Jocko Podcast - Jocko Podcast 11: Jocko’s Retirement Speech, Leif Babin, Charlie Platoon, Task Unit Bruiser, Stories, Memories, Heroes, and Lessons Learned

Episode Date: February 24, 2016

0:00:20 - Jocko's Retirement Speech 0:15:31 - Intro to Leif Babin 0:19:31 - About Leif 0:29:41 - Chris Kyle and the Movie, "American Sniper" 0:51:16 - Marc Lee 1:04:25 - Ryan Job 1:29:55 - Tony Eafrati 1:53:19 - [INTERNET QUESTIONS] - Best way to become a SEAL Officer.  Enlist first?  Or straight Officer commission? 2:01:10 - "Tell us a story about BUDS." 2:09:46 - What is Jocko & Leif's favorite Operator specialty? 2:21:07 - How to overcome the "Hand-cuffing" boss who isn't a good leader and doesn't trust his employees? 2:25:01 - To obey or disobey a bad order? 2:33:17 - What to do if you WANT to take ownership, but not sure how.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 11 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. And additionally, today, we have our first guest, Leif Babin. Leif, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here with you. Now, to begin this podcast today, I'm going to start at the end. I'm going to start at the end of my Navy career when I'm going to start at the end of my Navy career when I retired from the SEAL teams after 20 years.

And this is the speech that I gave on my last day of military service, my last day in the SEAL teams in about an hour before I walked back to the tradeette building, clean the last things out of my locker, loaded them into my car, and drove away from the SEAL teams for the last time. With 20 years of memories and experiences and the best times of my life and the worst times of my life, all rushing through my mind. And this is the speech I gave that day.

During my last deployment to Iraq in 2006, one of the first things we did was a series of operations on the eastern side of Vermont. In order to execute these operations, we took a majority of the seals to Camp Corregador, home with the first of the 506 Band of Brothers, on the edge of the Malab District of Morales. of Ramadi.

Camp Corregador was like Fort Apocalypse. They received mortar fire, RPGs, and small arms fire daily. The barracks were an old, partially blown out building with sandbags in the windows, dirt floors,

and no air conditioning. There were no showers. It was hard living. As far as the fighting, Charlie Company from the first of the 506, who we were set to work with, had suffered almost 40 casualties

in the time they had been in Ramadi, and had gone from a fighting force of 140 to just over 100. Charlie Company loved having seals with them. After the first operation they conducted with seals, the company commander told his battalion CEO, he wanted seals with him on every mission to help keep his men alive. As we continued these initial operations into the Malab district,

there were heavy firefights, many dead enemy and multiple coalition casualties. It was intense, sustained combat. Many would have considered Camp Corregador and Eastern Ramadi to be hell on earth. But I knew it was exactly where seals belonged. We soon completed that first run of missions and headed back to our main camp. When we got there, I told one of the platoon commanders, I wanted him to select guys to form a seven-man squad to take back to Camp Corregador.

But he told me he didn't want to just pick guys. He thought that some guys might not want to go back to Corregador due to the hard living conditions, the tough fighting, and the high rate of casualties. That sounded reasonable to me, so I mustered the whole troop in the planning space. I explained to them that we were sending a squad to Corregador permanently because the army is in a tough fight

and suffering heavy casualties, and that as Americans, as servicemen, and as frogmen, we cannot sit on the sidelines as that happens. If there's a fight, we need to be in it. I wrote on the dry erase board, Camp Corregador volunteers, and I said to this pack of seals, if you want to go over to Corregador, if you want to volunteer to be in the worst area with the worst living conditions, with the hardest fighting and with the highest chances of getting hurt or killed, then go ahead and write your name up on that board. And then I walked out of the room. A short while later, I came back in and I looked at the list on the board.

It was filled. In fact, every single seal to a man had written his name on that board. Yes, every man had volunteered to go forward into that raging storm. And that is who we are. That is what we joined the SEAL teams for, to do what no one else can do, in the worst areas, in the worst conditions. We crave the dirt and sweat and fire and blood. Let there be no doubt. It is in our soul.

It is in our nature. Sure, SEALs can do any job well, but it is in the belly of the beast where we thrive. I have seen with my own eyes the wholesale slaughter that occurs when seals are unleashed on the enemy as we were meant to be. And it is an incredible thing. It is also a thing of strategic impact. Areas like Ramadi and Sotter City, which after years of complete enemy control, become pacified soon after the sword of overwhelming carnage is wielded by the frogmen on the high ground. This is who we are. Death dealers, killers, executioners. And in being so, saviors, defenders, warriors. Now, there are those that say we need to change, evolve,

and mature. They claim that the nature of war has changed, that it is more complex and demands a more sensitive approach. I say they are wrong. War may morph and appear different through the ages. And when you live through a war and you see it up close

like we are now, you may notice complexities that you didn't perceive about the wars you studied in history class. But I tell you, there is nothing new. The nature of war has

never changed and never will change. The nature of war is death. To kill the enemy before he kills you. The rest is details. Now, of course, we can handle the details. In fact, seals can excel at all of them. Gathering intelligence, assembling information, forming alliances, rebuilding communities, training, protecting, treating.

Seals can do anything. But these details can also be done by others. You don't need to be a seal to conduct those activities. I say, send seals forward into the violent fray. Send seals where no one else can go to do what no one else can do. Send seal to find and butcher our enemies' soulless masses and leave nothing behind but scorched earth and rubbled buildings. is our nature. As I look at the SEAL teams today, I say to you all, yes, absolutely, evolve.

Get smarter, better, faster, more creative. Learn to mitigate risk when you can. Figure out new ways to win. Attack the enemy in new ways using information and intelligence. Infiltrate the enemy and turn him against himself, evil against evil. Adapt and overcome changing enemy tactics. By all means, evolve and get better every day, every chance you get. But don't forget the nature of war and don't forget the nature of seals. We must train brutally and without mercy so we can fight the same way, brutally and without mercy. Our job is to close with and destroy the enemy and we do it better than anyone.

Yes, our current wars will someday end. But war endures. Before man was, war waited for him. As long as man is, war will always be. Always. And our great nation will always need men to do what is in our nature. the enemy, kill him as he sleeps, kill him as he plots, kill him as he hides, kill him as he fights.

That is our nature, and that is our solemn duty. Light the fire. Take the torch, hold it high, let it burn bright. Let it supply the warmth and light of freedom and liberty for our countrymen. But also, let the fire incinerate our enemy. Let the inferno consume everything he is, everything he ever will be, and everything he has ever held sacred. As I walk away from the teams today, I assure you I will never forget.

I will never forget your service and sacrifice. I will never forget you, my fellow seals, for getting me here to this day, for leading me, for following me and for watching my back. I will never forget our fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines that have fought and sacrificed so much. I will never forget those big, tough frogmen and hardcore seals that came before me, particularly the ones that raised me in the teams and taught me the true way of the frogman. And finally, I will never forget our fallen brothers, the many seals who have sacrificed their lives for our freedom, especially Mark Lee, Mike Monsor, and Ryan Job of SEAL Team 3 Task Unit Bruiser,

who lived and fought and died like warriors. I am humbled to have served with you all, and I will never forget. Thank you. God bless the teams, and God bless the United States of America. and then I walked away. Now, I often talk about the Marine Corps, and I talk about the Army soldiers, and I talk about the immense respect and admiration

that I and that we as SEALs have for them. But if you haven't noticed, I don't usually talk about the SEAL teams and the frogmen that fill those ranks, probably because I was raised not to talk about what we do. but let there be no doubt. I hold the SEAL teams and the brotherhood of the teams sacred. The SEAL teams is not just what I did, it is who I am.

And really, it all culminated. It reached his peak in the highlight of my life, which was being in command of Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq. task unit bruiser was my vision of the teams it was everything i had always wanted the teams to be badass frogmen tough mean funny aggressive professional seals seals that take the fight to the enemy like our legendary forefathers in vietnam seals that the enemy feared because we hunted them down and killed them. Task unit bruiser was what I always wanted the SEAL teams to be. But I was not task unit bruiser. Yes, I was the commander, but task unit bruiser was by no means me. Task

unit bruiser was the men, especially a core group within the group that held the standard and carried the fire. It was those men that I am internally indebted for, for giving me that gift for fulfilling the vision that I had. Men like Mark Lee and Mike Monsor and Ryan Job. Men like Chris Kyle. And those are the ones that we talk about. We talk about them only because they are gone. But there were many others in that core group who go on silently, unknown to the world,

most of whom are still in the fight. and it was those men of course those fallen warriors that made the ultimate sacrifice but also those unnamed men of task unit bruiser who held the line and marched into the fray over and over again

for me and for the teams and for the Navy and for our great nation I owe them everything and I have one of them here tonight. His name is Leif Babin. And I'm going to let him talk about where he comes from

and how he ended up in the teams. But before I do that, I want to tell you something about Leif. After we got done with our workup, and before we went on deployment, before we went to Ramadi, I was talking to Laif and I was talking to the other platoon commander together, the Delta platoon commander, and Laif was the Charlie platoon commander. And I said to them both, I'm going to get you guys more combat than you can take.

I'm going to break you. And I was half joking, but at the same time, I had actually already seen men break during a fairly simple deployment to Iraq. But I knew I would push these guys hard. And through timing and fate and force of will, the battle field of Ramadi gave me the opportunity to make that happen, to push them and try and give them more combat than they could take. But they took it.

And they took it far beyond what I ever could have asked for. These two officers, the platoon commanders, and with them that core group of frogmen of warriors in task unit bruiser, they never wavered. They never cowered. They never faltered. in the face of bombs and bullets and fire and death, they held true, and I will never forget that. And so here is one of those men,

one of that core group of hardened warriors from task unit bruiser that held the line, my friend, my teammate, and my brother, Leif Babin. Jalco, thanks for having me. I'm fired up to be here. Yeah. So it's interesting because like I said, I mean, as I go back and listen to the podcast and hear what I talk about and how much respect and admiration that I always talk about for the Marine Corps and for the Army. And I seldom talk about the boys.

and as I was getting ready to have you on as the first guest, which is very appropriate, I wanted to make sure that everybody understood where I was coming from. And I think people were really excited that you're going to be on. Having a lot of them read the book that you and I wrote together, Extreme Ownership, and being intrigued about that, And having had me on the podcast and talk about my life, people are, you know, interested hearing a little bit about your life. And that's kind of one of the first questions that came across as soon as I told everyone that you were going to be on the podcast. And that was, you know, what was, here's a question.

First question of the day. Let's break it down. What was the motivation behind Laif becoming a seal? and if he can give a brief resume of his career in the forces. Break out your resume. I don't ever remember wanting to do anything else. And that's something I've heard you say that you wanted to go be a commando ever since you could remember being wanting to do anything.

And I think I was exactly the same way. It was I felt growing up, I grew up in the Piney Woods of Southeast Texas in a rural small town and we're high school football is everything it's just a few thousand people in the town you get at least that or more at the the games or Friday night lights every every every Friday

and I ran around the woods I played Army and I wanted to be a combat leader that's what I wanted to do and I played in sandbox and my GI Joe figures my little plastic Army men and that's just kind of what I wanted to do And then when I was probably in, I was probably in about junior high school. And I was kind of figuring out I hear about the green berets.

I had a cousin that was a green beret, highly decorated, Silver Star recipient from Vietnam. He was kind of a mentor to my dad growing up. And so I heard a little bit about some of those, you know, the snake eaters and started reading some books. And I sort of learned about the seal teams. and I remember distinctly a little movie coming out in, I think it was 1990, a little movie called Navy Seals starring Charlie Sheen, who was all about winning. You should have actually joined the teams and stayed in the team. He probably had a much better shape right now. No doubt.

He definitely would have been better for him, no doubt. But that really was something that kind of propelled me of, hey, what is this? What is this organization? I started reading about it, started learning about it, reading a lot of books about seals in Vietnam, and decided that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a seal. So I went to the Naval Academy and pursued that dream, and I knew that's what I wanted to do. I turned down an appointment to West Point because I wanted to go Navy.

I wanted to be a seal. And lo and behold, as I graduated from the Naval Academy or came up with a service selection night before our graduation, I did not get selected for the SEAL teams. And that was crushing. It was a soul-crushing event for me to think that I was going to go out in the surface fleet. I wasn't going to be a seal. I was going to be on a ship, be a surface warfare officer. And yet it took me three years.

I continued to pursue that and persevered to a lot of challenges. And through a lot of luck and a lot of hard work, the doors were open for me to be able to go, to get a bill to go. And I had some outstanding mentors that looked out for me and opened some doors for me to make that happen. And I was able to go and go to BUDs, our SEAL training. And when I was there, I think looking back on that time in the surface fleet was awesome for me, because it allowed me to gain immense responsibility and maturity that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And in kind of the peacetime, you know, pre-9-11 SEAL teams as an assistable two commander. It wasn't a lot of opportunity for leadership.

And so I was thrust into leadership positions in the service fleet, and I gained that. And I also gained a measure of just appreciation for where I was. And when everyone was, you know, when other folks were whining about how tough training was, I was just excited and fired up to be there just for the opportunity to do that. And so for me, then I went and served at a SEAL team as a assistant platoon commander, and certainly the highlight of my time of the teams was working at the task unit of brouser. And, you know, I felt like that's where, had I not had that experience, which I almost didn't get, by the way.

I mean, that was, I wanted to stay at, I was at SEAL Team 5, and I wanted to stay at SEAL Team 5 with the guys that I loved and trained with, and my commanding officer at the time said, no, your senior, we're going to rotate you to SEAL Team 3, you're going to deploy six months ahead. I was furious about that, that I was going over there. And lo and behold, I get over and get the word for Jocko and tasking it, Brouser,

and with an amazing crew of guys from Charle-Batoon, that was a, and it just wouldn't have been the, same otherwise and I still love the boys from team five of course but but it was it was just a phenomenal experience to be able to have that and you taught me to be the combat leader I needed to be through through a workup cycle preparing me and then unleashed me and charted with you on the battlefield to get after it in a way that was phenomenal where we able to have a historic deployment that made an impact and saved a lot of lives and did tremendous damage to the enemy and we came back from that from lessons learned

provided tons of lessons learned and taught seal leaders for the next generation. And that to me was such an incredibly rewarding experience. And I think something that built our company now at Eschlon Front and what we're doing and the ideas that have become the book, Extreme Ownership, where when I was teaching that leadership training and you were running training for the West Coast teams, providing those lessons learned to teach guys to be ready for those most difficult combat situations. And I was proud to train those guys and see the next generation of seal leaders go out onto the battlefield and accomplish some extraordinary stuff and re-prove the principles that we learned and revalidate them in different environments. And that was incredibly rewarding for me.

