Jocko Podcast 350: Someone Must Walk The Point. With Marine Corps Major Tom Shueman

this is jocko podcast number 350 with echo charles and me jocko willing good evening echo good evening sergeant humphrey's squad secured a path and established a position from which they could overwatch second squad as they re-entered friendly lines as humphreys marines were breaking down their overwatch position to move back to fob increment the rear element of the squad was pinned in a canal by heavy and accurate machine gun fire from taliban hidden in a tree line i ran to sergeant humphrey shouting let's go we got to move on that gun staff sergeant henley and i were converging on sergeant humphrey as we rushed to develop a plan to relieve the pressure on the pinned down fire team from the taliban machine gun i look back to see zach was on my heels there would be no need for an interpreter where i was going he just saw me start running and he did the same then sergeant humphrey stepped on a pressure plate ied the sound and force enveloped me in a sensation all went black i have no idea how long i was out but when i came to the first person i saw was zack he knelt beside me over me my rifle in his hand protecting and supporting me as i fought to my feet i imagine we looked like a filthy madonna and child in the moment as zach helped me rise i looked to my left and saw staff sergeant henley he lay in a heap a tangle of his own limbs himself struggling to rise he had also been knocked out and was shouting at me unaware that blood poured from his own blown out eardrums i could make no sense of what he was saying then i saw humphrey and stopped trying to when i got to him sergeant humphrey's right foot was completely blown off all the muscle and tissue on his left calf was gone his left thigh lay open from a piece of shrapnel later i would learn his jaw was broken but for now he lay at my feet screaming doc collins and corporal matt bland rushed to sergeant humphrey and began treating his grievous wounds i called in a medevac as i held the meat of his calf to the bone as near crick wrapped it with corporal sean leahy directing the squad's fire upon the enemy corporal spivey swept the kill zone for more ieds and then swept a clear path to the point at which the medevac aircraft would pick up humphrey through it all sergeant humphrey remained poised directing his own treatment and movement as we carried humphrey to the medevac helicopter all i could think was what a bad day it was in insufficient for the moment but it was all i could think to say they tried to put me on the helicopter but with staff sergeant henley and sergeant humphrey both wounded and gone there was no way i was leaving when we returned to fob increment the co handed me a towel to wipe the blood off my hands and gear and said sergeant humphrey is gonna lose a leg but the surgeon says he will live but what happened out there looked at him and exhaled i don't know sir that file is deleted there was little else to say so i turned away and went back to debrief of my platoon i was tired and sad and likely consul concussed but i had a job to do zach always did his and more i could do the same bringing out the collective narrative in the debrief began to bring back the details for me but zack standing over me ready to kill to protect me stood out in stark relief from the start that vision zack silhouetted against the dust still swirling from the explosion that flattened me color and detail becoming clearer as my consciousness returned is what is one i still see sometimes as i wake it says something about zack as a man as a battlefield interpreter and as my friend it was a common it was common to hear americans say of the afghans we can't want it more than they do but it often seemed we did zach was a huge exception he was not a soldier but he was there to fight he understood our missions in a way that other interpreters did not most interpreters were like specialty items in our packs inert and just riding along until it was time to employ them for their purpose but marines are utility players capable of addressing a wide array of circumstances and expected to prevail in each like a marine zach was an active member of first platoon he did not shy away from any danger he did not question doing whatever the mission demanded because he was committed to it for afghanistan zanullah zaki ran to the sound of the guns in a way that would have made a marine infantry instructor smile standing at the debrief talking through what happened as is expected after every operation i told the platoon that all of us were going out the next day for humphreys revenge i thanked zack for his willingness to always be where he might be needed particularly when it was protecting my life i had already come to see zach as more than an interpreter but now there was no way to call him anything but a brother and that right there is [Music] an excerpt from a book which is called always faithful a story of the war in afghanistan the fall of kabul and the unshakeable bond between a marine and an interpreter and this is a book that was written by that marine and that interpreter the marines name is major tom schumann and the interpreter an afghan national his name is zanula zaki and they served together in hellmann province with three five marines during an extremely violent deployment and they had each other's back on the ground there and they continued to support each other even as afghanistan fell apart and it's an incredible story of how all that went down and it's an honor to have the marine from this story tom schuman here with us tonight to share his experiences and his lessons learned from the battlefield and from life tom thanks for coming down man sir thanks for having me echo thanks um and you're just right up the street at camp pendleton that's a firm up in san mateo on the north side of base active duty marine currently serving and you're the what exo operations officer oh opso not quite exo still on the trenches hooking and jabbing awesome man well thanks for coming down and thanks to your chain of command for allowing you to come down here for the day i know that's not always an easy thing to pull off but appreciate it and i i always well everybody knows i love the marine corps so i i appreciate that we're getting a little love from the marine corps today it's outstanding um let's just get into this this is a this is a great story well well parts of it are a great story parts of it are are rough um i like to start at the beginning kind of figure out where you came from and how you got to this point in your life today so i'm gonna go to the book it says i grew up steeped in chaos surrounded by weak men who wouldn't control their temper didn't consider consequences and bullied women through their body language or by getting even louder than loud women my mom did what she could to provide stability but my childhood memories but in my childhood memories there is a through line of angry screaming holes punched in walls thrown glasses shattered the effect of that has been for me to seek the opposite in all things it's almost incalculable to me that someone does not consider consequences i am very comfortable in chaotic situations but control over myself and my surroundings is second only to my faith in christ in defining the essence of who i am my mom was a good kid left to fend for herself the south side offers a million ways to get off track and by 13 she was feral drinking and drugging for the remainder of her teenage years at 17 she was waiting tables in chicago to pay for partying when my father showed up on a motorcycle with a guitar and long blonde hair he chatted her up and played her song she put down her order pad hopped on the back of the bike and rode off with him then he decided they needed to move to georgia by 18 my mom was a pregnant high school dropout who quit using who quit using out of duty to me her unborn child three years later she was married with two kids living 800 miles away from her family things got bad fast my earliest memories are of them fighting when my mom confided in my father's sister i have to get out of here i can't raise these kids and all this she agreed to take the three of us to chicago my mom packed three-year-old me and my three-month-old sister jessie into my aunt's yellow datsun hatchback and ran back to the south side when we got there we landed in my great aunt's house mom called my father in georgia and told him we wouldn't be back well it's a wild way to get it all okay to get started yeah it was uh wild times there to to start off and i think it really ended up shaping who i am and and and to some degree it probably helped me professionally uh you know this idea of equanimity that calm in the storm and when when there's constantly chaos and emotion all around you i found that i would go inside get everything inside of me ordered and restored and uh to be able to you know there's a great line and gates of fire by stephen pressfield where the platoon commander die nikes he talks about the the role of the officer is self-composure and it's the it's to fire your troops when they when they won't go forward and it's to reign them in when they've when they've gone blind to rage and so this this idea of self-composure was really a survival mechanism for me early uh but it translated later on into i think being helpful professionally and and uh just to me men who cannot uh men who resort to physical intimidation or to raising their voice is it's weakness uh it's cowardice and uh and and if you can't logically compel someone with with at a conversational tone of your point then you probably don't have a very good argument or maybe you're just talking to the wrong person you know and so uh yeah it it definitely shaped me but i i think when we're talking about cowardice i think we can juxtapose that with courage and that's my mom's courage to have me when she was 19. i mean i look back and i reflect on that decision often that how scared she must have been the uncertainty and and for her to go through with it and to bring me into this world at 19 i i i will always uh just be so grateful uh for her courage there and um and then the same thing just to what every parent wants for their child is is an opportunity and you're going to see that you know when we start to talk about zach and and what he did towards the end of this book and and she understood that the that the best way for us to have an opportunity was again required courage she's 22 years old two little kids and drives 800 miles back to chicago with nothing and uh um but it's a conviction and and so yeah real really that was my first example of courage is is my mom yeah the um as far as one thing i talk a lot about with leaders is you you're basically there's a mob right your team is a mob whether it's a platoon whether it's a troop whether it's a sales team it's a mob and just like any other mob like they can get going in a certain direction and your job as a leader is to make sure that the direction that the mob is going is correct and the two classic examples kind of ones you you mentioned a little bit but my team does great right we go out and do a great mission and everything goes smooth that mob mentality can be hey look we're unstoppable we don't need to we don't need to rehearse very much we don't need to worry about planning because we're so good you as a leader need to go actually hey we did good but here's some things we can improve here's what we got to watch out for so you got to go pull the opposite direction of the mob the other time is like oh you go out the mission goes sideways it goes bad and you can feel the mob start to get dragged down and then it's your job to as leaders say hey yup we made some mistakes we paid for it but here's what we're gonna do to fix it next time so that idea of and look there's some times where the mob is going in the right direction you can just yeah that's the easy that's the fun part of being a leader the the mob's going the right direction you get to just cheer them on and say hell yeah uh so that's a very important thing to pay attention to you can't do that if you're getting emotional you just can't you'll be in the mob and in the mob is not the place for you to be in a leadership situation yeah the yelling thing i think it's one of the one of the interesting stereotypes that the military has the stereotype that you you yell and scream to get things done part of it's because of boot camp movies right how many times have you watched the first 45 minutes of full metal drackett right i mean it's just that's oh that must be the way leadership is and it's and as you and i both know there's plenty of leaders inside the military that that that do yell and they do scream and that goes back to the book the uh psychology of military incompetence and what what attracts the military to people like that and attracts people like that to the military but you know always have a an interesting you know with a guy that worked for me and wrote these books with me leif babin you know he's he's worked for me you know for 18 months work up deployment and then we've been working together for another 15 years or something like that and he he'll always ask a crowd of people you know how often do you think jocko yells at me and you know you know depending on how much the people know about me yo oh he must yell you all time he's like he's actually never yelled i've never yelled at him one time and leif usually gives the caveat that he gave me plenty of times where i probably wanted to yell at him but it's just bad leadership and again uh the same thing you just said if i can't convince you of my idea my idea is probably not that great and your ideas either that or my idea is not that much greater than yours so my default as well let's just go with yours that's easier that's it's gonna it's gonna make everything more efficient effective um so going back to the story here so you're this chapter as soon as i as soon as i got this chapter the chapter is called a hippie cop's son so you being the son your mom being the hippie cop talk to us through the transition of your mom going from being a hippie that's that's jumping on the back of a chopper with a random dude with long hair and going to georgia and having kids to coming back here and you know and plus you mentioned you know she was drinking at a young age doing drugs and all of a sudden she does like a 180 and she becomes a cop what was that all about yeah i don't think the hippie part ever fully transitioned uh i think it was she was duty-bound and uh she and the duty was you and your sister yes and so she didn't grow up with her dream job being a chicago cop it was uh there was health insurance and she had two hungry babies and uh and that was who was hiring and so i i think yeah the if if you talk to my mom today that that hippie part of her is still alive and well and uh was never quite uh subordinated by the uh her time as a cop but um the hippie comes out quite a bit as you're going in the marine corps you're going in [Music] it comes out sorry mom for sure and so yeah my mom had two rules you know don't don't join the military and uh don't get motorcycle did both and then uh crashed motorcycle and have had quite a interesting marine corps career but uh yeah i it was it was simply um a matter of necessity and duty for her children so that that's why she became a cop not not because she you know was watching bad boys bad boys or whatever you know the 90s uh that was not a it was it was yeah and and i imagine single mom being a cop that's i mean how the hell does that even work yeah what kind of hours is she working she's small lady too you know she's tiny uh and she's a cop in chicago in the 90s it was tough tough gig uh but at the end of the day she she had something that she was serving that was bigger than herself and uh and and service always comes at a cost or it's not service you know and service always hurts and if it doesn't hurt to some extent you know then then again i would argue maybe it's not service and so i i think uh she's working nights uh on the south side of chicago in the 90s and uh kind of raised by a village there as a kid getting passed off between my aunt my grandmother you know and and but a little collective effort there but yeah it was it was you know all my mom my sister and i all slept in the same bed for like the first five six years when we got back in a room in my aunt's house i mean it was uh it was tough meanwhile as that's going on your dad ends up going to jail when you're eight years old how's that go down yeah i uh i was still visiting him uh during the summers uh for a couple years after we went back to chicago i'd still go down there for the summer and then uh just one summer i wasn't going and um and yeah i think he was something with drug drug related um and i what's tough for me about that when i think about my dad i i look at pictures of me when i'm a kid and i and i'm the age four five you know six years old and i think you know you've got a choice and you got this little kid this little boy and uh how could you not choose him and that's like what will sometimes to this day when i when i just come across and this and and now that i've got my daughter just turned four you know and i and i just think i will always choose you and um there's that a boy needs a dad period and uh and my mom was super mom and she did she taught me how to throw football and she played catch with me she was not my dad and uh and that that was something that uh you know go you you don't want to go to the father-son banquet with your friend's dad and uh fortunately i had you know some some guys who some of my friends dads who looked after me but uh that that took a long time to distill i'm still kind of probably working through some of that um but yeah he got out of jail um when i was about to graduate junior high and i went back for the first time to see him but uh yeah that absence um was painful and yeah yeah you you describe it in here um going back to the book here you say i followed my mom into a room after dinner and sat there while she tried to decompress from her day she was folding clothes and she tried to talk to me i was non-responsive she looked me straight in the eye thomas tell me what's wrong i was suddenly crying so hard i couldn't stand i lay on the floor i just want a dad i said over and over through the gasps and sobs eventually my best friend's dad started taking me to the father-son events he wasn't my father but at least i was with a man who cared about me i want an autographed picture of chicago bear's wide receiver tom waddle at one father and son banquet winning that eight by ten black and white head shot capped off the best night of my life then my best friend's dad hung himself in his garage my father was in prison three states away my supplemental father figure killed himself and most of the men in my life were unaccountable it made me mistrustful of men and it also left me such that now when i perceive a void or a gap i feel a compulsion to fill it to make it better put less positively i'm unable to resist trying to bend a situation to my will i've never been the smartest or most talented guy in any room i've been in but i am relentless for better or for worse yeah as i was reading this we'll get to some of these parts where you are um determined a little too determined with the kind of determination that'll get you in trouble it's the kind of thing when you have kids and you're like oh my this kid's pissing me off and you realize oh that's because it's a strong willed kid and you actually want those things you actually want those things uh you mentioned your dad got out of jail when you're 13 years old and this sounds and when you talk about in the book this is sort of like um kind of a little bit of like sounds like you're living the dream a little bit you're down there in georgia for the summers you got horses you got four wheelers you got jet skis and you're working hard so that that was like a good experience you're learning a lot definitely a little best of both worlds going to grow up run wild in the alleys of chicago that's kind of where we hung out in the alleys playing basketball playing whatever getting into trouble and then yeah the summers i get to be a little pretend cowboy and ride a horse almost fall off it you know crash a four-wheeler go out on the lake uh so yeah it was a it was a nice little blend to kind of get to experience both things and undoubtedly i i did learn some things about hard work uh working for my dad um i worked for him for four years until i was 16 like all summer and uh my 16th birthday said you know you've throughout the these last four years you've saved up enough to get a car um you got a 1985 nissan maxima wagon with 250 000 miles on it hell yeah uh so like definitely appreciate learn learn to appreciate hard work and uh so that there was some there was some good lessons learned and you did uh you went to an evangelical christian camp down there yeah and you know uh south side of chicago is all italian and irish and very catholic and uh so i was kind of raised in and around the catholic church my dad was southern baptist i went to the southern baptist camp and uh very different i was going to say that that's very different definitely definitely different but uh you know i i the most important day of my life happened during that camp and that's uh when i accepted jesus christ my savior and undoubtedly uh that camp and that moment i'm only here today because of um that encounter and and and to be i've always had a father you know and so i i've always men in the church you know may abandon you uh i've always had a father and that father has you know when we talk about the title always faithful that that's always faithful and so uh in my darkest hope most hopeless moments there was always little light of hope and and that's thanks to what what started that day when i was 14 years old down on jekyll island at a baptist church camp i'm i'm talking a little bit about just because the way you said that but also because you may have been uh born again but you you're not a saint at this point by by any stretch we'll get into some of that stuff um you you may not have been always walking the enlightened path along the way that's a fair assessment uh so you roll into high school and you're six to 140 pounds which i didn't i was 100 sure that was possible echo charles assessment yeah that's fantastic so what's what's your deal in high school what are you thinking about what's going on in high school um riding the bench playing football uh you know i i was basically six 240 pounds in seventh grade so i was the big uh and then just never no no additional development there uh but i i knew i wanted to get out i knew i was getting somewhere and i knew that the chaos and the dysfunction of my childhood that i was getting out and initially i viewed that as you go to college is how you get out of this situation uh no one in my family had been to college but i knew that my friends who seemed to have more stability like their parents went to college and so that that was really the the goal and then i i thought you know i i don't know what jobs professional jobs are i know there are doctors and lawyers and so like i know i'm not going to be a doctor so that means i could be a lawyer and uh and so i would i would do the debate team yeah you each team yeah you went full nerd right is that is that a 100 national honor society drama club speech and debate team treasurer of the service club president of the ecology club yeah you went full money that's the hippie mom part so i got the president of the ecology club plus my ap bio teacher was the and i wasn't doing too well in ap bio so uh i uh yeah uh is this a catholic school yes boys only yes all boys yeah how was that loved it it was a blast i mean it's there's no egos there's nobody trying to impress anybody it's just guys being dudes and having like uh it was a ton of fun absolutely wearing a uniform every day yes where'd your mom get money for this school yeah so she took out a loan her first second mortgage for the house uh for us to go to school and that's why i always felt like i had to honor you know her sacrifice because uh she's working her ass off and making all these you know sacrifices that i i felt you know in turn a duty and obligation to her and so i took my studies really seriously in high school and i was was was doing whatever i could to to make sure that um her investment in in me was was there would be a return on it and so that's part of why i was in all these clubs um but yeah i i i thought i'll go to college i'll be a lawyer and then i'll be able to take care of everybody and that's kind of what i was thinking in high school now september 11th happens what what year are you in a sophomore sophomore did that start to make you think about joining the military it's why i'm in the military it it it made me think uh you know at that point it was still the age of innocence or ignorance you didn't know that at least i didn't know that there were bad people in the world who wanted to do the us harm and so it was initially very confusing but by the end of that day i knew at some point i'll do something about that and so i knew i'd serve i didn't know i joined the marine corps i didn't even probably know there was a branch called the marine corps and i wasn't gi joe i wasn't you know didn't have a dad in house wasn't doing like man stuff uh i just knew like hey somebody's got to do something about that you should do that and and that has put me on a trajectory of where i am sitting here today so you apply to college you get into uh loyola university chicago is that a good school i don't even know i'm sorry it's all right yeah it's pretty good pretty good school yeah pretty good school hard to get into i i don't i mean i think maybe they're gonna your alma mater is gonna come at you yeah you'd be like hell yeah it's hard to get yeah it's super hard to get into it's a leap uh so you get in there you're you're kind of stoked but you don't have any money to pay for college and this is where you first kind of discover nrotc yep yeah uh it's the ivy league of the midwest um there we go okay uh yeah i you know no one is is no one i'm not able to talk to kind of anybody about going to college uh i don't know anything about going to college and so well after all the scholarship applications are already passed and well after i'm like oh like okay so i'm into college like how am i gonna pay for it and uh and so i goog well there wasn't google on aol uh you know looking up college scholarships and i find that uh that there's this thing called rotc and that they pay for your tuition and i said well i want to serve anyways um this could be a thing and and when i call them they're like yeah the scholarship window closed like six months ago but you could do it for free and uh and maybe if you're if in a couple years you can you can pick up the scholarship and i thought well i got no other nothing else going for me so i'll i'll try this and uh so that's how i ended up in rotc it sounds like you were a little unimpressed in the book with the navy when you like what you had in your mind for what military service would be like and you showed up in the navy who didn't really impress you too much at the rotc branch at loyola chicago sure i i the only thing i i still kind of thought i'd be a lawyer and uh and my grandma had a big uh crush on tom cruise so i'd seen him oh a few good men dude and so i think well that'll make it happen right there right yeah and so my mom is really against it but she thinks oh well you're going to be tom cruise in this movie it's not a bit it's maybe not terrible and then i go to my little rotc orientation week and we go up to great lakes naval base and uh getting marched around and yelled at and it's just it's just clear like the the marine staff the navy staff and then the the midshipmen who are first class who are going to commission the marine corps and we're gonna i just said i don't know but it looks like these guys have these guys have something that this other group doesn't and uh so i think i want to go and so that was my still not knowing anything about the marine corps not knowing