Jocko Podcast 316: High Stakes Push-Back and Accountability. W/ Stuart Scheller

this is jocko podcast number 316 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening econ good evening december 18th uh 2018 general jim mattis resigned as a secretary of defense for donald trump and he did that he wrote a letter and in that letter he said quote because you have the right to a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours i believe it is right for me to step down from my position then clearly general mattis did not agree with what donald trump was doing or how donald trump was doing what he was doing and so he stepped down and you can read that letter online the letter of resignation and it's he did it in as respectfully as he could i think after he did that things went got a little bit worse between the two of them but the initial statement was certainly meant to be done in a respectful way to from the from the secretary of defense to the commander-in-chief but it was certainly a statement by him stepping down when that happened i was definitely disappointed to see general mattis leaving that position and because then it then it's a situation where he no longer has any influence over what's happening and general mattis highly respected marine and leader in the military but this kind of thing has happened before a harder line was taken by colonel david hackworth when he spoke out against both military and civilian leadership in his interview toward the end of the vietnam war interview with a news program called issues and answers sunday june 7 1971. here's some things here's some excerpts from that interview and the whole interviews in the book about face but some of the excerpts from that he was being interviewed by a guy named mr tuchner mr tuchner said in your view did poor training lead to higher casualties in vietnam colonel hackworth replied i am convinced of it i think that our casualties were at least 30 percent higher because of or even higher than that but i'd say just safely 30 percent because of troops that were not properly trained i participated in a study group in the pentagon in 67 and 68 which considered u.s casualties caused by friendly fires and the group was composed of highly experienced personnel that had served in vietnam and it was our conclusion that 15 to 20 percent of the casualties caused in vietnam were the result of friendly fire one man shooting another man artillery friendly fire friendly artillery fire firing on a friendly element friendly helicopters firing on a friendly unit attack airstrike on a friendly unit and i could count you in my own case countless personal examples for example during the battle of dak ii june the 17th a rocket ship came into my a company's position by mistake and released its rockets right on top of the company killing the executive officer and wounding 29 other troopers i can recall in september of 1965 as my battalion was deployed artillery was fired in the wrong place killing seven men in one of my platoons the interview goes on mr tuchner says did the upper echelon of the army really ever become changed on this war did they learn from their mistakes colonel hackworth i don't think so i don't think that the top level ever developed a realistic strategic plan nor did they ever have tactics to support that strategic plan and that is why perhaps we who have not been vocal should be charged for criminal neglect because it is our obligation it is our responsibility not only to train our soldiers well to lead our soldiers well but to make sure that there are no mistakes made that they are protected as well as possible from mistakes and error and once you make mistakes they must be surfaced critiqued identified and remedial action taken the interview goes on and it closes out with this mr tuchner asks colonel do you feel it is possible you have become too emotionally involved in vietnam colonel hackworth replies i have become emotionally involved in vietnam one couldn't have spent the number of years i've spent in vietnam without becoming emotionally involved one couldn't see the number of young studs die or be terribly wounded without becoming emotionally involved i just have seen the american nation spend so much of its wonderful great young men in this country i've seen our national wealth being drained away i see the nation being split apart and almost being split asunder because of this war and i am wondering to what end it is all going to lead to obviously hackworth was drummed out of the army shortly after that interview hackworth and mattis are not the first people to resign in protest or because they didn't agree with what was happening in fact another guy that hackworth refers to is general william billy mitchell father of the air force world war one commanded the first aircraft our first american aircraft world war one and after the war he started to build the air force and guess what the army and the navy kind of objected to it because they they thought that their ways were better and they he conducted field tests against navy ships used an aircraft and proved that we needed air power and there was a navy airship like a blimp called the shenandoah crashed in 1925 14 crew were killed and mitchell general mitchell protested to the press openly accusing the war department of quote incompetence and criminal negligence saying quote brave airmen are being sent to their deaths by armchair admirals who don't care about their safety mitchell was court-martialed convicted of insubordination and facing a five-year suspension he resigned his commission 1949 the sec nav the secretary of the navy resigned as the construction of the super carrier the uss united states was cut to pay for the air force b-36 long-range bomber program if you ever read the book dereliction of duty by h.r mcmaster another highly respected general and one of the things he refers to during the vietnam war that the joint chiefs of staff for lyndon b johnson he calls them five silent men because they didn't push back on some of the things or a lot of the things or all of the things that lbj and mcnamara were doing the army chief harold johnson general harold johnson said after his retirement after he retired he said quote i remember the day i was ready to go over to the oval office and give my four stars to the president and tell him quote you have refused to tell the country they cannot fight a war without mobilization you have required me to send men into battle with little hope of their ultimate victory and you have forced us into the military and forced the military to violate almost every one of the principles of war in vietnam therefore i resign and i will hold a press conference after i walk out your door but of course he didn't do that that's something he said later general wallace green marine corps marine corps chief and this is a guy that in world war ii fought the japanese with a 45 caliber pistol and a bayonet and he says in that same book in that book by mcmaster he says something along the lines of well if i resign in protest okay i'm in the headlines for 48 hours then what then i'm gone and someone else carries on i don't have an impact and that's a decent point it's a legitimate point made by green same thing i said about matters when you leave again it's a decision but when you leave you've got to realize that your influence is gone 1968 cyrus vance who was a world war ii navy gunnery officer he was he did resign as lbj's deputy secretary of defense in protest to what was going on in vietnam which he initially believed in vietnam war but as he saw it unfold he said this is not a good idea and he eventually resigned he also later resigned as a secretary of state for carter for jimmy carter in protest of desert one because he thought that we should negotiate more he did that two times i don't think either one of them had a huge impact 1997 air force chief of staff decorated vietnam war pilot resigned at the perceived punishment that was to be imposed on the commanders on the ground when the khobar towers were attacked in saudi arabia 2006 a guy named aaron watada army refused to go to iraq didn't believe in the war resigned matthew ho a former marine infantry officer in 2009 resigned in protest as a senior political civilian representative in zabul province in afghanistan wrote a scathing letter you can read that online 2021 lieutenant colonel paul douglas hague resigned in objection to quote traitorous withdrawal from afghanistan and also talked about an ideological marxist takeover of the military and the united states government at their upper echelons resigned so these things happen and i talked about this in the book leadership strategy and tactics i talked about when you should do this how you make that decision because when you resign or even when you speak out aggressively and ostracize yourself as a leader you no longer have influence over the situation you're gone maybe your statement will will bring about enough highlight will bring enough light on the subject that you can help that that your resignation can help that's what you hope for but it's not guaranteed and and and you may cause excess conflict inside the organization you're trying to help but then there are times when things have gone too far or a line has been crossed in your head and you feel you just simply cannot tolerate things the way they are and you've tried to use internal methods to influence the situation but it hasn't worked so you step out and you speak out and this has happened recently a marine corps lieutenant colonel stewart sheller spoke out about the disastrous withdrawal from afghanistan and he did this publicly and without authorization from his chain of command and for that and for other actions that he took he was relieved of his command he was imprisoned court-martialed punished required to depart the marine corps without retirement or benefits which is a steep price to pay to speak your mind on what you're seeing and that is a hard decision to make and it has consequences that will reverberate for years and lessons hard lessons will be learned and tonight we have a chance to learn some of those lessons directly from the source as stuart sheller former lieutenant colonel former united states marine is here with us tonight to discuss what happened stu thanks for joining us jaco thanks for having me that intro gave me chills brother you laid that out pretty awesome so i'm excited to be here echo i look forward to the conversation let's let's start at the beginning just to get some background on you as a human so where'd you grow up i grew up across the midwest my dad was just an insurance salesman worked his way up so we moved between missouri kansas ohio i ended up going to high school and college at the university of cincinnati high school in uh since 92 and then i moved out to virginia i got an accounting degree at the university was when you were in high school what was was your mom working mom was a stay-at-home mom so i've got two brothers and a sister so four siblings she was always there for us driving us to soccer practice i was a baseball and soccer player any good yeah i was an all-state soccer player i got a full ride played a couple seasons and yeah i was always a captain always a leader enjoyed competitive sports did you make it to the state championships you know in ohio they had i don't know if they still got it but they had a it was called odp it was like olympic development program so you'd have to try out for these regional odp teams and i made the team and i don't think we ever won anything significant and what position did you play i played all over i mean i played club high school college so usually i was a skinny runner i was a lot skinnier back in the day it was probably you know 140 through high school so i was usually outside halfback sprinting but as i got a little more muscle they put me back in the defense and then when i got to college i was again smaller so then they put me back on the outside midfield and we were you into school getting good grades and all that yeah school's always come pretty easy for me so i was always on the honor roll i put in the work i always got three five to four oh yeah i mean you say if you put in the work yeah that's a big yeah yeah man i mean i i like to have fun i like to play sports and so school wasn't always my focus but i knew getting a good education and you know wanting to build a good base was important so if i put in the work of homework i'd always do well but there were times where i just wouldn't do it and then you know you pay the consequences did you have interest in the military growing up i didn't so my grandfather landed at normandy and i looked up to him a lot but after his army service in world war ii he got out was in the federal service and his brother was in the fbi so that's why i got my accounting degree they were telling me get your accounting degree and go in the fbi so i always loved america i always wanted to serve but no one in my immediate family other than my grandfather was in the military and so through high school all i knew was i needed to go to college and get a degree and then a good job would be on the back side and i was getting an accounting degree and i thought maybe i'd go into federal service but that was kind of my thought process all the way through school what year did you graduate high school 2000 high school 2004 college so september 11th happened when you were in college that's right was it was what kind of impact did that have on you yeah good question so i was my sophomore season of soccer and we had i was living in the dorms and it was like a suite where it was like four bedrooms and then a living room and i remember sitting there with my teammates watching it and thinking wow this is significant our lives are going to change but i don't know how this is going to impact me and then like i said i just went back to i need to graduate college that's what i'm supposed to do so even most of my peers joined after september 11th and that was like their motivation it was different for me mine came a little bit later so i saw september 11th it impacted me like all americans but i continued just going through school still not even sure that i was going to join the military at that time so at what point did you get serious about joining the military so i graduated with an accounting degree started working as an accountant and did not enjoy working as an accountant and it was 2004 and i was watching the tv and i saw the marines moving through fallujah and i thought hey we're going to probably be at war for another 5-10 years i'd love an opportunity to go represent america be a leader on the edge of the empire i've always like been competitive being on teams and i just thought you know i could go into the fbi any time but this war may not always be going on and i want the opportunity to serve my country and so i called the marine recruiter and started my my path so really it was 2004 for me watching the marines on tv that i was like i need to get me some of that how long were you an accountant for not long i i did it part time as i was going through school and then i did it for probably nine months after i graduated it didn't take long realizing that grunt and fallujah looked better it did yeah looking at spreadsheets that's not for everybody uh so so how long did the recruiting process take in 2000 and so in 2004 you talked to recruiter for the first time that's right yeah i was quick um i talked to him probably in september and the hardest part was getting all the recommendations like you need college professors recommendations like university of cincinnati it was like 1v300 like none of my instructors knew me you know i had to like calm back up like hey you don't know me but can you fill this out you know and i didn't accomplish anything at that point in my life other than being a soccer captain so like what did i have other than a college degree and being on a sports team and so you're supposed to write all these accolades and accomplishments and extracurricular and so quite honestly when i fill out the application i was like they're not going to select me but i submitted it and my strength was athleticism so i smoked the pft and that was easy for me and within two months they selected me and i shipped out in january and where's marine corps ocs it's in quantico how's that i think for some how'd that compare to accounting i think for some people it's a lot easier there's a lot of prior enlisted guys that go through and i didn't know anything about the military i mean i didn't know the difference between officers and enlisted i didn't know the drill instructors were going to scream at us i quite honestly thought i'd show up and it would be like grown man rules and you know here's the challenge figure it out you know i just i don't know why that's what i thought it would be and it just it was not that and so you know the drill instructors all start screaming at you and they have you dump your bags and they kick your stuff all over the parade deck and i noticed when they were doing that all my peers had their stuff in ziploc bags because they expected it and i'm like the one guy who's just lost so my pens and my stuff are going everywhere and of course on the last one trying to collect it all up and so now i've got like five drill instructors circling me and i'm like fighting through their shins to get the rest of my stuff and so i tell this story just to say it was illustrated from day one that i was lost and then you know they kind of kept coming hard at me but my strength was like i said athleticism and then relationships so i was able to befriend all the guys around me learn from them and you know i quickly went we do peer evaluations there too so like in the first period evaluation i was at the bottom because i was lost but by the third one i was like in the top third right and so that meant a lot to me so i was able to demonstrate to my peers over the period of instruction that like hey there might be more to this guy than the lost little puppy we saw on day one and so that was kind of the story of my whole entry level training i mean do they get rid of guys that are consistently at the bottom of the pure evaluations they do so the way it works is they do a board system and so there's three boards through ocs and if you get essentially counselings so if you're at the bottom they're going to give you a counseling and once you get a collection of them that you sit in front of the kernel and have to justify why you're there he's ultimately the one that decides to cut you or not and then also at ocs you can quit you can drop on request and so it's actually pretty high attrition so we started with 65 and i think we got down to like 38 so i mean but most of it is people that probably shouldn't be there anyway quite honestly um there are some some very talented guys that i had one guy that made it to the last day the day before graduation this guy graduated from the university of chicago with a mathematics degree i remember him very clearly because his last name was sullivan and mine was sheller so i'm standing right next to him in the racks the whole time the day before he's just like i don't want a commission and i was like dude we just went through like 10 weeks of the craziest i was like he's and he said i just wanted to see if i could do it and so that's like the type of guy that you want you know and so i was just blown away by that and so then this guy made it like he he had graduated for all extensive purposes and just decided no and so there are some that go through all that and then wave off but the vast majority that i saw get a treated out probably needed to be a treated out and then you could roll from right right from there to the basic school that's right and how how was that six months so what they do is they just give you a baseline of infantry leadership skills they say it's not screening technically they're only supposed to screen at ocs you have to keep in mind later in my career i worked as an instructor at ocs and tbs and so i understand like behind the scenes of these two places intimately now too but tbs is for all the open ground contracts like myself where they ultimately determine what your mos is going to be your military occupational specialty so it's a very critical spot in terms of if you want to do something specific you got to distinguish yourself to be able to get that thing and you learn a lot it's more of a college atmosphere unlike ocs officer candidate school or infantry officer course which is like all field work tbs is like a lot of classroom work you do some field exercises just to kind of have a baseline of tactical knowledge but it's it's a lot of classroom stuff you said open ground what is that open ground contract so when you come in you either come in as a law contract an air contract law like jag yes i'm kidding yep so law air or ground those are the three and so check bottom line is when you're at tbs they can't manipulate the law or air contracts those are already pre-written but everybody else they determine their military occupational specialty at tbs and how did you perform in tbs overall i was the same thing i showed up i was lost um a quick story on that so there's a transition where you go from sleeves down to sleeves up in the marine corps you know lost lieutenant chiller didn't know that no one explained it to me at ocs and so we show up and so the transition happened to be just between the 10 days we had between ocs and tbs so i show up to check in and i'm the only one with my sleeves down right and everyone's like why don't you have your sleeves up and i'm like well all right so then again day one i'm the one that doesn't know anything it was the same thing pure evals you know i had to like work my way up and i did and um i was academically probably in the bottom third just because all the tests was just rogue memorization and i tried to memorize it a lot of guys that had been in the marine corps before it was just a little bit easier because they knew the knowledge inherently but my what what got me up was like leadership evaluations are weighted pretty heavily and i always did really good on the leadership evaluations how does that work was that like in a field problem somebody watching you and evaluating how you're doing yeah so the grade breakdown at tbs is 40 leadership 30 academic and 30 physical and the leadership is built upon different exercises where you're evaluated by your instructor so it's it's fed by things that you do but still ultimately it's subjective and even in the leadership school what they do is so if a platoon commander has like 50 guys they have to rank you one through 50. so they can't give everybody hundreds so to make it fair there's actually an algorithm where they have to stick it in and so that's how you get a leadership grade what's a is it just a typical sort of battlefield problem that they're putting you on are you running an ambush are you running a patrol or is it like uh what's it like what do they grade you on yep so some of them are leadership reaction courses where it's like a complex not complex but there's a problem that you have to solve and typically they're not solvable but they're determining how you navigate the situation that's not solvable there's situations where you just you're the patrol leader hey take your squad and go attack this fire team on this hill and they'll evaluate you based on that right there's pure evaluations feed into it um so there's there's quite a few probably five or six different things that you do mostly i think probably the heaviest weight is the in the tree line you're a squad leader so typically it comes down to your squad leader you're doing effects too you're doing pecs one which stands for field exercise so they have all these field exercises and they just make you a leader of whatever you're doing the defense build the defense order and brief it and that's going to be a big part of your leadership grade are you guys shooting blanks at each other yeah we are are you using miles gear or some equivalent we have we have miles it's now called itez it's actually i test 2 now same thing but it doesn't work very well in the tree line what it does do though is it provides a graphical overlay so if you're wanting to debrief it like you can show hey there is the lpop there was the support by fire so quite honestly when we use it it's more for after action purposes it doesn't it just doesn't work very well in the tree line so blanks is we found to be better and then what did you what so where did you graduate in the class when it came time to graduate so the way tbs works is they split it into thirds and so they do that so that one mos isn't overloaded with all the talent so if you're in the top third you get your first pick if you're in the top of the second third you get the second pick if you're in the top of the third third you get the third pick so it became this thing of everyone wanted to be like the top of the third third right so you're like you're playing the numbers game so like i said i started in the bottom third and i was like but because of my leadership grades i moved up to i think the top of the second third i think it's where i ended up and then you get to pick so what'd you pick i was i actually i wanted to be infantry and at ocs i said to my drill instructor i want to be an infantry officer in fact when i was going through the recruiting pipeline i my also even told me that the guy does my recruiting he's like i got an air contract and i was like no i want to be on the ground with a gun you know watching the tv marines flu shows like i want to be on the ground with a gun leader so at ocs then i told them i was like i want to be an infantry officer and they just were like infantry officer scheller you know why why were they freaking out about that i think they it's just all part of the show it's a song and dance right they just want to kind of knock you down in fact some of them are still friends with me um but i at the time you just don't really fully appreciate it and so those were kind of still bouncing around my head so when i got to tbs i actually had infantry number three so i put combat engineer and intel officer above it one two and three mm-hmm and my they call him spc staff platoon commander he's a captain he was an amp trouser and he just looked at me he's like sheller you're going to be a infantry officer that's and i thought he was joking i was like all right well yeah and then it came time for selection i was waiting for him to be like you know intel officer combat engineer said infantry officer and i was like sizing him up like you're joking and he's like no i told you you're gonna be never chopster and you know looking back there is no way i would have made it as long as i did had i had any mls other than infantry officer i just didn't know what i didn't know then i mean it's by far probably the best choice and so in a lot of ways that guy shaped my life and career and i was really grateful that he did that so then you get infantries and it's often for your officer school that's right and how long is that school three months and how was that where was it so i went through ocs january to march of 005 tbs april to september 05 in ioc september to december 05. so it was rapid fire there a lot of times there's because based on when schools pick up people have two or three month breaks but for me it just worked out where in 11 months from showing up to ocs i was standing in front of my platoon so by mid-december i was i was there and you must have been getting guys that were coming fresh back from actually coming back from fallujah that you watched on tv that were your instructors it's better than that when i showed up to 1818 was the center battalion of that attack that i watched on the tv and the first speech i gave my platoon was like hey i'm your new platoon commander half of them were in sweats and so i took my platoon sergeant aside after the fact i was like hey why aren't they in the proper uniform and goes sir they all have doctor's notes because they all have shrapnel still in their body from the push through fools and that was like the moment for me it was like oh my god like this is real i mean it's just like the way the world hits you of the responsibility so yes it was very real when i showed up to my units how was infantry officer school that is probably one of the best schools bar none i mean they really do a good job of preparing you and i mean there's just three months of intense intense infantry training and i i really felt prepared showing up for my platoon i mean the marine corps does a great job of putting a product in for the platoon in terms of officers now are you going to get some that slip through the cracks absolutely there is no perfect system but i'll say holistically from a guy that just wanted to learn and wanted to be a leader they did a really good job at preparing me so are they setting up are you in a platoon and you're basically taking turns as leaders going out and running operations that's right the whole time the whole