Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: If Something Stinks, FIX IT. Get People to Trust you. New Police Training Procedures.

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

If it stinks, fix it.How to build trust up the chain of command.Putting up with shit, and checking your ego.Implementing new Police training procedures.Cover and move with your spouse.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko underground podcast number 13 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening. Good evening. All right. So I was in a house in Iraq in my first deployment to Iraq. So this was either 2003 or 2004. And it was a small farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. I forget the full background of this scenario.

But it was something like one of the elder sons of this particular family. had been mixed up in some kind of insurgent operations, so we're out there looking for this kid. And by kid, I mean, you know, 25-year-old military-age male. We raid this house looking for this military-age male. And we get the building cleared, and the guy wasn't there. But, you know, his family was there. And so we've got the interpreter,

and the interpreter's kind of talking to the family. And there's some kids there. And so the guys are giving some, you know, candy to the kids. kind of stuff looking around. The house was basically one big room, but basically one big room. And there was mattresses on the floor in one of the corners. There's a real common over there for some of the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

They would just sleep with mattresses on the floor and they'd have blankets and mattresses kind of piled up. And that's where the family would eat. So that was in kind of one corner. Then there was a table for eating. with a couple chairs around, you know, a few chairs around it, you know, four or five chairs around this table. And then there was another table next to it that was sort of, I guess it would be considered the counter space of a kitchen. And then there was a sink with a water faucet, right?

So it was, there was some form of running water and a sink of some kind, you know, just picture like an old school kind of porcelain thing. All pretty old fashioned sink, but it is working. And then in between the table where the kind of counter table where they would prepare food and the table where they would eat. And those were separated by call it six feet, five feet, six feet. There was a slit trench to go to the bathroom. Now, okay, so what's a slit trench? So what this is, this is a little ditch probably about. six inches wide, maybe eight inches wide, probably about six inches deep, about two or three

feet long, and it's perpendicular to the wall. And then when it gets to the wall, there's a hole through the wall. And out the hole is a big, a big pit. And it's a sewage pit. Actually, these are pretty common in Iraq. They're, we, I don't know what they're called. We called them, we called them shit pits because they were just big pits that were filled with sewage. Kind of like almost an above ground septic tank, right? You go to the bathroom in there and over time, I guess maybe it goes away. I'm not 100% sure. But there's this trench.

There's no running water down this trench. This is just in the concrete, in this concrete floor. And it didn't really have too much of an angle to it. I mean, at least not enough of an angle because most of the, most of the excrement and urine was, or I shouldn't say most, there was a bunch of excrement and urine in this slit trench. And I remember sitting there thinking about this, just thinking how messed up this is, right? This is, this is messed up. Here were these people. And they were just normal people.

I mean, sure, they had a son that had been rogue, right? to be like if your kid, your son got wrapped up in some gang and all of a sudden the cops try and come and find about your house and you're looking around going, wait a second, we're just normal. That's who this family was. They were just kind of normal. My interpreter was having a good conversation with them and, you know, he was kind of asking what their background was.

When's the last time you saw your son and stuff like that? But it was also, you know, what do you do here? And they were farmers and they lived there for a long time. You know, we're trying to figure out, do you have any other houses where your son could be. They're like, no, we don't have any other houses. This is where we live. This is our farm. This is what we do.

They had, they had actually, money. They had, you know, a couple, I think they had an opal and then a, they had a couple, like a car and a truck. So they're able to get around. They're obviously make money. You've got to get gas and stuff like this. So they have, this is, this is a family that's kind of put, they've got some things going for. Right? They got a business. They got vehicles. They got housing. And yet with all that, they have this, this slit trench of shit that divides their, basically they're kitchen and their dining. And now listen, it's it's in these types of rural areas when you get out into these rural areas of Iraq, there's, it's pretty common that they wouldn't they may or may not have running water, right? There may not may not may or may not have plumbing. But this this level of kind of unsanitary conditions was not something that I saw very often. Most of the places, most of the farms that look, when you were in Baghdad and stuff, they have toilets and everything else, no factor. But you get out to the rural places, they would have like an outhouse or something, right?

I mean, you got to deal with it, right? You got to deal with it. So they'd have an outhouse. Or they'd have a separate room in the house. They'd kind of box something in. And then there'd be a slit trench in there. But they'd have some way of making the consistent human issue of waste. They would have a way of making it either sanitary or somehow acceptable, right?

They would figure it out. And this family didn't do that. Again, this is normal. These are people that I'm thinking, this was so mind-boggling to me. It wasn't like these people were inbred, you know, whatever. It wasn't like they were some stereotypical people that couldn't understand. They were normal people.

So it also wasn't like this family had just arrived, right? Because the interpreter's talking to them. They'd been there for a while. I mean, look, if you showed up at a place, if you moved in three days ago and you haven't got a chance to figure this out yet, you know, okay, I get it, right? It takes a little time. But this was their actual home where they'd been. They'd been there for a long time. I mean, I'm assuming maybe a couple generations, but at least, at least many years, many, many years.

And they still hadn't, like, remedied this problem. And so if you look at the other side of What? Well, not the other side, but for us in the U.S. military, all the times, the SEAL teams included, we would go and we would move into old buildings. We'd move into old buildings that were, you know, former, whatever, former regime elements or whatever. We'd move into buildings. We'd take them over.

Maybe they were just hangers. Right? Whatever. We'd move into buildings. We'd take them over. And as soon as we'd move in somewhere, we'd start like doing a reorg and fixing stuff and rebuilding things and retrofitting whatever we could to make these things more livable. We'd do that almost instantly.

And yet here was this situation where no move had been made to improve the scenario. And look, I'm talking about a place in Iraq, but this happens in America, right? You go watch an episode of cops, right? And you see and you look at what's going on here? There's a bunch of little things that could be squared away in this particular situation. Why is this like this? And the reason that I'm saying this is because it kind of left a mark on me. It's something that I, it's something that I, that left a mark on me in two ways.

The first way that it left a mark on me is I thought to myself, well, maybe the, maybe they maybe these people for whatever reason just didn't understand the situation maybe this was just what was normal for them you know if you this is how you were raised this is what we do this is how it works but but but i actually don't even believe that because what made what makes that hard to accept is that there's shit in your kitchen that's what makes it hard to accept right there's different yeah you get raised in a certain cultural way or you get raised by a family that whatever they're doing and that's what you understand the reality to be and that's how you grow that's how you grow up and you think that's

the way it is but you don't really you don't really need to get taught that that you know having a a trench to go to the bathroom in in your kitchen you don't need to get no one needs to tell you that's that's unsanitary no one needs to tell you that no one needs to tell you it's not hygienic to do that right you don't need to get told that It reeks. It smells bad. And so you look at it and you go, you know what? This smells really bad. I'm going to do something different. We're going to make a change here. That's what we're going to do. We're going to make a change here. This system of sewage disposal could use some improvement. I'm going to try something else. And then you do it. You try something else. I don't know what it is. Maybe you build a room around it. Maybe you move that thing outside. There's a bunch of different things you can try. But that, but so that's the other mark that got left on me is. If something stinks, then fix it. If something stinks in your life, if there's something wrong, then fix it. Now look, I get that there's things that there's some things in life that we can't fix.

Right? You can get a disease. You can have acts of God unfold upon you with no mercy. And there's you, well, then what you do is you face those things and you take ownership of how you respond to those horrible. events when they happen but oftentimes there's things in our lives that stink and we can actually do something about it we can actually do something about it so when I see something in my life when I see something in my life that needs to get fixed I might I might blow it off once and go oh you know no big deal and then I think what am so that is a

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