Jocko Podcast - 455: Pay Attention to The Condition of Your Mind, Body, and Spirit. With Vietnam SEAL, Tom Murphy

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Tom Murphy is a retired SEAL Officer who served for 25 years, including combat tours as a SEAL in Vietnam.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 455 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. As the Viet Kong initiated their ambush against us, three of the seven men in our squad were almost immediately wounded, including me. I was knocked to the ground by a bullet that laid open the back of my leg behind my knee. I quickly realized I had lost all function and feeling in the leg from the hip down. One of my machine gunners was shot through the hand, but he was somehow able to continue fighting.

and our platoon chief petty officer was badly wounded in the head, subsequently losing one of his eyes. With the reality of the ambush upon us, we immediately began returning fire and called for helicopter gunship support from our Navy Seawolfs squadron, who were regularly positioned immediately to come to our aid if needed. For protection and a better firing position, we all quickly crawled into a small pond and ditch alongside of a band. We guided our temporarily blinded chief petty officer with us along the way. This pond and ditch were used by the Vietnamese family occupying the hooch as an outdoor latrine. It was filled with feces and urine as well as catfish that survived by eating the feces. Extremely thankful for the protection provided by this man-made trench, the overwhelming smell was only a minor annoyance.

Within minutes, one of our gunship helicopters appeared and began strafing the area in front of us with its machine gun fire. This allowed us to maneuver along the ditch and then move toward the jungle. Once there, we set up a perimeter of weapons fire that allowed a medical evacuation helicopter to land and extract all my squad under the covering fire of the gunship.

We later learned that our weapons fire, combined with that of the helicopter, had killed three. Viet Cong soldiers and wounded several others. Still, as the squad leader, I was haunted by this ambush, and I felt personally responsible for our squad being attacked. I had fallen short of the be the attacker, not the attacked objective, and that gnawed at me in a way that's not hard to understand for any seal.

How did we not see this coming? What could we have done differently? Shortly after that incident, our intelligence sources helped to answer both of those questions. The Viet Cong had initially located us by tracking our boot prints in the mud to the ambush site. From that operation on, my squad went barefoot on every mission in the May Kong Delta. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Beyond the Trident, a Navy SEALs search through trauma for meaning in life. And the book was written by Tom Murphy.

And Tom is a retired seal officer who served for 25 years, including combat tours as a seal in Vietnam. And he has some powerful advice about leadership and life, which he has written about in this book. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned.

Tom, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you. I appreciate your invitation to be here. Yeah, the whole vision in my head as a young man was a Vietnam SEAL. As a matter of fact, when I checked into SEAL Team 1 in 1991, and I was a young, young, dumb individual. In my mind, I thought we were going to Vietnam. I mean, the war had been over for 20 years, but I still thought, you know, at some point, of course, I'm going to go to Vietnam. That's what's happening. That's not strange, actually.

I think, you know, everybody's mindset stayed in hot, warm, jungler places. And even though we were training in the Arctic, we thought we'd never go up there. So let's talk about you, you being a young man and where you came from, your background. So you're born in Tucson, Arizona? That's correct. And what year was that? 1943. It was a war baby, essentially, right during the war.

My dad was in the army at the time. Went in as a private, came out as a corporal four years. years later. He told me, don't do that. What did he do in the Army? Well, actually, he wound up, he'd had some years of college. It's a long story in his case, but he always felt he made the wrong choices. And he didn't finish college. He did get drafted. He went as a private, but he could type. He wound up in the South Pacific with several of the generals there. They had to have somebody typing up their messages. So he had a better than average career, but it certainly didn't get him promoted. And you had siblings? What did you have for siblings? I had one sister, one

younger sister, two older half-sisters. My mother died when I was six, which was kind of a traumatic experience from my little sister and myself. Yeah, you mentioned that in the book, how that kind of played out. I'll go to the book here. You say, life-changing trauma

barged in for my sister and me at an early age. When I was six and Sharon was four, our mother was killed in a tragic car accident. We were too young to process her death when it happened, but I recalled being very frightened about also losing my father. It was a nagging fear that stayed with me throughout my childhood and into my late teenage years. To help us get a fresh start, my father moved us back to Arizona in 1950 because you guys had moved up to Wisconsin, where your parents operated a burger stand.

They did. They did. What was the name of the burger stand? I don't know, but that was the first big job after the Army. He didn't like it much. He shared his grief with a woman who had been my mother's best friend and they subsequently got married. Our new stepmother, we called Mee Ma Ma'am adopted. Sharon and me. My dad was a gentleman, but his early life just kept giving him the short end of the

stick. His own father simply disappeared when he was two years old and never surfaced again. But hurt from that, abandonment stayed with him into old age. He was on his own by the time he was 15. Two years later, our country was hit with the Great Depression. At that point, he dropped out of school and turned his part-time job at a car repair garage into full-time employment. I'm pretty sure that wasn't how he envisioned his life going and it must have taken a heavy toll on him. Honestly, my father never got over the draining effects of the Depression era. That lasting trauma combined with the death of my mother pushed him to drink heavily. He was never angry or mean when drinking, but it did become a constant state for him from the time he came home from work

until he went to bed. Well, to be fair, he also kept a bottle by the bedside in case he needed a little chaser during the night. Okay, let's just call it what he was. He became an alcoholic. That's true. He was also a very gentle person in his natural characteristic state. I think people that drink alcohol sometimes go through major metamorphoses of their personality. He just got quiet and happy, basically. Yeah, that is an interesting thing. And I know you and I both got to see the effects, the differing effects of alcohol on different types of people, because in the SEAL teams, there can be a lot of drinking. You get the whole panoply reactions. And I have some guys that they would turn. turn into, you know, Mike Tyson when they had some drinks. I'd have someone else that would turn into Romeo when he'd have a couple drinks. Someone else would turn into George Carlin, the comedian.

And it was predictable. Like, that's what it did. Every time this person had a drink, you know he's getting in a fight. Every time this person got drunk, you know, he was going to be hilarious. And it sounds like your dad was kind of remained his personality. He did. Actually, as he got older, as I mentioned, as he got older, he couldn't handle it nearly as well. I think that's also a case, you know.

And at any rate, so we finally convinced him to go to AA. In AA, he was there for many years helping other people try to take their first steps to sobriety. And I think he was considered an extremely wise man because he could listen to you and not give you advice. I mean, he would just take it in and not tell you what to do. He became a legend in our whole family for that kind of characteristic. He felt that he had made all the mistakes a man could make, and so he didn't. I don't think he ever felt really capable of providing that input,

but it turned out everybody really admired that characteristic in him. And he was a schoolteacher? Sixth grade school teacher. They were trying to make him actually principal at his school from the time I was in sixth grade, But he didn't want it. And, you know, there is some kind of, I think, whether Epictetus or one of the old masters says, you know, it's not a question of having more. It's a question of enjoying what you do have. And that was exactly the way he had to life.

We had a little bitty baby pool he bought for the backyard. He'd get in that with a can of beer and listen to a ballgame and be perfectly happy. And it was something that I think he had learned to do. He was very happy with way life went. Yeah. I was a new guy at Steel Team One. and I was walking through the locker room, and this seal was also walking through the locker room,

and he's super excited, and he goes, yes. And he said, I was like, well, what happened? He goes, I just made E5, master chief as far as I'm concerned. That's great. Meaning he didn't want any more responsibility. E5 is the spot where you can kind of, you have enough autonomy that no one really bothers you. You don't have that much responsibility.

It's pretty easy to handle your responsibilities and that you could kind of cruise right there. I go along with that 100%. As a young officer, my real goal in life was to stay at Lieutenant J.G. The second step, right? You could be a squad leader in a platoon. You didn't even have to be a platoon leader,

but you were going to operate. You were going to stay in the field. And when I got to the point where I was going to get promoted past that, I gave very serious thought to getting out of the Navy. I understand that completely. So you went to a Catholic high school, right? No, I went to, actually, I went to a Catholic grade school. The long story there is that my mother, my mother that died in the car wreck, was a Lutheran.

And we weren't very active, but that's what we were. My stepmellon, who came in and kind of the new broom really tried to sweep clean, that's a whole separate story in my case, because she thought everything I was doing was not quite right. But she was Catholic, and so she moved us over into a Catholic school. So among all the things that you were doing wrong, being Lutheran was one of them? And that is kind of funny because as a Lutheran, I remember feeling sorry for the Catholic kids when I was just in kindergarten because we were told the girls weren't allowed to wear trousers even in the snow.

And then when I became a Catholic, I was sorry for the Lutherans because we felt the Catholics had an inside track to God. So I kind of felt like I had changed horses. So when you get to high, so that was a grade school that you were the Catholic? Yeah, it was a small grade school. And I actually, I think very highly at small schools, because you get to be an individual right away. You get to know everybody in your class right away. My brother-in-law who married my younger sister later in life, actually after university, was a classmate of mine.

He went on to become a lawyer and ran all the lawyers. He died, but he ran all the lawyers in Orange County at one point. Point is he said, I think I met one of every type of personality when we were in a fourth grade at Sacred Heart School. There was somebody that represented pretty much anybody he met later on in life. I kind of felt that way. While you were in high school, you get really into sports. And again, get the book, everybody. The book is called Beyond the Trident.

I'm not going to read the whole thing. But you start playing football, baseball, and fast-pitched softball. You say you became literally a sports nut. And then you get into some of the spiritual stuff that you're thinking about as a young kid. You say, I began life as a Christian. I was baptized at birth and raised as a Lutheran until my mother died in many ways her death sparked the beginning of my own conscious spiritual journey. Why is my mother gone? Why am I still here?

Although I didn't realize it in specific terms at the time, my primary education in a Catholic school with its underlying values structure provided a solid spiritual base for my upbringing. From an early age, my thoughts about God, church, and religion affected my behavior. The idea of God watching over me was appealing and I wanted to be seen by him as a good boy. So you got some, you take away kind of your values in life from those young days. Yeah, I hope when we're going to talk a little more about this as we go along. But the fact was it provided a very strong spiritual basis. I developed questions about some of it later on. But at the time, you know, I felt that there was a God.

Everybody should be trying to please that God. And there were rules. They were called commandments, but that didn't seem to me to be abnormal. And I think it provided a structure, mental structure on that side. And we'll get to the subtitle of the book is the three-legged stool we all stand on. But the point is, on that mind-body spirit legs that we all stand on, I had a pretty strong spiritual leg growing up. And also I think I had a pretty strong physical leg because of all the athletics.

And that just left the mental leg, which was probably lagging. but it came along later. Fast forward a little bit. 1962, when I graduated from high school, our nation had a military draft. Anyone in my age group who was mentally and physically fit was eligible to be drafted in the United States Armed Forces since my family had no funds to help me

at any follow-on university. I was at risk of being drafted unless I found a way to enter college. My dad had been in the Army spending most of his time deployed in the South Pacific World War II, rising to the rank of corporal. His only advice to me on the subject was this.

If I was going into the military, go in as an officer. And you said you got offered appointments for all four military academies. How did you pull that off? Blind luck, maybe. My dad actually helped in that regard, too. He started writing letters to the congressman in our state when I was a sophomore, which was a little too young to write my own letters, really, because you're not paying attention.

But what the letters were was, when are you having your tests for the academy? And all four of them wrote back. I mean, I guess there were a couple senators and a couple House of Representatives and gave me the dates and times where they were given the tests for the academy. And the long and the short of that was then I started and got a book in my junior year about SATs and how to pass SATs and started looking at that. And I just got very serious about the whole thing. I took the first set of tests in my junior year.

So I'd taken them twice by the senior year and I was in the top 1% of the country. That helped. And then I had varsity athletics in my background. and so all four academies said, hey, this is the kind of guy we think we're looking for. What made you pick Navy? Interesting, I guess, number one, I was living in a desert. So I think that probably...

That'll do it. And my dad's stories about Army training didn't motivate me either. So there was that. And then two midshipmen from the Naval Academy happened to show up in my high school and senior year. I liked their uniforms. I wasn't very serious-minded about the military at all, but I wanted a place where I could go to school

and not have to go into debt. And so it wound up saying, well, the Naval Academy seems like the right choice. I actually was pleased with it later on also the choice. The one big mistake I made, I thought it was an athlete at the time, right? I played varsity football, set some passing records in the state of Arizona. What I didn't realize, I got to the Naval Academy one year behind Roger Staubach. But that was about the end of that. And what I also didn't realize is the number of quality of people coming into the Naval Academy

me with varsity football backgrounds. About 40% of our entering PLEB class had played varsity football in high school. And so we had quarterbacks coming from all over. I wound up playing varsity football on the 150 team, but I never quite made it to the big league there. It was a lesson, but as far as I was concerned, if I was playing anywhere, I was happy.

Nice. You go to Pleeve Summer out there and you don't get home, you don't get a chance to go home until Christmas, And when you go home for Christmas, they had already had your bed. Your room was gone. The only place you could sleep was on the couch. Yeah. You know, I don't know if they did that on purpose or not,

but as soon as I left from Naval Academy, they redid the whole house in their master bedroom had to expand. And the only one way to go was to get rid of my bedroom. So I really have often wondered, you know, we started with, I think, 1,400-plus plebes at the Naval Academy. And we ended up four years later, a little over 800. So he had about a 35, 40% drop rate, most of them in that first year. And I think a lot of them had a bed to go home to when I went home at Christmas and didn't have one.

Any thoughts I had about not going back just dissipated to nothing. I went back, my tail between my legs, because it was a brutal year. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that here. You say the method utilized to teach the rules and discipline and responsibility at the academy were extremely harsh, and they have since been modified with the inclusion of women as midshipment. Some of the hazing was quite literally brutal by today's standards, but there was, at its core, at the core of it, a learned discipline that has served me and all the others well as we have gone on with our lives in the Navy and beyond. I was secretly a rebel plebe, and I hated hazing. Explain on that a little bit.

I'm not sure how far I can go into this subject, but for example. I think the statutes of limitations are pretty, I think you're safe. Okay. You have 40 years. about 50, 60 years, you're good. Some of the hazing had a 200-year history by the time I got to it, and it had not been modified at all. You went every morning to somebody's room,

and they had 30 minutes to do with you what they wanted. It was called a come-around. It was a brutal period for the weaker of the people showing up in the room. You'd hang around and listen to music. That meant you hung from the shower court with both hands, as long as you could hang there. And the guy who couldn't hang on the most was going to have. other troubles in his life right away.

You'd sweat pennies to the wall with your nose. Do what? You'd sweat pennies to the wall, till that penny would stick against the wall from your sweat. You'd be running right up against the wall. I'm just mentioning a couple. We may be needed. One of the bigger lessons was you never tell your boss

anything that's not correct. It was a brutal lesson because in the Navy, if the ship captains asking you a question, he doesn't want you to guess. There's only two answers. You either know it and you give it to them or you say, I'll find out. There's no other acceptable answer. But plebes have to learn that lesson kind of the hard way.

So anytime you had to, you ask questions at every meal, and you had to have an answer by the next meal, which also added pressure to your life. But if you gave a wrong answer, they say, okay, bring your atlas around. And the atlas was about, I guess it was 18 inches wide by about two feet long and an inch thick, a huge book that every shipment was given

when we first got there. You brought it around, you spread your legs and grabbed your private parts and got them out of the way. They backed up and came down the hall, and the idea was to see how far they could drive you down the hall. And it was a brutal lesson about don't ever guess. And I didn't like it at all, not so much from the physical pain, which was, it was just humiliating to me.

And so I went out of my way, never to give a wrong answer. But then later in life, I realized that's an important lesson. There's a lesson there, it was just a hard way to learn it. Now, when it was your opportunity and you were a senior, did you partake in the hazing? I hate to admit to this, but not much. Well, actually, I think that's better than if you didn't agree with it, but then you went and did it anyways. And actually, that's what happened. Some people that had miserable plebe years turned right around and really doled it out.

I had enough of it after one year. That's what the, when I say I was a rebel plebe, I wasn't really comfortable in the military at all. I had a roommate, though, that taught me a good lesson. He says, you know, you keep your mouth shut and you keep your shoes shine, meaning don't criticize, don't let everybody know what you are, where you're coming from, and then we'll go ahead and do what we feel like doing when we get to be upperclassmen. Yeah, that was one of the lessons I circled to cover was keep your mouth shut and your shoes shine. That's a good advice for life.

Oh, it is. Yes, it is. You were there. You were in boxing, like you said. You played the 150-pound team. You also had a little respite, I guess, from the hazing on Sundays. You went to Catholic Mass. You say, I didn't feel personally affected by my attendance in the ceremonies.

I was becoming aware of the social aspects of religion as it affected various parts of the world. I became disenchanted by how religion has been used by one side or the other to justify or support so many wars and killing throughout history. So you started figuring that out in college. Yeah, there was a time there where, particularly Latin America, a lot of the Catholic priests down there realized that the poor of Latin America weren't getting any better off. And so they were siding with the poor against some of the oligarchy and the regimes that were in place. And in that era, they were started to be labeled as revolutionaries as opposed to what the church ought to stand for, which is stand up for the poor.

And you go through an idealistic phase, and also that was the Fidel Castro first portion of Fidel Castro down in Cuba phase, where he seemed like he was taken over a truly corrupt regime when he did it, and it wasn't too hard to take it over, given that nobody wanted to support it. And I just think all of that came together in my mind about that time, and I'd already had trouble in the Catholic Church. The issues in a nutshell were that it was a very strict organization in my era. And a lot of rules, and a lot of those rules, if you broke them, were considered mortal sins. And mortal sin meant you go to hell forever. If you ate meat on one Friday and then couldn't get to confession, you were going to hell forever. If you didn't go to Mass on one Sunday and mismass on, you know, you were going to go to hell forever unless you went to confession. Those rules seem pretty strict to me, particularly when they changed the one about fish, midway through my high school.

