Jocko Podcast - The Unravelling 5: "Do You Guys Have Run-Flats?"

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Jocko completes his first tour and heads back to the US as Iraq begins to come apart at the sectarian seams.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, episode five, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. Where'd we leave off, Daryl? You were going home, and Iraq was just starting to come apart at the seams. You and your boys took down Sard's lieutenant, the Shia rose up, down in the south. We had to redirect forces down there to get them under control, which was a problem because at the same exact time, We had problems with the Sunni population in the West out in Anbar. In Fallujah, four blackwater contractors got lynched, mutilated, tortured, and hung up on display by a cheering crowd of people there. A few days after that, we sent a guy named Mattis and his Marines into that city to retaliate.

And if you tell the Marines that there's people in that city, that killed a bunch of Americans and mutilated and tortured them and hung them up on display, go do something about it. You better provide very specific orders because the Marines are going to tear somebody up. And they went in hard and they went in fast. And the Arab language press just had a field day with that. Start spreading out all over the Middle East, all over Iraq. The Americans are killing civilians. They're destroying indiscriminately. And this is going on right at the time, that the Shia uprising is happening in the South. And so we are split up all over the country.

You seem to focus a lot on the Shia uprising on the South, which was definitely a real problem. But the first thing that pops to my mind when you talk about the Shia uprising is Baghdad, is Sauter City. That's the first thing I think about. Maybe that's because I was in Baghdad. But also there was a lot. This is what I remember.

I remember that Sauter City, like, was immediately there was a lot of heavy casualties in Sotter City, in and around Sotter City to the troops that were out there, like right after we went and got Yucube. So part of it's because it was more visible to me. Part of it's because this is another big thing that was always evident was things that happened in Baghdad got a lot of press. Because it was Baghdad, the green zone, you know, you'd walk around the green zone. There was reporters and there was normal, you know, There was all kinds of press in the green zone, and that means they're 10 yards from Baghdad. They're in Baghdad.

And things that were going on in other parts of the country wouldn't receive as much press. And, you know, Fallujah had less press. Ramadi had even less press. By the time we get to Ramadi in 2006, there was very little press out in Ramadi. Almost none. I didn't really start to get an idea of what was going on out in Ramadi while you were there until maybe 2009, 2010, before I started to read, like, some of the longer pieces that started come out about what happens. And I was following it pretty close. You know, I knew there was some

fighting going on out there. The stuff that you began in the New York Times or the, you know, Wall Street Journal, but it took a while for people to really process what, what had happened out in Anbar. Yeah. And that's, so, so Baghdad was, Baghdad went south real quick. Baddad got bad real quick after, you know, that April. And again, that's about the time we're going home. Now, you know, we did, we did some turnover ops with the guys that relieved us and they were all pretty straightforward. You know, it wasn't, they weren't looking around going, hey, everything's going to change for us. The IED threat had escalated, but it was still, it wasn't even close to what it turned into, you know. There is a reason that I, I tend to focus on the South a little

bit. And you can tell me if I'm a little off base here, but this is, this was always my perception. This is right around the time. So let's see. Back in August 2003, just before you first showed up, that was when al-Qaeda and Iraq hit the U.N. They hit the Jordanian embassy. All the NGOs leave. The U.N. evacuates the country. And they're really working hard to do two things. One, not make this a coalition war, you know, where the U.N. is present and overseeing what's going. This is the Americans in there against the Muslims, against the Iraqis, right? And so, and they accomplished that in 2003 in a lot of people's minds. lines. And at the same time, they start hitting indiscriminately Shia holy sites, trying to foment a civil war. So now the Americans are just caught in this maelstrom, right? So that happens back in the fall before you get there. You're going around, hitting targets, doing your thing. And we're trying to clean this stuff up as it's starting to escalate. But we don't have a full grasp of what's going on yet. We think that it's remnants of the regime who are doing this kind of stuff. We don't have the idea yet, really, that there's an insurgency forming,

an organized insurgency. We get a. up to March 2nd, 2004, maybe March 11th, I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me. And the Spanish train, the Madrid train bombing happens. Hundreds of people are killed. 2,000 people are killed because Al-Qaeda in Spain hits a train. This is a couple days, three days before the Spanish general elections. And it went from a candidate who was the frontrunner, who was supporting America who was on board and it just swung immediately over to the anti-war candidate and Spain was the hell out of there, right? You had had this movement, like you said, every war, every conflict, there is going to be a piece of the population that just says no. And there's going to be a

piece within that group who doesn't just say no, who says, who has the idea that we are the bad guys here, right? And those people are pretty tireless and they're going to keep working. As the war starts to go on and things start to happen and we start to lose control, those people start to make inroads into the rest of our own domestic population. Their side starts to grow. In Europe, it's already stronger than it is here in America. The Madrid train bombings happen, more Europeans start to say, I don't know if we really want to be a piece of a part of this. And when the, when you guys took down Yaqabi in Najaf, at the time, I mentioned this in the

previous episode, you know, we, because it was a little bit more pacified down there with the Shia, we had the Bulgarians, the Poles, a bunch of our allies, coalition allies down there, and they start getting hammered by Saughters forces, and they're getting overrun. They're getting pushed back. And so that's more of our European allies who are like, this is getting a little bit uglier than we thought, and we're getting a little more isolated. And then we've got to redirect forces that maybe properly ought to be out in Anbar,

keeping, you know, this is the time where al-Qaeda in Iraq is starting to consolidate their control over the rest of the Sunni insurgency, right? But we've got to redirect to go support our coalition allies in the South now. And it's funny because, you know, I just, I look at maps of Iraq and stuff. I didn't realize that Najaf is a five-hour drive down there. You know, I think it's maybe 150, 200 miles or something, but, you know, we're not all driving on interstate 5. Yeah. And again, you're talking about driving in Humvees and they're slower, you know.

You know, we're going usually 55 miles an hour. You know, that's like flat out. You know, maybe we get to 60, but pretty much you're going 55, 60 miles an hour. Right. And also there was, you know, you'd have to do some checkpoint stuff along the way. We'd go and check with a battle space. So, you know, you know, the 200 miles, you know, what? going 50 miles an hour, you know, that's a four-hour drive.

