Jocko Podcast - 59: Valuable & Applicable Lessons from Battle that Apply Directly to Your Life, w/ Brian Stann

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

Brian Stann, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, awarded the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest award for valor in combat. Retired UFC Fighter. UFC Commentator. 0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:25 - Brian Stann Intro and Background 0:11:52 - Importance of Standards and Discipline 0:21:56 - The Leadership Factory: What makes a good leader vs bad leader. 0:38:45 - Brian Stann Enters the Marine Corps 0:48:10 - Brian Stann's Entry To Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) 0:54:00 - Combat Life 1:30:21 - The Burden of The Leader 1:44:34 - More Ops in Iraq 1:59:48 - Brian Stann Goes into Professional MMA & The UFC 2:18:55 - Hire Heroes USA - Jobs Program for Vets 2:21:27 - The Guardian Project - Martial Arts for At Risk Youth 2:26:52 - Closing Questions and Thoughts 2:27:57 - Support: Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book) and The Muster002 2:39:09 - Closing Gratitude   Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 59 with Echo Charles and me Jock Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Their screams are the worst. We're more than 100 meters away on the other side of the river, but I can hear Marines dying. Their armored vehicle hit a landmine. It caught fire with 15 men aboard. They scream as they bow.

burn alive the radio chatter is desperate almost hysterical nobody can get to them there will be no salvation only a torturous death in the flames from our position across the river we hear every agonizing moment and can see their funeral pyre rising over the river bank i can do nothing it is the most helpless, enraging feeling I've ever experienced. I have no way to get across the water to those burning men. It takes forever for the last screams to fade away. And that is an excerpt from a book called Heart for the Fight. And it's written by a guy named Brian Stan. And if you don't know who Brian Stan is. You can Google him.

He's a son, a father, a husband. He was the WEC light heavyweight champion of the world. He's a UFC veteran, 11 fights in the UFC with some wins and some losses against some best fighters in the world. He's also a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. with two tours to Iraq as a platoon commander and as a company XO. And I am honored tonight to actually have Brian with us here as a guest. Mr. Brian Stan, welcome to the show.

I got to tell you, that's, I have not been introduced like that before. That's an excerpt of that book that I could honestly say I've laid eyes on. I don't even know how many years. I forget the year. We released it. Some powerful writing by my ghostwriter, John Bruning, and that is a tough, tough memory. It's one of those ones that we kind of bury deep down

and think about just from time to time. But certainly when you, at times where maybe you take things for granted in life, it's good to go back to that moment, you know, and realize that whatever I may be whining about or whatever I think is difficult at the time is a heck of a lot easier than it once was, and I need to be grateful. Get off my butt and go finish.

Yeah, I think that a lot of people, you know, you see the explosions take place with IEDs and, you know, the wars that we were involved in were, you know, the main weapon of the enemy was the IED. And even when we made thicker, heavier armored vehicles or like track vehicles, when they get hit with an IED, even though it might withstand some of the impact, there's fire start and it's a nightmare.

And this is the nightmare you described right there. And, you know, I want to get into that. I want to get into the combat that you experienced. But before we do that, first of all, like, the people that listen to this show, not everyone even watches UFC, not everyone knows about you. So just kind of give a little bit of a background on growing up. Let's take it back to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Absolutely.

So moved around a lot. I was actually, I was born in Japan. and around that time when my mom had come back to the states, my father had left. And so grew up in northeast Pennsylvania. We moved around quite a bit, but got into sports in an early age, and I had a phenomenal mom. And I think not having a dad really affected my sister a lot more than it affected me. But even from an early age, I knew that the military. was going to be an option.

From the days of being a young kid watching silly movies like Iron Eagle, there was something. You better not call Iron Eagle silly in front of echo. That's like a classic to him. But for me, there was always something to it that that rang is special to me. And, you know, what I found is growing up without a dad, you tend to want to impress every male influence you have in your life. So every time I went out for a team,

I wanted to be the hardest worker on the team. I'd run through a wall for my coach. And that continued all the way through high school. And then all of a sudden playing high school football, I started to get recruited by some good schools. And not many people in my family had gone to college. Certainly I had expected to go to college, but never expected to get recruited to go play somewhere.

So that was a different experience for me. I didn't always handle it the best. But when the Naval Academy came knocking, I knew that's where I wanted to go. West Point started recruiting me early as a junior. I took my films, my tapes to the Naval Academy. There was just something about that place, and I wanted to go there. So I decided, before I make a decision,

let me visit West Point, let me visit the Naval Academy in a four-day time period. I'll visit both and make my decision. When I went to West Point, one of the football coaches was supposed to meet me there, never showed. So one of the players took me around campus, showed me some stuff. But it was still beautiful.

I mean, greater than any, you know, Scranton's one of the poorest cities in America. It's not nice. So, you know, my uncles, my aunts and my mom that thought of me going to the Naval Academy is a big deal. I remember my track coach in high school telling me, Brian, listen, this is a big deal. It's a great opportunity. There's a lot of things in your life that can change by going here. I said, yeah, but, you know, I'm getting recruited by some of these Ivy League schools too. He says, it's not the same, and I don't think you're going to fit in.

I'm going to be honest with you, Brian. My track coach is a bright guy. So two days later I go to the Naval Academy and I hand them my tape. Now they hadn't even started recruiting me yet, but those coaches were so nice to my mom. And by doing that, I was in. They recruited my mom. They were so respectful to her. The water was there.

It was so pretty. Okay. I'm in. And I had made that decision early, that that's where I wanted to go and focused on that. Did some summer school to take some classes to boost my AP courses in high school just to make sure they didn't have to go to the prep school first. I want to go right to the Naval Academy. And so that, in a really quick nutshell, football was a vehicle. Along with my academics were good, but, you know, having a 3-5 GPA and a 12-10 on your SATs

isn't normally going to get you into the Naval Academy. Football was the vehicle that got me there. And I could remember prom night, lifting weights in the weight room with my rented tucks in the locker. I was there all by myself. I had the security code. I was, you know, one of the only guys who worked all summer long, I was the only white guy where I worked in this tomato plant. And I would work to help pay for the high school I went to because my mom took me out of public schooling, put me in this good high

school because I had gotten suspended a couple times in middle school. And it was one of the harder decisions, but one of the best decisions that she made and pushed me towards. Because the teachers at that school when they saw me having this opportunity, they helped. Hey, let's help Brian get to the Naval Academy, go there to play football,

but, you know, really getting himself on a great trajectory. there's not a day I regret it. There were definitely days I couldn't stand being at the Naval Academy, like anybody, hated it, but the friends I made there, the opportunities and the pathway

to the Marine Corps, which still to this day, I don't know if I'll ever be as good at any job as I wasn't being a Marine Infantry officer. I just, I don't know that. And when you got there, the type of football

that they were playing didn't really match your, because you were a quarter, back in high school, right? I was. I was. And so in the book, you're saying that your type of football didn't really match what they wanted to do. No, it was a rude awakening for me.

You know, I went there thinking, hey, I'm going to be the next Roger Staubach. And we all did. And then all of a sudden you start to see all these other kids from all over the country. Wow, they're good too. I had never really run the option before. And they've got guys from the prep school that already done a year in the system and did that system in high school that can run the option. So next thing you know, I'm getting moved to wide receiver.

I'm getting moved to safety. Then I'm getting moved to linebacker. and I have to figure out how to play these positions. And it was one of the best lessons I ever learned as a young man where I had to make a decision. I'm going to contribute to this team. I'm not going to be a starter. I'm not going to be a star.

Some of the best contributions I can make as a leader are to help mentally prepare the younger guys to play. So my senior year I was competing for the starting outside linebacker position. And we had this young kid named Bobby McLaren who was an animal. I mean an animal, but he was uncontrollable. He could not understand the defense at all. He was just a wild man, flying all around knocking over anything he touched, but he was an idiot at football. It was an engineering major, really bright kid, but a moron in football.

All right, so I'm a senior. I'm going to help this kid out, and we're in two a days, and I'm competing for the starting job, and I'm helping this kid out whose third string, and he's getting frustrated, and then all of a sudden he starts to get it, and he's starting to grasp on. And slowly but surely I could see this kid taking not only my job, but the job of the guy, who was ahead of me who I was competing with. And, you know, the bottom line was, is I had to find a way to contribute value to the team.

Obviously, I was a special team's contributor, but leadership was going to be the biggest thing I contributed. And that made me a very valuable member of the team that season, and it taught me great lessons moving forward, both in the Marine Corps and especially now in my job, if you aren't finding a way to add value to your organization, to your team every day, then you're wasting time, you're wasting money, and somebody's going to take that spot.

Somebody will come along and take that spot. I don't care how successful you get. You can't take life for granted. Every day you've got to add value. I learned that lesson early. And my football coach, my linebacker coach, liked me the most. I was his favorite guy, and he would admit that to me in our personal meetings. But at the end of the day, he told me, Brian, I get paid.

I feed my family to put the best players on the field who are going to help us win. games. I really wish that was you right now, but it's not. Yeah. And those are hard conversations to listen to, but if you're going to be a leader, you got to be able to receive that information and find a way to get better. Yeah, you know, speaking of that, so you actually, they fired the coach that you had your first three years, new coach came in, and I'm going to go to the book here. It's your senior year. Two a days are brutal ordeals detested by every player who was stepped foot on a on a football field that summer our new coach paul johnson used two a days to make a statement he made us start practicing before dawn every day at zero four forty five we reported to the field

and johnson's new coaching staff beat us half to death with repeated fourth quarter drills we ran we hit none of this no contact drilling johnson spared no one by mid-morning guys were puking where they stood i love this right here No wonder why you pussies went 0 and 11. He shouted more than once as we gasped and suffered. Coach Johnson showed no mercy. When he evaluated the team, he concluded that we lacked discipline and motivation. He made our two weeks in August a crucible designed to test our toughness and our commitment to the team.

At one point, a wide receiver went down with a phantom injury. After the team doctor examined the wide out and found nothing wrong with him, Coach Johnson demoted him on the spot. So coach Johnson came in and brought the heat. I still remember, you know, back then at the Naval Academy, we had what was called Instant Messenger. And so you could leave an away message, you know, on your instant messenger. And we did our fourth quarter drills.

I remember our starting defense event, Pete Boutemiller. He left in his away message. He said, today I met death. And death kicked my, you know what. It was brutal. And they screamed that at us repeatedly. no wonder you went 0 and 11. We were a naval academy football team

and the previous coach had let discipline just run awry. You know, both on the field, in practice, in the wait room, in films, you could be hurt all week still starting the game. The things that are essential for a military academy team to win. I mean, you've got to be in better shape

than the other team and you've got to commit less mental errors because physically you're never really going to match up. Right. And we were making that error. And from all that chaos, one of the real amazing things I learned from those coaches, who that staff is basically still there today.

Coach Neumato Lolo was the offensive coordinator. When Johnson left, he's now the head coach. But they taught me as leaders to expect excellence. Every single drill, every film session, every weight room session, every conditioning, there was a standard. You either meet the standard or you don't meet the standard. And if you don't meet the standard, there are consequences. There's remediation.

There's ways that you have to fix it because this is the only thing that's good enough. If we're going to move forward, you either get better or you get worse every day, getting worse is unacceptable. And when you take that mentality as an officer to what you're doing in the field to train 160 Marines to go to combat, all of a sudden that gets a lot more serious than winning and losing football games. But that holds true in business. It holds true in anything. There is a standard. And if you accept below that standard just once, that sets a precedent that could lead to what happened before he got there. And I've gone back to the Naval Academy repeatedly and I've talked to the team.

I actually talk to the junior class every single year. And one of the things I always tell those coaches, gentlemen, you guys are putting out a better product as officers because you're here. Your job is to put forth the great football team, but I promise you. And the staff at the Naval Academy, the officers, they see it too. They are making better leaders because of what they're doing on the football field. Before they got there, that wasn't happening. What was happening on the football field was making us worse officers. And so I still hold true.

He now coaches, Paul Johnson coaches at Georgia Tech now. He brought me down to speak to the team a couple of years ago, and we had some great conversations. But, I mean, he's still, he's still that same guy, still thinks he can beat me up. Coach, I get it. and I'm not asking you in front of your teammates. You always say you can whoop me. You have to realize now there's not a chance. But he is this, boy, I'm telling you,

I still think I can whoop you and he'll throw this awful, you know, right cross. It's geriatric at this point. He can barely even get his arm up, but he still throws it like he can beat me. He's game. He's game. He's game.

The heart's there. The body ain't got it though. So you actually talk about this in the book. So here we go. All that effort, pain, and misery made me a more disciplined human being. It prepared me for the trials ahead as a Marine Infantry officer. In fact, many of the lessons I learned helped me better prepare my platoon and later my company for combat in Iraq.

In football and in a rifle company, there is no substitute for discipline, hard work, and commitment. If any of these elements are lacking, the team is going to lose. The company will get shot to pieces in combat and men will die. I learned there is no margin for error in both And the only way to be perfect is to demand perfection And never brook excuses There you go That's life

I mean you know at that point especially then That is your world that is your life The military is so unique In that other jobs you can leave it 5pm 6 p.m. Whenever you go home from work hey I am no longer an accountant Now I'm Jimmy now I'm Sarah, now I'm whomever, right? But in the military, if you're bad at your job,

you're a bad person. That's kind of how you're looked at almost. It's true. It's true. If you're an infantry officer and you're not good, if this isn't everything you eat, sleep, and breathe, you're weak. I mean, that's just the kind of environment we have.

And I always tell this story. When people look at me like I'm crazy, I tell them this story, had a Marine named James Brown, no affiliation with the famous person. And James is a great Marine. He was a tough, tough kid. And he was in a machine gun post watching over a main avenue of approach. And his job was to make sure that stayed clear.

He had the best optics, keep it clear of IEDs, make sure nobody plants an IED there. And everything was bulletproof around him, except for the one slit where the 240 Gulf went through. And it was hot. 125 degrees. And people always ask me, why are the Marines so extreme? When you make statements like that, discipline, commitment, they're everything. Everything has to be perfect. I tell them this story.

It got hot. James leaned against the rifle to get a little breeze through that slit. And that moment got shot in head by a sniper and died. It was an amazing shot. When we went up there and looked at what I mean. In Iraq, they had some very, very good snipers as we know. Yeah. Right?

But in that one split moment, I lost that Marine. And everything we do, everything you do to perfection, that's why. You demand perfection and everything you do because you are so afraid that they're not going to come home alive. And I had to tell my Marines this one time they were lacking in some of their standards. This is in Iraq. I made them stand uniform inspections. Imagine their attitude as I made them stand three uniform inspections a day. And they were so mad.

But in leadership, you can't do something like that without telling them the war. Why? They're not going to buy it. They're just going to hate you now. And I told him, I said, listen, guys, we're not strapping down our ammo and the Humvees well enough. We're not cleaning our weapons right after a mission like we should be. Not wearing our uniforms before we get back to camp because you think you're so cool because you've been in a bunch of firefights. If we don't do the little things right, it's going to affect the big things.

And ultimately what's going to happen is we are going to die. We're going to lose or the people we're here to protect are going to die. Therefore, I'm going to do these uniform inspections until all of these things are fixed, permanently, and I am totally fine with you hating me right now, if that means I will deliver you home alive with the mission accomplished. I'd rather you be alive and hate me than you guys love me because you think I'm super cool, but then have you guys die because of my poor leadership and my inability to keep you guys disciplined and keep you to the standard of perfection.

