Transcript: Jocko Willink on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #257)

Thank you. But yeah, so everybody starts with an introduction here.

Jocko’s Accomplishments

Jocko Willink, a retired Navy SEAL and Silver Star recipient, commanded the SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq—the most highly decorated special operations unit in the entire Iraq War. I did not know that until today. Number one New York Times bestselling author, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt. You also own an MMA and fitness gym in San Diego. You’re an OG podcaster with over a billion views, host of the presidential special “Above, Below and Beyond” celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, which is streaming now. A business titan with everything from leadership consulting to American-made clothing and supplements to a soccer club in your portfolio. Husband to Helene and father of four. Most importantly, you’re a Christian.

And Jocko, every year since I started this—I started this in Christmas of 2019, and we were still at war back then. I guess we kind of still are right now too, but meaning like Afghanistan, the same war that we were involved in. When I started this, it was pretty much all for veterans. And I wanted to make the biggest episodes the Christmas and the Thanksgiving episode because I remember what it’s like to be deployed overseas, sitting on your ass, or maybe not sitting on your ass, but without your family on Christmas and Thanksgiving.

And so I always make it a point every year to bring something inspiring, motivational, somebody that everybody can look up to. And you’re the perfect man for this year’s Thanksgiving episode. So I just want to say thank you again.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, appreciate it for all the guys and men and women that are overseas right now. Yeah, I did some deployments during those time frames, and it’s always a good time to focus on work a lot so you don’t have to think about it very much because you’re missing out.

Opening Prayer

SHAWN RYAN: But I thought, if it’s okay with you, I thought maybe we could open this episode with a prayer.

JOCKO WILLINK: Sure.

SHAWN RYAN: Perfect. Jesus, I just want to say thank you for having Jocko here today. And we’re going to release this on Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving is just a holiday that’s full of love, family, and friends. And both Jocko and I both know, as well as a lot of people, that a lot of people are not able to enjoy those things on Thanksgiving for whatever reason—whether they are first responders, police officers and they’re out, or they’re in the military and they’re deployed, or maybe they just have a lot of loss and not a lot of people around them.

But whatever those reasons are, we want this episode to reach them, to bring them joy on Thanksgiving, and just something that they can look forward to. And hopefully they can take something out of this. That’s also just for everybody in general. I know this is going to be an extremely powerful episode. There’s going to be a lot of life lessons in here, just little nuggets that people can take with them and better their life with them. And that’s what we intend to do here today. So please, please make that happen. Amen.

Gifts and Acknowledgments

SHAWN RYAN: But all right, Jocko, well, got a couple of things to crank out here before we start the big interview. So I got a couple of gifts for you. One of them—the famous gummy bears. Vigilance Elite gummy bears, legal in all fifty states. Still. No funny business. It’s just candy. I know you’re not a big sweets guy, but maybe give them a try on the flight home.

JOCKO WILLINK: Thanks, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And then I have another gift for you. This is from my friends over at USCCA, and they wanted me to give you a lifelong membership. So basically, what USCCA does—you’re a concealed carry permit holder, which I don’t know if you are in California. If you’re not, I know Newsom. I can maybe make an introduction.

But bottom line, if you ever have to defend yourself, your family, your friends, if you ever have to get into some type of an engagement with a bad guy, these people have your ass. They’re going to take care of all of the legal fees and coach you how to get through it. And they’re a huge fan of yours. And so I just wanted to present that to you.

JOCKO WILLINK: That’s awesome. When you go through the concealed weapons, the concealed carry course in California, the state-mandated one, most of the course is them telling you what a problem it’s going to be if you ever have to use your weapon. So it’s nice to have these guys as backup, man. Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re welcome.

Patreon Question on Leadership

And then last thing before we move on here, I have a Patreon account. It’s a subscription account. A lot of these guys and girls have been with me since the very beginning when I was doing this in my attic, and we’ve turned it into quite the community. So what we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. This is a good one. It has to do with leadership. This is from Nick Farrell.

“Looking back at your career now, what was your greatest flaw as a leader? What advice would you have given yourself as a young officer?”

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Well, for me, fortunately, I didn’t have to experience much time as a young officer because I was a prior enlisted guy. But when I look back at my career, one of the biggest things that I noticed is that I never really cared about where guys—what happened after the teams.

For me, it was just about the teams, and I didn’t really think about it for myself. I didn’t really think about it for anybody else. So, for a guy like—for instance, I never gave anyone any financial advice. I never said, “Hey, you might not want to buy that brand new F-350 Super Duty that’s seventy thousand dollars, and you’re going to spend your whole reenlistment bonus on it. You should probably do something else with that.”

And I never really did that and never really encouraged anyone to get an education. When someone came to me about getting education, I’d say, “Do you want to go to sniper school? Do you want to go to breacher school? We got you.”

And so I was very focused on the teams. And that’s just the way I was. And I recognized when I retired that there is something after the teams. And so I wish I would have paid a little bit more attention to that, especially for the guys that I was responsible for. And I didn’t do a great job with that.

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re saying, in a nutshell, you would have taken more of a stake in their personal lives to watch them succeed.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Do you feel—I’m learning a lot of leadership lessons right now. And do you feel—and I do that with, I would say, the majority of my team. I take a great interest in their personal lives because I want them to succeed. Do you feel—but there’s a caveat to this that I have learned throughout doing this. Does that blur the lines of leadership?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. And again, look, as far as their personal life, if a guy was having problems with his marriage or problems with his kids or something like that, I would do whatever I could to help him out with that. But I’m saying as far as planning outside—planning life outside of the teams—I just didn’t think much about it.

And even if a guy was having a problem with his wife or with his kids, my focus would be, “Okay, how can we get that fixed so you can go on deployment? So you can get back to being in a platoon,” which is what everybody wants to be doing anyways most of the time.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, thank you for that.

Early Life and Upbringing

Let’s move into your life story. So listen, I want to do a life story on you. It’s going to be a long one, and there’s quite a few rabbit holes that I’d like to go down with you. And I want to use this interview for—I want to learn a lot about leadership for myself. So I know I have a lot to work on.

JOCKO WILLINK: You and me both.

SHAWN RYAN: But where’d you grow up?

JOCKO WILLINK: I grew up in a small town in New England on a dirt road, and both my parents were school teachers. Pretty normal. My mom taught English, and my dad taught history. And I was not interested in either one of those things. So I was kind of a rebellious kid, but nothing totally out of bounds.

I had a lot of energy and probably a lot of aggression. And so I was kind of looking to get out of that town as soon as I could when I was growing up. And that’s why the military is a nice opportunity to do that.

SHAWN RYAN: Siblings?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I got an older sister and a younger sister.

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re middle child?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Middle child.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit. I was not expecting that one.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Well, and that—yeah, I forget what the middle child is supposed to be like. Am I not like the middle child?

SHAWN RYAN: I wouldn’t consider you to be a middle child, but—

JOCKO WILLINK: What’s the characteristics of the middle child?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know how to articulate that.

JOCKO WILLINK: Okay. Fair enough.

SHAWN RYAN: I think that the characteristics of a middle child would be bouncing around a lot from thing to thing and trying to find your place.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. No. I found my place.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s why—I know you did. I know you did.

Childhood Interests

SHAWN RYAN: What were you into as a kid?

JOCKO WILLINK: I wasn’t really great at any sports. I played soccer and basketball. I wasn’t really good at either one of them. I was okay, but definitely not great. I liked music. I liked hardcore music and heavy metal, and that’s where I spent a lot of my time—listening to hardcore music and heavy metal when I was a kid. Surfed, skateboarded, went to hardcore shows in New York City when I was a young kid, which was amazing.

And that kind of scratched my rebellious—I’ve always been a little bit of a rebellious kid, and so that kind of made me feel like I was scratching that itch. And I just related to it. The first time I heard heavy music, it sounded right to me as opposed to a lot of the other music that was out there—pop music. I just didn’t—it didn’t sound right to me. But hardcore and heavy metal sounded right to me.

And there was a lot of that “push yourself” also, like a DIY ethic of, “Hey, you’ve got to do stuff yourself. If you want to do something, if you want something, you’ve got to go make it happen.” And that stuck with me for sure.

Introduction to Jiu-Jitsu

SHAWN RYAN: When did jiu-jitsu start for you?

JOCKO WILLINK: My first platoon.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, it didn’t start until your first platoon.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Jiu-jitsu was not even remotely a thing when I was growing up. It wasn’t like Brazilian jiu-jitsu was completely unheard of. This is in the eighties. In America, there was no Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It wasn’t even in the magazines yet. It was nowhere. So it wasn’t until my first platoon where I got introduced to Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

SHAWN RYAN: What about wrestling? Didn’t wrestle?

JOCKO WILLINK: My high school didn’t even have a wrestling—

SHAWN RYAN: How big was your town?

JOCKO WILLINK: Graduated with eighty-five people in my class.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. It’s like where I grew up.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Small town.

Military Aspirations

SHAWN RYAN: What got your interest in the military then?

JOCKO WILLINK: I do not remember actually wanting to do anything else. The only thing I ever wanted to do as far as a job goes was be some kind of commando. And I collected little soldiers when I was a little kid. I had the British commandos from World War Two. I had a little Airfix set of one-thirty-second size of British commandos, and they had Zodiac boats, and they had kayaks, and they had the black watch caps on. And I thought that that was the coolest thing.

And eventually, I figured out that you could have that as an actual job.

SHAWN RYAN: Very cool. Let’s go back real quick to the rebellious. Why do you think you were so rebellious?

JOCKO WILLINK: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think part of it’s psychologically, right? I think all kids will have this.

JOCKO WILLINK: You have to rebel against your parents at some point because you have to get out of there. You have to leave them. And so you kind of create friction so that you can release. So I think that was part of it. And I also think I just looked around at the world and just, you know, had the angst of a young teenage child.

You know? You got a lot of testosterone flowing through your blood, and you just want to fight and get after it. And that’s kind of what I did.

SHAWN RYAN: Were you a troublemaker?

JOCKO WILLINK: I was a borderline troublemaker, but also, like, I didn’t drink, didn’t do any drugs. There was a whole, like, subgenre of music called straight edge music, which I wasn’t fully into that. But straight edge music is like no drinking, no drugs. And I was close enough to it that that’s the way I heard that messaging of, you know, drinking and drugs were bad. That’s kind of a weak thing to do.

And so never drank and never did drugs in high school.

SHAWN RYAN: How would you rebel? Would it be violence?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Going to hardcore shows, listening to punk rock music, listening to hardcore music, shaving my head, you know, getting in fights, just that kind of stuff. Right? That kind of stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Where did Christianity get rooted into you?

JOCKO WILLINK: So I was, you know, we went to a church growing up. We went to Saint Michael’s Church and probably did maybe three to five years of that. And, you know, when you look back, you know, people go, where do you get your values from? And I think that’s pretty much as an American, that’s where our values come from. You know? It’s like, that’s what you’re hearing. And so that’s probably the time that was the time where I was going to church and, you know, you’re going to absorb those values.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, did you feel like you had a strong faith as a kid, or did that come later on?

JOCKO WILLINK: For where I’m from, that’s just kind of normal, man. Yep. It’s just, it’s not some, you know, big deal. It’s like this is what you do. And like I said, when you get, you know, I always talk about the fact that you learn a lot when you’re in your first SEAL Platoon because it’s all new, and so it imprints on you. And I think that’s just growing up, you know, you go to church, it’s imprinting on you, and that’s where that’s what stays with you.

Moving Into the Military

SHAWN RYAN: So let’s move back to the moving into the military. So what drew you to the SEALs?

JOCKO WILLINK: Man, I had a friend that did the army program. You used to be able to go and join the army reserves. And in between your junior and your senior year, you’d go to boot camp. And I had a friend that did that. And when he came back, he told me this story. I’ve joked about it because I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s probably not. At least it’s not totally true.

But this guy told me that when he was in boot camp, they were out on this track. They were out in Fort Benning, and they’re out there doing morning PT or something like that. And there’s a guy with cami pants on, combat boots, a t-shirt, and a rucksack, and a ponytail. And he’s long hair and a ponytail, he’s running around this track.

And this friend tells me the story that he asked the drill sergeant. He said, “Drill sergeant, who’s that?” And the drill sergeant, without looking back, just keeps looking forward and goes, “Delta.” And then my buddy goes, “Drill sergeant, is there anyone that’s tougher than Delta?” And the drill sergeant, without looking back at him, just says, “SEAL team.”

And so I heard that story, dude. I’m a freaking young kid, and that was it, man. Now, again, you know, I don’t even know if that actually happened, but you want to know where I first started thinking about the SEAL teams. That was it.

