't know what to do. And he says, I said, what do I do you want me to do? Do I need a book bag?

because I thought it was a school. I didn't know. And he says, no, no, no, you don't need a book bag. You just show up Monday morning. We're going to take care of you. I said, really? Yeah. So I go over, at that time, we had three Quonset huts at the end of Coronado,

at the end of the base. And I go there and he gets me a rack. And so I'm sitting there the weekend. And these guys come in and they tell me what's happening and say, okay, it is what it is, right? I'm not in the Army. So I'm pretty happy. So that's how it just all started.

Then it started going downhill Monday morning. So what was the wake-up call like Monday morning? So you had no idea. Not a clue. You didn't know it was going to be physical. You didn't know nothing about hell week, nothing. You just thought you were going to a Navy school where you're going to learn about whatever. Right.

Demolition and that type of thing, diving. And it would be nothing where you ran or swam or whatever. So what in your mind as? you start getting physically and mentally abused at a high level on Monday morning, what made you say, okay, well, I'll just stick with it. Hey, you know, I'd been in that, see, the motivation is I'd been in that summary, and there was no way in God's green earth that I was going to go back to that summary. They're going to have to kill me.

I was not going back to that summary. No way. So how did the training kick off? You know, it was just physical training and evaluation, and they gave us the test, the sealed team test, and everybody passed it. And back then, we had eight-count burpees in with the, you know, run, floor exercise, and the swim. So, but it was, you know, I was half the man I am now. So it was a lot easier to pass the test. What class were you in?

originally 44, then 45, and then 46. So you got rolled a few times? Yeah, I got mumps the first time. What the hell? What's that? Mumps, it's a disease, a childhood disease from the 50s, that they have an occulation. Your kids got the shot. Right, so you didn't get the shot and you randomly got it?

Oh, there was no shot then. Got it. And then the second time I got encephalitis from the bay, from the dirty water, and then they gave me some drugs, and I got over that in about four weeks, and the third time I was ready to go. Then I knew what was going on, you know? So how far did you make it on each of those previous occasions? Two weeks and then three weeks and then away, you know, 46 I was good.

And did you start to understand what the mission was that you were getting yourself into? Yeah, because people explained it. You know, we had extensive training at the trade winds of what was happening and how things went down. Then you got it. You understood what's going on. You know, in that time, it was much different than it is now because the Navy controlled everything. You were a Navy asset. All funding came from the Navy as from not from Socom or being a national asset like in SEAL Team 6. So it's always where the money comes from, you know, how they dictate your life. And so we were like the dog and the manger, UDT, even SEAL team,

because the Navy, you know, we were poisoned to the Navy. If you wanted to make any headway, you had to be a surface naval officer to make any headway because we never had an admiral. We never had anybody, I believe. Well, I think we had a captain. So it was very difficult for people with a career to do that if you weren't an enlisted person.

So the guys that were your instructors at this time, were these guys that had already done tours over in Vietnam? Because this is what year is this now, 1960? 68, early 68. Oh, so you're definitely getting guys that were coming back from Vietnam. Right. And they're telling you what's going on. And a big crowd of World War II folks.

They were still in because the Korean, I mean, the Korean War was over in 53, right? And World War II was over in 45. So they still had time in their career to instruct at Buds. At that time it was UD-T-R-A. So it was a different world. What do you remember? Did you have any trouble in training in any of the evolutions? Not really.

I had trouble in the last swim, that four and a half mile swim at San Clemente, and we just barely made it within a minute. But, you know, the current was running really hard, and, I mean, we were really kicking just to make that. And a couple of guys didn't make it had to do it again the next day. So I was really thankful for that big swim. on that evolution to make it. But that's the only time I had any trouble.

How big was your class when you started? Oh, man, I don't remember. Probably 43 or 44, 45, maybe 50 people. And then I think we whittled it down to 17. So we didn't have that bad of an attrition rate. We had some really great guys in 44. Bill, I don't know if you remember Bill Wildrich, great officer. I mean, he was really an inspirational guy.

He could have been the poster boy for your book. Really a great guy. So he was really good to me for whatever reason. So one last question about Buds. When you're showing up, you don't know anything that's about to take place. It seems like guys now, they know kind of the minute-by-minute schedule. I was a little bit in between. We didn't know a lot when I showed up to buds.

Like I'd never heard of pool competency, which ends up being a huge thing. I knew that there was a hell weak thing somewhere in there where you stayed awake a bunch. But you just didn't know what was happening. What do you think? You think that's better? Oh, that's 10 times better. One of my goals in life is the Navy has been very kind to me, just like the Marine Corps has been kind.

you know, thank God for the Navy in my life. I'm sure I'd have been in prison otherwise, right? By the grace of God. And so I try to tell people, especially in small town, Texas, about the advantages of getting out of Texas and getting out of our small town and going to see in the world. But a lot of them overthink it and they just psyched themselves out. It's just too bad that they publish as much as they do because in my opinion, It's much better when you stand up And you just What are we going to do next? Okay, let's do it Let's do it let's get it on

You know, let's go And so because I don't want to Overthink things Let's just do it Yeah Did you was going through Hellweek? Do you remember anything special about that? For me I was kind of happy about Hellweek

Because I wasn't the best athlete So a swim and a run Where you had a time It was going to be it was all those were hard for me to pass. I had to go. Basically, the way I passed all my evolutions was by going as hard as I possibly could, but I was always nervous, you know, sometimes I'd be like you were talking about, like within a minute of the drop dead time. And I'd, you know, be going to squat. Yeah, and we weren't, you were not allowed to wear a watch. Right. So there's no, so for me, I failed one run in buds

and because I tried to pace myself. I tried to pace myself. This is kind of how I look at life now. I try to pace myself at one run and I failed. And I was like, okay. And from me, And then on, I just ran as hard as I freaking possibly could. And that's how I passed. But the thought of like actually knowing each little detailed thing that's going to come to you, when it came to Hellweek, I thought, there's no time limit. They can't stop me. I mean, I'll keep going no matter what. So I was kind of happy about Hell Week.

It was one of the easier evolutions because there was no time limit. You just had to keep going, which I was, look, I might not have been the fastest runner or the fastest swimmer, the best, the obstacle course. but I was good at keeping going. I could just keep going no matter what. Was how weak for you, any big eureka moment that you discovered anything? No, just everybody was very nervous, and we had magic things that one class would give the other. Like we would have a magic shirt that I got down from a guy by the name of Gary Cronin.

He says, this has been passed down five times. It was a wool shirt, long sleeve wool shirt that you wore out. under your jumper. And he says, if you wear this shirt, you're going to pass how we, man, give that shirt. I don't care if it costs $100. I want that shirt, right? And then the other thing that saved me is I had illusions, or I was delusional on Wednesday night when we had the big paddle from the area down to IBE or whatever it was. And Bill Wildrich, our crew chief, our crew officer was kind enough to let me sleep for 15 minutes in the belly of the boat because I was having, I mean, I was freaking out, right?

I was seeing monsters and all kinds of different stuff. He says, Posey, you lay down on this boat and arrest the guys paddle and nobody complained. So you try to return the favor however you possibly can to arrest those guys. You know, be the first one out there, get the boat ready, you know, pay it. him back for the nice thing they did for you to allow you to go through Hell Week. Yeah, I had some guys that I saw completely hallucinating things. I had one small hallucination, but I don't know if it really counts because I knew it was a hallucination.

While it was happening, I was like, oh, this is, we're out there on that thing. I think they call it around the world. We're doing around the world. Yes. And we're paddling. And we're in the middle of the ocean. And all of a sudden I start seeing traffic lights, like stop signs and traffic lights. and it's going to red, green.

And I'm looking, I'm like, I'm just hallucinating, that's not real. So I don't know, does that count? What do you think, Echo, Charles? Does that count? If you know it's fake, but it looks real? Yeah, yeah. Okay, that was the only hallucinations.

I had no monsters, thankfully. Yeah, that's good. I had one guy that started swearing, like language-wise, and he started swearing. He didn't stop for about 20 minutes. Just every word, freaking sweared. Everybody reached, hey, is everything okay?

Fuck, yeah, are you, and we're like, okay, bro. Hey, dude. Whatever it takes, man. Just stay in the boat, man. It's all good. But what are you going to do in the ocean when that happens? You have no recourse.

You can't lay them on the deck on the sand. I mean, what are you going to do? Keep paddling. Yeah. Paddle a little faster. So at this time, so it's 1968. At this time, and I was talking to Roger Hayden about this. He said, he said, that's a hero of mine.

I love that. Roger Hayden. 100%. Yes, sir. He said most guys went to UDT when they graduated. Well, there was three UDTs and one SEAL team. He said occasionally a guy would go straight to SEAL team, but it was very rare. That's right.

Most guys were going to UDT. A lot of people might not know about the UDT at that time. What was going on with the underwater demolition teams at that time? Well, on the West Coast there was UDT, 11, 12, and 13. 13 was a new team. They started, I believe, in 67 and disbanded. I think it was 70, 71, 72. And so the Navy was, again, our main driver for funding and for manning, for everything.

And so they wanted to keep UDT because in case of an amphibious landing or other sort of things, UDT was useful to them. Other than that, they had no time for you. And there was no funding. So like in our team, we had three pickup trucks and we had to go once a day, to 32nd Street to give them the surf report. So we would drive one pickup truck in the morning at 8 o'clock, go to 32nd Street and come home.

That's the only time we'd use that truck because the other two pickup trucks we had were in the team area, but they were up on cement blocks because we robbed those for parts to keep this one going. So there was just no money. And so we just kind of made things happen. but I think we were better for that because we had I mean when we went to Vietnam we had a para bag half full because we had no gear there was no reason to have a lot of gear because we didn't have any money so it really worked out well for me in my naval career because I was able to learn how to trade things with other services and make things happen and that really worked out to be very good training for me. me to support my sailors. My goal was always to support my fellow sailors because the Navy wasn't

doing it well. Nobody else was. So that was important. So you got ordered. What, what UDT team did you end up at? 13. So it's now, is it 1969 now or is it still 68? Still 68. So with 1968, you get your orders to UDT team 13. Yes, sir. You walk down the grinder a little bit, knock on a Quonson hut. Is that No, there was four, in the old cement, people who don't know about seal team don't know about that old cement building. It was there, I don't know if they've tore that down or not. They tore everything down right now. Okay, they tore that down. So it was probably 100 yards long and probably, you know, 100 feet wide.

And we had four teams in that building, you know, Seal Team won, and then 11, 12, and 13 UDT. So everybody had a very limited space, and it was kind of difficult, but one team was always, or, you know, one and a half teams, because seal team was always there, were always in Vietnam. So we had very limited space, no resources at all, and it was difficult because of that, because there was just no room. So when you got to UDT-13, you checked in, what did they do with you? Did you go right into a platoon? No, no, they immediately sent you to school because we were deploying and you had to go to Sears School. You had to go, in my case, I went to Out Border Motor School to jump school. And then it was just timed.

So the day you graduated from Sears School, you got an airplane and went to Vietnam. Did you get, did you wear that old insignia, like the, the UDT insignia with no eagle on it? No, no, that wasn't. There was no insignia in 68. That came later. And the insignia you had is you had like a diver's helmet on this, on your uniform right here, and that was the only insignia you had. And then, of course, UDT13 on that name badge.

Right, right. And there was no team badge. There was nothing. I'm going to tell you a little story. You probably heard this many times. So we get the pirate, I don't know, know if you remember who Pete the Pirate was? I know his name, but I don't know.

So he supposedly designed the insignia for SEAL team, right? Because he was drinking Budweiser one day, and he submitted like 20 designs because they asked for guys in the teams to do design. Now, there's a lot of controversy about that. So about three months later, they walk into the Quonset hut, and they said, okay, everybody's got their insignia, you know, and they gave us the, they just dropped this bag on the table, and they said, okay, everybody's got one of these. If you're an officer, you have a gold one. If you're enlisted, you have a silver one. We're going to have an inspection tomorrow morning.

So, everybody's, ah, inspection. So we're out there, standing on the grinder. Some guys got it on the right side. Some guys got it on the left side. They have it here. They have it here. They're thinking about putting it on their Dixie Cup, right? But, I mean, nobody knew what to do with it, right? And so this was the original Trident? Original UDT insignia that was different from the seal trident. So the UDT insignia, this is the one that basically that looks the same, but there's no eagle? That's correct.

And so nobody, I mean, seal team had their thing going the same morning, and everybody did the same thing. We just didn't know what to do. And we didn't know what it meant. And so that was it. What year did that happen? Was that after you got back from Vietnam? Yeah, after we got back from Vietnam. So you show up to UDT-13.

You don't get put in a platoon. You just get sent to Sears School. You get sent to Outboard Motor School. You get sent to jump school. There's no one tracking you. There's no one saying like, hey, this is what we're getting ready to do. Oh, they're tracking you because as soon as you get back, you go to another school. So they knew when you were coming back, and then they would immediately go to another school.

Then you just jump on the airplane. But I knew what platoon I was in. I knew who my OIC was and all that. And were those guys already overseas? No, no, they were in the States. So they're shuffling you through all these schools. When you got done with schooling, did you go through any kind of pre-deployment workup? Like I did my whole career.

It was like, oh, you're getting ready to deploy. You get put into a platoon. First you do some schooling like you're talking about, the pro-dev they call it, professional development. So you go to a bunch of schools. Then it's six months of ULT. And then it's six months of the advance post-that. And then you go on to planet.

For use none of that. It was a weekend at Danny's doing ULT. That's how, for people do know what Danes is, is an old-time team bar in Coronado, and that was it. So it was really OJT. And we had, we relied on the guys coming from SEAL team to UDT because there were so many new people and so many, I mean, everybody was an E3, right? because they expanded the teams,

and same with the boat guys, and there was no time for training, and they just wanted to get you in the war because there was 500,000 Americans in Vietnam at the time. So you had to go over there and take the next team's place. I mean, how long was it from when you graduated UDT replacement training to getting to the team, how long did you spend there before you went to Vietnam?

Did you go to Vietnam as a platoon? No, as a team. As a whole team. Yeah, as a whole team. So UDT13. How many guys were there? A total of about 90 to 100. And you're broken up into platoons inside the team?

Just like that. Yes, of course. Same basic. So you all got on a plane? We got on two planes. We got on two DC-6s, and we hedge-hopped Hawaii, Johnson Island. you know, going over.

So a three-day airplane ride. And because we just went from island to island and finally made it to P.I., which was our main mustering base. And then we were dispatched to where we were going to go and from Vietnam from there. But prior to going on that,

getting on that plane with the rest of the team, did you go to desert warfare training? Did you go to, did you guys train over the beach? Did you guys just do hydro recons up at, Camp Pendleton? Like, what did you do to get ready? Yeah, we did some of that, but it was like, for me, it was like a month long. Other guys who had been in a team for a long time got that training because they were there. I wasn't there, and we were short-manned, you know, because they just built that team. So they were drawing, and the beauty of Team 13,

God rest their souls of some of the people who have been in it. But a lot of times, if you wanted to get rid of somebody that was causing a problem, you'd send them to a 13, right? Lucky 13. Yeah, so it was a very esoteric bunch of folks and 13 and a lot of characters. You know what I'm saying? So what platoon were you in at UD-T-13?

