Jocko Podcast 290: Sea Stories and Tales of Terror, with Admiral William McRaven

this is jocko podcast number 290 with echo charles and me jaco willing good evening echo good evening within 24 hours i had ordered the special operations units to assemble in north carolina on the seal side all were senior enlisted from the same seal squadron all were hand-picked by the seal commander all had extensive combat experience the aviation crews were equally experienced and also hand-picked but none of them knew why they were being asked to come to north carolina on such short notice the following day as we ushered the members of the raid team into the conference room at our north carolina location i could see a look of annoyance on their faces by this time i had briefed my boss admiral eric olson on the bin laden mission olson along with the under secretary of defense for intelligence mike vickers and several cia senior officers were also present in the conference room the operator's body language was unmistakable clearly they thought they had been dragged out of virginia beach in fort campbell to participate in some kind of no notice exercise just to impress the brass i offered some short welcoming remarks and then turned over the briefing to a cia officer he began by handing out non-disclosure forms i watched with some amusement as the body language began to change rarely were non-disclosure forms required for exercises even sensitive ones it took a few minutes before the forms were signed and collected then another cia official stepped up on the small stage and began to brief the target the operators shifted in their chairs sitting up to focus on the slides on the screen the cia officer began gentlemen for the past several months the cia has been tracking an individual we call the pacer embedded in the slide was a link the cia officer clicked on the link and a video played on the screen everyone watched as the pacer moved around the compound at ac one we have reason to believe that the pacer is osama bin laden at the sound of bin laden's name there was silence in the room i could see a number of the seals glancing around at each other as if to ask are they screwing with us or is this for real the briefing went on for another 30 minutes after the cia analyst finished i pushed away from my table stood up and made sure everyone was clear on why we were here gentlemen i told them the president has asked us to develop a raid option to capture or kill bin laden for the past several weeks a small team has been planning the mission but now we have to find out whether the plan is executable we have less than three weeks to test and rehearse the plan at the end of that time i have to report back to the president on the viability of the mission there was no emotion from the operators no smiles no acknowledgment of the magnitude of the operation now it was all business i continued the agency has built a mock-up of the compound just a mile from here you have two days to work through the movements on target after that we will move to another location out west to do the full dress rehearsals i offered the other senior officers an opportunity to say a few words but they recognized that this was about the operators not a time to wax philosophically about the importance of the mission i will turn you over to your boss and you guys can work out the details any questions there were none all right i said let's get to work and that right there is an excerpt of the book c stories which was written by admiral william mcraven admiral mcraven served 37 years in the navy and held just about every position of leadership there is from seal platoon commander all the way up to four star commander of all united states special operations forces he oversaw thousands and thousands of combat operations around the globe during his time in service including some of the most important operations and perhaps the most important operation in the history of u.s special operations the killing of osama bin laden and all the while even with that incredible burden of command admiral mcraven was always connected with the troops as an example he stopped by my little base in baghdad and said hi to this common platoon commander as we geared up for a mission and asked ernest questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it and then listened intently as i explained my little part of the war he was always present thoughtful respected balanced and as good of a representative of the seal community as we could have hoped for and we have the honor of having him with us here tonight to share his vast experiences and lessons learned admiral thank you for joining us jacqueline great to be with you that's um that's from the book c stories now you've written four books thus far c stories make your bed your latest one which was called the hero code and then spec ops case studies in special operations warfare and practice i'll probably spend some time uh well i'm going a little bit i'll go into about into the yeah we'll go the array of books that you've written at some point and see stories is sort of well you were saying that's about as close of a memoir as we're going to get from you that's about it yep i guess this podcast is going to have to do that this will do it i'm going to dive into c stories first and because it relays some of your early experiences um here's the deal i'm gonna just read little tiny chunks of this book because you read your own audiobooks which is awesome so people can go out and buy those but in order to maybe trigger us into some other conversations and some stuff that's not in the books i'll set it up and i always like to start at the beginning and and find out you know who these people are where they came from how they ended up the way they did and and you got a pretty good pretty good interesting background and with that i'm gonna go to the book here talk to your dad when i asked him years later why he joined the military he said that as a boy he watched soldiers march through the streets of his hometown of marston missouri and board a train bound for the trenches of france his father an army surgeon was one of those men he knew then that he wanted to be a soldier after graduating from aviation officer school at brookfield in san antonio texas he re received orders to the 309th fighter squadron 8th air force the 309th was part of the first american contingent to be posted in the united kingdom at the time the americans were still working to build a fighter aircraft that could complete in aerial combat against the german messerschmitt so when dad arrived in england he and the other pilots of the 309th were given british spitfires the spits equipped with a powerful rolls-royce engines new guns and sleek aerodynamics were good enough to go toe-to-toe with the germans dad flew the spitfire throughout the war going on to fight in the campaigns in north africa sicily salerno and eventually at the normandy invasion he registered two confirmed kills during the war but would himself be shot down over france in 1943 the saga of his escape and evasion from france back to england was told many times during our posting in france but not by dad who rarely talked about his wartime service but by the french resistance fighter who helped him back to freedom and now lived near us on the outskirts of paris so your dad's a freaking war hero coming out of the game well yeah i think they were all heroes back then i mean you think about this greatest generation and i was fortunate growing up as a kid in san antonio texas that you know all of my dad's friends even back then had served in the air force or the the army air corps or the army and and they all fought in world war ii so you know you experienced these you kind of remarkable stories from these guys but of course that generation both my both my parents my father and my mother you know they grow up uh during the depression uh they grow up as children of world war one as i mentioned my dad watched his father go off to serve in world war one and my grandfather also he was young enough that he came back and served in world war ii so as a as a combat surgeon um and then of course all the men go off to world war ii uh so yeah they they had these stories and i think the stories helped him one of the reasons uh that i wrote the book c stories was because the stories that my father told i know helped him and that group deal with the challenges that they had in life stories help you do that as you well know and and frankly writing the stories and the book c stories kind of helped me it was it was cathartic you know you put these stories down on paper you remember them you remember the people you remember your emotions uh and it's frankly helpful to get those stories out sometimes yeah the so did your dad stay in the army so was he a career army guy the career he joined the army air corps which became the air force so yeah he spent 26 years in the air force retired as colonel um and flew until he had a heart attack something about whiskey and cigarettes and had a heart attack while we were over in france and so that took him offline status they sent him back to to fort sam houston actually to brooke air force base or to lachlan air force base the brook medical center there recovered and then retired out of lachlan and you were growing up you were what was your behavior like i know you got a pretty good story in there that's you know you obviously had a mischievous side which i guess is just what we're born with uh but you were also a really good athlete uh yeah it was uh mischievous is a good way to describe it you know and to your point i think that was the nature of a lot of kids back then you know i grew up born in 1955 but kind of grew up in the 60s and this was a time when you know the the movies were about spies you know i mean james bond came out the the there was i spy on tv and the man from uncle and and even though you know i grew up in texas and it was about cowboys and indian sort of thing the spy culture back then really kind of i think grabbed the young kid certainly grabbed me so yeah you know we were always looking at missions to go on and you know when i was when i was uh pre-teen of course a couple of those got me in some some serious trouble um and yeah i was good athlete but i was small i didn't really start growing until late in high school so my my dad happened to have been a professional athlete he played football for the cleveland rams running back for the cleveland rams and did that and that's where he made all of his money yeah i think he told me they paid him 120 a week which was good money back then and then he would get 10 for doing wheaties commercials so uh so he seemed like he was making pretty good money uh back then but he and a bunch of buddies saw that the you know in the in the late 30s early 40s that war was brewing and they i think he told me one time he and four of his uh of his friends on the football team just got up drove to california and signed up for the army air corps so you're you're what about grades were you interested in school did you care about yourself yeah yeah of course i cared about school i'm not sure school cared that much about me uh you know i was i was an average student i was an average student in elementary school and junior high school in high school and in college uh but but i worked hard you know i mean i worked hard to get the grades uh i didn't have a lot of skills in math and science um and and of course when i look back on my college career i mean i changed majors four times it wasn't until i got into journalism which is what i ended up graduating in that i found out i i had a little bit of a talent for writing uh so i mean i couldn't do i started off in pre-med in college that didn't work out so well i went to accounting that worked out even worse and then i went to the news reporting and then finally in the broader arena of journalism and so uh when you're going to college did you did you have a military career in mind at that point yeah i did uh yeah again i had watched my my dad and his friends and the one thing i loved about the military uh was just the camaraderie uh yeah even even after my dad retired we lived in a uh a residential area in san antonio called wind crest and wind crest is where a lot of the retired military and a lot of the active duty military lived so it was almost like living on base housing and so all the kids you know had some sort of connection to the military um and it was just a great environment to grow up in and i remembered a young age i decided i kind of my dad didn't push me this wasn't the great santini sort of thing but i just uh i enjoyed uh you know watching how my parents interacted with their friends and i said yeah that's kind of what i want to do and my dad wanted me to be a pilot and my my mom wanted me uh to be a doctor the doctor was not going to work out as she quickly found out but she did get me an rotc scholarship she had to do all the work you know again back then i don't think i had the discipline to do all the paperwork my mom worked all the paperwork and said you know go to this interview sign this do this and i got an rotc scholarship to the university of texas at austin and that kind of put me on the path how how had you heard about the seal teams at this point uh so interestingly enough my sister uh was dating an army green beret and this was probably 1971 and of course the movie the green beret with john wayne had come out and i i love the movie never heard of seals at that point in time and so this army officer comes a young captain comes to pick her up and this was at a time when it was very unusual because the vietnam war was still going on you weren't supposed to wear your class a's you know your your uniform out in in public back then um but he comes to pick her up and he's in his uniform and he's a green beret and so my sister notoriously late so i'm kind of entertaining the guy i'm about 16 17 years old i guess and and he says well what are you going to do and i said well you know i'm looking at going to the navy and rotc and he says well then you need to be a navy seal i'd never heard of navy seals and he had just come back from a tour in vietnam he goes let me tell you seals are the best guys in the navy if you want to do something special you go be a navy seal i'm thinking this is an army green beret telling me to go be a navy seal and that really is kind of what spurred me and then there was one article you know back then not like it is today of course back then you couldn't find out about seals but i got on micro fish in the library i found one article called uh men with green faces kind of it's a classic but it was it was in some old men's magazine you know back then they used to have these men's magazines and uh adventure magazine sort of thing and i must have read that article you know a hundred times trying to find out what it was like of course there was nothing on buds it was all about the teams interestingly enough about probably 10 years 15 years later i found that article the micro fish you know photocopy of it and of course i knew all the guys in the article it was ed bowen and it was bob mabry and it was it was a bob gormley i mean guys that now i was kind of serving with that were actually in the article so it was uh it was interesting now you made you you talk about this and um in make your bed you you go to visit buds was this like your junior year yeah it was between my junior and senior year um and you know we had some time off in the summer and uh so i wanted to go see what what buds was all about um so i took a flight to san diego and i show up at the compound uh which is i guess they're demolishing it now but uh so this was 1976. and i show up and i and i go to the quarter deck kind of unannounced and i i i tell them i'd like to see somebody talk about going through bud's training so the lieutenant who was running at the time this guy named doug youth vietnam vet very distinguished great great officer and so i'm waiting outside and i i look down the hallway and i remember this very vividly and i see this guy down the hallway and of course you remember how it's set up you know the offices are off to one side and we back then with the there was these posters and they were you know vietnam era posters you know manly men doing manly things many guys with bandoliers on guys in the mud with the stoner and and this guy is kind of looking up at these posters you know kind of you know longingly and and looking at i'm thinking to myself you have got to be kidding me i mean this guy you know he was thin kind of frail um and had a little bit of a mop of of long hair and i thought he was a dependent you know but he's kind of looking up and i'm thinking man does this guy really think he could be a navy seal doesn't he know i mean maybe steel's supposed to look like me you know six foot two eyes of blue big brawny guys and so as i'm watching this guy you know i'm waiting and thinking i feel sorry for this guy if he really thinks that he could make it through seal training so a few minutes later i get called into heath's office and i'm sitting there talking to doug youth and out of the corner of my eye i can see this guy kind of walking across in front of the doorway and finally doug huth stops me he goes hey bill hold on say i want to introduce you to somebody he said tommy tommy come in here he says bill this is uh tommy norris he's the last seal medal of honor recipient from fiat and of course as you well know jocko tommy one of the toughest guys that ever went through seal training and it just reinforced the fact and of course when you get in sealed training you realize this it ain't about how big you are it ain't about how fast you are i mean tommy norris one of the toughest guys because uh you know he had the he had the heart uh big enough to make it through the toughness the determination everything that we're looking for in seals and so a lot of guys that go through that think it's all about you know how fast you can run and how much you can bench press and they're missing the point uh the tommy norris's of this world so the ones that that rule the teams crazy how many uh guys with a big bench or a great run time quit yeah it's nuts right saw it early on we had this we had two guys that looked like weight lifters i don't think they made it through the first week that's that's not not what you're looking for as you know and uh lieutenant hughes who checked you in the first phase he was the he was the ceo of all of bud's when i went oh sorry yeah he was he was the captain in charge of the secretary going through so uh so you you end up going back finishing your senior year and then you got you got orders but was it hard to get to go to buds then it wasn't uh again back then buds was actually a course at the naval amphibious school so it was not its own command it was just a course that was run at the naval and phibic school and when i got orders i was at the university of texas i remember my orders came in and it didn't say basic underwater demolition seal training it had a course number on it and it said something about explosives training but that was about it and so i didn't even know whether these were the right orders to go to buds so i'm calling around but again back then nobody knew about seal training so you know the one of the officers had to call the detailer who back then our detailers and for your audience the detailers are the guys that that send you give you the orders where to go well we didn't have a sealed detailer back then it was an eod an explosive ordinance disposal officer that managed the seal community so yeah he said i don't know it's it's the course number so of course i show up turned out it was the right place to go well uh we just had bill posey on yeah and he showed up to buds whatever course number it was same thing and he thought it was of course he he asked like hey do i need a backpack for the books and like what do you think you need books for he says for the course he had no idea what he was doing he thought he was going to go he's got thought he's going to some kind of advanced dive hard hat dive school or something like that and i was also thinking about dick thompson we had a guy named dick thompson on who was a green beret in vietnam so he joined the army voluntarily then he volunteered for special forces then he volunteered for ocs when became an officer and i said hey was it hard to you know when you was it hard to get those billets and he goes no because it was vietnam they were like oh you want to be an officer cool go ahead you want to be in special forces cool go ahead do you want to join the army everything was easy well and i don't uh except all you have to do is pass the pt test and of course you know the pt test is not all that hard uh you pass pt test you get orders to buds i mean i think it was that easy back then and now again i can't i can't talk to the naval academy guys but for those of us in rotc hey if you raised your hand and you wanted to go you were probably going to get a bullet did you have any idea what you were getting into none none whatsoever again there were no books there were no movies there was nothing on seal training i knew nothing about what we were going to do i just knew that i wasn't going to quit they were they were going to have to kill me if they were going to stop me from getting through how was your water competency yeah good i mean i was a good swimmer okay uh and i've been scuba diving since i was 13. so i learned dive young um so the water i mean i thought we'd actually spend more time of course we did spend a lot of time swimming but i was always good swimmer so that was not an issue yeah i think that's a big that's a big problem for guys that show up from iowa that didn't you know they grew up wrestling and weightlifting or whatever but they didn't swim and that's a problem or particularly swimming in the surf yeah i mean there's a difference as you know i mean you can get in the pool and make pretty good laps but there were a lot of kids that came in with me that all of a sudden that you know you see the surf particularly in the the winter time off coronado and you know you get 10 12 foot breakers and they're like whoa never seen that before so that was a bit of a shock for him and then your class leader uh was was daniel stewart daniel stewart yeah one of the finest officers uh i ever served with and daniel had been rolled back he had uh as you recall and towards the end of the first phase of training uh or maybe it was right before uh hell week uh we did um cast and recovery so you take an inflatable boat small and you tied up along what we had was called pl which was a little small uh boat back then and then you hooked the old classic frogman in world war ii you hook your arm through the sling well in the course of hooking his arm through the sling the guy caught the arm too low ripped out his bicep and so daniel had to get rolled back fortunately for us he ends up being a class leader and he was lieutenant jg the other officers in the class we were all insanes and daniel had been in the fleet so he was already a surface warfare officer naval academy graduate exactly the guy we needed uh to frankly get through training again i knew nothing about what i was stepping into and neither did the other two officers uh that were with us we were all you know kind of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but uh but daniel had already been through it had some great great ideas on how we were going to make it through and he's the one that got us through frankly he was my first commanding officer at seal team one and he was i guess in the modern term that we would say we he would say he was jacked yeah he was like still is yeah and because he was a gymnast wasn't he a gymnast so he was the first human being because i didn't know anything about gymnastics but he was out on the old pull-up bar behind sale team one and he was doing muscle-ups on the pull-up bar i didn't even know what that was and i remember thinking damn i got some work to do over here that's a new guy um the instructors so you've got i mean this is first of all they're basically unchanged there's no supervision there was no adult supervision right well i think there was but of course as as trainees you don't think there is uh and you think they have the latitude to do anything to you so i think that was part of the psychological advantage they had was if there was in fact adult supervision which i think there was and i think they had certain criteria we didn't know it so i think today again the students going through because they have such a good understanding they know the instructors aren't going to kill them i can be honest with you i'm not sure we knew that back then uh and some of them seemed mean enough to do that uh but they were all vietnam vets uh you know these you know salty old crusty old guys and uh and of course as a young kid i mean you look up to these vietnam vets as we should uh great combat experience uh great stories and you wanted to be like these guys and of course they wanted you to be tough enough mentally tough enough physically tough enough to join them in the teams and you knew that was the standard you were fighting for so uh it was great to have those guys be your instructors because you know we looked up to them so much and we just wanted to do the best by them what was was it like just the normal kind of 75 or 80 attrition rate yeah same thing uh we started with uh i went back and had to check the numbers we started with 110 guys at least that's what the roster shows we ended up with 33 um so right about the same nutrition and yet 33 back then was a large class the class before us i think had finished with 18 or 20 which was about normal back then again i attribute a lot of our success to daniel stewart who managed to keep the class together during the tough times um and they were they were actually very impressed remember the instructors watched us very closely because we got a lot of guys through uh hell week i think we ended up getting almost 55 guys through hell week and we lost a lot of guys after that but still ending up with 33 guys was a large class and the instructors were trying to figure out how did you guys do that because we need to get more guys through well the answer was you had great leadership and that always helps when you're in in challenging situations yeah did um i know you you talk a little bit about in the in one of the books about uh instructor faculty who ended up being my first master chief at seal team one and he's a guy that uh really instilled well the professionalism because in the seal teams especially i would say more so back then but there was like a a professional side and there was an equally strong sort of hell's angel sort of sort of spirit that you could jump into and and like great guys on both sides um i think that mass chief faculty for me sort of leaned me and kind of my group at least put some level of hey you got to be squared away you got to present yourself you you know this is the military where in the navy like all those little things which you go to some other some other deeper darker aos and the seal teams there was none of that going on and and i i just appreciated that fact and it like i said it had a it had a good influence on me because when you're young and impressionable i just wanted to be a good seal right and if you told me a good seal was having a good haircut and wearing a square away uniform okay that's what i'm doing luckily people like that were around yeah and and i think he nailed it choco i mean that was consistent with what i saw with faculty throughout his career and as we talked before the podcast you know mike and i became very good friends we were neighbors in chula vista uh and he and daniel stewart stayed very very good friends so mike was actually our proctor again for your listener so the proctor was the the senior enlisted that really was in charge of your phase so he was our first phase proctor and and that was really important because it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the three phases but faculty as the proctor and daniel stewart as the class leader uh you know they they worked well together and faculty would you know give us little tips on you know how to get through certain evolutions and events kind of passed through daniel stewart so that team that teamwork between faculty as a proctor and steward as the as a class leader was helpful but mike was always professional i mean he was prof and as you know the instructors love to harass you uh and you know some of them harass you with a little bit of a mean spirit some of them have uh a good sense of humor and of course faculty could always do it with a little bit of a twinkle in his eye uh i mean let's not say you you weren't suffering the pain you were suffering the pain uh but there was always a little smile a little bit of a twinkle in his eye and you knew that he was gonna you know get you through this evolution even though he was gonna you know harass you to the max yeah the uh the other thing i think i learned well again never really broke it down like this but this sort of professional side versus this kind of hells angel side i think what i what what i learned from faculty was that what we were there to do was was do the do the mission of the country right and if you wanted to do that if that's what you were there there to do to kill bad guys to go out and execute operations which look this is the 90s when i showed up there was i missed the first gulf war but as far as i could tell if you wanted to do that if you wanted to actually do the missions for the country then you had to be professional right and that was the connection that i kind of made and and and by the way you know the idea of being a a frog man what could what could possibly trump doing being a good operator for being a frogman there's nothing that trumps that it's not any of that other stuff that you can that there's plenty of in the seal teams but there's there's nothing that trumps hey i'm a good i want to be a good operator i want to be able to do my job well i want to go out and execute missions and that professionalism i think is a i mean it was a key component for me and my career and uh something that i think people like master chief faculty embedded in enough people that it it carries on no you know you're exactly right the fact of the matter is uh there was a little bit of the the duality of if you will of the kind of the hell's angels and the professionals but even the hell's angels understood that if you were going to do a complex seal mission boy you better have the highest standards possible you better know your business you better rehearse it to the nth degree you are not going to come in and be cavalier about people's lives or about making sure that we're going to be successful on a mission so i mean again i was fortunate i had a guy named lieutenant john wright and john was a young uh you know probably incident or lieutenant jg in vietnam but when i got to underwater demolition team 11 john kind of took me under his wing and it was all about the professionalism and at first was okay ensign mcraven you need to learn the basics you need to know everything you can find out about demolition about parachuting about weapons you better be able to break apart every single weapon because john wright could do that now you know you you had that expectation if you're one of these senior enlisted guys but his expectation was you can't lead the men under you if you don't know the skill set it equally as well at the end of the day you you never know it quite as good as the enlisted guys do but you want to make sure you've put in the effort and so john instilled in me hey you got to work hard every single day you've got to earn their respect every single day the day you think you don't have to earn their respect that you've become so senior or you've become so entitled then you're the wrong person to be leading and that was instilled to me at a very young age fortunately my faculty and i ended up working together a number of times and later he became my command master chief uh and uh and to your point jocko i mean he was a guy that set the standards high and expected everybody to meet the standards or exceed the standards and and the standards were the standards and i don't care whether you were his friend uh or or