Jocko Podcast - 558: What We Can Learn From John Spencer Almost Dying 20 Times.

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

>Join Jocko Underground Full Episodes< Urban warfare expert and retired Army officer John Spencer returns to share stories from 20 Times I Almost Died, from Ranger School and Iraq to Ukraine, Gaza, and some incredibly close calls. Along the way, John and Jocko break down leadership, intuition, modern warfare, resilience, and the importance of developing a personal code to live by.00:00 – John Spencer: 20 Times I Almost Died02:53 – Kashmir: India, Pakistan & Modern Warfare05:10 – Lebanon, Hezbollah & the Changing Battlefield11:17 – Ukraine, Drones & the Future of War15:54 – Inside a Hamas Tunnel Under Gaza24:43 – Iraq: Common Sense, Orders & Leadership39:08 – The IED Trap: Trusting Your Intuition45:28 – “Pepper”: The Fight That Cost John His Ear1:08:27 – The “Sopranos of Baghdad” & Humility1:29:02 – Ukraine, Bucha & the Will to Resist1:38:00 – Ranger School: “You Can Always Quit Tomorrow”1:44:03 – The Best Ranger Competition & a 40-Foot Fall1:55:48 – Iraq: A Deadly Humvee Crash & Duty2:01:31 – Azerbaijan’s Special Forces & the Battle of Shusha2:11:08 – Going Full Rambo as an OPFOR Soldier2:16:01 – The Mission to Capture Saddam Hussein2:27:05 – The Current Situation in Gaza2:42:38 – Who Are You? Building a Code to Live By2:53:21 – Closing Thoughts With John Spencer2:54:19 – Jocko & Echo Closing / SupportersSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 558 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. My left ear is a natural conversation starter. It is visibly damaged about half missing. People get curious. They ask about it. It is a good story, and people's eyes tend to get wide.

Man, you could have been killed. Oh, there's more where that came from, I smiled, than casually mentioned this or that. I was a soldier for 25 years, and I am now known in defense circles for my globe-trotting war research, teaching, writing, and public work. It is a life and career that has landed me in jeopardy a time or two, or 20. 20 times I almost died. Hard to believe, but here they are. Tales of war, of travels and unsafe places, training incidents, freak accidents that could have happened to anybody, and a few that were purely my own fault. The good, the bad, the weird. All autobiographical, but this is not an autobiography. These are stories about the moments that shaped me, about lessons.

that stayed with me long after the danger passed. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called 20 times I Almost Died, Life Lessons from the Edge of Survival. And is written by John Spencer. John is retired U.S. Army soldier, Ranger, Ranger instructor, who rose through the ranks from private to major, served in combat as a platoon commander and as a company commander. He is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, director of the Urban Warfare Project.

He's the host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He's the chair of war studies at the Madison Policy Forum and the co-founder and executive director of Urban Warfare Institute. And with all that, he's also written scores of articles, case studies, books, including understanding urban warfare, which is based on the podcast. Connected Soldiers, which we reviewed last time he was on the podcast, episode 462. and he also authored the mini manual for the urban defender, which has been translated into dozens of languages

after it became a staple of war fighting in Ukraine. And we talked about that, as well as his time on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza when he joined us for episode 463. So if you want to hear John's full backstory, his military experiences in their entirety, go and listen to those two episodes, 462 and 463.

But for tonight, It's an honor to have John back here with us to discuss his latest book, 20 times I Almost Died. Well, it's good to see you, man. It's good to see, brother. And you echo as well. It's awesome to be back. And you're still on the road chasing war, huh? Absolutely.

More than ever, unfortunately, there's a lot of war going on. And I'm just in the last month, southern Lebanon, Gaza, Kashmir, working on work in Azerbaijan as well. So Kashmir, give me a quick brief on Kashmir because that was a little blip on the radar for most of the world, but it was a big deal. Sure. So writing a book about this four-day war that happened between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries in 2025. It was a blip, and it was interesting what the media covered from it. It was a massive, actually, war in exchange. It started with a gruesome terrorist attack against civilians, singling out men, asking them their religion, shoot them in the face in front of their family.

like 26 civilians died. India responds by attacking those terrorist locations, and then there's an exchange between the Pakistan Army or military and the Indian military. 20,000 artillery rounds exchanged, hundreds and hundreds of drones. And then India kind of ends it by escalation management, hitting 11 air bases across all of Pakistan, showing, look, you want this to end,

because we can hit you where we want when we want. Just got back from Kashmir, though, one of the, basically the field commanders, just amazing individual and getting those first person experiences of what happened during those four days and there'll be a book about it probably next year. Yeah, the Indian militaries, I've covered some of their stuff on this podcast just because there's a, you know, their tradition comes from England, obviously, and so they have a strong military.

It has a lot of similar attributes that they try and keep in their, kind of in their culture. Absolutely. And they have, and this is part of why. you need a book, you know, four days, how do you write a book about four days of war? Because it's the evolution of terrorism in this region, some changes that happened, but even the modernization of the Indian Army, which is this kind of story where India about a decade ago says, we're not going to rely on anybody else's traditions, weapons, or anything. It's going to be making India.

They created some unique capabilities that get tested, right? You often talk about war is going to test all those assumptions. it became the test. So a lot of those investments and changes that the Indian military government had made showed in their favor. And you can look at the Pakistan side, which is a Chinese-based military,

most of their military equipment comes from China and how it performs. So as an American, I'm like, there's a story here where Indian, actually Israeli-American systems going against Chinese-backed systems and how that performs, that could be a benefit to a lot of individuals

other than just telling the story of the war. Yeah. And what about Lebanon? What's going on there right now? What does that look like? Sure. So there's a, you know, I had been multiple times since October 7th, actually. Of course, we talked last time about the Pager operation.

It was just, I mean, there's a movie and a story in that. But Hezbollah kept it up, I think, in 2025, Iran passed Hezboa a billion dollars. So, Hezbole is Iran's crown jewel proxy army. And it's an army. It isn't just a terrorist organization. and I went last month to visit with the IDF to see where there's been this negotiated kind of pause to allow the Lebanese government, which is great for the first time in the history of Lebanon. They recognized Israel's a state, so massive on the strategic level.

From the warfighting element, though, how far the IDF are forward, really since the Second Lebanon War, they're far, they're four. So even traveling there was probably like number 22. We're practicing rollover drills. It was pretty interesting as how to get, um, into where the IDF are now holding this line forward until the Lebanese army is able to clear out Hezboa. Also what they've found in Lebanon,

you know, tunnels, we talked about tunnels and Hamas tunnels I've been into. And I've been into Hezboa tunnels before, but since in the last 20 years, they've built bunker complexes, they're not tunnels. And what they're finding, I went all the way forward to something called the Belfort Castle, which is like a Crusader Castle,

and Lebanon's all about terrain. So really, you gotta go there and see it see how many ridgelines and how you look back and you can see almost all of israel and it's almost like downhill and that's why it's always this fight over ridge lines and everything but one of the there are a couple things that if i had not gone i wouldn't understand like the the impact of these wire guided commercial off the self drones you know they're a problem in ukraine if you go to ukraine and some of the battle fields it looks like it's just all white because this piano wire that that's attached to their drone it hits the ground i don't know if you you know that like the tow missile

You ever go to a tow missile firing range? You're just walking over piano wires. Those started popping up in Lebanon and killing lots of IDF soldiers because there's really very few countermeasures because you can't use anything electronic. And they fly low because of the fact that they're wired guided, they can go almost 15 kilometers. It's still a threat in southern Lebanon to these IDF positions.

They're all kind of hold it, although they're blowing up. And what they have to do to blow up a bunker complex is very unique compared to what they, like in the Gaza, the tunnels where they fill with concrete or with liquid explosives. For these tunnels, they have to like take jugs of explosives and fill like caverns from floor to ceiling with explosives and blow it. And it actually will register as an earthquake in Israel, some of what they have to do to explode. And then what is it collapse on itself?

Yes, it collapsed on itself and you have basically new terrain. Is the Lebanese army working with the Israeli army at all? Or are they? I wouldn't say that. The Lebanese army for the first time, which actually really interesting CNN did some unique reporting about this. The Lebanese army has never had the ability to do anything against Hezbo. It's just a bigger army, way more financed, armed, everything. The Lebanese army is taking some of these trial areas that Israel has already kicked Hezboa off of,

but there's still like tunnels and everything. So Lebanese army is coming in and taking control of those and keeping a separation in their squad. coordination with the Israeli military, but the Israel military is like, I'm going to hold this line until you fill in with some security or do something else. But what's really interesting is that there has been cut off. So because of the fall of Syria in 2024, which in fact is actually because Israel's operations against Hezboa, because Hezbo, he should send tens of thousands into Syria to prop up Assad whenever he was facing problems. When that was gone, Assad fell really quickly, but now the new guy in Syria, which is, you know, former al-Qaeda ISIS terrorist, is not a

fan of Iran, so he's cut off the lifelines of shipping missiles. He actually stopped the vehicle, which is really interesting. One of the vehicles Syria stopped recently, which is full of these wire-guided drones because they're having such an impact on the battlefield that they, somebody is trying to push them in, whether it's Iran or Russia. But because Syria is not this highway to Hezbo, Hezbo is really struggling to survive. But to say the Lebanese army is working with Israel wouldn't be right, but there's a hope here. At least there's coordinated. That's why I asked you.

I was going to be very surprised if they were, you know, like actually doing some kind of joint operations together. But even the coordination, that's kind of similar to what we would try and do in Iraq. We'd get, you know, an area secured and then put an Iraqi police element in there. And hopefully over time, you can turn it over to them completely. And it sounds like that's similar to what they're trying to do there. Hopeful. Yeah. Yeah.

a capability kind of problem and how to rapidly do that in the midst of a war and everybody wants to hurry up. And for Israel, they're like, well, we're going to hold these positions until you get this fixed because if not, Hesbler just moves back in. And as much as you can see now, you can see a Lebanese army flag maybe in the distance. I used to visit. And even last year, you could stand in Israel and see a Hesbila flag flying just on the other side where they're not supposed to be because there was this whole UN mission millions of

spent for this UN mission to keep Hezbollah out of this kind of buffer area between the Latani River and Israel's border. And that's that road I had to take down to the Latani River back up, which actually from the military perspective, one of the other interests of part is because Israel hasn't been in this ground so long, they're not used to projecting power out that far. So logistically is how do you get logistics, you know, what we say, you know, amateurs talk tactics, professionals, talks logistics, to get that logistics to get that logistic. to get that logistic train to keep it under the drone threat as well with wire-guided drone

is a massive problem because they don't have like basing or anything to project out. It's not an expeditionary military. And what about, have you done any trips to Ukraine lately? No, actually, my last one was December of 2023. Once Gaza kicked off from an urban warfare perspective, the urban guy, I've been, I made my eighth trip to Israel, seventh trip into Gaza. And I was in Gaza this last month as well, just seeing like, what's the status of this? Haven't been back.

But still, say, closely connected some very interesting Ukrainian officers doing some of the robotics and some of the fighting over there. Yeah, definitely wild to see. And I was, you know, some of the advancements of how fast the drones and how fast the battlefield changes and the technology changes. It's like, it's incredible. Yeah. And I know you would appreciate this. I also, but I also spend a lot of times, you know, McMaster. if you've had him on. I have not yet.

Amazing, but he has this article about the fallacies of war, because he's a true, like you were a scholar. One of his is the vampire fallacy because it just won't die no matter what, is that you just need that one piece of technology, right? The drones are going to save us all, and it's not saving anybody in Ukraine and Russia. There's still a thousand a day dying

and they can't really move the lines because of just mass and combined enormous maneuver. But if you listen to most people in the world, they're like, we just all need more drones. We should need millions and millions or more drones. Like that's, yes, and that's not going to solve all your problems and you're not going to have this.

I think China is trying to put out humanoid. They did some fancy Hollywood movie. Like, that's their future. They're going to put humanoys, not have to risk humans, not have to put the man in the mud to seize that ground, to hold that ground. It's just all fallacy. So I cringe a little bit about the drone conversation. I believe they're important.

If you don't have them, whether, like we were talking in policing or in, you know, soldiering, if you don't have them, you're going to be found wanting. If you don't have a countermeasure to what the most advanced version is, you'll have, but that's not going to win your war, depending on what your objective is. You still got to put men and women in the mud to do hard things. And actually, the book I have coming out in October about the Azerbaijan and Armenia War, which was one of the real first stories of, like, drones in 2020. And you go there, and I've now interviewed every commander on every battlefield.

I mean, it's like seals and rangers humping up 40 kilometers of mountain terrain with rucks on their back to get to that objective where a drone might or might not be present and breaching mine, wire fields of trenches. It wasn't about drones, but that's this weird myth that we have that people want us to believe that that's the future. Like, it's a part of the future. Yeah, there's always going to be these advances in technology that when you get into them, they seem like they're going to change. game but I always say technology doesn't change the game it's become part of the game it's just part of the game and you have to adapt to it and it's still going to get back to what it is I mean there are revolutions in military affairs I believe in that and teaching at West Point you try to distinguish okay what's a revolution in military fears like black powder

the machine gun telegram railroad nuclear weapons these things change aircraft these things change the true character of warfare you're never going to show the nature but even drones, they're not a revolution in military affairs. There's an evolution of air power. Yes, they're cheaper, but if you don't have air power, which is what people just don't want to talk about in Ukraine, like neither side have air superiority, air control. So the drones are present for many reasons. I think AI will potentially be a revolution in military affairs across a couple of domains, but wait to see. Check. What made you decide to write this book? I mean, it's really a storytelling is I, the more I travel, the more I talk to, there's actually, I think we talked to my first book.

One of my writing mentors is Max Brooks, the guy who wrote the book, World War Z, just a really creative writer. And I would tell him some of these stories, like, you have to write these down. These are insane. Nobody's going to believe these, but you have to write them down. So I started doing that, and then like reading your books about living by a code and other things, it just started to, as I was writing just to kind of record my own history, there are lessons that shaped me and who I am and put me to the test. And I don't write it in the front

of the book, but the real, there are many themes that run through it. And I know it's kind of silly telling you, but the fact that stress reveals character, which when I finished the book, it was almost too late. Like, that's the thing is that all these are stressors I got put under. Some of them changed me forever, like the Earbyte story, I'm sure. Others tested me and tested my character at the moment, sometimes I look back and say, okay, did it change me or did it test me? Check. Well, let's get into it here. And like I said, if you want to go back and hear the rest of John's backstory and the military experiences, it's episodes 462 and 463, but let's get into 20 times I almost died. So this is, I'm going to jump in here. This is post-October 7th.

You're in a tunnel in a Hamas tunnel under Gaza and you're researching what's going on. and you say this, we were all wearing protective gear, but bunched up close together in an enclosed airless space. Even a small detonation would shred us like confetti. Everything in my experience signaled, this was not a safe place. You're pretty astute with that assessment. And being part of an ad hoc study group was not the norm for my research.

It made me even more nervous and I'm not the nervous type. I looked up at rowe. Am I saying that right? Rowie. Rowie, yeah. Roeie. For some, hoping for some verbal or visual cue, How far was he taking us?

We kept on. It was cowboy up time. I estimated we were 100 feet down. Rowe confirmed the actual depth was 150 feet. There was enough room down there to drive a vehicle through. And later recovered home videos indeed showed the terrorists gleefully zipping about in a small pickup truck, which explained the extensive ventilation system. Without it, carbon dioxide exhaust would have been fatal.

Here we halted. The guards were some 20 meters ahead, sweeping their lights about the blackness and beyond. Again, I wondered how much farther Roe intended to go. Just walking around down here stirred up wafts of thick dust that contained who knows what toxins. No one in our group seemed eager to go much further. But my attention was locked on the soldiers standing forward of us. His flashlight beam cutting into the void. Beyond him stretched more than two miles of unknown tunnel running deep into the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City.

Nothing about it was cleared or secured. Even if patrols had been there here yesterday or an hour ago, what way to be on? his light could change in an instant the soldier was peering off into uncertainty itself into the possibility of an ambush hidden explosives or fighters slipping back into the darkness the fact that we were even going down there was if I'm honest insane I began visually collecting information how the tunnel was constructed what the builders had planned to do with it this tunnel was estimated to extend two and a half miles back into Gaza City and it was hard not to think about the

people who built it how long was it since Hamas fighters had been right where we were The longer we lingered, the more uneasy I became, nor was I much enamored with my group. Nice enough people, but if things went haywire down here, every non-professional in the mix would only put us at further risk. Mercifully, Rowie declared it was the end of our tour and explained why we were likely the last civilians to bear witness to it. Everything we had seen was marked for destruction. The thousands of hours, material and money, Hamas dumped into this pit, would soon be utterly

obliterated. exhaling in collective relief we began to head back the way we had come and then you get into the lesson here if there's one lesson I learned if there's one lesson I carried out of this memory is the importance of presence there is no replacement for it not in the parent not in parenting not in leadership not in business not in research not in war titles and words matter but showing up matters more a four-star general walking into a unit Elon Musk on a factory floor a parent sitting behind beside their child presence communicate something that cannot be underestimated. The knowledge gained from presence

from simply being there cannot be replaced. So there you are, wandering around in these. Do you just occasionally go, what the hell am I doing here? That was one of the most vivid examples of how, how I get to this point. Usually I'm traveling in these wars, by myself or with a commander in his tank or whatever it is.

That one was very unique and in the situation. like we should not be down here. And I think because of my experiences, I even looked at it differently than some of the other people that was with us. Like, this is crazy. There are two guys standing in front of us, and it's uncleared tunnel for two miles in front of us. I mean, as you know, you could just shoot.

And it's going to hit everybody. I never find myself in a similar. I've been in plenty of tunnels in Gaza. And now there's an estimate of 600 miles of tunnels that they're dealing with. But that was one of those. But the knowledge I gained, as, you know, I've been in tunnels in North Korea. There's a similar one between North and South Korea called Tunnel 3 that you can go visit as a, it's actually a tourist site where they take you down into it. It's actually not as sophisticated, but it's a similar like invasion tunnel, the amount that was invested in that tunnel.

Was it captured by the South Koreans, had the North Koreans built it? Correct. It was discovered with like some air had popped up. There's three of these that had popped up over time. And there's been other, the North Korea, South Korean border is very fascinating. The fact that it's like exotic animals and things like that. They don't know if... Wait, what exotic animals?

