Jocko Podcast - The Unravelling 3: A Festering Sore

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

The traumatic experience of Vietnam shapes the US approach to the Gulf War. The easy victory in Kuwait shapes expectations of the Global War on Terror.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko Unraveling Podcast, episode three, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. Let's keep going. I know where I want to pick up. If you have somewhere, you can go first. I want to know what little Jock, little seaman recruit Willink, who joined in 1990, you taught us last episode, you come into the seal teams in the 1990s. And if you're a warrior looking for a war, the 90s are a little bit of a dead zone. Well, you've got to remember partially accurate.

But as we already talked about, warrior looking for a war in the delayed entry program through the summer of 1990 as this buildup is happening. I'm thinking I'm going to get exactly what I asked for. And I am super pumped about that. You know, I'm ready to rock and roll. I think that this, and like I said, on one of the earlier podcasts, I thought there were reports, there was 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours. And I'm like, oh, yeah, they're going to need me. They're going to need me to help win this bad boy because I'm young and dumb and ready to rock and roll.

So then when it was over, then I'm in buds and it's over. in buds and it's over so now I'm thinking okay what's what's gonna happen and you know showed up and then it was peace time peacetime teams

which is not not what you dream about when you're a when you're a young lad going in the teams going through seal training you think you're just going to war and I was dumb and so I was checking into seal team one and I thought they were going to send me to Vietnam

like even if the Gulf War is over but that's okay, Seals were sneaking around the world, doing stuff everywhere. You know, that's just not true. Just not true. It is kind of true now. Right. In fact, I'll go ahead and say, it is true now.

Like, there are things happening around the world all the time. That's the way it is now. That's post-September 11th. Pre-September 11th, there was years. You know, I knew guys that were Master Chiefs that were in the SEAL teams for 30 years. You know, they came in in 1970. and retired in 2001, and they never fired a shot in anger. So, yeah, the 90s was not good from a perspective of wanting to go to war.

And look, man, I'm sorry everybody that that's what I wanted to do with my life. I don't know what to tell you. I guess let's be happy that I didn't want to be a criminal or I didn't want to be a gangster. or I didn't want to be a murderer. I wanted to be a seal and I wanted to go to war. That's the way it was. And I'm sorry that that's the way it is, but that's the way it is. And I can tell you that with something else.

I'm not alone. Yeah. And I'm not alone. There's all kinds of young men and I don't know where we get it from. I don't know where it comes from. It's part of our instinct is to fight wars. I can tell you where it comes from is when you look at people like al-Qaeda and Iraq, who ended up taking over large sections.

of the country in 2004, five, and six, who do you want to send after them? You know, people have this idea that the American military, because it's so technologically advanced, and we've got all this, just access to so many tools and toys that other people don't have, that our soldiers are sort of like skilled labor. And that's not, it's not how it works. You know, you need people who are going to go in, you know, unless you're, unless you're sort of itching, for the fight. You're not going to be ready to handle the kind of thing that you guys had to deal with

over there. Yeah, and it is weird, though, to think that there's a bunch of people that want to go fight. Like, that's a weird, if you think about it, you know, from a basic human instinct, right, is survival,

right? The self-preservation, that's a basic human instinct. The last job you would sign up for with that instinct is I'm going to be some kind of a soldier. I want to go to war. So it's a little bit tricky to understand. It's a little bit tricky to understand.

And even if you go, even you say, well, you know, people fight, right? Like, you know, you go out on a Friday night in downtown, wherever, there's going to be some fights. And that's the way it is. But, and I guess, you know, out of those fights that break out, some of those people are going out looking for fights. It's just a human instinct. And I think you take that to the next level and you got people like me that, that want to go to war.

And again, like, it's knowing what I now know about war and understanding it at a deeper level, I do say, hey, I'm sorry, that's the way it is. But also, I'm sorry that that's the reality. And I'm not going to lie about it. I'm not going to tell you, you know, when 9-11 happened, there wasn't a giant part of me that was saying, oh, cool, now I get to go fight,

you know? Oh, yeah, it's tragic and horrible. And how dare they? But someone's going to have to avenge this. And thank God that someone is me and my friends. So I want to ask you about that part. So this drive to go to war, I do wonder if some part of it for people is they have an intuition that, you know, people love their friends. They got really great friends.

And those friendships were usually made great during the most difficult times of those people's lives. the guys who were there for them, you know, through a difficult breakup or whatever it was. Those are the times when those friendships get forged. And I think maybe people have an intuition that when you enter into a human experience with that level of intensity, something like war, it's really not, it's a level of intense human experience. It's not really accessible to most people in any way in their normal life, unless they're a criminal, that you're going to experience that, For you, was it that you wanted to go to war? Was there some part of you that, like, you were going to go to war with your friends? You were going to be part of this thing with other people?

Were you kind of into that? I appreciate you throwing out some nice little bait softball thing to make me sound like I had this altruistic thing of going to war with my friends. And way before I had any friends, you know, in the military, I still had that feeling. That's the last time I'll pander to you, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate you trying to make me look. trying to make me look like a good human.

But, hey, man, let's face it, there's a group of humans that have, I mean, every person has some sort of natural proclivity towards something, right? And I've said this before. When some people are walking around as a 10-year-old and they see a businessman in a suit with a briefcase, they think that looks cool. Like they think that guy's got power. That looks cool. They see someone else.

They see the fireman. And they go, that looks cool. I want to do that. They see an astronaut. They go, I want to fly into space. Or they see whatever. You name their occupation. And there's people.

And, you know, at Essela on Front, I work with people that love doing their job. Like, that's what they love doing. You love your job, right? That's what you love doing. It's like, okay, cool. guess what um my natural thing was i really wanted to do this job and you weren't going to be a model so i definitely wasn't going to be a model and and and and you know i i i don't know that i really would have been so um i wouldn't have been so i don't know that i could have been as committed as

I was to anything else. I can't imagine trying to, trying to, to have some other job that I would have been, this committed to. Now, I learned through the military and through the SEAL teams that commitment was a good thing and that I could kind of fake commitment. Like, I fake, when I went to college, the Navy sent me to college from 2000 to 2003. And when I went, when I went to college, I faked that I was into it. And I did really well.

Why? Because I made it my job. And I guess that was still tied into, you know, I guess, no, I guess I was going to say it's tied into steel. That was just, a lot of it, that was just ego. I'm going to be number one. That's me. I'm going to make this happen.

