Jocko Podcast - 462: Leadership and Social Connections in Modern Warfare. With John Spencer

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies w the Madison Policy Forum.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 462 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I received a text from Lieutenant Shockley. Have you heard what happened at Err? You better call the talk. After calling the battalion to see what was going on with Alpha Company, I was given orders to get on the first convoy I could find and get to Battalion Headquarters.

I got on a resupply convoy that was leaving at 2,300 hours. On arriving at Battalion Headquarters, I went directly to the Battalion Commander's office. He informed me that I would be taking command of Alpha Company immediately, only a few days after starting inventories. Normally a few weeks were allowed for a command transition to take care of all the administrative accountability. The I-Ram attack had been the last straw of many blatant deficiencies in the company commander's competency as an officer, let alone the commander of a unit in combat. The battalion commander's only real instructions to me were to fix it. Fix it all of it He said alpha company needed a strict hand

He also gave me the ability to fire or remove every person in the company Except the first sergeant Dismantle entire platoons if you need to he told me The first sergeant was one of the problems that I wished I could remove but I was stuck with him Maybe I could bring him in line and get him to understand my leadership style Near midnight on July 8th. I was dropped off at the JSS by a logistical convoy and as my boots hit the ground I immediately took command the old commander was long gone I unceremoniously assumed wartime command of a mechanized infantry company just what I had wanted

but not in this way or under these circumstances when in command take command and that right there is a little excerpt from a book called connected soldiers life leadership and social connections in Modern Warfare, it's written by a gentleman by the name of John Spencer. John Spencer served as an active duty soldier for over 25 years, went up through the ranks from private to major, and he served in combat as both a platoon commander and a company commander. He's currently the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and also serves as the chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum and is a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.

He's written dozens of professional articles, journal articles, case studies contributed to multiple books and he has written three books of his own, understanding urban warfare, which is adopted from his podcast, which is called the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He also wrote this book that I read from Connected Soldiers and, Finally, the mini manual for the urban defender, which went viral when Ukraine kicked off and it's now viral throughout the world. And it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to pass on his knowledge and lessons learned. John, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Jocko. The honor is mine. You know when you're going into a working group in subterranean warfare, that's when you know you're dialed in. That's when you're in the mix for sure. Let's get right into this really quick before we get into the book. So when were you born? What year?

1993. No, that's when I joined Army. Okay. So you were probably born in what? 75. 75. And where'd you grow up? Richmond, Indiana.

And what were your parents doing when you were growing up? So struggling, surviving. My mom, my dad left when I was about seven, left us, three kids under eight. So my mom struggled three jobs, three kids, didn't see her most of the time. I went to school, came home until I was able to enter the delayed entry program. Mom signed me away. There was nothing after high school anyways. Did you play sports or anything?

Were you doing good in school? I didn't. I wouldn't say A's, but I was passing. You passed. Yeah. Sometimes that's all it takes. Any veterans at all that were around the family, where did you get the idea from that the army might be a good call?

Yeah. So my grandmother, who was a figure in my life, had a few. ex-husbands that had served in World War II. So she was affluent at the VFW and American Legion in town, so we would go visit her. And I wrote that into the book Connected Soldiers, that there was something different to all the old guys sitting around with their unit logos and, you know, bonding with each other, which was a big part of, you know, coming back from World War II is that they're always in your community. So I got to experience that as a kid.

Nobody in my family, actually, that I knew of, although my grandfather served in World War II, I learned that later, but he wasn't around me. But I think that was the start of the influence. And then I just fell in love with what the recruiter was selling. And those recruiters do sell, don't they? Going to the book here, you say, I would like to say I joined the Army for some heroic reason, but honestly, I just had no plans after high school.

I was fascinated by adventure outside of a small town, Indiana, and our local army, the local army recruiters promised. And so you were thinking, Ranger, right? I was. Out of the gate. Yeah. But of course he told you, hey, don't worry. We don't have any slots for that.

Just take 11X, which is unspecified infantry airborne. And he said basically the same thing. That's a quote from the book. It's basically the same thing. How much, so did you join the delayed entry program when you were 17? I did. Then did you have to complete your senior year before you could leave? I was actually, I was younger.

So I was in basic training by 17. Oh, nice. Yeah. So I used to say I signed at 16, but that might not. not be possible, but I was, I signed early in that senior year, but I, I turned 18 in Panama, my first unit. So, yeah, I was, which gets you into like other people's ideas of what is a child soldier. I mean, I was, yeah, I had graduated at 17 because of my birthday and everything, but yeah, was off. Sweet. Boot camp, what you expected, an AIT and airborne school, where you just kind of,

when you're 17 years old, man, it's like, tell me what to do and I'll do it. Right. That was the gray man. I didn't know about the gray man philosophy at the time, but I was definitely trying to be the gray man. Just don't bring attention, just survive, just get through the gates, nothing special. And that's what I did, and it worked.

And your first unit was the 508th down in Panama? It was. What year was that? That was 1990, late 1993 through 1994. I was at Seal Team One at the time, and we would go do jungle training down there in Panama. Yeah. And we'd go out and stay on. the river for like 30 days.

It was awesome. Living in the jungle, living in jungle hammocks. It was good times. For a 17-year-old kid out of Indiana, it was not a good time. What was not a good time about it? I mean, you spend like two weeks of learning about everything that will kill you in the jungle.

And then we were, because of the five-of-wayth was the only one of the few active duty. So outside of the JOTC, the Jungle Operations Training Center. So we were one of the few that did operations at night. So we were out there patrolling. at night through the jungle where everything will kill you to include the stuff on the trees.

Yeah, just finding black palm. Black palm, yeah. Vampire bats, you know, the monkeys that will howler monkeys. Like it was, talk about culture shock of going from suburbia, Indiana into Panama. It was, so I got attacked by African killer bees within like two weeks of being there. It was, I was trying to be the gray man, but. everything was trying to kill me to include my, you know, my NCOs and officers. Like, why can't you run faster?

Like, uh, it was, it was a, a pivotal awakening to the military world for sure. And how long were you down there for? Only nine months before they close it down. And is that how you got to go to, uh, the 75th Ranger regiment? Not yet. I had, I went from there to the 509th, uh, Geronimo in Fort Polk, Louisiana, which the joint readiness training center. You couldn't ask for a better job as a soldier.

I mean, to play the war game. I know you've had other people on the podcast to talk about it, but the U.S. Army only has two, one in the almost the swamps of Louisiana, one in the desert out not too far from us. But I got to be the op force. I was the opposing force for over a year and a half, learning, really, really learning the field craft of hunting men

and doing ambushes and everything. Although it's a laser tag game, it was another pivotal moment that set the seeds that would keep me in for 25 plus years. You couldn't ask for, like, to go to war, but not really go to war. And we would do it once a month. It was the best job,

just in a worst location in the world. What kind of role were you playing? Were you guys guerrillas? Were you guys insurgents? Were you guys a near-peer competitor? What were you guys doing? Yeah, we were a near-peer, but with also insurgent capabilities.

So the opt-for, and we wore the OG-107s of Vietnam, but we also would dial in that, that laser tag stuff like nobody's business. But I was actually a mortarman as well. So we would insert into the box like a week before the blue four or the army unit would get there. And then we would also do attacks on like aviation, assembly areas and things like that. So we got to, the unit itself is supposed to be a competitive, you know,

because it can't be anybody's army, Chinese, Russian or anything. So it usually depend on what unit's coming, like if it's the 82nd airborne, then it's a very light infantry, you know, banned. that you have to hunt down into the woods. So it will, it also has tanks, it has hindis, it had everything. It'll ratchet it up on. How big is the unit there of Op 4? The brigade.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we, unlike other militaries, two brigades. So we have the black horse here in California and then we have the 509th. So it's a huge commitment. Like, I mean, a full brigade of soldiers. Awesome.

Yeah. I ran the training for the West Coast Hill teams. And we, you know, it's just the seals that were in the training detachment would become the op for. And you learn so much when you're doing that. You know, just that we had, we moved from the, we got our own laser tag system. I don't know if you've ever tried this sob stuff. Ditz was freaking awesome. It was like epic.

It's very accurate. There's a little speaker by your, by your, on your shoulder. So it would near misses would make near miss sounds. And you could mortar guys and explosions were going off. It was really good. It had GPS in all of them. So and it would it knew where you shot. So you could go back and watch the whole thing like a video game on Google Earth.

You'd see every little maneuver element going. It was awesome. But both sides learned a lot from that. And the opt for for sure, you start, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it, a very, uh, what's that word? Very dilapidated way of saying this. It was like, you learn to think like the enemy. You know what I mean? And you did.

And it's helpful. Yeah. to think unconventionally actually because you get unburdened by the the way to do things so then you get that asymmetric which I think all war pair is asymmetric and if it's not then you're doing something wrong where you're not trying to fight up to their strengths so as the appor I learned that as a young soldier but it was really the fieldcraft too that I was getting that would be really hard to get anywhere else and then from there it's to the 75th and how was that how was that transition and it was tough I had to go to you know I had to go to Fort Benning Georgia to do

the indoctrination or the the the pro be called rip right yeah rip okay i went to rip which actually one of my um one of my cadre was the devil uh sergeant struker who was from black hawk down if you know the the convoy leader yeah that was one of my rip instructors so uh it was a it was only three weeks but you say only back then now it's longer uh but it was i played the gray man survived and then went to two seven five in fort louis washington It was like a dream come true. It was what I had joined the Army, which I'm glad I didn't get it, though.

Had I gotten that in the beginning at 17, I wouldn't have survived to get it to it. So all that that I had before helped. And then it was everything I thought it would be, the opt tempo, the equipment, the training, the leadership. I mean, Stanley McChrystal was my battalion commander. Okay, right on. So that's when we were talking before we hit record,

you were talking about, we were talking about combatives. Yeah. And he kind of brought the jihitsu in. Yeah, he identified the guy, which I know you've talked about the godfather of U.S. Army military combatants, staff Sergeant Larson at the time. So he signed him to go look at everybody else's.

They brought, actually, it was after UFC 1. So they brought the Gracie's in. He actually went to, so Larson went to the Gracie Academy as McChrystal gave him this task. Like, look, we're doing ban at fighting. Like we can do better than this, like in the throes and things like that. He went to the Gracie Academy,

but he went to a bunch of other places, and he brought the Gracie's. So I was there when the Gracie's first came to 275. and gave like a, you know, like a little training thing. And took a lot of pictures, of course. Hell yeah. And that's where I learned about it. And we would just do like a circle death of just on the, you know, a wide open field and a circle and then just rotate.

And we knew nothing or what we were doing. But we were learning the basics of mountains, you know, in rear necket choke and all this stuff that would later become the foundation of what we do for soldiers now. Which, Larson and I agree with this now. And I actually got to live it, as you know, quickly is it wasn't really about the jiu-tizu. It was about giving you a chance to put your courage to the test. So we'd have this giant circle and we'd call people out into the middle. And then you call somebody else. Like this is why they still box at West Point.

It has nothing to do with boxing. It has to do with, you know, getting punched, you know, entering a ring in fighting takes a little bit of courage. It puts that to a test. And we're doing that. But then within a month of that training that I was doing, is when I get in a street fight and I get my earbit off. How'd the street fight start?

Number one, you're 19? Is that part of it? I am. Yeah, I'm a 19. So some people think alcohol was involved. It wasn't. There was a club in Kent Washington, you know, like soldiers do.

They go, they're on the hunt. So there was a non-alcoholic dance club called Cowboys that Rangers would go to together. We'd go there. And after those, there would be, usually a civilian like bonfire party. One of those, I was at a bonfire party with my Ranger buddy because you never travel alone.

And I woke up like 30 minutes later, I got knocked out by a baseball bat. And my buddy looked really bad. Like I just took a little nap. Do you remember anything leading up to it? No. No smack talking or anything like that? I was actually had my back to the fire.

I was talking to two girls. And then I woke up. So I had a nice little nap. My buddy who saw it happen ran over and then he got beat down. and was awful, woke up and they put us in cars and said, you probably need to leave. And all I asked was who did this and they gave me a name.

So young and dumb, you know, went to the hospital, got stitches in the back of my head, went back to my unit, told my unit, you know, the barracks, you know, what had happened. And they're like, well, you're going, we're going back, right? So that evening, we put like two truckloads of rangers, went back to that club where, you know, the party had come from, walk into the club looking for this guy, his name was Pepper. That's all I remember.

So we entered the club and the people come up through us. Are you looking for Pepper? Like, yes. I'm like, well, he's outside in the alley. Don't bring your friends or we'll bring ours. This is such like, now as an adult, like this is so stupid. Like, what are you doing? Like, as you have talked about, like, that's a choice.

You could have, but the whole honor, like, I mean, the cities and white people go to war. Honor is one of those. So I walked down the alley with like 12 Rangers. And inside it was a guy standing in the middle of it and a ring of civilians in a dark alley. And I entered that ring, took my shirt off, and just started swinging.

I had learned, I had never been in a bite before. I had, of course, people think that you know. Do you have any, do you know what this beef was about? Was it about one of the girls? or was it? Yeah, I guess he had thought that I was talking to his girls. Okay.

He had some mental issues, clearly. Just immediately started swinging. I had learned enough about close the distance and take them down. So I closed the distance, took them down easily. We're actually in the gully of the alley

at this point. But he's going crazy, like sticking his fingers in my eyes, scratching, like a real street fight. I achieved Mount easily. Not that I felt comfortable, most of this is a blur because all my adrenaline and everything is like off the charts. And at one point, I was, my head was next to his and I felt him bite into my ear. I thought he just bit into it.

I put him in almost like a crucifix upside down choke and he passes out. And then everybody's like, he's done, he's done, the fights over. I get up. I take the shirt I wasn't wearing and like, yeah, your ear looks pretty bad. I put the shirt on my ear, and now the cops are showing up, and we high-tailed out of there. And as we're driving back to the same hospital

I was at the night before, I put the mirror down, and my ear was gone. He had bit. He not, I barely felt it, but he had bit into it. Did it rip your ear off, or did it, like, take a bite out of a piece of hamburger? Like a bite of hamburger,

or did he bite it and re-ripped off? He bit in, and it cut right through it. Because your ear looks normal now. I mean, for the most part. Thanks. Yeah. Some people don't think that. So there was something left.

There was something left. Although I, you know, this is where like Trump, actually, how much it bleeds. And how hard it is to, it's to heal. It's not like it's cartilage. So they had to keep cutting away at it to get the skin, the clothes over top of it. And it's been a struggle. And I didn't stop doing combatives.

There's actually, I have to wear the headgear because you can actually see like cartilage poking through the seam of it now. where to get that to heal was really hard. The part of the book that matters is that because I was on profile, I didn't have a Ranger tab at the time. I was just a regular soldier, a non-tab. If you can't be on a medical anything in Ranger Regiment for more than 60 to 90 days, so they're like,

well, you got a leap because I couldn't wear a helmet for like a long time. So I got kicked out because of that. And then where did you go? I went next door, which is, so this is the really awful thing. You know, if you get, because Ranger Regiment is the only one has this release authority, which is one of the reason why, again, why it's so strong is that if, if you are, if you've done something wrong, there is no like, well, we're going to rehabilitate you. Like, well, there's somebody else waiting for your slide.

And so there's a regular Army infantry unit on the other side of Ranger Resumice Gate, the 25th entry division, which psychologically really sucks. because you just go over there and you're looking back at the gate across where you want to be. So I went to 25th ID right across the street. I went to Ranger School, which I had an awesome joke about I can't feel my ear during like the health and welfare checks of it's cold. I went to Ranger's School and then I realized for Italy. How was Ranger School? It was what the myth and lore said about it.

It was the greatest test of who you are. And I went on later, as you know, to be a ranger instructor. I love the course. Not, you know, you don't, what I see when somebody wears a ranger tab isn't necessarily their skills, but the fact that they, they survived it. And they had the option to quit, many options to quit. And they didn't. Did you have any major challenges when you were in ranger school?

Absolutely. Every ding day was a challenge. I was a sleepy ranger, so if I laid down, I fell asleep. Okay. Which doesn't work well if you're in ranger school. I had a guy like that in the platoon, and he, if we stopped, like, on a patrol, we'd stop just staying in the line of patrol for a 10 minute break, you know, after 50 minutes of humping. And in 30 seconds, you'd hear like, and he was rare security too. This is just totally ridiculous.

But it was an issue. Yeah. And some people, you just don't know until you've been, until you go through sleep deprivation, food deprivation. You don't know what your weaknesses are. I was a sleeping ranger. I was, but I wasn't trying to. to be distinguished undergrad. I was a gray man.

I mean, I was like a specialist who didn't go through pre-ranger because if you, you know, some units you go through this other phase where they make sure you're ready

because I had gone across the gate. I didn't have to do that. I went straight in. And just by sheer chance because Ranger School can be 60 days or it can be six months because you can recycle.

Yeah, depending on how many times you get rolled back. And having worked there, only about 38% of people go straight through. And somehow, which I didn't deserve to, I went straight through.

But it was extremely, it was what they say it is. It's like the hardest test. I mean, there's this quote by Tex Turner of like, I woke up in the sweat of night thinking that I was back in Ranger's school. Luckily, I was just in Vietnam. But it's true. And I even say in the book, I had guys in Err. Like, yeah, it's not as bad as Ranger School.

Yeah. There is something weird too because when you're going through some kind of a training course, it's a different kind of stress because the stress is that you won't make it. And that stress in a lot of ways is less than the stress of either A, I'm going to get blown up and killed or B,

I'm not going to do a good job with my troops. And I would say either one of those, those are just a different kind of stress, but the stress of like, I'm going to get tested on this thing today and it might just derail my whole career idea that I have. And that doesn't feel good. No.

Look, I mean, there's, and I've written a little bit about this. I mean, the beauty of Rainer's School is that it induces, I mean, I know Buds does, that's a lot of stress, but with the sleep deprivation, the food deprivation, the leadership grade that they just rotate every day, you never know when you're going to get called. The peer stress. So if you're a dick, I mean, or an a-hole, then you're not going through. Like, there's so many elements of this stress to put you to test your character. That's why I really think it does. And I know that other courses put you in the streams to test your leadership and even in your book about changing out the leader and the boat crew and everything. All that gets done.

But that duration and that longevity really tested. Do you want this? Oh, yeah. You know, Ranger School is they, it's a leadership school. So, you know, there's people that going through seal training. They were never a boat crew leader. I wasn't a boat crew leader in buds. You know, I was a freaking 18 year old kid that was like, hey, I'm going to carry the bus.

boat you do when we carry the boat I'll carry a boat but there's a bunch of people that go through buds they're not put into a leadership position you're going to get tested as an individual human member of a team but ranger school like you said you're gonna you're gonna lead this patrol and tomorrow night echo's going to lead the patrol and the next night I'll lead the patrol and we're all going to get graded it's all going to be stressful the other thing that's just totally different is the food food deprivation because in seal training you you're going to get to eat and you kind of get to eat whatever you want regularly You know, occasionally you're, this doesn't even sound like nothing, but occasionally you'll be down at the demo pits during hell week and they'll throw like a box lunch at you and it sucks.

That's one meal. Like you make it six more hours and you're going to be at midrats with a face full of spaghetti. Like, you know what I mean? And so that's a, that's just a different thing to be in Ranger School where, I mean, guys lose like 20, 30 pounds during Ranger School. I gained, I went from 174 to 185 in buds. And that's exercising whatever it is, eight hours a day of exercise. But I ate so much food.