what infantry was not knowing expeditionary none of this kind of stuff i just know that like it seems like they got their [ __ ] together and i want to be like those guys he picked colonel jessup earlier yeah you know that i had a conversation with a good friend of mine who's a who's a regular navy guy and he he said something you know we are he's deeply involved with the the seal community now but we just had a quick conversation about you know like the navy versus the seal teams because when people go to buds if they don't make it through buds they're in the navy and the job for someone that wants to go to buds that doesn't make it and ends up in the navy is not the job that they're looking for if you go into the army and you want to be a special force soldier and you don't make it cool you can be a rifleman in the 82nd airborne 101st airborne or that's still an outstanding job and you're doing something proximal to what you want to do the navy is not like that and he said well you know that makes makes it sound like my job was horrible and i said no not at all it's just that there's certain people that are attracted to certain jobs and i told them this story that i've told a hundred times about i'm on an lpd you know amphibious ship out here off the coast of san diego we're 30 miles off of pendleton we're about to go do a hydrographic reconnaissance the freaking waves are huge it's raining and miserable and i'm standing i'm standing there getting these you know getting ready to launch our zodiacs off the back of this lpd and this bosun's mate first class and it's you know it's whatever 10 o'clock at night storms and he looks at me and he looks out there and he looks back at me and he goes man i'm glad i don't have your job and i looked back at him and i said well i'm glad i don't have yours so there you go like everyone's got their own little thing so that's why when you look at people that are in navy rotc they're a different type of person than the type of per there's people that look at marines and go oh hell no i'm not doing that because they look at the navy people like oh they look like they're going to be doing some finance and some working on engine engineers and like this kind of thing it's just it's just propensity of job that people want and you looked at the navy guys and said they look like they're going to be engineers and these guys over here look like they're going to carry machine guns and you're a machine gun carrying type of dude a firm so uh but you still have so you still don't have a scholarship yet so you're at this point you're working at costco you're tying you're changing tires which is a rewarding job yeah someone brings you something that's damaged broken and then you give it back to him and it works again and i thought this was cool you you had a guy so now it's your junior year and your gunny gunny steel tells you that your grades your grades aren't good enough for a for a scholarship and he says you know what you better do is you better go to this platoon leaders class so explain though explain the platoon leaders class there are a couple different ways to commission as an officer you can go to um the academies are one commissioning source you can do it through rotc and then there's you can do it through occ meaning you've already graduated college and you can just do a little 10 week thing or you can kind of hit two summers during college year through this platoon leaders class course plc and so you do two six week hits and uh so since i still didn't have a scholarship going into my junior year and i wanted to be a marine i was advised that this was probably the route i would need to go and so i went to what's called plc juniors and uh it was a very good learning experience we talked about learning experiences where we started today yes we did and uh people still learning all the time sure and uh and it and you know i'm so jacked up like you know more effed up than a football bat as they'll say you know i i probably needed um an extra go and so i think ultimately there's there's a lot of benefit in that six weeks but uh and i think my gunnery sergeant recognized that i probably could use a little extra training and so i think he withheld some information there uh until graduation rehearsal and uh he said you know it's human you had the scholarship i just uh didn't tell you so congratulations so instead of spending six weeks hanging out with your friends or whatever you spent six weeks doing marine corps stuff yep donna quantico was that a quantico yep how was that course when i went 2006 it was uh it was tough uh i don't want to tell you know too many ocs war stories because i'll get heckled uh but uh i i thought it was it was this guy colonel chase used to stand at the top of the hill and just say like quit canada you shouldn't be here you're worthless like and then when i went back you know seven it was a new ceo and and i think we the surge was happening so we needed to make sure people got through and so it i'll tell you you know one thing that i'll never you know i'll always remember from that 06 is i had this mean as hell sergeant instructors ifo he was a mean mean man and uh every night we would hold the m16 by the front side tip between our thumb and our index finger fully extended straight forward and he would say discipline is and we scream instant willingness and obedience to orders and say discipline is instant willingness and obedience to orders and so we just do that over and over again and i've i've always uh thought you know that's that's shaped how i think about discipline and you know close order drill is the most basic form of discipline it's it's it's the most rudimentary basic form of discipline that we have that we build off in the military and then there's then you do battle drills which are another form of discipline you do immediate action drills another kind of it's all all this ties into just instant willingness and obedience to orders a drill is so that you you don't have to think about it you know and so thumb clip twist pull pin frag out right and so that's a battle drill or contact left and it and it's all predicated on a drill something that you do over and over again until it becomes less thinking and and when you why do you do this it reduces the need of physical courage when something is drilled into you it's you're not relying so much on your physical courage in that moment uh and and what i what i've been thinking about as i continue my career in the marine corps is is when you become more senior you actually need a lot more discipline than when you're pfc or last corporal or junior officer when you are a pfc or or junior in the organization so much your life is dictated to you so there's not a lot of opportunity to do things that are undisciplined and and and as you become senior you have more opportunity to discern what you what routes you want to go and the thing is that as you get more latitude or more freedom you have the potential to be less disciplined and i think when you think of the hard thing is usually the right thing and the right thing is usually the hard thing and as as you advance in this organization it requires you to have discipline to continue to do the hard and right thing and it's not that you would do the wrong thing you would just do the less right thing and and so i can just cut this little corner and be like well you know like i've been here for 15 years like do i really need to do like i'll generally kind of get it in the box but i don't have to like do all these little and so i find that that discipline uh in your habits and your actions and in your thoughts that helps you because otherwise you're relying on moral courage and so if physical courage if you rely less on physical courage through battle drills and immediate action drills and close order drill you you rely less on moral courage when you have disciplined thoughts habits and actions in your life and and so that that way it's not i don't have to say i don't need to put myself in in a position where my moral courage has to carry the day for me to do get up in the morning to like my boss like we have to be at work at 6 30 p.t no one's checking if i'm there at 6 30 like i'm the opposite i could probably come in at 6 40 6 45 you know and but by having the discipline of getting up when my alarm goes off at 5 a.m every day i reduce the need to have the moral courage to kind of make that decision and same thing with you know if you don't put ice cream in your freezer it's not a matter of discipline at that point it's i had the discipline not to buy it at the store because otherwise if it's in the freezer every time i walk by the fridge it's a matter of moral courage do i have the moral courage you're talking to necklace world right now to do this thing or not echo also equates moral courage with uh avoiding the ice cream you know it's it's always surprising uh or not always but a lot of times people are surprised that in basic seal training you have weekends off you go do whatever you want you can you can do whatever you want you can go get drunk you can go party you can you can get crazy and that's part of the test because once you're in the sale teams there's there's literally no one cares if you're showing up to pt now if you go out on a rock hump and you can't hang you're gonna get destroyed but they want people that find that that that will discipline themselves that have the self-discipline because and that's there's been plenty of people that didn't make it through seal training because they were because they didn't want to have discipline on the weekends just to do what they should be doing and said they wouldn't did what they wanted to do so that that's interesting the other thing is man as you get older and you get more senior and you can start cutting some corners [Music] every single person below you in the chain of command can see it and this is that where i got very lucky because i was uh i was pry enlisted so i was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two platoons which thank god what a what a freaking incredible opportunity but i would watch my platoon chief i would watch my platoon commander and if they were three minutes late i was tracking it if they forgot a piece of gear i was tracking it if they needed a little extra something to get need a little help getting up the ladder i was tracking it so when i moved into a leadership position i always felt those eyes man i felt those eyes all the time and i didn't want to let those guys down so so that's something that always weighed on me and then the last thing you know when we when we start talking about you know immediate action drills and battle drills what's really awesome is because sometimes people think oh well so what you have is a bunch of robots you know you've trained a bunch of robots just do whatever you say no actually you get these battle drills down you get people it's like do you play any musical instruments negative uh so guitar which i play i'm not good at it but jimmy page who played for the band led zeppelin echo charles we good okay he was a studio musician for years which meant he went into a student he was very well known as a studio meaning they would tell him exactly what to play and he would play the notes that they wanted him to play and he did that for for for forever just highly disciplined mechanical playing of the instrument and that's how he made a living for a long time and because he had all that discipline because he knew every fret and every note and how to bend them and how to how to manipulate them he knew them so well that when he got into led zeppelin now all of a sudden he could take those things and break rules so what you end up with like in a sealed platoon especially like a new guy in a seal platoon they're they're a robot for a little while you want to make sure that their weapons always painted point-and-safe direction they know exactly where the other people are during a during an immediate action drill that they're doing the safe thing so you drill them so it becomes mechanical and then once they start getting it now all of a sudden they can start saying wait i know i'm supposed to be over here but i can provide better cover for my other squad if i s scurry up this little this little mound of dirt a little bit and it's still in a safe zone because i'm not getting in front of it i'm not cutting cutting off anyone's field of fire so boom and so you even have the the front line shooters the new guys after a little while they're starting to think but they know the rules they know the rules so well that they can really think they can go right to the edge of that box they can go they can go right up to the edge of that berm that they know if they go any further they're going to cut off someone else's field of fire they know that so you get them so well trained and so well disciplined that they end up with a bunch of freedom and then that goes all the way up the chain now the guys that have got two platoons under the belt they can start making little adjustments with their whole fire team and then eventually you get a platoon commander that goes oh here's the rule right now and here's what i should do but i actually see something that i can do that doesn't break the rules but it bends them and it's going to give us a better opportunity to get a bigger bite on on this on this battlefield right now so those immediate action drills and like close order drill boom like we are doing without thinking and you've got to have that but then when you get to the actual immediate action drills people start to understand the concepts of what we're doing and then they understand the parameters you know there's certain certain notes on a guitar if you play this note then you play this other note it's not it doesn't work literally doesn't work the whole world will go that sounds like [ __ ] like everyone will think that so when a guy's good at iads or good at moving through a mountain environment when they're good at it they understand oh i can do this right here i can actually play this note i can play this note over here i can bend that note here's something i can't play that note over there it's not going to work and that's what we want we want people we want thinking shooters we want people that are understand that are so disciplined that they can actually have more freedom out there and and that's what always is the goal you know um and in the beginning that means we need to be highly disciplined and never you know when you're going through basic seal training if you make a tiny mistake it's it's it's like you're getting swarmed by instructors they do not want you to make the like you will not sweep someone you will not you give give a seal that's you know in his first splatoon give him a squirt gun and you give him that squirt gun and he's gonna like immediately have the best muzzle discipline that you've ever seen like he won't point it at his kid to score to be like it's like a physical like yeah i can't point this squirt gun at my son because it just doesn't feel right that's how like ingrained it is and that's what you want that discipline is embedded in their brains and then over time they go okay now i have such a good foundation to work with my mind can be free yep that's the goal uh so you got some of that stuff drilled into you i'm gonna i'm gonna jump into the book here for a second in my senior year with a scholarship i was over the hump money-wise but there was a new problem my metabolism slowed down and my regular diet of pizza and beer suddenly started yielding different results on my permanent perennial skinny frame i wasn't prepared for the metabolic cost of that in the appearance is reality marine corps where fitness is a virtue superseding most flaws in the core fatness is an unpardonable sin gunny steel again took me on as as a personal mission he was a picture-perfect marine thin haircut high and tight multiple meritorious promotions because he was genuinely squared away marine i still kept my eyes peeled for him whenever i was at northwestern trying to avoid him and heavy objects but one day he called me on my cell phone there was no avoiding him he ordered me to come to his office that was never good this was no different schumann [Music] you might let yourself become a fat piece of [ __ ] but i ain't we ain't commissioning a pig to lead marines normally i would have at least offered ii gunny but i was stunned into silence he continued you're going to come here come in here every morning for pt after that you're going to have a uniform inspection every day every day of your life is going to be the worst day your life until you conform to standards boom there you go yeah i was lacking some discipline for sure and uh it caught up to me and and we talked about again before we started about how good friends tell you what you need to hear and uh nobody told me i was getting fat uh so i don't want to like not take accountability for my own fatness uh but like i didn't think it was possible you know i'd always been a rail ski like it when i would go up in waist size i was like guess this is time for new pants like it was nothing was clicking that i was getting fat and you're like the slow bro the boiling frog right that doesn't notice that the water's exactly like it looks like a size 42. yeah and uh he uh he got me squared away yeah i had one of my friends um he's in the seal teams and he had a guy that was and that was not to standards and he brought him into his office and says hey bro there's no fat seals and you're fat and it ain't you're gonna start taking the prt until you're good to go so sometimes that direct approach what prt physical readiness test which again in the seal teams there's not there's not but there's not a bunch of people tracking you and there was years that go by where the guy a guy can if you know oh i had a trip wasn't there for the prt because like a command like the seal team would do one prt a year you know and you'd see it you know months in advance like oh the prt is on october 15th or whatever so if a guy's like cool i'm taking leave or i'm gonna go on a trip october 15th he's not there you do that three years in a row your pants size could be a 46. you know what i'm saying well what what is it though like a performance or a physical it's like a three-mile run push-ups pull-ups swim something like that so technically you could get gain a bunch of weight still pass that thing and be good to go or what you could but you probably wouldn't be able to pass it if and you know it's weird too like this goes back and forth the navy has a prt the regular navy and the seals for a while use the navy prt but that one you could probably could be out of shape like from a seal perspective and still be able to pass so then the seals made their own prt that just to make sure you don't have anybody that's uh that's not you know because there's no fat shields like just to enforce that rule without having to tell anybody like here's the prt if you don't pass it you got to get on the run program homie yeah but it's not like the kind they're you're measuring body fat or nothing like this and be like hey you're over you know 14 or whatever it's like we do have that as well oh if you're out of there there are height and weight standards and every year you're supposed to get height and weight and if and if you don't make weight you get taped and if you're not within tape then you get put on the bcp program what we call and basically you're the on the fat body program and you've got to do weekly check-ins and what's they measure your to get your body fat percentage so they'll measure like your waist your chest your arms that kind of exhale echoes wonder if there's a way to get involved in that could i do a pose down no i mean i like the the body weight i got taped my whole career yeah because if you're like if you're bigger and stronger you're going to get taped because you know like for me the max body weight or for something for a guy that's 5 11 was like you know 178 or something maybe like 182 or something like that and i would i weighed 225. yeah and so they'd tape you and they'd go yeah you're just you're just a big stronger also it's probably like a ratio then it's not like hey your waist is over this therefore you're out kind of yeah because you know you get these bigger guys who can you know they can do the prt yeah yeah and but they're yeah 225 235 but they can perform at that you know like you can't measure it like that you know or it's like oh but you're overweight doesn't make sense yeah no they have a ratio and then i never like had any issue with the tape at all i mean it was like good to go what about the prt ever had issues no prt good to go right now good to go no you got to be if you work out regularly you're going to you're going to pass the prt so you got to be a slacker dude and like they're not that kind of this is a rare dude in the seal teams that just give up on work i mean you're not wearing a shirt like 87 of the time yeah like if you're not in the field you're not wearing a shirt so if you're you know you're walking around every day and you're just putting on the lbs there's not too many occasionally it happens occasionally it happens but most of the time and not to mention like the actual physical part of the job if you're not in good shape you're going to get fired like if you can't go out and walk around the desert with you know 100 pounds and do it and hang you're you're going to get fired you won't be in a platoon so no and i guess you don't want to be in a seal platoon which is a weird thing to even be right at that point for sure so you got on the run program yep gunny steel straightened your ass out for a second time sure did we appreciate we appreciate him love him this is the this is the uh the non-commissioned officers that that make the that make the marine corps what it is make the navy what it is make the military what it is absolutely by keeping the young in line and often the seniors as well yeah um you seen up graduating which is awesome and you had to get lasik eye surgery so you get commissioned they cover that but that that makes it a little time for you to go to the basic school now at the basic school are you still thinking you still might be tom cruise at this point it seems like in the book you were still thinking it could be tom cruise no uh you've got to go into that with a law contract okay so pilots and lawyers aren't competing at the base of school they've already got their their contracts ahead of time got it i didn't know what i wanted to be when i was heading into the basic school it i it's in there i don't know yeah i i discovered pretty quickly what i wanted to be field exercise one right that's what changed your mind yes tell us about field exercise what so you know even though i got to do little summers with my dad and pretend to be a cowboy i still didn't know anything about being outside i didn't know how to camp i didn't know how to and uh we we go out we our class picked up in uh october so our first field exercise is in sometime in mid mid-november and it got down to five degrees and uh everybody's canteens were frozen no one knew like put the canteen upside down or put in your sleeping bag with you like you tried to bite in the mres like breaking your teeth off like uh all our like cold weather gear is super old sucks and like don't know how to layer don't know anything about how to live outside in the cold at least the majority of us and so uh you know up into that point everybody kind of talks about oh we're going to be infantry i'm going to be infantry you're going to be in between at that point i know what i wanted to do like tanks sound cool or this sounds cool like artillery sounds cool uh but at the end of effects one fielder size one uh no no one wanted to be infantry anymore and uh i was just like well [ __ ] if you all don't want to do that that makes me want to do that and so it's kind of like just a response to my environment when people don't want a challenge or people don't i want to i want the opposite and so i was like well now i do want to be infantry and and that's that was my i did i still had no idea what that actually meant beyond that it was a response to what other people didn't want um it wasn't until i got out in the woods that i knew uh at adam josh course i said yes yes this is the right place but it that was still to come and how was the basic school for you it you know they call like the big suck uh i mean it was it was uh it was challenging it was not like extremely challenging it was it was more a grind than anything it's just six months is a long time and uh and so i think i've gone back to quantico a couple times when i've taken the midshipmen down there and i've got to talk to some of the instructors and see their their poi down there now i think it's i think it's really good um it was just long it was long that's what it was now when you're going through that are you getting is it like ranger school you like get put in a leadership position in a patrol you take it out you get graded then the next one you're a machine gunner the next one you're a point man yep so you're getting good experience in the field sure yeah you there's there's several field exercises everybody's getting rotated through leadership billets and uh you know the the goal is to to make every marine officer able to lead a basic rifle platoon that's that's the intent of putting we're the only service that that puts you know our pilots and our lawyers and our agitants all through this this course where they're we're going out training as riflemen mm-hmm every marine's rifleman um was it hard to get selected for infantry yeah so it but by the time selection came down i i don't know what's uh like 300 uh in a in a one class alpha company and um i think there's maybe 30 40 infantry slots uh out of that and i i mean i remember you you were i was first platoon and we were when the sbc the platoon commander was reading out who got what mos uh there was a dude who was solid his dad was a sergeant major and and he didn't get it i thought oh well he's like way more squared away than me uh maybe maybe i'm not going to get it um so yeah i i think it was competitive uh for sure is that because like the talent spread thing yeah so it's top third middle third bottom third so that you have a quality spread across that that that right there that concept is what shows you that the marine corps puts the marine corps first it really is so what it is echo charles is when you go to the basic school you'd think number one guy would get the number one pick what does he want to do number two guy get the number two pick but then everyone would pick the the jobs like the good jobs the cool jobs and the people at the bottom would get you know whatever is considered a crappy job so instead what they do is they cut the class up into thirds the first guy in the first group gets the first pick the first guy in the second group so out of 100 this guy might be the hundredth or the hundred and first guy is that right yeah no the 201st guy gets the second pick the 301st guy gets the third pick so you end up with this quality getting spread through all the different jobs in the marine corps so it's not like there's some category of of marines of marine officers that are all just like oh they're just like the the lowest ranking guys are just terrible no it's you get an even spread across the board and that is a thing that tells you that the marine corps puts the marine corps the whole marine corps first that is one of the clearest indicators in history that we want uh everyone in the marine corps to have an opportunity and the marine corps comes first oh yeah wait so what do they base that on like the yeah throughout the six months it's academic there's a leadership score there's a pt score rifle score so there's there's several kind of scores that are calculated into your overall class ranking largely academic but definitely like leadership evaluations uh all kind of i i always say like i i only think that i i got it because um we were in the defense and the ground was frozen and my spc and i was a machine gunner and i just had a pickaxe and i was right next to a tree with big roots and he and he walked