time it's an in infantry officer of course it's a lot more current ttps as well whereas the basic school is the fundamentals and green side of building the defense very conventional type stuff the the timeless principles whereas infantry officer course is like this is the new rco this is the ied that's in ramadi right now uh so on and so forth this is how we do patrol in 5 and 25s right now and so there's still a lot of timeless stuff that goes on in ioc but it was really nice to get a lot of current ttps coming through that schoolhouse and then the instructors too at ioc if you're a captain and you're an instructor there you're hand selected and most of those guys go on to become generals quite honestly so you get the creme de la creme in terms of young captains that have just come off their first tour like the marine corps picks the best to go to tbs and then from tbs they pick the best out of tbs to go to ioc and so you really just get great instructors like i had brian shantosh who was you know silver star i had marcus mines who he got relieved recently as a botanic commander but in terms of like deep thinker warfighter like there was no better um so i just had i had a group it's quite quite funny when you look at my instructors a lot of them burnt out like the chantashes in the mines but i don't think i've ever ran into a group of officers that maybe were more outside the box thinkers and war fighters than that instructor cadre that i had there when you look back at that time is there any lessons that stand out to you like oh yeah that that operation left a huge impact on me i i think just the mental toughness that the instructors have pressed upon me every single day is what i left with i mean i walked away with an impression that these infantry officers are the real deal they're war fighters and their and they know their trade like it was very clear to me that i had to step up my game and i couldn't fake the funk because people could see right through it and so i think you know the ttps always change but the the thirst for going and opening the pub and making sure that you knew more than everyone else making sure that in those tough situations you were the guy they were looking to to have the direction to have that mental toughness that they might need are you guys doing live fire blanks both mostly live fire ioc is mostly live fire obviously you're not shooting live fire at each other so in the situations where we did force on force it was blanks but it was a ton of live fire did you learn anything about like uh the amount of pressure that you were gonna face did they do a good job of simulating the the pressure you're gonna face in combat situations yeah i mean that was the whole shtick i mean there was even a couple times where it may have even swung too far to the other direction because i remember one time we were getting close to graduating and we had gone from the desert of mojave up to the mountains of bridgeport and then we were coming off the mountains of bridgeport and they stopped at some like rinky dink casino just let us get drunk that was like in the middle of nowhere where probably no one would get in trouble because it was literally in the middle of nowhere right well the director this guy is still in the marine corps regimental commander or probably moved on by now but he got so he was the major and he just got hammered drunk and started screaming at the lieutenants that they weren't ready for combat right and that was like one of the few times where like you know i'm still young and the curtain had been peeled back but i remember thinking like i get it you got more experiences than me but i'm about to knock you the out like you know i mean lieutenant the major like you just don't talk to me like that like and so yes they did a very good job of preparing us but sometimes i felt like almost to the point where i was got a little unprofessional at times you know there's a line on how you treat a man i'll rise to the occasion when given the opportunity but i don't want to be denigrated and then from there it's bad it's that's when you went to one eight that's right yep so in fact uh most of the guys because we graduated right before christmas most of my fellow students took christmas break and then showed up in january one 8 was deploying so fast that the battalion xo actually came up to ioc and took me and my six peers that were going one eight and said i need you now we're going to ap hill right after christmas and i want you checked in with all your gear meet your platoons and then you can take you know a week for christmas and you're going to show up and go to ap hill with us and so that's what we did and and you already talked about meeting your platoon for the first time yeah so there was that then i went into the you know i didn't have a house so uh my personal life i was dating my my girlfriend at the time and i had gotten engaged i got engaged that chris so that week that i had off i actually uh i take that back i got engaged before i went to ocs so when i she was working in richmond when i went down to 1-8 she stayed in richmond and so i was living in like this shitty apartment um because i knew i was going to deploy in six months my plan all along was just do the first tour and then go up to richmond and get out and and be with my wife we got married in between tbs and ioc in fact marcus mines that guy was telling me about that was such a good instructor the ioc they call it combat endurance test this is like their screening event it's like a two-thirds of a marathon it's like 16 miles and then you got like little stations like at4 do the at4 radio do the radio and then about 10 miles in one of the stations is ground fighting and marcus mines was a college wrestler and so you know you were just exhausted at this point and this guy gets to just beat up on tired little lieutenants right like good job dude so that's what he does and i know i'm trying everything i can to fight him and i thought i was doing pretty good and i think because i was doing pretty good he started getting a little bit more violent and he elbowed me in the eye and gave me a black eye and i got married that weekend so in all my wedding pictures i have this black ice legendary um so yeah 1 8 sorry so ap hill in january to march and then we actually we went on deployment in june of o6 and where was that deployment too so at that time everyone was going to iraq so that's all we trained for that mark that january to june was like we're going to iraq there was no question about it but we're not going to fly there we're going to get on what we call a mew marine expeditionary unit you get on three navy ships and you sail over there back in that day you know six it was a it was a much bigger footprint back then the naval group had a submarine they had destroyers i mean it was a whole entourage back then but over time just navy's degradation it's now just the three ships so we got on the ships we sailed across the atlantic we went through the suez which you know it's like a million a ship so that just fiscally you know once you cross the sewers and you're in centcom like game on but when that happened israel and lebanon got into a conflict this was in like june or july of the six and so they actually turned us around sent us back to the suez and then we did a neo non-combatant evacuation operation and we took american citizens out of beirut we sent a platoon in there to secure the embassy and then we took him to cyprus and then we sat there and stared at beirut for like six weeks like i just did push-ups every morning like there's beirut awesome you know and all i wanted to do was go to iraq and so then after like two months of just staring at beirut we went back across the suez got into kuwait and uh they ended up saying you don't have the legs for the deployment because when you put people on a deployment there's like eas cutoffs and to extend that would have caused more trouble than it was worth they did take our sniper platoon out of that battalion and sent them up north because at 806 it was such a sniper fight we actually had unfortunately a couple snipers were killed so we ended up coming back from the deployment and had a memorial for these snipers and it was it was so weird because most of us hadn't even gotten into iraq and then we're at this memorial but that was that was the first deployment and then you so then you roll right into another workup that's right so i mean we went so i got back in december and we deployed to ramadi by september so like six seven months later and i this is kind of this is a longer story so i won't go in all of it but i ended up having to go to winter mountain leaders course from uh january to march and then i got back and we went to fort pickett all of april so i was i mean i was only home and then we ended up going to mojave viper was what it was called back then which was a two-month deal i mean i was only home probably for about six weeks and i and i my wife quit her job to come down and live with me in between that so we had bought a house and it was like yeah i guess i'll see you after the next deployment because i am just not home right and so i'll skip forward the reason i didn't get out after the second deployment is just that she quit her job and had came down you know when i was in iraq and all just worn out and she's like well what are you going to do i said i want to get out like that's the plan she's like well what's the plan after them i don't know we'll figure that out she's like we just bought a house please take a non-deployable so we can figure this out but um so yeah personal life was was tough at that time so when you came home from that deployment where you went to lebanon you get back from that and you immediately go into a workup but on top of the workup you go to mountain leader school you're just gone the whole time your wife who would quit your job is now sitting in the house filled with boxes that you never unpacked because you're a bad husband i promised i would paint the house and never painted it i've done this drill before i've definitely done that drill before i i moved to virginia beach and i was there for two years and in that time i did two deployments and a workup so my wife we never even took some stuff out of the boxes in the house that we bought so yeah i did that drill the bathroom never got painted um neither did anything else until until when until we were getting ready to sell the house then then i got a bunch of stuff done i can beat that i've done move to move where the stuff was still in the boxes from the last move and the movers are like well we need you to take it out of the boxes because we can't use other people's boxes i'm like you want me to take all my stuff out of the boxes for you to put in new boxes so yeah i bet there is a mountain leaders course up at bridgeport it is yeah and how was that it was awesome so i didn't want to go just because my wife had quitter driving came down and i had limited time it was this whole thing where i i put my name in the hat because i didn't know my wife was quitting so on the first appointment i put my name in the hat when i came back they're like you're not going and then at the last second like after my wife had quit and i promised to move all her stuff out they're like okay you're going i'm like what you know i was like flipping tables how long was that course it was three months and so it is very challenging because it's so cold um so mentally it really takes a toll but i'm a good skier i grew up skiing in ski resorts around the midwest and so that was fun and back then they probably don't do this anymore back then for weekends they gave us a 16 passenger van and let us as the students have it so we had a gunny who didn't drink and he just drove us to tahoe or reno every weekend i mean it was some of the funnest weekends i've ever had in fact the last time i came to san diego was on that bridgeport trip so me and my buddy took a flight to san diego and i had a guy who had an apartment in the gaslamp district and uh we had a good time yeah and then you you go on deployment and now you're working up you do you know you're going to iraq this time yeah we do and you know you're going straight to iraq about taking a ship that's right and but this is now 2007. seven but your workup is in 2006. uh no the workup the workup was january to okay july of those seven okay but still do you know where you're going do you know you're going to ramadi the whole time yes and so at that time still 2007 you start your work up ramadi's still pretty freaking hot at that point ramadi was very hot in january 07 and there was a thing called the al ambar awakening and so it was almost like the sharp pivot like right as we were getting there and so the unit that we ripped with two five i mean they had just it was like gun fight gun fight gun fight and then in the last two months of their deployment it almost like somebody just hit stop and so it created a lot of weirdness for us because it was like we were still operating under ttps where it was like gunfight gun fight gunfight and it just it really wasn't that by the time we showed up so where were you where in ramadi were you so i was a company xo now and we i was on the south west corner i started a place called jss iron and we had like two platoon outposts so as a company xo i was consolidating the patrol rosters and like the name of the game then was always have patrols in the battle space like what are we doing i just get them out there right so just like just saturate the battle space with presence and so as xo a lot of my role was just making sure that we had good perimeter security of our positions that we had all our gear and that the operational plan i was like the op so if you will at the company level and then about three months into the deployment they moved us because we were at that time trying to move out of the city to further outpost to allow the iraqi police to have more control and so we basically built a fob from the ground up it was called sua and this was all the way in the south west out of the city now and it was called sewa because it was literally i think built by a sewer and there was nothing there and you know even though we had been in iraq since what 03 it was like we had never been in iraq before so it was like baby wipe showers no chow hall i mean it was awful it was bad and so um we did that we finished the deployment there and what was the i know things had settled down a lot when you when you had patrols out in the city were they taking any contact or was it yeah we had one platoon that got in some context the the problem then it was almost i don't know i don't want to say more dangerous but it was like you'd get lulled into a false sense of stability and then there'd be a suicide vested attack and you'd lose guys and so my best friend so i i did the first deployment in bravo company i was playing commander so when we got back i was still a platoon commander and bravo company they moved me over to alpha company to be the xo so i still had a lot of good friends that were platoon commanders in bravo company one of them this guy's name was dave borden used to we used to make dinner he was a pittsburgh steelers fan i was a bengals fan so we'd always have like rivalry games together with my wife and he got he responded to a sniper threat and a suicide best came up to him guy wearing a suicide vest and detonated it and killed one of his marines and blew dave up lost his leg and so like there's just an example of you know i'm sitting there for two months with like nothing happening and then i gotta listen on the radio to my buddy being evacuated out lost a marine and then um and so yeah so we had one platoon um that all got combat action ribbons from doing patrols and getting into firefights but they didn't really kill a lot of people it was more that that deployment was more just about like census patrol stability building and trying not to get blown up i mean there was a there was the adjacent battalion i might get the units wrong i don't i think it was two eight and one nine and they were doing the rip towards the end of our deployment and this is still a story told in the marine corps while they were sitting at the ecp a huge so there's like two companies in there because they were doing the rip a huge dump truck blew through the ecp with a bunch of explosives and all the iraqis ran and these two young marines stand at these people from different units didn't know each other stood there and killed the driver and got themselves killed and all the iraqis were talking about how brave the marines were and we almost believed that they were probably exaggerating it a little bit and then after this huge explosion one of the cameras even though it looked like it was broken still had the footage and they went back and pulled the footage and it was exactly like they said these two young marines standing at the ecp knowing they were gonna die not knowing each other like in that instant realized what was happening and saved everybody else on that base so like that to me that story almost describes what ramadi was when i was there right like you can be standing on that ecp for seven months without a single thing and then all of a sudden in a second there's a dump truck flying at you and you know you're about to die so and so for me as the xo i was always it was like i'm not exaggerating it was like 20 hour work days constantly and you know you go back and you're asking why were you working 20 hour work days like i can't put my finger on exactly what it was it just seemed like there was always something that required like immediate attention and the iso container that i lived in was with my company commander and our one terp so it seemed like people were waking us up like somebody always needed one of the three of us that was the stupidest move in hindsight putting us three in the same sleeping facility like it was so dumb and so like when i came home from ramadi i mean i started having chest pains like real chest physical chest pains and i it took me a while to kind of figure out that it was anxiety and that i didn't experience anxiety during the deployments like when you're working 20-hour days and you're just go go going and it hit me like once i tried to chill out um but i tell that just to say i think i kind of was going so fast i just kind of frayed some of the wires in my brain there for a little bit it took some while to work through some of that so you get home you get home from that deployment and then what's next yeah so you know i had skipped forward there earlier so i had planned on getting out i didn't get along with my battalion commander on that deployment he was very dictator-ish almost like verbally mentally abusive i just didn't care for him i didn't i don't know if i even agreed with the mission of ramadi like like i said i joined because i wanted to be in combat but i found myself as my company commander would write the contracts and as the xo i was what was known as the pay agent i'd go to camp ramadi and they'd filled my book bag with like 200 000 cash and i'd run around and just give it to like these mafia figures and i'm just thinking like is this what we're doing like this just i don't know if this counter-insurgency thing oh this is what we're doing i was just like i don't know what this concerns these because all the generals are talking about like how great it is but like even as a young lieutenant like i had a lot of questions i was so like that was that was influential to me because i'm thinking like there's got to be a more effective way like these guys that i'm giving the money to right now i don't know if anyone else sees this but this guy is not going to build stability here in iraq this guy's going to take it he might even make it worse for the local iraqi and so anyway i left i would thought about getting out but my wife's very much wanted some stability i felt like she deserved it and so instead of getting out i took school of infantry as a company commander it was in north carolina i didn't have to move and the goal was to do three years there and find get a master's get an mba and then go on to the next thing and when i got to the school of infantry i was very busy i was go go go school of infantry is funny because right then it was iraq and all my instructors were iraq veterans and all their families are willing to put their problems on the shelf when you're at war but it's like they had an expectation for their husband when he got home that they would address some of those problems and then those poor instructors were working dark to dark and it was like every single one of them were going through a divorce like up to like my senior enlisted like every single one like i was bringing in chaplains i was bringing in workshops and so the biggest struggle there was just the personalize of my guys they all had drinking problems they all had marriage problems they were all working through their own demons and then trying to teach 300 privates how to be infantrymen without losing their cool you know not flying off the handle and so that was kind of emotion more emotionally draining than i thought it would be and i did it for about a year and a half until i right about then it was so i was at soi from 08 to 10. if you go back and look at the news around 0-809 the comment on the marine corps guy named conway was saying he wanted to get the marine corps out of iraq and into afghanistan so it was right when they were trying to do the pivot and i thought hey you know my ramadi deployment it wasn't the combat that i thought it was going to be it was very emotionally draining but it was you know i wasn't shooting a gun all the time so i was like i would love to get into afghanistan and then maybe get out and just have that experience and so i contacted my monitor and i found a deployment through an organization called joint ied defeat organization jaido and they he's like there's a joint requirement for an infantry captain he's like this is perfect it'll get you there you'll get every all the combat experience that you want and all you need is two years at soi not three so after two i can cut your orders if you get your command's endorsement we can make this happen so i went and talked to my boss and my boss didn't want me to do it he was very reluctant he wanted me to be the opso or the h i company commander which is like the senior bills there like he liked me were you instructing at all when you were at the soi or were you more just like uh overall in management position yeah so they you get 300 privates so soi is in two camps so there's mct and itb so all marine enlisted marines that are not infantry go to mct and they get it's it's evolving now with the new force but back then they got like two weeks of infantry training and itb you got one month so it was essentially like you're following school so the guys at mct if you're gonna go be a motor t driver go to mct for two weeks and then you go to your moto t school itb they just get longer training and their infantry marines and they go under their following unit and so again it it's changing now it's i think it's up to like 10 weeks for itb but back then it was only four weeks and so that's outstanding yeah it is it really is and so they got um so we would get 300 privates and we would divide them into four platoons the platoon commanders were either staff sergeants or sergeants and then each platoon commander had two or three instructors so you never had more than three to four for i don't know do the math like 75 guys um so it's a lot the instructor-to-student ratio was not good and there was no other officers i had a first sergeant and a gunny and then there's the young captain and that was the staff so you're not doing a lot of instruction you're not seeing a lot of what's going on i there were most of the instruction comes from they have a separate cadre of instructors at the instructor group so it's almost like the the staff that you have is almost like facilitating and the after hours and the watching and the the day-to-day leadership now there's still a lot of classes that we give out in the field or once they get back to the house and sometimes there's even like scheduled platform instruction but most of the platform instruction comes from general support instructors so the question was how much classes did i give there were probably two or three programmed company commander classes and the rest was just impromptu hey you're going on liberty this weekend i'm your company commander don't get in trouble i i was very lucky in my career i i was an instructor which is a strong word to use when back in the day back in the day we used to add seal team there was just instru there was there was training inside each seal team so like as an e5 i was teaching a bunch of stuff and it really put me in a great position because then you're you're having to learn it better and then you're teaching it and you're seeing how it works and seeing the mistakes that people made so i've always felt like i learned a ton doing that and then later in my career when i was running training which was our training was just freaking outstanding and but i got to again watch observe teach and i learned so much when i was in those positions and that's why i was wondering if you were you know kind of actively teaching and what you got out of that you're 100 right the the people that learn the most are the teachers and because you can't fake the funk when you're the teacher and you have to there's you know five six seven hours of prep for any one hour of instruction that you get at a minimum and so 100 agree i've worked at a bunch of formal school houses and we we learned that abundantly the people that teach are really the ones that learn in my opinion yeah i think i learned 70 of what i ever learned in my life while i was an e5 instructor cadre at seal team one because i taught that's the other thing i was like a young single guy so it was what what trip am i going on all of them i'm going to teach diving i'm going to teach land warfare i'm going to teach cqc mount every teaching everything and spec recon cool i'm going on the spec recon trip so really just got to teach everything and then you get to watch and you're de facto detached from what's happening so you watch it we used to teach the the new guys that came to seal team one we would put them through their initial course of training so then i'm watching the young officers and i was just i was an enlisted guy but now i'm watching these young officers and seeing like oh this guy is getting totally he's he's spending all this time shooting his weapon so no one's making any calls i'm never gonna do that i'm never gonna make that mistake and this guy over here is imposing his plan on the rest of his squad so they're all pissed at him i'm not going to make that mistake so i got to learn like i said i might even be more than 70 from just being a young e5 teaching at seal team one and then also you had these senior guys that were super knowledgeable and they're teaching you that's just freaking a good way to learn um but then you get picked up for this jaydo billet yep yeah that so the giado billet was awesome i mean it was awesome so i had no training so i mean you have heard my story of all my training in terms of ieds so an eod guy goes to school for six to nine months depending on what branch of service and what they did was they put me in crystal city in a hilton lobby conference room and then like had a fake name for the conference shut and locked the doors and they had some like old ied maker and he gave us like a crash course on how to make a circuit essentially and then how the explosives work and so we did that for three days and then they shipped me downrange and that was that that i mean it was crazy when you think about it and i ended up then you were the id expert then i was the idea i don't think they ever expected me to be the idea expert they wanted eod is obviously the ied expert but what the billet was supposed to do was be the infantry interface to have enough knowledge of ieds but to think like employment of infantry stuff and connect the route clearance platoon and the eod and then be able to translate that into whatever is important to the battalion commander so you get your three day of school and then you deploy right to afghanistan that's right yep how was your how was your wife on this whole scenario my wife stoked was she so dude all right yeah uh so we got because she's like oh you're home that's right you kind of have a normal job it's almost like a night and i got her pregnant so she was three months pregnant and then i went to afghanistan right um i'll tell the story because it just kind of illustrates the stress on a military family so we were going crib shopping she knows i'm going to afghanistan the child again i was we knew i was deploying when she was uh three months so we're going crypt shopping and we went i'm like this is like the third store like i hate shopping so we're in like the third store and i see a crib i'm like this one i want this one let's