Shawn Ryan Show - #257 Jocko Willink - Commander of SEAL Team-3 Task Unit Bruiser aka "The Punishers"

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Jocko Willink is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer, bestselling author, and leadership expert with a 20-year military career. Enlisting at 19, he completed BUD/S class 177, served with SEAL Teams One and Two, and later commissioned as an officer with deployments across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He led SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser in the Battle of Ramadi during Operation Iraqi Freedom, earning the Silver Star while commanding the war’s most decorated Special Operations unit. After retiring in 2010 as a lieutenant commander, Willink became a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and advocate of disciplined 4:30 a.m. routines. He co-founded Echelon Front, advising companies worldwide, and launched the Jocko Podcast in 2015, surpassing 1 billion downloads. He co-owns Origin USA, founded Jocko Fuel, and operates Victory MMA & Fitness in San Diego. His books—Extreme Ownership, Discipline Equals Freedom, and the Way of the Warrior Kid series—share his principles of leadership and personal discipline. Willink is a partner in the San Diego FC ownership group and host of the FOX special Above, Below and Beyond, honoring 250 years of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. He lives in California with his wife, Hellene, and their four children. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://USCCA.com/srs ⁠https://tryarmra.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://blackbuffalo.com⁠ ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://ketone.com/srs⁠ Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order. ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://gemini.com/srs⁠ Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card: https://Gemini.com/SRS #GeminiCreditCard #CryptoRewards #Advertisement This video is sponsored by Gemini. All opinions expressed by the content creator are their own and not influenced or endorsed by Gemini. The Bitcoin Credit Card™ is a trademark of Gemini used in connection with the Gemini Credit Card®, which is issued by WebBank. For more information regarding fees, interest, and other cost information, see Rates and Fees: gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement Some exclusions apply to instant rewards; these are deposited when the transaction posts. 4% back is available on up to $300 in spend per month for a year (then 1% on all other Gas, EV charging, and transit purchases that month). Spend cycle will refresh on the 1st of each calendar month. See Rewards Program Terms for details: gemini.com/legal/credit-card-rewards-agreement Checking if you’re eligible will not impact your credit score. If you’re eligible and choose to proceed, a hard credit inquiry will be conducted that can impact your credit score. Eligibility does not guarantee approval. The appreciation of cardholder rewards reflects a subset of Gemini Cardholders from 10/08/2021 to 04/06/2025 who held Bitcoin rewards for at least one year. Individual results will vary based on spending, selected crypto, and market performance. Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and may result in gains or losses. This information is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult with your tax or financial professional before investing. Jocko Willink Links: X -https://x.com/jockowillink IG - https://www.instagram.com/jockowillink YT - https://www.youtube.com/@JockoPodcastOfficial LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jocko-willink-260b289 GYM -https://victorygyms.com/person/john-jocko-willink JOCKO FUEL - https://jockofuel.com Echelon Front - https://events.echelonfront.com/product/muster-023 Amazon Author - https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jocko-Willink/author/B00ZY7MWW8 San Diego Futbol Club - https://www.sandiegofc.com/club/ownership Streaming Special - https://nation.foxnews.com/watch/f906bbf75deeb400207c23761349eef5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You and Santa? Best rappers out there. But Rees wants to know, what about the best unwrapping moment? Reese's peanut butter cups put your unwrapping skills to the test. And with three cups of creamy peanut butter and smooth chocolate per pack, you get your practice in. Experiencing that sweet and salty satisfaction again and again and again. Santa gets cookies.

You get Rees. Nothing else is Rees. Jocko Willink. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. It's an honor to have you. It's an honor to have you.

I can't believe it took this long. But here we are. And seriously, man, I've been watching you for a very long time. I mean, I've heard about you when I was in the SEAL teams. And, you know, even though we've never met, I just want you to know that I have a tremendous amount of respect for you. And a lot of the guys that I went through Buds with served with you, under you. And, man, you just have a reputation as a leader that is unmatched. And I just want to say, it truly is, man.

It's an honor to be sitting across from you today. So thank you for making the time. Well, I appreciate it. I was very lucky to learn from some really great people and be surrounded by a bunch of awesome, awesome dudes. and awesome to see what you're doing these days, getting after it for sure. Thank you. Thank you.

But, yeah, so everybody starts with an introduction here. Jocko Willink. A retired Navy SEAL and Silver Star recipient commanded the SEAL Team 3's task unit bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq, the most highly decorated special operations unit in the entire Iraq war. I did not know that until today. Number one, New York Times bestselling author, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt. You also own an MMA and fitness gym in San Diego.

You're an OG podcaster with over a billion views, host of the presidential special, above, below, and beyond celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corp, which is streaming now, a business tightened with everything from leadership consulting to American main clothing and supplements to a soccer club in your portfolio. Husband to Helene and father of four, most importantly, you're a Christian. And, you know, Jago, every year since I started this, I started this in Christmas of 2019. And, you know, we were still at war back then. I guess we are kind of still right now too, but meaning like, you know, Afghanistan,

the same war that we were involved in. And, you know, when I started this, it was, uh, it was pretty much all for veterans. And, and I wanted to make the biggest episodes, the Christmas and the Thanksgiving episode because I remember what it's like to be deployed overseas, sitting on your ass, or maybe not sitting on your ass, but without your family, uh, on Christmas and Thanksgiving. And so I always make it a point every year, uh, to bring something inspiring, motivational, somebody that everybody, that can look up to, and you're the perfect man for this year's Thanksgiving episode. So I just want to say thank you again. Yeah, appreciate it for all the guys and men and women that are overseas right now. Yeah, I did some deployments during those time frames, and it's always a good time to focus

on work a lot, so you don't have to think about it very much because you're missing out. But I thought, if it's okay with you, I thought maybe we could open this episode with a prayer. Sure. Perfect. Jesus, I just want to say thank you for having Jocko here today. And, you know, we're going to release this on Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving is just a holiday that's full of love, family, and friends. And both Jocko and I both know, as well as a lot of people,

that a lot of people are not able to enjoy those things on Thanksgiving for whatever. reason, whether they are first responder, police officer, and they're out, or they're in the military and they're deployed, or maybe they just have a lot of loss and not a lot of people around them. But whatever those reasons are, we want this episode to reach them, to bring them joy on Thanksgiving, and just something that they can look forward to, and hopefully they can take something out of this. And that's also just for everybody in general. I know this is going to be an extremely powerful episode. There's going to be a lot of life lessons in here

and just little nuggets that people can take with them and better their life with them. And that's what we intend to do here today. So please make that happen. Amen. But all right, Jocko.

Well, got a couple of things to crank out here before we start the big interview. So I got a couple of gifts for you. One of them. The famous The famous gummies. Famous Vigilance League. Gummy Bears legal in all 50 states still.

No funny business. It's just candy. I know you're not a big sweets guy, but maybe give him a try on the flight home. Thanks, man. Yeah. And then I have another gift for you. This is from my friends over at USCA. And they wanted me to give you a.

lifelong membership. So basically what USCA does, you're a concealed carry permit holder, which I don't know if you are in California. If you're not, I know Newsom, I can maybe make an introduction. But no, if, look, bottom line, if you ever have to defend yourself, your family, your friends, if you ever have to get into some type of an engagement with a bad guy, these people have your ass they're going to take care of all of the the legal fees and coach you how to get through it

and they're a huge fan of yours and so I just wanted to present that to you. That's awesome. When you go through the concealed weapons the concealed carry course in California the state mandated one, most of the course is them telling you what a problem it's going to be if you ever have to use your weapon. So it's nice to have these guys

as backup, man. Thank you. You're welcome. And then last thing before we move on here, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. A lot of these guys and girls have been with me since the very beginning when I was doing this in my attic and we've turned it into quite the community.

So what we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask every guest, a question. This is a good one. It has to do with leadership. This is from Nick Farrell. Looking back at your career now, what was your greatest flaw as a leader? What advice would you have given yourself

as a young officer? Yeah. Well, for me, fortunately, I didn't have to experience much time as a young officer because I was a prime listed guy. But when I look back at my career, one of the biggest things that I noticed is that I never really cared about what guys, what happened after the teams. For me, it was just about the teams. And I didn't really think about it for myself. I didn't really think about it for anybody else. So, you know, for a guy, like I, for instance, I never gave anyone any financial advice. I never said, hey, you might not want to buy that brand new F-350 Super Duty that's $70,000

and you're going to spend your whole reenlistment bonus on it. You should probably do something else with that. And I never really did that and never really encouraged anyone to get an education. You know, when someone came to me about getting an education, I'd say, do you want to go to sniper school? Do you want to go to breach of school? You know, we got you. And so I was very, very focused on the teams.

And, you know, that's just the way I was. And I recognize when I retired that there is something after the teams. And so I wish I would have paid a little bit more attention to that, especially for the guys that I was responsible for. And I didn't do a great job with that. So you're saying, in a nutshell, you would have taken more of a stake in their personal lives to watch them succeed. Yep. Interesting. Do you feel like, do you, I'm learning a lot of leadership lessons right now.

And do you feel, and I do that with, with, I would say the majority of my team, I take a great interest in their personal lives because I want them to succeed. Do you feel, but there's a caveat to this that I have learned throughout doing this, does that blur the lines? No. Does that blur the lines of leadership? No, and again, look, as far as they're personal, like if a guy was having. problems with his marriage or problems with his kids or something like that, I would do whatever I could to help him out with that. But I'm saying as far as planning life outside of the teams, I just didn't, I didn't think much about it. And so, and even if a guy was having a problem

with his wife or with his kids, my focus would be, okay, how can we get that fixed so you can go on deployment? So you can get back to being in a platoon, which is what everybody wants to be doing anyways most of the time gotcha gotcha well thank you for that let's move into let's move into your life story so this i want to do a life story on you it's going to be a long one and uh there's quite a few rabbit holes that i'd like to go down with you in and and and i want to use this interview for i want to learn a lot about leadership for myself so i know i have a lot to work on you and me both but um where'd you grow up? I grew up in a small town in New England on a dirt road and both my parents were school teachers. Pretty normal. My mom taught English and my dad taught history and I was not interested in

either one of those things. So I was kind of a rebellious kid, but, you know, nothing totally out of bounds. You know, I liked, I had a lot of energy and probably a lot of aggression. And so it, you know, I was kind of looking to get out of that town. as soon as I could when I was growing up. And that's why the military is a nice opportunity to do that. Siblings? Yeah, I got an older sister and a younger sister. So you're a middle child?

Yep, middle child. No, shit, I was not expecting that one. Yeah. Yeah, I forget what the middle child is supposed to be like. Am I not like the middle child? I wouldn't consider you to be a middle child. But there is a thing. What's the characteristics of the middle child?

I don't know how to articulate. that but I think that the characteristics of a middle child would be bouncing around a lot from thing to thing and trying to find your place yeah no I found my place I know you did I know you did yeah what were you into as a kid you know it wasn't really great at any sports you know I played soccer and basketball I wasn't really good at either one of them I I was okay, but not, definitely not great. I liked music, I liked hardcore music and heavy metal, and that's where I spent a lot of my time

listening to hardcore music and heavy metal when I was a kid. Surfed, luckily, skateboarded, went to hardcore shows in New York City when I was a young kid, which was amazing. And, you know, that kind of, scratched my rebellious. I've always been a little bit of a rebellious kid,

and so that kind of made me feel like I was scratching that itch. And I just related to it, you know? I related to the first time I heard like heavy music. I, I, it sounded right to me. As opposed to a lot of the, you know, other music that was out there, you know, like pop music, I just didn't, it didn't sound right to me. but hardcore and heavy metal sounded right to me. And there was a lot of that kind of push yourself,

also like a DIY ethic of, hey, you've got to do stuff yourself. If you want to do something, if you want something, you got to go make it happen. And that stuck with me, for sure. When did juditsu start for you? My first platoon. Oh, it didn't start until your first platoon. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, jiu-jitsu was not even remotely a thing when I was growing up. It wasn't, like, Brazilian jihitsu was completely unheard of. This is in the 80s. In America, there was no Brazilian jihitsu. It wasn't even in the magazines yet. It was nowhere. So that wasn't until my first platoon where I got introduced to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What about wrestling?

Didn't wrestle. Oh, shit. My high school didn't even have a wrestling team. How big was your town? Graduated with 85 people in my class. Yeah. It's like where I grew up. Yep, small, small town.

What got your interest in the military then? I do not remember actually wanting any to do anything else. The only thing I ever wanted to do as far as a job goes was be some kind of commando. And I collected little soldiers when I was a little kid. I had the, the British commandos from World War II. I had a little air fix set of one 30 second size. of British commandos, and they had Zodiac boats and they had kayaks and they had, you know,

the black watch caps on. And I thought that that was the coolest thing. And eventually I figured out that you could have that as an actual job. Very cool. I want to go back real quick to the rebellious. Why do you think you were so rebellious? I don't know. I don't know. I think part of it's like psychologically, right? You, I think all kids, will have this, you have to rebel against your parents at some point because you have to get out of there. You have to leave them. And so you kind of create friction so that you can release. So I think that was part of it. And I also think I just looked around at the world and just, you know, had the angst of a young teenage child, you know, you got a lot of testosterone flowing through your

blood and you just want to fight and get after it. And that's kind of what I did. Were you a troublemaker? I was I was a borderline troublemaker but also like I didn't drink didn't do any drugs. There was a whole like subgenre of music called straight edge music which I wasn't fully into that but straight edge music is like no drinking no drugs and but I was close enough to it that I that's the way I heard that messaging of you know drinking and drugs were bad. That's kind of a weak thing do. And so never did, never did, never drank and never did drugs in high school. How would you rebel? Ruby violence. Yeah, going to hardcore shows, listening to punk rock music, listen to hardcore music, shaving my head, you know, getting in fights, just that kind of stuff.

Right. That kind of stuff. Where did, where did Christianity get rooted into you? So I was, you know, we went to a church growing up. We went to St. Michael's church and probably probably did maybe three three to five years of that where and you know when you look back you know people go where do you get your values from and I think that's pretty much as a as an American that's where our values come from you know it's like that's what you're hearing and so that's probably the time that well that's that's the time where I was going to church and you know you're going to you're going to absorb those values. do you i mean did you do you feel like you had a strong faith as a kid or did that come later on or

for for where i'm from that's just kind of normal man yeah it's just it's not some you know big deal it's like this is this is this is what you do um and like i said when you get you know i always talk about the fact that you learn a lot when you're you you get a lot of your DNA when you're in your first sail platoon because it's all new and so it imprints on you and I think that's just growing up you know you go to church

it's imprinting on you and that's where that's what stays with you so let's move back to the moving into the military so what drew you to the seals man I had a friend

that did the army program used to be able to go enjoying the Army Reserves and in between your junior and your senior year, you go to boot camp. And I had a friend that did that. And when he came back, he told me this story. I've joked about it because I don't know if it's true or not. It's probably not. At least it's not totally true.

But this guy told me that when he was in boot camp, they were out on this track. They were out in Fort Benning and they're out there doing morning PT or something like that. And there's a guy with cammy pants on, combat boots, a t-shirt, and a rucksack, and a ponytail, and he's long hair and a ponytail, he's running around this track. And this friend tells me the story that he asked the drill sergeant. He said, drill sergeant, who's that? And the drill sergeant, without looking back, just keeps looking forward and goes, Delta. And then my buddy goes, drill sergeant, is there anyone that's tougher than Delta?

And the drill sergeant, without looking back at him, just says, seal team. And so I heard that story, dude. I'm a freaking young kid. And that was it, man. Again, you know, I don't even know if that actually happened. But you want to know where I first started thinking about the seal teams. That was it. And like I said, I grew up in the water.

So knowing that the seals worked in the water, you know, I surfed as a kid up in Maine, which was awesome. And so just having that tied to the water. And then the SEAL teams were stationed. I figured out that the SEAL teams were either in San Diego or Virginia Beach, both of which were cool places in my mind. And so I said, that sounds awesome. Join the SEAL teams and get stationed either in San Diego or Virginia Beach.

You can surf and do commando stuff in the water. Like, it's a literal no-brainer to me. Yeah. Did you look at any of the other branches or you were just like, I'm going to that. You know, of course, the Marine Corps is always tempting for a young kid because the Marine Corps presents such an awesome image and they're such an awesome unit. But I saw the SEAL teams as, again, it just fit with everything that I thought about being a military personnel would be, would be that. What age did you enlist? 18. 18? Yeah. What did your parents think?

I think they were pretty happy. Were they really? Yeah, yeah, because I was, you know, know it's like you have a plan that's a I love the military the military gave me everything the Navy gave me everything but initially what they gave me was a plan this is what you have to do if you do these things you're going to be successful and you get a blank slate when you go in there no one cares what your background is no one cares who your parents are no one cares what grade you got in high school they just this is what you got to do and so yeah my parents were stoked my dad did say uh he said you're not going to like it

And I said, why not? And he said, because you don't like authority and you don't listen to anyone else. And of course, since I knew everything, I looked at him, I said, hey, you know, dad, it's not like that in the SEAL teams. It's a team. And there's no bosses. You do everything together. That's how ignorant I was.

But yeah, you know, pretty ignorant going into the military, you know, not growing up around it. My dad got kicked out of ROTC, as a matter of fact. Oh, no. My grandfather was in the Army. he was a he was a 20-year army guy but i didn't know him very well he died when i was about 10 so didn't have a lot of military information and just thought that the seal team sounded like a good fit for me and you joined in was it 90 1990 what was going on in the world at 1990 yeah so well the gulf war

the original gulf war the build-up for the gulf war was starting and that's where i was thought i'd be going yeah i was pretty pretty stoked about that right on because panama had happened in 89 yeah that was another thing that made me think wait a second these guys are out fighting and dying for our country and i'm not doing that they're this is this is embarrassing so how do i get in who are those guys now do i go join them so you enlisted 18 1990 go to boot camp where do we go from there yeah i mean i was really stoked when i got to boot camp you know because again for me it was like blank slate here we go i had one buddy that rode on the bus with me uh who was he looked at me and he goes are you going seals and i said yeah and he said

me too and so we just we just hit it off real quick and he had been through college already he had he had knowledge, you know. He understood more than I did. I think he had a mentor that was a seal. And so, but he, he, we brought up real quick. And he ended up making it through maybe a class behind me. And he ended up, you know, as a master chief in the SEAL teams, but just a great dude. You know, he wrestled in college. Just a great guy. So, you know, went to boot camp. And, and then again, I was super, you know, just so open my mind. to like what was coming and happy about being there and just stoked to go to buds and then showing up at buds it was like the best thing ever yeah man did you i mean i'm

did you have did you meet an actual seal at all before you no shit nope so you showed a saw one in boot camp and i just saw one in boot camp and i think it was a guy that i met later who was getting reprocessed. He had been out of the SEAL teams for a while and then he'd coming back in and I kind of recognized him because, you know, I saw one SEAL when I was in boot camp

and I recognized him later and I talked to him, he was just a super chill guy but in my mind, you know, he's this SEAL so you think he's, you know, the coolest thing in the world. Yeah, damn. But no, I never knew any SEALs before I joined.

So how was it showing up for Bud's here for you? It was awesome. Were you intimidated? I mean, I would say not really. I wasn't really intimidated, but I definitely didn't know much about what was going on. When I showed up, there was a poster in medical. They had a Texas chainsaw massacre poster in medical, but they'd crossed out Texas chainsaw maskers and they replaced it said Bud's pool comp.

And they put it like a snorkel or whatever, a mask on the kid. it. And I didn't even know what pool comp was. You know, I didn't know anything about it. And I was, hmm, that's interesting. I guess they didn't have, yeah, there's any of the documentaries or any of that kind of stuff out. Nothing. So I wasn't really intimidated, but I was just excited, man. I was just excited. And, you know, like I said, I wasn't the fastest runner. I wasn't the fastest swimmer. I wasn't, I wasn't really that good at anything in particular, but I wasn't that bad at anything in particular either and I was young I could recover quick I was fired up I was very used to the cold uh but you know you're meeting guys that are total studs you know you're meeting guys that are

d1 athletes and whatever I had Olympic I had an Olympic alternate in my buds class for gymnastics like how fast can that guy do the O course compared to me you know what I'm saying and uh some D1 water polo players and you know just the whole the whole nine yards and I was just young and just fired up to be there, stoked. How many people were in there? Do you remember? I don't really know. Probably, I don't know.

I mean, 150? I actually don't know. A lot of people. I'd have to look at it. But how did you, I mean, did you measure yourself up against the people that you were seeing when you showed up like, oh, fuck, that guy's going to make it. that guy's not going to make it, if that guy made it. You know what I'm talking about?

There was a couple guys that, you know, seemed like studs that quit. The gymnast that I was talking about, Olympic gymnast or Olympic alternate gymnast quit. I had a D1 water polo player that quit. I had, there was definitely some studs that quit. And I realized, oh, there's a wrestler from Iowa that quit, not the college, but he was a stud. So, yeah, I realized that this isn't all about, you know, what you're at. athletic background is, because it's about being cold, wet, miserable, and suffering. And if you don't like that, you're going to have problems.

Did you have any problems? I failed, I failed to run. I failed to swim. I failed a no course. I failed pool comp. I failed like everything. When I went through, if you failed something twice, you got rolled. But if you failed something once, you could stay with the class.

And so if you failed two runs, you got rolled. And then if you failed one in the next class, you got dropped. So I only failed one of everything. And some of the ones were, you know, like there was some swims that pretty much almost everyone in the class failed because the tide or the current or whatever. There were some runs where a lot of people failed because it maybe wasn't quite four miles. Maybe a little over. Yeah, yeah, it was a little over.

So I failed a little bit of everything, but not enough to get me rolled. And I stayed with my class the whole time, made it through one shot. stop. How did you deal with failure? Just, just tried to go harder. You know, I failed a run. I paced myself on a run, which I wasn't fast enough to pace myself. I needed for basically everything that I did in buzz, I just need to go 100%. And probably, I don't know, my third or fourth run in first phase, I was kind of like, oh, I'll try pacing myself. And so I went out of pace and I just was wrong and failed. And so I never paced myself again on those rods.

I just ran as hard as I could because that's the only thing I wanted to do, man, was get through that training and be a seal. So I just put out hard. And that's how I overcame failure just by pure, just aggressive hard work, man. I failed pool comp and me and one of my buddies we got this shouldn't even be legal but we got we got dive equipment from dive phase to practice

with but we wore it in the dip tank so we were pool comping each other in the dip tank on a weekend and and then got got through it on Monday you know so so for those that are listening pool comp is an exercise that you do in second phase it's open circuit diving and it's one of the more strenuous weeks that you go through in buds a lot of people fail it it's a lot of people say that pool comp they basically beat the shit out of you underwater with tanks on a lot of people say that pool comp is the is the last major hurdle that you're going to have to pass uh to get through buds yeah so but how did you i mean how did you deal with the mental stress did that affect you at all or was it was it was it the physical stuff or was

of both. I mean, I had fun. You know, I'm not, and I'm not saying it wasn't hard. Like, how weeks, how old is hard? It's cold, wet, miserable. But I mean, I wasn't really mentally stressed. I was kind of having fun, you know, I enjoyed it. Like, man, you're going to get to be a frog man. Yeah. You know, I'll do it. I would have done whatever they told me to do. Like, I think there's some people that show up to buds that they would, they would rather die. and I was definitely in that category. So, you know, and I think they figured that out. You know, I think they figured out with guys.

They go, yep, this guy, we're not going to break this guy. Because they'll try, you know. But eventually they go, yeah, we can maybe hurt him physically, but we're not going to break him mentally. So for somebody that's going through buds right now, would you have any advice for them? Or what would your one piece of advice? Yeah, I tell people this one piece of advice all the time, don't quit.

Love it. You know? And that statistically is right because the vast majority of people that make it through buds, they quit. They don't get performance. If you get rolled for a run, you're going to have six weeks to get better at running. You can pass the runs. If you get rolled for swimming, if you get rolled for pool comp, you're going to get good at

pool comp for the next six weeks until you start up with your next class. What did you do for those six weeks? You practiced pool comp over and over and over. Okay. So the people that don't make it, generally speaking, quit. So if you don't quit, you should be in a pretty good spot. So don't quit. Yeah. It's a good point. So where do you go after Buds? Got done with Buds and I went to Seal Team One. How was that? Did you pick one? Yes. Well, I didn't pick one, but I picked West Coast. And, you know, it's, I was going to say this when you talked about being intimidated showing up to Buds. And I was kind of like, well, not really, because it's a big game and it's, you know, get wet and be cold and do pushups. It's kind of fun. But when I got to Seal Team One, I was definitely, it was intimidating going to Seal Team One.

I was definitely, the atmosphere for a new guy at Seal Team One was intimidating. I've heard the stories. Yeah, it was definitely intimidating. We went, myself and two other new guys were checking in to the Master Chief. We're standing outside of his door in our uniforms and parade rest and he calls us in there. We go to attention. We walk in. We're standing at attention.

And he says, uh, he says, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Everyone here has been to buds. It doesn't mean shit. Get out of here. Cool. So then the next, we had like all the new guys. assembled together and that master chief came in and said um he said don't be late don't forget anything and keep your mouth shut and your ears open those are real that's

a really good advice don't be late don't be light and and keep your mouth shut and your ears open and that's the way that's the way it was you know that's the way it was keep your mouth shut, keep your ears open, and try and absorb everything that's going on. And again, this is 1991, man, like the Gulf War that I thought I was going to be in, that they were reporting that there was going to be 30,000 or 40,000 casualties was over in 72 hours. I missed the whole thing. So this is just a peacetime organization. And even with that, it was pretty, pretty, pretty intimidated to walk into. You've probably seen the headlines. Another trillion added to the national debt. It's hard to even grasp the scale of it. 38 trillion in climbing. While Washington

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I mean, it sounds like the majority of your childhood you wanted to get into the military, found the teams, which, you know, is the, if not one of the best, you know, soft units to be in. I mean, what did it feel like for you? to graduate you know back then we didn't get our trident or anything you know we just you just graduated and you still had a lot of hurdles to overcome i was always pretty paranoid you know you asked

like when i failed something i was very paranoid about failing not wanting to fail and so even going to knowing that i was going to seal team one knowing i graduated buds it felt good but it didn't feel like i had completed the journey at all it felt like okay now you got to get through seal tactical training and you got to get through your board with the team. So I didn't have some, you know, elevated feeling of how I made it. I never really got that feeling in my 20 years. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, back to team one. I mean, so you get into team one. What kind of, what kind of team guys are there? What had they been through? I mean, we're in peacetime. We talked about Gulf War. You know, that was pretty short. What kind of experience was

in SEAL Team 1 when you showed up? Other than a couple Vietnam guys, there was relatively speaking almost no experience, almost no combat experience. No shit. Yep. And so it was kind of weird because the way we trained,

you were training for something that no one really understood. And as much as, like the Vietnam guys passed down as much as they could, but it still was like, you didn't really know what it was you were training for it and that made us train very very hard because it seemed like combat was this unfathomable tough thing and so we better train as hard as we possibly could and we thought we hoped and prayed that we would get to do one mission

you know that was the the hope and the prayer was maybe we'll get to do one what we used to call a real world mission yeah you know real world mission we would hope and pray that we would get to do some real world mission and we trained as hard as we possibly could everyone was very there was a lot of team one was very they called it stalog team one and uh there's another name for it but it was very strict i've always heard no fun one no fun one yep they had a bunch of names a bunch of names for no fun one stallog team one And yet, in my first platoon, the older guys would say team one. It's not just a number.