by and hitting this ground and literally not just the shovels bouncing off he's like what are you what are you trying to do there sherman i'm getting a chest deep fighting hole sir not on that ground you're not like chuckled and walked away uh several hours later comes by how's that going schumann i'm like two inches deep he's like like just uh i'm away sir and then by day three he goes by and he's like this guy's maybe just stubborn enough to be a grunt yeah because i'm sitting in a chesty fight home and uh i always think like maybe that's i think that's my how i got selected dude i've got this story from hackworth that i read the other day and i got to like do more with it but he's in korea and he's freezing and he wants to go home and he figures out a plan in in like when the sun goes down he starts to freeze he's like i'm out of here how can i get out of here so what he plans to do is he's going to dig a hole big enough to put his leg in and then he's going to toss a grenade into this hole and blow his leg up get some shrapnel and go home so the sun goes down and he's loading his fighting only starts digging man it's the same thing he digs and he starts digging and he's digging and he's digging he's digging through the night and right as he's finishing up this hole and he's getting to a point where he can finally throw this grenade in there and go home the sun starts to come up and he's like you know what i got this but uh it's a it's a good thing to remember that when it really sucks the sun's gonna come up at some point and you'll start to get warm again push through it um and it's good lesson learned it's not easy to dig in frozen ground took him all night just to dig a hole big enough for his leg to toss it it's funny to hear a guy like hackworth who was you know uh a very brave person just based on his action but he was done he was done it's like deck winners you know dick winners after everything he did in world war ii they brought all they got recalled for korea he showed up to to the boat they're in san francisco and they're like hey if you're a combat vet from world war ii you don't have to go and he's like cool i'm out that was dick winters i mean who's going to question dick winter's courage but he was like yeah i'm going back to my farm in pennsylvania um good luck gentlemen and that was that um all right got to go to the book here we got to get got to get mom back in the picture here um every time i visited my real home it was a fight over the marine corps when i was selected for the infantry my mom lost it i remember her yelling the hell you are that's not [ __ ] happening you'll be used as cannon fodder she mentioned something about shooting me in the kneecaps she swore this was just some macho [ __ ] because she was a cop she said it wasn't just me i was dragging down this road i was forcing her to travel it too but a young man has to live his own life and i realized that mine was the marine infantry so mom was not stoked on this whole seat oh it was every time i came home and it was for the first maybe 10 years uh and it was it's like donald rumsfeld dick cheney george bush oil i'm like mom where's the detergent like i came home to do my laundry and you're yelling at me about donald trump like i don't know anything about all these kind of things i want to be a marine infantry i want to fight and right now i just got to do my laundry so uh it was it was always a she was always on a 10 always yelling about it and then you know i end up going to a pretty dangerous place and then it's like okay you're going to get out and like uh i think i'm going to stay in and then like you know my tour comes up again like okay come back be a fireman dude i think i'm going to stay in um awesome stuff uh way to listen your mom um from from basic school you get infantry officer school how long is that course three months and uh you and i were talking earlier about um when i had james webb on the podcast yeah and he like gets done with the basic school gets done with the infrared officer course goes to vietnam they like bring him out in the field point up at a ridge line they go your platoon's up there who am i relieving oh it's just a sergeant you're you're the other platoon commander was wounded or killed or cass of act you got it and he he rolls up there and the first night he's in combat he's just calling for fire i mean just get it just getting after it and really leading a complex scenario and i you know i said how did you feel like you were prepared for that and he was like yes and i can only imagine that you going to now what is it 2007 2008 uh i started that course 2009. okay so 2009. we got two wars going on um got all these veterans teaching you that must have been about as squared away as a course could be and i would answer same as secretary webb i would say yes you know that course is an incredible course and more than anything it prepares you technically and technically to lead marines on the very first day it definitely helps you become mentally and physically tougher there's a lot of mental and physical development that happens uh their moral development that that happens there and the instructors as you alluded to were all iraq guys and so the quality of the instructor is super selective there and then just the actual curriculum there i you know two of my buddies our final exercises uh in 29 palms and they didn't come back with us to graduate they went to platoons that were in 29 palms and deployed you know a week later and so this you know this web part is still still happening and uh and you know when i showed up to my platoon i know that i have a lot to learn about leadership i know that i need to listen to my squad leaders i know all these things i also know that i could leave this platoon today and and that is a great testament to the infantry officers course are is there one on the east coast or one on the west coast are they all it's just in quantico just in quantico you just fly out for the final exercise out to 29 palms okay go out there and get some um this is also where in the book you start talking about um you start really forming your your bonds brotherhood now um you got a bunch of bunch of names bunch of guys you list off ty anthony alex pearson vince young cameron west you got some prior enlisted guys uh johnny epps am i saying that right and hey to all the marines who are butchering your names that's all good i'm sorry joe patterson robert kelly so this is rob kelly this is the son of general john kelly um john kelly enlisted in 1970 eventually became a four-star general you if you recognize his name it's probably from when he and you're not in the military it's from when he when he was the white house chief of staff rob was a prior enlisted guy like his dad fought in fallujah these are the guys that you're now forming a bond with and this is kind of like where you really start to become a marine absolutely yeah it's it's where i everything up to this point was hypothetical like i i think this is you know it all started when i was a sophomore i said oh i should go do something about that no idea what that was and then like oh i navy marine uh marine guys i like those guys they've got something and then like oh no one wants to be infantry i want to be and so all this stuff is just a theory and then i get to ioc and it's like no like these are the people i want to be around this violent aggressive stuff that we do here like it speaks to me in a very and so you know again grew up with the mom even though she's a cop she's still this hippie like there's no like talks about being a warriors no i and so it was i you know in in reflection there's there's something about a warrior calling that was inside my heart and inside my soul that it finally uh resonated felt validated when i'm running through those woods like a wild animal uh just attacking and shooting machine guns and rockets all day with this group of savage men and for the first time i said like yes like you've made the right decision and this is these are your people this is your [ __ ] and uh and it you know it taught me this many lessons but one is that you know it it's all it's all hard it's all shitty work it's all tough work but when you're doing it with the right group of men like you just talked about like those are the good times and and you wouldn't rather be anywhere else and so um yeah i i mean that that that list of names that you just read off all those guys went on to combat all those guys went on to do incredible things and then you know if we get back to november 9th where we opened with my with my squad leader i mean that's the day that robert kelly was killed and and uh to have rob kelly as a mentor and a friend um you know i didn't know his dad was a general until he was coming to speak to us you know that's the kind of guy rob was that he never would would mention that um and just uh i i i hope we maybe i don't know if we're going to come back to him but when we found out about the deployment you know so i'll i'll hold yeah actually um as soon as i was reading that section it because you the way you had it broke out broken down the book you're like oh we had these guys they're all just done with either ocs or rotc and we're all you know went to the basic school and then it was prior enlisted guys and you mentioned johnny epps and joe patterson and robert and i was like i was like rob kelly son of a general that's prior enlisted i actually went and looked that up because it was amazing right that this guy whose dad is general was like oh cool what are you doing i'm enlisting in the marine corps like hell yeah oh yeah um i was going to college so i went to college i had to go to college uh once i got commissioned did a couple deployments and then i had to go to college and i was in college september 11th it happened i'm and i'm talking to i went to the university of san diego and i had one of my professors i was an english major one of my professors was a nun and i'm talking to her and she says like like don't you know are you going to be able to stay here longer and i was like what do you mean she says well don't don't you want to stay can't you maybe try and get your masters i was like what i was what are you talking about sister clay literally i said what do you mean and she just couldn't comprehend and she goes well don't you want to stay here and you know be isn't this like in her mind this was the greatest thing ever i'm this guy that was in the navy and now i'm just gonna have to go to school and i was like no i want to go back i'd go back tomorrow if they would let me and she says why do you want to go back she's like why do you just dumbfounded why do you why do you want to go back and i in some awkward way because it sounds bad to say it i was like well i go back there and i get to be around a bunch of dudes like me that we listen to say music we like to do the same stuff we're interested in the same thing we laugh at the same jokes we we that's where i want to go i want to get back there and you know for you showing up there with all these studs it's like yeah this is this is where i'm supposed to be did you have any challenges there was there anything that you any major lessons learned if you could go back and square yourself away i had the benefit of having a couple months between when i graduated tbs and showing up to ioc so you know joe patterson would would pt us each day and i'd i'd work out with ty anthony and and so uh steve tris another so we we i showed up in pretty good shape thankfully because you it's hard to maintain or improve your fitness at the basis school because it's just 0 6 to 1900 every day and then you're studying on the weekends and so thankfully i had a couple of months and so i i the lesson i learned at ioc is is how to embrace the suck and uh i would say the only thing that i would say is like it would have been better if i learned it sooner um but i was i was out we were doing a patrolling exercise at fort ap hill and i was just gp holding security and been days without food uh july and virginia at ap hill and just ticks and and i'm holding the security and just flies landing on my face ants crawling up my sleeves spiders repelling down gnats in my ears and on my bellies grumbling and i got chaff everywhere and i'm just trying to fight all this and kind of so sad and this uh and just trying to survive moment to moment and as i continue to kind of fight nature i'm on security for that 30 minutes at this point and and all the gnats are still there all the ants are still coming all and i just finally said like you can't you're not gonna defeat nature you just gotta accept it and in that moment i just stopped swatting the flies i didn't care that the ants were crawling up my sleeve and uh it allows you to thrive and and when you when you when you when you it's it's good you know embrace the stuck is the marine corps version of good it's it's the stoics version of a more fate i love your fate it's it's this idea that whatever the circumstances are i accept them and i'm going to find opportunities within this current environment instead of circumstances rather than just try to survive in it and it it's it gives you power it gives you agency autonomy you know you no longer just become this this like this leaf that's in a and a brook that's getting tossed around now i have a vote it may be a lot pretty restrained options uh based on the the circumstances but at least i can say uh how can i best use these challenges um and and i think of like somebody like uh stockdale when when he's when he's in prison they say well was i a victim no you know you think of uh schulzenstein when he's in the gulag archipelago and he says thank you prison when you think of someone like paul who when he's in prison he's rejoicing i think of sergeant antoni as he's dying he he turns his last words are is everybody okay and so it takes all these moments and it allows you to just uh to take ownership back and uh and so yeah i think that is i probably learned that two thirds of the way through and i was probably feeling a little victim uh throughout most of that curriculum and then finally i said you know good uh and now now i'm like crazy because you know when i'm going up the mountains in bridgeport i just wish it was colder or i just wish there was some more snow i'm so happy that's so hot out here in 29 pounds if it was hotter it'd just be a little bit better and you know uh but you you got to say that kind of stuff and you got to try to at least believe it otherwise you're just uh powerless yeah otherwise everything really sucks it sucks when it sucks but if you can't accept it it's going to suck a lot a lot worse um now this whole book and by the way obviously i'm only reading highlights get the book so that you can get the whole story but it's not just your story it's about half of it is written by your interpreter zack and it's really interesting to hear his perspective because we as americans we have a really hard time uh picturing what we just picture a stereotype of what we think in iraq is what we think an afghan is or whatever we just have this stereotype in our head and that's kind of what we blanket over and i i know i always have to reiterate what an iraqi person is when iraqi dad is what an iraqi mom is what an iraqi family is oh they're a family actually the way i usually describe is to say they're like you are so if you're sitting here listening to me what's an iraqi family like oh it's a family there's a dad there's a mom they want to look out for their kids they're trying to grow their business they're trying to get by they're trying to fix their car they got payments due right that's what they're doing and it's really interesting to hear zach's story and his perspective he's one of nine children he's from kunar he's a pashtun he talks about the pastor wali which is their their culture which some people have heard a little bit about he goes into some details hospitality for visitors right showing courage that's just the way they roll you have to show courage in daily life and you have to show courage and bravery defending their communities you gotta show loyalty you gotta show kindness you gotta show respect then there's also they have a code for revenge they don't tolerate insults they're expected to take revenge if something goes against them or at least negotiate some kind of compensation if something happens to their family or to their community um zach's mother's father worked for [Music] president najibullah who who who they called dr najeeb who was the president of afghanistan after the sony soviet union was driven out so in 1989 the soviet union leaves um and and this this guy dr najeeb takes over as a president and that's where zach's mother's father worked zack's father was a soldier who who worked for the government in kunar after he got out of the army he worked as a clerk for the red cross worked for the red crescent um the dr najib's government collapsed in 1992 by 1996 um the taliban is expanding out a kandahar province they eventually capture and execute dr najeeb they take him and his brother and hang them from light poles in front of the presidential palace that's what's transpiring during you know as zach is growing up this is what zach's growing up in and i'm gonna go to the book here and again these are this is a section that's from zach's writing and he says this i was only five years old when they came from kandahar with their long beards and black makeup surrounding their eyes to take control of kunar but i knew that my parents were scared i remember life was very hard when they were in power in kunar we pashtuns were already very conservative but the taliban declared controls over everything in our lives each night i heard father tell my mother about the new rules imposed by the taliban every day there were new prohibitions they have declared television and music on islamic then they close the newspaper then women may no longer work or go to school father began to grow his beard mother my mother had to wear a burqa covering her entire body outside of our home even her eyes were hidden behind a screen she was prohibited from looking at strangers and could not go out of the house without my father or one of her sons it was strange to me that i had to escort my mother except for the madrasa there were no schools no university electricity was scarce maintenance of roads and buildings stopped stopped there was really no access to any of the basic life needs a government is supposed to provide except guns there were always plenty of guns the talibs carried ak-47s and rocket launchers everywhere they went there was sharia law of course that was a form of government the taliban were interested in they caught off hands cut off the hands of thieves talibs from the department for the enforcement of right islamic way and prevention of evils the religious police enforced laws about modesty with sticks they beat people in public who said they were not following the laws especially women many people were killed by beheading or stoning as punishment for their violations there was no real court just the taliban although they were from a very different part of afghanistan and had very different accents the taliban and pashtun like the people in my village so some of our neighbors were for the taliban my father was not and he suffered for that power shifts suddenly in afghanistan who you know and support matters more than who you are it has always been that way my father lost his job because he had worked under dr najib he grew his beard even longer so that he would not attract taliban attention without his clerk job he became a farmer in our family any child old enough to walk was a farmer we grew enough vegetables to feed ourselves with a little leftover to sell in the village market we grew and sold flowers too red roses afghans love flowers and plant them everywhere maybe they represent hope that something good can grow from dust i was only 11 years old on september 11 2001 i did not really understand what happened that day we really had no concept of america or the west we were told that the people there were infidels and that they would try to make us stop practicing islam or living in an islamic way i certainly did not understand their governments or laws or the things to come soon after the americans began their invasion i still farmed and played cricket in the forest but our village was growing more and more frightened every day people were scared that the americans would kill us with their planes especially those who worked for the taliban or al-qaeda my father had the radio up to his ear all the time the day the american bombs started falling across afghanistan the president of the united states said the oppressed people of afghanistan will know the generosity of our america of america and our allies as we strike military targets we will also drop food medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of afghanistan the world had finally remembered we existed the americans came with more guns and more trucks and more planes we hoped they would bring good things too afghanistan had nothing after two decades of war there was no government we had no schools no police no military literacy was 18.6 percent in 1979 in 2001 no one knew because no one had asked there was nothing to make us a nation except our hopes so i think it's really lucky that zach kind of got to see you know he he understood freedom he understood education and maybe that's not the best section to read but he definitely understood freedom he understood education he saw the oppressiveness of the taliban if he would have seen that he might have not had this place in his heart where he wanted to really help out america um and again uh almost half the book is his words so get the book and we'll read some more but get the book you want to get the real details of what it was like on the ground for these people that's a great place to get it um but september 11th happens america enters afghanistan and for him that's an opportunity he talks about that's an opportunity for freedom again like he sees that and eventually he does end up getting a job as an interpreter and we'll get there to that but going back to you you get done with ioc and you get assigned third battalion fifth marines three five marines and anyone that listens to this podcast knows about three five marines from well from with the old breed by eugene sled eugene sledge um three five four in world war one they fought in nicaragua they fought in world war ii guadalcanal new britain pelulu okinawa in korea they were at incheon they were at the breakout withdrawal from the chosen reservoir in vietnam they were in away city they were in the queson valley the death valley they were in desert shield desert storm and of course iraq and afghanistan so you get orders to three five hallowed unit um you get there and you get assigned um the little quote from the book second lieutenant schuman first platoon kilo company that's what you get told how does that make you feel yeah excited i uh i've been reading with the old breed and and with eb sledge there and that's that's kilo 3 5 and uh just one thing that we as marines do we do a very good job of preserving our our history our heritage our legacy it's it's drilled into you everywhere you go and then um so it's it's alive it's a it's a lie from the the stories that your sergeant instructors tell you at boot camp and officer kane at school and and then and but uh you know you check in you walk outside of the 3-5 kilo office and the cp for three five there's a picture of kilo on palulu with a note from eb sledge and like uh just the this the idea like that you have responsibility and an opportunity to carry that legacy forward i mean it's it's more it's all you could ever dream of it's all you could ever hope for um second lieutenant schuman first platoon kilo company you've been how long have you been in the marine corps for at this point a year nine months so you're nine months to a year and this is everything you've been working for through college and you get this um but that being said there's also like some and it'll be weird for people to hear this there's also some bad news and the bad news is that you're scheduled to go on a westpac deployment which means you're gonna be on a ship going around the pacific ocean not going into combat that was the plan for your battalion yeah all i want to do is fight i mean you leave ioc and and you it's just basically this controlled aggression and this is maximum violence and uh and and you and your all your instructors have just left iraq and and you know it's what you've been seeing for the last several years and uh you're ready to do that you you you know you've allen iverson you know he says we're talking about practice we're talking about practice you want to get it's time for the game and you want to go get validated and uh and so when you find out hey you're going to go to okinawa and float around a little bit you think well [ __ ] that's not what i was trying to do here uh so yeah definitely uh initially disappointed i got i was i guess that disappointment to it an extent persisted but once i started working in leading marines i mean every day i'm living in san clemente driving down el camino real past trestles beach into the north side of camp pendleton to go shoot machine guns with 35 savages like it's a pretty good deal and so pretty quickly like my little sadness was was mostly taken care of but yeah still a little disappointed for sure any challenges when you were doing your work up preparing for deployment undoubtedly the the the start these so three five last one to iraq and 08 and so the senior lance corporals all had um done the iraq deployment in some of the sergeants and then then the platoon that i picked up had just gotten back from okinawa they were the first time that 3-5 hadn't been in combat in 10 years and so they are all feeling that's what infantry marines joined for one reason they joined the fight and so they're you know all their seniors have been to iraq they've all been to combat they had to live with this that they didn't then they of course like always their their leadership is saying well we could go we're gonna go we're gonna go and then they they don't go and they just you know and so uh morale was low discipline very low uh there was i mean it was uh it was very tough uh leadership is always challenging and so like i the midshipman kind of when i teach in naval academy would kind of like you know [ __ ] and complain about different aspects of of leadership or timing and and i can't think of a time as a second lieutenant in the over 245 years in marine corps where it would be oh this is this must have been the easy time to be a second lieutenant it's it's always a tough time to be it's in in hue city and caisson i bet it was pretty hard to be a second lieutenant you know immediately following vietnam and the 197 probably pretty hard to be so there's no time where it's it's easy and it's it's just those challenges are different based on peacetime garrison wartime but those marines were disgruntled low morale and not disciplined and uh that's what i was stepping into uh initially as a platoon commander now when we found out we got we were headed you better shape up or you can put on the bench but you did much of your workout thinking you were going on westpac right about six months and um yeah this is when guys are like well we gotta do this again we're just gonna go sit on a boat um not cool uh but as you mentioned things things um changed so you guys get together it's around christmas time you get together you gather for your christmas leave a safety brief where they're gonna tell you not to be idiots uh battalion commander has some word to put out here's what he says uh here's what you say in the book as we gathered for our safety brief prior to releasing marines for christmas leave lieutenant colonel morris stood in a circle of more than one thousand marines all impatient for the freedom of the leave period and prepared for the usual tired exhortations about tire pressure and not drinking and driving those came in as expected but when morris announced we would no longer be deploying to japan the air became suddenly