Jocko Podcast 168 w/ SEAL Master Chief, Jason Gardner Pt.2: Lessons on Leadership and Life

this is jaco podcast number 168 with echo Charles and me Jocko willing good evening echo good evening Beowulf spoke wise sir do not grieve it is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning for every one of us living in this world means waiting for our end let whoever can win glory before death when a warrior is gone that will be his best and only bulwark so arise my Lord and let us immediately set forth on the trail of this troll dam I guarantee you she will not get away not to dens underground nor upland groves nor the ocean floor she'll have nowhere to flee to endure your troubles today bear up and be the man I expect you to be and there is some more Beowulf to start this podcast and it's an interesting note that Beowulf the poem started not as a written poem but a poem passed on as a story from generation to generation of the pagan anglo-saxon warrior people it was part of their oral history and their oral tradition and that's basically what we're doing here capturing stories from our modern day warrior people which we are continuing with today during part two of my brother Jason Gardner part one was the last podcast number 167 so if you haven't listened to that one just stop listening to this one right now go back and listen to 167 and then when you get done with that you can come back and hear the rest of it and if you have listened to 61 67 well here we go we're gonna start kind of where we left off what's up Jason not much I'm happy to be here check so we left off yesterday you had basically you'd stayed at team 3 you're gonna do an ops tour an ops task unit ops tour but then you made senior chief mm-hmm and then that's where we left off so you get done with that and where'd you go SEAL team seven going over to the senior enlisted Academy and knock that out because that is basically a prerequisite for making een ein but it's difficult to get away from NSW for the exact of course that one was six weeks there's two of them there's another one that's three months and it's just trying to cram that in it is difficult so made sense to go then and then they they popped me over for a troop senior enlisted advisor over its SEAL Team seven and so for people that don't know what that means you're going into a task unit you're tasked would you guys have a two platoon task unit or was it we did it was to check and that means explain your position of senior enlisted advisor in a SEAL task unit so there are two seal platoons which are the two manoeuvre elements and then over the top of the seal platoons there's myself I was a senior chief at the time and then there was a lieutenant commander at the time it was the task unit commander it was the same position you add in teams and then you were the senior enlisted guy in there and I was actually looking at one of my old briefs at leadership briefs from the teams and I don't you remember this because I haven't I don't do it when I do it for civilians now but I used to do the roles and responsibilities of everyone inside the task unit and be like okay this is what the task of the commanders should be doing this is what the senior enlisted guys should be doing and a key word there is this one a platoon chief you should be doing and this is what a platoon commander should be doing one of the key words there should be because there's a lot of leeway depending on personalities and what skill sets people have and sometimes people are capable of doing a part of someone else's job but they're maybe not so great at doing something they should be doing so you got to figure that out inside of a platoon I used to say that when you take a platoon if you take a platoon you've got to get to like you could pick a number like you've got to get to a level 10 with the top for leadership meaning the LPO the assistant platoon commander the platoon commander and the platoon chief you those they have to have a number equal to ten like you can't have a bunch of guys that are once because that's only a four but you can if you have a chief that's an eight well then cool it's like doesn't really matter that the platoon commander is not that great or the tune commander is a 1 or whatever and and that's fine sometimes you're gonna get some guys that are really good at something sometimes there's people that aren't and as long as you have some good leadership in there you'll be alright and that's what I realized when I was running to trade it you just basically need you need one leader one person that knows how to lead things and everything will be fine you but you actually should have two people that know how to lead things so that way if something happens to the number one guy and then they can kind of communicate and they can talk to each other and they can bounce stuff off and they'll just be that like infinitely better but yeah it's a it's always a little bit different in every task unit and well that was great because that roles and responsibilities briefed that you gave like at the time the the team task unit leadership going through the unit level training was was new and it was kind of a new position all the way together so it wasn't really well-defined I was really like where the hell is my role here so that was really helpful and I think what you and your troop SCA did is you kind of define because you guys participated in training and not all the troops troop commanders and trooper CAS were going out to every ult block yeah yeah for sure and I didn't know you guys did everything and then after that that was the standard everybody set that standard and it's a good standard to have yeah yeah and I was lucky cuz my first deployment to Iraq I had a task unit commander and Anna task unit SCA and we both are friends with both those guys and they really I was watching what they were doing going okay that seems to work pretty well you know just looking at how they interacted with me and they set a good example and I kind of took that when I came back and and that's the position I put myself into was kind of mimicking what those two guys had done and they that were really well balanced no not my crew and they're just good just really good leaders you know and so it's okay that was cool that worked and so that's what I did and then luckily I got to go through workup and then go to Ramadi so I kind of knew how it you know I I carved that out in there there was and then I wrote the roles and responsibilities cuz believe me when I was when I first took over trea that there would be all kinds of way sway lay things going on with guys not having any idea what they should and should not be doing they were everyone was just going what should I do like you said it was a new position a relatively new position I mean we had tasking to commanders back in the day but it was they would be completely detached and they show up hey I'm an O 3 or 4 I'm in charge of you and every would be a little gear that sounds cool whatever who's this guy yeah and you wouldn't see him till the point yeah yeah and then now now the new thing was you're like they're from day one which was really cool how we we evolved that way yeah yeah no and it's it's as it should be so you get there and farm up your platoons and start going through training yeah we start doing workup and so you know the tasks you do commander he had a lot of experience the both of all the platoon leadership had a lot of experience too so it was it was I would say it was stacked we had great all the way down to like some of our efj Ives had deployments to Iraq they had good experience so it looked like you know hey this is everything's gonna be easy and then we started started ult went out to the land warfare block which has really always been where I have a soft spot in my heart because it's it's hard it's dirty and it's mean but you know we train out there in the desert we were we gone through the first two weeks of the land warfare block which is doing our immediate action drills a lot of our range work our demo all that stuff and coming into the phase the last week which is the field final training exercises and so we're we're in this big classroom and we're getting the brief on you know a feedback on on the brief that we've just given for our first operation and after that the your your land warfare senior enlisted advisor came in he's like hey everybody listen up every task unit that's come through here before you guys has had a blue on blue during this training so you need to be really aware of your blue pours picture and and so I'm like I'm rolling my eyes and and my internal dialogue guys I'm like oh my gosh what a bunch of clowns are you kidding me everybody shot each other that is never going to happen to us you know I'm like heck I used to run land warfare training when I was at a training cell at a team and this just isn't that hard there is no way we're gonna shoot each other okay like let's just go four hours later it is just mass pandemonium we've we went in we hit a target things kind of were going really smooth and then all of a sudden everything fell apart weird we had like I I think we had seven down guys that we were tracking and then but that we couldn't even get clear word because everybody was talking on the radio at the same time we were trying to break off the target there was no organization there were guys all over the high ground around us I remember real specifically one of the fire teams pointing up to a mountain that was just to our left saying hey do we have friendlies up there and someone else saying no we don't have anybody you know and looking in a battle map no we don't have anybody up there and then that fire team wiped out what was our sniper element so we had a whole fire team just wipeout you know our four-man sniper element trying to come down high ground when the down man and so we made it to the extract dragging all our bodies out of order everybody talking get back to the camp realize we're missing a piece of sensitive equipment and then in the debrief we discover that we'd had this heinous blue-on-blue and you know a fireteam it pretty much wiped out another fireteam and we're just like oh man so we push guys back out to the field to find a gear that we lost and thank goodness they found it before we get to stop training to find that gear and then you know we we did by no fault of my own we did a really healthy assessment of what you guys as the training attachment had put us through and instead of going whoa you know blaming you guys are making excuses are like okay let's make a list and we knocked out like four things that we messed up the worst four things that we messed up and then how we were going to fix them like okay well this down man thing we don't have it right we better start carrying stretchers in the field and then we're gonna stick each fireteam is going to have a pair of bag so when a guy gets killed we're taking all the sensitive stuff off of him so we can move him easy we put them in the para back so we don't lose it okay that's done all right um guys we get everyone's got to stop talking on the radio at the same time we got to get some comms disciplines we ran some drills we ran drills on how we were going to get head counts and you know then we then we did the drills on how are we gonna identify each other in the dark as soon as their bullets without you know with no comms and and so we laid that out and like hey everybody here's where you know it carry the PS 17 panel like everyone's going to have that in your left shoulder pocket the little foot one spoons down so that's during daytime at nighttime we're going to use our strobes and you know they're at the time and even today I'll tell you what if I was going out today and I was worried about the enemy having night vision I would be more worried about and this is me personally and I don't want to argue this with anybody and you can hit me up about my own guy shooting me because they can shoot ya and they have big guns then the enemies see in my strobe yeah so that was something that panned out later so we did that I thought we did it in a real healthy way we we kind of we were really cutting corners with our rehearsals because we don't get graded on our rehearsals we get graded on a brief so all the effort goes into the brief but the brief doesn't stick with you mentally until you go out and rehearse it and so we're like hey here's the way we're gonna do our you know our head counts and in and we would do that counts my fireteam someone would say head count and then fireteam six is up fives up fours up threes up twos up ones up like okay we got rehearse it and we get to fireteam three and the guy would be spacing it and we're like a fireteam three okay and we get to the point where that was just second nature and then to the point where everybody cuz we got decentralized command going on now when we're moving off target fireteam six knows a headcount is coming and they just kick it off and it just rolls through and there's there's no issues so we got that done we did our next FTX we did considerably better but you guys ramped up the pressure and then we had other issues and we're like okay hey when we get all mixed up we got to be able to reorganize without sounding like a high school cafeteria so then I think the next thing we punched into was our reorg perimeters in the dark and we would go out and just mix everybody up I go boom someone won't pass us the hand signal for a perimeter and then we would go get it and get reorg and and hit it up like that and and and what I really enjoyed about the training and I told people who came through it later was that it was it was like it was super challenging and it was like a it was like going to a haunted house and like I enjoy going to haunted houses because I like to go through and something startles me and I'm not really happy that something like a guy popping out with a chainsaw or whatever startles me and so I'll go through it then I'll assess how I reacted and I'll go next time let's do something new but it's completely new and unexpected and you guys continued to turn that dial up of completely new and unexpected and that panned out to work out so well for us because we had a the right attitude about it and later on when I'm moving in that position when you talk about that later I I could see a healthy way to deal with that and the not healthy way to deal with it the healthy way is always owning it and taking responsibility and then it just it was so much fun to be we'd be done we be covered in sweat everybody was yelling and uh was a great experience and then we just we took that and then other blocks of training and the the most intense for leadership is definitely land warfare and then south which is our urban training and we just got hammered there - and then it's paintball and a bunch of other stuff but that was great one other thing like when you did your roles and responsibilities you didn't really define a position for the the troops senior enlisted advisor because in that year so like hey you're not really gonna be the assault lead or anything else like that because honestly like he said yeah the figures could run on us yeah the thing I used to say is is the senior enlisted advisor is the action arm for the tasking a commander so there's gonna be things that are gonna be need to make be made happen and that's the guy that's gonna make it happen so oh we got a building that's got a problem or we got a position that's needs support or we got a wounded guy like in the army and the Marine Corps their SOP is who runs a kasev AK it's the senior enlisted guy because that's the guy that goes oh he has the experience to make this happen under a massively stressful situation so my word to the senior enlisted guys like you're the action on this the task unit commander can't make things happen he's got a he's got to look at what else is going on he's got to figure what the next step is gonna be he's talking getting information he's passed information all that stuff is gonna he can't take time to go clear an extra building or set up a security perimeter on this Ridge look he can't do that that's the senior enlisted guy that goes hey boss and obviously he's saying hey boss if you want to get out of here here's what I'm gonna make happen I'm gonna go set a perimeter over here I'm gonna put Gunners up on that high ground and then you guys can peel through here and that's what relief and the tu commander goes awesome yes execute so that's that to me has always been the the best way to utilize the senior enlisted because if you put the senior enlisted actually in charge of something but that's what they're doing they're doing that thing and then when something else goes sideways who's gonna handle that now and it always seems to happen in a seam yeah so it's like the most complicated thing to write the thing that's hard to handle is the thing that you didn't plan for and so if you don't have it's just like it's just like you don't want to commit your reserves right you want to commit your reserves in in a situation where you don't have to well you don't want to you're as a tu commander you have one guy as like the reserve we have a reserve brain power and your reserve brain powers your is your se a because if something goes wrong you can't get on it but you need the most experienced tactically savvy guy to go and handle whatever it is what you may not even know how to handle you just know that you've got you know enemy approaching on a road from the north you're getting Intel you're getting fed information hey there's enemy approaching on the note Road from the north a senior get it taken care of and then see here goes I got it it goes and handles it and and that's basically how we executed and what was it what's really interesting is that over columns and guys with the ten comms would be up and a lot of times comms go down but over comms the word be like hey we're leaving break down your security and then you're waiting for a call and waiting for a call and waiting for a call and then you'd have to run over there and say it looking at someone actually say it and then they're like Oh mmm and and for some reason they're there they're hearing it in their headset and uh um it just it ain't happening and you just gotta go guys get to get jammed up you know and that hourglass is just turning and turning and turning and you gotta go back you know hit them to get things moving at that processor moving and going again and then sometimes just your presence there and what you know talking about yelling you're not yelling at them but like hey boom get the sixty gunner down let's go we're moving this way hey get that wounded man over there the strut ditched the stretcher we're done go and then hustle on everybody up and just trying to keep everything moving around and I'll say this now everything that we faced in combat was easier than the stuff we faced in training because you'd put the screws on us so hard that we were like okay we've seen something pretty dang close to this before so when when a guy stepped on on an ID and lost his legs that we didn't experience and training but everybody dealt with it in a professional way and of course that was a horrible situation but that was not something that we were new to we were like okay we've done it down man we've had this situation you had a couple of guys gets pretty severely wounded and it was it was a factor in their pain but it was no factor in how we fought and and how we dealt with the situation there were there a couple times that we came ludicrously close to blue on blues but because we had we had you'd reinforced everything in training because we'd mitigated those blue on blues