Jocko Podcast - 439: General MacFarland, the Ready First Brigade, and the "Army SEALs" of Task Unit Bruiser in The Battle of Ramadi

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<Lieutenant General Sean Barry MacFarland is a retired three-star general who served in the United States Army. In 2015 MacFarland, then commanding III Corps, was selected as commander of the coalition against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. 0:00:00 - Introduction.0:04:39 - September 11th.1:32:40 - The Battle of Ramadi.5:06:53 - Coming Home.6:36:00 - Final thoughts and how to stay on THE PATH.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 439 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I felt like I had no life in Ramadi. I cannot describe the horror we lived in. Those were very bitter days. Those days we lived in hell. We looked like ghosts out of a cemetery.

We were very tired. We had lots of complaints to take to coalition forces, but we were afraid. Some days we wished to be dead. just to be rested. On the streets, they accused Americans of being killers. People welcomed Al-Qaeda into their homes as a custom, but they killed families, raped wives, and took over. If one of them killed 60 people, he was called Amir.

They killed doctors and leaders. They killed doctors and said that it was because they treated Americans. The doctors fled the country. They killed Mullahs and said that it was because they liked Americans. Soon there were no men left to kill, so they started killing women and children. They killed women and said that was because their husbands were policemen. They killed children and said it was because their fathers were policemen. Fear made me very cautious.

Sometimes if a door opened, an entire family was killed, old people, women, and children. I had four huge locks on my front door. It looked like a protected holy place. I would only open the door for family. I was afraid of the coalition forces and the insurgents. I used to leave the house at 6 a.m. Before 7 a.m., there was a coalition forces curfew. After 7 a.m., the insurgents were out.

I used to carry a white flag with me. It was my husband's undergarment. The coalition forces know the white flag. Nothing works with the insurgents. The ugliest torture was committed by al-Qaeda. If the discipline didn't work, the people were abducted and slaughtered. The head was put in a container and thrown away, where the neck cut and the head placed on the back. The awakening started with Sheikh Satar Abu Risha because al-Qaeda killed many of his family.

The police started coming out slowly. People started coming out. We had the first woman's meeting on December 15th, 2006 at the elementary school. Captain Tina of the Coalition Forces was present at the first meeting and she worked with us. We set up literary classes for females. I worked with her, but I was also afraid. Now women are going back to have pictures made with coalition forces. We have satellite TV now.

We have internet. We're interacting with the rest of the world. world now. It's a sign of civilization. Iraqis are conservative, but not extreme. And that right there was a quote from Merriam, which is a pseudonym who was interviewed by Colonel Gary Montgomery and chief foreign officer for Timothy McWilliams in 2009. Her identity was concealed to protect her, but she lived in Ramadi prior to the war and lived there through 2009. Her husband was an Iraqi policeman and she was involved in humanitarian efforts that focused on helping women and children. And that's one example, just one example of the horror that existed in the city of Ramadi, the capital of Al-Lambar province in Western Iraq.

And it's also an example of how that horror was reversed and the insurgency was defeated and the city was pacified. by coalition forces, initially Americans, but over time, by with and through the Iraqi military and police. And that incredible turnaround was made at an immense cost to coalition forces. Men and women wounded and killed to execute that mission. But in the end, the city was secured, and the people of Ramadi were liberated from these evil. doers from al-Qaeda and their demonic allies. Now, one of the lessons that I learned in this battle was that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield.

And that includes every level of leadership from those on the front lines, taking ownership of their part of the mission, and executing all the way to the top level of leadership. and in this case, the top level of leadership in the Battle of Vermont was an army colonel, the commander of the first brigade of the first armored division. And he developed a strategy and shared division and unified a team of U.S. and Iraqi military and Iraqi police, along with Iraqi government officials, tribal leaders, civilians, and he implemented this strategy, made changes and adjusted the strategy when it was required,

and directed and oversaw countless operations to secure and stabilize the city. And he is and was one of the best leaders that I ever served under inside or outside the military. His name is General Sean McFarland. He served 37 years in the Army. He led troops in combat at every level And it was an honor to fight alongside him in the battle of Ramadi And it's an honor to have the general here with us tonight To discuss his experiences and lessons learned

General McFarland Thank you for joining us Hey thanks, Jacko, it's awesome to be here I guess let's start at the beginning And before we hit record You are already starting to be here. to tell some memories of your youth and your family. So you're from upstate New York, Albany, born in 1959.

That's right, Eisenhower administration. Wow. Right. You said it. I didn't. I can't deny it. Now, you know, when I bring guests on, you know, we'll talk about what their, what military history they had in their family.

Do we need to do a series of podcasts on the military history that you had in your family? Because it's a lot. Yeah. No, we don't need to do this series. I can recap it pretty quickly. I mean, for me, I mean, my dad was in the National Guard. He retired as a colonel in the Army Reserve. My grandfather was West Point Class of 1930. Started out in the horse artillery at Fort Bliss, First Cavalry Division, and commanded an artillery battalion in the 9th Armour Division at Bestone and Ray Magen, Bridgehead.

So do you do you, did you grow up? up with him? Do you remember him? He died when I was 10. I remember him pretty well. He was hard of hearing, as most artillery officers tend to be. That was my big memory of him as watching TV with the volume up. But he was a big golfer. I wish I had half the skill that he had. He played polo when he was younger, you know, all the, that was what they used to do in the cavalry,

you know, was to play polo. But he married a local girl from Albany, my grandmother, Harriet, and their first assignment was Fort Bliss,

Texas, as was mine, you know, and he, you know, went through the whole Depression Army thing and, you know, the lean years,

and then, Korea and my grandmother was a pretty funny lady. She said World War II in Korea saved their marriage. So it was a silver lining to every dark cloud, I guess. But they, you know, did 30 years. And then he taught meth at Albany Boys Academy until he passed away. So, you know, probably what got him was all the smoking and drinking, which was very common back then.

I don't have any memory of my grandfather without a cigarette and a glass of scotch. Same was true with my grandmother. She was a little class here. She always used a cigarette holder, you know, the long stem thing. She lived until almost into her late 80s, though. And she looked great. She never looked bad, but she would always have scotch with her. She was drinking a bottle of scotch a week until she died, you know?

I mean, and like I said, you know, just genetically, you know, so hopefully I've got a lot of runway in front of me, live in the good life like they did. I don't know. But so, yeah, they, you know, his grandfather, his father emigrated over from Glasgow, Scotland, Archibald, Archie McFarland. And he came over in the 1880s as a 10-year-old kid or something, fought in the Spanish-American War, became the first. motorcycle cop in Albany, New York. And on my mom's side, we go all the way back. You know, we have some recent immigrants, you know, from the troubles in Ireland, you're relatively recent, you know.

So we don't know that military history, you know, the IRA side of it, but there was some of that. And others go back to the Mayflower, actually, fought in a Revolutionary War. and my great-grandfather was a union soldier, and his brother was killed in action at Petersburg, and he survived, obviously, and his regiment went down to New Orleans and Red River and, you know, fought it all.

So he was the first member of my family to make it to Texas, actually, I guess. And he went back and went back to, he was a carpenter. in around Albany area. So, yeah, it's a long but relatively undistinguished military history until I met you, Jaco. So you're growing up, at what point did you realize you wanted to go to West Point? I didn't. I thought I wanted to go to the Naval Academy, but my eyesight wasn't good enough to go out there without a waiver. So, and they said, well, you know, you might be able to get in.

I said, yeah, but I wanted to be a Navy pilot. And my fear was I, you know, get through the Naval Academy and not be able to fly and, you know, end up three decks below the water line or something. So I said, well, I can get into the West Point without a waiver. I was like 2050 or something. That was before LASIC. So they were like, okay, and almost everybody at West Point Warglasses. You know, we were all the Air Force Academy and Naval Academy rejects.

We all went to West Point. And this was post-world right after Vietnam fell. I was like two years after the helicopters lifted off the embassy roof. So not a lot of folks were applying to the service academies. So I, you know. You were able to sneak in there? I slipped under the wire, and my tactical officer who went on to command the Ranger Regiment was very unimpressed with me. He said, he wrote, this is in writing, that I had no potential to be a combat arms officer.

And that was because I didn't want to be on the company boxing, intramural boxing team. because I was a tall lanky guy, I guess I still am, but even skinnier then, obviously. And he said, well, you could, you know, box it like the lowest weight class, you know, outreach everybody, which I was doing in, you know, mandatory boxing classes. And I said, I'm more of a triathlon guy because that's not a guy's sport, you know. Men don't do triathlon. Men's box, play football. And so he kind of wrote me off. And you literally put it in your evaluation or something?

It's in there. It's black and white. That's beautiful. Yeah, I know, right. The irony of that, huh? Yeah, yeah. So when you get to West Point, how did that compare to your, because you were raised in Catholic schools, right?

Was it like a break for you when you got to West Point compared to the Catholic schools? It absolutely was. I had a, my first squad leader was not a nice guy. He was like the brigade boxing champion in his weight class. You know, he's from L.A. And this was 1977. This is the year the Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series. So he already didn't like me because of that.

And I wasn't the best plebe anyway. and he would just haze me unmercifully. But as soon as I realized that unlike the nuns, he couldn't hit me. And I said, this is all downhill from here. I mean, second grade with Sister Maria Andre was much scarier than my squad leader at West Point. How is it when you're in class and you have these guys. from Vietnam and Vietnam is now fallen, what was the morale and what kind of lessons learned were you getting?

Were you getting strategic lessons learned? We just covered a McNamara's book on here, and it's really disturbing to read in many ways. Yeah, they were all Vietnam vets. And they were all like classes 65 through class of 67, and those classes got hammered, you know, and Vietnam lost a lot of kids. I mean, West Point, since the global war on terror, lost about 100 graduates, killed in action.

And that's really like one of the highest percentages because now we're a smaller army and all-volunteer that has ever been the case. But back then, they all had right shoulder patches from Vietnam. And I'll tell you, I didn't appreciate how they felt until August of, was it two years ago now when we surrendered in Afghanistan. Now I can really, really relate to how they felt. But the, so we all had sponsors as cadets, and my sponsor had been a Cobra pilot in Vietnam. And I started out, I wanted to study international relations, you know.

But I had taken AP calculus, and I was good at math and science. but that was hard, you know, and I thought, you know, I can BS with the best of them. I'm Irish, so I'll go international relations. And so my, there's a big paper. It's called the Social Sciences Department. Everybody goes through it's a rite of passage. And I was taking advanced international relations. And I had taken advanced calculus and advanced, you know, had taken a heavier,

course load in some of the engineering and sciences stuff just because, you know, I liked it. I could. It wasn't hard for me, you know, so I kind of balanced it out. I was taking advanced French, advanced math, advanced engineering, you know, I didn't know what I really wanted to do. And I said, well, I'll do international relations. And I wrote a paper about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. And the thesis was, the Czechs were wimps, because they didn't fight back. They rolled over. And my instructor was a Vietnam vet, a guy I still remember his name, Major Borowski.

I thought he was Polish, but he was Czech. His family was check. He still had family in Czech. And he hammered me on my paper, barely passing grade. And that was 50% of the grade. So I was lamenting this to my sponsor, who was this old, you know, his copra pilot, you know, for the young guy at the time. He said, well, look, Sean, you've taken, you know, thermodynamics and statics and dynamics and did well and advanced calculus.

And so, why don't you switch to aerospace engineering? That's what I teach. I'll be your instructor pilot. We go on flight labs. You fly around the Statue of Liberty. Of course, this is all before 9-11. You could do all kinds of crazy stuff. And they had these at Stewart Army Airfield nearby West Point.

They had all these little trainer airplanes, single engine, like Cessna's or Petsons. Piper Cubs or something. And we'd take off and fly around. And remember, I wanted to be a Navy pilot. And I almost crashed twice. And they said, okay, we'll just stick with the classroom instruction here. You'd do better with that. But I went on and got my aerospace, you know, graduated with my concentration aerospace

engineering and ended up with a master's of science in aerospace engineering from Georgia. a tech later on the army sent me there so so the arrow and that's what I did after I retired I worked in on hypersonics and kind of stuff like that you know but that's that that whole journey was kind of zigzag around and and initially it appeared like my tactical officer was probably right about my potential as a common arms officer I you know I'm looking at this wooden tank that we gave you, you know, Abrams tank. I started out on the M60A1, add-on stay, but it was a pretty primitive tank, and it was not unlike the tanks that my dad had in the National Guard Armory where we grew up, and I was kind of familiar with them, but it was at night, it had

almost no night capability. We had searchlights, and you turn on the search lights, or you had to have mortar illumination. And, you know, it was, or we had these things, we would do range card engagements. You were firing blind at night based on range card data. And you had a quadrant elevation and a azmuth indicator inside the turret. And I was in a cavalry platoon. And cavalry platoon leaders didn't ride on tanks. They rode on armor personnel carriers.

And we had tanks in our platoon, but the platoon leader wasn't on a tank. Were you in like a 11-3 or something? 1-1-3, yeah. We had nine vehicles in my platoon, you know. So anyway, we'd go out there and the squadron commander says, hey, you know, you're an armor officer. You should be able to qualify on a tank. I was like, we're like, oh, yeah, but I'm not battle rostered on a tank.

I've been preparing for it. So we had to pull together these pickup crews. And one of the Cardinal sins in armor branches, as an officer, if you don't qualify on your first try. It's called, if you Q2, you know, you are persona non-grada. And I Q2ed. And the thing of it was, is I had it in the bag, a Q1 on our last engagement. And I just kind of lost track of the number of rounds we were shooting, and we fired one too many, and that's all it took.

And so I was going to get fired. and my platoon sergeant, well, but there wasn't anybody to replace me, so we went out to, they had to keep me for the platoon battle run there. At the time it was called Table 9. Now it's a different table number. But we had to take the whole platoon out there, and the way it's an offensive engagement, and they give you the fire command, you know,

and you're supposed to bound to the next phase line, and then you're about 1,000 meters. is closer to the targets when they come up, and then you open up on, you know, it's like 10 or 12 targets. And I choked, and I got, I got, I, I opened fire from the first phase line instead of bounding forward to the next phase line. And the squadron commander was up in the tower and he said, I knew I should have fired that guy, you know, he's terrible. And I'm, I heard all this from my squadron XO, who, his nickname was Champaign Bill, great guy.

also a Vietnam black horse guy everybody was black horse 11th Cav in Vietnam all the all the guys I work for and he says well he says so you know the squad of commander was livid and he started saying you know I you know McFarland's probably the worst platoon leader I've got in the regiment which is funny because his predecessor loved me but it was just you know we didn't we didn't mesh personally I was a little too lackadaisical he said

he gave me a letter reprimand and said was too cavalier. And I probably shouldn't have said this, but I said, but we're in the cavalry. Are I supposed to be cavalier? And so that was probably the straw that broke the camels back with him. So now he had an excuse to fire me, but this is one of the first leadership lessons that I learned, is when we've opened fire at extreme range on the targets, my tank section and these primitive tanks did not miss. once. And they had no business being able to hit targets at that range, but they nailed them all

one round per target, and they were all down within seconds. And the regimental commander, the 59th colonel of the regiment, another Irishman named Fitzgerald, he was in the tower. And he's like, wow, that's really good shooting, you know. And then the squadron XO, who liked me a little bit better than the squadron commander stepped and he goes oh yeah that's Sean McFarland he's he's one of our better platoon leaders and and the Reginald commander so yeah he's one to keep an eye on but I so my NCOs saved my bacon they absolutely did and I'll always be grateful to them my platoon sergeant was a guy named staff sergeant Kim day K Kim you know who went on to become like an NCO of the year and the army you know top

drill sergeant. He was amazing. Barely spoke English, but he was an amazing NCO who really set the example of what Wright looks like for me in an NCO. And I owe most of my success to the non-commissioned officers, you know, but that was my first lesson and what a good NCO could do. Because, you know, before that, I had all these Vietnam NCOs, tactical NCOs at West Point. And they, they were telling me things like, you know, hey, when you get to your platoon, it's kind of like going to prison. You've got to pick like the biggest guy and knock them out, or you know, he's going to respect you.

It's like, what? I was, really? It was like, yeah, I'm like, I don't know if I can do that. I mean, I was an okay boxer, but I don't want to get in a fight with one of my soldiers. I could go sideways. And the soldiers were pretty rough and tough. This was before your analysis when I got to my platoon.

I had 42 troops. in my platoon. And when we started doing urinalysis, well, then in six months, I was down to 18 soldiers. And it was all because of urinalysis. I mean, these guys were like hardcore druggies and thugs. Half of them lived in Juarez and just commuted.

You know, they had bunks in the barracks. Back then it was all open bays and all that kind of stuff, like you see in the movies now. But they were a rough and tumbled bunch. And some of them were like really strong. strung out. You remember the Miles harnesses?

Yeah. You know, I mean, I remember standing in the Chow line and there was this one kid standing there. And I'm like, I hear like a Miles harness going off like, be, beep. I'm like, who is that? You know, and you know, you're five yards apart with your mess kits, you know, waiting, you know, to get to the mermaids and get with green eggs and ham. And you, so, you know, my platoon star and I started walking up the line to find out who's, whose Miles harness is going off. And there's this kid, you know. You know, I was saying, Specialist Rodriguez.

So Specialist Rodriguez is standing there. I'm like, hey, Rodriguez, your Miles harness is going off. He goes, really? I wondered where that was coming from. I'm like, it's coming from you. And later, you know, of course, we had to kick him out of the Army for, you know, positive urinalysis, you know. I explained all of the chapter proceedings to him.

I said, do you have any questions? And I said, because, you know, the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask. And he says, which one was that, sir? So those are the kind of soldiers that we started out with, you know, but I had good combat experience NCOs as a cavalry troop commander in the fold of gap. My first sergeant was a great guy, first sergeant Sherman Catchings. He'd been a scout in Vietnam as a young buck sergeant, you know. And so those black horse guys were kind of the guys who kind of,

impressed me and there were different types you know I had black horse guys who I admired others I had a I had a squadron commander who was hilarious and funny and had a distinguished service cross from Vietnam but you know he his squadron was the wild west you know and it was really like a frat house kind of environment where you know everybody cussed and drank and you know it was all about who was the best drinker and, you know, and if you could hang with the squadron commander drinking, then you were probably going to be one of his favorite officers. And if you were more of a, you know, introverted guy or not a heavy drinker, then he kind of put you in a different category. So it's pretty rough and tumble. But this squadron commander was kind of

legendary in the army. And I won't give you his name. because he has family in the Army, and I don't want to embarrass him anybody, but he was legendary, and everybody whose armor or cavalry knows who this guy was. And, you know, we were drinking, I mean, he would show up, we'd be shooting gunnery, and, you know, he would have his, he'd pull his flask out, and, hey, you want to slug?

I'm like, that's 9 o'clock in the morning. I'm okay, sir, thank you, you know. But he's, I said, so how did you get your Distinguish Service Cross? He says, well, he says, he was a black horse guy, you know. He says, I was flying an observation helicopter. And I'm telling you all this because you mentioned Vietnam. And they were the people who kind of influenced my early career and gave me all those letters of reprimand.

He gave me one too, which I wish I had framed because he called me, Can I swear? You can't. He called me a marble-headed motherfucker in writing. So is that in your record? No, that was a desk drawer letter of a reprimand. And I was mad, so I threw it away. I was like, man, why didn't I keep that to show to my subornis?

But those letters are reprimand and Q-toeing and almost getting fired. It gave me an appreciation for, hey, look, you know, the road, to the top is not always an unbroken series of successes. And I used to be able to tell when I was a tank platoon leader, my younger soldiers, hey, my officers, you know, if they cute two, I'm like, hey, I Q2ed and I'm your battalion commander. So, you know, you're going to be all right. You're going to be okay.

I'm not going to, but you're going to have to improve now, you know. But anyway, so I asked to this guy, how do you get your distinguished service cross? And he says, well, I was flying an OH says, as a spotter, you know, for the black horse. And there was an 8-inch battery firebase that was under attack. And I was spotting for these 8-inches, you know, a Ford Observer. And I took around to my transmission, so I was going to have to set it down. So I set it down inside the fireplace.

And I ran up to the battery commander, and I said, hey, Daiwe. he had a misster captain which he always called us the cavalry troop commanders he always just call us Daiwi you know and he says hey Daiwi you know anything I can do to help

and he says well that M60 machine gun over there and the corner is out of action Cruiseman killed or wounded if you get that back in action I'd be great so he said okay sir and I ran off and you know flipped it over cleaned the feeder tray out

put the rounds, slapped the rounds back in, charged it, got it talking. And yeah, the NVA is coming out of the wood line, you know, and he says, and I started mowing them down. Until, you know, I eventually ran out of, I had a couple of boxes of 7.62, a couple hundred rounds each, and then I was done. So, but they were still coming. So I looked around and there were, you know, one of the guys had an M-16 and had some ammo left. So I got his M16 off of them, you know, the one of the killed or wounded crewmen, and started using that and took out a bunch more of those guys,

but there were still some guys coming towards me. And now all I had back then, the aviators had 38 revolvers. And he said, so I took my 38 out and fired all the rounds I had from my 38. They were close enough. I was able to hit some of them. But there was still like three of them left. So now, you know, I'm looking at all your knives on the table, you know, and he says, I didn't want to get in a knife fight, you know,

and I didn't want to run away and abandon my position. So I'm looking around and I found one of the guys had a grenade on his LBE. So I took the grenade and I threw that grenade as hard as I could. And I killed one of them and the other guy jumped up and ran back in the woodline. And to this day, I wonder if I pulled the piece. pin on that grenade could I have killed the other guy too I was like what at what point did that story you know become but that was so typical of him it was usually a cowboy kind of a guy kind of slim pickings and you know Dr. Strange Love you know it was it but what was really

interesting to me Jocko was we started I was I was a platoon leader in 1982 in the third arm cavalry regiment and by the time I was a troop commander took command of my cavalry troop in Germany in 1986 the army had completely changed. It had to become a much more professional army. And

I commanded my cavalry troop 165 soldiers for two years, almost two years, and I only had one positive euro analysis. Remember, my platoon went from 42 to 18 in six months. And 165 guys, and it wasn't for a lack of trying, we only had one hot urinalysis.

And, I mean, the whole army just changed overnight. It was, and I know the other services went through a similar transformation. And it wasn't just the urinalysis. It was the, you know, we've got pay raises. I mean, as a second tenant, my pay was like, I think it was a little over $12,000 a year was what I made. I wasn't when I made captain when I was a captain I made clear 20,000 a year for the first time I felt like I was finally a grown up I was a grown up now making grown up pay but yeah I mean there was the pay raises and but you know national training center and all these post-Vietnam um transformational types of things that were happening across the services really kick in and had an incredible effect. So it was about that time when I stopped getting letters of reprimand and started to become a bit more serious about my profession. Is that when you kind of started to think

about it as it was going to be a career, or did you always have a career in mind? I always thought I was going to be a lifer, but it didn't look like they were going to let me be a lifer after my third letter of reprimand, you know, I thought, oh, geez, maybe it's just not, I'm not cut out for this. You know, I read a book and I covered on this podcast. It's called the psychology of military incompetence. And the basic premise of the book is that some people have very authoritarian mindsets and very disciplinary mindsets and they're attracted to the military because they see, oh, if I'm there, people have to respect me and they're going to have to listen to me and I can kind of impose my will on the world.

And those people can do well in the military, especially in non-combat garrison situations because they're running inspections and everyone's going to be in the right uniform. And yet those people, when they get put in combat situations, they're very close-minded. They can't think outside the box. They can't look at for other solutions.

And so the people that excel in combat might have records where they have, of reprimands because they didn't do this, they didn't do follow the rules here, they didn't obey this. And yet when they get into combat, that's actually the person that you want is this person that has at least some, some iota of rebellious mindset where they're going to say, this doesn't actually make sense. And I personally watched you do that countless times. Like, oh, you want us to do that? That doesn't make sense. Why would we do that? Is there a better way? Is there a different way? So it's, this is reinforcing what I learned from that book. And that book,

when somebody told me about the book and I kind of said, oh, what's, you know, what's some psychologist going to know about what it's like being in the military? Well, this particular psychologist was a British guy, World War II, wounded in combat, and then came back and, you know, did what he did in the psychological world. But yeah, this is, this is really fitting into the mold of someone that has, you know, is not quite staying inside the lines perfectly. But what that shows is they actually have an open, creative mind, and when it's required to have that, they're going to excel. There may be an element of that. You know, I'm also a lucky person, you know, a bit of a forest gump.

I just happen to turn up the right place, the right time, and have good people around me who were able to, you know, help me accomplish things that I probably never would have been able to accomplish. push otherwise. And even that right there. If you have a closed mindset, authoritarian mindset, you look at the people around you and you think,

you know, how can I make them do what I'm telling them to do? Whereas if you have an open mind, you go, oh, this person seems like pretty smart about that. And this character over here

seems like he knows what he's doing. And maybe I should just take a back seat and let them drive for a little while. Right, right. So there's some serious benefits to that. So one of the things that is fundamental to critical thinking is something called intellectual humility, which is, I find, first of all, I like the expression, intellectual humility. But if you, it basically says you've got to be

open-minded enough to recognize that other people have ideas and some of them might be better than your own. And not always. Somebody else said, if you're too open-minded to eventually your brains fall out, right? You've got to have an idea. But the idea of intellectual humility being fundamental to critical thinking is one that has stuck with me over the years and has, I think, served me well. you end up in the first Gulf War.

What was your position there? What was your experience like with that? Well, ironically, I ended up working for that same squad of commander who wanted to fire me. Now he's a regimental commander and I'm a former troop commander. So it was a little bit of a love-hate there. But I started out, well, I went through the war as the officer in charge of the regimental's Ford command post. We have a couple of, they're called M577s.

You know, they look like M1-1-3 armor personnel carriers on steroids, right? Big, tall things. Righting in the back on one of those things is like being in a World War II German submarine, you know, sausages hanging from the handles from the ceiling, you know. But it was an experience. But we had a couple of tanks and a few Bradley's assigned to us for additional security. And we stayed right behind the lead echelon, kind of tucked up with them in order to maintain radio contact with the forward elements of the regiment and keep the main command post, which was a lot bigger. harder for them to get established and set up, as informed as we possibly could.

And when they weren't in the fight, you know, we would basically take over those roles and keep the higher headquarters informed, which to me, the fact that the main command post was barely ever in Desert Storm and the Ford Command Post, which was run by a captain and me and I had, you know, two or three other captains and lieutenants working for me. and some NCOs. We're able to keep a 7,000 man regiment, you know, commanded and controlled is, I think, informative because as we created these giant stadium seating command centers, you know, we've kind of lost the art of mobile command and control or command of control on the move, right?

I had an experience I was going to a big exercise, like a big giant joint exercise. Where was it? It was in Gibraltar. And in the middle of this thing, we get tasked with a real mission down in Africa. And so I'm a young officer. You know, I was prior enlisted guy. So now I'm a young officer. And I was really, really close to the commander.

He was a commander at the time. So in 05. And I kind of became his, you know, his right-hand guy that would just kind of go do everything with him. But I remember this. He says, hey, we're going to go, we're going to Africa. We need a mobile talk. And I said, yeah, Roger that, sir. And I got, you know, two radios, five sets of maps, some pens, some pencils, and some tape. And I put it into an actual rucksack. And we loaded that thing up. And that was our actual, that's what we did. And then after a couple years, I went to college, Navy sent me to college.

When I got back, so now it went from, that was 1998. So now you fast forward. I guess it was more than it. It was like five years forward. And one of the first things I did when I got done with college, went back to a SEAL team. There's a big exercise going on. And they say, oh, yeah, we want you to come and be, come and look at the talk. So I come and look at this tactical operation center.

And it's the same thing. It's this huge room with TVs and all this stuff, maps everywhere and computers everywhere. and it was shocking to see that I had done that job with two radios in a rucksack and some maps, and it was now transformed into this big, massive. And of course, some of it's necessary. There's more assets and all that. But it seems like we may have gone a little overboard. Well, yeah, you think.

So we're learning that in Ukraine, where the bigger the command post, the more targetable it is and vulnerable. So, yeah, this little command post, these two command, vehicles, we'd go ramp to ramp, you know, we would just stop sometimes just lower our ramps. And, you know, guys wearing headsets and moving little stickies around on acetate. And one day the regimental XO flew up and, you know, kind of looked at what was going on. Because I have no idea what you guys are doing, but you seem to know what you're doing. And that's good enough and just drive on. And even as a battalion commander, you know, I commanded my whole battalion task force.

and training center exercises off of a plexiglass map board. And as we were in fights, you know, I would, you know, use a red pen or a blue pen and mark where things are going. Of course, we were all instrumented, and the observer controllers would come up and say, all right, sir, where do you think everybody in your battalion is? I'm like, well, I think Charlie Company's over here and, you know, Bravo Company's doing this, and this is where my scalpeloon is and mortars and so forth and so on. And they said, what do you think the enemy's doing?

like, well, I think, you know, their main bodies over here, main defensive belt, and I think, you know, this is where the reserve is or whatever. And they say, okay, you know, and they was just grade you on that. And then at the after-action review, they kind of compare what you thought versus what they thought. You know, you never had a completely accurate picture. But it was a way for you to measure your situational awareness in real time and see if you're good at it or not. and I think growing up in an analog kind of an world,

I think those of us who are digital immigrants and not natives have a better ability to maybe create mental pictures of our environment better than those who rely on a purely digital picture. And I saw this as a senior general going out to the National Training Center and I would go up to young captains, you know, I was a two-star division commander or a three-star core commander or whatever. I'm like, hey, you know, show me your overlay. Show me your scheme of maneuver. And they would point me at their digital screen, you know, their Blue Force tracker or FBCB2 or whatever

they had on their tank or Bradley and they're like, well, here it is. It's like, that doesn't tell me anything. I mean, if you get killed, who's going to know what you were trying to do here? You know, I mean, what's the, what's your axis of advance? You know, where do you think the enemy is? And they're like, well, let me, you know, press some buttons and pull up what the enemy. Yeah. And it's like, you can't outsource thinking to these boxes.

Yeah. There's also, I think, there's something inherent when you're coming from the analog world, you learn to really utilize, decentralized command up and down the chain of command. so the team knows, my guys know, oh, if they're going to maneuver over here, I need to make this adjustment. If I'm going to, I need to tell Jocko what's happening. I need to get permission to go there. Oh, but I can go over here on my own. And it just becomes the flow of information is more active because everybody knows that I need to know what's happening.

So then guys are pushing me the information. But if they think I'm looking at a screen and, oh, you can just pull it from the screen and now we don't really need to pass. and then there's a disruption in communication, and all of a sudden everything just gets terrible real quick. Yeah, and I think it creates cognitive biases where you tend to believe what you see, right? So kind of an anchor bias or something where you say, well, you know, if it's on digits, it must be true.

You know, if that icon shows up on my display at those grid coordinates, that must be where they are. It's like, well, garbage in, garbage out. You know, who knows where that, you know, might be from a Blue Force tracker, might be somebody hand-chammed it in there. Who knows? Or there may be latency or there may have been a loss of signal and that may have been their location two hours ago and it just hasn't updated.

I mean, you just really cannot rely on that 100%, but we tend to. I mean, we're all guilty of it. I saw it on the Internet, so must be right. So you're, the war, the first Gulf War, I mean, it's over pretty quick. Yeah. We ended up in a burning oil fields outside of Basra. Yeah. It's quite something.

But highly successful, right? I mean, by all measures, it's highly successful. Gosh, is there anyone that will ever be able to kind of stand up and really fight against America after that first Gulf War? It's like, well, I guess we've just achieved just. complete world domination. Yeah. Did we get that feeling? So I was now, so now I'm in the Navy at this point and I was in seal training as the

first goal four kicked off and I missed the whole thing. And of course, I'm totally distraught because I think I missed the last war that's ever going to happen. Yeah. What was the, you know, coming home from that, you know, I think we learned some really bad lessons in the first war because it was kind of easy for us and we rolled up and we did what we wanted to do and we did it really fast and we took a very small number of casualties.

and everything kind of went to plan. Yeah. Yeah, it was, first of all, I have to say, it was a pretty phenomenal experience to see this Cold War Army, which was kind of at its peak, or military, really, all of DoD was at peak in peak form. You know, it was like Mike Tyson in its prime.

And to watch the massive amounts of combat power flowing in along the tap line road. We were just north of the tap line. It was like, you know, one flatbed, you know, heavy equipment transporter after another with tanks and the crews of the tanks were riding on the tanks themselves and the gun tubes were, you know, traversed slightly, you know, in case they encountered the enemy while they're driving down the road on the back of a truck, right? and while these truck, you know,

endless convoys of combat power are going by, you know, swarms of helicopters are flying overhead and you see B-52 flights going north. It was just really an experience that if you didn't, if you weren't there to see it, you can never really appreciate what does it like to look at a division wedge, an armored division and a wedge formation.