charged like the ozone smell before a lightning storm a thousand marines collectively leaned in to hear his next words when he announced that dark horse which is 3-5 when he announced that dark horse was instead deploying to the sangan prad district of helman province afghanistan there was a roar so loud i felt it as much as i heard it i could not have wanted anything more for christmas i felt a surge of heat through my body a charge of adrenaline and excitement and deep down a tiny cold pit of fear i looked over at rob kelly expecting to see the same excitement on his face and i did not find it i gave him a come on man look he looked back at me with half a smile and said i was ready for a mew meaning the japan deployment mine was the fire of the unblooded knew sang and meant we would bury marines [Applause] um yeah that's what's happening um it's hard to explain to civilians that the young men that sign up to go to war really want to go to war and it's hardly hard to um convince young men that are really excited to go to war to be careful what you wish for at this point um we haven't really talked about this yet but you have long time girlfriend at this point andrea is that right andrea andre andrea andrea so you got andrea how long have you have you been together with her at this point uh close to 10 years and you so you met in high school yep and um so this is a lot i mean you don't get more much more long term in a relationship as a 20 whatever old your guy you are at the time than 10 years that's that's a long time and um you weren't a perfect boyfriend no but you'd still been together for a long time and you decide that you're going to break up with her just before deployment yeah i couldn't get my [ __ ] together i i knew it was the right thing to do she's my high school sweetheart you know we met at youth group [Music] she'd always been good and loyal and uh devoted and she's beautiful and uh she's everything i could ever hope or or dream of and um the right thing to do for a girl that's been dealing with your crap for you know 10 years at that point a decade by the way is to make an honest woman of her you know and uh so we go ring shopping um this is all pre-deployment leave we go ring shopping we're talking about it and uh and i don't have the courage to to do the right thing and uh so we pull up to lax we're about to deploy the next day and she's about to fly back to chicago and um she thinks i'm about to ask her to marry me and instead i say uh you should you should find a new boyfriend while i'm gone and she just uh she had a you know she had a fountain drink in the cup holder gave me a little fountain drink bath and uh told me what i thought i was real [ __ ] and that was it and um yeah uh terrible terrible thing i did there and um you all right you get done with that you spend the last day um back in back in california you go over you go with cam who's one of your buddies and you go with rob you go to general kelly's house and you have a barbecue um it's like a pretty poetic scenario for for you guys to be rolling out it's gotta be kind of crazy going to general kelly's house for like the going away right so there's the cabins on pelton and we went down to the del mar uh beach and those cabins there and cam and i had after the little fiasco with andrea we got hammer drunk and uh like the next morning it's like the day we're gonna get in the buses that night but rob says hey you know stop by have some lunch and uh like it's got the shake still from from and uh general kelly you know they like to drink pvr and like have a beer tom i'm like well well you're gonna say you say yes sir and so uh yeah i mean it was i mean it's always when you're a second lieutenant you're around a four-star general it's uh there's there's it's a little bit weird uh but really uh despite the hangover what was really uh captured my attention is just this the over the overall family dynamic of just a family really centered around service and and duty and then just the love and how so much of that love was through rob and emanated from rob and um and just as a guy who'd never had that it just uh was always remarkable just to kind of to see that from there um it's go time going to the book from the battalion headquarters at ford operating base jackson 35 was responsible for almost 37 square miles of sengan district and almost 60 000 people living throughout i was in afghanistan a week and at pb fires for 24 hours when i received my first mission on october 9th 2010. i had everything i thought i wanted now it was time to find out the truth i left patrol base fires with a mix of 96 marines and afghan national army soldiers to look out three areas the three five headquarters wanted to know more about in addition to first platoon i had a host of attachments four marines from three seven to give us their insight into the area and their experience within it an entire squad of engineers and two explosive ordnance disposal marines to contend with ieds the primary threat in sangin a section of six snipers the embedded training team detailed to work with the ana three interpreters to help us communicate a joint terminal attack controller to get us air support if any of the taliban who typically operated in groups of three to four men wanted to challenge a group of 96. sangin was prom was primarily dirt and blowing dust but irrigation canals stretching out from the banks of the helmet river created verdant fields of corn and the pink and red splashes of opium poppy on trails roads anywhere we would be forced to pass the taliban hid the taliban hid ieds by the hundreds they buried yellow plastic jugs containing pounds of homemade explosives triggered by pressure plates that completed a circuit when someone stepped on them ieds were indiscriminate weapons killing marines and afghan civilians alike their density demanded we move single file with about 30 feet between each person to keep an ied from getting more than two or three of us at once patrol base fires was at the center of it all walking single file is the best way to mitigate an ied threat but is a horrible way to encounter your first ambush i was at the front of the formation moving among the jade leaves and whispers of wind through a cornfield stalks towering over us all and concealing our movement when machine gun rounds from a nearby building began ripping through the corn i dove behind a brush pile that concealed me from view but would not stop a bullet much less hundreds of them the size of our group and the dispersed formation meant our element was in a firefight before the remainder of my patrol completely exited from pb fires i was going to die before i got the second half of my unit out of the base i looked to my left at one of my marines sergeant joseph nickirk netkirk nikirk nykirk and shouted i'm gonna stand up and put some suppressive fire through that window you fire grenade through it i stood and fired at the window as quickly as i could while still retaining any kind of accuracy nyquirk followed with a grenade that silenced the machine gun we both dropped into the back into the corn where the 37 lieutenant acting as our tour guide turned to me and said sarcastically lieutenant schuman you got your combat action ribbon now make a decision i was angry he was a fellow lieutenant not some not an ioc instructor i was the new guy so i just stayed quiet and took it but i did think to myself make a decision i did make a decision my decision was not to die in the impact zone of a machine gun and kill the guy shooting at us i thought i wanted combat but finding myself in a complex ambush with half the platoon still in the patrol base seemed like a bad way to start suddenly the combat action ribbon seemed less important less than an hour later i knelt at the edge of a cornfield as the ana their american advisors and the three interpreters spoke to a local elder to tell him we would need to use his compound for 24 hours like most in helmand it was a mini fortress made of thick walls six to ten feet high with a sh sheet steel gate goats and children would almost certainly roam within while women in burkas stayed out of sight inside homes made of the same mud brick as the walls as i waited for an update from the compound a single shot rang out followed by sergeant decker coming at me in a run sir teague is a teague sir teague shot someone i took a breath okay did he have a gun decker nodded his head yes sir is he dead very all right well tell teague he did a good job that's when the reality of saying hit me we could kill people here it was a notion that would soon become prosaic but in the moment it was striking so that's the kick off to deployment right there right into it right into it i've i always say that i got very lucky in my combat experience that it was the most gradual nice um escalation over time sure and that's just that's just pure luck and you did not get that gradual escalation baptism by fire [Laughter] i had a guy that was one of the sante raiders on uh special forces guy he did one mission in vietnam he they flew from america he was a brand new special forces guy he his first combat operation was sante raid he got off the aircraft and five seconds later was killing a dude like stepped off the aircraft and killed someone and 20 minutes later they were gone and that was his whole experience in vietnam but it was a pretty intense 20 minutes um that's the kickoff to this deployment and this deployment is an extremely kinetic deployment for you guys um and you know this is true of all wars i mean depending on where you are and when you're there it can be anything from a deployment where you're sitting around a chow hall eating whatever gourmet food from some contractor or it can be this this type of deployment this is a this is a hardcore deployment how how much did you know when you were going in how hot was it when you were showing up there you you knew what you were getting into not really we were still very coin centric so you know the the final exercise that uh that a battalion does before they um go out to deployments called emv or enhanced mojave viper now it's got a new name of course but uh like that final exercise that we're doing was all about kissing babies uh there's a big key leader engagement where you're sitting with the village elder and shaking hands with him and so it was like shuras and kaley's and my when i ran training we had we started doing key leader engagements right and they were going to go bad 100 of the time yeah it was so awesome like but we had great actors and people would come out being the key leader guy and you know it's very nice to meet you and the spider hole would open up and out come people machine guns but it sounds like maybe you weren't getting that treat you were getting the treatment like it was going to go like hey that's what you're there to do so we still did our our live fire training uh but the emphasis was you know the to try to recreate the iraq awakening you know that that was that was the playbook and uh about a week before we left though the company commander of the ao that we were gonna rip out um he's now battalion commander ryan cohen lieutenant colonel cohen came and he'd been medevaced and he's like [ __ ] is real and this was the first guy that kind of say like hey you you're gonna go over there and fight where did you guys know you were going where you were going specifically we did but the intel briefs were pretty spotty the ars there's there there's not a whole lot of are you communicating with guys directly so i i think some guys have sipper maybe talking but you know second lieutenant no not getting read in on really much of this stuff and still i mean to the point that the book that i'm reading on the flight over is three cups of tea and uh that's an appropriate reaction and then uh you know we're doing the the the cultural courses at leatherneck the big base before we fly into out to the patrol bases and i've got like a a little smart pack of like how are you how do you do nice to meet you sir and i'm i'm quizzing all my squad leaders and i'm like no you don't know how to say nice to meet you like let's do it again and like that's still really what i thought we were we're headed into and um it very immediately uh was apparent that no one was gonna drink tea and everybody was gonna try to kill us we when um in ramadi we had guys like our friends were coming to relieve us and so we're telling them um what's going down and what's happening and and they're going to like my guys are coming on wounded they're going to my guys funerals here it was like a it was a rare occasion for you know that tight turnover into like really hard combat but you know they came over they they knew what they were getting into doesn't a lot of times it doesn't doesn't work like that three cups of tea i had uh one of my uh senior leaders who's a friend of mine and but you know he was really hyped on three cups of tea and we were not especially coming home from ramadi we were especially not hyped about three cups of tea and when that book turned out to be a big lie boy did i have fun with that one throwing it back in his face um did you when you um during like those final exercises and stuff what was the attitude with your guys were they like okay well that's what you know that's what the boss is saying we're gonna be doing we're gonna be drinking tea with the locals no one had nef afghanistan experience and and so you know some of those guys had been in the flusion 08 where it was kind of that you know clear hole build it was really more towards the build phase there and so that 08 iraq experience was kind of reinforced some of the stuff that we're doing and so you know we're all hoping for a fight but we're marines and we're going to do whatever we're told we got to do and do it well and so if if it's kissing babies and you know and then we'll we'll do that you know and that's kind of what we're so what was the what was the mission that you guys were tasked to do like broadly yeah secure provide security for the same in district ao increase security that i mean increase security that's it and your company commander was when you write about him in the book he had an aggressive attitude he did um but it's it was hard to know like what his tolerance or willingness of risk assessment or or you know risk tolerance was or what he would accept or what he what he wouldn't but he was we kilo companies sledgehammer eb sledge have historically always had the aggressive reputation and we had hardcore sergeants that work up and and and yeah so we maintained this uh which it was enabled by our rco is this really aggressive company for sure and and then in order to maintain or establish security you're going out on patrols yeah you're taking a a with you all the time uh trying not to initially we would often forget him at the at the patrol base um but towards the latter half of the deployment we were bringing them always bringing them out but we we that first mission had like such high visibility because it was a but we were securing battalion objectives and doing a three-day operation that we had to have dna with us um but they a were happy to not go out and we were happy to not take them out and so uh it wasn't towards the latter half the deployment that we really started kind of employing them consistently um yeah those those first patrols were conventional fighting i mean it was the enemy was in a defensive depth with obstacles covered by machine guns and we were on the offense and just straight assaulting into an enemy defense and and that's and so anything about improving local security or doing any kind of counterinsurgency it was no just go out there and kill as many guys as you can yeah well that's actually part of counter insurgency is killing a bunch of bad guys and that was uh that's a very effective and necessary part of it because you can't build schools while you're getting blown up and you know security for the populace is the way that i for lack of a better word pitched it up my chain of command what we were doing hey we're going to provide security for the populace well how are you going to do that we're going to kill all these bad guys or at least as many of them as we can um what was your op tempo like so how often are you guys going out how long you staying out for i mean every day i mean we're we're doing platoon sized patrols every day for the first month or two and that's because you needed a platoon sized element to get in the to effectively fight the types of fights that were engaged in and then then and then it was a squad and but it was tough because you had you had a squad on post you had a squad on qrf and then you had a squad patrolling and the qrf squad almost always got called out and so that rest squad was really never resting and so you're either on post patrolling or responding out as qrf so it was it was uh that tempo was uh pretty brutal and and so the troops were out every day i don't know if it's the right word but it sounds like it might be the right word you kind of got in a little bit of trouble up the chain of command yeah um you got counseled for your cowboy attitude and this kind of thing break that down a little bit what mistakes did you make what could you have done to better where were you right where were you wrong we were out on operation and uh we've been out until two or three and and i and i called into the main the cp and i said hey we're gonna we're gonna turn our radio off for a couple hours conserve battery will be up at zero six and calm with the radio check and when i turned the radio back on at zero six couple hours later it was like broken arrow where are you sledgehammer or have you been overrun like sledge number one call in i'm like hey we called you guys got rogered up that that we were turning the radio off and the night watcho said that was good to go uh so it's like no you're not in the log book i'm like uh so yeah when we got back you know my my co was there and he said you know i'm gonna kick your ass and you think you don't have to call in and you don't think you don't have to report and one of my squad leaders uh we were in a fight and uh they had shot some artie or jaimar and the maine kept calling for a sit rep and you know what's the bda what's the sit rep and he said how about you guys just grab a cup of coffee take a seat i'm in a fight and uh you know we had uh this company gunny carlisle he was a savage dude and he's like what'd you say you [ __ ] like they're fighting over the radio and so my guys were yeah my guys were uh um it's like kind of that common tension between higher headquarters and the dudes doing the fighting and uh so yeah we got reigned in and and uh we got but you know it was punishment that had to go back to the company position from being out at a patrol base just as the platoon by ourselves but it wouldn't turned out it was a reward because the area around the company hadn't been patrolled aggressively and we had been patrolling now for a month a month and a half so we kind of created a little security bubble we were having a harder time getting in fights and so they brought us back and then the first time we go out we killed a ton of dudes and come back with some ak-47s we're like yeah sledgehammer one's here now you know here's his aks uh and so yeah i i could have had more tact for sure um yeah i was probably i was probably light on tact yeah um one thing i used to tell my guys was that like the next the next echelon is always messed up right from our perspective then that's excellent up the chain of command is always like they don't understand well here's the deal why don't they understand they don't understand because i'm not doing a good job of pushing them information and i'm not seeing what their perspective is because they're probably got someone screaming at them going what do you mean you're dropping already into that tell us what's going on and they're asking and that's how these things that's how you get a little disconnect you get a disconnect between the guys that are fighting and the guys that are not there there there can be some animosity there and it can be a problem if you're not careful especially from a leadership position you know for you for you guys that are out there you're going to be the one that translates things up and down the chain of command and that that that is not an easy job but it's a really important job because if we have a real disconnect then we're not getting the support that we need and it causes all kinds of problems so don't take anything personally right when they're asking you what the hell is going on just do your best to try and tell them what the hell is going on when they're asking you stupid questions it's because you didn't tell them what you know how you were going to do a kazzavac in this particular scenario or what you how you were going to handle this particular type of threat they're asking you this stuff because they want to know because you didn't tell them and just do your best i know it's hard and for senior leaders out there when your folks are in the field they're working on some [ __ ] and as soon as they get the chance they're going to tell you what's up but leave them alone as long as you possibly can leave them alone and let them sort their [ __ ] out and then they'll get back to you and you can you can get your numbers and get your update and get your sitrep and all that just try and understand each other's perspectives please it goes a long way yeah i think that was a good summation of lessons learned um all this fighting going on um it's gonna there's gonna be a price cam your buddy cam gets severely wounded by an ied lost his right leg in um a lot like injured his left leg or sorry lost one leg it really injured the other one um right eyes messed up that that seemed at least when i read it in the book it seemed like that was a little bit of a reality check for you because we are young and we feel like invincible yeah cam was this kind of larger than life john wayne kind of figured to me a guy big strong dude that we all looked up to charismatic and uh and when i came in the patrol base that day you know will donnelly the second platoon commander meets me and says i don't think cam's gonna make it and we were taking casualties at such a crazy rate and i'm like man if cam can go down i mean like um and i hadn't i was good in a fire fight i could still kind of compartmentalize and focus on the thing that i needed to focus on in that moment to to make the right decisions uh but i was i there's there's another great scene and gates of fire where uh the spartans before battle will will break the twigs and and they'll put half the twig in the basket it's it's like uh some symbolic of a of a dog tag and so that if they get so disfigured they match up the twigs at the end of the battle and they say okay this is this guy but there's another aspect of that is it's they break off their humanity because they're they're their sons their dads their husbands and they're about to go have to stick a sipho sword into somebody's guts and so they've got to separate and i still had not separated my humanity from the violent warrior killing and death that i was so intimately that was the world that i was living and i think of like if you think of it like it's like the river sticks you know we'd cross the river sticks and we're living in hades and i kind of had one foot on one shore and one foot in in hell and i was kind of just and um and when i when i found out when i heard cam wasn't gonna make it he did ultimately make it but when i found that out i just uh i broke down and then i i went back to my room and i had stored away a little uh snickers bar at the bottom of my rook and i thought on a rainy day you will need this for your morale and uh i didn't think that rainy day was gonna be like a week and a half into the deployment but i go to digging my ruck and i and i find that uh these little taliban mice have been living and [ __ ] in my ruck and they ate my snickers bar and i had i had no more resilience left you know and so that was like the and so uh i got sick i was puking emotional not in front of my troops this was all you know private but uh it was at that point that i said you can't be feeling these things anymore like you have a job and so you separate from you detach from that humanity and everything is compartmentalized from that moment forward which makes you super effective under fire the issue is if you don't reconnect to that humanity after your deployment uh you become cold emotionally unavailable you don't experience the richness and fullness of life it's a really safe way to live very compartmentalized because i don't get too happy i don't get too sad uh but it's not a very fulfilling way to live and and and the longer you and you know i was right back in afghanistan 12 months later and so the longer you kind of keep all those nerve endings dead so that you don't can't feel anything longer it's harder to turn them back on and uh and also you you start to get afraid of like what will i feel when i do turn all that stuff back on because i've been packing stuff in the sea back for a long time here and so what i convinced myself is is that like hey you don't have time you got troops to lead you got stuff to do like you don't have and what really what i found is like i didn't have the courage to turn it back on i didn't have the courage to feel the things that i needed to feel to figure out what the hell was going on and i basically told myself a lie they said you're too busy or too busy but really i was too scared to unpack that sea bag and as i said good way to be in combat probably bad way to live well i think it's important to a lot of times things are going on around us and we just don't know that they're happening so like you pointing that out it will help someone else go oh i know what's going on like i i know um my wife i was on deployment my wife sent me a email this is before facetime and stuff like this but she sent me an email and said um the kids want to see a picture of where you sleep like can you send a picture of where you sleep and yep got it and i i remember i took a picture of you know like my little wooden plywood cot thing and i looked at it and i was like oh this isn't good and i pulled out you know from some dug down in some backpack grabbed some pictures of my wife and kids hung them up around the bed took a picture took them back down put them back in the folder and back in the rucksack because the last thing i needed to be doing was thinking about my wife and kids when i got guys that are you know counting on me to make decisions um and i think that that was like a physical representation that i knew what i was doing and i think that when i got home i kind of knew okay you can put these pictures back up now in your head and i think a lot of times like just you the way you're describing that other people will recognize that oh they took those pictures down they put them in a folder they're not looking at them when you get done with that deployment you can open that folder back up and it's going to be okay uh important stuff to learn um at this point uh you meet zach for the first time seemed like you guys kicked it off pretty good hit it off pretty good out of the gate yeah initially very transactional he was a good interpreter uh he knew his pasture he knew english up to that point the only interpreters who were left either didn't speak english or didn't speak the local dialect and so they knew they weren't going to be able to get a job so they hung around and and what what i was finding is that every interpreter was quitting uh or they were such a liability under fire that we'd have bounded a couple hundred meters like where's the terp and we gotta go and uh and so we had had a rough rough uh go with our interpreter so yeah he shows up he's fit he's healthy he's not a coward and yeah that's good meanwhile you're pushing going to the book here in our first nine days of operations first platoon killed 15 taliban we were fighting harder and killing more enemy than any unit in 3-5 by extension that meant we were fighting and killing more than any unit in afghanistan i saw that as in keeping with my ceo's direction as i understood it but pushing that hard