Jocko Podcast - 298: The Way of The Frogman. "By The Water Beneath The Walls" With Ben Milligan.

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

0:00:0 - Opening0:10:10 - By Water Beneath The Walls. Ben Milligan4:10:43 - How to stay on THE PATH.4:26:00 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 298 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Within weeks of their arrival, the seals of debt, golf, were shaking off their initial jitters and even displaying some measure of proficiency. Signs of this were apparent in every aspect of their operations. On ambush, no one cleared his throat, coughed, spit, sneezed, or even sniffled. On insert and extract, the men stepped heel to toe to.

to reduce the sucking explosion of mud walking, and above all avoided the footprints of the man in front to keep from sinking even deeper. To improve their infield support, the SEALs befriended the pilots and crews of the Navy's helicopter squadron at NAA Bay and overhauled the SEAL's denuded landing craft into an up-armored ironclad.

Six heavy machine guns mounted the gunwales, a 60-millimeter mortar bolted to the rusted deckplate, and a bunker-busting, recordless rifle pinion to the top of the sandbag pilot house. It was so much armament that the men quickly recommissioned the LCM, the mighty Mo. To it, they added academy to block the sun and rain, a two-burner stove for meals, then draped hammocks between everything that didn't pivot or fire, essentially turned it into a houseboat littered with empty hot sauce bottles, coffee cups, clothes lines, all aides to reduce the number of trips back to Nau Bay,

and increase the amount of time they could spend in a mission area. To improve the quality of their encounters with the enemy, they experimented with a variety of tactics, false insertions that made the Viet Cong think the seals had landed where they hadn't. False extractions that made the Viet Cong think the seals had left and probably most important, squad-sized missions that half the seals punch but correspondingly increased their stealth and the amount of swamp land they could cover,

thus doubling their chances of Viet Cong contact. No small challenge in an area as empty of the enemy as the rung sat. And what did these innovations yield? A handful of captured documents and North Vietnamese currency, some freshwater wells, some rice caches, one so monstrous that it merited an airstrike. Then finally, after more than a month of frustrations, debt golf landed a jackpot ambush of two sampans that killed seven suspected Viet Cong guerrillas. The seal's reaction was the same as a year. anyone who has just caught a hot streak. A little more than a week after the first coup, one squad pursued a tip from the crew of a

hovering Navy gunship that had spotted several camouflaged sampans not far from Mighty Moe's anchorage. Despite having already blown their cover in that area from several days worth of patrolling, the squad leader in full daylight, the squad landed in full daylight and fell in behind point man, Billy Macon, a keen-eyed 28-year. year old Texan the father of a daughter and a five-week old boy he had never seen stepping alone into the middle of the sun drenched clearing and spotting a Viet Cong bunker Maken managed a single burst for his M-16 before he was cut down by an eruption of

machine gun fire that left him stranded hugging the ground to get under the rush of snapping bullets and splintering branches the seals fell back on their training and clawed themselves into a rough firing line, but one that was not nearly stiff enough to break the wall of lead that blocked their way to the fallen comrade. To Tom Truxel engaged in the untested platoon commander's perennial two-front war, the enemy and his own doubts. It seemed that the only recourse might be to pull back to the river and to the mighty mo's guns.

That is, until one of his men fired a 40-millimeter grenade into the bunker's mouth. The shock forced a momentary flinch in the enemy's ambush, just long enough for the heavyweight, Moscon, to bowl a mad dash from Macon, who is carried to safety just in time to whisper a final message to his wife, while the corpsman ransacked his tiger stripes to find his wounds. Considering that Macon's death was, considering that Macon's death in combat was not simply the first for the SEAL teams, but that it was also nearly a 2% of the war. manpower loss for SEAL Team 1, no one would have faulted Wires if he had forced a pause to assess the operation that had led to the tragedy. He didn't.

The reason was no more complicated than the same one taught to anyone who has ever looked up to see the belly of the horse that just bucked them off. Wires ordered his men back into their saddles and back into the rung sat. This perseverance would have payoffs. Within a month, the seals of debt golf were expanding their operational repertoire from planned patrol and ambush to unplanned quick reaction counterattacks along the rung sats choke points. In theory, it was an operational expansion that finally fulfilled the Bucklew reports, recommendation for Riverbank Raiders. In practice, it was a resurrection of the Navy's grapple-swinging boarding parties. Encounters now included the inland portals. pursuit and cornering of black pajama wearing attackers,

firefighters that varied from a few sharp rifle exchanges to 15-minute skirmishes. One of these against an enemy-packed haystack that did not stop firing until the seals launched 48 grenades into it. Before long, the operational impact of debt, Gulf's aggressiveness was considered so substantial that Admiral Ward approved its increase from two platoons to three, all but a guarantee of corresponding increase in impact while this blossomed so too did the seal's confidence best evidenced by their swagger around Nabe but also by a wooden sign above the entrance to their tent scrawled yay though I walk

through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil because I'm the meanest bastard in the valley though the helmets and flack jackets of the of uncountable GIs would soon boast the same thing by mid autumn 1966 the seals claim to meanest in the valley was undisputed in the rung sat no other unit was as lethal and that right there is an excerpt from a book and the book is called by the water beneath the walls the rise of the Navy SEALs, and it's written by a guy, Benjamin Milligan. And this book is a comprehensive history book

about the origin of the SEAL teams. Now, that passage hit me because I trained throughout my entire career at a place called Camp Billy Macon out in the Imperial Valley of Southern California. And I knew the story of Billy Macon. He was awarded the Silver Star, and they have that citation out there

at the Desert Training Compound. They also have pictures of his platoon, and BTF Tony, Tony Afradi and I. We used to inspect those pictures, and we used to look at BM1 Moscon, and he was listed in that platoon picture. We used to talk about him. And he was this massive guy.

We stood out in the picture, and we used to think, What would BM1 Moscow do right now in this situation? But that really is about all the information we had about Billy Macon and his platoon and what they did in Vietnam. Some word of mouth stories that we'd hear from some of the older Vietnam guys, but that's about it. But this book spells it out so much more. And the book details the entire history of the SEAL teams, from the scouts and raiders to the naval, combat demolition units to the underwater demolition teams up to what we now know and where I

served my adult life in the SEAL teams. Now I normally don't cover history books on the podcast because I prefer to read first person accounts of people that were actually there, people that understand what it's like to live through and experience things, not just research it. Well, this book is an exception because the author, Ben Milligan, was a seal, which adds a level of understanding and connection that comes across on every page of this book. It is also so thorough and extensive of history of the seals that it leaves no stone unturned and connects really to the soul of the modern day seal, connects us with our frogmen forefathers. And I think this book should be required reading

for all seals or anyone even remotely interested in the seals. So they understand where we came from and the sacrifices that were made to get us where we are today. And it just so happens that we have the honor of the author, Ben Milligan, here tonight to talk to us about his time in the teams and his amazing account of the history of the Frog Men. Ben, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Jocko. Let's start off by getting a little background on you and where you came from. Before we get into the background and where the seals came from, let's figure out about where Ben Milligan came from. So where'd you grow up? Indianapolis, northeast side. And what was the situation you were of what your mom and dad do?

My dad was a near nose and throat surgeon, worked in a small town in Indiana called Anderson. It was a small GM town. I think he was the only, it was him and one other E&T in town, so he was kind of like minor celebrity status. There wasn't a restaurant that we would go to in town where somebody didn't come up and say, Hey, Doc, thanks for, you know, such and such. Hey, Doc, I got a sore nose. Can you help me out? Yeah.

And at one point, I think every single member in my family, except for my younger brother, worked in my dad's office. So we kind of grew up, you know, in the medical field. Welcome to, welcome to Doc Milligan. Can you have a seat over there? Would you like a candy? That kind of thing? Yeah, kind of.

That was probably the worst of my dad's employees, but he was kind enough to keep me on the worst example of nepotism. What about your mom? Did she work? Was she a housewife? Yeah, housewife. She looked after us. She was three boys and one girl, so a fair amount of work.

What number were you? I was in the middle, so I have an older brother, a younger brother, and then baby sister. Okay. So you're number two out of four. Right. What about what sports were you playing growing up? I played soccer badly. I think they kept me on the team because the school that I went to was so small.

they really had nobody else. Yeah, but I didn't get to the SEAL teams through any athletic ability. I was a really good trier. So after at the end of every soccer season, when they passed out awards, they would always give me like the Mr. Hustle or the Most Improved or some other, you know, just sort of, you know, underhand award. What was the, anything else going on in high school? What kind of music did you like?

Well, I ran track. So I was a decent, a track. But as far as music, that's typical stuff. Nothing. Nothing crazy. Nothing crazy, nothing hip. You're looking at the, like, the lamest guy that ever got through butts. So you said you ran track or you ran cross-country, you're both?

I kind of did a little both. I did cross-country my freshman year. What's the longest race you run in cross-country in high school? Isn't it like three miles or something? Yeah, it's nothing overwhelming. I was good at it. I probably could have done that. But after my first year...

How fast can you run a mile when you were in high school? Oh, I think the fastest I did it was something like 450, 448, something like that. But the only reason I think that was as good as I was ever going to get, I didn't... When I raced, after every race, it was... I mean, dry heaving everything else. I couldn't... I would get so nervous before the race that I couldn't eat.

I wouldn't sleep the night before. It was miserable. What were you nervous about? Oh, just brutal, pain, because I didn't have the natural talent to do this, so I just gutted it out. So you were nervous about the suffering you were going to experience. Yeah. Which made you suffer even more.

I wish I was tougher. And so, what, did you have any inkling about going in the military when you were in high school? Yeah, I knew that that was, I was going to do that. I think I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a seal when I was 12. They didn't know what a seal was. How did you know what a seal was? I'd heard my older brother's friends talking about it. And prior to that, my grandpa had been a Marine in World War II.

So growing up until I was about 12, I'd wanted to be a Marine. Then I found out what Navy SEALs were. And then I also sort of found out right at the same time that after the Battle of Okinawa, my grandpa had volunteered. He was one of the few guys that could swim, and they were so desperate for frogmen after Okinawa for the invasion of Japan, that they had ransacked the ranks just looking for anybody that could swim, and he had volunteered for the UDT. So he was one of the handful of non-N Navy guys that actually joined, so he didn't do any operations as a frogman, but he was attached to a UDT. So you found that out, but...

Found that out, and I was like, well, you know, impressionable age, and like, I, like, I, I'm going to do that. What was your comfort level in the water? High comfort level. He was, my grandpa was, I think we were at the pool every weekend. Swimming was a big part of our growing up. And then so very comfortable, but I'd never raced in the water. Never swam competitively.

Like I said before, the school that I went to was so small. I think I had 54 kids in my graduating class. I mean, I played soccer because, there was no football team. I ran track because we didn't have a wrestling team or anything like that. We had those. I probably would have done them, but I did what I could. But when I got to Buds, I realized after Hellwake that I was easily the slowest swimmer

that had made it through Hellwick. I just didn't know what the hell I was doing. So didn't you go to college after you had done with high school? And where did you go to college? Purdue. Purdue study history. Is that what you knew you wanted to do? Did you always have like an affinity for history?

Always, yeah. Starting, you know, my dad was always reading to us. My grandpa was always reading to us. We would, as a family, we would take trips and often we were hitting a battlefield along the way. When I hit junior high, though, right at that, you know, consequential point in my life, my grandpa, every fall, every fall break, he started taking me to a different, you know, the long weekend. and he would take me to a different Civil War battlefield

or some other, you know, revolutionary war battlefield. So it just kind of got, I just got addicted. So it was just, I caught his enthusiasm, I guess. So when you were going to college, were you actually learning and putting, see, when I went to college, I was just doing what I was told to do. I mean, I was already in the Navy when I went to college, but I was just doing whatever I needed to do to get good grades. I didn't care about anything.

I just was doing what I needed to do, get good grades. I wasn't like, oh, this is so interesting. I don't think I said that one single time. I would just like, do I need to memorize this? Cool, give it to me. That was my attitude. But it seems like you might have had a different attitude. No, no.

If you, at least were trying to get good grades, you're better than me because I didn't care about that either. So I mean, I... You were just trying to pass? So I had tried to enlist in the Navy, my senior year of... high school. I hadn't shown up after a soccer practice back home and I had gone directly from practice to the recruiter's office and I was getting ready to sign on the dotted line because I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to go right into the Navy. And the recruiter to his credit, he stops me

before I sign and he, you know, he points, you know, obviously behind me and he goes, do you know that woman? I turn around and my mom has both hands on the window and she saw it. So I took a pause. We went out in the parking lot. My mom and I had a conversation, and she begged me not to join the military. Nobody had joined the military in our family since World War II. So when I got out there, I said I would go to one year of college.

And after, if I did that one year of college, I would have their blessing. So when I signed up for class as my first year, I had no, I had no plan. I just signed up for every class. It looked interesting. up for the history of World War II. I signed up for, I mean, I, I just, I had no, I just signed up for all these history classes, and I went to the first one. I was hooked. So you did kind of like your classes. I liked my history classes. Those are the only classes that I paid any attention to, but I loved them. And I had, I had great professors, the history and political

science classes. So there's really no military history classes or courses are left in the country. There's only a couple of institutions that do military history. So they've taken a lot of that military history curriculum, and they've kind of farmed it out to different disciplines, political science being one of them. And so I would just look for all these interesting classes, all the stuff that I was interested in. I managed to carve out a degree. And when I graduated in 2000, somehow I managed to graduate in four years. Then I tried to go to OCS. I had no idea what I was doing.

I'd never met another seal. My application to go to OCS and then get a buds contract afterwards was ridiculous. I mean, they asked, you know, on the application, now I know, you know, you need like an admiral or somebody to write a letter of recommendation. To my buddy, Fred. I had my high school soccer coach. My application was pathetic. Especially, that was in 2000?

Oh, yeah, in 2000. And the competition for the officer billets is insane. Insane. It's insane. So I just enlisted. And the freaking soccer coach just did cut it. Such a bummer. It was a very nice letter.

So then you just said, cool, I'm enlisting. Yeah. And my parents. Did your mom break down again? You know, my parents were on a trip when this happened. Oh, dude, when she's gone, good call. Yeah. Well, my parents were gone.

They knew how important this was to me. They knew that I really didn't have a plan afterwards. It's not like I'd been in some sort of apprenticeship to go to law school or anything like that. I wasn't prepared for anything. So when I hit that roadblock, I called my parents. They were, you know, like I said, they weren't there. Talked to my dad. And my dad, to his credit, just said, this is something you have to do.

And so I went over and went to the enlisted recruits. and I signed that day. Two weeks later I was gone. That's freaking legit. And what year was that? 2000. So I signed up in early August of 2000. I was gone by the end of the month.

That was 2000. Right. Okay. So you show up in boot camp and you have that shock to your system. Did you say to yourself, what did I do? My mom was right. Oh, yeah. I was a college graduate.

Like, what the hell am I doing here? Yeah, but... Folding underwear? Yeah, I mean, I didn't have the worst boot camp experience. Early on, they had, you know, asked if anybody here had college experience and I had raised my hand, so I got made the division yeoman, so I was able to kind of leave from time to time carrying the mailbag

and just... Carrying the mailbag for 45 minutes. I would just march around the base. Yeah. So you get to, what was your like pre-training getting ready for buds? Did you do anything or were you just, hey, whatever? Yeah, I've been following the buds pre-bud's training plan. You know, certain number of pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, everything, and then running and swimming every day.

So you felt like you were pretty good shape. No, I didn't. I thought I was an okay shape, and I'd been doing it for a year. And so about four months before I actually joined the Navy, I had linked up with the Purdue ROTC guys that were all training to go to Buds. And when I linked up with them, their training was on a completely other level. These guys were serious. They had met Seals before.

I'd never met one. And so I did four months of training with them. I mean, these guys were all in ROTC. I had a ponytail, had a beard. I was just, just looked like a piece of shit. So I showed up to, like, who the hell is this guy? You had a ponytail and a beard? What year was this?

2000? Yeah, it was 1999. But what was funny is a year later, when I graduated at Buds, two of these guys were checking. into Buds the day I graduated school. And I burst into their room to say hi. And they had no idea who it was. Did they make it? They all made it. That's awesome. Was any challenges in Buds? Anything that gave you a struggle? Swimming. Yeah, I had to, I expected that swimming would be just like it was, like running was for me. Like you'd start like running for me if I was going to do a long run.

go out at a moderate pace, that moderate pace, the further you go would get harder to maintain. And then by the end of the race, you're physically taxed, but you can, you know, gut through the last bit of pain. I swam like that. I swam at a moderate pace, and by the end of it, I was pretty well gassed, and it wasn't enough. So I started going every weekend in buds. I was linking up with Master Chief Nepper, who I didn't know at the time. I mean, I just knew that he was, you know, a guy that would, you know, take pity on all the shitty bud swimmers. And so when everybody else was relaxing and kind of, you know, licking their wounds from the previous week, I was at the pool with Master Chief Nepper.

And I would not be here or I would never have made it through if it wasn't for his classes. And, I mean, little did I know that, you know, he was, I mean, he's, you know, one of the oracles of seal history to the day. So you, when did you graduate from butts? Let's see, August of 2000, August 10th. My 20th year was 2001, 2001, yeah. Yeah, so you graduated August 2001. And then where did you get stationed?

I was supposed to go to Seal Team 10, but I went to Seal Team 4, East Coast. Just some paperwork mix-up or something? Yeah, half of our class was going to Seal Team 5, and the other half was going to Seal Team 10. And for whatever reason, SEAL Team 10 hadn't quite stood up yet. So they switched us to Team 4. So where are you in September? So you graduate in August of 2001.

Where are you actually standing when September 11th goes down? I was home having just completed airborne. So, I mean, like everybody else in my class, I immediately went downstairs, packed my bag, and was ready to go. A no call came. Thought you were going to NOM? I did. We all did. Man, I thought I was going to NOM in 1990 when I got in, man. We were going nowhere but disappointment. So you're at SEAL Team 4. You get into a platoon. What job are you in the platoon? I was a 60 gunner. This is a pig gunner.

Pig gunner, yeah. Freaking new guy. Yep, new guy. No, no responsibility. I was the I was the Intel rep of the platoon. Oh, yeah, that's right. They were like, oh, you went to college. Yeah. You can read. Intel rep, post. Right.

What kind of platoon? So you're a team 40, you get into a platoon. How is it? How's it work up? You having a good time? That was all right. I like, you know, there were some leadership challenges, but it was a good platoon. I mean, we had a good chief.

We had a good OIC. We didn't have a great mission. We were a marg, so we got attached to a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, Marine, what was it, an LPD or L.A.J or something like that. And we were just sort of on call in the med. You know, but at that point, you know, both Afghanistan and Iraq were going on. It was just, you know, we were sitting, sitting out in the med just floating around. We didn't do anything until we got called to go do Liberia.

It was the Liberian Civil War. So we did some hydrographic reconnaissance and stuff like that. You got your lead line and slayed out? I did. Right on. I did. And I was, so we had done probably half a dozen of these things. And then the last one that we were doing was directly in front of the U.S.

Embassy in Monrovia. And I was probably the closest swimmer to the beach, which meant I was the closest swimmer to the CNN cameras. They were out there. And if anybody knew my history, swimming, it probably would have pushed me further back. But so I'm, you know, paralleling the beach as we're doing this, and I know that, you know, the whole world is watching. And at some point, I got wrapped up in my lead line. I'm like, oh, my gosh. And I'm tied up in this thing.

I can't swim. It's a really close shore break, so I'm getting hammered with waves. I bounce my head off a big rock. I'm like, I've got to get out of this line. So I pull out my knife and I start cutting this thing. The wave is coming up on me, and I'm getting ready to get slamming. with this thing and I don't want to stab myself while I'm doing this. And so I look around. I got no, I'm holding the slate with one hand. I got the knife in the other and I need something to swim with. So I did the only thing I could do. I put my knife in my mouth and I started and I swam through this truck. Like how World War II Frogman is this? Oh, that's freaking awesome. So you get done with that deployment, that was kind of the highlight of the deployment, was doing hydrographic reconnaissance in Liberia.

Well, I want to brag, but yeah. It's freaking legit. Hey, I did two ARG platoons out on the West Coast, and I've done so many hydrographic reconnaissance as it's ridiculous. But I guess I've never done like a, I did real ones, but they weren't in combat. They were like in Kuwait. It was real. Like someone was going to land there.

I mean, but didn't get, I never put my mouth in my, I made my knife in my teeth and swam out. But I think you could probably agree. It's not the reason you joined the SEAL teams. Not quite why I joined the SEAL teams. And that must be, so what did you do after that? I had some sort of family challenges, so I briefly got out until figured out where I was going to be living. When I finally found out I was going to be living in San Diego, I put my OCS package back together. I really wanted to go back to the teams and be an officer.

Soccer coach, write you another letter of recommendation. I actually had a few decent letters, and I had just gotten to San Diego. I contracted during that year off, so Blackwater Triple Canopy. Where did you go? Iraq? Iraq, yeah. And what were you doing just PSD, basically? PSD, yeah. But once we got into San Diego, I...

Where did you go? were you in, where were in Iraq were you? What years? Well, that was 2004, 2004, 2005. I mean, I was, I guess it was 2005. I was back in the teams by 2006. What's PSD? Personal security detail. Yeah, it's like doing security for somebody. So that's what a lot of the contractors were doing. You're doing security for other government workers. Those government workers could be people working on telephone lines. They could be CIA people. They could be government people. They could be government people. but it's basically security. Gotcha.

So that's what many of those contracting jobs were for guys that were in special operations, just doing security. Gotcha. So how long were you out for then? A year. Then you come back in. Wait, what happened with your OCS package? So my OCS package was, I really just needed my last letter of recommendation. So I was in the...

the group one commander's office for my for my interview he was kind enough to to give me an interview and I had been getting ready for that interview for a while and the morning of the interview I was contacted by seal team 18 and said I was recalled so I was like well it's not the end of the world but let's see if I can get this you know OCS package signed off on it so just so everyone know seal team 18 is a reserve seal team correct where if you're in the If you get out of this teams and you want to stay connected, you can go in the reserves. And that's what that is. So you got recalled.

How many teams are there, like, all together? Well, there were eight seal teams at the time, four on each coast, and then there's dev group. But then in addition to the eight active duty teams plus dev group, there were two reserve seal teams. It was sort of a new concept they were trying. So they got eight teams. Plus two reserve teams. So 10, and then dev group 11. Yeah, I guess essentially.

Yeah, kind of. There are some other things, but yeah. Yeah. So when you say team, that's like a technical thing. Yeah, because you got SDV teams too. Right. Which are also teams. Gotcha.

But the numbers, though, because that's. Well, you got SDV team one and SDV team too. So you got another two teams. All right. This goes deep. You can't leave the SDVs out. I understand. The boys are working hard.

It's working hard. So I'm in the office. I knew that I'd found out that morning I was getting recalled, but it was still hoping that the captain could maybe figure something out. So I do the interview. Interview goes great, I think. And he's like, do you have anything for me? And I said, well, sir, not for nothing, but I just got recalled this morning.

I was wondering if there's anything you could do. I'd really like to follow through in this OCS package and come back to the teams as an officer. And he just said, no, that sucks. So I found myself back in the team. But, you know, it was the best thing that could have ever happened. I went to SEAL Team 5 and jumped on a great platoon with great leadership. And, you know, we followed you. Yeah, you guys relieved us, not my task unit, but you guys went to Hobby, Hobania.

Yep. So you rolled out to Hobania. And you were a reservist that was activated? Yep. And they put you in a platoon? Yep. Oh, that's freaking awesome. It was, yeah, it was great.

Did you do any of the workup or anything? Yeah. So you did the work up, went on deployment, but you're a reservist, but you're in a platoon. Yeah. What was your job? RTO, or the radio telephone off. I was the comm guy. I did a little bit of breaching, but then, you know, kind of taught myself how to be a J-TAC, but that's an interesting thing to try and teach yourself while you're on the ground in hobby.