get this one she's like i want to keep looking around and i'm like well i'm just going to stand here by this crib that i like and you can keep walking around and i'll be right here and then she just broke down crying and it had nothing was this the first baby yeah was this the first kiss kid this is a bad tackle i know well that's what i'm telling a story like it was my mistake people can learn from it that's right you better go walk around look at some freaking cribs dude i know and and so that's what she she as she was crying i'm just gonna stand here by this one you go look around and come back when you're ready i got it yeah i got it is it building relationships you were talking about earlier so uh bad move on my part so then we you know i had to usher her out she's crying i felt bad we got in the car and we drove home and it was like one of those really awkward intense situations we ended up buying the crib online because we couldn't bring ourselves to go look for a crib again and um and then i deployed right so i i tell that story just to say you know i really wanted to go to afghanistan but it comes these things come at a cost right so i got a pregnant wife who's trying to be very supportive she was supportive of me staying and she was even supportive of me going to afghanistan but it doesn't mean that it doesn't come with some type of personal cost so she's three months pregnant when you leave for afghanistan how long is the deployment to afghanistan a year check and did you come home for the birth of your kid like so you get when it's a year you get it's too already too long of an answer yeah you get two weeks um but i missed i missed the birth but i was able to come home like right as she like four days after the birth so right after she got out of the hospital so i did get two weeks with them but i mean having two weeks with a baby after you've been in just combat every day for six months knowing you're going back to that same place for another six months it was real hard to establish any emotional connection because like i mean that's just it was i would almost have rather not gone home and be honest with you because it like you're when you're with them your mind's there when you're there your mind's with them and so yeah in some ways it was good but other ways it was it was very hard so you go on deployment who are you who are you with so i got to just like a solo operation that's right it was just stu sheller versus the taliban um i got to bagram air base and that's where gida's task force was at so they called task force paladin in afghanistan so we got to task force paladin headquarters and they decided because most marines are familiar with southwest helmand and kandahar but they didn't send me there they sent me to rc east to support the 101st army division and so i got out the first unit i got to was a battalion called 3187 and they were in east paktika province and the fab i got to was orgoon and their company fobs were all so dispersed that anytime we had to take them logistics it was like a one day road trip throughout clarence platoon and eod and anytime there was an eod response we had to fly out on the fly line and it was just i say that just say was very distributed and like most people or marines picture of afghanistan is just like desert wasteland it was like the rocky mountains where i was at i mean it was not what i was expecting i got up there and i was like this is this is not the desert and so you could see pakistan from where we were at it was just it was uh cowboy country and then what were you doing um well i guess explain a little bit more detail yeah so you get there's a logistics supply that needs to go to some outstation i'll illustrate with with one more story from that time frame so one of the company fobs hadn't been resupplied in a while and so they planned this because in the july august it was raining a lot and so when it rains the the aircraft couldn't fly the logistical supplies and just because they with all these jingle trucks it was easier to move logistics so we took this huge patrol so i went with eod and route clearance patrol and all these logistics trucks out to this company fob and dropped it off and then when we got there they said hey we've got this platoon outpost over here on the border near pakistan that just hasn't had whatever in so many days like we really need you guys to push this stuff out here we here at the company fob don't have the assets if you call back to the battalion and they're like yeah if you can that would be great so we do so the next day then we go from this company fob out to the platoon fob and we left it like 8 a.m so how many vehicles are you bringing with you so you got just rough estimate route clearance platoon is probably a dozen you got the eod truck in there you've got are you guys in mraps what are you in what are the vehicles yeah everyone's well it's mrap's and jail tvs uh mix but they also had a lot of logistic trucks were jingle trucks you know what that is like a afghani flatbed and then you've got the afghan national security force they're all in their f-150 pickup trucks and then you got probably an infantry platoon or company for extra security that maybe in just humvees and so it's this so this is a big convoy long collection of different players damn and so we drive through to get to these things on the border you there's not roads you're driving through like the creek beds of the mountain crevices and we get to there at like let's call it one or two o'clock in that so there's 15 vehicles 20 vehicles i'd say like 40. 40 vehicles to go out and resupply a platoon yes which by the way has 40 guys yes so this is like correct already you can see what this is like crazy going on yes okay so 40 so a 40 vehicle convoy with every type of vehicles mad max is driving out to resupply 40 dudes that are out on the edge of the world they were on they were on the edge of the world yes and so it's maybe like two o'clock when we come out of the creek bed and this is relevant to the story when we came out of the creek bed there was like five afghanis sitting there with like their arms crossed staring at us and we're like let's look at these nefarious characters like what are these guys gonna do and nothing happened and we were all kind of eyeing them and that's relevant later so we go into the fob we drop all the supplies off it's like three o'clock and the call is made like what do we do it's three o'clock i mean it took us like do the math eight to three to get here do we want to go back or do we sleep here tonight again 40 vehicles like this little platoon outpost we're like so probably a bad call i mean in hindsight 2020 obviously was a bad call but at the time it just made sense like let's just go like you know get back late we'll be all right so when we start driving back now we're going back into that creek bed where those guys are so now it's nighttime no it's like three o'clock okay when we leave it it gets dark soon and so we're going back into this creek bed and where those guys were standing they had piled a bunch of rocks up to the the creek bed i'm like oh obviously this is going to be an ambush these guys piled a bunch of rocks as a marking mechanism or as a blocking mechanism great question okay jack you know what i mean so we didn't ask that very intelligent question we just immediately assumed ambush because that's that had happened it was before so we're like all right these guys are going to ambush us so you sit there you got your eyes up and you're looking around nothing happens and then it's just like all right we'll let them trigger the ambush like we're going to go through it and we went through it and nothing happened and then we just didn't think through anything else and we just started going so we get now it's dark it's probably eight o'clock are the afghans are you on night vision because i know you're on that what the afghan too the django trucks are on on night vision i can't remember they were so far back that if their lights were on i didn't see it check i can't remember it's a good question i don't remember so we were it's now like eight or nine o'clock it's dark and it started raining and i can't it's hard to describe it's almost as if somebody had broken a dam because it wasn't like the creek bed started slowly filling up it was almost like a wave came down and hit the tires this is like flash flood scenario out in the desert and so with but it's still only at the tires and the m-wraps and the jail tvs go through it still pretty easily but then we got the call on the radio that one of the jingle trucks had gotten stuck you know i can't even see it it's so far back so i'm like all right and your job in all this is like an observer or you're not in charge of anything are you i'm not in charge of anything but it's weird because i outrank everything yeah you know what i mean yeah so you kind of are in charge you're in charge in a way yes right and so we stop we're waiting for the jingle truck to unmess itself and then all of a sudden it was like another dam broke and then the water hit right to our grills like almost immediately and now it's a situation where you can't just get out of the car and so we a little backstory we had killed taliban members and taken their icoms and then we keep this is on the same operation this is on a previous one okay so i'm telling the story so that you understand we kept the icons in the patrol and we put it on scan and when the taliban started talking we'd catch it on the scan then we'd hand it to the terp the terp would interpret it and then we'd pass over the radio whatever was being said so when we were in the flash flood now we're like worrying about the water it comes across the radio like hey the taliban sees that we're stuck in the water and they're maneuvering to ambush on us okay yeah so now you're now you're in a situation where it's like all right what's your poison like because the machine guns are all hooked up to the trucks but at a certain point you might drown if you stay with the truck you might drown just trying to get to the shore uh so it's like what do you do well we all got up on the roofs of our trucks and the waters kept coming up and finally i was like i i'm gonna die from drowning before i die getting shot with a with the television so i'm gonna take my chances so i slung my weapon and i i was the first one to jump in i jumped in i swam to shore current was ripping but i'm a pretty good swimmer i got over there and then i started making rope bridges so i tied some rope up to a tree i threw it to the truck and then we started having guys shimmying from the trucks over to the shore and so then we passed this down and all the trucks start doing it well what happened was one of the soldiers in the back got on a rope bridge and he when he with the weight of him when he got in the water he panicked and he let go and he didn't like clip in or anything and so he rips down river so then the call comes on the radio hey we lost a soldier he's he's done he's gone and this is an afghan soldier i'm assuming no it's an american american american soldier yep and the afghan so he when he floats down river one of the ansf see the ansf cm2 the afghan national security force and so they all started talking about how they saw him and he basically from our last vehicle they spot him float by him so we know he's still ripping down the river right so now you're in a situation where people start getting off the trucks we know the taliban's maneuvering we've just lost this guy down the river and it's like oh this is getting messy real quick this is a little beyond getting messages and so we try to call in air support um you know because we've got a guy going down the river all this stuff and they deny it because it's raining and it's it's red air so they say no so i grab a bunch of guys and i'm like come on follow me we're gonna go do a patrol we're gonna try and find this guy and it's it's weird because they're not really my guys so i gotta like play diplomat and be like can i have some of your guys to go do this but i had good relationships so i was able to do that and then it gets even weirder so then the taliban passed over their radio that they had captured the american soldier so we got we picked up chatter that the taliban has the american soldier and so then we're all like man we got there's a the acronym was dust one so like we got a dust one situation so we call that over the radio and previously they said they wouldn't send aircraft but this time now that because we're right there on the board of pakistan when the taliban's confirmed that they have one of our men they're like we're sending an air support so they send this section of apaches like immediately and it was awesome i mean it was a female section lead and i was listening to her on the radio and she must have killed like 20 dudes and she was just like stoic like killed five secondary explosion rpg he's dead and like we were just watching her just like sweep this hillside just laying waste and um i'll just fast forward to the end of this story what happened was the soldier we ended up finding him the next morning he washed down river he drowned and we ended up actually having we thought he had been rigged with the explosives and so my eod tech put his bomb suit and walked up to him in the river and cut him down and when he floated down river i actually caught them and pulled them out and i don't know if you've ever seen any on this drown but like their stomach expands and they get all these veins and what had happened was the taliban even though we were listening to them they were monitoring the ansf radios and when the ansf saw the soldier float by they got on their radios the taliban heard that and then they pat knowing that we were listening to them passed misinformation to get into our loop but you know when i when i reflect back on it them doing that triggered the apaches which ultimately killed all of them so it's just one of those situations that i mean so you asked me like what did we do like there's a story of like you know you leave that and we're doing a resupply for a platoon fob and you just walk away from like that was there's just a lot to unpack right there so did the water eventually recede and the vehicles were able to drive after that the next morning it went down and we were able to get all the vehicles out because we brought from external sources some wreckers to help us pull stuff out but they made us go up and down the river looking for the soldiers rifle and mvgs which we were going to find but we spent probably until lunchtime the next day just walking through the water acting like we were going to find that and finally somebody made the decision to stop and then we got back on our trucks and left and what's the op temple like for you so there's one mission that takes two days three days what are you doing after that so you know then you go back to the company fob maybe spend a day reset and then you drive back to the battalion fob and then i involve myself in the battalion battle rhythm the meetings i continue to offer advice but every time we're back at the battalion fob anywhere in the battalion battle space where an ied is found and my eod techs fly out there i would go with them i mean i can just keep going for stories all day but we here's an example in that same space there was a helicopter that was flying a iso container of machine guns out to one of the outposts and it pickled it and which means it i don't know what happened but they decided to drop the iso container in the middle of mountains so like hey we need you to go up there check it out we want to send eod because there might be explosives in it so we fly up there we get to the thing see if we can re-sling load it we can't so we're like we're just going to blow it up they're like no you can't blow it up it's got machine gun and stuff and we're like well it's all burnt they're like it doesn't matter you got to carry it out so i was literally carrying like 250 cal receivers like through the mountains and it was all unusable but they didn't want to leave it there and we were supposed to fly out that night so i didn't bring this is such a stupid move i didn't bring like warming layers or things for the next day and of course because it took us so long to carry all that stuff then it got dark and then the aircraft didn't want to land in the mountains so we had to spend the night up there and i almost froze to death i remember the only thing we had was a body bag and i slept in the body bag spooning another man so that i wouldn't freeze to death i mean that talk about in your head when you're like in the body bag right yeah as you're doing these operations what are you what are your you know you you mentioned that earlier when you're in ramadi and you're handing out hun you know thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to various people and you're starting to think from a strategic perspective this doesn't seem like maybe the greatest idea in the world when you've got 40 vehicles going out to resupply 40 soldiers out in an out station somewhere and the risks involved and now you lose a soldier which is freaking horrible and now you're going to a mountaintop to recover destroyed weapons because you're not allowed to blow them in place what is your what are your thoughts of this now year how long you've been in for at this point you're yeah so that was eleven so seven six seven years so so you've got a little bit more maturity as a as a human and as a military officer are you starting to wonder what the hell's going on absolutely i mean you just outline really good points right there i think what ate me the most when i took that 40 vehicles to that 40-man platoon i could see pakistan i could see their bases i could see where they shot mortars at us from and we couldn't do anything so when you talk about strategic problems like does america really want to win this war like i can see the home base right over there like why can't i go over there and kill them and so i mean when i look back at the afghan war i can't wrap my brain around that if i was going to put service members lives at risk i'm going to do whatever it takes to win the war or i'm not going to be there but there was just a ton of things that we didn't do from a foreign policy standpoint to allow the service members to win the war it's criminal almost and so yes standing there at the border of pakistan i remember looking at their home bases and just thinking this is crazy and then how long you this deployment is a one-year deployment yeah and in the middle of it you go home you miss the birth of your son first son but you show up what two three days but after he's born that's right and now you're going through this transition of one day you're sitting there waiting to get blown up by an ied and the next day now you're sitting uh looking at the new crib holding your son yeah and i i agree i know it's horrible to say but like the mindset of not wanting to be a part of that kind of while you're still trying to work i never you know the in the in the navy we go on six months maybe seven months maybe eight month deployments and i never went home from one of them uh you know the army would send guys home because they'd be on deployment god bless them for 12 months 14 months 16 months they it was mandatory that they would send guys home and even even like battalion commanders would go home for two weeks to give guys a break and give guys rest and let them see their families but you go home it's it's two weeks at home i mean are you able to adapt at all or is it just how i just just send me back i think maybe if your home life was consistent there might be some utility in it but when my home life had changed so much like my wife couldn't even stay in her house because she had just had a kid she was bedridden she was at her mom's you know there i i'm not able to take care of her she's having to have her mom take care of her so i've gotta for my two east go stay at my mother-in-law's i've got a new kid i mean it's just it was like i was living somebody else's life when i came home and again all you can think about is the constant combat you're going to go back to and it was just a lot you roll back over there and you just maintain this op tempo for the year that you're there that's right i mean i ended up random operations tag along on random operations well i moved probably in october november-ish i moved out of eastern pakico and moved into a province called ghazni there was a district called andar and so we built a base from the ground up called andar fabandar and i moved to support one 187 so i went from 3187 to 1187 and back then so this is in 2010 the polish had run that ao for like two or three years and the polish don't fire unless it's in self-defense don't do anything aggressively so that's why they put americans there and so again you know we've been at war for at eight years at that point and it was almost like uncharted territory in the middle of afghanistan ghazni is like the economic center you know maybe outside of kabul and so for you know it's similar to ramadi where like i went to sua we've been in ramadi for six years and all of a sudden i'm using baby wipes and we have no infrastructure and it's like it's like we've never been there before i felt this at the same thing happened when i went to fobandar like we're building it from the ground up and it's even the the kinetic threat it was like no one had done anything and that that area was different than the first one i described because the first one was much more distributed it was like these long day patrols that one was very much like day in day out day in day out like foot patrol from the base or route clearance to just that adjacent little block over there and so so you were out you actually moved to that out station to that fob yes and how big was that fob how many people were there was it like a company was it battalion headquarters but all their companies were in company outpost so i mean there was only probably 200 people in it did they have a company there that they were utilizing for that ao that was running out operations for them yeah so i understand the question i think i think potentially one of the companies was in the battalion fob because obviously somebody owned that battle space i can't remember and and so then you're there and you're doing the same thing you're going out on patrol whoever's going out on patrol trying to capture the id information sending that id information back up the chain of command that's right yeah so um a couple more stories just to illustrate that kind of what i did one time one of the companies found a house full of it looked like propane tanks but it was like aluminum tanks filled with powder found like a hundred of them just didn't know what it was and so they threw them all in a well and then they took a picture of it put on a storyboard wait a second so the platoon's out on patrol yep they find a hundred aluminum tanks filled with random powder yep they don't know what to do with it so they chuck them in a well that's exactly right they did not misstate that okay and then you know young captain sheller is reviewing the storyboards because i felt like that was the right thing to do again i didn't have a boss so it was like you know i was in general support as battalion but i really could have done nothing had i chose to but every day went through all the storyboards went through all the stick acts went through all the stuff like was really trying to hide myself that story right there like i could i could just imagine looking at one of my platoon creators like okay tell me that again yeah yeah wait so what'd you do yeah wait what was in them and you hucked them all in the well and they were so ignorant they then took a picture of it and put it in their store usually when you do something that like raises an eyebrow and you're like i don't know if i should have done that you don't include it on the screen so they put it in the storyboard it's one of those things where i i bet a platoon commander can articulate you know what we didn't know what to do we couldn't carry him out we didn't want the enemy to use them the well was deep made the call sir yeah it's like okay roger that i'm having a tough time briefing this off the chain of command but i got your back so it turns out it was aluminum powder so in that ao so in the first one i was at it was all potassium chlorate there was a match factory in pakistan so all the ieds were potassium chlorate but in this new ao they used uh aluminum powder with ammonium nitrate so we called that anal actually and so what they had in those containers was aluminum powder that they would mix with the fertilizer to make the ieds and so i identified it i pulled the patrol together we went out and when we got into the house like i'm literally holding this powerpoint print out of the storyboard it's got a picture of the house and it's got a well in it and i'm like walking around there's no well i'm like are we in the right house it's kind of dark what had happened is they the taliban had come behind the soldiers and put like plywood over the well and then covered it in dirt to basically hide the aluminum powder that the soldiers had all thrown in there and so it took me like 45 minutes but finally i was like no no this is the house like this it has to be like right here and then you just start kicking it you're like oh you know so then we we ended up disposing of all of that um so there's one example of like what does a counter id team leader do they're you know just caught that and then the other thing i usually did was i i walked the rails so as an infantry guy i would pull probably six or seven soldiers out of the route clearance and on known routes where we found a lot of aed's the the time i got my bronze star where we were walking down a route i'm on one side they're on another side and you could see guys messing with something on the road like probably an id right so you know we try to close the distance this guy runs away circles around he's getting chased by my other guys on the other side of the street and so he crosses the street while i'm running out the other side and i was like one of those things where you like you both come around a corner and you're like face to face and you both just like try and pick up your guns and somehow you both miss each other from like three feet away and uh you know got behind a corner killed a couple guys and some machine gun fire went off and there was at one point where like i just kept chasing people and i found myself like 200 meters away from even like the guys i was with maybe like you know a half kilometer away from the patrol and then like panic started to sit and like oh like i'm kind of separated here um but i was able to i was able to bring the infantry up and link up and they got some mortars downrange and the takeaway from the story is we uncovered seven ieds on the throughout that day and rendered them all safe and they were trying to do a complex ambush right with all those ieds and we were able to push push them off but like there's an example of like great tactical success like what the did that do in terms of the overall picture like i'm not really sure like on the tactical level i mean that was was an awesome play that we ran but i mean i just got so many examples of that and then then i start studying the operational strategic levels that i'm like what was the connection to what we're trying to do like why why are they still coming from pakistan you know what is my political leaders doing like are we trying to get rid of the taliban or are we going after al qaeda yeah so many questions so you wrap up that deployment yep you come home how's coming home now that you're home home yeah so when i got home from afghanistan again i was going to get out but they offered me formal schools called expedition warfare school it's captain a major school it's a year and i just thought man this deployment has taken a lot out of me emotionally spiritually like a year in school with a bunch of other warfighters of my peer group probably really good for me rather than trying to jump into the corporate world and so i took the ews job instead of getting out which was in quantico you owe time after that that's right right look at you one step ahead of me yeah so the catch to that is there's a two-year requirement on the back side so by taking the ews job i then was required to go serve two more years as a company commander and this is going to get you out to what how many years really it gets me out to a career is what it does but yeah it takes me about 10 or 11 years yeah 10 or 11 years at which point a lot of guys say hey i'm i've only got you know what is it you look at it only got eight more years and really how many tours is that plus one of that last tour is a twilight tour so i really only have six years so people start negotiating and rationalizing staying in even if maybe it's not 100 what they're into at the time that's right which is which is interesting because you're almost the whole time you've