And that is something it's hard for people who haven't been in that circumstance. It's hard for them to understand. It really is. But even in my current job, running a nonprofit, I tell my staff, every single veteran, they speak to every conversation where there's the 10 time you talk to that vet and you're doing another practice interview. Our job is to help them find the American dream, to leave the military by their own choosing and now find not a job, but a great career where they can thrive. And if we take any conversation with them for granted, they may no longer want to take our advice. They may go out of it alone. They may not choose the right thing.

And we failed them. People give us money not to fail them. You're paid with other people's money that they gave us to help these vets get jobs. Period. If we're not doing that, then you don't work here anymore. I don't work here anymore. Period. We will find somebody else to do it because that's our job.

And so you've got to set that standard. But if you don't tell them the why behind it, they'll never understand that. And it doesn't mean that we have this culture. It's not like my platoon has. this culture where we were all so hardcore and there was no compassion. There was no personality. There's no smiles. As you can attest you, look, you can have an environment of discipline, hard work and commitment, but still have a lot of love, compassion, and good times. They have fun. A lot of fun. Straight up. You know what's great fun? When you go and you train

and you're awesome. You know who has a lot of fun? The New England Patriots. They have a hell of a lot of fun. And you want to talk about disciplining, commitment, and hard work. That's why they're on the top. And they have a lot of fun smile at the end of every season. Everybody hates on them and they're raising those trophies. So you got this section in the book that talks about what you're talking about right now. The leadership factory, right? So here I'm going to go to the book.

All the academic classes in the world will never teach anyone to be a leader. The academy recognized that long ago. And while we had to take courses on the subject, we learned by doing. The academy is structured to provide leadership opportunities in a wide variety of places and levels from the very first day you start as plebes. And this is emphasizing what you just said and discipline is something that I talk about all the time. And I know what's great is, you know, as I was talking to you on the way over here, you know, I do all these, I read these leadership or not leadership books. They're not books. It's about leadership.

They're about combat, right? But combat is about leadership. So all these books, all of them, every single one of them, whether it's an ancient Roman military leader or a Marine in Vietnam or an army soldier in World War II, they all, there is one common thing that's discipline, discipline, discipline, it's always there. Back to the book. Discipline forms the cornerstone of any military team. And of course, punishment serves as one of the means to maintain.

discipline. During my junior year, I learned not to be afraid to meet out punishment. At the same time, doing so requires a balance of appropriateness and understanding. So that's the why you just talked about right there. And this, again, goes to something that I talk about a lot, which is the dichotomy of leadership, which is in leadership, there's opposing forces that are pulling you in two different directions. And both of them are right. They're both right. It's right to be hard your guys and maintain strict discipline and it's right to love your guys and take care of them. You have to balance those two. And that's what you're talking about right there. That's what you were talking about when you were talking about they need to understand why they're being

punishment. Punished. Back to the book. Bad officers try to be buddies with their Marines. There's a fine line between getting to know your, getting to know the men under your command and bonding with them as friends. It is all too easy to make that mistake. At the same time, Here's the balance. At the same time, if a young second lieutenant doesn't make an effort to know his men, his aloofness becomes a drag and will hinder his ability to command in several ways. First, he won't understand the strengths and weaknesses of his squads. More important, he won't have the respect or the connection needed to motivate and lead

in the worst of circumstances. Men will follow other men into the worst possible circumstances if they respect and believe in their leadership. like all other aspects of command, it is a delicate balance. So you're just, everything you just said, you say it in the book.

And that's why you're talking about the leadership factory. But it's interesting. This is stuff that I'm sure they touched on it in the classes, but that's the stuff that you learn. You learn it from senior enlisted people. You learn it from other officers.

You learn it yourself. You work for people and you go, man, this guy's aloof. This guy's not talking to us. So it's stuff that we learn ourselves too. I'm going to finish this section up. I concluded the proper balance here depended on the officer's ability to listen and accept input while still making it clear that he was the ultimate decision maker.

That was the key. A second lieutenant couldn't be afraid to engage in frank and productive dialogue with his key leaders. A platoon becomes the reflection of its commander. He sets the example. And this is from what you just said. If his uniform is jacked up, his memory. won't care about their own this leads to disciplinary issues and becomes a very slippery slope the only way a second lieutenant can have the moral authority to set a high standard is to set a high

standard for conditioning and appearance is to be the example himself without conditioning a platoon cannot achieve its potential in the field aggressiveness suffers appearance breeds pride and reinforces discipline and espreed a core so that's Those, that's the leadership factory that you're talking about. And clearly, those things that you brought from the football field and from the academy, you applied them right directly into your folks in combat. They helped. And, you know, the Marine Corps has a really unique circumstance where they have the basic school

where every single officer goes there. And that's huge to set this huge standard. Then we go a step further where when we go to infantry officer course, that course was 13 weeks long, one of the very hardest, if not the hardest in the Marine Corps. mentally, physically, everything. You don't know anything that's coming, everything's a surprise. But I felt that my instructors

during our course were phenomenal. And they were getting all the real-time intelligence from the battlefield. All the training was realistic. But in terms of how you relate to your Marines from your junior enlisted to your middle rank to your senior enlisted, how you relate to the senior enlisted

from the battalion who worked directly for the battalion staff, how you manage those relationships to maximize the effectiveness of your platoon to make sure that you can get exactly what they need. They did such a good job of that. Then you take it one step further.

When I reported the Third Battalion and Second Marines, I'd be remiss if I didn't give credit to a guy by the name of Gabe Diana, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps now I believe. But he taught me he was a true student of leadership and military history. He would tell me all the time,

his craft is his hobby. There's nothing else he cared about. It's what he was. He loved being a Marine, love being an officer, and he taught me a lot about decentralized leadership, how to not micromanage, how to empower your junior leaders

that they start to think like you and you could achieve tempo on the battlefield. And you could immediately see examples of Marines. I call it, and I see it all the time in the business world. I call it JV leadership, where I'm a great leader if my people love me. And they're the same leaders that will tell their people, all right, guys, today we've got to stay 30 minutes longer because headquarters said so.

Look, I disagree with it. I think it's ridiculous, but we have to do it. So let's just sit here together. Now, none of their people are actually going to work motivated. There's going to be no discipline. There's going to be no standard that they're trying to achieve because of that horrible leadership. That's like they're angry at headquarters. Absolutely.

They're mad at the chain of command. Exactly. It's JV leadership. And I'm constantly trying to talk to people about that. Like JV leadership, the first thing of it is you think you have to be loved to be an effective leader. If you are an effective leader over the long term, you will be loved, but there's going to be intermittent parts where they can't stand you. They don't understand things all the time, but they're going to be mad at you because they're emotional.

But over long term, they're going to understand that what you did was best. The other, the second major part to JV leadership is thinking, hey, I'm in charge, therefore I come up with all the great ideas. And I'm going to make every single decision without your input. and I'm going to really try hard to make sure everybody knows I am in charge. That's ridiculous. It is not your job to come up with all the great ideas. Some of the best ideas I received were from 19-year-olds.

You know, 21-year-olds who had already been to Iraq once, had a great, sir, I got a great idea. Well, I want to hear all about it. It's our job as leaders to decide which are the best ideas to invest energy, time, and resources in. And that's not just, I get all this stuff all the time when I talk to different groups and companies. Well, military leadership is different than corporate leadership. Why? What am I saying here that doesn't apply? Well, it's too extreme.

It is not. You're taking us too literal with our warrior mentalities here. You do not need to be insecure. The best leaders are not insecure. They're secure. They know that they're there and ultimately going to make the final decision. But it empowers your people and you could achieve tempo when you're decentralized enough that they feel good about coming up with ideas,

sending them up to you to get backup for it and get resources behind it. But also knowing that they could make the appropriate decisions at their level because they know what your final intent is. Here's the outcome I want achieved. You get us there. You're the expert at it. That's why I hired you.

I didn't tell my machine gunners how to work their T&E system and how to cite in their machine guns, right? I just told them what I wanted them to hit. They're better than that at me. Taking the time to spend it with my Marines and their different functions and aspects and talk to them about how they're the expert and compliment them like that,

it made them feel great. It does wonders for a leader to go to their level, see what they do every day and see that expert work. Because they don't expect you to be an expert and all of that. They know that, right? Your job is different. Your responsibilities are different. You need to have greater perspective.

But when you go to their level and respect what they do and show them respect for what they do and how they do it, man, it's a powerful thing. That could make a group of people so much better collectively than they ever would have been individually. And when it happens, right, when you finally get there and can achieve that, it is awesome. It's the most rewarding experience you could ever have. And it's hard for people to understand because most people think, well, the most rewarding

experience you guys probably have is killing people. No, it's so much different than that. So much different. There's so much more to it. than that. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting too that, by the way, what you're saying right now is basically the entire book that my buddy Laf Bab is, there's a chapter in there called Decentralized Command. Everything you're saying. So, but, and that's why, you know, you've come up in a completely different, you know, in the Marine Corps, I was in the, in the, in the Navy. And yet, you know,

you and I have both, I can tell right now, basically completely aligned leadership principles. Isn't it interesting though that some guys don't get it? They don't get it and you could explain it to them and you'd say, listen, man, hey, you don't need to make every decision. And in fact, when you get out in a firefight, you won't be able to make every decision. You're going to have to let your leaders lead and you're going to have to let and they would listen to you and you could see it going right through their head.

It's wild. You wonder what psychologically is going on in there that makes you want to rebel. And a lot of times it's, hey, they got a bad review from this officer. So this is their way of saying, you know, hey, you know, go fly a kite. You know, this is their way of rebelling. And I noticed that with some officers. And some of the, you know, I had to fire a lieutenant during my second deployment. And he had this problem.

You know, he kept feeling he had to be best friends with his Marines. He spent way too much time with them talking about a lot of personal stuff. They'd be out on patrol and nobody would listen to him. I mean, it was almost straight mutiny. And everyone I had to fire him. And here was the thing is, I had to tell him, look, you're a really good person. And you are most likely going to be very successful in whatever you choose to do. So please, please remember that.

It's hard to hear that now. This is a very unique job. And we are in a very dangerous scenario. We were already in Iraq. And we were in a dangerous area at the time. And things were about to go south. And I had to remove this kid now before things got worse. and it was hard from to understand that,

but you can be a phenomenal human being, a great person, but just not meant to lead, especially in those circumstances. But it's some people, and I think obviously if they have so many years growing up in a household where it was so different from what they're being taught,

that I think sometimes is the root for them to push back against this type of leadership. No, you know, I've been taught differently for years and years. It's kind of like, wow, Did you just block it all out for the, you know, year and a half you've been in school before you got here? With guys, with all this combat experience, and not to mention, hundreds of years of history of combat experience saying, look, this is the best way to do it.

Yes. And saying, no, I'm going to do it differently. I mean, the military is a business. It is a business. It's run like a business. And the leadership there, it's about maximizing the potential of all the human beings that you have on your, team and how do you do that? Yes, it involves tactics and what we do is different, but the personal, the small unit down to the large unit leadership is all the same. It's all the same. And you go

around and you talk to different executives who are having trouble, well, you know, it's the millennials and what they do and what they do and this do. And we were talking about it on the ride here. People, the experts, always want to blame some kind of process. I think your process and your information flow is wrong and the way that you have your workflow set up in the office space, that's causing this issue in communication. No, it's not. You're saying that because you are afraid to have the hard conversations with the leaders who are failing. Of which, by the way, you're one of the leaders. Yes. So when you're failing as a business and you got these issues, yeah, you're going to be one of the problems. And you might need help squaring that away. And that's okay. That's okay.

You know, another thing I notice in business world is a lot of people in the business world, they have no leadership training. So they've figured it out. They've been lucky and successful and they've gotten by with good people. And then they get to a certain point where all of a sudden they're going, wait a second, I can't handle this anymore. You know, if you grow from six people that you know pretty well that you trust and all of a sudden you've got a staff of 100 people, if you don't start learning how to lead, you're going to have significant problems. And it's going to blow up. And that happens from 100 people to 300 people and then from 300 people to 1,000 people.

It'll happen every time. And you've got to train those leaders throughout the chain of command that all have the same understanding of the fundamental principles of combat leadership, which is leadership. I have to throw combat in there because that was my old job. You know, it's funny you bring that up. There's a great example. Dan Quinn is the current head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. He was a defensive coordinator at Seattle, hired as a head coach in Atlanta. And through his, he's a very good friend of Jay Glazer, who's obviously very involved in mixed martial arts and does.

a lot of the Fox broadcasts and I've worked with him and gotten close with him. And so Jay introduced me to Dan. Dan was looking to make the team tougher. And here's a guy who has achieved the highest level of leadership and coaching, just like you talked about. He was a great coordinator. Now he's a head coach. And he had the humility to seek out experts from all. I mean, he went to different sports, talked to their head coaches.

He went to the military. He went all over with humility to ask and get advice and glean experience. from other people's time and leadership to include, I couldn't believe it, but here I am having breakfast with the man. Here I'm in his office or I'm in there and, you know, their little cafeteria there. We're just talking leadership. And he's talking about some of his individual guys and he's actually listening to my opinion, wanted to hear what I went through, my opinion on this guy or that guy is he brought me

into do some martial arts drills to make the team tougher. But I gained so much respect for that. Here's a man who's achieved the highest level. He knows he's in charge. He's not out to prove anything. His guys know he's in charge. And when they don't meet the standard, there's a consequence. But at the same time, he shows them the same kind of humility as he seeks out advice to get better every day because he wants them.

Hey, Julio Jones, I know you think you're the best wide receiver in football. But there's ways you can get better. And you need to be humble enough to find them. And guess what? Julio goes first in every drill. The dudes, I mean, I've watched him. Works as hard as any human being I've seen in the football field. Always looking to get better.

Matt Ryan, the same. And look at the position of the team's in now. But he has continually done that. He turned to Navy SEALs last summer, brought SEALs in to work with his team, to work with him on leadership, on accountability, and all this combat, but leadership. And bring it into that locker room

and create this cohesive unit that has had a tremendous turnaround from the 2015 season to now 2016. Yeah, yeah. Now in the UFC championship. Again, for you reciting, my book, which is what you do is we got a chapter there. It's called Check Your Ego.

And, you know, my point is the number one, the number one characteristic that a leader has to have is humility. And if you don't have that, all those things that you just talked about, you won't do any of them. You won't ever get better. You won't listen to anybody else. You won't take any advice. You can't.

That's a horrible thing. Let me, let me get us back on track to your life a little bit here. Why did you pick the Marine Corps? Because I couldn't swim. No, in all honesty, you know, I had thought for a while that I wanted to be a team guy. Playing football and trying to be a SEAL, it's extremely competitive. You know some of the guys who went into the teams. And, I mean, physical specimens, discipline, they're incredible.

They train for four years to then go and do all these different screeners. And for me, not having spent four years in the pool was costly. Because when it came time for me to do this screeners, to go do mini buds. It was basically a mini hell week for four straight days of the academy. It was tough. And we broke the ice

and the Chesapeake, all of that. You know, I trained for it for two weeks, right? I still had a shoulder problem and a hamstring problem from the season. I mean, it was just not going to work. I was not going to compete with these guys for it. But ultimately, what attracted me was the Warner racket started.