So how many tanks is an advantage? division wedge? Well, tanks, back down the divisions were a bit bigger. So there were probably like 300 tanks and like about an equal number of Bradley's. You know, so you're like, you know, six or seven hundred combat vehicles. And then there's the field art, you know, self-propelled FAA. I mean, it's just amazing to try to wrap your mind around that.

And, you know, there were so many things going. on at the same time. I mean, we got there, and I was really, this command post I told you about, I scrounged half of it. You know, we only had like one of the vehicles who were supposed to have the other ones. So I just drive down to the port, and there's like an extra M577, a track vehicle. Like, who's kind of, oh, it's extra. I'm like, I'll take it, you know?

And then I had to find radios for it. So I'm talking to these Marines, and I asked them if they had to have. have any radios. They got, we just came off of, uh, a Marine Prepo ship, a Mips Rons ship,

you know, we just downloaded it. And they said, uh, we've got tons of extra radios. And these are serial number, you know, control items.

They said, um, they said, what do you got to trade for it? I'm like, well, what do you want? They said,

I said, we notice you guys are drinking some Pepsi. You guys, you guys got Pepsi? I'm like, yeah, like a case of Pepsi, we'll give you two radios. It's like,

really? Like, yeah, sure. I don't care. So, I mean, it's not our radio. I'll give it to you. So it was a lot of crazy stuff going on. It was a little bit of, you know, disorganized. So, I mean, it all came out okay at the end, obviously,

because we didn't really appreciate how bad the Iraqi army really was because the projections were we're going to suffer 10,000 KIAs. I remember that. Yeah, yeah. So we didn't know when we crossed. the berm what we're getting into but it pretty quickly revealed itself that we were talking about two different leagues and we were really punching down yeah so you get done with that and you must feel like you kind of you won the lottery I would imagine you felt like you won the lottery you're in that

position yeah seeing all that directing all that leading all that you must have felt like you yeah you won the lottery. Yeah. So it was a little jarring. So, yeah, it hadn't been in combat before. I remember a news reporter asking me what combat was going to be like during a live fire exercise we were doing. I said, well, probably at least twice as loud as this because there'll be somebody

shooting back, right? You know, so it won't be just us shooting. But I didn't know. And, you know, we had like you do in combat, you have your situations, your scrapes or whatever. But then, and, you know, I had never seen anybody kill an action before, you know, so that was, that was, you know, one of those life-changing events, you know. I'm forcing no friendly KIAs, but so plenty of enemy KIA. So we get, I come back and I was doing an R&D job, you know, and I went straight back to my research and development job. I was

working on anti-satellite systems and what we now have for our ground-based interceptors. You know, I was doing requirements, you know, doing aerospace engineering stuff for the Army.

And I get back and my old boss, like, okay, the funds over, come back to work, you know, because I kind of had stepped out of that job to go with the regiment and then I had to go back to it. And so I go there and they said, well, we need to go to Seal Beach, California to meet with Rockwell. You know, they're the prime contractor on this anti-satellite kill vehicle that we're working on.

So I get on a plane and I fly to Seal Beach, California. You know, that's a nice place. And, you know, we have our meetings. and, you know, a couple of the folks I was meeting with, we go to this little bar there, and it's, you know, people aren't even all back from Desert Storm, and I'm in a bar in Seal Beach. And to me, it was just like an out-of-body experience.

I was like, I can't believe. I flew out of a burning airfield on a C-130 that was in a huge hurry to get off of that running, runway so fast that the loadmaster said just throw your gear on the floor and lay on top of it and they took off they couldn't get off of that runway fast enough because I was one of the first ones to redeploy because I was kind of borrowed military manpower and like a week later I'm sitting in a bar in Seal Beach you know and people are you know you know grooving to the music and drinking you know fancy cocktails and I said I don't know. I feel like I'm on a different planet. You know, it was one of my first readjustment, redeployment, you know, kind of challenges.

So you get done with that job, and then you go back to, you go back, you end up in Battalion Command after that? Well, a few years after that. Yeah, a few years after that. So, yeah, I went to Fort Eleven work. you know, for school, for prison. And I did the two-year course there.

I did the extra year for the School of Advanced Military Studies, the so-called Jedi Knights, you know, that helped plan Desert Storm. I became one of those guys. And then after that, I went back to Germany, and I was in a cavalry squadron there and Schweinfurt. And it was all, it was interesting because it was post-Cold War now. And I'd been in Germany during the Cold War

And, you know, I'd been to Berlin through checkpoint Charlie, you know, and all that kind of stuff And then to come back after the wall was down to see how, you know, Germany was reunifying was pretty interesting. And so, so yeah, I was, you know, we went to the Balkans, you know, when I was an S3XO, went to Bosnia. We were the second unit across the float bridge on the Sava River there and separated the Serbs from the Bosnians and created a zone of separation. It was our cavalry squadron that found all the bodies from Srebrenica when the snow melted. You know, so, yeah, so we did the Balkans and then I – Is that where you started – or I should say, at what point did you? you kind of start, you seem to have a very diplomatic mind, meaning it seems like even in that

situation, you're aware of this whole diplomacy that's happening along and in conjunction with, hopefully in conjunction with what's happening on the military side. It seems like Bosnia would be a good place where you are now, you know, there's ambassadors, there's state department. Is this where you're sort of starting to see that? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So, I mean, it might have started in Desert Storm or Desert Shield, you know, because they, I had to be. be a liaison for a couple of months to a Saudi brigade. So I got to learn a little bit about coalition stuff. And then in Bosnia, we had to negotiate with some of the locals to, you know,

establish our base camps and things like that. So, you know, it was interesting to see the pecking order of who got what interpreters. I learned a little bit about interpreters there because by the time we get down to a major, you know, My interpreter was kind of an agony-faced 16-year-old boy, you know, who, you know, and you talk to, you know, who's the four-star or the two-stars interpreter, and it's probably, you know, some clamorous, you know, post-doctoral gal. Yeah, Harvard-educated. Yeah, beautiful or really, you know, well-put-together kind of guy. So I was talking to some local mayor and trying to negotiate a, you know, kind of a Ford area rearming point for our helicopters. We had little Kyle Warriors in our cavalry squadron.

And this kid kept, you know, I would ask the guy, you know, how much does land? Who owns it? You know, who's got the deeds or the titles and all this stuff? And the guy's kind of answering me in a business like manner. Of course, I don't understand a word of it, you know. And this kid would turn and he says, and, you know, would tell me what he was saying in an extremely offensive and profane way, you know. And I was like, you know, the way you're responding to me, I mean, it sounds like he just hates my guts.

But I'm looking at him. and he looks friendly enough, you know, so either he's like a psychopath, you know, or you're not giving me a very accurate translation. So I said, I said, is he really calling me these things and saying these things? And he's like, well, you know, that's basically what he's saying, you know, I'm not giving you the word for word translation. I was like, I said, well, how did you learn to speak English, you know? because he's very slangy, informal, you know, and profane.

He says, I watched a lot of American movies. I'm like, what kind of movies? And it was all like Jean-Claude Van Dam, you know, all these, like, action movies. I was like Chuck Norris and all. So I was like, okay, I got it. You know, so I said, you know, people don't, Americans don't all talk like that to each other all the time. You know, it's not, you know, it's not all Clint Eastwood, you know. No, it's just, you know, make my day punk or anything, you know, so.

But, you know, that's, so, so I learned a little bit about the importance of watching body language and not just listening to what the interpreter is saying. Because interpreters can have agendas or just not be very good, you know, so, yeah. So you're, what's your next step after you get done with that? Oh, well, so after, after that, I'm going back, I'm on the division staff, and I'm working for our. great chain of command, great guys, first infantry division. And it's funny, I said, it's just was telling this story to somebody not too long ago. So my boss says to me, and my boss, at the time he's a lieutenant currently retired as a three-star as well, and he says, so Sean, what do you want to do next?

I said, well, you know, I guess everybody's supposed to go to a joint job if you want to get promoted, right? you know, Goldwater Nichols, blah, blah, blah. He goes, yeah, yeah, sure, okay. He says, hey, look, the guy in charge of all armor assignments, you know, for armor officer assignments is a buddy of mine. So I'll ask him. I'll write him a note. What do you want to do?

I said, you know, here's some different joint jobs. These seem like they'd be fun. So he sends an email to this guy. This guy later ends up being my division commander, but that's another story. So he sends his note to this guy. Hey, you know, hey, this is Keith. Well, never mind. So he says, my deputy's a guy named Sean McFarland.

Good guy. He wants to go joint, you know. And these are the kinds of things he wants. So he gets an email response back to him. Now, because I was his deputy, he had set things up so that everything auto-forwarded to me. So I see this email come back from the Armourer's Office. Oh, it's him. I'll just open it up and see what it says.

Hi, Keith. I gave his name away. This is Mark. And, yeah, yeah, how the wife and kids, blah, blah, blah, blah. Great to hear from you. He says, yeah, Sean McFarland. Yeah, we're not going to waste a joint position on this guy. He's got no potential to be a battalion commander.

You know, he's kind of, he'll probably make Lieutenant Colonel, but that's it, you know. So we're going to send them to an elephant's graveyard kind of a job, you know, next. Where did that come from? I mean, as you... So I'd been, I had a good file, you know, but, I mean, it's really hard to get to be a battalion commander, you know. So it was kind of a thread the needle kind of a thing. And there were like lean years and years of plenty in terms of battalion commands.

and I was tracking towards one of the lean years. So, you know, and I did. I ended up on the alternate list, you know, number one on the alternate list, but didn't get activated. So they shipped me off to Third Army at Fort McPherson, Georgia then in Atlanta. And, you know, in the Valley of the Blind, a one-eyed man is king. So I was a Sam's graduate. it. This was during the drawdown, you know, after the post-desert storm, Cold War drawdown.

We're talking like 98, 98, 97, 98. Yeah, right in there, yeah. So, exactly. And so, like, there were, like, 10 of us that were eligible for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, 10 majors. I was the only one who got promoted to the Lieutenant Colonel. It was so embarrassing. I didn't have a promotion party because I felt like it would be really awkward, you know.

So I, it was not. Nothing. You know, it's like, no, no, no, don't even mention it. You know, hopefully nobody notices a different color oak leaf I'm wearing. No victory laps with the other guys. Absolutely not. No, I didn't want to dunk on him. So the third Army commander at the time was a guy named Tommy Ray Franks. And he needed an initiative's group chief or an action, you know, chief of an actions group, which is kind of a prestige job, you know, because now you're getting written, paper written by a general officer.

And it was literally nobody who wasn't with that level of experience who was not being told to get out of the army. You know, I was like the only guy standing, you know. So I ended up as his sick chief. And then from there I went on to be aide-de-camp for General Shinseki. And because I guess they figured that, you know, he's not so bad after all. And Shinseki was looking for a cavalry guy with Germany experience because he was the U.S. Army Europe. So I got to work with one of the great Army four stars. And then he went back to be Vice Chief of Staff in the Army,

and actually to be Chief of Staff in the Army. But the day he found out about that was the day my household goods arrived in Germany. And my wife's like, you know, you're not going to D.C. with him, are I'm like, I don't know. I don't think so. So I went in and asked him. He said, oh, you don't have to. You can stay if you want, you know. I said, well, if you don't mind me asking, who's your replacement going to be?

He says, General Montgomery Miggs. And I was like, oh, he was my division commander when I was, you know, being told that I had no future, you know. So maybe he'll keep me on as aide to camp. And he did. So he goes, oh, yeah, I remember Sean. He's a good guy, you know. So I got to stay with General Montgomery Miggs. And a little interesting Vietnam war story is as aid to camp, I got their medical files.

And I picked one up from the hospital and taking the other one over to Hydeburg Army Hospital, which is where Patton died, you know. And I mentioned to Gerald Nixon, I'm like, hey, sir, you know, it's your blood type A positive. That's what General Sonseki's was. He said, I know that. I was like, well, how do you know General Sonseki's blood type? He said, who do you think gave him blood when he got his foot blown off in Vietnam? Isn't that crazy?

That's wild. And because that job, that's kind of put you back on track with getting Battalion Command? Yeah, yeah, that got me back to Battalion Command. And that was another one of those experiences. It was probably the best experience because we weren't at war. Well, 9-11 happened while I was in Battalion Command, but up until 9-11. It was a great group of folks in beautiful Vilsack, Germany.

I had a terrific team and really, oh, my God, the best non-commission officers, you know, my E-7s were just firing on all cylinders and made my job so easy. So we had highest re-enlistment rate, highest operational ready rate, you know, all this stuff. And, you know, I mean, I don't know how to fix a tank. I'm like oddball and Kelly's heroes, you know, I just ride them, you know. I don't know what makes it work, you know.

So, but my NCOs, how to fix them and they just kept them running and and shooting uh extremely well and the soldiers were happy with good nCO leadership so they were re-enlisting at record rates and um and i was just along for the ride it was uh it was a fantastic experience and uh and i you know i you know i like to think i did a few things to make the battalion better but it was just a really good battalion you know and people say oh you don't want to take over a good You know, you want to take over a really bad unit. So, you know, by comparison, right?

You know, it's like, ah, you know, when I got here, everything was terrible, you know. Inflation was 9%, you know, and now it's 3% of it. And, but no, you know, I took over a unit that was really good. And what that allowed me to do is take it to the next level, you know. Instead of trying to do blocking and tackling, you know, we could. could do West Coast offense, right? You know, that was pretty fun, right? So it's like, no, let's do the air raid, you know, and people say, yeah, okay, let's try that. Yeah, and it worked really well. And the four didn't know what was hitting them. So that was a really wonderful experience. And we lived

in a nice house. Our kids were going to good schools there, Army Department of Defense schools there in in Vilsac, Germany, and my fellow battalion commanders are still some of my best friends, you know, that I had. It was not like a team of rivals. We were really, you know,

everybody helped each other out. It was a really good group. So when September 11th happens, how far into a battalion command or how much battalion command did you have left? I was pretty well into it. I was probably halfway through. and you know 9-11 happens to be my wife's birthday

and we were going to go out that night you know and I was out in the field with one of my companies was doing platoon level training exercises and I was out there to watch them and I guess we had like cell phones back then you know they weren't like we have now but yeah so I get a call and it might have been even over my Humvee, you know, on my radio. I don't know if it's somebody who's trying, but it was my wife, you know,

and she says, a plane just flew into one, into the World Trade Center. I was like, so, you know, I mean, that's too bad for the airplane, but, you know, you're not going to knock over the World Trade Center. It's like that B-17 flew into the Empire State Building in the 30s and, you know, state building's still there. But, no, it's pretty serious. So, you know, and oh, my God, another one just hit the other tower, you know. So I was like, well, let me get back.

And to headquarters to see what's going on, because nobody had, you know, iPhones or anything like that. Or in Grafenvere, Germany. So I get to a TV and like, oh, my God, you know, I couldn't believe it when the tower's collapsed. So I knew something had fundamentally changed. And, of course, we immediately have to go into a lockdown. and the my battalion just happened to be the unit that had the responsibility that month for securing the gates and you know the call the plan called for putting tanks at the front gates so I rolled tanks to the front gate you know which was pretty excessive but that was the

plan you know and we eventually you know dialed it down a little bit and then it got into this whole thing you know you were in Germany right you know so the gate guards do the you know the you know the guys checking all the vehicles coming on to the post. They're just soldiers, right? And, you know, they're armed, but, you know, are the magazines and the weapons, are they in the ammo pouches, you know, are they locked up in an ammo can, you know, with the sergeant of the guard under Series 200 lock? Right.

And I was like, look, if you're going to put soldiers with weapons at the gate, they've got to have the ammo in the weapon. Otherwise, leave the weapons in the arms room. well you know we don't want to do that so I said look I'm not going to put soldiers at the gate with you know unloaded weapons there's that common sense they got let's talk about earlier and I was told yes you will because so I said all right well then I'm going to be at the gate you know because if anybody's going to you know get in trouble it's going to be me so so I was at the gate and the guy was of course my next esh chain of command up his brigade command, you know, and he comes through the gate, you know.

And we were picking cars at random to inspect. We weren't doing 100%. But he was the guy I was arguing with. I was like, inspect this car, you know, and pull the particular, he was so mad. So, man. I thought you were done getting reprimands at this point. He didn't give me a letter of reprimand. Probably should have, though.

Did you think, so when 9-11 happened, because I'm a young, stupid person, I thought, oh, you know, there's going to be, like this is going to be over it very quickly, you know, this is going to be, we're going to do some attacks, we'll do some strikes and it'll be over. There's not one part of my mind that fought two decades of war was coming my way. Where was your head at? Yeah, I'm with you. Same? Yeah, I never, never expected. First of all, I mean, you and I served together in Iraq. At the time, I believed people that I trusted, you know, like Colin Powell and others, that there was a reason for us to go in Iraq. Now I don't, you know, I'm not there anymore.

To me, you know, Saddam was a bad dude and maybe he was going to develop a nuclear weapon or whatever. And I don't feel bad about, you know, the regime change that we affected there or anything like that. And we made some really stupid mistakes in the aftermath. math of that and I was there when we made some of those like disbanding the Iraqi army and all that kind of stuff but um the the moral imperative for that war seems to me a little bit harder to you know reconcile um but I think I mean there's just war and there's just in war I'm not saying that Iraq was an unjust war uh because you could You could make the case, but it's not the case that was made for us to go in there.

I mean, there was a justification, but it wasn't yellow cake, uranium, you know, or uranium yellow cake. You know, I mean, we probably did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Let me put it that way. Yeah. But, and then when we were in there, I think we fought the war justly, but poorly at first, you know. Yeah. The couple things that I think about that is, is when you're weighing the decision to go to war and you're like, well, you know, they might have yellow cake you're in them.

They might be building a WMD. You know what? Let's go stop that. And look what we did last time. It took us 72 hours. We'll go in there. We'll mop it up. It'll be no problem.

And then you think, yeah, okay, that's what we'll do. No one was sitting there thinking, oh, we're going to be over in Iraq. We're going to lose thousands of Americans. we're going to really disrupt the whole area of operations. No one put that into the calculus. That wasn't one of the variables that anybody figured on. Well, you know, as Clauswood said, war is the province of chance, right? You can't with any level of assurance know what's going to happen once a war starts.

But, you know, the conventional phase of the war was fought brilliantly, the third infantry division, and, you know, the fight in Baghdad and First Meff and First Mardiv and all that. Everybody who did that, hats off. Well done. And then we botched the transition to post-conflict operations, stability and support operations. We just botched it. And then I was there while that happened. I was in Baghdad.

I saw it happening, you know. What was your job at that point? I was chief of future operations for fifth core and then combined joint task force seven, which was evolved into multinational core or multinational force Iraq. What year was that that you were there? It was 03 to 04. Okay. Yeah.

I was, I was there in 03 and 04. Yeah. So I mean, so you saw it too, you know, it's like, you know, things are not going in the right direction here. And but, you know, this was when the IED started to show up. and you go to war with the army you have, not the one that you want. And, you know, we had the Haji armor on our Humvees. And, you know, but I was still driving around in an unarmored Humvee, you know, and an SUV in downtown Baghdad and Route Irish.

Out Irish. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, we were so naive in some ways back then. But then we had the, you know, the UN mission, you know, was destroyed by a car bomb and killed this, you know, a special representative from the UN. You know, just things started going south while I was there.

And, but I didn't, even then, I couldn't have imagined a 20-year, you know, campaign. I was, so I was there,

got there in the fall of 2003. And we showed up there. We're doing direct action missions. We're rolling up. former regime elements, thugs, criminals that are running around. They're shooting mortars. We're gathering intel, finding out where those mortars are coming from. We go get them.

We high five. You know, we totally dominate. You know, we're going into these targets. They don't even know what's happening. We're just capturing all these, all these, I don't want to call them insurgents because they certainly weren't insurgents yet. We're capturing these criminals and these thugs that we're running around. Dead Enders is what we called them at first, right?

Yeah. But former regime elements was really what we've considered them. One of the last missions that we did. And so I'm wrapping up deployment. It's now the spring of 2004. And the whole time that we were there, we were tracking to target Mutttaud al-Sauder. So I was on the other side of the radio when you were doing that. Yeah.

So we're tracking to get him and we never get approval. but what we did get approval to do, and again, when I say approval, we weren't even, very few missions that I did as a seal were top-down directed. Like, hey, here's a mission, you go do it. It was almost all, here's what's happening,

we gather the intel, we put it together, we run it up the chain of command. Very few operations were, this is the mission, you go do it. And I'm talking, when I say that, I mean like probably less than five missions of my whole career were, here's a mission, you go do it.

So one of these was, They didn't really quite feel comfortable. I guess I'm talking about you. Yeah. But didn't really feel quite comfortable getting Mukta al-Sauder. But let's see what happens if we grab one of his lieutenants. So, yeah, we had a whole op plan called, I think it was called Lee's lie's lieutenants. You know, and he was objectively Lee, Maktana al-Sauder.

Okay. And then, you know, all of his lieutenants had all like Confederate. Confederate names? Yeah, long-street. What did you call Yacubi? Yeah, Yacubi was one of them. I can't remember what, you know. So we would, but yeah, but yeah, that was, yeah, let's like kick the hornet nest and see what comes out.

So, so there I was winding up deployment. And I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I got to do this deployment. We got to do all kinds of operations. And I think when we go home, like there might be one more sealed deployment here that gets to do anything. And then after that, we won't be here anymore. It'll be over because that's what the trajectory of, of combat looked like. So we go get Mutata or we go get Yucchi, down into Jof, and that, like you said, I mean, that was,

it was a immediate, drastic, horrible change. Yeah, it was like kicking over an an hill. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, yeah, so I was at Chief of Future Ops, I was the guy who was saying, you know, we probably need a targeting cycle here. We probably need to figure out what we're going to be doing because we're starting to have an insurgency,

we're going to have to do something about it. So we started putting together a fairly primitive, simple kind of a targeting process, but we began the targeting process. And one of the first sets of targets was Sotter and his crew. So were you gone when we went into Sotter's house and all that stuff? I'd have to know what it had to have been after. Because we did that op, we got Yacubi. We came back the whole world.

I mean, like, there was fights at the front gates. There was, and I was down at Baghdad International Airport. We had a little adjacent base there. There's, it was mayhem. I remember standing in my towers, and I'm looking at, I think it might have been Route Mobile. Round Mobile goes to Fallujah, right? Well, we could see it.

Mobile in Michigan. From our tower, we could see it. And the whole thing is just smoking vehicles. And it's just, and I said to my. geez, this is, this is not good. Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, so, yeah, that was the beginning of our problems in the South there. We had, so this was fall of 2003.

Yeah, yeah. So I remember the Yucubei Raid. The Yucubi Raid was spring of 2004. Okay, I left in April of 2004. We must have left at the same time, right? Either you left right after I did it, right? Either you left right after I did it or right before I did it. So we, so because we went into, we actually were going to grab solder.

And we had it all. We had the cordon and everything set. And then we got a call from D.C. that said, don't do it. I mean, we were like literally in his house when we got the no-go call, you know. I mean, it was right up to the line. So, yeah, so we kind of vacillated on how we went. wanted to do things there in the south. And, you know, because we, you know, the Shia were a different kettle of fish.

Because they were the, the marsh Arabs, you know, that, you know, we wanted to ride, we wanted them to rise up against Saddam after Desert Storm. And then we let, you know, the Republican Guard escape. And then they could keep their helicopters. And then they started using those to attack the Marsh Arabs who we were surrounded by. And, you know, at index at the end of the war, and they were brutally suppressed. And then the Republican Guard turned and went north and did the same to the Kurds. And that's, you know, the Shia in the South did not forget that when we were back.

You know, it's like, oh, you were the guys that told us to rise up against Saddam and then pulled the rug out from the others. So you go home in 2004. When do you take over the 1-1-A-D? Yeah, so while I was there in Iraq with you, the Army made a decision. We're not going to do any changes of command in theater. And I was due to take over a brigade of the first infantry division, actually, and would have been during its deployment in Baghdad. And they said, no, we're not going to do that.

So instead, you know, I was already in the fifth corps staff. So we went back to Germany and I became the Corps G3, the chief of operations. And then they found another brigade for me. They looked around and they said, oh, first brigade, first armor division is opening up. You're an armor officer. You know, it seems like a good fit. So I went up there and took over that brigade instead because my brigade, when it came back, was going to convert to a striker brigade, infantry unit.

You know, they said, well, you know, it was just sort of a random chance event that I ended up commanding the ready first. And how long, once you take over, do you have a workup cycle? Are you, do you turning cycle? How long does that last? I took over in May, I think, May or June of 2005. And we began shipping out in December. So about five, six months.

And that you're just doing gunnery. You're getting everything squared away, getting know your people. Yeah, gunnery. we did you know went to the training center in Germany

at Holenfell's Germany was kind of like a miniature version of like Fort Irwin Yeah you know and did our

mission rehearsal exercise there pre-deployment site surveys all that kind of stuff forming storm and the team everybody was kind of

in new positions but that brigade had spent 15 months in combat around Najaf and Baghdad on its previous deployment. And it only, when we deployed it only had been home for a little over a year. So it had only just gotten back itself. And then it turned around and went back.

So a very high percentage of combat veterans in that brigade combat team when we went back to Iraq. And when you're going back to Iraq, you're going to Talafar. And you find that out. That's where you do your ad-von and whatnot. Yeah. So, yeah, we sent one battalion to heat to replace a mew that was coming out. And the rest of the brigade went up to Talafar, Sinjar, you know,

Western Ninhua province to replace H.R. McMaster and the third ACR. And you get this view of what third ACR and H.R. McMaster did in Talafore. you kind of show up and get to look around and see how effective it was. Yeah, got to meet Mayor Najim and Sheikh some of our Sheikh Abdullah, the Sharmari tribe there. Yeah, so HR had kind of developed the combat outpost technique for, and clear hold and build was really that term, was coined by Condoleezer Rice, I think, not HR.

I mean, it's like, what's your strategy? He said, clear, hold, and build. And everybody was like, sounds good. So, yeah, we looked at what HR was doing, and it wasn't, he hadn't finished clearing Talfar. There were still some pockets of resistance in there, some bad no-go areas. So we had the opportunity to, you know,

set up some of our own combat outposts and borrowing from the, the TTPs, the techniques and procedures that HR and his team had developed, we, you know, we got to learn. And the nice thing about Tala Farr was it wasn't a really big city. It was a fairly small city, you know, and we had the opportunity to kind of learn what right looks like, you know, because HR had started some projects for reconstruction. and we got to build up on those.

And so we had our mission rehearsal exercise in Germany, which, you know, a bunch of German civilians pretending to be Arabs, you know, to negotiate with you. You know, you had to have a willing suspension of disbelief to make it work. And you're sitting in the, you know, freezing mud, you know, in Germany. It's like, this is a desert, okay? Keep telling yourself that. and you'll believe it.

But we, you know, in some ways, Talfar was like a live training event. You know, I mean, people were really shooting in us. We took some casualties. We inflicted some casualties. And we were conducting real-life operations. In a city that was at that point relatively, you know, moderate to low threat.

You know, but, you know, we honed a lot of our processes there. And we thought that's where we were going to stay. At what point did you get word first rumor that you might be going to Ramadi? Almost as soon as we got there. Because there was a brigade in Ramadi, you know, the second of the 28th Infry Division out of Pennsylvania, guard and they were due to rotate out. And, you know, the guys on the core staff, I knew all the core staff folks because

I was a former Corps G3, you know, and I know everybody, you know, in Baghdad staffs, or a lot of them anyway. And they kept telling me, well, we don't really know who's going to replace this brigade in Ramadi. Could be you guys. You're one of the options. So I told my staff, well, okay, let's think about it. this you know if we're one of the options what do we need to do to make sure that we

stabilize our ao sufficiently if they have to pull us out and send us someplace else you know what how do we want to configure ourselves for follow-on operations so we had to keep so I kept Ramadi as a potential task in mind as I kind of distributed my forces and conducted operations. And one of the things I wanted to do was accelerate the transfer of battle space to the Iraqi army. I think it was the third Iraqi army division up there, Kurdish mostly. But let's get that going and let's transition the western parts along the Syrian border and work our way back into Talafar

so that I had two of my battalion task forces with me. One of them was already down there. And I said, it'd be good if we were the brigade that went down as what I told the Corps staff because one of my battalions is already next door in heat, you know, so it kind of gets the band back together again. And they didn't disagree, obviously, in the end. So, but I already kind of had some pretty good situational awareness

because of my battalion commander in heat. And so we began thinking about, all right, how would we transition to battle space so that all I have left is like one battalion task force that I have to leave behind here in Talafar and then maybe even turn that over to, you know, my friend, the striker brigade commander over in Mosul, Mike Shields, the 172nd out of Alaska. I mean, he could take this over. And so that, but I mean, one of the options was we, you know, know, they would send the striker brigade to Ravadi, and we would take over Mosul.

You know, there's all these different courses of action, and we were trying to plan for all of them at once. But finally, I guess in May, and I forget why, you know, or maybe I never did know why, you know, but they finally made the decision that was going to be our brigade that's going to move. and that's general casey i remember was up uh in mosul and uh and i had to go link up with him or and uh and that's when he told me we were scheduled to go to bagdad we were going to go work with the iCTF in bagdad i went on a pre-deployment uh assessment went over there did some ops with the with the iCTF came back kind of debriefed everyone hey guys you know this is what we're doing and then everyone went on pre-deployment leave and during pre-deployment leave my my boss my commanding officers you know said hey I need to talk to you went in and he said they're re they're putting us all in the west all of seal team three is going to be in the west so you're not going to bagdad you're going to romadi and for I knew about remoddy I tracked remoddy and at some point I had talked about romadi with my guys and so it was almost a little bit of self-fulfilling prophecy that I had been tracking romadi and how bad it was I got some stuff

some some stuff to read here this one here is the situation on the ground this is major alfred b ben conable USMC oh yeah I know Ben 2005 2006 senior intelligence analyst and fusion officer for one and two MF at Camp Fallujah interviewed this interview is from 2009 and he says this quote at the end of April May I think if you looked at the color tone map of all the cities that were good bad and ugly Baghdad was yellow Ramadi was orange going towards red as in the deeper the color, the worse it gets. So Ramadi, according to intelligence experts, was the worst city in the country in that time frame. By the middle of 06, Ramadi essentially looked like

Stalingrad. We were dropping shells in the middle of the city. It was a disaster at that point. Here's the New York Times, June 2006. Ramadi, the capital of Alambar province, has bedeviled American forces for months, making itself the toughest city in the most violent of Iraqi regions. Whole city blocks here look like a scene from some post-apocalyptic world. Row after row of building shot up, boarded up, caved in, tumbled down. Many neighborhoods are out of the control of either American or Iraqi government forces. Insurgents hold the sway. AP report, Todd Pittman, May 2006.

Whole neighborhoods are lawless, too dangerous for police. Some roads are so bomb-laden U.S. troops won't use them. Guerrillas attack U.S. troops nearly every time they venture out and hit their bases with gunfire, rockets, or mortars when they don't. Though not powerful enough to overrun U.S. positions and surgeons here in the heart of the Sunni Muslim Triangle have fought undermanned U.S. and Iraqi forces to a virtual stalemate. It's out of control, says Army Sergeant First Class bit Rubell behind the sandbags of an observation post in the capital of Al-Lambar province. We don't have control of this. We just don't have enough boots on the ground. The sheer scale of violence in Ramadi is astounding.

One recent coalition tally of significant acts, roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire indicated that out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 of those occurred in Ramadi and its environs, according to a Marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media. And that, he said, was a quiet day when nothing from Ramadi even made the news.

We also have the glass factory bombing that happened in January of 2006. You had the murder of, you know, there was a little uprising, I think we'll talk about, there's a little uprising of the tribal sheikhs in late 2005, early 2006, and Al-Qaeda murdered them all. Yeah, they beat that one down pretty hard. So you get this task in the order, Romani. One of the concepts of operation that's interesting, you know, you and I were emailing a little bit back and forth.

how we're reviewing some of this stuff. And one of the original concepts of operations that I heard was that when 1-1-A-D came in and 228 is going to leave, but there's a time frame where we'll have all that combat power on the ground. We'll have double combat power. And that's going to be the time where we're going to conduct this big Fallujah-style clearance of the city. And I told my guys, you know, hey, we're going to be doing this, what they did in Fallujah.

We're going to be doing it. That's what it's looking like right now. that didn't make it very far. The information that I got was Maliki said, hey, we don't want to send in the Shia army against the Iraqi army. We don't want to send the Shia army into Ramadi, filled with a bunch of Sunnis. We're going to have a civil war possibly.