It's an attitude, which, again, now that I, you know, when I got older, but I was young, dude, I was like, that's a real thing. Like, this is our attitude. And so, you know, we literally had haircut inspections every two weeks, uniform inspections with our camis. Like, it was, we had command PT every day. Everything was very professional. And that's how I fit in well with that, you know, and or I should say it fit me well

because I liked the military and that's what we were doing. That's interesting considering you don't like authority. Yeah, yeah. I think maybe at this point I had recognized that this was, this was that professionalism was part of the job for me, you know, for like that level of professionalism that I saw was that was what we were supposed to be like. That was the job. So I bought into it, man. You know, it sounds like when you went to one, when you got into the teams, it sounds maybe, maybe similar to what guys might experience today.

You know, you've got a lot of past experience. It sounds like when you came in, it was a little bit of past experience with the Vietnam guys. But I mean, you know, the G-Wa guys, it's every day there's got to be more and more guys, you know, retiring, calling it a day, moving on with their lives.

And now you have this younger generation that's coming in that, you know, isn't, I don't know. Maybe they are doing a lot, but I don't think they're doing a lot. I don't think we got a lot of guys in Ukraine. And so, you know, I mean, do you think it's, are we in a similar time today? It's a very similar time. The very similar time.

I tell those young guys now, I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years. And the way you just expressed that, I would have never expressed that because I was having a freaking great time. We were training hard. We were jumping out airplanes. We were, you know, diving and shooting machine guns and blowing things up. And, like, that's what we were getting ready, getting ready, getting ready. And so I understand the expression because now, of course, we all look back like, gosh,

how could you wait around for 13 years? But that's what it was. That's what we lived in. That's the water that we drank. And so it was, hey, this is what we're doing. And by the way, you're with an awesome bunch of guys. We have fun. Everything is like super professional and also super fun.

You know what it's, it's being in a seal platoon, man. Yeah. There's, I don't, I would rather, if I could just, heaven for me would be just like, seal, seal platoon forever. That's what we're doing. And we go to war, cool, we go train, cool. That's what we're doing. It's the best job.

And so I didn't, I didn't know enough to go, I can't believe I got to go on deployment again. No, I wanted to go on deployment. Oh, there's nothing happening. Cool. We're going on deployment. We're going to go to this country, that country. We're going to work with these group, that group. maybe something will happen and if it doesn't we're still going to be out here doing our best so i didn't

i i i didn't i had a good attitude the whole time like it was exactly where i wanted to be being in the silk platoon was just as good as it gets bad yeah i guess you know i could totally see that i mean i guess that that attitude probably came in with my generation when we came in it was it had i mean i joined in two thousand july of 2001 yeah and And so by the time, actually, like, two days after I graduated boot camp, the towers went down. So I know, I guess I didn't know. Yeah, that's a different level of frustration, right? Where if your country is at war and you joined the teams to go to war, if you're not going, yeah, there's going to be, that's going to be angst, right?

That's going to be problematic, for sure. And, but when there's nothing going on, just I didn't, I didn't know enough. to be frustrated about it. Yeah. We're having a good time. I mean, I think that would come in, too. I mean, is, I think that attitude comes in as well when you see platoons go out and do something and you haven't yet.

And then that creates, you know, I don't know if jealousy is the right. I mean, yes, it definitely creates jealousy and maybe some discontent throughout the community. But so where did you go? Where was your first deployment? First deployment was to Guam, and this is where I got introduced to Jiu-Jitsu. How did that happen? There was, we show up in Guam, and this is after our workup, so we're there, and we're sitting in our platoon hut one morning, and this master chief comes in. It's an old master chief.

Like, he had to be at least like 39 years old or something like that, but he looked like an old man, and he's old lanky, old guy, and he says, who wants to learn how to fight? and I'm like, I don't know what this old guy I think he's going to teach me, but me and a few other guys, new guys, we raised our hands and all right. So we went to the Navy base had like a judo training mat. And he told us to meet him there at a certain time.

And this guy's name was Steve Bailey. He was an awesome master chief in the SEAL teams. And he was a Muay fighter. And he had been training Jiu-Jitsu with the Gracies in Torrance in the late 80s. So he was like what right now would be considered like a mid-level white belt and Jiu-Jitsu and he just lined us up and just tapped us all out over and over again.

It's hard to explain to people how little we, how little human beings knew about fighting in 1992 before the UFC. Like no one even understood the guard or the mount or the rear naked choke. or the Camura or the armlock. There was, it didn't even exist. It wasn't, it wasn't even, it wasn't even, it didn't even exist, man. And so this guy, you don't even know that he's passing your guard. You even know what the guard is.

You don't know that he's mounted because you don't even know what the mount is. You don't know that he's taking your arm. You don't, you have no comprehension of what's happening. And so he just annihilated us. And to me, I just thought to myself, this, whatever this freaking guy knows, I will do whatever I can to learn it. And so we started training with him. That was my introduction to Jiu-Jitsu.

Wow. He just stuck with you ever since. Yeah. So how long has it been since then? Well, that was in 1992, 1993. Wow. So what, 20, you know, holy shit, 30, whatever, 33 years. Is that right?

Something like that. Wow. 33 fucking years. Yeah. Yeah, there was something that I recognized very quickly that, It was, I had to learn this thing, this stuff. Yeah. And now you're a black belt.

Yeah, yeah. So that was my first platoon. We go to Guam and this is 93. There's, you know, we go and do exercises. We work with other, you know, host nations. Again, I'm having a good time. You know, we're training hard. We're partying hard.

we're doing what kind of like young seals do um but you know there's no war going on except for there were some things that were happening in Somalia and so there was some guys on board ship from the east coast and the west coast that did some kind of operations in Somalia then they went from the ship to go do these operations now seals back in the 90s no one wanted to go on a ship, right? And so I got back from that first platoon, and me and a few of my buddies, we were like, hey, we know what we did in Guam, which was nothing,

and we know what the guys that were on the ships, they went to Somalia. Let's go on the ships. And so me and a few of my buddies from that first platoon that I'd gone through buds with and we'd done that first platoon, we volunteered to go on a shipboard deployment. And everyone's like, what are you guys doing?

And we're like, that seems to have the best chance. So that's what we did. We volunteered for what was called an ARG platoon on the East Coast. It's called a MARG platoon. We volunteered for the ARG platoon. And we went and did a shipboard deployment, which for me was awesome because we had a lot of assets to train with. We work very closely with the Marine Corps, which was awesome.

We did, you know, we trained. We did like their shooting package with the force recon guys. We trained with them. We did shipboarding with them. We did stuff, a lot of stuff at Camp Pendleton after our own workup. And I also got to learn and understand the structure of the Marine Corps and how they operated, which gave me an insight onto conventional forces at large in what they were doing, interacting with the Navy.

It was very, very beneficial for me. I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon for whatever reason. They didn't have a primary comms guy. And I had gone to comm school, as a matter of fact, on the East Coast, the SEAL comm school on the East Coast, which was awesome. And so then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon. So now I'm the primary comms guy in my second platoon, which means I'm sitting with the officers during planning. I'm, you know, learning how the communications work, learning about contingencies, learning about loss of comms plan, learning about QRFs.

Like I was learning things that I wouldn't have been learning if I had been a machine gunner. So I got very lucky that I was a comms guy and I had volunteered to be a comms guy. And the reason I had volunteered to be a comms guy was my third day at CIS guy. SEAL team won. I had quarter deck watch back when we used to stand watches. And the officer of the deck, which was another SEAL, said, hey, new guy. I was like, hey, sir. And he said, uh, if you want to be on every mission, be a comms guy because no matter what the mission is, you will get to go because if you know how to work comms. And the next morning when we woke up, I went up to the comm shack and I said, hey, I want to be a comms guy, which again, no one

had ever volunteered to be a comms guy. So I volunteered to be a comms guy. So I volunteered to be a comms. a comms guy and then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon and now was the primary comms guy in my second platoon and then probably one of the most influential things of my life happened in my in my second platoon so there was actually a couple pretty pivotal moments the first one was we had a we had an assistant platoon commander in my second platoon his name was Alton Lee Grisard and he was an absolute freaking stud just he was the quarterback at the Naval Academy he was a record setting like he broke Roger Stalbuck's records at the Naval Academy he was complete charismatic guy fun nice charismatic the whole nine yards and I was really good

friends with him really good friends with him and he got killed he got murdered he got murdered in a murder suicide so uh you can go back and look at the news on this but what is a murder suicide meaning a guy suicide by a cop or something no he was he was there was a guy from the naval academy another guy from the naval academy who was a submariner who had been dating a girl from the naval academy who i think was a surface warfare officer they had been dating they broke up Grizz had been like

hanging out with her and this guy showed up at the BOQ the Bachelor officer's quarter on on Coronado banged on the door and Griz opened the door

and the guy shot Griz shot the girl and killed himself holy shit and so really heartbreaking terrible scenario and I was really good friends with him and we'd had we'd had he was one of the first people

that had a video camera like a normal person with a video camera and we had made this video we were down in Panama doing jungle warfare training and we'd gone out and there was the song that said whoop there it is you remember this song and so he had filmed we were hanging out with these panamanian girls and these girls were saying whoop a a because they didn't speak english and we're just like into you know parting with these girls and and he had taken this video and he'd shown his dad and his dad was a warn officer in the navy and his you know his dad he'd grown up in japan for the most part and so gris had showed this video to his dad of me and him you know with these panamanian girls laughing in a bar saying

whoop, A-E-A, because we were just laughing. So when we go to, they had a big service at the Naval Academy because he's a hero at the Naval Academy. And I met his dad, and, you know, his dad recognized me. And, you know, I told his dad because he had told me. Because I said to him, I said to him one day, I told his dad, I said, you know, I said to your son one day, I said, hey, you grew up in Japan.

Like, you're going to a Japanese high school. well, how did you learn to play football? And he said, my old man taught me. And as that happened, you know, I got, I was very, you know, obviously we're all, we're all broken up for the mess. But I don't know what, I don't, I don't, I wasn't behaving properly. and my run-inmate from the SEAL teams who I went through Buzz with

I went through STT with I did three platoons with this guy I was in training cell and this guy was my roommate the whole time just like my run-inmate and he pulled me aside and he was like hey Grizz didn't you're not the only one that lost Grizz

and I thought to myself he's 100% right and what it made me aware of is that the way you perceive yourself is not going to be accurate all the time and you have to be very cautious in the way you behave because

you think you're behaving a certain way but other people's perception is going to be different and there's a really good chance that their perception is more accurate than your own. And that struck me. And this guy was, you know, this guy was my best friend. And he's telling me like, hey, bro, you're not the only one that lost gris.

And I'm acting like I was like he, like I was the only one that lost gris. So it made me aware of that, that again, just the way you perceive yourself is not the way other people are going to perceive you. So we go through that. How do you, hold on, this is, how do you find, how do you today, I mean, that's a big fucking lesson. I would take that as a big lesson. It was a huge lesson. So how did you, moving forward from that, how did you, how do you find out how people are

perceiving, are perceiving what you're projecting? I think it's, generally speaking, they're going to pursue, you, my assumption is that what I'm doing is viewed as negative. my assumption is that if I'm doing something, the assumption is it's viewed as negative. And so if you assume that what you're doing is being perceived as negative, it keeps me in check from behaving in a way

that is going to be perceived as negative. I mean, to the best of your ability. I'm not saying, you know, of course, just like every other human, we're all going to slip up. But recognizing that like, man, and I think I'm so thankful that my that was had a good enough relationship with this guy to to tell me that because otherwise I never would have you never would see this disconnect

between how you're perceived and what you think you're being perceived as and it was something that wasn't like I thought to myself oh here's how people are seeing me I was just acting the way I was acting but it was being perceived in a way that I didn't mean at all didn't have any intention but I could see as soon as he said it I go oh yeah that's right That's right. You need to look at yourself. You need to detach from, you know, the sadness and go, oh, yeah, what does it look like? What does it feel like?

Never mind what it looks like, because their perceptions are not wrong. Like I said, their perceptions are right. Oh, I had this video, his dad recognized me. I must be, you know what I mean? Like, that's all bad stuff. And I didn't recognize it until my buddy let me know. and I was very, very grateful. And it definitely made me recognize that, yeah,

people's perception of you is not what you think it is. And that's, if you're not careful, you can really get yourself of a bad reputation. And obviously, as you know, reputation in the seal teams is everything. You know, your reputation of the seal team is everything. So I was just very thankful that he gave me that heads up. And then, again, what made this platoon very impactful for me, Shield Team 1 Alpha

Platoon, we had a platoon, our platoon officer, our OIC was pretty much a new guy who had flat transferred from another part of the Navy and he had come in as our platoon commander. And which is no big deal, right? It's really no big deal. Like officers don't have a lot of experience. It's not that big of a deal. They listen to what you have to say. They listen to the platoon chief.

They listen to the LPO and they figured out. Except for this guy didn't really want to listen. And so it ended up causing some friction in the platoon. He, you know, it's one of those guys where, again, he probably didn't realize how he was being perceived. And he was being perceived as arrogant, being perceived as conceded, being perceived as not listening to the rest of the platoon, including the platoon chief, including the platoon LPO.

and he was dictating, you know, like, this is how we're going to do this and this is the way it needs to be and just wasn't listening. So it's problematic, but, you know, we're, what are you going to do? Carry on. Well, then we had a, we were at desert warfare training and he presented some plan to us and it was a bad plan and the LPO had like had enough of it. It was like, sort of this plan is stupid. And, you know, since the guy had a big ego, they got in each other's faces, and then the, the OIC takes a swing at the LPO.

Wow. And we split them up, yeah, which, again, we've seen plenty of inter-platoon fights. I mean, it's a thing. It's almost like its own sport, right? But when there's this much tension and negativity, it's a problem. And so we got done with that, and we go back and we kind of had, like, like a platoon meeting without the platoon commander. And we told the platoon chief, like, we don't want to work with this guy.

The platoon chief brings it up the chain of command. And we have a, we request captain's mass, like, not official, but we want, we request to go talk to the CEO. So we go into the CEO's office and the CEO, like, lines us up, you know, from the chief on down and he goes down the line, like, what's the problem, what's a problem, what's problem? And we're all saying the same stuff. This guy's arrogant.

He doesn't listen to us. It's his way or the highway. And we get done, and the CEO says, you know what this sounds like to me? This sounds like a mutiny. We don't have mutinies in the Navy, and we're not going to have a mutiny at my seal team. Guys go figure this out. Cool. We walk out of the office, and the CEO was a good guy who started to pull the thread.

You know, once we left his office and talked to the training cadre and figured more about the guy's reputation and talk to the guy himself. and he realized like two or three days later he fired him. And so big win for the E5 Mafia. We're all fired up that we get this guy fired. And we proceed. And now we get our new assignment for our new platoon commander. We find out who our new platoon commander is going to be. And our new platoon commander is a legendary seal who I had never met him, but I had heard

his name. Everybody kind of heard his name. he had been, he had been a prior-enlisted senior chief. So he went up all the way to senior chief. He was at UDT. He was a plank owner at Damneck. He was at SDV. He was at a boat team.

He was at team one. He had done everything in his career. Everything you could possibly fucking want as a leader. He had combat experience from Grenada. So everything that you could want as a leader, he comes in. and and I'm thinking everyone's like fired up and I go hold on a second guys this is this is happening for a reason this is because we're a bunch of mutineers that got our last boss fired and they're sending this guy down because he's going to crush us and like get us in line and so when he

shows up this guy um I'm expecting you know a six foot five 270 pound beast and this guy shows up and he's like five, eight and maybe 150 pounds. And he looks like he's about, he's like the oldest guy I've ever seen in the SEAL teams, which was probably like, you know, 37 or something like that. Gray, graying hair and all the whole nine yards. And he walked into our platoon space. And I'm like, who is this freaking, this guy's supposed to be the legend? He walks into our platoon space. And he says something along the lines of like, hey, I'm sorry to hear about your last platoon commander, but I'm not worried about it. I'm just looking forward to working with you guys. And right there, like the fact that he didn't come in and say, you know, I'm taking

over. I'm in charge. There's a new sheriff in town. He said, I'm looking forward to working with you guys. And I realize, oh, this guy is different. And then that afternoon, he's taking out the garbage, you know, sweeping up the platoon space. He's taking out the garbage. I'm like, whoa, that's a new, that's not just a new guy. job that's like a new guy that's in trouble's job and then a couple days later we had our first training mission and he put me and my running mate in charge of the mission which was awesome and crazy like from you know hey here's the mission you guys figure out how you want to do it and he just put that that responsibility and gave us ownership and so that that

guy, you know, when I was watching him, and as I went through that platoon, he was just awesome and he made our lives awesome. And, you know, when your seal platoon is your life and your seal platoon is your religion and you have a guy like that take over and the contrast between the guy that was arrogant and didn't listen to us and held on to all the power himself, I learned so much from seeing that contrast between these two guys. And so as time went on, that's, that guy left me with a lot of, a lot of lessons. And one of the most, one of the most important lessons that he taught me was we were, we were working with the Marines. We, like I said, we were in our platoon. So we were ships off the coast of San Diego. We're doing like the Marine

Corps workup with them. For Marine Corps workup, they got to do beach landings, red beach up in camp pendleton and before the red before the beach landing goes down seals back in the old days we went out with a lead line and slate like world war two and did a hydrographic reconnaissance and that is a gut check of an operation especially in a big sea state especially off camp pendleton in whatever month it was it's cold giant waves we're in our you know zodiacs it's such a gut check of an operation it takes five or six hours to do you're freezing the whole time and you take a you know a lead line and a slate So you take a lead line and you dip it in the water. And it's got little markings on it to show you how deep the water is.

And then you have this slate on your arm where you're writing down how deep the water is. And you do this whole, your whole platoon is doing it at the same time. And it's just a gut check. And we get done that night. And then you have to take all the, all the slates with all the information on them. And you bring them back to the ship. And then the cartographers, which are guys in the platoon that like take all that information. They build a chart to give to the Marine Corps.

And we go through all that. And then that day, early morning, we then go out and mark the beach lanes. So we swim across the beach again. And we set up the beach lanes. We mark them for the Marines. And the Marines come in and land. And so now it's like 48 hours of continuous operations, freezing cold, gut check. And we get done and get a few hours into the beach landing.

And the Marine Corps decides that they didn't like their landing. and so they said we didn't you know we missed our timeline we didn't bring the vehicles in the right direction whatever the problems they had we're doing it again we're reloading the ships and we're doing it again which is like mammoth and ballsy for the Marine Corps colonel to say like hey I didn't like it we're doing it again this is massive so we reload on the ships and we start the whole thing again and we go out to do the hydrographical reconnaissance and we're in our little boat pool, you know, we launched from the big ships, we go on the zodiacs, we get to the point, it's been all night, and we're getting ready to get in the water, and we're in our little

boat pool. And again, we just did this 48 hours ago. And someone in the platoon, it wasn't me, thank God, someone in the platoon says, are we really going to do this again? And the platoon commander just quietly says he says well you know we don't have to but would that be the right thing to do and not another word was said we got in the water because you have to do you're a frogman you're a seal you have to do the right thing it's the hard choice right now we just did it 48 hours ago there's been no shift in the sand there's been no obstacles put in but this is what we do and for me that statement is it the right thing to do step with me for the rest of my career and this guy you know i remember getting towards the end of that platoon and again when you're

when your platoon is your life and somebody makes it that good And that was the first thought that I had about trying to become an officer. Because I said to myself, this guy made life so good for me and these 16 guys in this platoon. Someday, if I can, I want to make life good for 16 guys in a platoon. And that was the very first thought that I had of following his path. And that's what I did. That's what I eventually did.

I followed his path, and I always did my best to emulate, you know, never be as good as him, but I always did my best to emulate his leadership. Do you think he knows this about you? Yes. Yep. Could I ask what his name is? I'd rather not say. Okay.

But he's well-known in the SEAL teams. That's pretty cool. He's, he has no. you know he's very low profile very low profile guy that's even cooler yep yeah i mean the best of us are right you know i'm just curious me when you when you make a switch you know when how fast did you see morale recharge you know in that platoon when you saw the leadership change and when he came in and said i'm excited to work with you overnight overnight is that fast instant yeah and it was just instant and then that deployment you know again we were on board a ship

we were actually we were actually staged off the coast of africa when the rwanda genocide was going on and we were like planning to go and getting our gear ready and of course we never went. This is where, you know, the face that you made earlier that I, where you went, like, that's how, that's the first time I felt that of like, wait a second, there's, I think it ended up being 800,000 people slaughtered in 100 days, but we were there. We were off the coast and we didn't do anything. Why didn't we do anything? Well, what had just happened in Somalia a year prior? It was Black Hawk Down. It was like, yeah, they were not willing to take that risk. We did the same thing. There was a couple missions we got spawned up for in Somalia and had our gear loaded,

had it 40 mic mic. I remember loading out 40 mic mic for the first time for real and being like, oh, yeah, we're going and we didn't go. So that was probably the first time that I felt that level of frustration of, you know, why aren't they sending us? Like, we can help. And that's the way it was, you know, definitely a letdown. How did that platoon end?

That was it. You know, we went on deployment. I think we spent some ridiculous amount of time because they call them gator squares, which is when you're just going around in a circle off the coast of, we did gator squares off the coast of Rwanda or off the coast of, not off the coast of Rwanda,

but off the coast of Kenya for several months. And then we did gator squares off the coast of Somalia for another period of time. And then we went up into the Persian Gulf because at some point, I think it was this platoon. There was something going on, like Saddam had pushed troops, move troops or something going on so we went up and and did gator squares in the persian

gulf for a while so i think we were at sea like a hundred and seventy four days out of 180 or something totally you're saying like that yeah just riding that ship lifting all day shooting off the fantail again did we have fun while we're doing it yeah dude we had a blast we had a blast also in the couple of days that we were not on the ship i met my wife so you meet your life? We went into Bahrain for like some training and the boys, we went out and I met my wife who was a stewardess at the time. Really? Yeah. How'd you make the approach? Um, oh man. So squad two had spent a couple days. They went off the ship before us and squad one still had some whatever we were doing some some work to do

and so when we flew into Bahrain because we flew to Bahrain and we didn't know what Bahrain was I mean a country but we didn't know that Bahrain at the time was like the Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf meaning they had it was like somewhat westernized they had bars and stuff like this and so when we when squad of one when we landed in the helicopters squad two is like running to help us move our bags and stuff. We're like, what's going on? And they're like, there's girls here, there's bars here. Like, so, and one of my, one of my buddies who was very, a very shy type dude, he was in squad

too and he tells me, yeah, you know, there's these girls here, there's these two girls. I've seen them each night and like, I know you're going to go and you're going to go talk to them and like, they haven't even give me the time of day. And I was like, bro, if there's girls, you know, I won't, I'll leave them alone. they're yours you handle it and so we go to a we go to this bar i know you're going to talk to yeah yeah oh shit i look across the bar and there's this like shockingly uh stunningly beautiful girl with blonde hair and uh like a white freaking skin tight gorgeous outfit on and so i saw it's just walked over to her and um yeah this is the embarrassing part is uh you know when you're on a

ship back then there was there wasn't internet and so we had a limited number of video cassettes there's no DVDs no streaming and one of the movies that we had was ace venture a pet detective and so we had watched that movie at this point like hundreds of times and uh i walked up to this beautiful blonde girl and and i said in like a jim carrie style i said you must be aphrodite's goddess of love. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and then laughed and, you know, we started talking. But that was the, I don't know whether it's more embarrassing that I said it to her or that she fell for it. I'm sure she's pretty embarrassed that she fell for it. But yeah, so we ended up, you know, having a long-distance relationship and, and, but that's, came home from that deployment

and, you know, go in another platoon. Right off the bat. Yeah, you know, this was, This was the 90s, you know. Just go on deployment, go on deployment as much as you can and hope that something happens. And so that's what I did. Just went back into another platoon, did another ARG platoon. So right back into the ARG platoon. New leadership? Yep, got a new platoon commander, got a new platoon chief, new platoon LPO, and all good dudes.

You know, it was just good time. Team one was a great team to grow up in for me. You know, they just had a, other than that one officer, everyone, else was just good good people and everyone was just hard-working frogman you know it was good anything significant on deployment three you know the only thing i can say was cool about that third deployment was that um we did some we did like at night of sum i think we did one shipboarding like a real shipboarding and i think we ran some security operations means and again this is how desperate we were. We locked and loaded our weapons and drove our ribs around like the boats,

the shit, the Navy ships. And I was kind of fired up. You know? Yeah. This is literally, to me, it was real. We locked and loaded our weapons. And then we did one shipboarding that was, you know, real. And again, in in the 90s, I was freaking stoked that I got to lock and load my MP5 because we used MP5s back then. Yeah, got to lock and load my MP5 and board a ship and get control of the vessel and turn it over to the authorities. And it ended up, it wasn't even like a, it was just some weird situation where they were making some kind of a distress call. But people thought they might be, you know, there might be a hostage situation. So, or some kind of, not a hostage situation, but some kind, they didn't know what was happening.

What kind of ship was it? Some random... Was it a foreign ship? Yeah, yeah, just some random, you know... Like a Mariske or something? Yeah, like smaller. There's a pretty... It wasn't that big.

They're probably, they're probably moving dates or whatever, whatever kind of produce from one of the Arab countries. It was nothing. It was literally nothing. I'm like bringing it up because it's funny that I was excited about it. And that's kind of how naive and into the teams I was. Did you board it? Yeah.

How to go? cool we took it over you know what happened when you took it over just walked up they're like uh we're not in distress yeah we figured out that they weren't in distress but we are now yeah that we stressed them out they were actually thankful i think they had some kind of problems you know some kind of problems with their engine or something like that so we showed up and you know it was a non-opposed boarding but you know we got to hook and climb on a you know we put our little uh uh water ski ladder. Like we had little water ski ladders. We just hooked it all and climbed up. It was cool. Right on. I was happy. Happy to do something for real. That's one thing, the Coast Guard,

the Coast Guard, one thing that's cool about the Coast Guard is no matter what's going on in the world, the Coast Guard's doing real stuff, you know? Coast Guard's always doing saving people. You know, the ocean is mean. Yeah. So if there's a war going on or not, if you're in the Coast Guard, you can still do some really impactful things. Of course, now they're doing all kinds of drug interdiction too. Yeah, I love that. Have you seen that video that those guys that jump on that damn submarine and open it up? Oh, no, I haven't seen that. It's, it's fucking awesome. It's fucking awesome. But we track sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try to chase every biohack. But real performance starts deep at the cellular level. Armour a colostrum is nature's original superfood.

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SRS. These statements and products have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition. These statements and information are not a substitute for or alternative to seeking care from your health care providers. All right. So when did you move over to two? So I got done with that, platoon, and I went into training cell at SEAL Team One. When I was a training cell at SEAL Team One again, I'm still like single and I taught everything.

You know, we just, we do everything. Do land warfare, Todd diving, comms, CQC. We'd just teach everything because we just didn't, we didn't have anything else to do. Wasn't like, hey, what do you want to do this week when you're home? No, I'll go to an island or I'll go to wherever to go make stuff happen. So I stayed in that mode. And then again, from my second platoon, I had, there was a, there was a officer program that was called the Seaman to Admiral program.

And it was started by a guy named Jim Borda, Admiral Borda. Admiral Borda, who if you know anything about him, he killed himself. I didn't. I don't know anything about it. So this is, again, there's all these weird threads through people's lives, but one of the weird threads through my life is that one of my biggest mentors and heroes is a guy named Colonel David Hackworth. And Colonel David Hackworth wrote the book about face.

And he was a Korean War veteran and a Vietnam War veteran. He was one of the most decorated army soldiers. and he when he retired he had retired because during the Vietnam War he did an interview where he said if we don't change the way we're fighting we're going to lose that's basically what he said and he got drummed out of the army for saying that because he was a colonel he was a senior officer he was the first senior officer to speak out against the war and the way we were fighting it and when he got out he you know he kind of he wrote books but he was a little bit of a journalist and a little bit of a, you know, yeah, kind of like a journalist. And he

reported that Admiral Borda was wearing a V on his Navy commendation medal. So a Navy com with a V. And he said he didn't write it because a V is an award for Valor. And, you know, like, that's a big deal. It doesn't stand for Valor. It stands for combat distinguishing device, but it's a V. And that story came out and Admiral Borda killed himself. But prior to that happening, Admiral Borda had started a program called the Seaman Admiral program because Admiral Borda was a prior enlisted guy. And so he wanted to offer that to other troops.

