Jocko Podcast - The Unravelling 4: War Party

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

After the fall of Saddam’s regime, US forces struggle to provide security as an insurgency takes shape. Jocko’s first tour is action-packed, but ends as Iraq spirals out of control.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko unraveling podcast, episode four, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. And we are about to pick up the thread of Jocko going to war. I want to read something from Tom Rick's book, Viasco, in the early part, from the earliest part of the invasion. Because I want to give people an idea of the fire you were jumping into in September, October. 2003. So the war started in March and the conventional forces of the Iraqis and the resistance in the cities is precisely the match for the U.S. military that you think it is and we burn through them. And the third infantry division gets up into Baghdad quick. They take the airport. They make their thunder run through the city and the regime collapses very

rapidly. That's in March and early April. And this passage is referring to a period now April into May. Quote, Baghdad was falling apart in front of the eyes of the U.S. military, with buildings being looted and parents afraid to let their children outside, but no one had orders to do anything about it. Looking back several years later, Colonel Alan King, the head of Civil Affairs for 3ID, spoke of April 2003 with a slow, chilled tone of horror in his voice. I got to Baghdad and was told, you've got 24 hours to come up with a phase four plan. On the night of April 8,

Colonel John Sterling, Chief of Staff of 3ID, came to me and said, I just got off the phone with the Corps Chief of Staff, and I asked him for the reconstruction plan, and he said there isn't one. So you've got 24 hours to come up with one. King was stunned. He had been asking for months, for just such a plan and had been told that when the time came he would be given it.

Lacking clear orders about what to do once in Baghdad, the third infantry division more or less stayed in place in the capital. You didn't find many dismounted patrols with 3 ID, recalled Jay Garner, a retired Army general and not one to lightly criticize his old peers. They kind of stayed with their platforms, that is, their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. On April 6th, Lieutenant Douglas Hoyt, a platoon leader with 3 ID, looters for the first time. Quote, I remembered looking through the sights on my tank at people and trying to determine

if they were hostile or not, he recalled later. He didn't stop them. It was not our mission at the time. The division's official actor action review states that it had no orders to do anything else. Quote, third infantry division transitioned into phase four, Saso, that's security and stability ops, with no plan from higher HQ, it reported. There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational. The result was a power and authority vacuum created by our failure to immediately replace key government institutions.

The president announced that our national goal was regime change. This is still reading from the Third ID report. That our national goal was regime change, yet there was no timely plan prepared for, the obvious consequences of regime change. As a matter of law and fact, the United States is an occupying power in Iraq, even if we characterize ourselves as liberators. Because of the refusal to acknowledge our occupier status, commanders did not initially take measures available to occupying powers, such as imposing curfews, directing civilians to return to work, and controlling the local government and populace. The failure to act after we displaced the regime created a power vacuum,

which others immediately tried to fill. Now, I know that war is a very confusing thing, and nobody has a plan after the first punch gets thrown in a fight. But there were some decisions made in the earliest days of this war that I find pretty inexplicable, specifically because they went against the advice of the military and the intelligence establishment. and they were made seemingly for ideological and political reasons.

El Paul Bremer, he was the civilian who was sent over to head the coalition provisional authority, the CPA, the civilian authority structure in Iraq. Let's just talk about what you just read before we even jump into the rest of this. So this is, you know, clearly, massively short-sighted. And there's a couple reasons why I think that that could unfold the way it did. And I'm guessing when you get, when you execute this thing that you think could take a long time, and all of a sudden you've, you know, you're, you're, you got to the top of the mountain, right? You achieved your goal.

And yet it, you did it so quickly that you don't know what to do next. and that is absolutely. I mean, when you read that, it's, there's no excuse for it. Like there's no excuse to think. Even if you thought, even if you thought, like let's say your thought is going into this thing. Hey, you know what? The people have been waiting for this.

We'll get Saddam out of there. And the people will be ready to jump for joy. Even if that's your assessment. you have to understand human nature well enough to recognize that what that looks like if you don't control it will not be a pretty thing that that's you to not be able to recognize that is a massive shortfall and it is very short-sighted so and again when you when you look at a, you know, a division commander or a brigade commander or division commander, like, yeah, they're thinking about it.

But believe me, they're thinking about, like, how we're going to get up there and what's going to happen to my troops and what am I doing with my dead and wounded. And they've got some pretty heavy thoughts. Oh, yeah. There has to be a commander, you know, the next echelon of command should be saying, okay, cool, I got these guys out there on the front lines that are going to win this thing for me. Here's what we're going to do next. You know, I used to tell the way I used to break down roles and responsibilities for a seal

platoon, I'd say, look, the enlisted leadership is handling the tactical problem that we got going on right now. The officer is looking to figure out what the next move is going to be. So what we have in this, you know, you expand that out several levels of the chain of command. And what you get is you got, you know, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion that are pushing up that are there in this tactical situation to win. the next echelon up the chain of command should be going, okay, what's our next move going to be? And that's the way things are supposed to work. And clearly, this is a disaster.

And you can see it start to unfold. The civilians, the civilian leadership structure, the DOD and in the administration, they didn't really expect there to be a reconstruction process. problem. They did expect the Iraqis to throw flowers at our feet and thank us for liberating them. And then we can look around and say, okay, now that Saddam's out of power, you know, who are some of the good guys that we've got in here? You can run this ministry now, right? And so they didn't push anybody to create a phase for plan for what to do after we defeated the Iraqi regime, right? In the military, at least at the time, you know, they want to go in there and kick some ass. They're not, they don't want to have to deal with the phase four plan if they

don't have to. And if the civilians are not pushing them on it, they're happy, they were happy, unfortunately, to, to assume that the civilians were taking care of that, that they were going to send in a guy like Bremer. And he was working with Chalabee and the other people, the provisional government that we had in place and that, that they had a plan for that. Yeah. And let me say something else here. When you're, when you're in that moment, right? If you take, if you, if you take this if you take early on in my combat career going to Iraq what we were worried about out of the gate was how we're going to do an assault that's what we're worried about hey look after the assault we do something called sensitive site exploitation where we search and we you know we search

everything and we look for everything we didn't rehearse that because you know what once we get the target secure it doesn't really matter right everything's going to be fine like we'll figure it out we want you want us to want us to look around you want us to look for computers you want us to look for Intel that we might find cool we'll figure it out what we're worried about is taking down the target that's what we're worried about this is the exact same story right what the divisional commanders what the guys on the ground are worried about is look we need to get this target secure and once they they figure once we get the target secure cool we'll have some time we'll be able to breathe we'll be able to hey it looks like people get

a little crazy okay let's let's let's get a grip on this thing let's settle this thing down and we you know let's get this sorted out so even to say if I'm going to make another excuse or if I'm going to make an excuse my excuse would be hey look we were focused on getting the target secure and that's okay like I get it and yeah my upper echelon should have been like okay you know what hey once you get the targets here don't worry we got we got another group over here we're going to come in and these are important things that we're going to follow and this is the structure we're going to set up and here's how we're going to keep civilians from doing bad things and Here's why we're going to get civilians to do good things.

And here's the money we're going to pump into the economy. And here's how we're going to transition, you know, businesses that we set up into businesses that the civilian sector is leading. I mean, this is all stuff that you could kind of map out. But then you get to a point where you've got target secure and it's not the way you want it to be. It's not really secure. And so then what you have to do is you have to take action, right? So this is a good lesson learned.

And look, it's easy. Sit here hindsight 2020. I would have done this. I would have done that. No, I'm not going to sit here and say that. What I am saying is as a leader, as a leader listening to this, you should be thinking, okay, I accomplished my mission. The mission I was focused on, I accomplished. Immediately you have to say, what is my next mission?

