Jocko Podcast - 64: The Value and Cost of Real Freedom. "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid", With Andy Stumpf

Episode Date: March 1, 2017

0:00:00 - Opening: "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid" 0:08:48 - Intro to Andy Stumpf 0:18:04 - New Guy at the SEAL Teams 0:22:18 - Deployments 0:26:38 - September 11th / Learning through experience. 0:40:49 - Iraq, Afghanistan, and Getting shot. 1:00:12 - Recovered and Getting Back After it. 1:23:02 - Andy's Retirement and Life after the Teams.  SEAL Foundation, Base Jumping.  1:40:13 - Support, Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book) and The Muster002   1:51:59 - Closing Gratitude            Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 64 with Echo Charles and me Jock Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. In a country that most people would struggle to find on a map, in a compound that few possess the courage to enter, men from my previous life took the fight to our enemy. In that compound, they found men that prey five times a day for your destruction those praying men don't know me they don't know you and they don't know

America they don't understand our compassion our freedoms and our tolerance I know it may seem as if some of those things are currently missing but they remain at our core and always will Our capacity for them is boundless and is only dwarfed by the hatred in those men hiding in that compound the hatred they have for you. Those men don't care about your religious beliefs. They don't care about your political opinions. They don't care if you sit on the left or the right liberal or conservative pacifist or warrior. They don't care how much you believe in diversity. equality or freedom of speech they don't care I'm sorry you have never smelled the breath of a man who wants to kill you

I'm sorry you've never felt the alarm bells ringing in your body the combination of fear and adrenaline as you move towards the fight instead of running from it I'm sorry you've never heard someone cry out for help or cried out for help yourself relying on the courage of others to bring you home I'm sorry you've never tasted the salt from your own tears as you stand at flag-draped coffins bearing men you were humbled to call your friends I don't wish those experiences on you but I do wish you had them if you had them it would change the way you act it would change the way you value it would change the way you value it would change the way you appreciate you would become quick to open your eyes and slow to open your mouth most will never understand the sacrifice required to keep evil men like those from that distant compound away from our doorstep but it would not hurt you to try and understand it would not hurt you to take a moment to respect the sacrifices that others make on your behalf whether they share your opinion

Or not it would not hurt you to take a moment to think of the relentless drain on family friends and loved ones that are left behind Sometimes for weeks sometimes for months sometimes for years Sometimes forever ideas are not protected by words paper and ink may outline the foundation and principles of this nation but it is blood only blood that protects it in that dusty compound a man you have never met gave everything he had so that you have the freedom to think speak and act however you choose he went there for all of us whether you loved or hated what he stood for he went there to preserve the

Opportunity and privilege to believe to be and to become what we want every single person living inside of its borders and under the banner of its flag Oh that man We owe that man everything We owe him the respect that his sacrifice deserves Saying thank you is not enough We send our best and lose them in the fight against the worst evil this world has to offer if you want to respect and honor their sacrifice it needs to be more than words you have to live it take a

minute and look around soak it in all of it the bad and the ugly you have the choice every day as to which category you want to be in in which direction you want to move you have that choice because the best among us the best we ever had to offer fought and bled and died for it never forget that now those words in a piece that was called a debt that cannot be repaid which was written by a fellow seal and a friend of mine named Andy stump when he heard that we had lost another frog man chief Ryan Owens during a daring raid on an al-Qaeda compound in Yemen and it was a very fitting tribute another fitting tribute yet another fitting tribute to yet another great warrior

who sacrificed everything for us. The hardest truths is that I know, we know that this will not be the last great warrior to fall. And those warriors still on the line close ranks to fill the void left by the fallen. And they continue to march forward. Into the dark and into the dust looking for and hunting for evil and those warriors Regardless of what they come up against

They will not Stop and this evening while that hunt continues and while evil lurks out there in the world I am lucky enough to have one of the good guys Here with me the man that wrote those powerful words and that powerful tribute. As I said, a friend and a former SEAL teammate of mine,

Andy Stumpf. Andy Stumpf, welcome to the show, brother. Thanks for having me, man. There was, that was an incredible piece, man. It really was, and thank you for writing it. I think it got around

and I hope more people get to hear it now and spread it and share it about that, know another brave warrior down yeah it uh like we were going back and forth over text i think took off like wildfire i i was eating breakfast with my sons and had received the news from buddy before it had broken on mainstream media and it was just one of those moments where it i couldn't get the thoughts out of my head so i cracked open my laptop literally took one at that one pass and just hit the post button and walked away came back four or five hours later and my phone was just

exploding and uh yeah i mean it it was cathartic for me to write it and i do hope that more people can understand the message and take just two seconds out of their day to realize what's happening all around them all around the world in any given time any given time it's happening yeah the sacrifices are there And it's, you know, speaking of social media, it's been a lot of people been requesting. They've been asking, do you know Andy Stumpf? And Andy Stumpf, do you know Jocko? So, yes, we do know each other. That is confirmed.

And they've been asking you to come on the podcast. So thanks for coming on, man. I know we haven't really seen a bunch of each other in the last few years. I think it's been like five years. That's ridiculous. And for all those people who've been asking, you can stop now. The answer is yes. I know Jocco.

We know each other for a while and here we are. So stop. We're good to go. Yeah, but I really appreciate you coming on. So let's get into it, man. Let's talk about, let's talk about, you know, give us your basic background. You know, tell us about growing up in Santa Cruz. What's up, Santa Cruz?

Man, what a great place to grow up. I mean, Santa Cruz is amazing with an asterix. And that asterisk is whether or not at some point in time in your life you leave Santa Cruz. Because it's a bubble. But for me, it was awesome. I have family roots there from not only my father, but my grandfather. They had one of the first construction companies there, built the high school that my father attended, built a lot of the infrastructure, and also had a lot of ties to, like, law enforcement and firefighters, which would help me out when I would get rides home, when I would get in trouble, you know, advantages that other people didn't have. But, I mean, I consider my, I mean, my background is very generic. I mean, I played water polo and baseball in high school. I'd give myself a C as far as being an athlete, like, just.

Very average junior lifeguards so comfortable in and around the ocean, which was a skill that obviously paid off in training. You didn't surf. Did you surf in Santa Cruz? I did surf quite a bit. And I'm sure you've surfed up there. As you know, it's extremely territorial. It's good waves. It's good waves. But like when you're 150 pounds, you know, and you're 17, 18 years old, I just really wasn't into, you know, fighting for waves. So I'd surf a little bit, a little longboard stuff down by cows, maybe steamers if it wasn't huge. And it just played sports. Yeah.

I mean, it was super casual. Work for my dad's construction company. Santa Cruz has a dichotomy, too, in it, in the fact that, especially when you were growing up, there was mad. Like, okay, there's that basically, I don't know if you want to call it the haves, the have-nots, but we're not talking about money. We're talking about, like, massive drug use, right? Still exists to this day.

Yeah. And it's like an undercurrent that not a lot of people know about Santa Cruz. Most of the people who live in Santa Cruz don't work there. The money all comes from the Silicon Valley. They go over the Highway 17. I mean, the median cost of homes in Santa Cruz, I think, is not. near $800,000, which is crazy because the city was kind of built around UC Santa Cruz. I mean, it's a college.

I mean, who can afford that stuff? But in the surfing scene, I mean, that's where a lot of the drug, from my understanding, that's where a lot of the drug stuff started, and then it just pushed itself out. It still exists. It's really bad. Yeah, it can be, it can be a, you'd think Santa Cruz is a nice beach town, but it can be a rough town. I mean, you make a wrong turn.

You're going to be in trouble. But, I mean, the same can be true here if San Diego or anywhere you may want to go. So when did you hear about? wouldn't you hear about the teams and decide you're going to get it on? Yeah. You know, so I come from a military family. My grandfather was in the Navy.

My father was in the Navy. He was a twin 50-Cal Gunner on the Mark I in Vietnam. The first squadron of patrol boats with the chikuzzi jets, which she said had a failure rate of about 90%. That had to be fun. And of course, they didn't fail at the time, but you would want them to. Like pulling away from the dock while you're in?

Yeah, no, just as a middle of a firefight, you know, a complex ambush that you're trying to get out of. God. So you can, I mean, I don't think, I actually had no for a fact. My father probably, did your dad work with seals? That's, yeah, that's, I was getting to. That's how I heard about it. My father probably didn't want me to join the military.

I mean, I don't want my sons necessarily too, however I would never stand in their way, just like my father allowed me to pursue what I wanted to do. But I started working for him when I was 11 and learned some of the best lessons of my life with bricks in my hands because he was a Mason. and I basically moved to bricks for a long time. But it was hard work, and it paid off later in life. And I remember we were driving back from a job when I was 11. And he mentioned seals. And with no understanding of what they are, just his description of what they did, how they – he was like, you know, they were in the water.

They would get them onto the boats. They'd drop them off. It was intriguing to me. So it led me to trying to search for as much information as I could find out about. them and in the early 90s, the intranet was not what it was today. So of course, I found the book that almost every team guy has read, The Men with Green Faces, all about Vietnam, but it's an awesome book. So I read that and then unfortunately stumbled across the Rogue Warrior series, which, as I was saying before we started, I made the mistake of thinking that it was a nonfiction

work and find out until a little bit later that that was incorrect, but I was hooked. And from that moment on, it was every piece of information that I could find. It's all I wanted to do. It was like a magnetizing force. I don't have the vocabulary to describe it. People who don't come from our worlds, it's very uncommon for them to hear that, but you know as well as I do. The SEAL teams is full of people with the same narrative. Oh yeah, I've just always wanted to do this. It was a calling. But yeah, I mean, the idea was sparked from my dad. And I was 17, still in high school, at junior in high school, and I went to the Navy recruiter and brought the Navy recruiter home because my parents had to sign for me. And I had my mom, who was an army brat and my dad, who was,

like I said, served in Vietnam. And I'm sure that they were not extremely excited, but they both signed for me. So I enlisted actually when I was a junior in high school and then left just a few days after high school graduation. That's so legit. Yeah, it was awesome. And I look back now, I'm like, why did I list a year early? All I did was give a recruiter. I filled their quota for the month. I couldn't leave. I was like, yeah, you got to still got to wait until I turn 18 and graduate, but I mean, the recruiter was happy. But, I mean, I never took the SATs. I had no plan B.

It's what I knew I wanted to do. And I never even considered anything else. I enlisted August 1st of 96. Awesome. Yep. And so then you show up at Buds. Showed up for Buds, January of 97, get some winter. Were you still 17?

I was 18. Nice. Yeah, got some, got some winners. class action on. Well, you're from Santa Cruz, so it was not that big of Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I never really laid in the ocean for extended periods of time without a wetsuit. But you know what?

Even the training was everything that I thought it was going to be. I mean, I was happy to be there. And it hurt every single day, and it was extremely hard. But God, I'd pay money. I'd give you every penny I have right now to go back. If I could turn back the clock right now, I would make exactly the same choices up until that point in my life. Yeah.

Maybe they would change a little bit later on, but until that point, we're still going on the same road. Yeah, I had somebody asked me that the other day. Some kid, I was talking to some school kids, and one of them said, you know, what can I do to get ready for seal training? I was like, man, seal training is awesome. You get paid. You work out. You literally work out all day long. They feed you three, if not four meals a day of all you can eat, just get after it.