So yeah, those are totally, I mean, there's stress to both of them, but I think the Ranger School is a different type of stress. The food deprivation is a huge thing and then the leadership stuff. Now, the other thing that's cool in Ranger School is you can peer people out and you can do it, you used to be able to do it unofficially in buds,

and now they do do peer reviews. But like we had a guy in our class that was just kind of not good and we brought it to the instructor's attention and they got rid of them. But also the instructors, back when I went through, they could just get rid of someone

because they didn't like him. And that's kind of good. It's also kind of bad because like, who is this instructor? What's his attitude? You know, what kind of problems does this dude have? So they've gotten better at it over the years

But that's what we're going to do We're going to put people to do some serious stress in these schools And Ranger School certainly Freaking get some awesome training in there So then what came after that After you get done with Ranger School So after Ranger School I went back to the unit I re-enlisted for Italy

I was in Italy as an enlisted soldier Amazing time from like 97 to 99 I come back to the States I'm teaching at the infantry school actually at the infantry motor leader course doing like our competitive boards and everything and somebody rec. I'm doing night colleges because it's for promotion

even enlisted, the more college you have the better chance to get promoted and somebody recommended to that. Like you should be an officer. And one of the boards, this great master said like, I don't know if you've considered it, but you should be an officer. So I applied to go to the officer candidate school and this is around

2000, late 2000. Yeah. Good timing. Yeah, timing, huh? So I'd made it to start first class, actually, in that, in eight years, which was just amazing because I had right leaders telling me what to do. Applied for the officer canada school, went. 9-11 actually happened before I started, because we were waiting. I had actually a friend in my house who was waiting, and we were there together.

Finished that, finished officer canada school, finished infantry officer basic course. But I had already had all the training. I was already jump master, air assault. at all this training ranger school everything so normally you graduate that and all the lieutenants have to go to ranger school like this is the thing i think people don't know either like as an infantry officer you either have a ranger tab or you have a story because they're literally the entire class of the infantry officer basic course will will be marched to ranger school and that's one of the big reasons it's a leadership call right but for whatever reasons they don't make it and they

and they can still do great things, but they had their, they went. I didn't have to do any of that. So I went straight to my, so from graduating infantry officer base course, I went straight to return to Italy, now as an officer.

And that was around December 2002. You have a story in here. You show up there and you're going to kind of, you know, make sure everyone knows you're the officer in charge type scenario. And you, decide to take the guys on a run and you're going to wear gas masks

and you say this unit runs are the tropes of military movies they're symbolic of discipline regimentation and spree to core the unit moves like a single organism and the body calls out cadence in one voice as the foot falls in a steady rhythm unfortunately when such a run goes disastrously wrong it starts

to resemble a crowd of protesters running from tear gas which ironically might be why a person would want to wear a gas mask it's symbolic of a breakdown in discipline and a The formation, because you had your guys out there in gas masks, the formation became chaotic as individuals dropped out, gasping or vomiting and trying to catch their breath. Rather than hearing a proud cadence being sung, I heard coughing, complaining, frustration, and even anger. My own feelings were of disappointment, not in my soldiers, but in myself.

How could I have not expected this when the outcome was so obvious in hindsight? I was momentarily gripped by indecision for how to handle this growing melee. I did not know whether to continue on the run or stop. Admit my mistake and have everyone remove the now-heated gas masks or keep going. Neither seemed optimal. There was no right answer, no school solution. My recent training had not addressed what to do when you've made a glaring mistake. I decided to continue the run and not show any visible signs of my internal struggle and anguish.

I had made a decision and I felt I had to stick with it and accept the consequences. If I had fostered any unit cohesion, it was by unifying the platoon in their distrust of my judgment. I was not off to a great start, but I was determined to repair the damage I had done. Chalked it up as one of the first many lessons learned. So there you go.

And just if you're a young, if you're a leader out there, you say here, John, that my recent training had not addressed what to do you've made a glaring mistake. I can tell you what to do when you make a glaring mistake. You say, hey, everyone, stop what you're doing. this was my idea and it was not a good idea. Put your gas masks away. We're going to walk back and I'm going to buy everyone some pizza.

That's what you do. When you make a mistake, you own it. Good times, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And the mistake of mistakes. And luckily I was given many quick, because we were jumping into combat two months later,

many other opportunities to prepare that damage. But man, was out of lesson to myself. It's not like I had not seen people running in gas masks before, but you're trying to create that shared hardship and all that together. It went horrible. It's like the nightmare scenario as people were vomiting in their mask. Yeah. You mentioned that you showed up, like the platoon had already kind of done most of their workup,

most of their training. You mentioned that in the book. You did get to take them to the kill house and you probably gained some respect back in the, in the kill house. Absolutely. And that was a huge. you know, you have, you fall down, you get back up, as you know, and doing that and demonstrating a proficiency, because there's many forms of power, right, reverent power being one of the

most powerful, like, respect, not just positional power. And I was trying that, but, you know, because I had been on a list of guy, they knew that I had been on listed guy, but there, and then you'll also have to show up and, and demonstrate you have that knowledge and that, and to get that, And in that, which is interesting, I became the Urban Warfare guy. Like I knew the killhouse, the battle drills and everything. And I was able to give feedback even to the senior NGOs. Like, okay, you know, think about doing it like this.

And, you know, there's no replacement to that level of live fire training. And there are those scenarios, as I know you know, that gave me that opportunity. And there were other quick ones to include putting them in a circle and rolling half of them up. Oh, because you had a little bit of jiu-jitsu. I did. And a little bit of jukey goes a long, long way.

You got a 200-pound squad leader that comes in and wants to wrestle you. Yeah. And you choke them out. Yeah. It was not like a part of the plan. It was just something they were doing. And that helped a little bit. There's a little pecking order in these groups of people.

They're echo Charles. Yes, sir. And being able to fight is a good thing. I mean, that's what we're supposed to be doing, right? Yes. It's supposed to be some kind of warrior, allegedly. Fast forward. Again, I'm obviously not reading the whole book.

Get the book, everybody. It's an awesome book. So much detail in here. Great lessons learned across the board. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. In March of 2003, it was no secret to anyone that the United States was about to go to war with Iraq. It was all over the news. In Italy, we had heard and watched reports of units moving in a position in places like Kuwait.

We only waited for the word to go. Fast forward a little bit. During the waiting period, brigade command allowed us more time with our families than usual so I was at home when the call finally came in the middle of the day, sir, it's time. I told my wife, Sarah, that the time had come and I had to go. despite knowing this would happen and anticipating it for months, it still came as a surprise.

Maybe we had secretly not believed we really have to face this moment. Unlike every subsequent deployment, we were given almost no notice this first time. We had loaded all of our vehicles and things to go to war, but that was weeks earlier. We did not know the day, week, month, or even if we would be one of the units

to actually be sent. Then suddenly the moment we had been waiting for had arrived. Boom. Yeah, and actually we weren't supposed to go. Like, thanks to Turkey, It's the only reason that we were able to go because Turkey decided to renege on its access to its land. The fourth infantry division had sailed boats and was going to land in Turkey and drive through Turkey into northern Iraq.

And last minute, the Turkey government said, no, you're not. So then they put us in because we could air drop and Turkey gave us permission to overflight. But we weren't even supposed to go. So it was interesting that my unit was doing all that planning. We'd actually moved vehicles even by train somewhere and moved them back. You know, this is what people do when they just, I'm ready. Like, it's like, put me in, coach, I'm ready. But it was the last, it was, so we didn't know because nobody knew.

Nobody knew, huh. You know, you're talking here. And again, one of the underlying themes in this book, obviously, it's called connected soldiers. And if you talk about whether it's letters in the old days and, you know, you guys were writing letters. And then it came to, you know, email and then it came to Internet. And then it's FaceTime. And you kind of go through that. But one of the things you talk about here is just like,

carrying photos and you know you talked about how people learn that from watching the movies like in the movie you know you got the photo of your fiancee and your helmet and stuff like that so i thought that was a a good assessment and then you say by 2008 i saw no photos in helmets and few in living quarters no imprinted photos anymore this is interesting for the invasion in 2003 we also did not know how long we'd be deployed would it be like desert storm which was really the last major war we had as a reference being that it was also fought against the iraqi army Desert Storm fighting lasted 43 days, including the aerial campaign. So you guys must have had that in your mind. Like, we're going to be home in a few months. We had it. So, you know, lessons learned, and this is not for me, but for generals. We had a two-star general get on our plane.

In Italy, as we're rigging out, getting ready to fly in Iraq, promise the entire unit, this would be a 90-day or less deployment. We'll see you back soon. And that, of course, you know, through the, what we call the Joe network, that spread across an entire brigade rapidly. Like, this is only 90 days. As a matter of fact, I was in Iraq, like 60 days into it. And I told my battalion commander, like, sir, there's a rumor here that we'll be here for a long time.

And he laughed at me. He laughed at my face. And actually it was CNN that released while we were in theater that we would be there for 12 months. So not through the FRG, the family readiness, not through the unit, CNN. Our families knew that we would be there for a year before we did. While we're giving lessons to generals and I'll add politicians to this. because these politicians and generals, for some reason, they haven't picked up on the fact

that when you go to war, the enemy gets a vote and things aren't going to go how they plan and how you plan. The enemy's not at the planning table, like telling what he's going to do, as we heard the other day from a SOG combat warrior. He's like, hey, you know, Dick Thompson. He's like, the North, the NBA wasn't at our planning table.

So when we'd show up, we'd know what the hell they were going to do. But these generals and politicians think, oh well you know here's our plan we'll go and execute this plan and it'll go according to plan and there won't be any you know we won't lose any soldiers we won't have any civilian casualties there won't be any collateral damage everything's going to go good and we'll be home in three months that's what they think that's the plan echo charles the enemy doesn't give a shit uh fast forward a little bit the combat jump the army was organized would be the largest since the jump into panama on 1989.

Actually, the U.S. Army has only been using paratroopers in combat since 1942. Of course, World War II images of paratroopers being dropped over Belgium and France are etched in the minds of most Americans. But since then, there have only been a handful of combat jumps. We were about to make history. You guys had to be fired up. We were fired up. And it was everything.

I mean, the airfield, imagine a thousand of paratroopers with like ACDC, Blaring and like, we were doing, which goes to the movies and everything. We're that lineage and the ideal of it and dropping and being able to wear the little mustard gold stain that you wear for the rest of your career for doing a combat jump. Explain that to Echo Charles. Please. It's kind of a big deal. So in the airborne community within all the militaries, you have wings that determine whether you're a basic, so senior or master rated. If you have a combat jump, you get a gold star in it.

And that's called a mustard stain within the airborne ranger, everybody's community. Like that's a big deal. because there's been so few of them. And if you have two, it's called a spotlight. Actually, when I was in Ranger's resume, there was a first star who had two, Grenada and Panama, which is also unheard of. But it's like this huge, you know,

from within the culture, this sign of very significance. And I paid, we call ours the mud stain, as you know from reading the book. We paid the price for that star. But to wear that for the rest of my 18 years or whatever, which is really important. Yeah. What do they call it mustard?

It's got like a yellow, the yellow color. Like a casual slang term. Yes. Just the mustard stain. Yeah, yeah. But there's so few people. Like, there's tens of thousands of airborne soldiers in the army. Probably hundreds of thousands.

We have a whole division just dedicated to it. There's, but in everyone, of all those people, there'll be like a few thousand at any time. And this was the first jump since Panama, which was in 1989. And so somebody would have had to be like pretty old and senior to have jumped there. And there was only, and that was only, you know, a couple of battalions or Rangers. Yeah, like 500 or 1,000 guys jumped in out of the whole army of 400,000 people. So that's a very rare thing. Yeah, which makes the term mustard stain kind of like stand out a little bit because my,

because really the purpose or, you know, kind of the reason people do that will be like almost like making it no big deal. You know, right? It's like the opposite. Like, it's a big deal, but the slang term is something that's not a big deal. You know, it's just a mustard sting kind of a thing, but it's like such a big deal. Sure. And it came with hate because you can imagine, you know, we were a small, I mean, it's only a really two battalions in Northern Italy. They did this jump about a thousand of soldiers. When you have a division of airborne. Yeah. There was a lot of hate for years. Like, well, you jumped into a secure airfield. Like, it doesn't, it's not real, despite the history of the combat jumps, even in World War II, on which ones were contested or not. But the hate, was massive. Oh, yeah. The military, the military jealousy and hate is strong. Very competitive. Yes. Fast forward a little bit.

The time finally arrived at Mark 26, 2003, at approximately 1945 hours, Sulu time, 12.45 a.m. local time. The green light came on. The jump master yelled go and hit me on my backside. My training kicked in. No hesitation is authorized. And I instinctively stepped out the door. My feet landed briefly on the ledge outside the door.

And then my body hitting the gusty wind sucked out into the air. Fast forward a little bit. It took less than a minute for 954 soldiers of the 1st Battalion 508th Infantry, second battalion, 5003rd infantry, and the 173rd headquarters staff to exit the 15C-17s and another minute or so to hit the ground. We did not have time to ponder the historical significance of the event. We were American soldiers just dropped into a combat zone and had things that needed to be done. Absolutely.

And we had a division of Iraqi army. Enemy. Yeah. We didn't on us. and you mentioned this you land in freaking mud like deep treacherous mud so you know

it's like you know the preparation for you know combat or something like that or the op-orders and the and the S2 gives the briefings and you get the weather and all that stuff like nobody mentioned the mud nobody said oh it's been raining for a week

it might be a little muddy on the drop zone but when I say mud I mean like tilled fields at some point's knee-deep mud with everybody, and they weighed everybody. I've talked about in the book, too. Like, we don't train under combat load for army guys. It would just break you.

Like, it would break people. So over 100 pounds on our backs dropped into knee-deep mud. In the middle of the night, it was, I earned that mud stain. You actually were a little worried when you got on the ground because you're like trying to slog for the mud and you figure you may not even be able to lead your, Put in two Paltune. Luckily, you run into one of the guys. You get everything going. Fast forward a little bit. Once we got everything in motion, we execute our first mission of establishing one of the blocking positions that formed a perimeter around Pashir Airfield, which was adjacent to the DZ. American Special Forces and Kurdish allies had already been operating in the area before our jump. So we encountered no Iraqi opposition. We accomplished our first mission without firing a shot.

Pretty straightforward. Fast forward. On April 8th, we received orders to attack an Iraqi divisional. headquarters about 15 miles outside of Urbeel. So this is now you're getting tasked to do something. You go through kind of the planning and the preparation and talk through it. And then you say once we're out of destination, I had the platoon spread out in a line facing the enemy position, finding whatever natural cover was available. My vehicle was in middle of the formation right in the middle of the road, actually. As the vehicles arrived in the response, the squad members dismounted and either manned,

the crew served weapons or took up individual fighting positions. Again, this is where the training was paying off. I'd already given the orders to the Mark 19 gunners that they could open fire with grenades as soon as we got into position. That's legit. It was legit. You had some pretty good decentralized command.

If you're like, hey, once we get in position, you know where you're shooting, cleared hot. It was literally, you know, Andy Stumps cleared hot. Yeah. And we knew exactly where the enemy was. They had forward observers at a high, ground to just the sounds of that. As soon as we hit, you hear a Mark 19 grenade launcher start launching.

And then you start seeing the enemy response. So they started firing like ZS, you know, their big in its circle because they didn't know what was happening. They just knew that because the whole point was to bring the artillery closer to the shore them, which was behind us. And we're the front line of that. But we're within eyesight of this divisional position. And the guys immediately.

And it was, I mean, like a. symphony. You know, I'm just sitting in the middle of it. And you see two Mark, you know, Martin 19s on both sides of me, 50 cows, engaging positioned. It was, it was, yeah, I've never, it's never been replicated. So it was an amazing moment, but the feeling was intense. After about 10 minutes in the intersection, we started to receive enemy mortar fire, mortar rounds make a very loud explosion. And it boom on impact. How did you like that? I didn't like it at all. Actually, and in hindsight, again, lessons learned

that, like, pulling into a four-way intersection probably wasn't the best ideal because, Echo, if for, like, mortars and artillery, there's things called, like, known locations. Like, you dial into those, and that's a good point to shift from. Like, we were sitting in an enemy, basically, known location. So they didn't have to know where we were,

and they started shooting, so we started receiving mortar fire. Some Iraqi mortarmen on the other side was like, hey, these dipshits are right in the intersection. That's right. You know, point seven two on the grid reference, boom, hit it. Yeah. Yeah, and then that's when the direct fire started coming in as well. And I don't know, I think I put it in there where the, you know, the sergeant major who had come up to their front line and wanted to see the troops and his, and then the fire starts whizzing the, the mortar around started landing.

He's like, what is that? And like, Sarre major, that's enemy fire. Hey, he's not to see you guys. And he starts, he goes away. But it was such a comical, you know, really. moment where he's like, hey, how you doing? They're doing good things. It looks good.

What is that? I'll see you guys later. Yeah, and just for anyone that's listening, you do have those stories in here. You talk about the lessons that you learned. So certainly, if you're in the military, if you're in the Army, if you're the Marine Guard, get this books. You can get those lessons learned. It's better to read the lessons than learn them while you're sitting on an intersection

awaiting enemy mortar fire. I don't mind where we were. I mind it that someone. Somebody at higher headquarters, I'm sure you can relate, thought it would be a good idea that we put out road signs in front of our battle positions attacking against concerns of civilians. So on the top of my vehicle, because I wouldn't let anybody else do this, I had road signs in Arabic saying,

combat area, turn around, go away. I don't know who it was. And then I had five-string concertino wire that I was supposed to put in front of this road just in case a civilian, between us and the division that were attacking somehow came down this road. but some higher headquarters guy thought that that would be needed. So I, as the Mark 19s and everybody's opening up, I run out with my RTO and throw it into the street

and then get back on my vehicles to command my unit. So that's the lesson that I hope other people get. You'll be asked to do some stupid things. Oh, yeah. Somebody that's sitting in an air-conditioned planning space coming up with some idea about all this stuff, yeah, they come up with some real winners right there. And you do go through like a great,

dialogue between your the forward the forward controllers the forward observation team and your guys like 50 meters more adjust right 25 meters and these guys your boys dumped like 500 Mark 19 rounds

yeah almost to a point where they almost go black on the Martin 19 ammo which was concerning because they were dialing them in and they got some of the first confirmed kills of our entire brigade about being dialed in because motors they had this arc and they're at the maximum range of it,

which is like 2,000 meters. And they're arcing them and trying to hit these positions and somebody else's dialing it. It's beautiful. Awesome. But then when they started going like, oh, we're almost black. I'm like, that's not good.

We're still sitting there. And we've got to be here for however long. Yeah. And you don't know when the call is coming. Here's just some of your commentary. Fast forward a little bit. The tough combat jump and first firefight showed me how the process of combat creates moments

of shared hardships among soldiers. At this point of the war, few of us knew, few of us in the platoon knew each other very well. Maybe I knew them least of all. Surviving those stressful situations bonded us to a moment in time. We survived the life-threatening combat episode due to the collective action of the group, not individuals.

Each soldier played a role in the group survival. Shared survival in battle will always be a unique, valuable bonding experience, as I found when things went well like they had today, and even more so when things did not go well, as I knew would eventually happen. So you're seeing that bond form with your troops before your very eyes.

Yeah. And this is, as you know, the book was kind of a trying to go through that, both with what I had learned about even in the academic study of cohesion. I call it the band of brothers phenomena because that's a great series that teaches you how these become,

Why we say brothers and sisters so much because it's it goes it creates this bond that goes beyond, you know, just serving together and surviving together. It creates a lifelong bond. And I was watching that in real time because we were given those experiences, but also the processing of it. So after the patrol was always, which is again why I wrote the book. After the patrol was I felt all that you'd ever thought that war would be sitting around the Humvee Top talking about somebody who fell out of the vehicle who made a mistake, you know, laughing at them. I didn't realize at the moment that that's also part of

the living with the war is that you process it together. So you experience it together, but you process it together. And that's what I saw later wasn't happening, but in these moments, the jump even,

like that, that hell that we paid going through that mud was an experience that only those that did it will have and will bond them for the rest of their lives. You just have to mention mud.

And it creates like a together Because war isn't about individuals. It's about groups. Yeah, and I've always made this kind of assessment like you go through boot camp and everyone in the army or Navy or the Marine Corps that goes through boot camp goes through certain level of shared stresses together and you start to bond even Echo Charles going through two days with football like you have a certain level of bond with those people Well, in the military you go so you go to boot camp well then you go to AIT so now you're doing some more stress stuff that you go to airborne school like okay. I'm okay, now we're all jumping out of airplanes. Oh, now you're going to go to Ranger School. And you just keep getting tighter and tighter. And then the highest form of this is we go into combat together and we take the ultimate risk.

