Jocko Podcast - 330: One Piece At a Time Until It's Built Into Something Worthwhile. Ben Milligan. Pt.2

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

0:00:00 - Opening0:07:00 - By Water Beneath The Walls with Ben Milligan.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 3.30 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. A little after midnight on Thanksgiving, 1944, while patrolling the Black Waters off Cape St. George near New Guinea, Burke's five-ship wolfpack spotted a Japanese radar contact. Immediately and without permission, Burke radioed his squadron, hold your hats, boys, here we go into the dark and into the enemy's guns burke's destroyers drop throttles to flank speed and launched torpedoes exploding two Japanese ships outright then wheeled

the starboard like the Parthine horses archers into the face of three more enemy ships that immediately tuck tail and fled in the night long pursuit Burke's deck sailors discharge and loaded their guns so fast and and so long that many passed out in their turrets from the fumes and from sheer exhaustion. When Burke's squadron finally returned to port, said a Time magazine reporter, every ship in the roadstead turned up its searchlights and every blue jacket in the fleet manned the rails in tribute. It was, Halsey said afterward, the classic sea action of this war. for 13 months Burke commanded his destroyers like Patton did his tanks to every order

he invariably responded proceeding at 31 knots a boiler bursting pace said one historian that caught Admiral William Bullhawalsy's attention who addressed the few his future dispatches to 31 knot Burke the name stuck in the last two years the war Burke was forced to give up command of his own squadron in order to become chief of staff to mark missioner a famous aircraft carrier admiral neither a pilot nor possessing any experience in aircraft carriers burke was at first out of place in the new staff role an onlooker to the aviators and a jolt to his morale that almost immediately expanded to his waistline essentially confined to the flag plot the ship's tactical command center burke was forced not only to learn everything he could about aircraft carriers and their tactics but also to elevate

his operational understanding, beyond the amateur's urge for the battle at hand in order to plan for the next one. Beyond the Marianas to the Philippine Sea, beyond that to Lete Gulf, then onto Iwo Jima. When submarine intelligence told him the battleship Yamodo was spotted en route to an unknown location, he spent all night hunched over his charts, a caliper in hand, then launched four planes against the spot where he would be if the rolls were reversed and sank the ship with more than 3,000 men aboard. Before his planes returned, Burke had already switched his attention to the next battle.

By the time they reached Okinawa, the final terrible fight of World War II, Burke had settled into a punishing routine, always up at 0.3.30. The sleep he did manage was usually interrupted by some 20 calls a night. In his waking hours, Burke watched nightmares unfold. His only sanctuary, the flashes of courage that for years to come, said a biographer would seem to whisper to him something about the meaning of the U.S. Navy. The worst of these and the greatest was the final transmission of a newly commissioned Ensign who had taken command of his crippled destroyer after everyone else in his chain of command had been killed.

before the ship sank and the transmission was cut off, Burke heard the young man say, quote, I will fight this ship to the best of my ability and forgive me the mistakes I am about to make, end quote. That voice would haunt and steal him for the rest of his life

is an emotion and a haunting that I think many of us feel. Did I do enough to train the young leaders that followed me? And the answer always seems to be no, I could have done more. I could have passed on more lessons learned. I could have done a better job teaching our operational history to the next generation so that they would not repeat the mistakes we made.

But there's so much to teach and there's so much to learn and there's so many lessons to pass on. And sometimes lessons don't get passed on. They get forgotten. And only the deepest of dedication and research and commitment can bring. Bring those lessons back. And that reading that I opened with was an excerpt from the book. The book is called By Water Beneath the Walls, which was written by a friend of mine,

a seal teammate of mine by the name of Ben Milligan. Ben has been on this podcast before. It's podcast number 298. Go listen to that if you haven't listened to it yet. But on that podcast, we discussed where Ben came from, how he ended up in the SEAL teams, and how he ended up writing this incredible book, which took him seven years to write. And the book is an amazing book. I think this is the most important historical book I have ever read on the SEAL teams.

And I think it actually might be the most important book on special operations as a whole that I have read. and if you haven't read this book, buy it immediately. It is absolutely an incredible look at the history of the SEAL teams, but it ties in so many other aspects of the military and special operations and the wars we've been through. And the amount of commitment that it took to write this is one amount of commitment that can come from only someone with Ben's. personality and his is drive to find out and unravel history and we're lucky enough to have ben back with us to discuss more of these incredible accounts of histories history from the seal teams and of the entire community of special operations so ben thanks for coming back man

Thanks, Chaco. It's great to be here. And this... Thanks for that section, too. It's one of my favorite sections in the book. One of the hardest things you do when you write a book is you have to edit it and you have to cut it. And I think we talked about that last time. This was one of those sections that I had probably 15 more pages just on Burke that I had to drop. That chapter had been completely structured differently.

I had started with Burke at his changing. command ceremony when he became the CNO and then I rolled into, you know, this, you know, 15 page just, it was my biggest introduction of a character, even bigger probably than Draper Kaufman. So I justified that in my head when I was writing it because I always felt like Burke, or at least when I discovered Burke, when I discovered his contribution to the creation of the SEAL teams, I felt like next to Phil Bucklew, Arley Burke is the in. indispensable man. He,

um, the seal teams would not have existed without him without, uh, and the, um, it wouldn't have existed without his biography that he just consolidated into, you know, this,

um, complete preoccupation with keeping the Navy connected to offensive warfare. And, and there was just example after example of his time in World War II. Uh, you know, there were, uh,

he was in, uh, at least two, um, uh, two vessels being shot out from under him, or two vessels were sunk by the Japanese that he had to, and he had to escape from. And in each instance of his escape, he was leaving behind every possession that he had, every possession that he had gone through the war with, and in the process he was

rescuing guys around him. In one case, he risked his life going into a completely smoke-filled passageway to rescue a I think it was a seaman like a radio a radio man he's the you know the chief staff of the ship and he's no business he'd get off the ship but he's you know saving the sailors around him

but yeah he was like you mentioned in your your opening the his commitment to passing on what he had learned, not just what he had learned, but his belief in what the Navy was to that next generation. That's what kept him as a CNO for six years. Like I say, in the book, it's two years

longer than even the closest competitor. C&O is normally just a two-year spot. Admiral King, who's the CNO during World War II, he serves for four. But after King, nobody else comes close except Burke and Burke's there for six years. And whenever, I know that you, you know, you take pictures of your watch when you start working on at 4.30. Which is funny because I often thought that I should start taking a picture of my watch when I sit down on my computer to start writing. I'm not sure it would be as motivating.

But whenever I hear somebody talking about how you have to get eight hours of sleep and sleep's the most important thing, I'm like, man, I know that you're wrong. And I know it because of Burke. I know it because of other people. High achievers, like somebody like Burke, he never slapped. Yeah, why that passage stood out to me. And look, I've got so many marks in this book now from the last time we did this and just from reading it.

But that idea that here's this guy who's listening to a young ensign go down with his ship. And he's thinking to himself, you know, after this guy says, forgive me the mistakes I'm about to make. And you know, Arly Burke sitting there thinking, he could have taught him. He could have given him a heads up. He could have given whoever that commander was or the lieutenant commander or the lieutenant that was above this guy in the chain of command.

All these guys could, he could have taught them something that maybe they wouldn't be in this situation. And just knowing that every effort that you gave to pass on the lessons, they failed. And now this guy is just young man, this young ens and is dying. And he's going to go down with his ship with all these sailors on board. And there's just all these lessons. And I mean, there's so many times when I was in the teams. Well, a good example is Mike Thornton.

You know, Mike Thornton came on this podcast a couple years ago. And we went moment by moment and debriefed the operation where he, for what, which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. And it's three hours. It's like a three hour debrief. And I was in the SEAL teams with at the same time as Mike Thornton. I knew Mike Thornton. I had met Mike Thornton on several occasions.

I'd spent time with Mike Thornton, but I had never gotten like a full debrief of what happened. And you think to yourself, all those lessons that didn't get passed on until he came on the podcast and told me, like all these little lessons and then you start thinking about someone like Burke or this entire book that you've written

where there's just all these lessons that are completely forgotten and well I should say they're almost completely forgotten I don't know that they're completely forgotten I know I know the point you're trying to make and I agree like since the book has come out I've been keeping a list there's been 12 12 guys that I interviewed in the course of the book that aren't with us anymore and I always think like what would happen if I had started the book a year late or a year later than I did?

Or what opportunities did I miss because I started the book when I did and not two years earlier? Like how many stories did I miss or how many lessons did I miss? The one thing that I think about when I think of like, you know, somebody who's as young as that ensign was in the section that you read, who's going down. I mean, that ensign, Mike Thornton, when he's, I think Mike Thornton was 25 when he rescued Tommy Norris. he's not old enough I mean he's old enough to he's a grown man I mean he's he's a he has a 25 year old's perspective on life but he doesn't have all the context that you know that you and I have and echo we've lived long lives I mean we've we've been around here for a minute and we've collected stories and we've collected context and we have you know enough

ammunition, you know, whether it's morally or whatever, to help us or to convince us to make right decisions. But somebody who's 25 years old or this ensign, I imagine this ensign, you know, probably 22 years old. Like, he doesn't know anything. He doesn't know anything about the world. He hasn't heard, you know, stories, you know, like the one that you just read. but what he does have, he has this, he's been imprinted by the institution that he served in

and by the people that are around him. And I think that's an important thing that, you know, Buds does or boot camp does. You're taking young folks from lots of different backgrounds and without, you know, the context that we have as you get older and you read books and you have these experiences. But you imprint, you know, the values of that institution on these people,

and you give them new mandates for what's expected. And that's cool. And I appreciate that. But, you know, like I said, this Ensign wasn't in charge of the ship, right? There was an Exo, there was a CO, there was an ops boss that are all now dead.

And even with the imprints of kind of the broad value system that we have in the Navy or the broad value system that you have in the Marine Corps, the broad value system that you have in the Army, there are actual tactics that you can know that can save your ass in certain situations. And, you know, when I was in trade at, like I remember sometimes,

especially when I first got home from Ramadi, I would be watching a guy move through the streets in Mount training, right? And I would feel like sick to my stomach if a guy wasn't taking cover. And it's a really simple thing that, hey, someone tells you, hey, listen, man, only move from cover to cover. Don't ever be in a spot where you're standing and you're not in cover. Don't ever let that happen.

When you're not behind cover, you're moving. That's the way it is. Obviously, it wasn't instinctual to a bunch of people coming through, you know, advanced seal training coming through workup. There would be out of every 10 new guys, there would be three of them that would stand around in the open. Like, nothing's going to happen to them. And so there's instincts. And that's why when I read this past, I was like, the feeling of the sickness that I can only imagine it's even worse for him. Because he's thinking, here's another ship with however many 300 souls going down on it.

And I know that I could have had them, you know, do whatever they could have done differently. And the lessons just didn't get passed on. And that's why to me, this book that you've written is so important because it does have. have lessons that I saw I saw us relearn some of the lessons that you've got in this book. I watched this happen. And so I'm glad. Look, I wish you would have written it earlier, right? I wish you would have written it 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

But you didn't because you're lazy. But it took you seven years to write this thing. And the lessons are just, they're just awesome and they're important. and you know, the whole dynamic, when you understand the whole dynamic of where this personality comes from, where this mode of operating that is sort of, look, the seal teams, every seal is a little bit different,

but there's some core things there that are, that they're going to be there. No matter what seal you talk to from what generation, they've got this, they got a couple things in their soul. and when people start to on those things can fade but when people start to understand where that thing that little nugget in their soul where that came from and they go oh that's actually not just a that's not just a rock that's a cornerstone and we should focus on that we should remember that we should know where that came from we should know why that was important that we had that characteristic or we had that that that way of thinking about things and for me this book illuminated so many threads of the thought process that we have that seals where they came from to make sure when someone says well you know we need to just fall in mind with no actually we don't need to just fall in mind there's a reason that we think this way there's a reason that it's beneficial there's a

reason that it's beneficial to keep an open mind there's a reason that it's beneficial to utilize decentralized command there's a reason for those things and we should never forget where they came from and the more we understand where they came from the more we can act upon them correctly right so with that I'm sorry, your book gets me super fired up about some stuff. I'm going to say that. So this, my idea, and I don't know how well we're going to be able to stick this idea, because you have way too much freaking,

you have way too many facts and stories running around in your head, and I've got too many questions running around in mine. But my idea was to try and go through some of the chapters. And like you just did, you just said you cut about 15 pages, cut out 15 pages of Arley-Burke. By the way, did you actually write those 15 pages? Yeah, yeah, they're written. Oh, yeah. I mean, I had, that's horrible.

Some of it's like, you know, strange. Some of it's like, some of its notes. No, no, no. I mean, it's all written. And it was all like, I mean, I have a, not a paragraph, but I have a couple sentences on Burke's wife. I'm like, all right, I need, not all of this needs to be. You know, but when you find, like, I don't know your experience,

but when you're editing, like, if you're writing a novel, I expect, like, the, the impulse when you're, you know, cutting stuff is that, you know, you have. have a turn of phrase that you really like. And you're like, oh, man, that is, I mean, that's the best thing that's been written since the Bible. And you don't want to get rid of it. And your editor tells you, well, nobody gets what you're trying to say.

It sucks. You know, you need to lose it. But I think when you're, you know, when you're writing history and you're, you've done all this research, you've followed, you know, so many rabbit holes. You've done so many requests at the Navy Art or wherever you've gotten your material. And you've found what you think is this incredible document. you want to use that stuff. You mean, you fought for it.

You mean, you want to put it in there. I mean, I have a lot of detail in each sentence. And I don't do that, you know, to make a reader, you know, frustrated. I have it because, you know, the way that I'm writing is I have four note cards that all sit in front of me. And those four note cards, you will usually have, you know, two or three points on them. I'll star which one, which point I have on each note card. I'll be like, I want to put that, that, and that.

in one sentence. How do I do that? Like, how do I fit all that, you know, stuff in there? So, yes, I did. I cut probably between 10 and 15 pages of Burke's biography. However, when I rewrote the chapter, I didn't completely lose that. I mean, I try to say that I left as much on the field as possible. I just, you know, compressed it into this really, really, you know, tight diamond of, of information. But yeah, everybody, I mean, there were whole characters that I cut. And I got better as time, on. So when I was thinking about how we were going to do this, and I started to go back through, you know, chapter by chapter, you know, what were sections that I cut, what were sections that I lost and, you know, not just characters, but entire episodes. I saw, I saw it in these

chapters. My notes that I was putting together were getting shorter and shorter and shorter each chapter because I was learning as I was doing this whole book. And I did my research and I did my writing chapter by chapter. I would research and write one chapter. I would go back to an archive. I'd collect all the stuff and I'd write that next chapter and then I'd do it again for the third chapter for whatever it was doing. And I got better as I went. Better at identifying what was going to fit. And also you must have seen a better, clearer vision of the story arc. Yes. And so you knew what was important and what was not. Yeah, much better. Much better idea of the story and much better respect for my reader.

because I was, you know, when I was reading this, I was completely in love with my own pen. I thought everything I wrote was fantastic. I wrote the first chapter. I was like, well, you know, I probably should just send this off to the Pulitzer committee. So they have just, you know, have this thing up front. They'll know what's coming eventually. But, you know, when I reread that chapter six months after I'd written it, and I saw it, I was like, I'm not sure why that character's in here.

It's like, oh, I don't know about him either. I found myself. I had like, I, I did five introductions of five different characters in that first chapter before I really got to Carlson and his Raiders. Like, what hell was I doing? Like, I don't even know why I spent all that time doing it. Like, I was just, but I was learning, you know, even when you're learning the process and you're learning how to get better as you go.

But yeah. You seem to think about the, you seem to think about the reader a lot more than I do. Are you like, I don't want to put the reader through this? I'm like, well, I'm the reader. I mean, I'm the reader. I'm my imagination. I mean, I'm my own reader. Like I wrote, like I said, I wrote the book that I wanted to read.

And I, you know, but like you, you have to think about your reader. You have to, or at least I felt like I have to think about my reader because otherwise I'm writing a diary. I don't want to write a diary. I want people to read what I'm writing. I guess the closest I would come to was like, does this, would this make sense if I was reading it? So yeah, I guess I think about the reader a little. bit. You're your reader. I don't think about the reader. It sounds like you think about the reader sympathetically. They're getting no sympathy for me. You're like, well, I don't want to put the reader

through some like, hey, the reader better get on board with this. I don't know if I, like I, my reader was a, I wanted it to be, I wanted my reader to be, you know, a team guy. I wanted this book to be for the seals, but I wanted my mom to be able to read it too. So that when I was thinking, like, when I wrote this paragraph up, was it sufficient? Dense was it sufficiently was there was there enough material in it or enough interesting things on that to you know to make me like oh that's that's good stuff But was it also written well enough that my mom could understand it. That's what I was thinking about well also the last time that we were on here. Yeah, and you asked me what my mom did and I just said that she was a housewife Uh huh how'd that go over it didn't go over great so what's the real deal? I don't I don't have a great idea my mom was everything she did everything you set yourself up and

My mom did everything. She was the chief of staff. There you go. That sounds better than housewife, I guess. Unless you're a badass housewife, in which case you're like, yeah, I'm a badass housewife. What's up? We know what that entails.