Yeah, there's like cranes and leopards and things like that because this is a ground that hasn't been touched since the end of the Korean War. So there's no humans that have been in there. So there's like exotic animals and things like that that have survived in an area that people aren't allowed to go into. And every once in a while they'll set off a landmine because it's also heavily mine but I think it was a century saw this like a air escaping from a hole or something when they found this one this is in the 70s but it's a tourist site now as an

example but that presence of understanding how much Hamas invested in that tunnel I couldn't have gotten it and all the other tunnels I was in because that was very unique it was an invasion tunnel it led right up to the border with Israel it was meant to flow thousands of soldiers although they didn't use it on October 7th but it was one of those moments of what am I doing? This is crazy, well, alone me, but what are these other people doing? And it was only open for like three days,

but that was the Israelis like, you want to see a tunnel? Okay, we got one right here. And there's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza? I think it's more. The last visit I had, I sat down and they have like a graphic of all the ones they've found, suspected, everything.

I mean, they found over almost 150 of them between the 10 mile between Gaza and Egypt. there's a border that was used for smuggling weapons, and they found, and the only way they found them, which is its own study, is how do you find a tunnel? That one was, they actually had intel that drove them to know that that tunnel was there, and then they went and dug it out. But one of the ways, they just drill a hole in the ground every 10 feet.

And they did that along this border for 10 miles. So 10 miles, just to make sure they all the way down to a water table, and then they stick a camera down. And for some of these, that's the only way you could know. So the estimate is 1,000 kilometers or about 600 miles in this very small piece of ground because they've been doing it for 20 years. That's wild. And those clearance operations are still ongoing. Yeah.

And they're filling them with concrete, which is very expensive or exploding them. But it'll take years to fill them or to deal with them. What's the procedure for clearing them as far? Do they try and clear them? Like does an infantry element go down there and clear them? It depends. It's been a lot of time. So they're the only unit in the world, besides some special community people, that have an entire brigade dedicated of engineers for underground for tunnels.

So they have robotics. They have dogs. Last resort is to send a guy down there, especially now that all the hostages are. That was one of the kind of the constraints of if there's a hostage in a tunnel. And they were, the hostages were in tunnels. Now they don't have to, I mean, especially with the robotics, they can clear them another way. but then you have a blast door. So there are cases because there's the blast doors,

which is, again, research geeky stuff. I was there in 2021 when there was a war between Hamas and Israel called the Guardian of the Walls, and Israel thought they had been successful at destroying tunnels, so they bombed a lot. But there's a letter that Yaya Senwar signed to put in more blast doors, because a blast door will stop the concussion from a tunnel going down it,

which it also stops robotics from investigating the tunnel. So there's some challenges. but there's no one way they do it. I know they're leaning towards you. They tried to fill them with water at one point, like to flood. Yeah, I remember that. It didn't work.

They're just too porous. The main way they do them now is they all send robotics down if they need to clear it. And then if there's nothing of value, depending on what value it is, sometimes they want the value of what's down there. And they've found some crazy stuff from like manuals on how to use the hospitals as headquarters

for the military, Hamas. to other stuff, but once they clear it, then they'll fill it with either explosives or concrete. Long war. Yeah. All right. I'm going to jump here. Obviously, I'm not reading the whole book. Get the book, everybody.

Once again, 20 times I almost died. I'm jumping forward here. You're in Iraq. You're a platoon commander. You jumped in and you're settling into your combat operations. And again, I'm just jumping, like reading some highlights of the book. There's so many good details in here about how you end up. But if you're wondering, oh, wait, what's going on?

We'll get the book and you can figure out the rest of it. We were to travel by road with no lights just by night vision goggles, which at the time illuminated the world in a blurry green hue with terrible depth perception. We wouldn't be blind in my lead vehicle, but I sure hoped my driver, Ralston, had eaten his carrots. Behind him sat Meyer on fire support, Cathcart, who our radio man sat behind me, and standing between all four of us was Brooks who manned the heavy 50 caliber machine gun up top. All four were young enlisted men, sons of the south,

and after two weeks riding with them, I felt we had a decent working rhythm. That too would pay off down the road. But let's get back to the mission. Our road south would cross a major bridge, then continue another kilometer to a crossroads where I would deploy my men and vehicles along the bisecting road.

One detail bothered the hell out of me, though. That business about setting up wire and warning signs. Higher headquarters really thought that was necessary, whom we were supposed to be warning. Civilian looky-lose sashaying up in the dead of night. So they wanted you to put up a checkpoint and put up big, these signs, you know, warning people. Yeah. I debated asking for clarification. Then I hoped that aspect would be scratched. But no, a supply truck turned up to unload rolls of Constantina wire and large prepared signs.

I can't read Arabic, so I assume they said, stop. You are entering the kill zone. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. When were we supposed to put, when were we supposed to put up these decorations? Once my men were in place along the road, we had to begin our attack, not wait around for some Iraqi patrol to raise the alarm. A more cynical officer might have forgotten the wire and signs, but I simply decided I'd handle that part. A good leader does not build unit cohesion by passing the stupid on down the chain. So what did you end up doing? So this is a attack, an attack, literally like rolling in with as much firepower as we had in a parachute brigade with artillery firing behind us.

And we were going to ride up and just literally drive up to this division headquarters and open fire. It was cleared hot as soon as we arrived. What they wanted me to do was to put wire in front of us for some reason. So once we rolled in, literally, Mark 19, 50 cows, everybody engaged. aging. I put my radio down, me and my driver, cut the wire off, threw it into the street, through the signs of the street, and then got back to commanding the fight. Do you think that that was the spirit of the order? Hey, I, like I said, I wasn't going to pass it down, but I actually say at the end of the chapter,

I think they're still there. I mean, we left them there. We accomplished the mission because But had I argued that at the time, it just wouldn't a waste of time. But yeah, I think it met the spirit of the mission. So did the immense amount of firepower that our entire platoon was laying down for a long time. Yeah, you know, when building combat outpost in Ramadi, they would put up signs. You know, and it actually made a lot of sense because you couldn't have vehicles and pedestrians walking towards this combat outpost as it was being built because it could be a vehicle-borne IED or it could be a suicide vest. And so there was legit Constantina Wires and the signs put out there that said, you know, had skulls on them and stuff like stay away. And it's fairly effective.

So I guess in that sense, it does, in that case, it probably does make sense. But, you know, maybe not in this one. Yeah. It's like the band of brothers when Tom Hanks goes up and sees the staff with the food and the bread. Somebody thought that was a good idea without even visualizing the context. Yeah, you know, that's in, in band. And a brothers, that's a case that I bring up because sometimes you're going to get in order to do some dumb stuff. And that's one of the best examples.

You know, everyone loves Dick Winters, you know, as a leadership example. Well, at the, in the end of the war, the war is almost over. They're about to sign the treaty and everybody knows it. And he gets, he has to send guys over on a recon across this river. And the first night he sends guys across the river, there's a gunfight. Someone, I think that, I think someone's get killed. There's some casualties. It's a bad deal.

they come back and the next night the I think he's a brigade commander says hey I want you to do another recon and you know dick winter says hey sir you know I'm not sure if that's the best idea you know there's really not much we're going to see we took casualties yesterday and I was like nope you're doing it okay Roger that sir you know and goes and they all sit down in the basement of one of the buildings and drink wine and never do the recon and that's one of those things I heard the same story about a few times in Vietnam, seals in Vietnam, that they were told to go out

to a particular, you know, set an ambush. Oh, yeah, we got intel that there's going to be something, you know, this, we don't should set up an ambush on this river or this road or whatever.

And the guys knew, like, this is not, it's either too far of an insert or the enemy is too thick there or there's not going to be anything. And so there was times where the guys, yep, and they'd push back

and they'd get told, no, shut up and do it. And they'd go, Roger that. And they'd go and patrol. 200 yards outside the wire and set up a perimeter and sit there for six hours and then they patrol back yep hey we set up the ambush didn't say anything and uh you know there's actually a really good have you ever heard of a of a video series it's called charlie company in vietnam it's really good uh it's actually on youtube so you can just go watch it but it shows a really interesting dynamic it's it's such a great leadership example. It's sort of like

what you see in the first episode of Band of Brothers with Sorbel, Sorbel, and you know, Dick Winters, Sobel, Sobel, who, which is a tragic story. I don't know if you know that guy killed himself eventually. But you get that dynamic of this really hardcore guy

that's, you know, thinks you know, he's very authoritarian and all that and then eventually Dick Winters takes over and he's a much better leader. In this thing on Charlie Company, it's the opposite. When you You, when you're introducing, this is a documentary. It's just, you know, there's guys out in the field with cameras.

You introduce this guy's Captain Jackson, and he can tell he is just admired by the guys. He listens to what they have to say. He's very easygoing when he talks to them. And a lot of admiration. And then another guy comes in and takes over for him, who's named Captain Rice. And Captain Rice is, you know, like the first image that you see him, he's kind of standing with his hands on his hips. and he looks like, you know, he's Captain America type pose. And he goes, oh, let's, and, you know, he's immediately kind of giving directives and not really listening as much as he should.

And eventually, you fast forward in the documentary, and they're saying, well, you know, hey, Captain Rice, you know, how's it going? And he says, you know, it took a little time for the guys to get used to me, but they realized that, you know, they just got to do what I say. And then they, then they go to some of his guys that are out in the field. and the guys are in the field, they're like, oh, yeah, we just call in the radio. We're not doing anything. We're not listening to what he's saying. You're going, dang.

So I always say that, like, there are times when you're going to get told to do stuff that doesn't make sense, and sometimes, you know, you've got to figure out a way around it. For instance, in your case, taking those signs, throwing them out in front of the vehicles and calling it good. Yeah.

It's a great conversation of, you know, lawful orders, unlawful orders that I get sometimes in my, I do a lot of media, questions about, I mean, like, the officer takes an oath to the Constitution, then listed to the officers appointed above them, lawful, unlawful order, some, there is a gray area between this. Like, that's just a stupid one. Yeah, I was going to say, there's lawful orders, there's unlawful orders and there's stupid orders. I, when I've got to ask a question a couple times, I'm like, no one ever gave me an unlawful

order. You know what I mean? It's like, there's not some colonel that's coming down, hey, I want you to do this thing that's totally illegal. Like, no, that doesn't, that just does not happen. At least I never saw it happen. Right, but we get drilled and being enlisted and going to officer how many times I had to, which is a great vignette, and I do case studies of the massacre of me lie,

those that were told to do awful things. That was an unlawful order to kill unarmed civilians to do the things that was done. There are plenty of other examples now, whether it's Blackheart or other books that, it happens, but it is very rare, and most people can distinguish. And it's not a thing that the media tries to make it out to be. Yeah, yeah, they make it like it's a thing. Like you just pointed out, there are, if you think about the millions of troops that deployed and millions of operations that were conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan and the amount of times

where something, you know, unlawful happened, it's very rare. It always gets found out and it's a nightmare. But if you think about all the times that good you know guys did the right thing over and over and over and over again and did everything they could to mitigate the Casualties with civilian populace all that stuff so it is it's so rare that you know when you hear about it you're like well that's not it's not really a thing but you're right I mean you do need to emphasize that if something unlawful does come down then you you know you have to you have you are to not do that, obviously. But, yeah, may take a lot of personal courage, depending on what the climate and culture of the unit is.

That may take a lot of courage, but it's, that's why you want the training, the leadership training, you may have to be stand alone against an unlawful order, how rare it may be. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Like I said, I never got told to do anything that was even like questionable. You know, it's just, Yeah, because we got a bunch of good people. And yes, we do get some bad people occasionally,

and you have those kind of cultures like you're talking about occasionally where you have maybe a platoon or a squad where the things are out of balance and things can go off the rails, unfortunately. And it's the gift that I'm given travel in the world to get to see other militaries where, you know, whether it's a conscript military or a less professional military, depending on what side you're talking about,

where those systems that we have from the day you enter when you raise your hand to the oath may not be present in some other places of the world, and I appreciate what we have. Check. Getting to your lesson on that one, the lesson is common sense. The U.S. military is full of maxims, principles, and rules from Sun Tsu's sayings to the principles of war. They are handed down as lists memorized by generations of soldiers off without anyone knowing exactly where they first came from, but they endure because they work.

There are lessons that despite contacts prove useful more often than not. One of those lists I learned as a young soldier was the five principles of patrolling. Planning, reconnaissance, security, control, and common sense. At first glance, common sense might seem too obvious to even include, but over the years, I came to understand why it earned its place right alongside planning and security. Common sense saves lives. I think one of the times, one of the reasons you have to remind you have to remind you people about common sense is because when people get too close to a problem, then all of a sudden

common sense can disappear, you know? And that was one of the things I learned from one of my platoon commanders when I was young seals. We'd be, he'd have us in the room doing all the planning ourselves. And then he'd wander in after we'd been, you know, staring at this mission for eight hours. And he'd point out some obvious thing. That was complete common sense that we hadn't seen because we were too close to the problem. And, you know, I always thought he was just attacked when I was a young guy. Be like, oh, this guy's a tactical genius. He sees these things that we miss.

We miss the most obvious things. But then I realized it's just because he was seeing everything from an elevated position because he made sure that he didn't get too far down in the weeds. And that's what I always try to do. But the closer you are to a problem, the less common sense you might have. Yeah.

And that common sense on that one was when we were about to drive into a, off a cliff and somebody broke the silence that was drilled, even to me as a soldier, you don't break the silence. And he yelled out, stop. like the common sense over Raya, but the fascinating part, whether it's teaching at West Point or whatever,

but the meta thinking, how we're taught to think, whether there's a military decision-making process or whatever, and you can get so tied into that that you're just like, common sense is to go right. Yeah. But the process overcomes that sometimes. I remember they were really pushing the military decision-making process

on like platoons. And I finally said, Guys, this is for like brigade level staffs. The military decision making process, this giant, you know, staff-driven process is for up a staff. It's not for a platoon commander, just platoon sergeant. Like, no. But the machine will eat that, right? Because troop leading procedures are supposed to be for that lower level.

And then you have MDMP and even you have higher levels with this. When people, that pushing down where it really becomes, Eisenhower's quote of, you know, plans are useless, but planning is everything. So it's the thinking through and what you want, which is, you know, whether we talk about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, people were thinking that we weren't, nobody had planned for that. Like, you haven't been around the military. We plan to plan to plan, whether it's space, you know, Martians Landing in Vegas. There are plans and there is a whole task force, as you would know better than I, that plan for the Strait of Hormuz. We don't have a problem planning.

It just sometimes you get caught in the process. Yeah, yeah. Fast forward a little bit Looks like a wire sir Coming out of the dirt on the right on the right there Going across the field I found what he meant It was a wire with yellow insulation bright yellow that alone was peculiar I had seen my share of IEDs the wires were usually black or subdued colors

Following the yellow line I saw it indeed led to a dirt mound right beside the road which was undoubtedly concealing a half buried Artillery shell we sat minute as I debated our options one of those moments I felt four pairs of eyes on me waiting to see how I handled it I guess I can guess what's beside the road what I can't figure out is what that wire is where that wire is going there's nothing out there I was musing aloud not inviting opinion but I heard a murmur of agreement I finally decided let's drive around it to the far side to see if we can see anything we turned onto the field eased along what I hoped was a

safe path staying parallel with the cord when I felt we had driven far enough I ordered a halt and opened my door Kathcart let's go we followed the wire with our eyes where it disappeared from view I assumed it was buried buried we walked beside it maybe another 20 meters then it simply ended as in not buried and not connected to anything so you think about this for a while let's call EOD I decided we'll keep the four trucks here the rest can head back Roger that, sir. Signed, Cathcart took a knee and got on the horn.

Sure, I had just killed the rest of our day, but I was not about to risk some other passing patrol getting killed for real. So this is a situation where, you know, you see something and you had a gut feeling. Explain your gut feeling on the floor. Sure. So the part that we drive around, it was a 1-55-round laying on the side of the road. And this is pre-kind of advanced EFK. this is early in 2003, right when a variety of IEDs are happening, 60 millimeter motors,

1-5-5 rounds are primarily what's being done. But this is just laying on the side of the road. And we'd actually driven past a family with a broken down road, which we were supposed to stop at, but time, all these things. But there was a stage of at this point where somebody would come and lay the IED and then somebody else would come and laid the trigger, then somebody else would come out explode it. So there was some common sense here to what was happening. but the moment in the field is standing over this yellow wire, which is odd, and the cathart next to me says, sir, we could just pull this out of the way.

Not that we hadn't done that in the past. We just pulled us out of the way. At this time, you know, EOD wasn't even a, it was only an Air Force thing. So you had Air Force EOD attached you. So you'd wait hours. So he's like, sir, if we call us in, we're going to be out here all day.

So there's that listening to subordinates element, but you're still the leader having to make the decision. And it was a bit of something wasn't right, intuition in my favorite book Gavin DeBekker's Gift of Fear there was some processing happening even in my subconscious like no and I don't pull it I surround it lately luckily I didn't because it was all a trap it was too obvious right in hindsight like course that's too obvious yellow wire at the time though it was like no we just pulled this off to the side of the road it was all

booby trapped so underneath that one-five-five round was four one-five rounds. There was actually a trip wire if you walked in to even look at it. And this is what the EOD, he was really upset about it. It was actually a trap for not just us, but it was a trap for the EOD as well. Because it had layers of booby traps under this thing. And had we pulled this of all the stories, which one was like probably the closest to death? It was that one. Because it was a split second decision on whether to pull that out of the way or wait. And we waited for hours. And it was a trap. Yeah. Yeah, that's. that decision making process, we're like, oh, it's gonna take it. And plus you see wires all over the place. It's not like this is some weird, like, oh, this is totally, no, there's like stuff on the ground and there's that and you go,

I've seen this a million times, whatever, let me just pull this thing. There was no initiation to it. So that's saying, like in order for these to go off, you have some electronic charge. There's just a wire that ended in a farm field. Like, of course I can pull this. Mm-hmm.

Dang. The lesson here, intuition is the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. In combat and in life, I have felt this gut feeling many times, a very subtle sense that something was not right. Our brains, our supercomputers taking in information

in a depth we do not fully understand. We are doing pattern recognition, scanning for dangers, even subconsciously running on biological code that is ancient and hardwired. Yeah. That's a hair standing on the back of your neck or whatever it is, it's there.

