Jocko Podcast 284: Staying Dangerous In Spite of Age. Warrant Officer Bill Pozzi

this is jocko podcast number 284 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening anybody home right from the very threshold of our bungalow reached us a hoarse voice of an elderly gentleman the voice woke us up at high noon of our first day amid the date palms of the settlement outside saddam's palace somewhere at the outskirts of baghdad hi guys this greeting that followed sounded a bit warmer our shared english proved to be good enough so we were able to freely exchange greetings with our visitor and learn what he wanted from us or rather as it turned out what that older feller could do for us in our iraqi reality my name is posey bill posey and i am the boss here he introduced himself to us clad in an american uniform pants and a brown t-shirt in case you need anything lads just bring me the list and i'll take care of it that was how bill posey greeted us at one time he might have been a strapping lad indeed but in spite of age he lost nothing of his military appearance and his advanced age only dignified him he brought us a box full of batteries in this climate they run out no time guys and you'll generally operate at night each of you must have a large supply of them he explained putting the box on the table that is how i remember my first encounter with bill posey our visitor turned out to be one of the oldest if not the oldest navy seals to serve in combat in that legendary u.s navy unit his vast experience and involvement impressed people and used his age to his advantage bill posey's knowledge on military bases how they work like ours in baghdad seemed unlimited bill posey volunteered with the u.s navy at a time when most young american males did their best to steer clear of military service some of his civilian friends even faked injuries or feigned joint problems fearing fit for duty opinion of the draft board which would have meant an unwanted conscription but no wonder in the late 1960s indochina was the scene of the brutal vietnam war and after all not every young guy had a warrior's soul during his service in the udt underwater demolition teams in vietnam posey with other udt men and seals took part in many combat missions in patrols in later time he also secured the landing of apollo 12 but when he volunteered to the first gulf war in 1990 the medical board rejected him saying he was too old for further duty however in 2003 he deployed to baghdad he built the camp infrastructure from scratch took care of our supplies and he was also an expert on our vehicles and he was a very generous man he raised money on the base for a catholic orphanage in baghdad but he also remained a warrior until the last days of his service including taking part in combat operations the guy was devoted to the fight and to his teammates throughout his entire career no wonder then that our base in baghdad was named after him camp posey camp jenny posey to be exact bill posey had a daughter who was also in the service but in the army he said that since the commanding officer desired to name the base camp posey after him he humbly let it be named in honor not of him but of his daughter hence the full name of our base was camp jenny posey and that right there was an excerpt from a book which is actually called camp posey written by polish special operations soldier from the grom named naval polska and this part of the book about the polish special operations unit working with seals in iraq this is a book that i talked about when i had my brother tom drago zaran on here for podcast 276 and that book by naval polska is called camp posey and as you heard camp jenny posey was named after the daughter of the vietnam era frogman warrant officer bill posey who fought in vietnam recovered the apollo 12 space capsule and who ultimately built camp jenny posey in baghdad and did combat operations with the seals and the grom in iraq and we are lucky enough to have this legend here with us tonight udt seal team vietnam iraq frogman and legend warrant officer bill posey he's here warrant bill thanks for coming on commander it's always great being here i thought you weren't going to call me jonco and now you're calling me commander i guess i wasn't supposed to call you warren you know old habits die or very slowly and uh at group one where i was at a lot of the time we really respected you and your ability to lead and your ability to push things through so uh you were a legend at group one uh not bill posey i was only a legend in my own mind well sometimes i got in trouble for pushing things through but it was okay so let's talk let's start at the beginning i mean this is a pretty awesome story for you to spend so much time in the teams and so much time just keeping that keeping the brotherhood on the path but it started you grew up in in california right california yes sir and what was the situation there um you know it it when i grew up it was after world war ii we were the first part of the baby boom so it was really nothing but optimism especially in southern california because there was nothing here there was hardly any people especially in the los angeles area so everything just blew out of the ground and it was an amazing place to be there you know we could surf the freeways went in so some days we could surf in the morning and then get an afternoon lift ticket up at big bear and ski in the afternoon how can you beat that living the dream yeah you could surf you could ski they had beautiful women i mean what more does a man want i mean it's the place uh my kid my son as soon as he got his driver's license he was on that mission and it's a lot easier now even though the traffic's worse guess what they got night skiing up there there you go he's like oh surfing in the morning going night skiing at night on the same plan what so you you mentioned um the baby boomers so was what about your your dad was your dad in the military yeah my dad was in the navy he came from victoria texas uh to long beach and he was on a ship called the uss cummings and he was stationed out of long beach and then did the south pacific he met my mother in southern california he took my mother after you married her to victoria texas and said this is where i want to go and she says no we're not going to victoria texas we're staying in southern california no air conditioning in that time so it was rough total game change yes sir so when uh what what was your dad's war experience like on the uss commons he was a gunner on the deck of the ships and he was a bosun's mate so that's what he did and he was in a couple of big battles there and they didn't sink him so that's good so he he had a very positive and my mother also who worked for the navy had a very positive uh idea of the navy and that kind of bled over to me so and then what what did your dad do after the navy did he get out after the war yes sir got out after the war and immediately went to work for the telephone company for 40 years was the lineman or what was he doing there the guy that climbs the pulse just getting it whole life yeah so he was a very good guy and a very hard worker really a hard working guy so i tried to be as much as like him as possible the week before he died he was 82 years old and he was climbing a ladder on a second story painting the eaves of my daughter his daughter's house so i'm an 82 that's pretty good yeah not no slowing down i guess we know where you got your genetics from so then you're growing up and this is like just prime kind of prime america you're in southern california you got you got surfing where are you going surfing at uh you know we did it all up and down the coast from santa barbara to san diego because it was easy to do and gas was like 29 cents a gallon so we could do whatever we want to just leave early in the morning and there was hardly any crowds especially well bef what really changed surfing was the type of material they used in surfboards so originally they used an epoxy well originally was balsa wood but that was before my time but when foam came out they had the foam but it was a polyester foam and if you wanted to resonate you would have to either put tar or paper over the res over the surfboard blank so it was very difficult to do and you always had voids where the resin went down into the uh surfboard material and you had a void so when the polyurethane came out that revolutionized the sport game-changer yeah it was easy to do much stronger much lighter it was it changed the sport of surfing so what years were you in high school what year did you graduate from high school uh 65 61 through 65. and so you're going to high school and i mean vietnam hadn't started yet until just barely probably just started to hear about it in 65. yeah no it was going okay then and everybody thought well we can kind of tiptoe around it and do other things uh to avoid the work because nobody wanted to to go because you know the draft was on and it was a different type of military so typically if you were drafted you were drafted in the army very few people into the marine corps none in the navy or the air force so you would go into the army you would go to vietnam you would come back in a plastic bag so it wasn't a good deal you know they just didn't think it through and it wasn't a good deal for draftees so when you're going to high school were you thinking about the military as you were going to high school no not at all we're thinking about how we can avoid the military it was a negative sense rather than positive and you were kind of like a motorhead right yeah i i will always turn to rich from the time i was a little kid i was always building cars or building different things so i was really happy in that world so give us i mean give us the highlights what was the what was the prize because what were the beauties well i had a low budget low ditch uh car i had a 55 chevy with a 31 ford front end on it uh the axle and everything with a 348 and a muncie four speed so i thought i was a cat's meow on tweedy boulevard we had this street called tweedy boulevard where everybody cruised right and it was the longest dead end street in the world and everybody would cruise on it and you know you see all your girlfriends and you know it was really good i mean it was like i don't know what that movie was with ron howard but i mean it was much more fun was it diner no uh god i can't remember that movie with ron howard i know the one you're talking about it was in the 50s and it really looked good in the movies but the 50s were really better than that because that was the optimism of the 40s and the 50s that america can do it all we can do it scientifically and our lives will be forever better and there'll never be a down time because my father was a depression-era kid right and they had completely different values than we had in the 50s because we thought there was no end i mean we could do whatever we wanted nobody in my family extended family in texas and in california had ever been to college nobody so i tell my father when i graduate from high school he says well i want you to go to work for the telephone company it's a great job and you can work the job for 40 years right i said dad i'm not i'm not going to be hanging from some telephone pole in south central los angeles that was a specialty because he could get so much overtime and i said i'm not doing that he says you know you're really not very bright i don't think you're going to make it to college well he was right there but you know what can you say did you play any sports or anything in high school yeah i did the good seal team sports i played water polo swam and did cross country and track so it was real good it was really kind of prophetic doing those sports and being able to do you know seal team or udt at the time were what kind of music were you listening to you know typical southern california beach boy jan and dean i i you know i tell i'm a schoolteacher now and the kids have a lot of problems now i mean they have a lot of interpersonal problems right and i tell them about my experience and they look at me wow i mean it was the greatest in my opinion the greatest time ever to be alive well did we since you work with kids now like what's the difference i mean i was thinking from from you're talking about cars right yes and when you have cars like a 1955 car that's a car that any well most people can look at and fully understand what's absolutely you know there's no magic to it that's right and now you open up the hood of a new car just like your point in the book if you make it simple everybody understands yeah and it seems like the cars back then if there was a problem with it you could pretty easily identify what the problem was and be like oh it's a carburetor or whatever and we just get that thing fixed but now it's hard to even tell there's so many complications inside of a car that it seems like kids these days also are faced with all these different complications as opposed to hey um you know this is what we're gonna go surfing and then we go to big bear we're gonna go skiing that sounds like a kind of thing you want to deal with as a kid right now they're dealing with social media peer pressure and all this other crap yeah it's a much harder life it's much more difficult and i see a lot of these kids in my line of work being really stressed out by other kids especially the girl on girl situation where one's chiding or bullying the others you know and and the beauty of it is and i don't know if you experienced this in your high school but the beauty of it is if we were mad at somebody we go out in the parking lot and duke it out not that i was a big fighter because i was as big as round as a pencil you know but i mean but that's hot you know that fight that fist fight in the parking lot and i don't want my kids at school fist fighting because i'd get fired but that little fight in the parking lot really earned uh respect from your peers and it taught you hey i can't be badmouthing these guys because he's going to sucker punch me and and straighten me out so but they don't have that now you know and i've been at my high school for eight years and i've never seen one fight wow it's just a different mindset i'm sure at your high school was there a fighter yeah there's fights and and not to mention you get into a seal platoon and there's like a fight every 14 minutes if you need it or not yeah someone's getting hit someone's getting choked someone's getting pummeled that's just the way it is [Laughter] so you you uh you grow up there in southern california kind of just straight up living the dream yes sir sounds outstanding and i got a job when i was 15 and a half in a grocery store and it was everything was unionized in so i started at 90 cents an hour which was big money for a 15 year old kid so i was able some weeks when i was a senior in high school i made more of my father who had been at his job for 20 years right and so i could buy so many car parts it was unbelievable never saved a dime was i was i smart if i had to save 10 of that i'd have been living in san diego right now [Laughter] so you so you uh as you're getting ready to graduate you know you're not going to college no i went to college for two you did yeah okay i went to college and college was very difficult then because everybody was trying to cheat the draft so classes didn't have 25 people in it they had 50. you know and you would beg the instructor to take you into the class because if not if you went below 12 units then you're open fodder for the draft so i always tried to take 15 or 18 units just in case i had to back out so i went to college because i wanted to be 21 when i went to service so i could drink legally right so that was my goal to be 21 and to be in the service i thought the drinking age was 18 back then no not in california not in california and texas it was but not in california when i joined the navy in the the drinking age was 21 but at the e club on nab coronado you could drink at 18. but you couldn't drink at the trade winds the team bar you couldn't go to the team bar right you're thinking way more strategic than i was strategic thinker i mean come on so you get done with so now so you graduate high school in 1965 you go to two years what college did you go to compton and and you're studying what are you studying anything auto mechanics oh so you're just getting into it yeah i'm trying to perfect my uh my ability to fix things are you racing cars yeah well i mean just street racing illegal street racing and and what car are you driving now did you graduate from the 55 oh no no the 55 chevy took a lot of different engines and different drive train setups and stuff like that so it was good for me and then at what point did you start thinking all right i'm not going to be able to was it did you make it to 21 before you got before you joined the navy so you made it to 21. no in 1966 i joined the navy because the draft was closing in as they needed more men um you had different steps so if you have if you were married then you avoided the draft if even if you were going to school but you weren't willing to make that kind of great no no no no no you weren't that nuts right i mean yeah you weren't willing to go that distance you know when the women in southern california at that time were incredible and you grew up where the women always took the pill well that's not true because the pill came out in the early 60s but nobody took it for a while so when the pill came about it was a whole new different social scene and you know everybody got their jihad on if you know what i mean and so it was very fruitful to be a a young man and a young woman in southern california in 1965. and so so you're so you're getting your your jihad on and and then so at what point are you did you say you joined the navy yeah we joined it in 1966 the draft was closing in and everybody had tried to get into a national guard unit or a reserve unit so there was nothing left because everybody of draft eligibility did that so i went into the summer marine submarine reserves which was the least desirable of any reserves right because you had to go into summary and so i did that and that proved my gateway to go into seal team i'm going to tell you the little story if you wouldn't mind commander so i'm on this ship and i'm turning a wrench right i wanted to be in the engine room because i wanted to see how those you know diesel motor was probably uh 15 feet long and it was a real good learning experience because i learned a lot of things about diesel but the problem is you couldn't take a shower in the submarine because there was no in the showers they had potatoes because there was no room we had about 85 people on the submarine there was no room for anything including the shower so you were out to sea for two weeks at a time and as an engineman you were really greasy and you could wash yourself but you couldn't really get yourself clean so you get in your rack and you put your face on your pillow and you know you wake up in four hours for your next gig and your face is so greasy that your your face slid off the pillow right and i didn't like to be greasy i didn't mind muddy or dirty but greasy it's not good you know when you had pimples on your face and this is the worst part so we used to go to a bar down here in san diego i can't remember the name of the the boat bar and you'd walk in and people would smell you before they would see you because it was a snorkel submarine where the the boat snorkeled to recharge the batteries and it permeated everything with diesel fuel so you smell like diesel fuel so people would you walk in the bar people would sniff and say oh my god where'd this guy come from and you're perfectly clean i mean your skin's clean but you just stink like diesel fuel right so after you know a little while on that summary and i went to the cobb the chief of the boat and i said cop you know i'm really not a quitter this is a volunteer service and a submarine i want to go to the army the army's good because i can sit in the mud and the mud you wash off and you don't stink right so so you're in there you're in the navy reserves at this point but are you but i'm activating but you're active after duties so you join the reserves you go through boot camp yes but you're summaries boot camp but you're active duty so you you don't have any break you're straight up you when you joined you joined no you you had as long as you wanted to kind of fake it in the reserves but usually it's a two-year gig so that's why i joined and then when i was 21 it worked out my time schedule perfectly right so then then you were activated got it and then you went was submarine boot camp actually different than regular boot camp no it was up at uh hunter's point in san san francisco and the marines would drill you and they tried to instill discipline and it was like a nine-week school it's because you you went to boot camp but you only learned about submarines because you're a detriment when you go on that diesel submarine you know submarines from world war ii not nukes but diesel boats and if you don't if you turn the wrong valve it could be the wrong you know it could be all over for the entire summary you've got to know what you're doing when you're not summary so we went to that boot camp and then the next step did you not did you not put two and two together on one event to be on a submarine because i wasn't the sharpest tool of the shed but i knew there's one thing i didn't want to god bless the guys that are on submarines absolutely look