And so they started this program and it was 50 sailors from the U.S. Navy would get selected. And I heard about the program. And actually, one of my officers said, hey, they've got this program going out. You should do it. And I did it. And I didn't get picked up, but I got slated as an alternate, which was no, there were no alternate spots that opened up because everyone took it. But I was an alternate. So I knew I had a decent chance.

And that the guy actually sent a note back to my commanding officer that said, make sure this guy applies next year. And so I applied again the next year. And I got picked up for that program. No shit. I'm just curious. I mean, a lot of us know, you know, where the story's headed into Ramadi. But, you know, and maybe the knowledge wasn't there. But, you know, I mean, now, you know, actually, maybe it was there because this was after your second platoon or during your second platoon. I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that, you know, officers, you join the SEALs to go to war. That's what you wanted to do. Now leadership package is presented. presented to you, you take it. Did you know that you would have more time in a combat role as an enlisted guy than you would as an officer? Yeah, at that juncture in my career in the way the teams were, this is 1998, you know, I had done three platoons, so I maybe had an LPO and a platoon chief left. So I basically looked at it as, oh, instead of doing an LPN or a platoon chief, you're going to do

an AIC and an OIC. Gotcha. And so it wasn't really, didn't really make that much of a difference to me. You know, when guys ask me now, like what should you do?

Or what, you know, if they say, hey, I want to go in the SEAL teams, what should I do? I, I mean, my career couldn't have gone any better. Like, it was great.

But to your point, if you want to do the trade of being, a seal, then you should enlist. Yep. That's just how. Why did you decide to take a leadership role? It all just boiled back to working for that platoon commander that made life in a

platoon awesome. And I thought if I can make, if I can make platoon awesome, if I can make life awesome for 16 guys in a school platoon, I'm going to do it. And, and, yeah, that was it. That was it. It's a damn good reason. Yep. So when did you go?

I went to officer candidate school in 1998. Yep. Early 1998, I went to officer candidate school. And, you know, that was, you know, you're pretty much, we had a decent number of prior enlisted guys in my class, but most of them, I'd say 70% of them were kids out of college going to OCS. And so, you know, I show up there. I'm a seal.

And the drill instructors, their Marine Corps drill. instructors down at OCS and great, great interaction with the Marine Corps drill instructors. You know, I became the class president, which seemed pretty obvious, I guess. But most of the class presidents are only class president for like three days in the first few weeks because they're just, they're just firing them. But I became class president. I just stayed. So I was a class president.

And then went through OCS, you know, folding underwear, literally with a ruler. have a ruler. No shit. Yeah. So, you know, graduated from OCS and then went to team two. Did you learn anything significant in OCS? Yeah, you know, leadership was a cool leadership challenge going OCS and being the being the class president, you make things happen. And it was cool to work. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, People are, and this is another thing that, you know, I've learned along the way is like, people aren't going to be perfect and they're going to make mistakes and I'm going to make mistakes. And as long as their intention isn't bad, then, you know, I get it.

And also, you know, to ask someone to perform like or behave in a way that they have to surmount their innate, like, habits as a human being, it's a lot to ask or someone. So when someone gets mad, when someone gets frustrated, when you see someone's ego come out, when you see someone look out for themselves, I kind of understand that that's the way people are. And I'm not going to be mad about it. I understand that people get, you know, there's, there's, people do crazy things, man. people do crazy things and I understand and I think that going to OCS was one of those things

I said yep there's kids were trying but kids were also doing things where you go I see what he's doing man he's worried about this test and he's looking out for himself right now and I get it I get it and I think just a little bit of understanding other people's perspective it was good for me to continue to be able to understand other people's perspective because if you don't understand other people's perspectives, you're going to be very judgmental. And if you're very judgmental, you're going to have a hard time interacting with other people. And when you're in a leadership position and you're having a hard time interacting with other people, that's not going to be good. Why did you, why did you go to two?

I'm just curious, why you went East Coast versus West Coast when you could have reintegrated back in with your old guys, you know what I mean? At the time, the officer community, if you went from enlisted to officer, they made you switch coasts. Gotcha. And I wanted to go to the East Coast because I hadn't been out there. I'd spent all my time in the West Coast. And so, and Team Two, I came from Team One. Team One was the traditional team on the, on the West Coast and the East Coast from my friends

that I knew out there was the same way. Team two was the traditional team. It was the old school team, you know, and that's where I wanted to go. So I got to go to team too. How was it as an officer? I mean, what is it like walking through those doors as a prior enlisted guy now as a junior officer? It was pretty much the same, you know? When I was an E5 or an E4, you know, I worked with, like I said, I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon.

I had a really good relationship with my platoon commander, my second platoon, good relationship with my platoon commander. And then when he got fired, I had a good relationship with the guy that took over. So, and I didn't, it seemed like good, good guys. They would just treat you like, you know, like mutual, you know. So I never really had a huge difference between the way I saw other people or the way, you know,

I always just saw myself as another team guy that's, this is my job. You know, when I was a calm guy, my job was to make sure the radios were good. When I was an officer, it's like, okay, I got to make sure that the plan is good, make sure we have contingencies. Like, there was other things I was going to be charged, but I'm still just a part of the machine that's going to take care of this. And if one part of the machine fails, the whole machine fails. So it was fine, you know. And, you know, team two was great. I had a bunch of good guys there.

And, and, yeah. And there was, like, you hear about the differences between the East Coast. coast and the West Coast, and they were team guys. You know, they were team guys that lived in Virginia as opposed to team guys that lived in San Diego and a bunch of great dudes. And I ended up almost immediately deploying to Germany. The chief of my second platoon

was the master chief in Germany. And they had been calling back for ops support. They wanted a GO to go over to Germany to help with ops support. And he told me this later, they were in like a morning meeting. And they said, yeah, we finally got

ops support coming from the beach. And they go, who is it? And they go, it's an ensign Willink. And the ops officer's like, what are you talking about? They're sending us an ensign. Like, we need an ops guy. And the match chief goes, hold on a second. What's that guy's name?

He goes, Ensign Willink. He goes, we want this guy. And so I showed up. And again, there's my old platoon chief who is, who is like a great guy who had a great relationship with, like an awesome friend of mine. He's the command master chief. And so I show up and develop a great relationship with the commanding officer there and the executive officer there just and the ops chief there became awesome friends.

And it's just great, you know, just great opportunities and work with these guys that are, again, man just dedicated to the teams you know just dedicated to the teams and i think that's the main thing is you know you get guys that the best the good guys their their commitment is to the teams and so you got a bunch of guys they're just committed to the teams and want to do a good job and that's so went over to germany and we actually like did some little mini deployments from germany um that were really cool and learned a lot and my the skipper was a great guy and He ended up, you know, becoming the officer detailer later, which, you know, again, it's beneficial. And the SEAL Team 2 executive officer, again, developed a great relationship with him, just a good guy that, you know, I was a hard worker.

And that, he moved from group from unit 2. So I was with the XO in Germany and then he becomes the XO at Team 2. So, like, when I get back there, I immediately get back put into a platoon. So I do a platoon at Steel Team 2 and a strike platoon off the aircraft carrier. Right on. Right on. Yep. Which was, again, working with a lot of assets and going over and doing VBSS over in the Persian Gulf, which again, at the time was a real thing.

Did you get a lot of leadership experience as the is the Opso in Germany, or was that kind of just, you know, getting you ready? As far as leadership of troops, no, but understanding of the bigger picture, yes. Because the guy that I work for there, again, he's a friend of mine and just a great guy. And he had, you know, a lot of experience himself at the time, right? Not experienced like guys have now, but at the time he had experience. And like there was one time we were, we were on a big exercise, a big joint exercise. and we, we like put together a talk, tactical operations center. What's interesting about this is, man, you think of a talk now, like, you think of what

a mobile talk would look like now. I'm not kidding. Well, I put together a mobile talk and I was the like the, the ops officer for this operation, this training operation, and I had the talk in my backpack. It was like three radios, two maps, some magic markers, some pens, like, that's what we rolled with and that's what we set up you know that's what we did but there was a time where there's a platoon in the field and there there's multiple elements that are getting ready to do target hits and we're waiting for like a pro word from this platoon that's supposed to be set up and

and we're waiting and I go sir can I pimp them for this pro word and he's like give him another minute and I was like roger that and 45 seconds later the guys passed the pro word and it just reminded me that like those guys out in the field you got to listen to what they're doing you got to give them the benefit of the doubt and that's what my boss was telling me like hey those guys got they're not sitting in the talk right now they're not they're making decisions so just good experience from that perspective and seeing you know the way the the sock worked was good so when did your i mean if this happened which would i think it would happen i mean when did you know as enlisting guys we always have a lot of

gripes and bitches and shit like that about, you know, the leadership. And so, you know, kind of where I'm going with this is when did your mind kind of expand and realize, you know, what the O position is and, okay, like, there's a lot more to this than I ever gave it credit for as an enlisted guy. Yeah. That happened. It happened on that deployment, right? And I think where, I think what was good was I was bilingual, meaning I spoke two

languages. Well, I mean, Mustangs, prior enlisted officers have fucking tremendous amount of respect in the enlisted pan's eyes. So since I was bilingual and I could speak two languages and I had to learn the officer language, but I spoke, I was fluent in E-Dog language. I mean, I was completely fluent. I was E-Dog mafia. If you go to talk to anybody that was a SEAL Team 1 in between 1991 and 1998, I was a maid man in the CL Team 1, E5 Mafia 100%. There's no one that would ever deny that. And so I spoke fluent E5 Mafia language. And then as I started to learn the officer language,

what I think I was able to do was translate what was happening with the officers to the e-dogs, which I think a lot of times gets missed. To this day, gets missed. Because it really is two different perspectives that are happening. And there's a lot of things that happen. at the officer level that don't ever get told to the e-dogs. And that does create frustration and angst amongst the troops because they don't understand what the hell is going on.

And when that happens, man, they get pissed. And I got pissed when I was, you know, when I was an e-dog and we weren't being told what was happening, we're freaking pissed. You know, I tell this one story where we were on the ship, this is my third platoon, and we got told, hey, you guys are going to launch your zodiacs off the ship. We go cool. So we drag all the stuff upstairs.

It takes an hour and a half, got to bring the fuel up, which means you got to notify the fire party, and they got to set up all their stuff so you can bring the fuel up to the top deck so you can launch the boats inside the ribs. And two or three hours into this, they're like, actually you're going to launch off of the well deck. Oh, bring everything back downstairs, another two or three hours.

Later, they say, oh, you're going to use helicopters. Now we've got to break all. So we're getting whipped around the whole time. And this is, by the way, someone just saying, oh, why don't they use the helicopters? Oh, okay, cool. I'll tell them. And they think it's just like this, but it's not.

So I always remembered what it was like. I also always remember, you know, when I was in STT, Sealed Tactical Training, we had to walk in every position in a platoon. So sometimes you'd be point man, sometimes you'd be the PL, sometimes you'd be the radio man, sometimes you'd be a machine gunner. And I remember, luckily or unluckily for me, we did a long patrol and I was a rear security. And I had no idea where we were. I had no idea we were going. I had no idea we were going to stop again. If we got contacted, I might as well have just started running around like a

chicken with my head cut off because I didn't know where the rally ports were. I didn't even know where the target was. And I hated that feeling. And I always said to myself, I am going to make sure that I keep the guys informed of what is happening. That is so important it gets dropped all the time because you get focused on like well hold on how much longer to the next but this is the platoon commander talking he's only talking to the point man and so now when he stops talking to the rest of the platoon they lose track of what's happening and it's just a cluster and so even as an enlisted guy I realized that you have to make a concerted effort to explain to the guys what is happening and if you fail to do that they'll have no idea and you won't know that they don't

know and that's that's a disaster so now when you move me up into this officer position now i'm saying oh yeah i bet the platoon has no idea what why they're having the helo's move to this position or why they're being told they have to stand down from this operation or because they don't they don't get told oh the charger de affairs in this country just said that we can't do it and here's the risk that they don't aren't willing to take they just hear hey it's a kank bird and they go so we just spent four hours doing this and now it's just nothing, but they don't understand why. And so it's incumbent upon the leadership to make sure that everyone in the chain of command understands not just what we're doing, but why we're doing

it and why these changes get, these changes happen. Because as you know, these changes happen all the time. They happen all the time. And so, yes, I think that one of the things that I had the capability of doing is I was bilingual. I talked to E5 and eventually I learned how to speak officer as well. And I could also bring the problems at the E5 level to my boss and explain to them in a way that they could understand that, hey, when you tell my guys, we're not allowed to explosively breach anymore, let me tell you what that means. And then they say, oh, okay, well, I didn't understand that. Thank you. Or when I get told, hey, you need to have this number of Iraqis with you,

friendly Iraqi soldiers with you on every operation. I need to explain to my boss what that means on the ground. And if you have a good relationship, which I was had a good relationship with my boss. So when I would, I would explain something to my boss, my boss will listen to me. My boss would, because also I wouldn't complain about stuff.

Like I wasn't going to complain. If I was going to my boss and telling them that something didn't make sense, they would listen to me because I would only say it, if it was true. And so I just developed that good amount of trust with my chain of command and it would work out well. So yes, as I got into that officer role, I started to see, oh, okay, I can understand why. If the troops would have known that it was the Commodore of the ARG that now wanted to use

helicopters because it's something they have to get checked off the box before they're allowed to go on deployment, if the guys understood that, they'd be like, oh, yeah, well, we got got to get qualls done too and this is the qualls that they got to get cool let's make it happen but a lot of times you know we we fails as leaders to let people know and then when i got to in the platoon at seal team two again now we're on a strike aircraft we got a lot of assets we're we're with you know a carrier air group which is an awesome like projection of power unbeatable projection of power, but we're a little cog in that machine and helping the platoon understand what we're doing, why we're doing it was beneficial.

Why do you think that the, maybe they are doing it, but they definitely weren't doing it when I was done. I mean, it seems like with what you just described prior enlist, Mustangs, prior enlisted going to officer, I mean, that's, they could alleviate a lot of communication issues within the military. Why do you think that they aren't, if they aren't, um, motivating people enlisted guys to become officers?

Why aren't they, why aren't they giving more billets? I mean, this, this seems like if, it could be a key component to a, yeah, a 250 year communication issue.

Yeah. There are, you know, it's, it's, with prior enlisted officers, some of the best officers I ever worked for or worked with were prime enlisted officers. Some of the worst officers I worked with were prior enlisted officers.

So I think it's more of an educational thing and more of an understanding that explaining to people that, hey, man, this communication that goes up and down in chain of command is, it needs to happen. It's a real thing. And when your platoon is complaining about something, you should listen to what they have to say because they're doing it for a reason. And of course, if you're asking me if they should take more prior enlisted guys and make them into officers, absolutely. That's awesome.

I wish they would do that all the time. It's a great move. Anything significant on the strike deployment or the mark, excuse me? It was a strike deployment. It wasn't a mark, but it was, you know, it was cool. We did a VBSS overseas. Again, this was like when doing VBSS was as real as it gets, get to lock and load your weapon and board a ship and get control of the ship. And it's as good as you could hope for, you know.

We took down a big Russian ship, which was a, which was at the time, it was like on CNN, you know, it was a, wait, what? We took down, like, there was a Russian ship that was smuggling oil. And so we, we, we boarded that ship and got control over and turned over to the authorities. So, you know, that was kind of a, a cool lot to do in the 90s, you know, in the 90s, some things that aren't that big of a deal seemed pretty cool. What year, so what year is this? That, that was a millennium deployment. So we were on, we were deployed 99 to 2000. It was like the winner of 99, 2000.

Where were you when September 11th, 2001 happened? So I get home from that deployment and I have to go to college because I didn't have any college. And again, this is why they changed that whole officer program that I did. I was a, I was in E5 at Steel Team 1. I went to 13 weeks of OCS, no college, and then I went to SEAL Team 2 as an officer. So it was awesome.

But when I got done, they're like, yo, you don't have any college. You have to go to college to be an officer. And I was like, oh, no, I don't need to go. I can go when I'm, I've already been doing it online. I've already doing the job. And the officer detail was like, no, no, you have to go to college. So I went back to San Diego to go to college University of San Diego.

And I did that primarily because of Jiu-Jitsu. I knew I was going to be. I knew I was going to be having some time during this three years of going to college. So I went back out to San Diego. So I'd get my own training, get with my old training partners and stuff. And then, so I got back out there in 2000. And I'm in the middle of college when September 11th happens. And when September 11th happened, my commanding officer or the commanding officer of unit two,

who I was deployed with as an ops. O, not the ops O, but as an ops, J-O, he was the detailer, and I was friends with him, and I called him, and I said, can you please give me back to a seal team right now? And he said, Jocko, this war is going to last a long time. Finish college. And I said, sir, I can finish when I, I can do all mine, like whatever. And he goes, finish college, this war is going to last a long time. And I didn't believe him at all.

But he was right. and and I always want to make sure I make this point he told me later that everybody called him everybody that wasn't at a team everyone called him I was just one of the other guys that called him it wasn't like I was extra motivated and I was just as motivated everybody wanted to get back to a team and so he sent me when I finished college 2003 again like awesome he sent me to seal team Seale Team 7 was like the next deploying team. I got to Seal Team 7 and my old XO from Seal Team 2 was the commanding officer and he welcomed me aboard and then a week or two later he fired a platoon commander and put me in charge. No shit. And so and we were slated to go to Iraq

and we left, I don't know, a few months later. Yeah, actually probably quite a few months later because I graduated in like June, July, showed up at the team and we went on deployment in September. So that's, you know, good relationships with people, work hard and, you know, he had a platoon commander that wasn't doing a good job, so he put me in there.

This was in 2003? 2003, that's certainly grateful, yeah. So were you on the invasion? No, so SEAL team. Three. Seal Team three did the invasion. Steel Team five had kind of established Baghdad, and then I went in and relieved them.

How was it? It was the best thing ever. It was awesome. I mean, and there was a... So you've done basically five deployments? Yeah, so this was my... Yeah, so this was my fifth deployment. No, my

No, this was my sixth deployment Sixth deployment. Yes, this was my sixth deployment. Yeah. I mean, dude, what's it feel? I mean, five fucking deployments of, I mean, you did some stuff, but now you're, 9-11 happens, we've invaded Iraq, and you're in fucking Baghdad.

I think you're in Baghdad. Yes, I'm in Baghdad, and I'm in heaven. I was totally stoked. And for, so there was actually like, There was, I had a sister platoon at SEAL Team 7 and they went to Baghdad and then we replaced them in like, or we kind of like, it was weird. We kind of replaced them within weeks. Like we started augmenting them and then kind of replaced them. And after a little while, like after a month or so, we were the only platoon in, we were the only SEAL platoon in Iraq.

Holy shit. For a short period of time. And, and so, you know, we were, we were just doing, you know, what the team five guys had, had established. And then my sister platoon at SEAL Team 7 had kept up the pace. And it was just, you know, Baghdad's SWAT is pretty much what it was. It was get intel from various sources, find out where a enemy was located, and then go get them. And we had a lot of targets and we got to do a ton of it. And it was, it was like what, it was what we all joined the teams to do, you know.

So it was awesome. Do you remember your first operation where you had an engagement? Yeah. Actually, the first time I left the wire in Baghdad, my, the troop SEA was a friend of mine. like we were E5 mobsters at team one and he had been there for like a month and so we show up and he goes there was like a mortar attack or something and he was like hey go take your platoon and go like check these roads in this place and and we went out you know we went out the wire and like check these roads and drove to here drove to there and then we came back and uh he was like

you good? And I was like, yeah, yeah. He was like, that was just kind of a shakeout. And I was like, good call, dude. You know, like, it was him saying, hey, like, there's nothing going to happen. We're not sending you on a wild goose chase, but, you know, go to these couple points and check them for whatever. So it was just a good break in of, you know, getting the guys, getting the platoon, getting the vehicles loaded up, went out, drove around outside the wire. That was kind of the first time leaving the wire with my nods on. The first time we got shot at, I was in a Humvee and I'm looking at the Humvee in front of me and I'm like, I see like sparks and I'm like, why, why is someone smoking?

Like, why is someone flicking their throwing their cigarettes out of the vehicle? And I'm like, oh, those are bullets, aren't they? And sure enough, one of the guys, um, one of the, one of the, um, one of the, guys got caught like a ricochet in the head totally good to go it like entered his went through his skin and then like kind of wrapped around his skull and yeah um but he was fine you know we still took him to charlie med but and then you know we and it was kind of that's kind of like the first time and we got you know that that deployment was relatively chill um i mean what's that feel like though i mean five deployments you joined to go to war when you're 18

don't see any now you're in charge of your platoon straight after college after 9-11 and you're fucking leading a platoon into battle

in Iraq I mean that's fucking did it even hit you was it surreal at the time or you just so in it you're like all right this is a deal let's go I knew

like I knew I think I'm very lucky because I was older you know I think I was what, 33, 32 or something like that point. So I knew how rare this was. I thought the war was going to be over in a couple months. Like, I was very, very grateful for everything that we got to do.

And I knew that every night. Every night I was, you know, like playing the Super Bowl game every night. You know, like that's what I felt like. I was very grateful the whole time. And I had a great bunch of guys, great bunch of guys, like. that were just hard charging and just it was awesome it was great and we we did a lot of direct action missions you know and so we did it we kind of got close a couple times to the idea of sniper overwatching we did it a couple times but it kind of left an imprint of my mind

of what capability we had but we were primarily just a DA for and we would just roll out and hit targets. And I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know if there's anything else I can say to make it for me to explain how happy I was. But that, to me, was just the most awesome thing. What about the pressure? I mean, I've always thought about, you know, I mean, I always felt a lot of pressure just going out the door, you know, do the right thing, you know.

But, I mean, what is the pressure like? And you don't really have any other reference because you hadn't gone on any kinetic operations until this point. But, I mean, what is the pressure like as an officer leading 16, 20 guys into battle at the beginning of a war where there's not a lot of lessons learned? There's not a lot of new tactics developed yet. Yeah. The pressure I felt was just wanting to do a good job, you know, not wanting to do anything, not wanting to. I wouldn't say not make any mistakes because I was not a risk-averse person

you know like I recognize that if you roll out on an operation things can go wrong and I understood that and I understood that risk so but yeah you know you worried about guys getting wounded you worry about guys getting killed

a little bit of a very distant idea to me guys getting wounded or killed it could happen I thought but it was man this is early in the war. The IED threat was relatively small. We would drive very aggressively at night on nods. We got ambushed a few times, but it would like, no factor RPG is going over the, you know, lucky RPGs going over the convoy, you know, machine gun fire going between vehicles. Like, we got, we got lucky. God's a frog man. But it was still a little bit distant to me that

someone could get wounded or killed it was there but not we we really dominated the battle space like coalition forces dominated the battle space and so I didn't have that much of that kind of pressure in my in my head what about the pressure of winning your your men over winning their trust when in yeah you mean you want to be the fucking leader that everybody wants to follow into battle. You know, that stuff, I would imagine, has to be going through your head. Am I making the right calls?

How do my men, I mean, we have talked about perception earlier. And that conversation I want to bring up, you know, more towards the end. But, you know what I mean? Are you worried about the guy's perception of how you're leading? These guys are my bros and these guys are my friends. And when I took over that platoon,

we were the first, like the first, maybe the first or second thing we did was a nighttime OTB in San Diego pilot recovery training operation so I had done three shipboard deployments man I know how to do over the beach and we go over the beach and one of our boats like capsizes or die or the motor dies I forget which I think it's just the motor died and we're we get the pilot and we come back and now we got a down boat and um the guys who when i took over the platoon some of the guys were kind of friends with the old officer and so there was a little bit of that and some of the guys didn't like the old officer and so there was a little bit of a friction right

and i so this boat's down and the guys like we're in a perimeter and the guys like do we got to call admin we got to call the trucks down here and get this boat towed back and i was like we're not doing that and they're like what are we going to do and I go this is what we're doing and I gave him the plan and I put all my fins and took the boat and I was like hey guys I'm gonna you guys are going to paddle this boat they're like they're looking at me like I'm crazy like paddling a boat through the surf like this is buds and I said we're going and as soon as we get like deep enough we'll set up a toe line and we did have a good long toe line and I remember I put beaded my weapon into the boat and I got in the water and I'm keeping the bow into the wave

so we don't flip over and then we get the other boat comes in I get those lines secured and then they start towing us out and then the guys drag me back into the boat but like one of the guys in that platoon was like after you did that that night like we were doing anything for you because because I kind of they had kind of said like oh we got to call admin and I'm like no we're not calling that we're going to make this happen but there was all kinds of stuff like that like step up and do the right thing and yeah these guys are my friends you know why these guys listen to me because i listen to them you know why these guys treated me with respect because i treated them with respect you know why they trusted me because i trusted them and and when you that's what

you do that's that's how it is and that was the attitude that i had i wasn't really concerned about that these guys were my guys and i trusted them they trusted me and you didn't know any of them prior to you coming into that platoon. I knew the platoon chief. Yep, the platoon chief was another, you know, team one, E5 mafia guy from from back in the day. So it was great. It was great to have that instant connection. But I don't believe I knew one single other person in that platoon because I'd been out on the East Coast and then I've been in college. So I don't think I knew once the sister platoon, my sister platoon, my old running mate, the guy that told me, hey, you're not the only one that lost gris. He was the eldest.

P.O. and my sister platoon. No shit. And I got to do some offs with him. Nice. Yeah, which was as good as it gets. Nice. What would, what would you say your most memorable experience of that deployment is? Uh, there was, there was a few things that happened where you, you, you, like, uh, there was the CPA and the joff was being overrun. And we needed, they needed QRF. Najaf is five hours away by Humvee. And they need a QRF. And they called us.

And I'm like, hey, there's like three other units between us and Najaf. Like why? And they're like, I don't know, but you guys are going. And I remember my, my, the SEA of that troop who like I said was the guy that was like, hey, go on this mission, which was kind of for no reason. He was a great friend of mine to this day. but I came out of like the talk and I was like hey guys load up all the rockets load up all the ammunition you can fit in the trucks this is what's happening we're going to QRF we're going

into joff CPA's been overrun and we 20 minutes later were jocked up and that guy that guy hugged me and I was like hmm this is interesting and because he was he usually went with us but he wasn't going with us and so he like hugged me and I was like hmm Interesting. Long story. No big deal. We got to Najaf. They didn't need a QRF.

The, I think, I want to say Blackwater actually came in with their heel. Is that what that? I was wondering if that's what that was. So we went down there. We spent the night, didn't do anything, and then drove back. But, you know, I remember thinking, hmm, that's interesting. I'm getting this hug for my bro. We ended up doing towards the end of the deployment, there was a,

there was a one of Sotters, Mictado Asauder was the leader of the Shiites in Iraq. And we coalition forces had been targeting him for months. Our whole deployment, he was being targeted. But they didn't want to hit him because they didn't know what the reaction would be. And so just before we were going home, we got tasked with hitting one of his top lieutenants. And it was a big operation, a lot of visibility on it.

And we went down and that was also, I want to say that was in the joff. We went down, we captured this guy. And when we came back, it was kind of, once it got out, it was kind of the beginning or one of the triggering points of the true insurgency in Iraq. Like I woke up that morning and there was like, you could look out on the, from, from, our base, and you could see, like, fires from the highways, vehicles were being ID'd and stuff, and it was, it was the beginning of the real formation of the insurgency, which I wasn't really quite 100% sure on, but you could see something was changed. Something just changed, and you could feel it. And I don't think America was ready for that. We weren't. You know,

we'd already made all kinds of mistakes, you know, standing down the bath soldiers and the army, signing down to Iraqi army like all we made all kinds of mistakes out of arrogance as a country um but i don't really don't think that we saw like oh damn this is about to get really really bad and that wasn't the spring of 2004 and that is truly when things started to spiral yeah yeah well jaco i know it's getting ready to get heavy with tasking a bruiser um let's just take a quick break when we come back we'll pick up right here Let's do it, man. A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now, and it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore, because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division.