somebody he didn't like if you could meet the standards then you were gonna be a good teammate before we jump into udt11 um it sounded like you almost had a damn helo crash at the end of buds we did uh yeah so uh it was the very last day of buds training and this was the the next day we were going to graduate back at the time you know when you finished bud's training that's when you had the big graduation you didn't get your triton then but all the parents would come out so this was the day before the graduation and and the last evolution was helicopter cast and recovery and so the parents that had come out for the graduation the following day all showed up on turner field and turner field as an area here in coronado where the helicopters would land they put some bleachers out there for all the parents to sit in and of course the instructor who at the time was lieutenant moki martin you know makes the parents think that you know here your sons are about to be navy frogmen you know and and this is a this is a really tough evolution it's a dangerous evolution and so he kind of built up the hype a little bit for all the parents when in fact as you know helicopter cast and recovery is a pretty straightforward operation so myself and dale stewart actually were the first two sticks so we board the uh the 46 the navy 46 and and so we go out picked up off turner field we fly out over the bay and the idea is you know they drop each stick off and they stick i think we had seven or eight guys on the stick and so daniel is the first stick out and i'm the first guy in the second stick so i get dropped off while the helo comes back around picks up daniel's guys picks up me i'm the first guy in the stick and as i get into the helicopter i sit down in the on the bench seat and i'm thinking yeah this doesn't look quite right i'm up to my waist in water and i'm thinking i don't think the helo is supposed to be doing of course as i look in the cockpit here are the pilots there are fighting the helo the uh the crew chief we had actually landed we lost power in one of the engines so the helicopter had settled hard into the water and one of the guys who was about to be picked up through the hell hole gets landed on and so now the crew chief he's running back trying to make sure this guy didn't get knocked out uh but now as the helicopter is slowly starting to sink we were following instructions and back then the instructions were okay gentlemen if a helicopter lands in the water everybody stays seated the helicopter will sink it will roll over and you just swim out after that of course we're not smart enough to realize that's a really bad idea but but you know it was about 30 feet deep where we were doing this so we thought ah no big deal if it sinks down we'll we'll swim out well uh so finally as the helo is kind of slowly starting to sink the crew chief realizes got to get the weight out of the back well we're looking at the side door and of course that that blade is like almost clipping the water and it's like how about this but he's giving us the ghost sign so we all dive out well the pilot's got no control of helicopter so now as we're all out trying to swim towards the safety boat who is always going i don't think i'm coming the helo starts to kind of follow us and finally uh you know we all get out of get out of harm's way and the helo i mean the pilot uh good pilot i mean after about an hour and a half he manages literally to drive the helo off to point golf you know that point over there and beach the helo so he saves the helicopter and nobody got injured but the funny part about it was as i got told later so the parents are all in the bleachers and and lieutenant martin is telling this story about you know you know helicopter casually says and then all of a sudden all the parents got up they ran past me what's going on and of course the helicopter landed in the water and i remember faculty as we we got back to the uh got back to the beach he said something to the effect of boy i hope this isn't an indication of how the rest of your career is going to go and of course it was an indication of how the rest of the career would go that's uh that's good times yeah um so now you go to udt11 and uh check into udt11 and look like i said i didn't want to read i don't want to read a ton of stuff from the books today because you did this stuff on audiobook but you captured the check-in process at a sealed team and this was a udt team which later became seal teams but i just i just had to go this is this is going to the book the hero code to your latest book and this is what it like checking into a team so you're the new guy one of my officers remarked yes sir i responded it's my first day in the teams first day in the teams well you're gonna love it here he said the guys will welcome you with open arms the old vietnam vets are really nice they love officers particularly new officers they'll treat you really well great i'm looking forward to it so there we go out of the gate it's uh you can see where this is going a sly grin came across the officer's face dressed in khaki swim trunks blue and gold t-shirts jungle boots we headed out to of the building and on the grinder after a short daily briefing from the executive officer we broke ranks and formed up into a circle the pt circle and then it began so ensign and you are an ensign at this time that's the lowest officer rank in the navy so ensign i understand you went to texas a m no chief the university of texas not texas a m so you couldn't get into a real school huh before i could answer someone else offered a response he's from texas there aren't any real schools in texas ah so you weren't smart enough to get into the academy we frogmen expect our officers to be smart what did you major in i hesitated journalism chief journalism you're a damn reporter hey exo we don't need no damn reporter in our ranks the executive officer smiled but said nothing what seal training class were you in a man at the far end of the circle shouted class 95 i yelled back you got to be kidding me an older officer said spitting out a lot of tobacco i heard class 95 was the easiest class ever they had a summer hell week over the next 15 minutes all 50 men in the circle had something to say about my shortfalls in between repetitions of push-ups flutter kicks sit-ups and burpees they questioned my parentage my athleticism my intellect my state of origin the quality of my seal training class and of course my love life you got a girlfriend one of the salty old chiefs asked i do chief what's she look like oh she's pretty very petite brown hair hazel eyes about five foot four the chief smiled do you think she'd like a swarthy italian with a mustache he said twirling the ends of his long handlebar i saw an opening no chief i said looking around the grinder she likes men that are taller than she is the circle went quiet the chief who stood no longer than five no taller than five foot four got up off the grinder and walked up to where i was standing inches from my face he sneered at me and said are you calling me short the men in the circle were shaking their heads one mouth don't go there anson another said softly he's very sensitive about his height well chief you are looking up at me i told him everyone in the grinder stopped exercising and turned my way what do you think that's funny ensign do you think insulting a chief petty officer in the united states navy is funny i am very very sensitive about my height and that hurts me i paused wondering whether i had taken my my my joke too far suddenly the chief burst out laughing and the rest of the men in the circle joined in welcome to the teams ensign when the physical training ended the chief and all the other members of the team came by to shake my hand and welcomed me to udt 11. i had passed the test i had a sense of humor good way to check in you've been there before you know the deal [Music] so i was uh i did the semen admiral program and i got went straight from officer from seal team one as an e5 went to officer kennedy school for 13 weeks went to seal team two as an ensign so i hadn't been to college it was a ridiculous program i feel like maybe i can get arrested for it or something because it was such a good deal well and then i did two deployments at seal team two and then i went to college so i was an officer in college but it was the i've been in the seal teams my whole adult life and so now i'm going to college and i'm coming home and you know i don't have anyone to banter with so it ends up being my wife and and after that could be dangerous yeah after about two or three months finally you know i said something about the meal she had made or what she had prepared or something like this and she looked at me and she goes hey i'm not a team guy and i was yeah and i i kind of chuckled but then i i realized she was 100 right you know the the the the lifestyle of being in a platoon where it's just constant attacks from everybody um it's it's it's a it's an environment that you get so used to you don't realize that that's just the way it is and and that may actually be the best part as you know about being in the teams uh and and for your listeners i mean every morning back then kind of pre-911 we had the pt circle and come hell or high water you know you were gonna break out and you were gonna do pt for probably an hour hour and a half and the pt circle was where boy if if you were not on your toes you know somebody was gonna rip you apart and and back to the point it was this sense of humor this this camaraderie that was built in the pt circle and in the locker room that then of course transitioned on to the to the missions and you would see guys in in you know very tough situations all of a sudden crack a joke and that is i think the power of being in the team sometimes is you build this uh this this level of teamwork with your uh with your swim buddies that is hard to replicate anywhere and and if there's one thing i miss um after retiring many things but that's the thing i miss the most is being around team guys being harassed harassing people back and realizing that hey no harm no foul you know just let's move on it's fun when you checked into udt11 what what did you think you were going to be doing so just as a little backdrop when i checked into seal team one in 1991 i thought i was going to nom like in my mind i was like hey look man i know we don't know about this stuff there's top secret stuff going on i know i'm probably going to nom or whatever cambodia i'm going to be doing sog missions that's what i was thinking because i was really young and really dumb when you checked into udt11 what was it 1977. early 1978. what did you think you were going to be doing same thing i mean i'm not you're good well back then of course we thought we were going to go back and rescue pows out of vietnam yeah or this was the cold war kind of the height of the cold war so we thought we were going to be doing missions against the soviet union and i don't think i mentioned the story in any of the books but when i when i first got there i was out doing a dive training dive one day and and one of the chiefs comes grabs me and says hey sir uh canadian officer wants to see you i mean i'm an insulin commanding officer i mean he's an important guy and i thought all right this is it i mean the commanding officer i mean it's something important so i i get up and he and i said well let me go back and change you guys not ceo said just come come as you are i was in my shorty wetsuit so i go up go and wait outside the ceo's office and the ceo's assistant says yeah going to see him and i had met the ceo but yeah i mean i was in ensign he was the commanding officer so i come in and he says vincent mcraven you know good to see you again yes sir he says uh i've been hearing good things about you and i'm thinking yeah okay he says he says look we got something important coming up and uh and yeah i need one of my best instances to kind of run this thing i'm like yeah this is this is what i've been waiting for you know there it comes and he says you know the fourth of july is coming up and we need somebody to be the frog float officer and of course i'm like i'm sorry sir what yeah you know every fourth of july we build a frog float to be in the coronado parade and i want you to be the frog float officer and i was like you have got to be kidding me but i remember when i came out i kind of had this kind of hound dog look on my face and there was a i don't remember hershel davis yeah so hershel davis was the command master over at seal team over underwater demolition team 12 and he sees me walking die and i'm a little han you know like shoulders down he goes what's wrong hansen that's uh masturbating i sit up and then i thought it was going to do some important i'm going to be the frog float officer and herschel said something he said well then be the best damn frog float officer you can be and i thought no that's it right there whatever it is whether you're the frog float officer or plant in the eelgrass which was another one we had to do do it the best you can i mean eelgrass plant eelgrass so the reason coronado san diego bay looks as good as it does and as clean as it is is because back in 1978 udt12 udt11 and seal team one we all got out and planted eelgrass underwater so that eelgrass would grow to bring in the little fishies to clean out san diego bay and it worked but that was hours of diving at three feet under the water planting eelgrass yeah i never i never did do those missions to uh to get the soviet union or to go back into vietnam but i was on my first deployment so i get to we deployed to guam and we show up there and they immediately have us do uh like a double duck insert we go in we hit a target live fire we come over the beach hit a target live fire we get done we're all you know pretty it's pretty cool and then we go out the next day we clean our weapons we go out they say hey you know get your weapons sighted in okay you know and of course same thing in my mind i'm thinking we're getting ready for the big mish so we go out we sight in our weapons clean them set them in get back and then a couple days goes by and they give us pagers too right which back in the day you know you might as well just you know it was it was just as as crazy as it gets so i got the pager well a couple days go by three days four days go by and we're not getting the big recall you know i don't know if they're trying to negotiate with whoever the terrorists were that were needed to die or whatever the case was but also there was good waves so i said you know what i told my told my roommate like a couple of us are gonna go surfing so we went down the spanish steps and we were surfing and all of a sudden i'm looking up on the cliffs and there's the guy that we told is up there waving his arms frantically and holy [ __ ] right we're getting recalled this is it so run in run up the spanish steps grab you know hey what's going on we got recalled shows me his pager he's got the 911 page damn it's on we get back we get down to the platoon space and uh you know the freaking senior chief comes in and he says uh hey you guys you you didn't clean up your brass on the range after you set in your weapons you guys got to go clean up your best so that was when i realized it maybe wasn't gonna quite i wasn't going to nom after all um how long were you how long did you udt 11 then uh two years and did you did you do a platoon there were you like an assistant platoon i was an assistant platoon commander uh dave tash lieutenant dave tash was the platoon commander i was in an sdv platoon so you know when i first got there of course thinking i was going to do real frogman stuff and being a regular underwater demolition team platoon which was as you know this was about kind of clearing beaches and that sort of thing and then i find out there are these things called back then swimmer delivery vehicles now seal delivery vehicles and uh and at first i was uh i wasn't happy about being assigned to an sdv platoon turned out to be one of the one of the best platoons i was ever in it was just it was real frogman stuff because we were doing you know six hour dives and our so for again the listener and sdv is a you know think about a manned torpedo with a bit bit of a cowling on it so you had a uh we started off what was called the mark seven so you had a pilot in the front and a navigator in the back and you could squeeze two more guys in if you had to and you could put some demolition in there and then and then they would launch off the bigger submarines and then later we got the mark 8 which was a bigger uh steel delivery vehicle but it was all about diving i mean you spent you know four days a week uh underwater yeah and an important thing to note about this when you say mini submarine there's a key component that is not what you're thinking if you're listening this and that is it's it's a wet submersible so you're not in this thing dry you're diving while you're in a you're basically on a motorcycle underwater underwater yeah so uh so i was one of the primary pilots and uh and i i loved driving the sdv and of course uh you know as i'm back here in coronado california and i had a chance to go back i mean you relived those days where you were going under the bridge and back then you had what was called an obstacle avoidance sonar and the oas as we referred to it yeah the underwater obstacles were not real clear you really had to have a good eye to be able to read the obstacle void and sonar so the navigator would read the oas and it was just kind of green glow and you'd have to pick out the pylons and the and the ships coming at you underwater in this green glow they've gotten much better today but back then the technology just wasn't very good so we tended to run into things every once in a while you know ships the coronado bay bridge you know and then you just it was fiberglass so you bring it back in and the master chief who was our fiberglass guru would you give you that look like i can't believe you ran into something again and he'd fix up the fiberglass and get back in the water did you go on a deployment i did yeah did a first west back so i went over to subic bay that's where naval special warfare unit 1 was in subic bay at the time and the uss gray back which was our special operations submarine so the grayback had these two big chambers on it that used to launch regulus missiles and they had converted these chambers uh to be able to launch the steel delivery vehicles so we went out there and again spent a lot of time underway on board the uss greyback conducting training operations once again thinking we were going to go you know run against vladivostok or something like that so there was always uh and you remember the time you know when when you were training one of the things that always motivated you was this could become a real world mission sometime you know if you ever got to the point where you were training and you didn't think that you were going to be able to take that training and apply it in wartime then i think it demotivated you but the fact matter is every time we went out on a training app there was always this idea that oh we're going against the soviets or you know we're going to go back in vietnam and get the pows that might still be there or we're going to go do some you know some of the nation's bidding somewhere and that always pushed you to do absolutely your very best on every single training mission no matter how hard it was even though as a training op you wanted to push it to the limits because you wanted to be ready for the real world up yeah and there was also this i don't know if it's a specter but this belief that this real world mission whatever it was going to be since it was a little bit unknown you you didn't you didn't know it you didn't know what it was going to be so it was always like i need to prepare even more even more because we just don't even know how crazy it's going to be right then how long so so you did one deployment to this to subic bay and then you got done with that and then you got did you get stationed at super bay right now yeah so i had my first set of orders to the naval post graduate school and i ended up having five sets of orders of which i didn't execute the first forum because i got pulled out to go do something else but yeah as soon as i got back i guess i had made an impression a good impression on the commanding officer out there in subic so i got back thinking i was going to go to a wonderful tour in monterey california and as soon as i got back the commanding officer says hey good news the commanding officer of naval special warfare unit 1 has asked for you by name and you get to go to the philippines for two years and i thought this is going to be tough and once again it turned out to be an absolutely fabulous tour my wife and i went out there mar my first child was all of a couple of months old at that time and uh you know we worked hard in the philippines supporting the platoons that would deploy over so back then unit one in the philippines the platoons from san diego would deploy out there that was kind of our home base and then they would go from there to other places but unit one had the responsibility of supporting them so i got there i started off as the intelligence officer and then since he kind of became the utility infielder the training officer and a lot of other things um but it was a great group of guys out there good mission and uh and life in the philippines back then was a was a good time you relay one of these training operations in in the book c stories that i would say left a mark on you you you were basically running a training mission you had a marine colonel that was playing the role of a hostage so he was being held out in a jungle camp somewhere and he's out there for a few days and then you know the seal team the seal platoon gets the tasking to go out and rescue this guy and it well it doesn't go well you know they get compromised and it it sort of falls on its face but the the marine colonel um you know colonel browse is that how you say his name colonel browse he he was like hey listen we already we already did this much let's continue to execute the rest of the plan even though it wasn't great let's just continue doing it so they to finish the exercise they had to move the kernel to an extraction point where he was going to get picked up by uh by c-130s and then the c-130s were gonna take him on a low-level flight and and you know you're in what are you lieutenant jg at this point joj right you've had this this colonel out in the field for three four days and you say hey sir you know you don't we can get you back to base and he's like no let's just get it done let's let's do the let's do the whole thing and a little more time goes by and you say hey sir you know you don't really need to get in this plane it's not going to be any training value for you and he says no you know we'll we'll just do it it's what a good leader does like they don't just you know bust out when when things are going to get boring um but then there's another delay the c-130s that are supposed to pick them up are they they're late they're delayed and finally delayed multiple times and and finally you say you know hey sir like we don't know when this is going to happen why don't you just you know you and i will get out of here you can go and of course he's a colonel he's got stuff to do he's got work to do so you he knows that too so finally he says look you know what you're right i got to get back to work and so he doesn't get on the c-130 you don't get on the c-130 um c-130 takes off with with um a bunch of americans australians new zealand some filipinos on there and i'm just going to go to the book here browse that's the colonel brows and i returned to a waiting jeep i shook his hand thanked him for helping out with the exercise and watched a young petty officer escort him back to subic exhausted i jumped in another jeep and drove home it had been a long couple of days half an hour later aboard the mc-130 call signed stray 59 the pilot checked his instruments like the rest of us the preceding days for him and his crew had been long and tiring adjusting his night vision goggles he could see the water just a few a few feet below him the water was closer than expected too close to recover the tip of the left wing caught the top of a small wave and in an instant the plane tumbled forward exploding in a fuel-injected ball of flame as it violently ripped apart from the impact of the aircraft and the sea of the 24 men aboard eight crew members and 16 passengers from the united states australia new zealand and the philippines all but one air force first lieutenant jeffrey a bloem died in the crash life in the seal teams always seems to revolve around fate or destiny or the hand of god why do some men live and others die why were some men saved that day did god have a different plan for us what about the crew and passengers of stray 59 surely their families would have wanted them longer in their lives they were all brave and honorable men all worthy of a full and prosperous life i think about them often 20 years later as i rose to the rank of admiral in command and combat in iraq and afghanistan became a daily activity i thought a lot about stray 59 the role of the mc-130s and their sister aircraft the ac-130s became more and more important to our special operations missions with every plan i reviewed and every plan i approved i asked myself silently whether the risk to the crew and the aircraft was worth the reward i can only hope that the sacrifice of the men aboard stray 59 saved lives lives of men and women who have no idea that their destiny rested with a plane that took off from qb airfield in 1981 and never return may god rest at their souls real world missions and regular missions in the military there's always some level of risk yeah um and as you well know uh there are times when you go left instead or right and it makes a difference between life and death you make one decision and it changes the lives of you know dozens of men and women and and this is the nature of life in the teams and i think back over those 37 years and and i've written about a few of them in the book but there were more of them and and you've been there where all of a sudden you know you have this near-death experience you know the parachute doesn't work uh you know you almost uh get blown up by one of your colleagues a hundred things but it doesn't happen you know you managed to get through it uh or it happens and and it's over and you've survived and you go and you don't spend a lot of time thinking about you're like okay well uh the reserve opened that's good uh or the guy fired an inch from me instead of hit me that's good um and that's that becomes almost a daily weekly monthly occurrence and you just learn to compartmentalize you learn to live with it but there was something about stray 59 it was obviously the magnitude of the crash and and just the fact that as you read it so beautifully there you know i had asked the colonel three times because again he was an important guy he was in charge of the office of the provost and and he was a senior marine there at subic a great guy and and i had kind of uh encouraged him to be this uh this hostage and so in the course of the the day which was relationship building which was didn't go so well but we were actually on the ramp of the c-130 as we were getting ready the third time and i knew you know you've been on these flights you know the the c-130 you know the low-level terrain following is i mean it's it's a vomit rocket i mean you're just up and down and uh and some guys don't handle it very well um and i thought we're gonna do that for three and a half hours does he really need to do that and it wasn't until we were actually standing on the ramp when he says yeah okay let's go um and then of course i got the call about an hour or so later we had to remuster in the in the compound there at naval special warfare one didn't know why and of course they were trying to get a head count to find out who was still alive and you have a lot of those in the course of your career and you hope you learn from them and as i pointed out in the book man when i was in a position of command you know from the time i was the commander of seal team 3 or the commodore or certainly my time after 9 11 you're reviewing these missions and particularly with the mc130s and the c and the ac 130s because you know in combat the guy they want to push the envelope it's okay to push the envelope but only if the reward is worth the risk um because you know i wanted to make and it wasn't just the the c-130s i mean i the helicopter pilots i remember at one point in time after not my uh unit but another unit had lost a helo and a couple seals have been on board and they'd uh but but the mission they were running i i thought was a little too high risk i pulled all the warrant officers in that were flying for me and i said we're not going to do that here's the deal if i find out that you take off on a mission that is red i'm going to fire your ass and send you back to the states you ought to start off every mission in the green in other words you ought to have planned it to reduce the risk as much as possible if it's a really important mission maybe i'll let you start off in the amber but we're going to have that conversation but we are not going to start off a mission in the red it ain't worth it if you think the shadow governor of pickup province is worth it is not we'll come back and get them tomorrow and uh and i didn't know how that would be received by the pilots because you know i mean i was uh you know when you when you start losing guys and losing helicopters you know you you really want to make sure you're doing things the right way because you don't want to lose any more men if you don't have to and um and afterwards i had a couple of the old salty you know warrants come up to me and and and they were appreciative of the fact that hey here's the line we are not going to do this now again missions may go in the red i got it but but let's not start off in the red let's not build you know risk into the mission uh and i think a lot of that goes back to stray 59 to realizing that uh your lives are on the line particularly in these uh these aircraft by the aircraft and the helos and everything else we fly around um but the interesting thing so when i when i wrote this i had no idea where colonel brousse was didn't i assumed he had passed away long since and and frankly the last time i saw him was probably a few years after uh probably in the in the mid 80s well i get an email from his son who had read the the book and he says hey sir my father's still alive and and i'd like to send him a copy of this book so uh i reach out to talk to colonel browse he and his wife are i mean he's in his 90s sharp as he can be and uh and he remembered the story and again you're always please you remember the story exactly as i as i presented in in the book and uh but uh but he also remembered the fact that uh his life changed that day and and that had a had a big impact on him as well and he was a combat veteran for all from vietnam vietnam oh yeah yeah heavily decorated um yeah i mean he was a a hard charge and this was this was not an admin marine this was a hell of a combat vet yeah well note if you're out there listening um colonel browse open invite if you want to come on here and talk about your experiences um i'm i'm gonna fast forward a little bit uh going i'm gonna go to the book make your bed again going to july 1983. here we go july 1983 was one of those tough moments as i stood before the commanding officer i thought my career as a navy seal was over i just been relieved of my seal squadron fired for trying to change the way my squadron was organized trained and conducted missions there were some magnificent officers and enlisted men in the organization some of the most professional warriors i'd ever been around however much of the culture was still rooted in the vietnam era and i thought that it was time for a change as i was to find out change is never easy particularly for the person in charge fortunately even though i was fired my commanding officer allowed me to transfer to another seal team but my reputation as a seal officer was severely damaged everywhere i went other officers and enlisted men knew i had