Jocko Podcast - 319: "Shut Up and Return Fire" with Admiral Thomas "The Hulk" Richards.

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

0:00:00 - Opening0:11:21 - Admiral Thomas "The Hulk" Richards3:31:23 - Final Thoughts3:45:18 - How to stay on THE PATH.4:14:04 - Closing gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocco podcast number 319 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. As the seals inserted into a rice paddy near where they had taken fire, Carl Nelson's U.H.1BC Wolf gunship commenced a right turn at 80 feet above the ground to cover them. His co-pilot Earl Schott worked the LZ's edge with his mini guns, while his gunners, petty officers Michael Dobson and Tom Clavon. fired their M-60s.

The SEALs patrolled northeast and then east on a dike separating the two rice patties and then move north on one perpendicular to the first. As they advanced, the enemy began firing from well-concealed and dug-in positions on a dike covered with heavy vegetation. The SEALs and Nelson's gunship immediately returned fire. As the patrol continued closer toward the tree line, the SEALs took accurate, withering fire from both sides of the dyke. Point man James Rowland fell,

shot through the groin. He was hit again as he crawled for cover. Seconds later, the platoon commander Grant Telfer was shot in both legs. Both seals managed to return fire despite their wounds, but the severity of their injuries and the immediate necessity to extract them soon

took them out of action. Lieutenant J.G. Tom Richards immediately radioed Carl Nelson and his Seawolf for fire support as he and his fellow seal Gary Lawrence advanced under fire to assist the two seriously wounded seals. As he dragged Roland to cover, one round passed through Richards' right hand, hitting the stoner's pistol grip.

Nevertheless, while Lawrence, Wendell Hedge and Donald Fuchrell returned fire, Richards continued to expose himself to enemy fire to drag the wounded to cover. When the automatic weapons man Foutrell was shot in the chest, He cried out, I'm hit, I'm hit. Richards, sensing the rising panic in Fuchrelle's voice, suspected the man was going into shock. To distract him, Richards ordered Futrell to shut up and return fire. Futtrell briefly did so with his M60 and did not go into shock.

As Futrell became semi-conscious, Richards pulled him back as well. When Lawrence and Hedge ran out of ammunition minutes later, Richards passed them the linked 556 ammo for his now inoperable stoner. The squad regrouped behind a dike and Richards urged the seals to keep pouring fire into the enemy as he radioed for emergency extraction. When Lawrence and Hedge ran out of ammunition minutes later, as the battle raged, extraction became imperative. Including himself, Richards had four wounded men, three of them critical. for pilot Carl Nelson and the Sea Wolves helicopter squadron flying in support of the seals. There was no hesitation.

And here's a quote from him. My crew knew that leaving anyone behind was not an option. When Nelson saw Richards dragging the wounded seals to cover, he alerted the transport helicopter flown by Lieutenant J.G. Edward Dyer to get ready for extraction and descended to cover it from an altitude of about 50,000. to 70 feet. From the ground, Seals, Lawrence and Hedge providing covering fire with their stoners, Nelson's gunship hit the enemy with devastating rocket and mini gun fire while Dyer urgently searched for the seal's exact location. On his second pass, Dyer spotted them huddled next to a dyke and came in hot, bleeding

off airspeed during his approach. As the slick hovered skids wet in a rice paddy, Richards dragged each of the three wounded seals in turn over the dyke then through the rice paddy to the helicopter lifting each aboard with his one good hand Richards later wrote with one hand it was probably the heaviest lift I ever made the best one too enemy fire intensified during the loading Lawrence still providing cover fire was about to climb aboard when Dyer began to pull pitch for lift off as enemy rounds hit the fuselage Lawrence grabbed the slick skid and held on for dear life until Lieutenant J.G Richards reached down with his uninjured hand and hauled Lawrence aboard.

For Richard's action and disregard for his own personal safety, the officer in charge of Seal Team 1 Detachment Gulf, Telford's immediate superior, recommended him for the Silver Star. The award recommendation's summary of action stated, quote, Without the conspicuous gallantry and cool perseverance of Lieutenant J.G. Richards, it is doubtful that the patrol could have survived. The next senior officer in the chain of command, located at Navy Special Warfare Group, Vietnam, and Saigon, endorsed the recommendation. Inexplicably, the chief of staff for the commander U.S. Naval Forces Vietnam downgraded the award to a bronze star. That staff went so far as to change the wording cited in the original summary of action.

The citation for the downgraded Bronze Star now read, Lieutenant Junior Grade Richards, Courage Under Fire, Cool Professionalism, and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. Such a substantive change in wording undermined the rationale for the higher award. It remains unclear why the chief of staff located more than 150, 50 miles from the battlefield made such an unusual decision. No explanation was ever given. The honor and recognition that were earned that day, but not granted, still rankles many of the seals and sea wolves,

who, along with Richards, risked everything to save first squad from certain destruction. Some have even argued that his original award recommendation should have been upgraded to a Navy cross as Carl Nelson and Edward Dyer were awarded Distinguished Flying Corps. Crosses, pointing out that Richard's extraordinary heroism under fire at great personal risk with total disregard for his own life mirrors that of those recommended for higher awards. Seawolf pilot Carl Nelson, who is on this podcast, number 288, expresses the sentiment's best. Having flown more than 600 combat missions with scores of those flights in direct support of two seal teams, Nelson vividly remembers the scene unfolding below his gunship as the

wounded platoon struggled to survive. Nelson recalls, quote, watching a wounded Tom Richards under intense enemy fire drag each of his wounded seals to safety across a series of rice paddy dikes and load them onto the sea lord, Helo. It was the most heroic act that I have ever witnessed. Tom Richards' heroism rates a Navy cross at minimum. He directly saved the lives of his platoon. Now that right there is from an article from Naval History Magazine. It was written in April of 2020 by a guy named Captain Michael G. Slattery. In another section of the article, they give us some more details, some more background

on Lieutenant J.G. Tom Richards. And it says, christened the Hulk by his fellow seals, Tom Richards, was well-liked and respected and he enjoyed a reputation as a highly capable operator he was a native of bright waters New York a graduate of Bayshore High School where he wrestled and played football following graduation he attended Villanova University on a Navy ROTC scholarship there he lifted weights and routinely bench pressed 400 pounds he was commissioned an ensign in the Naval Reserve in 1969 while still a midshipman at Villanova Richard was accepted to basic underwater demolition seal training when he began the rigorous program with

class 54 the six foot tall richards weighs 235 pounds he graduated 10 months later with class 55 at a lean and hard 215 pounds he was assigned to seal team one in coronado california so that's what the article focuses on talking about that one day in vietnam but the The Hulk continued to serve in the SEAL teams. And if you follow his career forward from that event in 1971, and you go forward about 20 years to 1991, I was a new guy at SEAL Team 1. I didn't even have my Trident yet.

I wasn't even an official seal. I graduated Buds, but I hadn't got my trite yet. It was a Saturday morning. And I was in the gym by myself, and I was smashing some weights. And I was blasting Metallica on the stereo system. And this was a time at Seal Team 1 where there was a five-disc CD player. And the entire thing was filled with all the Metallica albums at that time. There were five.

And it was locked shut. So the only thing you could listen, you had no choice. You were just going to listen to Metallica. So I'm in there. I've got the music cranked up to an unhealthy level. And in walks, Captain Richards, the Hulk. Now he's a full captain. He'd just taken over as the commanding officer, Buds.

actually took over before I graduated, so we all knew who he was. And I immediately, I'm a junior enlisted guy, immediately run over, and I turn down the stereo because I don't want to bother the senior officer. And as I turned down the stereo,

Captain Richards, just me and him in there on a Saturday morning. Captain Richards goes, hey! And I look over, and he says, turn that shit back up. And so I did.

And, And worked out and he was working out and we were throwing weight around and he was thrown around more weight than me by the way I doubt that And then you fast forward a little bit further I think it was 1996 or 1997 I think it was 1997 and now I meet the Hulk again now only now he's the Admiral he's in charge of all the seals And he interviewed me and wrote me a recommendation to become a seal officer and I got accepted into that program and carried on with the rest of my career, but never forgot the impression that Admiral Richards left on me and on the SEAL community.

And it's an honor to have him here tonight to share some of his experiences, some of his stories, some of his lessons learned from a 30-year career in the SEAL teams. Admiral, thanks for coming by. Well, Jocko, thanks for having me here. When I sit here and listen to those excerpts from Michael Slattery's article that takes me back to those rice patties. And it is a day that I would have to describe as one of the worst days in my entire naval career. It had to be the worst day. But I'll also tell you it was the best fucking day.

because I got those guys. I got those guys out of the Kilozone, over to the protection of the dike, and then into the helo. Yeah, I was a big strong guy. There's something called adrenaline rush, adrenaline high, and all that other stuff, and maybe you could help some, you know,

limp dick, you know, pencil neck geek, you know, drag some of those guys across the rice paddy, but I seriously effing doubt it. Thankfully, it was me that was only wounded in one hand, and I was able to drag those guys out of there. Listening to Carl Nell, make those gun runs. I don't know if there's any car nuts in the room or listening here, but one of my roommates in Villanova had a 1967 Corvette,

427, 425 damn horsepower. And when Skip stood on that thing, I believe he had a couple of cutouts legal or not, but when Skip stood on that sucker, it roared. Well, that is the closest sound that I can describe to those who haven't been there when a minigun rips off and lights off. And that was one of the most beautiful sounds that I've ever heard. So as I'm going back and forth,

Grant Telfer and his his update to the award recommendation. You know, use those terms that you used in the article without regard to my own personal safety or my life. I have to tell you that I never gave a thought to anything but my teammates who were, Grant was shot in both legs, Rock, Jim Rowland

shot in the chest and the groin and of course Jim's major concern what those injuries was with the equipment ever to work again

and then, you know, you mentioned how Don Futrell was getting ready to go into shock you know I'd never been trained about what somebody going into shock

sounds like or doesn't I had no clue but as soon as I heard Don, and, you know, you could hear his voice going up a few octaves. He referred to it in a note to me about his girly voice. You know, hey, Don, you were just shot in the damn chest. And you got a right to be, you know, going into panic or whatever it is. I didn't, we didn't have that conversation. This is flashing through my mind.

But I could hear it, and I just said, you know, it just came to me. Get his mind off his situation and get it back on to our situation. I didn't realize how badly he was injured and that he was going to be useless as tits on a boar hog after that. But, you know, I just wanted to get him back into action and out of any shock because, you know, we're in the middle of nowhere. And I have no idea how if we're even going to get out of there. And if we get out of there, how long it's going to take and so on and so forth. So, you know, just the great training from the Legends in SEAL Team 1 before I got there. We used to call it SEAL Basic Indctrination training,

and then we'd go through a pre-deployment training program. But those who set the history of SEAL Team 1 before I got there, those guys made all the difference in the training and my reaction and everybody else's reaction in the rice paddy. So as I was saying, it was the best of days and it was the worst of days. You know, thank God everybody got out of there. I don't know how often. Often it happens, but I'm willing to bet not very often.

Both Roland and Futrell, when they were shot in the chest, the bullets passed front to back, didn't touch a bone. You just went through soft tissue, and the heat of the round actually, I cauterized the injury. Those guys, you know, who are goddamn lucky is all I can say. Of course, I didn't know that at the time. and, you know, it was just a real, a real, you know, crappy situation. But as those guys got wounded, you know, my, you know, my focus became, we got to get out of Dodge, you know, we got to just get the hell out of here. And it was a hot DZ.

We had 70 or 80, 90 VC. We hadn't realized that, of course. But we had all these guys in the, in the, you know, in the jungle on the other side of the rice dyke. And constant fire, the, you know, he those, you know, Carl providing that fire at 70, 80, 100 feet above above ground level, he's, he's right there in the, in the action. That's not a hard shot to make if you know how to shoot at Elo's. Thank God they didn't.

So Carl and his crew are in danger. and then the slick, the helo was called the slick, is because it doesn't have the mini guns and the rockets and so on. Slick comes in naked to pull us out of a hot LZ. As you said, he hovered there, and I had to make those three trips under fire. And without Wendell Hedge and Gary Lawrence providing that cover fire, I couldn't have gone back and forth to that rice dyke to get those guys.

And so as I'll never forget it, Gary Lawrence is banging away and he runs out of bullets. And he calmly turns to me and he says, I'm out of bullets. Jesus, H. Christ. So seeing as my weapon didn't work and I usually went out with 1,200 rounds of ammo on my body, I ripped off a bandolier and for a little bit of background just like you're seeing those old movies with Pancho Villa and all those bad guys

in the westerns. They got these bandoliers of ammo wrapped around their body. Well, that's exactly what I had. But what I did is I put on a t-shirt or a blue and gold, wrapped the bandoliers around my body, and then on top of those,

I put on a set of camees, not only to cut down on the, on the noise, but it also cut down on the reflection of the brass of the rounds, and it protected them from anything that we might run into. So when those guys ran out of bullets, I did a button on my cammy shirt top and just pop the link and threw 120 rounds off to Lawrence and 120. And it's kind of like, if you watch it, it's kind of like a snake flying through the air. And they grabbed it, and they pop it down and they slam it in. and the receiver of their weapons and they start returning fire.

Quite a brave situation for those guys. And they were completely exposed. Well, we're all completely exposed. And as I'm loading the guys into the helo, I'd like to take full credit for that. But the crew members, as I got these guys up out of the muck, I mean, because they hadn't set down into the rice paddy, the deck of the cabin of the,

of the Huey was too high for me to lift these guys and I'd get them up high enough and then the crew members had done you know drag him into the uh drag him into the helo so it was a it was a bad day at Black Rock a real shitty day at Black Rock to be honest with you so it was the worst day in my career and the best um I got a bunch of questions up we'll we'll get to Vietnam back to Vietnam because I'd like to hear about how that you know what your workup was like how you ended up there we'll get there but just to give us a little background on you, let's just talk about what your childhood was like. How did you become the Hulk?

Well, that was pretty tough becoming the Hulk. I'll tell you, I'll tell you why. My dad was a policeman. And today, policemen who are our first responders going out and dealing with God knows what in society, they're not paid well enough for what they do. Go back 60 or 70 years, they weren't paid, you know, period. So there weren't a lot of second helpings at the dinner table. So while I grew up about six foot, five, eleven and a half is probably the God's

honest truth. If it wasn't nailed down on anybody else in the house, wasn't eating it, I was. You know, there's an old story about the only thing that ever broke was a handle on the refrigerator door. Well, I broke the handle on the refrigerator door more than once. but somewhere in I never wrestled I went to a Catholic grammar school and I am a retired Catholic Catholic but I went through a Catholic grammar school and got to the high school was the first time I saw anything like wrestling and it was interesting so I went out for the wrestling team and

We had a great freshman wrestling coach. And I want to say his name was Gordon Howesrath, but a great coach. And he was kind of ambivalent on the benefits of weight training. But he also was helpful in getting me a lifeguard job in a village of Brightwater's at one of the other beaches. and that was on a bay and a canal. So you didn't need any open water skills at that point in time. So what I did that summer is I had probably like 110 or 150 pound weight set, and I brought it over to the beach.

And we had a little garage kind of thing. And on my breaks, you know, I'd go over to do a few sets, this, that, or the other thing. Lunch break, I'd do a few more sets. and before I got on my bicycle and rode home, I'd do a few more sets. I came back to wrestling the next year with JV, and Coach Housrath calls me out to use me as the demonstration dummy on some particular move that he was going to do, right?

So he, you know, calls me out, and I laid out on a mat and he was telling the rest of the team what he's going to do, and I just locked. and here's this, you know, 35-year-old man, you know, 165, 170 pounds, you know, wrestling, you know, champion in his own right. And here's this, you know, smart-ass kid who's been lifting weights all summer long. And he couldn't move me. And he said to me, he says, what did you do? And, you know, change people's minds about weightlifting and conditioning for wrestling, at least at Bayshire High School.

Where did you get the idea? Were you looking at like magazines? I mean, how did you figure out even the idea of weightlifting? Where did you get the weight set from? Well, Ray Plate, if you're listening to this, it's your fault. We had a guy on the football team. Name is Ray Plate. And saw him in a 50-year reunion a few years ago, and he's doing well.

But Ray had arms that looked like. somebody's legs and Ray wasn't the biggest guy on the team by any stretch of the imagination but Ray was our nose tackle and nobody on the other teams pushed Ray around and I said that looks like it works let's give that a try and so I did and I learned I learned a lot on my own but I went down to I got the Navy ROTC scholarship you said to the Villanova and that's an academic scholarship. You've got to pass a physical, but it's not like, you know, going to buds.

I mean, you got a fog and mirror. You got to have 20-20 vision and that kind of thing. And so I, you know, got the scholarship and I went on down to Villanova. And, you know, I could have tried to walk onto the football team. They did not have a wrestling team. I could have tried to walk onto the football team. But, you know, I said, I don't know what this academic stuff is really going to be. I've got this scholarship.

So before I overload myself, let me just, you know, not go out for football. And so the football team at the time used the same weight room as, you know, the wannabes or anybody else at the school. So I, you know, I lifted, you know, with a lot of the guys on the football team. And there were a couple of monsters on the football team. and the number one rated 198 pound power lifter, not only collegiately but nationally, AAU, was on the Villanova football team. A name was John Zorinko, you know,

stronger than the law loud. But with a name like Zarenko, his nickname was Dizzy. But John could quote only bench press about three and a quarter, three-35, and he was always complaining. Now, listen, this is a 198-pounder. You know, five-foot-eight, a hundred-nine-pounder, played fullback, and he's benching 335 pounds.

You know, I mean, that's something to write home about. But John could squat 600-something, he could deadlift 700-something. If somebody tried to tackle him around the waist, they were going to break their shoulder. So I really got interested in lifting at the time. And we had another 198 pounder at the school. And Jim Rapucci was also ranked nationally,

and he was the number two 198 college lifter. Jim was a little bit stronger in the upper body. And Jim had 198 pounds of 410-pound bench press, competition bench press. So we were, you know, we were, always going neck and neck and I lifted at 242. Yes, I did get up to 250 if my wife is listening to this. But I lifted at 242, and I had a good strong 415 bench breast.

And my last collegiate meet I went into, I opened it 4.15 because Jim's record was 410, so I had to break it by 5 pounds. You got to screw it to boys, you know. So I hit the 415 just to get the school record. And back then, equipment was not as regulated, if you will, as it is today. You know, the bench had to be, it did not have to be X number of centimeters high, X number of centimeters wide. So this bench was just a little bit wider than we were used to benching with. And when I hit that 415, I came down and it sort of, my shoulders sort of tweak, but I push it up anyway.

and I just said, you know, I've got to do deadlifts here. I don't want to really screw up the shoulder because my plan had been to set the record, and I'd done it in the gym at 435, but I never hit it in competition. Hit it in the gym, but not a competition. So that whole weightlifting thing became, well, it's something that I'm still trying to do. So fast forward to showing up at, oh, no, wait a minute, we got to go back. We got to go back. Well, how did you hear about the Seagel teams?

Readers Digest, if you can believe it. Readers Digest magazine. Was that in high school or was that while you were at Villanova? That was when I got to Villanova. As I said, my father was a policeman. We didn't have a lot of money in the house. And I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, Well, on my older brother and older sister, if there was any money to go to college, they got it.

And I did not. So it was explained to me if I was going to college, I was going to college on a scholarship. So I actually had a part-time job that I was planning on doing the day of the ROTC exam. And my father says, you're taking this test. And it was 20 or 25 bucks. Doesn't sound like much today. but in 19, what was that, 65? That was a lot of money, 64, 65.

So anyway, I passed on 20 or 25 bucks and went into that ROTC test with a little bit of a bad attitude, but as soon as I got in the room, I said, wait a minute, you're not getting the $25 bucks. You know, that's history. You know, let's take the test. So, as you may know, you have to take the test,

then you have to pass the physical and the ROTC program tells you that they will provide you with the scholarship, you then have to apply to the university and get accepted. It's a completely different process. So I did. My father being a practicing or a convert to Catholicism was Adam, and he says there were about 50 schools on the list then that had ROTC scholarships. He says, you can go to these five or six.