And like I said, I grew up in the water. So knowing that the SEALs worked in the water, you know, I surfed as a kid up in Maine, which was awesome. And so just having that tied to the water. And then the SEAL teams were stationed, I figured out that the SEAL teams were either in San Diego or Virginia Beach, both of which were cool places in my mind.

And so I said, that sounds awesome. Join the SEAL teams and get stationed either in San Diego or Virginia Beach. You can surf and do commando stuff in the water. Like, it’s a literal no brainer to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Did you look at any of the other branches, or you’re just like, I’m going to do that?

JOCKO WILLINK: You know, of course, the Marine Corps is always tempting for a young kid because the Marine Corps presents such an awesome image, and they’re such an awesome unit. But I saw the SEAL teams as, again, it just fit with everything that I thought about being a military personnel would be.

SHAWN RYAN: What age did you enlist?

JOCKO WILLINK: Eighteen.

SHAWN RYAN: Eighteen? What did your parents think?

JOCKO WILLINK: I think they were pretty happy.

SHAWN RYAN: Were they really?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. Because I was, you know, it’s like you have a plan. That’s, I love the military. The military gave me everything. The navy gave me everything. But, initially, what they gave me was a plan. This is what you have to do. If you do these things, you’re going to be successful. And you get a blank slate when you go in there. No one cares what your background is. No one cares who your parents are. No one cares what grade you got in high school. They just, this is what you got to do.

And so, yeah, my parents were stoked. My dad did say he said, “You’re not going to like it.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Because you don’t like authority and you don’t listen to anyone else.”

And, of course, since I knew everything, I looked at him. I said, “Hey. You know, dad, it’s not like that in the SEAL teams. It’s a team. And there’s no bosses. You do everything together.” So that’s how ignorant I was.

But, yeah, you know, pretty ignorant going in into the military, you know, not growing up around it. My dad got kicked out of ROTC as a matter of fact.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, no. Okay.

JOCKO WILLINK: My grandfather was in the army. He was a twenty year army guy, but I didn’t know him very well. He died when I was about ten. So didn’t have a lot of military information and just thought that the SEAL team sounded like a good fit for me.

SHAWN RYAN: And you joined in, was it 1990?

JOCKO WILLINK: 1990. Yep. 1990.

SHAWN RYAN: What was going on in the world at 1990?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. So well, the Gulf War, the original Gulf War, the buildup for the Gulf War was starting, and that’s where I thought I’d be going. Yeah. I was pretty stoked about that.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

JOCKO WILLINK: Because Panama had happened in 1989. Yeah. And that was another thing that made me think, wait a second. These guys are out fighting and dying for our country, and I’m sitting not doing that. This is embarrassing. So how do I get in? Who are those guys? And how do I go join them?

Boot Camp and BUD/S

SHAWN RYAN: So you enlisted eighteen, 1990, go to boot camp. Where do we go from there?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I mean, I was really stoked when I got to boot camp. You know? Because, again, for me, it was like blank slate. Here we go. I had one buddy that rode on the bus with me, who was, he looked at me, and he goes, “Are you going SEALs?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Me too.”

And so we just hit it off real quick, and he had been through college already. He had knowledge. You know? He understood more than I did. I think he had a mentor that was a SEAL. And so we brought up real quick, and he ended up making it through maybe a class behind me. And he ended up, you know, as a master chief in the SEAL teams, but just a great dude. You know, he wrestled in college. Just a great guy.

So, you know, went to boot camp and then, again, I was super, you know, just so open minded to, like, what was coming and happy about being there and just stoked to go to BUD/S. And then showing up at BUD/S, it was like the best thing ever.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man. Did you, I mean, did you meet an actual SEAL at all before you?

JOCKO WILLINK: Nope.

SHAWN RYAN: So you showed up.

JOCKO WILLINK: Saw one in boot camp. I just saw one in boot camp. And I think it was a guy that I met later who was getting reprocessed. He had been out of the SEAL teams for a while, and then he’d coming back in. And I kind of recognized him because, you know, I saw one SEAL when I was in boot camp, and I recognized him later. And I talked to him. He’s just a super chill guy, but in my mind, you know, he’s this SEAL. So you think he’s, you know, the coolest thing in the world.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: Damn. But, no, I never knew any SEALs before I joined.

SHAWN RYAN: So how was it showing up for BUD/S for you? It was awesome. Were you intimidated?

JOCKO WILLINK: I mean, I would say not really. I wasn’t really intimidated, but I definitely didn’t know much about what was going on. When I showed up, there was a poster in medical. They had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster in medical, but they’d crossed out Texas chainsaw massacre, and they replaced it and said BUD/S pool comp. And they put it like a snorkel or whatever, a mask on the kid.

And I didn’t even know what pool comp was. You know? I didn’t know anything about it. And I was, that’s interesting. I wonder if they didn’t have any of the documentaries or any of that kind of stuff out. Nothing.

So I wasn’t really intimidated, but I was just excited, man. I was just excited. And, you know, like I said, I wasn’t the fastest runner. I wasn’t the fastest swimmer. I wasn’t really that good at anything in particular, but I wasn’t that bad at anything in particular either. And I was young. I could recover quick. I was fired up. I was very used to the cold.

But, you know, you’re meeting guys that are total studs. You know? You’re meeting guys that are D1 athletes and whatever. I had Olympic, I had an Olympic alternate in my BUD/S class for gymnastics. Like, how fast can that guy do the O course compared to me? You know what I’m saying? And some D1 water polo players and, you know, just the whole nine yards. And I was just young and just fired up to be there. Stoked.

SHAWN RYAN: How many people were in there? Do you remember?

JOCKO WILLINK: I don’t really know. Probably, I don’t know. A couple, I mean, 150. I actually don’t know. A lot of people. I’d have to look at it.

SHAWN RYAN: But how did you, I mean, did you measure yourself up against the people that you were seeing when you showed up? Like, oh, f*, that guy’s going to make it. That guy’s not going to make it if that guy made it. You know what I’m talking about?

JOCKO WILLINK: There was a couple guys that, you know, seemed like studs that quit. The gymnast that I was talking about, Olympic gymnast or Olympic alternate gymnast quit. Had a D1 water polo player that quit. I had, there’s definitely some studs that quit, and I realized, oh, there’s a wrestler from Iowa that quit. Not the college, but he’s a stud.

So, yeah, I realized that this isn’t all about, you know, what your athletic background is because it’s about being cold, wet, miserable, and suffering. And if you don’t like that, you’re going to have problems.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you have any problems?

JOCKO WILLINK: I failed, I failed to run. I failed to swim. I failed to no course. I failed pool comp. I failed, like, everything. When I went through, if you failed something twice, you got rolled. But if you failed something once, you could stay with the class. And so if you failed two runs, you got rolled. And then if you failed one in the next class, you got dropped.

So I only failed one of everything. And some of the ones were, you know, like, there were some swims that pretty much almost everyone in the class failed because the tide or the current or whatever. There were some runs where a lot of people failed because it maybe wasn’t quite four miles. It was a little over. Yeah. It was a little over.

But so I failed a little bit of everything, but not enough to get me rolled. And I stayed with my class the whole time, made it through one shot.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you deal with failure?

JOCKO WILLINK: Just tried to go harder. You know, I failed to run. I paced myself on a run, which I wasn’t fast enough to pace myself. I needed for basically everything that I did in BUD/S, I just need to go 100 percent. And probably, I don’t know, my third or fourth run in first phase, I was kind of like, oh, I’ll try pacing myself.

SEAL Team One: First Impressions

JOCKO WILLINK: And so I went out of pace, and I just was wrong and failed. And so I never paced myself again on those runs. I just ran as hard as I could because that’s the only thing I wanted to do, man, was get through that training and be a SEAL. So I just put out hard, and that’s how I overcame failure, just by pure aggressive hard work, man.

We got—I failed pool comp, and me and one of my buddies, we got—this shouldn’t even be legal, but we got dive equipment from dive phase to practice with, but we wore it in the dip tank. So we were pool comping each other in the dip tank on a weekend. Holy. And then got through it on Monday. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: So for those that are listening, pool comp is an exercise that you do in second phase. It’s open circuit diving, and it’s one of the more strenuous weeks that you go through in BUD/S. A lot of people fail. It’s—a lot of people say that pool comp, they basically beat the sh*t out of you underwater with tanks on. A lot of people say that pool comp is the last major hurdle that you’re going to have to pass to get through BUD/S.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: So but how did you—I mean, how did you deal with the mental stress? Did that affect you at all, or was it the physical stuff, or was it both?

JOCKO WILLINK: I mean, I had fun. You know, I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. Like, Hell Week’s hard. You’re cold, wet, miserable. But, I mean, I wasn’t really mentally stressed. I was kind of having fun. You know? I enjoyed it. Like, man, you’re going to get to be a frogman? Yep. You know, I’ll do it. I would have done whatever they told me to do.

Like, I think there’s some people that show up to BUD/S that they would rather die. And I was definitely in that category. So, you know, and I think they figured that out. You know? I think they figured out with guys, they go, “Yep. This guy, we’re not going to break this guy.” Because they’ll try. You know? But eventually, they go, “Yeah. We can maybe hurt him physically, but we’re not going to break him mentally.”

Advice for BUD/S Candidates

SHAWN RYAN: So for somebody that’s going through BUD/S right now, would you have any advice for them? Or what would your one piece of advice be?

JOCKO WILLINK: I tell people this one piece of advice all the time. Don’t quit. Love it. You know? And that statistically is right because the vast majority of people that make it through BUD/S, they quit. They don’t get performance dropped.

If you get rolled for a run, you’re going to have six weeks to get better at running. You’ll—you can pass the runs. If you get rolled for swimming, if you get rolled for pool comp, you’re going to get good at pool comp for the next six weeks until you start up with your next class. What do you do for those six weeks? You practice pool comp over and over and over again.

So people that don’t make it, generally speaking, quit. So if you don’t quit, you should be in a pretty good spot. So don’t quit.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. It’s a good point. So where do you go after BUD/S?

JOCKO WILLINK: Got done with BUD/S and went to SEAL Team One.

SHAWN RYAN: How was that? Did you pick one?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. Why did you pick—I picked one, but I picked West Coast. And, you know, I was going to say this when you talked about being intimidated showing up to BUD/S. And I was kind of like, not really, because it’s a big game, and it’s, you know, get wet and be cold and do push-ups. It’s kind of fun.

But when I got to SEAL Team One, I was definitely—it was intimidating going to SEAL Team One. I was definitely—the atmosphere for a new guy at SEAL Team One was intimidating.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve heard the stories.

Welcome to “No Fun One”

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It was definitely intimidating. We—myself and two other new guys were checking in to the master chief. We’re standing outside of his door in our uniforms at parade rest, and he calls us in there. And we go to attention. We walk in. We’re standing at attention.

And he says, he says, “Fck you. Fck you. Fck you. Everyone here has been to BUD/S. It doesn’t mean sht. Get out of here.” Cool.

So then the next, we had, like, all the new guys assembled together. And that master chief came in and said, he said, “Don’t be late. Don’t forget anything, and keep your mouth shut and your ears open.” Those are—that’s really good advice. Don’t be late. Don’t be light. And keep your mouth shut and your ears open.

And that’s the way—that’s the way it was. You know? That’s the way it was. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your ears open. And try and absorb everything that’s going on.

And, again, this is 1991, man. Like, the Gulf War that I thought I was going to be in, that they were reporting that there’s going to be thirty or forty thousand casualties, was over in seventy-two hours. I missed the whole thing. So this is just a peacetime organization. And even with that, it was pretty intimidating to walk into.

SHAWN RYAN: Real quick. I just want to go back to BUD/S graduation. I mean, it sounds like the majority of your childhood, you wanted to get into the military. You found the teams, which, you know, is, if not one of the best, you know, SOF units to be in. I mean, what did it feel like for you to graduate?

JOCKO WILLINK: You know, back then, we didn’t get our Trident or anything. You know, we just graduated, and you still had a lot of hurdles to overcome. I was always pretty paranoid. You know, you asked, like, when I failed something, I was very paranoid about failing, not wanting to fail.

And so even going to—knowing that I was going to SEAL Team One, knowing I graduated BUD/S, it felt good, but it didn’t feel like I had completed the journey at all. It felt like, “Okay. Now you got to get through SEAL Tactical Training and you got to get through your board with the team.”

So I didn’t have some, you know, elevated feeling of “I made it.” I never really got that feeling in my twenty years.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. Back to Team One. I mean, so you get into Team One. What kind of team guys are there? What have they been through? I mean, we’re in peacetime. We talked about Gulf War. You know, that was pretty short. What kind of experience was in SEAL Team One when you showed up?

The Peacetime Teams

JOCKO WILLINK: Other than a couple Vietnam guys, there was, relatively speaking, almost no experience. Almost no combat experience.