And I think really shaped when I decided to get out a few years ago after you'd retired and really shaped what this has become. And it's still rewarding to work with leaders in all aspects of businesses across industries and see. see them, see the light bulb come off in their head and watch them just go get after it and lead and win. Hey, back when you said that you weren't selected to be a seal, what does that mean? Like, you have to be selected? You know, like, I can't just, hey, I want to be a seal.

Let me join buds. Let me get through that and become a seal. Like, how does that work? Well, you have to get a billet to go. We call it billets. What does that mean? That means that you have a slot. You get a slot.

Here's an opportunity. And, you know, for us, like coming out of the naval count, we had 16 seal billets. So 16 people got to go. We had a prior enlisted seal in my class, so only 15 guys were getting to go. Probably had 200 people that wanted to go be a seal, and you go through a screening process. And after that, you maybe have 60 or 80 people that are eligible to go. And only 15 of those are going to get selected. I was not one of those 15.

So as far as the process goes in, you can't just be some dude. Like the screening process is how you're saying. Echo the piece that you're missing. is that there's basically two parts of the military. There's officers and there's enlisted guys. And the officers, the basic requirement to be an officer is you have to have a college degree. If you have a college degree, then you can become an officer. And if you don't have a college degree, then you're an enlisted guy.

I enlisted in the Navy out of high school, didn't have a degree, and therefore it was pretty easy to get to go to seal training because they need more enlisted seals than they need officers. And so it's pretty easy to get what they're talking about, a billet as an enlisted guy. Oh, okay. Because they just want to have, they need you. The officers, there's all kinds of officers that want to be SEAL officers. So they have hundreds and hundreds, if not probably thousands of people that apply to be SEAL officers.

And they, you know, they take a very small number of a 30 or 40 a year, tops. And with enlisted, there's probably, I don't know, a thousand a year that show up and go through. And so that was the challenging part. And for me, I actually didn't become an officer until I was already in the SEAL teams for eight years. And then once I did that, it was a hard program that I got picked up for as well. But coming right out of the Naval Academy is very, very hard to get one of those billets. But like Leif said, and actually his sister platoon commander that was in tasking a bruiser was the same way. Didn't get picked up.

Had to go to the surface fleet and drive a ship for a while. and then showed up at the SEAL teams and wasn't to asking. We actually went through BUDS together in the same BUDs class. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I actually liked it because you guys knew how to do some of the administrative stuff that most SEAL officers did not do. Let's get our evaluations.

Yeah, so that was awesome. So you say if you're an officer, it's harder. And they choose just a few guys, right? So if you're an officer. I'm not seeing as an officer, it's harder, but there's a little. less billets, as Jack would just explain. Oh, okay. And so what's that based on?

You know, there's less. Like, hey, I'm going to choose him, but not you. Is that based on the screening process? They based on, well, so you got out of the different commissioning sources, they've got a certain number of billets aside. So, and then you, it's not luck. It's based on your record. So it's based on your grades at school.

I mean, you had to have a high GPA, which I did not. And then you had to have a, why don't you just rub salt? the wounds that go about all by uh i'm just trying to understand you know but no this kind of think the other thing you they also based on uh pt scores as well so physical training scores you go through the seal fitness test and so i mean i'm going up against guys that are collegiate swimmers yeah you know cross country runners and uh you know folks like that who are uh crushing me on the test uh you know and and putting up ludicrous numbers whereas so so i could pass you know i could pass the test to go, but you've got to go way above and beyond that to even be competitive.

So that's kind of where, you know, where it was difficult. The other issue I had was that I had a bit of a conduct record as well. I got in a lot of trouble. I still got a lot of restriction. And I marched a lot of tours, and I had a lot of demerits. And when I had some upperclassmen who told me to do something I didn't like a couple times, I told them what I thought about it. And let them know.

and that didn't work out too good for me. God. Trouble maker. All part of the Lurd experience. Yeah, yeah. So, now another thing that obviously came up when, you know, it's been coming up,

actually comes up all the time. And, you know, being in Task Unit Bruiser, people have heard that name, they've heard it, you know, obviously around Chris Kyle. And I've been asked since the podcast started, you know, can you talk about Chris Kyle? And the whole time I knew you were going to be coming on at some point.

And I've been waiting to talk about Chris until you were here. And, you know, people say, did you work with Chris? Did you know Chris? And the answer is yes. We absolutely worked with Chris and wanted to take just an opportunity to talk about Chris. And one of the things that I would like to try and do is talk about Chris, the Chris that we knew, right? The Chris that, the Chris that Leif and I knew, the Chris that the guys that are actually served with Chris knew, who is a little bit different than the Chris Kyle that's often portrayed in the movies.

For sure, I'd be happy to talk about that. And it's funny because people want to tell Chris Kyle stories, you know, And he really is the legend, which I think a lot of people don't realize it was a name that was given to him. That was his nickname was the legend. It was given to him in the previous platoon before we worked together. And I remember I met Chris at that time because I was with Siltim 5, and I deployed at the same time under the Aegis of Siltim 3. And so we were there, and I remember meeting him in the talk. He'd just come back from Fallujah and doing some great sniper work there and working with a bunch of our mutual friends.

and so his platoon was in the Pacific Theater at the time, and he got a chance to go forward and be one of the few guys from the guys that were going to the Pacific that were selected to go to Iraq and actually be in the fight. And so guys were pissed. They were pissed. They were sitting there in the Pacific Theater, training, you know, some local national forces out to shoot rounds on paper,

and Chris was over there shooting bad guys in Iraq. And so they met, they made this nickname the legend for it, which was, uh, and it was very much in jest. Yeah. And so it's, uh, it's funny that as he's, you know, as you continue to go on and do these great things and now he's just this incredible larger life figure, he really is the legend. And it's really, so when I hear stories or watch the movies or hear people talk about in a way, it's, it is.

It's not the Chris Kyle that we knew. It's a different, you know, it's a superhuman. It's, uh, it's like a comic book hero. And look, the reality is I think, uh, you know, haven't worked really closely with Chris, and he was our lead sniper and point man, just so people understand that. In Charlie Baton, I was the Battoon commander for Charlie Baton, which meant that on every patrol that we went on, he was walking about eight or ten feet in front of me, and that we talked

all the time. We were in working about where we were going in, working together, and what areas we wanted to take down, what buildings we wanted to utilize. and he was a guy that really drove a lot of our operations. And so I knew Chris well. He was one of the three guys with, we had three guys that were on their third platoon, and we called them the triumvirate. And these two other guys are still active duty.

I can't name that they're outstanding guys. But these guys have been together for three platoons, three rotations, three deployments of the Middle East, to Iraq. And so we call them the triumvirate. You know, which is the triumphance is a term from the Roman era where you had a group of three people who share a position of power and authority. And these guys really drove. They really, they brought up the new guys. They trained new guys and got our platoon really where they needed to be.

We're kind of the heart and soul of the platoon. And Chris was, you know, the real crest that we knew and worked with was hilarious, number one. And, you know, that doesn't come across to a lot of people that he was a guy who's just funny as hell. always could crack a joke. Sometimes when he shouldn't have been cracking. Sometimes when he shouldn't have been cracking the joke. But he was a guy that, you know, I think it almost does him a disservice to pain him in a way that was this superhuman. Because the reason he was so successful at what he did is that he worked really hard at that

and was very focused on it to really perfect his craft. And he, you know, not only that, he delved into the planning. So we'd sit over a map and talk about where we want to. to go, look at different buildings and say, and then we go on a reconnaissance patrol, which we had to run up through approvals to the chain of command for certain types of operations, but Jocko is our tasking commander approved, our reconnaissance patrols. Meaning that I could approve them. So they didn't really have to go up that chain of command.

So it's pretty easy to get them approved for people that are listening. Didn't quite catch that, yeah. So we'd say, hey, Jocker, we want to do this. And he'd be like, great. So we'd go out and we'd patrol through some really bad areas and we'd hit like a dozen different buildings. Go in buildings here. Check out observation points there. See what kind of roads we could see and access that we could see.

So we'd figure out what gave us the best advantage. And then Chris would figure out where he wanted to be. And he'd put himself in that position. And so he'd get, I'm looking down this window. I'm looking through this loophole in the roof wall. And, you know, he, so he set himself up for success, which is awesome, which is what made him so successful. So, for instance, if the angle that he would pick from a building would be looking down the long axis of a road where he could see four or 500 meters worth of possible enemy targets, whereas another angle, looking down a shorter road, maybe you can only see 80 meters, and you have a much smaller area to cover. So he'd pick these areas that he thought would be the most prevalent,

the highest number of targets possible. Of course. And obviously that was how we made the, that's how we made the, that's how we were so successful. And that's how we were able to prevent attacks on enemy forces, or on enemy attacks on friendly forces, rather. And so, you know, not only that, but when we go into these positions, you know, Chris would be, he knew after the sun came up, first called,

prayer goes down in the kind of early dawn, pre-dawn hours, and then the sun comes up and the city comes alive, and enemy fighters are moving around. And, you know, he'd be on the weapon when he knew that was looking down his sniper scope, when he knew it was, it was, that was the highest in the early morning, you know, as the morning comes around, you know, that 8 to 10 o'clock hour, that's when we knew we were going to get contacted. And, you know, late afternoon, it was kind of the same thing. He'd be on his gun.

And, of course, he had to rotate out at some point. point. It's only humanly possible to stay on your gun for so long. But when he was on his gun, he looked down the scope of his weapon. I mean, he was very disciplined about that. And I remember hearing some other guys being like, oh, man, you know, I only have, I only have eight or ten kills. And Chris, you know, how's he got 85 now? You know, at some point through into our deployment before it was completed.

And, you know, the reality, you see some of those guys were, you know, we had seven. have another snipers in our platoon. And they did a lot of great work, and they did, they had some impact and certainly did great stuff. But a couple of those guys, I'd see that didn't have the same discipline, Chris at. They would, they'd look down their weapon and you know, 30, 45 minutes into it. They're not as, you know, they're not seeing anything or they haven't fired any shots. And next thing you know, they're kind of having a conversation with their buddy next to them.

Next thing you know, they're sitting back from their, their rifle. Next thing you know, they're just kind of looking through Bino's. And I remember watching Chris and just, he's just looking through a scope for two straight hours without coming off of it. And that enabled him to be successful, and that discipline really paid off. And certainly he was able to rack up the damage to enemy fighters. No doubt about it.

I know whenever I'd roll out to visit you guys in an Overwatch position, see everyone, and I would always notice Chris would always be on a gun. I never saw him not on his gun. Of course, obviously, like he said, he's human and he'd take breaks. But I noticed that, even on deployment, you know, and just say, oh, Chris is on his gun. Except for when you rolled in the cop Falcon. And he was crashed out sleeping with the rest of you guys.

So that was actually kind of a funny episode where we went in on boats and we snuck into, we snuck down. This is something Chris wrote about in American sniper. We went on the Marine Corps boat unit that was there was a great group of guys. They were awesome guys. And they took us very quietly down the river. canal that kind of comes off of the river. We were able to launch off on the riverbank,

very quietly foot patrol into the city and get into an area that other people couldn't get into. It was super dangerous. The bad guys had no idea we were there, and we were able to take advantage of that. Smoke a guy or two on the way in, and then moving and take down the buildings that were going to be this combat outposts

as the Army, they were falling this giant mine clearance element coming down the roads, digging IDs out. Jocko was riding in and a Bradley. fighting vehicle, braving the, some of the most dangerous roads in the world at the time, you know, coming in with the Army Battalion staff there and as our command and control. And so we were already in. We'd been there for, I don't know, three or four hours at that point, maybe longer. And so we'd shot a couple guys and we're, you know, we're a couple enemy fighters.

And we still had guys in security position, certainly, and guys on guns. But at that point, it was, the IED clearance team was like right underneath us. I remember actually looking over the side of the building and seeing this giant Buffalo, this huge truck armored vehicle with an arm on it digging out of the street. And I know you were in a vehicle kind of coming in just behind that, a few vehicles up the road. You were maybe a few blocks away at that point. And I'm looking down, I'm like, that's like 30 feet below me, like directly below me right now. So if this thing activates an IED that explodes, like I'm going to take it right in the thing.

I probably ought to get down and stop looking at what they're doing. So we were just kind of hunkered down. And when Jocko came in there, it was funny because in particular, the Army operations officer for the battalion. It was a great guy. And the battalion was awesome. This was task force banded, a bunch of tankers. Great guys. We love them.

They came in, and I remember you coming to the rooftop with a major, and he comes up there, and he's expecting just bristling weapons everywhere. It all seals on their guns. And I'm looking over as the major. you're standing there and kind of looking around. There's a couple guys on their guns, and there's some guys on machine guns and people watch the stairs. Security was definitely set, of course.

But I'm looking over, and Chris and our leading petty officer had just hammered down these, like, chef boy R.D. They didn't want to eat MRE. So they just crushed these, like, he had like three or four empty containers of, like, Chef Boyardee meatballs. Look like a complete slob. Yeah, it was just like spilled all over his uniform. He's just like totally racked out like completely asleep.

Slobbing ourselves snoring and the major was like like is this man wounding. It's funny though because we would get in the preparation for those big operations you'd be working so much doing the preparation of the coordination and planning that you wouldn't even stop for a day and a half or two days and when you finally get in the field you're tired. Exactly and we had to sleep and that's when we had to sleep when we knew we'd killed some bad guys, we weren't going to get attacked, or we were less likely to get attacked in the next few hours while it was still dark. We had to get sleep then. And so there was a real reason for that because once the sun came up, we were going to get hammered. So we all had to be awake. We all had to be ready to go. So we had to get that kind of sleep when we could.