And not only that, but, you know, I knew that the platoon needed a com guy. I've been to comm school, I've never been a calm guy, but they asked if I was a com guy, and I said, yes, I'm the best com guy. I just taught me someone to do it. That's a good call. Yeah. How was that deployment? It was great. What were you guys doing, hobby, in 06, 07?

That was like the winner of 06 into 07, right? Correct. What was your missions? What were you guys doing? We were doing a lot of, you know, sniper overwatches and then just doing going house after house, you know, doing little, little house-to-house-to-house raids looking for Al-Qaeda, just like you guys were.

Yeah. So you're kind of living. in the dream. I was living, I was doing exactly what I thought I would be doing and when I enlisted in 2000. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. I, I, I always felt that way when I was in Iraq. I felt like I was so lucky to be where I was. And then I will say in Ramadi, it was a little next level because, you know, when you're a kid, you kind of look, I was thinking nom. You know, my whole life, I was thinking nom, right? But even, there was something, even a little bit more seemed like a little bit extra,

was straight up World War II, right? You're thinking World War II. You're thinking tanks and stuff. So in Ramadi, there was times where tanks were rolling down the street, rolling in through buildings over walls. It was WWI-I. And, man, it was freaking awesome.

Yeah, but you're right. I mean, I had that nom expectation, too. And when we got there, it was, it was a ground war. The only thing that made it sort of nom-like is the Euphrates River. Oh, yeah, for sure. And we would use those Sok-Rs to insert. And, you know, there's only so many boat guys on the sock-Rs.

And sometimes they're alternating between right or port and starboard side guns. So if they didn't have anybody on, you know, a gun, you'd just stand up and you'd grab one. And, yeah, you're in a T-shirt and rolling up the Euphrates River. And it was pretty... There was an area... a whole AO called 1MC or MC1. I can't remember, but it was up

north, kind of northeast of the town of Ramadi and it was on the north side of the river and it looked like nom. I mean, it was ridiculous. Plus we had the Marine Corps Huey's flying around. We called it Vietnam because it looked like

it was Ramadi but it looked like Vietnam and it was freaking crazy. Right on. And so you get done with that deployment and then what do you do when you get home? At that point I started thinking about grad school. Okay. I was.

So you were a reservist. So when you got home, were you released from active duty kind of? Yeah, I went to, but I managed to parlay that into going over to Warcom. So I worked for a couple years over at Warcom. And my platoon chief from Seal Team 5 was going over there to run the J-TAC program. And, you know, I kind of taught myself how to do all that. So he said, if you want, you can come over, work with me while you're going to grad school. And so we just did J-TAC stuff for the next two years while I went through.

I got my degree. Where did you go to school? U.S.D. Oh, I went to undergrad there. Did you? Did you? Gorgeous. That's a nice place.

And then were you thinking, hey, were you still thinking about trying to put that OCS package in? I was. I mean, it was on the sort of the back burner. I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to go put the OCS package to go back active or do like an FTS package and get a commission in the reserves. Oh, check. So I had my first kid, and once I had the first kid, I was like, I don't want to leave this guy. So I went with the reserves.

So I got a commission. So the day I left active duty, I got a commission of the reserves. Oh, so you did end up getting a commission reserves. I did. You still have it right now? Well, I'm out of the reserves now. Oh, okay. I left the reserves four years ago, or maybe a little more.

So you get done and now you realize you want to stay home with the kid. And so then what, you're trying to put your life together on the outside. How's that go? No, great. Like any guy who leaves their dream job and, you know, suddenly find. themselves doing something they never expected to do. It didn't go great, Jocko. I was, you know, like everybody, trying to figure out what my next big thing was, looking for relevance in any area that I could find it. And I quickly realized that in my business life, I was not going to be

successful. What businesses did you try? Well, first off, I started at a textile manufacturer in Philly. We were trying to get back to family because we had, you know, I had a new new kid and probably another one on the way. So my wife at the time lived in South Jersey, so we went there. So I got a job at a textile manufacturer in Philly and they were great people. And I really liked the company and I was just terrible at it. You know, they wanted to start like a tactical products line and I thought I'd try, you know, business and, yeah, I didn't do well. I mean, it didn't do terrible, but I was just like, I don't know what I'm doing. So I started thinking about this right about then.

I was like, there's only two things that I can do. And, you know, I don't want to leave the kid. And, you know, at that time, it was, you know, one kid had become two. So I started thinking about that. this. What was the catalyst that made you actually get out your computer, open the word processor, and start typing? That was probably extortion 117. So like everybody, I went to, you know, quite a few of the funerals after that. And I went to J.T.'s funeral, John Tullsen. He was he was from Rockford, Iowa, so I went to his funeral and totally unexpected. But when I was there,

I met Jim Hornfisher or James D. Hornfisher. That's his author name, but he was a literary agent. He was, but he was also a, probably the greatest, you know, the greatest naval historian in the country. He had written last stand of the tin can sailors, Neptune's Inferno. So when I got to JT's funeral, everybody's there, everybody's drinking, I see this guy who's totally out of place. He's six foot five, you know, wears glasses. He's just kind of not a team guy clearly. And one of my friends quickly realizes that, you know, he has the two biggest nerds at the event and he introduces us. And within 30 seconds, I knew that this was a guy that was going to change my life.

So we started talking naval history. We got pretty lit up. I kept his business card in my pocket for the next year. It was kind of, you know, secretly working on an idea for a book. And after a year, I sent him a cold email and just, you know, here's a chapter. Take a look at it. And he sent an email back and he said, this is fantastic. And I spent the next six months putting an outline together for what the rest of the book would look like.

And he took that to New York and got a contract. So they gave me a two-year contract. I spent the next eight years working on it. They gave you a two-year contract. Yeah. And you just kept saying, hey, I just kept thinking. I just kept thinking they were going. No, it wasn't that.

It was like I just, you know, they wanted, they wanted a product that I quickly realized I couldn't give them. So I knew that. What did they want? They wanted a history of the teams, but they wanted it done quickly, like everybody. I mean, you can. So I knew that if I did that, then the history that I was going to write was going to be like every other history that have been written on the teams, sort of just wave tops. and I knew that it wasn't going to be written with any sort of intent beyond, you know, just my own interest in each of the events. I knew I knew the teams deserved something like this.

I just didn't know how to do this. So I just kind of broke the whole thing down. I found a bunch of, I found two or three books that I really liked. I read each of them three or four times. One of them I went through and I literally outlined it, you know, not page by page, but like chapter by chapter. It's like, this chapter is doing this. This chapter is doing this.

And I just sort of broke it down. How does this author, and I found another author. How does this author introduce characters? How do they, you know, how do they just, you know, structure or how do they, you know, weave multiple storylines together? And I just kind of taught myself how to do this. Did you? But I knew, I knew that they, that, you know, this was going to take me a lot longer than two years.

So when they gave you two years, did you just sign the contract and just knowing that you would? Yeah, I did the same thing I did at Sealed Team 5. You know, I said, yeah, I'm a calm guy. You said, yeah, I'll write this in two years? Yeah. How pissed were they when you kept missing the deadline by five years? You know, to their credit, they didn't bother me. They would check in.

And the only thing that they really did was they, they, They wanted to see the first chapter. So once the first chapter was finished, I sent that off, and they said, okay, this is, and it took me between six and seven months to write that first chapter on the Raiders. How many hours a day would you work? I would start at 4.30, and I would work until about eight. And then I would, you know, do the rest of my day, and then I'd come home. I'd get my kids to bed.

And then once I put them to bed, I'd work as long as I could until I was just kind of smoked. So you're probably getting like five, six hours a day on the book? Yeah. For, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what,

we'll get into the book now. But before we do, the book is freaking, it's an incredible book. And the detail you go into, it's over 500 pages long. I'll read a fraction of that today. It was so hard for me to figure out what to What parts to read

I guess I could have talked to you about it Maybe we could have discussed it, but I just kind of like Every page has got really important stuff on it The writing's terrific Clearly and unmistakably You sourced it from a lot of first person accounts You know, captured documents Or information captured from documents

from official traffic, from interviews, from other sources. It reads like an action novel in many parts, except for the fact that it's all true, which makes it even better to read. So this book, I can't recommend this book enough. Just a fantastic history. And it's not just about the SEALs because one of the premises of the book

is that SEALs wouldn't exist if either really the Marine Corps or the Army would have stuck to and committed, committed to the idea of having these kind of direct action raiders, which is what the SEAL teams ends up being. And everybody's got it, kind of got it now, you could say. But for many years, there was many attempts at doing this. And they wouldn't work out for various reasons.

Maybe a mission would go bad or a war would end or a combination of those two things. Or, you know, when you're in the Army and you're a general and you've got some cowboy-looking guy running around and you're senior to that cowboy-looking guy, you think I don't want this guy running around. I'm going to disband his whole organization. Or you're in the Marine Corps.

You do the same thing. Hey, you know, I was in the Marine Corps. Marine Corps is right and tight, you know, and now who's this guy running around with freaking long hair? No, I'm going to disband that whole organization. And that seems to happen a lot. There's one group, the Navy, where you're in the Navy, so you're sort of, you know, if you're an admiral in the Navy, you kind of want to have some of these pipe hitters running around that can make something happen. And that's, I think, part of the Genesis of the SEAL teams.

So, book is fantastic. Let's get into some of this. So here we go. on August 8th at 0900, both submarines departed sub-based Pearl Harbor and made it for the open ocean. It was in the lead was the Nautilus with Carlson and 87 Raiders a B company. Following almost a day behind was the larger and slower Argonaut with Roosevelt and the remaining 134 men, the majority belonging to A company. For eight sweltering days, the Raiders lived, crammed alongside each other,

anywhere they could stretch each man, a prisoner to the heat, sweat, and stink of the one next to him. After 2,000 miles of the Pacific's omnipotence, slightly farther than New York City to San Diego, the Nautilus finally arrived at its target on August 16th. So these are Marine Raiders, group that have been put together to go out. They're conducting freaking sub-operations in World War II.

Fast forward, and that's, you know, obviously I'm only reading chunks of the book, so it seems a little bit stilted or you don't recognize some of the names. Believe me, Every person that's in this book is described. You give an incredible background on people, where they came from, how they got in the situation they're in. So when you hear me jumping, you haven't heard of a character. It's just because I haven't read.

I'm not reading you the entire book. Fast forward a little bit. Sensing his momentum eroding like the ground beneath him, Carlson sloughed through the soft sand, hastening to gather his men before the sun rose. Obviously, they've been inserted at this point. If he could find an untangle his two reduced companies and point them in the direction of their targets, he might still have a time. he might still have a chance. Because there had been no reconnaissance, however, no one knew for sure where they were or where to go.

With four miles of beach to the left and another six miles to the right with targets, their targets could be anywhere if their targets were there at all. Worse still, one whole boat crew was missing. Without target locations or knowledge of enemy strength, with 13 men unaccounted, for and possibly drowned Carlson was blind and groping for answers in an ever-brightening world his men becoming ridiculously conspicuous along the white beaches in their uniforms of dyed black so this is already off to a bad start with these guys yeah they yeah I don't know what to say I mean I the I didn't right organizing the book I knew where I knew I knew where I needed the book to end

I knew that the book would end in Vietnam because in Vietnam, it's in Vietnam that the SEAL teams become what they are today. Land Focus Go Anywhere Commandos. What he didn't know was how it happened. And I didn't have like, you know, in order to, you know, decide what a book's going to be, you've got to have a, you know, not just an end point, you're going to have a beginning point. So I needed to find that first instance where the Navy wanted, or the Navy had that desire to create some sort of. sort of raiding unit. Now, we all know that, you know, the Marine Corps is a department of the Navy. So the Navy has its own army. And so logically, the Marine Corps should have been able to field that first commando unit that worked directly for the Navy. The reason that they don't do

that ultimately happens, you know, in the opening days of World War II, and all happens because of this Macon Island raid. The Marine Corps doesn't want the Raiders. The Marine Corps wants what it's always wanted, or not what it's always wanted, they want what they've wanted since World War I. And World War I, the Marine Corps becomes every bit as consequential as the U.S. Army. So the leaders of the Marine Corps, who all fought on the battlefield at the First World War, they feel like when World War II happens, they can finally achieve the status that their service has long deserved. So they're not interested in being the Navy's anything. They're interested in being their own branch of service completely, you know, subservient to themselves. So when the Navy says they want to spread the Japanese attention away from the Solomons or away from the South Pacific and do this raid,

Marine Corps thinks, well, it's, you know, it's not really what we should be doing, but we'll do it just because the Navy wants it. So when they send these raiders up there with a commander that the Marine Corps really didn't want it. They really didn't like Carlson. It goes predictably bad. And then the Marine Corps justifies the reason that they never wanted them in the first place. It's interesting. And I don't know if you'll remember this because it might be a little bit. You didn't come in until 2000.

Yeah. when I came in, the Marine Corps attitude was, well, we don't need a special operations group inside the Marine Corps because all Marines are special. And that's the attitude to persist. And they kept that like to the T when I was in. That was just how they rolled was through that. Yeah. I mean, they have had that attitude since the first, well, since World War II, but it's in the

First World War, they realize what they can be. Yeah. Which is a parallel army. You, the work that you did to research these battles and you go into so much detail with them, I mean, here we're going back to the book real quick. For the next 30 minutes, A company fought a suicidal enemy armed with four machine guns, two grenade throwers, automatic rifles, and a flame thrower.

Each time the raiders managed to silence a machine gun nest, another Japanese gunner would step over the piled body, surrounding it and bring it to life. Worst of all, unseen and inescapable where the snipers lashed to the tops of the palms. Not blinded by the sun and rewarded for their patience, each sniper sought out, movement, and took aim. We pleaded with Thompson to stay down, one man remembered years later's.

There were snipers within 50 yards of us. He did not. Compelled instead to shuttle between his men, pointing out targets as he went. His Medal of Honor was awarded posthumously. We had Japs in front of us, above us, alongside us to our left and behind us, remembered Corporal Young,

exposed at the tip of the cul-de-sac. Even when they managed to fight free of the Japanese around them, their good sense kept them nailed to the ground. I lay as flat as I could and tried to shrink myself as narrow as possible, said Private Glenn Lincoln, playing possum under the palm trees and the scrutiny of two separate machine gun positions. In 30 minutes, nine raiders from second platoon were dead.

So was Thompson. So was Lieutenant Jerry Holtham, the battalion intelligence officer, a child of missionaries and the one raider who could speak Japanese. Also killed were four radio telephone operators, each one singled out by the antenna wagging above his shoulder, which was connected to a waterlogged radio that either lacked the power to reach Carlson's command post or did not work at all. So like you said, this is just a disaster, this situation. It's a disaster, but it, you know, it highlights, you know, even though each branch of service has leaders that have their own purposes for creating these units at various times for various reasons. In each instance, whether it's Raiders or Rangers or Lerps or whatever, the guys on the ground, these are, I mean, every bit is heroic and deserving of, you know, our respect. as the seals that their legacies ultimately funnel into. So it's just, I mean, the branches of service don't support their efforts for one, you know, various reasons.

And it, you know, it takes a long time to get there. But you're right. You said it, you know, in your opening remarks. I mean, this history or this institution, the seal teams, could not have, would not have come to be, would not have come to be a land-focused commando unit had it not been for the gap that the Army and the Marine Corps and the CIA or the OSS continually provide over this 30-year period of history. So that kind of, as you mentioned, that kind of, that first raid, that making raid kind of put a damper on the enthusiasm of the Marine Corps to go out and make one of these units. Fast forward a little bit, you say this in the book. In May 1942, in anticipation of the Army's need, the Navy issued a narrow call for volunteers

to join something called the amphibious commandos. What made the call narrow was that it seemed to be directed at a single group. That group was, in the words of one reported, the 600 or so, quote, educated musclemen who had signed on as assistant instructors to the Navy's physical fitness program. These were led by the most educated muscle man of his day, Lieutenant Commander James Joseph Green Tooney. Am I saying that right, Tooney? Tunny. Tony.

Six feet tall, equipped with heavy fist-shaped chin and handsome smile that every man, woman, and child in the country recognized. Toney was known—wait, Toney, or Toney? Toney. Toney was known as the Great War Machine-turned heavyweight boxing champ who had not once but twice defeated Jack Dempsey. Unlike many boxers of his day whose training consisted of, in the words of one competitor, a haircut and a shave, Tunney had managed this feat by relentlessly conditioning his body during the day and by reading Shakespeare every night. After winning his second fight, Tunney had fought only once more, then quit the ring forever to follow that irresistible poll, as one contemporary reporter noted, to do something big in other fields.

This had included lecturing on Richard the 3rd at Yale and inventing the Gene Tunney Exerciser, a long board equipment, a long board equipped with ropes and pulleys that would raise the feet and condition the abdomens it sold for $3. Biggest of all, he had swapped his old Globe and Anchor for the bronze oak leaves of a naval officer

in order to rid his new service of what he considered its gravest threat, the pot belly. I dare say that 50% of the officers enlisted men cannot properly stand at attention, said the newly commissioned Tunney in 1941, partly blaming their ill-fitting dungarees, which stretched too much and induced the wearer to stick out his belly and hold them up. Tunney reasoned that the problem was actually a threat to national security and would eventually lead, in his words, to moral collapse.

Believing like all Marines that a strong physique undergirded a strong character, Tunney's initial efforts in the Navy had met with only moderate success because sailors were not Marines and as such had never cared much for either fitness or character. Yeah, your dry humor comes through a lot in this book.

I had to cut, I don't know, probably five, six pages of Tunney out. I mean, the one problem that you face when you're writing a book like this is that you, research is really suburb. You can go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. Keep going. You keep going.

You find article after article after article and you want to cram all of this information into that paragraph. And it doesn't take you anywhere. So you constantly have to be asking yourself, what is this? First of all, what's the book? I kept a note card on my desk when I started working on the book and the note card had three questions on it. It was pinned to the wall. It said, what's the purpose of the book? What's the purpose of the chapter?

What's the purpose of this paragraph? of this paragraph. And if the paragraph is not in support of the chapter, and if the chapter is not in support of the book, then you're not, you're doing it wrong. So, um, you, every character that you come across, you, you want to give them some sort of, uh, sort of introduction. Tunney's, uh, consequential in that he, uh, attracts all of these, um, studs. Yeah, he brings all these, yeah, yeah, studs. Uh, but he doesn't have the program that's going to be able to contain these guys. So he attracts all these, you know, you know, pro football players to his program that have, you know, they all want to, you know, serve their country, you know, in the most

aggressive way possible. And they find out that they're going to be calisthenics instructors. So, of course, you know, what's going to happen. So Tunney collects all these guys. And then, you know, I think the, anyway, go ahead. Yeah, it's, it's the, you know, I've, I've done a lot of reading about SOG and every basically I would say every SOG mission in Vietnam could be its own book and just want every single SOG mission and that's the feeling I get when when reading your book every one of these characters that you introduce could be their own book yeah just about every single character could be their own book you just have to stop you've got you've got to draw the line at some point you'd be like yes there's a book here clearly but we're you know we're going on to

you know this objective I never wanted to write a book with a thesis. That was never my objective. I didn't want to prove anything. But what I did find was that with the thesis, I was able to connect all these disparate stories. They never would have formed a, you know, a comprehensive story. But with that thesis, by asking the question, how did the Navy come to create a land focus go anywhere, commando unit? I was able to stitch all these other, you know, Rangers and Raiders and all the other stories of, you know, the non-seal units into a book about the SEALs. Here's another character that you introduce that we all in the SEAL teams know.

When 28-year-old Phil Bucklew, a football star from Columbus, Ohio had presented himself at an Army recruitment office immediately after Pearl Harbor to volunteer for the paratroopers, the recruiter had taken one look at a 6-foot-2, 235-pound frame and said, I could take two instead of you, considering that the smallest soldier the Army could accept was a shadow heavier than 105 pounds. The recruiter is absolutely right. disappointed to be passed up for the paratroopers and thus lose his chance to be dropped into a foreign land. Buckley had settled for the Navy, then settled again for the Tunney program, ostensibly

the best place in the military for someone with his background. After playing for Xavier University in Cincinnati and then for the Rams in Cleveland, Buckley had since gone on to raise money and recruit players for his own professional football team, accomplishments that had demonstrated not only intelligence and toughness that Tunney sought, but also leadership and the risk-taking of an entrepreneur. He was not the only footballer with hidden potential. Big John Tripsen, a six-foot-five, bushy-haired all-American from Mississippi State, had already seen more of the country than most Americans ever would, having traded his life on the South

Texas plains to play all-pro tackle for the Detroit Lions. And Robert Herrick, a mountain of muscle from the mountains of Colorado, who stacked every bit as high as his Texas colleague had enlisted in the Navy not only as a graduate of Colorado State, but as its head football coach. Essentially, it was a roster with more potential than Tunney's program could tame. Just a bunch of freaking beasts. Got to read this part too. So at the call for amphibious commandos, Bucklew and nine other Titan athletes raised their hands.

When they reported to their next assignment, a chief petty officer with a knowledge of angling and the Tani regime took one look at the oversized arrivals and dubbed them the tuna fish. The name stuck. You get another guy named Halperin in here who plays a huge role in all this. Yeah, he's indispensable. I mean, everybody, you know,

the temptation when you're writing about these guys is to introduce them as they come. You know, you come to Bucklew. You want to introduce Bucklew because Bucklew is, you know, one of the most important people in the history of NSW. You come to him, you want to give him the introduction that he deserves. But he doesn't become Phil Bucklew, the consequential Phil Bucklew until Vietnam. So you've got to hold your fire and you've got to, you know, sort of convince the reader that if you just hold on, we're going to get there. So because the most consequential person of this period is the guy you just mentioned,

which is Buck Halper. Yeah, you get this guy Buck Halper and at a mere six feet 225 pounds, you guys were monsters. This is back in the day too. This is freaking like World War II. Guys are not jacked like they are now. Like if you're six foot, six feet 225 back in the day, you are jacked. 100%.

Echo, can you confirm? Confirm. From the bro science perspective. Yes, sir. Okay. Just making sure. At a mere six feet, two 25 pounds, Robert Buck Halperin was easily the smallest of the group, but stood out from his fellow footballers for a string of peculiarities, not the least of which a face,

not unlike that of Hollywood's Robert Taylor. Besides this, he was half a decade older than the rest and had a personality that was not only as dry as Cabernet, but also incomparably unflappable. Most peculiar of all, he'd been raised and educated in the exclusive Chicago suburb of Oak Park, the second son of prominent Jewish immigrants at the time not exactly features that encourage friendships with working class white footballers, but try telling that to Halperin. Unlike the son of Jewish immigrants, unlike many sons of Jewish immigrants, Halperin had been raised to speak no Yiddish to practice no faith. A boy so adrift from any spiritual anchor that he adopted two regional substitutes as his sanctuaries. The first had been Lake Michigan in which he swam so often and so well that he once caught the admiration of awaiting Al Capone.

And upon which he had learned to sail, eventually reading the windy cities win so well that he had taken up competitive racing. The other sanctuary, a high holy place, if there ever was one, had been the Notre Dame football stadium. Asked why a Jew would submit himself to such a Christian university, Halperin had flatly replied, because it was the best. So this is another guy. Yeah. Just a character. And he starts, I mean, he starts like, you know, from nothing. He has no expectation.

He's so old when World War II starts. He's 34 years old when he enlists as a seaman in the Navy. But his brother had been a radiologist at Pearl Harbor. And so after you see your brother performing such service, what else are you going to do? You've got to do the same. So he pulls every string he can, gets himself into the Navy. And I don't know.

I don't want to give anything away, but he, I mean, he goes from the Tunney program all the way to China. I mean, he becomes, you know, NSW's first ground force commander. It's freaking nuts. Last week of August, 1942, Buck Halperin and the rest of the tuna fish, plus 36 enlisted sailors, left the Solomon Islands where they were trucked more than 100 miles to a point where the lower lip of the Chesapeake Bay met the Atlantic Ocean. Here the Virginia coast gave way to an isolated tidewater inlet called Little Creek and a dirt road based with dirt floor housing that made the Solomon's look like San Francisco. Upon arrival, they were greeted by an army officer. Lieutenant Lloyd Petticoord Jr., a 29-year-old former commander of the observer group who now wore knee-high leather boots of a horse soldier. And in spite of his small stature, when standing at attention looked like a nail waiting to be driven into a rail tie.