Where is this going? What has changed since I got done? Because if you think the battlefield doesn't change and this goes for business, this goes for life, this goes for everything, If you think that things aren't going to change, you're wrong. And part of the whole Oudaloupe, right? The Odo loop is, you know, you observe, orient, decide, and act. So you have to do that. This isn't just a cool thing to say.

Like, you have to do it. And when you look around and you see things starting to deteriorate rapidly, rapidly too. Then you have to decide to do something else and then you need to act. I will also say this. And you, you, you, the way. way you say this, the way you say these things, you know, you make it very clear, very rapidly. You just said that. You just said rapidly deteriorating.

And you asked me in between, before we recorded, you're like, did you know what was going on? And like, yeah, I knew. It did not appear. The trajectory, the downward trajectory wasn't as clear as it is right now. Yeah. As we're reading through it. I'm telling you. I meant specifically the explosion of looting when it happened.

I mean, that happened at a wide scale in Baghdad, almost immediately after we took that city, so that people were tearing pipes out of the walls of the ministries and things. It happened so rapidly that it would have been unreasonable to expect our forces to know how to deal with that. I mean, Bremer, Paul Bremer, the civilian who was in charge by that time in May, he told the military to start shooting the looters, and the military told him, we're not shooting looters.

What are he talking about? And somebody leaked it to the press. And, you know, that caused the effect that you would think. But the military wasn't, we weren't equipped to deal with it yet. I think we had two light brigades in Baghdad at the time when the looting started. And so these guys are in a city of five or six million people, two brigades, basically, at the time. And we don't know what's going to be happening, you know, at that moment. There's another thing that comes into play here and it's sometimes I talk about hey if you're

a leader and you can and you can patrol you know five kilometers an hour with a hundred pound rucksack on and so you then set up your your plan so that the whole platoon's going to do five kilometers an hour with a hundred pound rucksack you get out in the field they can't do it So it's a little bit of a blind spot for you to think that other people can do what you're going to do. There's a similar blind side. I just was talking to a client the other day where the blind spot is you're looking at something from a benevolent position where you think, oh, my leaders, they're not going to worry about, you know, their paycheck. They're going to take care of their people. That's a blind spot.

Just because you're not worried about your paycheck and you've got a good amount of money. saved and you're going to do okay doesn't mean some of your front line leaders aren't going to be like wait a second I would rather fire every single one of my people and still get a paycheck so there becomes a blind spot because you don't have the same values that your leaders do you don't have the same the same physical capabilities that or my my team doesn't have the same physical capabilities anymore as I do so that's a little blind spot the second one is my subordinates don't have the same value structure so they might make these decisions different than I would.

And if I don't know that, then I just expect everyone to do the right thing. Well, guess what? We have here. Here's the culture. These Americans are going, hey, once we've liberated them, they're going to be excited to start their entrepreneurial venture that they've been thinking about. And they are, it's a blind spot. The blind spot is when you get rid of the government, the first people that are going to take

action are the people that are looking to steal, rob, you know, murder, raped, exude their power over the situation. And the friendly, benevolent person that would have been excited to open a shop isn't going to even make, you know, is going to make a half a step in that direction and then lock their doors and say, I'm not going outside. It's ma'am. The military agreed to go in with fewer troops than they wanted to go in with at the beginning because they were under the impression that they were going to be reinforced by First Cavalry relatively rapidly.

In April, I want to say April 21st, it's at the last moment. It's a week or two before First Cav is supposed to deploy. Brumsfeld makes a call, decides that they're not needed. And so they don't go. And rather than having First Armored Division come in and overlap with the Third Infantry Division, division for a while as primary Baghdad force, they decide that once 3 AD gets there, or 1 AD gets there, 3 AD is just going home. And so that amounts to no reinforcements at all.

And then the military believed that we were going to have access to a good portion of the Iraq. Which, by the way, just throwing it out there, right? Like, you know, the difference between the bad general and the good general, is the good general knows how and when to employ his reinforcements and he holds it to the last minute. Like he doesn't commit those reinforcements. When you go, I don't need reinforcements, that's not good. And to give, that's, I think, first cab is 17, 18,000 men.

I mean, that's a serious force to get pulled, especially when the military at this point is deployed in Iraq with the expectation that it's going to be showing up. They're also deployed with the expectation that they're going to have access to some of the Iraqi security forces and police that they're already actively getting together. Major General Mattis at the time is working with a bunch of generals. He's got that famous quote to the Iraqi generals that if any of you mess with me, I'll kill you all. You know, we have a bunch of military guys and civilian staff at CENTCOM who are working with these Iraqi generals who are like, yeah, look, I got a bunch of people that are loyal to me who, We'll do what I say. They're good boys. They're not crazy.

Let's get this scene together. And we can provide security in the areas that, you know, we're used to. And Bremer does a few things. Again, Bremer's the civilian authority that's sent over by the Bush administration. The Defense Department of the Bush administration at this point are not getting along well with the military. The military feels like they're not being listened to at the high levels. Relationships are the most important thing. You know, relationships are more important than the chain of command.

and when you have two organizations that need to work that need to work together and you don't have relationships, this is a disaster. And it gets worse. So they're having trouble. The guy who's in charge as a civilian authority at first is a retired general, Jay Garner. And he's got a pretty decent rapport with the generals, but they feel like he isn't pursuing debaptification. Some other things, some of the administration's priorities that he's not pursuing aggressively enough. So after a month, they call him, tell him he's coming home, this new guy, Bremmer's coming. And I kid you not.

This sounds like something out of an onion article. Paul Bremer had to get a two-week crash course in Middle Eastern politics before they sent him over to be the head civilian in charge of the Iraqi occupation. Okay. And so he shows up with a list of things that he's going to do. On day one, he tells everybody that he is going to institute a radical debatification process, right? Anybody who was rank of colonel and above in the military or any equivalent of that in the civilian sector in a country like Iraq where a lot of the industries are state owned, a lot of the corporations are state owned, anybody who was in the top three or four layers of management of any of those industries, any of the government ministries, the military, all of this, they're not only fired, their pensions are cut and they're not allowed to work in public life and in the public sector ever again. Okay, so let me jump in. Here's what is awful about this, the way this is unfolding.

It happens all the time in the military, and it happens in civilian sector two, that someone with not a lot of experience in a certain arena, for whatever reason, gets put in charge of that arena. This is a, this happens. Is it, is an ideal case? No, it's not an ideal case. It happens all time. You know, the U.S. military is set up in such a way that an officer who got commissioned after 13 weeks of officer candidate school is going to show up on a ship and be, you know, in a department. He's going to be a platoon commander in the Marine Corps or the Army. I mean, he is going to be in charge of people that have vastly more experience than he does. It happens in the civilian sector as well. A kid goes to school for civil engineering and then reports to a job site on a big construction project and he's He's quote

In charge of these construction guys these Foreman that have been working for 27 years It's okay These things work as long as the leader that's stepping in is humble enough to say I don't know everything Let me sit back. Please educate me. Please give me your advice on what you think we should do. Please let's formulate a plan together that makes sense to everyone in this room. I'm here to support what you guys need.

Somebody that comes into a situation, and I don't care if it's something as bigger than a platoon, but it's something as big as this situation. I'm telling you right now, if you put a good leader in that situation with no experience and with no two-week course, if you put the right person in there, they would have squared this away. I'm telling you that right now. I know this to be,

I know this to be true. Like the times when I was telling you on another podcast, like if I tell you something, it's 100%. I'm telling you, you put a good leader with a good,

humble leader into very challenging situations. It'll be okay. I don't think there's any question that good leadership could have changed the whole, at this point, could have changed the whole trajectory of the war. So you get a guy rolling in there who is not humble?

Here's what actually happened, by the way. He comes in with this debatification order, a radical one. Jay Garner, the retired Army General who had been, who he's replacing, says, oh, you can't do this. This is going to put 30 to 50,000 highly influential people, the people who know how to run the industries, the ministries, all the managers, doctors, professors. you're going to put them all out on the street and tell them they can never work in public life again. And Bremer says, I'm not here to get your advice on this. This is what I'm doing. He says, okay, well, I need backup. He goes and gets the CIA station chief.