bloodlessly in training we didn't have him on the battlefield yeah well it was I mean for me coming into that role coming home I was I was I was I was pretty emotionally connected to the fact that I wanted you guys to be ready and just you know like the whole downtown man thing like it's not easy to carry a down man especially not easy when the guy helps you and he kind of it's in training he kind of jumps up on your shoulder and put his hand in that right spot on your back to stabilize himself and all those little things that they do to help each other out it's a it's not that easy it sucks and the blue on blue thing and I remember I a task unit you're tasking included would have a blue on blue and I'd bring him into the office and everyone in the chain of command would sign like a safety violation and and I would tell everyone I'd say listen I'm not doing this degrading you because no person in this room that's had a real blue on blue where people got killed is me and I did one thing I don't want is for it to happen to you so there's so much driving me just to try and make it as realistic as possible and then you know you get the kick-ass team guys that are running all the training man once you give those guys the direction they're just gonna go and that's just you know so I I mean I show up for the training sites and the guys would be so amped to make the training awesome and you know the amount of effort that the amount of effort the guys would put in to make the training realistic was crazy I mean some of those out at land warfare some of the demolitions that would get set up they would take up three-four days who they'd stay out on the training on the site for three or four days setting gamo up everywhere so there's stuff blowing up and catching on fire and just smoke everywhere total total mayhem and you know there's there's only this is the thing when you're training there's only so much you can do to simulate combat because what you can't do there's a line that you cannot cross you can't shoot people you can't do it you can't wound your in training and so that line can never get crossed and so what can you do to get it as close to that line as possible and the the laser system that we had and the explosives and then all just unleashing all that chaos and mayhem and I was lucky that I got to experience that on the battlefield and come home and be like bro and you know you mentioned it quickly like your attitude towards it but your attitude towards it is what the winning task unit attitude always was because it's real easy to go to blues bullshit you had a bunch of good setup on that hill like yeah you don't think al Qaeda is gonna set people up on a hill you don't think the moon's gonna set people in a spider hole in the middle of a compound you don't think by the way all that stuff we got it from actual after actions reports so the fact that you and your your task unit instead of looking at everyone else as to why you didn't do a good job you looked at yourselves and said okay what can we actually do better how about we actually try and improve some things how about we pick three four things we try and do those things better and then you do those things better and you're right cuz and you know this from working and training you already know what's gonna happen like you can see you put a guy here you put a bad guy over here you put a bag over there you've got a terrain feature like this you know what's gonna happen and you watch and unfold and then you also know that if the leadership can make some good calls it's gonna be no factor if the if the platoons have good standard operating procedures it'll be no factor but if they're not and the leadership starts to fall apart I mean everything falls apart and that thing you just said about the fire - I used to tell the tasking commanders I said imagine you got you got your fire teams out there imagine if each one of your fire teams was doing something good that was moving you in the direction that you wanted them to move just imagine if that happened and what happens when that occurs is the leader doesn't actually have to say barely anything other than we're getting out of here and as soon as everyone we're heading south we're getting out of here going to our old rally point as soon as everyone knows that they just make it happen and to you commander can do whatever he wants to do because the fireteam leaders are gonna make things happen themselves and and then we and the opposite of that is there's no possible way you can control these people if you have to tell them everything that you wanted to do you can't say hey you can't talk to all those people at the same time you can't know what the vantage point the best vantage point for us the 60 Gunners gonna be on that little Knoll you can't do it that guy has to understand what it is that is wanted from him and why it's important for him to do it and then once you know is that potent he makes it happen yeah and then um III think it was my tu commander that you're talking about when you you said that you didn't you initially you weren't sure if quiet guys could lead cuz he wasn't he's not allowed got like armed allowed god yeah he's he his personality is different he's not super loud but he was direct clear and concise and he did a fantastic I really enjoyed working with him yeah and he's a good example that I mean he's not the guy specifically I'm talking about but he's a guy that was you know especially like the little things you were just barking I put a 60 over there get put that stretcher away we're leaving it get that wounded man those things if you're not loud it's it they just don't get hurt yeah and so with your task in the commander I noticed that and it was kind of like hey man you know you need to get louder and and what he did was this you know get hey you know he's pretty loud my stupid SCA standing over there all those those tattoos on his arm he might not be the smartest dude in the world but he's our and when he tells you hey tell him to put that stretch away or whatever then you or whoever in your in your task unit starts barking out the orders and it happens you know and so yeah he did it he did a great job of that and had the same attitude as you because he was experienced you know that was another cool thing you know you get I get guys that were coming through training more experienced than me and the good sea leaders would come through that training be like oh that was awesome man yeah you just kicked our ass thank you we're gonna try and do better what did you see like they would just want feedback just want suggestions and then you get other guys coming through that it was everyone else's fault and the training wasn't real it's not realistic to get hit from three sides really what is that where do you see that in the Geneva Convention that you're not allowed to ambush from three sides and that attitude never turned out well it just never at 0-0 percent of turning out well of hey the training is unrealistic the training is this the trainings at like no actually just do the SOPs step up and lead and everything works and that was the other amazing thing as you'd see the same problems and once it wants the task unit got good you did you couldn't even stop them cuz you know because it's 40 guys against four or five as you know the training so the training guys are it's like four or five guys out there shooting them up yeah so yeah I mean you when you're running those scenarios you can't bring your guys back to life which you can remotely do fast enough to apply a decent amount of pressure to win that troop has just gotten up on staff yeah and then then everybody is so happy yeah yeah you can't you you're right you can't reset people you can't reset the OP for quick enough because the because that's when you get a steel troop that's just in straight of aggressive murder mode and going hard every other thing they see they're assaulting it's awesome it's a beautiful thing to say yeah so now when you you guys were you guys planning to go to Afghanistan knowing that work up I don't think you were were you irritated to go to Basra and so we were going to be going down to southern Iraq and working out of there and then the request for forces popped up that they were asking for a seal troop back in Afghanistan and I think on the on the numbered SEAL Teams had been out of Afghanistan since somewhere around 2005 so they there had been no presence whatsoever for numbered SEAL Teams in Afghan in a while this is a 2009 so initially there was a it popped up and then then it was confirmed and then like over the Christmas holiday they they said okay hey we're gonna send that my troop is going to be the troop to Afghanistan what that looked like no one knew so you're going to Afghanistan because there's a deployment order that has to get signed to go anywhere that's got to be signed by the Secretary of Defense right and ours to deploy a troop to a sealed troop to Afghanistan was in the book it hadn't been signed yet and so myself the tasking a commander and one of the OIC s who deployed with you we did a pre deployment site survey and you know I think it was like in February we went oh and usually on a PD pre deployment site survey or pre PD SS you go over you see what's going on then you come back we went over there and I stayed me and a CB chief came with me who was who was gonna set up our birthing and stuff with one of our support or or all four of us went and then he and I never came back from that pre deployment site survey we just stayed there so yeah so gonna you know in an awkward situation where we're going over there they were working for the Army on SF and they don't even know what they're gonna do with us a lot of them didn't want us because they'd had bad experiences unfortunately with seals before and so what I did whatever I kind of tore a page out of your book I didn't know this is what you guys did but this is what I did is I usually wear my hair like this I went ahead and got high and tight to shift over to look a little bit more like the army does because it's just it's just another way to establish rapport and I don't care about my hair I just don't and and so so when we got there the first place we went was to the siege of soda which is the oh six that's run everything there and I went into the sergeant majors office was the senior listener advisor I went in his office and stood in it I introduced myself and stood at parade rest and he looked up from his desk and stared at me I mean you know like I got a clean uniform on I got a high in tight and he goes I have never seen a seal like you before and I kept it real professional with him and then he's like hey we don't know where we're gonna put you we don't know what we're gonna do with you guys we're working through that you guys have got to go ahead and brief the colonel at the time so we we worked up a brief for the colonel and my task unit commander went in and had a meeting with him and he was he's a pretty fired up type of guy and he asked he asked the tu commander like hey what do you need what do you need from me and the boss told him hey I we need the SEC def to sign sign our line item to get us to deploy here and a week later that happened and so in and it's in order where the set def is supposed to sign stuff and ours is like 9th back and he went straight to our line item and signed it so that Colonel we made a good impression on him he had some poll obviously and made an impression moving forward so then we were looking at well okay where are we gonna go we still didn't know where we were going to go and and we talked to the the we had a briefing with the general and he explained hey I don't have enough partner forces for all of my you know ODS fo da teams that are here because normally we're working by with and through and he goes so you guys are going to go on whatever con op is hot and plus up my OTAs you are going to attract the Taliban and deny them freedom of movement and from a thought hallelujah yeah doesn't get any better than that it doesn't and then we moved down to Camp Brown and third group was running the Special Operations task force West down there and we got there and I met with the senior analyst advisor there and he's like hey we really don't we don't know where we're gonna put you guys we don't have any space for you here and we just stayed good you know and and we established a relationship with him and this the the commanders air and the XO and the ops guys and then two days later there the the sergeant major takes me out and he's like hey you see this big tent this this is dad this big tent right inside the gate he goes this is where we were doing all our vehicle maintenance and he goes we're getting ready to move those guys over to another yard you guys can have this and so so that was awesome we were basically like initially where we were the unwanted um you know in-laws showing up for Christmas like Randy Quaid and Christmas story and then now we were like hey old college buddies that had come into town and third group was just so good to us there was absolutely no parochialism whatsoever and that was just a great experience working with them across the board so how did you when did you start putting together how did you say okay this is what we're gonna do how'd that come about when they just they just told us there's like here's what here's here's what we laid out here's our capabilities and there's like well here's how we'd like to use you and we said Roger that where can we help we never came in and said hey this is you know this is what we do and we come in it and do this X Y & Z because they're targeting in their whole their whole philosophy was completely different than what they did in Iraq in Iraq we were very personality based and NSW as a whole we were reduced to personality based hoc targeting they're more about disruption they'll be like hey Taliban is over here in freedom movement we're gonna go do stuff over there and then they're gonna have to come find us and then it's going to slow them down you know everywhere they're going or hey on their funding this war with opium so are we gonna burn down opium fields and punish the farmer or do we wait to the Taliban collects the opium up into one spot and then go destroy it and that's the kind of stuff that that we would do we would go to the opium caches after the poor farmer who doesn't have a choice about what he's growing is harvested that they moved it to one spot and then we pop in destroy all their opium stay there for a couple days and fight him and then leave so so that was good but our attitude was like how can we help where can we help you and there they just gave us work and it was great and you guys had some pretty crazy ops yeah I I would say like so so the first stop we had the ad Vaughn Cruz that was there and we went out with three one one six and their commandos and they had an OP or they they went in and took a a bazaar which is like a strip mall basically where they're facilitate a bunch of opium went in held that destroyed all the opium for a day and then fought everybody that came out us so we went out on that operation with them and it was good it was a lot of fun and then that got them used to awesome and and what we brought to the table and that was an OP that was setting up in a concept of operations called siege engine and that was like I think the first frag order under it and they would do a concept operation like hey here's what we want to do with this stuff and this this siege engine was basically hammering the opium in the Helmand River Valley and it culminated with the last frag war and was when we went into Helmand in or in Helmand into Marja which is like at the heart of the Taliban it was a Taliban controlled town coalition forces had never been inside of it in a year later it was 2010 or 11 the Marines went in there and cleared it and it was huge fire huge firefight prior to us going in there this operation and it was why when I say we it was us the Afghan commandos the MSF Oda and the OAB above them I think that gets OAB right yep so that detachment above him and we just plus them up and there they're all a be commander was equal rank to our task unit commander rank but like my boss was just like he didn't push back he was like hey what do you need me to do and that that OMB commander really appreciated that relationship that he didn't have to you know bump heads a legal battle over people I would have been in this position exactly or I want to make this call so coalition forces had never been inside a Marja they tried to go close to us and just gotten shot out we choppered into a bazaar which was we took for the corner of four blocks and a pretty huge area where there was a ridiculous amount of opium consolidated they were refining opium into heroin and make an ie D improvised explosive devices all kind of stuff there in the middle of their town we went in there at night we stayed there for four days and just just got after it wholesale yeah I think there was 8,000 pounds of opium that we destroyed no it was a big operation there's a the the DEA was involved there FBI agents there was a huge was a huge crew and it was good to go and some of the lessons lessons learned from theirs that's okay so like the first day we are I was in one of the the blocking positions there and we were taking fire basically from the east and to the south because the way the different positions it was kind of like across the way it crossed out so when we were taking fire from the south had to be aware that like hey I can't see him but my bullets can see him in that way there's a bunch of guys and so we took fire from a tree line that was probably 50 yards from the compound that we were holding and I was up on a I was up on a rooftop with another guy and I saw like four guys walking around in camis and we were getting ready to light him up but they were wearing that like the stuff that commandos were wearing like hey we got guys moving down here we need a head count who's got the Afghani commandos cuz these guys look just like him and then they came back with oh hey we got everybody no one's outside of our position and then so we were getting right I'm like don't shoot don't shoot and then we called again they confirmed again no one's outside our position then finally twenty minutes later they're like oh wait we had some guys walk out to go to I don't know what they doing if they're going to the bathroom or what they were screwing around doing but we could have just completely lit him up yeah we used a lot of 50 Cal on that we had the air support the this we had everything from Huey's to b1 bombers overhead all day long bombs were falling that the Taliban was absolutely furious that we'd come in to this strong all over there's captured this much you know all the opium there was a somewhere like 800 pounds of refined heroin and heroin was like packaged in these these bags that were like this big and they had like a scorpion on it and it said like 2008 after you know and have like a label little marketing brand marketing like I'm you know made made here in Afghanistan or whatever and so it was a huge affront to them that we were there so after like the first two days we basically killed off every local fighter and then they started bringing guys up from Pakistan and then then it got kind of lively because the local fighters knew every piece of dead space but the guys from Pakistan weren't really familiar with the area so they would be bumbling in the open looking the other like aha bumbum get him you know we I think the third morning this we got up and there's no fighting we're like well when's it gonna cuz it says like you get to setting your watch