can create political and personal issues that people more removed from the sharp end of things can perceive as unnecessary risk they may even be right given the clarity that distance can offer in my aggressive approach to the area of operations i followed the rules of engagement but i was not particularly attuned to political liability that increased the farther anyone got from pb fires but i was consciously absorbing a lot of physical risk it made me short of patience with people i saw as less engaged which to be honest was everyone who was in afghanistan and not in first platoon when i got back to pb fires that day the ceo told me he was pulling first platoon back to fob increment over his concerns that i required closer supervision we were moving but thankfully zach was coming with us um we kind of we kind of addressed that the fact that that little disconnect showed up um between you and this is like i mean how many books can you read movies can you watch about that disconnect between the ramps the rear echelon [ __ ] and the people on the front line um there's a lot of documentation about that uh you you just um you get back to fob increment like you said and um the ops continue the ops are still going on back to the book that command is a lone is lonely is a trite observation but it is no less true for the countless times it's been observed it should be paired with the fact that leadership hurts every time you discipline a marine that you love every time you watch them bleed every time you watch them breathe their last it hurts i was 24 years old and living a reality that i now look back upon and wonder if some of it even truly happened i want to deny that humans could be so callous as i became in the destruction of people put on this earth by the same god i was i was convinced i would not survive sangin but i had realized that life is a gift and if i did survive i had some growing up to do i prayed to god and asked that if i did survive he would help me live a grateful meaningful life that would do honor to the people denied that chance it was learned i was largely incapable of making any objective decisions myself beyond where to patrol next and how to fight through the next ambush but i was ready to acknowledge i was not the man i professed to be i called andrea and told her i wanted to be a better man that i could only do that with her behi beside me i apologize for mistreating the woman who loved me and begged her to take me back she agreed though i still thought it unlikely i would ever live to see her again the idea was something to live for at some point that evening the ceo came in and told me that my friend and mentor lieutenant robert kelly was dead struck and killed instantly by an ied earlier that day i rolled over and stared at the wall i thought about rob cam west and me spending the last day before he deployed drinking beer del mar with robert and his family the next day was the 245th birthday of the united states marine corps first platoon killed four taliban it didn't bring anyone back [Music] by thanksgiving 2010 most of my closest friends in 3-5 rob kelly cameron west will donnelly and gunnery sergeant carlisle had been killed or wounded only staff sergeant henley and lieutenant vic garcia who replaced cam at pb fires with third platoon remained i only saw vic in passing another ioc classmate james byler had been horribly wounded losing both his legs the death or grievous injury of friends with whom i had been living training and fighting for two years left me feeling dead inside i was just waiting for my body to catch up we had arrived in sangin in october 2010 and settled into a life of brutal sameness we patrolled through suffocating heat and penetrating cold sometimes multiple hours long patrols in a day we engaged the elders we did post blast analysis we responded to ambushes we called in medevacs we called in air support we zipped our friends into bags for a final ride home they were men i loved because i knew them or i loved despite not knowing them for the simple fact that they had volunteered to serve as marine infantry men in a time when that meant war but it was harder and harder to feel that emotion as the toll of dead and wounded grew and i felt increasingly ground under the wheels of war so this is the burden of command that you're talking about and as you mentioned it's a burden that leaders have to bear alone um and what's interesting and it's an interesting i mean this is what the book is about is that you actually had an outlet for this and that outlet ended up being your interpreter zack he wasn't a marine he was there was no um there was no mask to put on with zach how did that relationship grow and develop out of necessity for my sanity is kind of how it came to be in um you know this this idea that war is both heaven and hell and that each each day you're experiencing the worst depravity that you can imagine but then you're seeing you know no greater love that has a man who laid down his life for his friends you're seeing the greatest forms of love manifested where someone willingly lays down their life for their friends so you you get these little glimpses of heaven and hell and through that you know you start to grow and mature and and you know general uh general mattis kind of talks about as he got his phd in combat you know that that you learn so much about life um in in five minutes in a fire fight that maybe could take five years outside of it and so i'm refining my character i'm growing up finally i saw a little boy i went to combat a little boy and i finally start to say it's time for you to be a man and you none of this is guaranteed and if you do make it what are you going to do differently because what you profess is not congruent with your actions and so first time i get the sat phone like call andrea a little cry and a little sad you know i know i broke up with you please forgive me take me back um and then uh yeah i i it's you kind of hinted at this idea that that as the junior officer you are the damn you you you're the between two rushing tides you know higher and then and then your troops and your subordinates and so you are in the middle of this and so you're trying to keep all the crap from rolling downhill on them but at the same time you got all this stuff bubbling up because you got a bunch of 18 year old kids that got stuff going on in their lives that are losing their own friends and it's all valid it's all valid it's almost all valid i should say and it's and it's you who's the mediator of of all this higher the pressure from higher and the bubbling up from from your supporters plus you've got some stuff going on your own life like you're trying to get back with your girlfriend like your best friends get getting killed or injured right so like you've got your own and and you've got to be like this this person this intermediary right in between all that and the pressure just you just keep absorbing pressure uh because you don't want to pass it to your troops and you can't pass it to higher and so uh an outlet uh was critical and and because you can't like my platoon sergeant had been through enough like i couldn't he was dealing with all the same crap and so i didn't want to put anything else on his plate and uh there was really only one person who i could vent to and that would and that was zach and uh yeah it was uh it really would help me maintain my sanity um so this book again i'm reading ten less than ten percent of reading four percent of this book um you have a ton of experiences here that you talk about i'm trying to get some of the high points um you develop this awesome relationship with zach who's a good listener and and who you can talk to about what's going on um fast forward a little bit of actually fast forward quite a bit there's a this is a was this a seven month deployment yes so it's a seven month deployment i think we covered maybe one or two operations i'm going to go all the way um forward to i think it was your last stop or certainly one of your last stops this is the a turnover operation which is always a which is always sketchy anyways because you got a bunch of people that are coming in they have their ideas you have your ideas and if that's not a good if they're not open to your ideas it's going to be it's going to be a lot harder um there's an area outside the wire that's called the golf course and when you guys go on patrol you stay away from the golf course because it's filled with ids you guys go out on patrol when you leave to go out on patrol you guys are going through the village where there's a bunch of afghans running around so you can't put a bunch of pressure plate ieds so it's a lot less ieds new lieutenant so on this op is it mostly your guys or is it mostly his guys no it's this the last of the left seat right seat so they're it's just me and two sergeants and all his guys and it's all his guys he wants to go out patrol through the golf course you strongly recommend that that's not a great idea he decides that it is a good idea and he's going to go out i'm going to go out going to take the patrol to the golf course guy hits a low order ied out of the gate um what happens then so sergeant nikirk was one of my one of my three marines that was or one of my two other marines that were on that patrol he i see him go up in the yellow smoke and i think you know son of a [ __ ] and when i get up to him he's uh standing on top of a 105 shell with a with one a yellow jug underneath and the yellow jug just is barely cracked open and uh we're we're only 100 meters outside the patrol base at this point so we call eod to come from the company position they come out and they say 105 shell on a 40 pound jug would have killed you know a couple people in front couple people in back you know nikirk you would be in little pieces uh and they said this is actually a tripwire id this is the first time we've seen this in this ao we've never seen this uh little fish line that you you kick in the so two little branches and you kick the little fish wire you can't see it and that's what close the circuit rather than a pressure plate and uh and so they reduced the ied nikirk has hme the homemade explosives all over his face he's been doused in it he's uh jittery and he's like uh can i go back with eod back to the cp and i'm like yeah go ahead uh and decker my third squad leader turns to me and says like can i go back with them too because these guys they're going to get us killed and i just had a son on this deployment and i haven't met my son yet he named his son maximum danger decker by the way and absolute kind of guy he is he's still in uh one of my heroes and and uh i'm like hey decker like if if stuff goes sideways out here i need at least one other person i know that i can rely on like sorry you gotta stay [Music] and he's not happy about it but roger and you still couldn't convince the new lieutenant like hey bro remember when i said this was a bad idea we just got the absolute luckiest thing we could have ever hoped for yeah let's backtrack and try this again tomorrow correct couldn't talk him off uh crossing the field but i was able to do is convince him that hey send the engineer who's already on the far side to sweep back through the field because he's clearly missed at least one ied uh that should have had a pretty big signature coming off a 105 shell so he's gonna re-sweep if we're gonna push through this field and as that guy starts to sweep back goes up and uh immediately huge ambush i mean just firing from everywhere and this is this unit's first time in contact so they're you know just heads down just not looking where they're firing just you know blossom shooting everywhere and there's only one marine who's standing up running into the field to go get the guy who got this bone up and it's sergeant decker the guy who just said a few minutes before hey sir can i go back because i've never met my son and i'm like okay well now he's going to be dead and the last thing i'm going to live with forever is that this this kid will never meet his dad because uh and so i i'm able to flag him down i'm like you're not going to go i'm going to go but just getting across the canal towards the field i mean that the canal looked like it was like a hail storm with just the bullets ripping through the water hitting all the sides of the dirt and so just it was uh and so i'm running along the line i'm like where's the corman where's the corman where's it corman uh finally one little hand goes up i'm like grabbing by the troop stab i'm like you're following me i'm like decker you calling the medevac i'll go out there and get this guy and i'm the only guy standing up and uh so the the machine gun the pcam is just following me through this field and as i enter into this field i'm like uh 105 shell on top of a 40 pound jog like the kids told us that that they said they saw them at least put 15 to 20 ids in this field uh we were on a big op we had just left like a skeleton security it was in it was uh and this place was in like uh low ground we couldn't see it and so the taliban puts at least 15 to 20 ids in there we've been in this field for five minutes and hit two of them so i'm going in this field thinking uh best case scenario no legs ml cola most likely course of action here you you are dead and then a lot of pieces people are picking you up with a vacuum you know um and i'm also like the pka pkm is just following me the whole way through you know i'm a tall guy with a big head and it's like yeah that's an easy target uh shoot that thing and uh and every time i put my foot down i'm like mother [ __ ] you know like uh and we get to the casualty start the treatment on the casualty uh he's got it lowered dead it again but it it heaved him up and slammed him down and he his hit a compound fracture his arm bone was sticking through and so i'm like okay that's good that's not a big deal doc you got that and i've been carrying the m32 for a couple weeks and uh it's a six six shooter grenade launchers like a revolver that shoots grenades and i'm like yeah get something and uh so i got to pop some nugs you know six-piece nug nope 12-piece nug how many nugs do you need before you quiet down and you know we i'm able to get these guys to you know break contact and uh but now i'm thinking like okay now i gotta walk back with this guy because when i'm running out i'm thinking i'm gonna get shot i'm thinking i gotta go help this marine oh i don't even know this marine right he's from the different unit but he's a marine so it doesn't matter so like i'm at that point i am thinking with every step like a little pucker factor for sure but there's a lot compelling me forward like not getting shot and trying to get to this guy and now i'm like okay well now we gotta walk back and this is the engineer uh so he's the guy that sweeps the ground and so uh yeah it was a it was a the taliban did not treat me nice on my way out that's for sure um you get back you get the wounded guy back to the line um you look at the the lieutenant you say this patrol's over at which point he admits uh i i guess i should have listened to you about the route it's that's the thing about combat it's so um unique is that everybody can live the same experience but have a different version of it and so like this guy's a super talented guy way smarter than me he had done he did great stuff with that platoon so i have nothing but great stuff to say about him he remembers it some of the these details differently so i will i will put it put that out there i remember this clear as day to me from my perspective is this how it happened uh but yeah we agreed patrol's over uh he said yeah that was me going through the golf course wasn't the right call i said yeah i think so and when i smoked my first cigarette did you talk to him while you were writing this uh i posted something about it one day again not indicting him not calling him out but just kind of talking about talking through this patrol and he you know he had sent me a message he's like well you know what here's what how i saw that all kind of unfold and and again there's no uh there's no animosity there's a ton of mutual respect nobody knows well besides vic garcia i think who is the my adjacent platoon commander out there out there in the northern green zone like nobody else can empathize with what we were doing on the edge of the empire and the most kinetic area of operations more than this guy so like there's a lot of mutual respect but um yeah we had our difference of opinion there you smoked your first cigarette after this operation you said uh and that's it right for this deployment yeah um you leave zach you talk about the fact you talk about what that's like when um when you know you're leaving zach basically on the tarmac um you had this great relationship with him uh he ends up getting a job another translating job he ends up leaving that ao as well uh but we'll we'll get into some of that but it's you at this juncture returning home i'm gonna go to the book on april 20th 2011 i landed back on u.s soil i was 25 years old and had just lived a lifetime on fast forward my body was battered and my brain was traumatized by multiple blasts the type of injuries sustained by so many of us in the post-9 11 wars but i also came home from sangin exhausted embittered angry and unsure how to express any of it there was no way to physically represent the moral injuries i had sustained and i did not know a way to talk about them though they were evident to anyone who knew me i was still angry at what i had felt been what i felt had been kilo company headquarters punishing me for aggressively implementing orders i was given i was depressed by the death and injury of my friends i was physically wrung out from seven months of insomnia long daily movements under load and the accumulated stress of leading young men in a place where someone was trying to kill all of us every day strangely like an addict having withdrawals i still missed the almost daily combat for of the first four months of our deployment worse yet just as an ied does invisible damage to marines as it shot as its shock wave passes through their soft internal organs people in my orbit were suffering from my injuries in the week before we got back my mom was counting the hours through sleepless nights at work her inability to stop crying in a bathroom stahl got her sent home for the day to recover when she met me in southern california on return she tried to talk to me about how i was feeling i didn't want to talk about it my desire not to talk never really mattered where my mom is concerned especially after she took it upon herself to read my journal from sangin i was angry at the violation of my privacy thomas i can't understand what hop what happened over there because you won't talk about it mom i'm fine then please make eye contact with me when i'm talking to you would you just let it go thomas you're my son and my best friend you have been since you were born it's like you're not there anymore you're just this angry person and i'm on eggshells i'm not letting anything go what do you want to say to me mom i said i'm fine so doing just fine huh uh you weren't exactly fine a lot of stuff going on in the head yeah i undoubtedly there are tons of benefits of those experiences at that time still a little bit raw i think ultimately we get to post traumatic growth but you gotta before you can get to post-traumatic growth you've got to get to gratitude and you've got to find a find a way to be thankful for that adversity thankful for that hardship you got to get to your good and um you know initially when the those tough things happened you don't say oh i'm so happy that this tough thing happened you know if whether it's a car accident or cancer you don't say i'm so hap but the thing happened and so at some point you can either continue to be a victim of that thing or you can take your agency back and say good and and and when you do that you can say i am thankful for the the things that i've learned from having this experience and that's why you know i know many amputees and lots of and this is the cycle you know initially bitter angry uh but even the double amputee triple amputee these guys i know they'll finally get to a place where they say you know i wouldn't trade that experience because of the things that i've learned and benefited from and the man that i am today because of that and so you get to gratitude and then you finally can kind of get to that growth but undoubtedly in this moment i'm still very uh hurt and offended i don't know offended but like again there was there's felt like there was some betrayal um do this thing but then like i'd come back in and be like why why are your hands bloody why why you got you know why so you got a lot look it kind of seems pretty messy out there like yeah you go out there and tell everybody we go kill these guys go do this thing and then when the generals come we're like hey sledgehammer kills everybody and then you call me in and say oh well you sure that guy had a gun like yes what are you implying sir like and so it and and it's and uh you just carrying too much weight already to have did not feel like your chain of command has your back and um there were times within the company where i felt extremely betrayed and and so uh yeah i think i was i was dealing with that um ultimately though i think i was thankful to have porcelain toilets uh california burritos pretty girlfriend uh san clemente doesn't suck you know so like a lot of things to be thankful for at that time as well but still trying to figure some things out and maybe not doing it that well uh what was your like enlistment status at this point like where were you at did you did you come back thinking maybe you'll get out did you come back thinking i'm definitely staying in like no i thought i was going to get out i mean i didn't know i i didn't have this lifelong desire to serve i didn't grow up as a kid thinking oh i want to be a soldier someday you know i didn't i didn't uh i never thought oh i want to be a general or colonel or any of this kind of stuff um i thought i should do something and then i thought i should be a marine i thought i should be an infantry marine and then once i finally figured out yesterday i should be an infantry i thought i should fight and i did that and i got the lead you know the best men in this nation and so i'd met my career goals and then uh and with the amount of crap that i had experienced i said maybe maybe i'm out and so there's this thing called career designation that you're offered as a lieutenant and you've got to accept it and i was not going to designate um because of i was really disenchanted or just uh disappointed with some of that company leadership and so uh i was going to get out i was serving as an exo and an adjacent company uh i got so is this when you get went to lima company yeah you know the frustration that you're talking about like with the leadership right how did you work through that during the deployment um not well i i mean between my company gunny who ended up getting medevac and zach like i i would say there were there were times where i was on the verge of a nervous breakdown it was never the taliban it was like i've been training to shoot silhouettes of men for years and now i'm shooting and so like i am only happy when a taliban is dead like i like that is no problem uh and i also am not personally offended that the taliban is shooting at me like i know that that's what the taliban does they shoot at us and so uh i've been training for that um contact front contact left like i'm training for the to be shot at and and then like marines get wounded well why do we have tourniquets on why do we do tourniquet drills why are we doing all these combat lifesaver and it's it's all these things you expect and if you're paying attention and taking your training seriously you expect that there will be casualties that you will have to kill people that you and so all that was okay and and when you go outside the wire you're in the yellow you know you're you're alert you're scanning your baseline you're waiting for that and so when you're in the yellow and you're alert you can respond to things fluidly adaptedly but you leave the wire condition one you leave the wire in full ppe flat kevlar because you know you're going into a hostile environment when you come back inside the wire condition four take your flak off take because you're so now you're within friendly lines and that when you get ambushed within friendly lines that's where you're vulnerable and that's when you can really get hurt and uh those moral injuries i think often outlast the the pain um associated with with those with physical injuries and so what i did when i got back to the states is i just ran i ran and ran and ran and those fire breaks outside camp pendleton i just every morning i would just go run for as long as i could for as far as i could and then i would just pour myself into my work as how i was dealing with things how did you come to the conclusion that you would stay in i had a new boss and the new the new lima company commander came in he's my current boss uh and he was everything i'd hoped for he was those ioc instructors you know had such high standards and they were so challenging they were so good i was like man a marine captain that's something that is a marine that is really something and then i found myself disappointed uh throughout my work up in deployment and disillusioned and then this and so i'm i'm thinking i'm out i'll go back to chicago going to be a fireman took the took the firemen test uh then this guy came in and we want to be marines because we want to do hard [ __ ] we want to be challenged we want and i wanted to be a marine because they had higher standards i looked at the navy i thought it's high standards that's what i want and this guy came in and he emulated all those high standards and every day i had to be at the top of my game every day i had to get better and that's all i wanted a leader who emulated uh what what he espoused a leader who was accountable and who held me accountable you know as a lieutenant i had very little oversight which in some ways was awesome because i just got to go running gun all the time out doing my thing but i needed somebody to mentor me i needed someone to hold me more accountable i needed someone to develop me and coach me and teach me and and he did those things and i said okay well i want to i want to do this what he's doing for somebody someday and so i said i'm going to stay in but as we grinded towards the mew i saw a flyer at the gym that said do you have what it takes uh come try out for recon and i said yeah maybe this exo staff life isn't for me i'm going to try to go fight again with some troops yeah the uh i guess no matter what industry you're in whether you're in the marine corps army um ibm um you know what what you name the company you're gonna have some you're gonna have some good bosses you're gonna have some bad bosses and and a lot of it has to do with what i was talking about earlier like if you're not doing your best to understand the perspective of the person above you in the chain of command it's going to be hard and here's the thing there's at least a 50 chance that they don't they're not trying to understand your perspective at all there's a 50 chance that they just think you should just be conforming to what i'm telling you and complying with what i tell you there's a 50 chance you got a boss like that and in that case you can't you can sit there and be mad like why don't they understand or you can say okay i gotta work with this i gotta make i gotta i gotta make sure i do my best to make them understand i gotta paint a better picture i've gotta do a better job and again it goes back to you know that gives you some kind of agency over your life to think okay my boss is an egomaniac my boss has a bad temper my boss doesn't understand uh my perspective my boss is looking to you know get promoted and that's the main thing he's look all those things all those horrible things and we've all worked for people like that and you okay cool that's what my boss is like all right here's what i'm gonna do here's how i'm gonna build a relationship with my boss