been saying you were going to get out you're going to get out you're going to get out which is weird i never i actually never thought i was ever going to get out until i got out the whole time i thought i was staying in forever i'm like oh i'm gonna do 50 years so watch this and then it was very abrupt for me you know when i was like oh you know what i'm actually going to get out and so i always thought i was going to stay in which is which was i guess it was very easy for my decision-making process because i was like hey what do you guys need me to do yeah what do you want me to do let me go to that call go to that whatever let's go um but you were always kind of i think it was like we started with the beginning of my story this i never had ambitions to go in the military and this was never what i thought i would end up doing the reason i continued to stay in is because i found a lot of purpose in being a marine officer and i truly enjoyed it truly enjoyed being around the service members so it's one of those things where i guess my self-image was never to be a career military officer but i continued doing it because i found fulfillment in it yeah and there's also something beneficial about someone that's not considering that oh i want to be you know that's i always joke about the seal teams because in the seal teams if you ask a seal officer a young seal officer why they came in the seal teams they answer what's what what what job do you want to do i guarantee what they're going to say is i want to be a platoon commander i want to be a seo platoon commander that's the that's which by the way is like three years into your career yeah you ask an army officer what they want to do a lot of them will say oh i want to be a battalion commander i want to be a brigade commander i want to be a division commander that's actually in their head seal officers do not have that in their head most seal officers don't have that in their head and there's something that's kind of nice about someone that's in the army that just says hey you know i want to be i i hey i want i don't have this big aspirations of being a general or a colonel they just want to go and do the job there's some benefits to it there's also some detractions to it because once guys in the seal teams get done with that platoon commander tour a lot of them go okay you know i did that and we've in the seal teams tried to extend the operational tour a little bit longer you know you can you can extend it you can go a little bit longer and still do work but eventually it's going to dry up for you and you don't get to be a battalion commander you could be still team commander but that's not the same as a battalion commander it's really not the same as a brigade commander cool jobs but it's not what people come in for so the fact that you were sort of always thinking maybe i'll get out means to me in a positive way you weren't trying to maneuver for your career because there's a lot of guys that oh yeah here's oh i need to do this billet i'm trying to get this award i'm trying to get this deployment so i can get promoted there are some people that that's what's driving their careers and it's it's never it's it's horrible to see it's horrible to see what they do and there's guys in the certainly guys in the seal teams that are like that that's their that did have the goal of a platoon commander is just a step just a stepping stone because what they really want to do is they really want to make admiral or whatever same thing can happen in the army as well same thing can happen in the marine corps but for you you're kind of like playing it by ear yeah which means you're not making decisions based on hey i'm going to look out for my career which is a good thing in many cases yeah that i see that in marshall too what you're the problem you described with guys doing what they want to do because a lot of marstock guys want to be a team leader or you know want to be a company commander company commander is kind of the pinnacle where they then bleed off all the talent because the company commander at marshall is a major and then they don't stick around to be the battalion commanders that they need them to do but i also see the general infantry a lot of the counter to what you just said there's a lot of guys that come in that have aspirations for being a battalion commander have aspirations for being a general and they're you know you kind of alluded to it there may be some positives to that in terms of big thinking and you know speaking good about the system and figuring out how to navigate the system correctly but i honestly think the focus should always be on the service member and what's best for them and i understand as a leader i've been doing this for 17 years the responsibility to the organization versus the responsibility to the service members so i'm not saying in all respects a leader always should just be looking out for the service member but i think when you get focused on how to navigate your career it does cloud your perspective on how to strike that balance so nonetheless you take the deal and you go okay i'm gonna go expeditionary warfare school and then i'm gonna owe them two more years so that's gonna put you at 11 years 12 years your wife's probably like cool at least this my guy might be gone a lot but at least he's got a job and it's we're getting a paycheck yeah i had my so as soon as i got back from afghanistan she got pregnant with a second kid so my two older boys are 14 and a half months apart so that's like you know before afghanistan and then like first time getting home from afghanistan and then it was like i said very quickly within nine months of being home from afghanistan went from like no kids to two kids you know so it was life was changing um and then we waited another couple years and had my third son in between my next two deployments so how was expeditionary warfare school i liked it um you know the anxiety that i had after ramadi came back full fledged after afghanistan started having different symptoms started having like face numbness and my eye my vision started getting blurred and everyone wanted to lump it into ptsd which i knew i wasn't struggling with ptsd i didn't have like bad dreams i didn't feel bad about anything i did i just had like tony soprano-ish like real physical symptoms and it just people then the buzz phrase was ptsd and i just don't think people understood what anxiety was and i just had to work through that and so i don't think i really understand what what you're talking about yeah so ptsd would be like oh i'm having trouble sleeping yeah i'm uh the hyper alert and all that yeah what's the anxiety piece what's what's going on with this and is it physiological yeah it's both so it's part hereditary it's part you know nurture nature so also it's part experience so i think the simplest way to just say it is once your fight or flight gets burnt enough your brain starts producing different chemicals that it may not be if you're not under high stress all the time and for me it just took a while to recalibrate i had to get into yoga i had to get into meditation i had to you know the best remedy is working out so if you can work out stay healthy and stay fit but the problem is a lot of guys after these deployments fall into the false trap of like alcohol and alcohol is one of those things where you know it can suppress some of those anxiety or things for a little bit but what they don't realize is it comes back twice as worse the next day and so ews was one of those like false hopes for me where i was like coming back i hadn't been drinking for a year and i was like drinking beer and you know i feel good at night and the next day i'd be like oh why do i feel so horrible uh i was also getting older too right i'm in my 30s now i'm not in my 20s anymore and so i think part of it was just learning my body learning all the physical reactions that took place in the deployment and not allowing myself to just be bend in a ptsd category that may not apply to me even though that's what i think everyone wants to label someone when they get back from something like what i had gone through and uh you know it all worked out i figured it out but it just took me reading a lot of books and talking to a lot of people probably more than i needed to to navigate it let me ask you this so if you get these like anxiety type situation and it's caused from some traumatic situation that you've been through and now this is post the traumatic situation isn't it like what you're talking about well i don't understand the difference between ptsd yeah and what you're talking about anxiety i think the the way i distinguish it is ptsd from what i've learned from the psychologist typically manifests itself in to guilt shame emotional struggling with some of the things that you went through that may have a psychological and physical impact on you anxiety to me think of it like you're about to do public speaking and everyone has butterflies but like a severe case of anxiety is almost like debilitating right and those physical manifestations may not necessarily be tied to a trauma they may just be tied to the way like you said physiologically or built or it may just be because you have experienced so many things that your brain is producing chemicals in an imbalanced manner no i'm not a doctor so somebody needs to check the stats on this but i can tell you having talked to many psychologists there is a in the whatever that manual is a major differences between the two okay and then you as you're working out and you're doing yoga and you start to get through that did that come after you went through the drinking phase of trying to get through it i always worked out sometimes i worked out and drank so i had to just get through the drinking thing yeah and then just focus on working out yeah and and this is all happening while you're at ews yeah correct learn anything good at ews what are you learning at ews aws is a little bit more like operational level yeah i went to two formal schools well i went to command staff later as a major command of staff is very varsity level treats you like an adult here's all the reading go read it and we'll talk about it like it was adult ews is like somewhere between you're still like in the basic training pipeline and you're like getting close to an adult but we're not really sure yet so it's you're treated as such and there are a bunch of captains that aren't careers yet that probably need to be treated like that but i think it gets generalized too much so there were times where i was like i'm a professional i've been to like multiple wars like don't talk to me like that um what's ews it stands for expeditionary warfare school it's like the captain to major pme so you don't have to go to the resident but you have to do the school so there's like box of books where you can get sent the books and get credit for it that way there's seminars where you can go to like night school for it so every captain has to go through it to become a major but they select the top ones to go to the resident one-year course and so that's where you got selected for that's right so your career is going pretty good at this point actually it was an indicator that i was on the right track [Music] uh and what what you this is a one year school where are you going at the end of that where'd you go on the end of that i went to third battalion second marines as a company commander so as a headquarters company commander where we our deployment was another mew was 10 months get on ships sail around the ocean and be ready to respond and as a headquarters company commander on a mew i had i had like a recon platoon i had an engineer platoon and then i had like all the supporting establishments in the battalion this was kind of an eclectic group of individuals and then they also used me as like the future operations planner if you will so as the opposite was on the ship they'd send me to like egypt or they'd send me to wherever to do the planning for whatever that bilateral was um and so that was my my 10-month deployment there that was a 10-month deployment yeah it was long shipboard deployment it was like right after the uh the libya thing um and the benghazi thing and like the and because of that thing the mew deployments had gotten like backed up something happened that messed up the deployment cycle because of that operation and so to like fill the gap my deployment was 10 months because they always want overlap and so i don't remember fully understand why it happened but they told us from the very beginning like this is gonna be a long one boys and that was a shipboard deployment it was so you're living on a ship which is good times yeah something but that's weird that's almost like for me you know because i came in before the war that's like a normal deployment that we did back then i did two deployments with the marines on the args out here on the west coast but it was like hey sail around go to wherever we're going like i went to egypt i went to oman went to these various random places and did whatever exercises we're doing people getting spun up about whatever they're getting spun up about you probably did you create any powerpoint briefs for you on that you know i did uh all right so that's another deployment and what comes after that so then i get back and they actually i was still a captain and they tried to make me the operations officer and i did the battalion operation yeah so i had actually gotten the top company commander fitness report as the headquarters company commander which is kind of rare so i think it just speaks to my potential commander really liked me thought highly of me and so he tried to make me the operations officer and i wasn't selected that year so i was going to be in zone the next year and regiment's like brother we got like five majors sitting on the deck up here that need key billet like if you're gonna make a captain that's not even selected like we're going to give you a major and so he came back to me and was like hey like this is what happened so you're not going to beat up so what do you want to do do you want to stay in the battalion and you've already done your company commander tour or do you want to go somewhere else and in my community headquarters company commander is like one of those weird ones where you can hide somebody there and so it's not always the best guy and so like in terms of street cred in my community i didn't want people to think i was just a headquarters company commander right and so i was like you know i gotta no i'm gonna stay here and i'm gonna go be the weapons company they offer me weapons company which is like the probably the best company commander usually in battalions and so that's what i did so i was a weapons company commander for the next year and a half did you do a deployment how's that i did so we did a deployment it's called a unit deployment program so we went to okinawa and we're the purpose of it strategically is to be involved in the war plan if north korea were to be do something but all we really do is try to prevent our marines from getting drunk and getting into fights and then we'll take them into you know japan and go into tokyo we went into south korea and that's a six-month deployment six months what number deployment was that for you five including when one of those was a one-year deployment yeah one was a year one was ten abroad mahdi was seven and then the first meet was six and the udp was six so it all comes out to i mean about four years yeah all the stuff up and then after that what's next yeah what's crazy too is with all those deployments like that was middle of 15. then i got promoted the major and i never deployed again so quite honestly all of that it was through my captain time which is even what made it crazier and so i got promoted to major and the monitor at the time was actually the company commander of my platoon commander buddy who got blown up in ramadi guy's name was eric clark and i knew him real well and so we had a special relationship and he had selected me for a place called ppno it's like plans policies and orders and in the marine corps it's a very prestigious bullet so it's like one of those builds that if you do well you can go on to be a general officer so if you're a guy that is playing the deep game like you described like that's the job you want and i uh at this point i had decided it was going to be a career so after 3-2 i was like this is i'm going to go to 20. and i just had no desire to sit in a basement cubicle in the pentagon and you know design the new helmet or whatever i was going to do right i just i couldn't do it and like you said earlier like i loved teaching and i loved idealistic young officer so i asked him if i could go to the basic school and he obliged because he had a lot of people that wanted to do people you know so he cut me orders to basic school and i tell that story about i knew him because it's not usually that easy to just talk to your monitor and say no i don't want that i want this and have it work out but in that situation it did and so he got me orders to the basic school and i got back from the udp in july of 15 and then i off cycle moved in october 15 and i bring that up just to say my kids now i have three kids at this point they're the two older ones are in school and i didn't want to pull them out of school so i actually geo batched so just again more more distance right so get back from that deployment and then i went and was living in a condo in dc and driving back to north carolina on the weekends for nine months uh until the following summer when i moved him up all right so the basic school this time you're on the other side watching people go through was that a good to me that sounds like a good learning experience seeing people how they react from a leadership perspective and from a psychological perspective that's right yeah and it's great the basic school is all taught by officers so unlike school of infantry where the instructor is primarily enlisted at the basic school the primary instructor is the officer so even as a major they sent me through a pretty good training regimen and i had to get qualified to train every single thing so it's like they have a different qualification for each subject that you attempt to teach and so they do a really good job there i got to be the operations officer a company commander and the war fighting director operations officer and war fighting director typically lieutenant colonel billets but i just got the opportunity because at that time they didn't have the lieutenant colonels and they chose me to fill both of those bills at different times and my three-year tour there so i mean i really got a great run out of that and not to kind of like focus on this you haven't really brought it up a little bit but just to kind of because where this story ends up your your career is like going really well at this point yeah i mean as you mentioned you were the number one platoon commander i didn't mention it as the weapons company commander i got submitted for the leftwich award which is you know best company commander in the marine corps i didn't win obviously but just to have my battalion commander submit me up through the regiment division for that was an honor and then yeah at the basic school like the monitor tried to send me to ppno and gave me exactly what i wanted at the basic school then when i got to the basic school they made me the opso and you know i said brand new major which is a normally lieutenant colonel's billet and then i did a company commander tour and then it was a new co and then the new ceo hand chose me to be the warfighting director and so yeah i mean i think i was very competitive now what were your fit reps looking like this whole time i'm all top i mean if we want to skip forward the judge in my case was like i've never seen a record so example exemplary it also high marked so there's an impartial guy that looked at my reports and it's like this is the best i've ever seen so but you got to keep in mind like i said earlier at the basic school the best captains went to tbs or went to ioc and when i was at tbs i was a major the best of majors don't always go to tbs the best captains do and so i was a little off track and when i the reason is coming out of ramadi number one i didn't have anyone that used to be in the military there's a lot of people in the military today i think nepotism is is prevalent like a general sons or at least had a regimental father and they they don't get a free pass but they understand the key billets that they need to go to and they understand the relationships that need to be harnessed and and developed and so these small advantages in the beginning turn into bigger advantages over time so i guess my point is when i went to school of infantry as a young captain that didn't help me at all as a professional and probably even going to afghanistan on an ia billet where i didn't get a report from a marine didn't help me at all in terms of career progression so like that whole three years where it was very important to probably separate yourself i just didn't do it but going into my 3-2 company commander time because all those experiences i had did make me a very effective leader i was able to really shine as a company commander and those reports were really what stood me uh it got me starting to separate from the pack and then as a major at the basic school again same thing so in those six years it was like i think that's when people started looking at my record and saying who's this guy but i think most of my other peers that there's a lot of peers that i have that are i will admit much better than me i mean smarter than me more talented and so i look at some of some of my peers and i'm just always impressed and i just always you know want to aspire to be like some of these guys but some of those guys were put on tracks early kind of hand selected for things early that i just don't think anyone knew about me until later in my career probably similar stories to ocs and tbs right i show up on day one and i'm lost and by the end people are like look at this guy maybe he's not as lost as we thought he was i think my career is almost the same story so you get done with being the uh basic school instructor and then it's off to then it's then is that when you went to command and staff college yep yeah and now so now you're in it to win it oh yeah yeah because once i got to the base of school i was in it to win it so yep i went to command staff got selected for school it was nice because i was already up in quantico is it hard to get selected for school uh it's not it there's two things one you got to be competitive so probably in the top 40 percent which really isn't that much but top 40 and then you have to be the timing testament right so there's a couple factors in place not always the best sometimes it's just about timing and how how long is this how long you go there for commander steps a year a solid year and as again now you're going to owe time but you don't care at this point because you're that's right you're doing a career your wife's on board with doing a career she loves the stability she's looking at retirement yep she's like we're set for life shares of that i think we're over selling it now but yeah she i mean our kids are all in school now so my youngest is now in preschool three kids in school they're still young enough that we want some stability and my goal actually was to go back to lejeune so when i was there as a captain i had bought a 50-acre piece of timberland that i've got four-wheelers and stuff that i keep on it and then we still own my house in jacksonville so i had two properties still in north carolina when we were up in d.c and so my goal after command staff was to get back to north carolina and just remain there until retirement and so that was kind of my play now some of the some of the more conflicted thoughts you had when you were in ramadi when you were in afghanistan are those are you are you kind of just dealing with those as in like hey that's the way it is sometimes you know i can do a good job i can try and mitigate that stuff in the future when you're at command and staff college and you're talking about now more senior level strategic level things are are you having considerations around those things are you having discussions around those things do you feel like you've sort of accepted that that's the way the system works and there's some benefits to it and there's some negatives to it and you can as you get more senior you can focus more on the benefits where are you at mentally yeah it's a great question so at command staff you can do a master's i think it's part of the curriculum now when i went through as a student it was like an option you didn't have to do it because it required extra classes and a thesis to write on your own time so some people just wanted the down time chose not to do it but i wanted the masters i wanted to challenge myself and most instructors there implore almost like they drive you towards writing something about like the tactical level small squad unit level like insightful novel idea i wanted to write about foreign diplomacy and how it was broken and i had been working on the small tactical level at the basic school for three years i was the warfighting director for the year previous like there's probably no one more qualified to write some type of thesis 20 page paper easily on how to do that but it just it didn't interest me um and so i was reaching for foreign diplomacy and my my instructors my phds told me like every year there's somebody that comes in here and talks about how the goldwater nichols act needs to be revamped and it's just the same old stuff and you know my counter that was like well it hasn't been fixed yet has it and that there's probably nothing more important when we're still losing wars and so despite all the pushback on it i wrote you're only supposed to write 20 pages then the parameters of the paper were minimum of 20 papers no more than 80 pages so i wrote 65 pages like i just couldn't stop writing and i gave it to my instructors and they just handed it back to me like immediately like 65 pages i'm not going to read this it's like you guys assign 80 pages a night of reading 80 pages a night i just spent months writing this and you can't even give me the time to say these parts of your paper don't add value like you won't even like read it they like make it less and so that's what i was up against it was like i felt like as an officer i wanted to be challenged academically and i just i didn't get it from the phds so i did i made it 30 pages got my master's checking the box and then nobody ever read the paper again did you learn any good information at command and staff collins was it helpful oh yeah i i do think the you know like if you're saying command of staff college is their value in it a hundred percent the real question is could it be better and yeah it absolutely could be better but it's always easier to find ways for it to be better i think from like 30 years ago what they have now is you know world's better than what we used to have like they have small groups they facilitate good discussions they really challenged my thinking on the wars i mean we went back to like frederick the great and prussia all the way through napoleon and civil war and modern day and i think they did a really good job but they didn't go in too deep onto anything and they challenged me and like henry kissinger's book diplomacy i had never opened it up and they really pulled a lot out of there that challenged me and i'm a i believe in realism and i don't think american foreign diplomacy has really gotten to that level and it's been like explored a little bit but again they just exposed me to a lot i think it's really incumbent upon the student that once they're exposed to something to then really get the education on their own and it takes independence to be able to do that if you just go through the motions of what the school asks you'll get very little out of it was there any paradigm shifts in your thought while you were there no my problem in an education system is i always start to get a little frustrated because there's like a system to the education system and like if you haven't figured out about me i'd like to challenge things and at a certain point people don't want to hear it and you're just becoming a pain in the ass and so there's like a line that you it's different for every person every boss i've ever had says i want honest feedback what does that mean to you like well i guess i'll find out through trial and error of giving you honest feedback and there's gonna be a certain point where i'm gonna either read through your face or through your emotion or what you're saying to me that i've gone too far and now i'm starting to annoy you and then that's when you know you got to back off and so i always find myself in the small group discussions like i can dominate any conversation with my opinions but there's a time where you got to read the room and understand you need to be