You make a stop for fuel. You make a, because, you know, we're not going to drive our vehicles until they're out of fuel or until we're low on fuel. So we'd stop at some fob somewhere, get a refuel, and, you know, check in with some battle space commander somewhere. So that brings it out. That stretches it out there. Next thing you know, you're looking at, yeah, you're looking at five hours.

Okay. So we get to the point now where we've got our already, a force that our military brass already thinks is a little bit too low or really a lot too low to keep, to provide overall security in the country, now we're split up. Over here in Anbar, down to the south, in the Shia areas, our allies, because of Madrid, because of them getting hammered in the south right now, because of the marketing of the anti-war movement in the West, are already starting to lose faith in us.

And then in April, as the country is starting to spiral, we know what's coming there. That's when Abu Ghraib happens. And that's kind of the frame that I put it in, is that we're starting to lose control of the domestic conversation, not only in America, but within our European, you know, with the European allies as well and with the rest of the world. And to the extent that this becomes an American war, you know, an American crusade against the Muslims, and we lose the rest of the coalition, the whole complex, the whole constellation of the war starts to change. and were you aware of any of that? Like was that in your head at all

as you were starting to get ready to leave there in April? Yeah. Well, you know, it's a good indicator, and I mentioned this on the last episode, that when there's the CPA in Najaf is getting overrun. So think about what that means. The CPA is getting overrun. Let everybody know exactly.

That means, so the coalition provisional, It's the it's the kind of makeshift government that's running Najaf. You know, there's different civilian authorities there, Iraqi and American and they're trying to you know, trying to rebuild some kind of a government and this gets attacked and is about to be over on, meaning that it's going to get taken over and the guys that were there was a lot of actually with a lot of contractors that were there. They were able to defend the situation. but when that's happening again and I said this on the last episode they called me and my guys in Baghdad so there is a multitude of these foreign you know foreign military units down there on that road there's like a road that goes from Baghdad to Najaf and along that way you know when I talk about stopping at checkpoints you know these were like different nationalities different countries

you would have their little base we'd pull in there get fuel whatever and Some of those people had armor. And instead of sending any of that, who are an hour away, 40 minutes away, two hours away, they take a group of guys that are in Baghdad with thin-skinned humvees to drive five hours to get down there. Who had just returned from driving five hours down there, executing an op, turning around, getting home, and now you're getting this. And you're the best option. Yeah, and we're the best option. And, you know, it's complimentary.

Great. Thank you. You know, I appreciate it. But from a tactical perspective, well, I mean, General Patton himself says a good plan executed now is better than a great plan executed in a week, right? Well, guess what? Even if I go right now, it's five hours. When a building or a compound is under the threat of being overrun, you're not thinking that they're going to make it five hours. You said, yesterday you used the term.

Was this what they told you? So we need you to go down there as a QRF? Like you were the quick reaction. We were the QR up, absolutely. And you're five hours away. We're five hours away. So, you know, that's an indicator. Okay.

Well, and it was one of those things where, you know, look, you're in the, you're in the military, right? And you're thinking yourself, what are these, what is the chain of command thinking? They don't get it. They don't understand what's happening. Whatever. We'll do our job. Maybe we're not seeing everything that they're seen. So, but yeah, as I mentioned on the last episode, as I'm standing in a tower.

looking out at the highway and I see multiple burning vehicles. I hadn't we hadn't seen that we had not seen that type of thing at all. You'd see a vehicle somewhere you wouldn't look out on the horizon and see five burning you know smoking vehicles that had just been hit with IEDs or RPGs and are now now under attack. So yeah, I could tell it was was getting bad. And again, as I said on the last episode, if you asked me March 1st, if I would ever be coming back to Iraq as a combat leader, I would have said, probably not.

This would be mopped up. You asked me April 15th, I'd say, we might be back here. When did you have a sense of, and I would understand if this was in the case, did you have a sense of the public mood shifting, especially when Abu Ghraib happened? Did you have a moment when Abu Ghraib happened where, you know, were you just so in the military world at that point where you were just like, what are these guys doing? What are those, you know, MPs thinking? Or did you have a sense of like, oh, this is not good? Yeah, I knew it was not good. Yeah, I knew it was not good. There had been some things that had taken place where some things got caught up by the media, got captured by the media, and it was bad. I had a couple incidents that happened where, where some things got caught up by the media, got captured by the media, and it was bad. I had a couple of incidents that happened where. where we, you know, we didn't look good. And absolutely tiny in comparison, but enough that I said,

okay, if this caused this much backlash, then what just happened in Abu Ghraib is not going to be good. Were you, it sounded like when we talked about it yesterday, you had some experience, like that you must have been in country at the time because you talked about the mood of some of the Iraqis like seeming to shift when that happened.

Was that something you got when you returned in 06? You're saying that the mood had shifted? With some of the Iraqis you were interacting with. Yeah, you could feel it somewhat. It also was very regional dependent, right? Depending on where you were. And it was, that was like one of those just creepy things. You know, you'd go through a certain town, certain village.

And I remember we went we actually were on our waist I think we were actually on our way to Najaf And we went through a town you got a map there of Iraq so I think there's a town called halah It's on the way down there and we went through there and Yeah, so there was halaw we started driving through there and There was people there was people as we started coming into the city where we hear them They're blowing whistles and like you just think And then they're giving you the look of we don't like you. And, you know, we get the traffic.

We get caught behind traffic and we're dismounting. This is before we had armored vehicles. So when we would stop the vehicles, almost every time if the vehicles were held up, we'd dismount and get away from the vehicles because the vehicles were kind of bullet magnets and RPG magnets. So, you know, we'd come to a stop and we would patrol, we'd foot patrol along with the vehicles. So the drivers would stay and the gunner would stay. and everyone else would dismount and we would foot patrol so we could get a little space.

If we were to get attacked, we'd be able to react in a much better way because the vehicles are basically stopped. You're in a traffic jam. You're in a traffic jam. So I remember. And that is where you would notice different areas. You'd get a different vibe from the people. And yes, as time went on, the vibe shifted earlier.

