Jocko Podcast - 69: The Real Top Gun. Battlefield, Work, and Life are Identical. With Elite Marine Fighter Pilot, David Berke.

Episode Date: April 5, 2017

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:09:45 - Intro to Dave Berke. 0:21:11 - Officer Candidate School. 0:27:39 - Southern Watch. 0:31:01 - Top Gun selection. 0:38:49 - September 11th 0:45:08 - Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda. 0:47:33 - Training Officer at Top Gun. 1:08:27 - Forward Air Controller (FAC) Tour. 1:26:43 - Ramadi. 2:14:41 - Home Coming.  Relationship. Pentagon. F-22 and F-35. 2:40:56 - Echelon Front transition. 2:52:54 - Green M&Ms, Support, Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid, and The Muster002  3:09:28 - Closing Thoughts and Gratitude.   Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 69 with Echo Charles and me Jock Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The president of the United States takes pride in presenting the Medal of Honor posthumously to Captain Henry T. L. Rod, United States Marine Corps. For service as set forth in the following citation. for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while attached to Marine Fighting Squadron 211 during action against the Japanese land surface and aerial units at Wake Island from 8 to 23 December 1941 engaging vastly superior for of enemy bombers and warships on 9 and 12 December Captain Elrod shot down two of a flight of 22 hostile planes and

executing repeated bombing and strafing runs at extremely low altitude and close range succeeded in inflicting deadly damage upon a large Japanese vessel thereby sinking the first major warship to be destroyed by small caliber bombs delivered from a fighter-type aircraft aircraft when his plane was disabled by hostile fire and no other ships were operative captain L rod assumed command of one flank of the line set up in defiance of the enemy landing and conducting a brilliant defense enabled his men to hold their positions and repulse determined enemy attacks repeatedly proceeding through intense hostile fuselads to provide covering fire for all Unarmed ammunition carriers

Capturing an automatic weapon during one enemy rush in force He gave his own firearm to one of his men and fought on vigorously against the Japanese Responsible in a large measure of the strength of his sector's Gallants resistance on 23 December Captain Elrod led his men with bold aggressiveness Until he fell mortally wound His superb skill as a pilot daring leadership and unswerving devotion to duty distinguished him among the defenders of Wake Island and his valiant conduct reflects the highest

credit upon himself and the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country signed Harry S. Truman and that is the Medal of Honor citation for Henry Talmadge Elrod the first aviator in World War II to be awarded the Medal of Honor And the first man to sink a warship from a fighter plane During the Battle of Wake Island and if you don't know anything about the battle of Wake Island it began Simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor when that started and it ended on 23 December 1941 when American forces were forced to surrender and that was with around 500

American servicemen and they had a handful of coastal artillery pieces and a handful of anti-aircraft guns and they had 12 aircraft and what they were facing was 2,500 Japanese infantry supported by three light cruisers eight destroyers two patrol boats two troop transports two aircraft carriers with all their planes and two heavy cruisers they were completely outnumbered and completely and utterly outgunned but they held out for 15 days and while they were under that siege on the 20th of December while the Japanese were preparing for their final attack major L rod got out one last letter to his wife Saturday 20 December 1941 my dearest darling sweetheart I never suspected this afternoon when I wrote my other short note that I would be sitting down writing another tonight

But here we are I just got in a few minutes ago and have just learned that Walt Baylor is returning and he has kindly consented to deliver this personally So I am very thankful for the moment Of course, there isn't a lot of news that I can write about. And you probably know more real news than I do anyhow. I am missing you terribly, and I am undergoing a few new experiences. But also is everyone else. We've had considerable rain today, and it is still cloudy. The wind has been very low, however.

The weather on the whole is nothing to complain about But I would like to see a good old-fashioned Typhoon sweep this entire area I imagine there's an awful lot of white washing going on now in high places It certainly will be a criminal shame if they succeed in covering over everything I am writing this in something of a hurry and under somewhat difficult circumstances I'll think of a million things that I should have said after I had gone to bed tonight but now I'm going to say that I love you and you alone always and always and repeated a million times or so give my love to Mary also

between the two of you you have it all there isn't any for anyone else know that you are praying for me and I have nothing more to ask than that your prayers be answered yours devotedly and loving and so I think it's important that when you hear that letter you recognize the fact that this is a and of course we always remember that these men we call them we call them heroes deservedly so we do that to honor them but I think it's important to always remember that these heroes, they're people. And these men, these heroes, these Marines,

these that held the line. They held the line for 15 days before they were forced to surrender after losing 49 Marines killed, two missing in action, three Navy personnel killed, 70 US civilians killed. And by the way, the Japanese losses were recorded about 820 killed with over 300 wounded two destroyers lost and almost 30 Japanese aircraft shot down or damaged but the odds and the ratio of force was just stacked

against the US forces on Wake Island and when you get into a situation like that a dire situation a violent situation a situation a situation where You are facing a determined enemy. There is that forms between people regardless of where they're from or what their background is or What their socio-economic class is or what service they were in none of that matters There's a bomb that forms that cannot be certainly had that in the Battle of Ramadi U.S. Army soldiers United States Marines C.Bs, our seals of task unit bruiser, all of us that were in that fight had that bond.

We were brothers. And tonight, I am honored to have one of those brothers here with me. And he's a Marine Corps aviator, a fighter pilot, who also did time as a forward air controller on the ground. talked about that in many of the books that we've reviewed on the podcast where you have a Marine Corps pilot who's now on the ground with the troops usually in one of the most forward positions because they have to know where the troops are out of that air conditioned cockpit and into the sweat in mud on the ground and this this pilot as an Anglico team leader who with his team

conducted dozens and dozens of missions with task unit bruiser in Ramadi and I've talked about bringing him on the show and so here he is tonight lieutenant colonel almost retired David Burke Dave welcome to the podcast and thank you for coming on thanks for having me man it's good to be here so we have to before we talk about what we went through together we have to learn a little bit about you where you came from what you did and how you went from being a You know a pilot but not just a pilot a top gun pilot but not just a top gun pilot but a but a top gun instructor Which is just incredibly selective that's got to be one of the most selective things in the whole world Right? How many top gun pilots are there? So you've got 25 at a time every three years. They kind of rotate through. Small group. Yeah. So that's ridiculous.

And but then, you know, you thought maybe you need to get after a little bit more. So you're going to go do an Aucco. So we'll get into that. But let's start off with where you came from, just a little bit about your background and how you ended up saying, you know what I think I want to do? Be in the Marine Corps. Yep. Go. Right on. So I actually grew up around here.

parents moved out here San Diego and I was probably a year and a half years old, one and a half years old. And between here in Orange County, I grew up in Southern California kid. Not all that of exciting with childhood. I don't have, you know, a ton of crazy memories. I was a pretty quiet kid. I was a good kid in school. Got along with most folks. Moved up Orange County. My parents got divorced. It was basically just me and my mom and my sister for a while. And I lived in a town called El Toro. And what happened to be very close to where I grew up was a marine base. It was a fighter base. And so as a kid, I probably was there in late 70s and early 80s, they had F4 Ph4s and A6s and just the cool jets at the time. And so I went to the air

show every year, grew up out there, and I think it was no joke, it was overhead. I could see it every day. And I think that just got my blood a little bit. I went to El Toro high school, went to the air show probably every year from that six years old until the time the base closed down, I mean, it was just part of my life. And, you know, I met some people along the way, too. You know, there was a lot of Marines living there, so I had some real powerful influences that kind of guided me towards that. I'm sure we're going to get into this,

because it's come up already in the pre-conversation. But at around 14, I'd say, watched this obscure movie called Top Gun. Straight up, top gun. Straight up, man. Watch the movie as a kid. Saw dudes flying airplanes off carriers, shooting down Migs, and I'm like,

I want to do that. and probably by 14 I had a pretty good idea that's what I wanted to do did you make the connection between school and grades and all that stuff because a lot of people saw that movie and said I want to be a top gun pilot but I'm still gonna slack off and do whatever I want and not you know play hooky and all that somehow you made that connection it's not shown in the movie right they didn't show no people studying hard in school because that would have not sold a lot of tickets I did eventually I mean when I watched that

movie I think there's just something I'd always been interested in aviation it's kind of captivating when you see planes flying around and get seen the air shows see the blue angels that kind of stuff you can't help a look up and watch that stuff it's cool I would say that my performance in the academic arena was slightly less than stellar I was I did fine but I had no real motivation to do anything I wasn't a real driven kid to to work really hard I kind of discovered that if I put in very little effort I was okay and if I wanted to do really well I had to put in a a lot of effort and I hadn't made much of a connection. But so as I got a little older, you know, I watched the movie.

You know, I think that was a part of a lot of different things. But about the time I was 16, so kind of junior year in high school, as I got some other influences in my life. The biggest one was a guy named Aaron Irvin. I started working at Target around the corner from my house, and there's a Marine there. And like I said, my parents got divorced. I had a stepdad that was there and kind of come and gone. He ended up being a really big father figure in my life and a real positive influence and a

Marine, which was great. And he explained some more things about what it's like to be a Marine. He's the one that made the connection for me that all that stuff you saw in the movies. You can actually do that for real. The Marine Corps, you can do that as a Marine. You know, it's not just a movie. That's a real life. Somebody's living that life right now. And you can do that? And I remember coming home and kind of telling my mom, like, hey, I'm 16. I'm a junior high school. I'm thinking about being a Marine Corps fighter pilot, which I had no military in my background. Nobody had ever done anything like that. And her answer was, a sounds awesome you should do that I mean just a hundred percent and she had a very similar approach you know everything ever every idea I ever had in my life that I run by my mom she's like well somebody's gonna do it might as well be you that was kind of a approach to everything I want to be a fighter pilot the Marine Corps somebody's gonna be it might as well be you and that's about the time I kind of sort of get my my stuff together a little bit I wasn't a mess but by any stretch but I was a little bit just kind of running to do my thing being a kid and I certainly think I was lucky

because I knew with great detail at about 16 and change what I wanted to do. I mean, I knew I wanted to be a Marine Corps F-18 pilot based in Southern California and fly-f carriers. And that's exactly what ended up doing. So at that time, everything I started to do from there was with that kind of singular focus of circling back to do that. I even knew I wanted to be stationed at El Toro. I mean, I had a real specific plan.

And so all the things I started doing from there, school, you know, into college as well, going to the Marine recruiter to say I wanted to join the Marine Corps, being an officer in the Marine Corps. All those things were geared very specifically towards that goal. Now, there's a ton of hurdles between time you're 16 and time I got my commission at 21. But everything else that I did in my life was either a distraction that I just got rid of or it was a means to that end. I worked full time while I was in school, put myself through the nearest college, you know the local state school that I lived close to I just drove up to school didn't have like a real big exciting college life wasn't a fraternity didn't go away to school I paid my way through a school I got a

good education I worked really hard to to do well but it was all specifically designed to you want to be in the Marine Corps and be an officer you need a college graduate you need to be a college graduate right on I can do that I can do that here's the closest college okay where's the closest college how much does it cost how much we need to work did the math it was my life from about that time I started to to work in, like I said, I worked at Target as a kid. I worked at Target from the time I was 15 and a half and got a work permit from school to the time that I got my commission in the Marine Corps. And I went to school in Cal State Fullerton, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. My mom was a guidance counselor and a teacher, so she helped me build a schedule that I could graduate as fast as possible,

which is exactly in four years. It was all day Monday, all day, Wednesday, and half a day, Friday, Friday, and I worked Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The money I got paid, I went to my tuition. My tuition went to my education. My education got me a commission in the Marine Corps. I mean, that was kind of it. I mean, in some ways you look back, I probably could have diversified a little bit.

But at the time, I wasn't unhappy. I was stoked, man. I was exactly what I wanted to be doing. There was no, like, man, I wish I could be doing this. It wasn't a chore by any stretch. Like I said, in retrospect, you know, I probably could have done things a little bit differently, but 17-year-old Dave Burke,

knew exactly what he wanted to do. And I had sort of talked myself into it, like, hey, any detour, that's going to throw you off your path, man. And you're gonna look back with a regret and go, you know why you didn't end up being what you wanted to be? Is it because of this or that? And I wasn't gonna let that happen.

So I kind of just got a little intense about being a pound in the Marine Corps. And sure enough. And there's still luck involved because when you go to TBS, which is the basic school, which all Marine officers go through, you have to still win or get that billet that you wanted. And you got that. But, I mean, that could have gone. Totally, man.

Sideways. there's a lot of luck involved. I think everybody in the military, and everybody that's been successful in the military knows you're looking back on your career, you know, it's a confluence of a lot of different things, but timing, circumstance, and luck, they're a part of it, without a doubt. Nobody can take credit for everything they've done. And I went back to do it again. The odds of it working out the way that it did are pretty slim. There's just a lot of things that worked out of my favor. But, you know, I went to OCS. I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. I started my freshman year at Cal State Fullerton. I was 17 when I started college. went right to the recruiter on day one or they called an Oso, an officer selection officer so it was basically a recruiter for officers. Hey, I want to be a Marine. He's like right on, start filling out this paperwork. Put out the paperwork. I said, I want to be a pilot. He's like, piece of cake, no problem.

We can make that happen. Sign this ground contract and we'll just make you pilot at some point in the future. So for those of you that don't know, that's a big lie. It ain't that easy. So when he says ground contract, of course the Marine Corps needs pilots

and guys to infantry. And so, but they need more infantry then they need pilots. And so they say, hey, don't worry about it. You just sign up for ground right now. We'll take care of that other pilot. You want to be pilot? Yeah, yeah, of course.

We'll take care of that later. Yeah, we'll just transition over. It shouldn't be a big deal. No factor. And at 17, I mean, I was signing paperwork to be a Marine officer. That was a big step for me. And I probably would have signed anything. Happily signed that.

After my freshman year in college, I went to Officer Candidate School. And to be honest with you, and I had all these big grand ideas for the last, you know, two, three years. I knew what I wanted to do. but when I went to OCS, that was the first real hurdle. I mean, everything else was either an idea, a plan, some paperwork. I get to the officer candidate school and it's like, okay, it was a real Marine drill instructor screaming at you.

You know, you're really doing the deed there. And getting through OCS was a big thing for me because it was the first real test of, did I, you know, I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no real sense if I had what was required to be a Marine. And I think as a kid, you build up what that is in your mind is a larger-than-life thing. Like how could anybody possibly do this you turn it into something more than it is when I went to boot camp There was a there was a there was a Navy seal there right and I swear when I saw him. I was like God look at that you used huge I mean huge big giant four arms and big just a big massive guy

It just looked like a destroyer of human life. I was oh my God So fast forward four years I'm in the teams and I meet this guy and He's not at all, man. It was completely in my head. It was completely in my head that this guy was such a destroyer. But I just thought, hey, he's a seal. He must be a destroyer. And I actually saw it that way.

Yeah. You can't help. And it's certainly at that age. I mean, those things are real powerful influences. When you get out to OCS and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, man, I need to, I didn't make this happen. That was a big, big achievement in my life that said, hey, I can do this. Okay, I started to realize I'm not the biggest guy in the Marine Corps.

Nobody's going to mistake me for a destroyer. But what I discovered as I got there is I knew mentally what I wanted to do. It wasn't a real question mark about my intentions or my desires. And I was surrounded by tough, strong kids, you know, young kids my age that are trying to be Marine officers. And that's a physical and a mental challenge. There's no doubt about it. And I was seeing guys kind of left and right of me that looked at least bigger, faster, stronger, tougher, and more capable than me. They looked like that, that same image you have in your mind.

I'm watching these, he was kind of fall out of stuff. We're not finished stuff fast enough. We're just straight up quit. You know, guys would DOR, drop on requests at OCS. And I was kind of looking around thinking, what's, you know, what's going on? You know, why are you here if your plan wasn't to get through it? So that was a good, a really good thing for me psychologically to realize that it wasn't just a kind of a fantasy or a dream. I had the potential being able to do this.

So I got through OCS. you know, that's kind of a painful process, as you know. It's 84 days. It can be slog. And you lose a lot of folks doing it for a whole host of different reasons. Some people get hurt. Some people quit. Some people just can't do it.

And when you get on the backside of that, I can make this happen. Let's get that air contract. Well, we'll get to that air contract at the basic school. So, which is when you get your commission, you finish school, you get a degree, finish officer candidate school. And so basically it's, hey, you've done everything that you need. You're a commission officer. It became a second in the Marine Corps in June of 19,

94, and the first thing you do on active duty is a Marine, is you go to something called the basic school. I know you've talked about it a few times. It's basically a school for the Marine Corps teaches officers a little bit of everything. It doesn't teach you everything of anything, but you get a little exposure to infantry, exposure to tanks, artillery, call for fire, a little bit exposure to aviation, patrolling, defense offense. So you kind of get a whole way in the land, and the whole point of that for the Marine Corps is you go there with 250 people. And they've got to give each one of those people an assignment, you know, a particular job, an MOS, a special team. and they rank you. I mean, you are ranked from one to 250.

And for aviation, when I got there, I remember getting in the first week, they kind of announced what billets are going to be available. Oh, we're going to have 40 infantry slots and 20. They just tell you kind of what we expect to have breakdown. And from there, you're supposed to go back and think about what you want to do. They had two pilot slots. I'm like, man, that is some rough math, you know, 250 folks. Now, not all 250 wanted to be a pilot.

and not all 250 people were qualified with, you know, their eyes and whatnot. So it wasn't competing with 250 people, but there's a lot of people that wanted to be a pilot. So the math was certainly not in my favor. And that was another challenge of, yeah, you got to do well. I mean, you get ranked and graded on everything, physical fitness, your leadership ability, your academics. You get peer reviewed. Your peers rate you and, you know, anonymously in what they think of you. So you got basically six months to get after it. And at the end, they line you up, 250 people. in a line, not this is a real line, and you walk into a room and on the room, there's a board, and whatever job is available, you can pick. Now, Marine Corps does this thing called quality

spread where they basically cut the class in third, so out of 250 folks, you know, 80, 80, or something around there. The number one guy picks, then the number 81 guy picks, and then the number 161 guy picks, or whatever it is, and then the number two guy picks. The only job in the Marine Corps that they did not quality spread was that the basic school was pilot. So it was going to be the first two guys out of the gate that wanted it that were qualified, we're going to get it. And I got the number two spot. So again, it was one of those things that I'm, I was starting to, in my mind, realize like, well, this, I can do this. You know, I built this thing up of what I wanted to do. You know, I'm 21 now, you know, 22, I think, actually. So it's six years of my life that I've been sort of

singularly dedicated doing this. And so that day were they, my platoon commander, a guy named John Marion, I'll never forget it, he was an F-18 pilot, brings him into his office. He's like, Dave, you're going to be a pilot,

and he goes, I think you're going to fly America's airplane. You're going to fly the F-18 Hornet. It was an awesome day, man, and I won't ever forget it. And that was it. I got my ticket. When I was selected for a pilot,

I was ranked, I think, like number eight at a 250 in my company. And by the time I graduated, like three weeks later, I was like 25 out of 250. So my performance might have declined a little bit after I had achieved that. You wasn't following the theory of no slack.

Yeah, there was a little slack in that line. That line was pretty tight for a lot of years. For six years and five of you got it. So a little bit of slack there at the end. But I did finish, you know, well enough to get that pilot slot, which is what I always wanted. It was kind of my dream. What year was that? That was April of 1995.