We go through the ultimate hardships. And this is why you have friends that you went through combat with that they're just, you know, your friends for life. It doesn't matter what happens. The interesting part of that, Jock, is that like if you watch the band or brothers, like when they go through currying, you know, they, they, they, trained together and then they deployed together. The U.S. military is such a beast now that that's not, it doesn't happen. So those that you bonded with in basic training or range school, whatever, you may never see them again. And in the World War II, when they came in as a group, then they went through basic airborne, everything together and then fought together. So it

created a bond that we don't replicate anymore. Yeah. Which is again what I try to get into is that togetherness aspect of it used to be. like programmed. And now we have other ideals of the way to do it. Yeah. And they did improve upon it because like in Vietnam, those units, you were just getting single individual replacements in your units.

And so you just had a bunch of freaking random dudes. And of course you'd bond with, you know, if the three of us were there for four or five months together, we happen to be, but then Echo's gone and someone takes his place. And they did change that for the wars that you and I fought. And it's like,

this unit is going on deployment. Now they still would have occasional replacements, but they would at least try and time them properly. where it's not the full unit, you still have the preponderance of the unit together. But you ended up replacing company commander as I let off this whole story with you. That was in the middle of combat situation.

We'll get to that. Interesting on that, though, is this is, again, the beauty of me working later in the Pentagon understanding how the military works. You have the individual at that large scale where the tradeoffs are. So we changed that individual replacement to unit replacements.

So then you get the, you know, not fighting a war, but you're only fighting it one year at a time. So in Vietnam, the headquarters would stay, and then they'd do individual replacements. So you think that with the institutional performance would change as well, as in you're not fighting the war. Every unit's coming into Ramadi. It's a completely different unit.

It's going to have a completely different approach, but the next guy is going to undo everything you just did. So there's cost benefits there. Yeah, we had a guy named Dean Lassie. on the podcast, he was a Marine, and he was in World War II, and he was gut shot off the beach in Tarawa. He was a young lieutenant. And they had been told, like, hey, if someone gets shot in the water, just leave them. Because we have to, and a couple of his Marines disobeyed that order and grabbed him and threw him back into a boat. And so he's gut shot, almost dies,

et cetera. And then you're like, well, so what happened after that? Oh, then he went and recovered, and then was on the next island. Like, so the big, Point in me saying that is in World War II, you went on deployment until we won. Yeah. And that's just the way if you really need to win a war, that's how you got to do it. And this one year stuff, because everybody ends up, you can't, it's very difficult to not have some psychological part of your mind saying, listen, I got four more months. I got three more months. I got two more months.

By the way, Echo, you're my guys. Echo and John, we got two more weeks. you know what? Maybe we don't need to do this and that can be a real thing that will come into play if you're not careful. Going back to the book here,

you talk about home away from home, shared living hardships, this is chapter four. Once in Iraq, we followed the traditions of wars such as writing letters home. And you do a cool job. You bring up a bunch of different letters from different people,

not only people that were with you, but you give some examples of the way they communicated in World War II and World War I just like just Western Union like there's this one guy guy has a child message on the fourth at 2235 not burgo was born she is both healthy and sends greeting to her father that's it and he got this like two months after it happened so you say I wrote desperately to maintain a connection to my wife of only two years, despite my attempts, there was a clear divide between what I was experienced

and what she was encountering at home. She endured a life without me there in Italy, far from her support network in a foreign land that felt unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcoming. I was experiencing a whole new life, one that I had anticipated for a decade and was relishing. So there's going to be a little gap. And you'd gotten married in Italy?

No, right before I... Before you went there? Yep. In between all that training. You talk about... And you talk about just the bonding around, the traditional kind of mail calls and how that was a thing. And actually, we didn't do that.

The only time I ever did that was it when I was in the, in the Navy and we'd be deployed on a ship. This was back in the 90s where there was no email or anything. So you got legit mail call and someone to walk out into your birthing space and he'd be like, all right, you have the orange mail bag and sit there and read off all the guys that had mail. I wasn't one of them. No one was right. My dumb ass.

I try to incorporate because I think these are of course long history of that in the military and even if you watch the Vietnam movies they get like a video or the guy gets a cassette and he plays the dear John but

the interesting part of the research has we moved to electronic communication that even when the soldier writes it's like there's something in the process of even writing and trying to explain to a love on what they're experiencing and what they get back once we move to electronic communication

that the research actually shows that you you actually are communicating different things. If communication is every day and I can just text you like, hey, how are you doing? I love you. The way you process what you're experiencing is actually changing. And there's some fascinating research going back and looking at all of that to see what are the soldiers telling their loved ones

and what are they getting and how is that impacting the actual war experience or later how to cope with it. We think that more communication means that we'll communicate more. No, actually it changes the way we communicate. If I can just send you a quick text or whatever, it becomes less substance. Yeah. You put a little less time and effort into it because you're just all text here later or whatever. And those things are less cherished when they arrive because like whatever, it's no big deal.

It's just a text. It is crazy though. Like getting a text from one of your friends that's in a legit combat zone. You get a text. This is kind of crazy. You know what I mean? Because that's relatively new. You also say this.

During my first call with Sarah, I was angered that after the first few minutes, she asked, why have some of the other guys been able to call their wives every day for the last month? And holding my tongue as best I could, I explained because I'm out living outside the base, usually staying in spots for only a couple days or weeks.

I'm not like the people stationed at these big support installations who can mose you over to the phones on their lunch break. So there you go. That's a tough one, though. That's legit. And it was, I mean, Most people, even within the military,

don't understand that. A new wife won't explain, understand that. Like, there are thousands of jobs in the military, and they'll be living in different conditions, even in war. Yeah. And most of them,

most of those jobs are on the big base with a phone and a pool and everything else. You guys are kind of squatting in various abandoned schools and government buildings, and you talk about that. You guys didn't take a shower for a month. But the cool thing is, once you got,

You say this about once you move into a building. The very first thing we did after ensuring we had security at a new site was to set things up to make our lives more tolerable. So this meant dipping into, tapping into power lines, setting up air conditioners, finding wood to make bathrooms, even hanging water bags that you could heat up and get showers. But then you say this, and this is really important. The important fact is that the improvements soldiers made were always oriented toward the group, not individual conveniences. We developed innovative ways to make us all more comfortable. It would break social norms to focus energy on establishing comforts such as personal air conditioning that was not first provided to the larger group.

As a leader watching this mutual cooperation and collaboration was gratifying, it was a clear indicator of unit cohesion and therefore signaled the presence of one of the most important elements of effective combat performance. Guys are looking out for each other. Yeah, and that direct tie, as you look through history and through the history of war, again, because I try to, you know, attempted to incorporate the research on all of this. I mean, going back to like the 1800s where if you didn't, if you were a coward on the battlefield, then when you came back, you didn't eat because your group had a small bit of food together.

And that was the translation. But also in these shared austere environments. This is, again, this is 2003. There is nothing established. We're living together, moving together, you're setting up community in that, not just the leader, the leader east last, all that stuff,

but the fact that this is a group experience, every aspect of it, really translated to combat performance. There is no individuality. And when we deployed and became like this, you know, other force, that started to incorporate in there. Like, well, we'll just form up right before the patrol.

well patrol together, come back, and now we're separate. Yeah. Yeah, you can talk about in the book about like, you're eating together. You're like on the hood of the Humvee, you're circled up and put some people on security, and like that's what we're going to eat,

but we're all together. And we're talking about what we saw and we're bonding. That's what it is. I think that that translates beyond military too, but breaking bread together, even at West Point, like there's one meal, which is fascinating to see, and I didn't go to West Point.

It's hot there where they have to eat lunch together. And they feed, you know, 4,000 cadets in about 15 minutes. But they sit at a family setting, everything, because, I mean, it's cool, it's like the traditional West Point, but there's also cohesive properties

into eating together. Like, you know, no devices, nothing like talking together. And the military knows that, but the military also sometimes does away with things that they don't know really why they were there. Like, we do PT together, right?

PT is, and people say this and I know you do it obnoxiously early. But there's more done in that time than the rest of the day. And some of that's through cohesion, building together, like forming a family. Yeah, no doubt about it. I have to read this part. We rarely visit Kirkuk from our more remote locations. Much like the front line soldiers of World War I, World War II, Vietnam and other wars

resentment of the comfort, safety, and luxuries of soldiers stationed in the rear is real. These soldiers are given colorful names like rear echelon motherfuckers, rems, and fobits from fob. Despite the desires of frontline troops, for the very comforts they mock, it is a point of extreme pride for the group to view themselves as tougher, harder, and more real than those who live in comfort in the rear. The suffering due to the living conditions was, in fact, act another point of bonding. Ironically, to us anyway,

its inhabitants named the base FOB Warrior. They probably did not find that as amusing as we did. I forgot I put that in there. Yeah. So Fob Warrior, meanwhile, on Fob Warrior, guess what they had, Echo Charles, Pizza Hut, Burger King, air-conditioned offices, the whole nine yards.

Disco night. Disco night. It's kind of crazy. We had our, we had a, CB you know what a CB is a CB construction battalion so I had a little contingent of CBs with me in Ramadi and we were trying to get we were trying to get them the supplies that they needed to build us bunkers outside of our tents right and because we were receiving like we had hits in our compound and so my my chief my CB chief went to Fallujah which is where the

headquarters was to like try and wrangle up some supplies and whatnot and he came back and he was like you know what they're building out there and I was like no what he was he was theater and I was like what he's like yeah they're building a theater I said wow that's interesting he goes I told him we needed punkers and they're building the theater so there you go yeah it's always the same I guess um meanwhile it seems like at this point again read the book there's so much good information but you start to get into phase four operations post conflict stability phase quote unquote nation building initially we mostly drove around kirkook attempting to stop looters and respond to people in the neighborhoods about violence in particular

even finding decapitated bodies we did not even have interpreters during this time is not to say we drove around aimlessly the military would never allow us to say that we use colorful language like presence patrols or later intelligence gathering patrols in reality we just drove around. It was during one of these present patrols that an ambush occurred. It was a complex trap from a concealed position

on both sides of the road directed at the rear of the convoy. So this is, you guys get contacted. But, you know, at this time, you're, I was, when I saw that you're driving around and you don't have interpreters

and you're trying to, like, just think about that. It's freaking ridiculous. It is. And it was hard to convince your soldiers that it wasn't. Yeah. But, I mean,

that night, again, taught us that there was an enemy. And that was RPGs from both sides, heavy machine guns. We went right into the trap, which is this real paradox of that time period. This is still 2003 when, you know, as you, I know, I know you've had many guests about, you know, getting rid of the bath party, getting rid of the Army. There's a couple of months there that nobody knows what's going on.

It's just, it's anarchy. It's chaos. There's no police. There's nothing. And we're just driving around, driving around. Yeah, we're trying to find. You know, we do a lot of battlefield collection, which I didn't put in the book. Like, we just, you know, the sheer amount of military equipment left in Iraq, I'm writing a new book talking about some incidents with that.

That was a big part of our job, too, was just we'd walk up and find a scud missile. Like, well, we got to call that in. We were just doing battlefield cleanup everywhere. So it's like we're doing things, but nobody knows what we're doing. Eventually, we started, like, standing up police to do things like that and everything. Yeah, there was a lot of driving around. But the leadership was really important. Like, no, no, you can't.

You're not just driving around. You're collecting intelligence. On what? On what? Well, we're ambush sites because you guys got ambushed. You say the engagement was over. This one after you got ambushed. You say the engagement was over very quickly.

Only a few RPGs have been shot, followed by a little machine gun fire. My soldiers returned fire and attack, and the attackers slinked away. When I got to the back, many of the soldiers had dismounted from the vehicles and started moving into the woods. in the direction of the enemy.

All firing had stopped. So I said to one of the 50 Cal Gunners, return fire, damn it. Where? Anywhere. Yeah, that was known or suspected enemy locations. How about where you just received fire? Yeah. Please return fire to where they were shooting at us from.

And you guys eventually went out there and found that they had more RPGs that they were going to hit you with. Which I don't know if I put in there. but so that became new home. So we have just driving around and like, well, that's a bad place. So then it's like, well, how about your company just stay there? And then they had

I know I don't think I'd put it in there. So you know, soldiers get frustrated when what the told to do. So we get told to live there and to set up ambushes on the street that we were ambushed. So we would put an infantry platoon in like a ranger school linear ambush

waiting for them to return. And every platoon, to include mine, like this is the dumbest thing we could ever ask be asked to do like like that resentment and how hard it is as a leader to say you follow orders we do to sign mission uh and then dang if about a week and a half later three dudes like they're in range of school come walking down the road with RPGs on their back and walk into our linear ambush and to get smoked but it was almost like i'm glad i didn't say what i was thinking that i agree with you this is stupid no you sometimes you get ordered and it was crazy that they came walking down the road,

just like Ranger School, which we will do in Ranger School. You have to send the out for athletic people so they can go through their rehearsal and do the mission. But three dudes came walking down the road with RPGs up and down their backs to do another ambush at the same location.

How does that work out for him? Yeah, they were left in pieces. Fast forward a little bit. Again, get the book. You give so much good detail and such good leadership lessons in here. In this early part of the war, we established baseline of 2000,

thousand three systems of communication and connection between soldiers and the unit between the combat zone and the home front. I observe my own soldiers connections with families, friends in the outside world. We found ways individually and as a group to be somewhat comfortable in the midst of combat. Everything from eating, sleeping, hygiene, and recreation was done with the group in mind or at least originally designed with that thought and that contributed to our unit cohesion. Looking back this time provided a picture of an ideal situation of bonding in combat without connection to the outside world. We as soldiers got to know each other and became friends due to reliance on each other as companions and as a support network. Getting to know one another in this way is important part of the bond that is needed in social cohesion. So you're feeling good. Yeah.

We moved from Erb Beal to Kirkuk in arriving April 11th, 2003. Fast forward a little bit. Our initial mission after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime was to prevent mass civil chaos. We patrolled the streets of Kirkuk on presence patrols. It was like we were saying the U.S. military is here. We were there for sure, driving around without interpreters, unable to talk to anyone and having no clue what to look for other than if we saw someone doing something bad. That was our attempt to maintain order. You go on to say looting was rampant. Our task was futile. So you've got these, you got these looters are out there. They're causing problems.

and you're out there trying to stop these looters. I'm going to get into one of these operations right here. On one of the visits, when the looters started running, the squad of nine men gave chase on foot. The Iraqis were not burdened down with gear, so they were getting away. Out of nowhere, one of the soldiers giving chase, specialist Ewell, took a knee,

trained his rifle at one of the looters, and shot the looter in the back. The looter fell to the ground screaming. The squad stood motionless in shock over what had just happened. Um, they just stood there staring at Ewell in disbelief. The dead silence was broken only by the scream of medic as the sergeants in the squad jumped into action and began administering first aid to the now wounded civilian. Luckily, Doc McCarthy was there. He applied pressure dressing to the gunshot.

He also let his emotions fly. Why the fuck did you do that, motherfucker? Get in the vehicle now, you stupid shit. This dude is dying. The civilian was put in one of our vehicles and race back to the main airfield where our main aid station, was set up. Ewell's action was completely uncalled for, unjustified, and irrational. His squad members were not only shocked by what he did, but they were also pissed. Ewell initially protested that he was fed up with looters getting away with every day, but that was not the

point. This is not what we as Americans do. We are the good guys. We do not shoot unarmed civilians, especially those fleeing who pose us no threat. Not only was it against the laws of armed conflict, This was against the values, norms, and ethics of being an American soldier of being part of our unit. His squad leader brought Yule to me and reported what had happened. By the time Yule got to me, his story had changed. Now he said he was just firing a warning shot, something we were also not allowed to do. Then he said he thought he saw a weapon in the looters' hands and invoked the right of self-protection that we give all soldiers. I said, which is it, Ewell?

Were you firing a warning shot, or did you see a weapon? He settled on believing he saw a weapon. You go on to say, you might think, given everything I said about unit cohesion and being willing to die for one's fellow soldiers, that the other soldiers present, Ewell's friends and squad mates, would circle the wagons in defense of him

regardless of his guilt or innocence. That is how these situations are portrayed in movies and TV shows. The few historical examples I know pointed towards soldiers standing behind their fellow team member who had committed the crime. Based on these limited data points,

I expected the soldiers to cover for Yule. To my surprise, from my first question to the soldiers, I was relieved that they showed no thought of concocting a story to protect their battle buddy or a following Yule's story that they viewed as preposterous. They made me proud with their integrity and values during the official investigation of the event. I saw the shooter's entire squad turned their backs on him. They reported his action as something that was not accepted in their squad. Each of his fellow squad members told the investigating officer how abnormal Ewell's actions were to the group and how upset they were with him for his decision.

They valued their primary group, their squad as a whole over blind loyalty to an individual. Yeah, it was a very vivid example of what we, you know, you learn a lot. And as an officer, I went through all the training of ethics and law of war, the Milai massacre. I learned about it hundreds of times now at this point. that was a real vivid example of when you say cohesion it comes with that norms and rules of what we do and don't do that are reinforced by the ethical code of the profession which self-polices so and this is before especially now what I studied other militaries of you know they can say they have they follow the laws they do this or that, but what is there kind of internal who we are, what we do and don't do?

And that was a great example without me of his squad saying, you know, that that was not what we do. So just make mistakes. We've had, you know, even in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad soldiers who have done really bad things. And part of the profession is that they're investigated, all that stuff. So this is even before what I later become in studying other militaries and other wars. Such a vivid example for me, and that's why I wanted to include it, that there is that cohesion doesn't, can lead the bad norms. Like we have kill squads where people, where single leaders can influence small units

what they think is okay or not, even if it's an internal dilemma within themselves. Again, we try to use these examples to teach new soldiers. that that's like you do have a cold, whether it's the constitution or our societal values. We don't harm civilians. You target enemies, and that dehumanization or whatever it is on, it's really hard to do.

And that was an amazing example of, you know, the soldiers truly showing who they are. Yeah, something I used to teach the junior officers is like, hey, you're going to have your guys back no matter what, what, right? And they'd nod their head and say, yeah, yeah. And I'd say, no. Actually, you need to make it specifically clearer that if they do something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, you will not have their back. They need to know that from the beginning. That that's how you're going to operate. Because otherwise, if you keep them in some gray area, they're going to assume,

well, you know, he didn't, you know, he covered for me when I showed up late to work and he covered for me when I didn't have enough money for this thing and I had to take a little from the platoon fund to pay for it. You see, you covered for him, you covered for him, you covered for him. And now you're in a situation. So you got to make that really clear. If you do something immoral, illegal, or unethical, you're done. And what's interesting about this, and I'm going to read through the kind of the outcome here,

you say, our chain of command wasted no time in responding to Ewell's actions. And investigation started the same day. every soldier who witnessed the event was interviewed. Even I was questioned. I was not there, but it didn't matter. I was responsible. Had I allowed warning shots to happen on other patrols? Had I allowed a climate of not following the laws of war or other rules to be disobeyed?

In the end, Yule was not punished. We were all shocked as we expected him to be taken away thrown in prison and never heard from again. I did not get to see the findings of the investigation or the investigating officer's recommendation to the chain of command, but with Yule's final, defense settling on his belief that he had saw a weapon and for other reasons, the battalion commander had weighed the risk of what punishing a soldier for shooting someone he thought was armed against punishing the soldier for unlawful actions. Punishing a soldier for shooting at someone he thought was armed could send a message to other soldiers who would then possibly be too scared to shoot when faced with an armed enemy. On the other hand, any blatant violation of our

rules of engagement had to be rapidly punished to deter others from doing wrong. It was clearly not an easy decision. It did not matter from then on. Yules, every move was scrutinized. He had demonstrated that under stress, he could not be trusted. And that's, that's your kind of assessment, because you didn't get to read the findings. You didn't talk to the battalion commander and say, hey, boss, wait, why did you make this decision? You're kind of making assumptions of what you thought Heath was thinking. Yep. And, and, and, in the investigation because you know like when this happens as you know

there's an independent non-biased investigating officer assigned who does all the interviews looks at all the evidence and makes his recommendation and the commander can still the recommendation could have been punishment but the commander thing can override depending on what the severity of it is and I did not get to see that final

report now but I had to live with that soldier yeah that had to be interesting yeah and it could be like a huge mistake, but it is now something that you had to watch for

because you're giving this weapon back and a full member of the patrol that other people are relying on for their safety as well. And I think you probably talk about this as well, but once you lose trust in a combat scenario

or in a war time, it's near impossible to gain that trust back fully. Oh yeah. No, that's a major problem. Yeah. And, you know, we obviously did multiple combat deployments and had investigations on shootings and like the amount of scrutiny that comes down on the platoon and on the unit is like significant.