It was more positive. and as we rolled into April. And this is in a Shia zone you're talking about down in Hila. Hala is definitely a Shia zone. So now when we went down there for QRF, it was like we were not getting nice looks from people. Coming from, I was in the States of the time, I was in the Navy, but we weren't engaged, right,

in Iraq or anything like that. And we're experiencing something, we're experiencing Abu Ghree. when it hits, something like the civilians experienced it, right? So I can speak from that perspective. There were people who had been starting to come in all along who said this is going to be another Vietnam. And they didn't just mean by that that we were going to get bogged down

and our mission wasn't going to be accomplished. You know, there was a moral kind of commentary being made on what we were doing over there. And those people who had been making the argument that America is this imperialist aggressor going over there in this unjust preemptive war to attack the Muslim world out of rage for 9-11 or whatever it is. The Iraq War in March of 2003 had a 74% approval rating in a Gallup poll. Now, part of that is people like to win, they expected to win, and if we had just cleaned it up,

it would have stayed, even if Abu Ghraib had happened. If we had just cleaned up the war and won it, I think people like to win. It would have stayed that way. But as it starts to seem like we're losing control of the country. And in an election year, that's a big part of this as well. This is in 2004, five months, six months before an election, a presidential election. Those pictures hit the news. There were a lot of moderate people, not hardcore anti-war people or anything like that,

who start to ask, wait a second, not only do we seem to be losing control of the country over there, what are we doing? It seems like we're losing control of ourselves. And when I think it was only two weeks after that, I believe that, yeah, it was two weeks after that news hit that Zarqawi put out the Nick Berg tape. And all of a sudden the American people, this is the first American that was beheaded by al-Qaeda in Iraq over there. and all of a sudden Americans are, they're thinking of the war in very different terms.

Rather than thinking of it as a liberation operation, that of course there's civilian casualties, there's going to be some messy things that happen. There's even going to be some soldiers that do some things that they ought and do. Now there seems to be this situation where there is some very, very dark things going on in this incredibly chaotic place, and we are just that we're starting to get caught up in that. and that we're just one element of darkness in this dark place. Because I think Americans, they didn't want to, they didn't want to think or believe that about themselves. And when you see those pictures, you know, they are incredibly shocking for people who are just civilians.

I mean, I think they're probably shocking for people who have seen violence as well, because there's a certain, there's a certain macabre aspect to a lot of them. and the casual nature with which some of those reservists were posing with some of those inmates. And I happen to be, I don't know where you fall in this. I happen to be of the mind that I, Abu Ghraib makes me enraged at the high-level political people who set the conditions for that place to happen. I don't give myself the right to draw harsh judgments on the soldiers and the MPs who were there, the ones who actually got punished. I wasn't there.

They were. I'm not saying it was right or justified or anything like that. I'm saying that you had this group of reservists from West Pennsylvania who were put into a situation that they're absolutely not trained for. They were trained as combat support MPs. They were not trained as prison. guards and they are put into an absurd situation under incredible stress in a prison that's in a combat zone. You know, Abu Ghraib is between Fallujah and Baghdad, right?

Right in there somewhere? It's sort of north of the airport. It's sort of north. So it's so it's northwest of Baghdad. And it was a bad area. Yes, you're right. It was in a combat zone. They're taking fire at the prison.

And now maybe as somebody who is over there. and had to be responsible for your behavior and for the behavior of your men. You can feel more comfortable coming down straight on the directly on the people who were involved. I just don't, I don't like to do that. I wasn't there. I don't justify it, but I don't hold that. What do you think, I think? I would assume that, obviously you talk a lot about leadership.

And so the people who set the conditions and created those conditions are going to be important. But I would maybe I would just assume because I know other people who served in Iraq who do hold the people who were directly involved with those things, the soldiers there, the MPs, very responsible because, yeah, I was over there in Iraq too. There were times that I wanted to beat the hell out of somebody or do this, but I didn't. And they did. And that's on them. And look what they cost us. And I get that. And I don't contradict them and say, well, what about these?

That's their right to have that view. And I don't give myself that right. But, I mean, tell me what you think. Well, yeah, you called it. When I see some frontline troops doing something that they shouldn't be doing, sure, they shouldn't be doing that. Whose fault is it that they're doing that? It's easy to say it's their fault, sure. But as leaders, guess what?

If you have troops, you're responsible for their actions. That's the way it is. That's the way it is. And if you have to understand people well enough, that's why I talk about human nature all the time. You're going to tell me, you're going to take 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old kids from Western Pennsylvania that are reservists, that have very limited military training. And what you're going to do is you're going to take them and put them in charge of the detainee, a bunch of detainees that they think are. terrorists while they're being attacked on a daily basis if you don't think if you if you can't see what could unfold there you're you're not having you don't understand

human nature very well so what does that mean you as a leader you're responsible we're telling everyone hey this these the rules this is what's in place this is why it's important if Al Jazeera sees us and I I'll use Al Jazeera and I think they they they and you you probably well I know you You probably will understand their arc of the way Al Jazeera has, what Al Jazeera has been. Because Al Jazeera kind of started as a sort of almost like a secular kind of anti-extremist broadcast.

The way Al Jazeera English still primarily is. I've got Arabic speaking friends who send me over stuff. It's very, very different in the Arab language version. So at the time, what Al Jazeera was to us was they're going to take whatever we do and they're going to spin it to anti-American, you know, in an anti-American way. So that was always my kind of like warning to guys. Look, if Al Jazeera's used you doing something, it's going to be a massive, you know, strategic hit. A little tactical move that you make could be a massive negative strategic hit. negative to what goes on in the war.

So when those guys are doing that, when those male and female detainee handlers do that, yeah, sure, do they deserve some punishment? Absolutely. Could that have been prevented and should it have been prevented? It absolutely should have. And I had, you know, we were running detainee operations as well. So my seals would go and capture someone

and bring them back and put them in a, in a temporary holding facility and we would stand watch on them. That's what would happen. This is also not a smart idea. You know, you, I'm going to go capture you. The guy was just shooting.

You're trying to kill us. Yeah. Now we get a hold of you. We bring you back and now, now we're responsible for your safety and comfort. That's not a good plan. It's not a good plan. There needs to be a level of detachment there.