failed and every day there were whispers and subtle reminders that maybe i wasn't up to the task of being a seal at that point in my career i had two options quit and move on to civilian life which seemed like the logical choice in the light of my recent officer fitness report or weather the storm and prove to others and myself that i was a good seal officer i chose the latter so here you are wanting to be a good seal and you tried to implement some changes you i guess swam against the stream when you look back at that you know this is this is a a subject that i've talked about a lot because well um there's a book called about face by colonel david hackworth and and you know at the end of the vietnam war he went on a tv program called issues and answers and and said we're gonna lose this war if we don't change the way we're fighting it and he was drummed out of the army in another couple of months and and my debate is always you know he was a golden child in the army at that point and would have absolutely been up for brigade command and division command and who had been in charge of tens of thousands if not more and could have really influenced the way the war was fought but he spoke up and you know that was it made made some enemies and because people you know i work with a lot of businesses and people this happens in business where people they want to speak up they see something that maybe could be done better different and of course there's always a a particular line that i make look if someone's doing something that's illegal immoral or unethical okay we're not doing that we got it but a lot of times and i wrote about this in leadership strategy and tactics i called it conform to influence because when i was in my first seal platoon i was i wanted to be all hardcore and so it was me and i was wearing a rucksack on the old course and wearing a rucksack out on the runs and and i was a new guy and i thought i was being cool and and hard and getting ready for war but my platoon was kind of looking at me like you know who do you think you are you're truly trying to prove hey rambo and i realized oh i need to be a part of this team if i'm going to have influence over them do i want them to train harder yeah i do absolutely but if they don't like me if i'm not part of the team they're not going to listen to anything i say as a matter of fact i'm ostracizing myself so i know this is a it seems like you went through this situation where you know you held up your hand and made a call i'm gonna go in this direction or i think we should go in this direction and didn't work out the other part of this is i always say if you're doing the right things for the right reasons you'll win in the end but it sometimes can take a long time before you you quote win and you might take some tactical losses along the way but if you're doing the right things for the right reasons eventually things should go your way when you reflect on on whatever went down at that command and the way it turned out what did you learn from it yeah i learned a lot from it actually uh and it all i think positively influenced me over the years first i didn't make all the right calls i mean there's no question about it i could have been a better officer uh and you know at the end of the day the commanding officer has the right to decide who he thinks is gonna be you know leading his platoons his squadrons and and i've never really faulted the co for making that decision i realized i could have done things better the command could have done things better but to your point i part of what i learned was i didn't conform i think the way that they had hoped i would conform and part of it was it just wasn't me uh it wasn't a good cultural fit for me at the time um but but i think you nailed it when you said you know there are times if you're going to influence the people that work with you better to do it from inside the wire than outside the wire sort of thing now again back to the it's got to be more illegal and ethical um but but what i also learned was you know you're going to have these rough times uh in the teams or anywhere you go but but that day i went home and i remember thinking and i said i don't know if i got a career left here um and uh how long my wife and i have been married at that point in time you know five six years something like that and uh i came home and i said hey i'm not sure what i should do and she said look you've never quitted anything in your life don't start now and best advice i could have had and of course you've got to weather the storm because fortunately the commanding officer i mean my paper wasn't good but it wasn't bad i mean he didn't crush me in my fitness report i was picked up by another team right after that who the commanding officer kind of gave me a second chance i made the best of that second chance but you know i go to a new team and of course the guys know you know the rep the reputation thing if you don't know in the seal teams and in life but in the seal teams it's like multiplied and intensified your reputation is so uh powerful and when i mean there's guys that make a mistake when they show up as a new guy and 25 years later they retire and their nickname is still based on the fact that they did something stupid as a new guy that everybody knows it that's when you meet them that's their name is whatever dumb thing they did when they were a new guy when they were 18 or 19 years old well and this was you know so there was kind of this whisper campaign when i got to the new team and and you understand that and you realize hey i got to prove them wrong i've got to prove that i'm a good officer and and so fortunately soon after i got to the command i went on a deployment it was a good deployment uh i did well at the command i went on to another command and then you know you begin to rebuild your reputation and frankly never looked back after that um but what it also helped me do was when i got into command um and and all of my command tours thereafter when i saw somebody that made a mistake when i saw somebody that screwed up um you want to find an opportunity if they're a good officer good enlisted to give them that second chance so that they aren't branded with you know a bad reputation you put them in a position to be successful to get over whatever that fault or that failure might have been and i was fortunate to have a an officer named john sandoz who picked me up at seal team four took me under his wing and said hey i remember you from my time at the west coast and and let's get back to work uh and again that uh that kind of quickly got me over the hump and then uh yeah you never look back so you know when you have the opportunity in a leadership position uh to help somebody out to give them that second chance to put them on the path to be better than what they were and you take that opportunity how freaking crazy obsessive were you to do a good job when you got the team for i mean i can't even imagine if i was in that situation i was already crazy on trying to do a good job you know like you must have been just full bore like your wife must have said after another three months she must say maybe you should quit there was a lot of that but you also realized you can't overreact and and i think when i got in there at first i would see things people you know that i thought were sliding me and initially i can't overreact to it because i was overly sensitive to it when it was just team guys being team guys you know back to the pt circle you know you're thinking was it was there something hidden in that we and there wasn't yeah and so you got to kind of get over that and uh and find that balance that goes okay look yeah you're gonna get harassed that you know that's best part of being in the teams enjoy the good-natured harassment uh and don't take it so personal every time and but to your point it probably took me a while to get over that i think i had to get past the deployment uh and then my next job was as the ops officer at uh still delivered vehicle team too and i had a great bunch of guys there and again everything went well and never looked back what did you do for a deployment at team four so i went down to uh south america did a united states and uh had a uh a great platoon and the thing about it was i mean we just you know you kind of lived off the land back then we weren't as sophisticated we didn't kind of have the money so we parachuted into colombia spent uh three weeks in some you know back part of columbia where most of the day we were foraging for food literally so you know we were looking for drinkable water i had to send a couple of guys to go to the market to get food because we didn't back then yes you could have brought sea rats as we refer to them the mres of today um but those were heavy you know those were in big boxes we didn't want to be carrying that around so you know a couple guys would be assigned child duty and while the rest of the platoon went out and and worked with the buso tacticos of the colombians and then we went from there to ecuador to peru to chile to yeah brazil i mean it was a great deployment so you then you did um ops officer sdv team two right and then from you there 1989 you you're the you're the exo at steel team one yeah so from from uh sdv team two i went to pentagon for two and a half years okay um and uh you know every operator goes kicking the screen into an admin job um but this one actually probably set me up for success much more so than i would have thought because you get into the pentagon and this was at a time when again the the seals we worked for the surface warfare guys um and the ship drivers and we worked in what was called oppo three in the pentagon but it was there where all the money that the seals got for beans bullets bodies buildings you name it came through the pentagon so i learned i was a lieutenant made lieutenant commander there i learned how to work the system how to get manpower in a seal team how to get buildings built how to get money for more ammunition none of my contemporaries had that experience so when i left um the pentagon and then went off to be the executive officer at seal team one uh in 1988 um i mean as the xo nobody could keep up because the cia was saying hey can we get some more bodies here yes sir i know how to do that can we get more money to the team yes sir i know how to do that you know and uh and so understanding the resourcing end of it uh you know made you a good staff officer now no seal wants to have that moniker on them you know you're a good staff officer but at the end of the day the good staff officers are what allow the team guys the operators to have the equipment they need and the you know the the money to go do the training and that sort of thing now by that time as the as the 80s and the reagan years and the reagan build-up starts the money started to come but before that uh we in the steel team we were living on a shoestring after vietnam uh i mean you know you uh you would go out to nile in california uh which was our our desert our desert training area was our only training area and uh and i think they they paid you like eight dollars a day uh and and you were like woohoo eight dollars a day that's great uh because a lot of other places you went you went on permissive tdy meaning they didn't didn't pay anything you just went um we always had a lot of ammunition and demolition but not much else what was the billet that you were in up at the pentagon so i was the assistant to the director of what they called op 37 so 37 was the designator for the naval special warfare actually i'm sure we called it naval special warfare back then that didn't come along until a little bit later but yeah there was a seal component in the pentagon that did all the resourcing i know when i came in the military i thought like the whole idea that you had to pay for stuff just didn't even make sense to me i thought everything was just free right hey you need gas you go to the gas thing at the navy base and they'll give you the gas you need didn't even make sense to me that you had to pay for ammo and that human being's like oh you're going to assign people to a seal team it's just they're just people they show up there so that that the the idea that was real foreign to me when people started talking about how much this trip is going to cost i would be like well we're in the military what are you talking about um so that gave you yeah for sure that's some insight you must have had you were like a black belt compared to the rest of these guys running around yeah and nobody wanted to go to the pentagon of course and nor had i wanted to go initially um but again turned out to be a great two and a half years because you you learned the system well and frankly that served me throughout as i became a canadian officer in a commodore uh i understood how to walk the halls of the pentagon and how to leverage uh those resources we needed to get the job done yeah you mentioned so far a bunch of different relationships that you have had and built and i mean they shine throughout everything that you write about it's all about who you're working with i know i've worked with this guy in the past and knew this individual and we spent time together the the relationships that you build but not only in the seal teams but then you start talking about relationships that you have and in the pentagon and who you work with there and who you know it's you can't there's no possible way to to overestimate the amount of roi you get on having good relationships with people and treating them good relationships you're right it's all about relationships and particularly after 9 11 you realized even more so because your relationships were the cia with the national security agency with the national geospatial agency with the army navy air force marine corps with the the service chiefs when i became the socom commander i mean you have to build these relationships with the combatant commanders with you know up and down the chain of command because it's the relationships that are going to allow you to get the mission done and if you have built good relationships if you haven't burned the bridges because you got hacked off about something those relationships really pay dividends in combat i had my uh when i was a task unit commander my two platoon commanders come in to me and we're out we're out at an island and we've got a bunch of paperwork due to the commanding officer you know the serialized inventory and the qualifications of the various guys and all this and they you know the guys come we shouldn't have to do all this paperwork right now this is [ __ ] come on we need we're we're training for war and you know they tried to they try to capitalize on my war-like nature by telling me you know we're training for war and i said hey guys we're gonna do all this paperwork we're getting it turned in perfectly and we're gonna do it before anyone else does because we gotta have a good relationship with the boss and if the boss doesn't think i can get paperwork turned in on time why is he gonna trust me to go out and run operations exactly right um from there you now you go to to exo seal team one who's the who is the ceo when you were there commander tim holden okay phenomenal officer naval academy graduate mit hart a lot like daniel stewart i mean hard as nails um tim would pt everybody under the ground uh just a remarkable officer unfortunately was killed in a bicycle accident several years ago but just a terrific terrific guy and you did one um you did one operation there which was the the recovery of a navy aircraft that had crashed in 1948 yeah it was a p2v so think of the p3 variant back then and uh yeah uh commander holden tim holden had been sent out as you recall this was during the kind of the tanker wars and been sent out to the wynn brown so i was the acting ceo as the executive officer and george bush who had been i think initially the vice president then of course became president had had been petitioned by the families of the the naval aviators that have been killed in this crash the plane had never been found and and they had been asking for uh the navy to put on kind of a full court press try to find the aircraft there had been some speculation where it went down um and this had gone on for years eventually somebody found the remains but because it was in such kind of treacherous condition they they couldn't or found the what they thought was the remains of the airplane but couldn't couldn't get to it so eventually we get the letter you know the the president uh wants us to to go recover the aircraft because it's at about ten thousand feet that's where they thought it was uh and they figured we could do some high altitude diving uh so as the executive officer i get tagged to be the kind of mission commander and it was a uh a unique experience i i took a guy named george parkhill who was uh i think george was probably a chief or singer chief at the time he ran the dive locker when they got the school team one yeah he was the dive master and that's why i picked george and a couple of other great guys to go up there and so we get up to this place called first tofino and then we have to take hilo out to the kind of the middle of nowhere on the outback and the place where we think the plane has crashed is in what i believe to have been kind of an old volcanic uh you know uh area i mean it looks like the inside of a what you think of as a volcano almost like diamond head um and there's a lake in the middle of it uh where the snow is melted off and you could only get into this place like for a month out of the year because it would it would freeze over and so this was i think september time frame so we get on the ground and there's i mean the hilo can't even land so we had to kind of jump off the hilo and kind of get set up um but uh we're looking around and there's clearly no airplane in this in this bowl we're in but there is uh off to the area where the sun doesn't hit so the sun would kind of make its way around but never kind of quite got to this area and as you look there's this kind of the only thing i can think of to describe is like a snow tunnel and it goes up about a thousand plus feet and it is you know i mean it's just a uh an area that's just completely covered with ice and but we're looking around thinking that the plane is probably in the water that's where why we were sent up to get it well the next day after we get in there uh park hill goes over and uh and starts chipping into this uh this kind of ice cave and goes in and i'll be damned there the plane is it's it is hidden under this ice cave and has been there for you know 40 50 years that point in time of course it is because the ice would melt and it would just crush the plane so there's nothing left but you know tiny pieces although actually the 50 cal survived um but so now we have found the remains of the plane and uh and again there were some we eventually bring uh some of the family out that was fit enough to to be there uh we we did manage to find some bone fragments and we buried those at the site but in the in the book i i i tell the story and i said you can believe it or not but it is true and i'm not the only one to have seen it as we are kind of burying that uh the remains of this thing and we i said a little prayer over this uh this cross we put up there and then as i get through saying it all of a sudden one of the guys turns me goes hey sir take a look up there and again if you can imagine we're in this bowl and i think it goes up to about 8 000 feet or something like that and and right above the ridge line i see what looks like a parachute flare i'm thinking is somebody shooting parachute flares uh you know i'm looking around thinking well maybe one of our guys is you know shooting parachute flares and i um nobody's shooting carefully shoot flares and there's one and there's two three four five six seven eight nine and they're kind of hovering up there and looking around thinking what in the world and the guy says uh hey sir how many of those do you see and again it's just this kind of glowing orb and it's just kind of floating up there and there were nine of them and there were nine victims on the plane and and it was up there for 10 or 15 minutes they all kind of hovered up and one by one they just kind of went up so i said look uh you can believe the story or not but i'm not the only one that saw it and i've often thought well if somebody was firing parachute flares please let me know because it was kind of one of those surreal moments uh because you are out in the outback where there is nothing out there um but uh but interestingly enough another kind of story like the like the barney brow story in that um i get a call from uh you know a good uh good friend who you would know jeremy williams and jw says hey sir got an army buddy uh we were just having dinner and i was telling him about your book and uh uh he's gonna call you when he gets to san francisco i said okay so he was flying back to hawaii and i got a call from this guy he says hey sir uh jw was telling me about your story in your book and so i got a copy of it that was my grandfather that died on that crash and oh by the way my grandmother is still alive so i got a hold of the grandmother and it was just a great conversation wonderful lady um and and you re and i i told her i said ma'am i i don't tell you the story i'm telling you in the book is exactly true um you know my my hope is uh you know uh that your husband is in the right place and uh and this and and her husband had been a young petty officer in the navy during world war ii gets out of the navy after world war ii and then missed the navy so much comes back in gets assigned up to whidbey island as a a backender on the this p2v and unfortunately you know crashes in the p2v and like he was 23 years old or something like that and but it was just the connections uh have been interesting i mean the book gets out there and then somebody reads it and then makes a connection you know six degrees removed sort of thing yeah that's uh that whole story is sounds it's almost supernatural there's some other things that you talk about in the book worth reading you you so you get done with that and you do uh is that when you rolled into being a task unit commander right so uh so then this was right before desert storm uh so when i left the xo back then the executive officers a lot of times would go do and be the task unit commander for a deployed you know seal platon on an amphibious ready group so it was uh again this was 1990 uh summer of 1990 and i'm with com fibron 5 and so i go off as an o4 as the task unit commander and no sooner you know we left in june i guess and then saddam invades iraq in august i think so we were already on deployment and we were a full-up amphibious ready group so we became kind of the go-to guys as the rest of the navy was kind of building the rest of the amphibious ready groups but we'd already been through the whole workup so we kind of immediately got tasked to head out to the gulf uh had a chance to interdict do uh some maritime interdiction operations which were a lot of fun considering those were kind of the first of their kind that was the big mish back there that's right the the meal the maritime interdiction operations those were the what i did those in what was it 99 well i guess i did some in the earl in the mid 90s but yeah those were real world i got to lock and load my weapon uh what else did you guys do for on that didn't you guys didn't you guys do some hit some islands or something as well yep so the uh so we went out there uh first time in uh i want to say november this november december and then we didn't know whether or not we were actually going to you know uh come into kuwait so they sent us back uh to submit bay for about three weeks uh not knowing well are we going to you know we're gonna send a large force into kuwait to kick saddam out and uh so that was all still up in the air so they said look you guys are the most experienced go back and wait so i think we spent christmas in subic and then we got the word nope we think this thing's gonna go so they sailed us back out uh i mean we went through the straits of malacca in the in the straits of hormuz about half a dozen times so we get out there into the gulf and um and yeah so first back in the november time frame we did the maritime interdiction operations on some iraqi tankers um and then our job was going to be to prep for the amphibious landing uh and so we in addition to the fibron 5 they brought what then later became the largest amphibious force i think since korea 33 ships uh looking at doing an amphibious landing in i think a place called ashuwaiba in kuwait with the idea that we would land the force and then you know begin to engage with the ground force and then push saddam out of kuwait well um it uh it of course became one of the faints the idea was uh we want to hold down saddam's forces so it kind of became known i think to to the iraqi army that we were going to land a large force at ashuaiba so of course two divisions came set down in kuwait to stop us from from landing well that allowed the ground forces to kind of sweep around and so we didn't do the amphibious lane we did take a couple of islands we took uh falaka island uh which it was actually very interesting again a good lesson for me so falaka uh had been bombed for like a hundred straight days or 1200 iraqi officers our officers enlisted on the falaq island because it was a kind of a key position before you got up into the into the waterway and and navy fighters when they would come back they'd have to dump their bombs so for again i like 90 days or something they were dropping bombs ordinance on flock island flock island was only about two inches above the sea level and it's just flat as it could be so the iraqis at night would you know they dig trenches and they'd hide in the trenches as we're dropping bombs on so finally uh when the time came the iraqis surrendered uh in falaq and we go we go pick up these guys 1200 of them and move them from falaca to the amphibs before we send them back to like saudi arabia and then back to kuwait but interestingly enough with all that bombing i think the bombs only killed about five iraqis so it showed you know we wonder you know how how did the germans withstand the naval bombardment on normandy and how did the japanese survive it well the answer is if you dig deep enough uh even you know a thousand pound bombs unless they land right on your head which apparently what happened uh to a couple of these guys you can survive this stuff but also the iraqis uh it was interesting to see us i was the colonel uh who accepted their surrender uh you know separated the officers from the enlisted but now i'm you know i'm on the island for several hours and i started flying back with some of the iraqis and they were hey man i'm from detroit i i came back to iraq to see my parents actually you know there were a lot of these guys that were american iraqis that had come back and kind of gotten seconded into the into the iraqi army and were like yeah i really didn't want to be here and uh do you have a cigarette by the way i don't that's that's pretty uh awesome experience though for you and i know that i was a rare guy that volunteered to do arg platoons because there was actually missions that happened you know the guys that were the the guys that were in the seal teams that were in somalia a bunch of them came off our platoons and i was like okay if they're if that's where i got to go and so i volunteered for arg platoons but where it really helped me out was that i was working with i was working with the marine corps right and we were you know building relationships with the marine corps but just understanding look when you're in a seal platoon in the 90s you didn't understand anything about the rest of the military it was like hey i got a 16-man platoon we'll take on the world then i learned oh this is a battalion this is how this is going to work this is this is the way we can work together with them this is the support that we can give them so it was very useful and very helpful for me i was very like i was a calm guy so i i made all the comms plan and learned how to how to communicate with all the different forces it was very very helpful for me to to do those i did two arg deployments and learned a lot about the conventional forces which was real lucky um you get done with that and then now you finally get your your time in uh in monterey right yeah finally i think the fifth set of orders i finally got to monterey so i went up there for two years and set up the special operations low intensity conflict the solar curriculum uh and then ended up graduating from that curriculum but also took the time that that's when i had an opportunity to write my thesis on the on the the principles of special operations or the theory of special operations and monterey was a great time because one i'd i've been deployed for 10 months on the amphibious ready group and and frankly been running hard for several years and my wife while i was deployed my wife had a had our third child so i came back we had my oldest boy had been born uh when i was going on my first deployment he was born in a week later i go on a deployment number two some was born in the philippines in jungle general uh literally that's what he called a jungle general and in fact a couple of years ago when i was the socom commander we went back out philippines and i went down to zamboanga my wife got a driver from manila to go back to the subic bay she hadn't been there in 30 some odd years so i'm down in in zamboanga for a couple days i i finally come back up to manila to pick her up and i get into the hotel room and she goes do you know that john was born in a quonset hut i said yeah she goes i mean it was a quonset hut yeah i know i mean that's all we had was a coincidence and so i mean jungle general was a series of quonset huts and uh and so i said number two son was joined i was born there and then we waited quite a while and and finally for our third child we we thought hey we got this all figured out uh my wife got pregnant i'm gonna go on a six-month deployment i'll come back you know i'll have time to you know get ready for the baby to be born and of course my six-month deployment turns into ten months and i come back and and my my daughter's a month old like hey i think that worked out okay but uh worked okay out okay for one of you yeah that's right but then then we did get up to monterey and uh and that was a good time so out there is where you your thesis became a book right and the book is called spec ops case studies in special operations warfare theory and practice i'm going to jump into this a little bit carl von klauskwitz in his book on war noted the defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offense it contributes resisting power the ability to preserve and protect oneself thus the defense generally has a negative aim that of resisting the enemy's will if we are to mount an offensive to impose our will we must develop enough force to overcome the inherent superiority of the enemy's defense cosworth's theory of war states that to quote defeat stronger the stronger form of warfare an army's best weapon is superior numbers in this sense superiority of numbers admittedly is the most important factor in the outcome of an engagement so long as it is not so long as is great enough to counterbalance all other contributing circumstances it thus follows that as many troops as possible should be brought into the engagement at the decisive point so you start off with that which people always ask me i've covered just about every well i've covered a lot of war theory and i never cover close words and one of the reasons i've never covered klaus wits i haven't yet i've covered a little bit but is because i like liddell heart better of course and and so apparently you feel the same way um continue on with your book no soldier would argue the benefit of superior numbers but if they were the most important factor how could 69 german commandos have defeated a belgian force of 650 soldiers protected by the largest most extensive fortress of its time the fort at eben emal which is a special operations paratroopers landing with gliders on this and and as you just said 69 german paratroopers took on this massive belgian force and won how can special