I wonder, what happened to the guy who ate meat last Friday? Is he down there or is he not? Because it was a mortal sin when he was eating it. So there was that side of things, too. And then when you go through puberty, there's an awful lot of sins that pop up in the Catholic doctrine having to do with sexuality. And I felt like I was always in pure danger of flunking religion. So there's a great book, by the way, by an ex-Catholic priest called Tom Stella. And the book is A Faith Worth Believing.

and he had a lot of the same problems that I did with regard to questions that he just kind of outgrew some of the answers. And the whole point of his book, though, was don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, meaning if you can no longer stand some of the rules within a given organization or part of religion, don't throw out the fact that we're all hardwired spiritual beings and we're trying to figure out why we're here. And that book had a great impression on me. But in high school and then in college, I had kind of lost, I couldn't stay with the rules, so I kind of lost, I just didn't know anymore. You know, my feeling was just simply, it's not bothered me, I won't bother them. And by the time I got to the academy, mainly I just wanted to sleep through the mass.

There was only a certain number of seats in that chapel where the officer of the day couldn't see you very well. And so they were sought after spots in church. I'm going to fast forward a little bit, preparing to graduate. After three years at the Naval Academy, I spent my final summer before the fourth year as an exchange midshipman assigned to the Venizuelian Navy. It was both an intense and thoroughly enjoyable summer. I was accompanied by another midshipman, Mike Wunch. How do you say his name?

That's it. Mike Wunsch from the Naval Academy, and we became fast friends. Mike was a light heavyweight wrestler and was nicknamed Meat Nose by our Academy. class and mates. Why is that? Well, he had a broken nose. That's one reason. And he was a tough guy. That was another reason. Yeah. There was a book called Beat the dealer, which was about blackjack. And you tell the story, you guys had figured out as card counting. And you actually went

and used the Naval Academy computer, which at the time was one of those old school Fortran machines. So how did this work? You guys had to figure out how to gamble? It was a whole little episode in itself, because Once we decided we wanted to do it, we went back and recruited a couple other classmates. It turned out there were four of us, one of which, really two of us, we were very, very competent. One of them, Pat Buckley was our genius. He died a couple years later. But we then had to use the Academy computer to try to see which one of three different competing blackjack beat the dealer systems were better.

Once we decided that, then you had to memorize the system. So we had to go in each of the halls of the academy. me had a special room where the cleaners would put all their stuff and clean during the day. So we would use that room at night because you had to hide out. It was not something we're going to be allowed to do and memorize every combination of every card you could be dealt in where the deck was. So we put way more energy into that than any other thing I did in four years there. Was it kind of traditional card counting?

Yes, it's absolutely. But it was in the infancy of card counting. And so back in those days, they weren't doing six and seven decks. No, they would still do one deck in a lot of casino. So you must have murdered. Well, we did. We had a real good time. I put it in the book simply because I can't remember right then the war in Vietnam was really heating up. And we went all over for 40 days after graduation and played in Panama, Bahamas, Reno, Las Vegas, had a great time. But I can't remember us having one conversation about Vietnam, but within two years, two of the four of us were dead because of the war.

Yeah, you say, although the war in Vietnam was growing in intensity at the time, I can't remember discussing. at all. What we didn't know was that within two years, two of the four of us, my classmates, Mike Wunsch and Pat Buckley, Mike was a Marine, Pat, a Navy pilot would be dead because of that war. What year did you graduate? 1966. And our class actually took more casualties and deaths than any other class coming out of any academy in any year. We just happen to catch the high point of all of the war. Yeah, I've had quite a few guys from the Naval Academy at that time, and they all. said the same thing didn't even you know graduate in 1965 didn't even think about Vietnam didn't

hear it in any classes like it was not not but just barely even mentioned that's right um you go from graduation to Pensacola florida for Navy flight school yeah how long do it take you to figure out that wasn't what you wanted to do I was upside down at 5Gs and a jet didn't decide that one for me uh not really and there's you know you just know and sometimes some things are right for you, some things aren't. It had turned out in my last eye test, I had a refractive air in one eye, as they explained it to me, within 20 years you might have to wear glasses. I had perfect vision in both eyes.

And so they said you can become not a pilot, but you can go be the radar intercept officer or whatever in a phantom. And it was that or go to the ship, and I was excited life on ship wasn't what I wanted to do. Or submarines, those were really the choices. And so I went down there only to discover I really did. didn't want to do it. I had an incredible break in the whole deal because I was a student in good standing. The academics weren't that tough. And I just kept putting in chits or request to go to the UDT seal teams. What did you know about UDT seal teams at that time? My whole image was frogmen

swimming in the Mediterranean, getting off the boat early. Had you seen them? I think, no, you know, in that era, I'd seen a couple of TV programs called Sea Hunt. with, I don't remember that one, it's a long time ago, but the point is the diving aspect of it, the danger underwater with all of this stuff, really appealed to me. But actually, my feeling was, you knew a little bit about Frogmen at World War II.

They were the guys going into the beach trying to blow up the obstacles before the amphid forces, all of which seemed pretty reasonable to me. And then really what it was in peacetime, which is going port to port and doing your training ashore. And so that was my big idea, was to be a frogman. Yeah.

Well, when I was going through Buds, they would tell us everybody wants to be a frog man on a sunny day. That's right. I could only imagine. I did a couple. I did three shipboard deployments as a seal. And I can only imagine if you're a normal ship, dude, and you see these guys, oh, they're out there PT and again in the sun midday. It rubs wrong. Don't they have a job?

All sailors are rub wrong by the guys in the bay that suits on the back of the ship. So you're putting in, you know, chits to try and get there. and eventually you get it, you say this. It's hard to overstate the joy I felt upon entering UDT seal training. The pure physicality of it was exactly what I needed. My goal at the time was simply to get through the training and then deployed to the Mediterranean with a UDT detachment aboard an amphibious ship. My vision of this lifestyle was lots of swimming, beach volleyball, and liberty calls in interesting ports.

I'd given no thought of any depth to the work or lifestyle of an actual Navy seal. and I hadn't heard anything about it prior to the training. The SEAL program was classified, meaning confidential to outsiders. In fact, when we first arrived for our assignment, many of the wives literally had no idea what their husbands did in the Navy. What I did know was that the training would be intense. I was very lucky to be getting into a class that started in Little Creek, Virginia in April. I finished up several months after spending time in Key West, Florida, Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.

This meant I spent most of my training time in warm weather and warm water environments. That's interesting. That's the first time I thought about that because I would always think that the East Coast, if you went through an East Coast training cycle, you were going to be harder because it's freaking cold there in the winter. In the winter. That's absolutely right. And, you know, I may not have an orthodox view of things here, but when I got there,

they were doing training on both coast. And what you just said, the winter classes on the East Coast were brutal because of the cold. and everything was brutal. But half the classes there wound up in Puerto Rico and Key West for their water work. But what I noticed in 25 years on the teams, a lot of the guys that have gone through many years of East Coast classes, half of those guys had gone through in warm water, and they were every bit as good operators as the cold water guys.

And there's one other story I might tell is that later on when I was at Steel Team 1, we went up to Alaska to do some cold water training, and one of the things I was doing was getting some tests on when you can't trust yourself underwater when the cold, particularly with our SDVs or underwater vehicles that were open to the water. And how would you know? What are the symptoms and how would we know for sure when a driver of an SDV ought to really know that he's no longer capable of trusting his own instincts? So I didn't have a lot of seal volunteers to go to get froze solid,

but we got some Marines who didn't have a lot of choice. And so we were freezing them solid. Running them under ice water up there, and, you know, 20 below zero with the thermometers, erectile thermometers and all this. But the long story short is I realized that the guy that I hired, the scientist came out of British Columbia, and he had done a study on drowning in his effects. He'd also done a study on cold weather. And to tell the water cold weather story, how long do you think it would take you if you fell off

a ship in the North Atlantic in the winter to stay alive? How long do you think you'd live? 30 minutes. Okay, well, most people, I've gotten answers from everything, one or two minutes to whatever. There's a couple things. If you don't have a heart attack as you hit the water, which is possible in that kind of deal. Or if you don't have a life jacket, you're not going to last very long. You won't last 30 minutes.

But if you're not going to drown because you happen to have a life jacket, the studies that this scientist did showed that a full-grown man probably live an hour and a half, which isn't really well-known. In World War II, the troop ships going over there would not turn the ship around if somebody fell overboard because the Williamson turned that they had to do took 20 minutes. And so the orthodoxy was, you know he's turning around and trying to get the guy because he'll be dead. But in fact, a lot of those guys wouldn't have been dead.

It's just a shame. But they also had, the scientists had a study with two little kids. They were about the size of a yardstick. And he had the photos. And one little kid was skinny little kid, and hadn't really caught his growth yet. one little kid was overweight. The skinny little kid, they had to take out of water in about 45 minutes.

It was a bathtub water that they chilled down to see when vital signs would start to draw. But the chubby little kid was three and a half hours. They had to bring it a TV to keep you entertained. Meaning the reason I'm relating this is you related to SEAL training. Everybody thinks, well, we're all suffering the same. We're all so miserable in this cold water. Well, the fact is you're not all suffering the same. And the reverse is true, of course, on long runs.

The big, tough guys in the water are really hurting in the long runs. Any seal can appreciate this story, but I don't think it's ever been given a lot of credence in terms of what makes a good seal, warm water, cold water, whether you can take cold water better than the next guy, because people are suffering differently. Yeah, yeah, and the instructors have a very high level of skill at figuring out what everyone's weaknesses is. Just like you said, that guy that's got what we called combat swimmer muscle, meaning the little bit of extra marbling

that'll keep you warm. We know that that guy's going to, you know, okay, so he's not suffering too bad in the cold water. Meanwhile, this other guy that's 145 pounds shredded, he's cold in five minutes, but yeah, like you said, they're going to put those guys out on a run. And by the way, the guy that runs really well,

he might not be comfortable underwater. So they figure out what your weaknesses are. There's a lot of variables. Yep. Yeah. So, Hey, by the way, isn't it interesting? Like, I don't know if there's a whole trend now of cold water therapy.

And, you know, people. I just got a cold water plunge back. Yeah, yeah, I have one too. And, you know, so that's why when you ask me how long you can make it, like, we kind of push the envelope, you know, and I know what 39 degrees. I know how long I can go for. Like, you asked me how long it was like, oh, yeah. And I've looked at this charts to make sure no one was going to die in my family

because we kind of pushed the envelope as a crew. Yeah. But, yeah. A lot more is known about the science behind it now. I'm sure that. All right, going back to the book, regardless of the temperatures, statistics say approximately 80% of every UDT SEAL training class will voluntarily quit or drop out prior to graduation. Thinking about this just a little bit should tell anyone interested in becoming a seal that

it pays to be to stay in the top 20% of each graded training event. Life in the bottom half of a SEAL training group was made pure hell by the instructors. The top half weren't getting it any easier in terms of effort, but as long as a trainee, He was excelling amongst his peers. He had a much better chance of getting through training. Yes, it does. It's going to be, the better you do,

the easier it's going to be. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be easier. You talk about Hell Week. Great section on Hell Week. You say one purpose of Hell Week is to demonstrate that the body can and will continue to perform well past the point where the mind says it can't go on further.

A secondary purpose of this week is to drive home in the most physical and mental ways possible, the importance of your team as the functional unit. There is simply no way to get through this week without teamwork, and this is repeatedly demonstrated. So that's the Hell Week. There's a lot of written about Hell Week. I don't know if you've seen this book by Tom Keith called Seal Warrior.

It's written some years ago, but it's an excellent description of Hell Week along with Seal Ops. If anybody's interested in that side of the thing. Yeah, yeah. I haven't read that particular book. Yeah, but I just like the fact that you focused on. Everyone talks about the pushing past your mental and physical limits, but really what they want to do is make sure you understand. You can't do this alone, and this is what the SEAL team is all about.

That's absolutely right. Following Hell Week, you do scuba. But in Key West. Yeah. Yeah. How bad can that be? And then you say during our final training exercise, we swam from the island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico back to Naval Station at Roosevelt Roads. That's a long swim.

It was approximately nine swimming miles if we caught the current in tides favorably. Over the course of the day, our group broke into two subgroups. My swim partner and I remained with the first group landing in Puerto Rico after approximately 10 hours of swimming. The second group missed the tide, and it took them about 13 hours to finally enter the bay and arrive at Roosevelt Roads. That demonstrates why an ongoing sealed motto during training is it pays to be a winner. And I like you say this, no allowance has made the next day for having done anything difficult

the previous day. We still began with a long early morning run and went through a normal day as of training. Another model that summed up the experience was the only easy day was yesterday. It is interesting, like in seal training, you do something like, well,

I didn't do a freaking 10-mile swim or nine mile swim. I did five and a half nautical miles. But like the next day is like, okay, yeah, you're still doing just normal stuff. And that's what you learn about combat as well. Like, you're going to have hard combat operations and the war's going to keep going.

That's exactly right. So you get done with that, you get assigned to UDT-22. So you kind of made, you made it. You made it, you know? And you say teaming up with six other officer graduates from my Bud's class, we immediately rented a seven-bedroom mansion directly on the water in Virginia Beach and established what we referred to in the Navy as a snake ranch, meaning you couldn't trust any of your buddies alone with your date.

our minds were on other things are on things other than war so you end up at UDT you're excited about that you go to airborne school and while you're at airborne school I guess they figure out that they need you at SEAL team so immediately upon my return to Norfolk

I received orders transferring me to SEAL Team 2 which was also in Virginia Beach the prospect of actually going into military combat then became a virtual certainty and I received the news with a feeling that I had been cheated out of my Mediterranean cruise at the same time I was also filled with excitement about going into combat as a Navy SEAL.

So you get orders to UDT which means you're probably going to do med cruises and being playing volleyball and then boom, for whatever reason they probably just needed Manning. They needed more SEALs. You get sent over to SEAL team. Now was it like, oh yeah, we're definitely going to war?

Yeah, there was no option Anybody who was going Seal Team 2 at that time was going over And Seal Team 1 mostly They were one on each coast Just two seal teams in that era Yeah, it was 100% certainty You were going to go to war

Unless the war ended, which it didn't You go from there to Ranger School Yeah, that was an experience Now I skipped out of the cold water part of UDT SEAL training And I got it in spades You got paid back by the Army? Yeah, it was the coldest winter in 20 years

two months, different kind of combat stress. I don't know if we've gotten into that, but the teams, other than Hell Week, lack of sleep wasn't the problem in UDTCL training. It was hard physical exercise all the time that you were awake, essentially, and they were inducing stress in that manner. The Army had a different method for stress. Their method to introduce combat stress

was lack of sleep and lack of food, and it has the same impact over time. And given that we were a winter class there, instead of a summer class, having a good time in the woods, it snowed everywhere we were going, and it froze even the time we spent in Florida. So that was truly a cold water test. I don't know if you're going to get, I put one incident in it while I was swimming with another buddy, Bubba Bruton, in the river. Go ahead. Well, there were four seals in the class in the Ranger School.

They had about 100 Army guys started, and you had to be medically dropped by a medical doctor. to get out of that unit. It's not like SEAL team. You take off your helmet and a SEAL program and you're off. You quit. And you're done immediately. But in the Ranger School, they wouldn't let you quit.

There was no quitting. You had to get medically dropped. And it's because a lot of guys weren't quite as volunteering, I think, to get through it. And so we had a lot of trench foot and frostbite and those kind of medical injuries. We graduated, as far as I know, about 80 of those hundreds, graduated. All four seals got the Ranger patch and only about 20 of the 80 got the Ranger

patch of the Army types. The Ranger Patch represented being patrol leader and being successful when you led the patrols. It was a different kind of training and it was different kind of results. But the episode I mentioned, I was there with one of my seal buddies named Bubba Bruton. Bubba was later shot in Vietnam. He was actually shot six times and they only found five exit wounds and the long story that's short is he died of those wounds later on a seal mission. He actually died in the hospital later on because he didn't find the extra bullet. But Bub and I would be in the back of every group as we come to a river because somebody has to swim across with the rope to set up the rope bridge.

So we'd strip naked, swim the river. That wasn't the hard part. The hard part was it took them 45 minutes to get our clothes ferried over to us. So we'd just be running in place, looking at each other, wondering how we're. We're going to get the next 30 minutes done. Ranger School was quite a trip for me. I think it stressed me in a way, a different way than SEAL training did. Fast forward a little bit.

By the time I finished all the SEAL training courses, Army Ranger School, survival escape evasion school, kitchen demolition school, combat medicine training, jungle warfare school, Vietnamese language school, and SEAL platoon pre-deployment training before deployment to Vietnam. I was feeling about as fully trained and ready for whatever is coming next as any man could be. You also say this. I remember being invited to the first party at the home of my commanding officer of the SEAL team too. I was drinking my first beer when a whole group of seals came by carrying a fellow seal stripped buck naked.

They hauled him through the crowd of men and women on his way to get a dunk in the ocean for his birthday. He turned out later to be my direct boss and a lifelong friend. Shortly after that, my commanding officer began wrestling with the commanding officer of UDT22, who is busy grilling hamburgers. Somehow in the scuffle, he wound up getting tossed on top of his grill. Another memory from that day, my commanding officer, my commanding officer's wife wore a t-shirt that said, so many men, so little time. I realized I had found my people. That's true.