It's awesome, man. It's so fun. With aggressive A-type, motivated, largely personality. surrounding you. It gets better as obviously the days and weeks go on and training some of the people who shouldn't be there weeded out.

But, and then even the teams, it's like, it can be everything that you want it to be. Yeah. So you show up, so you get Don, you show up with the teams,

your new guy. How was that new guy experience? Man. I don't know the statute of limitations on some of the things that were done to me, but, I mean, again, but it was,

it was awesome. I was surrounded by my heroes. I didn't know anything about anything. I didn't realize that at the time. But. Because in your head, because in our heads, we know everything about everything. I had been to Buds and airborne school at Fort Benning. I am the most highly polished soldier in the world.

And you just, FYI, for those people that don't understand, when you get done with Buds and airborne school, you know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing. You know nothing. And it's pretty ridiculous that it's got the prestige. People call Buds a school.

And again, you got to air quote that because you don't, you don't know how to be a, that's another one I get all the time. You don't, you're not a seal at the end of buds. I always tell people it stands for basic underwater demolition seal with the emphasis on the B. It's basic. You can run and do pull ups and you look great with shorts on a beach. I mean, but you don't know anything. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I checked in, you know, pre-9-11. Although they are better now. I just, I have to say that. Of course. They're way better now. I was talking to some guys that recent graduates that are now in the pipeline, they're getting trained.

And I told them, I said, you guys are getting trained infinitely better than what we got infinitely better. Now, it has to do with the time frame that you and I came in, the 90s. There was no, there was a few, very few Vietnam veterans left. You'd milk what you could out of them, but you weren't going to get, like now,

every single guy that's teaching every single bloods instructor, they're all combat veterans that have experience. So it's a different game now. And I think we were taught infinitely, better than the people before us. I'm glad to see that that cycle repeats itself. I mean, it's a matter of technology and understanding. And I mean, they've changed the pipeline a little bit, especially what happens after Buds. Because I went to Team 5 and we did our own Trident Board, you know, and we did our own trading. And then you go talk to the guys like down at Team 3. They're like,

oh, yeah, we didn't do any of that. Well, that just means I'm better than you, obviously. You know, but yeah, there's no competitive nature of the teams at all. But, I mean, And it was, I mean, I looked at these guys who had been in Seals for like five, six, seven, eight years or there was like a Vietnam vet walking around. Like you're just, I just wanted to breathe the same air as those people. And I mean, it's a, you realize incredibly fast that you don't know anything. And you realize that because you get taped up for your mistakes. Because you're reinforced every time that you make a mistake.

And it's just like, I couldn't do anything right for like years because I didn't know anything. The biggest. If we had been fighting an enemy, I would have been more of a danger to the people that I was with than the enemy that we were fighting. It just, I mean, I tell people it takes five to seven years to even understand what it really means to be a seal. And then probably at the 10-year mark, you're at the top of the bell curve as far as what you're going to be able to do operationally. But still, I mean, I was in heaven. I was in my, I wasn't even 21 yet, living in an apartment in Coronado, riding a bike to work. Richest guy in the world.

Well, until I got paid. Yeah, and then that would be the poorest guy two days after that. It is, like, for most guys that come in out of high school, because we're in your high school, you know, even if you're working at Wendy's, like I did, you're only making whatever $4.25 an hour in that amounts to, you know, whatever. You're getting like $80 every two weeks. You show up in the teams,

and all of a sudden they're giving you real legit money. They're filling your pocket up every two weeks. You are the richest kid in the world. Not a fair new guy, because you're paying for everything. You buy some beers. You buy some beers. Learned a lot of stuff in bars over beers. Indeed.

Learned a lot of, I mean, you listen to a lot of history. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn when you should keep your mouth shut because it gets shut for you. I've been taped up in a bar, maybe. The hazing was pretty good in teams back then. Yeah. Reinforcement, less than reinforcement. So you need a couple deployments.

Couple deployments. Two pre-9-11 deployments. And, you know, again, the life is a new guy is amazing. Like, here's a rifle. It's yours. And then my first department I worked in, I was a secondary comm guy. So I think I had like a PRC 77. Like rotary, you know, rotary dials and whip antenna.

I hadn't even been to comm school. But it's like, this is my stuff. And I remember going, getting issued my first set of gear that I look back at now. And it's like, I couldn't sell it if I wanted to. so antiquated, but I was so happy to be where I was. And we, you know, we'd trained for 18 months and we'd deploy for six, but my first deployment was to Japan, to the Kedina Air Force Base. And we experimented with how much we could drink and how much we could work out, like,

which ratio is best, 80, 20, 70, 30. And we'd go train our partner forces. But, I mean, we lived life hard. It was exactly the brotherhood that I thought it was be. I was surrounded by my best friends. We all had the same drive. You could have told us to go build sand castles. We would have had the best sand castles in the world

because we just go and go and go and go until we get it right. Surrounded by like-minded, motivated people. Come back to another 18-month workup as like a kind of new guy, one platoon wonder, if you will. Again, you know about 20%, but you think you know about 80. The ratio is just a skew. Went through the whole workup again. and then deployed to Guam for six months.

And at the same time, we'd go to Australia for a bit. We'd train with the partner forces there. We'd go to the Thailand, we'd go to Philippines, and then we'd go back and we'd just train and talk about how awesome we were going to be when the Big Mish. Remember the Golden Connix box? Big Mish and the Golden Connacks.

Leif and I've talked about that on here. Back in the day, especially pre-9-11, we were all preparing for the one big mission that was going to go down, the Big Mish. Yeah. And what was interesting is because we didn't have any combat experience, at least from my perspective, we trained freaking hard because we thought like it was going to be even harder than anything we could imagine. We don't know how hard it's going to be. So we're just going to be like it's not sand castles.

Because we would have prepared for that hard too. But it's real. This is what we're prepared for. So we trained as hard as we possibly could in every arena. In every arena to be ready for whatever was going to come, which we had no idea. I don't know if I've talked about this before, but we finally got my first deployment, deployed to Guam.

I'm ready for the big Mish, bro. Totally. I'm ready. It's going down from Gua. We get there. We get there and we have, you know, we get issued beepers. So you know it's real now because you're getting issued beepers. Because this back of the day,

no one had beepers back then unless you, unless some shit was going to go down. So they give us the beepers and we're like ready to rock and roll. And finally, actually, I was surfing. And I come in and someone's waving one of my buddies waving him in the beach like hey I run up what's going on hey we got a page so we get the page we get the page we know she We get the 911 page oh dang bro get but we get you get whole ass to base we get there we get in the LPO sitting there

You know I look at his face and I go this doesn't look like the kind of face I anticipated seen right now and I've been in Guam this is my first deployment I'm two days into Guam so I think man this is exact like you're you're saying? Yeah, What's going to be like? Of course, man. I just got on deployment. It's going down. So no kidding. The president knows that I'm on deployment.

He's ready. We're going to action that target. So what I failed to mention was that we were like our second or third day in Guam, the first day in Guam that we were there. We went incited in our weapons. So we got a recall, emergency recall 911, go back into base. Guess what we didn't do. We didn't clean up our brass.

So I'm not kidding. We went and cleaned up our brass. They made it. They recalled us emergency recall to go clean up our brass on the rain. after that the the beers got cracked open and it went sideways real quick for the rest of that deployment but isn't it amazing what used to constitute an emergency that was that was a rough one oh man so you end up so those are your couple pre nine 11th where were you in September 11th happened I was stationed at team five still and I was living in the archstone apartments right by the IKEA in Mission Valley. Watch the second one go in live. Dang.

Yeah, I remember it. It was living with a buddy and my wife. We'd been married for six months and watched the second one go in live. And then you knew immediately. Did you know, were you thinking on the first one? Because I wasn't the first one. I didn't see the first one going live. I turned it on just in time to see the second one.

But I think it caught most people. Like the first one, they're like, oh, well, that pilot's probably in trouble. It can be a lawsuit on that one. And then the second one, there was no doubt whatsoever. And I didn't know, I mean, looking back, I didn't have the mental capacity to understand the difference that it would have in my life. But I knew that something was going to be different. I mean, I think I realized that we were passing from the conceptual phase to the practical phase

of what we had trained to do for a really long period of time. You know who did know that? So the officer, the officer, D. So I was going to college at the time. And I called the officer D Taylor, who was a friend of mine who I knew who I'd worked for, who was an outside. standing guy and I called him up and I was like hey sir I'm in college get me out of college I'll finish online I'll do something just get me out of here send me to a team immediately please yeah

please and he and he says to me jaco don't worry this war is going to last a long long time and of course I didn't believe him yeah but damn was he right he he was but I mean I can only imagine being in your shoes I would have been like I don't really care this is what my calling in life is to be I don't I don't care if I'm in line to get the Nobel Prize for something. Like, we'll just put that on the shelf and I'll come back and get it. Nobel what? Yeah, like, see. There's a war going on.

Yeah. And so you get done with that. And then shortly thereafter, you ship out to the East Coast, right? Yep, go out to the East Coast and did the vast majority of my combat deployments out there. And while, I mean, what an eye-opening experience. You know, from, like I said, going from conceptual. shooting at paper targets and training hard and realistic

to being on a two-way range for the first time. I mean, the first target I ever was on, I think my helicopter had 27 rounds in it and the door gunner got shot in the face right in front of me. And I'm in mop level four.

Yeah, for those either don't know what that is. That's the chemical, biological, and radiological suit, protection that you wear. And highest level four is you're wearing your mask. You're wearing everything. So it's a horrible, uncomfortable, miserable thing to do.

And we had a four hour 47 flight on the way to the objective. And 30 minutes out, we got all of our stuff on to include our gas masks and the blowers. I was going to say, if you had the blowers, that does make it a lot nicer. Well, unless you put your weapon strap over the hose. I could go on for days about mistakes I've made in my life. So, yeah, I was skip breathing, and occasionally the glass would touch my eyeball. I couldn't breathe. But, I mean, so this is my first real target ever.

And we're hitting the number one Kenbio target in Iraq right after the war kicked off. And I was on the third 47 that came in and they blew the power grid by an A10 strike before we landed. And then they landed the helicopters in between the fireball in the city. So we were backlit. So each subsequent helicopter that came in took more rounds. And by the time ours came in, he started taking rounds at about a minute out. I didn't even know what they were. I'm just sitting there looking through straws, you know, through my gas mask, through my night vision goggles, suffocating myself because my weapon strap is over the hose.

It's supposed to be giving me the air. And, you know, there was some sparks. Nobody heard on the bird. Not a single one of our guys shot. And then right before we touched down, the door gunner just. falls over. And the top of his head kind of came off and tied my, you know, tie my jacket around his head and it just took off.

And away we went on our first combat operation. But the whole thing was just surreal. And that leap, I didn't realize how surreal it was until the next morning when I woke up. And I was like, man, I hope this is survivable. Because that was just one of many in the target deck. And it continued for months and then years. And, you know, two decades now. And now decades.

Yeah. And it was, and it took me a little bit of time to get up and running to be, to be comfortable in that environment. But I developed a level of comfort in that environment. And if I'm being totally honest, I mean, I loved it. I loved it. It was, I mean, I understand that it's high consequence and that it's high risk and that there's matters of life and death and decisions that are being made. But that's where I want to be. I mean, I was like, yes, this is what I came to do, to fight for the values that I believe in and to fight for people who can't fight for themselves.