I think I was in Bravo, and so it worked out good. Paul Plum's my OAC. So you get on the plane, now you're flying over there. Do you know what your missions are going to be? Don't have any idea. Don't have a clue. No idea what you're going to be doing. Don't know, don't care. Just give me the gun, let's go.

Are you, have you, you know, at one point you were trying to avoid the draft, but now you seems like you're kind of all in, let's go get some? No, but the reason people were avoiding the draft because this army was so pitiful because they were wasting those bodies. Why go, I mean, I don't mind dying, right? Because I never thought I'd last past 29. I mean, I thought if I made it to 30, I'd be an old man. I just had that feeling all my life.

And so, but why waste your life, have somebody pour all that money to bring you up and just kill you for no reason? And why do that? But you're in the teams, you know, the first day I got to the teams, the first muster in the morning and money, I looked at my right and I looked to my left, and it was all a bunch of weirdos like me. I never fit into society. I wasn't a popular guy or an outgoing guy or a well-spoken guy. I was kind of, you know, nobody really wanted me type of guy. You know what I'm saying? And so I get there and I see in my class of 43 or whatever it was people, they're all like me.

I said, man, I found a home. This is my people, huh? I mean, all a bunch of other weirdos. And so now you get to Vietnam, you have no idea what kind of mission you're going to be doing. Well, we knew more or less because we practiced it, you know, especially in training. Training was built around the mission in Vietnam. So we did a lot of hydrography reconnaissance. We did a lot of patrolling.

We did a lot of that so we could pick up those skills, you know. But we were the last class to go into 13, so we didn't have the training that they had before that when they built the team. And some of those guys. I mean, they had been to Vietnam like, I don't know if you wouldn't know. Tobacco Liu, this guy was fabulous, and he was my mentor, and he was just as crazy as a day long. But whenever he said something, you listened to him because he'd been to Vietnam a number of times,

and he knew what he was talking about. So you listened to the voice of authority. So that's what we all did. Lou said it, we did it. So you're training for hydrographic reconnaissance. Yes, sir. You're training for patrolling. Yep.

And you're thinking that. DA patrolling. Oh, for direct action, too. Oh, absolutely. So there's a decent amount of crossover with what the sealed platoons were doing. Yeah. We were the poor man seals. So when they didn't have a mission they didn't like, you know, give it to UDT.

So you show up in Vietnam. Where did you initially go? Tonsanook, then we got on the, oh, I can't remember the name of the ship. It was a destroyer escort, and we did a couple of months of hydrographic reconnaissance. And that was really a good thing for us because we got to gel as a platoon, and everybody learned their place, and we saw who the real warriors were and who to talk to and who to listen. And so that was very good. And so like after the mission, you know, in a debrief, Lou would say things, you know, Posi, what the hell's wrong with you?

What, you're standing at the beach party and you're lollygagging and not looking around and not at the ready position. If the VC come over that berm, what are you going to do? You're right. I was, you know, and so he would straighten us out. He was a great mentor to us because he'd been in Sealed team and a stone alcoholic. but you know he would you you listen to what he said was he your platoon chief yes and you guys are doing hydrographic reconnaissance are you lead line and slate whole nine yards right lead line and so i'll just explain because nobody knows what a hydrographic reconnaissance is so you have a beach

party of four people and so you have two ends of it and in the center and you have a line that could be at least a thousand yards long, and you have it on a big spool. And so you take the spool, and then, depending on the gradient of the beach, every 50 feet or 100 feet, you would have somebody swimming this line down the beach, and you might go 1,000 yards,

you might go, you know, a click, and you would take the lead line, see how deep it went, and write it on your slate, you know, position number one, 50 feet, position, well, you never went over 18 feet. You know, that was 18 to zero was what you're looking at in hydrographic concerts. Then you would take all the slates once you got done with your beach and you'd go back to the ship and you'd make a map of that beach.

So the gradient was at 1,000 yards out. It was 17 feet. So if they have to bring the LSTs in or landing craft, they knew what was going. on. So it was very interesting and really kind of a lot of fun because you would just be swimming, you would have your face in the water all day, you know, just kicking and you usually do two a day. You do a thousand yards in the morning, maybe a thousand yards in the afternoon. So it was a lot of fun. Vietnam's really a beautiful place. I mean, breathtakingly beautiful. And some of the water is just incredibly clear, you know, especially Cameron,

Bay. It's a delight to be in. I mean, it's like being at a resort and getting paid to be at the resort, right? This was the promise you got. Yeah. Maybe he's going to be buying your beer. Were you guys doing mostly daytime or nighttime? Daytime, because you had to see where you sat in the line and keep the line straight so everybody's slate would be correct. Yeah, I did two arg platoons back in the day and we did hydrographic reconnaissance, lead line and slate. I remember we did a ORE, operational readiness exercise before we deployed to Iraq. And my platoon drew the straw to get put on the ship for the pre-deployment training exercise. And, you know, this is, we know, like, this is when you're in Iraq, I'm getting ready to deploy to Iraq.

We know that we're going to take those guys place. Right. And we get put on a ship. And we get, we get this task. He comes down. And I remember I walked down the platoon space where all the guys are, I'm like, all right, boys. get the lead line and slates out it's on and one guy by the name of johnny i won't say his full name but he goes are you kidding me what are we doing we're going to do a hydro i said yep we're doing a hydro

he said he said you got to be kidding me we're going to iraq there are no freaking hydros in iraq 471 miles from the ocean yeah he was going totally nuts and you know what we did we got our lead line and slate out and we went out and did a hydrographic reconnaissance with a flutter board at red beach or wherever it was and took that stuff down, that's that, the Navy still needed that information for whatever reason. I think now they're kind of past. I think now they have...

Electronically. Yeah, they can do it with digital imagery and stuff like that. But that's only, what, 15 or 20 years ago that we were still out there with a lead line and a slate. So that's your first couple months of deployment. You're just getting your hydrographic reconnaissance on. Right. Were you, what position?

Were you the flutterboard man? you were a good swimmer? No, I wasn't a good swimmer. I mean, I can swim okay, but I wasn't the best. My position, a lot of times, we learned then how to adapt, and we had an IBS on board the ship, and we put a 9.9 horsepower motor on the back of that IBS, and we pulled the sea side of it, so the ocean, I mean, the land side, we could pull that line so much quicker by doing that and so much more accurately, and that's what we did, and I was constantly trying to keep that outboard motor running. So that worked out well for our whole platoon.

Yeah, that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to swim that flutterboard. Yeah. So you did that for a couple months. You're out there doing these hydrographic reconnaissance, and what came after that? Then we went into the Delta, and we were off of Antoy, and we'd take swift boats off of an LST, off of an island in the south of Vietnam,

and go in and do patrolling. And that was basically the next four months. We did a lot of patrolling and, you know, tried to do some DA and stuff like that, you know. So what are these operations like? You go in, you get dropped off by the swift boat. Well, first of all, you go in a lot of very narrow canals a lot of times if you weren't in a river. So you would always engage at the beginning.

So you knew exactly where they were going to hit you. So you say, okay, at the point X-rays coming up, everybody could get behind. We had a railing and we had armor, body armor on the railing, you know. And so we would all get behind the body armor on the railing, and they would open up with an RPG or a Claymore or something like that. And we would go a mile past and said, oh, that wasn't that bad today. So is it because you were going through channelized areas and you look at the map and be like, oh, yeah, here's the channelized area. Here's where they're going to get us. Yeah.

And so, I mean, it was very ineffective, but you just kept your head down. No swift boat guys. I mean, they were always being hit. Those guys were really brave guys because they had so many casualties. And they were right there, you know, with the 50s and the 60s and stuff, and letting them have it where we'd be hiding behind it with our M16 pointed out from this side. Okay, we're going to get those VC today. We never saw them.

I'm sure they were on the other canal, you know, with a command detonated Claymore or something, you know? Yeah. What was the goal of these missions? I'd think just to go make sure that they didn't take a big foothole in whatever sector you were in. And we would go to their camp and we would burn the camp down. You know, we'd get some C4 and light it and put it in the hooches, and it would burn down their hooches. and we'd go run their pigs off and stuff like that. And then we would patrol through the jungle.

They had drop us off in the jungle, and we'd patrol through the jungle because they weren't expecting us. You know, at that time, that was right after Tet. So Tet in the United States was very demoralizing because the Army always said, you know, we have this. We have this sector. We have this country.

We're doing better. every day. And then TED happens, this massive battle. And we beat them back, of course, but a lot, especially the Marines up north, really took a beating. And after that, as far as the people here in America, I think were, that that was the end of Vietnam. We knew we were coming back out of Vietnam because they did Tet. And then you go overseas in Vietnam, and the Army didn't want to go. they would tell us all the time. They would say, okay, you guys can go outside of the wire and do your mission or whatever you want to do, but don't expect us to come and, you know, be a QRF because we're probably not coming out to get you,

or if we're due, it might be the next day, right? Because the war, everybody wanted to stay behind the wire because they knew the war was going to be over and they didn't want to be the last man standing. So it was a different attitude, but we were gun-ho. We went, hey, let's rock and roll, baby. Let's do it. You know, let's go. This is our big chance.

And so we would go out, and our officers were very aggressive. The men were aggressive, and we just could do whatever we wanted to do. Of course, we ran it up the pole, so the command knew what we were doing. But it was really good for us because we could catch the VC. They'd be sitting lollygagging, and we'd be walking up to them, and they're over there lollygagging and it wouldn't have any idea that we were coming on them, you know. Nobody was out there. What position did you walk in patrol?

I was rear security. So I like that position because a lot of, in my estimation, and I'm probably wrong here, but I was, you know, I was always cognizant if somebody comes up on you, they're going to usually see you before you see them. So you've got to do a good job because it could be definitely. devastating them coming right up, you know, right up on you. Would most of your patrol, how many guys would you take out on a standard patrol? Usually 8 to 10.

Would you guys, how many M60s would you carry? Did you guys have stoners like they had over on the SEAL team? We were the poor man sealed. So no stoners. I'm just going to talk about the M16 if you don't mind, commander. You know, we got to Vietnam, and we used a variety of different weapons here in training in San Diego. and none I don't remember any M-16s that we used here so we get there and they gave us the M-16 say man this is so much different from those woodstock very very heavy weapons we had you know

and they really work good and they're brand new right out of cosmoline right and so we go on our first first mission and we get everything we're soaked we're everything because we're trooping through the jungle and it's raining and we have to go through these different low spots or full of water and we get the gun wet and we get in a firefight and you have to constantly recharge the weapon because it wouldn't it wouldn't work you know and so we then they had this real thick lubricant that came from the manufacturer of the weapon and they said this is the lubricant to use to keep your rifle but it kind of gummed everything up and so you know after about three of these where the thing didn't work. I went to the armor. I said, dude, you've got to give me

something that works. I don't care what it is. You can give me a six gun because it's better than an M16. I can make it work, right? And so they gave me an M3A1, a grease gun. You know, a little tank, people in tanks in World War II uses cost. General Motors made these guns for $12 and 87 cents each during World War II, right? And they gave me that gun. And only thing, thing you have to do is shake it one time, the water out, and then that thing would work flawlessly. You could come right out of the water, bring it up, give it a little dip, bang, bang, bang, bang. It was a wonderful weapon, and I carried that a lot because it worked every time. So I really like that weapon. It was very negatively buoyant, but it really worked good. What was your opt-tempo like?

I mean, how often were you guys going out on these patrols? You know, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little depending on what was going on and what we had coming down the pipe, you know, what the Navy would task us. We were really some, a lot of times, dependent on the Navy to do something with assets, swift boats or whatever. So sometimes we'd work five days a week, sometimes six, sometimes two. So that's going to lead me to my next point, if you don't mind. So I like to operate, right?

you know, and I like to be busy because I don't like to sit around. So I would volunteer, I'd go to Mr. Plum and say, Mr. Plum, you got to give me a job, man, I can't sit here in this LST or we're on sea float. You know, we're on sea float. It's nasty. And so he said, POSI, I got a deal for you. You're going to go with the Army today. Fine. So what we would do, I would hook up with a second lieutenant. I was 21 at the time, and he was like 20, right? Never been in common. And they given him a platoon of Arvin, right? We had a platoon of 30 Arvin, which was the Vietnamese National Guard. 30 Vietnamese who had little battle experience, if any, and we would go out with them,

and we would patrol with these guys. And we never let them get behind us. Never, ever let them get behind us because you don't know who's the VC and who's not, and you'd get shot in the back. So I would carry the radio. They never let non-English speaking people carry the radio. the radio because you had to have somebody, you know, that people could, one, understand, two, knew that they weren't getting suckered in with some Viet Cong on the radio.

So I would carry the radio, and the lieutenant would be in front of me, and we would be in back of the platoon. And so I like that because, I mean, these guys were slow, and they had no ability to engage the enemy. I mean, we had 30 guys, and if there were six guys. and if there were six guys engaging us, you know, they were freaking out, you know. And so we would kind of round them up and, you know, well, you're going to go here and you're going to go here. And, you know, it was kind of fun.

And one day we were out there with these guys, and they all gave them, you know, they knew there was no VC in the vicinity. So that's the missions that they would give us because these guys were so terrible. And so we went out today and we saw like these 30 guys. giving us the evil eye about, you know, half a click off over the other side of this rice said, Pettie, we got to make it back to the boats because these guys got that evil look on us and they're going to come and get us. And he said, yeah. So anyhow, we're getting these, you know, we're telling these Vs, I mean, these Arvin guys, we got to move. We got to get back. Well, they're kind of lollygagging along and these VCs are coming right up on us, right?

and I say to LT, we better, you know, we better do something. And he said, oh, he was good. I can't find fought with him at all. So we had this battle line there in the Hedgegrove area type, and things got real bad for us. And so I got on the radio and I called a net there, and I said, you know, to the Army guys, is there anybody else that can come and help us?

Do you have any helos or anything out there that can help us. And they said, we got no heloes, but we do have a fast mover coming in on you guys. Will that help you? And he said, does he have anything on board that can light these guys up? He said, oh, yeah, he's equipped with napalm. He said, really? And so through that radio relay, you know, we talked to that guy, and they talked to him,

I talked to them, and I said, okay, we're going to pop the smoke. And on the south side of the smoke, don't let that napalm go on up. us, you know, let it go on those dudes. And they did. And I'd never been around napalm close before because you could always see it in the distance, but never close. And man, it was incredible, the power of the napalm, just absolutely incredible. We were probably 100 feet away, you know, honkered down. We could see him off flying that phantom coming in. And he dropped that napalm and it was just like a blast furnace. And he lit those guys up, and the VC, it lit them up,

and they were still running completely engulfed in flames and liquefied their jelly gasoline. And it was really incredible to see that the power of that weapon. And so then we obviously, as soon as he lit him up, we all ran away and went back to the extraction point. So I'm happy that guy was there because I don't know. It'd probably be me and the LT and the Arvins. At that point, we'd let the Arvans been behind us

because we had have been running full speed ahead through that jungle, right? I mean, it was getting real bad, real fast. How often would you say you came into enemy contact on these operations? I've got some Vietnam friends that were in the SEAL teams. Sometimes they'd say they'd barely gotten any contact with the enemy. other guys different deployments. They got in contact, even Roger Hayden from one deployment to the next. One time he's out there, it's like not too bad.