A lot of my buddies were in the marchup that I had played with that were, you know, graduated before me. I had talked to some folks that were in special operations and seals, and they talked about it, and it's a smaller team. So it's a little bit different, whereas in the Marine Corps, the leadership, you know, at very young age, you're going to have 40-some Marines. You'll go on to be a company commander at this level. You're going to get a legitimate opportunity to command large-scale units, and that was really appealing to me.

That's awesome. And I thought that that was probably the best opportunity for me, because if, you're going to be a large-scale unit. because if I was going to try to then be a team guy, I was going to have to go into the Navy as a surface warfare officer. And then after two years, and then after two years, that's rough. Try to get to butts, and there's no guarantees. Being a seal is extraordinarily competitive.

And the physical requirements as officers to get there are really, really high. And so for me, the Marine Corps had an amazing appeal. Did you know about the Marine Corps when you went to the Naval Academy, though? I wasn't, I did as soon as I went to Plebe Summer because they had run. They run it, and I'll tell you, a lot of the people at the Naval Academy when I was there hated the Marines. So many of them went there with a chip on their shoulder. This is the Naval Academy. There's no Marine Corps stuff in it.

So when we get our opportunity, we're really going to be jerks. And we had this great lieutenant colonel when I was a senior, and we had all been selected to be Marines who told us, look, guys, this is not the real Marine Corps. They're not representing as well. We've got a bad crop here right now that are. that are trying to prove a point. When you get to the basic school, you're going to find that it's massively different. And I loved everything about it.

I loved the diversity of my Marines. I mean, we talk about race. Race is a big deal. Racism in our country. It's a big topic. I mean, there's constantly battles on all the Hollywood news sites going on about race. Didn't exist when I was in the Marine Corps.

Men from all over the world. Dark green marine. It didn't matter. It did not matter. We didn't care. Everybody, hey, this is so-and-so. We didn't care. We had a mission every day.

We trained together. We bled together. And it was phenomenal. None of that stuff existed because we won together. We suffered together. And we looked beyond all of it. It just doesn't matter in the military. And it's so frustrating to see it matters so much here in the regular world.

Yeah. Where people have all kinds of preconceived things. and some people are out there acting like they're fighting on for the better of race relations in our country and they're making it worse because they've got their own personal agenda as they do it. It's just really frustrating. Yeah, well, I definitely, in the military, like you said, everyone's wearing the same uniform. And I'm sure in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s it was a big deal, they stamped it out. Because it doesn't matter.

It's no factor. one way or the other it's no factor that it's pretty awesome uh yeah went to the basic school you uh you got stalled in the basic school for a little bit of time and you know going through some legal stuff and while you're stalled at the basic school your friends start going on deployment yeah and all of a sudden you got your classmates your friends your brothers are getting killed. And you know, that feeling of being on sidelines, I think it's really hard to explain to people

and you do a good job in the book that I'll highlight a couple times, but I heard this quote one time, and I'm gonna throw it out there as best I can, but for women, like they have an intrinsic, biological desire to have children. Not all women, but a lot of women, let's say. And a lot of men have an intrinsic desire to go to war.

I don't know why that is. I know I had it since I can remember having human emotions. I wanted to go to war. You know, I mean, when you're a kid, the first thing you do when you pick up a stick is you shape it into a gun and start pointing it at your friends and trying to kill them, right? So here you were on the sidelines, sitting back,

and your friends are starting to get killed. Wow, what did that do to your psychology? It was dark. It was psychologically, that was the most challenging time period of my life. You've got someone challenging your character and your honor trying to say that you were something that you weren't, and I wouldn't allow it. There were easier ways to speed at the process and I refused.

No way. I know what happened. And during that delay, it was a very, very dark period. And it was difficult. But you have to slow life down sometimes, gain perspective and realize, hey, look, this is going to take some time. Eventually, I am going to get there. But what really it turned into when the opportunity finally came to, progress. Using my time wisely, the war wasn't going to go away tomorrow. You know, sometimes you get

this feeling in your mind like, oh, man, my friends are out there dying, they're leading, I need to be with them right now, realizing, whoa, it's not going to be gone tomorrow. So don't be so anxious. Don't waste the time you have now to get better. What can I do? I'm not going to let this stupid instance hold me back from improving from when I eventually do go on to lead Marines. And so I found a way to contribute value, I found a way to get better. It didn't happen right away. You know, there was a couple of weeks where it was dark, where I was angry, but I snapped out of it because there's times in life where life and your psychology,

they want, you want to be the victim, right? You want to feel like you've been wronged. And the problem is, is a lot of times when you go into that mode and you start playing the victim, you never crawl out of it. you get stuck in that world of the victim. You get stuck in this world that you think is all bad luck and everything's always going against you and you stop driving, you know, your own life.

You got to crawl out of that. When your mind is telling you to play the victim and to feel bad for yourself, nothing positive comes from that. Nothing. Did something specific snap you out of that mindset? Did your mom tell you something or your... You must read.

They talk about that, my book? Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah, your mom says. Yeah, she did. I mean, my, my mom is the sweetest woman in the world, too, but there are specific times in my life where she was extremely hard on me. The mess with mama stands where they were at the right times.

You'd meet her now. You're like, oh my goodness, she's such a push over. But there were times where she, hey, you're going to fight this. You understand me? You're going to fight this. You're right. That's it. And you move forward.

And you owe, just like we all owe. the friends that you lose, there are many different ways that we could remember them, that we can memorialize them. Some people choose the wrong way, in my opinion, substance, alcohol, depression, you know, they choose more of a victim-minded way of remembering them. Others choose, hey, they're no longer here. I can't bring them back. What would they want me to be doing? What would make them proud? I take their life for granted if I use them as an excuse to be idle and fail. Right?

But I memorialize them if I remember them, speak their name, and talk about them as I move on and I succeed. And I still think about that. I think about Ronnie Winchester, who I played football with, who died in al-Qaeda in Iraq. I think about Brett Harmon, who was killed at an NC State football tailgator before he could even lead his platoon to, battle. And those incidents happen again while you're on the sidelines. And the other thing you start doing right now at that time period is, what is that saying? When the student is ready and instructor will appear? Well, you ended up at the Marine Corps, the martial arts center for excellence, and you started training. I did. I ran into a colonel named Joe Shusko, who is just this phenomenal

guy all about character. I mean, in his 60s could outrun all of us. I mean, the epitome of discipline, discipline, discipline. And he brought me in, I started working there, and I got further introduced into martial arts, and I loved it. I found, hey, this is what I should be doing in my free time. I should be hitting heavy bags. I should be training. I should be watching tape.

I need to be, if I'm not reading military history and learning about my enemy, I'm doing this stuff. This is the type of stuff that's going to keep my mind sharp. And then I got intrigued. I wondered, okay, I'm going to lead Marines. in combat. And a lot of these books that they were making us read on killing and some of these books that in my opinion are a little off on the psychology of battle.

Agree. I mean, just brutal. You're going to pee yourself before you get shot at. Actually, negative. I'm not going to pee myself at all. So I wondered, all right, well, what can get me ready for that anxiety? I'm going to sign up for a fight. I had this master gunnery sergeant who was a really good kickboxer who worked at this martial

art center of excellence. said, hey, master guns, will you train me for a fight? Can you get me like one of these martial arts fights out in town? Yes, sir, I can get you one. Are you going to show up? Yeah, of course I'm going to show up. I don't know, sir. I get a lot of you officers that don't.

So anyways, I convince him to train me. Every morning at five in the morning, we're training. And I had six weeks this fight. I don't know much, right? I've got a black belt in the Marine Corps martial arts program. All right, that's an arm bar from the guard, an arm bar from the mount, a sweep on how to escape the mount. And I don't, I've never shrimped before. All right, I don't know what butterfly guard is.

I have no clue what half guard is. All right. I've got a jab across and a leg kit. Sounds like you're ready for your first M.M.A. And I was a black belt, you said? Huh? That was a black belt. That was black belt.

I got a jab across and a leg kit. Understand. Understand. All right. So, I get it. It's my first amateur fight. We weigh in, and the guy's older than me, he's got the same haircut as, Chuck Liddell and he's pretty ripped.

And so you'd weigh in the same day as the fight. So we all leave. Now it's time to eat and then you come back and so I come back and I'm warm up and he hasn't shown up yet. There's only a little sheet that they hung off a bar in between us. And our fight's coming up in two fights. I'm like, man, this guy may not show up. This is the

perfect scenario for me. He doesn't show. He was scared. I go out with all my Marine buddies in the crowd. I mean, there's 50 people at this fight and 15 them are there to watch me. And that makes it worse, right? And so he shows up and he's warming up

he's stretching I'm like looking through the sheet like oh maybe I need to do some of that too you know I don't tell him anyways we walk down this tarp

the fight starts and this dude he hits me with the worst spinning backfish you've ever seen I mean slow motion off balance

my head's so big anything you throw it it hits any damn way but hits me with the spinning back fist and I'm starting to get embarrassed he's coming at me

aggressive and now's that decision point okay I can mentally break now and kind of cover up and get out of here if this is a little uncomfortable for me. And at that point I kind of snapped and I got mad.

And so I go to try and take him down, which I have no wrestling. Football tag. I try to football. He wraps up a guillotine on me, full on, wraps the legs around my waist, and he is hammered. Everything he's got, you hear him and it's tight. I mean, I can feel the lights going out. I'm like, oh my

goodness, no. And I could hear his corner man, yelling to him. it's his wife. So now not only am I going to get tapped out in the first round, I'm going to get tapped out to a fake Chuck Liddell being cornered by his wife. Finish him, Terry, finish him. Yeah, I can't do this. I can't let this happen.

I find a way out of the choke. I kick him in the leg and realize, oh, I kick hard. He didn't like that. And then I crack him in the forehead and I split his head open. The doctor comes in. He doesn't know what month it is. And the fight's over. And there was a bunch of Vietnam vets in the crowd.

hammered. And as soon as I get out, these dudes, these guys, these crusty fellas, throw their arms, I mean, spilling beer all over me. They're feeding me, they're putting the beer down my throat from their cup with they got dips in there. I mean, this stuff is probably disgusting, right? But it tastes it so good.

And from that moment on, I was hooked. You know, this is, this is what I should be doing. I had six weeks of a fight on my mind. If I can get used to that, how will I deal with the anxiety of unprepared for battle. Hey, we're on patrol.

You know, we get contact. What's our immediate action? Where we're going to have a major operation coming up in six days. I have to be able to think clearly on the battlefield. Direct, lead, play chess. And so I thought, man, this fighting thing could be a key. It could be a help. And it certainly did not end up being that.

But it ended up being my sanctuary through it all. It was kind of what centered me. I brought tie pads to Iraq the first time. You know, I had one of my sergeants, it was a pretty good martial arts. We would train in between missions. I would train my guys. See, that's the difference between the SEAL teams

and the Marine Corps. You brought tie pads? I brought mats. Literally, like I had mat rooms. That's ridiculous. The budget is much, much different. Yeah, I know. It's almost embarrassing for me to admit, you know.

You also did a lot of wrestling drills with Travis Mannion, who's one of your buddies, and so he helped you out. And there's an interesting part in the book where you talk about you and Travis are going to Brett, who you just talked about. You're going to his funeral. The guy was shot at some little scuffle.

NC State Tailgator. There you go. Shot the chest and killed. You guys are going to his funeral and the wrestling coach tells you guys to write your own eulogies for yourselves. for yourselves. Interesting drill.

That's an interesting drill. Joel Sherritt, he is the head coach at the Naval Academy Wrestling team right now. And it was wild, you know. So Brett Harmon was a Marine infantry officer. He was in third battalion, second Marines, which would be my eventual battalion, went to an NC State football tailgator. There were some guys there drinking and driving, and they almost hit a kid. And so him and his buddy from Chicago, civilian, ran out in front of the car and stopped him,

and they got an argument. What are you guys doing? You know, you guys are drunk, shouldn't be driving. The guys get out, they started to scuffle. Brett and his buddy won. Came back a couple hours later and shot them both point blank. Shot Brett's buddy in the face, and Brett went to get and take the gun from him.

He got shot in the chest and they died. And so it was interesting because as we were right in this eulogy, you know, me and Travis, we were so close. And he was a fantastic wrestler. And one of the toughest human beings I've ever known. I mean, what we used to do to each other was ridiculous training. I mean, as long as it was standing, I would just destroy him.

As soon as he got sick of that and wanted to tackle me on the ground, I wasn't getting up anymore and he was destroying me. But it would just go back and forth for hours. And instead of playing video games, drinking beer, going out and hitting on girls, that's what me and Travis would do on a Friday and Saturday night. And it was really tough when you really start to think, what do you want to be said when it's all over for you?

How do you want to be remembered? And I remember Travis, he really struggled with it. this. Struggled. I mean, he was so loud talking about that every else in the plane, it was weird. And part of it was because we were just struggling with the fact that, you know, our friend is dead, you know, for such a weird circumstance. Yeah, we could understand if it was an IED or a sniper or something.

Not this. And, you know, several years later, it was wild. But, you know, Joel shared when he would give Travis's eulogy. He brought that story up. Travis would get killed in Fallujah. And I remember driving up to Travis's funeral. And, you know, Travis is one of those guys that you just never, he can't die. He's just too bad.

He's too tough. He's too smart, too good. So I remember driving up to the funeral, and I had my wife there with me, and she was actually trying to make plans with their twin sister. Hey, we're going to be in town. We live in North Carolina. Let's get together this weekend. But her twin sister's husband didn't want to get together.

There was a part of me that didn't, Travis isn't dead. Like I'm going to get there and we're all going to hang out tonight. And I remember when I walked into that wake and I actually saw him, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was brutal. I loved that guy so much. And we carried him the next day. But, you know, it's just, it's so crazy how connected it was because Ronnie Winchester died in al-Qaeda in Iraq. and three days later,

Brett Harmon died at that NC State football game. We would go to Brett Harmon's funeral, write our own eulogies with Joel Sherritt, who would then end up giving Travis Mannion his actual eulogy, and I would carry Travis to his grave. I went to Al-Qaim Iraq and actually replaced Ronnie's platoon and turned over with the replacement platoon commander who took over for him when he passed.

While I was an infantry officer course, J.P. Blacksmith was killed in Fallujah. And I got this a little out of order, but when JP died, I found out right before I had my last amateur fight. I was an infantry officer course. And I'm getting ready to fight in two hours for a title. Travis Mannion was my cornerman. And we're in the hotel room and he got a call. And then he looked like he had seen a ghost. Like, Trav, what's wrong? He was nothing, dude. I'll tell you after the fight. And we had, you know, we had gotten bad. I was like, no, I know something's up.

What the hell happened? Travis told me, dude, J.P. Blacksmith got killed in Fallujah. So Travis tells me by J.P.'s death. I turned over with J.P.'s company, my second tour. So I met all of his old Marines, all of his own platoon commanders. I mean, it's just, it's such a small world that we lived and breed then, you know. And so in my little platoon commander's notebook, I had pictures of all of them. And before every mission I would flip through.

And you just think, how. how do I make them proud? Before every fight, I would look at their pictures and look at the pictures of my Marines. How do I make them proud? How do I make them proud? And I still think about it to this day.

And I end a lot of my speeches on this. They no longer have the chance to live. Who am I to take this life for granted? Because they would give anything to have one more day. Their families would give anything to have one more day. And I try to remind myself of that all the time. And you don't have to serve in the middle, to think like that. People look at me, well, that's extreme. Well, who have you lost in your life?