Which is what happened in Mosul in 2016, but that's another story. Yeah, and we'll talk about that one too. So another strategy was needed, a less kinetic strategy, spare the infrastructure, keep, because they'd done that in Flusia, destroyed everything, the populace was displaced. That's a whole problem. So the strategy was to be less kinetic, spare the infrastructure, keep the populace in place,

and secure the populace, protect the populace while eliminating the insurgents. That's kind of the rumor mill that I was hearing as you were showing up. Yeah, you got that right. So, yeah, John Groski. the brigade commander, the 2-28, good guy, you know, count him as a friend. But he said, hey, it's going to take three brigades to clear this city. And, you know, Ramadi was about four times bigger than Talafar,

and third ACR was bigger than the ready first brigade combat team. So his math was probably right. So, yeah, the idea was, well, we'll keep the two, 28 and bring in 1-1-A-D and we'll bring in an Iraqi army division, you know, which whatever that means. Exactly. So, you know, when we got down there, God bless them, you know, our National Guard brothers in arms, you know, they started to smell the barn, you know. And our Toa date, our transfer authority date kept slipping to the left, closer and closer.

So it became pretty obvious to me that, you know, these guys were not going to stick around to do a two-brigade-sized operation. We'd probably have some elements of them, you know. They were, you know, detachment kind of guys. But the whole brigade wasn't going to be able to do this. And then we were going to get an Iraqi Army division. Then it was a brigade out of the fourth division, I guess, up around like Samara or Tikrit or something. something like that. And they kind of mutinied when they were told they were going to Ramadi.

They're like, Ramadi, are you kidding me? We've heard about that place. So, you know, pretty soon, you know, really what we got was one tank company and a battalion of infantry where the battalion commander basically threatened his guys to come with him. And, but he only managed to get like a reinforced company's worth of jundis, you know, to come with them down there. So we had a battalion or a company of T-72 tanks, which, you know, always happy for that. And about 150 Iraqi Army soldiers who, when we said, okay, we want to put you guys out at one of our new combat outposts once we seize it, Falcon, he's like, all right, well, I can only keep a platoon at a time out there, you know, one-third out, two-thirds back, training, recovering, whatever.

And of the one-third, of course, you know, they're going to be. pulling cycles, you know, so basically I got like a squad's worth of combat power out of the Iraqi army. I said, you know what? Go home. I'll keep the tank company, though, and I attached them to one of my armor battalions. And, you know, and then we had like, what, about 140 Iraqi Sherta police on duty, mostly hold up on, you know, West Ramadi. And yeah, most of the city was in enemy hands. and the second of the 28th had done the first part of what HR did up in Talfour done most of the first part, which was isolate.

They had their entry control points and had kind of circled the city with their forces. You, there's a big list of who you showed up with and who remained there. I mean, first of the 506, 38 Marines, 17, 135, 16, 1,000, 1,6, 1,6, 1,000. The 16 comes and replaces the 38. That's the one six Marines. One nine comes and replaces the first of the 506. There's just a massive list of a group of people. You end up with there was because the first of the 506 had,

and there was elements of the first brigade, first Iraqi army division. There was. Elements of the first brigade, seventh Iraqi division. You had that tank company. You had the, and by the way, all those had these military transition teams, which were, you know. Steve Zaddy, Marine Colonel, you know.

Incredible. Incredible. So the military transition teams were soldiers and Marines that would basically embed themselves with these Iraqi military. And the same thing with police transition teams. And engineers. We had two extra engineer battalions there that were not. assigned to

or attached to the brigade per se the 54th which is out of Bamberg Germany and the 321 well first it was the 46th engineers out of Fort Polk Louisiana and then they replaced by a

yeah they came in later then it was a CB battalion and then the yeah we had CBs there too so we had a lot of engineers like basically a brigade of engineers because I had my own engineer battalion

and we needed every last one of them and still could have used more. Yeah. But we were really lucky. So we had Steve Neri, went on to become a two-star in Marine Corps with a 3-8, and then Bill Journey, who's now a three-star in the Marine Corps

with 1-6 Marines. We had 1-6 infantry, the U.S. infantry. So we had 1-6 Marines, 1-6 infantry, not confusing at all. We had 1-1-A-D and 1-1-1-1. Iraqi Army Division, you know?

So, yeah, you needed kind of a score sheet to keep track. And then we had first of the ninth infantry, the Manchus, come in after first of the 506, the band of brothers, commanded by Ron Clark, who's now a three-star. So, and Chuck Ferry with one-nine, you know, awesome guy, you know, a lot of experience in soft world. so a lot of connections through him to our, you know, task force kind of friends.

And, you know, we had the, you know, our, you know, tier one folks operating there, you know, you know, under Wyman Howard and the SEAL Team 6, and, you know, they had a whole group down there. Yep. And so General McChrystal had his team in there, and he called me in pretty early on. and, you know, we had a nice talk in like 2 o'clock in the morning,

3 o'clock in the morning, you know. But, yeah, so there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, lots of players. And then right up the road, you know, we had, you know, Larry Nicholson with the 5th Marines and Camp Volusia, General Zilmer, one of the best bosses that I've ever had, his deputy there Brigadier General Bob Neller

yeah so in out west Blake Crowe and the 7th Marines so it was it was a it was really good group of battle buddies that we had and then you have the civilian populace of you know usually I hear a number around 400,000 whether it was 300,000 or whether it was

Well the city yeah the AO I think had 5 to 600,000 A.O. Topeka. But the city itself was probably 350 to 400, but it was partially depopulated. It was probably about $250,000 when we were there. Then you have the Iraqi

government there. Which, by the way, is still like three times more than Fallujah had. You know, I mean, Fallujah was a neighborhood, was the size of a neighborhood in Ramadi. You have the government there. Like, you have the governor, Mahmoun who's

you know Sammy Mamoon was the governor of all of Anbar province but really he was only the governor of his government center in central Ramadi

we didn't have a mayor yeah we got one we got one eventually yeah and then there's and we'll get into this the tribal leadership right

you got all these different tribes and well 30 40 different tribes there but some of them are more prominent depends on a count right you know I mean I I never really

I had a firm fix. There were probably about a dozen, you know, prominent ones. Prominent tribes. And then there were, you know, sub-tribes. So the turnover, as this turnover is happening, you know, was there anything that you didn't expect in the turnover? With, just in general. You know, you're kind of looking at Ramadi from afar.

Well, did you have the, hey, can it really be that bad? I told my, my, I told my. you know my little crew there you know my uh what did we call them uh the guys my my my my SD your PSD I told him I said you guys are going to have to up your game because uh because I was impressed really by John Gronsky's PSD you know I mean they were on it you know there were no nonsense they were squared away these are guardsmen you know but you know the very combat experienced guardsmen they were 14 months of combat yeah they were they were as good as anybody in the regular army.

And I told my guys, I said, you guys need to be like those guys. Or, you know, a lot of us aren't coming out of this alive, you know. And I made some changes, you know. I mean, I kind of had to, you know, make some changes on my own PSD in order to make sure that I was going to. That PSD became a bit of a priority, huh? It did. It did. Yeah.

It wasn't a pickup crew. I mean, they became a regular, they were built around my MP platoon, you know. and he was one of my best platoon leaders. He's now a brigade commander in the 18th Airborne Corp. MP Brigade. So, you know, I was fortunate in that, too. Did you ever work with Seals before? No, I'd work with green berets, you know, up in Talafar.

And we did not have a great relationship. What caused that? Them. Their attitude. Too cool for school. you know and I said you know

we've got all these combat outposts in Talafar you know why is your safe house on the fob you know why aren't you out

living on these combat outposts where you can actually do things you know get to know the locals

and do all those special forces Green Paray things that you know you do no we don't

need to do that it's like really yeah no and they would just kind of roll in and roll out and do their thing and wouldn't tell me what they were doing no zero integration with me i had done some work with some of the the tier one guys up there in tallifarmer they're chasing guys around you know and they were much more inclusive in their planning you know but

the but the now people say well that was because it was uh first group and first group was pacific oriented and they had never done this stuff before and they were just kind of new to it i'm like they've been running around the philippines for a long time but They weren't used to working with conventional forces. So, okay, I'll give them that. And then, you know, we had some more green berets out in heat, you know, and my battalion commander out there, Tom Graves, with the first of the 36 infantry, Task Force 136,

he had trouble with them. I mean, they kept shooting at his tanks. I'm like, what looks like an Abrams tank other than an Abrams tank? Why do you guys keep shooting at these guys? One of these days, one of those tank crews is going to get annoyed and shoot back, and that will be a bad day for you, you know? So, but, you know. Were you nervous when you met me?

And I'm, you know. So I had never worked with Seals. And I didn't know what to expect. I knew this. I knew that Seals as a group, you know, as a whole, were younger, you know. You're not built the same as Special Forces guys. Special Force guys are all NCOs. And Green Brace, particularly, are all NCOs.

You know, the Delta guys, you know, they're, I knew a lot of them. but they're like former Ranger Regiment guys. And they're, I mean, they're good square way guys, and I'd work with them in Bosnia, quite a bit, Delta. So I knew Tier 1, you know. I didn't really know seals. But I knew that you tended to be younger, a little bit more aggressive, and that you had all these other skill sets that nobody else has,

you know, like all the underwater stuff. Yeah, I was going to say, that diving was really going to help you out. Yeah, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have gone knee-deep into the Euphrates or the Habania Canal, and, you know, if my life depended on it, you know, God knows what's under the surface there, you know. So, but yeah, but I, so when I saw that we were going to get seals, I said, well, there are some special, you know, forces, things that I would like them to help me do

with, you know, the kind of the irregular kind of stuff, you know, but, but that was going to evolve over time. But what I really valued in your skill set was your direct action capability and close target reconnaissance and those kind of skills. I said because if we're going to fight our way into a city, you know, I had a one of my battalion sergeants major was a former Delta operator, you know, Sergeant Major Colossos, and he'd been like Ranger Recon, and he was pretty well known as an operator, you know. And he had helped me a lot with marksmanship, with, you know, designated squad designated marksmen and all that kind of stuff. And I said, I need snipers and counter snipers, and he helped train some of my small kill teams and my brigade reconnaissance troop and things like that. And that was all good, but it wasn't going to be sufficient for an urban fight. So I knew I needed really good shooters.

I needed snipers. I needed folks that could really help me with, you know, these kind of direct action kind of things. Because, you know, conventional forces can do it, but special forces do it better. So I was glad that I had your guys. And then our first meeting just set the tone. because you said, hey, boss, or whatever he called me, I forget, you know.

Probably, sir. Probably, sir. That's right. It's the tier one guys that call me boss. They call everybody boss, right? But I guess, they always call me that. But, you know, he said, hey, sir, you know, what do you need? What do you want us to do?

You asked me. I didn't have to say, hey, would you mind doing something for me? You're like, sir, what do you need? I was like, this is going to be great. Well, you're also very lucky and I was very lucky. So a normal seal task unit like we had, you probably have two snipers in each platoon, giving you a total of four snipers.

But occasionally the sniper gets promoted and now he's the leading petty officer. And then another sniper might get promoted and be the chief pedd officer. So in task unit, Bruiser, we had 13 snipers. I mean, just completely lucky, but both platoon chiefs were snipers, both leading petty officers, snipers.

And then we just happen to have a bunch of guys that snuck into sniper school and we're snipers. And we happen to be in a shooting gallery. We happen to be in a shooting gallery for sure. And, you know, Seals, we, look, Seals had definitely done joint missions, you know, in Fallujah, clearly. There were SEAL snipers there in Najaf, Mazul, Baghdad, some other places. But as far as being that embedded and intimate with the convention. I hadn't really seen it before, but what I know is, you know, and as soon as we got there, you know, the first, when we, when we arrived in Ramadi, we're going to memorial services for guys.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, I'm sitting there as a seal. You know, we're supposed to be the guys that are going to go and make things happen. And I'm seeing these soldiers and Marines get killed. And I just thought to myself, what can we do to? help them how can we help them because they're in a terrible fight out there yeah and i don't want to keep going to their memorial services yeah yeah so immediately you know with colonel gronski was the same thing sir what can we do to help you guys out and you know one of the first things he said was well

we got we just lost marines up in firecracker yeah they had a big iD it was terrible three eight got hit hard you know they said well can you help us with that i said well when we put sniper team up there and sure enough killed ID emplacer very quickly and that was a great way to start building a relationship yeah so the great thing about the way i always look at special forces and i did the same thing in operation and air resolve is you know i want you to do the things that conventional forces can't do you know fill in the gaps um and uh and that's what i had you guys do it's like if I have a gap in my capabilities with my conventional forces, I'll turn to my special forces and say, can you feel this guy? I have a hard time getting there, you know, in and out, you know,

with my small kill teams or whatever. I have, you know, I'm trying to train, you know, these indigenous forces to do something, you know, can you enable those indigenous forces? I mean, that's kind of in your toolkit, you know, more than mine. And whenever I ask you to do something like that, you you've found a way to do it, you know. And I remember one time I was asking you to do some training for Iraqi police or something like that. And it was not obviously, you know, one of your favorite jobs in your job jar. And you said, but, you know, in Colin Green, I know him, he's a friend of mine.

He was in charge of all you guys at the time, you know. But I didn't know him at the time. And you said, well, actually, sir, this is good because my boss has been after us to do some more of this, you know. security, you know, security force assistance or whatever we call it, train and assist. So the fact that you're giving me a mission like that will kind of get them off my back a little bit. I said it in the nicest possible way, they're Admiral Green. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. But Colin's a great guy.

I appreciate his support. But, yeah, it was a different conversation with also a friend of mine, Ken Tovo at the time was Colonel retired Army 3 star now He is a friend But I had to talk to Ken I'm like I'm having a hard time Getting along with my Army Special Forces guys

And I thought I would have a better relationship with them Than I do with the Navy SEALs What's you know I was You know I went to West Point I was raised to hate the Navy You know why Why am I having a better time with my seals

Than I am with my soldiers here I'm now general But Colonel Tovo is a huge supporter as well. Yeah, and, you know, we'll start talking about. By the way, he says hello. I ran into him outside of Fort Liberty not too long ago. Okay. Well, it'd be great to have him on.

I said, I was going to be seeing you. And he said, oh, yeah, good. He was super supportive, especially, and I'm sure we'll get into this. But, you know, when you take aggressive actions, there's going to be, changes to the significant activities, enemy at the time. attacks, casualties, all those things are going to go up. And people like Colonel Tovo that understood what was going on, understood the fight that was happening.

And Admiral Green as well that understood what was happening and go, okay, yeah, we get it. And look, did they ask me, did they ask me hard questions? Yeah, absolutely. And they should. But did they nod their head at the end of the day and say, yeah, we get what you're doing. We understand what you're doing. And appreciate it. And that was huge for us because otherwise we'd get shut down.

Yeah. But no, so there were two really vital things that the SEALs did that I can't emphasize enough. One was whenever we set up a combat outpost, you guys would go in first and do CTR, close target reconnaissance, kind of clear it. And then you would move out and set up, you know, Overwatch positions with snipers, small kill teams. because within 24 hours we had our cop-in-a-box routine you know we go in at nightfall and at dusk and by sunrise we would have

basically a rudimentary combat outpost in place and then we would just continuously improve it from there and then you guys would be in a position to kind of catch the enemy as they tried to counterattack and that was that was huge. The other thing that you did that was really

incredibly helpful was when Sheikh Satar and the awakening happened you kind of flipped on a dime a little bit for me here at my request and Satar said well I can put like 4,000 guys in uniform like by you know day after tomorrow like where are these guys coming from you know but they were tribal militia guys you know and I called them emergency response battalions or ERU

or something like that. And yeah, they just like materialized. You know, there's like, there they are. And I had no way to put my arms around. I didn't have transition teams for that, you know. So I said, turn to you. And I said, hey, you know, what can you like, you know, get your arms around these guys and like give them, you know,

radios that they can call you and, you know, you know and help them set up some you know basic combat outposts and train them and help me screen you know all that kind of stuff give them some basic level of training that was so helpful you know I mean I don't know how we would have coped with the awakening if we didn't have task unit bruiser because I had no forces to spare for that yeah well I think that's one of those things where again my was to help you do your job and help the rest of, you know, the Army and the Marines do their jobs and whatever we could help that out. So we wanted to do.

As you're forming this plan, you know, you wrote an article with you and Major Neil Smith. I don't know where he is now, but he was the brigade. Actually, he wrote it and the military guy said, hey, sir, you really put your name on it too. It says in that article, developing the plan, we reckoned the task. force had to isolate the insurgents, deny sanctuary, and build Iraqi security forces, especially police forces to succeed. The staff developed a plan that centered on attacking al-Qaeda's safe havens and establishing a lasting presence there to directly challenge its dominance of the city, disrupting their operations, attriding their numbers, and gaining back

confidence of the people. We intended to take the city and its environs back one neighborhood at a time by establishing combat outposts and developing a police force in the secured neighborhoods. The plan called for simultaneously engaging local leaders in an attempt to find those. who had influence or Wasta and to get their support. We recognize this as a critical part of the plan because without their help, we would not be able to recruit enough people to take back the entire city.

You and I were talking before we hit record today of how much was going on and it seems to like separate in your mind over time, but cop iron. This was one of the first combat outpost that we put in. It was 18 June. It was over on the other. side of the Habanilla Canal. This is one of my memories where...

It was in Springfield. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A little place we called Springfield just south of the city. Yeah. So this is one of those moments in my life where I was looking around going. Is this for real?

It's once again, it's you and I and the battalion commander, Colonel Tedesco. We're in the back of a 577, one of those mobile command centers. And what happened? And there's like 50 armor pieces ready to go over that bridge. It was a railroad bridge. Railroad bridge and set up this combat outpost. Well, seals were going to go in first and get some of those buildings secured and then set up overwatched positions. And the bridge was fouled.

Yeah. There was a bunch of concrete. That's a Navy term. Okay. What's the Army term? What's the Army term? Covered with junk. Yeah.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the bridge was covered with junk, and we figure out that all of a sudden we're not going to, you're not going to be able to send tanks or Bradley's or support over that bridge for a few hours. And that means my guys are going to be over there without any support, direct support from armor, which we relied on heavily. So we're having this conversation.

I think it was your guys that said that the 120 millimeter smoothbore cannon was the best counter sniper weapon. That's 100% us that said that. You know, that's one of those, again, this for me is, like I was looking around going, is this really happening? We're sitting there in that back, that 577, and you ask me, hey, Jocko, if your guys go over now, we're not going to be able to get any tanks over from like two or three hours. What do you want to do? And I talked to Lafey as the platoon commander and said, hey, man, here's what's happening. If you go over, there's no support for this amount of time, maybe two, three hours. If you get contacted, then, look, we had AC130.

We were good. Yeah. But that's what we're doing. And sure enough, guys went over there and set up the Overwatch. And I don't know if you remember this, blew up a bunch of trees. Do you remember that? These guys were, so there's trees, date trees, that were obstructing their fields of fire. So they decide to blow them up, which we always have some charges in case we'd have to blow.

Well, date trees apparently are incredibly strong. So they're trying to blow up these trees. They're not falling down. I'm looking at Colonel Tedesco saying that was a controlled, that was a controlled detonation, that was a controlled detonation, that was a controlled detonation. That was a controlled detonation. Finally, I call up the guys like, hey, stop, work around the date trees. That's kind of the first combat outposts that we put in with you.

But again, for me, it was this pretty monumental moment to watch all this coordination and planning. and the pre-planning. I mean, all of us, and another thing I was thinking about. A bit of a synchronization exercise there, yeah. But, you know, before that, we had to seize the near side. We had to secure the near side of that bridge, and that was a fight. That corner of like Tamim, I think, was the name of the neighborhood there. Timi was that neighborhood.

There was a coordinated attack. There was a coordinated attack on it. ECP3 was called. Yes. And they took out. out the better part of an Iraqi army company there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. So what that was, so this was before we put in combat outpost iron, there was a coordinated attack. And again, it's important to talk about this because this is how good the enemy was. The enemy was good. They start with machine gun fire, get the heads down. And then as that machine gun fire is coming in, that allows them to come out from cover and fire RPGs and mortars.

And then while that's happening, now, you know, the Iraqi soldiers are all got their heads down, of course, because they don't want to get shot. Well, in comes a vehicle-borne IED, which are up-armored, you know, Mad Max up-armored vehicles that they drive right through the, right through the checkpoints into those compounds and explode themselves. And that happened. That happened a matter of days before we went down there because when we got down there, there was debris. everywhere. You could see the carnage of what had happened. So, yeah, when we're going down there, we're anticipating everything's going to be a fight. It was Indian country, for sure. Yeah, I mean, we didn't control anything inside of the ECPs, and we didn't really even control the ECPs very well at that point. Yeah, that one got over, I think it was two nine or three also got hit.

Yeah. And that's on the east side. No, 293 was the west side. No, that was, yeah, that's up by Hurricane Point, right? It was... Near the big traffic circle there. An oncoming MIT commander and an outgoing MIT leader were both killed. It was awful.

So that's sort of like you just called that. But they were good. Just to interrupt you, the Iraqi, the insurgents there were not pushovers. They were

pretty experienced fighters. In fact, somebody told me that Camp Ramadi had been like the Fort Sill of the Iraqi army where, you know, Fort Sills where the Army trains all their artillery soldiers. And so they were very accurate with indirect fire, too, with rockets and mortars and everything. I mean, and they were fast and they could adjust. So, yeah, they were no joke. And I'd read other intelligence reports that said that the enemy. me, you know, considered Ramadi sort of their Super Bowl, you know, that that's where

you kind of went. If you really wanted to make a name for yourself, you had to go to Ramadi, you could fight, you know, fight the Americans. That's, that was the, that was the show for them. I would brief seals that when we got home, that the enemy would do what we would do. They would, they had communications, they'd talk on radios, they would call for casualty evacuation, because we would watch them through ISR, pick up their casualties and bring them to Ramadi General Hospital, or they'd bring in reinforcements, they'd bring in supplies, like, they'd do cover and move. They would do what we would do.

And so you can't think that this enemy is going to be a bunch of knuckleheads. Like, they're going to do what we do, and they're going to do it well, and they're going to have more combat experience. Yes, right. Yeah. And they had accumulated a lot of that comics. A lot of them had come from the fight in Fallujah. You know, after we secured Fallujah, they moved into Ramadi.

So they knew how to conduct a conventional urban fight. Moving to... One other thing. And my brigade S2 kind of templated it that the enemy had really built concentric defensive rings or belts in the city. You know, IEDs covered by fighting positions and buildings and strong points and things like that. and it developed over time, but, you know, they had a plan for the defense of that city.

They thought that when our brigade came down there that we were going to attack, we heard, you know, reflections and signals intelligence that they were expecting a big attack that didn't really materialize. And the fact that our tanks were painted a different color than everybody else's, you know, they thought, well, this must be the elite, you know, because they're all painted green, because we came from Germany. And they said, well, you know, obviously the Americans would put their best forces to face the Soviet Union. So the armor units coming out of Europe must be their best armor units.

And, you know, I mean, that was true when I was a captain, but it wasn't true anymore. You know, we were just, you know, an average armor unit. I mean, great people in it, but we didn't get any pick of the litter. But there was a narrative that the out there that there was a big attack coming. And we, to an extent, allowed that narrative to persist when we realized we couldn't launch an attack, but we were in the middle of our transition with the second of the 28th. And of course, transitions are always high risk periods. So if the enemy was kind of in a defensive crouch while we were doing our,

transition. That would give us breathing space. So we allowed that narrative to go on for a little while. But in the end, we did have to launch offensive operations. We were going to take Ramadi back one neighborhood at a time. And I knew I didn't have enough forces to take it all back. And my thought was, I'll take as much of it back as I have combat power to do. And then the unit that replaces me will continue that. continue that process.

I never imagined us getting as far as we were going to get the awakening is what enabled that. But that was, so the enemies began developing these defensive belts inside the city. And we had a fight, we didn't recognize it immediately, but we were fighting our way through that first defensive belt at Cop Iron. Yeah. Yeah, I did also want to bring this up because I remember it happening. it was the 1-3-5, like, it's almost as soon as they got out into their A-O. Like, I think in the first 24 hours, they had a KIA. They had a PFC Brett Tribble and four wounded.

And then two or three days later, they lost three out there. Lieutenant Scott Love. Yep, Scott Love, David Cromby, they were killed. And two more wounded. And, you know, I remember going to see Colonel Dean after that happened. Yeah. And, like, telling him, we'll go kill these guys that did this. We'll get in there.

And him just being, I could see, like, on his face, he was thankful to hear that. Yeah. No, absolutely. So, Tony, 1-35 armor and 1-6 infantry were attached from my sister brigade, Second Brigade First Armour Division because I had to leave a battalion up in Tallah far initially second of the 237 armor and 136 infantry out in heat.

So I was down two of my three maneuver battalion. So I picked up 135 armor and one six infantry from second brigade. And I still have my own Philoitteauier battalion and engineer and support battalion. But my only organic battalion was Tony or Vijay Tedesco 137. And then I picked up Ron Clark in first 506 and Steve Neri 3-8 Marines. So it was a lot of battalions, but only one of the maneuver battalions was actually mine. That's crazy.

So I just wanted to throw that in there. So Tony came to me from my sister brigade. We were all First Armored Vision, but different. He was in Baumholder, Germany. We were in Friedberg, Germany, where Elvis Presby. Leslie served, coincidentally. And I said, you know, Tony, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to, you know, I'm going to make VJ 137 armor the main effort and to fight my way into the city of Ramadi.

And we're going to start in the south and work our way up into the center. And what that means to you is I'm going to take one of your companies away from you, you know, and you're going to be an economy of force. and you're going to be spread really thin in this area where Sheikhsatar was west of Vermont and the city of Tamim and all that and so he was he was spread thin and being spread thin

and lots of opportunities for IED teams to get in there and set up IEDs L.M.Barr University all that was all part of his A.O. So that's a hard thing you know, when you have to tell somebody, I'm going to disadvantage you so I can advantage somebody else. I can't be strong everywhere. I need to be strong here to get this operation going

to set up our first three combat outposts in the city, which was Hawk, Falcon, and Eagle, right? Hawk being a Remoddy General Hospital. Eagle was the stadium. First of the 506, 100, first Airborne, so they were Eagle. and Falcon with Vijay and 137 armor. So Tony took that in stride, you know,

but knew that he needed help. And I used my brigade reconnaissance troop to help him out as kind of a fire brigade, quick reaction force as best I could, the seals, whatever I could do to help Tony, I would do, but I couldn't give him more combat. I gave him that Iraqi art tank company, you know. I mean, whatever I could do to help Tony, you know, I wanted to do. So, but they paid a price for it.

They paid a very heavy price for that. And they were taking, I think, his attached infant company out of 1-6, Alpha-1-6, I think, was like, initially took the heaviest casualties for like three or four months, you know, as a result of that. he didn't complain about it you let me know but the rest of the story though is necessity is the mother of invention if Tony had not been the supporting effort if he hadn't been stretched super thin I don't know that he would have established a relationship with shake satire that he did which probably you know created the relationship

that we needed for the initiation of the awakening movement. Yeah, wow. You know, so, so yeah, I think that, like I said earlier, you know, I was kind of lucky in some ways, you know. I mean, I didn't make 1-3-5 armor the economy of force effort in order to create an awakening in order to generate enough combat power for me to clear the city of Ramadi, know, that was just a, you know, kind of a happy coincidence.

But, you know, if you make the right decisions for the right reasons, I think other good things will happen, you know, and I think that's kind of the way it played out. And you being, you know, having the mindset that, hey, how can we help? You know, that was another incredibly important enabler. You know, I didn't ask for a task unit out of the Navy SEALs that was going to, you know, be willing to do things that were not in their normal wheelhouse or look for ways, you know, because they were, you know, so taken by the fact that we were having memorial services two or three times a week in Ramadi for soldiers and Marines.

And eventually, you, you know, had some of your own, lost some of it. lost some of your own that way too. But that was, again, an example of somebody, you know, doing the right things for the right reasons and then good things happening as a result of that, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts of what everybody was doing. You get synergy. Cop Falcon. Now this is, again, in my mind, cop iron and cop falcon were, you know, seemed like they were

weeks and weeks apart, but this is now like a week later. And it's June 25th and June. June 26th. Well, we wanted to keep the enemy on his heels. Yeah. So we would try to conduct a major operation every three days or so. So the enemy never really kind of got his feedback on her. This is an even bigger operation.

And I remember talking, we sent guys in to do the recon. There was an armored reconnaissance that took place as well, which came up out of Springfield, out of cop-iron. Yeah. They got hit. Tank got hit in the street We had to bring out the record to bring it back And we set up an Overwatch on it for a while

But those We ended up, I remember We ended up bringing pictures of kind of the whole area Back to Colonel Tedesco And you could see he was like, oh, this is, you know, We went in the buildings that we were going to take That we're going to set up the combat outposts And of course my snipers get in there

And figure out, okay, we can go to this building We can support over there And I was talking about it before you got here with Echo, you know, we had, our snipers would look at a, at the operation, right? And, you know, snipers would look at it and go, okay, who's going to have, okay, you new guy sniper, you're going to be over here, you're going to see about a block and a half. You'll see this one intersection. Other new guy sniper, you're going to be over here. You're going to, you know, you're going to be actually almost facing back towards friendlies, you know, good luck. Oh,

meanwhile, the experienced sniper, he's going to be set up on. a long access road, he's going to see nine city intersections out to whatever, a thousand meters, which he can easily shoot. And that's where he's going to be sitting. He's not going to come off his gun for five or six hours. So that kind of thing going into Cop Falcon was where we were starting to figure out how to really capitalize on what we were doing. And actually, it was cool on that one, the Marine Corps, we came in on boats from the Marine

Corps. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, so, yeah, we had this, it was called the Haditha Dam unit. They had these three CERCs, I forget what CERC stands for, but they were like, what were they like? They were like gunboats out of Apocalypse Now, but on steroids, they had way more armor, and they had a little, or way more armament, but they also, they had impellers in the back so they could, like, run up on sandbars instead of propellers. and they had a little armored box in the front with a ramp. You could actually put like a squad or a fire team maybe,

a big fire team in this little band. And they could run up on this beach and drop it off. And we inserted you guys around Cop Hawk, you know, a small kill team to try to get after an indirect fire team, you know, mortar team. And, you know, so, and the Haviniah Canal was lined on both sides by these date bombs. And the soldiers called it

Little Vietnam, you know, because going up and down that area there, you know, in those... We called it, we called it Vietnam. Yeah. The little Riverine patrol unit there, but it was great for inserting and extracting.

Yeah. You know, that was a neat little addition there to our suite of capabilities that you typically wouldn't associate with an armor brigade, right? Yeah. And it's one that we were cautious about. We didn't want to overuse it because you're sitting in those boats, you really felt naked.

I mean, as you're going down there, you really, it was definitely, you're very exposed. You're very, very exposed. But we did it. I didn't like it for a different reason. I mean, I went on a couple of patrols with those guys, too. And they give you like this safety harness, you know, kind of snap link yourself in. I was like, if I fall off of. this thing. The Euphrates are the

canals maybe six feet deep, you know? And I'm wearing like 40 pounds of body armor, so I'm probably going to go in head first, and the only thing sticking up might be the soles of my boots. And I've got this harness

around my waist. It's like 10 feet long, you know? So it's not going to keep me from falling over, you know? It's just going to get you dragged. Yeah, exactly. What's the plan here? Have you guys really thought this through? Yeah. Not Coast Guard approved.

No. Going into Cop Falcon, you know, you mentioned the engineers and the engineers, I remember, I used to watch the engineers literally straddling

a 12 foot tall concrete T barrier. You know, some private up there trying to hook the crane. I'm watching this and thinking, man, we got to do whatever we can

to help these guys out. Yeah, there was no safe way to do that. And we did lose some engineers doing that or got some wounded. One of them was a CB, actually. We had some CBs building these, because I needed every engineer I could find. They were the coin in the realm. And the CBs were building these barracks or huts on Camp Hermody. And that's all they were there to do.

But I said to the CB commander, it's like, we need some of your guys to come out and help with the set up air conditioning units or what, you know, because that's a force multiplier. Because if you can cool off between patrols, you can do more patrols. It wasn't a luxury. And I'm like, uh, we don't go outside the wire. It's not what we do. We, we're a vertical construction unit here. And I was like, wait a minute. I saw the fighting CBI's with John Wayne.

I know you guys, you know, can go outside the wire and fight, you know, pushing Japanese tanks off of cliffs with your bulldozers. I saw that. It's got to be true. So they said, well, we're not qualified on our weapons. I said, I can fix that. We can make that happen. We can make that happen. I had a contingency.

But we sent them out. And it was, I think at Falcon, might have been fire. I forget when. but you had a kid doing one of those kind of things, you know, hooking up, you know, something to, you get lifted up onto the roof, you know, probably one of the crow's nests, you know, prefab fighting positions, and he was wounded in action, you know. You know, not very seriously wounded, but maybe like a through and through or something like that, you know, not to minimize it, but to say, see, you know, you guys can do this.