Part of it was ego versus the professors. Oh, you think you're smart. Cool. You give me any, ask me any question about your little test and I'm going to know it. And that's, that was the attitude. I made it into a game. I boost my ego, driven by ego. You know, that's not a bad thing, right?

I'm not saying it was my ego and I should have put, no, no, no. My ego helped me do well in college. I didn't want to get shown up by a professor. I wanted to be to go to battle with my professors and win, you know. So that's what I did. And so there are some false starts in the 90s. I think I remember you saying before that you were on a ship off the coast of Africa

while Rwanda was going on in 1994. And so there might have been some times where you thought, Maybe this is my moment. Maybe this is my memory. And prior of that, Somalia, I was sitting off the coast of Somalia, that same deployment. We had our gear loaded. It was the first time I loaded out. Like we loaded out our weapons, loaded out our gear, had our web gear filled with ammo and grenades.

And, you know, we were ready on that one. Is it 93? This was in, this was in 94. Okay, 94. So I forget what had happened, but there was, you know, something was going on in Somalia. And this is after we had pulled out. It was, yeah. Or maybe we were in the process.

I think we were in the process, but whatever had spun up had spun up. And it's actually surprising. If you would have asked me this pre-9-11, I would have told you the entire enemy order of battle. I would have known everything. And it's just because that was one time. Yeah. And now I can't even remember right now what was happening. You know, and if it wasn't for Rwanda being this massive genocide, I probably wouldn't remember that either.

Because we were spun up to go on that one. And we didn't go and do anything. And you are just spending that decade just sharpening the edge. And then Tuesday morning, 9.30 or so in the morning, I guess I was on the East Coast. I was actually just over by Arlington at the time when it happened. It would have been early in the morning here, but you get up at 4.30. So you would have been aware. 9-11 happens.

And not only are we going to war, but you are being fed an enemy that, you are, you. being fed an enemy that it's not a lot of ambiguity here. This guy's flying planes into civilian buildings. You're not being asked to go invade Vietnam for maybe a reason that half the country doesn't understand. This is a bad guy. And you're, what's your rank at this point? What are you in 2001? In 2001, I'm a lieutenant junior grade. So I had been commissioned. I got commissioned in 1998 I did a tour at SEAL Team 2 and at SEAL Team 2 I promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant Junior Grade and I promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade it was like the day I left so I was I was only at SEAL Team 2 for two years and then Lieutenant Junior Grade and

then they the Navy sent me to college I hadn't been to college yet and then while I was in college I automatically made lieutenant but I hadn't made lieutenant yet Yeah, so yeah, I was a lieutenant junior grade going to college. And so you are 9-11 happens and you're a seal officer and you're ready to roll. You've been sharpening the edge for 10 years almost. Or I guess it would have been about 10 years at that point. And do you have in your head the first Gulf War a little bit like this thing's going to be over before I get out of school? I'm absolutely worried, absolutely scared that I'm going to miss it.

I called the officer detailer who was a friend of mine who, um, I said, hey, you know, sir, pull me out of college, because I was in college. I still had two more years of college left. Like, it was, I was graduating in 2003. And I said, and this is a nightmare for me. This is a nightmare. You don't want to be one of the seals who didn't, who doesn't have any combat when everybody else goes. It's a nightmare.

And so I call this, the SEALD Taylor, who is a friend of mine. I had worked for him. He was a great guy. And I said, sir, you know, please just get me out of school. I'll get my degree online. I have no reason to be here. I can go. I'm ready.

And he said, and I... This was in Afghanistan or when Iraq was coming out? This was like September 12th. Right, right. Okay, so you want to go to Afghanistan or wherever. Wherever we're going on. I'm in.

Got it. Like, you could have told me we were invading. It didn't matter. You could have told me we were invading. Sorry, Denmark. Yeah, Denmark, whatever. Bring it. I'm ready to rock and roll.

And which is interesting because I'm saying these remarks. like about how excited and fired up and motivated and and and dumb I was and that's why we have leadership you know that's why we have leadership we have leadership and that's why I became a leader and as a leader like that's what makes the military work is you got guys that are ready to chomping at the bit right and sometimes you guys got people that aren't chomping at the bit and and what you have to do as leaders you have to find the balance you have to get people if they're not chomper at the bit, you got to push them. If they're chomped at the bit, you got to pull in the reins, you know?

And I'm going to tell you right now, it's much easier to have guys that you have to pull in the reins on. And I almost always, I almost always produced guys that I had to pull the reins on. I reinforced behavior that was aggressive. That's what I did. So all I had to do is pull the reins, because that's a much easier job. It's a much easier job. So that's the way I set myself up.

That's the, that's the culture that I produced. If you worked for me, I would, I was, I was, pulling the reins on you. And people that needed to be pushed, they weren't really front runners for me and they probably would find themselves in different situations. So what I'm saying,

it's interesting, you know, and I'm telling you like, look, I would have invaded Denmark. If they put the target on Denmark, I will go. You know, we're joking about that. But that's what you have to think about. You know, when you're in a leadership position, that's what you've got. And especially pre-9-11, this early phase of the war, everybody was worried.

And so this is the interest. So I called my detail and said, hey, boss, please send me to a team. I'll go to any team. I'll take any job. And he says to me, Jocko, this war is going to last a long time. And I didn't believe him. And I don't even know if he believed himself. Because all the lessons that you, you know, that you talked about that we learned,

unfortunately, hey, we can kick their ass really quickly. They're not a formidable enemy. Ba, blah, blah. I believe that. And I'm sure he must. must have had some sense of that. Maybe his sense was that this was going to be a broader, longer kind of global, low intensity conflict, and there would be plenty of time for me to do an operation here or an operation there. Because back in those days, I spent most of my career

training for an operation. Like if you were lucky, you did a singular real mission. Like I would have done in Somalia, like I would have done in Rwanda, had they given us the go. One mission, and I would have been totally happy. And so I think in his mind now that I'm reflecting on it, he was probably thinking, hey, this is going to be a long global war. It'll last a long time. We'll be striking targets for the next 20 years, or probably the next three or four years, we'll be striking these kind of terrorist targets around the world. That's probably what he was thinking. The other interesting thing about this is, is I was talking to him, him actually, I saw him and his wife a few months ago, several months ago, actually, and I was talking about, hey, I remember