So, yeah, that's a leadership issue. and you've got to understand, this goes back to the conversation that we had about, you know, hey, you've got a sadist in your platoon. And you've got to have that consideration. You've got a, you've got an asshole in your platoon. You know, you've got an asshole.

You're, you've got 25 people that are, that are, uh, guards at this prisoner. One of them's going to be an asshole. One of them is going to say, hey, if I get the chance, I'm going to slap one of these guys around. Hey, if I get the chance, I'm going to abuse these people. That's what I'm going to do. You got someone on the other end of that spectrum that they under, they'll, they'll, they'll, it and they would put a stop to that and you got everyone else in the middle. And so when that guy's not, when the good guy's not on watch, this shit happens. Well, yeah, there is that, but I, I mean, I tend to

think of Abu Ghraib as the, as the culmination of a lot of the bad decisions we talked about yesterday, not being able to provide security in the country, not having, which leads to not having enough intelligence, which leads to General Abizaid saying, I need more intelligence, go get me actionable intelligence. And so you have all the stuff with, you know, the fourth ID going out there and just doing mass roundups and bringing people in, whole villages that they're bringing in, because we got to, we don't know the difference. We don't have any human intelligence yet. They're all getting sent to Abu Ghraib because we don't have anywhere else to keep them. Abu Ghraib is the prison that is like the symbol of Saddam's brutal power, right? This had execution chambers, tors. This is where

you got, did not want to get sent if you were under Saddam's regime. We start sending all of these people there, huge number by the, by the Army's own estimate, 70, 80 percent of them ended up free of charges didn't need to be there. They get in there, and a lot of people don't know the whole story of Abu Ghraib. They get stuck on the grotesque pictures and everything. These reservists from Western Pennsylvania, they get sent into this place. It is vastly overcrowded and undermanned to, you know, I believe in September of 03, they basically got the number of guards that they were going to have until the next spring. Meanwhile, the population of the prison doubles, and then it doubles again.

They don't have the manpower to do this. You've got these 18, 19, 20-year-old kids who they walk into this situation, and people are already being stood on boxes naked by military intelligence. They're already being, you know, pinned up against walls and trust up, like in stress positions. This is already going on when they arrive, right? And so I try to put myself in this situation where, you know, yes, you're supposed to disobey an unlawful order, right? If you see something that's going on, there's an open-door policy and you're supposed to go on. But if I'm a 19-year-old or 20-year-old, I don't know anything about war.

I know what I've seen on TV, right? And so I show up the first day and this stuff is already going on. They didn't invent this. It wasn't these little group of guys that, you know, that went completely off the rails and nobody knew about it. It was this dark thing that happened occasionally like it. nighttime. You know, the famous picture where you have the pile of naked guys, that was the screensaver on the computer in the military police office. Everybody knew what was going on. There were times when these kids would go to medics, go to other people and show them pictures,

and be like, is this authorized? Can I do this? And they're like, well, the famous picture of Lindy England, the female, who was not supposed to be on the block, by the way. She was dating one of the guys on the block. She's from a completely different area. She's not cleared to be there. gives you an idea how the discipline had broken down, right? But she's coming just to hang out with her boyfriend every night, and they're goofing around with the prisoners. And there's a famous one where she's walking the naked guy on a leash. So we would end up – we ended up in Abu Ghrae with a bunch of people who were mentally ill, right?

There wasn't like a bunch of psychiatric hospitals. The prisoners. Yeah, right, the prisoners. There weren't a bunch of functional psychiatric mental health facilities all over Iraq at the time. And so we would be out there. And a lot of time, these people who were mentally ill would give our soldiers problems. And, you know, we would be like, okay, this guy's a problem. Take them in.

And we would take them in. And then they would get into the general population. Just to even clarify that more, when you say give them problems, this is just someone that's not doing what you're telling you to do because they don't understand. They're scared. And you're a 22-year-old soldier. And you look at the guy and go, you know, I can't judge what's happening, but this guy's not doing what I tell them to do. But zip them up.

And we bring the guy in. He's unmanageable in the general population, so we sent him over to the hard site where we actually have individual cells and we put him in there. And they're trying to get this guy. He's spitting on people, this guy in question, the one in that picture. He's spitting on people. He's throwing feces at people. He takes off his own clothes. They didn't strip him. Okay. And he goes and gets a tie strap from a Humvee and he puts it around his shoulders to like walk this guy over. And the guy goes down on his hands and knees. and the strap comes up around his neck. So it looks like a leash.

And they're walking him to the place that they're trying to bring him. And he actually, the guy, Grainer, who's like kind of, he's supposed to be the real sadist in the group. And he has some statistic tendencies. There's no question about that. He took that picture and he took it to the medics. And he explained the situation of what happened and said, is this, like, this is what happened? Is this okay? And they said, well, yeah, under the circumstances, you know, I mean, that seems fine.

And so, you know, this was the environment that these 19, 20, 21-year-old reservists who are not trained to be prison guards are finding themselves in here. And I think one of the other things that blows me away, it just blows me away that this is how it is, is that, you know, the military intelligence folks, the interrogators, they wanted to be able to kind of play some good cop, bad cop, and, you know, be the kind of, be able to be able to, build a relationship with some of these people they're trying to interrogate in various ways, depending on who they are. And it was the military police who were in charge of kind of setting the conditions in the place and making sure that the prisoners were in a sufficient level of discomfort so that when they went in to be interrogated, the military police, the military intelligence guys, the interrogators could kind of play that good cop side. And so you have, now that is something. You're supposed to walk this fine line.

between, you know, setting conditions to make people properly uncomfortable and abuse, like that fine line. And that is something that should require extraordinary training and discipline, right? That is a hard, hard thing to do, especially when you're talking about unsophisticated 20-year-old reservists who are dealing with jihadis. you're dealing with guys who are, you know, maybe he was a colonel in Saddam's army. And you've got to think of like what kind of, you know, just adaptable, savvy cockroach you got to be to survive that long, you know, under Saddam and make your way through the system. And now I am a guy who doesn't speak Arabic and I've got to figure out how to make this guy do what I want him to do. And I have no ways to control this guy who's looking at me. He's just not taking me remotely seriously, and I can sense that.