Well, when we're, when those things are happening and this massive footprint shows up in enemy territory, they're 100% going to attack at, at Cop Falcon first morning. And there's all this chaos going on. I walked inside the cop building to, you know, check. I think I was actually going to head up to the roof to make comms with my guys who had pushed out 400 meters down to a four-story building. And they, and you already mentioned that they, that the enemy was good with mortars. and it was like they nailed us. Sergeant Terry List, 26-year-old from Fox Lake, Illinois, from 137. Yeah.

Yeah, so that happened. Those were 122 mortars. Not 122 rockets that came in. And that was my Bradley. I had just pulled up in my Bradley when that was hit. And it's just, you know, so, yeah, Sergeant Lisk was standing right outside of my Bradley. Kind of like a little local security thing. And inside of the Bradley turret, you can't really wear all your body armor.

So I was just down to my little chicken vest, you know, the small vest. So I dropped down inside the turret, and I was putting on my body armor, really hard to do. And I got hung up on something, you know, a radio mount or something. And it just slowed me down. I had a hard time getting it on. And while I was, you know, hung up and, you know, trying to get out of the Bradley, that's when those two rockets hit right outside of Bradley. Sergeant Lisk was standing maybe five feet away from my Brad.

If I hadn't gotten stuck inside of my Brad, I would have been there with him. So lots of, you know, I mean, not to, you know, there it was war story or anything, but Sergeant Lisk, you know, got hit by a piece of shrapnel and, and, you know, didn't, you know, wasn't immediately killed in action. You know, the medics tried to help them out, but, you know, weren't able to save them, unfortunately. But that was day one on Cop Falcon,

and that's, you know, baptism by fire at Cop Falcon. You know, we knew we were in the right place, or I knew we were in the right place because how much the enemy didn't want us to be there and how hard they were fighting back against us. So that kind of just underlined for me, okay, you know, this is working. You know, the enemy hates this, so I like it, you know, and we're going to do more of this if we can. But you guys have done a great job clearing it out.

We're able to occupy it well, and then I know that that became, you know, one of your team houses there yeah yeah yeah i remember i was outside to come in um and yeah i remember seeing you come in when they when they brought in lisk on a on a litter yeah and you know then they're spinning up the the trying to get a casavac down there i don't know if you went up in your bradley or i don't know how they got him back up yeah i think it was all happening really fast i think he might have gone back in a one one three uh but um yeah we couldn't we couldn't We couldn't lift anybody out in Medevac, even in the Romani. Everything was groundivac because it was too dangerous to fly.

Yeah. But that was, I think we had a New York Times reporter with us who wrote about Terry Lisk and, you know, how he died. But he's a good soldier. And one of the things that I thought about is, again, I'm standing there and looking at you and it's like, guess what we have to do? We have to go back and do our mission. And that's what it is and that's what you do. That's what everyone did. And these attacks come. I got, you know, I found like from notes some Sigax,

these significant activities that happened. And like these are the kind of things that come in. 1-37 was attack with IDF resulting in one CFKA, 2-CF wounded in action. No radar acquisitions. The unit did not observe the point of origin. By the way, CF stands for coalition, force.

Yeah. 137 engaged, I forgot about this. R-C-IED remote-controlled vehicle while conducting operations at Cobb Falcon, the remote control vehicle traveling on sunset towards the perimeter at an unknown speed, engaged and exploded. Yeah. Sunset was the main road from Falcon up to the government center, checkpoint 293, the traffic circle there in West Romani.

and the enemy knew we liked that road. It was like our main supply route. And we had, you know, we lined the sides of the road with jersey barriers, concrete barriers. But there were still little gaps. And that's where the enemy started using these, we call them pizza box IEDs. They were kind of flat, square or rectangular. And the end of it would have like a little tail. on the end of it, like a kite tail

with pieces of pressure sensitive pieces of glass. And the idea was they would fling these things out in the dust intervals between vehicles driving down sunset because sunset quickly

turned from a paved road into under all the tanks and Bradley's and 1-1-3s into just a dirt road. And they would they would, you know, between each vehicle there'd be dust, you know, from the preceding vehicle. So they would wait for the second vehicle to go by or the third,

and they'd go in between, you know, pop up from behind these concrete barriers and fling these IEDs out there with these long tails of pressure plates. And if you drove over the pressure plate and the box was on the outside of the Humvee, you were fine. If you drove over the pressure plate and the box was under the Humvee, you were cooked. But they were doing that on that road all the time. and I've forgotten about the R-C-I-ED on sunset. But that was like shortly after we occupied

when they were throwing the kitchen sink at it. And yeah, that's what they're small arms attacks and mortar attacks and rocket attacks. And then, you know, you've got, we have the, my task unit out with Iraqi scouts. They're out in a building 400 meters away. and again they've got long access. They've got from their position that they get into,

which they plan for, they can see all these different long access roads, and it's very difficult for the enemy to maneuver, and then the report starts coming in, O.P. engaged to military-age males armed AK-47s. OPE engaged AIF, which is anti-Iraqi forces, conducting tactical reconnaissance of the OPE, reporting it to another anti-Iraq force.

BDA, anti-Iraq force wounded in action. OPE engaged two AIF carrying a mortar tube. Engaged two AIF armed with AK-47s moving tactically, approximately 280 meters east of the OPE. Engaged AIF and carrying an RPG, approximately 100 meters east of the OP. BDA, one AIF killed. Approximately one minute later, the OPE engaged the second AIF was attempting to recover the RPG. BDA, one AIF wounded in action. So that's...

They were racking them up and racking them. And that was really sort of like, you know, Cop Falcon became almost like a, you know, they were like moths to a flame, you know? Yeah. And that was a... You told me about this, that, you know, the teams were catching these guys a block or two earlier

than they thought they were going to make contact with us. So they were at shoulder arms. They're still positive ID. his enemy, you know, but they weren't expecting to be engaged at that point. And I guess that's how Chris Kyle got a few of his, a number of his kills. But that was a great TTP. And that's one of the ones we passed along to General Petraeus when he came in. Because he said, well, how are you doing this?

And we showed him. And he said, write all this up so that I can have everybody else do this in Baghdad and elsewhere, you know. So those TTPs were very. valuable for the rest of the surge force as well. On the, you know, the whole, the positive ID, PID question, I remember General Corelli coming down and we talked about this a little bit before we went live. He's saying, you know, we were briefing them on, you know,

the numbers of enemy killed, wounded, captured. Because I didn't like to just talk about my own casualties. I mean, why are you here, you know, not just to absorb casualties, but to, you know, make progress. And, of course, it's not all about enemy casualties. It's also about, you know, how much of the population are you securing and the city. And we laid all that out for them, but, of course, the way you do that is by killing the enemy, you know, and moving forward. And he says, so why are you killing, why are you shooting so many of the people in Ramadi? He says, have you declared everybody in Ramadi as hostile?

And you're just shooting anybody you see? It's like, no, sir, absolutely not. I said, that's just that there are that many enemy combatants in the city that you cannot. We told this to General Mattis. You cannot go outside the wire and not get into a firefight. Were you there when General Mattis came to visit? No. General Mattis came to visit when he was commanding first Marine Expeditionary Force.

three star at the time. Or maybe I was there and I didn't know it. Okay, all right. So he comes in and, you know, we had him, I think 3-8 was still there. And three-eight briefed him. And he goes, okay, now I want to go out and visit or, you know, go to the Gov Center where Kilo Company was. He's going to definitely find something at the Gov Center.

Well, you know, sir, if you go outside the wire, you're going to get in a firefight. He goes, well, good. That's what I'm hoping for. And his sergeant major was a guy named Bataglia at the time. He went on to become the senior enlisted advisor to the chairman. And so they go roll out. And they get into a firefight as predicted. And he had a massive PSD with him from 3-8 Marines.

You know, I probably had like 60 Marines with them. You know, I'm not exaggerating at all. But they got in a firefight and they got pinned down. They could not self-extract. So the 3-8 blows out their quick reaction for us, which happened to be two army tanks. You know, they gave them a tank platoon, you know, their QRF, you know, which they were grateful for.

So they blew out these two tanks and, you know, boom, boom, end of tick. And, you know, they're rolling back in the gate. So I'm talking to the Sergeant Major Patagli and he goes, hey, sir, I've got to tell you this story. He says, after this, he tells me all about the tick and get pinned down and all that stuff. And he says, so we're rolling back in. and I asked my driver, I said, hey, Lance Corporal, how do you feel about that? You know, 60 Marines pinned down on a firefight,

and it takes like, you know, two army tanks to get us out of it, you know? And he says, that Lance Corporal looked around me and gave me a funny look. He goes, you know, Sergeant Major, you old guys just need to get over that shit. And I said, wow, out of the mouths of babes, huh, Sergeant Major, you know, true joint warrior at the rank of V3? But that's, that, you know, was pretty indicative of the level of violence there. I mean, when Senator McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Lieberman, they're like, let's go out in the city. I'm like, absolutely not.

Not happening. No. Like, oh, it's fine. I was like, no, it's not fine. I will not have that on my conscience. Yeah. There was even guys in the SEAL teams that would, you know, how are you possibly killing this many people? Like how is this possible?

And again, you put Chris Kyle on his gun on a long-axis road as a combat outposts is being built and actively attacked. Guess what you're going to do? You're going to kill a lot of bad guys. Well, that's how I met Chris. He was, you know, laying behind, you know, his weapon, you know, looking through a loophole. I think it was a firecracker or someplace like that along a long axis along the racetrack road there. and I think you or Leaf said, hey, that's, you know, one of our top snipers,

and I think I kicked him on the bottom of his boot, you know, I said, hey, thanks for what you're doing or something like that. But, you know, at that point it's probably like, you know, son had been up a few hours. I don't know how long he'd been, you know, looking through those sites, you know, but he'd been there for some hours. So you said if they were on the gun for five hours,

he'd probably been on the gun for a number of hours. At that point he never looked around no never lost his focus he kept his eyes where they needed to be the whole time Yeah, that's yeah that was him as we talk about all these enemy that were out there Obviously there's civilians out there as well and You know we have to I mean the Number one goal is to protect the local populace, right? So we have to be as a as discriminating as we possibly can when it comes to engaging. Because there's civilians out there and we're going to be interact.

We're going to meet those civilians in an hour. Like, when we go out there and shoot somebody, we're going to be walking through that neighborhood in an hour. Or if we shoot someone that's innocent or a civilian, they're going to be brought to the gate of the cop or the command in two hours. and it's terrible. I found an interesting note. This was from Lieutenant Colonel Rod Harouche,

who passed out pamphlets for Cop Falcon, like once we got into Cop Falcon, Dear Noble People, this was a pamphlet sent out to the, you know, handed out to the civilians that are there. Dear noble people, military necessity will force us to do things we don't want to do. But what we have to do is for the sake of your freedom,

so you won't live in fear for the rest of, your life. It is my utmost intention to bring peace to you. We will stay until the job is complete until your children can play without fear and your families can walk the streets with honor. So this is

what we're doing. We've got thousands of enemy fighters intermingled with hundreds of thousands of civilians. How important is it to protect the local populace in these scenarios? Yeah, I mean that's the whole point

I mean, we were there. The theory of counterinsurgency is to separate the insurgents from the population and to protect the population. And that kind of dawns on me. I remember getting a briefing from a Marine Major in 3-8 at Hurricane Point, which was their main combat outpost there. Reggie McLean was his name. He was a great kid.

you know, if you could do it like a standing backflip in body armor, you know, you know, in the middle of a briefing, just to emphasize a point. So, but Reggie was kind of showing me, says, hey, you know, sir, that we don't really make enemy contact, you know, until we cross this street, you know, into Ramadi. And so, you know, we kind of assess this part of Ramadi is under control. And, you know, based on recent operations that we've conducted, you know, moving towards the what we call the racetrack area, you know, when I'm talking about the SUC area, you know, we've moved the forward line of own troops, the flot, as we call it, like one block to the east or two blocks of the east over the past couple of weeks or something like that. and that's when I began to think of this as more of a linear conventional, you know, instead of, you know, being just in this chaotic swirl, I began to see some patterns emerge.

I say, well, you know, if we really kind of apply that around the rest of Vermont, we really do begin to see the areas of enemy control, the areas of enemy control, the areas that we control, and the combat outposts are designed to exert control in a new area, and where are the areas that we really need to exert control? And that will kind of inform the progress of the campaign. So, and that's where we began to understand the enemy's defensive mindset and how they were setting up their defensive belts and what their lines of communication or what we called rat lines where they were and how they were operating and how

we could deny the enemy sources of revenue through, you know, gasoline, you know, theft and, you know, resale and black market operations and all these different things, how they all started to fit together into a pattern. And yeah, the idea of the combat output, was not just to defeat the enemy, but to be that transition from clearing, holding, to building. So one of the things that Cop Falcon and most of them, not all of them, but most of the major combat outposts, featured a civil military operation center, Seymok,

or Information Center, CEMIC. But we would put civil affairs officers at each of these locations, And people could come in and they could say, hey, you know, you dropped a bomb on my roof or whatever. Ran a tank through my front wall. Exactly. All these things. Or, by the way, you occupied my house. You know, this combat outpost is where I used to live or my business used to be.

Or whatever else the issue might be, you know, water mains or, you know, all the, what we call the sweaty mess, the sewage, water, electricity, all those different public services would come into the CEMOC, and we would then know about those. And then the patrols that we would send out, I would not allow anybody to go on what many called presence patrols. I'm like, we're not going out for presence. What's the purpose of a presence? So if we were going out on any patrol, they had to have a purpose, an objective, to reconnoiter a location.

One of the purposes of the patrols that the combat outposts began to do, and this came from a young soldier in 137 armor, was census patrols. he had begun to develop sort of a spreadsheet of the people that lived in the different buildings, you know, and how we had alpha-numeric designators for every structure in the city. So he was like, you know, Alpha-11, you know, is a family of three. And, you know, so we developed a more systematized approach with, you know, certain questions that we wanted to know. Do you have a vehicle? What is it look like? What's the license plate number?

You know, so if we see it someplace else, we know it's not where it should be. You know, do you have a weapon? Everybody's authorized. Everybody was authorized in AK-47. Iraq is very strong on the Second Amendment. And, you know, but you shouldn't have more than that, right? And so on and on, and we began to understand the population better. You know, do you belong to a tribe?

You know, as you know, the tribal affiliations break down in urban areas. But in the area where the Marines were, Hurricane Point, the Awani tribe was still relatively strong. And these were kind of the techniques that we began to employ in the clear hold and build. And then the other thing we tried to figure out is, okay, who are the people we can talk to about, reconstruction and that's why we had the reconstruction conference while we were still fighting our way into the city all the shakes every shake owned a construction company go figure right kind of like the soprano's something i remember you describing the some of the shakes as gangsters like these guys are gangsters that's what's happening well yeah i mean there are bedouins

so you know one man's smuggling is another man's free trade i suppose and sheep, cigarettes, gasoline, whatever, you know, the traffic would bear, but sometimes it was weapons. And I remember Sheikh Satar getting stopped at the Al-Qaim border crossing going into Abu Kamal and Syria. And the Marines out there stopped him because he ran through in ECP, probably because he was carrying something that he wasn't supposed to be carrying. and they shot at them and they detained them. And General Zulmer calls me and says, hey, you know, this is your boy, right? You know, Sheikhs the tar?

And he just kind of ran through a checkpoint and, you know. I was like, yeah, he said, well, what he, maybe it was an LR. I can't remember who, but, like, what do you know, what's the deal? I was like, let him go. Why? Well, because he's like instrumental in us turning this,

the battle around in Ramadi and if he wants to smuggle whatever he's smuggling, you know, let him, you know, help him. I, you know, I don't, whatever he's doing wrong is more. Make it right. Yeah, is more than made up for by what he's doing to help us win this war. We're not here to stop smuggling. It's not why we came into Iraq. I don't remember George Bush standing up and saying, you know, we're going in Iraq and by

God, we're going to shut down smuggling across the Syrian border. That was never part of the campaign. So why do we care? These people have been doing this for millennia, you know, and it was also true of tribal justice and the law west of the Paco's kind of a, you know, approach to rough, rough justice. And Sheikh Satar used to tell me that kind of stuff all the time. Oh, I did this. Like, really? I kind of wish you hadn't told me that. That's, you know, when we started talking about Iraq and you were talking about going into Iraq and, you know, I started talking about they didn't put into the calculus, the amount of casualties that were going to take place. And this is something that I've said to many people over the years is when you're going to war, you've got to have two wills, the will to kill and the will to die. And the will to kill is not just the enemy because when you go into these, when you're in war, civilians are going to get killed.

Especially when the enemy hides among them. Especially when the enemy hides among them. You know, there were, you know, clearly in a battle like Romadi where there's all those civilians intermingled with the enemy, there's incidents where civilians get killed. You know, I got some of the reports here. You know, flare was used as an escalation of force at a vehicle that's approaching. Warning shots fired.

Vehicle doesn't stop. engaged, one civilian killed, you know, and it's determined a civilian because they search the vehicle and there's nothing to significant to report. The investigation takes place, you know, police station, multi personnel, civilian personnel bring in remains of a civilian and the police station that the guy's been beheaded. These things are happening out there. Well, obviously the beheading wasn't us. Yeah, clearly that's not us, but I'm saying there's, civilians are being killed on, you know, absolutely the civilians were being killed by the enemy. And here's another one.

Anti-Iraqi forces digging in a previous shot hole. So this is an area, this is one of the tactics, techniques and procedures of the enemy. We called it reseeding. Yeah. Drop a rice bag in a shot hole. That's practically PID. Yep. And in this particular situation,

previous enemy was observed, engaged with 25 millimeter. After the attack, people flee. Dismounts go out to assess BDA, and they're told that a female civilian was killed and a civilian was wounded based on this information, initiated investigation and initiated condolence payment process. Well, that was the other thing that the Civil Military Operation Centers used to do is condolence or salacia, as they call the payments.

Those are heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking incidents, and I can recall a number of others, both in Iraqi freedom and an inherent resolve, where you do everything you can to avoid or prevent civilian casualties, but they still happen. And sometimes it's just horrible, you know, women or children, you know, it's just one of the ugly aspects of war and why it should never be undertaken lightly. I was just going to say one other things. One of the ways we tried to mitigate that was get Iraqi tribesmen from that area, called them Kit Carson Scouts, to go on our patrols and say, you know, say, you know, we know the people in that house are good. The people in that house, well, you know, not so good, you know, watch out for them.

That was incredibly valuable. Obviously, it's a lesson that we lifted from our operations in Vietnam. It wasn't infallible, and even with that, we had some tragedies occur. One of my guys, they were in an observation post down by Cop Eagle. They're watching, they're observing, and they see a vehicle. It's painted like a taxi. it's moving west to east. It's talking to people that are observing and watching and pointing and doing things that

normal people don't do. Vehicle then turns down the road towards the outpost. And there's actually signs, big signs in Arabic on the road that say don't pass here, danger, danger. Vehicle goes past those signs. The platoon commander. fires a warning shot into the vehicle, into the engine block, vehicle continues.

And one of my snipers fired one round, kills the driver, vehicle rolls to a stop. And as soon as the vehicle stops, out get, I think it was a woman in four kids. You know, it's just terrible. I don't know why this individual was doing this. Could this individual have been probing? Could they have been trying to see what they could get away with?

Sure, it's possible. I don't know. But these are the kind of things when these things happen. You know, first of all, everybody knows about it. I mean, everybody knows when a civilian gets killed, it's immediately, you know, you've got the people out there in the civilian populace. You've got the sheikhs that know. You've got the police.

You've got the Iraqi army that sees this stuff happening. So, in a situation. situation like this, these guys are doing their best in, and clearly within the rules of engagement, but, you know, one of the terms that I heard out there that I also used was good shot, bad result, meaning like, hey, I can't say anything to that sniper that negative. He was watching this happen. This was a clear that could have been an vehicle born IED all day long and so he it's a good shot. The result is bad. When when these kind of things happened, what was the reaction?

What was the you know what the procedures that we went through to you know in this particular case? It was like really quick, you know, because the family's right there. we can immediately try and take care of them, get them, you know, pay them money, which I know that sounds callous and cold, but that's one of the things that happens. From your perspective... I would say culturally, that's important, though.

Yeah. Yeah, in that culture. So obviously, we, like you said, we investigated every escalation of force, even if it, you know, especially went to lethal force, even if it didn't have a lethal result. We still had to do a AR Army regulation.

15-6 investigation. And we did it for every KIA as well on our side. We did it for every fractricide or suspected fractricide. I mean, we were doing a lot of investigations all the time. But like I was saying earlier, I don't know if we were recording when I was talking about how you get numb to certain things. I don't know, we weren't recording. I don't think we were recording yet.

Yeah, so Ramadi was such a violent place that at least I felt like I was becoming numb to the violence around there. And maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I realized I had become numb. And I think everybody around me was to a certain degree, varying degrees, probably numb, to the level and intensity of violence. And that's why when somebody from outside of Ramadi came in, even from a place as violent as Baghdad, like General Corelli, he would be shocked. He's like, why is this place so violent?

Surely it's something you're doing, Sean, you know? And I don't think it was. I think it was, yes, to an extent it was, because I was trying to take the city back, You know, and the enemy was reacting to our actions, and that was causing the violence to go up. And, of course, after it reaches a tipping point, then it goes down. And it was interesting when General Petraeus came in with a surge, and in Baghdad, it followed almost the exact trajectory of violence. You know, in Baghdad, it went up, peaked, and then dropped like a ski slope, and so did Vermont.

But at the time, we didn't know that. You know, we couldn't forecast that. We thought that's what would happen. We believed it would. But we were doing our best. And until we tried, you know, we couldn't be sure. One thing that was sure is that if we didn't try, these people would live under the terror of al-Qaeda.

And it was al-Qaeda. I think at that time they'd rebranded themselves to the Islamic State in Iraq under Zarqawi, kind of broken from Osama bin Laden's, you know, Mainline Al-Qaeda. And, of course, ISI became ISIS, you know. You know, we kind of got a chance to take another bite at that apple later. And, you know, the movie about Chris Kyle, you know, opens, and it's clearly Ramadi, right?

I mean, to me, that's Ramadi. Where he's laying in a sniper position looking out on this dusty street and there's a woman there, you know, in front of, and it's one of these murky situations, shoot or don't shoot, I don't know, what's the right thing to do? And we had people, you know, junior people making those life and death, kill or don't kill decisions on a daily basis, privates, you know. And we just trusted them to do the right thing. We trained them.

They, you know, they knew what the right thing was, you know. But in the stress of the moment, you know, we're all humans ultimately. And so when things like this would happen, you know, it would be sad. You know, I'd feel really bad about it. But I would kind of lock it away, compartmentalize it, and move on. Because, you know, you had to keep the mission in mind. And the civilian casualties, unfortunately, were part of it. I saw it again in Afghanistan, big time as a two-star, you know,

there, and I saw it again in Operation Inherent Resolve. When the enemy hides among the people, like you said, there are going to be civilian casualties. You do everything you can to reduce that. People who complain about what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, I don't pretend to be an expert on what the Israelis are doing there. I don't know what their exact TTPs are or anything. But I will say that, based on my own experience, even if you do everything right, you're going to get some things. things wrong. Yeah, the, um, the ROE brief. So, you know, of course, before we go out, every operation, we're getting an ROE brief. And it's a, you know, very clear, very straightforward.

I would make it even clearer. You know, what I, what I would tell my guys is, you better make sure that the person you're killing is bad. That's what you have to make. You better make sure that they're bad. If we kill in a mom, because there's a mom's out there running around, there's teachers out there running around. There's doctors. There's moms. There's there's people out there. And if you kill one of these people, everyone knows we're disro- they're not, we're not going to operate anymore. I mean, if you go out there and kill civilians, look, if a mistake happens and it's within our ROE and, okay, it's going to get investigated, if you're not doing the right things for the right reasons, we're going to, we're not doing this job. And then we can't go out there and protect,

you know, help protect the army. We can't do our job. job. So we have to make sure that the people we are killing are bad. Yeah, and to the extent that you can. And, you know, like you, you were asked at the beginning of this, you know, what happens, how, you know, when it goes bad, you investigate it, you take the appropriate action, whether it's disciplinary or corrective, you know, training or modification of your procedures. And then you move on because you got a mission. It's no different, in my mind, excuse me, from when you lose one of your own. You can't let that stop everything in its tracks, you know, because then that death

loses its meaning, you know, and you can't let that happen as a commander. And I felt the same way about the civilian casualties. He was like, that was really unfortunate. but it would be even more unfortunate if, you know, after that happened, the survivors still have to live under the reign of terror from al-Qaeda. So we'll continue our mission to liberate there. How much in, I was thinking about this as well, how, for lack of a better word, intimate, the battle was. because it's in this little tiny city.

And so, like, if I was, when I was in Baghdad, the number of times that I talked to a colonel, a full bird colonel, was, you know, I could probably count on my hand. I would see you all the time. I would see the battalion commanders all the time. And we had meetings that we would have. Then I'd see you in the field.

And you'd ask me about this. We'd talk about this. There was such strong, relationships because everyone was so close together, the proximity, the battle rhythm, like you said, I didn't know that you had that. I probably forgot that you had this policy of we're going to do a major operation every three to four days. What does that mean?

That means you, me, the battalion commanders, the company commanders, we're all sitting in a room or we're in the field, we're at a cop and we're talking to each other about what's happening right now. So it's, to me, it was very different to have that much direct. interaction with the whole chain of command all the time. And of course, part of it is out of necessity because you can't leave the wire unless that company commander out there knows and briefed his platoon commanders that you've got guys patrolling through that area at this time, going to this, going to this place, you know,

not coordinating was just suicide. Yeah. Now, the level of synchronization of everything that had to happen, uh, like you said, in a pretty densely populated, a relatively small area, but with a lot of people in it, is really mind-boggling. And no one person can do that. I mean, that's every echelon in the chain of committee.

All I could do is try to, you know, set the standards and kind of give the broad direction. But then it was down to the field grade officers, the company grade officers, the senior and junior NCOs, to really make it happen. And a lot of times there wouldn't even be an NCO on the scene. It would be the young private at the ECP or whatever, doing what the right thing would be. And you're wearing these shirts that say discipline. Definition of discipline is doing the right thing when nobody's looking, right?

And that's what we counted on, is disciplined American troops, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, doing what was right, even when nobody was around to check on them. And that's why we were successful, ultimately. And that's why we were able to hold ourselves together when we didn't know how to do counterinsurgency for about two or three years after we invaded Iraq. As we had disciplined troops on the ground with NCOs who were enforcing standards

to make sure that we held it together until we officers figured out what the hell we wanted to do. When you were talking about the increase in enemy attacks, the increase of casualties, what kind of pushback were you getting from that from your boss? So my boss was a major general at the time, Rick Zilmer, who I've said earlier was one of the best bosses I could ever have. we had one

the worst day we had was I think it was December 6th of 2006 we had six KIAs and one died of wounds at Brooks Army Medical Center from Burns received

previously and I don't even know how many wounded we had that day so among the six casualties we had soldiers and Marines. One of the Marines, not the only one, but one, and they were all

separate incidents. Three were killed in one incident. The other three were killed by indirect fire and sniper, but three were killed by an IED. And in that one IED on route on sunset,

there on the way to Cop Falcon was my one of my officers who was really central to the awakening movement on my staff, Captain Travis Patrick Quinn, left behind a wife and kids, a young soldier named Vincent Pumante from the Field Artillery Battalion. And I saw these kids right before they went out. And then major U.S. Marine Corps, Megan McClung, who was my first. public affairs officer. Why did I have a major from the Marine Corps as my PAO? Because I'd asked for one. I had an infantry officer who wanted to get back into the line. He's, you know, God bless him. You know, he said, I want to go back to leading soldiers in combat. You know, I don't want to be your

public affairs officer, sir, if you don't mind. He was a Rhodes Scholar from Princeton, but, you know, I was like, okay, you're pretty good at this, but, you know, you're a Army Ranger and you want to go back to fighting. I get it. So I went to General Zilmer and General Neller and I said, you know, the Army does a lot of things better than the Marines, but one of the things the Marines do better than anybody in the world is public affairs. And I would like, and I have a problem because everybody thinks Ramadi's a lost cause. Right before we got there, we didn't mention it, but the Marine G2, who's a great guy, by the way, and a very smart guy, have a lot of respect for him. But, you know, nobody's right all the time. And he said, Ann Barr was a lost cause. That's,

as my brigade was arriving, you know, and the preceding brigade had lost 80 or 90 soldiers and Marines. And I knew I would probably lose a similar number. And I was resolved not to let that happen without having something to show for it. So my deputy command, A guy named Jim Lechner who had been into the Battle of Mogadishu, and he's a great guy, and he says, so what's the plan? And I said, you know, peace and prosperity in Ramadi, you know, we're going to do it. You know, we're going to make it matter. We're going to make our losses matter. So, but it would only matter if people recognize the success that we were beginning to have by that point.

The awakening had occurred in September, and, you know, now we're. in December. So I get, you know, I was having a hard time getting reporters to come to Ramadi. Now, most commanders, the last thing they want is to see reporters, right? You know, but I wasn't breaking squelch. You know, people weren't recognizing what was happening here. A great sacrifice that the progress we were making with the tribes and all that kind of stuff. So I got some, so, so, So General Zomer said, all right, I'll get you. I'll send you one of my public affairs officers. So he sent me Major McClong, Naval Academy graduate, red hair gal, you know, just outstanding.

Just outstanding, you know, lights up the room, you know, kind of a personality. And, you know, she was all over it, you know, and I used to say, you know, she said, sir, I put out this press release for you. I was like, thanks for my eloquence, Megan, well done. So they were coming back from Sheikh Satar's house. And Travis, you know, he was a very funny, quirky guy, kind of a warrior, scholar, poet, musician. Arabic speaker. Yeah. Maybe not as well as he claimed, but good enough, you know.

I mean, he had really endeared himself to the tribes, himself to the tribes. They gave him a tribal name, Wee Sam, you know, and all this. And they hit an IED, one of those pizza box IEDs. and you know because of the incredibly bad design of up armored Humvees, as you know, the fuel tanks were underneath the crew. You had these armored shells that were super hard to get out of and a fuel tank underneath it. So you had a fuel enhanced IED pretty much every time it went off. And so it was bad. And so we lost Megan and Travis and Vincent in that one episode.

And then we lost. Neil Smith was my. IOPs, chief of ops, and he's the one, he says, we just had an ID event, 3KIA, 1WIA, route sunset. I'm like, what are the battle roster numbers, you know? And he started reading them off, and he says, it's just a minute, you know, all computerized,

he looks up who the battle roster numbers are. Sure enough, you know, he starts telling me, you know, it's Travis, it's Megan, Pimante. And I knew Pumonte because he was inside the headquarters element, so brigade headquarters. So, you know, my stomach, you know, dropped. It was just a horrible, horrible day. And the other events with the Marines and soldiers getting killed just lasted all through the day, through the night.

And it finally ended around 10 or 11 o'clock at night. I didn't think that day would ever come to an end. And then somebody says, hey, sir, you know, Sergeant, you know, another guy, you know, got a report, passed away of his wounds there at Brooks Medical Center. So I go back to my office and kind of slumped down in my chair, you know, and behind my desk and, you know, start taking a look at all the actions I got to approve or whatever on my desk. And my admin, NCO, comes in and says, hey, sir, General Zomer on the phone. Like, okay, now what's he going to have to say? And he says, hey, Sean, he says, I know you had to really.

tough day to day. I'm very sorry for your losses. Is there anything I can do to help? At that moment, nobody could have said anything better to me. And from that time on, I would have followed General Zilmer anywhere because he just said the exact right thing to help me get to the day. He didn't say, he could have. He said, Sean, what the hell's going on in Ramadi? You know, why are you losing so many troops, you know, he could have even asked that in a non-accusatory way, and it still would have kind of undermined my confidence, made me start to question myself. But he didn't. He asked me, what can I do to help? That is the model of combat leadership in my mind. You know, what can I do to help you? You know, August 2nd was a bad day for us in Tassian to bruise our

so Ryan Job gets severely wounded. And once he gets wounded, the guys evacuate him, bring him back to Cop Falcon, get him medevac'd up to Charlie Med. And at that point, I mean, 137, it's Bulldog down there. It's Mike Baima. You know, they're like fully engaged. Main gun, Mike. And at some point, they kind of think they know where the, we're.

where the enemy's located. And he, man gun, Mike calls Leif, hey, can you help us out? Can you come and help us out and assault this building?

Well, I'll send Brad's for you. And Laif called me, and, you know, I'm up at Camp Ramadi, calls me, hey, this is what's going on.

They need help. What do you want me to do? Or can I go? And I was like, yep, go. And clearly, go up there.

and Brad's did a great job, you know, lit up, lit up the building, soften the building. Mark gets killed. You know, crushing to all of us. You know, they extract, come back, and, you know, Leif comes to me, and, you know, he's obviously, you know, totally distraught. and one of the things said to me, says, I don't know if I made the right decision. And, you know, what I told them at the time and what I still believed to this day,

what I told them was there was no decision to make. It wasn't a decision to make. Your Army brothers were being attacked. They needed help. That's not a decision. You don't say no to that. We step up. That's what we do.