And that was, you know, one, that particular operation, I remember in particular, Chris, he was, he just kind of had a good sense about things because we were arguing over a building. I was standing on the rooftop. And I was like, okay, there's a building, there's a big building to the south that would give us a good vantage point let's move down what do you think about that building over there i'm talking it over with him and with our platoon chief tony and uh chris was like you know what i like this building to the east let's go what do you like four story yeah yeah he was pulling a four story and uh i was like i don't know man that building the south looks pretty good he's like i think this building the east is where we want to go and uh we talked about it for a little bit

and i was like okay roger that let's go to the east so we moved we moved about 350 yards down the street to this big four-story apartment building and it was it was absolutely the right call i mean have we not done that we would have uh because it was i think we had what did we have like twenty-two enemy confirmed kill from that over the last four real estate right there a couple dozen uh you know probable kills so it was it was and it was at a great advantage point and we were looking right down a long access road that was able to prevent a whole bunch of attacks on uh the u s soldiers that were building that combat outpost and it was and they were under fire the whole time.

And as soon as the sun came up, I know you were sitting in the camp when those mortars came in. And then, lo and behold, so the mortars explode in the camp. And we, you know, it's easy to just say, oh, mortars. But the reality was a gigantic explosion goes off. And we were 350 yards away.

Fragg was raining down. Fragmentation from that explosion was raining down on us from 350 yards away. So it was massive, 120 millimeter mortars coming in, you know, unfortunately killed a soldier, a little bit a couple others. And that very, I mean,

within about half an hour of that, Chris smoked two guys out of like four that were loading a mortar tube in the back of a truck. So, and when, that's who Chris was. And that's the impact that he had. And he had a good sense about where to go and what to do. And he was excellent at it.

And he was just, it was just awesome to work with him. He was so much fun to be around. and always quick with a joke. And that's the real Chris got we knew. And I'll tell you, just to go back to the fact that he, you know, after, you know, I was in the combat outpost. We take these mortars. Soldier gets killed.

I remember, and another soldier got wounded. I think in Iraq he got wounded as well. And it's a nightmare, right? These guys are bleeding out. It's a nightmare. And the thing, and we talked about this on the last podcast, of how helpless. you feel against mortars. It's the worst.

It's the worst. Because they came from maybe, it could have come from three, four, five kilometers away. And Eugene Sledge talks about it. And we talked about World War I and how bad it is. And so you have this combat outpost. And all the guys are on there, they're now horrified, right?

You're scared. When is this next random bomb going to just blow up? We cannot be safe. And if you can imagine the, when I got word from you, hey, Chris just killed two guys with a mortar tube. And I went to, you know, the company commander and the brigade commander was down there as well and said, hey, sir, one of our snipers just killed two guys with a mortar tube loaded into a truck.

You couldn't do anything in the world better for them at that time. Nothing better in the world to walk into those guys and say, hey, you just lost a soldier to a mortar. We got them. And that was one of those things that just helped build our relationship with the conventional unit so much. And you know what? We needed to have a relationship because you could sit here and tell stories all day long about what they did in return for us, which was also just incredibly brave. And that very same day we were calling QRF,

and I know you were trying to move vehicles out of the way so we could get the tanks out there to our guys that were pinned down and needed help. And those tankers came out every time those soldiers were amazing. You know when Chris Kyle got those two guys hot, like how far away? way is that typically? Or is there even, there's no typical, right? That's the other two. When people talk about these sniper elements,

first of all, they have to understand that it's in Ramadi, in downtown Ramadi in 2006, this was like Stalingrad. I mean, it was just rubble pile buildings, just, we had, this was al-Qaeda and Iraq battle space. I mean,

this is the precursor to ISIS, and it's the same people. And there were several thousand of these guys that controlled the city, and it was, It was just a nasty place. So we didn't go out in these little two and four-man teams. We were going in with 15, 20, 25, 30 guys.

You know, sometimes we had as many as just 40 guys who are plussed up with Army and Marines that went in with us. And we always had Iraqi soldiers, but we didn't count them as part of our, as part of our, these are the guys going to help bail us out if things go down. So we had to have a big enough element that could prevent us from being overrun. And, you know, if Chris were here today, I think he'd tell you, man, it's, you know, The only reason he was able to do what he could was because there was a huge team of guys supporting them. The guys carrying the machine guns in that were helping beating back attacks. And guess what?

When you're attacked by machine guns and rockets from RPGs and you've got a dozen enemy fighters maneuvering on you, you're not breaking contact with a bolt-action sniper shot. You've got to have those machine gunners that are going to beat back those attacks, and that's what those guys did. So without that whole team, and we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, were carrying our own shoulder fired rockets. Our leading petty officer was always a guy that would carry that big heavy 84-millimeter recoil this rifle over his shoulder, this big bazooka-looking thing, and the heavy rounds for that. And we had to have that kind of firepower with us.

So that was critical for all that we did. But most of the shots were pretty close. I mean, you're talking urban combat is, you know, there wouldn't a lot of real long-range shooting. I mean, every once in a while, I think Chris and Tony, hit a couple guys from 1,500 yards or so out in a rural area. I wasn't on that particular operation, but there was,

but most of the stuff in the urban environment of downtown, I mean, we, we hit guys from as close as, I remember a couple, a couple times where, one time in particular, me and Mark Lee and Chris were sitting in a room,

and we look over, and there's some guys, like, there's literally some moosh, like some enemy fighters with machine guns, looking around the corner and they're like they're like 25 yards from us like you know maybe 30 yards from us and they're they're looking down the street they knew we were in there somewhere but they got the building wrong so so you're talking a 30 yard shot there with it that's

where guys coming up you know i think chris ditched his right his sniper rifle grabbed his m4 and shot those guys through the window um and then you know some of those shots are making a lot of i think the average was i would say probably anywhere from one 100 to 300, 300 yards, something like that probably. And that, you'd call that pretty close. It's pretty close for a 100. For sure. For sure. These guys that are trained to make, you know, 1,000, 2,000 yards shots. And so it's just a very different type of environment.

And that urban combat is, it's personal. You can hear those guys yelling at you. You can hear them yelling the jihadi regar. We're yelling back at them. You know, there's a lot of profanity going back and forth. But it's, you know, some of this stuff was hang grenade range, definitely. Dang. And you call them what, Mouge? Is that what you call them? Muge.

Mouge. Mouge. That's, that was what we call the enemy fighters. So they call themselves Mujahideen, which is those engaged in jihad. That's their name for themselves. And so we shortened that to Mouge. And we actually got told that we weren't supposed to call the Mouge. Yeah, it's interesting how you can take a real name, shorten it, and it becomes derogatory. Yeah.

Well, the interesting thing was we were. told that it was derogatory and inappropriate to say mooges and that it was disrespectful to the local populace and when we talked to the local populace you know what the local populace called the moose moose that's what they called them it was funny we had the cultural experts telling us when we were actually talking to locals and understanding what was happening more than anybody else at that particular time yeah maybe it was like offensive to them though you know the actual Muge. Maybe they were offended. We were not concerned about offending

the Muge. You're all shooting them. You're shooting them, but the Muge, that's too much. Another example of the big cultural warriors who just don't get it. You don't understand it. Yeah. It was... Those local people were praying for us to go kill them. Go kill the bad guys.

And free them from this evil terrorist organization that is imposing this horrific just brutal reign of terror on them. And so, I mean, it's exactly the same thing you see ISIS doing today. And we saw it over and over again in the city where you'd go into a house and there's a family there. And they're trying to just not to get killed in the crossfire.

And they want your help and they're happy you're there. Dang. You know, you mentioned Mark. And Mark was in the movie. Mark Lee. He was in the movie American sniper as well. And again, there's something that comes across in the public image or the image that gets created through Hollywood and through books and through media. whatever else.

And they really, in the movie American sniper, they really missed the mark with Mark. I mean, they really missed the mark. No doubt. Made him into kind of a weak-looking guy that didn't believe any of what he was doing, which was obviously

couldn't be further from the truth. Well, to that point, we get ass all the time, like, you know, tell us about American sniper. Was that accurate? You know, I think it's important to say that first of all, I'm very glad that Chris Kyle's story's out there. And I think that to get people to recognize what Chris did and, you know, the impact that he had

and the fact that his story is representative of so many hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and Marines and sailors and airmen that have deployed multiple times, what their families go through. And I think that's a great thing. but it is a Hollywood movie and so you know the the scenes in Iraq were not a reflection of the reality that we knew

and in particular that depiction of Mark that's what disturbed those of us that served closely with Chris and closely with Mark were most disturbed by that and it was just the way that Mark was portrayed you know Hollywood has

they hate the Iraq War so they've got to they got to have someone in there that doesn't like the Iraq War And so they portrayed Mark in a way that, you know, he made some despair. They got him saying, I don't even remember exactly what he says, but he says some lines about he doesn't believe in what he's doing. And that is just utter and complete horseshit. I mean, there's no Mark Lee believed in that mission.

I mean, he was an extraordinary warrior. And, you know, when other people were out to kill bad guys and try to, you know, do a bunch of operations. I mean, Mark truly believe we were there to help the Iraqi people. We need to free these people from this brutal reign of terror. And I think he had a, he had strategic insight that, uh, I'm not even sure I had. I mean, I read back like Mark's last letter home and he talks about being involved in a great conflict, right, in a great struggle. No, he had some, like the one we're involved in it. And it's, I think that was very reflective of that this is this, seeing that, you know, the enemy that we're fighting here,

this type of jihadism with this strain of Islam that exports jihad across the world and wants to go out and terrorize and brutalize people, like this is a great struggle. This is going to be a generational struggle. This is going to go on for a long time. It certainly transcends Iraq. And I think he had, he really seemed to sense that

in a way that was pretty phenomenal. In the movie, they make him out to be this sad guy that's all serious. And again, they completely missed the mark. Just like they portray Chris to be this ultra-serious guy. Mark was hilarious,

gregarious. Another guy that was joking all the time, mostly at inappropriate times. And had that, you know, he would just, he would light up a room when he'd come in to a room

because he was just on fire. And to portray him as this guy that's all down in the dumps and depressed. It was just, it was horrible to see that. It was, it was just so opposite of the real mark.

I mean, this, the brooding guy, and they had him as this kind of like, pencil neck kind of geek, you know, is, to quote Patton,

couldn't fight his way out of a piss-soaked paper back. I mean, Mark was a badass guy. He had massive arms. He carried his, his big, heavy Mark 48 machine gun

that weighs like 25, 27 pounds, fully loaded with all the gadgets on it. with no sling. He carried his shoulder like it was a little M4 rifle, you know, that weighs seven pounds. I mean, you know, it's gadgetry. He's, he was a, uh, just an awesome warrior. And, and yeah, that side of him that was just hilarious. It was so many stories of him cracking jokes and just keeping everybody laughing. And we, we kind of talk about if you, if you're listening to podcast and you haven't seen a series called, on the history channel called

Live to Tell. It is a fantastic series that actually, actually a former seal friend of ours. Ray Mendoza produced. He did. He produced it. He was in Ramadi, actually. And he relieved us in Ramadi. When we got done with our deployment to Ramadi, he's one of the guys that came in the next task unit that came over and took our place.

And he worked out of Camp Corrigador. That's right, which I just spoke about. So they made an episode. One of the episodes is about Charlie Patoon and Mark Lee. And we got to tell some of the stories there. But, you know, you don't have that. You can't tell every story that you want to tell. You want to tell every story, the little memory you have of these guys.

You know, one that always sticks out in my mind because he joined your platoon late. And he came from another platoon, came into your platoon after workup. And one of the first trips we did with him was to Vegas. And we went up there to work at, what's the name of Nellis, Nellis Air Force Base? We went up to work at Nellis. What a boondoggle trip that was. Total boondoggle. We would work from probably about noon until, let's call it, six or seven o'clock at night,

and then everyone would go gambling and drinking and partying until 10 o'clock the next morning, and then gamble. It was just one of those trips. But we were getting after it. And that's another thing about being a young seal. You don't have, you don't owe any money, right? So you just, when I remember when I was a young seal, I was like the richest guy in the world. Because, you know, you go from being a civilian that's 18 years old, making no money.

And all of a sudden you're getting a paycheck. And then you get the SEAL teams, and you're getting dive pay and jump pay and demolition pay. And you're like the richest guy in the world. You're like a rock star. And that's kind of the mode that Mark was in. When we were in Vegas was he was big time in it, getting after it. Well, I remember you on that trail, I remember you coming in and say, HDH, are you in? I was like, I was like, what is H-D-H?

You're like, are you in? You just have to commit. I said, Roger, that, I'm in. Yeah. I'm like, I'm in. I did that with a bunch of guys. H-D-H, who's in? And I went in out of guys like, I'm in.

No one even knew what I was talking about. And then I, at whatever, we got together that night. I'm like, all right, H-D-H, who's with me? And everyone joined up. I said, it's $100 hands. We're going to the blackjack table. We're all going to play three, $100 hands. Which, boom.

To those guys at our Navy paychecks was a big deal. Yeah, yeah. So we did it. But playing gambling with Mark was insane because he was so, so, like, hostile and yet at the same time, fun. And I remember I came walking down to the casino, and he's like, hey, sir. And I look over and he's across the casino, and he's at the blackjack table, and he goes, he must have been on a winning streak. He goes, when are the new Cadillacs coming out? that was just so

so him just to be fired up like that it was just awesome awesome he was just one of those guys and you know not only was he hilarious to be around uh you know a big strapping good looking dude he uh he just was very comfortable in his kid as well you know and he

he was absolutely in love with his wife Maya who's in that uh in live to tell and uh she had given him this these, I mean, these little pajama pants. I mean,

this is like, and he would wear them around the camp, these pajama pants. And I was like, bro, are you wearing pajama pants right now?