His personality wasn't far off. As one of the few soldiers who had participated in the Marine Corps flex exercises, he knew all too well the challenges awaiting the men. He now welcomed to the intensely difficult course. He had just created a course of soft sand runs, rubber boat races, and endless team calisthenics known as the Joint Army Navy amphibious scouts and raider school. At last, the Navy's volunteers for amphibious commandos were about to come them. That's sort of the beginning. And there's something, you know what's interesting? I don't know.

I'm thinking if you do those like psychological games where or psychological tests where somebody says something and it makes you think of whatever, you know, you have to say what it means. But when you hear amphibious commando, who's not 100% in on that kid? Like when I think I knew what an amphibious commando is when I was five years old and wanted in, you know? I had the I had I collected these little Air Fix soldiers the little one 30 second size little army men when I was a kid My mom eventually threw them all the way by the way Brutal just a savage

I had hundreds of them and I used to you know dream and talk and play with those things But my favorite was the British commandos they had little zodiacs and and kayaks and little beanie caps Like that was the deal and you see that that was When I was a little kid, that was like, here? Amphibious Commandos. So, again, I can't read the soulbook. I know, but yeah, pedicure. Like, he's a, each of the people that I focus on in the book,

I tried to drill down as close as I could. You know, there's, you know, the general rule of thumb is you start big and you go small. So you read whatever is available. the existing literature that's out there. And there have been a couple of books that have been published in Pedicort's a character. So you kind of trace those down. You know, pedicord, Halper, and Buckley, whatever. You're trying to get as close you can to the person that you want to write about,

or the person that becomes the consequential person of the moment. So you're trying to learn about them in such a way that you can find out the traits in that person that made them consequential. and whether the traits that made, you know, somebody like Carlson a failure or the traits that made pedicord or Buckley or Halpern a success. So oftentimes you'd hit a wall. There's no place, you know, there's no more information that's available in existing literature. So you've got to start digging into, you know, archival material. So I had learned pretty quickly, you know, what archives around the country usually had the most stuff.

So I would go to those archives and I would dig. Where is this? Is this a place you got to go to? Like big libraries or something? Yeah, so the archive, I generally used about five different archives. The most, the best one was probably the National Archives in Maryland. They have the most stuff, and they have the, it's accessible. When you start getting to the military archives, not the Army so much.

The Army Archives is actually really a world-class institution. I loved going there. That's in Carlisle. The Marine Corps Archive in Quantico, another great archive. The Navy Yard, or the Naval Heritage and History Command archive at the Navy Yard. That was a bit trickier. They had, for whatever reason, I think, a lot of it had to do with the fact that they had an active shooter there a few years before. So security on the base was tight, but they would really, so a very close-held institution.

So when you went there, you know, digging through their stuff, it could be a little complicated. You had to plan around it. But you'd find stuff. You'd find, you know, I found letters that pedicorder written. You've got to really, you've got to look at the letter. You've got to read it once. You've got to highlight what's important.

And you've got to read it again and again and figure out, you know, what you can learn about him from the letter, the way he talks, the way he writes, the way he thinks. When you run into that, when you can't, you know, squeeze. any more information out of that, then you're left with finding the family. And, you know, in this case, I found Petticoor's family. I tried to find, you know, at least a family member for every, you know, person that I, you know, focused on on the book. Had dinner with Buck Halperin's son last night. Still close friends with him. But Petticoors family, you know, some of these people,

they don't realize like how important their dad or their grandfather was in this history. And they have no idea why you're calling them. And they, you know, they would provide photos. They provide letters. Sometimes they would let you come to their house and dig through their stuff. But yeah, Petticoad was one of those that I didn't expect to find as much as I did. But talking to them, I mean, you can get little details out of them. I found one photo of Petticoat wearing those books.

boots. And I knew that they were, you know, the boots that Army cavalry soldiers wore. And I didn't anticipate that there were boots that he wore, you know, through the rest of his career until I ran into an old scout and raider. I was a 96-year-old guy, old Jim Barnes, what they called him. I was like, you know, I'd sat down to interview Jim Barnes and I, you know, what do you remember about pedicord? And the first thing that he remembered were those boots. Damn, little detail. After this here, you detail, you go through some of the details of Operation Torch, which is up in North Africa, the Sabu River.

It's a success, you know, it's a tough operation. Five of the ten original tuna fish get the Navy Cross from that operation. And again, I'm skipping through some of that right now. Get the book. Get the book and read about that freaking operation because it's epic. The origination, and, you know, we've said this a couple times, but the origination of everything that goes on here is, is you have to talk about the Raiders. You have to talk about the Rangers.

You have to talk about why, what happened to them and why they didn't become seals, or at least the seal type thing. this is a section here where you start talking about the Rangers. Right. So the premise is that the Navy should never have had this capability. When I started trying to come up with a title for the book, my options for subtitles were something like the origin story, the Navy SEALs a unit that should not exist,

something like that, something is provocative like that. And the reason they shouldn't exist is because of the Army and the Marine Corps and the CIA. All of these institutions were better suited for this mission than the Navy was. So in order to explain the question that I asked at the beginning, how the Navy come to field this land focus, go anywhere, commando force, the way that's phrased is you have to understand why these other institutions didn't become that first, why they didn't block the Navy from becoming that. And only in understanding why they didn't become that,

Can you understand, really understand why the Navy did it? Why the Navy felt like it had to do it. That includes the Rangers. Going to the book. The officer selected to command the Rangers, 31-year-old major William Orlando Darby, born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1911, the same gorilla studded year as Lord Lovat and Russell Volkman.

Darby grew up believing that he was destined for greatness. Of average size and looks, his greatness lay below the surface, as it is so often with tragic men, a war would be required to uncover it. Black-haired, blue-eyed, wide-mouthed as a duck. Darby had a ruddy face divided into equal parts, forehead and chin. His left cheek bore a mysterious, brilliant red scar. Not particularly muscular.

He nevertheless affected chest-out shoulders-back posture in which his arms seemed always cocked to the rear as if never more than a moment away from snapping to attention. son of a printer and a musician, the second child between two sisters. He grew up scouting the Arkansas woods and playing the saxophone. While in high school, his older sister died. In Texas, he married then divorced. In spite of disappointment and tragedy, his attitude remained as it ever had been,

good-humored and irrepressible. In personality, just like his posture, he was direct, forceful, and never vacillating. Had the military gene not dominated and driven him to, a life of soldiering, he would have made a born salesman. He is the ideal commando leader, wrote Colonel Vaughn at the end of the course. He possesses the energy, keenness, and personality, which produces the best out of those under his command. Graduated from West Point in 1933 at the apex of the bell curve, ranked 177 out of

346, he was originally assigned as a field artillery officer. Fast forward a little bit. If the ideal army officer was equal parts, confidence, bravery, energy, and obey. obedience, Darby was all these things, but perhaps too much the last. More than anything, he believed his men could and should perform any mission assigned to them from the most audacious lightning raids to the most ignominious rear echelon duties to the most spectacular seized, season hold operations. Because of this, no one would be more responsible for proving the value of the Rangers or for their downfall.

So you go into talking about their first experience, the Rangers' first combat experience, which was in Dieppe. Am I saying that right? Yeah, D.E. France, 1942. Yeah, that one sentence that I give DEP, that represents 20 pages of book that I had to cut out.

Like I spent, like I said, the research is really seductive. And when you find something that is so, you know, what you think is meaningful or what you think, you know, sort of shows you the direction that this whole thing is going in, you, I mean, the temptation is to really, really focus on it and drag your reader through this. But you have to remember that, you know, you're trying to get the reader someplace. And you don't want to front load a chapter with 20 pages of battle and introduce characters in this battle or of this battle that really aren't going to take you anywhere. God, they're all so epic. Speaking of British commandos, Jocco's perhaps inspiration for being a commando himself.

You got this quoted, I'm just going to read one quote. This is what the rangers said about the commandos that they went into Dieppe with. My God, those commandos can fight remember of one ranger after the battle. They'd kneel down or lie down and fire, then stand up, grab an apple off a tree, and start firing again.

Freaking Brits. So you go through that raid, you go through another raid It was even more dramatic, victim of a winch that broke while lowering his landing craft, dumping him his radios and equipment back into the ocean. Darby nevertheless scrambled back aboard his boat, then led four companies plus one chaplain ashore. There, despite squelching wet boots, he and his rangers marched uphill for three miles, every man carrying a full load out of ammunition, plus fighting knives, bayonets, climbing ropes,

one stick of dynamite, and two mortar rounds. The two unluckiest also pushed a mule cart, bulging with still more mortar rounds. When the rangers arrived at Fort Duneord, they found it was surrounded by concentric circles of barbed wire as high as eight feet and his deepest 14. With every snip, each man's nerves cinched tighter. Just as they were about to reach the last ring, a machine gun barked and drove them to the ground. Darby, ever the artillery man wasted no time. Roy, pull your company back a few yards, then hit him when the barrage stops. Lieutenant Murray had hardly gotten his men untangled from the wire when the first rounds thumped into the back.

battlements. Thus persuaded the French defenders, abandoned their machine guns, and retreated, chased by Murray and his Rangers, shouting, hi-ho, silver, away. That's fighting against the French, the Vichy French. Fast forward a little, go ahead. No, I mean, when you read that, when you, when you think about the Rangers, it just reinforces everything I said before. The SEALs should not exist. Yeah. When you have, you know, what is clearly a naval commando force, a go-anywhere commando force, as capable as the Rangers were in 1942. This is a capability that the Army had. They created it. They were smart enough to create it, and then they lost sight of the reasons that they created it, or actually they didn't lose

side of the reasons. The reasons that they created it are the reason that they had the downfall. They didn't care about the Rangers' commando capability. They were more preoccupied with using the Rangers as a way to teach the rest of the Army how to fight. We want to integrate our Rangers with British Commandos because the British Commandos are really the only English-speaking troops on the planet that knew how to fight. They wanted to, you know, George Marshall wants to take that experience and pass it along to the rest of the U.S. infantry or the Army infantry. And so by the time that the infantry starts to, you know, elevate itself to the the capabilities of the Rangers, then divisional commanders start using the Rangers,

more as not commandos to go, you know, raid an artillery position or a command post. They just start pushing them ahead of the infantry, almost sort of like suicidal spearheaders. And when, you know, when the chapter ends, I mean, it's just, it's so depressing but so predictable. Let's get there. This is a massive mission. This is in Cisterna. You go through, I mean, I'm going to catch the last little bit of it. You go through the battle.

You go through what unfolds. I mean, there's so many leadership lessons to learn in here. Obviously, I talk about leadership all the time. The amount of leadership lessons that are in this book is incredible. Kind of wrapping this up. Since he'd been blown off the top of a smoking tank, Dobson had somehow made it back to his men near the Cala, Cala Capriini House.

There, while organizing another defensive perimeter, he had taken more shrap on his right thigh. Now lying in a ditch next to a burning self-propelled gun whose artillery rounds continue to cook off around him. He passed his command to Captain Charles Shunstrom, a ranger since the Akaneri days and Darby's tank killing companion at Gala. Upon taking command,

Shunstrom, as aggressive a soldier as the U.S. Army had ever produced, shored up his position with several companies of the 3rd Battalion, and even attempted a flanking movement to either break free of the encirclement, or believe it or not, take the town. None of it worked. At 1045, solid communications were finally established between Darby and Shunstrom's radio, the care of which was now in the hands of Captain Edward's, Edward Kitchens, Kitch to everyone who knew him, who was set up in the 1st Battalion's makeshift aid station

and whose feet were gradually becoming more and more encumbered by wounded Rangers. At 1115, Darby told Kitch to hold on and that the 4th Battalion was making slow but steady progress. 30 minutes later, Darby reiterated his encouragements and even asked Kitch to put together a rescue party for 3rd Division's reconnaissance company that reportedly had been. been captured in his vicinity. Maybe you can break up the thing and rescue them, Darby said. His suggestion is tone deaf as his original expectations. Operationally employed like infantry, Darby's Rangers were now dying like them too.

At the Cala Caprieney House alone lay some 16 dead Rangers, another 22 wounded, and only five men still fighting, barely three loaded weapons among them. At 1215, Kitch became so overwrought and weeping that he could no longer make himself understood. Darby asked for another voice, and Kitch quit the house altogether, preferring to die outside in battle, rather than trapped inside manning the radio. Grasping the receiver now was a hulking ranger, master sergeant Robert E. Holt from Brooklyn, New York, one of Darby's originals. Some of the fellas are giving up, Colonel, said E. Halt, his voice.

scratching out of the speaker box. We're awfully sorry. They can't help it because we're running out of ammunition. But I ain't surrendering. In his farmhouse command post, Darby became frantic. Don't let the boys give up, he pleaded. Get the old men together and lamb for it. How many men are still with you?

They're coming into the building now, E Holt replied, gunfire snapping in the background. We're out of ammo, but they won't get us cheap. So long, Colonel, maybe when it's all over, I'll see you again. With a violent wham, wham, E-Halt's transmission would cut out. Darby squeezed the handset and steadied himself. Use your head and do what is best. You're there and I'm here.

Unfortunately, I can't help you. It stung to say the words into the deadline. His fourth battalion still a mile from Cisterna. But whatever happens, God bless you. God bless all of you. With the mention of God, Darby's voice choked, his eyes watered. E. Halt, I leave everything in your hands. Tell the men I am with them to the end. After a moment he sat down the handset. Bracing himself, he wrapped his hands around a telephone receiver and called General Truscott.

It apparently was too much for them, he said, muffling his emotions, replacing the receiver in its cradle. Darby asked his staff to leave the room. As enemy shells beat a steady tattoo around the house, He crumpled into a chair, dropped his head into his arms, and sobbed. Several minutes later, Darby appeared outside, his shoulders straight, and his chin thrust forward defiantly. He was still in command, but in command of what? No one quite knew. I hate hearing that. This whole episode is based off of a couple of sources, one of them being Shunstrom's report that he wrote.

I want to say three days after the battle, after surviving this thing. He was one of the few that escapes. And on the radio transcription that they were keeping at Darby's headquarters. So you can actually see everything that was said on that radio, and you can read it, and it's horrible. And you know, I mean, no going into it, you know, what is going to happen and where, you know, what is going to happen and where it doesn't make it. it easier though. So despite these legendary heroics like you said I mean the the

heroics of the troops are undeniable just after World War II all six army ranger battalions were disbanded and you say here a specific superficially modeled on Churchill's butcher and bolt commandos the US Army Rangers by the time of their disbandment looked nothing like them this was in the end the predictable result of different parents. Preoccupied with the readiness of his front-line soldiers, George Marshall had created the Rangers not to perfect the art of Churchill's coastal raids, but to serve his infantry. First, by gaining battlefield experience that could be transferred to the rest of his troops, second, by handing them off to infantry commanders who committed the Rangers to missions with

impossible odds, and then either blame them for their failures or diminish their uniqueness by using them no differently than regular infantry. Though no one could have guessed the consequences, It was a prioritization that produced a lasting gap in the U.S. military's order of battle for a unit that specialized in raiding, one that could best be filled by a branch of service, less preoccupied with this infantry. And there was only one branch that didn't have infantry. So there you are setting up that one branch that doesn't have any infantry. Yeah, at the time, I mean, there's only three branches. The Air Force doesn't exist yet. It's the Army Air Corps.

So of all three, the Army, Navy, and the Marine Corps, Navy's it. And you can, I mean, you can see where this is going before you even get out of World War II. You can see the cycle that's going to continue all the way until Vietnam. Commanders are going to identify a gap. They're going to create commandos to fill that gap. They're going to commit them to action often to disastrous results. and then they're going to renege on their idea. They're going to pull the rug out from under these guys.

And every gap, every time that happens, it's often going to leave, you know, that unit's commando partners in the Lurch. And always that commando partner is the U.S. Navy. And the Navy's just going to get more frustrated, more frustrated, and they're going to continue pushing their units, their special units, into that gap. Yeah, the next part of the book is called Opportunity. chapter four subtitled draper coffman and the course that cracked the Atlantic wall

then laid the first bricks of the legend of naval special warfare here we go he's the weirdest guy in the book by far but tall and thin lanky even with dark hair a narrow face and a chin that stretched down like a tear drop draper Lawrence Kaufman also possessed poor teeth and spectacles

as thick as submarine glass given to bouts of indolence he was absent-minded, a failure in any subject that not capture his interest, and alarmingly progressive on the issue of race, at least so fought his mother a shrew on the topic. As a young man, Kaufman had wanted nothing more than to attend the Naval Academy and command a destroyer as his father had. When poor eyesight threatened to torpedo his dream, he submitted himself to the doctor's orders, however medieval and for one hour a day held a palm over each open eye. This when his appointing congressman suddenly died, leaving his academy application in limbo, he told no one of his plan escaped from his Connecticut boarding school, got a bunk at the Washington, DC YMCA, and then walked the halls of Congress, slipping past secretaries and performing a rehearsed

sob story until someone, anyone, gave him an appointment. Once finally accepted, he rode crew, acted in school dramas, and in cruel foreshadowing, spent 30 days on a prison ship for sneaking off campus. When he graduated in 1933, a year when Navy pincher stalked the ranks looking for any excess ballast to pitch over the side, he was given his diploma and a physical disqualification from the Navy, a steep four-year price to pay to achieve the rank of civilian. Thus betrayed his childhood dream, Kaufman packed his pride, shelved any ideas of glory, and settled for an onshore operations job in the shipping industry. his life suddenly devoted to endless manifest for unloading and offloading of cargo. So there's your introduction of Draper Kaufman. I mean, just so many characters, and this guy's definitely one of them, gets put on a six-month assignment to Europe while he's doing that shipping job.

While he's in Germany, he witnesses Adolf Hitler giving speeches. He realizes that this guy's, he realizes what's coming. Yeah. So fast forward a little bit, he decides he wants to go and serve in the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps. To be accepted in the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps, an adjunct unit of the French Army, one was first required to submit a down payment of $3,500 to cover living expenses in the cost of one ambulance. In 1940, that was almost the price of a house. Even more than alarming, volunteers were bound to follow orders of the French military.

To a man with purpose in his boots and adventure in his guts, just the sort of Hemingway. Hemingway is the French cause had attracted in the last war. No price was too high. And you say, actually, it was too high. That was a, and he had to beg, borrow, and steal to get this money. Imagine you have to come up with the price of a house to go and serve in a freaking ambulance corps where you're going to get bombed and blown up.

Working for the French. Yeah. I mean, we all know the, you know, Draper Kaufman's sort of biography. I mean, not everybody, but we get, you know, if you, go to Buds, you're going to get the Bud's history class or the SEAL history class. At some point, somebody's going to mention Draper Kaufman. There was no Bud's history class. There was no SEAL history class when I went through Buds. Just saying, I'm saying there wasn't. I mean, it was 1990. So, yeah, I know. And that's just going to make me mad if we talk about it. No, but if you come across any

sort of, any history book that's been written, Draper Kaufman's a character. And they're going to hit, you know, like I said, they're going to hit the wave tops of his, of his biography, you know, before he becomes, you know, the, um, a indispensable character in the, uh, in the UDTs, Central Pacific campaigns. What they're not going to do is they're not going to put, uh, that biography in context. Um, and when you really dig into it, like, you know, yes, we know he was an ambulance driver, uh, on the Western front in 1940. We don't know what sacrifice had actually cost him. to put himself in that position. And the reality is so much more like me.

I mean, you're right. I mean, he, you know, he cashed in everything he had, you know, to go do something that he believed in. Like, how many people do you know, I don't know anybody like that today that would, you know, give away your house? Yeah. And it was all because he was just trying to, he was trying to do what he thought was right. He was trying to, you know, serve his country, even though his country, wouldn't take him at the time because he couldn't see anything. It's just, you know, every character in this book, they have, you know, everybody wants to do

something in the book and most of them don't get to do the thing that they want. But all of us, we don't know, you know, what legacy we're going to have. And we don't know, like, what thing that we don't want to do that we have to do is going to be the most important part of our lives. And that's what happens with Draper Kaufman. He doesn't want to do any of this. He doesn't want to be an ambulance driver. He doesn't want to be a bomb disposal guy in the Blitz.

He wants to be a naval officer. He wants to be on a destroyer. They won't let him. So he does all these other things to try and live up to what his dad has done. And he ends up being, you know, he becomes a legend because of it. So just to dive into a little bit of Kaufman what he did, on May 10th, 1940, Kaufman arrived at his post six miles beyond. the protection of the Magno forts in the Saar River Valley in the northeast shoulder of France,

where the borders come to a point and jump like a salient into the ravenous mouth of Germany. The same day, Hitler launched 100 divisions through the Ardennes Forest. As he had known it would, the Second World War had begun. Again and again, for two unrelenting weeks, Draper drove to the front, picked up survivors, and returned the inside of his ambulance slippery with blood. The whole while he sustained himself on bits of food and the horror of French cigarettes. The only sleep to be had was taken in snatches,

never in a bed and never with his boots off. Responding to the deliberate fire of German McGunners, Boch barbarians, he called them. He and his fellow ambulance drivers began draping dark blankets over the side of their vehicles to cover the giant red cross emblems. By the end of his third week in combat, Two ambulances had been shot out from under him and he had lost 10 pounds

This is what he gave his a house worth of money to go do On the afternoon of September 7th 1940 a thousand German planes attack London's and surrounding areas killing 400 men women and children and wounding 1,200 more the next day 412 were killed wounding nearly double that number for 57 consecutive days Days London was hit had he arrived any earlier who knows what the Royal Navy's reaction would have been to his request as it happened, as it always happened, when opportunity meets courage. Draper arrived at exactly the right moment. The day Draper Kaufman volunteered for the Royal Navy, he presented himself to the Admiralty at 9 o'clock in the morning.

So he goes and volunteers to join the Navy. But because of his eyes, by five that afternoon, young Draper Kaufman was a sub-lieutenant in his Majesty's Navy. The only one hitch, once again, he was barred from duty at sea. Several weeks into his new career, a German bomb landed just outside the hotel in which Kaufman was billeted. Had it detonated upon impact, Kaufman's story would have been buried along with the hotel, another footnote in military history, nothing more. As it happened, the bomb hit but did not detonate. It's only damage being a 30-foot tunnel gouged into the earth.

Before long, an army bomb disposal team arrived, cordoned off the area and set to work. With hand tools alone, the squad painstakingly dug a path to the bomb, and large, the hole and short up the sides in case of collapse. The objective, reach the bomb without disturbing it, gently unscrew the fuse, winch the inert remains from the dirt, and accompanied by police, and accompanied by police or sirens, by police car sirens and loudspeakers, unexploded bomb coming through, transport the carcass to a nearby cemetery. Usually this method worked in case it did not.

The entire bomb disposal team was killed. The next day, Kaufman volunteered for bomb disposal. for eight months from September 1940 to May 1941 Hitler waged a war on the British people More than 40,000 civilians were killed More than 100,000 were injured The instrument of all this destruction was the bomb

Many of these weapons were defective Or deranged as in they failed to detonate upon impact Or were time to detonate After a bomb disposal team had arrived So that's what he ends up doing He ends up doing this bomb disposal duty after a while of doing that, he decides he's going to go back to the States.

Once he's back into the States, the Japanese attack. After two years of waiting, the United States was finally at war. In a few days, a message found Kaufman, ordering him to get out to Pearl Harbor right now. Imagine that Japanese trickery extended beyond strategy and into engineering,

Draper prepared for the worst. When shown the 500-pound bomb at Schofield Barracks, he sent everyone else to cover, then examined it, sketched it, and telephoned each nail-biting step back to his controller. It had been dropped too low, he determined, landing on its side instead of its nose.