And it was awesome. Loved it. It's interesting how you talk about that transition from like, from training, which is what we all lived. There's very few people that this is another thing that's hard for people to understand about, especially about the early days of the seal. Well, for us, the early days of the seal teams is there was so few people at. actually had combat experience. And that went all the way up to the leadership. A lot of leadership had no combat experience.

And so for us, all of a sudden, in a very quick learning curve, you know, you spend two weeks on deployment, you had more combat experience than, you know, than anybody else in the SEAL teams at that time, you know, other than the guys that were deployed right before you, but you had a, that's how quick the learning curve was. And things were changing.

I mean, look at what we trained. I mean, we were doing OTB and exhaustion, Drager dives, and I'm doing river and stream crossing. in Nileland. Bro, I'm not kidding. Before my first deployment to Iraq, I took my seal platoon. We went on board of an amphibious landing ship in San Diego and went, and no kidding, did lead line and slate beach reconnaissance at Camp Pendleton.

That was less than, it might have been a month and a half before deploying to Iraq to do operations. That's how, that's the lag time in the big bureaucratic machine in the military. Hey, you know, we got this big fleet. exercise you guys can go participate in one of one of our one of my guys in that platoon I come down and go hey break out your lead line and say so again for those these that don't know there's the very prehistoric type operation that was excellent descriptor yeah it's war it came from World War II it came after the

Battle of Tarawa at the Battle of Tarawa the Marines went in and as they went into the beaches in their landing craft they hit reef and the the the they opened the gates of the of the landing craft the Marines got out and unfortunately the reef ended and so these guys these Marines went out and they went into you know 10 12 15 feet of water instead of two feet of water and many

many Marines were drowned heavy gear that was not buoyance it was not designed for swimming it was it was meant for beach landing not for a swim and anyways that was kind of the one of the precursors to the UDTs and and what so what our predecessors used to do was go in

with a lead line which is a of string with a lead on the bottom of it and it's got little marks on it called buntings, little marks on it that tell you how deep it is and you go in as a big team and you drop these lead lines and you figure out how deep and you and your slate is a piece of plexiglass that's been sanded down and you write with a pencil on it how deep it was in this particular location. It's like trying to do calculus with an abacus basically. So we are you know like less than two months from deploying to Iraq for the first time. None of us had ever been in combat. We're not One single person zero not one single person in my seal platoon had ever been in combat before Including our tasking commander no one and so we say oh you know what we need to do right now is we're gonna do a hydrographic reconnaissance That's what it's called lead line and slate but one of one of the guys might do what you do what are you talking about And I go bro. We're just gonna do it and it was like you've got to be kidding me what is wrong with us

But so that learning curve was fast but then but I also to to kind of emphasize what you're saying And I look at it when you said, you know, your first like platoon, you know like 20% and then your second platoon, you know for me, because I have four kids, it's very similar to what you learn with kids. Yes. Your first kid, you're like, oh, wait, what? You don't know how to do anything. Everything is hard. You know, you're worried about everything. Your second kid, you're like, I'm pretty much good to you. Your third kid, you're like, okay. You know, I think we're comfortable. Your fourth kid, you're like, hey, first kid, go take care of your sibling. Exactly. Which is really, which is really exactly what you do in. teams you're like hey you know you know one cruise wonder go show that new guy what's up because you don't have to do it anymore and you want them to learn the experience but that's the same thing with the combat operations that you do and and over you know a period of a couple weeks all of a sudden you go from being you know I'll give you another good example from my perspective my first

deployment to Iraq when every operation we would go on like the first like let's call it five or seven operations that I did every piece of gear that I had to change the batteries changed the battery My nods changed the battery, my lasers changed the battery, my flashlight changed every single battery. I need a brand new battery in every one of these pieces of gear. Well, I was doing it because that's when we talked about the big Mish, that's what we would think. You know what? I got to have this 100%.

We realized after a week, if everyone does that, we're not going to have any batteries left in another two weeks. And so we all realize, you know what? You're going to have to use that battery and keep track of how long you're using it for because you don't want it to fail. But you're going to get, you know, 12 or 15 or 25 uses out of this thing. But that's the kind of lessons that we learned And that's the kind of comfort level You got like, okay, if my nods fail, I'll stop, I'll put a new battery in my nods

And we'll move on. So those are the kind of things That you learn in that steep learning curve That all of us, our whole generation Went through that real quick. And you only learn that with time in the saddle. Like it takes experience to understand like, okay, I can use this lithium battery That probably costs $9.

And I didn't turn it on the whole time And I'm going to huck it. You know? I think I can use it again. I mean, but I mean, everything changed. The tactics changed.

The way we trained changed. It was amazing what happened post 9-11. All this stuff we thought was going to be crazy effective because it worked in Vietnam. Guess what? Doesn't work in the desert. Let me ask you this. When you say that you only learn it in the saddle, when you were,

when you went through training when I was running training, you were able to convey a lot of that information of those guys, though. I tried. I think you were. And maybe you couldn't give them every single little tiny thing. Yeah. But what I'm saying is there was no one to teach us that stuff. Yes.

In, for me, it was in 2003. There was no one to say, hey, you don't need to change your battery on every operation. You're going to need those batteries. You need to make them last. So we did get, we did get some fundamental knowledge back from. For sure. From those early times. And then you still got to add that experience, though.

I mean, like you could read a book and then go do it for real. And you need the combination of the two to have that confidence. And then you can impart it on somebody else. And, you know, history just like, like you said, the Vietnam guys, like, they were just timed out. We didn't have access to that. And I look at the pre-9-11 training that we did. It was awesome. But don't get me wrong.

I loved it. But, man, it doesn't work in Baghdad. Yeah. You know, and then we had a tactical shift again in probably 2006, 2007. You know, it's just, it's that, I think, is what separates our community. from a lot of other ones. Like we're malleable. Like we have leadership that's like,

listen, this isn't working in real time. We need to create a solution for it right now. And we're willing to do that. We have just a little bit more control of the wheel. Yeah, well, part of the reason is because we had no doctrine. Yeah. Whereas the other service branches, many of them have this beautiful, really well-written doctrine on this is how you do this type of operation.

And we didn't have that. So guess what? For us to say, you know what? That didn't work yesterday. We're going to change it today. they didn't have that capability. They were like, hey, this is the way we do it. Yeah.

And we never really had this is the way we do it. I mean, think about before trade ed. I was at Team 5, right? So we would go to Alaska and do cold weather training. And the Team 3 guys were off driving DPVs. I mean, there wasn't even talking in between the team. So there was so much skill set. And of course, I mean, if you were Team 3, I wasn't telling you shit.

I'd give you the wrong information because we're competing with ourselves. But yeah, like you said, no doctrine. And then finally we had, you know, the trade at, you know, East Coast and West Coast and, you know, sharing information and coming together and lessons learned and all that stuff that I think largely professionalized the force from a paperwork perspective, but has impact on the battlefield as well, too. It's not sexy and it's not fun, but it keeps people alive. No, there's no doubt about that. The amount of interoperability we would do as the different training departments was awesome. It was awesome. And bouncing lessons learned and the feedback loop that we got going was definitely far superior to anything than.

Like you said, when we had the teams going all different areas and not talking to each other. I mean, I got issued overwhites at Team 5. They wouldn't issue us tan BDUs because we were a Southwest Asia platoon. And I'd look at the guys wearing the chocolate chips. I'm like, God, I'll get a pair of those. I'll trade you for these woodland cameras. It's just a different world. But I'm actually extremely grateful that I got to see both sides of the coin because if you never got to see that evolution,

you're missing a huge piece of who we are as a community. And also, I believe it would be easier that we could let it slip back in that direction. If we don't, like we said, capture those lessons and be able to pass them on. So how many then you got out to the East Coast, how many deployments did you do out there? I bounced back and forth from Iraq to Afghanistan for basically four years straight. It'll be everything between three to,

four months. They were shorter in duration. So I ended up in my career, I've been to Iraq three times in Afghanistan, five. And at one point there, you kind of got a little setback. Yeah. I equated to going to Vegas,

and you can play craps for a really long time, and you can be on a great heater, and then a seven is going to come up and bite you. And hopefully you don't have a lot of chips on the table. Yeah, I got, I got shot from about 15 feet away by a guy in a window that I didn't see, and I was staring at that window for 10 minutes before I was sitting on a ladder looking into a courtyard where they were trying to determine which building was the one

that we were actually going to make entry on. And they determined that the building that I was looking at was the one we were going to make entry into. Actually, I got to back it up a little bit. So we walked by this building originally. The lights were off because I was walking point at the time. So we went down an alley. you know, we're not always the best.

NINJas, we made a little bit of noise. So a guy comes out of a house. We pursued him into the house and made additional noise while we were doing that, securing that to make sure that maybe it wasn't the guy. We weren't exactly positive of the location. So maybe that could have been the guy. So it wasn't, and we backtracked and went back down that alley. And the guys who were doing the, they were fixing the target,

trying to determine which building it was going to be. They needed some time. So I threw a ladder up on a wall because I'm not a huge fan of not. being able to see over things, climbed up on the ladder, I was just looking at the outside of a building. And the lights were on this time, which defeats a lot of the technological advantage that I have. So I was kind of just looking underneath my nods. And I could see plainly into the window. I never saw a shadow.

I never saw a curtain move. I never saw anything. And they finally gave me the go ahead, hopped off the ladder. And I remember being in the corner of the courtyard by myself for a little bit before two other guys came over with me. and I almost approached the door on my own because I had before. And it was dark and I had the shadows. And it was kind of like an American house where there's a, it was like an L. The long end of the L being the garage.

And then there's that path that goes to the front door. And then it breaks off. And then there's that window right there. And that was the window I was looking at. I was just going to go to the corner to set security for the breach. And I almost left the shadows. It's like, you know what? Not today.

So I waited for two more guys to come up. And right at that corner that I was going to post myself up on, there was a window. And I wasn't going to turn my back on the window without taking at least a quick peek in it. And as soon as I turned my head to look in that window, I heard a crack and around hit me high up on the hip and spun me. And then this only time I've ever felt it in my life, the true sensation of time slowing down. It really was almost like the movies. It's probably the only thing I can say was ever like the movies. But it slowed down and spun me towards him.

And when it hit, I pushed off a little bit with my right foot, I think just instinctually, can I kind of push me down? And there was a vehicle in the driveway. And I ended up stuck underneath the vehicle. I had a shotgun on my right-hand side, and the bungee cord got stuck on the undercarriage. I'm laying on top of my gun. Can't get it staring at full auto fire from like 15 feet away out of a window. A guy is just up on his knees, just hosing.

And probably three seconds occurred or expired. and I mean obviously all hell broke loose from people on our side engaging the window they made entry from the other side ended up having I think it was eight American servicemen get wounded on that target alone some of it was our guys were too close to a breach I mean a lot of it was it was some fog of war stuff from a unit that you wouldn't associate necessarily with the fog of war but it you know it happens I am I associate the fog of war with all units, unfortunately. Yeah. But you know, it surprises you at some levels more than others. And it was, you know, they wanted to get internal. They wanted to get the breach on the door.