And he'd be like, yeah. I was like, why are you wearing? I mean, he's a new guy in a platoon. Don't let Jock see you. I was like,

do you want to get your ass kick? Like, why are you wearing a pajama pants? He's like, they're comfortable. Maya get him to me. I like him. I mean, he's like,

he just did, whatever you don't like him who cares so that was just the way mark was and uh you know he just was uh i remember a particular not he was he was a strong christian guy definitely uh he'd gone to seminary for uh about a year or so i think you know to study to be a preacher and uh decided uh you know what instead of being a preacher i want to be in the seal things but his christian faith was certainly always a big big piece of that and i remember some of the most random things we were talking about uh i don't even remember how it came up But if you remember the old 1980s song, The Warrior, which is like cheeseball, 1980s.

You know, and we got in an argument about who sang the warrior. And Mark was like, it's Pat Benatar. And I'm embarrassed to say that I said, no, it's Patty Smith. Because I have to admit that right now. This gigantic collection of, you know, any song, you'd imagine on my iTunes. and so we argued about, we had some wage, I don't even remember where the wager was, but it was, in fact, Patty Smith, if that was right.

Right on, bro. And I think that, you know, you talked about his faith, and we've talked about on this podcast before, the, when you get somebody that is heroic, that oftentimes they have a certain sense of the word, that you just use was comfort. And you could see that with Mark that he was comfortable

in the fact that he might have to make the ultimate sacrifice. And I remember one of the things I'll never forget about Mark is as you guys would be rolling out on an operation.

And you would line up the vehicles right in front of the chow hall on our little base, shark base. And it, you know, if you guys were going out, I would go out there and see you guys off. And just to help everybody understand, like, we're rolling out on an operation into some of the most dangerous enemy territory anywhere. And people would come out with Jock and aren't from our task to shake folks' hands.

I mean, because you knew that it could very easily happen and not everybody's coming back from that off. And it was always reassured to see Jocko out there talking to people, shaking people's hands. And that was, and we're going out. particular operation like that where IEDs are causing catastrophic damage and killing soldiers and Marines every single day. Yeah. And those IEDs at this point were generally victim-activated IEDs,

which means that the person that's going to get blown up is what activates the IED, so they have some kind of a pressure plate or a crunch wire or something that a Humvee runs over and causes the IED to detonate. That was sort of the premier mode that the enemy was in at this point, which meant that if you were in the first vehicle, you were most likely to hit that IED. And I remember, you know, one of those nights came out and looked up at Mark and I said, hey, are you feeling lucky tonight? And he said a big smile on his face. And he said that the thing, one of the other things he had said in Vegas besides, you know, when are the new Cadillac? someone one of the other things that he'd get everybody saying is when the dealer would bust you know he'd say everybody's a winner everybody's a winner and so i looked up at him and he and he said everybody's a winner and then it was another time i went out there and and you know i said you read rock and roll tonight and he stood there in the turret and like like a movie you know they just have those cheesy salute scenes in a movie where the the the guy is salutes the officer he like stood at attention to his turret and just cracked me a super

crisp salute and I I probably like flipped him off or or you know which is highly unusual for a seal to do that yeah yeah but you could see man he just had that confidence and that comfort in who he was in what he stood for and he was ready for he was ready for anything including including the ultimate he was a phenomenal guy absolutely and just an honor to serve with men like that.

I think the last guy that they kind of represent in the movie American sniper is Biggles. Ryan Job, nicknamed Biggles who if you're in the military, if you're in the SEAL teams

and you use a heavy weapon the nickname for that weapon is a big pain in the ass weapon to carry and the nickname for it is a pig. And you're actually a pig gunner. If you carry that big. Mark 48 used to be an M60. Now it's a Mark 48.

They call that weapon a pig. Because you've got to carry that pig. And now you're a pig gunner. And his nickname was Biggles. And he nicknamed his weapon, Piggles. Biggles and Piggles. Just to think about the way they represented Ryan.

And I don't remember all that well. Again, they had a special screening of American sniper. forest down here in Coronado. That's when I saw it. I saw it one time. So I don't fully remember how they, I definitely remembered how they represented Chris and Mark, obviously. But, you know, Ryan, it didn't seem as significant of his role. So it was a little bit, they didn't make such a production out of bagels. But obviously in doing that, they again shortchanged just a fabulous character and an incredibly funny and lively and warm human being that was an absolute, just an absolute treasure of a person.

And so no one's going to, you know, if all you do is see the movie American sniper and even if even if we wrote an entire book about it. Biggles, you wouldn't be able to get across what any of these guys really brought to life. Yeah, he was a phenomenal guy. And I actually, you know, some people, some people talk to me. People have said to me before, you know, like, hey, who's the greatest person you've ever met? I met some phenomenal people in my life, you know, and I think my immediate reaction to that is Ryan Job. Ryan Job is the greatest person ever,

I mean, he just was, he was, and it was actually, what's crazy is when I first met Ryan, you know, when he, he joined our platoon, he got the nickname Biggles because he didn't exactly have the rippling six-back. He was just a toughest-nails guy that just would not quit no matter what, was determined to be a seal,

but struggle with the run, struggle with the swims, and got what we call the full benefit in our seal training of buds, which is, he got rolled back. He was no incredible athlete or physical specimen, especially when he showed up in Charlie Petun and T.U. Bruiser. No doubt. He was not ready for the teams at that point.

When Bigel's got the Charlie Battoon, we rolled right out to the deserts of Southern California and got what we call land warfare training on. And that's really man camp. We talk about seal training, and people think it's all about carrying logs around and boats and all that stuff that you see from that's really just our initial screening process

what we call buds basic on our demolition seal training going out and working together in a workup is really where the training to be a seal to be a teammate to work as a unit happens and so our whole task unit from Jock all the way down to our

lowest common denominator the most junior ranking man who happened to be Ryan Joe we went out to we went out to Southern California deserts and just And we shot weapons. We learned how to shoot, we would communicate. And it is, everything is difficult.

It is, you're going, you're dragging down men, you know, who are killed for training purposes over rocks and through cactus, and you're running and gun in, and it's hot, and it's tiring and exhausting, and it's awesome. And it's the training where the same training that's kept SEALs alive on the battlefield and are enabled us to do things for a long time. And SEALs have been training there since Vietnam. particular place where we go and train there. And it's awesome.

I love it out there. And when Biggles got out there, he was struggling. He was coming off of about, I'd say, 30 to 45 days of leave easy living. He was. And he'd gone after Buds where he'd had to make it through training, he had to be in shape. And now, you know, one of the things some people struggle with when they get done with that training is now it's up to them.

Now it's up to them to be in shape. Self-discipline. And some people have to be in shape. that self-diceman, and some people don't. And I certainly wouldn't at peak physical condition after that. I struggle with that. But Biggles took that

to a new level. And, you know, when he came out there, all of a sudden were handing him a 25-pound Mark 48 machine gun, which he named Biggles, as Giacos said. And he's got to carry this thing and carry the six to 800 rounds on him and move through

the jagged rocks and sand and desert in 150 degree heat and and he was struggling he was struggling anyone even in the greatest of shape that's challenging but Ryan was really struggling to keep up on that and so I remember having some very he was in my squad and so I was witnessing this I was watching this and we pulled them aside and said hey listen if you want to be here you better harden up you got to harden up the standard is here low you know the standard is is way up here and you're here you're way lower than that standard. So we had to

push him to get there. And I remember some stern counseling sessions. We assigned one of the guys from the triumvirate I mentioned before. It was one of the guys on his third platoon. Great dude. Our most experienced machine gunner. And we assigned him to be a mentor

to Biggles and train with him. And so every morning we would PT, work, go for runs. So when other guys were resting, Ryan He's got to go out for a run. He's cranking out pull-ups. He's training and working.

And, you know, it was, I didn't know how it was going to go then. He had a long way to go to get to where he needed to be, to be physically able to keep up and not track down the rest of the guys. And I don't think I've ever seen a guy make that kind of a transformation. That was an incredible transformation. Ryan must have looked himself in the mirror and said, this is what I want to do. I am going to turn this around completely.

And he became what we called Biggles, 2000, which was the new model. And I mean, he, by the time we deployed, you know, six months, eight months after that, that, that, that, uh, work up. He was born again hard. He was born again hard. And he, he was a, he never fell behind anything. And he always kept up with everybody and carried not only his way, but sometimes others

who were struggling. And, uh, and he would help them through. And it was, uh, it was funny, uh, a couple of stories about him. We were at Nylon. and he's in the weight room. And, you know, one of the things about buds, you're doing pull-ups, and, you know, I know Jocco on his Twitter feet always has the pictures of, like, ripped off calluses from doing pull-ups or deadlifts, you know, with the barbell.

And that's just part of buds. I mean, you tear up your hands on the ropes and all the O-course and everything you're doing. And so we're in the gym out in our land warfare training facility. And he's got these, like, the fingerless, like, weight lifting gloves on. Like you see in like goals gym. And I'm like, not allowed.

And I'm like, seriously? I was like, Biggles, come here. Why do you have gloves on? He's like, well, I'm just trying to protect my head. He like, like, gave me some energy like that. I was like, no. No, no. You need to harden your hands up, man.

No gloves. And he was, he was like, Roger that, no gloves. And he took that to such an extreme. On our operations, we always wear gloves on operations, because you're having to smash. through a window or wrestle down a prisoner and grab the hot barrel of a smoking red you know glowing red hot machine gun he was a machine gunner so he had to deal with that stuff so we were

we were we were mechanic's gloves are similar to to protect our hands from that and uh in i remember on patrol and in iraq look at him he's like no gloves on he took that to such an extreme he was like i am going to be a hard dude and i'm going to roll out with uh with no gloves on a carry this machine and I was like hey man where you go then I'm like hey where you're going I'm good I'm good and I don't know if it was not smart not smart but but hard

but tough and he was unbelievably tough and you know after Ryan got wounded and people that know the story of Ryan he got hit in the face with the enemy sniper round on the same day that Mark Lee was killed August 2nd 2006 and we thought he was a dead man you know

when he got hit the wound just looks so horrific I just didn't think anybody could survive that and and yet he did and I went over to grab his hand and said hey man we're gonna get you out of your hanging there and he like sat up and told me he was okay I was like it was unbelievable to see that I mean just how tough that guy was and and you know after that we were waiting for about three weeks to see he lost his right eye where he got hit and we realized later that he the only The reason he didn't get killed is because he was disciplined and he was on that machine

gun. We were two hours into an operation. It was a brutally hot day, you know, probably hitting 117 degree high in Ramadi. And he was on his weapon, looking down the sights and the round that was aimed for his head had hit his weapon, hit the receiver on that machine gun and deflected kind of back toward the right side of his face rather than taking his head off. and that's what saved his life, that discipline. But tragically, not only did he lose his right eye,

but the shrapnel from that severed the optic nerve to his left eye, and he was left blind, completely blind from that. And it was devastating when I got the news from that. And yet when I talked to him on the phone, and he'd been intubated, so he had this kind of really hoarse voice. That's right. Because he'd had him in an induced coma for a while. I think it was a week or so, several days at least.

It was a long time. It seemed like forever. And so we're waiting to hear, you know, his sight's going to come back or he's going to, you know, have his left eye. I mean, this is the difference being, you know, permanently disabled for the rest of his life or just having a nuisance of not having, you know, one eye. And when we got that word, it was just devastating. I mean, I'm talking to him on the phone. And he's in this horse, you know, horse voice he's talking, just tell him it's okay. And he's joking about wanting to get a parrot on his shoulder and eye patch, you know, so he can look like a pirate.

and he's just a just a phenomenal guy. And I don't know that I ever had a conversation with Ryan from that day forward that where we didn't laugh hysterically. I mean, he was the kind of guy that just looked at all the things he could still do in life was not going to dwell on his disability, was not dwell on the fact that his eyesight had been taken from him in the prime of his life, you know, and he just was a phenomenal guy. He showed me the true meaning of toughness.

and he just was of selflessness. And it was just, it was phenomenal to be around him. I mean, he was just the, he would, he was just such a funny guy. I, you know, I was thinking about it when I was, I was listened to an earlier podcast, and you were quoting from the book that I gave you, about the time you gave me about face. I gave you the few months after that, you gave you the wars I knew it by General George S. Patton, Jr. And I was thinking, you know, Jaco had mentioned that we were watching Pat and

in Ramadi and just to put that perspective we were watching we would project the film up onto the back wall of the camp and literally it's about a 20 foot high wall just on the other side of this wall is bad guys I mean if we actually did a bunch of operations right outside that wall so I mean this so here we are you know watch we're all in PT geared smoking cigars in our in our like workouts you know shorts and shirts wearing flip-flops you have like a you know these huge camel spiders run across your feet you don't want to get bitten by those things they're pretty nasty but we watched that movie a patent and I remember in particular Ryan was just so he was so he thought it was so hilarious there's a scene in the movie which is a phenomenal movie you

hadn't seen it the George C Scott movie is phenomenal but there's a scene in the movie where Patton gets passed over for promotion and one of his peers Omar Bradley who had actually been a subordinate to Patton is getting promoted above Patton and so it's obviously devastating it's obviously crushing for Patton and so one of the his aides runs up to him and he has the news but patten doesn't have the news yet and he's like sir general can i can i pour you a warm glass of milk can i draw you a bath and and ryan for some reason thought that was absolutely hilarious and i remember on multiple operations we'd come back you know guys were smoked and tired and uh bigles a roll up to me and say sir can i pour you a warm glass

of milk can i draw you back and just laugh and stare at that i was like shut the hell love but we had some good times the uh first of all i remember talking to him on the phone when he came out of uh the induced coma and again you know like you i'm thinking you know what do you say right and of course he just puts you at ease and just starts making jokes and then he says to me and he gets serious and he says to me i want to come back He says, I want to come back. Can I come back? And, you know, I said to him, listen, just get healed up and you can come back. And he's like, Roger that. And he goes, don't worry. And I said, don't worry what? He said, don't worry. I can still shoot. And I said, okay. And he goes, and sir. I can smell them. I said what?

He goes, I can smell the enemy and I'll know where to shoot. And I said, all right, if you get healed up, I will bring you back over here. And unfortunately, I mean, he was in real rough shape. It wasn't like he was just blind. I mean, he had massive damage to his sinuses, to his face. And, you know, we didn't get, we were home before he could even, even would have a possibility of coming back. But he certainly would have.