What he had visualized as an old-fashioned oriental puzzle turned out to be the easiest job he'd ever had. I couldn't have set that bomb off if I had a sledgehammer, he said later. To those who witnessed the bespeckled master, pushed past the line of gockers to single-handedly disarm the bomb, there were few actions as a deserving of praise. A couple headlines. DC Man takes live, Jap, Baum Apart.

gets Navy Cross ran the headline in the Washington Post. All Florida will rejoice with Rear Admiral James L. Kaufman on being the father of so worthy a son. So there you go. That's where Draper Kaufman comes from. Yeah. Draper is, there's some folks in the, that have spent their lives looking at the history of Naval Special Warfare.

and they know more about this history than even I do. I mean, I specialized over the, you know, like I said, the period from World War II to the period of Vietnam. They have an even fuller account than I do. And one of the things that annoys them is that Draper Kaufman has risen to this sort of, you know, like I said, legendary status. He's, you know, considered by many the father of America's Frogman. He's not. he doesn't he doesn't create the UDT

he doesn't create the frogman he he happens to be the pivotal person at multiple points in that history but he's not the he's not the godfather like everybody or not like many people

have suggested that he is including his sister who wrote a pretty decent biography of him but like I said he is a consequential person And what's also interesting about him is that he is, like everybody else in this book, is he's making decisions or he's deciding to do everything he does. He's not a victim of history. He's not writing a wave like a lot of people, you know, would suggest we're all sort of doing.

Like the, there's a metaphor that people use to describe the transformation of the SEAL teams. and that's the evolution. We've all seen that sort of painting at Peas where you've got the naked warrior crawling out of the surf and then you've got the sort of Vietnam guy sort of crouched and wearing his tiger stripe fatigues and next to the seal in Iraq or Afghanistan wearing the body arm and everything.

They call that transformation, the evolution. The evolution sort of suggests, though, that this transformation was, one, inevitable and that it didn't require the intent that all of these folks who have this consequential role in our history had. And they clearly had intent. I mean, when Draper's going through his history or his biography, he's deciding that he's going to go serve in the French Army. And when the Germans sent him home after he's released from the POW camp, and they make him sign this document that he's going to go back to the states

and he'll never take up arms against the German Empire again. He intentionally decides that he's not going to do that. He's going to go join the British Navy, and he continually does this. And just like everybody in the book, they are not victims. Each of these characters, they all have agency, and they all decide that they're going to do these things for whatever reason. Mostly it's the decision that they arrive at is to satisfy what they have decided is their version of relevance.

There's a spot where you say basically Draper Kaufman is not really the godfather that people, some people give him credit for of the frogman, but such a consequential guy. He is a consequential guy, and you're right. He's not the father of America's frogman. Kelly Turner is that. Kelly Turner creates the UDTs. Nobody would have done it if wasn't for Kelly Turner. He wants the UDTs because the Marine Corps, at every step, they frustrate his plans to use reconnaissance troops.

And Kelly Turner, he's, Kelly Turner wants to control everything in his orbit. And so he creates the UDTs to do just that. The demolition is sort of secondary. He wants a reconnaissance force that he owns. and Draper just happens to be the vehicle for for Kelly Turner's you know once we pick we do pick up with with Draper Kaufman though you say as such who better to start the Navy's underwater demolition course in the Second World War than the men who'd seen the most of it the

man who'd seen the most of it a sailor for whom no barrier ever held and who was about to squeeze his biography into a syllabus like none that had ever existed to create the type of amphibious engineer that he envisioned, Kaufman needed elbow room. Like pedicord before him, he found his elbows, had ample space in Fort Pierce, Florida. To create such a unit, he would require students with, in his words,

both temperamental stability and individual initiative. To that end, Kaufman insisted that candidates be subjected to very heavy physical training. Very heavy, he emphasized again. As he knew from his own career, first in France, then in the Blitz, This type of experience would show students that they could push beyond their physical limits,

doing without sleep and food and warmth, and still function without their arms falling off. More important, training of such intensity would create in its students a sense of purpose and unity like nothing except actual war. Fast forward a little bit. Short on time, eager to screen out the obvious people that would not make it physically and long on his desire to simulate an experience that was as close to war as possible, Kaufman decided that all three problems could be solved by the same solution. One week of misery. Never reluctant to ask for help,

he walked south along tent row until he came to the section reserved for the Scouts and Raiders. There, still six months away from being transferred, Petticoord listened to Kaufman's proposal. He had never been asked to compress the Scouts and Raiders eight-week physical conditioning course into one block of uninterrupted training. Certainly men could be pushed, indeed nearly broken, but what Kaufman had asked to do was another matter. In the end, Petticoord agreed. What else could he do? This was Kaufman. The seas parted at his arrival. What Petticoor did not know, no one did, was that he was about to help create the sacramental cup from which nearly

all future naval commandos would drink. You were wet, chafed with sand, just completely miserable, remembered Frank Kane years later. In the daytime men melted under the sun. At night they shook so hard from the wet and cold that their hip flexors swelled and cramped. Their teeth chattered like jackhammers, shouldering boats, sloshing with water, they marched for miles and sand and dunes that collapsed beneath every step. soddened fatigues adhered to the grit and sand, turning armpits, thighs, and scrotums into raw meat. If any instructor detected a student on the stealth and concealment problem as he wormed his chafed and dripping body to the plantation house,

the man was punished by being sent to sit inside where swarms of mosquitoes feasted on his misery. In addition to simple surf drills, rubber boat training included hours of paddling, while harassed by the nearby air squadrons F4 pilots, who would try to nail the floating rafts with sacks of flower bombs. Jetty landings and night portages were attuned by based ambulances and performed over boulders as broad as dinner tables, the endless surf smashing the panels and men against the rocks. Intended to simulate the long drain of campaign march before battle,

this seemingly endless harassment ultimately culminated in a day-long mocked, skirmish known as the extended order problem or to the students so solid day beginning before dawn students raced off the ramps of their landing craft just as the beach erupted in thundering sheets of flame for a whole day instructors armed with charges unleashed a torrent of exploding columns of water and showers of mud and debris the students belly crawled on throbbing knees and elbows into hip-deep mud swamps and surf as the explosions chased them from cover and foxholes. Until Kaufman's regime, no Navy unit had been subjected to training course whose essence so closely resembled that of real war.

The frantic harassment, the inescapable cold, the relentless exhaustion, not only did it prepare men for what was to come, it set them apart from everyone else in the Navy. Even in the early classes, as many as half the men who started did not complete the week. that was entirely the point modeling his project on the culture of the core fronk Kaufman had set out to forge both in a spree decor and the reputation that always accompanies it exclusivity if you haven't been through it he would later say you're not a demolitioneer in august 1943 Kaufman volunteered for his own program at 32 years old with eyesight not good enough to qualify for his own demolition standards

standards, he was hardly an ideal candidate. I think I have never seen a man's struggle so desperately, Warnock said after witnessing Kaufman's performance. The moment he finished his 10-mile beach run, he passed out. During the ocean swim, Warnock thought he would drown. We all knew he wasn't a great athlete, said Frank Kane, and we thought, hell, if he can can make it, we can too. Throughout the training, Kaufman listed but never sank, alternately encouraging and bullying

his boat crew from start to finish, as one remembered with his bloody battle cry of Kor Frank. When men showed signs of cracking during another bone-trilling dip in the ocean, Kaufman turned it into a joke, annoyingly repeating the same mocking phrase. The water he boomed in his strong mid-Atlantic accent is never cold. The Monday after Kaufman completed this week, he was ordered to report to Captain Clarence Goldbranson, the base commander of four. Pierce swollen from head to foot with fingers like sausages ready to burst he

crawled out of bed and staggered into the commander's office what's this I hear about 40% of your classes either being in the sick bay or quitting the captain bark I don't think you have any idea what you're putting these men through Draper I do Kaufman responded it was hell when Kaufman's trainees completed hell week the name his week of misery inevitably took on, their demolitions training program progressed to its next phase. Two weeks of explosives, two week of reconnaissance, and three weeks of practical exercises. So there you go. Freaking hell week. Yeah. Created by, I mean, we look around. I mean, how many team guys do you know that would

fit his bill today? I mean, we kind of think that we sort of created ourselves. I mean, we have a lot of people that sort of came together to create this program, and they're not, they don't look like us. I mean, they were sailors, ship fleet sailors, I mean, that put this thing together. And somebody who's, you know, the most unlikely person, I mean, Draper Kaufman is not what you would think of as a modern-day seal or modern-day frogman. And in fact, you don't want to be. He just, I mean, he's, he sort of continues to do the thing that he doesn't really

want to do because that's the right thing that he you know it's the it's the it's the thing that's going to accomplish the mission that he's been given which is to demolish hitler's atlantic wall and he doesn't know how else to do it so he you know he squeezes every drop of his biography into this curriculum uh fast forward a little bit actually fast forward a pretty good chunk going into d day and again your your your detail and the the research that you did to get here is just it's unbelievable to read. With terrified soldiers frozen in place, neither advancing or retreating, Freeman and Cayley, Kihei sprinted between posts, yelling obscenities and kicking the infantry men away. Once clear, Freeman gave the signal, tossed a purple smoke grenade, and Petty Officer Bass

pulled the fuse. Fire in the hole! At 655, only 22 minutes after landing, the whole area exploded in a roar that drowned out the battle's din, shooting skyward a mixture of water, smoke, wood, sand, and steel high into the air. The defender's response was vicious. As soon as the smoke and debris settled, the fire from the hills became unbearable. As Mingledorf, the Georgian with a hole in his leg, crawled hand over hand to the seawall and safety

around slammed through his helmet into his forehead, killing him instantly. With the obstacles blown and the beach cover gone, Petty Officer Bass, a former CB from Durham, North Carolina, resisted the urge to run and instead found Seaman Farrell alone, Still writhing from the hole in his knee and with a fresh wound to his right eye Bass bent down to cradle the boy to cover him and as he did a bullet tore through his back entering just to the right of his spine and blowing a hole out his right shoulder

Sergeant Murphy one of the Army's naval augmentees found them both and dragged them to the seawall Wounded himself and with nearly everyone in his crew either shot or dead Freeman was unstoppable Blasting obstacles clearing out infantry men before his charges blew helping his wounded to cover Though they had been cut to shreds, Gap Assault Team 1 had completed its mission. Their 50-yard gap was clear. That's just one little chunk of the detail that you give on all these heroic acts that are going on. Fast forward by morning's ed with the help of Hall's destroyers, the gap assault teams had partially cleared five of their 16 target sections along Omaha Beach. By nightfall, the total was 10.

for the NCDUs and accomplishment that came at a cost prematurely estimated at two dozen dead, at least that many wounded, and 15 more missing. These last had either been blown clear of their landing vessels and drowned, or, in the words of one rider, had run off to fight with the army. In fact, some had done just that, or at least abandoned their section of beach. As a handful of planners had expected, the most difficult aspect of Rommel's Atlantic Wall had been the beach and the underwater obstacles, a problem that had been overcome only because of the Navy's commitment.

First, in identifying the issue, next in commissioning Kaufman to solve it, then in sharing those lessons with the Army's combat engineers. Ultimately, however, the Navy's greatest contribution had come from the NCDUs themselves. In addition to the Presidential Unit Citation, Admiral Hall had gone on to recognize the demolitioners by recommending them a trunk full of individual awards, individual awards, including six Navy crosses, one of which went to chief petty officer Bill Freeman. I kicked myself ever since that I didn't recommend him for a Medal of Honor, Hall said later. I never heard of anybody who did a greater job than that fellow did. Responsible for getting the Army past the underwater obstacles on Omaha Beach, the NCDU's achievement was, in the end,

made possible only by their training at Fort Pierce. There they had learned not only the technical skills of underwater demolition, the explosives, the pull fuses, the minimum safe distances, but also as Kaufman had insisted, the ability to push past the limits of normal human endurance to withstand cold, hunger, raw skin, exhaustion, even the chaos of combat, the kind of fortitude that made winning wars possible. Only our vigorous training held us together, one survivor said afterward, but what about, but what about after that? With the collapse of the Atlantic Wall, the mission of the NCDUs had been accomplished,

and therefore no unit in the U.S. military was in greater threat of disbandment, or at least would have been had it not been for one final hang-up. The Navy's planners were loath to disband a unit that had just performed so effectively. After all, the war was far from over, and there was no shortage of needs for sailors so conditioned to the combat that lay ahead. Boom. Yeah, it's, I mean, I don't know about you, but nobody ever connected Hellweek or the reason. for Hellwick to Omaha Beach.

But I don't think that we would have that crucible today if it wasn't for that. It justified everything that Kaufman did. I mean, we, later in the war, you see

lots of people get pulled over to the UDT, whether they're CBs or Marines or even soldiers in some instances. And those, you know, they don't necessarily go through Hell Week. If it had not been for that experience, it's likely that we would not have this, like that crucible. And without that crucible, what would the SEAL teams be? I mean,

they'd be another commando force, but would they be everything that we are today? I mean, that's the defining moment of training, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you called it the Sacramento Cup. It is, the sacrament. I mean, we all have these, I mean, there's instance, All around us with those institutions or the US Constitution or their whatever your Catholicism. I mean that your faith has these little institutions built into it and you know if you're going to take the catechism There's all these sacraments that you've got to do and what's more what's a bigger sacrament and you know the becoming of a seal then than hell week. Yeah, not one You get into next Tarawa and what happens at Tarawa, which is a total nightmare. I don't know if you had the chance.

We had a guy, Dean Ladd, that was on this podcast, and he was Marine Corps. Wow. I think he was a first lieutenant by that time. Wow. That did a bunch of islands, including Tarawa, got gut shot Tarawa 800 yards from the beach. Two Marines, disobeyed orders. to leave him and move forward and dragged him back to a boat. He survived, ended up going back.

But, yeah, you detail what happened there, how bad it was. And basically, if you don't know, anyone that doesn't know, the Marine Corps hit reefs on the way in, and the boats got hung up, and so the guys had to get out and walk with no protection whatsoever through the ocean, 800. It was around 800 yards to get to the beach where there was, once I got to the beach it was hell as well.

And we've always known the Tarawa is the moment that, you know, the need for UDTs is identified. We don't exactly know the reason, though. I mean, because the Marine Corps, they come up with the solution or what they perceive to be the solution before the Tarawa battle even commences. And that, like I described, is the landing vehicle tractor, the LVT. It's a technical problem. They have a technical solution for it. the problem with that is Turner doesn't like their solution.

Kelly Turner sees the coral as a cancer. It's going to complicate everything as far as all the rest of the campaigns ahead of him. He doesn't want to deal with us. He wants that coral out so he can get his Higgins boats to the beach. And the only way to do that is to find him. Yeah, and what's interesting too is after Tarawa, the Marine Corps solution was, you know, like you said, it was just more. Yeah, more.

Just, okay, so we're going to lose X percentage of boats on the way and, cool, more. We're going to lose this many LTVs on the way and, cool, more. Bring us more. That was their answer. And Turner was saying, hey, actually not a good answer. Let's figure out how to solve this problem. Yeah, Churchill's quote, you know, we've run out of money. Now it's time to think.

I mean, you could just say, you know, just as much when it comes to logistics. I mean, there's nothing that compares with the U.S. military's logistics and manufacturing might going into this, but we still have limits. You can't, these LVTs, they take up a ton of space on all the ships that the Navy's going to use to transport them. The Higgins boats, they're easier to carry, they're faster in the water. You can time everything from naval gunfire support to aircraft coming in to support the landings if you have a faster vehicle to get them from the ships to the shores. And that's what Turner wants.

He wants to be able to get his ships as quickly to the beach as possible. It's the safest way. It's the easiest to get everything there. And the only way to do that is to find the coral and get rid of it. We start training now, but under Turner's direction, we start training. We're training in Hawaii now. In May, a fresh batch of NCDU recruits arrived in Maui. Per the direction of Kohler and Kaufman, the men were told to abandon the bulk of their gear,

Their green fatigues, their boots, their May West life jackets, even their helmets and sidearms, and slip into a pair of black Maui swim trunks and dive masks. Their rough rubber edges sanded down to prevent them from biting into their face. What followed were nine seemingly endless days of training on how to systematically map an underwater landscape and blow it up. Rocks, coral, night swimming, blast, no rest, no sleep, suicide stuff, one trainee remembered. For no fewer than six hours a day, Recruits lived in the water, perfecting their strokes until they could swim a mile before breakfast.

Their only day off was Monday when possible. Seeing that this was the first time many of them had handled explosive fused or tied primer cord into a trunk line, accidents were routine. Fingers blown clear off or hanging by bloody shreds of skin. Asked how long he could swim underwater with 100 pounds of powder. Recruit Knorik replied, with 100 pounds of powder, I could probably stay under forever. So this is, I highlighted that point because this is a point now. where we're starting to see the idea of the naked warrior. They're getting rid of all their gear.

They're just wearing trunks. Saipan is where we get this recon, like a legit recon going on. The closer his swimmers got to the beach, the more nervous Kaufman became. At 100 yards, he tried to turn them around, but most of them kept going. At 50 yards, some began to pivot back, but some didn't. Closing to within 30 yards of the shore and 40 yards of the guns, so close that they ceased swimming and dug their toes of their sneakers into the sand, pulling themselves along with their gloved hands.

When that last line finally did run out of water, each man backed off slightly, turned left, then side-stroked along the beach for 25 yards, edging his mask out of the water with every breath, careful to remember the locations of any gun positions under circumstances, not an easy thing to forget. On the swim back, each man ignored his exhaustion and worsening leg cramps and stayed as close as possible to the bottom. When they neared the reef, Kaufman reboarded his mattress and offered

a nearby swimmer a toe. Get that damn thing out of here. You go over this earlier. All the little rafts that they had were getting shot up. On the other side of the now surf slammed reef, each swimmer waited for pickup. When the landing craft arrived,

the coxins took turns motoring each man and either drop. Drop them a Jacob's ladder or reversed engines until he could grab hold and pull himself up. Throughout this cumbersome boarding a period packed with vociferous cursing, said one survivor, every man aboard fully expected a mortar round to drop square under the boat. As soon as the last man was loaded, Kaufman tallied his

numbers and realized that in addition to the officer killed on the air mattress. Two of his swimmers were still missing. Pulled in separate directions by his instinct to rescue and his orders to rush back to the fleet, Kaufman looked around at his blue-tinged black-striped men and chose the more painful option. With the fleet waiting for his information, Kaufman ordered his boats back to the APDs. When the men of UDT-7 arrived back at the Humphreys, they discovered something remarkable. Though several men had been wounded, some with serious internal injuries from the mortar blast, not a single one of their swimmers had been lost.

In fact, the only men that had been killed had been the ones who had remained on the LCPRs as they had waited for swimmers to return. Kaufman's UDT-5 swimmers had been slightly less fortunate, with one killed, several more wounded and two still missing, but it was nothing compared to the blood bath that occurred just one week before at Normandy. So this is another methodology of execute these things. And it's sort of a metaphor for what actually happened, the entire history. So the Navy intentionally creates all of these units.

They create NCDUs, they create the UDTs, they create the Scouts and Raiders. All these units are created for a specific purpose. They're committed to action for a specific reason. But once the Navy creates these things, the Navy can't necessarily predict how far the individuals that are that belong to these institutions are going to push them. They're going to push those envelopes. So Kaufman, you know, when he's driving his men toward the beach or he's pushing his men to swim, he also is trying to stop them. He's trying to stop them 50 yards from shore. They won't.

They keep going 25 yards. So, you know, the SEAL teams are created by the Navy. They're created by the Navy for the Navy. but the, you know, you can sort of see it just in that moment. The seal team has become so much more because of the seals themselves. So the seals don't create it. We don't. We're not responsible for our own institutions.

We think we are, but we're not. But we are responsible for what that institution ultimately became. Yeah, you know, there's an interesting time that you make in the book, and I don't remember if it's in my notes to cover us, I'll just mention it now. the Navy The Navy Just by nature of being disaggregated and being spread apart Especially back in the day

There was decentralized command Unlike really unlike any other organization Absolutely And that that spirit of decentralized command of like Hey you go and you make you take the fight to the enemy You get in this ship or you get in this submarine You go overseas and you take the fight to the enemy That's you have mission time

type orders. Right. And that's the way the Navy had to exist back in the day. And that vein and that DNA remains. And that's why you get these guys that are very proactive and will, will be default aggressive out there on the battlefield. That's exactly right. Default aggressive. Latitude only works if your default orientation or default setting is aggression. And if you read any like naval history book during like the Napoleonic Wars or if you read the Patrick O'Brien mastering commander series like you're you're never you know connected to your chain of command

whereas the army always is always is so that you know as technology has improved or as technology has gotten better to connect commanders to their troops in the field that chain of command has only thickened whereas in the Navy I mean we have all of this history behind us, or the Navy has all this history behind it, of latitude, of mission type orders, of relying on the aggressiveness of the individual commander. You just have to trust your guys. But you have to be specific about what you want. Oh, for sure. Otherwise you get rogue. Exactly. You do talk about what the UDTs brought back from that and what they brought back was

good information, good intel that they could then form into make a better battle plan. The invasion of side pan goes smoother. Fast forward a little bit. By the fall of 1944, the Navy's underwater demolition teams were the most indispensable of all U.S. military's special operations units, a facet directly attributed

to the Central Pacific planners who would no longer go anywhere without their reconnaissance reports. The UDTs were an essential part of amphibious organization for the remainder of the war, wrote Turner on the last day of combat on Tinian. It is questionable

if we could have made our landings except after the great losses, except after great losses if we had not had these teams to prepare the way. This assessment was immediately echoed by Admiral Connolly, who concluded his invasion in Guam by declaring that without UDT's discovery and demolition of some 640 obstacles along 3,000 yards of beaches, including the nearly car-sized coconut log cribs filled with loose coral, the landings, quote, could not have been made.

There, in spite of orders forbidding them to do that, do so three demolition swimmers including gunner's first mate gunners first mate gunners mate gunners mate first class henry l green had grown so convinced of the udt's worth that they had planted a white butcher block sized sign at the waters edged with the following message u s marine welcome to the u s o greetings from udt four hearing this admiral connelly had summoned the team's commander to a state room in order to hand him a starch counseling but instead had neutralized his own admonitions by stopping the young officer at the door declaring, wait till I tell Turner, he'll have those Marine generals eating crow.

It's so childish. Yeah, it's so childish, but that's, I mean, that's what it is. I mean, how many times have you and your service interacted with, you know, a sister service? And, I mean, the rivalry exists. Yeah. Like it's a, you know, it's a brotherhood, you know, on the battlefield. But still, we're, you know, always chasing our institutional prerogatives or trying to, you know, push the boundaries of, you know, our institutional authority. Yeah.

And what's interesting is when you get into the senior ranks, there becomes real, there's a real tension between the services and the amount of money that they get. Right. And it becomes a real thing. But yeah, you say here to recognize their contribution for taking of the Marianas Turner showered the UDTs with awards. More than 60 Silver Stars, 300 Bronze Stars, reported the largest mass recommendation for sailors and Marines in the war up to that point. Given the importance of the job, Connolly would have pinned Navy Crosses on the commanding officers of UDT 3 and 4, but in the end settled for Silver Stars, each of them presented by none other than Admiral Kaufman, Draper's father. As for Draper himself, rumors circulated about his nomination for the Medal of Honor,

an accolade his father, chairman of the awards board in the Pacific, lobbied against for fear of the medals association with recklessness. In the end, Draper received a Navy Cross, his second, pinned on by his father with a comment that allowed the photographer to catch the serious young man in a laugh. Thank the Lord you found a clean short. Yeah, that's a relationship I could have spent a lot more time on. I mean, he's, you know, Draper's dad is out there. you know, in the fleet. He's a Commodore himself and, you know, he knows exactly the risks that his son is taking and he does nothing during the entire war to either convince Turner, you know, to have the UDTs take less risk. He just, he's his, you know, I don't know as a father and I know you're a father too. Like, I don't know that I'd be able to to keep myself.

disciplined enough to not interfere. But he does. You'd get him orders to the Washington, D.C. admin spot. Yeah, I just don't know how, whatever that impulse, you know, that those guys had, I don't know that it exists today. Either that, you'd make him a freaking boat crew leader at UDT4. Just freaking ready to get some. This is just, you jump into this next part.