And it's that book, that gift of fear, which I had read before this. I mean, it's how many times we actually override that and say, well, that's, don't listen to that signal. Yeah. This one was a gut feeling. And the weird thing is, sometimes you override that feeling and it's like, oh, yeah, everything's fine.

And it's, you know, you got lucky and you start to doubt your intuition a little bit. I remember when I was a kid, these, one of my buddy's girlfriends. And she was supposed to like, fly down and see him and she just she just didn't get on the plane and he was like what what do you mean he's like well I mean whatever I forget shitty she was in some Florida or something she says I no I'm I'm not coming and he was like well why what happened he said she said I just couldn't get on the plane I had a bad feeling you know the plane didn't crash you know now who knows echo Charles maybe she would have gotten on that weight little extra weight difference you know

or whatever what in war though there is as you close as we all quote about, would play this war game, part of the planning, and he would roll the dice. And that chance in war is so present in every day. So there is the,

some of us luck. Bad luck, good luck. It's the probability and chance of war. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And you can do everything right and it's still, you can still get caught.

That's right. And you can do everything wrong and come out unscathed. Yep. All right, moving to chapter six, which is called Pepper. Oh, man. I think we talked about this last time, but not in this much detail. Age 19, two years into my service, all my dreams came true

when I was assigned to 2nd Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Lewis Washington. At long last, I was one of them, the best of the best, and I was thrilled by that truth every waking moment. So you're a young Ranger. How old do you? At that point? Yeah. 19.

Yeah, check. 19 years old, two years in the army. There's a local watering hole called Cowboys. And this is where all you guys... What's wrong with that? All you guys would roll down there. Sounds good. And a bunch of young rangers with high and tights rolling down there.

John, I don't know if you remember those. They were like Mohawks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't do them anymore. No. We had Mohawks. Why don't they do them anymore? It was...

I forget it. I don't think it was, generally... or Christopher, somebody came in and said that, you know, this is in the counterinsurgency, you know, this is the beard area, like you're just causing yourself to stand off. Where are the actual, to go back to World War II, where does it come from, this distinction of this haircut? But they basically said it was causing you to have to stand out more than blend in. So then they went to, not a relaxed stand, I just went to a regular haircut.

Yeah. I got my buddy Seth Stone. He was in Sauter City, 2008. I guess where I was. Yep. And we talked about this last time, but he, he gave himself a straight up mohawk, right?

And he, he, he, he ends up getting into Sondar City and he's got a brief, like some colonel or some general. And he's got his helmet on because he doesn't want to take his helmet off

because he's got a war hawk. And he said he stood there talking, the guy's like, you know, hey, you know, hey, Lieutenant, you can take your helmet off, you know, take your body. He's like,

I'm good to ghost or no factor, but he was really just hiding the fact that he has a of Regan Mohawk. And I've got a great picture of him in Sauter City, like looking off in the distance as the walls being built and there's smoke in the, you know, in the background and everything. And he's got his helmet off and he's sporting that warhawk. So, you know, occasionally that might be the proper haircut for the situation. So here you guys are. You guys are at Cowboys, the Bar, one of your buddies, Kent.

he's talking to some dudes and some girls and you know the stuff and they decide all you guys are going to go out to this place called the quarry and you get out to the quarry and this is a you know a campfire scenario and you're you're there talking to some girls et cetera et cetera next thing you know you're just you're out i have a little nap i hit in the head with a baseball bat yep hit in the head with a baseball bat and i i didn't feel a thing it was just literally like i woke up later but i didn't i didn't feel the impact nothing Damn, that's crazy. That's potentially lethal blow. Yeah. I mean, an unexpected blow to the head with the baseball hat. Back of the head. Towards the top, back of the head.

And I got a pretty good stitch, but, I mean, miracle. Oh, it opened you up to? Yeah, opened me up to. Miracle. The opening up is part of the story because I went to the hospital, got stitches, didn't answer any questions, and then went back to my barracks. That would later come back to haunt me. Like, wait a minute, you were there.

And then I'm in the same. the next the next night like wait a minute you were here last night and then the MPs come and I answer God do not lie cheat or steal part of our code I answer all the questions and it becomes a longer so so you get you get knocked out um you get stitched up but you don't really say what happened and now your boys are like wait a second you got jumped this is about you know you these these people are disrespecting well the first of all they're trying to hurt they hurt one of our brothers unacceptable and they heard a fellow ranger fully on a fully unexpected and they beat the other guy down and he was very present and awake for it so they knocked me out i have a ranger buddy kind of code you don't go anywhere alone they beat him down really bad um but he made to the point where he still was able to walk and everything but he was a very visible sign where i'm like nothing happened to you like he was a very visible sign of how they had attacked two rangers at this party so your ranger brother are like we gotta go get payback correct and this is this so this is that that night

like you you got knocked out one night and now the next night you're going back correct it's like a Friday night and in your barracks and everybody like what happened and we're making calls I'm not to dime me about like chain of command calls and everything like and then we're gonna go back up like okay so two truck loads full of of Rangers go back up on Saturday night. You roll in there. And by the way, so that's the reason the chapter is called Pepper, because as all this was going on,

your buddy heard someone call out the name Pepper. Yep. And so that was the intel that you had gathered. That's right. Was it some dude named Pepper did this? Yep. So you go into Cowboys and you go into the bar, I'm looking for Pepper.

And sure enough, you found him. Yeah, they, a group of, a group of individuals said, also came up, said, you're looking for Pepper, like yes. And he said, he's in the alley down the street. bring your friends or we'll bring ours. This is very like childish kid stuff in hindsight. And of course, I walked down this alley, leave the, so it wasn't a bar fight. Actually, that was a non-alcohol.

No, there's no alcohol involved in this, just stupidity. We walk down the street down this alley, dark lit alley. There's already a giant arena of civilians, you know, young kids with one guy standing in the middle of it. This is straight out of, uh, uh, roadhouse type scenario. And we walked out. So I like this is like an 80s freaking movie. It's so awful that I was there.

I actually went back to the like really recently. I was given a brief to the Ranger Regiment and I went back to that. Did a little battlefield tour. That's right. And we're walking. So now we're like literally like reservoir dogs, shoulder to shoulder walking down this alley with all the all the Rangers I had brought. And one of them said at this point, you should take your shirt off because I had lifting weights, you know, swall.

So I take my shirt off. How much did you do? I probably weighed 180. The Rangers, you know, they run a lot. 180. But there's many points of this story. One of the points of this story is that I'm inside freaking out. I have no, I'd never been in a fist fight basically at all ever.

And I'm walking into this arena with a guy sitting in the middle of it. Because of the UFC won, of course, and I tell this, and I told you this, of course, we had had the hoist Gracie and his brother kind of. tutorial that now Matt Larson, who is that you've talked about, is actually kicking butt at West Point teaching combative still. That's awesome. We had had that tutorial, like two weeks of not knowing what you're doing in Jiu-Jitsu. That's the amount of training I had.

So from a very kind of war studies perspective, I was as unprepared as any individual could be for the battlefield I was just voluntarily walking into. And Pepper clearly had had some experience as a scrapper, basically. So I take my shirt off, enter this arena, and there's a guy sitting in the middle of it. And then it's Pepper. It's Pepper. Actually, I think I might even said, are you Pepper? And it was just, he started swinging. And you knew, you knew at least to close the distance.

I did. I was really professional. I was really proficient at closing the distance, grabbing the arms. And that's what I did what I, at this point, All of my adrenaline, like, and this is the story even in my first book, I tell, like, as a great case study of what it feels like to be unprepared for something, like all my adrenaline, cortisol, everything is just off the charts. And I barely remember parts of this, because I'm not ready.

So I close the distance, wrap them up, and take them to, and literally, and this is the part when you tell the story, like, this didn't happen. We're in the alley, and now we end up in the gully in, like, ankle, knee-deep, walk. in the gully of this alley, and I am, I had successfully closed the gap and achieved a mount on top of him. So I was mounted on the side of this gully with basically our feet in the water, and we're having this fight with fingers into my eyeballs,

scratching, like everything, because he had clearly had never been wrapped up. He's just a swinger. And at one point, unlike they taught us, I achieved arm control, but my face was close to his face, face and he I thought he'd bit into my ear because it hurt really bad and then he let go and then I got him in some like crucifix reverse choke until he passed out got up felt better about myself and then like the movies there's like sirens in the background like we got to go

and I get my shirt that I hadn't wearing like and your ear looks pretty bad they gave me my shirt we leave before the cops show up kind of like a movie like cops slid in we're sliding out And then I do the visor on that while the guy's driving at a hospital really fast, do the visor, my ear's gone. Like how much of your ear is gone? You've seen it. It's like three quarters. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty jack. And I could have actually, which is that all these, this one story has allowed me to, you know, have conversations with my kids, have conversations with young men.

One, you know, nobody can disrespect you. You earn respect. It is given. It is not demanded. But even I don't get an ear surgery. I get offered the ability to have my ear fixed. Because my identity is so tied to the Ranger Regiment, I'm like, I can't do that.

I can't miss, I have a Ranger school slot. If you're in the regiment and you are gone too long, then you gotta go. So I denied all the surgeries and just wanted to get back to my unit to serve as quickly as possible because my identity was tied so much to it. And then eventually they kick me out. They don't kick me out.

I get released for standards. It's the terminology. It actually, it's Lieutenant Colonel Stanley McChrystal at the moment of 275. And he says, basically, you have a profile. You have to leave until you are healthy and you come back.

What's a profile? That's when you're injured and you're recovering from an injury so you can't do certain things. Because of my ear, I couldn't wear a helmet for like three months. Like, well, you can't be here. You've got to go get healthy and come back.

And that was he on your board with Stan McChrystal? on your board. He was the battalion commander. So he basically signed this as a counseling statement, you know, basically. What was the actual term that you used for relief for standards? Relief for standards. Could is that a disciplinary thing or is that just like a medical thing? So no, it can be a disciplinary too. It's unique to the Ranger Regiment is, you know, it's a longer conversation. But in Ranger Regiment, if you have a discipline or medical or anything, they don't have to have any like a U.S. Army administrative action,

they just signed this document. Got it. And then you go somewhere else. Yeah. And I just went to literally the infantry unit on the other side of the Ranger Regiment fence. So as a young man, there's so many lessons here about my life, like a depression,

and my identity is gone because I wanted to be a Ranger so bad. What year was this? This is 1996. Damn, dude. Yeah. But things happen for a reason. I go on to have, to this day, if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be sitting here.

But that story gave me so many life lessons the hard way that I had to include it in the book. To include in Jiu-Jitsu, Echo. Yeah. And I would go on and learn Jiu-Jitsu and know how bad I did in that fight. But it is kind of crazy that even with your, I think in the book you say you had done like four classes of Jiu-Jitsu

and that's what you needed to get, close the day. distance on this guy like there is if you're not if you're not skilled opponents the gross motor movements of jiu jitsu are actually not that hard like rush the guy grab onto him get him on the ground like that stuff if someone doesn't know what's happening that's what was so crazy when I did jiu jitsu for the first time having no idea what was going on none like there was no this is pretty UFC there's no even a comprehension of like the guard was not a thing the mouth It wasn't even if it was like nothing.

It was nothing. It was, I don't even know a good metaphor to describe what it was. The master chief that was teaching me, this literally did whatever he wanted to and you had no idea what was happening. You weren't like, oh, I'm gonna keep my arms in. You didn't even know your arms were out.

You didn't think, well, I don't wanna turn my back. You're like, I don't even know, he's on my back. I didn't have nothing to do with me. You know what I mean? It was crazy. And so you only had this minimal amount of training and you still understood these concepts. You're able to impose them.

That's one thing that was because, Because when I started to learn Jiu-Jitsu, I only knew three things, but I could impose them because someone else didn't know anything. Yeah, I mean, this is Matt Larson. Again, having Matt Larson was in, this is where Jiu-Jitsu starts for the entire military, really, because Stanley McChrystal sends Matt Larson out

to all these schools saying he wants to, which is actually unfortunate they're going back towards this band-jabbing hand-to-hand combat thing. He wanted to redo that system. So he sent Matt out. We're going back to that? Yes. In what way? What are you talking about? They restarted some of the bayonet assault courses.

I understand the, I like the bayonet assault courses. I mean, I think that that's cool to like run around and like aggressively slaughter some dummies. I think that's cool for aggression. You know like in a basic for the basic training. That means is that replacing. Oh, no, that's not a good call. That's not a good call, right? Because there's no, which is really the close of distance is about the courage to move forward under that. That's what Matt said. Like it isn't about building UFC fighters in the military. It's giving them examples to overcome their. fear of being punched in the face. So that closed the distance with the initial lesson. But Matt used to teach all these lessons. Like, it's crazy that even in our movies and everything, everybody's strategy is to take their hand with the most amount of fragile bones and banging against the hardest part of the human body, the skull.

And that's the game plan of most people in a whatever street fight or whatever. That's the stupidest plan. Yeah, it is stupid. You know, there was some of the stuff that we learned because I was lucky. to, well, I guess lucky in a way that I got to see like the various martial arts come into the seal teams over time. And yeah,

the reliance on striking as a way to control somebody is it was really interesting to see because striking is not a good way to control people. You know, Rodney King. Rodney King, like how

well did striking work to control him? You know, it's like they had to beat the living shit out of that guy. And that's very common. It's hard to knock someone out. Go watch a boxing match. It's hard to knock someone out. You know, if you get a complete sucker punch on someone, you probably have, what do you think? What's a percentage chance? If you get a sucker punch on someone, 50 percent? 50 percent. I think it's 50 percent. I think it's 50 percent of the time if you get a sucker punch on someone. And now look, if the guy's like a skilled boxer and he sucker punches, maybe it's a little higher percentage. But a random dude

doing a sucker punch with someone else, it's like a 50 percent chance that you're going to get that you're going to knock them out. So now we're thinking, oh, if we strike someone, there was this fantasy in the SEAL teams. Like if you strike someone with your muzzle or you strike them in the face, that they were going to be now like fall down and be compliant, which was it turned out to be so wrong.

We had guys muzzle striking dudes in the face. And all it did was open up a bunch of cuts and acute damage to their face, which didn't get them under control. And now you had a bleeding and injured prisoner that you have to deal with. Right? And now you're turning him over to the diff and this guy's got like big lacerations on his head.

And they're like, what happened? Well, you know, one of my guys, muzzle struck him three times in the face. Well, why do you do it three times? And then why does he? Oh, because someone else then had to go and tackle him because he still wasn't controlled because a strike, generally speaking, doesn't get someone under control. So yeah, it is interesting that how much it's the, it's like the fantasy of the 70s, you know, before the UFC. You know, I'm going to hit you, you know, I'll throw the three strikes and you're going to fall down. It's like it doesn't work.

which is the point of UFC 1 puts all of that to the test. So much more, if you remember, the boxer wore a boxing glove. Art Jimerson. Because he knew that he would break his hand. And all of those first fighters in UFC ones are all breaking their hands,

banging their hand against these people's skulls. There's that one with a big, like, 600-pound guy, and the guy keeps striking him because he's broken both of his hands. And he still has got to strike this guy. Yeah. Well, hopefully Matt Larson has got a handle on keeping things the way they are supposed to be he's pushing again culture and everything he's

pushing and we have some leadership but it's um because sometimes it does veer right are you like we're not trying to prepare you for a UFC fight there is there it's a it's an bureaucracy that can veer left and right without the right leadership um and he's constantly and at west point which it's an amazing place for him to be about what what is it about not just the skills but is this you want to test somebody's courage which he uses like the Jessica Lynch story as well. And you've got to fight. And there's no better way to test somebody to fight

than put them in a fight where they're not going to injure as much. So then there's the skill sets. Yeah. And, you know, obviously I like Jiu-Jitsu a lot, but I was never bought in that Jiu-Jitsu is the only solution. It's like, no, Jiu-Jitsu, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai. And then whatever other kind of stuff, you know,

you can figure out that works and pass that information on, getting locked into one thing ever. That's like saying, hey, this is the, this is like saying we're on the battlefield. This is the only tactic we're going to use. Like I would never say that. Why would I say that about fighting? So it's more about,

and I think as much as I talked last class about what Ranger school is for us, it's, you know, a test of character. It's what it is. It's a lot of things, but it tears you down to your individual. And now I get to test your character. Will you quit? Will you do lie, steal food, all that?

combatos starts with it will give you test your courage as much as West Point still does boxing as well requires one which they should semester of boxing do they do judo too or wrestling they're all those are all optional boxing is mandatory okay because I think I want to say the naval academy is like a semester of boxing a semester of wrestling and a semester of judo maybe and maybe it's turned into jitzao now but like wrestling and boxing is a great combination you know what I'm I've had my son do boxing just not so much to want to know how to throw a punch about how to not get hit by a punch as much as I have in Jiu-Jitsu. And if you have a good, like, combo, you'll beat 80% of people in the street with just one, two,

combo maybe throw a three and a four on there just to finish it off. But yeah, and a little bit of head movement, you're going a long way. But now there's, I just saw a video of Matt comment on like the Danes of trench combatives. So the setting matters as much as once you do this progression of you're not going to be on a mat in a combat. The Danes had set up basically a trench line and then they jump in and they basically have and they have fake knives because this is what we're seeing. And they, you know, which we have like the like the electric knife, things like that

that throw that into a combatist fight. But like let's put the realism as much as you were talking about SLA Marshall's gift, of all the things you gave about that realism of training. So it's the same thing for combatives training. You should elevate this to realism. Yeah. So put you in a trench and then, you know, weapons, knives, everything. Yeah, yeah, man. Good stuff. Your lesson from this, and you kind of mentioned it already, but respect. Respect is one of the most misunderstood values among young men, young soldiers, and even many adults. At its core, respect is a positive feeling, admiration for someone's character, ability, or achievements. It is not the same as honor, though the two are often get tangled together. Honors about esteem, even prestige. Respect is deeper. It is not demanded, is not taken. It cannot be forced. Respect is earned. In my youth,

I believed the opposite. Like so many young warriors, I thought if someone disrespected me or worse, disrespected my tribe, then a fight was the only way forward. That mindset leads you down dark avenues. You tell yourself that respect is something you have to defend at all costs, and that the mere perception of disrespect justifies violence or revenge. That thinking destroys lives. It nearly destroyed mine.