Oh, there's no doubt about it. And that was incredibly genuine. And that's just the kind of guy Ryan was. And what's amazing is, you know, he went on to do so many things. And, you know, he married his girlfriend at the time. He was a phenomenal lady, incredibly, incredibly phenomenal lady. And he went back to school after he got out. He was medically retired.

He graduated with a business degree at a 4.0. I was like, Ryan, dude, I think I had like a 2.8, 3. I got full eyesight, man. What in the world? And, I mean, he just could not be kept down. And he went and climbed. He summited Mount Rainier, 14,000-plus foot mountain, completely blind. I mean, that's a difficult mountain.

A lot of people get killed trying to climb that mountain. with the full use of their limbs and eyesight. And he went and did that great organization called Camp Patriot that helps wounded vets and had taken him up on that climb. And he called me up and said, hey, Leif, we're going elk hunting. And it's something we talked about in Iraq because Ryan was a big hunter, grew up in Washington State and had gone hunting. I grew up in Texas, and I loved to hunt.

And I'd gone out with Colorado and hunted up there. elk cutting. So we talked about doing an elk cut. And, you know, now I thought, well, it's, we can go. You know, we can listen to the elk and he can be, you know, part of the hunt, but he can't, you know, how can he actually shoot an animal? He can't actually do that anymore. And he said, it's like, they got some kind of gadgetry for me, you know, set up. He's like, I'm going to shoot an elk. And I was like, are you in? It was kind of like $100.00 hands. And I was like, I'm in. Absolutely. I'm in. And I think it was like my 10-year naval cabaret unit going on.

I was like, cancel that. We're going on. So Ryan and I went to win up there with Camp Patriot. They had this crazy, like, gadget set up on the scope or the weapon. And it was a camera. And it was, so you could look and through it the sights. And so we kind of had this, I was spotting for him, looking to the camera. We kind of got him situated, kind of told him when to hold.

We kind of had like a ready, five. higher terminology we came up with. And one thing about Ryan is that dude could shoot. And, you know, he struggled at Nileland, originally keeping up and, you know, with his physical fitness until he became Biggles 2000 and then was born again hard. But when we got to our shooting schools, we realized what this guy could shoot. He was a great shot. And so when we were training with that rifle, we were on the range and we're practicing

to go on this elk hunt, I'm talking a man on the target. I realize right away, like, if we miss, it's my fault because he's going to be, he's He's got to, right when I tell him to pull the trigger, he's hitting that target, and it's going to be right wherever that crosser is. So we kind of figured it out, and we went out and tracked this, this huge elk down that was donated by, you know, a great, great Google folks. And we went out, he shot a gigantic, like, world-class elk. That was a beast. And then once we got it, we were cleaning the thing, and he just, you know, he just, he wanted to got his hands in there, like elbow deep and in the cleaning. process and just it was it was a phenomenal phenomenal experience and Ryan just couldn't be he could

not be kept down he focused on everything that he could still do and it was some of things I couldn't even explain I remember when he was living in the Phoenix area and I went out to visit him and we're dry we had gone out to breakfast and we're driving back to his house and this is he'd only moved there after he was blind so he'd never been in this area before and We're driving past. He's like, you just missed the turn. And I'm like, obviously I'm driving. He's blind.

He's sitting in the past your seat. I was like, what do you mean? How do you know that? He's like, I just, you should have turned back there. And I was like, you know, soon it out, I was found my little smartphone and I, map it out. And it was like, you're exactly right. Like, we had to do a U-turn and go back. I don't know.

He had laid it out in his mind, just the grid, the grid system and what, how long it took to go where. And it was, it was phenomenal. And he taught me so much about just toughness and self-revelling. and just the attitude of be able to overcome any challenge and be thankful for the blessings you've been given. And he was just incredibly awesome warrior, teammate, and friend, and we miss him. I used to grapple with him, you know, after he was blind. And he wrestled.

He wrestled in high school. And so he had some scrap to him. And I remember, you know, first of all, you used to have that tears that come out of that eye. So he'd be like constantly kind of wiping the eye, getting tears all over me. Then I'd be giving them a hard time about that. Like, quit crying on me, baby. And, yeah, but it was awesome. It was awesome.

That's a great sport that you can do. You know, you realize how much contact is involved when you're doing that and how you can, it's so instinctual. And that was another thing. He just was like, oh, yeah, I'll grapple. I don't care. Can't see. No factor. And I always had to make and pay for the time when Chris, that was one of Chris Kyle's little, you know, little scams that he played was.

Let me, let me tell that. That was, because I had a good eyewitness to this scenario. So, Jocko's our tasking a commander, you know, and he's a black belt Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Everyone knows this because we're training at five o'clock every morning. We're all showing up and doing jujitsu and choking each other out. You could always see our, you could tell who our tasking it was, because when you called a name of someone, we would turn our heads, would turn our entire shoulders at the same time because our necks were getting cranked on.

That's right. Because we had just battle royale, as you would encourage it. But in particular, you know, Chris, and we talked about Chris Gilesons, it's a humor. It's a phenomenal guy. He had a great relationship with Ryan and really kind of took Ryan. under his wing and and one of the things Chris liked to do was instigate he was a huge instigator and uh and so they would they they talked Ryan into they're like hey Biggles come here you know so Biggles the new guy he's fired up like hey I want you to go get up in Laif's face you know

so and they'd have him come up and like stand in your face and like stare at you like one millimeter from your nose yes that's what you would do which was obviously very provocative And so that was the whole point. They were trying to just instigate some kind of, which, you know, I'd shove them across the room, get out of my face, you know. They had him do it to Jocko. He wouldn't do it for a little bit. He kind of did everybody else. And so they're like, do you got to do it to Jock?

They're like, you don't have any, you know, you don't have any balls, you don't do it to Jock. So finally, he's like, I'm sick of these guys telling me. He's like, I got to prove I'm a new guy. I mean, his manhood's on the line. I'm going to go do it to Jock. And he did it in a pretty public. forum because we were we were planning this is on our trip we're actually practicing like urban assaults so we're in this kind of a theater's type set up

and guys are you know planning the mission and I remember watching every so they not only if they talked him into it jaco doesn't know this but we all know it's coming so everyone's watching this and and so all of a sudden jaco like turns around it's so I think Chris or someone says like hey jacca jaco turns around and And Biggles is standing like one millimeter from his face, killing him this, like, evil stare down. And Jago just grabs him, like, turns him around, you know, grabs him, like, turns him around, you know, gets his back within, like,

in like half a second and just throws a rear naked choke on him. And he, he had to go sleepy time. And he's like, yeah, so you got a rear naked choke off. You're like tapping, he's like tapping, tap, tap. and Jock was like, I don't accept taps. And he just, and so he's, you know, he just, he goes to sleep. Jocko just kind of lays him down on the floor. And then we just kind of, and he just went on about away.

That's kind of normal day at the show teams. And then, you know, so like, you know, six or eight seconds goes by. He like comes back, kind of slowly comes to, gets up to a knee, then stands up, and he's like, kind of looks around, like, what happened? And we're all kind of kind of, Jock was just acting like nothing happening. Yeah. And everyone is laughing his step. And then, you know, Ryan's like, I thought you guys said you're going to have my back.

Because they told him, like, we'll have your back. And so I had, I had like, coach him out. I was like, hey, bagels, look, man, they're not going to have your back. That's the whole point. They wanted to see you get choked out. So after that, I think it was a good learning experience. But pretty legit, good times. And he was a great sport about that, just like everything else.

Yeah, yeah. So, like you said, just an amazing, amazing guy. And if anybody wants to, anybody's feeling sorry for themselves or, you know, these people that ask about mental toughness, just, just think yourself about Ryan. There's one more guy that, uh, that I've been asked about a decent amount.

And it's a guy that was in Live to Tell in the Mark Lee episode. And again, I was, knew that you'd be coming on at some point to talk about and we'd have an opportunity to talk about Tony Tony Fratty and Tony is a guy that I actually grew up with in the SEAL teams he was and just as you might suspect when you watch Liv to Tell and you see what his attitude is like he was a hard drinking fist fighting beer-swilling frog man and you know

and still is and still is to this day and there was you know how often he would come to work on Monday morning with a Shiner or you know bloody knuckles it was just it was just a normal occurrence I mean no we didn't even get asked questions about it back then

so Tony Fratty was an old school seal team one guy that you know kind of like me grew up in the seal teams and grew up in that era of the 90s and the dry years, still had some Vietnam veteran mentorship, but didn't really get that opportunity to be in combat until, you know, until obviously until September 11th. And what a, we actually, even though we were both at Team 1 together, we were never in a platoon

together. So we were buddies, we were drinking buddies, we hung out, but we never did a platoon together. And so I knew he had a very good reputation. He had a very good reputation as an operator. He always had that. But I never really worked with him. It wasn't until we were into asking a bruiser together that I actually worked with him for the first time. And when I realized for the first time what I had in Tony, beyond the toughness and beyond the tactical prowess was when we were at

actually we were at land warfare training the training that you were just talking about and you know there was a little kind of a quick operation to pull off and it was just a quick you know hey go and assault this area was the daytime it was basically going through the mechanics of an assault on a target and i was watching you and tony tony was your platoon chief i was watching you to kind of figure out the plan and you threw a couple ideas out there and he just said hey so sir, here's what we should do. Boom. Put these guys over here, set up a base over here,

bring the maneuver over here, and put one overwatch position on this hill. That's how we should do this. And you looked at him and said, that's awesome. That's perfect. Let's get everyone over here, and why don't you just go ahead and brief them up?

And he looked at you and he said, no, sir, you tell him what to do. It'll be better coming from you. And so here was a guy that obviously, because he'd been in the teams for 15 or 17 years, obviously had more tactical experience than you did. But he was so secure in his leadership and so secure in his tactical knowledge

that it didn't mean anything to him. And he realized that the best thing that he could do for the team and for your platoon was to let you lead this, let you put out the word, let you give the plan. And I realized at that point, And this was early in our workup, that this guy was not just a tactician,

not just a tough, badass frogman, but he was a real leader. And as I know you will say, you were absolutely blessed to have Tony as your platoon chief. I got to say the SEAL teams has produced some phenomenal, phenomenal individuals, some incredible battlefield leaders throughout the decades in the, proud legacy and history of the SEAL teams. And I can say with confidence that I believe that Tony Afradi is probably one of the best combat leaders of SEAL teams has ever produced. And I don't say that very lightly at all, but he was a phenomenal, phenomenal battlefield

leader. And you've heard of the break glass in case of war guys, this is that guy. And he was just... his experience level was phenomenal. I mean, he had, at this point, to put it in respect to as a platoon commander, I'm on my second platoon. So I had one deployment to Iraq. Chalko had a few deployments before because he was a, you know,

he would have been an enlisted man for eight years. And, but, you know, Tony was, this was his eighth deployment. I mean, he had massive amounts of experience in the teams. I think he'd been busted down and rank like twice, right? Yeah. You know, hard fighting guy. And he was, he wanted to be that. platoon chief. That's all he ever wanted to be.

And he was incredibly, incredibly good at it. I just, I can remember that same Lamb Warfare training you were just talking about. We're under fire. We're in a very difficult situation. There's a lot of chaos going on in this training environment. Here we are preparing

for actual combat. And of course, they're trying to make that as realistic as possible and as challenging as possible. And we're getting shot at from like one of the target buildings. And it's made out of like, you know, two by fours and, and plywood, the target building that's nearby, Tony realizes that we got to assault that target building now because we're taking fire

from that building. And he does a like full on sprint, like wide open for about 50 yards and does human battering ram into the doorway, one man clear into the building and like kills the role player who's shooting at us. And it was like, that's who Tony is. he's a total badass he's gonna handle the situation and that's the guy he was on the battlefield I mean he definitely he was he was the guy I mean we leaned on him the the only time that I ever had an issue working for jaco willing was when jaco said hey I'm gonna have to

put Tony with this other group of guys that's right that's right and I was like I was furious and angry about that in a way that was and until jacco kind of took me under his wing you said you said, hey, here's why I'm doing that. I had to balance out some leadership, you know. And we put him with the most junior guy. Yeah, put him with the most junior officer. Who is an incredibly capable guy and did phenomenal stuff. But it was the right call.

The definitely was the right call as much as I hated that. But that was difficult. But Tony was just one of those guys that, you know, he was intimately involved in the planning, default aggressive. I mean, just incredibly aggressive. We're going to go in there and we're going to hammer the enemy. We're going to go right in his backyard where he's never going to expect us. And we're going to win.

We're going to crush them. We're going to kill bad guys. And one of the things that gained us momentum, you know, you talked about earlier, Jocko, the mortars that hit right outside the building you were sitting in and killed the soldier wounded several others. We had IDs going off, and I know you were sitting in there in the meeting at the brigade. I went to, I was actually, I met the brigade commander once, I think, or maybe twice, but I went in there.

Actually, no what? No, it was the first time I ever met the brigade commander. So I go in to meet the guy that's in charge of all of Ramadi. And as I go in to meet him, I'm in his tactical operation center. And we had put guys, Tony, was out in the field doing a sniper overwatch for an ID, for ID emplacers, in an area called Firecracker, where there was IDs all the time and where days earlier an IED had gone off and had killed several Marines and wounded several more. So I come into the Tackle Operation Center, and I'm in there for 30 seconds, and a call comes in,

and it's the Marines reporting back that one of the SEAL snipers had just killed an IED implacer on Firecracker. And the brigade commander came out of his office to kind of see what, wait, what? And then there I was. And so it was the, again, like with the mortars, I could not have ever set up a better introduction to the brigade commander than saying, than that happening at that moment in time. And we'd been on the ground for maybe two or three days and already starting to have an impact taking out these bad guys.