by you're like okay Sun's up and we should start getting some shooting by now there is nothing and there's nothing and so we radioed up to the to the headquarters were like hey what what is going on did they quit and then they're just laughing hysterically on the radio and they were able to tell this and I can't describe to you how but the guy who had the keys to the armory where they were storing all their weapons they couldn't find him probably cuz we bombed him over the night and they couldn't get into the armory to get their stuff to come us attack us but it wasn't just an audacious operation that worked out great and then you guys take any casualties during that we had ordered the Afghans or did the army yeah so we had a rocket hit the compound over next to mine and our dog handler and one of our corpsman got fragged with a corpsman the friend knocked a tooth out and then launched stuck in his tongue so he's real lucky at his to slow down the momentum and then the dog handler got hit in the back there were several of the army guys that got straight-up shot and then here's the awesome part like the I feel like their call sign was Pedro but it was Air Force medevac and as soon as they heard that we were troops in contact they lifted up and they would just be loitering real close to the firefight and then like as soon as that that mist report came over and like hey we got a guy down they came in and it would be like I would be watching going we're gonna get that helicopter shot down and they would just come in they had a minute the door gunner had a minigun and they would just land right like on top of the guy in the middle of the firefight we don't care in like I would just I was so proud I could just be crying because it's such an awesome thing to see because it's complete disregard for their own personal safety and they're just waiting to jump in there and get guys so luckily on that operation no one was lost and then everybody was the guys that were shot will all recover from their wounds and what kind of damage what kind of damage do you guys do to the enemy significant I think it was it was pretty significant I mean um there's just a huge amount of drugs and and their equipment and things that we destroyed and then it just had to hurt them psychologically that they thought that that was they a complete freedom of movement and then all sudden we came in and stayed there and just did the meat stomp on them for four days and you guys weren't only doing urban situations you guys were going into other scenarios where you're like digging in on hillsides and whatnot - right right so later on we you know we that that that saying take the high ground or it will take you because all of our operations I think we only did we did 223 total operations on that thing most of them were multi-day and so there were only two that we were in and out in the same cycle of darkness and typically you know we would do terrain studies and we're like hey we got to defend these positions and so when we had a compound that were like here's the compound this is the compound that we're gonna take and hold where's the high ground around it and then we need to get elements up on that high ground as well there were also there was there were two like time-sensitive targets where we came as a quick reaction force where other elements were there's another coalition soft element and SF element that got an assaulted in a valley and they had two strong point to building because they'd been hittin this valley and then we came in on the high ground during the night and then the next morning because that most times Taliban didn't fight at night because we had the advantage the next morning when the Taliban assaulted them we were on the high ground behind them and laid the hammer down and then were able to get stuff to the word those guys were able to get out that day yeah so we were taken we were taking high ground positions quite you know when it made sense there's one operation we were on were there what really wasn't any high ground and so there there were some there there were like the furnace we could clear away from the compound that we were holding was 30 yards and then it was a dense like green zone and a wall people could completely creep up so we had guys go you know we identified that we're like okay what are we gonna do and then someone's like hey we can put let's go put pop flares out there you know and so in you know that's like going back to Vietnam stuff but guys went out and placed those and then BOOM you know we when once the bullets started flying and we were the troops in contact the tick is we say in the vernacular started to really get up to speed and then all of a sudden you're like like oh those pop flares are going off okay start pumping 40 mike-mike over there or whatever and um yeah it was it was cool there's a one of the stories we have back back in Marja the guys brought a algl which is like this forty millimeter chain gun and then it has this the new one has like a computer mount that goes on the top and so you look at the screen and then you you put the little cursor on on what what your target is okay and then it lazes it and then gives you an elevation correction based on the ballistics for the 40 millimeter and then you raise it up you depress the lever and then just buh-buh-buh-buh so there was uh there was guys in a tree line that were shooting at our guys and they had set this thing up and basically is a 40 millimeter sniper rifle and there they had the like a predator was overhead watching giving them feedback on the fire so they shoot at these guys in this tree line and then they ask the predator for a battle data damage assessment and the predator comes back with two eki a which enemy killed in action one ran away on fire that's good and what about I know you told me a story one time about you guys weren't in the high ground here's somebody there's somebody like across the valley I had a little elevation on you and you guys were digging in and digging in and digging in sandbag sandbag sandbag as much as it good yeah so there was one of the operations we were in so Wally caught and that this was one of the places that was bad enough where they actually came at us at night so we did our insert helos dropped us off and we were in our perimeter getting ready to start our offset patrolling to hit these compounds we get when PKM and two RPGs just come zipping overhead and luckily we had whenever we got inserted we always had a patchi's that escorted us in they went over and started hammering these guys they wound up getting things I want to kid him up killing like thirty people and and what had happened was as it turned out we were offset from a target but where our offset was put us right next to where some other a bunch of other Taliban guys happen to be and they thought we were coming to get them so they maneuvered then when we we did our offset patrol got to our target guys came at us in the dark we could see him coming from the high ground we laid a fire team pushed out shot them right when they came around the corner completely no factor and then you know just 30 well when they got within they came around a corner 30 yards away from - aw Gunners who just caught him down and then one of those guys I think later we figured that was probably some bigwig with the Taliban so he took that compound and we took the high ground immediately behind it but it was in a mountain range so there was there is always going to be high ground around our high ground the next day once they figured out where we were at and then they got on all the high ground around us and then they just brought it and I can him the where we were at on that high ground it was like the ground was too hard to dig we always brought ten empty sandbags per guy so that you could fill them up and make defensive positions we couldn't fill sandbags up because it was like trying to dig in your parking lot so we just stacked all the rocks we could stack around us and then they kicked this thing off with a barrage of RPGs and then just a steady stream of PKM fire which is you know there belt-fed machine gun and I remember being laying flat on my chest and there's like eight inches above my head are they right and and by the way I'm not I took my body armor off because I was oh it's hot I'm gonna take my body armor off and my helmet and I'm like Oh got my helmet back on and I snaked into my body armor everybody did and then these that bullets are hitting the rocks steadily eight inches above my head come and the gunner is he's a he's eleven hundred yards away and he's just basically you know almost lobbing I mean lobbing him in because I'd been shooting it we'd been shooting at the guy a little bit and we just couldn't kept sliding by in a rock and it was too windy to get him and we had a I think we had a Reaper overhead but in the middle of the day in Afghanistan when the rocks are 90 degrees and a person's 90 degrees it it's worthless they can't see people and the Afghan T's are not sitting out in the open war and kill them so I was like and the moment I wasn't scared but I'm like okay I'm getting ready to get shot and I'm getting ready to die by the sword this is what I get and that would and that was it and then our SATCOM radio antenna got shot and got knocked over and so now we had no comms to get air support because we desperately needed to get some more air in and then my boss like I don't know how he got shot he didn't get shot but the tu commander is like all right and he just got up there and fixed the antenna and was hitting it well down in the compound our guys just started lobbing mortars and we used we had the they started using the delayed fuses so they were detonating 25 meters above the ground which which lays down an impressive frag pattern and tamped things down a bit and then we just got hammered and hammered and we're like oh this is not gonna be good like 15 minutes later they're like hey we got some air to you and it's not it's not like we weren't without air cover because we did have a Reaper and I think a predator showed up too but there's limited so two french jets showed up and a lot of the coalition forces will be difficult with you sometimes when you're calling for air support and argue with you and I'm not sure that these guys would have argued with us but we just said hey there were two main ridge lines that we were taking heavy fire from and we said do you know we give us a show of force flights where you they'll fly real low over those ridge lines and see if it pushes their heads down and they came in right over both ridge lines and that tapped it down because they got down and then a little while later that slowed things down and it was more manageable now for us we get our heads up and start to shoot back a little bit then the b-1 bomber shows up and they've got bombs to waste you know and they gave us four 500-pound bombs on each Ridgeline airburst at hundred yard increments boom boom boom boom boom you know and then that hammered them a bit then we were able to isolate some of the other guys use our own organic weapons to hammer the other guys and then we were like phew man this place is bad the next day so we were supposed to extract that night and we're like hey when's our extract oh and at 2:00 in the afternoon on the high ground position we ran out of water and it was a hundred and fourteen degrees so there's no shade there's no water it's just a massive suckfest and that nothing's comin till it gets dark so just waited the helos came in after dark kicked out pallets of water and ammo to resupply us and they're like by the way you're staying for another 24 hours because what we didn't know is that us being there was having a huge effect on the whole battle space and some other elements were able to adjust their position and some of the afghan surrogate forces were able to get a whole bunch of stuff done but oh we got that over the radios like oh we're gonna stay here like don't they know that we almost got ok hammered like this is the first time up until then we always had the upper hand they weren't really worried about getting like just getting overrun and in this point there was a real fear any second now we're gonna get overrun and then they're like you're staying for another day and I remember talking to my two platoon chiefs I'm like hey we're staying here for another day and you're gonna push out and clear this stuff and we're gonna reinforce this position and here's what we're gonna do and then they took a deep breath and they're like okay Roger that and um we stayed another day and the next day we we got and doing through it came at us pretty hard again but then we we did a little bit more air support we had developed a relationship with the 82nd airborne combat air brigade their Apache helicopters which are like tanks in the air they lived right down the road from us and so we would have barbecues with them and we would have we would run a range and have them over and then they would come suit at the range and we'd stand around and bullshit they broke their sleep cycles so this is really employment for pilots they have got to have a X amount of rest before they can fly and they do not break their sleep cycle lightly they broke their sleep cycle to come support us and then they put themselves at risk where like the Afghan EES don't like helicopters so when a helicopter shows up they'll sink they flew low on purpose because they'll go all of that helicopters low I think I can hit it and then they can't resist they come out and then they'd have these guys would just hammer them and they came in the next night and that that was awesome yeah so I was still at trade at while all this was going on and I remember I would get emails from you from the from your task you too commander as well and we were just be talking about you know like hey this is what's going on and I remember I was signing the emails back to you guys as the spiritual advisor I was there in spirit dude yeah and we in and yeah we were we were hitting back up to you because there's a lot of there's a lot of massaging and stuff that has to get done you know we got like I was looking at a picture in the hallway the other day and it's that that classic pitcher with the yellow smoke and Mike he's there and and sets right behind him and I never really studied everyone's gear but I looked at Seth and Seth's got the enhanced battle rifle which is the m14 that just in you know the situation it was it didn't work for our lasers in our site so they these guys up at war comm fixed it up so you could use it and have seven six to on the battlefield guys all had that and we got there right away and they were just getting ready to field the scar heavy and we got them to field it first overseas which is not what they like they like to field it first everyone trains with it we got them to feel that overseas that was awesome because all of our guys had you know a hundred and seventy-three grains of democracy and justice flying out there so when you when we would take when we take a nap when we take a compound right take Kate clear and clear compound hold the compound the Afghan ease would they were used to five five six so they would know like okay it's pretty windy today and I'm out at five hard yards it's not likely you're gonna hit me with your five on your five five six rounds so they would be like kind of out in the open and we would just kill them and then then then that that circle would go out and our guys were regularly getting guys at five six seven eight hundred yards and these are just thoughts car heavy with it they so here's what they did most of our snipers took the the night force three by five to fifteen scope that was on our alright that's our twenty five switch that back gun had some issues and and would Jam a lot and then just put them on their scars and that's what they patrolled with so they would have it all the way down in three and a half hours so if you're patrolling you can just swing it up it's got a low magnification so you have both eyes open you can shoot and then they can put the bipods out and hit stuff far out and and and those things were were in freakin valuable and and it just brought a whole new dynamic to the battlefield and and you know that the scar had some problems there's it's not a direct impingement thing where the gas doesn't go all the way back as a gas piston like the m14 did they told us don't Lube those and guys would still Lube them and then Oh jam up and they're like a rods gun sucks I'm like well I hope you lubed your gas piston yeah I put a lot of Lube on it do that don't do that so so that worked great and that was that was awesome that we were able to get get that over there and the the Commodore at the time basically gave us whatever we wanted and asked for this is the support we got from Group one was incredible now you guys do you guys didn't really take that mini Academy no one got killed right no I got killed how many guys got wounded two guys got wounded with frag um you know we had a couple concussion injuries where guys got knocked out and it's hard to quantify how serious that is and then on on our turnover operation when SEAL Team One came to relieve us is when when when Dan can Austin got hit by that IAD and lost both his legs and that I mean horrible event and and thank goodness it's just like there's so many things that lined up to save Dan's life because we've been inserted for an offset patrol went in there got got in there secured the the bazaar and then we push guys up to high ground like we always do except for the Taliban suspected you know oh well they come to take it that they mined the entire high ground so as that element was pushing up there was an explosion and then there is quiet and then tu commander gets on the radio hey was that a controlled Det and the OIC who deployed with you came back and he's like it was not a controlled Det and we've got some wounded we're like okay work through it get on the SATCOM the the 47s that had dropped us off it was an SOP for them to have a flight surgeon on one of their birds and so they hadn't made it all the way to bat base or it may been that they lawyer de round for a little bit and that could have been too so they were right there and there was surgical stuff right there when because Dan's wounds were absolutely horrible and then once the EOD guy started what's that happen and it was lucky because the charge went low order so if it's gone high order it would have killed like six guys he discovers that they're in a minefield basically his metal detector is getting overrun so he's got a bayonet or a big screwdriver and he's probing the way out in front of the guys so they could get Dan out and on to the medevac that later got him back how long had you been on the ground for like a matter of 10-15 minutes so on we did like and we did an offset so he patrolled in for like three or four klicks so it was a little your hours yeah it wasn't a couple hours but it was inside of an hour that's why I'm not sure how long was 47s were loitering or if they were on their way back and they were able to turn him around but they they were back quick and they had that surgeon on there which I think really made the difference for for Dan you know now he's guys running marathons I haven't run a marathon lat yes I feel like such a loser that he's competed in the Olympics a couple times right now he got a gold in the Paralympics right there you go yeah yeah he's awesome awesome guy yeah that was that was that was devastating devastating I remember we got word back that you know one of you one of the guys and we just assumed there's one of your guys actually because I don't think we