And I have no way to control this guy other than force in order to make him respect my authority and comply with what I. They're just, they were absolutely not prepared to be in that situation. And I blame the people who put them there and who created the conditions for that to happen. I don't know, I don't know what group of 20-year-old reservists you could have put into a situation like that. that would have handled it well. Would they have done what they did? I'll tell you what group, a group that had a good leader.

You have a good leader that explains what's going on. These things, an American soldier, reservist, active duty, doesn't matter. You put good leadership over to those individuals and they will do what they're supposed to do. That's what happens. And I've seen this over and over and over again in my time in the US military,

working with soldiers, working with Marines, meeting 18 year old kids, 20 year old kids, if you lead them correctly, they will absolutely do what they are supposed to do. If you don't, if you don't, well, then they're going to go where nature takes them. And, you know, another thing we have to remember is, and you know, this was my sort of initial reaction was, like, oh, whatever. You know, when I joined the SEAL teams, you know, it's a, it's a very, it's a very violent, culture and a very hard culture to be a part of. And, you know, we got hazed.

We got hazed significantly. And that's just the way it was. So every single one of those pictures, I was like, oh, yeah, you know, we, we, I've been that guy. I've been that guy. I've been beat up. I've been been taped up. I've been hung up.

I've been all those things. You know, that's, that's normal every day. And then you take it one step further. You look at the whole Navy. Oh, when I went through the shellback ceremony, not quite as bad as a seal team hazing, but it was a big authorized hazing. And then I was like, oh, what about Sears School?

Well, what happened to me at Sears School? Oh, guess what they're doing to you in Sears School? They're slapping you around, you know, you're naked, you're being abused. That's the way it is. You're freezing. They're putting you in stress positions. It's all the same stuff.

So from my, you know, My initial reaction was like, yeah, well, whatever. These are terrorists. And by the way, you contrast that against the fact that Zarqawi's sawing people's heads off, right? And I'm like, wait a second. The enemy is sawing people's heads off. And I'm supposed to be mad at this reservist because she walked a guy around with a leash. Look, that's, that's, and you know what, that is actually the reality.

That's the reality. That's the reality of what happened. Well, when you compare what was going on in there to what was going on in that same facility under Saddam a year and a half before, it's not comparable. Even though that's the reality of what happened, it didn't matter. It didn't matter. Everything I just said had no, had no, it did nothing to paint, to clean up the picture that got put out by the insurgent and the Al Jazeera media. And really, and our own media that posted these pictures over and over again with no explanations. And, and, you know, you show that to an Iraqi.

This is what the Americans are doing to us. In Abu Ghraib. In Abu Ghraib, this is absolutely what this added, this is why I said on the last episode, this is what added so much fuel to the fire that it became, yeah, this is, this is a turning point. And that is why, from a leadership perspective, everybody on your team has to understand that their tactical decisions can have strategic impacts. And that is an example I use all the time at echelon front of a tactical decision that had strategic impact on an entire war.

That's exactly. Like, you know, you want to look at Bremer and you want to talk about, you know, disbanding the Iraqi police and the Iraqi military. Yeah, that's a strategic blunder. and it had strategic implications. But this is a tactical blunder committed by frontline troops, E3s and E4s,

that had a massive strategic negative impact on the war. There's a lesson to be learned from that all day long. Also, and I'll go back and forth with people on this as well. You know, how could I have been responsible if I was the, if I was the, if I was the company commander, if I was the battalion commander, if I was in charge of that person,

how can I be responsible for what those frontline troops do? And that right there is just where everything falls apart. Because the minute you have people saying, hey, it's not my responsibility what the front line troops do. That's the complete wrong answer.

It's the complete wrong answer. You have to do the proper training. You have to give them the proper understanding of what the mission is. You have to give them an understanding of what the impact of their mission is, what the parameters are, They have to understand.

You as a leader are absolutely responsible for that. And when we fail to lead, this is the kind of thing that happens. I agree. And I agree that it was ugly when people started scrambling for cover rather than taking responsibility after it happened. Although there's evidence that they were getting political pressure put on them to do that. Remember, this is an election year. And I mean, to me, like, the idea that nobody in the upper echelon of the Defense Department and resign their position over Abu Ghraib just blows me away.

But the Bush administration was in a point where we're in the middle of a close election. This, we have to just put this on, you know, these E2s and E3s and E4s on the ground and, like, wash our hands of this. When there was a lieutenant colonel in the prison who knew what was going on, there were JAG officers who came through that prison. And, you know, there was an incident where Griner, you know, the main kind of the main ringleader guy, he had this game where he would have hooded prisoners and he would like to just jokingly kind of walk up. around and get them disoriented and then walk them into a wall. And one of them got a bloody nose. And so, you know, a medic saw it and cleaned them up and everything. And they decided they needed to counsel Grainor over it. Give them a counseling shit, right? And now normally for non-military

people out there, a counseling shit is like sort of a reprimand, right? We have this counseling shit. It's been, you know, it's been printed in newspapers and stuff. It's not at all. It just kind of says like, hey, you're doing a great job. If you need any kind of clarification on the rules or anything or if you're under too much stress, make sure you talk to us, da, da, da, da, da, but keep up the great work. And, you know, this was after a guy had just walked a prisoner into a wall and made his nose bleed, which again, like, in the context of Al-Qaeda, in the context of Saddam is nothing. In the context of being a new guy in a seal platoon. Right. So, like, if I got away with just a bloody nose and walk into a wall, I'd be pretty stoked. So the fact that,

the fact that that was your initial reaction, and this is interesting, the fact that that was your kind of initial reaction. And I think it was a lot of people's initial reaction. It's like, well, okay, yeah, but we're still not them. It tells me, though, that at this point in the war, we still did not realize that we were fighting, we were running a counterinsurgency. I think you're right that we didn't realize and I don't think we were. I think that this is what turned, this is what, this is what solidified the insurgency. Okay. This, this is what turned it from, Hey, some Iraqis that, you know, you take 20 Iraqis that the month prior still had that American flag in their back pocket for when the tide changed, all of a sudden they were like, oh, no. And, you know, 10 of those 20 threw that American flag away at that point.