i've spent probably my whole navy career probably spent a month on a submarine total maybe a month and a half and it doesn't take much to figure out that it's a special it's a different breed of human being that goes on there and can deal with it because you're in a confined space you know there's someone that sleeps in your bed when you're not sleeping in your bed racking right yeah it's called hot rack and echo charles so this is the deal echo they only have so many beds they have more people than they have beds so when it's your turn to go to sleep someone you share a bed with someone or maybe two people so you get to sleep for six hours and when you get out of bed someone else is getting into your bed it's warm right so this is just it's not normal it's not normal it's not and they're just as greasy as you oh maybe not greasier yeah and and everything is confined you know and you literally don't see the sun and so it's a so i'm just wondering you didn't you didn't think too much you didn't think to yourself oh well i'm gonna be on a freaking aluminum can underneath the ocean for months at a time maybe that's not the right deal yeah but that was just you know all my friends most of my friends joined the submarine reserves and so then they went on the submarines so that's just the way it was anything to avoid the army how long did you spend on in the submarine service a month and a half not long at all not long at all so after a month and a half of smelling like diesel and being stuck underwater you went to the chief of the boat right one time and that's where i cut you off where you went to him and said i said all right i'm done you know i i just i just don't like it and i'm not the right guy to be this you know and he says posey do i have a deal for you he says you go down and take this test this afternoon at 12 o'clock and you can be a seal team guy and i said well nobody knew because this is 1967. nobody knew what it meant right what seal team was and i thought well seal team well they have seals i thought right seals and i said well does that mean that you train seals and to do tricks for recruiting and he says they'll explain it to you so i go over to the a part of the base and they put a hard hat outfit on me and the first test was to drop you over the side of the ship in the bay and you walk around on the bottom of the of the bay for a half hour to see if you're claustrophobic and so they drop me over at the side and they uh you know i walk around for a half hour in the mud you walk through the mud and this is in the old school like what is it the mark 8 dive helmet thing yeah yeah you know yeah yeah and you know it was real old school it's real yeah and so that was part of the examination [Music] so all of the sediment that's been there for 150 years i mean you took one step and you couldn't see for the next five minutes you know so they had me walking around and what else did they do with you oh then then they pull you up and they i said hey i passed the test where do i where do i go what do i do and they said well you have to take the other test and i said oh okay and nobody knew what seal team was right so i i talked to the guy there and he was a dive guy and i said well what sealed him he says man it's the greatest you go down to san diego you lay on the beach you are a lifeguard for marines who make marine landings at uh at uh camp pendleton right and you have a girl under each arm and in each hand you have a beer and the navy buys you beer he said really the navy buys you beer yeah and these girls are gorgeous they're they're wonderful down in san diego i said man that's the life for me that's what i want to be right so you didn't know because there's no internet there's no books i think men with green faces was his first book if i'm not mistaken from world war ii and i checked that out of the library and that didn't you know you didn't know what you got there so you just didn't know which was i think a plus where were where were you stationed when all this was happening long beach okay so then they transfer me to san diego and i go to the team area the friday before training starts and i go there and oliveira i don't know if you ever heard of him he's my proctor and i show up at like four o'clock in the afternoon and he says where you been i said well they just brought me in the bus here i don't know what to do and he says i said what do i do what do you want me to do do i need a book bag because i thought it was a school i didn't know and he says no no no you don't need a book bag you just show up monday morning we're gonna take care of you he said really yeah so i go over at that time we had three quonset huts at the end of coronado at the end of the base and i go there and he gets me a rack and so i'm sitting there the weekend and these guys come in and they tell me what's happened and say okay it is what it is right i'm not in the army so i'm pretty happy so that's how it just all started then it started going downhill monday morning [Laughter] so what was the wake-up call like monday morning so you had no idea not a clue you didn't know it was going to be physical you didn't know nothing about hell week nothing you just thought you were going to a navy school where you're going to learn about whatever right some demolition and that type of thing diving and it would be nothing where you ran or swam or whatever so what in your mind as you start getting physically and mentally abused at a high level on monday morning what made you decide okay well i'll just stick with it hey you know i've been in that see the motivation is i'd been in that submarine and there was no way in god's green earth that i was going to go back to that summary they're going to have to kill me i was not going back to that summary no way so how did the training kick off um you know it was just physical training and evaluation and they gave us the test the sealed team test and everybody passed it and back then we had eight count burpees in with the you know run floor exercise and the swim so but it was you know i was half the man i i am now so it was a lot easier to uh to pass what class were you in uh originally 44 then 45 and then 46. so you got rolled a few times yeah i got mumps the first time what the hell what's what's that mumps it's a disease a childhood disease from the 50s that they have an inoculation your kids got the shot right so you didn't get the shot and you randomly got oh there was no shot then got it and then the second time i got encephalitis from the bay from the dirty water and then they gave me some drugs and i got over that in about four weeks and the third time i was ready to go then i knew what was going on you know so how far did you make it on each of those previous occasions two weeks and then three weeks and then away you know 46 i was good and did you did you start to understand what the mission was that you were getting yourself into yeah because people explained it you know we had extensive training at the tradewinds of of what was happening and how things went down so then you got it you got you understood what's going on you know in that time it was much different than it is now because the navy controlled everything you were a navy asset all funding came from the navy as from not from socom or being a national asset like in seal team six so it's always where the money comes from what you know how they dictate your life and so we were like the dog in the manger udt even seal team because the navy you know we were poisoned to the navy if you wanted to make any headway you had to be a surface naval officer uh to make any headway because there was we never had an admiral we never had anybody i believe well i think we had a captain so it was very difficult for people with a career to do that if you weren't an enlisted person so the guys that were your instructors at this time were these guys that had already done tours over in vietnam because this is what year is this now 1960 68 early 16th oh so you're definitely getting guys that were coming back from vietnam right and they're telling you what's going on and a big crowd of world war ii folks that they were still in because the korean i mean the korean war was over in 53 right and world war ii was over in 45 so they still had time in their career to instruct at uh at buds at that time it was udtra so it was a different world what do you remember was did you have any trouble in training in any of the evolutions uh no not really uh i had trouble on the last swim that four and a half mile swim at san clemente and we just barely made it within a minute but you know the current was running really hard and i mean we were really kicking just to make that and a couple of guys didn't make it had to do it again the next day so i was really thankful for that big swim you know on that evolution to make it but that's the only time i had any trouble how big was your class when you started oh man i don't remember probably 43 or 44 45 maybe 50 people and then we i think we whittle it down to 17. so we didn't have that bad of an attrition right we had some really great guys in 44. bill i don't know if you remember bill wildrick great officer i mean he was really an inspirational guy he could have been the poster boy for your book really a great guy so he was really good to me for whatever reason so um one last question about buds when when you're showing up you don't know anything that's about to take place it seems like guys now they know kind of the minute by minute schedule i was a little bit in between i i we didn't know a lot when i showed up to buds like i had never heard of pool competency which ends up being a huge thing i knew that there was a hell week thing somewhere in there we stayed awake a bunch but you just didn't know what was happening what do you think you think that's better or you think that's oh that's ten times better like one of my goals in life is the navy has been very kind to me just like the marine corps has been kind you know thank god for the navy in my life i'm sure i'd have been in prison otherwise right by the grace of god and so i try to tell people especially in small town texas about the advantages of getting out of texas and getting out of our small town and going seeing the world so but a lot of them overthink it and they just psych themselves out it's just too bad that they publish as much as they do because it's in my opinion it's much better when you stand up and you just what are we going to do next okay let's do it let's do it let's get it on you know let's go and so because i don't want to overthink things let's just do it yeah did you um was going through hell week do you remember anything special about that for me i was kind of i was kind of happy about hell week because i wasn't the best athlete so a swim and a run where he had a time it was going to be it was all those were hard for me to pass i had to go basically the way i passed all my evolutions was by going as hard as i possibly could but i was always nervous you know sometimes i'd be like you were talking about like within a minute of the drop dead time and i'd you know be going to squat yeah and we weren't you're not allowed to wear a watch right so there's no pa so for me i failed one run in buds and because i tried to pace myself i tried to pace myself this is kind of how i look at life now i try to pace myself in one run and i failed and i was like okay and from then on i just ran as hard as i freaking possibly could and and that's how i passed but the the thought of like actually knowing each little detailed thing that's going to come to you when when it came to hell week i thought there's no time limit i'll they can't stop me i mean i'll keep going no matter what so i was kind of happy about hell week it was one of the easier evolutions because there was no time limit you just had to keep going which i was i look i might not have been the fastest runner or the fastest swimmer the best the obstacle course but i was good at keeping going i could just keep going no matter what right was how like how weak for you any any uh big eureka moment that you discovered anything no just everybody was very nervous and we had magic things that one class would give the other like we would have a magic shirt that i got down from a guy by the name of gary cronin he says this has been passed down five times it was a wool shirt a long sleeve wool shirt that you wore under your jumper and he says if you wear this shirt you're going to pass heavily man give that [ __ ] i don't care if it costs a hundred dollars i want that shirt right and then the other thing that saved me is i um i had illusions or i was delusional on wednesday night when we had the big paddle from the area down to ib or whatever it was and bill wilderick our crew chief our crew officer was kind enough to let me sleep for 15 minutes in the belly of the boat because i was i was having i mean i was freaking out right i was seeing monsters and all kinds of different stuff he said pose you lay down on this boat and the rest of the guys paddle and nobody complained so you try to return the favor however you possibly can to rest those guys you know be the first one out there get the boat ready you know pay him back for the nice thing they did for you to allow you to go through hell week yeah i i had some guys that i saw completely hallucinating things i had one small hallucination but i don't know if it really counts because i knew it was a hallucination and while it was happening i was like oh this is we're out there on that thing i think they call it around the world we're doing around the world yes and we're paddling and i'm we're in the middle of the ocean and all of a sudden i start seeing uh traffic lights like stop signs and traffic lights and it's going to red green and i'm looking i'm like i'm just hallucinating that's not real so i don't know if does that count what do you think echo charles does that count if you know it's fake but it looks real yeah yeah okay that was the only hallucinations i had no monsters thankfully i had one guy that started swearing like language-wise and he started swearing he didn't stop for about 20 minutes just every word freaking swearing and everyone reached like hey is everything okay [ __ ] yeah are you [ __ ] out and we're like okay bro hey dude whatever it takes man just just stay in the boat man it's all good but what are you going to do in the ocean when that happens you have no recourse you can't lay them on the deck on the sand i mean what are you going to do keep paddling yeah paddle a little faster at this time so it's 1968 at this time and i was talking to roger hayden about this he said he said that's a hero or mine i love that 100 100 yes sir he he said most guys went to udt when they graduated well there was three udts and one seal team he said occasionally a guy would go straight to seal team but it was very rare that's right most guys were going to udt exp a lot of people might not know about the udt at that time what was going on with the underwater demolition teams at that time well on the west coast there was udt 11 12 and 13. 13 was a new team they started i believe in 67 and disband i think it was 70 70 172 and so the navy was again our main driver for funding and for manning for everything and so they wanted to keep udt because if in case of an amphibious landing or other sorted things udt was useful to them other than that they had no time for you and there was no funding so like in our in our team we had three pickup trucks and we had to go once a day to 32nd street to give them the surf report so we would drive one pickup truck in the morning eight o'clock go to 32nd street and come home that's the only time we'd use that truck because the other two pickup trucks we had were in the team area but they were up on cement blocks because we robbed those for parts to keep this one going so there was just no no money and so we just kind of made things happen and but i think we were better for that because we had i mean when we went to vietnam we had a parabag half full because we had no gear there was no reason to have a lot of gear because we didn't have any money so it really worked out well for me in my naval career because i was able to learn how to trade things with other services and make things happen and that really worked out to be very good training for me to support my sailors my my goal was always to support my fellow sailors because the navy wasn't doing it well nobody else was so that was important so you got order what what udt team did you end up 13. so it's now is it's 1969 now or is it still 68. still 68. so it's 1968 you get your orders to udt team 13. yes sir you walk down the grinder a little bit knock on a quonson hut is that basically what happened there was forts in the old cement people who don't know about seal team don't know about that old uh cement building that was there i don't know if they've tore that down or not they tore everything down okay they tore that down so it was probably a hundred yards long and probably you know a hundred feet uh wide and that we had four teams in that building you know seal team one and then 11 12 and 13 udt so everybody had a very limited space and it was kind of difficult but one team was always or you know one and a half teams because seal team was always there were always in vietnam so we had very limited space no resources at all and it was it was difficult because of that because there was just no room so when you got to udt 13 you checked in what'd they do with you did you go right into a platoon no no they immediately sent you to school because they were we were deploying and you had to go to seer school you had to go in my case i went to out border motor school to jump school and then it was just timed so the day you graduated from seer school you got an airplane and went to vietnam did you get did you wear that old insignia they like the the udt insignia with no eagle on it no no that that wasn't there was no insignia in 68 uh that came later and uh the insignia you had is you had like a diver's helmet on this on your uniform right here and that was the only insignia you had and then of course on that name badge right right and that there was no team badge there was nothing i'm going to tell you a little story you probably heard this many times so we get the pirate i don't know if you remember who pete the pirate was i i i don't know his name but i don't know so he supposedly designed the insignia for seal team right because he was drinking budweiser one day and he submitted like 20 designs because they asked for guys in the teams to to do design now there's a lot of controversy about that so about three months later they walk into the quonset hut and they said okay everybody's got their insignia uh you know and they gave us the they just dropped this bag on the table and they said okay everybody's got one of these if you're an officer you have a gold one if you're enlisted you have a silver one we're gonna have an inspection tomorrow morning so uh you know everybody's wow lance backs man so we're out there standing on the grinder some guy's got it on the right side some guys got it on the left side they have it here they have it here they they're thinking about putting it on their dixie cup right but i mean nobody knew what to do with it right and so this was the original trident original udt insignia that was different from the seal trident so the udt insignia this is the one basically that looks the same but there's no eagle that's correct and so nobody i mean seal team had their thing going the same morning everybody did the same thing we just didn't know what to do and we didn't know what it meant and so that was it what year did that happen was that after you got back from vietnam yeah after we got back from vietnam so so you show up to to udt 13 do you you don't get put in platoon you just get sent to see your school you get sent to outboard motor school you get sent to jump school there's no one tracking you there's no one saying like hey this is what we're getting ready to do oh they're tracking you because as soon as you get back you go to another school so they knew when you were coming back and then they would immediately go to another school then you just jump on the airplane but i knew what platoon i was in i knew who my oac was and all that and were those guys already overseas no no they were they were in the states so they're they're shuffling you through all these schools right when you got done with schooling did you go through any kind of pre-deployment workup like you know like i did my whole career was like oh you're getting ready to deploy you get to platoon you you know you you uh first you do some schooling like you're talking about the pro dev they call it professional development so you go to a bunch of schools then it's six months of ult and then it's six months of the advanced post that and then you go onto plymouth now we'll use none of that it was a weekend at danny's doing ult that's how that for people do know what danny's is an old-time team bar on uh in coronado and that's that was it so it was really ojt and we had we relied on the guys coming from seal team to udt because there were so many new people and so many i mean everybody was an e3 right because they expanded the teams and same with the boat guys and there was no time for training they just wanted to get you into the war because there was 500 000 americans in vietnam at the time so you had to go over there and take the next team's you know place i mean how