Just like the 137 did for us, just like the 1-506 did for us, just like the 1-3-5 did for us, the 3-8 Marines. So once a, one six, everyone in your brigade, when we needed help, they came. So that, but that was a violation of your protocol. Which part?

You, as you're, you're, you were there for a specific task and purpose. And, uh, you were directed to do only those things that special forces can do, uh, or should do. and when you went to the assistance of my guys, you were exceeding your authority or Lafde. And that's why you are not a Navy SEAL in my eyes, but an Army SEAL. And, you know, the brigade print that commemorates our deployment is of the quick reaction force coming out of Cop Falcon

in response to, I forget it was Ryan or Mark. Ryan, yeah. Ryan, yeah. And I'm proud of that because, you know, that kind of shows the bonds that you guys made, you know, living side by side there at Falcon. Those guys would have done anything for you. And they did. Yeah.

On multiple occasions. That, you know, that area around Falcon, my goodness, it's, I mean, I think it was shortly thereafter we had a couple it might have even been the same incident or we had a couple of Bradley's knocked out I think it was the fight that kind of spun up

after that. I think that spun up after that. Yeah, so that fight kept on going we really kind of kicked over Hornet's Nest there and a couple of silver stars on, you know, in 1-36 infantry. Mike McCusker was the company commander. Mike had been my executive officer when I was the G3 at Fifth Corps.

I love Mike. Big broad-shoulded guy. And he'd been wounded a couple of times. You know, he had a couple Purple Hearts in that deployment because he was always leading from the front. Well, his soldiers knew that in a problem. appreciated that. So a couple of them, Sergeant Anderson and Trump Bauer get out there in the midst of all this fight. And one of these Bradley's takes a hit and catches fire, actually, you know. And,

oh, I'm sorry, yeah. And another Bradley comes to his aid. And the first Bradley commander is wounded. Second Bradley commander climbs up on top of the Bradley. There's guys trapped in the back. they go inside, they manage to go in and get that Bradley open, one of the hatches open enough to get everybody out of the back of the Bradley. But there's wounded, and the Bradley commander himself is wounded. So the other Bradley commander says, you know, he goes in, he clears a room, you know, in his building, gets all the wounded into that room, leaves the wounded Bradley commander in charge of the wounded, and then goes out to get help from somebody else.

Has to run a quarter of a mile through enemy fire down these streets, these gauntlets, to get the attention of somebody to help him. He runs up to a tank. You can knock on the outside of a tank all day long. They will never hear you. But he's an infry guy. He doesn't know this. So he's banging on the tank.

Tank's like, that could be small arms fire banging off me. They don't know. They don't care. you know so so he has to run farther he finds another Bradley gets you know gets in there and it gets all these guys medevac at this point I'm at Charlie Met and these Bradley's come in and you remember like the

Bugs Bunny cartoon you know Yosemite Sam you know the Acme dynamite blows up you know and his clothes are all like in tatters and you know charge strips of cloth just hanging and off of them. That's what these guys' no-mex uniforms look like on these Bradley commanders, you know, as

they're, and one of the guys, I can't remember it was Sergeant Trumpauer, Sergeant Anderson, one of them, two staff sergeants, you know, and they're bleeding, their uniforms and tatters, you know, smoke is literally coming off of their clothes. And now they're at Charlie Med. And by the way, we had a Navy forward surgical team out of Belboa there. He was the commander of which was a class 81 Naval Academy grads. Same year I graduated from West Point. He gave him permission to, you know, criticize everything I was doing.

But well deserved. He was a good man. But anyway, we're, they're pulling all these guys out of there. And the NCOs refused to get on a stretcher, on a litter, until all of their soldiers are on letters. And the battalion Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major from 137, had to literally go pick one of these guys up

and lay him on a litter, you know, to get medical attention. That's, you know, that was the teamwork, you know. One of the things I say about the military, people don't understand is there aren't, there are very few places in the world where people will willingly sacrifice their lives for a total stranger. Just because you're part of my team, you know?

I mean, I don't know you, but you're part of the Ready First Combat Team or you're supporting the Ready First Combat Team or you're just wearing an American patch somewhere on your uniform, you know. That's enough for me to willingly lay down my life. It's a remarkable thing, and that's why whenever I think of Romani, I think of that Charles Dickens' opening line in The Tale of Two Cities, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. You never meet or see the kinds of heroic acts, selflessness, at the same time you see some of the worst. things that you ever want to see, you know, dead children or something like that, you know, I mean, the contrasts are immense, but it's like nothing else in the world, you know, and that's,

you guys, you know, rapidly became brothers to, you know, Bravo 137 armor, you know, and they would have done anything for you, anything. You know, we're talking about Mark Lee and you're talking about the question that you got asked. Well, I know you know Mark's mom and we were, you know, once she was notified that Mark was killed, Laif comes into my office. You know, I have a phone in my office there and he's making that first phone call. And, you know, here Laif was preparing to console her and, you know, you know, know, try and provide comfort to her.

She answered the phone and like, you know, I'm listening. And, you know, her immediate response was, how are you guys doing? What can I do to help you guys? And this is from a mother that just lost her son. I know, it's incredible. And, you know, Debbie is a remarkable lady. But I will say that more often than not, that was the response I got from the next akin when I made my phone calls.

When Travis Patrick Quinn died, and I talked to Amy Patrick and his wife, and we lost the first Sergeant Jagger who had, in 137, who had five or six kids. And by the way, the family members, we were stationed in Germany, and his little

concern, the German word for camp, in Friedberg and they didn't go home. They stayed in those little concerns with the other family members of those who are still deployed until the end of the deployment. So my wife Linda and others,

they took care of the Gold Star families that were living among them, never knowing if they were also going to become a Gold Star family next. I mean, it was, you know the home front of a four deployed unit was was very intense but but i found talking to those parents and then the army would send a one's at least a one star to every kia's funeral and when i when i was redeployed i did a number of those too and uh i just marvel at their strength you

know i mean i don't know where it comes from i would hope that i would have the same in a similar situation. I'll tell you when my son was a second lieutenant platoon leader deployed in Afghanistan, I was commanding a division of 20,000 soldiers, but I was mostly thinking about 30 soldiers in Afghanistan, especially their platoon leader, more than, you know, probably as much as I was thinking about the other 20,000 that I was responsible for.

So, I mean, it's, I don't know how our, you know, families can be so strong in those moments, but it is a remarkable thing, and I'm grateful for it because it's hard enough, you know, to break the news to people that their loved one isn't coming home alive. And, you know, then when they turn around and try to console you, that's almost like I don't know

it's one of the things that I'll never get over you know you mentioned Travis Patrick Quinn and well let me read a little something this is from the article that you that you had ghost written for you

by Neil Smith yeah I'm trying to give credit words to you I might have made a couple of edits but I didn't have to do much. It says this. Convincing the local sheikhs to join us and undertake another uprising was an immense challenge. Obtaining their support was the linchpin of the second part of our strategy.

We knew it would be pivotal when we were pivotal when we arrived in Ramadi in June. The Sheikh's memory of their first failed attempt at establishing the Al-on-Bars People's Council, which was late 2005, early 2006, was the main obstacle to our plan in this regard. And that's the one that I mentioned earlier where Al-Qaeda just murdered. was between six and eight of those people, those tribal leaders. The Sunni Kut Satar's brother and father, I think. The Sunni tribal alliance was fragmented and weak compared to the growing Al-Qaeda forces that controlled Ramadi in those days.

At the same time, area tribal sheikhs had no great love for U.S. forces or the Iraqi army. Early in the insurgency, they had directly and indirectly supported former regime nationalist insurgents against U.S. forces, and as a result, they had temporarily established an alliance of convenience with al-Qaeda and Iraq. Many tribal members were killed or captured combating coalition forces, which diminished the sheikh's ability to provide income for their tribes. These conditions in turn enabled al-Qaeda to recruit from those families in need of money. Another aggravating factor was that Iraqi army forces initially stationed in Anbar, consisted largely

of southern Iraqi Shia's Ramadi area inhabitants regarded them as agents of the Sadr Militia or Bader Corps with a covert agenda to kill off Sunni tribes and enable Shia takeover of Anbar. Nevertheless, the tribal leaders were still fed up with al-Qaeda's violence and frustrated by their own loss of prestige and influence in their traditional heartlands. The brigade staff believed that by offering convincing incentives, we could create a tribal Alliance that could produce lasting security in Ramadi. To persuade the tribes to cooperate, we first needed to understand the human terrain

in RAO, and that task fell to an outstanding and talented junior officer, Captain Travis Patrick Quinn. Yes, he have the mustache. The big mustache. That didn't look like an Army reg mustache. Did you give some leniency to him there? I cut him some slack. Relaxed grooming standards.

He did this thing that you can find on the Internet. the stick figure kind of coin manual of what we need to do, what mistakes we're making, what we see, what they see. It was fantastic. It was called How to Win an Anbar by Captain Trath. It was, he made a mockery of Army PowerPoint Rangers. He was a true Ranger. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the origin of that PowerPoint thing was, there was a conference. in Fallujah at the Meph headquarters, mostly for civil affairs folks. And we were getting a lot of skepticism in some quarters, I will say, over what we were trying to do with the awakening, you know,

because these tribes were previously not our friends. And so I said, you know, Travis, we've got to break through to these folks, you know, we've got to explain what we're doing, you know. And I said, you'll have to explain it in terms that even a Marine can understand. It's no offense. And we've got a Marine in the room. And so Travis comes up with this stick figure PowerPoint presentation that reads like a Dick and Jane school book, you know, and everybody's happy, mustaches for everybody kind of stuff. but it was brilliant.

It went semi-viral a little bit there, but it explained perfectly what we were trying to do with the Anbar tribes. And, you know, that was just him in a nutshell. It was great. I want to say, so the guy who wrote this article, too, by the way, Neil Smith, I want to say something about him. Neil was one of my company commanders up in Talafar,

tank company commander and then his time was up and you know he moved up to brigade staff lucky him but while he was a company commander and this goes back to my earlier point about the kind of people that we have in uniform they were clearing a building and there was they were taking fire from the building and an NCO grabbed Neil and said sir let me go in first through this door and you know and went first and took a round to the chest and was killed an action that guy who was killed in action his name was staff sergeant legaspi he was an Olympic boxer he boxed in the Olympics and he sacrificed himself for his company commander just think about that you know we had you know you know

Mike Mansour, you know, Mark Lee. We had a distinguished service costs for a young officer, brand new. It's only been out of West Point a matter of months, earned a distinguished service cross in heat, you know. The silver stars for the incident I was just talking about. Some guys didn't get silver stars, but we had an NCO. and 1-9 infantry, the Manchus, first of the ninth infantry,

out in Corrigador. He was Ukrainian. Givgeny Rindich, I believe his name was. He was a squad leader. And first of the ninth infantry had been in Corrigador

for a year, went home to Fort Carson and came, they were reflagged, they weren't first of the ninth in Corrigador previously, went home to Fort Carson, Colorado for a year

and redeployed right back to Corrigador severely under man because a lot of those soldiers were still you know not present for duty not return to duty yet

they were still walking wounded in that battalion on their books that's why when the chief of the army came through I explained this to him and I said look 1-9 infantry is like 80% strength

and then they're doing R&R and because we're there for a year so take 10% a month off of that you know they're They're barely able to hold their fob, let alone conduct offensive operations. So that's why they created these warrior transition units in the Army. That's an aside.

But Rindich, you know, had been a squad leader in Corrigador, knew what his guys were going back to. He was on orders to go do something else. He said, no, I want to go back. If we're going back to Corrigador, I want to go back with my squad. because I'll be able to make sure that they come home. He was leading a squad in the Mullahab district on the east side and was killed in action by a sniper.

So those are the kinds of people that were in Ramadi that made such a difference. I don't know that that was the average level of dedication, professionalism, competence, willingness to sacrifice of every unit in our military at that point. But it was

definitely common, that's why I say the Uwo Jima Memorial uncommon valor was a common virtue in Ramadi. You know, it was very common there. Those guys, every squad leader I gave an Army commendation medal for valor because it took courage to be a squad leader just to lead your soldiers outside the wire

because you knew you were going to be in contact and they were all looking at the squad leader like what are we doing you know so so those guys had to be the adult in the room and say it's okay. And how old are those guys? Yeah, not old, you know, staff sergeant, I don't know, 28, 27. So, I mean, it was really,

remarkable you know out in heat you know the kid who earned the Distinguished Service Cross was shot twice kept you know his when we when our brigade got extended I went out to heat and said

hey sorry guys you know we're all we're all going to get to spend an extra month and a half in combat you know and as you described earlier you know fairly intense combat at that good luck to us all and I went home or as I was you know after after the discussion I'm talking to the battalion commander and the radio start crackling there's a firefight out in heat and one of the

company commanders and his first sergeant are down and his four fire support officer was with them big kid you know like I said you know, a mid-tour replacement lieutenant goes out there because the first sergeant is Samoan and the other, one of the platoon leaders was the Vietnamese and the company commander was not a big guy. So DM Vaux was the name of this lieutenant. He goes and tries to get the rescue the company commander

and Lieutenant Jackson tries to get the first sergeant of. Lieutenant Jackson, they're on the wrong side of the Humvee from where the enemy is. They're, you know, right there getting shot at. Lieutenant Jackson gets shot almost immediately, loses consciousness, regains consciousness, and alternates between returning fire and rendering first aid, finally gets the first sergeant up,

keeps himself between the enemy and the Bradley he's trying to get him to. He's trying to get him to DM's Brad. Gets shot again, falls down, gets back up, gets everybody into the Bradley, Now, you know, other people have entered the fight, you know, a platoon sergeant taking command of the platoon, maneuvering against the enemy, you know, putting his Bradley between everything that's going on, you know, and he gets a silver star. Lieutenant Vogue gets a silver star. Lieutenant Jackson refuses medical attention while the other folks are being, getting treated by the medics. It's a 30-minute ride back to Camp Heat.

You know, Lieutenant Jackson nearly bleeds out because he hasn't been looked at because he claims he's okay. But the other guys make it. One of the reasons they make it is the battalion Sergeant Major, former Delta operator. The medic couldn't find the artery that was bleeding in this one guy's thigh. He reaches in with his bare hand and clamps off the artery. with his bare hands and holds it closed for the entire Bradley ride back you know

and all this is going on to get back to Camp Pete the battalion commander goes to see the company commander and the company commander just says I am so sorry sir that you know this is and the battalion commander of Tom Graves is like

what are he talking about you know you know so proud of all of you guys so that's That's the kind of, you know, team that we had. And many others probably had, too, but I think it was at Travis and Megan's Memorial Service, our Anglico, Marine, Big Marine Major, was crying really hard at the end.

And we remember we had the shakes there for the Memorial Service. And Mike was his name, and I was like, you know, kind of gave him a little bit of a hug, you know. it was him or somebody else that said, you know, why is it always seem like it was the really good ones, you know, that we lose? And he wasn't the first to say it. A lot of people had. And it occurred to me that it seems like we only lost really good people because those were the only kind of people we had over there or they wouldn't have been there. everybody we lost was a good person maybe I've been a great soldier but you know they stepped up they volunteered for something dangerous

for something bigger than themselves and they may not have belonged to the greatest generation but I believe they were the greatest members of their generation and I put a lot of those 19 year olds into body bags and help lift them into the back of CH46s and, you know, it was just, my daughter was about that age at the time, you know, my oldest. And I just couldn't get my head around the fact that that was it for these kids, you know.

That was their whole life right there. And all their 19-year-old buddies were standing around. Probably never even had a grandparent die by that point in their life. And now they're seeing their buddies kill. And they're trying to cope with it. it's such an extraordinary experience and people you know coming back from war

Vietnam World War II whatever they say they don't really talk a lot about it it's kind of because who could understand that unless you've seen it right you know unless you've been there like you have you've seen it you saw Mark and his buddies and

Ryan and his buddies and Mike I mean the way that those folks would ruck up and move out to the next mission after losing one of their closest buddies is just so awe-inspiring yeah it is and you know for us you know we we would see the turret gunner on a lead turret on a army patrol rolling out the gate and you know what's that what's that kid rolling into you know you're in the lead. lead turret gunner on a Humvee in a logistics patrol that's going to go down to cop,

Falcon and drop off some mermites or whatever. And he's going to come back and he's going to go back and go come back and go. And there's IEDs all over those streets. There's snipers out there and they get up and get in that turret over and over again. And the guy's patrolling, you know, oh, what are we going to do? We're going to go do census operations. We're going to, yep, well, that's what I'm doing. What are you doing tomorrow?

Same thing. What are you doing tonight? All stand and watch up. on the roof of this building. Yeah. And just to see that kind of dedication and selfless sacrifice every day from thousands and thousands of men and women that are continually stepping into the fray, stepping into the breach just over and over again.

Yeah. And then, you know, when you redeploy, to this day, you know, I'll see an old movie will come on that I missed when it came out because it came out in 2006 or 2007. you know and I'll say this is what people were focused on nobody knew

that's why I wanted those reporters come out people were unaware of the tremendous sacrifice the courage the things that were

happening every day where uncommon valor was a common virtue and they were watching or listening

to things that were just so trivial and silly um it's It's hard to reconcile for me sometimes. The,

the, the, the, the, onbar awakening, Sheikh Sadar Baziya, Abu Risha. I, originally knew him as

Sheikh Satar Bizia. That's what I originally knew him as. And I don't know, I don't, I forget the whole complexities around the, the names. I had a,

I had a lieutenant junior grade, prior enlisted, Navy guy who was, I don't really actually, I'm not even 100% sure what his skill set was. He was married to a Japanese woman and he was a Buddhist, even though he was raised in Ohio or something like this. Super nice guy. And I think he had something to do with computers, you know, some kind of, you know, some kind of information technology.

Like that's what he was there to support. I'm not even 100% sure. Was he your intel guy? He kind of posed as an Intel guy. Yeah, I remember this kid. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I needed somebody to do tribal engagement that was one of our lines of an operation. I said, hey, all right, you're going to go work with these tribal people.

And the first report I got back was he, because he went out with Colonel Dean. And he just basically did ride-alongs and reported back to me what was going on. That was kind of the first I heard. He said, hey, we met this guy. And he seems like he wants to get on board. He wants to do this desert protector program. And I had to look that up. The desert protector program was out in Al-Qaeda.

and the Marine started it. Yeah. And Maliki got rid of it because then you had a bunch of mercenary groups or militia groups run around the country. But then very quickly, Colonel Dean, you know, just set up the recruiting and made that stuff happen. And then, you know, we did start to see that kind of turnaround happen, you know. And one of the things that I remember that really stood out to me was, you know,

we were putting in cop sword and I think it was also called OP sword but it was Can you remind me where that was? Like north of cop Grant So cop Grant went in By the way we picked the name

Grant and honor of you know the Army Navy cooperation in Vicksburg. I remember that clearly that was outstanding I remember this so 20th Street and we had all this intel that the the al-Qaeda was saying they're going to fight for 10th Street they're going to keep 20th Street there's no way and I talked to you about it and you're like well let's put a cop in there yeah put a combat outpost right in there and that's what we did and actually was you know so again the big planning cycle went up there that that was near women and children's hospital pretty close to that yeah and it's so it's south of route Michigan okay I know I know I know okay I know Michigan okay I know I know what's like a it was the south side of the government center area yes yeah okay okay what

surprise me about it is we went up there. Did we did what we normally did you and I were somehow United on like we were probably we were very early like there was no one there it was like you me like seven or eight soldiers were holding security and I immediately pushed my guys out they went out and set up you know a couple overwatch positions and the you know this the building started but what there was like almost no attacks yeah so we're up there And my guys didn't kill anybody. Apache's came in. I don't know if you remember.

Apaches came in and like they took a lot of fire from the entire city. I don't remember that. Which was shocking to see. They flew in. There was massive gunfire and they flew away. The good thing is Apaches can take a lot of hits. Yeah. Like B-17s.

But it was like that was the first time that we went in and I kind of said, oh, that was different. There wasn't these big mortar attack. There wasn't enemy maneuvering. And again, this was now in pretty late. You know, this is maybe late August. And it seemed to me like maybe things were going to change. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I think at that point, we had punched the enemy hard enough in the face, you know, that they were maybe back on their heels a little bit. So the timing, I don't think it had anything to do with the awakening at that point. I think the awakening had something to do with the way the enemy was reacting to our aggressiveness. And they, I believe, saw that they could really partner with us as long as we were going to take the fight to the enemy. They would not have to worry about retribution. If we were really going to crush the enemy and that's what we were all about,

great, because they had scores to settle themselves. And you probably remember that, you know, they kind of got a little over their skis on some of the score settling there, going into mosques and just, you know, you, you, you and you, your Al-Qaeda come with us and nobody ever saw them again, right? You know. But the enemy activity would drop in that area, so they were probably right. They knew who was who in the zoo. I mean, it was extrajudicial, and we certainly didn't sanction it or encourage it in any way. but they had their ways of doing things and that was the power of that

relationship that we had with the tribes. In your incredible article on 9 September 2006 Sheikhsatar organized a tribal council attended by over 50 shakes and the brigade commander at which he declared the Onbar Awakening officially underway. The awakening council that emerged from the meeting

agreed to first drive al-Qaeda from Ramadi, then re-established rule of law and a local government to help support the people. The creation of the Awakening Council combined with the ongoing recruitment of local security forces began a snowball effect that resulted in a growing number of tribes either openly supporting the awakening or withdrawing their support from al-Qaeda.

Yeah, game changer. So I end up going home in October. And even though, like, I saw a little glimpse of maybe some changing, and you already mentioned December was a very tough month. Yeah. That was, that was the December, I think, was when the fever broke. There was, in between, you know, in between September and February,

like there was another 50 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines were killed in those six months. you know, after the awakening council, that first tribal council. You know, for me, September 29th, you know, you mentioned Mikey Monsor. That's when he was killed, you know, jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And again, the support that we got from the first of the 506,

they drove down IED-infested road to evacuate the wounded Kazavak Dam, brought an element back out into the field, to go recover the Iraqis that they left behind. And Colonel Clark, you know, he's personally called me and told me what was happening, told me what was going on. And, and, you know, here's Colonel Clark. I don't know how many, you know, he had lost a significant number of soldiers himself and taken massive casualties just like everybody else.

But he wasn't jaded. He wasn't callous. He wasn't desensitized at all. He, you know, he cared about Mike. He cared about the guys. cared about Seth, the platoon commander, cared about me. And just that unity, same thing. Like when he called me, hey, this is what's going on?

What do you need for me? Battalion commander. That's in significant combat on a regular basis. Asking the random seal that's over on the other side of Ramadi, what can he do to help? Yeah, well, Ron is an extraordinary officer still serving as a three star now. Yeah, I've always been proud of having him and his battalion as part of our brigade. Yeah. Yeah, he's as good as they get.

I've been in Ramadi for maybe like two weeks, and I was over there, and we had a combined, a joint combined element out in the field, seals, Iraqis, and Army soldiers, and I'm in the tactical operations center with him. And while that's happening, there's something else going on. And I was watching him, and he was. handling things like a complete boss. I think you used that word earlier. And I was thinking to myself,

this guy is outstanding. Yeah, no, yeah, we're lucky to have them. And like I said, that was kind of when my deployment was coming to an end. And we continued to operate. We soon started our turnover. Yeah. Five came in. Yep.

Team five came in. and what we felt like was we felt like we're leaving early. Like we're abandoning our friends. Well, the good news is, you know, SEAL Team 5 fell right in on what you guys were doing and, you know, they carried forward everything. I didn't really detect any sort of variance, you know.

And, you know, they didn't try to walk anything back. I mean, they were really good at following the ear lead. Yeah, no, we had a really good turnover with them, and we were all friends with those guys. So when they're coming over, we're talking to them. I know the platoon chiefs were talking, and the senior enlisted were talking, and the officers were all doing good turnover, so they knew what to expect. No, but I got to say, you know, having the SEALs as part of our team of teams was tremendous.

You know, we had Marines and SEALs, and we had some Air Force and guys, you know, and obviously our A-Lo team, you know, Air Force on the staff. And walk into the brigade morning updates, the battle update briefs, you know, you never knew if it was going to be, you know, an Army soldier announcing, you know, the brigade commander, you know, every come to attention or attention on deck, you know, from one of our, you know, naval officers. But, yeah, it was great. I mean, it was not by design, but it was.

It worked out nicely that way. Yeah, so SEAL Team 5, while they were there, they really helped us kind of take on all of those ERUs, those thousands of recruits that came out of the woodwork and turned them into some sort of a force to be reckoned with. and they kind of were up there in the Jazeera, Angora areas, you know, and really kind of ran Al-Qaeda out of town. Yeah. When I was leaving, you gave me this tank here that's sitting on this table, this wooden tank.

I have one just like it on my desk. By the way, for anybody who can't see this, you know, we're sitting at a square table, and Jocko has sort of, of a fighting position in front of him, with stacks of books, you know, around him that he's written. And in the center, you know, facing outward, the gun tube isn't pointing at me, fortunately, but...

I'm smarter than that. There's a wooden Abrams tank that we used to give to our very important teammates there, like Jocko and Steel Team 3. And then on the outer perimeter where I'm sitting, there's a bunch of vicious-looking knives. But again, you know, thankfully, they're pointing more towards you, Jock, you know, so I don't know. I keep myself in check. A psychologist could probably, you know, look at this and say something about it. I don't know.

The feng shui of the room is very interesting, I guess. It is. And we're in a completely black room. and everybody's wearing black but me. So all I see these disembodied heads and tattooed arms, you know, and then this in front of me. You know, when you gave me that tank, you told me something I'll never forget. You told me, and it's something that I was able to then tell the families of Mark Lee,

tell the families of Mikey Monsor, tell the families of Ryan Job. You told me that are seals from the first of them. Task Unit Bruiser had kept hundreds of your soldiers and Marines alive. Absolutely true. And that, you know, regardless of the outcome of the war, the reasons for the war, or the fall of Ramadi back to ISIS, or the questions, the reasons we went in there to this day, when people question what we did, why we did it, how we did it, those words meant everything and mean everything, that the sacrifice was not in vain.

Because we were able to keep your soldiers and Marines, our comrades in arms, our brothers and sisters in the Army and the Marine Corps, in the Navy and the Air Force, alive. Absolutely true. And we gave the Iraqis an opportunity for a better life. You know, maybe they didn't. take full advantage of that because Maliki came back in and did what Maliki did, which probably directly contributed to the rise of ISIS later,

or the re-emergence of ISI that we had defeated in Ramadi once. But that doesn't take anything away from what was accomplished in Ramadi through the blood, sweat, and tears of all the people who served there, you know, with second of the 28th, first of the first armored, or the first of the third infantry who came in behind us? You, like I said, I went home. October and November, there's significant fighting. There's a guy from Steel Team 5, great guy,

was severely wounded in late November. You get 2,200 Marines from the Mew. Is that right? Well, the Mew was 2,200. So General Casey came out and said, hey, I'm starting to see the progress that you were talking about. Could you use another battalion of Marines? It was 2-4. It was the battalion landing team for that Mew.

And I was like, I don't need another battalion. You already have like eight or nine battalions here, you know. It's like the size of a division almost, and I'm a colonel. I said, but I could sure use another couple of companies of infantry because, like I told you. you, first and ninth infantry was badly depleted and we were extended and all of us were, you know, undermanned at that point. And through casualties, you know, 86 killed, 485 wounded, and like 95% of those happened in Ramadi in a nine-month period, 5% up in Talafar. I mean, that's the intensity that we're talking about, you know, think about it. You know,

out of 6,000 troops of all services, 500 were casualties? What's that casualty rate? I don't want to do that math right here. 10%? Over 10. Or almost 10, yeah. So, I mean, that is a pretty, you know, intense environment. So, yeah, I said, I'll take a couple of infantry companies.

And so I got two, Echo and Fox of 24, and a Marine rifle company is something to behold. It's 250 Marines. My rifle companies have been treated down to about a little over 100 soldiers at that point. That's what I was operating with. And in comes these, you know, and I gave both of them to 1-9 infantry out in Corrigador. And they almost outnumbered the battalion I attached them to. I was going to say, yeah. But the amazing thing about the Marine rifle companies is they're also junior, you know.

There's one E7 in that whole company, the one company gunny. And in an Army company at full strength, 135 soldiers, there's four E7s. You know, squads are led by staff sergeants, not in the Marines, buck sergeants, you know, and so on down, right? and it was an interesting, you know, an interesting, you know, difference between the two services. I mean, we had combat outposts side by side, Army and Marine that we were, like, established within days of one another. And within 72 hours, the Army was running hot chow and had showers set up and all this kind of stuff. And, like, two weeks later, the Marines have nothing going other, you know, there's eating MRI. but they got a prison gym

you know that's about all they got and I was like you know you guys don't have to live in squalor I mean you know actually General Corelli came out and visited me goes why is it so different I was like you'd have to ask the Marines I don't know it's a thing you know that's like you know but anyway it was interesting with the two services operating

side by side and then with the seals in there third service kind of like with a foot in each canoe almost you know trying to it was really a unique command uh that I was privileged uh to lead um you you I didn't I almost forgot the riverine guys oh yeah the riverine guys yeah no doubt actually remember that you were you were you wanted to shut down the rat lines coming across the river yeah and And you couldn't quite, you couldn't quite figure out how to do it. And you came to me and said, hey, Jonko, can you, like, help me? Like, there's these, all these boats over here.

They're all being used. We're watching them. We can't stop them. Can you help? And I was like, well, I'm a frog man. That's water. Let me go. And I started running up the chain of command.

And we were worried to bring the Iraqis with us because they couldn't swim. Right. And we didn't want one of them falling out of a boat and drowning. Right. So, and, and, but we wanted to take them with us, because we did all of our operations with Iraqi soldiers. So what we did was we put massive life jackets on them, and we had them hold security from inside the boats,

which they were carabiner did too. February 18th, 2007, you get relieved by... John Charlton and First of the Third. Yeah, First of the Third ID. During my time, when I was there, this is kind of like the aftermath from my perspective. Enemy attacks were 30 to 50 a day. I get home and I'm watching, you know,

I'm watching time tick by and they go down to 10, 10 a day and then 5 a day and then 1 a day and then 1 a week. And August 2007, Ramadi goes 80 days without a single attack on U.S. forces, which was like insane to be hearing. That's when I was on the joint staff that. I was a colonel in the Iraq. I was chief of the Iraq Division in the J5, working for another Marine, great Marine named John Sadler.

And Admiral Mullen was the chairman, and he says, well, we're going to Iraq, you know, bring the chief of the Iraq division. And, you know, John, you come along to, you know, obviously. And so Sattler and I are like, well, we both want to go to Anbar. And Ambramalan's schedule was, you know, it was all Baghdad-centric. So we went on an excursion. out to our old stomping ground and walked around the racetrack where so many of our soldiers and Marines had been killed and wounded, Katana District.

And they had previously recently had a 5K run around there. A 5K run. Crazy. And the only shot fired was the starting pistol. And I said, if only. if only as I walked around there in a soft cap, not even wearing any body armor. And this was August 2007. We redeployed in February.

It was like six months later that I wish that every soldier who had been wounded or served there and every family member who'd lost a son or daughter there could have walked that racetrack with me that day to see what their sacrifices were all about. Because we did give the people of Vermont, you know, a chance at a completely new life and hope. Yeah. We got pictures sent back to us. Like the seals that relieved us, sent us pictures of, like, what it was like for them. And we were reading the reports, but it was, I have the, I have a picture of that 5K funder.

Really? I would like, I have never seen that. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was looking at that thing, and we got a picture. And when we were, when you were there, I think that's when, Al-Qaeda did a fun run around the, you know, they loaded up a pickup truck. Yeah. Drove around there.

From that article, key lessons learned. The most enduring lessons of Ramadi are ones that are most easily lost in technical and tactical discussions, the least tangible ones. The most important lessons we learned are accept risk in order to achieve results. Now, what's interesting about that one is, for me, in the 90s, You know, the idea of risk aversion, I don't know if that actually came from the military, but I thought it might have come from the military. Like the easiest and best way to get promoted and move up the chain is just to go and not do anything. And so this one, if you're inside the military, well, as a military person, when I read that,

I go, I know exactly what that's aimed at. the fact that you have to accept risk in order to achieve results, there is a whole culture of people that don't think that. And if you don't take risks, you're not going to achieve anything, except for maybe getting promoted. You can get promoted if you don't take any risks. And I know this isn't about promotion. This is about the battle.