What would make them proud? How do you truly memorialize them? It's certainly not through failure. It's not through being idle in life. Live a life of substance, not just existence. And that, you know, as you do that and you remember them, that makes them proud. That makes it, that makes it worth it. You know, it's very similar to that final scene in saving Private Ryan where he's like, did I earn it? You know, and for those of us who served and were in those great circumstances or for those people, there's people that were in tragedies

where they were in car accidents, they lost people, they think the same way. They think a lot the way they do that we do when we look at life and taking things for granted and achieving every day, adding value. Yeah, there's darkness in the world regardless of where you are.

You, you know, speaking of your combat tours, I want to kind of dive into those a little bit and let's take you. You take over your platoon. You're a platoon commander now. Back to the book here. During our first platoon meeting, my introductory speech lasted less than two minutes.

We're going to be aggressive, I told my new command. We're going to train our asses off and we're going to be, and we're going to work harder than anyone else in the battalion. That was it. Short, to the point, all business.

What's more? They found out. quickly I wasn't kidding so you you guys work hard you get prepared you deploy to Al Qaim which you just talked about that's where you ended up going and I'm jumping ahead a little bit people gonna have to read this whole book themselves but you're you're basically now setting up a position on a bridge you're kind of a blocking force and this bridge prevent enemy from consolidating on another area where there's another operation going on.

And I'm going to the book. Mortars began to fall on our position. As we fought back, I made sure that our vehicles moved from one spot to another, so the mortar crews would not zero in on us. From a wadi that ran perpendicular to route emerald. Several insurgents began lobbying rocket-propelled grenades at us. The rockets exploded all around us. Then another heavy machine gun let loose.

This one sighted on the north bank as well. We were caught in 180-degree crossfire. From my window I could see Corporal Delator and Bravo One. They were taking the brunt of the fire and Delator briefly dipped out of the turd as bullets bounced off the Humvee's armored skin. Then I saw his hand pop up above the blast shield holding a video camera. It takes a rare kind of cool to do something like that. In combat, an infantry platoon's first task is to achieve fire superiority over the enemy. To do this requires pouring it on the insurgents until they,

are forced to either disengage or go to ground. Once they're either driven off, either driven off or pinned in place, you've gained command of the fight and can dictate what happens next. Even with the tanks, because I failed to mention you had some tanks, some army tanks with you,

and you throughout the book have the same deep love for tanks that I have for army tankers, marine tanks, but I love tanks. Even with the tanks, in this case, we didn't have the fight.

power to gain control of this battle. There were too many insurgents shooting at us from too many different places. We needed some help. I reached for the radio's headset, began calling airstrikes within minutes. Huey Cobra gunships, thundered in on scene to deliver deadly accurate hellfire missiles into targets we identified. So was this situation here? Was that like your first big combat scenario?

It was. It was. And the thing that made it so difficult was there was another platoon. assigned for that mission. Right. And they got stuck in the mud. They got stuck in the mud. They got stuck in the mud.

Stuck in the mud. And so we didn't get the opportunity to aerial reconnaissance. We didn't have the opportunity to look at overhead imagery of this terrain. We had nothing. I had 15 minutes. Hey, if they're not there in 15 minutes, you're a go. So in that 15 minutes, I'm briefing my guys. We're getting ready.

Now we're meeting. This tank crew is from Boise, Idaho. We'd never even met them. I met them the day before. my guys had never worked with them before. So there was a lot of confusion that took place just in the route up. And as we got settled and started to identify targets, and as you know, in that scenario, the acoustics and in the movement,

the amount of people, we are the most precise military in the history of this planet. So we not only have to identify where is the gunfire coming from. What caliber do I believe they're firing back or at us with? Because that dictates what caliber I'm allowed to return fire with, depending on where they're shooting at me from. Are they in a dug-in position north of the river? Are they shooting at me from a building where there's civilians around? Are they shooting at me from a wadi where now I can drop hell fires on them?

I can hit them with tanks. That's a lot going through your head when you've got four vehicles, two tanks, an aircraft you're trying to control as a 24-year-old kid, and everybody's waiting on you to say what's coming next. Just like in every vehicle, there's another kid in there directing everything they're doing. And that is all part of it. But that was our first time.

When Delo Tori, I don't put in the book, but what I said to him over the radio, I mean, I verbally almost killed him through the radio for doing it, that wild son of a bitch. I've told this story on the podcast, but I had a similar story, and I'll tell it again right now because Mikey Monsor,

who ended up getting killed in Ramadi Medal of Honor, I went to go to his little station where he was, and the guys were like, hey, do you see Mikey's video? And I was like, no, you know, and they go, go take a look at Mikey's video. So Mikey was a heavy weapons gunner

and carried the Mark 48. And so I go back and do his little word Camp Corregador in Ramadi. I go back and do his little hootia built for himself. I'm like, Mikey, let me see your, let me see your video. And he goes, oh, Roger, that, sir. So he pulls out his little camera

and he shows the video. And there's a massive firefight going on in the Moolob district of Ramadi. And he's got the camera up. And you can see it ducked out or go up. He's filming everything. And he gets done showing me. And at one point in the video, he turns the camera at himself. And he goes, it's the Moolab, which was just classic, Mikey.

And so he gets done. And, of course, I'm all hardcore. And I go, hey, Mikey, bro, what are you doing out there? You know, you're in a firefight. You need to be on your pig gun, getting rounds down. and killing bad guys. He's like, sir, I'm sorry, I was, I was Winchester. He had no more.

He already dumped a thousand rounds. And I was like, all right, Mikey, you're good, you know, that you're fine. You can video it all you want if you go Winchester. But yeah, I was thinking that when I read that, I was like, you probably weren't too happy about that. I was so mad, so mad. Another thing, let me just give you this prompt, and you're going to hear this too when you get off this podcast and people are going to hit you. you up on social media you're gonna hear from young so you're gonna hear from

soldiers and Marines that are gonna ask you questions because they listen to this and they get knowledge from it is there anything that you didn't expect that you wish somebody would have told you going into that first firefight for someone that's in basic training right now or or at the basic school right now anything that you piece of advice you'd give them yeah you know a few things you know one don't go in there guns of blazing right away because in that circumstance the sound is actually one of your better indicators or where the gunfire is coming from because when that heat is blazing you're not going to see a muzzle flash it just doesn't exist right the other thing is

when you're when you are keeping your vehicles mobile that doesn't allow you to lock in on a t and system with a heavy machine gun. So you've got to be smart in the increments that you move in and the formations you move in and make sure that your machine gunners have drilled that. We would do drill. We would do T&E drills till my guy's hands bled and not just the primary machine gunner, everybody in that truck. So if one goes down, the other comes up so that when we moved them, they can quickly

get back on that same target. Because basically what that became a game of is you suppress that position with a 240 golfer, a medium machine gun until I can talk the tax. tanks on and then the tanks, they don't miss. It's all computer. It's like a video game. And we dug in positions, just aim a little bit lower and watch the shit fly. Excuse my language. But that was one of the problems.

When we went in and we started receiving some gunfire, everybody started shooting fire at where we could identify with. But then also we're getting shot at from other positions. We can't really tell because of the acoustics until somebody actually hits. Wait a minute, we're getting hit from back here too. And then some of the increments my drivers would move in, they moved so much that it was no longer a small adjustment on the T&E for that machine gunner. Now they've got to get out of the turret, exposing themselves to work that thing in,

and because of collateral damage, you can't just work it in, send some rounds down in, oops, I hit the building 10 feet away. You're not allowed to do that. You've got to get that sucker into where you see it on the site, and then you can start sending rounds down while that guy gets to shoot at you because you're so concerned with collateral damage.

And so drill, drill, drill, because a mortar dropping on the top of a Humvee is not a good thing and they are more accurate than you realize. The enemy out there has been launching mortars and indirect fire for decades where you get a little bit of ammo to do it on Range 400 out, you know, out in the palms for Marines, that is. These guys get to do it every day for real.

Yeah, and you know what? They don't even have to be good. They get lucky one time and human life doesn't mean anything to them but it means everything to us. So they get lucky one time. And that's the way it goes. And that's the way combat is. So you get done with that.

And tank hits an IED. You need to find out what's going on. And basically there's a burning Abrams here going on. Suddenly a huge explosion drowned out all other battle sounds. The ground rolled and shook as if the fault line had suddenly collapsed, Ahead a maelstrom of sand dirt smoke and flames boiled skyward Before I could even ask sergeant Peterson's voice came over the radio mortar hit one of the tanks my column break to a stop The explosion morphed into a dry into a small dirty brown mushroom cloud over Saff sergeant Plumkees m1

No way a mortar did that that had to have been an massive IED Luke Miller called over to me I have no columns of them so now you radio for a medevac You're trying to find out what's going on. The tank's on fire. And here we go back to the book. I took a deep breath and ran for the burning Abrams. I took only a few steps before I saw Robertson frantically waving back at me. Sorry, waving me back.

Just then a line of bullets stitched across the sand about 10 feet ahead of me. I executed my best football shuttle run and dashed back for cover. Bravo 3 laid down suppressing fire, which allowed me to get across the open space on my second attempt. So that's cover and move and another thing. Chapter in the book, something I talk about all the time.

This is the fundamental, this fundamental tactic. That's what it is. Cover and move. Then you guys are doing it right here. When I reached Robertson, he shouted, we still got two wounded in there. We had to get the men out quickly.

I climbed onto the tank. Miller following a short time later. The incoming fire was heavy and more than once we had to duck behind the turret. So getting your game on, Brian Stan. I'm kidding. You know, the funniest thing about it was I was trying to maintain a low profile when I got in the tank.

There's little micro things you can hide behind. And the drivers, the person deepest in that thing, and we couldn't get him out. He was the last one. And he was a bigger guy. And I'm trying to lift him. I'm a strong dude. And I lifted way toes in Iraq. And that was a strong, bigger guy than I am right now.

Couldn't get him out. And I couldn't understand why. And he's looking at me. He's got blood over me. He's like, why is this taking? so long and he doesn't say it that clear I mean he's he's out of it I didn't know at the time he was paralyzed from the chest down there and so I realized the only way I'm getting him out is if I get my legs underneath me and that's going to create a target and so you we think

sometimes we think some silly things in combat and I just thought look if I'm going to get shot by these guys what's the last thing I want them to see before they hit me and that's my rear end so when I hopped up I I faced that right towards them but I honestly think I think it would save me. You'll talk to people that hunt, and they talk about when they get that perfect buck in their sights. Huge rack. And it's such an easy shot,

but they're so excited that they pulled a shot and they miss. Well, when I've got a Kevlar helmet on, I look, who's seen baseball? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can see me right now. It's just his headset. When I've got Kevlar on, I mean, if someone's trying to snite me,

or they're trying to shoot at me with a meeting machine, machine gun and they see they're like oh man I got this dude they missed and I squire I was able to pull him up and we literally you know we we almost collapse off the tank and land on top of another guy and got him down but the only thing I could think of me obviously grateful when we landed hey I don't think I got shot did you get hit he didn't get hit and we were able to get him out but that was that was what I think happened is sometimes you just get lucky and I think I presented such a big target Whoever is behind that trigger just straight blew it. Yeah, that's a nightmare too.

I'll tell you when this enemy sees a downed vehicle, it is like a bullet magnet. The fact that you survived that is ridiculous. And yeah, it's a miracle and luck and everything else. Because when the enemy sees a target like that, man, they just pour fire onto it because they know they're creating a total catastrophic situation for us. And they almost always have a camera on it too.

Yeah, that's true. They are, they study film. It didn't, I couldn't find it. But they study film like NFL teams study film. And sometimes you find their footage where they didn't even attack you. They're just watching what your response was to see what they're going to do next. People underestimate the evil and the detail that they go through. Maybe Ahmed the sniper decided to delete that video because he was going to get in so much trouble for missing the big...

We're getting American. He's like, how did you miss this guy? I don't know. So you call in, actually you call in helicopters. They come in under fire. Don't take any hits somehow miraculously. I still have been, I have not been able to find who was flying that Huey. I never was able to find out.

And I mean, I wish I could. That guy who landed because a whole squad was taken out a few clicks to our east and there was no medevac birds. And this guy, I mean, we laid down the butterfly trigger so that he could land. But man, he showed some guts. He would have been fired had they got hit and had that halo going down, but he didn't care. He knew there was a Marine there that needed to get out and need to get out now or else he was done. And he landed, got him and lifted off.

And I never saw him again. I'm telling you that. That's a real hero. That was a Marine Corps. It was a Marine Corps pilot in a Huey of all things. A Huey. That took some stones. And I wish I wish I could find that person.

Well, he might hear this podcast and reach out. I hope so. I hope so. Now, you get that back to base, Halacious run, and you guys get back. Yeah, great, we survived. And then you get retasked. You got to go bring ammo weapons,

or sorry, ammo, water, fuel back up there. And this was interesting. I got this and I kind of brought it up earlier. But back to the book, Just before we rolled out, my alpha section arrived back at Al Qaim after a very dull day covering the jump-off point for the assault force tasked with crossing the Afraidis. They'd encountered no opposition. And my Bravo section, Marines quickly busted out the stories of our busy day, much to the jealousy of the rest of the platoon. This is what I was trying to explain earlier.

So these guys, you know, these guys are in a crazy firefight, almost get killed. They got guys getting wounded. They come back. The other squad had no action. And what are they? They're jealous and mad. Alpha section was so full of aggressive angry Marines who wanted nothing more to get into the fight.

They lobbied to go out on this run, but I vetoed the idea. Sergeant Pete's men knew the terrain now and we needed that experience to shepherd the two trucks to the bridge. I told my Alpha Section they'd have plenty of opportunities in the days to come, but I knew as we left the wire,

they remained on the base, frustrated and anxious. That just tells you what the Marine Corps is all about. They hated me that night. Hated me. And then, okay, so you do that. That's another hell run. And again, I'm not going to read your entire book.

People can buy this book and read it. But when you get back again, another just crazy run. When you get back, guess what? You've got to go back to the bridge again. That's good times. So here you go. Back to the book. We're going back to the bridge tonight.

I started. Alpha had sat out the last couple of fights. They were fresh and eager and ready to go in the fray. Right now, Bravo section had all the bragging rights. And that was driving Francis's men nuts. When I broke the news, I like this part. When I broke the news, I saw no fear in anyone's eyes, just anticipation and excitement. Be careful what you wish for, I thought.

So, again, Marines are fired up. to go and you go out again and this one again goes sideways you're using up all your nine lives oh man this this one got ugly quick and you know we expected it to but there's there was things working against us a little bit in that we had to go up there the tank that that that had the catastrophic kill days earlier we had to go up there and recover you can't leave that in the battlefield And so I had never even, I had never known what a Mike 88 recovery vehicle was. I learned that in Ramadi as well. It's, it's a tank with no guns.

And it's basically, it's a mechanic vehicle. They go fix the other tank or they tow it. And so we were going to meet a tank section, so two regular Abrams tanks, plus this Mike 88 tank recovery vehicle in the middle of the desert. Here's your grid. We'll meet there. I'm going to kick my order there. I've never even met.

these Marines before. Hey, by the way, here's your introduction to my Alpha section, by the way, too. We're going to head straight north and try and catch them by surprise

and get right up to the bridge. But I told him, look, this area has been heavily guarded, so be prepared. Well, this master sergeant who's driving the Mike 88 lets me know,

hey, sir, just so you know, once we get on that asphalt, this thing is only going to go about 10 miles an hour at best. What? As you started, wait, what?

we're good on sand but we don't go very fast on asphalt like well you don't want to go on sand you know what they bury in sand for us and what they have waiting for us there so man we hit the line of departure we head north and they

opened up on us and that Mike 88 just crawling crawling and my section leader staffs are in France his vehicle gets hit with an RPG just missed by an IED but the back of the vehicle's on fire and when we're getting hit, the tanks start returning fire.