And that fired the brigade commander up, and he immediately wanted to employ us in different locations throughout the city. And that was like a blank check for getting after it for us was, oh, you want us to go into these worst, the worst parts of Ramadi? We will do so, and we will do so immediately, and that's exactly what we did. Tony really had a vision, too, as far as getting the platoon ready and making sure that we knew, he had a feeling that we might need some sniper capability. And so we plused up the number of snipers well beyond what the normal number is within our 16-man seal platoon

to be ready for that. And he trained them and got him ready, and certainly leaned on Chris. his expertise there, but Tony was really the driving force of getting our platoon qualified and ready to go. And I remember one time in particular where we were looking through a, we moved into a really, really nasty area of South Central Amade. And there were two buildings that were right next to each other. And we were, several of us were, I was in a group that was across the street.

Chris and I were together on that one. Tony was with another group of guys that were across, that were in a different. different set of buildings and the building that we were in just it just wasn't a good position and we were trying to figure out where we need to go but it just was not a good position the sun was going to come up within you know pretty soon and we needed to get in position so we actually fell back and took a building right next to where Tony and his guys were and we actually smashed through the concrete wall connecting them the the wall that supported there was no doorway or anything window but we had to make a walkway so we could actually like get in it out and

communicate with each other. And I'm sitting there and listening to the radio and on my command of control position. After the sun came up and Tony was a sniper looking through a loophole in the wall, which is like a hole that was maybe six or eight inches in a diameter that we'd smashed out with a sledgehammer. Sometimes we use explosive charges. But it gave you a little bit of cover so that you didn't get shot in the face by some enemy, another enemy sniper across the street or somebody shooting at you with a machine gun. And so he's sitting there on a sniper rifle when I just hear this crack.

and it was just a round coming in and it missed his head by like two inches maybe I mean it came right in just whizzed past his face slammed into the wall just behind him and so I hear the crack and then I hear some profanity

and then I hear some like Rambo style yell and then I hear just machine gun fire and yakackackackackackackackackackackackack and so Tony the round had come in past his face and Tony was pissed and he reached over, grabbed a Mark 48 machine gun,

and dumped a 100-round belt through the loophole. We had no idea where the round really came from, but 100 rounds got shot back in the general direction, and I think that was discouraging to whoever was shooting in it. So that's the kind of guy who Tony was. He was going to... You shoot one bullet at me? I'm shooting the 100 back.

And, you know, he was the guy, too. Because he had that relationship with you, when I first checked in the SEAL Team 3, me and the Delta Battalion Commander who was a good friend of mine that we'd gone through Bud's with

the Jocko referenced earlier you know we had heard about this guy Jocko and interestingly enough I actually heard your name before

mispronounced of course Jock Willanek from a guy that I grew up with when I was in like high school and he started training in Jiu-Jitsu and I was starting to talk about being in the SEAL teams I wanted to be a SEAL

And our family friend said, yeah, I rolled jiu-jitsu with this guy who's a seal. His name was Jocko Willanek. And he beat me in this tournament. He's a great guy. So he was talking about you. So I had heard that name before. And then when we were working together at Team 3, I was like, okay, I hear this guy, it's actually pronounced Willing, Jocko Willing.

Okay, this is that same guy that I heard about, you know, years ago before I was even in the Navy. And so, you know, we're like, who is this guy? We hadn't met him before. I knew a bunch of the guys already in the platoon. Tony said, I remember standing there looking at the board. We had the boards like magnet boards of all the names that are going to be in the platoon. And, you know, I'm at the top of the OIC and then Tony's next. And then a bunch of guys underneath.

Chris is kind of right up there. And he's like, or like I said, what can you tell us about Jocko? He's like, Jocko is the guy we want as our task of the commander. We're good to go. That's how he was like, Roger that, we're good. So that was my first introduction to Jocko. Yeah, yeah. And then as the Delta Platoon commitment,

Jock gave us his typical stare-down, Hi, I'm Jock. I don't like people when I meet them. Face, when he meet that, I'm going to intimidate you and look at you with furrowed brow and jutting out jaw. I might have to fire you guys in, I don't know,

two weeks, three weeks, we never know. So the Deltipater commander is now, you know, just certainly a good buddy here is a great buddy of mine and was like, who is this guy? He's staring at me. I don't know if he likes, but I can already tell.

And Tony was like, listen, he's good to go. Don't you worry. Tony, awesome. Just outstanding. And I think one of the things that impressed me about him was that he,

those old Vietnam lessons, the old school, just hardcore frog man stuff, he held the line on that as far as getting ready as far as gear inspections as far as debriefs

and the planning he just he just had that intense level of of patience and of focus on the operations like nothing else in the world mattered to him

he drove standards no doubt I mean he enforced standards and he was just expected expected us to be hard. You know, when guys wanted to get soft and, hey, you know, do we really need to push ourselves hard? Like, no, we're going to be hard. And, you know, in his thick New Hampshire accent,

he'd say, you better get you can of hide. We're going out to get it on. And, you know, one of the things that became a mantra for our platoon was BTF, big tough frogman. And what Tony would say that, like, hey, we knew, like, we're going to beTF. What are we going to do? We're going to beat F in. We're going to get in a big mix-it-up, which meant a big gunfight.

Then we're going to BTF out. And then we added Big Chow. Then we're going to go to Big Chow, hit the Chow, we're done. Well, BTF meant we're going to go in. It's going to be hard. It's going to be tough. We better, you know, we're going to carry. A lot of these roads were so dangerous.

We didn't drive as we would foot patrol in for, you know, kilometers carrying heavy gear, tons of water with us. We had to bring all that stuff in, and it was just, it was tough. It was difficult. And we were going to BTF, and we took pride in that. Yeah, BTF pretty much became a way to overcome any obstacle of any kind. Mental, physical, environmental, all you had to do is just BTF, you know. Oh, there's some kind of a challenge at BTF, BTF, and then what are we going to do?

BTF, more. I actually remember Tony's saying, because, you know, I don't sleep a lot, and he doesn't sleep a lot. So we would spend time together when everyone else was sleeping. and he'd come down to my office and I'd say What are you doing up? He goes, I was just laying in my bed Bedief, BTF, BTF, BTF, BTF, BTF, BTF, BTF, BTF,

BTF, so I figured I'd come down and see you. I remember him sitting in the camp. He would get, you could track it. We'd come back from an op. He'd be happy. He was fired up. We'd drop our gear every single time with great, tremendous discipline.

I talked about him in Forces Standards. Hey, we just got done with an op. Everyone's tired. Everybody's exhausted. Drop your gear is what he'd tell everybody. 10 minutes, I want you in the mission planning space. And we'd go through that post-operation debrief, just talking about what went right, what went wrong,

what we'd learn from it, what's the enemy doing now that we hadn't seen before. How can we adapt to that every single time? There was no cut in the corners. We did that every time we could do it in kind of a short, concise form. But he'd be happy. We just got back from now. We just went out and did some damage. And then you could track Tony's happiness factor.

It was inversely proportional. His happiness factor was inversely proportional to the amount of time we spent in the camp. So the longer we stayed in the camp, he's like, he's like getting angry. I'm getting angry. And if we had an op canceled, which was pretty rare, but every once in a while we'd have a night where we didn't go out, and he would just be angry. I want to go out.

I want to go get some. Why are we in the camp? And, you know, as we wrap up on Tony and Tony was definitely a force, but just so everybody knows. that this was a task unit of 40 plus guys. And there was absolutely a core group in there, and Charlie and Delta Platoon, of guys that were without question,

without any question whatsoever, warriors that, like I said, held the line and towed the line, and went forward over and over again. and the rest of the guys, maybe the guys that weren't quite in leadership positions, but it was a very tough deployment. Casualties, firefighters, killed, wounded. And there was stress, massive amounts of stress, and there was combat fatigue, and there was fear.

But all these guys over time. came that fear to do their job so we could accomplish the mission that was put in front of us. I think that's something that has to be recognized. Some of these guys are still active duty, and we're not going to name them. We're not going to talk about them, but they were a critical, critical part of the team. And that it's not, you know, as we're kind of back to what we were talking about with American Sniper earlier. I mean, I think Chris would be the first person to tell you that this is a team.

effort it is a huge team effort and so we couldn't have done it the snipers couldn't have done any of the stuff they're doing without the machine gunners without guys carrying the rockets without the guys carrying the radio and all the heavy equipment that goes with that and you know the corpsman that's carrying his you know all of his equipment we couldn't have done any of that as seals without the support from the Army and Marine Corps and what the support those guys brought to us and so it was a massive massive team effort and just particularly those guys in Charter-Batoon I was I just couldn't have been more

proud of our guys going through some incredibly difficult situations and stepping up and getting the job done and making the best of a very bad situation doing what they need to do. And it is, it was just an honor. It was an honor to serve with those guys. It would always be, we had some horrific days. I would do anything to trade those days. I'd do anything to trade places with Mark Lee and with Ryan Job and chartered to who gave their lives, but most of those days were the best days of my life and always will be.

And it was just such an honor and a privilege to be a part of that. And one day I'm going to get the Delta platoon commander on here, and I'm going to tell you right now he's going to say the same thing about his crew and the work that they did and the incredibly harsh environment that they went through and the sustained combat operations that they conducted. well so thanks to all those guys and thank you jocco Willick for being our leader for training us for teaching us for inspiring us for instilling in us this default aggressive mindset to go out on the battlefield into the fray into the worst most dangerous areas and make a difference and win and none of that would have been possible without your leadership and I'm proud to have served with you. And I could tell you that was,

you read your speech earlier. That speech was incredibly powerful. It's something that resonated across the SEAL teams with me, my generation of SEALs, and every SEAL that I knew or worked with about what that meant.

And it really captured so much of what we think in a way that maybe other folks couldn't articulate it, but it's certainly captured the message of what seals should be doing, the nature of war, how we need to train, how we need to prepare ourselves, and how we always need to remain there. And when you gave that speech, and I was honored to give a speech as well at that retirement ceremony, but as you packed your bags and retired and left the SEAL teams, I remember thinking, it's a sad day in the Jocco the SEAL of SEAL teams. And it was a...

really it really was but you certainly left your mark on the SEAL teams not only for me and all the guys from T.U. Brewers that we served with but the generations of SEALs that you trained that you passed on those leadership lessons are to so we thank you. I'm not dead yet but thanks thanks brother appreciate it it's awesome and yeah let's uh let's quit talking about each other and let's some questions from the internet how does that sound i'm with that echo by the way echo charles is here today echo charles

yeah hey guys how you doing glad to be here with you all welcome welcome back right on well i might as well i might as well read you guys some questions right yeah do you feel the same way yep fire away all right cool first question i'm just going to direct these at both of you guys yeah

jocco and life assuming someone would be a good seal officer. Would you suggest they go enlisted first, get experience, then become an officer? Would you suggest that? Or the other choice would be just go straight officer commission. So I guess we have both of those examples here. I was enlisted first.

Laif went straight commissioned out of the Naval Academy. And I think we're probably going to say pretty much the same thing here in terms of... To me, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter where you get your commission from. It doesn't really matter if you get a commission. It doesn't really matter. There's guys in the SEAL teams. There's enlisted senior leaders that are awesome examples.

They're awesome leaders. They change people's lives. They have a huge impact on the battlefield. There's obviously officers that do the same thing. I think, you know, I had an incredibly lucky career, and I had a great career, and I wouldn't change any part of it at all. You know, I was lucky enough to being an enlisted guy and do multiple deployments as an listed guy and then be an officer and do multiple deployments as an officer.

And it was great. And I wouldn't change any part of it. And I know plenty of guys that were officers their whole career and they wouldn't change any of that. And I know plenty of guys that were enlisted guys their whole career and they wouldn't change any of that. So I think the important thing is think about what piece of the puzzle you want to feel. fit into what you really want your your expertise and your job to be i don't know what do you think waif you wish you would have done sometime as an e-dug as a sled dog for sure i mean look there's there's a part of me that certainly always wishes that uh but uh look i think it's it's just a different

it's a different job you're going to always uh as an officer straight out of a commission source i had to lean on those i had to lean on those chiefs i had to lean on those leading petty officers those folks who had experience who could help me and guide me. And, you know, no matter who you are, you're not going to have it all figured out. And it's something that Ijako, you talk about often, we talk about often, and when we work with companies. So having run our leadership course, what we call the junior officer training course, and every single SEAL officer that graduates from, you know, from every commissioning source that graduates from the SEAL training pipeline, goes through this course.

It was about a five-week course, four-week of classroom, one week of field training exercise, where we're kind of out in the field and putting these guys through some challenges. And I led that for two years. I instructed that course, and I think we put 130-something officers through that. And the best officer, we had some great officers that went through that, and probably the best officer I put through was a prior listed seal. We had some officers that struggled. and probably the guy who struggled the most was another prior enlisted seal.

Both these guys had been prior enlisted a commission officer. So it just goes to show you that you've every source, whether it's a naval academy, whether it's prior enlisted and going to Seaman Amble program, whether it's coming in through OCS, officer candidate school or ROTC at universities. You've got outstanding people that come out of those commissioning sources. You've got some people that aren't that good that come out of those commissioning sources. So it's about you, and I think it's kind of immaterial. The physical part is pretty important, right, going in?

Well, of course. You've got to have some level of athleticism, but it's not... Is it too obvious? Yeah, it's not... It just, if you... Yes, show up and be ready to make it through the training, but that has next to nothing to do with your ability to lead people. Of course, you have to be physically fit.

You have to be able to... I mean, there's no... doubt you have to be physically fit. Yeah. That's like a ground base. No doubt about it. So if you don't have that, you're not even close.

So everybody that is going to be in a leadership position in the SEAL teams is physically hit, period. Gotcha, okay. Yeah, I'm for whatever reason thinking just to be a SEAL. Okay, cool. All right, next question. Chakwin-Layf. Are your books principles universal

or only for U.S. audience? we work with audiences anywhere. They apply to anywhere. I mean, across the world, human beings in any kind of leadership capacity, in any capacity,

you know, business or life. And, Jock and I've actually done a lot of work internationally as well. So we've done, I've spoken to groups in Europe. I've worked with leadership training groups from China

and spoken in Canada. I mean, across the world, we're leaders or leaders are dealing with the same kind of problems. problems, same kind of issues. This is not universal only applies to America. It applies anywhere. Yeah, and what I found is, and Jockey always talk about like how it's relationships, building relationships up and down the chain of command. So, and really that relationship's

theme is, is kind of everything in life, whether it's like your friends or your spouse, husband, a wife, or whatever, in the teams or in business, right? So relationships apply to everything. everybody in the whole world, no matter what culture, U.S. or otherwise. So each different type of person, right, where the people who read your guys' book isn't always going to be a military guy or a business guy. But I just had a friend who sent me a picture. He was in Frankfurt, Germany, walking through out of his hotel, and there's a guy sitting in the lobby at, like, the coffee bar reading Extreme Ownership in Germany.