Chapter 6, the contest for the guerrilla war in China and the organization that had no damn business fighting in it, the U.S. Navy's Army of sailors. This is just freaking buck wild, this whole section. I mean, you get this guy born Milton E. Roberts in 1900 in Jerome, Arizona. Miles spent his first years in a mountainside mining hub called by the New York son in 1903, the wickedest town in the west. He was the only child of a lumber cutter who was nearly 30 years older than his mother.

Before Miles was even eight, his father was dead, which was something of a blessing as it had given given his mother an opportunity to move and remarry then in Seattle. His stepfather, Miles had received, from his stepfather, Miles had received the last name he would live with, but not much else. At 14, Miles ran away from home.

And you just set up this background with this guy. He enlisted in the Navy. He ends up taking some test to get into the, in Ireland, to get into the Naval Academy. He gets in, goes to the Naval Academy, and then he gets deployed to China. for a five-year tour,

ends up, you know, doing operations in the Yangtze River. This is the warlord period. He learns about leadership, diplomacy, geography, small boat handling, how to shoot his way out of a holdup. Unlike most Westerners, picks up various coastal dialects. So this dude's speaking freaking Chinese or Mandarin or whatever. He's brilliant.

I mean, there's nobody, I mean, like I say, you know, I mean, we got our history. not just from, you know, Frogmen, we got it from, you know, just fleet sailors. And this is, I mean, no miles. Did you ever see the movie Sand Pebbles?

Yeah. This is Sand Pebbles. Yeah, this is Sand Pebbles. So Sand Pebbles, go watch it if you haven't seen it. I know you haven't seen it, Echo Charles, because it's a classic. It's an actual good movie. There's not many, like,

CGI explosions in it. But yeah, this is Sand Pebbles all day. We had the movie Sand Pebbles on one of my ARG deployments. This is back before Internet or anything. So we just had videotapelial. We would watch sand pebbles over and over again. And that's what this guy is doing. So he ends up running these freaking guerrillas in China, which is nuts.

He's, I mean, nobody knows about him today. Like he's completely forgotten to history, but I mean, he's every bit as consequential, at least as far as the Navy's journey from, you know, the ocean to the land as, you know, say somebody like Lawrence of Arabia. He doesn't have the style of somebody like that, which is probably part of the reason that he's forgotten. And his book, A Different Kind of War is, you know, it's not, you know, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

But, you know, he wrote that thing when he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. So he was racing against the clock to try and get this recorded. And he was, you know, he knew he only had maybe a year to live. And he's, you know, drafting this thing. He's typing up little sections of it. his wife is cutting these sections out to reorder them and she's putting these things together with scotch tape.

I actually found that record in the National Archives. It still exists. So he talks about, his wife wrote the forward to the book to say, you know, how this was done, how it was cut, re-taped together, everything like that. And then to see that, to find that in the National Archives, the whole, you know, these re-taped-together pages, It's pretty incredible. But, you know, like I said, this guy, he is the Navy's version of Lawrence of Arabia. He means the...

It's freaking crazy. Yeah, insane. And he's a flag officer. And he's involving himself the entire war in these little mini skirmishes and ambushes. I mean, he's almost killed three times just by assassins. Yeah, it's nuts. It's a freaking crazy story. And he loses his mind in the process.

Yeah, yeah. You say this, along with his promotion to Admiral King, elevated... Seiko, which is the Sino-American Cooperation Organization. This is this group that they got running all over China, to naval group China, an act that likewise elevated each camp to a formal, and they got all these camps. They got all these camps set up. He's running this network of camps, an act that likewise elevated each camp to a formal naval unit and invested miles with the authority of a group commander, increasing his

roles to 600 officers and 2,400 enlisted men, about 300 more than allotted to a World War to battleship and a commitment by the Navy that was further augmented by various numbers of Marines, Coast Guardsmen, radio operators. To supply all these men, Miles received two planes. Their engines rarely idle, to which ferry loads from Chong King to the various camps. The gas alone for these planes gobbled up as much as half of Miles' monthly tonnage allotment over the hump. But for the first time in the war, Sacco camps began receiving at least a portion of what they

deserved. So this guy is running a freaking crazy guerrilla war. He's running an army. He's a naval commander who's running an army like we talked about earlier. He's running, he has no communication with these units for the most part. So he's getting these commanders, mostly Marines that are coming to him. He's giving them a spine of sailors to go work with. And then this Marine commander and these Navy sailors are trucking sometimes three months at a time to get to their station in China. They set up a camp, they start training Chinese guerrillas, and then they commit them to action.

and because he has no communication with him, he has to rely on the aggressiveness of each of these leaders. In some cases, it works out, some cases it doesn't. So really, all he's doing at this point is just managing his talent pool and assessing whether or not they're sending back, you know, aggressive enough reports about the operations that they're undertaking. Anyway. Yeah, you cover it.

I mean, it's just, it's an incredible story. And there's 10 books in its own right. It's 10 books. And the thing that I was blown away with, and I focus my attention of this chapter on Camp 6 because Camp 6 is really the only unit in Saco that is run by a member of Naval Special Warfare. Every other camp, except in rare instances,

is run by a Marine. So the legacy of those camps is, you know, understandably, you know, a feather in the Marine Corps. cap. They should be nothing but impressed with the legacy of the Marine Corps led units. But Admiral

King, towards the tail end of this period, you know, they're running out of Marines descent. And not only that, but the Scouts and Raider program is going away. Admiral King doesn't want it to go away. He wants to send quasi-marine sailors to backfill the Marine commitment

to Sacco. So he repurposes the Scouts and Raiders school, turns it into the amphibious rodder school, and is trying to get as many marine-type sailors into Sacco as possible to justify this course. So we don't have to get rid of this course after the end of World War II. And Camp Six becomes sort of the repository of all of that experience. Buck Halper, who you mentioned at the beginning of the book, the Jewish Notre Dame quarterback, he gets sent there. Phil Bucklew comes west and starts leading reconnaissance. raiding operations.

But yeah, Camp Six is the... Camp Six is the first instance of naval special warfare really going ashore. And they do everything. They do raids. They do ship attacks by the end of the war. Halperin is literally leading from the saddle on a horse and pushing his guerrillas into action. It's incredible. Yeah.

It's freaking... It's just a great story. And again, I've often said that when I got in the teams, I don't know, when you got in this still, so it wasn't. There was no doctrine when you got in the teams. There was no doctrine when I got in the teams. If you wanted to know how to do an assault on a target, you couldn't look it up. Someone had to tell you, your platoon chief or your LPO was going to teach you how to do it. It wasn't written down anywhere.

Whereas the Army and the Marine Corps, you can look at exactly how to do a target assault. It tells you step by step what to do. So we don't have any doctrine. We have more now. But that's one of our biggest weaknesses is that we don't have any doctrine. One of our biggest strengths is that we don't have any doctrine. And that's why you get a freaking guy that's like, oh, cool, what are we going to do? We're getting on a course back raids.

That's what's happening. Cool. Let's figure out how to do it. And again, that decentralized command, the default aggressive attitude, that's got to be in, that's the DNA of the SEAL teams. And it's rooted back to Camp Sets. Caps six. Nothing like it. Fast forward.

The end of the war should have been the happiest day of my life, wrote Miles afterward, tasked with an impossible mission and yoke to impossible partners. He had nevertheless achieved something greater than ever been asked of him, a Navy-run guerrilla army and intelligence infrastructure that had stretched from Indochina to the Gobi Desert. Assisted by Marines, his sailors had trained as many as 100,000 Chinese guerrillas, rescued airmen and missionaries, blasted open. Japanese tanks blown up some 158 bridges derailed some 66 Japanese trains sunk 35 Japanese ships

raided uncountable Japanese camps and led at least one cavalry charge on camels Best estimates at the time placed the number of sacco inflicted casualties at around 26,717 killed 8,720 wounded 600 346 captured of the roughly 2 captured of the roughly 2,500 Americans who served in Saco, five were killed. That's amazing. That's amazing. And this isn't even considering the strategic impact of Saco, because, you know,

they're tying down a million Japanese troops the entire time. Yeah. Troops that could be fighting on all those islands, the Marines are slogging across. For sure. But they can't. A million. I mean, there's, you know,

when you think of there's 30 or 40,000 Japanese on these islands, when most of these islands, somewhere around that number. You know, if you have an extra million soldiers to throw into that mix, as was true of every successful general in history, Miles' success had come at the price of his sleep, his health, his family's happiness, and even his sanity. For his sacrifices, he had been kept not with praise and press releases, but with troubles, bureaucracy, and overweening scrutiny.

In the end, Saco, along with the Navy's guerrilla warfare effort, received a reward as glamorous as an obituary. As Miles bitterly concluded, the month that followed, the surrender of Japan was the worst through which I lived. After hosting a dinner for many of his Saco officers, this is right after the war. Miles began rambling, seemingly endless lecture on what the atomic bomb would mean for the U.S. Navy's future. As men awkwardly drifted out of the room,

Miles continued unaware when every man had left and when the lights had been turned off. After the camp doctor confined him to his state room, Miles jumped from the window and took off sprinting through a right. Rice Patty, chased by a group of American advisors and Chinese guerrillas, he escaped, passed them all, and stole a Jeep. As he rattled past his pursuers, he was heard muttering over and over, I must get to the drill field. Block the road, God damn it, that's an order, he shouted. shouted the camp's doctor to the driver of a six-by-six truck.

When the Jeep reached the roadblock, Miles jumped out and ordered the truck driver to move. The doctor countermanded the order and told Miles to return to his quarters, whereupon Miles accused everyone of lying to him. You're on the sick list. The doctor finally managed. What are you saying, doctor? I'm all right. I don't think you are, Admiral. The doctor replied nervously

and have to officially inform you that you are on the sick list and have been relieved of your command. As the words drilled into Miles' delusion, the doctor could feel him shaking like a leaf. Finally, Miles relented, eye-eye doctor. He hopped back into the Jeep, returned to his quarters.

Next morning, he's placed under house arrest and his razor confiscated. In Washington, Metzell met, Met, Mrs. Billy Miles and informed her that her husband had a complete mental breakdown and that they could only hope he had not suffered permanent brain damage. Yeah. They broke him. I mean, he literally left everything in China.

When he comes back, it takes months and months before he regains his sanity. But he, you know, this whole theater of warfare was, I mean, mad. And it's just dealing with the Chinese on a daily basis. I mean, so many other people have tried. Joe Stillwell tries to deal with Chiang Kai Shack. I mean, he's frustrated his entire war. He leaves not in disgrace, but at least in massive frustration. Weidemeyer has the same headaches with the Chinese.

But what Stillwell and Weidemeyer don't have to deal with is the oppressive army scrutiny. And when the Army gets there, I mean, they see China as clearly, you know, their area of operations. And it is. I mean, you can't argue with it. I mean, it's the land. I mean, just like if the Army decided that they were going to seize control the South China Sea, the Navy would certainly have something to say about it. But when they get there, you know, the Navy has this infrastructure in place and they don't know what to do with it. So they try to, you know, progressively take control of Miles' organization.

And in the end, Miles loses out, the army takes control of it. And the only thing that stops them from really seizing control is all of the trouble that Miles has had, which is geography. They can't seize control of this thing. Miles maintains his command over his organization for the remainder of the war. So the problem is the solution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. I got to mention this section here. At the time of the Japanese surrender,

Rudy Bosch, a 17-year-old volunteer with the amphibious Rogers, looked up from the middle of the training exercise in the swamps near Lake Okeechobee to hear the class instructor announced, stop what you're doing, the war is over. Told to return to Fort Pierce, Bosch, and his classmates were then given a single final order, tear it down. What followed was the sacking of three years worth of construction. Mess halls, classrooms, offices, ranges, towers, before a backdrop of flaming white tents that at once proudly lined the roads,

sheltering the nearly every special group in the U.S. military from the Rangers to the UDTs. The Rogers, who had not gotten a crack at China, took out their frustrations by demolishing everything with their bare hands. By the end of the week, the only thing that suggested the past experience of a naval base was the pool. Last to go were the men themselves. That's it. War's over. And with it, the Rogers, too. Yeah, we didn't even talk.

Give us a quick brief on the Rogers. Well, the Rogers are the sort of the natural culmination of the Scouts and Raider program. So the Scouts and Raiders, they're the name sort of doesn't make sense. I mean, the Scouts and Raiders seemed like they would be, you know, reconnaissance troops and commandos. They really weren't. Scouts and Raiders are a joint unit created at the very beginning of the war. It's an Army Navy unit. The idea is we need Army scout boat officers to take Army beach marking troops ashore

so the Army can signal the landing fleet, signal the landing craft so troops can get into the right beaches. This is what they do in North Africa. The problem is after North Africa, the Army starts to lose interest in this, and they stop creating their portion of the scouts and raiders because they have enough beach marking troops for the remainder of the war. So they basically leave the entire schoolhouse in the hands of the Navy, which now the Navy has all this curriculum, and they have no prohibition on what the Navy's portion of the Scouts and Raider program can do. So naturally the Navy starts, you know, taking not just the transportation side of the mission, but they take the entire

beach marking side of the mission. So they have troops that are quasi, you know, commandos that are trained to do beach marking. But at this point in the war, or in 1945, when Saco has been created, they realize that they can use these troops, not just for beachmarking anymore, but for straight up commando operations. They have the Army's curriculum. They have all the experience of working with Army commandos. So they train their sailors and everything that the Army Commandos have been trained with. And the plan is to send these units to China. And that's the Amphibious Rogers.

So the Scouts and Raiders, naturally, I have a picture, I think, in the book of, there's a sign that says Scouts and Raiders, and then underneath it, the Amphibious Rogers. Within months, there's no more Scouts and Raiders sign. It's the amphibious Rogers. Not the best name for a commando unit, but the idea was that, you know, these were the Navy's pirates. You know, the Roger was the Jolly Roger.

These guys are supposed to be the swaggering, you know, bushwhackers of the Pacific. Chapter 7, the U.S. Navy's post-war plight and the sailor raiders who led her back to significance in Korea. Again, there's just so much detail that you put into this. It's absolutely fascinating to read. You end up highlighting, now we're in. I'll fast forward to.

in Korea, Target Baker. This time the scouts were accompanied by a boatload of Marines, who upon landing, established a hasty perimeter, then flashed seaward the signal for all clear. When the remaining boats hit the shore, the Marines secured a beachhead, then scouted inland for the tunnel entrance. As they did, two trains appeared and did the job for them,

revealing the location of the two rail tunnels. To the southernmost, the scouts put to flight one century armed with nothing but a wooden rifle and a bayonet. After securing the southern tunnel, the UDT swimmers slogged some 2,000 pounds of explosives 300 yards past the beach, where they stacked pack after pack into the tunnel's mouth and under a bridge. At 0305, the UDT swimmers pulled their fuses, initiating a hasty six-minute retreat to the beach and the boats followed by a concert of oars through the surf. At 3.30 noted the task force diary, charges exploded.

20 minutes later, the men of Saga climbed back into the bass, which was the ship, and into history as the Navy's first successful Raiders of the modern era. For joy and for many of the Navy planners, it was just a start. Yeah, that was a tough chapter to sort of figure out where the center of gravity of this thing is. Like what, because the, I mean, just the number of raider organizations that the Navy sponsors during this period, They sponsor the Marine Corps UDT group, which is the Special Operations Group. At the time, the SAG, they sponsor UDT-led British Commandos. They sponsor Army Raiders.

I mean, everybody is trying to figure out how to, you know, do sort of what the Koreans were doing to the U.S. military at that point, which is bottled up in the Pousan perimeter. It's like, you know, we've been watching a Pusan perimeter moment in Afghanistan. Their lack of leadership, lack of planning, lack of resourcing, you know, forces, Army, or the U.S. forces back into this small pocket. And they're doing everything they can to sort of not necessarily break out of it, but at least, you know, not do nothing. and the not doing nothing is trying to cut the North Koreans supply lines. And the one advantage that they have with the Korean Peninsula is all of these arteries, all these roads because of the spine of the North Korean geography, is they push everything to the edges of the peninsula.

So this is the first time the Navy really sees this huge opportunity to start sponsoring raids ashore. It's the first time that the UDT, which is the only special operations unit that survives disbandment in World War II, that's the moment that they cease to be just beach marking or just reconnaissance troops and demolition troops, and they start going ashore. But they, you know, like every other instance, they are going ashore, not alone. They're going ashore with the Marines, with British commandos, CIA operatives, partisans, and they're slowly learning this trade. You go into chapter 8 here tells another story of the Rangers

and the resurrection of the Army Rangers and the guerrilla raid that failed to forestall their second death. Just another one of these, you got a guy named John Hugh McGee. these characters, all of them. They're just freaking epic. I mean, what this guy did is just incredible. His career, you look at these guys' career.

And I mean, at least in John McGee's case, I mean, he's a totally, he maybe has the worst World War II experience of anybody. Let me just jump into that real quick. A year later, McGee was at the epicenter of history. hopelessly commanding Moro troops in the Philippines against Japanese bombers in the snake-choked Malarial hills around Del Monte Field, Del Monte Airfield, at kilometer 117 of the Sayre Highway, becoming the only American of the 11 who fought there to survive the war. After six months of resistance on May 10, 1942, McGee swalled his pride, obeyed his superior, and with a humiliating, blindfolded salute, surrendered himself and his American and Filipino

troops to imperious Japanese officer wearing a kimono. Many of the Filipinos were tied to stake, shot, and buried in pits. The Japanese soldiers never bothering to confirm they were dead. At 33, McGee's dark brown hair had already faded into an iron gray. For the next 25 months, McGee survived beatings, trench foot, dysentery, malaria, mosquitoes, cages, and slavery. For nourishment, he and his fellow prisoners were fed a meager diet of rice and a few vegetables that occasionally included yams, dog meat, wafer thing, candy bars, and cigarettes.

The last two purchased were the monthly allotment of 40 pesos that the Japanese could turn into a lever to pry prisoners' submission. So sensitive did the men become to their hunger that when fearful of transfer, they gorged themselves on every scrap they had hidden. One man even devouring a litter of puppies born the same day. Along with his Catholic faith to which he cleaved, McGee sustained his mind on a series of escape plans into the Philippine jungle, even making use of a urinary tract infection that kept him up at night to memorize the guideposts of the constellations.

To each plan was attached an obvious choleric, colerary, obvious to him anyways. Once escaped, he would raise and lead an army of Filipino guerrillas against the Japanese. For two years, he plotted mentally choosing men for work details, not for strength, but for their knowledge and gunnery and logistics. men around whom he could build the guerrilla army in his mind. On the night of June 12th, two years, one month and two days after his capture, he finally got his chance, while anchored off the east coast of Zamboanga Peninsula on a prison transfer ship, McGee palmed off his rosary beads to a friend,

dropped every stitch of his ragged clothing to the deck, then tiptoed over his sleeping comrades, placed a naked foot on top of the railing, and dove into the racing current. through an initial volley of bullets and passed two other prison ships, McGee drifted for miles until rescued by a native in an outrigger who paddled him to land, gave him a t-shirt which McGee turned into a loincloth, a shore two native boys eventually found, fed, and clothed him,

tied undersized sneakers to the bottom of his feet like heelless slippers, then pushed and pulled his emaciated frame over jungle trails lit by nothing more than a torch as bright as a cigar tip. And you go on from there, but just you have to kind of realize what's happening with this guy and where this guy came from. And what he wants. Yeah.

He spends the entire war, you know, essentially just neutralize. Yeah. Well, so he's in prison camp for two years. When he finally escapes, he wants to go run a, run a freaking, an army, a guerrilla army. Well, there's other people that have already been running a guerrilla army. And now they outrank him. they have the experiences.

So he kind of gets sidelined the whole time. His war is just a series of disappointments. Yeah. And when he gets back home, he finally meets the daughter that his wife, he meets his daughter, he was never met before. And his reaction is immediately to volunteer for service back in the Pacific Theater. And the day he gets back, the day he takes command of his troops, they drop the bomb.

And the entire time, I mean, that he's been neutralized this entire time facing these series of disbandments. His little brother has been one of Merrill's marauders, most effective battalion commanders, which is a really frustrating thing for this poor guy. The psychology behind that. Yeah, so when he finally gets to Korea, and, you know, he has this new opportunity to prove himself, all he wants to do is create the, you know, the army that he had built. in his mind and he gets there and or anyway you have the there's a there's a so they go they end up he ends up putting together kind of a group mageese rangers is that correct accurate statement i mean he

he's the um he's the indispensable person when it comes to army special operations in korea everything sort of flows out of him uh he has all these ideas at the beginning of the war and he puts them all in writing. And so everything from the Army Rangers are reconstituted based off of his recommendations. The partisan command is created based off of his recommendations. And he wants to sort of combine these units together. He's got this idea. It's sort of unformed. It's not exactly what, it's not a mature idea at the beginning of the war. It becomes, you know, you see when you look through the structure of the institution that he had sort of created. You see like a siege of soda form. Yeah, like the components are there. They're there. Like you can see. And every time that he

constitutes this thing, the Navy is a critical part of his ideas. You can't do any of the types of things that he wants to do unless you have significant Navy support, Navy transports. Anyway, so the problem is, you know, the Army has moved past. all of his ideas. They, you know, they, they entertain them. They entertain these ideas for a period. And as you see throughout his service, the Army plucks these things off the table one at a time, leaving him to go back to, you know, the states, not in disgrace, but not, not to fulfill the thing that he wants. He got these, he's got these ranger groups together again. And here's a, section where the Rangers are, some of his McGee's Rangers are going out. They're on an

operation. I'm going to jump into the middle of this operation after a moment. moment of intense argument. Watson ordered back one of the Koreans. They had left the radio. Watson ordered back one of the Koreans to get the radio who, not surprisingly refused until Watson threatened to beat the man himself. Scambling to the clearing, the Korean soldier seized the radio by the backstrap, then dragged it behind him, bouncing, rolling, smashing over rocks, and leaving a trail of broken knobs, handles, and antenna. Bastards got his brains in his ass, seeed Watson as he watched. When the runner reached the trees and presented the radio, everyone could see that it was destroyed. With their only hope for survival, buoyed upon the ability to communicate

their position to the Navy's fighters and helicopters, the radio's destruction meant Virginia, that's the name of the team, Virginia's was not far behind. Had Watson wanted to repay this cruelty in kind, his rage was instantly short-circuited by the shredding sound of a machine gun fire and the terror of communist soldiers lunging across the body-strewn clearing. Without a word, As Thornton recalled, the Virginia survivors plunged into the trees and careened down the hill in a wild melee. Stumbling, rising, running, and falling again, hoping with every bruise to break through to the valley floor before the enemy cinched the noose around their necks. After running for what seemed like a half a mile, the men collapsed into the relative protection and shadow of a ravine. As their lungs pumped miniature fog banks into the cold air, their ears caught the growing but unmistakable hum.

of hum and chop of two helicopters echoing through the valley when the first helicopter made it back to the clearing its pilot aged into a hover kicked out a bundle of supplies then leaned out his window coming face to face with a volley of muzzle flashes banking hard the pilot escaped and ambush the ambush only barely with the clearing obviously overrun both pilots rolled rolled their helicopters into an anxious racetrack search around the mountains flying so low that Thornton could easily make out easily pilots face without a radio even without even marking panels the Virginia survivors waived frantic arms but betrayed not a sound since any noise would only alert their hunters not the engine deafened pilots for 30 or so minutes the pilots searched then ascended and retraced their path to the ocean Virginia was alone except for the blowing wind and the rustle of the leafless trees remembered Thornton there was silence lonely, empty silence.