Those were like Holy Cross, you know, Holy Cross, you know, Villanova, Notre Dame, those were the schools that I had to apply to. I applied, and, you know, the rest of that is history. So it was a great program. So I get to Villanova, and I want to let's back up a little bit more to, you know, staying in school. I was a good student in high school. I was, you know, I was the one that the rest of the honor class kids couldn't figure

out what I was doing in the room. So, and in New York, they had a, still do probably, a program called the Regents, Regents testing. So at the end of the year, you would take a statewide exam in, you know, math, chemistry, physics, whatever it might be. And I don't think I got under 94 in any of those. So that's part of what helped my transcript for review by Villanova looked pretty good. And I had scholarship offers to the State University of New York system.

And I was pretty much determined that I was going to go to a place called Cortland State. Cortland had an excellent, you know, PT program for teaching, and they also had a pretty good wrestling team at the time. So I... How good did you do in wrestling in high school? I did better than, better than it shows. And so I'll tell you my complaint on that one. I in my senior year I was wrestling this one kid and I want to say it was from from West Islip but one of our big rivals and so on.

Anyway, the guy stood on me from the in wrestling you have a, you know, you start the match. Both guys are on your feet and then the second and third rounds. You know, you start with one guy on what's called the box. position and the other guy, his arms around the wrestler is in the top position. One of the most common moves is a stand from the bottom, and the guy on the bottom will stand and rip the guy's hands off of his waist. The guy was on top and get away and get his one point for the neutral position. Well, I said, you know, okay, stand.

So what I did is as a guy was standing, I just went up with him, used his own momentum, lifted him off his feet, and swung his body, so it was kind of like perpendicular to mine. So now what I did is I, instead of throwing him to the mat, I just bent down to the mat. I bent my knees, and as I said, this guy is perpendicular to me being upright, so he's parallel to the mat. So now that he's sliding down my side, my knee would hit the mat, he'd slide down along the side of my body and hit the mat. nobody knew that this guy had had a couple of damn concussions during the football season. So when he bounced off the mat, he bounced and laid there.

That was not my plan. My plan was to teach him not to stand on Tom Richards. And, you know, so he's laying on the mat. You know, I said, terms other than, oh, shit, and, you know, what the hell's going on here, you know, went through my mind. And unfortunately, I got, quote, branded as a dirty wrestler as a result of that. And right after that, they rewrote the damn New York high school wrestling rule book that had said the man in control's knee had to touch the mat before the opponent,

which is exactly what I did, to the man on top must safely return the opponent to the mat. I suppose it's an old girl sport, not sure. Yes, that shows a certain amount of male chauvinism. You're right. But anyway, I get to the county meet, and I'm in the semifinals or something like that. And this guy stands up and starts to get away from me. I try to take him down, not in the matter that I just discussed,

but just like a double-leg take-down, and I get him, and I pick him up, and he squirms away from me. I don't have control of him. He squirms away from me. Next thing I hear is a whistle. I get penalized at one point because they claimed that when this guy got away from me, that I threw him down to the mat. and when he got away from me,

I had managed to scramble around behind him and get control. So I should have had two points for a takedown. Long story short, the guy put on his track shoes after that, and the refs never called him for Stalin. I chased him around the mat. Yadda yada.

Yeah, I'm whining. But I can say that they rewrote the New York State High School Wrestling Group book. It was a real disappointment. But quite frankly, had I, and so he ended up like second or third in the state that year, and I'm just saying to myself, you know, you should have been a track star and not a wrestler, but anyhow, but all things considered, you know, I went on, I went on to the ROTC scholarship, and had I gone to New York, had I won

New York State, I'd probably had any number of wrestling scholarship, so you wouldn't be talking to me today if that had happened. So, you know, we're good here. So then you pick up a Reader's Digest at some point, and you read an article about the SEAL teams? Or was it about UDT? So my father, as I said, didn't have the money for high school or college tuition or anything like that.

Was your dad a vet from World War II? Yes, he was. And what did he do? He was a gunnery instructor. And he actually never left the United States. But one of the places he was. stationed was Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And after I retired, I ended up working for a company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,

right on the naval base where he was assigned. But go back to the ROTC scholarship. That was my ticket to college, my ticket into the Navy. So as I'm looking around the Navy, I'm trying to figure out what it is that I want to do. I'd been a lifeguard for years and years, and I was in decent shape. I could swim. and so I I was

Navy you know still had you know PT boats you know they were using them over there in Vietnam and so on and I said yeah it's small boat stuff you know sounds like you know some fun because I'd cut grass in the summertime and saved money and I bought my own

you know 14 foot you know boat with a 30 horsepower Johnson and you know you know Evan Rood Outboard Motor and so you know small boats were something I said okay this is what I want to do And then, of course, the Navy doesn't have much of an emphasis on that. And so I look around, I find this UDT stuff. I said, okay, I'm swimming, you know, working in the ocean

and working with demolitions. You know, that sounds pretty interesting. So I said, I'll try for that. And then I find this article about the seals. And I said, that really sounds interesting. I think I'd really like to do that. So I couldn't find out much about it. But while I was there at Villanova, I let the staff know that this is what I wanted to do.

And I made the application for Buds and got accepted. Well, in my junior year at Villanova, I had changed majors. So between my junior and senior year, which would have been your first class cruise as a midshipment, I ended up going to summer school and I did not make my first class class. cruise. So I'm getting ready to graduate my senior year and the graduation and commissioning is held sort of simultaneously at Villanova and I get called into the ex-o's office there at the ROTC unit and he says I got some bad news for you Tom you know you won't get commissioned here in beginning in May with everybody

else because you've got to go on a go on your first-class cruise before you can get commissioned Well, you're not going to believe this. That's when the guy who did so well on his ROTC test got his brain back together, and that's the first time I learned the power of the pen, an independent thinking of the Navy. So I write this letter to Bupers and say, Hey, I'm going to be a frogman.

I'm going to be a seal. I don't need this first-class cruise. What an arrogant job. back ass I was. So long story short, the Navy comes back and says, okay, you don't have to go in your first class cruise. I get commissioned with everybody and I go out to buds. Got to back up just a little bit here. So as I'm, you know, understanding that there's a certain amount of swimming required and probably running in other conditioning, you know, I've just got out and, you know, bench pressed, you know, 400 pounds at the, at the collegiate, you know, weightlifting champion.

And you're walking around at 245? I was walking around at 245 at that point in time. And, you know, squat, you know, 500 and something, you know, deadlift, you know, five and a quarter or something at that point in time. Long story short, several years later in the career, once I was in the Navy, you know, 10 years later in the Navy, 25 pounds lighter, 30 pounds lighter, I lifted more except for the bench press than I was at Villanova. But anyway, so,

nobody and the ROTC staff could tell me what I needed to do, you know, when I showed up in Coronado. And so I said, well, UDT underwater, you know, got to be some swimming here. So, you know, I jumped in the pool at Villanova about three times, maybe four. And I said, well, if there's going to be a lot of running involved, you know, I started doing a little bit of road work, you know, and I dropped 10 or 12 pounds. and I showed up at Coronado thinking I was ready to go, right? So I show up. They give me my first issue of equipment, and they tell me that the class that was in pre-training at the time

is over here at the ocean front. Go over there and tell them who you are and you're joining the class. Well, I showed up and walk up and instructors look at me, like, who the hell are you? And before they even let me take a step, they make me go get a freaking EKG because they thought that I was some short, fat, you know, pile of whatever. And so here's another time when your alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass.

So we got instructors. I don't remember if Terry Moy was there. He's a legend in our time and a legend in his own mind. But Terry was quite the guy. But there's another guy standing there. Your complexion, Echo. And his name is Dick Allen. Dick is about 5-11.

He's the All-Navy, and I think he might have been the inner service boxing champ. And Dick was standing there at about 215, 220. And I, you know, looked at Chief Allen, and I said, you know, shit, if he can do it, I can do it. Oh, my God. That had to be one of the first. of the dumbest things that I ever said in public to anybody.

So they kicked the shit out of me. I did not pass my first screen test. Like I said, I didn't even know what the screen test was. So they rolled me back to from Class 53 to Class 54. I didn't even, you know, sign up with them. But what year was this? This was 1969. So Vietnam's in full swing.

Full swing. You know you're going to Vietnam if you go to a SEAL team. Absolutely. Absolutely. And remember, there were only two seal teams at the time. And I guess guys were still getting orders to UDT out of Buds too at that time. The majority guys coming out of Buds got orders to UDT. Was there any, I mean, was the culture in America just so split that you just didn't even think about, like the hippies that are running around in protesting wars?

Did you see any of those people around Villanova? Were those people in Coronado? So in my last semester at Coronado, excuse me, last semester at Villanova, all these young politically active individuals decided that they had to make a statement. So they're holding a rally and they're blockading access to the campus. And, you know, shit, I'm one of these guys, right? Well, no, I didn't have the bank accounts. I didn't go to Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands on spring break.

But I'm one of these guys. They know who I am. because I was, you know, my senior year, I was a bouncer at a couple of the bars that everybody went to. So here they are. They're having this big demonstration, and I forget what particular class it was

over at Berkeley Hall that I had, but I'm walking over to Berkeley Hall and you've got this, you know, mass of students. And say, hey, campus is closed. You can't go on campus, Tom. I said, well, we have one minor problem here. I've got a class in Berkeley Hall right over there, and I'm going to Berkeley Hall,

and the only problem is that you're temporarily between me and far away all. So what's it going to be? They stepped aside and I went to class. It was easy. So you had no idea what was going to happen in Buds? I had no clue, not a clue. See, I cleaned that up pretty good. I had no idea what it was going to be about.

But while I was at Villanova, Not only did I lift it on the gym on base, but there was a YMCA in town. And I ran into this guy who claimed to be a retired Navy corpsman who would serve with the Seals. Can't remember his name, 165-pound, dark-complected guy. I think he was Italian-American, whatever.

And we got to talking, and he told me a little bit about, you know, the war stories and how tough it was. but one of the things that he said to me is he said every one of those instructors is a humanoid every one of those instructors had done whatever it is

they're about to ask you to do or what they're about to do to you so I said to myself I locked in my mind at that point in time I said if that human being or that human being or even that Marine over there can do that

I can do that. So that was the mindset I went into Buds with. If he can do it, I can do it. And it worked. Was there anything that was hard for you? Was you running? Did you suck at running or did you get good at it pretty quick? I sucked at running until graduation day.

But, you know, with a 500-some-odd-pound square. lot, you know, going into training, I could run, I could, I could do 50 or 100 yards quick. So when we, back when I went through training, Jocko, you remember when it was hard. We, we trained on the other side back where the ball fields are, foreman field is. So we'd finish up our PT on one side of foreman field. the side away from the bay towards the ocean. And over on the bay side of Foreman Field was a row of pull-up bars and dip bars.

So after PT, we would go run over to those bars and do pull-ups and dips. Well, the deal was the instructors would break you into groups of X amount of guys and you would run over to the pull-up bars. The first guy in each group got to stand there and scratch his ass, while everybody else is in the lean and rest

punching out 20, 50, or however many pushups. I never did push-ups after PT. I was always the first man of my running group to get over there. If it was over 100 yards, I was the last man. But I never had to do push-ups in that group. So I don't know if we still call them goon squads. When you went through, I'm sure, Jacko, I'm sure you made a few of those.

I made some goons squads. You probably made all of them. The deal was, and I didn't realize that the deal was with the instructor staff is that wherever Rensin Richards is, that's where we cut the goon squad. So one day, you know of Admiral Ray Smith. He was in class 54, and 54 is a class I started with, went through third phase before I got a cellulitis infection. So I'm a man of two countries or two classes, but I graduated with 55.

But anyway, first phase, Ray and I were, you know, were on one of the conditioning runs, and we're running north towards the North Island fence. And we're just about in front of the lifeguard towers at Center Beach there in Coronado. And Ray and I were running along just having a conversation, you know, I mean, because these conditioning runs weren't fast. They were, you know, hard enough, but they weren't real fast.

So Ray and I are running along having this conversation, and Ray looks around and he realizes, oh shit, we're right about here at the point where they're going to cut the goonsquads. He says, Tom, I got to go. And Ray literally took off at that point in time, and he was no more than 10 or 15 yards in front of me where the instructor stepped in and says, all right, everybody, assume the position, that is push-ups because we're starting to goons squad. Boom. And so they cut the goon squad wherever I was, except one time. So we're doing a soft sand conditioning run. This time we're going south.

And we're running down towards the public beach down there, and that's about a three-mile point. But right across from where the marina is, there used to be a great big pile of sand. And we called that Mount Surabachi. Well, the instructors would take us down the soft sand road, which was between the ocean front and just probably got, you know, 30 or 40 yards in from the Strand Highway, we'd run down that soft sand road. And then we'd get to Mount

Surabachi and we'd run around Mount Surabachi. We'd run up and over Mount Surabachi. Well, I got tired of all this running up and down Mount Surabachi stuff. You know what I'm saying? I mean, I've tossed my cookies more times than I can tell you. And I am one hurt and son of a gun. So they go up and over Mount Surabachi. They loop around and they head on down towards the state park beach there. And I don't even have the freaking class in sight. Today an instructor gets shot for losing track of a student.

But I don't even have a class in sight. So the class goes down and I know what the run is for the day. So they're going to come back. So I just loop around Surabachi real nice. and easy this time. Loop around Surabachi. The class comes back. I loop around into the back of the class,

and it just worked out. The instructors were looking forward as I came up, and the goon squad had already been cut down by the state park. So as I had caught up to the class, this great big instructor by the name of Tracks, Bear Tracks, Williams, looks over to the class and he sees me as the last man in the formation. And he looks at me.

And he says, Ensign Richards, I don't know how you got to be here. I do know you're not supposed to be here. But somehow you did it, so I'm going to let you stay here. And that is the only goon squad I ever missed. How many, so I guess you said you were in 54.

That's who you went through Hell Week with? Right. I went through Hell Week, and diving phase was the third phase at that point in time. So I went all the way into the second phase of diving week before I got a cellulitis infection that actually hospitalized me.

How many people quit during how week? We started with slightly over, slightly over 200 guys in class 54. And we ended up with right around 52, 54 guys, graduating out of 54. So we lost 150 guys. Just ringing out of, out.

Ringing that bell. Kind of crazy. And then you said at this time, some guys would get orders to UDT, some guys would get orders to SEAL team. It seemed like at one point it was you were going to go to UDT most likely. Yes. A couple guys would go to SEAL team. And you ended up getting orders to SEAL team?

Yes. And as far as I'm concerned, that was no action because what I did is I realized that the situation is just as you expressed. and then only a few guys and then going to the SEAL teams. Well, I petitioned a couple of the instructors that, hey, I really want to go to SEAL Team. And, you know, one of them was a highly decorated

seal chief by the name of Tommy Hatchet. I don't know if that name rings a bell to you. But Tom was one of the few black guys we had in the teams at the time. and I went up to Chief Hatchet and I said, you know, Chief, I really want to go to Seal Team One. I said, I think that's where I belong.

And I went up to a couple of other instructors. And now at this point in time, Chief Hatchet was in second phase and I'm in third phase, but I went to those guys because second phase, of course, not of course, second phase was land warfare and those are the seal guys. And I said, yeah, this is what I want to do. And obviously, that must have said something to somebody because they let me go. So you show up to SEAL Team 1.

Let's back up. I want to tell two training stories here. 100%. In different hell weeks have different layouts and, you know, what's done when. Because, of course, the students, you know, learn too much about what's coming up next. and they can sort of get their minds around it. So when Admiral Smith and I went through training together, one of the events that they did was, you know,

I don't know what they called it, but let's call it the last man standing. That is they drew a circle in the sand, put the class inside the circle and said that the last guy inside the circle gets X number of points for his boat team. Well, you know, Ray Smith was a boxing champion at the Naval Academy. Jesus, I want to say he was a weight man,

that is he threw the hammer or something like that. So Ray was a pretty strong guy. Ray was about 200 pounds, maybe 205 at the most, maybe about 95. He was taller too, right? Yeah, about my height. Oh, really? I mean, just a little bit taller.

Oh, I mean, because he did look kind of skinny next to me. Yeah, he's lanky. So Ray and I went up to each other and we said, hey, let's make this easy on ourselves. We'll throw everybody else out of the circle, and it'll be you and I and see who gets the points of the boat group. That's exactly what we did. We threw those other 50 suckers out of the circle

and came down to Ray and I wrestling on the ground, and I'm trying to pick them up and throw them out of the circle. When instructor Moy sees that I've raised my head to see where the line is and where I've got, where I've got Ray, so I can, you know, toss them out of there. And just as I raised my head, Instructor Moy had a IBS paddle full of sand through it in my face. You know, basically I had eyes, ears, nose, and mouth full of sand. And quite frankly, I thought I was blinded. But the students say that after I roared at instructor Moy, that I only missed them by a couple of steps.

because I said, screw it, screw it, Lieutenant J.G. Smith, I'm going after that son of a bit you. Just filled my face full of sand. I missed the instructor. And they had one of the guys take me down the water and clear me out.

The crappy thing is, the Ray Smith didn't even get the points for his boat crew because he didn't throw me out. I left my own accord. So fast forward, 20 some odd years. I'm now the skipper of Buds. And

Ray is the admiral in charge of Naval Special Warfare Command. And Ray and his wife, Kathy, are living across the street on the amphib base. And Ray's son is going through sealed training.

So, Ray, you know, we have the breakout and you know, some people, the breakout include, busting the students out of the barracks, giving them all sorts of confusing directions and things to do. There's also instructors firing blanks from M60 machine guns, using flash bangs, which are a very bright, very loud, explosive simulator to disorient the students. And yet here, you know, a couple of hundred yards away on the other side of the Strand Highway is Navy Housing.

So usually that Sunday night when we started Hell Week, the phones lit up. And one night it was Admiral Smith's wife, Kathy, complaining to Ray. You know, what is Tom doing to those boys? So as their son goes through training, I was particularly careful to make sure that I did not single him out. But I was also attentive to the fact that, you know, You know, sometimes the son of, we call them legacies going through training, just like they did in what was that movie? Animal House, you know, legacies.

But we wanted to make sure that, you know, somebody's father had been jackass of the week to one of the instructors that that didn't carry over and taint his son's attempt to get through training. But anyway, I remember Ray coming, you know, telling me the story about, Ray, do you realize what they're doing to these boys? I'm sorry, Kathy, if you hear this, but Ray was concerned about, or Kathy was concerned about her son. Ray and Kathy were married when Ray and I went through training, but, you know, Ray obviously did a phenomenal job of not, you know, telling Kathy about what, how bad his day was. Yeah, that's a hard thing to camouflage, too, because you're coming home with, you're chafing and you're bruised up and beat up.

You've got cuts and nicks all over your body. and your ankles and knees are swelled up. It's pretty savage. Absolutely, but, you know, Kathy obviously didn't appreciate what Ray was going through when he went through training. So we get through Nate's first phase. He makes it through Hell Week. And, well, not quite.

So when Ray and I went through training, Hell Week secured on Saturday morning. Not that you had it easy, Jocko, I understand. Training secured on Saturday morning. morning. Well, when I was the skipper of the center training secured on Friday morning, you got a whole 24 hours off. So the, as I mentioned earlier, you know, guys learn, you know, tricks about what happens at what point in time during hell week. And so the classes had come to understand that, okay, around 10, 10, 30, maybe 11 o'clock on Friday, they're going to secure you,

you know, because the corpsman got to give you a check. And then, you know, they got to, you know, I got to make sure that we get anybody over to Balboa who needs to go to Balboa. That's Balboa Naval Hospital. But, of course, the instructors want to get off by three or four o'clock in the afternoon. So we've got to secure everybody earlier enough. So the students knew this. So the students, so I get the instructor staff together. I say, this is what we're going to do.

The students think that at the end of this particular evolution, their week is over. So when you get them lined up here, they're thinking we're done. So we're not done. So what I did is I went out to, you know, they thought I was coming over the, coming over the dune to these guys lined up by the ocean that I was going to secure training. Secure Hell Week. Secure means to finish it up, close it down. So I come over the berm and I walk down to the class and I start to engage Hanson Smith in conversation. along the lines of, you know,

Inson Smith, you probably remember stories of your father that he and I went through buds together and everybody is a soup sandwich at the end of Hell Week, whether it's Friday morning, whether it's Friday morning or Saturday morning. Everybody's a soup sandwich. Ensign Smith was no better, and he has no idea what the hell I'm talking about. He just knows that they're standing there,

getting ready to get secured. So I said, Enson Smith, Do you recall that when your dad and I went through seal training, seal training didn't secure until Saturday morning. This is only, you know, 10.30 Friday morning. I guess you guys got another 24 hours. And I turned around and I left. I did not secure a whole week.