So, I mean, this is, it's everywhere. And I think leaders who seek to be better, I mean, this book is for them. The principles in this book are for them. And a lot of the companies who work with, they, even if they're based in the U.S., they have ties to other countries, manufacturing plants in Mexico or China or, you know, across the world and do business across the Atlantic Ocean, across the Bessabia Ocean. I mean, it's a very international, interconnected world out there. And, I mean, most of the companies we're working with these days have offices in South America.

or Asia or Europe and they're kind of worldwide. This could, and this is going to sound kind of crazy, but this could easily be a relationship counseling guide as well. Well, obviously, if you take extreme ownership of your relationship and you realize where it could be you, that could be the problem in your relationship, yes. Now, that being said, Echo Charles, this will not turn into a relationship podcast. We're here to talk about war. You're not going to be Dr. Laura.

Yes. It's not happening here. Not happening. Good try. Okay. Thanks. Next question. Tell us a story about Buds.

So Buds is the basic steel training that you see on TV and that you see people carrying logs on their heads and boats around and doing push-ups and pull-ups and getting wet and sandy. And the reason that I don't talk about Buds a lot is because it's not, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what the SEAL teams is all about. And in fact, when you get in the SEAL teams, you realize that Buds is nothing more in a screening process to weed out people that don't really want to be there. but if you compare it to what you have to do once you get in the teams, it's actually nothing. Because there's no way that you can compare,

hey, you got to go get in cold ocean water and then roll around in the sand. Oh, no. And I always think back to the first time when I was in the, I was at Camp Corregador, and I'm rolling out on the first major operation we were doing in the Malab district of Armani. and there's tires burn in the street, there's smoke, you can hear the gunfire. Getting wet and sandy and being cold is a joke compared to that.

So that's why the whole Bud's thing is something that I just, it's not that big of a deal. And I think some guys try and turn it into a big deal, especially if that was kind of the highlight of their career was going through seal training. Yeah. But if you were in the teams and you deployed overseas, then that shouldn't be the highlight of your career. It shouldn't be the highlight of your knowledge. It shouldn't be the highlight of your, the man test that people like to consider buds, not a man test.

It means you didn't quit being cold. Good job. And to that point, I think it's, you know, for those folks that didn't really get tested in combat or didn't get a chance to go out on the battlefield and experience the just, incredible physical nature of combat and how difficult it is then buds is like everything

and so they talk about buds all the time and so it's kind of this legendary thing and look it's a great training program it's been around for a long time it screens out the people that don't have the characteristics as jaco said that we think are going to be successful and it works and we should keep those standards high and we should push that I thought buds was a pretty

good time we had some great times in buds I love the guys I went through buds with most of them and but it's it's gotten nothing on combat and you know it's interesting that some of the the big political uh discussions today you know one of the one of them is the integration of women into the seal teams into special operations into infantry units and everyone's always focused on you know if they can meet standards and and if they're uh you know if if if if if they can make it through training then they should be they should be you know they should be able to go out and serve right

and they're focused on training and the people they're talking about training at the highest levels because they don't know what it's like to be in real combat. And real combat is infinitely harder than the toughest. I mean, why aren't we talking about integrating the NFL? Where you've got huge, big, strong guys that are smashing each other. And yet that's, you know, maybe you get a concussion. Maybe you tear your ACL. Maybe you break your elbow, you know, or snap up, snap your wrist.

You're not going to get killed. Very rarely does someone get killed in the football game, right? And where combat is infinitely harder than that. infinitely more difficult than that. And so, you know, and unlike a football game that's over in, you know, just a couple of hours, you're talking about something that can last weeks, months, even years. And it's just the physical nature of combat cannot be overstated. It is incredibly difficult.

And when people are shocked to hear that, you're like, tell me some stories about buds. You know, buds carry some logs, man. Don't quit. Okay. I mean, it's make it through, you know. Yeah. It's combat where you're, and you'll see it, too, guys who excelled in buds because they're great athletes, sometimes we'll go to the battlefield and they're like, I remember the first time that an IED, I saw an IED going off about a block away from me. And we were sitting on the rooftop in a sniper position.

This is my first appointment before Jock and I were working together. And all of a sudden, there's a hundred foot fireball that goes up in the air. I mean, the blast wave hits me and just knocks me on my ass and frathing. just metal fragments and shards of concrete and stuff just raining down all over the place from from a block away you know from us and uh it was it was like damn that is that is not something i want to be standing on or riding a vehicle when you hit that thing and when you see something like that or like just the kinetic energy of rounds coming in and just you know think of the biggest strongest guy you can imagine with a sledgehammer just smashing a wall next to you and

and, you know, multiply that time seven or 800 rounds a minute for a belt-fit machine gun. I mean, it's incredibly difficult and dangerous and overwhelming. And so you see some of the toughest guys that did well in buds are like, ooh, not necessarily eager to go out in that. And so it's a whole new level of difficulty. And it's just, it can't be overstated. So I think that it's the difficult is a combat. Again, just cannot be overstated. People need to understand what the reality that is like.

I think this idea that America is not going to, oh, we kind of dictate the nature of wars. And, you know, as we've been told, the tide of war is receding. And it's just not true. As Jocko said in his retirement speech, the nature of war does not change. And we're going to always have to fight wars. We're going to always have to be in difficult conflicts. We don't get to choose that. And so we better be ready for those difficulties.

In the late 90s, we would hear that from senior leaders. leadership that we don't look the the direct action mission we're not going to be doing these those anymore why would we do a direct action mission when we can send an Tomahawk missile and then oh why would we do a reconnaissance when we can send over a drone and why would we go clear buildings house to house when we have technology that can put bombs right into buildings so this idea that we're going to have the ground wars are over we need to move on to the next phase of warfare and and adapt to a new way of doing things.

And of course, what was it, eight years later, September 11th happened, we spent 15 years in Afghanistan and whatever, 10 years in Iraq, that on the ground doing those very missions that everyone thought we would never do again. So yes, the nature of war does not change. And it's not about technology either.

Some of the guys that don't make it through that training, think, oh, man, if I can just get through somehow and I'll get all this cool gear and I'll have night vision and lasers and I'll be badass and it's like it's not about that and while we need to we need to invest in technology certainly and equip our military accordingly

it's the people that matter it's leadership at all levels that matter you know one of my favorite quotes from the hero of the Pacific War who was in charge of the entire it was the commander in chief of all forces US forces in the Pacific

I got named Chester Nimitz Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz good old boy from from central Texas. And he said our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense, but in ourselves. And I mean, that's just exactly true.

And we've got to always push those standards, keep those standards eye, prepare people for the difficulties of real actual combat, and just how physically demanding it is and crushing it can be and be ready. so then we can execute and we can win. Next. Back to Buds real quick.

How long is Buds? Six months, right? Yeah, about 27 weeks or so. Because a lot of people think that it's like, you know, hell week, right? That's the time where you don't sleep that much or whatever. I think some people think that that's buds. Like you just don't sleep ever, and it's all hard. They drowned you and then they bring you back to life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nuts. Anyway, next question. aside from command, what is your favorite operator specialty? Machine gunner, Reacher, Corman, et cetera, thanks. Well, my personal preference was a radio man, because I was a radio man. When I was a young enlisted guy, I was standing on the quarterdeck. Standing quarterdeck watch, this senior guy said to me,

what are you going to do? What are you going to do to do in a platoon? And I said, I don't know, maybe a machine gunner. Because, of course, when you're a young kid, you want to be a machine gun. Don't, give you the damn machine gun. And he said, don't be a machine gunner. You want to be a radio man because they go on every operation. I said, okay, fair enough.

Went upstairs and volunteered to be a radiamen. So they put this 30-pound radio on your back and carry the radio. And it was very lucky for me because that got me in the position where I was part of planning, even as a very junior guy. I was part of the planning. So I learned a lot about planning. I was lucky because I did shipboard deployments. So then I was involved in planning and working with them.

Marine Corps, so I had some experience with big conventional units, and I learned a lot then. So I was always very preferential to the radio man. I thought it was the most cerebrally challenging job. Now, that being said, let me tell you what I wanted my platoons to think. I wanted my platoons to think that each guy was the most important guy. I wanted the radioman to think that he was the most important. I want the corpsman to think he was the most important because he was going to save everybody. I wanted the snipers to think they were most important because they were going to kill everybody.

I wanted the machine gunners to think they were the most important because they were going to lay down the fire and get us out. So I was always a big supporter of all of them. And you need them all because it's a team. And you get those people and I go, oh, this is more important or this or, you know, my job is the best. And we were talking about Chris and the kind of portrayal in American sniper as a sniper. You've got to have that entire element working together. You got to have those machine gunners. You got to have the corpsman.

You got to have the radio man who's passing position. And, you know, telling friendlies where you are so you can get help, you know, directing, help in where you need it, you know, and telling where the enemy is. I mean, all that stuff is absolutely critical. I think as a, as far as a favorite specialty, I like to shoot. I like combat shooting. Combat rifle, pistol shooting. It's always been one of my favorite things to do.

I love that about the SEAL teams, you know, training in combat. rifle pistol shooting it, you know, moving and hitting different targets and shooting against steel targets. And we go to these amazing ranges and it's super fun. And that being said, that's not my job. And that is a real realization you have to come to as a leader, is that my job is not to shoot. And I've got to be able to shoot because there are times when I'm the only guy who can do that and I've got to be able to eliminate a threat and I've got to be able to do it accurately.

So I have to be able to do that just like I've got to be able to do that. just like everybody else but that's not my job and I really learn that in our advanced training you know after buds there's another six months of what we call steel qualification training and and one of my instructors you know as jock and I often say like failure is sometimes the is the best teacher often the best teacher and I remember I was trying to shoot lay down fire for my squad we're under fire we're shooting and I was actually trying to look around and I got a safety violation for that for like trying to

shoot rounds down range and trying to look around. I was like, guess what? You can't do both. And I was like, Roger that. I should have gotten a safety violation. It's dangerous. You never want to pull the trigger on your weapon. If you're not looking down your weapon controlling where the sites are. And it was exactly what it should have happened. But it was a realization of me like, I can't do both. And why do I need to be shooting right now?

Because there's like eight other guys in the squad that are laying down fire. And there's nobody else that's looking around. It's my job to high port my weapon, which means it's pointed at the sky. And I've got to be looking around, take a step back off the line. Jock often talks about detach and look around. So I'm making that call as command of control. And if I'm not doing that, nobody's doing it. And so leaders have to always be reckoned.

You have to understand the specialties. You have to understand how that stuff works, what the capabilities and limitations of your guys are, of the departments and the team, of the assets that you have within your team. But you can't get sucked into the details. you have to stand back and high port your weapon, detach yourself, and be the command control to make those big strategic decisions. Next question. How easy or difficult do you find it to delegate command and control? It's really hard.

Until you are totally overwhelmed. And guess what? In combat, you're going to be overwhelmed. I mean, you can't do it all. And so anything in life is like this. And so when you know, you know, as a platoon commander, I have got two junior officers who are my assistant battalioners. And they don't have the experience I have.

It's their first appointment. And my job is to train those guys up. And so I've got to give them responsibility and teach them how to be a platoon commander and empower them and train them and mentor them. I'm sure it was incredibly difficult. In fact, I know it was incredibly for Jock, who had a lot of experience.

done a lot of direct action, captured kill missions in Iraq to let me be a platoon commander to go out and plan and run that stuff. But you have to do that. And so you have to train people. We always talk about how leaders have to work themselves out of a job. That's what they should be doing. You have to do that so that you're training the people underneath you to grow and learn and take on greater responsibility so that you can constantly look up and out and then you can grow and learn and take on greater responsibility. Yeah, we talked about that a little bit too, right? Delegation, like in my case, the creative field where if I'm going to have someone to take care of some stuff, it's hard to trust them to do it, even though it's just in your own head,

because you're used to doing it this certain way. And you even see that person doing it different, even in that one way. You're like, oh, you get all, you know, uneasy about it, but how you were talking about how you give them a certain type of mission, just like a, you know, you focus on that result. They know why they're doing it. Here's what I want you to go out there and do. Go out there and do it. And I can't really get concerned on how you go out there and do it.

Because, you know, in Ramadi is a perfect example. You know, Leif had his element that was going out, but there was multiple other elements that were going out in different parts of the city all the time. And so I couldn't get in the weeds on Laf's and I couldn't get in the weeds on the other four or five element commanders that were going out at certain times. I mean, all at the same times often.

and so I had to absolutely let go of it and let these guys make it happen. Now, the reason I was able to do that was because we had built up trust. I had put those guys through the ringer. I had micromanaged them and just been a total, I don't know, how would you describe it? I mean, when we first started workup, I was really in the weeds with them. Like, hey, no, you need to. You kept tight rains out of the gate. So look, this is how you need to do it.

I wasn't telling them what to do, but I was kept pushing them. Okay, look what you did here. Think about this. Move in this direction a little bit. You can't do that right there. And it didn't take long where the guys like, okay, they know what the expectations are. They learn. And now I don't have to worry about them.

So now what can I worry about? Now I can start worried about deconfliction. Now I can worry about what the strategy is. And, you know, for bigger operations, obviously, when we were doing battalion-sized operations, obviously, I've got to go out there and coordinate with the battalions. and sometimes go out just to go out and see how these guys are operating. But I couldn't go out with five different guys,

five different elements at the same time or even two different elements at the same time. And so you have to build the trust and have the confidence in your leadership and then give them the guidance, the parameters, the expectations, the goals, make sure that's very clear. And then you can let them go

you can let them run and you can do your job. And that's how we rolled. And Jocko actually, I mean, I remember this well because I knew that he wanted to be out on the battlefield with us on every single operation. I mean, that's just where he would choose to be. And yet he saw his place as, listen, I've got managed these other helmets. And I remember a couple times when I was like, Jaco, why don't you, why don't you come on this op with us? Like, go on the sniper overwatch with us. And you were like, no, I can't do that.