SHAWN RYAN: No sh*t.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. And so it was kind of weird because the way we trained, you were training for something that no one really understood. And as much as, like, the Vietnam guys passed down as much as they could, but it still was like, you didn’t really know what it was you were training for.

And that made us train very, very hard because it seemed like combat was this unfathomable tough thing. And so we better train as hard as we possibly could. And we thought, we hoped, and prayed that we would get to do one mission. You know? That was the hope and the prayer was maybe we’ll get to do one—what we used to call the “real world mission.” Yeah. You know, real world mission. We would hope and pray that we would get to do some real world mission.

We trained as hard as we possibly could. Everyone was very—there was a lot of—Team One was very—they called it Stalag Team One. And there’s another name for it. But it was very strict.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve always heard “No Fun One.”

JOCKO WILLINK: “No Fun One.” Yep. They had a bunch of names—a bunch of names for “No Fun One,” Stalag Team One. And yet, in my first platoon, the older guys would say, “Team One. It’s not just a number. It’s an attitude.”

Which again, now that I—you know, when I got older, but I was young, dude, I was like, “That’s a real thing.” Like, this is our attitude. And so, you know, we literally had haircut inspections every two weeks, uniform inspections with our cammies. Like, it was—we had command PT every day. Everything was very professional, and that’s how I fit in well with that. You know?

And or I should say it fit me well because I liked the military, and that’s what we were doing.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s interesting considering you don’t like authority.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe at this point, I had recognized that this was—this professionalism was part of the job for me, you know, for like, that level of professionalism that I saw was—that was what we were supposed to be like. That was the job. So I bought into it, man. You know, go—

Training for the Unknown

SHAWN RYAN: It sounds like when you went to One, when you got into the teams, it sounds maybe similar to what guys might experience today. You know, you’ve got a lot of past experience. It sounds like when you came in, it was a little bit of past experience with the Vietnam guys. But, I mean, you know, the GWOT guys, it’s every day. There’s got to be more and more guys, you know, retiring, calling it a day, moving on with their lives.

And now you have this younger generation that’s coming in that, you know, isn’t—they’re not—do I don’t know. Maybe they are doing a lot, but I don’t think they’re doing a lot. I don’t think we got a lot of guys in Ukraine. And so, you know, I mean, do you think it’s—or we have a similar time today?

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s very similar time. A very similar time. I tell those young guys now, I didn’t shoot my weapon at the enemy for thirteen years. And the way you just expressed that, I would have never expressed that because I was having a freaking great time.

We were training hard. We were jumping out of airplanes. We were diving and shooting machine guns and blowing things up. And, like, that’s what we were—getting ready. Getting ready. Getting ready.

And so I understand the expression because now, of course, we all look back like, “Gosh. How could you wait around for thirteen years?” But that’s what it was. That’s what we—in. That’s the water that we drank. That’s what—and so it was, “Hey. This is what we’re doing.”

And by the way, you’re with an awesome bunch of guys. We have fun. You know, everything is, like, super professional and also super fun. You—you know what it’s—it’s been in a SEAL platoon, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: There’s—I don’t—I would rather—if I could just—heaven for me would be just like SEAL platoon. SEAL platoon forever. That’s what we’re doing. And we go to war? Cool. We go train? Cool. That’s what we’re doing. It’s the best job.

And so I didn’t—I didn’t know enough to go, “I can’t believe I got to go on deployment again.” No. I want to go on deployment. Oh, there’s nothing happening? Cool. We’re going on deployment. We’re going to go to this country, that country. We’re going to work with this group, that group. Maybe something will happen. And if it doesn’t, we’re still going to be out here doing our best.

So I didn’t—I had a good attitude the whole time. Like, it was exactly where I wanted to be. Being in the SEAL platoon was just as good as it gets, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I guess, you know, I could totally see that. I mean, I guess that attitude probably came in with my generation when we came in. It had—I mean, I joined in 2000—July of 2001.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And so by the time—actually, like, two days after I graduated boot camp, the towers went down. So I—I knew—I guess I didn’t know.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. That’s a different level of frustration. Right? Where if your country is at war and you joined the teams to go to war—

SHAWN RYAN: Mhmm.

The Reality of Perception

JOCKO WILLINK: If you’re not going, yeah, there’s going to be, that’s going to be angst, right? That’s going to be problematic for sure. But when there’s nothing going on, I didn’t know enough to be frustrated about it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: We’re having a good time in this area. I mean, I think that would come in too. I mean, I think that attitude comes in as well when you see platoons go out and do something and you haven’t yet. And then that creates, I don’t know if jealousy is the right, I mean, yes, it definitely creates jealousy and maybe some discontent throughout the community.

SHAWN RYAN: But so where did you go? Where was your first deployment?

First Deployment and Introduction to Jiu-Jitsu

JOCKO WILLINK: First deployment was to Guam, and that’s where I got introduced to jiu-jitsu. So that happened. We show up in Guam, and this is after our workup. So we’re there, and we’re sitting in our platoon hut one morning. And this master chief comes in. It was an old master chief. Like, he had to be at least like thirty-nine years old or something like that, but he looked like an old man, and he’s old, lanky, old guy.

And he says, “Who wants to learn how to fight?” And I’m like, don’t know what this old guy thinks he’s going to teach me, but me and a few other guys, new guys, we raised our hands and alright. So we went to the Navy base, had like a judo training mat. And he told us to meet him there at a certain time, and this guy’s name was Steve Bailey.

He was an awesome master chief in the SEAL teams, and he was a Muay Thai fighter. And he had been training jiu-jitsu with the Gracies in Torrance in the late eighties. So he was like, what right now would be considered like a mid-level white belt in jiu-jitsu. And he just lined us up and just tapped us all out over and over again.

It’s hard to explain to people how little we, how little human beings knew about fighting in 1992 before the UFC. Like, no one even understood the guard or the mount or the rear naked choke or the Kimura or the armbar. There was, it didn’t even exist. It wasn’t even, it didn’t even exist, man.

And so this guy, you don’t even know that he’s passing your guard. You don’t know what the guard is. You don’t know that he’s mounted because you don’t even know what the mount is. You don’t know that he’s taking your arm. You have no comprehension of what’s happening. And so he just annihilated us.

And to me, I just thought to myself, this, whatever this freaking guy knows, I will do whatever I can to learn it. And so we started training with him. That was my introduction to jiu-jitsu.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. He just stuck with you ever since.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. So how long has it been since then? Well, that was in 1992, 1993. So wow. So what? Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. Whatever. Thirty-three years. Is that right? Something like that.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Thirty-three f*ing years.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. There was something that I recognized very quickly that it was, I had to learn this thing, this stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And now you’re a black belt.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yep.

Volunteering for Shipboard Deployment

JOCKO WILLINK: So that was my first platoon. We go to Guam, and this is ’93. There’s, you know, we go and do exercises. We work with other, you know, host nations. Again, I’m having a good time. You know, we’re training hard. We’re partying hard. We’re doing what kind of like young SEALs do.

But, you know, there’s no war going on except for there were some things that were happening in Somalia. And so there were some guys onboard ship from the East Coast and the West Coast that did some kind of operations in Somalia, then went from the ship to go do these operations.

Now, SEALs back in the nineties, no one wanted to go on the ship, right? And so I got back from that first platoon, and me and a few of my buddies, we’re like, “Hey, we know what we did in Guam, which was nothing. And we know what the guys that were on the ships, they went to Somalia. Let’s go on the ships.”

And so me and a few of my buddies from that first platoon that I’d gone through BUD/S with and we’d done that first platoon, we volunteered to go on a shipboard deployment. And everyone’s like, “What are you guys doing?” We’re like, “That seems to have the best chance.”

So that’s what we did. We volunteered for what was called an ARG platoon on the East Coast. It’s called the MARG platoon. We volunteered for the ARG platoon, and we went and did a shipboard deployment, which for me was awesome because we had a lot of assets to train with.

We worked very closely with the Marine Corps, which was awesome. We did, you know, we trained, we did like their shooting package with the Force Recon guys. We trained with them. We did ship boarding with them. We did a lot of stuff at Camp Pendleton after our own workup.

And I also got to learn and understand the structure of the Marine Corps and how they operated, which gave me an insight onto conventional forces at large and what they were doing, interacting with the Navy. It was very, very beneficial for me.

Becoming a Communications Guy

JOCKO WILLINK: I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon. For whatever reason, they didn’t have a primary comms guy. And I’d gone to comm school, as a matter of fact, on the East Coast, the SEAL comm school on the East Coast, which was awesome. And so then I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon.

So now I’m the primary comms guy in my second platoon, which means I’m sitting with the officers during planning. I’m, you know, learning how the communications work, learning about contingencies, learning about loss of comms plan, learning about QRFs. Like, I was learning things that I wouldn’t have been learning if I had been a machine gunner. So I got very lucky that I was a comms guy, and I had volunteered to be a comms guy.

And the reason I had volunteered to be a comms guy was my third day at SEAL Team One. I had quarter deck watch back when we used to stand watches. And the officer of the deck, which was another SEAL, said, “Hey, new guy.” I was like, “Hey, sir.”

And he said, “If you want to be on every mission, be a comms guy because no matter what the mission is, you will get to go because if you know how to work comms.” And the next morning when we woke up, I went up to the comm shack, and I said, “Hey, I want to be a comms guy,” which, again, no one had ever volunteered to be a comms guy.

So I volunteered to be a comms guy, and then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon, and now I was the primary comms guy in my second platoon.

The Loss of Alton Lee Grizzard

JOCKO WILLINK: And then probably one of the most influential things of my life happened in my second platoon. So there was actually a couple pretty pivotal moments. The first one was we had an assistant platoon commander in my second platoon. His name was Alton Lee Grizzard, and he was an absolute freaking stud.

Just, he was the quarterback at the Naval Academy. He was record setting. Like, he broke Roger Staubach’s records at the Naval Academy. He was complete charismatic guy, fun, nice, charismatic, the whole nine yards. And I was really good friends with him. Really good friends with him. And he got killed. He got murdered.

SHAWN RYAN: He got murdered?

JOCKO WILLINK: He got murdered in a murder-suicide. So you can go back and look at the news on this.

SHAWN RYAN: What is a murder-suicide? Meaning a guy, suicide by a cop or something?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. He was, there was a guy from the Naval Academy, another guy from the Naval Academy who was a submariner who had been dating a girl from the Naval Academy, who I think was a surface warfare officer. They had been dating. They broke up. Grizz had been like hanging out with her, and this guy showed up at the BOQ, the bachelor officer’s quarters on Coronado, banged on the door.

And Grizz opened the door, and the guy shot Grizz, shot the girl, and killed himself.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: And so really heartbreaking, terrible scenario. And I was really good friends with him. And we’d had, he was one of the first people that had a video camera, like a normal person with a video camera. And we had made this video. We were down in Panama doing jungle warfare training.

And we’d gone out, and there was this song that said, “Whoop, there it is.” Remember this song? And so he had filmed, we were hanging out with these Panamanian girls, and these girls were saying “Whoop a e a” because they didn’t speak English. And we’re just like partying with these girls, and he had taken this video and he’d shown his dad.

And his dad was a warrant officer in the Navy. And his, you know, his dad, he’d grown up in Japan for the most part. And so Grizz had showed this video to his dad of me and him, you know, with these Panamanian girls laughing in a bar saying, “Whoop, a e a” because we’re just laughing.

So when we go to, they had a big service at the Naval Academy because he’s a hero at the Naval Academy. And I met his dad, and, you know, his dad recognized me. And, you know, I told his dad because he had told me, because I said to him, I said to his dad, I said, “You know, I said to your son one day, I said, ‘Hey, you grew up in Japan. Like, you’re going to a Japanese high school. How did you learn to play football?'”

And he said, “My old man taught me.” And as that happened, you know, I got, I was very, you know, obviously, we’re all broken up from this. But I don’t know what, I wasn’t behaving properly.

A Critical Lesson in Self-Perception

JOCKO WILLINK: And my running mate from the SEAL teams, who I went through BUD/S with, I went through SQT with, I did three platoons with this guy. I was in training cell, and this guy was my roommate the whole time. Just like my running mate. And he pulled me aside, and he was like, “Hey, Grizz didn’t, you’re not the only one that lost Grizz.”

And I thought to myself, he’s a hundred percent right. And what it made me aware of is that the way you perceive yourself is not going to be accurate all the time. And you have to be very cautious in the way you behave because you think you’re behaving a certain way, but the other people’s perception is going to be different.

And there’s a really good chance that their perception is more accurate than your own. And that struck me. And this guy was, you know, this guy was my best friend, and he’s telling me like, “Hey, bro, you’re not the only one that lost Grizz.” And I’m acting like I was, like he, like I was the only one that lost Grizz.