They go on the run. You highlight, you go through some of that, and then finally, fast forward a little bit on April 10th, 10 hallucinatory days since the mountaintop battle in just two to three miles from UN lines. The last remaining members of Virginia mission were cornered in a cave, captured, and ransacked, then beaten and bound with wire so tightly that Watson's arms soon swelled to twice their normal size. For the second time in his life, this veteran of the Darby's Rangers was a prisoner of war, as fate would have it, captured while escaping from a disaster as consequential for the Rangers as Cisterna had been. And this guy, Watson, you introduce him later and you have to get the book to see what

this guy's about, but let me give you a little something. So this guy gets captured. In the 29 months since his capture, Corporal Martin R. Watson, a soldier no guard or prisoner believed was actually a corporal had set an example for captivity that to this day was has never been exceeded 30 days after he was captured for 18 of which he had been starved in a cave to make his 240 pound size somewhat easier to handle Watson and a South Korean comrade had knocked out a guard with a rock and made for the surrounding mountains where they had survived for five days until their pursuers had disabled them by rolling a grenade into their hideout Never medically treated, except with some shreds of brown paper to cover his wounds,

Watson had nevertheless escaped again, this time by wriggling out of his rope restraints and jumping free of a moving truck as it slowed around a bend. This time he survived a week before inadvertently walking right past a wide-eyed North Korean patrol. For these attempts and one other, plus an attempt at suicide with a piece of broken glass, he had been relentlessly beaten with rifle butts and boot heels and peels and periodically starved and almost always isolated once in an unsheltered hole for 72 days with rations described by the record as sparse.

Rightly suspected as an OSS spy and saboteur, Watson had also been subjected to almost daily interrogation by North Koreans, Chinese, and even Russians who had drilled him upon his exposure to the Gestapo in World War II, but especially on the organization's methods and tactics of the paratroop unit to which they knew he belonged. Watson's response to these and other questions had been a mixture of stony silence or intentional contradiction, responses that had invariably earned him a switch across the eyes, a pistol barrel across the face, or hours of kneeling with his nose pressed against a wall, and then a stone on his head.

Throughout these deprivations, Watson had never lost his bearing or conviction. once standing during a packed camp lecture by a British speaker from the London Daily Worker to say that he didn't know what communism was and he didn't care to find out. Nor did he and his fellow POWs want to listen to this traitor, commie, son of a bitch. For this affront and as his example to other prisoners, he was eventually frog marched before a military tribunal informed of. of the armistice then sentenced to death by firing squad. He still didn't talk. In the end, after having been starved from 240 pounds to 120, his was an example that earned him the final distinction as the second to last UN POW to be released across the Freedom

Bridge. On the other side, he learned that the Rangers he had so steadfastly protected from exposure longer existed. As far removed now from the Army's interest as was the man who had resurrected them from the grave, a man whose accomplishments had disappointingly matched those of his past. About the same time that Operation Spitfire had been unraveling, Colonel John Hugh McGee, the Korean War author of the Army Rangers and Korean Partisans, had presented himself for the third time to the Quonson hut maze of the Eighth Army's headquarters in Pusan, intent on securing

a date for a partisan advance into North Korea, a date for which he had long been waiting. The reply from his superior had been simple. Never. After a year-long tour, McGee left Korea as dejected as he had left the Philippines, never again to have a chance to lead a partisan army on a campaign of liberation. On top of everything else, he was branded. the scapegoat for the failure of Virginia and Spitfire, failures with consequences beyond a battered reputation.

Yeah, the way that the Army is treating special operations in this period is similar to the way that they dealt with them in World War II. They created the Rangers. They attached them to divisions for control. In each instance, the divisional commanders, they don't see much distinction between the Rangers and their own infantry. So they treat them like infantry. And usually they use them as their front line infantry. And predictably, they get mauled. And then the commanders justify their own belief that they were just like infantry.

So the only thing that really could have kept the Rangers of the Army from disbanding them would have been the sort of raid that McGee sends Watson and his team to complete, which is a penetration rate at a deep, you know, deep penetration rate behind enemy lines to destroy a tunnel. For lots of reasons, the rug gets pulled out from under this team before they even go, and their chances of success before they even launch are diminished to almost nothing. They still go. And like you read, that passage that you read, I mean, the survival, the lengths that they go just to survive are incredible.

And this mission is almost completely lost to history. I mean, when I started researching that mission and researching Watson, I didn't have a lot to go on. There's really only a couple of accounts about it. And I had, you know, based off of what I had done, the research I had done for my World War II chapters, I sort of knew, or I sort of suspected that there would be like some post-POW report about Watson. Couldn't find it the first time I went to the archives, but I knew that these reports were. were roughly, you know, two pages. Whenever anybody was recovered from a POW camp,

the military would interview them. They would put the circumstances of their capture and the circumstances of their captivity in these reports, and, you know, they'd lock it away in an archive someplace. So I knew that this report probably existed. So I contacted the archives. They confirmed that the report did exist. And I, you know, being in Illinois at the time,

it wasn't super convenient for me to go back. I expected that, you know, the two pages wouldn't provide a ton of detail anyway. But I asked them, could you take a look at it and then send me the pages of his report? The archive was kind enough to do it. She went and she looked at the account and she said, yeah, the accounts in a file, you know, a file labeled such and such is the record of American POWs in the Korean War, but it's 750 pages. So I can't scan it and copy it and send it to you. I was like, well, can you just find his section and then send me those pages?

And she said, no, it's 750 pages. It's not been cleared. You'd have to put a FOIA request in just to go through it to make sure that there's no classified information. So I put the FOIA request in. They go through, but they still won't send me the two pages. Anyway, I sort of forget about it. I've sort of moved on to another chapter. I figure if I'm going to find anything on the Virginia One Raid and it's going to be the center of gravity of that chapter.

I'll find it eventually. but it's sort of, like I said, I put it on the back burner. I've already moved on. So I come to the archive several months later, and I remember I put this FOIA request in. So, you know, I do a double check on it. It's the end of a long day. My back is aching because of all the pictures that I've taken.

You have to stand over these tables and, you know, take picture after picture. And when I leave the archive after a day of research, I've got like 3,000 images. Like, you know, it's, you know, it's not fun. But at the end of the day, I think I've got about 30 minutes left. I find the archives. I'm like, hey, can you find this report from me? I'd like to take a look at it and see what it is. She comes back with the 750 pages.

I open it up. It's not 750 pages of American POWs in the Korean War. It's 750 pages on Martin Watson. And no one has ever gone through it. Not since the day that they took the reports and put it in the archivocels. and put it in the archive. And it is, it's a gold mine. I mean, it had everything from his police reports,

the circumstances of his captivity in Sisterna, because he was part of Darby's Rangers in World War II. And then the fact that this person, he's present, not just for, you know, the consequential moment of the Rangers in World War II, but the consequential moment of the Rangers in the Korean War. Man, it's amazing. Account after account of all the people that, you know,

It's not just his interview. It's not just his post-captivity interview that's in the 750 pages. It's interview after interview by his fellow captives. And they all have the same story about this guy. He is incomparable. And he gets a bronze star after his, you know, after his captivity. And he gets a promotion to sergeant. I mean, I couldn't, I know, I mean, maybe Freeman.

In some instances, maybe Halper and a couple of others, I mean, nobody that I come across in the writing of that book, is more deserving of the Medal of Honor. I mean, the length that he went to for his own men on that hilltop in the Virginia One mission, and then the lengths that he goes to just to survive in the POW camps and to escape, numerous escape. I mean, but yeah, he's, I mean, I've never. Do you have your next book identified yet? I got a good idea.

The problem with the, the, the, um, uh, the record is that there's no dates. And I've thought, you know, you could write a book about Martin Watson. I think you would have to make it fiction, though. You'd have enough material to write that book, but you couldn't write it with the same level of specificity that I wrote this. Because you need the chronology to tell that story. And the chronology is just...

Don't you think you could piece together the chronology from the other, the events that he's actually in? You could, I've thought about it. And you would have to find, you'd have to go through each of the report. reports and and track down, you know, the, you know, the 100, 150 guys and see who's still alive to see if they can put, you know, some chronology to it. You, it would, I don't know, I have, I've thought about it. What happened to him after the war after he got out of the army after he was meritoriously promoted to sergeant? Yeah, right. He is, uh, it doesn't have the, it's,

it's not the best, uh, uh, epitaph. He's, um, he ends up having some trouble. I mean, like I write in the book, his interwar period between his release from the German POW camp in World War II and his entrance back into the army, it's punctuated by some 76 arrests by the Connecticut police. And, yeah, ranging from fighting to drunkenness back to fighting to resisting arrest. I mean, he has no, I mean, he clearly has, you know, post-traumatic stress.

But he also, you know, that's just who he was. He'd grown up in this sort of like rough and tumble gang type environment. And, you know, he's, you know, he would be a nightmare to command. But, you know, also, you know, incomparable in combat. But after the war, he marries. It doesn't go well. He's, you know, completely, you know, broken from the war. He ends up having a couple of kids and then moving to Alaska.

to work on a pipeline. His son, who I have become friends with, is every bit as big as his old man was. I mean, he's just equally a monster. But the nicest guy that he never made. But I think he met his dad, you know, maybe two dozen times in the course of his life. And then he passes away, I believe, from lung cancer.

He smoked his entire life. And the password that his son would have to use to get into his hospital room was courage. Korean war ends. Your next section is Arlie Burke, the Bay of Pigs, and the launching of the Navy's limited war seals. You talk about Arlie here. During the period of the CIA's preparations for the covert invasion, invasion invasion, invasion of Cuba, the U.S. Navy was led by Admiral Arley Burke.

The 58-year-old CNO, whose most conspicuous feature, were a tight shock of curly bleached hair, a fist of a chin that fell into a loose and swollen neck, and a sizable bulk that had long since settled into his hips, a trait that gave, said one witness, a sea roll to his stride and adjoin his shape, the impression of an upright base. or a freighter. So there you got Arlie Burke. Not an attractive man. Yeah.

And here's an important part. And this is one of the parts where we start connecting this DNA of the SEAL teams to the DNA of the U.S. Navy. In 1943, when Burke finally arrived in the South Pacific to take command of Destroyer Squadron 23, Desron 23, the Little Beavers, He pinned himself to a drop-leaf desk in the sweltering belly of his command ship and crammed into his head a year's worth of combat reports every battle from Coral Sea to Savo Island. Appalled at the micromanagement of destroyers in which the permission to launch torpedoes against an already discovered enemy fleet was denied for four immutable minutes. Burke crafted an entirely new doctrine of employment. instead of spreading his destroyers around the fleet's larger ships as nighttime submarine

pickets all dependent on permission from above to break guard duty to engage the enemy, Burke proposed to concentrate his ships at the head of the fleet and to govern his skippers under what has since been called the doctrine of faith, an unprecedented delegation of authority in which an enemy sighting would be immediately followed by a, coordinated torpedo attack without orders. The use of all caps was Burke's. To convey this attitude to his sailors, Burke issued them a 12-page mimographed memo,

whose very first lines read, If it will help kill Japs, it's important. If it would not help kill Japs, it's not important. Keep your ship trained for battle. Burke's list of non-battle-related orders was succinct. There were none. corrections to this section will not be permitted. It took less than a month to make his point.

So that's Burke. You go through this thing and Burke is running the Navy and, you know, clearly he's an aggressive guy and believes in decentralized command. You do a great job of covering what happened at the Bay of Pigs, how that ties into our history and the SEAL teams. really pretty interesting story the way that unfolds. And, you know, it ends up with, well, it's a horrible situation, but we do gain some experience that we then take, we work with some of these Cuban nationalists that helped us out as well. Yeah.

And this is the toughest chapter. Well, that's not the toughest chapter. Each of the chapter presented, you know, various challenges when it came to researching and trying to, like, craft the narrative or trying to figure out, like I said before, What's the point of this chapter? And how does this, how does this serve the story? Or how did this push us forward?

And, you know, what aspects of, you know, Burke's personality or Burke's own history, how is that relevant? And absolutely, you're, you know, you hit the nail right on the head when it comes to, you know, Burke's, you know, emphasis on latitude and decentralized command. But the other thing about Burke that's really important, or that's essential about him, is that he refuses to allow the other branches of service to define what the Navy is. And, you know, in the revolt of the admirals or in that period during that period during the, you know, the interwar period between World War II and the Korean War, you know, the other branches of the service are trying to tell the Navy that, you know, we need to really dearm ourselves and become sort of just a, you know, more of a merchant marine, which to Burke is anathema. He has no interest in commanding a Navy that's just a support or a transport unit.

To Burke, the Navy is nothing if it's not an instrument of offensive warfare. And so he's constantly, when he becomes the CNO and he becomes a CNO for a period, two years longer than even the closest, his closest competitor. It's normally a two-year job. He's the C&O for six years. No one has the influence on the U.S. Navy that Arly Burke does. So when he becomes a CNO, he's constantly, the entire time, he's constantly looking for opportunities to push the Navy into a more offensive role. So he champions this limited war capability. You know, he sees enemies all over the globe and he's trying to figure out how the Navy can either bring forces to bear, launch Marines, launch missiles, launch, you know, naval gunfire.

and that orientation ultimately creates this unit. But like I said, writing the book creates, you know, presents, you know, structuring and research challenges. You know, every chapter is hard to write. This chapter, though, this was probably the easiest chapter when it came to write the first draft because there's been so much produced about Harley Burke. Numerous books. A couple of them are pretty good with lots and lots of corroborative detail in them. And then just finding his fingerprints all over those documents that create the SEAL teams.

They're all over. I mean, everything, all the documents that his office is creating. But then you can see his little scratches and his pen scratches in all these documents because he writes with, I think it's a green pen. And you can see them still on the documents when you go to the Navy Yard today. The problem with this chapter, the particular Bay of Pigs part, is just finding the material because the CIA is still involved. And I can't tell you how many times I tried to get documents out of the CIA.

It's a black hole. You just can't get them. So I finally was able to track down the actual Cuban frogmen that participated in the raid. And all of them were just totally generous. with their time. So the book is written almost sequentially. There's a couple of chapters that I wrote out of order, but this chapter in particular is the one that just sort of kept me up at night until the end. So I know there's more material out there and I've got to get it into the book. And I mean, short of going down to Miami and meeting with the actual, because they closed the museum, they closed

the Bay and big museum. But I managed to find them and their accounts are in there. Yeah. It's an epic, epic retelling of that. Um, again, that's why you got to get this book to read these sections, because I'm not covered at all today. Uh, but we do get Kennedy. We get Kennedy who now is really focused on this idea, the small war idea, the counterinsurgency idea, the guerrilla warfare idea. He's all over it.

He starts pushing people in that direction. He needs someone to run the, the special warfare center at Fort Bragg, which is where the green berets come from, where they get, it's like their schoolhouse. Um, he, he's, um, he's, um, he, he's, um, he, he, he's, he, he, he, he's, he, he, he's, He ends up talking to one of his friends, one of its military aides, who recommends a guy to run it. This guy named Colonel Bill Yarborough, who's another character in the story. At the change of command ceremony, his soldiers observed him as he was, average size, chest out, shoulders back, a rooster of a man, his narrowed eyes and pursed lips locked into a stoic gaze as revealing as a Roman bust. son of an army colonel married to an army brat with a son on his way to an army commission and two daughters on their way to army husbands.

Yarborough was the very picture of army tradition. 48 years old now in press slacks and blouse boots with no prior special, no prior experience in special forces. Nothing on the surface seemed to indicate anything besides a conventional background and a preference for more of the same. But that was just the surface. Beneath his obvious soldierly bearing was hidden an ambition for a military organization. Organization as unconventional as had ever existed. Born into a military family and predictably funneled into a West Point education, whereas only step out of formation seems to have been as a cartoonist on the school newspaper. Yarborough's early Army career was in fact a litany of non-conformities.

Four years with the Philippine Scouts, one of the most unconventional assignments in the U.S. Army. Two years as a parachute test officer during which his creativity had burst open as wide as the thing he was testing. This had manifested in everything from redesigning the paratrooper's pants to boots to promoting his untested unit by acting as a stunt double for a Hollywood movie

for which he was afterwards nicknamed showbiz. And in creating a silver badge that looked like an ice cream combed shaped parachute flexed with winged angels that was ultimately adopted as the symbol for the entire airborne. In World War II, Yarborough survived

incomparable five combat jumps, five campaigns, two combat commands, one of which had fought alongside Darby's Rangers at Cisterna and later earned a presidential unit citation and one crash landing. And except for a brief sidelining resulting from an outburst against his division commander, Matthew Ridgeway, it was an almost unblemished record of direct action with a record with honor so compelling that any normal soldier would have coveted its repetition. Yarborough wasn't normal. What was the outburst about Ridgeway? Remember?

Yeah, I'm trying to think it was a it was an errant drop, I believe, in Italy. An errant drop of the paratroopers or an errant drop of a bomb-friendly fire situation? No, of paratroopers. Okay. Yeah, they landed them in a place that they shouldn't have landed them, and he returns from that. and he does something that you just can't do in the army. He, you know, lets his boss have it. And Matthew Ridgway is not,

Matthew Ridgoy is another, you know, hero of the story, but, you know, and maybe not a hero of the story. He's an American hero, but he's an executioner of the Rangers in Korea. But he's also the executioner of Yarbrose sort of rise to infantry or paratrooper greatness. He short-circuits his career, sends him back to the States. I think the only way that Yarbrough gets back. into command is through Mark Clark.

But yeah, it was, yeah, Yerbro, Yarbrough, Yerbo. He is probably next to Kaufman. I don't think I met anybody who was as tough to just sort of pinned down. Like, what does he want? Because, I mean, his whole background seems to imply that he's, you know, just this conventional, you know, soldier. but he has no interest in it. And I couldn't find, you know, the letter or the document to, you know,

suggest, you know, why he was sort of turning his back on that and why he, you know, bought in so, you know, fullheartedly to this idea of counterinsurgency. But nevertheless, it's there. He becomes the biggest disciple or apostle or whatever you want to call him of counterinsurgency, of, you know, winning, you know, the hearts and minds of the people. and then turning them or at least denying them to the enemy and the way that you did that is not through combat It's through all the stuff that nobody likes to do It's digging well. Yeah, it becomes real obvious is you saying here your

Yerbo's first action as commander of the Naval Special Warfare Center and top train of special forces was to initiate a top to bottom Review of training and curriculum an effort to match his men with their mission so here we go into Fast forward a little bit before long the special warfare center began to feel less like a command course and more like a college campus complete with courses in bridge building sanitation animal husbandry axmithing crop raising pig pen construction swine inoculation leaflet creation field irrigation seed planning and rice cultivation not all of Yarbrough and of course there's resistance not all of Yarbrough staff approved of the changes particularly said Yarbrough the old jockstrap commandos the

Ranger types gallant bloodletters and fighting machines to be sure but men who are anything but diplomats and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be they were he continued men devoid of the more humane qualities compassion pity and mercy men who bristled at the idea of lying on their bellies to teach an illiterate tribes and on how to aim a rifle so he's got a totally different idea of really what the green berets should be and he's got another little he's got another little different opinion too here fast forward a little bit to convert his men to his new philosophy as warfare, my religion, he would one day call it, in which the battles objective was not the destruction of an enemy's army, but the winning of indigenous minds

and sympathies. That must be the precursor to hearts and minds. Yarborough enjoined every one of his officers above the rank of captain to accompany him into the pine barons for what he called his talk in the woods. As long as I am charged of special forces, he would say, there will be no womanizing, no No drunkenness, no wild parties, no adultery. There'll be no troublemakers, no wild men. That stuff is out.

There will be moral standards, disciplinary standards, appearance standards. The rules are going to change, he would promise. There will be a new start. So he's coming hard. He's coming hard. And this, that chapter in particular, so I talked about some of the challenges of other chapters and, you know, either, you know, finding material or figuring out what the chapter is about. and how that chapter served the larger story.

The story of the special forces presented a problem, but I was not prepared for. Every chapter took about, you know, between six, around six, seven months to write. When I got to, and they all followed a similar pattern, you know, whether the, whether the unit was, Navy unit that we're talking about where it's being created, committed to action, and then it's retained in the order of battle, or whether it's an Army or Marine Corps unit that is

created and then disbanded. There was this pattern that was sort of predictable. You know, Navy unit created, Army unit disbanded, or Marine Corps, whatever. When you get to, and it fit with, you know, my understanding of my thesis, which was the Navy's continuing to fill this gap in the order of battle. And that held until the special forces. When I get to the special forces, my thesis sort of like started to crumble. And I had this moment of like panic where I was like, I mean, the only thing I can do is

just ignore the entire existence of the special forces because it's, I mean, it doesn't fit with what I've been doing for the past, you know, seven years. and when I you know obviously that's not what I did I because it's not the right thing to do because you're telling a history you have to you know understand the relationship you can't just change history to figure story I mean you I mean there's so many times if you're writing history that you know the temptation is there you want to you know make the facts fit your narrative it's not that's not honest and it's not what you're supposed to do so I ended up having to take an entire year and did not

nothing but, you know, really learn the history of the Army Special Forces, which is a fascinating history. But it also, you know, revealed within, you know, three or four months that it wasn't the fact that the Special Forces was, you know, created, committed to action and disbanded. It was that they were completely reoriented to a non-commando-type mission. And no one was more consequential in that shift than Yarborough. Yeah, the end up the gap that all these other Raider units would fill and then get disbanded, he didn't go into that gap. He went into this other gap.

He went into this other gap. And then there was a gap that was created by President Kennedy. And trying to connect those two people, I couldn't figure it out until I found that article about Spartacus, about Kennedy watching this movie. Oh, yeah, tell that story. I'm not going to cover it, but tell that story. In the months leading up to, um, uh, His inauguration, he's been elected, but he hasn't yet become president. He gets a, his brother tells him how great the movie, the Kirk Douglas movie, Spartacus is.

And he, you know, his incoming secretary of the Navy happens to be going as an extra ticket. You know, Mr. President, I'd like, would you like to go? So he goes. And the movie's already started. The theater owner sees, you know, Kennedy come in, stops everything, brings him upstairs. have a cup of coffee together. Everybody, all the other theater goers are just waiting for them to start. So goes down with the cup of coffee, restarts the movie, and he watches this thing, and he comes

out. And he's, I mean, it's a, if you've ever seen, you know, Spartacus, it's, you know, it's the epic. I mean, when I was a kid, I saw it, it was, I mean, I've never seen anything like it. And it makes an impression on him. And where, you know, it's a slave army that, you know, is fighting across, uh, Italy and they're liberating other slaves and they're turning them into gladiators and that's what Kennedy wants to do and he sees in this movie he sees an answer to his problem you know we're going

to turn these you know legions of you know third world you know people into you know our army of freedom and Yarbo brought into that bought into it oh yeah meanwhile fast forward a little bit Chapter 11. At 1 o'clock on January 1st, 1962, a Monday, SEAL Team 1 was, without fanfare of any kind, unceremoniously commissioned on naval amphibious base Coronado, right where the neck of San Diego's Palm Tried Resort Island met the flat seven-mile-long sandy isthmus called the Silver Strand. Located on this base, a peninsula of military-grade right angles that jutted out into the sparkling

waters of San Diego Bay, the team's physical footprint was little more than a single World War II era Quonset hut. The team's authorized strength was for 10 officers and 50 enlisted men, most of whom had not yet been pulled from their West Coast underwater demolition teams. The man most responsible for recruiting, equipping, and training these men was their 29-year-old commanding officer, Lieutenant David Del Judas. Raised just outside of Newark, New Jersey, by Italian-speaking, working-class parents, Del Judas was of average height and athletic build, and like nearly every other frogman, well-tanned.

As an officer, except for you. As an officer at UDT-12, he had been selected to lead a 10-man detachment to Vietnam on a two-week trip up the Mekong River to deliver landing craft to Laotian troops. Troops at the Army Special Forces were already training for combat. briefed on the insurgents and the menu of reptiles that he and his men were sure to encounter. They had seen neither, just a hundred miles of mud-browned river. Now Del Judas was in charge of a unit that had been created in no small part to return to that river, but to what end no one quite knew. So there you go.