operations force that has inferior numbers and the disadvantage of attacking the stronger form of warfare gain superiority over the enemy to understand this paradox is to understand special operations relative superiority relative superiority is a concept crucial to the theory of special operations simply stated relative superiority is a condition that exists when an attacking force generally smaller gains a decisive advantage over a larger or well-defended enemy the value of which the concept of relative superiority lies in its ability to illustrate which positive forces influences the success of a mission and to show how frick the frictions of war affect the achievement of the goal this section will define the three basic properties of relative superiority and describe how those properties are revealed in combat and then you talk you talk about relative superiors achieved at a pivotal moment in the engagement once relative superiority is achieved it must be sustained in order to guarantee victory and if relative superiority is lost it is difficult to regain again and then you go on to explain what you already mentioned the six principles of special operations simplicity security repetitions surprise speed and purpose and the book what this book consists of is is case studies that that describe and show how all these things come into play so that's you made pretty good time of your of your of your session up there in monterey yeah you know it was uh to your point you know you take advantage of the opportunities you get i found studying at the postgraduate school was yeah i'd been an operator for 15 years it was it was great actually now to kind of get an opportunity to to get intellectually engaged and there are some phenomenal faculty and professors up there but when i when i decided to write a thesis um i'd read a lot of class what's and you know klaus kind of talks about the principles of war and you know everybody has these ideas of various principles of war and cosmets point there is look the defense is always going to be stronger than the offense because the defense just has to preserve and protect while the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy so that was the but but then then if that's true then why does soft work and so i went in there initially looking for the principles of special operations so uh i i went and visited all these uh places and talked to all these commandos and and the but but i was visiting i was in in germany meeting with uh lieutenant vitzig who was the the at the time he was the lieutenant that re led the raid on abana mail and colin kilrain who was a young lieutenant at the time who is now a vice admiral uh colin kilrain uh was uh stationed uh up in that conference with the comp swimmers so colin was going to be my my translator and so we linked up and went all over europe interviewing these guys it was great but we get down to talk to lieutenant fitzig and it was hard to find these guys com because again this said there there was some sense that because they had been in the german military was there some nazi overtones et cetera et cetera didn't not the case with lieutenant vitzig because he had gone on to work in the west german army and retired as a colonel but nonetheless i think there was always some concern about you know some of the wartime efforts but finally colin tracks him down so we go to visit him and uh and i'm sitting there for three hours and i have created this list of questions for him and and he's a very stern fellow and and uh and was very cautious early on and so as we're talking and i'm asking these questions colin is translating them and he's answering them short almost bluntly doesn't seem particularly happy that i'm there but he's trying to be gracious and finally about three hours into it i turned to colin i said ask the colonel if he's the one that actually developed the plan for how the demolition was going to be used on the surface of a been a male and in perfect english he says yes i was and we continue on in english for the next hour or so he'd been vetting me he wanted to find out whether or not this was a serious uh but it was the kernel so he says at one point in time i'm i'm kind of talking about this he says so you are trying to develop a theory here and at the time i was not i was just trying to identify principles and i thought huh he says i think you are working on a theory you need to flesh out the theory and so i went back and spent the next year thinking okay how do you take not just the principles but what is the theory of special why do special operations work when they shouldn't work based on kind of cloudswits and a lot of others uh and then again the case studies uh kind of bore out why they work in certain areas and why they don't but the but the study of that uh paid dividends for me after 9 11 because every single time i reviewed a mission and i figured at one point in time that i had i had touched about 10 000 missions over the course of my time as the deputy commander jsok and the jsoc commander where you know you're either commanding them you're overseeing them or you're reviewing them because you know every every concept of operation early on had to come to a general officer so i would review every concept of operation as well and i always ask myself okay we're making this too hard is it is it a simple plan carefully concealed repeatedly rehearsed and executed with surprise speed and purpose and that was that was the essence of this recognizing that the frictions of war chance and uncertainty [ __ ] happens is gonna try to knock your plan off it's this kind of apex that it's on and the only thing that's going to keep it upright is the courage and the boldness and the perseverance of the men that are that are fighting to keep this plan upright and and as i would think through all of these concepts when i'd see it a con up i'd say now we're making this too complicated guys make it make it easier make it simpler i mean i was always trying to get to the simplest approach you couldn't always get there but you wanted to do that because you realized the simpler it was the less chance uh the the less risk you were going to have the less chance that things could go wrong and that was just always you know in the back of my mind then of course the bin laden raid comes along uh and we we adhered to the the thesis the theory as closely as we could i said look we're going to flesh all of this out we're going to keep this plan and we're going to go from point a to point b in a helicopter get on the ground just like we do you know we've done thousands of times before we're not gonna make it complicated we'll get the bad guy we'll put him on a helicopter and take him home that's it oh by the way now we're gonna repeat this thing we're gonna rehearse rehearse rehearse rehearse we're gonna keep it uh confidential so nobody else knows about it and then when the day comes through the mission we will have surprise speed and god knows we had purpose um so you know that was just the way i attended after my time in monterey tended to look at every single mission we did you get done with monterey and then what's what's next so after monterey i went back down to naval special warfare command for about a year waiting to take command and i was i was training officer down there for a year just an admin position holding a holding position if you will until i took command of seal team three is that when you did the project where you're kind of looking at the next generation of warfare so uh in between that was really when i was the chief of staff so i left sale team three and then became the chief of staff at group one uh which uh for your listeners oversees all the seal teams on the on the west coast and that's when we really began to develop this idea of thinking back to le del hart i mean it really was why do we have to do things the way we have always done them because even up till you know 1998 we were still doing the way things the way we had done in vietnam even even the guys on the elite east coast seal teams hadn't developed too much beyond kind of the standard seal platoon size and by the way nobody else gets in the platoon but a platoon guy you got to have gone through buds and it was like what if you're going to tap into some wire or something where is the pencil neck geek guide you're going to bring level sorry we can't bring him along because he doesn't know how to ride in the zodiac put two put two life jackets on him stick him in the zodiac because you're bringing this guy along and then of course admiral olsen had taken over war com when i became the commodore and he'd seen things work on the east coast and so he really wanted to take a look at naval special warfare even more broadly so how do we have sniper elements well back in the day when i came in the sniper was in your platoon you know the radio man was in your platoon everything was inside the platoon organization well then we began to say hey yeah but you're breachers well that that's what one of the guys the platoon was the designated preacher one of the guys in between was the automatic website one of the guy in platoon was a was the sniper well why don't we take guys that do a lot of sniper work and make them the world-class snipers and then world-class preachers that that evolved then all of a sudden 911 hits and it went on steroids before i i jumped over a part when you were ceo of seal team three uh one thing i used to tell guys all the time was if we were doing an off if we're doing a a water op i'd say hey if you're in the water it's a real world op because if you're in the water you can die period and you about died about that i'd steal team three as the as the commanding officer up in was it morro bay bay capsized in a rib yeah that was not a good day except i came out of it live so maybe it was a good day yeah we went up there it was one of the platoon was doing their final exercise before deploying and as you know the commanding officer generally comes up for the ftx the final training exercise uh we'd gone up tomorrow bay myself and the command master chief um and the platoon was still doing some training they were going to do the ftx i think the following day and uh the there had been a storm off the coast so morro bay's got this thing that looks a little bit like the rock of gibraltar kind of right in the middle of morro bay and but what it does is it funnels the waves so the storm surge off the coast had created these huge waves breaking coming into morro bay well there was a place inside morra bay where the seals were training so they were kind of in their zodiacs doing their regular training but i noticed as i was getting out to go with the platoon that i saw two ribs out there they didn't belong to me they belong to the special boat unit but i'm i'm kind of looking thinking wtf what are these guys plan on doing because i'm looking at 20 foot waves breaking here and uh so i'm i'm with one of the seals i said run me out to that that boat out there so they zip me out there and they and i get on the rib and i'm talking to a young lieutenant surface warfare officer i said so what's plan here son and he says uh i said we're gonna we're gonna go out through the waves i said you're gonna go through those ways sir we've got a plan i've got my uh my senior chief he's on the jetty he's timing the waves we're actually not going to go straight out through them we're going to kind of cut around near the jetty just as it's breaking and by the way all my guys are trained in kodiak you know we can do this uh okay well give me a life jacket i'll go with you and of course there are two seals in the back of the boat uh tom rainville and ginopalusa and uh so gino who you may know he's got quite the sense of humor he said hey sir come on let's go and he said uh you know i didn't have a dry suit on the water temperature was in the 50s and then he said yeah if we tip you know you're gonna get awful cold i said well then don't capsize the boat so we're in the back three of us are three seals are kind of in the back of the boat in the bolster seats back there and and you know we're all kind of timing the waves as team guys team to do and frank the waves are getting kind of bigger and bigger and all of a sudden the coxswain guns it whoa and he had straight for the wave and i mean we hit this first wave we go straight up the first wave about 30 knots and i literally am counting like you do when you jump out on a static line i go 1 000 2 000 3 000 4 000 bam we hit in between the the first and the second wave well the the bauman he goes he goes flying off uh he's lost one of the engines now he does the right thing the coxswain swings the boat around because we got no choice now so he guns it to try to beat the second wave well the second wave you know his waves tend to get bigger and bigger second wave is probably 30 some odd feet and and he hits it again and we hit it full speed and we go up in the air and this time i am i literally count to 5 thousand one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand five thousand we hit it's like holy [ __ ] hit the boat cracks guys are thrown out and now all of a sudden the wave of the day comes you know so the boat is facing the scene but now we got no power and that third wave just lifts that boat up and i can remember seeing it as the boats get lifted up and and you know there's water coming over the 33-foot boat and there's another you know eight foot of water coming over the top of the thing and it just bang throws us right on the back well i'm underneath the boat and uh and i'm tangled up in shot line and you know shot line is this kind of very thin nylon line it's wrapped around my neck i've got somebody's weapon is wrapped around me and i am i mean i am completely tangled underneath this rib and uh again much like you know times that you have in the teams most of the times you can you can get your way out of these things and uh and so i'm under the boat and i'm i'm trying to extricate myself from this thing but it's choking me and i'm i'm losing air and i remember thinking to myself so this is a this is how it's going to end well i mean all this time and i'm going to die under this damn boat and i remember saying to myself well i'm never going to see george ann bill john or kelly again my wife and three kids and and as i am struggling again to this day and i actually i use the word in the book miraculously i'm untangled that should never have happened i mean i was so wrapped up in shotline in somebody's sling in the bolster seat things and all of a sudden i'm i'm loose and i shoot to the surface um and uh well now i'm in the second set of waves coming again and i'm thinking oh i'm not going to make this and there's two seals who had seen this uh seen the boat flip over they're in a zodiac in their udt swim trunks uh and they come hauling ass out of nowhere and they're yelling at me skipper skipper and i can hear him and i'm thinking you better get here fast cause i'm not gonna survive this next wave and they come i don't even get in the boat they the guy does a literal u-turn you know slide and turn i grabbed the side of the the sponson there hang on and i can remember the prop is hitting my jungle boots that i've got on yeah and they pulled me out of the wave just before it crashes over the top of me and they had pulled tom rain another group had pulled tom rainville out uh those four guys ended up receiving the navy marine corps life-saving medal uh for saving my ass uh and toms as well but back to the second chances i mean it was once again uh that could have been the end of my career um and and you know there were people that thought highly enough and then they went back i mean they did the investigation everybody we talked through everything and the the teams to their credit when they did the investigation said you know um this is what we expect of our operators the lieutenant who was the the surface warfare officer i mean we expect them to push the envelope you know this is and a lot of times you're going to have these expectations guys going to push the envelope it's not always going to work out well uh so to the credit of you know the admiral and the commodore uh we all from a career standpoint survived it fast forward again about uh i don't know 20 some odd years after the book comes out i get an email and uh and a guy says uh sir you know this is so and so lieutenant jones of course i didn't name the name the young lieutenant uh he said that i won't go into too much details but he said i love the story it's exactly how i remembered it and just wanted to reconnect with you and say thanks for everything and and and he had uh again because he he had been the boat oh i see and you know by by navy regs the boto ic actually is the guy responsible but i the thing that i admired about this young man is so he loses the boat and you know he's got to see i mean one he he does the right thing he makes sure he's got a head count on guys he gets guys out he gets a medevac to the hospital um and he takes immediate charge of the situation uh gets the boat off the bottom does everything right after the disaster and you've seen it before sometimes guys have a disaster like that and they just they're crushed by it and uh and they can't think and they can't operate and they can't take command this young lieutenant did exactly what he was supposed to do i mean sometimes bad things happen uh and and then you gotta kind of you gotta man up and get the job done and he did and and i think the investigation board saw that and gave him another opportunity you're uh you know like i look at your life and i think you know he's you know really had some good luck in his life but also reading your book i think damn because the one of the next stories in your career was you basically got drawn and quartered by your parachutes which i i you had a parachute so you take over the you take over the what's called naval special warfare group one which is the person that's in charge of all the seal teams on the west coast and all their training manning and equipping and and overseeing and giving them guidance and you go out on a parachute jump for whatever reason because that's what we do and you you you about got drawn and quartered from the story it sounds like you about got ripped in half that's about right yeah so this was i mean routine parachute jump and and i'm not a good jumper i'm not a good free faller but you know it's something you got to do so we go out launched out of north island on a c-130 and get up to about 13 000 feet and it's gonna be again a routine jump ramp comes down and it's i mean it's one of these kind of chamber of commerce days here in you know southern california not a cloud in the sky i remember i mean you can see mexico you can see the pacific ocean you see the strand and it's like ah that's a beautiful day and i'm i don't know fourth in the line of march so to speaking so the guys go out and trump master gives me a call i go out behind these guys and and i'm falling flat and stable i'm looking good and there's two guys off to my left and one guy off to my right and i'm watching this guy off to my right and he's starting to kind of drift underneath me and i'm i'm kind of watching but then he stabilized next thing i know the guy to my left is right underneath me and i check my altimeter it's too late it's about 500 feet he pulls his parachute and and in relative terms course i'm moving at about 120 miles an hour and he's stopped uh i can't get out of the way and i hit his parachute and it's kind of like hitting an airbag i would assume and so it dazes me and now i'm spinning out of control as you know what i should have done is gotten stable again uh look check my altimeter pulled my ripcord but you know things being what they were i'm spending i'm dazed i'm like hey i just know i gotta reach for my ripcord or this isn't gonna end well so i reach for my rip cord pull it while i'm in a head down attitude spinning pilot chute comes out wraps around one leg the riser comes out wraps around another leg now i'm completely tangled up in the parachute i remember thinking myself yeah this doesn't look so good so you know you're i'm sitting here trying to get my way out of the parachute or at least get get the damn thing to open well the good news is it opens the bad news is when a parachute opens you know it blossoms so one riser went one way one went the other way and it snapped my pelvis in two uh broke it by about four or five inches fractured my back ripped the muscles out of my stomach that's attached to the the bony part of your pelvis and ripped the muscles out of the legs and i end up about about two miles from the drop zone now i'm always quick to point out like this kind of injury pales in comparison to what we saw in iraq what we saw in afghanistan um and and the lessons you know from the jump were not so much about the accident but it was really more about the fact that uh you know at the time as you pointed out i'm the commodore i mean i'm one of the senior guys on the west coast i've been in in the business for 20 some odd years i'd had a lot of near-death experiences i was pretty savvy i thought i was invincible sort of thing and the next thing you know you know you're in in the er in the hospital and and you're laid up and you realize it takes a whole lot of people to get you back up going again my wife became my nurse because once i got out of the hospital you know you've got to get shots to make sure you don't your blood doesn't clot admiral eric olson made sure i was able to stay in the navy and back then that was touch and go because uh you know you pretty serious accident oh by the way you're a navy seal what good are you gonna do if you can't walk and you can't run and and team guys being team guys they came by gave me the right amount of harassment the right amount of encouragement um and it really did take a lot of people to kind of get me up and going again and and it really was about just this remarkable um you know group of folks that we are you know honored to be part of and and how they took care of me right about time i needed it and of course that was what july 2001 it was yeah so i was i was laid up about and then of course uh 9 11 happens and i'm actually kind of recuperating in my house uh and we we'd wheeled a hospital bed uh into my house there in coronado and naval at the naval base uh when 911 was happening and uh and about a a month or so later i got called to go to the white house um and wayne downing and for our listeners he was a retired four-star general who would run u.s special operations command he got asked by president bush to be in charge of the office of combating terrorism which was had been newly established after 9 11. and downey gets a hold of me and says hey i'd like you to come work for me and he knew i'd been in the accident and of course at that point i mean i can't go back to an operational team as much as i wanted to and i thought well you know this will maybe give me a chance to heal and while i got the white house didn't have any time doing any rehab you know you just went right to work um but i had to park on what was called the ellipse which was outside the white house it was about you know 600 half half a mile maybe into into the white house every day and that became my pt was getting out of the car and going man that's a long way to walk you know but little by little your body heals and get back to work so now you're and this is a he said something that reminded me so i worked for admiral mcguire i was his aide not not at this time but one thing that he had gotten when september 11th happened he was working acquisitions at the pentagon or something like that and i he he told me you know his attitude was okay not i want to go to a team i want to deploy which is what every team guy thinks but he just said you know okay well this is my foxhole right acquisitions i'm gonna get money for the teams that's what i'm gonna do and that was sort of the same attitude that it looked like you had it was like okay this is what i'm gonna do well i'm gonna do it to the best of my ability you you you do talk about um there's there's a hostage situation was it martin and grot yeah yeah martin and gracia barnum well what was interesting and you know get the book it's it's it's fascinating how you put that together but one thing that i found interesting about and it's a good lesson learned for people is it was something that was kind of on the you know on the back burner and people weren't focused on it and here you had two americans that were being held hostage and like i said it was on the back burner and you sort of became a champion for hey we need to do something about this and that had a huge impact and eventually you know a rescue mission was undertaken um unfortunately the husband was was killed but the wife survived and but one person can make a huge difference and and you can be you can be a champion for a cause and have a real impact which is and you know it's not like you were the senior guy there or anything like that but you you grabbed onto this cause you knew it was the right thing to do and let it i thought that was a that's a powerful thing to think about well particularly you know i was in the white house so you're you are close to the uh you know the decision makers on these things and and i realized i did have an opt-in now i'm a navy captain so i'm fairly senior at the time uh but when the barnums had been held hostage for six or seven months before i even arrived there and i was stunned frankly that we the united states it's not that we weren't doing anything but i didn't think we were doing enough and you know having been in that kind of hostage rescue business i knew what was the art of the possible um and so there was a thing called the hostage subcommittee which by virtue of my position i was in charge of it it was an interagency committee but to your point jaco yeah you have an opportunity no matter where you are in the chain of command you can make a difference uh and i was fortunate enough to be able to get in and brief president bush and to you know have the ear of uh dr county rice who was the national security adviser and ambassadors from that perch in the white house uh to be able to try to orchestrate something on behalf of the barnums and uh and so it was uh it was pretty fulfilling to again we were we were sorry we couldn't uh you know get martin rescued but uh i remember i i'd never never met gracia but uh several months after uh after she had been rescued i was just sitting in my cubicle there in the white house and the phone rang and uh and she was on the other end and uh you know thanking me and it's like you don't need to thank me i mean this is you know i'm sorry we couldn't rescue your husband she was just she's a remarkable woman you know just uh her faith sustained her through you know that year and a half in the jungle um but uh but yeah the best thing about working in the white house was almost like the issue with the pentagon and this really did serve me well because two years in the white house now i knew how the white house worked and so when i became a deputy jsoc commander and then the jsoc commander now you know how to get decisions made you know what uh what the interagency process works it looks like you know who all the players are and in fact most of the players a lot of a lot of the players that i had served with on the national security council staff then a couple of years later they're they're somebody else important uh and so you can back to those relationships you can leverage those relationships in a positive fashion um so understanding how the white house worked and also the great relationships i had built served me well uh in a number of my commands when in between being the deputy json commander and leaving the white house is that did you go to soccer europe so you did a tour at soccer was that like your standard two-year tour it was two-year tour uh but i was fortunate at the time i had a great army kernel of work for me named stu braden and stu came to me with this idea that we needed to stand up a nato special operations force well the folks in nato the bureaucrats did not want to do that but stu understood how to make this happen and once again i was fortunate general jim jones was the eucom commander the sack year commander at the time we pitched the uh the plan to him and he supported it and as a result we were able to stand up in 2006 the nato special operations force that today has got 22 24 countries that are part of nato soft and of course they deployed with us overseas in afghanistan and continue to be a great partner um and a lot of that credit goes right back to stu braden and the great work he did from there you do you go to jsoc um you take over as the deputy commander and i think uh you you you throw out um in c stories you give an example which i think is a well it's it's a pretty important story there's a mission going on you're in the uh you're in the talk the tactical operation center and here we go i'm gonna go to the book this is from c stories unbeknownst to me lieutenant colonel bill coltrip that's right the sea squadron commander and colonel jim hickey from 1st brigade 4th infantry division had maneuvered farther up the dirt road from wolverine 1 which was one target to another small house designated wolverine 2. as i watched the isr feed from the west cam and listened to the radios the visual and verbal didn't match up wolverine 1 appeared reasonably quiet but the radio calls from cole trip sounded like they were moving rapidly on a target it sounds like they're on target lee i don't see any movement outside the house i motioned to the jock non-commissioned officer who sat at the end of the long wooden table that made a horseshoe around the isr screen so you're sitting there watching this thing unfold the isrs what's what's the feed that's coming from the aircraft overhead he was also on the headset seeing what i was seeing which was nothing i raised my hands in the universal sign of wtf and he shrugged and called back isr is on the target i don't know where the squadron is sir i hated to call the squadron in the middle of an operation and that's an important point um you know from a from from my perspective you know i was a platoon commander an assault force commander and a platoon and then a task new commander and the fact that you weren't jumping on there hey where are you at what's going on what's going on is is i'd say if you've got a boss you've got at least a 50 chance of a boss that wants to know exactly where you are at all time and it's not fun and it doesn't help and so here you are you say i hated to call the squad in the middle of an operation it's the last thing any tactical guy on the ground wants a call from his boss sitting warm and comfortable in a jock 50 miles away from the action still it was our responsibility to manage the quick reaction force and the medical evacuation if something went wrong on target that was hard to do if you didn't have good situational awareness of the mission and the truth was i was curious as to whether this new lead was panning out so they were tracking a lead somewh somewhat reluctantly i pushed the talk i pushed the talk button and reached out to coltrip bill are you on target yes sir culture responded somewhat excitedly we don't see you on isr there was a pause on coltrip's end sir we are on wolverine2 just down the road from the original target and we have jackpot jackpot jackpot jackpot was the code word meaning they had captured the objective at first i assumed coltrip meant case is that who you were looking for but suddenly it occurred to me that the tone of culture's voice indicated something more significant jackpot do you mean little jackpot or big jackpot big jackpot culture of answered and going um as this goes forward big jackpot was salaam right so these guys had just captured saddam um and i was actually i was in iraq at the time and and so we had found out i think we had found out we found out really quickly one of the guys that we were working on the oga guys we were working out with was one of the early um interrogators on him and come down yeah we got him so as much as i know you were trying to keep it secret there was uh it didn't stay strong stay secret very long i know there's a there's uh before we jump in a little bit about saddam so when you when you were running that earlier i mentioned