That means I'm the chief staff officer, the chief financial officer, the troop motivator. You're everything. Yeah. Getting after it. So there you go, moms. So now she can stop being mad at me. This is six months later. All right.

So my thought was we go through this and talk about some of that. Because you know, you and I had conversations during the, during the podcast, after the podcast about the amount of people, the same thing you're saying right now. You had to just cut things out, cut stories out. Yeah. And so many of these things can be their own book, can be their own story. You could pull back the, pull the thread on any of these characters and you could, you have your own book. You have another book on just about any of these characters.

But I thought just going through some of the chapters, going through the chapters and talking about some of the things that didn't quite make it. Chapter 1 is called the reluctant. By the way, I was thinking about this as I was putting this together. Chapter 1 is called the Reluctant Creation and Violent Demise of the Navy's First Commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders. Your subtitles for each chapter indicate that you have a lot to say. This is going to be a long book. Like, chapter 1, the reluctant, you know, my books have like chapter 1, get some.

You know, boom, we're done, right? Chapter 2, get more. Like, I'm an idiot. You're over here. The reluctant creation and violent demise of the, the Navy's first command is the Marine Corps Raiders. That was my editors. That was Julian Pavia.

He sort of insisted. So each of my chapters were something like, I don't know, like, it wasn't as tight as Carlson's Raiders, but it was something like, the only one that I remember is for chapter five from my UDTs. It was like the Murmint of War. Before they had come up with the Frogmen as like a moniker for them. They were calling them like really clunky, you know. God, that's awful, especially after that movie.

What's that movie? Echo Charles. Which one? Zoolander. You know what I'm talking about? So in the movie Zoolander, which has Owen Wilson in it, who's like one of my favorite people of all time.

That guy seems so chill and cool. And it also has Ben Stiller. Ben Stiller. So Ben Stiller plays like a really dumb model, a man model, right? And he comes from some freaking mining town in Pennsylvania or something. And he's in this bar with his dad. He's trying to be like more manly.

And his dad's in there. And his dad's played by, uh, John Voight, John Voight. And they're all, they're all like covered in mind dust. Vince Vaughn's in there and no lines. He's no lines. Yeah, no lines. Just no lines. Just being tough. And so Ben Stiller's in there trying to be tougher.

And a, and a commercial comes on the TV. And it's him advertising some like fragrance. And he's dressed up like a mermaid. And his dad's like, I can't have you running around here. I was a damn mermaid. And he says, it's not a mermaid. Dad. It's my man

So that's what I thought of when I saw that thing I was reading through yesterday. I'm like did we really have to go there with the merman Clunky clunky's at the least all right so so but my yes so his point was you need to give the reader some idea of what's in store for them Like if you start a chapter on the if you okay, so Imagine you're a reader you're picking up a book ostensibly about the Navy Seals and that first chapter is you're reading three pages and it's all about the Marine Corps, what the hell are you doing? You have to give your reader some idea of what this is about.

And, you know, when I thought about it, it completely made sense because now I'm not just doing the reader help on chapter one with the Marine Corps Raiders, but I'm going to be helping the reader when it gets to the Army Rangers and everything else. It has to tie back in. Each of these chapters have to tie back in to the SEAL teams. It had to be relevant to.

who, you know, how the Navy had, you know, created this first. Yeah. Well, there you go. That's why we have the clunky. That's why you have the big long titles. Long titles for all your chapters. You're one of these guys that pulls off like, hey, if I'm just really nice, maybe Jocko will leave me alone.

You know, like you gave this super nice explanation. Now I kind of feel bad like, no, that's a good title. You did good. You put me in check, all humble. And I'm all like, I'm a jerk. I'll just go. I'll leave. So, uh, Marine Corps.

Let's talk about this chapter. I know one of the guys that you mentioned to me as a guy named Pete Ellis. Pete Ellis. He didn't make the cut, huh? No, I thought Pete Ellis. Pete Ellis is relevant because Pete Ellis is the, he's the Marine, he's a First World War Marine who is,

he's the first Marine to articulate a vision for the Marine Corps that is more than just a subordinate service to the U.S. Navy or the Navy's police force. He imagines, after he sees what the Marine Corps is capable of on the Western Front, the Marine Corps is the, when World War I starts, and the U.S. military finds itself in the trenches, not just in the trenches, but then moving on the German army, the best force that the United States military has is the Marine Corps. So there's all these Marine officers, staff officers, Marine commanders, who suddenly, by comparison with their peers in the U.S. Army, see that the Marines, Marine Corps is the best service, the most capable service, you know, we have. So why not, you know, start thinking beyond, you know, just this idea of being, you know, the ship-borne utility force for the U.S. Navy. Why not start thinking of the U.S. Marine Corps as almost a rival to the U.S. Army?

So in order to do that, in order to justify that in Congress, the Marine Corps had to articulate a mission for itself. And that mission was, you know, it was a specific. essentially come up with by Pete Ellis. Pete Ellis, he identifies the enemy, or at least, you know, he's writing this in 1922, 20 years before World War II starts. He knows that the next war the U.S. is in is going to be with Imperial Japan. He knows how rapacious Japan is. He knows their ambitions to dominate all of Asia. And if the U.S. military wants to confront Japan, it's going to have to have a force capable of doing that, a force that's not just, you know, a force that's like I said, the ship-borne utility force of raiders or jungle fighters, anything like that.

They're going to have to have all the logistics capable of supporting an amphibious army ashore, artillery, aircraft, logistics, ships, landing craft, all that stuff. So he is the one that comes up with this plan. Problem with Pete Ellis is he is a personal disaster. He is nobody that I wrote about is as much of a liberty risk. I mean, he is, he suffers from depression, something they call Naraznia. And he, whenever he, when he's writing this plan, the advanced base operations for Micronesia, when he's drafting this plan for the Marine Corps, he's doing periodic bouts at the mental hospital in Washington, D.C. He eventually.

What did he do in World War I? He was a staff officer, but I wasn't completely clear on his combat record. I got the sense that he actually saw a decent amount of combat. He wrote a plan of operations for, I can't remember which assault it was. I think it was on the Blanc Monk section of the Hindenburg line, but it was supposed to be a brilliant operational plan, and it was totally successful. and I think it was noticed by Pershing at one point.

It was called one of the best plans in the war. But after that, you know, when he's, you know, during this period of the 20s, after one bout in a mental institution, he convinces the Secretary of the Navy or the Undersecretary of the Navy, which is Theodore Roosevelt Jr. at the time, to send him on an island hopping survey of the Central Pacific so he can justify or so he can prove what he suspects, which is the Japanese are building all these island readouts throughout the Pacific. He gets the authorization by Teddy Roosevelt Jr. He goes out there.

Something happens at one of these island bars. He starts announcing his intentions while he's on a bender. The spies try and collect him and get him packed off. He manages to escape. escapes the island, makes his way to another island, and then drinks himself to death. There's a whole cottage industry of writers out there that say that he was poisoned

or he was killed by the Japanese. I think he was just a drunk, and he just, his liver couldn't handle it. Do you ever train, I don't know what the name of the place is, but for a while we were using some facility, and I don't want to name it, but you'll know what I'm talking about. That used to be an institution, like a mental institution.

Did you ever train at that place? Boy, that sounds familiar. For a while, we and the teams were going to some place that was formerly a mental institution. And it was creepy. Like, you'd go into certain... Is it east coast or west coast? It's in the middle of the country, kind of. I don't know that I was there.

Man, it was weird. You'd go into rooms and you just like look around. and there'd be weird. It was weird. It was really weird. You know, like you get a little bit of scariness. You know what I'm saying? You know, it's night and you're with like one other dude.

You're standing in some weird hallway in there. And it's, it looks like it's from 1922. That's what made me think of it. Like 1922. Well, you know, when you start talking about what a mental institution was like in 1922, it's not like what it's like now, right? Right. Right now it's, you know, probably they've got nice windows and they want to make things safe and open for people to understand and learn and feel good about themselves.

This was not the scenario in this place where I trained at at all, man. Like, well, like an asylum. Yes. No, 100%. It was like an asylum. Yeah, it was like an asylum. You thought it was haunted. That's why you're scared.

Kind of. I think there's probably a justifiable reason to think that too. I mean, when you see like, not just, you know, asylums, but there's this been, or there's been this story of this, uh, orphanage in Canada, you know, that had all these indigenous children. They're finding just massive burial plots now of all these kids that were killed there. It's horrific. Yeah. Well, that was a...

I'm not an expert on that for any reason. Yeah, well, that was one of the goals was to just re-educate the children. You see it happening now right now with our school systems. Kids are getting re-educated in a new way. Speaking of ending up in asylums. So there's another character that's a... Yeah. Yeah.

A guy named Red Mike. Yeah, I was hoping you'd ask about him. You could write a book about Red Mike. That's... Red Mike Edson. So when I was trying to sort through the relevance of the Raiders, the Raiders are important to the history of the SEAL teams because they're the first instance where the Navy telegraphs its desire for its own raiding force.

They want to broadcast or they want to franchise raids throughout the Pacific to draw the Japanese attention away from the areas that they're about to attack. So Japanese defenses are too consolidated. They want to spread them out on all these islands. So before the invasion of Guadalcanal, it was the Navy's idea to pull the Japanese attention. all the way to the Central Pacific, you know, 2,000 miles north. So the idea is launch some submarine raiders on these things. And, you know, like I said, spread Japanese attention, spread Japanese defenses.

And I was looking at, I knew that, you know, I knew that that was the goal, and there were two raider battalions that were designed to do it, the first raider battalion and the second raider battalion. Now, I knew the second raider battalion had taken Macon, and that was probably more in keeping with the point that I needed to make to launch pad into my second chapter. What I didn't like was that I would have to spend so much time with Evans Carlson. Now, if you read the book, Evans Carlson is one of probably the three most peculiar characters in the book. He's really frustrating.

And, you know, if you're writing history, you know, the goal is always to be objective with characters. You don't want to telegraph to your reader that you don't like somebody. Evans Carlson is a person. It's hard not to dislike. Merritt, Red Mike Edson, on the other hand, is he's incredible. Like, you, I mean, he's, I mean, he was incredible before the war in Nicaragua.

He fought through all these little banana wars. Like, I know that the Marine Corps has this love affair with Chesty Puller. There's no reason that, they should have any less affinity for Red Mike Edson. He's everywhere during World War II. He leads some of the most daring assaults of the war. He's at Tulagi. He's at Guadalcanal.

He's at Tarawa. I mean, three major battles in Marine Corps history. I think he had two Navy crosses, a Medal of Honor, Silver Stars. I mean, he was incredible. And he's got a terribly tragic. end. It's bizarre. It is bizarre.

Did you read about him? Yeah. He leaves the Navy, or he leaves the Marine Corps under protest when, during the revolt of the Admills after World War II, right before the Korean War, when the Army and the Air Force kind of collaborated to strip the Navy in the Marine Corps of funding. He resigns the Marine Corps in protest so he can protest more loudly. he has a series of jobs and eventually he commits suicide in his garage. I don't know.

I mean, it's one of those, you don't hear a lot of World War II veterans that made that decision. But, I mean, it stands to reason, you know, considering everything that we're going through right now. I mean, someone who has gone through as much as, you know, Red Mike Edson did, had suffered as many blast injuries as he, no doubt, you know, suffered. I think he was probably dealing with all the same, same things that so many of our friends are. Yeah, so I think that idea of resigning in protest

and what you get from it, where it ends up is a tough thing to talk about because once you're done, yeah, you're done. You're done. And actually, I think it was Green during the Vietnam War addressed at who he was like to comment on the Marine Corps. I can't forgive my memory, but, you know, he was getting interviewed.

Well, why didn't you, you know, leave? Because you got McNamara who's a jackass. You got LBJ, who's a total jackass. Maybe it's time just to, you know, make your statement. Hey, and he said, look, I'll be in the news for 48 hours. And then that's it. They'll have another guy and I'll have no influence. And that's, you know, I've often talked about hackworth doing the same thing, Vietnam.

You know, he could have been a division. He could have been a brigade commander. Could have been a division commander. He would have had whatever, thousands of troops underneath him that he could have fought in a different way, but instead he sort of resigned in protest. And yeah, you know, there's another, the commanding officer of, I want to say, the Lost Battalion World War I, but he was a medal of honor recipient, and he killed himself. After the, he was one of the pallbearers at the tomb for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

and you know that happened I want to say like 1919 was when they actually had everything set up for the to dedicate the tomb of the unknown soldier he was as a metal off honor recipient he was one of the guys that um that was one of those pallbearers and then I think it was about a year later he booked a sea passage from new york to cuba or New York to Florida or something and then wrote a wrote a note and disappeared, you know, killed himself. Did you read that Patrick O'Donnell book? What is it called? I can't remember what it's called. It was just one that I had seen. It looked interesting. What's it about?

It's about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Oh, okay. No, I did not read it. I'd be curious to read it. It's about, I think it's about all the pall bears in that. Wow. Oh, there's one of them. And it will

A little bit What was it that you didn't like about Carlson so much? Carlson, he's just Man, Carlson is I think Carlson There were lots of characters that I came in contact with

that are other Carlson's. They're characters that you You know, they've done They've done an incredible amount for their country. But you have the benefit of hindsight. You have the benefit of perspective. And you have to weigh in on their legacy.

So has Carlson done more than me? Yeah. Has Carlson done more than you? I mean, yeah. I mean, he fought through World War II. Like, he's not even close. Like, yeah, there's nothing. We can't compare, you know, our contribution to somebody like Carlson.

And he's in one of the first raids of the entire war, and then he fights in successive battles. What's important about Carlson, though, is that the Marine Corps loses all respect for him after the Macon Island raid. They give him another chance with the long patrol on Guadalcanal, and he does admirable work there, but it's not enough to overshadow the defeat and the aftermath of the Macon Island raid.

the Macon Island raid, it isn't really known how disastrous it is until 1943, a whole year later when U.S. forces retake the island, and they discover that the Marines that they believe to have been drowned in the evacuation weren't drowned but captured and killed, beheaded by the Japanese. So it's sort of a failure that kind of unfolds over time. But when the full scope of the failure of the Macon Island raid is understood, the Marine Corps never lets Evans Carlson command troops ever again. Now, that's perfectly fine for the Marine Corps leadership. Was there something about his personality that...

It was a personality, yeah, but it was also his politics. He was, I think he was a borderline communist. He was definitely a populist, definitely like a socialist populist. But he was, by the end of the war, he's advocating for the Chinese, not the nationalist, Chinese, the Chinese communists. Eventually, he dies in disgrace, penniless because he resigned from the Marine Corps. I can't remember exactly what happens to him in the aftermath, but I know he has no money. Teddy Roosevelt has to pay for his funeral, not Teddy Roosevelt, James Roosevelt. But some of it's his personality.

Some of it's just he's kind of ponderous. Like he's a bit boring, like, you know, stuffy. Like one of the things that I think is most telling, the most descriptive episode I have are a little vignette in the book is when one of his junior officers comes up to him and asks him for, you know, a few books to read that will help him understand, you know, how to command or the military art better.

And all the books, that Carlson recommends are books that he's written. You've got to think a lot of yourself to tell somebody, you know, if they're looking for books to read these five that I've written. So he tried to read him and they're all impenetrable, boring books about Chinese. Like he gave up. Well, I'm very thankful right now for the book about face by Colonel David Hackworth because whenever somebody says, hey, what's a good book for me to read about Leishap

and I would say, oh, yeah, read about face. Because otherwise I'd be pulling a Carlson and tell him to read it. Extreme ownership or leadership strategy and tactics. I'm a loser. No, you don't like me, too. I'm right up there with Carlson. I didn't say that. Well, if it wasn't for Hackworth, I'd be right up there with Carlson.

Hang on, you haven't seen the books that Carlson wrote, too. I had to read them. Were they just nasty? It was just boring. Do you remember any titles of them? Did you read the whole thing? Are you like, this is ridiculous? I'd get the idea.