And I think you said you listened to when I had General McFarland on the podcast. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was like if a civilian got killed in Romani, was like such a huge situation because everyone was so interconnected. The civilians were interconnected with the shakes, who were interconnected with the police, who were interconnected with the military,

who were interconnected with the U.S. military. So it was like everybody was going to know that this thing happened. And we had to be able to explain why these things happened. We as coalition forces had to say, hey, here's what happened. Here's why it happened. But it was definitely one of the hardest things. And those investigations, if you have to carry out those investigations.

And like you said, it's like some other person outside your unit that's going to come in. They're going to find out what happened. And that's the way it has to be. That's the way you have to maintain the upper hand from a moral perspective. That's the other thing is, you know, I think I forget the words you use, but you were talking about how it was against the, against what the unit, what the platoon or the squad, what they were like as a unit. It's also such a devastating impact to the war effort. Like civilian casualties are such a horrible impact to the war effort that, I mean, even Abu Ghraib, like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, like those people were basically hazed really

badly. And that was a horrific setback for our strategic efforts in that country. and it was like they were being abused. They weren't being killed. So when you start talking about, oh, a civilian deaths, they have such a huge negative impact on the strategic goals. You simply cannot allow these things to be taking place. Right.

And I think there's a lot that I learned. And now that in having teaching taught strategy at West Point, I think I failed in communicating that to my soldiers, being able to connect those tactics to the strategy. You could argue, you know, when did we understand what the strategy was and when were we actually implementing it, as you know, even post-Rimati before the counterinsurgency strategy was there, but being able to translate that to the soldiers,

even in 2008 when I go back, when the height of the sectarian advice, a lot of my time, even at that lower company level, was trying to get them to understand soldiers who had watched those movies, had thought war was going to be something that it, isn't what they were doing connecting that to the national interest to the strategy to the how do we get out of here

aspect was really hard and I think this is the part of being a warrior scholar that I think some some militaries get it right or not like you can't only know what you're doing you have to know everything the things that came before and how to connect those dots for the soldiers because if not they're going to be very unhappy

with handing out soccer balls and building schools especially like an infantryman. Like you trained me to close with and destroy the enemy. How does this achieve the goal? And that was a big part of my job, especially in 2008, was to communicate that to the soldiers.

Yeah. Yeah, we had all those different lines of operations going and you're literally sending guys out an Overwatch position where you know they're going to kill enemy fighters. And at the same day, you've got another element that's going out and helping to put a roof on this thing that we're hoping to turn into a score.

Like that's all happening at the same time, which is wild. Which is, you know, I know you read, you read the counter-surgery manual when it came out. In order to convince somebody that the center of gravity is the support of the population, it takes like a master's level, it took the military, like, you know, multiple PhDs to be able to articulate it, that that is, the center of gravity is the support of the population. And then all these things can ripple to that, to, counteract that. Now as a student of war,

General McMaster wrote about fallacies of war, like the ideals that special forces can always get the, you know, can achieve the strategic goal or thing. I think one of the fallacies that we have is that all war, the center of gravity will be the support of the enemy's population. You think that's a fallacy?

Yeah. So what do you think it is? It's just going to be different. It's going to be variable. It depends on, yeah, depends on the war. In a counterinsurgency, without doubt, And it took us six years to figure that out. Yeah. That the small insurgency's ability to live amongst the people and gain their support and you can separate them

and all that will achieve the strategic goals. In a war, like against the Nazi regime, against the Japanese or whatever, the goal is to remove the enemy's will to continue to fight. Take away his means or the ideal that he thinks he can win. And we can apply that to, even Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, other aspects is that, of course, you don't want to do counterproductive, but the center of gravity, as Clausworth defined it, is the main source of the enemy's power.

If he's in a, what we call in a, not a total war, because that's something else, an unlimited war. Like if you're, like when we moved in, I did, and this is really the just a potion of this book is that I did two types of war. I did a war in 2003 where the goal is to remove the regime. the Saddam regime from power. That's the goal. And the center of gravity of that is his military's ability to resist that. So you take down the military.

Then we transition to this other phase where the goals are different. Depending on what the objectives of the war is, the center of gravity in a revolution, in an insurgency, whatever is, that's the correct identification, as Clauswood said. The first problem is to identify what type of war you're in. I believe now, just based on heuristics of the primacy, that most people, not, I know, not you, but believe that all war, that support of the population is the center of gravity. Yeah, no, it certainly depends on the entire situation that's happening.

The interesting thing about that story with me reading the counterinsurgency manual, which was an online draft of it. because this was in April. If you look at the publication date of that, it's not until that summer, I think. So I had an early draft that I found online on like, I forget what the global security. There was some website that just had some early version of it. Well,

what triggered me to go and look at that was my first deployment to Iraq. So 2003, 2004, we had built this wall with like our link diagram of our enemy that we were going after. And there was like hundreds of people on it, Hundreds of, you know, quote unquote enemy fighters. And we would, you know, get to go out and capture, kill some of those people. And so was everyone else.

But we, I had, I actually jokingly would call this the beautiful mind wall. Did you ever see the movie A Beautiful Mind? I did, yeah. So, you know, he connects all these weird conspiracy things. So I had built this with my intel officer. It was like, hey, we need to be able to see everyone, see how they're connected. And it seemed like a really smart idea. So we built this big wall, like literally the wall of our talk was a, was all these different individual

people that we were going to target capture kill. So fast forward three years or two and a half years, now I'm back in Iraq and it just so happens that that same Intel officer is working down the street from me. And so I knew her commander. And so I'm talking to her commander, is a friend of mine and he was, you know, come back to my intel shop. Let me tell you what's going on. And I walk into her office and on the wall is the same. It's a chart. with hundreds of people on this link diagram. And I looked at that and I said to myself, just in my own head, I'm like, we're losing

because we've been doing this. Everyone's been doing this going out and capture, kill, bad guy for three years. And enemy attacks are up 300%. And this city that I'm sitting on the outskirts of is almost completely run by the enemy. Something's wrong. And I went back and, you know, I, of course,

you know, I was hearing the word insurgency and I got I probably had heard about something about the manual that Petraeus and the team was working on and I googled it found it and I read that thing and then I presented my commanding officer hey we've got to we've got to go out there and we got to get into the city and and then well when McFarland showed up you know he brought that same idea that McMastered had used up in Talafar so everything lined up very lucky for me but my mindset was a lot different than it would have been otherwise it was also different because my first deployment to Iraq guess what I did I lived the the Navy SEAL dream do it do a direct action mission kicking a door breach a door grab a bad guy come back high five yeah we're awesome like I I did so much of that that my mind was I guess like satisfied in the fact that okay I know how to do that so now when I'm looking at go wait wait what did that do from a strategic perspective what did all those operations do and it's not just me it's hundreds of other units across Iraq

so when I read that and I saw the secure the the populace, I was like, oh, if we don't get to do this, we don't do this, we're going to be here forever. We need to get the level of violence down to a point that the Iraqi soldiers can handle. We need to get them trained up to the best of our ability, and they were terrible, but we need to, because they were so bad, we need to mitigate the violence as much as we can. How are we going to mitigate the violence? We're going to kill a lot of bad guys, number one. And number two, thankfully, with General McFarland, he came in with the C's Clearhold and build, and that's where we ended up doing.

Yeah. Have you read General Petraeus and Andrew Roberts' new book called Conflicts? I haven't read it. It's pretty good because, you know, General Petraeus being the mastermind, and actually if you talk to him, you should have him on the podcast about the pushback he got from everybody on the creation of the counter-insurgency strategy and what he had to do when he was in charge of that command that was responsible for the learning of the military and how much institutional pushback he got.

In the book, Conflicts a lot shorter. It actually walks you through the genesis of everything from where did the hearts and minds first get mentioned, which is like the tiger of Malaya and the Malayan where he was viciously seeking the enemy, but also protecting the population. So it's not that you can, and he walks you through like wars from Israel's War of Independence to Ukraine. And when does, when is there an insurgency? When does counterinsurgency work in combination? to attacking whatever it is.

And it's an amazing, fast, like really quick review of a bunch of wars where each war has its own language, its own goals. I mean, it's just like you mentioned about ISIS coming back. In General Petraeus, who is rightly said, ISIS started the day we left because the Iraqi government

that we had been backing for 11 years and creating all these shared power structures, which I've really gotten into now with urban warfares. Who hones the power? And that's really an element of, you know, you have to secure the population, but there has to be a power, and it can be good or bad.

As soon as we left Iraq, the government immediately implemented sectarian policies, right? So through the vice president in jail, like, you know, that's what created ISIS, was the gap in shared powers. So one group, the Sunnis thought that they were now being written out of the power structures and they were. And then they created this. We're going to fight to get it back.

They're going to fight to get back. And they took cities and they took military equipment and they took everything. And they built something that was allowed to build for two years before we have the biggest urban battles since World War II because of the fact that these sectarian policies were there. So the problem with the fallacies that I love and General McMaster had some and I've added. some recent ones, is that people want a framework to understand a war. They're just like,

just tell me how to understand this. When war is human, it's political, it's uncertain. As you know, like Ramadi is different than Fallujah. Fallujah's different than Ku Klux, which had like everybody in it. Having that ability to understand

the war you're fighting, what is the goals, and then what are you working with here? What are the different power structures? And this is why Afghanistan, we're back in an illegitimate, one of the most corrupt governments on the corruption index of the world,

and we're backing them for 20 years. And then it just falls apart. And it's really hard to fight an insurgency, Vietnam, Afghanistan, for an illegitment government that the people don't accept. It's not a good idea. No.

When you talked about Petraeus getting pushed back, there's the book, The Strategy, or The Indirect Approach by B.H. L.H. L. L. Hart. And he's got this great section where he explains that each progression in naval ships was met with just atrocious pushback. So when someone said,

hey, we should use, instead of using sails for these ships, we should use steam. That will ever work. How are you going to have enough fuel? What's going to happen when the steam runs out? You're going to have these ships out there. Can't go. Okay.

Then finally, you know, it gets to a point where this is the obvious answer and you can't rely on wind when you're in combat. And then it's, you know, oh, we need to make the ships out of steel. Well, how are you going to repair those things? Wood is so much better. Wood, float, steel doesn't mean. And every level, each time, even going all the way to like aircraft carriers

versus regular, you know, battleships, each person, each level that you try and change, it takes a significant amount of pushback. You're going to get a bunch of pushback from the institution, which has done things and they want to keep doing the same things and the inertia of what they're doing is not going to change unless it is forced. And then the really interesting thing is that he says, you know, the first person that steps up and makes the extreme case and doesn't back down, that person's going to be a martyr. And they're going to get drummed out of the military. You know, perhaps we could even say that David Hackworth was that guy who at the end of the Vietnam War were saying, hey, listen, if we keep fighting the war like this, we're going to lose.

And what did they do? He's a martyr. You're out of here. And it wasn't until 20 years later they went, hey, you know, that guy was kind of right about a lot of what he was saying. So, yeah, this is the beauty of at the end of my career being able to teach at West Point to teach strategies and to get these light bulbs after it all from all these military theories from SunZoo to Jomani, Klausowitz, Boyd, to understand that you have military theory, but then you have culture. Like we resisted the airplane. We resisted the tank. We resisted like all of it as in the military because that's what militaries do.

Like, no, no, this is what we do. Like, and there can be like a complete revolution in military affairs. We would take tanks and bring them by horse up to the battle. Like, when you actually get the chance to step back from it and study it, the light bulbs, even, you know, and why I clausowitz, even, you know, this is this dead Prussian guy that everybody in the military quotes. Like, why is he, it's almost like the Bible, too. Like, nobody reads it, but they quote it. because it gives you maxims like Sun Tzu did, like when Sun Tzu is used by businesses

and you probably use them. Because people need ways to understand complexity. And for us military people, all these military theories are there. But then once you start to actually put it in application, I'm going like, why did we do it like that? Why did we keep doing something that wasn't working? Well, it's cultural and there's these reasons,

there's these organizational reasons where like the guy who brought the airplane to the military was literally, was a court marshal and the president had to save him and he had to he blew up ships in this you know in the demonstration and if not

the in you know we would have lost tens of thousands of more soldiers like all these and this is the gift that I was given as having to learn it and then teach it as you know you can read a book but when you have to teach somebody else military theory that doesn't know anything about it

and it's come back in droves for me now as a researcher you're going, you know, whatever it is. Like, yeah, but what's the political goal? I don't care what the military is doing. What is the goal that they're, and are they actually doing it? Like, because I experienced where there was a political goal, but that's not what we were doing.

So now I get to explain to other people like, yeah, I can tell you about what's happening on the battlefield, but what do you think the goal is here? And whoever it is I'm talking to, they think it's another goal based on what they know. Like, of course, you've got to protect the populations and you have to win their support. Okay, like, well, how? How much support do you think the Japanese population had for the emperor during World War II? 100%. Did that factor into our approach to remove their will to continue to fight to the death of 100% of them?

Not. So understanding those links has been a gift that I was given after this book, of course. And at some levels, you don't need to know that, but it's a window that I was given. I really appreciate it. Yeah, so it's all good And speaking of the evolution of war Going back to the book on August 11th, 2003, We struck our first improvised explosive device

There were many more to come But this one was the first and you You guys took a hit Doc McCarthy, one of the one soldier Especially you don't want to lose in battle Shrapnel had sheared the forward assist charging handle The Most buttstock from his weapon More significantly a large piece of shrapnel

Had caught off his thumb which hung by a sliver of skin. Blood was spewing steadily from his hand. His calm tone was almost even more startling. Doc looked at me calmly and said, I have arterial bleeding. You need to get me out of here immediately. From his medical experience, he knew he was in danger of losing blood too fast and could die if he did not get medical attention very soon. You guys call for the medevac and get him out of there.

But you guys actually, what, you guys had a, like, wasn't there a low order charge that went off and put flat tire in one of the other vehicles because you guys had to drive through where you hit the first IED to get back to the helicopter landing zone. The chaos. Yeah. So it was a 1-55 artillery round, which was the typical IED back in the day that had exploded, but had lowered dead it. So it just like banana split open.

We drove through the ambush because you didn't know if it was followed by an ambush and then realized we had to drive back through it to get him to where the ambulance would be. And the The vehicle in front of me blows up It looked like it blew up But it hit this banana peel of an artillery round Sitting in the road they didn't see And we thought we got hit again

So then we're shooting out You know What we think is getting hit by And we keep on driving But that's a yeah the chaos Of the introduction of the IEDs Which started rapidly in 2003 It wasn't like it was a slow build

It was like quickly They came quick Quick Quick You also So you guys end up getting teaboned by a civilian van. You guys are near up armored Humvee. Sergeant Wood, my Ford Observer,

and another guy named May on the driver's side were really messed up. Metal from the vehicle went through their legs. And, you know, you have to take care of them. And there's five dead Iraqis in this van and there's a bunch of more wounded, just a nightmare out there. Yeah, I have a new book that I'm writing.

It's like 20 times I almost died. and that's one of them. There is chance and just sheer bad luck in war. And we were turning around in the middle of night, under night vision goggles and out of nowhere, and the vehicle that we just talked about the ID, and most people don't realize, I mean, this is,

we're driving around in open-air pickup trucks during this time. So if you get hit by an ID, it's taking out everybody. I just happen to have the one, the one up armored Humvee, which is like an M1-14, of the entire platoon, but we were turning around in the middle of night on a highway and it lights out for me.

I actually got knocked out in the hit, but with this vehicle, because Iraqis actually would drive without lights. So the guy on the gunner at the top didn't see it, and it just teaboned us at like 50 miles per hour. They weren't wearing seatbelts, so most of them, it's just carnage. It's just the randomness of war,

and it caved in that side, but had it not been that up armored Humvee, we would all, it actually threw the gunner out of the, out of the truck and sheared the grenade, the mark 19 off the top of it, it was horrific. And I woke up to like, like, just all the stuff on top of me and like my helmet's gone. Like, it was rough. Fast forward a little bit on October 18th.

We heard a call on the battalion command net of troops and contact. One of the platoons and the battalion was being ambushed and needed help badly. The radio traffic really picked up. The contact was easily 20 miles from us, but our company, out of our company sector. But just like almost everyone in the battalion, we were listening in. After a few minutes, I was told by my company commander to, move to the ambush site and be prepared to fight. My platoon was being tasked to support the battalion in any way we could.

Just get there. We rushed to the site. By the time we got there, the massive firefight was over. Fast forward a little bit. I talked to the lieutenant who's with them. He told me that it was first lieutenant Bernstein and his convoy that had been surprised. He then recounted the story, some more of which I learned later. Bernstein, who was the Charlie Company executive officer, was traveling in the last of a three-vehicle convoy,

returning to his post when the site came under rocket attack. His convoy was closest to the location from where the unit believed the rocket had originated. He was directed to intercept the attackers. As the approach of the location of the rocket launchers, they were attacked by machine gun and RPG fire. The driver of Bernstein's Humvee lost control and crashed into a berm, becoming separated from the other two vehicles. The gunner, PFC, John Hart, was killed by enemy fire. The driver specialist Joshua Sams was thrown out of the vehicle and became trapped under the wheel. when the vehicle stopped on top of him.

Bernstein jumped out and returned fire on the attackers. He was hitting the upper thigh by a bullet, severing his femoral artery. He continued to crawl around to the driver's side of the vehicle and attempted five times to get the vehicle steering wheel and gas pedal to get the vehicle off of Sam's. He was finally able to move the vehicle off Sam's, and then Bernstein pulled him out from underneath. With this final selfless act, Bernstein collapsed from loss of blood.

By then, the two other vehicles were able to return and the enemy retreated. The other soldiers did what they could to stop the bleeding. A medevac helicopter was called in, but Lieutenant Bernstein never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Bernstein received a posthumous silver star and was buried at West Point with full military honors. And we didn't cover it in the book, but this was the guy that like kind of gave you heads up and taught you how to use vehicles and he was a real brother of a fellow officer. Yeah, that one hit.

I mean, and actually it's 21 years ago last week. So it's the anniversary of his death was just recently. So it's, it was hard for me, you know, of course, all, you know, any loss of life and it's really hard help. But this is a guy who, even though I had had all, you know, enlisted time and everything, I didn't know anything about vehicles. Matter of fact, vehicles were new to the airborne unit. and he took me under his wing and just seeing him made me feel better.

You can see, you know, you run into, as a platoon leader, you know, there is a separation between you and the soldiers and there's a relationship with you and your platoon sergeant, but the fellow platoon leaders, of course, have a special understanding of each other's hardships and this guy, so if I saw him, it just made me feel better on the battlefield, even during that year. So once I knew it was him, it really hit me hard. And to know that we didn't get it.

there in time. And this is also before, you know, tourniquets and everything. So the guys were trying to use a belt. Which is freaking just horrible. Yeah. You say we lost a few people on that deployment. There were fortunately no KIAs in my platoon,

although we had a lot of wounded soldiers. The three evacuated after the first IED. Those injured in the car wreck and another IED later, which was smaller so that no evacuation was needed. It was a painful time for all of us. I lost a good friend and everyone in the platoon was emotionally impacted by the event. Fast forward a little bit.