when I called you after September 11th, and he said, he said, yeah, everyone called me. So, so the reality is, yeah, Jocko was fired up. So was every other seal that wasn't at a seal team was calling trying to get to a seal team. Well, 97% of the seals that weren't at a seal team, maybe 90% were they wanted to go. They wanted to go get in there. And Seals had to rework their mission, I mentioned. I mean, you guys are, you go to Afghanistan, you're doing mountain warfare, maybe doing some of the higher risk missions,

but semi-conventional missions a lot of the time, right? Well, you want to talk about reworking your mission. I had never done any type of vehicle assault. until about maybe a month before we left for Iraq. The only time we would use vehicles, we would call them helo trucks, because it was to simulate a helicopter, because you can't always get helicopters

for your training evolutions. So we would get in the back of a six ton or whatever or a six-by and drive up to a target area and get out and pretend we just got out of a helicopter. We didn't look at it. never even made sense to us that that was like a viable combat system a hum v and it's actually kind of crazy because it's not just i can tell you right now and any any seal that says anything different would be full of shit you know there was we had these this this uh vehicle called a

dp via desert patrol vehicle which was like a those old doom buggy is a dune buggy looking thing and like that was kind of a thing but it was almost like that was like that was was this little specialized thing where if you were going to do a reconnaissance in the desert, very specific, you might use one of those. There was no way we were thinking, hey, a sealed assault force rolling down, you know, downtown Baghdad in vehicles. We just didn't think of it. We just didn't think of it. And really our urban combat, I would say our urban, our assessment of urban combat.

not our assessment, but our idea that we would be engaged in these, like, hey, we're going to be an urban, which is totally ignorant, if you think of it. I mean, it's just totally ignorant. I mean, we would go out and train, let me put it to this way. We'd go out and train for a month in the desert. We'd go train for a month in the jungle. We'd train for three weeks in the mountains. We'd go for a week in the urban environment. Like, we just didn't put it together.

Even the Somalia experience in 93 didn't really change that at all? Not as much as it should have. Not as much as it should have. It should have been a eye-opener. But, you know, what that was? That was one mission. So there's plenty of, you know, just like I said, you're training for one mission.

That was one mission. And it's like, oh, well, that kind of mission probably won't happen again. That was a little chance encounter. It happened to be in a city. You know, we are going to be ready for these desert patrols, foot patrols. So our Our attitude had to shift

Very very quickly and it did and and one of the best things about the seal teams is one of our strengths one of our weaknesses is that we don't have doctrine or we didn't we have we have doctrine And so when we would do When we would do one of these desert Rades on a desert target in training No one would tell us exactly how to do it. We can kind of figured stuff out and you got passed down through oral history. And so we, we didn't have a lot of doctrine and we, therefore, when missions changed for us, we could, we still knew how to figure things out. That was the, that was the biggest strength we had was we could be in a

situation and go, okay, here's it, here's the adjustments we need to make. How do we make these adjustments? And we could make them. And it seems like you guys probably had the expectation of being given a task and you've got to figure out how to go accomplish that task rather than kind of being told you're part of the war and you're going to be handed some extra high risk you know high value missions and so forth but you're just part of the war and um you know your detailer told you to hang on that you'd be getting some action little did you know that uh the civilians up top of the doD and everywhere else were cooking something up for you yeah because we're we're And I guess it became very evident very quickly that we were going to go into Afghanistan.

And so that kicked off. And that kicked off very, very quickly. Yeah. You know, very, very quickly. I think we had troops in there by October. October, yeah. Pretty remarkable how quickly we were able to get people in there with the Northern Alliance and start working on that. Yeah.

But it was the same day that the planes at the towers in the Pentagon that people started. talking about Iraq in the Defense Department and in the White House. Paul Wolfowitz and Wormsfeld, they were the ones pushing it early. And it was that day they started talking about, is there a way to connect Iraq with this? They had their own reasons that we talked about the last episode for wanting that guy out of there. There probably weren't a lot of ways to connect Saddam Hussein. So you're kind of, you're kind of implying that they're looking to make a connection, almost, you're almost implying that it was in a disingenuous way.

I think that. Or let me ask you, are you implying that it was a disingenuous way? So I think that some of the civilians at the high level, specifically Wolfwitz and Rumsfeld, Cheney to a degree, that they believe there were good reasons to take out Saddam Hussein and go in there and do this. And that this provided them an opportunity to do it. Yeah, I do think that.

So I would agree. Okay, now that you've kind of, Taking that little nuanced adjustment for me, I would say their assessment was what we want is greater stability and We want better security and we don't want any of these areas where these kind of people can fester and grow We're here. We're looking at Afghanistan. Let's look at Iraq too You know and sure now now you You take that attitude and then you overlay that on top of of, hey, this is the asshole that, you know, did all these things in the Gulf War.

This is the guy that tried to kill my dad. Like all these things, you overlay that. And now I, you know, I get it. Well, what do we learn from what happened in Afghanistan? We learn that you can't have big swaths of territory that aren't under the firm control of states, right? Because there's nobody to hold responsible for what goes on there. and they become these festering sores. Where do we have problems?

Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico in a different way. They don't so much, you know, not international terror or anything, but there's large swaths of groups that are pretty nasty down there controlling large swasa territory. And we kind of decided that that's not acceptable anymore. To just have these areas that are not really under anybody's control or even worse are a state that is willing to ally itself with. terrorists. I think they made some tenuous and disingenuous connections to Saddam Hussein. I do think that, and I think that there's been people from the CIA and other places who've

come out and said that there were some people in the administration who, you know, we would tell them, here's one side of the story, but here's the other side of the story, and they would just ignore the other side of the story. And part of that is just like, you know, confirmation biases and the whole nine yards. And, and, and, yes, this is where, you know, we started touching on this subject earlier. This is where as a leader, as a decision maker, you have to take the time and do the mental homework to really and truly try and understand

what the other side of the argument is. And you know, you talked about this when you came on my podcast, you talked about the fact that you, when you put the podcast together, you want to, your kind of bar that you're trying to set for yourself is that you can empathize with both sides of an argument. And that is a very important tool to have as a leader to not just look at the other side of the argument

and say, they're wrong, they don't get it, they don't make any sense. That is not the right thing to do. And in fact, whenever, you know, as a leader, when you present to me a plan, or when you come to me and you say, hey, here's how I want to solve this problem or here's what I think about this,

and I have a different opinion, my immediate reaction is, okay, how is he right? That's my immediate reaction isn't, Isn't how is Darrell wrong? My immediate reaction is how is he right? How is he seeing this? How can I be wrong? That's my immediate reaction.