We got all these kids thinking, we're done, we've made it. Maybe I can get a hot shower. I can't take another step if I had to. And there's guys with tears running down their faces. And they turned to each other. I can't do it. I can't make another 24 hours. So the deal I had with the instructor staff was, okay,

they mustered the kids up and off they go on an IBS carry towards the rocks in front of the Hotel Dell. And what I wanted him to do was to suck it up and do whatever was necessary. And so these kids sucked it up, and they went down to the Hotel Dell and came back, and I secured him. And when I secured him, I said, this is a lesson you're probably never going to forget in your life. You thought that this was going to happen. That is, Hellweek was going to be secured an hour ago.

It didn't happen. You need to suck it up and figure out what to do. At that point in time, and maybe it still goes on today, but classes would have a teacher. shirt made for their class. And there'd be some kind of a cartoon or caricature on it and a saying. Well, that class is saying was, it isn't over till it's over. And every one of them learned a lesson. Not only in that class, but for the next several classes, they didn't know what was going

to happen. That was my objective. Keep them confused. Keep them confused. Something else I did when I was a CEO of Buds. was establish something called the junior officer training course. Now, as we all know today,

seal training is broken to several sections, but two distinct sections. The first approximate six months is equal to what I did back when I went through training. The second six months, where you earn your qualification as a seal, is more advanced training. In my day, they had something called SEAL Basic Inductoration Training.

That is, you would get to the SEAL team. You would go through this five or six weeks of advanced training, which is what today's second six months is. You would go through that next six weeks or so of advanced training, and the decision would be made whether or not the commanding officer is going to recommend you for your Trident to become a SEAL. When I graduated from seal training, me and X number of guys, as we discussed a few moments ago, went directly to seal team one. A bunch of guys went to UDTs, 11 and 12.

13 was still around then, too. So what happened was those friendships that you, and believe me, as you know, Jocco, I'm sure you guys understand, there are no tighter associations or friendships than you form when you go through Bud's training. So what would happen was naturally when you get a bunch of guys, 10 or 15 guys from a particular class going to a particular team, they tend to hang out together to include the junior officers. And the Naval Special Warfare is probably one of the few organizations where there are a lot of close friends between the officers and the enlisted,

and I mean really close friends. First name basis, you name it. You know, grand, you know, godparents, the kid. you name it, close association. What I wanted to do was I wanted to break that bond. I wanted to break that dependency. I wanted those junior officers to have to go to a team and stand on their own, not be able to lean on a bunch of guys that they had gone through training with.

They were now officers. They were now going to have to make some significant decisions that would potentially affect some of their fellow classmates. They were always officers, if you will, and you know going through training that officers were assigned more responsibilities and leaned on harder than some of the troops. But I wanted to give these guys not only separation, but I want to give them some tools to work with. So I started at that point in time what I called the junior officer training class. And it was only two and a half for three weeks at the outset. I don't know what it is today.

but we set that program up for two reasons. Leadership training, you know, management, you know, training, exposure to other factors about the Navy other than Bud's training. So I set that up, and now that junior officer training is part of that second six months of the Bud's training. but I feel proud in the fact that that still exists and of course it's part of that evolution of training that is naturally going to happen, but it was one of the best things that I thought

that I did while I was the seal of old butts. Yeah, and just it's expanded a ton. I know my buddy Laif was actually, when we got home from our last appointment together, he took over that JOTCY course expanded. He started taking guys out in the field. field, we really focused on leadership. And I think it, by the time he was done, I think it was out to maybe six weeks and just

trying to make it more comprehensive and get the guys more prepared for when they do show up at a SEAL team. So, yeah, it's still there. We put together a reading list, you know, and we, not just so that guys that have a list to refer to, we made everybody take a book and provide a summary. I forget the name of the young Ensign who took Dick Marsenko's first book, Rogue Warrior. And before I say anything else, sorry to see that Dick has passed. He was a very influential individual in the development of development groups,

Heel Team 6, whatever they're called today. Although Dick did things his own way, ruffled a few feathers in the process, I have nothing but the greatest personal respect for Dick Marsenko. So Dick gets out of the Navy after some kind of a felony conviction. Tom Richards personally feels that I don't think Dick Marsenko would do anything, you know, of a felony nature. That's just not who Dick was. Dick could be a royal pain in the ass and, you know, you name it.

But, you know, Dick got some things done. So anyway, he writes this book, Rogue Warrior, first of his books. And in it, he reveals a number of things that were probably, you know, classified at the time. But he just, you know, served some time. And I think he retired as a commander. I'm not sure what happened to him. He had been promoted to captain, but in any event. the Navy decided not to slap his wrist about some of the things that were in the book.

But you can tell reading the book that Dick had not separated from the Navy on the greatest of terms. And so this young junior officer who was the first guy to review Dick's book titles his book review Rogue Weiner as opposed to Rogue Warrior. I'll never forget that answer. And he noted some of the things that Dick said, and he saw some of the way that Dick was, you know, poking his finger back in the eye of the United States Navy. A kid did a very good job. And, of course, that's exactly what Dick was doing,

saying, fuck you, the United States Navy, because, you know, Dick, well, that's who Dick was. that was a junior officer training course was a was something that I was really proud of so you obviously at the end of buds for you you didn't have junior officer training course you just showed up to the seal team and that's why that's why I created that junior officer training course because I saw what I was missing I mean I walk into a team and now I've got to uh you know how many years did you had before you got commissioned jocco I had eight eight years here I go you know what behind the years uh you know you're

Ensign and I'm walking in and I've got to be the guy in charge of guys like Jocko who's got eight years under his belt or in my seal platoon we had Jack Schultz and who was the Randy Sheridan two first class I think Jack made chief during that period of time you know I really should have been in a learning mode as opposed to a leading mode at that point in time. And I learned as much as I could from those guys. So again, that goes back to the whole premise of that JOTC. So you graduate from Buds. Now it's just checking into CLE team. How many guys from your class went to CLE Team One? I don't remember, you know, Gary Stubblefield, you know, best man of my wedding and so on. And he and I deployed to Vietnam

shortly thereafter. Was it 1970 when you graduated? Right. I was it. I, I graduated in April of 1970. That was 55, class 54 graduated in February. And Gary was from 54. There were half a dozen of us, maybe no more than a dozen that went to Team 1. And right into platoons, right into pre-deployment training and boom, gone. I know I talked to some of the guys from Vietnam, and they said when they checked into Team 1, I remember one guy telling me, like, you got in the shower, you know, after a PT or something,

and he's looking at everybody, everybody's, like, shot up, everybody's wounded. It's just so much combat for those guys back in that time. And the SEAL team, Seal Team 1 and Seal Team 2, that's it for the SEAL teams. And there's, what do you have, 150 guys at the team? Thereabouts. That's a, yeah, that's a good number. And we had, we had situations in, at CEL Team 1 where a platoon would be, you know, scheduled to, you know, come back from a deployment and the deploying platoon is headed on over there, and maybe they hook up in the Philippines. We're a couple of guys from that platoon that was supposedly coming back to the States. A couple of those guys would augment that platoon and go right back in country.

There were a lot of deployments like that. and a lot of hard men. How long did it take for you to get your trying to? So you went through SBI and SBI you said it was like eight weeks long? About probably closer to six. And that must have just been straight, just jungle training. Jungle training, you remember Nileland out there in California and the Salton Sea and the irrigation canals and so on that feed into that

provided some really interesting terrain. And of course, it's the frickin' desert, so it's hot. So it was a really good place to train. And then at the end of SBI, that's when you get your trident? Right. And then you get put into a platoon. Absolutely. And at that point in time, you were going into a platoon.

And the challenge for the CO and X over the time, of course, is, okay, what's the makeup of the platoon? We normally want to have an officer making a second deployment. and then you've got a couple of senior enlisted and maybe a couple of junior enlisted. Senior enlisted might be on their third trip. The junior guys might be on their second. But we had a green platoon. Grant Telfer was a surface warfare officer

before he went through training. And he started training as a lieutenant. And I don't remember how many years senior to me he was. But he started training as a lieutenant. Was that his first platoon as well? Exactly. Oh, wow. He and I graduated in class 55.

Oh, okay. So the XO called me in and asked if I wanted to be the AOIC and Grant's platoon. And I said, sure, that gets me where I want to go sooner than it normally would have. So you bet. And as I said, we had Jack Schultz, who later got commissioned, retired as a commander out of the dev group. And Randy Sheridan, who got wounded, and I think he was medically retired from an action in Vietnam with the platoon. Randall Hedge and I think Moses Marquez were the other two guys who had prior prior deployments.

So we, out of 14 guys, 10 of us were FNGs. So you do a workup and you're preparing to go. Now you're together with your platoon and how long is that? Do you spend six months like nowadays we do? No. In that case, as I said. So I got there in April. We deployed in the end of August.

there in April we went through SBI. Yeah, doing the math. I go through SBI and finish up SBI and they're putting together this platoon, Zulu platoon. And then we get Zulu platoon put together. We go right into pre-deployment training. So, and it was only X number of weeks, a couple of months because we had to finish up, you know, with enough time to give, give guys a week or 10 days off before deploying just to, you know, take care of business. So it was a pretty, you know, slam-bam situation. But you had the awesome thing is you had guys coming back from Vietnam that were running your training for your platoon.

Oh, absolutely. The SBI program, when I went through it, was run by guys like Master Chief Al Ui. And, you know, Uncle Al, Mass Chief Al Ui was a fantastic individual. I don't think I ever heard him raise his voice and I don't think I ever saw anybody working for him not do exactly what the hell they were told to do. He was a piece of work. I remember working with Al later in life

and it was just a pleasure. But Al, Gary Gallagher, you know Gary Gallagher? I just know these names. Okay, Gary Gallagher, nickname Muncher, Navy Judo champion. He's one of the instructors. So we set up this event where we're supposed to take down a hooch. We're supposed to enter it, search it, and if there's anybody in there, take them hostage and search for whatever it might be there.

So we go to the hooch and we set up, I'm on the outside of the door, and I'm facing away from the hooch just as security just in case somebody comes up while the guys are inside. Well, the bad guy in there is Muncher. Muncher is 200 pounds. Like I say, All-Navy Judo champion, right? Muncher throws a couple of guys away in the inside of the hutch.

He comes blasting out the door. The Hulk is on his knees, you know, there to provide security. I got my weapon at the ready. and as Al Huey ripped on Master Chief Gallagher, you let that 220-pound ensign who was on his knees catch you and wrap you up? Because, I mean, I caught him from behind.

I caught Gallagher from behind and just wrap them up in a nice, neat package. And Master Chief Huey had a blast with that. But lesson learned. you know there there we go here's this here's this bleeder coming out and uh you know you got to be prepared for uh for those for those bleeders coming out and you guys were real there was no other mission that you were looking to do you know you're going in vietnam and that's just 100% of the focus complete uh i mean when you look at the the mission focus that the seal platoons have

today uh the breadth of the breadth of the type of missions they can get you know like uh interdiction sea, taking down a ship at sea. I never thought of that. You know, I mean, I wouldn't have had a clue of how to do it. Yeah, I'm sure, as our guys have done today, we've clearly figured out how to do that. And those type of things, no. You know, we were focused on one thing. We were created by President Kennedy to do that.

And did you always carry a stoner? Right. That was my weapon in the field. And even when you were telling that story, you were throwing linked 556 ammo. to two other guys. Right. So how many stoners did you have in that squad? Let me see.

Gary and Wendell might have been the only other. Because I think, yeah, I think Gary and Wendell was probably the only other two guys. The rest of the guys had M-16 or M-16 variants. But the important part of that is, and one of the reasons why multiple guys were carrying stoners is so that you had that ammunition interoperability. And, you know, the receiver group of my weapon took four rounds.

And the guy said if that stoner hadn't been across my chest where it was, I'd have had four holes. I wouldn't be here having that conversation today. So my gun was an inoperable model. But as I said, I carried me anywhere from 1,200 rounds on an op, and I had plenty to give away. So when you guys get done with deployment and now you're flying over to Vietnam. Do you guys fly commercial over to Vietnam? How'd you get over there? Fly commercial.

No, yes. All kinds of sod guys flew over there. A lot of Army replacements. They flew over their commercial air. Or I guess it was chartered flights. That's what it was. Chartered flights. So the regular Army guys would fly over there in commercial flights.

We flew over and I believe what might have been the last United States Navy C-118, I believe it was. And, you know, we were going to go to Hawaii from Hawaii to the PIA and then to, you know, Tonsanat Airport in Saigon. So as Navy pilots would have the habit of doing, shucks, we got to Hawaii and broke down for a few days. Well, none of us were rich at the time or now. But I had a few bucks and managed to waste it. but I also, you know, was able to distribute a few bucks to some of the other guys in the platoon because we had no money.

We didn't figure we were going to be anywhere. We were going to have to pay for anything or have the chance to go buy a beer. But, you know, we broke down in Hawaii. And that's where Grant Telfur showed us his palm tree climbing skills to go up and, you know, pick a coconut. And then from there you go. Did you stop on the PI? We did. And then from there you get into Vietnam.

What's it like when you hit the ground in Vietnam? Hotter than I could have imagined. We're talking August in Vietnam. And, yeah, I didn't grow up with air conditioning. But I grew up on Long Island, and you had the Long Island sound on one side, and you had the Atlantic Ocean on the other side. So it never got really got particularly hot.

So, you know, going through, going through training in the summer in Coronado was as hot as I'd ever been before I got to Vietnam and it was just hot, humid, muggy and a hyperkinetic level of activity

like it's hard to describe. So what was your, where were you located? We spent a few days in Saigon and then we were shipped down to the very southern tip of Vietnam. If you look at Vietnam on a map,

there's kind of like a little tail, kind of like the keys in Florida. Well, there's a little tail down there and the very bottom part of Vietnam, and we were on the, we're on some called the Kulon River down there. And did you have another platoon with you, or is it just Zulu? There were several platoons, you know,

cycling through there. What we had was something called sea float. And seafloat was a series of barges lashed together in the river with detachments of, you know, patrol boats operating from there and seal platoons operating from the barges. Shortly after we got there, and when we arrived, they had already started building a short air strip and some, what do they call them, sea huts, you know, plywood and, you know,

plywood and, you know, screen sides and, you know, didn't do much more than block the rain. Of course, there was no AC. And what was the mission set you guys were given? We were there to look for VC, VC tax collectors, you know, anybody infiltrating that part of the world. Gather the intelligence, try to find out who these folks were, where they were, and go after them. We did specific ops going in for an individual at a location. We did things like going out in Sampan's patrolling at night, looking for the VC tax collectors, you're trying to hit up the locals.

We'd sit on Riverside ambushes, you know, looking for these guys. I missed a particular operation, but Grant Telford squad had a phenomenal app based on some intelligence that we generated. And again, you know, Jack Schultz would go off, you know, checking with the PRUs, the advisors, and, you know, looking for bits and pieces of intelligence. And one of the coups that they came up with was a weapon storage facility not too far from where a solid anchor was located down there in the Namcan province. At that point in time, our squad was up in a place called Damdoir, you know,

25, 30 miles up the river, something like that, and operating out of there. We thought, you know, there might be some virgin territory. We could go find some bad guys. But while we were up there, you know, Grant and the other guys found this, you know, one of the largest ammo cachets, you know, VC ammo. caches located in the war. Yeah. What was your opt-temple?

Like, how often were you guys going out? I've heard, didn't they sometimes rotate squad one tonight, squad two tomorrow night and they go back and forth? Absolutely. And sometimes if you didn't have something to work with, it might be every third day. It might be every fourth day. But, oh, boy, we had a, we had a little sign hanging on the, on the outside of the hooch.

Actually, that's, you know, where you draw the little lines and then a slash to it. And, you know, five, those are the, those were, that was a tally of the known KIAs. I really don't remember the total number of ops that we did in that six months. But it was a heavy op tempo you were working a lot. It was heavy enough. Yeah, I would not have wanted to have to go out more often than that. You come back, you know, because you go out. and you completely break your circadian rhythms.

You go out and you go out at night and you're exhausted. You're slogging through your ankle, knee-deep mud carrying 50, 60 pounds of gear. And if you patrol 5, 10 clicks, 15 clicks doing that stuff, you're a whipped puppy. And it takes a couple of days to respond because you don't want to go out tired And you don't want to go out and not fresh because if you do, somebody's going to die. So you had, would you guys have, did you guys have 14 men in your platoon? Exactly.

14 guys. So the squads you're going out with was seven? Seven, six, five, whatever, whatever we felt was necessary. We were sitting down there on solid anchor and we were routinely getting mortared, you know, from some place, you know, a few clicks to the east. and a few clicks north. So what you do is you look at the impact of the mortar, and you can tell by the size of the hole that the mortar makes, whether it's a 51 or 82 millimeter mortar,

that's the bad guys did the 82. We had 81s, right? Okay, thanks. It's been a while. So you can tell by the size of the crater what size mortar it was, and that told you the maximum range. of the mortar. And again, again, looking at the crater, you could also tell if it was a high angle shot coming down from a short range. And so you could kind of figure out that range. And then, of course, the orientation of the crater from the impact tells you the asmuth, the back azmuth, where it's coming. So we kind of did that. And we said, okay, they're probably coming right down this here river and setting up about here. So we went out early and set up further so that they'd have to come down in front of us. us. We were tired of having a card games interrupted by a mortar attack, you know. So we,

quite frankly, that's true. There were several mortar attacks where we were out of that, out of that card game and into the, into the bomb shelter before the freaking cards hit the floor, I'm telling you. But so we went up there to try to intercept this mortar crew. And, of course, you want to be careful and not tip your hand with any kind of. kind of a VR visual reconnaissance of the area. So we did a VR and then we set the app a few days later. But the canopy was so hard. What we missed was another trail on the river.

So we set up X number of yards off the river so we'd have a field of fire on the river because we figured they were coming down the river. Oh no. These boys are coming down in his well-worn track behind us. You know, whistling Nixie or whatever the Vietnamese were doing there. All of a sudden we're sitting here facing the river, and we hear this chatter going on behind us

as these guys are walking behind us with the mortar. And we couldn't do anything. That is, if we started to make the noise to shift and try to take them under fire, these guys are walking down the trail with their guns in their hands. You know, we're sitting there, sitting there, lying near, kneeling there, you know, in position facing the river. With your guns pointing in the wrong direction.

Guns pointing in the wrong direction. So we'd have made a hell of a lot of racket and we'd have taken some hits. So we call off the mission and, you know, later on we were in our own sandpans paddling back to sawed anchor. And you look off in the distance and you see this flash. Well, the Vietnamese had a 105 millimeter battery across the river from a solid anchor. And we also had a shared talk, tactical operations center. And before we went out, we put in a designated no fire zone. So we're paddling our sandpans back down the river.

And I see these flashes. and because of the angle of the flash, you know it's headed in your freaking direction. And I said, well, it's not going to be anywhere near us. All of a sudden, there's an air burst almost directly above us. And then a few more air bursts, you know, up and down the river where we are. I get on that radio and I, you know, to the U.S. side of the talk, you know, ceasefire. probably said a few things in the air that I shouldn't have said,

but I said, cease fire. They cease fire. And I got back to the talk, and I'm a J.G. I had this fucking lieutenant about hanging from the rafters as I was explaining to him, you know, how he almost killed some of us. I could not believe. You could see the shrapnel peppering the water all around us.

Nobody got hit. I don't know how that happened. Another lucky day on the ranch. How often would you say you guys would get an enemy contact when you guys went out? I don't want... The kind of guy I am, not enough. We went over there to kill bad guys, you know. These people had caused the United States of America to get into a shooting war over here.