So I started the basic school in October of 94, right after I got graduate in college in June. A little delay to get down to Quantico for the basic school. That's six months long. I graduated sometime mid-April. Wow, about this time in 1995. And then you go to flight school, you do the rag, you do all that stuff to get out to a squadron. And then the first kind of work you were doing was Southern Watch, right? Yeah, so I get through a flight school.

I ended up picking F-18s. I get stationed at El Toro. So I am literally living the dream. I move back to my hometown. I think I went to like my 10-year high school reunion and you know I had told all my buddies you know what I wanted to do I ran into some people hadn't seen in a while it was it was good and Shortly after I got there I actually flew the last flight out of El Toro they closed the base and all the Marines moved down to Miramar So the Navy where Topkin was was filmed and all that stuff back in the day the Navy left San Diego

moved back east and the Marine Corps happily took over that base and so I moved down to Miramar ended up in an F-18 squadron Station out of Miramar flying hornets off carriers. Straight up living the dream. Your actual dream you are now living at this time. That is exactly right. I'm living in San Diego. I was living in P.B. Off anacapa.

And stationing Miramar flying hornets. And the carrier that I was assigned to my first deployment, we did Operation Southern Watch. So I watched Desert Storm in 91 on TV. I was a freshman in college. and we hadn't we hadn't done much in the military since then but we had flown every single day

since that war ended in I think it was it March of 91 every single day since then we flew patrols over Iraq to make sure that the skies were clear and we were enforcing the no-fly zone and here it was you know 10 years later 2000 on a carrier

in the Persian Gulf flying combat operations over southern Iraq did you guys ever drop any bombs sir I did yeah a few of us did. Not a ton. There wasn't a ton going on, but what we would do, these things called response options. So if the Iraqis would do something, I think in my case, they set up a surface air missile south of

a line that they weren't supposed to be. And we had surveillance that told us what was out there. And I launched on a mission and blew up a SAM site with something called a J-DAM at the time. It was a bomb guided by GPS, which at the time was this brand new thing. Yeah, it was crazy technology. I think we were on the only planes in the entire

carrier that could do it because we had this thing called a GPS. Super fancy back then. But at the time, Jacko, that was combat. Oh, for sure. That was it. There was no other show in town. And so the night that I dropped a bomb on a Sam site in Iraq off a carrier in an F-18,

you could have just retired right there. We're done. Yeah, that was it. I could have come back to that. It could have flown me off the ship. And I probably would have died a happy man at that point. I was like, that's it. I have reached critical mass.

That's all I ever wanted to do. So it was, again, a lot of it was just things worked out of my family. favor, but I did exactly what I wanted to do. And that event was kind of, at the time, sort of the pinnacle. That was what I thought I was going to achieve. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing in the dry years for the seal team. Like, if you did some kind of mission, you were just super stoked. You know, we were over in the Persian Gulf.

Actually, same time, 2009, 2009, 2000, I was there. I was in the Persian Gulf when we were doing, you know, meal operations, stopping smugglers coming out of Iraq. So we were taking down vessels and getting control of them. And again, at the time, super stoked. Yes, the big mission was taking down these vessels. And you thought it was pretty cool. It was cool. It was cool.

But you just didn't have anything to compare it to at all. Yeah. So what happened? So I get back from that deployment. That's the summer of 2000. And shortly after that, I got selected by my commanding officer to go to Top Gun. So that was my first exposure to kind of advancing inside the squadron. So as a young guy, I'd done almost two years in the squadron.

I've been there for a little while and got some qualifications and grew and developed in the squadron. And they pick one or two guys every couple years from a squadron to go to the school. And the whole point of going there is you learn kind of this advanced, you know, it's like a master's degree, basically, in being a fighter pilot, with the intent that you're going to bring back to the squadron and be one of the kind of key trainers, the key leaders in the squadron. So I went to Top Gun early the next year, summer of, actually about a year later, so summer of 2001, I go to Top Gun. I came back and we were just in a workup cycle you show up to top gun just so everybody knows Yeah, you feel like I mean especially because you were the big combat vet with bombs dropped and you feel like you're pretty much a complete stud

Yeah, and then you show up a top gun and the instructors just can completely annihilate it just further as you don't know it's it's it's you're learning how to dog fight Mono e Mano against another guy in another plane like stock car racing because the planes are equal, and it's you against the other guy, and it was actually cool. You were explaining some of the rules and how you'd set it up, and they have, you know how in Jiu-Jitsu,

you know, you, okay, you know, you start standing, you know, you shake hands, bump fist, okay, now it's on. Well, with the top gun, they start at a certain distance. They go towards each other at a certain altitude, certain distance away from each other. They go, they pass at a thousand feet,

you know, left wing to left wing, and then once they pass, they say, what do you say, game on? Fights on. Fights on. And then boom, Now it's go.

So that's how they start in their neutral position. And of course, when you show up there, it's just like Jiu-Jitsu, and the fact that it's like a guy that did a little bit of training somewhere, and then they show up at a jiu-jitsu place, and they're going to get totally destroyed. So he shows up, you show up at this thing, and you think you're, again, a big combat vet, and you just get annihilated. Totally. So, yeah, I get that I had dropped a bomb. That's singular. I had dropped a bomb. A bomb.

And I was, yeah, I was a big deal. that dude had dropped a bomb, you know? And so at the time I was, I thought, because some of the instructors had never done that before, right? Most of them. Like you said, there's the dryers. It just wasn't a ton going on. You know, I had a story here and there, but I think more than anything in my own mind,

you kind of build up like, I got some game here, man. I'm going to watch this. You know, I'm going to do some good work here. And, you know, I had done well enough in my squadron. And then I was one of the guys that got picked to go to school. Which is another little confidence boost. Yeah, it is. So your ego's getting fed.

A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, you're feeling pretty good about yourself. And so you go up there and like you said. So you know you're a student and you know you're not going to, you know, you're not going to be as good as the instructors. But what you don't know is that you're not just going to lose. You're going to get, you're not just going to lose or get annihilated. You're not even going to know what happened.

It's going to be over and you're going to kind of be flying back and before you're going to land. And you're not going to be of explaining what just occurred. I mean, it occurs in a way that it's so, it's hard to explain. It's like you weren't there. it's really it's humbling I mean Jocker we're talking the very first flight on the very first day

my very first event the very first fight of the first flight it was over in like 20 seconds and the instructor was saying okay they say knock it off when we're done we're going to start and set it up again and I knew right then I was totally in over my head the very first one and it was so my

first flight was so bad that when I landed we're walking back in to you go to maintenance and you basically go back and turn the airplane back in and so they can fix it. And then what you're supposed to do is walk across street to the squadron hangar and talk about it. And I'm in my gear and you're supposed to get undress out of your flight gear and go. He's like, hey, don't get undressed. And I'm like, okay, right? He's like, why don't we just go do that

again? It was bad enough that we didn't even need to talk about it. We just need to just, hey, and he's like, hey, why don't you just take a deep breath, man? And we went and did that flight without ever, without ever even talking about the first one. Right. So I kind of knew I was, yeah, I had some work to do. So Top Gun is really good about not just humbling you, but obviously it teaches you a ton. It's a six, at the time, it was only six weeks for the Marines because we didn't do some of the syllabus that the Navy did because we got it elsewhere. And it's six weeks where you start with literally just you against another guy, one against one. And you end up building up to where it's, you know, six to eight of you on the front, on the blue side, the friendly side against, you know, 1520.

simulated adversary. So it's a it's a lot in a short period of time and that idea being like really bad when you start happens over and over again in the course. So you get through the one v one phase and at the end you're like oh finally I got this one b one thing. I got this thing wired. I can do this I'm like all right cool and you're not going to go two against whatever and you just get rolled again and you're like back to square one so it builds you up and breaks you down builds you up standard military you know just breaks you down to your pieces and then the guys there that are instructors are so they're obviously really good

I mean that part is sort of speaks for itself they're really good in the airplane but what makes them unique is that they're exceptional teachers so you learn a ton so by the time by the time you finish top gun that that image in the mirror when you're like man that dude is awesome they get shattered it's actually all back together by the time you leave

and so you leave there like you got that patch in your shoulder you fly back you get the patch in the last day you get up in your airplane F-18 with my name painting on the sign with a top gun patch and I flew back to Miramar I'm like see you the dream is getting better The dream is getting better.

But there's been enough reminders. They're like, yeah, I should probably maybe cool out a little bit. You start to just learn that there's always guys out there that are significantly better than you. And you keep climbing up the hill. But finishing Top Gun as a student, you feel like you've hit the top of the mountain. But you realize, because the guys you've been working with, there's an awful long way to go. You at least know what you don't know. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

You know what you don't know. And you know, there's a lot that you don't know. And so it kind of dispels all those feelings. You know, we went through flight school. Like, wow, I'm a, I finished flight school, I got F-18s. I've really got this flying thing nailed. And you're barely functional in an airplane compared to these other guys. And when you get to a place like Top Gun, it's just such a concentration of talent.

As good as it feels, you actually, the thing that you get the most out of some humility, because you just got crushed for six weeks, crushed. And hopefully you learned something out of it. And you're supposed to take that back and teach the guys in your squadron all those same lessons. And so my expectation was I was going to go back from Top Gun. I was going to spend another two years, 18 months in the squadron as kind of the senior instructors, and then go on to something else. And I didn't know exactly what that was at the time.

But as I'm leaving, no joke, my last day, I remember the guy who asked me. It's actually the same guy that's going to do my retirement here in a couple months. He's like, hey, man, have you thought about coming back to be an instructor of Top Gun after this tour and your squadron's over? And I try to play a cool, like, oh, let me go home and think about that. but clearly there wasn't a lot to think about there. So I left there with kind of an inclination that I might get asked back, and I was pretty stoked about that. They didn't formalize it, but he was a senior IP on the staff,

a senior Marine there as well, a real respected guy in Marine Aviation, and he had given me a sit down. So I was hoping that that was going to happen. But I also thought I had time. I thought I was, you know, this is July 2001, and obviously, you know, six weeks later, 9-11 hits. And so all that calculus kind of changed. And very quickly, my squadron, which was on this regular cycle of preparing to go to what was going to be another Southern watch deployment, just like we did, that whole thing had changed because of September 11th.

So what happens on September 11th for you? Yeah. You were active in a squadron, getting ready for work in the morning. Totally. Boom. I'm stationed right up the road here. You know, five miles north here is Marine Corps Station Miramar. I'm on my second half of my first tour as a pilot in the F.8.

team's quadrant. I'd already done that one deployment and I had a routine down. You know, I was getting up. I was probably, I guess it was probably five in the morning. I'm sitting at the foot of my bed, lacing up my boots like I did every day to just get in the car and drive into work and click on the TV. And, you know, I see, it's 8 o'clock back east or around that time and I see what's going on. And I think, you know, same story for all of us, kind of piece it together very quickly. Like, hey, this is an accident. This is something's really happening here. You see the second building. And it very quickly kind of clicks in like, this is the real thing. And I knew, I knew something, I knew we were going to go to war.

I didn't know what, I obviously didn't know the details, but I knew things were going to change really dramatically. As a matter of fact, you know, my drive to work, which normally would have taken me 10 minutes or whatever, 15 minutes, something, some short drive to get up into the base. It was like three hours to get on the base. You know, they're inspecting every vehicle, you know, every car is getting pulled over, dogs just, you know, the whole nine yards that just the security. It was pretty chaotic. It was kind of mayhem. and I drive into my squadron and half of my squadron had already, not half, but a good number of guys had already been up to Fallon, which was where we're going to go for training. The same place the top gun is, and it was just part of a normal training cycle.

And my squadron commander at the time, an awesome guy called me because he'd gone up there and I was supposed to be part of the second half of that went up there. He's like, hey, man, you need to go brief. You're going to be the lead of a four ship of aircraft. We don't know all the details yet, but we're going to, they're going to call. you, they're going to find live ordinance, and you're going to have to fly an mission, an air patrol, combat air patrol mission, we called it a cap, because there were still a bunch of airliners that were still airborne coming in from places like Japan and Korea, these long-haul, you know, 12, 13, 14, 14-hour flights.

There's a whole bunch of airplanes airborne, and we didn't know if there's a potential issue with those airplanes, you know, if they're going to try to do the same thing back east that they did out west. Total chaos. And I had just recently graduated from Top Gun, so I was, he's like, hey, you're the lead. And we didn't have a good, we didn't know what the mission was. I mean, it was basically one of those things where we're supposed to get airborne. And somehow, between us and some other control,

we're going to kind of determine if a particular aircraft might have been a threat. And that was happening all over the country. People were in their aircraft, Air Force, Navy, Marine pilots were just launching to do these protection missions of what ended up becoming something called Operation Noble Eagle, which started on September 11th. And it was this aviation overwatch of key cities and key locations. and we were totally clueless on what that was. Now, I ended up not launching, but it didn't happen.

You know, but we did the brief. We were getting ready to go, and it was just kind of that moment of chaos of we were on our heels, and Topkin didn't prepare me for that. I didn't have a sense of what was supposed to do with an airliner, you know, filled with civilians on some route coming from Japan and trying to figure out what I would do if somebody said, hey, that aircraft, we figured out that aircraft is going to try to fly into a building or crash into an airport or something like. That it was just it was just kind of mayhem and it was you know it was tough to start off the The idea being that if that is suspected of happening or they can somehow confirm that's going to happen

Then you or one of your mates is going to have to shoot down a civilian aircraft That's what you're being that's what they're thinking. Yeah, exactly and and that was something I'd never considered You know, there's anybody had considered no at that point and I've read there's some you know there's some pilots that actually ended up launching out in the East Coast. I've read a couple articles of pilots that took off in their F-16s here in D.C. Because obviously it was with the Pentagon up in D.C. and the New York City that actually did get airborne and they had

missions to do exactly that. So in some sense, I was pretty lucky that I didn't have to go through that calculus, but I still can picture where I'm sitting, given that brief with three other pilots, kind of like we're sitting today. And we're even asking ourselves like, well, how do you, I mean, how do you shoot down an airliner?

What would we actually go through to the deal? How would we determine And, you know, we were kind of trying to talk through that. And the idea that an airliner filled with civilians, and we knew, you know, at that point that those other airliners, there was regular commercial airplanes that just took off to go on their flight and they had crashed. We knew everybody on board, you know, nobody's going to survive that.

And so it was just a very strange way to start what ended up being kind of a cycle of war that, you know, we've all been through for years now on that morning of getting that call from the CEO, hey, this is what you're doing. And, you know, that was the beginning. shortly, very shortly that's route within a date or two. No, actually, I think probably that late afternoon and certainly by the next day, my squadron

was one of the several squages that was tasked to go back out on the carrier. So we split that squadron in half. That same CEO that called me, he took guys from Fallon, flew onto the ship, onto the carrier, right off the coast of LAX. And I still, we talked about this.

I can picture to this day I took off out of San Diego and it's flying overhead, Los Angeles International Airport, and we had guys that taken off from the carrier that had live missiles. and they're doing a cap and I'm flying, you know, kind of opposite direction overhead L-A-X looking down. And, you know, I grew up in Southern California, L-A-X is like one of the busiest airports in the world. There's planes all over the tarmac on the runways, on the taxiways, because there's everybody landed, nobody took off.

There's no controllers. And they're doing this cap mission where they're just flying overhead L-A-X, kind of largely unknown on what's going on in just that moment of surreality of, airborne. And there's nobody else flying, and we're just sort of just waiting for something to happen. you know, it was kind of one of those, hey, you'll get your, you'll get more specific instructions as we figure it out. You know, the leadership was, was scrambling every bit as much as we were and kind of looking down, thinking this is, this is a whole new world. You know, this is not Southern Watch, you know, that mission we've been doing. And within maybe six weeks, we steamed out. We loaded the carrier a couple months early, put the squadron, the whole air wing, got on board the carrier, and steamed out towards the North Arabian Gulf to go do,

what we called is Operation Enduring Freedom. So late 2001, I think it was maybe November of 2001, we were going to war. And Afghanistan was where the war was. You remember it. And at the time, that was it. There was nothing else going on.

We went to Afghanistan. So I did a seven-month cruise on a carrier from November of 2001. I think we came back April, May of 2002, and did combat operations over Afghanistan and, you know, a lot more ordinance. lot busier. We did a mission at the time. It was called Operation Anaconda. I think I might ask you about that. That was like the largest ground offensive. We had supported since

desert storm. And when we came back in April, April or May of O2, we thought we'd sort of largely won the war. We thought we'd accomplish most of our mission. We left thinking, hey, this thing is winding down. We're feeling pretty good about it. And when I got back in May of 2002, I kind of distinctly remember, like, I just had my war experience. You know, I was a pilot in combat and you know I'd done Southern Watch but obviously you know nothing like this and but I I'd done a combat deployment off a carrier supported troops on the ground in Afghanistan dropping bombs and flying off carriers I kind of thought that was it I think a lot of us did yeah a lot of us did I know I thought that might come back from my first deployment to Iraq I was kind of

you know I'm thankful that I got to do this deployment and I thought it can't go on that much longer but I mean really quickly after we got back it it it spiraled and I said oh this this is going to be a while. Yeah, big time. While I was on that deployment, I had got an email from Top Gun saying, hey, why don't you come up here next summer, being an instructor? So I came back in May of that deployment, knowing that my next step was going to go back up to Fallon. So I was feeling pretty good about that. I was pretty pumped to know what was next. And, you know, in that period of time we came back, you know, I'm packing up that summer moving out in the fall, and already the years are starting to turn for what ended up being Operation Iraqi Freedom.

You know, it's, the writing is on the wall that this is, we're not done. I mean, we're really just getting started. It was several months before that all kicked off. I think everybody in the military certainly knew this is which way it's going to happen. And I think there were some things along the way that were supposed to occur, but we all knew this was coming. Certainly, you know, it kicked off in March of the following year. It wasn't a big surprise to any of us.

And I was up at Fallon kind of watching that whole thing roll. And I realized that that deployment that I did. just finished was not the end of you know what what we were doing as a country trying to deal with this problem and and then you show up at top gun to be an instructor which is you know you said the going to top gun was like a master's and so now it's it's beyond a doctorate right i mean it's yeah and we say it's the phd i mean in our business um you know certainly is uh for a marine or a naval aviator a fighter pilot that's that's it top gun kind of represents it's the schoolhouse it's it's the place where you want to be and as an instructor you have it you have you have you

You have a huge amount of responsibility. It's a bunch of sort of mid-career guys. It's Navy lieutenants. It's Marine Corps captains, maybe a junior major or a junior lieutenant commander. But it's run by relatively young guys, guys that have maybe a full deployment under the belt. And, you know, quickly guys were coming in having done Afghanistan combat operations, guys coming, having done Iraq combat operations. So in the time that I was there from 02 to 05, the combat experience on the staff went from basically none to everybody.

Every single dude had been in combat. It was coming off a long deployment where they had done back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Guys that I knew had done 10-month appointments to Iraq on a carrier. I mean, really seasoned guys where just one generation three years prior, not a single person on the staff had seen any combat like that. The exact same thing in the SEAL teams we experienced. Exact same thing. It went from zero or close to zero combat experience.