Through time and service, I learned the truth. Respect is not something you shout about or fight for. It is something you build patiently through your actions and excellence. True professionals, true leaders, the giants in any field, whether military business, sports, or scholarship do not demand respect. They earn it. And because it is earned, it lasts. Important lesson. Yeah.

I mean, you think about even gang culture. Like, it's such a fallacy about respect and disrespect. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things that as, you know, a young, like you said, young warrior, right? that that stuff means a lot and when it gets when it gets ruffled it's very very difficult for a young man to sort of detach from the part of respect that is all wrapped up in their ego and thinking oh yeah I've you know I said something about

some guy asked this question one time you know somebody said something to me in the street I wanted to beat him up type thing and I said you know you don't have to try and earn respect from somebody that doesn't respect themselves. Like anyone that's running around the street, I think this guy was like some drunk idiot, you know, like saying something about whatever, his girlfriend or his wife or something like that. And it's like, bro, you, now you're going to go get in a fight with this guy? That's what we're doing.

We're going to go in a fight with this guy on a Friday night. You just took your wife out for dinner. And now you're going to go fight some random loser in the street, possibly get sued, possibly go to jail, possibly get stabbed, possibly get jumped by his friends. You know, almost no outcome is good. And that's what we're doing. Like, no, we should not be doing that. You need to elevate a little bit and just be careful with that.

And it translates against echelons. I mean, from even war. I mean, there's the three reasons people go to, nations go to war still stands. Fear, honor, and interest. Honor is not the saying there's respect. But honor is a big part of why nations go to war. Yeah. I'm going to fast forward a little bit.

You're in Iraq. You're with Ahmed, who's like a tribal leader slash gangster. Ahmed was all smiles. And there's a guy that shows up, Najib. Ahmed was all smiles. My dear friend Najeeb, what a delightful surprise. May I conclude my business with Captain Spencer? And then I shall be entirely yours.

Najib steered icily at him. Pretending not to notice. Ahmed turned the music down a notch, then addressed me. I've thought about your civil affairs. plan to start delivering large dumpsters in the neighborhood so everyone stops throwing it in the streets. I knew what he was doing, making Najib wait, letting Najib overhear us, as if Ahmed was the kingpin and I, the hapless U.S. Army officer, had come hat in hand to seek his counsel. Ahmed started naming local drivers who might agree to the work.

Najeev listened, seething, until his patience finally broke. Ahmed, what about my sister's boy? Brad was at my ear, rapidly translating. Quite unfortunate, Ahmed admitted, but that is how headstrong young men behave. They shot him like a mangy dog in the street, and now they walk around smiling. Now I knew of the beef. One of Najeeb's guys had refused to stop for Ahmed for an Ahmed checkpoint. Ahmed shrugged.

Had it occurred in your territory, your men would have done the same. Najeeb's eyeballs bugged out. He started to sputter, but Ahmed calmly raised a palm. You are being discourteous. I'm speaking to Captain Spencer. Captain Spencer can go to the devil. His fists were bald with rage, and the look in his eyes was the one my mom used to get

just before she erupted. Only the weapons here were a lot worse than a belt. Najeeb's man's hand went closer to his guns, one of his little security dudes. Uncle, likewise, reached toward his vest. And this is one of Ahmed's guys. The table guards leveled their AKs and fits his eyes.

wide in a flash all three of us saw how precarious our position was if anyone in that room said or did the wrong thing in the next few seconds we'd all be lying in a pool of blood i was an airborne ranger trained to destroy troops how would i wound up here i slowly raised my palms speaking smoothly soothingly soothingly and brad and brad matched my tone gentlemen we're all friends here that wasn't true shooting to jeep's nephew was like dumping gasoline on a roaring blaze all i could hope was that neither boss wanted to die over such petty grief Not that either would give an inch in the moment, of course. It was the same story all over Iraq. Bad guys, worst guys, and U.S. troops caught in the middle. The young man seems to have made a huge mistake in his actions, I told Ahmed. But the bullet struck his face and he is disfigured. They told him to stop. He disobeyed.

Disobeyed. I looked at Najib. I know Ahmed. He's a generous man. Is there some compensation for your family that you might accept? I had been in Iraq long enough to know tribal or even cultural settlement for wrongful deaths could be paid in what we called blood money. Najib sneered.

The only thing I'll accept is his head on a stick. Seemingly bored with all this posturing, Ahmed casually waved. Half a million dinar. Najeev exploded in rage. Half a million, four million. The boy is injured, but he lives. Three million, you cringing jackal, or I'll kill you where you stand. I'm not standing, Najib, one million or you'll be dead before you hit the floor.

Najib cast his eyes slowly about the room. uncle stood like iron ready to die the two guards at the table and sergeant fits were remarkably steely any shooting he'd be the first to fall nijib's eyes locked on mine like lasers i didn't appear to be armed but in fact had my nine millimeters pistol ready under the table all things considered a million dinar was nothing to sneeze at so nijib finally nodded allah is good i slowly exhaled i don't have it here ahmed con cautioned you're a man of your word nijib aloud just to-you've been take care of just take care of this never happens again he nodded to his man and uncle let them out death staring them every step of the way brad was quavering beside me and sergeant fits slowly rolled the tension out of his neck and ahmed just another day in the office he spiled benevolently as we stood it was a pleasure to see you as always my captain please extend my fondest wishes to your mother the sopranos of bagdad yeah which is there's a article i wrote called the gangs of bagdad which is kind of a macro level of what I was doing day to day in Baghdad

was driving around to these Tony Sopranos, legit. And they were in character, like full Adidas jumpsuits. I mean, this demeanor. I don't know if they watched it, but they were legit. And they had gangs. They had, it was a mafia. And I would go around and give them lots of money, which is where the chapter starts off.

And I get in the room very dark, similar to this jaco, with me, my translator and my bodyguard, who kind of stands off to the side, but entering into this basically mob scene of the guys taking guests of like, you do me a favor, I do you a favor. And I'm one of the people coming into this meeting and then the guy storms in. And it's, you know, I go from a, you know, a street fight. Now I'm almost in a gun fight in a very small room where everybody is hot-tempered and a gun on the trigger, hand on their trigger. It was crazy. And how did I get here? And I had about four of those Tony Sopranos to deal with in an area of Baghdad of about 75,000 people.

And that's how we achieve stability. I know Romani, I'm sure there were power brokers, more of a tribal. This is urban. So this is like, you asked him what their tribe was like, we talk about my tribe. It was more of these, you know, people who controlled gangs and had the power to do it. Gangsters. Your lesson here is humility. The Supranos of Baghdad chapter may read like a gangster movie set in the middle of a

But for me, it was one of the hardest and most important lessons I carried forward. The lesson is simple to say, but difficult to live. Be humble. In the military and business and in life, people often tell you to be aggressive, to be the smartest person in the room, the toughest, the smartest, the most lethal. I have lived that world. And yes, there's a place for strength and resolve. But there is also greatness and humility.

The real honor is not the honor we receive. It's the honor we give. Yeah. Yeah. Painful. Yeah. You know what's funny is like how often you actually have that kind of you got to do the same thing with in many cases just like your straight up chain of command like you're going to be working for some people that you may not hold in the highest regard you know people that may be unexperienced they may be arrogant they may be like who knows but there are definitely people that you're going to work for where you have to put you have to just be humble because if you like you like you know you like you. Like your ego flare up.

Their ego's going to flare up and you're going to get crossed when they're the boss. So. And I had situations in Iraq similar where I thought I was the boss in a room of where they were the boss. If I didn't have the humbleness like I did that, just to be quiet for most of it, it could have gone badly. And there were a couple other situations where I learned where I was like, I'm the American. I'm the captain. I'm in charge of this whole area. You come in.

Like that's not going to work. No. Fast forward a little bit. this is still in Iraq. I don't know who suggested using this opportunity for a weapons check, but it was not unusual. Soldiers in combat are trained to keep their weapons clean, lubricated, and serviced almost religiously, but from time to time they need to test fire their weapons to be certain they are ready to spring into action.

That junk pile of barrels did not look like anything that required further investigations are requested radio permission from my company commander, and he granted us the okay to light it up, a simple test fire of weapons. My guys grinned. Nothing like some live fire to clear the senses. I gave the honor to my Mark 19 grenade launcher mounted atop my vehicle. It's basically a belt-fed 40-millimeter grenade machine gun that makes a distinctive wump-womp when fired, followed by a boom, boom, boom, methodical and beautiful in its symphony of destruction. We backed my Humvee up about 300 meters. I didn't want to be any closer on the off chance those barrels were filled of gasoline. The rest of the platoon waited another 100 meters behind us.

Brooks was above me in the vehicle gun hatch sliding the large lever back to arm the Mark 19. When he looked to me for approval, I calmly announced fire at will. Having blown up all kinds of stuff over the last month or two, I figured I had seen it all. What I had never seen before or since was time stand still. The tank ditch vanished in an explosion I can only liken to slow-mo footage of the Moonshot blasting off from Cape Cranapro. Only this wasn't slow-mo. And we saw this immense white wall of shock wave flying out to meet us.

I just had time to duck between my driver's side door before it hit us with the sound and fury unlike anything I'd ever known. Non-lethal, thankfully, but a thing you actually felt pressing down into your guts. When I was sure it was past and gone, I slowly rose and just stared, stunned. A beaut-sized. column of smoke and fire was pouring into the sky mushrooming out and it just kept climbing a mile high maybe two maybe more my stunned guys looked at each other and to me all of us all of our ears were ringing jaws unclenching realizing we were lucky to be alive radio static cut the

wonder it was my commanding officer white six white six this is attack six was that you i swallowed feeling so mortal and unworthy before the looming hammer of the gods. Raising the mic, I replied as blandly but confidently as I could. Attack 6, this is white 6. Test fire complete. There was no way to hide it anyways. The cloud streamed into the sky like a signal flare visible for miles in every direction. Calls were already pouring in from units across the region.

Every one of them demanding to know what in God's name had just happened. It was not the kind of thing you could cover up. The sky itself told the story. So this isn't the book's not written chronologically. This is going back to 2003, he is a young platoon leader. And it's again, another lesson learned of stupidity

of shooting at these barrels. And at this time we were, and people just don't understand the battlethill collection, these things that people get assigned to do. Our job was to go out and find any stockpiles and we'd find entire warehouse is full of stuff and we'd collect all that up.

And a lot of times we would just blow it in place. So literally like we're playing pyro around all of Iraq, just stack. We would take just Iraqis who had been kicked out of the Iraqi army because I was there for that. We would load them up on deuce and a halfs and take them out in the fields and just collect up all the artillery rounds and put them all in the pile and blow them up. But this was that test fire into that tank. And it literally just echo it was just black barrels and probably rocket.

fuel is what we think that it was. Most likely it was rocket fuel that we shot at. And I've never seen to this day a mushroom cloud as big as one that created. We blew some missiles in place and same thing. It was a legitimate mushroom cloud. It was crazy. And we had we had stopped. It was kind of by the highway. I think it was route Tampa. Did rent Tampa go south of Baghdad? I think it was route Tampa. And so we were down there. And we'd you know some aircraft that identify these big missiles on the ground so we're like cool go blow them in place we go out there We set security and I'm looking at my UD guy and I'm like you know, he kind of set you know the the safe distance and it was you know Probably like half a mile or something because we because they were by the road so we had to stop the traffic on the freeway

And I was kind of like dude I think we might be you know little little little being a little extra cautious little risk averse here I don't think we need this much of road boy was I wrong those things went. It was crazy explosion. So this sounds like, this one sounds even worse, man. And it was that moment when he,

we, I still talked to that company commander, Ned Richmond. And he, he thought I would come back with like burnt off eyebrows and everything, but we still laugh about this test fire complete. Yeah.

Actually, you had a funny one with Laif. We were hitting a target in Ramadi. And his breacher, one of his breaches had breached a car trunk while they were searching it. Well, In the car trunk, they had a thing of gasoline in there, you know, like a five-gallon can of gasoline.

It caught fire. There's this raging fire. And I'm like a few buildings over and I see this just probably like 40 or 50 foot fire. And I get on the radio and I'm like, uh, life, mind telling me what's going on with that fire over there? You know, he kind of said, yeah, we breached the thing about putting it out now. I was like, okay. But it was the same thing.

and you know things go a little bit sideways from time to time but um you know the important thing here there's lesson here was integrity you say from the day soldiers enter service crossing the line from civilian to soldier they're indoctrinated with list of values at first they are memorialized like memorized like multiplication tables over time they are tested sharpened and proven and proven in training and in combat until they are no longer words but character integrity is at the center of that list any profession any human relationship is built on trust trust between a soldier and a commander between a a worker and a boss between a husband and a wife between a citizen and society. Once trust is broken, it's almost impossible to win back.

That is why integrity is not an accessory to character. It is the core. The West Point Cadet Honor Code states simply a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those that do. It was first formalized under General Douglas MacArthur, and it is a single sentence that can be applied in every corner of life. The U.S. Army value of integrity expands on it. Do what's right, legally, and morally. Integrity is a quality you develop by adhering to your moral principles.

It requires that you do and say nothing that deceives others. As your integrity grows, so does the trust others place in you. The more choices you make based on integrity, the more this highly prized value will affect your relationships with family and friends. And finally, the fundamental acceptance of yourself. You know, last time, this didn't make it into this book, but I think it's worth revisiting. You had, first of all, I think you were a company commander and you had a young, you had a couple kids that were playing around with guns and one of the guys shot the other guy in the neck. Yep. Got wounded, hurt really bad.

And then shortly thereafter, you had a young lieutenant that had a negligent discharge, which that's something that was supposed to be reported up the chain of command. You already were jumping into a situation where the, the platoon had to. a bad reputation. You had this freaking kid get shot and you just decided like, I don't need to put any more bad shade on this platoon. And so you decided that you were not going to report the chain of command. How does that tie into this integrity? Yeah. I mean, there, there is this one is a story of it's kind of easy to tell the truth that there's a mushroom cloud. but you're right we should couple that with times like when I was offered $10,000 by a guy at a checkpoint to try to just just let them through and I could have taken that and there's so many cases where people don't that case wasn't an issue of whether I was it was almost whether I was going to follow an order which is report not lie about it actually the company commander asked about it later and I he grieved with my decision like in that moment when in that story with connected soldiers the unit where I was making a decision that I felt was,

I was taking some of the burden on myself by not reporting it to allow this entire unit. And he couldn't hide because it literally, his weapon exploded into the clearing barrel. He couldn't hide it in front of his soldiers, of course. He wasn't going to lie. That complexity is the human nature of stress revealing character. Of course, we do not lie, cheat, or steal,

but that's going to put it into the reality of human condition and situations. How do you maintain your integrity doing things that's right for your unit, your family, and everything without breaching your integrity? And these are real examples of being able to do it. Funny thing about this is my daughter, you know, I built this into the code, like your book talks about living by a code, a family code. And we have that, we do not lie, cheat or steal, and she's at church and she hears it.

It's not like I created these things. Actually, I took it from the West Point, Kid, Conduct Code of Conduct, basically. But these are universal values and why they're so important is we've got to put them to the test. So it closely links to that situation, although the stress of those days, as you know, from our last talk was intense.

So having to make those decisions like that were really hard and accept that risk to myself professionally of not lying about it. about it but not reporting it. So is it, are you maintaining your integrity by not reporting it? And I made a real decision that it wasn't. So I maintained my character

while still doing what I thought was best for the men. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a tough call on that one. And you talk to your company commander later. Yeah. And he was like, yeah, you made the right call. And I think a lot of times, you know, I've played things out in my mind like, okay,

if this gets found out and I have to sit down with my boss and explain I made this decision or why did this. Is it defensible, you know? Was I doing this for my own benefit, you know, which is always a big red flag. If you're trying to take care of yourself, like, I mean, you're not going to get into trouble with this, you know, lieutenant has an AD or an ND and you report it. You're not going to get any trouble for it.

He's not going to, it's not coming down to you, especially because you just took over the platoon. So it's not like you were doing it to protect yourself. You're doing it really to protect the platoon, get their morale moving in the right direction, and gain some trust from them. You know, and at the same time, that's risky too because I always tell the young leaders in the military, if they think that you are going to cover for them,

stand by because you're going to need to cover for them because they're going to do shit that they shouldn't be doing. And if you set that precedent and then all of a sudden, you know, they cross a line that you know, but they don't know, now we have a major issue, you know. So when you cover for them on some small scale without saying, okay, look, because I've had this conversation with many guys.

Oh, you got in trouble for drinking. Okay, cool. This one is your get out of jail free pass. If this kind of shit happens again, I will not be able to help you and I'm not going to help you. So you've got to draw that line in the sand where they understand, okay, I got away with a little bit. My boss isn't a tyrant, but if I do this again, it's good. There's no escape. So, but a lot of times guys make the mistake of they just go, okay, well,

you can get away with it this time. And then the next thing they do is even worse. And then they're surprised when you come down on them because you need to. And they're surprised about it. And so you got to really set that standard of, you know, this line. And if you go over this line, I got nothing for you. Yeah. So.

And I had to have that talk with them in to make sure they knew that wasn't covering for anybody. And that, and that platoon leader faced consequences. Absolutely for his action. And he had to, you know, stay up and clear everybody. and drill it and everything, but I had to make that very visible because it's in the gray that somebody may take a decision

to mean that they can get away with it. So I was very deliberate in explaining what had happened and then what was going to happen as a consequence of it. What the hires knew or not, that was a different story, but the men definitely knew what was the rationale and the leadership decision that was made.

Yeah, check. Leadership is hard, man. Yeah. Um, fast forward. We're going to take into another war zone, Ukraine. Around Kiev, there is no single grand clash. The battle unfolded across hundreds of square miles with numerous, uh, medium and small scale engagements.

We had several locations. We wanted to inspect and Bucha, am I saying that right? Yeah, Bucha was the first on our list. By the time we arrived, Buccia had already become a name whispered in horror. Russian soldiers tied Ukrainian men, women, and children and the elderly with their hines behind their backs and slaughtered them at close. range. Some were shot point blank, others execution style. The images emerging from the town were not war. They were evil, a special kind of evil. This was not the kind of violence Liam and I

hardened by conflict had seen before. This was intimate murder. Cruelty close up. And for that reason, in its own way, even worse. The somber truth was still being uncovered. Videos would surface later. Mass graves would be exhumed. Stories of torture. mutilation and sexual assault would flood the world. Authorities recovered hundreds of bodies after Russian forces withdrew. The local count eventually rose to 458 in Buccia alone, most of them shot and many with binding marks on their hands. A mass grave about 45-foot trench near St. Andrew and All Saints Church held a dozen or more bodies and body bags when satellite imagery first revealed it. Entire families were found in their homes. Their lives extinguished in what

what local testimonies later described as acts of systemic terror. 17 bodies were found in a mass grave just days after we visited. Among the earliest grim confirmations that what was happening in Boucha was only the beginning to be fully known. The full number would climb later. Yeah, that's, so this is my post career of war research going here, we wanted to recreate the battle of Keeve.