And here's another really good lesson for young officers and just young service members in general. When you're fighting at night and you've got night vision goggles on and tanks are returning fire into these buildings, right? They were shooting down on us in these buildings, shooting us through windows. So the tanks are identified targets and they're taking them out. The debris, it's heavy. The material that these buildings are made of, it's very heavy and it blinded us. couldn't see now because all the damage the tanks did and my lead vehicle blew the turn.

Back of the vehicle's on fire, they blow the turn so we all blow the turn and link back up and now as I look down the block ahead I could see these lights blinking, which typically tells us it's signaling and ambush that are expecting us to go that route. It's now decision time and you've got to be quick. So at that time we're about to,

hey, let's turn the convoy around, let's hit the turn where we know we're going to get right to the people that need us, right to that down tank, Let's fight our way through this kill zone. Let me call on some airstrikes. That time is when they let loose those suicide vehicles and one got through our perimeter. And, man, I've,

one of the Marines actually filmed that explosion. And just a horrible, I mean, I heard that explosion. It just the first thing went through my head. I just got five kids killed immediately. It's the first thing that went through my head. Radio silence and everybody's waiting for it. There's no crying. There's no mourning.

There's no timeout. There's no, hey, staff sir, Robertson, you take over, no. I mean, after that thought, my next, my next thing needs to be me giving orders out of my mouth and moving people forward, because we don't have time to mourn right now. And so immediately I set a perimeter with the tanks. I established which vehicle is going to be the tow vehicle for our down vehicle, where the casualty is going to go, where's the corpsman, and I get out of my vehicle and I push. That's what leaders do. We go to the point of friction. Where's the point of friction? And that was my vehicle that's just hit with a suicide vehicle.

man I get there and on top of it is this 22 year old kid Jeff Lamson who's built like a number two pencil right he was just in this vehicle I mean this vehicle is destroyed

how he's conscious I don't know but he's on top of it pulling our gunner out of the turret who's got a piece of shrapnel in his head bigger than that book everybody in the vehicles everybody's wounded but staffs are and Francis

comes out and the whole side of his face is melted and he's like, sir, we're going to be good. I was never more relieved in my life. They're still getting shot at. Francis is basically walking, but he's not totally conscious yet. There's like bullets hitting on the guard. Like I got to grab and put it behind the vehicle for a second because he's out of it, of course.

But man, to see Lampson, this kid who actually had a little bit of an attitude at the time. With one of the guys I had to correct an awful lot, hairs a little too long, he tried to grow a mustache, a peach fuss. I mean, he's a kid. You look at the, I mean, you would never imagine that this is a warrior,

but in this time in need, I'm telling you, man, he was saving lives. And it was so humbling and so motivating to see that. And we were able to, we got everybody in that Mike 88, eventually got the toe, got out of there, and I mean, we called in a massive airstrike.

And we won, but we didn't pitch a shutout. That's for sure. And the hardest part of that was when all my casual are loaded on, you have, we're not doctors. We have no idea. When you see a guy with shrap in a lot of his brain like that, you think they're done. So my Marines, they think we may have lost two or three of these folks and they're down. And as far as I know, we're out there to fight from the three, four, five, six days.

That was gas, right, that had shrap in his head. Was he, was he walking wounded? Was he? So he would come to, he got shot. As Lampson was pulling him out of the turret, he got shot again in the elbow. as we were pulling him out and we got him to the MEDAVAC and he was just, I remember he was,

he was cursing. I can't believe I let them get us. I can't believe I let them get us. Blaming himself for the suicide vehicle, getting to the vehicle. And I told him, it's not my fault. It's not your fault.

And, but at least he was talking. Yeah. But, I mean, this, I, you know, this is pretty freaky when you see a piece of metal in someone's head just like this. And I don't, he couldn't see himself and nobody wanted to tell him.

Nobody wanted to say, hey, reach up and touch what's in your brain right now. But he was gone. I mean, once he left that day, we didn't see him the rest of the deployment. I didn't see him until I had gotten back. And the craziest thing is we reunited for an episode of Ultimate Insider with the UFC. And I didn't really know what they were after. And this producer, you know, asked me if I could get this guy there.

You're going to do a story. It was really going to be honorable to him, this and that. And it was, right? But at the same time, he's sitting us next to each other. and he's asking this Marine, hey, do you blame Brian Stan for this happening? Do you blame this for, I mean, it was, it was dark and it was difficult. It was hard for both of us, man, because, you know, for gas, he lived, right? And he's got a family now, but the amount of headaches, the piercing headaches this man

struggles with, you know, in and out of comms, try and text him. I don't know where his numbers at. He's a great warrior, great dude. But the pain he lives with every day. I mean, that's never going away. He had, I think, four brain surgeries after that. Four brain surgeries. Unbelievable.

And he was blaming himself. Crazy. Warriors. And you know, you kind of wrap up that here, going back to the book, our unit 3-2 Marines is known as the Betio Bastards. In 1943, the battalion took part in Operation Galvanic. The invasion of Tarawa. Patio Island was the main target of the landing force

and the Marines faced an entrenched enemy with pre-registered fields of fire on the beaches. For those you that don't know what that is, that's an actual nightmare when the enemy already knows where their rounds are going to land when they fire them. It's a worst-case scenario. The first assault waves were nearly wiped out by machine gun and mortar fire as they waited through the lagoon

onto the narrow beach. It took 76 hours to, to clear the island, which was barely 2,000 yards long and a few score wide. Over 3,000 Marines and sailors died or fell wounded during what became the most ferocious close quarter battle ever fought by the United States Marine Corps. That was the legacy of my unit, a legacy of determination, heroism,

and stoic resolve in the face of unimaginable adversity. On May 10th, 2008, my Marines proved They were cut from the same cloth. It's so humbling when you watch these young men from all different walks of life. Some of them only citizens in the United States for a couple years at that point. Really diverse backgrounds. I mean, it's not a gang full of white people. I mean, it's very diverse.

I mean, they don't care. And, man, when they're getting shot at, there was nobody ducking for cover. nobody they are getting after it their their love and care for one another for the mission for people trying to destroy their way of life it's it's awe-inspiring to watch their selfless acts i mean what they'll do and and this was more obviously direct engagement against an enemy right but but there's i've seen them you know just like lamson was willing to sacrifice himself to save robert gas right I've seen Marines do the same to save innocent Iraqi kids. The same care that they had for one another,

they had for the people that they were there to protect. And that gets lost a lot when people talk about these wars. It's become cool to paint our military like we're this brutal force that's wiped out, you know, all these people in these different countries. I mean, these were men, these were men who were such great professional. But under the most extreme circumstances Understood that they could lose their life and that was a hundred percent acceptable to them if that meant saving the guy next to him And that it's hard for me to meet somebody like Michael Strahan or a football player

Famous person right they're all impressive people, but it's hard for me to meet someone like that and be like oh my God Can I get a picture for Instagram? When when you've been around 19, 21, 20-year-old kids. And these kids don't come from rich backgrounds, right? They didn't have a whole lot. There was a reason when our nation was in two wars, they decided to sign up and be infantry in the Marine Corps.

It was, they will forever be the greatest people I've ever been surrounded with. Yeah, you know, I talk about that all the time. The fact that when we were in Ramadi specifically, you know, here we were the special operations guys, the Navy SEALs, whatever. We, all of us, all of us guys, we just had such admiration and love for the Marine Corps and for the Army soldiers that we work with. Those guys, like you said, and for us, we're sitting there, we're going, man, we've got we've got infinitely more training, infinitely more training than

A grunt has. That's just the way it is. Absolutely. You talk about the budget. We used to shoot more rounds in a week than a Marine Corps company would shoot their workup. No kidding. Like we, I saw all the numbers. So we get infinitely more training.

We get better gear. And yet you go down to the government center in Ramadi or you go down to cop falcon and you look at those soldiers and Marines that are getting after it every day. And that's why we just had nothing but the utmost highest respect for those guys and they knew it. That was some nasty fighting down there too. Nasty fighting in Ramadi. Yeah. I'm going to take us back to the book here.

An Amtrak, a lightly armored amphibious vehicle, first platoon 325 struck a landmine only a few hundred meters from our position. So this is another operation that you're out on. And this is where we started this day off. We heard the explosion, saw the smoke, flames rising behind us and then heard the cries for help over the radio. We couldn't go to their aid. The bridge had not yet been cleared and we were almost certain had had been mined by the enemy. Besides, we couldn't leave our blocking position without exposing the left flank. The track burned as 325's fellow Marines and my friend and mentor, Lieutenant

Deanna, from our weapons company, frantically tried to free the men trapped inside. Inside Alpha 3, I could see this color drain from my men's faces. They looked absolutely stricken. Then the tracks ready ammunition began cooking off. With each detonation, I could see my men flinch. I ordered everyone to face south. I didn't want my men to see what was unfolding. Hearing it over the radio was bad enough.

Five Marines died inside the track. Everyone else inside suffered wounds of varying degrees. The driver was pulled from the wreckage, his face bloody and missing teeth. The explosion had slammed his head against the vehicle's front console. Another Marine emerged with his uniform on fire. Quick thinking men nearby got him on the ground and put the flames out with a fire extinguisher. Of all my experiences in combat, this is the one that haunts me the most. The feeling of complete impotence in the face of such a profound.

tragedy scarred us all that day. Gabe Diana had actually served in Lima 325. It's a reserve unit out of Columbus, Ohio. Before he became active duty and then became an officer, he was enlisted with 325. And I remember when we were starting this operation, and 325 came to our base, him bringing some of these guys.

Hey, man, he grew up with them. I mean, these were his brothers. And now they were firefighters. They were police officers all brought together for this mission. Man, it was brutal. Absolutely brutal. And I remember hearing a story about this woman from Columbus who they had lost, I think it was over 20. I think it was around 22 Marines from Lehman 325 during that deployment.

And she decided to paint these beautiful murals and murals of each one. And they were so nice that the Marine Corps Museum for a while put them right in their foyer. as you walk into the museum, there they were, and they were big. And I remember hearing the story, and then I was doing a shoot with the UFC and the Marine Corps, when the Marine Corps was advertising with the UFC, and part of this shoot was going to be us as fighters, and then with the Marines going to the Marine Corps Museum. And I was kind of, you know, both sides of the fence on that. And we walked in, and they were there, and I didn't know.

I didn't expect it. And it was really tough because here I am, you know, I'm around these Marines, and I'm around, you know, some of my buddies and Rashad Ebb. Fores Griffin were there. And I mean, as soon as I walked in, man, my eyes filled up with tears. You know, being, getting the opportunity to meet some of these men very briefly, then we set off and go. And because of my relationship with Gabe Diana, who was my mentor at the time and knowing what he went through that day, childhood brothers of his and him also being helpless.

And nothing's fair in combat. We know that. Nothing's fair. And you don't have the choice. again, you don't have the choice. That gets cleared on. That force continues to push west so that we can finish the mission of this operation. We've got to continue providing our blocking position, and that's it.

If you lose focus, more of that's going to happen. It's a difficult thing to deal with, but that's what we signed up to do. That's why we have an all-volunteer force, and it's the greatest military force this world has ever seen. And it's unfortunate, but part of it is dying. We die in battle. So that the innocent people here that live in America don't And it sucks and it's painful But at the end of the day we all we know

When we sign up we know that that is a possibility It is indeed Now you had Nine guys wounded from your platoon Is that right? From that whole deployment From that couple days Okay yes

Here we go nine men in a week here I'll go to the book But some of them were the reservist tankers that weren't technically mine. But got it. The loss of so many Marines under my command had eaten away at me, almost to the point where I suffered a crisis and confidence, nine men in a week of combat.

What had I done wrong? What had I done wrong? What lessons could I learn? My mind obsessed over those questions. Inside the COC, I braced for the shit storm. Captain Ford Phillips, my company commander spotted me

as I came through the door. He swiftly took me aside. Here it comes, I thought. Brian, excellent job. You did everything right out there. Thank you. My jaw almost fell open. Those were the last words I had expected to hear.

I greatly admired Captain Phillips and had long since learned he always meant what he said. His words were never designed to make someone feel better. They were always designed to make a man a better officer and a better Marine. Always. His words ease the pain of the last seven days, but did not erase the guilt that I felt. To this day, I questioned the decisions I made that night. That is the onus of command. You always bear the responsibility for those under you.

When they suffer wounds or are killed by the enemy, it is impossible for an officer not to second-guess himself and own part of their suffering or deaths. As leaders, we understand control. That is where we operate. Having it is comfort. but combat and the enemy strips that away at times. Once the bullets fly and the violent chaos of a firefight reigns, control becomes an illusion. A platoon commander cannot determine which enemy bullets will strike what vehicles.

He cannot select the moment when an insurgent triggers an IED. He cannot dictate who survives and who doesn't. All he can do is try and fight back to try and demolish the chaos with enough firepower that the enemy dies or runs away. Almost everything else is beyond the leader's control. Those limits of leadership were never drilled into us at the academy. When I experienced it for the first time during Operation Matador, I came gradually to understand on an intellectual level. But in my heart, I still wonder if I could have done something else that might have saved

my Marines from harm. I still spend sleepless nights replaying every moment in my head hoping men like Robert gas and Jonathan Lowe can forgive me. All part of it, man. And it's funny you read that passage. I was up last night. Same thing. 2.45 in the morning and replaying it.

And it's not something I would say, there's a negative aspect. People will hear me say that and be like, oh man, that's bad, you know, post-traumatic stress or something. No. It's me being a human being who cares and wonders. and it's hard. That's never going to go away.

And I'll always wonder that. You know, wouldn't it have been a better decision to take a left turn and abort the mission at that point? Should I have tried to get back to the bridge? Or if I'd have gone three blocks up, maybe there would have been a path

we could have found and put our headlights on. There are so many what ifs, so many what ifs that you go through as leaders. And if you try to ignore those times where you spend those sleepless nights and not think through it, I think it makes it worse. I think the fact that I'll go through the drill,

like last night, which is the first time and a long time that I did, I think part of it because I knew we'd probably be talking about it. I think it's healthy to do that. For me, at least it has been. It's healthy for me to replay that and to understand. And, you know, you talked about that moment with my company commander Ford Phillips. I remember that conversation. and I remember kind of going back at him a little bit and saying,

you know, I just, I think if I would have done this or done that, and he stopped me. Brian, listen, you did everything right. You did everything that you could do out there. And it was, you know, it was definitely what I needed to hear because we still had a long way to go on that deployment, and I still had to go do another one. It was great leadership on his part because it gave me,

there was no more second guessing at that point, you know, because that was not the time. to sit there and start to question my decision and my instincts in battle that it served me well up until that point. I had a similar conversation, as a matter of fact, with Laif. So, you know, when Mark Lee got killed, it was Ryan Job, who ended up dying as well,

but he had been severely wounded. And Laif was down at a combat outpost with his platoon, and we got, Ryan Job, had been Kazavats, out and now the guys are down at this combat outpost and the army who the 137 bulldogs Bravo company who we had an amazing relationship with Captain Mike Bahama main gun Mike they were out trying to try to get after it and they got to a point where they said hey we think we know where these guys are that shot Ryan do you can you guys help us I mean it was like the worst day of fighting

And Laif called me up on the on the radio and says, hey, I want to go back out. They think they know where these guys are. I want to go back out. And I was like, go. Go get some. And he went out and, you know, they were under heavy fire. And that's when Mark got killed. And, you know, Leif was, you know, he was, you know, the mission gets done and all that.