Carlson's a dork. In the beginning, I did. In the beginning, I had everything collected. I read books that I knew that Carlson had read just because I wanted to think like he was thinking. He was fascinated with Mao, so I was reading Mao when I was writing this chapter. So I got better with my research as I went on, but at the time, like, when I wrote chapter one, I had not yet stepped into an archive. I wrote the first draft of chapter one just based off of, out of books that existed,

from online archives. I was able to find a ton of material online. on the Macon Island raid. So, I mean, you pay, you know, $20 a month, you have access to Fold 3 and a couple of other archives, and you can find the after-action report of the USS Nautilus or the USS Argonaut. So, you know, not having stepped into an archive,

I was taking advantage of everything else that was available to me. All the books that Carlson had written, books that Mao had written, things like that. So I was saturated with all this stuff, is sort of extraneous. I got better in my research. So chapter two is the first time I stepped foot into an archive. And I was like, oh, I can do this better.

All right. Well, let's get the chapter two. Chapter two, which is called the sidelineing of the Army's amphibious soldier scouts and the call-up of the Navy's second-string sailors. I think that's a pretty good title. It's pretty good. All right. For the second-string sailors, that's a nod to.

You know, these guys, all of these second-string sailors were all members. Every single one of the initial Navy contingent of the Scouts and Raider program are all NFL veterans. They've all been, Bucklew, he's not only a college football star, not only an NFL star, but he was building his own football team. He made his own team, right? He founded the Columbus Bullies, and it would have probably been a successful NFL franchise had it not been for the start of World War II. That is a freaking legit name, too. Columbus Bullies. The Columbus Bullies.

Yeah. Man, if I would have known, see, if I would know that, tasking a bruiser might have been tasking at bullies. I guess it doesn't quite work quite as well, does it? No, seems kind of sinister. Yeah. But today's, I guess, especially in today's climate, you'd be like politically incorrect to call yourself the bullies. It's true. I'm a bully.

He looked like a bully. If you see pictures of him, I mean, I went through, you know, like piles of pictures of Bucklow. And, you know, every picture, especially in those World War II days, he just looks like a, looks like a dick. He's an asshole. Looks like it. But that's completely opposite of what everybody I talked to said of the personality. Actually said about the guy. He said, they all described him as the nicest guy.

Like he was, he was just so much fun to be around. It was super humble. But yeah, every picture he managed to like, you know, go from what I assume is a, you know, pretty fun loving guy and too, you know, has this big scowl on his face. And so what I meant to go down this path to be a little bit of Carlson. So Carlson's personality, was he a dick? Was he a arrogant guy?

No, he was his deal. He was. How do you end up on these failing missions? Was it a lack of experience? I think it was a couple of things. He was infatuated with the Chinese and the Chinese operational system. He was in the Marine Corps, the slogan, the Marine Corps slogan of Gung Ho came from Carlson. He, that's his lasting legacy to the Marine Corps.

We understand Gung Ho to me an expression that, you know, epitomizes, you know, Marine Corps tenacity and Marine Corps. What do you, freaking charge the machine gun nest is what it means. But it really means work together. It means work together. Right. It's a Chinese expression.

It's vague. I'm not sure if it's even accurate, but he took it from his time on the long march with Mao's guerrillas. Yeah, it means work together. But I'll tell you what, when we picked apart some of Mao's work on the podcast, the thing that's crazy about Mao's work is it's basically, saying you need to utilize decentralized command to win in military operations. And I'm like, hey,

bro, Mao. That applies to everything, dude. You can't have decentralized organization in order to win a war and then centralize your government as soon as you're done and think that you can explain how many, you know, what every farmer in the country is supposed to grow and how much we're going to sell, whatever we're going to sell it for. Like, it's crazy that they came to that conclusion. I don't understand. There's so many contradictions like that in World War II. I mean, how are the Germans who are the most hierarchical government system, you know, on the planet? And they managed to produce a military that was able to use initiative decentralized command. Yet at the top, they're stultified.

They can't accomplish anything. I mean, they can't, you know, release the Panzers and D-Day. Like, I mean, they're... But, yeah, at the lower level, they're, you know, able to do, you know, able to be dynamic and fluid and agile and all the rest. You know what? When your ego starts to get out of control, you start to think I better control everything. that's what happens and you could see

I mean it seemed like Hitler did that throughout World War II the more he won the more he thought well I better just control everything see it's working I better just keep doing this and by the end it was all on him hey we're gonna attack Rush even though those generals are saying hey bro not a good idea

no we're doing it yeah but Carlson the other thing that Carlson did was he was so infatu with the Chinese system that he was he would eat with his men he would have these like town hall discussions he would, he essentially abolished rank except for like in certain aspects he,

but when he got on the, I mean, when he was, you know, on the actual Macon Island raid, you can see a clear misunderstanding of what the mission was, which told me, I mean, that is conveying to you, he doesn't know what his mission objective is. He hasn't thought through. He spent two weeks sitting on a submarine,

you know, driving across the Pacific under, you know, completely miserable conditions, you know, sweating, you know, through his, you know, yeah, like, and he finally gets there. I was on modern day subs that had AC and they were super clean and you're not worried about getting depth charges dropped on your freaking head. Imagine a two-week transit. No, I can't. Gas fumes all up in there. And he gets there. They get on the island and they look around and there's. You know, there's nothing really to raid.

I mean, just the fact that they landed there, the fact that they were able to assault a Japanese position and win, mission accomplished, get off the island. There's nothing else that you have to do here. There's no intelligence that you're really going to gather. But he's paralyzed, which just, you know, like I said, it conveys that he doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't really know what the purpose of this mission is.

He hasn't connected, you know, the Navy's planner's vision, you know, to their actions on. on that island. And then you're comparing that to Bucklew, who was like a good guy, a nice guy, even though he looked like a bully. So what you, wait, what you said this is when you started going into the archives for the first time

was chapter two? Chapter two, yeah. So I, I, because you didn't spend enough freaking time invested in, in research just on, just on online reading Carlson's books. So you wanted more. Yeah. You're a glutton.

I don't know. I mean, if I had known, So there were two things that I got from chapter one writing that. I was like I was encouraged because I felt like I was a good researcher. I'd put, you know, a compelling chapter together. Were you a sniper? No. I was a calm guy and a breacher.

J-TAC type. Yeah, I was a calm guy too, but I'm just thinking from a patient's perspective. Yeah, I'm really antsy. It's, I find my, yeah, and I don't know what the disconnect is. because I find myself like whenever I'm being instructed now or like I find myself like I get real like I can't I can't listen to this guy I gotta get out of here I'll find myself just leaving I would have thought you would have gone down the sniper because you have this you know super anyone that's you know going into archives and and reading Carlson's third book on whatever communist leadership from 1932 now I didn't want to read it though like I remember looking at that book and just kind of like hanging my head like I got to read another one of the these things. I don't know what, I don't know why I was compelled to do it. I was though. And I wanted, I just wanted to get it right. I wanted to, I wanted to have a good idea of who this guy was. And I also didn't have the benefit of reading Carlson's, you know, letters like I did with other

people, you know, say like a Bucklew or a Halper. Is that because Carlson didn't have letters? No, he has them. I just didn't go to the archive. Oh, so now that's the archives. Yeah. So that's, and now you're starting to find real. I'm finding real documents. I'm finding, like, I'm getting, I know Bucklew, I know Halper because I'm, I'm, I'm reading their letters. I'm reading the letters of the folks that created the scouts and raiders, like pedicord. And not just reading their letters, but I'm talking to family members, talking to people that actually knew them. I'm getting a real sense of who they are. It completely changed how I researched, but it also told me one thing.

I was not going to be able to write this book from my basement, which was terrifying. I was going to have to go places. I was going to have to hunt for stuff. And it was terrifying in the beginning. And talk to people. Talk to people the worst. That did become like, you know, the one nice thing about, you know, writing a book about World War II is you don't have anybody arguing

with what you're going to write about them. You know, they don't exist. They're not around anymore. Yeah. When you get to Vietnam, I'll tell you a story later in the podcast. There's people who are still alive that I wrote about that don't like what was written about them. Ouch.

But, you know, you. You insulate yourself from, you know, the criticism by your due diligence. You make sure that you get it right. If you don't, shame on you. But in Chapter of you. Have you had to retract anything? No, there's nothing that I've retracted. There's nothing that I would, I've communicated with folks, you know, after.

And the one case, the person I wrote about, he had just passed away. his family read about what I wrote about them. It's nothing, you know, particularly damning or anything like that, but they weren't thrilled to hear that their dad had, you know, not completely succeeded in Vietnam and had kind of run off with a nurse in Saigon. So what I said to them is, you know, they were, I think the note that they sent me He said, you know, we were disappointed to learn about, you know, what you perceive is our dad's failure. And Vietnam, and I responded, I don't think your dad was a failure.

Absolutely not. He prepared SEAL Team 1 for war. He failed in this one narrow, narrow context. And that context being, did he advance or did he advance naval special warfare toward, you know, what they ultimately became land-focused, commander raiders? In that context, no, he didn't. And another, he did. He was a success. But, you know, I told him, you know, even though he failed in that, you know, a particular moment,

lots of people were failing in that particular moment. Nobody really understood what, you know, what they were getting their hands into. Yeah, it's real easy to look back with hindsight and say, well, yeah, obviously we should have done this instead of that. It's like very easy to look back and say that, you know. Right. And so I ultimately told him, I was like, I'm proud to call him. him my teammate. I mean, I look at his legacy and, you know, I see, you know, mistakes that I made. Like, I'm not perfect either and nobody is. So anyway. So we get the second string sailors. These are the tuna fish, right? Yeah. He's the tuna fish. These are all guys that have gotten kind of roped

into the U.S. Navy kind of accidentally. Like Bucklew, he joins the Navy because the Army and the Marine Corps won't take him because he's humongous. I mean, he's too big. He tries to volunteer for the paratroopers. He's too big. And the quote from his oral history is that the recruiter told him that the army could take two instead of him based on just his weight, which is completely accurate. And Bucklew isn't even the biggest one.

Big John Tripson, when you see pictures of Bucklew and Tripsen next to each other, Tripson is a head taller than Buckleau. How tall you think Tripson was? Six, seven, probably. I mean, he's massive. He's a mountain of a man. He's huge. Six, seven.

And he's just big. Yeah. He's just a big thing. We had this conversation on the last podcast because imagine being six, seven, like two 60, two 70 in 1940. Right. I mean, no one's even lifting, bro. No, nobody's lifting. These guys are just jacked through nature.

Through football. They're playing a lot of football. And Halperin, who I wrote about, he's the smallest one. Halperin was the, you know, he's the, you know, he's the. Jewish guy that, you know, went to play for Notre Dame. And I think he was like 6-2-225, something like that. And he's the smallest of the tuna fish. Yeah, so all these guys end up in the Navy, which, and they're thinking, hey, we're

going to figure something out because we're jacked, we're physical, we're kind of beasts. Yeah, they pull them in to be like calisthenics. Yeah, I was going to say that. And that's what they get pulled to do. They think that that's what they're going to do. They think they're, you know, joining to go, you know, do this like, you know, whatever commando program and they get you know roped into you know jean tony jean tony is you know he's a famous character um himself he's the uh he's the two-time um boxing champion right he beat uh help me out joe lewis

no not joe lewis um this is terrible because i wrote i wrote two whole pages about tunny's fight in um philadelphia uh with um i can't think of it um um I know that you wrote about the fact that he, like, trained. He was the first person that trained. Yeah, he's the first guy that, like, that was going through physical training in order to get good. And he was able to, he only fought like three times, though. Yeah.

And two of those were championship fights. Jack Dempsey. Jack Dempsey. That's right. So, all right. So now we got these guys. So, yeah. So they're, they're in Gene Tunney's regime of physical fitness.

and structures. They're kind of getting, they're taking Navy recruits. They're, they're training them. They're putting them through, you know, little PT sessions like they're doing log PTs. They're doing like little like group activities, these stuff that, you know, either Gene Tunney had pulled from the Marine Corps or that they had kind of developed along the way themselves, which, you know, that's kind of plant a seed for later when, you know, the scouts and raiders, uh, conditioning curriculum gets compressed by Draper Coffin. But they all volunteer for this commando program. They don't really know what it is.

But then they get hoodwinked again from, you know, Tunney's regime to being landing craft skippers for Army commandos, you know, the Raider section of the Scouts and Raider program. That would piss me off so bad. Wouldn't it? Oh, man. They find themselves out there and they're like, all right, you guys are going to be in charge of the boats. I would be angry.

What's the character, you got some guy named Witsleben? Somebody that you cut, you were telling me about this guy. What's this guy? Vitzleben. So when I wrote the initial draft of this chapter, the thing that I felt like I had to convey

was that the senior commanders in World War II, they had a serious problem when it came to amphibious warfare. One, they didn't have landing craft. But two, even if they did, have landing craft. It's a bit of a problem. They didn't know, uh, the armies commanders. They didn't know how to put troop to shore. And there were, uh, there were logistics problems. They, they, they knew that they would need to, even if they were able to land, um, men, even if they were

able to put landing craft on beaches, uh, they needed to put, um, men on beaches in which there were beach exits. So exits so you could drive vehicles off the beach. I mean, if you land on a beach that has, you know, cliff faces and you can't drive off the beach, then, what good is it that you've had all these landing craft? You have to have guys that can find beaches, good beaches, and then alert the army to where those beaches are, so it can bring an entire landing force ashore. The army has completely, in the interwar period,

from World War I to World War II, they've done almost nothing when it comes to the development of amphibious doctrine. nothing showcased the threat of all of that more than the terrible disaster at Dieppe, which happens in August of 1942. That's the first time the Allies attempt to land troops on an enemy beach or a Nazi-controlled enemy beach. Now, the proponents of troops and the battle are Canadians. There's a decent amount of British commandos. There's a handful of American army rangers.

they go ashore most of the Canadians are killed or captured and part of the reason that this raid or this assault or this attempted dress rehearsal of D-Day fails is because they don't have a good assessment of what the beach exits were like they don't know how

when they got ashore the tanks either they weren't able to get off the beach because the sand was too loose they couldn't their treads buried up to the hubs that they couldn't get off the beach, the tanks and the vehicles that were able to get off the beach, they ran into tank traps almost immediately.

So the idea was, you know, writing this whole chapter on, you know, the Deup raid was just, you know, a way for me to talk about, you know, all of the imperatives that a scout and raider force would need to solve. Yeah, bring to the table for the mission. Right. you needed to find a beach that you could land on. You know, the sand is dense enough that had beach exits and that you could, you know, signal the rest of the fleet for.

I cut it all. Gone. All of it was gone. And Vitzleben was one of those characters. He was one of the architects of, you know, Hitler's initial push to fortify the Atlantic wall. I don't know why. I put Witzlaven on my notes, but he was a character that I got sucked into because he was one of those guys that he hated Hitler.

And yet he still did everything he could to, you know, fortify the coast. He was ultimately one of those guys that participated in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler. And he ended up getting executed by dangling from a meat hook. Anyway. That's a little bit of a rabbit hole, isn't it? Isn't it? Every one of these freaking characters is like... I know.

It's a lot. I mean, it's a lot. But, you know, all these things are just, you know, they're very now. What's the problem with Bucklew? The problem with Bucklew is he's everywhere Meaning what? He's moving around too much Trying to do too much?

What? No, no, no. He, like the problem, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, proxlew presents a problem, presented a problem for a, for a writer, not for anybody else. Bucklew is incredible. And I, uh, I wrote, I wrote, you know, sections about Bucklew in chapter two. I wrote sections about Bucklew in chapter four, sections about Bucklew in chapter six, a section, I mean, a whole chapter about him on, uh, um, in the Bucklew report. report and then again he comes on the stage in my chapters on Vietnam when he's the commander of naval operational support group he's everywhere he is the indispensable person in the history of

naval special warfare what was the problem that I ran into is that if I had talked about him a little bit here and I talked about him a little bit here and then a little bit there I was kind of wasting ammo on him I was going to let her I was going to you know I was going to force a reader to kind of discover all of him. Bucklew's relevance, you know, instead of like compressing Bucklew

into that final chapter on the Bucklea report and really, you know, instead of, you know, spreading out your tanks, you know, consolidating him into one punch. So the reader finally gets a sense

of how important this person is. I just didn't want to waste Bucklew, you know, throughout the book. I wanted to, you know, collect him all on one thing. But it took me, you know, almost until the book was entirely

written and I had to go back through the book and I cut bucklu cut bucklew cut cut bucklew so I could you know yeah because otherwise you're kind of giving away the story because bucklew doesn't become but you're not he wasn't bucklew out of the gate and he was a stud sure he wasn't like phil h bucklew right which is what the where seal training takes place is called the phil h bucklew center for neighbor special warfare right our schoolhouse is named after this guy but he didn't come out of the gate that way came out of the gate as a guy and he never come kind of shines in the way that other characters did. So I was always frustrated because I knew that I had to talk about Buckleau,

and I knew that Buckley was so important. But he never, you know, he's not the first guy ashore like Halpern is. He's not, he's not the ground force commander in China like Halpern is. But he's there. He's always there, like all the, you know, like some other characters too. So, but I just didn't want to lose the. Was he younger? Is that why he was still around when Vietnam gets, comes into play?