So when we, yeah, when I hear reports like that, that the attitude is, here's what we think. You come in here with your opinion and I'm just going to disregard it because I know better. That's an awful. It's arrogance. It's ego. And it'll drive to that decision making. Yeah, I think that there were people in the civilian power. structure who, you know, they were at mid and junior levels in those same, in the same power

structure, the DOD and other places during the first Gulf War. They felt a lot of guilt over the fact that we had told the Shia and the Kurds encouraged them to rise up and then stood aside while Saddam butchered them. And they felt that we, that we besmirched ourselves a little bit by doing that and that we should have taken that guy out then. What I, what I, what I, resent about the way that they handled it early on was I feel like I think that they didn't trust the American people enough to give them the story straight rather than laying everything out and saying look here's the strategic situation here's why we can't let this guy stay here anymore here's the you know for regional stability reasons for humanitarian humanitarian reasons just lay it all

out and let the American people make a decision about that. Instead, they kind of gambled on a few things. Now, I'll give them, like, by all accounts, they all believed that he had stockpiles of WMD everywhere, right? And if that was the case, he's a guy who's perfectly willing to use those in irrational, wildly irrational ways. So if he had them, that's a very dangerous thing. By all accounts, these people weren't lying about that. You know, they weren't making it up. They expected to find them. They were surprised when we didn't find them everywhere. I wish that they had not rolled the dice on making that the front line of their argument. Yeah.

For sure. And, you know, this comes up all the time. You've got to tell people the truth about what's happening. And when you tell people the truth about what's happening, then that will have the ultimate positive result. And to take that a little bit further, when you are telling people to that, truth that means you also tell them the truth about things that you don't know 100% because when you say listen we really think well this is gonna keep this is gonna help stability we can't have these areas where al-Qaeda could

train if they get pushed out of Afghanistan they can easily come here we can allow that to happen this is an unstable region by the way and also there's a strong possibility that there could be weapons of mass destruction there so do do we know any of these things 100% no of course not this is what we're thinking And instead, when you go out there on a limb and you, you know, it's beyond just putting all your eggs in one basket because that's one problem. But then the problem was the level of certitude that they gave was because they were trying to sell it. Yeah.

It came across with a lot of certitude. And, you know, look, man, when you look at those overhead pictures and you see, you see Condoleezza Rice and General Powell, these, you know, highly respected. respected people in the United Nations and the United Nations are all nodding their head in agreement. Hey man. That's and like we we talked about earlier, this is a, this is coming from people in, Saddam's own people that are saying, yes. Yeah. Of course he has these things.

Yes. Yes. He has them. Right. Even with all that, you got to give yourself an out as a leader. And the way you give yourself an out as a leader is by. not being so egotistical and arrogant that you know something 100%. You know how many things I know 100%?

Like almost nothing. There's almost nothing that I know 100%. And I will never, like very rarely will you catch me saying this is the fact. I just not going to say that. You don't have an out and you lose trust and confidence with people when you express yourself that way. So I always joke with people. I say, if I ever tell you something like 100%, If I ever say, Daryl, this is what you need to do, 100%.

I'm telling you this. Then you should probably do it. Yeah. Because I will not, you probably likely will never hear me say anything like that. So those are some mistakes that I think compound the mistake that you're talking about. Yeah, there was an element within some of the brass up in the civilian leadership who, you know, this is from stories that have come out since then, as people have reported it, including people on the inside, that the decision that we were going after Iraq,

it wasn't a debate, what are we going to do? We got hit on 9-11. We got to do something about Afghanistan. Where else are our threats? That there were some people in there in powerful places who made the decision. We're going into Iraq, and we're going to figure out how to tie this thing in and sell it.

What's that book by, what is it, Bob Woodward? Woodward's got one. What's the name of that one? My favorite one on the early period up until about 05 is fiasco by Tom Ricks. Yeah, see, I should have reviewed because, you know, I'm trying to think through these things and I haven't thought about them for a long, long, long time. Neither have I. You know, so I'm trying to think through, you know, what, like, these players, because

there certainly were players. A lot of them were there in the first Gulf War. And we talked about before, you know, one of the things that happened after the Gulf War is the military people, the generals in the First Gulf War, including General Powell, who's now the Secretary of State, who's now quite skeptical of the idea of going into Iraq. He agrees to go to the UN and lend his credibility to the salesmanship. But he was worried about it, and he was counseling caution. Well, he was doing that in the First Gulf War, too.

The generals at the time were saying we want six-carrier strike groups, we want overwhelming force because they were Vietnam guys and they didn't want to get bogged down into a quagmire. And a lot of the civilians who were there at the time in the defense department and the rest of the power structure were there in the Bush administration in 03. And they're hearing the same thing again from the military. A lot of the military brass is like, wait a second here. You want to do what? They're a little more hesitant.

And the civilians, Wolfowitz, and them are like, yeah, yeah, okay. We've heard this before. This is just how you guys are, apparently. And since then, they had watched us just take a point. the Iraqis in the Gulf War, use basically air power and some, you know, and some patrols in Kosovo to achieve a pretty, you know, pretty good result there. And so now, and now we're in Afghanistan, and that hasn't dragged on for 19 years yet. We're just a couple years into that one.

And so we're thinking, you know, I think there were some people who were a little bit blasé about it because they had the idea that at this point there's nothing that the American military can't do. Yeah. That there's just nothing it can't do. When the Kosovo thing was happening, it kicked off. And I was at SEAL Team 2 at the time. And we started dropping bombs.

And it like hit the new, I forget the timing of it. But the timing of it played out that it had kind of kicked off and maybe it, you know, in the afternoon or something. And overnight, you know, we wake up in the morning and there's bombs being dropped. And we show up to work. And at SEAL Team 2, we have quarters. And so we're all standing there. and, you know, there's a couple basic announcements that come out, you know, and then I'm not kidding,

like one of the admin girls gets up and is like, hey, we're having the potluck dinner on whatever, so it's going to start at this time, you know, families are invited or whatever. And then one of my buddies says something along the lines of it. It was kind of like one of those moments where, you know, the young, I think he was an E6 at the time, but, you know, barks out. Hey everyone potluck dinner aside We should we're at war right now You know and I was kind of I always laughed about that

Because even that you know we started dropping these bombs and everything It was really really distant and again This is coming from me all amped up hoping to go to war praying for war blah blah blah And the war a little war started and everyone was kind of like out whatever You know we're gonna drop some bombs you know It's it seems so regional and so small and so small and and potluck dinner aside, you know, we're at war right now. And what was it, 86 day bombing campaign?