you were running this project of like looking at the future of warfare and what we could do and i was part of that so i was and there was like five of us and you were basically taking us and sending us to all these uh very cool probably some of the best schools i ever went to i went to lock picking and car stealing and just all these really cool stool uh uh schools to get us prepared to do like you said operations from a totally different perspective and i remember i i sat through your brief a couple times and you would brief you know some senior officers and you'd say hey listen in the sealed teams we do direct action but we have tea lambs now and so do we really need to do direction or are we really going to have to do direct action missions when we've got telams and we've got another thing we do is special reconnaissance well are we really going to do need to do special reconnaissance when we've got satellites and and we've got you know uav capabilities that are coming on board and and you know i remember like i said i was a young guy and thinking okay well i need to i need to transfer to this new format we're not going to do direct action anymore i think the next time i saw you i was in baghdad you came down to camp jenny posey where we were we were i was jocked up literally about to go out on my whatever 50th or whatever direct action mission and and uh i thought it was funny i kind of smiled to myself said well looks like we're still doing it looks like we're still doing it sir um but but this this mission got saddam and then amen you do a it's a very interesting perspective i mean how how how crazy is it to sit here and talk to you you were interacting with saddam when he got captured and you detailed in the book but i mean just some some high level thoughts what was that like deal detailing with this freaking horrible horrible sadistic person yeah it was very interesting because the um you know when we first captured him i mean he was pompous he was arrogant uh when uh when when bill called back when bill culture called back and said hey we got big jackpot good to your point you had asked about case so case was the guy we were the facilitator so we were trying to get the facilitator who we thought was going to lead us to saddam well they had gotten case and then case it had kind of pointed them towards saddam and they opened the spider hole you've seen the picture saddam's in there so they bring saddam back to crit and and i'm i'm down in baghdad and um and so now we had a plan okay what do you do if you get saddam well i had to call general abzade who was the centcom commander i called john mccrystal who was my boss back in tampa and i had to make plans to well we want to we want to verify that saddam so i needed to get dna sent to you know the lab and fbi lab and all that sort of thing but uh but as all this is happening um uh the uh the jtf commander um general rick sanchez i get the word joel sanchez is outside the jock i was like what i mean he was the big guy in the rack time three star at the time and uh so we'll bring him on in so sanchez comes in sits down beside me and says uh bill understand you got to saddam i said hey sir i do not know that yet uh yeah i'm not going to call jackpot until i can see it until we can verify it you know how this goes you know there are a lot of times we had captured guys who we thought had the right name the cunhas were different people were different you call jackpot then you're embarrassed you know 24 hours later when it's not the right guy and he says hey no i mean i i heard through uh you know through oga that that you got him i said well sir he'll be down here in 30 minutes you can see for yourself i think we both just spotted the leak huh well so uh so the uh about 30 minutes later the helo arrives well uh i mean i'm busy making phone calls so i turn to my chief of staff who i call him i think captain lee at his request um and i said hey go over there you've got to come back and and i'm trusting you tell me whether you think it's saddam or not so he and general sanchez go over there and he comes back a few minutes later he goes sir it's saddam and said okay so now i'm calling about and doing my sort of thing well about uh you know half an hour later i i go back over there and uh i remember talking to sanchez it was kind of one of those funny moments so saddam has this big beard and uh and i realized we got to get him cleaned up because we're going to have this kind of press release and everything and frankly it looked like saddam even with a big beard i mean he's got this bulbous nose and everything but i figured well let's get him cleaned up so no iraqis can say it's not saddam so i turned to one of the guys that said okay let's get him shaved and get him cleaned up and then we'll take a picture and then we'll be able to compare the yeah so as i'm saying sanchez turns to me says i don't know bill do we have the authority to shave him i said sir we had the authority to kill him if he was you know if he was trying to get us i think we got the authority to shave we both kind of laughed i really liked rick sanchez he was a good guy um so we so i go off make some more phone calls i come back assuming that what had happened was some ranger or somebody had had gotten the shears and was kind of clean and said why come back saddam's got a pair of scissors in his hand and he's clipping his own beard i'm like no let me have those scissors yeah just yeah pull those away and he's like well i was told to get cleaned up but but the next the next day was the day when you you recall the press conference uh where the ambassador and joel sanchez say we got him well they hadn't seen him yet uh sanchez had seen him but the ambassador hadn't seen him yet so they fly out to uh to our place there in baghdad and go to to see saddam and they brought some of the iraqi leaders with them and again saddam i've you know i've got him now in a jumpsuit and he's sitting on a cot but when they when the iraqi leaders came into the room small room about this size actually i mean they are yelling at him they're spitting at him and he's got this look on his face like boys i'm still in charge here sit down any kind of motions to him you guys just sit down don't you know who i am and i'm looking thinking wow he is he still thinks he's in charge he's about to find out he's no longer in charge you know so uh i didn't really want to bring those guys in because i knew this would happen it would just bolster his ego so after uh after they left i talked to sanchez and dr ambassador i said sir that's it i don't want anybody else visiting him i am responsible for him now uh i mean and called general lab's eight he will tell you i'm responsible for him so here's what i'm telling you nobody else visits him uh we will you know i will take good care of him but i don't want him you know feeling like he's somebody important over the next 30 days i held on to him and in the room i had a an officer and a a security guy and a and a medic or a doctor at all times with him because he was 67 years old he had all sorts of health problems um but it was interesting to watch as as the days and weeks went on and he no longer had his you know palaces and he no longer had his generals he no longer had his handmaidens he really just became a pathetic old man um and uh and every time i'd come in every i'd go check on him every day he'd always stand up to want to talk to me i would say no and i wouldn't talk to him and it made him mad and he would talk to the rangers and the and the doc and i told him i said i don't want anybody saying a word to him um and he would always ask about el jefe yeah yeah el jefe and of course i came in i made sure my stars weren't on my name tag wasn't on but he knew who i was yeah i mean just by yeah so 30 days into it it was time to move him and i was really hoping that by this time you know the insurgency had really had kind of blossomed he didn't know that of course um and i thought well let's see if i can get him to tell the insurgents to stand down so we had a plan uh brought my translator in and of course i knew what his answers would be but i figured i got nothing to lose here so i sat down with him and i said look you know the kind of the war is over here the americans have come in we've and he just kind of nodded and i said but your people are still dying and you know you can do one of two things you can become benito mussolini and be the petty dictator or you can do right by your country now it's not going to end well for you you got to know that but tell them to lay down their arms so so we're not killing any more iraqis and i knew he'd ask me the question that i thought he would ask he said if it was you would you do it and uh and i said look you know if it was for the best part of my country i'd do what it took to save my country and he looks at me goes i don't think so he in arabic but it was true i knew what he meant and then i said to him i said okay you're not going to see me again we're moving you and he was like because we've been taking pretty good care of him and he was like oh this is not a good idea and so then he starts to get a little talkative i said time's done and so that night we undercover darkness we moved him to some military police and they held on to him until the trial but watching his again watching him and his behavior and how it changed when he no longer felt he was in a position of power it was okay i think important to realize you know that that's what you do you know you're booked back on bullies you know at the end of the day you stand up to the bullies and if all they had was the trappings around them they're they're not the kind of people that are going to be able to stand up to you for very long and you know he was a function of the generals that supported him and all of the trappings and when you took that away it was just a a bully a sadistic maniacal uh evil evil just evil pure evil so you you you get saddam and did you think the war was going to be over at that point no because by that point we'd seen the insurgency begin to build uh as you recall you know i got there in october of 03 and it was interesting when i got there the guy i was relieving it was an air force one star who was the deputy at jsoc time um i'm getting there thinking hot dang that you know i finally got to get in uh get in the war and he says hey look i said you know some great there's some great restaurants in downtown baghdad you know if you uh you know you get a break go down there's this place to get some swarm i'm like i'm sorry what he goes oh yeah i said man the war's over and we just got to get saddam but i mean everything's kind of over now i was like damn and then a couple weeks later route irish blows up and uh and as you know route irish never changed after that then we started getting guys ambushed uh and again this was uh the transition period of the war so by time we got saddam in december uh the insurgency was kind of uh you know it was it was moving pretty strong by then so we knew that it wasn't going to be over anytime soon but so i was there too at that time the last op that i did well we did a couple more but the last big op that i did was going after yakubi which was um sodders one of sodor's lieutenants and that that really made things bad really quickly um so you you're the you're the deputy at jsoc and how how are you just doing like a port and starboard in iraq yeah since afghanistan so uh of course at this point in time so this is 2003 for me uh you know we we'd gone into afghanistan uh kicked the taliban out put karzai in and then afghanistan was kind of for a long time there it was the other theater that we didn't have much presence there the only soft presence was a kind of a half a seal squadron at the time uh and and probably some reserve green berets from uh from the 20th and 19th group everybody else was in was in iraq um and so we go to iraq but then uh in late 2003 john labs 8 says hey look we need to we need to pick up the pace in afghanistan a little concerned about the taliban resurgence etc so what we would do is we i would go kind of uh over to theater and in a you know four or five six months sort of pump and and i'd spend a couple of months in iraq and then i go to afghanistan then i'd come back to iraq and go to afghanistan so i would bounce back and forth uh on the plane uh you know fly through iud stop there and then go to afghanistan spent a couple of weeks there kind of managing that pop back to iraq and so it was just kind of back and forth and it was supposed to be generally three months on three months off rarely ended up being that uh when i was a deputy it'd be you know four or five months back for a couple months back out and so we just kind of flip-flop back and forth um and at some point in time joel mcchrystal kind of came over and uh and really began to focus on iraq and then moved me to afghanistan and so myself and the other deputy then kind of began to rotate more and more in afghanistan um but that that took a while when did you take over as uh commander jsoc uh 2008 then did you spend start spending more time in iraq oh yeah so uh yeah i remember at the time uh we had developed the capability um to really be able to kind of command and control remotely at that point time we built up the the jock in in fort bragg to be in a position where the isr was good enough and you could have stayed as the commander you could have stayed in fort bragg you know let the kernels and maybe the one stars kind of run things but you know there's no way that was going to happen i mean you got to be forward if you're going to command um so yeah i mean a week or so after i took command i went out to iraq and then settled down there for six months seven months i don't remember what it was and then periodically i'd bounce over to afghanistan just to kind of keep things moving over there and then in 2009 by this time john petraeus had taken over centcom and uh and he said hey look yeah we we really need to have you the jsoc commander shift your flag to to afghanistan so uh so then i i would say prior to that it was probably three quarters of my time in iraq a quarter in afghanistan 2009 comes it just reversed then i you know three quarters of my time in afghanistan about a quarter of my time in iraq you gotta you gotta section and see stories that um i think i'm not going to say there's a typical mission but i mean there's a little bit of a typical mission it's what you mentioned already you know you do something over and over again repetitively and i thought this was a this one pretty pretty concise little quote typical mission going to the book in a cloud of dust the helos lifted off from an airfield in western iraq and within minutes we're in a tight formation screaming across the desert just 50 feet off the ground two minutes later the next the next call came crossing the border a drone flying high overhead captured captured the scene as the four helos crested a large berm separating iraq from syria it was broad daylight and there was no hiding from view if the syrian air defense detected helos either visually or on radar they would immediately open fire with surface-to-air missiles or anti-aircraft guns the syrians were our allies but not our friends one minute to touchdown from above the two blackhawk gunships took the lead and immediately began to separate one taking the north side of gadia's compound the other the south they would provide gunfire support for the assaulters the view from the drone shifted away from the approaching helos and on to the compound in the large courtyard seven men hearing the noise of the inbound helos began to run excitingly looking for cover grabbing their guns ready to fight on screen roger votel responded watching as the helos came into view barely missing the outside wall the lead helo flared its nose arching upward tail rotor down as it stopped in midair and landed hard on the ground inside the courtyard shots fired shots fired came the familiar refrain the operators poured out of the first helo and immediately were engaged by gadia and his men the next helo was seconds behind executing the same aerial maneuver landing just feet from the first aircraft outside the wall the last two helos set down the soldiers rushing off the aircraft and taking up security positions to ensure that none of gadia's men escaped the assault shots fired shots fired the operators inside the courtyard spread out sweeping forward toward godia the rounds flying both ways there was no way out one by one gadia's men fell and within minutes the fight was over cowering unarmed in the small tent in the middle of the compound were several young children and a woman the drone overhead watched as the operators went from dead man to dead man looking for their target minutes later came the call jackpot i say again jackpot roger votel answered a smile coming across his face this mission had been a long time coming on target the chaos was subsiding the gunfire had stopped but the clock was ticking by now the syrians were aware the americans had crossed the border it was time to go picking up the body of abu ghadiyah the assaulters exited the compound boarded the helos and within three minutes were back in iraq the total time of the mission 17 minutes but you're right typical mission as you well know this was uh at one point in time i think we were doing between 20 and 25 missions a night uh in iraq with the the whole force not not one entity but the entire force um and and they were they all followed pretty much the same sort of method of operation that you either went in by hilo or you went in by ground ground assault and of course the great thing about iraq from a tactical standpoint from a commander's standpoint is you drive to the objective you know if you're in baghdad or mosul or pick a place uh you know you drive 500 feet from the objective the guys get out you know the guys put up blocking positions the assault force comes in breaches the door away they go and yeah i would go out with the guys periodically and we'd hit four or five targets a night you know just not there not there up not there you know and eventually you get the bad guy um and then of course the helo ops we use mainly for getting out into you know ramadi area and a little further out but that particular mission uh abu ghriyah was probably one of the one of the most notorious facilitators and we we just could never get to him and he was the guy that was bringing in all the fighters foreign fighters from outside iraq and he would funnel them in through across the border and uh and into al qaeda in iraq and we called him at the time but he was elusive and finally when we finally got an opportunity to get him um you know i was briefing president bush uh on the the video and um and it was interesting to see you know it was it was great because the president was very decisive uh and i was fortunate in the course of my time as both the commander and the deputy i had both president bush and president obama and i will i will offer as different as they may have been uh from a personality standpoint they were both very decisive when it came to giving you authority to go get go get the bad guys and and this one you know they i remember president bush going around the table with uh uh you know the secretary of defense secretary of state and they all said thumbs up and away we went and again from the so i gave votel hey you you at your timeline you go and he was in iraq at the time and uh next thing i know you know 17 minutes i mean 17 minutes from the time they launched time across the border get the objective and back that was i remember when i when i reported back to the white house they're like i'm sorry what it's done it's done that's right that's done that's building a good reputation for the troops holy mackerel uh in the midst of all this stuff you got going on you get you get hit with the uh the maersk alabama and captain phillips and what's interesting i remember i used to tell these young junior officers and platoon commanders and task unit commanders if you think these operations are just gonna show up on your door and like okay cool then we'll just go execute it every one of them is a is is like a soap opera to try and get it to put together you have to kind of force these operations to happen and and so you've got all that going on and then here comes this um the maersk alabama and it's great you got to read the book there's all these different assets you got people guys moving from different theaters and guys from the states coming out you got air assets you got navy assets chips and logistics for all those pieces this is a this is a massive operation and again i love your tone of voice when you when you read it in the audiobook you keep you keep saying it's a lifeboat like it's almost comical and i just went to the udt seal museum in fort pierce florida where they have the life they've got it there i haven't seen it i'll have to take a look yeah i know it's great and of course we got some connections there so you're not allowed to walk inside but we got to walk inside and check it all out you can see all the bullet holes are there and everything but what i noticed about that um a couple things number one the authority and trust that you had with the guys on the ground which is the mark of a of the leader that you want to work for the one that's not micromanaging the one that trusts the the guys on the ground the general patent said the what do you say the the commander on the ground is always right and that seemed to be your attitude all the time the trust that you had with the guys on the ground and what was phenomenal also as even when that op happened i remember thinking to myself man if that happened in 1994 how much different do you think it would have been a lot different well you know the interesting thing about it and you you characterize it correctly and and the operators don't even understand this and nor do they need to know this but uh i talked about my time working in the white house for two years in the white house so when i became the jsoc commander uh i was in a position to be able to understand how decisions were made in the white house and also in the pentagon and i had a great relationship with the secretary of defense bob gates and emerald mike mullen who was the chairman and of course we'd done a number of things for the white house that point in time but one of the things i used to always do and i think it infuriated some folks in the white house in the pentagon was i would always say let me pre-position the guys you don't have to make the decision you don't have to give me the authority to do the assault but what i don't want to do is for you to give me the authority and then not be in the window to do it so let me go ahead and put the guys off the coast of somalia for whatever we were going to do and then if you decide to go go and finally of course somebody said you do this every time and you know that there is this kind of predisposition that if the guys are already out there why not just let them do it i was like really no i i didn't know that but that was always a little bit of the the game if you will i played in terms of making sure that i wanted the guys always to be in a position uh that if we got the approval to go uh that that they weren't we weren't now having to move and then miss the opportunity because i'd seen it happen before where we waited and waited and the decision was hard and finally people would say okay we're going to give you permission to go and you go i'm sorry man cool it's going to take me three days to get there it's going to take me three days to get there and that's what they didn't understand a lot it's three days by the time not just the guys from the states but you got to move ships down and ships don't move very fast you know um so you know 99 of the time i think the the white house and the and the and the pentagon was was happy that i i pushed them to be in a position but but not always but in the case with the mayor's alabama i mean i get the call uh from the joint staff that this uh this lifeboat's been taken we got a captain in there and and uh you may get called to to do this mission of course i kept thinking it's a lifeboat um but uh but very quickly i mean it happened to be over easter uh and and it's not that things changed much over easter as you know um but i just remember it happened to be that weekend but you know immediately hey i know what to do i'm going to get on the on the video with uh admiral mullen and i'm going to get on the video of the white house and we're going to begin to lay out a plan and i'm going to make sure that the guys on the west coast are ready to move because we got to get boats i've got to get the fleet moving uh interestingly enough for this my one time that i was proud i was a fleet commander for a couple of days because general petraeus chopped the change of operational control chopped the fleet assets to me even though i was actually in afghanistan and of course what people i think have trouble understanding is my situational awareness by the time this is go my situational awareness in afghanistan was almost as good in terms of the bigger picture of the guys who are on the ground because i'm looking at it from the closed circuit tv that the that's on board the ship we've got a drone overhead we've got a lot of these assets so you can kind of see what's happening of course at the end of the day captain scott moore who was the the commander of the seal unit there he's the guy that's running the show on the ground but scott and i are talking you know a couple times a day um but yeah you can't be in a position as the three star to be telling okay look i want the snipers in these positions and i only want the snipers to do that no no you you got to rely on the guys that have been doing this again for years this point in time you know they're going to make the best decision possible that was one of the things that always gave me comfort as a commander was i knew the guys would make as good a decision as i would make i needed to put them in a position to be successful my job was to get them to the point where now they could take action if they needed to and then let them figure out how to take the best action whether that was bin laden raid whether that was the mayor's alabama whether it was a thousand other missions hey you're the commander i'm not going on the op i'm not going to be the guy that's in the line of march i'm not going to be breaching the door i want to put you in a position to be successful i want to make sure you got the right isr i want to make sure you got the right you know cap overhead i want to make sure you got the right artillery i want to make sure you got the right medevac i want to make sure we're monitoring a way that's going to make you successful at the end of the day hey young sergeant young petty officer young captain young lieutenant whoever you happen to be you take you take the tackle into this and and you'll do just fine yeah you'll screw it up every once in a while guess what we all do and when that does we'll take a hard look at why we made the mistake and we'll make the corrections and if somebody screwed it up because they really did something bad we're going to hold you accountable but other than that get out and do the very best you can we weren't always successful and we had some some ops that went south on us um but i wouldn't change anything about the way we had set up the organization to empower the guys you know at that level to make the decisions and take the actions yeah i in i call that uh the iterative decision making process that was one thing that i as i was in charge of things and some kind of an operation would come up or even if it was like a totally tactical thing of what should we do right now i would always make really small decisions really quickly yeah and it made people think i was very decisive because i would make decisions very quickly they wouldn't recognize how small decisions i had made and then i would just adapt and adjust them as needed as we move forward but i like the fact that you use the iterative decision making process taking small steps to actually put some to make it easier for the boss to make a final decision because look we're all ready just all you need to do is pull the trigger the weapon's there the site is on that we're ready to do this just say go and we'll go similar similar one with uh salah ali salah naban am i saying that right right sally nabahan so you talk about you know again these there's relationships and here you had van hooser on the ground who's who's like the the epic seal officer right he was a he was in vietnam as a marine and you know lost his leg due to a parachute accident and it's just a badass right nothing stops pete that's right and and here you are you have so you've got him below you in the chain of command where you've got this awesome trust and then up the chain of command you've got mullen and the chairman of the i mean mullen the admiral mullen the chairman of the church and chief of staff and he trusts you so this is how you you you run this thing as through these relationships yeah and it went fortunately by that time by the time we went to sally nab on so sally nabhan was a guy in somalia but he had been responsible for uh two embassy bombings and he was at one point in time he was like the number one guy on the fbi's uh top ten list and then after 911 happens he kind of falls a little lower down the list but but nobody could find him and again a very elusive guy hiding in somalia and then again our our focus had shifted to iraq and afghanistan well also we get this lead on on nabhan and uh but we didn't know whether or not it was him for certain again we had an oga source who said hey we think this is him uh and if it is him he's going to be in a blue sedan he's going to move up and down the beach um so back to that process again it was okay i'm going gonna put the guys in a position so we moved a couple of small boys a couple of destroyers out there put some little bird helicopters on them uh and set the conditions so that if in fact we had a bead on nabhon then we were in a position to react and uh and to your point about pete van hooser so again interestingly enough you talk about the distributed command so i'm in afghanistan pete is back in on this in the states we are both looking at the same feed so we had a predator overhead a isr platform and now i had briefed this because there had been a lot of concern in the white house that they didn't want to put helos anywhere in somalia because of the blackhawk down incident and no matter how much i tried to convince them that really it would be okay we've we we know how to do this we've been doing this a lot there was still a lot of sensitivity to that and i understood that um but we had developed this kind of special bomb at the time that we could drop from a small airplane but it was experimental to say the least um and so i had been given approval to okay you can bring the helos in but only to confirm that you've killed a bad guy don't want the helos in until the bomb has been dropped and you've gotten the bad guy then bring the helos in get the remains bring it back yes sir got it well um you know not always that simple so as the sedan starts to move and we believe that to be salinabhan we've got i mean it's a long road but there's only a small window of opportunity where that that vehicle is not going to be in a crowded uh area not a little village or something because we didn't obviously want to hit any civilians so the plane gets overhead we're in the window but the plane can't get a bead on the weather comes in nothing's looking right we can't get the targeting right and now i'm i'm losing my target so pete van hoose was on the other end going sir come on you know we're we need to send the helos in and i'm like you know um i was really told kind of not to do that but now my target is getting away and you know you roll the dice and hope that this is the bad guy that you thought it was and so finally i said okay pete you got it and you know the helos went in and of course as soon as the bad guys saw the helos they open up on us and hilos open up on them that obviously doesn't go too well for them these little bird gun ships which you're familiar with uh seals get off uh the helos uh do a quick chord on i mean this was right before they were getting to