Get the breach on the door. So we put a C6 strip charge up, which is a very large explosive charge that runs the length of the door. I put it on the hinge side. When they set it off, there was a unit that had entered on the other side of the building without telling anybody standing about three feet from it. So there was some people who were shot on the inside. There were some people who were shot on the outside.

And then there were some people who were hurt from the explosion. So they had little birds coming in, grabbing people. I ended up getting thrown in the back of a Bradley with a guy who jabbed me with a 14-gauge needle and hadn't prepped the bag. So he pulled it back out. And I told him at that point, you're done with any medical treatment at this point. I'll handle my own stuff from here on out. Like an army medic, he was just shaking. I'm like, you're good.

I'm going to live, I think. So just take it easy. Take it easy. But, I mean, I didn't do anything differently that night. that I hadn't done before, hundreds of times. You know, I was on the wrong side of the bullet. And it actually really rocked my confidence. It was, I was young, I was my mid-20s,

where I wanted to be operating at the level that I wanted to be operating at. And, I mean, I couldn't walk for almost a year. I had hemipelisia, like paralysis of one side of my leg. I had drop foot for a year. Is that because it obviously hit nerves then? They don't know if it, I mean, they don't know. It either hit the sciatic nerve as it went through,

or the shock wave short-circuited it. Either way, the result was the same. It fried it all the way down to my ankle. So when I was in the back, when I got to the hospital in the green zone, my biggest complaint was that my ankle felt like it was snapped in half. And like I still have never had a surgery,

never broken a bone. Everything is still inside of my pelvis. They just wrapped the wound with ACE wrap and drugged me out of the compound. I mean, that's literally it. And then they went back to business. but I thought that I was like my ankle's got to be destroyed somehow so they cut my boot off like very gingerly and they're looking at it and like your ankle's totally fine but that was by

far the worst part of it was the neuropathic issues for like a year and a half almost two years it felt like I had dipped my leg in gasoline and just lit it on fire 24-7 and so the Navy I mean I had like 14 15 pill bottles I mean I was taken two three four Ambien staying awake Of course, the only way to up that game is to combine it with Captain Morgan, which I did in a variety of dosages. So I would sleep but wake up exhausted. I mean, it was rough. It rocked me as a person and as a seal. I didn't know if I was ever come back from it.

Where were you stationed at that time? Were you still out on the East Coast or did you go to Buzz? I was on the East Coast. I went to Buds as basically a break to rehab my name. myself. I mean, like so even still today, I can't fill my left leg from the knee cap down. I roll my ankle all the time. I'm just used to, I'm used to it. You somehow compensate for it the best you can. Yeah, I mean, I don't do any like lateral stuff because if I catch my left foot to the outside, that that's the role that I can't stop as the one of the outside. So, I mean, I still train as hard,

if not harder than I used to. I'm just super cautious with what it is that I do. And I tailor it all towards the stuff that I do now. But yeah, you want to talk about, you know, you watch all these movies where, you know, guys are just getting drilled and they're running at it and like, I'm going to be the biggest warrior ever. And like, I was flat on my back. I mean, I was freaking done training. There's nothing I could do. Pinned under a car. Needed a buddy mine to come over and pull me around in the middle of a firefight to get me out of harm's way. I mean, I got super lucky. The belt I was wearing that night has the second round that the guy shot at me. It burned the belt for like two inches. And then the copper jacket is still in the belt itself. That's how close I got to getting hit even higher up in the hip. like the pelvis, I don't think I would have survived that one if that would have hit me.

Because there's an AKA from like three times the distance from me to you right now. It was spicy. So when you, they're just, I mean, I'm not trying to say anything super negative about the care that you got. But they're like, okay, take this pill, take this pill, take this pill. You're in pain, take this pill. It was early. So I was, I got home about two days after it happened. They flew me. They medevaced me to launch stool. I decided I didn't want to stay there, so I checked

myself out and got a Delta ticket and flew into New York. I got picked up by another plane, and my wife met me at the stairs of the aircraft in Oceana, the Naval Air Station there, with my son in a stroller, and she was pregnant with our second child. And about a week after that, my arresting heart weight was sitting at like 150. I was sweating profusely in a ton of pain, and they took. take me to the hospital. And I remember talking to like this, I think I was an E5 at the time. So I was talking to this little punk E2 Corman who was checking me in. And he's like, you know, what's the nature of injury?

I'm like, you know, gunshot wound to the hip. And I kid you not. He's like riding this stuff down. He stops. He looks at me and he goes, self-inflicted? And my wife's sitting there looking at this. she's just like, what's going on? Like she has very little understanding of the military medical system.

I sat in the waiting room while they took people in with the sniffles and the flu for four hours before they took me in. And my wife finally just started losing her mind on them. And like, you know, it was a training hospital as most military hospitals or they had never seen a gunshot wound because it was relatively early in the war, you know, given where we were at that time. And they wanted to kind of have all the doctors. All the residents come in. They're like, hey, can they come in and check out the wound? Like, we've never seen a gunshot wound. I'm like, sure, if you bring a pint of morphine with you and juice me up first, I don't care what you do.

Like, I just couldn't sleep. I was in so much pain. The treatment that I got from the military was not awesome. It was frustrating at the time. So this is just to make sure this is 05, right? 05, yeah, early 05. It wasn't awesome. They weren't used to seeing a lot of that stuff.

Yeah, I got pills and I got sent home and kind of largely left to my own devices, which was not a smart call at the time. I mean, in my career, I felt like I was a race car in fifth year going around turn four and then somebody dumped the tranny into reverse and there was just pieces everywhere. And I had to kind of put it back together myself and it sucked at the time. My wife still, I mean, she's pissed about it, the treatment that I got. But, I mean, the military did what they were doing at that time. I don't hold them against it or hold it against them at all. But it sucked for sure. And I do know we've made vast improvements since then.

You were one of the guys that the reason why there's been so many improvements because, you know, guys were coming back and getting the kind of treatment that they would definitely deserve better. You know, one of the worst things about the whole thing was actually the flight out of Balad. And a C-141 full of stretchers of people that were wounded far worse than I was. just the noises that were being made on that flight from Balad to Landstool. I was very fortunate. I had a doc who was assigned to me. And I was just like, hey, knock me out right.

Like, I don't want to hear this anymore. And I had the guy just basically just juice me up until I fell asleep for the whole flight. But what an experience that you'll never forget. Just a tube full of bleeding Americans, you know, on their way back to try to put their lives back. together. People missing. I mean, I was right next to a guy who was standing in a turret of a Humvee when a suicide bomber clacked himself off and every inch of his body from belt line up was just completely tattered. I mean, another guy who had his legs blown off. I mean, like, I'm sitting there. I'm like, I'm like, okay, I thought I was injured. You guys, you guys are way worse off than I am. It was a very

sobering experience. How did you, so you go, you go kind of pretty far down the road of, of booze and pills. I can give you some good recipes if you're interested. Three blues of red and two bottles of Captain Morgan. How did you, okay, we'll take it for granted that you went pretty far down that road being that, you know, you've got the team guy personality of, okay, I can't do this. So I'm going to, I can't do this to the extreme. So I'm going to do something else.

I have two speeds. I have go and stop. How did you figure out, okay, you know what? What was the slap in the face that made you say, you know what, this is not where I to be. I was in the car with my wife. So one of the pills that they gave me was neurotin, which is a anti-seizure medicine for children, but it has a secondary or tertiary side effect of neuropathic pain control. It was an attempt to try to get that burning feeling to stop in my leg. And I kept signing waivers for the dosages because we were off the charts, like we were making medical history

with the dosages that I was on. And another side effect of it is central nervous system. suppression. And I remembered going by the gasoline, or going by the gas station and looking at the sign for the prices of the gasoline. And my wife asked me a very rudimentary mathematical problem. And I couldn't figure it out. And I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the world, but like I should be able to add two plus two and, you know, maybe multiply that out a little bit. And I couldn't do it. And I recognize that in and of myself. So that night, I stopped drinking. and basically started weaning myself off of the neurotin because you can't stop it cold turkey,

because if you do, your propensity for seizures goes through the roof. So you gotta graduate yourself out of it. So it took me like six to eight months to get myself off of the neurotin, off all the pills. And I just started working out like a maniac. And that's how I got myself. I did it all on my own. I didn't get on any protocol from the Navy,

but I remember that moment where I just couldn't answer that question. I was like, okay, time to shift. course and you know a lot of people always a lot of people ask about um you know when you're injured what they ask me you you're what do you do and I always say hey I do what I can do if I got a blown out knee you know I'm gonna do I'm gonna do I'm gonna do one leg of squats the other leg I'm do pull-ups was that your your attitude was like okay what can I do you know that's that's how I found uh crossfit was through getting shot that's what I used to and again I could care less people get very excited about the term crossfit functional training whatever you want to call

it. To me, it was really new at that time. Like, I was on the bodybuilder routine. You know, Chustin tries and back and buys. The 90s team guy routine. Totally. Or otherwise known as the echo routine. Or you run on Wednesdays. But yeah, so like, and I had never done squats before. So I literally held onto a pole and lowered myself down into a squat and I picked myself up. And I just, I just changed stuff so I could do it. And I remember the first night of sleep that I had that was really good. And my wife could probably point to it on a calendar because I came back from the gym.

Like I had no responsibilities at work because my last water was still deployed. So I mean, I literally was like, hey, come in on Thursdays and we'll give you some E-STEM on your leg. That was the therapy. So I went into the gym and I just crushed myself, came home like covered in sweat and just passed out. Slept good and just continued that routine on.

And, you know, they were saying it would take me a couple of years, if ever, to get back on full active duty because they didn't know. I mean, because it was with nerves, they're like, yeah, you reach the end of the medical practice when you start talking about nerves. I've never had, I mean, the doctor's with

probably a decade of medical experience is saying to me, I don't know. I'm like, hey, doc, I don't have an MD and I can tell you that I don't know. Could I get a better answer out of you than that? Like, come on, man. But yeah, I mean, I worked myself back, I wasn't done.

I didn't want to be done. And I worked myself back to a point where I felt confident again that I could deploy, and I was still continuing. So I left and went to BUDS in 2006 as an instructor, used that time to rehab myself. And then by the time I got to Team 3, it was about four or five years after that injury

where I was going through training when you were the OIC to trade at. And also you became an officer at that point when you were going to BUDs. I did. I did. It's not that I didn't have a choice. It was the best choice that I had at that. time. So when I got shot, I was on my LPO tour. And for people who don't understand the military, it is a mandatory go-no-go wicket for advancement. And they counted it as me not

successfully completing it. So to advance, I was an E-6 at the time and I was trying to walk the ladder. I'm sorry for laughing. If those of you that think I'm an evil bastard because I'm laughing, I'm not laughing because I'm a laughing at the old, just the ridiculousness of the system. So if you want to march your way from E1 to E9, you have to hit these mandatory career wickets. And the jump between E6 to E7 for the enlisted guys is the large jump from middle management to the C suite of the enlisted realm. They judge you only by your service record. Unless you have these mandatory wickets, you're getting swept off the table. And so I submitted my chief package twice with a good, awesome evaluations.

I mean, I was doing some awesome stuff in my career. I had good awards, good recommendations, good evils from everybody. And two years in a row, they're like, nope. And so finally I started calling people who probably shouldn't have told me the answer. I'm like, hey, what's going on there? They're like, you know, your LPO tour is getting counted against you. And I didn't want to be done with being in the military. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, okay, how, what can I do here if I want to continue on and I want to have impact?