I was so happy. Everybody seemed right. You also say this, valuing physical strength. Looking back on the entire early period of my life, I'm struck by how. intense physical exercise always counterbalanced any deep feelings of upset or insecurity about my future. I wonder why more emphasis is not given to this by health professionals trying to help individuals with mental health issues, especially people trying to raise normal children

and teenagers. People in good physical shape are, by and large, in my experience, happier and more energetic than their counterparts in accomplishing their goals, whatever those are. Research now proves that exercise physiology releases chem or physiologically, you know, physically releases chemicals in the brain that contribute to a sense of health and well-being, which also encourages learning. This ties directly back to the ancient Greek understanding of the interlocking importance of the mind, body, and spirit. The three-legged stool concept was right on target. As for the three-legged stool, I was standing on at the time. I would say that the mind and body

legs felt strong and supportive. The spiritual leg of my stool was asleep. So that's, um, You mentioned this. You know, this is sort of what the book is about, these, this three-legged stool that you have to have in your life in order to maintain a good balance. And that's the mind, body, and spirit. And that's,

that's the crux of the book. So, fast forward a little bit here. I arrived in Saigon, Vietnam, in May of 1968 with a platoon of Navy SEALs. For reference, a SEAL platoon normally consisted of two squads of seven individuals. This was three months after the beginning

of the famous TED Offensive in South Vietnam, by North Vietnam. So you showed up and it was on. It was on even at the airport. As we were coming into Saigon, it was being mortared. So we had to get ready to leave the plane with everything, all the weapons and everything ready to fire. It was over, but it wasn't over.

How did you, how was your mentality going in there? The first time in, like I say, it was, we were fully prepared. You couldn't train anybody any more thoroughly than we were getting trained. and everybody wanted to be there, which is really a good thing with seals. You don't have a bunch of draftees who really like to get out of it if they could. And a lot of draftees, of course, found lifelong jobs in the Army and the Marine Corps, but some didn't like to be there, and some weren't as enthusiastic about landing in Vietnam. But in terms of a Navy SEAL platoon, everybody was chomping at the bit.

And I think that's what SEAL training does to somebody. How many guys did you have that? that had already done tours in Vietnam? Our platoon had about half. And maybe I got more in my squad because when the platoon leader decided who's going to go into what squad, I had a very,

I'd say four out of seven of us had already had a tour. And what I also noticed, I didn't mention it, but a lot of the guys, the operators that just wanted to go out every night, and I would have a couple extra guys in my squad every time

because they'd go back-to-back nights. As long as they'd had a little bit of sleep, That's all they wanted and to get back out there. So, yeah, I had a lot of talent and a lot of combat experience in my squad in that first tour. You arrived three days later. We were out on our first operation to Mekong Delta area around the small city of Mai Tho. Me Tso. Me too.

And you go into some examples here. To give an example of a typical seal combat deployment, I went out on around 60 direct action missions during my first tour. A direct action mission is one whose normal purpose is to kidnap, ambush, or blow up something or someone. We made enemy contact of some type on about half of these operations. This contact often resulted in a firefight or straight capture called body snatch of a specific Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army person of interest. In other cases, we conducted a trail or canal ambush for enemy personnel moving into our kill zone. Many of our missions resulted in our taking prisoners. Since we were on the ground among non-combatants before and after each action,

it soon became apparent that there was very little difference between the Vietnamese on our side, quote, the good guys and the Vietnamese on the other side, quote, the bad guys. In fact, we started to recognize that the bad guys were often just teenagers living in difficult environment, while the good guys were living in barracks, eating well and often reluctant to fight. All of this has been well documented. So, That's, you know, what you're dealing with. That's kind of the seal teams when I was coming in. That's what I thought I was going to be doing.

That right there. Yeah. The things that you guys do, and we know, of course, I'd read as many books as I could to try and figure all this out. But fast forward a little bit, and you already mentioned Bubba Bruton. One of my best friends, Bubba Bruton, who was also assigned a SEAL team two. We arrived on the same day and attended Army Rangers.

school together. Following all our training, we were assigned to separate seal platoons and began deployments to Vietnam. During his second SEAL combat deployment period in Vietnam, Bubbo was shot six times while on patrol. His teammates rescued him at great personal risk to themselves, and they moved him to a spot where a MEDAVAC helicopter could pick him up and transfer him to a field hospital. Unfortunately, the doctors in the field hospital didn't accurately count the bullet entry wounds with the bullet exit wounds, and they inadvertently left one bullet inside him. Sepsis set in and Bubba quickly started a physical decline. At first, his attitude toward recovery was good.

The doctors had to amputate one leg below the knee in the first surgery. In the second surgery, they took off more of the leg above the knee. Then the third surgery involved removing the rest of the leg and part of the hip. That's when doctors discovered the extra bullet. When Bubba was told about the additional body parts that would have to be removed, they said the light simply went out of his eyes. he died shortly after that. Bubba lost hope when he could no longer envision a future for himself

and extinguished his will to keep fighting. This loss hit me hard. Bubba was the most charismatic, big-hearted, fun-loving person I knew. And there's a Knox class frigate named after him, the USS Bruton. Here's another example of what you were doing in Vietnam going to this document. The president of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star

to Lieutenant Junior Grade Thomas Ernest Murphy, United States Navy for conspicuous gallantry and intrepity in action while serving in the Republic of Vietnam on 2 March 1969. While patrolling in a heavily defended Viet Cong base camp area, Lieutenant Jr. Grade Murphy was acting as

patrol leader and point man for a seven-man squad of fifth platoon, seal team detachment alpha. The squad approached a house containing a large-sized enemy force. As the squad moved close to the house, they were cited by the Viet Cong unit who immediately began to run from the house. Lieutenant Jr. Grade Murphy, knowing that he was closest to the escaping men, pursued a group of five armed men as they tried to escape. Although he had exposed himself and was without supporting fire, he managed to kill four of the group. under his direction, other members of the enemy unit were then taken under fire as they fled the area.

The entire operation resulted in the capture of Viet Cong. Ten Viet Cong killed, six individual weapons, and five B-40 rockets captured. As a result of the skillful execution of the operation, there were no friendly casualties. Lieutenant Junior Grade Murphy's leadership initiative, aggressiveness, and courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. So this was an active deployment. Very active. And I've talked to a lot of Vietnam SEALs,

both when I was in and since I retired. And not all deployments are created equal. And there are certainly deployments where guys got in their whole six-month deployment. They got in four or five firefighters. They went out on a lot of operations, but just the AO that they were working in, it just doesn't happen. And the same thing, I mean, I only fought in Iraq.

And even between, I did two deployments to Iraq. You know, one of them, we got in a few firefights, but nothing really bad. Did a lot. We did a ton of operations. We're going out probably every other night, sometimes more than that. But, you know, we just had an advantage over the enemy. But then my second deployment, there was one of my elements that did 24 operations in a row. They got, they got an enemy contact, 24 straight missions in a row.

Then they had, like, one day where not. happened going right back to it so it's very there's a great disparity between what deployments are like where you are you know same thing on my first deployment we'd go out to some out station and there'd be a special forces a team out there and they were just you know added every day getting gunfights all the time getting mortared living off of MREs and meanwhile we're on this big base and next to Baghdad international airport we got food we got like it was totally different deployment. And then you could go to someone that's down in the green zone. And I mean, they're basically, they have a pool and a gym and restaurants, like actual restaurants where you

go in and a waiter takes your order. Like it's, it's just crazy how different things could be. But for you, this deployment certainly was a very kinetic deployment with lots of, lots of combat in it. That's definitely true. And the AO, the area of operations can make a huge difference on what's going to happen. I have a comment to make. I don't know. It seems to me that back in the early days of my deployments in Vietnam, communications were not nearly what they are today. And it would take two days to get a message back to the U.S. and two days to get one back. So he had some recovery time between explaining to your boss what you just done and trying to do something else. One of the ways we got around doing anything we wanted to do was something called Unodier. Unodier is unless

otherwise directed, I intend to do the following. Well, by the time they got the message, you were already out in the middle of it. And so we had an awful lot of autonomy. And then we found ourselves in the middle of what in military terms is called a target-rich environment, meaning no matter where we went, within 100 yards of where we were stationed in Mito, you could get in a firefight. Our problem was you could get yourself overwhelmed by the number of people moving through the area. And a couple of field platoons over the years did. They'd sneak into an area, and then lo and behold, at the first sound of something, they realized there must be 300 people around us. You know, we just penetrated a battalion bivouac, base camp, in the darkness.

So those kind of things were the real danger, because as everyone knows, seals carry a lot of firepower. Six or seven seals will carry what a whole big group of Marines or army people would. And so the firepower aspect gave you a fire superiority every time you opened it up. So you could almost always extract yourself from where you were back to where you had to go. And seals want to go to water. There's no doubt about the fact that a water extraction is the quietest, safest thing for a seal. Helos are a whole lot more dangerous to extract, particularly. Going in can be dangerous.

Going out can really be fatal. So we preferred water exits and entries, and we had the ideal situation for that. Mekong River ran right through Mito, and all the little tributaries around there provided access to the backlands, and we captured a couple of sandpans right away, and that was our favorite insertion vehicle, because a little nine-horsepower motor on the back of a sandpan makes no noise over a couple yards away if you got on very low. And so the operational content of the things that seals will do

has to vary by the environment, and that's what people were learning. That's why we went barefoot. All Vietnamese peasants in our area were going to be. going barefoot. And since we've been tracked by our boots and also anybody that's ever trod around in muddy areas realize boots are a real, they're a cumbersome thing to have on your feet. Barefoot is a whole lot more quiet and easy to move through mud. How long did it take to condition your feet for walking around with no shoes on? You do some conditioning. Actually, I know you're into jiu-jitsu, and over there they had some Korean black belts in

Taekwondo. And we no sooner got over there, then they started offering classes. And so, So I think two-thirds of the platoon started taking Taekwondo up on the roof of the hotel we lived on, and it's a very rough surface, a concrete surface, and all those Taekondo lessons. So I think that started it. But also, we carried something called coral booties at the time. Coral booties were given to us in UDT training, and they were a simplified little tennis shoe. All there are a canvas top with a flat leather, hard leather bottom, because coral, as you know, is very abrasive if you step on it.

So we would carry those on our H gear. So if we got in an area where we needed to put something on, we just slipped on those coral boonies. But by and large, because we were in an area where peasants walked all over barefoot, the trails were pretty easy to manipulate. They weren't like we were hard asphalt roads. So, yeah, it was very effective.

We all felt much better about everything when we got the shoes off. Were you guys wearing jeans? You wear jeans, and also in the wet weather, I guess, you know, everybody's heard about it. you also wear ladies tights, pantyhose. That might sound funny, but boy, when you start talking about all the leeches

and all the problems and places they can get to, those pantyholums were a lifesaver. And so, yeah. And you didn't wear anything else normally because of the humidity and everything in your privates area. So long and the short of the short of this, that's where the word going commando comes from. Because it's much more hygienic not to wear underwear.

Were you carrying a stoner or were you carrying a car? I carried, that's an interesting question. And I carried a car. At that time, we were carrying some other things. I carried a 9mm submachine gun for a while, just so I liked it. I don't know, it was an easy. And, well, we had several that people would pick from. It wasn't like we were told what you had to carry.

The point I'd like to make is somebody in every group, every element's going to be the point man. Somebody's going to be first. and in my era most of the officers wanted to be that point man because as you're in a patrol, you make so many little decisions on point, whether you're going to stop for a minute, whether you're going to move forward,

whether you're going to go left or you're going to go right. Was that sound important, or was that sound something we can ignore for now? Clearly, the officer in charge made all the final decisions when you got to an objective, but the officers, particularly in a small unit, felt like, yeah, why not walk point?

So I walk point. And one of the lessons that I think I'd like to mention is one of the things that walking point did was teach you you had to use your intuition along with your intellect, meaning your present tense all the time. You're paying as much attention as you can to everything. But you also have to have a sixth sense about whether that noise did mean something or it didn't to you. So I think often people, and I got into this in the latter half of the book, if you're going to go into a new area of exploration,

there's two tools we have. One is our intellect, but one is our intuition. And learning to use that intuition, that intuitive ability that everybody has, is hard for many people because our ego, the left part of the brain, dominates most people in the Western world. And by Western world, I'm just thinking about

the two Americas, North and South and Europe, the Industrial Revolution People's scientific background. There's a great book on the subject Dr. Ian McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and the Emissary. And the Master in the Emissary talks about the two sides of the brain left and right. And the left side is actually the emissary. The right side can do everything the left side can do, but the left side can't do everything the right side can do.

And the right side is your big picture side of your brain. And it's also the side that doesn't get used as often. It's the intuitive side. It's the side that knows there's more two life than just what the left-hand side of the brain. is saying the left half of the brain is kind of like a house of mirrors. It keeps running the same tapes. And it doesn't have a way to get out of itself without accessing the right, which is why when you get to stuff like meditation where it starts to use the right side of the brain, some people are for the first time experiencing the differences. There's another interesting

book by a woman. It was the most listened to TED Talk of all time. And, uh, The name of the book is My Stroke of Insight. She was a clinical neuroscientist by profession, and then she has a stroke. And she has a stroke after 15 years of being a professional, and she loses all three on the front, the two lobes on the left side and one on the right side. She can't talk, she can't move, she can't walk, she can't feed herself,

but she's in a state of complete bliss. And it turned out to be the most listened to TED Talk ever, and the book is fascinating. Did she get her ability to speak back? Yeah, that's exactly what the book is about. As she started to reconnect with those other lobes, she recorded what was changing in her perspectives. And the book now, it's also,

she has a second book, too. The two books together talk about each portion of our brain, left front and back, right front and back, have different personalities. They all look at, differently. And if we're constantly in the front left part of our brain, that's the critical part. That's the part that's the part that's the part that's the part that's the part that's making the same mistake we've already made one time before. If you just go to the front right

part of the brain, it says, why not do this? It doesn't have a history. You know, it's ready to try something if it seems interesting. And the other part of the right side of the brain is opening up to understanding that we are actually connected. Life has meaning. That's the broad picture of yourself. So anyway, this is all an interesting set of topics when you're looking at something new. And I think I had my first big experience of the real importance of intuition right there as a Seale Point Man in a patrol where you just, you didn't have all the information. You had to make the decision and you had to go with your gut feeling. You had to go with that intuitive feeling. Yeah, we can move or we don't have, we should stay here for a minute or we could go left now or whatever.

So your opt tempo is you're going out. I think you said you did six, around 60 operations there. you're there for 180 days. So you're basically probably going out every other day. Every other day. And some of the guys were just going out on every op because they just want to go get it. The other thing we were fairly lucky in that we could make contact pretty easily. So we didn't have real long ops. We didn't have to go on multi-day ops.

And we didn't have all the difficulties of living in. I've got a good friend who's a Marine. And they were living out in the middle and over most of the time. And miserable living conditions along with not ever getting back to any place interesting. We didn't have that problem. We were living in a hotel. It was a sandbagged hotel with Army guards around it, but it was still a hotel.

Now, there was nothing fancy about it. What city? It was in Mito. In Mito. Yeah, and the Siltipatunes were, there was a big Army base seven miles away, had the 7th Army Group, Arvin Group, and they had the 8th Army, I think, people deployed there.

And you could, like, go out your hotel and get a beer. Oh, absolutely. And that's what I think so. This is why I always thought it was just, just unfair. It is. That you guys were over there living in a hotel, growing out on operations,

come home, have a beer, and we're over in Iraq. There's like no drinking, no, there's just nothing. And it sounds like you guys had a much, a little bit, a little bit. It was a little more civilized war than we had. It definitely was. And, you know, I listened to one of your podcasts

and listening to the sealed experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you realize things have changed completely pretty much. And the other point I'll make, and I don't know if it's interesting, I think when the Navy, when we were in the Navy and nobody else, the Navy never wanted seals. There was no love lost with any part of the Navy. They had no love for the SEALs because we didn't support any part of the Navy

as far as they were concerned. When it moved over to the joint world, and we started being part of a joint, operational unit. I think seals lost an awful lot of autonomy at that point. Because although seals weren't like by the Navy, we were largely left alone to decide what we wanted to do, when we wanted to do it, how we wanted to do it. The actual mechanics of how we did it is we hired our own guides. We hired our own Vietnamese interpreters. One of them they just made a documentary of Ming, who

was my interpreter along with some of the other patoons and went through. They're a wonderful Vietnamese man who worked with many seal platoons over his tenure. But that was just, usually they were XVC who had become over to our side, and they were just, they were on hire. They were getting paid in cash based on results of the operation. And so it was a very efficient intelligence system that we were using, and nobody was able to tell us to go here or to go there, with the exception of operations where there was a downed prisoner of war, a pilot or whoever, moving through our area and they thought somebody thought they had a location for him. One of the things I noticed there

was that the intel that would be picked up secondhand by the actual Navy or the Army over there could be miles off. I mean, they would tell us to the, you know, right down to exactly where this hamlet has to be. And we'd get there and there's nothing but rice paddy because the person pointing at the map had never seen a map before probably. So it was very difficult to know what you're going to find. And we never did, we never crossed past with. We got to one place one time where U.S. Prisoner War had passed through several days earlier. That's as close as we got. So you're out there on this deployment, and, you know, you go into this book here.