They were all about the same age. I think he was younger than Halpern. Halperm was the old man of the group. Halper him was 34. I think he was 34 when he enlisted as a seaman, right? Halper was. And he was a Notre Dame graduate and NFL player and all this other crazy stuff. NFL player.

He was running his dad's commercial light company in Chicago. He was developing a clothing store. I mean, he was kind of like, it was kind of the jaco. He had a lot going on. And then he just enlisted as a seaman. He was married. And he was a professional, you know, sailboat racer. He was a competitive sailboat racer on Lake Michigan.

I don't know if you remember in his epitaph that I write in the book. He was, Halperin was, he was in the 1960s Olympics for sailing. What the aisle? He wins a bronze medal. What a freaking stud. Yeah, he's incredible. And he was 34 when he, so he must have been old in 1960. He's old and the pictures of him.

He must be like 55, 60 years old in the Olympics. He's the oldest man that was competing at that time. But by then, Halperin has developed, I mean, Halperin is, you know, he's more than how, he's got, he's friends with, he's friends with Sinatra. He knows everybody. Like, he's running, you know, he founded LL Bean. Like he was, by that point in his life, I mean, he's.

Wait, Buck Halpern founded L.L.B. Yeah. Explain that to be a little bit. That's as much as I know. I know he was one of the founders. Finally, I got to the end of one of your rabbit holes. You didn't have the freaking weird with all to dig in. Full details of LLBin.

Well, maybe if, you know, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a factory up in Maine where we produce stuff near LL Bean, maybe that's a little bit of an important deal. We could have known a little bit more about the frogman history of LL Bean. Well, I'll give him some props. I'll get to the bottom of that one for you. I think he sold his shares. But Buck, yeah, Bucklew, he doesn't quite, you know, outshine, you know, Halpern and or other guys in all these other episodes. So, but he does, you know, like he finally takes center stage, you know, during the, you know, during the. Buckley report and his whole biography is compressed into that into that report but that's getting

ahead of the story all right we roll into chapter three and this was um i mean it's a rough one to read uh i was listening to and and rereading it i was listening to the podcast we did on it man this is a freaking hard one to read because it's um well the name of the chapter is the u.s army's first commandos and the raid that wasn't so this is not a bad this is one of your more abbreviated titles, so we give you credit for that. I don't know why you're laughing. Well, you know, Echo has new, doesn't even say anything. I try and keep it, I try and keep it tight.

Echo's not even talking, so. Once you mentioned it, I can't unsee it. Oh, he's just getting warmed up, man. I'm telling him he's going off from here. It's kind of like when Theo Vaughn said, you looked at you halfway through the podcast and says, like, what about you? Your name is Echo. You haven't said anything yet.

Okay. For a guy in echo, you sure don't say much. Yeah, there you go. That was a good, observant situation. This was a rough one because, well, I guess because of what happened with the Rangers in the beginning. What was it like right in this chapter? This is a, this was the fifth chapter I wrote.

So I felt like I was further along. I was better than I was. some of the earlier chapters. I don't, I don't know if that accounts for, you know, why I think the chapter has such a great arc to it, but I, or it's just because the, you know, the, the history itself has such a, you know, such a tragic arc. It was hard to write this in the, the sense that I was, I always assumed that I'd be rooting for the Navy, like throughout the book, rooting for, you know, the Navy chapters, and then I'd get to an Army or Marine Corps chapter, and I'd be like, see, I told you so.

Like, I knew, you know, I knew that you guys were going to, you know, screw up and there'd be an opportunity for the Navy. I found the opposite to be true. Or not, maybe not the opposite, but I found myself, you know, um, uh, yeah, just, you know, empathizing with these guys so much. Like there were, I mean, this, the Ranger contribution, um, uh, in World War II is, it's remarkable. the contribution of guys like Darby, remarkable. I mean, and to have to write about Darby critically, that wasn't easy to do. I had to, it was the first time that I had to write about somebody who, you know,

I knew to be, you know, a legitimate American hero and write about them, you know, in a light that's not flattering. And I'm not sure that anybody's ever done that before. I'd read a lot of books about Darby, and every single one of them. they, you know, his, they burnish his legacy. They consider him, you know, to be one of the, the founders or one of the, the most important, you know, greatest contributors to American Special Operations history. And that's true.

But there's also this other truth that Darby should have known better. And he didn't. And I don't know why. I mean, I thought, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Like, nobody in the U.S. Army knew better than Darby what a raid was and how a raid could be successful and what elements would have to be put together for that raid to fail. And that raid, I mean, there are so many, you know, kind of warning bells about the raid on Susterna that should have alerted Darby and the rest of the chain of command that this was a disaster waiting to happen. And yet, you know, nobody threw the brakes on. This is one of the ones where you do a little psychological kind of profiling of Darby

I actually wanted to read this section part of it I read on the last one but it's worth reading again because part of it I didn't read on the last one black-haired blue-eyed wide mouth as a duck Darby had a ruddy face divided into equal parts forehead and chin his left cheek bore a mysterious brilliant red scar not particularly muscular He nevertheless affected chest out, shoulders back posture in which his arms always seemed cocked to the rear as if never more than a moment away from snapping to attention. Son of a printer and a musician, the second child between two sisters. He grew up scouting the Arkansas woods and playing the saxophone. When in high school, his older sister died in Texas.

He married, then divorced in spite of disappointment. And tragedy, his attitude remained just as has ever been. Good humor and irresponsible. Or sorry, in irrepressible. In personality, just like imposter, he was direct, forceful, and never vacillating. Had the military gene not dominated and driven him to a life of soldiering, he would have been a salesman. He is the ideal commando leader, wrote Colonel Vaughn at the end of the course. He possesses the energy, keenness, and personality, which produces the best out of those under his command.

graduated from West Point in 1933 at the apex of the bell curve ranked 177 out of a class of 346. He was originally assigned as a field artillery officer. Like all soldiers who graduated then and with that assignment, he embarked on an eight-year career punctuated by the peacetime artillery corps elements, boredom and horse manure. In 1941, he was one of the few soldiers who attended the Joint Army Marine Corps amphibious exercises in Puerto Rico, Disappointed at not snagging a combat command in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. In mid-January, 1942, he was made assistant to Major General Russell P. Hardle, commander of the 34th Infantry and assigned to Northern Ireland, the staging area for a theater of operations still two years in the future.

Anxious to get into the war, when assigned to escort General Truscott on his base tour and Ranger recruitment drive, Darby made the most of it. Truscott duly rewarded Darby's professionalism and interest with an offer to command the first Ranger battalion. Few offers have been accepted so enthusiastically. At first glance, Darby's Rangers viewed him as a pencil-pushing aide to camp. And why not? He was, after all, little more than a peacetime artillery officer, not even an infantryman. This perception died a quick death. Throughout their training, Darby slung a standard M1.

his shoulder and rotated between companies marching climbing shooting doing whatever the men were doing and doing it better After an intelligence officer from headquarters briefed the Rangers on the allied procedures for surrendering to the enemy Darby bristled and took the floor this formation this information you have just heard is all very well for those troops who are going to be captured But that is not for Rangers if there's any any capturing to be done he continued it is the Rangers who will do it Within two months of training together, the men were reverently calling him El Darbo. By the end, he would defy comparison. An Army staff officer wading ashore at Sorrento in 1943 would find a man wearing a ranger patch and ask where he might find Darby, smirking, the ranger would reply,

you'll never find him this far back. If the ideal army officer was equal parts confidence, bravery, energy, and obedience. obedience, Darby was all these things, but perhaps too much the last. And that sentence stuck with me, you know, from a leadership perspective, of course, because it's about balance, right? And you do need to be obedient. But at the same time, if you're too obedient, you're too obedient. Right.

There's a famous quote by one of Frederick the Great's generals. he says to a young officer, the king gave you a commission because he assumed that you would know when to break orders. And that's all part of initiative. I mean, that's all like if there was one trait that I sort of settled on as being the reason that the Navy seemed to be ahead of the game, or at least ahead of its peers when it came to the creation of special operations units. It was because the Navy had this culture of latitude and this decentralized command and initiative that enabled subordinates to feel like they had the flexibility to make decisions on the fly or adjust to the realities that they were facing.

Whereas somebody like Darby, Darby is in the U.S. Army, and one thing that I wrote is, you know, the chain of command in the U.S. Army has never been delinked. It's never been delinked. It's only been progressively thickened over time. And you see that not just today,

but you can kind of see it happen gradually. And I would see it, you know, a little bit in World War II, and I kind of got my first sense of it here, reading and writing about the Rangers. But I also saw it, you know, in my Korean War chapters. And I would come across, you know, an Army General like Edwin Walker, who he's flying above his troops, above his soldiers, in a little spotter plane with a bullhorn, telling individual units which one, you know, which one to move.

Like, I mean, in some sense, that, you know, that says to you, the reader, know, what a cool, what a cool general that he's, you know, willing to, you know, put himself out there for at the same time. Like, that's also like, that's taking all of the initiative away from your guys. And you're, you know, you're not only telling them where they should advance, but you're also telling them that they don't have the authority to retreat either if they need to or to, you know, gain a tactical advantage by maneuver. Centralized command at its worst right there.

Absolutely. And the last time we, we were on, we talked about the fact that, hey, when you're in the Navy, You know, throughout history and you, you know, if Ben's in charge of this ship, you're going to go sail away from me as the admiral. I can't talk to you anymore. Like you're, you got the mission. You're going to do it to the best of your ability. The other thing that's interesting about this is sometimes the ocean is going to dictate what you're going to do. Like there are certain times where you cannot, you cannot proceed.

You cannot continue. The ocean is going to stop you. You know, you can get. some really, really extreme examples where weather could inhibit you on land from making the type of progress you want to make. But you... Right, a river swollen. Right, a river swollen. But those are extreme examples. Right. Out in the ocean, that's kind of a regular thing. You know, there's giant sea states that come through. It's, it's... So, so you have to have some more ability to adapt because you are going...

Look, if you're in a sailboat, the wind's not blowing. You're not going to... anywhere right that's what's happening you can't maneuver to the north because the direction of the wind or the direction of the sea state you can't do it it's not going to happen so you have to have some level of flexibility whereas more so on the ground you can power through a lot of weather events and again I'm going back to you know times before radios and before before motors where you're just going to make this happen so it seems like yeah unfortunately Unfortunately, that Darby was a little heavy on the obedience, and it's not always a positive thing. No, I mean, and not just on obedience, but on, not just on prerogatives, that's not the right word either, but protocol, I would say.

So he gets one of the, one of the shocking things that I saw when he was putting the Sisterner raid together was he, put in charge of the entire assault element, an officer who'd never been with the Rangers. Which is because he was in the rank? Just because he had a date of rank, you know, that preceded, you know, the Rangers that he'd been working with since they had been training together in Scotland.

These were Rangers that knew what being a Ranger was. These guys had been trained by the British Commandos. They knew what a raid was. They knew how a raid would succeed and how it would fail and instead of putting one of his, you know, one of his rangers that he knew from Scotland in charge, he selected the guy who'd never been a ranger. And he's not a bad leader. He's an excellent leader.

And he acquits himself, you know, incredibly during the battle. But he also doesn't know as daylight's creeping up on these guys. And they have a sense of, we are in the middle of a German division. there is we can't do this we can't accomplish this he does not have the confidence to say guys we're turning around um speaking of british commandos uh i know one of the one of the people that you had to kind of cut was mount batten yeah lord lewis mount batten this dude is like the british of all british right he is but he's not the one thing that i thought was uh interesting about mount batten is um they're germans the mount batten family they're they're germans his his father i believe it's his father he

uh becomes the first lord of the admiralty but he's born in germany he serves in the german navy um he doesn't uh emigrate to uh england or to the united kingdom until he's a bit older and then he uh rises up through the ranks of the british navy becomes the first lord but Mount Baton. So Prince Philip, Prince Philip who just passed away, he was a Mountbatten. So Lord Louis Mountbatten was his uncle.

Check. Yeah, so Mountbatten, I mean, he's a fascinating character. By the time he's put in charge of combined operations headquarters or the entity that commands all British commandos, he's been, I think he's been shot out from under two ships, or he's had two ships that were sunk. You know, that's the second time you've made that statement about, hey, this guy had two ships shot out from under him.

Yeah. And it sounds really cool right now, right now. Yeah, right. We're like, damn, you know, because we're like, you know, we think that's kind of cool. But I wonder if there's any negative, if someone's looking at like, dude, this guy's lost two ships, bro, what's wrong with you? Yeah, right? I wonder. I didn't think about it.

Well, he kept getting promoted. Yeah. I mean, he had the political connections. He's really young. He's really dynamic. He's one of the few people that is able to, not dominate Churchill, but he's able to, like Churchill thinks he's just, I mean, he's this cavalier. And so he, wait, so he's the one that grew up in Germany.

That's his dad. That's his dad. Yeah, Lewis Mountbatten, he grows up. He's British as, I don't know. He's British. He's British. And he seems to have like all the stereotypical kind of British personality. Absolutely.

Yeah, he acts British. Yes, he's the, he's, uh, I mean, he's, he's playing polo and writing books on polo and stuff like this. I mean, this is it, man. He's, he's hanging out with the king and queen. He's got a cigarette holder. I mean, he's, he's British. He's the, he's the quintessential British. But the commandos themselves, who we kind of, who we throw in with the sort of, who played the biggest role in in in,

Creating the British commandos. Is that, is that Clark? Yeah, Dudley Clark. He's the guy who initially comes up with the idea. He's another weirdo. Really fun to learn about, really fun to write. He was a British Army officer. He'd grown up, I believe, in Palestine.

He had seen, not only, he'd seen British Raiders during the First World War. He'd kind of experienced what some of that was like. I think he was friendly with Orde Wingate. He was a, oh, yeah, one of the things, one of the ways that he got the idea for British Commandos was he was infatuated with the Napoleonic War history. And in fact, he was a real student of Wellington's Peninsula Wars and all of the partisans that Wellington had hired and sent against the French forces. So he, when, after the disaster at Dunkirk, you know, Dudley Clark, who's a bit of an oddball in the military hierarchy, I think his hobby is he's an amateur actor, but he puts a little paper together and he sends it up to Churchill.

And the paper is essentially create special troops that are capable at sea and send them on all of these little. raids against the coastline, spread out German defenses. Not dissimilar from what the Navy was trying to do in the Central Pacific. Churchill is the... Churchill's completely infatuated with any idea that his generals do not like. This is one of them. He thinks this is the great idea, not just because this is going to spread German defenses out, but more importantly than that, it's going to energize the British people.

The British people have just suffered this terrible defeat at Dunkirk. They need a win. They need a series of wins. So, yeah, he agrees to it. He pushes the entire British establishment to create these commandos. What he does not expect and what his generals don't expect is that these raids start being successful. so successful that they want to develop more of them. And so by 1942, there's not just British commandos at this point.

There's Canadian commandos, there's French commandos, and they're all sort of operating under this COHQ. Have you ever read the book Rogue Heroes? It's a book about the British SAS in North Africa. It follows them all through the war. But, boy, if you want a book that is kind of outside of, you know, the American Special Operations experience, that is... That's the one? It's interesting because, you know, it's even, I would say it's the SAS experience, the SAS and the SBS experience during World War II,

establishes a type of commando that we're not familiar with. And it establishes a legacy of expectations that we don't really have. We have sort of a no-fail expectations on our commando operations. The SAS, the SBS, they were willing to just try stuff. And if they lost an entire team, well, that's the price of doing business. I mean, and I think they kind of carry that cavalierness through today. Like I think, I mean, if you've ever worked with SIS or SPS, I'm sure you have. I have, yeah.

I mean, I don't know if you noticed that. them, I certainly noticed it when we worked with the SBS. These guys are, you know, maybe not as, I wouldn't say they're less well trained, but they are willing to, they have an expectation of risk that I was not familiar with. And I think they pull that directly from this experience in World War II. Jack. What else was it that made Dudley Clark an oddball? I mean, the dude's an actor.