So I decided I needed to maneuver. So I researched officer programs and stumbled across the limited duty officer program, which is traditionally for E7, E8s, and E9s. And there had never been an E6 candidate picked up. And so I threw my package in the next year that it came up and was actually selected first out of the whole stable of people that were selected that year ahead of like five or six other chiefs who ended up getting picked up for LDO. But for me, I'm looking and I'm like, I want to stay in and I want to have an impact. This is the only way that I can do it. So that's why I submitted my officer package. It was never any burning desire of mine from like years before that.

It was just that I need to do something to keep moving. And that was my route to do it. Did you, when you were, so you get wounded, right? And obviously you could have said at that point, hey, you know what? I'm done. Yep. you know, when you look at the various reasons that a person could choose from why you said like,

you know what, I'm not done. Because friends, you know, other guys that we both know that I've talked to, they have, you know, various reasons. Some of them are straight up vengeance. Like, oh, I'm going to go back and I'm going to get after it. These people are going to pay. Some of it, hey, for myself, you know, kind of like what you were saying.

Like I feel like I can't do what I am supposed to do so I want to prove that I can go back and do it. What was like the driving reason for you? If you had to pick one, maybe it's just all those things, which is a perfectly acceptable answer to you. I mean, vengeance is certainly a part of it, right? Like, how dare you?

I'm the only one who gets to do that to people. You know, yeah, what a crazy, crazy thing to think like that. But you kind of do. Like, you think you're invincible, right? So I needed to prove to myself that I could still do the job that I wanted to do. I was pissed about it. And I was at a point in my life. where I was still very tied to what the job meant.

I derived so much of my personality and who I was from that job because it was all that I had focused on for the vast majority of my life at that point that I didn't know who I would be without that. So it was a combination of all of those things that just kind of kept driving me towards going back. And there was, I mean, there was never a second hesitation. I like I knew I was gonna not stop. I just didn't know that the road the road

which I was gonna take to not stop. You know what's weird to is and I you know for guys that like you and I that are full on institutionalized in the military it's almost like when I was in I didn't understand other options like it wasn't like well I could do this like right now we can sit back you know Andy you could have gotten out back then. Oh sure it's so clear to see that No, but when you're in, you're just, no, well, if you can't do this, well, then you did, there's nothing else that you actually can do. This is the only option in the world. And if we're being totally honest, a lot of that is by design. I'm sure it is.

The military and especially the SEAL teams. What do we do to our buddies who want to get out? You know, like, I am thinking about getting out. Hey, fuck you, quitter. Quitter. You know what I mean? Like, we, I mean, we're the most. I did 20 years and one of my buddies was like, I said, hey, man, yeah, I'm like at the 18 year market.

I told one of my close friends, I'm like, yeah, man, I'm going to retire at 20. They're like, quit. Quitter. But think about the training from day one. It's about the guide to your left and right, right? And then you get back from a mission, you take care of the team gear first. You know, the last thing you do is you take care of yourself. So we're...

You are the bottom of the priority list. You're the bottom of the priority list. Life is the bottom of the priority list in the SEAL teams. And that has secondary and tertiary effects when it comes to understanding what you can do or options that you would have outside of the military. I'm not saying they do it by design, but the system that we come from naturally puts on a set of blinders,

which I think is essential to make us as effective as we are. You're right. I think it is a complete secondary effect. It's not like there's some evil training person in the sky that's going, okay, the way we can get these guys to stay in, us do this. No, the way that the SEAL teams has evolved

to be the best we can be in combat is to make this thing your number one priority, which I say that all the time. I got asked this the other day. I was doing a working with a company. And you know some guy who's asking me you know how did you do your work life balance when you're in the seal teams and I'm like you know this is an answer. I shouldn't be giving I'm not authorized the only you know what you do you marry an awesome girl. Yep and then you focus on your job. That's what I did. I married an awesome girl and I focused on my job and my wife knew she knew it wasn't like I covered up and said no no no no no babe you're my number one priority. It was like no no no no the teams and then the teams and then everything and then like to just you just Jitsu and then everything else and then you're you're down here that's the way it is and I'm not trying to be an asshole That's the that's the reality of the situation and

That's why yeah, that's that's why another reason why when when guys get wounded and they go yeah well what else you're gonna do Yeah, so you get to team three what so what was your position when you because So by the way so just so people understand this LDO thing which by the way I don't know if you know this but it's completely gone it's yeah they shut it down they shut it down Yeah. It's one of the, if not the only way to get commissioned without a college degree. I'm working on a high school diploma here, people. Public school education barely, Santa Cruz. But you showed up and like to this day, right at this moment of time, and I was quote unquote running the training. I have no idea what your job actually was. How awesome is that? That is pretty awesome. Well done. But, you know, I know I could tell you exactly what role you fulfilled, you know, as a leader. But I don't know where you would have.

broken out on an orch job. What was your actual job? I was the training officer. For a task unit? For the SEAL Team 3 in general. How come you were running around with a machine gun dude during workup? Because they would have failed their ORE. Okay.

I mean, the platoons would come or like, you know, the SEA would be like, hey, we failed land warfare. Will you come out to Nile them with us for the OREs? Absolutely, I'll come out in swing blanks. And like, I mean, for one, like, I have, I never wanted a desk job. I loved the best job in the SEAL teams. And you know this is an E5 shooter. Absolutely.

When I, my first combat deployment, my responsibility was a sledgehammer. Then I moved up to Huli. And then I moved to a shotgun. And then I could do whatever I wanted to do. And it was the best job in the world. And like, that's all I wanted to do. So although I was an officer. You get to be, by the way, you get to be a master.

with a sledgehammer or a master with a hooligan to it. You just become, it's your life. Precise, efficient. And so, you know, like I put my officer package in, but let's say like 20% of me was like, you know what, this is just a means to an end. I'm going to figure out a way to get back on the battlefield because LDOs are not supposed to be tactical leaders at all. You're a line officer, but I should have never been, well, I should have never been by the

letter of the law of the LDO manual in a tactical leadership position, which I eventually worked my way to, not by any kind of design, but I went to Team 3, the training O, and, you know, they're getting ready to send people to Afghanistan, and no one's ever set foot there. And, you know, the skipper wanted to send me there, and then the troop commander had a great relationship with, and they were short an officer here and there, so I'd like, maybe I'll go out to San Clement Island for a little bit. You know, maybe I'll get on the roof and throw some grenades in the window.

It's hard to say what I'm going to do. And so I just kind of started going out there again and then went out to Nilean when the troop failed their land warfare, I went out with them and tried, just to try to go and do smart stuff to help them out, to relieve some, give the leadership some distance and space. And it was awesome.

I mean, it's awesome when guys that were experienced would come through like yourself. It's so good to have guys like you coming through, especially because you were super experienced, really good tactically and super humble. It wasn't like you were out there like, no. You were like, oh, this is awesome training. Let's like, oh, yeah, this.

Hey, we need to do this. It was just so good for the troop to see that type of leadership out there. Plus, I like offensive maneuvers. And what I'm telling guys to move forward, they're like, oh, we can do that. I'm like, oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We can do that.

And you should. And they just, they weren't because, you know, you get a junior officer in a community full of A types. And most of the people that work for them have more experience than them. They're hesitant to make a call because we eat our own because we're the most voracious community ever. So they're afraid to make an offensive call when they should make an offensive call. Like I've heard you say before and I know we have the same position. Like the default move should be aggressive, drive forward, not away.

Like put your enemy on their heels. You don't need to be on your heels at all. Like take their space and time away to make a decision. Shorten their shorten your ooteloup and get in the middle of the. of theirs and just start wreaking havoc. But you got to have, again, time in the saddle to be comfortable making those calls. And a lot of it I noticed was pattern recognition. Like, oh, I've seen this. You know, okay, high grounds over there. Sure, let's get some guys over there. Hey, they're going to come around this building. Don't ask, don't ask me now. Just go over there.

Just set security, please. Just go over there, please. Like, you can see, it's pattern recognition from time in the saddle. And because I was exposed to awesome people throughout my career. And I watched them and I wrote down what they did. And I just have always tried to be a sponge. You have to be a sponge and suck up knowledge. And so then you do another deployment. And you do end up in a leadership position. Yeah. Which again, good job.

You said it was, what did you just say? It was unintended or something like that. It was relatively unintended. Relatively. I like, okay, you've quantified it now, thank you. Because I was going to have to call bullshit on you. You know, so I went through the last, you know, the troop commander from that troop was like, hey, we're going to come over. I was supposed to be the opso.

on that deployment at a firebase that was in between the two platoons. One of the officers was having a kid. He wanted to stay back for about the first month, month and a half. And so they had no AOIC. I'm a minted O-1 at this point.

Freshie, butter bar. One of my favorite things to do totally in the side was to put my camis on with my butter bars and I'd go to the ops meetings over a group.

Yeah. And I'd let like, E6s and E-7s talk to me like I was a brand new guy because I always, I mean, I look relatively young and they're like,

you know, Later on once you got some time and these guys are actually guys that you would probably or in many cases have been in the teams Longer than oh for sure yeah hundred percent and I'd be like uh-huh tell me more And then I'd catch them later on to my khakis and they're like oh I got I got to admit I had some fun as a butter bar as well I got to admit I'm like oh that's awesome thank you so much for the guy and so I have one day I know as much as you do and they're just like yeah I told I told a I told a chief a senior chief actually that was kind of calling me out like Butterbar at when I was at team two and I was telling him in front of my platoons there and they all knew me and I go well you know you know senior you got to you got to understand ensigns run the Navy and he he is he went but he's you can see him turning red instantaneously into orbit yeah instantaneously in orbit he actually said you know you guys need to straighten this ensign out and I said hey why don't you do it I'll meet you out the mill vans let's call it noon I'll be out there warming up you'll be out there warming up you'll be had

by herself. Oh, that was so good. Yeah, so, you know, the, the true commander was like, hey, do the last month the training with us, which was the San Clementi Block. Oh, yeah. So went out there with the San Camini Block. The skipper was like, hey, go over there as the opso,

but we're going to slide you out with this platoon. We're having some potential leadership issues with the OIC, a man that I know you're familiar with. Because we experienced them largely together. Yeah. And I think, and this is me speaking for why I think he did that. I think he put me out there as a safety mechanism.

I don't know. I don't think he had anything else to do. So I went out there and he ended up being relieved. And then the skipper, I mean, I was an 01 wearing 03 and 04 when Scott wasn't paying attention because I would just take his caller devices off. Whatever. It's not like I'm an O3 either. So I would just put on whatever.

color device so I could get my hands on. Good thing. There was no kernel bars available. Oh, I didn't wear it. If I could find some general stars, I'd have been rocking those things. And I mean, it was one of the best deployments of all the stuff that I did while I was in.

I think what I was the proudest of is a lot of the guys I deployed with for people that I had put through buds. And to see them overseas on their first deployment and the only word for it is, is afraid to do something because of the consequences.

You know, there's, as you know, there's a lot of oversight. If you pull the trigger on somebody, you had better be able to articulate why you did that. You need to be able to conduct yourself over the radio. You have to be able to paint the picture. There's a correct way to brief. There's the ways that, you know, you got to play, you know, it's mental judo, you know, and interacting with people.