a little village pull the bodies out and all four of them turned out to be bad guys and sally nabhan was one of them um and and i remember the next day or maybe later that day admiral mullen comes on the video and uh yeah he's very gracious he goes well you know bill congratulations please pass on my uh congratulations to captain van hooser and the guys uh really good job thank you sir and he goes no william and i knew i was in trouble when he called me william he says now william i recall you briefing the president of the united states that you were going to drop a bomb on this guy and there were no hilos were going to come in yes sir uh well you know every once in a while you got to give the commander a little discretion and the admiral kind of smiled and again he said okay william i'll let you get away with it this time and uh all all's well it ends well sort of thing but uh the president never questioned it and i think cabral mullin appreciated the commander's decision yeah and those the amount of leadership capital i made sure that one might have cost you a little bit of leadership capital but the amount of leadership i mean will you just talk about the other op that we discussed there with uh abu ghadiyah you know 17 minutes and and how many as you said thousands of operations were conducted that you know look we all we all know some of them go bad and sideways and that's awful but the i mean the batting average of success was overwhelmingly it's actually incredible when you think about it and and so this this uh this op tempo and this kind of being successful on a regular basis and building that leadership capital and and kind of i mean i guess you in my opinion or the way it looks the final operation that you you cover and see stories is is the first one that i started off with which like i said is i guess it's been 10 years yeah it's been 10 years and and i mean if that's not the most famous u.s special operations mission i'm not sure what is but it's neptune spear um the raid that killed bin laden and i mean you you got to get you know the perspective that you give um the intelligence gathered the preparation the secrecy i mean you got one part where you're talking about i forget who it is you're talking about maybe it's your exo or or your deputy or maybe your ops officer but you're not even telling your ops officer it's complete secrecy about what's going on the professionalism in every department you go through and kind of talk about the decision-making process and the discussion to get to these decision points and the conversations and the relationships between you and admiral mullen and secretary gates and the cia officials and then the president who's who who has to understand and be comfortable with this and the i mean this is a tough this is a freaking hard choice to make yeah um massive amount of risk and some other much lower risk in terms of us troops and i you know like to to say oh yeah yeah of all these options we're going to take the one that puts the us troops in the in the biggest risk um just do an incredible job of of spelling that out in the book the pilots their skills and then of course you know you got the seals on the ground the best guys in the world the best of the best um what a what what what an incredible story well there were so many people that had to had to you know make this happen um and and to your point uh you know great trust uh from you know the president on down but i look back and i'm always quick to point out about this and you can certainly appreciate this you know we were we were honored to be the guys that got bin laden and and i think what the reason we were honored was because we were representing you know the hundreds of thousands of soldiers sailors airmen and marines you know and thousands that were killed in combat and training for combat uh that had died as a result of 9 11. um so yeah this was a i mean this was the brass ring for us but it was also an opportunity to represent everybody that had had sacrificed so much from iraq and afghanistan but on this particular mission you know back to my earlier discussion my job i knew my job was to put the operators in a position where they were going to be successful unfortunately early on uh because uh we referred to it as the bigot list which is a world war ii term that says you know only those people that are authorized to know the intelligence so when i was brought into this in late january it was me and of course the white house is looking for a plan and now fortunately you know i had been in the teams at 34 years or so at that point in time and thousands and thousands of missions and frankly i did go back to my my thesis at the post-graduate school and i figured okay i'll i'll present a shell of a plan to the present um and uh and then we'll take it from there but the plan was gonna be pretty simple we're gonna get on a helicopter we're gonna go from point a to point b we're gonna get the bad guy put him back on the helicopter and come home that's it i had looked at a lot of other alternatives you know could we parachute in uh could we come in by vehicle could we you know it was there other ways to get to the target but every time i looked at that i kind of came back to my thesis which was this idea of the point of vulnerability at what point in time where would you get tripped up so if we parachute in you walk into an lz and the next thing you know there's kids on the lz or there's and now you're still 15 16 kilometers from the target you just ain't gonna make it same thing on if we come in by vehicles what happens if uh you know we get stopped at a checkpoint and everything gets busted uh so i i decided early on that it was just gonna be uh you know hellos from point a to point b um and that's what i bring the president on and and early on it was just me and i had a another captain who was in dc that was kind of covering for me but to your point i couldn't tell anybody i couldn't tell my command sergeant major i couldn't tell my ex so i i mean it was that was it so my executive officer guy named colonel art sellers who was just magnificent throughout this i always say he's kind of the unsung hero early on i had to tell art because in in my world i'm a three star uh admiral and your executive officer is the guy that i mean he's he's kind of like an aide to camp but more so he's the guy to make sure that every paperwork piece of paperwork comes in that you've got to take care of you take care of anything's happened that's happening the exo is orchestrating all this and he becomes your kind of closest buddy along with your ad to cam so as i told art early on i said art something's brewing i don't want you to ask any questions about it uh you just need to do what i tell you and and you know and we'll be fine he was like former ranger sir i got it and uh and art kind of helped me through all this you know we'd move from point a to point b and the staff would call up and go where's the admiral going i would say you just get him there you will worry about where he's going now the interesting thing was i had been diagnosed with cancer um in 2010 and so uh with chronic lymphocytic leukemia so the staff was always a little reluctant to ask me where i was going and when i kept going back and forth to washington dc they assumed i was going to bethesda or walter reed for for treatment i didn't again i didn't want to necessarily play on my cancer diagnosis but i also didn't want to disabuse him that idea because it gave me a little bit of cover for action i could move and the staff would just say he's in washington and people would say what's he doing and they would kind of go uh we don't know but they felt comfortable thinking it was kind of part of my cancer treatment finally you know the president at one point in time said well okay you've briefed me on this can we do it sir i don't know i mean i've got to bring in air planners i got to bring in the seals i got to bring in you know more people uh before i can really tell you whether or not we can do this so the president gave me about three weeks and that's when i brought the guys in to that undisclosed location in uh in north carolina where you read the uh excerpt at the beginning and it was pretty funny because as as you can appreciate you know these guys have just come back from a deployment i'm often asked you know why did you pick the seals over the delta force guys and and they think it was because i was a seal and was like are you kidding me uh you think i would risk this mission based on you know some parochial nature of who i thought was uh going to be wearing a trident or not so there were two commanders i trusted implicitly on the army side and the navy side unfortunately for the army guys they had literally just deployed to afghanistan and the seal squadron had just come back so they were all on leave so that provided my kind of cover for action uh because the team just assumed they were out you know skiing in tahoe or doing something so i called the the squadron commander and i said okay and then of course pete van hooser the co and we move them all down to this undisclosed location and you know we did these kind of sensitive training exercises every once in a while and you can see when they walked into the room they were like you sob you called me off leave with my girlfriend to be you know kind of showcase something to the brass and then all of a sudden when the cia guy said and we're going after bin laden it was like as you read it's like are they serious you know and i see the guys looking at each other like are they serious and then of course after that it all kind of unfolded but but again my job was really to not to push it one of the things i was careful about doing because as we would meet with the president we have a number of options we had a a kind of a massive bombing option can we take out this thing we called ac-1 the abadabad compound one there's a big compound you've probably seen pictures every kind of trapezoid-shaped three-story building a couple of other outer buildings but that was going to take a massive amount of ordinance to level the place did did i hear was it something like 30 yeah i think it was more than i was 50 2000 pound bombs in order to level the place and of course the the cde the collateral damage assessment was going to actually uh hit some of the the outer line houses and and we knew there were women and children on the target so i knew from the get-go the president was one we didn't know it was bin laden uh so the president was not gonna you know kill innocent women and children uh at all then we had a second option which was a more um surgical bombing option to get the pacer as you pointed out the guy that would come out every day around noon and walk around the compound once again even with the surgical bombing option we were probably going to kill a couple of kids and uh and i think the president just i know that was just not what he want to do and oh by the way we weren't going to be sure if we did either one of those bombing options how would we know whether it was bin laden the al qaeda could have said wasn't him unless we had physical evidence it was and of course we weren't going to rely on the pakistanis because we didn't know whether they had been compromised um so it didn't take long i think for the the group uh the president's small team to begin to focus in on the raid and admiral mullen was always supportive of the raid uh and and leon panetta who was director of the cia was always supportive interestingly enough and i've told this story before secretary gates did not support the raid and he didn't support the raid because he had been in the white house during uh desert one when the helicopters crashed and at one point in time after one of the meetings for the president every time the president at the end of the meeting would kind of go around the room okay where are we now and uh and they would say well i'm for it i'm against it and he would turn to secretary gates and say mr president i don't support the raid and so after the briefing was over i came up the secretary i said sir i work for you if you don't support the reading you don't want me to uh to do this just say the word i mean you know that's your call and he said something i thought was just you know again fabulous leadership he said bill said i don't agree with the raid but we've got to give the president every option available and if the raid is an option then i want him to i want you to do the best you can to plan for it prepare for it and give him that option at the end of the day the president will make the decision but just because i don't support it doesn't mean we're not going to put that option in front of the president and again i thought that was very classy of him and the kind of leader that you would hope to have in that chain of command um but i remember the second last meeting we had the president again because we were struggling with determining whether it was bin laden he turned to mike lighter who was the director of the national counter-terrorism center which had been stood up after 9 11. and he asked lyden to kind of red team cia's intelligence to kind of check their homework so uh the next meeting we were at which was a couple weeks later meeting starts end of april meeting starts off and the president turns to the lighter and he says well mike you know what did you find i could tell lighter was a little uncomfortable he goes uh well mr president we we've reviewed ci's intelligence and we think the chance that it's bin laden is anywhere between 60 and 40 and when you said 40 i'm thinking oh well i mean this mission's over who in the hell is going to authorize a bunch of seals to fly 162 miles into pakistan to a compound that is about three miles from their west point three miles from a major infantry battalion you know a mile from a police station and oh by the way the pakistanis have nuclear weapons i mean who would authorize that on a 40 chance that it's been locked so i told the president i said sir you know i've got to head to afghanistan i'm going to command it from there if you decide to go uh great i'll have the boys ready to go if you decide not to go not a problem i got bad guys in afghanistan we'll just kind of get back to work so that was on a wednesday i fly out to afghanistan and got there sometime on friday and i get a call from leon panetta the director cia and he says presidents made the decision to go and i thought wow that is a gutsy decision uh i mean in light of the fact that we just didn't know it was bin laden uh and but this is back to the kind of discussion we've been having all throughout this uh the podcast is the president had seen i think over the time that you know we'd been conducting missions that we were mostly successful he he had faith and confidence in us um in a way that uh you know every commander would hope that their bosses had had confidence in them and we hadn't got them all right i mean again when i was jsoc commander we had a couple of uh notable uh disasters frankly and uh but even at that the president recognized that you know the failures we had um were understandable in light of some of the circumstances around it and things don't always go perfect but he had confidence that we could do this and uh so the next day saturday the president calls me and he says he called to really tell the guys you know good luck and it was interesting because you know man-to-man you can tell you know even though he's the president united states he had this empathy you could tell he understood these guys are about to get on this helicopter and fly into pakistan didn't know whether they would come back because of course we didn't know whether or not was the compound rigged because as you saw in iraq quite a few times you know these guys would rig the entire compounds uh was bin laden going to be wearing a suicide vest you know what what were they going to be facing and so as president united states he understood those risks and and i could tell you when he asked me to pass on you know his best to the guys i mean he seriously meant that he understood the risks they were taking and you know as a commander that means a lot to you and i did take the opportunity to pass that on but then i remember he said uh well bill what do you think i said well mr president i mean if he's there we'll get him if not we'll come home the problem with the if not will come home scenario which i had briefed the president on i said look if the seals get on target and somebody comes out with a gun it is not going to go too well for them and as they begin to sweep through the target which they will and more people come out with guns and you know iraq and afghanistan and pakistan people have guns it's not going to go well and as they go from the first floor to the second floor to the third floor looking for bin laden and if they get to the third floor and the guy we thought was bin laden turns out to be nothing but a tall pakistani this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions i didn't tell the president that but he understood that because we had talked about the fact that i told him early on i told everybody there if the seals get on target somebody's going to die you just need to understand that right now nobody is going to walk away from this unscathed um so understand those risks to the president and the other team so i understood that and uh and again back to the fact that uh he had faith and confidence in us um we kept it secret we kept it simple and then of course the day of the operations the guys executed it exactly as you would hope they would you got a story in i think it's in the hero code uh no actually it's in c stores it's the story about where where you uh get in trouble you get kind of caught by your dad well not caught by your dad but you get caught you you you tried to infiltrate a military what was it a more ammo story an ammo storage thing you you know you think you're james bond or whoever and you infiltrate you got a cap gun on your on your you know a six-shooter cap gun with you and and you you infiltrate a freaking military compound with your buddy and then they chase you out of there they're coming they've got dogs looking for units it's like a serious operation and at some point you drop your pistol you get back and uh you know you get you get away with it get away with it your dad says hey your dad you know next day or whatever it is you know dad says hey there was someone tried to infiltrate you know anything about that and you lied to him yep and it seems like you could tell by the look on his face that he knew that you lied to him you suspected you went to bed that night you pulled down your covers uh to get in bed and there's your there's your gun so he knew um you talk a lot about integrity and you know telling the truth and and i think you know when you're when you're talking about um discussing these things up the chain of command and it's you know i i would you got to tell the truth about what's happening but you develop that kind of trust with your whole chain of command from the secretary of defense to the president so that when you say something they actually believe what you're saying and that might that might seem really uh like like a like a insignificant thing but if you think about what's riding on this operation for america for the world if they don't have that like legitimate pure trust in what you're telling them i i can't imagine i can't imagine making the decision giving the go-ahead to someone that i don't deeply and truly trust a hundred percent yeah you know you asked earlier on about about my dad and i think you know we're we're all kind of products of our experience and i was i was fortunate to be raised by two great parents but uh my mom stressed it a lot um about you know the importance of of truth and honesty and she expected me to grow up to be a certain type of man a man that would open doors for for ladies that would you know take care of women and children i mean she had this this vision of me i was going to be a stand-up guy and honest and true and all those sorts of things and you you always want to uh make your parents proud and this particular day and you're right i was 11 years old and we we tried to get into this ammo storage point near lachlan air force base we got busted and i dropped the cap gun and when i and it was a day or so later my dad was the head of operations so he was the number three guy at lachlan air force base so the security guys had reported to him that and they knew some kids they didn't know who it was but they knew some kids that tried to break in um and and when my dad confronted me as i said in the book it's the first and last time i ever lied to my father um and uh and he never until he died in 2007 he never raised the issue again and the reason i thought that was interesting parodying this because i carried that burden until until he died in 2007. but there was another one i mentioned my time in the pentagon and again we all to your point jacob we all are raised with this idea that it is of course you're going to be honest you know of course you're not going to lie to people and you find you know that as you go through life sometimes that's harder to do than it is to say but when i was in the pentagon i worked for a guy named captain ted grabowski and grabowski vietnam are sealed um was a little quirky uh for a seal didn't look like a seal he was kind of short in stature the spectacle had had more glasses he'd been in a glider accident and he had a little bit of a of a limp and so did not look like you're your typical seal but i found him to be brilliant hard-working incredibly insightful and he knew the pentagon but it was on like day one or the first week i was there at one point in time we're we're talking about our budget uh with a three-star admiral and uh and i thought grabowski we had this opportunity we were going to get a whole bunch of money for our ammunition and our and our seal delivery vehicles and the the admiral questioned grabowski and he said do you really need all of this money i mean can't you take a little slice off the the ammunition do you really need that many sdvs and i thought grabowski's going to stand he's going to say absolutely i need that and much to my surprise he goes you know what admiral you're right uh we can cut our our uh ammunition allowance by this we can reduce the number of sdvs from six to three and i thought what the hell just happened why'd he do that and afterwards i'm talking to him and he says look billy says i've got one rule when you're here in the pentagon he says never lie or misrepresent the truth because if you lie or misrepresent the truth somebody will find out and they will no longer trust you and if they don't trust you you are of no value to me and it was a little bit of this kind of philosophical linkage between it wasn't just about the moral application of being honest there was a practical application as well which is if you are honest if you are trustworthy people will trust you with their money they will trust you with their relationships they will trust you with their lives they will trust you with the big missions and it isn't just about saying well you know i'm just not going to lie sometimes people misrepresent the truth that they embellish things in a way that is you know to their benefit or in a way that will get them the mission i mean i knew on the bin laden raid there was no way i was going to mislead the president of the united states and i hope in my time in the military i didn't mislead anybody at least not not willingly and not there or not intentionally so it is it's it is important not just because we know it's important to be honest but because if you're not honest and you're not trustworthy you can't build those relationships if you can't build the relationships you can't get the job done how many times had you guys or you seen various units get spun up to go get bin laden yeah a lot of times um and that was yeah part of it when i first was approached by admiral mullen in afghanistan he said hey cia's got a lead on bin laden i mean i was respectful to admiral mullen of course but i'm thinking i've seen this picture before i mean we you know we'd had him in the hindu kush we'd had him in tora bora again uh you know we'd had him in pakistan a number of times i mean uh you know he was like trying to find waldo i mean it seemed like bin laden was everywhere i remember one point in time we had a lead on him up in the hindu kush it was something like you know 12 14 000 feet or something like that up in the middle of nowhere and somebody said he's hiding in a cave up there so because the altitude was so high i could only put two guys on the 47. i put an air force sts guy and and one other guy and so the helicopter can barely make it up to altitude and of course something this is just a wild goose chase but they came back and said the the young i think he was a captain or a major comes to brief me and he says i'll say obviously ben lasse says but there were footsteps up there in the snow and i'm like really he said out in the middle of nowhere we we followed these footsteps into this kind of little cave area i'm thinking really yeah of course it was not bin laden it was something but it was so yeah we had a lot of leads like that we had some leads in pakistan that uh i mean i remember seeing uh be a little careful about this but i remember seeing intel uh and i looked at and said well that's him there's there is no question in my mind but it wasn't him because in fact he was in that compound in a badabad for probably five years uh and and never left that compound um so yeah yeah there were a lot of leads out there but this was the only one that panned out what was the timeline from the first time you talked to admiral mullins that he said he had a lead and execute yeah so he he approached me in december of uh of 2010. i didn't i wasn't asked to come back to uh the states until january february of 2011. so uh in in the february time frame i spent a lot of time with cia kind of looking at the intel uh and then i think i had my first meeting with the president sometime in march and then we had a bunch of meetings between march and the end of april and so uh april 30th or somewhere around there is when i left for afghanistan maybe april 29th and then got to afghanistan and then we you know we launched two days later and how what was the timeline for the boys from that meeting from that meeting when they signed the non-disclosures yeah so that was probably uh five weeks four or five weeks so that was so we spent three weeks uh you know briefing up doing all the rehearsals um and then at the end of that three weeks when i went back and met with the president said we can do this uh yeah i think that was towards the end of april so i had general tony thomas who was my number two guy there at jsoc uh i had to stay in in washington and i said okay tony let's let's get the guys from the states let's get it moved out there now so tony along with pete van hooser and of course we had cia and national security agency and national spatial agency and and a whole kind of interagency group that went with us uh but tony's got us set up in this little talk tackle operation center there in the in jbad and zlalalabad and uh so when i came out uh i mean it was uh the guys were set everything was ready to go i ended up rolling it uh about we're gonna we were gonna launch on saturday but there was some from some fog in the uh in the area and the temperatures were a little high at the time uh so i rolled it 24 hours and then and then we pressed forward on sunday um like i said you got to get the book um for the details and all leading up to this but there's one little part i wanted to cover um the missions be actually being executed so you're in this in the in the operation center and here we go inside the jock i was getting updates from van hoosier and thompson the seals were clearing we're still clearing the three-story house and the helos were holding their position outside a badabad i looked up at the clock 15 minutes had passed since the assault began sir the squadron commander is on the radio van hoosier alerted me the voice was unmistakable deep calm in control this is romeo 6 6. he paused and you could hear a small shutter in his voice for god and country geronimo geronimo geronimo the hunt for the most wanted man in the world was over we had gotten bin laden the jock erupted in cheers immediately followed by van hoosier's booming voice shut the [ __ ] up he yelled we still have to get these guys home the jock immediately quieted down van hoosier was right we still had a long way to go i had no sense of relief no internal exhilaration no feeling of victory the mission was not over and when i read that i just thought to myself i mean what a freaking professional uh van hoosier and you could see i mean here it is you know the the ultimate mission capturing the ultimate bad guy or killing the ultimate bad guy and and everyone's all excited and van hooser's just on point just just no deviation it always was freaking outstanding and it's interesting too because you call back and say yep we got we got geronimo we got it done and then you realize wait is he dead or alive well i had to report back to panetta yeah uh i think he'd heard the geronimo and i i just said you know dry and then i thought oh [ __ ] because you know much everybody thinks that this was a kill-only mission it was not we had a plan to capture him if if in fact he gave up and there was he was clearly not a threat and then i realized i don't know whether he's dead or alive so i had to call back down to the squadron commander and say geronimo ekia question mark ekia so there was a few second pause and i think the guys in the white house and they were like i thought he already reported geronimo as i said no he's dead so let's make sure we understand that um i mean like i said you go into what happened after after that it's just a incredible story i mean obviously it's incredible story get the book to check that stuff out uh before before i close out the book see stories there's one one one other little section i wanted to cover it's from a it's from a chapter called the greatest the next greatest generation and this this takes this section takes place in 2007 we mentioned that you were in europe for a time you were in charge of all special operations forces in europe and africa but that means you're actually over in germany most of the time and in this part you're visiting wounded soldiers on their way home from iraq and afghanistan so on the way home from iraq and afghanistan oftentimes the the soldiers the wounded would be would stop in germany and at launch stool and you would go there to visit these wounded guys and um you talk about one of these one of these cases here so you're going in to visit going to the book the doctor nodded and i pushed the door open and entered lying on the bed completely naked was a young soldier not more than 25 years old his body was swollen from the impact of the blast burns covered the upper half of his torso and below his waist he had lost half of one leg and much of the other his face was so badly damaged that his eyes were almost sealed shut and his lips burned clean off life-saving tubes extended from just about every orifice in his body and monitors around the room beeped continuously sir he can't talk but he can hear you and he likes to engage people the doctor said i slowly walked up beside the bed hey partner my name's admiral mcraven i could see him acknowledge my presence you look like [ __ ] he managed to smile and reached out his hand toward the nightstand the doctor grabbed a clipboard and handed it to the soldier he likes to write out his responses the doctor said pulling the attached pen from its holder he scribbled on the notepad you should see the other guy i laughed and he chuckled with me looks like they're taking good care of you is there anything you need once again he grabbed the clipboard and wrote a beer the doctor looked at me and reluctantly shook his head well i'll tell you what when you get back to the states get well and the beer's on me he just nodded i was struggling with what to say i had been in these situations hundreds of times before and all you could do is make small talk normally i knew the soldier or his unit and i had something more significant to offer i walked around to the doctor's