I mean, obviously, in sustained combat like that, you got a section here called mixed emotions. It's difficult to describe the emotions I felt as a young seal officer in Vietnam. I look back now at some of the things we did with sincere remorse, but the overwhelming feeling, At the time, by those not wounded, was an adrenaline rush. Excitement mixed with fatigue, a hint of apprehension because of the danger, but we were always looking forward to the next operation. This adrenaline high was psychologically addicting, and anyone who didn't feel it didn't thrive as a seal. I recall only one or two individuals out of all who served with me who clearly should not have been seals. After my 25 years of service, I can confidently say that most seals were extremely proud of their skills and their line of

and were deeply committed to their teammates as a group and were outwardly happy with their general lifestyle. Like most combat veterans, I went off to war thinking that it was my duty to defend the nation. At the time, I didn't believe that killing in a combat zone had any semblance of the crime of murder. We didn't have any time to really contemplate that either. During my years as a seal, religious services were never part of a deployed, normal activities. Any personal religious beliefs were generally kept private by anyone holding them.

As the years passed and I saw our country involved in combat all around the globe, thoughts about the moral legitimacy of our actions began to grow in my mind. These thoughts were compounded by further information about the number of truly innocent people killed or maimed in each place and war zone. The morality of killing in war is a philosophical question that is as old, as warfare itself. From the beginning of time, nations have sent their young men and women to defend their countries with an unquestioned license to kill on the basic premise that killing in war is lawful. This notion is confirmed in mainstream literature, which commonly projects death in war as simply a matter of course.

Although governments sanction killing the enemy as legitimate and morally acceptable, scientific studies conclude that killing in war leaves many combat veterans with long-lasting psychological scars. Most people agree that war is sometimes necessary to end evil, and I believe that certain situations justify the use of force to stop atrocities, but humans should think hard before deciding that killing is appropriate as a punishment or for retribution or as a means to settle political differences between countries. murder in the support of a country or an ideal is still murder.

Lastly, killing in the name of God would be abhorrent to any loving deity and is not justified by most of the world's major religious belief systems in their original intent and form. So as you're getting done with your first platoon, these are thoughts that you're having a little bit later? Yes, mostly later, because the speed of things when you're actually doing it in the adrenaline rush, in all of it, kind of preclude thinking too much about it.

You start to have the effects of doing what you're doing, but probably don't slow down. Most people don't slow down for a while. And that was my case. I didn't really... The difference between reading about killing somebody and actually being close and killing somebody is huge. And I think as a nation, of course, we've kind of glorified.

Our movies glorify fighting, our games that kids play, kill everything in sight, to single shooter games. And there's a huge difference, of course, when it starts to impact you. And so although the reaction a human being has to that is going to depend on the human being. But I feel that one of the reasons I wrote the book

was we now spend a whole lot more attention on the after effects of combat on certain individuals. They're called post-traumatic stress disorder. And not only that, But the studies that are getting done recently are showing that combat veterans are more difficult than any other kind of trauma survivor and victim to rehabilitate. It's more difficult for whatever reason. So some of the therapies aren't working for those were a couple of main motivations that made me

want to write the book. The book is the main theme is, you know, the need to go after going through trauma to keep going, to find a root out, to find hold us in a reason to believe life has meaning again. And so that's part and parcel of that. The fact is, although wars are sanctioned by governments, soldiers in every war that's ever been fought, some of them have true psychological damage by what they've done, even though they thought what they were doing when they did it was fine.

And then later on, it's a part of their psych that says, no, it really wasn't. It was human beings that were getting killed. And once the perspective about that changes, everything else changes in terms of how you feel. I wanted to make the point, though, that there's a huge difference between the emotion of guilt, which is a crippling emotion.

It rates below hatred and scale of human emotions and submit sincere remorse. Sincere remorse is a more open understanding. Boy, if I knew something differently back then, I might have acted differently. But I did it. It's the path I've been on, which has led me to wherever I find myself now,

meaning all paths are good paths. All lessons are probably needed. And that would be true for anybody, going into the SEAL team now. They may well need exactly what they're going to find in the SEALs. I don't think that there was enough attention paid to the psychological effects on humans. Seal training is largely physical, mental training. They want to know that you can handle those two sides of things. But as long as you're ready to operate, they're not thinking about that third leg of your stool at all, and that's up to you to even know if you have one. And so I wrote the book to

say, yeah, a lot of people that are having trouble with rehabilitation should keep looking. They should keep looking until they can find a way to believe again in things that they, you know, their value structure in trauma often gets blown away by the trauma. And what you believed before, whether, you know, your value structure was patriotism or religious or whether it was just a good life as you've envisioned it, what you've gone through a trauma. And by trauma, I don't just mean combat trauma. I'm talking about, no, you could, a death of a loved one. a messy divorce, car accident problem where you get crippled for life,

bankruptcy, all kinds of issues become trauma. As a matter of fact, I read a study recently that said 80% of all humans are going to have some major trauma in their life, and 20% are not going to recover from it well. So it's a universal issue, and I was trying to address that in the book. Essentially what I want to do is say, you know, to find the way meaningfully through trauma, and passed it.

I just thought if anything that I've learned in my passage would help somebody, that's why I wrote the book. Yeah. You go a little bit deeper with this thought. I specifically, you say I specifically remember part of our UDT basic, our basic UDT seal training that cut to the core of this mental contradiction. And this is the fact that you say,

the problem is killing in war triggers a moral crisis for many veterans who later find themselves struggling with their self-image in their relationships, with who they love most, and with their spirituality. And then you say, I specifically remember part of our basic UDT SEAL training that cut to the core of this mental contradiction. The instructor challenged our class with a hypothetical dilemma concerning a secret operation in a foreign country. We were told that it was of primary national importance that no one knew U.S. forces were ashore in this country and were responsible for the operation. In this theoretical scenario, seals on their way to the extraction point were spotted by a woman and child. Although they were innocents, they could still obviously divulge the fact that they had seen the seals.

Since they could not be taken prisoner and loaded back onto the submarine at sea, the dilemma was what to do with them. The attitude the instructors were looking for was a willingness to do whatever was necessary with the woman and child, if not doing so, would compromise the mission. I don't remember having any trouble with my understanding that we were capable of doing that if required. What wasn't taught was the potential psychological impact of such actions which can last a lifetime and they often do. So putting people into a training scenario where they got to make a decision we're going to have to kill civilians. And I mean, I ran a ton of training when I was in and we would run that drill all the time. And the answer was not ever to kill the civilians. The answer was, oh, no, number one, what kind of planning did you do?

And number two, now you're, you cannot do. There's things that you cannot do. And one of those things is killing civilians against the rules of engagement, clear as anything. I agree with that completely. Obviously, there's been an evolution in the training methodology. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I mean, you know, when you talked about the amount of oversight that you had, which was very minimal, and the amount of oversight that we had, which was enormous.

maximal you know every and you know specifically my my second deployment to Iraq we're in Ramadi we're in this little tiny city relatively small it's only four miles across but there's 5,600 soldiers and Marines there we have relationships of the police the Iraqi shakes out in the villages the imams out there the civilian public we everybody's known our there's an Iraqi government there that we're working with so you know it'd be like I guess it'd be like if you were in your hotel in Vietnam. And you start killing people outside the hotel.

Like everyone would know what was happening. And that's kind of what deployment was like for us. You just, you couldn't do that. So I think, and clearly, I mean, we recognize now, you know, even from things like the, the Milai massacre, right? Sure. Those things, you know, we study those things and try and understand how they happened and why they happened and trying to understand what the strategic effect is on the, the United

States of America. So I think those things definitely come to light. I think it's been a very positive evolution. Did you ever read the book? I think it's called Lone Survivor about the group. They had that dilemma. The dilemma occurs all the time for seals.

Maybe not as starkly as they were putting it in the training exercise. And they made a decision to let the two people go, which was the right call, one of the right calls, except it costs everybody, except one guy in the Patoon in his life or in the squad that captured that is featured in the book. Yeah. One thing that's interesting is we would actually hire civilian role players that were, like when we were fighting in Iraq, we'd hire Arabic-speaking middle-aged women to go out

on target and create problems so that guys would learn how to deal with them properly. It's exactly what's needed. You know, our line of work, I'm talking Seals' line of work, at least in my era, was rife with all of those kinds of issues all the time. Not only that, the unfortunate part about a seal ambush when you're talking just plain old ambushes, which was a lot of what we did, is you cannot select who's going to walk in front of the guns.

And you're hoping that everybody there's got a big gun, and everybody there is a truly bad guy. But normally, you don't even see them all when it starts, and then when you're going to collect whatever down there by way of intel and the bodies, and some may be not dead yet and all the rest of the problems that occur in a real world environment like that,

you can wind up having sincere remorse about some of it because you're going through the effects of some little guy, he's only 18 years old, he's got a little picture of his wife and a kid, and he's saying, well, you know, he had a gun, but my goodness, you know, it starts to weigh on your mind. Was it a, in the May Kong,

Delta, was it a free fire zone? It was also free fire. But the problem there is if a lot of the people that were still in that zone were only there because they couldn't move out for whatever reason. And yet anybody moving in that zone was free fire. So the rules have changed too. I don't think those kind of free fire things, hopefully they don't exist anymore. Oh, yeah, I know.

But war is a miserable business. You know, there's a saying that I just read a great book. It was called Spearhead by a guy named, I think the last name is Makos. He was a tank driver in World War II. It's just the view of the war from one tank crew. Fascinating book. And right in the middle of it, he says, you know, the downside is that war is an awful business to be good at.

You know, and that's true. At a time of war, a lot of rules disappear. I always have throughout history. And that's not right. It's certainly not right from a spiritual point of view. But it's a fact that it's a brutal situation. It's that not controllable by the, by the forces involved in it usually.

So the point that I was just trying to make, is that I'm hoping that our country, I think, I'm hoping that our country will think long and hard before we start another deployment or perpetual war somewhere, simply because when you look back at most of the ones that we've had, they didn't work out well. And not only didn't work out well at the end of it,

they didn't work out well during it. And the cost of it, cost of people, money, and the misery and trauma that it caused families to have people, soldiers and military people, come back wounded or killed, and the psychological trauma that people have if they aren't even wounded or killed coming back out of war has a major impact on our country. So I'm hoping we just get a little smarter about the whole situation. I have been echoing those words myself for basically since I retired from the military. military and and I think there's a couple of problems that we have number one we look at the

situation we look at a potential war like the war in Iraq and we think well look what just happened in the Gulf War in 1991 you know we rolled in there it was over in 72 hours we'll just do that again and having that attitude about anything any operation you're going to do you have to just put you have to stack worst case scenario on worst case scenario on worst case scenario on worst case scenario and that's what you weigh the risk as you don't say well if everything goes perfect you know this will work out pretty well which is what i think we do a lot of as a country i do too instead of saying if everything goes wrong and then of all the wrong things that went wrong all the other branch branches from that they all go wrong and then the branches from those all go wrong that's what we should weigh

should we do this or not agree completely and we don't do that we say oh yeah i think everything will go pretty well. We've got the greatest military in the world and they're, you know, just a untrained people and they don't really know what they're doing. So we'll just mop it up real quick. And it doesn't work that way. And then you have to, and you have to face the fact that in war, and I've said this again for basically since I retired, you have to have the will to die because Americans are going to die and anyone thinks that we can go to war, no Americans are going to die. So you have to have the will to die. And you have the have to have to have. have the will to kill.

And that doesn't just mean enemy because no matter how good you are, there's going to be civilians that are going to die. And anytime you say, well, we've got the perfect weapons, we've got the perfect GPS guided bombs, we've got the most trained soldiers, it doesn't matter. You have to, again, worst case scenario, on worst case scenario, civilians are going to die. The enemy is going to die, which, you know, that's okay. but civilians are going to die and our Americans are going to die. And you need to weigh that as part of those worst case scenarios before you make a decision.

And oftentimes I don't think they weigh any of those worst case scenarios. I think they think everyone's, you know, no Americans are going to be killed. And of course we won't kill any civilians. So everything will be perfect. And let's go ahead and do this thing. And it's just bad risk assessment. I agree with you completely. I also think that the,

the actual strategies that we don't have or should have for these engagements never really come about. There was a saying by Gary Kasparov, a world chess champion, and I remember the saying, I like to play chess, not that I'm any good. But what he said was that strategy without tactics is a slow route to victory. But tactics without strategy is simply the noise before defeat. Yeah. Yeah. And we've had that problem in all the countries that I've been associated with since I became a Navy SEAL, retired out of the Navy SEALs, and I've watched what's happened since.

Yeah. National strategy that was actually going to make sense has never really developed. So we're always doing tactics, hoping that the tactics will work. Yeah, and then hoping maybe we'll figure out where we're going along the way. And that's cool to do when you're, you know, 19 years old and you got a VW bus and you want to drive around the country and kind of figure out where you're going. that's okay. But when you're sending a nation of war and people are going to get killed,

it's not a good plan. No, that's exactly right. You mentioned PTSD earlier. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the symptoms of this disorder include being easily startled, feeling tense, on guard or on edge, having difficult to concentrating, struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep,

feeling irritable and having angry or aggressive outburst, engaging in risky reckless or destructive behavior, You say when it comes to Navy SEAL's mental wellness wasn't ever a topic normally discussed. The overt concern about our health focused largely on maintaining our physical wellness and correcting any behaviors that posed a physical risk to us. Those behaviors such as inebriation or fighting could lead to disciplinary actions by the superior chain of command. And for the record, we got the blame for many fights, but the Marines always started it.

So you did throw that in there. But yeah, you're talking about guys just getting drunk. drunk and getting in fights and even though we think, oh, that guy's just a, you know, some kind of a liberty risk. But what is the underlying problem that could be causing this? Psychological issue that's causing it. You say in my experience, seals returning from combat tours have had a variety of mental reactions, although there was often a lag time for the symptoms to show up.

The shock of events can sometimes take years to break through to the surface of the mind which delays the PTSD diagnosis and treatment. Some veterans have remained relatively unaffected by their operational experience. At least from an outside looking in. Others became more overtly religious or more patriotic. A number of them turned to excessive alcohol use, the drug of choice, among deployed seals throughout my time in the Navy. And sadly, some went truly crazy in terms of their personal habits, actions, and attitudes.

Fast forward a little bit. In my opinion, the path to recovery from PTSD often lacks a crucial emphasis on the healing power generated from an actively believed in spiritual practice. I certainly suffered from that void during and after my first seal deployment. And then going to going back, uh, continuing the story here, after my first seal combat tour in Vietnam, I was transferred back to a UDT team in San Diego, California. As operations officer, my job was to help prepare the entire UDT command to deploy to the Philippines and subsequently to deploy in platoon size units of Vietnam largely for underwater demolition

work on various canals and rivers. Moving from active seal. duty to UDT was good for me psychologically. My time in Vietnam during this deployment was simply that of an overseer of UDT activities and except for a few patrols with both UDT and seal platoons. I did not feel particularly at risk. The biggest dangers of our activities at this time were booby traps, which managed to kill or maim several members of my UDT team.

So this is your second deployment. That's right. And now what are you like an operations officer? I was the operations officer of UDT-13, that's correct. And would you deploy with the team to the Philippines? We deployed the whole team to the Philippines in those days. And out of Subic Bay, which was a major naval base and staging area for the U.S. Navy in that era, we would deploy then the subgroups into Vietnam.

There was quite a bit of work to do for UDT in Vietnam with all the damage that was being done, just clearing canals, clearing rivers, getting people out of, ships like the PBR squadrons where they would get sunk and there still be bodies in the boat. I only had to dive in one situation that was that type. It's amazing diving because in the Mekong River, if you're about six inches underwater, it's completely black. And so you're down there, the boat's on its side and you're twisting around underneath, trying to grab bodies out of it. I found it extremely disconcerting.

You don't know which way is up. and that's the kind of mission that a UDT or seal will be a sign that normally doesn't get talked about but somebody has to try to get those bodies out and so a lot of that kind of work was being done by UDT in that era but mainly it was just blowing canals back free and blowing obstacles out of the river that needed to be blown and it was quite busy.

Yeah, I've had some UDT guys in here that did some fighting and got wounded in Vietnam during those types of operations. Well, one of my best friends in Austin trip to booby-trap while we were both at UDT-13. Excuse me, he had quite a bit of damage, but he's back to being able to do everything. But yeah, it was a danger. The booby traps were everywhere. They weren't as sophisticated, I don't feel, or maybe as, well, as sophisticated as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they were everywhere.

Little hand-grenade booby traps across the trail. Every step we took in the Métong Delta had to be kind of checked down. out. You used a little stick. You go right down to the ground and figure out if there's anything down there in the darkness all wet past your head and you take another step. So fortunately, you didn't have to go that far to get into troll. But it was a very, very dangerous place to walk around. So you get done. You say taking time to reflect, during my initial deployments, things happened so quickly that I hadn't stopped to reflect on the bigger world picture in which I was playing a small part. Returning from Vietnam and the Philippines to the United

States, I became directly aware of the acute division of opinions inside the country about our combat activities in Vietnam. At first, I was taken aback by what I perceived as hatred and potential violence against myself and my military service colleagues. As for me and my fellow seals, our initial reaction was a desire to directly confront this perceived threat. One of my close seal friends painted his Volkswagen bug in full camouflage, and we began carrying nightsticks in our vehicles for proactive response if anyone wanted to confront us. That just happened. Well, that was the era, of course, the protests, and that was the era when people in America

were starting to look hard at the whole situation. That was the era when mothers in America were tired of losing sons. But we were the people in the front line, and we were wondering, well, you know, why can't we get some credit for having gone and done it rather than being booed and spit upon? and everybody's got their stories to tell from that era. And your story is riding around in the Volkswagen Bug. That's fully put in. We were ready to retaliate.