a passive listener and so that was probably my struggle with it i just felt like some of my views went counter to what they were trying to teach and if i was to get too aggressive with it it seemed to be counterproductive advice discussed and so a lot of it has to do with counterinsurgency you know same thing with ews like i just the way you win the way you fight a counter or the way you fight an insurgency is to not get involved in an insurgency and that requires deeper thought on the operation on strategic levels and we've just celebrated these generals for the last 20 years that have wrote the small words manuals or reinvented the small world awards manuals and counterinsurgency manuals and there's a time and place where we as military tacticians need to understand how to do it absolutely 100 agree read all the books got it but to just continue to engage them for multiple decades without like real metrics of effectiveness or exit strategies afghanistan withdrawal is just the perfect example i mean there couldn't be a better historical example of how that was just terribly executed and it's just a symptom of a much larger problem and so a lot of these opinions i had in commanded staff solidified through my paper and you know i left there i told the story about me handing the paper to the phds because that's just another example of like no one really cared they were there to expose you to the things that they were exposed to but they didn't look at like where stu sheller was academically and say how do we get stu sheller individually to be more challenged and developed to where we need him to be and maybe they don't have the bandwidth to do it but you know you look at the great military minds of history like klossowitz he had a guy named scharnhorst that was a military professional that sat there and ch and knew where kosowitz was met him there and then challenged him specifically and i just i i sometimes wished i had that so you wrap up at that school yeah and then where are you off to and then i so i told the story if i wanted to get back to north carolina so i told my monitor different monitor now don't have a relationship with this guy and so i had seen him on two road shows which is like yearly the monitors go around and you get an opportunity to shape what your desires are going to be when you're a mover so i told them two years previous i want north carolina i don't care i want north carolina and no one really wants camp lejeune so usually when you say camp lejeune it's like all right you got it but you know i had spent my whole time in camp lejeune and quantico i'd never been out to the west coast or anywhere else and so i knew there was a chance that the marine corps was going to start to say no brother you you've uh homesteaded too long so then i saw him the year before same thing and so he said all right i'll tell you what to do if it's not north carolina i'll call you and keep in mind i didn't do my opso billet based on that story i told and as a major you got to do what's called key billet and for an infantry officer that's opso or exo so coming out of command staff they're like you have to be an exo to remain competitive and so i mean everybody got orders in like january february march i mean i got to like the end of march we're talking like you're gonna move in june and i still haven't even talked to this guy like all the school registration is in like january my wife's asking me every day and i'm like you know i don't know what to tell you babe i don't so i finally because i know this guy's real busy but finally i just broke down and i called him and i was like hey man in a march everyone in my command of staff class has orders except for me you told me you would call me if it wasn't campbell's june so i'm assuming i'm still going to campbell june can you confirm and he he's like no campaign's filled he's like but good news we have availability in 29 palms or san diego and i'll let you pick and so i got off the phone with them i didn't know exactly where i was i was at panera and i was still writing my master's thesis at the time so i was like i used to go to panera and just write and so i'm sitting in panera just mad and i'm thinking about all the property i got north carolina and how like i've been telling my wife it would be north carolina for two years now and so i wrote them an email email's a little bit easier for me to not be as emotional because i can kind of edit it and i wrote but i want to put in writing i was like hey man i'm putting this in writing for you i'm going to forgo key billet there's got to be a sexual assault officer or some other thing in north carolina that you can give me it's in writing make it happen then i hit send and like you know you gotta understand like how how scary it is to do something like that because like i essentially said my career is over in the panera but i wanted north carolina and so then he called me back and said this is what he said he said i got your email i'm going to give you exactly what you want and then he hung up oh my god i was like oh man yeah i'm going to be the sexual assault officer second reign division like this is and i'm gonna have to go back and look at all my peers and they're all gonna talk about where they're going to be battalion exos or battalion officers or wherever and i'm gonna have to tell them what crap job i just got because of what i did to myself and i know what he did then because the monitor has two responsibilities he's got a responsibility to the marine corps he's a responsibility to you as a person and the monitor's job responsibility marine corps is to keep competitive officers competitive so then he went he didn't know me from adam so after that he went through my record and as he was going through my record he probably came to the realization like this guy is pretty good if i bury him in a staff job and second marine division then i end his career and he had a responsibility to keep me competitive but he also knew that i had like dug my heels in and i wasn't going to california without like probably you know screaming at the top of the mountain so he was in like a no-win situation and so that's how i ended up at marshall so he wasn't advertising a marshal support battalion xo and he had that kind of hidden on the shelf and so he called me back and he was like hey i've got a martial support battalion xo they're actually asking for infantry officers i haven't made it public it's not really key bill but maybe it is kinda because it's still a battalion exo it's just not an infantry battalion he's like would you be interested in that i was like yeah north carolina marshall this all worked out thank you you know and so that's how it work how it happened and so i took second marines uh mrsb marine raider support battalion is what it's called and so the way it works is marsoc's got three battalions and then they have three support battalions the sport battalions have their logistics common intel marines and they basically just do a six-month workup just in the mrsb and then they aggregate them to the mrb unit and then they do six more months and then so it's like a full year of training and then they deploy as that aggregate team and i was the exo so all i did was facilitate the teams on their timeline but i was only there for a year so quite honestly i only saw like one full cycle and then other cycles in the state of did you go on deployment or no so while i was there because they only have three battalion commanders and so they actually the battalion commanders of the support battalions are actually badged marsaak guys and so they have in that sense they have six battalion commanders so marshawk has at any time six commands selected battalion commanders and so the sodif downrange they have a cycle of when those guys go down there and control command that unit they actually while i was the exo took my battalion commander to be in charge of the sort of so he doesn't deploy with the battalion he only deploys with like maybe five key guys and then some other people from across the regiment so i was essentially the battalion commander for majority of the time while i was back there but i never deployed so i just sat uh there in courthouse bay with my battalion uh his battalion but i was acting and uh it was really it was a good time i i truly enjoyed it and why was that building on me a year because i got selected lieutenant colonel yeah good question i would have stayed in marshall until they until i retired to be quite honest with you but i got selected to lieutenant colonel and i actually went to the manpower meetings it was acting ceo and exo and in the manpower meetings so like i heard it from the horse's mouth they're like we don't have we're filled up with lieutenant colonels that are badge like we can't accept any non-badged lieutenant colonel so you gots to go a kid so i was your wife during that year was everything going cool there yeah everything she's kind of stoked she's in north carolina it's all government i thought we hit a we had a sweet spot then you know once we got back to north carolina we were in our house it was familiar territory i was happy with my job at marsoc kids are in school now so she has a little bit of like sanity yeah i mean it was good things were good on the home phone at that point and so then what happens when you make lieutenant colonel where do they send you so i mean i knew i got i found out i got selected in like october so i'd only been at marshall for like three months so like within three months of taking the job i was looking for the next job and so i had some buddies that were up in division second marine division which was still local and so i basically started putting out feelers and i was like hey i'm gonna have to move um i'll take a staff job up there got my xo job being the exo edelmar soccer support battalion so i don't need key bill anymore i don't think so if you could if you guys could take me i'd appreciate it and then i finished the year at marsoc and that in that spring the chief of staff of mars sox an 06 talked to the chief of staff of the division who's in 06 the chief of staff both of those gentlemen are generalists now actually and between that conversation they decided to make me the sixth marines opso so i don't know how that shook out i don't know if it was because they just thought i was that talented or because i hadn't done key billet in an infantry battalion that they wanted to give me the regimental up so to make me more take care of you that's right but either way it was i mean pretty important job there's only two regiments in the division and to be the operations officer of one of them was a big deal so then i did that for the next year before i was selected to battalion command and then what happened once you got battalion command so i got selected battalion command um shortly after getting to the regimental opposite job so but the regimental opposite job just to paint a picture going into the the story we're about to tell i mean it was the marshlaw job was awesome fulfilling manageable hours good work the regimental opso job was like 20-hour days we spent two months at an itx which is in the mojave desert where it is just expected that like i don't eat i have tobacco and i just drink energy drinks like it's almost like i'm looked down upon if that's not how i conduct myself and it just it took a lot out of me and my boss was uh not very appreciative most of the time and i got into some like this was kind of at the point of my career where i started really pushing back so like as a as a first lieutenant as a exo and ramadi with my battalion commander was kind of verbally and even at times physically abusive like i just kind of took it and in my head was like this is wrong but as a regimental also as a 40 year old man if you start telling me like i'm gonna i'm gonna what do you say i'm gonna fillet you i'm gonna cut you in half that's what i'm like come bring it what you gonna do you know like these are the conversations we would have and it's and it's like dangerous right because and i had these with multiple 06's like i don't know what it is about regimental commanders but they they just felt like they could talk to me like like i was a piece of and i just got to a place in my life in my career where i just wouldn't be talked to like that and so it created this unhealthy tension and then when i would push back on some of these conversations you would think that after like a couple days it would actually um be like a steam release but it almost like it almost was like seen as a threat and it would almost increase the pressure where then they would come back and want to like reassert dominance which would then want to cause me to like reassert like you and it just became unhealthy and everyone could see it and so you just got to understand that like that's what i came out of after a year of just being overworked to like almost like fist fighting a couple times and then going into my battalion commander seat so you you're you're having clashes with regimental commanders oh yeah and as this is happening are you thinking yourself like all right maybe i need to maneuver a little bit here you know i spent a bunch of time at expeditionary warfare school learning about maneuver warfare and not to attack you know hardened positions head on and here i am engaging in verbal battles with my boss yeah do you ever think like well maybe i should have taken a different tact when you have certain people with certain expectations so you can just not push back and try and do an artful way but that type of person is still going to expect you to work 22 hour days and be unappreciative when you do get to bust your ass to get the product to them and then the follow-up question once you finally get that product is where's the next product and so sometimes you get a boss that just no matter what you do whether it's soft diplomacy or whether it's verbal fighting back you're just not going to probably change that person so the point you're making is like pick your battles and be smart but the point i'm making is at a certain point in my life i just refuse to be talked to a certain way and so was that good for my career was that good for my mental health i don't know but like i just i i kind of solidified who i was what i was capable of and how i was going to be treated and that was the bottom line and i had certain values that i wasn't going to compromise and i didn't care what it meant for my career and i've got a couple stories where like i basically tried to throw my career away a couple of times because i was like this is important to me like this is important to me and you know you can think about what you want but um when i think something is right like i just don't back away from it what kind of thing would you put your kind of you know draw a line in the sand on in terms of like regimental commander where you're like you know what i'm done with this there was one time she's there's one time at itx until the culminating event and honor in the service for the marine corps at itx is called um mwx maneuver warfare exercise and one regiment gets two battalions and then one battalion given hyper-enabled capabilities it's free force on force now it's supposed to be free but there's a lot of rules that almost drive the skiba maneuver but i mean it's the closest thing we get in terms of like i is a regiment alapso with two battalions with lar with artillery and with a whole exercise force that determines who got killed and who doesn't get to build a plan but it's also like high stress and so most of our coc was back in the rear where i thought the regimental commander should have been but old generals and kernels think that they need to lead from the front and in doing so actually probably put a lot more risk on the system and they're not comfortable sitting back in a coc that has probably the capabilities that we need and so what that caused was him coming out with a forward capability that i had and in signature management when you're trying to like not turn on certain things or turn them on in a systematic way that disguises your digital footprint he and i were sitting in this tiny little coc that i made out of the back of a trailer it was just one of those situations where i got like six computers i'm typing on all of them i'm trying to control battalion opposites different lar platoons i'm trying to worry about my signature management and he's yelling at me to do something and i'm like quickly answering him while trying to do all these different things and there was just like one situation where he snapped started screaming in front of everyone and i looked at him and that was a situation like you're talking about maneuver warfare i didn't say anything i just walked out it was just like i'm we're gonna fight so i walked out i took like 20 minutes and i came back in and then he like hey up so like maybe you should just chill and get some sleep and that was his way of saying like maybe he went too far like trying to offer me some sleep and of course i'm stubborn i'm like no i don't need to sleep i'm just fine and like i talked to some of my guys after because he did it in front of everyone a couple of my guys were like i can't believe you didn't hit him like i can't believe you had the balls to just walk away like i wouldn't have done that so there were times but i guess i'm just giving those examples because it's like man this just you're exhausting me so it is what it is so you're in that job as the regimental operations officer when the afghan afghanistan withdrawal goes down is that right yeah so another relevant piece of the story is eighth marines we used to have three regiments in the division and eighth marines dissolved and so 1 8 actually got aggregated into six marines so i was the regimental officer that took one eight re-aggregated them and then made sure they had all the supplies that they needed to go out on deployment so like i was working with their obsolete exo like on the daily and so i was very familiar with that unit that got on the mu that ultimately responded to the kabul incident and so that's part of it right 1-8 was my first unit if you remember where my best friend got who with the suicide vest and then 1-8 was in my regiment that i was so kind of man trained and equipped as much as the higher headquarters does to send them out on that deployment and then i was selected to botanic command so in june i went over to school of infantry and took advantage training battalion and that was in like mid-june and you know august 26 is when the uh the s fest attack occurred so in june you were going to school you went to school no i i commanded a battalion that was out of school so it's called advanced infantry training battalion and so that's the place where if you want to go through sniper school if you want to go through advanced squad leader school if you want to go through advanced mortar school all the advanced infantry schools are housed under that instructor cadre of the battalion that i commanded all right so just to get into afghanistan a little bit uh just to get well not to get into a little bit but to put some context around it um february 2020 trump makes a conditional deal with the taliban that we're gonna withdraw um september 2020 the afghan government the taliban hold talks in doha the talks break down they're not making any progress but america still continues this withdrawal plan february 2021 u.s and afghan government officials warn everyone that the taliban is not abiding with the agreements they're they're doing offensive things they're making maneuvers april 14th biden changes the withdrawal deadline from may 1st to september 11th which is let's face it you don't pick the the date september 11th out of a hat there's a you know some kind of a symbolic gesture that that the bite administrated administration wanted which is hey september 11th this thing's over um april 15th the taliban says up you guys reneged on what you said you were going to do you said you're out by may now you're saying september we're going to take counter measures may the taliban starts doing exactly what they said they start increasing attacks increasing in scale their attacks increasing in frequency their attacks june 6th u.s contractors begin pulling out and when you pull out contractors now the afghan forces and this is where you really start to see some of the problems that are going to occur because when you pull out these american contractors that take care of gear and supply replacement gear all of a sudden all that's gone and this includes you know vehicles planes aircraft drones helicopters everything that they've got all of a sudden they don't have the the capacity or the know-how to keep it to keep it running july 1st america closes bagram airfield like in a really kind of weird way of just leaving just just kind of up and left without telling anyone didn't even tell the afghan that that was going to happen the afghan government thought was going to happen just did it and by the way the bagram bagram is a you know is a great logistics hub it's a big massive airfield it's well supplied well supported how long has it been there for 20 years yeah you know 19 years some incredible amount of time so it's in a relatively secure area fully functional and we just kind of leave it july 8th biden says he's confident in the ability of the afghan military to ward off the the taliban and fight the taliban and defeat the taliban july 23rd the taliban starts applying pressure uh president ghani is now not just asking but almost a begging for us assistance there's a conversation that that biden had with ghani and he's he says and i don't know if i'll nail the quote but he's saying that the perception is in the world that things aren't going well and biden says hey whether it's going well or not we need to project a different picture august 6th taliban takes full control of their first province and now this is in direct violation of what they said they would do in the deal with america august 15th taliban takes control of bagram no resistance they just walk in there they there's a prison there they free a bunch of these high-level prisoners from various anti-afghan government and anti-american forces they also enter kabul that day president ghani flees bails out apparently with a bunch of money and i will never get over the irony of the fact that president ghani was this kind of academic individual that had written a book called fixing failed states a framework for rebuilding a fractured world and in that book he uses examples like oregon the state of oregon in america a first world country and that's how he talks about using examples of how to how to fix failed states august 16th biden comes on and says yeah well you know the the afghan military's falling apart because they're cowards and their political leaders are weak weak august 17th allied governments complaining about the lack of communication and coordination from america so they start their own rescue missions and we're hearing a lot about that august 23rd the director of the cia william burns meets with the taliban leader with uh baradar to discuss the evacuation so we're trying to sort of save what we can piece together some kind of an extraction plan that's on august 23rd on august 26th suicide attack 11 marines one soldier one navy corpsman killed the marines apparently they there are reports that they knew that this attack was coming there's even some sources that say that the marines were saying hey we got to put up a stronger perimeter we got to push the perimeter out and they got told no so that happens that's on august 26th and that is when you reach the point where you felt you needed to speak up about that yeah a couple other events in that timeline from at least my perspective so as the service members were watching all that play out real time in social media on the news everybody was getting very upset rightfully so and so one day you didn't mention was 17 or 18 august the commandant of the marine corps released a white letter that said hey i know a lot of you are struggling but i want you to know your sacrifices were worth it and if you're struggling go see the therapist you can google it that's i just summarized the whole thing and i read that and thought this guy doesn't get it the reason people are upset is not because they think their sacrifices aren't worth it the reason they're upset is because the leaders have failed in this withdrawal and that is undermining all their sacrifices and he didn't address that at all and a hand wave of going to the therapist is not good enough so you gotta understand like i read that and it just just kind of started eating at me and then the other thing that you have to know is i've heard from the generals without naming names i've heard this story many times following vietnam there's two commandants commandant wilson and commandant barrow and what they did was and this is what's told today fix the service they focused on cleaning up the draft class the drug users and making sure they could fix the failures from vietnam never does anyone talk about the operational strategic failures that occurred at the general officer level at vietnam that never got addressed and what's happening right now in the at least the marine corps with the shift in the tactical focus and i understand i think there's actually a lot of utility in the new forced design but what we didn't do was take a knee and address the operational and strategic failures that happened in our last two decades and i feel like the narrative is going to be told again that the generals had to fix the service because this current g-watt generation isn't capable of fighting on the tactical level so i'm struggling with these two problems like senior leadership isn't addressing the failures and i and i have a couple examples of that and then yes that takes us to august 26th i'm sitting in my office as a battalion commander and i am literally i have people texting me pictures of the marines that had gotten killed so like i'm finding out like within minutes that's the gossip on the inside the company commander for all the marines that got killed was one of my spcs at tbs meaning he was one of the one of the platoon commanders not an sbc he was he was a teacher at tbs i knew jeff ball real well and i knew some of the marines so and i have this long history with one eighth so there's there was no one where it was more personal to than i felt like myself in that moment and so i sat there in my chair and thought i don't think senior leaders get it i don't think they understand the failures all these conversations about how well it's going i can't think in military history at least over the last 30 or 40 years where there has been such a monumental failure and not one person has acknowledged it and i just knew with certainty that following this event no one was gonna be held accountable like i had enough experience and education to be able to foresee they're gonna wash right past this and you can't make up for the lives that were lost but we can absolutely get ahead and prevent the next stupid decision by starting to hold people accountable and i felt the way to do that was through what i wanted to be just the one video like i did not plan it to be anything other than that i thought i'll make one video i'll explain some of the things that i think they should have done and i'm going to demand accountability because that's what i think we deserve because we're missing it and so that was what led to that first video and even after i made it like i i articulate in that first video that i knew i was potentially going to lose my job my retirement my family's stability like obviously i had thought through that i articulated it in the video and even after i made the video i didn't post it right away i went back to my house and was like pacing deciding whether or not to hit post because i knew as soon as i hit the button it was going to change the trajectory of my life but again i had spent my whole adult life experiencing studying thinking living this and i just got to a place where i didn't think anyone else was going to say it i felt the need to say it videos about i think it's about four and a half minutes long that's right something like that um you're in your camis so that's something so you're you're definitely um not shying away from who you are you you know you stay you but you say in the video you've been in the marine corps for 17 years um and one thing that i reflected when i saw the video for the first time is i thought to myself oh you know your entire career we've been at war you know i spent more than half my career we weren't at war you know we was in the 90s the dry years but i'm thinking man this guy's been in the marine corps for 17 years the marine corps and america has been at war for that entire time you as you mentioned you said you know you got a lot to lose you knew what could happen you knew you were risking your battalion command you know family stability the whole nine yards you bring up that letter from the from the commandant that he