It was an odd guy that had done a little operation here or there. to every single guy except for the new guys, you know? And then, but your learning curve, when you show back up there, it was just as steep as the first time. Yeah, without a doubt. So when you're there as a student,

and you don't understand a lot of what's going on as a student, at least on the instructor's side. You know, they're not trying to keep anything from me, but you're just, you were so busy just trying to keep your head above water. You're not spending a lot of time wondering what the instructors are doing on the free time. You know, you're just prepping

for every brief. the flight may take an hour, but you've put in 10 hours of work ahead of time and you've debriefed for six hours, and when you're done, you need to go start the next process again. So you are just all day, every day, thinking about your next flight

and getting ready for that and the things going on. So in your learning curve as steep as a student, when you get there as an instructor, and I didn't know this at the time, you get there, when you're there as an instructor, you have certainly been selected to a pretty elite group of folks, but you don't teach to,

student at Topkin when you're an instructor for a year. They spend an entire year with you as an instructor. There's only 25 guys on the staff. And so a third of you basically, if you kind of do the math or sequester for an entire year, just going through what's called, we call the IUT, the instructor under training. And they're just teaching you how to teach students. And in that year, you're now flying all these different training missions with the instructors that are training you to be an instructor. And you're getting annihilated again. So that'll be a lot. So that whole continuum of, wow, I'm pretty good, you were reminded very quickly. And so it takes an entire year. Now, the good news about that is by the time you're finishing your initial instructor

qualification, you can go teach students, you have been flying more than you've ever flown in your entire career. I mean, I'm flying two, three times a day sometimes for a year. And so you're just getting reps and reps and reps. And you have got more reps, I think, than anybody in aviation. So by the time you get your first student, you sit down, your very first student brief, you're A game has been elevated, you know, quite a bit and you're able to fly with the students and teach them way more effectively because, heck, when I finished Top Gun, I went to Afghanistan. I didn't do a single air-to-air mission for almost a year. I was dropping bombs. I was doing casts and all those other type of missions. So when I got there, I was pretty rusty on those skill sets. A year of flying with instructors will resolve that. It's just the amount of flying that you get, you know, in Jiu-Ti, we call it mat time. Yeah. But, but, but. but for a normal pilot, you're not even getting a fraction of that, right?

A fraction. Yeah, not only you're not getting a fraction of it, a lot of the time that you're flying is, when you're not a top gun, is, you know, sometimes you do admin flying, just flying to and from different places. Sometimes you're just prepping for a very particular mission. You know, it takes a skill to, you know,

the missions are getting ready to drop bombs or do arm reconnaissance or different types of flying. You don't get to see all of it. You get to see a pretty narrow amount. At a top gun, you get exposed to everything. repeatedly. And so that one against one that we talked about

that we call it BFM basic fighter maneuvers which is just you and another guy fighting two airplanes you do that a ton but you do all the other things

just as much so you get exposed to the PhD part of it isn't just the reps I think that's critical but it's that you get exposed to this nuanced part of aviation

that you just didn't even really know existed so you get all the science all the math all the things that drive us to say this is why we do the things do then just get to practice it over and over and then you go back to the science and go hey i think

there's some flaws here maybe some differences here and the guys at top gun are the one writing the manual we literally write a manual it's four inches thick of all these different chapters of how to fly the airplane everything from doing a one against one to dropping a bomb to mission planning top gun owns that and so i was given a chapter in a book and a lecture that i was responsible for and that the thing that was pretty amazing for me is when i got there the mission set that I was responsible for, my SME area, my subject matter, expert area was surface air threat and counter tactics.

So I was the guy as a captain in the Marine Corps that was responsible for writing the chapter, teaching the lecture, and establishing our tactics for how to defeat threat surface air missiles in AAA. And this was from September of 2002 to March of 2003 that I was the guy that established the Navy Marine Corps' procedures and techniques and how we did that and taught that.

So, you know, Desert, I'm sorry, or OIF kicks off, you know, guys that I'm what had flown with and trained with are out there on deployments or write in me letters, hey, we're seeing this threat. What should we do here? You know, buddies of mine that I've been growing up in aviation, I'm saying, hey, this is what we should do. This is how you should deal with this particular case. And so the responsibility as an IP, I think why it's such a PhD type program is that your level responsibility grows. You have to be more than just a good pilot. You can teach anybody to be a good pilot. But if you can't teach and explain to other guys what they're doing and how to get better and how to keep themselves

alive, you're kind of useless in combat. So it was a, it was the best three years in my life, man. It was, it was ridiculous. And we just flew every day, two, three times a day. I got qualified in the F-16. I got to fly a totally different airplane. So I was dual-qualified in an F-18 and an F-16 as a Marine on a Navy base at a Navy command after having done two deployments on carriers. I mean, you cannot. It'd be like if I said, Jocco, I need you to do Jiu-Jitsu three times a day, every day for three years that and you need and that's all I need you to do I don't need you do anything else yeah yeah you know it's I've actually done a backseat ride in F-18 at Falun as a matter of fact and and one of the things that I think is important to

understand or at least from my perspective one thing that made it really cool was when you get an F-18 if you've never been in one most people you're not going to get the chance to get an F-18 and fly with it right so I'll give a little description of what I thought was one of the coolest parts about it is that if you look at the structure of an F-18 the the the pod that you sit in the cockpit is really far forward and the wings and the engines are stuff are behind you and it looks that way when you look at it but when you get in it You those those wings are so far behind you that you feel like you're in a superhero pod You need to turn you need to turn hard you can't just look back to see the wings and it's a glass canopy that surrounds you So you feel like you're just in a little pod that is moving at

whatever 800 miles an hour and it's it's it's a crazy feeling it's a crazy feeling and you because you're it's deceiving because you just feel like you're in this little space pod somehow Star Wars powering through the air you don't realize it behind you is you know tons of metal and machinery that's making this happen and the G forces and all that stuff it's it's it's it's a very cool very cool thing to experience for me I I thought oh yeah that was awesome I didn't Think to myself man, I should have been a pilot. I know you we were talking about it yesterday For you the connection between man and machine is a really cool thing that you enjoy for me I don't like it

I don't like to rely on a machine I don't even even getting in Bradley's and stuff and Ramadi and always think you know I mean I always was apprehensive about a big machine that I had to rely on I want to rely on me Yeah, and what I could do and that's why I had that little disconnect to always I always I was apprehensive about a big machine that I had to rely on I had to rely on me. I'll always I I still have it today, you know, that's why I'm waiting for the robot war because I want to fight those things So I just have a little disconnect with the machines, but I can see Where people that are have that type of mindset. It's just you know, it's just a complete equalizer as you were telling me last night You is like it is it's a stock car race. It's you in the same plane as me and Who is better is gonna win period. That's it. There's really no excuses you can make. Yeah, that's one of

One of my favorite things, it's always been one of my favorite things about flying fighters is that it's an equalizer. You don't get, you don't bring any advantage to that airplane. Now, if we're going to train something, you and me, there's guys that are bigger, guys that are better heart rate, they got, whatever. There's a whole bunch of ways that maybe you can bring an advantage. You lose all that that, the minute you strap on that airplane. Because you're only going to go as fast as the airplane goes. You're only going to pull as many Gs as the airplane pulls. That's what you get.

Now, you get a lot of all that stuff. I mean, it's awesome, but your success or your failure is 100% about how well you interact with that machine and compare to that other guy. And if you lose, you know, wow, my engine, no. Well, I didn't have negative. You lost because you were worse than me today, period. And look, we're going to find reasons why, you know, we record every flight. We record our radars. We record our information, our display.

So you can go back and dissect. And what you end up being able to do as an instructor is right there, that's why you lost. This decision you made here, this move you went, you went this direction, or you went up or down, and you decided to go at this speed or whatnot. You can dissect every single flight. And the great instructors are the ones that can tell you, this is why I did this to you in 45 seconds. Because here, you made a decision, and it took me this long to capitalize it, but right now is where I took advantage of a mistake that you made.

And you freeze that mistake, and you put on a TV, and they see it, and they look at it, and that burns in their brain, and they make that mistake over and over and over again, until eventually they don't make that mistake and then you're starting to make your money as an instructor. But being in an airplane, I brought every bit of capability that airplane had

and I never had it. There's no, you don't start at a disadvantage. And if you beat somebody, they have nobody to look at, no excuse, nothing to blame except for their own performance. And I loved that

and I will always love that about being a fighter pilot. And then when you're flying an F-16, now you have a different airplane. So, hey, one airplane's, faster than the other. One airplane actually turns better. And so now instead of it just being two totally equal platforms, it's one has particular strengths of weaknesses that are different than the other

ones. So you better be really good about avoiding his strengths and getting, you know, and playing to his weaknesses and vice versa. And if you lose, guess what? It's still your fault 100% because instead of you having two similar airplanes, you couldn't identify what he was able to do better than you in his regime that he has, you know, you're stronger than me fine. Then I'm going to do, I'm to try to be more agile than you. You know, you're quicker than me. Okay, well, I'm maybe try to outpower you, those type of things and those games

that you'd play kind of back and forth. There is no question at the end of a flight at Top Gunn that you're fighting another dude who won. Nobody comes back like, I wonder how I did on that one. It's all very evident. If you're looking over your shoulder and a guy's telling that he's gunning you

with his airplane, you don't go back to the debrief and think, I wonder how this is going to play out. So it's all right there laid out. The cards are always in the table. There's a reason for everything why you succeeded in, while you failed, and I just thrived in that environment because you couldn't hide from anything.

Everybody saw everything, and it was all right there. A good student, a really good, talented student coming up to Top Gun has what percentage chance of winning? So if the best, let's say the hypothetical, the best student that I ever saw that came to Top Gun as a student from a squadron, the best student that ever came to Top Gun to fight a qualified Top Gun instructor stands at zero percent chance of winning. the best student at Top Gun has zero chance.

I could fall asleep in an airplane as an IP and a student is not going to beat me. There is just such a huge... It doesn't even mean that we're better. I don't mean to imply that we were better pilots, but you just... It's just time. Yep, it's just time.

You are just... And I don't even mean that critical. It's just not even close. And nor would they expect it. You know, I mean, some students... Every now that a student kind of thinks he's going to do some good work. You know, hey, watch this.

I'm awesome. But most guys show up realizing that that disparity. I understood that when I got there as a student. These guys are just in a different world. And you want to get to that world. But, you know, as an IP, you... Which is instructor pilot, by the way. If I flew my best jet on day one against the best student,

it would be over so fast that he almost wouldn't even learn as much as he should. So you still fly your best airplane, but you make sure that there's a learning process there. just annihilate somebody at Top Gun as if you can do that the students that go come there even on their last day aren't aren't on your same level they just aren't they've gotten a lot better the learning curve is steep but when you're in your third year as an IP at Top Gun you have just had so many reps you know so many laps doing the exact same thing you've seen everything that it's almost like we talked about this yesterday it's almost like things are happening in the slow motion for you like you're in the matrix and that guy is just working as hard as he possibly can and doing his thing

And you're just kind of sitting there kind of watching it at like one third speed. So your ability to decide and do something to him or something to that airplane or make a decision, you're just operating at a faster pace than him. And that reaction is just impossible to keep up with. I can't wait until you start training jiu-jitsu because you're just going to, the analogies are just everywhere. And that's one thing I say. In jihitsu, you can see the future. You can actually see the future.

When you're training in jihitsu with someone that doesn't know as much as you, you know what is going to happen. You know what they are going to do. Just like when you're in the cockpit and you do something and you know what that person. You know what they're going to do. You just know it. Totally. And don't forget, too, as an instructor, you've been on the receiving end of that for years as well. So you understand kind of both sides of that coin.

And, you know, you fly with someone and you'll think to yourself like, oh, I can't believe you just did that. And then, you know, three turns later is when you get to take advantage of that because, you know, some time will have to play out for his mistake to really reveal itself. Like, man, I can't believe you just did that. this is going to cost you over time. And you can go back on the tape, like I said, and say, hey, you know, you're worried about what happened at the end, where I'm behind you. But what really, what let me do that

was 30 seconds ago, you did this, and when this was the environment or the circumstances. And you see that stuff, and that's when you talk about seeing the future. I mean, if you really want to be a jerk about it, you know, if guys are your buddies, you know, I'll get on the radio, like a buddy of mine, students that came through, but guys are my squadron,

and I'm like, oh, that's going to hurt. And they're like, what, what? I'm like, stand by. You know, and 30, seconds later you'll be gunning the guy because you see the mistakes that they make and you know how that's going to play out. So you are on your own playing field there as an instructor. And like I said, man, it's not about being better or worse. It's just the time. And you get so much of the time there. And you get exposed to all the why. You get the why at Top Gun. We teach the why a lot. But when you're

writing the manual, when you're doing that and you have all the testing. equipment available and you're running a thousand computer generator reps to see what their results are. The level of what you know about the why is just so much more. So you just, there's a whole world available to you to, and the guys at Topkin too want to be there, though, the most, that IPs are killing to get to a place like that. So there's not a lot of slackers there. Not a lot of dudes you're trying to motivate or kind of prod along like, hey, buddy, let's get going. You know, dudes are getting after it from startup to shut down every single day. And so you're also getting pulled along because you want to keep up with your peers.

You know, you don't want to be the worst top gun instructor there. You know, every time you think you've made it, you realize all you did was just getting a more selective pool, and your goal is the same is to be the best that you can be, and hopefully the best you can be is one of the best guys there. You know, you don't want to be last at Top Gun, because then you're just last, and I don't be last at anything.

Who does? And so that's a real kind of a type of, a real aggressive group of dudes, and they pull you, and you've got to keep up. And sometimes, you know, a couple guys here and there don't, for the most part, the selection, process works pretty well you know what's cool just to bring this back for a second to you know talking about leadership and interacting with other people the same exact thing happens when you start to pay attention to the tactics techniques

procedures of leadership you start to see the moves that people are making you know you start to see the moves that your subordinate is making because his ego flaring up or because he's getting taking too much ownership of something that he doesn't want to let go and he's getting emotional about her you start seeing you start seeing the same type of things at one third speed and you know that that was great for me when I was running the the west coast seal team training I saw we we take a platoon we had these scenarios and we put a platoon through we'd put another platoon through we'd put another platoon through we'd put another platoon through we'd just over the same scenario you know guy here shooter over here

person on this hilltop hostage in this room we put all these guys through the same scenario And so as soon as you'd approach, as soon as you'd watch him approach, and you say, oh, the platoon commander's too far in the rear, this is what's going to happen. He's not going to see what's coming up front. Yep, there it is. And so you just know what's going to happen. And it's the same thing when you start dealing with their personalities. You get a guy with a big eagle that comes in and he wants to run everything his way and he thinks he's going to be able to control everything and he's not going to be able to do this. So you can end up, and I see that in the business world obviously now too, too, where you get the same exact problems of a guy that's too emotional about his plan or has too big of an ego about something or he's not passing the world. well enough or they're he's trying to control everyone and not using decentralized commitment it's so obvious because you have the reps we have the reps in this in this arena to be to look at a situation say okay let me watch this oh oh okay I see what's about to happen here's what's going on we can break it down so it's the same thing across the board you get that level of just experience and repetitions and repetitions and now you can kind of see the future and you can predict what's going to And then the good thing is in the business world, when you can predict what's going to happen, you can stop it.

You can get the people on the right track, pull them back in and get them arranged. Well, I think the thing that a lot of people don't realize, because sometimes I think it's just different in the military. The reasons why people are successful in the military and the reasons why people fail are exactly the same as why you succeed in business and why you succeed as a person or why you fail. Now, look, I know being an airplane is different. I get that. The environment might be a little bit different. being combat certainly so the setting changes in all these things the setting is different but the reasons are exactly the same and so to dispel whatever myth you know it's different in the military

it's identical in the military no doubt it comes out in an airplane or it comes out on a ship or whatever it comes out in downtown romadi mean it the setting yeah it's different but what's going on it's identical um and when you get to a when you get to be in a place where you get to devote 100% of your time to that and you're not distracted by just the distracts of military bureaucracy and life of training schedules and did everybody do their you know their annual survey when you're away from that and you're just living in a world just being tactical and doing nothing but learning about how to be the best pilot you can be and the best teacher everything not just being a fighter pilot everything in the world slows

down everything slows down and I think it just gives you a perspective on life that top gun I will carry those lessons I mean obviously I care that with me in everything that I do and I will forever right you know what was honed at a place like that and in some ways in the military it's just a luxury because it's just not that common to first someone say for three years you're just going to do nothing but this dude are you kidding me so so speaking of decision making and good and or bad decision making so you're living the dream living the dream you're up in fouling you actually have a house and up in the mountains your skiing flying and and and then somehow you make a decision that's a

bit off the track a little bit. What was that all about? I don't know what you're talking about. So yeah, I'm in my third year at Top Gun at 2005. I was selected to be the training officer. So I am running Top Gun as the senior IP there, which is just, it's awesome. It's a, it is literally, as a Marine, it's a dream job. You could not ask for anything better. I was dating what ended up becoming my wife. So my wife, Whitney, at the time, we're dating, so lives out there. We had a place in Tahoe. So drove a Corvette. Life was pretty good, man. And I'm actually coming up on my end-of-service obligation.

I can leave the Marine Corps in 2005, and I sort of sold my relationship to Whitney on that idea. Like, hey, come put up with this living in town, but I'm going to get out of the Marine Corps. Don't worry about this. None of it. This is all, it's all company. Don't worry about that.

Deployment's war. It's over. You don't need to worry about that. And so I think I oversold that to hurt a little bit, got her to move out. to Tahoe. And so there was just a part of me that didn't feel done with the Marine Corps. And ironically, in this amazing experience that I had built up in my mind since I was 16 years old, I'm now a Topkin instructor. I joined the Marine Corps, knowing, because as a fortunate,

the Top Gun was this big influence. I'm going to leave the Marine Corps as a Top Gun instructor. But I had spent four years flying F-18s off carriers, basically in the Navy for all intensive purposes. I was a Marine and Marine Squadron, but we deployed with Navy carriers, and I spent three years in Fallon on a Navy base with the Navy command as one of three pilots on the staff at Top Gun.

And there was just a part of me that I knew I was going to be done. I was ready to leave the Marine Corps, but I wanted to leave the Marine Corps, having fulfilled, I think, that part of being a Marine, a real Marine, is kind of how I felt. And so, again, And I had kind of contemplated what I was going to do. You talked to somebody called your monitor.

He's the guy that gives you orders. Hey, this is what's next in your career. This is where you're going to go for how long we think you should do this because it's helpful for whatever. He kind of explains it to you as a guy that basically is responsible for your career progression. And I was kind of going back and forth. What do I do? Do I stay in?

Do I get out? I kind of was struggling with that decision. And he's like, look, we're going to, as a topic of structure, you've got a lot of skill, got a lot of experience, and they want you to use that and bring it back to the Marine Corps and go to a squadron and teach these guys. So he gave me orders.

He says your orders are going to be to go to Japan. You're going to fly F-18s back to the regular fleet squadron and you'll go from there. And I even, I think I even got to the point where I had orders given to me.

Would you been like a squadron commander or a squadron ex-o? No, I would have been like an operations officer or maintenance officer. I was two junior. I'd only been in 11-year mark. So I'm kind of up on what's called,

we called a department head where I'm going to run a major department in a squadron. Operations or maintenance are kind of the two big. big ones and I it just it just didn't it's not what I wanted to do I had like I said some long-term plans to do another stuff I was thinking long-term I was going to get out and go do something else and so I called the monitor I said hey I want to do a fact tour a fact is that forward air

controllers like you described earlier on the podcast and we had this little list on the internet that was called a hot fill list it was basically all the jobs that nobody wanted and if you called it was a first-come-first or if you called and volunteer for anything you were automatically going to get it And because it was just a list of jobs that they couldn't like force on guys for whatever reason. I'm probably not explaining it all that well. But the bottom line is the hot fill bill. It is you call you.