It was some certain number of days, very, very effective bombing. And, you know, the first time we kind of looked around and said, hey, maybe we don't need to put boots on the ground to win, which no one ever said that. And even after that, you know, going into Iraq, It was like, oh, you're going to have to put boots on the ground. Still would hear that. But I'm sure some people are going, really? And even the ground forces that the coalition did commit in Kosovo, they were just driving around, showing presence.

Yeah. You know, one of my friends who was in the Army said that some of the people took calling it dabbing, driving around. And, yeah, so you get up to 2003 and we're going into Iraq. That decision's been made around the summer of 2002. It's a matter of selling it to the people, selling it to which allies of ours we could. We get into early 2003, and there are global protests, largest protests in history, as far as I know. 30 million people participated, massive one, six, eight million people on February 15th or so. Much of which, by the way, was, you know, you would think something like that would be a global event.

I think most people just, unless they were. participating or, you know, knew somebody who knew somebody. They knew were like there were some protests, but the idea that there were these giant protests, I think most people, that passed right by a lot of people. Yeah, I don't even remember anything about that. I kind of remember it. I remember, you know, it was a three-minute news story somewhere. That's about it.

And we end up going into Iraq, largely because this is what Rumsfeld wanted to do. Let me just jump in real quick. Because I was going to bring this to present day, what's happening? Something happened right now for COVID. virus. What you just said, right? This is very standard when a war scenario starts to unfold that you are going to get one half roughly of the population, even after September 11th, you know, okay, 80% of the population

after 9-11, said Afghanistan, they had something to do with it. Cool, go get them. By the time we fast forward two years, now we're looking at Iraq, and you got at least half the population going, I don't know. And what's interesting about what's unfolding right now is March, it is March 25th, 2020, we're like in the, in the middle of this COVID virus thing,

the country shut down, you know, not allowed to go out of our houses in California. New York is, you know, under serious pressure. So the whole country, the economy is at a standstill.

that's where we're at right now. Well, when you go to war with Iraq, where you go to war with Afghanistan, or you go to war with anybody, there's a whole group of Americans that raise their hand and say no. And it doesn't matter what the, what the cause is, you know, even when we were going to take out ISIS. A lot of it just has to do with their own self-conception. Hey, war is just never good. And so you get some level of resistance against the, the government, right? There's some level of public outcry against the governmental decisions.

And what's been interesting about this, and I think it's turning a corner right now, is this virus war, there's no resistance. There's no, there's like no, and I'm starting to see it now, but basically everything, it's total war. If we need to shut down the government, if we need to shut down the economy, it doesn't matter. This is all bad. And look, I don't, Whether that's the right decision or not, I don't know yet. But I do know this. There's almost no resistance. And case and point, you have both Democrats and Republicans during the most divisive time we've had in a long time in America.

I mean, I think you've got to go to Vietnam to have this much divisiveness between, and even in Vietnam. Like, if you talk to, okay, the civilian populace that was more deviseable. divisive than the government was. Would you agree with that statement? Yes. So, you know, in the city, in New York City, you had construction workers and you had hippies and they were more, they were further apart than the Republicans and Democrats were at the time. Oh, yeah.

So, right now, it's the opposite, actually. Most Americans are closer together. It's the government officials. It's the Republicans and Democrats that are so, so separated. That's interesting. Until you throw this war against a virus, and then all of a sudden, it's all hands on deck. We're all moving in the same direction.

Now, there's been some disruption now because this bill came through, and the Democrats, you know, the Republicans put forth a bill. Democrats came and added a bunch of things that they want to it. And so we've got a dispute going on now. But broadly, all I'm saying is we have a situation right now where there's much, much, much less resistance. and the government is used to. It was kind of shocking how rapidly we decided we were okay with that.

And again, I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do. I don't know. I'm not that guy. I'm not the expert on how to handle an epidemic. But if you would have asked me a couple months ago, what would it take for whole states to just accept being told to stay in their homes for an indefinite period of time? I would have to be dying the streets. Otherwise, no way we would accept that.

But it kind of goes to show you for as much as we like to complain when pollsters call us up and ask you like, what do you think of the government? What do you think of the media and all these other institutions? And we say, I hate them, 10%, you know, 5% approval rating, that I think this kind of shows like the ease with which we handed over pretty authoritarian powers to the government because the media told us there was something out there that was scary. And I'm not saying it's not scary, but that was the information we had. He said a couple hundred people had died. Shows that we actually do have a little more faith in our institutions than we like to pretend sometimes, I think. I think the other thing that made this a little bit of a perfect storm is you had a lot. Not only did you have alignment between the people and the government.

You had alignment between the two political parties. And then you had this high level of alignment between social media and the real media. You know, instead of there being, you know, you know, you could. Instead of finding these extreme views, hey, COVID's nothing. Like after, you know, a couple weeks ago, you weren't really allowed to say that. You know, because early on there's people going, it's just a flu. Who's going to get it? I don't care.

That got shut down real quick. And all of a sudden you had the media, the big media and the social media all aligned with, this is the plague and we better get it under control. It was interesting to see how the social media kind of model. mentality that is usually mobilized for political correctness issues and things very quickly those same networks got mobilized for this for sure it was interesting to see how that works and I don't know if maybe that's the first time that it's jumped you know kind of jumped issues like that yeah it's crazy to watch yeah it's crazy to watch so in this situation going into

iraq yeah we had we had resistance from the people against the government move not You know, obviously it wasn't unified resistance. There was a lot of Americans that, like, yeah, cool. In March 2003, it was either Pew or Gallup, the biggest poll that was run the time in March 2003, 74% of Americans supported the war. That's why you will not find anybody who was of age at that time. You said, did you support the war in 2003?

No. It's like funny. That's funny because according to the polls, three out of every four people did, but I cannot find anybody who admit to it now. Well, you talked about the generals and the politicians learning bad lessons from the first Gulf War, so did all of America. And all of America said, you know what? Let's go over there and kick some ass.