Seal teams get commissioned. And this is when all the history finally, you know, starts to collide. It collides, yeah, it culminates in this. And, you know, the individual that collides in is Phil Bucklew, who's been there literally from the beginning of Naval Special Warfare. And he, you know, there's a reason that, you know, the Naval Special Warfare Center is named after this person. The Phil H. Bucklew Center for Naval Special Warfare. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't, I mean, he doesn't create, you know, the, the, Outs and Raiders, doesn't create the UDTs.

He doesn't create the SEAL teams. But he's there for these critical moments to help the SEAL teams along. And his ability to form relationships, his ability to write, because he was obviously, and he's super humble and is able to convey his message apart. Yeah, convey his message in such a way that really there's only one answer, but he never gives the answer. It's like he allows people to discover the truth for themselves, which is the best way to get people to discover the truths. Better than I could have said it. Yes. I wish I'd have that in there.

Yeah, he writes these. We'll get to it. Phil H. Bucklew. When he had left his house on December 7, 1941, Phil Hinkle Bucklew was a six-foot, two-inch, 235-pound. former fullback for the Cleveland Rams, whose major concern that morning had been to choose one of the four football contracts burning a hole in his pocket.

With thinning hair and a heavy jaw, a curled lip and downturned eyes, not to mention a torso as thick as a tree trunk. Bucklew at 26 looked 10 years older than he was and was 10 times as mean. While intimidating from a distance, Bucklew up close actually possessed a personality that accomplished the opposite.

He had never attracted to his orbit enough players to found and coach his own football team the or sorry he had even attracted enough players to his orbit to found and coach his own football team the Columbus bullies a team on its way to another league championship had the Japanese not exploded the afternoon as they did if I would have known about the Columbus bullies my task unit task unit bruiser might have been the task unit bullies instead but one of those things um in the Sicily campaign he had checked to check to check the Beach himself and fast forward a little bit then signaled the fleet from the bobbing

shell of a blackened kayak while screaming balls of fire skipped off the water around him in the weeks before Normandy invasion he skimmed to the coast and collected density testing bottom samples to up to 20 yards from the shore then invaded a flotilla of six enemy trawers and a crash of bullet snaps from MG 42 machine gun by escaping into the night and fog on the smoke-grade dawn of D-Day Bucklew and his LCT scout boat crew led the first wave of floating tanks to Omaha Beach Fired ear-splitting rockets and twin-50 cow machine guns to silence an enemy pillbox, then spent the day throttling through red-clouded water and mined topped obstacles to pluck drowning soldiers from burning landing craft.

Fast forward for his service in World War II, Bucklew had received an unheard of number of commendations, a bronze star for North Africa, a silver star for Salerno, and then a brace of Navy crosses. One for Sicily, another for Omaha Beach. Not even his friend and fellow footballer Buck Halperin had been awarded. as many. Naturally, such a record had opened doors to more unconventional opportunities, including two and a half years in Korea, more than twice the length of a standard war tour, where Bucklew had doubled as the Navy's representative to the CIA and led the beach jumpers, a Navy unit created to collect and jam the enemy's electronic communications or periodically mimic

them to sow chaos in their transmissions. So there's just some of the stuff that you talk about that Bucklew's got going on. And that's another one of the, those units to the beach jumpers right another one of these random units that the navy puts together freaking just get some um so he's got to write this report where talk about why he had to write this report uh he had to write the report because uh the original commander um got sent home and the reason that the original commander of the uh the commission or the survey team um uh we don't know if he was sent home for a health problem or as one person said for a closet drunkenness.

But they, I mean, the point of this report that they're sent to to create is to figure out what the hell the Navy's supposed to do in Vietnam. It's not a theater that any naval commander is eager to, you know, insert himself into. There's no Arley Burke at the helm of the Navy at this point. So the character of, you know, naval leadership is slightly different, maybe not as aggressive. But they still want to, you know, see what the Navy can do. So they send the survey team, but the people that they select for this survey team are almost, you know, they're sort of, they're weighting the scales a little bit. I mean, they send David Del Judas, who is, you know, he's the commanding officer of SEAL Team One. They send Phil Kail.

who's a former UDT guy from the Pacific Theater, Silver Star winner. And they send Phil Bucklew as the second in command, who is, you know, nobody has had a more inland naval experience outside of the SEAL teams than this guy. Make him the number two. The commanding officer gets sent home, putting Phil Bucklew in charge of this report. They spend the next six weeks, two months, you know, hopscotching the country, trying to figure out what to do.

And the report that he, creates is entirely his. I mean, he lets no one else take the responsibility for this report. He drafts it himself. He types it himself even. He doesn't have a yeoman to it. Did you see original copies of this thing? That's freaking legit. And it took a surprisingly long time to find it. I couldn't find it anywhere. And you have images of these things, right? You take pictures of all these things? Yeah, I have images of that. And I, yeah, I don't

have any of the original documents. There's left everything with the archive where it should be but you didn't smuggle any out not saying that the temptation wasn't there because some of the archives that i you know went to um you know there uh some of their record keeping you know has a little bit to be desired and you want to protect you know this history you know uh but no i never know that it's all there but yes found the report and um uh yeah holding it is a little weird holding a lot of these documents because you you know you haven't touched or Most likely no one's touched some of the stuff since they were You know printed off or typed off or whatever

You have here according to Bucklew this is the report according to Bucklew the battle required Something not unlike the river reinforced used in the American Civil War in which said Abraham Lincoln Uncle Sam's web feet had fought not only in the deep sea and the broad bay But also up the narrow muddy by you and wherever the ground was a little damp What a great. I mean, he quotes freaking Abraham Lincoln in this report. This guy's crafty.

For an unconventional example in a modified amphibious environment, Bucklew could have drawn attention to his own legacy. He didn't. He never did. So the humility. Lincoln's fleet was example enough.

In practical terms, his solution for the Navy heretofore failure was a comprehensive overhaul of the entire counter-infiltration effort. And you talk about this idea of counter-infiltration. as opposed to counterinsurgency.

They want to keep the infiltrators, the communists from pushing into South Vietnam. It's a blockade. I mean, that's a traditional Navy mission. Navy doesn't understand counterinsurgency. Maybe it's much more comfortable with a blockade. Right. And so therefore, according to the report, more Navy boats, more Navy boarding teams, more riverine checkpoints, submarine nets, navigation lights, a system for checking cargo manifests

and enforcing curfews. And in exchange for all this, more Navy representation in four-core planning. On the question of whether the Navy was missing the boat on counterinsurgency, the winning of the locals' loyalty through civic action and leading the indigenous troops, Bucklew's report was comparatively silent, especially given the date, just 86 days since Kennedy's assassination. Though he recommended increased boat support to special forces camps, He already judged the Green Beret's efforts as slow and time-consuming and therefore ineffective.

Fast forward a little bit. In its 46 pages, the report used the term counterinsurgency only two times, or sorry, only three times, a somewhat nebulous field, Buckley would one day call it, four fewer mentions than the term counter-infiltration. The report's preferred mission. Appearing a total of 10 times was a variant of the term rating, a tactic that could, said the report engender more fight back spirit amongst the rag sailors, though those were the South Vietnamese trained riverine sailors, but would require companies of pursuit raiders,

preferably Marines or Rangers. And who would accompany such, and who would command such raids? On this question, the former scout raider turned Saco guerrilla did not blink. The overwater transport of raiding and landing forces should be a Navy responsibility. Yeah, that, I mean, that part alone, I mean, the fact that he doesn't even mention seals in that, I mean, clearly the Navy thinks, like, I mean, if there's not like a little, you know, you know, when the teacher, you know, pounds on the chalkboard and says, hey, you might want to remember this for the test. Like, that's what he's saying. Like, hey, don't you guys think that you want to be doing this mission? And the Army and the Marine Corps is like, nah.

Crazy. Nine days later on February 25th, 1964, the Bucklew Report, the name by which he was, you know, even McNamara would refer to it, was officially distributed to leaders across the Navy, MacV, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff eventually rising to the Office of Secretary of Defense. It was handled, said Bucklew, like a hot potato. Actually, it was more like a gauntlet, a challenge to the Navy's leaders to not only directly fight an inland river war, but to fight it in a way that mostly deviated from the consensus strategy of counterinsurgency.

Over the next two years, this challenge would propel the Navy toward the development of new vessels, new organizations, and most importantly, new missions, including the reports most recommended, raiding beyond the riverbanks. So there it is. From there, the seal starts creeping inland. That's what starts happening. And here's the intro that I started this podcast out with. Debt one, SEAL team won, debt golf, Billy Macon.

That's what's happening. From there, they start, they start. making adjustments to training. Right. The Navy has set up the SEAL teams. They haven't created, I mean, they've created the SEAL teams, but they haven't determined what the SEAL teams are going to be. They've raised them, like any parent was going to raise a child.

They, like, planted a seed. Right. But the child is ultimately going to be the one who decides what his future is going to be like. And they, you know, all of this has come together into this last, you know, last two chapters. Like, here we are. And, you know, they have trouble in the beginning. They were almost sent home.

The seals almost completely missed the war. Anyway, so that the guys start coming back from those Vietnam deployments. And like I said, they start making adjustments because they're creeping more and more inland. I like this. Some of these things, some of these things just warm my heart because I'm so connected to them, right? So here we go back to the book. Frustrated with the enemy's retreat from the Rung Satz, Riverbanks, debt golf had already started pushing further inland. So far in fact that seal team one's

replacement platoons were now anticipating almost nothing but helicopter insertions. So we might not even be in the water at all, not even next to a river. To better prepare for this inland land warfare, seal team ones Anderson had ordered Guy Stone, a former Korean war soldier and forward observer who had left the army to become an enlisted seal to create a six week long pre-deployment course in basic infantry tactics. With a training camp carved into the chocolate mountains some 100 miles east of the Pacific Ocean, Stone had trained his team one comrades in every skill of soldiering that he knew, everything from contour navigating to mortars, every skill a step closer to Navy infantrymen.

To the commanders now convened in Coronado, such developments seemed to justify an official revision to the Navy's, to the SEAL's Navy imposed operational boundaries. In other words, what Del Judas, Anderson, and Early were describing as direct missions outside of a purely naval or maritime environment. As they already knew, there was only one other available area that could present a Navy unit with that kind of opportunity. An area contemporary described as the war's true bastion of iron, the Macong Delta. Yeah, I've had some Vietnam seals on here, but that connection to our West Coast desert training facility, that's it, man.

Like that's, you go out there and, you know, I had Roger Hayden on here where so a Vietnam. I don't know, Roger. Yeah, just, well, that's right. You worked at Warcom. But he was, you know, he'd start talking about being out there at the desert training facility. And like, they set up the point man course where they put booby traps

and targets. all that like that's what I did when I got SIL Team 1 you went out there and you did the point man course everybody did the point man course that came directly from these guys in Vietnam so these things are um you can still you can still have that thread yeah gonna push forward a little bit get into some um some of these stories that you you get from the fighting that the seals start doing as they push in and this is the this is where the reputation really starts to stand strong. I'm going to jump into the middle of a mission here,

realizing that the enemy was already moving to cut them off. Gallagher decided the only thing left to do was fight. This decision made, he directed his men to make for the only cover around a lone peasant's house, but just 20 uncomfortable yards away from the nearest tree line. When they reached it, their first job was to calm the family inside, not an easy task for any home invader,

and one in which the squad was only partially successful, as two children quickly escaped, sure to eventually tell the Viet Cong their position. Next, most important, was to check the wounded. Yaw's entire left side was starting to freeze up and fix whatever was wrong with the radio, the same troubleshooting checklist of cleaning connectors, swapping out handsets, changing batteries, plus a healthy amount of cursing and praying. This troubleshooting, however, was only partially successful. When Ture finally got the radio back online, the only other person who,

could hear him was Jack Rowell, the radio man for 7A, and they had problems of their own. At a little before 3 a.m. Peterson and Squad 7A considered themselves in a very difficult position. Everywhere they looked in the surrounding tree line, there was movement. At one point, Peterson had even seen torches, what seemed like hundreds of them moving toward their south. But as they were now finding out over the radio, it could have been even worse. Once Gallagher and Seven B's situation was learned, Peterson was quick to count his blessing. First, he had none of Gallagher's casualties except for the Lurp who had shot the man Peterson had meant to interrogate. Every one of his men still had a full load out of ammunition.

Next was his position. Clear fields of fire in every direction and the cemetery's berm for cover, even concrete volts if the enemy brought in his mortars. Most important of all, Raoul's radio was now working. as it should, putting the squad in reach of Army Slicks and Navy Sea Wolves who were at that moment on their way to 7A's rescue, or at least they had been. Recognizing 7B's overwhelming need, Peterson quickly made two decisions. First, he ordered Raoul to relay 7B's position to the helicopters, effectively putting his own squad at the back of the line. Second, and this decision was made by default of the first, 7A would now fight the encircling enemy alone.

Just as Peterson's decision was made and the helicopters began diverting south, a group of some 30 Viet Cong fighters, as if sensing 7A's sudden vulnerability, stepped clear of the eastern woodline, spread themselves into a screen of skirmishers, and started forward. The first wave was coming, and no one knew what was coming behind it. Having been forced to spend the first few minutes at the farmhouse calming peasants, dressing wounds, and fixing the radio, Gallagher, despite showing, shards of metal in his legs was now checking each man's field of fire and telling him to hold that fire until he gave the order. As men organized their positions with easily accessible stacks of ammunition and grenades, they scanned their sectors for any sign of movement. They didn't have to scan line, scan long. Soon, between the rice bales, there was movement everywhere. Look at them all,

said Boynton. It looks like hundreds of them. But as best he could tell, hundreds who, by their milling around still had no idea where the Americans were. Right about the time that Boynton was making that assessment, Hook Turr received what they had been quietly desperate for. The check-in procedures from Lieutenant Commander Myers of the Navy Sea Wolves who rattled off the loadout for his flight of two helicopters, wings racked with 2.75 inch rockets and machine guns, then gave his altitude and vicinity a racetrack in the sky far enough away

so as to not reveal 7B's position. In response, Ture gave a physical description of the rice paddy and 7B's location in it, along with the rapidly deteriorating situation, multiple wounded, an enemy everywhere. The next call was the lead pilot of the Army's flight of slicks,

who, upon hearing of 7B's situation, replied he would not be able to help as it was a, quote, violation of squadron policy to land in a hot LZ, end quote. What happened next is a matter of some dispute. One account suggests that the Seawolf pilots may have shamed their army peers by offering to pick up the seals themselves, or at least the wounded. The Navy fuselages could only handle one or two men. Another explicitly claims that the Seawolf commander told the army pilot, you're going to go down or I'm going to shoot you down.

Whatever the truth, within a few minutes, the matter was resolved and Gallagher told Ture to tell the helicopters what he wanted. At a little before 3.15 a.m., the moon behind him, two seawolf started their attack run across the rice paddy. As they closed with the tree line, someone in the squad, there is some dispute as to who, stepped out of the farmhouse, ripped the pole ring on a mark 13 signal flare and tossed it in the grass. Within a second, the flare ignited a bonfire-sized glow that told the pilots exactly where the seals were, but also drew the bullet snaps of every muzzle now blazing from the tree line. As the seals flinched beneath the fire and responded with their own, the world above them exploded with the wamp-wamp of the two gunships, strafing the enemy's muzzle flashes with their rockets and four machine guns. With the landing skids directly above them, the combination of rotor blades and rocket exhaust nearly ripped the roof off the farmhouse.

As the seawulfs unleashed this chaos, several seals got online and followed suit, launching grenades and shredding through belts of stoner rounds. they had so linked. The noise was unbelievable, wrote one man afterward, and it looked like something not of this world. Behind this cover, the army pilot reluctantly landed his slick, and Gallagher directed the firing line of seals to begin bounding back toward it. While the firing line covered, Mike Boynton transformed himself into an ambulance, cradling men from the hooch to the helicopter, then helping to shoulder yaw to a seat crammed between the pilot and co-pilot. Finding Gallagher limping away from the firing line, his rifle still in hand and compressing a fresh gunshot wound, and leaning into the rotor wash like it was a driving rain. Boynton picked him up and heaved him so hard into the helicopter's open door that he flew right out the other side.

That accident forced Boynton to run all the way around the helicopter and repeat the effort, finally stashing Gallagher all the way in the back. Once everyone was finally loaded, the pilot eagerly applied his collective pitch control lever until several nether. knocks on the helmet, forced him to look back. Hey, we've still got men on the ground. Boyton yelled above the noise. At this, the pilot depressed his collective just in time for Roy Matthews, the barrel of his stoner glowing hot red to dash from the hooch and clamber aboard, rounds now clanking

against the fuselage. This time, the pilot's liftoff sent a shutter throughout the entire helicopter, prompting yaw to crane his head toward the dash where he saw an RPM indicator flashing red. While gaining the next 100 feet of elevation, the helicopter shook like it would suddenly drop out of the sky, a feeling that only intensified when every gun still connected to a living communist finger started firing and surrounding the slick with green tracers. It was a barrage that had resulted from the near simultaneous liftoff of the sea wolves because they had somewhere else to be. Yeah, I mean, then you go into talk about how they go now and take care of Peterson. and 7 alpha.

I mean, if I had written any slower, this would not have been written because a lot of the guys that gave me the stories from this thing are no longer here. Ron Yaw just passed away a couple months ago. Min just died. Bob Gallagher just died. I mean, all of this history is very, very slowly, but it's happening. I mean, one of the last things that Pete Peterson, and, well, one of the last interactions I had with Pete,

because Pete was more than generous with his time to do interviews with us, but one of the last things that he did was I sent him a galley copy of the book before it had published to get it in Bob Gallagher's hands. So he could see this. I wanted, you know, all the folks that I interviewed from 7th Platoon, the one person that would not be interviewed was Bob Gallagher. that said I still was anxious for him to know the legacy and the contribution that he had you know not just to the SEAL teams but to you know establishing you know what ultimately

the SEAL teams became the mission that the SEAL teams have so sent the copy of the book to Pete uh Pete drove it over to Bob's house um Pete you know didn't get any information on whether or not he actually read it, but after Bob passed, they found the copy of the book in his house with a note inside that said to pass this book onto his best friend. So hopefully, very hopefully, he was able to at least see this. Yeah, well, then that's a good indication. You say here, when this was done, he submitted awards, this is Peterson, submitted awards up through CTF-116 chain of command, bronze stars for just about everyone of every member of seven bravo a silver star for boighton and for gallager a navy cross

an award that he had to justify to an awards officer with multiple statements but who responded by saying that the evidence could actually support a medal of honor i hope it does i mean i i think there it would be that would be really great if uh this could act as something of a record for maybe an adjustment of some of these awards we'll see yeah i mean i mean Right now I think we got Gallagher and Watson. But, yeah, and, you know, one of the, you know, great things, or one of the most interesting things about that episode is that Peterson submits himself for nothing. Yep.

I mean, how many officers or how many people do we work with, you know, over the, you know, the course of our careers that, you know, their preoccupation was, you know, what awards they're going to get out of this. Awards are one of those funny things that, you know, They don't always necessarily, you know, say what the person, you know, deserves. They often say, you know, how good their chain of command was in recognizing, you know, what they, you know, what they got. 100%. Awards are crazy.

Awards say just as, they say as much about the person that submits them for it as it does about the person himself. I mean, I had a guy, a saw guy on here, Dick Thompson. got into a helo to like set up the spy rig or something during a bright light operation ends up. The helo just takes off. He's getting ready to go on leave. He's getting ready to go on Liberty. So he doesn't even have his weapon. He doesn't have his gear with him.

And the helo takes off to go on this bright light to go and rescue down guys. They can't get in. He ends up throwing a rope out, rappelling down, grabs the crew chiefs gun, repels down, no gloves, burns his hand, gets in there. rescues people, recovers body from two different helicopters. It's completely, it's completely. Oh, by the way, he dropped down. The rope ended, and he drops into 150 foot canopy, just drops, just lets go and just falls through the freaking jungle canopy to get in there.

It's totally insane. He gets done with that. I mean, there's no possible way he should live, number one. And no way should he've actually rescued guys. He lives, he rescued guys. He gets like a bronze star. It's freaking totally. Totally insane.

And you know, here's the other thing about, and what's what, and you, you, you lay this out very clearly, a very important thing about this SEAL Team 2, 7th platoon. What really, they were doing great operations, but what really made it important was that they were doing these intel-driven raids. Then they were gathering intelligence. They were exploiting that intelligence, and they were doing follow-on raids. So this set like a standard. It creates our cycle of operations. And what's important about that is, you know, we didn't, I try and tell everybody that I meet that the SEAL teams,

we didn't invent ourselves, we didn't, everything good about us, we took from somebody else. If anything, the SEAL teams are just an aggregate of all the best pieces of all these other units that have come before us. And not just Navy units either. We took the best parts of the Rangers, we took the best parts of the Raiders, and we combined all that. And when we didn't know how to do something, we found the best person to teach us how to do it,

and they taught us how to do it, and we took it. And same thing when it comes to this cycle of capture kill. I mean, we sort of stumbled upon it. And I think with guys like Pete Peterson and Bob Gallagher, who are really leveraging the information that they can get from other units and then aggregating that to drive their own operations. I mean, the guy like Bob Wagner, who's essentially single-handedly creates the PRUs.

And the PRU is the best part about that is the cycle of operations that they get and that the SEAL team sort of notice, like, we can do that too. Yeah, the use of interpreters, the use of the locals, but the use of the locals not to build a guerrilla force, but just to gather intelligence and then go do hits. And it's just, I mean, it's like, you know, it's no different than what the police do in every major city across the country. You arrest somebody, you shake them down for information,

and then you go get the next person. It's a cycle of operations that just keep perpetuating itself. You've got incredible sections in here. And again, this whole book, we barely even touch the surface of what you've got in this book. But I want to finish off with this section here. It says this. Last section I'm going to read. In March of 1969, the Rand Corporation, a semi-private think tank that specialized in research and analysis for the Department of Defense,

published a report titled the Navy SEAL Commandos, a case study of military decision-making and organizational change. As far as I know, the first academic level study of the SEAL teams. The report's author was Francis J. Bing West, a former forced recon Marine and Vietnam War veteran whose investigation had begun a year earlier. And by the way, you can read a bunch of his books right now. He wrote a bunch of other books, wrote books about Iraq. His investigation had begun a year earlier and whose research had produced a raft of documents, dozens of interviews, and the firsthand observation of several seal missions into the rung sat. the Mekong Delta. So he went and observed what seals were doing.

And this guy is a force recon marine himself. From this research, West had produced an 18-page report whose introduction provided a brief description of seal training. Training he estimated at a cost of around $14,000 per man, plus an overview of the seal's commitment to Vietnam at its height, a commitment that never exceeded 150 seals, or roughly 1,150 fewer than the in-country height of the Green Beret's total compliment. It was a commitment that stood out in even starker relief when placed next to the author's obvious admiration for the SEAL's progression from lackluster coastal raiders to the war's most aggressive direct action commandos. Admittedly, commandos who had had no business becoming such and had thus drawn the interest

of the same preeminent think tank that it created the U.S. military's nuclear defense strategy. Intended as a study on organizational change, the report's true purpose had been to discover how the Navy could have possibly succeeded in creating a land-focused commando force, a force that even the Viet Cong had reportedly dubbed the men with green faces, a color not normally associated with the Navy's traditional medium. It was a puzzle of personal importance to the author. As the Marine Corps, the far more likely branch of service had never succeeded in creating anything similar.