And even though I knew he wanted to do it, he knew he had to, you know, whether it was approval of plans for the other guys that were across the city or other helmets that were out there doing those things, that he understood what his role was and realized that if he was out there with me, even though it had been fun, he'd been getting gun fights. And that was exactly where he wanted to be that he wouldn't be able to provide that support to some of the other guys and what they were doing. And so he couldn't do that. And so it was, I know that was incredibly doical for you. And one of the reasons that Leif knows that is almost as soon as we got there, I said, Hey, Leif, I'm going out in the field for a little while. You're going to be tasking to commander. I left him back and went out the field.

That was so awesome. And yet, it was one of those things. And I'll tell you, that was actually one of the reasons why I did realize I couldn't go out as much as I would want to because I had to maintain command and control. So like I said, if it was a big operation where there was multiple units involved, obviously I'd go out. Sometimes I would go out just to go out because you have to, you know, I always talk about this. You can't be so far back in the rear that you don't know what the guys are going through. So I got to just go out there just to go out, go over to Craigor or go on some operations or go out to the one MC and see what it's like up there.

But the fact of the matter is I had to be in the position to command and control. and I kind of learned that out of the gate when I left Laif back at camp. We had some significant operations happen, and he got caught in a firestorm, and I wasn't where I should have been. So I had to tighten myself up a little bit. It had to be more judicious in the way,

in the timing that I rolled out, because it is hard to delegate. It's hard to delegate, especially not only do you want to do it, But there's an element of pushing your kid out of the, out of the nest for the first time. And you feel like I want to be there. I want to make sure that this goes good. And not that I didn't trust these guys, not that they weren't perfectly fine on their own, but no matter what, these are your bros, these are your buddies,

and you want to be there to make sure to give them everything that you can. and so that's another little element of it that makes it hard. But you have no choice. Cool. Next question. How do you overcome the handcuffing boss, a boss who isn't a leader and doesn't trust his employees? And he's a credit hog.

I know a little something about this. Jocko the credit hog. Jocko the credit hog, handcuffing us. Didn't trust us. No. Not true at all. Jocko was the opposite of that. But this is, listen, the answer is pretty easy, and this is something that Jocko taught me,

because I have a hard time with this. Like, you know, somebody that if I'm one of those hard-headed guys that, you know, wants to just go accomplish the mission, default, aggressive, let's get it done. And if someone's preventing me from doing that or asking me a question that I think is even tangential, I'm furious and frustrated by that. And Jocco had to kind of tighten me up a few times on that and say, listen, throttle back. and you know you got really what that is it's just about putting your ego in check if you put your ego in check and you make that boss look good who cares who gets the credit for it it's about the mission and

whether or not you're accomplished the mission and guess what if you go out and accomplish the mission the guy who's in charge is going to get the credit for regardless right so that's okay and you can't worry about that and there's the more you accomplish that mission the the the the will be shared, the truth will be seen, and you're going to get, you will read the rewards, your team will reap the awards from that, regardless of whether it's the overbearing boss or not who's trying to be the credit hog. And so you just can't worry about that. You have to put your ego and check. You've got to make your boss look good, and you've got to accomplish the mission. The handcuffing boss, the way you overcome the handcuffing boss is by building a relationship with them.

and I'll probably end up saying this on every podcast. I had the same relationship with every boss I ever had, whether they were psychopathic micromanagers or whether they were tactical genius, laissez-faire leaders. I had the same relationship with all of them, which was they trusted me, they knew I was going to get the job done,

and they gave me what I needed. That's what you're trying to accomplish. And some people, as Leif just pointed out, you have to work harder to achieve that. Some people are less trusting. Some people are more paranoid. You're going to end up having to figure out these other human beings. And that's what is hard about leadership, especially up the chain of command.

So you've got to figure out this puzzle of a human being and you've got to get towards that strategic goal, which is building a relationship of trust. And once you have that, the cuffs are going to get unlocked. Now, the other piece, the credit hog, that Leif just talked about, clearly, clearly, if you are saying to yourself, he's taking all the credit and I'm not getting mine, that's the red flag. That's the alert saying, hey, brother, your ego is calling. You need to put it in check. Like Leif said, you want to make your boss look good. Nothing you can do better to build trust with your boss, then make him look good and give him all the credit.

He's going to let you run. Those handcuffs are going to get a little looser every time you do that. I never cared about who got credit. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? We're going to put that ahead of accomplishing the mission that we're here to do? No. The credit doesn't matter.

Give the credit to your boss. Deliver it to your boss on a platter, on a silver platter, bring him that credit. And walk away from it and say, I'm going to go get you some more. and those cuffs are going to come off. Make it happen. Interesting. Next question. What do you do where you know an order is bad,

but if you don't fall in line, the punishment will be terrible. Jocko, you talked about this when you were reading the Maxim's Napoleon. And I think the quote was something like every general in chief who, in consequence, of orders from his superiors, gives battle with a certainty of defeat of his army,

ruin is culpable. And I think that's exactly true. And what that really means is extreme ownership. You own it regardless. And so, you know, in the military, you've got the uniform code of military justice, which is the legal framework that the military falls underneath. Our laws, our military justice system. And you're obligated to not follow a illegal order. So if someone gives you an order to go execute prisoners or do something that you shouldn't do,

you actually are legally obligated to not follow that. And that following orders, like, you know, whether you're, and it didn't work in Nuremberg, right, for the SS guards who sent people to their deaths and say, oh, it's just following orders. It's not, that is not a defense. So you have to, it's on you. It's your responsibility. And it's certainly under our own UCMJ, it's on you. And I think in those kind of situations, you have to,

own that. If it's truly bad, if it's truly catastrophic, you have to be willing to take the punishment. You want to punish me for that? Okay, cool. You want to fire me? I'm not going to do that because I'm going to sleep better at night knowing that I made the right decision. I'm not going to go down this path. It leads to

the destruction of our team that puts people in harm's way, that puts, you know, that causes people to do something that's unsafe and puts them in jeopardy and you've got to be able to stare yourself with a mirror, and that's most important. Oh, you want to fire me for that? Okay, cool. I'll take that. Now, some people, you have to understand that you've got to prioritize. And there are

those people that are like over the top. Everything is like, you're telling me to do this and I don't agree with it. And it's really not that big of a deal. And one example I thought of, people are shocked to hear about what it's like going to war in today's world, the administrative requirements that are on you. The massive amount of paperwork that we had to do just to get approval for an operation, all the things that we had to do that are required on us, and we're in the middle of a war. And guess what? We bitched and grieved about that all the time.

No one more than me. And Jocco was probably sick and tired of hearing me about that. And one of the things he sat right away was, hey, guess what? All these admin requirements they're putting on us? Even though we're in the middle of a training right now and they're asking us for this paperwork, we're going to do them. We're going to do them. All of them.

Yeah. And one of the reasons that I did that was because I did not want higher headquarters to have anything to hold over me at all. And furthermore, guess what I was doing? I was building up myself a little relationship with the boss man. Because, oh, you want admin stuff done? No problem. Don't even worry about it.

We're going to build it up. That's what we're going to do. And then there were times where the paperwork did cross the line. And one of those situations that we ran into was not really a paperwork situation, but they had, they wanted us to work with Iraqi soldiers. And we've talked about this before. It's in the book. The Iraqi soldiers are very unreliable, unmotivated, can be disloyal, don't have good training,

don't speak the same language as us, don't have good equipment. I mean, it's just a laundry list of reasons why you don't want to put your guys' lives in their hands. Well, in Ramadi, the fighting was horrible in 2006. In other areas of Iraq, the fighting had actually sent us. down. Well, the command above us wanted us to work with Iraqi soldiers. They wanted all the special operations people to work with Iraqi soldiers. So they actually, and all of the special operations people, mostly, were resistant to this. And so everyone would kind of skate by and figure out how to not do it. I'm going to take a 25-man element of U.S. special operators and we'll take

three Iraqis with us, just to kind of check the box. And you could see why they were doing this. You know why? Because it's safer. It's a way they're, okay, we're doing what you said. And they were actually using the term Iraqi face. We're going to put an Iraqi face on this mission, which to them literally meant one face in some cases. So we get told this as well. And if you read the book, we'll talk, we talk about the fact that, yeah, we were definitely not pro taking Iraqis. But we realized that if we didn't do that, if we didn't get the Iraqis out there fighting, they were never going to learn how to fight. And we were never going to be able to leave Iraqis. Iraq. So we knew that it was something we had to do. But then they went one step further and they set up a ratio. I don't know this sounds crazy. They set up a ratio and they said, I think it was for every one American soldier, you have to have five Iraqi soldiers with you. It was some ratio like that, some number. And if you were out in some part of central Iraq outside of a small town and you were doing some kind of a simple mission, you could get away with that all day long. In Ramadi, wasn't happening. That would have meant I would have been sending three or four seals out with 20-something Iraqis. And that means if there's a firefight, you've got three guys that are reliable. If one seal gets hit, who else is going to handle things? It's a nightmare.

And so this order came down, and I just ran up the chain of command and said, we can't do that. And we're not going to do that. Here's what we're taking. We'll take as many Iraqis as appropriate, but this is the minimum force. We're going to have every operation that we go on. And so we set that standard. And of course. And this is something I talk about a lot as well.

It was a sensible argument. It made sense. There was obviously casualties on a regular basis in Ramadi. There were firefights every single day. The platoon out in Corregador, their first 24 missions in a row, they got in a firefight. 24 missions in a row, they got in a firefight. Then they had one day where they didn't, and then the next day they did again for another, however many missions.

So there were firefights happening on every mission. So for us to be like, okay, yeah, we'll just bring three seals and 15 Iraqi soldiers. It's a nightmare. We're all going to get killed if we do that. But one of the reasons that we were able to do that, that Jocko was able to get approval for that is because all the little stuff that all, you know, other people would say, oh, we don't want to do this paperwork or that's too much. And they complained. We had done that. We had done those little things.

Yeah, it's a pain for us. Yeah, do I want to do that? Of course not. I'd rather be trained doing other stuff. but we're going to do it. And so because Jocko had set that standard and we made it happen, then when we really push back for the stuff that really mattered, which is what I was talking about,

you've got to prioritize and execute, prioritize the stuff that really matters. We were able to get that approved. And guess what? They didn't want us to go out and get killed. So we explained it up the chain of like, listen, if we do that, we're going to get a lot of guys killed by doing that. And I talk about this often.

The fact that leadership is aligned to the front troops. If not, then there's something drastically wrong. But of course, my bosses wanted me to keep my guys safe and kill bad guys and win the war. Of course they did. And in businesses, of course the boss wants you to be profitable and keep your troops happy, but be profitable. Be ethical, right? Those are standard things and those are going to be aligned. So if you send up an idea up the chain of command or you get told to do something and you don't do it because it's not going to help you be profitable, why would your boss disagree with that?

it's not going to happen. So you have to have the wherewithal to actually know when to say no. And on the moral and ethical things that Laf talked about, those are clear cut. Those are clear cut. If you're getting told to do something that's illegal or immoral, then it is your duty and responsibility to disobey that order. And that's the way it is. All right. Last question. My team has missed our last two deadlines. I want to take ownership, but I'm not sure how. it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate.

And look, you have to be effective. We talk about there's only two measures that really, that matter. And that's effective and ineffective. Are you effective? Are you accomplishing the mission? And if you are, figure out a way to become even more effective. If you're ineffective, you're not accomplishing the mission, then you've got to figure it out. You've got to take ownership of that.

You've got to solve that problem. So if your team isn't getting the job done, you can't tolerate less than that. As a leader, you have to drive those standards. I learned pretty early on that in the SEAL teams, there's some strong personalities there, which is awesome. That's one of the great things about the SEAL teams.

And there's always this tension between people have their mind. We should do it this way or we should do it this way, or we should train this hard, or we should focus here or there. And that's awesome. You have some incredibly talented great guys as we've just talked about. But as a leader, you have got to maintain the standards. And there are standards that just cannot be compromised.

You've got to push hard. You've got to drive that performance. You've got to set the tone for that. And if you don't do that, no one's going to do it. So it's not what you preach. It's not the words that you say. It's not the email. that you sent. It's not the banner

that you created to put on the wall or the PowerPoint slides that you built. It's actually what you tolerate. It's the performance that you see. And if it's substandard, you've got to push again. And you've got to push again. You've got to set that bar high. Now, that being said, you can't

drive your team into the ground. You have to lead them. You can't be a slave driver. You can't destroy your team. You can't be overbearing. but for those things that really matter pushing performance to the next level you have got to set that standard and I think that's what makes truly the best military units the best teams out there great

it's not what you preach it's what you tolerate and with that one thing I like to think about when I hear about standards and what you're going to tolerate don't just think about your team. You got to think about yourself.

You got to think about raising the bar on yourself. You got to think about what you're going to tolerate from yourself. And how you can raise that bar and raise that standard and get better with everything you do. And thereby lead by example so that your team becomes the example. And with that, I think we'll close it out. That was a long haul on the podcast. I wanted to say thanks to everybody that's been tuning in and listening to the podcast. It's been amazing, getting all the feedback.

Thanks, obviously, to my brother here, Laf Babin, for coming on. I know he'll be on again. if anybody out there wants to continue these conversations out there on the interwebs you can connect with us on Twitter I'm at Jocko Willink Laif is at Laif Babin

and of course as you know Echo Charles is at Echo Charles Thanks for leaving reviews of the podcast and of the book on iTunes and Amazon, that is very helpful to us so we know how we're doing. And most of all, for everyone that's out there, in your little chunk of the world, listening to our little chunk of

the world, thanks for getting out there and for getting after it. And so, until next time, This is Jocko, Leif, and Echo. Out.