wrote and [Music] you know you mentioned did anyone throw their rank on the table and say we shouldn't give up bagram which again you know going back to the the silent five which is what mcmaster called the the joint chiefs of staff that worked for lbj and you can even hear you know that i read in the beginning of guys that reflected back and said i should have said something i should have i should have stood up um you talk about the fact that the people that died dying in vain if we don't uh you say you said if we don't own up and say we did not do this well in the end and you know i always look at that when someone gets wounded or killed in combat at a at a bare minimum at a bare minimum at least we go okay we can learn from what happened in this situation we can pass it on we can make sure it doesn't happen again and that's what you're talking about um and [Music] you kind of close it out by saying i've been fighting for 17 years i'm willing to throw it all away to say back to say my two to my senior leaders i demand accountability and that's it um pretty simple straightforward message you hit post i hit post you hit post um how long did it take before you know you started getting texts from your friends and your senior leadership good question uh no one's asked me this question yet so walked in the house didn't say anything got upstairs and i was sitting in my bedroom on the bed my wife was getting ready for bed she got a text she said did you post a video i was like yep i sure did she's like you know i won't say that girl's name she's like so and so my friend is texting me saying you're going valve right now i was like oh going what viral okay i was like you should probably watch the video tell my wife so she watched it and she's like you need to take this down we're this is we're gonna get in trouble take it down and i was like babe it's already up but you can't can't put the lid back on the bottle and even if i could i don't know if i'd want to and so this is me saying this in this moment i was like i really believe in what i said in that video like i feel very strongly about it and so my wife then started feeling the gravity of what i had just done started stressing out and so then i went downstairs was sitting on the couch and was just kind of thinking and then all my friends started texting me one of my friends from marsoc actually texted me and said stu everything you said in that video is correct but it's going to come at way too high of a personal cost and you're not going to change anything he's like take it down and i told him i was like no this is the hill i'm willing to die and i'm not taking it down and then i had one of my instructors from aitv who texted me his gunny as a section leader awesome dude he's like hey sir i watch your video and i agree with everything in your video but our adversaries could take this video and use it against us and i think you need to think about that and i think you should take it down and to him i said you know there's probably even some truth to that but if we can't fix internally what we're doing right now with this conversation that i'm trying to start then it's all for nothing and so i guess those are all three true stories where i was like you know from my loved ones from my friends from people that worked for me were oh i mean i and there's like 10 other examples right so my phone blew up that night no one none one in my chain of command contacted me that night so just people that knew me and you know i i've never like my wife and i never like slept in separate rooms even when we were angry like early in my marriage i was like i'm never you're never making me sleep on the couch right like this is our house we sleep together we're gonna deal with stuff but like that night i slept on the couch and i bring that up just to illustrate like that's how stressful it was it was just like was she mad just basically because you were you were torpedoing your own career yeah like i said i mean we had stability like in those three years probably for the first time in our life and she thought she was going to be there i had just taken battalion commander scenes so she knew i was going to be there for at least another two years and i only had a year after that until retirement so she knew she had another three years in north carolina she had just started a new job as a teacher the kids were all in the same school for the first time she finally had all the stability that she wanted and then this took her by complete surprise and she knew that i probably wouldn't even have this job much longer so every all the stability she thought she had you know i took from her some people asked me about this when it was happening and i was like on social media or something like that and i got asked about actually no i think i was getting interviewed on a news channel but you know my response um it i guess i drew subconsciously from what hackworth says when they say oh do you think you become emotional and he's like yes i have become emotional because i've watched so many good men die and um i am emotional and that's sort of what i said i said listen here's a here's a guy that's been at war for 17 years who i guarantee he's lost marines and he's sitting here looking at this situation saying this is i'm not like i'm not taking this anymore when did you hear from your chain of command the next day so as a battalion commander i was always the first one in the office and it just so happened that that day my wife had a medical appointment and i had agreed to drop the kids off at like at school at like let's call it eight o'clock and so it was like an abnormal occurrence so that's like the one day i didn't show up early and so um i take the kids until now i don't get into work until like 8 15. and as a battalion commander you don't tell people when you're coming in you just show up at a normal time but i had texted my option xl like cameron late and so i tell you that just to say my co had stopped by my office and called like three times um and my op so called me and was like hey sir co was really looking for you should probably call them and so when i drove in i got in i think at like 8 30 that morning seal was actually walking because his building's let's say a two minute walk from my building he was actually walking between the buildings and i saw him and so i stuck my head out the window i was like do you wanna you want me to come back to your place he's like no just meet me in your office so by the time i went parked my truck and went into my office like he was already sitting in my office waiting for me and what do you say the first conversation between colonel emil and i i mean he he came off as actually very caring keep in mind this is a career colonel command selected that doesn't know me very well i've never met him before my battalion command so he's had about six weeks of meetings maybe like seven meetings with me so just imagine i mean he's another professional i'm professional he doesn't know me right it's not like a guy i've been working for for a couple years or even a guy that knows a guy that i know real well like i don't know anyone that really knows i mean they're like we just don't know each other we haven't developed much of a relationship so he's like so he posted a video yes sir and he didn't really there wasn't much small talk he said i wish you would have talked to me first if you would have talked to me first we could have worked through some of this and that's and he's right and that's the appropriate way and i said yes sir i understand and he's like i think that this video might be used to run messages that may not have been your intent i wish you would have thought of that and again he was right and then he just stated look there's going to be an investigation that's going to take place and then based on the investigation we're going to determine what to do i'd like you to go home take the rest of the day and i will text you on monday with where we stand and like all of that was very reasonable right very reasonable stuff was this already like on fox news and uh hitting the news outlets and all that at this point no so this was still sort of you know your facebook friends you know and then like or was it how big was it i mean i think it probably had received like 10 000 shares so i mean by the end of the night it was picked up by all the major news stations so in the morning like the commandant's office knew about it i mean everyone knew about it but you know it hadn't been picked up by mainstream media yet but it does by the end of the day but like it wasn't like everybody knew hey when your friend your gunny and your wife we're all like hey dude take take it down yeah what was the question i mean they everyone knew yeah and so my ceo left my xo came in and i turned over the battalion to him and then i went home and then and then when i got home my co called me an hour later and said hey i need you to come back in i'm sorry to jerk you around oh that was weird i was like all right you meet me at my office he's like no meet me in my office okay so i meet him in his office and he just looks at me and says and hands me a piece of paper and says you've been relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence do you have any questions yes what do i do now he's like i need you to come in tomorrow he's like what will probably happen is there will be an investigation and i don't think they're going to keep you here he's like they'll probably move you up to quantico and general alford asked to maintain the investigation so that he can take care of you that's what he said i was like okay i'm like trying to trying to like reconcile that in my mind and but at the end of the day like i kind of knew i'd be relieved over it and i just said okay sir and so i signed the piece of paper that's that i'd been relieved i walked out and i actually made a post like immediately after it's still up on my pages my facebook and linkedin and just and i was very appreciative i said i think effective of 1400 today i've been relieved and my command is doing exactly what i would have done i'd like to thank them for the opportunity of getting to serve as the aitb battalion commander and i look forward to the next chapter right so very appreciative post obviously something changed for your regimental commander or somebody talked to him and said all right this is what we're doing yeah uh and by just so everyone just so civilians know what you're talking about relieved of command means you just got fired yeah so you got fired and battalion command is a huge stepping stone and it's a huge responsibility so the ramifications were i would never get promoted again and you know as you worked through it in your mind i had been relieved so i'd been fired so i knew i would never be promoted again but i knew that there was still potential for legal action right so like best case i am just like a disgraced lieutenant colonel cubicle somewhere olympian towards retirement but you know worst case was i could be separated out via legal action and so i didn't know i was just unknown at that time how many days was it until you posted your next video so that occurred on a friday and then i went into i said i haven't gotten into all this in the story so this is new stuff i went home and you know my wife now had kind of wrapped her head around life was changing and she was still down for the cause at that point so she was thinking like maybe we'd go down to florida my parents had vacation rentals and like manage the vacation rentals and i had had i tried to do like a father-son days with my kids and i already had a pre-planned one with my oldest kid down on the outer banks she was like do you want to cancel the thing with paul my oldest son and i was like no i think i could probably use like a day away with just one of my kids she's like we need to talk to the boys and i was like all right i was like i don't know if i can do it tonight i've just been fired why don't we you know give me the night and so went to bed i was the last night i actually slept with my wife that night slept with my something the same bed with my wife got up the next morning got the three boys on the couch and i told them hey guys your dad was fired but i was fired for doing something that i thought was right i wasn't fired for doing something you know bad or nefarious i want you guys to hear it from me because your your friends at school are probably going to tell you and nothing is going to change for you you're going to get to keep living here and i may have to go to quantico to work for the next three years but you'll get to remain in school that's what i believed at the time so i told him that then i took my oldest son and while we were out spending the day on the boat all i was thinking about was what do i do and i do i kind of skipped over this to go back when i made that post that just thanked my command when i was on my social media i read a public comment from one of my previous bosses so when i was at soi as a captain the lieutenant colonel was my battalion commander that he did a lot for me he retired as an o6 he had gotten on my social media and said if stuart schiller was honorable he would resign and he didn't state that he was my previous boss or that he was like a mentor to me didn't email me didn't text me and i felt like i mean that really was like a stab in the back to me because a lot of general officers that are on linkedin they prefer linkedin not facebook so that's why i had a lot linkedin too a lot of the senior officers knew who he was and so for him to call me out like that and so i'm struggling with when i'm with my kid on the boat i'm struggling with they relieved me without even an investigation like i knew my job was at risk when i posted that video but like i feel like a tolerant organization would have been like hey we're going to let investigation play out we're going to let you sit and calm down obviously this was personal but you've broken some rules and let's let the investigation play out and we'll see where the chips fall like that's the reasonable but they they obviously fired me within like 12 hours were you surprised when you got released i was surprised i didn't let an investigation take place i really was it did not i didn't expect that like when i was calculating what would happen i thought i might be benched while an investigation took place but i didn't think i'd be relieved immediately but even that probably wasn't enough to push me it was that next comment from my old boss where then i like while i was sitting there with my son playing at the seeds of i don't know if this organization cares about me as much as i care about it and so i just was struggling with this and so then it came back to like what do i want to do like if none of them care about me do i want to limp towards retirement for the next three years because that's best case and i just came to the decision like no i can't live my life like that like this was never supposed to be a career this was always supposed to be something that was fulfilling i don't care about the money as much as other people might i really don't like i'll be fine and i thought i need to get ahead of this and i'm not going to let them just dictate the terms i'm going to resign and i'm going to tell them that because i still believe in what i said and they haven't addressed any of that and so after i spent the whole day with my kid on saturday i kind of came to that conclusion saturday night and so then on we slept in out there on the beach we had a hotel and then on sunday morning i took him back you know to the house and i dropped him off with my wife and i was you know had been fired on friday so i said hey can i go out to the farm i went out there every once in a while just kind of like me time and she was like absolutely i get it and i went out there so on my 50 acres i've got two abandoned school buses that i put out there it's kind of like trailers and we actually i i listen to a non-profit called a hero and we do suicide prevention for like outdoor treatment for veterans and so that's why i have it i've had it i've had retreats out there for the veterans but when i went out there that sunday i essentially on one of the school buses set up a video and the message of the second video was you fired me i don't think you care about me i'm resigning effectively immediately i don't want any money i don't want any benefits and then i and i posted it and that's where you know it really quickly became an escalating series of events between the marine corps and myself yeah and you know all this even your original message you were talking about what you wanted was accountability i mean obviously i wrote a book called extreme ownership and this is the the very that's what it is right and that's what you're that's what you're saying even after this video comes out there's still no one responding to anything in the video and and they also did some things where they're like they put they put some uh they made some pr maneuvers on you on you saying hey we're gonna make sure that he gets the help that he needs something along those lines yeah so after the second video came out now so again this was sunday i was fired on friday so i haven't been to work yet so it's sunday night well after i make a second video i mean it's 45 minute drive i post it from my farm it's a 45 minute drive back to my house by the time i got back my wife had already seen it and was very upset and you hadn't pre-briefed your wife on no any of this no that's why she was justifiably very angry and you know i won't go into all the details of that but that's where the that's where the path started to diverge between my wife and i and so i ended up going and staying in a motel so i was in a day's end for the rest of the week and my yes the question you asked was they started making statements the marine corps pao office public affairs office released a statement that was all over the media because now these videos were getting picked up that second video that i did was the banner of fox news like if you went to foxnews.com that day like that was the first thing was my my face on a school bus right and so the marine corps was trying to get out in front of it and they released a statement that said we are trying to locate lieutenant colonel sheller to protect himself to protect him against himself and his family and i was like what and i had my phone on me the entire time and i had even talked to my battalion xo for like 20 minutes like i was texting my friends and i was like if the marine corps was really trying to find me like they didn't think to text me they didn't think to call me and so like potentially potentially the public affairs office arm just wasn't talking to like whoever should have been calling me and just got out ahead of it first but like the other part of it is maybe like they really just didn't care about me at all and they just put that out but like again i'm having all these indicators of this like this escalating thing of like me feeling like what i said is right all right you should show some sympathy and they're like no i'm going to poke you in the chest because what you did was broke the rules and then i'm like well no come back and listen to what i'm saying like no you're still breaking the rules i'm gonna make it worse for you and so like each one of these is just an example of i'm like if they cared about me they would have called [Music] um one thing that i noticed and i heard you talking about it you know at the end of that second video you're getting emotional and you're like um asking for accountability and then kind of ranting against everything a little bit um and you say you know follow me and we'll bring the whole system down so you're you know going hard and i heard you i heard you later say like yeah i didn't choose the best words yeah i appreciate asking that so people have asked me a lot do you regret it because my life has dramatically changed lost a lot gained a lot the one the thing i've come through this with the understanding is i wouldn't change my original position or the events at all like i don't apologize but there are certain ways that i delivered the message that i would absolutely go back and tweak and the one shining example is the we're going to bring the whole system down in that second video and even in the third video i say a couple of things that like could it or were stripped out of context and so yeah you gotta understand i mean in that second video like that emotion wasn't fake like i knew i was giving up everything like i i i was terrified and i was emotional and i didn't take multiple takes that was like one take jay-z get on the mic drop it post it right like there was no editing of that video and so i wish i could go back because it allowed the media to just paint me as this violent extremist and i don't think i ever came anywhere close to that like obviously in my i can't say obviously in my head i was trying to communicate that the system has centralized power it was corrupt and it needs to be fundamentally changed but in the emotional outpouring of the moment i said i want to bring the whole system down you know like i was just mad um but and i went back and clarified like in my like three days later in a post i put in a constitutional matter with one loud voice but like no one reads the follow-up you know what i mean you get that one shot that's right especially when it comes to like viral type videos that are going to get out there no one's fault no one's following up with that um you get home from that video and your wife is like you didn't pre-brief your wife now your wife is just like well no this isn't this isn't going to happen that's right yeah i mean and so yeah i'm probably not going to develop much more of the story with my wife and i but i will say you know i still like this past christmas after all this was done you know i got out on christmas eve we spent as a family all of christmas together we went to a water park together like i still very much love her we are still going through a divorce this situation was very challenging and there's things that we both would have done differently and there's reasons the reasons i didn't say anything is because i knew what she would say and again this was very important to me but i think more than anything the reason we're going through a divorce and we didn't decide to reconcile is because what this situation did was illustrate the trajectory of my life and how i'm always going to be on the move and i think in one comment she summarized it with i just in retirement want to learn how to play golf and you want to fundamentally change the government right those are two very different things and the story that i just painted you for the last 17 years i mean this woman has stuck by me and suffered through a lot and like she deserves a little bit of stability she hasn't had it her her whole adult life and she justifiably deserves that um and you know she's still the mother of my children so i'll never have anything bad to say about it there's talking about the verbiage that i would have changed there's absolutely things i would have changed with how i handled my situation with her you know there's you know things that i still look back on and it makes me sad but at the end of the day you can't look back you just got to look forward i i've tried to do the right thing i obviously hit some minds while moving forward but i kept moving forward and you know she's still a big part of my life and so that is what it is you know i was a rebellious kid and i like was a rebellious kid i listened to hardcore music i didn't listen to my parents i didn't like school i didn't do good in school i didn't i was like a rebellious kid you can just trace that streak all the way back to my birth so when i look at your your from you what we talked about today from your birth on up it's like i don't see that streak and then all of a sudden it just kind of manifests itself i get look you're talking about when you're in ramadi you're giving away money to these locals and you're thinking this doesn't seem like the i'm thinking that too doing the same thing i'm in ramadi in 2006. we're forming relationships with people i'm thinking okay well i guess this will move us in one direction but i'm not sitting there as a obedient you know uh slave as to what i'm being told this is what you're being told to do do it i always pushed back on my leadership throughout my career always had that rebellious streak and this just kind of like do do you when you look back at your life do you notice things along the way that are indicators that you had sort of a limit to what you would take i mean what's movie movie reference what's the movie reference where the guy is like an accountant or something and then he just kind of loses it falling down yeah am i right because i never even saw that movie but i remember it yeah michael does that's what happens right he's a normal guy yeah something happens he's not gonna take it anymore yeah nothing really happened he just reached this point in general at the beginning like there wasn't like any indicators that was the beginning of the movie no not really yeah everything life like traffic so what do you think stu are you do you see indicators in the past where you're you're thinking like man i always had this idiot no michael douglas basically going to suicidal rampage i don't think the comparison is fair again i think yes to your point i didn't always push back i mean i started to give some examples there with my regimental commander to kind of paint a picture of you know at a certain point i started to just solidify who i was what my values were and it's funny a lot of people have asked me this which i'm sort of surprised by the question i've actually been surprised by a lot of the questions people give me but one of the questions was why now you've been in you're in ramadi in 07 you did all this your whole life why now and they were asking that question almost implying as if there's a democrat and that's a president and like i used my platform to exploit now to become popular the truth is i think people grow develop an appreciation right as a young first lieutenant i wanted to go serve my country you know when i look back on george bush's philosophy to export democracy that was obviously stupid but if you asked 23 year old stuart schiller or you know i'm watching the marines in fallujah all i could see were the marines running through fallujah i used to love the movie black hawk down when you watch that movie it's like it glorifies it if you look at the operational failures in somalia that led to that event but like i didn't have a deeper appreciation for that so i mean the question you're asking me is like why did i get to that moment i had just at that point had enough education and experiences and i was in enough of a position of authority that there just wasn't many other people like me at that moment in time willing to say what needed to be said so as time goes on after this when do they actually like arrest you do you get arrested right yeah yeah so i posted that second video like a week goes by now you did a september 11th video too right yep we did a third video you're still not arrested yet nope then i even did a fourth video in my charlie's where um i basically after my my second or third video was like just kind of an outpouring of emotion where my second video was very angry i resigned my third video i was really just talking about violence and i was trying to like take the sharp edge off the second video but i still don't really go back to accountability but after my third video now all my friends are texting me and being like dude you're looking a little crazy you look a little erratic great and so and keep in mind like after my second video even though the pao office put that message out that they were trying to find me then when i went into work they command directed a mental health evaluation so my mental health was being attacked from all these different angles and it's so hard to defend mental health because if you really are crazy anything you say is marginalized because you're crazy right so it's like you're crazy and i'm like no i'm not well that's what a crazy person would say you know that's that's catch 22 right that's the book catch 22. if you're crazy you don't think you're crazy that's right so how do you defend it so anyway so did you start wondering no you know what you're laughing but like when everyone tells you it you do start to question like you know if everyone in this room is crazy like what does that make me either i'm the only sane one or maybe i am the crazy one so after the third video they actually offered me a deal a legal deal i could have just taken it now i've been that but i was like man there's a lot of talk of me being crazy and i didn't help myself with these two videos i was like i need to end and bring the message back and so that's when i made that fourth video in my charlie's like general mckenzie is like i can't think in military history where someone is so obviously culpable like