It's yours for any reason. And I'm like, hey, man, I see there's a hot fill to be a Ford Air Controller in Japan. Because we're going to go to Japan. We kind of crossed that bridge of, okay, we're going to move overseas. We didn't have any kids. This is with Whitney. This is with Whitney. She's a little bit not super cool with it, but we found, it will go to Japan.

We'll fly. It'll be, it'll be fine. And he's like, you're not going to be a Ford Air Controller in Japan. You're gonna go fly and whatnot. I said, dude, it's right there in black and white man. It says, Hot Phil. I'm your guy.

And he was like, okay, yeah. I mean, and so he gave me these orders. And I wanted to be a fact, because I wanted to leave the Marine Corps having fulfilled all the parts about being a Marine. And in my mind, it's funny, because it's like we're opposite on that. The real challenge or the thing I didn't really want to do,

but I knew I should, was getting out of the airplane and doing something really hard on the ground. Like my natural state in the Marine Corps is in an airplane. And for some people, they're miserable and don't want to do it. For me, that was...

Right. So to do that was, to be a Ford Air Controller was... And it's strange to hear myself say it. I didn't want to go be a Ford Air Controller, but I knew I needed to go do that. There's no... I needed to leave the Marine Corps

and say, yeah, I did that too. And it was just a matter, I think, of fulfillment of kind of an exclamation point on a career that I always kind of fantasize and as I learn more about the Marine Corps, there was more to than just being a pilot. Right. So I just wanted that.

So in your mind, Were you thinking forward air controller in Japan met you're gonna go over there You know have a little team of Marines you'd go out to the different Training ranges call for some bombs all good you know go home at night be with your wife Might even go time in Japan. Yeah just just nice little sort of like a long vacation Working a little bit of time on the ground I get to go to the field I spend the night in the woods Yeah something like that you know yeah really cool camping and they pay for it Yeah, so yeah that's what it was I was gonna go to Japan

There's a bunch of really cool was gonna be in Okina actually, so not mainland Japan. Okinawa's got great scuba diving. It's kind of neat. And, you know, I could bring my wife with me. It's going to be a lot of fun. And you can, I can train. I was going to teach guys how to use airplanes and drop bombs. I knew how to do that.

I was, it was going to be a really cool thing. So I get these orders and my wife and I moved out to Japan. We got there and to Okinawa, a place called Campans on a little base up there in the middle of the island. And I'm there probably, dude, I'm probably there a week. and my boss, the brigade platoon to commanders, like, hey, we're, we're going to send a brigade platoon, which is probably 50 guys, I'm guessing. I'm guessing at the numbers to Camp Lejeune because that angle go just came back from seven months in Iraq and they need to go right back and turn very quick turnaround.

They don't have enough qualified guys. And so, I mean, I'm there a week and I'm coming home to tell Whitney like, hey, there's the deal. They need guys to go out to Lejeune to do this deployment to Iraq and I'm going to be one of those guys. So we were there instead of a year we were there for maybe She was like is there snorkeling? Yeah In Iraq because you were telling me about scuba diving So we crammed a year's worth of stuff in about six weeks

Because we had so it was probably Maybe early November When the word kind of came down And we knew we had till the end of the calendar year So we shoved a year's worth of living in in Japan In about six weeks and we did Korea We did Thailand we did mainland to Tokyo We got her dive quality.

I mean, we did it all. Only December 22nd or whatever it was, you know, we flew home. And I went straight to Lejeune from there to start training with second Anglico, which was the team that had just come back from Iraq after their seven-month appointment on a very quick turn. They're probably four months into their turnaround. So you get just real quick for people that don't know what Anglico is. Yeah, please. Go ahead. The Anglico stands for Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company.

And really what it is is it's a group of it's a group of small teams four or five man teams called firepower control teams and what those teams We're all supposed to be able to do is Control airplanes tell airplanes what to do with their bombs We could control artillery so how to fire artillery ordinance and even we didn't do it there in Iraq But we could use naval gunfire so guns off ships we were training all three of those skill sets and the whole point of an Anglico and a place like Iraq is It's you had different units yet a Navy Union units, Army units, Marine Corps units, and as an Anglico, you're a liaison. So that's what the L in Anglico is. So I was trained to go to an Army unit and know how Army does, people may not know this.

All the services actually do the same job differently. So the Army and the Marine Corps will get the same mission and have a totally different way of doing it because their doctrine of their training is different. Now, it's similar, but there's a bunch of pretty critical differences in there. And so what we're training to do is we had all Marine airplanes in where we were in Iraq and all Army land forces. And so the Army doesn't have any training how to use Marine Corps airplanes. Marine Corps doesn't have a lot of air training to use Army ground forces. So when those two people connect, there's a problem with how they communicate and what they want from each other. Insert Anglico, we're the liaison between the Army ground units and in this case the Marine Corps Air units.

So my job was to control Marine airplanes to support the Army on the ground. And that was all over Iraq. And what the Anglico team would take this whole group and break it into maybe 25, four-man teams, and went all over the country to go do this same mission with the whole bunch of. of different units. So that was our mission as a forward air controller. And I was qualified as a forward air controller because I had flown airplanes, job bombs in combat, understood how F-18s were supposed to support ground maneuver. And I went to school at Ford Air Controller School. So let's go to Japan. It'll be fun. We'll pretend to do that for a year. And then we end up in Camp Lejeune

training to go to Iraq. And now it's your first time kind of doing grunt work, right? So last time I had held a rifle, shot a rifle, and worn a pair of combat boots was the basic school. So I had, you know, I was, I got my air slot at TBS. That was a big day for me. You know, I'd done six months of that. I had that check in the block. I was feeling pretty good about that. And I had never, I don't think I put on my camouflage uniform.

I think I wore a flight suit. Honestly, I think every day for seven years. I could probably count on one hand. well even longer than that I wasn't even counting flight school I could probably count on one hand the number of days that I didn't wear a flight suit from the time that I selected to go to flight school

to the time that I ended up in Anglico days I mean so this was a foreign now I was a Marine I went to the basic school was all back there somewhere but you know I think there is this and I've mentioned this I think to you I think it's just sort of this habit of self-sabotage like well I can't leave the Marine Corps

without being a real Marine. So I'm going to literally sabotage myself by volunteering for a job that I don't know if I really want to do, but now I'm stuck doing it. So I'm going to have to do that. So I won't ever have to say I didn't do that. So this kind of cycle of breaking promises to my wife, volunteering for stuff I didn't really want to do, but knew that I should. And next thing I know, it all blew up in my face because let's go to Japan.

Japan's awesome. Good sushi and great experience there. And it's going to be awesome. And I will be a fact. And I can for the rest of my life say, oh, I was a Role Marine. I was a fact. And I did all that. And, you know, it's January in Camp Lejeune.

Careful what you wish for. Holy man. So, yeah, make no mistake. I mean, I did that. I volunteer, but I did not at the time when I was trading in my flying orders for these fact orders. I didn't expect to be in Ramadi. But as, hey, we need to send a brigade of platoon to Camp Lejeune to prep those guys to course. Yep.

I'm going. I mean, I'm not going to not go. That's what we need to do. We're going to go do that. When I got to Camp Lejeune, I ended up being the senior, just by rank, the senior forward air controller in the unit. I was kind of a mid-level major. I'd come from Top Gun. I came straight from Top Gun to that, and I was an experienced guy.

And the commanding officer, no joke. I can picture the day, it walks in one day, and he hands me a piece of paper, and it's got, like, 26 lines on it, one for every team. And on the other sheet was all the locations that we were going to go to. And he's like, fill out where all the teams are going, because we got to cover these, 15 different locations, you know, one to two teams per location and just write the number of the team on there and get this back to me by close the business. Like, Roger, that's her. I'd take care of it. And again, my wife loves the story, and I didn't tell her at the time, but my best friend who I grew up with was in Ramadi at the time. He was in 3rd Battalion, 7 Marines, who we replaced when we got

out there or did a turnover with. And that's where the war was, man. I mean, in late 2005 and early 2006, the war was in Ramadi. And so I took the pen. I wrote Lightning 6. And so 61, 62, and 63, we're all going to Ramadi. And I handed it off to ever filled it out, gave to the CEO. And so if you're going to go do something you don't necessarily want to do, but you're going to go do it, you might as well do it. And that's where the war was. I could have gone to a whole host of other places where there's not much going on. It would have been relatively chill. I would have gotten that check in the block for sure. I would have said, yeah, I went to here or there. And And no hit on the guys that were different places.

It was just more going on there. And if I wasn't going to go, then somebody else was going to go do that. Or was Neil, Neil was telling you what was up. He said, hey, it's on. Big time. No, he and I were tight, and we talked as regular as we could as much as we can say. Oh, yeah, wasn't he telling you like, oh, yeah, I was putting rounds, I was shooting yesterday. And you said, well, what were you shooting at?

And he's like, people. Yeah, I was just, it was such a foreign thing to me as a pilot. Certainly coming from Top Gun. This is my best friend, too. In our whole life, we both wanted to be Marine pilots. And we never were in the same unit together. We just couldn't get aligned with that. It never occurred to me when we were kids dreaming about being Marine Corps fighter pilots.

The only time we'd ever serve together was in Ramadi as Fort Air controllers. He'll listen to this podcast. He'll get a good chuckle out of this. So he was there for the seven months prior. So I think maybe June or July of that year when I was getting ready to get orders, he was on his fact tour. And he was just a battalion fact in 3-7, you know, OP 293, Opie Hiorea, OPVA, just doing the deed, man.

I mean, getting after it big time and struggling. There's a lot going on there. And when he would tell me this story is even someone who had been a Marine for that long, he's like, yeah, we're in a firefight. I'm like, are you shooting your rifle? He's like, yeah, man. I'm like, what? The people that are shooting in me, it's, you're disconnected.

And you have this, you don't have this sense of what that means. And so even as I was processing what he was saying and trying to understand and then saying, this is where the, this is what I'm going to go do and kind of volunteer. to go do that. I'll be honest with me, there's still a part in retrospect that didn't really quite fully grasp what that meant. I don't know how anybody on their first deployment to a place like Ramadi goes into that. You know, I dabbled at aviation. Like you said, I'm up in sky. I mean, it's relatively safe. And I'm sure even the first deployment you did, there's just, there's an element of just not being able to fully understand it. And that didn't even become clear to me

until right when we're getting ready to leave Ramadi and the new unit's coming in and I was explaining what they're about to get into. That's when it really hit me. And I just rewind myself a year earlier. I'm like, I'm that dude that really doesn't know what the hell's about to happen to him and what's about to go on.

But it was, like I said, man, and I don't even want to make it sound like that big of a deal, but I volunteer for a fact tour. They needed guys to go to Lajun to go to Iraq. That's where. Romadi was where the fight was. My best friend was there.

I'm going to Romani. And that was about it. It was just that's where I thought I should do. So I went to Romani. And now you're leading Marines, too. Yeah, and yes, so I explained just a minute ago about those things that make you successful and things that lead to failure are identical. They are the exact same things in an airplane are the same on the ground, but the environment is different.

It is different. There's no way around it. And I also would say, too, that, and for good reason, I think the ground Marines, you know, I work with a lot of infantry and artillery. Most of Anglico was made up of artillery and some infantry. And, you know, obviously there's pilots that are controllers. There's a decent bit of skepticism of pilots coming in to lead these teams. And I think for a good reason, you know, because a lot of these guys, when I talk about combat experience.

They're on their third, fourth, the climate to Iraq. Totally, man. You're coming in. Yep. They're on their, they've already done. You're wearing your top gun patch on your shoulder of your camis. Well, what's worse is I'm not wearing my top gun patch. I'm wearing my camis.

and they're like, have you ever washed those camis? I'm like, as a matter of fact, I haven't. They're fresh, you know, brand new. And they're wearing their camis from, they did the march up to Baghdad. They went home for four months and just like it right back around and did OIF2. Guys, it did Fallujah, and they're back.

And they're on their third deployment in three years and they're legit deployments. And, you know, Dave Burke, Mr. Topkin shows up. He was like, hey, where's this brigade platoon? You know, where's my salt team? You know, and I think that skepticism of, for good reason is who is the, this guy and that's a real

that was a real leadership challenge for me is to apply those things things that I knew were effective but in an environment that I'm totally out of my comfort zone man I'm totally out of my comfort zone and I have to apply a skill set of things that I just haven't shot a rifle since 1994

I got to the basic school in October 94 the first thing you do is go to the rifle range that's the last time I squeeze a trigger on a rifle was October of 1994 and here it is is you know January of 2006 prepping to go to Ramadi and I got a sight in my M4. So they should be skeptical a little bit and it was a challenge for me, a real leadership

challenge of to be successful in a place that I'm not comfortable with. To be honest with you, if you told me I was going to lead a squadron in combat, I'd feel pretty comfortable doing that. I know it would be a challenge, it'd be hard, but I wouldn't feel like, hmm, I don't know about this. I would be all over it. I don't mean to say easy, but right in my wheelhouse. not true for that so I worked hard to try to be successful in that and you know you got to get

your Marines to buy off on your your program you know that are because you're gonna go downtown with those guys you know and every relationship with anyone with those guys was different as you know you know and you got to build those relationships and demonstrate that you know this is gonna work and then you know just talk a little bit about you know people have heard about what T.U. Bruiser was doing over in Ramadi and we'll get to how we interacted but overall what are you guys doing when you first got there you just kind of jumped into it with both feet as they say we did man um so i get there i've got a salt team that stands for supporting arms liaison team really what it meant was three of those little four-man teams uh

grouped together in a one 13 man team because we had an additional corpsman little uh medic with us so i had three of those teams that i was responsible for and i kind of knew what I expected was going to happen. I got there that I would be in what's called the talk, the tactical operation center, which was I'd kind of run things from the desk and farm out my teams and units to support the guys that needed our help.

These army units were going to go to missions, they needed someone to help them control the air. I had those teams. I would give them those teams. Well, it took basically no time to get there and realize that the demand signal for our support was higher than we could have ever responded to. They needed 20,

20 of our teams, not three. And so that idea that I would kind of be a COC guy, a talk guy, was over in the first day because as I get there and we're doing the turnover with the other Anglico team getting ready to leave, he's introducing me to all the people he's been working with. And it's like 15 different teams. You know, they're not running operations with like three battalions. It's 40 squads, you know, and these guys are going out in 12, 13 men teams, and they all need you. Yep. So.

And there's operations. I mean, just so everyone knows, there's 5,600 people in the 1-1-A-D, or you showed up with the 22-8. So it's 6,000 people or whatever. And there's operations going on all over Ramadi every single night. There's people patrolling. There's people getting in fire fights every single night. There's constant gunfire.

And so there's no way with three teams you're going to cover all that. You can't do it. Yeah. And that was sort of the immediate awareness for me is, not only was I not going to be able to support, everything. I know how to prioritize and tell folks, hey, we can do this and not that. You know, I can help you here or there.

And so very quickly it was a matter of how am I going to break down my team and support these guys. I did have an advantage that I was, as an F-18 pilot, that was the primary aircraft. F-18's inherers are the primary aircraft that was doing the support. And I knew those airplanes really

well. And I was able to very quickly when I saw what the Army, hey, we're doing this patrol today. And we're going to take our Humvees from the Camp Ramadi to go to this location. And it would be really difficult just to get there, just navigating at night in your Humvees on the night vision goggles,

and the roads can be kind of confusing, and you know what it's like down there. And some days you're operating in downtown Ramadi, and it's straight up urban combat, like just buildings. And five miles away, you can be in a place, we called it Mike Charlie One, that it looks like Vietnam. I mean, it's, the contrast,

if we're being so close together, it was so incredible how different those places were. And so every environment was different. I was able to understand what airplanes could do well and not well in those environments. And so as they asked for support, I'm like, hey, I can't really do that, but what I can do is this. And maybe this will be more helpful for you. And I could very quickly build a relationship with the Army, which is really who you needed to be the best support for. The Marines, they were going to get on board.

We were good. We had a relationship. I wasn't worried about my Marines and us building our team. What I was worried about was us as a team being effective for the folks we were supporting. and showing that we could do good work for those guys. And we took a very different approach. I immediately broke our team into three separate teams, 6-1, 6-2, and 6-3.

I actually sent the 6-3 team, a guy named Allen to another base, Blue Diamond. You remember that base right across the river? Because there was a company based out of Blue Diamond that were doing operations independently and they never had any Anglico support. So, dude, you got to go, they literally moved there and lived with those guys.

And then my other team, 6-1 and 6-2, Adam and I, Just we took a whiteboard and all the requests for support we just started plugging our names in and so it was just I had five guys he had four he had his own Humvee I had my own Humvee we had all the weapons all the radios and just started to just go do operations 2-28 would do everything for just a little vehicle patrol where they would just do a present patrol their two Humvees driving around the city we would just jump in on that and just bring a third truck which was a ton of firepower and awareness Sometimes we were just doing foot patrols and we would just go walk around and do move into contact or do room clearing stuff like that that jocco man I found myself way way out of my comfort zone very early I think my second mission there was a raid where I was ended up like clearing a room I was in a stack of dudes clearing a room while I was trying to talk to airplanes overhead of

where and it was just a basically a manpower shortage like yeah you get in yeah go go you and these two guys go clear the room. Roger that. And I was a senior or mid-grade major. I was always kind of one of the senior guys, but I wasn't in charge of this. So I would be working for a first lieutenant, which was perfectly fine.

It was his platoon. He was doing this mission. He knew what he was doing. I was there to support as best as I could. That image of like, y'all just get up on the roof and control air. It'll be awesome. What do you need me to blow up?

Negative. I mean, it was, hey, get in line and start getting after. And I think that I remember that second mission, we're with the 228. And the lieutenant was, I think he was like a, I think he worked at Home Depot. No joke.

Because it was National Guard unit. Yeah, National Guardian, these dudes were awesome. They'd been there for probably 10 or 11 months by the time I got there, maybe even longer. They'd been there almost a year. Hardened dudes that had lost a lot of guys and sacrificed a ton. But I was learning everything I could from them because they were veterans and I was brand new. I was supposed to bring this great capability. But the reality was I was just soaking up from them as much as I could.

And I'm clearing a room with this guy, you know? So the phrase, what am I doing here, went through my head a lot while I was there. And it was just kind of, Ramadi was the type of place that the deal was, is when you got there, it was just a bullet train. And you just jumped on the train. Or you had to. You couldn't slow things down. You certainly couldn't ask those other guys, hey, can we dial it back a little bit? We need to get up to speed.

They were just doing their thing. And if you were going to be anything other than a hindrance, you need to get on board immediately. And so that's what we did as best we could. And I have a lot to thank for those guys at 22A because no matter how hard we tried, those first couple times we're just getting up to speed. We're not bringing our A game yet. We're trying to figure out what's going on around us. And there's no doubt that without those guys, their leadership, their willingness to kind of bring us on board and get us up to speed.

That played a big part. We got up to speed quickly. But day one, I'm sure, you know, we were struggling to keep up. Just like we were talking about with flying and jiu-jitsu and fighting and everything else, you show up there and things are going, they're not slowed down a third. They're going five times faster and you're just seeing, you know, you're getting told to clear a room. That's the only thing in the world you can see is now this room and you're not aware of all this

other stuff that's going on. And it definitely takes some ops to get your, to get your senses about you of what's happening. Yeah. And the ops were, there were so many different kinds of operations. Like I said, you know, you'd go from doing just, you know, a three Humvee, presence patrol in downtown Ramadi is not cool it's not it's just you're just waiting for something to go wrong you know whether it's getting lit up you know in a firefight RPGs getting shot i mean

you're literally just driving around waiting for somebody to do something to you know these present patrols and then you go right from that to you get some intelligence that somebody needed to grab was in uh you know a house somewhere in a totally different environment and you'd be off doing a raid we help stand up the QRF you've talked about that in the past the quick reaction force where you you literally just waited right outside the gate of the main base for somebody to call for help. Okay, something's gone wrong. It's here. Come help us.