So it made me aware of that, that, again, just the way you perceive yourself is not the way other people are going to perceive you. So we go through that.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on. How do, hold on. This is, how do you find, how do you today, I mean, that’s a big f*ing lesson. I would take that as a big lesson. It sounds like you did as well. It was a huge lesson. So how did you, moving forward from that, how did you, how do you find out how people are perceiving what you’re projecting?

JOCKO WILLINK: I think it’s, generally speaking, they’re going to, you, my assumption is that what I’m doing is viewed as negative. My assumption is that if I’m doing something, the assumption is it’s viewed as negative. And so if you assume that what you’re doing is being perceived as negative, it keeps me in check from behaving in a way that is going to be perceived as negative.

I mean, to the best of your ability. I’m not saying, you know, of course, just like every other human, we’re all going to slip up. But recognizing that, like, man, and I think I’m so thankful that I had a good enough relationship with this guy to tell me that. Because otherwise, I never would’ve, you never would’ve see this disconnect between how you’re perceived and what you think you’re being perceived as.

And it was something. I wasn’t like, I thought to myself, “Oh, here’s how people are seeing me.” I was just acting the way I was acting, but it was being perceived in a way that I didn’t mean at all. It didn’t have any intention. But I could see as soon as he said it, I go, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

You need to look at yourself. You need to detach from, you know, the sadness and go, “Oh, yeah. What does it look like? What does it feel like?” Never mind what it looks like because their perceptions are not wrong. Like I said, their perceptions are right.

“Oh, I had this video. His dad recognized me. I must be,” you know what I mean? Like, that’s all bad stuff. And I didn’t recognize it until my buddy let me know. And I was very, very grateful. And it definitely made me recognize that, yeah, people’s perception of you is not what you think it is.

And that’s, if you’re not careful, you can really get yourself a bad reputation. And obviously, as you know, reputation in the SEAL teams is everything.

The Power of Reputation and Leadership

JOCKO WILLINK: Your reputation in the SEAL teams is everything. So I was just very thankful that he gave me that heads up.

And then, again, what made this platoon very impactful for me, field team one alpha platoon, we had a platoon our platoon officer, our OIC, was pretty much a new guy who had lat transferred from another part of the navy, and he had come in as our platoon commander. And which is no big deal. Right? It’s really no big deal. Like, officers don’t have a lot of experience. It’s not that big of a deal. They listen to what you have to say. They listen to the platoon chief. They listen to the LPO, and they figure it out.

Except for this guy didn’t really want to listen. And so it ended up causing some friction in the platoon. He was one of those guys where, again, he probably didn’t realize how he was being perceived. And he was being perceived as arrogant, being perceived as conceited, being perceived as not listening to the rest of the platoon, including the platoon chief, including the platoon LPO. And he was dictating, this is how we’re going to do this, and this is the way it needs to be and just wasn’t listening. So it’s problematic, but, you know, we’re, what are you going to do? Carry on.

Well, then we were at a desert warfare training, and he presented some plan to us, and it was a bad plan. And the LPO had, like, had enough of it. It was like, sort of this plan is stupid. And since the guy had a big ego, they got in each other’s faces, and then the oh, I see, takes a swing at the LPO. And we split them up. Yeah.

The Mutiny That Wasn’t

JOCKO WILLINK: Which, again, we’ve seen plenty of inter platoon fights. I mean, it’s a thing. It’s almost like its own sport. Right? But when there’s this much tension and negativity, it’s a problem.

And so we got done with that, and we go back and we kind of had, like, a platoon meeting without the platoon commander. And we told the platoon chief, like, we don’t want to work with this guy. Platoon chief brings it up to chain of command, and we request captain’s mask. Like, not official, but we request to go talk to the CO.

So we go into the CO’s office, and the CO, like, lines us up from the chief on down. And he goes down the line, like, what’s the problem? What’s the problem? What’s the problem? And we’re all saying the same stuff. This guy is arrogant. He doesn’t listen to us. It’s his way or the highway.

And we get done, and the CEO says, “You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like a mutiny. We don’t have mutinies in the navy. We’re not going to have a mutiny at my SEAL team. Guys, go figure this out.”

Cool. We walk out of the office, and the CO was a good guy who started to pull the thread once we left his office and talked to the training cadre and talked, figured more about the guy’s reputation and talked to the guy himself. And he realized, like, two or three days later, he fired him.

And so big win for the e five mafia. We’re all fired up, and we get this guy fired. And we proceed, and now we get our new assignment for our new platoon commander. We find out who our new platoon commander is going to be.

A Legendary Leader Arrives

JOCKO WILLINK: And our new platoon commander is a legendary SEAL who I had never met him, but I had heard his name. Everybody kind of heard his name. He had been a prior enlisted senior chief. So he went up all the way to senior chief. He was at UDT. He was a plank owner at Dam Neck. He was at SDV. He was at a boat team. He was at team one. He had done everything in his career. Everything you could possibly f*ing want in a leader. He had combat experience from Grenada.

So everything that you could want as a leader, he comes in. And I’m thinking everyone’s, like, fired up. And I go, “Hold on a second, guys. This is happening for a reason. This is because we’re a bunch of mutineers that got our last boss fired, and they’re sending this guy down because he’s going to crush us and, like, get us in line.”

And so when he shows up, this guy I’m expecting, you know, a six foot five, two hundred and seventy pound beast. And this guy shows up, and he’s, like, five eight and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, and he looks like he’s about he’s like the oldest guy I’ve ever seen in the SEAL teams, which was probably like, you know, thirty seven or something like that. Gray graying hair and all the whole nine yards.

And he walked into our platoon space. And I’m like, who is this freaking this guy’s supposed to be the legend. He walks into our platoon space, and he says something along the lines of, like, “Hey. I’m sorry to hear about your last platoon commander, but I’m not worried about it. I’m just looking forward to working with you guys.”

And right there, like, the fact that he didn’t come in and say, “I’m taking over. I’m in charge. There’s a new sheriff in town.” He said, “I’m looking forward to working with you guys.” And I realized, oh, this guy is different.

Leading by Example

JOCKO WILLINK: And then that afternoon, he’s taken out the garbage. Sweeping up the platoon space. He’s taking out the garbage. I’m like, woah. That’s a new that’s not just a new guy’s job. That’s like a new guy that’s in trouble’s job.

And then a couple days later, we had our first training mission, and he put me and my running mate in charge of the mission, which was awesome and crazy. Like, from, “Hey. Here’s the mission. You guys figure out how you want to do it.” And he just put that responsibility and gave us ownership.

And so that guy when I was watching him and as I went through that platoon, he was just awesome, and he made our lives awesome. And when you’re when your SEAL platoon is your life and your SEAL platoon is your religion and you have a guy like that take over and the contrast between the guy that was arrogant and didn’t listen to us and held on to all the power himself, I learned so much from seeing that contrast between these two guys.

And so as time went on, that’s that guy left me with a lot of lessons.

The Right Thing to Do

JOCKO WILLINK: And one of the most important lessons that he taught me was we were working with the marines. We like I said, we were an art platoon. So we were ships off the coast of San Diego. We’re doing, like, the Marine Corps workup with them. For Marine Corps workup, they got to do beach landings. Red Beach up in Camp Pendleton.

And before the beach landing goes down, seals, back in the old days, we went out with a lead line and slate like World War two and did a hydrographic reconnaissance. And that is a gut check of an operation, especially in a big sea state, especially off Camp Pendleton in whatever month it was. It’s cold, giant waves. We’re in our zodiacs. It is such a gut check of an operation. It takes five or six hours to do. You’re freezing the whole time.

And you take a lead line and a slate. So you take a lead line and you dip it in the water, and it’s got little markings on it to show you how deep the water is. And then you have this slate on your arm where you’re writing down how deep the water is, and you do this whole your whole platoon is doing it at the same time. It’s just a gut check.

And we get done that night, and then you have to take all the slates with all the information on them, and you bring them back to the ship. And then the cartographers, which are the guys in the platoon that, like, take all that information. They build a chart to give to the Marine Corps, and we go through all that.

And then that day, early morning, we then go out and mark the beach lanes. So we swim across the beach again, and we set up the beach lanes. We mark them for the Marines, and the Marines come in and land. And so now it’s, like, forty eight hours of continuous operations, freezing cold, gut check.

And we get done and get a few hours into the beach landing, and the marine corps decides that they didn’t like their landing. And so they said, “We didn’t you know, we’ve missed our timeline. We didn’t bring the vehicles in the right direction.” Whatever the problems they had, “We’re doing it again. We’re reloading the ships, and we’re doing it again,” which is like mammoth and ballsy for the Marine Corps colonel to say, like, “Hey. I didn’t like it. We’re doing it again.” This is massive.

So we reload on the ships, and we start the whole thing again. And we go out to do the hydrographic reconnaissance. And we’re in our little boat pool. We launch from the big ships. We go on the zodiacs. We get to the point. It’s been all night, and we’re getting ready to get in the water. And we’re in our little boat pool. And, again, we just did this forty eight hours ago.

And someone in the platoon, it wasn’t me. Thank god. Someone in the platoon says, “Are we really going to do this again?”

And the platoon commander just quietly says he says, “Well, you know, we don’t have to. But would that be the right thing to do?”

And not another word was said, we got in the water because you have to do the right thing. You’re a frogman. You’re a seal. You have to do the right thing. It’s the hard choice right now. We just did it forty eight hours ago. There’s been no shift in the sand. There’s been no obstacles put in, but this is what we do.

And for me, that statement, “Is it the right thing to do?” Stuck with me for the rest of my career.

Following His Path

JOCKO WILLINK: And this guy, I remember getting towards the end of that platoon. And, again, when your platoon is your life and somebody makes it that good. And that was the first the first thought that I had about trying to become an officer because I said to myself, “This guy made life so good for me and these sixteen guys in this platoon. Someday, if I can, I want to make life good for sixteen guys in a platoon.”

That was the very first thought that I had of following his path, and that’s what I did. That’s what I eventually did. I followed his path, and I did always did my best to emulate and, you know, never be as good as him, but I always did my best to emulate his leadership.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think he knows this about you?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Could I ask what his name is?

JOCKO WILLINK: I’d rather not say.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JOCKO WILLINK: But he’s well known in the SEAL teams.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s pretty cool.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. He’s he has no you know, he’s very low profile. Very low profile guy.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s even cooler.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Yeah. I mean, the best of us are. Right?

Overnight Morale Transformation

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I’m just curious. When you make a switch, you know, when how fast did you see morale recharge, you know, in that platoon when you saw the leadership change and when he came in and said, “I’m excited to work with you.”

JOCKO WILLINK: Overnight? Overnight. And like that fast? Instant. Instant.

Yep. And that was just instant. And then that deployment, you know, again, we were onboard a ship. We were actually staged off the coast of Africa when the Rwanda genocide was going on. And we were, like, planning to go and getting our gear ready, and, of course, we never went.

This is where, you know, the face that you made earlier that where you went like, that’s how that’s the first time I felt that of, like, wait a second. There’s I think it ended up being 800,000 people slaughtered in 100 days, but we were there. We were off the coast, and we didn’t do anything. Why didn’t we do anything? Well, what had just happened in Somalia a year prior?

It was Black Hawk Down. It was like, yeah. They were not willing to take that risk. We did the same thing. There was a couple missions we got spun up for in Somalia and had our gear loaded, had forty Mike Mike.

I remember loading out forty Mike Mike for the first time for real and being like, “Oh, yeah. We’re going.” And we didn’t go. So that was probably the first time that I felt that level of frustration of, you know, why aren’t they sending us? Like, we can help.

SHAWN RYAN: Mhmm.

JOCKO WILLINK: And that it’s the way it was. You know? Definitely a letdown.

Deployment at Sea

SHAWN RYAN: How did that platoon end?

JOCKO WILLINK: That was it. You know, we went on deployment. I think we spent we spent some ridiculous amount of time because they call them gator squares, which is when you’re just going around in a circle off the coast of we did gator squares off the coast of Rwanda or off the coast of not off the coast of Rwanda, but off the coast of Kenya for several months. And then we did Gator Squares off the coast of Somalia for another period of time. And then we went up into the Persian Gulf because at some point I think it was this platoon.

There was something going on. Like, Saddam had pushed troops, moved troops, or something going on. So we went up and did gator squares in the Persian Gulf for a while. So I think we were at sea, like, 174 days out of 180 or something totally insane like that. Yeah.

Just riding that ship, lifting all day, shooting off the fantail. Again, did we have fun while we’re doing it? Yeah, dude. We had a blast. We had a blast.

Also, in the couple of days that we were not on the ship, I met my wife.

Meeting His Wife

SHAWN RYAN: So how’d you meet your wife?

JOCKO WILLINK: We went into Bahrain for, like, some training. And the boys, we went out, and I met my wife who was a stewardess at the time.