And we took the lesson and our leaders indulged this from Kosovo in the First Gulf War, that war is primarily about liberation and freedom and getting rid of tyranny. And that's what war is primarily about. when war is not primarily about those things. War is about suffering and destruction and death. And we let ourselves forget that because of the 90s, because of the way things went in the 90s. And we let ourselves forget that to our detriment. Because if we would have gone into the war with clearer eyes,

we would have been more prepared for the shock of the violence when it hit us. Yeah. And if you go into war thinking the, The thing that I always say is you've got to go into war with the will. And it's two wills wrapped up in that, the will to kill and the will to die. And if you don't, if you think you're going to go into war and you think you're not going to kill people. And by kill people, I mean, you're going to kill civilians. You're going to kill kids.

There's going to be, you know, babies murdered or killed by errant bombs and errant machine gun fire. And there's going to be some of your soldiers are going to lose their minds and do some horrible things. Like, that's going to happen. That's going to happen. So if you don't think that's going to happen, you're wrong. You're wrong. Children died on that first night of bombing before anything went wrong. You are wrong if you think that.

And if you think you can get in and out without taking any casualties on your side, if you think you're not going to be put in American flags over caskets, you're wrong. And so, yes, I totally agree that when you come off of, and it's actually a little escalation in the in the niceness of war because you go from the Gulf War, We took some casualties in the Gulf War A lot of them were friendly fire But you know there was there was Americans killed But then you go from that to Kosovo

And now you're like wait a second You track the you track the trajectory From Vietnam to the Gulf War And now you're in Kosovo where Hey we can pull this off And I guarantee there were people thinking You know what? Okay we maybe maybe some people will kill Did you know but we're gonna be all right

And there was the provide comfort example where we kind of, you know, we pushed the Iraqi forces back and made room for the Kurds and the Kurds moved in and they, you know, they created her bill as it is right now, which is a pretty nice place to be, relatively speaking. And so we had this idea that all you got to do is get rid of some of the bad people, break down the bad power structures, the oppressive power structures. You know, there's a, I got, I love trolling, my libertarian friends. And I told them that, you know, there was a libertarian streak in the Iraq war. planters and they say, well, what do you mean? We're against war. Yeah, yeah, you're against war. That's fine. But the impulse, the idea that all we have to do is go in there and get rid of Saddam's regime. And then since that's not there, freedom will break out. Everything will just sort of be, you know, it'll just take over. They'll become Vermont Democrats just overnight. And that's not how it

works. Freedom is something that exists in a hot house environment, you know, where order is enforced and security is provided. And, you know, I'm always shocked. I don't know why I would be. I wasn't in a position to have to make these kind of calls back then, obviously, and I hate, you know, I always refrain from like armchair generalship and I can't stand people who do that kind of thing. I get a little resentful and frustrated where I see civilians making decisions that seem motivated by politics. But it seems like across the board nobody really expected there to be an insurgency. The civilians didn't expect it.

Most of the generals didn't expect it. Some did. Some had something to say about it, but they weren't in position to really have their voices heard. And so we had military leaders who, even then, even still, not expecting a full-blown insurgency, were asking for 3 or 400,000 troops to secure the country. And they were told we don't need that many. They felt that the war would be politically more difficult to sell if we had to tell people who were sending 300 or 400,000 troops over there.

And so we end up going in with 1 to 120, 130, I think, something like that. And the first part of it, it goes the way the first Gulf War went, right? the U.S. military does what it does. There's one thing I don't know just before we get too far beyond this, you know, when you talk about what you think is going to happen is you create a, create an opportunity for freedom, and freedom's going to break out. That's what's going to happen.

What I think happens is you have to establish an environment for freedom, and then it's going to take a number of generations for people to be able to own that freedom and have it flourish. Because, you know, when you've had generations, so 2003, what we're talking about, almost 25 years under this brutal regime, you got people that are absolutely conditioned

for, you know, to be, to fall under the, the orders of violence. That's what they're conditioned for. And for them, it's like, okay, I'm on board with whatever you want to do, boss, you know. Yeah, you know, I recently had Rose Schindler on my podcast and, you know, she was in Auschwitz and Auschwitz survivor. And there was just complete compliance by the Jews. and if they got told, hey, you know, go put your family in the oven,

you go put your family in the oven because the alternative was instant death. And so how long does it take when you do that to generation upon generation upon generation, they're not, they don't even know what to do when you give them freedom. So what you have to do is you have to give them a taste. You have to start, you have to get them,

you have to get them addicted to freedom, right? You have to let, you have to protect it for, You have to feed it to them. You have to let them eat it. You have to let them grow accustomed to the taste. You have to let them get that taste and start to love that taste so much. And that won't happen with the first generation. It's just not going to happen because they still won't trust it.

You have to go to the second generation where those kids are raised like, oh, I can do what I want and I won't have my tongue cut out. And then maybe the third generation where you've got people that are like, hey, you're not going to take my freedom from me. That's what I think. I think it takes that kind of, that kind of, of, of nurturing of the environment of freedom and getting people conditioned to understand the human beings as a human being. It's a right that you have. They don't have that attitude. Their attitude isn't, I have a right to freedom.

That's not the attitude. And when you give them a glimpse of it, like, hey, like when you see the troops that pushed up into Baghdad initially, it was like, they're waving American flags. It's like okay and and that's why it's there like the the the seed is there and you know you recently saw that in some of the protests in Hong Kong and China where like you there these people are getting this from somewhere in Hong Kong it's pretty obvious where they're getting it from they they lived as free people for many many years but so they still have some of that but there's a seed that exists like in the in the mind but it's been so

buried by by fear that you have to do something that's a long-term plan and that's That's why, you know, that's why when you look at, you know, when you look at Germany and you look at Japan and you look post-World War II, it was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to, I don't even know if you can say this. We're going to impose freedom on you for an extended period of time until that's what you want. Because human beings do, they are, they do want freedom. But sometimes it's just been buried and abused and beat down so hard that it's not worth it to them. and they don't understand it. And I think one of the prerequisites to living in a free society is you have to have a population that trusts each other. You know, you had had the Sunni minority in control in Iraq for a long time. And the Shia majority and the Kurds had been abused under that system under Saddam for a long time. And now you've got to convince the Shiites who have the votes now under democracy to just take over the government.

you've got to convince them not to take revenge on the Sunnis. You've got to teach them why it's a good idea to allow the Sunnis into the government at all after everything that they've been through. You've got to convince the Sunnis to buy into a government that's now going to be led primarily by Shiites. And you got to, that takes generations. It's generations. You know, and in order to do it, you know, the first and foremost thing you have to be able to do is you got to provide security in the place. You have to be able to let everybody know that, look, you don't have to go after the Sunnis. You don't have to worry about the Shi'iates coming after

you because Daddy's here. And, you know, when we decided to go in, Light and then reinforce that decision by canceling the first cavalry's deployment, pulling the third ID back when we replaced him with the first armor division. For what I believe, I mean, and, you know, people can debate about this and they do and they will for a long time for what I think were political reasons. You know, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they've been telling everybody that the war. What about those decisions? When, when you're talking about, what, what about those? So the military all along had wanted more troops.