long was it from when you graduated udt replacement training to getting to the team how long did you spend there before you went to vietnam did you go to vietnam as a platoon no as a team as a whole team yeah as a whole team so udt13 how many guys were there a total of about 90 90 to 100. and you're broken up into platoons inside the team just like us of course same basic so you all got on a plane we uh we got on two planes we got on two dc sixes and we hedgehopped hawaii johnson island uh you know going over it's a three-day airplane ride and because we just went from island to island and finally made it to p.i which was our main mustering uh base and then we were dispatched to where we were going to go and from vietnam from there but prior to prior to going on that getting on that plane with the rest of the team did you go to desert warfare training did you go to did you guys train over the beach did you guys just do hydro hydro recons up at camp pendleton like what did you do to get ready yeah we did some of that but it was like for for me it was like a month long other guys who had been on a team for a long time got that training because they were there i wasn't there and we were short manned you know because they just built that team so they were drawing and the beauty of team 13 and god rest their souls to some of the people who've been in it but a lot of times if you wanted to get rid of somebody that was causing a problem you'd send them to 13 right lucky 13. yeah so it was a very uh esoteric bunch of folks and uh 13 and a lot of characters you know what i'm saying so what platoon were you in at udt 13. i think i was in bravo and so it worked out good and paul plums my oac so you get on the plane now you're flying over there you do you know what your missions are going to be don't have any idea don't have a clue no idea what you're gonna be doing don't know don't care just give me the gun let's go are you have you uh you know at one point you were trying to avoid the draft but now you seems like you're kind of all in let's go get some no but the reason people were avoiding the draft because this army was so pitiful because they were wasting those bodies why go i mean i don't mind dying right because i never i never thought i'd last past 29 i mean i thought if i made it to 30 i'd be an old man i just had that feeling all my life yeah and so but why waste your life have somebody pour all that money to bring you up and just kill you for no reason why do that but you're in the teams you know the first day i got to the teams we the first muster in the morning at money i looked at my right and i looked to my left and it was all a bunch of weirdos like me i knew i never fit into society i wasn't a popular guy or an outgoing guy or a well-spoken guy i was kind of you know nobody really wanted me type of guy you know what i'm saying and so i get there and i see in my class of 43 or whatever it was people they're all like me i said man i found a home this is my this is my people huh i mean all a bunch of other weirdos [Laughter] and so now you're go now you get to vietnam you have no idea what kind of mission you're going to be doing well we knew more or less because we practiced it you know especially in training training was built around the mission in vietnam so we did a lot of hydrographic reconnaissance we did a lot of patrolling we did a lot of that so we could pick up those skills you know but we were the last class to go into 13 so we didn't have the training that they had before that when they built the team and some of those guys i mean they had been to vietnam like i don't know if you know you wouldn't know tobacco lou this guy was fabulous and he was my mentor and he was just as crazy as a day long but whenever he said something you listened to him because he had been in the vietnam a number of times and he knew what he was talking about so you listen to the voice of authority so that's what we all did lou said it we did it so you're training for hydrographic reconnaissance you're training for patrolling yep and you're thinking that ea patrolling oh for direct action absolutely yeah so there's there's a decent amount of crossover with what the sealed platoons were doing yeah we were the poor man seals so when they didn't have a mission they didn't like you know give it to udt so you show up in vietnam where where did you initially go tons of nuke then we got on the um oh i can't remember the name of the ship it was a destroyer escort and we did a couple of months of hydrographic reconnaissance and that was that was really a good thing for us because uh we got to jail as a platoon and everybody learned their place and we saw who the real warriors were and who to talk to and who to listen and so that was very good and so like after the mission you know in a debrief lou would say things you know posey what the hell is wrong with you what you're standing at the beach party and you're lollygagging and not looking around and not at the ready position if the vc come over that berm what are you going to do now you're right i was you know and so he would straighten us out he was a great mentor to us because he'd been in seal team and a stone alcoholic but you know he would you you listen to what he said was he your platoon chief yes and you guys are doing hydrographic reconnaissance are you lead line in slate whole nine yards right lead lining so i'll just explain because nobody knows what a hydrographic reconnaissance so you have a beach party of four people and so you have two uh ends of it and in the center and you have a line that could be at least a thousand yards long and you have it on a big spool and so you take the spool and then every depending on the gradient of the beach every 50 feet or 100 feet you would have somebody swimming this line down the beach and you might go a thousand yards you might go you know a click and you would take the lead line see how deep it went and write it on your slate uh you know position number one 50 feet position well you never went over 18 feet you know that was 18 to zero was what you're looking at in hydrographic constants then you would take all the slates once you got done with your beach and you'd go back to the ship and you'd make a map of that that beach so the gradient was at a thousand yards out it was 17 feet so if they have to bring the lsts in or landing craft they knew what was going on so it was very interesting and uh really kind of a lot of fun because you would just be you would have your face in the water all day you know just kicking and you usually do two a day you do a thousand yards in the morning maybe a thousand yards in the afternoon so it was a lot of fun and vietnam is really a beautiful place i mean breathtakingly beautiful and some of the water is just incredibly clear you know especially camaron bay just it's a delight to be in i mean it's like being at a resort and getting paid to be at the resort right this is the promise you got yeah maybe he's gonna be buying beer were you guys doing mostly daytime or or night time day time because you had to see where you sat in the line and keep the line straight so everybody's uh slate would be correct yeah i did two arg platoons yes back in the day and we did hydrographic reconnaissance late i remember we did a ore operational readiness exercise before we deployed to iraq and my platoon drew the straw to get put on the ship for for the pre-deployment training exercise and you know this is we know we know like this is when you're in iraq i'm getting ready to deploy to iraq we know that we're going to take those guys place right and we get put on a ship and we get we get this task and comes down and i remember i walked down the platoon space where all the guys are i'm like all right boys get the lead line and slates out it's on and one guy by the name of johnny i won't say his full name but he goes are you kidding me what are we doing we're going to do a hydro i said yep we're doing a hydro i said he said you got to be kidding me we're going to iraq there are no freaking hydros in iraq 471 miles from the ocean yeah he was going totally nuts and you know what we did we got our lead line and slate out and we went out and did a hydrographic reconnaissance with a flutter board at red beach or whatever it wasn't and took that stuff down that's that the navy still needed that information for whatever reason i think now they're kind of passed i think now they have electronically yeah they can do it with digital imagery and stuff like that but that's only what 15 or 20 years ago that we were still out there with a lead line and a slate [Laughter] so that's your first couple months of deployment you're just getting your hydrographic reconnaissance on right were you what was what position were you the flutter board man because you were a good swimmer uh no i wasn't a good swimmer i mean i i can swim okay but i wasn't the best my position a lot of times we learned then how to adapt and we had an ibs on board the ship and we put the 9.9 horsepower motor on the back of that ibs and we pulled the sea side of it so the the ocean i mean the land side we could pull that line so much quicker by doing that and so much more accurately and that's what we did and i was constantly trying to keep that outboard motor running right so that worked out well for our whole platoon yeah that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to swim that flutter board yeah how so you did that for a couple months you're out there doing these hydrographic reconnaissance and what came after that then we went into the delta and we were off of antoi and we'd take swift boats off of an lst off of an island in the south of vietnam and go in and do patrolling and that was basically the next four months we did a lot of patrolling and you know tried to do some d.a and stuff like that you know so what what are these operations like uh you go in you get dropped off by the swift boat well first of all you go in this a lot of very narrow uh canals a lot of times if you weren't in the river so you would always engage at the beginning so you you knew where exactly where they were going to hit you so you say okay at the point uh x-rays coming up everybody could get behind we had a railing and we had uh armor body armor on the railing you know and so we would all get behind the body armor on the railing and they would open up with an rpg or a claymore or something like that and we would go a mile past and said oh that wasn't that bad today you know so you you is it because you were going through channelized areas and you look at the map and be like oh yeah here's the channelized area here's where they're going to get us yeah and so i mean it was very ineffective but you just kept your head down no swift boat guys i mean they were always being hit those guys were really brave guys because they had so many casualties and they were right there you know with the 50s and the 60s and stuff and letting them have it where we'd be hiding behind it with our our m16 pointed out from the side okay we're going to we're going to get those vc today we never saw i'm sure they were on the other canal uh you know with a command detonated claymore or something you know yeah what was the goal of these missions um i i think just to go make sure that they didn't take a big foothold in whatever sector you were in and we would go to their camp and we would burn the camp down and we'd get some c4 and light it and put it in the hooches and it would burn down their hooches and we'd go run their pigs off and stuff like that and then we would patrol through the jungle they'd drop us off in the jungle and we'd put patrol through the jungle because they weren't expecting us you know at that time that was right after tet so tet in the united states was very demoralizing because the army always said you know we have this we have this sector we have this country we're doing better every day and then ted happens this massive battle and we beat him back of course but a lot especially the marines up north really took a beating and after that as far as the people here in america i i think were that that was the end of vietnam we knew we were coming back out of vietnam because they did tet and then you go overseas and vietnam and the army didn't want to go they would tell us all the time they would say okay you guys can go outside the wire and do your mission or whatever you want to do but don't expect us to come and you know be a qrf because we're probably not coming out to get you or if we're due it might be the night next day right because the war everybody wanted to stay behind the wire because they knew the war was going to be over and they didn't want to be the last man standing so it was a different attitude but we were gung-ho we went hey let's rock and roll baby let's do it you know let's go this is our big chance and so we we would go out and our officers were very aggressive the men were aggressive and we just could do whatever we wanted to do of course we ranted up the pole so that the command knew what we were doing but it was really good for us because we could catch the vc they'd be sitting lollygagging and we'd be walking up to them and they're over there lollygagging and wouldn't have any idea that we were coming on them you know nobody was out there what position did you walk in patrol uh i was rear security so i like that position because a lot of in my estimation i'm probably wrong here but i was you know i was always cognizant if somebody comes up on you they're gonna usually see you before you see them so you got to do a good job because it could be devastating them coming right up you know right up on you would most of your patrol how many guys would you take out on a standard patrol usually eight to ten would you guys how many uh m60s would you carry and would you got did you guys have stoners like they had over on the steel team no we were the poor man sealed so no stoners i'm just in going to talk about the m16 if you don't mind commander you know we got to vietnam and we used a variety of different weapons here in training in san diego and none i don't remember any m-16s that we used here so we get there and they give us the m16 say man this is so much different from those wood stock very very heavy weapons we had you know and they they really work good and they're brand new right right out of cosmoline right and so we go on our first first mission and we get everything we're soaked we're everything because we're trooping through the jungle and it's raining and we have to go through these different low spots they're full of water and we get the gun wet and we get in a fire fight and you have to constantly recharge the weapon because it wouldn't it wouldn't work you know and so we then we they had this real thick lubricant that came from the manufacturer of the weapon and he said this is the lubricant to use to keep your rifle but it kind of gummed everything up and so you know after about three of these where the thing didn't work i went to the armor i said dude you got to give me something that works i don't care what it is you can give me a six gun because it's better than an m16 i can i can make it work right and so they give me an m3a1 a grease gun you know a little tank uh people and tanks and world war ii uses cost general motors made these 12 these um guns for 12 and 87 cents each during world war ii right and they gave me that gun the only thing you have to do is shake it one time the water out and then that thing would work flawlessly you could come right out of the water bring it up give it a little dip bang bang bang bang it was a wonderful weapon and i i carried that a lot because it worked every time so i really like that weapon you know it was very negatively buoyant but it really worked good what was your op tempo like i mean how often were you guys going out on these patrols you know sometimes a lot sometimes a little depending on what was going on and what we had coming down the pipe uh you know what the navy would task us we were really some a lot of times dependent on the navy to do something with assets swift boats or whatever so sometimes we'd work five days a week sometimes six sometimes two so that's going to lead me to my next point if you don't mind so i like to operate right you know and i i like to be busy because i don't like to sit around so i would volunteer i'd go to mr plum and say mr plum you got to give me a job man i can't sit here in this lst or where on seafloat you know we're on it's nasty and so he said posey i got a deal for you you're going to go with the army today fine so what we would do i would hook up with a second lieutenant i was 21 at the time and he was like 20 right never been in combat and they given him a platoon of arvin right we had a platoon of 30 arvin which was the vietnamese national guard 30 vietnamese who had little battle experience if any and we would go out with them and we would patrol with these guys and we never let them let them get behind us never ever let them get behind us because you don't know who's the vc and who's not and you'd get shot in the back so i would carry the radio they never let non-english speaking people carry the radio because you had to have somebody you know that people could one understand too knew that they weren't getting suckered in with some viet cong on the radio so i would carry the radio and the lieutenant would be in front of me and we would be in back of the platoon and so i really i like that because uh i mean these guys were slow and they had no ability to engage the enemy i mean we had 30 guys and if there were six guys engaging us you know they were freaking out you know and so we would kind of round them up and you know oh you're going to go here and you're going to go here and you know it was kind of fun and one day we were out there with these guys and they all gave them you know they knew there was no vc in the vicinity so that's the the missions that they would give us because these guys were so terrible and so we went out today and we we saw like these 30 guys giving us the evil eye about uh you know half a click off over the other side of this rice paddy said lt we got to make it back to the the boats because these guys got that evil look on us and they're going to come and get us and he said yeah so anyhow we're getting these you know we're telling these visas i mean these uh arvin guys we got to move we got to get back well they're kind of lollygagging along and these feces are coming right up on us right and i say to lt we better you know you know we better do something he said oh know he he was good i can't find fault with him at all so we had this this battle line there in the in the head grove area type and things got real bad for us and so i got on the radio and i called the net there and i said you know to the army guys is there anybody else that can come and help us do you have any helos or anything out there that can help us and they said we got no helos but we do have a fast mover coming in on you guys uh will that help you i said does he have anything on board that can light these guys up he said oh yeah he's equipped with napalm he said really and so through that radio relay you know we talked to that guy and uh they talked to him i talked to them and i said okay we're gonna pop the smoke and on the south side of the smoke don't let that napalm go on us you know let it go on those dudes and they did and i i'd never been around napalm close before because you could always see it in the distance but never close and man that it was incredible the power of the napalm just absolutely incredible and hot we were probably 100 feet away you know hunkered down we could we could see him off flying that phantom coming in and he dropped that napalm and it was just like a blast furnace and he lit those guys up and the vc it lit them up and they were still running completely engulfed in flames and and liquefied their jelly gasoline and it was really incredible to see that the power of that weapon and so then we obviously as soon as he lit him up we all ran away and went back to the extraction point and so i'm happy that guy was there because i don't know it'd probably be me and the lt and the arvins at that point we'd let the arvins been behind us because we had been running full speed ahead through that jungle right i mean it was getting real bad real fast how often would you say you came into enemy contact on these operations you know i've got some some vietnam friends that that were in the seal teams sometimes they'd say they'd barely gotten any contacts with the enemy other guys different deployments they got in contact even roger hayden from one deployment to the next one time he's out there it's like not too bad the next time it's crazy what was it like for you no it wasn't we weren't seals and we knew we weren't seals and we would just go do the missions that the navy told us to do so it wasn't like ramadi i mean it was we'd have contact as far as claymores and stuff like that going on in swift boats but i mean it wasn't at all like what you experienced in in your battles well i don't know i didn't it wasn't getting chased out by vc and having to drop napalm 150 feet away but we were lucky on that though you know we were very lucky how were you how was your luck with taking casualties uh for the arvin no for for your seal for your udt well in my platoon i don't think we had one casualty and we had a real good oic paul plum i don't know if you know him he was really a good officer and he really looked out for the