it's just clear like the emperor has no clothes you have to see it and i could go through all the details as to why i think that but that was the fourth video i was trying to bring the message back to accountability and so after the fourth video is when they gave me a gag order and just said i mean the gag word was crazy i don't think i've actually released the verbage of it but it was like if you talk to him and he talks to him and they say that you said that you're going to jail like anything like online chat rooms like any email if you communicate this was because they offered you a deal but then you made another video that's right and so now they didn't know what to do now now i'm moving faster than their legal deals are moving faster than the investigation and they haven't actually charged me with anything so they're they're starting to get scared because i don't know if scared the right word but they they don't know how to handle it they don't know how to address it there's a guy that's not taking the deals and he's still making statements and they and everything they've done at this point hasn't been effective in stopping it so they hit you with the is this when they arrest you no this is after the fourth video is when they gave me a gag order so i'm still not in jail you so now you're not allowed to talk to anybody that's right you're not allowed to post on social media that's right not to communicate in any form you're just on lockdown yeah a couple points number one i'm i constantly say to clients and people and friends we don't make good decisions when we're emotional like don't try this started as a joke when i was a young enlisted guy like we would go out drinking and make decisions you know and the joke was hey don't make decisions don't make life-changing decisions i would volunteer for platoons and do stuff like that so this is a good example right you take a step back and and say okay where am i going to be strategically and this is another thing i talk about all the time is taking a step back and saying okay how where does it how does this play out strategic from a strategic perspective where am i going to end up just just things to think about which you're clearly like hey here's some wording i could have changed here's a thing that would have helped out my relationship with so there's always things that if you can try and take a step back they're going to be beneficial to you almost guaranteed the risk to that is time the risk to that is time also the risk to that is you can rationalize to not do anything that's right you can rationalize to get to a point where you say you know what it's not worth it yep and and again is it smart to do that calculus it probably is because my my feeling i don't i don't know you but my feeling is if you were to run the calculus you would have still came to the same conclusion you might have executed your plan a little bit differently but it's important too if you can take a step back run the calculus so that way the course that you plot will be the most effective course in what you're trying to do and this is just general you know i've got some friends and they know who they are who call me from time to time super emotional and i gotta talk them through like what the strategic perspective is what it looks like over the long term and and how to make the next step forward so good good lesson learned and again from my from just talking to you today i think you still would have made the same you would come to the same conclusion that this is something that i don't want to use the word passionate not that you see just that you were passionate about it but you were you were convicted you had conviction about what you were saying um and you know something else from my perspective in a in an ownership and an accountability perspective that i think people don't understand as leaders is if you make a mistake and you take ownership of the mistake that you've made then what you can do is you can fix the mistake and you can actually change things and just because you say hey this was my fault doesn't mean you necessarily get fired or have to resign you know any of these senior leaders could say hey this is what we thought we're not perfect i'm not perfect i made a mistake i you know i did that i did that with i made a a speech coming from president biden if i was in president biden's shoes what i would have said and it was like hey i made this mistake we under we underestimated that means i underestimated that means i thought that the afghan forces were stronger that means i thought that the taliban was weaker i miss misassessed and miscalculated how this unfolded here's what we're doing to fix it and and this is the thing that i think a lot of leaders don't understand when a person does that when a leader does that the the team doesn't think oh you see that's right you were messed up no they think oh okay yep he messed up but he's humble enough to take ownership and we're going to get it fixed and we and we'll support him now this is my whole freaking career was taking ownership when things went wrong and and so i i think just again to some of these senior leaders when you take ownership of something it's not it's a step forward it's not a step backward it is a true step forward and by the way when you blame other people or you deny or you act like it didn't happen that is a step backward that's what people don't understand that's what leaders don't understand they don't understand that saying what wasn't it was the afghan people's fault it was the afghan military's fault that's not a step forward it feels like one but it's not it's a step backward because every single other person knows people know the truth about what's going on they can sense it and i think that's one of the reasons why your videos were widely shared because people thought this guy he knows what he's he believes what he's saying and he he's speaking from a perspective of truth like people people saw that yeah people weren't like oh he's trying to blame the leadership what's wrong with that guy no people like yeah he's trying to blame the leadership because the leadership is wrong and they should admit that and they should take ownership of it [Applause] so you get gagged gag order comes then what do you at what point you get arrested right so i got gagged on let's call a friday i went through a saturday sunday monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday so now it's going into the next weekend and that following week on the tuesday wednesday i knew that the secretary of defense the chairman of the joint chiefs and general mckenzie were going to be testifying to the house and the senate and so i calculated if i violated the gag order they might have a disproportional response and that that would bring attention to the whole message that i was trying to illustrate so i made another post that was this one was probably my most insightful you know it was it had some like insightful language in terms of not like revolutionary insightful but i mean like personal attacks on people like i attacked all the like the last four presidents you know i attacked general officers and i didn't say anything that was untrue but like i said some like hard stuff to hear it wasn't very it wasn't like a uniting message it was just like a you to everyone and again i even put in the post i'm ready to go to jail but before i made the post i read the entire ucmj manual for quartz marshall and so i knew what the requirements were to send me to jail and quite honestly i didn't think that they had the criteria to send me to jail i was kind of prepared to go to jail but i didn't think that they had the legal ability to do so for violating a gag order that i thought was illegal and so that was the only time i violated the gag order was that one time and then i showed up at zero eight on monday and they had pmo waiting for me and they sent me to jail and the way they did it was they wrote on the document that i was a flight risk which was like just an outward line i showed up at zero eight on monday right i've been to work every day on time the full time answering every phone call so like it's just a lie and no one will be held accountable for that but that was what it was and uh got to jail that monday morning and but my calculation was correct all the generals had to answer questions to include the secretary of defense about why i was in jail because i went to jail on that monday and they started their testimony on tuesday and wednesday and then i was out you know six days out i was a total nine days so you end up getting charged with article 88 contempt toward officials article 89 disrespect towards superior commissioned officers article 90 willfully disobeying superior commissioned officers article 92 dereliction in the performance of duties article 92 failure to obey order or regulation article 133 conduct on becoming an officer and a gentleman how long did it take for that trial process to come about usually it takes like months they did mine five days after i got out of jail so you spent six days nine days in jail nine days in jail and what were you doing in jail just sitting there yeah i was in a solitary cell yeah i honestly all i did was write so the first two days i didn't have any any writing gear or books and then by like day three my lawyer was able to drop off like all these legal pads pens books and he gave me my command investigation that just had i mean we can get that if we want but i mean all these statements from these other officers that just like weren't just lies straight up personal attacks and so i was like writing on the league just example of like oh he showed up late to work that kind of thing oh yeah so he was smiling in his command photo we don't smile in command photos i knew i didn't like him when he when i saw that [Laughter] another one another one this one guy they use that in the court of law against you these aren't like i don't like people that smile either i agree with that guy these aren't just like you know side of the mouth comments these are on statements that they sign right i mean these are formal statements this one guy i was at the beach with his family a week previous and i went to his house for dinner two weeks previous with our families to hang out and like when i was in that motel where like you know i had miller like can scattered my life's falling apart like i probably really could have used a friend and he was texting me like hey stu how you doing man just want to make sure you're all right is there anything we can talk about like why are you doing this he then screenshotted those and brought them to the investigating officer unsolicited to say look i was trying to figure out what his motives are like this stu sheller is just a nefarious character have never been about tie and commander and i'm like who does that like what man does that blood in the water oh there's blood in the water man sharks are gonna pounce yeah but they didn't realize that i wasn't you know yeah so you end up going to trial and this trial the judge you said looked at your record and was like hey well where'd this come from the judge i don't think wanted me to plead guilty so it wasn't you know all those charges you read off and there was like all these findings of facts the only choice there was only one choice except guilty for all of them at special court martial or pleaded not guilty to all of them in general like so to get in the weeds about what any of them said it was almost irrelevant and so so if you did not not guilty what would have happened i would have gone to general court martial and i'd remained in jail for another four or five months while they prepare on pre-trial while they prepared the general court-martial procedure and then i would have gone and tried to plead not guilty to all of them in general check and then you you pled guilty to all of them again there's no like i want to plead guilty to these two and not these three is it there's no point in looking at the details of them it was do you plead guilty to all of this you don't even need to read it stu do you plead guilty to all of this at special misdemeanor you get a the lowest character characterization of discharge is general under honorable which they'll determine later or you go to general plead not guilty and if you get found guilty of one of any of these it's a felony and you'll get dishonorable and you'll sit in here for another four months and i'll tell you what even with that choice i thought very strongly about doing the general because i was going to say bro you're at this point i know god i'm kind of surprised i know i almost did that and i think and to the judges you know sentiment i really think i could have won but you got what i asked myself was what's the most important thing the most important thing the reason i gave all of this up was not to beat them it was to preserve the message of accountability and if i felt deep inside that i had broken some of the rules for me to beat them based on undue command influence and legal leupold i felt like would have marginalized my message of accountability and for me to plead guilty for breaking the rules and then look at them and say look i'm not apologizing but i'm accepting accountability i felt it strengthened my message and it also expedited my exit so that i could come on you know jocko's podcast and talk about how general mckenzie needs to be fired right so for all those reasons uh again i it made more sense to plead guilty and that so that was kind of almost anticlimactic a little bit you you i'll tell you though there was some drama and so like i said the fastest court martial from exit of uh jail and agreement in the history of the marine corps also one of those charges like 88 i think i was the first officer charged since vietnam like they were just like throwing stuff on the wall right but they released the command investigation with all those like it's just crazy things that those officers said to the media with my medical investigation so that selective articles could be written about like how i was a violent extremist and it was just blatantly false stuff like i'm still on the fence of whether i should sue for libel or just like move forward but so once they leaked that investigation to your point the judge the judge was like if that's true like this is criminal like those people should be brought to the court not lieutenant colonel sheller and so the marine corps was like forced to do another command investigation on the elite command investigation so they did another command investigation and so then i asked for that other command investigation because it had to do with me and they're like no you got to go through freedom of information act i was like let me give this straight so you had an investigation that was about me that you leaked through the improper channels you were scolded by the judge you created a new investigation still about me about your improper handling and the only way for me to get that is to go through the problem problem the proper freedom of information act like that's correct and i was like ah you know this is like have you done that have you requested it i haven't ever come home you got a request i don't know it's probably already burned to the ground i'll be honestly but i probably will so going back i probably will sue for libel this one publication and i'll probably freedom of information act to add to that libel suit but like right now the most important thing again is the message and making sure that people understand i mean there's fundamental breakdowns that are not being addressed apolitically that's what i want to change so like do i have grievances that i can legally pursue sure but that's like i said earlier like money's really not that important to me so we'll figure it out and so you part of your re part of the deal was you you resigned and you were done you're done in the marine corps that's right at 17 years maybe 18 years now 17 17 years yeah and then you got out what just before christmas christmas eve christmas eve that's right that was it that was it where were you when you were out what was that night like uh my family came down actually yeah so hung out with my family just acted like it wasn't happening i honestly don't think it's hit me because right now you know someone that's listening to the show we're taping this in early january but after christmas with my family then i've started doing all these media shows because i've been on a gag order for the last four months so i don't think the reality has actually hit me yet it's gonna come when i'm done doing all this media and i'm sitting in my place by myself with nothing to do that's probably when it's gonna be like oh but i've i've stayed too busy for it to be real yet so what's so here you are here i am i mean this is only freaking three weeks right that's right what's next what are you doing so i just wanna what's the new mission the so i wanna illustrate like why i'm so upset with general mackenzie and so i'm gonna just take a second talk about that and then then i'll answer your question through that so the reason i in that fourth video try to prefer charges against general mckenzie which is my legal right to do explain i didn't touch on that explain what you did you explain what you did there in the manual for court martials rule 137 clearly states that any member of the ucmj can prefer charges against another member in the ucmj now that when you prefer that means that charge sheet has to be routed up to the first general officer with general court martial authority sometimes it's at the colonel level and so the strategy there was i knew general alford was trying to hold me accountable i knew he would never have the courage to refer charges from my preferral but then he would have to publicly declare that he wasn't going to seek accountability against the general and he was seeking accountability against me so i was using that tactic to illustrate the hypocrisy of the system but they denied me the ability to even route it which is my legal right to do i mean it was just i mean illegal in my opinion it doesn't matter so they don't allow me to do that the reason i was trying to prefer those charges is because general mckenzie is the centcom combatant commander he works directly for the secretary of defense who works directly for the president what happened was in you know the the story you gave in the withdrawal from afghanistan general mckenzie and i know the operational planners that developed the plans for the withdrawal they submitted the national security council four or five plans most of them included keeping bhaka mayor base but they needed 2 500 troops if you go and watch general mckenzie's testimony on the back side he says i tried to say that we needed 2500 troops why that's relevant is because they determined that that number was what was capable of maintaining bagram air base when president biden and the national security council said no you got to go below 2500 then general mckenzie was at a critical moment right so as a as the senior military advisor you have a responsibility to convince your boss why you should execute your plan now you can't force your boss to do that but every staff officer knows how to get i mean as an operations officer there's an art to making sure that my boss does the plan that i think is best because i know better than he does in a lot of ways so it's artful but he failed to do that so once he failed to do that then he looked at the restraints that were imposed upon his plan if he didn't feel like he could execute the plan effectively without undue loss of life he had a moral obligation to resign he did not do that once he didn't resign at that point he is accountable he doesn't get to go back after the fact and say no i told the president of the national security council 2500 and they didn't listen to me it doesn't matter that you didn't convince him and you didn't resign it you're the senior military advisor so for all those reasons i think general mckenzie should be held accountable right now just as i've started this media tour 72 hours ago the white house released the general mackenzie was being replaced in the spring by a nuisant comp combatant commander um and i don't think it's a coincidence to be completely honest with you because i've been hitting the media pretty hard that guy he's going to undermine his whole career if he doesn't raise his hand and say he should be accountable before he exits so that's one thing i think the operational level of war which is at the combatant commander level linked to the political policy strategic level of war which is the national security council executive branch is where we're failing wars where we failed vietnam it's where we failed the gui generation and how you do that as you hold leaders accountable at that level and right now congress and the executive branch aren't holding up their end of the bargain i'll give an example of what i think is wrong with congress when i went to i placed myself in jail in a lot of ways to illustrate something and i underestimated i guess i overestimated congress's ability to do anything because bipartisan took turns with their sound bites of anger about the failed afghanistan withdrawal and then guess what nothing congress's given by the founding fathers leverage over the dod is the budget and what was not in the news is six days previous they unanimously approved a 740 billion dollar 22 fiscal year budget and not one of those vocally outraged congressional representatives said hey you're asking for 740 billion dollars who's accountable from the afghanistan trial show me metrics of effectiveness for the 21 budget because to do that would require courage to do that would get spun as potentially anti-military and that would go against self-preservation so what do i want going forward i want the operational level of war combatant commanders to start being held accountable in the same manner that they were in world war ii i mean look at how many generals lincoln fired before he got to grant and grant wasn't a good tactician but he had operational foresight he knew how to stick with it the second thing i think is we need leaders not politicians so i've got a website authenticamericans.com where you can see some of my political views but ultimately it's where you can support me and i've also got a second website votesforvets.org because i think we need leaders not politicians i've in the four months that i've been on a gag order gone out and organized a bunch of people running in the 22 race so i've got five senators and 20 congressional representatives that all i think embody the leadership and courage that we need in politics and some of them i think have a real good shot at winning some of them are more of a long shot but it's i have the ability right now with the platform i've built to raise money bring in media to some of these races bring in different organizations to support some of these leaders that i think need to be up in uh in d.c and is that also linked through authenticamericans.com for the for the people that are running for the vets that are running votes for vets okay number four so votesforvets.org is really where you can see most of those candidates um my website authentic americans really you can donate to the disabled veterans pack through authentic americans and that money ultimately will go to support the coalition that i built but i they're they're separate authentic americans is really my brand and my thinking and i don't i'm not gonna run most likely in the 22 race i plan to just support these other veterans i've been through a lot like i said i think i need to stabilize a little bit and reassess the landscape before just continuing to sprint but i do think you know my whole life has been america i love america and i love foreign diplomacy and i think the federal politics game is where you really make that those changes and so i see myself running for something but it probably won't be until 24-ish so that's what you're going to do you're planning to go into politics right now in in the future in the future i mean right now i'm probably going to write a book i'm probably going to you know figure out where my house is going to be at so you know i'm going to spend the next couple of years getting my foundation stable until i see something that i think makes sense it's a lot going on man there's a lot going on man i can't believe you only got out a month ago that's right that's kind of crazy i it seemed like longer time had [Laughter] passed uh you're on social media um you're on facebook on instagram on twitter yeah if you go to my website all my social media is linked at the bottom so if you just go to authenticamericans.com you can find all my pages it's all at stuart sheller s-c-h-e-l-l-e-r um yeah it seems like we're at a decent place to close it out it's been over three hours uh echo charles yes sir any questions i don't actually i was going to say dude why don't you like write a book or something i guess you are gonna so there you go yeah i've been writing all these social media posts and this one guy commented me the other day like he was i think he was trying to be nice he's like hey stu have you ever thought about writing a book instead of slowly writing a book over facebook yeah facebook seems to be like your primary well the reason social media i mean instagram and like tick tock or really the new generation but facebook allows long written posts and so really now that if you look at it linkedin has has a smaller character limit and so what i've done now is it's the same post on facebook and linkedin so really the linkedin character limit is like the exact character limit of all my posts because i usually write like two pages and then i try to pare them down for the character limit um but it just goes to i think the attention span of our current generation like it has to be in digestible chunks you get one of your books and it's a lot harder to get them digest but if you hit them with like five posts separated by three days you gotta i think a much higher chance of getting them to digest some of that what are you hearing from the marine corps right now they've gone calm silent right they have a lot of articles have been written on me since i got out and started doing this media and the same statement is we're not going to comment on a civilian that used to serve in the marine corps right so they've got like one comment that's we're not going to comment about it and so we'll see though i'm hitting them with a lot of media so that might change but like you said it's only been like one week since post christmas they've been back so who knows what do you what about your friends in the marine corps what are they saying nothing i mean the the lieutenant colonels that were closest to me in the investigation that i've made i've gone a couple interviews and just illustrated what they said they've obviously gone calm silent all these other guys that i know have come online i've been like that's that they did that and so i think they're probably having a hard time kind of reconciling what they did at least i would if i were them i mean i can't speak for them but i can say i've had a lot of guys speak up and say i can't believe they did that like that's so snake in the grass-ish yeah i mean um you said you've listened to this podcast a little bit i i am a huge fan of the marine corps in fact my my family says that whenever i talk about the marine corps i have a quote and they'll joke about it i say the marine corps is freaking squared away that's what i tell if for whatever reason i'm with my family and the marine corps comes up i'll be like marine corps freaking squared away and it's the truth i i love the marine corps i worked alongside the marine corps pretty much my whole career and just i think the marine corps is outstanding and this is uh this is rough it's rough to watch this unfold well to be clear i love the marine corps and i think the marine corps is pretty squared away but that comes from you know the individual is such a high caliber person holistically in the marine corps the problem is the centralization of power over time and it kind of puts the blinders on so there's some fundamental things that need to be addressed but everything that i'm doing is not from contempt or or hate it's from a place of love i have i hold high regard for the marines and i still think highly of them i'll uh tell you what you do you take that that 65 page draft that you had they got rejected yeah and then what you what you cut it down to 30 yeah so that other 35 pages that's what you put in your book yeah there you go because we all kind of want to hear about that yeah yeah right on stu you got any closing thoughts before we uh shut it down now i'll just echo to your audience as i watched my saga unfold in the media the mainstream media is so polarized right now it was very hard to get a true assessment of like how people even felt watching the news because it almost felt like people were taking my statements and trying to fit them into whatever their narrative was