But next day, Leif comes to me and he says, you know, hey, Hey, Jocco, he was tore up, you know, he was tore up. His friend, his brother was dead. His other friend was severely wounded. But what really got to him was Mark because, you know, he made this decision to go back out. And he said to me, you know, I just don't know if I, you know, I don't know if I made the right decision. And I said to him, Leif, there was no decision to make. There was Americans out there fighting in the streets.

trying to get after these guys that had wounded one of your guys, one of our guys, and they thought they knew where he was, and they thought you could go and get them, there's no decision to make you, don't even have a choice in that situation. You do what you do as an American, as a seal, as a frog man. There was no decision. You did what we do. I think that's something that any leader, when you get your young leaders out there no obviously if they screw something up obviously that's a different story but you know you don't have the luxury

of knowing what's going to happen in a combat situation there's no crystal ball there's no you don't know like what you just said guys would say that stuff to me sometimes like you could have gone left or right oh really because if you could have gone left like you just talked about and hit a giant ID and now everyone's dead you could have gone straight

and you could have gotten clear you don't know You don't have that luxury in combat. You're making decisions based on the information that you have at that time. You don't know all this other shit yet. If you knew it, obviously looking back, hindsight's 2020. We wouldn't have even gone there in the first place. But we don't know that. The only way to avoid any risk is not to go, is not to do your job, is to just go ahead and stand up, raise your hand and say, I'm a coward.

That's how you can avoid these situations. but guys in the Marine Corps, guys in the SEAL teams, they don't raise their hand and say that. They raise their hand and say, where's the bad guys? We're going to get them. And one of the mistakes you can make, too,

is sometimes you want to stop and you want to think about it. Sometimes there is no right answer, right? There's a bunch of things you can do. There's a bunch of options, and whatever one you take and maintain tempo and achieve tempo and stay a step ahead of the enemy is the right one. It's how you execute it.

Either way, you could be going into a bad day, but you better do it your way and on your terms. Yeah. One thing that's guaranteed to turn into a bad day is sitting there and not doing nothing. Absolutely. Because I'll tell you what, if you're not maneuvering, the enemy is maneuvering. If you're not maneuvering, the enemy is absolutely maneuvering. They're getting, they're flanking you, they're getting a high ground, they're doing something.

So you better just be in action, taking action, make a decision and go. Especially on their turf. Their turf, their cities, their neighborhoods, they know every corner. We're guessing. So now you come back. I'm fast forwarding to where you're now becoming a company XO. I'm going to the book. Just after we deployed again in 2006,

I was pulled from weapons company to become executive officer for India Company, three, two Marines. It happened so fast and I have time to get to know my new Marines. Before we ended up in country again, we deployed to Al-Lombar province to a fob near Habanilla. And this was cool because you were in Habanilla and I was 20 miles away in Ramadi. in that summer of 2006. Next, my company lost four Marines killed.

Lance Corporal Don Champ. Champlin was our first. He was killed by a roadside bomb on the main road running through our area. That was the end of August of 2006. A month later, on the 24th, our company commander sent a platoon out after an insurgent who'd fired a rocket into one of our patrol bases.

They'd gone out without a special device that blocked incoming cell phone signals and prevented insurgents from remotely detonating IDs. sure enough the platoon got hit with a bomb blew Lance Corporal Renee Martinez 70 meters into the air he died instantly That one really hurt I'd been on the base at the time I took great pride in going out on patrols not to ride heard on the platoon commanders but to be there as an additional asset and to share the risks with my Marines This time I've been tied up and couldn't get out there with the men When I heard what was happening, I grabbed a Humvee and raced to the scene.

We carried Renee back to the morgue. Inside, I stood next to him, held his hand, and said my goodbyes. I will carry the guilt of that day for the rest of my life. I should have been out there with that platoon. We kept taking casualties that fall. Even units just passing through our area got hit. One EOD rig got hit with a roadside bomb. though the blast didn't destroy the armored Humvee had set off a couple

phosphorus-based incendiary grenades the EOD team had left on the floor of their rig before we could even get to them the white hot chemical fired melted them where they sat the site was indescribable after that scene morale in the company plummeted the men questioned the mission what was the point we were getting shot at almost almost every day going into Habania to patrol was a daily nightmare of snipers, bombs, and ambushes. Half the time, we couldn't even fire back. The rules of engagement were so strict

that if civilians were in the area, we could not engage the enemy. Since there were almost always civilians in the area, our Marines had to show incredible restraint even as they watched their brothers die. So you guys were wrapped. That REO was tight. It was tough.

I mean, it was, Habania had never been patrolled before. They had set up patrols. basis, but they had never gone out and walked around and they had, you know, the outgoing units said, you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. But you had to. The only way, the only way to defeat that enemy was to suffocate the area and what mattered most of the people.

If the people trusted us, they would feed us the information so we could capture the enemy. If the people trusted them because we wouldn't patrol and we were scared, then they would trust them. And we would end up not accomplishing our mission. And it was, it was so hard. you know people have this idea that because you wear a certain rank everybody's going to listen or it's hardcore leadership and they're not going to ask questions you know when i would go

patrol base to patrol base and speak to my men and they would ask why why should i walk out there tomorrow you know we don't have CNN and and this general or the president talking to us giving us this big huge hey here's the ultimate game plan or we don't get any of that I mean, my guys were showering once every 17, 18 days. That's it. We were living amongst the populace, amongst the enemy that was traveling all around the country coming in and attacking us. And so it got really difficult. But the one thing that stuck with them, that they could understand that at their perspective they got was, hey, look, if you quit on me, that's one less guy to man the post on top of this patrol base to keep this roadway clear.

That's one less guy guard in Mikey's flank when you go on patrol and you've got three patrols tomorrow. We were already so thin at that time. Our battle space was way too big for us to truly suffocate it to make sure the enemy couldn't come in in influence. Way too big. But as we got better, as we secured the area and we focused really on the main supply route and the economic parts of that, the shops, if we could secure the shops and secure the schools. Because the kids couldn't go to school

and the kids tried to go to school, al-Qaeda killed the teachers. So now we secured the area enough that the two schools could open. When we were able to do that, then the shops opened up and the people could start living their lives again. That was one of the proudest days

in my Marines' lives when those kids could walk to school again. These schools were corners blown up from IEDs, bullet holes in them. there were no roofs. I mean, they were, by our standards in America, you wouldn't be able to fathom what these looked like. They were basically concrete squares with really bad desks in them.

The school supplies they had were given to them from us. And so that was a huge win for us. And at that time, it was right around the same time of the surge. When the surge took place, what happened was two Iraqi companies pushed west and were able to take up a quarter of our battle space, which then greatly allowed us now. Now we've got enough people.

Now we can really influence it. What happened were the Iraqi people who you would sit down and have dinner with them and bring them gifts and talk to them. I'd have meetings with them at 2 in the morning when they felt comfortable to speak to me. Now they're telling me who, where, what time? Where can we get them?

And when you've got Marines question the mission and all of a sudden you deliver them some intel and say, hey, at 3 a.m., you're going to go find this person at this spot. This is what they look like. This is what they're called. Get them. Then they get excited.

And I don't mean get them is in terms of, hey, they're going to go and they're going to go kill that person. They're going to go capture them. And we had a whole process. The whole very frustrating. You had to literally, now my Marines are no longer infantry. And now they're also detectives. All right. So this is the intel package that led to this detention.

Here's the paperwork for the detention. We deliver them to the detention center. If you don't hit every wicket right, that person's back on the station. streets in three days. So that was also detailed, discipline, and doing all the right things, but they did it. And I tell you, Ramadi, Habanilla, they were some of the worst

areas in Iraq that fall. By Christmas time, it was amazing to turn around. It was incredible. They were quiet. Yep. They were quiet. It was, you know. I left October 21st, 2006.

There was 30 to 50 enemy attacks a day while I was in deployment, about six months. by January, there was like one or two enemy attacks a day. Down from 30 to 50. It was boom. It was incredible. Incredible progress. We left in February.

February 2007. And speaking to coming home, third battalion, second Marines came home in 2007 after suffering 15 killed in action. Could have been far worse for all of us. If we hadn't seen any progress in Hobania, that's what you're talking about. Then all those questions we had over the mission and its value would have returned home to torment us for years to come. In fact, we did see progress and that made it a little easier to accept things. And yeah, that's basically what you just said. And that's why, you know, you and I were talking about this on the way over.

As nice as it was that we got to see that happen, there was nothing more sickening to me. to have eight years later have the black flag of ISIS flying over the city of Ramadi at the government center that that it was just absolutely heinous to see that it didn't need to happen and you know they actually took Ramadi back again through massive air strike and I was talking to one of my buddies that that was a J-TAC that's actually coming on the podcast Marine Corps J-TAC that I was talking to you about earlier but he's I was like how many bombs did we drop in Ramadi? while we were there because it was a populous city there was normal iraqis that wanted to live their lives we weren't dropping moms he was like i don't know maybe a dozen 15 in the second

push in romadi that the iraqis just did behind the strength of american firepower you know how many air missions they did 600 strike missions have you seen pictures of romadi right now it's rubble Now they're rebuilding it now, but it was just rubble. And yeah, just, it's so disheartening. So you come home from that deployment and it's pretty quickly after you got home that Travis got killed. Yeah. And, you know, I wanted to give a little credit here to the MIT teams because Travis was a MET team, which is military transition team, which was, okay, so,

I talk about this sometimes, right? So the SEALs and the special operations guys, a lot of times we live in relative comfort. Okay, so we live like, okay, we're pretty comfortable. You know, like I said, I had mats on deployment. I brought a GP medium tent to put mats in because I got to train some Jiu-Jitsu. We have a nice weight room, you know, we, and seals are super aggressive and crafty and figuring out like, okay, what can we do?

How can we get this? Contractors and order and stuff. And so we just make, we do a good job of building our, infrastructure and when I say infrastructure I mean some some comforts come with that right now you go to the conventional's take a step down because they're not getting as much leeway they don't have as much they can't get away with as much so they're living maybe a little bit harder maybe even a lot harder than and of course a by the way there's special operations guys that are living out in the sticks in Afghanistan with two of them with you know 280 tribesmen so I'm saying I'm talking about

my particular situation which my particular situation was in Iraq when I'm deployed there we always lived good always lived good conventionals we'd go out to their outstations we'd stop on a way to a mission we'd stop by someone you know stop by wherever some cop somewhere or some fobs somewhere those guys are living rough and I had seals my seals that lived in Corregor they were living rough but my point is you go one step further and now you get to what called a MIT team yeah and the MIT teams are embedded with Iraqi troops and so they are living with Iraqi troops. There might be two, three, maybe four of them.

And they're out there living with the Iraqi troops, counting on the security of the Iraqi forces to protect them. And, I mean, it was horrible. When we first got to Ramadi, there was a, there was a VBI attack that killed the oncoming mid-team commander and the outgoing Mitt-Team commander. They were doing a turnover at a station. And VBID came, killed them both, wounded a border.

bunch but it's interesting because I didn't know Travis was a supply officer in the Marine Corps and so so the the Marine Corps has this way of selecting where you where you get what you get to be in the Marine Corps as an officer they take the class and chunk it up in a thirds and then the each top third you get a pick and it goes down the list so that way they don't have every single guy all the best guys quote unquote going to be Marine Corps infantry or going to be a pilot you might be you might be the bottom the top of the bottom third in the class and you get your pick. So you don't, it doesn't matter how you perform.

I mean, it matters, but. Out of a class of over 200, Travis was 17 in his class at the basic school, which is a very prestigious to graduate. The top 25 is incredible. Yeah. And he got his third choice. His third, he's a logistics officer. He was furious.

So he's angry. And then, and the Marine Corps did this very, very well. They understood the importance of the MET team. so they really took great guys and sent them to the MIT teams. And so they put up volunteers, hey, who wants, who wants to raise your hand and go live amongst the Iraqis, counting on them for security, training them, working with them, eating their crappy food, living without air conditioning? I mean, it just sucks. It just sucks.

It's awful. Of course, what does Travis do? Well, I'm game. Oh, yeah. Let's do this. So he went and obviously, He was killed in action. He was killed in action during a firefight trying to, like you just talked about.

Wasn't trying to save other Marines. He was trying to save his fellow Iraqi soldiers. And just like you just said, there's so many people that don't understand how closely we worked with Iraqi soldiers and how committed we were with helping them. So that's a classic example. and by the way that that eulogy that he wrote for himself was this Travis Mannion was a man unafraid to stand for what was right I think that's something that anybody could aspire towards and and actually another you know you talked about the

connections earlier well there's a connection here that Travis's roommate in the Naval Academy was a guy by the name of Brendan Looney who did what you talked about the painful way of getting to the SEAL teams. He went to the surface warfare community. Then he got picked up for the SEAL teams, went through SEAL training, and he was also killed in Afghanistan in 21 September 2010. But you come home from that deployment and now you've got you're married, you got one daughter, you're expecting another daughter. And by the way, this whole time, like we talked about earlier, you've been fighting

MMA training. Your first pro fight was between deployments. Yeah. And your amateur fights we already talked about was before your first deployment. And you make a decision that, all right, you're going to get out of the Marine Corps. And obviously, this is probably the hardest decision you ever had to make at that point. Brutal. Brutal.

But it's 2007. How much are you with, were you thinking at that time? A, I'm going to go for this MMA thing and it's gonna be I got a shot at making it. You know, it was, it was, I knew I had a shot at me. You must have thought you had a shot

because your ass was undefeated at this point. Oh yeah, knocking people out. Of course. You were the man. The worst thing that could have happened, right? I mean, the worst thing. I'm training with, so I would basically go around the base

and I found this corpsman with cauliflower ear. Hey, how'd you get that cauliflower? I, uh, state champion at Oklahoma wrestling in high school. Boom. be here 1800 every night got it i'll bring you gear cool he was in and he then started training with this started fighting but i got a wrestler dude no right another cue to wrestle hey you do you're a blue belt and jihitsu you're my instructor master he was my master i had no striking coach we had no

padwork no nothing it was me and and a couple of marines plus a corpsman and we would get after it every day. And then every time we fought, we won. So we thought we really knew what we were doing. And I would take leave. Every once in a while, I'd take leave and I would go to Extreme Couture for a couple of days and get destroyed.

I went out to Temecula, to Dan Henderson's place. I'd go get destroyed. And I'd just try and learn two moves, right? Give me two moves. So here I'm in the WEC. Again, arm bar from the mount, arm bar from the guard, got those. I know what half guard is now.

I can't sweep a soul from it though But Mola Wall showed me how to defend a single leg and a double leg when I was out of Temecula So now I got that down pat and I still got a mean Jab Cross hook away we go baby and and I'm winning fights with these things and You know I would end up losing the first time at WC and and that would prompt me to to leave Georgia go find somewhere to train and I'll never forget my first training session at Jackson Winkle John Academy and I'm there training and Greg Jackson comes walking up to me after my first practice and and this is as polite as he could try to compliment me at the time Brian I'm so amazed at how far you've gone with how little

information you've been getting code word wow you suck how the hell did you win all these fights you know one of the things I explain I said look when you only know so much. You can fight 150 miles an hour because you're not thinking. Then all of a sudden I'm learning all these new techniques. Then I started thinking. I had an up and down period there where when some lose some and I got to a point where after the Phil Davis fight, hey, you may be out of here. You know, the UFC wasn't a huge fan of me. They didn't really care. You know, Joseph wasn't a huge fan of these WEC guys that were forced upon him. That wasn't a talent. He went and found it. And I told him I'd fought three times inside of six months.