The next time it's crazy. What was it like for you? No, it wasn't. We weren't seals, and we knew we weren't seals, and we would just go do the missions that the Navy told us to do. So it wasn't like Ramadi. I mean, it was, we'd have contact as far as Claymore's and stuff like that going on in the swift boats, but, I mean, it wasn't at all like what you experienced.

in your battles. Well, I don't know. It wasn't getting chased out by VC and having to drop napalm 100 feet away. But we were lucky on that, though, you know? We were very lucky. How were you, how was your luck with taking casualties? For the Arvin?

No, for your seat? For your UDT platoon. Well, in my platoon, I don't think we had one casualty. And we had a real good OIC. Paul Plum, I don't know if you know him, he was really a good officer and he really looked out for the sailors. So we were really good with that.

And he did, you know, he would see the mission and he would explain the mission and very, you know, most of the guys, we were called knuckle-draggers, right? And so he had to be simple because, you know, we just didn't have the experience of all the stuff that they have now. and so he was really good and we got it and so it just wasn't the opt tempo of seal team one for UDT in most places and then how long were you do it at this was all taking place all those missions were taking place those patrolling missions were taking place out of the the barge some a barge some of the swift boat depending if you were in an tooy antoy was an island and you'd go in and the barge was in the middle of the river, you know, and so we would deploy off of that. And so you did operations off both those? Yes, sir. And how long were you doing those types of operations? So you did a couple

months worth of hydrographic reconnaissance off of the USS, whatever that ship was. Yes. And then, and now you're doing, USS Cook, USS Cook, and now you're doing these type of patrolling operations and, you know, swift boat operations. How many months were you doing that for? I think around four. But every two months you'd have a break and sometimes you'd go back to the PI and regroup and get new guys or do whatever. And then how long was the total deployment? Six months. Okay, so that was, that would pretty much your deployment. Yes, sir.

So you come home from that deployment, what year is it? 69. Yeah, I think 69. And then what was the, what was the Apollo? Oh, that's right. So at what point did you hear about Apollo? Well, when we were getting, you know, nobody wanted to come home. At least most of the guys didn't want to come home because people didn't like you if you're in the armed services.

If you had a haircut like most of us in this room, they perceived you to be a soldier or a sailor and they didn't like you. So I didn't want to come home. I volunteered to stay. And then they said, well, you can go on Apollo. I said, oh, man, I was a history major also in school. and I said, man, this is a time to, you know, if I can be on Apollo, even though it's such a pain, it was a pain in the ass, that I should do this. So they, one day they announced, okay, we're going to do Apollo 12 and 13,

and whoever wants to do it, come and see the XO. So nobody saw them the first day. And so the second day they made, at quarters, they said, whoever wants to be on Apollo, go see the XO. Because we knew the next day you would be voluntold, right? And so for Apollo 11, the first one, you were in Vietnam when that happened, right? We didn't even know what happened because we were out and there was no TV or radio. But that was the big one.

Everybody wanted to go on that one. I knew a couple guys on that, and that was really Wolfram. I can't remember his first name. But he did a really good job on that. They had the good guys on that. But then once it was over, people like, ah, everyone hears what the story is. and sitting around in the ocean for a while, looking up at the sky waiting for these guys to touch down,

being on a ship, wherever you are. So it turned from a good deal to like, hey, maybe we don't want to do that. It wasn't a team deal, right? I mean, it wasn't a good deal for the team guys. So they say, so I go to the XO and I said, okay, I want to go on Apollo, but I want to choose my position on the team. And he says, well, what position do you want to be? And I said, I want to be the first man out the door.

He says, you got it, Posey. So he was lying to me and I know he was lying to me But I thought I had a shot right? Because the first man out the team had his name announced It was literally a billion people looking at TV And even on the second one Because they thought the second one was going to blow up Because it got struck by lightning on the pad

Right? And so So I said, okay, I'm going to be the first guy out the door And he says, yeah. And so then other people volunteered and we did it. So the reason why it was a pain in the butt is because we did it three times a day, morning, noon, and night, cover of darkness, is because we never knew when the capsule was going to come down for sure or not, right?

And you'd go out, and in the first supposed two hours, you'd be on scuba on the surface of the water because they thought there were moon bugs. We didn't know if there was decontamination from the moon. excuse me and so you'd suck that thing I mean I probably sucked that tank dry in 15 minutes but you had to keep it in your mouth on the side

to breathe because you know that was the procedure that's what NASA required and so we would be out there and doing this thing and for the first two hours being on the surface like that with that thing in your mouth

it would make you seasick and so you'd throw up so every all the time before the mission, I would go eat a bunch of saltine crackers because I didn't like dry heaving. I'd rather heave something that was solid rather than just dry heaving. And so you'd be seasick for maybe a half hour, then you'd get over it and, you know, away you went. And the process, for every minute they had, you were supposed to do minute A, minute B, all the way to X, X, X, X, X, X, X, NASA knew what you were supposed to be doing over that four hours and 45 minutes,

and you had to abide by that schedule to do because if you fell behind, they were really mad for whatever reason. And our team was really good, and I think at one time we held the recovery rector on Apollo Tell for doing the fastest one. And the problem with it is the guys land in the ocean, these three astronauts in this capsule that's 12 feet across, and probably 10 feet, oh, not even 10 feet, 9 feet high, right? And they're bobbing there for like an hour on the thing inside of this capsule on their back.

And they come out and there is green. I mean, I don't see anything green on this table. They're this color green when they get out of the capsule because they're so sick-sick because they've been in this capsule with bad air and I'm sure all their sewage problems and all this stuff and they're green when they come out of it. and you want to get them out of that as soon as possible, so, you know, to give them some relief. So it was a very interesting thing.

We had a mock-up, and we practiced on that off of the Hornet, that was the aircraft carrier. We did that three times a day. One time, we couldn't stop the capsule, and the capsule would catch the wind, and it would run. If you got in front of the capsule, it would run you over, just like a lawnmower, right? And go over you about two knots.

And you know, you can't swim two knots. It's impossible. You know, with all the stuff we had to wear, it's impossible at two knots. And so we couldn't stop this. So in our morning exercise, we couldn't stop it. So we went back in the afternoon, and I said, you know, if you drop me right on the capsule, I think, because the first man out the door, there was a D-ring on the side of the capsule, and you would hook this hook into the D-ring

and deploy a parachute to stop the forward progress of this capsule from running over you and running away. You couldn't stop it. So I said, drop me right on the capsule, and I can stop this thing because we had the other team doing it. And I was lucky enough to be able to do it. I'm sure the wind wasn't as great as it was in the morning or whatever, you know. And they said, because they were thinking about firing a 50 caliber,

into it to sink it because it's a navigation hazard. I mean, it's a big piece of iron, right? And we stopped that. And then on the mission day, the seas from trough to crest of the wave were probably 12 to 15 feet. Yeah. And it was really brutal. And it was slapping that capsule around like there was no end. They said, what are those guys going through inside of that capsule? So I jump out of the helicopter that day and they put me right next to it, right? and I go and I can't find the D-ring. I can't find I'm panicked. You know, to my mind, commander, what's worse?

Being somewhere where you're supposed to be competent and you're totally incompetent and you make a fool of yourself, what's worse than that? Nothing. Nothing, nothing. You know, it's like, you know. Especially with a billion people watching. Yeah, that's the one thing that's worse

is have a billion people watch you be in-confident when you're supposed to be competent. It's like the bridegroom on the wedding night. I mean, you want to be competent, right? Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. Yes, you want to be competent. And so I couldn't find it, and I was panicked.

And I didn't know they put a piece of foil over it because the outer layer of the capsule has foil, this gold foil. It's very bright, and it shined in your mask, and it was very difficult to see. So I'm going around tapping the sides of the capsule looking for it, and I finally found it, and I was able to hook it up, and then we went from there. and so it went really good for having such high seas. So the rest of the process, and they said, whatever you do, whatever you do, you do not go and strip the foil off the capsule because they want to analyze.

Capsules like a fiberglass aircraft aluminum, right? And all over the, they have this gold foil, this plastic gold foil. Do not take any of the foil because we have to analyze the situation. when it comes out of the air, we need to know what's going on. So, oh, no, we would never do that, right? We would never do that. So we knew at what point the aircraft carrier, the aircraft carrier takes four miles to turn around, right? And otherwise, they're right on you.

And they got the big, you know, the giant binoculars about that big, and they're looking at you. You know, one of those. Because the NASA guy's always hated us, you know. just like everybody else. And so as soon as the aircraft carrier starts making its turn, we go on the other side of the capsule, and we're stripping this foil off, and we're sticking in our wetsuits, you know.

One for mom. One for mom, one for the girl. I had a girlfriend that played the cello, and I could never get anywhere with that girlfriend. I said, man, this is going to bode me well with this girlfriend. This thing's been to the mood, man. She's getting something. I gave, what is this?

How big was the area that you knew that the capsule was going to touch down in? Well, we anticipated being within four miles. So it was pretty accurate. Pretty accurate. But you never know because they had the aircraft, I mean, excuse me, the Air Force guys in C-130s with the para guys being able to jump out if it wasn't within. Because they knew once it started declares. accelerating coming out of space because it had to go from 24,500 miles down to, you know, five miles an hour. They knew upon a deceleration where it's going to be so we would steam to

that thing. I mean, that carrier was right there. I mean, we saw it come right out of the sky. So that was really that that those mathematicians and the sailors really did did well on that. Yeah, that seems like a that seems like a big challenge. know where that thing's going to be within four miles, going from 25,000 miles an hour through the atmosphere. And then did, so were you the first guy out? You were the first guy out. Did they say your name on?

Absolutely. There we go. And so this is kind of a funny, funny thing here. So my mother was really proud of me, you know, my son, he's going to be. Mom, nobody wanted to do it. I volunteered first. You know, she said, don't tell the neighbors that. You were selected.

As far as mom was concerned, you went through a rigorous selection program to figure out who had the right stuff. That's right. We drew straws and the low man got to go on Apollo because nobody else wanted to go. Do you still have any of the foil? No. Dang it. So my mother knew I was going to be on Apollo and she knew my name was going to be announced, right? And my city.

So we didn't have color TV. My father didn't like color TV. So she says, I'm buying a color TV. I'm going to see my son. So they had all the neighbors in and all the – we had a group of kids that I went to school and college with. And they all came over to my house. And my wife didn't know me, but she came to my mother's house just for that thing. And she says, the first time I saw my husband was a half inch tall.

So that was a big deal. So what happens when you get done with that? What's your next thing in UDT? Then I wanted to go on 13 because I just, I was, you know, my team was really good at this. Okay, we had some great officers, great chiefs, great people doing it. And I wanted to go. And I said, okay, I want to go. They said, well, you're just about done.

And I said, what do you mean I'm done? And he says, well, you got to sign up for another four years to go on this. And I said, four years to go on Apollo? Because they had the Vietnamization. This was a terrible thing, and this is what I see going on in Iraq. They had the Vietnamization of Vietnam. So we turned over all of our assets to the Vietnamese, especially in the very hot sectors.

And we would only go as backup. or support if they were having a problem, you know? And so you could see the end of the war coming, even in 69, the end of the war was coming because these guys were taken over. They were completely incompetent. And so I said, man, are this Team 13 going to make another deployment? Probably, you know, but what's it going to be like? Were you just going to be sitting, you know, watching Victory at Sea movies somewhere

and not really going out and doing a lot? And so I just got out. up for that other four years. Did you stay in the reserves? Was there a reserves at the time? The Navy, the real Navy reserves. So just big Navy reserves? Yeah, big Navy reserve.

And you went to a diving unit or something. And is that what you did? You stayed in the reserves? And then they, Admiral Bonelli was instrumental in getting the other, the UDT seal reserves going. So then when they did that, I joined that. But then I got.

real busy and I dropped out of that for a while. What did you do when you were in the reserves and now you're reentering the civilian world? What did you do? School. What'd you go to school for? Anything I can get as quick as possible because I was 24 years old and I wanted to get out of school because my contemporaries were very young and I just wanted to get out. So I tried to jam through that as quick as I could. And what did you get a degree in? History and then a minor in business. And then what'd you do? Well, one of the, actually, before school started, I hitchhiked around the world. So at that time, you could hitchhike around the world, and I wanted to see the world and see what was going on, you know?

And so we started in L.A., and we got, in those days, you could get a car, and if you drove it to New York, they would pay for the gas. So it was free because we only had $1,200 to go around. world. It was a service. Instead of transporting it, they let people drive it across. It's like an early form of Uber. Yeah, yeah. It was you drive Uber, right? So we got in this car and this car was a brand new, God, what was it? Something British, right? And it could go good. Oh, like an MG or something? No, no, it was better than MG. I can't remember what it was. But it was small, but it was really fast. Triumph? Maybe a triumph? So, no, it was something pretty nice.

I can't imagine a worse decision than someone getting Bill Posey straight out of a freaking fast British car to drive across country. And gas money. Free gas money. This is bad decision. No wonder this kind of Uber didn't work out. Dude, you ruined it. So we get this car on like a Friday afternoon, and you have to call the guy and say,

okay, we're leaving Los Angeles right now. we'll be there maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, right? So 49 hours later, we get to New York City, and we call the guy, and they said, hey, we're here. He said, you're here. 49 hours to go 3,000 miles? Well, we left, we really left earlier than Friday, right? And we were literally going a lot, 100 miles an hour across the nation.

And at that time, you could really go, right? And so then we just got on an airplane. At that time, the cheapest airline was Icelandic airline, but you had to spend three days in Iceland. So that was cool, right? Who are you with? Oh, my travel friend, a guy that I'd known for 10 years. He was really a great guy.