even knew that turnover that you know the turnover was taking place I assumed it was one of your guys but you know and then then I heard it was Dan and I remember the first phone call that I got and I was like is he gonna live oh yeah and at this point they were like yes he is because I mean I know it was like touch-and-go but then that with the first person I don't I don't remember who was was like yes he's stable he's gonna live and I was like then we're good to go and I just remember thinking thank god he's you know good easy to make it you know you know the the like are not unlike the second or third op we were there more our guys were Mick we're doing an op with a bit one we always had Afghani commandos with us because they were the partner of course though OTAs we were doing and one of them stepped on a mine and it blew both his legs off and part of his arm and one of our guys got cut in the face with his femur and then there were some issues where when they were putting all of our tourniquets were failing because the plot had a plastic windlass that was was going and so the the one guy he that got hit and they got cut in the face with his femur and it messed him up man only for a little bit and I didn't know what to say to him so I didn't say anything to him and I you know what I wish I had because I've come to a conclusion now with a lot of this pain that everybody carries around that that it it's it's a poison you carry inside of you and if you talk about it it lets it out and then then it's kind of detoxing you a little bit and so like I don't know you know if you're listening to this in your in situation if someone's gone something through horrible and you don't know what to say say something just sit down there and and just talk with them about it you know ask how they're doing see if they can get it off their chest because it helps yeah I the same thing we had they got like I had one guy that got shot in the chest plate and got shot through the Camelbak on his back those are two different operations too I mean like so what does that do to you when you're thinking how close was I to just gettin killed twice you know in two different scenarios and for sure I think you know if you don't and if what is you know what do we do in the teams like make a joke about everything everything's a big joke which probably helps in some cases it does but yeah let let you definitely got a if you get the opportunity to talk to people about what's going on and what I think it does is even more than like well I'm sure I don't know cuz I'm not a psychologist but okay there's the idea that you're like letting this stuff out right I'm gonna let this stuff out there's also the idea that when you talk about something you you articulate what you're thinking and you have to like put it into words that somehow they become a thing that you can manage yeah yes it makes complete like when you don't talk about it it's just like you have a conversation with somebody about whatever you you want to debate with somebody about some subject if you never debated about it before you're gonna be at a disadvantage cuz you don't really understand all the ins and out but when you actually talk to someone about it then you say oh here's here's a point that I can make here and here's our point that can make there if you don't talk about this stuff it's just sitting in there and it doesn't get any better you don't understand it any better when you talk when you just like we were talking on the last podcast how when you teach something you understand it more because you have to detach from it to look at it from the outside well if I explain something to you I'm explaining it to myself too you know I'm planning it to myself too and I told you this yesterday you know when um when I had Tom Fife on the podcast who was in World War 2 Korea and Vietnam and got a Purple Heart and all those and it and I asked him you know I I asked him some question about losing guys when he was a battalion commander in Vietnam 60 years ago I didn't say that part but I'm like you know what was you know what was how did you guys handle casualties or something like that and I don't know what the question was but here he is this you know Army colonel retired army colonel and he's talking about the guys that he lost 60 years ago and he got choked up and I remember looking at him and I'm thinking to myself okay this is the way I'm always gonna feel about the guys that I lost it's never gonna go away yeah and like just hearing him talk about it and seeing that reaction I was like okay and that's what I tell all my all my bros now I'm like hey you're always gonna feel that way like it's it's just here's a guy that was in World War 2 Korean Vietnam he got a Purple Heart in all those and he gets choked up talking about the guys that he lost in Vietnam and Korean World War two but you know I specifically asked him about Vietnam so when you talk about these things I think you get some kind of handle on them because you have to articulate them in such a way that you can then it's like what you have to name your enemy right you have to you have to name your enemy they say if you don't name the enemy than you how are you gonna fight him well it's the same thing when you actually say hey you know I really feel bad about this or whatever or I think I could have done this better or I think I made a mistake or I wish we would or whatever it is that you're thinking you know whatever survivor's guilt whatever that thing is that you have when you say it you get you get to look at it and you get to look at it from the outside and go okay I yeah I'm explaining this to Jason and I'm telling him what I'm thinking and then while I'm explaining it to you I'm explaining it to myself is what's happening and that's why I think talking about it not only does it get it out but it gets you a handle on it somewhat yeah the process of it coming out of your mouth and then back into your ears or maybe letting different parts of your brain adjust and deal with it but yeah check what else so you come home from Afghanistan Amy hey so like and here's another thing I want to talk about too and and you brought this up in this the the book your cover in the last couple podcasts about fear like once that first bullet goes by or the it's just like everything shuts down and you just go to what you're supposed to do and then you do it it's like in the moment all that motion goes away there's no fear but then afterwards and before is when you have the fear like I would lay in my bed there and I would completely was would picture notification going on for my wife like I could see the guys and blues driving out to my house or you know okay this is a good chance that I'm gonna get severely maimed and I could picture myself sitting in a wheelchair outside of uh you know the the the paddock that I have my horse is in and I can't even ride them anymore and you know now I'm getting emotional about that which it's it's odd to me but that that that's weird how how it a you know when you're in the moment you're not afraid later on when you're thinking about it is is when you start to freak out about it a little bit that there's no doubt and this has been confirmed over and over and over again that the waiting is the worst I that's just you're just anticipating and then once you're going you're going and you got stuff to do and I was never in situations where I like didn't have anything to do and there was really things happening where I was like well the the few times I've been mortared where I'm like sitting there waiting for a mortar to either hit me or not hit me that sucked a lot but it wasn't yeah it wasn't like it wasn't like an hour though you know it's like Foom Foom okay we got about thirty seconds I don't know maybe a minute before we find out where it's gonna be at but I also think that you know if you're scared of dying it's gonna be real nightmare all the time I think yeah and like paralyzed light like I said that one point in us well a car I'm like okay I'm gonna get this is what I get it was just was there was not fear it was just an acceptance I'm gonna get shot here pretty soon I wonder how bad it's gonna hurt or burn or whatever it is and it's like alright that's gonna happen okay later on you think about it um there's one other thing I think on an earlier podcast people were asking a question about if you had a routine because I had a really definite routine that I went through prior to going out in Afghanistan and it wasn't like anything religious but I'd sit there I'd be in my room and you know we'd have everything but like well we had everything in our room but we had a ready room and all that so iris had sent me the CD from this country singer core blonde I put that on and then the first thing I'd go through is I change out every battery in all on my deer because you got like your belt our headsets you're not all that stuff's getting new batteries then I would go through and look at all my battle maps clean out the ones from the last one get my new battle maps for this one study them then I would always always always carry 24 hours worth of water with me and then pack out my food then I would go get fresh batteries from my radios then I would go through all of my gear strip it down put it back together for anything that I any special gear and equipment I needed for that off there was a later on I like to carry a sixty power spotting scope because I was spending a lot of time on I ground make sure that was all clean up make sure that my radio is charged with crypto all that stuff it would take me like two hours to go through that whole process and then we would go outside we would do our comms checks together and go out and get on the helicopters and get after it and so that that routine right there is like so good because if you had all that stuff ready and you just sat there for two hours they would not be fun no no and I mean you got to go you got to check everything three or four times I remember riding with a guy on on a ride and as a battery died on his nods in the all of the you know when he's driving on a convoy I'm like good grief ya didn't put a fresh one in that cost like ninety cents dude my my first deployment to Iraq we were doing that and we stopped we stopped changing batteries for every op like after a week because the ops were like an hour long yeah and all the sudden we realized we were gonna run out of batteries like we just didn't have enough battery so we just went to like hey carry an extra battery and if you know if it dies then whatever change it ours we're all it's all night yeah you guys are going out all night isolated you know we were ten feet from our Humvees or whatever 20 yards from our Humvees you have a big stack of batteries and it didn't matter it's totally different scenario yeah I think that I would always be super busy with doing stupid you know officer stuff well you know getting this brief checking with this guy whatever doing all that stuff and I I would just get all ready and it seems like I would work up until I got into Humvee yeah and that's my tu commander tattoo and it was hard on him because he would go in on the OP already on a rest deficit him yeah and then when you're gonna stay out there for two days eventually you know he's got to go down but they we figured out like um he would he would pass it off to one of the other Oh I cease to be the GFC because he didn't want me to be the guy talking to the jtac about what to drop well I'd be pretty liberal there's a there's a picture of me and Dave Burke good - yeah good deal Dave and it's it's in downtown Ramadi I think it's on the roof of cop Falcon and we're both just completely asleep sitting there just so sleep yeah because and the same thing cuz when I'd go out a lot of times I'd been awake and you know late all of us would be awake for a long time so you get in the field you like cool I can sleep now and and that was like okay so that was like one of the hardest things as a leader is like you get there you get in the Opie and everybody wants to stay awake and that means we're all gonna hit the wall in like six hours so it's you you gotta let go and say hey you four guys get in there and I need you to take sleep so you're ready to bump out on these security positions or these fighting positions or whatever it is because it's coming yeah everyone's just gonna hit the wall at the same time and you're all asleep so tired alright so that's a was that the last op you did was with Dan was that the very last op who did you do a couple more I don't remember it was pretty close to the last op because one of our platoons had already redeployed at that point um you know in leadership you're the first one there and the last one to go so we didn't go until the last bird but I think I think that was our if it wasn't I wasn't when our last one it was our second to last one it was going was coming home from this deployment any different than coming home from your other deployments oh yeah I've been there for eight months and it was the most kinetic deployment of of my career so yeah they and and NSW started doing that the third location decompression stop where they're like hey before you get home we want you to sit down and blow off some steam and sit down with you know a psychic and talk to the psychic a little bit and are our redeployment flight kept getting bumped so we redeployed like I think eight days later than we were supposed to and every day I was like hey the birds gonna go tomorrow get up muster they're like nope maybe tomorrow and we did that for eight days in a row finally we got on it and it was getting so long I was really angry I'm like let's go home and they held their ground and I'm really glad that they you know held their ground because when we got to the other location and you start drinking I was just a freaking idiot drank way too much but I needed it I needed to blow off some steam and stuff and it was good to have the other guys to talk to and and and to be somewhere where you know my loved ones didn't have to see me being just a complete buffoon and then you know and then I got home and yeah that that it took a lot so I live kind of at the time was living in East County San Diego and the area I live in is really similar to areas of Afghanistan so I would find myself in my yard you know and I was back and constantly scanning the high ground and and doing a technique called ballooning and that's where yeah I'm here and then all side-step here and then all backstep here it's so like it you just make it difficult if a sniper's aiming at you that you're hoping that he's squeezing the trigger as you're steppin to the side you're gonna step out of his his crosshairs doing stuff like that and then um you know when when you go eight months and every stressor that you have is a fight-or-flight full-blown stress or whether it's the enemy's shooting you or indirect fire coming in it's hard for your body to come back and then differentiate between somebody not agreeing with you on something you just said or anything else my sleep was completely jacked up based on us operating a lot at night and I had I've always had issues with my sleep so on the deployment I'd started taking take an ambien then they were given to giving it to me and so I was having difficulty sleeping without that and then you know I think it was the first night or second night I was home the dog started barking and I kept a gun on the nightstand which is just just an SOP now it's in a safe because I have kids but dogs are barking I roll out of bed grab the gun and I'm at the ready waiting just like okay and then iris you know rolls out of bed and she looks up and sees me standing there naked holding a gun next to the bed breathing heavy scanning both the entrance and she's just like oh wow what came back and you know I I didn't get a chance to talk about um my wife and where I met her but she was a Wrangler on a ranch that we go to a lot for training when I met her and she's just just hard a good good good partner soul mate and and she's been extremely patient and put up with a lot of stuff that most women wouldn't have and when I came back I was doing I was drinking heavily just and mainly you know as I assess my drinking issues it was because I was so wound up that it would be four beers as to where I could get myself back to where everybody else walks around in their daily life where they're just calm because I was just like oh and that's just a factor from one is not sleeping and then the other one is just coming back from a deployment like that you get it takes you a while to decelerate when people are shooting at you and all these horrible things are happening and then now you're back in society but you're not really where you're back here in in the US but you're not really you're not all the way back and so and in my temper was like a millisecond fuse will get mad about stupid stuff and all kinds of stuff and finally she said to me she said you know hey baby you're not you're not the same guy you were when he left and I really want you to talk to somebody and so immediately I got on the phone I called up the psych and I started seeing the psych and talking through a lot of this stuff that I had going on and started working at getting better and it's a it's a long process and it was it was helpful to talk to those guys it to say that you have PTSD and in is is somehow maybe admitting a weakness and I don't know if it's you know how do you define PTSD for me it's like okay well if I'm going to cry I'm getting hyper alert and when I came back from this one and I was hyper alert all the time an adrenaline is just a constant steady drip of adrenaline going in and that's why I was kind of drinking heavily to calm down you know one in the vicious cycle I got into it the ambien and that's a and then my sleep in jacked up and then inflammation and all the other health health issues that came with that so that was like kind of the first step the second step was at this time I came over the training detachment and and you know 2010 and was now running the land warfare section for you and doc Marci Kirk parsley was our diving Medical Officer Group one and he's a seal later on went and got is uh his you know doctorate and became a doctor he kind of at that point was discovering that all these health issues that we were dealing with was were revolved heavily around sleep and so he was able to help me like get off the ambien start doing stuff to take you know natural things to get my sleep back in order did you ever do the sleep study did he put you on the thirty but I I did a sleep study later and yeah I've sleep apnea and so I've got a CPAP machine and I sleep with four that and and that helps but you know you sleep and diet or a lynchpin like sleep diet and exercise there's three pillars of good health probably is there a fourth pillar probably like hip knows it her I don't know those are the big three I would say and getting that sleep fixed up helped my mental state a huge bit and helped my physical state I was in terrible shape at the time and a lot of different joint pains and ailments and so that was good you know I was taking melatonin and he goes how much melatonin you take I'm like oh I'm taking six milligrams he's like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa you know you need your body is gonna not make its own and ideally you get to the point where you're not even taking you know like some magnesium at night to help you calm down and so that that started me on on the path and now I was really glad because otherwise I know guys that can't sleep without ambien and I don't think that they're really they're not really getting into the sleep and