I partnered with this production company called Ironclad, and we're doing an eight-part audio series on Sciops, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe. even our own government, would conduct a sci-op on its own people. And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to sciop-show.com, order it today. I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them?

All right, Jocko. we're back from the break it's about to get real heavy here but um this is where you go to seal team three take task unit bruiser is the task unit commander correct not quite not quite because as i'm finishing my deployment my with seal team seven um my commanding officer again who is my ops officer in unit two my executive officer at seal team two now he's my commanding officer and he says the last thing I do as a commanding officer is I'm going to make sure that you become the admiral's aide no one wants to be the admiral's aide of course because you know it's an administrative job but there's a reason why he wanted me to go be the

admiral's aide and it is because at that point in time at that moment I was going to come straight off the battlefield you know this is 2003 2004 there hadn't been that many platoons gone over there I'm going to go straight off the battlefield and work directly for the admiral and that's what they want they want somebody that has fresh combat experience that can tell him what is happening and I you know I did all kinds of excuses and tap dancing to try and get out of it but it was it was happening so and and you know it's part of it is it's very it's outstanding professional development because you're going to see things that you would not see without doing it so I that's what I get

I get home, uh, from deployment. And I check in to be the Admiral's Aid. And yeah, it was, uh, it was definitely a wake up call because, you know, we always, we had a thing was if, you know, avoid wearing a uniform at all costs. If you have to wear it, make it perfect, right? That was kind of like a thing at seal team one. And I was really good at avoiding wearing a uniform. Like, I didn't I like to wear a shirt at work, you know, as little as possible. And the first trip I went on with the Admiral, I think I had four uniforms with me. Like khakis for the Pentagon, camis for Fort Bragg, dress blues for a ceremony, and civilian clothes. That's like one trip.

Damn. So I check in to be the admiral and, you know, it was definitely an eye-opener of what's happening in the community and what's going on and what's happening at that level. And it was, yeah, a massive learning experience. And again, you know, I had the E5 mafia language down. Now I learned the officer language. and now it was learning I don't know what to call the next level up of officer language

but it's like flag officer language because for that year I was in the Pentagon I was you know and you'd be it's weird when you're an aide it's kind of like you don't exist but you do

and I don't mean that in a bad way my boss was a great guy he was just a great guy nice guy cared about me a lot but like when you're in a room with a four star general Like, the aides are kind of these sub-humans in the back, but you're listening to everything. You're seeing everything.

And so it was a very educational experience as to what's happening at those levels. You know, you're going to meetings at the Pentagon, J-Soc, like, just really educational. A lot of inside baseball going on. Yeah. And, you know, for us in the SEAL teams, we don't realize often. how much visibility we have, especially back then. Look, and I guess now it's pretty obvious, we have a lot of visibility.

But back then, you know, you wouldn't think that a E5 in a seal platoon doing something dumb on Liberty would get a phone call to the app from the Vice CNO or the CNO or the CNO or the SEC Nav. Like, these things are a big deal. And so that's what I learned. I learned the amount of scrutiny that we're under.

The SEAL Team 5 guys, they had a someone in that platoon uploaded digital pictures of their deployment to a website that was supposed to be secure that got breached. And so these pictures went out over the internet. And the pictures, so I'm there when the CNO is calling the admiral to ask him about each of these individual pictures, what is going on in these pictures? And implied in that was like, what is wrong with your troops? Example, there's an image of a guy, an Iraqi guy, he's being held by the jaw, and he's got a,

a pistol to his head with a flashlight in his eyes and see he knows like what is going on in this picture and the admiral like hits the mute button and I'm like sir they don't like to have their picture taken so you got to face their picture to the camera you got to face their face into the camera and the light is so that you can illuminate the camera you can illuminate the picture that's why the closest flashlight you got is in his pistol that's what he's doing boom Emeralds tells him what's going on. Oh, shit. Next picture.

A guy with a sandbag over his head, cuffed, blood coming out of the sandbag. What's going on with this picture? Hey, sir, that guy resisted. He got subdued. He probably could have been shot, but our troops are disciplined. And instead of shooting him, they captured him, they had to subdue him. They used minimum force required. And now they've got him handled.

And now they take a picture of it. So like these little things where I realized that's the level of scrutiny we're under. And that's why, again, when I became a troop commander, being able to translate and explain to the guys what is going on and what the visibility is and how much it matters, what you do as an E4, as an E5 in a seal platoon, it has a strategic impact for the, the, nation in some cases, and that was really clear with, like, Abu Ghraib, but also for the SEAL community. And if we are not professional, we don't get work. And that's not, I'm not saying that for the benefit of the SEAL teams. I'm saying that for the benefit of the country, because SEALs are good at what we do.

And if we're not getting jobs that we should be getting because of these, kind of ancillary actions, it's bad for the country. It's bad for our war fighting capabilities. So I learned a lot about that when I was, when I was the Admiral's Aid. And there was another, there's another couple of huge cases. There was, there was, you know,

I got to hear about what was happening from a legal perspective. Like there were some guys that shot someone, this wasn't, Seals, this was army guys, regular army guys, conventional army guys, shot someone in south of Baghdad somewhere, and I don't quote me on the story, but they had planted a gun on it. And they were going to jail. Like they were under trial for murder. And I just would hear that and go, what were these guys thinking? You know, why would they be doing this? And the immediate answer is, well, because they're

afraid they're going to get in trouble, right? Oh, they're afraid. that the ROE didn't allow him to shoot this guy, and now they're trying to cover it up. The reality of this scenario is the ROE, if someone is, I'm trying to think of the exact terminology, reasonable certainty that they're committing hostile intent, not a hostile act, hostile intent. So if I think you're going to do something,

and I'm reasonably certain to that, I can shoot you. Whether you have a gun or not. And yet we have guys, this particular case, these guys were getting in trouble because they planted a gun. They didn't need to do that. So that was like another just learning about how much scrutiny the military. So like I initially saw like, oh, there's the, the seal teams is under scrutiny. But then I realized it's not just the seal teams.

There's a lot of scrutiny on everything that we do. And the Abu Ghraib scandal that caused so many people that, that fueled the insurgency so much and I saw that it fueled the insurgency so what a couple you know 18 19 20 year old privates were doing in a prison fueled the insurgency

and the al-Qaeda took advantage of it they propagated those pictures they propagated those pictures from team five like that's what happens and so I guess I realized how the tactical actions of our units seal teams Marines, Army soldiers

has a strategic impact and we have to think about what we're doing. That is something I never thought of. Where does the scrutiny come from? I mean, it's the law of armed conflict, right? It's like the Geneva Convention, the law of armed conflict.

There are people that are in place to make sure that we are conducting war in a forthright and justice. manner if there is such a thing you know can we go back to the quote from uh from apocalypse now like you know handing out charges for murder around here is like handing out speeding tickets at the indianapolis 500 you can take that approach but it's not going to help you it's not going to help you you there's there's rules and we have just got to follow the rules and if the rules don't make sense then you got to raise your hand and say hey these rules don't make sense

And I did that. For instance, and I brought this up earlier, breaching. So when I first got to Iraq, that first deployment, we're breaching every door, of course, right? Well, so was everybody else. Everyone's just breaching the hell out of everything. You're going to enter a building. You breach the door because it gives you a tactical advantage, right? So guys, civilians were getting injured by breaches.

And eventually, they said, hey, no more breaching, no more explosive breaching. Done. So I get this word and, you know, I talk to my guys, no more explosive breaching and, you know, what's their reaction going to be? Not good. Totally not good, right? Hey, and it's exactly what, it's exactly what you would think it would be. Hey, wait a second. You want us to be at more risk.

You don't care about us. You don't understand what it's like down here. This is a problem. You don't understand the battlefield. Screw you. That's basically the response. So, and I'm thinking the same thing, right? But now am I thinking, wait a second, does my boss want to put my guys at risk?

What do you think? Really? Does my boss want? No, no. Actually, no, I don't believe my boss wants to do that. There's got to be something else going on. Hey, boss, what's the deal with explosive breaching? Why are we being told we're not, why are you telling me we can't explosively breach anymore?

And he's like, here's what's happening. Here's the amount of casualties from breaches. Here's the civilians injured by breaches. here's the number of breaches that are happening every night in Baghdad or the surrounding areas and the civilian casualties are so high that the generals are saying don't do this anymore and I said okay now boss if I'm going on to a target where the intel represents a higher probability of there being some kind of resistance on the target can I breach. And he's like, well, what do you mean? I said, well, if I get this Intel that says that

they're expecting them to have bodyguards or they expect there to be IDs, can I use explosive breaches to mitigate that risk? And he's like, yeah, that makes sense. And that's what we did. And that's also when we started doing callouts, which initially guys were doing callouts? Yeah. All the way back then. Yep. We started doing them. Holy shit. I did not know that. We started doing callouts. And it was like we were figuring out how to do it. Okay, what are we going to do? Because from my perspective now, all right, so I'm not going to explicitly breach this door. So we're not going to really have the element of surprise that we want because when we're sitting there with a sledgehammer or what, even a lock pick is, or, you know, anything's going to make noise. We're going to alert them that we're there.

So now we've got guys in the stack or waiting outside this building. They're not behind cover. This is a problem. How can we mitigate that risk? Well, since we have to wake them up to breach the door anyways with a freaking sledgehammer, let's just get a little safe distance. set up our vehicles and wake them up and say hey you got to come out and that's exactly what we started doing and then so what we ended up with was a good variety of tactics of sometimes we do a call out sometimes we just mechanically breached the door and sometimes we explosively breached the door

but all those things were a result of me talking to my boss and then talking to the guys and saying guys here's why we can't breach this is bullshit okay well we can't oh there's a a huge super high risk explain that risk to me and they explained to me you know what i agree with you guys boss we're going to explicitly breach tonight boss says cool my boss never told me no um so those kind of things i think again where we get into the hey do just do what i'm telling you to do both up and down the chain of command i don't want my i want my guys to resist me i want them to say we should be able to explosively breach okay tell me why and i should be able to look at my boss, here's why. And by the way, if my guys explained to me, hey, we should

explicitly breach and here's why. And I explain it to my boss. And my boss says, no, okay, do I have an argument? No, okay. Well, then how can I mitigate this? Well, I can mitigate it by not stacking my platoon up in front of the door or outside the building and doing a, doing a call out. So those kind of things, I think, get lost when it comes to communicating up and down the chain of command. I got a question for you. I mean, earlier when we were talking, I can't remember at what point we brought this up,

but we were talking about leadership. I believe you had just gotten through OCS. Anyways, you had said that trust your guys, and that's how they trust you, right? And so, big proponent of that. How do you just trust your guys? I mean, do they have to earn? your trust or do you give them the trust and let them fuck that up or give them the opportunity

to fuck that up? I'm asking because for my own, I'm learning. I want to learn from you. The way you do it is a little bit of trust at a time. So if you started working for me, I wouldn't be like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight. Why don't you take lead on that? I'm going to sit in the talk. I've never worked with you before and I'm just going to let you go take lead on a mission.

No, it's like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight. can you run external security for me? Or can you clear this back, you know, outhouse with your fire team? And you're like, cool, got it, boss. And you do it. You do it well. And then the next time, hey, you're in charge of external security. And the next time, hey, you're in charge of vehicles.

The next time, hey, you're in charge of the breach team. So it's like I'm going to give you a little more trust each time. And then you keep making good calls. Maybe sometimes I have to tighten you up. Like, hey, what were you doing going to clear this other building? That wasn't part of the target. Yeah, but I saw a guy over there. But I don't care about that, but you didn't tell me.

Yeah, but I didn't have time. Well, what if we have a blue on blue? Because this, oh, good point. So, you know, you learned a little bit. I took a little bit of risk, maybe a little bit of a little outside the zone. So that's what you do, just a little bit of trust at a time. You build it over time. But I have to trust you.

And actually, what's funny is I thought where you're going with that question is, if my guys are telling me, like, we need to explosively breach this target, do I have to trust them? And the answer is, yeah. Well, I mean, then you get a guy like me that works for it. me that works for it and we have to explosive breach every single fucking time. How do you trust me? Yep. And then I go, hey, hey, Sean, if we do another one of these explosively explosive breaches, we're probably not going to get approved for our next missions. And you go, what do you mean?

I said, well, they've had a bunch of collateral damage. They've had a bunch of people in the in the Baghdad general hospital that are wounded civilians from breaching charges. And we're just going to get told no. So now what are you going to do? I'm telling I'm, I trust you, but do you trust me? And okay, well, that makes sense, Jocko. Okay, can we mitigate it? How can we mitigate it? Well, we could do a callout. We could throw flash crashes through the windows. Like, there's a bunch of ways. We could figure out ways to mitigate things. But if I don't talk to you and you don't talk to me and I don't explain to you what's happening, how can we expect to be aligned? It's just not going to happen. And so that, that open mind.

and having good relationships with people is what it's all about. And by the way, this extends to, like, the other units that you work with, right? The other military army and Marine Corps units that you work with, you've got to listen to what they're saying about their A-O, because that's going to have an impact as well. Makes sense. Makes sense. And I can't believe you guys were doing callouts back then. How would you do it? set the vehicles in a either usually an L type scenario you know so we'd be able to see the

the black side of the building but we wouldn't set ourselves up in an envelopment and we'd get on the radio and say hey you're surrounded you know and our turp would do it hey you're surrounded come out how would that work would they come out usually yeah no shit occasionally there would be no one there what was the ultimatum uh I don't know if we ever even reached an ultimatum. I think we had a couple where there was no one home. And we eventually breached, which again, which is a good escalation, right? I guess depending on how you look at it.

But if they wouldn't come out and now when we explosively breach this thing, we'd explosively breach it like big. So there were some very valuable lessons in the Admiral's Aid slot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and again, even that first deployment to Iraq, these kind of conversations, you know, these kind of things, understanding what my boss was having to deal with. Do you feel, I mean, it sounds like he, it sounds like he had a great relationship with him,

but it, what I want to ask is, I've always expected my leadership to have more experience than myself. And so you're showing up at a slot to be the aid for the admiral with more combat experience than the admiral has. That's an assumption. Maybe he was a Vietnam guy. I don't know. No, it's a correct assumption. I mean, how...

By the way, my commanding officer, remember I said I was the only platoon in Iraq for like a month or two? when my skipper showed up he was no combat experience and you remember what I was saying earlier about like I understand you know like I don't expect my boss who's never been in combat before to be able to roll in and start telling me what's what and I understand he's going to ask me some questions about some things that he doesn't understand because he doesn't understand and that's okay like oh sir let me explain to you why don't you come on an op and you can see what this looks like Like that kind of attitude as opposed to, which is really easy from a judgmental perspective to say, why the hell are you in charge?

Or, hey, I'm trying to run operations down here. You're asking me a bunch of questions. It's like, hmm, no, actually, come on down. Sit through our brief. Tell me what you think. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm. I mean, I've had both leaders too. And I think I've always paid a lot of attention to how my leadership.

approaches me with with with certain issues and are they open to are they open it or i mean when you have a leader that comes in with a with a little to no experience i mean that it's once again how are they going to project that are they going to project that and lean on us or are they going to are they going to fucking hide from their inexperience and and you know what i'm getting at and present like an overinflated, overinflated bullshit confidence. Yeah. And so how do you deal with that?

It's like, hey, boss, that sounds like a good suggestion. Let me bring that to boys and see how we can make that work. You know, it's like, what am I supposed to say? Boss, you haven't been here as long as I have. You don't know what you're talking about. Where's that going to get me? Yeah. So it's like, hey, boss, sounds like a good suggestion.

Let me get with the guys and let's figure out how we can implement that. Hey, boss, I was talking to the guys, and I just want to go over a couple things. There's a couple secondary and tertiary effects are going to happen. If we do what it is you were saying, it's going to cause this and it's going to cause that. I'm good. We've got to mitigate this one, but I just want to let you know that's what's going to happen. I didn't know that. How do you recommend?

Oh, here's what I recommend, boss. You see what I'm saying? So, again, if I don't listen to him, he's not going to listen to me. If I don't put some trust in him, he's not going to trust me. Makes sense. makes sense so how does task unit bruiser come about so um yeah

i do that year at the admiral's office and then the next the next billet is to be a task unit commander and a billet opened up at seal team three and so seal team three here I come did you explain what a task unit is to the audience task unit is the old name now it's called the troop

but it's the old name for two platoons combined together with a little headquarters element above it. So it's about, it's about 36 guys, but it really can be anywhere between 30 and 50 or 70, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think people are always surprised that the variables inside the military, like a infantry company can be 80 guys or can be 280 guys. You know, there's a big variation. But generally speaking, a task unit is two platoons or a troop is two platoons.

with between 16 and 20 guys in each platoon. And so you are tasked with leading the task in it, two platoons. Man, I just had so many friends slash, you know, Bud's classmates that were in that. I mean, Cowie, Mark Lee, Leif Babin, Seth Stone, I think, I don't want to mention his name, he might still be in there. uh Andrew Paul a fucking ton of them man I think uh Melendez maybe

was Mario Melendez with you guys but um yeah a lot of these guys plus a lot more enlisted but I don't want to say all their names because I don't know who's in and who's not anymore but um but

and this is where man you is your guys just have all positive things to say about you i've never heard anything negative about you from anybody that you've served with and that is that is fucking incredible yeah i work with some awesome guys man for sure and you guys seem really tight and that is cool to see too yeah it's a great crew of guys man great crew of guys i mean it's almost like you took your task eating it with you into your business career

yeah there's a lot of those guys there you know that are in there but but um I don't know where to start with this, so I'll let you start. Yeah, for me, it was, you know, I thought that this may be, this could be getting towards the end of my operational career. There were some couple other options that may play out or not, but at this point, you know, just for me, this is just an awesome opportunity, you know an awesome opportunity and I love the SEAL teams and to be a troop commander tasking to commander for me was just awesome I was again I guess I find myself struggling for words

when it for me to be able to describe the things that I've had in my life like being a platoon commander in Iraq when there's one platoon in Iraq like this is just this is like if you played football your whole life and you get to go to the Super Bowl, you know, or you get, you know, you, you are in a rock band and you get to play Madison Square Garden. That's what it was for me. This is the only thing I ever dreamed of doing. The only thing I wanted to do was being the teams, and now I'm in the teams. And now I'm getting to be in charge of some team guys. And yeah, it was, it was awesome from the word go, you know, showed up and I, like, I stole a lot of stuff from Colonel David Hackworth and one of the one of the key components that I stole from David Hackworth was he

would rename the units that he would take over so when he was in Korea he took over Fox Company he changed it to fighter company when he was in Vietnam he was in charge of the 439th which was called the Hard Luck Battalion and he changed it to the hardcore battalion and he did that we even with each of his subordinate elements he would change their name to something cool and so when I took over task unit bravo was the original alpha bravo charlie and i took over for task unit bravo and the first thing i did was change the name to bruiser and it's totally unofficial and i just went with it and that's what we got so where'd you come up with bruiser had to begin with b and there was an old band

friend of mine had called the bruisers and i was like hmm that's too easy so there we go right on bruiser coming in hot and i mean let's face it it's a it's a pretty good theme it is a damn good theme it's a pretty good theme and that's a good sitting just something that i took from colonel david hackworth and and it does have i've worked with all all kinds of companies now you know at echelon front and there's so many companies that have told me that their sales team gave themselves this name or their concrete team gave themselves the name like this happens all the time now and people report back that, yeah, man, it has an impact. You're not just Team Alpha or Team Bravo.

You're tasking a Bruiser. Let's go. Right on. Right on. I mean, did you know, did you know you were going to Ramadi when you took it? No. We didn't know where we were going at first. Anywhere?

Like, or anywhere in Iraq? So there was one task unit that was designated to go to Iraq. And that was Alpha. And Bruiser and Charlie, one of us, one of those task units was going to go to Paycom, meaning no war. And so my commanding officer and Master Chief, they brought us all back. They brought the headshed from each task unit back. And they said, hey, we, if you want, we can take and we can split up the task units

so that whoever hasn't been to Iraq, we can all put them in one task unit and they can all go to Iraq. And then the other guys that already have been to Iraq can go to Paycon, which is the fair fairy, right? Like when the fair fairy shows up to try and make everything fair and, uh, the fair fair. Yeah, I was, so I, I, I had my opinion, but I went back and asked the guys, because we were just starting our land warfare. And I said, hey, here's what they're offering. They're offering for us to split up and guys that haven't been to Iraq can go. Or we stay together and they send whoever performs the best to Iraq. And I kind of smiled.

And they're all like, hell yeah, let's go. So it was, you know, a little bit of a competition to see who goes to Iraq. And, you know, we were, we were all very hard working. Sounds like it. I mean, fuck, man, so many led Chris Kyle, Eli Krain's in there. I mean.

Eli wasn't with us. Oh, he wasn't? No, he wasn't with us. Yeah. I mean, wow. Wow. Yeah, a bunch of, and, you know, a bunch of guys whose names people don't know,

who are just awesome guys. And I think, so Tony Afradi, he's the, might be the one guy that I, we were E5 Mafia team one, me and Tony. And I'm trying to think if I knew anyone else in there, I might have known the, I think I knew who the other platoon chief, or another good guy,

but we weren't ever at the same team, but I knew him. But other than that, I don't think I knew one single person in there. What do you think your reputation was for them? What did they think they were walking into with you as their tasking a commander? I mean, Tony knew me. I mean, he knew exactly who I was. So he got the word out? Yeah, I mean, yeah.

I mean, Tony's as hard as they come. And Tony has an outstanding reputation and had an outstanding reputation. And so, you know, he knew me. And so that was that. And, you know, my, my platoon in Baghdad had done a lot of stuff. And so we, you know, I had a lot of experience at that time, you know. At that time, it was a lot of experience. And, you know, like I said, I was a, I was an enlisted team guy for eight years.

So I, at a minimum, you couldn't lie to me about what the radios could or could not do. You couldn't lie to me about, like, basic team. guy stuff you had to tell me what was what I had to tell me the truth about stuff when did you find out you were going to Baghdad so or not Baghdad excuse me Ramadi so I would say

about halfway through the workup they said all right you guys bruiser's going and look bruiser's going to Iraq we're like yeah so we were planning to go to Baghdad

and work with the ICTF, which the Iraqi counterterror force. I went on Advon, as a matter of fact. And I went and did some ops with those guys and saw what they were doing and started the turnover with their task unit commander. And that's what that was like kind of a very, look like it was going to be an awesome deployment. Like those guys had a good force that they were working with. They had a good op tempo.

They just had good stuff going on. So it looked like that's where we were going. And when we, when I got home from that PDSS, they wanted to align all of, because the East and West Coast were both in Iraq at the same time. And yet, the West Coast had Western Iraq, except for they had an element in Baghdad. And then the East Coast had Eastern Iraq, except for they had an element in Ramadi. And you can already see this doesn't make much sense, right? So as the two commanding officers were getting ready to deploy, they talked about it. And we're like, wait a second, why do we have our forces kind of disjointed?

West Coast, you take Western Iraq. That's like Fallujah, Habanilla, Ramadi, East Coast. You take Baghdad, which includes the ICTF, and then the other stations that they were had. and it makes sense you know like there's no two ways about it and uh when i heard that i i was on i wasn't on leave but my guys were on leave pre-deployment leave like we were that ready to go to bagdad and uh my skipper called me to the office and said hey what do you think about going to romadi and i was like i knew exactly what was going on in romadi i mean the intel reports were very clear that romadi was a total total war zone total disaster

and it was the worst area in Iraq. And I said, yeah, Roger that. And I tried to, inside, I was like, oh, hell yeah. Outside, I said, well, sir, you know, there's a couple more things I need. And I bargained to get like a few, I bargained to get a few more people. I bargained to get like some computer stuff that we needed for our, you know, for our communication stuff. And he was like, yeah, I can get you.

I can get you these other people. And I said, I'm in. And that was it, going to Ramadi. Did you know this was going to be, this was it as far as kinetic deployments? Yes. Yeah. I mean, there was sustained fighting every day. Like, there was soldiers and Marines getting wounded and killed.

every day. And this isn't a big area. Ramadi's not a big city. It's small. IEDs were totally out of control. So you had a pretty good idea what you were walking into. A hundred percent. Yeah. Well, not 100 percent because, you know, there's still some things you're going to learn, but I knew I knew what was happening. I was, again, thankfully, I had done that deployment to Baghdad. I had, you know, experienced as a, as an enlisted seal working for the Admiral. Like, these are all things that helped me understand. It was like, I was just a little bit ahead of the power curve. You know what I mean?

Just enough ahead of the power curve. You know, did you ever get rolled back in buds? Yes. I didn't get rolled back in buds, but you could tell the guys that got rolled back, they were like, okay, like pool comp, they know what's coming. They're just a little bit ahead. And that's how I felt like I was going into Ramadi. He was just ahead enough to know like, okay, I know what's coming.

And I told me, you know, once the tasking was on the ground, I'm like, this is going to be a historical deployment. How do you? Which is a big statement. That's not a small statement. I don't, didn't throw that a word around, but I knew. I knew. How many guys did you have that had experience? Like actual experience?

Every guy that wasn't a new guy had been to Iraq. We had a lot of new guys, I think. We had a decent amount of new guys. We had a decent. It wasn't overwhelming, but we had a solid, probably normal average number of new guys. Okay. Three, four guys, Purple Tune, new guys, something like that. So not overwhelming and all great guys.

I mean, if you know what you're welcome. Let me ask this. How many guys on your team are in your taskings? and had an idea of what they were walking into? I don't know if anybody did. I don't know if anybody did. How do you prepare these guys for that? I mean, just telling them what's happening.

You know, you put the Sigax, the significant activities, which are basically enemy attacks, briefed the Sigax in the last 24 hours, and then you brief them the Sigax in the last seven days, and then you brief from them in the last month. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist because in the last 24 hours,

there was three guys wounded, one guy killed, you know, 38 enemy attacks. And you think, well, that's a rough day. But then you realize it's every day for seven days and then you realize it's every day for seven months. Fuck. Or for a month and then that's how it's been.

And just before we showed up, like, the three eight Marines had had a terrible about, about a week where they had lost four or five guys in that week before we showed up. And they'd lost a couple more before that. But, you know, that's what we're getting into. Who were your tasking at, excuse me, who were your platoon commanders? Leif Babin and Seth Stone. Yeah, my brothers.

Yeah, two guys. You didn't know them before. Didn't know them, met him, and two guys from the Naval Academy, neither one of them got selected out of the Naval Academy. They both had fought their way back from the fleet to get to the SEAL teams, both of them from Texas, both of them surfed. Neither one of them had much experience at all.

But they were, dude, they just, they wanted to be good, they wanted to be good team guys. And they wanted to, they wanted to, but they wanted to fight, they wanted to fight for God and country. And they were tough, they listened. Yeah, yeah, they were, couldn't ask for better guys to work with, you know, for the, for the two platoon commanders.

And, you know, it's funny because Laif will tell the story about when I met those guys and how, A, I didn't smile to him and I wasn't nice to them. and B, Seth thought I was going to fire him, and I hated him. And it's actually true. Is it really? It's actually true. Not that I hated them, but that I might fire them.