I found it interesting. I've heard somebody say one time, I don't remember if it was in the context of Abu Ghraib or not. They were talking about, you know, you don't need a. You don't need sadists for something like this to happen. You have a bunch of inexperienced people under extraordinary stress who are not trained to handle the situation that they're in. And even from the political level, from the administration, because it's in the press.

People are watching the news that there's a debate going on. Should torture be allowed? Should we move the definition of torture over a little bit or not? So that's in the air, that there's some permissiveness going on. They walk into a situation where everything that we saw in those pictures was already happening. And they're told, this is what military intelligence wants. Well, I'm an E2.

I just showed up to the war. Am I going to be like, well, I don't know any better. I say, okay, I know what I've seen in movies and on TV, but I guess this is real war and this is how real war actually is. So I'm not going to say anything. And they get into that situation. But it's not, you don't have to have people ordered to do it. You don't have to have, you know, all you, you know, all you.

need is a certain amount of permissiveness. And the way the person put it was, if you think there was, imagine if there was a bar in San Diego or Los Angeles where it was just, you could go in there and there was a person and you could just go punch them and insult them and whatever. So you get done with work and you could just go home and have a beer. You and your buddies, you had a stressful day and you go in there, you could slap this guy around and not everybody would do it, but that place wouldn't be empty. It wouldn't be empty. And just, just by making it allowed and not having, I mean, there's a reason that the Army is, that the military is an institution of discipline, right,

is you are gearing people up to go face an extraordinarily difficult task, which involves killing and being killed, 19-year-old kids who were working at a mechanics garage four months ago, you know, and you have to get them in the mindset that they can deal with killing somebody and with people trying to kill them. and with their friends being killed. And where this is not a distant reality where smart bombs are taking out Iraqi high-value targets

while we're kind of over here in Kuwait, Abu Ghraib is getting hit with mortars all the time. And so it's right there going on. And the people that they're processing into this prison, they're being told, these are the people who are firing those at you. These are the people who, if they overrun this prison or if they get loose and there's like a prison break or something, we'll chop your head off without a second thought.

And that was true of some of them, right? And these 19-year-olds have to figure out how to be the authority figure in a situation like that. And it is just, you know, all of the decisions from Bremen, you know, this is like the reason I said it, you know, the decision to go in with two few troops against the advice of the military so that we couldn't control the country and we didn't have the research. All of those decisions are why those kids ended up in that place under those conditions, you know. Yeah. And it's also, again, it's a lack of understanding of human nature. Yeah. Right.

What's the famous experiment at Stanford where they, you know, the prison experiment? Yeah, the Stanford prison experiment, right? Does everyone not know that? If you put people into a position of authority, they're going to start to abuse their power. And now you set the conditions like you just said. These are terrorists in my mind. You know, these are terrorists. And I'm a good guy.

They're bad guys. And I'm being told actually to make sure they're uncomfortable. Cool. I got this. Where do you think that's going to end up? Where do you think that's going to end up? Especially if you're not trained. I mean, just think about like if you are in charge, say the Stanford prison experiment, you don't need sadism, right, to explain it. Like just I'm in an authority position. There's a person over there on the other side who's telling me to fuck off. And now I got to figure out how to make him compliant. Now, there's ways to do it. But you've got to be pretty

sophisticated to do that, to do it without resorting to force or coercion. You can do it, but you got to be pretty sophisticated, you know, you've got to be kind of an alpha personality. You have to have ways to do it. They were not given any of those tools. They were just told be the man, control these people, these are terrorists. And when these people got noncompliant, they don't have any tools to handle these guys except for force and humiliation. And those are the tools that they have, you know. And it was just, it was an awful, awful situation. when it happened. And it became pretty clear very shortly after that that we were looking at something like an insurgency.

As I said, in my estimation, that event and the way that it got portrayed absolutely solidified the insurgency without a doubt in my mind. And if you kind of look at the time, look, there was, the insurgency was starting to gel a little bit. bit, right? A little bit. You know, you had pockets here, you had pockets there. You know, you were just talking about what was happening in Adjaf, what was happening in Sarder City, what was happening in Fallujah. Like, you had stuff going on. But there were still Iraqis that were like, you know, I hope the Americans can pull this off. And when that happened, yeah, all that, all those little pieces that were floating around, all of a sudden started to jail. Were you, you know, you had been taking out a lot of criminals,

gangsters, people like that during your first tour. Had you seen enough by that point that when the Nick Berg tape came out in May of 2004, that that did not surprise you? Did you already have an idea of that these are the people we were kind of dealing with? I think that the Fallujah Bridge, that was the, to me, was the first indication. of okay I see where this is going and then Nick Berg was an exclamation point on that when you uh I mean you were processing back probably by that point to start your tours uh the admiral's aid I mean were you just like screw that send me back turn me loose on these people

yeah I mean it was really hard the it was it was a real it was uh when I when I was when I was pleading with my boss to plead with his boss to plead with his boss to let us go to Fallujah and and help in that situation and we got stood down that was a hard pill for me to swallow. I was very, I was very disappointed about that. You know, I was very disappointed about that. And it kind of left a mark. And yeah, that was, that was a hard, that was a hard one, you know. And actually, those guys, okay, so one of them, Scott Halveston was a seal.

And those guys had come to my compound. We stayed in a compound in Baghdad. Those contractors. Yes. Okay. Those contractors came to my compound. And they had kind of just shown up, at least that's the impression that I I got was that they had just shown up.

And so we had a conversation with him. And I remember, like, I was, like, talking with some of them. Remember I said my platoon chief was like an off-road guy. And so he was all dialed on vehicles. And so we're sitting there talking to him. And I remember asking him, or either that or my, it was probably my chief asked him because he had the mindset of vehicles. And he was like, do you guys have run flats?