He says, come talk to this guy with me. They go in and say, oh, you definitely can't do this. He said, I'm not having a discussion about it. This is what I'm doing. Okay? That's what happened. A week later, he decides that he's going to disband the entire Iraqi military. the entire interior ministry, which is the entire police force, internal security forces.

You're talking about 385,000 armed men from the Iraqi military-aged fighting males. Military-aged fighting males who are now out of work, who our military guys, Mattis talks about this, some of the other generals talk about this. We were working with them. We had a list of names of Iraqi soldiers, 125,000 names of people who were ready to fall right back into ranks and assist in reconstruction, assist in security operations in different parts of the country. And we didn't have enough soldiers to do that on our own, right? So we sent- Not to mention some little things like we don't speak the language, we don't know the country,

we don't know the culture, like all those things. He put half a million men, influential people, all Sunni, by the way, for the most part, because that's just how it played out. That's what the previous regime was on the street and made them pariahs in society overnight. A lot of these are armed fighting age men. He's ignoring everybody's advice when he does these things. And he's doing it for, you know, the people who were kind of pushing to do this, Douglas Fyke back in Washington, Paul Wolfowitz. These are guys who's, they lost ancestors in the Holocaust.

And they're looking at this as Saddam Hussein is Hitler. This is denazification. You're not going to let Nazis continue to work in the government of, but if they've done a little more history, They would find out that we tried that in Germany. And by 1949, 1950, we were like, you know, we're going to have to moderate this a little bit because these are the only people that have worked in government for the last 10 years, 12 years. And so it got to a point where even then we were like, all right, you remember the Nazi party?

What were you just a junior member? You were a teacher. Okay, fine, you can have your teaching job back. Even then we had to moderate. But they were coming at this from an ideological perspective. They had an idea in mind of how they were going to run this thing. And they were taking advice from nobody. And overnight, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands of young fighting age men who, in an honor culture, right, in a culture where a man's ability to take care of his family and be the man, the providers, it's important everywhere.

It's a whole different ballgame over there. And the Sunni population now feels that we're coming in there to attack and assault them. And we're losing all this while we're losing control of the country. while we're starting to see killings and robberies and reprisals and looting on a wide scale. And those are the conditions under which, against all advice, he's making these decisions. And I mean, a lot of Iraqis and a lot of American soldiers paid for that arrogance. I believe that. And again, this is a guy of all people that if he should have been listening to the advice of the people on the ground,

It should be a guy who had to get a two-week crash course on Middle Eastern. He came out of the, you know, he was an ambassador, or he was a diplomat for a while, and he was a private sector consultant guy. You know, he worked and just, he was just a business consultant. Once again, this is why, of all traits that a leader needs to have, humility is the most important one over and over and over again. And this is the situation you can see. It sickens me to revisit this.

And you think, yeah, you think all it takes is a little bit of humility and this problem would not have happened. And there's another quote, I think it's from Patton, where he says the general on the ground is always right. You know, look, when you're in the rear or the general on the front is always right, whatever the quote is. It's like, yeah, when I show up somewhere and I just think I know better than everybody else, General Franks, who's the commander of all our forces at the time, he, by a lot of reports, can hardly be in the same room as this guy. He wants to ring his neck. So you've got the commanding general of our forces over there and the civilian authority over there who can hardly be in the same room. And then another thing that is kind of inexplicable happens. Over the course of about a month and a half, the commanding general, General Franks, he retires. And by, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to say this because I don't know what I, but they're all. are several other officers and civilians who were there at the time who say that he checked out kind of early mentally. And General McKearinen, he was the ground forces commander in charge of Sifflik at the time. He gets bounced in June. So after just a couple months, several other

officers, the head of the Army, the chief of staff of the Army at the time, he leaves. And to give you an idea of his relationship to the civilians. The chief of staff of the army retires in June or July, and neither Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, nor his deputy Wolfowitz, show up to his retirement ceremony. We're in the middle of the start of a war, and that's the relationship to the head. Rumsfeld needs to replace him. He passes over all the three and four star generals in the army, and he calls up a guy who had retired three years earlier and puts him in charge. which, you know, is fine. He's a good man.

By all accounts, he did a fine job. But it gives you an idea of the relationship that civilians have to the military at this point. And one thing that really is a problem with this is when you have a guy now, so now when these new military commanders roll in, now the guy that, quote, has the experience

on the ground is Bremer. Right. And since the new guys coming in, you hope that they have the, kind of humble, hey, what are we doing? Tell me what we need to get done. How can I support the mission here? And now all that does is exacerbate the problem, the ego problem, because you have humble

people that want to help, but you have an ego, an ego-driven person that is just driving this agenda and now doing it with more authority because they have the air quotes, they have the experience on the ground. There's a story I remember from this period. It was from May, June in that period. There was an Army intelligence officer who had developed some sources, and he was working on trying to figure out what the imams were saying in the mosques on Fridays. He wanted to know what were they telling the people in the mosques.

And so he gets a whole bunch of information. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, some of it's neutral, whatever. And he brings this to the civilian authorities. And they look at it. They just, they're not interested. They say, that's tactical. Bring it to the Army. And so he says, okay, so he brings it to the Army.

me and he brings it to a colonel who's an intelligence officer for, I guess, this would be three ID at the time, or rather one AD at the time. And he looks at it, and he just, you know, in the whole stack of intel reports, he finds a couple of the preachers who were kind of making anti-American statements. And he says, well, we have to arrest these people. And the guy's like, well, look, all of the imams have to talk like that. We need to tell the difference between the ones who were serious and the ones who aren't, right? And it got to the point where he couldn't get anywhere with the military and he couldn't get anywhere with the civilian side. So he just stopped bringing these reports in because he figured he was putting his own sources in danger and he wasn't getting anywhere with the

people he was bringing him to. And so he just stopped. And he told all his sources, just cut loose. Just forget you knew me. I don't want to get you in trouble or anything like that. So there's just no good communication going on. Yeah. And again, if you take a step back when somebody brings you intel like that and your first reaction is you got to attack them when your actual first reaction is how can we build a relationship with these people who have influence over the civilian populace that that's what you ask yourself summer of 2003 we've got hundreds of thousands of fighting age men on the street they were cops they were you know they were they were Iraqi servicemen they're out of work a lot of them are already armed and meanwhile there is a

budding insurgency that's starting to crop up we don't really know it yet but by the summer of 2003, they're already paying $500 in operation with a bonus for providing video of killing American soldiers. And these are people who don't have, they don't have income anymore. And a lot of them are pretty angry about it. And they don't need, you know, some, they don't need a strong Islamist reason to want to go set an IED somewhere at this point. And a lot of them start doing it. And they start to pick up over the course of the summer. And now you're not there yet. Yeah, and really at this point, they were doing a lot of mortar attacks, a lot of pot shots, a lot of pop shots, a lot of RPG attacks.

The IED thing wasn't, it wasn't quite getting, it was getting started. Yeah. But it was very, very young in its technological advancements that they were going to make. And there didn't seem to be any coordination to it. It seemed to be individuals who were kind of. And I will say that, At, you know, now looking back, we see this downward spiral. We see the beginning, you know, you see really, I wouldn't even say we see the downward spiral looking back.

That's, that's, that's giving ourselves, we're giving ourselves too much credit. What you see is, okay, you know, when you see a, you know, when you look at a, what's it called, a whirlpool. you know what I'm saying? You see like a little bit of movement on the surface and maybe you notice that it's all moving in the same direction. Maybe you notice there's a little vector point in the middle of that whirlpool. It has a little dip, just a little dip. But you can't see like the downward spiral.