I mean, you, you, you, you returned to Italy in February of 2004. How was the, how was the return home? It was good. Is what, what, you know, again, the dichotomy of, of the differences now, where there was, you know, there was a cooling off period in Kuwait, get back, there's all the hugs and all the welcome. I actually, because I had entered in this delayed entry program, I think, I was a cooling off period. I talked to Andy about this, but I didn't have a college degree, but the Army had a program where they let you go be a platoon commander or platoon leader and then send you back to college. So as soon as we got back, I went into college.

I stayed on base and tried to finish my bachelor's degree on post. So I was immediately separated from the guys, but there is this almost scattering of it, and you'd see them in passing. So for me, personally, it was kind of hard. And then they got the word that in 11 months after we returned, they would be going in Afghanistan. And you weren't going with them. And I wasn't going with them.

And I actually tried, you know, went to the command and everything. And they tried really hard, but I was in, like, big army system in school. And he tried to pull me forward. And actually,

I had started a combatives program where I was teaching soldiers, even, you know, trying to stay connected to the unit, combatives on the, on the football field. One of those soldiers that I, that came to my flyer of learning,

I was just teaching, you know, like, white belt stuff. Ryan Pitts He was awarded the Medal of Honor In that deployment because that's One Not in a bunch of bad situations That my unit, the 173 went through during that tour

So yeah, it was hard for me personally as Like you want to go back with the same people That you'd formed all these bonds with And at one point they were trying to make it happen And it just didn't so they all went off And I had to stay there The big green machine I think in the army you guys call it the big green machine in the Navy we say needs of the Navy

Like the Navy needs is what it needs and that's what it's going to get Yep After that you get done with college You do the captain's career course Yep What is that? How long is that? It's like 13 weeks or something is it's considerable Are you paying attention to what's happening over in Iraq?

Are you now looking at Afghan? I was I stayed focused on Iraq I mean just by sheer numbers as a scale we had more soldiers of course going there but I also disconnected in some ways which I came home from Iraq and thought we we left in April of 2004 and we did like it was it was really bad when we left because of well quite frankly it's because my platoon went and captured mook one of Mook daughter Al Saughters top lieutenants a guy named Yucube and that caused total chaos to break out like no one expected it it was to no one was prepared for it and so we started to see things really spiral bad but then we left and it was like oh well you know the spiral would be because we'd

seen other little spikes in in enemy activities in 2003 2004 and I thought it would settle down and I kind of thought to myself like well you know I'm thankful that I got you know I got to do what I wanted to do in the military got to go into combat cool and it took a couple months of watching it get worse and worse and worse and worse before I was like oh this thing's going to be going on for a long time I don't think I ever got that and actually this is which part that this would keep going oh I don't think I was in my fact because I remember the first battle of Fallujah 2004 when the four Americans are hung up I I remember that vividly because it was aired across the United States everywhere. But I didn't connect the dots that that was a massive sign of years to come. Or that we would continue to try the same thing and get no results. Or I do remember the MRAP conversation that the IEDs were losing soldiers with the military. There was a battle within the industrial, the Congress and the military.

Like, do something about this. Do something about the IEDs. And it's another example, which again in the research of when the military is like, I don't, I don't need mine resistant vehicles. I don't want them and I won't take them. And it was McCain and others who forced the military to deploy mine resistant vehicles just for the ground troops. So they stop dying every day. Because the military is going, well, they weigh too much and they're too much to fuel and blah, blah, blah, they have a bunch of excuses. The military, this is a thing that I've learned, especially working in the Pentagon for the force charge general.

The military fights not the war it wants to fight. So it didn't want to accept a new equipment set because this isn't the war that we want. This is not though, this will be over soon. We need our tanks and everything. You fight on the field of battle. They thought it would change the organizational chart of the military. So they didn't want it.

Like it doesn't fit our narrative with the real war that we're about the fight. And we have to be ready to fight, which is something that's very unique to the U.S. military. It's like we're, because we're an expedition to marry with, with peer competitors. We envision what the future of war is, even if we're dying now. And that, it took outside influence, just like with these, the airplane to say, like, to force the military. And it usually, and we were losing soldiers every day and we're like, we don't need that. This is when you become a ranger instructor for a few years?

Yes. You had a good time doing that? Oh, one of the best jobs I ever had. I mean, again. What did you like about it so much? One, I loved, so in order to be a ranger instructor, you have. have to go through certification. So this is probably one of the, again, another point where I learned that you can know a lot.

You can know how to do ambushes and rage and all that stuff. But when you have to teach others how to do it. So the Ranger certification program or the Ranger instructor certification program was legit. Like verbatim, you had to get up and teach every block of instruction that you would be teaching to the students. I love that. What I would later understand is in order to achieve mastery, and I know Jiu does the same thing. You have to be able to teach other people. You don't have to just be good at it.

And Ranger instructors, having officers as Ranger instructor was something new. Actually, after they had lost a bunch of soldiers in training from hypothermia that they incorporated it as like a safety mechanism. But then you are also, you're walking lanes and everything. I love that aspect of it. I love what was going on behind the scenes in Ranger School to create these moments that are testing individuals and the whole business of it. but I also got to compete in the Best Ranger competition.

How'd you know? What? How'd you do? I finished it. Oh, right on. Echo, that means I did really well. Yes, that's awesome. Because it's like the Olympics for the, at least the Army guys, the three-day competition,

60 plus days of straight competition. And 50% of the people die out on the first day. Your bodies just quit. So to even finish it was huge. I only got one shot at it. But what's so funny is that the guy who won it in spades, like he made everybody else look ridiculous, Colonel Liam Collins,

later becomes my boss. He is my partner into these war zones now, and he loves to show me his pistols. He actually puts them up behind him in Zoom calls. You win pistols if you win the Best Ranger competition, and he puts them up behind them because of my pistols. Just to let you know, remind you. I got 12th place.

That's freaking outstanding. Yeah. Did you get to see one thing that I, So I was never an instructor at Buds. And like even talking to Andy Stumpf about it. And he's like, he was in second phase. And, you know, he could just see the stress on people's faces. And he talks about how he'd be watching them underwater.

And he could tell by like when their hands started to do certain things. Oh, he's like, oh, this guy's coming to the surface. And then working hell weeks, of course, like checking and seeing what is it, when can someone keep going? When do they not, when are they going to break? What does that look like? because the only hell week I ever saw was mine. You know, like, that's it. Yeah.

I never got to see it from the outside. And I know there's a lot to be learned from that. Did you pick up some of that stuff as a Ranger instructor? Absolutely. And that was, again, another honor to do it. Every aspect. There's one job that they actually do, too, is what they'll assign. I don't know if Buzz does this.

In Ranger's school, like a class will come. It's like 400. Oh, yeah, proctor type thing. We call it an L-O, like a liaison officer. It's like the nice guy. Yep, that's what a proctor is. Yeah, they can go to if they have like they like their boots burned up in the fire or something like that. They can go to him if they're having trouble.

So being able to travel with one group of individual through all the phases because ours are in three different phases. So even though I was in the first phase, so I got to see the first week where we lose a lot of people as well and actually see people that I didn't know get sent there that don't want to go. They get sent there because they're like some of the lieutenants because it's part of the process. but then they sabotage themselves. I didn't know that part about it. But being the L&O and sitting in the boards, which I think was a really important part of the process. Each phase has a board of the commander and everybody.

So somebody who's failed like a patrol, he's been peered or whatever, there's a command team that then, but still gets to make his fate on whether he redos that phase or moves forward or whatever. In the last phase, which is the Florida phase, I saw, you know, this is where I saw a grown man cry. because they'll be in a,

you know, they just survived, you know, like six months of it, and they didn't pass something, like a patrol, just based on the, like you said, the Ranger instructor, whatever, the roll of the dice or whatever. Now they're, they'll be given the option of,

you want to go back to day zero? Or do you want to quit? And that aspect of being able to quit, which is a real big part of the book I'm writing now, is if you had that ability to quit, like we were talking about, In Ranger School, they'll just, I think I've seen some of buds.

They'll do this too. Like, you know, you don't have to do this. You can quit at any moment. Oh, yeah. That's all of buds. Yeah. Well, Ranger School isn't that rigorous. It has the moments.

And that board is a really big one where, you know, you don't have to do this. I mean, why are you doing this? And they really would test somebody. I never got to see that. And I was really interesting to see the character of some people and why they were doing it. Like, why do you want this? Like are you do you want to go back to date? Sometimes the commander would give them a day zero option to go back to the very beginning

just to see if they how much they wanted it. And then if they took it, then maybe he'd say they'd restart that phase or whatever. I, you know, getting into understanding motivation and will for something like that and of this our course was a unique aspect as an instructor. Like no very few people get to see behind that level of the scenes. Yeah, that's got to be a strange thing. like I would say in seal training, most of the people when they're quitting,

it's under duress, right? They're like, hit the surf again or pick up the log or whatever. And so they're just in that moment just being like, you know, I've had enough of their shit and they quit. Whereas if you're before a board and they're like, here, you're warm,

everything's cool, you're not being stressed. Do you want to quit? That's interesting. I don't know if you ever get that option in buds. I don't know if there's something like that where you're getting told, I'm sure, yeah, it must happen where they're like, all right, dude,

you got to start again. They definitely do that. And it's actually very squared away because if you get, if you make it to Hell Week and you make it to the first, I think you have to make it through Thursday. If you get rolled on Wednesday,

you go back to the first day of training. Not to the first day of Hell Week. You go back to the first day of training. And those first few weeks of training suck. But what they don't, what they want to avoid is like, this guy's going to rest. and be totally good to go and have a big leg up on all of his peers because he's been rested.

No, you've got to do all this shit again and you're going to be broken down like everybody else is and then you're going to start out week. So, yeah, it's what it works. I also got to see that, you know, if you get to, and you're an instructor too, and you see, if you get to see patterns. So like who you think is going to be the leader isn't who you think it's going to be when you, because we rip all rank and all badges and everything off. So somebody could be a special forces, non-commissioned officer for like 18 years and be, and they're in the course. But none of that's there.

So you can strip away and you actually get to the true sense of leadership, teamwork, all that, and you get to learn even, although I had been in the military for a long time and gone through Ranger School, of like, really learn those lessons of, it's not who you think it is.

And the one that you think it is may not be. And I know you, that's what you do in explaining some of that. But as an instructor, I got to see it and learn it. It's funny, when I took over TradeDette, I was like, okay, I just need the platoon chief and the OIC to be good leaders. By the time I was done with TrayDet, I was like, hey, in this platoon, I just need like some, a couple good leaders.

They can be anywhere in the chain of command, truly. They can be like a guy that's got two or three platoons under his belt. They can be the leading pair of service. And that platoon can be successful unless the platoon chief of the OIC has some big ego and they don't want to listen to that guy. and they'd rather just fail than listen to somebody that's stepping up. So, yeah, leadership is definitely an interesting thing to study and look at.

That's in the book, actually, where if I had the difference between a well, no, a poorly led cohesive team versus a well-led non-cohesive team, which one would function better. And I firmly believe that it's a cohesive team that will overcome poor leadership. So this is the aspect of,

which is more important. And military has really struggled with this. It's always about leadership, leadership, leadership training. Where cohesion in my book, I'd say, like, no, no. Like, we know from historical analysis of all militaries,

like, that's one of the foundation is cohesion between the groups. Yeah. That being said, in my opinion, you have a bad platoon commander, but there's, but the reason that the team is tight because there's leaders in there.

They might not have the rank, they might not have the authority, but they are freaking leaders. And when they go back and they, hey, boss just said this, it's a dumb idea. Here's what we're going to do. And everyone goes, cool, got it. And they make it happen. So even in that subgroup, there's going to be leaders in that subgroup.

And there always are. There always are some pipe hitting guys. They're like, oh, I got this. Hey, don't worry about this. I got it. And they make things happen. And then you'll be all right. Because you can have, I've also seen a squared away group get destroyed or at least not perform well

because they have a bad leader, especially if the bad leader has a big That's what destroys it all because he's not going to listen to anybody else Hey, we're doing it my way and then you start to get the Conflict inside the platoon and things just fall apart this is the and I agree with you and the informal leader can have more impact than the formal leader 100% this is also again why Ranger Regiment is able like well I he's gone What happens if you're the leadership challenges if you have that Inform or bad which is what I experienced in 2008 like I had like a like this massive guy who had immense amount of of informal leadership that was negative and I could tell that like I had to cut that out and and that's really hard in an organization to see you can't fire anybody in the military in the

regular military like there's no firing like and there's very limited firing in the seal teams yeah it's it's not easy I should say it's it's funny when I started working with civilian companies you know I was like oh well I don't just you got someone that's like not doing what they're supposed to do you just fire him and they're like well no you can't do that blah blah blah and then they'd ask me the same question and then Like, well, I had this bad lead. And they go, why don't you just fire him? Well, you can't just fire someone in the military.

You know, they got to write him up and you got to get his commanding officer to approve it. And he's got to find replacement bany to go in there. It's like not easy thing to do in any case. It's much easier if they do their freaking job and you can get them squared away. Speaking of the unit that you took over, you served as a ranger instructor almost two years. 2007, you get a call. Do you want company commanding combat? And of course, you respond.

Yes, sir. You were going to join Alpha Company First Battalion 68th Armor. They arrived in Iraq in December 2007. They were sent to FOB Prosperity. They were poor performers based on their reputation from the NTC, the National Training Center. But luckily for them, they were stationed at FOB Prosperity. And again, everyone, get this book so you can hear these details. There's so much good stuff and so much leadership information in here.

And just information about what this war was like. by 2007 fob prosperity had a green beans coffee store a mega gym um tennis courts a stocked fishing pond that's a new one yeah stocked fishing pond swimming pool um dining facility that rotated cuisines on a daily basis and offered 24 hour short order fast food line that's what these guys were doing most of the soldiers had their own rooms most of them had fiber optic internet access 24 hours a day. So that's where these guys were at. And this company was run basically like they were stateside.

They had like, oh, you've got to stand duty from this time to this time. Other than that, go do whatever you're going to do. That led to, you know, problems with complacency and drinking and missing formation, et cetera. Fast forward a little bit in March 2008, forces loyal to the Iraqi Shia cleric Mukta al-Sauder, known as Jaish Almadi, which is Jam, J.AM began a series of violent attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad and other Shia-dominated areas. These attacks were believed to be a response to the Iraqi government operations in the Shia holy city of Basra. Sauter City was a two-mile by two-mile square, about eight miles northeast of Fob prosperity in the northeast corner of Baghdad, an estimated population of two million, exclusively Shiite residents. the attacks also included a great number of RPGs, IEDs, machine gun attacks against U.S. forces around Sauter City.

And this is just kind of setting the stage for what was going on when you showed up there. Alpha Company gets called out of FAAB Prosperity. So they're in the, they're in there at the dining facility eating beautiful cuisine. And they get sent out to this place called the Joint Security Station Err. Am I saying that right, Err? Yeah. or JSS Er. It's less than a mile from Sauter City.

And the primary purpose of this is they have these balloons that go up overhead. And they have cameras on them. So it's like a little blimp. It looks like a little blimp. And they put them up in the sky. And the primary purpose of JSSR was to secure this aerostat balloon

to make sure that it was safe. So people could track what's happening in and around the area of Sauter City. So, they're getting attacked. Meanwhile, you show up there. You're assigned as a battalion staff assistant operations officer.

Additional duty of serving as the Iraqi Security Force Liaison officer. At this point, you run into EOD female, who you end up connecting with. Again, I'm just trying to set the stage for your, what else do I need to tell you about or what else do we need to tell the crowd about when you show up there?

what's happening? I mean, it's in the midst of the height of the sectarian violence strategically, so the Shia and the Sunnis are killing each other. So they're still targeting Americans, but it's basically at a point where people start talking about civil war back here in the States and where General Petraeus is getting called back, where they're doing surges. So my unit was a part of the surge of Baghdad,

trying to bring order as the entire strategy. I mean, beyond counterinsurgency, they seemed to be failing, and violence was way up. As an urban warfare guy, now I've gone back to study, this is the Battle of Sotter City. So it's in the mists of me showing up. It's also where the Battle of Sotter City starts where you have a city of two million that you're not allowed to go into, but they're launching rockets out of it hitting the green zone. And this little base that I take over, it's right on the outskirts of that city you can't go into so you can see into it to facilitate other people's operations. So the Army is stretched.

So I think that's in there as well as then we had. started stop loss. Stop loss is happening, which means you're not allowed to get out anymore. You've got to stay. Right, which is like a backdoor draft. Like a guy signs up and says, I want to do four to six years. And at the end of that, they're like, yeah, but you're not going anywhere. We're going back to combat.

So I had like 40, I think it was like 50% of this company was stop losses. So you talk about, you know, in Vietnam, you know, the dealing with draftees. Yeah, this is basically a backdoor draft. The Army is severely stretched to keep the number of people we need over 100,000, 160,000 in Afghanistan, 40,000 plus in Afghanistan. So we start this stop loss and nobody can leave. So now I have a unit who's already think they're the black sheep. Most of them are people who aren't even supposed to still be in the military.

Many of them have profiles, what we call like profiles, like that they're not supposed to be in war, but they took them all anyways. So it's the Army is like all the red lights are flashing as the Army's trying to fight this war. you did a good podcast on your podcast with one of the battalion commander i think he's a battalion commander that was with that was in the solder city building the wall on gold so just for reference if anyone's really interested in getting a little bit more specific about that you got a great podcast about it um july 1st 2008 major john gossert the battalion executive officer walked to up to my desk at Cop Callahan and said, you want command, you'll get Alpha at the beginning of August.

Get over there and start your inventories. And it turns out that this company commander there, Captain Niddle, was not doing a good job. And you go out and you start to do your inventories because there's all kinds of equipment that's got to be turned over. You're signing for everything when you're a company commander. You're every piece of radio, every night vision, every weapon, every vehicle, everything.

is yours. Yeah. And so you got to go and like make sure that it's there and that it's in good working order. You show up there and you can already tell those this whole thing is just not, not good. Um, you show up and the guys are like, take me to the, take me to your skipper and they're like, uh, he's asleep. We don't wake him until such and such a time.

You know, it's just bad out of the gate. You start inventorying, um, immediately upon observing the, observing the, observing and interacting with the soldiers in alpha company, I felt something was wrong. There were clear signs, a lack of leadership, no standards, discipline issues. These are easily remedied factors, but these soldiers interact with each other differently, or at least in a manner I'd never seen in my 15 years in the Army. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure you would have gotten the same spidey senses like, holy crap. This is Lord of the Flies. It was literally lower the flies on this base. There is no, there's just informal groups of people who are like, well, let's go outside for a little while. So the way they, you know, the officers and non-commissioned officers and the soldiers all interacted with each other, the discipline and their equipment, their procedures, like it was all gone. Like, it was all gone. And in a book I put in there, most people don't understand, a military organization is made up of many systems. And you can have disbalance or, you know, some systems can be failing.

But in this, all of them were failing from leadership to standards to training to, you name it. It was, my eyes were just like, and I had served, I had also never served in a mechanized infantry unit. So I was airborne ranger for all those years. And they're like, oh, you're going to go take a company of Bradley's and tanks. Like, shouldn't I go to some school or something, know something about them?

You'll pick it up when you get there. You'll figure it out. But this was, yeah, when I was going through those inventories, it was, I started making a list of all that. Okay, we need to change this, this. And I had this giant list of things that we would have to work on. because, you know, leadership is also about just assessing. So we get taught that, like, you don't immediately make changes, assess.

So I'm just assessing, like, making, my list keeps getting bigger and bigger. They don't do operations orders. They don't, you know, clear their, you know, they don't wear their equipment. They don't take care of their equipment. Did you ever read the book about Face when you rolled into this situation? I did. Did you read it before reading, before going into this situation? No.

Yeah, that's a bummer. I didn't really get into the kind of the study of military to late. Yeah. I would read that book. Like, if I was not doing some immediate work, I would just, I had it on, like, next to my cot and would just pick it up and read it. You could read anywhere in that book, and I'd be like, all right, I'm a little bit better now. That was when I was in Ramadi.