SHAWN RYAN: Really? Yeah. How’d you make the approach?

JOCKO WILLINK: Oh, man. So squad two had spent a couple day. They went off the ship before us. And squad one still had some whatever we were doing, some work to do. And so when we flew into Bahrain because we flew to Bahrain, and we didn’t know what Bahrain was. I mean, a country. But we didn’t know that Bahrain at the time was like the Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf.

Meaning, they had it was like somewhat westernized. They had bars and stuff like this. And so when we when squad one, when we landed in the helicopters, squad two is, like, running to help us move our bags and stuff. We’re like, “What’s going on?” And they’re like, “There’s girls here. There’s bars here.”

Like, so and one of my one of my buddies who was very a very shy type dude, he was in squad two, and he tells me, “Yeah. You know, there’s these girls here. There’s these two girls. I’ve seen them each night. And, like, I know you’re going to go and you’re going to go talk to them and, like, they haven’t even give me the time of day.”

I was like, “Bro, if there’s girls, you know, I’ll leave them alone. They’re yours. You handle it.” And so we go to a we go to this bar.

SHAWN RYAN: I know you’re going to talk to them.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit. I look across the bar, and there’s this, like, shockingly, stunningly beautiful girl with blonde hair and, like, a white f*ing skin tight, gorgeous outfit on. So I saw her. I just walked over to her.

And, yeah, this is the embarrassing part is, you know, when you’re on a ship back then, there wasn’t Internet. And so we had a limited number of video cassettes. There’s no DVDs, no streaming. And one of the movies that we had was Ace Ventura, a pet detective.

And so we had I had watched that movie at this point, like, hundreds of times. And I walked up to this beautiful blonde girl, and I said in, like, a Jim Carrey style, I said, “You must be Aphrodite’s goddess of love.” And she looked at me like I was an idiot and then laughed, and, you know, we started talking.

But that was the did I don’t know whether it’s more embarrassing that I said it to her or that she fell for it. I’m sure she’s pretty embarrassed that she fell for it. But yeah. So we ended up, you know, you know, having a long distance relationship and but that’s came home from that deployment and, you know, go in another platoon.

Third Platoon

SHAWN RYAN: Right off the bat.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. You know, this was the this was the nineties, you know. Just go on deployment. Go on deployment as much as you can and hope that something happens. And so that’s what I did. Just went back into another platoon. Did another art platoon.

SHAWN RYAN: So right back into the art platoon. New leadership?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Got a new platoon commander. Got a new platoon chief, new platoon LPO, and all good dudes. You know? This was just it was just good team one was a great team to grow up in for me. You know? They just had a other than that one officer, everyone else was just good good people, and everyone was just hardworking frogmen. You know? It was good.

SHAWN RYAN: Anything significant on deployment three?

JOCKO WILLINK: You know, the only thing I can say was cool about that third deployment was that we did some we did, like, a night of some. I think we did one shipboarding, like a real shipboarding. And I think we ran some security operations means and then, again, this is how desperate we were.

We locked and loaded our weapons and drove our ribs around, like, the boats, the navy ships, and I was kind of fired up. You know? Yeah. This is literally to me, was this is real. We locked them over our weapons, and then we did one ship boarding that was, you know, real.

And, again, in in the nineties, I was freaking stoked that I got to lock and load my MP5 because we used MP5s back then.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Got to lock and load my MP5 and board a ship and get control of the vessel and turn it over to the authorities. And it ended up it wasn’t even like a it was just some weird situation where they were making some kind of a distress call, but people thought they might be, you know, it might be a hostage situation.

So or some kind some they didn’t know what was happening.

SHAWN RYAN: What kind of ship was it? Some random it was a foreign ship?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. Just some random, you know like a Marisk or something? Smaller. It was a pretty it was wasn’t that big. They’re probably they’re probably moving dates or whatever whatever kind of produce from one of the Arab countries. It was not was literally nothing.

I’m, like, bringing it up because it’s funny that I was excited about it. And that’s kind of how naive and into the teams I was.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you board it?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How’d it go?

JOCKO WILLINK: Cool. We took it over. You know? It was

SHAWN RYAN: What happened when you took it over? Just walked up to like, we’re not in distress.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. We figured out that they weren’t in distress.

SHAWN RYAN: But we are now.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. They we stressed them out. They were actually thankful. I think they had some kind of problems, you know, some kind of problems with their engine or something like that. So we showed up and, you know, as a as a non opposed boarding. But, you know, we got to hook and climb on a you know, we put our little water ski ladder. Like, we had little water ski ladders. We just hooked it all and climbed up. It was cool.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

JOCKO WILLINK: Was happy happy to do something for real, you know. That’s one thing that the coast guard. The coast guard, one thing that’s cool about the coast guard is no matter what’s going on in the world, the coast guard is doing real stuff. You know? Coast guard’s always doing saving people, you know? The ocean is mean. Yeah.

So there’s a war going on or not. If you’re in the Coast Guard, you can still do some really impactful things. Of course, now they’re doing all kinds of drug interdiction too.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I love that. Have you seen that video that those guys that jump on that damn submarine and open it up?

JOCKO WILLINK: Oh, no. I haven’t seen that.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s it’s f*ing awesome.

JOCKO WILLINK: Right on.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s f*ing awesome. Yeah. But alright. So when do you when did you move over to two?

Training Cell and the Seaman to Admiral Program

JOCKO WILLINK: So I got done with that platoon, and I went into training cell at SEAL Team one. When I was training cell at SEAL team one again, I’m so, like, single, and I taught everything. You know, we just we do everything. Do land warfare, taught diving, comms, CQC. We do have we just teach everything because we just didn’t we didn’t have anything else to do. Wasn’t like, “Hey. What do you want to do this week when you’re home?” No. I’ll go to Nilendor. I’ll go to wherever to go make stuff happen. So I stayed in that mode.

And then, again, from my second platoon, I had there was a there was a officer program that was called the seaman to admiral program, and it was started by a guy named Jim Borda, admiral Borda, who, if you know anything about him, he killed himself.

SHAWN RYAN: I didn’t. I don’t know anything about it.

JOCKO WILLINK: So this is a again, there’s always weird threads through people’s lives, but one of the weird threads through my life is that one of my biggest mentors and heroes is a guy named Colonel David Hackworth. And Colonel David Hackworth was a wrote the book about face, and he was a Korean War veteran and a Vietnam War veteran.

He was one of the most decorated army soldiers. And he when he retired, he had retired because during the Vietnam War, he did an interview where he said if we don’t change the way we’re fighting, we’re going to lose. That’s basically what he said. And he got drummed out of the army for saying that because he was a colonel. He was a senior officer.

He was the first senior officer to speak out against the war and the way we were fighting it. And when he got out, he, you know, he he kind of he wrote books, but he was a little bit of a journalist and a little bit of a, you know yeah. Kind of like a journalist. And he reported that admiral Borda was wearing a v on his navy commendation medal. So a navy comm with a v.

And he said he didn’t rate it because a v is an award for valor, you know, like, that’s a big deal. Mhmm. It doesn’t stand for valor. It stands for combat distinguishing device, but it’s a v. And that story came out, and admiral Borda killed himself.

But prior to that happening, admiral Borda had started a program called the semen admiral program because admiral Borda was a prior enlisted guy. And so he wanted to offer that to other troops. And so they started this program, and it was fifty sailors from the US Navy would get selected. And I heard about the program. And actually, one of my officers said, “Hey, dude. They got this program going out. You should do it.” And I did it.

And I didn’t get picked up, but I got slated as an alternate, which was no there were no alternate spots that opened up because everyone took it. But I was an alternate, so I knew I had a decent chance.

And the guy actually sent a note back to my commanding officer that said, “Make sure this guy applies next year.” And so I applied again the next year, and I got picked up for that program.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit. Well, I’m just curious. I mean, mean, we a lot of us know, you know, where the story set it into Ramadi, but, you know, and maybe the knowledge wasn’t there. But, you know, I mean, now, you know, actually, maybe it was there because this was after your second platoon or during your second platoon. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that, you know, officers you join the seals to go to war. That’s what you wanted to do. Now leadership package is presented to you. You take it.

Transitioning to Officer

JOCKO WILLINK: Did you know that you would have more time in a combat role as an enlisted guy than you would as an officer?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: At that juncture in my career and the way the teams were, this is 1998. It, you know, I had done three platoons, so I maybe had an LPO and a platoon chief left.

So I basically looked at it as, oh, instead of doing an LPO and a platoon chief, you’re going to do an AOIC and an OIC. And so it wasn’t really, didn’t really make that much of a difference to me. You know?

When guys ask me now, like, what should you do or, you know, if they say, hey, I want to go in the SEAL teams, what should I do? I mean, my career couldn’t have gone any better. Like, it was great. But to your point, if you want to do the trade of being a SEAL, then you should enlist. That’s just how.

SHAWN RYAN: Why did you decide to take a leadership role?

JOCKO WILLINK: It all just boiled back to working for that platoon commander that made life in a platoon awesome. And I thought if I can make, if I can make platoon awesome, if I can make life awesome for sixteen guys as a platoon, I’m going to do it. And yeah, that was it. That was it.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn good reason?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

Officer Candidate School

SHAWN RYAN: So when did you go?

JOCKO WILLINK: I went to officer candidate school in 1998. Early 1998, I went to officer candidate school. And, you know, that was, you know, you’re pretty much, we had a decent number of prior enlisted guys in my class, but most of them, I’d say seventy percent of them were kids out of college going OCS.

And so, you know, I show up there. I’m a SEAL. And the drill instructors, the Marine Corps drill instructors down at OCS and great, great interaction with the Marine Corps drill instructors. You know, I became the class president, which seemed pretty obvious, I guess. But most of the class presidents are only class president for, like, three days in the first few weeks because they just, they’re just firing them. But I became class president, and I just stayed.

So I was class president and then went through OCS, you know, folding underwear literally with a ruler. They have a ruler.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. So, you know, graduated from OCS and then went to team two.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you learn anything significant in OCS?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. You know, leadership was a, it was a cool leadership challenge going OCS and being the class president. You make things happen, and it was cool to work. You know? It’s people are, and this is another thing that, you know, I’ve learned along the way. It’s like, people aren’t going to be perfect, and they’re going to make mistakes, and I’m going to make mistakes. And as long as their intention isn’t bad, then, you know, I get it.

And also, you know, to ask someone to perform, like, or behave in a way that they have to surmount their innate, like, habits as a human being, it’s a lot to ask of someone. So when someone gets mad, when someone gets frustrated, when you see someone’s ego come out, when you see someone look out for themselves, I kind of understand that that’s the way people are. And I’m not going to be mad about it. I understand that people get, you know, there’s, people do crazy things, man. People do crazy things, and I understand.

And I think that going to OCS was one of those things that said, yep, there’s kids were trying, but the kids were also doing things where you go, alright, I see what he’s doing, man. He’s worried about this test, and he’s looking out for himself right now, and I get it. I get it. And I think just a little bit of understanding other people’s perspective. It was good for me to continue to be able to understand other people’s perspective.

Because if you don’t understand other people’s perspectives, you’re going to be very judgmental. And if you’re very judgmental, you’re going to have a hard time interacting with other people. And when you’re in a leadership position and you’re having a hard time interacting with other people, that’s not going to be good.

Joining SEAL Team Two

SHAWN RYAN: Why did you go to two? I’m just curious why you went East Coast versus West Coast when you could’ve reintegrated back in with your old guys. You know what I mean?

JOCKO WILLINK: At the time, the officer community, if you went from enlisted to officer, they made you switch coasts. And I wanted to go to the East Coast because I hadn’t been out there. I’d spent all my time in the West Coast. And so, and team two, I came from team one. Team one was the traditional team on the West Coast, and the East Coast from my friends that I knew out there was the same way. Team two was the traditional team. It was the old school team, you know, and that’s where I wanted to go. So I got to go to team two.

SHAWN RYAN: How was it as an officer? I mean, what is it like walking through those doors as a prior enlisted guy now as a junior officer?

JOCKO WILLINK: It was pretty much the same. You know? When I was an E-5 or an E-4, you know, I worked with, like I said, I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon. I had a really good relationship with my platoon commander. My second platoon, good relationship with my platoon commander. And then when he got fired, I had a good relationship with the guy that took over.

So, and I didn’t, it seemed like good guys. They would just treat you like, you know, like mutual. You know? So I never really had a huge difference between the way I saw other people or the way, you know, I always just saw myself as another team guy. That’s, this is my job. You know, when I was a comms guy, my job was to make sure the radios were good. When I was an officer, it’s like, okay, I got to make sure that the plan is good, make sure we have contingencies. Like, there was other things I was going to be charged, but I’m still just a part of the machine that’s going to take care of this. And if one part of the machine fails, the whole machine fails.