You don't see the vortex yet. I would say somebody that was really, really paying attention might have been able to see a little tiny dip. I think to everyone else, To me, to my guys, it was these things, we weren't connecting them yet. We could barely tell that there was a move, that there was a, that everyone's moving in the same direction or that there was a movement in the same direction. So it's still not clear.

It's very clear looking back. I mean, it's very clear. You know, when you're looking back, you're like, oh, yeah. And I remember, I remember when they, when they did the dissolution of the Iraqi army in the Iraqi police, it was, it was kind of like a little bit of a surprise more than it was. What did you?

Are you kidding me? You know, you'd think, you know, naively think, okay, well, I guess,

you know, makes sense, right? Makes sense. CENTCOM literally got informed by a written note. So, again, from my position,

platoon commander, looking out, going, that seems weird. But, you're thinking okay well it's kind of outside your purview not only outside my purview but you know I wasn't on the ground yet right I was I definitely wasn't you know the station chief up there that's monitoring all this stuff you're looking at it going okay what I what I don't want to do is

sit here and come across like oh I told you so no that would be a lie yeah for me it was like oh they disbanded the iraqi army it's i bet you know in my mind i'm thinking okay they're probably going to rebuild it from the ground up okay got it whatever did you start to get an idea in august that things were changing so august second or rather i believe it was a seventh um al-qaeda in iraq announces itself by hitting the jordanian embassy um just blows the hell out of it 17 dead, 40 wounded. August 19th, just two weeks later, they hit the UN building. I think they were in a hotel, and they hit that side of the hotel, killed 22, wounded

over 100, and the UN special envoy for Iraq was apparently this very well-loved, I don't know a lot about him, but a very well-loved Brazilian guy, very well-respected, and he got trapped in the rubble and died while people listened to him scream, and the UN bugged out. They had like 800 people in Iraq before that. They were down to 15 within like a month. They were out of there. And then the end of August, the 29th, al-Qaeda in Iraq, starts hitting Shia shrines in the south. They hit one in, I think there was a celebration, a Shia celebration going on in Najaf,

and they hit the Imam Ali shrine down there and killed 95 people, wounded over 500 people. And so they're at a point now where they're not hitting U.S. targets. They're just hitting, they're causing, they're starting to cause some chaos. and we didn't know who was doing this yet. At least as far as I know, I don't think U.S. intelligence was putting this all together. You know, we didn't have the Zarqawi letter yet. We didn't have any of the videos. We didn't quite know what was going on.

But we were starting to get an idea that something was changing in August. As you were getting ready to get on that plane, I mean, were you starting to realize you were going over there to get into a real fight? We knew that things were bad. I shouldn't even say bad. we knew that it was unstable. We knew that it was unstable. We knew that our guys, the seals that were there, were out hitting targets.

Their work was fairly consistent. As I remember, I could be wrong. But from what I remember, you know, they were like hitting targets. And it was pretty consistent the whole time. And, you know, they were getting bad guys. And so, you know, here's something that I talk about, a decent amount, which is all, Our impression, my impression, and America's impression, was we're hitting targets, we're catching bad guys, there's a finite number of bad guys, and once we catch them. The dead enders, yeah.

Yep, once we catch them, okay, well, then we'll be done. I hope they don't catch them all before I get there so I can get some of these bad guys. I mean, you remember, they had the deck of cards. Here's the guys we need to get. and okay so from my perspective it seemed to be getting it seemed to be um there was I would say the clear um the clear separation was you had the American flags the kids with American flags welcoming and seemingly very quickly that was over and we were I don't know if I want to use the word the enemy but we were no longer we did not appear

to be any longer welcome but the feeling the feeling that I had what I which I think most people would agree with was that the people that were waving the American flags were there and they were ready to wave those flags, we saw them wave flags, they've hidden those flags, there's some bad actors that have moved in, we need to get rid of them, and then we'll be okay again, right? It was, it seemed like a finite problem that, you know, we had a glimpse of like where the Iraqi people's attitude could be, and clearly, something was going on, and, you know, we had a glimpse of, like, where the Iraqi people's attitude could be. And clearly, something was going on and we still had work to do because there's people that are attacking groups within Iraq and we got to go help the people that were waving those American flags. It almost seems like there was a mentality.

I get this from a lot of civilian leadership too, that similar to what you're saying, there's a finite number of bad guys in there. We have to go eliminate them and then things will be all right. it's almost like saying that we're thinking of eliminating bad guys rather than an overarching mission of providing security. It's like saying once we get rid of all the gangsters in this town, we can disband the police. Yes. And, you know, one thing I was going to say as you opened up with or whenever you were you reading that piece, the immediate thing, the immediate thing you got to do is security for

the populace. That's like the, that's the overarching or one of the overarching goals of, of counterinsurgency. First priority. Is we've got to get security for the populace. And so the minute that you see the security for the populace going away, you're like, okay, this is bad. This is bad. But to answer your question or to take that threat a little bit further, yes, it seemed like there was a finite number of now of bad actors.

it didn't seem logical that people and this is again, this is where you get a cultural difference. The cultural difference is in America, if you tell me, you know, that you got my back, that carries some weight. That means you're going to stick with me. In Iraq, especially for people that, you know, what's the expression?

They're looking for the winning horse, right? They're going to bet on the way. They're going to look. When they see the horse that's going to win, that's where they're going to put their bets. They see America rolling in. And isn't that like an Osama bin Laden quote? Have you heard that quote?

No, tell me. It's something along the lines of, you know, we will bet on the winning horse. Like when we see a horse that's winning, that's the one we're going to get behind. I mean, they live in a country where they know the consequences of betting on the wrong horse.

Exactly. I don't think we knew that. And so if you think to yourself, well, there was people that were pro-America slash pro-freedom, let's just call it pro-democracy. I mean, people that from our perception were on board. I mean, look, we saw them pulling down the statue. When did the statue come down? We see them pulling down the statue of Saddam, hitting it with their shoe, which, you know, hey, we know about their culture. We know that hitting them with the soul of your shoe is the worst insult.

You can give. They're on board. They're on our team. There's a little bit of an omen with that thing, though, is the Iraqis were trying to pull that thing down, and they couldn't do it themselves. We had to go help them out. That's very foretelling. And, you know, I don't think that those people who were waving the American flags and then put them away necessarily just changed their mind. There were a lot of people that were angry that we did come in there and knock off the state without a plan to provide security afterwards. And they blamed us when things would happen to them. And that's fine. But those people could be won back.

What they can't be won back from is when flying an American flag is going to get you skin alive and you're home the next day. And we're not doing anything about it. And so General Abid. Well, that goes back to something we already talked about, which is if you have to pick a side, if you have to, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you have, if you. has to pick a side side one is I'm gonna help you build a shop and side two is if you don't do what I want you do I'm gonna murder your entire family you help build that shop then who side are you picking I'll help build the shop if you can protect me yeah well that that's and if you don't see that protection right and that's what took us

another three years to establish which I'm sure we'll get to but the choice that we gave them was like hey we're gonna help you we're here to help you will well we're We're here to try and protect you. And also what we have to remember is, man, the Americans, we can't, we can't discriminate very well yet. Yeah. And that's a problem. And where I thought you were going to go with that is when you, I'll wave the American

flag, but then all of a sudden you put a main gun around through my, you know, through my, uh, mosque or my, you know, the, the, the, the grocery store on the corner or you run through, run over my house. I'm not happy. So you add that into the mix along with all the military age males that now are out of a job and are worried that they're going to now be the minority in this country. I mean, we're brewing up some bad, bad stuff. But to answer your question going in, the way it looked to me at the time was, look, we had people waving American flags. Now there seems to be some people that are stepping up to try and stop that.

we need to go and get rid of those people and help the people with the American flags. Yeah, get their country together. So as the violence starting to pick up over the course of the summer, one of the things that we realize we don't have and that we need is information. And so I got to imagine when you started to show, there's a big push for getting us actionable intelligence, right? There was this general Abiza's big, big word. And right, again, what does that actually mean? what that means is a very short-sighted business plan, which is that,

because that, what that right there tells you is General Abizaid is seeing the same thing I was seeing, which is there's bad guys, we need to go get them. What does actionable intelligence mean? You can take action. Actional intelligence mean there's a bad guy, you go get them.