And to see these young guys who had no experience and afraid to, I'm afraid it's not probably the best word, but hesitant to make decisions. And then at the end of the deployment, just sharp teeth out, knowing what they need to do and I can just sit back. And again, a lot of that is them getting that experience. But I was just glad that I was able to be there to provide that buffer because I wasn't going to let anything happen while I was out there. To the best of my ability, like I always picked the most dangerous place to be. I always wanted to be in the position where there's going to be a decision to be made.

Like that's just the way that I want to be. Like where's the most dangerous place to be? Where's the most optimal place to be? Put me in coach. I'm going to be right here. And then to try to teach other people to do that exact same thing and then to step back.

That to me is probably what I'm the most proud of is the growth of the people that I was there with. You know that you talk about that mental judo thing, which again, this is one that's going to be hard for civilians to understand how much you know, it's like a bureaucratic force that exists in the military. And really, you have to be, you have to be able to navigate through that. And that was, that was the thing for me that I always look back and I go, I wish I would have done a better job of teaching that to guys.

Because I had no problem teaching them the tactical side of things. And then if I really was close with someone or I really spent some time with them, I'd be able to get through the rest of it and say like, okay, by the way, this is how you have to do this. This is how you have to walk this line. This is what you have to say in these situations. And they'd be great. But some guys would catch like, some guys would catch the, uh, the, the surface jaco, right? Just like the surface jaco, which is like, girl, right?

Which is, which is awesome, right? That's absolutely part of, part of it, right? But guys that only caught the surface jaco, sometimes they'd get caught up later because they'd say, you know, oh, this guy was a, This guy was you know risk averse. I'm like well you know here's what you got to do and you got a guy that's a risk of course or this guy's in Eagle. Here's what you got to do. He's got to handle them. So that's something that when I had the opportunity in the time, but that thing and the other thing about it is there's no training for that. That's just I was just going to bring up a saddle. That is there is no one that says and it's hard to even simulate because that means you got to simulate some other human beings. Yeah. Rank and characteristics and personality. That might change halfway through your deployment. That might change. halfway through your briefing you know you can brief a guy that's all in a good mood and all of a sudden He turns because he saw you said something that you got to learn how to deal with that and that political side of that's what it is basically It's political and its relationships building those things up that is

So key and once you get into the leadership position I hate to say this I hate to see it once you're in the leadership position That is at least as important as What you're gonna do tactically I mean the SEAL teams have made their mark kinetically, but we get our go-no-go off of PowerPoint. Absolutely. I mean, I've had briefs come back because the helicopter

was facing the wrong way on the insertion slide. I've almost gotten to fistfights. I'm like, listen, it's Helvetica 12. Not 11. We're not doing Times New Roman shit now, all right? The new battle space. Get out of my face with that Times New Roman, son. The Battlespace commander said it's Helvetica, bold sometimes only on the X-Phil slide.

But like, I mean, it's insane. Like we have, we can bring some of the most amazing combat power to bear, but only if the leadership can articulate and navigate what the battle space owner wants. Because we don't make sense to a lot of people who don't come from our background. And you got to learn to read what they're saying and speak their language. And then you just, you got to maneuver. I mean, that's the biggest thing is you got to maneuver. And then then you can be so wildly effective.

It doesn't matter how good you are tactically. If you can't get outside of the wire, I mean, and it's truly, if I tell people this all the time, but you want to shut down the seal teams, kill Microsoft office. We're done. Yeah. We're done. Yeah. The whole military is actually very, you know.

It is a bureaucracy. You said it's kind of a bureaucracy. It is the biggest, I mean, it's 100% bureaucratic. I mean, it's amazing. And as an E5, you're like, I just, I just want to. I go jam my mags up and then make them empty. And you're like, yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to be up for 12 hours looking for the appropriate helicopter icon.

And I may get sassy and have it move in with helicopter noises. It depends. And then you've got to be able to brief it, right? Because then there's a whole other skill. Like, I don't know how many times you have to go and not only present the brief, but like talk to the guy who's going to say yes or no and develop that relationship. You're selling your operation. In many cases, you're selling your operation. Until you get that relationship where they're coming to you.

you and saying this is hey this which is the best possible case and I was blessed to end up in that situation where it was just a total mind meld of hey whatever you guys want to do what can you do here can you that's that's when you that's when you just are loving life and it doesn't get any better than that PowerPoint oh my god so you got you hit the control key in the arrow it only moved a little bit yeah if you need to move that just to get it centered I know so much about PowerPoint that I could never forget if I wanted to. It's so horrible.

So that was an awesome deployment, though. It was awesome for different reasons. I mean, don't get me wrong. I was carrying generally my 300 windbag and two javelin missiles to high ground positions and coming back with them all empty the majority of the time. So I got to have a- So yes, that does go in the awesome deployment box, yes. So I got to have a little bit of what we'll call a hoot.

And then, but again, professionally developing for me too, because I didn't have any experience being an opso for a task unit. And you want to talk about relationship stuff, sometimes, you know, the base that we were on, I just developed a relationship with their N3 or S3. And ended up, I was selling myself. We had a great relationship. I could come to him the day before,

but like, hey, we're looking at doing this. He's like, yep, no problem. Let me know what's line up a QRF. And it just, it's so much, pulling the trigger is easy. All the stuff you got to do to get to that point is so hard. And it just doesn't make the movies. because it's boring. Yeah,

no, there will, there will literally never be a movie or a book about that crap. Why can't we have a movie about a 72 hour planning cycle?

I don't understand. Where's the three meter imagery? God damn it. This is five. I heard one of my platoon commanders, not lay off the other, the Delta Patoon commander

was telling someone, and he goes, he goes, you know, someone was like, oh yeah, you guys got to me. And he said,

I watched Jocko literally beat his head up against a wall for every single operation that we did. I was like, oh, damn. And that wasn't the conventional side that I was beaten up against.

It was, you know, it was our chain of command, which is very, um, which can be very micro focused on little things from time to time, occasionally. You get the broad spectrum of leadership.

Yeah. Inside of the teams, not all of it is good. But you, whichever, whichever game you got to play, that's what you got to play. And that's exactly what I did.

And that's, you know, that's why I always say the, I had the same relationship with every boss I'd ever have. Yeah. No matter who they were or what, how crazy. they were or how awesome they were.

They trusted me and they were going to give me what I needed to do my job. Yep. So that was your last deployment then. It was. And then you went to trade at. And I was gone. You were check. I got there in August of 2010.

Yep. I was, well, I think the last time I literally saw you before today was in the hallway right by your old office. You were walking out and I was coming back from deployment and we like, hi, hey,

what's up, yeah. Later. Yeah. So like five years ago. It's not a big deal. Actually seven years ago. What'd you do there?

I was the opso. Okay. I think, I mean, did you get to go out at all? I didn't do anything. I augmented the leapfrogs. I'm not, I don't do good when it comes.

I mean, I did my job, but like I'm not a paperwork, you know, ninja at all. And nor is there really, it's not really an opso, much like the trade at guy is not the CEO.

He's the OIC. So a lot of those positions, there's redundancy. There was a training warrant. You know, like there was. Also, it's fairly repetitive.

So there's not like an at a team with the first time you're going to go through this and out to everything. You get through two or three cycles and it's like, okay, you could put this thing on autopilot. It's the same thing every three, six months, whatever it is. So I got medically retired. I was going to just get out of the military. I came back from that deployment and I was talking to the officer detailer about what I would need to do to continue my career. And she said, well, you know, since you haven't done your AOC or your OIC tour, we're going to need you to to do is two back to back, A-O-I-C-O-I-C,

and then you're going to do your, you know, your disassociated tour. I'm just like, we, we can stop right now. Like, my wife's not going to tolerate that. Like, I think she's at the vast limit. I was at the limit, my body, like my ankle. I almost had to medevac myself out a couple of times, like roll my ankle extremely bad on an offset patrol in, like laying on target with my foot up in the year.

It was just, I was, I recognized it like my time was over. So I researched what it would take for me to stay in and continue, and it was not tenable. So I was just going to get out of the military. And I was five days from my separation date and went to go get my physical. And the doc is like, no, I'm not signing this. Right on. Good for him. They extended me a year.

I mean, I had to go. I went out to NICO out at Bethesda did that as far as the kind of the horsepower for the ride-up, got the whole full assessment done and ended up getting medically retired, which was a huge benefit to myself, all thanks to that doc who was like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to sign this. Yeah, that is awesome. And there's plenty of team guys that, you know, spend their entire career. I'm not going to the doctor. I'm not going to, and that's another thing that gets conditioned into you going through basic

seal training, which is don't go to medical no matter what. I was in the same way. Even after getting shot, my medical record was thin. And, you know, I was going through the questionnaire in the interview at the actual discharge's physical. And he's like, what? Like, you couldn't find any of the documentation. And then I left Nike with like 300 pages.

And if you read that thing, it's like this guy will never, I should be in a wheelchair right now with a straw. Like, you read that thing. I'm like, oh my gosh. And then you get away. It's like, the bureaucracy, submit a package to the med board. And six months later, they're like, okay, you're out. And that was it. That was it.

No retirement ceremony. I just was like, hey, I went and talked to the, oh, I see. I was like, hey, it's almost lunchtime. I'm going to leave now and I'm never going to come back. How many years was that for you? One month should I have 17? Yeah. Yeah.

And so I literally went in. I was like, hey, it's almost lunch. I'm leave. I'm not going to come back. He was like, all right, cool. See you later. I had some terminal leave saved up at like 90 days worth. And I just gone.

Never went back in. Yeah. I think I went and got my DD-214 or like my retirement ID card like a year later. Yeah. Just never went back. That's crazy, man. It's crazy how you do that time and then it's over like that. In a blink of an eye.

In a blink of an eye. I remember that. I was all big. Did the retirement ceremony. He did that. Came back. All my rest of my gear, which was all packed up in my drying cage, went up, grabbed it, pulled it back, threw it in the back of my van, drived out the gate.

That was it. Yep. No more. Yeah. Badge is gone. That's it. Done. Never to be back.

20 years. Done. Yep. It's bizarre. So then you get into the afterlife. Indeed. And what's that been? So what year did you, what year was that, that you retired?

I got retired the last day of June. 2013. Okay. So I'm coming up on this year. It'll be four years. I had, fortunately, I was kind of double-dipping on weekends. I had a job that I was doing on the weekends. So I transitioned to doing that full-time.

And I dabbled in a lot of stuff. I mean, I got 3,500 hours of flight time. I've typed rated in a Gulfstream jet, a citation, 525 jet, which gets me like five other jets. I could fly. I did. When did you rack up all those hours? What I do on my weekends is not. You know, the business of the Navy.

I flew hard. I mean, I was just flying a ton. I got my pilots license on my own when I was in, and then all the rest of the licenses came in the two to three years after I was in. But I just was cranking out hours. I had a company that I was working for that was paying for all the training so I could fly as much as I wanted to. So I dove in to the bucket, both feet.

I did charter flying for a bit. I mean, I was managing licensing and sponsorship deals for an organization. and it just everything kind of just morphed. I left that organization, got back into teaching military guys a little bit on the jump side of the house.