side of the bed is he a marine or a soldier i whispered to the doctor sir i don't know i'm just the attending physician i can find out for you though no not necessarily not necessary walking back around to my side of the bed i leaned over to the young man and asked are you a marine or a soldier he seemed agitated by the question he pointed to a tattoo that was etched on his thigh he must have assumed that the tattoo is fully visible but the blast had burned the leg so badly that only a smudged outline appeared i looked closely and could see the image of a big red one the first infantry division you're a soldier i commented he grabbed the clipboard infantry he wrote infantry the toughest occupation in the army i thought the soldiers are always marching always carrying a rucksack always in the line of fire you have to be strong and fit to last in any infantry unit particularly during war as i glanced at the young man's battered body i wondered if he fully understood the degree of his injuries he noticed me assessing his physical condition and suddenly a look of defiance came across his swollen face he rolled in my direction and then wrote slowly in capital letters i will be infantry again so that's um you know like you said it's something that you witnessed hundreds of times and and and one thing that you write in the books and i've heard you talk about it as well is with all these wounded soldiers that you've you know soldiers sailors airmen and marines that you've gone and talked to every single one of them every single one of them has just wanted to get back their unit and get back in the fight yeah and you've been there you know that and it is remarkable to me and i think of the to your point you know hundreds of these guys that i've met never once did i hear anybody complain i mean guys that lost arms and legs and blast victims and they didn't complain it's just amazing to me i i don't know if i tell the story in that book but i've told the story before when i was socom commander i went up to to walter reed and i used to do it periodically same thing when the guys would get back and i know i had um before you jump into that i had one of my guys ryan jobe who uh was shot in the face he was blinded um and i'm talking to him you know he's back he's at i think he's at bethesda and i'm talking to him from ramadi and you know he's begging me to come back and he says you know sir i'll get my pig you know he's a pig gun or he's a 60 gunner he goes sir give me my pig don't worry i might not be able to see him but i can smell him i'll get him and and you know there's just the the attitude and same thing with the first guy that i had that got badly wounded a guy named cowie cowie and cowie was you know we know if he's going to keep his leg but he was shot up bad he's on morphine or whatever he's on and we we've been in ramadi for a very short period of time at this point and i get to the to the to the uh charlie med the field medical area and i roll in there and he's you know he he holds out his hand and and i grab his hand and he like pulls me in close and he just whispers he's you know sir let me stay i'll sweep up just please let me stay don't send me home and and you know here's a guy that's a freaking incredible athlete incredible guy and we don't know if he's going to keep his leg and the only thing he cares about is you know can i stay right yeah and this again it seemed like and it was of course just the soft guys you saw it again and again with all the guys that we encountered but this one particular visit i had up to walter reed i'd come up see some of our kind of soft guys rangers and and others who've been wounded and couple again and of course walter reed was where we sent the frankly the most seriously injured certainly the the blast victims and the uh and the amputees the barn victims generally went to down fort sam but i'm up there visiting a couple of guys and talking to them them and their wives and everything and you know you know how to talk to these guys they're guys that that are our rangers or delta operators or seals and and and that particular day i there were three or four of them there and then afterwards a sergeant major who's escorting me around says hey so there's somebody else i'd like you to meet he's not a soft guy he's with the 25th infantry division and he was in iraq in a vehicle vehicle got hit by an explosively formed projectile he is a quadruple amputee and i said hey absolutely i'd love to go meet him so i go up to the to the second floor of the rehab center there i see the young man standing off to the side and he's kind of leaning up against the rail and of course he's only about yay big because he's got no legs and so i come over to talk to him and i kneel down so i can kind of get eye to eye with him and i know what to say i mean what do you tell a young kid who's lost both his legs all of one arm and most of the other arm and so as i'm i'm trying to make some small talk i mean he obviously saw some in my eyes you know the pity of remorse or something and he turns me he says sir i'm 24 years old i'm going to be just fine i never forgot that i'm 24 years old and i'm gonna be just fine and all he wanted to do was this unit was still in iraq and he said can you get me back to hawaii so i can be there when the 25th infantry division comes back so i think we can manage that and we did and he was able to get there and meet his unit when they came back well outstanding that's um and that's you know again a lot of the book is obviously focuses around special operations and and as you point out as we both know the the the sacrifices absolutely made by the entire the entirety of the the us military um is just it's it's incredible it's incredible and the bravery the bravery doesn't the bravery doesn't stay in one unit it's in all these units and um incredible to see um you end up as the bullfrog in the seal teams which is which means that you at however many maybe you had it for a year or two i'm not sure but that means you had more time in the seal teams than anybody else in the seal teams at that time on active duty right how long did you how long are you the bullfrog for it so bullfog for for three years uh so i i share so i i was made the bullfrog at 34 years into the teams and i shared it with a guy named brian siebenhaller who was probably a captain at the time but brian and i had gone through training together so uh and brian was young enlisted trooper when we went through training then of course he went to i think he made senior chief then with ocs and and has a long career as an officer absolutely fabulous officer great friend i hope to run into him while i'm here uh so brian and i because we had been in the same class we we shared the the bullfrog for a couple years then brian retired and i i i think i ended up flying solo for about the last year of my time as the socom commander but yeah for the last three years um yeah i mean part of this is just longevity you know you just you keep swinging away and uh yeah 37 years but it goes by fast you know i was i had a chance to talk to one of the seal classes yesterday and i said i said let me let me tell you a little story i said you know when i retired in 2014 and i i had a chance to be the chancellor of the university of texas system so 230 000 kids 100 000 employees great great opportunity but i would meet these uh you know these these very uh successful captains of industry um that were billionaires you know and everywhere you went and they were they were great they were actually very very good people i really enjoyed uh the folks that i had a chance to meet but they were all envious of me and all the money in the world could not get them the opportunity to lock out of a submarine or fast rope out of a helo or you know jump out of a plane from 30 000 feet at night on o2 and as successful as they had been they didn't have the experiences they didn't have 37 years of being in the locker room being with the guys getting harassed every day in a good-natured manner and and and being with guys that were sacrificing their families that were sacrificed they didn't have that experience so i told these uh young students going through buds i said guys let me tell you something you still got there in second phase so they still got a long ways to go i said you know you're going to have those days still left in training where you're going to want to quit don't do it don't do it because once you pin that trident on your life changes forever and and you'll have hard days in the teams you're absolutely going to have hard days and i said i was fired i had missions that didn't go well but when you look back over your time in the teams whether you spent four years or 40 years you'll never regret a moment of it because you're going to have friends and stories and adventures that your you know your friends from high school and college will never have had uh and when you're old and gray like i am and you're sitting in your rocking chair and you'll be able to look back on that and say you know what that was a pretty good run i wouldn't trade it for anything the um person that you shared the the bull frog with yup yeah he was my he was my platoon commander there you go you mentioned you know earlier today we were talking and you you mentioned something else about the trident and and who who owns that trident yeah yeah same thing talking to the the guys going through training i said look you know if you get your trident you need to understand it's not your trident it's not joe's trident it's not john's trident it's it's all of our tridents you represent everybody that ever wore a triton and everybody that's ever going to wear a trident so you have a responsibility as a member of this community to wear that trident with honor with dignity every single day and i i also told him another story about you you mentioned the parachute accident and and after my parachute accident about a year year and a half afterwards i'm still in the white house and i go down to naval special warfare group two and the commodore was having a commander's conference so all the officers had kind of assembled there and i'm still i'm barely walking well by now but you know we're gonna do what team guys do we're gonna have pt in the morning we're gonna do a 10 mile run so we kind of break out the pt circle and of course it's push-ups sit-ups all that sort of stuff and i'm i'm struggling to get through the basics because i've got my abs are not back the pelvis is still hurting but i faked my way through the pt now we're gonna go for the run and uh i think we went out to whatever the salt point state park not at some point uh whatever the state park state park yeah yeah but we're gonna do two five mile loops or something like that so we start off on the run and i hang for all about 100 yards and then everybody just leaves me so but hey i'm gonna i'm gonna do what i can so i'm i'm kind of walking jogging trying to finish the run well a few minutes later the guy that's the lead runner you know he comes around on the first loop of the two mile run and he sees me and of course at this time i'm a navy captain i've been in for 20 some odd years and he kind of pulls up beside me and he says uh sir what are you doing i said what do you mean he goes what are you what are you doing i mean you're coming off a bad parachute accident he said you got nothing left to prove and i remember i thought about that for a long time and he was absolutely wrong and i told these young guys i said every single day that you wake up and you wear that trident you've got something to prove and if the time comes that you think you're too senior or too entitled or that you've done it long enough that you don't have anything left to prove you're the wrong guy for the job and you need to leave because i don't care whether you're an ensign or a seaman or a four-star admiral every single day you wake up you got something to prove um and if you don't take that attitude then you're probably not the right person for the job something i wanted to ask you about because you you mentioned it real quick um you know you were talking about hey we had a lot of success and we sat here and you know you and i nodded her head talking about how great you know we had been and the the special operations community and i talked about i talked about this incredible batting average right and all that and and then you know you were saying um things always didn't go well when things went bad you know and i i you know i've i've had things go horribly horribly wrong and um you know it's it's one of those things that really stings what do you have any um advice or any stories where you remember where something went wrong and you had to own it yeah unfortunately probably way too many stories um but the one consistent part of when things go wrong is you got to own it i mean you have to you're the person responsible and what you don't want to do is you don't want to say well look i know i'm in charge but but it was really the you know the young captain of the major or the seal lieutenant commander i mean it's real no no i'm sorry you're the guy in charge you're responsible now that doesn't mean you got to get fired every time but that means that you have got to take ownership of the problem you've got to figure out how to make sure that problem doesn't happen again you have to hold the people accountable if the mistakes they made were were mistakes of laziness or of not being moral legal and ethical then you have to hold them accountable and even when they did everything right and they screw up you still have to hold them accountable doesn't mean you have to fire them but you have to hold them accountable so that everybody understands look we got a standard this is the standard we have to maintain and and if you don't live up to the standard you are going to be held accountable because lives are at risk but the first person you have to hold accountable is yourself um and so you know most the time certainly over in combat when things would go wrong uh i had to go see the four star and say this is on me because you know and again this gets back to the navy mentality as you all know i mean in the navy because the navy has always had this kind of shipboard mentality and for your listeners you know when you are the commanding officer of a ship you are responsible for everything that happens on that ship and when you pull away from the pier the commanding officer is king i mean he is he or she now is responsible for everything that happens and the navy understands that look if you were the commanding officer and your ship runs the ground and you were asleep in your stateroom and the young junior officer who was on the helm or was the the officer of the deck failed to wake you up even though you had told them to wake you up i'm sorry that's still on you because you created an atmosphere of fear or something where that junior officer didn't feel like he had the latitude to wake you up in the middle of a crisis so you see it happen a lot and people say well why would you hold the commanding officer responsible when he left orders for that junior officer to wake him up before things got bad and the point of the navy is of this idea this tradition in the navy that the commanding officer is responsible is because then you didn't train them well then you didn't create the the culture for them to do the right thing something was wrong when you were the commanding officer so frankly throughout my time in the navy and certainly in the special operations community at the end of the day it's about me now you know fortunately you know your bosses know that hey when things go south uh your job is also to correct the problem sometimes the problem is with you i mean i think back on a hostage rescue that we had and i'm always careful about telling the story but we had a hostage rescue that did not go well and the hostage ended up getting killed and uh and unfortunately the guys didn't tell me the truth about the situation but i also looked back on this and realized that some of this was on me because at the time as i mentioned i was kind of bouncing back and forth between iraq and afghanistan and this mission had come up and normally in a hostage rescue situation i mean we treat it you know like it is a no kidding and national mission and we are going to do everything possible but because we were running so many missions sometimes in afghanistan um it's not that the guys didn't take it seriously but we probably didn't follow all the steps that we normally would have taken if this had been a national mission and i think some of that played into why we didn't do the detailed planning that would have helped again would it have changed the outcome i don't know but i remember thinking afterwards uh yet the guys on the ground kind of failed to do what they probably should have done and we held them accountable uh i personally held them accountable but i also kind of had to look myself in the mirror and say hey you know uh at the end of the day maybe you should have provided better oversight and asked harder questions rather than deferring to somebody else to do it so but here's one other thing i would offer to you you know you're going to make mistakes and the one thing i tell folks that are learning to be leaders is particularly in combat you're going to make mistakes but you've got to be ready to make the next tough decision because if you are afraid to make the next tough decision when the last mission went bad then you're not the leader we need you to be particularly in combat again every once in a while i would have a mission that would go south and i knew we could have done things better and i realized now the next mission comes along and you say [ __ ] i need to i don't know should i do this should i not do this and if you start to doubt yourself if you start to question too much if you're afraid to make the the tough decisions then you're putting guys lives at greater risk so yeah again you got to learn from those mistakes you got to do the best you can but as the leader you got to be prepared to make the next tough decision and if you're not for fear of failing again it's time to move on and and i always found that when things went south invariably another opportunity would particularly in combat another opportunity is not far around the corner okay now uh now let's let's uh put our a-game on and you know you talked about when i got fired same thing when a mission goes south and now you know have another opportunity and you double down on everything you want to make sure you are uh you're doing everything you can to be successful and get beyond that bad mission um and that's how people progress but yeah yeah unfortunately um yeah too many times uh that uh the things didn't go well but i'd like to think that the ledger shows we had more successes than we had failures but i do remember one time on a particular target in a country not iraq and afghanistan that i needed permission to take a strike the intelligence said hey i had a matter of minutes before the the bad guy moved off target so without staying too many names i i get to the four star and i said i need permission from the president to take this strike in two minutes i get permission back from president obama to take the strike so i take the strike and it's not the right guy now the good news is it was a bad guy the bad news is it was not the guy i thought it was and and so now the white house comes back and and says um hey um you know the president made this decision and and it you it didn't pan out the way you'd hoped i got it it was a bad guy but you know we were you were getting the president's permission because you said it was this guy so i had so i said yeah mia culpa and let me explain to you how i came to that decision and a long story between you know certain as you know handheld radios don't have the same fidelity et cetera et cetera but it forced me to go back and say okay i just put the chain of command in a difficult position they trusted me and i let them down i let them down because maybe i rushed it too much trying to get a win and and you have to go back and reassess but the last thing you want to do is put your boss in a situation where they trusted you and and you you let them down uh i mean i i had one mission that went south and i remember my boss you know you don't mind getting wire brushed you know when you're so you know wire brush me you know when somebody calls you up and just rips you apart uh you know i got used to that uh i mean combat that happens um but i remember one point in time i had a mission kind of go south and the and the four star when i had him on the phone i was explaining things he goes bill i am really disappointed in you and your men and man yeah that uh that's a knife in the heart sort of thing um and he had a right to be but we cleaned it up got back to business and then i remember a couple years later uh he and i were having lunch and he said uh do you remember that incident oh yes sir i do remember that incident he goes you covered really you recovered very well and uh and you did a great job and then you know again that's that's what you want your bosses to say you know that they appreciate the work you do well at uh the bullfrog for three years and and in what was it uh you actually did the commencement speech at the university of texas before you retired i did yeah um i was about to say you're a you're a shining example of the of the fact that the zero defect uh attitude is wrong right you know you have that that zero defect attitude of hey if if someone fails one time get rid of them or if someone makes a mistake or if they're not perfect get rid of them um with all due respect sir you are an outstanding example of you know someone that someone that's you know but i don't want to say you had plenty of defects along the way but a few mistakes but there certainly are i mean uh just so people understand you know when you get fired from a position and as a naval officer that can be that that often times the end of your career so you can hang on for a couple more years but yeah that could be the end of your career yeah um i mean i was blessed with again great people who gave me a second chance and uh you know as i said earlier i think you know every once while we all need second chances um and again i was fortunate in my career number times i remember we had one one particular mission uh where i went across the border into pakistan it was my first mission actually as a jsoc commander and without going into too much detail bad guys we'd been looking at this target for a long time um and my first mission as the commander and i have i mean i've rolled the dice i've i've always been a bit of a risk taker so we wanted to go get this target so we go in and guys kind of get compromised just as they're coming onto the target gun battle ensues bad guys get killed uh but we wanted to capture them because we knew they had intel and anyway the mission does not go well so i come back and um so now i've got a report back to my boss who was general marty dempsey who was the centcom commander at the time so i called him up and i said hey sir you know here's here's what happened and obviously i'm i'm not too happy about it kind of went through it and he says okay bill okay fine so hang up hang up the phone a few minutes later phone rings there's general dempsey on the phone he says hey bill you sounded a little down so yes sir so you know the mission didn't go as planned he goes it's okay man i mean missions are not always going to go as planned and you know you made all the right decisions but as we all know the enemy gets a vote sometimes he said don't don't let this shake you you know you just keep doing what you're doing and i tell you that my first mission as a jsoc commander and when the centcom commander has your back like general dempsey did and i mean that's when you i said you need people up up the chain of command that believe in you even when things don't go well and i always hope that when i was in command and and officers below me struggled sometimes uh i would take the officers analyst that i take the time to go down and say it's okay you know things don't always go well get back up on the horse and let's keep moving i mean if you've got confidence in these guys now again there's some guys you just got to say you know what you weren't meant to be in this position and i had you know you got i had to fire a few people too and some of them you know as as good as they might have been in training when it came time for combat it just it wasn't they weren't right for it and then you had to move them on as graciously as you could if they they weren't the right guy for the job but again i was blessed throughout my career to have people that had confidence in me and and continued to give me second chances and and and put me in a position to be successful early on in my last deployment to ramadi i had a had a blue on blue had a fracture side take place and you know it's a freaking complete and utter nightmare and on a friendly iraqi soldier got killed one of my guys got wounded several other friendly iraqis got wounded um and the army the army working in ramadi was kind of like hey you know like it happens almost but that's not a very special operations attitude um you know at all uh van hoosier happened to be coming through country at the time and he happened to stop by shark base at the time which was my little base and and you know he was a marine in vietnam and he said hey jocko i was in way city and he goes and i wasn't he goes i didn't fight in way city but i was there afterwards and it's urban combat and this [ __ ] is hard and i forget the percentage but it was a massive third of the casualties in way city were friendly fire you know it's gonna happen square your [ __ ] away fix what you can and you move on um and that was to me okay okay this is uh i'm not the worst loser in the world which i absolutely felt like it's freaking horrible and then you know uh a few months later mark lee is the first seal killed in iraq and you know i'm again just heartbroken and and crushed and admiral mcguire who i you know was his aide for 13 months and called me up you know and said hey you got to get back out there yeah you're doing the right thing and and that kind of support from these senior leaders at that time you know it's a very similar situation for me but um you know it's real easy too real easy to pile on right to say oh you had a blue on blue what the hell is wrong with you real easy to do that it's really though you lost the guy what are you guys doing real easy to take that approach and both those guys you know just just took the approach of actually understanding what we were going through hey man there's we're we're getting in firefights every single day here you think we're going to make it through a six-month deployment and not take any casualties like that's i don't even know i don't even know why i would think that like it's a crazy thought but uh another good leadership lesson and it's just you know hey people are gonna have things happen people are gonna make mistakes things are gonna go wrong what are you gonna do you're gonna you're gonna pile on especially somebody that's already freaking tearing themselves up you're gonna pile on and i had to do the same thing you know with uh with platoon commanders you know leif babbin i mean he's he's calling me up you know it's another he's calling me up hey we just you know guy got shot ryan job shot he's hit bad i don't know if he's gonna live the army's in a gunfight right now jocko we need to go help him and i'm like execute you know don't didn't run it up the chain the army's we're side by side with these guys and he ends up losing mark you know it's like are we gonna pile on these guys are we gonna support they're making a freaking hard decision they're making the best possible decision they can make at the time and and that's what we have to do yep yeah and your point about decision making is a good one because the nature of combat and to some degree the nature even prior to combat and training you see it but more so in combat because to your point you're having to make hard decisions all day long you're just not going to get all those decisions right when i when i became the chancellor of the university of texas system uh i'm in charge of 14 institutions very large institutions university texas at austin and the anderson cancer clinic and and i've often said you know in the states today some of the hardest jobs in the world are being the presidents of institutions like that because they've got students they've got faculty they've got donors they've got you know all these sorts of things but every once in a while there were people outside the system that well why did the president make that decision why would he do something like that why would she do that and i'd have to say you know they make a thousand decisions a day 999 of them you don't see because they were good decisions and now you're going to get on them because they made one bad decision uh i i i got this you you thank you very much for your input but you know and i would tell the presidents look i've got it i haven't been the president of university before but i've been in charge of things it's okay do the best you can you're going to make mistakes i got your back and but you know if you make a serious mistake i'm also going to hold you accountable um yeah and if you if you're a repeat offender right that means you're probably not capable of doing the job and we're gonna fire you and that's the way it works so you you end up retiring after 37 years um uh i guess there was nowhere really else for you to go it worked the career worked out okay yeah and and then you you'd given that commencement speech which is i guess it's i have to check with echo charles my my kind of uh what is it pop culture guy yes was is it safe to say that's a a a viral speech viral okay so might be even iconic oh iconic you give the iconic make your bed speech um did you know you're at what point did you figure out you're gonna be the chancellor there yeah so they had approached me in april about the job um and uh and frankly initially i said i wasn't interested i mean i was coming off you know 37 years i was really kind of ready for a break and and i knew being the chancellor was another you know stepping into a you know 365 to a year sort of job um but i mean my wife and i would talk about it and she said okay look if you could do anything else because i got asked to be ceos of this and that if you could do anything else what would you rather do and i thought yeah i don't know this actually sounds like a pretty good gig so i'm i've got to have a you know i'm going to have great students that kind of like my troops uh i'm going to have a football team and a baseball team and a basketball team and and i'll get to travel around i mean it was essentially the same sort of leadership dynamics of being in the socom commander the jsoc commander i mean again you had faculty and students and issues you had to deal with and i had subordinate commanders and so it turned out to be a great job but that was in april um and then i give the speech in may um but it wasn't until so the speech uh to your point i mean it it gets a lot of traction and then uh and it was about june i i decided you know i think this is going to be a good good job for me so we agreed to do it and i think sometime in july they kind of anointed me and then i took over in january you uh you like brushed over the fact earlier that you got diagnosed with cancer and you know uh and in the book you talk about kind of what that or one of the books you talk about what that experience was like and and it it seemed like it was something that you could kind of uh suppress for a while but it ended up what in 2017 kind of catching up with you a bit yeah it did so uh chronic lymphocytic leukemia leukemia i mean the good news is it's a chronic cancer so it is manageable to a degree but you know for years prior to 2010 every time i'd get a physical the doctors would say well you know you're anemic i would say yeah well i'm sorry about that and you know i got a job dude what do i do and they say well take eat more protein take these iron tablets or something right and and then uh in 2010 uh a doctor diagnosed they did a bone marrow biopsy and they came back told me i had cll and but i remember the