Because they had these armored, like, Ford Explorers, which was kind of what everyone was driving. The armored Ford Explorers were crap. They didn't, all they did was add armor, like the minimum kind of armor, but there was no adjustments to the suspension. So they were just kind of crap. And I remember my platoon chief asking, I was pretty sure it was him saying, do you guys have run flats? Meaning if you get a flat tire, can you keep going? And their answer was no. And so, you know, you kind of had a bad feeling.

And this is now that when you're asking me this question, which you seem to want to know if I sensed the escalation, this is one of the things where, as I think back on it, this is where we knew things were escalating. Because we were looking at these guys saying, hey, do you guys have run flats? Because if you're going into Fallujah, We knew where they were going.

Yeah, and they got ambushed. And they got ambushed. And I'll have to actually go back and ask my platoon chief if it was that crew, but I'm almost positive. And again, forgive my memory, man. This is, this is. Lots happened between now and that. A lot's happened between now and then, and I'm glad we're talking about it. But there was contractors that were not prepared.

And three months prior, you could run around in Baghdad however you wanted to. and you'd be fine. Two months prior, you'd be running around in Baghdad. You might want to check yourself a little bit. You know, starting to get into March, you'd be like, okay, we need to think about this. Now, in April, we're looking at these guys going, do you have run flats in case you get a flat tire? Because if you get a flat tire, you lose your mobility. You're going to lose your survivability.

So that is what, that is the kind of thing that we were thinking about. and then seeing those guys, you know, strung up from the bridges, from the bridge, and then Nick Berg, it was like, okay, yeah, this is, this is, this is going to get worse. That's the only one of those videos I've watched. I made myself watch the Nick Berg one when it first came out, and I, after that, I was like, I don't need to watch another one. I've seen it. I thought about watching the Foley one when it came out, but, um,

You know, Nick Berg, by all accounts, he's a great kid. He's a little eccentric. And, you know, he reminds me of in certain ways if you've ever read the book or seen the movie Into the Wild about Chris McCandless. He kind of reminds me of that guy where he's a little bit naive, maybe. He's idealistic. Just like those contractors, though, who had no idea, apparently, what country they were in. And a lot of people didn't yet. Yeah.

That was another thing, like, you'd see contractors. And at this point, look, I'm not, we were by no means, like battle-hardened, you know, guys because our first deployment we got in a few firefights playing the game on god mode yeah we we we had done a lot of operations and we were good we were good at what we're doing like when you saw our convoy you know when you saw our convoy maneuver through the streets we were really good you know if we had a flat tire we looked like a NASCAR pit crew you know again my platoon chief you know running guys through drills my my meeting petty officer running Gunning guys through drills, the guys in the platoons just locked on.

And so we, you know, like I said, we weren't battle-hardened, but we'd done a lot of operations. And we'd see, it's like the classic, you know, and I talked about this with some of the Saga guys I've had on my podcast, or even just any of the Vietnam guys, that classic scene that you see in the movies of the new guy getting off the plane in Saigon and, you know, with his brand new clean camys on and, you know, fresh haircut and freshly shaven. Credence playing in the background. And then, you know, who does he come across? He comes across the long-haired, hardened, thousand-yard stair, gear totally trashed.

Not even trashed, but broken in. I remember looking at these contractors and, you know, they got brand new web gear. They got brand, you know, they got brand new setup. You can tell that they haven't worn it very much. you know, they might have done some shooting drills or whatever. So you're a little bit nervous when you see guys like that. Because this is a different time too. But as you get into 08, 2009, a lot of those contracts,

these are former special ops guys. These are a bunch of guys with experience a lot of times. These contractors, a lot of these contractors were guys that had been in, you know, been in the military, been in the SEAL teams, been to, you know, been to Green Bray or whatever. In 04, how much experience could they have had? Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like they were they were a green beret in the 90s.

They were a seal in, you know, 1987. You know, I mean, I met, I had lunch with guys. I remember having lunch with guys, you know, like team guys, you know, and they're, they're your bros. And they're fired up to be over there because, you know, as much as I talked about wanting to be in combat and had the luck of going, getting to be in combat. And I talked about guys that had been in for 30 years that never were.

Well, those guys got out. And all of a sudden, came for them to lock and load their weapons and go do God's work and they took that opportunity But you know it's it I met plenty of guys Especially because this is the this is the actual time you know this is the time when black water and the rest of the rest of the contracting gigs you know this is like 1200 1500 bucks a day that's how what that's what the demand signal was and the demand signal was we want guys that were special operations you know because they had at least have more training and it was you know you fast forward three four years and it was like hey we'll take pretty much anybody especially because pretty

much anybody if you were in the military you know you had run convoys and you knew how to handle yourself it feels like with the contractors the way you're describing it that they it doesn't sound like they had the same kind of overarching leadership structure that was like looking after them, that they had like a looser leadership structure that, I mean, the idea that they were going into Fallujah with, you know, when they couldn't run flat and just all that, like, who's making that decision to allow them to do something like that? Yeah, it was that experience for me that, you know, 1500 bucks a day, but you couldn't have given me enough money to take those jobs because I was just looking at him going, man, like I'm, you know, I'm literally standing there

looking at a guy that has, you know, whatever, whatever dumb gear set up he had where you're looking at, you know, he's got his, he's going to get in a vehicle and he's got his pistol, like, you know, whatever, in a position where he's never going to be able to get that thing out, or whatever dumb thing they had. And you're looking at him thinking, like, that sucks. And then you're looking at, you know, over at one of my guys who has everything completely dialed in can make things happen, you know, immediately. You know, I, my assistant platoon commander at the time was just one of those kind of gear, gear heads, you know, and everything he was testing all the time.

And I'm looking at him going, you know, this guy, you know, my guy is so eminently prepared. And I'm looking at this contractor going, heesh. And what kind of comms are you guys have? You know, there's a question that I'm going to ask, right? That's, you know, my platoon chief is going to go, do you have run flats? I'm going to say, hey, what kind of comms do you have?

because I was a radio man So in a seal platoons you know That was how I was raised And and I'm the guy that's asking What kind of comments do you have? And they, you know, you get the response of how we have Inter Squad radios for you know

The two cars so we can talk to each other Oh, what are you going to do if you get in trouble? Well, we have what was it? Whatever sat phone You know satellite civilian satellite communication thing Who are you going to call? You see what?