Fast forward a little bit. During these years, I consumed way too much alcohol. This was not abnormal among team members and drinking heavily to relieve the psychological and physical stress was the social norm for many of us. It became hard to tell the difference between heavy drinkers and alcoholics. I was outwardly happy,

but psychologically unsettled. Something inside me was rebelling against the events that I had experienced in Vietnam, but I also simultaneously reveled in the life of being a Navy SEAL. The emotional discord was sometimes disturbing. So you like being a team guy, but maybe you didn't like everything you had to do on deployment.

That about sums it up, although I think when I first started deciding that I might have learned some things over a course of a lifetime that were worthy of trying to, I read an article, well, let me back up one step, I read an article that said the guy was 80 years old and he'd been a speechwriter for President Kennedy when he was alive and then he went on to be a speech writer for LBJ and he kept all the stories and boxes and stuff for all these years. And he said, I realized I'm 80 years old. If I have any knowledge to dispense, I'd better start dispensing it.

And that's kind of how I felt with this book. I started getting seriously concerned about people coming out of PTSD and not finding a viable path forward. And so I started writing the book with all of that in mind and kept trying to keep myself out of it, meaning I was trying to write a memoir and not be part of it for statements like that. You know, I wanted to write a truthful memoir when I started putting myself in the book,

but there's a lot of things that are very difficult to discuss. And one of them is, you know, the dichotomy between being a seal and loving it, and yet there's a part of me that was rebelling against what we were doing. And so my reaction was what it was. It was slower in coming. It was fairly significant when I got there. And I was in a model until I found a way through it and out the other side of it.

And so I feel like maybe other people can benefit by that. That's why I wrote the book. But everybody read the books said, put more yourself, put more stories in there, and nobody's going to read it. So what has resulted here is what's in front of you. I wanted to make it interesting and put the life-filled side of seals. You know, we all got into, you got into the seals as a young man, I got into seals. Pretty much 90% of everybody was very young when they became a seal.

And the seal experience is what matured us. The seal experience is what made us what we are. And the seal experience is what led me to what I want to do now and where I find myself now. So I think it's a good experience. But the fact is, it's a brutal way of having to learn some lessons. Because I think the word seal could be synonymous with trauma. when you decide you're going to become a combat seal, you're actually signing up to actively involve yourself with trauma.

And you're going to experience it personally. You're going to have friends that are wounded, friends that are killed. You're going to have the families that you have to deal with. As you move up and you've got more people under you, you've got more of that to deal with. And so it's a subject that's been part of my life, my whole life, without giving it a whole lot of thought. It was just innate and being a seal.

And then I realized that, yeah, There may be some things I'd learned from that. It could be of use to somebody, but I wanted to make it interesting, and I also wanted to tell the truth. And the truth to me now probably isn't the truth at the time. I had a T-shirt at the time that summed up my mentality. It said, peace through far superiority.

And that's kind of how I felt about it. We were going to go in and we were going to make peace, and then people in every country were going to like what we did. Of course, that's just not been the history. It doesn't. Fast forward a little bit. After five years as an officer, I was seriously considering leaving the Navy

because of the promotion requirement up or out. Getting promoted meant I would have to leave seal platoon life and take on positions of more responsibility, which I feared would be largely at a desk somewhere. I interviewed with a central intelligence agency, developed a business plan to buy and run a ski lodge, and started a small import export export, company. I also studied for and received real estate license and formed a company with 22 other

seals to invest in real estate. At one point, I seriously considered become an mercenary soldier for hire in Africa. In short, the future was blurry, but I was casting about with great energy to find a viable, challenging future path in my life. By incredibly good fortune, I received notice that I was to be awarded an Olmstead Foundation scholarship to study at the University of my choice. So that's a big deal. Completely life-changing, of course. At that point, I had a big decision to make. Do I stay in the Navy?

Do I get out? If I get out, what do I do? And then the scholarship opportunity presented itself, which meant it was a wonderful scholarship. I describe it a little bit in the book where you can go anywhere on earth to any university of your choice. It has to be in a foreign language. They don't care what kind of grades you get,

but you have to immerse yourself in the culture. And then you get a year to come back into any university of your choice in the States and get your advanced degree. that you wouldn't be behind the people that didn't do that. So as, but you owe the service two years for every one of those years you spent doing that, meaning when you come out of an own-stead scholarship, you probably ought to stay until you retire. So it was a fundamental choice, but in my case, it certainly was a right choice,

and it changed my life from some of the things that started happening. So you spend, you go to Madrid, right? How long are you in Spain for? Almost three years, because they gave me six. months of language training and you can choose to do it in Washington, D.C. or in Spain. I chose Spain. And so, yeah. And then the two years at the university. So you're over in Madrid and this is where you start to see some of the impact of the war coming out a little bit. You have a little what we would call in the modern era road rage. That's exactly what I had. Yeah, you're driving.

There's like, you know, you slam on the brakes. It's kind of your typical thing. But you say at this point, I lost complete control of my anger. I swung open. door got out and began running full speed toward the man with the intention of beating him senseless. Obviously, there was no doubt about what I was prepared to do. The taxi driver quickly ran back to his vehicle and sped off before I could reach him. I turned back toward my car and began shaking uncontrollably, realizing I had overreacted in such a shocking way. When I thought about the act, I'd almost committed, I was stunned. Where did that come from? Yeah, he was berating me badly. I was trying to tell him in Spanish that I couldn't turn right. I had to go straight.

Then he comes across the intersection instead of turning right himself, rolls down his window, things going bad. I slam on the brakes to bring an end to it. He decides to stop his car in front of me and come back and continue it, and at that point I lost control. But it certainly was eye-opening. Did you ever have a temper before? Not really.

I will say this, the one year I spent in naval flight school, I did mention in passing I boxed at the academy, and I finally won the World War II Championship, so pound for pound I felt pretty capable. And I was getting into a couple of fights when I'd get drunk in that year, I was pretty much unhappy. But otherwise, no, no. I've never thought about, I'm always a happy-go-lucky guy, basically.

But, yeah, during that one year ago where I was unhappy, I had more of a tendency, particularly when I had too much to drink. So this stood out as an incident, like, what the hell am I doing? It was completely out of character. Obviously, I don't get in fights. I didn't go the other way if I could help it. But what it did do is say to me, okay, what's going on? and then what's going on turned into,

how much do you think you've had enough of combat for a while? Meaning, you know, I'm backed off. I got so happy when I could let my hair grow. I had some hair. And it just back off. I'd been 10 years in the military at that point, and under a lot of stress from the time I got to the Naval Academy, through the tours in Vietnam, and out,

that it was the first time I ever had a chance to be my own person as an adult. And, boy, I sure reveled in it. I just reveled in it. beginning. Do you have to check in with anybody in Spain? The guy I reported to was in London. So you were completely rogue at this point? I was. And the only rule was, please don't mix anymore and you have to with the American community. You're not there for them. You are there to become part of the Spanish community.

Also during the end of that tour, I met my wife, and that changed the course of my life. And where'd you meet her? I met her on a skiing trip to Andorra, as it turned out her headed out of Spain to Andeara on a bus, and she was taking the tickets. She was a teacher at the British Council School teaching Spanish kids to speak English. And, but she's been in charge of me ever since. Where was she from?

She's English, and she was from England in the British Council School. Okay. My wife's also a Brit, by the way. Oh, that right. Well, then you know what I'm talking about when they take charge. Yeah.

Yeah. So at any rate, we've been married 50 years and I sure got lucky. Mental withdrawal. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. In terms of my personal symptoms, I found myself an initial period of mental and spiritual uncertainty and withdraw, which seemed to impact many of us as seals.

And then you talk about a sense of direction. In my case, the second phase of healing began in Spain, where I started to discover a sense of spiritual direction for my life that I could follow for reasons I will discuss. The events during this period led to a course of action. I had faith in. I always felt like a student. And I suddenly had a whole new field to study. Of course, I didn't have all the answers, but I had a bunch of serious questions.

So this is where you start thinking about things out of the box. Right. Spirituality. And you give these three belief paradigms. First, and I'm going to go, there's a lot of detail in the book. Get the book so you can understand these fully. First, science has largely defined what we believe to be real. Clearly as a, like you said, Western humans, like this is science.

Second, religious traditions of the multiple branches and sex of Christianity, posit the main, posit man is a sinner requirement. baptism for spiritual birth so that's like our Christian background and then finally third beginning primarily with Freud and the advent of modern psychotherapy there's a widespread belief that people shouldn't delve deeply into their own minds and traumas without trained therapists at hand and then you go on to say with these three interweaving belief structures influencing most of us it's little wonder that personal exploration of our inner subjective beings has

not been popular as a norm. So these are the things that kind of challenge us from delving into this type of thought. And then you go into some additional challenges, one, which you kind of talked about earlier, our intellect, like, hey, you know, I'm just gonna believe in what I can read in the book. Another one is our ego,

which wants to be in control of everything. I talk about the ego quite a bit. And lastly, the idea of not expressing emotions. Yeah, a man in America, you know, John Wayne was the epitome, of a good male. You know, you speak softly, carry a big stick. You don't like emotions.

You don't want any of yourself. That was kind of the male role model. It may still will be the primary role model. I noticed Spanish men speak a lot more. In Spain, a man's masculinity is largely measured by how well he converses with other people. And not in America, of course. But that was one big change.

If you have a table with eight or ten Spaniards sitting at it, eight or ten will be talking at one time. I've wondered who's listening because everybody's talking. But turning a phrase is a real art form in Spanish and not in English of course.

So this kind of begins your conscious, you have a chapter, chapter eight, the conscious search begins and now you start getting into out-of-body experiences. O-O-B-E. Do you call them Ubees?

Or am I just? Well, I call them O-O-B-E's. but we just did an audible, audible book, and the auditor, the guy that, I'd like to have you do the audible book, actually,

but the point being, he calls him obese, and I didn't correct it, because why not? It's the same. The point is, it's a human capability, but it's not a human capability

that everybody's experienced. So it's kind of out of the box. I tried it yesterday. So I got home late last night. I've been awake for a long period of time. And I figured I would just, because I couldn't fall asleep, which happens to a decent amount,

to this guy over here. So I'm thinking, so you go through this out-of-body experiencing and you talk about how to do it. And one of the things that maybe you can help me, because so you say, picture your hands and then picture your hands kind of coming up and you're looking at them even though they didn't move? Is that what I'm supposed to be doing?

No. Okay, see, I was messing it up. No, no, not really. But can we back up one step? Yes. When I got to Spain, I came across a book written by a guy named Carlos Costaneda, who's got a checkered past.

He got a Ph.D. out of UCLA, I believe. Where the checkers come from? What I mean is he's written a series of books, and some people like them and some people don't. But one of them was in a bookstore over there, and it was called Journey to Ixland, and the story is that there's a PhD student on his way to Mexico to try to finish his dissertation. Really, he's down there to try to get high on peyote or mescaline, but he's doing his work to try to finish. And he meets this old Indian, the old Indian, he feels as just a crazy guy, you know,

and maybe the old Indian can help him some way. The Indian turns out to be a shaman, a senior guy in a part of the Indian tradition down there. And when the Spaniards had taken over the new world, some of the Indians died off because of the culture shock. Some of them got disease and died. Some parts of some Indian tribes would go into their own mind to try to assimilate a different environment.

And this particular tribe, according to the book, had done that. And so the old Indian, Don Juan, is really a teacher. And this guy who thinks he's smart is really the food. And so the book, in the middle of it, they say, the Indians talking to the American guy down in Mexico, saying there's three levels that you can get to real quickly without a body. He says, the first level is you get wide awake in a dream state. You've got all your conscious, just like we're talking here. If you want to get up and move around, you move around if you want to talk to the person on your left, you talk to the person. It's not like a dream where you're watching it. You're actually there. He says, that's level one. He said, level two is you go where you want to go. You go to whatever part of the world you want to be in if you're in this world. And he says, that's a little harder. He says, level three is you make time go one second at a time when you're there. He says, when you can do that and that's where I'm at,

he tells the young guy, you basically have kind of got two existences, although you could ask yourself, okay, what's the real difference between both of them if you really want to get philosophical? But the point being, in a spirit of just pure exploration, I said, well, hey, he was talking about finding your hands in a dream, and it seemed pretty simple. I'll just try it. So I did.

It took me about two weeks, I think. Simple trying, just saying, okay, what you do is before you go to bed, say, I'm going to find myself looking at my hands in a dream, and when I find myself looking at them, they might be picking up something, or you usually have your hands. He says, you can look at anything, your pocket boots, your feet, but generally your hands are something you're going to see sooner or later in a dream. The act of looking at the hands will bring you wide awake in the dream scene.

and that's what it does. And then you keep your hands up in front of your eyes and go wherever you go using them as a focal point because that keeps you in. It's like learning to walk. You've got a skill set there and you need to practice it. And so that started what I, it just opened my mind to the fact that

later on I learned there's a real spiritual reason for this and to get to the heart of that. It's that number one, we're not tied to our bodies. can leave. It's there before we're born, it's there while we're here, and it's there after we're done. And yogis in multiple traditions throughout history have known this, it's just in the Western world, largely because Catholicism and its influence is filtered on down to make it something that people feel there may be some moral problem with doing it, I guess, because we aren't taught to about it or taught the procedure. But it's a physical capability, so I've been doing it

off and on ever since, largely in the beginning just for a spirit of exploration. Where am I? What do I look like? What do I want to say? All your senses are so wide awake. It's not like you've just had a big meal or you're sleepy or any other thing. So it's an incredible experience in and of itself. But then later that's what got me involved in trying to look at, okay, why can a human do it?

Even though science says we can't since I was doing it. A good example is living in San Diego. I'd wake up in, out of my body, inside. the bedroom and could go right up through the roof and look down one time I saw there's something wrong with some of the shingles on the roof so the next day I climb up there sure enough there's something wrong with those shingles so no matter what anybody wants to say to me obviously it's doable because I've been doing it so I put that in the book because it started me on a journey not because everybody needs to go out of body but it started me looking outside the box and

maybe I don't know everything there is to know about who we are what we are and then I began exploring that. I've been exploring that for 40 years, and I still feel like a student. I don't feel like a teacher. I feel like we're all fellow travelers on a spiritual path, whether we actually know it or not. And another thing that you talk about in the book, and again, get the book, you can get all the details about the protocols that I obviously didn't remember very well when I was just sitting there trying to fall asleep. Just keep trying. Just keep trying. Why should pop out? You won't have to be convinced. You have another section about exploring links to dreams. How did that impact you?

Once I started doing the out-of-body things, I started paying attention to dreams. There are some wonderful books. One thing about the book that I've written is I tried to reference source material in every single subsection so that if anybody gets interested in any of this, they can go to some starter materials. And the whole bibliography is subdivided for that reason. But anyway, dreams, there are various people that have written about dreams very eloquently. A lot of them are mystics.

over the years I think a lot of real knowledge comes through these mystical channels but it's really frowned upon by a lot of religions mysticism is pretty much frowned upon by most religions even though most religions start with a mystical experience you just start by thinking about

Moses getting the commandments from God that's kind of a channeled mystical experience you think about the way the Islam got started you know you've got Mohammed getting the word through a channel source of the Koran.

You think about the Spanish mystics of old. So the point is there have always been these people. There's always been all this information flow. But it's not really something that in the Western world again, we've been accustomed to reading about or learning about either in school or through whatever religious tradition

we normally grew up in. What about the mescaline and the peyote? I didn't put anything in the book about that. Oh, you mean in the original? books. I've never tried it. So I, without personal experience, I didn't feel, I know now that in terms of PTSD, they are having some very, I believe,

useful results with certain types of kind of natural psychotropic plants. But since I've never tried one, I didn't feel that I ought to be talking about it. But did you, okay, so I'm picturing it's 1973. It's the hippie movement. There's drugs everywhere.

You're free in Spain. You've got long hair. And you're drinking. There was no time where you're like, oh, you know what, maybe I'll go ahead and try some of this stuff out since I just, you know, been reading these books about it.

I wouldn't say I never tried to smoke a marijuana cigarette while I was in Spain. Okay. You're exactly right. But it was not a habitual thing when I got there. I mean, before I'd gotten there. And so it didn't become a habitual thing there either. It was,

I still preferred to drink a beer. And as far as anything else goes, I've never tried anything ever. I put in the book a reason, I believe that I was late bloomer with regard to all illegal substances, when I wanted to be an athlete all the way through high school and college. And it really kept me from wanting to experiment with anything. I was more important to physically being physically fit.

Yeah, no, I just, you know, there's obviously, you just mentioned it, there's so much stuff going around right now with psychedelics, and I've actually never tried any of them, and actually I've never really had any of the drugs except for caffeine and alcohol. but I figured if it was 1970 whatever and there's so many drugs and you're wanting to explore the realms of your psyche it seems like well maybe some of that LSD would have taken you where you wanted to go well I really I don't know what it was but I guess maybe I didn't trust myself with it what I felt like still had some of that Catholic guilt going through I think that's definitely true

I mean you know you're going to carry some of that around you need to learn to be self-accepting of it and not let it overpower you. Because if you think about that subject, you think about the idea that we're all born sinners with original sin for something somebody did eons ago in the Garden of Eden, that's a heck of a load to carry around. You feel like you're not quite right as a human.