I think we might have talked about it last thing, but yeah. One of the most decisive battles, but this story of the massacre of Bucha, and I deal a lot with media and World War I and accusations of war crimes and things like that. It all has very deliberate definitions, but what the Russian unit did in Buccia, and they actually received awards from Putin for their operations in Buccia, was tie the hands of civilians behind their back and shoot them in the back of the head, execution style and other horrible things.

I do believe that was a special type of evil And to be there was very somber Of what that town village of Kiev experience Was awful to see firsthand You show up there And what's an interesting point that you make in the book You talk about the fact that in the movie Red Dawn Right?

In the movie Red Dawn, it's like the teenagers From the high school that go out and do the resistance And you make the point that more realistically In Ukraine And if Red Dawn ever happened in America it's going to be the veterans that step up that have the experience. And sure, they might, you know, command some teenagers from the high school football team, Echo Charles, if needed.

But it's going to be the veterans that step up. And you meet one of these, one of these colonels. And, you know, when our guide introduced me as Major Spencer, the man who wrote the manual, the colonel's eyes lit up pumping my hand in gratitude. He rallied his men, sang my praises. They broke out into appreciative whistles, cheers, and applause. And that's because you had written this, we talked about it last time, but you had written this like a mini, mini manual for urban defense. And it spread throughout Ukraine.

It did. Like wildfire. It blew my mind that it did. And great guidance for people that are trying to defend their, it's literally meant for them. Absolutely. You know, you didn't write it for them, but you wrote it for them. Yeah. To block the streets and eventually how to do an L-shaped ambush, things like that, there's like very basic stuff that, that they translated and printed hundreds of thousands across the country.

He, and even in Boucher, had had a copy of it and was there with me. So it was surreal for that posting on X to translate into a war zone for civilians, him being a veteran of which are so many that I think Russia underestimated veterans with access to weapons and not wanting to be subjected to, you know, Soviet rule were able to do. But it was surreal. I'm surprised they didn't throw a couple of Vietnam vets into, I mean the Vietnam vet and red dawn would have been like 40 but wasn't the dad so that's the interesting part the dad who gets captured what was his background that he had trained them in

yeah I don't know maybe maybe he was but then there's that Air Force pilot that gets dropped in yeah but I actually I want to write that book of because Ukraine is such a real story of you know from grandfathers on the roofs with RPGs they had gotten from their other grandfather that they take out this whole combo of a hundred vehicles in in right off of Butcha actually. They, a hundred convoy of vehicles, of Russian vehicles,

because Grandpa's on a roof hitting the last fuel vehicle with an RPG. He had taken from the Russians at another location. The Red Dog gets it really wrong. You've got to add some veterans in there. Yeah, well, yeah, America right now

with guys two decades worth of war. Yeah. That'd be hard. We'd be a hard place to invade. I mean, we'd already be hard just because we got a lot of guns right in these parts. But now that we have 20 years

a combat experience too guys everyone between the ages of like what i guess maybe 25 and 55 i'm 55 by the way so that's like yes or even older than me and guys that are 65 the man you're so specific actually even for a u.s. veteran is how many times we do a lot of we did a lot of defensive like even within ramadi you know defense of a site but what if you're the the civilian now helping design the defense of the entire city and and your goal is just to keep them out or to entreat them, all of this, that very common urban warfare history that has worked, even against us, through that into the book and the fact that they immediately translated it into actions.

Yeah. And that's where you get this lesson here. Service. Services the act of helping or working for someone beyond yourself. One of the U.S. Army core values, selfless service teaches, put the welfare of the nation, the army, and your subordinates before your own. Selfless service is larger than just. just one person and serving your country you are doing your duty loyally without the thought

of recognition or gain the basic building block of selfless service is the commitment of each team member to go a little further endure a little longer and look a little closer to see how he or she can add to the effort that value captured what I saw in Boucher and what I have seen in other war zones service means putting something greater than yourself first when your family your community or your nation is under attack when freedom yours or someone else's is threatened or where there is a bully and I hate bullies you stand up to. To serve is to step forward. Powerful.

Yeah. And that guy wasn't, just to be clear, he wasn't military. He was a civilian. I called him a colonel because he had, I think he'd been one in the Soviet military a long, long time ago. And he formed like a militia like we would want in a neighborhood. But actually, how many people would volunteer to serve and be that? And that's what you saw in Ukraine and why they survived the initial onslaught was

just a bunch of civilians standing up and saying no. Going out and making things happen. Serving each other. There are some chaos that caused as well as given civilians weapons also without training, which is a bit of what's your plan, whether you talk about. And I get asked this a lot. The book was translated to 16 different languages.

It isn't cut in pace. It does depend on culture, service, preparation, access to weapons, really important. If you're going to resist an invasion, like you said here, depending on what state you might attack you might but are they going to be organized um because there's there an element that was really interesting about the ukraine war it was just about slowing the russians down because if you can get into the city like we were talking about the attack of bagdad

which the plan was to encircle the entire city of six million and clear it house by house which would have went horribly but if you can get inside that city and do a psychological then people actually lose that service mentality that will to fight they're like well it's over now. There's a there's an American tank sitting in the middle of Baghdad. It's over, right? And they all walk away. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, the way the locals can fight compared to, you know, the invading army. I mean, even, you know, in Iraq, once the Anbar Awakening kicked off, and you had the locals, the tribal leaders that were putting their tribesmen out into the Iraqi police. And now they were policing up the areas. It was like so much easier because they're just,

they understand the culture better. They can make things happen smoother. Um, fast forward a little bit. We're in Ranger School. Oh, yeah. Phase two. I knew I'd had it. Had to get off that mountain ASAP or I was done for. The ice storm was just my final stroke of rotten luck. I'd have to go back and start over.

Was I crying as I turned away, letting the rest of the file pass me? I couldn't feel a thing. On the verge of passing out, I moved mechanically toward the ambulance when a familiar figure suddenly stood in my path. Nice night for a walk. It was Sergeant Hall. trying to smile through his grimace. In a winter wonderland, I rasped.

Where are you heading, John? I tried to swallow, nodded toward the ambulance. Yeah? You sure about that? Shame welled up inside me, and it felt a lot worse than hypothermia. He gave my shoulder an encouraging jab. You can always quit tomorrow.

That was not just a ranger line, but it was the kind of fatherly wisdom I had never had growing up passed to me at the exact moment I needed it most. I slowly nodded. Tapping my last ounce of strength, I about faced, and we took shelter. And I'm going to fast forward a little bit to Ranger School Phase 3. Meanwhile, more men fell out with foot pain.

Seeing their faces as the stretchers carried them off was heartbreaking and never more so than when I went to the weekly religious service offered to Rangers in the middle of the swamp there was sergeant hall and just seeing him gave me a burst of energy but when I greeted him he hung his head in near tears his feet were so swollen he was wearing boots two sizes bigger but that wasn't enough to quell the pain i guess it wasn't i guess it just wasn't meant to be he muttered well serge uh you know he looked up sharply what you can always quit tomorrow He stared at me long and hard Then holding a tree for support

He hauled himself up to his feet I'll walk you out John It was my turn to steady him the way a family does That moment sealed it from me He was no longer just my sergeant he was my brother His face was so red from holding it in I thought he was going to burst But he didn't quit that day or the next

And then miraculously his pains largely subsided And he carried on guys were there for each other in those freaking dire moments. And by random luck, he appears in the book multiple times as much as my development from civilian to Ranger to whatever, Sergeant Hall, Leon Hall, later Colonel Hall, actually just with them for summer vacation with the kids, was there.

The Rangers School, like we talked about, is our, it's going to test your character all the way to break you down. That one was interesting as a Ranger instructor, and I know your time as an instructor, but for this one, the uniqueness of what that sleep deprivation, food deprivation will do to the human body, depending on what status, you know, everything from child up to that moment will do to the human body.

Ranger School exposes so many, like you would never see it unless you went to that environment of what that does to the body. And one of those things was what he was experiencing, which, you know, we were in the mountain phase in Dalaiaca, Georgia during the winter where it was at times negative 20. So just freezing temperatures. And you end that phase and you go to the swamps of Florida in lower Florida.

And it's in the 90s. Well, some people's feet had frozen so bad and it chilled blaine, not frostbite, but chillblane, that those molecules, when they thawed, they didn't like thaw correctly or something, but it caused, like, them to be walking on needles for not one day, but like it just didn't stop. And that's what he was experiencing, very unique human stuff. And as much as actually, I got to tell you this because it was freaky. In the mountain phase, as an instructor, you go back and you see some cadets or some students, called them studs, had to go to another phase because their necks would basically be locked down.

And they'd be facing down. This huge hump would form on the back of their neck. We called it rubber neck because their muscles just weren't so developed that carrying that rucksack on an incline had done. something through their neck and it was a real like medical phenomenon that would happen. Freaky. They were 100% fine and some of them kept going just looking up and like, you are right? Like I'm fine. I can do this.

What the human body does. But the fact that he was with me, that was one of the themes in the book that I wanted to make the theme, although there's lots of things of, you know, you of course, have talked about on the show many times, but the sheer ability to just take one more step, just to wait one more day, what that will do to your mentality, let alone mind over body. But the fact that I wasn't alone, that he was there in the course with me was so unique for me to experience. And there are other times when he was still there with me.

But in that part of, you know, where the U.S. Army went really bad with the Army of one kind of aspect versus be all you can be, all this stuff, that you're never an army of one. and I wasn't in that school uniquely, and even though he wasn't when he was in a different platoon, that just his presence for me at that age was such an immense thing, but that motto that was, you can always quit tomorrow, was really big for us in that course.

Your lesson is not just about quitting, but family. Family is blood, of course, but not exclusive to blood. The truth is bigger than that. Family is found wherever people choose to walk through the fire together, refusing to quit on one another. That is the real lesson. No one is meant to go through life. alone we all need people who steady us when we stumble and remind us that we can endure

when Leon told me you can always quit tomorrow it was more than a ranger line it was wisdom given at the exact moment i needed it most fast forward a little bit um and this gets into the best ranger competition that's a hardcore evolution right there it is so so tell me about because they take it serious yes they do the army does not play around they do not when it comes to the best ranger competition So what unit were you stationed at when you did it? I was in the Ranger training brigade. So I was a Ranger school instructor. It was the only chance I was going to get to do it.

So fascinating, who wins the competition. But just to do the training and to do the competition, which for us is like the Olympics of. Do you get selected from the Ranger instructor group to represent at the best Ranger channel, Ranger competition? You do your own competitions in each battalion. and then in the regiment. So each division basically gets, I think, two teams

in the Ranger Regiment, because it's the best Ranger, it gets a little bit more. Both the Ranger unit, you know, the three battalions, and the school get a little bit more slots. But you have to compete. So you do a competition within the unit in each one of the battians, and then you come do it. So then, yeah, you have to get selected.

And they select individuals when they make teams because it's a two-man competition on who they think will win. and so buy all your scores and whatever it is. And they cut you from duty, which is hard why an officer, it's hard for officers to do it because in order to compete for it, you're training like six months in advance of this.

It's an endurance. You train six months in advance just to get selected to be one of the guys? Are you saying once you get selected, now you're training for six months? Correct. And you, so you kind of had to be an ass kicker. You had to be in extreme physical shape

just to make it to the team, but also survive the team, which is actually, as you know, one of the stories, is that how many people go into the competition injured because it is just this ultra-endurance competition that you're training so much to prepare for these three days that you're over-training. Basically, you exert yourself,

and you have all this medical team, but you're like a pro-athlete by the time you join the team. You have a dietitian and medical team and all this stuff. The whole nine yards. They take it very seriously. Does every unit that participates take at that? seriously? No, no. Some. But the Rangers have to take it seriously. Well, if you don't, so this is the thing. If the division, and I, as a Ranger instructor, because I actually helped run the first

year and there was my second year as a Ranger instructor that I competed in it, the teams that every division can send a team, if you send a team and you haven't let them prepare for a three-day competition, which is always the fascinating part, like you could be the fastest, like a 12-mile road march for its army. You could be super fast in doing that. But then you, if you don't do that back to back to back for three days, you won't make it. So 50% of the competitors who may have been given six months

to train or may have not, 50% just historically of this competition die out in the first day because they're college athletes or whatever. They're not trained to do three days of it nonstop with an MRE a day. How did they screen to make sure that you are good for three days

to get you on the team? So the competition, the trial, was a full day and that's a pretty good test because there is and you're with now you can do all the testing of how fast you can recover how much lactic asset are you building like all these things you can test for somebody's ability to recover quickly and that's the competition the competition is something really hard and then there's depending on how which is really fascinating again just like ranger school is so developed by if you finish faster you have more rest you have more recovery time

but if you're if you're barely surviving it's going to trickle into the next event and And you're now the first for the next event based on where you placed. The way they tested, we tested was the tryout to get on the team was a full day. So some people would die out in that day because they gave 100% in the 5-mile run and the 12-mile road march. And they're not ready for the, you know, 1,000 meters swim and all the rest of it. And they actually just, their body quits on them. So it's pretty easy selection. Okay, he's not on the team.

So there are a couple ways that they. But it is weird how some people just have a certain genetically. like composition that makes them better for this type of event where I could see someone going oh you know this guy was a great you know wrestler we should put him in best ranger it's like that might not be the best call but this guy was great whatever you know because obviously there's going to be wrestlers that are would be awesome but I'm just saying it's it's a very unique competition it's like the MMA of endurance competition you can't be good at one thing it doesn't matter if it's physical because there's some tactical there's land navigation and

shooting, rope climbing. There's all these other individual skills that you have to be good with as well, but the overall foundation, if you can't go for 60 plus hours nonstop, which is fascinating. The guy who won my years, you know,

is a special unit person. Like, he cheated. You already had like this elite status of selection into an elite status. So it's just like, and he's like, I didn't prepare for this. This is another day at work. Oh, damn.

Yeah. Talking smack too. Was he like 36 years old? He was. The guy I won't. That's my research partner, now Liam Collins. Oh, right on. Yeah.

And I think, though, the endurance athletes, if I remember correctly, endurance athletes peak at like that age. They peak at like 35. Like triathletes, I want to say the best triathletes are in that age zone. Am I right, Echo Charles? Do you have any idea? I don't know. Do you have any idea?

Well, thanks for your input. But he's a freak of nature, to be clear. So even at 36, let alone at 46, that I still knew him, and he's still running 100 miles a day. Just beast. And it's not just the runner, because that's also the competition. Like, you can, great, you run fast. But that doesn't mean you can carry a lot of weight for an unknown amount of distance over the three days. Does the Ranger competition change year to year?

Absolutely. And there's some fascinating stories of where one sergeant major comes in, like, I want to do this, this year. We did pugal sticks one day. Like, that's weird. and how do you, because it's all about points and weighted points. How did they point the pupil sticks? Yeah, you fall,

you did it on a plank. So this guy had watched the wrong, like, movie or something, but you did on a plank, and if you fell off, you won the round and you get a certain weight. Some, again, it's almost a science to the competition as well, as you know which events are weighted the most. So it's not just who got first place,

but like the endless road march, the first night ends with an unknown distance road march. It can be 12 miles, it can be 30 miles. It's weighted a lot because it's so if you win that, then it doesn't matter if you won the 10 events before it. That's weighted more. So a true strategy, and this is what the teams will do,

each team has a coach, knows where, okay, you need to finish top three in this event. As much as so as like the Pugals, you just got to do your best and it doesn't really matter. It's not weighted that much. Check. This particular thing, you ended up falling off the cargo. at as you were trying to go down at a high rate of speed and you're falling to your death you know

this is one of the times you almost died and in the last second your foot got tangled up and like spared your life yep did you get injured did it rip your knee apart or anything nothing freaky and it's in front of everybody because everybody can watch this like a this is done every year at forbinney in georgia and so everybody has spectators everywhere my family's there but we had trained this because we have home court aband some people say it's cheating if you work at Ranger School where you can of course train on all these. There's more than one option course there's a two mile one. This is one of the shorter ones

and you develop tactics to do every, you shave seconds off of everything. So we develop the tactic of this 40 foot cargo net you go up and you string in one line if you follow one line up on the way back you just curl your legs up and you just slide down it. You have control

but we hadn't accounted even working there that between all the practice that we had done on all these obstacles they upgraded them right they paint things they switch out nets so on the morning of we get to this option we're doing our method this the entire net had been switched out and had been tightened so when i went to do that tactic i just free fell because i didn't have my feet in it and i just free fell 40 foot off this thing and just by again sheer luck i was i was falling now head first down in my boot caught into the net

tangled in the net and stopped me and my head is like this far from the bottom. Freaky. And then I still got to get off and keep going. So it was a split second in all the black shirts and the ranger structures were, you know, black rangers were running to me. And I had to keep going because I had, you know, this competition I had prepared for for so long. And you guys end of what, 12th? Yes.

Me and my partner, who later, you know, cuts the dead weight. He wins another year. It's what I used to say In my own defense is that that was the first year And everybody, you know, 50% of the competitors Die off on the first day. Just their bodies fail. It doesn't matter how good you are.

And just to finish was a badge For me, a badge of honor. But nobody up to that point that year, 2007, had ever won their competition who had not done it before because you learned so much about your body and what training you need to do.

And actually the winners would say your training started the day after the competition. You've got to increase those injuries, that over-training by training for that day. And some people had won multiple times. Liam had done it before. So who wins? Yes, I got 12th place with me and my partner. He later goes on and does it twice more and wins on his third time with a different partner.

Are you allowed to eat? Like, is nutrition open? No. So back to that, you know, difference between Rangers and Seals. You get one meal, you get one meal a day during the competitions. There's not, it changes again, like they said. Is it MRE? Yes.

Damn, dude. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. And it's 60 straight day. I mean, the first night is this unknown distance road march. The second night is land navigation where the farther you cover, the more points you get, the more you're up in your level.