They said, we need more people to secure this country. Eventually, General Franks sent Com general, uh, who was commander of Iraqi forces, of our, of our forces in Iraq at the time. He finally bought in and he got his. his subordinate generals to buy in to the lower amount under the assumption that they would be reinforced once we knew that Saddam wasn't going to use chemical weapons on us and things like that, they were going to be reinforced and that we were going to have the Iraqi military and police available for Saso operations.

And just none of those things ended up happening, right? You get up into April. I think, yeah, so we go in in March 2003. Well, actually, let's back a little bit. Where are you? When did you get out of college? So I graduated college in the spring of 03. Of 03.

And you get a platoon. This is, again, why my life has been just awesome. I've been so blessed. I showed up. When I asked for orders to a SEAL team, the guy that I asked for orders to, the guy that told me, you wait. When he did give me orders, he gave me orders to the next deploying SEAL team, right? he gave me orders to the next deploying seal team. That's a miracle, right?

That's, that's, it's a miracle. It's also relationships. It's like also like, you know, I worked hard when I worked for that guy. I worked hard and he, he trusted me, you know, and he took care of me. He sent me to the next deploying seal team. So it is, I graduate in the spring. So June, July, August, September, set for a, set for a September deployment. So I go to Seal Team 7.

Seal Team 5 is on deployment. They got one platoon in Iraq. Seal Team 5 is on deployment. They're coming home in September. The Steel Team 7 is replacing them. And by the way, not all of Steel Team 7, just a couple platoons are actually one platoon is scheduled to go to Iraq. Did you know these guys yet? Who?

You're platooned. I know it's a small world. It's a small world. Here's the really lucky things. The Seal Team 7. commanding officer was my executive officer when I was at SEAL Team 2. So again, I knew him. I had a great relationship with him.

We got along great. He's a great guy. And so I show up at SEAL Team 7 in the spring, 2003. Their workup, their pre-deployment workup cycle for civilians out there, you know, you train to deploy. and the deployment training ends long before you go on deployment. It will end six months before. And then you spend six months doing some kind of fine tweaking. You do what's called what we used to do.

We don't do it anymore, but you do like an operational readiness exercise, a big exercise to prove that you're good to go. And then you do some additional sort of theater-based training. Like, okay, we know we're going to this area. We'll do some focus training on that. So the main bulk of the workup was done. It was over. By the time you got there.

When I showed up. So I show up and I'm there for a matter of days. And I'm walking. And actually SEAL Team 7 had just been commissioned at the beginning of that workup cycle. So SEAL Team 7 is brand new. We don't even have a building yet. So I'm walking outside. You know, we're kind of thrown into some ad hoc buildings.

And so I show up. And the commanding officer, like I said, is a guy that I work for. And so he knew me in and and you know when you work with someone you know him you trust him and I had a great relationship with him and I'm walking down the hallway. So I check in and I'm done with my check in and And there's one one platoon is slated to go to war As you No, I'm not even in a platoon. Oh, this is before that. I'm not even in a platoon

Okay, okay I show up to be ops. I show up to be you know, whatever Yeah And I'm walking down the hallway the external part of the building and I see the commanding officer I'm like hey what's up sir and he goes Jocko you look so angry

what are you so angry about and it's just my face sir I said it's just my face sir you know that and he goes what can I do to make you happy and I said give me a one-way ticket to Iraq and he just smiled and I was like well that's interesting

and looking back I knew looking back he knew what he was going to do and what he did was There was a weak platoon commander. And a week after I showed up at SEAL Team 7, he fired that platoon commander and gave me that platoon.

How much time do you have to get to know your guys? A couple months. And what kind of war do you think you're getting into at this point? I don't care. You just, you know, whatever. So we're starting. But you guys got information coming back from the deployed. We're knowing what SEAL Team 5 is doing and what they're doing is dream ops for

us direct action missions load up humveys so now now we're thinking about humvies load up humvies go out the middle night take down a target grab a bad guy come back interrogate him find out you know what he's doing get more targets go hit those targets it's like a dream come true what's the opt tempo here and you're talking about nightly missions like several times a week they're doing they're doing you know they're doing their opt tempo's high I don't know what the specific numbers are I would say they're probably doing two three four targets a week This is glory. This is awesome.

Like you said, there would be seals who would spend their entire 30-year careers be master chiefs who would never fire a shot in anger. And these guys are taking down targets. Target after target after target. And not only that, but like I said, we trained for a mission. A single mission would be, you know, the highlight of my life. And here's guys doing three, four, five, six missions. So I get put in this platoon.

And I remember as soon as I took over the platoon, we had a training mission that night. Was it that night? Yes, it was that night. And when I took over the platoon, actually, the commanding officer called me, the offgoing, the guy that was about to get relieved, they called him and the platoon chief into the office, into his office. And we get in there and he goes, you know, lieutenant so-and-so, your performance is subpar, and you are hereby relieved.

and of and jaco you are now taking over and he says uh how did this go down oh yeah and he says you know lieutenant so-and-so you're dismissed that guy walks out he says chief i know you i know um you know you got a you got a platoon of good guys you had bad leadership i should have done this earlier whatever he said i don't want to put words in his mouth but he said you know chief you got jaco and So you asked me if I knew these guys. I knew that guy. Okay. The Paltoon chief was a buddy of mine from Team One.