it's just it's not good and at this time you were working at trader came back and took over the the land warfare senior enlisted role there as it should be yeah that's a that was my dream usually guys don't ask to go to Nylund and and I was like hey please send me out there this is what I like and now that was good to go you know what's it's it's really interesting and we talked about this earlier as we applied pressure mm-hm to the different troops we would see troops that were that were loaded with superstars they had so much raw talent but then they didn't own their mistakes and they were just terribly returned hey I'm gonna be like what I know you guys are good to go what is going on here and then we would see troops that necessarily did not I'll have a whole lot of raw talent but they were very humble and they were they kept their their all plans super simple and they would just they would be the troops that that like that we couldn't the OPFOR just couldn't our opposition forces couldn't keep up with them that's just a fact and it's over and over and over and over again and again and again and the the people the people that it's interesting too because you might think well if you're not humble then you're going to be cocky and if you're cocky with the training guys then they're gonna be more judgmental and they're gonna push you harder and they're gonna jump on everything that mistake you make it's not like that it's like it's so clear that when a when a troop was humble they would fix themselves and fix the problems and the mistakes that they made and when they weren't but you know you get four or five guys six seven guys in a troop that are cocky and arrogant and that not only are they not owning their own mistakes but they're blaming everyone else inside their own troupe it just turns it's so horrible to watch it's just it's it's horrible to watch because they're at each other's throats they're blaming each other for everything and no one's taking ownership it's just a total nightmare and it has nothing to do it's like even completely objectively looking at a troupe you just you just watch them fall apart because someone doesn't say hey you know what maybe we should just work together and try and do better which is essentially all you need to do is say wait a second it took us 12 minutes the tradit guys timed us on getting our headcount leaving that building it took us 12 minutes and in that 12 minutes we took four more casualties maybe we should look at how we're getting our head counts whatever just whatever little thing yeah and if you're an arrogant person you just it's just anything guess what then you end up with a bunch of new guys that are all arrogant cuz they're all just imitating you you know they're all imitating the senior guys there's not a new guy that checks in to a team goes you know what my chief seems a little bit arrogant I'm gonna be more humble I thought now no you're a new guy you're like I'm gonna act like my platoon chief that's what I'm gonna do and that's what you do and you end up with a whole whole to ask unit of just people that don't want to say that they did anything wrong and it's again it was just horrible to see cuz it be guys that were all over you guys we like we know everyone you know ya know everyone on the west coast know every guy like they're our friends and yeah bro know in your heart that was the hardest part of the job was was having to you know you're looking at your friend in saying bro man I'm I'm not like you're not I'm not just saying this you guys are doing really really bad mm-hm and you need to fix some of this stuff or it's you're not gonna get through it you're gonna get reloaded yeah and yeah that was the worst part of the job in my opinion yeah absolutely and then it's super tricky just to be able to debrief these guys and do in a manner where you don't sound condescending yeah yeah I mean um god I love that job I would I would you know go out there I had my little voice recorder and I would sit there and I would take all my notes and the voice recorders you can't write while you're all the stuff's going on and sometimes I would just record the guys as they're freaking out total panic screaming at everyone I just record them and I'd get back and I'd be like hey man okay when you guys got strongpoint into that building what were you thinking you wanted everyone to do he's like they just needed to move and I go okay let me do it let me just play what you were saying and you'd press play on the recorder and the guy be like and you couldn't even understand you couldn't even understand him yeah be like man bro this isn't just like this isn't just me and there's some guys that didn't like me you know or whatever it's like it's not just me and I like you actually I think I seem like a good dude I'm just saying like these mistakes are bad and they're not just made up man they're not just like I'm not just making you up you guys ran to the wrong target and the whole task unit ran to the wrong target you're in charge of the assault and you ran to the wrong target and everyone followed you and that just you know you didn't you didn't do what you were supposed to do but that's not good and I'm not just saying this because I want to be cool I'm saying this because it's not good yeah is this it was crazy and with the great opportunity in that is it was a non-stop experiment to where you could watch how guys organize themselves and how they their organization structure responded to pressure yeah and you could see like oh well these guys are using decentralized command and we can put all the dang pressure we have to bear sort of killing every other guy and they can still function or these guys have over centralized or command or there just isn't any and I can put a fraction of pressure and then it just cracks everywhere and falls out and that's cool that that I mean again I learned so much from the several years that I was doing that well I could see the personality traits that guys were exhibiting as they came through there and then how they were organized functionally and what worked and what didn't yeah and the other I just said a bunch of negative stuff about how much it sucked but it was so awesome you'd get these studs these young seal beasts ePHI vests that would just be like objects of this element we're moving you back I love this guy and I just they would just be awesome and so you'd see that all the time too of course yeah and so that was what made it so cool and yes it's the ultimate leadership laboratory to to experience from the outside from the instructor cadre perspective of we're gonna put 28 platoons through this little problem it's the same problem and the only difference is and you could say there's some difference in the guys but there's really not there's actually like the seals in the platoon they're good they're they're solid defined there's a couple knuckleheads there's a couple great guys there's a couple guys there's guys in the middle but that's not the difference the difference is so blatantly clear the leadership that you just get to see that over and over and over again that's awesome yeah how long did you stay there for it was there three years and then what what came next you made Master Chief mm-hmm and then wrapped up your time at trade at and then then it was time to go over to team five Chuck I went over to team five and the way the progression is you do a slot as the operations master chief and then the next cycle were built on a two year cycle you would fleet up to become the command master chief and operations is just it is a crazy job because you are responsible for every single moving part that the SEAL team does so you're looking at what all nine platoons are doing for training you're involved with where everybody is going to deploy all the gear they got all the ammo that they order anything in between outside your dealing with all the other commands um and then so halfway through our work up the ice ISIL went and took Mosul and then deployed they they they split up how the team was organized so that that kind of threw a wrench in how we were deploying we had to come up with a plan to possibly deploy half of the team during unit level training and it it was busy but then it was was a fantastic experience because basically learn how to do everything and then every time so working with with like if someone came to me and they complain to me about our admin department and then I would go to admin and like hey what's going on here and then I want to find out that like we'll have to blame and sometimes all of it lies with the guy complaining about it or hey this other unit over here they're not doing this right and then I just go over and talk to them and find out that hey they've got some issues I don't know about that we could help them out with or we're not doing everything correctly and so I got I took that stuff that I learned from you know like Danny Carroll and Steve Hinds and monetary size and started to apply it outside of just a platoon level but to a command level and a relationship level and it it worked out great we got we had a lot of stuff done and yeah I'm rambling a little bit but there you have that that stuff every time there there was every time there was a complaint this isn't doing the right they suck at this I dig into it and there are a couple times I didn't dig into it and I'd wind up with egg in my face and now I just dig into everything I take what someone tells me like somebody gets in trouble over the weekend and it's like okay this is what we heard right now the first story is never the real story and then let's just don't have to make a call now let's wait and let things develop and find out what the real facts are before we do something need your that we can't take back and sometimes it wins out that it's worse and sometimes it wins out it's then it's better I remember one of the things I heard a general say on on on the deployment that I was on later on he says he's he's not gonna make a decision until he has to they're like hey we want to do this and he goes do I need to make that decision today no ok then I'm not gonna cuz he can let more facts come in he can deal with more stuff which made sense that was general Nagada which was the sock cent commander when that stuff went on and he was I've never met him personally but he believed in real flat communications so when he sent out an email there'd be like eight a couple hundred people cc'd on it and he because there's a tendency for people on staffs to use the the flag officer there they're working for they're using them like the The Wizard of Oz right they're like oh the general just said this and then you're like well I saw his email and that's not what he said in fact here's let me forward you the email and highlight it and everyone else will bcc'd and no one does that but there's I've seen it happen a lot of times with other leadership who does it don't use flat comms where people below them will start saying this guy says this or this guy says that and start doing a little bit of manipulation to maneuver whatever their agenda is or just they get things going the way they want to do but one thing I heard you know just kept on that don't make a decision until you have to and there's a weird dichotomy in that because you know every there's there's plenty of quotes that are are the opposite of that which is you know good well like we said there's a good plan right now is better than a great plan executed tomorrow or whatever or you know you've got to be decisive and the reality is there's and I've I say this a lot which is if I know that we are a graduate we get Intel that there's bad guys in this building in this town somewhere and they're like we want you to go hit it that doesn't mean it's like okay okay I decide right now okay yes we're gonna go hit it we load up the vehicles and we start driving and we drive there and hit it no we actually go okay well let's let the information develop and we'll start planning so I made a decision the decision was to start planning the decision is to go hit the target and then it's like okay well now it's nighttime we have a good plan but we're not sure we haven't confirmed the Intel okay well let's let's drive to a Forward Operating Base and get staged all right so we've still flexed I've decided to do that but we haven't decided to go hit the thing but we're still prepared to if we need to we've moved in the right direction and then we get it you know Intel that well we don't know but a vehicle arrived at this person's house and we think it might be him okay well let's push to a staging point right we still haven't decided to hit it but we've moved in that direction this happens with businesses to where there's something unfolding a new market right hey this new market might open up okay let's invest all of our money into this new market right now no that's not a good move what you do is okay let's let's find out let's let's invest a little bit of money and find out how big that market really is okay cool we do a little study oh it turns out that that market does look pretty big okay let's do a little research and see what it would take for us to push it into that market okay cool and so you're moving in the right direction but you're not just jumping in did with this decisiveness to say okay I've seen all I need to see I've decided that we're just gonna go all-in right now that doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes there's other times where it's like guess what we're standing in the hallway or we're standing in the street and we're getting shot at we're gonna get into a building that's what we're gonna do like there's no what we're not gonna think about we're not gonna move towards the building no we're going in the building cause right now out here we're gonna die so yes be decisive in those situations be decisive when you have to be decisive but if you don't have to make a decision the big decision right now and you can make a series of smaller decisions iterative decisions that move you towards what you think decision you will have to make then go that route yeah absolutely okay so you guys deploy to and this is when you guys get into Mosul no not following deployment okay this is what you guys do on this deployment I I went to the the command split up so the CEO and the command master chief were up in Iraq and then I was at another spot non-disclosed locations yeah on a crisis response element with the XO and that was that was six months that was six well we did five months because at the time they said you have to be front door to front door in six months and because you can't predict the air flow we did a five and a half month deployment and and and that was a big eye open or two because we on that deployment I said I was going to an embassy once a week how'd the boys handle it I mean just they they did good we had we had guys kind of spread out in different spots and there was a big operation that went on there that when the national mission force did and our guys participated in it and it was it was a good like shooting deal nothing happened up in Iraq I think it was frustrating for them and then by the nature of how everything was there was a really slow strike process so when our guys could see like a vehicle-borne IEDs towards Iraqi counterparts to blow them up it would take 20 minutes to get clearance to drop a bomb on and and and only fifteen minutes to drive there in like five minutes driver so you they just watch it happen live on TV and they're like so that that aspect of it was frustrating and there wasn't wasn't a real clear decision made on what was gonna happen at that point so there wasn't it was I know the guys up there didn't do much but just spin spin and spin and spin which is really difficult okay get ready oh never mind hey get ready never mind and yeah that was uh that was good so it was a good deployment overall it was a good experience for me to kind of like because I was the senior enlisted guy where I was at and so that was great and came back from that and we did our change of command and then I fleet it up to be the command master chief and you don't really know who you're going to get paired up with when you're in that leadership role because there's a commanding officer and a commanding Master Chief and as it happens I got paired up with a guy that was just awesome and I'd known forever and the two of us are a lot alike personality wise which we really you know like we went to a couple of leadership seminars and they're like you guys are almost the same person so hey here's what you're gonna have to watch out for because both of you are really blunt and yeah I really won the lottery it was a it was a real pleasure working for him he was a fantastic leader and what he did really well specifically was he communicated a lot so he's always speaking with his his XO his ops officer and myself and then the task unit commanders he spoke with all once a week he would have a meeting with them once a week you know and he was all the way down to the platoon all I see and he did it in a manner where he wasn't stepping on other people's toes and there was never any there was never any any guessing on where he was coming from or what he expected and everybody knew that he cared about them was was his his first priority and then the mission came after that so that was really good but hey you know what if you if you if you messed up he don't hold you accountable he he'll he'd give give you a written counseling and he did that for some of his guys and he just did some shady stuff and they're good dudes and he's like okay well hey you know hopefully this stops here and did it doesn't written counseling so so that was good but yeah ghin it's the same message that we talked about in the last podcast which is just knowing where you stand and absolutely having predictability and know when when you know a guy's got a reputation like oh if you step out of line you're gonna get formal written counseling that tightens people up immediately whereas if you think on this guy's kind of a pushover guess what you do you cause more trouble and you cause more problems yeah yeah you really do and it was like there was always an escalation with it but it was it was straightforward and then everybody always understood like hey I'm I'm not mad at you these are just the standards we have here and you did this here's the consequences is that you know we need you to fix yourself I'm rooting for you to fix yourself I'm not mad at you and then let's just move forward from here got back from that deployment and then I got back in February you started this podcast in December iris it started listening to it and then like I said podcast six is when I started listening to it and then I was caught up within a week because I was able to do it my longer commute and then just you talk about I wish I had this I mean I had the luxury of having this when I was in a really important leadership position threefold as a husband as a father and as a seal right and those in the the priorities are almost always the same or it's weighted heavily husband father seal and so all the stuff that that is discussed here through all these lessons from these books and all that it can take and apply to every stinking aspect of my life and I did it and like the hardest thing for me was that to really get introspective and honest with myself about what my shortfalls were and it's not something that you can do overnight it's not like I can get a shot and get inoculated it's something that is water tortured in and then I just growing so much from it and go nuts you know the the like starting with the the dang sea of machetes season of the