I've been passionate about jumping ever since the first jump that I did. How many jumps do you have right now? Just over 6,000. Which seems like a lot. Yeah, to meet guys that have 29,000. I jump at Skydive San Diego all the time. And if you work in the sport for any period of time,

you'll be at 10, 15, 20,000. It's not uncommon. But in the military, that's the school bus to get. to work. So it's an ancillary skill set at best. So I couldn't pursue it until I got out. But I, uh, when I got, it was hard for me when I got out. If I'm being honest, um, I got to a point where I couldn't watch the news anymore. You know, 2013, all of the ground in Iraq that was sweat and blood and tears of people that we know to gain was being eroded. And I

describe it like watching the tide go out an inch at a time until all of a sudden it's gone. And I used to make the news. And now I'm saying, here on the couch watching it and I had to turn it off and I really struggled with finding something that I thought mattered and it's it's it's it was tough for me I didn't think a lot about what I was going to do when I was out when I was in for reasons that we kind of already talked about it's a natural path that you take when you're in but it took me like a year and a half to really get my head on straight and figure out what it is that I want to do I still don't even know how I'm going to do it but I know that I want to make a difference I want to do I want to do

I want to make this country a better place than it is right now. I want to take the awesome stuff that I was exposed to when I was in the teams from the people that I was fortunate to be surrounded by and make people better with that information. How I'm going to do that, I don't know, but that's kind of the circular path that I'm on like half of my ear. And the other half, I'd just dress up in a squirrel suit and jump out of airplanes and off cliffs. Which is nice.

It doesn't suck. I'm not going to do it forever. though. I mean, I look at it as something that's enriching for me and empowering for me, but there's a timeline for how long I could do it. I mean, I'm a bad landing away from not being able to jump anymore. And I take it very seriously. I have a very structured training protocol. I don't let myself get out of currency, whether it be jumping or packing parachutes or, I mean, I treat it like a military operation. It doesn't make it safer for me, but I try to pay attention more than anybody else who is around me. And my goal is to never be surprised.

like I don't ever, I want to understand what's coming and I don't like, and it happens occasionally, you'll jump off of a cliff or you jump out of an airplane or something will happen that surprises you and I try to avoid that at all costs because I find that, you know, that's when the catastrophic stuff can occur. But it's, you got to find the next step. I mean, you and I both know people who derive their entire identity from what they used to do. and it's tough to sit back and watch them not be able to depart from that because it becomes self-destructive. Yeah, because it doesn't last forever. It can't last forever. I mean, you're renting your Trident. It's not yours.

At best you can move the marker in the SEAL teams, hopefully in the right direction. Maybe leave a little bit of legacy if you did, you know, the legacy that you should leave is making it better than when you got there. But that's the best you can do. And then you got to put it away. Even if you do 20 years, with the average lifespan of an American, you got some time left. And the military retirement check is not massive.

So you're going to need another J-O-B. But what I needed, I needed a purpose. And that's where I started doing, you know, fundraising for the SEAL Foundation. That to me was huge, teaching the military guys, which kind of felt like I had not a foot in the fight, but I had some impact again. And just trying to shorten their learning curve. Because, I mean, they expect these guys to know so much stuff that if you could just shorten their learning curve and give them a little bit of space to breathe, you know, to take the stress off. And that stuff's real. Yeah.

Like, that stuff is real. And when you impart that knowledge on young guys, it is real. When you make that learning curve shorter and steeper and faster, that is real. That has a real impact on those kids going out there. And it's those little lessons that they learned. And I mean, I still hear that from guys. that come back and and they say yep yeah we did this you know cover move you know I'm like yes like I'm so happy to hear that because I know it's kind of like the early

days of jiu jiu jitsu in the fact that we didn't really in the early days of jiu jitsu there wasn't as much knowledge as there is now and now the first three days you go to jihitsu you're gonna learn about underhooks you're gonna learn about body position you're gonna learn about hip movement I didn't learn no one taught me that stuff Back the day no one no one taught you that stuff You just had to figure it out and if somebody teaches it to you it's like you take a quantum leap Yeah, you know and it's the same thing with the the guys that are in the military and they can get that quantum leap just by saying oh Here's a perspective of leadership that it took me

Jackass Jocko you know 14 years and screwing up a bunch of things to go oh this is what you need to do in these situations So to be able to say look you don't need to be the jackass that I was all you need to do is not know, this little bit tidbit right here and this whole thing over here. And that definitely has a huge impact on those guys. And it is awesome to feel that. Yeah. And it makes them better learning the other stuff because they're less stressed out. They have a better understanding.

And it's just, and 90% of the stuff I teach, I'm like, listen, it's pattern recognition. I saw this so many times and I did this and it defeated that. So just do this. Just trust me and do this. And you'll be better. And then they do. And they're like, oh, wow, that was awesome. I'm like, yeah, I know.

That's why I told you. How about the, you talk about the foundation? What do you do in the found? Tell us a little bit about the foundation and how, if people want to support the foundation, what's the best way to get that done? Yeah. So obviously there, I think their last stat I heard,

there's 40,000 service-based organizations that help people peripheral to the military. So there's a variety of choices. And if you're from an Army family, awesome, go support an Army charity, right? I obviously have a close DNA tie to Seals. So a buddy of mine, recommended trying some stuff skydiving in the skydiving world to try to drive attention

to fundraise for the seal foundation because just like I've never had I think a unique thought in my entire life I swear that every idea I've ever had came from somebody else was like this one was his but to me that was the link to finding a purpose again because I realized that okay my days of putting my toes on the line are over but there will always be people with their toes on the line. And the next best step is, let's create a buffer for the families to step in. Because, I mean, you've seen it. The knock on the door is a tornado wrapped inside of a tsunami with a hurricane at the same time. I mean, it is destructive. So let's try to do something that helps the families. And that's what the Seal Foundation does. Everything from educational

support to legacy preservation and everything in between. I mean, you can go, the Navy Seal Foundation has an awesome website. And there's people who do GoFundMe's, which is what I did, or go to the foundation and donate directly. You can look at their rating as well to. It's like 96 cents that every buck goes to what they espouse that's going to go to.

It's awesome. Like it's a great foundation. Yeah, do some research on it. Get involved and skip a latte one day, you know, and donate five bucks. And it goes to a good cause to a good cause. I've been into some houses where kids are getting raised by a memory of a father and a picture over a fireplace. And no money will ever replace that, but it maybe will make their life a little bit easier.

Yeah, no doubt about that. What was the record you were going after? Yes, the completely arbitrary distance, lateral measurement of distance in a wing suit. So that was the idea where all the good ideas start, which was in a bar over cocktail. And buddy was like, hey man, you should go try to set a world record in your wingsuit. I'm like, well, I don't even own one yet. So what are you talking about? I'll do it, of course.

But like, what's the record? Sign me up. What is it? What is it? I mean, yeah, I'll obviously crush it. But what is it exactly again? And where do I get one of those? And it was trying to set the furthest distance or farthest distance, sorry, the farthest distance

flown in a wingsuit. So I bought a wingsuit. and after jumping it for less than a year, which I don't recommend to anybody to do this ever, I got hooked up with a really good mentor, the guy who actually taught me how to base jump, taught me how to fly the suit, and we went up to Davis, California,

and I jumped out of a caravan at 36,500 feet, got into a lovely spin, which I didn't ever happen before, so that was a great experience. It was new for everybody. And got out of it, and then just flew the suit as far as I could and ended up breaking two world records

one for the distance that you fly before opening your parachute, and then the second one is they tack on the distance from when you open your parachute to when you touch the ground. So you keep flying forward? Yeah, and I had an on-heading opening, so it just opened up in that direction, and I was exhausted, so I just laid there like a limp piece of meat and augured into the ground into a farmer's field

because I had no, like, my landing zone was Earth. I couldn't see the airport that I was, I had some visual indicators. What was it? How far was it? 18.25 miles. So I got out of this bird and I passed. Did you really get into a spin when you came out? Oh, yeah.

What happened? Just no air? I'm just not really good in a wingsuit. And I didn't have the requisite skill or competence to be attempting what I was attempting. But it was a challenge thrown in front of me and I was like, of course I'm going to do this. I literally had not been jumping wingsuits. I did that jump in August. I got my first wing suit in December of the year prior.

It's not recommended for people. So I got in the spin and I got out of it, but I got out of the plane. I knew where the airport was, and I knew I was going to fly in that direction, but I passed the airport at over 10,000 feet in the air. And then I was just looking at fields in Davis. So I just put my head down, I was flying. I didn't have an altimeter on me. It was awesome.

There was so many things that were just, I was eyeballing it, calibrating before I went. I was like, camera one, camera two, camera one. All right, let's go. But I had just come back from a base jumping trip to Europe. Thank goodness I had, because I'm flying. line, I'm like, those trees are looking really big. Oh, yeah.

Those trees are looking really big. I'm going to pull, you know, moderately low opening altitude, flew straight into the dirt. And, yeah, people are like, oh, you're going to, because it's been broken since then, a Marine did. Uh-huh. And people like, oh, you're going to go for it again? I'm like, no.

Never. Never will I try. I got into the spin because the plane, the, the, the, the Cessna 206, the caravan, is not designed to be that high. Like, it had a supercharged engine, a different propelled. Pellar system. Everything was stripped out of there except for the huge oxygen bottle. It was just the pilot, the oxygen tech, and me. And, you know, normally when you're scot-diving, they'll pull back on the throttle to slow down. It's called giving you a cut, a cut of the airspeed. Well, if he would have done that at that out, too, we'd have fallen out of the sky. So he's like, got his fist on the throttle with his foot on the dash pulling back. And I opened the door and I stuck my head out. I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. And I'm jumping like the biggest wings suit. on the market. And they're like,

they're a combination of a prom dress and a straight jacket. And I got out of the plane and it just inflated and like, oh boy, here we go. That's good times right there. Yeah, coming at you, full speed. But you raise some money for the foundation?

Yeah, it's like a $150,000 bucks for the foundation. And, you know, from that I developed a great relationship with them. The CEO of the foundation. Foundation is married to my first troop chief that I had when I was at the East Coast. So there's a great tie-in. And anytime they call me. I know that guy well. Yeah.

But so anytime that they call me, though, like, my default answer is yes. Like, of course, I'll help out anything that I can do. And I mean, honestly, like, I won't say that it saved me, but it helped get me back on the road that I should have been and to have a purpose like that. And then, I mean, I bet you, I hypothesize that for you working with organizations and leaders and seeing, the light come on. It gives you a purpose in life again to impart those lessons. It's exactly the same thing for me. So one built to the other that kind of got my feet in the pool of interfacing with people

like that. And I realize that it makes a difference and it's important. That's awesome. Well, it's been awesome to hang out with you. Yeah. I appreciate it. Once every seven years, we should do it. Yeah, seven years we'll do it again.

And speaking of purpose, Echo Charles, we know you have one. purpose and that is to kind of inform anybody that might want to support this podcast. Yep. On how they might be able to do that. Just to clarify. Oh, here we go. My purpose to inform is part of a creator purpose. Okay.

Understood. Undisclosed for now. Understood. Hey, when you jumped out with a wingsuit. Yeah. And you went into the spin. Did you think that that was that was it for you? No.

I never think like that. Straight up, bro. Dang. I was say somebody comments, as I said the other day on, I forget, I don't know if we had someone on the podcast, but I was saying that like when I'm flying in an aircraft in a commercial airliner, I think if this thing crashes, I'm going to live. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to grab this chair seat and I'm going to turn it into something. I'm going to throw it in the water that's going to break the surface tension.