I didn't know who they were. I didn't know what their attitudes were. I didn't have high expectations that they were going to be, you know, successful or good. and so and you know what this is another thing i stole from hackworth this is exactly what hackworth would do hackworth's like yeah when i meet guys i don't know who they are i don't know what they're going to do i'm not going to become friends with them because if they're not capable of doing the job i'm going to get rid of them and so yeah there's a reason why i didn't like bro out with them when i first met them because i will fire them if they're not going to do their job correctly or

or if they're more concerned about themselves than they are about the platoon. And if you're more concerned about yourself than your platoon, you will not work for me. You will not work for me. And I will do everything I can to like get you out of the seal teams. So luckily and thankfully, those guys didn't have an ounce of that in them. You know, they wanted to take care of their platoons.

They wanted to fight. They wanted, that's what they wanted. And, uh, they did. Who are your chiefs? Well, the, you know, the one chief is, is, um, uh, was Seth's chief, and he's, he's not in the public light. Uh, and the other chief was Tony Afradi. And, you know, Seth's chief was a, a great combination with Seth, hardworking guy, and, um, a good compliment to Seth

and then Tony Tony Afradi was Laif's chief who again he was E5 mob with me at SEAL Team 1 and like just a just a just a stud dude

I mean honestly he's on the on the platoon list that you form up for the apocalypse like Tony's he's on the top of the list you know because he's not gonna back down

and he's and he's great you know there's a situation when we were in um going through workup and i was watching tony and laf they were getting ready to do some training up just a real simple training op you know target like a like an iteration training on a target assault or something like that and they're sitting there in the you know in the sand you know with the freaking sticks and tony tells him like hey hey sir we should come in from here set up a base over here, move through here, rally point over here. That's what we should do. And Leif's like, hey, that sounds really good. Why don't you tell the guys? And Tony goes, I think it'd be good if it came from you. And I was like, damn, dude, that's a professional. He's trying to elevate

the platoon commander. Instead of him being like, I want to show these guys that I'm the real guy in charge. Instead of doing that, he elevated Leif. Just in that little moment. That's one little one little moment in time where you see a guy that's like a real, true professional whose ego is totally out of it he wants to have a good platoon. So, yeah, just epic.

And, you know, since I was, you know, I'm good friends with Tony. I grew up with Tony. And so we had a great relationship. Yep. Do you, before we, we go to Romerati. I just want to ask if there was, how did you address your team when you knew

that's where you were going? What was the, well, how did you tell them? Stand by to get some, boys. Yeah. It's weird. There was a, there was a time earlier because I knew that Ramadi was the worst place. And I had said at some point, like, we're, we're going to end up in Ramadi. I had said that. Like, I kind of knew it. And so the guys were tracking. The guys knew what was what. And, Bro, the idea, you know, it's like I had a guy named Dean Lad on my podcast, who is a Marine officer in World War II. And like, he's going into Tarawa. And the threat brief that they're getting for Tarawa was like totally out of control. You can see it.

The Japanese are dug in. They got mortars trained on the beach. They got machine gun, pill boxes, the whole nine yards. And Tarwa was tiny. And I asked him the same kind of probing questions that you're asking me of like, well, how did you, you know, how did you feel? And I was like, well, were you nervous? Were you scared about getting wounded or killed?

And he goes, that always happens to the other guy. And that's exactly, you know, that's how I felt. That's how I can just about guarantee you every guy in tasking a bruiser when they heard we were going to Ramadi was like, hell yeah. Every single one of them was like, hell yeah. nothing bad is going to happen we're going to go and kick ass that's what we do which is exactly what you want fucking awesome yeah we're frogman dude this is what we do this is an opportunity you know that the storied legacy that the guys in vietnam built that we

got to you know get to walk around in coronado with a trident I mean not you know you not walking around, but guys know you're a seal. You go into a McPee's on a Thursday night, which I'm sorry you missed out on. But back in the day, you're going to McPee's on a Thursday night. Like, you know, you're a badass. And I didn't do anything during that. Nothing. I got to live off the reputation of the guys that came before us. So to have an opportunity, get some of that back, yeah, that's a, that's a, it's a huge opportunity. And it's a heavy weight. We got to hold the line. yeah so you get to you get to iraq you're in her body

let's talk about day one yeah so we were on the PDSS or no uh the advon right so a few of us came over on the advon and yeah everything i had read about was going on there it was going on there and you know what day it was I don't know but we were going to a memorial service like almost out of the game yeah and again what was what was what left a mark was I could tell in the memorial service that this was a routine like it wasn't an ad hoc thing like I'm looking around and I go, this is not an ad hoc thing. I've been in the military for at this point 15 years. I know what it looks like when you throw together a ceremony last minute and you get in there and you do something. This was not that. I'm looking at like the setup where they

have the memorial crosses. Those things are not, those things are used. I'm looking at where the preachers talking from. I'm like, oh, he's delivering remarks again. So that's this, that's See, my first memory of Ramadi was that was going, yeah, these guys, you know, we're showing up here. These guys from the 228 under Colonel Goronsky, they've been here for 14 months. They've taken, they've lost almost 100 guys. They've taken hundreds and hundreds of casualties. And we're, we need to do what we can to help them. That was my attitude.

It was like, we need to help these guys as much as we. possibly can. Yeah. And I'd like to, I just want to remind the audience. I mean, your task unit, the most decorated soft unit out of the entire Iraq war. That's what we're walking into. Yeah. We had, um, for some reason we had 13 snipers.

And I say for some reason because that wasn't normal, you know, both the platoon chiefs were snipers we just had we were overloaded with snipers which was a real blessing um and that seeing remember i talked about being in bagdad and we did a couple operations where i kind of caught a glimpse of what we could do with snipers like a little a little glimpse and when i saw what was happening there i thought to myself oh i i think i have an idea of what we can do here and the turnover with the guys from team two great great bunch of dudes um it was like there was areas where and same thing with what the coalition forces were telling us the 228 was like hey this area here you can't go there it's it's not passable areas you know there there are too many

IEDs to go down there, period. So it was, we knew, I knew, I knew it was going to be a fight because it was all around us. You know, we lived, it's another weird thing. It was like, growing up watching war movies, it was usually like, good guys are over here, bad guys are over there. You go over to fight the bad guys. Like, okay, World War I was trench warfare.

Even the trenches seemed like they were a little bit far apart. And Ramadi was like, oh, the other side of this wall right here, there's bad guys. It's like the other side of that wall, there's bad guys. And when you go out the gate, you go out the gate and there it is. You're in it. You're in Ramadi. And, you know, there was people killed on Ramadi, you know, from mortars and rocket strikes and stuff like that.

So it was all around you. How big was Romani? I never made it out for. Probably like four miles across. That's it. Yep. 350,000 people, roughly speaking of civilians. Yeah.

Camp Ramadi was a pretty big base because it was a former Iraqi army base. Those was a pretty big base and we had a little annex to that base right on the Euphrates River, as Frogman should be. And within, once the whole task unit showed up, like the night the task unit showed up, there was like a coordinated attack on on various bases, ours being one of them. And like every guy in our task unit, the first night that they showed up in Ramadi was on the roof of our building,

just getting after it. Oh, shit. Yeah. So that was kind of a good welcome to Ramadi as well. So you get, okay, so you're not in the middle of some big base. I mean, it's, you go on the rooftop and you can engage.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we did. Yeah. Day one.

Yeah. And it's funny, too, now that you mentioned at the Commodore at the time, who was the detailer that I asked to send me back to a SEAL team ASAP, who was the commanding officer when I was in Europe. So this guy's a friend of mine. And before we left, to a speech to the whole team, and I harass him about this to this day, he's like, hey, the chances are none of you are going to shoot your weapons.

like this is a different time and all this stuff and I think I sent him an email or a webby thing and I said hey sir we've been here for 48 hours every single guy in my task unit and some of the techs have have engaged and he was he was like yeah Roger great guy great guy so what was the mission set was it was it very specific or was it always something different

it ended up being pretty specific and that is setting up sniper overwatch positions in support of the army elements on the ground. That's kind of one. We did do direct action missions with our Iraqi counterparts. We did the overwatches with Iraqi counterparts and we did, you know,

clearance operations, patrols to contact, reconnaissance missions, demo raids. We kind of got full spectrum frogman activities. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It was the 2-28, who was the brigade that was on the ground when we got there, they had pretty much secured the outskirts of the city. And so there was just starting to initiate the idea of pushing into the city.

And it seemed like, and as a matter of fact, while my guys, before my guys arrived, we were getting word that one of the course of action was a Fallujah type clearance of Ramadi and so now I'm like oh it's completely on right it is completely on but Maliki who is the president just been elected he said I don't want to do that type of assault on Fallujah because it'll cause a separation between the Sunnis and the Shias and this will be this will be a civil war Is there another way to do it? And so this is where when the 1-1A.D showed up, which is the First Brigade, First Armored Division, ready First Brigade, when they showed up, they had a plan that had been used in northern Iraq, at Talafar, to clear the city like a small section at a time. And that's what we ended up implementing.

Do you think that was the right call? Yes, yes. I do. I do. it would have caused so much destruction in the city that it would have caused mass civilian casualties, displacement of people. It would have been very problematic had we done a Fallujah-type clearance of Ramadi. So, and I think there actually would have probably been more casualties had we done it

that way on the U.S. side. Certainly on the Iraqi civilian side, it would have been rough. So I thought it was a good plan. What was the first operation that you took your task in and on? We started doing some like almost immediately some small DAs and stuff like that. Like I remember the first DA that Laif was going on. And this was we had a, when we first got there, the first couple weeks, we were still under command of SEAL Team 1. So my skipper hadn't taken over yet.

So I had taken over the Ramadi, task unit Romadi space, but my CEO wasn't in charge yet. And so my goal was to do as many missions as we could for the SEAL Team 1 CO so that my CEO would be like, Jocko knows what he's doing. And that's what we did. And I had a good relationship. I had known the CEO from SEAL Team 1. And when he came out and I met with him and I kind of presented the case and explained to him what I saw and how we were going to operate, he was just

we got along great and so when I started running up you know missions that we were going to do he was he was approved and that was very cool and we got very aggressive out of the gate and like but I remember Leif's first direct action mission

and he he may have never done a direct action mission before and I'm the task you to commander but this thing was pretty close to the front gate and I'm like he can go do this thing And so he's putting together the plan.

And there's like a lot of stuff to organize. And he came to me and he's like, hey, bro. He's like, I don't know if we're going to be ready for this. And I'm like, bro, you're going to be fine. You're totally good to go. You got this. And he was like, you know, he trusted me, man. And I trusted him.

That's why I was going. But he looked at me like with that kind of like, like, okay, if you say so type thing. And he went out and did it. You know, and it's all good to go. So we ran some missions like that. And then what happened was, when I met the, the colonel, Colonel, Colonel Gronsky, this is before the 1180 showed up, because you're asking about the first missions that we did.

So I had put, Tony Afradi had taken a little sniper element with some Marines and him and some seals and a couple Iraqi soldiers out to this area where the Marines had been IED and lost Marines in early April. And so Tony went out there They're in Overwatch for 48 hours or something like that 24 hours, 36 hours Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing I go to meet the brigade commander

And as I'm going to meet the brigade commander I'm walking through his talk Like this is out of a movie I'm walking through his talk And they're announcing like through the radios That the seals just engaged to IED and placers at this location where that IED had taken place.

And I walk into his office and he goes, are those your guys? And I'm like, yes, sir. And he said, I need you over in Eastern Ramadi. And I said, Roger that, sir. Let me, let me get it fixed. Let me get it together. And, you know, we chatted and he explained to me

what was going on. This area called the Malab district, run by the first of the 506. Band of Brothers, outstanding army unit. I mean, just as awesome as it gets. they were in control of this or working to get control over this place called Malab district, and they were just getting annihilated with IEDs. I mean, it was absolutely horrible.

And so went back and I put together a crew and to go over to Eastern Ramadi and conduct a massive clearance with them. So we're over there for a few days. We're getting to know the Iraqi troops. we're planning this big, giant operation. And again, bro, when we're in the SEAL teams and we think of a big operation, we think of like a task unit, right? Maybe a task unit plus a company of Rangers

or a company of maybe a platoon of infantry guys. When I say big, bro, I'm talking like thousands. Holy shit. But hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers. So we're planning this operation. and it's weird. So now we're talking about what is the headshed doing? Like, so in Ramadi, the leadership had figured or made a decision that they didn't want

any battalion-sized operations conducted in Ramadi. But this clearance was going to take that whole battalion plus to get it done. And they run it up the chain of command. hey we want to do this battalion sweep of this area and it comes back hey no battalion sized operations and so they said okay so we took and broke up this battalion sized operation into like multiple smaller operations that were company plus sized operations it's a little bit of a shell game is what I'm getting at but it was the mandate that had come down and the commanding officer of the battalion said okay that's the mandate we got to meet here's how we can

here's how we can maneuver around that and still accomplish the mission. So that's what we ended up doing. And this is, this is the, you know, you're talking about the first major operation. So this is the first major operation that we're doing. We're planning to sweep a certain section of the city first thing in the morning. Then we're going to reset do another section of the city, then do another section. And what do you mean by sweep? Clear.

You're talking about like ground reconnaissance? sniper overwatch. I'm talking the Iraqi soldiers with the U.S. Army, but primarily the Iraqi soldiers in the lead are going to enter every building in a area. It's a clearance operation. Okay.

Meet with the people, see if they have weapons, talk to them about, get atmospherics, and then go to the next building, you go to the next building, you go to the next building. So as they do this, they know that they're going to go to attack. So in order to interdict the attacks, and they also know that once you clear a street of IEDs in a matter of hours, they come out and we called it receding the IEDs, which is, it's, it happens so much that they have a term for it. It's receding the IDs. So they know that if we clear a road and get rid of the IEDs, the enemy will come back in and put IEDs. So when we put together this plan, I have a group of seal, that are going to go with the Iraqi soldiers to help them and do C2 for their clearance operation.

And then I have two elements of seals that are going to go out and one of them is going to watch one of these long access roads and the other one's going to overwatch a shorter access road, but also the Ramadi Soccer Stadium, which is a staging area for the enemy. And then I am going to be with the company commander who's an awesome guy, Joe Claiborne, crazy, crazy Joe Claiborne. I'm going to be with him because he's helping C2 and the Iraqi soldiers with elements of his company. There's a lot going on, man.

Yeah, no kidding. So we launch pre-dawn, and this is another thing, pre-dawn operation, and we had done, Stoner had taken guys out with Claiborne, with Joe Claiborne, like a few days earlier. and he had gotten a big gunfight and when they came back I was standing at the gate waiting for me

they came back and I you know he's like totally impressed and I walk with him to his battalion commander and this guy this company commander Joe Claiborne who's been in Iraq for four or five months at this point he's lost two guys I think he's had a bunch of guys wounded I think at that point like 20% of his guys have been wounded or killed and he goes to the battalion commander and he says I want seals with me on every operation I do from here on out from one

engagement with my guys he was impressed and we were I mean I was overwhelmingly impressed with him and his guys they they were outstanding but that's how much we hit it off with these guys and I've told them since that that was the best compliment I've ever got my life was when a was when an army company commander goes and tells his battalion commander I want seals with us on every operation we do from here on out after just getting in a major engagement. So now you fast forward a few days and we're going on this mission. And as we're driving in, it's eerie. And what the moose would do is they would light tires on fire.

And so you're rolling into town of black smoke everywhere. There's fires burning very, very eerie as we roll in. and I have already have my sniper elements had inserted at this point. And one of, they were inserting on the mine clearance vehicles. So it's a pretty sneaky little operation. You know, the mine clearance vehicle goes by. It stops to clear a mine, but then some seals get out of the back and go set up an overwatch position.

Very cool. So they're in position. The one by the soccer stadium is in position. The other group gets in their spot. and the building that they had selected was not the way it looked like it was going to look on paper or the way it looked on the overhead imagery they didn't have a good view of this long access road that was going to be utilized for the clearance which was bad because it was going to get cleared and then it would be hours before the op started and now we'd have possible iEDs getting receded

that's a problem didn't want that to happen so that element decided to move and now there's a lot of time compression the sun's starting to come up and we're like as they realize the sun's coming up they're like oh we don't have good visibility of the road that we need that's our that's that's their commander's intent is to watch this road they can't see the road they decide to move as they move they go into a building that is just outside the limit of advance and I'm sorry for civilians that I'm talking in military jargon but there's a point where the clearance operation was supposed to stop and so they're on the other side of it's a road it's like okay the clearance operation they will not go

pass this road so now as things start to develop I've got my guys my sniper element over by the soccer stadium they're starting to engage enemy the seals that are pushing through they're starting to income experience resistance and they're starting to engage with my little element starting to engage so there's a lot of enemy fighters out there and And at some point, one of the Iraqi elements, which I don't know why they did this or I did not know, no one knew that they were going to do this, they had decided that they were going to set their own cordon around the area that was being cleared. So by themselves, they ran from where the clearance was taking place all the way to the limit of advance road. and they went across it to enter the building

and set up an overwatch position for themselves. That's where my guys were. So one of my guys, and again, there's so many little details that go into this, but we had seen, they give us intel pictures, and the intel pictures have body armor and helmets and AK-47s and chocolate chip chemis that the enemy has. So we know that the enemy can be wearing

body armor chocolate chip camys helmets and we know they carry the k-47s so one of my guys is in that overwatch and they're looking out the bottom floor and they see a guy with an AK-47 again it's like not quite nods time it's the worst time a day dude and the guy sees a guy with an AK-47 maneuvering through the courtyard which they had zip tied the courtyard shut so this guy had actively entered the courtyard and was now maneuvering and my guy shot him. Obviously, looking back, this was one of those Iraqi soldiers that had run up there. So now him and his Iraqi soldiers and there was a small marine element that had gone with. There's an Anglico element and gone with these guys because the job of the Anglico is to keep track of the front line trace

of where friendly forces are. So they see these Iraqi soldiers run off and they follow them because they're freaking awesome Marines and they're doing their job. So now they get up to where this guy is, where this small element is and they're like, what's going on?

They're like, hey, you know, broken English, the whole nine yards. One of our guys went in that compound. He got shot. And so then what do they do? They all start shooting. So what we end up with, now we're entering the blue on blue.

This is a blue on blue happening. And as my guys in the Overwatch position are now returning fire at the Iraqis that are dumping down rounds trying to get their guy out of the courtyard the Iraqis call for the QRF

so now a QRF to go down and it gets to that corner 50 caliber machine gun puts it on the on the Overwatch my Overwatch position And again, this Overwatch position is Iraqi soldiers and seals and starts engaging with 50 Cal into this Overwatch position. As this is happening, now my guys call the heavy QRF, which is tanks. And as this happens, I look at the company commander, Joe Claiborne, I'm like, hey, those are my guys calling QRF, let's go, like follow these tanks down there.

Roger that. So we kind of break contact over here and we pull out onto that main road, Faruque Way is what it was called. And as we're driving down this road, I'm looking at, I see the tank and I see red smoke, which is what we use for emergencies. And I see the tank and I'm, I just, as soon as I looked around, I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I knew something. my gut instinct was telling me there's something something is wrong so I get out of

the Humvee and I'm with my SEA he's a great dude and I look and I see the gunny sergeant from Anglico and I'm like well what's happening and he goes there's Muz in that building right there he goes he's like we're gonna call for fire like we got to take him out I'm like okay standby because I didn't feel comfortable and looked at my like SEA gave him like the head nod and he like got all my gave me the squeeze and I started walking up and as I'm walking up to this compound I see a white on the ground on the door I see a white zip tie and I'm like my guys are in here and I kicked the door open and when I kicked the door open I saw tune chief Tony fratty standing there

And he's like stoked to see me because they called the QRF. He's thinking I'm the QRF. And I go, what happened? And he said, hey, a guy was coming, guy was coming through the courtyard. We engaged him. And then they brought it. And I looked at him. I said, it was a blue on blue.

And he looked at me like totally confused. And he said, can we get the guys out of here? I said, yeah, and we had a 1-1-3 was down there as a Kazavak already. So got the seals and the Iraqi soldiers that were in there, put them in the 1-1-3 to get him out of there. And Tony stayed with me, because Tony's like,

there's a reason why I said Tony's like top of the list because Tony just got 150 rounds shot at him through a 50-Cal. By the way, one of my other guys, Matt Hasby, he got fracked in the face. He was so, had so accepted his death, it was wild, but Tony, Through all that, it was just like, hey, I'm staying with you, boss.

I'm like, check, no factor. Those guys go back. And I went up then to the company commander. And, uh, same thing. I looked at him. I said, hey, that was a blue and blue. And he's same, same look. Like, what?

And I said, it was a blue on blue. And he radioed it in. So, and by, as soon as I saw that white zip tie, I figured out what had happened. You know, I was like, oh, and I saw the building from the map where my guys were supposed to be, where they were. originally planning to be. I knew that while I was at the limited advance. Like I knew what had happened.

And talking to that Anglico guy was like, yeah, the Iraqis pushed down here. And I was like, oh, so we finish the clearance, you know, because that's what you do. Like, there's still a mission going on. We finish the clearance. And as we finish the clearance, we then, we're now like some elements stay out there, but the bulk of the clearance force is now going back to base. I go back to base and myself and the company commander go to the same battalion commander that he had just totally won his seals with us on all of his operations.

And this battalion commander is one of the best guys. But seriously, one of the best leaders I've ever met. And he looked at me and he looked at, he looked at Joe. And he's like, what happened out there? And there was a giant battle. map like literally wallpaper and i just walked through with him i was like hey sir i had an element here had an element here uh my my element moved to here this iraqi element pushed down he goes they went past they limited advance my guys didn't know who they were engaged them uh they called the

QRF my guys got engaged by the QRF my guys called the heavy QRF i came down and made the connection And he was like, and this guy was, you know, he'd been in Ramadi for six months. As a battalion commander or five months or whatever it was at that time, I guess they got there in December. Yes, it would have been like four or five months. He was just awesome. And he was like, okay, he's like, we learn from that. Don't let it happen again.

We got another mission to do. And I was like, Roger that, sir. And so we went, rejoc, went out again, did a whole other operation, got done with that clearance sector and again now everything's you know we didn't have any more of these things happen and then we came back did it again boom rolled out so we end up doing clearances the whole day engaging all kinds of enemy fighters the whole nine yards and then i get back once the last mission is done because these were daytime operations you know other than us inserting at night once the sun was setting the iraqi soldiers can't clear it at night so it's a daytime operation that's

why. Now I get back and I open up my field computer and need this to say I had some emails and some some texts, you know, the webby texts to explain that, hey, stand down. Investigation is commencing as to what happened. I'm like, yeah, Roger that. So we consolidate and we go back over to Western Ramadi, Camp Ramadi, Camp Mark, what we end up calling Camp Mark Lee.

And now I'm getting ready to debrief and my skipper sends me an email like, hey, we'll be out there tomorrow, be ready to debrief. And now I'm trying, so now one Iraqi soldier's dead, multiple Iraqi soldiers wounded

and one of my guys wounded, blue on blue. Dude, it's a freaking nightmare. It's a nightmare. So I spend the next however many hours trying to figure out who is to blame for this. My assumption is someone's getting fired, right?

Because you can't have a blue on blue and no one gets fired. My assumption is someone's getting fired. So it's kind of the question is who's getting fired. So I go down the list of like the element leader that was in charge of the Iraqi soldiers. Guess what he didn't do? He didn't keep control of those soldiers and let them go down and leave the limit of advance.

The radio man that was in charge of that element that moved positions didn't tell me or anyone else where he's going. He just did it. Shooter, shot a guy without doing a good PID. Like, I went down the list and was figuring out who was to blame. And there was something in my gut that felt

so disgusted by my thoughts and it I was probably you know a half an hour away from when the CO arrived and I couldn't figure out why I felt so disgusted in this debrief and it occurred to me like a giant slap upside my head that the reason I felt disgusted is because I was trying to blame people for things that were my fault because this operation like every operation when you are the senior leader on the battlefield you're in charge of everything and every one of those mistakes that happened are because of me they're they're because of me because i failed as a leader to convey how important it was to pass your location i failed to convey as a leader how important the limit of advance was.

I failed to convey how important it was to keep control of those Iraqi soldiers. Those things are my fault that that's happened. Not any one of those guys. And so when the commanding officer showed up and the command master chief and the investigating officer and they're sitting there in the room

with my wounded guy who's got his head bandaged up, it's Matt Hasbury, you know Matt, right? Matt was my swimmer. somebody in second face. So I'm looking at Matt in the back. I mean, it's only a miracle that he's alive, right? He had 50 cow punching through the roof. He's laying there.

He drew out his pistol so he could like fend for himself as he got overrun. Oh, my fuck. So, and I will say with that moment when I realized why I felt disgusted, I felt so relieved like, oh, you're an idiot. this is you. And I felt okay. This is you. This is what you did. You're in charge. You're responsible. And this is what the leader does. And so I went in the room and, you know, I asked that question, whose fault was this? And there was a, there was a pretty good moment of silence. And then someone chimed in, well, hey, it was my fault. I did this. And I was like, no, it wasn't

your fault. And then the radio said, no, it was my fault. I said, no, it wasn't your fault. The whole team was in there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, everyone in Taskinga Bruiser was in there and the command master chief and the skipper and the investigating officer. And I went around the room and asked, you know, whose fault is this? And everybody, you know, whether it was they wanted to blame the Iraqis, whether we want to tick ownership themselves, everybody was chiming in on whose fault it was.

And then I said, no, it wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault. There's only one person to blame and that person's me. And that is the truth. that is the truth when you are in charge of a team and something goes wrong it is your fault and then I said and here's some things that we're going to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again and I started talking about time and space deconfliction I started talking about how

we were going to overly signal we went through some protocols but that was it and you know my boss who I already had a great relationship with and the Master Chief, who's a great legendary Master Chief, he you know, those guys my relationship and trust with them went up

in both directions because they understood what they understood what had happened they understood that I understood and I think you know, if they would have been in their rights to say, hey, Jacco, you're done.

Or they could have fired anyone in that long chain of command. I would have, I would have protested with my own job if they would have tried to fire someone else besides me. But, you know, I had a good relationship with them. They understood how complicated it was. They saw all these little things. There's a million other little elements I can tell. you about, like the fact that Matt Hasby, who was getting shot at with a 50 caliber machine

gun, which you'd think, hey, dude, you're getting shot out with a 50 cal. That's, that's an American weapon. Like, that's not common. Well, 12 hours prior to this, he was in a sniper tower, and he got engaged with a Dishka, 12.7 machine gun by the enemy. And he was, he told me he's literally up there thinking, I can't believe these guys of the Dishka found me again. Because otherwise if you think you're getting shot at with a 50 cow, you call cease fire, you throw a red smoke, you do something to stop it. He had no idea. And so that's, you know, to the credit of my command master chief and my commanding officer, they listen to me, I listened to them, and we carried on. And that was a very rough way to begin the deployment. Do you have any idea how much credibility

was boosted within you with your team that day? I don't know, but I can tell you that you and I have both sat in rooms where some officer blamed someone else other than themselves, and you and I both know that that is disgusting. And that's what disgusted me. The fact that I was even having those thoughts, you know, part of it was me trying to truly figure out

what happened but part of it was like oh yeah this is you trying to look for someone to blame there's no one to blame you're in charge so you know I the guys in the troop the guys in the task unit like these guys I'm not a hard person to figure out I'm not maneuvering in some way I'm not I am who I am and I'm those guys knew that and so I think I would have lost a lot of respect I think I did what they probably expected I was going to do, you know, maybe some of them were pleasantly surprised, but I think most of them knew me. They didn't, you know, I think I would have been a, it would have been, we would have been, we would have been very out of character if I'd have gone in there and blamed someone else. That's not, that's not how, that's not how

it works. You know, again, this goes back to that, uh, platoon commander I had, you know, that guy, he was responsible for everything. When we screwed something up, even when we screwed something up even when one time one of my friends got in trouble like on liberty and he wasn't even there he wasn't even there and he's like yeah you know i should have seen this coming i was like check so when things go wrong you better take ownership of it and they certainly went wrong in that scenario and you know there's another um the commodore of group two at the time who was a guy that was a legendary, legendary leader in the SEAL teams. And he had been a Marine in Vietnam.