sailors so we were really good with that and he did you know he would see the mission and he would explain the mission and very you know most of the guys we were called knuckle draggers right and so yeah yeah you had to be simple because you know we just didn't have the experience of all the stuff that they have now and so he was really good and and we got it and so it just wasn't the op tempo of seal team one for udt in most places and then how long will you do it yeah this was all taking place all those missions were taking place those patrolling missions were taking place out of the the barge some would barge some of the swift boat depending if you were an anne toy and toy was a island and you'd go in and the barge was in the middle of the the river you know and so we would deploy off of that and so you did operations off both those yes sir and how long were you doing those types of operations so you did a couple months worth of hydrographic reconnaissance off of the uss whatever that ship was yes and then and then now you're doing uss cook uss cook and now you're doing these type of patrolling operations and you know swift boat operations how many months were you doing that for i think around four but yet every two months you'd have a break and sometimes you go back to the pi and regroup and get new guys or do whatever and then how long was the total deployment uh six months okay so that was that was pretty much your deployment yes sir so you come home from that deployment what year is it 69 yeah i think 69. and then what what was the what was the apollo oh that's right so at what point did you hear about apollo well when we were getting you know nobody wanted to come home at least most of the guys didn't want to come home because people didn't like you if you're in the armed services if you had a haircut like the most of us in this room they perceived you to be a soldier or a sailor and they didn't like you so i didn't want to come home i volunteered to stay and then they said well you can go on apollo i said no man i was a history major also in school and i said man this is a time to you know if i can be on apollo even though it's such a pain there's a pain in the ass that i should do this so they they one day they announce okay we're going to do apollo 12 and 13 and whoever wants to do it come and see the xo so nobody saw him the first day and so the second day they made a quarters they said whoever wants to be on apollo go see the xo because we knew the next day you would be voluntold right yeah and so for apollo 11 the first one you were in vietnam when that only happened right we didn't even know what happened because we were out and there was no tv or radio but that was the big one everybody wanted to go on that one i knew a couple guys on that and that was really wolfram i can't remember his first name but he did a really good job on that they had the good guys but then once it was over people like ah everyone here's what the story is it's sitting around in the ocean for a while looking up at the sky waiting for these guys to touch down being on a ship wherever you are so it turned from a good deal to like hey maybe we don't want it it wasn't a team deal right i mean it wasn't a good deal for the team guys so they say so i go to the exo and i said okay i want to go on apollo but i want to choose my position on the team and he says well what position do you want to be and i said i want to be the first man out the door he says you got it posey so he was lying to me and i know he was lying to me but i thought i had a shot right because the first man out the team had his name announced it was a literally a billion people looking at tv and even on the second one because they thought the second one was going to blow up because it got struck by lightning on the path right and so so i said okay i'm going to be the first guy out the door and he says yeah and so then other people volunteered and we we did it so it the reason why it was a pain but is because we did it three times a day morning noon and night cover of darkness is because we never knew when the capsule was going to come down for sure or not right and you'd go out and in the first supposed two hours you'd be on scuba on the surface of the water because they thought there were moon bugs we didn't know if there was decontamination from the moon excuse me and so you'd suck that thing i mean i probably sucked that tank dry in 15 minutes but you had to keep it in your mouth on the side to breathe because you know that was the procedure that's what nasa required and so we would be out there and doing this thing and for the first two hours being on the surface like that with that thing in your mouth it would make you seasick and so you'd throw up so every all the time before the mission i would go eat a bunch of saltine crackers because i didn't like dry heaven i'd rather heave something that was solid rather than just dry heaving and so you'd be seasick for maybe a half hour then you'd get over it and you know where you went and the process for every minute they had you were supposed to do minute a minute b minute all the way to xxxx nasa knew what you were supposed to be doing over that four hours and 45 minutes and you had to abide by that schedule to do because if you fell behind they were really mad for whatever reason and our team was really good and i think we at one time we held the recovery rector on apollotel for doing the fastest one and the problem with it is the guys land in the ocean these three astronauts in this capsule that's 12 feet across and probably 10 feet oh not even 10 feet 9 feet high right and they're bobbing there for like an hour on the thing inside of this capsule on their back and they come out and there is green i mean i don't see anything green on this table they're this color green when they get out of the capsule because they're so seasick because they've been in this capsule with bad air and i'm sure all their sewage problems and all this stuff and they're green when they come out of it and you want to get them out of that as soon as possible so you know to to give them some relief so it was a very interesting thing we had a mock-up and we practiced on that off of the hornet that was the aircraft carrier we did that three times a day one time we couldn't stop the capsule and the capsule would catch the wind and it would run if you got in front of the capsule it would run you over just like a lawnmower right and go over you about two knots and you know you can't swim too much it's impossible you know with all the stuff we had to wear it's impossible at two knots and so we couldn't stop this so we in our morning exercise we couldn't stop it so we went back in the afternoon and i said you know if i get if you drop me right on the capsule i think because the first man out the door there was a d-ring on the side of the capsule and you would hook this hook into the d-ring and deploy a parachute to stop the forward progress of this capsule from running over you and running away he couldn't stop it so i said drop me right on the capsule and i can stop this thing because we had the other team doing it and i was lucky enough to be able to do it i'm sure the wind wasn't as great as it was in the morning or whatever you know and they said because they were thinking about firing a uh a 50 caliber into it to sink it because it's a navigation hazard i mean it's a big piece of iron right and we stopped that and then on the mission day the seas from trough to crest to the wave were probably 12 to 15 feet yeah it was really brutal and it was slapping that capsule around like there was no end he said what are those guys going through inside of that capsule so i jump out of the helicopter that day and they they may put me right next to it right and i go and i can't find the d-ring i can't find i'm panicked you know what what to my mind commander what's worse being somewhere where you're supposed to be competent and you're totally incompetent and you make a fool of yourself what's worse than that nothing nothing nothing you know it's like you know especially with a billion people watching yeah that's that's the one thing that's worse is have a billion people watch you be being confident when you're supposed to be confident it's like the bridegroom on the wedding night i mean you want to be confident right you know what i'm saying yes yes you want to be competent and so i couldn't find it and i was panicked and i didn't know they put a piece of foil over because the outer layer of the capsule has foil it's gold foil it's very bright and it shined in your mask and it was very difficult to see so i'm going around tapping the sides of the capsule looking for it i finally found it and i was able to hook it up and then we went from there and so it went really good for having such high seas so the rest of the process and they said whatever you do whatever you do you do not go and strip the foil off the capsule because they want to analyze its capsules like a fiberglass aircraft aluminum right and all over the they have this gold foil this plastic gold foil do not take any of the foil because we have to analyze the situation when it comes out of the spa out of the out of the air we need to know what's going on so oh no we would never do that right we would never do that so we knew at what point the aircraft carrier the aircraft carrier takes four miles to turn around right and otherwise they're right on you and they got the big you know the giant binoculars about that big and they're looking at you you know uh you know one of those it's a nasa guy's always hated us just like everybody else and so as soon as the aircraft carrier starts making its turn we go on the other side of the capsule and we're stripping this foil off and we're sticking it in our wetsuits you know what if we can sell it back to them yeah one for mom one for the girl i had a girlfriend that played the cello and i could never get anywhere with that girlfriend i said man this is this is gonna bode me well with this girlfriend this thing's been to the moon man she's getting something what is this [Laughter] how big was the area that you knew that the capsule was going to touch down in well we anticipated being within four miles so it was pretty accurate pretty accurate but you never know because they had the aircraft i mean excuse me the air force guys and c-130s with the para paraguays being able to jump out if it wasn't within uh because they knew once it started decelerating coming out of space because it had to go from 24 500 miles down to you know five miles an hour uh they knew upon a deceleration where it's going to be so we would steam to that thing and it i mean that that carrier was right there i mean we saw it come right out of the sky so that was really that that those mathematicians and the sailors really did did well on that yeah that seems like that seems like a big challenge knowing where that thing's going to be within four miles free going from 25 000 miles an hour through through the atmosphere and then did the did so were you the first guy out you were the first guy out to did they say your name on absolutely there we go and so this is kind of a funny funny thing here so my mother was really proud of me you know my son he's going to be a mom nobody wanted to do it i volunteered first [Laughter] i you know she said don't tell the neighbors that you are selected as far as mom was concerned you went through a rigorous selection program to figure out who had who had the right stuff that's right now we we drew straws and the low man got to go on apollo because nobody else wanted do you still have any of the foil no dang it uh so my mother knew i was going to be in apollo and she knew that my name was going to be announced right and my city so she we didn't have color tv my father didn't like color tv so she says i'm buying a color tv i'm going to see my son so they had all the neighbors in and all the we had a group of kids that i went to school and college with and they all came over my house and my wife didn't know me but she came to my mother's house just for that thing and and she says my first time i saw my husband was a half inch tall [Laughter] so that was a big deal so what happens when you get done with that what's your next thing uh i i wanted to go on 13 because i just i was you know we my team was really good at this okay we had some great officers great chiefs great people doing it and i wanted to go and i said okay i want to go they said well you're just about done and i said what do you mean i'm done and he says well you got to sign up for another four years uh to go on this and i said four years to go on apollo uh because they had the vietnamization this was terrible thing and this is what i see going on in iraq they had the vietnamization of vietnam so we turned over all of our assets to the vietnamese especially in the very hot sectors and we would only go as backup or support if they were having a problem you know and so you could see the end of the war coming even in 69 the end of the war was coming because these guys were taken over they were completely incompetent and so i said man of this team 13 going to make another deployment probably you know but what's it going to be like are we just going to be sitting you know watching victory at sea movies somewhere and not really going out and doing a lot and so i i just got out i didn't up for that other four years so did you stay in the reserves was there a reserve at the time uh the navy the real navy reserves so just big navy reserves big navy reserve and you went to a diving unit or something and then is that is that what you did you stayed in the reserves and then they uh admiral bonnelli was instrumental in getting the other the udt udt seal reserves going so then when they did that i joined that but then i got real busy and i dropped out of that for a while what did you do when you when when you were in the reserves and now you're re-entering the civilian world what did you do uh school what'd you go to school for um anything i can get as quick as possible because i was 24 years old and i wanted to get out of school because my contemporaries were very young and i just wanted to get out so i went i tried to jam through that as quick as i could and what'd you get a degree in history and then a minor in business and and then what'd you do um well one of the actually before school started i hitchhiked around the world so at that time you could hitchhike around the world and i wanted to see the world and see what was going on you know and so we started in la and we got in those days you could get a car and if you drove it to new york they would pay for the gas so it was free because we had only had twelve hundred dollars to go around the world uh it was a service instead of transporting it they let people drive it across so it's like the early form of uber yeah yeah it was you drive uber right so we got in this car and this car was a brand new um god what was it something british right and it could go like an mg or something no no it was better than mg really i can't remember what it was but it was small but it was really triumph maybe it's triumph so no it was it was something pretty nice i can't imagine a worse decision than someone getting this is bad decision but no wonder this kind of uber didn't work out dude you ruined it so we get this car on a like a friday afternoon and you have to call the guy and say okay we're leaving los angeles right now and we'll be there maybe tuesday or wednesday right so 49 hours later we get to new york city and we call the guy and he said hey we're here he said you're here 49 hours to go 3000 miles well we left we really left earlier than friday right and we were literally going a lot 100 miles an hour across the nation and at that time you could really go right and so then we just got on airplane at that time the cheapest airline was icelandic airline but you had to spend three days in iceland so that was cool right who are you with you oh my travel friend uh a guy that i'd known for 10 years he was really a great guy just another guy from linwood that you grew up with yeah he was really he's a big dude and that worked out well for us because hitchhiking could be a little iffy at times and then we got to where we pulled wherever we pulled in europe but they had a real late winter and we didn't have any winter clothes so we only stayed in europe like a month and then we went down to we went down to uh israel and if you wanted to work in israel so we went and got a job at a kaboots in israel for three months so that was really good what were you doing there uh just working on this caboots and i was a beekeeper and so they made me a beekeepers and then a painter and so we were doing that and they paid us five dollars a month and free room and board but that was cool because then we could see all the sites in israel because i always wanted to go to israel right and pay and at that time you could hitchhike all over israel anybody would pick you up and let's say you're going from haifa where we were down south to you know the dead sea or whatever you could do that it was really good and we left there and just started hitchhiking across the world is this like 1970 or so uh 71 yeah 71 i think yeah and what's the when you're when you're home from vietnam and you know you're talking about earlier you know people are they think you're a soldier they're looking down and you did you feel that once you're right back absolutely i mean i i really had regret that i didn't stay in the military because uh you know the people wouldn't have anything to do with you of course as soon as you got out you let your hair grow a little longer you know and so that you fit in more rather than you know not having any hair so that kind of mask what was going on but i mean the you know the hippies were just plain you know nasty i mean they the thing i hated about them they had dirty knees and dirty elbows they didn't take shower all the time and they stunk and they smelled like marijuana i mean it was really nasty you know when the women were i mean they didn't keep themselves up it was it was bad so i had no inkling there that i wanted to be a hippie i just didn't i don't get any inkling that you were much of anything either nobody wanted to be a well none of my elf wanted to be a hippie right so so you how long did this uh did this hitchhiking scenario last about 10 months took us 10 months to go around the world did you keep going did you keep heading east after you got to israel oh yeah we hitchhiked across well that time you couldn't go to an arab country after israel so you had to go to cyprus then from cyprus to turkey then we just started hitchhiking in turkey and made it across afghanistan and then through india you know and we could make it to bangladesh well bangladesh was east pakistan at the time they didn't have bangladesh because a lot of countries changed you know since then and we made it there then we had to get on a aircraft because we couldn't go across burma and you know go we did go to burma spent a couple of days there then to japan and back to the states sometimes you either had to fly or be on a ship because you can't hitchhike in the water right and did you feel like at the end at the end of that that you had sort of gotten your fill of and seeing what you wanted to see yeah and for that sector yeah but you know i really i always we did a westpac you know with uh uh udt so we saw you know china which is hong kong at the time in japan and stuff so you know but then the next year i went to school and then we took the summer off we got student loans to travel in the summer not to go through school because we had a gi bill right and so got student loans and we hitchhiked to chile and came back with a three-month period so that was good what are you doing on the when you're in chile what are you doing for instance we're just hitchhiking and seeing what's going on with the people you know because then you travel with the people and you really see what's going on you really see rather than being on an airplane you see their mode of transportation what they eat and you know we never had a problem never had a problem you said you did a westpac with udt when was the westpac no that was during vietnam i mean that was called the westpac got it right yeah and being on board ship for that two months we did sailing too so then you do this trip now now you get back to california yeah and now you gotta like grow up kind of well no then it was then i had a very serious major in college it was beer and women and so i was i excelled where'd you go to college when you got back uh orange coast college in uh orange county and you continued to study history is that what you started yeah because it was the quickest way of getting out of college and you just wanted to get out and get some kind of a job just wanted to rock and roll that's right just go get some kind of work so i could make money then what was it two years did you finish college no it was actually what i had to start over because i took a lot of stuff that wouldn't transfer to an academic major because i took a practical art with auto mechanics but then it took me like a year and a half to get out of junior college in another year and a half to get out of you know big boy college and then what then i went to work i went to work for machinery manufacturer then i got back into the reserves what year did you get back in the reserves oh geez maybe 75 i think they you know i told you earlier that i had covet