And I said, look, I need a break. And I literally looked at my MMA training like you would look at the training of a marine company. Where am I weak? How much time do I have? What am I going to schedule? What am I going to do? Who are the experts I can go to to get better in all these areas?

And I approached it. I knew at that point, hey, look, I still had a full-time job. I never fought without one. Transitioned of the Marine Corps, started working at a company called Med Assets. Met Assets had this project, this thing. Hey, hire heroes who want to help vets get jobs. Well, maybe you could lead that. Took that over.

So I'm working every day. But at the same time, you know, I started this thing in MMA. I can't go out like this. Too many people said I was going to wash out, that I was going to be exposed. Couldn't do it. No way. There were too many Marines at the time taking pride in my performances in there. And although I was older, you know, I'm 20, probably 29 at that time.

So in terms of MMA age, I'm already, I'm green and I'm already kind of getting a little old, but I started to find a way, started to figure it out, and not cutting any corners like other fighters were at the time, but starting to figure it out, and it all just came down to discipline where a lot of martial artists don't want to spend time. They don't want to spend 30 minutes drilling one move and understanding how they could use that move from various positions and why it works and how it plays into my style of fighting,

why it will be effective. They want to drill that one move. They want to do it five times and then they want to go live. Let's go live. Guilty. And I had to learn at that point if I'm going to catch up

with these fighters who are younger in many cases, but much more experience than me, I have got, I've got to take an analytical approach and an honest approach to my skill set and start to shore up some holes

or else I'm going to continue to lose. You just practice just wrestling like, crazy and then submission avoidance. It was, I actually went and put a gee on for the first time ever. It was working some basics because everybody wanted to hold me down.

If I could get out from underneath somebody with a geon, it's gonna be a heck of a lot easier, no gey. Truth. I was bringing in wrestlers that were way above my level. A guy named Harry Lester who was,

you know, an Olympian, was coming in and throwing me all over the place. And so I was training, wrestling nonstop. And then I would go and I'd go to Albuquerque. I didn't have a fight coming up,

but I would go live in Albuquerque for two weeks at a time away from my family and help other guys in their training camps and get exposed and drill. And without, here was the other big part was guys like Rashad Evans, Keith Jardine, Joey Vio-Signor, Nate Marquart. Without those guys, it would have never happened because after they would beat me, after they would pass my guard, take me down, hit me with this combination, they would stop afterwards and tell me how and why. And so I learn at a much faster rate than you're typically.

fighter would because not only am I, I'm drilling with some of the best in the world, taking the time to drill and taking an analytical approach. Hey, I know we're going to work this today, coach, but my butterfly guard is completely ineffective and I'd love to work it specifically, not just on sweeping because I don't think I'm going to get there yet against my level of competition. Just get up. I'd love to use it to get up or even just get to the fence where now I've got a third leg that I could utilize to get back up. And so we would drill specifics like that. and I've got these guys who have 30 plus fights who are champions now taking the time to help me, which meant a lot to me.

I'll never forget it. I mean, they were as much coaches to me as Mike Winklejohn and Greg Jackson were. You know, and then, you know, obviously on top, you could do all of that. The other piece of it was when I would do my camps there, when I really got where I was at my best, you know, when I beat Chris Liebinger or Santiago, when I was beating those guys mentally, I was in the best place. my family was in it when it was in a great spot they were my wife and kids were very supportive of me leaving and doing my camps in albuquerque and my time away from them it made me nasty they'd come visit but man i would literally look at my opponent like you're the one who kept me away from my

family this long you're going to pay for it and and it was it was a strong motivator and and that if you're in a place the fighter where you're not hungry getting new information being able to to mentally be in the right place for you to perform. It's not about who the better fighter is. It has nothing to do with it. It's about who fights best that night. And if you can't mentally be in the state where you're going to fight best that night,

you've got a problem and you're in the wrong place. And that phase of my career, that's when I was there. I was able to do that. And that was when I was at my best for sure. Yeah, I mean, you had some stunning fights. I know I always tell, you know, sometimes my fighters will say, oh, you know, I'm not feeling it tonight.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter You have like this is in training I'll say look it doesn't matter how you feel tonight Because fight night come you might be feeling good bad Doesn't matter what you have to do is perform right now That's what you got to do So train yourself to perform right now

But yeah you had some uh you had some great fights And Chris Levin who I know trained with Chris's great guy And that he's such a tough bastard And you guys threw down Yeah we knew we knew neither one of us were going to be that hard to hit. But, no, tons of respect for that guy. And that was a fight he didn't have to take.

You know, I saw an opening there where there was a window and he may just take me as a fight to, okay, let me go get a win, get some money. And go on because he had just come off two huge wins in like a week or 10 days notice. He's a psycho. And so, I love him. Phenomenal guy in this sport.

And yeah, you know, it was a while ride. And when I look back on it, there's definitely some regrets like anybody. There's some things you wish you wish you could have done. Some things that happened family-wise that certainly stalled and helped aid the decision to stop. You know, my wife losing her little brother to suicide was a really tough thing. Her mom was living with us at the time. So, you know, us going through that tragedy together, it's hard. We're human beings, and a lot of fighters have to deal with tragedy and compete.

This is what we do for living. We've got to fight through it. It's a hard thing. When I look back on it where I know I was as an athlete and as a mixed martial arts, how green I was to have come that far and been a legitimate top 10 middleweight at that time, I'm proud of that. Especially in the era, especially in the era when I fought, where there were some extra clicker activities going on as well. You're fighting against guys that were a lot of guys were on steroids.

There was no testing or there was really limited testing. It was an IQ test, right? If you failed that, you know, you were just straight up. dumb. But it was fun. I mean, the guys, you lost to Chal Sowna, right? Who was two minutes from being the middleweight champion in the world against Anderson Silva. You know, you lost to him.

You beat Sakara. Then you lost to Bisbing, who actually is the current middleweight champion. So the guys that beat you were badasses. Yeah. Absolutely. And you were a guy that started fighting three weeks ago. You know, that's just awesome. man, it's a testament.

The coolest part about it was during that time, you know, and it kind of happened subtly beneath that, you know, at least to the fight fans, was taken that little Higher Heroes USA project that that company met assets asked me to watch over, right? Step one was starting to build some programs. Step two was getting one of my best friends in the world who served with me, who was right next to that track as it burned. Nate Smith to come in, be my chief operating office. and build this amazing team and leveraging some of the media attention I got for fighting,

leveraging it for our cause, in building it. And not just building a company where, hey, we went out, we fundraised for a mission. No, that's bogus. We were out there accomplishing the mission, helping veterans get legitimate jobs, careers, so that they can succeed and lead again back here, home, and in their communities, and watching it grow from a team of five to a team of 10 to a team of 20 to where now we've got 96 full-time employees. And we're bringing in over 300 veterans and spouses a week into the program. That was all built with this amazing team of people while I was still fighting.

That was my full-time job doing that and having a board of directors that had the foresight and the perspective to say, hey, you know what? yes, you're going to be a little limited during some of these training camps, but what you're able to bring to our brand is helpful right now in the phase that this company is. And it's been a wild and really amazing ride. And some of the things we talked about earlier where you have these things, these questions that will always haunt you about the loss of your friends, the loss of your Marines, the loss of your seals. When you can lead an initiative like that, it helps you feel like, hey, you know what, I am, I am taking advantage of every day. Every day we're moving

forward, we're achieving, we're helping other warriors now find success post-military service. And that's me earning it, earning my day where they don't, they no longer have any. You know, Travis Mania doesn't live anymore. And his family would give anything to see him one more time. I can't bring him back. But I'll tell you what, if I sat here crying about it, feeling sorry for myself that my friend Travis was gone, he'd be the first. to slap the hell out of me when I die for it or at least do a double leg on your ass he was I'm telling you man that that was he planned on fighting when he got done with that deployment he'd still be fighting to this day he was a bad bad dude and that was

your last fight in the UFC and he retired after you fought Vandal A Silva which did you plan no to do that so those you that don't know that aren't an MMA there's a guy, a legendary mixed martial artist named Vandalay Silva. I saw him fight a few times in Japan back in the back in the day. And he's a brawler and he's incredible punching power. And his nickname is the axe murderer because he looks like a psycho. And anyways, Brian had a fight with him. And these two guys went in there.

It was like Russian roulette. He was a street fight. There was a street fight. There was a street fight, and eventually you got caught, you know, got caught by one of the best strikers that have ever been in the game. And by the way, you dropped him a couple times. You had that, I mean, you didn't have it won, but you definitely, you dropped him two or three times in the first round or twice in the first round? He came back from the dead, the minimum of two times. The eyes were in the back of his head, and then he just, he looked at me again with bloodshot eyes.

it was it was unbelievable unbelievable but no that was not the plan and so that the plan you were with Greg Jackson and wink right uh I wasn't I so for the the Sikara Bisbing and Vanderley fight I trained myself and the reason being was uh right after I had fought Shale Sun in two days before Christmas me and my wife land and baggage claim and I get a call and her little brother who had struggled with bipolar disorder and depression. And we didn't know that then, right? He had taken his own life.

Went up to a cab in the middle of woods and taken his own life and had to tell my wife there in baggage claim. And her mom at the time was living with us. It was personal life was a mess. Still got to pay bills though. Right? You still got a company to run. Still got a fight career that I've got to push through.

And I can't just, hey, look, I'm going to take seven months off here to get through this because I have bills to pay. Anyways, it caused me to start my own camp. So the game plan going in, was, hey, we're going to take Vanderlaid down a little bit in this fight and disrupt him. Really, really confuse him because nobody's used to me doing that. Yeah.

And so I fly to Japan. We get off the plane of that long flight after a long training camp where I absolutely overtrained. And we get to the hotel and me and one of my striking coaches, Manu Nattau, we go start hitting pads. We're hitting pads. And padworks done it. Oh, man, all of a sudden I start to cool down. I can't lift my knee up on my left leg. tear something in my head.

And it happens, right? I mean, Vanderlai could have walked in there with how many miles he could have walked to a couple injuries. So anyways, now this gets into my head a little bit. And so I asked to see the UFC doctor. And so as soon as he landed, he was told, hey, you got to go see Brian Stanis. Hey, look, I've looked at all the stuff. Nova Cain is legal.

I just want to get Novakane for fight nights. I won't feel it. And I'm walking around the hotel and I'm trying not to show anybody that I'm limping at the press conference because I have a legitimate limp. And anyways, he's like, okay, we're in Japan. We're not in a second or third world country. We're in Tokyo, right? I could have walked across the street and probably got in light a cane.

Anyways, supposed to get it, supposed to get it, I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it, doesn't get it. When you fight in Japan, the fights so that they could cater the American TV audience, you leave like 7 a.m. So he's sitting there, sorry. So I let that affect me too much mentally. And we're trying to warm up backstage, and I'm trying to shoot some double legs, and I'm not feeling it. And in my own head, right before I walk, I'm like, you know what, this dude's got some miles on him. I hit like a truck. Let's get in there.

Let's knock this dude out and let's get this fight over with. So, ready to go, walk out there. And he tags me first. Hits me behind the ear. And, you know, most of Vandalase fights, he's a little bit more of an accumulation guy. He's not considered a one punch knockout guy. This one right hand he hits me with. I had never been rocked in the Akron before in my life.

And he dropped me. So I was like, all right, it's on. Let's go. And so then I rock him. And once I rocked him, then I thought, okay, one more good shot on the chin, and he's done. And I landed it, and he'd go down, and then he'd come back. And wait a minute here. And so I'm just caught up.

And so the second round, I start to get a little bit more technical and move around a little bit. Like, all right, he's obviously not going away. I've got to take a different approach. I don't know what this guy's made of. And then he, I didn't even, I don't remember. You know, I get caught with that. huge punch. I don't remember any of it.

And it's crazy, but I realized I lost. I came to as John Anick, who's one of my closest friends now, comes up to be with a microphone. And I realized, well, I don't remember winning. So I must have lost this fight. And it was a horrible flight home. I'm sitting there flying home, and I had a jack and coke in my hand. Couldn't sleep at all. Didn't sleep.

And I am miserable. I lost to a guy I was supposed to beat who was supposed to be washed up. You know, I had pretty much made the decision then, you know, I'm out. It's over. If you're not going to get busy being the champion, then there's other areas where that need my attention more from my family to the company I'm trying to run. And it was a hard decision. And part of me when I made the decision thought for sure, I'm definitely going to come back, right?

I'm going to come back. And for like two years, I held on to that and had to fight against it. Like, no, it is not in your best interest to come back anymore. You do a better job talking about on the microphone than you're gonna do strapping the gloves on anymore, pal. You're 35, now I'm 36. It's over. That makes me feel real good over here.

So, hey, you know, we've been going for a while. Tell us about, like, specifically with Higher Heroes, how can people support that? Where do we look for it? All that stuff. So that way people have information on it. Yes, we've got a website, Higher Heroes USA.org. and if you are a service member or a spouse who needs help finding a career if you're unemployed or

underemployed, you go on there, you register, and we'll get you your personal veteran transition specialist. Fancy term for a job coach. And we'll take you through the whole thing, from revising your resume to teach you how to effectively do a job search, how to interview for a job. We will help you, if not build your LinkedIn site for you. Teach you how to use that to impact and expand your network. Do social media audits.

Hey, what pictures and posts does you? not have up on Facebook right now. Take a look, hey, no, big pop a pump at Yahoo is not your email anymore. It's going to be Christina Smith at yahoo.com, all right? All the do's and the don'ts, but then we have a job board with a lot of corporate partners will match you to all those companies. So people, if people want to hire a veteran, they can go through you as well. Because that's the one thing I get hit with a lot is, you know, people say, how can we help

veterans? And I say, hire veterans. And they say, where do we find them? So now we've got a good place to find it. Absolutely. We're bringing in over 300 people a week in the program who are all going to get one-on-one assistance and different from any other nonprofit. Everything we do is tracked, logged, and analyzed in Salesforce so that we can hold ourselves accountable. I can hold every one of my employees accountable for the workload they have.

They all have weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual metrics that they have to hit. They don't hit them. They no longer work here. We run this nonprofit like a business because people donate money to us to help veterans find careers, period. And if we're not doing that, then we go away. And I take that very serious, and it's what's allowed us to grow from a team of four to now a team of 96. And we'll continue to do so. And my main mission now is to make sure Higher Heroes USA is there for the next generation of combat veterans as well, when they return home to a society that doesn't understand them as

much. And the real help, the real need is for the veteran to learn how to communicate their skill set, how to deliver their value proposition. It's a hard. hard thing to do. Think about your seals when they got out if they went to a job or try to write a resume. What the hell do I put it? My first resume looked like I was trying to get a job as a mercenary. It was off and I was a naval academy grad. Imagine these young sailors, you know? Yeah. And over 80% of the people we help at hire heroes are your young enlisted service members, the ones who need us the most. Awesome. Awesome. And then you got the Guardian project going on. Incredible project. And I'd love to get these guys down. Ben

Vax, who's our executive director, come down and be on your show someday. It's so in line with some of your beliefs on martial arts and jiu-jitsu. Ben has a vision that every kid should have the opportunity to train martial arts. Every child. Check. And so he went out, networked, and found a man by the name of Joe Lundonfeld, who's on my board at Higher Heroes, who's an executive at Twitter, and they bought a property in Oakland where there are a lot of young men and women who don't have much going on after school. And they don't, the chips are stacked against them. There's not a whole lot that they have.