here's how i'm gonna build trust with my boss regardless of what their situation is so i'm just saying i like the fact that you were able to get to a point you say okay you know there's good bosses there's bad bosses out there um of course everybody try and be a good boss try and support the people in the field that's 100 it but when you're a subordinate and your boss is maybe not quite what you dreamed of good challenge build a good relationship with them and and things are going to get better um that's the way it works in the meantime you get married right you make that deci decision you finally say all right i'm gonna do this is that before you uh screen for recon it was before i screamed it was it was right when i got back right when you back got back you closed court wedding yeah to recon and you got some cool uh you had an interesting day of getting selected um for recon which was actually pretty cool story won't go into it now people can read the book for that one uh but you end up getting selected for recon but do i get do i have this right instead of going to reconnaissance school they have recon on deployment or going on deployment quickly and they say hey you're not going to recon school you're going to be an advisor so the battalion was deployed so when i showed up the battalion was deployed i'm the one guy back one couple guys back and they and i was supposed to go to school and then it's called an ia an individual augment came down and they said hey we need one dude to go advise the afghan on how to be recon you're all we got uh even though you haven't been to school you're gonna go advise these these guys how to be and so i joined an advisor team that was mostly guys senior officers who are going to advise like a brigade level uh so like staff stuff and and me and a recon staff sergeant were going to go out and advise the afghan recon company so you've been back home for how long at this point i was home probably for about five or six months when uh i got the word that i was gonna get the individual augment and and then you july 2012 you go back to afghanistan you're out at patrol base long beach what was that setup like it was an old artillery firing position it was just a triangle tiny tiny little firing base outside of marjah and uh it was july and the human factors if it like the human factors of the first appointment was the losing the guys and and the fighting the grinding every day this was i mean not that i had any amenities really on that first deployment but this deployment i mean it was a cot a cameonet a palette of water and appellate mres and that's it and i was living with the a a right downwind from their [ __ ] uh it was like the plagues of moses coming through that place like bugs coming through and waves blocking out the sun i mean it was uh it was hard hard living out there uh in july and then yeah i'm going out i'm fighting with nna and then i'm a i'm a jtac so i'm like a freelance jtac so anybody uh who needs the guy for an op they're calling me and i'm getting to go on some pretty cool ops how many a are you out there with about 50. so it's you how many american advisors the one other staff sergeant counterpart and then we we'd pull like four or five grunts from uh the ao who would kind of help stand security um so it was very lonely so this is a totally different kind of deployment again the disparity of different types of deployments you can go on is insane for you to be out in the middle of nowhere now with a bunch of freaking afghans oh god um did you so was your mission just to train these guys up yeah train train the afghan and partner advise assist and then you know go out with them on operations and yeah it was but i mean at this point those guys had been trained for a really long time so i mean really i'm just kind of talking to their leadership and then going out on operations with them what's the op tempo light how often are you guys going out we're going out every day but it's not reconnaissance type missions it's like they're just basically better infantryman than your average afghan soldier and so but we we really patrolled from like 2 a.m to 6 a.m because by you know when the sun came up it was over 100 degrees and so for the first couple months it was just real early morning patrols not too kinetic with those guys but again a company going out would say oh we can have a jtac just jump on this op and so when i was jumping on these ops with the different marine companies we were getting it really getting into it freelance jtac in in afghanistan um what would you take away from a leadership perspective on this deployment uh leadership is lonely uh which i've i've kind of already knew but it was particularly lonely when it's you know a couple of lance corporals are the only other americans around and so you could only talk about the things that landscape has talked about for so long and uh so that was really a lot of time to think by myself um the you know one of the things that i'm advising these guys and uh they said one of them turns me and says well you know when you leave is the taliban's just gonna take afghanistan back anyways and i'm like what are you talking about you got a whole army like you got 10 years of training you got millions of and and i was like i want afghanistan more than you want afghanistan and it's a really important lesson for me to that you can't want something more for someone than they want it for themselves and that applies to many different areas of life and um so that was kind of hard to to accept um and i found that i am happiest when i'm under fire and like it when when when you have a purpose and that is being a warrior or lead combat leader and you're good at that thing there is nothing more rewarding our sacrif are satisfying than when you get to and so got right back in the game and right back in my first firefight and i'm like okay here's what i know what to do like you're going to do this you're going to do that and so um and then i was an enabler and that was a weird role for me because i'm not used to being a commander and so when i'm the jtac i don't come i don't have command of anybody i'm just there to support a commander and so it's tough because you see like here's here's what we need should be doing but like that's not your role and so like staying in staying in my role as an enabler was uh was was different for me and so i got to appreciate maybe that that role a little bit um you get orders go back to pendleton it's now march 2013. when you get home it's safe to say at this juncture your work-life balance was not in balance at all i just only did marine stuff um andrea at this point she had moved back to chicago yeah um one of your buddies pulls you aside and is like um do you do you want the marine corps do you want marriage like which one of these two things did you want because they're mutually exclusive like you're doesn't sound like you'd be able to do both um you decide marriage that's the thing you're gonna work towards and you tell your wife i'll get out of the marine corps we can go home we'll figure it out um she says nope not it i still don't want to be with you um so this is a rough this is rough eventually uh you get her to come back she comes back out um back out here yep um doesn't end up being once again still not still not where it needs to be with with her and you eventually find out that she'd been unfaithful to you while you were on deployment with one of your fellow marines with a marine that that that live with you um how do you get through that so i talk about ambushes that that life is full of ambushes and um you know like sometimes combat veterans will try to say like oh well i was in an ambush with with bullets and bombs and and so you can and i'll tell you that my worst ambush was that that was my worst ambush in my life you know and uh and so i tried not to establish higher like everyone trying to compete and who had it the worst or who and and so and combat veterans think that we have this or veterans in general think that we have this special kind of you know people should feel bad for us because we did this like first off i volunteered for those things i wanted those things i sought those things no one made me do that um i was trained and prepared for those things i wasn't trained or prepared for that and uh and that was a moral injury that took a long time uh and maybe still presently one that um you're you heal from and you know i much of my motivation in life is a response not to repeat the same mistakes that i experienced when i was growing up and and one of those was divorce and so i thought you know no matter what i'm not going to get divorced uh but at that point um i thought yeah this this is uh this is over and um i want to just make it very clear that uh ultimately that um that those actions from my wife uh are not representative of who she is as a woman uh and that she has been the greatest blessing of my life um outside of my savior and so i wouldn't be here today without her but i was hurt i was angry uh i lost my mind a little bit uh i went crazy you know i i not like crazy like yelling or screaming or uh but just kind of went on a bender of doing unhealthy [ __ ] um for a long time but through it all uh i dated and did whatever but they're always inside me i i was so happily married and i was so much looking forward to starting a family and there was no one else that i wanted to be the mother of my children there was no one else that i wanted to grow old with there was no one else i wanted to do life with more than her and so even though i met some great people along the way and had a lot of fun along the way at the end of the day i'd always come back to thinking about her and so i kept trying to stuff other stuff into that and uh and finally i said you know maybe you stop trying to force and and and so she had been so forgiving with me and so graceful with me and so merciful with me and uh i have gone wayward many many times and um yeah and i finally called her and i said yeah let's uh let's try this again uh which was probably the best decision ever made because now i've got the most uh beautiful loyal devoted wife and most phenomenal mother to my three children and so i messed a lot of things up in life i think um doing a re-attack on that was uh it leads to some really interesting conversations at ipac you know that you know uh when you go to the s1 or the admin and they're doing your s1 audit they say like do you ever get divorced and you're like yes like okay who's like who'd you divorce and then like are you remarried i'm like yes and like okay who's in it like and there's nothing miss lance corporal's like oh i i uh just keep pushing let's corporal just keep pushing yeah no i i mean again i'm only reading a small part of this book and you give a lot more background on the whole situation on you know you take ownership a lot of your behavior um and i think that's you can kind of as i read the story i was like yeah well that's to be you know you can see it and then even the reconciliation you can see it as it's as as it's being put together um that you had to square your [ __ ] away um and and that's what was able to you know allow this to happen um but again i i think it's just like man i mean the seal teams has like a 90 divorce rate it's like it's like insane because of all this stuff you're gone you're it's just it's just it's just mayhem i don't know what it is in the military at large but it's really freaking hard on relationships really freaking hard on relationships so um i think it's just the way that you spell this stuff out you talk about it is really important it's gonna help a lot of people win when they're going through this kind of thing so um appreciate you putting it in there um 2014 winner you're assigned to the school of infantry you're gonna you're that you become the director of of combat instructor school so what does that exactly mean so the school of infantry is where uh all the privates come after they go to boot camp and so if you're gonna be a non-inventory marine you go to a course called mct where you get like six weeks of basic inventory stuff or four weeks of basic and then if you're going to be an infantryman you get three months of your basic you're a rifleman machine gunner uh mortarman and so and then from there you go out to your unit and so that the combat instructors are the ones that receive those privates and pfcs and train them in their in their their craft it's also where we have all the advanced infantry schools so if you come back as a squad leader to go to the advanced squad leader advanced machine gunner the combat instructors are the ones bringing the squad leaders in and teaching them the advanced tactics and so but before you can be an instructor there you've got to go through a course comment instructor school and then you go out and you train the privates or you train the sergeants and so i was the director of that school which was uh just a phenomenal position working with the highest caliber sergeants and staff sergeants uh in the entire marine corps and it was really really uh refreshing and good for my soul to be around 20 to 25 dudes who are at the top of their game every day and just doing grunt [ __ ] uh it was it was a great time and were you teaching as well i did a little bit of the platform instruction but uh i was more like the principal and and mine i had combat instructors who taught in combat instructor school and so you know hike with them go out on the range oh i see the range do a little class here and there but generally uh my instructors did the bulk of the teaching i always feel like you learn so much when you're an instructor role and i was very very very lucky to have been in that role quite a few times i was an e5 man i was in e5 teaching immediate action trails and you've learned so much man you're detached you're watching it happen you see that officer that's looking down his gun instead of looking around you're like hey what are you doing and by the time you're in that time i was at a position like it was freaking awesome um to have been through that from a detached perspective because you're watching it over and over again uh sir you're doing that meanwhile zach is carrying on by the way um and again i'm i'm zach's not here we're we're we're uh not reading much of his story but he's he got married he married a woman named diwa is that right diwa uh they're having kids um he he graduates from a school of course the taliban still gaining power um and that's not good for him not good for his family 2016 they're they're receiving night letters which are just straight up death threats from the taliban taliban to kill him to hurt his family kill his family anyone that helped america i mean it's like a nightmare for him he decides to apply for the special immigrant visa program um that's a long process still not even complete for him to this day so uh he gets poisoned at some point loses his pancreas so he gets poisoned he's you know his guts hurting he goes to the doctor the doctor's like hey they're they're poisoning people the taliban's poisoning people uh lose it like i said loses his pancreas i mean it's just horrible uh meanwhile still no still no real progress in um in his siv you know to get his visa to get over here meanwhile you are going through your career you take command of lima company third battalion fourth marines um lucky lima so now you're kind of back in the game back to leading troops uh you're gonna go on a deployment was it was the whole deployment plan for australia yes damn i never i i when i was in the military man uh the the guys talked about australia as if it is like the promised land heaven and i never went there until i retired uh and it is it's it's freaking amazing um there's a place called noosa have you ever heard of this i was there yeah there's not too many places in the world i would move to like tomorrow afternoon but that's one of them the freaking waves there they've got like the most incredible waves there's a place in california called malibu i'm sure you've heard of it there's like 10 malibu's in a row like all just different little spots and you can walk walk down you ever been to uh the san diego zoo the one right here in downtown yep it's all like uh all really manicured these nice paths and it just looks like this is like the most like like jurassic park scenario you walk around this thing at noosa is like that it's like you're on this jurassic park beautiful nice little trail and then you're just watching these beautiful beautiful waves um so you're going to australia uh your company commander how how was that how was that how do you like being in command again yeah i when i was at school of imf tree i there was one regiment seventh marine regiment which is out in 29 palms and they were the only ones doing the special person magtf so they were going to iraq afghanistan syria and so i contact the monitor and i say hey i want to volunteer to be a company commander because i know my time is coming up i don't want to go out to seven marines not a lot of people volunteered to go to 29 palms and so within like 30 seconds he writes me back he's like you got it and this in the monitor is like a person who's always impossible to get a hold of you know you're right and this is this instant instantaneous you got you want 29 palms no problem you got it man uh i'm like cool he's like you're gonna go to three four i'm like okay cool uh and then i find out that they're not even a they had deactivated because of force cut structure and then they had reactivated so there there's only an h s company of three four right now and i'm like okay and by the way they're going to australia and so i call i call them on her back and say hey i said i want to go to tournament palm so i go on one of the deployments to iraq and he's like uh you said 29 pounds you got 29 palms gotta go yeah and uh so i was initially a little butt hurt uh but ultimately yeah australia doesn't suck uh there are worse places to be deployed and so had a good time there um company command was awesome i mean company command was awesome it's just 150 just savage aggressive out 29 palms just attacking shooting [ __ ] blowing [ __ ] up and uh great lieutenants great platoon sergeants great squad leaders i mean just an aggressive company aggressive work up uh it's it's an infantryman's disneyland out there you know and says every day you get to go do great infantry training and so uh workup was a blast it was a great team i was very very fortunate to have the team that i had and then uh yeah we had a good time in australia any any major leadership lessons learned there a whole lot um for sure i i think i become very obsessive in how i approach training and command and it's because at a very young age i gained a great appreciation for the consequence of this profession uh that there that it's not called duty there is no responding and that when these kids are dead they're dead forever and that the hole that is left is felt for eternity and and having had that shape me that's that so that's how i approach everything that i do is like i will not stop until i know that these marines are as lethal as possible and had the best opportunity to come back to their moms you know and their wives and their children and and so push push push and um also i'm very competitive and so like i want to be the best platoon i want to be the best company i want and so when with with that in mind you know we were the main effort company uh we got uh during all the big exercises and then on deployment we got to go to queensland and i got to be become part of a uh australian battalions that my boss where the rest of everybody stayed back in darwin and so it's like staying in indiana or being in malibu you know so it's like uh you want to get and so uh it queensland is much nicer and and i was a senior marine in queensland so a lot of this like was pretty good but i didn't have all that came at a cost where i drove my marine so hard that uh i burned them out uh i pissed them off um and i could have had a more harmonious approach to leadership and i look at you either you're either i'm either looking at you professionally or personal as a person but not both at the same time and so if you come into my office and you you could be anybody say hey sir this my mom got breast cancer okay whatever i can do to support you right now how can i help you like you have my undivided attention i care about you how so i i will still treat you very much like like you're my son and and uh but outside of that i'm just i i'm ruthless like i don't want you to be sorry i just want you to be better i don't want your excuses i just want your results uh the solution is generally just work harder and be more aggressive and so i drove you know redlined the cup and that's a long workup a long deployment and by the end of it um i'd really wore out a lot of those marines and i think i i think i could have had a more harmonious approach to leadership and tried to at least keep them humans and marines kind of a little bit at the same time but uh so i you know if i have an opportunity to be a battalion commander i think i'm going to try to be more mindful of of that yeah it's definitely something that you you uh a lot of these great leaders or allegedly great leaders or even mythological leaders that we have in the military you you you see that's the that's the thing that shines through about a lot of them um that you don't see on the surface but when you read about them or you read their books like chesty polar like oh this is just the ultimate hard ass but when you read about him and how he treated the troops and how much he cared about them um you know hackworth the same way like like the hardest dudes you could ever imagine and yet they would completely know when they were pushing too hard pull back the reins get protect their guys from stupid [ __ ] and like that's why these guys were so totally beloved by by their troops because they the troops want to get pushed hard but they don't want to do dumb [ __ ] and they know and they're then they're humans and they need to get treated that way so that's uh definitely some great advice for anybody that's in a leadership position in any scenario um yeah you want to push hard yeah you want to win yeah you want to do better than everybody else and one of the ways to get the most out of your people is to treat them like people um you come back from that deployment is that when you get you actually get remarried is after that deployment yes so you get remarried um all's looking good you are now driving across country get your next set of orders and i'm gonna i'm gonna go to the book here um you're driving across country now i had a lot to think about i'd been to war twice i had married divorced and was about to remarry the same woman i'd commanded a company of marines and the marine corps had seen fit to select me for a promotion to major i was now a career marine on my way to spend three years molding future navy and marine officers this is when you're heading to the naval academy via some schooling as i crossed our nation i visited the graves of nine dark horse marines where and when i could i visited their families they were still living breathing men to me they certainly were to their families as i began to turn my thoughts to training and educating future officers i felt it critical to visit and reflect in the presence of some of the men who had made me who i am corporal tevin nguyen sergeant jason pedo pedo sergeant jason pedo lance corporal alec catherwood first lieutenant robert kelly first lieutenant william donnelly iv corporal derrick wyatt lance corporal arden banagwa first sergeant christopher carlisle and sergeant matthew abate all about sergeant pedo and first sergeant carlisle died in sangin sergeant pedo made it back to walter reed hospital in maryland before he died first sergeant carlisle survived his wounds the day that the day zach and i watched from a distance then got promoted retired and was killed in a motorcycle accident i owed him much of my sanity while in sangin i needed to tell him that mata bate was the heart and soul of three five a recipient of the navy cross the second highest award for valor presented by our nation his death in combat stunned every marine in the battalion he was a scout sniper who spent much of his time in support of kilo company he was the one the one of whom heraclitus spoke the one who will bring the others back no one was cooler than a batte no one cared more than a bate he was the author of the gun fighting commanded commandments posted on the wall at pb fires and now inscribed on the back of his grave marker quote thou shall never leave the wire without bandana containing at least four inches of slack in any situation thou shall blaze nothing matters more than thy brethren to thy left and right thou shall protect no matter what when going out in a hail of gunfire thou shall pop them nugs until the body runs dry of blood and look hella sick um i found a newspaper article about um abate it said sergeant james finney 25 served with a battery in sangin when he heard of his friend's death he had the same reaction as many of the marines in the battalion how do we win this war without him um as your [Music] driving across country as you're stopping by gravestones as you're talking to families how is your perspective changing these gold star families um are incredible and the loss for them is as present today as it was the day they lost their son and um the pain doesn't go away and we have a collective duty and responsibility to carry their son's legacy forward and to do everything that we can to honor their sacrifice i have a personal responsibility to honor these men and how i live and uh and a responsibility to the families and so um you know tevin nguyen was killed december 28th his son he'd been there for the birth of his son right before he deployed and that was it and uh so going to see little tevin junior art of banagwa uh his first generation american both his parents immigrants um was killed when he was 19. he was the of that engineer squad attached tequila company he was the the 12th marine that was injured or killed and i got to tell this family like your son is my hero and your son is the reason i'm alive and that everybody in his position before him who was walking point through a minefield either died or lost her limb and your son when he was 18 years old still grabbed his pack grabbed his rifle and a metal detector and walked out in front of us never once turning to me at 18 years old and saying sir can somebody else take this responsibility my son is his namesake and uh the idea that these men knew the consequences ahead of time and win anyways and that if you told them how the story ends every single one of them would be right where they were fighting next to their brothers mata bate when he got his navy crossed they the squad leader got shot and one marine goes to help the squad leader he gets blown up the corpsman goes to help the marine that gets blown up he gets blown up the next marine goes help the corpsman he gets blown up finally everyone recognizes we're in the middle of a minefield and every time somebody moves they're killed so people stop moving it's a normal thing to do everybody but one marine and he runs and he treats all the casualties he coordinates the medevac he grabs the metal detector sweeps the lz doesn't not train to do that just proofs the minefield with his feet repels the enemy calls calls in that helicopter um yeah and so when i talk to these these families it's um it's so heavy uh but it's so important and um i just thank god that uh men like this lived and that i had and just for a little bit just for a moment i got to know them and uh not only did these men die well but they lived well and they're meant to celebrate and and and i it is my lifelong duty to continue to honor these men every opportunity i get that's it i know i i eventually told uh mark lee's mom a story about mark very similar to what you're talking about so i start off by telling her that in vietnam like the point men would rotate because your walking point you're going to get ambushed you're going to get blown up you're going to hit a tripwire and they would