So it was fine. You know? And, you know, team two was great. I had a bunch of good guys there. And yeah. And there was, you hear about the differences between the East Coast and the West Coast, and there were team guys. You know, there were team guys that lived in Virginia as opposed to team guys that lived in San Diego and bunch of great dudes.

Deployment to Germany

And I ended up almost immediately deploying to Germany. My the chief of my second platoon was the master chief in Germany, and they had been calling back for ops support. They wanted a JO to go over to Germany to help with ops support. And he told me this later. They’re in, like, a morning meeting. And they said, yeah, we finally got ops support coming from the beach. And they go, who is it? And they go, it’s a, it’s Ensign Willink.

And the ops officer’s like, what are you talking about? They’re sending us an Ensign. Like, we need an ops guy. And the master chief goes, hold on a second. What’s that guy’s name? He goes, Ensign Willink? He goes, we want this guy.

And so I showed up, and, again, there was my old platoon chief who was, who was, like, a great guy who had a great relationship with. He’s, like, awesome friend of mine. He’s the command master chief. And so I show up and develop a great relationship with the commanding officer there and the executive officer there just, and the ops chief there became awesome friends. And it’s just great. You know? Just great opportunities and work with these guys that are, again, man, just dedicated to the teams. You know? Just dedicated to the teams.

And I think that’s the main thing is, you know, you get guys that the good guys, their commitment is to the teams. And so you got a bunch of guys. They’re just committed to the teams and want to do a good job. And that’s so went over to Germany and we actually did some little mini deployments from Germany that were really cool and learned a lot.

And my the skipper was a great guy, and he ended up, you know, becoming the officer detailer later, which, you know, again, it’s beneficial. And the SEAL team two executive officer, again, developed a great relationship with him. Just a good guy that, you know, I was a hard worker. And he moved from group, from unit two. So I was with the XO in Germany, and then he becomes the XO at team two. So, like, when I get back there, I immediately get put back into a platoon.

So I do a platoon in SEAL team two and strike platoon off the aircraft carrier.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Yep.

JOCKO WILLINK: Right on. Yep. Which was, again, working with a lot of assets and going over and doing VBSS over in the Persian Gulf, which again, at the time was a real thing.

Leadership Lessons

SHAWN RYAN: Did you get a lot of leadership experience as the, in Germany, or was that kind of just, you know, getting you ready?

JOCKO WILLINK: As far as leadership of troops, no. But understanding of the bigger picture, yes. Because the guy that I worked for there, again, he’s a friend of mine and just a great guy. And he had, you know, a lot of experience himself at the time. Right? Not experience like guys have now, but at the time, he had experience.

And, like, there was one time we were on big exercise, a big joint exercise, and we put together a tactical operations center. What’s interesting about this is, man, you think of a TOC now? Like, you think of what a mobile TOC would look like now. I’m not kidding. Well, I put together a mobile TOC, and I was the, like, the ops officer for this operation, this training operation, and I had a TOC in my backpack. It was, like, three radios, two maps, some magic markers, some pens. Like, that’s what we rolled with, and that’s what we set up. You know? That’s what we did.

But there was a time where there’s a platoon in the field, and there’s multiple elements that are getting ready to do target hits. And we’re waiting for, like, a pro word from this platoon that’s supposed to be set up and we’re waiting. And I go, sir, can I ping them for this pro word? And he’s like, give him another minute. And I was like, Roger that.

And forty-five seconds later, the guy’s passed the pro word. And it just reminded me that, like, those guys out in the field, you got to listen to what they’re doing. You got to give them the benefit of the doubt. And that’s what my boss was telling me. Like, hey, those guys got, they’re not sitting in a TOC right now. They’re not, they’re making decisions. So just good experience from that perspective and seeing, you know, the way the SOC worked was good.

Understanding Both Perspectives

SHAWN RYAN: When did your, I mean, if this happened, which I think it would happen. When did you know, as enlisted guys, we always have a lot of gripes and bitches and shit like that about, you know, the leadership. And so, you know, kind of where I’m going with this is when did your mind kind of expand and realize, you know, what the O position is and okay, like, there’s a lot more to this than I ever gave credit for as an enlisted guy.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. That happened, it happened on that deployment. Right? And I think where, I think what was good was I was bilingual, meaning I spoke two languages. Well, I mean, Mustangs, prior enlisted officers have f*ing tremendous amount of respect in the enlisted man’s eyes.

So since I was bilingual and I could speak two languages, and I had to learn the officer language, but I spoke, I was fluent in E-dog language. I mean, I was completely fluent. I was E-dog mafia. You go talk to anybody that was in SEAL Team one in between 1991 and 1998, I was a made man in the SEAL Team one E-5 mafia a hundred percent. There’s no one that would ever deny that.

And so I spoke fluent E-5 mafia language. And then as I started to learn the officer language, what I think I was able to do was translate what was happening with the officers to the E-dogs, which I think a lot of times gets missed, to this day, gets missed. Because it really is two different perspectives that are happening.

And there’s a lot of things that happen at the officer level that don’t ever get told to the E-dogs. And that does create frustration and angst amongst the troops because they don’t understand what the hell is going on. And when that happens, man, they get pissed. And I got pissed when I was, you know, when I was an E-dog and we weren’t being told what was happening. We’re freaking pissed. You know?

I tell this one story where we were on a ship. This is my third platoon, and we got told that, hey, you guys are going to launch your Zodiacs off the ship.

First Deployment Challenges

SHAWN RYAN: We go cool. So we drag all the stuff upstairs. It takes an hour and a half. Got to bring the fuel up, which means you got to notify the fire party, and they got to set up all their stuff so you can bring the fuel up to the top deck so you can launch the boats inside the ribs.

And two or three hours into this, they’re like, “Actually, you’re going to launch off of the well deck.”

I’ll bring everything back downstairs another two or three hours. Later, they say, “Oh, you’re going to use helicopters.” Now we got to break all… so we’re getting whipped around the whole time. And this is, by the way, someone just saying, “Oh, why don’t they use the helicopters? Oh, okay.”

Cool. I’ll tell them. And they think it’s just like this, but it’s not. So I always remembered what it was like.

Learning the Importance of Communication

JOCKO WILLINK: I also always remember, you know, I was in when I was in STT, SEAL tactical training, we had to walk in every position in the platoon. So sometimes you’d be point man. Sometimes you’d be the PL. Sometimes you’d be the radio man. Sometimes you’d be a machine gunner.

And I remember luckily or unluckily for me, we did a long patrol, and I was rear security. And I had no idea where we were. I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea where we’re going to stop again. If we got contacted, I might as well have just, like, started running around like a chicken with my head cut off because I didn’t know where the rally ports were. I didn’t even know where the target was, and I hated that feeling.

And I always said to myself, “I am going to make sure that I keep the guys informed of what is happening.” That is so important. It gets dropped all the time because you get focused on, like, well, hold on. How much longer does the next… this is a platoon commander talking. He’s only talking to the point man.

And so now when he stops talking to the rest of platoon, they lose track of what’s happening, and it’s just a cluster. And so even as an enlisted guy, I realized that you have to make a concerted effort to explain to the guys what is happening. And if you fail to do that, they’ll have no idea, and you won’t know that they don’t know. And that’s a disaster.

So now when you move me up into this officer position, now I’m saying, “Oh, yeah. I bet the platoon has no idea why they’re having the helos move to this position or why they’re being told they have to stand down from this operation.” Because they don’t get told, “Oh, the chargé d’affaires in this country just said that we can’t do it, and here’s the risk that they aren’t willing to take.” They just hear, “Hey. It’s a cancel.” And they go, “Oh, so we just spent four hours doing this, and now it’s just nothing.” But they don’t understand why.

And so it’s incumbent upon the leadership to make sure that everyone in the chain of command understands not just what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it and why these changes happen. Because as you know, these changes happen all the time. They happen all the time.

Being Bilingual: Speaking E-5 and Officer

JOCKO WILLINK: And so, yes, I think that one of the things that I had the capability of doing is I was bilingual. I talked to E-5, and, eventually, I learned how to speak officer as well. And I could also bring the problems at the E-5 level to my boss and explain to them in a way that they could understand that, “Hey. When you tell my guys we’re not allowed to explosively breach anymore, let me tell you what that means.” And then they say, “Oh, okay. Well, I didn’t understand that. Thank you.”

Or when I get told, “Hey. You need to have this number of Iraqis with you, friendly Iraqi soldiers with you on every operation,” I need to explain to my boss what that means on the ground. And if you have a good relationship, which I had a good relationship with my boss, so when I would explain something to my boss, my boss would listen to me.

My boss would, because also, I wouldn’t complain about stuff. Like, I wasn’t going to complain. If I was going to my boss and telling them that something didn’t make sense, they would listen to me because I would only say it if it was true. And so I just developed that good amount of trust with my chain of command, and it would work out well.

So, yes, as I got into that officer role, I started to see, “Oh, okay. I can understand why.” If the troops would have known that it was the Commodore of the ark that now wanted to use helicopters because it’s something they have to get checked off the box before they’re allowed to go on deployment, if the guys understood that, they’d be like, “Oh, yeah. Well, we got to get quals done too, and this is the quals that they got to get. Cool. Let’s make it happen.”

But a lot of times, you know, we fail as leaders to let people know. And then when I got to the platoon at SEAL Team Two, again, now we’re on a strike aircraft. We got a lot of assets. We’re with, you know, a carrier air group, which is an awesome, like, projection of power, unbeatable projection of power. But we’re a little cog in that machine and helping the platoon understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it was beneficial.

Prior Enlisted Officers

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think that the… maybe they are doing it, but they definitely weren’t doing it when I was in. I’m not going to… I mean, it seems like with what you just described, prior enlisted Mustangs, prior enlisted going to officer, I mean, that could alleviate a lot of communication issues within the military. Why do you think that they aren’t, if they aren’t, motivating people, enlisted guys to become officers? Why aren’t they giving more billets? I mean, this seems like it could be a key component to a two hundred and fifty year communication issue.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. There are, you know, it’s with prior enlisted officers, some of the best officers I ever worked for or worked with were prior enlisted officers. Some of the worst officers I worked with were prior enlisted officers. So I think it’s more of an educational thing and more of an understanding that explaining to people that, “Hey, man. This communication that goes up and down the chain of command, it needs to happen. It’s a real thing.”

And when your platoon is complaining about something, you should listen to what they have to say because they’re doing it for a reason. And, of course, you’re asking me if they should take more prior enlisted guys and make them officers, absolutely. That’s awesome. I wish they would do that all the time. It’s a great move.

Strike Deployment

SHAWN RYAN: Anything significant on the strike deployment or the… excuse me. It was a strike deployment. It wasn’t a mark, but it was, you know, it was cool.

JOCKO WILLINK: We did VBSS overseas. Again, this was like when doing VBSS was as real as it gets. Get to lock and load your weapon and board a ship and get control of the ship, and it’s as good as you could hope for. You know? We took down a big Russian ship, which was at the time was, like, on CNN. You know? It was a…

SHAWN RYAN: Wait. What? We took down a big…

JOCKO WILLINK: There was a Russian ship that was smuggling oil. And so we boarded that ship and got control over and turned over to the authorities. So, you know, that was kind of a cool op to do in the nineties. You know? In the nineties, some things that aren’t that big of a deal seem pretty cool.

SHAWN RYAN: What year… so what year is this?

JOCKO WILLINK: That was a millennium deployment. So we were deployed ’99 to 2000. It was, like, the winter of ’99, 2000.

September 11, 2001

SHAWN RYAN: Where were you when September 11, 2001 happened?

JOCKO WILLINK: So I get home from that deployment, and I have to go to college because I didn’t have any college. And, again, this is why they changed that whole officer program that I did. I was just… I was an E-5 at SEAL Team One. I went to thirteen weeks of OCS. No college, and then I went to SEAL Team Two as an officer. So it was awesome.

But when I got done, they’re like, “Yo, you don’t have any college. You have to go to college to be an officer.” And I was like, “Oh, no. I don’t need to go. I can go when I’m…” I’ve already been doing the… And the officer detailer was like, “No. No. You have to go to college.”

So I went back to San Diego to go to college, University of San Diego. And I did that primarily because of jujitsu. I knew I was going to be having some time during this three years of going to college. So I went back out to San Diego so I could get my own training, get with my old training partners and stuff.

And then so I got back out there in 2000, and I’m in the middle of college when September 11 happens. And when September 11 happened, my commanding officer or the commanding officer of Unit Two, who I was deployed with as an ops JO, he was the detailer, and I was friends with him. And I called him, and I said, “Can you please get me back to his old team right now?”

And he said, “Jocko, this war is going to last a long time. Finish college.” And I said, “Sir, I can finish when I… I can do online, like, whatever.” And he goes, “Finish college. This war is going to last a long time,” and I didn’t believe him at all. But he was right.