You see where I'm going with this? This is just all bad. It's all bad. And that's why, you know, when we saw that unfold, it was, you know, it was horrible to see. It was horrible to see. And it caught them off guard because contractors had been running around the country doing all kinds of work.

Good work. Good work. Yeah. Good work. Providing security, you know, running convoys for people. They were doing good work and necessary work and saving. you know, the government money. Because even though those guys are getting paid $1,500 a day,

at the end of the day, that's way cheaper than hiring or then bringing, you know, bringing in an enlisted man to go through the training and be on the VA for the rest of his life. Like there's a cost benefit to it. And there's a cost benefit to them because they have the opportunity to make money. So they were doing good work. But when things started to escalate and you're, and, you know, if you're Blackwater and you're bringing in contractors, you know, you're bringing in contractors in whatever,

four or five months earlier, hey, give them a little training, cool, go run a convoy, they put their military experience with their little training they just got. They got a couple guys that have a little experience, you're good to go. They make it happen. You fast forward to sending them into Fallujah, and you see the results.

Yeah, people didn't have, they didn't have an idea of what kind of war we were in yet. And, I mean, Nick Berg is a perfect example of that. I mean, he was a, you know, if he would have gone to coast, to do what he did. So he was 26 years old and he had a business. He was kind of an adventurous kid. He did cross-country bike rides, that kind of thing. And he had a business where he would fix high-rise like communications and transmission equipment. He would dangle 600 feet up in the air

and do repairs, electrician repairs. And he was good at it and he wanted to start his own business. He had actually done some work in Kenya before where he would go down and he would kind of do humanitarian work and also like pursue some business opportunities in his mid-year-old. He was just in his mid-20s, which is kind of a fascinating kit. Most people aren't doing that in their mid-20s. He would have gone to Kosovo and done something like that. And, you know, the bad guys would have come across him there. They might have held him for a while.

They might have, he might have, you know, caught a straight bullet or something like that. But they weren't just looking for Americans. And if they find you, they're going to kill you and publicize it. It was just a different kind of, it was a different kind of war and a different kind of enemy. and I think people didn't realize that that was the kind of war we were in yet. And there's no mistaking it after that Nick Berg tape came out. Watching Zarqawi read that statement and then murder him himself in such a grisly way, and it took so long that especially with it coming right after Abu Ghraib,

I think people just started to get a very dark view of the war. and things only started to deteriorate in the country in many ways from then because I'm pretty sure that this is around the time when we didn't really exactly know what we were dealing with. We didn't exactly know who this enemy was or where they were. And so we just kind of pulled back. It was an election year. We didn't want a lot of casualties. And we just started to pull back into our bases and kind of did this, you know, Petraeus called it, by a counterinsurgency where we're just racing our convoys through an area and going back to

our bases. And meanwhile, wide swaths of the country are just being taken over by Al-Qaeda. And, you know, there was a, well, there was a strategic decision that was made arguably for what were a lot of political reasons having to do with domestic politics. And also, I think, because we just didn't expect to be in this war. This is not the war that we planned for. We had people, right, just like this happens in a lot of wars. We had people who knew what kind of war this was, and they were ready to fight this war. You know, Petraeus had been up by himself in Mosul with 101st all this time. Mosul, for anybody doesn't know, the map of Iraq is way, way, way, way up in the north, far away. So he had some level of autonomy from what was going on in Baghdad and

everything. And this is a guy with a Ph.D. who literally wrote the book. book, right, on counterinsurgency, and he's the man. I mean, he knows what he's talking about. He studied this stuff. And he was handling Muslim in a very different way. He understood the hearts and minds aspect. He understood the fact that we have to win over this population if we're going to actually, you know, provide any stability and build something here. And, you know, the particular enemy that we had, Al-Qaeda, so dark. Forget about flying planes into buildings, okay? I mean, that was an evil act and everything, but something like that, I can honestly just put it as a, you know what, this is a terrorist action, but they're attacking a symbol of American power for their sort of broad strategic reasons and fine. The kind of interpersonal savagery that al-Qaeda in Iraq was engaging in to the point where eventually, you know, Osama bin Laden said, we need to pull back from these guys, right?

that they gave us this opportunity. It would have been just on a silver platter to say to the Iraqi people, look, this is your other option. We're the good guys here. We're going to make mistakes. Some of our soldiers are going to do some bad things. But, you know, Saddam was here, and now these are your other options. We're your best option here.

And, you know, because of Abu Ghraib and because we had this lack of understanding, and we were trying to make up for those early mistakes for a couple of years, right. We just, it took three years until 2006, you know, before we really started to put some people in charge who knew what was going on and were ready to take action and take risks, you know, and that's, we're going to get into that in the next episode here. But I want to talk about like just what a huge gamble Ramonty was and how, you know, people think the American military is like, well, it's really just a matter of focus. Like as soon as we decide we want to go do something, you know, we might be have, we might be, we might be

making bad decisions for political reasons. We might have a muddled mission or whatever. But if we actually decide to go do something, then it's over. And we'll just go do it, right? At the time, there were people who thought the Ramadi mission was suicidal. That there was no way you guys were going to pull that off. And there was so much writing on it. Because if you hadn't pulled it off and it hadn't gone the way that it went,

I mean, the surge wouldn't have happened. No. You know, and as you're back home and you're watching the news, I mean, you must have had, and hearing stories from guys who were coming back and guys who were over there, you must have had sort of a this creeping understanding coming up that like when you go back, A, you're going back and B, when you go back, like, it's going to be on. Let's talk about that on the next episode because there's a whole story behind. that. Well, if you're listening to this podcast on the Jocko podcast feed, it's now on its own feed as well. And eventually we'll separate those. So if you want to hear these types of stories, subscribe to this podcast if you want to listen to it.

You can also check out our other podcasts. I have a podcast called Jocko podcast, The Warrior Kid podcast as well. And then I have a more lighthearted podcast called Grounded. and Daryl has a not-so lighthearted podcast called Margar Made. And if you want to support any and all of these podcasts, you can do so by getting some gear from Jocko Store or from origin mane.com. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl.

Out.