machete season that was like the first really dark pot and you know I was driving I was wincing listen to that I'm like why did he do that to me um but then I appreciated how good I had it right then then then and so now as those those podcasts are so dang necessary to understand how evil I could because I could I could completely go down any of those roads and then once you understand that that's in your heart you can control it but then you can appreciate how good you have it and and you've got that like the the the episode that you did on the My Lai massacre I had to pull my car over because I was crying because I was so ashamed that this this is I was just like can't this story be about somebody else and not Americans and then later on when when I when guys make chief and I talked to you about this I'm like hey when my guys make chief we have we have to put them through all this training a lot of the training I don't think is good one of the things I did for him is like hey we're gonna listen to these three podcasts and Maile was one of them the other one was steel my soldiers hearts which was an awesome podcast and awesome lessons and they're all awesome lessons but it was all good because the guys listened to it then we have discussions and then you know you came in and and we VT seed and talked to him and that was such good stuff but going down that road and then being in all these different situations at the executive level levels of leadership sand the SEAL Teams and I could see in real time I'm like oh okay this is uh this is uh uh yeah my face is getting flushed and I'm a little emotionally attached to this idea my mic my fists are clenched What did he say he told me to breathe alright and then I come back and like oh or someone said something I disagree with them and I just ran headlong into you know a pillbox and like that did not work out well maybe I can learn to finesse it and then it worked out great because our I think we did the feedback I've gotten anyway is that we did really good at the team and we dealt well with a lot of other people and so that is is a huge degree for myself was having the podcast to learn these things in military history and then being able just to be introspective and improve on my life as well and having these discussions with my cuz she listens to the podcast all the time and we discuss it it's just been good for for us across the board you know when we deployed on that deployment knots during the deployment we did the the clearance and a Mosel we had one platoon that went to an area and they were working under the conventional murray every well it was all we were all working for the conventionals the conventional forces in Iraq in 2016-17 they were the main effort we were in support of and then our guys went to a location where they inherited a pretty toxic relationship and they took some of the lessons that you talked about and they went in they're humble they said hey how can we help what can we do oh hey when are your Wendy have when are your normal battle rhythm meetings we want to send a representative there so we make sure we're doing everything right and we're getting the word and all and they really lean into it they turned that relationship around in a matter of a month completely around and and then they were in an area of Iraq out west that was not there wasn't a lot going on out there at the time but that Colonel was so impressed with them and liked them he bent over backwards to make sure that he could get them outside the wire so that they could get after it and we were able to get them outside the wire and at the end of the ployment all five of our platoons had been in combat they were the last ones the fifth platoon that hadn't and then they got the opportunity to really mix it up on to operations and it was a hundred percent because of that that Colonel liked them as people and trusted them and wanted to see them do well he wanted to celebrate it and when people don't like you they want to see they'll walk across the street to see you get screwed over relationships are stronger than the chain of command absolutely and they had written in there I love this because I've copied this on their on their whiteboard in their their their joint opera their jock they had at the top in all caps relationships equal mission success so when one of their ePHI vests went over and talked to a Marine Corps áfive they were really cool with them they didn't manage their own security like the Marines did security around their camp they would bring dinner out to the guys that were standing watch at night just like it was it was awesome and then everybody there was a you know a real real sense of teamwork and stuff out there so that was good and that yeah that was but you guys did some real tough fighting inside of Mosul yeah now our our platoons that were up north on you know when they kicked off the liberation of Mosul which was the biggest military operation since the invasion of Iraq and there were I believe three different main lines of approach going towards the city and Isis pretty much controlled everything on the outside guys the first couple days of that there were semi trucks that were loaded with explosive e achill borne IEDs that was a semi like I don't think you know outside of the Moab we don't have a bomb that's carrying that much stuff coming at him and that's where you know he OD chief fine and was killed on the first couple days when our guys had gotten into an area they were they were partnered up with the the Peshmerga which are the who are the guys that occurred not me Kurtz yeah thirds yeah so they're partnered up with them and they were pressing into an area and they got into an area that was just too laden with IEDs and they were having to back up their their Matvey the truck they were driving in and Jason had the door open so he could make sure that he was in the same tire tracks of that he'd just driven over unfortunately they'd driven over a cross plate once it crushed it halfway they hit the rest of the cross plate and it was a daisy chains of explosives it went off he ate a bunch of it hit him right in the face it was a fairly horrible experience for our guys that were there because he was still breathing biologically he was alive for like the hour that they were with him before they could finally get a medevac to him that was too hot the medevac wouldn't come in so they had to offload him off the truck get him in the back of a pickup truck and then drive through all this heavy fire and a lot more IEDs to get him on on on board the medevac and then you know then he expired and it it's the worst case scenario period and it's something that we drilled we started drilling we call it a Keiko drill for when you lose a guy back on the Strand and we would do full-blown drills like okay here's what we need to do to cover down on that so that we're ready and I'm a little bit superstitious I think if we practice to do something a whole bunch of times it's not gonna happen and then it happened but luckily it's something that we it's not lucky that it happened but it's something that we drilled and more so we had like a book because there's an incredible about emotion and everybody wants everyone gets excited they all want to do stuff inside there it's sometimes you can do there's too much that you can do and you can confuse a situation so we just opened up we had the Keiko book we opened it up and like our add mineral guy is like hey what's step 1 and he goes down he goes alright we need to do this what step two we need to do this there's no way we would remember that we went through it went through the steps one of the things that that I was pretty adamant about is because I had a good idea although I haven't experienced it directly about what my guys had gone through that were there with him and I wanted to get a a psych-out to just help them unpack some of the stuff they went through but before the end of deployment so he could do two things he could get out there and help him unpack what they were you know what they went through and then he built up some rapport so at the end of deployment on the the next stop they had some rapport with them so the the group sent sent the guy out now this is like three weeks after this happened because the best thing to do is to do something in the I stayed busy because there was a freakin war to fight but then when stuff tapered down for them and now like others downtime hey guess what the psychs coming out and he's gonna hang out there and you don't need to speak with him but he's available and typically he you know he'll get out there he puts a thing up hey you want to speak with no one signs it but then he's just there and at lunchtime a guy hits him up and then later on another guy hits him up and yeah and the guys went through and there was there was heavy fighting up until the day that that we read apply team seven basically came in and we're doing turnover ops and going out and doing stuff there and Mosel we had just there was a little bit law of a law when eastern Mosul was finally cleared and then there was a big reassessment on moving over to the other side of the river but uh it it was it was busy and it was uh was pretty good I mean we had a couple of vehicle-borne IEDs that got within a hundred yards of our guys before they were able to kill them with and then the the drivers got like a kill switch on him so when he dies it gets released it gets released in detonates and there was no shortage of I think there was at least like seven or eight of these things coming at us a day and then they they've been prepping for months so they were laid in all across Mosul there was a garage underground that had a V bid in it and so as the front line moved closer all of a sudden this car would just drive out and drive right into the Iraqis and blow him up and there's no time to hit it with a Hellfire or or stop it or whatever and they may have them come in pretty quick yeah you know going back to the the casualty plan it's it you were giving me a hard time but you were harassing me saying like when are you gonna write your protocol book because I've talked about you know how you got a protocol for certain situations that all right like you said things that are real emotional things that are moving real quick things that you know you're you need to be thinking about but you won't be able to think clearly about when they're actually going on and that's what you're talking about you know you guys put together a protocol to follow and the Navy has one of the teams have one but you know you got to look at it and actually understand what it means you can't just open up a book that you've never looked at before so but but that protocol idea for for your life is definitely a powerful thing whether especially for things that are going to be emotional and and rough to go through if you have a good protocol commence the protocol step one and and you also talked about the guys continuing to be busy and that's absolutely true if you're gonna sit around and well if you're gonna sit around you're just gonna think about the the horrible event you just went through and that's not gonna go well you're not ready to deal with it so get back to work work let it settle a little bit and then you'll you know you'll you have to deal with it later but you do have to deal with it at some point yeah I know that like one of the times that I got to go out to the to the to the to basically the flotte with our guys who are going advise and assist and they would be about three blocks back or four blocks back from the front lines the civilians that lived in Mosel would just move away from where the fighting was and then just kind of mingle around just outside of it and then go back to their houses so we were at this this one location where the guys were providing support to the Iraqi CTS and we had snipers up on rooftops we're able to see all the way to the frontlines and take shots and then we were also using mortars pretty heavily we got some eighty ones in that are just friggin awesome so to think our so one thing another story right after this so there's all these civilians around what's a little nerve-wracking because who's who right and there are a bunch of kids there were some kids right next living in the building next to with their families next to where our trucks were parked and they were really nice kids and they spoke pretty clear English and they wanted candy and stuff so we were chatting with them a little bit and and messing around and then so we were there all day and then in the evening a bunch more kids came out there is a whole group of kids and I don't know if they just come in the area or was the evening and they just want to come out and play and so there's we were in this area where there weren't a lot of buildings so we were right in the middle of this big field so you know we could see anything coming and the kids were all playing and then a salvo of 120s came in and so 120,000,000 Wars boom boom and they basically kind of bracketed us but then where where one of them landed was right where those stinking those poor kids were and I looked over there and I I saw like this beautiful little girl hopping away in the smoke and she's missing a leg I saw a guy run out and snatch up a little body and he's just wailing you know I thought about my kids at home and what those people are going through and how awful it must be and now we just got to rely to stop this freak and crap that was going on with ISIL because it is just so and to see innocents shattered like that was rough but that's that's part about you no no in the darkness and what does that do that makes me appreciate my kids more and then never pass up an opportunity to hug them or tell them I love them or anything like that yeah and that those kind of stories right there you know I I pretty regularly have to explain to people that there are evil human beings in the world that they're those those people that drop those mortars they don't care about those kids at all and I heard other stories from guys coming back from Mosel after you were there where one of the biggest risks that was going on was the e the guys doing the EOD job well what does the EOD guy do he dismantles bombs well they do that in the lowest possible risk way that they can which often means if we find or if they find an AED of some kind what do they do they just blow it up in place they send a Rob robot over there and detonate the thing and just blow it up and that makes your job a lot less risky well what was happening over there it was suicide there was suicide bombers okay so what'd he do with the suicide bomber well what'd he do with the suicide bomber that comes up that's wearing a suicide vest you shoot them and you kill them and that makes your job pretty easy because then you can then once you've got a dead person with a bomb on their chest you can send a robot over there and blow up the bomb well what happened and what the some of these stories I got told was that these Isis was putting these suicide vests on little kids and so you can't shoot the little kid and you don't want the little kid to get detonated and it was one of the riskiest things that they had to do and you know that's and again that's what that's the kind of thing that that you know there's there's a like there's a lot I'm not saying America is a perfect place because it is not but that kind of doing you hear a story like that and you know that there's a some random Zod guy with the wife and kids at home and whatever else he's got going on and he puts all that on the line to try and help some little Iraqi kid from getting blown up that's say what you want about America but that right there is America we went out to the to the well I were going out to the floor every day I got an opportunity to go out with him another time when they were right on the edge of Mosel going into it and the building that they were occupying was a school and one thing I noticed as I was walking through the buildings of the school is that on the walls of the school like okay inside the classrooms had all the Disney Princesses Dora the explora all the stuff that our kids enjoy there so it's twofold there's a third there's a thought like all our Western culture and lifestyle is going to get overrun negative because Western culture on the whole while you said it's not perfect it's still the best thing going and it is completely contagious and even over there in Iraq in a school that was controlled by ISIL their little kids are looking at the Disney Princesses and Dora the Explorer and you know that stuff Western things because it's good it's appealing yeah and that that gave me that gave me a tremendous amount hope yeah in just our culture and way of life forward that's the whole idea of months ago when I had said that oh you want to solve the problem in North Korea give those people I phones so they yeah watching YouTube because you watch a couple of YouTube videos and you look around at your you know barren neighbourhood where you're eating like water with salt and it is your dinner and you watch a YouTube video of people eating steaks and McDonald's and subway and you think yourself the something's not right here yeah and it's not gonna take real long before those people say look we're doing this wrong and he probably heard that story about Gorbachev when Gorbachev came to America um and when in if you're at the story know Gorbachev came to America from the Soviet Union and he went into like a Vaughan's or whatever supermarket he went into and he went into the cereal aisle uh-huh and saw that there was 390 different kinds of cereal in there and he realized that they needed to stop what they were doing because you know how many different types of cereal there was in the Soviet Union one you know that's it and when you try and control everything it doesn't work and and actually I remember you called me up one day you're like hey this use like I was losing this podcast this applies to everything cuz like it's the same with government I'm like yes it is you can't control everything if one person tries to make all the decisions it doesn't work I was actually gonna read this Thomas Sowell chunk from when I went last time I had Jordan Peterson on because he lays out this thing about how the government with the the government trying to control the pricing of some kind of Pell some kind of help in in if the government raises the prices every hunter goes and buy go goes and gets all these pelts and then turns them into the government and then the government what do they have now an excess of pelts and so now what do they do with them all they don't do anything so there's nothing to do with them because they they don't happen they aren't needed and whole cycle unfolds where things just don't work with centralized command yeah and things like Dora the explora and the Disney Princesses and Thomas the Tank Engine and all these Mikey and the Dragons these things are going to spread and those evil bastards what do they do to try and stop it you know what do they do they try and control anything any and any form of freedom and especially freedom of speech you know controlling the internet all those things and it's disturbing to see but I believe that like in Jurassic Park EKKO movie reference my dad even give you credit was he really yeah he's like one of the first guys to appear on the screen he just walks past even I still still in that movie I think the line is life will find a way right yep life will find a way yes that's what happens that's what happens I think so you know with all these these these folks will remember those folks in Mosul they'll remember that they'll remember who