doctors were more concerned about the anemia they said how do you get up in the morning i know i get up i drink a couple of rippets uh you know energy drinks i go to work and um because what was happening was my body was storing the iron and the bone marrow but it wasn't moving the iron uh so long runs you know you just weren't getting the oxygen uh into the system but hey sorry you got a job to do you know you get up and do and so and then when i became chancellor i could tell that it was uh it was starting to to get more problematic um i was just finding days i had trouble getting up off the couch you know and but again you have a job to do so you you get up and you go do it and you power through it uh finally in 2017 it just kind of perfect storm i'd had a little bit of a virus um the anemia was at its peak and uh and my doctor who had diagnosed me in 2010 great guy named michael keating who really kind of i talk about it in the hero code you know you go in there you're scared you know thinking that you know my career is over maybe my life's uh over uh in the not too distant future and he said hey don't you worry about it we got this you're going to be fine you and of course first question i ask is can i go back to afghanistan my wife was like really that's your first question uh but uh so you know i was able to kind of continue on but finally in 2017 it caught up i got some uh some therapy at md anderson um they pumped me full of chemicals and and i mean a month later all my numbers were good and i've been you know knock on wood been feeling good ever since then so when'd you retire from the chancellor job uh 2018 summer of 2018. and uh when did c stories come out all right i'll check yeah better check uh sure 2019 maybe so also it's after you retired after our time yeah okay that was uh so make your bed was the first one and that was i think when i was still the chancellor yeah c stories was maybe 2019 and then hero code just came out and so hero code the latest one before we close out uh what what brought about the hero code you know i think it really kind of came back to make your bed i mean i'm always just like you are joking you know people are always asking me you know uh you know kind of give us more lessons that sort of thing but but people were asking me okay tell me who your heroes are um and and the hero code it's not about me i mean it's through my eyes but it's about people that i met or encountered along the way and it is about the qualities that they had um and i actually when i first started it um i thought you know what is a hero i mean we kind of intuitively know what a hero is but i pulled up the textbook definition and it was actually pretty good the textbook definition says a hero is someone we admire for their noble qualities and i like this idea of their noble qualities doesn't mean they're perfect but they have noble qualities certainly at a point in time when when they need them so the first story is about courage and winston churchill said something like you know courage is the most important of all qualities because it guarantees all the rest so you know you're not going to have anything else unless you first have courage and and the first story is about ashley white who was unfortunately killed in afghanistan and her remarkable courage but i go through the book with these these stories of these people that i think had the right qualities the courage and humility and sacrifice and perseverance and in this sense of duty and you read a little bit uh on the sense of humor uh i mean frankly and i tell the story about being at udt11 but of course i saw that sense of humor in the hospitals and this is when it really resonated with me back to the the infantryman who said you know you should have seen the other guy i mean how many times did i did i give some guy you know the kind of good-natured banner you say man you look like [ __ ] that was always the standard comeback you should see the other guy uh and of course that was their way of saying hey i may have lost an arm or a leg but they haven't beat me i can still laugh about this and so you know and then the last one is on forgiveness and you talk about you know what missions went south well this is one that went really south on us uh and it was a uh we were going after a bad guy in gardez uh had some soldiers on target we thought the bad guy was in the compound guys got up on the on the walls sniper's looking down in somebody comes out with an ak-47 he gets shot another guy in a doorway picks up an ak-47 the the soldier automatic weapon shoots him but in shooting him rounds go through him and unbeknownst killed a number of women on the other side and so when the action dies down they get on target uh they can't figure out why the the women by the time we get in there they are bound and and so frankly initially we thought maybe it was honor killing but of course we didn't uh it sounds crazy but we just didn't understand at the time that you know they bound them up so that they the jaws didn't open and other things and so it took us a while to really understand what's going on but then what we realized as we did the investigation was a one the two guys with the ak-47s turned out to be afghan policemen and the women were innocent bystanders uh that we had unfortunately killed i mean it was the war of all my time it was the worst you know kind of uh civilian casualty incident um that i'd seen and we'd had some bad ones but none quite as bad as that and i realized hey at the end of the day i mean it's back on me and so i went down to apologize to the father and i remember i linked up with some afghan soldiers and and one other army guy and we went into this town in gardez and of course there are hundreds of angry afghans um but you got an obligation you know so i i sat down in this uh kind of city hall for lack of a better term with about 200 afghans seated there and and and i apologize to the father and i remember before i did it i had talked to my afghan counterpart general saleem and i said what do i say to this guy i mean we killed his sons and a daughter what do you say to a guy like that and saleem looked at me and he kind of cocked his head and he said oh he will forgive you i said so i don't know he goes oh no he will he will forgive you and i said well with all due respect slain and he said he's a good muslim he will forgive you and he said look he said the thing about forgiveness is it not only relieves your burden it will relieve his burden as well it will take away his anger and it will if he forgives you and i thought man that that's that's a stretch but i got there and sat down with the father and i apologized to him and and i could see the look in his eye and and they forgave me and this idea of forgiveness particularly today you know it seems like everybody today gets easily offended um you know everybody gets slighted and they want to hold on to that anger they don't want to forgive people for whatever that slight was because the anger empowers them to be mad it empowers them to fight back and they feel like if they let that anger go if they forgive that individual then they don't get to be the person that holds the power and i think that's just absolutely the wrong way to approach it and i mean the whole thing about forgiveness i tell the story about there about the white supremacist dylan roof that killed all the people at the the baptist church and the families went up one by one and said i forgive you i forgive you and the point was they were not gonna they were not gonna hold on to that anger they were not gonna kind of bear that burden um so today as we look at society and we we wonder why everybody gets so offended i mean i i would offer uh take the opportunity to to try to forgive the people that offend you i mean some of them are big offenses some of them are little ones but i think as a society we can we can do a little better than and every single slide every single you know misstep somebody takes you don't have to hold on to that anger you don't have to fight back you can forgive people oh it takes a lot more strength to forgive someone than it does to hold a grudge it absolutely does i i often worry to worry um because you know sometimes we have whole sections of society or countries or peoples that that have a grudge and you know i i look at his two parts like you need one one side needs to say i'm sorry and the other side needs to forgive and it's very difficult to get two human beings just just two human beings to do that and when you have you know a collective lot of grievances from two different opposing sides we have a hard time making that progress um that's the latest book the hero code and as you as you and i were talking as we as we started off i i've written these kids books and uh the kids books have a code the warrior kid code and i mean it's just the the similarities are are awesome it's awesome to see uh i know you didn't read this but but you know uh you know it talks about humility and staying calm and treating people with respect and trying to help and protect people and it's just these are the things that that we need to do and um yeah i appreciate the fact that you you put this this latest book out to to give people a little guidance a little something to strive for uh with that it's only been about four hours um echo you got anything oddly no i don't i think we covered it she usually throws a curveball question at the end so you're getting off easy anything else before we close out yeah uh i want to thank you jaco um you know you have represented the community with such dignity such honor i love what you're doing i love what you're doing with the podcast i love what you're doing with your life i love how you are engaging with the community around you um you know it is important for us particularly at this time you know the the community has had its ups and downs we're we're in a little bit of a trough now uh but we need great folks like you to continue to be the sort of representatives uh that people can look up to uh and so frankly i want to take time to thank you for the great work you've done the great example you have set for you know not just the the new young kids that are going to be sealed someday but frankly for everybody you come in contact with uh that's that's incredibly valuable nowadays so thanks well i i certainly appreciate that i can i can guarantee you that um there's there's the only reason i'm here um is because what the community gave to me and and the people that i was able to follow and emulate and it's just um it's an honor to be sitting here talking to you and thanks for coming on today my pleasure and and more important thank you for your service to to the navy to special operations and first and foremost to our to our great nation and then somewhat selfishly um thank you for what you did to the for the teams thank you for leading me and and and my fellow frogmen and for setting an example that will forever guide our conduct our character and our ethos it was my honor thanks and with that admiral mcraven has left the building so echo yes you were you had no questions which is kind of surprising it was crazy did you start connecting the dots on who was in the room yeah more so the thing is already new and uh well one it depends on what you mean by new right but yeah i knew and i heard and you know i am familiar familiar with admiral mcrave okay so you had you had connected the dots oh yeah but not all of them though okay and it's crazy to just hear them all like the saddam hussein one i didn't connect those dots before um the captain phillips one i did not know either but but so you'd connected one out yeah one dot for as far as as far as you know some of the some of the most important special operations so awesome uh to have him on here and to be able to hear some of those stories and thoughts so admiral craven thank you so much for coming on and what does this mean for us well means we can do a little bit more it means we can certainly we have work to do the work that we have to do starts with us in order to get better in order to move in the right direction echo charles yes sir he said something he said something that i i feel like i'm going to kind of take this with him well a lot of things obviously but one that really stood out is and he said it twice maybe three times where he's like my job is to put you set you up for success right put you in a position where you can succeed right that was his deal it's like man that's a good way to put it right there because you know how you always talk about hey don't micromanage don't you know you want to let your team lead you know how you put it and it's like yeah if you because you can apply that to yourself as well like bro set yourself up for some success man sounds like a good plan you know go learn some stuff yeah go [ __ ] out 100 that's a great analogy and i thought you were going to say when he was talking about the guys like hey sir you got nothing to prove he says no you're wrong actually you've got something to prove every day and it's interesting something i used to talk about to the young seal officers is i would say you have nothing to prove but everything to prove because sometimes they think they got to prove that they're in charge so they start barking orders at people and you know we're going to use my plan and all that other stuff and you don't have to prove that you're in charge we know you're in charge you're the officer you're literally called the officer in charge you don't need to prove that but you do need to prove you did you you had a lot to prove yeah it's like that always struck me as a um like don't like be aware of complacency or resting on your laurels you know how like you know someone who has the over stated attitude of i don't have anything to prove when it's like too much of that right little off balance of the dichotomy kind of thing it's kind of like they did something awesome and then they sort of ride it out and then they still think they should get kind of the cred for it like a hundred years later or whatever and it's like hey like that's cool that you did that but recently you've been kind of doing nothing kind of an added you know so that that's what that always struck me as where it's like you always have something to prove like don't be like oh yeah you should like keep respecting me this much first like one thing i did yesterday yeah well you know 37 years for him in the seal teams in the in the military and again what's i think is important is as he said look there's so many people that did so much have done so much work so much work to to protect america and everybody from you know obviously the seal teams but just you know we talked about the infantryman we talk about everybody there's so much people that work so hard to protect freedom so i feel like you know you have a guy that's a four-star admiral on and of course you're gonna talk about what his experiences were and you know he's going to give you his perspective but you know i tried to point out in the beginning he you know admiral mcraven was always connected to the guys on the front lines and the people that are out there making it happen so awesome um so we need to set ourselves up for success is what you were saying before i went on a little uh yes sir what do we got how can we set ourselves up for success well big things and small things and then a lot of us you know we're not gonna be admirals straight up i'm not gonna be admiral it's very unlikely we'll just say that okay so i'm gonna do maybe my small little part to set myself up for success okay just my small little part in your world in my world exactly right so what does that look like for me and i think others too so this is the good news about this this kind of stuff is that it's achievable by anyone just take a few little steps set yourself up for success so what are we doing reading more we're working out more keeping ourselves physically and mentally capable that's what it is an opportunity presents itself you want to be physically and mentally capable or you want to be physically and mentally incapable that's the question is this a question for me we want to be capable kind of rhetorical kind of kind of obvious question so we do that through working out we do that through reading paying attention and listening that's a big one a lot of us don't do that that much anymore pay attention and listen trust me kind of like you're not really listening to me you see what i'm saying so you see what i'm saying anyway on this path that we're doing all this we do need supplementation so good news we're gonna start with energy drinks i'm calling it energy drinks it's a new wave of energy drinks do you think that these energy drinks that we have created are going to make all other energy drinks obsolete it we it has the potential to do that as of right now hey this is kind of a new thing technically you know and but it seems like it seems like that's a pretty obvious course that seems like the people are looking at the old the dinosaurs we'll say they're thinking oh this dinosaur it it tastes okay and it gives me energy for an hour but then i ruined my health and i feel like crap yeah and then they look over at this can of discipline go and they go oh this makes me feel really good and it's it's actually good for me yeah this is this is how uh this is how the old energy drink dinosaurs are going to go extinct yes they're going extinct that looks like the current tree the freaking big comet just hit or whatever it was what killed the dinosaurs was it a volcano no i think it was an asteroid oh you know that's the current thing the asteroid the asteroid just hit the other energy drinks in the form of jackal discipline go oh yeah so they're going down just anticipating fallout on that one they're starving they're dying so yeah so that's what's going on boom new energy drink no stigma in this one no no no sugar sweetened with monk fruit no unhealthy preservatives no toxic chemicals no no preservatives whatsoever we it's it's pasteurized boom boom and it tastes good so boom this thing is good for you straight out all upside no downside short-term and long-term benefits boom strategic and tactical discipline go there's there's also just been going powder and capsule format don't forget about that one also we got stuff for you joints keep your joints in the game don't have to worry about doing that anymore yesterday i did squats you did squats when monday right or something like this yeah i think it was so i always think about this where i'm older than i was before and so i incorporated the deep squats right yeah from your influence and i thank you for it and you think with a deep squat especially when you go hard it's like okay you know my knees because that's a lot of times that's the that's what you get like it's like oh yeah dude so if you suggest deep squats or something about all my knees or you know and i get it it's true so every time i think about this like this joint stuff like my joints i think about the squats got it by the way yes uh yesterday i started warming up doing squats my brother came over jade we start to talk you know you get into conversations whatever the camera and then not when you're squatting so i'm well you know in my i'm doing the warm-ups okay first one we get in this conversation while i'm warming up i do one preset i was explaining to carrie i do one preset okay dog okay hell yeah all day and it's basically one set one it's like a half working set it's like the the weight that i'm gonna use for my first working set i do that but not as many reps as so much so you know it's like a priming kind of thing so i do that right boom right at that point the conversation goes deep [Music] so like we're just talking two hours two and a half almost hours before my first set but oh so now you so you're saying there's a two-hour lag time like time between my prime i know so you prioritize next so in my normal course of action that kind of stuff happens this happened before where it's like hey my conversation came and hey sorry i skipped the workout you know the sun went down straight up it's dark night time already i don't know 8 30 maybe and it's like well you know i'm all cold i've been sitting down talking for two and a half hours i'm not warm anymore and let's face it but it's almost bedtime why are people coming around your gym to talk to you like that because my gym is on the side of my house outside yeah and you know i hey that's that's a conversation for another time for sure but it's significant nonetheless so i go inside i'm like okay cool i'll do the squats tomorrow whatever all good so i go inside i take off my shoes and i'm like drink some water or whatever and jade's leaving in the friend they're leaving him like i was like no man no no no it's not gonna get me this time conversation no conversation i go back out finish the whole squat actually i added one more set too like it by the way there you go the world right now collectively is celebrating your perspective yeah oh yeah so might i add joint warfare i was not worried about my joints any at any moment yeah my knee joints in this particular mouth actually i know where i got to curve that little bit you got joint warfare on your jawbone anyway success all around joint warfare super krill oil all day also we got some immunity stuff this is important as well you don't get sleep you know you were kind of talking about not getting yeah i had a couple i had a messed up sleep schedule pass not last night two nights before that yeah i had one last night anyway lack of sleep lack of this lack of that can kind of jam up your immune system don't worry about that and stuff too that's supplements for that cold war vitamin d3 boom don't worry about your immune system either joint immune system no factor right there um also milk supplemental protein in the form of desert that's uh that's some good stuff as well a whole nother story but good stuff nonetheless yeah you don't you want let's face it you want ice cream ice cream has a lot of downside to it yes it does you can have milk all upside no downside yeah upside legit upside protein so to put that into perspective and i just heard this i didn't even know where i was listening to something but and it reminded me some people eat like a thing of ice cream every single day it's like a thing you know like oh at night after dinner for a while every single day every single day i remember i was running so much i was running so i think it was uh i was out i was out a team too and every day was like okay monday pt was like pt and the run tuesday pt was of course end to run wednesday was swim and a run thursday was pt and a run again and then friday was a run what kind of run the friday run which admiral talked about was like a 10 mile or 12 miler sorry can't do 10 miles i would come back from that i would just do my 20 rep squat routine too so i was eating ice cream with a total abandon yeah yeah so the the the situation i was hearing about reminded that remind it reminded me of the concept that some people don't do these crazy runs or workouts or whatever it's just part of their normal everyday routine like hey let me just eat some ice cream every single day yeah some obvious detriment when you do that kind of stuff you drink though you so you replace the ice cream with the mulk you got the same front side yeah there were front end payoff yeah but a way different back end payoff actually you get a back-end payoff unlike the back-end of price cost hey you can get this stuff jack-o-fuel.com if you if you subscribe to it it's free shipping which is a legit thing because right now there's let's face it there's large rather large extremely large companies that are trying to lure you into their little realm yeah by giving you free shipping and we understand that we got to compete with them so if you subscribe free shipping you can do double support much appreciated also we got originusa.com if you need a jiu jitsu if you need jeans if you need boots if you need a t-shirt if you need a belt you can get it all origin usa.com the usa part is not some sort of thrown on branding no because the stuff is freaking made in america 100 without compromise think about that yeah we're talking about fighting for america cool that's awesome we love it guess what else we got to do we got to support the economy here because without the american economy nothing else matters you don't have a military unless you have a good economy so support the american economy stuff that's made in america with raw materials that were made or grown or produced in america that's what we're doing originusa.com get it yep it's true also uh jacqueline store called jocko store this is where you can get your discipline equals freedom good get after it all this uh all the all the representative ideas of the path on your apparel is where you can get it um also we have a subscription as well free shipping on this one only in the usa though as of right now okay we're working on the international scenario but only in the usa it's called shirt locker this is where you can get shirts with a little bit different more creative we'll see more fun designs for like a better way of maybe putting in anyway they're more interesting you get one every month it's kind of interesting because once i get a hold of a couple designs it's gonna be not fun it's gonna be dark not fun it's gonna be more cool well there you go they're not they're cool right now but they're light-hearted some of them yes people seem to be enjoying them um yeah so yeah free shipping on that one and yeah every month is a good one check it out if you like it hey get that subscribe to this podcast too wherever you listen to podcast don't forget we also have jocko unraveling podcast with my man dc daryl cooper putting out word grounded podcast we have the warrior kid podcast we also have jocko underground.com if you want to get a little additional podcast scenario you can check that out uh you have to subscribe to it it costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month what are we doing with that we're creating a platform of our own that if things go sideways we got a contingency plan we'll meet you in the underground underground jockowunderground.com come and check that out we have a youtube channel by the way and uh we make videos we make videos we do we have obviously you all know echo's got some technical skills that he can put to use he can do the editing and some of that other sort of sort of just technical skills and then obviously i come in with the assistant director and i kind of created and the creative side the creative element the vision and the talent by the way you're the talent you know but i do appreciate your being able to edit properly so if you want to see echo's edits and my vision yeah check out speaking of jocko's vision and my lack of vision from time to time psychological warfare is an album with tracks of jocko telling you how to skip not skip not skip not skip okay workouts if you're in the mood to skip a workout like basically to achieve what i achieved last night let's say you don't have that fortitude that day don't worry giaco got you on this one this goes for a lot of other weaknesses as well so check that one out psychological warfare if you want a little a spot psychological spot getting over the hesitation check out flipside flipsidecanvas.com dakota my my brother he's making cool stuff to hang on your wall also made in america we got some books you heard about some of them today spec ops these are from these are from admiral william h mcraven we got spec ops we got make your bed we got c stories and we got the latest the hero code those are available on our website if you go to jockopodcast.com and you click on books from the podcast they'll all be there that's also a way to support too by the way we've got final spin this is uh my book that's coming out and you're gonna want that first a dish you're gonna want the first dish so order that the right now the publisher is like where are you american you're not really a fiction writer and we don't know people are probably not going to appreciate your work they're more looking for uh well you know that's what they're saying so like okay we'll print you know a limited number of copies technically aren't you a fictional writer because i've written a bunch of fiction kids books yeah you are correct i made that point as well and then they said that thank you very much right got it so look the book comes out they're we got to let them know at least to print enough so if you want to pre-order that one and get that first a dish go ahead and make that happen um so that's final spin leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol which also yeah that's another code i forgot to mention that one today yeah uh the code the evaluation protocol this one was freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four mike in the dragons about face by hackworth extreme ownership and the dichotomy of the leadership which i wrote with my brother leif babin lake fabin and i also have a leadership consultancy and we solve problems through leadership go to ashlandfront.com if you need us to come and help you in your organization we have we have extreme ownership academy online leadership training get to the leadership gym get to the hey you don't go to a gym one time work out and then you're good no you got to stay healthy you got to maintain that strength so go to extremeownership.com join our online we're doing by the way you got questions come and ask me the question i will be on a zoom call literally ask answering your question come and check it out we have a live event called the muster next one up is phoenix august 17th and 18th and then las vegas october 28th and 29th check extremeownership.com for that as well all those are sold out by the way and this one will too these will too we have a couple other events you can check out battlefield we go battlefield walks we have ftx and if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star family check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization helps out our warriors if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want look if you want more of my over elaborated estimations or you need more of echo's disoriented discourse you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram which echo only refers to as the gram and on facebook echoes that ecwid charles and i am at jocko willink and thanks once again to admiral mcraven for for everything too much to sum up but thanks to all the soldiers sailors airmen and marines who have been on the battlefield well for hundreds of years and who allow america and freedom and democracy to exist and the same goes to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for your protection here at home and everyone else out there you know i didn't quite get into it to this book the hero code and admiral mcraven gives some guidance on how a hero should live but another thing that he indicates is that you are the hero we need it's you go out there and get after it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 460,569

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, make your bed

Id: cG_i1I1V8q0

Length: 257min 35sec (15455 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

McRaven is an American hero. He personally organized Operation Neptune Spear, the covert mission to dispatch OBL deep within foreign territory. He's a former special operator, a leader of Navy SEALs and former commander of JSOC and SOCOM. He served for 37 years. If he saw orbs, I believe him.

But forget all that, let's get Mick West's take from his mother's basement on what four star Admiral McRaven saw that night.

[u/mdeesol07]

What’s the time stamp where he talks about the orbs?

[u/DNRreturns]

Oh, my favorite Admiral is a witness? Damn. That man has more integrity in his left pinky than most elected leaders do in their entire bodies. Being a SEAL, he is also one of our elite warriors who goes to the dark places on the map. This man has done things that will not be declassified until after his kids pass.

I would take him seriously folks.

[u/Permit_Current]

Interesting he said they looked like parachute flares. Should make every smooth brain "muh flares" debunker bot a bit more hesitant.

[u/FigIntelligent4238]

Brb gonna go make my bed

[u/MrLudwig25]

I listened to this fishing today and that part gave me chills.