A person that says, hey, what we need to do is protect the civilian populace, that's a totally different mindset. It's a totally different mindset. And actionable intelligence means something completely different. Do you think there was also a bias in we did not have the resources to protect the civilians across that country? We did have the resources available to go take out some bad guys. And so maybe we just got tunnel vision on the thing that, you know, that we did have the capacity to actually do.

It is also a, it's a battle of short-term gratification versus long-term gratification. And when I go out and get a bad guy, I feel good. I feel like I did a good job. I high-five my platoon mates, and we say, let's go do it again. So you show up in September, October, somewhere in there. And so what are you told when you get there? What's your mission? Hey, our mission is to go capture kill bad guys.

So somebody's going to deliver you a piece of intelligence, says, there's a guy here. Yep. We're going to develop the intelligence. We're going to get intelligence. We're going to marry up intelligence. We're going to collaborate intelligence. We're going to get intelligence through a myriad of different sources. Including some of the people that you're capturing as you go along.

Including some of the people that we're capturing, including sources, including, you know, the whole nine yards. SIG and human, the whole nine yards. Yeah. We had an epic at the time. Just it was everything I could have hoped for. You know, here's a target. Like, it's like almost what you picture in the movies, right? Here's a target package.

You guys come up with a plan. We literally get a Piece of overhead imagery. There's a red X on the building Go get go take down this building bring us back the bring us back the military age males and you've got a lot of autonomy to plan this out yourselves total Unmitigated autonomy and what's your op tempo going in all the time the most we ever did was I think we did four ops in 24 hours Sleeping during the day and hitting it up at night no not even sleeping just going from target to target like come back and tear it

gate figure out the next guy go get him. All right. So really, really. And this is mostly around Baghdad. 95% Baghdad. We did do some operations in other areas. What parts of Baghdad you talk about? Everywhere in Baghdad.

So has, have we gotten to the point yet where I know in sprint by spring of 2004, Haifa Street starts to be a pretty ugly place. So for everybody out there, Haifa Street is, I don't know, a couple miles, three or four mile-long boulevard that runs along the Tigers River in Baghdad. And on the other side of the river is Sadr City, which is a Shiite area. And on the other side- It's a sea-ed area. It's also like a ghetto. Yeah. And on the other side of Haifa Street is also a heavily Shiite area, but Haifa Street itself is primarily a Sunni area, I think. And so it kind of became like a fault line. Had that become, I mean, I've seen, I've seen a video from spring in 2004 where people are

driving down undercover reporters driving down that road and there's just al-Qaeda flags off the trees and the median yeah um this is one thing that was one thing that was not good about this deployment for me oh it was good is not good it was the way it was the way it was the way it was for me was we were going to hit targets um like my next deployment in romadi i never left romadi romadi's a little tiny city it's three miles across In Baghdad, I would rarely go to, I probably, I probably went to, I went different places all the time. So we were in and out. We would go in, we'd be in and out of a target in 20 minutes, half an hour, maybe 45 minutes.

The way most people think it seals operate. The way, that's why I'm saying it was like so, it was awesome, you know, it was awesome. And we would, we knew, like, well, we knew Sondor City was bad. We knew, we knew certain areas. We knew about Haifa Street, but it hadn't become Haifa Street yet. Like, we didn't think of it that. way also because we were staying at the Baghdad international airport where so for us it was a transit to get into Baghdad we weren't living there the green zone was massive too the green zone was

this massive area and we'd go to the green zone and when you're in the green zone it's pretty you're detached right it's not like being out you know we'd we'd sometimes we'd go to do an op somewhere in in Baghdad we'd pull into some army you know little checkpoint and there was guys hanging it out there a lot of a lot of special forces guys a lot of the SF green berets hanging it out there a little tiny you know they'd be in a house somewhere with a perimeter around it that they'd kind of haphazually set up you know I'm not hapazually but they they'd put together so those guys if you asked them they'd be like oh this street that street kind of like I'll talk about Ramadi like oh here's this street here's this neighborhood

here's what was bad over here's what this building was like we knew it to that level and the guys in the platoon knew to even more detail and then you'd break down the platoon You know, you had one platoon on one part of the city and the other platoon, they knew everything. So for me, like, oh, no, Haifa Street. Yeah. Haifa Street probably heard about it, you know, but it hadn't become a thing yet. You don't have any territory that's like yours. Like, it sounds like you're getting, there's a high value target that's out there somewhere.

And, okay, call up the seal, send them over there. And there's not a lot of structure to, you know, you're doing this mission. and then that builds on it and goes to this mission and next and next and next. Well, that's always the ideal is that, hey, we grab one guy, we figure out where his friend is, and we go to his friend, and that did happen. Okay.

But a lot of times, there's also, when you look at the network, the network is not organized. It's a network. It's almost like a randomized network, and you got one guy that's got four or five people in a cell, and maybe he's part of one other guys who's running another cell. So it's not like a chain of command with, you know,

500 insurgents on the bottom and then one at the top. No, it's just splattered bad, little groups, little cells of 5, 6, 7 bad guys. And, you know, like you said earlier, it's, hey, I just got fired. I lost my job. I, you know, I was a platoon sergeant. I still am in contact with my machine gunner, my RPG gunner, and my point, man. I'm going to call up, you know, Ahmed and Mohammed and whatever. and we're going to put together a little hit,

and then I know I can get paid, and I'll give them a little bit of money, and now we'll send we're in business. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of that going on. And at this early point, you've got former Iraqi military who were just kind of nationalist insurgents.

You got people who were just doing it for the money. You haven't gotten to that point that we get to an 05 where al-Qaeda and Iraq kind of forces everybody onto the same page, right? So you've got all sorts of different groups, and people with varying levels of commitment, I imagine. So you're doing this all fall through the winter and the spring. Yep. Just, I mean, you just, you're, so jocco's at war.

I mean, you're, you're probably, how are you feeling? Yeah, I mean, we are, we are just, I mean, I, and this is interesting, and this can kind of give you some insight into, you know, you're, you're reading this as if this was so obvious to see, right? I'm there. I'm in it. And in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm happy I'm here. I'm happy I'm getting to do this right now.

This will probably be over. This will probably be the only combat deployment I ever get. And thank God, it's this good. And the op tempo is this high. And we're doing this many operations. And we're doing our part, right? I felt very good about it. That was my feeling right through the beginning of April was, was, hey, it seemed finite.

even even to the actual point that we had a a giant target board and and I I told my commanding officer you seen the movie The Beautiful Mind so you know he had this crazy looking target thing I said hey sir in order to because I had a hard time and when you look back you can realize why I had a hard time putting this picture together in my head of what all these groups like I'm like wait a second is this guy connected to Is someone else or we grab this guy? Where does this lead to? You weren't the only one at that time.

Exactly. So I say, I got to put this thing up and we put up this physical board to be able to visualize everyone we're going after. And it took up a, like a big wall, probably a 20, maybe even a 25 foot wall in a, in a, in a, in a GP tent. And then, you know, whatever, seven feet tall. And it was covered with pictures. It was covered with strings.

It was covered with, you know, we put. this beautiful mind thing together so we could actually I wanted to be able to see the progress that we were making and so and we did and we'd put a green you know the Ghostbuster symbol like the thing with a slashed through it if we caught him we'd put a green with a slaster if we killed them we put it with a red and we'd get intel from other units and other units were capture killing and so we started picking away at this board and it seems It seemed like it was a finite thing. It seemed like, hey, we're here.