Just another guy from Linwood that you grew up with? Yeah. He was really, he's a big dude, and that worked out well for us because hitchhiking could be a little iffy at times. And then we got to wherever we pulled, wherever we pulled in Europe, but they had a real late winter, and we didn't have any winter clothes, so we only stayed in Europe for like a month, and then we went down to Israel, and if you

wanted to work in Israel, so we went and got a job at a caboots in Israel for three months, so that was really good. What were you doing there? Just working on this caboots, and I was a beekeeper, and so they made me a beekeeper, and then a painter, and so we were doing that, and they paid us $5 a month, and they paid us $5 a month and free room and board. But that was cool because then we could see all the sites in Israel because I always wanted to go to Israel, right? And pay. And at that time, you could hitchhike all over Israel. Anybody would pick you up. And let's say you're going from Haifa where we were

down south to, you know, the Dead Sea or whatever. You could do that. It was really good. And we left there and just started hitchhiking across the world. Is this like 1970 or so? Uh, 71. Yeah, 71, I think. Yeah, and what's the, when you're, when you're home from Vietnam, and, you know, you're talking about earlier, you know, people are, they think you're a soldier, they're looking down, and did you feel that once you got back? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really had regret that I didn't stay in the military because, you know, the people wouldn't have anything to do with you. Of course, as soon as you got out, you let your hair grow a little longer, you know, and so that you fit in more rather than, you know, not having any hair. So that kind of mask what was going on.

But, I mean, you know, the hippies were just plain, you know, nasty. I mean, the thing I hated about it, they had dirty knees and dirty elbows. They didn't take shower all the time, and they stunk, and they smelled like marijuana. I mean, it was really nasty, you know, and the way. women were, I mean, they didn't keep themselves up. It was, it was bad. So I had no inkling there that I wanted to be a hippie. I just didn't. I don't get any inkling that you were much of a hippie either. Nobody wanted to be a, well, none of my elk wanted to be a hippie, right? So, so how long did this, uh, did this hitchhiking scenario last? About 10 months. It took us 10 months to

go around the world. Did you keep going, did you keep heading east after you got to Israel? Oh yeah. hitchhiked across, well, that time you couldn't go to an Arab country after Israel, so you had to go to Cyprus, and from Cyprus to Turkey, then we just started hitchhiking in Turkey, and made it across Afghanistan, and then through India, you know, and we could make it to Bangladesh. Well, Bangladesh was East Pakistan at the time. They didn't have Bangladesh, because a lot of countries change, you know, since then. And we made it there. Then we had to get on an aircraft because we couldn't go across Burma and you know go we did go to Burma spent a couple of days there then to Japan and back to the States sometimes you either had to fly or be on a ship because you can't hitchhike in the water right

and did you feel like at the end at the end of that that you had sort of gotten your fill of and seen what you wanted to see yeah and for that sector yeah but you know I really I always we did a west pack, you know, with UDT. So we saw, you know, China, which is Hong Kong at the time and Japan and stuff. So, you know, but then the next year I went to school and then we took the summer off. We got student loans to travel in the summer, not to go through school because we had the GI Bill, right? And so got student loans and we hitchhiked to Chile and came back with a three-month period. So that was good. What are you doing when you're in Chile? What are you doing, for instance?

We're just hitchhiking and seeing what's going on with the people, because then you travel with the people and you really see what's going on. You really see, rather than being on an airplane, you see their motor transportation and what they eat, and, you know, we never had a problem. Never had a problem. You said you did a Westpac with UDT.

When was the Westpac with UDT? No, that was during Vietnam. I mean, that was called a Westpac. Got it, got it. Yeah. And being on board ship for that two months, We did sailing too. So then you do this trip.

Now you get back to California. Yeah. And now you got to like grow up kind of. Well, no. Then I had a very serious major in college. It was beer and women. And so I was, I excelled. Where'd you go to college when you got back?

Orange Coast College in Orange County. And you continued to study history? Is that what you studied? Yeah. Because it was the quickest way of getting out of college. And you just wanted to get out and get some kind of a job. Just wanted to rock and roll. That's right.

Just go get some kind of work so I can make money. Then what? Was it two years? Did you finish college? No, it was actually what I had to start over because I took a lot of stuff that wouldn't transfer to an academic major because I took a practical art with auto mechanics. But then it took me like a year and a half to get out of junior college

and another year and a half to get out of, you know, Big boy college. And then what happened? Then I went to work. I went to work for machinery manufacturer. Then I got back into the reserves. What year did you get back in the reserves? Oh, geez.

Maybe 75, I think they, you know, I told you earlier that I had COVID real bad and I lost part of my memory. So I have hard time with dates and names. I just can't remember what it was. I mean, that might not have anything to do with COVID. It might do the fact that it's 40-something years ago And you didn't really care at the time You're like, hey, I'm going back in the reserves and whatever Yeah, it's funny

I find myself, I can't remember sometimes what platoons I was in Because people like, I did this platoon, this platoon, I'm like, oh yeah, what platoon was that? I kind of forget sometimes when it's like your whole life For a year and a half as your platoon And I'm like, what kind of idiot am I that I don't remember What platoon I was in? I can usually back, but deconstruct what it was and figure it out.

So you go back in the reserves and but when you're back in the reserves, are you part of the UDT reserves? Yes, they started it then, whenever that was. And then what are you doing? One weekend a month? Yeah. And you're going down and drinking beer and doing the future reconnaissance. No, I mean, it actually looked, UDT really cleaned up because then they saw what

SEAL team did. That cut the way for us. So we would do more SEAL team things than we would do UDT because UDT was a thing of the past. So that was really good. And so we did that. I did that. And then, you know, I don't know how many years I did that. Then I got out for a while. Then I came back in like 86 and came back into reserves. And then, you know, it was, you know, that was really good. And then the, I know, I know, when that book, Nevaal mentioned that when the first Gulf War kicked off, you rogered up and said, hey, send me.

What happened with that? Well, I wasn't fully qualified on a couple of things, and so they wouldn't send me. And so, you know, that was cool, and that just made me work harder to get up to speed on everything. So it just didn't work out. But, you know, what can you do? I mean, if you don't have those qualls, you don't have those qualls. Like what calls? Didn't you have, like, dive soup or something?

Yeah, I mean. Just like the standard kind of seal leader calls. Yeah, just stuff like that because I got in a year before. But I kind of evolved. I was 40 years old, I think, at the time. I can't remember how old I was. And you know you're not going to run and gun like these studly dudes right here, right? You're not going to do it because you can't do it, right?

No matter how much you work out. you know and so I said you know I really have to find my place and see where I'm an asset and so the training department was really good for me because there was a big paper push there and I got to work in training and then I got to go to a lot of places I could volunteer I would volunteer for 30 to 60 days a year to go to exercises to support the teams so that was really good for me, you know? And so I learned a lot because of that. What do you remember about when, you know, UDT 13 got decommissioned and then UDT 11 and 12 sunsetted and became Seal Team 3 and 83? So were, were you still in the reserves at that time? No, I wasn't in. And so that I did,

I missed that process. And then, of course, the funding and I don't know because I wasn't there, but that's what I think happened. The funding process and the leadership process went from the Navy, from Big Navy, to Socom. And so I'm sure people listening to this that live that will find fault with me on my facts, but it was a different world. The Navy, you know this. Team guys wear thin very quickly, right? Very quickly. Wear out are welcoming me? Yeah, yeah. Wear it out. And you have to really protect yourself against that because then the other units won't work with you. And if they won't work with you, you can't do it by yourself. Yeah. Yeah, well, we definitely learned that lesson over time of just getting,

working with your counterparts and giving them the support that you can give. Absolutely. Because then they'll support you back. Right. So after the first Gulf War where you got denied, but then you realized, all right, I got I figure out how I can help, what I can do, and you stay in the reserves for the next 10 years. And then September 11th happens. Yes.

Where were you in September 11th? September, I was actually going to go to work for the boats and help promote their recruiting. Okay. And so that was on the 10th of December, I mean 10th of September. And so I was going to go work with them like at a DOD job to help promote that or be an active reservist. They hadn't worked it out. So then they said on the 10th, they said, don't calm down because we're not using it. We'll give you a call the next week and tell you because we don't have your funding appropriated yet.

And so in the 11th, my friend calls me and he says, have you watched the TV? And I had worked all night because I was flipping houses, right? and I worked out all night on this one property, and I went home, and he calls me to 8 o'clock in the morning. He says, you seen the TV? And I said, no. He says, get down and watch a TV. So that's where the towers, he said.

So I call the unit, and I said, hey, I'm available. What's going on? Don't come because the base was, were you in at that time, Commander? I was actually going to college. The Navy had me in college at that time, and I was doing the same thing. I was calling my detailer and saying, hey, sir, I'll quit college right now. finish this stuff later. I don't care. And you know, I had this conversation with him. It was, it was Admiral Pibis. And I had worked for him before, and he was an awesome boss. Yeah, he's a great

and, and when September 11th happened, I called him and said, hey, I'll do anything, you know, send me back to Steel Team. I don't need my degree. I'll do my degree online, whatever. And what's cool is, you know, I think I'm, you know, being all default aggressive and stuff. But I talked to him a couple years ago. Actually, I talked to him and his wife. And guess what? Every guy that wasn't at a team was calling up saying, hey, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go.

That's the community. It's everyone wanted to go fight. That's what we do. The World War II guys are caught. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So you call up and what they tell you?

Don't come to base? Don't come to base. It's a lockdown, but come because they could activate. me on reservist orders, because I knew it was going to happen because we had some of those same problems in Vietnam here, and so I'm good at making little things happen, and so I went down there, I think, on a Friday. I think 9-11 was on a Tuesday, I just can't remember, and so then I went down there that Friday, and then went to Group 1 and started working some issues that they had, especially activating reservist.

Yeah, because all of a sudden we needed to man up all kinds of positions. A lot of positions. And the team positions that team guys didn't want to do. And rightfully so, but it was good to get the reservists back in to that line of fire so that they could, you know, because you got to get it on, you know, I mean, it takes a while to get up to speed. So the war kicks off in Afghanistan. At what point did you get?

on the freaking launch pad to go to Iraq. How old were you at that point? 2003 is when you went? No. I think I wouldn't. Either 2002 or 2003. I can't remember. But before the war, just before the war started.

So what happened is I'm there working for group and I would, a great guy that I really, really loves, Jimmy Barron, Master Chief Barron, I don't know if you remember him, sir. Master Chief Barron was working on the DPVs. They actually pulled them out of storage. A DPV is a dune buggy looking thing with a, is it a 50 or 60 on the top? I can't remember, right?

I think it could be either one. Yeah. You could go either way on that. Like being, no, I shouldn't say that. A little joke, but I'll refrain there. And so he pulled those out of storage, and he was really good. good wrench turner. I mean, he was fabulous. He was a guru. And so I asked him, I said, you know, I'm here at group. Can I support you guys? And he says, well, you can't do it during a day,

but you can come at night. And so I went there a bit to help them because they were trying to push that stuff out the door before Christmas, right? And so I go down there and I'm turning a wrench there at like three o'clock in the morning saying well it's about we have to be back here at six it's about time we went home you know that type of thing baron is a great guy in this whole i think there was nine guys involved with baron on those three or four dpvs maybe it was more and so i got to work with them because i wanted to go forward right so my boss at group one i said they they had as soon as we come on board they have a thing in the car conference room they said okay who wants to go forward who wants to go to the war everybody raises

their hand and my my civilian boss he looks at me and he says posy he says you're too old you're too fat you're too stupid you're the last guy we're going to send we're going to send you we're going to slim the cleaning lady before we're going to send you I said no you're not you're going to send me he says no way in hell okay and I said yeah you're going to send me he was why was I arguing with my boss, right, to have him do me a favor and send me overseas, right? Who would do that? I was stupid. And so... So he was right. Yeah. So he says, no, we got a lot of work for you to do. We got to push all these guys out because, you know, the reserves at that time weren't really, we had kind of a looser type of reserve unit and they weren't deployed that often. So, so, so. So,

Some of them had ID cards that weren't current. I mean, there was, you know, and their wills were from three wives back in 1972, you know, and you had to bring all that a mountain of paperwork that usually took four or five days. And we were trying to facilitate these guys through the system to get them out the door, you know, and to get them, you know, just basic training, because we didn't do a lot of chemical training, basic chemical training and all that kind of thing. So I was doing that, and I was working. DPVs at night and finally Master Chief Barron leaves the 20 I think it was the 26th of

December and and so I said man I was really hoping I could go with those guys so anyhow they have like a couple of weeks later they said we need somebody to go over to there to help service vehicles on Humvees because we never had a lot of Humvees we never had a lot of vehicles and CEL team, especially there was no up armor, no armor. And they were put Lien HUMVs out of the surplus storage from the Army. I mean, they were just thrashed, right? So I said, you know, I'm really good mechanic. I never opened a hood of a Humvee, right?

Didn't have a clue. I said, I'm really a good mechanic, and I think you should send me. They look at me. That's 56 years old, right? So eventually because they couldn't find anybody better than me, which was the first rung of the ladder, I mean, they said, okay, you're going, you're going over and you're going to work on these Humvees. I said, well, what are we going to do about tools? And they said, well, Barron has all the tools and he has all the stuff. But everybody knows in any given wartime situation that you don't, whatever you need the most, you never get.

I mean, if you need that special gun or whatever it is, it never shows up, right? So I go to Harbor Freight and I buy this gigantic box of tools because I know that those, you know, those assets aren't going to be there. And so I took my box of tools and they hadn't got their tools, all their tools, and they're coming over to borrow. They had all snap on stuff, you know, with a snap on shirt and, you know, the $10,000 box, just the box alone was. $10,000. I got my harbor freight, 298 Crescent Wrench, right? And so, Possey, could we, we really need a number 11 metric end wrench. You got? Of course I got it. So they sent me over, and they had these Hylux Toyotas that they were going to use on the initial invasion, and they put winches and all kinds of different stuff on them. But the Hylux shows up, but all

other stuff's not put on. So that was my, I think the first couple of weeks that I was putting on all the stuff to the Hyluxes to get them out. And then we had a lot of servicing of Humvees and all that and a lot of reorg stuff. And so then they were looking for people to go forward. Who's going to go in this position? Me. God, come on. Come on. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Jeez, Louise. And so I'm stuck back at the base and I'm doing different stuff that I really don't like to do, and I'm listening to see when a chance of me going forward.

What's the need? What kind of talent that I have? Because I think most of us, Marine Corps and different facets of society, we have a place in society. Like I'm not a leader at all. I'm a follower, but I'm a real good follower. The commander's intent, I want to hear the commander's intent. then I want to explore with the commander what that intent is.

I want to know what it really means. Because sometimes the words don't convey what that person really thinks. I want to know how I can support that person any way possible. You know, what's his real meaning? What's those words coming out of his mouth? How can I help? If I can make my sailors have whatever they need and they're happy, and then secondary that if I can make my boss look good

and then the Navy look good, then it's cool, right? It's cool. I mean, everybody's cool because they want you around. Then if you get, they say, well, who did this? And they say, Posey did it. And so it was a good thing, right? I mean, you know, you did this right or whatever. And I say, no, no, no.

No, it wasn't me. It was my two subordinate smucketele. and Giradelli here. So I always try to defer that or push it back to my boss because that's what makes you valuable and if you need a favor sometime, those people will come forward.