And so my job was to kill the bad guys. and we didn't have enough contact as far as I'm concerned. You know, I'll finish up with another thought on that, but that's what I signed up to do. And if the nation comes to a point where that needs to be done, send me, coach. You know, that's who is in the SEAL teams. That's why you have SEAL teams, special forces,

Green Berets, Air Force Special Operations guys. These guys, you know, send me, coach. That's what we're here for. So as you got towards, because the event that we started off talking about, that was one of the last operations that you guys were scheduled to do. Is that right? Absolutely. We had deployed in August of 70, and we were, you know, scheduled to come back

the beginning of February of 71. And my squad had, you know, started, you know, cleaning the gear and preparing the gear to pack it up and send it home. Because one of the last things you have to do is clean everything because it's going to be inspected to make sure you're not bringing back any particular mud, flora, fauna, or whatever from overseas. So it takes a while to prepare. We'd started that process in my squad and Grant wanted to do one more operation. And since it was Grant with whatever information he had had, I wasn't paying attention to.

it. I was working with my guys getting ready to come home. But his operation didn't quite go as he planned. Because he flew, they got contacted in the helicopters. They took fire on the way into the area where they were

going to go. And that's when Marcus Arroyo got shot in the shoulder and wounded seriously enough to end up being medically retired. So they, so squad one goes out to

execute this mission. As they're flying into this LZ, they take fire, a royal gets wounded. It's bad enough that they can't, they have to abort the mission. They come back to base. They come back to base and they take Marcus off the plane, our corpsman, Doc Harris, Tom Harris, who's on his deathbed. Tom Harris takes Marcus down to, you know, we had a, call the sick Bay. Not much more than that. There at Solid Anchor. And Tom is monitoring, you know, what's going on with Marcus. Doc Harris was, excuse me, Marcus was the radioman for that squad. Doc Harris was the other radio men in the platoon. Doc Harris has taken care of Marcus O'Royle, and so Grant needed a radio men. And so

my basic thought is it's not smart to go back. Grant wanted to go back. And I said, well, you're going back. Someone's going to have to carry your ass out of the rice paddy. I'll carry the radio. Words to

that effect. And we, you know, it wasn't to grant, I don't want to say in defense, but, you know, in Grant's thought process, it wasn't exactly where he was going in. But so anyway, we go back to that area and we took fire as we were coming in.

And we landed and we went up a rice paddy over one and up the next. And we were, as I say, taking fire almost immediately. But we went up that third section of rice paddy. We were just in a kill zone. Had you guys had anyone wounded prior to that? Yes. Randy, Randy Sheridan had been seriously wounded. He basically lost his elbow as a result of the wound that he got on one of my squad operations.

Had you guys had anyone killed in your platoon? No. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I feel fortunate to be able to talk about the operation from 31 January, 1970, 30 January, January, 1971. because nobody was killed with that number of bad guys and without the flying and dedication of how three Carl Nelson in particular and his doorgunners, I'm not here to have the conversation. So it's interesting to be able to have that conversation. any smart eyes remarks that I might make about it,

call it seal humor. But, you know, that's what it is. I'm happy to be alive, and I'm glad those guys are alive too. Yeah. And then that ended up being the last mission that you guys did. Absolutely. There was nobody left to come anywhere. We, you know, and unfortunately, there was not much of a debrief.

You know, we were all there in, were we all there in Bintui? I think except Marcus, Marcus had, Marcus went, well, I don't know what his, his evak process was, but the rest of us were there in Bintui, third field surgical hospital, you know, together for a few days, but then we went different directions in the process. That's, uh, uh, Jim Rowland went one, one place. I came back to San Diego.

I don't remember where Grant went. Uh, but, uh, you know, I basically, Jesus, I don't know how many years it was before I, I saw Grant again. It was just one of those deals. How bad was your hand messed up? I can't imagine getting shot in the hand. It seems like for you to be totally mobile with your hands. What? Just get lucky?

Uh, yeah, I got lucky. And, you know, when, when you tell somebody that you were wounded, people want to, you know, you know, People are almost hesitant to ask about your war-waring because they figure you're going to pull down your pants and show where you're shot in the ass, you know? But I've got a better one because I was holding on to the pistol grip of a machine gun. The round went through the end of my thumb, through my finger. You can see how the nail there is somewhat damaged. And then through the hand and just shattered the bones in the hand. hand. So I was a radio man at this point in time and I was fortunate. I was able to use my thumb,

my index finger, uh, in order to, uh, to operate the, the handset because the end of, the end of my middle finger is no good. My ring finger was no good. And neither was my, my, uh, my pinky finger. So I had, I had two fingers to, uh, to work the radio with. And, uh, you know, I was fortunate to be able to do that in, uh, in Grant Telfer's recounting of how, uh, this went down. He said, you know, he heard me yelp or scream when I first got hit. And then he mentions in the summary that he provided for Captain Slattery. He heard, you know, Tom Yope a second time.

Well, let me tell you about that second time. We've all seen people like John Wayne or what's the name, Clint Eastwood, get wounded and, you know, go on and do great and wonderful things. And I don't remember if it was two mules, Sister Sarah, where Eastwood takes an arrow in the shoulder, and he puts a little gunpowder on the hole in the front of his shoulder, and the hole in the back of the shoulder, and pulls the arrow back out through.

So I said, hey, shit. Eastwood can do it? I can do it. So I looked down on my hand after I got hit, and I see what I thought was the bullet sticking out of the back of my hand. So, hey, you know, let's just take a second and take care of this. I reached down and I grabbed what I thought was a bullet between my teeth and I just give it a good yank to get that bullet out of there. Well, it was one of my finger bones and that finger bone was still attached.

That's as Grant heard me yelp the second time. I mean, I don't know what the pain is like giving birth, but I'm telling you, that was absolutely amazing. I swear to God, my toes curled. But that's the kind of guy you have in the teams. That's who the fuck we are. Okay, I got a hole in my hand. That's a bullet. Let me get rid of the bullet.

There's an old saying, you fuck with the truck and you get dumped, right? That's who the special forces are. If you want somebody to go in there and do the job, you want somebody to ignore pain and do what it is that they're supposed to do, 1,800 special operations. You're coming home now from Vietnam. Did you know the war was going to,

did you know that was probably going to be your last deployment? No, I didn't. And quite frankly, I got, got that information sort of like as a surprise. My, you know, when I was first wounded, they told me they were probably going to have to have a second operation on my hand to restore, you know, full function. So I get to Balboa Hospital and they unwrapped the cast and so on.

And they say, we don't think you're going to be able to move your ring finger. And so I move my ring finger and not a whole lot of strength there, of course. But I said, oh, well, you know, if you don't think we need to go in again and straighten out the bones and so on, it seems to be functioning, just go through a recovery process and you're good to go. So I said, well, if I don't have to have a... another operation on my hand, that's good for me. And so I went through the rehab, and I, as soon as soon as I was given a medical clearance

that I was good to go, I went back into the XO's office and said, XO, sign me up. And he said, Tom, I'm afraid I can't do that. The war is starting to wind down, as you just said, Jocko. and the leadership, rightly so, wanted to make sure that a bunch of guys, a bunch of guys, the rest of the guys who had not had actual combat experience, would have that opportunity for that exposure. Let's make sure we understand opportunity, exposure, and the required experience that you want in your military fighting forces.

So the CO and the XO were getting as many new guys, the opportunity to deploy and get that exposure to, holy shit, I'm going to die, or maybe I'm going to live and live through it and you're a different person. That's what they were trying to do. Ex-O tells me that, unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to become a member of another platoon. And I said, well, I'm out of here.

I can't stay here and watch these guys go, do what I want to do. So at that point in time, I went through a decision process, trying to figure out, do I get out of the Navy? If I do, what do I do? Border Patrol, FBI, you know, what's going to be? Do I stay in the teams? If I do, what do I do? And so I went from SEAL Team 1 to the training center as a diving officer.

And that was a great experience dealing with the kids, the new guys. Kids, new guys, they're like four years. The officers are like three or four years younger than me, right? So I had that job. It was a great experience. So I said, well, I'll stick around for a little while longer. And ended up being 30 years. but I was really

disappointed not to get the opportunity to go back and as you know I went to El Salvador when Lieutenant Commander Schaffelberger was killed and as soon as I heard about Al's death I raised my hand and I was surprised

that there weren't a few more people raising their hand but I raised my hand to go down there I mean that's where that's where my train and my experience and my skills were going to be needed in some way, shape, or form. I want to do that. That's why I signed up.

So before you went down to El Salvador, so you went to Buds for a little while as the dive phase officer? I had a two-year tour at Buds, and one of the things that I felt was a failure on the mission where we all got wounded there in 30th of January was an intelligence failure.

So from Buds, I went to Defense Intelligence School. It was a nine-month program back at the Navy Yard in Washington, to see actually the Anacostia Annex, nine-month program. And from there, I went to two years as the Intel officer at Naval Special Warfare Group 2. Then I got to Team 1, to Team 2 as the ops officer. And that's where I met folks like Bruce Van Herdham,

Dick Marsenko, you name it, all the cast of characters. Bob, was it Bob Wagner, the Navy Cross winner from, one of the Navy Cross winners from Seal Team 2 was running the training program at Team 2. And he was a, he was just hard as now, son of a bitch. You know, great guy. He wanted to make sure that the guys were trained and ready to go and do what they needed to do. What was the at this time in the late 70s, I mean, there's just be, there have been no money for the seals, I'm imagining. No, like what was the, as the, as the Navy drew down, you know, during like the Carter years.

What was that like? Seeing as I'm not sure if the Navy can stop my pension, I have a hard. time answering that question. When I came back from Vietnam, we had, and before I left to go to the Diving Officer, the Navy was tearing down. It's brownwater Navy, and they weren't really thinking about special operations.

They were just thinking about brownwater Navy. You interviewed Carl Nelson from House all three, the helicopter attack light squadrons that were set up in Vietnam were commissioned in Vietnam and disestablished in Vietnam. Never even came back to the United States. There was not a commitment by the Navy to support special operations, aviation assets. When I came back, Seal Team One had a directive to, reduce end strength by, it was either 30 or 34.

Oh, yeah, they sent guys to the fleet, right? They sent them back to the fleet. The expression that sticks in my mind was the 30-34, as we called them. It might have been the dirty-30, but it was 30 or 34 guys. And, you know, Bruce Van Hurdham and George Worthington, you know, God rest of soul, George just passed away. But can you imagine, you know, somebody in the Navy, we're reducing end strengths, comes down and they tell Commander Worthington, and lieutenant commander Van Hurdham, okay, you got a shit can,

34 year guys who've just been through some of the most difficult training in the world and send them back to the fleet. They came up with the best set of criteria that they, could at the time for people who had only been in the team for a certain period of time, guys with no deployments, guys under the rank of such and such, you know, there were a number of those things, but they did the best that they could, but it sucked. And a bunch of those guys came back. Probably most of those guys came back. But what that shows, if I just said about the the Howe situation, the SEAL Team 1, and I'm sure SEAL Team 2,

went through the same thing. I actually have never talked to anybody about that. But you look at the green berets. The Army were tossing those guys left and right. So the military did not understand the Department of Defense, State Department did not understand what was going on in the world and the type of conflicts we were going to see coming down the road. To your point there in the 70s,

It was a period of time when not much was going on. But you turn around and you start looking at El Salvador and other locations. The operations we did down there in Panama, you know, things are starting to look pretty stinky around the rest of the world. And you're not going to send an aircraft carrier or a battleship to do that.

You're going to send somebody like us. And you even fast forward to the Gulf War. you know multiple who was it that was getting you know most of the assignments every once in a while a ship or a submarine would launch a few missiles on a particular strike but you know who was who was getting all the press who was doing all the missions naval special operations Navy Special Warfare we've we've evolved as you asked me earlier about the some of the types of missions then as compared to now,

we've evolved incredibly. And that evolution is absolutely key. We today are the same people that we were 50 years ago. Jesus, time flies. We are today the same guys as we were 50 years ago. The guys who figure out how to get it done. People like to use the term out-of-the-box thinking. If you think there is the box, you're already constrained.

There is no box. And as we move forward, people wonder about what it is about naval special warfare. We are problem solvers. We figure out how to get it. We are given some of the most difficult missions there are in the inventory of missions and told to figure out how to do them. Sure, we draw in all kinds of other specialties. but that's exactly what we do.

We draw in. You know, look at that whole business with, you know, bin Laden. You know, that wasn't all us, but look at what was brought to bear when we went from incredible intelligence assets, incredible aviation assets, incredible planning assets. Our guys figured out how to fly behind mountains and out of radar signatures so the host nation wouldn't even know we were there. That takes a lot of innovation, problem solving.

When I talk to people about who the military is, what we do, people think of us as, you know, bullet launchers, tank drivers, airplane drivers, submarine skippers. They don't understand all the planning and thought and problem solving. Personal management, you name it, that goes into having a successful unit. It's not just pushing a button and launching a missile that General General. dynamics might have built. It's all the other planning that goes on before and after that is so important. That sets the military aside. So when you let's talk about El Salvador and this is one of the small conflicts that was going on. How did you end up getting down there? Well, unfortunately, I was at a team party back in May of 1983 and people were shooting the breeze and it turned out that

Lieutenant Commander Al Schafferberger, who was serving a tour down there as a seal member of the military advisory group, had been assassinated. Boy, there's so much that I can say about that. I learned, I've had the opportunity to have some great jobs in the Navy. Each one of them I've learned so many things, and you don't have enough time to listen. But look at El Salvador. So I'll get killed. I volunteered to replace them.

And I was a commanding officer of a special boat unit 13 at the time. Great opportunity. So the requirement for the guy for replacing Al Salfa Burger was they wanted seal experience, they wanted a boat experience, and they wanted the guy to be able to speak Spanish. They also wanted the guy to be a volunteer. Well, when my name was forwarded to the commander of the military advisory group, He says, well, three out of four ain't bad because I didn't speak Spanish.

But I had the other stuff down. But that's exactly what I did. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, that's why I went to Naval Special War for it. That's what I wanted to do. You know, one of the guys that SEAL Team 1 had his, when I was a skipper, had his brother come out and they were running around.

did PT with us and so on and so forth. And this guy says to his brother, the seal, says, who is that guy? It looks like there ought to be a sign there. It says, in case of war, break glass. And he told me about that, and I had to laugh. But that's what I want to say about each and every guy in the teams. In case of war, break glass.

So that's why I went down to, went down to Salvador. I wanted to see what was going on. I had two or three weeks of personalized Spanish training, but I was the outgoing commanding officer of a unit. I had, because it was active and reserve, I had X number of active and I had three time that many reserve, officer fitness reports,

you know, chief evaluations to get out. And the other thing is, a lot of those guys did things that deserved recognition during the period of time that I was commanding officer. So I had awards to get written up. And so it was a hard period of time. I didn't get a whole hell of a lot of Spanish. But by the time I left El Salvador, I was dreaming in Spanish. How long were you down there for? I was down there for a full year.

But it was, I first got down there and I working in the embassy. whether they were Americans or, you know, Salvadorans, they all had to speak fluent English. So we could get business done because numb nuts here couldn't speak Spanish. We could get business done speaking English. And I tried doing it all in Spanish when I first got there. And it was enough of a delay.

I said, okay, we'll work on this gradually. You know, I'll be English. So we went and we spoke English, but that was one of the most exciting times that I've, that I've ever had in the military. I got down there and there was a civil war going on. The mill group commander, a guy named Joe Stringham, Colonel Joe Stringham, smoking Joe Stringham. The, I don't want to say the guy was on speed, but I don't know what made the guy. this man tick. That man never slowed down, that smoking Joe. I mean, parapetetic, hyperkinetic, you pick your term, that was Joe. I couldn't keep up with the man, and I thought I was pretty good.

So I get down there. I'm there for about 10 days or two weeks, and I have, you know, taken over the job that Al was doing part-time. And I'm the ex-o at the office. as well as the Navy rep. And there's a, there's a retired, or, I don't know, Hilda, Hilda wasn't in the Air Force long enough. Hilda, the secretary, who was a Hispanic American, and she was, a piece of work, she brought out this piece of paper that Colonel Stringham had written.

This is, the colonel wants me to type this up, I can't read this. and so Hilda and I were going over this particular piece of paper and said the only reason I could make sense of it and figure out what it was was because I had been part of the conversation and knew what he's trying to do. But that's, I mean, he didn't have time to write that right clearly. So 10 days after I'm down there, I finally, you know,

my position is I could see the daughter's office and maybe even see partly into his office. And Colonel Stringham's getting ready, to go off back over to the Estado Mayor. The Estado Mayor is their equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He worked with all the leadership of the Salvador military. He's getting ready to blast off and go over to the Estado Mayor. And I was not at my lifting peak, but I was, you know, pretty big,

almost Jocko's size. and Colonel Stringham was a few inches shorter and a good 50 pounds, maybe 60 pounds lighter. So I just stood in the door. And I said, Colonel, we got to talk, I got to have some left and right margins. And so he said, okay, come on over the house tonight. All right, so.

But that was a fantastic year. Colonel Stringham spent his time working very closely with the Estada Mayor because as you remember, there were things like death squads going on before four I got down there and before the colonel got down there. I think there had been a number of nuns who had been kidnapped, raped, killed, and all that other stuff, and it was being blamed on some of the Salvadoran armed forces,

not the bad guys, but the Salvadoran. So Colonel String was doing everything that he could to provide that U.S. influence on how to come. conduct warfare. And so in order to do that, he needs to spend a lot of his time over there. So I ended up being the stuck-e in the embassy. And when I say stuck-e, you know, that meant this meeting that came up, or this delegation coming down to Salvador and so on and so forth.

So it was a wonderful opportunity. Let me drift right back to Ray Smith for a second. Secretary Armitage, named Rachel Armitage, was a Naval Academy graduate. And, you know, Secretary Armitage at the time was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, I think it was. He had a couple of active duty military assistants. Ray Smith, his classmate from the Naval Academy, and another guy. So, international security affairs is what paid for. what goes on, you know, what money comes to El Salvador.

And they monitor it and review it and so on. And it was a lot of money at this time. It was a lot of money. Billions of dollars are going down there. I don't remember the numbers, and I should because I can't tell you how many hours or weeks I spent going over the numbers, this, that, and the other thing. So about after we had that conversation, you know, Colonel and I, you know, so I'm in country, you know, no more than three weeks, no more than four weeks. no more than four weeks. And Secretary of Defense

comes down to visit. Casper Weinberger. Secretary Weinberger comes down, an assistant secretary Armourages with him. And in my accelerated preparation to go down to Salvador,

I went to a couple of courses and there was this Air Force was a major at the time. Anyway, He and I became friends in this three-week course at Air Force Basin. He ends up being an assistant to Weinberger. So Weinberger comes down for the full treatment, and I'm handling the backside operations,

making sure that everybody's where they're supposed to be, yada, yada. And so I didn't have any contact with Armidage, you know, Weimberger, this Air Force mayor. that I had met. Colonel Stringham comes back. We're having a debrief of the day, and first thing out of his mouth is, it says, who are you?

What do you mean? Who are you? He said, three or four people on the Secretary of Defense staff today asked me, how's Tom Richards doing? Who are you? So I said to him, I said, well, one of my Bud's classmates

is a special assistant to, you know, Secretary Armitage and, you know, if we ever needed to play an ace in the hole and things weren't quite going right, and I could always call Ray and he'd be more than happy to help figure out how to unscrew something and Stringham just shook his head. But one of the, there are any number of stories, you may recall that we had a limitation on the number of advisors we could have in country at a given point in time. and that number happened to be 55. And as I say, there's a number of stories

about how that number came up. Be that as it may, that was a number that we had to live with. I can count to 55 in my sleep, starting with my left hand, my right hand, my left foot, my right foot. If we had 56 American military individuals in country, the press was all over us like a hangover on Saturday morning.

Oh, you're not living up to your obligation. You're trying to get too many trains. in country, you're doing this. Bottom line is, my job, my ass was gonna lose a chunk if number 56 was in country. We were at some points in time, we had guys getting off the airplane

at the Salvador and Air Force base and other guys getting on at the same time just to make sure we stayed at 55. And at one point in time, we had a series of challenges, security challenges in country. I had my go bag packed. I always had my go bag packed. Did that 55 include like the embassy security Marines and all that? No, that's where I was going to go. The Marines had a security detachment and it was one of the largest. It was, oh, 25, 28 guys. It was a large, you know, Marine Security Detachment. And so you had the Marine Security Detachment. You had the military advisory groups,

staff. So that was me, the colonel, Ms. Martinez, a couple of, you know, three, four army officers and Air Force officers who were five, six Air Force officers who were Army and Air Force officers, who were doing various things as part of the group staff. Then you also had the Defense Atte's Office, Defense Atash's office. There were only a handful of of guys over there, no more than half a dozen. So we had a meeting at the embassy. We called everybody in to get everybody in uniform on the same page. It was about security kinds of things.