And this is a classic kind of representation. These guys got the shit burning detail, which Echo Charles is when they have basically half of a 50-gallon drum underneath of a little plywood shitter and then every couple days you got to put diesel fuel on that thing and burn it it's just freaking disgusting and so john here runs into this guy and you know the guy says good morning sir and he says soldier what did you do wrong he looked puzzled asking what do you mean sir i refraised my question how did you get this detail he replied with a laugh oh no sir i asked for this job i love it people leave me alone it's easy work and i don't have to go out there he paused and pointed to the concrete walls of the JSS, you know, out there.

So if you got guys that would rather burn shit with diesel fuel, then go and do your job as a soldier, that's not a good sign. I've actually been surprised when I tell that story. How many people don't know that the military does that? Like one of the few movies it's in is like platoon, where the guys are put on that detail that they, we build these boxes, people piss and shit. shit in a can and you got to burn that

with a certain type of gas and make it go away. And everybody's like, what do you mean you do that? That's what military do. Like, we don't, this is all steer environments. You have to build or you dig a hole in the ground and you fill the hole back up. But like, what do you mean you burn shit?

Yeah, he was burning shit. And you had a giant, you have to stir it too. Yeah. Because you have to stir it. You have to slowly stir it so it all burns evenly with this diesel you put in it. And this guy's just smiling. Like,

It was the craziest thing. Like, you know, you can make a movie out of like the like usually like that person is not happy, but he was ecstatic. That was his job. Like a gomer pile like, you know, bigger like. You obviously run into some negative leaders and you kind of talk again, you got to get the book to get all this. It's such a perfect example and there's so many good leadership examples. But you end up saying this. This was the bad news bears of an army unit.

The weight of fixing this company started. said in deeply my list was getting huge um fast forward a little bit on july 6th 2008 I left the soldiers at j s s er to go inspect the platoon of alpha company that have been sent to delta company to guard a smaller site so there's basically this is another thing that people don't understand about the military in general you have your company of platoons what three platoons and they go hey we need one of the four platoons we need one of your platoons over here okay and those guys are gonna work for someone else, they're still kind of your responsibility, so you have to take care of them.

So that's what you're doing in this situation. One of your platoons had been sent to Delta Company and you get out there. JSS shop was a short distance from JSS Earth. So you guys are pretty co-located or close located on the northwest side of Sauter City. This platoon, second platoon, was different from what I had seen so far at the rest of the company. The platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Patrick Donovan ran a tight ship. His squad leaders were demanding of the soldiers.

Donovan and his squad and team leaders. had made sure all their equipment was laid out correctly and the soldiers spoke to the NCOs with respect and discipline. I heard soldiers joking with each other on the side as friends. This was a tight team. It felt like the army I'd known my entire career up to that point. So again, it's just like sort of a representation

of different leadership and this group is a little bit isolated from these other knuckleheads and they're squared away. Yeah, it's like pattern recognition. Like I couldn't, I tried to write the book. One of the reason was to articulate. Like, what do you mean you could feel

that there was something wrong? because you have all these things indicators that if you're a new if you were a new platoon leader unfortunately you might not like oh this is just normal right you might you might believe that that's normal I had been in a lot of squared away

units or really good units so when I saw good I could feel it and when I saw bad I could really feel it and with this one every element of the systems that I talk about in the book were there and it wasn't even in performance

but you can tell the way that people talk to each other the way they take care of their equipment, everything. It's just a bad culture. This is crazy. July 7th, two Alpha Company soldiers who were believed to have been getting high by huffing compressed air were in their living quarters at JSSR playing a game of trust with a nine millimeter handgun. Specialist B placed his Beretta nine-mill handgun to the neck of PFCR thinking if he pressed the muzzle hard enough into his buddy the way. weapon could not discharge. This may seem like a crazy thought, but it's a function of the weapon while cleaning the handgun. Many soldiers discovered that when you press the barrel of the weapon into

something firm like the palm of your hand, the slide is pressed to the rear and the hammer will not fall when you pull the trigger. So this is a true statement. The insanity of this is that these two soldiers were attempting the feet with a fully loaded weapon. So of course, the weapon fired when they pressed the barrel into a non-solid surface. In this case, the neck of the other soldier, causing a gaping wound and immense damage as the bullet passed through R's neck and out his chest, paralyzing him below the waist for the rest of his life. Clearly, there were many known and unknown factors that led to the trigger being pulled, but I felt strongly that it was a direct result of poor leadership and lack of discipline in a unit with just average military discipline. The chance of something

like this happening is close to zero. Less than 24 hours later, the unit hit rock bottom at around 1,300 hours on July 8, the large semi-truck topped by aluminum soda cans to give the appearance of those cans being in the cargo pulled up outside the walls of the JSS. The driver pressed a sophisticated detonator and unleashed hell on earth. The truck had been rigged as an improvised rocket-assisted munition, I-RAM. This I-RAM consists of nine large metal canister bombs, empty propane tanks that were each filled with 150 to 200 pounds of explosives, scrap metal and ball-bearing, They were loaded onto a semi-tractor trailer modified with rails that allowed the bombs to be lobbed over the outposts, high concrete walls.

Seven of the rockets landed inside the walls of the JSS. Fast forward a little bit. Once the rockets stopped exploding, many people started to come out of hiding because that's pretty much what they did is they took cover, hoping to receive orders to attack or something. But the lull of any explosions was short-lived. The I-Ram truck caught fire after five rockets had left the truck. Then the fire ignited the two remaining rockets that had failed to launch, causing them to explode. The soldiers were in shock. The explosives were more powerful than anything they'd ever experienced.

Miraculously, there were no fatalities, but the physical carnage and psychological trauma of this attack ran deep. Damage to the buildings, vehicles, and equipment was extensive. Generators were hit and spewed dense black smoke. Some ammunition could be heard cooking off from the fires. Trucks were destroyed, leaving only charged skeletons. The bombs that hit the ground left craters 10 feet across. and a few feet deep. The T walls, which were six-ton steel-reinforced concrete blast walls around the JSS,

had holes the size of basketballs, and many were thrown to their sides like they were dominoes simply tipped over. The explosions knocked out the electricity and with it, any hope of air conditioning showers and the internet. Air conditioning was crucial, with high temperatures averaging 100 degrees and spiking higher. Now there was no escape from the heat. Even the Iraqi people had swamp coolers in their houses and minimized moving around during

the peak heat of the day. the number of soldiers who suffered concussions from the bombs was widespread and harrowing. Weeks after the attack, one of the sergeants who suffered a concussion went to the medic complaining of headaches. It was determined that he had hundreds of fractures in his jaw. He was evacuated back to the states and within weeks lost all of his teeth. So this is a freaking devastating attack that hit them. And shortly thereafter, the decision to relieve Captain Niddle of his command at

probably been made after the huffing shooting incident, after the IRAM, the brigade commander of Fulbert Colonel, had driven to JSS, Err, told Niddle to get in his vehicle and drove him away. His command had ended as shamefully as it had been performed. I was the guy who would have to clean up his mess. Yeah.

They call it the Fob Destroyer, that I ram. The I ram. It's a Ketib Hezboa device that was being deployed. You know, lots of high-speed guys, like you were trying to intercept them. from where they were coming from because it's just a very advanced weapon and it there's a couple

of videos although they took the video down they actually they had recorded it's gotipa has blood recorded they put it to music the actual attack on jess or I can't find it anymore they took it off and you see the balloon fall into the sky but the carnage that it caused I mean it was insane

yeah and the carnage that it caused was your the company commander you're getting fired immediately that's freaking bad ass that the brigade commander just drove out there and was like hey jump in there I don't think there was a conversation it's kind of like that we talk about we call it the black Chinook like that like it was like a fictional thing no this dude made up patrol went to get him put him in the car and drove him away and even the platoon like or the company didn't like where to

go and then I'm I get put in with that fix it and in the middle like two or three hours later everything's still on fire I get dropped mm-hmm Yeah, you say when I stepped off the vehicle, it was pitch black and deadly silence. I told the radio operator to assemble all the NCOs in the company so I could talk to them. I really ended up talking at them. I wanted to first give them a clear message and we could have a conversation later. I told them we would start with a clean slate that this was the past was the past and I would not incorporate it into anything that Alpha Company would become. They needed to lose and stamp out any negative attitudes about squads, platoons, and company.

Today was day one like zero one hundred hours in the morning. I also said there wouldn't be no gray areas regarding standards. I was not making new standards, but we would follow military standards, customs and courtesies. We would do things the way we all knew they were supposed to be done. It would be black and white, right or wrong, not gray. Who knows if I said the right things that night. I guess we would find out in the very near future. So. Yeah, and there's a little bit, that was hard. I wanted to create that environment of this, this was, we. would rebuild that company. But there was a little bit of, but you weren't here. So that's what that's the actual, I think I tell you later, the first sergeant, who's the only person actually said it to me to my face. The first sergeant, the next day said, you weren't here. You can't understand what they went through. And then he left to go on his mid-tour leave, which said a lot about him. But I, and I, you had to reiterate, it wasn't one night, but that's just, it wasn't me coming in.

it was we were going to rebuild this company. And as we say later, we moved, which was a huge help later and got a new mission. Because even having a mission, like when you put soldiers somewhere, whether it's like we were talking about in strategy, like they don't understand why they're there. I mean, there was a company of people on a piece of sand protecting a balloon. It's really hard to motivate them towards, you know, what they're, what we call tasks, because there's social cohesion or there's task cohesion. It's really hard to get task cohesion if the mission is to protect a balloon while you're getting attacked. Yeah, if you even know, like, why is that balloon up there? What is it doing?

What is it doing? What purposes is it served? Maybe if you knew that it was protecting other Americans and it was critical for what we're trying to do here in an operational level. Like all those things. But if you don't know what any of those things are, it ain't going to be good. So after you show up there, you say this. The brigade commander visited me shortly after the I-Ram attack. He was not condescending.

overbearing about solving all the company's problems overnight. He only made two direct commands. One, make sure the soldiers were wearing gloves and eye protection. Like either one of those would shield them from a bombing. The second order was to, quote, get the internet back up, end quote. The internet? That was the farthest thing from my mind. But it showed me what our current leadership felt soldiers needed, the ability to talk with their family and friends.

How odd. I was more interested in preventing another IRAM attack, more injuries or even deaths. Protecting my soldiers while increasing our combat effectiveness was higher on my list of priorities than email capability. Motivating the company so more soldiers could not find excuses to leave the combat zone was more important than Facebook. Adequately dealing with the very real mental and physical injuries from the I-RAM attack was more crucial than allowing my soldiers to play video games. Addressing the long list I had compiled of what was wrong with this unit was more vital than posting selfies. Still, I had to follow orders like all soldiers. I would learn to work within this new combat environment,

even with what I felt was the misplaced prioritization of getting the internet back up, I would have to find the right balance. So that is definitely an interesting statement. Yeah. From, and who is that, your brigade commander? Brigade commander, yeah. And I, I don't, he was a great leader, actually,

and I don't fault him for that. It just seemed to be, there is, with this forever war, there was this ideal that creating home away from home and connecting them to home, was the most important thing. And the research shows that that's not true. I mean, they had just gone through a severe traumatic event as a group, and they needed to deal with that as a group.

And this is what, as you know later, I mean, they're seeing, it's from now as an academic or a researcher, like why did he do that? Because culturally it was an ideal that that was the solution to morale and making the soldiers deployments is giving them that feeling of staying connected to their social support networks at home, not understanding it actually counterproductive

to their performance. And this is why I wrote the book in a way I wanted to write it with those two different episodes, not just my experience, but that was two different militaries, two different nations at war. Yeah.

So it really rippled down to, well, if you can talk to your wife or whatever, that'll make it all better. Yeah, what's interesting, if you throw my experience into here, so 2003, 2004, very similar to what you had in 2003, 2004. But then I had this 2006 when you were a ranger instructor. I was 2006, which meant there was like the beginnings of it. Definitely not an, it was, it might have been kind of an ideal level.

Like you could call your, you could call, but there was someone waiting and you couldn't spend all day and you couldn't do it every day. And you could get on Facebook, but it was going to be slow. and there was two people waiting by the computer ahead of you. And so it was probably a pretty good combination, a pretty good balance between like you could connect with home if you had to. But it was kind of a bit much to try and do it every day. Like I would talk to my wife once a week maybe, maybe once every two weeks.

Like, hey, how's it going? And she'd say, everything's great. And I'd say thank you. You know, pretty, I think it was pretty ideal. So by the time we get to your experience, in 2008, it's like internet in your bed. Yeah. Which is totally different.

Yeah. Did you have something there? No, it's not all time is the same. Just like, you know, what are you spending the time for? And this is what I've done lectures since this is people are like, what's the solution in our ever-connected world? In this moment, connection with the outside world, isn't what they needed.

I understand. We think that, of course you need to talk to your families and you need to keep those bonds. In that trauma, the solutions, because they brought in, like, you know,

psychologists and behavioral health and all this stuff after the fact and thought that was a solution. Is that not all time is the same. So who you're connecting for, what is that time being used for is what I've tried to help people since who want answers,

whether in business or in the military, like, okay, what's the solution? if we're all connected to this virtual world and some people will apply meaning to it like well you still have to find the time and then use the time you have together for those purposes

like this whole mandatory fund like just call everybody into the office they're going to spend time together that's a real example of in that moment they did not need connections to the outside of world they needed to come together as a group process what had just happened

dust themselves off but it's both a micro and a macro sense of this ideal of how we're going to spend time, which world are we living in? You have to be present in the moment. As I wrote this book, and now people are like,

well, what's your solution? Like, I'm not going to turn. You know, some people thought the solution here should have been turned the internet off. That wasn't the solution. You're never going to do that. I can tell you in Ukraine and Gaza,

you're not turning anything off. You have to know when to come together and the time being used for a very specific purpose. That was a point when they needed to heal and get back to the job. It wasn't tell the family what happened. Yeah.

It's, you got to find the balance and figure out what you're doing. You know, it's interesting because you and I were talking before hit record, and I was saying that I would read about face in Ramadi. I would read it,

and I would just open it up, and I would read it, and I would read it and read it. And after, it was shortly after Mark, one of my guys got killed, and I like picked up, it was like 24 hours in my mind of combat,

combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, that's what we're doing. And I just, I didn't want to read it. And I ended up picking, somebody had left a copy of the book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is like about hippies in doing drugs. And I read that. But as I looked back, I was like, oh, you were kind of like you needed a mental break

from just thinking about war 24 hours a day. And that's what you did. You read this other book. And then when I got done that book, I was like, okay, cool. I went back to her about face. but knowing that, hey, you might need a little breather sometimes because there's times where, like you said, you go through something traumatic as a group

and you need to deal with that as a group, but there's also going to be times that communicating with your family back home is going to help you overcome things. But just like anything else, if you take it to an extreme and now you're calling home every single day, you know, this is another,

you mentioned in the book that you didn't see people with printed out pictures of their families. And I had this thing where my wife sent me an email and said, the kids want to see a picture of where you sleep. I got that, yeah. Yeah. And so I opened up like a bag and pulled out some pictures of my wife and kids and hung them up, took a picture, sent it to my wife

and took those pictures back down because I didn't want to every day when I'm waking up in the morning when I'm going to bed at night. I didn't, I know this doesn't sound like the best thing in the world. I didn't want to be thinking about my wife and kids when I woke up in the morning, went to bed at night. I had a job to do, and that was a distraction that needed to wait until later. And I think that was actually healthy. And were there times where it was like, oh, I really want to talk to my wife or see if I can

catch the kids and see if they're awake? Yeah, of course. But most of the time, like, I got a bunch of guys relying on me to make the right. decisions at the right time. I got to do the right thing. I don't even want to think about anything else. So there has to be some kind of balance and certainly shutting it off isn't the answer, but also piping internet into your room 24 hours a day is not the answer either. So got to find some balance. Speaking of leadership, you say here, the ultimate crime of Alpha Company's former leadership pair was not that they were poor leaders, although they were,

but that there were absent leaders. They erected a barrier between themselves. the troops and stay firmly behind that barrier. You say I had to replace that new form of power with traditional present military leadership. I had to bring us back to proven effective military systems for the good of the troops under my command. Most of the soldiers, this is why I really wanted to highlight this part, most of the soldiers welcomed the reestablishment of the military systems they remembered from their training and former assignments.

When they had enlisted, it was with the expectations of those systems. As much as some of them may have outwardly enjoyed the lax wild west. under the former leaders, even the more rogue mannered among the soldiers embrace the return of structure. There's no reason to be a dictator, but I followed regulations and expected alpha company soldiers to do the same. Almost all of them were happy to do so. The discipline, standards, tactics, operations, traditions, and administration were all

elements of effective teams I had been a member of in my military upbringing. I just thought this is important to point out that people want to work hard. They want to be respected. They want to be disciplined. And if they're living in, you know, the bad news bears or, no, what example did you just say it was like when you showed up there? Lord of flies. Yeah. People, there's like one person out of the group of 100 people.

There's one person that likes being, that likes it being like Lord of the Flines because he's the Lord of the Flines. Everyone else, it sucks. Yep. And so for normal people to say, man, I really wish we had some discipline and some order around here makes total sense. And you could, you, you felt that. Yeah, absolutely. And the aspect of the absent leadership, too, is like, I get contrary to everything they had ever heard.

Like, you don't ask your soldiers to do anything. You won't, you don't sit in the ivory tower and then they're living like that. Like, they, they will suss that out really quickly that you aren't their leader. You're the guy who shows up and says some stuff. You're not the leader. So I had to do all that, but 100% with the, they, we train as we fight is what we say. and they were living in a foreign world that wasn't even comfort you're like

that chaos wasn't ideal for them people want order kids to soldiers yeah yeah you had to make some leadership changes and one of the ways that you did that was you brought you switched the entire third platoon with first class Donovan's second platoon and brought them to your location

Delta company put up a fight but the Italian leadership supported you so that's a good move. It was a hard one. Delta was not happy. Delta was not. Delta fought it. Matter of fact, I asked very few,

like the battalion commander fix it. I asked very few things to him, and I didn't think they would give me that. And he's like, okay, and the Delta guy had to pound sand. But to give him that on a lower risk, but it was really interesting with that injection,

I knew it was good. I knew it was so, like there's a couple other examples of like that injection of good the exponential qualities it gives you for examples for the other platoon all that bled it bled over so immediately that had they not supported me on that decision

to switch those out I don't know what would have happened and you brought staff Sergeant Fincher brought him out of fraud prosperity yeah and he became so I had to form my own patrol because this guy was absent and you know at the time as you know whether you're doing just stability operations or just commanding you had to be able to move around the battlefield and that comes

commander wasn't doing that. He literally was like on that night shift watching movies between like 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. before he switched out. Yeah, I didn't go into it. But yeah, these guys had set up their leadership team was working eight hour shifts. And like, hey, dude, you got it. I'm going to sleep. And now you got it.

And I'm going to eat. Now I've got it. And I'm going to watch movies. So that's what they were doing, which is freaking pathetic. So Fincher was like, again, an amazing noncommissioned officer who made a platoon, kept that platoon in order, it became my element to move around the battlefield to go do the key leader engagements and go with the other patoons on raids and things like that. But he was another, I couldn't have done it without him. You mentioned this earlier that you guys ended up getting

sent to a new battle space, a place called Ottomia. Yeah. You know it? Yeah, I do indeed, actually. There was a special forces group up there in 03. And I want to say it was 5-2-3. As they were up there and we went out there and hung out with them for a while and got mortared and got hit with RPGs and had good times out there in Ottomia. It's right on the river. Yep. Were you guys in that base that's right on the river? Yeah, Coppa Apache. Okay.

So you guys end up at Cop Apache. Cap Apache had space for only one company. The battalion made the decision to send two companies there. And what this meant was buildings or choose these little container housing units, like they're basically like a little trailer. you live in instead of having two people you guys were going to put eight in there so it's going to which made some interesting aromas but yeah it was a again with the research in there that element of proximity when these guys live go back to their own spaces it was again separating from the group if you live as a group you are a group so you guys get a new mission too

Obviously, you're not watching out for the balloon anymore. Now you're given some major areas of Ottomia, some districts that you're going to patrol. And this meant you had to create another platoon, which you were not too happy about. You get left some good interpreters, which interpreters are huge. You know, we were kind of laughing earlier

about the fact that you didn't even have interpreters. You're just wandering out in the country, you're not able to speak the language. When you have good Terps, it's a game changer. It's a tool, especially if your role is this, all these different functions, they become, the interpreters I had became vital to me accomplishing the mission period, whether it was the raid or the key leader engagement.