I mean, we know Echo isn't a bit of an actor. I don't think he's odd. Was there some other thing that dragged you into this or that you started getting the feeling this guy's a little strange? Yeah, he leads the first commando raid. And it's a completely, I mean, so he has this idea, you know, not much different than Carlson, you know, to come up with these, you know, commandos.

But, and like Carlson, he leads one of the first raids. And like Carlson, he's completely unsuited to do it. I mean, he's not an operational commander. He's the thinker. I think he kind of, he suspects that, but he's willing to, you know, put himself on the line to prove, you know, his idea. He ends up going through the war and coming up with,

he ends up being a really capable spy, not spy master, but like deception officer. He's able to convince the Germans at, you know, different points during the war that we're about to attack in this spot, which forces the Germans to move troops to an area. But he leads that first commando raid, and they don't really raid anything. I think they stumble across two German bicyclists.

They kill both of them. They forget to search them. They don't know what they were even guarding. And then on his particular raid, one of the guys accidentally ejects a magazine onto a beach, right when there's an approaching German patrol. the Germans counter ambush them and they have to race into the water to get back to their boats. When they get back to their boats, Dudley Clark realizes that his ears has been almost been shot off and a sailor has to stitch it back in place for the transit back to England.

Damn. Getting the ear stitched back on. By a little, by a petty off. In like a freaking zodiac or something? Yeah, and the mission is so badly planned when they get, when they finally get back on. to the coast, back to, they didn't have any deconfliction. They get stopped by British shore, but patrol boats, thinking that they're a German boat, you know,

trying to send raiders ashore. And when the, and when the, the Coast Guard comes aboard their vessel, all the British commandos are drunk. So not only they get shot off the beach, they drank the entire boat's liquor supply. There you go. How about the Devil's Brigade?

How does that play into this? The Devil's Brigader, they were just one of those units that I was really interested in. I really, I was almost trying, like, looking for an excuse to write about them. They were, they were a unit that was a joint Canadian and American unit. And it was the kind of the brainchild of Mount Baton Marshall had buy-in. It was supposed to be a unit that they dropped into Norway on like snowmobiles or, or snow tractors that would lead raids ultimately became a pretty adequate semi-commando force. It was an sort of ranger, sort of airborne, and Robert Fredericks became the commander of it.

And he was as interesting as Darby. You know, had, you know, as equally a storied career. I think he was wounded something like nine times during the course of the war. And what was the, how come the devil's brigade didn't sustain? Well, I mean, the Army Special Forces, when they are claiming their forefathers, they always point to the Devil's Brigade. And I don't really, I don't really see a connection between Army Special Forces and the Devil's Brigades. Except for the fact that these guys are in the Army. Well, they're in the Army and they're.

and they're airborne qualified. But they're not leading partisans or anything like that. They're shock troops. They're more like Rangers then. They're more like Rangers. Just like Merrill's Marauders. Merrill's Marauders are, you know, when I set out to write a chapter on the Rangers and to talk about how the Rangers opened a gap for the Navy to fill, I didn't think

that I'd be covering Darby. Other people had covered Darby before and I was like, I kind of want to avoid that. I'd rather focus on, you know, a Ranger legacy that has, you know, that's less well known. And my idea initially was to cover the 5307th, which is Merrill's Marauders in Burma. I really wanted to, instead of Sesterna, cover the Battle of Michina, which is an isolated hilltop in Burma that the Merrill's Marauders sees. And there's some pretty interesting characters. Merrill, he's another oddball. I think by that point in the war, he's been removed because he's already had two heart attacks in Burma.

He stayed in the field. And it was another excuse for, you know, to talk about Stillwell. still was another character that I've always, you know, kind of had a soft spot in my heart for. But they just didn't fit because, you know, the reason that I had to cover Sisterna, the reason that I had to talk about Sisterna as opposed to Pointe Hock or Michena or another one of these really important ranger battles is because Sisterna is the one that leaves its impression on the Army hierarchy, on the chain of command. even when you have a success as incredible as Pointe Hawk,

even when you have a success as incredible as Cabatawan and the rescue of all those POWs, it doesn't leave its legacy or it doesn't leave an impression on the Army chain of command like Sisterna does. Sisterna clouds an entire generation of hostility of regular conventional army leaders to the concept of elite commandos, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that's definitely, that section of the, book and again I read it on the last the last time we were together on this podcast it's just it's it's it's it's very difficult it's difficult to even read and and what's incredible about it is it's the notes from the radio room these are these are transcripts of what was actually said between Darby and his front line leadership who are being overrun and slaughtered and you can you can read exactly what they were saying to each other it's yeah another

just incredible. A lot of that's taken from, you know, like you said, the transcripts, which I, that's one of the few times that I was at an archive going through it, going through a document and not just, you know, quickly taking a photo and moving on. That was one of those times where I was like, I was trying, I mean, I knew what happened and I was reading it like it was a novel, like, and I was, you know, tensing up, like, knowing what each page, that each page was going to get worse and worse and worse. and that I was watching this unfold in an archive, you know,

eight years after the fact, but it was, you know, every bit as real to me. Well, maybe not every bit as real, but, you know, these are, you know, fellow Americans, you're doing the absolute best they could for the country for each other. And, you know, the guy on the other end of the radio was watching his friends die around him. And then before we move to chapter four,

what about Charles Shunstrom? What's that guy's deal? He got cut completely out of the book. Is that right? Yeah, sort of. I mean, he got, so he's responsible for writing the Shunstrom report, which is the report written only, well, if I do the math, right, probably a month after Cisterna.

So he's one of, he's one of the guys that was captured in the final moments of the raid. He was, he had been with Darby all. the way through the rangers experience. So he'd been one of the handful of rangers trained by the British commandos in Akhnikari, Scotland, fought through North Africa, fought through Sicily, fought through Italy, the winter line, and then he's one of the officers captured. He's the officer who's driving Darby in Jala when Darby is in the back with a 50-Cal, or with the recoilless rifle and destroys the Italian tank that turns Darby. from Darby into Darby the legend.

So he's with Darby throughout, you know, the everything. He's as, you know, he's as incredible or as, anyway, he's captured at Cisterna, escapes two weeks later, makes it back to friendly lines. And from his escape, he's able to write this report of what actually. happened. He's one of the few guys that got out, and he drafts this, I can't remember, the 10-page report. So a lot of what's in those final pages is drawn from the Schundstrom report. Now, he has a really tragic end to his life. I can't remember how he passes away. I think he's dead within 10 years, though, of this event. He, after World War II, he, I think he goes to

Southern California. He tries to be an actor. It doesn't work out. And then he, he, you know, turns to drink, and a series of bad decisions leads to a series of worst decisions, and I think he starts robbing banks. He's one of those guys that, you know, he just isn't able to reintegrate into society. He'd been a ranger officer, one of the, you know, guys in charge, and here he is, he's not able to, you know, reintegrate into, you know, polite society, and ultimately, I can't remember how he dies, but I think it's some combination of alcohol. and, yeah, some combination of alcohol, robbing banks, guns, just getting after it. Yeah.

You know, this, it's pretty good. You got to kind of ask yourself, and I had a conversation with someone the other day about, you know, just like modern times and all this, who's going to fight the wars? Yeah. Right. Who is going to put freaking black paint on their face? and pick up a weapon and crawl across the beach and start killing enemy. Like that's a certain type of human being, right? That's the type of human being that may not correctly reintegrate into society.

This dude might end up robbing banks when he gets back. It's the Martin Watson problem. Yeah, it's the Martin Watson problem, which we'll get to. But we do have to think about that. And when you have guys, You know, we talked about obedience as a characteristic being, look, is it good to have some obedience? Yes, it is. And was Darby maybe too far on the spectrum of being too obedient?

Yes. But then you get some other guys that are on the other end of the spectrum that you want. You want to have someone that's going to be like, hey, I don't care what you tell me to do. I'm going to go attack this machine gun nest. Get out of my way. You want to have some guys like that. They're hard to control. But if you get rid of these guys, if you get rid of the Charles Shunstrom's and the Watson's,

you get rid of those guys, your military is not going to be able to function, in my opinion. It's not going to be able to win. It's okay. Yep, you're right. It's not, it's going to be able to function. Probably going to be able to function very effectively in a peacetime environment. So my question, you've commanded these guys. How, how, I mean, what's the answer?

How do you, how do you, you know, take the strengths of a Shunstrom or a Watson? But how do you make sure that they don't go off the rails? Yeah. What you have to do is you have to put the guard rails in place. and you have to, and it's not, here's the interesting thing about this. This isn't that hard. This isn't where you've got to be constantly monitoring every single thing that they do. You have a good relationship with your guys.

Then when you say, hey, listen, here's the line. We're not crossing it. Guys go, yep, Roger that. And they know you're not playing around. You haven't, you haven't shown them where, hey, you know, Chaco says this, but he doesn't really mean that. No, it's like, when I say something, this is what I mean. and this is what we're going to do.

This is what we're not going to do. And look, I mean, I had guys that were definitely, actually, I want to have guys, just like I just said. I want to have guys that going to say, hey, if I can get, if I get the chance to do this in a hyper-gressive way I'm going to do it. You give me a chance to kill the enemy, I'm going to do it. That's what I'm going to do. That's what I'm here for.

That's why I was born. Dude, Tony Afradi, you know Tony Afradi? Tony was a platoon chief in Charlie Patoon, Tasking a Bruiser. if he would do anything to be able to go out and kill the enemy. And he would also never cross the line of like, oh, okay, hey, we're not doing that. Cool. That's, then that's the line. And that's exactly what you want.

And what? So the question that you posed to me, how do you do it? What you do is you have a good relationship with the guys. You explain to them what we can do, what we can't do, and then you explain why we can't do it. And there was, I used to go and brief the JOTC classes. the junior officer training classes and and briefed mine okay well there you go one of the things that I used to tell these guys was hey listen when it comes to when it comes to the rules of engagement when it comes to the law of armed conflict you have to not just do what you think is right

you have to do what you think what you have to do not just what is you think is right but what is legal and here's the reason and and layf had to have this conversation layf had a senior officer room when I was explaining this to these young guys like yourself that what's what people think is right what you you take 16 seals and you say you give them in a case example of is this right in your own personal moral code you're gonna get 16 different answers you can get so yeah this this this this this person's a insurgent we'll kill them or this person's an insurgent oh well we we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't hurt them because we can reform

You can have all these kind of wild different answers. So what you the only thing you can actually follow isn't what an individual quote thinks is right. You have to follow what is actually legal and I made that I always made that very clear with my guys. Hey listen this is what you can do. This is what you cannot do and here's why and of course in any leadership situation. It's important to explain the why and you know for instance in Ramadi there was a bunch of reasons why you can't go out and

Shoot an innocent person. Well, first of all, yeah, it's morally wrong. Second of all, everyone would know about it immediately. So it's not like I could have a sniper going, oh, you know, I'll sneak in a shot over here. No one's going to know. No, we're in a city with 400,000 Iraqi civilians that we there's a mayor. There's a police force. There's a there's a governor. There's a whole there's teachers and doctors inside that city. You kill an innocent civilian. Everybody's going to know about it. And by the way, all those Iraqi government officials, They have relationships with the brigade commanders, with the battalion commanders, with the company commanders. We're all talking. So if you think, oh, I'm going to shoot some innocent person, get away with it, you're never going to get away with. It's not happening. And on top of that, we are now losing the war. When you go out and kill an innocent civilian, you're giving propaganda to the enemy. And you're creating more insurgents by killing an innocent person.

So you have to not just explain, hey, legally you can't do this, but also here's why you can't do it. I was speaking to a group of army leaders one time, and I said, hey, in any platoon, you're going to have a sociopath in there. You're going to have somebody that's, you give them the opportunity to kill, or maybe even you don't.

They might take advantage of that. They're going to look for an opportunity to kill. They're going to look for an opportunity to torture someone. They're going to look for an opportunity to rape a woman. Like you take a platoon, you're going to have that in there. And I got some looks from the crowd kind of like, oh, that's not realistic. And no kidding, two weeks later, I was doing a podcast with Jordan Peterson. And before we started recording, I said, hey, let me ask you a question.

Here's what I told this group of Army guys. I said, in your platoon, you're going to have at least one person that's a sociopath. Is that an accurate statement? And he says, how many people in a platoon? Well, in a platoon 40, 50. And he goes, oh, you know, I won't try and imitate George Peters, but you know, he basically, oh, yes, definitely. And then he said, because it's like one in a hundred in normal society that you have a sociopath. But the Army or the Marine Corps is not normal society.

You've already screened out a bunch of pacifists, right? You've already screened out a bunch of people that are definitely not sociopaths. And so to have, you probably actually have two or three sociopaths inside your platoon. And and and then look, you also get some guys that just, you know, like, like Schundstrom. He's not necessarily a sociopath, but maybe, you know, who knows how this guy was raised? Maybe occasionally somebody gets smacked around, you know, occasionally you beat someone up. Violence is part of, you know, culture in some parts of America and some families in America. Like, that's what you grew up with.

So that's what you get. So once again, to answer your question, you know, you. you got to put you got to put the very clear guardrails in place that say hey look this is what we're doing this or what we're not doing and then you have to have the The consistency that when you say something The guys know that you are not playing around and that you are gonna follow through with whatever it is you say And and and and I think where guys get caught sometimes from a leadership perspective is they don't put out those guardrails And then when Ben crosses the line and you do something you weren't supposed to do I feel kind of bad because I didn't even tell you not to do it So I'm looking at you going, well, I guess I'm going to, you know, send you to court martial now.

And you're going, wait a second. You know, we killed three guys on that last operation and four guys on the operation before that. Now you're mad at me because I killed somebody. Well, what were the circumstances? Well, you didn't talk to me about any circumstances. Well, you got to know the rules of engagement. Well, I know the rules of engagement that seemed like that way to me. So you see where I'm going with this.

I have to be very clear about what the line is and why we cannot cross it. it also seems like like in an extreme team environment like in football it seemed like there was some sociopaths there too and actually I actually know of one who's I think he's still in jail right now but he

in an extreme team environment it's like people who are just normal people where I'm down for the team they get influenced just to do stuff good and bad just because of the team environment do you find that a lot 100% where it's like I mean actually you know what now that I'm thinking of like the massacres certain masks for sure I'm asking that's definitely what happened like that's what we're doing okay we're ready for it you know I've been talking a lot about this lately is just the fact that people human beings are so so their brains are so pliable you can program a person so easily to believe whatever and by the way it's happening all day long right now with all these people out there that are looking at their social media all day long that's they're getting programmed you're getting programmed you're receiving information you don't even know what you're

You're seeing and it's happening right now, you know, the the propaganda that's coming out from both sides from from Ukraine, right? It's like all you have people going high into the right on whatever Image that they saw and you got to take everything that's coming out of there with a grain of salt, but What it's showing you is how easily influenced human beings are and that's a really negative thing, but it's also really positive thing because you as a leader have the ability to say, hey, here's what's going on. Here's what we need to do. Here's why we need to do. I'm do it, here's why we can go to this line and we can't go past it. And those are the rules. That's what you need to do. If you start to allow slack and then you develop a habit of allowing slack, you're going to have a freaking issue. You're going to have, you're going to end up with issues. If you don't have the ability to say, hey, listen, dude, we're not doing that. One thing that's interesting in the SEAL teams is most of the guys want to do a good job and have

good reputation. So when you say, hey, hey, Ben, we're not doing that. Or hey, Ben, it seems like you were thinking about doing something. Let me tell you why we're not doing it. You don't go, real, it's bullshit. No, you go, yeah, I got it, boss. Thanks for explaining that to me. It's not that hard.

But if I'm weak and, you know, you end up with that dynamic in the military where you have a really strong personality. Or a really strong chief. Or really, yeah, really strong. And a brand new officer. Yep. And if that can, that's a classic scenario, right? That's the, that's the damn platoon, right?

That's the movie platoon, right? You have, you have Barnes and you have whatever that officer's name was, and he just gets run roughshot over by Barnes. And that's a perfect example. That's a perfect example. Hey, you're a new guy shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. This is the only way to win this.

Okay, well, yes, sir. Or yes, yes, Sergeant Barnes. And then you have a guy like, Elias who is saying hey but what are you doing but he doesn't have the strength to back it up to and to to get his platoon officer on board with what's happening so it's a classic thing to watch out for 100% all right let's jump back into the book here go a little bit more forward going to chapter four chapter four draper Kaufman and the course that cracked the Atlantic Wall

then laid the first bricks of the legend of Navy's Special Warfare. So there you go. And this really... You should have saved that dramatic intake for the last chapter. That's the longest one. There's only one that's short.