And of course, there's a half a dozen media personnel, always keeping an eyeball on. They counted, and there was no way we had 55 of our advisors there, but we had a bunch of our advisors there. We had a bunch of the Marines there. We had our mill group staff. We had our attaché staff. So they counted well over 55, you know, military guys. And so I spent part of a press conference explaining to them, you know, who these people are and how they count and how close attention we do pay to that, pay to that number. But that was a real pain in the in the butt. So as I mentioned, I'm talking to the press about that. Mrs. Richard's little boy, Tommy, did not go to Salvador, prepared to be, you know, fielding

questions from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Diego Union. I mean, give me a break. I was a fast learner, though. But it was, it was, it was difficult. You know, they had, they had an agenda. And I had, I had, I had, I had a mission. And so I won't say never the Twain shall meet, but I had to be very careful with my answers, and I had to debunk a number of their concerns. While I was there, and I apologize for not being able to recall a man's name,

there was actually a reporter from San Diego who was killed on a battle zone. And, of course, the colonel was over at the Estado, so I was taking that next press conference. And I'm saying that they, you know, one of the things that they press complained about was the number of what they were calling non-combatant injuries that were occurring. And of course, this reporter's injury,

or death is non-combatant as you can get. But I try to explain to them, there's a firefight going there. There's a gunfight going out there. these bullets, when they come out of the end of the gun that are aimed by people are not necessarily the best marksmen that they are that there could be,

these bullets don't have name tags on them. And it's hard to tell where they're going to go and who's going to get hit. One of the things that the guerrillas did because they were, you know, guerrillas and they didn't have the kind of funding that you might have wanted to have was when the shooters, the guys, are out there,

one of the guys gets hit, fall down, one of the women or one of the kids go right out onto the battle zone to collect the gun and the bullets for the other guys so they still have weapons and ammunition to carry out the fight. They're right there in the middle of the firefight. Of course they're going to get hit.

It isn't our decision that they choose to make them combatants, but that's what they have done. They're no longer women and children. They are combatants. They are right there. in the combat zone. That's the kind of thing that these different countries

with these different senses of values do to the Americans. And they do it throughout the Middle East. They were doing it in Salvador. And that's the type of battles that our young servicemen are forced into. You take an American kid whether he's come out of high school or college.

What do we talk about today? We've got, you know, women's rights. We've got gays rights. We have equal opportunity, you know, LGBT, whatever the variety of things are, that our youth of today is drilled to be so aware of and so conscious of. We treat women in the United States. My wife weighs about a buck 18 or a buck 20. If I was to raise my hand to that lady, I'd break her in half. I've never even thought about it.

In foreign countries, they use women as flack jackets to protect themselves from bullets coming in. Those kinds of things are so antithetical to what we think and we believe as Americans. And yet we take this kid out of, you know, Peoria or, you know, pick your. you know, central United States or Central American values. We take this person and we put them in the middle of this shitstorm, this soup of total disregard for human rights and human life, human values, and, you know, we do this to people on a daily basis. That's the kind of thing that I really first encountered in Vietnam,

saw it brought home again in El Salvador, you know, being on the ground as I was. So we do some pretty interesting things to our youth of America by throwing them into this cauldron of discontent that we do. I could go on for that one a little bit more, but that's an incredible thing. So I will go on with that for just a little bit more. Let me talk about something people call PTSD. And I won't use some of my terminology on your podcast, but we need to lose the D. Let's just go back to my day in the rice paddy in January of 71.

I got Don Futrell with a bullet hole in his chest. I got Grant Telfar shot in both legs. I got Jim Rowland with a bullet hole in his chest. Jim Rowland with a bullet hole in his chest in his groin. My hand is, you know, looks like a, looks like kind of, you know, raw hamburger, you know, left in a pile of juice. I'm not ever going to unsee that. I'll say that I don't mind, and I really don't because we had signed up to do that. That's what we're there for.

But people today are coming back from wars, and they're seeing far worse. seeing roadside IEDs, you know, supposedly impenetable, you know, armored vehicles, you know, ripped the part like a, like a beer can. And the parts of the people inside of that that they try to drag to safety if they happen to be a survivor. And they just watch bleed out or the corpsmen that have to deal with out on a daily basis. you cannot unsee any of that. It's not going to go away. You look at our first responders of today.

You've got a knife fight. You've got a gunfight. You've got a fire at a house. You've got a gas explosion. What do those people see? They see fellow members of their township or whatever their association is in parts. Blood everywhere.

You know, sometimes human forms. Irrecognizable if there is such a term. You're never going to unsee those things. So let's not talk about post-traumatic stress as a disorder. If you don't have some thoughts, some concerns, if you didn't wish your fellow American wasn't such a jackass at times to cause this kind of hate, discontent, pain and misery on other people, If you didn't have some form of thought process, of, again, regret that these things happen,

wish they didn't happen, wish that you didn't happen to see it, if you didn't have those kinds of thoughts, that's the disorder. You know, I tell my wife that I don't have any post-traumatic stress. I don't have any flashbacks. You can call me a lion mother, but, you know, there are things we were, we were sure. standing outside a dinner theater shortly after I came back from Vietnam. Car backfired. Jackie, look, where am I?

I'm on the ground. I'm looking for what the problem is, where it came from, what I need to do about it. I wouldn't call that post-traumatic stress. I'd say that's good training. But as we look at all these individuals who come back from these situations, and I want to include the first responders who face these things every day. As we look at these people, we need to understand, we will never understand some of the things that they cannot unsee,

but we need to understand that they have been in those situations. And we have put them there. We the American people sent Chaco and myself, the rest of us, to various places around the world, we never could find on the map before we went there, to do things, to try to support people, democratic pursuits and shit happens and it's not it's not pretty but yet we do that to the youth of America time and time again so we need to understand that this post-traumatic stress

exists it's not a disorder and we need to make sure that we address it so where did you when you when you came home from Vietnam and like you know you just talked that story about the the the backfire in the car. What about the rest of your platoon? It sounds like you guys kind of went to the four wins in all in different directions. We sure did. I think I mentioned earlier in the podcast

that I hadn't seen Grant Telfer for 15, 20 years, maybe even more after that. And he later became a commanding officer of SEAL Team 1. While he was in that position, I was on the East Coast. And years later, I bumped into Jim Roland and Don Futrell went to went into EOD. Another one of those easy, easy warper specialties.

He went into EOD and Don retired as a W-4, but shortly after he went to the platoon, I lost track of Don. I knew he went into EOD, but we reconnected and I spoke at his retirement. But, you know, crap, that was not much. much to say for, you know, keeping tabs on your platoon members. Other guys got out. Marcus Arroyo was a highly successful, you know, executive in the, I believe, was the FAA, or was the TFAA, I believe.

And, you know, so, but we lost track of each other. And so we're really, I know I am really looking forward to seeing some of those guys again. here this weekend. But those guys, you know, they carried on, right? So whatever PTS they had, they were able to say, okay, this is my, this is what I'm going to do now, I'm going to go to the FAA or I'm going to go to EOD and we're able to kind of push through those, whatever, whatever was going on in their heads. That appears to be, that appears to be the case.

And of course, not of course, Jim Rowland got out of the Navy for a little bit after, after Vietnam, but he came back and retired as a senior chief. So let's go back. You get home from El Salvador. What's next on the agenda? Let's see. Where do I go from El Salvador? I came back here to beautiful sunny Southern California.

And I was on the staff of Special Warfare Group 1. And I worked for a couple of folks who end up being flag officers, Chuck Lemoyne. and George Worthington, a couple of good guys, and of course met a whole lot of other good guys. And what I'll say, what I need to say here is, when I retired, that's what I miss most, the guys. I miss the guys, and of course knowing what was going on in the world,

but you miss the guys. You missed the organization, the association. So I went to group one, and from group one I went over to the BCO SEAL Team one. Now, that's almost like cheating because I was the operations officer at group one. So I knew how the group staff worked. I knew how the group commander worked. And when I say the staff, just how it functions, who did what to whom.

Who you could call, you built those little relationships. Right. Admiral Worthington and Admiral Lemoyne had a, and several other guys who were the commander there, had a secretary by the name of Lena. And I'm embarrassed, I can remember Lena's last name. But Lena was a piece of work. Lena knew everything.

And if you were good to Lena, you learned a lot. But I remember one day, you know, I think it was Le Moyne. Le Moyne comes out to Lena and, you know, all right, I want this, this, this, this, and this. Lena knows that sounds kind of familiar. She comes strutting into my office and we, you know, we try to piece it together and figure out, you know, she had some of the files for that and I had some of the files. But, you know, she was, you know, quite a young lady. It's a young lady, older lady.

But there were some great folks on that staff. And like I said, it's kind of like cheating. to have that chance before I went to SEAL Team 1. And then your CEO of SEAL Team 1 for a couple of years, and this is, what years are you, the CEO of SEAL Team 1? 86 to 88. Okay. And during that period of time, I had the chance to deploy to the Persian Gulf. I was going to say, the oil rigs and the counter-Iranian stuff.

Right. Right. So we had two barges that were really oil rigs support barges. And we use those as floating operations bases for a couple of elements of, you know, a couple of aviation elements. I think their participation was later declassified, but we'll just leave it at that. A couple of, you know, aviation elements. And, of course, we had our patrol boats.

And our patrol boats were, you know, doing escorts of U.S. Navy big hulls. They were also doing escorts of tankers, you know, as you may recall, a number of those foreign flagged ships were reflagged to U.S. ships, so we could actually, excuse me, we could actually escort them up and down the, up and down the Gulf. Was there any highlights to those deployments? There were a number of them. we had

there's a Paul Evancoe led an op on something on a boat called the Iran Azjar

and the Iran Azjar was caught trying to seed a few more mines after you know Iran had been told

stop what you're doing anyway they they conducted the op you know seized the boat a bunch of mines

and so on well fast Ford, and you know, several months later, I'm out there as the task unit, you know, commander. And we get a report of a craft in restricted waters, and it looks like there might be mine-like objects on the back end of this boat, and that this is another group going to be laying mines in the sea lanes. So we go to GQ.

we launched some of these aviation assets to try to get some night shots of the boat in question. And it was coming up, you know, coming up towards dawn. And, you know, obviously, you know, those early hours are the good time, too, at the hit folks. Some folks are getting up. Some folks are going off a watch. Some folks are eating. So good time to make a hit if you're going to do that. So they came back and they had some pictures

and sure look like mine-like objects. But you know, you got that little, we call it it Spitey Sense. Something's not quite right with this picture. And one of the things that I always say to the guys, if you think that there's something wrong with this picture, you stop what you're doing and to figure out. until you figure out what is wrong with this picture. So we got guys locked and loaded.

We got the slicks. We got the gunships. These guys are ready to go take down these boats, this boat. And I said, hold fast. We're not going anywhere. Give me one more shot at the early twilight. It turned out to be another oil rig supply boat. that had a bunch of 55-gallon drums,

not mines on the after deck. I won't say what country it was from. They were in waters where they shouldn't have been. They have no idea how close to death they came. So I'm sitting out there. I'm in the talk. I'm monitoring all the other communications. And I'm the one that, you know,

we had these guys in the air said, you know. and the three-star Navy type who was in charge of, you know, Mid-East-Fore, you know, Navy Mid-East-Fore, he, I didn't realize it, but he was in the talk the whole time, you know, listening, you know, I'm sure of them, the LaSalle was based in Bahrain, we're out there in the middle of the Persian Gulf. and the

the admiral was there and you're just listening you're listening and you know when I called it off when I saw what it was and you just went you know and went in and so I came

I came ashore you know a week 10 days later and the 06 you know Opsol calls me over and he says good job but you know we had American lives on the line We had international lives on the line.

Could have been a mining operation. I just did not know. And I was not sure that this was a miner, a mine laying vessel. So I said, nope, we're not doing that. What were your major lessons learned? What was like a good takeaway from being the commanding officer at Steel Team One? Trying to train the guys are going to follow me,

prepare them for their jobs. There was a platoon with Dave Pittle Cow was the commander of the platoon and Gardner Howe was his assistant that would be Vice Admiral Howe was his assistant

and they were going over to the Gulf and as they're in my in my office getting ready to go one of the things I explained to him I said, I feel that you guys are as prepared as you can possibly be to go over there and to conduct the litany of operations

that you would be called upon to do. But I said to him, I said, my fervent hope is that that doesn't happen. And I got these two confused looks or inquisitive looks from these two gung-ho

seal officers who were getting ready to go to war because it wasn't the shooting war at that point in time. And what I explained to them was if you guys have got to do

the things that we've trained you and prepared you to do, that means that somebody has failed big time. And so that was a learning experience for Dave and Gardner, but it was one of the things

that I tried to, to, try to impart to those guys. You know, there's, there's, wow, in case of, in case of glass, in case of glass, in case of war break glass, that's us, absolutely. But if it devolves to that point, that means that White House policy has failed, you know, state department policy has failed, any number of things, you know, across the spectrum of the leadership of our country has failed. So it is truly, in case of war, break glass.

one of the that same platoon as it turned out as they're preparing to uh preparing to get ready to uh to go overseas uh you have any number of uh training operations and uh you know we those of us in the teams are familiar with something we call a rubber duck uh a rubber duck is a is airdrop of a of a small rubber boat on a platform, as it were, drops out in the ocean and you sink the platform and from that point in the ocean, you go ashore and you do your job. And if everything worked all right, everybody else in the world doesn't know that the C-130 or 141 might have dropped this boat and seals off the coast. Well, they had a rubber duck drop practice event.

and there was a parachute rigging malfunction, and instead of the parachute deploying, the rubber duck creamed into the ocean. You know, the platform breaks into a thousand pieces. The boat is shredded. The outboard motor is lost, et cetera, et cetera. So I had not stayed up for, or stayed at the commander for the event.

but I get to the command about 7 o'clock in the morning and I get a high-speed, you know, five-minute brief that the rubber duck died, and it was a rigging malfunction. So before, seven o'clock is before quarters, our day at Team 1 started with quarters at 7.30. So it's about 715. Before I could even get to Lieutenant Piddle Cow or Lieutenant Howe, the parachute rigger from the squad comes in, bangs on my door, Patti Osher's second class, Bacchus.

Bacchus apologizes to the commanding officer of the team for letting his platoon down, for letting my platoon down, for not meeting the expectations of everybody that they had for Bacchus and the troops to do that job. When Bacchus came into my office to do that, that told me that I clearly had some level of communication with the guys,

some level of respect, from the guys, that before I could go out and try to rip him a new one, he shows up at my office and apologizes. You know, that told me that I must have done something right at SEAL Team 1. That was probably one of the greatest experiences in Team 1. You have people taking ownership

and that's an attitude that starts at the top. Yep. So you wrap up at SEAL Team 1, and then your next big command is taking over buds. That was my next opportunity. I spent three years at Naval Sea Systems Command learning a lot about money, purchasing, and all that other kind of stuff.

And I followed a guy by him with Tommy Hawkins, who was a legend in the world of our research development an acquisition and even though I left that job as a quote certified Navy acquisition professional I was I was offered jobs in the acquisition side of the house I was offered the opportunity to take jobs in acquisition as opposed to continuing in naval special warfare so yeah and I could have been a program manager in NAVC or as I went to you know the job at the at the center but I probably never learned as much as Tommy Hawkins knew about acquisition. Quite a guy.

So, yes, my next command was at the center. And there are a couple of things that were really, really fun about the center. You watch young men come in there, and they're not entirely sure what they're getting into. and they're also not entirely sure whether they can do this or not. They're pretty sure they can. That's why they're there in the first place. They really want to, which is why they're there. But a lot of folks have a little bit of a nagging doubt.

And a lot of those guys' success is at times a somewhat of a surprise perhaps to their parents. But in many cases, an achievement of great pride on the parents' part. And as a commanding officer of the center, one of the things that I did was I attended every Bud's graduation. Now, again, this was when Bud's was the six months before we went on to the follow-on SQT, I believe it's still called these days. So they would complete the six months, and then they would go to the various teams for that follow-on training before they received their special warfare designator. Anyway, I cannot tell you how many parents would come up to me at these graduation events, and they would say, you know, Captain Richards, we really want to thank you and your staff

for what you have done for Frank or, you know, for Frank or, or Eckers. or Gary and their development and their maturation process. You know, he's a changed man after these six, six, eight months. I said, no, Mrs. Smith, you really have to understand, we took what you gave us an individual who had some pretty high aspirations, and you taught them to have those high aspirations. We taught an individual who thought he had the qualifications, and you helped him develop these qualifications. You might have thought he was a little bit of a misfit here and there.

I'm probably speaking from personal experience, but you prepared this young man to get there. We wouldn't have this young pedios or this young ensign graduating from seal training if it hadn't been for you. And, you know, these parents would just kind of, look at me and look at each other. Hmm, yeah, you know. Maybe there's something to do that.

But that's a point that I would really like to make, that the individual who graduates after, now it's a year, but that individual came to buds with a certain amount of preparation, a significant amount of preparation. And it's preparation that reflects family values, family, family motivation, family support for an individual. And I can remember something, we never thought he was gonna be any good.

You know, we kept trying and trying, you know, he always kept getting in trouble and whatever it might have been. And that's my point. You kept trying and trying and trying, and look where he is now. He said, that's your fault. And they'd stop and they think.

But it's that, it's that preparation, that growth, that goal setting that these young men have as they start looking around and figuring out what they wanted to do. As we talked earlier in the podcast, I really had, you know, when I was in high school, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do when I got out of college if I was going to be fortunate enough to get to college. And in today's environment, it's significantly different. Our youngsters grow up seem to grow up a lot faster. But that said, they're not going to make it through Buds without that background, without that preparation, without those family values. That's so important.

They have to have that base, whether they realize it or not, they have to have that base to succeed. Yeah, and it's so strange to look at Buds. It seems impossible to predict who's going to make it and who's not. the amount of incredible athletes that show up there and quit the you know i know i had a guy that was in my class that was a you know NCAA water polo player had another guy that was a gymnastics alternate on the olympic gymnastics team and both those guys quit and you know i was like an average maybe even a little below average athlete in high school and you know like i just just was ready to stick it out and what i was like i was ready to stick it out and what i was

I was wanting to ask you, and I don't know how close you were to it to see this, but, you know, in talking, I remember talking to some of my friends that worked as the physical therapist, right, at Buds. And I had a couple of them that had come from professional sports. And so in professional sports, he was telling me, you know, he worked with a baseball team or a football team, pro level teams. And he'd say, you know, I might see one or two cases of Patel. Phamoral Syndrome or what is it ITB swelling or this type of back thing he goes I might see one or two of those in a season He goes I literally saw 48 cases of Patelah formal syndrome in the last three days It's like this highly you just get this so much repetitive You know injuries that happen to all these guys coming in but then also what the thing I was gonna ask you about is the

Did you start to see any common I mean, you kind of just mentioned, but in the like the psychological makeup of the people, because you got kids that come from rich families that show up there that were, you know, two parents that went to church on Sundays and the kids do great. You also see those same kids quit. You see some kid from the hood that grew up without parents or, you know, a single mom or a single dad and didn't have any money, didn't have anything, and they make it. And you also see kids like that that quit. What did it look like to you? I agree with you 110%. you mentioned the gymnast.

We had an Olympic swimmer in our class. Fred was a butterfly guy. Fred made it. There was another NCAA swimmer in the class. I believe his name, well, his name is not important. There was an NCAA swimmer in the class. That means you're like what, the top six or top eight in your event in the country, one of those. In any event, this guy busted his ass.

And one day in one of the series of nuisance races in the pool, this kid beat Fred in one of the races. Two days later, kids gone. His goal was to be able to say that he beat this Olympic swimmer. He was in there for the wrong reasons. I have never really been able to tell you who was going to make it It was not, but as I've looked at it, you know, for years and years, and I've worked with a guy by him of Captain Bissett up in New England as he tries to prepare guys for training.