Quote, how the concept was shepherded through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress, I am still trying to determine, the author wrote. For the mission of the Seals exceeded the charter of the U.S. Navy. as best as he could tell, the legality of this infringement had been tolerated because of its negligible size, but later had been allowed to widen because of a series of factors, none of which at this point should come as a surprise. The first of these, now here you start talking about how we ended up with the seal teams. The first of these, at least in the May Kong Delta, submitted the author, had been the neglect of the U.S. Army in general, and the 9th infantry division in particular to push their commando-type units to the same,

to, quote, develop the same aggressive attitude towards ambushing that the seals had, end quote. It might further be added that neither entity had adequately prepared those commando-type units to make such a transition in the Delta environment, a claim best evidenced by one attempt to conceal the river insertion of five Lerp soldiers by having them copy the seal method of jumping from the back of a moving boat, but that ultimately resulted in the drowning of all five men. The second factor that accounted for this infringement, the report continued,

had been the Navy's senior officers, whose tours, by comparison, were mostly dreary affairs, a condition made more noticeable when, quote, in the presence of generals, end quote. To compensate for this, the Navy's leaders had allowed the SEALs more latitude than they had their other units, a black market tradeoff that

had produced a steady supply of anecdotes for the Navy and thereby, quote, saved the pride of the admirals, end quote. That's an interesting concept. Like the, the admirals wanted something to talk about. Yeah, right. Ultimately, the author decided the most important factor in the seal's infringement was owing to the seals themselves and the culture that weighed upon them. Drawn from a notorious selective training program that produced few qualified candidates,

the seals naturally had had to find a mission that kept casualties low, a circumstance that might have pushed them, like the Lerps or forced recon Marines, into a reconnaissance role that they had anyone to pass, had they had anyone to pass intelligence onto. So you're saying there, look, You got a small number of people, probably one of the safest missions you can do is, hey, we're going to go into reconnaissance where we're not supposed to be seen. We're not supposed to come in contact with the enemy. And Bing West is saying here, like, they could have gone in that direction.

They could have gone into this reconnaissance role had they had anyone to pass the intelligence to. They hadn't. Nor had there been any great pressure from the Rive Marine Force to engage in any sort of green beret style advisory duty or civil. action so they didn't go in that direction either they didn't go where Yarborough went hey let's go raise a bunch of local guerrillas to fight organizational orphans with no larger force to support or control them and possessing quote no love or administer or admiration for the Vietnamese end quote the seals had set out into the swamps not to prove themselves their training had already done that said the author but

Quote, because not to go, not to go would have been inexcusable to the others. They had developed a collective value system which emphasized physical hardiness and courage, and they liked to fight. That's just a beautiful thing. So the seals, seals didn't have this, you know, you might talk to an Army Green Beret talking about, hey, I like my little people. You know, the sod guys call them little people. They're forming relationships with the locals. This is a quote. The SEALs had, quote, no love or admiration for the Vietnamese, end quote.

That's crazy, right? And then just to say that one more time, they weren't doing anything to prove themselves. They were doing it because, quote, because not to go would have been inexcusable to the others. They, they're talking about the others. Like, it's inexcused. If you don't go, you're not a seal. You're not a seal. It's inexcusable to the other seals.

They had developed a collective value system which emphasized physical hardness and courage, and they like to fight, end quote. So when the tactics of patrol and ambush had proved unproductive, nobody not a seal, meaning no blue water superior officer had ordered them to try something else. they had just done it. It was an exceptional adaptation. The Marine veteran author made a special note to point out that his fellow Marines had failed to mimic, and by following the previous logic, for reasons that blamed them for this,

a sequence of attribution and blamed that, if the preceding pages have proved anything, was not a sufficient explanation. Quote, what strikes me as most remarkable about the seal story, the author concluded is their performance and their ability to learn and adapt in a decentralized suboptimizing environment end quote though all true and commendable it was also an explanation that it considered only the record that came after 1966 missing was any analysis that

probed deeper than that top layer of history whose soil had fertilized this inland evolution The armies and Marine Corps preceding 30 years of whipsawing interest in raids and raiders and the Navy's perennial preoccupation with justifying its worth in offensive combat, a preoccupation that it combined with the Navy's traditional latitude and the UDD's traditional adaptability to create what several unidentified seals soon described to a documentary filmmaker as the war's unsung soldier. and quote what we consider without question

the best troops that the country has end quote both descriptions notable because they didn't use the word sailors and just short of the readers digest appraisal that had dubbed them the war's quote super commandos

by the end these would be assessments that were next to impossible to dispute You're kind to end on Bing West report. That was one of the first things I found. I found that at the UDTCL Museum's archives. When I started this book, I was one of the first places I went to do research.

And the archives at the UDTCL Museum are a little disorganized, in some cases that provides opportunities that you didn't expect. And one of those was Bing West Report. And I had found it. I read it when I got it, but I hadn't thought about it. It had, you know, it had provided enough kind of food for thought that it just kind of stuck in the back of my head, stuck in the back of my head for at least eight years. And so when I was, you know, nearing the end of the book and I was trying to find a way to, you know, kind of summarize everything that had happened, you know, it suddenly dawned on me. You know, I'll go back to that report.

And I knew that it had been written by Francis J. West. I didn't know it was Bing West. I was like, oh my gosh, it's Bing West. And I've read, you know, books by Bing West. And not only that, but in a way that, you know, it made this thing even more like just strange that it happened. But on one of the last ops that we did in Alambar province, we had gotten, my platoon had been ambushed on a rooftop sniper overwatch. And one of our, one of our seals, Mark Robbins, had been shot. through the head. He took a bullet, a 762 round from a PKK, through his right eye, and exited the

back of his head. And we were cut off from support. We couldn't get any. I was trying to get aircraft down to support us. They wouldn't come. They wouldn't come because there were so much machine gunfire. And we were trying to get the other seal element to fight to our position. And they were, they were on foot and trying to get there as quickly as possible. So at one point, I asked for a, you know, a Marine QRF. And the Marine QRF was separated from us at the FOB by this road that we called IED Alley. We'd never known a vehicle to drive on this road, had not gotten IEDD'd. And one officer who was there a major, he jumps in a Humvee, grabs another Humvee,

and they start trucking down the road to get to our position. They get to us. They provide cover for the helicopter to get in. and we Mark actually walks himself to the helicopter remarkably he's still around

he's a Lake County cop now but what makes this story even more remarkable is that the Marine Major who came to our rescue was Owen West Bing West Sun

As soon as you started to tell him I knew exactly where the story was going I was like this has to be Old West this has to be a big son I mean it's just incredible like the and

And Bing was, you know, the fact that Bing wrote this report, Bing had this interaction with the SEAL teams in 1968, and then writes this report in 1969. Super humble report, too. I'm incredibly humble. It's so super generous. And I mean, you have so many opportunities to, you know, draw attention to other things, and he doesn't.

I mean, he's truly impressed by this organization. What, you know, we, you know, as a, as an institution, have not done, which I think we should do at every opportunity, is recognize the influence that all of these other units had on our creation. Soldiers, Marines, Rangers, recon, everybody. They've all contributed to who we are. At some sense, our history, I think it's, I mean, especially if you frame it in this way, it's not our history.

It is our history, but it's a lens that you can use to look at the entire history of American Special Operations. from World War II to Vietnam. We wouldn't be here without them, and in some ways, they would not have changed into the units, or they wouldn't have permanently created these units had we not set an example for them to also follow.

Yeah, I mean, it's, um, and, you know, the thing with Bing West and just that humble report that you can, you can, I mean, the Marine Corps is just so professional with so many ways. It reminds me, Dave Burr. who was a top gun pilot F-18 pilot, Marine Corps fighter pilot, ended up being the senior instructor at Top Gun,

F-35 pilot, F-22, but this is a total stud. And he worked with us, he was a fact with us on the ground in the Battle Armadi. What's really interesting is, you know, he came from Top Gun. He was the senior instructor at Top Gun. I mean, you're not going to get any more professional of a human being as a Marine.

That is the senior instructor, instructor at Top Gun. And I was talking to him about when he came to one of our briefs for the first time, this is we're in the Battle of Maui, we're doing a brief, some kind of an operation. And he was just telling me right away he was just so impressed with just how the brief was. Just how the brief was. You know, this is young Lieutenant Lafab and Chief Tony Afratti getting up there and talking about what we're going to do, me giving the commander's intent.

And like, I remember him telling me that. This was 10 years later, he probably told me that. And just that humility to think, oh, these guys are doing something that is squared away. And for Bing to be able to recognize that and write that while the war is still going on. That's pretty impressive. And, you know, you say that he didn't really probe deeper than the layer of history that's prior to 1966. But I'll tell you what, that left plenty of room for you to do just that with this book. and this book

which provides so much history, so much information. Thank you. And, you know, one thing that is awesome about the Marine Corps, and I've talked about this on this podcast before, and I actually talk a lot about it with clients, because the Marine Corps has an incredibly powerful culture.

I think it might be the strongest culture in the world. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I, yeah, I, I've said it time and time again, like pound for pound, there's no institution like the U.S. Marine Corps. Their ability to, they require much more from everybody, from their troops than every other branch of service.

The trade-off, though, with that by requiring as much, is a level of responsibility that nobody else gets in the military. And the result is its initiative and courage. And that initiative and courage is part of, it's part of their culture. And if you, you know, I thought about this for years as I was doing this podcast and interviewing people. And what the Marine Corps has is this culture that is rooted in the stories of their history. And I think that what you've done with this book will strengthen the history of the Frogman and the SEAL teams. center, anchor our culture to a past that is filled with these qualities that we want,

these qualities of bravery and heroism and adaptation and evolution and pride from our successes and humility from our failures. And I think this book connects us with the individuals who paved the way for us that we are lucky enough to be associated with and lucky enough really to call our brothers. and make this incredible group of individuals that we call the teams. And it's an outstanding book, and I think you've done a real service to the community

by writing this book. And anybody, if you're in the SEAL teams, absolutely just order this book immediately. There's an audiobook version, which is outstanding as well. Get this book, anybody that has any interest in any military history in the history of all special office,

Operations, just get this book. There's so much information in it. It's immaculately researched. And I just, I couldn't be, I couldn't be more impressed with it, man. And I'm, look, I feel, I feel somewhat bad because I write books basically from my own head. And it feels like I have a much easier task than you do. I don't have to read anything. I just write what I already know or what I live through.

and for you to dive so deep into this, it's just outstanding. And I think it's a huge, a huge, a huge service to the teams, man. Thank you. So thanks, Ben. Echo Charles, you got anything? Well, I think we covered it. Good to see you.

Thank you. It's nice to see you, guys. Yeah, that's right. Hey, Ben, where can we find you? I know you got a Twitter, right? Is that pretty much your social media extent? I have a Twitter and an Instagram. I probably should create Facebook

because I think there's a few older people that would like this. I know your Twitter is Ben H. Milligan. Right. What's your gram? I'm no to this. So please bear with me as I'm getting better. B. Milligan 3.

B. Milligan 3. Yeah. B. Milligan and I've got three. I've got three little boys. So that's a... Okay. Yeah. And do you have a website or anything?

I look. I don't have a website. I mean, I'm just like the, I'm in the most incapable person when it comes to social media and promotion. What I always say is the same personality traits that make it possible to write this book are the same personality traits that make it hard to promote it. So I'm doing the best I can. I appreciate you bringing me on here.

Yeah, I couldn't have done this without lots of people helping out. including everybody that, you know, came together to, you know, get this to Admiral McRaven, you know, to get that, that blur from him. And then, you know, I just couldn't have written it without just, you know, the support of all the people around me, including the three little guys that I wrote this for. Well, hey, man, once again, thanks for your service in the Navy. Great. Thanks for your service to the teams.

Thanks for doing what you did. And really, truly, honestly, man, I can't thank you enough for writing this book. And it's just an outstanding document. I hope everybody gets it. So much to learn and so much respect to be paid to the forefathers that brought us to where we are today. Thanks for shining a light on them for us. Thank you. And with that, Ben Milligan has left the building.

Echo Charles. Yes, sir. need to uphold the legacy of the teams by getting better. What do you got for us? First off, side note, me and Ben have history. One of the first people that I met in San Diego when I moved here. Yep. Because of a connection between cake nuts.

Yep. Through my Hawaii people, you know, that came to eventually become seals. He was one of the first people. He didn't remember you, though. Well, here's the thing. We both would, no, no, no, no, no, zero is inaccurate. Zero is inaccurate. He was like looking at me.

I was like, maybe a little something. Then later on the break, yeah, we reconnected. Once you described exactly the situation because he didn't remember you. Either way, we're all trying to get better. Which is weird. You know, when someone's got such an eye for detail and he doesn't remember you at all, that's got to hurt a little bit. Yeah, especially all the research he's done and all the stuff that his brain is like capable.

You don't even make muster in his grade. Didn't even make mustard day, bro. Either way, we're connected now. We're pretty much boys again, so it's all good. And, you know, we are trying to get better, as you mentioned. So, boom, we're over here. What are we going to do? We're working out.

We're reading, not as much as Ben, but we, well, most of us, not as much of Ben. But we're trying to stay cognitively and physically in the game and improving ourselves slowly, quickly, whatever. Is I'm saying? Through this journey, we need supplementation. Good news. supplements called Jocko Fuel. First one to talk about is the energy drink.

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Has electrolytes too, by the way. which is that ever a thing? Electrolites and energy? Sometimes you need them. Yeah. Well, no, no, no. To have them is a thing, yes.

But I don't know if other energy drinks have electrical. The thing is doesn't even matter. They don't fit because there's too much poison than the other ones. Yeah, yeah. Here's the interesting thing. You look at the way the SEAL teams

came to fruition, right? There was a gap. There's gaps. And some people enter the gap, but then they leave it, right? They do that. But the SEAL teams are just there. The UDTs are just there.

We're staying with it. That's sort of like this whole situation. we're finding ourselves in because there is a little gap. Oh, no, everyone wants to make poison because it sells, put a bunch of sugar in it, put a bunch of caffeine in it and just give people poison and don't care. That's the gap. The gap is like, hey, people might actually want something that's healthy. And so I've seen now that we win in the gap, there's other people that are trying to get in there,

but they don't believe in it. So as soon as they realize how expensive it is, how hard it is produced, as soon as they realize that they just leave the gap. So we're just there. Solo operation. It's cruising in the gap. Stand in tall like the damn seal teams. This is the freaking seal teams of drinks right here.

JoccoDiscan go. That's what's happening. Oh, yeah, delivering. And that's the thing. And you know what? Accomplishing the mission at all costs. I'm not telling anyone to be offended. I'm not saying that.

In fact, I would never say that. I'm not telling people to be angry. I'll never say that. I can't impose outrage on somebody. That being said, Those other entities that created these old school, old era energy drinks, they're kind of playing on your weekend. They're taking us for fools. They're taking advantage of humans.

They're like, hey, hey, this is taste real good. You know the guy in the alley with the red eyes or whatever. Giving away crack. Yeah, yeah, hey, hey, take the, it tastes good. It's good. It's going to ruin your life. Nice little boost. Meanwhile, you're like, cool, you buy it, you drink it, you enjoy the whatever you enjoy.

And then later on, when that guy's long gone. you're over here paying the price. Yeah. And it's not even like a monetary price. Addicted, less healthy, all this stuff. And here comes Jocko. Giving you something that's good. Good.

Finally. Finally. There we go. All right. We're on it. Discipline go in the can. Boom. Yeah.

So discipline and also discipline the supplement itself. There's powder. Yeah. There's capsules as well. Just, you know, you're on the go. Whatever. Different deployment methods, you know. Also, joint warfare.

Crill oil. Crill oil. These are free joints. It's vitamin D3 and cold water this for immunity. Mulk, additional protein in the form of a dessert. God, it's so good. This will never change. It was so good.

The only thing that will... Once it hits the lips. Evolve with this is new flavors. I hear about new flavors. Maybe some cookies. I said it. I said it. I'm not saying.

I'm just saying I said it. Also, Jocko white tea. If you know about that, that's the OGT that Jocko drinks and was and still is into. Yeah, it's good. Probably if you like deadlifting 8,000 pounds, you like that tea. Yeah, yeah, they go hand in hand, 100%. And you can get all these things at the energy drinks, wah-wa. Everything else, including but not limited to the energy drinks, jocklefuel.com.

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Sure. So we're going to, we're going to have to sneak in under the radar here. Yep. That's what we're doing. I understand fully. Also, vitamin shop. You can get the stuff at vitamin shop.

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It is printed in America, but not just. printed in America. Same saying. We go all the way back. OG to the roots. The seeds. The seeds of the plant that made the seeds.

All made and planted, grown, sewn, sewn in America. Everything. American made denim. There's some leather in there. There's a lot of awesome materials. But you got boots, you got jeans, you got Jiu-Jitsu stuff. Yeah. You got a lot of stuff on there.

J-J-J-J-T stuff. There's a couple places where they mentioned that kind of training was going on. back in the day. Back there like, can you just imagine these guys like, hey, we're going to train you in demolitions, blowing things up, underwater swimming,

small boat handling, jujitsu. They're doing it all. So get some of that. Origin USA.com. He busted out some boots at camp. Hey, look,

I'm not going to go into it. But those were some good boots. Yeah. Impressive. I don't even really wear that many, or boots on that many occasions, but that one was like, that could coerce me into wearing boots.

Look at you. As far as the origin goes. Origin USA.com, by the way. Also, Jocko is the store. It's called JoccoStore and this is where you can get your discipline. Equals. Freedom stuff. Hats, hoodies, shirts.

Also good. Also other stuff. There's good stuff on there. Little developments going on over there. Anyway, jocclos store.com. Look at you like you're on the top secret mission. If you like something. You can't get it out of the national archives what Echo is creating over here.

Look at you. It's top secret until you go there. Then it's like, boom, secret. It's a real secret, but you can go on the website. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Available to everybody.

But, reveal your new shirt. Oh, yeah? Your shirt locker shirt. Oh, you like them. Because we're making the shirt locker. The shirtlocker, if you want a cool t-shirt, and this is what I've leaned toward the whole time is shirts that are kind of tied

to the podcast. And this is one of them right here, the Sea Wolves, 1966 to 1972. By the way, commissioned in combat, decommissioned in combat. That's the Sea Wolves. You heard about them today. They will go and get the seals out of the worst possible situation. Gunfire don't care. It's true.

So how do you get that shirt? Sherlocker. What's up? One of the homages to the Sea Wolves. Yeah, very much. Oh, you can get this at the shirt locker on Jocko store. So yeah, you sign up for the shirt locker. You get a cool shirt.

Cool. It's hard for me to explain how cool it is. Baring levels of creativity. Either where it's a cool shirt. You get one every month. Free shipping on that one as well. This is just one of them. I got a new feature that we're working on.

It should be done. It should be done within the next. I don't know. But if you remember the shirt locker, hey, look, you missed a shirt. Last month, five months ago, whatever. You'll have the option to get it if you remember. Oh. We're working on that one.

On the last, yes. This is a shirt. I'm glad you like it. Jocco. You know, people seem to like the designs overall. Well, you know, this is just one of them. So, yeah. Jocco store.

I bet people like that one a lot. Because I like that one a lot. Well, because I'm a supporter of the Sea Wolves. Scramble the Sea Wolves. Hey, subscribe also to this podcast. We also have some other podcasts unraveling

that I do with my brother, D.C. D.R. D.C. D.C. We got the grounded podcast. We got the Warrior Kid podcast. We also have Jocko Underground.com,

which we release a little, what's it called? A little alternative podcast. A little complimentary podcast where we talk about some other adjacent items and we do some Q&A. And the reason we have that is in case these platforms, which we do not control, which we don't like, we want to be in control so that we can deliver. And if people start inserting advertisements into this podcast, we know you don't want

that. We don't want it. We'd rather have you listen to a 74-minute advertisement at the end where Echo Charles is talking. Hey, $8.18 a month if you want to help us out with the Jocko Wonderground, go to jocco underground.com. If you can't afford it, no factor, we're in this together. Email assistance at jocco underground.com. We also have a YouTube channel.

Subscribe to that. We make awesome videos where I am the assistant director and really the driving sort of creative force beside the awesomeness of most of the videos and then Echo does some editing for it. Red, you're doing great work. Thank you. Origin USA. also origin USA cool channel YouTube channel

Oh yeah fully yeah that's a good one If you're interested in in an American Company their ups and downs Challenges successes Yeah that's a really good on Also psychological warfare What that is is an album with Jocko tracks on it Tracks on the album with Jocko talking

Getting us through our moments of weakness Which we may or may not have You know either you can get that Anywhere where you can get MP3s Psychological warfare Good on If you want something To hang on your wall

Which you probably do You don't just want to have walls That are just plain and black You do Well I guess I do But if I didn't Then I would go to flipside canvas.com And I would get some cool stuff

From my brother Dakota Meyer Who makes awesome stuff To hang on your wall Got a bunch of books Look this book today By Water Beneath the Wall By Ben Milligan This is an outstanding book

It is an outstanding book I can't know what else to tell you get this book it's so good so much information so much history if you have any interest if you listen this podcast let me put it this way if you listen this podcast you will freaking love this book I love this book it is awesome get it the it's just an outstanding also have final spin coming out this is a novel apparently allegedly possibly a novel written by me it's a story it's available now for pre-order You want to get that first a dish. I have people coming up to me now.

They're apologetic because they're bringing me second a dish of discipline equals freedom. They're second a dish of leadership strategy and tactics. You don't want to be that person. You don't have that sort of sunken look on your face. You want to say, I'm in the game. Hey, we have a little connection. You got that first a dish. We have a little connection.

I'm not saying don't talk to me if you have a second edition, a third edition. It's okay. Look, I have an open mind. But if you want to have that immediate connection, let's get that going. Leadership strategy and tactics field manual. The code, the evaluation of protocols. Discipline equals freedom field manual. Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Mikey and the Dragons, about face by Hackworth. Almost brought that up today. I almost brought that up today. But, you know, once you open that door, who knows when you're stopping. Because he's got, now that I think about it, he, I didn't even mention this. He's got it in here. What? Hackworth.

Hackworth was running the Tiger Force. I can't believe I didn't bring that up. I'm sorry, Ben. I missed all. There's so much, think about how much information is in there that I didn't bring up Hackworth. That's crazy.

That's crazy. So he's got Hackworth, Tiger Force. What happened to them? Why did they come about? How did they do? Why did they get turned off? There was a whole story behind it. Once again,

that's by water beneath the walls by Ben Milligan, about face. I wrote the forward to the newest version of that. We got extreme ownership in the dichotomy of leadership. I have a leadership consulting company called Eschelon Front. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Eschalonfront.com for details on that. That's where you can find out about the muster, the field training exercises, EF Battlefield.

We have an event coming up in Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. It's called the muster. Come and get it. We also have the FTX field training exercise. That's happening. Next one is in St. Louis, September 20th and 24th. is probably close to sold out. I think we had a group of people that couldn't make it,

so there might be some openings. Check it out. Go to Eshlamfront.com. We also have online training, an online leadership training academy. You need to go to the gym to stay in shape. You need to go to extreme ownership.com to keep your leadership in shape.

Come and check it out. If you want to help service members active and retired, their families, gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. She does all kinds of. of incredible things for veterans. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved,

go to America's mighty warriors.org. And if you want any more of my monotonous, monotony, monotone, or you need more of Echo's mystified murmurs. You can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the gram, and on Facebook Echo is at Equitrals, and I am at Jocko. We'll link and Ben Milligan is on Twitter at Ben H. Milligan and his Instagram is, what is it, Ben Mill three? I don't know, listen.

Rewind it. It's B. Milligan. Three. B. Milligan three. There you go. M-I-L-L-I-G-A-N.

Again, thanks once again to Ben for your service in the Navy, your service in the teams, and now your incredible service to the teams by writing this incredible. book that will solidify our roots, our culture, and our history. Can't thank you enough. And to all the military personnel out there on the front lines right now, thank you for defending our freedom and our way of life. And to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all first responders,

thanks for keeping us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there, how about we all take a little lesson from these frogmen? How about we develop and embrace a collective value system that emphasizes physical hardiness and courage, an attitude that can press on through pain and suffering, a humble intellect that can adapt and overcome, a discipline that's unbreakable, and an unwavering commitment to accomplish the mission. That is the way of the frogmen. That is an ideal example.

To follow and the one that I wake up and face every day to hold the line. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.