He became a tool, and you had to learn how they used that. And again, very little training, but yeah, absolutely. If that's, you're communicating for all the nuances. And I went through interpreters too, because some were right for some missions, not right for other missions. I had an old guy who was really, really like immediately garnered respect

because age and the culture means a lot. So if I was going to a high level meeting, he was the one coming with me. And they would give him tea and everything. It created a new dynamic. Was that Ahmed or Brad? Ahmed. Ahmed.

Who died. Yeah, and he died. Yeah. Like just died of natural causes. Of, of, that guy lived. He smoked like a chimney. He ate like horribly. Had a giant, you know, the giant pot belly.

But yeah, just had a heart of time. and died on him. Terrible. You had another crazy thing take place with third platoon who is attached to Delta Company, but as I mentioned earlier, these guys are still your responsibility. And what happened is there's a guy, PFC Black, who's a 220-pound dude, and Staff Sergeant Artes, who's a smaller dude, 160 pounds, and basically Black is in there without his shoes on.

He's in the gym working out with no shoes on. Artes sees him and says, hey, man, you're not. You know, what are you doing? You got to wear shoes. And this dude, Black just freaks out and attacks him. And like a rabid animal, Black lunged Artes driving him into a full tackle from across the weight bench. The sergeant slammed to the ground. And before he realized what was what had happened, Black was on top of him beating his face in with a 10-pound weight.

Black proceeded to savagely beat Artes unconscious. It was pure luck. And what clearly saved his life was other soldiers, heard the slamming weights, ran into the gym and jumped on Black. He took five soldiers to contain this monster, but the damage was done. A medevac was called, Nortez was evacuated all the way to the United States. He never fully recovered because the brain damage he incurred. He would suffer from seizures and have a stutter for the rest of his life. He was medically discharged from the Army a year later.

Black claimed PTSD as his defense, knowing that the chain and command or army would walk on eggshells with soldiers in disciplining anything that might be PTSD related. He received minimal punishment after cyclone. testing validated he had mental issues no surprise there and he was later medically discharged from the army i was stunned it's freaking terrible it's terrible and that dude was like i don't know if the guy in full metal jacket although this guy was bigger um and had medical issues or mental issues before he came in which is a little bit of the you know we also dropped all the waivers the stop losses we dropped felony waivers we dropped drug waivers you know i'm always stretched but this

that I had to have that guy around my formation for a while before they got him out of country too and like two guys on guard of him at all times. It was like every time I thought I was on a lead then something would knock you back down. Like the challenges weren't stopping. It's like I was recreating. It's not like I was building the plane and flight. Like the challenges were continuing. And that was horrible.

It is the stress where people, people do stuff in the combat situation that is, It's amplified compared to regular life. You know, like this might have been a shoving match in the states, but all of a sudden dudes get his head pounded in with a 10-pound weight belt, and he's disabled for life. That's just freaking terrible. Fast forward a little bit.

An additional blessing in disguise was that unlike the plush living facilities on the bigger basis, Coppa Apache did not have a 24-hour cafeteria. The Army soldier cooks served military-style meals during set windows for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Patrols, actually lunch was MREs. Patrols would come off missions and eat together. At a minimum, squads were eating together in accordance with their patrol schedule and the priorities of work.

Breaking bread as a group provides another natural bonding time. So beneficial. Huge. And I think it applies to even our families. I do with my kids. If you're not having disconnected time together, transformational conversation, the military had always done that, but had gotten away with it. you've gone away with it.

Those daily practices that are reinforced cultural aspects, people don't realize what they're doing. And the benefits were measurable what it does. Alpha Company was beginning to evolve from a bunch of disparate, detached, separate individuals into one congruous, connected, and cohesive unit. Within a short time after moving to Apache, Alpha Company was starting to function.

Soldiers were living and eating together, doing purpose-driven missions, where they understood why and what they would be doing when they went outside the wire every day. As a result, they were viewing themselves differently. They no longer felt like black sheep of the battalion. And I don't know if I mentioned that. Oh, yeah, I did because they hadn't done well in some of the training.

And so they were like the black sheep. And now they're starting to do well. And I had to get that out of them. That was that first talk that first night. Like I knew that that was there. Like it was and I knew that that was a huge issue. How you view yourself is how you're going to perform. So, you know, of course they're going to perform.

Nobody expects anything of you. So I tried to, immediately stamp that out immediately. Like you're not the, we, day zero, that you had to beat that black sheep mentality out of them where there was no expectations they could do wrong. They could out of them. That reminds me of Hackworth.

You know, he took over the 439th in Vietnam and they were called like the Hard Luck Battalion. And they were the black sheep and they had a bad reputation and he changed him to the hardcore. What's up? Echo Charles. The internet cafe at Camp Apache was small room in the main building, and every time I walked past it was filled. It did not matter if it was 2 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

It was a hot spot for the cop. So then you talk about some of the personal issues that people face and how those came to fruition, whether it's a girl getting pregnant and she's threatening this. And, you know, the Dear John letters, the whole nine yards now become Dear John emails. Fast forward a little bit. soon I discovered that there was just not enough time in the day. Under the supervision of Staff Sergeant Fincher and me, our patrol left early in the morning and made rounds of meeting with one of the three police chiefs, Iraqi army leaders, local governing bodies, local tribal

neighborhood bosses, the power of trash company, local shop owners are stopping in to see one of my patoons on their missions. We returned anywhere from 10 to 12 hours later. Thanks to the new digital nature of warfare, I returned to find that I had somewhere between 20 and 100 work emails. I dropped my gear. No one thinks about that. No one thinks you're over in freaking cop Apache getting emails, but you are. I dropped my gear in my room and immediately got back to work. One of our former handymen in the company built my room right next to the company command post

with the door literally leading from it to my bedroom where all the radios and computers that tracked everything were located, where soldiers in my company rotated shifts to the patrols that were out or to hire command when they called. Unlike previous company leadership, I felt I had to be. readily available to everyone in the company. Even when I was getting a few much needed hours of sleep, I was only a loud voice and two steps away from being back on the job. Yeah, and that's, you know, I was young, relatively, I mean, I had wake-up criteria.

So that's the thing we have within like, okay, if this blows up, if this happens, wake-up criteria. If so-and-so calls wake-up criteria. But I was also running myself into the ground. I was interested in drinking jaco. drinking the army I don't know if the Navy does it had them to yeah the ripets yeah so I was surviving on five or six ripets a day the tea that I was getting out there I had to order NyQuil which there is Amazon in at this time so I was ordering NyQuil to be able to

just to power down it's horrible I like took 10 years away from my life I had a few mentors that were there like like my S3 that I had of my podcast who of the 100 emails he would make sure I, he would call and say, like, look, I know you got a lot going on. This one, you got to answer this one now. So he was like the overarching, like father figure me of this time. But, you know, looking back, I was making some mistakes, even running myself into the ground. Yeah, you definitely go and talk about these rippets and what they had in them and they were just terrible for you. And it's like they were kind of addictive because they had sugar in them.

So you get the, you get the caffeine rush, but then the sugar kicks in. So it crashes you down. and that's like one of the reasons I made these was because it makes something that's actually cleaning good for you and we've been doing a good job of that. We were issuing these to sell. Oh, for sure. In crates.

In crates, in pallets, just big pallets of this crap. And it's like, it's really, like I had a battalion commander almost die because he had like kidney failure because he was surviving off monsters and rippets. And he literally almost died. But we were issuing that he's out. Yeah, I had the same thing. I mean, I had guys when I was at trade-ed,

you know, guys, because guys would come back from their deployment and now they're going to work and trade-ed. I had guys that would drink five, six, seven, or eight monsters a day. Yeah. And just, they would end up in the freaking hospital. Yep. It's absolutely terrible.

So, um, you can see in some of my photos around this time, I have, like, I have, my bags have bags. Mm-hmm. It's crazy what I was doing to myself. Check. You talk about this one incident where your guys were hit by a, like this, this anti-tank grenade, but it ends up killing this kid who one of your soldiers, Martinez, had, you know,

had taken a picture of and kind of felt connected to because the kid was always out there on the street corner. Because that's what happens. You drive down the same street every day. Eventually, you get to know the local pop. You get to see that kid and you probably give him some MRE candy and then he comes back again and you probably say hi to him and now he knows your name. And so you develop these little relationships and that's what happened except for as after he formed this little relationship, this kid gets killed in a very bloody, brutal way by this grenade that happened to bounce off the Humvee before it detonated. So again, this is just some of the some of the trauma that you're talking about. And again, you know, you're looking to see how he's doing.

You kind of go look for him. And you say, I did not see Martinez. He was one of the few soldiers who had paid for an internet cable to be run directly into his chew, which is his housing thing. I later learned after the patrol that he had lain on his bed trying to process what had happened that night. One of the things that hit him hard was wondering if that had been Twinkie Boy, this kid that he had taken a picture of, could it have been. The images continue to flash in his mind. He was having trouble sorting it all out, trying to compartmentalize that it was just part of the job. That this time, though, he could not do it alone.

He needed to talk about it. The other guys in the chew were out, probably at the internet cafe. So he reached out for his laptop and checked to see if his wife was online. Facebook said she was, fortunately. Although he really needed to talk, there's only so much he could tell his wife. He did not want to worry her, nor did he want to look weak in her eyes. He kept a concise. So this happened tonight.

We had a rough patrol. Don't worry. I'm fine. But I saw an Iraqi kid get killed. It's pretty fucked up. There was not much more she could say to help. him, especially because he had just told her he was fine. When he came to telling his wife about his experiences in the war, his view was no news is good news.

So he did not share a lot of daily war events with his family. Maybe when he got home, he would. Maybe. Did this senior soldier get the emotional and psychological support he needed from the conversation with his wife? Although I hoped he did. I seriously doubted it. And I learned later in interviewing him for the book that he didn't. He didn't.

And he still traumatized. by that event, which is that this is the story that was the New York Times op-ed that led to the book. Was this story of that one that all soldiers hate to see children harm.

Like, it's something very unique. If you look back in Vietnam, first battle of Fallujah, an image of a child that's been harmed. Innocence really has the cut through to your heart and moral injury. And it messed him and others up. And after that,

I knew that when I visited him, on the spite, but they were not okay. And they went back to the cop. I thought I would find them talking about it, and they had barely talked to each other about it all. They were talking to their wives and whoever else would listen, rather than processing the vent together

to see who is having the most problems with it. That story is the genesis of the book. Yeah, there's also all kinds of things with perspective, too, because if, you know, the 10 of us do something, do an operation, well, there's one guy that's over here thinking it was his fault because he, you know, maneuvered the vehicle this way and the kid, well, someone else says, no, dude, that kid was already there. Like, there's all these different perspectives when you come back and you do a good debrief where

people find out a more accurate assessment of what happened and go, oh, okay, and at least you get to kind of share that burden between the different people on the team. Whereas if something like this happens, you feel like, hey, if I wouldn't have moved my Humvee, the grenade would have hit a different way. And so I'm the one that killed this kid is, you know, what can go on in people's heads. If they're not sitting around and saying, hey, well, here's what I think happened. Oh, no, that didn't have anything to do with where you put the Humvee. These, this, you know, that kid was already over there. I saw him over there.

So that debrief that you can do amongst is very important. Yeah. And I, in reflection, we weren't, we weren't doing those. We weren't doing, we were doing post-patrol intel briefs. Like the platoon guy would go out and see what did you see. I mean, this is also a 15-month deployment. So the keeping, one of the solutions after writing this book is that, but the idea of incorporating somehow the campfire discussion in a debrief.

I don't know how when you guys do your debrief, but ours are very intel-focused, like what they saw. Even the what we call an after actions review, which is not combat, it's training, you know, the sustains, improves, all that stuff, where the debrief after patrol is very intel driven. If we don't have these campfires anymore, which is 2003, we'd sit around the Humvee eating in whatever, a philosophical campfire. This is a great example of since you don't have it, there are severe repercussions of not having that moment. Because yeah, you can go send them to talk to somebody later. who doesn't know what he experienced. That debrief has to incorporate that,

that emotional, psychological element to it somehow. Yeah, no, I, we didn't, we were not successful in doing that either. Our debriefs, your guys' priority was the, you know, the intel, that was our, our primary thing is like, how did we perform, what did we do wrong, what could we do right, what can we do better? That's the main thing that we focus on in our debriefs.

And the intel thing is almost like, it's another thing that we're about to do, because we take SSE off site, so now we're going to sit around, we're going to say where we found it. But a lot of times our guys are going to turn it over to our intel people. They're going to do all the processing.

And so we're not even that hyper-focused on the intel. We're going to give them what we took off target. If there's anything that's stood out, we'll tell them. But it's not some big, we're not trying to collaborate all the information. And then as far as the emotional content, no.

Like, we're going to get ready for the next operation. Like, that's what we're doing. And so we did not. do a good job of that. Other than the fact that guys were, you know, we were, like I said, we had kind of limited internet. We had, uh, we did eat meals together because there's like, there was a, there was, if we were going to eat on our little base, it was going to be mermaids and we were going to

sit there and eat and, you know, it was chow from this time to this time. So you wouldn't see everyone. And our main area of congregation was like platoon hut. So that's where everyone's doing. That's for the brief. Whether you're, uh, writing a letter home or. or you're cleaning your weapon or your lamidating maps, you're all in this one same spot.

And we're doing a brief every day, basically. Like we're always getting ready to do something. Yeah, it's, it became, as I wrote out, I tried to think through. One, we had a concept back then called every soldier is a sensor because you're, you're in the environment all the time. So that object is not supposed to be there, but that guy saw it. And you try to debrief through that. Every soldier was basically a collection, rather than just the leadership.

But it is like you would and if you wanted to do this like and create this moment where you could determine whether people needed more help, right? So you know, trying to believe that soldiers are going to self-select for help, which is a cultural thing of what is strength. Like mental, having mental issues is viewed as not strength in many elements within the military. You would have to train it into the process, which is cultural. Like this debrief isn't a moment that we all do. Some of us do it differently.

if you had the awareness of how to even facilitate a conversation about a traumatic event and then facilitate, okay, this is beyond my level of training, that soldier is showing issues with what he just saw because one of the biggest predictors, which I didn't know until after research is, the biggest predictor of trauma like PTSD is previous trauma. So you don't even know that the soldier is trauma prone. but he will depending on how the debrief goes somebody will tell you that like no I'm

messed up I'm having problems with this and so you'd have to force it into the actual day the practice that may have a different purpose kind of like eating the child together like the purpose is to feed you feel you but no actually that's this goes back to the start of military so Valley Forge

like we're bonding in this time yeah yeah that's definitely something for leaders out there right now you're saying you could have done a better job in 2008. I definitely could have done a better job in 2006. I know talking years later with guys

that there was things that they thought had happened, things that they perceived, that they did wrong or this mistake happened, that they carried on their shoulder, like it was their fault that this thing happened the way it did. I was like, well, no, actually, here's what's going on. Here's why this happened.

Here's the call that got made. Here's why we did this thing. Or here's what the other nine perspectives were. And so, yeah, it'd be very helpful to make sure that everyone, has the opportunity to say, hey, here's what I saw. What did you see? Here's how I feel.

How do you feel? And you know what? I had some guys be like, yeah. Yeah, no factor. Like, okay, cool. And that's cool. That's fine. But a couple people are going to be, you know, whether it's just their, like you said,

past trauma or it's something that they specifically saw or specifically did. If they don't clear it up and get it off the chef, they're carrying a weight that they shouldn't be carrying. you gave another situation of a moral dilemma and names have been changed but second lieutenant heedly had a negligent discharge of his weapon into the clearing barrel at the front gate of cop Apache and again you go to some details here but there'd been a bunch of these AD's accidental discharges at the brigade level so it's been causing problems and after this rash of and you go into the details between what's different between a negligent discharge and an accidental discharge. And it's now called a negligent discharge in most cases. An accidental

discharge is like maybe a cookoff where your weapon's hot and it actually fires around, which can happen. It's not, it is truly an accident. Negligent discharge is like you made a mistake. So there's been a bunch of those and you say after the rash of negligent discharge, the chain of command dictated that every ND incident would be reported to the division commander who was a two-star general at the organizational level one tier above brigade. Ours was Major General Jeffrey Hammond, infamous across the division for crushing soldiers' souls. The soldier who was responsible for the incident had to be taken in front of the brigade commander, if not the division commander, and typically received some sort of public punishment.

So when our second lieutenant he, Lee, had this accident, the word spread like wildfire throughout the company. Guess who had an ND? My dilemma was this. everything in my value system as a commander and soldier, as well as a strong ethical code deep in my gut, said to follow orders and report the incident. If orders were not followed, it showed other soldiers that some orders can be followed while others can be disobeyed. Do as I say, not as I do. But reporting this incident so soon after the incident of the soldier shooting his fellow soldier in the neck and the I-Ram attack episode would result in yet another kick to Alpha Company while we were down. The black sheet fuck up again or typical alpha and likely what a bunch of losers. These remarks would be made throughout the battalion and also within alpha company. Morale had not yet improved enough to make the men immune to this self-flagulation. They had heard this condemnation and said it for themselves for too long the habit to be so quickly raised. The company would most likely be visited by battalion and higher commands and told how they

continue to screw up and disgrace the greater organization, which is exactly what happened after the IREM attack. This would be proof that nothing had changed, nor would it ever. The company's identity and self-esteem were especially important to me at this specific moment. After more than an hour of struggling with the decision, I decided not to report the ND to Battalion Headquarters. I called Green Platoon together and explained my decision to them. I insisted that Healy was not above the rules that this was about Alpha and our team. Heedly would be punished at my level. We would keep the matter internal and deal within the company. It would not be swept under the rug and he would not be treated differently for being an officer, as happens all too often.

Heedly would be required to meet every incoming patrol at the gate no matter the time and oversee that clearing of their weapons. To this day, I still struggle with whether I made the right decision, but at that moment, I felt team building and self-respect of the soldiers were at a tipping point. Positive action, not negative was what we needed. We did not have to air our dirty laundry for the entire battalion and brigade to see they would not be given more reason to criticize Alpha Company. Interesting. How do you feel about that decision now? Yeah, it's still, you know, in hindsight, I wanted to write that as the way I felt it when it happened.

In hindsight, you're like, oh, John, come on, you're over dramatizing. Like, no, that was a severe moral dilemma for me. And, you know, with all that you know from what happened in the event, to include there, many leaders visited Alpha right after that I ram attack. Instead of saying, like, we're going to dust ourself off. They literally said, this is your fault. You guys are awful. You're non-convitioned officers. It's your fault this happened.

All that and that full picture. This was that new platoon leader who had just been given a platoon, an engineer who had been given an infantry platoon. There are so many factors. but it tore me up as the soldier that I was to follow orders. Like it's straightforward. Like in all that I, I, the way I described it there. But like you were talking about earlier, as I had to explain to, I couldn't just make the decision. I had to, I wanted to make sure I explained to every one of them why I was doing it.

That this is we, like, so I was laying my, my, not my career, but I was definitely risking my net. for this this element of this is us this isn't me telling you what to do and he's not above the law but we're going to deal with it within so i agree with the decision i made but it's still like when you just read that it's still like bugs my you know career soldier in me i i think it was the right decision but i it's still like and hammond was don't get me started on that guy he would crush people's souls, not even in a positive leadership way, but my battalion commander read the book later. What do you say? He said, no, you said, John, you made a decision. I would think so. I was, you know, I would always think of things from like my boss's position. If I had to say,

hey, boss, this is what was going on. This is why I made the decision. And if I was going to be humiliated or embarrassed by that, then I'm like, okay, this is not the right thing to do. But if I know, if my boss, we had this saying, or I at least had this saying, like being the senior guy with a secret, and meaning there's something going on and I'm going to keep it. And that way, if it leaks out, I'm going to be the one that's going to pay for it. So there's a certain comfort level of like, well, if this leaks out, which it very well could, will I be able to look at my boss and say, hey, boss, this is what I was doing this, why I was doing it? Or am I going to be like, I'm busted and I'm an idiot.