He has somewhere around a 70, better than a 70% success rate for his candidates. The average success rate of any class, as you know, is somewhere around 25 or 30% graduate. in Drew's case, 75% graduate. So as I've looked at things over the years, there was another group when I was a CEO of the center who had a 75% graduation rate. That group was in Naval Academy candidates. Let's stop and think about...

Like how many of them were Naval Academy? 70... Of the Naval Academy people who came in, Oh, I see. So 75% of Naval Academy guys make it. Right. Yep. Let's stop and think about it.

In order to get into the Naval Academy, that is one hell of a competitive process. I don't think the American public realizes how competitive it is to get into a military service academy. It's either political appointment or a combination of political appointments and exceptional academic capability and physical ability. For years, those academies only gave engineering degrees. I might be somewhere back in the 70s where they started with some other degrees, but it's very difficult to get into the academies. So if you get into the academy, you have set a goal, you have worked hard to achieve that goal, and you've attained that goal.

Now, in the case of the Naval Academy and the individuals who end up with a quote of the buds, I'm not an academy graduate. I'm fairly sure of how it works, but if there's a guy out there who wants to correct it, please do so. They have a warfare specialty selection process, and the number one guy in the class of the Naval Academy can pick what warfare specialty he wants to go to. The way it works, and that's the way it works,

whether he decides he wants to be an aviator. Of course, if he wants to be an aviator, Of course, if he wants to be a seal, he's got to pass the PFT. But if he's got the PFT and today he's got to go to SOAS, the Special OPS acquisition and selection. But you've got to be at the top of your class. So you've not only fought to get into the Naval Academy. You have fought to keep your grades up. You have fought to keep your physical conditioning up.

because out of the top 100 guys in the Naval Academy, they're probably going to eat up those quotas to go to Buds. And so now there's 1,100 guys in the Naval Academy. Every one of those 1,100 individuals was pretty outstanding to get there in the first place. Now you've got to work to be in the top 100, 100 plus in that group to get selected to Buds. So those guys, this is my reasoning, those guys have fought and challenged for everything that they have gotten every step of the way. And so they're used to fighting and they're used to overcome an adversity and they're used to

succeeding. So I give you that as a, that goal setting, attain those goals, figure out where you want to go, set those girls early and drive towards those goals. To your observation about the, you know, Patella syndrome, what? Yeah, that was one example. I remember kids in my class got this thing called Patella Fomoral Syndrome. or they got their IT band was this problem, or they got this ankle.

You know, my ankles rolled. You know, the medics at Buds will see, instead of being, you know, at a football practice and in one season they see, whatever, in a whole season, they'll see 10 bad ankle springs. In Buds, they see that every week. Every week they see that. And they just see these injuries over and over again.

And I was just wondering from your perspective, what you saw, you know, what was the reason when someone says, it went why they quit it's hard for me to comprehend that you enlist in the navy you know you enlist in the navy when I enlisted the Navy I enlisted for six years in the Navy I'm freaking 18 years old I enlist for six years in my life that's a what is that a third of my life right I enlist for a third of my life I signed the dotted line I I run and swim to get ready I go to boot camp I put up with all that crap say goodbye

of my friends and families, you know, tell everyone, hey, I'm going to go try and be a seal, get through boot camp, then finally show up to Buds. And like the first day, after going through all that stuff, people are quitting. It's hard to comprehend. Did you ever, were you able to put together any kind of understanding of that? No.

And I've gotten into some conversations with, people who think that they've come up with the with the test that's going to show who's going to make it and who's not and as far as I'm concerned they're full of horse manure. Let's go back to my observations about those families of those successful kids. They have they have a sense of values. They, you know, whether they know right from wrong the way we would want it to be, that's that's hard to say. But they have they have a sense of value. that they have grown up with. And like the Naval Academy individuals that I've said, these individuals who succeed have set goals and they are very determined in getting to those goals. And like I said to the family, we didn't give them something that they didn't have

before they got here. And that's the thing that I don't know about. I will tell you out loud that I know, never thought about quitting in buds. Me neither. I puked, you know, I cramped. I used to, you know, I was the worst runner in the class. You know, everybody knows about getting a stitch in your side when you're running.

I had a goddamn freight train running through my liver. And I can't tell you how much it hurt. But I would actually say to myself to my, to my, you know, sniveling body, I would say, is that all you got? As you go through training, it's all between the ears. You've got to have that goal in mind and you've got to be willing

to put up with whatever it is. There's a couple of things I'm going to say here. From the neck down is a life support system for the neck up, for the brain housing group, as we call it. It's all between the ears. And I don't know who said it first, but there's an expression that I use about mind over matter.

If you don't mind, it don't matter. And I mean, I can't tell you, again, how much I hurt on those runs. As I look at, so there's something either right or wrong with a few thousand of our American service members called SEALs that have this, that have this mindset. There is definitely a mindset. It's not a killer mindset. It's a success mindset. It's, you know, wolves and sheep mindset.

You are what you are. And I strongly believe that there are people like that. You know, my wife, my wife knows who I am. And, you know, don't mess with me, you know. So, and that's the way it is with, with, with every seal I know. You don't mess with the guy. And it's not just because of my size or Jocco's size.

It's because of the attitude. You're going to lose. Instructor Moy one day, I'm in the goon squad. I maintain, for those of us that are old enough to remember, there used to be half a dozen palm trees out in front of the Hotel Dell that go down to the rocks, where we do our rock portage. I maintain that I have probably caused the death

of at least one of those palm trees because I ended up puking at the bottom of those because of what those guys made me do in the goon squad. It didn't matter. I didn't give a good goddamn what they did to me. They could not get that four-letter word out of me. Quit. It was not going to happen.

I was, we were down there by the rocks and I'd done the roll in the surf, the roll in the soft dry sand, we used to call them sugar cookies, because now here I am coated in water and white, sparkling sand from the Coronado Silver Strand, and I'm doing what's called the duck walk. So you're squatting down, and you've got your hands folded behind your head. And I will admit that I was not doing the duck walk

with any degree of alacrity, shall we say. Was I feeling sorry for myself, you bet your ass? And instructor Moy comes up to me, and he, like I say, I'm squatting down with my hands behind my head, you know, trying to squat, wattle, walk whatever, towards the ocean. And Moy is roaring at me. He says, what the hell are you giving it there, Inson Richards? And I looked up at him and I said, would you call, would you believe a sick duck? and I watched Chief Moy have to turn around.

His shoulders are shaken, but I was not quitting. And there's that something that all these psychiatrists, psychologists, whatever they are, they haven't quite been able to figure out what it is. Again, I keep going back to the goal setting. Go back. Today's training, young men not only have to. train in order to be able to pass the PFT. You know, if they only do the run in 12 and a half minutes,

they ain't going to make it through buds. And that's for a couple of reasons. It's not only because of the physical ability, per se, to do the run, but it's what I look at as the ability to recover. Because when you get to buds, if you haven't been doing this for years and years, you know, if you haven't been running,

if you haven't been swimming. If you haven't been doing that for years, you are going to break down when you get the buds. So you have to really have built up your ability to recover. Okay, I didn't do a lot of swimming and I didn't do a lot of running in preparation for buds. But I was lifting weights at that time at pretty close to a damn pro level.

And I was doing it 12 and a half, 13 months a year. That's what I lived to do. When I got the buds, I could do PTSD. all day long. If I only had to do push-ups with my own body weight, that was a whole lot of doing, wrapping out with 315 pounds. Oh, we've got to do a few push-ups?

Oh, that's okay. I'm joking about that, but push-ups didn't bother me. And to the Olympic swimmer we had in our class. You know, Fred was probably on vacation during those swims. You probably fell asleep on the six-mile swim out at the, you know, San Francisco.

Many Island. but that gave Fred a chance to recover. When I was doing PT, you know, the PT circle in the morning, okay, I knew that I, unless some instructor got really innovative, I probably wasn't going to have too much trouble with this. And so if you've got something like to swim or you're an incredible runner and you can keep up with those instructors, you know, through the soft sand runs, and not only is it not difficult for you physically,

but because it's not difficult for you physically, it's an emotional break. You know, there's a certain amount of mental stress or mental strength that you don't have to use during that particular evolution. So if you're in really good shape, that takes a strain, a stress factor, out of a particular event, run, swim,

you know, whatever it might be. But even with that ability, you know, we had a high school, or junior college, uh, miler who did a damn mile in something like four minutes and 10 or 15 seconds. You know, you clocked me with a damn calendar.

This guy quit, you know, uh, but, you know, you take off the, uh, cute little nylon running shorts and you put on the,

uh, the, uh, the boots and all of a sudden it's a different kind of running. But, all that said, there has to be that mind that, that mindset there.

In addition to that physical capability, there's got to be that mindset. What it is, I don't know. Every once in a while you run into a guy, I have a classmate of mine. I'm not going to mention his name because somebody's still on active duty. But years ago, one of his sons

was expressing interest in the teams. and that particular individual did not get to the teams. He didn't get to training for whatever reason it was. But we had gone down and we had spent some time with my classmate. As I'm driving back with Jackie, I said to Jackie, he said, sweetheart, Schmucketele is going to be the member of that family that makes it through. There was just that feeling I got from that kid. And yes, he did.

And every once in a while, you get that. But not often. It was his demeanor. It was his presence. It was his confidence. Not cocky, but his confidence. You can't always see that. And I was probably lucky in that judgment.

But he made it. proud of them. But to your point, Jocko, I don't know what the it factor is. I look at the confidence in the goal setting and the ability to recover to get you through. As you heard,

I like to think if an individual's got a specialty where he can take a break, that that will be very helpful to him. There's just some missing link there that I don't know exactly what it is. And it's just so hard to put your finger on. Did you notice anything from when you went through in 1969, 1970, and then you fast forward, what, 20-something years,

was there anything that you said, oh, they got soft over here, they got weak over here, this is easier, or this is harder? I'm going to say it got harder. and so I take over as a CEO of the center. And one of the things that I did was I looked at the schedules for each of the different phases. And I also looked at all the schedules for the advanced training because one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to go out

and observe, you know, observe the class, observed the instructors, yada, yada. I went and I spent time out of San Clemente Island when I was the commanding officer. I went to wherever there was training. So I take over as a skipper and I'm looking at the training schedules. Now, when I went through training, I do not recall a training day that started before 0-700. We had to be on the line at 0-700.

And I was after breakfast, so we didn't form up. but training started at 0,700. And I got to training, and I'm looking at the schedule. The 0400, 0400, 400, 0400, 4,000. When I went through it, it was early. And this particular thing that jumped out of me was a 0530, or 0.515, 4-mile time run. And I'm saying, what?

the hell is this shit. You know? I was saying that too. I was doing them. So whether it was the first phase or the second phase, you know, they came up to me and I said, you know, what are we doing here? Well, that's the only low tide. And that guy is one of the luckiest guys in Naval Special Warfare.

because my question was how fucking stupid do I look? One high tide in the morning, one low tide in morning, one high in the afternoon, one low in the afternoon. And that is not cast in stone because there are a certain number of days in the year where you only have a combination of three tides. You know, you'll get two highs. I said, do not even think about opening your mouth

to say anything else about the tides. But to my point, they were now doing four-mile time runs and maybe an O-course or another session before breakfast. And like I say, we didn't do that. Now, when we were out at San Clemente Island,

there was no schedule. It was 24 hours a day. But otherwise, you know, of course there were nights swims, you know, which, of course, when you get, it wasn't like, you know, seven to five every day. Yeah, you might have, you know, night, you know, night navigation. We'd go up to different places for orientering and so on. And again, you, you, you throw the clock out the window just because of, because of what you're doing. But basically, when we

were at the Strand, it was a, it was a seven to five or seven to five 30. Or again, you talk about night dives and so on, of course, you're going to work until, you know, 10, 11, midnight, whatever it might be. So, so it, it has changed. They are putting at least 12 or 15 pounds into a 10-pound bag. I mean, they are really, they're using every, every minute of the day. So if somebody asks me, is training hardy today, you bet your ass it is. And the guys are in better shape.

They're all, they're all in better shape. So like if you're running with your boat crew, you're running with guys that are able to run faster. So you better be able to run faster. They're just all in better shape. I was over there a couple of years ago and one of my buddies was now a civilian work in there. And we were having the same conversation and we were standing out by the first phase office. And he, you know, there's a hundred helmets lined up. And he said, you know, he goes, look at these hundred, whatever it was, 122 helmets.

He goes, every one of these guys, I'm telling you. Tony was a stud and they're gone. He's like this program is hard. I said, yeah, Roger that. It's a hard-breaking program. It is. And as he said, every one of those 120 guys was a stud. And it goes to that missing factor in there.

What is that, you know, what is it that caused you to put up with all that crap? You know, why did you do that? Some of it is, you know, just perseverance, you know, bullheadedness and so on, but there's some other factor in there. Yeah, we wanted to, you know, wanted to do something for our country. We wanted to do the best job that we could, and we want to do, and as a result, we selected what we thought was the hardest. I didn't realize that when I did that, you know, 50 years ago. That wasn't known that way. But I knew that it was going to be hard, and I selected it anyway in 10.

today's day environment, every one of these kids knows it's going to be a ballbuster. It's going to be hard. And yet they select that. There's a missing factor why those young Americans decide to do that. I can't put my finger on all that. And there's that missing factor about what it is that enables these individuals to put up with what is arguably the most difficult training, you know, in the, in the military in the world.

Did you think you were going to become an admiral? Never. What number seal admiral were you? Number five? So there had been four prior to you. How'd that go down? How'd you hear about that? About the fact that I...

About all the above, I guess. Well, you must have been thinking, hey, all right, I'm going to get done with this tour. I'll be a captain. then I'm going to retire because... Well, I... Jocko, I will not ever claim to have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but it was probably one of the hardest working motherfuckers in the building.

I took one particular job, you know, from a friend of mine, and I remember him saying, yeah, you know, first couple of weeks, three weeks, you know, you might be here at 5, 5.30, 6 o'clock, something like that. But after that, you can get it down, you'll be out of here at 4.30 every day. well I never left at 430 in the entire two years that I had the job

and like I said I worked as hard as I could in whatever job it was and the other thing that I will say is I think you really have to be who you are somewhere around 724 when I was selected

to flag officer Admiral Lemoyne, Chuck LeMoyne, was the Navy SEAL on the board. There were a number of guys a year or two senior to me that I had a high expectation that, you know, Tom Dick or Harry was going to be selected during that period of time. But that was my, you know, basically my first time up. You have to have completed your major command tour, you know, to be eligible. and then you got, you usually got three looks.

But, so anyway, Chuck was on the board. And I had worked for Admiral Lemoyne when he was Group 1 commander. And as I said, you have to be who you are, 724. Well, when I was working for Chuck, I was the first relatively senior officer in the building in the day.

You know, I usually beat the chief of staff in. I usually beat the Commodore in all the time because, you know, our job was to prepare the environment before he showed up. And so anyway, there was an individual

in the organization who was up for captain and didn't get selected. and because I was there and it was out here on the West Coast, you remember Margaret? Indeed. Margaret, the Detailer. Great lady.

She did will by me more than one occasion. Me too. Anyway, Margaret called out asking for the chief of staff. You wasn't there. How about the commoner? He's not there. He says, well, here's a deal. So-and-so didn't, the 06 list.

is coming out and, you know, Schmucketele is not on it. And we wanted to give Le Moyne the chance to prep him before everybody else saw that so that he'd be prepared for any bad news. So, Admiral Le Moyne gets, again, captain at the time, gets in 10 or 15 minutes before the morning, meeting at 8 o'clock. And by habit or custom,

he didn't like to be interrupted before the meeting. He wanted to prepare himself as well. So I banged on the door and barge on in. And I said, excuse me, Captain, you need to hear this. And so I shared the news and left the office. So it was my job to herd the cats

and get everybody into the briefing room in the morning. And there are a few of us standing in the hallway, smoking and joking as you usually do, getting ready to go in and sit in a meeting that will be 60 minutes of your life that you'll never regain. So we're smoking and joking, and Captain Moyne comes down a passageway, and he made an observation.

I guess I can imagine what you're talking. talking about and my take on that was he thought I might have shared the situation with the guy who did not get selected and I turned to the cabinet and no captain where that's that's that's that's not on the agenda it's not anything that I felt that was in my purview to share with anybody and it's things like that when you're dealing with you know junior officers and senior officers that leave an impression. I think I left that impression on Captain Le Moyne. So when several years later, he's on the flagboard, he had some personal experience with who I was and what my values were. And so that's kind of how that works, I believe. You've got to work hard. You've got to do well. you can't do some stupid things. But I have to tell you that I just wanted to do as good a job as I could

and take care of all the people working for me that I could. And I think it paid off. People like, I'm a Worthington and, yeah, I'm a LaMoyne. I'm sure that the two of them had a conversation about, you know, who was going to get selected. Yeah, and I mean, at that time, there just wasn't that many seal admirals. Oh, no.

You had, no, there absolutely weren't. And, or I guess not Worthington, probably Smith. I think Worthington was retired by then. But, you know, I mean, you just got to be who you are, 724. And, you know, working harder than everybody else helps being there when it counts. I said that, I might have said that there was a short list when I raised my hand. go to El Salvador, they only needed one line on the list. There were no other volunteers at that point in time.

And the leadership of the community recognizes those things. And the last place Tom Richards wanted to go after being CEO, SEAL Team 1 was the Naval C Systems Command and sit at a desk and do procurement and research and development. I couldn't even spell it if it hadn't been for Tommy Hawkins. the community would have been in deep kimshi. Oh, boy. So you end up going, taking over what we call Naval Special Warfare Command,

which means you're in charge of all the seals, all the special boat units, all in charge of basic seal training, advanced silts, you're in charge of everything. And that had to be a pretty climactic moment for you to take command. Oh, Jocco, that was an incredible opportunity and an incredible honor to be selected, to have that job, to lead a community like Naval Special Warfare. Not everybody who gets selected to fly gets the opportunity for that job. And I am thankful to the leadership of our community.

you know, again, Abel of Lamoine, for giving me, Admiral Lomoyne and Admiral Smith, for giving me that opportunity. And those were some of my most rewarding years. We were still in our, if you will, early years with Special Operations Command. We were still in our early years of somewhat of a divorce from the Navy, if you will,

because, you know, my, I had two people I reported to. You know, one was a joint service commander, Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine, down there in Tampa. And the other was a code up on the Opnav staff, you know, ultimately, of course, to the CNO. But the money was, you know, there's something called the golden rule. He what's got the gold rules. and the money at that time was from Socom and that's where, you know, the vast majority of my attention went. But going back to the opportunities,

there were so many things going on in the world and specifically within our community. There was a captain by the name of Todd Vizi. He was not a captain at the time, but Todd was stationed down at Navy military personnel command. I believe that was after they had, it was, after they had shifted down to Memphis. And what Todd did was he carried the water for our efforts to create the SWIC community. You know, when I took over a CO Special Boat Unit 13, we had fleet sailors coming to drive these small boats.

The engines, the quote, main propulsion engines of a 65-foot Mark 3 patrol boat were a Detroit-Defatry-Defatil 8V 71TI, I think. And it was a long time ago, but that engine was usually, if they saw it on a ship, that might be an auxiliary diesel generator, not the main propulsion engine. They might not ever have seen it. So you get an engineman from the fleet who's never seen your engine. You get a gunner's mate from his fleet who's looking for the five-inch gun. You get a communications or electronics technician who's looking for, you know,

CIC, it ain't there. And oh, by the way, you need to learn about the M-60, the Prick 77, you name it, that they've never seen before in their life. So we'd get these guys for two or three years, they'd learn a lot about Naval Special Warfare, then boom, they're gone. I took over as CEO of the center, and we had continuing conversations with the then current. COs of the special boat units. They were called units then, not teams. And they decided that they wanted the center to host a training program for their fleet guys coming in.