And I learned that in Vietnam. When we would go to these different places, they would leave like flags and pictures of different things and China and pottery. Then we were able to take those assets, to the guys that were on the Navy bases, and if we needed cases of sea rats at the time,

or would you guys mind you're unloading all this beer out of this ship, and would you guys mind pushing a pallet of this beer off the dock and let it fall into the water, and then we'll retrieve it, and I'll trade you this Viet Cong flag with genuine Vietnam blood. They didn't know was pig's blood, with a couple bullet holes that we shot in the parking lot. We would really appreciate that, you know. So we could barter our way in Vietnam because we had no money.

We had no assets. We could barter our way into different things. And then I knew because so many people hadn't been to the war since Vietnam. Well, they did, of course, they did the 96-hour war. And they did other little wars, but they didn't have a supply trade. I knew that I could be valuable there securing assets for my team. We only had 44 guys originally in Baghdad. So before I went, I went on the Internet, and I should have bought 12.

I bought six Iraqi flags, and I took them with me, and then I took $550 of cash of small bills and another $500 in large bills, because I knew that as soon as we won, that the currency would be no longer valid, and that you'd be. you could buy that currency at a bargain rate and be able to do something with that currency, right? And so when the war started, I mean, when the war ended, as far as George Bush calling it off, nobody knew what to do with the currency. So before it was like a 16 to 1 ratio with Iraqi currency for the American dollar, and then by the time Bush called the war off, it was in limbo, and you could do a thousand to one.

You could literally buy, I turned my $550 into Iraqi dinar, and I could buy a box of money, a box of money, okay? And so, but there was nothing to buy. Yeah. There's nothing to buy. The sanctions really worked in Iraq. There was nothing to buy. And so I had all this money, and I had the, I brought the flags, and I was trading because we don't have in SEAL team when I got to Iraq. we don't have a logistics tale, right, at that time.

Now we have a logistics tale. They got so much smarter. But we didn't, I was the logistics tale. And as soon as we get, we went. Real quick. So you were in Kuwait when you were preparing to go. Yes. They're saying, hey, we need someone to, so the troops push up into Baghdad.

Yes. You're still in Kuwait. Finally, they go, look, we need someone to help us up there. We got vehicles to maintain. We've got to build a base. They're looking around. They keep looking past you, and finally they freaking got no choice, but the said old man up there to go get some.

I'm the last fish in the barrel, right? So what do you? Do you jump on a helo and fly up to Baghdad International Airport? Or did you drive up? No, no, no. So they tell me, I was at the team area in Kuwait. Now, as a team, you could hitchhike real easy, though, and it was really quick. I love hitchhiking because you meet a lot of interesting people.

But anyhow, I have my own vehicle because I'm like the, the go-to guy to get things done for whatever, you know, little things. You know, somebody's got this or they need that or whatever. So they tell me at five minutes after one, in Kuwait, they said, you have to be at, help me with the name of the air base. Byap? No, Al-Assad. El-Assad.

You have to be at the Al-Assad by 2 o'clock, and you're getting on an airplane, and you're going to Baghdad, and they're going to. to drop you off there at Baghdad, you and Barrett. I said, dude, it's five minutes after one. And it's like 70 miles. How, in Iraq, I mean, in Kuwait, how the hell am I going to, he says, you've got to be there. Get in your car and go. Shut up. So I get in my car and I got this rental car. I'm going literally 100 miles and now. We're down the Iraqi, I mean, the Kuwait freeway. Luckily, they didn't stop me. And I get there at 10 minutes, no, it's 12 minutes to 2. and I tell Barron

Barron, get your stuff and we're going to a wreck. He said, Posie, what do you got me into? I said, I got things going here. I can't. I said, I showed him the orders. I had a set of orders for him. He said, oh my God, you dumbass.

And so we throw all the stew I get my toolbox and throw it in there and we're just jamming stuff in this rental view. And we get there, we get to the C-130 at one minute to two, okay? One minute to two. And the guy's looking at me, the crew chiefs look at me, he said, what are you doing?

I said, we got orders. Here's our orders. He said, yeah, you got orders. We know who you are. I said, well, what's going on? Let's go. He says, zero 200. Zero, 200.

Too much time in the civilian world for you, huh? No, but they told me two o'clock. No, they said, you got, I mean, oh my God. So we go back and we pack our stuff and we actually put underwear in our sea bag and the whole thing, right? And so we're there. And so we thought we're going to go to biop, right, to Baghdad, Internet, Saddam Hussein International Airport, right? And so these guys get us in there and they go on the red light in the aircraft. They said, well, what's going on?

Where are we going? He said, well, we're going to a road about 40 miles outside of Baghdad to meet your guys. I said, really? And they have this pallet of stuff in the aircraft. And I said, okay, sounds good. We're going in, no lights, no nothing. We're going to be on this highway outside of Baghdad, right? Me and Jimmy Barrett.

Posey, I'm going to kick your ass. Because the guy's been to, you know, a ton of stuff. I mean, he's, it's like talking to Michael Jordan. That's Master Chief Barron, right? I mean, he's the man, right? The man. And dumbass worn offer Posey is telling him what to do. So we get there and he says, okay, we're going down.

We're going to go into this highway. We're going to turn around and we're going to do a five and five on you. And I said, really? I said, you got this, you know, I said, okay, well, you're going to ride the palate out, right? I said, okay, good. So we jump on this pallet Well, it wasn't a 5 and 5. They were actually on the deck, right?

And they let us out of this aircraft and we were going about 20 miles an hour, but we just rode the pallet out. And our guys, and we have all this ammunition and all this stuff that they needed. And so we immediately head over to this hedge and just sit there for about a half hour, and our guys eventually, they knew we were there,

but they were afraid that some, you know, the Iraqis were going to get on, And so then we go the next day, we go in on these six-bys to Baghdad, and we go along the road, and people are clapping. We love George Bush. We love George Bush. Really? They love George Bush.

I mean, all along the highway, they're telling us that. I said, my God, I should have took a picture of that because they didn't love us after a couple of weeks, right? So we go to buy up. There's nobody there. So we go to Al-Lundi Palace, no, the first, I'm sorry, we go to the CIA headquarters, the Iraqi CIA headquarters, and we're mustering there for a day or two. So we get in there, and what they did is they used a J-dam, and they collapsed the six-story Iraqi CIA headquarters down, they panicked it down to two sections of the building that survived. And so there was cordite and concrete dust everywhere, and it was very hard to breathe. And so we go in there, and I said, you know, we ought to go, we ought to go to these offices.

The top offices should be a head dude in the Iraqi CIA, right? The head guy has the top office. We had to go see what we can see. So we make our way through all this construction stuff, destruction stuff, and we go to the top office, and it's Uday's office, right? And so I opened a desk drawer of Uday's office, and he's got these chrome sunglasses that like Elvis wore, right? I said, and the guy I was with, the chief that I was with, he grabs his glasses, and then he had on his desk a picture of him in these glasses. And so he grabs that. And he says, okay, which one do you want?

I said, I'll take the glasses. and he says, okay, so he takes the picture and I take the glasses, so I got Uday's glasses. So we stay there a couple of days, and then I go out that morning that we're supposed to leave because I wanted to make sure the vehicle was serviced and ready to go, because we had gasoline, we had ammunition, we had mortars, we had all kinds of stuff on this six-by truck, and I think we had three or four vehicles. So I'm up in the cab of this truck, making sure everything's in, and I have my bayonet that I had in Vietnam,

and I'm sitting in the seat like this, and my bayonet gets stuck in this MTVR truck there, and then they start shooting at me. You know, and it's just, I mean, it's 5 o'clock in the morning. The sun just come up, and they're shooting at me, right? I say, man, I've got to get out of this truck because it could go, you know. If they hit the gasoline, God knows what's going on.

So I'm trying to get out of this truck, and I'm trying to push this stupid bayonet over inside, and I'm pulling on pulling. And I go out the side of the truck and I didn't see this covert right here. And I go, I do the big crash. I got my weapon across my chest

and my battle rattle. And man, it's killing me. It's killing me. And so I get out of there and I walk back there and, you know, whatever. And we go, then we go to Alrundi Palace and we said, well, the army's going to come in here to buy op and they're going to run things because they're the 800 pound gorilla,

right? They're always the 800 pound gorilla no matter where we go. We shouldn't, the commander's making this decision. We should go find another place because we don't want to get kicked out once we start improving it. So we go down to the servants quarters and they have some nice little buildings there, but they burn out some of the buildings and they stole all the air conditioning and the wiring and the walls and everything. And so we go in there, and that's our camp Cheney Posi, right? It wasn't Cheney Posi at the time.

And so we go there, it's Neptune, Trident, you know, every SEAL team named it known to man. So we start improving that camp because we know we're going to have a lot of people laid on in that camp, you know, just not the 18 that we originally started with. So we go to this camp and we start improving it. And I don't know if you know Ranger, I don't want to say his last time. Yeah, I know. Okay. I'll call him Ranger, right? And this guy's a master.

I mean, so we're in biop, and we're the only people in biop. And there's some little, you know, skirmishes and stuff out of town, but there's not a whole lot going in. So we're going to biop and we're going to the Army. And it's like being with us a rock star. People are saying, I mean, he's driving this Humvee, right? John, John, we haven't seen you since Grenada. John, we haven't seen you since Panama. How are you doing?

I mean, the guy's a rock star there in the Army, right? I said, man, I'm happy that I know this guy. And so we do that. Then people start coming in, and we had a real good opt tempo to begin with. The SEAL team was really kicking ass. Okay? We had great commanders, great platoon chiefs. I mean, everybody, I mean, because we thought the war might be a 90s.

six-hour war like it was the first Gulf War. So we want to get as much experience as possible, right? Yeah. Little did we know we'd be there 22 years later, 21 years later. So we're there improving the camp and this, and we're there one day, and we have a morning meet at 8 o'clock with everybody in the camp. And John comes in, and he says, he's swearing, and he never swore. He never swore, and he's sworn. He says, I'm so sick of this. He tells the commander right there, I'm so sick of this, we're changing the name of this camp. Nobody knows where this camp. We've changed the name of this camp 15 times since we've been there. The Army doesn't

know where they changed the name, you know, we're naming this camp, Camp Bill Posey. And I look at him, I said, are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind? Only dead people or very courageous people have a seal a seal team camp named after him. Are you crazy? He says, no, we're doing that.

We're announcing it at the meeting tonight. I said, John, don't do that. Just let me have time to think about it. So as soon as the Army came in, they cut us off, our opt-tempo. We had no operations going because they were afraid of us, right?

They wanted to homogenize everything and make everything happen the way they wanted to happen. And rightfully so, because they're going to swing. It probably won't be us, right? So I go to the morning meeting, the mayor's meeting, and I said, hey, I got some great news. We're going to rename our camp after an Army person

because SEAL team has the greatest respect ever for the Army. And we love what you guys are doing here at Biop, and we think we want to honor you. And people say, Pousie, what are you talking about? Sit down, you dumb ass. I said, no, no, we want to do this. And they said, okay, no problem. So I go back to my guys and I say, okay, let's name the camp.

I had to name it after an Army person, right? And it was either Audie Murphy or my daughter, who was a J-R-O-T-C cadet at UCLA. UCLA? Yeah. So we're going to name the camp either. Eddie Murphy or my daughter who's a ROTC cadet, a thing. So he said, okay, we're going to name it after your daughter. So we named the camp, Camp Jenny Posey, right?

So that was very, and I can't believe, I mean, John coming in there and saying that, and people going along with it, why would he do that? I just, I never figured that out, but it worked, and it was really nice of him and nice of the command to allow that to happen, because I did. not deserve it. I'm not Mike Monsour or any of those other very courageous dudes and I wasn't dead yet. So I thought that might be some bad juju. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, it was awesome. I ended up spending six months at Jenny Posey in 2003, 2004. And what was cool was, and there's a classic picture of this and I'll find it and get it posted somewhere. But the, you know, we go out,

do our operations and we'd go out for however many hours or days we'd be out for. And when you get back to camp, there was a big sign on the camp door. And it was a pretty good selection for the space because we could we could shut this big giant gate. And it would just be no, there would be no one on there but us. But you guys made this big giant sign that said, welcome home to Camp Jenny Posey. And it was just an awesome site when you'd come back no matter what happened out there. you'd come back, you'd see that big sign and be like, all right, we're good to go.

So that was the way it should be. And it's a pretty freaking legendary situation to have. It was different. So how long did you end up staying there in Iraq? Because you ended up getting hurt, something happened to you? Well, when I jumped out of the truck, I didn't know it at the time, but I broke my back. But, you know, I went to the army that day when we pulled in. to buy up and I said man you guys got to give me something because my back is killing me and the guy

says okay let me examine you and so he says you don't have a medical record so I got an MRI box and put medical record Bill Posey here it is here's my medical record right and he says well I'm going to send you back to Germany and I said no you're not you're not he says yeah you got your medical record here and I'm going to send you back I took that medical record and I walked out of there and he was lucky I got some pills, some pain pills before that. So that knocked it down. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't terribly debilitating. So it worked out. So did you roll out on any ops with the boys? Oh yeah, I got to do 30, I think. But, you know, being 56 years old, of course, you know, well, grandpa's here. And he's going to, you know, he doesn't have all of his teeth, but, you know,

But, you know, it's always in the C2 unit, you know, the backup. So if something happened, at least we could get the squatters, you know, and all that and at least take care of them. Or if we had to, you know, go help those guys in a QRF situation, we were always available, you know. So that was good, you know. I really enjoyed that. I really appreciate them allowing me to do that. I don't know if I'd have been an asset or a deficit, you know.

So well I could tell you though you know the having the vehicles out there you never know when something's going to go wrong with a vehicle Yes sir and to not have a good Mechanic there to ready to get those things up and running and like you said those those Humvees that we had because we got those Humvees turned over it up us we showed up a couple months after you left Same those things were beat down hand-me-downs You know scavenged Marine Corps hand-me-dance I believe they came out of the Marine Corps some of them were C we got some from some C-B some We got some some reservists somewhere canvas somewhere canvas doors. I mean they were a total disaster

But you guys got them up and running and we kept we know we kept working on them and we know what was awesome was it didn't take very long Like you said the seal teams not only do we not have vehicles But prior to this we didn't have any vehicle procedures either we didn't we didn't know anything We just we would we actually thought that vehicles It was kind of a joke in the seal teams if you got inserted by a vehicle. We called a a a helo truck Right. Meaning, hey, we're just pretending this as a helicopter, but we don't really have one. We didn't realize that this is going to be our primary mode of transportation is going to be the Humvee.

Not even the DPVs or any of these high-speed vehicles for a solid three years there in the middle. It was a Humvee and that was it. That's what you were getting. And not up armored. Oh, yeah. Yeah, not up armored. At least not in the beginning. No, not in the beginning.

And we ended up doing Mad Max kind of things. We'd end up with finding the bulletproof steel. Eventually, we'd put that on various parts of the Humvee to try and protect you as much as you're good. Yeah, the first few months we were there, we had turned the seats in the Humvees to face outboard so that our body armor would be facing outward and we could sit there and scan. But, I mean, it was because we took the canvas door with what the good is canvas going to do. Not going to do you any good at all. So we did what we could, but what was really impressive, not only do we get the vehicles up to speed and then we were doing all like the NASCAR drills of figuring out how to change tires really quick and rigging for toe, all those things. We rigged all that stuff up, all the navigation systems, which we got from this, the civilian sector of, you know, just taking a GPS and coupling it with a portable computer.