And I always want to make sure I make this point. He told me later that everybody called him. Everybody that wasn’t at a team, everyone called. I was just one of the other guys that called him. It wasn’t like I was extra motivated, I was just as motivated. Everybody wanted to get back to a team.

SEAL Team Seven

JOCKO WILLINK: And so he sent me when I finished college, 2003. Again, like awesome. He sent me to SEAL Team Seven. SEAL Team Seven was like the next deploying team. I got to SEAL Team Seven and my old XO from SEAL Team Two was a commanding officer. And he welcomed me aboard. And then a week or two later, he fired a platoon commander and put me in charge.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: And so, and we were slated to go to Iraq. And we left, I don’t know, a few months later. Yeah. Actually, probably quite a few months later because I graduated in, like, June, July, showed up at the team, and we went on deployment in September. So that’s, you know, good relationships with people, work hard, and, you know, he had a platoon commander that wasn’t doing a good job. So he put me in there.

SHAWN RYAN: This is in 2003?

JOCKO WILLINK: 2003. That’s eternally grateful. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: So were you on the invasion?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. So SEAL Team Three did the invasion. SEAL Team Five had kind of established Baghdad, and then I went in and relieved them.

SHAWN RYAN: How was it?

JOCKO WILLINK: It was the best thing ever. It was awesome. I mean and it there was a…

SHAWN RYAN: So you’ve done basically five deployments?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. So this was my… yeah. So this was my sixth deployment.

SHAWN RYAN: Sixth deployment?

JOCKO WILLINK: This is my sixth deployment. Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, dude, what’s it feel? I mean, five f*ing deployments of… I mean, you did some stuff, but now you’re…

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: 9/11 happens. We’ve invaded Iraq, and you’re in f*ing Baghdad. I think you’re in Baghdad.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. I’m in Baghdad, and I am in heaven. Yep. Most totally stoked.

Baghdad Operations

JOCKO WILLINK: And for… so there was actually, like, there was a… I had a sister platoon at SEAL Team Seven, and they went to Baghdad, and then we replaced them when, like… or we kind of, like it was weird. We kind of replaced them within weeks. Like, we started augmenting them and then kind of replaced them. And after a little while, like, after a month or so, we were the only platoon in… we were the only SEAL platoon in Iraq.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: For a short period of time. And so, you know, we were just doing, you know, what the Team Five guys had established. And then my sister platoon had… SEAL Team Seven had kept up the pace. And it was just, you know, Baghdad SWAT is pretty much what it was. It was get intel from various sources, find out where enemy was located, and then go get them.

And we had a lot of targets, and we got to do a ton of it. And it was like what it was, what we all joined the teams to do. You know? So it was awesome.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you remember your first operation where you had an engagement?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Actually, the first opera… the first time I left the wire in Baghdad, my… the troop chief was a friend of mine. Like, we were E-5 mobsters at Team One. And he had been there for, like, a month. And so we show up, and he goes… there was, like, a mortar attack or something. And he was like, “Hey. Go take your platoon and go, like, check these roads in this place.”

And we went out, you know, we went out the wire and, like, checked these roads and drove to here, drove to there, and then we came back. And he was like, “You good?” And I was like, “Yeah. Yeah.” He’s like, “That was just kind of a shakeout.” And I was like, “Good call, dude.” You know? Like, it was him saying, “Hey.”

First Combat Experience

JOCKO WILLINK: There’s nothing going to happen. We’re not sending you on a wild goose chase, but, you know, go to these couple points and check them for whatever. So it’s just a good break in of, you know, getting the guys, getting the platoon, getting the vehicles loaded up. Went out, drove around outside the wire. That was kind of the first time leaving the wire with my nods on.

The first time we got shot at, I was in a Humvee, and I’m looking at the Humvee in front of me. And I’m like, I see, like, sparks. And I’m like, why is someone smoking? Like, why is someone flicking their throwing their cigarettes out of the vehicle? And I’m like, oh, those are bullets.

Okay? And sure enough, one of the guys got caught at, a ricochet in the head. Totally good to go. It, like, entered his went through his skin and then, like, kind of wrapped around his skull and… But he was fine.

You know, we still took him to Charlie Med, but and then, you know, we that was kind of that was kind of like the first time, and we got you know, that that deployment was relatively chill.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what’s that feel like, though? I mean, five deployments. You joined to go to war when you’re eighteen. Don’t see any. Now you’re in charge of your platoon straight after college, after 9/11, and you’re fing leading a platoon into battle in Iraq. I mean, that’s fing did it even hit you? Was it surreal at the time, or are you just so in it? You’re like, alright. This is the deal. Let’s go.

JOCKO WILLINK: I knew. Like, I knew I think I’m very lucky because I was older. You know? I think I was, what, 33, 32 or something like that point. So I knew how rare this was. I thought the war was going to be over in a couple months. Like, I was very, very grateful for everything that we got to do. And I knew that every night every night I was, you know, like, playing the Super Bowl game every night. You know?

Like, that’s what I felt like. I was very grateful the whole time. And I had a great bunch of guys, great bunch of guys, like, that were just hard charging and just it was awesome. It was great. And we did a lot of direct action missions, you know, and so we did we kind of got close a couple times to the idea of sniper overwatching. We did it a couple times, but it kind of left an imprint of my mind of what capability we had. But we were primarily just a DA force, and we would just roll out and hit targets.

And, I mean, it’s yeah. I don’t know if there’s anything else I can say to make it for me to explain how happy I was, but that to me was just the most awesome thing.

The Pressure of Leadership

SHAWN RYAN: What about the pressure? I mean, I’ve always thought about you know, I mean, I always felt a lot of pressure just going out the door, you know, do the right thing. You know? But, I mean, what is the pressure like? And you don’t really have any other reference because you hadn’t gone on any kinetic operations until this point. But, I mean, what is the pressure like as an officer leading 16, 20 guys in the battle at the beginning of a war where there’s not a lot of lessons learned. There’s not a lot of new tactics developed yet.

JOCKO WILLINK: The pressure I felt was just wanting to do a good job. You know, not wanting to do anything. Not not wanting to I wouldn’t say not make any mistakes because I was not a risk averse person. You know? Like, I recognize that you you roll out on an operation, things can go wrong. And I understood that. And I understood that risk. So but but, yeah, you know, you you worried about guys getting wounded. You worried about guys getting killed.

A little bit of a very distant idea to me. Guys getting wounded or killed. It could happen, I thought, but it was man, this is early in the war. The IED threat was relatively small. We would drive very aggressively at night on nods. We got ambushed a few times, and it would, like, no factor. RPGs going over the, you know, lucky. RPGs going over the convoy. You know? Machine gun fire going between vehicles. Like, we we got we got lucky. God’s a frogman.

But it was a little still a little bit distant to me that someone could get wounded or killed. It was there, but not we we really dominated the battle space. Like, coalition forces dominated the battle space. And so I didn’t have that much of that kind of pressure in my in my head.

SHAWN RYAN: What about the pressure of winning your your men over? Winning their trust? Winning yeah. You mean, you want to be the f*ing leader that everybody wants to follow in the battle. You know, that that stuff I would imagine has to be going through your head. Am I making the right calls? How do my men I mean, we have talked about perception earlier, and that’s a conversation I want to bring up, you know, more towards the end. But, you know, I mean, are are you worried about the the guy’s perception of how you’re leading?

Earning Trust

JOCKO WILLINK: These guys are my bros, and these guys are my friends. And when I took over that platoon, we were the first like, the first maybe the first or second thing we did was an nighttime OTB in San Diego pilot recovery training operation. So I had done three shipboard deployments, man. I know how to do over the beach. And we go over the beach, and one of our boats, like, capsizes or die or the motor dies. I forget which. I think it’s just the motor died.

And we’re we get the pilot, and we come back, and now we got a down boat. And the guys who when I took over the platoon, some of the guys were kind of friends with the old officer. And so there was a little bit of that, and some of the guys didn’t like the old officer. And so there was a little bit of a friction. Right?

And I so this boat’s down. And the guys that were in a perimeter, the guys like, dude, we got to call admin. We got to call the trucks down here and get this boat towed back. And I was like, we’re not doing that. And they’re like, well, what are we going to do?

And I go, this is what we’re doing. And I gave them the plan. And I I put on my fins and and took the boat. And I was like, hey, guys. I’m going to you guys are going to paddle this boat. They’re like, they’re looking at me like I’m crazy. Like, paddling a boat through the surf like this is BUD/S. And I said, we’re going to and as soon as we get, like, deep enough, we’ll set up a tow line. And we did have a good tow long tow line.

And I I remember I put beaded my weapon into the boat, and I got in the water. And I’m keeping the bow into the wave so we don’t flip over. And then we get other boat comes in. I get those lines secured, and then they start towing us out, and then the guys drag me back into the boat. But, like, one of the guys in that platoon was like, after you did that that night, like, we would do anything for you. Because because I kind of they had kind of said, like, oh, we got to call admin. And I was like, no. We’re not calling admin. We’re going to make this happen.

But there was all kinds of stuff like that. Like, step up and do the do the right thing. And, yeah, these guys are my friends. You know why these guys listen to me? Because I listen to them. You know why these guys treated me with respect? Because I treated them with respect. You know why they trust me? Because I trusted them. And and when you that’s what you do, that’s that’s how it is. And that was the attitude that I had. I wasn’t really concerned about that. These guys were my guys, and I trusted them. They trusted me.

SHAWN RYAN: And you didn’t know any of them prior to you coming into that platoon?

JOCKO WILLINK: I knew the platoon chief. The platoon chief was another, you know, Team One E-5 mafia guy from from back in the day. So it was great. It was great to have that instant connection, but I don’t believe I knew one single other person in that platoon because I’d been out on the East Coast, and then I’ve been in college. So I don’t think I knew once the sister platoon, the my sister platoon, my old running mate, the guy that told me, “Hey, you’re not the only one that lost Grizz.” He was the LPO in my sister platoon.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: And I got to do some ops with him.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. Which was as good as it gets.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

Most Memorable Experience

SHAWN RYAN: What would what would you say your most memorable experience of that deployment is?

JOCKO WILLINK: There was a there was a few things that happened where you you like, there was the CPA in the job was being overrun. And we needed they needed QRF. Najaf is five hours away by Humvee, and they need a QRF. And they called us. And I’m like, hey. There’s, like, three other units between us and Najaf. Like, why? And they they’re like, I don’t know, but you guys are going.

And I remember my my the SEA of that troop who, like I said, was the guy that was like, hey, go on this mission, which was kind of for no reason. He was a he’s a great friend of mine to this day. But I came out of, the talk, and I was like, hey, guys. Load up all the rockets. Load up all the ammunition you can fit in the trucks. This is what’s happening. We’re going to QRF. We’re going into Najaf. CPA’s been overrun.

And we 20 minutes later, we’re jocked up, and that guy that guy hugged me. And I was like, this is interesting. And because he was he usually went with us, but he wasn’t going with us until he, like, hugged me. And I was like, interesting. Long story. No big deal. We got them to Najaf. The the q r they didn’t need a QRF. The I think I want to say Blackwater actually came in with their heal the helo.

SHAWN RYAN: Stab with that. I was wondering if that’s what that was.

JOCKO WILLINK: So we went down there. We spent the night, didn’t do anything, and then drove back. But, you know, I remember thinking, that’s that’s interesting. I’m getting this hug from my bro.

We ended up doing towards the end of the deployment. There was a there was a one of Sadr’s Muqtada al-Sadr was the leader of the Shiites in Iraq. And we coalition forces had been targeting him for months. Our whole deployment, he was being targeted, but they didn’t want to hit him because they didn’t know what the reaction would be. And so just before we were going home, we we got tasked with hitting one of his top lieutenants. And it’s a big operation, lot of visibility on it.

And we went down, and that was also I want to say that was in the yeah. It was in the Najaf. We went down. We captured this guy. And when we came back, it was kind of once it got out, it was kind of the beginning or one of the triggering points of the true insurgency in Iraq.

Like, I woke up that morning, and there was, like you could look out on the from our base, and you could see, like, fires from the highways. Vehicles were being ID’d and stuff. And it was it was the beginning of the real formation of the insurgency, which I wasn’t really quite 100% sure on, but you could see something was changed. Something just changed, and you could feel it.

SHAWN RYAN: No. Sure. And I don’t think America was ready for that.

JOCKO WILLINK: We weren’t. You know, we’d already made all kinds of mistakes, you know, standing down the Bath the Bath soldiers and the the the army, sounding down the Iraqi army, like, all we made all kinds of mistakes out of arrogance as a country. But I don’t really don’t think that we saw, like, oh, damn. This is about to get really, really bad. And that was in the spring of 2004, and that is truly when things started to spiral.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. Yep. Well, Jocko, I know it’s getting ready to get heavy with tasking and bruiser. Let’s just take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll pick up right here.