We were still losing them after three years, but they wanted to, instead of having to learn all this on the job, let's put it together and teach them about this special warfare stuff that they're now in the middle of. So we started out the first class with a three and a half week. class. And when we laid it out as a three and a half week class, they were concerned that that was too much time, you know, to have these guys away from the team. Now, of course, because they were away from the team, that means that they had a boat

or two that was not manned. So, you know, understand that. They finished up with the class. The skippers were so charged that the next class was a five-week class that they decided. and that all grew. So I go from CO Special Bo Unit 13 with the problem, trying to solve part of it as the commanding officer of the center. And now when I get to be the commander of Naval Special Warfare,

I was able to convince the Navy to create the SWIC NEC. And that was just, yeah, that was just, I think, a great accomplishment for the community. And I have to look at folks like Todd Veezy and congratulate them and thank them for their work. And there was a boat guy, Master Chief, Kelly Webb. Unfortunately, Kelly has since passed. But Kelly was a big prime mover in that as well. And I will also say that at one point in time when I was looking for the next command, or the Forest Master Chief for Naval Special Warfare,

it came down to Kelly and a Trident winner. So those are the last two guys standing. But he was quite a guy. So establishment of the SWIC community was something that was just outstanding. And now it's a rate and everything. And guys go in, that's their career. They can go and have their whole career and special boat team. And one of the, you know, it's, I remember having a get-together.

I talked to as many folks as I could on each coast, and I remember, you know, saying the folks and I said, guys, you know, this is, this is hard for me because so much of my time is going to be directed upward, you know, whether it's, you know, budget personnel matters that I'm going to have to work with Socom and the Navy. When I walked in and took command at Naval Special Warfare, there was a relatively new building that didn't come close to accommodating the staff at Naval Special Warfare Command. When I walked in, six, eight, ten, maybe he was 20,

trailers surrounding the building. And I don't want to offend anybody, but I referred to Naval Special Warfare Command's facility is trailer park trash. and here we are sitting right next to the to those gorgeous multi-million dollar

condominiums, they're looking down on a trailer park. I'm sure they love that. So the first budget cycle that I went into with the four-star commander down there in Tampa and I stood up and I pounded the table

and I said, look at this building you guys got. Look at the addition you're putting on. I said, I walked in I've got my people working in trailers, in trailers. And long story short, because it's the way things work, we got that much, we got an accelerated military construction program that clearly wasn't done by the time I left command, but that became one of the top priorities

for the SOCOMM-Mil-com budget to get us some buildings. And I'll go one step further. You know, this afternoon I'm getting a chance to go down and view the new facilities for SEAL Team 1. That whole Naval Special Warfare Complex down there is billions of dollars. More importantly, that says that that billion dollar figure was high enough in the priority list to get funded. That says that Socom and the United States Navy and the Department of Defense recognized the commitment required to retain the capability that Naval Special Warfare provides to our military readiness.

They understand that and they're funding it. It's not just a bunch of new buildings. It says so much more than that. Yeah, that is so impressive for what's down there, what they built for, and it's all the West Coast Steel team down there. It's absolutely phenomenal. It's like, I mean, I remember when I got to Seal Team One and checked in, it was very underwhelming.

I mean, we kind of, I guess our building, I don't know what year that building was built where Seal Team One was, but it was maybe 10 years old, maybe 15 years old, something like that. I'll tell you when it was built because it was turned over to me as a CEO of Seal Team One in 1986. So the building was five or six years old, I guess, when I got there in 1991. one. And I mean, all it was was pretty much like a little office building had some had some lockers in it. But it was it was underwhelming. You know, the gym where I worked out with you was just, you know, it was just a normal gym. It looked like somebody threw together whatever random

equipment. I think we had we had two squat racks. I mean, it was just kind of hodgepodge. And you didn't expect that. You know, it was the whole, and the whole thing kind of felt hodgepodge, I guess is what I'm saying. You go now, now check out that facility. you're going to be, it's like a, it's like the James Bond movie. You know the James Bond movie where they're training commandos somewhere and they open up a door and there's people repell it down. There's pools and all this shooting ranges. That's what it's like.

It's phenomenal that the nation has made that a priority to put these guys in the right spot. A few years ago I had the chance to go up to Alaska and we've got a training facility up there in Alaska. And I was stunned to see the improvements. that have been made to that training facility to include a, God, it must be a 50 or 60 foot climbing wall in there. Just absolutely amazing. And again, those improvements, you know, not only speak to the readiness, but also speak to the recognition of the leadership of our military with the importance of the special operations community. Yeah, it's just such a great way to support those guys. You know, the last thing I did before I retired was run the training on the West Coast for guys.

getting ready to deploy and just there's nothing more important than making sure that guys are ready to go do that job absolutely uh you know speaking of your trip down to seal team one you're you're doing that this afternoon we're probably a little over three hours right now um what did you do what did you do once you retired uh i got the uh i got the chance to work for a uh a boat company uh up in uh up in new hampshire and i i worked for for a gentleman who's, you know, probably not much shy of, you know, a genius. We developed a boat called the ghost, and, you know, Greg Sankoff is the gentleman's name, and so many innovative things that he put into this.

Navy's just not ready for that craft perhaps yet. And, of course, there's a few other challenges to get it in to fit and be interoperable with systems that we have available today. But that was a fun experience. I had the chance to take what I had learned as a Naval Special Warfare Program officer at NAVC. And, of course, knowing what I knew about the requirements of naval special warfare and some of the things they could do,

that was a real fun job. And I also worked for an Alaskan Native Company. Alaskan Native companies are minority owned and operated by Alaskan natives. We have other small business set aside, are there also set-asides for the, you know, I'm not sure, but in any American Indians. So they had special contractual advantages, if you will. And what I saw, whether it was for the Alaska natives, Native Americans,

these folks would take those advantages and do a good job whatever it was it was requested or required. And in the contracting world, the Defense Department contracting world, there is a requirement for major contractors to have a percentage of minority contracts. One of the neatest things that I saw about this company, and the company's name is a lutech and a Fognac is the apparent company. But the programs that they had for the development of their tribal members were absolutely amazing. Carl, who ran the computer side of things, was absolutely amazing. He was a native who went to school on the scholarship programs, you know, college, masters, and so on.

And he just, you know, had such an impressive computer system for the entire company. And I say that because I've never worked anywhere else who is anywhere near as good. If you hear this one, Carl, you owe me a beer. But just, and Carl was one. And there were a couple of young ladies in the company who were just a pleasure to work with when you saw that they were, if you will, a product of the system and it proved what a good job that they were doing.

Whether it was a college or vocational, technical training, they had all kinds of programs set up for their folks. It wasn't, you know, you know, five or 10,000 bucks every six months or a year, whatever it was, they had all these great programs set up and they would take those funds and take the profits and build a fund and so on. I was pretty impressed with how they did it.

And I only say this much about it because of some of the bad press that some of the people have given it and how it was non-competive, et cetera. There's a lot of competition among those Alaska Native companies, and they did a damn good job. So it's quite an impressive program. And again, an opportunity to learn so much about the Alaskan natives.

It's just great opportunity. Their base is on Codiak Island, where our training facility is. their corporate headquarters their real business offices are in Anchorage so I get to start meeting a number of the natives

all the board members were natives and many of them had spent a lot of time on Codiak where we have our training facility and then they learn that I'm a retired seal and they tell me about the time those goddamn seals

walked across these you know, special, you know, sacred burial grounds or areas that were set aside and they weren't supposed to be. But I believe those fences are mended, not doing anything that I did. But there are a couple of folks who have whatever acreage they have on either a Fognac or Codiac. And they allow the seals to, as they're conducting some of their missions up there,

to use some of that property to touch base and use the staging points and that kind of thing. So it was really fun for me to see that relationship a couple of years ago when I went up to Alaska. Where were you when September 11th happened? I was driving in my truck. I was working for SAIC at the time. And I was coming up from Virginia Beach,

headed to D.C. And my wife was up, you know, working in Vienna with a friend of hers. And so I'm in my truck and I hear this. And I called Jackie and said, get a tank of gas. And when you can get out of there, get out of there. when I heard it, and by the time I had a chance to get hold there, it was too late. So I was headed on into the S-AIC, and I knew that whatever had been, you know, I forget exactly what I was going up there for, but I knew that that was out the window.

And I said to myself, I was, I think I was about Fredericksburg when I heard it. I said, well, if I keep coming north, I'm not going to be home for a long time. And I just knew that. And they took a few of us with military experience, and we set up a talk, and we set up, you know, started setting up phone trees, trying to find out who was where and how everybody was. And so it was quite a, quite an interesting experience from that. side of things. And then what did it look like to you as you watched the seal teams start to engage in the war on terror? So shortly after that, my wife and I are sitting at home watching a news show

and they're showing something about the Northern Alliance doing this and the other thing. And they showed two big open back trucks. We'd call them a four by four or other six by or something. like that. And I looked at the video and I said to Jackie, he said, sweetheart, that truck is filled with Afghans. That truck is our guys. Well, how can you tell? I say, I can tell by the way they sit. I can tell by their posture. And I can tell by the way they hold their weapons. Look at the differences. He said, oh. And I knew right. then it was going to be quite a deal. Because of the work I was doing with SAIC,

I had the opportunity to sit in on a briefing that was given by the Chief of Naval Operations at the time, and he had been with the president just a few days before. And as he recounted his experience with the president, you could have heard a pin drop in the room, given the commitment and the will to fix that. I guess what are you up to right now? You retired yet, for real?

I'm retired for real. Before I leave, I'll give you a business card that says leadership management and motivation. But I work with a few kids every once in a while who've got a desire to go to Buds. but, you know, Jackie and I are supporting a wildlife museum in Virginia Beach. And other than that, we're pretty much retired. But anybody wants an old fart with an opinion, you know, give me a call. Well, like I said, I know you got another appointment this afternoon going to check out the teams. Probably a good place to wrap up.

Echo, you got any questions? Yes. All right, here we go. Are we still lifting weights or what? Well, given the seven-plus decades, I've been on the face of the earth, the, you know, few and far between, I've actually just in the last five or six weeks started to go back in the gym. But it's something I'll never stop.

And the reason for it is, you know, at 74 years of age, I don't have to hire somebody to cut my lawn. I can still go out there, I can do it. I don't have to hire somebody to move those boxes around the house. I don't have to hire somebody to move the dresser. You know, I can still do that. And that's not only speaking to my physical well-being, it's speaking to my medical well-being, excuse my mental well-being, just to be able to do that.

Do you got a gym at your house? I've got a few hundred pounds. So here you go. When I went down to El Salvador, or I went unaccompanied for a year. And with that, I was able to send 1,000 pounds or 1,100 pounds of personal gear. 700 pounds of weightlifting equipment.

I had squat racks, a bench, and at least 500 pounds of weights in my own room, in my own building. when I there was a the guy I relieved was assassinated but they actually had

a gold in El Salvador so I said well I'll give that a shot and so I went to goals a few times and I'm deadlifted in five and a half or whatever and not drawn any attention to yourself yeah

you're right stupid with a capital S and I ended up getting I found out from a certain intelligence agency that my nickname in the gym was El Grua, which stands for the crane. And next thing I hear, the colonel I mentioned before, calls me into the office,

and he said, we got a report that there's some folks taking notice of your attendance at Golds. I said, ah, shit. And so that was the last time I went to Golds. Oh, man. Well, look, we got a bunch of, of stories out of you today. Like I said, I know you've got to go. You got any closing thoughts you want to say? I had a great 30 years, a lot of good guys. And I'll tell you, one important

closing thought. When I took over in 96, we were still deploying sealed patoons the same way I walked out the door in 1970, 26 years. A lot of things changed in those 20s. And a lot of things changed in those 26 years. Captain Pete Tonys and Stan, damn it. Both guys who'd been group commanders on the East Coast, had come in and had pitched a recommended change of how to do business. And we were calling it the squadron deployment. So what I did at that point in time is I sat down with Admiral Smith, who was still on active

Duty and Admiral Eric Olson and a couple of other folks and I said guys this is what I think we wanted to do you may not be aware but in the 84 85 time frame we had tried something like that with the with SEAL Team 1 and it didn't work we'll go into those details but I sat down with Admiral Smith Admiral Olson because I knew Eric was going to be followed well maybe I didn't by that point in time, but my goal was to make sure Eric was going to be the next flag officer. Anyhow, good judgment on my part, by the way. Better work by Eric. But I sat down with those guys, I said, guys, this is what I think we should do.

Now, I don't know exactly what it's going to look like. So what I did is I went, after talking to those guys, I went back and we set up a working group on the Warcom staff. and the senior guy in the working group was probably a commander. And I said, guys, the last thing I ever want to hear is the Admiral said or the Admiral wants, other than the fact that I want to figure out how to make this work. I think we need to change how we're doing business. We had 04s down to E6s on that, on that, on that,

working group to figure out how to make it work. And we didn't get it, we didn't get it fielded by the time I, by the time I left command, but we had the, we had the core of what we were looking at. We were already already looking at different team deployments and how we were going to change that all. So we'd have one team with boat guys, intelligence support, logistics support, that kind of thing, deploying forward. And as I stopped and look today,

it looks a whole lot different than what walked out the door finally under Eric Olson. But I am so proud of Stan and Pete of bringing that to me and us taking that and laying the groundwork because this is now, this is now 22, going on 23 years after we started working on that and here, Naval Special Warfare

with, you know, lipstick on the pig in a certain number of places, but it's still the same pig. And, or it's the, it's probably a boar hog by now. But it's what we started framing at that point in time as the way for Naval Special Warfare

to do business. And again, I'm proud of that working group, proud of Pete and Stan and the other guys agreeing because I didn't, like I said, I didn't want to start going down this road if somebody was going to throw out dozens of man years of work and planning to toss it out.

So that was that in combination with the SWIC NEC were the two things that I figure were probably the best accomplishments that I ever had. Let me have one more thing. You talked earlier about working with the physical therapist and so on. You need to go back and thank, I believe it was Pete Tonys, who started that, you know, bringing in those physical therapists to work with the team guys.

But there's, you know, it's interesting for me to hear your comments on how important those kinds of things were to you in your career. And I think, you know, way to go there, Pete. You know, those guys were doing some good things. But those are the two biggest things that I'm probably proudest of. That and Petty Officer Bacchus coming up to me at SEAL Team 1. That's outstanding. And that transition that you started, that you initiated,

that got pushed to you, I guess, up through the chain of command, to redo the way we were deploying. I mean, the way the deployments went, eventually, once the war started, we would have been just kind of worthless, you know, being a random platoon out there by yourself. You just don't have the value that you need to bring to the battlefield and what we were able to do as giant squadrons with all the augmentees, with all the logistical support. That's what we needed. And look, didn't mean we lost our ability to be nimble, because we were.

we could still take a platoon from that squadron and kick them out to some random out station. You could have a five or six-man element. I had little elements sitting in tiny spots out on their own. But we were able to do that because of that squadron idea came to fruition. And otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to have been functional. One other thing contributed to the success of that squadron. When you first came in the teams where were platoon still deploying on the amphibs? Yep. I did two amphib deployments myself.

So I did one, my first deployment was to Guam, and then I did back-to-back Ard platoons out here in San Diego, six months on a ship. Well, being able to take the platoons off the argue was another key part of that. And I can remember going to Sinkus Navier, four-star admiral, saying this is what I want to do,

and this is how I want to do it. and that is when the amphibs try to do advance force ops, that means you've got to get those amphibious ships within a few miles of the coast. You're not doing anything advanced force. And one of the terms that they use is doing in stride amphibious operations so they can just drive up to the beach and do their thing. But if you have to stop and let the seals do their thing,

you're sitting there with a bullseye in it. So I had to be somewhat tactful with Sinkas Navuura. Yeah, because no leaders ever want to give up their assets. They don't want to give them up. Nope, they did not. And so I explained to him how a submarine, and explained to him, you know, Jim was a, you know, commanding officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier. Probably not much I have to explain to him.

But as I laid it out to him, I said, you know, We have these theater special operations commands and these forces allocated to them. They're not only Navy Special Warfare, there are Army and Air Force assets that are available to you there. And you can get there by submarine, you can get there by C-130,

you can get rubber ducks. There are no C-130s on the amphibs that I've seen, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, well, who's gonna pay for that? I said, we are, Naval Special Warfare and U.S. Special Operations Command. He said, sold. And that's how we, that's the third biggest thing that I feel that I can hang my hat on in my career. You know, getting people to finally understand, if you want to do something in stride for the amphibs,

you're probably going to launch that reconnaissance from somewhere else. Yep, as it should be. Yeah. Well, outstanding, outstanding stuff. You open invite anytime you come back if you listen to this and there's other things you want to talk about that you missed. Scratch them down on a piece of paper. This place is yours.

It's been an honor to sit down and talk with you. You know, obviously, thanks for everything that you did for the country, for the teams, for the Navy. And thanks for putting some faith in an E4 that came to your office, wanting to request. and you legitimately changed the trajectory of my life, and that's how I ended up here. So it's been an honor, and thank you.

Thank you, Jock, and I don't know if you knew it, but for the first two or three years that they had that seaman to Admiral program, and I guess you were in like the second year, Naval Special Warfare, you and the other boys that went in there, you guys were the top four candidates each year. We're just trying to hold up the line.

Good, John. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it. The Hulk has departed the area of operations. It's just freaking crazy to sit here. Kind of like it was crazy with Mike Durant. I was watching him on TV after he'd been captured in Somalia, and I was watching him in 1993 as a young, seal, new guy, and now we're sitting here talking to him.

Think of how crazy this is. Here I am talking to Admiral Richards, who literally wrote the recommendation for me to become a SEAL officer in 19 what was that 30 years ago 25 years ago something like this Yeah and he's legendary seal from SEAL team one where I'm from he was the commanding officer of SEAL team one Right before I showed up he was he was the commanding officer of buds by the way when I graduated Mm-hmm and here he is just the right there debriefing I'll tell you where It's awesome and I was talking to him about this a little bit.

I was telling him that when Mike Thornton came on the podcast and I had I forget when Mike Thornton actually retired, but we overlapped in time. You know, I was in for a while while he was in. Not very long because he retired probably somewhere around when I came in. I don't know, but there was overlap time. There was time. He was in the team. He was a SEAL Team one guy.

He was a metal of honor recipient. Legendary. Legendary. Like you need to put music behind. that when I say it on the like in post so so Mike Thornton but as much as I knew who Mike Thornton was I had met him you know I had met him multiple times I'd also met him when mickey montsor when when his parents were given Mikey's Medal of honor at the white house like Mike Thornton was there we we talk we hung out we drank beers like I know him and I had never

gotten any kind of a debrief about the operation where he ended up receiving the Medal of Honor until he came on the podcast and gave us up to our full detailed debrief on why he received the Medal of Honor. So it's the same thing here. I had known that Admiral Richards was, you know, a badass Vietnam guy. That's, you know, that's just, there's a whole category. When you're a new guy in the teams in the 90s. There's just like a whole, there's a whole group. And it's just like,

oh yeah, a nom guy. And you're not in that group or even close to it because now it's 1991 when I'm checking in. Vietnam's been over for a long time. But that,

that's the group. And you don't know too much about them. You don't understand. You couldn't debrief, like the debrief that he went through today. How awesome is that? It's just, hey,

here's exactly what happened. Here's what was going on. Here's what I said. Here's the words that came out of my mouth. Here's what the other individual. Here's where the helicopter. Just hearing these details and understanding them, it's just so, I'm so lucky to be sitting here. Yeah.

The whole time, these thoughts flashed in my head, like, okay, imagine if you're like a VC guy or, you know, NBA guy. And you, for whatever reason, get face to face. face with this motherfucker right here. Let's say, I don't know, you guys lost all your weapons or whatever. Now you've got to go hand to hand. You're surrendering. Till the death. You're surrendering. With this freaking guy. The most hardened, the most hardened

NBA, like just warrior, he's surrendering. He's just, hey, I'm done. Bro, forget the wrestling kid who got body slammed in a concussion. Forget that guy. This guy is going down. Yeah, you're going down. You can tell,

and you know, he threw his numbers out, right? I mean, he's throwing out his numbers. Oh, yeah. But you can just tell, too, some people are strong.

Yeah. Like, they're just genetically freaking strong. And by the way, when you're 14 years old after your freshman year and you weigh 140 pounds and the 170 pound wrestling coach comes out and can't hold you down

and you're not that good of a wrestler. But you're just doing it on pure power. You're one of those dudes. You are just a, strong, jacked. It's not even just jacked. It's like the genetic that, that dense, just strong

freaking muscle. And he's just made of that. Just made of that 100%. Checking into buds at 1.45, by the way. 2.45. I got a little confused there because I checked into buds at 175 like a little baby.