And so we'd have the live feed GPS going in there. It's all stuff that we just figured out. And then all the actual immediate action drills, we did all that within a very short period of time because, and it's one of the strong points of the SEAL teams and one of the weak points of the SEAL teams. one of the weak points of the seal teams is we didn't really have any standard operating procedures for a lot of things. There's no manual. Like in the Army, you can pick up a manual and it will show you how to conduct a raid. You can pick up a manual can show you how to conduct a reconnaissance. It can show you how to conduct an immediate action drill in the city. In the urban environment, in the rural environment, you can pick a manual to find all those things. And in the seal teams, we didn't have that. It was all passed down word of mouth over years.

And so you couldn't just pick up a manual and say, oh, refer to the manual on this. That's a disadvantage because it's nice to have somewhere to start from, but it's an advantage because our minds are very flexible and very good at problem solving. And that turns out to be advantageous when you get tasked with a mission that there is no manual for. And that's what we're able to do with working out of vehicles. And we ended up being extremely proficient in vehicle operations very shortly after we started doing them for the first time. pretty that's one of the best things about the seal teams open minds and flexibility you know and i from my perspective it's more than that that the guys that go into seal team and it's got its good points and it's bad points just like you said commander but they're a different breed of people and i i

really believe that that they can make things happen i mean guys just come out of the blue and say yeah we're going to do this and we have this process and it's a legitimate process and it works I mean what a gift from God you know it's a gift from God the way a lot of SEAL teams socially they're weird but you put him in the battle situation am I not right you're right socially there's weird as a day as long yeah yeah oh oh he's coming I'll give an example that We had a Medal of Honor winner. Well, before he was Medal of Honor, the team bar was the trade wins. And he'd go the trade wins at 4.30, getting off work.

And you'd walk in the door and he had this screen in front of the door. You'd walk in the door and see this one guy sitting at the bar. You would immediately go down around the screen, go out, because you knew there was going to be a fight in like 15 minutes, right? And the guy turned out to be a Medal of Honor winner. But, I mean, that's the beauty of the teams that we allow people like, that to go in and prosper and contribute to the effort. I mean, that's the beauty. What a wonderful thing. A gift from God. Yeah. So when you got back home from that deployment, what came next?

Well, can I just go a little bit? I'm going to talk about the charity. If you wouldn't mind. Oh, yeah, that's right. The charity you ran in Baghdad. I want to talk about that. So I always like to support the chaplains because they did a lot of good things for a lot of people, right? And so I would go talk to the chaplain. He happened to be a Catholic chaplain. And I said, Father, what can we do for you? How can we help you? He said, man, we got this orphanage, as Christian orphanage run by German nuns.

They had three German nuns in Baghdad, and they're constantly being harangued by the locals, especially since the war started, and we could use a little help on that. And I said, well, what do you need? He says, well, they really need money? And I said, really? They need money. And so I went to the morning mayor's meeting. We had a morning mayor's meeting at 10 o'clock, and it was every unit on biop sent a representative,

and we would all help each other. The most help they ever gave me is when the Grom needed good. gasoline because everything else didn't need gasoline. I got gasoline for the grom. I was able to trade to the grom. And then I needed a pair of quadruple E size nine boots. Now who in God's name takes a brand new pair of triple or quadruple E size nine boots? Some guy defoliated his boot, right? And I was able to do that to get that. But I was really happy about that. But that cost me some big, big things to do that. So I say, okay, I go to the mayor's morning meeting and I said, okay, after the meeting, anybody can talk right after the mayor. I said, okay, there's 44 seals here

in biop and we want to challenge the army in a contest. Everybody's looking at me, Posey, sit down, you dumbass. Okay, you're stupid. I said, yeah, we're going to. I said, yeah, we're going to We're going to kick your ass, okay? I said, we're raising money for this Catholic charity, downtown buy-up, and we will, us 44 guys, I think there was 12,000 guys at the base there, is going to outraise the United States Army, a few Marine guys, okay? We're going to outrage you because these people need money. And they say, you dumbass.

And I said, we're going to call it, and I don't, I'm going to just say the guy's first name, John T, and I want to say his last name, and I had this jar in my hand, this big cookie jar like this, clear cookie jar, and I had his picture on the front of it with this big lettering, the John T. blank

orphans fund. And so, and I had a hole in it where they could stick money, right? So people after the meeting says, you know, my father was in the Navy. Don't let anybody see me put money in this jar. But I'm going to put money in this jar,

and we're going to get more money for you. And I said, fine. So I go back and I tell our guys, I said, we're doing this charity thing. And we named it after our Army Ranger, John T. And he comes up and he says, Pousie, are you out of your mind? He says, I don't help orphans. I make orphans.

I said, you just relax, big boy. I'm going to take care of this, right? So we did this for, I think, 45 days, and I would taunt them. Every morning mayor's morning meeting, I would taunt them. Oh, SEAL team now has 10,000 Iraqi Dinar. What are you guys doing? You know, where's the Army at? And the Army rep, well, we got 300.

And so I would taunt them every morning. And the people just, I mean, they would, I would drive my Humveed. down biop and they'd wave at me and come and give me a handful of money, American dollars, but mainly Iraqi dinar. And so finally, we ended up with six boxes of money, six medium or small boxes of money. And then we went to the nunnery and delivered this money. So we were afraid that by doing that, that we would draw the attention of the rackies that they would come and raid these poor nuns and kill them and do whatever for this money because it was i mean i don't know how much money we had but we had a ton of money and so the commander their seal team says okay

here's what we're going to do we're going to do a raid on this nunnery and we're going to be very ugly to them when we go in and we go out uh so that we can protect them you know we're going to act like we're going to hook them and the kids up and so we did that and so i go knocking the door and I talked to this kid and I said, I want to deliver something to the nuns. And so he let me in and I go talk to them. I said, Sister, we have this. She barely spoke English. We have money for you.

Where would you like it? And she says, oh, you can just put her on this little card table they had right there. So I mentioned to my guys in the Humvee to come in and we were doing TOT because we were really worried about spending too much time there that it was a social call or not, you know, some kind of a bad call. And so my guys come in and they're banging on the door with their gun butts and just being ugly when they go, we're going to get you what you did. You know, they were really good. And he'd break these six boxes of money. And I said, at that time, it was very difficult to find cardboard boxes at buy-up. It was impossible. And I wanted my boxes back. And I said, where do you want?

She says right there. So we start dumping these boxes of money out. And it was a stack about two feet tall. and it's going all over the floor. She looks at me and said, who are you guys? I said, well, I don't know. We're the army, right? So I said, we're doing this. She said, well, why don't you sit down and have lunch with us? We're going to have lunch, and we have Pepsi Cola.

And I said, sister, we're going to be out of here in 30 seconds. We just have to make this look ugly because we don't want them to come and give you a bad time and steal this money from me. She says, we understand. So we're banging our way out. You know, they're pointing the guns of the nunnery and this whole thing. And so we just ex-filled.

And so I heard later on that that was really good for them because they were really having a hard time financially, you know, of feeding. I think they had 60 kids there. So it was really good. And it was really good because the Army really supported us. That's awesome. That's where the bulk of the money came from, obviously. And it was really wonderful that they did that.

So more power to them, huh? And it's also wonderful that the press didn't pick up any pictures of young seal holding his weapon aimed at some none. I'm surprised that didn't happen. We don't do too great with the press. No, I made her stay in the house and the kid walked me out. Got it. We were trying to be very cognizant of that, you know, but we didn't want to leave a trail that they would have problems after that. Oh, for sure.

If it looked like they were helping coalition forces, that's a death sentence. Right, right. So that worked out. So eventually, though, you end up in as you did 30 combat operations, you saved a bunch of orphans. I mean, this is just Bill Posey on the rampage. You've supplied the whole seal teams with everything they needed, repaired a thousand Humvees. But you got to a point where you were too banged up and you. No, my funding ran out.

So I was on reserve funding on non-active duty. my funding, I was on active duty, but the funding from the reserves was paying me. And so then they told me to come back out. And so... Oh, I thought you got injured. You came home because you were hurt. No, but I was hurt, but it didn't bother me. I mean, at the bottom, I don't know, for whatever reason, the bottoms of my feet were

killing me, but that, you know, what can you do? Mm-hmm. You know, you got to do what you got to do. Mm-hmm. So, you know, that was really a good thing. and then they sent me, this is really funny. Well, maybe it's not funny. I come back and this admiral calls me,

and he says, Posi, no, it was an Army, I mean a Navy captain, your fundings ran out, you have to go home. And I said, what do you mean I have to go home? I'm hurt, I got to get fixed. You got to fix me. He says, no, no, I'm giving you a direct order. You have to. you have to disengage yourself.

And so... Was this when you got back to the States? Yeah, it got back to the States. You're dinged up. Now you're dinged up and you're like, hey, I need to get some medical treatment before I... So I look like Chester, right? I'm going given one of these, right? And I said, you guys got to fix me.

And so he says, no, I'm giving you direct order. You have to report into the X-Phil tomorrow. and get out. I said, okay. So I go, of course, a warrant officer, I mean, not that we're brilliant, but we know how the Navy works. We know how the whole thing works, and there's chapter and verse on any given situation. So I go to the instruction, you know, 100331, and I look at it, and I pulled instruction out and I talked to the captain the next day and I said, Captain, do you know about instruction 10031? And he says, no, I don't, but I don't care what it is. You will report this afternoon at 12th. I said, no, I won't. I'm not being disrespectful, sir. I talk to my command.

They stand behind me and that you guys have to fix me and you can't send me home. And he says, We'll see about that. So I immediately, I left there and I went to talk to my congressman, who I knew because I was doing things. And I said, you know, I'm not being disrespectful. I love the Navy. I'm not disrespectful. I'm not that kind of guy. I'm not a seaboard lawyer.

But you have to fix me. And I was at the clinic every day, and I knew all these kids that they were mustering out. I mean, an E3 Marine Corps guy mustering out there, send him. him home and he can't even walk. I mean, he can't do anything, right? And they send, I think, 60 of those people home. And so I go to my congressman. I said, sir, you've got to help me. I mean, this is not right what they're doing to all these kids. I can get along. I can make it happen, right, because I can go to the VA or whatever. But it's not right what you're doing to these kids. So he calls the admiral and they straightened it out. So I'm in six months of rehab

and I went to the clinic there that we have at SEAL team and they really helped me. So I was really happy about what was going on there. And, you know, then my time was up and I went home. So it was good. What did you do when we went home? I started flipping houses again. So I'm good at carpentry and that kind of stuff and flipping houses. And then I moved to Texas.

And I worked for the, I was working in an oil field for a while as a service component of the oil field. And then I got the job teaching school. How did you end up in the job teaching school? What made you decide to do that? Because I couldn't do the oil field job. My back, I didn't know my back was broken, right? I didn't know.

I was just having all these back problems and feet problems. And I thought it was just old age. Of course, we all get old, right? I mean, you guys are even feeling it at 25? Yeah, 26. 26. Okay. But, you know, and so I had to quit that oil field job,

and I found this teaching job through this part of our church has this high school. And so the guy calls me in and he says, you know, you never taught before and you only have a college degree, but you don't have a teacher credential, you know, but, you know, maybe we can help you. So they hired me. I was lucky enough to they hired me. And so that was really, for the last eight years, been a really good gig for me. My objective there is to have those kids not make the same mistakes that I've made.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. You know, and I did a lot of stupid things. What subject do you teach? History, government, economics, and art, and Bible. It's a wide range. Yeah, but it's a, you know, it's a small school, so you do everything. You know, we only have like 175 kids enrolled in high school. Are you seeing, are you getting feedback from kids that graduated four years ago,

six years ago, eight years ago that you had an impact on? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, they tell me, you know, we really loved your class, whatever. Because I tell, you know, the problem, at least my perception, I'm probably speaking out of turn. But the problem is they treat the kids like kids. You know, how many in World War II, even in Vietnam, you had these guys that were 16 and 17 years old,

you know, going to the war, I mean, World War II, full jihad going on to the war, right? Going to the war, you know, against the German superpower, and we say these kids are kids when they're 18 years old. They're not kids. They're adults. Don't baby him. So I try not to baby. I just give it to them straight.

You know, this is what's really happening. You know, think. You know, my objective, read, write, be able to present yourself. Think and then act. I mean, if you can think, you're dangerous, right? You're dangerous. You're full on dangerous. Because I don't think a lot of the schools now want you to think.

It's not a good thing. And then what you also apparently now, you have your own radio show. I do. So what's that all about? How can we listen to that? Oh, I don't think you want to, Commander. I just have this little, we talk politics every morning from 630 to 7 on 95.9, Tahano Radio, Victoria, Texas. And we talk about things that are going on, and especially things that are going on on the Republican Party.

And how we can, you know, fight back from what we think has not been well for us in the past here, especially the past couple of years. And how old are you right now? I'm going to be 75 and six months. Is there any part of your brain that thinks maybe you're going to, you know, retire and sit on the front porch and drink coffee in the morning and watch the grass grow? You know, the problem is I really hate old people. I hate old people. and I don't want to be associated them. I don't want to talk to them.

I don't want to do anything with old people. So I really find that, you know, when you're a kid and you have every possibility in the world out there, every possibility that you can do anything you want, right? You can do whatever you want. What a wonderful time in life, right? Instead of some 70, oh, my back, my side. I mean, they all want to talk about their operations. I don't give a rat's ass about their operations.

Right? I don't care. So I like dealing with interfacing with the kids and, you know, trying to give it, you know, I don't think it's a not indoctr. Well, maybe it is indoctrination. But I'm really big on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, of the things that your grandfather, my father, your great-grandfather did for America. I mean, let's honor those people. I mean, especially like Memorial Day to Day. Let's honor those. folks and thank them for all the wonderful things and allowing us to have the wonderful things that we have in this nation you know so that's my objective you know teaching school I am slowing down COVID was really mentally hard on me and so I hope I don't lose my mind here in the next three years because I hope to teach for the next three years well I'll tell you what that's a freaking about as good of a closing as we could ever hope for here. Echo, you got anything?

Usually, if you haven't listened, well, you've listened to the podcast. So Echo, you know, speaking, you were talking about some weird social things. Sometimes Echo throws out some weird social questions right now. We don't know what's coming. Actually, more for clarity than anything. Back to Apollo 12.

What was your job there? Like, what was your... I was the first man out the door, so I would hook the slow-down parachute to the side, and then we would put the capsule, the collar around the capsule. Then our decontamination, because we thought there was moonbugs, the decontamination rafts would be inflated, put it on the side. The decontamination man would open the door and put the astronauts in the rafts, and then they would go up in the helicopter.