real bad and i lost part of my memory so i i have hard time with dates and names i just can't remember what it was i mean that's might not have anything to do with cove but it might do the fact that it's 40 something years ago and you didn't really care at the time i'm going back in the reserves whatever yeah it's funny i find myself i can't remember sometimes what platoons i was in because people like i didn't split through this with you i'm like what platoon was that i kind of forget sometimes when it's like your whole life for a year and a half as your platoon and i'm like what kind of idiot am i that i don't remember what platoon i was at i can usually back but uh deconstruct what it was and figure it out so you go back in the reserves and but you when you're back in the reserves are you part of the udt reserves yes they started it then whenever that was and then and then what are you doing one weekend a month yeah and you're going down and drinking beer and doing beach reconnaissance no no i mean it actually looked udt really cleaned up because then they saw what seal team did that cut the way for us so we would do more sealed team things than we would do udt because udt was a thing of the past so that was really good and so we did that i did that and then you know i don't know how many years i did that and i got out for a while then i came back in like 86 and came back in the reserves and uh then you know it was it was you know that was really good and then the i know in that book uh naval mentioned that in the fir when the first gulf war kicked off yeah you rogered up said hey send me what happened with that well i got um i wasn't fully qualified on a couple of things and so they wouldn't send me and so you know that was cool and that just made me work harder to get up to speed on everything so it just didn't work out but you know what can you do i mean if you're not if you don't have those calls you don't have those questions what calls didn't you have like dive soup or something or yeah just like the standard kind of seal yeah just stuff like that because i got in a year before but i i kind of evolved i was 40 years old i think at the time i can't remember how old i was and you know you're not going to run and gun like these studly dudes right here right you're not going to do it because you can't do it right no matter how much you work out or you know and so i said you know i really have to find my place and see where i'm an asset and so the training department was really good for me because there was a big paper pushed there and i got to work in training and then i got to go to a lot of places i could volunteer i would volunteer for 30 to 60 days a year to go to exercises to support the teams so that was really good for me you know and so i learned a lot because of that what do you remember about when you know udt 13 got decommissioned and then udt 11 and 12 sunsetted and became seal team three and 18 five and 83. so you were were you still in the reserves at that time i wasn't in and so that i did i missed that process and then of course the funding and i don't know because i wasn't there but that's what i think happened the funding process and the leadership process went from the navy from big navy to socom and so i'm sure people listening to this that live that will find fault with me on my facts but it was a different world the navy you know this team guys wear thin very quickly right very we're out of welcoming wear it out and you have to really protect yourself against that because then the other units won't work with you and if they won't work with you you can't do it by yourself so yeah well we definitely learned that lesson over time of you know just getting to working with your counterparts and giving them the support that you can give absolutely because then they'll support you back right so after the first gulf war where you got denied but then you realized all right i got to figure out how i can help what i can do and you stay in the reserves for the next 10 years and then september 11th happens yes where where were you at september september 11th uh september i was actually going to go to work for uh the boats and help promote their recruiting okay and so uh that was on the 10th of december i mean 10th of september and so i was going to go work with them like at a dod job to help promote that or be an active reservist they hadn't worked it out so then they said on the 10th they said don't calm down because we're not using it we'll give you a call the next week tell you because we don't have your funding appropriated yet and so on the 11th my friend calls me and he says have you watched the tv and i'd worked all night because i was doing i was flipping houses right and i worked out all night on this one property and i went home and he calls me at eight o'clock in the morning says you seen the tv and i said no he says get down and watch a tv so then that's with the towers he said so i called the unit and i said hey i'm available what's going on don't come because the base was were you in at that time commander i was i was actually going to college the navy had me in college at that time and i was doing the same thing i was calling my detailer and saying hey sir i'll quit college right now i'll finish this stuff later i don't care and you know i had this conversation with him it was it was admiral pibas and he i had worked for him before and he was an awesome boss and when september 11th happened i called him and said hey i'll do anything you know send me back to seal team i don't need my degree i'll do my degree online whatever and what's cool is you know i think i'm you know being all default aggressive and stuff but i talked to him a couple of years ago actually i talked to him and his wife and guess what every guy that wasn't at a team was calling up saying hey i'm ready to go i'm ready to go that's that's the community it's everyone wanted to get to go fight that's what we do the world war ii guys are calling yeah exactly exactly yeah so you call up and you say and what they tell you they say don't come to basis lockdown but come because they could activate me on reservist orders and because i knew it was going to happen because we had some of those same problems in vietnam here and so i'm good at making little things happen and so they i went down there i think on a friday i think the 911 was on a tuesday i just can't remember and so then i went down there that friday and then went to group one and started working some issues that they had especially activating reservists yeah because all of a sudden we needed to manage all kinds of positions a lot of positions and the teams guys team positions that team guys didn't want to do and rightfully so but it was good to get the reservists back in to that line of fire so that they could you know because you you know you got to get it on you know i mean it takes a while to get up to speed the war kicks off in afghanistan at what point did you did you get on the on the freaking launch pad to go to iraq uh how old were you at that point um 2003 is when you went no uh i think i went either 2002 or 2003 i can't remember but before the war just before the war started so what happened is i'm there working for group and i would um a great guy that i really really love jimmy bear and master chief baron i don't know if you can remember him sir master chief baron was working on the dpvs they actually pulled them out of storage a dpv is a dune buggy looking thing with the is it a 50 or a 60 on the top i can't remember right i think it could be either one yeah you could you could go either way on that like being oh i shouldn't say that little joke but i would i'll refrain there [Laughter] and so uh he pulled those out of storage and he was really good wrench turner i mean he was fabulous he was a guru and so i asked him i said you know i'm here at group can i support you guys and he says well you can't do it during the day but you can come at night and so i went there a bit to help them because they were trying to push that stuff out the door before christmas right and so uh i go down there and i'm turning a wrench in there at like three o'clock in the morning saying well it's about we have to be back here at 6. it's about time we went home you know that type of thing baron is a great guy in this whole i think there was nine guys involved with baron on those three or four dpvs maybe it was more and so i got to work with them because i wanted to go forward right so my boss at group one i said they had as soon as we come on board they have a thing in the conference room they said okay who wants to go forward who wants to go to the war everybody raises their hand and my my civilian boss he looks at me and he says posey he says you're too old you're too fat you're too stupid you're the last guy we're going to say we're going to slim the cleaning lady before we're going to send you i said no you're not you're going to send me he says no way in hell okay and i said yeah you're going to send me so he was why was i arguing with my boss right to have him do me a favor and send me overseas right who would do that i was stupid and so so he was right yeah [Laughter] so he says he says no we got a lot of work for you to do we got to push all these guys out because you know the the reserves at that time weren't really we had kind of a looser type of reserve unit and they weren't deployed that often so some of them had id cards that weren't current i mean there was you know in their wills were from three wives back in 1972 you know and you had to bring all that a mountain of paperwork that usually took four or five days and we were trying to facilitate these guys through this system to get them out the door you know and to get them you know just basic training because we didn't do a lot of chemical training basic chemical training and all that kind of thing so i was doing that and i was working dpvs at night and finally master chief baron leaves the 20 i think it was the 26th of december and and so i said man i was really hoping i could go with those guys so anyhow they have like a couple of weeks later they said we need somebody to go over uh to um there to help service vehicles on humvees because we never had a lot of humvees we never had a lot of vehicles and seal teams especially there was no up armor no armor and they were putting humvees out of out of the surplus storage from the army i mean they were just thrashed right so i said you know i'm really good mckin i didn't never i never opened a hood of a humvee right didn't have a clue i said i'm really a good mechanic and i think you should send me they're looking at me that's 56 years old right so eventually because they couldn't find anybody better than me which was the first rung of the ladder i mean they said okay you're you're going you're going you're going over and you're going to work on these humvees i said well what are we going to do about tools and they said well baron has all the tools and he has all the stuff but everybody knows in any given wartime situation that you don't whatever you need the most you never get i mean if you need that special gun or whatever it is it never shows up right so i go to harbor freight and i buy this gigantic box of tools because i know that those you know those assets aren't going to be there and so i took my box of tools and they they hadn't got their tools all their tools and they're coming over borrow they had all snap on stuff you know with the snap-on shirt and you know the ten thousand dollar box just the box alone was ten thousand dollars i got my harbor freight 298 a crescent wrench right and so oh posey could we we really need a a number 11 metric uh entrance you got of course i got it so they sent me over and they had these uh these uh hilux toyotas that they were going to use on the initial invasion and they put winches and all kinds of different stuff on them but the hilux shows up but all the other stuff's not put on so that was my i think the first couple of weeks that i was putting on all the stuff to the hiluxes to get them out and then we had a lot of servicing of humvees and all that and a lot of reorg stuff and so then they were looking for people to go forward who's going to go in this position me god come on come on we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here geez louise and so uh so i'm stuck back at the base and i'm doing different stuff that i really don't like to do and i'm listening you know to see when a chance of me going forward what's what's the need what kind of talent that i have because i think most of us marine corps and different facets of society we have a place in society like i'm not a leader at all i'm a follower but i'm a real good follower the command you know commander's intent i want to hear the commander's intent then i want to explore with the commander what that intent is i want to know what it really means because sometimes the words don't convey what that person really thinks i want to know how i can support that person any way possible you know what's his real meaning what's those words coming out of his mouth how can i help if i can make my sailors have whatever they need and they're happy and then secondary that if i can make my boss look good and then the navy look good then it's cool right yeah it's cool i mean everybody's cool because that's they want you around then if you get they say well who did this and and they say posey did it and so it was a good thing right i mean you know you did this right or whatever and i said no no no no it wasn't me it was my two subordinate smuckitelli and jira deli here so i always try to defer that or push it back to my boss because that's what makes you valuable and if you need a favor sometime those people will come forward and i learned that in vietnam when we would go to these different places they would leave like flags and pictures of different things and china and pottery then we were able to take those assets to the guys that were on the navy bases and if we needed you know cases of sea rats at the time or would you guys mind you're unloading all this beer out of this ship and would you guys mind pushing a pallet of this beer off the dock and let it fall into the water and then we'll retrieve it and i'll trade you this vietcong flag with fat genuine vietnam blood they didn't know it's pig's blood with a couple bullet holes that we shot in the parking lot we would really appreciate that you know so we could barter our way in vietnam because we had no money we had no assets we could barter our way uh into different things and then i knew because so many people hadn't been to the war since vietnam well they did of course they did the 96-hour war and they did other little wars but they didn't have a supply trade i knew that i could be valuable there securing assets for my team we only had 44 guys originally in in baghdad so before i went i i went on the internet and i buy it i should have bought 12. i bought six iraqi flags and i took them with me and then i took uh 550 dollars of cash at small bills and another 500 in large bills because i knew that as soon as we won that the currency would be no longer valid and that you could buy that currency at a bargain rate and be able to do something with that currency right and so when the war started i mean when the war ended as far as george bush calling it off nobody knew what to do with the currency so before it was like a 16-1 ratio with iraqi currency for the american dollar and in in then by the time bush called the war off it was in limbo and you could do a thousand to one you could literally buy i turned my 550 into rocky dinar and i could buy a box of money a box of money okay and so but there was nothing to buy yeah there's nothing to buy the the sanctions really worked in iraq there was nothing to buy and so um i had all this money and i had the i brought the flags and i was trading because we don't have an seal team when i got to iraq we don't have a logistics tale right at that time now we have a logistics tail they got so much smarter but we didn't i was the logistics tale and as soon as we get we we went uh real quick so you weren't you were in kuwait yes when you were preparing to go yes they're saying hey we need someone to so so the troops push up into baghdad yes you're still in kuwait right finally they go look we need someone to help us up there we got vehicles to maintain we got to build a base they're looking around they keep looking past you and finally they freaking got no choice but they said the old man up there to go get something i'm the last uh fish in the barrel right so what do you do jump on a hilo and fly up to baghdad international airport or did you drive up no no no so they tell me they tell me i i was in your team area in kuwait now as a team you could hitchhike real easy though it was really quick i love hitchhiking because you meet a lot of interesting people but anyhow i have my own vehicle because i'm the like the uh the go-to guy to get things done for whatever you know little things you know somebody's got this or they need that or whatever so they tell me it five minutes after one in in kuwait they said you have to be at uh help me with the name of the air base uh you have to be at the al assad uh by two o'clock and you're getting on an airplane and you're going to baghdad and they're going to drop you off there at baghdad you and barron i said dude it's five minutes after one and it's like 70 miles how in iraq i mean in kuwait how the hell am i gonna she says you've got to be there get in your car and go shut up so i get in my car and i got this rental car and i'm going literally a hundred miles an hour down the iraqi i mean the kuwait freeway luckily they didn't stop me and i get there at 10 min no it's 12 minutes to two and i tell baron baron get your stuff and we're going to a wreck he said posey what do you got me into i said i got things going here i can't i said this i showed him the orders i had a set of orders for him he said oh my god you dumbass and so we we throw all this stew i get my toolbox and throw it in there and i mean we're just jamming stuff in this rental vehicle and we get there we get to the the c-130 at one minute to two okay one minute to do and the guy's looking at me the crew chiefs look at him he said what are you doing i said we got orders here's our orders he said yeah you got ours we know who you are he's i said well what's going on let's go he says 0-200 0-200 too much time in the civilian world for you huh no but they told me two o'clock no they said you got i mean oh my god so we go back and we pack our stuff and we actually put underwear in our in our sea bag and the whole thing right and so we're there and so we thought we were going to go to biop right to baghdad international saddam hussein international airport right and so these guys get us in there and they they go on the red light in in the aircraft he said well what's going on where are we going he said well we're going to a road about 40 miles outside of uh out of baghdad to meet your guys i said really and they have this pallet of stuff in the aircraft and i said okay sounds good we're going in no lights no nothing we're going to be on this highway outside of baghdad right me and jimmy bear posey i'm going to kick your ass because the guy been to you know a ton of stuff i mean he's it's like talking to michael jordan that's that's master chief baron right i mean he's the man right the man and dumbass worn officer posey telling him what to do so so we get there and he says okay we're going down we're going to go into this highway we're going to turn around and we're going to do a five and five onion i said really i said you got this you know i said okay well you're gonna ride the pallet out right i said okay good so we jump on this pallet well it wasn't a five and five they were on actually on the deck right and they let us out of this aircraft and we're going about 20 miles an hour but we just rode the pallet out and our guys and we we have all this ammunition and all this stuff that they needed and so uh we we immediately head over to this hedge and just sit there for about a half hour and our guys eventually uh they knew we were there but they were afraid that some you know the iraqis were going to get on us and so then we go the next day we go in on these six buys to to baghdad and we go along the road and people are clapping we love george bush we love george bush really they love george bush i mean all along the highway they're telling us that i said my god i should have took a picture of that because they didn't love us after a couple of weeks right so we go to buy up there's nobody there so we go to owl lundy palace no the first no i'm sorry we go to the cia headquarters the iraqi ci headquarters and we're we're mustering there for a day or two so we get in there and what they did is they used a j dam and they collapsed the six story iraqi cia headquarters down they pancaked it down to two two sections of the building that survived and so there was cordite and concrete dust everywhere it was very hard to breathe and so we go in there and i said you know we ought to go uh we ought to go to uh these offices the top offices should be a head dude in the iraqi cia right the the head guy has the top office we have to go see what we can see so we make our way through all this construction stuff destruction stuff and we go to the top office and it's uday's office right and so i opened the desk drawer of uday's office and he's got these chrome sunglasses