rotate those guys and in ramadi being the being in a lead vehicle you're the one that's going to get blown up you're the one that's going to hit an id and uh especially being the gunner you know well now you're not in any any armor and you're just um totally you're exposed and we'd line up the vehicles and and markley you know he's a new guy and so guess what he is um turret gunner in vehicle one night after night and and when you leave the gate at ramadi uh when you when you drive towards the gate to go out into town there was a uh vehicle graveyard and there's like 75 or 100 vehicles out there and they're ever just twisted and gnarled they've all been dragged back and every one of those vehicles represents one two three four five casualties wounded killed you know just just heinous and that's what i don't know who the i don't know who the hell decided that was a good place for the vehicle graveyard but it was a shitty place for the vehicle graveyard because that's what you saw and same thing with mark man never asked for somebody else to take his spot some heroic dudes for sure and did it with a smile on his face i'd i'd go how are you feeling hey mark what's up man how you feeling and like his favorite response he liked to gamble a little bit he'd say i'm feeling lucky sir um so that's the guys we get to work with now this you're taking all this with you to be um a professor at at the naval academy which is a pretty i mean you're you've got all this awesome combat experience i know awesome might not be the right word but you've got this real experience and you're going to take that back now to the naval academy how did you how did you end up getting that billet how did that billet end up coming about yeah i think it was a mistake um i uh i was deployed to australia and i said you know when's the last time you read any fiction all you do is read biographies and uh you used to be in high school you were smart you liked to do ap literature you let your kind of as you pointed out nerdy uh and then progressively got dumber through college and uh um maybe try to read a book that isn't just uh and so i googled popular works of fiction and the first one that came up was great expectations by charles dickens i read that and i said oh i like this and um a message came out we said we need someone to teach english at the naval academy i know anything about the naval academy not academy guy i'm not an english major uh failed english and uh i said well maybe that's me sounds like a good pick and uh so i'm a guy that you know shoot your shot and uh put my head in the ring and yeah clearly the marine corps needs to refine that selection process but uh they they picked me um and uh before i knew it i was at georgetown uh in a m.a english ma program get in my ass kicked not qualified to be in that program i should have been in the t-ball league and i showed up at the all-star game how how long how long was that course of instruction so it's supposed to be a two-year program marine corps likes to keep the morning tight so 12 months so i did 12 2-year program in one month or 12 months so yeah working on a compressed timeline uh been in the fleet at that point for 10 11 years and so just through got thrown in the deep end of the pool uh didn't know how to swim but it was an incredible experience it was it was experience i really needed because i very much was just a hammer and that's all i knew and i had no other tools in life and studying literature and writing and it really uh it helped me work out a lot of things that i'd not unpacked yet and uh so i i knew i was going to be outside of my comfort zone i didn't know quite how out of my comfort zone i was but i was i was outside of it and uh from like orientation to when we're going around the table where i think you just tell people what's your name is like i'm tom french caller like no from orientation i was already out of my depth uh through conclusion uh but i had a great i had some great friends that i met there that helped me and i had some great professors and um so yeah then i a year later i show up and i start teaching english and how was it when you showed up at the naval academy had you ever even been to the naval academy before no i couldn't even told you where the naval academy was when i applied for that position uh just uh i just thought i what i thought is like they're gonna pay me to go read books and then i gotta write a little book report on it like that's what i thought like an english program would be and then we're having these discussions in class and i'm like what the hell are these words like this is supposed to be english and we're using all these words i have no idea what anybody's talking about like we're doing this close reading and literary analysis and all this kind of stuff and um but yeah i got up to annapolis it's beautiful and it was an awesome awesome job these midshipmen were hungry they're good good americans and i got to pick my favorite books and then talk to talk to them about my favorite books you know so we're doing fields of fire and matterhorn and gets firing starship troopers and uh and so that course was not offered when i went to when i was an english major yeah i didn't get to do any of those books unfortunately and uh so yeah teaching these midshipmen poetry and composition and [Music] but i was teaching a little bit about leadership literature i was teaching a little bit about composition and i was teaching a lot about leadership in the classroom and it was a super rewarding tour and uh really really enjoyed my time there now one thing that you talk about in the book is as you start as you start teaching justin justin mcleod who's one of your marines uh dies of an overdose and in the same month two of your other marines die by suicide you at this juncture um ask for and get counseling professional counseling what what did that consist of and how did it help you so mcleod wasn't my first marine that that i lost to the war after it but mcleod was tough in a lot of ways um i just i still have a hard time coming out of the yellow you know getting into the white and being vulnerable and and but when i would sing my daughter to bed and she was one years old at the time i'd always try to just be real present vulnerable with her and seeing you know this little light of mine with her and then i just finished that and then i come to my room and one of my marines from singing so say gotta call me and uh mccloud he had he had shown up to 35 in 2008 he had gone on the iraq deployment he'd gone on the mu deployment and so he'd done our work up but then he was going to eas he said you know i thought i was going to extend but i just had a son i'm going to i'm going to ease and i said you know you're my best shot you're my best nav guy like uh i know you just had a son but um we really need you so do whatever you need to do and if you want to ease but i hope you extend and he comes back and says you know sir you're my family too a few months later um the engineer steps on the pressure plate the mcleod is over the charge and they both get hit and um i'm about like five people back and as i come up uh as i come up one of my marines hands me mcleod's fingers and uh i look at mcleod he's missing his arm and uh his legs and like uh i it was teague and i said thanks teague and now i'm in this like weird position i have these body parts with a body part that doesn't exist anymore i put them in my cargo pocket and uh my engineer's going into shock so i all i have is my frog top so i take my i take my blouse off i wrap him in my blouse and i've got nothing on under my flat jacket and i go back to mcleod and initially he's like real calm and cool uh he's smoking a cigarette saying like kill these mothers you know whatever and and uh but we're having a really hard time landing the the medevac burden there's there's probably five or six guys all working on them uh when you've got an amputee it takes a couple dudes to patch up you know each thing and so what i would always do is the first thing is i would take a junior marine off and once i had security set once i had the medevac in motion i would take that junior marine off so that they can hold security and i get my hands in that marine's guts and so but it was dusk and they were having a hard time telling a laser or smoke they couldn't they couldn't see where to land and so and then every time they'd come in that zone would get hot and taliban would start shooting at them and so they keep waving off and uh mcleod starts to succumb to his wounds and um and i i said ioc and the marine corps training is is just so good it's phenomenal it prepares you to do the things technically and tactically uh but there's nothing that can prepare you to have a conversation with a guy who you convinced to extend who said i'm going to get out because i want to teach my son to play baseball because mccloud had high school scholarships our college college had to go play baseball but he enlisted and said and i'm saying hey you got to stay here for desmond because someday you're going to teach him how to play catch and you get and and knowing that what is he going to be able to do you know he's got no arm no legs and he starts a flat line and i just like everything in me wants to cry for this marine but everybody's you know as a leader like you said everybody is looking at you how you're going to respond to this thing and and i got to keep trying to talk to this guy about finding that will to live again for his son and uh very um and the will to live is a powerful thing and he stays and he and and but he he never stopped fighting that battle and ten years later um and claimed him and uh and so yeah that's what got me on the the road to pb abate but it also i was still very destructive in my tendencies and my thoughts and my actions and uh and my family was the casualties and so i was still fighting the war myself in a lot of ways and being selfish and being harmful and uh my family was the one suffering and um you know i i thought oh i i just push push push that's how i deal with everything you push and uh but you got to look at this as we know how if if you are if we we do a really good job of teaching our marines and sailors how to treat casualties physically if you're if you're routine we know it's self-aid if your uh priority is buddy aid if you're urgent it's got to get to higher echelon of care and so if you've got us a sucking chest wound we say we got to get you to the dock we don't say just hey you got a second chest when you probably just patch this up you'd be okay no we said we got it but what we don't do is say like these invisible wounds are your routine are you priority or you're urgent and so um you know if you're routine and you're just having a bad day that's normal everybody has sad day funky day whatever and you just whatever whatever you got to do put on the jocko podcast go for a run you know you get out of it you know if your priority you need some buddy hey i'm going through this thing you share it with your buddy you know your buddy can kind of fire to firemen carry you out of that thing and you but sometimes you got a sucking chest wound and talking to your buddy or or going for a run is those are helpful uh but they're not going to heal that wound and and i've been bleeding for a long time uh but i lacked the self-awareness uh to be able to triage that when i also lacked the ability to and so i needed to go to it just like if i had a second chest when i want to go to a doctor i need to go to a doctor and so um yeah i uh i finally uh went and and there's a cpt cognitive processing therapy i think it's called and and what it does is it brings you to the traumatic event over and over which is a super dangerous thing to do by yourself you know you can't you don't those are all volatile and you need a trained professional to open up your sandbag and start to unpack and pull some of those things out and uh and through like that repeated exposure you you start to kind of be able to negotiate or navigate that and and so my wife says and i'd have to distrust her judgment that that was uh what saved me in a lot of ways saved our marriage and um so yeah i uh that that was kind of how i ended up there and it was it was it was very helpful how often do you go well i went for about nine months while i was at the naval academy um and you know you're supposed to do i don't know 12 15 20 sessions of this cpt uh and mine got a little truncated because i got orders at the naval war college um and i haven't been back uh but it's at least to a point where it's i'm not i don't think i'm an urgent casualty right so i think uh so probably still benefit from it but um yeah and and it's it's one of those things where it's the self-delusion where you just say oh i don't have time for it i don't have time for it i got i got marine sleeve i got it's like man if you don't get to the root cause of some of the stuff that you're doing you're gonna so make it a priority and also mostly by the way you're just scared of dealing with it and so you're making excuses because you don't have the courage to deal with the tough stuff that's going on inside you and so um yeah that's uh that was kind of my my experience with all that you mentioned really quickly that you established um a charity organization called patrol based abate pbabate.org and that was in november 2020. what's the purpose behind that yeah so i i i've always been like a person that if there's a problem you should walk point like you should try to figure out how you can contribute and uh i said this suicide thing whatever's whatever we got going is it seems to be not working and uh so i said let me go read all the va suicide reports so i pulled up you know 10 years of va suicide reports and what i kept coming back to is that the leading possible cause of veteran suicide were feelings of disconnectedness and isolation so that veterans who are disconnected or isolated are are more vulnerable to suicide okay and then there was a little stat that kept showing up that was really surprising and that there's no correlation between combat and suicide and veterans and that people generally have it like what really and that was my same reaction and and but as i thought and reflected on that when you transition the thing that you're missing is that tribe and that purpose and you can find that in other ways jiu jitsu there's plenty of ways where you can find that chai find that purpose again uh but it not everybody is able to fall into or find that thing and and i think when i think of a uh an air crew on a c17 or c130 when i think of a motor t crew or com section everybody in that unit has said i'm willing to die for you and everybody in that unit understands that um keeping aircraft flying is like that's an important keeping trucks rolling like that's important the ability to communicate important so everybody when you look at a mission a mission is a task and purpose and so the military quite literally issues you a tribe here's your squad you're in first squad uh and then they and then they give you a mission which which actually has a purpose built into the mission statement um and so then as you transition there's this identity crisis because over your left heart there you've got a name tape that says navy marines you know and it's like we just hand you a piece of paper and say you're not that thing you say well man i still i've been indoctrinated into this thing and there's not a process of indoctrination in out of it um and and so i said what is out there that is getting people if if isolation and disconnectedness are the two big risk factors here what is out there that's getting all veterans in community and getting all veterans connected because it's if it's not just a combat [Music] veteran problem and what i found is like the overwhelming majority of veteran service organizations out there and there were many are dedicated to supporting our special operations our wounded and our goals our families and i am so grateful that as an american that we recognize the people who've made the most sacrifice our special our navy seal foundation our green beret found like i'm so happy that we say these people have paid the most cost they've given a limb uh they've deployed seven ten twelve times by special forces uh their goal so i'm happy that that's where we've resourced and put and invested in because these people deserve it um but what the data tells us is that there's there's more to this picture and so i didn't find an organization at the time that i felt was inclusive or accessible to everybody that's raised the right hand and i wanted and there was always some kind of barrier to entry said you know uh you gotta you don't you're not disabled enough to to be eligible you're you're not uh you don't have enough of a disorder you haven't been to combat enough you it's it's always this barrier or check this box check this box uh and then or they're like really very reactive i've overdosed i've had a suicide attempt it was right to bang now now that you're right a bang and that that you're in your moment of crisis now you're eligible and i said well let's what's preemptive what's proactive what's left of bang in this and i didn't find a whole lot and i i said let's create a space where your service is your price of a mission that that you don't i can i can check a lot of these boxes by the way uh i don't want to be defined by disorder or by my disability or by you know i i just want to say hey i'm tom and i could use some community and i could use some connection and so we went and we got 350 acres up in montana and we said uh we're gonna do the things that you like to do veterans so what are the things that you want to do well let's build around a shared common interest so we've got a fight club that does jiu jitsu we've got a strength club that does powerlifting we've got a music club that's been up there we've got an art club that's been up there we've got a book club that's been up there we've got a hunting club that's been up there and so a lot of these organizations are predicated around fishing for example and i think that's really good uh a lot of healing could happen during that not everybody is in to fishing you know and so like you you you and so we want to say i want to say hey if it was up to me i'm a grunt who likes to read so like i like to hike and i like to read books and so like i would just have pbotted be like the hiking book club uh but that's not everybody's thing and and so we want to say whatever you're into uh if you're willing to walk point we'll resource you and we'll build a club or club around you and so uh and we're gonna and we're gonna fly you up to where where our dojo is it's on the side of a mountain in a montana river valley there's no more beautiful dojo in the world to roll than on the side of that mountain in the pibate there's no better place to to lift weights or and so uh and we fly you out free of cost uh we pick you up we feed you all free of cost because it's it's all this idea of so many veterans especially guat veterans and or post 911 veterans are conditioned this thing where well i was just a and they use this just and and and we've we've really i think largely through social media constructed this hierarchy of what it means to serve and if you weren't in ramadi or if you weren't part of this organization or you like and it's this weird competition of in this red definition redefining of what service means it's like no service means you raised your right hand you swore into the constitution you did that for four years honorably that is what services by definition and so uh you serve something greater than yourself and uh and so we want the airmen the sailor the soldier the marine the national guard the reservist active duty pfc if you if you raise your right hand you're eligible and you're in no additional call and and like many people when we would say this they're like wait me well i'm just an a nope i'm just an airman i'm just a motor t's like nope we actually built this place for you like for me well i would go but i can't afford it's like oh good because it's free cost oh i would go but like i don't do that it's like what do you do well let's go do that thing and and so uh we've run two we call it the return to base program uh we've run uh two summers of it and uh you know the pillars are getting around the fire um because i really think that connection forms around the the fireside chats uh getting out in nature because i think i believe good things happen outside and then getting back into service and so we do a service project around there and uh and then we sustain that through local chapters and so um we just say like uh what sandbag do you want to fill we need somebody to walk point and uh we created this space for you and uh we got a big tent we got a seat for you at the table come on get in community get connected and uh that's what we've been doing and it's been uh pretty incredible to be a part of it how many people have you put through in the two summers about 150 people uh up to montana and then um we're still running another program this fall and you know if we can't do the thing that you do on a side of a mountain i'll find a way to support you so so somebody said hey i'm in the scuba diving can't scuba dive on the side of the mountain so okay so i found a partner down in the bahamas and we're going to send 15 veterans out in october and so about 150 but people who have been through um our local chapter programs i mean it's thousands right and so every month all around this country you've got pb avatar new york boston orange county san diego austin meeting and getting and getting into community and getting connected and so uh it's been pretty awesome to to watch it grow and um yeah yeah that sounds awesome and uh if people want to support it they go to pbubate.org to support it that's the best way um so get trying to try to follow the book a little bit here um by summer 2021 meanwhile while all this is going on zach in his world is falling apart um in afghanistan the taliban is taking over um time is short again you detail a lot of stuff in the book but uh you go into like full combat mode but administrative effort to get zach and his family out of there um and you're going down i mean you're just you're taking every everything you can possibly do to get this done social media fundraising senior military leaders uh politicians to try and get something going to get him out of there and of course this is no small task because at the time there's tens of thousands of other people that are also trying to get out of afghanistan as all of this stuff as it starts to fall apart um and and just to give a little bit of zak's perspective here um and again i i'm fast forward there's so much so much more detail in the book get the book uh this is from zach on july 16 2021 when tom told me i needed to get to kabul and explain why i had to stop and sit for a moment i was relieved that more people than just tom and i cared about the survival of my family but i knew chaos was coming i just needed it to be still before it began i just needed to be still before it began even when you've been planning for it the thought of leaving your home forever is overwhelming how do you say goodbye to your family members when you know you may never see them again how do you kiss your mother for the last time how do you keep from forgetting the smell of her hair after you do i sat on the terrace of our home where so many of the simple things at the center of my life had happened childhood marriage my children taking their first steps they were moments as tied to a place as i was now i was being forced to leave them behind with my home for all my sadness there was no hiding from the situation life for regular afghans was bad and getting steadily worse i was living in hiding the taliban's messages which had long made it clear they were looking for me and would kill me for working with the americans when they found me were growing bolder and coming more often i could not live in kunar i could not survive there more importantly my family could not when i learned that the americans left bagram in the middle of the night on july 2nd i thought about my own times flying in and out of there i remembered how the air base felt like it could not contain all the planes and helicopters it seemed like america's power was without end i had placed my faith in that i did not see then how the americans and our government would ever let the taliban come back but here the taliban taliban were leaving me messages at my family's doorstep during the night so it was just awful for him and um at this point the book kind of kind of turns into a suspense espionage spy political thriller it's it's mayhem but it's not a novel it's what's really going on and what's really happening to this real person and his real family and and one thing that's cool is the way this the way the book is set up it's telling it both from your perspective and then you hear his perspective and then you hear his perspective and you hear hear your perspective as you're trying to coordinate this movement and link-ups and bona fides and messages and like dying batteries on cell phones right which you think you know when you're in a first world problem you know oh no my cell phone died and i'm not gonna be able to get a message until i get to my car and get it charged right um you know he's out there his his battery's low and he's literally standing at the wall trying to make calms um it it's it's it's a crazy scene and again we all i mean everybody watched this on the news but to hear somebody that was on the ground their perspective as they're trying to escape this is zach again at the airport wall so he's at the wall trying to get into the airport a taliban fighter stood closer to the wall and was watching the crowd an ak-47 hanging across his chest he saw us looking up at the american on the tower roof he looked in the same direction and reached out to alert his friends i saw him look up at the american again i could tell they made eye contact with each other the talib put his pistol put his hand on his pistol grip of his ak the american reached towards his hip but another american standing on a half wall below him reached out to grab his leg he shook his head no and the one on the tower moved his hand away from his hip the taliban below made their hands into the shape of pistols and pointed them at the american as he carefully climbed down and stepped back over the wire i kept my eyes focused on him i could not see his face i did not know if if it was major jared lefevre is that right lefevre major jared lefevre but i felt in my heart that this was the moment then i saw him lift his hand to his mouth and speak into a phone a message arrived on my own in in the group chat with tom and jared the text said put your son on your shoulder i lifted my son over his head over the shouting sweating mass of people he was wearing a bright blue shirt as john shattuck had told me to have him do early that morning the american waved me closer i grabbed my family and we fought through the crowd to the base of the wall with our new friend following as we pushed my countrymen aside i was nodding at the man i knew now as major lefever he shouted me do you have your family yes i yelled back and one more major lefevre turned to the three americans next to him all large men and heavily armed i could not hear them all talking but from their gesture i could tell they were trying to decide how to pull seven people up and over the wall they began to they begun to attract attention from more of the taliban drowning people will reach for any hand they see the crowd was beginning to move toward the base of the wall below where they stood the americans finished conferring and began to move my eyes were locked on major la fever as he sent me a text we have to figure out how to get you to us at the door to your left um and and that's the way this book goes uh reading through this it's it's it's agonizing and you just you just don't know how this is gonna end um other than the fact that the title of the book indicates um that you know we have to keep the faith you keep the faith zach keeps the faith and ultimately the uh service men and women