Like a little baby. And it wasn't like I was a skinny guy. You know? I wasn't skinny. But I damn sure wasn't 245 pounds deadlifting over five benching over four. I mean, come on. Yeah. So if you're a random Viet Cong fighter that you've been raised in the fields and eating rice and you weigh, he was just saying after the podcast, he's like, yeah, you know, the average Vietnamese fighter was, I think he said 5.5 135. Yeah. That's the average fighter.

That's literally the size of my wife. Yeah. And so we are talking about just that, what, what the Hulk? It's like being the actual Hulk. He grabs a hold of you and starts shaking your head around. Yeah. So. That's interesting.

I remember the stories of you saying like, oh, when you're in the wait room. Yeah. You know, the Hulk comes in. And you'll turn it down. Yeah, because I'm a new guy, man. Yeah. You know. That's interesting.

And plus the other thing that's interesting is, I thought, you know, who is this old guy, right? And in my mind, he was 100 years old because he was a mom. And you know how old he was? I did the math. He was like 43 or 44. He was six or seven years younger than I am right now. And I'm in there thinking, like in my mind, I think this guy doesn't know what rock and roll music is, you know?

And it's just so ignorant. It's so ignorant. Meanwhile, he's about, he was just telling you, he's like a bouncer at this bar, hucking people on their head. He's the freaking bruiser, dude. I wanted, I should have talked to him about that. You know, I have a bouncing background. Yeah. Maybe we could have shared.

You guys have like that kinship of being bouncers. I'm sure his, uh, his time as a bouncer might have been more robust than might, probably. Yeah. And well, that's, you know, when you, when you asked him about lifting and still lifting, like, such a key component of life is just to keep exercising. Because, I mean, what do you say? What, what do you say? What, 74 years old? Yes.

Yeah, I mean, he rolled in here to date with no, I mean, you just in totally perfect health. And, you know, shook my hand, you know, the handshake is kind of a little subliminal warning of just what could happen. You know, he's kind of like, look, you might think you're tough. They're young jaco, but, you know, you want to play? Yeah. Yeah, and I didn't, and I was doing the math when he told me the year he was born during the break. And I was surprised.

I thought maybe like, oh, yeah, maybe 60 something, you know? Because just, you know how you can just tell a guy's like just his whole energy, you know? And their energy, yeah. Yeah. So, but my estimate was way off. So, yeah, man. And that, and that was his thing, too. Like, obviously, like, he was saying like, yeah, running wasn't my jam or whatever.

It was just straight up lifting. Yeah. Nothing. Literally nothing else, really. I mean, unless I miss something. Just lifting He was just jacking steel And plus wrestling

Yeah Wrestling for sure Which is you know a good skill to have It's kind of the jam When the judo Navy Judo champion comes running out of a hooch On a training often you got a double leg Good stuff

Well A thanks everybody for listening And we appreciate you hanging out If you if there's look You probably want to Jack Steele after you listen to Hulk. I know I'm kind of feeling like I want to go deadlift something right now. Yes, me too. Probably going to need some supplementation.

You might as well get some. Yep. Get a little bit of that jaco fuel. Joccofuel.com. That's the clean one. It's a big deal. It is a big deal. So we got energy drinks.

Yeah. Let's go. Jock, go. We got some protein. Tastes good and clean protein. No sugar. That's called milk. Yep.

All that stuff you can get at jocofuel.com. The the, if you want to get the drinks, you can get them at Wawa, you can also get all the stuff at vitamin shop. We're in the process of going into so many more stores right now. It's awesome. I'll keep you posted on that on where you can go to your local neighborhood and get your, get your jocco fuel together. So that's good.

And you might have seen recently we started talking about the hunting. I did. Hunting apparel. Yeah. We did a little live last night, a little live, what was it? Live Instagram, live. Live. Yeah.

So we did that. Yesterday. What was the takeaway on that? Sorry to say I didn't catch it. But what was it? I guess you're going to have to go back and review the tapes, bro. That's why I shared it or whatever.

I understand fully. That's where I shared it. Obviously, the players on there, Cam Haynes. Yep. Who else? Pete Roberts. Kip Folks. So we started a company, Origin Hunt.

And we're going to be making a marriage. American made hunting gear. Kip folks has a massive amount of experience. He was one of the original guys at Under Armour. Yeah. And so he has done all kinds of product development. And one of the main guys that they sponsored, well, actually the longest guy sponsored at Under Armour was Cam Haynes.

And Cam Haynes is obviously a legendary bow hunter. So they had a relationship. and yeah, there was an opportunity. Cam was going through whatever he was going through at Under Armour. So we had an opportunity to form a company together, all of us. And it's funny, I saw somebody who wrote like, oh, oh, I'm glad to see Cam's, whatever, the first ambassador for Origin Hunt. And the fact is, no, he's not an ambassador of Origin Hunt. He's a founding, a founding owner of Origin Hunt.

So it's a totally cool thing for, for us to be a part of and and listen. I know it seems a little bit crazy. I know you might think I'm a little bit like, oh, you're going a little whatever, right? When I say to you that, hey,

we're in an economic war and people go, oh yeah, yeah, they get it. But here's the thing. It's like, it's like one of those things that's not in front of your face

so you don't worry about it. Right? It's like, oh, there's something wrong with our sewer pipe under the house. And you're like, okay. But as long as it doesn't stink, you're not, you're not calling the plumber.

Right. It's like the check engine light. Yeah, it's like the check engine light, but it kind of flickers on and it goes off. Goes off. And it flickers on, it goes off. And it flickers on, it goes off. I'm telling you, I'm the check engine light right now for the world. And I'm telling you right now, the check engine light is on.

It should be on. And you need to get in the game because that's what's going, that's happening. We're in an economic war with China. And the more we Blow it off and act like it's no big deal And keep driving the car Keep flushing the toilet down the sewer pipe We're gonna look up and that thing's gonna burst

And it's gonna be shit everywhere So and your car's gonna break down So let's not do that This is American made stuff Origin USA.com This is American made stuff It's the everything about it is American made So get in the game

That's what we're doing We're making workware We're making Jiu Jitsu gear. We're making hunting gear. Guess what? Guess what I need in my life? Jiu Jitsu gear, hunting gear, work wear. If, and I'm not joking, by the way, with this.

So I saw us, I don't know if it was a sample or just one of the pants, right, for hunting. So that looks like something I would wear. I don't go hunting as of yet. Okay. Yeah. And I don't know if I am or not. But as of right now, I am. Do you desire to hunt?

I am currently not hunting. How about that? Do you want to hunt? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. But when I say it's one of those things, it's one of those things. There's a lot of things. Yes. So I don't know. Am I going to get there?

Yes. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway. The question is, what if I just wear them anyway? Is that posing? I mean, tech. I'm not doing it.

I wouldn't be wearing these hunting pants to make like I'm a hunter. One of the things, one of my philosophies of life is you want to have multiple purposes for everything that you have. So even like Delta jeans, they're, they're cool to wear if you want to go to a restaurant with your wife. They're also cool if you have to just go do squats in or you do yard work in, right? That's the kind of flexibility you have. Yeah.

You want to make things that have multi-purpose capabilities. So the clothing that we're making for Origin Hunt will be multi-purpose. And if you're in an urban scenario where things are unfolding and you just happen to be rolling deep, Echo Charles style with a pair of camis. Sure. No one's going to give you a second look. Other than to go, man, those things look legit. Okay.

Yeah, so I think you're good. I'm clearing you hot. Okay, so even if there's no scenario unfolding. The only thing that you would have to use caution in, in my opinion, with origin USA.com is if you didn't train jiu-jitsu at all, but you thought that geese looked cool and you just went out and got one and you were wearing it down to the club. That makes sense to me. I wouldn't do that.

That would be posing. Okay. Yes. But if you happen to, if you happen to reach in the freaking cupboard and you pulled out a pair of freaking camo origin pants, then you were like, hey, this is what I'm. wearing I think we're good wait but the camel because hunting camo is different than rega like right now I'm literally wearing camel pants as am I well we're wearing camo shorts right and we're not and we're not fighting in the jungle right now we're not

could be we're ready if we need to be later either way you know no one's going to be like oh er like thinking that I'm actually trying to act like I'm actually doing X Y Z in the jungle no one is mistaking you for a commando exactly it is like no there's no No one's mistaken you for a jungle warrior, right? Correct. Yes. So, do I, am I extended that same sort of courtesy or latitude with? I'm telling you you're good.

And because of the materials that we're using to make this stuff, you're going to want to, you're going to be, this will become the standard kind of, I think there's going to be people all over America just going to the grocery store in origin hunt, camo. That's what I was kind of, it's going to be a thing. That's what I was planning on. Yeah. Because, and I'm only, I didn't even feel them. I saw a picture of them.

And I know, I know good pants when I see them. See him. with a cut. You got that, you've got that gut instinct that's always been good, you know? Well, you know, some people got it. Some people got that special talent.

So yeah, origin USA.com, if you want to get some cool of the, what would you say, like the things you and I have said on the podcast, you get some jocco store. Dot com stuff, a t-shirt. Yeah. Okay, well, you know,

of course I always say how to represent on the path. And the reason why I always say it like that is because that's the best way to say it. Okay. It's not the best way to say it? No, no, no, no, no, no. Apparently it's not.

No, no. Apparently it is because you say so. Okay. All right. Well, in my opinion. Should I leave now? Current? You want me to go?

Current. Because I don't want to get the way of your freaking awesome. It feels the most accurate. How about that? Okay. Okay. Just seems to jump in one of his moods today. Okay.

All right. No, no, no. That's good. That's good. Either way, if you want to represent while you're on the pack, When I'm on the path and I wear this shirt, I am currently representing. I'm in the, in the middle of representing while on the path. Okay.

You see what I'm saying? Right now you're in the middle of over-explaining something. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. In the spirit of accuracy and consistency and thoroughness. Thorowness, yeah, I'm explaining. That's how it's how it's better. It's a better fit. Either way, jocco store.com, that's where you can get this stuff.

Good apparel. Good apparel. Good apparel. It's subscribe to the podcast. Check out jocco underground.com. That's where we're, we got an alternative site in case we need it.

You know the deal. If you want to support us there, we're putting out an extra podcast for you, some extra information. It's $8.18. a month. If you can't afford it, look, if you can't afford it,

you can email assistance at underground. At jaco underground.com. Also, check your situation. Check your situation. Because if $8. $8.18 a month, if that's putting, a negative impact on your zone, then check it out.

You need to do some assessment of where you're at because that's not where you want to be. So go back and start listening to the podcast at one. We're going to go through all kinds of things that are going to help get you to a point where you're like $8.18. a month to provide freedom to the world. We're in. That's my recommendation there. YouTube channel. We got a YouTube channel.

Subscribe to that. Subscribe to the origin USA YouTube channel. Flipside canvas, Dakota, My, I was gonna bring up something about Dakota today. Oh, you know what I was gonna bring up Dakota but I just didn't was when Admiral Richards was talking about first responders dude Dakota's a first responder right now. Yeah like not not like oh he does like Training for them no no I'm saying right now. He's a first responder Dakota Meyer is currently right now probably out fighting a fire helping somebody medically in a car accident and But he, man, it's a freaking insane, hard job.

And I'll give an example. And I don't want to, I'll give you a, I'll paraphrase a conversation I had with Dakota the other day. They pull up to a, they pull up to a site that they pull up to a call. It's a suicide. It's a young, it's a teenage child who has committed suicide by Hank. themselves. And I think Dakota said something

like, you know, like as we're pulling up and I'm starting to get out of the vehicle, like the person I'm with, whoever he's with is more experienced person. And they're like, hey, grab the bolt cutters. And he was like, okay, and he grabs the bolt cutters because that person knew that they were going to have to cut them down and that was

like the easiest way. So, yeah, all the first responders out there, man. We appreciate what you're doing. That's Dakota Meyer, and that's Dakota Meyer, who is not only a U.S. Marine, not only a metal of honor recipient, not only a freaking awesome guy, but he's also currently, at this time, a firefighter, EMT, paramedic dude that sends me pictures at 1 o'clock in the morning of him responding to a car accident, a house fire, a freaking medical emergency.

so God bless that guy and go check out flipside canvass.com buy some cool stuff to hang on your wall which is what it is I forgot to tell you that that's what you know what it doesn't really matter if if I was like hey he's selling cottage cheese and and and freaking clay bowls I'd be like cool go buy some cottage I want some cottage cheese now and some clay bowls that's what we're doing Dakota flipside canvas.com hey I written a bunch of books check those out Eschlamfront leadership consultancy. If you need help inside your organization,

go to ashlamfront.com. We got some live events coming up. You know when we got coming up, we got the battlefield, EF battlefield, and we take and we go and walk historical battlefields. We do Gettysburg. We do Little Big Horn. So go and check that out.

We just go site by site. We walk where the, where the leaders walked, where the troops walked. We discussed their decisions, the good decisions, the bad decisions. That's a smaller group, right? Yeah, it's like 25, 30 people. Oh, yeah. And it's two days.

And, you know, we like have dinner and hang out, have lunch, all those things. So, hey, look, if you want to go there and you also want to ask about, hey, here's a leadership challenge I'm facing. Here's what I'm doing with my company. That's cool, too. And those answers that we give will many times be. given with the overlay of, hey, here's a historical battle. Here's what this general did.

In this particular case, here's what this colonel did over here. Here's what this freaking war chief did over here. So if you want to come and check any of that stuff out, go to eshlamfront.com. Look for events. We also have an online training academy called the academy. Extreme ownership.com. Look, you got to go to the gym if you want to stay in shape. Yep.

If you want to improve. If you want to learn guitar, you've got to practice. If you want to learn a language like Spanish because you're going to Al Salvador because the person that you're replacing just got to assassinated there and you're the only person that Rogers up to go do it and you got to learn Spanish, you got to go practice it. You got to get taught it. Leadership's the same way. And it doesn't happen overnight. You've got to learn it. You got to study it.

So we have the Academy Extreme Ownership.com and listen, guess what leadership is? Leadership is life. Whatever you're doing in your life, you have to set goals. You have to figure out what tasks you need to complete. You need to prioritize and execute. How you're going to make something happen. How are you going to get that house bought? How are you going to pick up a new job?

How are you going to go rebuild this relationship with someone that you hurt? Like those are all things that we do. Those are all leadership things. They might not sound like it. Leadership is life. So, Extremeownership.com, yeah, it's about leadership, but don't think to yourself,

well, you know, I'm not really in a leadership position. So I guess it's not for me. You're in a leadership position. You are in a leadership position. If you're the most junior person working at Wendy's, if you're the grill guy at Wendy's, which was my job, by the way, when I was younger, if you're that guy,

you're flipping burgers at Wendy's, which I did, you're in a leadership position. And you can build relationships with the people there. And you can start to figure out how things work. And you can get promoted. You can move up. You can buy your own store. That's what happens, by the way.

When you're the most junior person, if you become a leader, if you think like a leader, that's what you can do with your life. And it just doesn't apply to work. You want to build a relationship with another person. You're in a leadership position. This might sound cold. But guess what? You have a wife or you have a husband.

you're in a leadership position. The way you interact with them. The techniques that I use when I'm talking to you, Echo Charles, as my work compadre, are the same techniques that I use when I'm talking to my wife, when I'm talking to my kids.

It's human interaction. So if you need help with that, which by the way, we all do, because you're not born with it, you're not born. Look, can you be a born leader? Yes, you can. Can you be kind of charismatic?

Yes, you can. the best leaders still make mistakes. They still have room to improve. And people that maybe aren't blessed with that natural leadership gift. Guess what? You got room to improve too. There was a guy that's totally slipping in my mind right now where Admiral Tom Richards was saying he didn't ever raise his voice.

Like he never heard him raise his voice, but everyone listened to him. Al Huey. Yeah. So it's like, okay, so consider that phenomenon like in life where we're, essentially you have this crazy and when you think about it's crazy this ability to navigate through all kinds of different personalities and they all get on board the program get on board like basically you know how to make everyone do what they want to do for themselves or the group or

whatever even and a lot of times that's the part that I think maybe kind of goes over my head even where it's like it's not just what I'm trying to make the whole group do sometimes it's just one person in fact most of the time it's just one other person in many different situations or whatever. But it's like, yeah, it's your brother, your wife, your friend, or whatever. And you can navigate, no matter of the personality, you can navigate and control the scenario for everyone, you know, for everyone's interest. That's like a superpower.

And you know what else is interesting is as you go through life, the more you understand these concepts, you see them everywhere. You seem. And the reason I, what made me think of that is when you said, you know, wife, this, you mentioned wife. You mentioned like peers. You're mentioning all people that you're close to that you interact with. When you go and walk into a restaurant that you've never been in before and you interact with the hostess.

That person that's going to get you a table, there's a leadership situation happening. Directly. Not hidden. Not the kind of like, oh, if you really left. It's literally happening. It's right there. And you might get, you might get like put, oh, yeah, yes, come have a seat over here, sir. And you get put by the kitchen and there's noise.

coming out, there may be some background smells that you're not particularly fond of, that can happen right there. And you can also get put in the window seat, overlook in the ocean. That is a leadership scenario. And if you know how to interact with other human beings, you're going to end up by the window. You're going to end up overlook in the ocean, not with the racket from the kitchen coming out. Is you what I'm saying? Yes.

So go to extreme ownership.com. Let's get you over with the ocean. at the restaurant let's get you in that situation where you're not having to raise your voice like Al Huey and people are doing what you want them to do because they want to do it because they understand what it is we're trying to do as a team go to extreme ownership.com and also if you want to help service members active and retired if you want to help people that have served in the military that need help Mark Lee's mom mama Lee she's got an incredible charity organization She helps people so much, so much. If you want to help her help people, you want to help her help veterans, you want to help her help Gold Star families, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org so you can either volunteer, donate, or help out somehow. Also, check out heroes and horses.com. What's up with Micah? Mika Fink. I don't know what he's doing right now at this moment, but he's probably wrestling. a grizzly bear, shoeing a horse, or like capturing, or maybe he's sitting in a sweat lodge hallucinating about, like, what does he hallucinate about, about calves? Traffic light? Traffic lights?

No, that was me. So there you go. Just an awesome program. Check that out. And if you need more of us, well, you know where we are. Again, do I want you to go and just sign up for the algorithm and put a, put a freaking carabiner around your heart and hook it into the algorithm and have it ripped out. No, I don't want you to do that.

I don't want you to do that. But if you want to be, if you want to know what we're doing, check it out. But don't let the check it out turn into carabiner around your heart. That's what I'm saying. Watch out for that. That's the social media platforms that are out there. They got carabiners. They're giving them way.

They want you to take that carabiner. They want you to put. They're like, and for some reason you think it's cool. You're like, oh, look at this shiny. Care of you like you give a little yeah look give a little kid a mouse trap that's rig to blow They're gonna pick it up and get whacked by it They think they were doing the right thing curiosity So watch out for that man the Graham the Facebook the Twitter

Echoes at echo Charles I am at John Willick and thanks once again To Admiral Thomas Richards for coming by for sharing his experiences we By the way unfortunately as soon as we hit stop and we started talking he's like told me 14 more freaking awesome stories about his experiences about nom about what they were doing what they were wearing so we'll get him back on again but thanks for coming on thanks for your service admiral and and once again thanks for for taking care of me as a young a young seal trying to do better and thanks for setting a great example for the young seals on how to be badass frogman and to the rest of the military folks out there. Thank you for your service. In protecting freedom and our way of life around the world, what did Admiral Richards keep saying?

724. 365 days a year. You're out there. You're out there. So thank you. And thanks to our police and law enforcement, all the firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service.

all the first responders. You guys are just out there putting it on the line every day. So we appreciate what you do as well. And everyone else out there. Listen, I'm a little at risk for saying this. Because I talk about things like the indirect approach. And I say you should think through your situations. And I say you should make iterative decisions about what you're doing.

so you're taking small steps to move in the right direction. I say those things all the time because that's what I want you to do. 99.9% of the times, that's what I want you to do. But occasionally, on the rare occasion, when things get bad, you have to do what Admiral Tom Richards told his wounded machine gunner to do in a rice paddy in Vietnam, and that is, shut up and return fire. That's all I've got.

Until next time, Zekko, and Jocko. Out.