Everything else is okay in all of our universe. But here we are, you know, science says we're just a thinking animal, and there is no beginning, no end past being alive. religion says, well, you're kind of born flawed, but there's a couple ways you can save yourself, but in the Catholic Church that meant repeated confessions after mortal sin. And so some of those things are not conducive to internal, and again, psychiatry, which came about saying, you know, you may have bestial urges down inside your mind, and you don't know what you have, let's get a therapist before you start looking at it.

all of those things are inhibiting when it comes to personal search. And the reason I bring it up is because if a person has a pretty good life and things are going well on all aspects of it, they can probably know that their belief structure is probably pretty good because your beliefs create your emotions, not the reverse. So what you have is a series of beliefs that you've gotten from heredity, from your family, from growing up, from other people. And they cause a worldview.

And what I said, this book is my worldview, actually. But your worldview changes often when you have trauma. Big trauma, a lot of that gets blown away. And so what you believed in before may not be satisfying to you on the far end. And that's what, you know, they talk about the fog of war. I believe that's actually the fog of trauma. The fog of trauma is you come out and you're no longer believe what you believed before the trauma. And you may be mad at God.

For a while, I finally came to realization that I was mad at God. I felt like somehow God had let us down, or the church had a lot. let us down. Somebody had let somebody down. And that was a kind of a feeling I had in that era that if there was a God, I didn't understand him, you know. And the very word God is a loaded word. Because throughout history, mankind has kind of taken what I believe to be indivisible. The actual structure has meaning. But when you break it into little bitty pieces and everybody thinks their piece is the only right piece and anybody else has got to be a moron for believing in something different, then you get into the kind of confusion that really, really,

religious differences of cause and a lot of wars and a lot of ethnic cleansings and a lot of everything else has happened throughout our history largely because of these differences of opinion among humans. So you're having some pretty big thoughts at the time. Yeah. And then, of course, you finish up your time in Spain. Did you get married while you were over there? Got married right after.

Okay. So you get married, you get back to it, you go to the University of Oklahoma. What did you get your Ph.D. in? Political science, political philosophy, international relations. You get done with that, and then now you're married, and you go to the Philippines, and you're going to be in charge of all seal units in the Western Pacific. This is your new job. And while you're doing that, you've got to finish your dissertation, which sounds like it was not fun to do.

It was not something I anticipated. I like being a student. And the studies at the University of Madrid and Oklahoma, I just kind of be. enjoyed them. And then also getting the preparation for the dissertation was a little bit of work, but it was something I kind of enjoyed. And then we got to the Philippines. And then, of course, I've got a job. So I've got to write a dissertation, and I got the job. And so what happened then was kind of horrific in that I had to start. I can't do it in the evenings because I never know when the evening's going to start. So I get up in the mornings at 3 a.m. I get four hours of work

in. Then I run down a hill where I was living to do PT with the guys, and then go work in the office and do the thing all day. And that went on all year. And as I point out, it's like working from 8 o'clock to midnight, six days a week for a year. And I reached pretty much low limit at that point. I mean, I had not realized that I'd brandly new married, come home to my wife every night, you know, and I'd already been up since 3 in the morning. That turned out to be a long year, and she was very, very forgiving and loving about all the issues. She also had to learn to type to type the dissertation. And any time I make a page change or a correction, she'd have to retype the whole page. Yeah, that does not sound like fun. No, it wasn't fun, but we got through it. You knock out that

time in the Philippines. Next thing up is you go to Uruguay for, to go to their senior naval war college. While you're down there, a fiancé of a Navy friend gives you a copy of the book called Seth Speaks, the eternal validity of the soul by the American author and Mystic. Jane Roberts. And this is a book where this woman is, and this is another term from your book,

is channeling, meaning bringing the mind of someone else through her and she's talking for this other dude named Seth. That's what this book is about. That's not what the book is about, but that certainly is the mechanism

of the book. Okay. Okay, yeah, okay. That's not what the book is about because the book is about. The book is about the human reality. and what role we play in it? Why are we here?

It's a bigger, broader perspective. I could back up one step and maybe talk about the procedure. Jane Roberts was what's called a full trance channel, meaning she was in a complete trance, and her mannerisms changed pretty much 100% from when she was wide awake. She and Seth have written a series of books together over the years. Her husband, Rob, was the scribe. He would write down everything as it came through,

and so the first thing that grabbed my attention about the book, that's the first book of the Cess series, and there are 12 books in the Cess series, which is quite a lot of books, was that Seth would dictate a book cover to cover and never change a word. Seth would go sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and never have to repeat anything,

and he'd spell out any word that he thought they didn't understand. And I would just finish my dissertation with all of its rewrites and all of the scribblings and trying to make sense out of paragraphs for myself and realized this was a phenomenon I'd never come across. So the first thing that struck me about the material was just how could anybody do it?

The second thing that struck me was the message. I think you could talk about Seth in a number of ways. He is a teacher. He claims he's an essence that's no longer physically personified, but he's been many, many people over the lifetimes that he's aware of. His teaching is loving,

and it's the kind of teaching that you pretty much have to read a book or two of Seth to see if it's going to work for you. And what I hope to communicate is that we have two tools. You have your intellect and you also have your intuition. So if your intuition is not saying that the Seth material is for you, then it's probably not for you. But a lot of people will not try it. And so how would they ever know if you really want to get into that? He's just the first of a series of channels that I talk about in the book because I wanted to give a flavor. once I got involved in studying the materials,

I wanted to give a flavor of kind of materials that come through by several of the channel sources. The second book in the Cess series is called The Nature of Personal Reality. I think that book largely changed my life because it started to talk about the overall centrality of beliefs in each person's lives and how our belief structure largely structures

what happens to us and how we respond to it. And we already talked about emotions. Emotions come from beliefs. And so what you have is a series of beliefs, and then an event occurs. And if you have three people watching the same event, you're going to have three different reactions because there are three different beliefs structures creating three different sets of emotions.

So if everything's working well in your world, you can probably figure that your belief structure is pretty solid. But as Seth points out in his second book, The Nature of Personal Reality, We carry a lot of beliefs around in our minds that we don't even are aware of. Like if you believe life is a valley of tears because we're all sinners, you may never even give that any thought. You just think that's the truth,

but it's actually a thought you just think all the time. If you believe it's better to be white than black, or you believe it's better to be rich than poor, or you believe it's better to be male than female, well, if you're a poor black female, you're starting off with a bunch of beliefs you may be never given any thought to, which may be inhibiting the way you react to everything that happens to you in life. And it goes on from there in terms of the centrality and importance of beliefs.

That had never occurred to me nor at anybody that I'd ever talked to, ever talked about that. So there are things like that that flow through these channels that I found very useful. And I would only say always use your own discernment, your own intuition. I could talk about a couple other channels if you want to just mention them briefly. Sure. Well, for example, we started with Moses receiving the commandments, right? And most people are familiar with Moses, so that's the first channel we might want to talk about. But Seth then and Jane Roberts is a good classic one.

Alice Bailey, interesting woman. She died about 1950. She was born in the end of the last century, I believe. She was sitting in church one day when all of a sudden a voice appeared in her head, and he identified himself as a Tibetan monk. And he said, I've got some teaching, and you and I have agreed to do it. together, if you're willing. She agreed, and they did, I think they did 30 books over 30 years. And the teaching is incredible. And he starts out with the same message that I just gave,

which is if the teaching from their books resounds and reverberates with your intuition as well as your brain, then it's good teaching. And if it doesn't, then it isn't. So it's a fascinating series. You look at all the books that came through Alice Bailey, and she died within six months of completing her work, with the Tibetan. And she hounded him for years for her name because she was female and she couldn't stand it. Eventually she got his name out of them. But there's a group of people living in caves in Tibet. They do astral travel as a norm getting out of their body. That's where they have their meetings. If you want to move up in their hierarchy, first you've got to get out of your body, right? But they've been living in these caves. Unobstructed, or what would be the word, they've been

inhabiting these caves for maybe 20,000 years. Nobody knows for sure. But it's a very interesting series of books, by the way. There are 30 of them. Another man, Edgar Casey, who's now, I think, world famous. There must be 50 biographies of Edgar Casey. He lived at the turn of the century. He died in mid-nid 20th century.

Edgar Casey was a medical clairvoyant, meaning he was a full trans channel, kind of like Jane Roberts. But he would go on, he would see the body that he had never seen anywhere. They could be in Ohio, and he's in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which, by the way, is where they have the library that has 9,000 records of people that were treated by Edgar Casey for medical problems that they'd already exhausted every other medical solution. And he would tell you your temperature, your pulse,

what's going on with your liver, your heartbeat, and then he would talk about what you need to do to fix these things. And he'd do it for people that he had never seen. And he didn't want any money. He traded chicken for some of his services. He stayed poor all of his life. There's a couple interesting things about Edgar Casey. One of them is he read the Bible cover to cover once for every year of his life.

He was a fundamentalist Christian. And he had to read it twice a year because he started when he was 10 until he could catch up. But then at the end of his life, after all of these medical treatments, which caused quite a bit of fervor among people not liking somebody doing that, and it didn't cause much fervor about the people getting cured. But at the end of all of this, agreed to do what he called life readings. Well, in the life readings part of his sessions,

he started talking about things like reincarnation. We got a soul, the soul has multiple lifetimes, things that he personally wasn't so sure about, but he had great faith in the source by that point. Fascinating biography. There's a wonderful biography about Edgar Casey called There Is a River by Thomas Sucru. And there are another 45 or 50 biographies

if you want to start looking into him. And the library is still there with all of his records. One of my favorite teachers is a woman called Pat Rotagast who channels an entity called Emanuel. A manual flows through Pat Rotagast and answers any question that people in the audience want to ask him. And his answers are so broad-based, loving, solid, and supportive that anybody that wants to dip their toe in the water might just start with Emanuel's books.

There are four of them because it's an easy way to get the feeling whether this material is good for you or not or right for you or not. And if you don't need it, then probably it isn't need it. But if you got stuck in life somewhere, you got stuck into some place that you're not happy with it, my thought is exactly your thought, which is if you're lost in a forest, a mental forest or a physical forest, don't just sit there. You're either going to starve or die, and you're still going to stay lost. Start walking.

And that's what I'm recommending. If anybody wants to pick up any of these books and read any of these sources of material for themselves, fine. And if it works for you, fine. And if it doesn't keep looking, find something that works for you. So that's just an overview of channel sources in general. And so as you're going through this, I mean, there had to be something, you know, you had a open mind as a human to read these books and go, oh, yeah, okay, well, I can see where it can make sense of this. I mean, there's a lot of people that just go shrug their shoulders and say, well, you know,

that sounds crazy to me, so I'm going to move on. Well, with me, the reason I mentioned the out-of-body experience is because before I had the first one, I might not have gotten going in this kind of direction. As soon as I started being outside my body in a conscious way, I realized that anything I'd believed about that before just wasn't correct. So that got me looking for answers. The answers led in a direction called metaphysical teachers. They really are the world's wisdom teachers.

They come from all sources. Many of them are mystics and wrote several hundred years ago. A favorite of mine that I put several poems in the book that I just wrote is a person Persian Sufi named Hafiz who lived a thousand years ago. But his book, there's a recent book by Daniel Ladinsky called The Gift of his poems. He was thought to have written several thousand of those five or six hundred survive. They make me laugh. He's so God-filled and love-filled.

And his way up, and they last less than a page, each one of them, but I think the proper dosages is about two poems a day. But it's that kind of material. You don't have to have one source. Go where you can find something that has meaning. But I found that in the directions that I mentioned in the book. And as you're doing that, you're moving through your Navy career. That's true.

And you end up getting stationed in Key West. You almost die in Key West. You've got some buddies. You got a sailboat named Happy Heather. Heather's my wife. Yeah. You take Happy Heather out with a couple of your buddies. And you make three bad decisions.

Bad decision number one was. going to go diving the three of you all at the same time with no one on the boat. Bad decision number two was, since you were the most experienced diver, you'd go on your own and they could go together. So now you're by yourself. And bad decision number three, one of the guys didn't have a good life jacket. So you gave him your life jacket. Boy, these are not good decisions.

Obviously they're not. You end up, there's the current stronger than you think it's going to be. You end up low on air. you end up when you come up out of the water or from the, when you surface, the boat's a couple hundred yards away, several hundred yards away. It's getting dark and you can't get back to it.

So I'll go to the book here. The chances of being found in the darkness were slim because, by the way, the sunsets. I was 60 miles from the nearest land and didn't expect any boat transits in the area, even in daytime. Barring a shark attack during the night, I knew I had a day or so before the sun beating down to my head

and lack of water would make me largely incapable of helping myself. My fate was out of my control. During the hours that I was being carried by the current, I had time to go over the events in my life. I realized that I had been truly blessed and while I didn't like the thought of how I might meet my demise, I discovered I had no fear whatsoever of dying. I felt calm and only modestly concerned.

About four hours, after about four hours after I had started my dive, the happy heather repaired out of nowhere in the darkness. Having finally freed the anchor, my friends did exactly. the right thing. They allowed the happy Heather to drift with her bowed down current. Then they just touched the motor light lead to add a slight extra momentum before going back to drifting down current, meaning they were on the same drift path as me. This procedure took them a while to catch up to me, but it worked. Yeah, it was over four hours, but that about sums it up. The idea of making all those decisions, mistakes at once, generally, I'm sure

you're going to agree. Once one's decision gets made badly, often a couple of others will follow pretty quickly. And that's what happened that night. And of course, I couldn't make it back to the boat. It got dark. I started the current went up and it couldn't swim against it, had to ditch everything, and just wait. So I was drifting,

had a lot of time to think. United States invades Grenada 1983. And I guess you go down as the initial disaster relief team on the island. After three years in Key West, I worked directly for the head of chief of naval operations, C&O as a member of the Navy Strategic Studies Group.

Following this tour, once again, I reported to CNO as part of his personal staff in Washington, D.C., involved in a long-range planning issues. In the middle of this tour of duty, I was ordered back to Norfolk, Virginia, to take command of SEAL Team 6. through all these transitions I continue to sense that my spiritual well-being was undergoing a transformation I also began exploring the fascinating intersections between science and spirituality

so you're driving on with your Navy career and continuing to go down this spiritual path you've got some summaries here from a book called the spiritual child yeah I'd like to talk about that for a second Go ahead.

Can I back up for one second, Jack? Yes, absolutely. The real message about getting lost at sea there in Key West, and Key West was a lovely place at the time. I took a bicycle to work every day, and thoroughly enjoyed the lifestyle of being in Key West of Ernest Temingway's house and all that. But anyway, when I was lost at sea for those hours, I had a lot of time to think. About four hours to think.

Yeah, it was about four and some. But the whole point, and the reason I put it in the book, was that I realized that I was pretty calm about the whole thing. and I wasn't afraid of dying whatsoever. I wasn't too keen on what might happen in an old intervening hours. But I realized that, and the message is that if a person truly isn't afraid of dying, that they probably have a pretty solid spiritual leg at that point. It's probably pretty well balanced with their mind and their body.

And that's the big message. I realized, yeah, for better for worse, my path had led to a point where I was ready to die without any fear at all. Of course, I'd had quite a bit of out-abody experience. and read a bunch of reading that I had a feeling about the afterlife was going to be pretty much just a continuation, maybe feeling a little bit better about things than you do when you get old. So the point being, the real point is that many people fear dying, and I think probably that fear of death comes from a specific set of beliefs

about maybe the finality of it all or maybe you're going to go to hell, things like that. So that's the only point I wanted to make. so we can get back and I really wanted to talk briefly about Dr. Lisa Miller, University of Columbia, all the studies they've done with children and adolescents about mental health issues. And the long and the short of it is that there is no single predictor more predictable, predicting than active spirituality in terms of good mental health. All the other predictor variables that they study are less predictable. but what happens, and she defines active spirituality different than I'd seen before,

active spirituality is a person who actually believe lights has meaning and they have a role to play in it, and they're using that belief and understanding on a daily basis. They're asking for help, they're looking for guidance, they're trying to do their best. She calls, I'm not sure the term, but people that just go to church, for example, on Sunday, and it doesn't really affect what they're doing during the week or how they do it. Those people aren't in the study group that she's most interested in, but it turns out there's a physiological change in our brain structure if a child grows up actively spiritual.

And then all the problems that adolescents are undergoing, whether it be addiction or whether it be stress or whether it be bullying and all the problems that they come to body shaming for young girls, all of these problems that cause a lot of stress are more readily handled by people who are actively spiritual. So it turns out that the importance of, her belief is that all human beings are hardwired to be spiritual, but it's like any other muscle. If you don't exercise it, it'll atrophy.