So, you know, I think you made the right call. Thanks. There was actually a concept that General Millie came out later, like discipline, disobedience. Discipline disobedience. Explain this concept to me. He was talking at the macro level, like the complexity of the battlefield. Oh, disciplined disobedience. Got it.

I missed the D. Yeah. Disciplined disobedience. Yep. So you're given a mission, you know, a whole mission command, commander's intent, whatever, you can be given a mission. And not, you know, of course, we disobey. unlawful orders like that's ingrained in us, but he was talking more of this,

the complexity of the battlefield will require you to do what, you know, within the intent may require you to disobey an order that would either get people uselessly killed or whatever, but he didn't really flush it out well, but I think for some reason I look back to somewhat of a discipline, disobedience.

Yeah, and that's really, really important what he said there is just, if as long as, and this is the same way, I didn't articulate it this way, but this is exactly the, the way to articulate it is, am I supporting the intent of my commander? My commander wants us to not be jackasses and have ADs or NDs. And if we have one, we want them to be made an example of. Okay, cool.

You did all that. You just didn't air out dirty laundry in front of everybody. So I think that's a huge good way to think about leadership is, you know, am I complying with the commander's intent. Maybe not to the letter, but the overall intent is there. The problem is, like we talked about in my first tour,

is when that commander isn't necessarily commanding. So it's almost like beyond even the commander's intent. Like, is it the right thing to do based on the values of whatever, you know, the mission, the values of, yeah, yeah. So I 100% agree, but I've also been faced with,

like, having to make decisions because that person is not commanding. Yeah. Which is the, yeah. And then it comes. It comes down to, like you said, it's like, what are, you know, what is the next higher chain? Are we doing the right thing for the right reasons? And ultimately is like, is this, and I even went further, it's like, we have to make sure

what we're doing is not just the right thing to do that we think is the right thing to do, but is it the legal thing to do? Yeah. Because there's times where you think, oh, it makes sense to me right now at this moment to do this thing. It's like, no, you can't, you know, you have to do what is legal. and if you're not doing what is legal, you're going to have problems.

Yep. So you actually had another one that you mentioned in here. A guy offered you basically tried to bribe you with $20,000. And you said, nope, I'm not going to take that bribe. So that was pretty good to see. Fast forward a little bit. Operations in Iraq at the time were mainly focused on stability, working with the local Iraqi people and leaders to assist them

and establishing legitimate democratic governance and providing essential services such as water, power, sewage, and education to the population, probably in that order. We were not digging wells and teaching classes, but we were facilitating the establishment of systems that would enable the Iraqi to do so for themselves when there were no more Americans around, maybe with the assistance of international aid organizations.

So you're doing that kind of humanitarian, I guess, nation building type work, but you're still doing patrols. You're still doing cordon knocks. You're still doing raids. You had another one where a guy stole some. money off target. Yeah. And you busted that guy and you and the, I think of the other

platoon commander or someone took that money back to the individual and said, you know, hey, this is not represent or reflect the way Americans work. Here's your money. It was stolen by a soldier. The soldiers being punished. So that's the right way to handle things. Fast forward a little bit. On December 29th, 2008, we received another call for an immediate raid to capture a high

value target who is believed to be in the local area, man linked to numerous IED attacks against American and Iraqi security forces. I received the call from the battalion operations officer Major McMillan. John, I'm emailing you the target packet now. We do not have much time. Your team needs to move immediately. I said, sir, I can get them moving in 30 minutes. Major McMillan said, we don't have time. I need you moving in 15. I replied, sir, 15? Yes, brigade wants you rolling now. I bought you 10 minutes and I'll stall you for five more. I know you can do it. Hell yeah. Yeah, Mac was amazing. He actually lives in Colorado Springs such a good friend. He's amazing. That's a great answer right there. So you guys get tasked with this mission. Obviously, it's a

time sensitive target. First platoon moved through the secure gate of Apache. Head to the target site. You find out if the target site's under construction. Kane reacted quickly. Lock it down. one one take the northwest edge one two northeast i'll take southeast one four take the rear southwest block and you go through a lot of the details here which are awesome to read about and are very educational in two just two minutes the platoon had control of the site of course once you have control of site there's a couple of iraqis that start running away some of your guys pursue the iraqis that are running away they catch them they bring them back within the perimeter fast forward it was no surprise to anyone that one of the two runners was, in fact, Abu Omar, jackpot. First platoon had done it.

They placed plastic flex cuffs around his wrist, what we called zip tying him up and took Abu Omar back to Cop Apache, where he was handed off to the battalion intelligence team. We later found out that Abu Omar was not just any high value target. He was HVT number five on the divisions list, a major leader and part of a bomb-making chain of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, several special task forces made up of the most elite soldiers had conducted raids to capture him and failed. That made alpha companies win even sweeter. You got to give him wins. Whether it's football movies or whatever, that was the tipping point.

That was a win that forever left the black sheep mentality behind. Yeah. And that, just like everything else, when you capture someone that's like a high level value target. And you say this in the book, like it spread. from once, you know, guys are saying, damn, John, you're making us look bad. This is from Captain Jensen and Bravo Company. So the word spreads.

Yeah. Just a month after Abu Omar's capture in January 2009, we began to transition our responsibilities to another unit. This happened across Iraq, more or less yearly basis. It's not true to say American forces fought in Iraq for eight years. They fought one year over and over again for eight years. That was a good point. February 2009, you're done.

you get to Fort Carson, Colorado, you have to fill out your questionnaires. Did you see any dead bodies? Did you engage in firefight? Did any of this bother you? Do you have trouble sleeping night? Do you self-medicate? And of course, your answer to all these questions

like everyone else's was, no, no, no, no, no, I'm fine. Right? And you're right about that in there. My friend, BTF, Tony, we had to fill out these things. We were still on deployment. They made us fill these things out, and I was reviewing them. and in big block letters at the top of his, he wrote,

this is a cry for help. So I at least knew he still had a sense of humor. You say my own mental state was questionable. It was not so much that I was traumatized by the horrors of combat. It was I had overwhelmed myself with the stresses of command, doing things to my body and mind with self-medication and sleep deprivation. And again, the self-medication that you're talking about is like freaking caffeine and NyQuil. Yep.

They didn't have Ambien. I can't take Ambien. I had a bad. Bad experience. I've never taken it before. There were lots of my soldiers on it, though. So I actually got a list, which was technically a violation too, but like a list from the dock of what all my soldiers were on. Yeah.

We went through like six months of Ambien in like a couple weeks. I should have known that that was not good. I was like, no, that's weird, but I've never taken it. But yeah. I can't even do a half a pill. What does it do? For me, I like, It's like roofies.

Like I don't, like, KOs you? Yeah, chaos me and I don't have memory of it. Like I was actually on a transatlantic flight to Australia. It took a half of one, woke up and my friends were all pissed at me, like the other military officers,

because I had gotten up to go to the bathroom and was like stumbling all over everybody to where the stewardess was going to like land the plane because this guy, I like, I cannot take Ambien, not even have a pair. Damn. I've heard, I think I read,

this might be why I didn't take it, but I think I've read, that that sleep is not equivalent to actual sleep. Right. Or to natural sleep. Yeah. It's just like not the same thing. You get home.

It's sort of your typical stuff. Um, you end up hanging out more with the EOD officer that you had met overseas. So that's, that's happening. And in the meantime, the platoon leaders in your company, is broken up. Like, you're all sent to a bunch of different directions. Every one of them, immediately. 150 people.

That's the way the rotation of the military at the time was all reassignment. Going, getting stationed in new places, getting moved around. Either released from their stop losses. So you remember those 40 to 50%. So they were now allowed to leave, which caused a lot of issues with the guys that are finally free. then you had reassignment you had schools because the military

wasn't doing schools so you had NCOs who were getting promoted like two positions without the primary schools for it or reassignments

to other units who were then probably getting in the deployment cycle to go in this time you'd have I had NCOs

and I wrote one where they do 12 months home 12 months deployed 12 months home 15 months deployed for eight years

and so they were reassignment to another unit who was probably in their pre-deployment and then getting ready to go back in. Yeah, that was a long time. That was always crazy for us in the SEAL teams. You know, we do six months appointments, maybe seven when you tack on the pre-deployment site survey and like the wrapping it up at the end of deployment

and we'd be over there with Army guys that were there for 15 months, 14 months. And by the way, this was their second or third deployment of that length. And we would, you know, and the Marine Corps actually does it the same way, we do most of the time, which is like a six-month deployment. Yeah, good old Army. I thought 15 months was just about right. I would think at the time, again, this is 2006, like, in my mind, well, you know, the Army guys,

once they're done with this war, they don't deploy. Because that's one thing that in the SEAL teams, you're deploying, like, regardless to war, no war, you're still going on deployment. Army doesn't really do that. Like, you can be just going through your normal life and you don't go on. deployment. But when that war ended up dragging out for 20 years, it's like, oh, yeah, this plan needs some looking at.

Maybe the six-month deployment is better. However, you know, it takes you a month and a month and a half to figure out the terrain. It takes you, now you get in the groove, and now you're getting ready to go home. Have you ever seen the movie War Machine with Brad Pitt? I saw part of it. Yeah. I saw part of it. It's a real funny example of that rotating.

Whoever is receiving you is like, I, faces as a commander like whatever I wanted like the guys like yeah whatever you'll be gone two months so it it ripples across not just the formations but even in the where you are that they know that you're you're just the guy that's here for the next four months yeah yeah and the seal teams we used to be let's say that the officers only rented their lockers you know like because we have a locker like a drying cage and like oh the officers they just rent theirs like if you're an enlisted guy at the seal team you can live there like you're there for eight i was at seal team one for eight years you know what i mean just in enlisted guy just getting after it and that's awesome and you're you're totally right

like oh your officer come and take over hey he'll be gone in a few months we'll take it'll take him a a few months just to figure out what's happening and then he'll run his mouth for a few months then will be gone. No factor. Fast forward quite a bit in the book and in life. On February 18th, 2018, less than a month after Martinez reached out, Sergeant Ryan Shetter committed suicide. He died in his mother's home at the age of 31.

No one knows which demons plagued Ryan. There's no way to know if it's what he saw in 2008, where he was the driver of the third. truck and green platoon convoy the night they were attacked by a grenade and the iraqi child was hit by the blast or if it was another any other event during his 26 months of deployment yeah that when he had so it factors in the book and also the work i would do later in the pentagon with you know 22 veterans a day committing suicide um and this ideal that the virtual we learned this in covid but he was actually reaching out virtually and people martinez was reaching

out to Shetter virtually like say hey you're okay and you know the answer is yeah I'm fine I'm fine so Martinez actually took that really hard because he was reaching out to Shutter on social media trying to see how he was doing because people knew he'd lost his job

he was struggling and everything but we're more connected as a society than we've ever been in human history but in many aspects we're more alone the virtual world does not replace the physical Shedder felt like he was alone.

Even though all his buddies were all around the world virtually, it didn't bring him comfort and that's really sad. You also talk about in the book, soldiers are from Alpha Company that did well, you know,

that got out and flourished and got after it. So, you know, again, I don't want to pay the veteran as always being having problems. A lot of guys just, they move on, they find their mission to get after it. Have you ever heard the saying, so this is Jim Mattis saying that I, I say to myself a lot

now is that don't let your military service be the greatest thing you've ever do. Sounds like a good idea. I know you embody that, but I find a lot of people that, even old soldiers I'm with, that's got to be your philosophy. You can't live in, you can still excel in life. Yeah, for sure. And it is, you know, the thing that, one of the things I think that makes it hard is, well, it's what you talk about in this book, right? When you're in the military, you're surrounded by a bunch of people and you have the social cohesion of being surrounded by those people.

And this is stuff that you talk about in the book. And you have the task cohesion, which means we're all, hey, and look, even if we don't agree on what the mission is, we know what we're doing tonight. We know that we're going to get in these Humvees. We know that we're going to drive to this location. Like we're at least we have task cohesion for what we're doing as humans today. And sometimes in a nice world that turns into like, hey, we're trying to do this as a nation. We're trying to do the right thing. So again, you use those terms task cohesion and social cohesion in the book.

And they're so strong when you're in the military. And then what happens to a lot of guys, unfortunately, is they, get out and they lose immediately the social cohesion gone because now they don't have their buddies anymore. And then really quickly after that, this task cohesion is gone because we don't have a mission anymore. That's why like when I talk to vets, I always say find a new mission, find a new mission. You want to be an awesome dad? You want to be an awesome dad. You want to start a company. You want to go be a construction worker. You want to run triathlons. You want to get good at Jiu-Jit-to. I don't care what it is, but you got to find something else to do.

You got to find a task. And then once you find that task, you'll find a task, you'll find task cohesion with some other people that are going to be on that same road because there are going to be other people that are training jihitsu running marathons being dads starting companies working at companies like you're going to find a group of people but and then you can kind of start to rebuild some of the social cohesion as well but i think those two points that you bring up in the book are things that really get lost when people get out of the military absolutely they feel they they never they feel like they've lost rather than gained they've lost community brotherhood. Nobody understands them and they don't build it again. It's not a one time and one place.

That human need for community, like you said, you can find it in a judicious community. You can find it in a CrossFit community if you do that. But it's a human need. And that's why COVID, this was released really right before COVID. It teaches you like, it's a human need. You've got to find it and you got to pursue it. But if you just want to waller and you'll never have it again, then it's going to lead to really negative outcomes. You cover a lot of this stuff in the book. I'm going to fast forward a bit here. Kind of get to some of the conclusions here.

Soldiers like all people are social beings. They need physical human interaction on a daily basis. They need social support from others to cope with stressful situations. And again, I'm just going to point out this is not just people. There's not just soldiers. This is just human beings in general. Constant contact with social support outside the primary group or inside the military tribe presents further complications.

It slams war and home lives together. it adds new levels of stress to the experience of the soldiers and their families, stresses that had never been a part of war in this way. It requires the soldier to split mental ability and resources between war and home, unlike never before. Or unlike ever before. I have no way of knowing the pluses. If the pluses outweigh the minuses, this is the new reality, and we have to better study, understand, and adjust this to this connected warfare. What has been done in the past to create cohesive, effective combat teams still works and is extremely important.

Despite the rapidly changing external environment in which the military exists, many tried and true tested practices of team and organization building still apply. I mean, why do you do muster? I mean, there's some things that apply to life. Team building, shared hardship, quality time together. Like you can design it. You can do it. the outcomes. It isn't natural. You have to create it. And that's in the military, who I'd give examples of where we had

lost our way in some elements of it, not adapting to the external environment. But it's definitely a vital need. Yeah, no doubt about that. And like you said, in this day and age, if I really want to, I can do all my communications via email or text and never interact with another human again. if you're not careful, you can do that with your business. If you're not careful, you can do that with your life. If you're not careful, you can do that with your family. Yep.

100%. Which is disturbing. I'm going to close out the book with this section here. You just say, the ways to improve battlefield cohesion, methods of infusing social media and other technological advancements in a manner that makes our military stronger and finding techniques to make soldiers better on and off the battlefield still matter. War does require and produce bands of brothers.

But now they are connected soldiers. So that wraps this book. We've been going for three and a half hours. And you just mentioned that it's good to when you get out of the military, find a new mission and don't let being in the military be the best thing that you ever did. Well, you have followed your own advice on that one and you've done a lot. lot since you left the military and we will we will pick that up on the next podcast so with that I guess thanks to everyone for joining us if people want to follow you

you're on the interwebs you are John Spencer online.com you're on Twitter X and Instagram at Spencer Guard why you say Spencer Guard National Guard so I've gotten that a lot because I actually did I serve in the California State Guard work for National Guard. It had nothing to do with it. It was just what it was available. Spencer Guard. Okay. At Spencer Guard on Instagram and Twitter X. You got a YouTube channel at at John Spencer 328. Sometimes I say people's YouTube channel. They don't know what it is because they haven't posted in a while, but I looked. You are posting on there. You're on LinkedIn at John Spencer. You're on Facebook at John Spencer. And so that's where people can find you. Obviously,

the books that I went over to Connected Soldiers today. You've got your podcast. which is called the Urban Warfare Podcast. Concrete Hell, you cover this book on there with Lieutenant Colonel Lewis DeMarco. You cover the Battle of Ramadi, which I listen to with Lieutenant Colonel DeMarco. Some good ones that I've listened to, operational approach to cities, urban strong points.

Again, these are all things that I might be a little bit niche interested in because I'm a little bit niche interested in urban combat. And yeah, Roger that. Defeating the urban enemy with General Petraeus, obviously that was an interesting listen. And then also you got one about studying the October 7 terrorist attacks. And you actually make the case, were they even terrorist attacks?

This was more like a division assault where they were looking to take and hold the ground. So a bunch of things that you're doing, and we're going to get into those. And most important, you actually travel to war zones currently. And that's what we'll talk about on the next podcast. your various voyages to find out what's happening on the ground. Again, I know a lot of people like to talk about various conflicts around the world, but it's very, very difficult to understand what's happening in a conflict if you have not been on the ground or you're not talking to someone that has been on the ground directly.

So I appreciate that, and that's why I want to talk to you about that on the next podcast. In the meantime, if people need fuel, I recommend they go to joccofuel.com. If they need clothing, you do Gigi Jiu-Jitsu? I, yes, of course. Okay. It's been a while. Okay. Well, you say, do you do no ghee or do you not train?

I did. I had not training right now because I've been working, Ukraine and in Gaza. I was training in Colorado Springs, both Ghee and no-gi. Okay. For the Gie, origin-usa.com. For the no-gee, origin-usa.com. For the jeans, origin USA.com. For the boots, origin USA.com.

For what you need to wear on your body, go to origin USA.com. 100% made in America, not made by a slave who is being treated miserably. We also have jocco store.com. Is that where you got this hoodie that you're wearing? This lightweight hoodie? Yep, but we don't offer this one anymore. It's what do you call? It was like a limited edition.

It's a limited dish. Limited a dish. Not available anymore. Maybe we'll bring it back. Maybe it won't. But yes, if you want to represent discipline, equal freedom, apparel. That's where you can find it.

Jocko store. Also the shirt locker, by the way. It's a subscription scenario. You get a new design every month on your shirt. New shirt. Every month. New design. This is a subscription.

So yeah, people seem to like that one on jocco store. Primalbeef.com. Colorado craftbeef.com. I don't have to link you up with Colorado craftbeef.com since you live in Colorado. You're a little bit further away from Colorado craft beef, but we'll, make something happen there because you need steak for life subscribe to the podcast check out

john's podcast again it's the what is the urban warfare warfare project podcast all kinds of cool guests and discussions on there also we have the jocco underground podcast subscribe to the youtube channels that we've talked about written a bunch of books um again these books are connected soldiers and understanding urban warfare by John Spencer. He's also written that was the mini book of mini manual for the urban defender. Yeah. And that you can just go to your website and download it. In 17 different languages.

Yeah. Yeah, because that thing is a good, like, just manual of how to get things done in urban combat. I, of course, have leadership consultancy. Eschlonfront. Go to Escalonfront.com and check that out if you need leadership training. If you need leadership training, you can come to one of our events. You can call us and we can help you out.

Or you can go to Extreme Ownership.com. We have online training for leadership. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved. Go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also check out Heroes and Horses.org.

That's Micah Fink. He's taking our veterans. that maybe are having a hard time finding their new mission. Maybe they're having a hard time resolving some of the things that are in their minds after war. And he does a great job of supporting them and showing them the path. And also Jimmy May has got an organization beyond thebrotherhood.org. So check that out as well.

And thanks to John Spencer for joining us. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to all of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out there. On the front lines, keeping us safe, keeping freedom available to us. Thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here at home. And we will join you once again next week for some on the ground reports from John Spencer. That's all we've got for tonight.

next time this is john echo and jocco out