Just to go a little bit further. I think, Echo, I've got to take it back one step. So you've seen the capsule splashing down into the ocean. The capsule from the rocket. From the rocket. From the rocket, yeah, like it goes to the moon or whatever. It goes up in the space. And then to get back, it just splashes down in the middle of the ocean.

Gotcha. So somebody's got to go recover that capsule and get those astronauts out. That's someone, UDT. That someone, Bill Posey coming in hot. First guy out the door of the helicopter. Of the helicopter. Of the helicopter. So the helicopter, and actually if you go to the USS Midway, they have one of those helicopters.

The helicopter. That's the helicopter. That's the helicopter? 66. Yes, sir. of the 12. Yes, and they got a little

Freddy the frog on there, ready to get some. Complements of Pete Carolyn. He painted that on it. Okay. There you go. Does that make sense now? Yeah,

I started to gather that, but yeah, I wanted to make sure that that was the... See, people who live through Apollo just think everybody knows about it. I apologize for not being clear now. All good.

It seemed pretty exciting, though. Kind of nuts. A billion people watching it. Oh, yeah. And there he is. And out the door first. Bill Pose. from Linwood, California, in full color for mom,

who was highly selected, highly selected through a rigorous program to get there. And making a fool of myself because I can't find a D-ring. Well, sir, awesome. I really can't thank you enough for coming on. And obviously for your service to the country, to the Navy, to the teams. You know, it was you guys that formed our, You formed who we are in the SEAL teams in the UDTs coming up through Vietnam, and then you kept that thread going and you brought it all the way to Iraq to Camp Jenny Posey for us.

Thanks for everything. Thanks for helping our legacy exist. No, let's not let's put credit where credits do. I worked at Group 1, it oversees all the West Coast SEAL teams, and I would deal with SEAL Team 3 all the time, and I would work with you, Lieutenant Commander, and it was really great working with three. I really enjoyed working with three because we could really get things done. And thanks for the leadership and everything that you did over there. You were an inspiration to us all. And even though you've written these books, and I don't know if you remember this or not, you wrote something just before

I got out, and it was really inspiring what you wrote. And I wrote you, and I wrote you, back and I said, man, this is a great piece. You ought to be an author. So, you know, give credit where credits do guys like you that grind it right down to the fine dust and that you can make things happen. Thank you for your service. Yeah, well, we wouldn't have been able to do anything without the legacy that you guys put forth for us. So teamwork and the teams. Amen. Until the end. Airborne. Thank you, sir. Hi, I. And with that, a warrant officer, Bill Posey, left the building some good stuff man about how to be a good frog man and how to be a good human you a guy that's been in the game and stayed in the game right stayed in the game

56 years old rolling out on ops getting after it it's it's funny to hear like everyone else or everyone's take on things you know you have various guests and they're different takes on things and like his take on it was kind of like for lack a better way of putting it like it was just just kind of easy like it was just one big ride that he was on kind of thing he was like oh imagine showing up to buds which used to be called udd t trial replacement training replacement can you imagine you show up and you think you you'd go do i need a book back because you think you're going to to a freaking educational name of school and you're actually entering what's allegedly the toughest military training.

You're like, whatever. Yeah. What? Like I surfed and I played water pole. Bring it. What are you got? What are we doing? You want me to get wet?

Be cold? Cool. Watch this. I'm going to sleep for 15 minutes in the front of the boat. I'll be good when I'm done. Roger that. What are we going to nom? Cool.

What are you doing beach recons? Roger that. Oh, we're going on patrols. Getting in a swift boat, getting shot up, hiding behind a piece of freaking body armor? Cool. I'm down. What?

Apollo? Okay, cool. What I got to do? Hook the beaner in? Like, he's just getting it, whatever. The whole time. Yeah.

I think, well, there was a lot of my favorite points of that, but when I asked him about retiring, he's like, I don't like old people. What a freaking epic answer. 75 years old. Whatever.

He's like, what? No, I got stuff I'm going to do. I'm out here making stuff happen. Yeah. I started a radio program, by the way. It's kind of true when he talks about,

um, like old people talk about their operations. Yeah. He's not talking about his operations. He's talking about going to Iraq. Yeah. He said one little thing that he said that stood out to me when he was like, oh yeah, they throw you over the deck or whatever in the water and to see if you're claustrophobic.

The casual way that he said that was like, oh, they go, because they just want to see if it's claustophobic or whatever. You know the suit that he's talking about? I'm assuming it's the old school with the big helmet, like 20,000. Leagues under the sea scenario. I know what I'm saying? A claustrophobic in the bottom of the bay. Yeah, that seems like a way bigger deal than his tone was when he said it. Seems like not a lot of stuff was a big deal for Bill Posey.

He was just jumping out of helicopters, hooking in Apollo 12, going on patrol with 30. Oh, by the way, dropping danger close napalm. That luckily happened to be there as you were about to get overrun. Whatever. Yeah. Watching up to Baghdad, landing, jumping out of a freaking C-130 that's going down a highway. What are we talking about? No factor.

He was like, oh, yeah, then this happened. Whatever. It's just part of the ride he was on, really. Man, freaking awesome. Camp Jenny Posey. I can't, I don't know if I can relay that enough what that name had to be, to, it was this moment in time, right? That can never be recaptured. Camp Jenny Posey.

That's crazy. Like everyone that was at Camp Jenny Posey, oh yeah. Oh, you were at Posey? Like, it's a little thing. Yeah. You know, bro. I mean, I'm not trying to get crazy. We weren't freaking, you know,

wasn't the battle the bulge. But for the seals at that moment in time, it's pretty freaking awesome. Pretty freaking awesome. Camp Jenny Posey, welcome home. Welcome home is what it said on that sign. Welcome home. And that was Jenny Posey.

Yeah, by the way, for those of you that are just listening, Jenny Posey was in the room, you know, because she did end up graduating from Army or OTC, and she was here laughing, because I could see her. She was laughing at stories. And also, you know, she told me afterwards, she never heard all these stories. Huh.

You know, she never heard all these stories about numb, about getting thrown over the side into the damn bay to walk around for half an hour. By the way, that's an ignorant test. That's like the witch test. That's like the witch test. We'll throw you in the water. And if you drown,

then that means you're not a witch. But if you survive, means you're a witch and we're going to kill you. Check this out. We want to see if you're claustrophobic or if you like the water. So we're going to throw you in the water. What happens if you're not comfortable?

What are we doing then? Like you just freaking get all wrapped up in your lines to the surface and next thing you know, you got them lead boots up and we got problems. Yeah, it seemed problematic. That's not like the safest test We got for our do they still do that?

No. No. There'd be dead people all over the bay. Can't be throwing people in the water? That's only the Bill Posey freaking test. It's brutal. All right. Well, so speaking of staying in the game long term, which is what we're looking to do.

Yes. How can we stay in the game longer? Bill Posey style. Okay. We want to keep ourselves capable. Capable in every way. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, social. When do we start throwing social into this?

It's part of life. Okay. For real. Keep that one. For real, you need, like, you need robust relationships. You do. I'm not robust. We'll just say healthy relationships.

How about that? Either way, we're going to talk about physical and mental. So you want to be exercising. We want to be exercising. We want to be doing jiu-jitsu. We want to be eating well. Here's the thing with eating well. It's really hard to get all.

the nutrients that you need. Okay. It's hard, for real. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Even if you have a perfect diet in real life. Which no one does.

There's no such thing. Well, maybe there's some freaking like Hollywood, whatever that's up there that has like the personal chef and has the person coming in with the, you know, plucking the kale from, flucking the kale from, you know, northern Bulgaria where it's grown without. any interference from man.

Right. And then steamed for like, you know, like 38.1. Yeah. At 17 degrees. Exactly. Exactly. So that person might have a perfect diet. No, but even then.

But even then. Unless they don't have a job. That's what I'm saying. Those people up in Hollywood, they don't have a job. Yeah, they just sit there. Yeah. And don't do anything. No offense to my people in Hollywood.

But come on, let's get real. What about though? You know, it's neat. It's really hard being on the set all day. Shut off. Bill Posey was getting thrown over a boat with a freaking hard hat helmet on to wander around in the muck. That's been there for 150 years. That was hard.

Yeah, that was hard. Yes, for sure. Being on set, no. You get zero credit. Yeah, it's hard to compare the. Do you get zero credit? Did Bill Posey get a fresh Bulgarian kale salad when he got out of the water? No, he did it.

Negative. So even if you, even if you, even if you, even if we're going with this, where we go with this. a fresh Bulgarian kale salad and everything else perfect balanced meals in whatever way you're balancing them because we're all different in a lot of ways

very hard to get these all the nutrients that we need and want okay good news jaco has supplements supplementation for us that was the longest freaking with the perfect diet

a perfect diet or not so perfect diet supplementation is going to get you way ahead of the game keep you in the game That's what's going to do. So what do we got? And what do we have them for? We got them for your joints, for your mind, for your body, and for your muscles directly. Joint warfare.

Chreel oil. Super krill oil. These are for your joints. Okay. And this is going to be a big deal. Because if your joints fail you, you can be strong. You can be strong. You can be capable.

You can run every day. Your joints start failing. You start bothering you or whatever. What good is it having a 454 big blocker? You got a flat tire. over here. Exactly. Right rear.

You know what I'm saying? You're not going anywhere. Oh, yeah. Or you can rev your engine a little bit just like you can stand there and flex in the mirror, but you're not going to be able to take anybody in a jiu-jitsu match. Yeah. That's for sure. You've got a bad wheel.

It's true. It's absolutely true. So we need to have the joints up to speed, let's say. And trust me, I know I've experienced both. Well, what a true testament is, joint warfare, there's people that subscribe to joint warfare all the time. And the feedback is awesome because people realize they go, oh, maybe I don't need it anymore. Then they go a week and a half and they're like crackheads running back.

Say you subscribe. Hit they want to have it and they don't want to miss it. All kinds of good stuff in that. Also, vitamin D3. Yep. Okay, so look, maybe some of us work outside and we get, you know, sun. And then even then, I think you still might be lacking in vitamin D3. Well, why roll the dice?

But why roll the dice? Why roll the dice? Why, I roll the dice. Don't roll the dice on your vitamin D. Nope. Get some easy. And there's teeny tiny ones. You know some people,

they don't like swallowing those big. Remember the old school, what is it? Freaking amino acids or whatever. Remember that? Those big ass horse pills. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's not like that. teeny tiny, easy money.

You're good to go. Yeah, exactly. You're good to go. Also, for immunity, along with vitamin D3 is Cold War. Mm-hmm. In these times, we're not, sometimes our immune system sometimes it needs a little attention

extra attention I'd say that's a good call it's true we just got back from a trip and that's sometimes that's the time where your immune system gonna need a little spot sometimes so yeah you got the you got the cold war from Joccofuel also

protein in the form of dessert it's called milk yes is there a new flavor okay so good so ridiculous we just got to the month we just got done with the And I don't know why I asked Jamie this. I got paranoid, but I was like I was about to fly out and she was out there before getting everything set up and I text her. I was like, hey, do we have milk out there? And she's like, are you serious? Of course. She's like, of course we have mold. We have pretty moat. Dude, I was out there just just taking because they bought mud. So beautiful. I showed up. They got a refrigerator in my room. There's milk in the refrigerator. Hollywood guy over. Yeah, Hollywood guy. I was on set all day back off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So yeah. So I get. there and there's milk and then there's milk and I was just well this is what I was doing I was taking like opening up the milk bottle and just drinking a little bit of milk and pouring milk in there and shaking it was so freaking good to go it's such a game changer you're on the road and

you're you're just eating clean so legit get yourself some milk yeah and by the way right now I've been on peanut butter the chocolate peanut butter cup for like probably a month right now and I got everything I started looking at my cupboard and I'm like thinking could it be me could it be Mint could it be strawberry maybe a little vanilla granul and I just keep for the past month I've been grabbing that grabbing that chocolate peanut butter It's a Reese's peanut butter milkshake. It's that freaking good. Yep, same boat So you're there. Yeah, all right. So one of the one of our people at the muster was thanking me for whatever reason for the milk the raw milk or the one the non-flavored one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's thanking me for that. I told him, hey, man, you're welcome.

There's no problem for me to get that out. You know, Brian, Pete, all you guys, cool, cool. But, you know, you're welcome. So that's a good. That's an interesting one, though. So if, like, yeah, if you don't prefer like a flavor necessarily, I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine. But, hey, man, everybody's different. Man, got that option.

Is there a banana thing flavor coming out? Banana. Banana is coming. A banana milk. I've obviously, have you had it? Have you had the new? No.

No, you're not in the inside. You're not on the inside circle. Freaking good. Name, not confirmed yet. But we're getting there. And it should be out. It's good, man.

It's like a banana cream scenario. Yeah, see. And that's so freaking good. Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous. Again, you feel like you, you feel like you're having a dessert straight up.

Like that lately with that peanut. Now, yesterday I did actually, yesterday had a mint. Yesterday I had mint, which was good. to go. It's kind of like, it's essentially a cheat code. It's one of those cheat codes.

All right. We need to move on. I start to feel like we're in this weird tangent world where like you and I are getting super hyped on it. You know why? Because you're imagining drinking milk right now and I understand. But so yeah, so get it for yourself. How about that?

Get it at joccofuel.com. You can get, you can get, um, we have a drink too, by the way, a beverage. When I was in Florida, we, at the muster, we, we, we, we, Supplied, we'll say, are people with the Disman Go. And, man, so good to go. So good to go. And then went to Wawa down there in Florida, which is pretty freaking cool. Going in a Wawa, walk to the fridge.

There you go. You can just, there you go. It's like he hit in Wawa. What's up with that? Cool. Here's the thing. Right now there's people like, oh, we're making a healthy energy drink. Bullshit.

You're actually lying. There's only one person that's making a healthy energy drink right now. Us, we are. I guess there's only one team that's making a healthy energy drink right now. There's only one team that said, you know what, we're not going to put a bunch of freaking chemicals in here to preserve this that are going to go in your body and preserve your body in some weird way. That's what you do when you die.

You go to a mortician and they preserve your body. They put those chemicals into the drink and say, oh, it's cool, it's good, drink it. No, we didn't do that. We pasteurize it. We pasteurize it. We don't have to add any of those chemicals. Look at, you know, I almost, I almost got sucked in. Almost got stuck.

Some guy commented on some social media tag. He was like, oh, this, you know, just a standard. He's trying to, there, he, me, trying to pitch, you know, some, you know, some supplement. It's the same as everything else. It's actually literally not the same as everything else. All you have to do is look at the ingredients and you realize, oh, it's actually, It's not even close to everything else. Not even close.

It's a totally different ballgame. So if you're thinking that, you're wrong. You kind of, I mean, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. And you can kind of understand because when you think about it, try to exclude you. Exclude yourself in what this whole, you know, discipline go thing. Exclude that. So I'm not a part of it? Pretend it doesn't exist.