that like elvis wore right i said and the guy i was with the chief that i was with he he grabs his glasses and then he had on his desk a picture of him in these glasses and so he grabs that and he says okay which one do you want i said i'll take the glasses and he says okay so he takes the picture and i i take the glasses so i got today's glasses so we stay there a couple of days and then i go out that morning that we're supposed to leave because i wanted to make sure the vehicle was serviced and ready to go because we had gasoline we had ammunition we had mortars we had all kinds of stuff on this six by truck and i think we had three or four vehicles so i'm up in the cab of this truck making sure everything's on and i have my bayonet that i had in vietnam and i'm sitting in the seat like this and my bayonet gets stuck in this mtvr truck there and then they start shooting at me uh you know and it's just i mean it's five o'clock in the morning the sun just come up and they're shooting at me right say man i gotta get out of this truck because it could go you know if they hit the gasoline god knows what's going on so i'm trying to get out of this truck and i'm trying to push this stupid bayonet over to the side and i'm pulling and pulling and i go out the side of the truck and i didn't see this culvert right here and i go i do the big crash i got my weapon and across my chest and my battle rattle and man it's killing me it's killing me and so uh i get out of there and i walk back to there and you know whatever and we go then we go to al burundi palace and uh we said well the army's going to come in here to buy up and they're going to run things they're the 800 pound gorilla right they're always the 800 pound gorilla no matter where we go we shouldn't this the commander is making this decision we should go find another place because we don't want to get kicked out once we start improving it so we go down to the servants quarters and they have some nice little buildings there but they burn off out some of the buildings and they stole all the air conditioning and the wiring in the walls and everything and so we go in there and that's that's our that's our camp cheney posey right it wasn't jenny posey at the time and so we go there it's neptune trident you know every seal team named it known to men so we start improving that camp because we know we're going to have a lot of people late on in that camp you know just not the 18 that we originally started with so we go to this camp and we started improving it and i don't know if you know uh ranger i don't want to say his last year i know okay yeah i'll call him ranger right and this guy is a master i mean so we're in biop and we're the only but the only people in buy up and there's some little you know skirmishes and stuff out of town but there's not a whole lot going in so we're going to biop and we're going to the army and it's like being with us a rock star people are saying i mean he's driving this humvee right john john we haven't seen you since grenada john we haven't seen you since panama how you doing i mean the guy's a rock star there in the army right i said man i'm i'm happy that i know this guy and so we do that then people start coming in and we had a real good op tempo to begin with seal team was really kicking ass okay we had great commanders great platoon chiefs i mean everybody i mean because we thought the war might be a 96-hour war like it was the first gulf war so we want to get as much experience as possible right little did we know we'd be there 22 years later 21 years later so so we're there improving the camp and this and then we're there one day and we have a morning meeting at 8 o'clock with everybody in the camp and john comes in and he says he's swearing and he never swore he never swore and he swore he says i'm so sick of this uh he tells the commander right there i'm so sick of this we're changing the name of this camp nobody knows where this camp we've changed the name of this camp 15 times since we've been there the army doesn't know where they changed the name you know we're naming this camp camp bill posey and i look at him i said are you out of your mind are you out of your mind only dead people or very courageous people have a seal a seal team camp named after him are you crazy he says no we're doing that we're announcing it at the mayor the meeting tonight i said john don't don't do that just look just let me have time to think about it so as soon as the army came in they cut us off our up tempo we had no operations going because they were afraid of us right they wanted to homogenize everything and make everything happen the way they want it to happen and rightfully so because they're going to swing it probably won't be us right so i go to the morning meeting the mayor's meeting and i said hey i got some great news we're going to rename our camp after an army person because seal team has the greatest respect ever for the army and we love what you guys are doing here at biop and we think we want to honor you and people say posie what are you talking about sit down you dumbass i said no no we want to do this and they said okay no problem so i go back to my guys and i say okay let's name the camp i had to name it after an army person right and it was either audie murphy or my daughter who was a jrotc at ucla ucla yeah so we're going to name the camp either audie murphy or my daughter who's a rotc cadet i think so he said okay we're gonna name it after your daughter so we named the camp camp jenny posey right so that was very and i can't believe i mean john coming in there and saying that and people going along with it why would he do that i just i never figured that out but it worked and and it it was really nice of him and nice of the command to allow that to happen because i did not deserve it i'm not mike monsewer or any of those other very courageous dudes and i wasn't dead yet so i thought that might be some bad juju you know what i'm saying yeah it was it was awesome i ended up spending six months at jenny posey in 2003 2004 and what was cool wasn't it there's a classic picture of this and i'll find it and get it posted somewhere but the you know we go out do our operations and we could go out for however many hours or days we'd be out for and when you get back to camp there was a big sign on the camp door it was it was a pretty good selection for the space because we could come we could shut this big giant gate and it would just be no there would be no one on there but us but on the you you guys made this big giant sign that said welcome home to camp jenny posey and it was just an awesome sight when you come back no matter what happened out there you'd come back you'd see that big sign and be like all right we're good to go so that was uh that was that was the way it should be and it's a pretty freaking legendary situation to have it was different so how long did you end up staying there in iraq because you ended up did you end up getting hurt something happened to you well when i jumped out of the truck i didn't know it at the time but i broke my back but you know i went to the army that day when we pulled into buy-up and i said man you guys got to give me something because my back is killing me and the guy says okay let me examine you and so he says you don't have a medical record so i got an mre box and put medical record bill posey here it is here's my medical record right and he says well i'm going to send you back to germany and uh i said no you're not you're not he says yeah you got your medical record here and i'm going to send you back i took that medical record and i walked out of there and he was lucky i got some pills some pain pills before that so that knocked it down it wasn't you know it wasn't terribly debilitating so it it worked out so did you roll out on any ops with the boys oh yeah i got to do 30 i think but you know being 56 years old of course you know well grandpa is here and he he's gonna you know he he doesn't have all of his teeth but you know but you know it's always in the c2 unit you know in the back up so if something happened at least we could get the squirters you know and all that and at least take care of them or if we had to you know go help those guys in a qrf situation we were always available you know so that was good you know i really enjoyed that i i really appreciate them allowing me to do that i don't know if i'd have been an asset or a deficit you know so well i can tell you the you know the having the vehicles out there you never know when something's going to go wrong with the vehicle and to not have a good mechanic there to ready to get those things up and running and like you said those those humvees that we had because we got those humvees turned over to us and we showed up a couple months after you left same those things were beat down hand-me-downs you know scavenge marine corps hand me dance i believe they came out from more some of them were see we got some from some cb somewhere we got some some reservists somewhere canvas doors i mean they were a total disaster but you guys got them up and running and we kept we know we kept working on them and we know what was awesome was it didn't take very long like you said the seal teams not only did we not have vehicles but prior to this we didn't have any vehicle procedures either we didn't we didn't know anything we just we would we actually thought that vehicles it was kind of a joke in the seal teams if you got inserted by a vehicle we'd call it a a helo truck right meaning hey we're just pretending this is a helicopter we don't really have one we didn't realize like this is going to be our primary mode of transportation is going to be the humvee not even the dpvs or any of these high-speed vehicles for a solid three years they're in the middle it was a humvee and that was it that's what you were getting and not up armored oh yeah yeah not up armored at least not in the beginning no not in the beginning and we ended up doing mad max kind of things we'd end up with finding this the the bulletproof steel eventually we put that on various parts of the humvee to try and protect you as much as you could yeah the first few months we were there we we had turned the seats in the humvees to face outboard so that our our our body armor would be facing outward and we could sit there and scan but i mean it was because we took the canvas door what the canvas going to do not going to do you any good at all and so we we did what we could but we but what was really impressive not only do we get the vehicles up to speed and then we were doing all like the nascar drills of figuring out how to change tires really quick and rigging for tow all those things we rigged all that stuff up all the navigation systems which we got from this the civilian sector of of you know just taking a gps and coupling it with a with a portable computer and so we'd have the live feed gps going in there it's all stuff that we just figured out and then all the actual immediate action drills we did all that within a very short period of time because and it's one of the one of the strong points of the seal teams and one of the weak points of the seal teams one of the weak points of the steel teams is we didn't really have any standard operating procedures for a lot of things there's no manual like in the army you can pick up a manual and it will show you how to conduct a raid you can pick up a manual can show you how to conduct a reconnaissance it can show you how to conduct an immediate action drill in the city in the urban environment in the rural environment you can pick the manual to find all those things and in the seal teams we didn't have that it was all passed down word of mouth over years and so you couldn't just pick up a manual and say oh refer to the manual on this that's a disadvantage because it's nice to have somewhere to start from but it's an advantage because our minds are very flexible and very good at problem solving and that turns out to be advantageous when you get tasked with a mission that there is no manual for and that's what we're able to do with working out of vehicles and we ended up being extremely proficient in vehicle operations very shortly after we started doing them for the first time pretty that's one of the best things about the seal teams open minds and flexibility you know and i from my perspective it's more than that that the guys that go into seal team and it's it's got its good points and it's bad points just like you said commander but they're a different breed of people and i i really believe that that they can make things happen i mean guys just come out of the blue and say yeah we're going to do this and we have this process and it's a legitimate process and it works i mean what a gift from god you know it's a gift from a god the way a lot of sealed teams socially they're weird but you put them in the battle situation am i not right you're right socially they're as weird as a day islam oh he's coming i'll give an example of that we had a medal of honor winner well before he was medal of honor the team bar was the trade winds and ago the trade winds at 4 30 getting off work and he see you'd walk in the door and he had to screen in front of the door you'd walk in the door see this one guy sitting at the bar you would immediately go down around the screen go out because you knew there was going to be a fight in like 15 minutes right and the guy turned out to be a medal of honor winner but i mean that's the beauty of the teams that we allow people like that to go in and prosper and contribute to the to the effort i mean that's the beauty yeah what a wonderful thing a gift from god yeah so you when you got back home from that deployment what came next well can i just go a little yeah i want to talk about that forever if you would oh yeah that's right the charity you ran in baghdad i want to talk about that so uh i always like to support uh the chaplains because they did a lot of good things for a lot of people right and so i would go talk to the chaplain he happened to be a catholic chaplain and i said uh father what what can we what can we do for you how can we help you he said man we got this we got this orphanage just christian orphanage run by german nuns they had three german nuns in baghdad and they're constantly being harangued by the locals especially since the war started and we could use a little help on that i said what do you need he says well they really need money and i said really they need money and so i went to i went to the morning mayor's meeting we had a more mid morning mayor's meeting at 10 o'clock and that was every unit on biop sent a representative and we would all help each other the most help they ever gave me is when the grom needed gasoline because everything else didn't need gasoline i got gasoline for the grom i was able to trade to the grom and then i needed a pair of quadruple e size 9 boots now who in god's name takes a brand new pair of triple or quadruple e size 9 boots some guy defoliated his boot right and i was able to do that to get that but i was really happy about that but that cost me some big big things to do that so um i i say okay i go to the morning the mayor's morning meeting and i said okay after the meeting anybody can talk right after the mayor i said okay there's 44 seals here in biop and we want to challenge the army in a contest everybody's looking at me posey sit down you dumb ass okay you're stupid i said yeah we're gonna we're gonna kick your ass okay i said we're raising money for this catholic charity uh downtown buy-up and we will us 44 guys i think there was 12 000 guys at the base there is going to outraise the united states army a few marine guys okay we're gonna we're gonna out raise you because these people need money and they said you dumb ass and i said we're gonna call it and i don't i'm gonna just say the guy's first name john t i want to say his last name and i had this jar in my hand this big cookie jar like this clear cookie jar and i had his picture on the front of it with this big lettering the john t blank orphans fund and so i and i had a hole in it where they could stick money right so people after the meeting says you know my father was in the navy don't let anybody see me put money in this jar but i'm going to put money in this jar and we're going to get more money for you and i said fine so i go to back and i tell our guys i said we're in this we're doing this charity thing and we named it after our army ranger john t and he comes up and he says posey are you out of your mind he says i i don't i don't help orphans i make orphans i said you just you just relax big boy i'm going to take care of this right so we did this for i think 45 days and i would taunt them every morning mayor's morning meeting i would taunt them oh seal team now has 10 000 iraqi dinar uh what are you guys doing you know what where's the army at uh in the army rep well we got 300 and so i would taunt them every morning and the people just i mean they would i would drive my humvee down buy off and they'd wave at me and come and give me a handful of money american dollars but mainly uh iraqi dinar and so finally we ended up with six boxes of money six medium or small boxes of money and then we went to the the nunnery and delivered this money so we were afraid that by doing that that we would draw the attention of the iraqis that they would come and raid these poor nuns and kill them and do whatever for this money because it was i mean i don't know how much money we had but we had a ton of money and so they the commander their seal team says okay here's what we're going to do we're going to do a raid on this nunnery and we're going to be very ugly to them when we go in and we go out so that we can protect them you know we're going to act like we're going to hook them and the kids up and so we did that and so i go knock on the door and i talked to this kid and i said i want to deliver something to the nuns and so he let me in and i go talk to them i said sister we have this she barely spoke english we have money for you uh where would you like it and she says oh you can just put her on this little card table they had right there so i mentioned to my guys in the humvee to come in and we were doing t.o.t because we were really worried about spending too much time there that it was a social call and not you know some kind of a bad call and so my guys come in and they're banging on the door with their gun butts and just being ugly when they go we're gonna get you what you did you know they were really good and these break these six boxes of money and i said at that time it was very difficult to find cardboard boxes at buy up it was impossible and i wanted my boxes back i said where do you want she says right there so we start dumping these boxes of money up and it was a stack about two feet tall and it's going all over the floor she looks at me and said who are you guys i said well i don't know we're the army right so i said we have we're doing this she said why don't you sit down and have lunch with us we're going to have lunch and we have pepsicola and i said sister we're going to be out of here in 30 seconds we just have to make this look ugly because we don't want them to come and give you a bad time and and steal this money from you she says we understand so we're banging our way out you know they're pointing the guns at the nunnery in this whole thing and so we just x-filled and so uh that i heard later on that that was really good for them because they were really having a hard time financially you know feeding i think they had 60 kids there so it was really good and it was really good because the army really supported us that's awesome that's where the bulk of the money came from obviously and it was really wonderful that they did that so more power to them huh and it's also wonderful that the press didn't pick up any pictures of a young seal holding his weapon aimed at some nun i'm surprised that didn't happen we don't do too great with the pressure no i made her stay in the house and the kid walked me out got it because we were trying to be very cognizant of that you know but we didn't want to leave a trail that they would have problems oh for sure if it looked like they were helping coalition forces that's a death sentence right right so good tactic that worked out so so eventually you though you end up in this you did 30 combat operations you saved a bunch of orphans i mean this is just bill posey on the rampage you've supplied the whole seal teams with everything they needed repaired a thousand humvees but but you got to a point where you were too banged up and and you no my funding ran out so i was on reserve funding on non-active duty my funding i was on active duty but the funding from the reserves was paying me and so then they told me to come back out and so oh i thought you got injured you came home because you were hurt no but i was hurt but it didn't it didn't bother me i mean at the bottom i don't know for whatever reason the bottoms of my feet were killing me but that you know what can you do you know you got to do what you got to do so you know that was really uh a good thing and then they sent me this is really funny well maybe it's not funny that i come back and i this admiral calls me and he says posey no it wasn't it was an army i mean a navy captain your fundings ran out you have to go home and i said what do you mean i have to go home i'm i'm hurt i got to get fixed you got to fix me he says no no i'm giving you a direct order you have