So that's the second night. There's like historical events. They'll change a lot of the in-betweens, but there are historical events because they are the crushers that actually cold the herd and it makes it easier. I'm surprised they don't. I know I've seen it on television before, but I haven't seen it like covered, like on wide world of sports or something.

No, the History Channel, covered it for multiple years. ESPN covered it for multiple years. I just, I just missed it. Yeah, it was actually rated,

I think it was, I don't know what magazine, Discovery Magazine, is the toughest military competition in the world. Yeah. How hard. It's a freaking no joke, man. Yeah.

And it was just like, an honor to do it, serve, and to finish it. I was, yeah. And actually the person who picked me up afterwards with Leon, there he is, Sergeant Hall was the guy who did it. But it's a good joke. And I see Liam who won that year. And it was like another day at work for him.

And they won, like sometimes it's close. Like, and it's all changing. Like him and it was actually, his partner was a sniper when I was in 275 when I got my earbit off. That's how small, you know, the community is. And they're all, they're both in a special unit at that point. And it was like they were in the lead from day one and by like a great margin. Like doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to catch them.

Damn. It's not like that every year. Studs. Yeah. Awesome. Fast forward a little bit. We're going back to Iraq. Patrol.

Mounded patrol. Humvee. Something had hit us really hard. Was it an RPG? Roadside bomb. No. There was something else outside May's window. Reckage of some other vehicle.

But whose? I cranked my neck. Found Sergeant Wood in the seat behind May. in the same predicament pierced by shards stuck in his seat his door and window smashed too guys trying to help my door opened and hands pulled me out everything hurt like hell but at least i could stand i spotted caleed our interpreter a few meters away he'd been sitting behind me and looked shaken but intact where was brooks i glanced up and back toward the turret but he was no longer maintaining that manning the heavy machine gun then i spotted him among the group helping may and wood i later learned

that he'd been thrown from the vehicle landing in a nearby field in a freak stroke of luck that kept him alive. The gun itself was gone, sheared off in the crash. But the crap, but crash with what? Was it a suicide attack? Nobody seemed to think so. It was an Iraqi civilian van heading for Kirkuk in the middle of the night without any lights on. It flew past our parked vehicles and teaboned us at what my guys all agreed was easily 60 miles an hour. My blood ran cold. How bad is it? Trust me, sir. You don't want to see it. He was right. Being in command though, I didn't have much choice. Still a bit dazed, I came around for a look. From the road, it looked like the van it slammed into a brick wall. The front was a display of abstract metal sculpture dripping with

engine and bodily fluids. I had seen men torn apart in war, but nothing compared to the wreck in front of me. At least three corpses. Was it four? There's six, sir. It looks like the two in the back are still breathing. I saw that was true, but what I also saw made me think they wouldn't be breathing much longer. Then I heard Wood cry out and turned to my own. We need to call a medevac, I said. Done, sir. They're already in the air. Minutes later, the chopper was putting down, medical teams jumping out in full gear.

Minutes after that, more headlights coming from the north. What had to be every emergency rescue asset from the cop was pulling up in a semi-circle around the accident. I pulled my guys back to let the pros in. They had to cut May and wood-free, bandage them up before they could bleed out. Both were hefted onto litters to be whisked off. by the chopper but may wasn't having it i'm good sir we don't have to do this hey lieutenant i came closer the doc stood next to him shaking his head he's not going to walk this off that bandage looks good sir that's all i need may pleaded i knew where he was coming from that soldier instinct to defy

all adversity to sacrifice and to never leave your team or your family then i glanced at the wreck and at the dead civilians now mercifully covered by ponchos should i have ordered the medics to leave may to let him stay with us? No, they would have looked at me like I was out of my mind. So he was carried off to the Medevac helicopter yelling all the way. They put him in the chopper, which got him and would to the best army hospitals first in Baghdad and then in Europe. Following surgery and physical therapy, both were able to walk again, but not run and both were discharged from the army. May saw it clearly that night. Once he was on the chopper, he knew he would not finish the fight with his wartime family. What May displayed in that moment was something I had read about in books,

seen in movies about World War II in Vietnam and witnessed many times already in our platoon in Iraq. Another aspect of a soldier's commitment to duty involves how they respond to injury. You might expect that being wounded is a golden ticket to get out of the war zone and return safety at home. The reality is often the opposite. Yeah, gnarly. Yeah, that was what...

Luckily, what I think I mentioned... I mean, this is 2003. This is the time we're rolling. and around in regular cargo Humvees with wood slats on the side. I was in a M998, which is an up armor or 1096, I forget what it is, 1096 I think, an up armored Hunvee, just one that we had.

And we were turning in a road, and the thing, T bonus, like six miles per, had it been any other vehicle in my formation, all dead instantaneously. But the fact that we were basically in this wheeled tank, it saved us, didn't save all six civilians in this van driving. Did any of them live?

None of them. They didn't make it to even pick up. They were all dead. And then how bad the metal that did, it still collapsed that side, went into the legs of May and Woods. Lesson. Duty is an obligation.

As much as we should all serve something greater than ourselves, we also each have a duty. In the military, that duty is both moral and legal. The Army definition includes a simple but profound instruction, fulfill your obligations.

Doing your duty, means more than carrying your assigned tasks. Duty means being able to accomplish the tasks as part of a team. You fulfill your obligations as part of your unit. Every time you resist the temptation to take shortcuts that might undermine the integrity of the final product. But duty is not only a military concept. It is part of everyday life. Every day we face temptations for shortcuts, temptations to look away,

temptations to serve ourselves rather than others. To choose duty is to choose responsibility to keep faith. those who rely on us. Not always easy. No. And I had to get up that next morning for myself and go back on patrol. New vehicle lost up to two individuals only, only. And then go back to work this.

Did you? The war doesn't stop. No. Fast forward a little bit. And we kind of discussed a little bit this in the beginning. But in late 2020, numerous articles that noted that new fighting had broken out in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabar. How do you say that?

Nagorno Karabak. Nagarno Karabak. That news is unlikely to garner attention from anyone outside the family in the region or some expertise in the former republics. Nagorno Karabok had long been a flashpoint between Armenians and Azerbaijanis going back to the early 1990s. I read how the tide had turned when the Azerbaijani special forces scaled the sheer cliffs rising more than 400 feet that protected the mountain city of Susha.

So we talked about this a little bit, but just tell us about this crazy offensive operation by these Azerbaijani special forces and what they did. Yeah, so this is the book that I have coming out in October. This is actually the story of 2021 when I went by myself, interesting, because Liam's my boss now at this point. So the guy who beat me in Best Ranger 2007 becomes my boss at West Point. And I retired, now I'm doing this war research. Like, I want to go here.

I don't know if you can. And I'm in 2021, like nine-ish months after the war had ended, going through checkpoints as a civilian bomb. It's one of those times like this is too much. As much as that tunnel was, as me, the only American anybody in this entire region has ever seen, going through Azerbaijani checkpoints, right beside Russian checkpoints, trying to get to this city that ends the 2020. of war. So this is the city of Susha and why I was there as an urban warfare guy. The war starts in these massive, you can't describe it. We tried to do in a book of line of control, flat, open land, mine wire pickets as far as you can see, entire cities that used to be there

taken brick by brick to nothing. So they're a city on the map and you drive by them, like where is it? And all you see is, as far as you see foundations of homes, because they took, every brick from these cities and demolish them. It starts into flatlands and then it goes into high mountains, where as the Azerbaijani is in September of 2022, breakthrough the line that control will have a breakthrough, which was really just soldiers on the ground doing it. It isn't drones or anything.

Then there's a war that continues on. And while they're fighting in one part of the battlefield, they send 400 special forces through the wood line, despite aerial movements, and they have to basically ruck for about 40 kilometers with about 60 pounds on their backs to get to the city that is important to both sides, the city of sushi.

It sits on a cliff 400 feet, and it's an ancient city, and why, because it's a fortress city, and it overlooks actually the capital city. So it's like decisive, what we call decisive terrain. I had known a little bit about it, but, you know, again, I want to go see it, walk the ground, like not only fall,

all the path that these, basically a ranger unit, an Azerbaijani unit, 400 of them walk and what they do to try to stay hidden for this 40 kilometer movement. And they set up a patrol bases around this cliff city. Well, what they don't even know, and this is how the special forces kept it so secret, they assigned us Special Forces General,

basically to this operation to take this city of Susha. And there's four teams of 10 who have the job of scaling the cliffs, because it's a really easily defendable city. I mean, it sits on a cliff, and there's only one entrance you can fully block off. And they had lost it in 1990s, but even the 400 that are of these teams

don't know that there are these four teams of 10 that are like the sniper, the seals. Actually, they do develop some joint task forces, so they had their version of seals and others in this element, but nobody knows that this is happening, that these four teams, one of them gets actually compromised. And there's, they send a whole unit to another city to as a diversion. Like, it's, the planning that went into this was masterful.

And then they have the 400 that are split up in a hundred person teams that also have to scale, basically, cliffs, not the 400, sheer, but like straight up hands to infiltrate the city and take it with very minimal fight. Because as soon as those four infiltrated the city, they set up in like hotels and serve as snipers to start taking out the defenders and reporting on the defenders. But then a fog rolls in. So this is the whole thing about, you know, Murphy. You have this key piece of technology. So nobody's drones work. So it's actually November 7th, 2020.

And the Armenians actually send massive tanks and reinforcements from the capital city towards the. So it starts being like this moment where it can go both ways and they run out of anti-tank guided munitions to do anything about the tanks because they could only bring what they carried with them. It's such an epic story that you would think would come from World War II

and it's 2020. But a fall rose in, eliminates all the drones, nobody has drones, and it's just battle to the very end. But they've basically back and forth and they've taken the inside of the city. Fascinating. And it ends the war.

Because once Susha, the city is called, clear now they have the high ground over the capital. So Armenia goes through Russia, basically asks for a ceasefire. And the war ends right there because that urban city was taken. So as an urban warfare guy, like that's, I need to research that and try to recreate the story. And in 2021, I was able to recreate some of the story, but that's where I've been spending the last two years is going and learning every part of it. So I have a lot more context now, of course, the time passed of talking to every general in all the previous battles, walking the ground, making new maps of it. And you talked to the guys that were on that 40-man element? Yes.

Yeah, yeah. How's their attitude about this whole thing? They have a very, this was the hardest project I've ever done. It probably will remain because of not only the translation problems, because, you know, you have to have a translation. translator there and we're understanding doing this research. And I know we talked about SLA Marshall going in like, no, you had access to World War I, World War II people right after what they had experience. But I'm talking to people on the same team that were in the same battle with different

views on how it went and trying to arbitrate. Okay, you said you, you were here. He says, that's made this really hard to recreate this. especially that battle, but we actually did all the battles of the war. And this is a pretty big, all the decisive moments. Those guys were very quiet, didn't want to talk, you know. But learning about the fact that how they planned it,

that general and kept that secret of the four teams away from the other guys who had no clue that they were there and then do those de-conflictions was really interesting to learn about. Yeah. I can't wait until that book comes out. Um, lesson here, discipline. Many people think that military discipline is simply about following orders. It is that the take that hill moment when obedience and courage come together,

but it is also much more. True discipline is doing the right thing even when no one is watching when there is no order to follow. It is acting in accordance with your values, maintaining control of your thoughts and actions in the absence of supervision. Discipline is hard work, consistency, and goal setting. It is getting up every morning to exercise, not because you want to, but because it's part of the job and part of the job that demands it. Like the Azerbaijani soldiers who climb those

mountains to reach sushi, discipline is the endurance of both body and mind in the face of challenge. One of the earliest lessons in discipline I ever learned came from my mentor, brother, and family, Leon. At Fort Polk, he showed me that discipline was the daily grind, the choice to put in the work when others would not. The military provides endless opportunities for advancement, physical development, specialized schools, competitions, education, and leadership, but only for those willing to outwork everyone else. Leon and I set goals and worked toward them every single day. We stayed late, studied, trained, and pursued mastery while others were content to simply show up and do their job.

That was discipline, not waiting for orders, but creating your own standards and living up to them. I think you say discipline is freedom. I do believe I say that. For me, the research is that this job that I have where there is no like guidebook of like how to success. It's the discipline of going to these areas, finding that information, getting to the truth. That is one of the reasons I wanted that to be in there. Yeah, no, it's the truth. Speaking of Fort Polk, so Fort Polk is the Joint Readiness Training Center.

It's where the Army sends its brigades, battalions, divisions to go and train and get ready to go to war. It's sort of like a big giant test in the field. And they have one out there and they have one in Fort, Florida, or in California. I've never been to the four Pokemon, but I've been in the four under one one. Yeah, which is a bigger. Freaking out stay. It's insane. Like, it's amazing.

We have three. They're called the Dirt Combat Training Center. It's one in Germany as well. Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot about that one. So I guess I've only been to one out of the three. And you actually got stationed there as what we call op for, which is opposing for.

So you were a bad guy. I was a bad guy. And I learned more about field craft and fighting than I would for my rest of my career. I'll tell you, like the guys that would come and work for me at trade at, the same thing. Like, because they would be opt for. Not all of them, but some of the guys we opt for. And you just get so good, so sneaky, so crafty, your field craft goes up. Everything gets better.

And yeah, you learn. So you got to do that. How long were you stationed there for? So this is before going for that Earbite fight. It's one of my first units. I was there about 16 months before I applied to go to Ranger Regiment, which is fascinating going to other armies is the armies that take those individuals. We really don't, although that's supposed to be a combat deployable unit.

What if you took all of your op for and then sent them into combat? Yeah. The Israelis do that. That's smart. They send their instructors. They actually, and there's fascinating learning in Gaza where they'll take their instructors and turn those instructors, which are going to be your elite. Okay, now you're a unit.

And immediately push them into the fight. Yeah. No, that's awesome. So we're there, you're there and you're, you know, it's funny because you just said, what's the Army of One? You said you're never an Army of One. That's right. But you actually weren't

I was. I was. So taking a prone firing stance, you basically were like, your op-forward unit got hit, there was chaos and confusion, you ended up alone in the field.

Yep. And you decided yours was going to go full rogue, Rambo activities and started sniping and killing people. Yep. Taking a prone firing stance, I drew practice bead

on the silhouettes moving below, 200 meters off, not an impossible shot, but no sure thing either. I keyed in on one figure who had to be a senior, your sergeant just by the way he stood planted fist on hips barking orders at unseen subordinates he liked to peer off into the distance standing perfectly still he was like general patten or somebody

in other words begging to get shot that's kind of like the guy i just described earlier i waited until i saw an observer controller loitering about 10 meters from him then fired the shot cracked through the air and sure enough patent's sensor lit up this is a laser a high speed laser tag system he turned yelling at his men assuming it was friendly fire but the ref was right there to set him straight and just like that i was gone again hunting for my next sniper perch and so you're out there for three days just go going full rambo and what's what you bring up that's important is that your your buddy um sergeant hall they're trying to shut you down and the talk and everything they're like hey we got to stop we're going to pull him out of the field we don't know where he is and all the

And Sergeant Hall's like, hey, he's good to go. Just let him keep doing what he's doing. Yeah, because it's not normal for a single, as you know, in any military to have a single guy that you haven't heard from in days. Like, it would be like an entire post shut down and do search and rescue for this guy. But Leon, who had gotten killed, he's my sergeant.

This is before being in the school. We all got killed and I'm, and he is the one now sitting basically watch over them not letting, like, And he would see reports of people getting shot where it just didn't make sense that there's people dying from one opt for a guy. Like he's there. He's leave him be. If not, they would have shut the whole literally, the whole post, the whole extra I was down

to search for this one soldier's specialist out by himself. So the fact that I even was allowed to be out there was very unique. And some people like, that's not. It didn't happen. Like it happened. It was crazy. And the lesson is never alone. And the military part of our creed is never leave a fallen comrade.

There's comfort in that promise, whether you are a soldier in the field, a nurse in the hospital, ward, a teacher in the classroom, or anyone who has never feared being alone, who has ever feared being alone is the assurance that your people, your team, and your community will come for you. But beyond that code lies an even deeper truth. You are never truly alone. When you are physically by yourself, even when you're physically by yourself, you carry the pack with you, the training, the names of the people who shaped you, the rhythm of their footsteps, the mission you share, and the look on the mentor's face when they refuse to give up on you

are all still forms of company. They march with you in memory and in muscle. Every skill you have mastered, every voice that guided you is still there, even in the silence. Check. Yeah, which is the first book,

Connected Soldiers about this virtual world is so many people go down in dark roads thinking they're alone. Like, you're never alone. I wasn't alone in that moment and you're truly in life. You're never alone. You let yourself think that.

Fast forward. Another section of the book. And again, it's not chronological. So we're going back Iraq just as I was getting cozy one night in Kirkuk some hot new intel came over the wire a possible location for the aza spades jaws dropped we couldn't pronounce half the names on the most wanted cards but everyone knew the ace of spades el hafei the boss of bosses saddam

blanky blank hussein about 168 square miles of Iraq to hide in and someone thought the fallen tyrant was here in our sector visions of glory flashed through my head conspicuous gallant entry headlines, ticker tape parades, even a ridiculous image of a White House reception, and the Bush twins. The thought came and went in an instant. This was beyond a serious moment. This was the mission of all missions. And unlike a well-planned raid, we did not have months to build a mock site and rehearse

every detail the way they would for the bin Laden operation years later. We had minutes. First things first. I called my squad leaders in and laid out what little until we had, a suspected safe house west of the city center, a farm, near the Tigris lowlands, not a fortified compound. Expect bodyguards in a fight. Reports mention suicide vests. Move fast, but think smart.

Keep your heads. 20 minutes later, we were back on the road. So you got the freaking call that Saddam's out there. Yeah. And to move now, which is, as you know, all that training, because sometimes you will get zero time to do all that planning, what a TLP, whatever, MDMP, like, no, go now. Yeah, that's freaking epic, dude.

And the first thing. fact, and I think I'd tell it, I mean, we do the search, of course, is a dry hole and just, but the fact that he was found not far from, so this is really near Al Huija, which is a really bad place, actually. He's found not too far from there outside of Tikrit in a farmhouse in a hole. Like, did we miss them? So I always, you know, we were there when he was caught. So this is really, and we were there in December about time when he actually came when they caught it. Like, did we miss them? There's always that little question in my mind as it was just a farmhouse of no.