How about that? The drink doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. And let's say even you don't exist. Okay. He has a point. that guy saying, oh, he's just like everything, you know, it's like everyone, everything else or whatever, you know, like, oh, yeah, just some peddling, some, you know, whatever. He has no idea.

He's, the thing is he's right, except now he's not right because you're not, but everyone else kind of does that. You see what I'm saying? So if I didn't exist as a human, this guy would be correct. Would be correct, yes. So you kind of, like, if he don't know, he just decayed you. You know what decayed means? No. Didn't know.

Oh, check. So if he did, you know how you don't, you know, you did. You get decayed a lot, actually. People don't know me. They just don't know. Oh, yeah, and they're just like, oh, look at that. Yeah, they just assume. Yeah, yeah, they just assume like everyone else.

Like, remember that time about the Warrior Kid book? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in the day. Some guy chimed in. Yeah, like, so I forget who posted it, but someone posted something saying, oh, yeah, like, you know, where the Warrior, the name's you a way or whatever. And some professor or something was like,

oh, just another guy pedaling. toxic masculinity or something like this. I'm paraphrasing totally. Just an awesome comment. And it goes, sorry I'll pass, right? Like didn't read it. Oh, look at you.

Pulling the quote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, didn't look into the whole thing and everyone just piled up on him saying, hey, essentially, right, you're decaying this guy.

It's not that. It's like, whatever. My daughters read it like that kind. And he was like, oh, he was backpedaling or whatever, but totally decayed you. So, you know, it's just another decay situation.

Isn't it weird, though, that someone would make that move? Like, like, let's face it. What's a good lesson to learn when you're a kid that almost everybody learns. Don't judge a book by its cover. Almost everybody learns that lesson. And here's a guy that double violated that. Number one, looking at me and judging the book by its cover.

And the number two, straight up judging the book by its cover. Straight up literally doing that. And this guy's a professor who's a liberal guy because I, you know, who is this guy. And he's some super liberal guy. Look, I get all kinds of liberal people that read the books. No factor. They're like, oh, yeah, this guy's an open mind. Cool.

Just decayed me. Yeah. Twice. But even worse, broke the act, broke the, broke the metaphorical rule and broke the straight up real literal rule. Broke it right there for everybody. He should have got two L's in his column, right? L loser, loser.

Double up. Yeah. Yeah, fully. And yeah, being liberal or not liberal, that wasn't in this case the violation. It was in being that ignorant. That was the violation. If he was a super liberal guy that read the book and was, like, hey, I think that the way you portray X, Y, Z, I'd be like, okay, cool, yeah, that's a good, good feedback.

I need to pay attention to that. It's true. Well, so yeah, so you, hey, look, so for future reference, you will get decayed in the future as well. And this energy drink situation, he just decayed you. It's all good, bro. It's all good. Look at the, the ingredients are filtered, carbonated water, natural flavor, citric acid, monk fruit extract. That's the, that's the ingredients.

Now look, there are other ingredients that are like the supplement part, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, like caffeine alpha GPC. Like those are real ingredients that are in there, but they're supplemental. They're good for you. Yeah. Where's the bad for you ingredients on here? There are not. There you go. That's the way they should do like.

That should be the new labeling system, right? What? There should be two columns. Good for you, bad for you. That might be too much. much reality for it's too much reality but that's the way it should be because people don't know it's true people don't know that that that all those chemicals that are getting put in there they should be in the bad for you column yeah by the way

yeah kind of like cigarettes yeah yeah cigarettes they say hey you can get cancer for yeah they should just have one column that says this left side makes you strong right side makes you weak yep exactly right kills you poisoned you check yeah it's true so yes all right uh so wah-wa you can get the drinks at wah-wah. You can get all the stuff at vitamin shop. You can get all the stuff at joccofuel.com. And also, kind of important, if you subscribe, if you subscribe to whatever it is you want, the shipping is free because we don't want you have to pay for shipping. So if you subscribe, shipping is free. Because we know that there's other organizations out there that offer free shipping.

We want to make sure you have the option. If you don't want to go through those big, Organizations, but you still want to get free shipping, we got you covered. We got you covered. No factor. It's a big deal, man. Free shipping. Seems small. It's a big deal.

And you don't forget to take your stuff to, or you don't run out. You don't run the risk of running out. That's a big deal, too. By the way, take it from me. I've been there. Also, you can get it at origin, USA.com. And also origin, USA. Dot com.

You can get American-made stuff. Jiu-Jitsu geese. For sure. jeans, American made denim. Boots. I have your boots, by the way, still. Then all my boots are your boots. They're mine, no.

Our boots. But here's the thing. I have some. Oh, the boots that you brought home. So those are my boots. Yes. Yeah. You didn't bring them today.

Apparently you didn't bring them today. Well, my son was trying to wear them. That's awesome. And I was like, okay, cool. He wanted to walk a mile in your shoes, literally. Yeah. American made shoes. Also, yeah, denim, boots, belts.

Wait, wait. Are they doing belts and allets? Yes, belts, wallets. Wallets. So, homemade in America. All made in America 100% 100% without compromise. Do you know how hard it is when you say without compromise

on the end of something? Especially something like making stuff in America. That's a big, bold statement. Because there's like a rivet for a pair of jeans. And everybody's like, cool, yeah, we get rivets from China. Oh, good to go. Yeah, cool. That's negligible.

No big deal. No big deal. We're not worried about those particular slave labor elements that are working in a sweatshop. We're not worried about them because it's rivets and we need them. That's the easy thing to do. But we got most of the jeans made in America. We look, most of our stuff is made by Americans that are actually, actually enjoying their job.

We got most of our parts not made by slave labor. That's kind of cool, right? No, it's actually not cool. That's actually a good point. Like, you're like, the rivets. They seem small. They seem small. So it kind of makes it.

Until you're a 12-year-old kid getting freaking beaten. Yeah. In a factory, 18 hours a day. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, go ahead. Get yourself those other, get yourself those other jeans. Savages, man. So yes, if, if, hey, look, if this kind of stuff interesting,

you want this kind of stuff, origin USA.com. Also, Jocko is store. It's called Jocco Store. So go to jocco store.com. This is where you can get your discipline equals freedom, shirts, hats, hoodies. This is also, this is higher quality stuff. This is not ballpark giveaway free.

quality stuff. It's high quality stuff. Trust me. I know that too. Also, we have a subscription situation new called the shirt locker. So you get a new shirt every month.

Free shipping on that one as well. The designs are more creative, more fun. You got to trust me on that one. Because like, if you're like, hey, prove it.

And then like you look at it and you're like, oh, you're right. It's too later. Eddie, you don't get that shirt anymore. I will say at the muster

when I saw our people with some shirt locker shirts on. I felt a little extra like connect. I felt the same way. Exactly right. Kind of a little extra connection. We know they're like, look, we get there in the game, but then when you see that, you're like, oh, they're in the game.

In the game. In the game. And looking good. Full support. Yep. So yes, check it out jocco store.com. If you like something, get something. Subscribe to the podcast.

Don't forget about other podcasts that we have, Jocco unraveling with Daryl Cooper. Darrell Cooper just dropped the new martyr-made podcast. Yeah, I noticed that. Okay. So you can go check that out. I think we, he and I had prepped to do a podcast. And then we ended up not doing that particular one for the unraveling.

And then I think he just kind of took some of that and went, went deep on it, which, as you know, D.C. can go deep on some stuff. So, so check out Jocco unraveling. Check out martyr made. Check out the grounded podcast, which Dean Lest, we've got to do some recording with him and then Warrior Kid podcast. We also have the jocco underground.com. So look, we don't know what's going to happen with any of these platforms is the bottom line. We could get cut off for whatever reason.

We could get ads imposed on us from other things that we don't necessarily want to be doing advertisements for. There's all kinds of things that can happen. We realize this. We need to have a contingency plan. We built it. the structure for our own platform if we need to do it. So if people, if all of a sudden things get crazy,

we will be standing by, we'll be on the jocco underground.com. If you want to help us out with that so that we never have to rely on anyone else and we don't have to have, we don't have to do ad reads in the middle of a freaking podcast. Right. Hey, Warren Offster Posey. You're telling us about what was like in Vietnam. Hold on a second. I'm going to talk about a new whatever.

Right after these messages. Yeah, right after these messages, you can tell us what it was like. No, we're not doing that. So if you want to help out $8.18 a month, if you can't afford it, that doesn't mean we don't want you in the game. We want you in the game.

You can email assistance at jocco wonder ground.com. And so we're releasing one podcast a week where we kind of do a little topics that are, we'll say related to, but not quite the normal topic. For Jocco Podcast. It's more of like an expansion, more in-depth. So you can check out that, and we also have a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to if you want to see some of the stuff.

A lot of these things I'm the assistant director on. Sure. Most of the good ones, I'm the assistant director on. They're all good. They're not all good? Okay. Yeah. Subscribe to that YouTube channel.

Also, Origin USA has a YouTube channel. You can check that out as well. Yep. Also, psychological warfare. You didn't know what that is. It's not on the YouTube channel, but it is an album, a Jocko album with tracks. And each track helps you get through an individual moment of a weakness that you might have. And we all have them from time to time.

Bro, I had one the other day. Not yesterday. Day before. Wait, was yesterday? Yeah, day before yesterday. Yep. But you know how like, yeah, you're the one who did this where if you have a moment of weakness and you get past it, You've got to punish yourself for having the moment of weakness.

You got to add on what do you add like a set or a 10%? Could be 10% or just some burpees. Could be starve yourself for 14 hours. I don't know. But somebody got to pay for that. Hey man, those chocolate chip cookies were good to go. And I'm fasting tomorrow. What you got to pay for that.

And yeah. So man, that happened to me. What was the moment? I wanted to skip the workout. Actually, I didn't want to skip it. I was into it. I warmed up. You know the kind where it's like,

hey, if I just start warming up, I'm going to be in the workout. Yeah. It was harder than that. The moment of weakness was bigger and more robust than that. I warmed up. I did like two good sets and I was like, kind of like, hey, I did those two solid sets right there. So if I don't do the second half of this workout, we got to go. I can just finish these sets and be done, you know?

So I was like, oh, man. So I got through it. I said, no, I didn't. I did the whole workout. And then as a punishment, I had to do a METCon. There you go. And I doubled up on the METCon. Thing.

Yeah. Check. Right on. You can get that from anywhere you get MP3s. Also, if you want to hang something up in your wall, you can go to flipside canvass.com. Dakota Meyer, my brother is making all kinds of cool stuff to hang on your wall. Also, I got a bunch of books. We have final spin coming.

Final spin coming. I wrote a book. Could be novel. Could be some other format of reading, of writing. Could be poetry with a mixture of poetry. with a mixture of prose, with a mixture of transcripts of human beings talking. Basically, I made my own form up. Am I allowed to do that?

I don't know, but I guess I did. Story, it's available now for pre-order if you want to get that first. When does it come out? November 16th is when it comes out. Here's the thing. You know what the publisher's saying? The publisher's like, well, you know, you're kind of a guy that writes him out, We don't know.

Big question mark. Yeah, big question mark. We're not sure if you're people that listen to you, your podcast, will actually want to read some kind of a weird novel from you. It's like, okay, cool. That's true. So they're not going to print enough. And then people are going to order it when, you know, in on November 14th.

They're going to be like, oh, cool, I want to get a copy. They're going to end up with a second of dish. And there's no, this is not a redeemable situation. You know, you make some decisions in life you can never go back from. Like you get a tattoo on your forehead. seem like a good idea, right? But you can't go back from that, right? You can't go back from that.

It's there. Now you could go get it removed. Then you got a scar on your forehead. Either way, we're not thinking that that's the, the move that we can go back from. Yes, sir. Hey, you go out drinking and you decide you're going to go for a drive afterwards. You get a DUI. There's no, you don't go like, hey, hey, officer, you know what?

Let's hit rewind. Right. You can't do that. You show up. I'm you know you come to the muster you come to Jock alive you roll up you got that you got you got that you got that final spin and you're like I'd really like to get this signed I open it up I'm gonna sign it I'm gonna sign it like cool man I appreciate it but then I see that second-ed-dish down there and I'm sort of knowing I'm sort of seeing where you're at you know I'm sort of seeing where

we're at you know I'm sort of seeing where we're at I know that at the moment of truth you were kind of like, well, and now you can't, you can't walk back that decision. Again, you can work through it, right? You're still going to go out. You can wear a hat if you got the tattoo on your forehead. You got the DUI. You're going to go through the classes so you can recover and get your license back.

Yeah, you can do the best you can. But you still got that scarlet letter. Yeah, I got the scarlet letter. Second a dish. Don't let it happen to you. Don't let it happen to you. All right. We got leadership strategy of tactics.

We got the code, the evaluation of protocol. Discipline equals freedom field manual. Brand new versions have been out for a lot. little bit now way the warrior kid one two three and four Mikey and the dragons often called the best children's book ever written sure so a lot of people call it yeah I dig it at least quite a few of them I agree about face by Hackworth and then the OG extreme ownership in the dichotomy of leadership we got Eshlam Front which is a my leadership consulting company we solve problems

through leadership go to Eshalonfront.com we have eF online.com on there we have courses on there we have leadership courses on there we're doing live Q&A all the time if you want to improve look leadership is not an inoculation you don't get a shot you don't read extreme ownership one time you go cool I'm good to go doesn't happen doesn't happen anybody you need to reinforce those learnings you need to expand your knowledge how do you do that EF online.com go get it muster we just got done with Orlando freaking awesome we got fiends August 17th and 18th Las Vegas 28th and 29th check extreme ownership.com if you want to come to that

Do it quick. They're selling out EF Battlefield we go walk the battlefields and go through leadership lessons learned. I'll let you know when the next one of those is coming up And if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out Mark Lee's mom Mama Lee she has a charity organization She does all kinds of things to help veterans on One of the major things that she does is she gets them medical treatments that might not be covered by the VA or by the military medical system. One of the big ones is hyperbaric chamber, sending guys out for 30 days to get multiple iterations of that type of treatment. And it's extremely helpful for people.

A bunch of my friends have gotten. It's been awesome. If you want to help, you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. and if you want more of my nagging narratives or you need more of Echo's vexing vocals you can find us on the interwebs on Twitter on the gram and on the Facebook

Echo is at Echo Charles I am at Jocco-Willing and thanks once again to Bill Posey what an awesome opportunity to sit down thank you for everything you did for America and everything you did for the teams. Huya,

Warren Officer Posey. And to the rest of our uniform personnel out there, thank you for what you do to keep us free. And to our veterans, thank you for your service and sacrifice and also to our police and law enforcement. Our firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers,

Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all the first responders, you all work hard every day. Every single day to keep us safe, Thank you for what you do day in and day out for us and to everyone else out there. Remember what Bill Posey had to say. Remember, he said, if you can think, if you can think you're dangerous. If you can think you're dangerous, stay dangerous.

Stay dangerous. Age, apparently, age is a number. and you can go hard and you can keep going and we all have more to give so i say we step up and give it and until next time this is echo and jaco out