There's only one more that's coming that short. I'm going to read a little chunk from the book here. Landing at 06. 25 one of the earliest crews to arrive Gregory and the army engineers had dragged their rubber boat into the surf lashed it to a wooden stake and run for the farthest belt of hedgehogs It looked impossible to be there without being hit One of Karnowski's men remembered afterward It looked even worse without a helmet despite the chaos Karnowski and the demolitioneers laid their charges ranesksoners ran

out their primer cord tied in and blew their charge the first shot was magnificent remembered one man after it nothing else was as soon as the charge blew machine guns opened up from everywhere and men pushed their bellies into the sand Conrad Millis a quiet California carpenter made chief petty officer for the example he had set during training grabbed the primer grab the primer cord real and sprinted for the next row of obstacles he was identified later by the pack of explosives around his neck with a big hole in his chest as the waves of infantry landed the demolition job grew even more complicated terrified soldiers either did not notice the purple smoke

warnings swirling around them or did not care i thought i'd never get one of the infantrymen out from behind a piling and demolition here confessed later he moved out just in time and our second shot went off as obstacles blew apart the army and navy sections began working together mingling as a single team regardless of the advancing tide lieutenant Gregory having destroyed the tank crippling hedgehogs at the far end of the beach turned away from the enemy and splashed back into the surf like a man possessed he waited or swam to each remaining stake where he waited until someone threw him a charge then using the lessons taught to him by the NCDUs stretched his arms as far as they would reach and placed his

bomb next to Rommels then blew them to Nothing. So D-Day, you talk about this being the most consequential day in the history of NSW. There's 190 Navy demolition years, 32 of them are killed, 65 are wounded. So that's a total number of casualties being at 97. This is 51% casualties. Yeah, I mean, just in contribution or just in sacrifice. It outmatches any other tragedy that NSW has experienced. It's far exceeds anything, at least in any single day experience. And this happens mostly in the space of around three or four hours.

Gap assault teams, three and 14, 11, they're all destroyed even before. I mean, right, 11 is destroyed as soon as its ramp drops. Three and 14 are destroyed before their ramps even drop their. With mortars. Mortars and just about everybody on a board is killed. It's the most important day of the 20th century. I mean, it's the day that determines whether or not Hitler is going to be removed from the continent. And it's tough to, you know, write this check.

and not make it, you know, outshine everything else. It's a, it's too much. The chapter was twice as long when I, you know, when I finished the first draft. It was, I wanted to, I didn't want to leave anything behind. I wanted, you know, every, every gap assault team, every, every NCDU to, you know, have full representation. I think there's 21 gap assault teams that land. I ultimately had to, you know, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and try and, you know,

consolidate as much as possible just so it was a readable chapter. And I also had to figure out what the hell am I trying to say in this thing. You know, I expected that writing a history of the SEAL teams or writing how the Navy had been the first to create this type of unit, I always expected that it would be tough to justify how I put the Army or Marine Corps chapters in. And it wouldn't be tough to, you know, justify the Navy chapters. The Navy chapters would just sort of write themselves. I just had to say, what happened? Just say, what happened?

I found the opposite to be true. because, you know, it was, you know, with the Army chapters and the Marine Corps chapters, you're really just, you know, trying to show like why these units failed or why they, why the, you know, their senior leaders pulled the rug out from under them. With the Navy chapters, you're having to, you know, show how, you know, a unit like the NCDUs, which is, you know, created just to solve one problem, and that problem is the obstacles in France or the obstacles on the coast. How did that, why is that relevant, you know, to the ultimate creation of, you know,

to the ultimate creation of Go Anywhere, you know, naval commandos. So I, um, it took a long time and it took multiple draft before I realized that the point of this whole thing or the relevance to that story is not so much, um, you know, the fact that they were, uh, you know, just blowing up obstacles. It's the fact that they left such an impression on the Navy's leaders, um, after that. You know, there's, you know, there's all these, um, you know, episodes of naval bravery. You know, there's the experience of the destroyers that ultimately save the day, that push the Army ashore.

These destroyers, you know, they're on the outskirts of the battle until Admiral Hall. The Army is looking at what's happening on Omaha Beach. There's successful landings on Goldsword and Juneau. There's successful landings at Utah Beach. Everywhere, the landing to get troops ashore. on D-Day is going well, except here at Omaha. And Omaha, you know, the Army commanders, like, we might need to pull our troops off.

They might need to do something that they've never trained to do, which is a full-scale evacuation in front of the enemy. Admiral Hall, who has made it a point to make sure that he's in charge of the invasion until the forces are firmly established ashore says, no, we're not doing that. And he does what, you know, nobody has done up to that point, which is push.

destroyers right up to the, as close to the coast as possibly, pushes them 800 yards away from the coast. That's insane. These destroyers, they come in at flank speed, and as soon as they get to about where their holes are about three feet off the bottom, they all turn left, and they all start going right along the coast. So you have all this bravery that happens. As soon as they get, you know, to a point to the end of Omaha Beach, you think all these

ships are going to turn, and some of them do. some of them have enough depth where they're able to turn around. The ships that don't, they just reverse, and they just start going backwards. And they're blasting away at these pillboxes and structures. In some cases, they are blasting underneath the pillboxes. So the pillboxes, full of Germans, just start tumbling off the escarpment. So in all that... I don't think I've seen that represented in like in saving private Ryan or anything like that.

No. And everybody thinks... Because 800 yards off the beach is freaking close. Everybody walks away or everybody, you know, comes away from, you know, the reading of Omaha Beach as this victory of American infantry over, you know, the German obstacles. And that's true. but there's also another truth. And that's the commitment, or that's the force that the Navy brought to bear on that day. And the Army would not have gotten off those killing fields or off the killing beaches without the contribution of the U.S. Navy.

But what I found was the point of this chapter was that with all of that, with all of the contribution that the Navy had made, with all the bravery, the Navy walks away from that battle with all of the, knowing that the greatest contribution that they'd given that day was with the naval, with the NCDUs, with the Naval Combat Demolition Units. They are awarded, you know, six Navy crosses, more Silver Stars, and you can shake a stick out. They've got, they award the NCDU's only one of three presidential unit citations that are awarded from a naval unit on Omaha Beach. Right.

So the reason that that's so important is because when the Navy, when the dust settles and the Navy is looking at their entire contribution at Omaha Beach, they know how important the NCD's contribution was. And more importantly, they know how important the curriculum was that created these units. And that curriculum, I don't know if anybody in charge of Omaha Beach had realized what curriculum had created them, but there are people that know. And that curriculum is now validated because of everything the NCDUs did. And that curriculum, as you know, developed by Draper Kaufman. Yeah. And the main part of that curriculum is Hell Week. Yeah, the crucible of that curriculum is Hell Week.

And the reason that it's developed is because, you know, it's the closest thing of the least Draper Kaufman had ever come in contact with two combat. I mean, at least it matches the experience that Draper Kaufman had had when it came to combat. He'd been in, you know, we can get to Draper Kaufman, but it prepared the guys that went to Omaha Beach for exactly what they experienced. You know, they were wet, they were cold. I mean, they'd spent almost 48 hours on ships that were, you know, often. Some of these ships were sinking prior to. They were so overwhelmed with water and rain that, you know,

they went into battle, cold, hungry. Often, you know, nearly all of them were seasick. They're all wrenching their guts out, so they don't have anything in them when they hit the beaches. And then the chaos that unfolds around them is they've gotten at least a taste of it on the beaches at Fort Pierce. They, you know, the So Sali Day, I mean, they'd been peppered all these bombs going off around them.

They were probably better prepared for what they encountered than any other troops on Omaha Beach. Yeah, the Hell Week thing is definitely interesting. Because it is shocking when you look at it and you know the kind of people that show up, just the numbers of people that show up. I mean, a class will start with a couple hundred people. And by the time they're done with Hell Week,

they'll be down to 10, 15, 20% of that. And these are people that enlisted in the Navy, that had a goal that told their families, they were gonna be Navy SEALs that dedicated six years of their life to signing that dotted line. They trained, they worked, they went to boot camp, they gave up whatever other possibilities they had in life and they poured all that into this one singular dream.

Without a fallback plan, too. With the crappiest fallback plan, it just sucks. It sucks. But, I mean, it's not like if you go to the Marine Corps, like, and you don't, you know, get into Mars. You can still be a pretty awesome Marine. Yeah, you're a freaking infantryman in the Marine Corps, which is a beautiful thing. Same thing with the Army, special operations. Oh, you don't make it through special forces training?

Okay, cool. You're a freaking ground ponder, which is awesome. The Navy, you don't make it through seal training. And if you have the mindset where you want to be some kind of a machine gun, totin, badass, well, guess what? You don't make it through seal training. You are literally not going to be a machine gun toting badass at all. And that's a horrible fate for these young guys.

But they know that that's their fate. And yet with that fate, they still ring that bell. And people from every background, people that were Division I athletes of every division one athlete, wrestlers, football players, you name it. swimmers, runners, they all quit. People that were, you know, raised with a silver spoon in their mouth that went to Ivy League schools, they quit. People that were raised in the ghetto with really hard lives, they quit. Some of them make it, some of them quit.

Same with the Ivy League. Some of them make it, some of them quit. It's a crazy crucible, and we still don't even understand it. We don't understand who's going to make it. No, I think the only thing that we really know is where it came from. That's about it. And we don't, and I mean, as much as Draper Kaufman wrote, and I can't. And I came, I mean, when I, so I went to his daughter's house in Indiana, and she let me have, you know, two days just to go through this entire, this humongous file cabinet.

He kept everything. And there was letters, I mean, tons of letters between, you know, him, family members, friends. One thing that he never really kind of talked about, at least contemporaneously, he only really talked about it in his oral history was this, you know, this hell week. that he invented. I mean, and nobody really, I mean, all the guys that went through it talked about it. He didn't even talk about, you know, his own experience going through it. So after he created Hell Week, and he didn't really create Hell Week. All he did was compress, you know, that, that curriculum that, you know, Phil Bucklew

and all those other Scouts and Raiders, they established it. All Draper Kaufman did was like, okay, I like this. This is eight weeks long. That's great. Let's put it, let's make all this five days. It's like, how are you going to do that? Well, you're just going to cut out all this. stuff that you don't need, like, you know, like sleep. We'll just, you know, keep keep the guy. And he

did it himself. I mean, he not only, you know, it creates this, he puts himself through the training. At 32 years old. Yeah, 32. And he's a terrible athlete. He's a terrible athlete. He's a terrible swimmer. He can't, he can't qualify. I mean, his eyesight, he can't even qualify for the standards that he sets for himself or for sets for the program. Like he would not be, he would not qualify for, you know, the course that he creates. Then he does it. You visited You visited where Omaha Beach you visited Fort Pierce Yeah, how is that with the with the breadth of knowledge that you have when you're down there?

That's incredible It's there's nothing quite like you know going to the places that you're writing about if I could have gone I wish I could have gone to every single place that I wrote about I've kind of made it a mental mandate for me of future books. I'm never gonna write about anything unless I go to the place there's a way to Omaha. I mean, there's a way to, you know, all of Normandy. And I mean, I'm not sure at which point you should go to the cemetery at Omaha Beach. If you should go to the cemetery first before you go to the beachheads and before you go to all the battlefields and point to Hawk. Or if you should go see the battlefields and point to Hawk and everything and then go to the cemetery.

Either way, you're going to that cemetery and you're going to walk around it. And the one thing that you're going to see, there's a poem by Robert Frost before you go into that cemetery, and it said something like, you know, don't talk, just listen, just look, and note the dates on these headstones, note how young they were and they died for you. And it's overwhelming. And then to take that, and then to go see the places where all of these guys were, you see dog green, dog red, and all the beaches, and then you go to Pointe to Hawk.

You can't even look over the cliffs. I mean, you see where these rangers, they climbed up. And I mean, the Germans at the top are cutting ropes, and they're throwing grenades, and they're leaning over the cliffs, and they're machine-gunning them off the ropes, and still they came. And the section that you read of Karnowski, He dropped his helmet in the water before, you know, the operation even started before the, you know, the, before the ramp even dropped. He did not have a helmet and he, you know, spent, he ran, you know, from, I mean, and where was he going to get a helmet? Everybody else needed their helmet.

There's no other helmets to take. And he, you know, ran ashore and wasn't able to get a helmet, you know, for almost 24 hours. He finally, finally found a helmet that wasn't attached. to somebody that he was able to take. But, yeah. And how about Fort Pierce? Fort Pierce is really something. We can talk about Fort Pierce a bit later.

There's a recently went to Fort Pierce for their annual muster. But, yeah, Fort Pierce is one of the first places I went. And I didn't quite understand what the island was like, what the separation of Hutchinson Island was, because Fort Pierce is the actual town. It's on the mainland where Hutchinson Island, that's what we colloquial call, or that's what we call Fort Pierce. It's actually two separate islands.

It's an intercoastal island that separates, you know, from the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic is, you know, kind of a crushing surf, and you can see all the rocks that are there. I mean, the idea of rock portage and everything like that, we all, you know, we always think of it as, you know, right there at the Hotel Dell. Yeah, you know, you get this fairy tale hotel, you know, and these, you know, jagged, you know, humongous, you know, rocks. They have the exact same rocks right there at Fort Pierce, and they did the exact same rock portage.

You know, it was just as dangerous then as it is now. But you can see it. I mean, you can see, you know, this is the birthplace. This is where it all happened. And it wasn't just the birthplace of, you know, the NCDUs and the Scouts and Raiders, but it was the birthplace of, you know, kind of American special operations thinking everybody took a turn at Fort Pierce. Anybody was going to do any sort of amphibious training, any special unit was going to take a stop at Fort Pierce, the Rangers, the Army Raiders that, you know, went up the Sibu River on the Dallas.

They all, everybody took a turn through Fort Pierce. It was the garden bed of special operations thinking at the time. Yeah, and you might just mention the UDT Seal Museum, which is down there in Fort Pearson. It's freaking unbelievable. It is an awesome, awesome thing that they're continuing to build down there. Couldn't have done the book without it. Oh, really? Like, as far as them giving you information and point you in the right direction?

You know, it was the first place that I went to, and it was, I went there before I even knew what an archive was. and their archive is it's not really an art I mean it's a it's a room with a bunch of file cabinets in it and the first time that I went in there you know nobody nobody told me what I couldn't look at

I mean I just just went in there with the camera and you know I got to work I didn't know where World War II was I didn't know where Korea was Vietnam but it's all in there and I was gathering stuff that you know I didn't know what I was looking at.

I took a thousand pictures away my first day at an archive, and it took me a month to go through them and just to sort of figure out this is this, this is that, you know, this is an operations plan for Okinawa. This is a, you know, this is an op order for, you know, a train demolition raid in Korea, something like that. I mean, but yeah, that was the first time that I, you know, really kind of got the evidence

of the cold case mystery that I was trying to, you know, it out. All right. Let's move on to, and again, I've already told you, if you're listening to buy this book and to do it as quickly as you possibly can. We're literally just hitting wave tops on this stuff. There's so much incredible information.

Obviously, D-Day. I read one, I read two paragraphs about D-Day. There's the entire incredible section about all of it, about Draper Kaufman, who, we covered him a lot on the first time. were on because he's such an incredible character. He's not the guy that you would think created or was one of the lead role players in creating this organization that we have.

He's a guy. And you know what you pointed out on that first podcast is he's a guy that was, he didn't really want to be, he didn't want to be some kind of commander. He wanted to be a naval officer that was in charge of a ship. And it just wasn't going to happen for him. His eyesight was bad. It wasn't going to happen. And he just made things happen.

He looked around and said, all right, well, what can I do? And what does the military need? What does the, what does the, what does the, what does the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way he wasn't necessarily going to work for America, either. It was like, who's fighting. I'm in. Yeah, I think that's important. I mean, for anybody who's trying to be a seal right now, I mean, you, whether you succeed or whether you don't, I mean, there's so many ways to serve your country. I mean, here's a guy who spent four years at the Naval Academy, hoping to fulfill his dream to be.

a destroyer's sailor. He wants to just be on a destroyer. That's all he wants. And it's, you know, the rugs pulled out from under him right at the moment. He's, he's ready to take the fleet. And he's got to come up with Plan B. He doesn't know what Plan B is going to be, but he doesn't, you know, let that paralyze him. He, when he doesn't see a way to contribute to his country, he makes one up. And then he makes one up again. The thing that just keeps, the, the, the, the, he doesn't His guiding star in that whole process is just like, I want to be useful. I want to help and I want to be as close as I can to, you know, to that help. And if I can't fight, then I'll carry, I'll carry stretchers.