And also it gets strong if you use it every day. So those are interesting books, science showing what happens actually in the brain, what happens to people's lives, longitudinal studies, who is handling stress and those kinds of things better, and the one predictor that shows people more likely to have a better time with life crises and stress are people with high spiritual. Yeah, very similar to when we had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on here, and he explained that, you know, he went through this story of what he said was his spiritual awakening, which was he found a study, and I forget what it was, but they were trying to prove that God was real,

and they couldn't prove that God was real, but what they did prove was that the people believed in God had much better lives than the people that didn't. I agree. And he decided, you know what, I'm going to start acting like I believe in God, and that's what he did and he got over his addiction to heroin and kind of moved his life in a positive direction. I think that's a great example. A great example. And that's the message in the whole book is that three legs of the stool need to be all strong and well balanced, even if people haven't paid attention to those legs before the crisis. Once they go through trauma, they need to

start looking at all three again and keep working on all three. So I think that the biggest thing that many therapies don't discuss as the spiritual side of things. I have a family member in the psychotherapy trade and she says it's not our lane. It's not our lane to tell people which direction spiritually they should go. They can mention that

it might be important to a person but they're not in business professionally to recommend this or that path. My book is all about find a path for yourself, whatever that path might be. Yeah, you have another interesting point. You say in addition beliefs can and do change as we go

through life. That means we can consciously adjust and replace beliefs that are no longer serve us. In other words, we are not at the mercy of our beliefs unless we choose to leave them unexamined. To feel like we truly have meaning and purpose, we need to first recognize the value of having a viable belief structure. Then we need to mold that construct for ourselves by examining our current beliefs and changing or eliminating those that don't suit us. That's right. Is it an actual set of, this is a complex topic to talk about briefly, but there's a lot of things you can do to help yourself with regard to beliefs. For example, For example, you can just take some words, let's take the word love or take the word travel or work,

or any word and then see what emotion it brings up. For example, if it brings up the word of marriage or the bird travel or what emotion are you getting? When you use those words, that'll tell you what you much believe, meaning you can back into it that way. Or you can just say, if I have an emotion, what must I believe to be having this emotion? I mean, there are various techniques you can use is what I'm getting at. most of the books, the Seth materials and other kinds of metaphysical materials deal directly with that subject, and they deal with it because it's so central to human reality. And it's my personal belief that the next big evolution of human consciousness

is going to be to create consciously what we largely create unconsciously right now. We don't examine our beliefs, we don't make any attempt to change them. And if you're looking at something that's being reflected to you, and you're trying to change the thing out there that's reflecting, you're going in the wrong direction. It's all coming from inside with the belief structure, causing the emotions that then lets you have that experience. Yeah, a thing that I talk about a lot is detach, detach from what's happening so you can

That's exactly right. And this is what I picked up a huge theme from your book. In fact, that might be the underlying theme. You don't use the word detach, but you say things like, you know, examine and parse out, like what are your beliefs? So if you're going and actually echo and I talk about this a lot, hey, what are your biases? If you don't detach from your brain,

you'll have biases that you will make bad decisions based on. But as soon as you take a step back, why am I feeling this way? Oh, and what you're saying, the exact same thing. Wait, why do I believe this?

You know, why do I believe I should fire this person because they did this thing? Oh, wait, am I just firing them because I'm mad because they didn't listen to exactly what I said and now my ego is offended, so now I'm going to fire them.

And that's what I've been taught was that if you're a boss and you're not getting obeyed, then that person doesn't respect you. and if they don't respect you, then you should, like, there's the whole path. You can go to it.

And for me, it just, we always use the term detachment. Like, take a step back. Think it's exactly right. So you can see it more clearly. I'm going to fast forward a bit here.

You've got a chapter, chapter 15, God. And you say the concept or word God has historically meant vastly different things to different groups of human. For some people, God is either up there or out there somewhere.

Some say he judges us, while other believes he doesn't judge anything. He has ever. created. Still others may think he favors certain groups of humans. So you give a pretty good assessment of the wide variety of what people think about God. Yeah, I try to give some quotes in the book. It would reflect a broader point of view. But yeah, exactly. There's a book by Anita Morjani who's called Dying to Be Me. She was in a coma dying in the hospital when she had her out of odd experience and was in this complete state of bliss. And so,

she came to the conclusion that God is not a person, it's a state of being, and she was in that state of being. Her book has gotten very famous. It's got an awful lot of copies sold, but it comes closer, I think, to the indescribable. But pretty much every mystic in every age has had this experience, and you can define a mystical experience as a direct experience, as opposed to the analogy is you go to a church, and it's kind of like reading from a menu about food. Somebody might have eaten 2,000 years ago, but you're not eating it. eating it. And the difference is, it's the difference in reading about water and being in water. So there's a whole big difference in wanting the direct experience. I got influenced by Carl Jung

a long time ago and he believed that direct experience was everything when it comes to a personal spiritual research and that organized religion can often be a hidden hindrance because it's not often encouraged. And so his feeling was any spiritual church literally should should, should be a pilgrimage, a personal pilgrimage. And there's a Catholic monk who's also a mystic Thomas Merton who got pretty famous. And he believes that, I do too, that a good spiritual search will go from question to question, not answer to answer, meaning it's personal. And it's like a personal pilgrimage, and you have to stay open.

And you have to stay attached to what's going on. And you have to use both sides of your brain, which is your intuition and your intellect. Fast forward a little bit more to another highlight of this. you're talking about enlightenment and you say the choice. Within this discussion, there are basically two approaches to living our lives. The first approach is to simply let life happen. Whatever comes, we do the best we can. This leads fairly quickly to feeling more like a victim than a creator. At any rate, it implies a certain level of fate and uncertainty as the primary causative factors, living as a kind of passenger along for the ride. Some rides end up being much easier than others,

most apparently. The second approach, which falls under the umbrella of in-lust, is to embrace the idea that humans are responsible for everything that happens in their lives. This is true whether or not we can make sense of everything that we encounter in life from our limited human perspective. Now obviously, well, maybe not obviously. I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership where you're responsible for everything that takes place in your world. And this clearly struck a chord with me when I read that. I thought, okay, well, this makes sense. Well, it's true.

I think those statements are basically true. It occurs to me, Voltaire, a famous Frenchman, said something along the lines of, you know, well, there's two things that are popping into my head. One is, it's no more a miracle to be born twice than it is to be born once. And the second thing is, a leaf doesn't need to believe in photosynthesis to turn green, which means, you know, people can take any stance they want about God, but if there's a divine force out there, they're going to experience it whether or not they believe it or not. Those two things kind of make me laugh.

And for a little more ownership, I know fast forward a little bit more. Moving toward taking self-responsibility in life involves contemplating the thought that the events of our lives are not accidents. If they're not accidents, then they have a cause. If they have a cause that we personally influence in some way, then obviously we should be truly interested in understanding more about how this works. Yeah, so just saying, instead of just having the need-jerk reaction that you were just talking about, If you take that one step back, disconnect a little bit from that knee-jerk reaction, you have a much better vision point from which to make a decision. And the question you might want to ask is, what does this event have in it of a learning nature for me?

If it has a meaning, what might I learn from it as opposed to this has got to be good and this got to be bad? Oftentimes, you can't tell right in the incident anyway. It's going to be sometime downstream before you know whether something was really good for you or bad. Yeah, and I've been asked multiple times, countless times probably at this juncture. You know, what about those things that you truly can't control in your life? You get some kind of a disease. Your child gets some kind of a horrible disease, and how do you take ownership of that? And what I always tell people, well, you can't take ownership of this event that you truly have no control over,

but you can take ownership of how you're going to respond to it. That's exactly right. And also, I think as you get deeper into a metaphysical understanding of things, you can see that there's no event problem. no matter how horrendous it might appear. It may not have a lesson in it if you're willing to learn the lesson. And it doesn't make the event any less horrendous, maybe. But it's certainly possible to take some good

from pretty much anything. The alternative is to stay lost in this fog of trauma. And being lost in trauma is not where you want to stay forever. And not saying that's easy. And certainly people go through horrific things. That's exactly true. Moving forward a little bit more, and again, get the books,

so you can get the details on these things. What I want to get to the point where you start making some recommendations. This one here is called the Chapter 19, taking the next steps. The best place to start is exactly where you are in your life right now, right? And again, you talk about

the fact that you've got to take a step back. Some people are just going through life. Echo Charles calls it cruise control. You know, they're not really actively driving. They're just going wherever the kind of car is going to, you know, this is the speed we're going. This is okay.

So we have to do that. Know that your life has a purpose. Again, you are in control of creating the life you want. And then fast forward a little bit more. Make it a daily habit to practice a personal wholesome discipline. Focusing on the well-being of your mind, body, and spirit. Be gentle with yourself. Choose simple happiness through better choices and actions.

And do whatever is necessary to arrive at the full conscious understanding and awareness that life has meaning, and we each have a role to play in it. Yeah, that's the fundamental point I'd like to make. Focus. You say Winston Churchill was quoted in one of his biographies as saying that he generally has about six things on his mind which were bothering him at any time.

The way he dealt with them was to prioritize. His thought process likely went something like this. Of the six things worrying me, I can't do anything about two of them. Another two will probably resolve themselves over time, but I can take action on the other two and that will be my focus. That's right.

And actually I use an example in there about seal parachuting. And the reason is because if you worry about all parts of a seal parachuting evolution at once, it's overwhelming. But if you take it all in pieces, you can tell them all the way through it and enjoy the evolution.

Yeah. That's why I use that as an example. You also have a couple ideas about this. You say this idea transcends cultural boundaries. The Russians have a practical saying, Shoot the wolves closest to the sled first. Yeah, exactly.

The Spanish philosophy is also mentally liberating. If the problem has a solution, what are you worried about? And if the problem doesn't have a solution, what are you worried about? Yeah, I love that saying. You talk about tracking, what's working. So again, this is about paying attention to what's happening in your world. You say, trust yourself. And we get into the last chapter here.

And again, there's so much. much guidance in here. I don't want to cover the entire book, but the last chapter, balancing the mind, body, and spirit. Revisiting the three-legged scoot stool. As I look back in my career and my life, I can clearly identify times when my metaphysical three-legged stool was balanced and steady and times when it wasn't. Giving adequate attention to our mind, body, and spirit is, in my opinion, an essential ingredient for living a good life. And you kind of recap these things. Mind, we can reap remarkable benefits if we strive to remain open-minded and focused to the greatest extent possible in the present. The goal is to keep our minds from wandering into

the problems or issues from the past or those projected in the future. And boy, does that happen. Our bodies are simply our souls in flesh. They don't need to be scourged or ignored or mistreated as a lesser part of our being than our spirit. Our bodies are necessary vessels for our existence on earth and they should be treated with care and love. And finally, Spirit, we now understand that our spiritual urge for connection and understanding is innate in every human being.

This inner desire also needs to be treated like a physical muscle that should be exercised and consciously strengthened as we go through life. I agree. I hope you agree. You wrote it. And just to close out the book, and again, I've touched on some of the highlights.

of the book, but there's so much more information packed in here. Moving ahead, you say this. During my final semester at the Naval Academy, I took a voluntary course in advanced Spanish literature. The class was taught by a Spaniard professor named Santiago de los Mazzos Mocha. We referred to him as Don Santiago. He was barely five feet tall and a truly elegant dresser like the men of all social and economic levels in Spain at the time.

He had spent several years as a P-O-W during the Spanish Civil War, and he was lucky to have lived through that truly horrendous experience. He was the most impressive professor I ever had. A primary requirement for his course was to memorize two verses by famous Spaniards. Messages that he told us kept him alive during his time in captivity. I want to end this book with one of those, which is from the Carmelite Nun and prominent Spanish mystic St. Teresa. Quote, let nothing disturb you,

let nothing scare you, everything passes by, God is unchanging, with patience, everything is gained. He who has God lacks nothing. God alone is sufficient. End quote.

And you close it out by saying you already have all you need to live your life to the fullest. You only need to uncover it. So, Definitely some sage advice from the book and very interesting. And I'm glad you're getting it out there. Well, I appreciate this opportunity.

Clearly, I told you before it started, I looked at this like a trip to the dentist. I wasn't sure. I was going to enjoy it. Hopefully I made it a little less painful. I'm not sure. I know my voice could be a bit jarring. Yes, sir. Definitely did.

I appreciate everything. And so you do mention. in the book about an app for the phone, and I think it's available on the computer as well, but it's called Lucero. Yeah, Lucero means bringer of light or light bringer, and it's a charity and also a startup company that I've been involved with.

They deal with mental health issues for children. We're living in an age where we look at a lot of the problems from an adult point of view, but boy, the Surgeon General just issued a report that said There's literally been two pandemics recently. One of them was one we all talk about. The other one is what's happening to kids. All of the markers are going in the wrong direction for a lot of teenagers.

There's an exodus from churches from a lot of teenagers when they get to that teenage years. A lot of the issues involved of stress are really coming to grips, are coming home to kids, and they're the future. So the Lucero app is making a game of the mind-body spirit principles that wound up in my book. And trying to make it fun for kids. to learn, to have a safe place to go. We say have a mentor in their pocket. We want to go upstream from suicidal urges,

upstream from the issues and start having them have some understandings of what we've just been talking about in language they can understand without feeling pressed by it. What ages is it aimed at? 10 to 14 right now. I think it's prime time when most, like I say, Lisa Miller and her medical crew said that that's prime time for a child to start asking the big questions. It's also before they get so old that they don't want to listen.

So that's the prime. We're hoping that whether there's 20,000 kids using the app already, it's available on Google Play and Apple Store. And it's a wonderful thing for parents and kids and caregivers for kids. If you can't get your kid to throw his phone out the window, then maybe this is. Use the Lucero app occasionally. It's a mental health app for kids. It's been designed and vetted through some major companies now.

It's a tremendous thing, I think, for kids, but it's not only for kids. I see adults needing the same kind of understandings. And so that's why I wrote the book. But, yeah, that's a wonderful thing, and we could use all the help we could get with it. And what else are you up to now? Well, primarily the two companies are taking up a lot of my time. I've had four startups, and they don't get any easier. It's like having a little child.

As soon as you get them hat and clothes and shoes and everything, everything and they fit, they all grow them. And they're right back looking for more. So what are the two companies? The company, Lucero is the company. And that's at LuceroSpeaks.com. And the charity that's associated with that is Personal Excellence Foundation. Okay.

And the two are symbiotic in the sense that a lot of the initial, we started the charity during right before COVID, which was, the idea was to teach the facilitators to teach these church groups and YMCA groups and all other kinds of kids groups. And then they all stopped meeting. So we went online and then fundraising has been tough, tough because a lot of charities need help. So we went ahead and started a startup. We felt like we knew a little bit more about startups than we did about starting a charity. These are my two friends, one of which is a seal starting both of these companies.

And so, yeah, those are, they're wrapping us up, but there are things that I feel are very worthwhile. So I don't mind it. I'm happy to be involved. And the Lucero app, because it's on Instagram as well, at Meet Lucero. So you can check it out there. Yeah, and so it's something that anybody can use, and kids get a lot of value out of it. The ones that are using it get a lot of value out of it,

and they register their mood swings and everything every day. They're starting to look at their own situation from a different perspective, a more detached, as you mentioned, perspective. I like it. Well, does that get us up to speed? It absolutely does, from my perspective. Okay. Echo Charles, you got any questions?

Yeah, I got a few questions. Football questions? Well, I was going to ask that. So you played quarterback? Yeah. Okay, for up and two. high school until the Naval Academy too. They have a 150-pound team,

which is a varsity sport among a lot of colleges. But it's an interesting sport if you talk about that because your tackles weigh the same as your fullback and the same as your running backs. Everybody's the same size, which makes it a very fast sport, and I played three years of it there, yeah. Do you remember this was,

there was a quarterback for Navy called D. Dowice. Does that ring a bell? No. You guys played option, right, at Navy? Yeah. Well, yeah, actually, yes. I was back, like I say, back in the Staubach era, he won a Heisman trophy, and it wasn't much chance

I tried to take his job. Did they play option at that time? Yes, but he was a thrower, as you know. They call him Roger the Dodger, and that was, you know, what he was doing. He was either throwing or running the ball. Yeah, D. Das was a small quarterback, and it was really, really fast.

He was known for being super fast. Oh, yeah, no, he was probably the best quarterback since Stavok is probably the truth. Yeah, yeah, right on. We played against him. Navy. I played for U.H. That's a ho. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah. Right on. And then, okay, can you clarify a little bit your road rage situation with the guy? Because, like, I was trying to sit together. Obviously, it's a rare occurrence.

It's detailed in the book. Yeah. Okay. Real quickly, I wrote, I was a red light and he was behind me in a taxi. Okay. He started laying on his horn, right? Okay. See, that's what it was, the horn. The horn was annoying to me. But then when he was wanting to go right, right, and there was no lanes, and I didn't want to go right, so I was going to go straight. And I was trying to make signs out the back window. I can't do it. And then instead of going right, he came straight across the intersection and he rolled down his window. Now he's berating me out of his window and I'm trying to answer in Spanish. And this is frustrating. And even then when I slammed down the brakes, I was almost

out of control, but probably okay. And then when he went forward and stopped his cab and then got out and started to come back to give me some more trouble, then I just lost it. I saw red. I saw red at that point. I could understand Road rates and I never thought about it. But of course, if you've ever seen Road Rage up close with two other individuals, you realize probably a few seconds before one guy loses it, it's not that bad. And then all of a sudden, one guy just trips off. Snap. Yeah.

I think it's a symptom of a lot of, one of the symptoms of PTSD is overreacting to situations that are not that dangerous. Sounds anything. And that guy triggered something in me that clarity did not justify what I was going to do. It's crazy to think how that animal instinct, look, we may. make iPhones and write books and create all the world. And yet you can just get mad. Because some guy yelled at you, you know? It's actually crazy to think that.

Oh, yeah. You could be so smart. You went to the Naval Academy. You know, you did all these things. You didn't know. Freakadoot cut me off. You know, honked his horn. Yeah.

That was the major violation. Kick off right there. Yeah. There's something unique about driving. in the car and the, you know, other cars and all this stuff. It brings it out. Somehow it does bring it out. I've seen people do it on an airplane.

I was behind a couple guys that got to that point on the plane. And I thought, well, as soon as they're off this plane, one I was going to really try to kill the other one. I mean, they were. What were they fighting about? I never do, but you didn't have any doubt about where they. One guy was whispering, I'm going to kill you. That's probably about the armrest, right?