And so we just started doing all these missions. And I just was on board with all of them. And they varied and they were very different from day to day. And you got to call for fire too. Legit. We did. Between me, I did a lot and my teams, I controlled the release of every single piece of ordinance in the Marine Corps inventory.

So every piece of ordinance that the Hornets and the Harriers dropped and everything from the Hughes and the Cobras. And artillery, we called artillery as well. They had a, you know, a field artillery battalion out there that we did controls from, as Anglico, I did myself. So, you know, that story, you know what, you get to TBS, there's an old saying in the Marine Corps, we all subscribe to it. Every Marines are riflemen.

And we're a top gun instructor. That could not be further from the truth. Because the last thing you are as a top gun as the training officer at top gun skiing in Lake Tahoe on a Saturday afternoon is a rifleman But I will I will say this for the Marine Corps. Yeah, I'm biased. I'm a little parochial to the Marine Corps Dude, it's all in there The OCS TBS all that exposure all that doctrine everything you learn it's there now it took a while to dig down and find it And those same things that when I went to OCS and I was a skinniest guy there and I was scared I couldn't get through it. I'm like wait a second

Bigger tougher stronger dudes are doing this or not doing this and I am it's all in there and so I just had to figure out how to tap that stuff again and bring it back up and just go do it so great decision here I am in Romadi getting after it and then you guys showed up yeah there was one story you were telling me that you were calling for fire up in mc1 and it was your buddy yeah yeah we are doing um we're doing what's called movement to contact my favorite mission as a pilot nothing better than movement to contact And the movement contact mission is you literally drive your humbies, take all your folks out, and you set up a staging area in the north side of this, this big area is big, kind of wooded, dirt,

has like little ravines and trees and stuff like that, and we would just, we would walk a patrol. And, you know, 10, 15 guys would just go from north to south, and the mission was called moving to contact. So you walked until you got in contact, which meant you got into a firefight. And I remember not this same day, but my first day going there, I think it was Bravo Company, a 228. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was, and I met the platoon commander for the first time. And I kind of get out of my Humvee. I walk up.

I'm looking for the platoon commander. I'm there as a supporting asset. I'm a helpful guy because I bring airplanes. It's going to be good for them. And he walks up, and he's got a shotgun hanging on his kit. And, you know, I was a brand new guy, but I was, I'm like, hey, hey, what's with the shotgun? You know, I have a rifle. Everybody's got a rifle.

He goes, hey, to be honest with me, I find that this is the best weapon for these type of missions. And it turns out he actually was right on that patrol. It's like, dude, what am I doing here, man? You know, I'm going to go do a foot patrol with the guy with a shotgun. So I knew that I was in, there was a lot in store for that. And we would do these patrols, these move into contacts, and you'd end up in a building. And my job as a fact was, hey, get out in the building, get up on top of the roof right away. And I would do Overwatch, you know, similar different assets.

I had airplanes, I had radios. Seals would do Overwatch all the time and it was just a matter of covering moves. So I would get up on the roof and go, hey, this is what I see. this is what the airplane sees. Okay, you guys jump to that next building. Sometimes the next building would be 20 yards away, sometimes it would be 200 yards away. So you would just do these bounding movements

building to building. And then when they get to the next building, my other guy would be up on the roof. He'd say, you're good. We'd run down and go to the next building. And so we get into this building, and as soon as they get up on top of the roof of the building, so if you can picture it, half of us are in the roof of the building,

half of the other guys are trying to move to the other building, so they're out in the open. And from that other building, as I get up on the roof, I look up, and the first thing happens is, like, three RPGs hit the building that I'm in directly underneath me. I probably miss our team by like 15 feet below us. So above their heads and below us, that's the first thing that happens. And there was a vehicle, like a truck, and I was a car, just some car in between on a like kind of a dirt road behind some trees where this fire came from. And we had airplanes overhead. It was two F-18 Ds. I remember it from an East Coast squadron.

And at TBS, they teach you, hey, every mariner's a rifleman, and they tell you these stories, is that one day you're going to be in a position where you're going to be in a firefight and there's going to be an airplane overhead, and it's going to be a buddy of yours from TBS. It's going to be an old buddy, and you're going to be like, hey, Jockowitz, Dave, help me out. And Dave's going to roll in on his white horse and come in with his hornet

and blast these things out of it. And your infantry buddy is going to thank you. you one day. I'm like right on. The only problem was that I was on the ground and the guy flying the airplane was one of my closest friends. A guy named Boo Friedman was an opso of the squash and I just left and no joke. I'm like hey we're in a troops in contact you know we're taking fire from wherever and on the radio he says hey chip it's boo what do you need and it took me right back to TBS only the problem was I was supposed to be in an airplane when that happened and I'm like I said, I said south to north call wings level.

And that's what happened. And I had four passes from these F-18s did these strafing runs on this car. And I remember looking at the Army guys with us in the first lieutenant. And I looked at him, I go, dude, we're going to be fine. That's all. Like super cool, like very chill. Hey, this just happened. I see what's going on.

There's Hornets over head saw everything. What do you need? I need this. We're in. And the next call is wings level. Hey, you're cleared hot. and, you know, the hair and marm standing up telling the story. It's just one of those stories where the Marine Corps, for whatever insane reason,

will take F-18 pilots and train them millions of dollars and 10 years of training them, and they'll stick them on the ground. And it's for that exact reason. That exact event was, I could bring an asset that the Army would never have an environment that they would never be able to use, and through two buddies just talking plain English to each other on the radio, make it happen in like that and um i was supposed to be in that airplane jaco that's how it was supposed to work out but in that particular day man it was the roles were reversed but it was it was an

awesome it was kind of a culmination of a lot of things like that the marine corps it's a legit that thing they breed in us it's a real thing uh and it was pretty satisfying to be honest with you you see that car burn on the ground and then uh eventually i don't know maybe a month or so goes by and we show up and who's the first who's who's who's who's you did you meet first? Leif? Yep. Leif was the first guy that I met. Actually, Laif and Tony show up together. So we had seen you guys, you know, we had turned over and we were just kind of getting up to speed. We'd probably been there maybe a month or so before you guys had. So, you know, quick learning curve, we're just kind of getting comfortable with what's going on.

We also know there's a new brigade platoon coming in. I'm sorry, a new armor division coming in. We know that the unit that were there, the 228, that brigade combat team is leaving when new brigade combat team is coming in. And we were actually in just a relatively short period of time, we're kind of the continuity because all the old guys are leaving. We had the overlap. So we had kind of a prominent role with the new battalion and the new battalion commander. He's retired now. Awesome dude from a 137 armor guy named Tedesco. Just an awesome dude.

Awesome. He had been there as part of his turnover had come out a couple months prior. Maybe a month prior and saw us and we had to be. My favorite thing about Tedesco is like you said, awesome guy. We were getting ready to do a big operation with them. I think it was the first time we were pushing into South Central Romadi and we were in his briefing. And he's quoting Patton, but he's quoting Patton the movie. He's just getting after it.

I was like, yes, yes, thank you. Thank you for bringing me here this day. Yeah, he was awesome. He had seen me. He just so happened when he was doing his initial turnover before the, the Petown. came out, I had controlled a release. I controlled a hellfire and blew up a car, and he got to see it. And it was kind of a cool thing.

He comes and was like, who are these guys? I'm in the middle of doing a real control. I happen to be in the COC that day. Blow up a car. It's all in the video. We got this big TV screens to show the whole thing, and this car detonates and cool pictures and everything. And he comes over to me after we're done.

I'm kind of sitting there, and he's a lieutenant colonel. I'm a major. And he's like, can you do that when we get here? I'm like, absolutely, man. He's like, we're going to get along great. That was my initial interaction with him. So it was awesome. And so we knew when they were coming back,

we had already, just through virtue of that experience, built some pretty good inroads of them, and we were going to do some good work. He was also the type of guy. Look, there's this whole brigade combat team came in. That's 5,000 guys. But his battalion, that group of, you know, several hundred, was really the core group that I initially did most of my work with.

And his approach was, if you can help us, you're on the team. Same exact attitude. he had with us. Yeah, for sure. For all the enablers. So they were called the bandits, and they had a little bandit pin, had kind of a skull and crossbones kind of thing.

You were, if you, you were, I was a bandit to him. Just totally on board the team. And he treated this like his own guys. And that was awesome. And so,

um, all the enablers, we had military, we had working dogs. We had explosive ordinance disposal. We had the Anglico folks. We had the seals. You know,

all these different groups from different places that none of them were assigned to him. But his approach was if you can help my soldiers out. you're a bandit, you're on the team. And everybody was like, right on, let's do this. Because you needed to work with them anyway. You might as well make the best of it. We started to do a couple of missions, and every one of those missions was your teams and my teams.

And I would say probably in the first week or so, I'm guessing a little bit of dates, but relatively quick in the first couple of missions, we are doing the similar things. We're bringing support and Overwatch and helping these guys do their job, which is the exact same thing you guys were doing, totally different ways.

but ultimately we're supporting these guys. I'm in my little building there or one day, whatever, just sitting around prepping for something and in walks Leif and Tony. You know, they drove over from your base, which is kind of, you know, a little bit of a haul around there or drive in and he goes, hey man, um,

love to work with you more. We find a way that we can work together on some of these missions and we got this big mission coming up. You want to come down and brief with us. Well, yeah, absolutely. I'd love to go brief with, the seals and it'd be awesome. I thought it would just be kind of this cool one-time thing. I get to see how seals do the business. And that was it. That was his introduction. Had

Leif and Tony, I'll be really candid, I'd like to think I would have done that. I doubt I would have gone to Shark Base and knocked on your door and said, hey, Laif, Jaka, let's do some work together. He made that initial contact and him and Tony. We were definitely equal opportunity employers. The same thing as, you know, Colonel Tedesco, if we thought someone could do something to help us out we could compliment each other in any way, man, we were knocking on doors to try and make that happen for sure. Yeah, and that was his approach. I didn't, I'd never done any work on the ground. I didn't know much about the seals. I'll be very blunt. I had my own opinion of what I assumed you guys would be like, and it was probably something out of the movies. I expected like long beards

and dudes just running around doing their own thing. And so I was actually a little surprised that, that Leif came and asked to do some work with us. And so I went to that first night, mission, that first brief. I don't want to say I was skeptical, but I was certainly interested in what, because my fear was that you guys are going to go do your own thing and my guys are kind of just either not be able to keep up, not know what you're doing, and not fit in very well and be able to help out and just kind of put ourselves at risk. And look, I'll say this very bluntly, I have a very high bar when you leave Top Gun on what to expect from a mission brief and mission execution and mission debrief because that's what we're all about. And I was pretty sure

that there's no chance that you were going to do anything anywhere near that. And I was shocked and kind of overwhelmed at how professional your team was. And that was the biggest thing for me was what are these guys going to be like? I just sort of pictured a kind of a pickup game. Hey, let's go out there and just kill some bad guys and come on back and high five each other. And dude, it was one of the most professional organized mission briefs. I totally understood what your plan was. I knew exactly where I was going to fit in.

We went and did it. And then you guys debriefed. After we came back after this. It was a relatively unevent nothing really happened that night in terms of in the grand scheme of things that we saw we were there and then you debriefed it You guys came back and you mission debrief dudes were there kind of clean of weapons and time going through and analyzing what happened And that was it man. I was totally on board. I was I was I was sold at that we could work together like pretty effectively And that was kind of the beginning it just sort of started out of the blue and you guys came down and asked to do some good work and and and we did you did a lot of work work. I did.

Your team did a lot of work with us. Because we started to think, because from our perspective, and I know there's one junior officer out there who's now probably a lieutenant commander or maybe even a commander at this point. But at that time, you know, he was on his first deployment and he was a JTA. What we call in the SEAL teams, our air controllers are called a J-TAC. And so here he is. And some of those missions, instead of being a SEAL, he's being a J-TAC.

So he's one of those guys that looked over at you guys and said, hey, wait a second, Can you take this radio for me and do that thing so I can go do my frog man stuff over here and that at and plus Again to be blunt you guys could do it a lot better than we could period. You know we we you know you were an F-18 pilot for crying out loud and we had a new guy junior officer on the radio trying to call for fire you guys were just imminently better qualified to do it and so yeah we looked at it as if okay we that gives us one more shooter and it gives us a whole new level of expertise and Now, of course, there's J-Tax and the SEAL teams that they are a lot more experience than they're awesome. And of course, but in our group, to bring you guys was just a huge level up for us to get a lot better and give us more people to maneuver as SEALs on assaults or on overwatches or whatever. So it turned out to be a real good little relationship we got going there. It was a classic win-win when a seal says, hey, would you control the air so I can go shoot people?

you know and that means I'm no I don't have to clear that room and be in a position where I might have to do something like that I'm all over it and I yeah I know here you're talking about we had a he and I had a great relationship someone that I really loved working with who wanted to go be a frogman like you said I wanted to go control airplanes and uh we found a way to make that stuff work now it was it was a big deal for me though man to to for my for me and my guys to work with you guys because you've said this on the podcast. And I know how organizations can, we're not necessarily parochial that we don't trust other people, but we get really comfortable with how we do business. And to just bring in another group of dudes,

I think this also speaks volumes to Tedesk and all those guys. You're gonna just, you want to make sure those guys can keep up. You know, and everybody knows that you guys are legit, man. And to keep up, you got, you're gonna have to keep up.

You're gonna have to carry your own weight and you're gonna have to make it happen. You're gonna have to provide something because at the minute you become a drain, on the on the team you know you're gonna get cut loose and we we couldn't afford to be a drain on you and we couldn't afford to have other people be a drain on us

so I think there's a lot of kind of at the beginning of there's a lot of reasons why it wouldn't have worked there's a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn't have worked and the only reason it did work is that everybody was committed to building a relationship to support the battalion that was it we all have the same end state in mind it wasn't about what can the seals do to be seals and be great what can we do to support those guys

yeah what's the whole thing I was opening up with that's sort of where that came from it's just this attitude that everybody there was on the same team straight up on the same team and so then that turned into big missions you know big missions pushing into Ramadi putting into combat outposts you know night after night day after day doing those those big operations and that relationship just got just got stronger and stronger you know Laif, obviously, with you and just turned into something really, not just cool, but man, effective. Yeah. Effective.

It was. I mean, in that deployment, I kept a long journal. I took a lot of notes on my experience there, and I've gone back and re-read it a few times, and I've somewhat recently, throughout that whole thing, one of the common themes is how, Lave and I did this today We did stuff with you all the time And it kind of became in that middle That kind of June, July, August

I mean that was all we were really doing Because we were so busy And the big op was kicking off And we were starting to get into downtown But you know, Pugus would never been All these clearings and all this stuff And so The need for us to support the Army

And the need for you to support the Army Again, we could have had 10 times as many of folks done more work. Everything in that journal is just about what we were doing together. I think at the time I just kind of lost track of it because we were just every day get up and go do something. I mean, there was no down days.

There was hardly ever any time we weren't doing anything. And it was almost always with you guys. And it was a huge highlight for me to be with a group of guys that were so on board with just making things happen. You guys had an incredible knack of, This is in the way or this process keeps it. Yeah, we got that sorted out. Hey, I need to get airplanes.

Well, to do this and this, no, no, no, we can get this sorted out. So you guys had kind of had cornered the market on what do you need. We'll make, we'll get it. We'll make it happen. And for me, to be able to get that asset sort of delivered that I could, and you did all the work to get it, but I can control the hell out of it. Right on, man. I didn't have to do any of the work to explain why I needed this because you guys did

all that work and you had a valid reason for it. They would laugh at me if I said, I wanted an AC 130 gunship. Like, who are you? I'm Dave Burke, man. I'm like, negative. Laf and Jocko need an AC130 gunship. Not every time, you know, obviously it was a thin asset, but when that thing showed up overhead, and then you get the guy we were talking about it.

I was like, you want to control this? I'm like, yes, I do. I want to control this thing. So there's a lot of mutual benefit there. And I think what we also proved is, I think, for the battalion and the brigade, they figured out that we were really helpful in helping those guys accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. And that was just, I'm not putting very good.

words to it right now but is obviously real rewarding and it was the highlight of that deployment is our ability to work together through like I said there's a whole laundry list of reasons why we shouldn't have been able to do this a bunch you didn't work for me I didn't outrank you your guy there's just a whole bunch institutional roadblocks that we could just stand our own corners on our own thing and you and I could have never met and that wouldn't have really been all that uncommon it would just been ops normal it worked out man yeah a lot of awesome highlights on that deployment and obviously some of the worst days of our lives were over there June 20th talking about that yeah man so obviously I know we're going to talk about this so we had been

there quite a bit and I remember kind of the shock when we first got there talking to the 228 I'm first day I'm there I go to alpha company and they've got a memorial outside of their compound of all the soldiers that have been killed I can picture it's just kind of like a names are on a little placard and it's kind of a tall little pyramid looking thing with the names on there. And you see it, you understand it. Hey, people have died here. You get it. It's not hard to understand that those things have happened,

but there's just a level of disconnect when you first get there. You're like, oh, people are dying, but you haven't seen it. And then, you know, very quick, I think probably my second mission out there was kind of a QRF from a vehicle IED. So basically an insurgent with a bunch of, bombs in his vehicles got in between American convoy and blew himself up. So I see my first dead body. You know, I see real combat.

People are dying here. It was an enemy. It wasn't the same. And then, you know, March, April, May, we started taking, I mean, not started, we continue to take casualties and I'm starting to go to memorials. And we're starting to see guys that we knew and worked with and were friends with and built relationships with. And they're getting killed or really gravely wounded.

And those memorials started to become every couple of days we're going to a memorial. And that sort of weighs on you. I've thought about this a lot and how it affected me. You know, as a pilot being out of my comfort zone in this environment and what that was like. But without trying to diminish any of that loss, there's a disconnect when it's not your person, when it's not your guy. and on June 20th, so Chris Leon, who was my radio operator, we were in a building that we had been in. Let me back up.

I was not there. I had left that building that morning, gone back to the COC. Adams team with Chris had replaced us. We were basically just going back and forth operations into this combat outpost because it gave us a really good view of the north part of the city. And we had to be there, basically 24-7. And Chris and Adam's team had gone back out there, and they were supposed to go from like 12.

to four, something like that. I don't know what it was. We gave them like a six-hour shift or something. And then we were going to kind of figure out if we replace or start over, we had just sort of sent them out there and we're going to come back in a little bit. And I got a call on the radio from the battalion saying, hey, can you extend your Anglico team out here for four hours? We're going to go do another movement to do some clearing.

I'm yeah, Roger that. Hey, Adam, can you guys stay out for another couple hours? You know, support. We're going to get you air or whatnot. You know, standard answer. Yeah, Roger that, no problem. And then during that, time um it was not uncommon to take fire in from that in that op and there was some sniper fire

and the first shot uh there was a younger marino lance corporal who was up there and chris ran up from the other side and kind of put put him down he was hey want you get down take cover go go over to the other side of the building and chris got up to start to he was a he was doing his observation to try to figure out what's going on and Chris was shot by a sniper and I get a call kind of very very closely after that from Adam you know I'm kind of manning the radios all the time anyway and even our home little base there like where we had a radio right there so I was never really not there I was just on the radio and say hey Corp. Leon's been hit we're on our way back and that was about it so I didn't have any real good sense of anything

was going on and um A little panic sets in, like, okay. And I don't want to press for too much information. I get a call from Alpha Company who had manned all the observation posts between where he was and where we were, that they were clearing, make sure the roads were clear. They're using their tanks and their Bradley's so they could pick him up and bring a straight shot. Because that was a pretty busy, dangerous road. He always had a lookout for IEDs and stuff like that.