But the reason that you, it might seem strange to somebody that's not in the military, why would you have to say that? Of course you're going to take risk. You're in the military. But there definitely was a culture that I saw a lot growing up pre-war that we are going to mitigate all risks. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting that I know a number of people who are risk-averse in terms of budget or saying the wrong thing, things that might be harmful to them professionally,

but would have jumped on a grenade for me, you know, or you or anybody they don't know, but happen to be wearing the same camouflage pattern, right? Mm-hmm. Why are we so willing to sacrifice ourselves physically, but not professionally? You know, we have a lot of physical courage, but we seem to lack moral courage sometimes.

Yeah, you have to take risk to make progress. You have to have an economy of force in order to create mass elsewhere. And that means risk. And the other thing I'd say, I mean, when we got there, the mantra was, as you stand, as the Iraqi stand up, we stand down.

You know, the idea was we're going to pull out of the cities, but we were going into the city of Ramadi. And I explained to General Casey, I'm like, I can't pull out of a city I've never been into. You know, we've got to get control of the city before we can turn it over to somebody. And the Iraqi army wasn't enthusiastic about that. You know, who came in behind us was the tribes, you know?

So, yeah, risk is part of the... you know, everything everybody ever talks about in war. I mean, if you can't accept risk, you're in the wrong line of work. The other thing I'd say, I don't know if it was in that article or not, but perseverance. You mean, you talked about it. You know, we were battling headwinds. The enemy was fighting back hard, especially initially. If you, you know, stack arms, you know, when the enemy pushes back, you're never going to win.

War is a contest of wills. When we lost, after that really bad day that I had there and that I had, I said the brigade had, you know, I was just one of the people that had a bad day, certainly not anywhere approaching how bad it was for those who were wounded and certainly not as bad as the family members who lost their loved ones. But the next morning I go into the Bub, the battle update brief for the brigade there and our little headquarters at Camp Romani. and everybody's kind of looking down at the tops of their boots, you know. They'd feel bad because we'd lost two staff officers in one day. By the way, the guy who bought all these wooden tanks and designed our coin, he had been killed in action previously. He's my S-1, Jason West.

And so it was the third, you know, our third staff officer killed in action. And so the staff officer was really, staff was showing it too. I mean, people talk about those idiots up at platoon headquarters and don't get it. And we were taking fire on Camp Romani. We were losing people on Camp Romani, plus we were losing staff officers outside the wire. So, you know, one of my heroes is a guy that we named a cop after Ulysses S. Grant. And one of the things I admired most about him was his ability to persevere. You know, the wilderness campaign, you know, certainly comes to mind.

Vicksburg and others. But the most salient example of perseverance by Grant, and the one most inspiring to me, was the Battle of Shiloh, where on day one, the Confederates caught the Union forces by surprise and almost pushed them into the river. I mean, the Union guys were literally in their sleeping bags or eating breakfast when the Confederates came out of the woods. and, you know, if not for the heroic stand of a few units, you know, the Union Army would have been wiped out that day. Grant was not with the unit that day, with his army.

He was elsewhere. But he heard the sound of the guns and he rode back to it. And he got back there and it was nightfall. And one of the units that had fought back was Sherman's division. And, you know, of course, when it rains, it pours and when things were bad, it rains, it rains. So, of course, it starts raining. So Grant gets under a tree to light a cigar and think about what's going to happen. And Sherman comes up to him and says, well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day today, haven't we?

And Grant says, yep, lick them tomorrow, though. So I told that story that morning to my staff. So we had a really bad day yesterday, but we're going to lick them tomorrow. Perseverance is an underrated virtue. and I can't say enough about its importance in combat. Yeah, and there's a side of that. I mean, the pressure that you're getting from up the chain of command when you're not producing results,

or the results that you're producing are negative because casualties are going up, enemy interactions going up, and if someone's on the outside, they don't see the broader strategy, it's you've got to resist, you've got to persevere up the chain of command. I know I had a call, you know, we were probably, I don't think you'd arrived yet.

We were like maybe three weeks, four weeks on the ground. But we had already realized, like, we can kill these bad guys. And so I start putting these sniper teams out. They're killing IED emplacers. We're getting some good numbers. We're also getting heavily scrutinized because same thing. People are saying, wait, how are you killing all these people? And I'm like, please come and look.

Please come and come out with us. but my one of my officers from from the task group staff you know call me and said listen it's been three weeks you're you're killing these people and we haven't even seen a downturn in the number of enemy attacks right and I said thankfully I had read the new uh counterinsurgency manual I had a it was out online it was the one that Petraeus wrote and I had read of like a draft the version of it online. Yeah. And I said, sir, the average counterinsurgency lasts seven years.

It's been three weeks. Can I get a little more time? And he said, Roger that. But yeah, that perseverance day after day getting up and moving forward. And again, I want to point out that you made adjustments. There was times where you were trying something. It wasn't working. You didn't say, oh, we're just going to keep doing this thing that's not working.

No, you'd say, oh, that's not really doing what we thought it was going to do. I'm going to take a step back and go in this other direction. So the best adjustment that our brigade made, I wasn't even there. I was the last person in the brigade to take R&R. Because we were there for 14 months, and it was like the 12-month point or 11-month point. And I was like, okay, now it's my turn.

So I went home for Thanksgiving. Worst, weirdest Thanksgiving I've ever had, I will say. Because I've still got 6,000 Americans, you know, in harm's way that I'm responsible for. for him. Anyway, so I'm on my way back and I started to hear indications that I had left a plan in place when I was gone. You know, I said, here's the next operation, a couple of operations. Every three or four days, you know, we're going to do another operation, right? We kept that going. And we had really reduced the enemy control in the city of Vermont to the northeast part of, you know,

Malab around, you know, south of the hospital, that area. And that was where, you know, we were going to, like, drive the final stake through the heart. And while I was gone, this, the key rat line into that part of the city ran through this area. You'll know it called Sophia or the shark fin, right, just east of the city because it looked like a shark fin. And there was a tribe up there that had not joined the awakening yet. They were kind of on the fence. They were afraid. They were intimidated by Al Qaeda's presence in the area.

We got it. So one day, you know, a bunch of Toyota pickup trucks, you know, white pickup trucks roll in there. Al Qaeda is going to, you know, drop the hammer on this one shake who's kind of waffling, you know, whether or not he's going to join the awakening. they were going to make sure that he did not. And so this big fight blows up. And I think one of your SIL Team 5 buddies had given him a Theriah satellite phone. And he calls the only numbers he has and he gets Travis Patrickman, Captain Patrick Quinn, on the phone.

And he says, we're under attack, you know. And so we put a UAV overhead. and all we see is a bunch of Arabs shooting at each other. You know, I mean, you can't tell who's on what side. So Travis says, have all of your guys wave towels over their heads. So we know which side, you know, isn't waving the towels. That's who will attack. And that's what they did.

And we started attacking them. And then at the same time, two companies, a tank company and an infantry company out of Corrigador, start pushing up toward them. And the enemy breaks and starts to run, and we start strafing them, you know, their pickup trucks, you know, their technicals, their guns on. And, you know, we just, I'm sorry, we hit a whole bunch, we took out a whole bunch of all kinds of guys,

really broke the back of the insurgency on that side of the city, which, but it wasn't the plan. I mean, this was completely ad-lib, right? and I get back and I'm in Kuwait and I'm hearing about all this. I'm like, what? You know, so I finally get back to Ramadi and all of my battalion commanders, my deputy and my ex-O are like really nervous. And I'm like, sir, we know that you, you know, we were supposed to do this, but this seemed like a really important thing to do. So we decided to do this instead, you know, kind of we hope you're not mad.

I was like, are you kidding me? I'm so proud of you guys. Probably the best battle this brigade fought, and I wasn't even there. You know, all I can hope is if I had been here, I wouldn't have screwed it up. You know, I mean, you guys did perfectly because you took the initiative and you did what needed to be done. So that's the third thing I would say, you know, other than taking risk and perseverance, I would say another important thing is trusting your subordinates to do the right thing, building that trust. I trusted them. They made the right decision.

They all kind of huddled all these lieutenant colonels. You know, I can just see their cute little faces around the table. And they did the right thing. They came up with the right solution, and they did a magnificent job. And, you know, I am not at all ashamed of the fact that the best, probably the most important battle my brigade fought was fought without me. You're proud of it. I am proud of it. That's decentralized command.

I know. It's exactly what everybody should hope for. It's like when your kid goes off to college and, you're a lot. you know, does better than you did, which mine did, you know. So you don't envy them. You're proud of them, right? So that's kind of where I am on that. And so those, I would say those would be the three things.

Once you gain the initiative, never give the enemy respite or refuge. Right. You absolutely did that when you're conducting a major operation every three or four days. Try to do the same in an inherent resolve. Have you ever been on a number? a Navy ship before. Yeah. Have you ever seen an underway

replenishment before? Didn't do an unwrap. I was on the Truman. When the Truman was working, the Truman group was working for me when I was commanding inherent resolve. Nice. They got to launch and recover on an F-18.

It was a lot of fun. I was a young seal. But I know how crazy un-reps can be. Especially in tough weather. It's insane. You watch an under, so for those of you that are listening, it's actually in some cases three giant Navy ships

because there'll be the battleship or whatever, the warship in the middle, and there'll be a supply ship on the port side and one on the starboard side. I almost said left or right. I was going my sailor card revoked. And they're going, they have a speed that works, they're going to 10 or 12 knots or something like this,

and they're only 20 feet apart. These are massive ships, and there's lines being thrown across, said there's police systems. It's total mayhem. The first time I saw it, I was just, and I was a new guy in the SEAL teams, but I had parachuted and just fast roped and repelled. I was like, this is the most hazardous thing I've ever seen happen in the military.

And they do it in heavy seas sometimes too. I've seen in heavy seas. It's even more insane. When I think of you saying, like, if you didn't know what that was, if I got spawned from from outer space and they said, okay, you got this ship, you're going to have to resupply it. How do you want to do it?

I'd be like, okay, we'll pull into a port and we'll unload everything that we need. I wouldn't in a million years think that it was possible to do what they do. And so for you, that's what I think of.

When I think of doing one of these missions, the logistics of the missions that were going on for you to be like, yeah, we're going to do one of those every three or four days. I remember, this is I was talking to someone about this the other day,

filling up sandbags to go and eat chow. Oh, yeah. Who thought of that? That was brilliant. So that was one of, That was a Marine came up with that. It was at Hurricane Point that they, you know, three eight steam nearest guys were doing that. And I said, we're going to do that on Camp Romani because there's like thousands of people on Camp Romadi.

And we're building a cop every few days. And it takes 20 to 30,000 sandbags. Yeah. But, you know, if you say like 3,000 people aboard Camp Romadi, three meals a day, that's 9,000 sandbags you put on a – on a flat rack and on a PLS and off it goes that with the Combat Logistics Patrol going out that night. So my S3, a guy named Andy Schaffner, came up with a name for it called Operation Jamestown, no work, no food. But you know what? Everybody loved to it.

It was awesome. And they didn't just fill up one sandbag. They're like, I'll do two or three, you know. I'm over here. I got the shovel. But that, to me, doing one of those massive operations every three or four days is like, you had to almost have been spawned from another world to think that that was even possible. I can tell you, like, in some Army logistic school, if they posted that up, like, here's the mission.

I'm like, oh, though we can't do this because of the following 29 reasons. But for you to say, oh, no, we're going to make this happen. That's impressive. Well, so, okay, this goes to another leadership point that I'd like to make to commanders, and that is Newton's Law of Inertia, right? which is that an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an external force. You know, an army unit, a staff, anything is going to want to remain at rest unless a commander puts it in motion. You have to be that external force that impels it forward.

And, you know, that is the essence of, command. If you cannot do that, you know, then you really have no business being in a command. And you have to listen to reasonable concerns and objections and say, well, we can't do it in three days, but we can do it in four. And I used to say, if the answer is no, tell me why not or how you can fix it, you know, don't just say no. And if it's a reasonable pushback, I'm all ears. You know, I don't want to ask you to do something dumb. You know, one of my key policy letters was if it's a bad policy, it's not my policy. So let me, you know, let me get the feedback.

We'll have a discussion. But at the end of the day, you're going to always have to make somebody do something that they would rather not do. Right? Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so that means you can't be Mr. Nice guy all the time, you know. Remember that's, you probably don't.

there's a Star Trek episode one time. Echo might know this. You might be getting to his world. No, Star Trek, sorry. This is the original show, so you may not know this one. It might be before the time. But Captain Kirk gets split into two personalities by the transporter beam, you know. He's got the nice Kirk and the bad Kirk, you know.

And the nice Kirk, everybody likes him and everything, but he can't make a decision, you know. The bad Kirk is just like malevolent. He's like crush anybody in his path, you know, to get whatever he wants. He's like pure id, you know. And but, you know, the ship's in danger because the nice Kirk won't make a decision. So they have to like force the two back together and then he can balance, you know, the two and make the right decision. And so it's always a balance, you know.

Robert E. Lee, I'm no fan of his, but he did say something. profound once, which is as a commander, in order to accomplish your mission, you have to hazard the thing that you love the most. And the thing I miss most about the Army is being around soldiers. In order to, but to be a good commander, I have to risk my soldiers' lives to accomplish a mission. I do everything I can to reduce the risk, but you're never going to completely eliminate it, right?

and then at the end of the day, you also have to say, was the risk worth it? Was the sacrifice worth it? And can you live with that? And that's where the trust piece comes in. I've told people all the time. I slept well at night as a commander,

even knowing that I had soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in harm's way constantly. And people below me were making decisions that were moving them, in and out of harm's way. Because I knew that in my job, I had the right people in the right place, and I trusted them to make the right decision

with the information that they had. And if they didn't have all the information and they made the best decision they could under the circumstances, and it turned out to be wrong, like you said, good shot, bad result, I'd back them up, you know. That is, you know, a really important aspect

of combat command, but I think it applies to all. almost any line of work, but maybe a little less so. Well, believe it or not, I wrote a book with Laf Babin called The Dicotomy of Leadership. I know. And it's like, hey, can you... But you didn't use the Star Trek episode. You've missed a golden opportunity.

Yeah, obviously I missed that episode. Otherwise, I probably would have written that a lot earlier. But, you know, it's like, hey, can you plan too much? Yes, yes, you can. Can you plan too little? Yes, you want to be balanced. Can you communicate too much? Yes, you can.

Can you communicate too little? Yes, you can. But, you know, the opening chapter, the ultimate dichotomy I talk about, I was like, well, you love your guys and you're going to put them at risk. Every time they go outside the wire, something can happen to them. And that's what you're dealing with as a leader. And it's not going to go away. Well, as long as they, and if they know that you love your guys, they're more willing to go into harm's way. Yeah.

You know. Yeah. Another one of your bullet points, never stop looking for another way to attack the enemy. And what's interesting about this, and you mentioned it, it was a huge part for me, like when we came home from Ramadi, you know, what did all the, what everyone know about us? We killed a bunch of bad guys. So I had to talk about the tribal engagement that we did, the civil affairs piece that we did, and the training of the Iraqi soldiers and the Iraqi police, because no one knew about any of that. But what you talked about earlier that, you know, I would hear you talking about the brigade meetings was like, oh, yeah, what, oh, they're selling black. market fuel, how can we stop that? Oh, they're paying because they're smuggling this. How can we stop that? So it wasn't just, oh, we're going to find different ways to kill them. It's like, how can we disrupt their economics? How can we disrupt their relationships that they have with these? How can we disrupt their interference with the local populace? I mean, it's taking the

Ramadi General Hospital away from al-Qaeda because that was a major command and control element for them. But I mentioned it earlier. They would casualty evacuate their wound. to the Ramadi General Hospital and you could watch it on ISR. Yeah, yeah, we couldn't allow that. Yeah. And so when that got shut down and all of a sudden they're bringing wounded back and they're being arrested, being detained immediately. That was an epic scenario.

Yeah, it was, yeah. So absolutely, I call it the kitchen sink scenario or approach. You know, I'm going to throw everything at the enemy I possibly can, as hard as I can, as often as I can. and, you know, until they break. I've got more troops than they have. Mine are better trained, better equipped. Eventually I'm going to win, you know.

I'm not going to take my foot off their neck at any point, and I'm going to find new ways to make their day miserable. That's what I wake up every morning. That's my job. How can I make life harder for the enemy today, you know, or tomorrow or next week or next month or next year, depending on your echelon? One more of these.

The tribes represent the people of Iraq and the populace represents the key terrain of the conflict. The force that supports the population by taking the moral high ground has as sure of an advantage in counterinsurgency as a maneuver commander who occupies the dominant terrain in a conventional battle. And that was definitely written by Neil Smith. I mean, he took my point about the human population. He put it much more poetically than I could have. But that's absolutely true. Why do you fight a counterinsurgency? How do you fight a counterinsurgency?

The key terrain is the human terrain. And when we arrived in Ramadi, we did not have a good appreciation for the human terrain. That's what Travis and others, you guys, you know, helped a lot with that, actually. chart that and track it. And even though Sigax might have gone up, we saw more and more green human terrain. And that was the true measure of effectiveness. If you're measuring the wrong things,

you're not going to come out with the right result. You have to measure the correct things. And for us, it was human terrain. Yeah, that was a huge piece of it for me. And again, I got very lucky because I got this, the counterinsurgency manual, which made me seem like I was a little smarter than I actually am when I was talking to my chain of command. And me saying, secure the populace, this is what we're, you know, this is what we need to do, secure the populace. And one of the ways that we're secure in populace was we're going to kill as many bad guys as we can.

We are going to rack them up. and we're going to do it without harming the civilians and letting them see. I mean, we had, and I don't know if you got to see this, but there would be locals that would cheer when there was a body of an insurgent laying in the street. They'd be happy. They'd be celebrating. They probably knew who that guy was and didn't like them anyway, right?

Yeah. A lot of these guys were the drags to begin with. Yeah. But so that idea of taking and keeping. the moral high ground, make sure that you're doing the right things for the right reasons is just so critical in this scenario. And it would have been an abject failure had we, and this is the big we, all of us not had that attitude. So I don't know if that was in the back of my mind, but I got to ask that question once as a three-star when I was leading the

campaign against ISIS. And I was in Baghdad. It was Pentagon News. Candy Crowley asked me, you know. And I don't know, because I'm looking at a camera, they're looking at my face, my picture on the screen in the Pentagon briefing room. But, you know, I can't see who's asking me. But Candy Crowley, though, in this case. And she says, hey, General, how do you feel about carpet bombing in Syria against ISIS? And I was sitting in Baghdad where, you know, about 90% of the local news media was controlled by some Iranian entity or other. And they were lamb-baseding the coalition for not being as aggressive as the Russians were in Syria.

Why can't you be more like the Russians? And so that was my context for my response when I said, look, I represent the United States of America. We fight in accordance with the law of armed conflict, you know, the Geneva Convention, the rules of engagement. I said, at the end of the day, it doesn't just matter if you win a war. It matters how you win the war. And right now, you know, we occupy the moral ground. high ground, that's where we need to stay. So, no, we're not going to carpet bomb.

That's what the Russians do. In fact, they deliberately attack hospitals and other protected places, you know, with ground penetrating, bunker penetrating bombs. That's not us, and we don't want to be that. And not only that, it's not even effective what they're doing. You know, we'll continue to mitigate civilian casualties to the best of our ability, and that's how we're going to win the war. So a little life lesson here, you know, I look at my public affairs office or spokesman who's a full colonel, public affairs guy.

Hey, how do we do? And like all colonels will tell every general officer, three-star general who asked some of that question, sir, you did great. You knocked it out of the park. I said, I didn't step on any landmines. No, sir, sir, you're clean. You're good. I'm like, okay, I'm going to bed because it's like one o'clock in the morning, our time.

I get up in the morning I get an email from my wife Sean you're trending on Twitter Facebook all these social media Oh oh yeah it's like oh yeah so I pull up my computer screen And there it is top general slams Ted Cruz and Donald Trump you know

Over carpet bombing I was like what in the hell are they talking about So I start reading this article Turns out that day or the night before There had been a presidential primary debate where Donald Trump and Ted Cruz had been talking about, oh, you know, we'll just carpet bomb all these ISIS guys in Syria. And I don't think that they really understood, you know, the definition of carpet bombing. You know, I think they were thinking more along the

lines of... We're going to aggressively pursue destroying them. Yeah. But it was, you know, not the best application of that term, you know. And if I had known the context of that, I would have made clear that, you know, I'm not impugning anybody here, you know, by my response, because I just don't think they understand the doctrinal, you know, concept here, you know, because they're not military because they're not military, guys. So let me as a military person explain to you the difference between carpet bombing and, you know, being aggressive with a bombing campaign, which, which is what I think they really were asking for, you know, not just like level everybody, kill everybody. That's not at all what they meant, you know. But I didn't know that that was the context, so I wasn't able to,

you know, make that, you know, clear. So as I'm reading this and my, you know, I'm just kind of sinking into my chair, looking at, you know, with this growing realization that I've somehow inserted myself into a presidential campaign, you know, my aide comes in and says, sir, the chairman's on the phone for you, you know, and General Dunford, who's, you know, I'd worked for in Afghanistan and knew them, but, you know, it's never good when the chairman's calling you. Well, I shouldn't say that, you know, General Dunfer is a great boss. So, but I kind of knew why he was calling me in this case, you know. I was like, yes, sir. He's like, hey, so what's the deal with this carpet bottle thing? I was like, well, you know, this is what I really was talking about. And I didn't

understand that there would have been a presidential debate. Nobody said that to me. He says, okay, I'm looking at the transcript. I can see how this all kind of happened. So you're good. Don't worry about it. But just, you know, make sure you understand the context a little bit better. Somebody preps you a little bit better before. Because we are in an election year.

I was like, sir, absolutely, you know, point taken. But, you know, I said, really, though, there's nothing wrong with what I said. I just didn't put it art very politically or tactfully. He said, that's right. I mean, obviously, we're not going to be indiscriminate in our attacks like the Russians are. So that was true in Operation Harris-Ov was true in Iraqi freedom, and it was true in Afghanistan. We're not perfect, but we try as hard as we can to be perfect. And we hold ourselves.

Great risks. And sometimes risk to ourselves in order to spare the lives of a civilian. I mean, I don't know of a single soldier, sailor, or a Marine who wouldn't willingly allow himself to come to personal harm to spare the life of a child, you know, an innocent child, right? I mean, it's just not in our DNA. And I think everybody understands that, you know, but it bears repeating as often as possible, I think, you know, and that's why that's comments in there. Yeah, that attitude of taking risk and, you know, like, again, even in the SEAL teams, guys would be like, oh, you know, you're going out these sniper overwatch positions and killing people. the risk to go out into those sniper overwatch positions where by, you know, an hour after the first call to prayer

and now the enemy knows where they're, and they're going to attack in force. Well, remember what the enemy tactic was. They would send out kids to look for the snipers. You know, the small kill teams or the observation team, whatever it was, they would send little kids out because they knew Americans wouldn't harm little kids. Yep.

If there were a bunch of guys in, you know, black pajamas or whatever, you know, carrying A.Ks, different story. But they sent out little kids. And you knew that when the kids found you, within an hour, grenades were coming your way. The kids would be nervous. Like, these aren't kids that are like lollygagging around. That was, you know, another big indicator, like the streets would clear. And you're like, okay. Well, it's a matter of time.

Yeah, we're blown. Yep. But yeah, the amount of risk that my guys would take to go out there and get set up in a position. And then there was no leaving, too. The Marines got hit, leaving an Overwatch position. Now, look, did we leave the Overwatch position sometimes? Yes, we did. Sometimes it was like, yeah, we better get out of here.

But a lot of times it's like, we're just going to stay here and wait until night. And we have Bradley's if we need them. But yes, American forces going through. great lengths and taking great risks in order to protect the civilian populace is the norm. It's the same as taking risks to seize a hill. You're trying to seize the moral high ground, the, you know, the key terrain is the population. You would, you know, at Iwo Jima or a place like that, you know, soldiers, Marines would risk their lives to seize the key terrain. We risk our lives to seize the key terrain and a counter-surgency,

it just happens to be population instead of geographic. Indeed. So we're in the month of Memorial Day weekend, you know, in a couple of weeks as Memorial Day. And we've talked about Mark Lee and his mom, Debbie, who's got an awesome

5013C nonprofit called America's Mighty Warriors. And they do wonderful things and by the way, if people are concerned about where their money's going, it's got a platinum rating for, you know, financial transparency. But they do what her son, Mark, who was an extraordinary young man, I didn't know him very well, you know, I barely knew him.

You knew him. I didn't. Random acts of kindness, you know. And he wanted to pass it forward. He wanted to do good things for people. And, you know, we're kind of talking about doing for others. And Mark Lee was one of those kind of people. And his mom, I can see where he gets it from.

She wants to do it for others. And so America's Mighty Warriors is a great place to put in your money if you want to help veterans or Gold Star families who need help. and there are a lot of them out there. One of those groups of people that America's mighty warriors is helping are the veterans of the ready first combat team. We have a memorial plaque that was created after our deployment back to Germany. And it lists all 86 soldiers, sailors, and airmen who made the ultimate sacrifice in Ramadi.

and then the 485 who were wounded are, you know, recognized as well, but by name are our KIAs. And those include the names of our fallen seal brothers. So that plaque, because it has so many names on it, it's big. It's bronze, it's heavy. And when the brigade was reactivated in El Paso at Fort Pleist, Texas. There was nothing sturdy enough to mount it on, so it just

kind of leaned up against the brigade headquarters and exposed the weather. And copper, you know, exposed the weather gets something on it called amber green, which kind of turns it, kind of a greenish color. Or bronze does, I mean. So

we're raising money to fix that. And Debbie Lee will accept donations for that. purpose on her website America's Mighty Warriors all you have to do is say in the comments section for your donation ready first or something to that effect ready first memorial and it'll get into the right account but it's gonna cost

about $30,000 to get this fixed so anybody who wants to recognize the sacrifice of the soldiers sailors and Marines who were killed in Ramadi to make a better, you know, create a better life for the people of Ramadi. And for each other can make a contribution through America's mighty warriors, ready first in the comments block. And we hope to have that fixed and unveiled in time for us. to have a 20th reunion at Fort Bliss in El Paso and get as many of our fellow veterans together there to reminisce and to help each other out.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm a huge supporter of America's Mighty Warriors. It's America's Mighty Warriors. org and we will definitely make that happen. We will definitely make that happen. Before I, we move on to past Ramadi here and, you know, as I was trying to parse down what to talk about in Ramadi, I mean, it, you know, again, we could do an entire series of podcasts and, and, you know, how many other people to come on and talk and tell their story.

Again, you mentioned, like, there's heroism everywhere, all over. that battlefields filled with heroism and the soldiers sailors airmen marines that were out there that went back carried on with their lives and heroism and ingenuity you know i mean at all echelons yeah indeed um so you know will i had to select what we were going to talk about obviously i talked about some of what we did tasking a bruiser was a tiny tiny fraction of the effort that happened um you know this is five you punched above your weight though We got after it, that's for sure. But still, you know, there was thousands and thousands of personnel there.

They did the bulk of the heavy fighting. They did the bulk of the heavy lifting. We were doing what we wanted to do. You know, we were doing and making as much effort as we could. We wanted to make a difference. But we were a small fraction of the effort that took place. This was the soldiers and Marines that made this happen. That being said, you wrote something, you wrote an addendum to the original article that I think really expresses what this team consisted of.

And it says this, one of the great legacies of the fight for Al-Lambar province will be enduring, that will be enduring, is the mutual respect earned by the various service members who fought side by side. This respect was more evident than in Ramadi. sorry, nowhere is this respect more evident than in Ramadi where our brigade combat team, the ready first combat team fought under the command of one Meph, one Marine Expeditionary Force. The ready first was not a pure Army BCT. It contained Marine Corps elements, including a reinforced rifle battalion, comprised of elements from the 3-8 Marines and 1-6 Marines, two rifle companies from a Marine Expeditionary Unit, 2-4 Marines,

A Riverine Patrol Unit, an air and naval gunfire liaison platoon, and a civil affairs detachment. The Air Force supported the Ready First with an Air Liaison team embedded in the BCT. The brigade staff itself was a de facto joint organization. It had Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers and NCOs throughout. The electronic warfare officer, a Catholic chaplain, and the head surgeon were all Navy commanders. The Civil Affairs and Public Affairs officers were Marines. Marines. Outside the brigade, the support came from a marine logistics group and won Meph's air combat element. Numerous other external USMC units, including a platoon from a radio

battalion, a postal unit, explosive ordnance disposal teams, firefighting teams, air traffic controllers, and military transition teams also provided support. So did the Navy in the form of surgical teams and corpsmen, CB battalions, electronic warfare experts, and seal platoons from SEAL teams 3 and 5. The Reddy first enjoyed a particularly good working relationship with his special forces and other special operations forces in and around Ramadi. Soldiers bestowed the affectionate nickname of Army SEALs on the members of SEAL Team 3 in Ramadi who fought and died alongside them.

The brigade is particularly proud of its association with SEAL MA2 Mike Mansour, who, while supporting an operation in Romadi, won the Medal of Honor. The soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen, and Ramadi were deeply grateful for the life-saving heroics of their Navy doctors and corpsmen. The spiritual aid given by Navy chaplains to all services will never be forgotten. The skill and courage of Marine Corps pilots who attack targets to assist troops in contact will likewise never fade from memory. In return, the Army's Apache pilots won the respect of Marines and sailors, who, in the

mix also came to rely on the army paladins for timely and accurate fire support. A command could not have asked for a better, higher headquarters. The one Meph staff was dedicated to ensuring that there were no halves and have-nots among the units in Al-Lomba. Often the army received first priority ahead of the Meph's own Marines. The Meph commander at the time, Major General Richard Zilmer, ensured the ready first had the resources it needed to fulfill his intent, and he never questioned or second-guessed us even during the darkest hours. His forbearance demonstrated his trust in and respect for

the professionalism and competence of the soldiers under his command. Altogether, the joint effort in Ramadi worked because, no matter what service uniforms they wore, professionals dedicated to the mission professionals dedicated to the mission performed as expected. The professional dedication invinced itself in shared values and shared understanding. It was not uncommon to see soldiers and Marines march forward side by side in final honors at memorial services for their lost comrades. At times, the helmets atop inverted M4 carbines reflected a mix of Army and Marine Corps camouflage. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps, each today without peer in its domain of land warfare,

have not shared such a strong bond of common experience and understanding since the island campaigns of World War II. The services should nurture those bonds and sustain them over time. Too many people to mention. I think you did a pretty good job of getting most of them, but you can't. express, I can't express this incredible team that we had and that it was an honor to be a part of for sure. Thanks, Jacco. Likewise. If I had a chance to write that again, I would have highlighted the contributions of our National Guard and Reserve brothers and sisters as well. Some of those Apaches were out of the Texas Army National Guard. Some of those guys flew cobras in Vietnam

That flew Apaches over Vermont. And they would take a lick in and keep my thinking. I remember going out to the landing zone, a little distinguished visitor of landing zone outside the brigade headquarters and seeing an Apache out there and some, you know, warrant officer older than me walking around looking at the holes and the Apache and making the decision, yeah, I can get back in the fight with this and off he would go.

and you know those guys I think the world of them they after we left shake satire was you probably know it was killed but prior to that you know a reconnaissance patrol a group of scouts four humvees ran into about 70 al-Qaeda fighters near the habanilla canal and a place called we called it donkey island you know the old fairy tale there, but from Pinocchio, but Donkey Island, that's where they were hunkered down. And the, you know, 16 scouts against 70 al-Qaeda fighters, and, you know, it wasn't going well for the scouts, but as scouts are supposed to do, good cavalrymen,

they maintain contact with the enemy. And so they stayed in there, and despite their casualties. So they called for the quick reaction for us. And I got to say, it was not an easy lift to get, permission to bring Army Apaches to operate with an Army Brigade in the Marine A.O. The Marines are very jealously protective of their air combat element, and rightfully so. But it was kind of, you know, we just do do things differently, you know, and trying to get those things, work through all those differences was a not inconsiderable challenge.

And our Anglico team was instrumental in making that occur. But those Apaches came in and immediately started hosing down the enemy on Donkey Island, but started taking return fire themselves. And because they were so far away from Camp Romani that we couldn't, they wouldn't be able to medevac or Kazavak the wounded soldiers who were VSI, very seriously injured. So the Apaches landed. One of the Apaches landed while the other one kept up the fire.

And they call us a spur ride for like a down aviator. The front-seater jumps out of the helicopter, puts the wounded soldier into the front seat of the helicopter, and then he snap-links himself to the outside of the helicopter, which then takes off and flies back to base. Distinguished flying crosses earned that day by our National Guard support, you know, and it was not uncommon. I think there's a picture in that article

of one of our Riverine patrol boats. Apache in the background. With National Guard Apache supporting a riverine patrol boat. It's flipped from Marine to Navy. I'm not sure when that picture was taken. But, you know, probably you know, Marines and sailors, both aboard that patrol boat with Army National Guard soldiers

over watching them. It was quite a, and probably some Iraqis aboard as well, you know, probably, you know, less than enthusiastically, but they're nevertheless. Yeah, we owed so much to the 2-28 soldiers because when we got there, they told us how to stay alive. They told us where to go. They told us what to do and what not to do. And same things with the 3-8, Marines. We sent our snipers over to talk to their snipers and get the gouge on what to watch out for, what to do, what not to do. And we just, we owed so much. Those guys saved so many of our lives just by knowledge transfer, just by telling us how they were operating and what to watch out for. Yeah. Certainly 2-28 helped us out a line on our transition. Yeah, absolutely.