We're making progress. We're here. We're making, you know, look, hey, in the last week, we've rolled up seven bad guys. And I know we're not the only unit that's doing this. So we got units all over this country and they're all rolling up bad guys. This ain't going to last forever.

I'm glad to hear you say that because part of the impression that's gotten back to a lot of us who have followed the war at like a New York Times, Wall Street Journal kind of level. is that the military knew that things were not going well and that we were not getting anywhere and that the civilian leadership back home didn't want to hear it

and so that that just although the military was on who was on the ground they knew the reality of the situation it was just that wasn't getting fed back because the civilians wanted to hear it but it sounds like things were not that clear well we'll get to it in this story you're going to see that everything that I just told you yeah I am going to have a moment of clarity when I get to Ramadi

and it's very obvious and it's directly related to what I just said. So I will tell you this. No, that is not accurate. And people on the ground, myself included all the way up through April, we were thinking

this is a finite problem. There are still Iraqis out there. And by the way, the Iraqis that were waving the American flags, they didn't disappear. And we would get the smile and we would get the high five offer and we would get the like we did we did one-op in downtown Baghdad in the middle of the day. It was awesome. I mean, because Baghdad was kind of like it's a very western looking city. And at this time, there was commerce. There was things going on, right? So there was activity. And so we went into a crowded, there was cars everywhere. I mean, it was like it was like a city. It was like San Diego. I think people lose that.

They forget that these are just cities. So we, because at night there was a curfew. Yeah. So we did a lot of our operations, 95% of our operations at night. And there was a curfew. So what that curfew meant was that people had to get their work, get everything done during the day. So when we rolled out into Baghdad in the daytime for this one daytime hit,

we did in downtown Baghdad, it was a zoo. It was a zoo. There was cars everywhere. There was pedestrians everywhere. There was people everywhere. And we were driving, by the way, in unarmored Humvees, window, you know, no doors. We had taken the doors off. We'd turn our seats outboard so we'd be facing outboard so we could address threats if they came up.

And we had pre-staged in the green zone. And we confirmed our intel that the bad guy we were looking for was in where we thought he was going to be, which was like in an office building above a shop. So we roll down there. And this is like, you know, it's like going into a crowded city and here we come, you know, and we looked different, right? We were, we were seals. We had, you know, our Humvees were, we had big, like, we'd built like, kind of like they looked like Mad Max vehicles. So when we rolled out, it was obvious that we were a little bit different.

And then we, since we had all of our seats facing outboard and we had guys in the back, We carried guys in the back open open back vehicles. They look like pickup trucks, basically those and we had a articulating arms with weapons on them and so the our vehicles look like porcupines with gun sticking everywhere Very well coordinated. We drove even though you know, I told you that we hadn't had much experience in driving As soon as we as soon as we got a hold of it like I also told you Seals adapt and seals figured stuff out and then we want to do it really well. So we did that and like my platoon Chief, he was like an off-road guy. And so he was the one that was kind of spearheading, making those things into Mad Max

vehicles and putting like bumper plates on them so we could push people out of the way. And when we rolled into Baghdad for that, for this one of these daytime hits that we did, and we did more than one daytime hit, but this one was just awesome. And, you know, you just see the civilians are getting out of our way. And we come in, we scream in, you know, scream into. the right in front of the building that we're going into, but everyone dismounts in a matter of seconds storming in there. I mean, it was very dynamic.

And then, you know, we do our mission. And that's what we were doing. And so it seemed like a finite thing. It seemed like with us and with everyone else that was doing this, we were going to be able to get ahead of this. and my point on telling that about the daytime was people weren't looking at us like invaders. They weren't looking at us like we were doing something wrong. They were kind of fired up, man.

Like they were kind of, you know, it wasn't, you didn't get the negative feeling, right? And I remember the first time I saw like a legitimate, just straight up jihadist. the first time that I was face to face with a jihadist was in Fallujah and we did a hit in downtown Fallujah and we pulled a bunch of guys off target because it was like a hotel situation and we didn't know how to figure out which guy was the bad guy we're looking for so I was like take everyone so we took like 13 military age males off target when is this this is like uh probably December November December 03 okay And we get the guys, we get back to the, the, we get back to drop these guys off. And it was actually, there's an army unit. I was going to say it was Marine Cooper as an army unit. And the, you know, so now we're turning these guys over to the, to the tactical holding facility, the TIF. And when we're, you know, so we have them all bagged up.

We got bags over their heads and we got them zip tied. And so now we're going off, like taking pictures of them all. And, you know, I'm like, I, the guy looks like a kind of a normal guy, whatever. This guy looks like kind of a normal guy, whatever. And then like pulled the bag off of one guy's head and this guy's looking at me. And it's like, oh, this motherfucker wants to kill me. That's what's happening right now. And I was like, this guy's a straight up jihadist.

And, you know, they ran, of course, and it was like, right, you know. So even though I say, hey, you know, it's hard to tell who's bad and who's good. and when you run into, there was a lot of times where I'd look at someone and be like, that person wants me to die. But most of the time, it was, that person is, you know, smiling. And then you, look, it was a bell curve, right? Some people stoked that you were there.

Some people filled with hatred. A bunch of people kind of in the middle, not wanting to take one side of the other because they want to bet on the winning horse. And that's what we were dealing with. But because you'd see those people out in the middle of the day. And not only that, like I said, in the daytime, guess what they're doing? Like when we're driving down the highway, there's cars on the highway.

There's like cars. There's people. There's gas. There's people doing things. There's markets are open. So you're not thinking that this is, this is desperado, right? You're thinking like, okay, cool. We got some people.

We got to clean up. Those were the things that indicated to me. We have a finite, like, we can win. We can, we're going to, this will be over. This will be over All that commerce going away Pretty soon Yeah yeah but at the time

Commerce people You know little shop set up And I'm not talking about like one or two shops I'm talking massive Like a freaking farmer's market Like a farmer's market Like that's what's happening So I'm not sitting there thinking

Oh this is going to fall apart I'm thinking cool We'll get rid of these bad guys And then these normal people That are happy to see us We'll be able to We'll be able to continue to grow and everything we find. And there's probably zero chance that I'm going to be coming back here on deployment

because this will be over and we'll be done. It was just a few months after you went in on that Fallujah operation that the four Blackwater guys got lynched in that city, mutilated, tortured, killed, burned, and hung up as a crowd of people cheered on it, cheered for it. And after that, we didn't go into that city with less than 6,000 Marines. So when that happened, it was, like we, like, when I went into Fallujah, and I think I don't, I mean, I did, I don't know how many ops we did in Fallujah, but it wasn't a lot. What is that?

It's about 20 miles west back then. That's like 20, 30s. There about another 20 or 30 is Ramadi. Yep. Okay. When we went in there, we knew it was bad. Like, Fallujah was bad. It was already bad.

There was no, Fallujah was going into Fallujah was, was. higher risk in our minds than going into Baghdad. Baghdad was a very neighborhood centric. Like, oh, yeah, when you're going over there, be careful. Kind of like what you said with Haifa Street. Like, hey, we knew we'd get into, oh, yeah, this area's bad. There was this many attacks. We had, like, the board up with the amount of attacks

that were coming from the enemy. So when we knew we were going to Fallujah, it was not good. And you could feel it, too, because you could feel it Because you roll in there and there's not people out on the streets. It's quiet. Not quiet in like a peaceful way, but quiet in an eerie way. And when you do see someone, they're looking at you. Maybe not with the fullborn, I want to kill you, but not friendly.

And you can feel that. And you know that. Sure. So going in there, you definitely could feel that there was, maybe it was going to take a little longer there or whatever. But, hey, even when we rolled up those 13 guys in Fallujah, like most of the guys that I looked in their eyes, I was like, oh, you know, he'll be out tomorrow. He'll understand. We just got a bad guy out of his, you know, out of this area. Cool.