I'm going to live. No worries. Yeah. I mean, like, I'm not saying that it was going to work out great for me, but I'm going to die missing my fingernails because I'm close. following my way towards victory. Like it's, the thought never enters the mind like, okay,

I need to give up now because it's over. Negative. Not that you have that much of a choice. Yeah. But you still fight, period. Yeah, no,

that's good. Yeah, yeah, it'd probably be the same way. You know, that's how I am too. You know, fully. Anyway,

let's talk about some support. Yeah, let's do it. Let's talk about On it. You know, on it? You heard of On it? I do.

Yeah. Of course you have everyone has. There you go. You're good. Just check in. I don't need this. Okay. Hey.

I need it. Anyway, on it, I got some more krill oil, so I'm good to go. Baseline. On it is a, what do you call them a sponsor? Supporter? Supporter. Yeah. So if you want to support this podcast and or yourself at the same time.

And you're into supplements. You work out a lot. We recommend on it supplements. So we take on its supplements. It's the only one, the best one. Anyway, if you want 10% off, onet.com slash jocco. Let's say you get the 10% off. Anyway, yeah, that's a good one.

By the way, the last podcast, as people noted, we had Colonel Reeder on here, you know, a Vietnam veteran. And I pre-briefed echo. I said, look, this guy's flying in. He got up at 3 o'clock in the morning. He's coming here at 6 o'clock at night to do a three-hour podcast. He's been in a conference all day. when it comes to, you know, time to go through your stuff, go through it quickly.

And people would say, hey, did you have echo on a leash? And I said, we just pre-briefed. We're just respecting the colonel's time. So I get the feeling right now, we could be paying for that. Right. Yeah, metaphorically, I did have a leash for sure. Get it out there, man. Extend it up.

Usually, usually I tell a cool story because it's not like, hey, take acrylic oil and then I don't take krill oil. Or I take it in and I'm like, whatever this doesn't. work it works so during the week I work out and I kind of talk about my experience positive or negative but in this case never negative because it actually works it's one of the only supplement companies that you know will work anyway I'm not going to go into any stories I only worked out a few times this week and it's all the same story why did you only work out a few times this week oh various things oh you know okay I work worked out today what okay no I'm just making sure it sounds like there might be some slack

no echoes world right now yeah yeah I'm you know maybe maybe not nonetheless even even if I told you the story it'd be a redundant story okay you know my joints feel good you know people know that already taking crow oil that's what happens anyway if you like these supplements if you don't actually if you don't know about the supplements get them make your own evaluation you don't got to listen to me anymore anyway so let's let's switch over to Amazon. Amazon click through. So how that works is if you want to support this podcast, before you do your

Amazon shopping, go to jacobodcast.com. Click on the Amazon banner. Then do your shopping. Supports. I made the sodium in the water analogy. You know, you know, when you it's like, it's not just sodium.

It's like potassium. It's like heavy metals. I think it's called. You throw them in water. Boom, big explosion. I make the analogy that clicking through Amazon is a small action. takes what, three seconds, right? Yeah, maybe not even. And you think, oh, yeah, I'm going to, you know, click through and I'm going to do my shopping.

That doesn't, because of my action, my small action doesn't, it's not a big deal. But here's the thing. That small action is a big deal, just like sodium and water. So be the sodium if you want to support. So click through and do your shopping. Boom, that's a good, good, good way to support podcasts.

Also, subscribe if you haven't already on iTunes. Leave a review. Jocker, Stitcher, Google Play. Not everyone has an iPhone. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I always asked about some other thing, too, SoundCloud? SoundCloud. So I'm not 100% sure of how that works.

I explored SoundCloud before, unless there's like a separate thing that does push his podcast. I'm sure someone will let us know how to do that. Yeah. If we're missing on SoundCloud, then, yeah, I'm sure that should be where we should be as well. Anyway, subscribe. But in the meantime, subscribe. Yeah, to whatever the one that you're doing, Google Play, iTunes, whichever.

Subscribe if you haven't already. Leave review if you feel like it. YouTube. We have a YouTube channel. Subscribe to that one. Put more videos. I know before when you were watching, you were like, hey, these are just podcast videos, right?

Remember? There's some good stuff. You got some good stuff. We do now, and that's the point. That's the point of making. So we put more videos on there now. Just made one that, what, yesterday? Yeah.

That'll be up soon. Anyway, subscribe to that. If you haven't already, you'll get the alert. Is that one going to be out by soon? Yeah, a few days. A new Echo Charles video? Yeah, it's more mellow, more cerebral. Oh.

Stand by. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch it. It's cool. It's fun, I guess. Anyway, if you have the inclination to get a T-shirt as well, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocco Store. U.R.L.Jocco Store.com.

T-shirts, rash guards, patches, Velcro patches as well. The delivery time now, from purchase to delivery is quicker now. Know that. So yeah, go on there, jocco store.com. If you like what you see, go ahead, grab one of that. That's a good way to support. There you go. Ah, but psychological warfare.

If you don't know what the, you know what psychological warfare is. Yeah, I support it. There you go. See? How can you not, really? You know? I mean, that's a rhetorical question. Yeah, I think you're right about that.

So, yeah, if you don't know, it's, you know, when you have moments of weakness, if you're, what, getting up early in the morning, it's hard, I'm tired on a press news or whatever. Or, you know, you're about to work out, but you'll skip the workout because you're not feeling like it. Moments of weakness. You get this album. You can download each individual track or the whole album, whatever. Jock will get you through it. It's like a spot.

It makes you want to do the work. I want to wake up early. Anyway, iTunes, psychological warfare, search psychological warfare, jocco willing. We're actually getting some requests now. For other moments of weakness. Yeah. People are like, hey, this moment of weakness,

we need a track. This moment of weakness need a track. So like what? I'm logging those down. Someone was saying, when I get tired. Oh, right. In other words, it's 10 o'clock at night. I'm getting tired.

I still have work to do. Yeah. I think I'm just going to blow off the work and just go to sleep because it's an easy route. Yeah. Maybe we need a track for things like that. Yeah. It's possible. And because you know the whole thing biologically when you hit the wall, right?

That's your body really in a way saying like, hey, you're going too far. But nowadays in our environment, going too far is beneficial because you have this like other goal that your body in a way doesn't really know about. So psychological warfare will help you get past that. Put your body in check. Exactly right. Get your mind to control. Yeah. So anyway, jump on that, man.

That's one that's supporting yourself fully. Anyway, it has been number one since the day it was released straight up. That's pretty cool. I'm not mad at that at all. You know why that is? Why? Because people are supporting the podcast and that's pretty cool. So thank you for supporting the podcast.

Way less people skipping workouts. Way more people waking up early, obviously. See? There you go. And those are the ways. Also, while you're clicking through Amazon, you can pick up the books that we review on the podcast, right? We just did My Captivity in Vietnam through the Valley, My Captivity in Vietnam.

And it's a great book. But there's all the other books that we've reviewed on there are on there. On here are on there. So pick those up. Extreme Ownership. There's a little book. It's about combat. And it's about leadership.

It's about combat leadership. Well, what else is there? What else would you want to read about Jocka White Tea? A couple things. Jock White Tea. Some people call it Jaka White Tea. Some people call it the 8,000 pound deadlift solution. Yeah.

Hell you. Some people call it Camura tea, because apparently you're hitting Cameras very solid. Yeah, I get when you get the tea on. Also, I've heard it called problem solver tea because the problems that you have Little bit of tea also problems are getting solved so you can do that and and by the way It sounds like oh this is I'm just being you know exaggerating or whatever factual yeah 147% factual or a T Amazon you can also pre-order way the warrior kid and

And when people read this book, it's sort of like when people taste the tea. We're going to have a supply issue. I'm telling you. So just order it. If you order it now, that way you get a copy and that way you won't be wondering why all these kids are out there getting after it

and you're going, what's happening? No, you'll know. You'll know why they're getting after it. Way the Warrior kid. And lastly, also, if you haven't signed up to come to the muster, Number three, muster in New York City, May 4th and 5th. Do it. ASAP.

I've been seeing a bunch of folks on social media. They're saying that they're going to be there. So look forward to seeing everyone. It's going to be awesome. Obviously, I'm going to be there. Lief is going to be there. JP is going to be there. Dave Burke is going to be.

You haven't met Dave Burke yet. He's coming. I hear good things. Oh, yeah. You're going to hear some real good things from Dave Burke. And if none of that really motivates you and get you in the, the game because not hard core enough and you really need to get nuts well guess what don't worry we got you covered because echo Charles is gonna be there echo Charles is

gonna be there come on down there's not gonna be any hiding behind a curtain there's no backstage divas at this gig we're gonna be out front with everybody interacting solving problems finding solution and basically just getting after it so come on down to the muster and if you want to give us feedback or comments or continue this little conversation that we're having right here you can find us on the interwebs that means basically we're talking about Twitter we're talking about Instagram as well sure and then again we're also talking about that Facebook so Andy what are you on those oh man uh on the Instagram it's my name Andy Stomph

212 very original okay and I think Twitter There is Andy Stumpf 77, also original. And you're on Facebook? The book of faces, yes. I'm contractually obligated to be on there. Nice. And Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocco Willink. Echo, do you have anything this evening that you want to add to this podcast?

Man, that's it. You know, usually I have some expanding question. But, man, you nail it. You're very articulate. Yeah? I use the words I understand. Two syllables or less. Yeah.

Dang. Solid. Man, thanks for coming, man. Great to meet you, man. Right on. You too. Andy, any closing thoughts you want to throw out there? No.

All I can say is thanks for having me on, man. So in 24, we'll do it again. No, it's great to meet you, Echo. I mean, I sit back and I love what you guys have going on. So just keep driving ahead, man. It's awesome. People need to hear it. I appreciate the feedback you've been given me on the podcast,

and obviously thanks for coming on. Sorry, it took so long. Sorry everyone it took so long to get you on. And you know what? Bullshit on 24. We'll get you back on here and we'll do this again. Like 2020. Okay.

And, you know, obviously, man, thanks for your service. Yep. And it was my pleasure. And your continued contribution to the teams and to our country. So thank you for everything you've done and you know we started out Tonight talking about a debt that cannot be repaid and that is very true We cannot we cannot repay that debt. We owe too much to those that have fallen for our freedom But what we can do and what we must do is try

Try to live every day with that thought in mind, that thought of the service and of the sacrifice of those that gave their last full measure for us for our freedom. Nebulous concept that can be so hard for some people to grasp, but I will tell you it is a real thing. And it's a thing that's hard to recognize until it is taken from you and the chains of oppression control your body and your mind and then when your freedom is taken away That is when you realize that freedom is the most important thing Singular thing that gives each of us the divine opportunity that only freedom can give and to do as we wish and to do all of those things beholden to no man and yet while with that freedom we are beholden to no one let us choose let us consciously and deliberately choose to be beholden, forever beholden to those men and women

who have relinquished their lives so selflessly. The altar of freedom. And to them, let us live. Let us live. Live lives worthy of their solemn sacer. Let us live lives worthy of the price that has been paid worthy of the freedom we are blessed with and worthy of those heroes We are forever To let us live

For them love God for tonight and so until next time This is Andy and Echo and Echo And Jocko, out.