And so everybody's kind of picking up the pace to clear out that road and he's coming back. And I get a call. Hey, he's breathing. we're heading straight to Charlie Med. And I'm like, all right, okay. I kind of had this sense of this is going to be okay. Charlie Med is this medical facility on the camp that we were stationed at there, and it was literally 100 yards from where I slept.

And I just ran down to Charlie Med to meet the Humvee. I was there. And I'm sorry, it wasn't Humvee. It was a Bradley, Bradley fighting vehicle. Bradley pulls up, myself and my Corman dock are there. the Bradley has a door on the back of the Bradley that comes down like a ramp. And the ramp comes down. He's on a stretcher.

Doc goes up to get the front piece of the stretcher. I'm at the bottom, and he comes down carrying the stretcher, and Chris is laying on the stretcher. And he went right by me. I looked at him, and I knew immediately that he was gone. I mean, it was gone. I could see the entrance to the whole thing was all kind of there. They had stabilized them.

They had done their best to kind of manage the wood. but there was no question that the outcome had already played itself out, and Chris was gone. They take him in to the medical facility, which I'd been in, and you've been in a dozen times for a whole host of different reasons. But it had always been somebody else. I mean, I may have known that person and been close to that person, but it was always somebody else. And Doc goes in with him, he's carrying the stretcher, and he comes out in probably, Doc goes probably 10 seconds, and he just comes out with his head shaken. And I knew.

I wasn't holding my breath or whole, I knew. But he kind of came out and just sort of, I guess, confirmed if that's the word I'm looking for, just sort of made it official that Chris had been killed. And it sort of initiated just a very strange kind of very sequence of events. So I knew Adam and the rest of the team were trying to get back, and they're going to have a slower road back because they're not going to get the support. It's just going to take a little more time. They're going to get their gear and all the things going along with that.

Chris just got loaded in Humvee and racing back in Bradley. They're kind of loaded up their Humveys and it's just going to take some time. And I know like, I need to get back to the vehicle. We parked our trucks because I want to meet them there. And I walked back, like I said, it was maybe 100 yards from my hooch to Charlie Med. And I get about halfway there. And I had this thought that I maybe didn't confirm that Chris was killed. And so I actually walked all the way back to go find there's a senior medical officer.

We called him the Smough, really awesome guy. that dealt with all the casualties there, who I knew, because I had controlled helicopter Casabax and wounded folks. I've been there a lot. We gave blood. I mean, we were in that facility all the time.

And I don't know why I needed to do it, but I was, I had to talk to him that, hey, is Corporalian, is he killed? He's like, yeah, I'm sorry, man. You know, it was kind of an odd conversation. I could tell the why, he was looking at me, like, why are he asking? me this question like it just was one of those things that I was in sort of I think it's just a

stage of disbelief that as I walked back and I was going to deliver the news I had sort of told myself like I can't tell them in case what if I'm wrong because I never really went through that I saw him I saw doc but there no words were exchanged and I had this very odd like walking back and forth a couple of times and kind of sorting it out and then you know my job was next thing I had to do is I had him I watched the trucks pull up they all get out you know four guys and everybody else had heard, you know, all the Anglico teams that were there and we shared a facility with EOD

and the working bellies. Everybody, you know, the word was past something that happened. And I, you know, hey, Corpillon's dead. You know, we'd do something called, I think it's called a Hero Flight. Hero Flight's going to be at like 1600.

I got the information in like 10 minutes. The process of them bringing in a casualty that casualty not surviving and then moving they had that thing wired and I'd seen it done a bunch of times but it just it was Chris, it was my guy

he was a guy that I just knew differently than everybody else and I just saw him differently when we entered our trucks he was the back left and I was the front right and our trucks are always parked backed into their spots

so they're always side by side so the back left of his truck and the right front of my truck door we always had to fight space for each other you know Chris was a a standard perfect Marine like he could be 90%

the way through if he saw me walking up he'd get out of the way close the door to let me in I'm like oh come on dude like just here's just a great Marine just I walked past that kid without even really talking to him you know a thousand times just every single day a couple times a day and it

demystifies as a Marine you just live a slightly bit for me I shouldn't say you how it felt for me as I just felt with all that was going on and all the destruction and the death and the violence and all the things that I'd sort of become accustomed to at that point there's just an aspect of it that's just a tiny bit insulated

in your life to a really small degree but it's enough to just keep you sort of preserved and when Chris was killed it just sort of exposed that it broke down one of my last little boundary of I'm okay here because I can do this because I'm going to get through this, I'm going to go home, and everything's going to be okay.

And that hurt a lot. That hurt in ways that I did not understand how it was going to hurt. I just didn't know what that was going to be like. And all those next steps, and I know you know this, because you saw it, he's on a helicopter,

and he's gone flying away in that 46, in what feels like about a minute. It's hours, and I even rehearse the movement on to the, to carry him onto the, but you go from Chris's city is on his way into watching the helicopter flyaway, and it feels like it takes about that long.

And then you're just sort of left, and you walk back, you literally walk away from the medical facility where the helicopter just takes off, and you walk back 100 yards, and you just go back to your room. Only Chris is gone. And it's like that whole deployment kind of,

I don't know what the, right word is it's like I had to start the deployment again because all the things that I was dealing with and all things that I was managing and leading as as the leader would know whatever you want to say was my job it all is a sort of change in terms of what I thought really well the guys that I was working with everything was different now because it was their brother that was gone not somebody else and it just sort of changed the calculus and it really redefined the rest of that deployment and I'll be really really blunt it was hard for me to not fold and there was a lot of instinct of like I do not want to do this anymore I do not

want to be here this is more than I had bargained for and this we can laugh about volunteering and being a marine you know it was a little more than I bargained for and look man we had done some crazy stuff at that point and I'd seen some bad things happen I was a participant in some bad things and I was okay I was doing okay and I was gonna be okay with that and this one just sort of I just struggled with it a little bit so it was a tough day man yeah and obviously you know for for us it was you know what a month and a half later on August 2nd when when Mark got killed and you know I think that's one of the things that that we felt you know that little bit of insulation that you're talking about we felt it we felt I will say much

I would say actually more insulated because you know my guys were out there taking massive risks getting in crazy gun fights getting after it to a degree that no one had ever thought they would and we were doing all right we had a couple guys get wounded here and there but they were okay and and honestly that guys getting wounded you know if it's not a a devastating wound I mean I had you know one of my guys got wounded early on and he almost lost his leg but guess what he didn't and that that didn't make us feel more vulnerable in my mind it made us feel stronger and like hey we might get wounded but we're going to be good and so yeah when mark got killed and especially mark who was you know such a gergarious and such a guy so full of life that you don't think he can be killed you don't think

he can be killed and same thing you know that insulation was just completely shattered and i think what was also it was it was recognizable it was recognizable to me was that other people outside of task unit bruiser they thought the same thing they thought hey the seals are here they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna push through this they're gonna they're gonna win and there nothing's gonna happen to them and we saw it you know at the memorial service you could see in guys faces that they were they were also Their insulation about us was was kind of shattered too and then it turns into damn if the seals can get killed Where am I at? I think that was another thing that that really you know that was another thing that really just made Mark getting killed such a

Such an impact all of us There do there's no doubt that what you just said is exactly how it played out You were the first guy to talk to me when when Chris's helicopter flies away. It's it's It's literally dusty and the helicopter's loud and it kicks up dust there and it was dark. It was nighttime. And you came up to me and I don't remember the exact words, but we were just turning around and walking back. And you said something like, we're going to get after this guys and we're going to go find the snipers that are doing this. Something to those words.

And it was basically like, we're going to take care of this. And I remember feeling really comforted by that. Like, yeah, man. Yeah, go do that. That's awesome. and feeling good about that that we weren't helpless and we're just going to suck it up and deal with this

just this terrible loss that we're going to get something from this we're going to go find some guys and go get after it and we're going to go kill these guys yes and you guys were going to you guys are going to make that happen and I remember feeling I remember how that felt

and look June 20th to August 2nd just like everything else was a blur man it was like it was like it might as well just been the next day because things happened so fast there. And I was, you know, I wasn't on the patrol on August 2nd, but I was on the radio, I was a guy running the air. I was doing all the same stuff we always did, you know,

and I was back in the COC with you working that mission, all that stuff that happened. And before you know it, we're watching the helicopter fly away. You know, or he's gone, you know, and you're seeing the aftermath of that. And I actually went back last night to look at my journal entry for that day because I ended up running down to Charlie Med again because that's where everybody came in. And I remember seeing Laif there. You know, Laif was a guy who worked with a ton and there he is.

He's got a wound. I'm looking at it. I'm sitting over his right shoulder. They're cutting his shirt off. They're attending to Laif who was, Laif was a larger than life. You know, for a guy like me who always kind of felt a little bit like, what the hell am I doing here, man? What the hell am I doing with the seals? Like, this is insane.

These guys are just, they're just larger than life. And to see the exposure of that, it bothered me. And I knew I had the feeling of, holy cow, if this can happen to these guys, you know, it can happen to any of us. And it's not a good feeling. And when you saw the guys from the team who were, it was just, it was just, everybody was scrambling. And it was just that sense of, and I don't want to make it sound like there wasn't a, nobody was panicking or freaking out. It was not like that. But it was just a tiny bit.

chaotic, if that makes sense. On a small degree, but enough when you were so used to just being completely not like that, that feeling, like when Chris lost, was what I felt was like, oh man, I'm not really in control any of this.

I am not in control. All that stuff that I've told myself, all that comfort and confidence, and we're getting better, and I'm going to be more effective and do more good work until this thing is over. It was like, negative that could be you that could happen today and then it and between Chris and

Mark the army suffered oh god bless we were going to memorials like every couple of days people were getting killed all the time and every one of those eroded that that confidence a little bit and then when it happened to to Mark and Leif that was hard to see that and it that was the feeling that I had was like I'm yeah maybe I'm just lucky you know maybe I maybe this whole thing is just luck um now look we we regrouped I mean June 20th was a bad day you know we did all the things we did the more we paid our our we honored him the right way you guys came in we did it the right way and we acknowledged uh Chris um but if you kind of think what's going on in Ramadi in the middle

of June, man. There was no taking a knee. There was no like, let's hold off for a second, catch our breath. The bullet chain was just running. As a matter of fact, it was just going to, it was actually just going to get a ton worse. You remember July and August were just, they were insane. They were insane. So we lost Chris really at the big ramp up. Right. You know, we'd done a big movement in earlier in June and we were really starting to lay into the city, but the real, you know, the crazy J-block, you know, that kind of stuff. That stuff was all out in front of us. And so for me, it was, you know, my entire career, I've done a whole bunch of really great stuff in my career. Nothing is even, nothing is even, it's not even more talking about what anything else in my career

has meant compared to that deployment and then that day. I mean, it's just light years different. And it was like, you got to get up and go do it the very next day. And I remember going that first patrol, that first mission and trying to, that feeling of, okay, yeah, it's different. And I think you've got one or two ways to go with that. It's either going to get inside your head and kind of mess with you. you and break you a little bit and and I could feel that happening or you just you just you just don't

you just shut it down and just go do it um and I found how to compartmentalize you know I'd come back I'd have moments when I was back on my hooch up on the roof by myself I have my moments man no I don't want anybody to think that I didn't uh I had plenty of those moments as a matter of fact I still do to be honest with you I still have my moments I go visit Chris at Arlington on his birthday I go visit Chris in the day he was killed I go to visit Chris Memorial Day his mom comes out I see cat she and I are very close I have my moments without a doubt

but the rest of the three months in Ramadi there was just not there wasn't a ton of time to do that so I guess I kind of just saved it maybe for for when I came back and it it was there and it's not good but um

yeah man so then you you do come back and I mean obviously like you said it ramped up it ramped up all the time and the guys were just you know everybody like I'm not just talking about our guys I'm talking about everybody it ramped up hardcore it got hotter outside the the the combat got more intense the enemy started fighting harder they got more squared away and like you said you and the rest of the guys there did the mission day after day after night and then one day you fly home yeah and how was that transition for you getting back to

the states uh interesting it was an interesting transition so from the time that i left romadi so you we packed up our stuff we left romadi i think we went to kuwait for a day or two went to Lejeune, went to Japan, because I had to check out of both places. Jack, I think it was six days on the calendar from the day I left Romani to the day, to the day I landed on a plane in San Diego, which at the time was all I wanted.

I was the, and I've been fairly good about this throughout my career, is when I want things to happen. Administratively, I can make those things happen. If I catch one of there's a flight from Japan to San Diego and I can get on that flight, I'm going to get on that flight. Even if my CEO is yelling me like,

how did you get out of here so fast? I had this thing in the guy and the paper and I got to go and I'm out. I wanted to get out quickly. So I found myself in San Diego executing my next orders, which the Marine Corps said, you go to Ramadi,

you do the Factor, you're going to go back to San Diego from there, which will be your next set order. So I knew while I was in Iraq that San Diego was in my future. My wife had already moved down there. I told you she was living with my best friend,

Neil, who was on that fact tour before me. So I go in Ramadi His battalion comes home We show up My wife and my best friend are living together in San Diego Which was really good for her Because he was able to kind of And keep her aware of what's going on

But knew exactly how to explain it in a way That wasn't going to freak her out And he also to be honest He knew how to downplay I would call hey we're doing this no big deal I mean I didn't I wasn't telling him half of what the hell was going on I'm not going to share those stories

So he was a really great resource for her I paid very very little time worrying about it. To be honest with you, I was comfortable that she had a good support structure, which she really didn't. We got married. I deployed four months later to Ramadi. She started dating a dude who was driving a Corvette and living in Tahoe as a top corner

instructor. And four months after we got married, I was in Ramadi. So there was no, like, easing. So I knew there was just, I didn't know at the time. I didn't think of it, but it was obvious looking back that she was just thrown. to an environment that she was totally unprepared for. Forget about just me being gone, but just the fact that I was in Ramadi,

and it's all over the news, everybody was going on. I think one of my Marines has killed and a lot of crazy stuff going on. And next thing, you know, I'm home. September 28th, I'm back in San Diego. Like, three and sixty-five days to the day, I'm home. And I checked into an F-18 squadron,

like the day after I got home, before October 1st, I was back into an F-18 squad in San Diego. Which is insane. and I to be really blunt I was you know all those guys in Anglico went back to Anglico and Camp Lejeune and Camp Hanson and Japan I was like later bros you know like no long goodbyes you know high five great deployment you know I'm out I was just on to other things and I kind of extricated myself it's you know I follow the rules to do whatever's supposed to do and before I know what I'm back there and I honestly I think also kind of kidding myself

like that was to be the best thing for me. Let's get home. I knew something was a miss because on the drive home from the airport, I fly into San Diego International, just down the road. My wife and my mom, who lives in San Diego, both of them saying, came to pick me up from the airport. You've already met my mom, great lady. My wife and my mom picked me up from the airport. I got pictures of them meeting me there, get in the car, drive from San Diego International to our house in Pacific Beach. And as we're pulling like onto Chelsea, up to the, house, um, I like screamed to them and told them stop talking or something like that. I said something like, I don't even, I don't know what it was,

but I think I just remember sitting in the passenger seat and some, the gears are just start, I'm in a truck or a car. Like, whatever, I don't know what it was, but something's going on. And I think just the pressure is building

and I'm, and I have no sense of what's going on, no outlet for it. And they're like having a perfectly normal adult conversation. That might have been an octave above what I was willing to accept. or tolerate, maybe, and I completely freaked out on my wife and my mom who hadn't seen in the year. And, you know, they were like, oh, sorry, you know, they were super cool, no pushback,

and it was an indicator like, yeah. And you recognize that? Immediately. You're like, oh, God. Yep, immediately. And it was that combination recognition of, that's not good. And clearly, I have things I need to deal with that I wasn't quite aware of. So I knew, no question right away.

And I think, you know, I think about this a lot with other Marines and the things you experience in combat. You've talked about PTSD a lot. Look, that's a subject you could spend hours on. The bottom line is everybody deals with things differently. It doesn't mean you're broken or messed. It just means you have some process you've got to go through and you got to deal with it. We all deal with it differently.

I had maybe talked myself into, I was 33, I was a fairly experienced guy. I was surrounded by very young Marines who, maybe in my mind didn't have maybe the emotional maturity, maybe the life skills to maybe manage some of these same chaotic things you know guys that saw Chris get shot I maybe kind of built myself up a little bit

as a little better equipped and I was better equipped in my mind and I was in a matter of 45 minutes from the airport to the house I'm flying off the handle on something so um it just all it was man it was

it was those two things like That's not good and this is gonna probably happen again. I'm gonna need to I'm gonna need to think about this I can't pretend like I'm not gonna just have some sort of residual you can't leave Ramadi Be in San Diego six days later and not bring some baggage home with you and I was bringing some baggage home And there is some baggage there a little bit So that transition was was it started is there anything that like anything that helped you? Yeah Dude, I'll tell you what helped the most is my best friend who had been in Ramadi and endured all of that loss.

Look, our story, you know the guys that we replaced, the guys that replaced us. It's a very similar story a lot. They understand that. You know, I think having an outlet, having one other dude, it happened to be my best friend, super 14. So it was, you want to talk about just hitting the jackpot and being the best equipped to sort of just deal and power through it

and accept what's going on and embrace it and all those things that go along with it. I had an outlet, man. I had my best friend who, I mean, He knew every place we were. I mean, it wasn't even like, oh, he was here. It was the same place. Yeah, because Ramadi's not that big. It's just not that big, man.

And so we say, I was on the corner of Sunset in Michigan. He's like, yeah, I've been there about 500 times. Yeah. And he was struggling a little bit, too. You know, again, it's all relative. I mean, we're handled it relatively okay. You know, I'm going back to kind of dealing a normal life. But the moments when you get those little spikes,

and those is what kind of comes up and gets you, those little spikes, reactions. He could see that in me and I could see that in him and we actually been really, we're really good for each other. When I see him kind of get a little shaky, a little break, like I'm not, you know, he's not digging his environment a little bit or he'd see that in me. You had that other person that kind of bring you back to helping you deal with that, which is good. The flip side of that, while it was really helpful for him to be there, I think it was really tough on Whitney because she was not my outlet for that. I wasn't, kind of got cut out.

Totally. And I didn't, certainly not by design. I'm not like doing this calculation of I don't want my, she just not, I'm not going to use her as a resource, you know, for that. And to be honest with you, too, there's also a little part of me. She doesn't know what the corner of Michigan sunset is like, so.

Totally, man. And I'll, I'll be really candid, you know, I think I would have been almost, embarrassed is maybe not the right word, but I wasn't, I don't know if I wanted her to see that part of it. You know what I mean?