You know, their families have a hard time making money and there's a lot of trouble they can get into. And they go find them and they bring them in and they come. They train martial arts. They train jiu-jitsu. They train boxing. They do their homework. Then they've networked with local restaurants and they get a healthy meal afterwards for

free. In many cases, this is the only healthy meal that that young man or woman's going to get that day. They have regular members to the gym, but those members, pay a membership fee that also then pays for those young kids so that they can come for free. People buy a ghee for themselves, then they get a free ghee for one of the kids. I've gone there and taught and ran some classes, and it is just, it's incredible to meet these young men and women who haven't been given much in life. Their parents are grateful because now they're not paying for after school care.

They can't afford it anyways and their kids are not wandering the streets. But now they've got this place to go to where there's like-minded people pushing them to do better. Don't allow your circumstances to direct your life and tell you who you're going to be. Nothing should hold you back. So the discipline that they're learning now, the camaraderie, the character they're learning a guardian is starting to spill into the other aspects of their life. Their grades are going up. They're being more nutritious. They're focused on their future.

Hey, wait a minute. College? I can go to college. They've got these great positive inspirations around them. And the goal is to take Guardian from O. Oakland and start to brand it and get it in gyms across the country where now we don't need a physical facility to do it. And other gyms can take on the program where now we've got a system where they can adopt

it and people can pay their membership as part of a way of paying the membership for these underprivileged kids to go there and train after school as well so that they can have a chance just because they're poor doesn't mean they shouldn't get the opportunity to train jiu-jitsu, to train boxing, to get all the character development that goes along with martial arts. Yeah, that's all I got I actually I got another book coming out in the book is called The Way of the Warrior Kid and it's a kid's book and it's basically about a young kid who's getting picked on at school. He can't do any pull-ups. He doesn't know his times tables and is basically miserable, right? And anyways, school ends and his uncle Jake comes out to stay with him for the summer. Uncle Jake is a team guy. So Uncle Jake says, oh, you got some issues? What are the issues? I can't do pull-ups. He goes, We can fix all those things. So, you know,

obviously gets him working out. Oh, you're getting bullied because he's getting bullied badly? Well, guess what he's going to learn? He's going to learn Jiu-Jitsu. So I honestly think there's going to be a little bit of a surge of Jiu-Jitsu in America. I love it.

And it sounds like this is right up, right up that alley. It is. You know, when that comes out, we're going to grab a bunch of them make it mandatory for these kids. Things like that inspire them. I mean,

they make a difference. When you look at just the social and the economic impact, young man or woman who has a high likelihood of probably getting arrested, especially when you look at some of the problems we have with our criminal justice system, right? Now instead they have a positive environment, never get, they go into college and they go get a great job and they're contributing. They're winning now. Huge impact for our country, for our communities to do that and to get more jiu-jitsu, more martial arts in some of these, these poor, super rural areas in our country where there's extreme poverty and our super-relipped.

urban areas where there's extreme poverty where these young men and women don't get that opportunity because their parents can't pay $150 a month for them to go. And they don't have any positive influences in their life. That can fix a lot of problems that we have going on in our country. There's no doubt. Is there a way to help the Guardian Project right now? Absolutely. Go to go to guardianproject.org. There's a website right there. You could become a monthly sponsor. I mean, that organization is in startup phase. If someone could give five to $10 there's a month to them, that is a huge portion of a young man or woman's monthly membership for them to go to that gym, get a free meal, have someone looking at their report card,

tutoring them in math, teaching them jujitsu, confidence. I mean, we got young ladies in there and they're in there, their confidence, when they start dating and who they choose and how that, I mean, the way they're going to approach life, these young men and understanding how to respect and train with a young lady, Hey, I'm going to grapple with you this round and how to respect you. I mean, it's amazing to watch what's happening at a young age and how quickly

they're developing. It's awesome. That's awesome. So, higher heroes, the Guardian Project organizations to support. And I guess that kind of wraps it with us. If anybody wanted to support

this podcast, Echo Charles. I have a question. Oh, Echo comes with a deep question. Got a question. Kind of deep. So when you watch a few good men, are you like on the side of the Marines, like the whole movie?

See what I'm saying? Don't group me with them just because I wear the same uniform? Yeah, but, you know, a few good men, he's going against the Navy. Tom Cruise is the Navy guy. He's not a seal, but, you know. So I am, when I watch a few good men, I am with the Marines all the way up

until they break their integrity. All right, which is a movie, right? But under no circumstances should we break? our integrity and that that's a problem you know that's it's so false no colonel would tell someone one thing then tell this junior guy over here no you go do this and then lie about it and try and cover up right the big cover up yeah cover up remember when they break their integrity that's I don't care what

uniform you're wearing that that's a problem or if you're not wearing a uniform at all we just talked about that on the last podcast maintain the integrity it's true follow-up question is there such thing as a code red no okay there's no That's what I thought. Anyway, so support, right? We can talk about that if you guys like. Cool. Yeah, let's do it.

All right. All right. And let's do it fast. All right. We'll speed it up here. Let's talk about on it, supplements. I worked out today. He probably can tell.

Yeah, you look like you work. It's on. It's there. So on. The name of the pre-workout is total strength and performance. I left out the strength in there. Okay. So you perform good and you're strong.

Anyway, if you want 10% off Onet stuff, Shroom tech, AlphaBrain, total strengthening performance, go to onet.com slash jaco. You threaten me with a krill oil rage today. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another story right there.

Anyway, Onet.com slash jocco, that's for 10% off best supplements in the world. Approved. Approved. Approved. Approved. Boom. Also, if you shop at Amazon. by duct tape, whatever,

or the books that we talk about. Hard for the fight. You better order this one quick because I don't think it's in print right now. My mom bought off five copies. My mother bought it. I can't believe you got one. She must have resold that on eBay

and didn't realize she sent it to you. Yeah, so yeah, books. It is on Amazon though and you can buy it. Yeah. And in the event of you doing that, or buying anything else. And you want to support the podcast, by the way, click through the jocco podcast.com website

or jocco store website. So click on the little Amazon banner, boom, then do your shopping, then get the book or whatever else you get. And you can support that way. That's a good way. That's like small action, big result. Like sodium in a fish tank is what we say, you know?

That's what you say. Come on, bro. We say it. It's all good. Anyway, and then, you know, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher and Google Play if you haven't already. Seems obvious. But, you know, do that if you haven't. And then, you know, write a review if you're in the mood and you're in the mood to support podcast.

Also, YouTube, we're putting out more videos now. I noticed that. Shorter videos. Jocko Good. That's one of the OG videos. That was a good one, though, by the way. I thought it was good. Subscribe, yeah, YouTube.

If you like those videos, if you like little Jaco McNuggets, rather than the whole podcast all at once, shareable, right? I say, hey, Brian Stanton, watch this video real quick. It's two hours long, you're not watching it real quick. Three minutes long, you might watch that one real quick, right? Absolutely. Same thing, exactly right, the same thing. So that's what we're doing now, if you didn't know.

So, yeah, subscribe to that. If you want to, you know, you want to be updated on that. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocco store. Jocco.com. We think of original names like that. Yeah, simple. But you know, you've got a cool name like Jaco.

Why change it up? Right? Yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. And, you know, there's some shirts on there. You know, if you want to kind of get after it that way, get yourself a shirt that's kind of, you know, you're wearing shirts anyway, I figure. Right? Yeah, why not wear a jaco shirt?

Right. You got to wear one anyways, right? Exactly right. I agree with you. I agree with you. Exactly. Right. And they're good.

Is this has to be one. The discipline equals freedom? Yeah, discipline equals freedom. See, that's an awesome shirt. There you go. See, that is an awesome shirt. Brian Stan approved. There's a lot of people wearing those shirts.

It's pretty legit. Yeah. I'll show you some. And you know what? You just don't want to wear the shirt. Yeah. You want to go ahead and live the life. You better represent.

If you're going to do that, don't wake up at 10.30 in the morning and roll out of bed on a sit. No, no, no, no. Yeah. Go to accomplish something. Get in the game. Yeah. Very well put. Yes.

So yeah, check out those shirts. I'm not saying buy a shirt. I'm not sitting here and saying buy a shirt. I'm saying go on the website, joccal store.com. Look at the shirts. If you like the shirts. shirts and you want to support the podcast get a shirt it's on you um there's some rash guards in there so you can you know some some physical activity grappling surfing

anything they you know anything they do a lot of physical activity any range of motion rash guard's good hoodies good patches good regulation size or not regulations good all good anyway what about these mugs these mugs better be on there oh yeah the mugs on Unfortunately, I got a bunch of them made, and we sold them on Amazon, and we had a bunch in stock, and then Joe Rogan posted a picture of his, and then they were all gone. I was going to say it had to be, yeah. I got more coming. He's crazy. Yeah, got more coming.

The map back. Early March, I think. I had tweeted out before we started the show. Just showed the desk with all the weapons on it. The amount of testosterone and jawline in here is maximum capacity. Between us and it, there's 30 feet of jawline. running through this office right now. Yeah.

But yeah, I think what, March, right, too? It was like, I think early March I think they'll be available. Or something like that. And still working on the international for the mugs, right? Yeah, probably. So, hey, we're going to make that happen. So I'm standby for that. Also, okay, psychological warfare.

I like to feel sometimes I don't need this anymore. I'm over it. But if you do need psychological warfare, okay, here's what it is. You ever have those days where you're like, you're about to work out or you have planned to work out and you're like you know maybe I'll just work out tomorrow everybody has yeah absolutely right yes so what you do is you get this album that we put together well it's jocco talking I just kind of recorded it but like I said echo presses record better than anybody yeah better than it's true it's absolutely true put it on iTunes

you can get like a track like if your thing is like I eat donuts way too much and you're like I'm going to fight the donuts or whatever. You can just get that track. It's called what? Sugar-coed lies. For example. Is it just Jocko's voice yelling at you? Why not to eat the donut?

Yeah. I love this. Yeah. Essentially. A donut is great. Yeah. You don't need to. Your voice is so stern and intense.

It doesn't matter. Absolutely right. It's like Batman. Right? Christian Bail Batman. Christian Bail. Don't eat the donut. That's more Laif.

Leif has the Batman voice. You're kind of like. I don't know who I'm like. I don't know. A Joker or something. I don't know. Either way, there's a bunch of them, though it's cool. Like to wake up in the morning.

Anyway, it's good, man. It helps a lot. It's been very well received. I think so. Surprisingly. Yeah. I was kind of surprised. Yeah.

So, because Echo thought it was a good idea. No, man. People need this. I'm like, people need two minutes of me talking about donuts. I need it. That's what I'm saying. To go work out.

But what's crazy people post and send me in like, there's no way I can sleep through. Because one of them, the first track is called, wake up and get after it. Because I, I think that. really one of the easiest ways to start developing discipline in your life is to wake up early in the morning. So the first track is wake up and get after it and I actually do a count to 10. Give you the opportunity 10 seconds. Fair enough. To get out of bed.

If not out of bed by then, we got issues. But crazy. It's fun. Anything else? Along with that, if you want to get some jocco white tea, yeah, it's available. It's available in-stock on Amazon. And you know before I was hesitant Because at one time I said hey

We'll never sell out of it again And everybody that listened to this podcast Bought it that day we sold out in 15 minutes Because we sold out the first time And I said no I'm just gonna get a ton I said don't worry guys We'll never sell it again

Yeah we sold out again Now I'm feeling pretty confident That we won't sell out again That means I went kind of Richter I over-engineered the whole thing So we shouldn't sell out of Jock-White-T again you can get it on Amazon dot com

international orders check eBay when you're clicking on Amazon get this book right here by brian stan hard for the fight you heard him talking about it tonight I covered a tiny portion of the book great information about combat about leadership and about life definitely check it out I'll put it on the website yeah it'll be on the website you know boom it'll be on the website and also we were just talking about this got that kid's book coming out Uncle Jake teaching young Mark How to be a warrior kid instead of a wimpy kid Jiu-Jitsu

Yeah pull-ups, yeah Studying, yes, being disciplined, yes Basically getting after it Affirmative, age 10 Pre-order it now Why not? If you like this podcast 100% you will like this book

I don't care if you're 49 years old You will dig this book I dig this book. I wrote it And I like it I like to read it. My nine-year-old daughter's reading it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's good.

I'll leave it at that. And I'm not a person to sit there and say, like, oh, what I did is really good. I don't do that. I like this book a lot. You know, what you did is really good. Yeah. Also, Leif and I wrote that book right there,

the book called Extreme Ownership. You can get it. We talk about war and we talk about leadership and we talk about war. You know, what else would we talk about? Get the right one, not one of the spinoffs. Yeah. Fakers.

Lastly, extreme ownership muster, May 4th and 5th at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. Extreme ownership muster, number two, by the way. Number one already happened in San Diego. It was awesome. This one's going to be awesome. By the way, I haven't said this yet about extreme ownership muster, too. We will be there.

I will be there. Echo Charles will be there. We will not be backstage. There is no backstage. We will be up front. I will be sitting at your table. We will be talking about things J.P. Dinell is going to be there as well. He's going to come and get some. So come on out to that May 4th and 5th. There's a video coming out about it soon. I warn you that when the video comes out, it's going to sell out because Echo Charles makes these videos so persuasive that everyone's going to

come. And while you're waiting for the muster, you can still carry on this conversation with us on the interwebs on Twitter on Instagram and when you're gonna look at that face brooky boho we gonna be on that one too

so echo is at echo Charles I am at Jocka Willink and Brian Stan is at Brian Stan I keep it simple I like how you do it two ends on Stan

by the way Echo Charles you got any clothing thoughts that's it man my man good to meet you and have you for sure Mr. Brian Stan. Pleasure, guys. A pleasure and honor.

Thank you so much for having me on. I know we've been trying to do this for probably over a year now. Well worth it. And you've got a new subscriber. I've got to listen to more of this. I mean, we talk about a lot of things that we think we already know. Yep. But man, it's motivating, though.

When you continue to hear it, you continue to hear it, and you hear like-minded people out there achieving. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. And I would like to thank everyone for listening. And we appreciate it. the support and the fact, more so the fact that you are out there with us trying to get better.

And for those of you with a uniform on, especially those overseas right now, taking the fight to the enemy, thank you all for keeping us free to law enforcement and firefighters. Thanks to you for keeping us safe. For those of you that are just out there on the grind, working hard and doing good work, go ahead and keep doing that good work. And Brian, thanks for coming on. Thanks for your career in the Octagon. Thanks for what you're doing now with the charity and helping vets.

But most of all, thanks for your service to this great nation. And to your fellow Marines. who I was always humbled to serve alongside thanks to you. You proud leathernecks for your service and sacrifice and forever upholding your motto, Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. And when we go forward, to each of us all of us when we go forward in our lives let us do so with the intention of honoring those brave souls

those soldiers sailors airmen and marines who stood and held the line and gave their last full measure for us so until next This is Brian and Echo and Jocko out