Like well he actually was caught in a farmhouse nowhere in a hole like did we miss him? What did you like even have time to figure out where this Intel was coming from? No, it's just coming from like your because you're a company command at this point? A platoon commander. So you're a platoon commander like yo here they're saying Saddam's out this target side go hit it. Yeah, came from battalion same thing. He all he got was a grid and and and then some of that detail of like. Did you hear of other people hitting targets like that?

No. We had done some missions for like Kimmel Ali and things like that. Again, did the invasion, the Deco Carriage. So we had done a previous operation about a month before, much more organized, though, was a battalion operation with multiple companies moving on this farmhouse that they thought Chemical Ali was in. He wasn't there either. But that was not abnormal for this to be like, no, move now.

I don't know where the intel came from, but. Yeah, that's definitely wild. Yeah. We hit we hit we got Intel about some Chem bio site you know and we got jocked up Full mop level four with the whole nine yards and went hit that But there was nothing in there but again it was a very like a short notice kind of thing Because I remember we're like scrambling and getting out our

Our full mop levels four suits and putting the freaking rubber boots on and all that stuff And yeah we didn't have a bunch of time to prepare for it and you know like 20 you got 20 minutes there I remember my commanding officer one you know he asked me like hey how much time do you guys need to roll out and hit a target and I was like 15 minutes and he was no seriously and I were like oh I'm serious you give me the location and the radio the frequencies of the battle space owner we'll leave in 15 minutes like everyone's ready to go so yeah 20 minutes we're right there we're doing those in Baghdad those time sensitive targets later but this is that's late wait in 2008 2003 you're literally on you know hum V Top like are you going to go this way you're going to go that way you got reach you got out of security if you've trained you can it is possible it is an ideal for sure but it's possible dude you must have been freaking well your boys fired up everybody was fired up but that's the thing is that gets us is like did i mean he was moving at that time around like that you know like just like a woman moving from farmhouse to farmhouse is like we we don't think that like it was a completely bad intel it might have been yeah might have not been the right farmhouse but

he might have been in the air you just never knows that gets us that gets us us more than the craziness of just go. The lesson there is take action. A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. General George has patent words and Bonnie. The decisive leadership and belief that movement, even imperfect, beats paralysis. My mentors like Leon and Liam, of course, taught me about setting goals, but from a firefight to life itself, it always comes down to taking action.

Good things come from movement. Nothing changes without it. Whether you are leading soldiers, teaching cadets, or facing a personal decision, facing a personal decision, waiting for the perfect plan is often just fear disguised as caution. Boom. There you go. And I guess we're getting kind of a little bit towards the back of this book. You're in Israel.

Do you have a vest and helmet ready? That's always a good question. A minute later, we exited the building and hopped into a Jeep of the Jovis across the sand outpost to the general's command vehicle, which wasn't a black SUV or an IDF Hummer, but a namir. Is I saying that right? A Namir. Essentially a tank with less firepower and extra armor. He showed me in, gave me a seat, and the driver wheeled us out the main gates. Within minutes, we'd crossed the border into Gaza. 15 minutes after that, we'd entered an urban area. I had no clue where we were. Finally, I asked, Con Unis. It was the place we'd just spent an hour discussing

where his troops had fought the hardest, a notorious terrorist stronghold, honeycombed with death traps. As you may have noticed, I visit places like Kiev, Susha, Sardrat, Mumbai, where violent clashes recently took place, not during the actual bottle itself.

Now, suddenly I was in a war wagon, infantry crammed in all around me, powering into a zone where heavily armed killers would definitely regard us as a primary target. This is the guy, I think we talked last time. General Goldfuss, who was an Israeli Navy SEAL who they made a division commander.

And we're at his base, not in Gaza, talking through this battle of Cagnos, and he's like, yeah, but let's go. And he just throws me in his, it's actually a tank with a turned into an infantry pill Shannocker, and he drives me into the, into the battle. We're taking a lot of hard turns. On the gunner's video monitor, I watched us skirt piles of rubble and squeezed the, through narrow passages between high buildings. We passed other IDF vehicles, dismounted squads, blocks and blocks of rubble. Then I heard gunfire, heavy machine guns,

and RPG booms. Sounds I remembered in my bone, sounds you never forget, sounds you pray you'll never hear again. We came to a sudden halt, down with the ramp and we emerged. You don't have a weapon, do you? I do not. It gets better. I would be like, bro, yeah, I got a body arm,

I got a body arm and helmet. Now give me a gun. It was a four-way intersection with tank blocking all the other avenues, bombed out buildings all around, and what gunfire may be a block away, a scene straight out of a World War II movie. Two turns down side treats brought up a sort of a public square facing a heavily damaged mosque, scoping the panorama. I saw IDF troops on the watch with a small group huddled at a far corner. That's who'd come to see. As we crossed toward them, I pegged them as combat engineers.

They had a drill mounted on a small two-wheeled trailer about the size of an outdoor lighting rig, grinding straight down into the ground. Once they'd gone down about 50 feet a camera attached to a fiber optic cable was slowly lowered down the one inch Or down the inch wide hole and the engineers saw what the camera did on a monitor This was the technique the general wanted me to see IDF teams were sinking hundreds of cameras a day Once looking for tunnels once discovered the Hamas tunnels were quickly breached Investigated and destroyed We spent the rest of the day Visiting other units in the General's command during doing their operations in one instance feeling the building shes

shake as an armor brigade commander to explain the challenges he was facing from Hamas guerrilla fighting techniques. The general and I withdrew unarmed that day, but sadly two IDF soldiers died and IED blast there a few hours later on one of the very streets we traveled. That's about as close as the action I want to get to these days. So, yeah, once again, you know, what we were talking about earlier, you got to go out there and see it. Yeah.

And not all my research I need to see that. That one specifically Gaza, and that would not be the last time I was, I mean, That's February 24, you know, seven trips. And as they got to understand who I was, you're like, all right, you're coming with us. And even if other people knew that I was doing that, it probably wouldn't be, let's say, kosher. Because there is a lot of risk. It's just not normal. I think the world needs it.

I'm not a reporter. I'm collecting. I actually just wrote a 63-page report of all of those tactical lessons I've taken from the IDF that I think the U.S. military could learn from. And that element of the underground, of course, is that there was no way, there was no entries left. There was so much rubble that they had to go back because of Intel to say, you might want to go back and look under there. There's a really big tunnel there that you guys missed that was coming out of the mosque. Some of these lessons that I've taken and why I'm there then put me going back because so many lessons were being learned that I think would be in any

urban warfare scenario of that scale and veracity of the enemy and all of that that I've collected. But I found a bunch more times after that, like, it's a different type of research than going after, like that sushi, which is, you know, nine months after, although there were still enemy in the area, which was unique on that one, what they called enemy patrols trying to breach their perimeter. This one is like, I'm bounding between buildings. Like, what am I doing? As I didn't ask for that, but they want to say, hey, you want to see these.

we're going to show you, which I have now discovered this. There is an element of doing research after a war, even in like a policeman, you know, they don't take everything that somebody says happened for verbatim, even with the police came because they're going to see it differently. For me to go in and be able to see and watch it happening, it's a lot different than the research I had done before that of asking them what they did. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, absolutely.

Where's this 63-page report? Is that West Point? We'll see when it has to go through editing and everything. Okay. Yeah, modern warrants too. Yeah, it's got everything from facial recognition. What they were able to do with facial recognition would have changed what you and I did in Iraq like where I used to sit at a book at checkpoints with a list of faces, a bolo or something like that. The facial recognition has advanced so much. They can put them on drones. They can put them on a stand and just walk everybody through the

stand and pick out all the combatants or the Hamas fighters out of the crowd like oh you come you step over here stuff that we never had in our wars where's um what's the status right now in in Gaza so the status is the you know the president the administration president Trump got this 20-point police plan nobody thought it was possible Hamas returned every hostage to include dead bodies from years ago so there was a basically a ceasefire uh agreed to. And then there's this line between what the IDF control and what Hamas controls, because of the 20-point plan is disarmament, new government, re-education. So there's basically

low-level conflict still happening. As Hamas, I was just there a few months ago, deep, not too far from where this happened in Sujaia, in watching Hamas fighters still trying to infiltrate this new line that has been formed. There's basically a line, where the IDF control and there's a line where the Hamas. Where is that line generally? It's about halfway through Gaza. It's called the yellow line. The Israel control is now about 60 plus percent of the Gaza Strip and Hamas controls or they, it's Hamas control because until they take the guns, as General McMaster says, until you take their guns, they're going to be in control.

40 percent is Hamas controlled and that's the line. What's the, have you been in the 60 percent that's controlled by Israel right now? I have, but with the IDF. And what's, so are there civilians there? Yes, that's where all this, they're not all the civilians, so there's still two million-ish civilians. They're in that 40%. There's still humanitarian zones.

Wait, isn't it a total of two million civilians total? Yeah, 2.2-ish. So 60, in the Israeli-controlled area, what percentage, or how many of those civilians are there? Yeah, I don't know what the total number, but there is actually, in the southern part of Gaza, there is basically beyond the yellow line tribes that aren't actually they have the same thing with families and tribes that aren't Hamas that are on this on the other side of that line but on the Hamas side of the line okay or no on the Israel side on the Israel side there are civilians and there and there is parts of the what would be considered that 40% that is actually not Hamas

controlled this tribal this is a different tribe controlled it's really the the major cities of Gaza city actually where the idea I've never went into where of great majority of in that central part of Gaza. If you understand the Gaza Strip, though, actually where the urban area starts, what the IDF are sitting on really goes right up to the line where the urban area sat,

but there is this fence line. So there's always this buffer between the Gaza urban areas and the fence. So, of course, Israel now is sitting on this line in outposts, basically. And they still go forward to destroy tunnels that are in these rubble fields. Not all of the Gaza Strip.

strip was destroyed, but of course, there's combat, and there was multiple battles across all of the Gaza Strip, so lots of it are destroyed, and the rubble, and the IEDs, actually. One of the biggest challenges of creating some normalcy in Gaza will be dealing with the unexploded ordinance, just thousands and thousands of rounds. That's one of Hamas's main weapons to take those unexploded ordinance and turn them into explosive IEDs and things. I was there in, what was December of 2025, and an IDF tank had hit a 2,000 pound bomb that Hamas had taken, repurposed as an IAD.

So the tank, the Merkava hit a 2,000 pound IED. And luckily, they all survived. Really? Yeah. Is there any Palestinian elements that are starting to step up wanting to, you know, move forward in a peaceful way? Absolutely. And there's, so there's the tribes, of course, Hamas are still trying, and it's

Still until somebody disarms them because the war were stopped, so they were supposed to get off their arms. But the Peace Board, which is a separate organization that was set up to kind of implement the 20-point peace plan that has multiple countries on it. And like Jared Kushner, one of the leads, they have, they formed a new government. That's not the Palestinian Authority, which or Hamas. It's like Palestinians that are now like making the decisions over what governmental established institutions will be created. There are schools running with a new dereliferation. radicalized curriculum. There's a lot of stuff actually happening.

A lot of people focus on the, you know, Hamas, you know, talking to Hamas or getting Hamas to give up their guns. But from a kind of still bite by bite, it's almost like a Ramadi part where everybody wants just immediately for everything to be okay versus what they're actually doing is taking it bite by bite. So areas that are less Hamas controlled, they got to clear that rubble, clear the tunnels, clear the IEDs. And they have multiple schools already opened.

And then they have, of course, the pushing the aid and a distribution in the hospitals and everything all throughout. But yeah, that Palestinian government called the Incag, they stood up, vetted everybody, and they're making the decisions on kind of rebuilding this, which is unique to anything that we ever face, a complete society, basically. It's 2.2. And I fought in, you know, areas of Baghdad like Sauter City that actually has 2.2 population. It isn't the scale of the problem, but it's the fact that this area was. run by terrorists who spent, I mean, they're billionaires. I mean, the Hamas leaders are billionaires sitting in Qatar. Took all the money, didn't invest in it.

So they don't even have water desalinization. It was all NGO, you know, relying on NGOs bringing things in. So you have to rebuild a society. And it's right to start a de-radicalization. So even starting, you know, they had Palestinian Sesame Street about how to kill Israelis and summer school, everything. So they're starting it, but they actually can do. almost like a Ramadi, how do you eat an elephant?

We do it bite by bite. So they're starting in these southern Gaza areas where they have schools running, tribal leaders that don't want Hamas, that they can vet. They have a, which is, we talked about, like an international security force that will have to come in and provide the security until they can get a Palestinian police

and all this up and running. They won't fight Hamas. Everybody's like, well, who's going to disarm Hamas? And that's the incrementalness that is the play. but the fact that they created this peace board to actually unlike other wars, especially in this area where everybody was just demand to stop kind of like what happened with Hezbollah,

like the UN organization that was created to kind of supposedly keep the peace between Hezbollah and Israel, it isn't Lebanon, it's Hezbollah. It just creates perpetual violence because the other side doesn't care what this UN organization with no power does. What they've done in Gaza has created this, peace board that's separate than the UN, get them out of the business, and they actually have

U.S. people kind of pushing it along, getting Palestinian leadership, getting schools, economy, start teaching them trade, all that. But bite, bite, by, by, depending on who I talk to, they're, like, skeptical, like, they're never going to give up their weapons. These are the same people when we were talking last time. I said that they would never give up the hostages. Like, there's no reason they would give up the hostess. And they gave up every single hostage to include ones that had been there for 10 years, they were holding on the Bible. bodies in tunnels of IDF soldiers. How many, I know the Hamas strength at its highest level was up 40 or 50,000?

Yep. What do you, what is it? The numbers are so, yeah, but. Okay, let's call it 40,000. What do you think it's at now, the Hamas strength? I actually haven't heard a number. During the war, people would say that they are, the recruitment was, they had recruited as many. Although the average recruit and during, since October 7th for Hamas was 16th.

So they have a readily radicalized population of people, and it's one of the only ways to make money. Again, if Hamas controlled every dollar and the NGOs brought things in, Hamas takes their tax, you can see where you get to this. So what's the true number of Hamas fighters? I don't think it's in the tens of thousands, but it could be.

And this is the element of until you build, like we did in Iraq in different places, you've got to start building almost like new society, of de-radicalized populations and giving them trade and jobs and things like that. So that isn't the only occupation. So tunnel digger and Hamas fighters are like your only occupations. And you could sell things like markets and things like that. I don't know what the, I haven't heard a number.

Some of the challenges are about those small weapons. But what's another positive, everybody always focused on is that, you know, we talked about that, the border between Egypt and Gaza, which was. was just a highway of weapons, especially when, you know, after the Arab Spring and, you know, places like Libya and things like that, I mean, the amount of weapons that that was discovered on the hot, just in Israel on October 7th, you know, Chinese, Russian, American, because there was a highway going from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sealed that. It, they verified like 10 feet at a time, that there was no more tunnels. And they took control of monitoring that Gaza, Egypt border is that

even if there are fighters, eventually they don't have the weapons. Like to make more rockets, to have all those explosives that I told you about. But like heavy weapons and stuff, they got what they got. Of course, they have a radicalized population. And this is the, you still see conflict happening as they send fighters forward to probe the line of this wall that's basically been created. Were the areas that were less radicalized in Gaza? So there were areas like in the far north? No, far south. Far south, far south that were less radicalized.

Yep. And so these are people that have kind of already kind of gotten on board with this new Palestinian government. No. Some have now, which is interesting, it's almost like that gangs of Baghdad, sons of Iraq, Al-Anbar. At one point, Israel is arming the opposers of Hamas. And there was a lot of controversy. Like, it's pretty kind of normal. those people, there are now absolutely, yes.

So let me answer it differently. Yes, there are tribe leaders, and there's actually a mission going in and check on some of the schools that the tribe provides security for that outside observer that are very anti-Hamas. You know, this is the business of

they are interested in power, so. Yeah, of course. Creating that national Gaza, the Incag, this government of Palestinians, to make these decisions. I'm sure there'll be some resistance of even tribal leaders on

they want their cut of the pie, which is that cultural aspect of, they got to be involved, and they're approving like even school curriculum in their areas for their kids, which is the right thing to do. And they don't want the Hamas, the radicalization,

because they lived under the cost of that dumping all your money into terror. Yeah. Well, it sounds like at least there's some level of progress. The fact that, so this is, There's a lot to be skeptical about, but the fact that the U.S. administration got Hamas to sign this 20-point plan and that is conditions-based is historic.

As much as I told you about Lebanon recognizing Israel's right to exist, the fact that Hamas, Qatar, Egypt, and all the other countries that would also be a part of this, because there are other countries that matter and it's like that we're a part of the problem, the fact that it's conditions-based. If you don't know the history of this region, like even if there's a ceasefire, it's a, yeah, we agree to. pause for now. I'm going to kill you, though. I'm still going to raise my people to kill you. That is conditions based and you have leadership. So that the U.S. administration, at least for this administration, is still doing a lot of visits to see, okay, how are you progressing along this?

And everybody's just not, okay, we stop the war, so we're good here. The fact that every element is conditioned based. It's even conditioned based for the Palestinian Authority, which is the government of West Bank, Judea, Samaria, where they have that pay to slave program. and they have radicalized. Their textbooks were just in the news recently. They're using October 7th math, you know, the old school of like,

how far does a bullet travel is the math problem to kill this, you know, the Jewish person on October 7th, and they found some textbooks in Judea and Samaria. These are massive problems, but I'm actually optimistic that they, this board and these people that are actually conditions based checking on like, okay, we said we're going to do this. What's the progress? If not, just letting it, like, we just,

want the war to stop. That isn't a solution to work. Well, what makes me optimistic is like when I hear about the Palestinians that are actually stepping up and I understand the mob mentality and the gangster and the power struggle, but that's what, that's what makes a world go around, you know, but if you have at least people that don't want radicalized children and that want, don't want to live under, you know, the terrorist like organization like Hamas, it's the same, you know, it's very interesting, you know, in Iraq, you know, you mentioned some of the tribal leaders but one of the guys, Sheikhs Satar Bazi, who was kind of the biggest tribal leader

that stepped up and kind of commenced the Al-Lombar Awakening, he had been, he was part of our targeting packages that we had when we showed up. So like the guys before us had been targeting him as a guy that was a, you know, a bad guy. And it's the same thing with General McFarland. He got asked by the MF commander. He said, hold on a second.