And he had come in at the tail end of Way City. And I can't remember if I talked to him or if he emailed me. But he said something along the lines of, hey, Jocko. I don't know if you know about me. Yes, I know about you, sir. I was in the tail end of Way City in Vietnam. I saw, he, you know, he was one of those guys that made it very clear that he was not in the Battle of Way City, but he showed up there afterwards, or he's at the tail end of it. And he said, um, he rattled off the percentage, like a third of the casualties in Way City were, were Fratchercide.

That's just one battle. It's like this complicated stuff. And it was the first, he was, he let me know like, okay, this stuff. This stuff. This is war. And by the way, the army like that battalion commander blue on blue was a part of romadi you know we think of in the seal teams we think of blue on blue it's like you're getting kicked out of the seal teams like if you and I are running around with sim and I shoot you there's a decent chance I'm getting kicked out of the seal teams like that's how much of a mortal sin it is and the army in the Marine Corps they're like And it's just like, we have to mitigate it as much as we can, but if you can't, it's, it can happen.

This is part of it. It's part of it. And it's a horrible part of it. And look, we, we had other blue on blues that potentially could happen. We had shots fired, but we never had it escalate like that one did. And that's because we learned a lot of lessons from that one. And we prevented all kinds that never escalated at all that never happened. but you know it's one of this it's funny we we in extreme ownership layf and i were writing

are kind of chapters independently and it ends up there's three chapters in there that are about blue on blue one of them was chris kyle with a p id on a guy with a scope weapon and he's telling laf like hey i got a guy with a scope weapon in this building is there any friendlies in that building and laf's call him the company commander hey do you got any friendlies in this building the guy's like no he's we got a guy with scope weapon he's like kill him because there's snipers that are killing americans and chris like didn't quite feel comfortable and laf was like hey he's saying we're cleared and goes back and forth and finally laf's like hey we don't feel comfortable taking the shot and the guy's kind of pissed and this is a great company commander guys kind of pissed

and he's like okay well we'll go clear it and leif's like roger we got you know we'll tell you what we see and a few minutes later the army goes to assault that building but they come out of the building that they were going to assault there was a they didn't know we miscounted the buildings or they miscounted the building i forget what it was but that right there man if chris could have shot one of friendlies but you we had to be so careful about these engagements and then there was another one that i wrote about where we had a element sniper element on a rooftop and there's a Bradley fighting vehicle on a intersection and he calls back like hey we got we see bad guys on the building of building 48 j or whatever the building was and the company commander's like you

got any guys on that building I'm like hold on I'm like because it's you know multiple guys with scope weapons on top of a building I'm like do me a favor have the Bradley count the number of buildings he sees till he gets to that target and he's like what? And I go, please. He's like, okay. He says, all right, hey, whatever, dash one, count the number of buildings you see before you get to that target building.

Guys like, what? He said, count the number of buildings. Counts the number of buildings. Come back. He said, hey, we mis-id the number of the building. It's actually building 32. Like, yeah, we got friendlies on that building. Do not engage.

So that's what we were dealing with, a lot. And there was cases in Ramadi of people engaging home viz. Like, there's probably no vehicle in the world with a more distinct silhouette than a Humvee, and we had guys, there was soldiers and Marines that engaged Humvees because of the confusion and chaos of the battlefield. So that's how we started off with a massive lesson learned. With a lesson learned like that, and you took ownership of that. I mean, and this is, this is advice for future.

future leaders in war. I mean, how do you, how do you brush that off and get your head back in the game? Well, what are we going to do to prevent it? You know, like, we got lessons learned. And, you know, I think when you're shooting headplates and you miss one, if you start thinking about the one that you just miss,

you're going to miss two more. And I think that's a really important thing to be able to do with other factors in your life of hey look this happened it went bad we need to fix it we need to fix it and we need to move on if you live in the past on stuff it without you know you learn from it but you can't it's like i say about when when you with with losing people if you lose someone like your friend your your parents your brother your sister whoever someone close to you dies you got to remember them but you can't dwell in the past you can't just you can't just be there forever because

then you're not moving forward. So I think it's the similar activity here from my standpoint is like, okay, like this is what we did wrong, this is the lessons that we learned, and here's how we move forward. Did you feel any type of reluctancy to, to address your men as a, is their leader again after that, immediately after that? No. No. No. I, man, I was really close with these guys, you know, up and down the chain of command. These guys had, we did a workup together. They've seen me in every different type of scenario. They're not like, these are, these are my brothers.

I wanted great relationships, you know, so I wasn't, I, if I would have blamed one of these guys, I would have been ashamed to show my face. You know what I mean? But they were more like, hey, this wasn't your fault. Like, yes, it was. Like, they've tried to re-explain to me, you know? Well, the other thing is they're all thinking he's got her fucking back. And that's really definitely one of the most important attributes of a good leader is knowing that your guy, your boss has your fucking back.

Yeah. Yes. It is absolutely. and and you got to know that they have your back. And this is, you know, this is one of those things where it turns into, or you have to watch out. Because if you work for me and your impression of me that I give you is that no matter what you do,

I'll cover for you, now we get into a bad zone. Because you have to know that, If you do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, I'm not going to have your back. Now, if you explain to me what happened and what went wrong and you had a, what we, what we learned from the army, which is a good shot, bad result, 100%, 100%. But if you are doing things that are illegal, immoral, or unethical, you need to know that I will not have your back. And even something, even, you know, even this isn't that extreme,

but like I would tell guys, uh, hey, you get a DUI. It doesn't matter what I do to your back because you're, it's going to be in the system and you're going to get in trouble and there's nothing I can do about it. Like, there's nothing I can do. Like, I can go and be a character witness and tell, tell the Commodore how great you are, but the Commodore is going to go, oh yeah, you had a DUI, you're getting, you're getting, uh, busted down and you're pulling from your platoon. And I have, it doesn't matter how much I have your, back. That's what's happening. So yes, you're right. But as a leader, you've got to put those parameters up to make sure that guys understand what the left and right lateral limits are.

And they can be big. But they're not infinite. And that's why I need to know that you have my back. Because if you're out doing something that you shouldn't be doing, what are you doing to me, man? Because I am going to, I'm going to take the fall as well. It's not like I'm just going to be like, Oh, no, he did it because I am responsible. You do something stupid or you do something illegal and you get rolled up. I'm going down too, as I should because I let it happen. So yes, 100%. And these guys knew that.

These guys knew that. That is how we have to operate. And luckily for me, like I said, I did that tour as the Admiral's aide. I understood what those left and right lateral limits were. I understood that very well. And that was a real blessing because there were no, there wasn't really any ambiguity about that. If you do something that's outside the box, I will not have your back. Anything you do inside the box, and like I said, it's a big box, a big box, I got you.

But you better be doing good things, at least with the best. intent and our mistake's going to happen yeah man they are going to happen especially in a combat zone like are civilians going to get killed in the combat zone yes they are are the wrong breach is going to happen to the wrong building yep they're going to happen these there are things that are going to happen and I will have your back as long as your intent was good as long as you were doing the right thing for the right reasons all day and yeah my guys knew that for sure and I knew that with them how was it working with Chris Kyle great yeah it was a great he was a very a very dedicated sniper he was a wise ass he was funny as hell he was a shit-talker

in like a good team guy way and And he was just a great guy to having a platoon. Yeah, man. Like, you'd see him and Tony looking at imagery for hours, trying to figure out what building would be best, looking at the angles, looking at the distances, look at the long axis, like, that's what they did. And, you know, he was good, man.

He was good. He would spend, you know, a long time on his gun in sniper overwatch positions. And he would set himself up, for some good positions. You know what I mean? Like he would set himself up on some long access positions

where he can see four or five blocks and meanwhile like a new guy sniper might see half of an alley. So, but he earned that position, you know? He earned it with his patience and his and his discrepancy. Like he was, he was very, very good. He was as good as it gets.

Was he good at passing arm wisdom? Yeah, you know, I'd say I was a little bit out of the line of fire of him passing on wisdom because I wasn't a sniper. Gotcha. But, you know, he'd pass on some hassling to these new guys. I can tell you that. The funny thing is, you know, they, he liked to do, this is weird, but he liked to do, like, pranks, like a grade school kid.

Like, he would prank people, do funny stuff. Like, that's what he's like. So he wasn't, you know, in the movie, they make him out to be. like super serious all the time and all this stuff and he was actually just a funny great guy to be around that brought a lot of uh brought a lot of entertainment with him you know a lot of entertainment right on and we had you know and we had a good crew of guys that was you know that's a seal Paltoon, man. It's a seal platoon. I was, I guess there's seal platoons where they're not like having fun and and ribbing each other and, you know, being brothers. But I was never

in a platoon like that. I was always in a platoon that was freaking awesome to hang around. And, you know, when I was a young seal, what I do on the weekend? went to the team. We went to the team on the weekends. Went to a team on Saturday and worked on your gear. Went to the team on Sunday and worked out with your buddies. That's all we did. That's what we did because there wasn't anything else.

And once I had a family, I had to like at least take a little bit of time. But even then, I was, my family was second to my platoon, to my task unit, to the teams. I would love to tell you that I'm embarrassed to admit that or that that's not the right thing. But when you're in the SEAL teams, I think that is the thing. That is the fucking way it is, man. That's the way it is. And, you know, God bless my wife who was just like a saint. But she handled the family stuff.

And I handled the war stuff. Were you married at this time? Yep. So going to Ramadi, I had three kids at that time. You had three kids. How are you handling? I mean, how was, how long, how many deployments he did you? you done married with kids and or with kids two well no one uh three three so my daughter was born

my oldest daughter was born the day before i went on the strike deployment in at team two she was born and i left never changed the diaper and then while i was in college i had two more kids because i was home and then um and yeah i mean I was I was in the SEAL teams man like we go on deployment we go to war and you want you want to be with your kids but you're not going to be with your kids in the SEAL teams it's not a good it's not a good family environment now if you have a strong family you know men have been going you know on some form of deployment since the beginning of time you said this at breakfast and I fucking love this I mean Because I hear sometimes people like, oh, you know, the father's got to be around, like, I wasn't around. You know, and a lot of dads weren't around. And they raised some awesome kids. And so, yeah, guys have been going on the hunt, on the sea voyage, on the crusade, whatever

you're going on, men have been going on that stuff for a long time. And the kids understand that. And the moms understand it. and they raise warriors. How long have you been married? I think 28 years. What is the secret to a successful marriage? There's a couple, but number one is marry like a pretty awesome woman.

And then, you know, just apply the principles of leadership to your marriage. you know it's the same principles that you want your wife to listen to you you better listen to her you want your wife to trust you you better trust her you want your wife to respect you you better treat her with respect you want your wife to care about you you better care about her you do if something goes wrong you better take ownership so that's worked out great for me and my wife's a saint my wife's a saint I'm sure she is You know, when you were asking me about the pressure of my first deployment to Iraq, and I told you that I didn't really feel this wasn't, it wasn't, the idea of the idea of

someone getting wounded or killed was kind of a little bit of a distant thing in the back of my mind. And in Ramadi, it was front of mind. And when you see that many casualties happening, like on a daily basis, there is the odds are going to catch you and of course do you hope am i fatalistic because that was my thought process maybe but it was also just numbers man it was just the numbers you just look at the numbers and every day every time you leave the wire there is there is a chance And so it's a daily basis. And listen, the Army and the Marine Corps are just making the most incredible sacrifices.

You see it. You go to their memorials. You hear it on the radio. That's one thing that was, you know, you'd hear it on the radios. You'd hear, hey, there's one KAA heading back to Camp Romadi, heading to Georgia. or three wounded, heading to Charlie Med, like you would hear these things. It's just constant.

This is daily. Daily. So, and, you know, I try and give as much admiration to the Army and the Marine Corps who fought so hard in such terrible conditions. And that's what they were facing every day. And that's what we were facing. And we had the blue-on-blue happened almost pretty quickly thereafter.

Cowie got wounded, bad. And, you know, Cowie's just a stud. And he's in Charlie Med. he's all doped up on morphine the doc pulls me aside and he's like hey I don't know if his leg's gonna make it Roger

and Cowie like I you know bend over to like hold his hand and he's like the first thing's out of his mouth let me stay damn

damn So that's the kind of guys you got, you know. Let me stay. So, you know, this is, um, once the 1-1-A-D shows up with Colonel McFarland, later General McFarland, you know, that's when we start pressing in. to the city, that's when we start supporting these combat overwatch, or the, yeah, these combat outposts being built in the city, which is a huge construction project. And there's a time period when they're building these combat outposts in the city that they're extremely

vulnerable because they're doing a construction project in the middle of a war zone. And so what can we do to help that is we can set up sniper overwatch positions. And when the enemy would maneuver in to attack them, we would kill them. And it was actually General McFarland. He wrote it in an article. It's like those combat outposts being built were bait. You know, he didn't put him out there as bait. He put him out there on the grand strategy of taking over the city.

But it's like a salt lick. You know, you start building this construction project in the middle of downtown Ramadi. The insurgents are absolutely going to attack you. And when they do, my guys would be in an offset position, 200 meters away, 300 meters away, 400 meters away, looking down a long-axis avenue of approach where the mooges would come. And they'd kill them. And it was, you know, an ideal setup for us. you know and it was when we started doing this like this the amount of the amount of scrutiny

for the one one ad for general McFarland you know he was getting scrutinized on the amount of combat that his guys were getting the amount of casualties and the amount of killing that he was doing he was getting that scrutiny from his from the from the from the meth and I was feeling the same thing. Um, and it was always like, please come see. Come and see. Come and see what's happening here. You'll, it doesn't take long to figure out. And thankfully, you know, they did. You know, I had the siege of soda commander who's a great guy at the time, you know, came down, visited. The, you know, the Commodore visited. The Socom commander visited, you know, General, General Brown, Socom commander. He came to see us in Ramadi. We got 35 seals, Brown.

he's in charge of all of the world of special operations. He came to Ramadi to see what we were doing to talk to the conventionals, make sure that they were getting what we needed. So there was a lot of eyes on what we were doing. And part of that was because of the amount of people we were killing. And part of it was because they were very risky operations.

I'm going to ask a question. You'd been studying this. You'd been studying Ramadi since before you got there. or, you know, seals have, what, year and a half workup? You started studying, sounds like, I think, what you said, maybe you maybe found out six months into workup that you were going to Ramadi? No, we didn't know we were going to Ramadi until, like, a couple weeks before. Okay.

Yeah. Well, you're talking about doing dailies, weeklies, monthlies of troops in contact, casualties. You've studied, you've studied this fucking battle space. it's very obvious it's hot why are you why would anybody be under scrutiny for the amount of combat that they're seeing when they want you to

incrementally take over a fucking city that makes zero sense to me yeah yep and again it wasn't just me and special operations general McFarland was feeling the same thing and again

just like General McFarland had a a great relationship with the Meph commander. I had a great relationship with my commanding officer. And so when I explained to him what was happening, you know, we started probably a few weeks, like three weeks into these sniper watches that we were doing. This was early in deployment. And we'd killed, I don't know, how many, probably, I don't know,

10, 15 something, mostly IED emplacers. And I talked to my headquarters. And they're like, hey, you know, you're killing these IED in placers, but the IEDs haven't gone down yet. And I said, hey, sir, the average insurgency, according to the counterinsurgency manual, last seven years, it's been three weeks. Can I get some more time to work? And he's like, yeah, check.

But yeah, I mean, it, well, you know what it's like, you know what it was like for a seal rotation at the time. You know, you went to Iraq, right? there's not a lot of direct enemy contact and there's not a lot of killing most of the time you're doing DAs they don't want to fight do they get killed sometimes yes but most of the time they don't really want to fight so they surrender and you capture the capture kill part is mostly capture for me on my first deployment was almost all capture killed very few well now you're in this zone where there's enemy that are, like I said, like us, going to assault lick,

they are maneuvering through the streets and we're in locations with tactical advantage that we selected with long access down multiple roads. You're going to start killing a lot of enemy fighters. And it was abnormal. It was abnormal. And so, you know, the, the scrutiny came, but I welcomed it. It's no factor. You know, we had to have guys sign a shooter statement for everybody that we killed. There was like a sworn shooter statement. And at first, guys, like, well, you know, why we got to do this? It's like, hey, because in five years or 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, someone's going to come back and say this person died here who did it and we'll say either oh yeah that was us because this is why or no that wasn't us so I again luckily for me that

had seen the the officer side of things I understood that and I was able to explain it to the guys explain it to the guys like hey there's a reason we're seeing this scrutiny it's because we're killing a lot of bad guys and they the chain of command needs to make sure that we're doing the right thing for the right reasons we are and they see that and we got we got such great support from the siege of soda from my chain of command from the the special operation chain of command for sure like I said general Brown came out and and by the way the the army and the Marine Corps was like epic you know I had the colonel that was in charge General Sean McFarland had him on my podcast and you know like you can tell it was as good as it gets

And so yeah, there's there's scrutiny because you're killing a lot of bad guys and there's also scrutiny because these are risky freaking operations and you know a big one was going out in the daytime Why would you give up the tactical advantage of going out at night which we have because we got night vision we got lasers a whole nine yards. Why would we make that mistake? Well, there's a bunch of reasons. You know, there's a bunch of reasons. Number one, our mission from the Siege of Sotif was to train and fight company and platoon-sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. So that means we are supposed to train them and go and fight with them. Company and platoon-sized elements, not special mission units, not DA units, company and platoon-sized elements of infantry-sized elements of infantry

soldiers that's what we were supposed that's what our task was we put together some scouts we put together some some special mission units but that was our task they don't have night vision they didn't even have flashlights we used to give like a fire team of iraqi's a flashlight so for them to do a clearance operation at night was like just a non-starter so that means they're going to go out in the day well since we're training and fighting them guess who's out in the day we are so now since I got my guys out in the field during the day I want to protect them so what am I doing Overwatch positions. What time is it? Daytime. And by the way, we killed 99% of the enemy was during the daytime. Because at nighttime, the enemy came out a lot less. So that, and again,

one of the big mistakes that I made was I never really explained that outside of my chain of command. Like, so to the teams at large, most of the guys go, what were you doing? Oh, here's why we're doing. I think, oh, cool, cool. Occasionally you get a guy like, that doesn't know what was happening, doesn't know how bad it was, couldn't conceive a reason to go out in the daytime, or couldn't conceive how it's possible to kill that many enemy fighters. Bro, they are everywhere. And so I should have done a better job of communicating that aspect of things, but I didn't really recognize it because my chain of command, they knew. And most of the, you know, the people that were around me that were actually talking to me, they would be like, oh, yeah, that makes

sense. We get it. Like I said, including the chain of command on both the special operation side and the conventional side. But you're going into these areas and the Army's taking casualties, Marine Corps's taking casualties. And I know that at some point we're going to take casualties and the we you know we like I said we had a couple guys wounded cowie was wounded bad but um on August 2nd that's when Ryan Joe got got wounded severely and you know he was shot in the face and I know when you had when you had Laif on the podcast um Laif gave you a pretty detailed description but you had you know a guy like Ryan Job who, I had his parents on my podcast.

Just, man, you can't, you can't even describe just what a. tough funny like we'll literally do anything for you just as good as they come and he gets shot thankfully he was had his weapon right up in his cheek well where he's supposed to have it you know three hours into a clearance operation on a rooftop and he still is a disciplined machine gunner he has his weapon up in his cheek well and he single shot shot hits his rifle hits his machine gun and hits him in the face and just devastating damage to his face and um they you know they the kazavakum and this kind of initiates one of the larger battles in the battle of vermadi was was on august.

second and Leif and his guys go back to Cop Falcon which is a combat outpost and we have a great relationship with the 137 and Leif's great friends with their company commander Mike Baima and I'm great friends with Colonel Tedesco and now they're they're starting to take heavies out there in the field it's a big gunfight and Leif gets Ryan Kasavak and it didn't look good although he did stabilize but you know

Leif did not think he was going to make it for a bit and these guys are back there and the army our brothers in the army said hey we were taking contact from some of these buildings we think this is where these insurgents are

can you help us and you know layth called me on the on the radio and he's like hey here's what's happening um the army needs our help they want us to go hit some buildings and I'm like you good said I'm good like execute and they went out to hit those buildings buildings. And, you know, it's already, like I said, one of the biggest battles. And, you know, Leif and Tony, you know, Tony was the platoon chief down there and just no, no hesitation from any the boys rollout. Um, they softened up the target with the Brad's, you know, 25 millimeter chain gun. And I think they went in the first building and cleared it in the second building they go into and they take fire from an adjacent building and um mark mark lee who's another guy that's

just all good like in his in his whole being in his soul he's good he's good and he gets shop killed and uh I was actually I was in the talk and I'm watching this happened watching this happened and I see I see them caring on ISR I see them carrying a guy out and uh one of the guys in the talk goes maybe it's an Iraq And I actually knew that it wasn't because I knew that Leif didn't have any Iraqis with him. So I knew he was one of our guys. And Lath gets back to, um, cop falcon. He calls me up and he told me what happened.

He said, we had one KIA. And I said, who? And he said, Charlie won four. I'm sorry, man. So, got their guys together, you know, and came back to base. and um you know i mentioned general brown had come to visit he came to visit on august second just that was just when the scheduled visit was and he came to the flight line for the angel flight

and earlier that morning you know one of the marine elements that we work with from three eight there was a fourth platoon i think was lemma company and tony and laf and those guys had done a bunch of operations with them and gotten to know them and um they're a system platoon commander or they're a platoon commander um you know he was kind of brewing out friends with tony because tony's tony you know and um You know, it's weird. I heard this story from both guys at a later time, but when Tony gets up there and he sees the platoon commander from fourth platoon,

and he's like, dang, they must have heard about Mark. And the platoon commander told me later that he saw Tony, and he said, dang, they must have heard about Joe. because that morning Joe Tompsey from 3-8 he was killed Wow

So Seals, Marine and Army We stood there on that flight line and load those boys up to go home And the war doesn't stop. And that was a shortfall for the SEAL team's out of the 90s. You know, you think you do an operation. and when, you know, when the operation's over, it's over.

And if you lose a guy, well, it doesn't really, I mean, it matters, but the operation's over. But we never really thought about that. Guess what? The Army and the Marine Corps, they understood that. We had to learn that immediately. How are you holding it together? I had to focus on the job. um you know i had to focus on work we did the memorial service um told some stories about mark at the memorial

service we were in vegas and he was like a maniac dude just hilarious he's gambling and um He would like, I'd walk, I'd walk through the casino and I'd see him gambling. He'd be like, hey, sir, when of the new Cadillacs coming out? I'm winning big over here. Like, he was just that guy. And, uh, or if you're playing blackjack with him and the dealer would bust, you know, he'd yell out, everybody's a winner and he'd get the whole casino saying that stuff. So we got to tell some stories about Mark.

Um, and then I also remember that. that day, Seth, he had an operation plan on Eastern Ramadi. And this was like the day Mark got killed before the memorial service. And he sent me like a Webby, which for those of you don't, it's like text messaging. He sends me a Webby. He's like, hey, we're not going to do this operation tonight. And I was like, hey, you're good to go, man. like I understand that like chain of command don't worry I got it like you're clear to go and he's like

he's like no no we're not going to do it and I said no no you're cleared like you can do it and he called me on the field phone he's like hey bro I don't want to take the guys out right now I was like oh got it he's like guys aren't in the mental state we need 24 hours but again for for Seth Stone to be so in tune with his guys recognizing like they're not in a good psychological position to go out so he calls me up and tells me like it's a no-go like that's leadership um and you know it's just devastating man it's devastating because again mark you know we didn't seem like Ryan was going to live you know and we didn't really know he was going to be blind yet but it seemed like he would live and um but mark

you know this is again just a terrible undescribable loss and when you talk to the army guys too it hit all them because we were we were getting after it you know and like I told you earlier when when something happened there on the radio like everyone would kind of hear it you might not hear it directly but if you're in

my platoon and you hear, you'd hear reports. And if I'm an army guy and you're my platoon sergeant and I hear, oh, we just got mortared an hour ago. And then I hear on my radio, hey, SEALs just took out, or it's like, T.U. ramped, engaged three mortar men with mortar tubes with three rounds of, uh, seven, 300 wind mag resulting in three EKIA. Bro, I'm going right over you. I'm like, hey, the SEALs just whack those dudes.

And that happened a lot. and you know we had been very lucky and we had been very lucky for months and so talking to the army guys when when mark got killed it was like the invincibility was shattered but the war does continue and so we stood down for like a day then did the memorial service the next day and then we got her gear back on fuck man as a leader what do you say to your men for them to keep it together i told him the truth i told him the truth And that was that I did not know what to do, except for one thing, work. And I knew that every day that we weren't doing our job, there was going to be soldiers

and Marines that were going to pay the price for it. And I knew 100% that what Mark would want us to do would go, go and go and fight. and by the way Mark's brother's a Marine and by the way Ryan Job's brothers are Marine like you don't think that they want us to go out there and do everything we can Cestone's brother in the army

like this is we there was only one thing to do do I know did I know how to mourn did I know how to say the right thing about loss and death and life and all those things no I'll tell you what I told them exactly

you. I don't know what to tell you. All I know is what I know how to do. And that's work. We're going to go back to work and we're going to take the fight to these mooges and we're going to kill as many of them as we can. With as much loss as you've experienced up to this day, would you have changing anything? Would you have told them anything different? maybe but I don't know that there's anything else to do in a situation like that I could tell them what we were talking about earlier like remember don't dwell and that kind of stuff but these are these are you know we're all very focused at this time on what's happening very very focused on what's happening and

And so I don't know what the broader, you know, life impact of that, you know, could I say some philosophical thing? I don't think so, man. I think I actually said the philosophical thing. We're going to get back to work. We're going to get our gear on. We're going to lock and load our weapons. And we go do what we're supposed to do because we're frogmen.

I can't think of anything better to say to be. honest with it yeah we're frogman this is what we do this is who we are this is what every one of us signed up for this is it Do you want to talk about Cali? Well, Cali, he was home, man. Cowie, you know, like I said earlier, he said, let me stay. And I was like, bro, go heal up. And, you know, he wasn't going to heal up.

Not in four more months or five more months. His, dude, he took a freaking armor piercing round to the, femur there was chunks of leg gone like it's a miracle that he kept his leg props to the the charlie med the docs that worked on him and all the people at walterita wherever else bethsda like they kept his leg man but you know it was terrible for cowie because you think cowie wasn't there you know and dude he wanted to be there you know he wanted to be there he would have given anything to be there yeah And, and then, you know, you get Laif, Leif, just the same responsibility that I talked about when it comes to take an ownership of thing.

Well, there's Leif, man. And Laif is taking ownership of having one of his guys severely wounded and having one of them killed. And me too. Like, this is us. I approved all these operations. I came up with this whole damn idea. And Leif called me. Can we go?

And I said yes. Leif came up with this idea and I said yes. And this is on us. That's the way it is, man. That's the burden of command. That's the way it is. And Leif was devastated, of course. Life was completely devastated.

and you know when when when he talked to me about it you know he said something along the lines of like I don't know I don't know if I made the right decision in going back out there was no decision to make. That's not a decision. There are Army brothers that have gone out over and over again to pull us out of bad situations. And these fellow Americans are asking for our help. That is not a decision.