The lynching in Fallujah was just a couple days before you were involved in a pretty, you were involved in a pretty, important op. I was 31st of March, I think, and around April 2nd, April 3rd, which is getting near to the end of your deployment. Bremer orders, Sotter's house surrounded while, you want to tell

the story? Well, there's a couple things. So first of all, on the Fallujah thing, when the Blackwater guys, you know, I was you know, telling my task unit commander, hey, we can go. And he's like, I, you know, I know, I know. and he ran up to our headquarters, his boss,

and was like, hey, you know, jocco's guys, they can go, we can go, we can go get those guys down, and they told us no. To go retrieve them. I was like, we will go. And, you know, this is, this is hard to understand.

I don't know if you'll understand, but, you know, to plan a military operation, you know, people, I was raised, let me put you this way, I was raised on a 96-hour planning site. for how long it takes to plan and prepare for an operation. My boss at some point during my deployment said,

hey, Jocko, if we have like a time sensitive target, how much time do you need to prepare and launch? And my response after I assessed it was 15 minutes. So that's where, when you're on an opt temple like that, and that was a no shit, You if we got if you wanted us to roll 15 minutes we'd be in vehicles and we'd be rolling and we did that on multiple occasions where it was Hey, we got the call. I have I've we did one where I had guys that were lounging around and they were in They were in turrets of of our hummers and like civilian clothes with their kid on and you know like just

We did operations where we in civilian clothes intentionally. That's different in this particular case like guys had gone to the exchange or something and put on civvies and all of a sudden the call came and boom it's like hey load up so to think about that 15 minutes we'll roll and we did it on multiple occasions so when that happened with those guys in falusia you know i'm like you know we're seeing it on the news we're hearing about it and i'm saying hey you know to my boss get us get us permission to go let's go and he did his best and they were like no and the the marines ended up going to take care of that situation but you could now things are starting you know that that was with all the other things that you mentioned with the UN being attacked with the embassies being attacked earlier that

March earlier in the March before then I think yeah there was a couple Shia celebrations in Baghdad and Karbala that got blown the hell out of by a QI and each one of those were they weren't they didn't hit me like they hit like that did when the when it happened when that happened with the guys guys guys guys killed at Fallujah it was okay they want to kill us and you know you felt that before but they want to kill us and they ambushed us and you know they shot RPGs at us and you know but that was that was a another level right that was another level that was a hate that was a hatred that wasn't a you know this is the

difference between whatever the guy that murders his you know his his his neighbor in a fight and and you know stabs him and goes oh god I'm sorry and you go sheesh and the guy that you know cuts off his wife's head and in and utilates her body that's the difference that's to me that was the wake-up call of oh okay that this is this is this is going to get ugly a couple days after that happened though you got a different mission yeah so you mentioned So Muttah al-Sadr, you know, a very influential, and I use that word, it's not the right word. Influential, you know, when you think of influential America, you think of somebody that's, you know, let's use words like sane and has, you know, smart and has a wields, you know, a lot of sway with people in a positive way.

So this guy was influential, but in a very negative way. Shiite Muslim. Shiite Muslim and he He was a real problem and was causing problems and he was a good leader charismatic You know when you see pictures of him you can see where you know when you when you and I talk about What draws people into a cult like situation and a lot of it has to do with being that leader This guy's that kind of leader you know a fiery guy a charismatic guy He looks

He looks kind of crazy You know and he looks like he could instill Fear in people and so He was causing problems One of those guys whose eyes come through in pictures Yeah, so he was one of those people And we had been targeting him and when I say we yes Me and my platoon but everybody was targeting him meaning tracking him what's he doing? He's a bad guy

Can we go get him? Should we go get him? Will you go get him and and now the big thing about the big difference with him was he was a guy that was a national presence and really an international presence there was an active murder warrant on him out of this time I believe yeah so he is but but he's a he's a recognizable true he's a political political leader and a real presence whereas all these other little cell guys that I've talked about these guys were not these guys were nickel and dime you know criminals thugs sure they were running a cell of four guys six guys whatever maybe we got some guys that were Morcena, I don't even remember. But this guy was a totally different story.

This guy is a totally different story. You know, this would be like, I guess if you wanted, this would be like a, you know, a Democrat, you know, Trump is president right now. This would almost be like the Democratic challenger. Yeah. Or maybe of two or three Democratic challengers that are running to be, you know, get the nod from the DMC. He's one of those guys.

At this point. At this point. Some of the intelligence estimates that I've seen had his militia up to 10 thousand people he's a powerful guy and the question was can we go get this guy and what will happen if we do and this idea was getting batted around the whole time that I was there you know and there was times we spun up the target package I don't know if we well I know we never loaded up to go do it but we definitely had you know oh all right hey let's let's do some planning on it oh it might pop oh we might get approval and now you're starting to talk about

And almost every operation that I did was approved at, you know, the, the, you know, 05, maybe 06 level. So this guy was now getting approved. This was like a much, much higher approval. Yeah. It's a political decision. It's a political decision. Yeah. So we're going back and forth the whole time.

And I never even thought twice about it, you know, like, okay, we'll go get him, not, whatever. You tell me what to do, man. I'll go, I'll go do it. You know, like we said on an earlier episode, man. Did you put a target you put a red red X on a house in Denmark? Sign me up. Put me in, coach. So we get this.

What we get is the powers it be decide we don't really want to get solder out of the gate because we don't know what's going to happen. He's got 10,000 militia. He's got all this influence. This could cause a real freaking problem, a real problem. Yeah. When we've already got a problem over here in Fallujah, we already got Sunni problems. And my, you know, assessment had I been in charge of everything,

would have been like, hey, well, do we want to rip, how about we just rip the Band-Aid off? You know, that could be one way to look at it. Could also be... Especially given what happened. Yeah. So what we finally end up doing is we get the go-ahead to go and hit, do a hit, do a hit and capture one of his senior lieutenants.

That's down in Najaf, right? That's down in Najaf, which is the, you know, the freaking Shiite holy city. South, the Baghdad. Yeah, you can't, it's the spot. And we get the order that we get cleared to do this operation. And it's a pretty straightforward operation. It's kind of what we've been doing the whole time we've been there. It's a little further away.

And we've done some operations, as I said, outside of Baghdad. And we driven, you know, sometimes we drove four or five hours to get to do a hit somewhere occasionally. But Najaf was kind of like that. So it was a long transit to get down there. But pretty standard hit, you know, we rolled in. Did it feel that way? Like, did you have an idea that this is a little bit, you know, this is a little bit different? Yeah.

I mean, we knew it. I knew, you know, this was probably the first target that was a truly. who HVT for us. So people will throw HVT on anybody, you know, high value target. We got a lot of targets, you know. Some of them more important than others. And now what I'm thinking back,

we got some pretty big targets and pretty, we got some guys that ran some pretty big cells. In fact, that daytime hit that we did in downtown Baghdad, that guy was running a pretty decent amount of bad guys. So we did some good ops. Well, Sauter himself after this op goes down, lets you know how high value this guy was. Yeah, so we go in middle of the night, very quiet.

We set up, and I always remember this, is that we're very quiet. We would always stop our vehicles some distance away from the actual target, and then we would foot patrol very quietly, so no one was going to know we were coming. And, you know, plus we'd get there at 2 o'clock in the morning, whatever, blacked out.

And whenever you would do this correctly and you had a little bit of luck on your side, because bad luck is dogs barking. Bad luck is, you know, some drunk guy on a rooftop yelling at you. There's like things happen. This wasn't one of those nights. Very lucky. Silence. Just quiet.