Like, hey, babe, check out this ridiculous vulnerability that I have right now that I'm going to carry with me for God knows how long. That's going to come up out of nowhere and you're going to have to just deal with it. So there was a, I think the thing that bothered me the most and was part of just kind of getting back to day-to-day life was it I would get, I would get my moments. My reaction was just, I just get pissed off. It was that feeling of, so I have this like, some event would happen, something stupid would catch my attention and kind of heighten my, you know, my response. And because it happened, I'd be annoyed. With myself that I let it bother me and then I'd be pissed off on myself because I let it bother me

You know what I mean like this ridiculous cycle of I told you the story the other day My wife and I shoot I guarantee you remember this to her walking across the street downtown No, no by the beach I think and an auto body shop is running the the air drill to pull some tires off I can you know that that kind of sound and as we're walking I think my left arm is over her her shoulder were walking like this I hear that sound and my first reaction is I push her down to the ground. And in the time that it takes to do that and catch that it's happening is maybe a third of a second. You know what I mean? So I hear it. I do the, I'm, I'm reacting and pushing her to the ground. I'm kind of getting on top of her to do look at what

to, oh, that's the car. It's not a thing. There's no reason for you to do this is about a third of a second. And what bothered me in the boast about it is that I did it. Not that I felt like that is that I reacted to it and I was like embarrassed like what's wrong with me to to go through that and she's like what the you know and I'm I it sounded like you know and kind of going through that whole thing and I think just the the the fact that I had responses pissed me off and I would just kind of honestly I have a temper about it and that was she got to see me just get pissed off it stuff for no real good reason which you never really get pissed off like I mean I have temper it's about just stuff that just I would get mad about it.

stuff that just didn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, I have a temper about things that, like, my computer pisses me off just like it pisses you off, man. That's totally normal, right? I would get, I would have reactions to stuff that just, there was no way for her to say, oh, that makes sense, I understand. It would just be this totally oddball.

Somebody would say something wrong, it would just trigger in ways that she would look at me and kind of be like, who are you? She knew all my flaws. She knew was everything right and wrong with me. And all of a sudden now I'm doing all this of those stuff. You put another little thing in the mix. Yeah. that to the mix. So I got my wife who

we get married, I leave, I go on this deployment, I come back, I'm home for maybe seven months before I deploy again. In that seven months, you know, welcome to marriage to Dave Burke, you know, that involves a year-long deployment, seven months in Iraq, you know, God only knows what the hell I was, you know, I'm back to work,

so I'm back at a squadron as the XO, you know, working ridiculous XO hours in a fighter squadron prepping to go in a deployment. I voluntarily extend my time. to make the deployment, which is exactly what you should do at the beginning of your marriage, is volunteer to extend on a deployment. I got accepted into grad school. I was going to go to Dartmouth. I was getting out of the Marine Corps. I was going to go to get my MBA. And I remember the conversation

of, hey, I'm going to extend, it asked me to extend and, you know, I was explaining why I was going to do what I was going to do. And she's like, why would you do that? And I said, so I can deploy. And you hear those words like, God. I just. say that to my wife, like, which is, so I cannot be with you, so I can be apart from you long, so I can hang out of the boys and go do that, you know what I mean?

I can not retire from the Marine, get out of the Marine Corps. So I cannot do all these other things that I, not set up this future that I told you all about and sold you on. Totally. So to say that my wife, and everybody's got those stories, the laundry list of reasons why she should have just sort of cut bait and be like,

no, this is not happening, is a lot longer than the list of reasons why she shouldn't have. and props we're good she's here and my marriage with her you know for all the ups and downs it goes long everybody's marriage the one thing I don't worry about even when we're at our worst

at our absolute worst which our worst is whatever it is we have our worst at our absolute worst I don't have a shred I don't have a brain cell of thought of I wonder if our marriage is going to survive this you know this throwdown we're having over God knows what you know so we kind of went through the fire there and she

she got forged yeah big time she's a stud she deserves mad props for going through that because I'm not really sure why she did to be honest with you she's a you know what I can't I can't come up with any good reasons either she had a lot of options on the table I'm not sure yeah so it was that transition was tough man so now you're in another squadron you go on deployment again which is another what are you doing on that deployment just more so I'm back in an f18 squadron on the XO and the Opso actually did both jobs on this deployment. We just go to Japan. It's a West Pacific.

We're back in Iwakuni and Okinawa just doing, you know, exercise and training, that kind of stuff. Get done with that. And so now maybe it's time to get out of the Marine Corps. Before I left on that deployment, I had told my commander, the group commander and the squager commander, hey, this is it for me. I'm hanging it up. It's been awesome. I happily to extend for this deployment that they needed me to go on. I was great experience.

I got to train a bunch of young guys. Life was good. But they knew before I left that I was going to be out of the Marine Corps at the end of that. I deferred at Dartmouth for a year, paid my non-refundable deposit, which I've never gotten back. That's why they call it non-refundable deposit. Absolutely. My point is I wasn't kicking around the idea of getting out. I was in full execution.

We had looked at houses. Like we were in execution. This was merely a detour to get to that end state. And I'm due back from that deployment in January, I think it is, of the following year. and it turns out that the Marine Corps wants to send a guy to go fly F-22s with the Air Force for three years. And they're accepting applications for the F-22 Raptor Exchange, which had never been, happened before, never happened since. It was a one-time thing.

And the guy that they picked was going to go to non-deploying in Nellis and fly the F-22 Raptor. It should probably apply, I guess. It seems like a reasonable thing to do Because if they say no, then Yeah, you got your plan Go get my MBA, it's all good And lo and behold At the end of December

I get the word that I got picked up For this Raptor exchange And I remember calling Whitney I'm like, hey, babe And it's like, yeah, she already knows Something's up right there Totally, she knows what's up And I did the standard

Dave Burke oversell Hey, no deploying, we're gonna go to You know, it's all, here's all the goodness There's no downside, you know, and she's like, shut up, you know. She's all, and she was good with it. You know, it was, it was just another one of those things like, I can't say no to this. This is just something that doesn't happen. And you just don't get to, nobody gets to fly the F-22 in the Marine Corps, because the

Marine doesn't fly F-22s. Same thing I said when I flew F-16s and Top Gun and all this sort of stuff. So it was just another thing that I just couldn't believe was happening. And I couldn't leave the Marine Corps saying I walked away from that. I just couldn't. And she was totally on board. and came home and didn't get back my non-refundable deposit and moved to Vegas and started flying the F-22 Raptor. Three years up there and then at some point that rolled into the four.

Yeah. And that rolls into the F-35 at some point? So I'm flying F-22s. How many people were flying the F-22 at this point? So we probably had, I knew at the time what number I was. I think I might have been in the high, like a lot. hundred something you know we had two squadrons that were stood up you know and it was starting to pick up the pace it was early 2008 so the rapture was just starting to get its legs

underneath it was started building more and it was starting to become a thing and the Marine Corps had this idea that they're gonna they're gonna build this new stealth airplane called the F-35 and they're gonna get it and they wanted somebody to go to the Air Force to learn all the airplanes are really similar they said go steal all their experience and all the pain that they've gone through to stand up this thing and then you're gonna bring it back to the Marine Corps so the deal was this F-22 gig was it was really high probability I was going to go right from the F-22 to the F-35 and command the first operational squadron. And lo and behold, man, that's exactly what happened. We went to

Tyndall. We lived in Tyndall for three months when I went through training, and that was awesome. We're living on the beach in Florida for three months. I get trained in the Raptor. We move out to Vegas. I lived there for three plus years. Started a family. My first two kids were born in Las Vegas. We're killing it, man. I mean, it was awesome. And as I'm getting ready to leave Vegas. I get selected to command the first operational. There was a guy there before.

They didn't have airplanes. There was another CO before me, but I was going to go out there and accept and start flying the first F-35s of the Marine Corps. I show up. And this poor guy was selected to do the same thing. You know, two years prior, a great dude.

But he, you know, we'd stayed in touch and we were always in contact and helping him stand up with everything. And I get there. Jocko, I'm there, I think, two days, and the first airplane showed up. I'm like, what's the What's the big deal?

He spent two years He didn't see a single airplane The working Setting up all this paperwork, grinding Doing all this administrative stuff to prep He gets no airplanes You show up two days later, boom Do the amount of work that him and his guys

Went through to stand up to squadron And I literally showed up And the next day the first airplane landed That's my new nickname for you Like this really isn't that hard man What's the big deal? And he and I did a turnover And he left and sort of flying up 35s

and you know that's a whole part of my career we could spend hours on that but I flew the rapture which was an amazing airplane and I flew the F-35 which was this amazing airplane and I got to totally be relevant in aviation I had sort of exhausted I did all the things I wanted to do in a hornet I loved that airplane I did Top Gun I kind of had reached all the things and we talked about this too when when you leave Top Gun you're never going to be that good ever again so it's just a matter of how How slow you can make the process of getting worse. It's just how can you slow it down to be as good as you can,

knowing that you will never be as good as you were there? Because you're never going to get the reps again, ever. You're just never going to get it. And so it's just a matter of kind of slowing down that process. And at some point in your mind, like, I don't want to be in this business if I'm not at the top of my game. When I fully have 22, I didn't have a job. I didn't, I wasn't run.

I wasn't the opposite of a squadron, which is what I should have been. I just show up and flew the plane. I had some leadership responsibility in the organization. Did you show up, grab the keys from someone, take it out a little spin, run it into the ground, write a little report and be like, let's do it again. The keys back to the maintenance guys. Yeah, hey, this thing's broken. Give me another one.

It was. Good deal, Dave. It was awesome. Yeah, so I did that. Totally great for my marriage. I was able to combine all these professional interests with great, which you don't get to do in the Marine Corps when there's a war going on. You just don't get to do that. And here I am.

And dude, I had no more friends in the Marine Corps, man. Nobody liked me. They're all doing back-to-back to back appointments and airplanes are breaking. And I'm living in Vegas flying the Raptor. All my bros were like, we're done with you, man. We've got nothing for you. So, you know, I was just, I almost felt guilty. I did not feel guilty.

But I almost did. Yeah, almost did. And then I go out to, we moved to Destin, Florida, you know, or Fort Walton Beach. And we lived in Niceville in this awesome house and this great community. And I was the first. pilot to ever fly the F-35B operationally in the world. Like, ridiculous. I did that for like two and a half years, and it was awesome.

And then you, what brought you up to D.C.? So what brought me up to D.C.? So I was so sure that I was going to leave the Marine Corps after that command tour of the F-35 that I reapplied to Dartmouth, got back in again, got accepted to... Do you have to give them another deposit? No, I was smart enough not to pay the deposit because there's a tiny little possibility that wasn't going to work out. Anyway, I did get into Dartmouth again.

I was like, babe, I'm going to go to get my MBA. I've always wanted to get my MBA. And I got selected for an academic fellowship where I basically got to go to grad school for a year. I went to, so they sent me to Johns Hopkins University to get my master's. And I basically went to D.C. And it was a civilian for a year. And between those two things, there's another terrible deal. Like, can the Marine Corps like to pay you to go be a full-time student at Johns Hopkins,

which they did. So we moved up to D.C. and I went to John's Hopkins to get my master's. And then the next thing they offered you was to go back and... Yeah, so from there, the payback of that good deal was to go to the Pentagon, which was totally a reasonable thing. I'd post-command. I'd been to school.

I certainly couldn't complain about how tough my life was in the Marine Corps since, you know, the last eight years or whatever it was. And I just went, basically did a desk job in the Pentagon. And I work for in the joint staff and the chairman of joint chiefs of staff just work in some project. It wasn't all that exciting. It was I learned a bunch, but it was just kind of a kind of a mad job. I was, you know, very nine to five strict hours. Don't take work on with.

No Blackberry, no real responsibility. Pretty chill life. Life was pretty good. I selected, I picked up Colonel while I was there. The end of 2015, I was selected for Colonel. And in the summer of 2016, I selected for, command again as a colonel this time to command an F-35 squadron. But I didn't want to do that.

I don't know how this is going to come across to the people listening. And what a terrible deal it was at the Marine Corrassar to be a colonel and go-fly F-35s again. And I'm not, I don't want this to come across that I was complaining. But what I, the one thing that I, in all those great deals, and dude, they were great deals. the thing that I was missing the most was that I always kind of felt like I had one foot in and one foot out. They were these non-deploying jobs, the Air Force Exchange. The F-35 job was kind of standing up a squadron.

We weren't prepping for anything. And I loved it, but I could feel sort of underneath the surface like a lack of investment. I could tell I just wasn't, I didn't have to be 100% pot committed because there was no, we're going to go, to deploy or we're going to go to the there was no thing that was going to happen and I think one of the healthiest things about being in the Marine Corps

you're always prepping for something. So even the crappy stuff you don't want to do you know hey we got to do this because the end state is this and I was missing that and it sort of over time started to erode a little bit that I just I was catching myself I don't know, a little slack in the line

to be honest with you. To be really blunt I didn't have to bring my A game every day. I just didn't. I could do the things that I was doing certainly in an airplane because there was just an element that there was no outcome to what I was preparing for. And I started to kind of find other interests. Like school became really interesting to me. I did that year.

And so I continued my education, Johns Hopkins and started working towards my MBA because I needed something or wanted something else. And once you kind of catch in your mind that the Marine Corps and what they're asking you to do, I was going to go back to a training squad. And I wanted to go to be an operational commander with operational units that are preparing to go to something. I wasn't going to get to do that. I was going to go back to a training environment. I caught myself losing the thing that was the most passionate about the Marine Corps and seeing it as more of like, okay, three years here, this will get me to this retirement

and this amount of money. And it was just starting to become a little too professional and not enough of a passion. And I don't mean to say I was going to need to feel like a 21-year-old again. You don't need to recreate it like that. But my wife actually sat me down. We were talking and she just kind of looked at me and it's like, dude, you're not going to be happy doing this. It was really clear to her,

I think even more clear than it was for me. It's hard to come across as ungrateful, but I was not going to be good at that job because there was something that was missing. It was something that I didn't. There was nothing about it that it made me feel passionate about doing it. So no joke, man.

Last year, August, I basically told that I declined command, I declined promotion, and I put him for retirement the same day. And that was a big move, man. It was a big move. That created a little splash out there in the world of the Marine Corps.

Yeah, maybe. It was, it surprised everybody, but my wife, obviously, she was totally got it. And I knew was the right thing. My closest buddies, I mean, I talked to my bros, my tight, my bros, those guys understood. But, yeah, it was a big move. And I was turning down what, by all rights was a really good, great deal, another great deal. about it but and then at some point you show up at a different kind of event in Virginia with Laif and I working with a company for our company Eschelon Front we're doing a

leadership training for a company and you decide to come down and check it out lay said come on down check this out see what you think of this yeah so Laif it talked to me a couple years ago and when I was leaving that F-35 drop before I went up to DC and he's like hey man Jacco and I are doing this thing it's going to be awesome um we'd love to you know talk to you about it I'm like hey man I'm I'm all in on this other gig I'm going to

school I'm going to the Marine Corps we stayed in touch I mean Leif was a buddy I mean was a guy that I appreciated the times that we reconnected here and there and I certainly appreciated the call but it just really wasn't in the calculator I wasn't really I wasn't there so yeah when I told him like hey man I dropped my letter I'm getting out

and like I said Leif isn't always the easiest guy to get a hold of right away to talk sometimes he's got a lot on his plate he's a busy guy and he texts texted me back right then I'm on the bus leaving the Pentagon he's like hey do you have time to talk right now

I do so he calls me and we talk for I mean probably a solid 45 minutes to an hour and he's like hey jock and I are going to be up in Vienna here in a couple weeks why don't you come out for the day I'm like okay right on

and he gave me you know I'd like Like I was following you guys. I knew what was going on. I was seeing what you're doing. Things were blown up. I was certainly bragging on my buddies, Leif and Jocko, to anybody that would listen to me about it.

And I watched you, you and Leif give this presentation up there in Vienna to this group. And, um, dude. You were, uh, it was awesome, man. You were, the smile on your face, when we, you know, we got done and that first day and we sat down with you, you were in. Big time. You're like, I am in. want to do this this is all you were you were pumped and and I think that was you know and then and

then actually we did I brought you up and we did an event with another company yeah and that you're now involved with for a long term and and and even then you know because then because then for us you know I wanted to see what you were going to do and see how you were going to do it and man I was like I don't know you gave your first two paragraphs of talking you know your first two minutes of explaining something I was like okay cool I'm good and I was you know just everything that we talk about all the time you know that's in the book and hearing you describe things from the book but with your view on it and your angle and it's it's it's refreshing to me and also I'm just I mean I'm even learning right so I'm hearing a different angle and like I talk about with with everything like we just talked about with with flying at top gun or like it isn't jiu jiu jitza or like it is in the battlefield the more different angles you can see something from the better you're going to be going to get at it and so here I am listening to you going oh there's another angle yep here we go so that was awesome and it was also the first time you know with jp same thing you know i i i listened to

jp it's like the first time jp you came with me and he was just a sitting in the back like what you did the first time he was sitting in the back and and i say man come come up you know when when i do this q and a answer some questions and you know i'm thinking hey if something goes sideways i'll just be able to cover for him no big deal you know somebody asked a question and jp kind of gives me a look like hey I'll answer this and I was like okay you know go ahead and I'll just cover for you just gives an awesome answer I'm like okay I'll sit down now and it's the same thing with you I was like you know you're thinking okay where's he gonna go with this with this is a tough question or whatever and boom here you go you know fire for a fact and and and both those

two events happened really close together for me and for me it was and I call I actually called life I think it was the next day or as I might have been that evening and I said Hey, Leif, you know, we're good to go. Like, we are not going to have to do all of this ourselves because Dave and JP can do this. They get it. They can do it. And which was, you know, everybody in their own, I don't want to think it's arrogance, but it's, it's just, you don't see it. And so you kind of think, how is, and you know what it's like when you're in command

of something, that's one of the really hard things to do is let go, you know, and Laf's talked about this all the time, you know, when I'd be watching him roll out on out the gate for his first mission. I done all kinds of missions like that. And here he's going out of his first one that he's in charge of. And you're thinking, man, I should just go. I want to go. I want to go. And then, you know, two hours he comes back and you're like, high five. And then you go, cool. I don't have to be the guy that goes every time. And so when I saw you, when I saw JP, and I was like, this is awesome. And I called Laif and said, we are going to be good to go. Other guys, they can do this. They can bring the same message. They can bring the same passion and power and knowledge. And that was very, very, you know,

refreshing to me and bottom line is the experiences are the same I mean they're not exactly the same but the experience in Ramadi is the same and then the experience that we had throughout our military career and now you get to see what it's like interacting with businesses and you see all those similarities so that was a

that was a big day and so in case I haven't made this clear yet Dave now is with us part of the echelon front team and doing what we do helping businesses with their leadership in their companies. So it's awesome.

It's awesome having you on. It's huge for me. I told you, I left the Marine Corps. I'm like, there's something missing, and I can't stay in Marine because there's something missing. Well, you leave the Marine Corps, like, how in the hell am I going to recreate that thing that I'm looking for? Not in the military.

It's all I know is that's the place. And that was my biggest fear was, I'm not going to go, like, go to work, you know, go do a stuff. some thing that I so I was worried like I gotta find something and that's part of the reason

when that first gig with you guys in the back I was like holy cow man you've got to be kidding me it's all those things you just discussed all those things I spent my whole life living and breathing and learning and then it's with people like

Lave and Janko from we're gonna do this together yeah so good deal Dave are you kidding me yeah dude I wasn't on Monster.com searching for employment opportunities. Leve called me.

He said, come to Vienna. I'm like, okay. My head was a million miles away, man. I'm just working through paperwork to drop my letter out of, to leave the Marine Corps, like very hastily with no, no plan B. There was no, I'm leaving to do this. You can ask Whitney, like, there was zero conversation about what I'm going to do. And I came back from them, I'm like, have a seat.