That is what we do. That is what we do and we do it. Every time. you've ever talked to Vietnam guys Vietnam guys if it was a platoon in trouble or a downpilot they were going same thing with the Sea Wolf pilots by the way Seal platoon in trouble they're going

that's what they're doing and when our army brothers are asking us for help we go that's not a decision that is duty that is being a frog man and I also told him if we had a crystal ball and we could tell when something bad was going to happen

of course we wouldn't do that thing whatever that thing was but we don't have a crystal ball and combat is inherently freaking dangerous and Laif understood that Laif understood that it didn't make it any easier for his soul for his heart that was broken but he understood he understood that that's what mark you know what i was talking to mark's mom the other day and mark has had a huge impact now america's mighty warriors like is

an incredible organization that's helped out so many not just seals but other people and she you know she said you know if if i could talk to mark and mark had a chance to go back and not sacrifice his life on that day but none of this other stuff would have happened he wouldn't he wouldn't come back and I'm like I know so this is what we do this is what we sign up for

and that's part of being a frog man and look we we had some you know we had the 80s and the 90s and man like there was nothing going on and mark was the first you know mark was the first seal killed in iraq it again you'd like why well look at the battle space man at the battle space it was of complete war zone why did the one one a d lose that many guys why did the first of the 506 lose that many guys why did the 137 why did the 3 8 Marines like just losses why well it was a freaking war zone man and the war didn't stop so It was back to operations.

And that's what we did. Got her gear back on, locked and loaded our weapons, and back to the field, back to conducting these operations. You know, and as far as what did we change, we honestly, there was, after that one, it was like we were so used to the city, you know, my first deployment to Iraq, we went all over the place. We went all the way from Najaf, down south, all the way to Hadith up north. We went east of Baghdad, west of Baghdad.

We went out to Ramadi. I was all over the place. This whole deployment, I only left Ramadi one time to let go to Balad for one meeting the first three days, four days of deployment, and I was back in Ramadi the whole time. So we knew what was going on. And so we continued to push. And, you know, the guys, every one of those guys,

night after night, day after day, jocped up, getting in a Humvee, driving past the damn vehicle graveyard that had 75 or 100 destroyed vehicles it from IEDs, out again, out again, out again, out again, the Army, the Marine Corps, and us. It's the way it was. Fuck, man. Jocka, what was your, what were you awarded the Silver Star for? Well, it was just this deployment.

The whole deployment? Basically, this deployment, yeah. How did the deployment end? well we were we continued to push operations we continued to eliminate enemy fighters we saw the beginning of the Anbar awakening which was an incredible process that took place and again I said General McFarlane and I talked about it for a long time on on the podcast I did with him but the local populace began to turn against the insurgents which was the goal and as this happened we started seeing you know intel would come in that there's enemy fighters in this area or there's

a enemy fighter in this area there's a group of iED makers over here so we started pushing when i say we like coalition forces we started really pushing and taking it to the enemy um we had one we we had started really pushing some good operations and eliminating a lot a lot of bad guys and we were getting towards the end of deployment um and you know again man I'm talking about I'm just talking about this my guys but there are so many stories you know there was so much loss there and so much heroism there. You're hearing one person. I've had a bunch of guys in my podcast

that were everybody from brigade commander, company commanders, battalion commanders, and gunners and medics to tell their little tiny part of the story. Their little tiny part of the story, you know? The brigade reconnaissance element.

Dan Pinyon, he was like the Sergeant Major and, like, they had the heaviest casualties of any group, any company-sized element. He had a, he has a guy named Marquis Quick that jumped on a grenade to save some of his other teammates. And, like, it, it kind of just happened and almost got overlooked. And they're trying to get him the Medal of Honor now. But that's one, that's a one, and I didn't know about that.

I didn't know about that until he came on my podcast and told me about it. And I didn't know about it. So my point in saying all this, man, is I'm giving you, like, a little fraction of my view. And I had 40 seals in Ramadi. And I just want you and everybody to know that there was the companies and platoons from the Army and the Marine Corps that were out there all day, every day, and they were taking the fight to the enemy. and they did an outstanding job

and they suffered insane casualties over and over and over again. And I've tried to tell as many people as I can about that. There's a reunion coming in Texas, January 16th, 20-26, the 20-year reunion of Ramadi. It's January 16th and 17th. But I hope that as many people that we're there, can go to that.

That is fucking cool. Yes. And it's, it's, General McFarland is leading it. And there was just so much heroism in, in that city. Um, and to be able to witness some of it with my guys and with other groups, it was just, it was just, it was, it was, it's, it's amazing to look back on, um, so much sacrifice. and such, you know, such incredible Americans. Yeah, it's, it's humbling to think about.

And so as this deployment for us is now starting, we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And one of the things that I did on my last deployment, I always figured I never would tell someone, hey this is the last op because I think that's like bad luck they don't want him to freak out I didn't mind bad luck but I didn't want everyone else to feel bad luck so we were getting kind of towards the end of deployment and um Seth who you know is just um incredible and he's out there and he's in Corregador, reading his guys, and they do an operation in support of

the 1st of 506, who again can't say enough good stuff, can't say enough good things about the 1st of the 506, the battalion commander, their company commanders, their company sergeants, their e-dogs, I mean, just awesome. And I think part of this is when you get into like a real fight like this dude everyone is just like wants to help out and if you can help out i i'm thankful and seth and his guys had been out there with the first of the 506 for pretty much the entire deployment for them and um they plan an operation um set at two overwatch positions mutually supporting overwatch positions down in the malab district south malab district and seth was in one overwatch position and the other overwatch position got attacked it got attacked they were

getting attacked through the morning you know like RPGs small arms fire things were starting to escalate and that somebody through dead space like got close enough to throw a grenade and threw a grenade and um mikey monsor who again just just as solid as they come man as solid as they come he saw their grenade yelled out grenade the way he was positioned on that rooftop he was the one that could have gotten away from it and he could have left his guys exposed but um instead he jumped on it um the other guys were wounded bad though and called over to Seth and Seth assembled his guys left his Iraqis there left their gear there just brought their you know their primary kit rolled over

fought their way to that position and then, you know, got that under control organized and got them Kazavak out and got back to base, Camp Corregador. And then Seth had to take some of his guys that could still function mentally back to get the Iraqis and back to get the gear so you know Seth just stepping up and it was the it was the battalion commander he called me up and told me um hey he told because I could hear what was happening over the radio but once they were out of the field he called me and he said um gave me a sit rep on on the guys one guy was like pretty good to go two guys were wounded you know they were going to get they were going to get medevac and he said didn't think mike he was going to make it he said they were

doing CPR on him he didn't think he was going to make it and he was right So it was, um, I mean, immediately, I immediately knew that he had jumped on the grenade. And, uh, I talked to the guys once they got to Germany, the guys that had been Kazavak. And they told me, you know, and they were like sending me sketches of what happened immediately. And so it was like about as clear of a Medal of Honor action that you could think of. And luckily, like I said, for for Dan Pinyon and his guy Marquis Quake, Marquis Quick, they were in the middle of deployment. You know, for me, we were almost done. So started putting that award together.

Did you write that award? Seth did. And he got the input from Mike and Doug, who were like, and Benny, who were the guys that were saved. And yeah, he put it together. He started writing it and then I mean, I tried. that edited it or whatever, but yeah, it was, you know,

and talking to Mikey's sister, it's like, I mean, many conversations over the years, but one of the things that always stuck with me was she was just like, it was not a surprise. Meaning like, that's Mikey. So I'm a surprise. I think he's going to, what do you think he's going to do? save his teammates or save himself six six we weren't surprised by it it's fucking incredible man

yeah I mean the the families of those guys are just all just amazing people and uh you know that maybe a day later Seth had to come you needed to come talk to me about something and like I remember they

to get to get to from camp carragador to camp romadi was down route michigan which was like not a good place to drive down and he came to see me and when he did the uh The battalion commander sent him in a section of tanks. To make sure it'd be all right, you know. And that's, you know, that's, you know, that's why that that bond with those guys is so strong, you know. The um just being in that battle space with those guys that what they would do for us was just so like you could just tell and that they were they cared about us as much as we cared about them and you know they put they put Mikey Monsors on the first of the 506 on their memorial wall the guys that they lost he's one of them wow And now, at this point in the deployment, we were, that was September 29th, and we were, we were kind of running low on guys, man. But we kept doing whatever we could do.

guys from team five showed up and man they were fired up man and I remember telling those guys like to their task unit their whole task unit you will take casualties which is a horrible thing to say and I'm looking at them and it's like as you're looking at them you're like I don't know if they really believe me And those guys, God bless him, man, they went to Mikey Monsor's funeral.

They went to Mark Lee's funeral. But they had just gone to Mikey's funeral. They were showing up maybe a week or two later, like they're ad fond. And, yeah. But they were, man, they were, they were fired up. And we turned over the best we possibly could with those guys. and you know so much and you just can't

like download enough information I remember I was like I don't know maybe this before Mikey got killed but we were doing some big clearance operation and I'm like ended up in some rear security while we're doing clearance but we had done the clearance now we're moving back and I'm in this you know just like a nug

because I'm out there but I'm out there kind of just to be out there um you know layf and tony have got it but i'm watching as the platoon is like moving through the streets and you think these freaking guys are good right now like it's it was a very awesome thing to be witnessed to and the reputation you know that we had earned was like i i could see it i could feel it the way the army treated us the way the Marine Corps treated us it was like it was awesome it's fucking incredible man like I'm I have to say it is fucking incredible I mean the deployment that you had the losses that you took the action that you saw the lives that you guys took

I mean it's a fucking hard deployment and I just want to commend you and all of you guys, man. I mean, you know, from an outsider looking in, you know, you see, especially nowadays, I mean, we're kind of talking about this this morning. I mean, you see a lot of, you just see so much a fucking animosity within the veteran community. It's a real fucking shame. And, man, like, the tasking of bruiser guys, man, I'm, you guys are fucking tight.

I mean, I'm not aware of any. You guys just seem really tight. And, you know, to have an employment like that with that kinetic, the loss that you guys have experienced and the respect, you know, that your guys have for you and that you have for them is truly fucking unmatched. Yeah, it was an honor. and it was the boys, you know. I've never seen anything like it.

When you asked me if I kind of knew what was happening in my first deployment, like I was in Baghdad, we were doing DAs, and I was like, yeah, I knew. And on this deployment, I really knew. Like, every day, I knew that every day this was going to be, this was the highlight of my life. This was the most thing out, this was the most, this was the highlight of my life. I knew it every single day. And every time I went out, every time I saw the boys off, I knew that this was the most important thing I would do in my life was this. And, you know, one thing that I leaned on, because, you know, you, there's the whole political aspect of this thing of like, oh, why were we there, what was it worth, all that kind of thing.

And one of the things that the brigade commander said to me as I was leaving. And, you know, he, we had a four-minute brigade meeting, of a 30-minute brigade meeting, he spent three minutes talking to me and, and, you know, kind of saying, hey, this group of seals is leaving us. The tasking to bruiser guys are gone. And, you know, he presented me with this, like, wooden tank. that they had made like a little cool little sculpture of a wooden tank which by the way the guy that was in charge of getting those tanks made was one of the brigade staff who was killed in combat but he said uh he said uh he said your guys kept hundreds of my soldiers and marines alive

When I got home and I talked to Mark's mom, I talked to Mikey's mom and talk to Ryan's mom, that's the one thing that I felt I could indisputably tell them about their sons. Politics, Iraq, al-Qaeda, whatever. your sons made sure that hundreds of American soldiers and Marines were able to go home to their families. And by the way, those soldiers and Marines made sure that my seals were able to come home to their families because the Kazavaks and the QRFs and the fire support was all them

every single time and tanks they lost nine main battle tanks so you think you're doing okay like i'm happy they sent set stone down to see me in a section of tanks but we lost nine tanks when we were there yeah and those guys sent those tanks out and those bradley's out and those soldiers and marines over and over again to support my guys casavac my guys extract my guys extract my guys fire support for my guys over and over and over again and the fact that we were able to repay that in some way killing IED in placers killing mortarmen killing RPG and machine gunners enemy it's it's at least I know that that's meaningful I know it's meaningful Mm-hmm.

Thanks for sticking with me on that, man. You want to take a break? Sure. Let's take a break. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing. what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind-the-scenes

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Let's get back to the show. All right, Jocko, we're back from the break. Nice shooting, man. Oh, right on. Nice shooting. But, so we're wrapping up tasking and bruises deployment. And, you know, one thing that I, one thing I wanted to ask is, and I think, you know, throughout the four or five hours I've been interviewing you, I think I know,

but I'm curious what your perspective is. Why do you think that your men have such a deep respect for you as a leader? Yeah, it's what I said earlier, you know, I treated them with respect. I listened to what they had to say. I put my trust in them. And when you give those things to people, they give them back. No, it's not a guarantee. They could be a nefarious bad person, you know?

And that happens. But those guys, they were just, you know, it's what the time. teams for me was always supposed to be and what it was you know that was that that was that is the teams to me when I think about the teams best job ever best guys ever and all my platoons I had like just great people and yeah i think you know kind of i think you know kind of i everything for me was kind of a bonus like you know i enlisted in the navy when i was 18 years old you know and now i'm an officer hadn't even been to college like that's a pretty cool bonus and now i get to lead troops in combat that's a pretty cool bonus now in in in Iraq that's a bonus and

tasking a bruiser in a in an incredible war zone it's just all a bonus and my point in in saying all that was it wasn't like I was going to be admiral you know what I mean like it wasn't I wasn't going to be admiral well I mean I guess I could have been admiral but I wasn't that wasn't my goal that was never that was never really something I too much about my career was really about just being with the platoons about the fucking job yeah yeah and the same reason you joined yes and i get it you know it's another thing when i was when i was the admiral's aid i saw what the admiral did you know and it was he had a great attitude about it you know on september 11th i think he started his job in the pentagon as an acquisitions

officer. And one thing he told me, he said when, when September 11th happened, I check into my job as the acquisitions officer, last job in the world I wanted to do, you know, because he joined, he probably got in the teams in 1976 or something, no Vietnam, I don't think he, no Gulf War. And now this big war starts, and he's in the Pentagon doing acquisitions. And he said, you know what, Jocko? I said, this is my foxhole. and I'm going to fight.

And that's what he did. And I think that attitude, regardless of where you are, you know, sometimes I get people that were in the military and they didn't deploy to combat. And they're like borderline ashamed about it. And I'm like, hey, man, you signed that dotted line and you did what your country needed you to do. So, you know, thank you for your service.

But, yeah, for me, I think that I really just love the teams. and the teams man every day was awesome why did you decide to separate I mean I think you kind of just said it but the reason I'm asking Jocko is

you know to have um and I mean this in the best most respectable way it is a real fucking shame for the SEAL teams for the Navy for the United States to lose a leader like you and so and you know there's a lot of frustrations I think you know there's a lot of there always has been there

always will be right there's a lot of frustrations but especially especially in the last eight years you know there's a lot of frustration um within you know the military ranks I hear it I'm sure you fucking hear it all the time too and and you know it seems like the best leaders, in my opinion, always wind up leaving early. It can definitely happen. I mean, we do have some amazing leaders in the SEAL teams. But, you know, for me personally, so I get done with that task unit. Come back, the Admiral who, you know, I had worked for was still in charge.

and you know he he he met me on the plane when we landed and he told me later that he's like when he got on the plane because he got on the plane like the plane lands he got on the plane's family or outside and he said when he saw me on the plane he was like oh like uh oh because bro we were you know we were in the game and you know at a certain point you you don't care about anything else. You know what I mean? And I was definitely at that point by a long shot. And, you know, of course, respectful to the admiral, said hi, and thanks for coming.

And I got off and I saw my family and he said, when I saw your family, I was like, I was like, he's going to be fine. And so he also said, where do you, what do you want to do? Like, it was awesome. you know and he when when mark died i talked to him when ryan was moved like he was he was just awesome supporting and again my whole chain of command you know the commodore the admiral my commanding officer like everyone the the senior enlisted guys because i knew all the all the senior enlisted master chiefs as well and everyone was just very very supportive and so when i got done with

that deployment, he, um, he said, where do you want to go? And I knew where I wanted to go because Ramadi was not over yet. And it, we saw like a glimpse of change, but they did some of the heaviest fighting after we left. And so I knew, because I had, I was in training cell at shield team one. And when I was in training cell at seal team one, I learned so much. And it was so important I realized how important it was to train and then having my guys Laif and Seth and the rest of the JOs and the e-dogs like bringing them up in the teams I knew that I needed to do that for more guys and so I knew that the one place that I could do that was going to trade it and so I said to the boss the admiral I said you know I want to go to

the trade at and he said cool and he gave me orders to trade at. And when I got there, it was exactly, you know, what I, and what I knew it was. You know, I knew that we had guys and, you know, we got home October 21st, or when we left Ramadi, October 21st, the guys from Team 5 that are depicted in the movie warfare,

that happened November 19th. So, you know, we had just left. And those guys got blown up. And yeah, Elliot and Joe, you know, got severely wounded, which was horrible. But I knew that that's what I need to prepare guys for. And I knew that there was no better place to do that than trade at. And so that's what I did. I went to trade at.

And, you know, it really turned out to be even better than I thought it was going to be. Because now, now I have so much context in my head about leadership, about combat leadership, about the big army, the Marine Corps, the Navy, the battle space, everything from CQC to recons, just every type of operation that we could do, I kind of, I felt pretty good about. And so I went in there and started teaching, you know, started teaching the leadership and started running training. And it was, it was awesome.

It was awesome to be a part of. It was awesome to, yeah, awesome. to be a part of and it was it was a little weird too um like we'd be doing mount training urban training and i'd be watching and i'd see like some new guy standing in the middle of the street and i would get like a like a sick like knot in my stomach and i would like go over to him and like bro get out of the street man you're going to get shot out here and like i really fuck man yeah it was it was definitely, you know, it was, it was perfect place for me to be because I cared about the guys more than anything. And I just had a bunch of experience with this exact thing

that everyone was going to do. So, you know, that's what I did. And when you asked me about why I, why I ended up retiring. So I showed up there and I was probably at like 17 years or something like that. And, you know, it was just, okay, this is what we're doing next, do this for a while. And then I started, there's one thing that I didn't like when I came home from deployment. When I was gone on that deployment to Ramadi, when I left, sorry, my first deployment to Iraq, when I left, my son couldn't crawl. When I got home, he could crawl and he could walk. So I was like, hmm, that sucks.

In Ramadi, which was, and I also, you know, of course you miss all the holidays, whatever. But then I, when I got home from Ramadi, he could swim. I remember asking my wife, like, who taught him how to swim? And she's like, oh, it was, you know, one of the lifeguards down at the base. And I'm like, dude, I'm a frog man. and someone else taught my son how to swim. That sucks. So that was like a little deposit in the back of my head.

And, you know, was it trade at and just, you know, we're gone all the time at trade up. And as I started to, and I got, you know, I, I, I had the luckiest career ever. I got, um, deep selected O four. Like I, I very, you know, everything had always gone well for me in my Navy career from you know, being selected for the semen admiral program in the first place, which was probably because I was Sailor of the Year at Steel Team 1 when I was an E5. Like, I'd been doing, I was on a very good trajectory.

But I also looked at it and I was like, okay, what's my next billet? And you started looking at the billets and like, there weren't jobs that I was super excited to go do. and then I was thinking, well, okay, what's after that job? And it turned out when I measured it out, I was about seven years at that time from being a, like a SEAL team CEO. And now, fast forward a little bit because I'd come home from Ramadi the War circle, but now it had started to like draw down. And I'm like, man, I could hold on for,

seven more years by that time it was like five more years and then what will i be doing okay but i love the teams but what about these people that live in your house you know who are these people that live in your house and why don't they really know you so i just did the random numbers mentally on what that was and I just decided I'd done 20 years I'm going to go focus on my family I did not focus on my family when I was in the SEAL teams at all the teams was I was married to the teams I was married to the teams and my wife and family came second and that's not I think I needed to give something to them. Maybe if I'd been more balanced, you know,

maybe I could have sorted it out, but I wasn't very balanced. I was in the teams, and I love the teams. And I felt like, yeah, if I can't give the teams everything, then it's probably not going to be the best thing. Do you still battle with that decision? Yeah.

Yeah, I do. I Yeah No shit Oh yeah When did you retire 2010 Fuck

15 years 15 years You're still battle in that decision Yep Why The teams gave me everything You gave the teams

Everything Yeah Yeah there's nothing better Than going to work in the teams you know you and I just got all giddy going out to dump some rounds out there you know what I mean you and me were kind of like in a different like we were like a couple kids out there and you and I used to do that all day every day until we were sick of it yeah you know so uh yeah and it was hard because I you know I had to go tell my chain of command and and it was hard for me to go tell the

admiral uh go tell the commodore then and then tell my teammates you know that that sucked because you're a quitter you know and i was not a quitter and now i'm going to quit when i left team one you know they used to say if you got out of the teams you're a quitter right and and i said uh when i left team one i said because i was an enlisted guy and i was going to become an officer. And I said, hey, the only thing worse than a quitter is a traitor. And I'm not going to the dark side, you know. But yeah, quitting the teams was, was bad. But at the same time, I, you know, I remember cleaned out my cage the last day. I had great, you know, I had great time at trade at. And, you know, it was, that's when Ryan, Ryan Job, who had been wounded so bad, he died from complications from his

medical stuff, you know, that was while I was at trade at. And, you know, again, that was one of those things where it was really, it almost like hooked me back in, you know, because just knowing that Ryan, you know, he's another guy. Like, he was blind, bro. And I talked to him on the phone, he's like, can I come back? He wants to come back to Ramadi. He can't see. He wants to come back to Ramadi. Like, this is the kind of guy that I'm going to abandon right now to get out of the Navy and do some other whatever, like nothing else matters. So that was, you know, another thing that kind of almost hooked to me. But again, I'd go home and see my, see my kids, see my son. You know, you have a, you know, three daughters and or, yeah, I had three daughters and one son

at this point. You go home and see them and they're like, what's your name again or who, who are you again? Like, that is an equal thing that's starting to pull. How old was your oldest she was born in 1999 so she was 11 wow yeah and my youngest doesn't even like no my son can remember because i would like he he was at he was on training trips as a young kid that's like a little kid he was hucking grenades and shooting machine guns and paint balls and all that stuff so he he remembers all that stuff stuff. Did you have a tough time integrating in with your family? Not really. Did they have a tough time integrating with you?

Not really. That's good. You don't hear that very often. Yeah, I always left my work at work, you know. I always tell, like, police officers and military people, like, take your uniform off when you go home, don't leave it on, take it off and put on a pair of, you know, for me, it's flip-flop surf shorts and a t-shirt and be in that mode as opposed to. to keeping your uniform on. So I felt like it was pretty, yeah.

Another weird thing that always freaked out, like Leif and Seth, that I never swore in front of my family. Yeah, I would, and meanwhile, in the teams, you know, every third word was an F-bomb, and I'd come home and just never swear. Because it's almost like I had a, you know, like a mental deviation when I went home

and I was that guy. And then at work, I was the team guy. And I wish I could do that. But maybe I can't try harder. But, I mean, did you struggle with, did you struggle with the transition? I mean, we both know a lot of guys struggle with the transition. Did you have any plan when he got out? I didn't really have.

My plan was to surf, train jih Tjitsu, and hang out with my wife and kids. That was my plan. That's a good plan. And, you know, and then I opened a jihad, Jitsu gym. So I figured I'd be able to teach Jiu Jitsu and hang out, surf with my kids, surf, and that's what my plan was. Probably about six months before I retired, I had a friend that owned a big company and he asked me to come and talk to his executive team about leadership. And I knew him from Jitsu. I was like, yeah, cool. And I went up and I gave like the kind of, like, the kind of

leadership brief that I gave to the SEAL platoons. And I think in his mind, I was going to get up and be like, you need to do pushups or whatever. And all of a sudden, I'm talking about decentralized command and taking ownership and prioritized and execute and all these things. And then they start Q&A and they start asking me about leadership. And I'm answering all these questions. And by the time I got done, he's like, I want you to talk to every division I have in my

company. And I was like, well, I'm retiring. And, you know, when he's like, I will pay you. And I was like, well, he's like, oh, let's make a deal. I said, okay. So I started going around talking all of his divisions. And at one of those divisional meetings, his, the CEO of the parent company was there. And the guy came up to me afterwards and said, I want you to come talk to all my CEOs.

And he owned like 45 or 50 companies at the time. And I went and did that. And then it just started happening. And I eventually was getting like business, you know. and Laif had gotten out of the Army, the Navy, the Army, Laf had gotten out of the Navy and he was like kind of considering going to law school, I think at the time and his wife was, you know, gainfully employed at Fox News and, you know, I was like, hey man, I need some fire support over here and he's like, we want to do a leadership company.

And I kind of talked about it with him before because when I started talking, talking to these civilian companies, I realized that everything I had learned about leadership applied to all leadership. It wasn't unique to combat. It was, it was leadership was leadership. And once I realized that, I realized that I had something that would be useful for a lot of people. And so then, like I said, it just grew word of mouth. And from there, this is kind of how all this stuff eventually happened because as Laif and I would talk to different companies and they would come up afterwards and be like, hey, do you have this stuff written down anywhere? Do you have a pamphlet you can give us? And so we wrote it down. And then I want to,

I think one of Laif's wife's friends or something was a literary agent was like, this could be a book type thing. And so we wrote a book proposal. And yeah, the book agent shopped it around. And one of the people, I think the third, fourth, fourth or fifth person at St. Martin's Press was like, we'll take it. And so we wrote the book and, you know, the book came out and it was really did well. Yeah, it did. Yeah. It did really fucking well. Yeah. Yeah. Man. And then, I mean, you've created, I mean, I think I counted seven businesses. I'm probably off. But am I off? You get the podcast, Extreme Ownership, the kid's book, which is going to be a movie, Origin, Jocco Fuel. Fuck, what am I missing?

Jocco publishing. Jocco publishing. Yeah. The soccer club. Yeah, yeah. Jiu-Jitsu, Jim. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Get some stuff. You lost count. Yeah. Yeah, I look at it and people ask me about this. So the podcast. thing. You know, I went on Roe, I went on Tim Ferriss's podcast. And when we got done, he said, hey, dude, you should start a podcast. And then I went on Joe Rogan heard that podcast and was like, invited me on his podcast. And this was 2015. Like, podcasts weren't really a thing yet.

Yeah, you're, you're, you are an OG podcast. Yeah. I mean, way before anybody even knew what the hell it was. Yeah. I think, I think the numbers at the time there was about 15% of the population of America was listening to podcasts. I don't know if it's 100% now, but it's pretty much everybody. But I went on Rogan in the middle of Rogan show. He's like, you should start a podcast. Of course, Rogan tells that to everybody. But he told me that. And I said, well, so I got Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, like two massive podcasts or tell me I should start a podcast. So I talked to my buddy Echo Charles. I said, do you know how to do this? And he said, I'll figure it out. And then next day he came back and was like, all right, I know how to do this. And I said, cool.

He said, can I be on it? And I said, what are you going to do? And he said, you be Jocko and be normal. And I was like, okay, cool. And so that's how the podcast started. And then once a podcast started, it was just, you know, people would ask me about, like, what kind of supplements I used. And I was like, well, here's what I would like to use, you know, and why don't I make what I like? And then people would ask me about jihitigis and my, there was a company up in Maine, you know, New England where I'm from and this guy Pete was up there making jujitsu geese 100% in America and I was like, get those kind of geese because those are American made. And I ended up linking up with him and origin kind of took off and Jock Fuel kind of took off.

And it was just, yeah. And then the kids books were somewhere in there. You know, I, there's, I went, I was trying to get my son. My son was not like a reader, right? was his little kid so i went to try and find him like something that he might be interested in right and i picked up this book and it was like a pirate book and i was like cool you know pirates what young boy isn't going to be into pirates and i read this this book and it was the lamest weakest most pathetic pirates ever and i'm like yeah i'm not going to read this to my son

And I just decided I'll write my own books for kids. And so, and the idea of the first warrior kid book was just like immediately in my mind. The whole thing, like start to finish. I had the whole thing in my mind almost immediately. And it's a real, it seems obvious, right? Like there's a kid, like all kids, who can't do any pull-ups, doesn't know his time stables, doesn't know how to swim. and he's getting picked on by the school bully, right?