And it's quiet. How many are you? There's probably, I don't know what the toilet. total number is, but, you know, we're running an unassault package. So there's probably 20 assaulters going in the house. And then there's, and then there's, you know, a bunch of guys driving the vehicles, manning the vehicles and external security. It's a pretty decent size package. And so it's all just dead silent until that breach goes. And then the breach goes, you know, everyone wakes up. But it was, again, we're in and out of

there in a matter of minutes. We were, we were good at this point. We were good. And So we're in and out of there in a matter of minutes. And back on the road. Back on the road. And as a matter of fact, you know, this is the first time we did this. As soon as we got on the road, we linked up with helicopters that came and landed and took him. So that's when you know, that's how I knew. As we were planning, I'm like, oh, they're really concerned about this guy.

If they're going to land helicopters and get this guy into the confinement because they don't want him with us, they want him. They want him. So that's how I knew it was going to be a You know, that's one of the ways I knew how important this was And of course, look, we knew we know, you know, we knew this was one of Saunders guys We knew that he was one of his top guys Maybe not as much of a top guy Maybe it wasn't a great test case

Yeah Because Sotter went nuts And the whole country went nuts And he took his mighty army from Sarder City went and installed himself in Najaf, and the Shiites just blew up. Yeah, and it was very bad planning with regards to putting everyone else in the country

in a posture to be ready for that. Because the Army, the Marine Corps, actually, yeah, mostly the Army around Sotter City, they hadn't been given, at least they didn't appear to have been given a heads up. And even if they were given a heads up, they weren't quite, didn't quite know what posture they needed to get into

because the Shias, they started to get after it, hardcore. We had most of our forces around focusing on Baghdad, Musul and out west around Fallujah, because Fallujah 1 is coming up right now. And we had a lot of our allies, you know, the Poles and the Bulgarians, some of our other allies down in a lot of the southern Shiite cities. And they just start getting hammered, right? Yeah. Yeah.

The, well, there's a couple things that happened. The CPA in the Jaffe started to get overrun. Right. And as that started to happen, so we did the hit and then drove back. And it's like a five-hour drive. Yeah, it's something like a five-hour drive. So we'd come back. And by the time we come back, almost,

and I don't remember the date's great on this, but almost as quickly as we got back, it was, hey, Jocko, the CPA and the Jophe is getting overrun. It's on already. And they, you know, we're sending you down there as QRF, which to me, QRF, five hours, this is not a QRF.

And they didn't have a helicopters where they said, you know, hey, we want you to drive down there. And I'm like, Roger that. 10 hours of driving. Yeah. And I'm like,

Roger that. You know, like, you want me to do something. I'm going to do it, you know, unless it just makes no sense whatsoever. So I did it.

I did push back a little bit. I'm like, wait a second. You mean, of all the units that are between Baghdad and Najaf? There's not, you're the, I'm the best option you've got with no armor. And the answer was like,

yep. And I said, cool, Roger that. And I remember this. my task unit S, my task unit senior enlisted advisor, who was a, who I mentioned earlier, who was a good friend of mine, who at this point on the deployment was like, you know,

we joke about it and we joke about it, the fact that his wife would call me his, he says, he says, we're soulmates, right? So we're like total bros. And for whatever reason, he was not going with us.

Like they didn't send the task unit commander or the, because when he did the hit, the task unit commander came with us and, you know, he's the ground force commander. I'm just the assault force commander. Well, for this one,

for whatever reason, probably because he could, those guys could provide us better support if they weren't with us, if they were kind of like monitoring what was happening. If we needed it, they stayed. So as I'm leaving,

uh, I'm getting ready to, you know, like load up my home V and my SEA, my senior enlisted advisor, who's my pro, like, hugs me. And I was like, oh, damn. And the reason is because the CPA was getting overrun, and we were going down there to do an alamo. And, like, my direction to the guys was get all the ammo that we have. Everyone get a machine gun, a heavy machine gun, as many as we have, you know, the rockets, the whole nine yards. Like, this is what's happening.

And that's what we did. We loaded up and gave my senior enlist advisor a hug. Loaded up the vehicles. We rolled down there, and by the time we got down there was over. You know, it took us five hours to get down there. Yeah. We got down there. We hung out for a night.

Nothing, zero happened. And then we drove back. And that was right around. It would have been probably about the day you were driving back is when first Heluzis started probably, April 4th. No. No, no, no, no, no. The, like the articles I've seen had your operation on April 2nd, but maybe that's not right. Wait, I don't, no, I don't think Fallujah 1 went down right then.

It was just a few days after. 31st was when the Blackwater guys got taken. Okay. It was in the week after that. Okay, you're just referring to that initial kind of push into Fallujah. The initial one that got called off after three days. Got it. Okay, yes, yes.

So that was happening as we're doing what we were doing. Yep. And so now, now, I mean, I'm within a few days of, I don't know when I came home, but I'm within, like, we're starting to know that we're going home. I may have even sent a couple guys home at this point. Like, guys, we're starting to head back home. And I remember we got, we started, we started getting attacked on our base fairly regularly. some mortar attacks we got some rocket attacks we had the main like one of the gates right

by us get assaulted you know where myself and that senior enlisted advisor like we drove out there with our guns and there's you know tracer fire coming over the road and we're like okay so it's on and there was a burning vehicle that had been stopped there was a vehicle born iED suspected vehicle born id and then actually so this is where i was going to that all happened that's this thing where the gate got attacked prior to that myself and my Senior enlisted divisor We were in a tower and we were just looking out and There was

There was Like you could see one of the major routes one of the major highways out there and there was like Five or six Smoking vehicles and this was they were probably five miles away, but like you could see distinctly There was multiple vehicles that had been attacked and And then our gate's getting attacked. And you got the Shia blowing up in the south.

You've got the Sunnis starting to really get wild in Fallujah. And it's time for you to go home. And are you, I mean, how do you, is there, are you locked into, like, your missions enough that your blinders run? Are you kind of aware that, like, you're leaving at a time when this country's starting to fall apart? Well, this is the first time when I start thinking to myself, may be back here. You know, if you asked me on, in March, if you asked me March if I was going to come back,

so one month probably, you know, if you asked me March first, if I would be coming back to Iraq, I'd be like, no, this thing will be over. This thing will be over.

If you asked me April, whatever, April 5th, April 7th, if I was coming back, I'd be like, yeah, it's probably a good chance I'm coming back here. Because you could see things,

I mean, literally see things before my very eyes that indicated this one. was going to get this was going to get western real quick came back in mid-april sometime around then here's maybe indication is where were you when abu grave hit the news i don't know you'd have to tell me when abe grape hit the news april 28th to the end of the month so you it wasn't like something where it hit you you remember where you were when it hit that kind of thing you know i think that we were home. I think that we were home. And by the way, Abu Ghraib was one of those areas. That was a bad,

bad area. It was midway. So when I remember when I first heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought a little bit about the prison because we used to send our prisoners there sometimes, but it was a bad area. Abu Ghraib was a bad area. They took a lot of casualties up there. And so when I first heard in the news, I heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought, well, you know, what's going on up there in terms of, like, has there been attacks? And so the thing that spun out from that. We'll talk about that next episode but is where I would say what you had was what you had between Fallujah Yucca, Yucube which was Sotr's lieutenant between those two things the the the attack on the contractors and Yucubey what you had with those two things was a

massive spark like a big massive spark that actually was a little bit more than a spark that was like a like a um it was a spark and it started some kindling was on fire and it was burning pretty bright but it was still you could step on it you could step on it and you might have been able to put it out maybe maybe not but what abu grabe ended up i think being was a massive amount of fuel on the fire yeah yeah and i suppose we can talk about that one yeah that's a that's a topic in itself next time um If you want to check out our other podcasts, I have a podcast called Jocko podcast.

I have a podcast for kids called The Warrior Kid Podcast. And I have a podcast called Grounded, which is about, well, it's about Jiu-Jitsu in life. And then Daryl has a podcast, which is called Martyr Made. And you can also support this podcast

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This is Jocko and Darrell. Out.