Like, you know, that person next year's trying to get the armrest from you. That dude might die. Apparently. Apparently. I remember I got asked one time, Hey, Janko, if you were on an airplane and there was a person sitting behind you, it was a family and there was a kid, and the kid was kicking your seat and, like, yelling and kicking your seat

and wouldn't stop kicking your seat, what would you do? And I said, I'd continue writing on my computer the next book that I'm working on. I had a friend in my neighborhood that had that happen with a guy. The guy was behind him, and he was a cage fighter or something, and he was always either tripped up on something, or he was, later they threw him off the plane when he landed because he wouldn't let him get on his following flight. But he kept kicking the seat behind my friend.

And my friend had the seat all the way up, so there was nothing more he could do. And so finally he calls a stewardess, the stewardess comes, and realizes the guy behind him is crazy, and the guy's muttering about not having slept in three days and one thing or another. So my friend, a pretty big strong guy himself, that Stewart said, would you mind moving?

We'll find you another seat. My friend said, why should I move? That guy's the guy causing the trouble. And so what happened is they called ahead. The pilot called ahead. They had somebody come on a plane and take the guy off. But, you know, I guess my friend had two things going for him. He didn't get into road rage.

And he was stronger than I would have been. I don't have gone ahead and moved, I think. Yeah, on the plane, I feel like there's certain people who are just more at ease at being on a plane and then versus somebody who's like constantly stressed on a plane. But I feel like everyone behind the wheel, for the most part, has some element of altered mental state in some capacity.

Everybody feels like it, you know, like a lot. I mean, some people have to work harder to suppress it for sure. And they actually say that each country has got different personality profiles behind the wheel. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I won't get into details. But the point is some of them are kind of funny. And they they I won't go any deeper but to say Spaniards drive differently than

Americans Americans drive differently than Brits Brits drive differently than Italians if you ever been in Italy there are no rules basically America is actually pretty chill like the way we alternate getting into a lane yeah yeah yeah that's pretty standard you go you go hey we both got to get on the highway yeah and go I go boom boom we that's not normal no it kind of depends on the state too a little bit you know see maybe a little bit state's our personality and city go LA, New York versus Kauai. Boston.

If you want to throw Boston in the next up. It gets a little wild. If you're in Italy and you make eye contact, you lose. You make eye contact with another driver. You've lost it. He knows you've seen him, so then he's going to take all the advantage

he can get. And if you're crossing a road as a pedestrian and you make eye contact with a driver, you've lost. He's not going to respect you whatever ever. You saw me? I'm not responsible for your life anymore you are. Now you did it on purpose.

You did me? Yeah, it's true. Right on. Any other questions, echoed. Last one. How often are you engaging in these meditative, spiritual practices? I look at it like brushing your teeth. The thing about meditation, you know, what you're trying to do, essentially, is get some control over your mind.

Right. Your mind controls you a lot more than the reverse. And so what you're trying to do with meditation is open up the right side of your brain, move into an alpha state. It's kind of interesting in the Olympics. I don't know if you notice the guy on the pommel horse for the U.S. team in the recent Olympics. He's sitting over there in an alpha state, a meditative state, way to be. for his event. Everybody else is so wired up, they can't sit still, and yet he'd learn how to put himself in this state. But meditation is the guy that he just did the one event

really well, and they just brought him on the team to kick ass on that one event. If you see any film of him sitting there before, he is just just exactly like a Buddhist monk sitting there on the sideline waiting for his event without any stress whatsoever visible. It's because he'd moved over to the right side of his brain essentially. Well, meditation does that, but it's a practice. It's a daily practice. I go along with that and say a little spiritual reading, never heard anybody, whether read the poems of Fafis and the gift. I mean, they don't take 15, 20 seconds to read a poem,

but they fill you with something that you can use on a daily basis. And so I do it every day, every day. Yes, sir. Right on, good to meet you. Well, great many of you guys, that's for sure. Yeah. Any final thoughts, Tom? No, I don't know.

I think I'd really like to leave the message with people would be, you know, if you're going through hell, like Winston Church has had to keep going. You know, if you're having bad mental issues or you're stuck in life or whatever, keep looking. Find a way to move past it. And that's really my whole message. The message in the book is you need to keep moving. Well, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing the lessons learned. Obviously, thanks for your service and your sacrifice for the teams and the nation. and thanks for putting this book together to show people how to continue on and stay balanced and build that that foundation that they need of mind, body, and spirit.

Well, thank you. And with that, Tom Murphy has left the building. So mind, body, spirit, all important. One thing that we know, we can definitely handle. and we should not ever let slip his body, right? Physical things we're doing. Otherwise, because the other things can fall apart.

If we're to look, if we don't keep track of our health, the other things can definitely slide. So probably, look, is it, could we say it's the most important leg of the stool? I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that, but it's the one that is most visible. and it's the one that is it's almost the one that could decay the easiest

I guess they could all decay easy I think it's the most straightforward Okay let's go with that Let's go with it for sure It's one thing that we know we can we know we can handle Yeah We don't need to delve too deep to figure out That we need to do pushups

And we need to do squats And we need to train jiu-jitsu And we need to run Yeah Not pretty straightforward Straightforward Don't really even have to read one book To figure any of that

out. Exercise, eat good, rest good. Pretty straightforward. Like within that framework, you can do kind of whatever. Yeah, I got a lot of freedom in there. Okay. Hey, so we know we're going to rest good, you know, at least you are. Yes, I am. Yes, sir. And you know we're going to work hard, but we need clean fuel. That's true. Do we not? We need clean fuel. Yes, sir. Well, if you need clean fuel, come check it out. Joccofuel.com. We've got awesome fuel for your system we've got the protein that you need we get to hydrate that you need which is really refreshing we got greens we've got energy drink which i had during this podcast i also had hydrate during this podcast so that's what we got we got it going on we got we got the supplements for your

joints which you're going to need when you're training hard we got the the super krill oil which is awesome for your life we got time we just got everything that you need check it out joccofield com also you can get us at walmart you can get us at wawa vitamin shop gnc military commissaries aphys hanifers dash stores in maryland wakefern shopwright hib mire wagmans harris teeter lifetime fitness shields and whatever gym you're going to we got you covered so check it out joccofield If you have a gym, you have a jih Tjitoo academy, you can email J.F. Sales at joccofield.com. Let's get it. That's what I got.

It's true. Also, origin USA. Don't forget about that. You do need a uniform if you choose to practice jiu-jitsu, which I would recommend. Now, you can go what's called ghee, a ghee, you wear a ghee or no ghee, which you don't wear a ghee, but you do wear a rash card, short. Fight shorts. What other words could have evolved to cover no ghee?

Because let's face it, we took kind of a very simplistic way. I was just thinking slick. Could have been like, oh, you're training geese or slick? Yeah, yeah. You could have said, what else could you have said? Well, in basketball they say shirts and skins. Skins, yeah, it would be skins. Yeah.

What's the other one? You could do colors red and green or red and blue. But why would you call it green? You know, blue team, right? Blue team red team. No, no, no. I'm saying we, look, when we started, there used to be ghee. You used to be just called Jiu-Jitsu, and it was assumed that Jiu-Jitsu meant

ghee. Right. At a certain point, you could do either ghee or no ghee. Yeah. Which, I'm just saying, that could have evolved. That's a real simple, straightforward. I think it makes sense. Yeah.

But I was thinking it's weird that that's what we came to. We didn't call it something else. Yeah. Well, that actually makes sense when you think about it because just like I said, ghee was just the norm. And then someone took off the ghee and it's like, hey, that guy's over there with no ghee. Yeah.

On. Like it could have been, oh, here's one. I think it was in Portuguese. It was like seen kimono. Met like no with no kimono. The reason I say slick is because back in the day. Back in the day. If we were doing something without our combat gear, we'd say, oh, we're just.

going to jump, hey, first two jumps are going to be slick. Yeah. Oh, we're going on a dive. Oh, our first dive today is going to be slick, meaning we're not bringing the equipment. Yeah. So slick probably could have been done, could have done it. Yeah. It's weird because I've told you this before, the rear naked choke.

Yeah. Which is called naked because it doesn't require the jiu jihitsu kimono to wear. So they could have said naked jiu jihitsu, right? Right. Which would have been weird because we are wearing shorts. Right. Could have called it shorts jiu jihitsu. I like slick.

I think slick is a, is, is, is, uh, that's a good one. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because the rash card kind of indicates, you know, some sort of a streamline. Also, I bet if you went back far enough or not, I bet, but it could be that if you went back far enough, you were in no gijitzu, but you started wearing, you started bulking up and, in refining and making the clothing stronger. Mm-hmm. So that you could, so it'd be more durable.

And then eventually you realized, oh, I could choke someone with this. Mm-hmm. And now you make it even more durable. So maybe it should be Jiu-Jitsu and Ghi-J-J-Zu-T-T-T. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I guess it could be. Well, I guess we do say G-Gi-J-J-Tu-now that people start ju-Jitsu, knowing there's G-I. I know G-Gi.

Yeah, yeah. Do you do G-Gi-Gi-G-G-or? Yeah. No, they say do you train G-G-G-in-the-G-G. Yeah. In the G-G-G. So lots of options there. Yeah, either way.

Right now, we're sticking with G-G-No-G-G-G. But we got you covered both fronts. Either way. It's true. So rash guards, look, if you're not wearing the gear, you're going slick, you can go rash guard. You can do a shirt. You can do a dry fit. What would you guys call it the brr? B.R.

Is that, do you use that for Jitz? You could for sure. Yeah, or even a dry fit scenario. But I'd go with a rash guard. Rash guard all day. That's the preferred, it's interesting because from surfing board shorts, rash guard, well, that's more bodyboarding. Surfing is wet suit more than.

Well, it depends on where you are. It depends on that water temperature. Why would you wear a rash guard? Under what circumstances do you guys were rash guards surfing? Well, the sun and the surfboard rash that you get from paddling on your surfboard, which is why it's called a rash guard. I thought, yeah, but well, you know, south side, Kauai, brand keys, paper beach, etc. The boogie boards, bodyboards gave you the rash. The surfboards not as much.

Did you surf? Not really. Most of the surfers I knew didn't really get many. I'll tell you this. Here's the thing. You get conditioned to not wearing a rash card. Surfing. Surfing.

Yeah. Yeah, you can get conditioned. So bodyboard, if you have a new bodyboard, you get less of a rash. But once you had that thing for a year, it depends on use. But your ass is getting a rash. No matter how, quote, unquote, conditioned you are. And it freaking sucks. So I understand rash card.

That's why we would ever wear rash cards, bodyboarding. But interesting how it carries over to the jiu-jits because you wear surf shorts, board shorts in jiu-jitsu. even the new fight shorts well now there's a bunch of different kinds but the original fight shorts are kind of just board shorts with like a slit on the side I think even kind of that's what shorts are now

still are fight shorts yeah it's true it's a lot of cross over there yeah surfing in there jujjia so nonetheless origin USA so you go to origin USA.com is where you can get yours whether it be ghee no geish guard do we have fight shorts on there or board shorts boom all made in America by the way

which is a big deal and jeans did you say jeans? Yeah, well, not yet. But you're about to? About to, yeah. I'll let you go. Yeah, we're going with the rash guards and geese and stuff first. But yes, as far as being made in America goes, it's not just assembled in America. It's like the materials are grown in America.

The idea formulated from the people who grow the materials to make these items all originated in America. Right on origin USA.com. Get yourself some freedom in the form of clothing. Yeah. Jeans, boots,

best jeans, by the way. Different kinds, by the way, options. Not just one. You know, they could only make one

because we're limited. No, no, it's not limited. So get what you want. OriginUSA.com. Also, Jocko has a store called Jocko store. Discipline equals freedom,

which is true, by the way. Sometimes we forget that on the weekends. Maybe not me, but other people. People I hear forget that discipline equals freedom not freedom freedom Then doesn't necessarily just equal you see what I'm saying but if you want to represent

It's where you can get the shirts and hats and hoodies some rash guards on there too by the way Apparently socks as well socks coming soon I got it you know it's one of those things but yeah oh you're letting down the people by this time People weren't expecting socks everyone's feeling like their feet are undisciplined at this time yeah I understand actually by this time yes so Check for the socks okay for sure do they say discipline on them or freedom on them or both. Does one sock say one sock say the other thing? No, they both say discipline equals freedom. Okay, that's probably good.

Yeah, yeah. They look good. Two options. Otherwise, you might have, when you're walking around, freedom equals discipline by accident. No, no, no, wrong. We're inside out, maybe. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

We got you covered. They're squared away. Discipline equals freedom, socks, everything. We even got soap on there. We've got some cool stuff on there. So check it out. JoccoStore.com. Also,

Check it out. Included in the cool stuff is another option. Which, by the way, is kind of subjective. Yes. Whether something's cool or not. You're kind of blanketing everything that you make as cool. Yes. Which is kind of a kind of true.

Take the liberty. Kind of 100% true. Well, hey, look, don't just take my word for it. Like I say, check it out. You like something. Get something. Hey, you don't think it's cool. Then, of course, you know, don't get nothing or, you know, get something for someone else who does think it's cool.

Whatever you like. nonetheless back to short uh jockel store so shirt locker shirt locker subscription scenario i like the way you say stuff thank you i like the stuff you say to you take a dramatic pause you take a dramatic pause oh i take a dramatic pause i'm going to say dramatic you're saying shirtlocker and pausing it's kind of ridiculous like yeah in a good Like almost like, hey, just in case there's applause that's happening kind of amongst the world when you say that. Sure. But people.

Anyway, like I was trying to say, I'm saying this is important info that you're currently standing in the way of. Check. I'll be quiet over here. For the people. Anyway, short locker is a subscription scenario. You get a new design for you sure every month. Different colors, designs, layers, the whole deal. Pause.

Anyway, you can check that out If you click on the top Where it's the shirt lock You check out there Some past designs on there See what's kind of coming up this month Little sneak peek of the You know the current design

You see you learn all about it Look at that you did that whole thing In one nice kind of cohesive cohesive unit Yeah thank you But I'm sure there's a couple people that were like Hold on I just need a second there They're just kind of

kind of gloat in the last word that he said Thank you Jocco jocco store.com That's where you can see all this stuff Uh, as the kind of, kind of the CEO of dramatic pauses over here. Yes, over there. Yeah. So we used to say pot, this is kettle. I pass pro word black.

Yeah, exactly. Which is the team guy way of saying, that's like the pot calling the kettle black. So, all right, you're going to need steak as well. So check out Colorado craftbeef.com and also check out primalbeef.com. Awesome steak for you to, for you to eat. you don't make and eat so check that out my wife's kind of getting super dialed on the

primal beef methodology of cooking from Sean Glass yeah which is three minutes three minutes two minutes two minutes done it's kind of her little protocol but she's really kind of knocking me in the park right now

is that on the grill the stove no this is on a pan you know yeah yeah you know uh uh stove top cast iron skillet yeah that's kind of a big deal yeah that's all I get It's a big deal when you grab the handle of a cast iron skillet, which doesn't...

You got to be careful. Yeah. So check it out. Get yourself some steak to cook in the proper fashion. Colorado Craftbeef.com, primalbreath.com. Check those out. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also, jocco underground.com.

Also, YouTube. We've got a bunch of YouTube channels. Check them out. Psychological warfare. Flipside canvas, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on the wall. Books. Check out the book Beyond the Trident by Tom Murphy, which we covered today. Lots of interesting information in there.

If you have an open mind and you can see some other perspectives. Also, I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out. I've also written some kids books. I've written a bunch of kids books, actually. I think I've written about six. So check those out. I've written, I think, about the same number of adult books, perhaps.

So anyways, that's what we're doing. Check it out. Also, I have a leadership consultancy. It's called Eschlein Front, where we solve problems through leadership. whether you're a small, medium, or large company, whether you're a small, medium, or large team, you need help with your organization, and the help that you need is leadership help.

And that is what we do at Eschalonfront. Check out Eshlonfront.com. We also have a bunch of events. We've got the muster in Dallas coming up, 16 to 18 October, also the Women's Assembly, September 11th through the 13th in San Antonio, Texas. So check those out. Furthermore, there's a lot going,

on in our lives and your life does not come with an instruction manual it certainly doesn't come with any courses on how to live better so we made an online training academy extreme ownership.com how to take ownership of your life how to lead interact with your family your spouse your kids your employees your peers your boss that's what we do so check out extreme ownership.com learn how to lead and learn how to live And if you want to help members, service members, active and retire, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families.

Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. Also check out Micah Fink's program, Heroes and Horses.org. And finally, Jimmy May's organization Beyond the Brotherhood. Dot org. And if you want to connect with us, I am at jaco.com. I am on social media.

Echoes on social media. I'm at Jocco Willink. Echoes at Echo Charles. Just be careful because what they really want to do is ruin your life. Also, once again, thanks to Tom Murphy for joining us, sharing your lessons learned. We really appreciate it. And thank you for what you did to carry on the proud tradition of the SEAL teams. And thanks to all our military personnel, past, present, who fought or are fighting to preserve our free.

and our way of life. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all of the first responders. Thank you for preserving our safety here at home. And everyone else out there, just make sure you detach a little bit and you pay attention to what you're doing and you pay attention to the condition of your body and you pay attention to the condition of your mind and you pay attention to the condition of your spirit. make sure that you're not adrift in the world and that you have control over what you're thinking

and what you're doing don't leave things to chance but instead create your own outcomes and that's all we've got for tonight until next time zecho and jocco