That's, you go to anyone, any kid in the world, they've got one of those problems or a problem like those problems. And so I put those problems in the book, and then I brought in a character, Uncle Jake, who's a seal, who is going to come stay with, you know, the family for the summer, and he's going to teach this kid how to fight, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to study, and how to swim. and that's the first book and it you know the feedback of all the you know of all the things that

I'm currently doing getting feedback from like a 10 year old kid that says writes me a letter and says I did my first pull up or I got an A on this math test or I started training Jiu-Jitsu and I did my first competition those are the most epic things to receive I love that man yeah there's that's awesome yeah there's not a lot of uh oh there i should shouldn't say that there is a lot of guidance out there in the world right now not a lot of it is good guidance you know and so the values that kids should be receiving in many cases they're not receiving so i tried to give it to them in a fun way they're funny books uh but they're powerful too when did the first one come out i think it was two i think it was 2007

because I was almost done writing it as extreme ownership was coming out. Okay. That's pretty cool, man. Yeah, yeah. You're touching a lot of people. I know you know that. I would venture to guess that you, it's hard to, it's hard to,

it's hard to grasp that. and uh but you're a huge motivation for me and um i hear about you all the time and and it's man i just i just it's fucking cool what you're doing you're pumping a lot of good into the world you're pumping a lot of what people need into the world whether it's adults or children and and um man there's just there's just um there's just that that many great role models for young people to look up to these days and you're one of them and that's fucking cool well like I said I had some great role models in the teams um and left me with some you know especially the guys that I lost you know those guys were just great great role models

and you know um sometimes people ask like if having kids made you more nervous about going to war and for me it didn't like I felt like happy that I had kids and Mikey and Mark you know they they didn't then they didn't have kids man and it's you know it breaks my heart and and luckily Ryan you know Brian before he died he his wife got pregnant and that's just awesome to see but you know passing on what example those guys were and you know the the the character in this book right here, the warrior kid book,

the main character is named Mark. And there's another book I wrote for kids called Mikey and the Dragons. And clearly the main character in that book is named Mikey. And so those guys doing my best to make sure that, you know, people remember them

and learn some of those things that represent their values of what they were like as people. So it's an honor to be able to share their memories and make sure that their names are never forgotten. And this is turning into a movie. Yes, it is. Yes, the movie has been filmed.

And it will be coming out next year. That's awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, it was a pretty interesting experience to see, and a pretty awesome experience. Is it an animation? Nope, it's real people. No, are you in it?

I am in it. Yep. Fuck, yeah, man, that's awesome. I'm in it, but I don't play Uncle Jake. Uncle Jake is played by Chris Pratt. So, and, you know, Uncle Jake and Chris Pratt, Chris Pratt's just, just such a great guy. Is he? Oh, he's an unbelievable guy.

Just, just, the first time I met him, I was going to UFC with Jack Carr and some of the other actors from the terminal list. It was like the promotion for the Terminalist, and I didn't know, I didn't know Chris Pratt at all. But I'm kind of like going and, you know, I'm like, oh, you know, I'm going to meet this Hollywood guy or whatever. And just super humble, super nice, super cool, self-deprecating humor and super charismatic. Like, there's a reason why that guy is who he is, you know, funny, charismatic, just cool. And so I was really, really stoked. And what happened was he had, we were, we were kind of connected on, through Jared, who was training him to get him in shape for terminal list.

And while he was training him, he was giving him jaco fuel. And so he really liked the taste of jocco fuel and how it impacted him, got him in shape for that movie. And then he also was like wearing origin clothes because he's a patriotic guy. He wanted America Made because now Origin makes jeans and t-shirts and hoodies and boots and we make everything. and he wanted to support America. And then he had a little break in between work, movies.

And he was talking to his business people and they're like, hey, you know, you need to find some more sponsors and this kind of thing. And he goes, you know, why am I out looking for sponsors when like I like Jocko fuel and I like origin? Why don't I connect with Jock? Because he met me one, you know, I met that guy. He seemed nice enough or whatever. So he called me.

And he said, hey, man. And I was like in the mountains and he said, hey, do you want to do something with Jocco Fuel and origin? I'm like, hmm, sure, you know, it's pretty awesome. And so we ended up connecting on that. And as our business teams were working through the business deal to kind of figure out what that looked like, I had been starting down the process of making the movie with a guy from Hollywood who had walked into his kids.

bedroom and his kids were doing push-ups. And he's like, what do you, what are you guys doing? They're like, we want to be warriors. We want to be warrior kids. He's like, what are you talking about? And he gave the kids, gave, gave their dad, this guy, Ben Everard, the book and said, like, we want to be a warrior kids, like this guy. So he reads the book and he's like, oh, I got to get this turned into a movie. And so he, friend of a friend of a friend, searched me out, came to my gym. And I had been offered like to buy the movie rights to warrior kid, I don't know, like maybe four or five times, but that's a real weird thing anyways. But he came down to my gym and set of a meeting with me and said, I want to talk you about this.

And he like got the vision, saw the vision. So he and I had been, we'd gotten the screenplay written from a screenplay writer named Will Staples. So we kind of started moving. Meanwhile, I'm talking to Chris Pratt about origin and jocco fuel, right? And Ben is like, you got to get Chris this script. And I'm like, dude, I am not giving Chris the script. I'm like, I'm not doing that because he was like a friend, you know? I'm not like a, I mean, at the time, I didn't know him that well, but he was like a friend.

And I just, you didn't want to ask him for shit. Bro, I don't want to ask him. You know how many people, these Hollywood people? Could you just could you? Yeah. Yeah. So I just didn't. I'm like, I'm not giving it to him.

Well, my business team had told his business team. Yeah, well, you know, Jonko's, he's making this movie. They're like, well, what movies he make? Well, why don't we know about that? And it was making a kid's movie, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, well, where's it at? Well, he's got the screenplay. So they give my business team, gives his business team the screenplay.

And they read it. And they're like, okay, this is good. And they gave it to Chris's film manager. And it's a woman named Julie. And I found this out later. They called Julie Dr. No. because she says no to everything. And so, but she got this script and she read it.

And when I met her for the first time, the first big meeting we had about trying to make this happen, she was in the room and she met me, she was super cool. She's like, my dad listens to you, or my husband listens to your podcast, my kid listened to your podcast. Like she was, she knew kind of the background. And she said, I got done reading this script. I wiped the tears from my eyes

and I sent it to Chris and said, you better make this movie. No shit. And then Chris said, he said, yeah, I read the script and I was like, okay, we're going to do this.

And then I wish it was as easy as I just said it because then, you know, the cool thing is, Chris and I shook hands. We're going to do this. And that handshake encompassed origin,

it encompassed Jocco Fuel and it encompassed the movie. And two guys, we shook hands. And that handshake held the whole thing together because, bro, you get into this Hollywood and lawyers and ownership and it was crazy. But that handshake and, you know, him being a good person and a man of his word and me being a man of my word. And despite all the chaos, we got through. And now Chris

is like a part owner of Jocko Fuel, a part owner of Origin USA. And he plays Uncle Jake in the movie way of the warrior kid. That is awesome, man. that's a hell of a story yeah it's I can't wait for it to come out when does it come out sometime next year okay it's it's weird but the way they make movies um and the time it takes for them to then edit and assemble it and then the the uh advertisement of it the marketing of it takes months and months and so you know they wanted to be released in a big season you know because they think it's going to be a big movie because it's it's i've seen like i've seen it you know not a fully edited version but i've seen it and it's it's awesome it is it is awesome

congratulations it'll make you laugh it'll make you cry it'll it's really powerful very cool yeah yeah man that's what i'm talking about man i mean everybody i don't talk to anybody that's happy about what's going on in hollywood what's being pumped into the theaters what's on that's nobody and so to see like something like that you know what i mean come out that's like i mean that's a feat in itself you know and so and then and then you know congratulations yeah yeah it was um you know skydance eventually came in it's skydance and apple and you're right it's a movie that we haven't seen this type of movie in a long time you know the kind of movie that's going to leave that impact on on and it's i'm telling you like everyone in the family the parents

will love it the kids will love it yes old school family good entertainment yep that you're probably going to learn something from yes indeed so yeah kudos to you yeah let's talk about origin that's a fucking awesome company yeah it really is man it really is and you know growing up in new England in the 70s and 80s, and this is when everything was being sold overseas. All the, all the big corporations just took and gutted all the American factories, literally took the machines out of them and sold them overseas and started making stuff overseas so that they could make more money for the corporate headquarters. And it just gutted a lot of, a lot of New England.

It gutted a lot of the southeast, you know, the big textile mills just got annihilated. And I mentioned this earlier, but when I had the podcast and I was talking to people about Jiu-Jitsu a lot and people were asking, where should I get a Jiu-Jitsu ghee? And I had seen this company origin, this guy Pete Roberts was up there and he was making these geese in America, 100% in America. And so I started telling everyone, hey, if you got to get a ghee, get an origin geese. And I started trying to reach out to him to see if I could meet him or find out what's going on. And I had never heard back from him. And finally, I was on a Facebook live one day.

And somebody asked me, hey, what kind of ghee should I get? And I said, yeah, I get an origin Gea. Go to origin. I think it was Origin Maine at the time. OriginMain.com. And that guy makes stuff in America. And by the way, if anyone here can find that guy, I think he said, his name is Pete, tell him I want to talk to him. And a woman that was on that, who I since got to know named Sarah like used her contacts and got in touch with him and said hey there's this guy jaco he wants to talk to you he's got a huge podcast and pete says what what's a podcast because he's up in Maine that's awesome so eventually we link up and we have a conversation and I could see you know he's just a patriotic guy that's trying to rebuild manufacturing in America I flew up to Maine

we same thing as a matter of fact we had a stake and we had a handshake and we we we teamed up and basically you had he had this ability to manufacture and I had an ability to talk to people and so those two things together were like a perfect storm when we joined forces I want to say there was like six employees at origin making it it was something like a hundred garments a week and right now we've got almost 500 employees and we make like 15,000 to 20,000 garments a week So it's a totally different ballgame. And it's awesome because, you know, we have, we had lost the ability to manufacture in America and the corporations just lied.

Because they'd say we can't do this in America. They would literally say, we can't make this in America. We can't do that. This is America. You tell me we can't make things in America. This is what, this is how, this is how we won wars. This is how we won World War II. We made stuff in America

So don't tell me We can't make a pair of jeans in America Just like they've been saying For the past 10 years That we can't make any Of these electronic components in America We'll look who's coming back now Right

So it's an awesome company Got You know we're gonna continue to grow It's hard It's very hard Especially because we're so strict About American Made So you know

You gotta get the cotton Where's the cotton coming from Where's literally everything literally everything, the zipper, the boots, these, these rivets, everything that with the soul, everything, the thread is 100% made in America. And if we can't find a component that's made in America, we either make it ourselves or we'll find someone that we can convince to make it. Wow. You have to do, you have to hold the standard. And it's good to see. Other people are coming back to America now. Good. Good. Bring it back. This is what we should

be doing. This is how we rebuild our country. This is how we rebuild America. And if we don't have the ability to make things to be self-sufficient we will lose so it's a huge part of it's a huge part of me of how i feel i can give back to what this country's given me you definitely lead by example that's for damn sure you put your fucking mouth where your money is and that's awesome it's hard to find these days yeah well i mean that's literally what you just said we we put all of our money back into these businesses. All of it. You know, now we have four factories. Like we, we put all of it back in there. And, and we bet on it, you know, this is, this is where we put our, our soul is into these companies because we believe in them. And we're

patriotic. We love America. We love the people we work with. And this is what we have to do. Once again, congratulations. yeah yeah and then out of that spawned jaco fuel because you know one of the guys at origin Brian he had worked in the supplement industry and he was like hey you know we we can make supplements we do jihitsu and they had like made some supplements before and do you how would you feel about making supplements and I said I if we can make them good and healthy yes I I I Look, I've been overseas drinking Red Bull and Reddit and rip it and whatever freaking tiger's blood they were giving us over there.

And that stuff's just not healthy. Yeah. And so I didn't, and I, you know, we talk about people that, we talk about like veterans. You know, you were mentioned veterans that are, you know, I know, I know you had some friends that had some bad experiences with drug addiction, alcohol addiction. Bro, I have friends that were drinking five, six, seven, eight monsters a day. That's, that's horrible. And so we started the jocco fuel and, you know, we just kept things as clean as we possibly could.

And, you know, believe it or not, there's a market for it. Believe it or not, Americans want to be healthy. And we probably timed it very well because as COVID came out and people got more concerned about their health, people were paying attention. Is that the latest flavor? That's one of the latest flavors, yeah. Yeah, I give it a, can I try it? Yeah, yeah, there you go, man.

It's a little iced tea lemonade. Ice tea lemonade. It's pretty damn good. Yeah. Yeah, and it's no artificial sweeteners. We had to, this is the extent that we go. So when you make a drink like this, you've got to put preservatives in it so that it has shelf life.

Mm-hmm. Well, those preservatives, as you might imagine, might not be too good for you. And I wanted to figure out a different way. And so Brian figured out a way to pasteurize it. In other words, you like basically cook it. So anything that could be in there that would interfere with its shelf life won't be in there anymore.

It'll be dead. No shit. And so we had to find a line. We had to wait like nine months to get a company that, you know, bottles these or cans these to put a, align in to pasteurize them so that we could make them as healthy as possible. That's like what we're doing across the board. And, yeah, that's what we're doing, man.

That's awesome, dude. What, you know, we're kind of wrapping up the interview here, Jock. But, you know, originally I'd reached out to you several months ago. And I had saw a tweet that you put out on X about our mutual friend now, Braxton McCoy, about the, the land grab and um you know like like i had mentioned we'd never met but i've always been watching you from afar and that tweet basically all you said i think is pay attention to this guy so looked him up paid attention to him saw the the sale of public land and i was like

fuck it let's bring him in here maybe we can have an impact on this and you know collaboratively we did it got pulled yep and um a huge deal man yeah thanks for doing that it's my pleasure yeah and thanks to braxton that guys yeah what a dude yeah but um but you know i just especially ever since covid you know i think whatever everybody knows you know things aren't things aren't going great and uh and you've you you just always a a a voice of reason And a stoic, a voice of reason that makes a lot of sense. And so I just want to ask you, you know, what are some of the top things on your mind on what's going on in our country and what are we doing wrong?

What do we need to get back to? Yeah, I think there's a lot of amplification of emotions and ego that happens through online platforms. So through social media, right? And when that happens, when you're not interacting with another human being, but you're interacting with a, you know, a fake human being or a bot or someone that you can actually see or talk to and someone that it's very easy for you to say, oh, this person's bad or you just ignore what their perspective is, which is what I talked about, whatever, how many hours ago we started this thing is understanding other people's perspectives and knowing that people see the

world differently man like and there's a reason that someone sees it that way and instead of just saying the way that they see the world is bad and the way I see the world is good or the way they see the world is wrong and the way I see the world is right saying like oh it's interesting that they see the world that way I wonder why And as I've said, this whole podcast, if you listen to what other people have to say, they're going to listen to you more. If you say, shut up, you're wrong. They're never going to listen to a word that you have to say.

But if you say, hey, what makes you think like that? And they explain it to you. And instead of you try and figure out where they're wrong, try and figure out where they're right. And in most cases, in most cases, there'll be some kind of common ground. In most cases. Hey, are there some people that are just evil? Yeah. If you're ISIS or you're like a communist,

it's probably going to be hard to find some common ground. But if you're in between those and, I mean, I've, I mean, I guess like I said, you can say ISIS. But most people, you say, oh, you got family? Do you want your kids to have a nice place to live almost all people will say yeah almost all people will say yeah well I want them to you know be healthy so at least we have that common ground now so if we if we look for that as opposed to looking for all the reasons why I should hate you and you should

hate me I just that's that's not beneficial so and I think social media amplification so and I think Social media amplifies a lot of that, and also social media is not real, right? And so people will say, are our country so divided? Yeah, on Twitter it is. But I talk to people, I travel all the country. I have a leadership consulting business. I work with companies of every description. Energy companies with people out on oil rigs, construction companies with people pouring concrete,

finance companies in New York where they're doing deals for billions of dollars and everyone in between. And the vast majority of people that I meet are like, what are they focused on? Oh yeah, they want to take care of their family. They want to do a little bit better at work. They want to make some more money. They want to be healthy. That's what people are doing. And it's very strange that we forget about that. And as I travel around the country and I meet all these different people, I see people that they have common goals. They have common goals. And if they have the same common goal as me, how we get there, you know, we'll try and figure out the best solution. And I don't see a lot of that. You know, if you say something that I disagree with,

I hate you. And that's, that doesn't, that doesn't bode well. But like I said, I think for the most part, that's online. Now look, you can go show me, we can go look at riots in the streets of people that are, you know, actively trying to hurt other people. Like, okay, yep, you're right. That's, there are people that are out there

on the fringes for sure. But that's a small group. There's 350 million people in America. You want to show me a riot that has 3,000 people in it? Yeah, that's bad. But it's not America. And so I would say,

open your eyes open your ears listen more try and understand other people's perspectives try and figure out where you can agree with them which can be difficult but usually you can and if you can can listen to what they have to say and ask earnest questions about what they believe a lot of times you can figure out oh yeah there's some common ground i understand them a little bit better now And maybe I can, maybe I can move a little bit. And maybe I can help them see something that I see because they actually want to hear my perspective now. Barking at people and trying to shove your perspective down their throat might feel good

at the time, but it doesn't change any minds. So. It's a great perspective. Do you think this is happening because of the absence of the human connection, because of social media? Social media certainly amplifies it, but also it's the way the algorithm is constructed. The algorithm is constructed. When I see something that makes me emotional, I share it.

So your goal is to post something that makes me feel emotional. What's the easiest emotion to trigger in me? Anger. It's definitely anger because it's hard to pull. my heartstrings. You don't really know me. You don't know what, like maybe if I had a dog that I lost, but you don't know that. Or maybe I had, you know, whatever, something happened to me in my past and oh, that, thank you for sending me that. It's good. Makes me, you know, connect with these emotions. That's hard to do. But how hard is it to make me mad? It's not hard at all. You know, I'm a military

guy. You can figure out 20 things out of the gate, right? Fini figure 20 things out of the gate. That can make me mad if I'm a normal person. If I'm a normal, you know, military. person or if you're a no what is it you can tell me 15 things right now that will make a conservative mad and you can tell me 15 things that will make a liberal mad and so if you want to get reactions make people mad and so that's what the algorithm is set up for and when you make me mad i share it if i have a strong opinion about it i share it and so that's what the algorithm does it just amplifies strong emotions and strong emotions aren't a good way to make decisions. And the strong emotions become polarizing. And so when

people are polarized, they're not listening anymore. And everything I just talked about goes out the window. There's been a lot of talk about, I mean, I see it all over your comments section. There's something, there's fucking hashtags about a jocko for president. I mean, do you see yourself ever getting involved in U.S. politics? I certainly hope not. I don't, I don't really have any desire to do that. And I don't, I think that, I mean, I think that, I guess it just depends. You know, because every time you think that things will settle down, the pendulum will go swinging back in the other direction and back in the other direction.

So I certainly hope not, man. I don't like politics. I don't think I, I don't think I would like to do that. I don't think you would like to do that either. You know? But I think that's. That's the problem. Yeah.

There's everybody that's in there, there's nothing else they'd rather be doing than sitting on their fucking ass on the floor of Congress or the Senate or higher. Yeah, well, hopefully we get some of these term limits and things like that because career politicians are definitely problematic. And, but who knows? That means they have to vote themselves out of a job. What are the chances of that? From slim to none.

Slim to none. But, you know, you get the Warrior Kids series movie coming out. The upcoming generation is Generation Z. They get a lot of shit. You know, what are your, what are your thoughts on Gen Z? What do they need to be looking out for? What's your advice to them? Yeah.

I think when I look at it, I forget, it's actually, I think Gen A, Gen Alpha is now, I want to say those are teenagers right now. Okay. It's like Zen Alpha, Gen Alpha, and then Gen Z is sort of above them, maybe 20s? You think that's right? I think Gen Z's, they're entering the workforce and are already in the workforce. Yeah, man. This is America.

And you can do, can you can, can you do anything you want? Nope. No, you can't do anything you want, but you have a lot of opportunity in this country. You know, I was talking to a kid the other day. and I was just like man he's in the fire department and you know like there's a salary cap in the fire department right and I said hey man like save your money figure out something else you can do you in the fire department you got time to do other things what do you do in your spare time right there I already know you're not doing much so what can you do and I kind of said you know like

We're at my gym and I said, look, see all this? I go, all this was just like an idea at some point. Just a little tiny idea with no true value whatsoever. Nothing. And here you are in a gym. And that's the same for everything that I have in my life. Everything was just like nothing. But if you apply it and you execute on it, now all of a sudden they start to grow value.

And so, you know, it's always surprising to me that the opportunity that we have in this country. So are you going to get it given to you? No. Is it going to take hard work? Yes. Will you have setbacks? Yes, you will. Yes, you will.

Enjoy it. Enjoy it. Like, this is what, uh, here's a gen alpha tour, term lore. You heard this lore? No. So like creating lore. So, like, creating lore. you're, if you look at when you have problems, those problems are how you create lore about

what you did with your life, the kind of thing you can tell your grandkids, the kind of things you can tell your kids. Hey, this is what happened. Oh yeah, I remember, I remember when I had my wife and my four kids in a 934 square foot house. That's lore, man. My kids are kind of fired up for that. Like, there was two girls sharing a bedroom. I took the converted garage and split it in half, one for my son and one for my youngest daughter. That's what we're doing. That's cool. At the time, would I rather had, you know, some mansion? Sure. But that wouldn't got me no lore. So when you go through challenges, you face things in life, look at as an opportunity to make some lore for your existence. It's going to be a struggle. But with America, if you work

hard, you will be rewarded. And you're going to, look, it's not like a guarantee. But if you work hard, you have to make sure you're playing the right game, too. So I had this conversation with a guy, actually two guys consecutively a few years ago. And they were both hard workers in two totally separate industries, two hard workers, working very hard and not able to get to where they wanted to go. And they're putting in, you know, 50-hour week, 60-hour week, 70-hour weeks, like really getting after it. And I said, hey, listen, if that's what's happening, you've got to check what game you're playing.

Because if you put a lot of effort, the example I use was soccer and basketball, if you put a lot of effort into basketball, how many points can you score in a game? 30, 40, 50? You get 50 points in one game. as an individual player. If you're playing soccer, how many points can you get in a game? Maybe one or two. So if you realize that you're not getting

the points that you want to get, you might have to say, I need to get into a different game. So you have to be smart. Hard work isn't rewarded solo. You have to also, you know, detach, look around and say like, okay, is this game that I'm playing

the right game to get where I want to go? So you have to keep that in mine too. But this is America. If you play the game and you play the right game and you play it hard, you're going to end up in a good spot, which is all we could ever ask for. Another great point. Another great point. Last question. If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would they be? I would say, first I'll give you the easy shot. JP to know.

Next I'll go Debbie Lee and then I'll go Johnny Clark who was a Marine in Vietnam and he was a grunt and you know our

our special operations guys get a lot of credit, well-deserved. But sometimes, oftentimes, and I tried to give as much credit as I could today to our conventional Army and Marine Corps brothers and sisters that fought. But it's, they don't often get the credit that they deserve. And Johnny Clark wrote a book called Guns Up when he got back from Vietnam. He got wounded three times, the third time he got wounded when he finally got pulled out, he had lost like 40 pounds, 35 or 40 pounds patrolling in the jungle for 14 days, 17 days,

20 days at a time. And he just, he's an incredible guy. It's a legendary book in the Marine Corps. You know, I got to shout out guns up. I did that event for the Marine Corps birthday up in Camp Pendleton. And I was able to get a guns up. Semperfy, happy birthday, Semperfy, guns up. But Johnny Clark, just an amazing guy and has had a really incredible voyage in his life

that I think would, I think everyone would be blessed to be able to hear his story. And I think that it would give a lot of people credit. But, you know, we've, I had the honor of bringing a lot of the SAG guys into the forefront for the things that they did in Vietnam and most certainly, you know, the most epic guys. But I always want to remember these grunts, the infantrymen. Thank you for saying that. And by the way, you did a fantastic job giving those guys credit. I talk about the exact same thing on here. a lot about those guys never get the credit they deserve you talk a lot about special operations

non-profits and it's like yeah great we got another one we don't fucking need anymore these guys need them you know and and um so it's pretty fucking cool you're doing that and and uh that that actually is a segment that i planned on cover and but it could slip my mind is the sod guys i mean i started interviewing this year a couple of Vietnam guys and got inspired from what you and John Stryker Meyer are doing over there and

and you know and and for me I mean those guys that is that is the generation that motivated me that made me want to want to serve the country go to war and ultimately you know become a seal and

man those guys are fucking something aren't they Yeah, as I've told John Stryker Meyer, and I've told the rest of them, like, as a, as a task unit commander, I wouldn't approve, I wouldn't have approved any of those missions. I'm like, yo, you're going out where? Wait, across enemy lines. You got three Americans and four Vietnamese and you're going out there into wherever with no ground support. You sure about that? Those guys were in a different, a different breed.

Yeah, they are. God bless them all, man. They were just, just epic. And like I said, the infantry grunts in, in Vietnam, they were what they suffered through. And, you know, it's a small percentage of them, right? Just like any of these wars, there's a small percentage of people that fight them. There's a lot of people in the military. There's a small percentage of people that fight those wars and the grunts in, in Vietnam.

You know, even Hackworth, Hackworth, who was in, he was at the end of World War II. He didn't really fight in World War II, but he was there for the end of it, Korea, like full on in Korea and Vietnam. And he said that the Vietnam soldiers had the worst conditions, which is coming from a guy that was speaking from a place

where he could make a statement like that. So the grunts from Vietnam, Johnny Clark guns up. Yeah, if you could, I'm sure he'd be honored to come on here and share his story of, of his life which is like i said it's an epic story right on we'll reach out well jaco thank you again for being here man and and um like i said man it it thank you for for taking that trip with me today i know that was really fucking tough um but you know the beginning of this we prayed uh that this would breach the right people and that this interview would would touch a lot of people

and it's going to man and you're just a hell of a guy super thankful that we connected it's an honor to be able to share these guys stories you know again not just my guys but the whole team that was there and you know again I talked about me talking about these little fractions of guys

small group in Ramadi that was my guys and there was all kinds of those guys but man you talk about there was guys all over Iraq there was guys all over Afghanistan that were in terrible situations suffered through so much and they sacrificed for what we have and what we're we have the opportunity and that opportunity is based on the sacrifices that these men and women have made and you know you asked me right before a break right right as we took a break you were like you okay and I said yeah and

And I did a podcast with a guy named Tom Fife. And Tom Fife was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And he got a purple heart in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And I was talking to him, and we talked about World War II, and he got commissioned for Korea. And by the time he was in Vietnam, he was a battalion commander. And we were talking through the different types of missions and all good. And, um, we got, I, I just was curious about, you know, what, what the operations were like. And I ended up saying, you know, well, how many casualties did you take as a battalion commander?

And he got choked up. And I was sitting there watching him get choked up and I was like, oh, this is 50 years ago. And he's getting choked up thinking about his guys. And that was a moment for me that I realized, that's okay. And I think we've been told that there's something wrong with us, but there's not. Like, you get sad when you think about your friends, it's okay. You get a tear in your eye when you hear the national anthem. It's all right, man.

and you sometimes spend a little too much time thinking about something that you went through, it's okay. And I think it's important for us, our generation of veterans, to recognize you went through some tough stuff. Think about it sometimes. It's hard.

And that's okay, man. That's okay. Thank you. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. God bless you, man. Back at you. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you. Appreciate it.