on the ground remain faithful and zach does get through all kinds of gates and wickets to get him and his family out of there um gets out before the attack at abby gate um which happened a few days after he left where we lost one us army soldier one u.s navy corpsman and 11 united states marines um perhaps the last to die for that particular cause in that particular nation by that particular enemy or perhaps not um only time will tell but zack made it out and and made it to america and um i mean it's it's very powerful and it's very powerful to hear his you know his perspective let me just give you a little bit of that this is when he's back i was willing to risk my life thousands of my fellow afghans lost theirs i worked for my people and country in pursuit of a better future for all of us but i also worked with and for the americans because they came to help us build a better afghanistan i would do it again i would still sacrifice my myself for my country for my people and for america the country that saved and welcomed me and my family too many good people died for a dream for me to ignore the obligation to pay it back the taliban were not our only problem the corruption in our own national government was a chain around our collective necks leaders must earn their positions by deserving the trust of the people a government with anything less will never survive and the governed will never thrive too many of our leaders bought their way into power as a means of enriching themselves too many warlords held on to power by force placing themselves ahead of the people they were supposed to protect it was a frail system that fell when the foreign support holding it up ceased to exist for now the taliban own afghanistan the afghan people are again living in a nightmare people i love who are still there are suffering they are starving with no food and no money with which to buy it modern medical care is already only a memory security and freedom are a dream when they seize the nation the taliban claim that former members of the security forces and people who worked with the americans would be safe in italian taliban regime it was a lie then and it is a lie now the executions and torture have already begun i knew that was coming the taliban told me themselves [Applause] and you know those statements about afghanistan and the leadership really apply anywhere and corruption and nepotism and arrogance and power your hungry leaders are the downfall of any organization any team any company and uh any country and we have to definitely be aware of that ourselves and pay attention when was the first time you saw zach when he got to america i flew out to minnesota to to see him he had been in a refugee camp in virginia i think it's fort pickett for a while and uh kind of tough to get down there or get into the camp and and so he'd been maintaining all along that he wanted to go to texas because his cousins were there and important to assimilate with family uh his cousins had also been interpreter and got here a couple years ago and so he was under the impression that he would get to texas until uh about 24 hours they said you go to minnesota tomorrow in january and uh you know minneapolis in january is not uh texas and so um he was in a kind of bad spot and so i flew up there got to see him got to see his family and then he had been waiting for like a work permit and it's better if you stay within the resettlement process because if you pull out of the resettlement process you kind of get reset back to zero and he had just received that work permit about the day or two before i showed up to minnesota and he told me i got my work permit i said so do you need to be in minnesota he said no i said let's go to texas uh so the next day we were on a flight uh what was it seven seven passengers eight bags four car seats with a layover in denver uh but we landed in uh san antonio that night and um it was good to see the mission through and what's he up to right now he works construction hanging drywall at a cancer hospital six days a week 12 hours a day and he just uh but he just had a son while we were in new york together so two weeks ago he had a son and so now uh sajad is his fifth kid and uh american by birth um i've been having some great conversations with the vietnam guys and and some vietnamese that came over you know after the war and uh just their their work ethic and what they instilled in their kids is just amazing and um you know when you you hear about zach like hanging drywall 12 hours a day it's like th this guy's gonna make something happen like he is gonna make something happen um just just an awesome story of of you know just the the unceasing uh faith that that you two had in each other to make this happen um so where are you at now i'm back at 3 get some uh get some legit model right where do i try to research where that came from when they start saying that uh in iraq is is where it jack so uh they were they did they were in phantom fury alfajr and uh and so yeah i'm dark horse three and i'm the operations officer for three five so we're uh training and uh getting ready to deploy next summer you deploy next time or any idea where you guys are going pacific ale pacific ao get some uh i i guess that kind of brings us up to present day right yeah um probably a pretty good place to wrap it up i know you got some marines to go lead um what do we miss no i think we got it for people for people to find you first of all um the book uh always faithful it's available anywhere um order it we'll put a link to it right echo charles yes sir we will we collectively will do that so people can find it and get it uh patrol base abate that's your your organization yeah um go and check that out uh pbabate.org uh i found like a kick-ass little video of sergeant abate too it's like 30 seconds long i don't know if there's any more video if there is please let me know he could just tell he's just like like whatever percentage of charisma of whatever percentage of just being a badass uh that's freaking legit um you're on instagram yep you are at kill dot zone but it's spelled funny z zero so it's z and then a zero and then an n and then a three so at killzone is where you're out on instagram um echo charles you got any questions yeah how'd you crash your motorcycle back in the day i crashed it twice your mom really hates you yeah because i tried to go too fast too soon and uh so about lost my thumb and that's when i kind of retired from just sort of randomly or was it like a very specific incident where you know you made some raw specific wrong decisions yeah too fast in a turn and laid it down okay everyone that i know that has a motorcycle or had a motorcycle has crashed in varying levels of injury or whatever so that's kind of the thing yes uh i like you know i mentioned mark lee like in a gamble i like to gamble and man the odds when you're riding a motorcycle the odds are just not your favorite for for being okay when when whatever happens happens and it's happening oh yeah that's what it i mean that i don't know every single person in the world with a motorcycle but every single person that i know that had a motorcycle crashed in including myself by the way and i didn't even own the motorcycle i had my friend's motorcycle for the summer i laid it down uh-huh so it's like but in my mind when was that college but you didn't get injured no i handled but i still understood what kind of bike did you have did you have a super bike do you have a harley i had a my first bike was a victory and then my second bike was a ducati okay yeah that ducati gets way tempting doesn't it i mean that thing just wants you to roll yeah it's almost like one of those inevitable slippery slopes well correct me i don't know everybody's different to a degree where you go fast and you're like you kind of feel the power a little bit but you don't want to push it and then you kind of get kind of be like i can't go faster i can't go fast and it just never stops right until you crash and i move through that progression very rapidly well we're going to um we're going to support your mom on the anti-motorcycle gig here fair enough tom any final thoughts no sir well hey thanks for joining us today thanks for sharing your lessons thanks for your continued service with the marine corps and thanks for keeping the faith with your interpreter zach who never let you down in the field and you did not let down when he and his family needed you and uh to everyone out there right now that's still holding the line i recommend we remember the guidance from sergeant matt abate in any situation thou shall blaze nothing matters more than thy brethren to thy left and right thou shall protect no matter what until the body runs dry of blood thanks tom thank you and with that tom schuman has left the building echo i would say you know when you when you reflect on just talking about tom's first deployment you know he's a platoon commander there's just so much responsibility and that's what's that's what's good if you know if you if you've been in the military you've you've had so much responsibility that for people in the civilian sector out there you hire someone to run a branch or run a manufacturing facility and they've had this much weight there's a really good chance that they're going to have some good lessons learned and and being able to do a good job it's just a lot of weight is on the shoulders of these young young soldiers sailors airmen and marines out there a lot of weight a lot of burden on these young guys and it's it's it's look this is this highlights the story of an officer but the young the the young corporals the sergeants it just really is an incredible thing that we send these young men and women to do out there on the battlefield and i'm glad we were able to capture some of these lessons and share them and um yeah so there we go so thanks again to tom for coming down here and to three five for letting them come down for the day uh appreciate everyone's support for the podcast um if you wanna support the podcast and you wanna support yourself you know get yourself some of that jocko fuel get yourself some of that jockofield.com have you tried pink mist yet yes how do you like it i like it it reminds me of it doesn't remind me but it's similar to like the orange where it's like you i'm not saying you can't go wrong because of course you can go wrong but it's one of those ones where it's like just it was good but i just wasn't surprised that it was good you know it's like that kind uh yeah so we're talking about new flavor of discipline go it's called pink mist it's like a pink lemonade scenario it's kind of hard to make the word pink sound cool but when you put pink mass probably might be the only way to make thing sound cool pink mist so there you go that's our our energy drink here's the thing this is not normal energy drink there's no chemicals in there there's no sugar in there it's literally good for you so go get some joco discipline go and it'll really help you out in life i think it was you doing a speech to a group of people it might have been life i don't know i've been at origin at the camp maybe i don't know i don't know either way but here was the po here was one of the many points where there's like there's companies where they'll be like hey let's make an energy drink and they'll be like okay so what are we going to put in this energy drink because we got to sell it yeah i'll tell you what they're going to put in whatever the consumer will want right now yeah so it was and what's cheapest yeah so you and you made you said this more eloquently than me but i'm gonna i'm gonna say what i really gathered from it and it was kind of um like it was it kind of haunted me a little bit where you have a company that's like okay let me make an energy drink what are we gonna put in it okay let's put some caffeine in it for the energy right so okay cool caffeine we'll put this much in however much right he goes okay but we gotta preserve it or we gotta make it taste good we gotta you know cause they we gotta get them to drink it right sure seems seems like oh of course you gotta get them to drink it add sugar but so let's put sugar okay so sugar wait we want it to be we want it to be really good though more sugar more sugar and you know okay so i and even at this point sugar is like cool like that's nothing new you know oh i don't know let's put like some other stuff some chemicals some preservatives in here some stuff that and then after a while these things start adding up right all these little ingredients and it's like okay has anyone ever thought of like wow what this is gonna do to like a you know 17 year old kid or a person or whatever if they drink one of these every day which is kind of the goal man if they if everyone drink one every day that'd be freaking awesome right as far as okay so has anyone taken taken account for like what if these people are drinking one of these two of these every single day like what's going to happen to them oh yeah we did that but like we don't care about that we just want them to drink them every day oh what if what if like what if it's really bad for and what if it causes maybe some death oh well we don't care about that you know as long as we're drinking them every day kind of a thing and that's kind of the picture that was kind of painted there was like bro that's true that's true it's 100 true and they can they cut the corners on the costs our drinks like three times more to make well i think in some cases four times more than some of you than what what some of these other companies are putting their drinks yeah and if they cut costs that means they pay less for it that means they get more money when you you know like so it makes it's weird because it makes sense on one hand but on the other hand it's so like sinister you know so nothing sinister on our side only goodness only the goodness the goodness of monk fruit yeah we put some caffeine in there not too much though yeah but just 95 milligrams but we got some nootropics in there make sure you get all the energy that you're gonna need so there you go get some chocolate fuel get some milk i've been on the mulk train lately yeah peanut butter be honest with you binge is going hard in the paint with peanut butter it's so good it's so good it's ridiculous uh so chocofuel.com you can also go to the vitamin shop vitamin shop has pink mist by the way a little exclusive scenario going on with them right now and also you can get the stuff at wawa hey by the way okay rtds ready to drink milk milk yeah it's out there it's a protein meal it's a protein dessert it's a protein provider of goodness to you and it's ready to drink it's so funny how like we had like a little stockpile like a pre-sale stockpile at camp and they were like oh this is we'll have enough just for the campers and you know just not no well we what we thought was we will reserve multiple pallets it'll be more than enough to last one week yeah dude people went ham because once you taste one you're like i'm gonna have oh i'm gonna have one for breakfast one for lunch one for dinner i'll put them in my season everyone in my cereal it's all good we're freaking drinking this stuff twenty four yeah that's like two days that's like two days yeah like two days and that was it yep so we uh we are on the path just trying to produce as much of the ready to drink mulk as we possibly can right now to get it out there because it's delicious and it's freaking good for you yeah yeah so good good so as many as you want uh yeah that's all jackalful.com speaking of jiu jitsu originusa.com we're making jiu-jitsu geez we're making jeans we're making boots we're making hunt gear hey the delta 68 has new colors or something like this yeah i saw like a picture a little thing yeah yeah the the one of the wash houses which is like a giant machine a series of machines that can wash things at a high rate so they get like worn they get broken in yeah is that the traditional way because you know how you have a lighter color jean then you have the freaking dark dark it's called the wash house now wash houses are really hard to build and we have one but ours wasn't working but you know the team down there in north carolina has been busting their ass getting the wash house back up and running we had to get new machines had to get them installed put in there um and now we have like the original wash house from the golden era of american textile is back up and running i think we're playing bro we're not playing no no i don't think we're not playing no you're not are you gonna do acid wash remember acid wash i feel like acid water that right there is up there with like hair metal to me i don't like it right yeah it's weird how acid wash at the time was freaking awesome by the way no not me i never liked it it was awesome in the time but i don't have any pictures of me wearing acid wash jeans or uh affliction t-shirts interesting remember when affliction was all wild and all the companies had all the weird designs i have a few pictures of us and you have it it's not affliction but it's like in that direction but it was like throw down because a lot of people was following they had one that was a little bit and also you know what my my caveat here is i did wear some walk-out shirts like for a specific fighter for a specific camp for a specific fight which i can't remember may or may not have been straight up just like cheesy affliction but uh luckily for me i i didn't own one so no you weren't there are pictures of me at the club represent remember the affliction uh jeans do that like weird they go hard man very hard those afflictions you take something you know i think the genes were acid wash you know yeah they weren't but you know you know the book the dichotomy of leadership yeah you take anything and you make it an extreme it can become bad yeah so if you take like genes and there's like thread on them but then you start going crazy with it it turns bad yeah you get if you put a pair of jeans in a wash house and they become like comfortable and a little bit faded that's cool but then you put like acid on them and they look all weird that's not cool you can't take stuff to an extreme i understand and that's why they kind of stuck in the 80s where you went hard and it was like freaking out they jumped on the trees coming back right apparently yeah yeah because there's a show called stranger things which i have not watched but my daughter's or yeah one of my daughters is into it but and do you think 80s bro okay and am even me just starting to say ask this question i feel like you're probably one of the last people to ask about this or maybe one of the first i don't know but do you think that like you know things always come back right the retro and it comes back and you know all this and fashion is one of those ones but isn't there always like one two three things that are like that's two hardcore 80s that that'll never come back yeah that's true but here's an interesting thing first of all the 80s in my mind it seems like it was a few years ago but it's like 35 years ago so when i was a kid 60s stuff right 60s and 70s like things were like hype but that was only i mean this is in the 80s for me so they're only like 15 years old and they were still hype yeah you know what i'm saying so it's weird that we're talking about things that are coming back but it's been 40 years since the 80s yeah it's just straight miami vice activity going down yeah did you like miami west uh yeah here and there but i guess that was kind of a big thing some guy i used to work with at the valet used to say like oh you're tubs from miami like oh somebody did a uh uh photoshop of you and me as crabs uh tubs and crockett and it looked legit yeah yeah yeah they did a good job they did a good job of that that made me laugh and it you kind of i will say you kind of get a little bit of tubs going on that's what they said i did i didn't gather that at the time but hey cool man if more than one person i you know lend it some weight all right uh so there you go so no acid wash no acid wash so we will prevent that from happening right now uh also drop the story documents door this one equals freedom if you want to represent with a shirt a hoodie what winter what fall right is it fall right now in winter you know got some hoodies on there discipline equals freedom standard issue sure he's on it's rolling oh the standard issue speaking of which layers layers but people are representing currently as we speak so yeah look out for that also we got the shirt locker which is the subscription people are representing that hardcore yeah i'll just see random people oh that's actually that's the locker again full-on supporting yep you get a new design every month they're new they're creative see if you can recognize them um yeah supporting appreciate the support and subscribe to the podcast also also we have jock on the ground we just recorded a couple of those well yesterday yeah so that's where we answer your questions directly we also cover some some subjects that i have been coming up with i you always give me some subjects i feel a little bit bad because so far i think we've done one of your subjects out of 50. yeah so i gotta open my mind a little bit more you know accept what you're putting down maybe also i'm not seeing the vision like you're putting some you know we should talk about this thing yeah and i'm not really i'm like thinking what the [ __ ] what is this going to get us i know yeah and i have to figure that out about you like what is it exactly that goes through your mind that that says okay i could talk about this versus i won't um because here's here's a i'll think of something or i'll come across them or something will be presented to me and then i'll be like hey that's interesting i wonder what jaco would think about this so then i'm like oh i'll like write it down i've never gotten that vibe from your suggestions i've only gotten like what is i've this gotten like why is this interesting yeah i know you'll be like talk about something and i'm like i don't understand how that's good so we'll do one of my subjects okay are you disappointed when you get the notes and you're like oh he didn't pick my subject again you feel like you're spinning your wheels and wasting your time no i never do i never do but disappointed sometimes you know maybe here and there because sometimes especially the list that i just sent you some of those were just like a threat that popped in my and i just wrote it down so and i just which one is the best one best one the best idea that you have had oh i don't know i'd have to look at it bro they can't be that good of ideas if you don't even remember them i think they're all pretty good i thought they're all pretty good oh uh here's here's one i don't know if it's the best one but like the difference between um like pain and suffering so it's more like the it's like the concept i mean and maybe i won't put into words as good but the idea that like you know when you feel pain the natural instinct is to be like oh it's pain so avoid it but then every once in a while you have a certain type of pain that you know is not like damaged it's not damaged you know it's like whether it be for a good cause or it's more for like construction it's just like like if you know when you lift weights now so when i was a little kid i used to like do push-ups or whatever and then the next day my arms and chest would be sore and i used to hate it because i didn't know what it was i mean oh i don't want that feeling i don't but then when you realize what part of the process it is you kind of like now as an adult and we talked about this before offline or whatever where when you have doms you kind of have like whether it be from jiu-jitsu or lifting you kind of have a better feeling because you know you're sort of in the game so it's like you won't avoid that anymore in fact it's kind of like a so what's the difference like where's the difference you know and and can you just flip it over mentally see i'm saying there's a certain pain you can be like oh this sucks wait a second wait a second you know what i'm saying i think i'm starting to recognize why these subjects are again so i picked the subjects most of the time they've done some good ones i mean open mind you know i'm gonna put out a list of subjects that i thought of and i'm gonna see if people want to vote on them and then i'm going to open the bottom of the list for suggestions do that that's good uh yep so you can that's jocko underground.com it costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month if you can't afford it just email us assistant said underground draw at jackunderground.com because we got to have a place that we control because right now we don't control the platforms we're good with the platforms we get along it's fine but you never know when things might go sideways so we have a youtube channel as well we've got psychological warfare we've got flip side canvas bunch of books hey check out the books check out the book always faithful by tom schuman and zanula zaki um available we'll have it linked in the thing um only cry for the living by holly mckay check that book out you want to hear about the war in iraq up close and personal that's a great way to do it and then i've written a bunch of books of course also of ethnofront leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership so many problems let me rephrase that all your problems in your organization are leadership problems that's what they are so if you're having issues inside your organization it's because you have issues with your leadership you want to fix them go to ashlandfront.com come and check out what we offer all kinds of different things from leadership consulting to events that we put on all through that we also have a an online training platform because just like trying to get in shape you can't just go one time to the gym and think you're gonna get in shape you gotta train every day so extreme ownership.com if you wanna come and check out our online academy if you wanna support patrol base abate go to pbabate.org so support what tom's got going on there for veterans and if you want to help service members act and retire their families gold star family check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got an incredible charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and heroes and horses micah fanc up there he's in the wilderness right now on a horse with 40 other guys and they are finding themselves in the wilderness and if you want to check us out on social media tom schuman is at killzone zero n three and for us on the twitter on the gram on facebook echoes out of withdrawals i am at jacqueline watch out for the algorithm that's trying to get you and thanks once again to major tom schuman for his service in the marine corps his continued service in the marine corps thanks for sharing some of those lessons here appreciate you coming down thanks to three five for cutting them loose for the day to come down here and share some of those lessons and to the soldiers sailors airmen and marines that have given their lives so that we can live in free freedom we are forever indebted to you and we will not squander this gift and also to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correction officers border patrol secret service all first responders thank you for your sacrifice to keep us safe here at home and everyone else out there there's one more thing in the book and tom mentioned it briefly today uh it's something that sergeant matt abate scrawled on the wall of his patrol base in afghanistan it said simply someone must walk the point that means someone has to be out in front someone has to take risks someone has to make things happen someone has to look out for threats someone has to guide the way someone has to move forward and it seems like sergeant abate was talking to all of us and he wasn't just talking about war he was talking about life so go out there and take a point and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 115,374

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: aNgHaWdklhU

Length: 259min 29sec (15569 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022