The pass down was great, and it saved a lot of lives. One thing about that epilogue that I wanted to point out when it says that we couldn't have asked for a better, higher headquarters. And I mentioned the support from General Zilmer. One of the things that we struggled with was post-blast fires after IEDs. And we lost some soldiers and had some really bad burn victims and my Navy chief surgeon had commented on how difficult it is even for the surgeons, you know, to deal with that emotionally. So I was mentioning that to General Neller, who was Brigadier General Neller at the time that, you know, working for General Zilmer. And I said, you know, that was one of the problems that we were facing. He said, well, I'm

What can I do for it? I said, well, I have noticed that all the Marines are running around in Nomex, and most of my soldiers don't have Nomex. My tank crewmen, Bradley crewmen, have Nomex, but that's about it. I'm an armored brigade, but, you know, the Nomex suits are only for the combat vehicle crewmen and not all the dismounted supporting types.

And because of the post-blast fires, you know, you know, I could really use some. And he said, well, how many? And I said, geez, I don't know, maybe 4,000 sets. You know, we had about 6,000 troops there and reminded me more. And he said, well, Sean, again, you know, the Marines don't have a lot that the Army doesn't have. But one thing we do have a lot of is Nomex flight suits out at Alasot Air Base with a third Marine Air Wing. and he took all the spare flight suits from the aviators from the third Marine Air Wing

and gave them to our soldiers. So I tell people that. I said a Marine General literally took the clothes off his Marines backs to give to our soldiers. Is there a better example of inter-service cooperation, and support than that. If there is, I can't think of it. And after that, you know, General Neller always had this reputation. You know, his nickname was Grumpy Bob.

You know, tough exterior, but, you know, heart of gold kind of a guy. I tell you, General Neller at that moment, became my absolute hero, and I would have followed him anywhere. We were so blessed to have the first Marine Expeditionary Forces, our higher headquarters. I don't know if the awakening might have happened without them. Yeah, they were a bit skeptical. You know, are we running with the bad crowd, you know, with these shakes?

But they gave us a flyer on it. They let us, you know, see how it would go and experiment. I remember in a brigade meeting you were talking about this plan and you were talking about the fact that you had told higher headquarters that you think you got a guy that can. kind of help with this moving forward. And their reply to you, they kind of like, I don't know if it's the next meeting, but they said, hey, we were

targeting that guy. We've been targeting this guy for six months. What are you talking about you want to work with him? And he said, well, that's what you, that's, I think, when you were explaining the mobster thing about, hey, well, you know, he's a gangster. And if a gangster needs to make money to feed his gang, he's going to sell some stuff and trade some stuff and make some things happen.

And, you know, this is also where I started hearing that, that I guess it's an Arab expression of they're going to bet on the winning horse. Yeah, the strongest tribe. The strongest tribe. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I use another thing to explain it to General Zilmer and Neller, who are both Catholics. I said when I was in Catholic school, one of the nuns taught us that every saint had a past, but every sinner has a future.

And so these shakes, they have pasts. They're not white sheets of paper, but who's to say they can't be going forward? So let's take them at their word and work for them, trust but verify, right? But, you know, let's give them the chance for a better future. So that bought me enough time. credibility there to give the awakening a chance to grow. The one thing about the awakening meeting that you didn't mention was

Sheikh Sitar did not like Governor Sammy Mamun. He was from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which the Sheikhs considered to be indistinguishable from al-Qaeda. Kind of the political wing of al-Qaeda, Sinn Féin and, you know. So they had some pretty tough language in there about getting rid of the governor and replacing him with somebody from the awakening movement. And I said, let's soften that a little bit and say, you know, through the democratic process. Because I had seen how tribal justice has worked.

And I was afraid I was giving them sort of a, you know, license to kill. You know, so we, you know, we made that a bit more politically correct. And so the 12 points were all good 12 points. If I could have written them myself, I would have written the first 11 the way they were. The 12th one, they modified at my request. So they were savvy guys. And Sheikh Satar was like right out of central casting. You met him.

Yeah. Kind of very photogenic guy. and we like we had a photographer with me journalist and can I get a picture he goes wait a minute so I get my better gun here and gets the right well put on different robe and here's my good side

and all this kind of stuff he knew what he's doing yeah he was a character yeah he said he was a character yeah and and a courageous human being yeah because he had to have known you know

how hard they were going to come after him. Yeah. And he might have been confident enough to think that he could overcome that, but you know there's risk. Yeah, yeah. And we were talking about the Apaches a little earlier. And, you know, that was one of his requests. He said, can I get some of those?

I was like, Apaches? I was like, yeah, yeah, they're really good. I'd like some of those. Like, you know, you're not going to get any Apaches. So, like I said, of 2007, February 2007, you're done. Yeah. You turn over.

Yep. You go home. Yeah. For me, look, I was in charge of 100 people, 40 SEALs. I was there for a little over six months or seven months. And I came home and I went back to doing what you're doing in the SEAL teams when you're not at war. About a month goes by. and I woke up in the morning and I kind of just had a whole different, I had a, I had a lightning, a lightning feeling in my, in my being, right?

Like, I kind of thought to myself, like, why do I feel kind of like better today? And better isn't even the right word, but I just felt like some big pressure had been alleviated. And I realized, oh, I'm not worried about one of my guys getting wounded or killed right now. Oh. And I didn't even realize that it kind of was an afterthought how much I was thinking about that on deployment of every day is like, yep, today could be a day. You hit a roadside bomb. You hit a triple stack IED and I'm going to lose six of my friends today or tomorrow or the next day. So, you know, I was like, okay, cool.

I don't have to worry about that stuff. I, you know, can carry on and move forward. what kind of pressure relief did you feel? Did you feel any? Did you, what was it like for you coming home? Yeah, I don't think I had that experience. You know, I came back. I was still a brigade commander.

I was still kind of fighting for my brigade as we were inactivating it in this remote corner of Germany. We were kind of a bit lost in the shuffle because the U.S. Army of Europe was drawing down and, you know, we were informed on the way home that, I'm sorry, you know, sorry by our higher division headquarters that, sorry, but we expended all of our welcome home money on your sister brigade. There's none for you. And then, you know, they had a division memorial plaque made with all of the fallen from the division,

from the deployment, the vast majority of which were under the ready first combat team. And somehow or another, they forgot to invite anybody from our brigade to attend the memorial ceremony or the unveiling ceremony. The excuse was, well, we deleted all of you from the global address list because, you know, you were deployed. And it's like, that's pretty weak. So. The hits just keep on coming. Yeah. I mean, we were able to, fortunately, we had a U.S.O troop come through, and we were able to get a performance. former to come gratis and perform, and we raised money.

I forget even how we managed to pull this rabbit out of the hat, but we managed to put on our own welcome home ceremony. Nobody welcomed us home. We welcomed ourselves home. We got notified, like, you know, we're at Friedberg and Giesen, and this unveiling is in Wiesbaden. If you're not familiar with Germany, trust me, you know, these are not close together locations.

and, you know, like, hey, we're unveiling this memorial. Why aren't you guys here? I'm like, what are you talking about? You didn't get the email? It's like, no. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we didn't send any to you. So can you get all your battalion commanders and sergeants major down here in an hour for this event?

I was like, well, out of respect for the names on there, yes, I'll do it, you know? So we get down there. They didn't even have any seats for us. We had to stand behind the bleacher. And so, you know, and then for our, you know, the kind of the final thing was our inactivation ceremony for the brigade because it's going to be stood down and then stood back up at Fort Bliss, Texas. You know, we're at the rehearsal and it's like, where's the band? And like, oh, we forgot to put that on their calendar. well, you got 24 hours, you know, you're only an hour away from us.

You know, tell the band that, oh, we put them on block leave, so they're not available. So we had to have, like, you know, canned music for our, you know, ceremony. So, I mean, you know, rubbing insult into injury. And then thanks to General Odeyerno, I had a good job when I got back to the States. I went to the joint staff. he had been the former director of the joint staff and was looking after me a little bit because clearly my division wasn't

back in Germany and so we get back to the States and I'm the chief of the Iraq Division General Petraeus is ramping up the surge and it was game on so I just jumped from one treadmill to another but I will say this that when I was, you know, learning my new job and just focused on that,

when I would park my car in South parking lot of the Pentagon, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up because I was in an open area and an urban environment until I could get undercover. Because you remember when we'd go to the government center in Ramadi, you'd have to, before you got out of your Humvee, you'd have to throw a smoke grenade and zigzag, from the Humvee into the door of the government center.

I mean, that's how bad it was when I first got there. And I was like, I just being in the open with lots of windows around me, multi-story buildings, it took me a while to get used to that. I'm okay with it now. But, you know, that took me a little bit of... So I did leave a little bit of a mark. It did, I think, yeah. And my wife will tell you that, you know, I have undiagnosed PTSD, you know.

I don't know. I would get a few. So I took over training when I got back for the advanced training for the seals, getting ready to deploy, and I would be out. We'd run these big urban combat drills, and I would be standing there watching, you know, these guys. And if there was a guy that was, like, standing in the street, standing in the open, I would get that nod in my stomach, like, for a split second of, like,

you're going to get shot. What are you doing? And I'd be like, oh, okay, he's going to get with paintball. I was the same way after Bosnia, because there was all about mind awareness or so many minds, and I just never would get off hard stand if I could help it. And when I got back to the States, if I saw a little kid out in like a soccer field, you know, I was like, oh, my God, you know, he's going to step out of mind. So, I mean, it was, you know, all these things kind of leave a mark, I think.

I can't, to this day, I can't watch realistic war movies. I just can't. you know, especially if there's like civilian casualties involved, you know. It's like, no, it's too real. I can watch the old World War II 1950s, Yule Brenner, you know, those kind of guys, you know, where, you know, there's no blood, you know, just put their hand over their, you know, chest and they fall over one shot, they're down, that's it, you know, they never move again. The kind of the bloodless war movies, I can watch those.

They're so hokey, you know, guns of Navarone or whatever. But, you know, the more realistic saving private Ryan, I can't. I can't watch that. I was watching The Pacific, which if you're right. And I was, it was, it came out sometime after we got back. Yeah. But I was on an airplane. And I was like watching it with headphones on in the dark airplane from, you know,

five inches in front of my face on my computer. And about halfway through this. And it was whatever episode, they, They land and there's no attacks and they're patrolling through the jungle and you're like, you know they're going to get attack. And I remember that feeling of walking down the street in Ramadi, you're like, we are 100% going to start getting attacked at any moment here. And I'm watching this thing. And all of a sudden I kind of had a shudder of like, oh, you're really, really, really into this right now, aren't you? Yeah.

You need to take a little breather. Yeah. No, in Ramadi, it was like, you know, if I haven't been shot at for 10 minutes, I'm 10 minutes closer to getting shot at again, you know. so, yeah. So you were around when they're putting the surge together. Yeah, I was in the Pentagon. Well, the surge was put together. My job was to kind of shepherd the surge through the, you know,

interagency process, you know, as it was occurring. And we had all the big hearings, the famous Petraeus Crocker hearings on the Capitol Hill and preparing everybody for all of that. And what are the benchmarks for success of the surge? I mean, we got the surge approved, but, you know, you know, how do we know if it's working and all those kinds of things. So it was a bit of a pressure cooker job. And then I went from there down to, got promoted at one star.

I went down to take command of a joint task force in charge of military support. Did you get promoted of one star because of Ramadi? Did that help? Was it like, was it recognized at this point? Now we're getting into 2008. It's been a couple of years. Are people like, oh, yeah, this guy did a good job? Yeah, well, the president.

Despite his multiple write-ups that he has as a young officer. Yes, absolutely. So the president of my selection board was a guy named David Petraeus, who came back specifically to, they brought him back to make sure that, you know, the folks that, you know, he, he saw and wanted to move up, you know, were recognized. So HR and I were on the same one-star list, you know. Although I was, I'm two years older than HR, you know, he was class 83. I was class 81.

And once again, Candy Crowley comes up to me in the halls of the Pentagon when I'm a colonel there, you know. And, well, this was before, you know, my, you know, issue with her at Operation Inherent Resolve. And she says, hey, Colonel McFarland, she says, do you know HR McMaster? I'm like, yeah, of course, we've known each other for a long time. And both cavalry guys. And she says, well, don't you think it's, you know, strange that he hasn't been promoted to Brigadier General yet? I said, you know, I'm two years senior to him, and I haven't been promoted to Brigadier General yet. So why don't you ask me how I feel about me not being promoted?

Oh, I didn't realize. I was like, you know, just because I have hair and he doesn't, doesn't mean I'm older than he, or he's older than me, you know. So she said, well, okay, well, tell me about both of them. No, never mind. You ruined it. I'm not going to share that with you. But, no, HR certainly deserved it. And I was proud to be on the same list as him. And a lot of us who served as brigade combat team commanders in Iraq together or around the same time, all ended up as brigadiers together on the joint staff and Army staff. And then throughout our careers and kind of a band of brothers type of a thing, you know, where, and then my time in Afghanistan, I've served as

the DECOS OPSOPS, Deputy Commander, U.S. When did you go to Afghanistan? 11 to 13, 16 glorious months during the surge there, actually. You know, actually the back end of the surge. And I got the opportunity to work with so many great, you know, Brits and Aussies and Canadians and French officers and on down the list plus multiple other services that, you know, by the time I became a three-star commander in Iraq for Operation Inherent Resolve,

every single component commander in Sencom I had served with in Iraq or Afghanistan previously. You know, special ops, you know, Tony Thomas and Scotty Miller I knew, you know, and, you know, all the other folks on down, you know, the, you know, Smoke Bydler, Kid Donagan, CQ Brown, all these guys I'd worked with before in combat. How rare is that, right? And even, you know, I had an Australian deputy in Afghanistan, and he worked for me again in Iraq. So it was like usual suspects, another war, round up the usual suspects.

And General Neller even said that to me, you know, and he was a three-star, and I was a two-star and goes, doesn't the Army have more than five generals? Why do I keep running to the same guys over and over again in every, you know, war? I say, I don't know. I guess they got their go-toes, you know. You get done with this process of getting the surge to happen over Iraq, and then you said 13 and 14 you're in Afghanistan. No, 11 through 12.

Oh, sorry, 11 through 12. 11 through 13. 11 through 13, you're in Afghanistan. This is your first time going to Afghanistan, right? It was. I had to learn all new place names. And it all sound like cling on names to me, but I got, I learned it pretty quickly. And how did you compare what were the differences, what were the lessons learned that applied and which ones didn't apply?

Yeah. Well, obviously everybody, you know, General Petraeus had been there prior to my arrival. And everybody said, well, you know, let's do another awakening here in Afghanistan. stand. This is like when they tell the one hit wonder, can you write another hit song for us? Just do the same beat or whatever. Let's go. Yeah, you know, I don't know if it was like lightning in a bottle or something.

But, you know, General Allen was my boss. And he played an important part in The Awakening, too, as a one star with two Meph. When they came in behind one Meph, General Allen really kind of spread what was a Ramadi phenomenon across Anbar and then General Zodiano and Petraeus made it an Iraq-wide thing with the sons of Iraq, right? But General Allen and General Gragainis and these guys, you know, they understood that, you know, the different tribal groupings

and how to get them to, you know, come together and join this movement. And I always say about the awakening that I was Salieri to General Allen's Mozart because it would have been a ship in a bottle type of phenomena if General Allen hadn't spread it province wide and then into Baghdad with General Petraeus. So when we were looking in Afghanistan, I mean the dynamics were just completely different. It's a much more fragmented society because of the terrain, you know, the big valleys

and unlike Iraq, the enemy had this safe haven in the federally administrative tribal areas in Pakistan, the Fata, Zyristan, that they would go to every winter. There was no campaign season in Iraq. It was Gamon 365. In Afghanistan, the snow would come in, Taliban would go to the Fata, you know, and then when the snow melted in the mountain passes, they'd come back,

and we'd have a fighting season, which was one of the biggest mistakes we made in our withdrawal, is we did it in the middle of the fighting season. You know, we could have done it in the winter. There's no factor. Yeah. Much less factor. Yeah, so, but anyway, so there were a lot of differences,

but there were also a lot of similarities. You know, I mean, it's counterinsurgency. You're trying to build up the, the indigenous forces to, the problem is in Iraq, Maliki hadn't gone off the rails yet on us. He was working mostly with us, right? In Afghanistan, Karzai just hated us. So when you have the government that you're trying to support actively fighting against you, not all of it, not at the cabinet level necessarily, but the head of it,

the president. And the way we created the Constitution for Afghanistan made the president, the executive, incredibly powerful, much more powerful than in America. You know, an Afghan province isn't like an American state. A lot of people think it is, but it's not. An American state is a sovereign entity. You know, we are the United States. The states decided to create a federal government. in Afghanistan, the president appoints the provincial governors. You know, it's an administrative distinction, you know. And, I mean, everybody derives their power, not from their local population, but from the central government.

So if you get the central government against you, you know, and all the provincial governors are against you, and then you have corruption in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was on another whole level in Afghanistan. Wow, that's saying a lot. I had the opium things going on down there in the south, but a much more fragmented, you know, there was no large tribe,

well, shake kind of loyalty in Afghanistan, where that's what really turned it for us in Iraq. If the Sheikh said, okay, we're flipping, 90% of the tribe would go with them, you know? That didn't happen in Afghanistan. So we had all these things. We did not have control of the border, not in the least. And, yeah, Iran influenced the Shia militia groups in the South,

but that was just the part of the country. It wasn't, you know, the most critical part. It wasn't Baghdad necessarily. Although the Shias were in Baghdad, and they were going on their campaign against the Sunni neighborhoods and everything. We were able to, you know, split the different Shia militia groups in Iraq. And Afghanistan, the Pashtuns were, you know, there was no, there were no levers, you know, like tribal elders, unless you got down to the very low village level, you know.

And so if you're going to go village by village, you know, it's going to be a problem. The other big problem is the level of advancement. You know, the Iraqi society was basically a 1970s society frozen in amber, you know, for 20 or 30 years, right? But they had a lot of the institutions of a modern state. You know, they had universities, they had infrastructure, they had industry, They had all this. Afghanistan had none of that. General Abizade famously said Afghanistan is a 14th century country, not in 1970, 14th century.

And if we stay in Afghanistan for 100 years and do everything right, it'll be a 15th century country. You know, I mean, that was the magnitude of the challenge in Afghanistan. So, you know, there are a lot of people over there. I know a lot of them, but everybody tried really hard. but it was probably, you know, more than, we probably set our sights too high. Not to say we should have withdrawn the way we did. I think we could have continued to manage that, you know, but it wasn't a one-generational issue in Afghanistan.

It was multi-generational, and we would have had to keep our hands on the back of that bicycle seat for another 30 to 40 years. But we weren't taking any casualties for 18 months. months. We had no U.S. servicemen or women killed in Afghanistan. You know, would that have been worth it versus allowing, you know, ISIS Corazon to, you know, form and gel and now project threats around the world again, you know, above my pay grade, but I would submit that we could have maintained that force over there and it wouldn't have broken the bank.

Yeah, it certainly seemed like we had reached a, if nothing else, a steady state of somewhat stable scenario. Yeah, stability and support operations. Yeah, absolutely. After that, we're getting into 2014. You take over, what, in Fort Hood for? Yeah, first I commanded the first Armored Division at Fort Bliss. And after I came back from Afghanistan.

And my son was graduating from West Point, and he said, Dad, what are you going to do next? I said, I'm going to command a division. He said, which one? I said, either First Infantry at Fort Riley or First Armored at Fort Bliss. He goes, okay, I said, why? He says, well, I think then I'll apply for first calf at Fort Hood. I was like, I get it, buddy, you know, no hard feelings.

You don't want to be that guy, you know. So I went to Fort Bliss, First Armored Division, which was great. I'd been stationed there several times before is where I met my wife as a lieutenant and everything. So I love Fort Pleasant, love El Paso, and I had a great time, great people. You know, I mean, just a wonderful team of teams there, both on the installation size and the division.

And the best thing in the world is to be both the division commander and the installation commander, because then, you know, you're... You own it all, huh? Yeah, exactly. And it was brand new. I mean, it'd been around since the 1800s as an old cavalry post. So it had the old charming tree-lined, you know, Colonel's Row around the parade field and the chapels and all that really nice old West stuff.

But it also had several billion dollars of recent military construction. So, you know, the new part of Fort Post was state of the art. I mean, it was nothing better. So we were, I was very fortunate. it. But General O'Dierno was now Chief of Staff in the Army, and he said, Sean, I want you to go take command of Third Corps at Fort Hood, trying to move you along here. You know, don't want you to, you know, get stagnated. So how long did you do Division Command for? I was only a little over a year.

So they're definitely moving you along. Yeah, yeah. So they moved me up to Third Corps, took over from General Mark Millie. And then shortly thereafter, you know, we were slated to go to Afghanistan, but, you know, change a mission. And we got the, told that, you know, we're going to go take over the war against ISIS in Iraq. And, you know, headquartered in Kuwait, Iraq and Syria would be our area of operations. How did you feel watching the rise of ISIS as it was coming back? Deja vu all over again. You know, not only was that, excuse me, not only was the rise of ISIS,

predictable it was predicted when we withdrew from Iraq in 2011 everybody who had been there said this is going to be bad to what how do we fail to convey that message up the chain of commander is it just it was conveyed it was ignored then that's it that's like just how it is yeah um and so our friends in Ramadi and the Abu Nehmer tribes and folks like that who stood with us against al-Qaeda were butchered by ISIS when they came back into the down the Euphrates River Valley. And so when I got back in Operation Inherent Resolve, people said, well, you know, can you get the awakening band back together? I'm like, they're dead or run off? No. You know. That ship has sailed.

But that's not to say that there aren't military-aged men and the tribes out there who won't join the police forces to once again police themselves so they don't have to rely on predominantly Shia external folks that they don't trust to do it. I was very excited to see giant convoys of ISIS flying ISIS flags. across the open desert because I thought to myself, they are all going to be killed.

Like as opposed to what we were dealing with, these, you know, hiding in the shadows and mixing it with the civilians, when you're in the open desert driving in convoys with big giant black ISIS flags on your vehicles, I thought to myself, oh, this is going to be, that you want to engage in a conventional war with us. This is going to be good for us. Yeah, and eventually it was, but initially not, because we went into that fight not optimally configured.

First of all, it was two countries, Iraq and Syria. In Syria, we were not fighting one war against ISIS, we were fighting two wars. We were fighting a war against ISIS and a war against the Assad regime. And the Venn diagram on those over a lap, in good and bad ways. We had different authorities in Iraq and Syria, but both were in my area of operations. We had multiple commands, special ops and conventional ops,

banging around. So Secretary of Defense Dash Carter said, well, I want to put it all under Sean McFarland. He knew me, you know. But he said, I want to give Sean control over all the special ops, include Tier 1, which I talked to Tony Thomas, and I said, I don't really need that, you know. As long as I've read card, we can work around that.

But we created a combined joint task force. Really, it was set up by the U.S. Army Central Command, you know, because they were sort of like the contact force. You know, we have contact force, blunt force, decisive force. They were kind of the contact force, and their job is to set up a temporary command post until, a war fighting headquarters, like a core headquarters comes in, and that's what happened, and we took that over. And then once we're kind of on the ground, it quickly became apparent to me that we were fighting an almost conventional force, you know, hybrid at least, with largely, forces largely trained and equipped to conduct counterinsurgency.

and we were supporting them under basically counterterrorism authorities, you know. So we had a misalignment there. And I could retrain and re-equip the Syrian and Iraqi forces under, you know, with my own resources. And I had to, but I had to convince my bosses to change the authorities we were fighting under things like the non-combatant casualty value was set at zero, which means, you know, you can't drop a bomb if you think there's going to be a civilian casualty. If you're fighting in an urban area, as we discussed earlier, you need to relax that. And ISIS was largely in urban areas. We had other challenges.

A week after we got there, the Russians arrived in Syria, along with their SA-17s and their SU-27s and things like that. we had challenges with the Iranians, Qasem Soleimani, and the Revolutionary Guards, trying to create inroads through Iraq to Syria. You know, there's a Shia militia group in Iraq called the Khadib Hezbollah. They were trying to link them up with the Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon. So the Iranians, when we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, the Iranians, The Iranians filled the vacuum that we left behind, the power vacuum. And so we had to deal with that.

And there were hundreds of Shia militia groups on the battlefield fighting ISIS, fighting each other, fighting all kinds of things. Some of them were good. You know, Grand Ayatollah Sistani raised them with a fatwa to fight ISIS. Some of them were Khadib Hezbollah, Asabal Haq, groups like that. which were extensions, proxies really, for the Revolutionary Guards from Iran under Qasem Soleimani. Others were somewhere in between, you know, Bader organization and others were semi-independent of Iran, not fully. So you had this whole spectrum.

Unfortunately, the more aligned with Iran, the more effective than lethal, the less, you know, the Sistani guy. were barely getting enough calories to stay alive, let alone fight the enemy. So we had a lot of challenges there. And then in Syria, we had the Syrian Kurds. And, of course, in northern Iraq, we had the Iraqi Kurds who don't like each other, as you know. The P UK, the PKK, you know, they'd buried the hatchet to fight ISIS. But, you know, neither of them liked the YPG in northern Syria. And the Turks claimed the YPG were an extension of the...

PKK, which they were actively fighting in Turkey. And the YPG were communists, our communists, but they were also the most effective ISIS force. And then you've got to remember all the opposition in Iraq or in Syria was raised in opposition to the Assad regime, not in opposition to ISIS, because ISIS was fighting the Assad regime too. So, you know, this expression, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Really? Because ISIS and the Assad regime don't like each other. of them is my friend. Can you help me out?

And then the Jordanians were very nervous, and they had that fighter pilot captured and burned alive. And, you know, so there were a lot of, you know, things going on. A lot of I had forces in Turkey, forces in Jordan, forces in Iraq, forces in Kuwait. I was trying to bring all my special ops guys together under one hat. So Special OPS Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resol, OI.R. Couldn't get permission from the U.S. Army Central Command Fire Marshal to put them in one of the empty warehouses next to my headquarters in Arafjan, Kuwait.

So, you know, I'd be in a core headquarters. I had lots of, you know, these big Drash Command Post tents. So I set up a, you know, a headquarters for them out of drash tents. You know how many, and the fire marshal wouldn't let them occupy the warehouse because there weren't enough sprinkler heads in there for the number of people they wanted. Guess how many sprinkler heads are in a tent? I'm going to guess a zero. Yeah, pretty close.

But that's okay. You know, it wasn't his deal. I mean, what a way to fight a war, right? But anyway, we got command of control arranged. I, you know, identified the problem, which was, you know, how we were organized and the authorities that we had. You know, Clausewitz, everybody talks about wars and extent. extension of politics.

Another great thing that he said is the first and most important that a statesmen or commander must make, or decision a statesman or commander must make is to understand the type of war that he is about to embark upon, neither mistaking it for nor attempting to turn it into that which is alien to its nature. In other words, you can't fight a conventional force like a, a counterinsurgency just because you want it to be a counterinsurgency. You have to change the non-combatant casualty value. You've got to lift that, you know.

You got to tell your guys, no, you don't, you know, find IEDs and disarm them. You know, you have complex obstacle belts that look like something out of L.A. Maine in the Second World War. You're going to get all your EOD techs killed that way. You've got to do combined arms breaching, you know, and train and equip. them to do all that. And I had about a billion and a half dollars of, you know, money that I could use for that. And so I, you know, we set about to change things. And, you know, we had Mosul and Raka, Raka in Syria was their capital. Mosul was their biggest city. And we had to get those two back.

And, you know, so we had to organize the campaign, visualize it, right? A commander has to understand the environment, right, then visualize, and what's the problem is, after understanding the environment, and then visualize a solution, and then communicate that and then control it, right? You know, so I understood the problem. I visualized the solution. I communicated it with varying degrees of success, up the chain of command, what authorities I would require. Like we had in Iraq, the ability to accompany indigenous forces on the ground. That was not initially allowed, you know, but we got that permission, but it took time. I had to convince them, you know, that it's okay for us to be outside the wire with these guys. We had to figure out how to provide, how to conduct

airstrikes against ISIS folks who were in contact with Iranian-backed militias because we didn't want to support Iranian-backed militias, but we did want to kill ISIS, you know. So we had, we developed all these solutions, but it took a little time, but we got there. We had to get the Iraqi army up off its back, dust it off, put it, you know, clean it up, point it in the right direction, give it what it needed, and then we had to kind of be next to them. We had to convince the prime minister and everybody that this was a valid way to go. And I had to, I had to develop my own campaign plan with lines of operation and battle rhythm events and decisions. And, vision points and all that kind of stuff, you know, and all that was in about 30 to 60 days.

So it's a busy, it's a busy 30 to 60 days. Yeah, but, you know, it's what you're trained to do. And, you know, the Army had prepared me for that well by the time I'd spent on the joint staff working the interagency processes. My time is a joint task force commander doing border security, learning about, you know, law enforcement and civil agencies. My time is working with cabinet-level ministers in Afghanistan as a two-star as the deputy chief of staff for operations over there, working the NATO chain of command. I wore a NATO hat and a U.S. hat. So I understood how the NATO chain of command worked and how

it sourced forces, and we had 29 troop contributing nations, some of them from NATO, some not, on my staff. So I had to figure out how to bring them all together. my time as having a combined joint staff of several hundred in Afghanistan was great training for that, right? My time is, you know, fighting in Iraq. A lot of these guys were still around that I knew from those days, you know. I mean, the 7th Division Commander, General Murty, you remember him? He was now like their deputy chief of staff for logistics and, you know, some of the shakes were still around, still knew me. You know, the mayor from Talfar was around.

You know, so I knew a lot of people, and I just kind of knew how the Iraqi government and everything functioned. So, but I got to say this, because I'm talking to a seal, the war winner was, when we pulled out of Iraq, we left behind an ODA. Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha.

And they had to turn that over to a SEAL team when I got there. And what they did, even while we were gone under Chief of Mission Authority, under the ambassador, they continued to work with the Iraqi Special Forces. Remember the Iraqi ISOP, Iraqi Special Forces? And they evolved into the CTS, the Counterterrorism Service. The Counterterrorism Service, bar none, were the most effective. force, indigenous force, I'll say not more effective than us, but

most effective indigenous force in Iraq or Syria, better than the Russians by far, you know? Because we had picked and trained every one of their leaders and they were a truly national force. They were not Shia, they weren't Sunni, they weren't Kurd, they were Iraqi.

They were led by folks that we had, all of them were picked and trained. And they were led by but good leaders who understood leadership and leadership from the front. There were 14 battalions in the CTS

and two brigades. Within a year of the ISIS invasion of Iraq, all 14 of those battalion commanders have been killed in action. Think about that. But no Iraqi security force would make a move against ISIS

if they weren't led by a counterterrorism service unit. The CTS had to leave every attack. They became shock troops. That's not what they were. were trained for. They were trained to do counterterrorism. But the need for them,

they had to adapt and become the shock troops, the lead echelon, or else nobody else would follow. Just like Siltim 3. You know, I mean, you had to adapt, right? So non-traditional roles. But that's

the key to winning is adapting. Yeah, the guys that were over there, you know, when Mazul went down, they were super impressed with the Iraqi soldiers that went in there and fought and took massive casualties going in there. Well, they took massac casualties because they're not particularly good, you know. You know, the average, you know, private Jundi, you know, got like maybe 15 rounds of, you know, marshalmanship training before they put them out in the field. A lot of it was OJT.

but the CTS guys absolutely be impressed by them because those guys are the real deal in fact one of the first casualties we had was a Navy SEAL up there Kevin Keating Jr. Yeah no it's it's C4 it's C4 it's Charles Keating Charles Keating yeah Charles Keating Chuck Keating and um yeah from SEAL Team 1 and yeah that was on my watch I mean that was a there was an explosion of ISIS guys out of Mosul, you know, as we were starting to put the pressure on them around Ramadi, and we took Ramadi back, and we were taking Fallujah back, and we're moving, we were working with the Syrian Kurds and starting to put pressure in Syria and closing the man-bidged gap where all the foreign fighters are coming through, and at the same time,

we're beginning to put pressure on them up around Mosul, and so they did a countertouching. happened to be while I think the Secretary of Defense was visiting. But like 500 of these Muldoons came boiling out of Mosul. And, you know, this whole, you know, pleasant fiction they were telling ourselves that, well, we're one terrain feature back, you know. Well, you know, the enemy wouldn't let us be one frame. They mean, they were on top of our guys before we knew it. And it was a tough fight.