I'll be an ambulance driver. If I can't be an RAF pilot or if I can't be on a British ship, then I will dispose the bombs that are landing in central London. If I can't be a ship driver in the U.S. Navy, then I will teach the rest of the Navy how to dismantle bombs. I'll do whatever I can. And then when he's... Anyway. Yeah. It's an incredible, incredible story that...

It's just crazy. It's a crazy thing. He becomes a French ambulance driver and then becomes a British naval officer. And then finally, they eventually let him into the U.S. Navy. That's crazy. Yeah. If you want to, like, for somebody...

And his dad is one of the most famous destroyer skippers in the Navy. And his dad, I mean, who clearly loves his son. I mean, you see the, you see the paralysis in his, you know, like we talked about last time, the paralysis and the paralysis and the letters between the two. Like, he knows that his son's going to be committed or sent on these, you know, terribly dangerous missions. It's never been done before. Like when, before Draper Kaufman heads out with UDT5 to scout the beaches for Saipan, his dad knows that these guys are going into combat with nothing. and the letters are, you know, he signs them off, you know, just the same way, you know, anybody, any other dad would, you know, I love you. Lots and lots of luck.

And that's all I can do. That's all I can do for you. He's not going to receive it on his son's behalf. Craziness. Chapter 5. The evolving contest that created the merman of war. World War II's only indispensable special operations unit. So we have that controversy about the mer men.

Yes. We don't really like that term. We don't. But it's what got used, right? Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, they used it. I mean, that's the, I think that was the, the Wrigley Spearmint Gum hour that was on the radio. I mean, that's where it came from.

They called the Mermen of War, yeah. Unfortunate little piece of history, but we can't change it. All right. Going to the book here real quick. in the late summer of 1943, right about the same time that Draper Kaufman was putting himself through Hell Week, U.S. commanders in the Pacific were about to initiate two campaigns with one ultimate objective, the invasion of Japan, blocked by a swath of ocean five times the size of the Sahara and whose every atoll had been turned into a Japanese fortress.

The strategy to accomplish this objective was one in which the Allies would leapfrog most islands, especially the most robustly defended, let them wither on the vine, said Douglas MacArthur, and seize a handful upon which they could build airfield substantial enough to support the long-range four-engine bombers needed to soften up the next handful on the way to mainland Japan. In the South Pacific, this path would progress from the mountainous jungles of Guadalcanal to a nearby group of similar islands,

Many well-charted and populated, and all of them battlefields large enough for the U.S. armies and MacArthur's ambitions. In the Central Pacific, this path would start some 2,000 miles west of Hawaii in the Gilbert Island chain. The first lily pads large enough to support bomber-sized airfields, but so small, so remote, so daunting, that their volcanic spines of white sand and green palms could almost be mistaken for the rigid back. of a thousand sea monsters and there was only one branch of service that could lead the hunt against those the same branch that would go on to break Hitler's Atlantic wall but employing an altogether different kind of method indeed a method unlike any in military history so you're setting us up pretty strong there right for this this is a make up for the merman true True. This is the first time the Navy is kind of the master of the battle space. First time in history. And that's going to play into a significant role because we need to get onto these islands. We need to figure out how to get onto these islands.

And there's this weird little gap, this weird little gap of information, this weird little gap of tactical control that no one really knows how to fill. Yeah. What's the What's the myth behind Tarawa? The Tarawa is Every history that I'd ever read about the SEAL teams starts with a vignette about Tarawa

and that Tarawa is this it's this meat grinder battle in 1943 in which the Marines they take this island in the Central Pacific and in three days the Marines lose as many men as they've lost in the entire six-month battle

for Guadalcanal. It's the first time that Americans realize that this is going to be, this is going to be something, this is like the Shiloh moment in the Civil War where Americans realize this is going to be everybody is terrible. It's going to be a monster.

And you're going to have to do this on island, every island across the Pacific to get to Japan. If we're going to carry this, you know, FDR's policy of unconditional surrender against the Japanese, it's going to be a bloody, bloody battle or bloody way to do it. And so the idea is that, you know, part of the reason that Tara was such a meat grinder is because the landing craft couldn't get past the coral reefs, which is true. The landing craft couldn't get past the coral reefs and it's going to be a problem on every subsequent battle. But the Marines had already anticipated that.

The Navy had already anticipated that and they had fielded a new technological solution to overcome it, which was the LVT or the amphibious tractor. It wasn't a landing craft as much as it was, you know, a tractor that could float and as soon as it got to coral, it would just crawl right over it. I think they brought 125 to talk. I think there's only a handful left by the end of the first day.

The rest are technologically, they're broken. So the subsequent days, the only Marines that can land to support are, you know, they're kept on the outskirts of the battle by this coral reef. So they have to, you know, drive up the Higgins boats. They drop their ramps, the Marines rush out into the coral, and they jump into the lagoon. And then they've got this 3,000-yard wade to shore where they've got a, you know, deal with mortars, machine gunfire. And there's, you know, pilots that are flying above this tragedy.

And the record is that, you know, this lagoon, this, you know, pristine blue lagoon, it's never free of red. I mean, it's just, it's a sea, a wash with red the entire three days. And it's, it leaves an impression on everybody who encounters it. just because of the Marines that are being pulled from the lagoon for the next three days. They don't have hair. They're completely swollen. It's a crime scene.

Every single person in there that's a crime scene. So the myth is that because of this, the Navy decides that they have to, on every subsequent battle, they've got to create a unit that can destroy the coral so the landing craft can get in there, which is true, sort of. The landing craft, you know, the coral is a problem, and it does need to be destroyed. The bigger issue that creates the UDTs, which ultimately creates the SEAL team, is not so much the coral as it is. The fact that the Navy is at this point in the war, they're not given access to the Marine Corps special units. Because the Marine Corps, like I said in Chapter 1, they have elevated their status to such a point that they are now on parity with the Navy.

So up until that point, the Navy had this impression that the Marine Corps was at subservient service. And on every battle, Navy admirals could trump Marine Corps generals. But at this point in the war, Marine Corps generals, they're just as they're on par with their Navy admirals. So if the Navy wants to send out reconnaissance troops, a special reconnaissance mission, or if they want to conduct a raid or anything like that, they've got to go through the Marines. Corps because they're the only guys that have or they're the only service uh that has a unit that could do any of those things so when turner Turner Turner is the um the commander of the fifth amphibious force he does not uh he hates this policy absolutely hates it he's the he's the biggest uh

i described him as the the first um personification of an actual life ahab and um the pacific theater He is the biggest, what do you call him? He's the biggest dick that's ever served in the surface Navy. He's a tyrant almost. And he absolutely hates the fact that he does not have control of the Marines in the way that he anticipated having control of the Marines. So he's not as concerned about destroying the coral as he is with having his own unit that he can control, that he can send out to find out information

and either find it out, cut it out, whatever. That's why he creates the UDTs. It's not a issue of coral as it is. Control. Control. Yeah. One of the characters that you cut, I guess, James Jones from the recon company. What's this guy all about?

James Jones is, so one of the options that the Navy had prior to this sort of re-alignment or reassessment of Marine Corps authority would have been the VAC recon company, the VAC, the VAC, 5th amphibious force VAC. That would have been a unit that Kelly Turner, Admiral Turner, would have had access to to send on special missions, special assignments,

including missions to destroy coral, find coral, things like that. But now that the Marine Corps has the status that it does, he doesn't really have access to this unit anymore, but it's sort of the replacement for the Marine Corps Raiders. It's not as big as the Raiders were intended to be, but they sort of formed this unit around James Jones. He's a really interesting character. He was a tractor salesman in Africa before the war.

And just by being a tractor salesman, he manages to pick up multiple languages. He's a really, really interesting guy. and he was one of the initial guys put in charge of the observer group, which was the unit that ultimately became the Scouts and Raiders. As a side note, he is the father of James Jones, the national of Obama's first national security advisor. Wait, father or grandfather?

Father. Wow. He's his father. And so when I was doing my initial research for this, I was trying to get an interview with him. No dice? I was close. I had, I was going.

That's not dice, bro. It was not dice. I was going back and forth with his secretary. He has a, not a nonprofit, but like a strategic think tank. And I was going back and forth with his secretary. Couldn't make it work. So no dice. You're right.

No dice. And well, then what happened with the, what happened with them? The VAC Recon Company, they initially, they have some pretty impressive raids right around the time of Tarawa. They raid a little island of Apamama. It's kind of a, it's a similar Macon Island-style raid. They use the same submarine that the raiders use for Macon Island. they they it's it's kind of a textbook island raid you know navy and marine corps cooperation but after after that the they don't really do much until the battle of okinawa and the reason that they're important is because they're kind of once the uDT are created you can see how important the udt become and how less important every other unit becomes and at one point the vac recon company um doesn't really have a mission, so they assign them to the UDTs.

And so they take every Marine that's in the VAC Recon company that can swim, and they plug them into a UDT. Do they actually get transferred to the Navy or no? No, they don't get transferred. And by Okinawa, they separate themselves from the UDT again, and they're back to doing their sort of island raids. But until Okinawa, there's not a lot of other little satellite islands to do the things that they were trained to do. and then what about the USS Burrfish recon of Yap?

This was a UDT10 operation. What was going on there? Yeah, that was one of the, that's in August of 44, there's a series of sort of secret reconnaissance. So after the Tinian reconnaissance, which Draper Kaufman leads, It's a combined reconnaissance between VAC recon, so the Marine Recon and UDT swimmers.

The Navy really sees the potential of doing these night secret reconnaissance of various islands. So the next group of islands that the Pacific planners are hoping to capture are in the Palau, so Pelaloo, that whole episode in the war. So one of the satellite islands of Pelaloo is this island of Ypresbyn is this island of Yen. GAP. And so the USS Burfish with a contingent of UDT swimmers, half of whom are not, haven't really been trained in the traditional UDT curriculum, which they've established at Maui, but half of them are actually OSS.S. Maritime swimmers. They send a combined recon team ashore at YAP. Three of the swimmers get separated from their boat. The boat ends up paddling back to the

U.S. is Burfish, which is the submarine, they come back out the next night trying to recover the swimmers, hoping that they've managed to stay alive ashore and not get captured, but they, after the second night, they realize they're not going to be able to have a link up, and three swimmers get left behind. And they are three, as far as I know, they're the only three missing, well, there's a couple of others, but there are three unaccounted for NSW members out there. We still have not recovered their bodies. We think, based off of the research of one archivist at the National Archives, who's also Moonlights as a historian himself, Nate Patch, he's put together a pretty convincing argument that the bodies are probably at Babelthuap. They're buried with a handful of other captured American aviators.

But we have not found them. There's an effort right now by Project Recovery to try and track their bodies down. All right. But likely they were captured. They were bounced around. The Japanese tried to do a cover-up of their execution. They said that they were put on a transport bound for the South Pacific back to the Philippines. Based off the research that Nate Patch did, looks like that was all just manufactured,

and they were killed right there. So that That chapter Kind of brings the the underwater demolition teams Sort of how we really got the traction going on the underwater demolition teams And then in chapter six you start going into just the Totally different aspect of warfare

I mean a totally different aspect of warfare Chapter six is called the contest for guerrilla war in China and the organization that had no damn business fighting it the U.S. Navy's Army of soldiers. And this is definitely one of the wildest sections in the book, all pretty much centered around this guy, Miles, who this is like a whole book onto itself. Of course, I guess I say that over again for all your characters. But this guy's insane.

No, I mean, I literally at the end, I guess he is insane, right? He is. I mean, the effort breaks him. It completely breaks him. He's committed to a mental institution. It takes him several months to, and part of that's drug-induced. I mean, he's self-medicating by the end of the war, taking an incredible cocktail worth of medicine just to either stay awake, go to sleep, and then deal with the pain that he's dealing in the fevers, too. He's got almost constant malaria throughout the entire war. Yeah, I mean, of all the guys that I, I mean, I say there's kind of a horse race in my head for who is the weirdest character. And Miles is definitely leaning for the tape. I mean, he's like, yeah. I mean, he's fascinating in the sense of how unremarkable he seems. Like when you meet Miles, like he seems like any other ship officer that you would encounter. Just like if you did a visit or any of the, you know, other guys, you know, he's not a physical specimen.

and he's kind of, you know, nerdy looking. He's just forgettable. He's totally forgettable. He's not like, he's not like an exotic person. He's not like a Lawrence of Arabia type character at all. And yet he does every, I mean, what he contributes to the war is every bit as remarkable as a Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, I mean, we run over the figures on the last time you were on this podcast, but he ended, this massive guerrilla force that he ends up running.

With no business doing it. With no business doing it. And that quote from the time. No damn business. That comes from another Navy officer. One of Miles' friends. He's like, we have no damn business doing this. I found the letter.

Like, if, you know, one of Miles' friends thinks that, you know, the Navy has no damn business, then what hope did we really ever have? Yeah. And yet the impact that they had was completely strategic. They end up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000, I think, enemy Japanese soldiers, but more important, tying up a million of them. Only lost a handful. of Americans.

It doesn't account for the number of Chinese lost. I mean, but you're right. I mean, the Chinese contribution is, you know, it's unaccounted for and, you know,

significant. But yeah, only six, six American deaths in the entire effort, which is a, you know, the effort, you know,

stretches from 1942 to all the way to 1945. I mean, it's, you're absolutely right. There should be a book written about this. And when I, when I got into this, I didn't want to write this chapter.

I was so tired of not so tired, but I was like, I was so anxious to be done with World War II when I finished my UDT chapter and I was so ready to move on to Korea. I just wanted different scenery, a different record group at the National Archives. When I got to this point,

I mean, all I wanted to do was leave and I was just trying to like, take this China stuff and kind of stuff it into like an introductory section of my Korean War chapter and I couldn't do it. One chapter or one page became two pages and became three pages and four page. And I'm like,

mother, mother had to write a whole new chapter. It derailed my entire timeline for you know finishing the book. What's the movie potential for uh for this for this? I think that I mean I think you know if you have to if I was going to say like which of these I think they could all be movies but you know if you haven't seen we've seen you know saving private Ryan um we've never seen a um a representation of a guerrilla war um like what happened in China and World War II. It could totally, and Miles is such a, you know, an interestingly, an interesting character.

He could be like, I mean, he's interesting in the fact that he's so boring, but he does. I mean, he survives 40 assassination attempts. He's a naval officer who's involved in probably more ground combat than anybody else in history. Yeah, including a freaking cavalry charge on camels. Yeah. It's nuts. It's nuts. The whole thing is nuts.

But yeah, the movie potential of chapter six is high. I think the movie potential of, you know, the UDT chapter is just as high too. I mean, that's, I mean,

the emergency or I can see a movie of, you know, these guys, you know, totally, you know, going into battle with just knives and, you know,

fins and masks. That'd be pretty neat. Uh, you have another character that you bring in here, uh, going to the book at 60 years old, thick jowled and with white hair parted just off center, wild build.

Donovan a nickname he had earned as a volunteer leading soldiers through mud, gas, and death on the Western Front, looked in his uniform nothing like the head of an insatiable, unconventional warfare organization and more like an overweight toddler playing dress-up. For signs of the former, one had to look elsewhere, first to his left breast where he had humbly affixed a single ribbon, his Medal of Honor, in effect, saying, to his peers that no other awards mattered. And second to a career as an attorney, as a New York attorney and politician, occupations that had introduced him to everyone from movie stars to Mussolini and taken him further around the world than most presidents. He had been to Siberia, to size up Bolsheviks, to the Far East to hunt down business, Ethiopia to tour the Italian front, the Boclans, Turkey, and Spain as the president's

unofficial envoy. in past ages, a hero millionaire like Donovan could have responded to a world crisis simply by raising his own regiment, equipping it, and leading it into battle. In the 20th century, such impulses had been curved by the increasing complexities of modern warfare and a corresponding bureaucracy that recognized the limited value of eccentric amateurs, Medal of Honor or not. Now blocked from commanding regular troops, Donovan, courageous entrepreneurial, imaginative, and most of all unstoppable had set his sights on the only field of action whose battle lines had not yet been drawn

and on the one man who stood in his way. What's up with Donovan, dude? Well, it's an impossible contest. I mean, Donovan is, when I set out to write

this, not this chapter, but when I set out to write an OSS chapter, and I was attracted to it just because of Donovan. He is a, I mean, there should be a Donovan movie. He's, I mean, all the, you know, the stories about Jay Edgar Hoover, you know, dressing up in women's clothes. These are rumors that Donovan started. I mean, he's responsible for so much.

When you say that, you mean he actually was responsible for starting the rumors about Jay Edgar Hoover dressing up in women's clothing? He, yes. That's what we're saying. I'm saying, yes, he is responsible. I'm not saying that. This isn't hyperbole. This is what this guy did.