Here's the plan. and dude it was instantaneous for me it was instantaneous and then to be able to share that message and believe it and have all those feelings in a totally different way and to work with you guys

yeah and it's cool too because you get that kind of for you top gun for me working in the training command where it's like what I already talked about you have this experience and when I was getting out I'm saying what am I going to do with this thing what am I going to do with that I got all this knowledge

and I thought okay Well, I guess I'll put it in a cruise box over here, lock it up, and it'll, it'll fade away and turn in dust. But when you realize that you can take what you learned and you can apply it to all these, you know, civilians and civilians and civilian companies, it's a pretty, it's a pretty damn good feeling to have. And to be able to go go out and do it on a regular basis. And one of the best things about it is you get to see the improvement. You get to see teams. And again, it's kind of like when you show up and you see the leadership issues you're having, it's like you're seeing, you know what the future is.

You know how to fix it. And you just go, this is going to be fun. And you get to see these people grow and learn and improve and get better. And if they're already good, you get to see them become awesome. If they're not doing great, you get to see them improve their position and then move in that direction. So it's definitely rewarding from that aspect. I know you've already seen that. Yeah, without a doubt.

And, you know, that book and the lessons in, you tell you. talked to me, you know, the title of the book is how U.S. Navy Seals lead and win. You know, I'm top, my life is what I learned from Top Gun in the Marine Corps. It just so happens, like we said, it's exactly the same. I have my own long list of my personal experiences with those things, but I was telling you the day, like the concepts, it's identical. And so there's no like big leap in my mind. Like, how am I going to get there from?

I'm going to embrace this. It's, oh, yeah. Oh, my God. That's exactly what I've been doing for the last 23 years. Only my story is this, this, and this, and this is my view of that. So, again, man, it was just, it was so easy to just see it and go, this is, this is legit. I am, I'm all, I want in. I want in right now.

I'm like, hey, slow it. I'm like, no, 100%. I don't want, I don't want to go look for, look, this is still happening, right? Yeah, it's happening. So try not to oversell it a little bit, but it was, I was all in, five minutes in a day one. Yeah. It's been, been awesome so far. And speaking of Eschelon Front.

If you want to have us come work with your company or with your team or whatever, you can email info at echelonfront.com If you want us to speak for an event, don't contact a speakers bureau. Contact info at echelonfront.com. You'll find us there. Also, we have the muster coming up. Speaking of echelon front, the muster number zero zero. It's going to be in New York City, by the way. Dave will be there.

He's going to do a little presentation. Because you know what? He's going to do a presentation. He's going to do about the Oudoloup? I can. A lot of questions about the Oudoloup. He's going to do a presentation about the Oudoloup. It's going to be 14 hours.

No, he's going to talk about his perspective on a lot of the stuff. And Oudalup, a lot of times people ask me. about the Oolooop because I do talk about it and I've said a few you know a month ago or something somebody asked me about and I said you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna bring you a professional a professional with that specific information so Dave will be talking obviously Leif is gonna be there JP is gonna be there clearly as well JP's gonna be doing a little presentation as well from his perspective on some things echo Charles mm-hmm you know echo Charles is gonna be there will he be

doing a presentation Don't know time will tell I don't know what he would present on maybe just present on you know we can bring all the intensity You can do a presentation on cruising Yeah Balance things up a little bit back to throw a little balance into that dichotomy right there and yet so muster May 4th and 5th New York City Marriott Grand Marquis It's an event about leadership it's tools for Lucy leadership it's about understanding

Understanding leadership and getting those reps in and hearing all the different angles that's what makes you good at it Of course it's live of course there's no backstage There's no Diva green room that will be hiding in Saying bring me some green m&Ms for my next set. No, that's not happening We won't be hiding is gonna be all of us together. We'll be learning be becoming better leaders We will see you there now as far as this podcast cast goes echo Charles maybe you could present us at this time with some information on sure if anybody does want to support this podcast how they could do it

yeah small presentation yeah small presentation who is that with the green M&Ms that thing you said with the green that was somebody right somebody Lee Roth it's David Lee Roth and I actually know the story behind this there's a reason why he did that they would have a it's called a I forget what it's called but when you go to somewhere oh it's It's called a rider, right? So you get a contract and the contract comes with the rider and says this is the things that we need. Right.

So what David Lee Roth from Van Halen would do is he would say, hey, I want, you know, seven bowls of M&Ms with no brown Eminems in them or green or whatever. I think it was brown. But he'd say no brown M&Ms. And this sounds like a ridiculous request, right? I mean, who would possibly want that, blah, blah, blah. Well, David Lee Roth did it for a reason. Why do you think he did it? Can you guess?

No. Can you guess? Because check it out. Think of how simple this is. He's doing a concert one night. He's doing a concert two night later to concert three nights after that. So he's on the road hitting these concert venues and there's all the stuff that has to be set up and all the stuff that lights and sound and sound boards and special effects and ramps and all this stuff's got to be set up and it's got to be set up right when he would show up if the seven bowls of M&Ms were laid out and there's no brown M&Ms in him. He wouldn't have to go and inspect everything. Because he knew that they were paying attention. And if he got there and it wasn't that way, he knew that these people had an issue with attention to detail. And so now he had to be, go and scrutinize and make sure everything was in place the way it was supposed to be. Little lesson learned from David Lee Roth. It was like a little test.

Yeah, a little test, little test. The M&M's test. Interesting. And by the way, that story that I just told, that may be 100% urban myth. Right. But I, no, I heard it from it. Sounds dope.

I thought. I think it's true. I'm sure somebody, I'm sure our listeners will tell us where that can be referenced. Yeah. For some reason, I thought, I thought it was somebody else and that's just how they were. Or their OCD or something like that. I don't know. But either way.

Hey, you're, so you think about like, the reason you were such an important asset, given your skill set as a forward air controller, that's what it's called, is because essentially you have all this expertise, while you're in the air and you can bring all that brain and eyes to the ground. Yeah. That's why you're better than you're. Yeah. I mean, in a- Yes, absolutely.

I didn't really pick up on that until kind of later. It's like, dang, that's pretty advanced. If you think about any, any aspect, I mean, it's like if you, that's why in the corner of a mixed martial arts match, oftentimes, they'll be a striking coach, they'll be a jujitsu coach, and they'll be a wrestling coach, you know, they'll have those, you Specific guys in there and sometimes they'll bring a specific guy in to corner like like Dean Dean has been brought in to corner guys that are going against a specific Jiu Jitsu person Because they want to get a little bit of that expertise same fundamental concept here Hey when we started this podcast

I needed somebody that knew how to press record Boom see same thing identical Yeah identical all those years of pressing record and then stop and then record and then record board again yeah so I'm kind of like good deal echo in a way yeah same thing doing the same thing as Dave really when it comes down to it speaking of doing good things so that was a big like breath like you better say so I'm gonna say a lot actually I'm not to say a lot actually yeah you know last one I felt like I really went deep into the krill oil analogy the nightclub omega-3s oh don't do that yeah you know I know I feel like the man

mess that was a good analogy that was a perfect analogy that was excellent in fact it was so good I wouldn't touch it that's what I'm saying that's exactly what I'm saying you know that it's too much of a good thing anyway if you don't know what krill oil is it's a little like what shrimp things baby shrimp you extract the the the oil and it's good for your joints the omega-3s in that the good for your joints anyway in regards to supplementation which I'm down for now by the way I'm a supplement person not all supplements just the key ones joint maintenance whatnot anyway get them from on it that's the best ones everyone knows that factually so if you want a 10% discount on that go to on it

dot com slash doc I want to talk about the sodium in the water situation I got a feeling we're just gonna hear it over here yeah so so while Dave and I are talking through the podcast are you just over here just Dreaming up just where you're going with this. When you say, Echo, how can you support? I'm thinking, dang, you, Dave's been controlling all this stuff and going to Top Gun. You've been doing your stuff,

and I'm watching, like, sodium in the lake videos. You ever watch those? You're doing what you have to be. Doing what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah. So, that's, um, anyway, the more I watch those, the better analogy I realize it is, you know, with the Amazon click through things.

So people want to support this podcast in an easy way. Click through the website, joccoopodcast.com, this little support tab. Click on it, do your Amazon shopping. Some people are smart when they do this. They're clever, they figured out, which I think I mentioned, or I know I mentioned it a long time ago,

but what they do is they click on it, then they save that URL into their bookmarks. Some people are smart like that, yeah. Like it just says Amazon. Exactly right. On my bookmarks bar, it just says Amazon, and that's what I did. Right.

I'm not even smart and I did that. Yeah. Hey man, that's a smart thing to do. Good way to support. Yeah, good way to support. Before you do your Amazon shopping, click through there. And, you know, that's a really solid, solid way to support. Small action with a click through. Big reaction, big support. There it is. Also, subscribe to YouTube. If you're into videos, you like the video version of this podcast or little excerpts that I'll put on there if you don't want to watch necessarily the whole podcast. At any given moment, a little excerpt you can take some value from that also shareable Shareable yeah yeah you don't want to share with your buddy hey I heard you got this situation going on Just watch this two hour 48 minute podcast and it'll make no people don't have that kind of patience

No or a lot of time the time yeah it's before they're going to work that day you know they can listen to four or five minutes not they're like man I got this guy that's really you know Treat me bad at work. What should I do? Cool. Yeah, what you do ignore and outperform next Exactly, yeah as opposed to hey listen to this you know episode number you know whatever It's 19 hours long. Yeah, can't do it. It's not realistic. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko store We got a new design. That's all I'm going to say about it. Um, so yeah, go in there jocco store.com. Um, that's a, you know, A new, you mean a new shirt, new t-shirt? New t-shirt, yeah.

A new t-shirt is out at this time. It is currently, yeah. Dang. This was kind of like a crowd. So people should kind of get after it. Yeah. This was like a crowd. I wouldn't consider it crowd-sourced idea, but you know how.

Crowd demanded? Yeah, you know, I was like, hey, you put this on the shirt. Put this on a shirt. It makes sense, make sense. So I kind of extrapolated all the ideas that I thought were good. masked them over the ideas that I heard from you you thought were good and boom there it is new design up currently legit yeah jocco store.com anyway there's some cool stuff good for there's stuff for women and rash cards there's stuff for

rash cards no hey that was the interruption of thought but so like rash cards we have Give you some more alpha brainy after this one. Yeah, I don't know. It's okay. Good. You know how you think of like five things at once? And they're all like jockeying to see which ones they're going to come through? Yeah, that's what happened right there.

The rash guard thought came in in one. Anyway, I think I'm going to put a new rash guard one design out as well. But anyway, Rashgard, if you want 19% improvement in performance. All aspects of performance? All. Yeah. Mental physical, emotional as well. Oh, double blind tested by the way.

Yeah, I think like quadruple blind. Yeah. And not blind tested, all that stuff. Psychological warfare, if you're having weakness in maintaining unmitigated daily discipline in all things, listen to psychological warfare. Yeah. I got, I just got interviewed the other day. And it was a, the guy, you know, he set me up this question, you know, hey, what do you do when you're, you're in a situation? where you've got you know you want to go to the gym or you're you're supposed to do some hard

task for work or you're just trying to do something to improve yourself and you just you know the mindset comes in where you just you just don't want to do it you know what should you think people should do then yeah and I said do it anyway right and then it was all quiet because he thinks I'm going to give this big explanation but there's no big explanation yeah the explanation is oh this stuff is hard yeah I can't make that thing easier for you. I cannot make 20 rep squats any easier for you. I can't do it. They're going to be hard. In fact, they're going to suck. And I can't make nothing I can do is going to make it easier for you. You know what you have to do? Just do it anyways. It's kind of like,

I told this to Jade, that exact situation or that thing that you just said where it's, even if you don't feel like doing it, you still want to do it and all this stuff. So, but your body is like, oh, it's kind of running on auto. Like, okay, compare it to like a video camera, right? Where you put the settings on auto and it'll, it'll adjust with how it's feeling. And that's how it's going to handle any situation. The light kind of goes down and it kind of adjusts how it feels, you know, to deal with this situation. So if you're running on auto and you don't feel like dealing head on with this workout, these squats,

you're going to maneuver around it just kind of automatically. No, you've got to turn it to manual. And be like, I don't care if they're hard squats, easy squats, for what I feel. I'm going to do them. This is what we're doing. Yes, exactly. So it's like a manual. Mind control.

Yeah. Just control your own mind. Yeah. We've talked about that before. Don't do it all like the automatic because your body wants to rest. Really? It wants to rest. Weak.

Your body wants to rest every single day, actually. You got to turn it from auto to manual. And you can get information like this in psychological warfare on iTunes. The artist's name. Jocko. Is Jocco Willing? The artist. I never thought that I would be.

I thought you had to paint something or sculpt something to be an artist. I thought that But now I put something on iTunes Then they just know you're an artist now Yeah Junk of the artist To deny that I'm to say they're really stretching the words on that

But yeah man if you're You know if you're Slipping on the diet Waking up in the morning And you want to hit snooze Maybe post-spilling the workout And you want How should I say like a spot

To switch the dial from Automatic to Manual that's what it is. So search psychological warfare on iTunes. Jocko Willink. Get after it. It's a war on weakness. Yeah, big time.

You know, when you're clicking through Amazon, by the way, you can get Jocko white tea there on Amazon. And, you know, when you get it, I'm just going to say this, when you get it, you will see. And I'm going to give you one word just to kind of what to anticipate. just just think about this deadlift that's what you're gonna be that's what's gonna come to come to come to mind with the jocco white tea it's gonna be going up a lot so and that's by the way again quadruple blind double tested that you're gonna bring your you know minimum what's the

lightest I think the minimum that you're gonna get deadlifting is 8,000 8,000 pounds so get on that you can also pre-order weigh the warrior kid it comes out May 2nd by the way it just came out on iTunes as one of the most anticipated books of the spring oh dang it got listed right how do you imagine that right kids book now all of a sudden we're talking most anticipated book of the spring which means people are waiting for it and they've ordered it so if you want it order it now now i'm going to tell you there are some people that are not looking forward to this book coming out they are not anticipating you know who those people are bullies Oh yeah bullies aren't looking forward to it. I'll tell you who else isn't looking forward to this coming out

Donut makers people that make donuts know the gig is up Weakness you know weakness is like a creature like a oh yeah creature and like a thing for sure He's not looking forward to this book coming out because all those things are going down all those things are trembling Make those things tremble harder order way the warrior kid for your kid for your neighbor's kid and for yourself you will dig it also discipline equals freedom the field manual it's coming out October 17th I know it seems like a long time away but I'm telling you you should pre-order it now why because when you pre-order it you will then know that it is coming and when you know it is coming you will begin to prepare for it

Mentally and physically for this book to arrive on your doorstep you want to be ready Mentally and physically because when you get this book you will have to do certain things Namely get after it. Yeah that one Extreme ownership of course the book you can get it right now you don't have to wait at all Not just for you but for your team your spouse your boss your babysitter your mother-in-law you know she needs a copy of of that she needs it takes ownership so grab her a copy just be gentle with it you don't have to throw it at her but maybe just you know place it on her desk so she can read it because the more people you get in the game and start taking ownership

of things the better your life's gonna be straight up now if that isn't enough of us you can find us active the Interwebs Twitter Instagram and if you gonna look at that Facebook key we gonna be there as well Dave is at David Burke Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocka Willink echo Charles any closing words I feel like we should talk about the movie top gun a little bit right no actually one one question one quick you know how like when you watch top gun right of course maverick that's your guy or goose that's your guy did you like ice man because he was pretty dope you know what I'm talking about right do absolutely who doesn't like ice man boom see absolutely yeah there it is yeah simple as that yeah that's your one

question profound question yeah or did you ever buzz the tower you know I'm saying that never happened is that fake is that like you can't really do that you can't really do that you can be in a ton of trouble as they say you can do anything once you can do that once. And then what? You're out. You're out. But not if you're Maverick.

You know what I'm saying? Awesome. Dave, man, obviously thanks, Tom, for coming on. You got any closing remarks? And I'm sure we'll do this again. And when you listen to this, you'll think of a bunch of stuff that we should have said on this one.

But anything else you want to wrap up with for today? Yeah, man. First, thanks. This was awesome. I've been thinking about this for a couple weeks now we've been talking about it. I was super fired up to be here. And this was awesome.

You know, we were talking about it just briefly, and I mentioned it. You know, my wife obviously, I talked about the things that they went through. So my wife and my mom, you know, those are my family. Those are folks that have endured to whatever degree that when you're removed, I think when you're on deployment you do this stuff, it's hard. But it's actually in some ways harder for the people that you leave behind because they don't know what's going on. They're just waiting and wondering and dealing with it, and they're kind of holding their breath. I remember a story that Whitney told me when I was deployed.

I didn't think about any of this stuff. A buddy and Neals had come to the house. He was gone, and he couldn't get in the house, and he was knocking on the window, which was by the front of the house, and kind of ringing the doorbell. And it was late at night, like not a time that somebody should be at the door,

and she didn't want to answer the door. And she's telling me, and you don't think about that stuff until you get back and hear the stories because you don't really think about what your family's going through because you're busy and you're doing your thing. And she talked about the thing

that she hated the most was people knocking on the door because she was always just sort of a tiny bit paranoid that it was going to be somebody coming to tell her about me. You know, Chris's mom, Kathy Leon, who's someone, I don't even have the words to describe how much I love her and admire her. And it's not just about her loss. She, obviously, she had to answer that call.

You know, she had to take that call on June 20th, 2006. She took that phone call. But that woman has endured the loss of a Marine who sacrificed myself on behalf of the entire country. And my relationship, the irony of all this is that I would not have a relationship with Kathy if Chris wasn't killed. And I would give anything to take that day back and bring him home. I would trade any of it. But the goodness that comes out of that, there's always some goodness. If you look for it hard enough that comes out of all this.

stuff and the loss and the things that you sacrifice. And I know Kathy certainly is listening and I never anticipated having a relationship with someone like that based on those circumstances, but my relationship with her is really important. And what she has done for the country is really important. And if you look hard enough in the worst situations, you find something that's good. And my relationship with her is really good. And I would really, it would be wrong for me to go through this whole podcast and

talking about all this things without acknowledging. that goodness with her so I wanted to mention that well Dave obviously thanks for thanks for coming on I know we've been talking about this for a while and it's great to have you on and thanks for sharing your story with us the story of you a Marine fighter pilot a forward air controller but also a son, a brother, a father, a person. And yeah, thanks for sharing the story of Corporal Chris Leon, a Marine, no doubt,

a hero without question. But let us remember, let us always remember that these men, these men we call, Warriors these men we call soldiers these men we call Marines these men we call heroes let us never forget that they're people sons and daughters husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and let us not forget that they're they're not only courageous and vigilant and bold and aggressive and inspiring they're also fun and outrageous and flawed like any of us and that they're loving and loved and that

they're people behind people and those that are left behind never forget like Chris Leon's mom Kathy Leon who wrote a note on his memorial page back in 2008 and she said hi baby another difficult day to face without you here I never thought that Memorial Day would be in memory of you my dear sweet beautiful son it's been one year 11 months and five days so close to two years that I cannot bear the thought we honor you by flying the flag every day and we will place your American Heroes tribute banner for all to see tomorrow more tears and maybe find a smile or laugh as we remember your deep voice great smile joking sense of humor and the love you showed to us

are forever empty and broken without you miss you so much and love you more major Henry L. Rod, Corporal Christopher Leon, like them who have fallen. Remember them as warriors, remember them as heroes. And echo.