to you have to disengage yourself and so is this was this when you got back to the state yes just got back to you you got back to say you're dinged up now you're banged up and you're like hey i need to get some medical treatment before i so i look like chester right i'm going give him one of these right and i said you guys got to fix me and so he says no i'm giving you direct order you have to report into the x-fill tomorrow and get out i said okay so i go of course a warrant officer i mean not that we're brilliant but we know how the navy works we know how the whole thing works and there's chapter and verse on any given situation so i go to the instruction you know one zero zero three three one and i look at it and i pull pulled instruction out and i talked to the captain the next day and i said captain do you know about instruction one zero zero three one and he says no i don't but i don't care what it is you will report tonight this afternoon at 12. i said no i won't i'm not being disrespectful sir i talked to my command they stand behind me and that you guys have to fix me and you can't send me home. and he says well we'll see about that so i immediately i left there and i went to talk to my congressman who i knew because i was doing things and i said you know i'm not being disrespectful i love the navy i'm not disrespectful i'm not that kind of guy i'm not a you know seaboard lawyer but you have to fix me and i was at the clinic every day and i knew all these kids that they were mustering out i mean an e3 marine corps guy mustering out there sending him home and he can't even walk i mean he can't do anything right and they sent i think 60 of those people home and so i go to my congressman i said sir you've got to help me i mean this is not right what they're doing to all these kids i can get along i can make it happen right because i can go to the va or whatever but it's not right what you're doing to these kids so he calls the admiral and they straightened it out so i'm in six months of rehab and i went to the clinic there that we have the seal team and they really helped me so i was really happy about what was going on there and you know then my time was up and i went home so it was good what'd you do when we went home i started flipping houses again so i'm good at carpentry and that kind of stuff and flipping houses and then i moved to texas and i worked for the i was working in oil field for a while as a service component of the oil field and then i got the job uh teaching school how did you end up in the job teaching school what made you decide to do that uh because i couldn't do the oil field job my back i didn't know my back was broken right i didn't know i was just having all these back problems and feet problems and i thought it was just old age of course we all get old right i mean you guys are even feeling it at 25 yeah 26 26 okay but you know and so i had to quit that oil field job and then and i found this teaching job through this part of our church has this high school and so the guy calls me in and he says you know you've never taught before and you only have a college degree but you don't have a teacher credential you know but uh you know maybe we can help you so they hired me i was lucky enough to they hired me and so that was really for the last eight years been a really good gig for me because my objective there is to have those kids not make the same mistakes that i've made i've made a lot of mistakes in my life you know and i i did a lot of stupid things so what subject do you teach uh history government economics and art and bible but it's a wide range yeah but it's a it's a you know it's a small school so you do everything you know we only have like 175 kids enrolled in high school are you singing are you getting feedback from kids that graduated four years ago six years ago eight years ago that you had an impact on um yeah um yeah i think so i mean they tell me you know we really loved your class whatever because i tell you know the problem at least my perception i'm probably speaking out of turn but the problem is they treat the kids like kids you know how many in world war ii even in vietnam you had these guys that were 16 and 17 years old you know going to the war i mean in world war ii full jihad going under the war right going to the war you know against the german superpower and we say these kids are kids when they're 18 years old they're not kids they're adults don't baby him so i try not to baby now i just give it to him straight you know this is this is what's really happening you know think you know my objective read write be able to present yourself uh think and then act i mean if you can think you're dangerous right you're dangerous you're full-on dangerous because i i don't think a lot of the schools now want you to think it's not a good thing and then what you also apparently now you're you have your own radio show i do so what's that all about how can we listen to that oh yeah i don't think you want to uh commander uh i just have this little we do we talk politics every morning from 6 30 to 7 on 95.9 tajano radio victoria texas and we talk about things that are going on and especially things that are going on in the republican party and uh how we can you know fight back from what we think has not been well for us in the past here especially the past couple of years and how old are you right now i'm gonna be 75 in six months is there any part of your brain that thinks maybe you're gonna you know retire and sit on the front porch and drink coffee in the morning and watch the grass grow you know the problem is i really hate old people i hate old people and i don't want to be associated i don't want to talk to them i don't want to do anything with old people so i really find it you know when you're a kid and you have every possibility in the world out there every possibility that you can do anything you want right you can do whatever you want what a wonderful time in life right instead of some 70 oh my back my side i mean they all want to talk about their operations i don't give a rat's ass about their operations right i don't care so i like dealing with interfacing with the kids and you know trying to give it you know i don't think it's a not in doctrine well maybe it is indoctrination but i'm really big on the constitution the declaration of independence of the things that your grandfather my father your great grandfather did for america i mean let's honor those people i mean especially like memorial day today let's honor those folks and thank them for all the wonderful things and allowing us to have the wonderful things that we have in this nation you know so that's my objective you know teaching school i am slowing down covet uh was really uh mentally hard on me and so i hope i don't lose my mind here in the next three years because i hope to teach for the next three years well i'll tell you what that's a freaking about as good of a closing as we could ever hope for here echo you got anything usually if you haven't listened well you've listened to the podcast so echo you know speaking you were talking about some weird social things sometimes echo throws out some weird social questions right now we don't know what's coming actually more more for clarity than anything back to apollo 12. what was your job there well like what was your i was the first man out the door so i would hook the slow down parachute to the side and then we would put the capsule the collar around the capsule then our decontamination because we thought there was moon bugs the decontamination rafts would be inflated put it on the side we'd hope the decontamination man would open the door and uh put the astronauts in the rafts and then they'd go up in the in the helicopter just to go a little bit further i think echo i got to take it back one step so you remember you've seen the the the capsule splashing down into the ocean the capital from the fro from the from the rocket yeah like it goes to the moon whatever it goes up into space and then to get back it just splashes down in the middle of the ocean so somebody's got to go recover that capsule and get those astronauts out yeah that someone udt that's someone bill posey coming in hot first guy out the door of the of the helicopter of the helicopter so the helicopter and actually if you go to the uss midway yes they have one of those helicopters the helicopter that's the 66. wait that's your helicopter yes sir the 12 yes sir and they've got a little freddy the frog on there ready to get some compliments of pete carolyn he he painted that up so there you go yeah yeah that makes sense now yeah i started to gather that but oh yeah i want to make sure that that was the see people who lived through apollo just think everybody knows about it i apologize for not being clear now no no all good seemed pretty exciting though a billion people watching it oh yeah and there he is and out the door first bill posey from linwood california in full color for mom who was highly selected highly selected through a rigorous program to get there making a fool of myself because i can't find a d rig well sir awesome i i i really can't thank you enough for for coming on and obviously for your service to the country to the navy to the teams you know it was it was you guys that that formed our for you formed who we are in the seal teams in the in the udts coming up through vietnam and then you kept that thread going and you brought it all the way to iraq to camp jenny posey for us thanks for everything thanks for thanks for helping our legacy exists no no let's not let let's put credit where credit's due um i worked at group one that oversees all the west coast seal teams and i would deal with seal team three all the time and i would work with uh uh you lieutenant commander and it was really great working with three i really enjoyed working with three because we could really get things done and thanks for the leadership and everything that you did over there you were an inspiration to us all and even though you've written these books and i don't know if you remember this or not you wrote something just before i got out and it was really inspiring what you wrote and i wrote you back and i said man this is a great piece you ought to be an author so you know give credit where credit's due guys like you that grind it right down to this fine dust and that you can make things happen thank you for your service yeah well we wouldn't have been able to do anything without the the legacy that you guys put forth for us so teamwork and the teams amen until the end airborne thank you sir hi and with that warrant officer bill posey has left the building some good stuff man about how to be a good frogman and how to be a good human a guy that's been in the game and stayed in the game right stayed in the game 56 years old rolling out on ops getting after it it's it's funny to hear like everyone else or everyone's take on things you know you have various guests and their different takes on things and like his take on it was kind of like for like a better way of putting it like it was just just kind of easy like it was just one big ride that he was on kind of thing he was like oh can you imagine showing up to buds which used to be called udd udt trout replacement training replacement can you imagine you show up and you think you you'd go do i need a book bag because you think you're going to look to a freaking educational native school and you're actually entering what's allegedly the toughest military training you're like whatever yeah what like i surfed and i played water polo bring it what do you got what are we doing you want me to get wet be cold cool watch this i'm gonna sleep for 15 minutes in the front of the boat i'll be good when i'm done right roger that hey there what are we going to knob cool are we doing beach recons roger that oh we're going on patrols getting in a swift boat getting shot up hiding behind a piece of freaking body armor cool i'm down what apollo okay cool what i gotta do hook the [ __ ] in like he's just getting it the whole time yeah i think well there's a lot of my favorite points of that but when i asked him about retiring he's like i don't like old people what a freaking epic cancer he's 75 years old whatever he's like what yes no i got stuff i'm gonna do i'm out here making stuff happen yeah i started a radio program by the way it's kind of true when he talks about um like old people talk about their operations yeah he's not talking about his operations he's talking about going iraq yeah he said one one little thing that he said that stood out to me when he was like oh yeah they throw you over the over the deck or whatever in the water and to see if you're claustrophobic yeah the casual way that he said that i was like oh they'd go because they just want to see if they cost that he's talking about i'm assuming it's the old school with the biggest thing like 20 000 leagues under the sea scenario you know what i'm saying a claustrophobic uh in the bottom of the bay yeah that seems like a way bigger deal than his tone was when he said it seems like not a lot of stuff was a big deal he was just jumping out of helicopters hooking in apollo 12 going on patrol with with 30 oh by the way dropping danger close napalm that luckily happened to be there as you were about to get over ron whatever yeah watching rolling up to baghdad landing jumping out of a freaking c130 that's going down a highway what are you talking about no factor he was like oh yeah then this happened whatever just part of the ride he was on really you know man freaking awesome thank you camp jenny posey i can't i don't know if i can relay that enough what that what that name had to be to er it was this moment in time right that can never be recaptured camp jenny posey that's crazy like everyone that was at camp jenny posey oh yeah oh you were at posey like it's a little thing yeah you know bro i mean i'm not trying to get crazy we weren't freaking you know wasn't the battle the bulge but for the seals at that moment in time is pretty freaking awesome pretty freaking awesome cam jenny posey welcome home welcome home is what it said on that sign welcome home and that was jenny posey yeah by the way for those of you that are just listening jenny posey was in the room you know because she had did end up graduating from army or rotc and she was here laughing because i could see her she was laughing at stories and and and also you know she told me afterwards she's never heard all these stories huh you know she's never heard all these stories about nom about getting thrown over the side into the into the damn bay to walk around for half an hour by the way that's an ignorant test that's like the witch test that's like the witch test we'll throw you in the water and if you drown then that means you're not a witch but if you survive means you're a witch and we're going to kill you check this out we want to see if you're claustrophobic or if you like the water so we're going to throw you in the water what happens if you're not comfortable what are we doing then yeah like you you just freaking get all wrapped up in your in your in your lines to the surface and next thing you know you got that lead boots up and we got problems yeah it seemed problematic yeah that's not like the safest test we got for our do they still do that no no there'll be dead people all over the bay can't be throwing people in the water that's that's only the bill posey freaking test that's brutal all right well so speaking of staying in the game long term which is what we're looking to do yes how can we stay in the game longer build posey style okay we want to keep ourselves capable capable in every way physical mental emotional spiritual social when do we start throwing social into this part of life okay from keep that one fro you need like you need robust relationships you do maybe not robust we'll just say healthy relationships how about that either way we're gonna talk about the physical and mental so you you want to be exercising we want to be exercising we want to be doing jiu jitsu we want to be eating well here's the thing with eating well it's really hard to get all the nutrients that you need okay it's hard for all yeah agreed yeah even if you have a perfect diet in real life we which no one does there's no such thing well maybe there's some freaking uh like hollywood whatever that's up there that has like the personal chef and has the person coming in with the you know plucking the kale from flocking the kale from you know northern bulgaria where it's grown without any uh interference from man right and then steamed for like you know like 38.1 yeah at 17 degrees celsius exactly so that person might have a perfect diet no but and even then but even unless they don't have a job oh that's what i'm saying those people up in hollywood they don't have a job yeah they just sit there yeah and don't do anything no offense to my people in hollywood but come on let's get real what about though you know it's really hard being on the set all day shut up bill posey was getting thrown over a boat with a freaking hard hat helmet on to wander around in the muck that's been there for 150 years that was hard yeah that was yes being on set no you get zero credit yeah it's hard to compare the do you get zero credit did bill posey get a fresh bulgarian kale salad when he got out of the water well he did a negative so even if you eat where are we going even if we do have a fresh bulgarian kale salad and everything else perfect balanced meals in whatever way you're balancing them because we're all different in a lot of ways very hard to get these the the all the nutrients that we need and want okay good news chocolate supplements good news supplementation for us that was the longest with the perfect diet a perfect diet or a not so perfect diet supplementation is going to get you way ahead of the game keep you in the game that's what it's going to do so what do we got and what do we have them for we got them for your joints for your mind for your body and for your muscles directly joint warfare joint work grill oil super krill oil these are for your joints like okay and this is going to be a big deal because if your joints fail you you can be strong you can be strong you can be capable you can run every day your joints start failing you start bothering you or whatever what good is it having a 454 big blocker you got a flat tire over here exactly right rear you know what i'm saying exactly you're not going anywhere oh yeah or you can rev your engine a little bit just like you can stand there and flex in the mirror but you're not going to be able to take anybody in a jiu jitsu match yeah that's for sure you got a bad wheel it's true absolutely so we need to have the the joints up to speed let's see and trust me i know i've i've experienced both well what what a true testament is joint warfare there's subscribe people that subscribe subscribe to join warfare all the time and the feedback is awesome because people realize they go oh maybe i don't need it anymore then they go a week and a half and they're they're like crackheads running back so yeah subscribe hit they want to have it and they don't want to miss it all kinds of good stuff in that also vitamin d3 yep okay so look maybe some of us work outside and we get you know sun and then even then i think you still might be lacking in vitamin d3 why roll the dice don't why roll the dice don't roll the dice on your vitamin d nope get some easy and the teeny tiny ones you know some people they don't like swallowing those big remember the old school uh what is it freaking amino acids or whatever remember that those big ass horsemen yeah yeah yeah it's not like that no teeny tiny easy money you're good to go yeah exactly you're good to go also for immunity along with the vitamin d3 is cold war in these times we're not sometimes our immune system sometimes it needs a little attention extra attention i'd say that's a good call it's true we just got back from a trip and that's sometimes that's the time where your immune system gonna need a little little spot sometimes so yeah you got the you got the cold war from choco fuel also uh protein in the form of dessert it's called milk yes is there a new flavor okay it's so good it's so ridiculous we we just got to the mo we just got done with the muster and i i don't know why i asked jamie this i got paranoid but i was like i was about to fly out and she was out there before getting everything set up and i texted her i was like hey do we have milk out there and she's like are you serious of course she's like of course we have more we have plenty more essential dude i was out there just just taking because they bought my so beautiful i showed up they got a refrigerator in my room there's milk in the refrigerator hollywood guy over here yeah so i get there and there's milk and then there's milk and i was just well this is what i was doing i was taking like opening up the milk bottle and just drinking a little bit of milk and pouring milk in there and shaking it was so freaking good to go it's such a game changer you're on the road and you're you're just eating clean so legit get yourself some milk yeah and by the way right now i've been on peanut butter the chocolate peanut butter cup for like probably a month right now and i got everything i started i'm looking at my cupboard and i'm like thinking could it be mint could it be mint could it be strawberry maybe a little vanilla griddle and i just keep for the past month i've been grabbing that