and shows like yours podcasts like yours youtube channels i was actually getting much more accurate feedback from what people thought than mainstream media so i really believe going forward if the mainstream media can't figure out how to reconcile kind of their own polarized views that platforms like yours are even more important so i just encourage you to continue the good work brother well it will and there was recently uh some information that came out about joe rogan and he's just annihilating the mainstream media which is awesome it's just total destruction i mean maybe two three four times what the mainstream media has for listeners rogan has so and and he's one of you know he's the leader he's the the head of the pack but there's a lot of other another a lot of other uh people out there that are doing the same thing trying to get the word out and trying to talk in a nuanced way about things and you know you're a perfect example of a guy that's going to get interviewed and have they're going to interview with questions for sound bites that they can make headlines that the people will click that's their goal and so you know having you on here to actually give your perspective your full perspective say whatever you want like that's the goal so people can actually hear and understand where you're coming from and i think that's important yeah well uh thanks for coming on man i appreciate it thanks for traveling all the way out here i know you uh never made it to camp pendleton or 29 palms for it to be stationed but you finally got to visit san diego at least for a little bit thanks for sharing your story thanks for sharing your concerns thanks for sharing your lessons learned um and i know what you did and what you're doing is not the easiest path but you're standing by what you believe to be right and what i believe to be right which is people need to take ownership when things happen and that is commendable and i hope uh that despite the negative impacts that this has had on you on your life i hope it eventually has a positive impact for the marine corps for the military at large and of course for america and on top of all that ma'am thanks for your service absolutely yeah hey uh a year down the road bring me back on the show we'll see where i'm at awesome man thank you all right and with that stuart sheller has left the building definitely appreciate him coming on an interesting journey that he's been on um yeah just thinking about some of the stuff that he talked about especially from you know at the end start talking about the the political ramifications of things that happen and again again these are all things that i talk about these things in leadership strategy and tactics right you give up your influence but at the same time like david hackworth just get to that point where you're not gonna take it anymore you know when he when he was talking about mckenzie one thing that's interesting is he he and i just thought of this as right right as stu left but you know he mentioned that you're in that position the president says no to your plan then it's your duty to turn in your rank and that is one way of looking at it for sure um but also you know the other way and i talk about this leadership strategy and tactics that's one thing to do or is it your duty to mitigate the risk of the plan that's being utilized that's another way to look at it as well and but here's where either of those two options here's the the point that i think is important and this is stu would agree with this the outcome you own that's the difference this is something that you know when napoleon said if you if you follow orders even if you know they're wrong and you follow orders you're culpable so that's the point so where i might disagree with stu that it's the duty of someone to turn in their rank if they can't convince their boss or turn in their resign from their job if they can't convince their boss that is one way of looking at it i would say that it's your duty to execute the plan to the best your ability and then take ownership of the fact that you didn't weren't able to convince your boss take ownership of the fact that the plan that executed was one that you agreed to execute and you did and it failed and it's your fault so just to again i'm sure you know we'll be able to talk about this some more in the future but i i wanted to as i was walking back upstairs after after walking out stu just thinking about that fact of look it again one way to say it is your duty to turn your rank in my opinion it's your duty to either turn to your rank or take ownership of the plan and take ownership of the outcome of the plan that's what you do so a little nuance on that but uh appreciate him coming on and again trying to trying to be able to allow someone to share their entire perspective so um he's trying to do the right thing we're all trying to do the right thing yep we should be trying to do the right thing i think so too yeah and i think that starts with you know improving ourselves yes trying to do the right things in our own world it's true yeah seems like something we all should be doing yes echo charles any recommendations on how we might do that yes i i will say well okay so my recommendations are about there's these four there's four things there's actually eight but these four things and they're divided into two each one right this is as far as recommendations to do to improve yourself so you have your relationships these two kinds of relationships my opinion or that can be categorized i think uh there's your health and capability two things um your money and what you do with your time and your world view and spirituality the four things okay essentially so you want to improve that if you feel like you're lacking in any one of those pay attention to it try to improve it good news about this about that about this whole thing good news we have things that'll help you improve all these things that's a good that's a good let's start with the physical actually the physical part of it i think is is a big one you know and so you once said early on this particular podcast sure that the physical one will positively influence all of them yes and factually factually and what i didn't say which is equally as true the physical one will negatively impact all of them oh look at that let it slide i'm telling you i actually wrote about both those things in leadership oh no in the discipline because freedom field manual yeah oh yeah and you know we all heard that hey if you don't have your health you don't have anything like you know like that whole thing i mean yeah think about it like if you're like okay let's say you have the best you just landed the best job and it pays a lot and you love doing it so you can't walk the stairs you can't walk the up or you now are gonna are at risk of xyz terminals diseases yeah no one takes that yeah that's not a good situation regardless of how much money you make or what if you have great great relationships intimate family friends great but you neglected your health now you're on the path to demise does that help your relationships no does it hurt your relationship oh yeah everybody's sad including you by the way either way you see where i'm going with this all right so let's take care of our physical health let's improve our physical health i like it never too late to start my opinion well after you're dead a little bit too late but as long as we're listening to this we're alive and we're doing it uh good news we have some supplementation to help you on this path physical and mental boom here we go okay so a big one that i actually i don't wanna say i didn't pay attention to it because i do take it every day but it just sort of just you just take it as the vitamin d3 that's immunity that's all it's a lot of things that's a big one yeah i feel like when i got miss rona yeah no factor really partially because of vitamin d i mean i'm thinking so i'm going to give you um that i have the exact same story so yeah the first time we caught it that was like 20 20 i here's i'll tell you i don't know i didn't test positive technically but here look we went end of 2020 right that's when we got it like that yeah yeah no symptoms at all mm-hmm not even like the actually i don't say no to i lost my sense of smell right that's it no fever and no cough no cough no cough no temperature no factor didn't miss a workout nothing my workouts as i reviewed i was noticed that my workouts were a little bit weaker than normal but i just thought i was over training or something like this yeah you have a bad day yeah no factor and then still got after it by the way yeah boom right well they say if you have a fever you shouldn't work out you can have a cold but if you don't have a fever you still work out check your body will still like respond correctly that's what i hear i don't know so so this kind of recently will say an undisclosed time um members of my family took a coronavirus test tested positive so took the test no quarantine there's very many good reasons to believe that i whatever they had that my family member had i got it too good reasonably i'm not going to go into how or why all this stuff the next day after that the results come back positive right from my family yeah test positive same deal of course i got it i had to i've got it technically i didn't go take a test and test positive so i don't know full disclosure so again no symptoms no symptoms no fever no cough fever no factor no cough no factor in fact so technically i got coronavirus on paper that's what i got not in real life not in the field there was no corona virus to be seen or heard or felt anything it was only on paper i attribute that to i think anyway the care that i took of my immunity vitamin d3 yeah cold war by the way cold war isn't every day the cold war is like if you see something on the horizon yeah boom cold war all day oh yeah pre-emptive strike on that yes sir savagery yep so we got all that jocko fuel cold war vitamin d3 we've got stuff for your joints joint warfare you know it's a theme everything is war against this bad stuff right because that's what it is surprisingly enough our theme is a war war against weakness organs disease or robots war against robots by the way just in case actually we like robots from time to time nonetheless okay all right also if you like energy drinks or if you would like energy drinks but you don't want the health the ramifications that some traditional energy drinks uh provide for lack of better term we got something for you too discipline go energy drink all healthy so good no preservatives all natural no sugar all natural all natural fruit all natural vitamin vitamin b12 vitamin b6 electrolytes so good for you oh yeah only 95 milligrams of caffeine enough to get a little oh yeah but not enough to give the car exactly right so if you're on this path and you're down for uh energy drink scenario this is 100 the one it'll keep you on the path not off you drink a bad energy drinks you're kind of off the path let's face it not this one boom on the milk don't forget about mulk and look you're gonna get situations where you're like in your life where you have you're on the path you're feeling good you're staying disciplined and you just ate a freaking salad with a chicken breast super healthy oh yeah hell yeah then you want a little something afterwards yes we got you covered get a milk oh yeah then you're do you have dessert yep that's 100 good for you yeah so eat so we had a scenario actually i shouldn't even say it because i kind of fell off the path a little bit but we had a scenario a friend of a friend daughter birthday scenario cake was involved big chunk and it was what it was like a cupcake but it was like way bigger yeah so but it wasn't as big as like a a regular sized cake i don't cake's not that tempting to me because i only like the frosting okay one of those games this one was a chocolate what is frosting do you know what it actually is what is it it's well it depends on what kind but normal i don't know butter there's a lot of butter in it butter sugar flavoring there's like a flavoring of some sort um like chocolate frosting it's just butter sugar and chocolate and like cream i think that's pretty much it yeah that's the part i like there's a lot of cake part i don't like that's what cupcake's not really my thing bro i'm like exact opposite and there are six of them and they're huge so you know the kids ate some it's a birthday i get it and let it slide um but bro those big cupcakes there's a lot of leftovers i'm just saying there's a lot you ain't ham you know but here's the thing that i only ate one meal that day so technically you know but it was it was weakness what does that mean so you should have had a mulch i should have had them all would have fulfilled the whole total thing here's the thing it was an opportunity it was like what do you call it one like the bad guys come in at a target of opportunities yeah that's what you had exactly right oh yeah you got beat by a freaking cupcake right i totally did i totally did i was doing something in the kitchen and there was like a container the leftovers you know how uh people when you're younger you're like gonna go out with your friends drinking and you do like oh we're gonna pre-game you ever heard of that yes sir hey we're gonna pre-game here's a little hint a little hint for everybody let's say you're going to uh watch the ufc at your friend's house or you're going to you know your wife's got a friend that has some part you know whatever you're going to some unknown realm where you're not sure what's going to be eaten pregame with a mulch oh yeah pregame of the milk that way they show up look they show up with you know pizza and instead of eating nine pieces of pizza you just had a mulch you're good you're so correct you're so good maybe you have a piece you know yeah we're gonna be social eat a piece of pizza taste good whatever oh yeah so i'd get before back in the day long time ago i'd get i'd order sushi right and you know sure some people in the room don't really aren't really into sushi i am very much so and i get it when i'm like super hungry um next to sushi spot is a is a place you can get milkshakes so every once in a while i'd get a milkshake too if you drink some of the milkshake before the sushi it's like you're not even that hungry for the sushi anymore counterproductive yeah yeah because it's not only is there calories for sure but it's like sweet and you know what it affects your brain pregame you accidentally pre-gamed with the wrong thing it's absolutely true you pregame with the monk or if you're going to go out to dinner where it's like hey we're going to this place it's not necessarily italian food yes yeah look you're going to get the chicken parm which is kind of you know we're borderline we're brushing up against but you're still gonna have some pasta with it which so no pregame yeah pregame that's what i'm saying a little hint for the world yeah that's a good actually really good advice man i do that all the time the other thing you got to watch out for is you you you go this is another situation hey we're going to a dinner party you ever go to it like one of those these people aren't on here on top of things right so you show up at five you tell me we're going to a dinner party that means we're gonna be eating dinner we show up at five next thing i know it's seven o'clock that we haven't eaten yeah yeah now i'm not happy about the scenario right cause guess what it's not that you're not eating because they're putting out freaking chips and whatever appetizers yeah so pregame yeah pretty game that's what i'm saying pregame with the mulk hey i don't want to get too technical though now that i just realized it does it's actually kind of the opposite it is a pre-game technically but does the opposite of a drinking pre-game i've always heard of pregame as the drinking yeah oh yeah that's that's the only way i've been in the drinking pregame you drink to get more liquored up get liquored up you don't drink the milk to get more full yeah i guess i guess kind of it's a positive pregame that's what we're talking about so pre-game nonetheless very constructive beneficial if you want any of this stuff go to jockofield.com if you subscribe to it shipping is free if you want to pick up some of the energy drinks that's actually good for you go to wawa if you want to pick up any of this stuff go to vitamin shop and you can get better it's true better at life oh yeah better healthier fuel.com it's a big deal also origin origin usa american-made stuff no i'm this isn't just any kind of stuff it's like american-made denim jeans boots leather stuff i i would say if you want to clarify it a little bit more without going through a list of stuff you could say american-made stuff that you actually need right oh yeah this is stuff that you actually need this is the what do you what do you need well you need you need jeans you need shorts you need a sweatshirt you need a t-shirt you need a beanie you need the stuff you need you need boots you need a ghee jiu-jitsu what are you going to train nokia oh wait you're training oh yeah that's fine too but you need a rash guard yes so there you go go to originusa.com you can get all this stuff that you actually need which is a good idea and it's all made in america too by the way even the the materials everything 100 made in america down to the thread down to the rivets on the jeans the zippers on the jeans you know the buttons even even the buttons it's true bro that's true also jacques was a store if you want to represent on the path discipline equals freedom the idea good if something happens that's not that great there's going to be some good anyway if you want to represent dracostore.com that's where you can go we also have a subscription situation called the shirt locker and these are additional designs that you can only get once well i guess now if you're a member you can log back in the store and get other designs from before so we do have that feature that's a big deal we didn't have that before i'm just saying it's a new feature oh yeah put this guy in for a nobel peace prize over here on that one it's a good one that's a good big deal man big deal did you put release of you know a a news article about that that's what's available look at this let's just say it's a big thing okay so you see what i'm saying but yes jacquelinestar.com you want to represent you want to check it out if you like something get something also subscribe to this podcast we also have the unraveling podcast we have the ground up podcast the warrior kid podcast you can also join us at the underground jockowunderground.com there's weird things happening out there there's people being banned shadow banned there's videos being censored which is crazy yeah like we talk about china and the fact that they ban parts of the internet and social media they you are not allowed yeah and here it is happening here in america oddly enough what is the what do you think is like the above board not even above board what what is the motive you think man banning someone driving a narrative i feel i'm sorry man i feel like someone who's respond i mean i'm sure there's a group of people who are responsible for that and they're kind of running the banning but what is it like what is the conclusion that they come to be like you know what we should really just ban this driving a narrative they're driving a narrative and here's here's what sucks is the worst thing you can do to try and drive a narrative is not let people talk because if someone has a dumb idea the best thing you could do is let them talk about their dumb idea so we can say hey here's your why your idea is dumb what's scary is when we let ego get involved and instead of me saying you know what echo's got a opinion i'm not sure if he's right or not but i think he's wrong so therefore i'm going to ban him i should be like well echo's got an idea if that idea actually has merit we should bring it out in the open we should talk about it and see if it's right or wrong or maybe not necessarily right or wrong this is where it's this is what this is what's scary not necessarily right or wrong everyone wants everything to be black or white science science isn't black and white science changes so when you say something is wrong what how many things are actually wrong not too many especially when you have evolving situations whether they're political situations medical situations these things evolve and so to just say you know what we're not going to let you talk about your idea is really crazy and it's happening that's why we made the jocko underground jocko underground.com it's a a place that we control we don't control this platform that you're listening this to right now unless you're on the underground so if you want to help us out in the underground have a little sanctuary of freedom you can go to jackonground.com you can subscribe it costs 8 18 cents a month we do an additional podcast to say thank you answer your questions talk about some some correlating subjects so check that out if you can't afford it we still want you in the game we still want you to be free so you can email assistants at jockleunderground.com if you want some of that we have a youtube channel by the way where we are making really good videos and straight up look this is really really really good the video that you made with the robots oh yeah yes that was insanely impressive did you even put it did you put it on the youtube channel uh yeah yes put it on the youtube channel because that is really good like i was very impressed look i know you're good i'm not trying to say that i have low expectations i have the highest of expectations sure because you've made some really good stuff in the past this one i understand and you know what to be honest with you i wasn't even the assistant director on this one kind of bummed me out okay maybe a little bit better all right there's a couple little pointers i could have added you know a couple little plot line could have been a little bit you know tightened up but from a graphics perspective it's amazing so if you want to check out some of those videos that echo charles makes in his head and then makes them in actuality subscribe to that origin usa has a cool channel too subscribe to that i made you know what i made i made a mp3 um album yes yeah oh yeah psychological warfare of course yeah that's the one this album you talk about it does have tracks on it each track is literally the solution for any moment of weakness you might have the common ones apparently i need to make one for cupcakes because you got ambushed by a cupcake bro it was that was like it was like too fast for me to be like oh let me pop in freaking psychological warfare i don't even think i have my phone you got ambushed i got hey hey look what used to be 100 effective is now no longer well i didn't put it in if i put it in and i still chose to eat the oversized cupcake which had a very large front-end benefit by the way um then it would not have been 100 but you know i chose not to to you know to put it in but nonetheless you put it in 100 effectiveness it'll get you past these moments these common moments of weakness skipping the workout nope you won't skip the workout but today i didn't i wasn't about to skip the workout at all but you know every time when you you talk about like oh yeah when you wake up and it's cold but it's so warm in the bed yeah today was literally like that this morning it's a little chilly out there didn't eat it though it actually even took a cold shower just kind of prove to yourself i got the cold tub oh and i gotta get into it brother the cold shower you know they say one of the benefits is like it it exercises your mind to do something you really don't want to do so that way like mentally every everything else seems like i don't know easier or whatever um i i guess even though you really don't that's not the first thing you want to do go on a cold shower or cool down when you wake up usually but when you get out you do feel like dang some other stuff got awakened in your body or whatever it's a good way to wake up yep it's true um flipsidecanvas.com dakota meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall check that out got a bunch of books final spin somebody just posted the last page of final spin which we gotta admit it's kind of cool so i was like it looks so cool to see that last page posted because the way it's laid out and stuff final spin check that out leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol displays freedom field manual way the warrior kid one two three four get your kids on the path get the neighbors on the path mikey and the dragons about faced by hackworth quoted from it today extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership that i wrote with my brother leif babin also we have a leadership consultancy echelon front leadership is the solution to your problems i don't know what your problems are but i know leadership is the solution inside your organization go to echelonfront.com for details on that you can also check out some of the live events that we have we have the muster two-day conference we have field training exercises which are two days you spend out in the field learn how to maneuver and then lead in simulated combat missions you will feel your leadership improve battlefield where we go out and walk historical battlefields and talk about the lessons learned from the good and bad calls made by leaders so check all of that stuff out at echelonfront.com we also have an online training academy for you to assist you in taking ownership of your life the various skills in life that will that will make you better that will put you in a better position that will help you overcome scenarios that we all face so if you want to take ownership of your life go to extremeownership.com i'm on there two three times a week live you want to ask me a question good go on there and ask me a question you wanna you wanna dive a little bit deeper into extreme ownership go on there we have courses that you can go through when you want to put your team through extreme ownership training go on there get your team unified behind the same principles extremeownership.com if you want to help service members actively retire their families gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization that does incredible things for veterans and their families if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to americasmightywarriors.org and if you want to hear more from me talking a little too much or you want to hear from echo who's barely talking and still talking a little bit too much you can find us on the interweb on the gram on facebook on twitter echo's addict with charles i'm at jacqueline i'm also on what's it called getter g-e-t-t-r i'm on there now too i'm on there so also check out stuart sheller at stuart cheller on all those different um categories and he's also got that website authenticamericans.com and thanks once again to stuart sheller for coming on sharon has a view on things thanks to him for trying to make a difference and thanks again stuart sheller for your service in the marine corps to our country and thanks to all the military personnel out there right now trying to make a difference in the world trying to keep it safe for freedom by doing what few people will do and the same goes for our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders thank you for keeping us safe and protecting freedom here at home and everyone else out there there are a lot of forces at work in the world a lot of strings being pulled a lot of decisions being made there are agendas and personalities and people sometimes look out for their own self-interests and that's okay sometimes in most cases that's good because when we're all looking out for our own self interest then collectively we're moving forward but sometimes people's self-interest starts to hurt others especially from a strategic perspective when people start to look at their own self-interests and it helps them but it hurts us as a whole from a strategic perspective that's when you may have to step up and try and do it tactfully and try and do it through influence and by building relationships and by guiding others in the right direction and if none of that works then think strategically about how to handle your next steps do the calculus don't let your emotions drive your decisions think about that indirect approach from b.h liddell hart think about the effectiveness or the ineffectiveness of being direct and then make sure you are staying true to your principles and what you believe in after all in the end you have to look yourself in the mirror and you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you did the right things for the right reasons so move with caution but also with conviction and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 304,895

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

Id: xbvK3gO3Pgg

Length: 232min 42sec (13962 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022