gave them freedom and by the way it was Iraqi troops which was amazing to hear their Iraqi troops fighting hard and sacrificing because in Ramadi it was pretty rough to get the Iraqi troops to take lead and when they would take lead the insurgents would be waiting for them and would deal heavy blows to those guys and it was a nightmare to watch but it's it's awesome that they stepped up and they did the house-to-house clearance were they heavily supported by coalition forces by Americans and firepower and all that yeah but guess what I mean how how many people did they lose at one point we thought we were going to lose our entire partner force when they first kicked it off they were losing they were losing 15 to 20 guys a day and and we did the math like at this rate and it was because our our strike process was really slow and hadn't gotten decentralized yet that was fixed later but we're like okay at this rate in three weeks these guys were in our entire part of horses gonna be gone yeah and what's really impressive is there we lost a battalion in Ramadi that they deserted and they had shown up they did a couple operations they took some casualties and they left and so for those guys when you were in Mosul to take massive casualties and stick it out that shows you that how much that's just leaves and it's it's incomparable - it was there before it was there Ct their counterterrorism unit which is there like premier yeah basically Tier one yeah they were all really really good to go dialed in and and it was just the fighting was so brutal they were losing guys heavily and the other funny thing somebody put this on social media the other day and it was like Jocko willing could predicts the future or something like that because I was were on with Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan's idea what do you do about these Isis guys how could you ever defeat them and I was like if you gave the ISIS problem to like a Marine Corps second lieutenant and said like hey figure on a plan on how to beat these guys they could do it it's like there's a bunch of bad guys you surround them and move through and kill them all that's what we're gonna do and he's like yeah that actually did happen and and that is what happened yeah and it was a it was beautiful in the amount of attrition that took place was awesome yeah and for those people that think that you can't kill an idea they're wrong you know and then there was some of the stuff where ISIL had gotten so hysterical was something there was a video there's one of those you know I do those horrible videos and it was something happened over in Syria and they released a video where they you know they killed like nine guys but they were from the local area and and then I guess the tribe was like hey can we have the bodies back of our guys you just killed and they're like no so the next day at suicide bomber walks into the ISIL headquarters in that area that tribe which the way the tribalism works they're willing to do that and boom clocked off killed like 30 people they just you know and and I think there's one or two people that are kind of hardwired maybe to do that out of a thousand and they they have to do these videos and force people totally to do that stuff because it's not in their nature certainly isn't in mind another that's another big misconception it's like oh they're just willing to die know they're getting coerced and forced into those situations you know that's that's what's actually happening like you said sure is there one out of a thousand that's like so brainwashed that's all like yes I'm gonna go be a marker sure there is some of those but most of them are hey if you don't do this we're gonna kill your whole family so which one do you want and the guys go yeah okay go ahead come over and I'm talking about situational to where they've got they all like a guy strapped to a post with the thing on and then they tell someone go stab them and the guy didn't no one wants to do that you know like there they were doing what the Japanese were doing in World War two oh okay I see what you're saying hey you'll hack off some heads for training today go kill some poor Chinese farmer yeah go and no one wants to do most people don't want to do that and that's like in in their situation to a lot of those people I don't want anything to do with this no yeah well you got to do it or the result is we're gonna kill your family and then they just get into a situation where they're doing and it's not good anyway on a positive note like on that deployment I clean my dang diet up as a result is you know Peter Atia being on this podcast and my mom listen to Peter tea his podcast and keep it smart on myself and started doing uh basically I did pretty strict Kido there's a couple weeks where I ate nothing but eggs and sardines and man has boring okay oh but I felt I found you know an inflammation went away I drop pounds and I was getting in good shape and then I started experimenting with the intermittent fasting which is something that I'm still doing now and now is that's good stuff you start that during deployment before on the deployment limit I'm like hey okay I'm gonna quit eating sugar because you'd mentioned sugars bad for you and I never really paid attention to it it is bad and then I'm like okay I I'm like I hey I'm gonna stop eating sugar and I was eating big salads and stuff like that and and there was a guy that I was deployed with this really smart on this stuff and and he's like well hey if you're if you stopped eating sugar than you need to eat quit eating that yogurt and that milks got a lot of sugar and guess what that fruit has got a lot of sugar in it so man then I started looking at labels getting smart picked up a book read it on basically you know how I eat now is is is roundabout a paleo thing like I try to avoid grains and carbohydrates and stuff that's processed because the other day you're like you know I mean yeah you know I'm stay I stay that way but then you're like but if I go to someone's house and they say like hey do you want to you know do you want a piece of bread or whatever yeah I eat it yeah cuz because there's there's another aspect to that I don't want to be the vegan guy who is like hey you know what I'm better than you because I'm a vegan so I've um but I'm better than you diet yeah and so it's like really uncool if someone offers you food to say no yeah so that's that's where that's something I weigh out if I was like okay I go over to your house and we're having be sinner that's what I'm gonna eat because I can afford to eat a piece of pizza or you're not gonna die and then you just gotta watch out for the slippery slope oh yes cuz it is I say no to bread all the time no no I'm good and then like you said if it's someone hey if it's a situation that unfolds where it's like oh I'm gonna look like I'm gonna be bringing attention to myself is really what it boils down to I'm gonna make everyone talk to me about me and my little thing it's like no I'm not that important I'm just some dude like it's weird so I'm not gonna make a big thing out of that yeah and bread sandy I mean you can eat some meat without getting your fingers all dirty ya know it's it is it is handy and the the lettuce wraps while good in theory and actually have you had someone make a burger I had one the other day was an iceberg they I said I asked for like lettuce on the burger and it was iceberg lettuce cut like basically in half so it was big two big giant chunks and it worked really well Howl's growls pretty cuz normally it's like oh they give you that one big piece of lettuce that's all wilted by the time it gets you you can't pick that thing up it's not happening you actually got to use a fork a knife to eat a burger which in its own right is kind of disturbing yes if we're eating burgers and we're using a fork a knife we don't respect that I mean that's just not something that we're doing but all of a sudden we are if we got wilted lettuce on the city's shit and so you started so you cleaned up your diet what did you weigh when you went on deployment 193 pounds and I'm five foot six and then would you weigh when you got home uh I think I was 165 how did you feel mentally way better yeah weight and and doc parsley had already cleaned up your my sleep habits yeah we were basically getting on step right as as I've been I've been on step lower for two years and you know it sleeps like anything else I just got to be disciplined with it I don't get up at 4:30 in the morning I get up around 5:30 or 6:00 but I'm really careful that that like you know the lights are all out because for me even stupid little lights will wake me up and and it's quiet and all that and then I got I got one of those weighted blankets which is pretty cool you must have told my wife about that or iris did because we both have a weighted but I get now too it's not on my side of the bed it's just on her side of the bed yeah they're not cool in the summertime because they're too hot oh yeah man I just go to sleep and sleep I don't wake up at all don't look till the next morning you know like normally you wake up a couple times during the night and that thing you just get under there and you feel all safe I feel like I'm in the womb you're all you got the weighted blanket got the CPAP machine yeah keeping it real yeah one of our mutual friends that has a CPAP machine and his wife was like you know when you when you mask comes off Dee you know I'm trying to wake you up so you can put it back on and he's like don't you know don't just leave me alone and she's like well what if your mask comes off and then you stop breathing and he's like just let me die so that's good so you come home from that deployment yeah and then what you do when you got back I went over to trade a candy cane the command master chief there and then started you know preparing or making sure all the fundamentals that you'd stayed in place we're still there and they were still there the guys were just really hard and doing a good job and then and now is it over running unit level training and and seeing that and then working myself out of a job getting the the guy that's my replacement set up to take my job and and here's the deal like as I leave Naval Special Warfare they are so good to go and I see the younger guys now that are coming up at every level the people like to complain about the Millennials and I really don't see any issue with them because they're doing good and and when I measure myself against who they are when I was their age they're way better I'm like oh my goodness biggest problem I have with Millennials right now as I look at him I'm like how are you so much bigger and stronger and smarter than I ever was when I was 22 come on I told you this the other day I roll in here and I'd hear something like guys training over on like another mat and I went over there and they're clearly young frogmen and there's six of them and they're all dripping with sweat cuz they've been getting after it argh and they all look like they're yoked and just ready to go start just killing people and I'm like what's up fellas like we're getting ready to go to land warfare I said legit it's just so happy yeah just yeah you're right these guys in in the teams right now and in the military at large if you're going in the military you're doing it for a reason you know yeah when you and I joined I want no war going on we were hoping there would be but you're going to now like me you know what's up you know what you're doing you know you're stepping into and now retirement you're gonna know I think so really excited but thirty years is a long enough time to where I'm like oh I'm ready to go yeah hardest part is that like I'm glad that you're going with the feeling like hey things are good to go because the hardest part is you start thinking that you like that you are so critical and now like oh what it's like no there's ten guys that are just as good as me better than me and they're all gonna get in there they're gonna do a better job than I could have ever done and and then the other thing is like when you hear some rumor or whatever about something going sideways and you get you get all freaked out because you want to be like back or you can help and you got guys going on deployment like something but it's just like that you have to you it's just hard to let go and I mean I'm not saying you're gonna be able to go but it's it's hard to not just think about it the same all the time like it's hard dude it's hard to come to grips with the fact that you're not the team's anymore that's all it is yeah and then that's what that's I mean I'm super appreciative that I'm getting to work with echelon front because the work that the best thing about being in the teams is the peer group yeah and so I'm training right into the same peer group of just a bunch of awesome people and then getting to go and and I really enjoyed like a third of my career as a SEAL Team 5 the other third of it was at trade and I really really enjoy working with people teaching passing stuff on learning I'm always learning and that's I'm super excited about it yeah it's like I said once you get over the fact I'll give you a little heads up if you cleaned out your locker yet it's it's like 80% done okay yeah that last 20% sucks yeah that's the worst part for me loading that stuff into my van and knowing and then your your car your access card doesn't work anymore it's just like game over and you just drive out and you know especially for guys like you and me and you know you even ten I mean I was in for twenty years you're in for thirty but I mean how many memories do you have at the SEAL team one grinder at the SEAL team three grinder at the trade at building it's like my whole life is right there and you know you know when you're leaving you're just it's it's all those memories are there but man they're good memories and I know that if I pick up the phone guys will answer and uh yeah you know when when faculty died like last year and I was like what I felt like all that yeah I just felt like all that memory all that memory that he had of us is gone like that he had of me and all my little run inmates that I used to run around with we were all team one guys we were all in like he had these images of us and knew us when we were little kids and kept us out of trouble and all that stuff and I'm thinking all those things you he which he had a perspective that only he could happen like I was like oh those are all gone and that was that was a crappy feeling of just damn why does that have to go and I never got him on the podcast either which is a freaking shame yeah but the good thing is like you said we're still all just kicking it yeah and I mean really it's like just this naval special warfare any organization or team we're just in that for that little time and then it's shaped us way more than we shaped it we had our influence and it'll just keep on going and that's what that's like there's a piece of piece of us that's never ever ever going to die as long as this country's around or there are guys doing frogman stuff there will be a little piece that it gave us and we gave it there moving forward you know you know that's good to go it's about as good as it gets about as gonna gets I think that's probably a good spot and but we might both be retired echo Charles but we're not done yet mm-hmm in fact we're just gettin warmed up plenty of fighting I'll be it in a different way that is left to do and we're gonna do it you got any suggestions on how we can stay in the fight stay in the fight and on the path big time yeah the first thing you Jitsu right a little bit more direct relationship to the expression fight do you do it - you're not doing it do it from any benefit so we always talk about not gonna go too deep into it I wanted to cuz I was thinking about it you know some people don't call a jujitsu match or jiu-jitsu training or a fight some people do something that don't so this is what I kind of discovered or realized that if other types of fighters or martial arts practitioners they tend to not call jiu-jitsu a fight you know like oh no it's not a fight you know you it's a match or it's a whatever and then you have the totalitarian kind of attitude which is like hey anything that you're struggling against another person or another force it's a fight even for you going to the grocery store and looking for a certain kind of it can be a spaghetti sauce yes sometimes yeah sometimes especially when I'm doing it for somebody else it's another element nonetheless so the way I look at it if you and I roll yes and we go hard yes is that a fight that's a fight for huh well your kid so because I look at it in that way anything that I'm struggling against another person or force or in your case another person and force it's a fight so that you know with you that's it that's essentially a good example unless fighting all-out war total war total war total war it's good to exercise that you know hives that whole look psychology for the fighting man it's just so good but just starting off with total war you start to view your life through the aspect of just total war yeah oh because now we're taking it to the next level this this workout I'm gonna be total war yeah this person that's trying to get somebody somebody hit me up on social media today said said he was getting emotionally blackmailed okay he said what would you do it was like not getting emotionally black black male t no factor stifle your emotion yes a well you're not because well yeah it's like don't even have emotions so how can he blackmail his son Chris so yeah I mean but makes sense though I don't know though because what emotions sometimes can be more you know more of a thing yeah for certain people you know and everything yeah for sure unless you if you have no emotions well then you're gonna have real problems yeah it's like me you can alert but you should learn to control your emotions and one thing that can help you learn to control your emotions is jiu-jitsu jiu-jitsu because it's an exercise in prepping for all-out war in life very good direct anyway I won't do in jiu-jitsu we need Aggie and rash guards that's essentially the uniform uniforms yeah for the jujitsu and you get that at the best ones anyway at origin or didn't mean comm that's where we get it it is in Farmington Maine all made in America yeah which is not a small deal not don't deal at all you can say oh whatever no it's it's a big deal and and what's awesome about speaking of America is going up to Farmington Maine and seeing a factory with 40 people working in it craftsmen making stuff here bringing back a town right back in the industry yeah that's what we're doing here movement check yeah Jesus carts other clothes joggers athletic gear apparently jeans from what I hear yeah yeah you don't know about those yet American denim and then we got supplements yeah Jason gardener talk to me about origin jaco supplements coming at you live yeah I am on the joint warfare doing the morning to at night krill oil every morning and I am on the mocha train on the mole train you know when I get when I want to have some dessert and like yeah you know what almond milk and then a scoop of the mint chip won't hit that with a stick blender it's a she ate Smee and then every morning my coffee I got a scoop of the vanilla monk actually that you know that you know the video you made with Tim Tim for where he's like probiotics yeah it was Jason Jason was like you know I wasn't sure was gonna get that stuff within I saw at because that's what did you know that was you yeah I pretty much figured exactly I was on the site look I'm I look at this Mulk like man so first of all it said keto