No, and the reason he did that is because at the time, the OSS and the FBI were in some sort of competition for the international intelligence mission. And one of them turned into a crossdresser. He wanted to delegitimize his rival as best as he could. I mean, and at the same time, Jay Edgar Hoover was, he was putting rumors out there that Donovan was having an affair with his daughter-in-law. So they were both at each other from like... So is there any truth to the rumor of J. Edgar Hoover dressing up in women's clothing?

I don't know about that, but I think there is suspicion that Donovan was actually having an affair with his daughter-in-law. His son's wife. Yeah. That's pretty... And so how does he play into our story here for the development of the SEAL teams? So Donovan's important because Donovan sees what the Navy's doing in China and he wants it. He doesn't think the Navy should have anything to do with this.

Donovan has established himself as the head of the U.S. intelligence organization, which he has understood to include all sorts of special programs. So if there's going to be a guerrilla warfare effort in China, OSS is going to be in charge of it. So he comes to China. So first he tries to rope miles into the OSS. And he establishes Miles as an OSS, not operative, but head. of an OSS program. Problem is Donovan also wants to send all of his OSS folks to support SACO.

But Miles, Miles starts to receive these guys, and they're all, you know, a lot of these guys are, you know, they're pretty interesting guys, but Miles doesn't want anything to do with them. They're like wannabes. I get to feel like they're kind of like they. Because because my own boondoglers. Because who Miles is getting is Marine Corps officers, like primarily, right? He's getting Marine Corps officers in the beginning. But what he really wants are people that don't know anything about China.

He doesn't want racists. Oh. He's the peculiar type of officer who actually he likes the indigenous people that he's working with. up. He's infatuated with China. He's infatuated with the Chinese. He thinks that these are, you know, members of the most, you know, one of the most civilized, you know, countries on the planet. And he has respect for them in a way that other Americans don't. He totally rejects the orientalism or the superior American idea. In that way, he's, he's, he's, he totally rejects the, the, the, the, the, the, the superior American idea. In that way, he's just like, you know, T.E. Lawrence. I mean, he's,

he's a believer. He's the worst kind of person in something. I mean, he's like, he actually, my worst, worst kind of person, I'm only joking. He's like, to other people, he's, he's not pliable. He's, he really believes in the potential of these Chinese soldiers to tie the Japanese down or to actually attack them. And, you know, Donovan comes in, and Donovan's a manipulator. Donovan's been manipulating for years. He, you know, managed to, he's squirled himself into positions his entire, you know, since he got that Medal of Honor, he's used it to, you know, plow pathways through bureaucracy

and to create a unit that never should have been created, to create this OSS and to, and some of his schemes are completely hairbrained. But some of them are not. Some of them are actually, you know, pretty good. So when he sees Donovan, he's trying, or when he, when Donovan sees Miles, he first wants to, you know, put Miles under his thumb. And when Miles can't be put under his thumb, he tries to take the whole thing and leave Miles with the weather stations. That's all he wants to leave Miles with. He wants to take this entire guerrilla army that Miles is starting to build. And he justifies that because Miles is, you know, like, like, quote in the book, he's not putting scalps on the barrel head fast enough.

And he almost does it. He gets real close. but the thing that stops him is the Chinese won't work with Donovan. But they do like Miles. They can smell the intent. Yeah. Right? Absolutely.

Donovan is freaking shady. It's tough to, you know, I hate to. I guess he's got to be shady a little bit. He is. I mean, he's, I mean, it's tough to not, you know, respect Donovan. He's a character. Like, uh, and he, you know, but he's a, he's a toddler with a, with a flamethrower. All right.

Can we go back real quick? There's two characters that I want to talk about from the UDT, I think. Okay, hit him. Alan Gordon Leslie. I was thinking about the contribution of other branches of service to the UDTs. Alan Gordon Leslie is a Marine that gets attached to UDT5. He becomes Draper Kaufman's executive officer of UDT5. for the Battle of Saipan.

He is Canadian, and I was thinking about him the other day because we're here in San Diego, and I was walking through the Hotel Dell, and I was looking at this, you know, this, you know, monument to, you know, Victorian architecture and everything. And it was there, you know, during World War II. And Gordon Leslie, he goes through the entire war.

He's one of the scout snipers who seizes the pier at Tara He shoulders a flamethrower and assaults the entire pier. So there's this pier, you know, cutting into the lagoon at Tarawa. And that pier would have threatened to cut into the flank of the Marines that were landing on the beach. So the Marines had to take it before they landed. So they sent a scout sniper platoon to do it. And Gordon Leslie was the guy with the flamethrower.

He's fighting, you know, pillbox to pillbox or emplacement to emplacement. And, you know, using the flamethrie. blame to her to destroy guys while he's got a machine gunner to his left and they're going down this incrementally taking the entire pier. He survives the Battle of Tarawa and he becomes, he volunteers for the UDT as sort of a Marine Corps liaison, but he falls in love with the UDT and manages to stay with them and the Marine Corps completely loses track of him. They don't know where he is. They think he's a casualty. He stays with UDT5 throughout the remainder of the war. And when he ends the war, He tries to transfer from the, officially transfer from the Marine Corps to the UDTs.

He wants to stay with the Frogman. It becomes so controversial. It goes all the way up to the commandant to the Marine Corps. The Marines say we're not losing a Marine to the Navy, especially to the UDT. We're going to keep him. So he's entitled to like $4,000 for the backpaid because he hasn't gotten it in three years. So in retaliation, he takes his $4,000. He goes to the hotel Dell.

He slaps that $4,000 on the front desk, reserves a peninsula of rooms in the Dell, and he throws a two-week bender. It's so bad that Draper Kaufman has to put up a watch bill of officers to make sure that his frogmen don't leave that wing of the hotel. Good times. And who's the other guy you wanted to bring up? Normans are Seymour Owens, Commander Seymour Owens.

So one of the great things about doing the research for this book is you get to discover all of the characters that weren't seals or that weren't frogmen that contributed to the importance or the success of naval special warfare. And one of those, one of those that's always stood out to me is Commander Seymour Owens. He was a destroyer skipper. and he was involved in the fire support mission prior to the invasion of Tinian. So Tinian is the greatest strategic battle probably of the entire Central Pacific campaign. It's the island that ultimately becomes the airfield that they fly all the long-range bombers to bomb Japan on. That's where the Annola Gay takes off from to bomb Japan. It's a perfect tabletop island.

But before it can be that, it has to be taken. And one of the biggest coups of the war is Draper Kaufman's reconnaissance of the beaches that nobody ever thought anybody could land on. But in order to sell that, in order to land all those troops on those beaches that nobody expects, UDT7 has to stage this elaborate ruse. on the south of the island, Etienne town. And so on the day of the actual invasion, when all the Marines are secretly sneaking into the beaches

that Draper Kaufman has found, the UDT-7 is conducting a daylight, you know, reconnaissance. And they're protected by, you know, multiple battleships, one being the USS Colorado. Another Colorado has lighted itself up amid ships or a broadside to the beach and it takes devastating naval gunfire, shore gunfire, and its guns are knocked out.

And suddenly, all the swimmers of UDT7 are exposed and they're about to, the Japanese are about to switch their guns away from the ships that are defending them to the swimmers in the water. Now, Seymour Owens is the brother-in-law of Draper Kaufman. He sees what's happened. He sees that the Colorado's guns have been knocked out and he commands his ship without orders. He commands the Norman Scott to get between the Colorado, so one, the Colorado can escape,

and two, so he can also protect the UDT swimmers that are in the water. Suddenly, the USS Norman Scott becomes the center of all Japanese nail a gunfire, and it's destroyed. I think 47 sailors are killed in the process, including Seymour Owens, but he does it because he knows how important it is to draw the Japanese attention away from those beaches in the north. How are we doing? We're doing, I'll tell you how we're doing.

We're, we're going to stop for today. That's the end of World War II, right? And again, that's the end of World War II. We hit some of the wavops. There's so much more incredible information in the book. Get it, but what we'll do is we'll just record another podcast. actually we'll just do it after this one so people can stay in the groove on it

but I think that's about it for today because we're looking at already three hours bro or at least real close to three hours so thanks for coming out Ben appreciate it echo what do you think any major things you need to bring up

no nothing major it's just interesting to hear all these stuff that was going on under my nose the whole time. Under your nose, under all of our noses the whole time. A, if you want to support the podcast, you can do it on. I'm drinking some go right now. How is that go tasting? You said it, but I was in the middle,

you were in the middle of telling me cool stories and then you said it's delicious. You got mango mayhem right there. You know, that's Echo Charles has got his own signature flavor. That's how cool Echo Charles thinks he is. It's my first time. I don't think I've ever had an energy drink. Well, you know what? It's starting to get to the,

you're probably not going to sleep a bunch after you drink that bad boy. So if you need some of that stuff, get some jacofuil. Joccofuel.com. That's where we're selling this stuff. Also, vitamin shops got it going on.

Wawa's got it going on for the drinks. You know, we have, we have ready to drink milk coming. That you can be able to go into a store and just grab a cold mok out of the fridge. Salted caramel. Ever heard of that?

I have heard. Salted caramel is definitely. a thing we got chocolate vanilla banana cream so the perfect mix we got a mix coming your way so we got that coming don't forget about your joint warfare and whatnot krill oil what else origin USA

dot com American made stuff American made stuff in our economy going in the right way they'd be real easy it's real easy I was having a conversation with someone the other day like I know you know I saw another brand like that.

I was like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. There's no other brand like this. There's no one else that's doing this. If someone goes, oh, you know, we're going to get into the jiu-jitsu market. Cool. I take $7,000 and I

order some rash guards from China and get them printed. Cool. Now you've got a brand. Bro, no, that's not what I'm talking about. We invested our lives into this, into buying, the equipment, capturing the know-how.

You know, you talk about how some of the people that you would, you have interviewed that have since died and you wouldn't have been able to capture that knowledge. We've actually had that happen at origin. People that, the old timers, and I mean that with all due respect, the old timers, the people that knew how to run a loom, the people that knew how to work on machines, the people that knew how to weave and knit, they passed this information out. Some of them, we're losing them now. So if you started a board, you.

for you know four thousand dollars by ordering some stuff from China and slap that Hey good for you that's fine no no no but let's face it's not too good for you Don't do that you want to support a real company an American company go to origin USA.com we're making everything you need by the way jeans boots t-shirts sweatshirts Rashcards whole nine yards so check that out origin USA.com it's true also Jocko has a store a hunt gear too I know you're seeing it coming. I know you like to wear camouflage pants

for no reason to echo Charles. To be camouflage. I mean, just saying, you know, that dual use kind of survivorist survivalist prepper. You're like, just in case, I got to go into the jungle. I'm going to be ready to rock and roll. We got this pattern.

There's a little bit of a tribute to our forefathers. The pattern that we've made for camouflage is, you know, obviously the primary goal is to make sure it's effective, but we were able to make it effective, been while still giving a little bit of a of a of a of a shout out to the tiger straw to the tiger stripes so you know one we got one for the one for the highlands sort of the western colors and another one for the more like the eastern colors so we got like a woodland versus a more of a highland

camis but yeah a little bit of tiger stripe activity it's common both viable for me both viable yeah because you know you might you never know what you're gonna get it to whatever I wore the heavy the hoodie snowboarding yeah viable viable yeah right on there you go yeah also jaco has a store called jaco store so you can represent where you get your shirts to represent discipline equals freedom good other stuff just a good way to represent on the path when you see somebody else wearing this kind of stuff you know you know you know what's up uh subscribe to the podcast don't forget about jaco underground we appreciate your support that we just got done recording one this morning

It's going to be a long day in the office today, bro. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. If you want to support jaco underground, jocco underground.com, check that out. We got a YouTube channel. We got some books. Primary book I want to talk about by water beneath the walls. Look, Ben, straight up.

I was being straight up with you before. Probably not the title we would have gone with, you know. It's hard to say. It's a mouthful. We have no idea what it means. Did you read the, you read the... Of course I read it. I get it. There's a tie back to whatever battle took place 9,000 years ago and you want to make

that to be... Yeah, plus he likes the wordy, like, you know, scenario. We're actually surprised. We're actually lucky. Maybe that was the short version of the title. Oh, you should have seen the other. You should have seen the options I had for subtitle. Oh, man. Scary. Hey, hey, let me tell you, all kidding aside, this is an absolute, this is an incredible book. It's, it's an incredible book. the knowledge that it will give you is phenomenal. It's also really funny. You've got your sit over there with your little dry sense of humor. And that dry sense of humor just shines through throughout the book.

And it's dramatic. It's funny. Dude, it's like a, you know, I feel like a commercial for some weird summer movie. Dark comedy. Yeah, it's like, funny, sad. You'll laugh and you'll cry. And that's the truth. Honestly, in this book, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll learn.

phenomenal book don't sleep on this book and and you know there's there's an audio book too who reads the audio book do you know some random actor some dude no I can't believe I can't remember his name okay it's a Kiko it's a Kaleo Griffith's okay I listen to I listen to the sample just to kind of see what we were doing with freaking good to go yeah so you can get the you can get the the audio book as well and sort of like you you won't you You'll feel like you're listening to a podcast or you'll feel like it's very engaging. So support this book.

Ben put seven years of his life into this book. I don't know how bad your eyesight got reading through all these things, but you've made some sacrifices to get this book done. And as I said, the first time you're on, there's no one, in my opinion, a non-seal couldn't have written this book, in my opinion. and I think the fact that you serve, the fact that you're a combat veteran that you were in the SEAL teams is you have a perspective that comes through, that an authenticity that comes through,

it's just a phenomenal book. So by water beneath the walls by Ben Milligan, get that book immediately. You already know all the books out written, so get some of those too. If you need some help with leadership inside your organization, do you want to talk about decentralized command? Let us know.

So, Ashlamfront.com. And if you want to go check out some battlefields, we do an awesome battlefield review. You've been to Gettysburg? Yeah. We do Gettysburg. No kidding. We're also, yeah, if you want to come, let me know.

And we also are doing Little Bighorn this year. So if you want to check those out, go to ashlamfront.com. Next muster's in Dallas. Wait, is that the next one? No, we just did Dallas. Next one's Denver. So we got a bunch of those events. We got the online training academy, which, you know that thing?

I started this thing off talking about how you can't get all the lessons learned across to everybody that you want them to. And that's one of the reasons we have the online academy, extreme ownership.com. The goal, the mission of Eshalom Front is to teach these lessons to as many people as we possibly can. That's the goal. Me, Laif, J.P., Dave, Steve. We can't get around to everybody.

But you know what? Everybody can get online. Extremeownership.com come and learn these lessons of leadership so that you can use them in every aspect of your life. Every aspect of your life. You can help you. You can help yourself. If you want to help service members,

you want to help active duty service members. You want to help retired service members. You want to help their families of the Gold Star families. Any of those, if you want to participate in an awesome charity, Mark Lee's mom. She's got an unbelievable charity organization. America's mighty warriors.org if you want to volunteer or if you want to help out. And don't forget about heroes and horses.com.

Micah Fink. Keeping people out of the algorithm, getting them back on track. As far as Echo and I go, we're both on Twitter. We're on the gram. Echo's at Equal. I'm at Jockle. Watch out for the algorithm. What's your Instagram handle?

Call sign? B. Milligan 3. B. Milligan 3. I think you should have made one longer than that. I'm on the Twitters and the Wi-Fi's. Oh, you're on Twitter too? Yeah. Okay.

Is it the same thing? Ben Milligan 3? Ben H. Milligan on Twitter. Ben H. Milligan on Twitter. Awesome. Hey, seriously, thanks for coming on again. Thank you. Appreciate it.

This is fantastic. It's always great to be here. And thanks for writing that book. Thanks for reading it. Not only that, but thanks. for, you know, it, uh, this, it took, it took a lot to do this. And I'm being able to give this back to the teams was, you know, you know, this is, this is why I'm here. So, so this is my contribution to, you know, that institution that, you know, defined us. So 100% man. Awesome. Um, and we'll,

we'll pick this up where we left off on the next podcast. Thanks to all the military personnel past and present. Who laid the groundwork. for progression who laid the groundwork for what we were able to do via your lessons written in blood. So thank you. And thanks to all the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all first responders out there, thank you for what you do on the home front so that we can be safe. And everyone else out there, man, this.

This story right here that we're talking about is about opportunities about so looking for opportunities It's about taking ownership of what's going on in your world It's about seeing where you can help out It's about seeing where you can fill a gap That's what this is about the seal teams just didn't sprout up from nowhere into this fully Blossomed flower didn't happen at all It happened one piece of dirt at a time to build up into something that's worthwhile. That's the way life is.

And the only way that happens is if you go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Ben Milligan and Echo and Jocko. Out.