And that's how Charles Keating, you know, lost his life. But, yeah, it was pretty intense fighting. And, of course, you've seen the pictures of Mosul, and Ramadi looks even worse, probably. You know, I mean, it was really, you know, block by block. Yeah, it looked like they dropped a lot of bombs in Ramadi. Yeah, actually, we didn't drop a ton of bombs in Ramadi. When I saw like, I saw a lot of bombs in Ramadi.

Pictures of Tamim. Yeah. And it was like rubble. Yeah. A lot of that was ISIS did that. Okay. A lot of ISIS rubbled a lot of it. Now we did some of it to be sure.

But ISIS really brought a lot of it on themselves. But Mosul, we did a lot of that. I did a lot of that. Mosul University where they were making chemical weapons and things like that. You know, yeah, absolutely. We did our. share of damage. But part of the problem

is also the Iraqi army when they go into an urban fight, the way they do that is to rubble, you know, what's in front of them and then occupy the rubble. It's kind of a Soviet technique you're seeing the Russians doing it in Ukraine right now.

So because we weren't necessarily with them at Ramadi, you know, side by side, we were like back from them. They were using artillery to just pound the cities. And by the way, most of the Iraqi army is who? What sect? Oh, Shia. Shia. And most of the people in Ramadi were Sunni. So they didn't care. They didn't really care. So, you know, ISIS did some of it. Coalition. Yeah, we did some of it. But a lot of it was the Iraqi army just

going in there and just, you know, you know, steamrolling it. And the same thing happened in Mosul. I mean, this is how they're going to do it. And it's hard to criticize them because at their level of training and sophistication, what else, how else they're going to operate? You, with the, what was it, like something like 25 or 30,000 estimated enemy were killed in this time frame? It's a massive number. It was about that, yeah. And, and I know. In a year, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, very limited casualties for us. Obviously, Charles Keating, he talked about C4. Joshua Wheeler and we had a Marine Sergeant Cardin killed at Fire Base Bell, yeah. Which is still, for all the progress that got made, that's amazing for ISIS being, you know, destroyed to that level.

It was pretty amazing to see. Yeah, but that's because the Counterterrorism Service were so well trained and equipped by us that they absorb. the bulk of the casualties that we would have had to absorb had there been no CTS. Yeah. Well, thankfully, we did train them. Right, absolutely. I mean, that was one smart thing that we did. The other thing is we went after deep targets.

You know, in a counterinsurgery, you don't really think deep close and rear, you know, but we had a deep battle against the caliphate. And we went after their sources of revenue. banks and oil refineries and all that kind of stuff with deep strikes. Yeah, I was reading some interview with you, and you were talking about the fact that you were just literally blowing up banks where they had their money. Yeah.

So they couldn't pay their soldiers. Like a billion dollars in one strike one time. A billion with a B. Yeah. That's got to be quite annoying if you're ISIS, right? a billion dollars getting blown up. I'll tell you, the impact on them was measurable. I mean, it was after those bank strikes that we began to see, you know,

a decline in morale and capacity by the, you know, the foreign fighters and all the other folks. By the time we got to Mosul, the enemy was saying, well, you know, the battle of Kiara is going to be decisive for the battle of Mosul. We cannot lose Kiara, West Air. field and they they we captured it almost without a fight they couldn't resist us at that point you know because of the effect of the deep battle targeting yeah i mean it was it was a real uh eye opener on the effectiveness and of course you have to take a lot of isr away from hvi hunting from the special ops guys what they didn't like and from you know dynamic targeting close support you know of the

advisory teams working with the Iraqi divisions on the ground to, you know, do your target development. But, you know, I made it pretty clear where my priorities were and, you know, was able to get what I needed to do that. And I think it paid off in the long run. That's some of those principles that you talked about earlier, about finding different ways to hurt the enemy. That's definitely hit them in their pocketbook.

Yeah. And I don't say that HVI hunting was a complete waste of time, but it was... Just a lower priority at the time. Well, it was an inordinate drain on resources for ISR. I was like, we can't afford to have 90% of our ISR looking for needles and haystacks. As a conventional warfighter, my approach is instead of finding the needle in a haystack to just burn the haystack down, and then we'll get the needle that way. And so we did a mix of that.

Yeah. You wrap up there in 2016. I did see in my research that you were named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2016. I don't know how that happened. To this day, it's a mystery, but I was honored that Senator John McCain did the write-up for that. That was an embarrassing phone call, by the way, to my boss. I was like, hey, this is going to, my public affairs officer found out about it, told me. So I said, well, I better tip off General Austin.

Who was it that found you? Who was it that figured out that you should be recognized that way? No idea. Absolutely. Just randomly someone found you. It might have been the dust up that I had over my, you know, press conference. The press conference. Because the fallout, the blowback on that, you know.

know, all kinds of people that, you know, not necessarily of my ilk, you know, were cheering, you know, and it's like, I, you know, okay, I said what I said, you know, people are going to make of it what they're going to make of it. And I became something of a folk hero for some folks out there. Maybe that's what it was. I can't, again, I do not know, but I was honored that Senator McCain did the right-up. That's to me the most meaningful. Who did you get to blowback from? I mean, okay, I get it you get it from your boss. Like, hey, you kind of made the presidents.

Like, you're coming, you're in the wrong lane accidentally. But like, was there people saying? Well, I told everybody, I said, I don't know how this happened. You know, I'm embarrassed, you know, to be even telling you this. And, you know, just FYI, I'm not going to go to the big gala in New York City or any of that kind of stuff. There will be no press availabilities as a result. Was there people in the Army that didn't like the way you did things? No, I'd just say I didn't get a lot of direct, because people knew me and I was like out in front of this telling everybody, hey, I don't know how this happened and everybody believed it.

So nobody said, oh, there's McFarland out there self-promoting or anything. So it wasn't that. It was just, for me it was just awkward, you know, because people, I think might have made, some people might have assumed. otherwise. In a broader sense of like you're in Ramadi, you're doing this counterinsurgency stuff. And wait, why is it an armor guy doing counterinsurgency? And now you're in Iraq and we've been doing counterinsurgency and you're saying, no, we should be doing conventional war. Was there people that were, you know, inside the army going out to McFarland? This guy's going in the other direction again. Did you have kind of, for lack of a better word, haters?

Skeptics. Skeptics. Skeptics. And in both cases, you know, you're the person on the ground as a commander who has to make an assessment of the situation and come up with a plan of attack. And then you have to convince whoever you need to convince to make that attack succeed. And in some cases, that was up my own chain of command, you know, back to, you know, Washington, D.C. or through C.N. or sometimes it was, you know, the Chod conference in Madrid for NATO, you know, I had to fly over there and talk to them about that. Some of it was Congress. Some of it was, a lot of it was right

there in Baghdad, trying to get the prime minister and his folks aligned with what I was trying to do, and also Tehran. Now, I didn't talk directly to the Iranians, but I knew who I could talk to who did talk to the Iranians and I would make crystal clear to them what I was trying to do what I was not trying to do you know kind of reassure and then there were the Russians you know and I had interlocutors for the Russians as well to make sure that we didn't get you know nose to nose too often still happen yeah but you know they always came off the worst for it man that is a Just a crazy, complicated scenario that you were just kind of moseying through. Yeah, the National Security Council called it marbled, you know.

Okay. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, it's better than dogs breakfast or, you know, shit show or whatever, you know. So you get done with that. Now you're, like I said, we want to reiterate that you were one of times. Time magazine's 100 most influential people. You get done with that. Your next duty station is Trey Dock,

the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. Yeah, I came back. I commanded Third Corps for a better part of another year. And, yeah, the Army wanted me to go to Europe, take command over there. And at that point, you know, I was kind of a spent force. largely. I needed to recuperate. And I didn't know that I had enough energy right then and there

to go take command of U.S. Army Europe. So I requested not to do that, which at a senior level, you don't, typically when you turn down the next step, that's pretty much the last thing you do. But I will say this, that General Millie and General Dan Allen, the Vice Chiefs, the Army were very understanding. And they gave me a couple of options. And I chose Trade Act to work for an old battle buddy, Dave Perkins there, you know, and kind of, you know, decide what I want to do next. Do I want to hang around and hang around, you know,

for the fourth star I'm still in my 50s do I want to retire but I was a trade doc at a great time you know working for General Perkins was an absolute pleasure you know he was one of the smartest guys I know

it was during the whole multi-domain battle operations kind of roll out you know got to learn a lot and I'd been a trade doc one star in charge of leader development and education so you know I I was in it

I'm a doctrine nerd because I went to Sam's and the leadership nerd because I was a one star. And I just really, and I got to work on my direct reports for the recruiting command, the ROTC cadet command, and the basic training guys, you know, and a couple other, the asymmetric warfare group, which is kind of like special forces, but not. So it was, I loved it. I absolutely loved my time at Trey Dock, but, you know, I decided that, I did have this master's degree in aerospace engineering.

I wasn't getting any younger. You know, I was going to get promoted or I wasn't going to get promoted, you know, it wasn't 100% one way or the other. So decided to retire on my terms. I thank General Milley very much for the opportunity to continue to serve. But, you know, it was time for me to go do something else, I think, you know. So that's why I, that's why and when I left. And I think it's important for everybody to kind of know when you've kind of reached the end of the line.

And, you know, everybody reaches it sooner or later. You know, you can ride it all the way to the last station, you know, or get off at other stations along the way. And there's no one right answer, you know. And I felt that, you know, the folks that, you know, are around me were great folks. and, you know, the Army didn't depend on Sean McFarland, you know, necessarily. So that was it. Yeah. You called it after 37 years.

I did, yeah. And, you know, I don't regret it, but there are parts of the military that I do miss. But hanging up my uniform for the last time was, that was a surreal experience. Like, surely I'm going to have to put this on again sometime. I mean, it hung there for a while in the closet until I realized, nobody's going to ask me to suit up here. But, yeah, so I taught for a semester at Georgetown, enjoyed that.

They were very nice. They were, you know, willing to let me, you know, continue to be there, stay there as a professor, but I got an offer to go do my aerospace thing, you know, out here in San Diego and flew out here and walked around. Can I say the name of the company? Sure. I won't. I'll just say... A company. It was a great company

with very patriotic leadership with a great ethos, doing amazing cutting-edge technology and I was so excited I called my wife because we thought we were going to retire in the D.C. area like most people do. And I said, we've got to come out here to San Diego and do this.

And I loved it. But then after doing that for about four years, you know, decided to kind of, you know, drop into a lower gear, semi-retire. So I have time to talk to folks like you and spend more time with grandkids. We're up to five. Yeah, we talked a little bit when you were in San Diego, and, you know, I was going to try and get you on here. But, yeah, like you said, it was seem like you were busier than you should have been as a retired guy. Well, I guess a semi-retired guy.

Well, after 37 years of defending capitalism, you know, I spent four years practicing it, you know. And there was a big learning curve there, so at first anyway. But, you know, I still do a little bit of consulting. I still do mentoring for senior officers, which I enjoy. While I was here in San Diego, I'd drive down to Miramar and get on their classified VTCs and talk to folks at Carlisle Barracks or Maxwell Air Force Base, you know, about war fighting. And as I was driving, they did that pro bono, you know, gratis. And as I was driving back to my office, I said, you know, I think that was the highlight of

my day, maybe my week, you know, it's kind of like more time to do that. And we were up to four, now five grandkids, and, you know, my wife wanted to be closer to grandkids and, you know, none of them were in California. So, so, yeah, so we, we, now we're, you know, I do the things that I like doing, like talk to you. So you're currently senior fellow Belfour Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University? Yes. Secretary, Defense, Ash Carter asked me to come join them doing that. I'm kind of in an inactive status on that now. I mean, I was more active initially. I don't really do that much. Senior fellow Institute of Land Warfare Association of the U.S. Army. Yeah, I still do that, yeah.

Member of the Army Science Board. Yes, right. Senior mentor, highly qualified expert at the U.S. Army War College. That's how I do my mentorship for a and coming general officer war fighters yeah actually general officer and flag officer yeah outstanding and senior fellow association of the united states army so that's kind of what you're up to right now yeah yeah that's uh that keeps me from you know vegetating trying to stay relevant or informed i have skin in the game you know my son-in-law my son are both on active duty majors and uh you know i want I want the best for them, not, you know, in terms of promotions or anything. I mean, they earn what they get, you know, but in terms of making sure that the Army and our

joint force is configured properly for the threats that are out there. How do you think we are? Where do we set right now? What does the Army and the military at large need to watch out for in the coming years? you know, you won't be surprised. You know, the number one threat on the horizon is China. However, China is an asymmetric threat. You know, I don't think China wants to, you know, get into a shooting war with us.

I think that they definitely want what they want in the South China Sea and Taiwan. And if they can figure out a way to kind of bluff their way or intimidate their way out, there to get it, they will. The other threats, obviously, are Russia, resurgent Russia. The threat that opposed to Eastern Europe, is, we're seeing that every day in Ukraine. And then, of course, we got North Korea,

which is really an extension of China, the China threat, you know, that's like a bad cop, worst cop, the type of a thing that they're trying to do. I'm crazy, but this little guy over here, he's extra crazy. So talk to me, the crazy one. How about the military culture? And in Iran, obviously.

The military culture, so I truly believe our biggest threat is internal, though. I mean, those are our external threats. Our biggest threat is internal. I was talking to someone the other day, and they were talking about China and Taiwan, and what do you think China's going to do? When do you think? And I said, if I was China, I would sit there and watch. America just kind of like get less and less lose, get more and more weak.

And then if another 20 years, we'll just have Taiwan because no one will be there to defend it. No, that's kind of the concern as you see reflected in our recruiting crisis where fewer and fewer Americans feel called to serve. How much longer are we going to be able to sustain an all-volunteer force or afford it? You know, we can't man our ships, can't man our planes. Everything gets more expensive. We have supply chain vulnerabilities overseas, you know, that we have to, you know, become aware of and figure out how to secure so that our defense industrial base can, as a former member of the defense industrial base, can produce the weapons and the systems

that our warfighters need in a timely manner. look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. They invaded. They got their teeth kicked in. They spent about six months to a year reconstituting, and now they're back. Could we do that? Could we reconstitute?

I know that they're driving around in older tanks and all this kind of stuff, but they bounced back. Not unlike, you know, in World War II, you know, Germany had it all their way at first, and then the Russians, you know, finally got their act together.

Now, this is something that America needs to pay attention to. You know, how resilient are we as a nation? Look at what we did after Pearl Harbor, you know. And then we continued to lose aircraft carriers. You know, we only had a handful. in the Pacific and we continue to lose them. But, you know, within four years, we had, what, like a hundred of them? You know, I mean, it's amazing, but we don't have that kind of industrial base anymore.

So what's the solution? What are we going to do? How could we recruit a million soldiers? We can't recruit them, is the short answer. How could we induct a million soldiers? And how could you train them? How could you equip them? How could you transport them?

I mean, these are all hard questions that worry me somewhat, but not as much as the question as do we even want to try? You know, is there a will, is there a national will for us to even try? I mean, open borders. I spent two years doing border security, you know. I can tell you, the things happening on that border are horrendous. The things coming across the border are even worse. So, you know, 8 million Americans?

I mean, our unemployment rate statistics don't count the 8 million that crossed the border this year. What are they doing? You know, where are they? You know, drive around San Diego, you can see some of them. But, you know, these are questions. You know, does America want to keep on being America? and if it isn't, who's going to take our place? You know, it's like when the United Kingdom said,

you know, we're tired to be in the world's policemen, we're going to lay that burden down. America, you got it. Right? We did. I mean, they had the East of Suez Agreement where the UK said, you know what, if it's east of the Suez Canal,

we're just not going to worry about it anymore. America, you take it. You know, that was an example of, you know, the UK, you know, kind of ratcheting down its imperial will. Will. Yeah. Right. We're an empire.

Okay. If we had an east of Suez, you know, in Iran, it's just such a pain in our neck, the Houthis and all that stuff. Over to you. Who? NATO? NATO's not really, or EU, they aren't necessarily set up. to be that, you know, strong of a unified partner,

especially outside of their own geographic area of operations. I mean, look, I mean, they're still buying natural gas from Russia and oil and stuff like that. You know, so, I mean, it's hard to envision, you know, you got you got some countries that do try to help out there with France and the UK and countries like that. but there is no alternative to the United States unless it's China and you don't want them to take over the world's policemen role, you know, the guarantor of international, of the international order, right? They're not.

And the U.N. isn't. I mean, look at the ridiculous things the UN is doing right now with respect to, you know, the Israel Hamas. Hamas, we fought Hamas, Joko. You know, they just flew a different flag, but it's the, same crew, right? And now the United States, you know, Hamas, you know, are they that bad, you know, what's 1,200 rapes and murders in one day after all, right? Holy cow, world have we come to. This is what scares me, you know. I mean, it's not just the United States, it's the

entire West. There's like a malaise. We have a declining birth rate, you know. We don't want to have kids anymore. We don't want to repopulate, you know. Are we just committing national Slow suicide. Of course, China's be deviled by some of these same problems. Don't get me wrong. I mean, China's got more problems. I'd rather be in America looking at China than China looking at America. You know, make no mistake.

But we have to rediscover, you know, what it is about America that's worth fighting for. And we need to inculcate that in our young people or policymen makers, everybody. That's what scares me. That's the biggest threat to the United States, I think. I mean, we still sit on top of the richest natural resources in the world. We just choose not to take advantage of them. That could change.

That's a policy issue, you know. We haven't lost anything strategically there except time. It seems like, I mean, it's just real obvious that we are just really bad with this whole information warfare thing and what people are being taught, what they're seeing what the kids are being taught, what's being taught in universities. Like it's... Marxism. Yeah.

That seems to be getting across very well, you know? But I, yeah, I do, I'm concerned, you know. I mean, even the people on, you know, that don't like America, even the Americans who don't like America are weak, you know, I mean, right? I mean, it's like, we're going to have a hunger strike until we're hungry. can you bring us vegan i mean really it's you're not you're not impressing me you know you're no nelson mandela's out there you know you don't have the courage of your convictions yeah um yeah i mean it's it's pretty pathetic you know there's an expression that you know uh hard times uh make

strong men, strong men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times. I think soft men are making hard times right now. Where they're about to. Yeah. And I say men in the generic sense, you know. What gives you hope then in when you look at all this? Every time I get the opportunity to talk to firefighters, policemen, first response. commanders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, guardians now,

and see the kind of people that are out there, you know, or walk around the floor of a factory. Talk to the people on those assembly lines, you know, not assembly lines, but production lines, you know. The people that work in the five-axis mills and the lades and all that machinery, that industrial machinery, the people who know how to fix it, right? When I walk around and I talk to those folks,

I, you know, I'm hopeful. I wish they were younger. A lot of them are our age. We got a whole crew of them. I got a clothing company called Origin USA. We got a whole generation of younger people. And I'm talking 22, 23 years old that are, that have learned how to maintain that equipment,

fix that equipment. you weave material. Like it's, we're doing it. And what's important about what you're doing is you're passing generational knowledge to the next generation. My fear, and you ask me about hope, I'll just give you one more thing that concerns me, is that, you know, that torch is going to drop, you know, because the next generation isn't there to grab it, you know, that, you know, the current, you know, there are things that we can't do anymore because we've lost the institutional knowledge,

all the people that knew how to do it have retired or died. You know, our nuclear industry is a good example of that. You know, we stopped making reactors and bombs a long time ago. And then we try to, if we try to do that again, it would be, you know. Don't count out the U.S. Navy over here. We'll still run in all kinds of nuclear reactors. Yeah, that's true. I mean, that is a source.

Although they're a little bit different than commercial, but absolutely you're right. The Navy is, you know, gives us hope. And those young Navy nukes, you know, when you talk to them, it's like, wow, that's so impressive. When I was working in industry, we'd get these interns out of these colleges. The same one with the crazy demonstrators and all that stuff.

But I'd be so impressed by how smart these kids were. They were, like, way smarter than I was when I was their age, about engineering things, you know? It's like, how do you know how to do that? that already. So there are smart folks out there. We're not challenging them. We're not pulling them up to, you know, or pushing them to be all they can be,

to quote a recruiting slogan that we finally have rediscovered. And I hope we rediscover some other important things that have worked for so long in the United States and that, you know, we abandoned because. something easier came along, but not always the right thing to do. Social media and also the crazy stuff. Well, I always find hope. Like you, when I go out and I talk to people, when I go out, because listen, those young men and women that are in the military right now that are in police law enforcement that

are in factories that are building, that are making things, that are going into construction, that are, I mean, I talk to all kinds of construction companies and energy companies, and there's 22-year-old young men out there getting after it, power lines, digging trenches, building things. Like there is, the good thing is, the people that we kind of see a lot, that we see the most of,

this is through social media and on TV, and right now they're in the news at colleges. We see them more. But like you said, they're doing, you know, 12-hour hunger strikes. You don't get credit for that.

And those people, they're going to do whatever they're going to do, but it's not going to have any impact. And I think that this next generation that's coming up, That is tough. That is hardworking. That does love America.

I think they're just going to eventually when the light shine, when they come out, they're going to just overrun these people that have been, you know, on 12-hour hunger strikes before they request their vegan meal to show up. Yeah. And, you know, I'm not. So my hope is strong, sir. Okay. Well, you probably interact with more than I do.

And I'm glad that you have that. hope and that gives me hope. That did not sound convincing. I worry. How about your son and your son-in-law, the soldiers that they have, they must be reporting back that they've got good troops. They have good troops, but like always, you know, they're in the conventional forces, so it's a bell curve.

But let's not forget about you losing, you know, whatever it was, more than half of your troops in 1983 to drug problems. Yeah, no, exactly. We have good folks coming in. The problem is, you know, we have an obesity problem in America, you know. So the folks that we're getting in today, you know, require, they're a little more fragile. And we can get them there, but it takes more to do it. the Army now has like a pre-basic training course.

Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, and it's working really, really well. You know, instead of saying, sorry, you don't cut it, it's like, well, you could cut it with time. Come in here, we'll teach you what you need to know, we'll get you in shape, and then they do very well in basic training. They actually end up in a lot of times in leadership positions.

So the problem is, You know, they're arriving at our doorstep fragile. And they're not arriving, you know, tough and ready to go, right? And that's just means we need to change the way we look at all of this. But we need to encourage people to do hard things. We need to challenge them. And we're not. We're not, you know.

And I'm really concerned about. are young men in particular. I have a daughter, I have granddaughters, and I want the best for them. I want them to be whatever they want to be. But it's not a zero-sum game, you know, that it's not, well, women can't be what they, all they can be only if men are less than they are, you know.

We want both sexes, and I'll say, use the term sexes instead of genders, advisably. We want both sexes to be all. they can be. And so we do a lot to encourage our young women, as we should. We need to really get serious about encouraging our young men. And there's people like you and Jordan Peterson and other people like that out there that are trying to do that Mark Wahlberg. And that movement needs to spread. You know, we really need to focus on our young men because we

can't do this just on the shoulders of our young women if we're going to restore America to great you know and I shouldn't say restore America to greatness to keep America great I will say it that way to keep America the great shining beacon that it has always been we need both men and women to do that and we we've got to stop I mean when's the last time you saw a commercial where the guy is like a smart is acting intelligently. You know, usually on commercials, the guy is a doofus, right? You know, he's like the butt of the joke, right? Okay, I get it.

You know, it's funny. Guys can be dumb, you know. And I'm not saying get rid of all those, but how about giving people somebody to look up to and, you know, and say, oh, okay. And not at the expense of women either, but just, you know, the guy can be smart too, you know? that's kind of where I'm at.

It's like a rising tide lifting all boats, you know, and we really need to invest in our young men in particular because they do the dangerous jobs out there. 90% of workplace accidents, more than 90% of workplace accidents, men. That's not an accident. Or, I mean, that's not, you know, coincidence, I should say. That's because men are drawn towards more challenging work. and because in some cases because of physical strength,

they're better suited to it. Okay, let's recognize that, let's celebrate that. Let's not say that's toxic. Oh, it's a toxic work environment because only men, you know, are doing certain things, our Navy SEALs or something like that. Well, maybe that's because they need to be, you know. And that's okay in some examples, you know. I mean, maybe not at the corporate board level,

but maybe in certain highly physical, areas, it is. It does matter, you know. And, and I just, I worry about that. And, and I, I know there's cause for hope out there, but, you know, we have to, we have to actively reach out to those folks. Because if we leave it up to the young people to find their own way, it's going to take them a long time to get there, longer than it should. Then they may get lost along the way as well. They could. Yeah, I mean, it's happened before. you know, in history. So let's not let them do that.

I mean, the Middle East, they kind of allowed their younger generation to a lot of Arab Muslim cultures, you know, they're like, I don't understand my kid anymore. You know, they're these radical, you know, belonging to these jihadi groups, you know. That's not how they were raised, but somebody got to them, you know. and I point the finger right at our generation. You know, it's like it's up to us to make sure this doesn't go off the, this next generation doesn't go off the rails. We've got to reach out and grab them and start guiding them

in a positive, productive direction. And I don't know that we've really done a good job of that. Certainly is a tall task for all of us. And I can tell you I talk to young men all the time that are out there getting after it. They're definitely doing hard things. They are. Well, I mean, this country could not function without them. Right. You know, I mean, and it is functioning.

We have to give them the opportunity, though, to continue to let this country function or make it function. Well, hopefully today some people will hear this and hear some of these stories that you've told about, these, you know, about the heroics that we saw in the battlefield and hopefully get inspired and recognize that there is a higher calling

of duty that's out there if one chooses to step up. Yeah. Probably good. Do we get, are we up to speed? That's kind of where we're at now. That's life. I got nothing to add to that. I think that's really good, Jock.

Thank you. You are doing the Lord's work. Keep it up. Keep up the fire. Echo Charles, any questions? I go one question. One question. The hard-hitting question.

What's a mermite? Oh. You guys talking about mermites all casually and whether. I don't want to interrupt the whole flow. But what's a mermite? A mermite is like a big thermos for food. And you have these typically three inserts and it's sort of a maybe about two and a half feet tall, eight, ten inches wide.

And like a lunchbox. You know what an MRI is, right? Yeah. No, it's not. So an MRI is like a one person individual food. Yeah. Not that great. Mermite is like, okay, we have the capability to heat some food, but we're going to give it to a lot of people.

And so we bring in these mermaids. So what they do is they take these like, they're usually like green, you know, army green containers. and they fill them with hot water and they stick three of these metal containers in there and it'll be eggs scrambled eggs, bacon, and probably cream chip beef or something and the other one. And then they put the lid on it and the first sergeant throws them in the back of his Humvee and, you know, with a coffee bullet, you know, and that's breakfast and a few loaves of bread in a box or something. So it's more than one person? It's hot rations for units.

Mass-produced. So it's like a little catering setup. Yeah, that's a real strong word you're using right now. I'm trying to draw a parallel with like other stuff. And then for whatever reason, a lot of times inside the Mermite, you know, when they reopen it, the eggs will have turned green. I don't know why. I remember getting Mermite and it had spaghetti noodles and gravy. So that was the mix that we got, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things. Yeah. It depends on if your cooks are half awake or half asleep when they're making your food. They're never fully awake. Actually, I have experience with MREs. Actually, ate MRAs for a few months.

How come? After Hurricane Eniki. So we had a hurricane in Hawaii. And so, yeah, like the Red Cross came in. How old were you? 10th grade. So, I don't know, 14, 15 years old. How were the gains?

Gains were fine. Actually, I enjoyed the MREs. Okay. They've come a long way. They're not as bad as they used to be. you know, but you can go too long on MREs. During Desert Shield, we had nothing but MREs for like three months, and we're sitting out in the desert.

And the 18th Airborne Corps G4, the logistics officer, says, well, you know, we're going to have to go to three hot A's a day here at the Corps headquarters to free up the MREs for those guys out there in the desert. I'm like, thanks for your sacrifice. But then they came out what they were called tea rations, which are tray rations, which are kind of like almost like Mermite, you know, which is actually made by cooks. The tea rations is like pre-made, and it's like they're in these like trays and they just heat them up and you come out and you pull the foil off it.

And we got like a month of nothing but chicken cacciatore. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which I like chicken catch atore as much as the next guy. For a few weeks. Yeah, it got to be old. Yeah, we had a lot of stew. And it comes with like, what I'm like, it's kind of random stuff it comes with, right? Like little napkins and this and that.

I don't know. I thought it was kind of cool. It was about the same time, 1992-ish. Yeah, right. Yeah. That would have been it. There you go. Cool.

So I'm in the game. You're in the game. Good to meet you. Awesome. Any other questions, Echo Charles? That's it. Thank you. General, sir, any other, any closing thoughts?

My only closing thought, like I said, is Memorial Day is almost upon us. If you wanted to donate for the Ready First Memorial, I told you how to America's Mighty Warriors.org, you know, please annotate Ready First in the comments box. But there are a lot of cemeteries around our country where our service members, men and women are in their final resting places. Take the time and go out there. Here in San Diego, you have a beautiful one up there at Point Loma, where Mark Lee is. And I found myself, I was standing there one day and say,

this is one of the most beautiful places on the Pointe Loma and the Rosicranes Cemetery because you're looking at both sides on the water. And I turn around and there was Mark Lee's grave, you know. Section 60 at Arlington, where a lot of our most recent fallen are buried. Any place where there are cemeteries on Memorial Day, please make sure that you don't forget about the service and the sacrifice of those veterans who've gone on to their reward. go lay some flowers on them on their graves,

just show that you care about what they did because this country wouldn't be here without them. I wouldn't be here without them. I wouldn't be here without Jock and his crew. I've told Jocko, the story, I said, whenever I think of Jock, I think at that time we were standing on a rooftop together and we had just secured a building in Ramadi, and Jock was like, sir, would you mind if you went to this more secure part of the roof?

because I'd really hate to get my brigade commander killed, like, you know, before his tour's over. I was like, I appreciate that. So a lot of our folks didn't have a Giaco there to, you know, keep them out of harm's way and paid the ultimate sacrifice, and they're worth thinking about this month. So, and to all of you out there who listen to Jocko's podcast, thanks for doing that. He's a great American, and I'm proud to know him. And I think I'm probably the second most famous person that served in Ramadi after Chaco and proud to be.

Oh, definitely and certainly should not be that way. Sir, thanks for joining us. You should be in the top 100 in Time magazine. Some of the guys that were, some of the people in that top 100, I don't even know if I even want to be associated with him. That honor is all yours. I think, yeah, I think Vladimir Putin was in the list with me. Yeah, thank you for joining us, obviously, and more important. Thanks for your leadership.

And yes, thanks for your leadership throughout your career, maybe accepting the early days when you were getting rent up a lot. Deservedly. As I look back, if I had a lieutenant like me, I probably wouldn't have liked me very much. Well, throughout your career, but specifically from me and from my guys and the men that we had the honor of serving alongside in Ramadi, thank you. You gave hope to a hopeless situation. You unified all our military branches and the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and the tribes and the people and you showed that we could achieve victory and you proved something

that I have never forgotten and that I pass on all the time and that is that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and you led. So thank you. you. And most important, a solemn salute to the brave soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought and died on that brutal battlefield to protect their friends and further the cause of freedom and liberty for the world. We will never forget them. Thank you. Thank you. And with that, General Sean McFarland has left the building. So much sacrifice made. What can we do?

Live good lives. Help people. Work hard. Take care of your friends. Take care of your family. Be good people. And I want to close out by reading a quote from General McFarland. Americans should remember that more things unite us than divide us.

We have shed blood, sweat, and tears together on battlefields around the world. I've had the sad privilege of comforting young soldiers who've lost their buddies in combat, listening as they refer to their fallen comrades as their brothers, despite their differences in color, creed, or socioeconomic background, and meaning it. I've seen men risk their lives without a second thought for another, simply because he wore the same flag on the shoulder of his uniform, especially if he had been wounded in action. In an iconic photo from Vietnam,

at the height of racial unrest in America, there are four soldiers pictured carrying a wounded comrade. Two of the litter bearers are white, two are black. We can't see the color of the wounded man. It doesn't matter. They are all Americans. In the words of a song from that era, quote,

His welfare is of my concern. No burden is he to bear. We'll get there. For I know he ain't heavy. He's my brother. So thanks for joining us, everyone. We appreciate it. If you want to support the podcast

and support yourself and support America. You can go to joccofuel.com for supplements, origin USA, for American-made clothing, jacobstore.com for podcast gear and apparel, eschlonfront.com for leadership consulting and extreme ownership.com for online leadership training. Thanks once again to General Sean McFarland for joining us. thanks to all our military around the world trooping the line right now and here at home thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers board patrol secret service and all other first responders for your daily service finally thanks to all

of you for listening and for the support now take these lessons go out there get after it time. This is Echo and Jocco. Out.