Wait, you're doing a meeting with this guy. This guy's one of people on our target list. And well, you know, like he's a powerful, guy and how do you you know when he's a powerful guy and he's trying to maneuver and make things happen so who's he friends with the most powerful people around or who the most probably at one point it was al Qaeda okay so he's making deals with Al Qaeda he's making things happen he's by the way he's making money he's you know transporting stuff and then he oh the Americans are here now okay they're powerful oh that's better for us

it's better for my people and by the way Al Qaeda did some things like kind of like a mosque where it's like oh Al Qaeda murdered a bunch of people and oh I actually don't want to work with them anymore so he has a change of heart and next thing you know he becomes a leader so when I hear about that kind of you know that gives me some hope that there's Palestinians that are there that want some kind of peace want some kind of normalcy and if that's true then hopefully that can spread and we can you know we have to be careful as Americans because when we help someone we prop someone up and put them into power it automatically makes people hate them right you know

it's like it gets used as oh you're that guy's a puppet and so hopefully those some of those people are strong enough that they can actually hold their own when that kind of criticism comes their way. Yeah, that's, and as you know, we, I'm sure we don't have time to talk about this whole idea of not getting in forever wars and people just using those as synonyms for nation building projects or what has boots meet on the ground.

This isn't a US organization coming in and rebuilding Gaza. It's actually, that's why it was, I think whoever put this together did it really well. You know, these are Palestinian Ghazans being in charge of the future of Gaza and it's going to be done not just a military security perspective,

but it's education, it's religion, so we're working with the right, you know, religious leaders and all these other countries who dealt with their own radicalization like Saudi Arabia, UAE,

and others being involved, whoever put this together really had learned from some of those lessons of us trying to make societies like us. This isn't a U.S.-led operation. It's Palestinian-led, which is important. Yeah, yeah.

Check, all right. Going back to the book here, lesson of all lessons. I have a question I like to ask people in groups when I was in the military was, who are we? It was a question about our values, about the Army values of our standards, not only the ones required by rules and regulations, but also the standards we held ourselves to, our norms. Now I ask not only myself, but others, who are you? At first, I usually get puzzled looks. Then I tell them there is no wrong answer.

I also tell them I will go first. I am a father, a brother, a son, a ranger, a writer, and a scholar. a man who lives by a set of principles, values, and morals about right and wrong. I think the drill is important. Everyone needs identity and purpose. I also learned that neither identity nor purpose matter without values. Values are the foundation of who you are, what you do, and who you choose to stand beside. And the family code that I wrote to distill all my experiences, adventures to pass on to my family. Here it is, the Spencer Family Code. Strong and body in my mind. Sorry strong in mind and body.

We work to improve both every day. We are always growing and improving. Treat all people with kindness. We treat others as we want to be treated. Respect is earned, never owed. We respect all others and ourselves. Own your decisions and take responsibility. We do not lie, cheat, or steal, or bring unnecessary harm to others.

We do not look to others for meaning or self-worth. Never quit. Life is hard. It will hurt. We will fall, but we will always get back up and move forward. Given nothing, if you want anything in life, you must put in the work. Set the goal. Do the work.

Excel. And by the way, it's an acronym, Strong. Be strong. I love you. And we'll close it out with us. That is our family code. It is different from the codes I followed in the military, the Ranger Creed, the Army values, and the warrior ethos. But it builds from them.

None of these may be right for you, your family, or your community. but I believe everyone should have a creed or a code, a set of values that defines who you are and who you choose to be. And no, you do not have to almost die to figure it out. So there you go. And I know we talked about my warrior kid code. Absolutely. Yeah, that's out there, which, you know,

that's one of the things I realized when I wrote that first book was, man, having some general guidelines, some general principles, it allows you to make such better decisions when you have them. And when you don't have them, you're just, you know, you've got no direction. And so for a 7-8, 6, 7, 8, 9-year-old kid that's out there, and then a 19-year-old kid, and then a 24-year-old kid, and then a 28-year-old man or woman that got to make decisions that are in leadership position like this is, if you don't, you need to have some kind of a code that you're going to follow.

And sure, the military will issue you some, but coming up with your personal one is also extremely important. Absolutely. And it gave me a framework I still use every day. We'll say be Spencer Strong. And it allows us to talk about challenges and who we are and who you are. It's a foundation. I think a lot of people could value. And I got a lot of even reason when my son was reading the Warrior Kid books about that. Yeah. I've had, believe me, I've had a lot of grown-ass men and women tell me about how much the Warrior Kid books help them out. That's awesome. So what else you got going on right now? Get the new book coming? When's the next book coming? The next book is out in October. It's about the Nagorno-Karabakh War, the 2020.

Actually, it ends in 2023. Have a book, spend a lot of time in India, like I said, in Kashmir. Because we have a book coming out. It'll probably be out at the beginning of the next year about that war between India and Pakistan. I have a lot of writing projects, a lot of travel to do, because unfortunately there's a lot of war. But learning from war from strategic to tactical, I love my job. and my kids sometimes like to hear about their stories, and I just wrote a few of them down in that book.

Check. Is that get us up to speed? I think so, yeah. All right, so where can people find you? You've got a John Spencer Online.com. Yeah. You've got a new YouTube channel, I think. I just renamed it.

It's an old one, yeah. John Spencer War Scholar. Yeah. It used to be John Spencer at 398. Yes, right. We forgot to ask you. What was 398? Just a random.

It's the number they gave me. Fair enough. And then on Instagram and on Twitter X, you are at Spencer Guard. That's right. Echo Charles, you get any questions? Well, yeah, one quick one. Okay. Remember rewind back to the gangster scene.

Yeah. The standoff scenario. Yeah. What's the currency? Dinar. What is it? Dinar. Yeah, you're rocking denouye.

Yeah, yeah. What is the exchange rate for that? Then? Then, yeah. At that time. 2008? Yeah, I don't know. Let's see.

It was about $100 to $300 to $300, I think. Okay. So that's, okay, okay, okay. So if he's offering like $3 million or whatever, that's like, what, $1 million? It wasn't that much. Yeah, I'd have to do. Oh, wait, $300. Yeah.

I'm doing my mouth off. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so it's a lot less then. It's a lot less. Okay. They're talking about $100,000 maybe. Yeah, yeah.

And we did these, I mean, I'm sure Jaco did, salacia payments for, you know, we'd go out and give out like $1,000, $2,000. I forget what the DINR exchange was at the time. And that's what pretty common when, like, Oh, I shot your brother. Let me give you some money. Absolutely. It's even when you breach their door or like a tank runs over their fence.

Yeah, well, that part makes sense because like, yeah, if the freaking, you know, the garbage man comes to my house and bumps into my car and be like, hey, where's my money? It may seem when you hear it in this kind of very simplistic terms, it seems like it's a foreign idea to us. But believe it or not, in America, we have the same. same thing or at least something very similar in that if you get killed in a some kind of an accident where there's negligence like your parents there's there's sort of a precedent yeah you sue them and by the way it's like a million bucks and sometimes it's not a million bucks so it's like you know 500,000 but there is a number where the you know the guys go hey we're going to sue you and they go well we'll settle and they say four million bucks and they go no we'll give you a million

And your wife says, a million bucks for Echo Charles? Done. I was in a lot of meetings, though, actually, because it's so cultural that the, like, the tribal leaders would then, didn't matter what they thought would agree within themselves what that person was going to get for their loss of their loved one. So it's so, there's a cultural element there, too, is where they're deciding amongst themselves and their power structure how much that person should get. Yeah. And, you know, all my organized crime culture comes from movies, you know, not about. me. But in one of my favorite movies, training day, that's what it was about. That was the whole thing. What? So Alonzo, Denzel Washington, the back story, the whole reason he was like that whole

day happened the way it did is because Alonzo accidentally killed a Russian organized crime guy in Las Vegas. He didn't know he was organized crime. He just lost his temper, killed him. Then the rest of the family or whatever was like, hey, now you owe us a million dollars. Oh, it's a million box. million dollars yeah go you ever heard like where a company i think they say this about the ford pinto so the ford pinto which had some kind of a gas the where the gas tank was positioned if it got like basically in a little bit of a fender bender it could catch on fire and again don't quote me on this but there's other cases like this where the company does the math and they're like okay we're going to recall all these cars and do all these repairs and it's going to cost this much money or

we're going to get 4% of the buyers of this car are going to have somebody killed and they run their numbers and they're like a little cheaper just to let it ride so uh coincidentally my one of my other favorite movies called fight club that's the guy's job yeah the main guy you watch fight club yeah yeah so he's one of his we don't talk about it there so before that he's on the plane with some arbitrary person and he's like I was a recall coordinator and I could probably give you the exact lines but to in the in spirit of time he says basically uh the amount of like the typical out of court settlement you know let's say fuel injectors explode blah blah blah out of court settlement is a times the whatever is b times the whatever is c a times b times c equals x if x is less

of the cost of a recall, we don't do what. That's what he said. Yep. So is it really weird to hear it in this plain speak in this other culture? Well, I go, you know, you killed my brother, you shot my brother in the face. I want this much money. It's weird. But for us, all that weirdness is camouflaged by just legal teams. And the reality, at the end of it, some freaking lawyer is looking at the wife of some guy going, how about a million? And the wife's going, no, I want to fight it. And they go, okay, you can fight it, but it's going to cost this much. You're going to call lawyers. And the lawyer's going to take this cut.

And by the way, here's what we paid in the last nine cases like this. And here's what we can prove. And she goes, right, a million it is. So it sounds all weird. Yeah. And you might also be, you know, it seems like it's a lower price. Well, they have less money. So, you know, I guarantee, same thing.

Like a lawyer that's talking to some low income poverty and poverty family is going to be like, oh, yeah, your husband. we're sorry, here's 500 grand. We're some super rich person who, by the way, has the capacity to go to court and run up those bills, will be like, oh, definitely, you know, 1.5. But there's a number, man. Yeah, you're right. There's a number for, like, you lose a finger, you lose a hand, you lose an arm. Like, in some kind of an industrial accident, there's a number. And that's what you're kind of getting.

Yeah, now that you're explaining this to me, you're absolutely right. Like, you can literally just turn on the local TV and be like, are you injured in an accident? Well, we got a number for that. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, all right, okay, cool. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So thanks for that clarification and exploration. Good to see you again.

Anything else like that, John? That is it. That's it. John, any closing thoughts? No, I appreciate being here. It's twice. I mean, it's an honor. Such a big fan in my son.

They wanted me to bring them, so I'm actually in trouble. Both my son and my daughter, like you said you said you would take us to see Jaco. I don't think I said that. And they know that I'm here. So I'm going to be a little bit of a doghouse, but we're such great friends. You're aware, can't wait for the movie. November 25th, the movie's coming out, Echo Charles.

Yeah, Echolz is in it. Oh, really? Yeah, my kids. Got a very pivotal role as MMA Coach 3 or something like that. Hell, yeah. We're going to find out what your actual title is. MMA Coach 3. Is it number 3?

I think so, yeah. Something, maybe one, I don't know. Funny enough, my kids, I'm in the same boat with my kid. Everything I want to do, they're like, oh, we want to come. That's right, man. You know, sometimes. That's cool. Sometimes they don't.

That's good. True story. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us once again. You know, thanks for sharing these experiences, lesson learned, and, you know, that you learned kind of the hard way some of these things. I'm glad the times that these are times that you almost died and that you didn't die. And thanks for your service in the Army for fighting our nation's enemies. Thanks for what you continue to do today.

Going out there and learning so we can teach the next generation of war fighters how to do it right. Thank you. Next, brother. And with that, John Spencer has left the building. Living by code, important thing. Part of that code, in my opinion, has to be being strong, being healthy, being capable, right? And you know what that means? That means we train in.

That means jiu-jitsu, wrestling, running, sprinting, lifting, fighting, swimming, surfing, getting after it in all forms. And when we get after it in these physical forms, we're going to need fuel and we recommend Jankofuel. Check out joncofuel.com. We got your protein. By the way, we have a protein coming out that is it's called the trendy name for this kind of protein is clear protein. Have you heard of this? Clear protein though.

So it's it's protein, but it's not, but it's in some case it's clear. So, our is not clear. but instead of tasting like like a like a shake it tastes more like a lemonade I understand actually they there was a name for it before what was it it's not clear but anyway I know you're talking about anyways that's coming I've got I got the I got the early production and universally my whole clan was on board immediately like just so stuck so my whole family was just totally fired up taste really good and it's What it gives you is it gives you a like a different what's it called like a different access point to protein because you know if you think about it sometimes you don't want to have you want to have something like light and refreshing and this we got you covered so anyways we got that common we get all kinds of protein we got delicious protein that you can have for dessert that is like a shake we got energy we got supplementation we got time more we got super krill get on a super krill please

Get on the Supergirl. Get on the joint warfare. We got everything that you need. You can get this stuff at joccofuel.com or pretty much any retailer, any store. Retailers like an industry term, isn't it? Sure. Yeah, I don't.

You never like, hey, I'm gonna go down to the retailer. Like, no. So you can get at any store. That's like when you use the term colorways. Yeah. What am me? You did. You used it one time.

I had to put you in check. Like, just like you should put me in check for saying retailer. I don't know. Look, in the industry, it is a retailer. That's what you refer to it as. but just like in the industry, it's like colorways for shirts, but are human, normal people,

we don't say, hey, I'm gonna run down to the retailer. Or hey, can you grab me the black colorway t-shirt that is, no, we don't say that. So I'm putting myself in checks since you didn't help me out. No, no, no, no. We got what you need, jocococofield.com, you can get it there or you get any store

that you might go to, a grocery store, a convenience store, a supplement store. We got you covered. If they don't have it there, then just go and ask. Say, hey, can you get some Jocker Fuel in here so I can get stronger, faster, smarter, healthier, and better as a human being. Jock Fuel.com.

Check it out. Also check out origin, USA.com. This is where we make American-made goods. American-made t-shirts, hoodies, jiu-jitsu gis, jih T-suits, rascars, everything that you need for life, we got you covered. So we got sneakers coming, October 2nd.

They're freaking legit American made 100% American made so we got what you need at origin USA Go to origin USA.com and get yourself American made products and listen it's the you know the holiday seasons are coming right some of this stuff's gonna sell out don't wait Get it now so that way when you give your husband or boyfriend because we don't have many women's products right now Not that we won't, but right now currently we don't. But when you want to get your husband or boyfriend a pair of jeans, you want to get him something that's American made. You want to get him something that is the highest quality.

You want to give him something that says, oh, I don't support communism. Because trust me, your husband doesn't want a communist pair of jeans. You know, that's an American made pair of jeans. And you might think that some of those quote unquote iconic brands that are in America, you might think you might have the night. We thought that these iconic American brands are in support of America, but they're not, by the way. They're in support of communism.

Our economic adversaries, that's where they're spending their money. So don't support them. Support America, the United States of America. Go to origin, USA.com and get some. It's true. Speaking of the holidays, it needs more retail options. E-commerce retail options, various color ways, by the way. Jocco store

Jocco store.com So where you can get your discipline Equals Freedom T-shirts Good Good T-shirts Four versions of that by the way People seem to like it Here's a note about Jocco store

Every once in a while your size might be sold out It's way more rare than it was before See what I'm saying I'm on top of that Yo look at this guy I'm on top of a new leafy A little bit of a new leaf But every once in a while still

You see what I'm saying You're not perfect yet I'm not perfect exactly and you know if your size and or colors sold out there I'm gonna chance of the restock is coming like soon within the next six days sometimes less sometimes one day so I'm saying the restock is coming so what you do is that I provided this little option there instead of ad to cart you just say notify me when available you put your email I don't spam nothing so I'm saying you just put your email in

there boom you get the email but you can get it right when it comes in won't even miss it GTG. GTG. I'm telling you, that's very helpful. A lot of people do that. Rather than being discouraged, you know,

or something like this, you know, that's very helpful. You get what you want. You say, y'all, it's not in stock. Good.

Gives me time to prepare for it. Yeah. Sure. The whole thing. You see what I'm saying. Yeah, man, when you know,

you know. Also, the short locker, subscription, new design every month. Is what I'm saying? If you want to learn, if you want to see

what kind of design, a little bit more creative, if you will, not your, you know, straight, kind of an indirect approach almost, creatively speaking. Anyway, you know, check it out. Go on the top. It says, shirt locker, click on it, show some past designs, some, you know, the current,

it'll show the current design, too, of the month. Nice. Like kind of like a little sneak peek or whatever, so you can see what, you know, what it's all about, the vibe. Anyway, people seem to like it. But, yeah, it's all on Jocko's store. You know, you like something, get something. That's what we hear.

We've written some books. So, first of all, we got the book we covered today. 20 times I almost died by John Spencer. Check that book out Also put your legs on by Rob Jones Also need to lead by Dave Burke And then I've written a few books I think about I don't know

10 or 12 books Some of them are for adults Some of them are for kids But they're all for you And they will make your life better Check out the Warrior Kid books Warrior Kid movie coming November 25th Global Release Apple TV

Stand by to get some That's what we're doing Also check out Escelanfront.com If you have problems inside your organization, they are leadership problems. They are leadership problems. So if you need help with leadership, which you do,

check out Eshalomfront.com. We have a bunch of different various programs to help get you and your team aligned. Also check out Extreme Ownership.com where we teach the skills of leadership on the interwebs. And then 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. Please do go to America's mighty warriors.org also check out heroes and horses.org and then Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org and of course check out warriors and need dot org And finally stronghold rescue.org a lot of charities we're trying to try to get out there into the world because they're all doing outstanding stuff if you want to connect with us for John Spencer on the interwebs. He is john spencer online.com and then YouTube John Spencer war scar And then on Instagram and Twitter X.

He's at Spencer Guard. And then for us, check out jocco.com. And then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink, Echoes at Echo Charles. But if you can, just don't even go there because it's not good for you. It's not healthy. It's not helping you. But that's on you. We are trying to help you.

Do not let it take your soul. And to all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who are currently deployed around the world defending freedom. and defending our way of life. Thank you for what you all do every day to keep us safe. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for what you do to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, it's a good little lesson to remember.

Good little protocol to follow. Ask yourself, who are you? what what standards do you live by what what is the code that guides you and your thoughts and your actions what values do you stand for if you answer those questions it's going to benefit you and don't don't let it be by chance right don't let life go just the way it goes own it steer it in the direction you want it to be moved. Do what you know you should do and be who you know you should be.

And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this Zekko and Jock out.