compliant on there I'm like oh oh good to go because a lot of the protein stuff is loaded with sugar and then I saw probiotics I'm like okay I'm done here's the issue it's either loaded with sugar or it tastes horrible because even you put whatever sweetener artificial sweeteners taste horrible except for one the one that we use which is not artificial it's actually from nature itself that might you want fruit so yeah you can get all those from origin main calm and and I also realize that you haven't tried the war your kids strawberry milk yet and I'm I'm gonna get that to you all you're gonna get nuts right it is ridiculous it is ridiculous so get some that yeah it's true also chuckle as a store as we all know by now it's called jaw closed or so you got chuckles dark omnes where you can get your shirts more rash guards trucker hats flex fit hats we're doing both do we know which one sells more they're even really are you just making they were even when I checked when did you check kids around man I can't look at me and say it's just don't lie to me dude it doesn't work I like smell it how about this all up check it we'll get back to you we're good now we're good now there's no factor I'm good here's the thing they're not trying to look at me and tell me something that you don't know yeah you've not wear a today doesn't even matter cuz look what if I'm like hey I like flex it oh but the dropper truthful clear what you want tell me the truth okay well I'll report back how about that is that cool anyway hoodies like I said women's stuff on there if you want to represent while we we are on the path that's where he can get the stuff to represent you also get some choco whitey you can get it from whatever yeah it's cuz it tastes good and it's awesome for you and it gives you an 8,000 pound deadlift which is not you know light something subscribe to the podcast if you haven't yet otherwise echo is gonna keep telling you to subscribe ma is gonna invade your dreams and tell you subscribe well whoever you people that haven't subscribed yet you're crazy where this is 168 podcast this is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of listening but you didn't click Subscribe we had issues with you so just subscribe don't forget about the warrior kid podcast trying to tee up a couple more right now to get them out there to all of you so get some of that and then also youtube we have a youtube channel if you want to check that out it's it's starring echoes videos it's starring the video version of this podcast that's right well you would have made that oh yeah I guess so yeah so it's starring echo Charles's videos so you check out that you see what Jason Gardner looks like yeah that's something you're gonna definitely gonna see what Jason Gardner looks like does do you think Jason okay does and people please let me know does Jason Gardner look how he sounds I think so yeah I think so you think so well the thing is I've I you already saw I saw you and didn't hear you so a lot of people in this relents yeah people he opposite I think you probably I think you probably look how you sound I think I think but it's hard for me to make that judgment because I know you I I kind of I I gotta find that picture I'll post a picture of you and me age whatever 2019 yeah and I'm really the same so you guys the winning at the same time no you went in a few years before years before and then we ran over and do each other overseas and just really hit it off yeah yeah yeah what else psychological warfare yes what that is deep you get mad every single time that's that's funny this is the one that broke me this is the one where I was like bro we're not doing this whole it's the pork thing anymore we're done doing it yeah we're done I'm not doing anymore I'm not gonna listen to you it's not happening but here's gonna go Joe Rogan's towns recorded afterwards by myself somewhere well you can just be cool quiet no who's gonna be in the pudding Jason garden was psychological warfare yes actually you know what it's not because Jason garden is in the game deep in the game yeah so of yeah you know for him to know what psychological warfare is isn't a big shit's not gonna be very surprising yes so for the for the people who don't know what it is is what it is ten album with tracks chuckle check the thing you gotta remember about this this whole segment of us just sitting around and talking mm-hmm for the quote-unquote supports which it barely is right it's more just like a just a session of but it was because when we got done with some podcast early on it was like being drugged through like the emotional freaking hell and you get done in you want to just go home like you want to just like okay let's you know it's like my my youngest daughter she'll if she sees something scary or whatever or you know she'll say like can we watch something funny you know just and so that's what this actually is is hey okay we're gonna talk about people getting killed people getting blown up people getting butchered real people real people by the way and when we get done with that we're gonna lighten it up a little bit so we can carry on we're not gonna forget about it but we're gonna have a little bit of levity towards the end that's what this originally was somehow you ended up just saying the same thing over and over again good at saying it yeah you seem saying so yeah good so what I did was I did lose sight of some things yeah you know but we're back and you know I'm gonna explain what psychological warfare you people don't know it's an album we tracks chocolate tracks talking about how you can overcome certain moments of weakness on the path boom that's pretty concise there it is next on it on it dot-com kids on it good company this is where I get kettle bells home gym home gym home gym yet oh yeah to build it okay so I'll have one right now just got the Rings but o-rings blow so much that's the that's the original thing that you need to get first thing you need to get you know I didn't used to think that I used to think was a pull-up bar but I changed my mind rings yeah I could use more versatility yeah cuz rings are fuller ring guess they are and they're and they're also a dip bar and they're also a ring push-up bar yeah anything oh yeah big tendency thing I got my earrings from honey anyway I'll calm you kettle bells rings what battle ropes those maces those crazy Masons do workout with that man you'll be you be in the game big-time anyway a lot of good stuff on there go there on it comp slash Jocko we got some books too we got some books like Mikey and the Dragons which you know I think might be the best kids book ever written I don't know maybe no no no I read this other one knows no way that we're making the Dragons check it out it is gonna help kids overcome fear and it's an entertaining story and it's got awesome drawings in it and it rhymes yeah I just shipped one out to my buddy on the East Coast and he's got little ones and he hit me up yesterday on text he goes you know bro I just read that to my kids cuz I'm three hours ahead of us they loved it that book is awesome thank you I have people that this is odd but I have people that and I have people that say I get a god of tears in my eyes when I was reading the letter to his son you know that can be kind of heavy oh yeah so when I made that original short video about or whatever yeah I should I think I said this way I should to my brother and he's like I'm kind of like tearing up I don't know why like what the video and it's not like it's a super sad thing but just it's like I guess it's like so like real you know like these are things you kind of deal with and now you have to take on this courage kind of thing in a second I don't know yeah funny so check out that check out the warrior kid books or your way the warrior kid and Mikey or and marks mission somebody asked me people sometimes ask questions that center around themselves they're asking you a question but so somebody asked me a question it said two words what is the theme of way of the warrior kid go into words so that was the question so now this person just wanted me to say like sum up this book in two words and this was a mandate it wasn't like hey man could you kind of give vacation it was like two words so I was like cool you know and I said it's really it's actually really easy what is the underlying theme of the way the warrior kid book series the underlying theme is this warrior kid there you go it's like you want your kids to be warriors what does that mean is that mean you want them to join the military and and go fight no means you want to be warriors the whole thing which actually gets explained in there mm-hmm so yeah war man that's the warrior kid books discipline equals freedom Field Manual you I've send a lot of those for your people yeah no I bought like ten of them and had you sign them to a bunch of guys and santim out they love them and helps people out yeah I've had guys in the last year lose somebody like have someone in the family or friend die and then I'm like okay go look at this page you know yeah where you described how to deal with it yeah I actually had to use that page myself and hopefully I don't have to use that page but there's other things that go on in your life that can steer you off the path and there's other pages in that book that will keep you on the path discipline goes freedom Field Manual extreme ownership everything Jason was talking about what we did at trade debt everything that we tried to teach to the seals that we're gonna go overseas it's in the book extreme ownership it's in the book that Icona me leadership they're both in there you show me your notes the other day Jason from from when I in briefed your troop it's like oh here's your notes you give me a little picture what do they say they say cover move simple prioritizing executing decentralized command that was so I don't know 12 years ago or something like that 10 years ago same word coming out sam word hasn't changed learn those extreme ownership in the dichotomy leadership excellent front that is our leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership and every organization has problems all kinds of problems all kinds of problems and every single one of those problems is a leadership problem that's what's gonna fix it is fixing the leadership that's what we do it's me it's life Babb and JP to Nell Dave Burke Flynn Cochran Mike Cirelli Mike bimah and does this make you a new guy bro yeah and our latest member I won't calm a new guy cuz it really does matter you went to buds before me right so that's like a real thing like I'm a new guy apparently yeah anyways our latest Jason Gardner who you've just listened to for five hours is also on the team and if you want help with your organization and your leadership inside your organization go national on front calm also we have the muster the muster is a Leadership Conference gathering magical magical it actually actually it's just muster it is aa muster that's what it is we're all gonna get together we'll talk about leadership get granular and delve into leadership from a lot of different angles May 23rd and 24th of Chicago September 19th and 20th and Denver December 4th and 5th and Sydney extreme ownership calm I haven't stood about this yet just the muster inch I haven't posted it all when I post it's a lot of stuff it sells so if you want to go awesome sayings if you want to go register now go - L'Enfant comm actually go to extreme ownership calm and that's where you can register to come to the muster in one of those locations we will see you there EF online online interactive leadership training starting to see the cool feedback from people on that so EF online it is EF online.com we have leadership training courses online interactive what else what other verbs are adjectives to describe interactive engaging in very engaging up what name your adventure with choose your adventure there's a choose-your-own-adventure content areas that you have to unfold yeah and we're updating it and adding different content to it monthly so it's going to continue to grow and educate both you and us as we all learn to become better or leaders if you want in on that I went through that obvious things make the video and coincidentally few like a month maybe month enough before I went through an online training for CPR okay okay so the online training for CPR well secret you got to do the physical thing too you know for the certification whatever but there's an online training part of it so you know and not too bad not too bad the online thing you know I really went through it kind of committed myself to it not as long or whatever but you know kind of someone through I was like cool good but there were tangible things that I've been you know you could have done this a little bit more different to actual actually get the training quote-unquote training that new someone you know might eat whatever so you know a few months later I do I go through the EF online and I'm thinking to myself why not think back on the CPR this is what they shoulda did with the CPR thing granted the CPR I wanna eat could tell us a lot older what it's contemporary so I'm not really blaming them but that's the way I really saw it I was like okay this is good this will give you like the training train it'll allow you to make mistakes I'm an online training or do the wrong thing and then get corrected say hey you did this you don't kind of know well that's one of the things that worried me but because if you remember the Navy like Navy course you take on something that was online yep it'll be horrible and boring and everyone just copy each other and just click through the things to get it done and you don't take anything away from it that was my fear how does this if we if we don't do this right but then as soon as I started looking at the technology and the things you could do and the way you could make it engaging it's it's I don't want to say it's better but if you're sitting in a if you're sitting at the muster and I say something and you're like wow and you go to write that down and then you hear me say this tail end of something else and you missed it you can't press rewind right there you watch it you can't press pause and be like that was a really good point I know how I can apply that to my world and just write down how to handle something you can't do that at the muster yeah on online oh let me rewatch that Oh Oh Jacqueline laughs just at a role play on dealing with someone in the office I actually need to deal with a person like that how should I actually I'm gonna watch that again you see those little maneuvers take place so that's what we did and we realized that we just don't have the reach for the demand that's out there fresh lawn front we appreciate the demand and we want to satisfy the demand so that is EF online.com if you want to get fully engaged in our leadership training that's it and of course we have EF overwatch where we're taking all these experienced leaders that have been in combat for the last couple decades and as they move into the civilian sector placing them into jobs where they can help lead organizations using the experience they have and understanding of the principles that we talk about at a salon front in the book extreme ownership and on this podcast go to EF over watch.com where they're standing by waiting for you by the way thank you and if you got done or get done listening to this three hours of conversation and you want to continue it further this wasn't enough and you're not sure what to do well then that's cool because you can actually get in touch with us and have little commerce little mini micro conversations with us on the interwebs on Twitter on Instagram and on - aphasia poor people half echoes adequate Charles I am at at Jaco Willick and jason has multiple handles go Jason and Gardner on Twitter Jason dot and dot Gardner on Instagram and Jason and Gardner on Facebook you're gonna have fun with Twitter I'm just gonna let you know because Twitter is the place for somebody with little one-liners to hang out and participate and throw one-liners out into the world and make people laugh or make people think and it's just it's it's pretty fun it's remember you ever feel like The Terminator robot you ever feel like that no I do sometimes and one of the ways that I feel that is when I'm having a conversation with someone and I see little one-liners what I do say and sometimes I mean if I'm answering questions for a client I'll be like okay here's like as soon as they're asking me I'm seeing little possible answers of how they fit in their world and does it make sense to them and I've got a list and then I just kind of choose one and go and what I'm having but I remember that in like when I was a school child I was a little kid going to school especially like around what grade is 5th 6th and 7th grade how old are you nah no horth is 11 a lot like 11 12 13 right yes it was like every single comment or statement that its school teacher made was just a prime setup to not get out of the park with a one-liner from the back rub you just I would just be sitting there going I I would want I would be so timid I have to bite my tongue all day long as much as I could because when you're 12 years old you can only hold it in for so long before it just comes out and then so anyways you're gonna like Twitter because you can use your little one-liners which you are very very good at and they're always like I said they're always very educational or humorous or they at least make you think so you'll have fun with that yeah and don't feed the trolls and don't feed the Russian BOTS no that's my new thing be careful don't click on anything all right echo anything else no awesome Jason yeah I'd like to thank my parents Jim and cookie Gardner for all your unconditional love and support over the years my sister Ari who is a blue belt in jujitsu dude you did what listen to the podcast listen to the podcast immediately found a jujitsu place up there and San Clemente and started training and then my brother Thaddeus who's a tattoo artist tattoos up in San Clemente at San Clemente tattoo if you're gonna get some ink go see him if you're local and thanks to everybody else and thanks to all the frog men out there past present and future get some hell yeah and we always thank everyone in uniform that protects us at home and abroad from the evil that we talked about today and that includes obviously our military personnel police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs correctional officers Border Patrol all the first responders and also thanks to all of those that did serve and that have done their part as veterans for our great nation like my brother here Master Chief Jason Gardner thanks for your service thanks for coming on and of course I'm looking forward to another bunch of good years together thanks for everything bro and to everyone else that's listening I'll go back to Beowulf for every one of us living in this world means waiting for an end let whoever can win glory before death so endure your troubles today bear up and be the man I expect you to be that's how our ancestors lived and that's how they died so let us do the same arise set forth and get after it and until next time this is Jason Gardner and echo and Jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 180,977

Keywords: Discipline, freedom, military, extreme ownership, leadership, advice, jocko willink, echelon front, navy seal, jocko podcast, excerpt, echo charles, leader, lead, win, jocko store, seal teams, sniper, discipline equals freedom, defcor

Id: 1vNlCHHD4tg

Length: 182min 20sec (10940 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019