We kind of, one of the guys I grew up with at Tiel Team One. That helps. Yeah. And he had a good relationship with the guys. Yes. So he could kind of slide you in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I was excited about that. And the LPO of the sister Paltoon was like my best friend for forever in the teams. So that was really solid too. and then the task unit who ended up being the task unit senior chief was another like guy that I grew up with a team one so yeah I had some great connections and that guy was like one of my favorite guys ever so yeah I'm pretty stoked man I mean I got the commanding officer I'm super stoked it's just it's awesome it's awesome and this is this is you know this is glowing right now oh man this is why this is why you're in the teams right this is why you this is why you this is why

you work hard this is why you this is why you take care of your teammates right because that's all this is this is like guys that I'd known for you know my whole career and they're all stoked I'm coming in they're freaking stoked so the guy the commanding officer says see you later to this to this he says hey you know you're fired and he then the chief he says chief you know help with the transition I know you got some good guys in there And he says, Roger that. And he goes, all right, you can go. I'll talk to Jocko.

And then the platoon chief looks at me. And he goes, do you want me to tell, do you want me to tell lieutenant so-and-so anything? And I said, yeah, I said, tell him to get his shit out of my desk. And like, that was that. And sure enough, you know, he left and the commanding officer, you know, we talked for a little while. And then I went down and that guy was gone.

And his shit was out of my desk. And that's when I rolled in. So that night, we were doing a training mission. And I immediately went in there and I talked to chief and I said, hey, who's the junior guy? I said, who's a junior guy that like is good to go? And he goes, this guy. And I go, he's going to run the op tonight. And he was like, what do you mean?

I go, he's going to run the op tonight. And he was like, are you sure? And I'm like, yep. So he did. You know, this young junior enlisted guy starts putting together the plan. And a couple critical things happened. And this junior enlisted guy ended up being. just a great friend of mine and very, very helpful to me because when you build relationships

with your junior enlistic guys, they can tell you what's going on, blah, blah, blah. So that night, during this mission, we, during this training mission, and again, here we are, we're going to Iraq, or we're praying to go to Iraq, and we were slotted. There was two platoons going to scent com. One was going to be in Bahrain, one was going to be in Iraq. We weren't sure who was who. Pretty much the other platoon, our sister platoon, and then the plan was to rotate these two platoons,

and you'd spend some time in-country, and then you'd go to Bahrain, then you'd switch, right? Part of that was just the fair ferry, right? Everyone wants to go to war, hey, we're not going to let one platoon get all the experience. So that was part of the plan. So, but still, we know we're going to Iraq,

and here we are, we're going on a training mission, And it's like an over-the-beach pilot rescue or something. Just not something we should have been focused on. So we go, we come over the beach, and one of the boats like capsizes and the engines flooded and it's just a disaster. And luckily for me, I had done a lot of, well, I was, you know, I'd been in the teams for a while and I had done a lot of, and I had done a lot of. of amphibious operations more than normal team guy because I had done two back-to-back ARG platoons meaning you know an ARG is an amphibious ready group working off a ship like back in the day there would be one ARG platoon for every six platoons that

would be going on a what we called a spec ops deployment just going to land-based deployment there would be one ARG platoon and it was always the bad deal and no one wanted it and I did two of those back-to-back and the reason I did two of back to back is because the odds were if you were going to do something real it was going to be from the art platoon because those were the guys that went to Somalia and and so I was like hey I'm going to do those art puttoons because those guys are doing real work forward deploy at least so so I had done a ton of water work and a ton of over the beaches more than more than a normal seal you know does especially at that moment in

time so the boat flips blah blah blah I the guys are like Like the guys are looking at me like, hey, we need to cancel. Like, we need to go admin, basically. Go admin. We got to get a vehicle down here to get this boat back to base. Because what are we going to do? How is this going to work? And I was like, negative.

So I kind of just like took over. And I said, hey, here's what we're going to do. Boom. And I gave out the plan. Like here's, and it's a pretty simple plan. And this is the kind of thing I'd done before. You know, you get one guy with the extended bowline. He's going to go out, get through the surf.

Keep that thing oriented to go through the surf. Everyone else is going to push it out. Once we get in we're gonna paddle this thing and when I said we're gonna paddle this thing out These guys were looking at me like I was completely insane because you know you got a 55 horsepower motor on there it's a big zodiac boat but and it's filled with gear so it's a pain in the ass But I know that I can do it because I've done it before so but what it the key is that That they didn't think about too much was somebody being in the holding the bow line of the boat and keeping that boat oriented through the surf and as long as that's happening which it's not hard to do that because you're

You're like basically a sea anchor. So I say guys, listen, the bowline thing needs to be, you know, kept forward and we'll just paddle this thing out. Once we get out there, because a couple of the other boats were fine and we just would tow it out once we got out there. So here we go. And the guys are like, okay. And I remember actually the guy that the young guy that I had run in the op later, like five years later, he told me like when you. So I was a guy. I was like, okay, I breeder my weapon in the boat, put on my fins and.

took that bowline and started swimming out. And the guys got in the boat, paddled out, we paddle out through the surf zone, got it hooked up to the other boat. We towed it out. We did our rendezvous at sea. But like five years later,

that young guy said to me, like, when you made that call and then we did it, he's like, after that, he goes, I would have done anything you ever told me to do because I couldn't believe that you said it, and then that it worked.

So that was like the first thing I did. The first day I did. I think it was that night. I think it was the night that that guy got fired. We did this. Okay. And so, and again,

I was very lucky because, you know, I had done all these arque platoons. And I was a prior enlisted guy. So I had done multiple deployments. And then I did deployments as an officer already. So I was very lucky that I had this experience at the time. Because I certainly was no,

you know, certainly no spectacular human by any stretch. So that was, that was the first night. I meet these guys. And it did, you know, like you mentioned something on one of the,

earlier podcast about like bonding together well we did a little bit of a shitty up and it went sideways and we pulled it off and once we pulled it off it was like okay and then we we did our final preparation and then we went on deployment and finally jaco's going to war yeah i think we're up over an hour so let's wrap it there and leave everybody uh with a cliffhanger right on well jaco's head into war in the meantime if you want to support this podcast first of all right now you're probably listening to this podcast on the jonko podcast feed we're going to set up this podcast the thread on its own standalone what is it podcast feed it'll be its own standalone podcast so if you want to keep listening to it subscribe to it and then if you want to support this podcast you can also

check out our other podcasts i got a podcast called Jocko podcast. I got the Warrior Kid podcast and I got the grounded podcast and Daryl has a podcast which is called Margar Made and if you want to support any of these podcasts you can go to a place called jocco store.com

and you can get some gear or you can go to origin mane.com and you can get some gear there. That's all I got. Thanks for listening. As things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.