grabbing that chocolate peanut butter it's a reese's peanut butter milkshake it's that freaking good yep same boat same but oh so you're there yeah all right so one of the one of our people at the muster was thanking me for whatever reason for the uh milk the raw milk or the one the non-flavored one yeah he's thanking me for that i told him hey man you're welcome there's no problem for me to get that out no you know so brian pete oh you guys cool cool but you know you're welcome so that's a good that's an interesting one though so if like yeah if you don't prefer like a flavor necessarily i mean it's kind of hard to imagine but hey man everybody's different man got that option is there a banana thing flavor coming up banana banana is coming a banana milk i've obviously have you had it have you had the new no no no what's the name is there on the inside freaking good name not confirmed yet but we're getting there and it should be out it's good man it's like a banana cream scenario yeah and that's so freaking good yeah it's kind of ridiculous again you feel like you you feel like you're having a dessert straight up like that lately with that peanut now yesterday i did actually yesterday had a mint yesterday i had mint which was good to go so it's kind of like it's essentially a cheat code it's one of those cheat codes all right we need to move on i started to feel like we're in this weird tangent world where like you and i are getting super hyped you know why because you're imagining drinking right now and i understand but so yeah so get it for yourself how about that get it at jacofuel.com and get all this stuff you can get you can get um we have a drink too by the way a beverage that's true when i was in florida we at the muster we we supplied we'll say our people with the discipline go and man so good to go so good to go and then went to wawa down there in florida which is pretty freaking cool going in a wawa walk to the fridge there you go yeah you can just there you go looks like in wawa what's up with that cool here's the thing right now there's people like oh we're making a healthy energy drink [ __ ] you're actually lying there's only one person that's making a a healthy energy drink right now us we are yeah i guess there's only one team that's making a healthy energy drink right now there's only one team that said you know what we're not gonna put a bunch of freaking chemicals in here to preserve this that are going to go in your body and preserve your body in some weird way that's what you do when you die you go to a mortician and they preserve your body yeah they put those chemicals into the drink and say oh it's cool it's good drink it no we didn't do that we pasteurize it we pasteurize this we have to add any of those chemicals look at you'll notice i almost i almost got sucked in some guy commented on some social media thing he was like oh this uh you know just a standard he's trying to there he me trying to pitch you know some uh you know some supplement it's the same as everything else it's actually literally not the same as everything else all you have to do is look at the ingredients and you realize oh it's actually not it's not having close to everything else not even close it's a totally different ball game so if you're thinking that you're wrong you kind of i mean you know i try to give people the benefit of the doubt and you can kind of understand because when you think about it try to exclude you exclude yourself in what what this whole you know discipline go thing exclude that so i'm not a part of it pretend it doesn't exist how about that the drink doesn't exist yeah yeah okay and let's say even you don't exist um okay he has a point that guy saying oh he's just like everything you know it's like everyone everything else or whatever you know like oh yeah just some peddling some you know whatever he has no idea he's the thing is he's right except now he's not right because you're not but everyone else kind of does that you seem saying so if i didn't exist as a human yes this guy would be correct would be correct yes so you kind of like if he don't know he just decayed you know what decayed means no didn't know oh chad so if you didn't you know how you don't you know you did you got you get dk'd a lot actually people don't know me they just don't know oh yeah and they're just like oh look at that yeah they just assume yeah yeah they just assume like everyone else like remember that time about the warrior kid book he was like on twitter back in the day yeah chimed in yeah like so i forget who posted it but someone posted something saying oh yeah like um you know uh where they were kid from wimpy to warrior the navy whatever and some professor or something mm-hmm was like oh just another guy peddling toxic masculinity or something like this i'm paraphrasing some comments and he goes uh um sorry i'll pass right like didn't read it look at you pulling the quote yeah yeah you know didn't look into the whole thing and everyone just piled up on him saying hey essentially brad you're decaying this guy it's not that it's like whatever my daughters read it like that kind and he was like oh he was backpedaling whatever but totally decayed you mm-hmm so you know it's just another dk situation weird though that someone would make that move like like let's face it what's a good lesson to learn when you're a kid that almost everybody learns don't judge a book by its cover almost everybody does learns that lesson and here's a guy that double violated that number one looking at me and judging the book by its cover and then number two straight up judging the book by its cover straight up literally doing that and this guy is a professor who's you know uh a liberal guy because i was you know who is this guy and he's some super liberal guy look i get all kinds of liberal people that read the books no factor they're like oh yeah this guy's an open mind cool just decayed me yeah twice but even worse broke the act broke the broke the metaphorical rule and broke the straight up real literal rule broke it right there for he should have got two l's in this column right loser loser double up yeah yeah fully and yeah being liberal or not liberal that wasn't in this case the violation it was a man who cares ignorance yeah that was a violation if he was a super liberal guy that read the book and was like hey i think that the way you portray xyz i'd be like okay cool yeah that's good good feedback i need to pay attention to that it's true well so yeah so hey look so for future reference you will get dk'd in the future as well yeah and this energy drink situation he just decayed yourself it's all good bro the ingredients are filtered carbonated water natural flavor citric acid monk fruit extract that's that's the ingredients now look are there there are other ingredients that are like the supplement part vitamin b12 vitamin b6 like caffeine alpha gpc like those are real ingredients that are in there but they're supplemental they're good for you yeah the bat where's the bad for you ingredients on here there are not there you go that's the way they should do like that should be the new labeling system right what there should be two columns good for you bad for you that would be right reality it's too much reality but that's the way it should be because people don't know it's true people don't know that that that all those chemicals that are getting put in there they should be in the bad for you column yeah by the way yeah kind of like cigarettes yeah they'll cigarettes they say hey you can get cancer from yeah they should just have one column that says this left side makes you strong right side makes you weak exactly right kills you poisoned you yeah all right so yeah all right uh so wah-wah you can get the drinks at wawa you can get all the stuff at vitamin shop you can get all the stuff at jockofuel.com and also kind of important if you subscribe if you subscribe to whatever it is you want the shipping is free because we don't want you have to pay for shipping so if you subscribe shipping is free because we know that there's other organizations out there that offer free shipping we want to make sure you have the option if you don't want to go through those big organizations but you still want to get free shipping we got you covered we got you covered no factor it's a big deal man free shipping seems small it's a big deal and you don't forget to take your stuff to or you don't run out you don't run the risk of running out that's a big deal too by the way take it from me i've been there also you can get it at or originusa.com and i'll say originusa.com you can get american-made stuff jiu-jitsu for sure jeans american-made denim boots i have your boots by the way still then all my boots are your birds they're mine no power boots but here's the thing i have some oh the boots that you brought home so those are my boots yes yeah apparently you didn't bring them today well my son was trying to wear him and i was like okay cool he wanted to walk a mile in your shoes literally yeah american-made shoes um also yeah denim boots uh belts oh wait wait are they doing belts in other wallets yes belts wallets boots homemade in america all made in america 100 yeah 100 without compromise you know how hard it is when you say without compromise on the end of something especially something like making stuff in america that's a big bold statement because there's like a rivet for a pair of jeans yeah and everybody's like cool yeah we get rivets from china oh good to go yeah yeah cool that's negligible no big deal no big deal we're not worried about those particular slave labor elements that are working in a sweatshop we're not worried about them because it's rivets and we need them yeah that's the easy thing to do look we got most of the genes made in america we look most of our stuff is made by americans that are actually actually enjoying their job we got most of our parts not made by slave labor that's kind of cool right yeah no it's actually not cool that's actually a good point like how you're like the rivets they seem small it's small so it's it kind of until you're a 12 year old kid getting freaking in the big 18 hours a day yeah that's cool yeah go ahead get yourself those other get yourself those other jeans savages man so yes if if hey look if this kind of stuff interests you you want this kind of stuff originusa.com also jacqueline's store it's called jocko store so go to jackostore.com this is where you can get your display equals freedom shirts hats hoodies this is also this is higher quality stuff it's not ballpark giveaway free quality stuff it's high quality stuff trust me i know that too also we have a subscription situation new called the shirt locker so you get a new shirt every month free shipping on that one as well the designs are more creative more fun you got to trust me on that one because like if you're if you're like hey prove it and then like you look at it you're like oh you're right it's too late eddie you don't get that shirt anymore i will say at the muster when i saw our people with some shirt locker shirts on i felt i felt a little extra like connection i felt the same way exactly right kind of a little extra connection we know they're like look we get we get there in the game but then when you see that you're like oh they're in the game in the game in the game and looking to do full support yep so yes check it out jacquelinestore.com if you like something get something subscribe to the podcast don't forget about other podcasts that we have jocko unraveling with daryl cooper daryl cooper just dropped the new martyr made podcast yeah i noticed that okay so you can you can go check that out i think we he and i had prepped to do a podcast and then we ended up not doing that particular one for the unraveling and then i think he just kind of took some of that and went went deep on it which as you know dc can go deep on some stuff so so check out jocko unraveling check out martyrmaid check out the grounded podcast which dean list we've got to do some recording with him and the warrior kid podcast we also have the the jocko underground.com so look we don't know what's gonna happen with any of these platforms is the bottom line we we could get cut off for whatever reason we could get ads imposed on us from other things that we don't necessarily want to be doing advertisements for there's all kinds of things that can happen we realize this we need to have a contingency plan we we built the structure for a our own platform if we need to do it so if people if all of a sudden things get crazy we will be standing by we'll be on the jockowunderground.com if you want to help us out with that so that we never have to rely on anyone else and we don't have to have we have to do ad reads in the middle of a freaking podcast right hey warren officer posey you're telling us about what was like in vietnam hold on a second i'm going to talk about a new whatever right after these messages yeah right after these messages you can tell us what it was like no we're not doing that so if you want to help out eight dollars and eighteen cents a month if you can't afford it that doesn't mean we don't want you in the game we want you in the game you can go to you can email assistants at jockowinderground.com and so we're releasing one podcast a week where we kind of do a little topics that are we'll say related to but not quite the normal topic for jocko pondcast it's more of like an expansion more in depth so you can check out that and we also have a youtube channel that you can subscribe to if you want to see uh some of the stuff a lot of these things i'm the assistant director on sure most of the good ones i'm the assistant director on they're all good no maybe some people they're not all good okay yeah all right uh subscribe to that youtube channel also origin usa has a youtube channel you can check that out as well yep also psychological warfare if you don't know what that is it's not on the youtube channel but it is an album a jocko album with tracks and each track helps you get through an individual moment of weakness that you might have and we all have them from time to time bro i had one the other day not yesterday day before wait was it yesterday yeah day before yesterday yep but you know how like yeah you're the one who did this where if you have a moment of weakness and you get past it you got to punish yourself for having the moment or weakness so you got to add on what do you have like a set or a 10 percent 15 percent burpees could be starve yourself for 14 hours i don't know but somebody got to pay for that hey man those chocolate chippy chocolate chip cookies were good to go and i'm fasting tomorrow what you got to pay for that and yeah so man that happened to me what was the moment i wanted to skip the workout i actually didn't want to skip it i was into it i warmed up you know the kind where it's like hey if i just start warming up i'm going to be in the workout yeah it was harder than that the moment of weakness was bigger and more robust than that i warmed up i did like two good sets and i was like kind of like hey i did those two solid sets right there so if i don't do the second half of this workout we kind of go i can just finish these set and be done you know so i was like oh man so i got through it i said ah no i didn't i did the whole workout and then as a punishment i had to do a metcon there you go and i doubled up on the met content bang yeah check right on you can get that from anywhere you get mp3s also if you want to hang something up in your wall you can go to flipsidecampus.com dakota meyer my brother is making all kinds of cool stuff to hang on your wall also i got a bunch of books we have final spin coming final spin coming i wrote i wrote a book could be novel could be could be some other format of reading of writing could be poetry with a mixture of prose with a mixture of transcripts of human beings talking that basically i made my own form up am i allowed to do that at this point but i guess i did um story it's available now for pre-order if you want to get that first when does it come out november 16th is when it comes out here's the thing you know what the publisher is saying the publisher's like well you know you're kind of a guy that writes about leaner camps and we don't know right big question you know yeah big question mark we're not sure if you're people that listen to you your podcast will actually want to read some kind of a weird novel from you it's like okay cool it's true so they're not going to print enough and then people are going to order it when you know in on on november 14th they'll be like oh cool i want to get a copy they're gonna end up with a second a dish and there's no this is not a redeemable situation you know you make some decisions in life you can never go back from like you get a tattoo on your forehead seemed like a good idea right but you can't go back from that yeah right you can't go back from that it's there now you could go get it removed then you got a scar on your forehead either way we're not thinking that that's the the move that we can go back from yes hey you go out drinking and you decide you're gonna go for a drive afterwards you get a dui there's no you don't go like hey hey officer you know what let's hit rewind right you can't do that you show up i'm you know you come to the muster you come to jonco live you roll up you got that you got you got that copy of final spin and you're like i'd really like to get this signed i open it up i'm going to sign it i'm going to sign it like cool man i appreciate it but then i see the second dish down there and i'm sort of knowing i'm sort of seeing where you're at you know i'm sort of seeing where we're at you know i'm sort of seeing where we're at i know that at the moment of truth you were kind of like well and now you can't you can't walk back that decision again you could work through it right you're still going to go out you can wear a hat if you've got the tattoo on your forehead you got the dui you're going to go through the classes so you can recover and get your license back yeah you can do the best you're going to do the best you can but you still got that scarlet letter yeah i got this girl second a dish don't let it happen to you don't let it happen to you all right we got leadership strategy of tactics we got the code the the evaluation the protocol this one is freedom field manual brand new versions been out for a little bit now way the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons often called the best children's book ever written sure so a lot of people call it yeah i dig it at least quite a few of them i agree uh about face by hackworth and then the og extreme ownership in the dichotomy leadership we got echelon front which is a my leadership consulting company we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront.com we have ef online dot com on there we have courses on there we have leadership courses on there we're doing live q a all the time if you want to improve look leadership is not an inoculation you don't get a shout out you don't read extreme ownership one time be like oh cool i'm good to go doesn't happen it doesn't happen to anybody you need to reinforce those learnings you need to expand your knowledge how do you do that efonline.com go get it muster we just got done with orlando freaking awesome we got phoenix august 17th and 18th las vegas 28th and 29th check xtremeownership.com if you want to come to that do it quick they're selling out ef battlefield we go walk the battlefields and go through leadership lessons learned i'll let you know when the next one of those is coming up and if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she has a charity organization she does all kinds of things to help veterans one of the major things that she does is she gets them medical treatments that might not be covered by the va or by the military medical system one of the big ones is hyper hyperbaric chamber sending guys out for 30 days to get multiple iterations of that type of treatment and it's extremely helpful for people a bunch of my friends have gotten it's been awesome if you want to help you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want more of my nagging narratives or you need more of echo's vexing vocals you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram and on the facebook echo is that echo charles i am at jacqueline and thanks once again to bill posey what what an awesome opportunity to sit down thank you for everything you did for america and everything you did for the teams hooyah warren officer posey and to the rest of our uniform personnel out there thank you for what you do to keep us free and to our veterans thank you for your service and sacrifice and also to our police and law enforcement our firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all the first responders you all work hard every day every single day to keep us safe thank you for what you do day in and day out for us and everyone else out there remember what bill posey had to say remember he said if you can think if you can think you're dangerous if you can think you're dangerous stay dangerous stay dangerous age apparently age is a number and you can go hard and you can keep going and we all have more to give so i say we step up and give it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 142,812

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: igLFp7rHvTk

Length: 190min 38sec (11438 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021