JOCKO WILLINK: Let’s do it, man.

The Admiral’s Aide Assignment

JOCKO WILLINK: You bet your ass you do.

JOCKO WILLINK: Not quite. Not quite. As I’m finishing my deployment with SEAL Team Seven, my commanding officer, again, who was my ops officer in Unit Two, my executive officer at SEAL Team Two. Now he’s my commanding officer. And he says, “The last thing I do as a commanding officer is I’m going to make sure that you become the admiral’s aide.”

No one wants to be the admiral’s aide, of course, because, you know, it’s an administrative job. But there’s a reason why he wanted me to go be the admiral’s aide. And it is because at that point in time, at that moment, I was going to come straight off the battlefield. You know, this is 2003, 2004. There hadn’t been that many platoons gone over there.

I’m going to go straight off the battlefield and work directly for the admiral. And that’s what they want. They want somebody that has fresh combat experience that can tell him what is happening. And I, you know, I did all kinds of excuses and tap dancing to try and get out of it, but it was happening.

And, you know, it’s part of it is it’s very outstanding professional development because you’re going to see things that you would not see without doing it. So that’s what I get. I get home from deployment, and I check in to be the admiral’s aide.

And, yeah, it was definitely a wake-up call because, you know, we always had a thing: if you know, avoid wearing a uniform at all costs. If you have to wear it, make it perfect. Right? That was kind of like a thing SEAL Team One. And I was really good at avoiding wearing a uniform. I didn’t like to wear a shirt at work, you know, as little as possible.

And the first trip I went on with the admiral, I think I had four uniforms with me. Khakis for the Pentagon, camis for Fort Bragg, dress blues for a ceremony, and civilian clothes. That’s like one trip.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

Learning Flag Officer Language

JOCKO WILLINK: So I check in to be the admiral, and, you know, it was definitely an eye opener of what’s happening in the community and what’s going on and what’s happening at that level. And it was, yeah, a massive learning experience.

And, again, you know, I had the E-5 mafia language down. Now I’d learned the officer language, and now it was learning, I don’t know what to call the next level up of officer language, but it’s like flag officer language.

SHAWN RYAN: Flag officer language.

JOCKO WILLINK: Because for that year, I was in the Pentagon. I was, you know, and you’d be, it’s weird when you’re an aide. It’s kind of like you don’t exist, but you do. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. My boss was a great guy. He was, you know, just a great guy, nice guy, cared about me a lot.

But when you’re in a room with a four-star general, the aides are kind of these subhumans in the back, but you’re listening to everything. You’re seeing everything. And so it’s a very educational experience as to what’s happening at those levels. You know, you’re going to meetings at the Pentagon, JSOC, just really educational. A lot of inside baseball going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Level of Scrutiny

JOCKO WILLINK: And, you know, for us and the SEAL teams, we don’t realize often how much visibility we have, especially back then. Look, and I guess now it’s pretty obvious we have a lot of visibility. But back then, you know, you wouldn’t think that an E-5 in a SEAL platoon doing something dumb on liberty would get a phone call to the admiral from the vice CNO or the CNO or the SecNav. These things are a big deal. And so that’s what I learned. I learned the amount of scrutiny that we’re under.

The SEAL Team Five guys, they had someone in that platoon upload digital pictures of their deployment to a website that was supposed to be secure that got breached. And so these pictures went out over the Internet. And the pictures, so I’m there when the CNO is calling the admiral to ask him about each of these individual pictures of what is going on in these pictures. And implied in that was, what is wrong with your troops?

Example: there’s an image of a guy, an Iraqi guy. He’s being held by the jaw, and he’s got a pistol to his head with a flashlight in his eyes. And so he knows, what is going on in this picture? And the admiral hits the mute button. And I’m like, “Sir, they don’t like to have their picture taken, so you got to face their picture to the camera. You got to face their face into the camera, and the light is so that you can illuminate the camera. You can illuminate the picture. That’s why the closest flashlight he got is in his pistol. That’s what he’s doing.”

Boom. Admiral tells him what’s going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: Next picture. A guy with a sandbag over his head, cuffed, blood coming out of the sandbag. “What’s going on with this picture?”

“Hey, sir. That guy resisted. He got subdued. He probably could have been shot, but our troops are disciplined. And instead of shooting him, they captured him. They had to subdue him. They used minimum force required, and now they’ve got him handled. And now they take a picture of it.”

So these little things where I realized that’s the level of scrutiny we’re under. And that’s why, again, when I became a troop commander, being able to translate and explain to the guys what is going on and what the visibility is and how much it matters, what you do as an E-4, as an E-5 in a SEAL platoon, it has a strategic impact for the nation in some cases.

And that was really clear with Abu Ghraib, but also for the SEAL community. And if we are not professional, we don’t get work. And that’s not, I’m not saying that for the benefit of the SEAL teams. I’m saying that for the benefit of the country because SEALs are good at what we do. And if we’re not getting jobs that we should be getting because of these kind of ancillary actions, it’s bad for the country. It’s bad for our warfighting capabilities.

So I learned a lot about that when I was the admiral’s aide.

Legal Cases and Strategic Impact

JOCKO WILLINK: And there was another couple of huge cases. There was, you know, I got to hear about what was happening from a legal perspective. There were some guys that shot someone. This wasn’t SEALs. This was army guys, regular army guys, conventional army guys, shot someone south of Baghdad somewhere.

And I don’t quote me on the story, but they had planted a gun on him. And they were going to jail. They were under trial for murder. And I just would hear that and go, what were these guys thinking? You know what? Why would they be doing this?

And the immediate answer is, well, because they’re afraid they’re going to get in trouble. Right? Oh, they’re afraid that the ROE didn’t allow them to shoot this guy, and now they’re trying to cover it up.

The reality of this scenario is the ROE, if someone is, there’s, I’m trying to think of the exact terminology, reasonable certainty that they’re committing hostile intent, not a hostile act, hostile intent. So if I think you’re going to do something and I’m reasonably certain that, I can shoot you whether you have a gun or not. And yet we have guys, this particular case, these guys were getting in trouble because they planted a gun. They didn’t need to do that.

So that was another just learning about how much scrutiny the military, so I initially saw, oh, there’s the SEAL teams is under scrutiny. But then I realized it’s not just the SEAL teams. There’s a lot of scrutiny on everything that we do.

And the Abu Ghraib scandal that caused so many people, that fueled the insurgency so much, and I saw that it fueled the insurgency. So what a couple, you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-old privates were doing in a prison fueled the insurgency. And the Al Qaeda took advantage of it. They propagated those pictures. They propagated those pictures from Team Five. That’s what happens.

And so I guess I realized how the tactical actions of our units, SEAL teams, Marines, Army soldiers, has a strategic impact, and we have to think about what we’re doing. That is something I never thought of.

The Law of Armed Conflict

SHAWN RYAN: Where does the scrutiny come from?

JOCKO WILLINK: I mean, it’s the law of armed conflict. Right? It’s the Geneva Convention, the law of armed conflict. There are people that are in place to make sure that we are conducting war in a forthright and just manner if there is such a thing. You know?

Can we go back to the quote from Apocalypse Now? “Handing out charges for murder around here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500.” You can take that approach, but it’s not going to help you. It’s not going to help you. There’s rules, and we have just got to follow the rules. And if the rules don’t make sense, then you got to raise your hand and say, “Hey, these rules don’t make sense.”

The Explosive Breaching Debate

JOCKO WILLINK: And I did that. For instance, and I brought this up earlier, breaching. So when I first got to Iraq, that first deployment, we’re breaching every door, of course. Right? Well, so is everybody else. Everyone’s just breaching the hell out of everything. You’re going to enter a building, you breach the door because it gives you a tactical advantage. Right?

So guys, civilians were getting injured by breaches. And eventually, they said, “Hey, no more breaching. No more explosive breaching. Done.”

So I get this word. And, you know, I talk to my guys. No more explosive breaching. And, you know, what’s their reaction going to be?

SHAWN RYAN: Not good.

JOCKO WILLINK: Totally not good. Right? Hey. And it’s exactly what you would think it would be. “Hey, wait a second. You want us to be at more risk. You don’t care about us. You don’t understand what it’s like down here. This is a problem. You don’t understand the battlefield. Screw you.”

That’s basically the response. So and I’m thinking the same thing. Right? But now am I thinking, wait a second. Does my boss want to put my guys at risk? What do you think? Really? Does my boss want…

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOCKO WILLINK: No. Actually, no. I don’t believe my boss wants to do that. There’s got to be something else going on. “Hey, boss. What’s the deal with explosive breaching? Why are we being told we’re not, why are you telling me we can’t explosively breach anymore?”

And he’s like, “Here’s what’s happening. Here’s the amount of casualties from breaches. Here’s the civilians injured by breaches. Here’s, you know, the number of breaches that are happening every night in Baghdad or the surrounding areas. And the civilian casualties are so high that the generals are saying don’t do this anymore.”

And I said, “Okay. Now, boss, if I’m going on to a target where the intel represents a higher probability of there being some kind of resistance on the target, can I breach?”

And like, “Well, what do you mean?”

I said, “Well, if I get this intel that says that they’re expecting them to have bodyguards or they expect there to be IEDs, can I use explosive breaches to mitigate that risk?”

And he’s like, “Yeah. That makes sense.”

And that’s what we did.

The Birth of Callouts

JOCKO WILLINK: And that’s also when we started doing callouts, which initially, guys were not…

SHAWN RYAN: Were doing callouts?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. We started doing them.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit. I did not know…

JOCKO WILLINK: Doing callouts. And it was like we were figuring out how to do it. What are we going to do? Because from my perspective now, all right. So I’m not going to explosively breach this door. So we’re not going to really have the element of surprise that we want because we’re going to be sitting there with a sledgehammer or a lockpick or, you know, anything’s going to make noise. We’re going to alert them that we’re there.

So now we got guys in the stack waiting outside this building. They’re not behind cover. This is a problem. How can we mitigate that risk?

Well, since we have to wake them up to breach the door anyways with a f*ing sledgehammer, let’s just get a little safe distance, set up our vehicles, and wake them up and say, “Hey, you got to come out.”

And that’s exactly what we started doing. And then so what we ended up with was a good variety of tactics of sometimes we do a callout. Sometimes we just mechanically breach the door, and sometimes we explosively breach the door.

But all those things were a result of me talking to my boss and then talking to the guys and saying, “Guys, here’s why we can’t breach.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Oh, okay. Well, we can’t. Oh, there’s a huge super high risk? Explain that risk to me.”

And they explained to me, you know what? I agree with you guys. “Boss, we’re going to explosively breach tonight.”

Boss says cool.

Task Unit Bruiser

JOCKO WILLINK: My boss never told me no. So those kind of things, I think, again, where we get into the, hey, do just do what I’m telling you to do, both up and down the chain of command. I don’t want my guys, I want my guys to resist me. I want them to say, we should be able to explosively breach.

Okay. Tell me why. And I should be able to look at my boss. Here’s why. And by the way, if my guys explain to me, hey, we should explosively breach, and here’s why. And I explain it to my boss, and my boss says, no. Okay. Do I have an argument? No? Okay. Well, then how can I mitigate this?

Well, I can mitigate it by not stacking my platoon up in front of the door or outside the building and doing a callout. So those kind of things, I think, could get lost when it comes to communicating up and down the chain of command.

SHAWN RYAN: I got a question for you. I mean, earlier when we were talking, I can’t remember at what point we brought this up, but we’re talking about leadership. I believe you’ve just gotten through OCS. Anyways, you had said that trust your guys, and that’s how they trust you. Right? And so big proponent of that.

How do you just trust your guys? I mean, do they have to earn your trust, or do you give them the trust and let them f that up or give them the opportunity to f that up? I’m asking because for my own, I’m learning. I want to learn from you.

Building Trust Incrementally

JOCKO WILLINK: The way you do it is a little bit of trust at a time. So if you started working with me, it wouldn’t be like, hey, Shawn, we got this op tonight. Why don’t you take lead on that? I’m going to sit in the TOC. I’ve never worked with you before, and I’m just going to let you go take lead on a mission. No.

It’s like, hey, Shawn, we got this op tonight. Can you run external security for me? Or can you clear this back, you know, outhouse with your fire team? And you’re like, cool. Got it, boss. And you do it. You do it well.

And then the next time, hey, you’re in charge of external security. And the next time, hey, you’re in charge of vehicles. The next time, hey, you’re in charge of the breach team. So it’s like I’m going to give you a little more trust each time, and then you keep making good calls.

Maybe sometimes I have to tighten you up. Like, hey, what were you doing going to clear this other building that wasn’t part of the target? Yeah. But I saw a guy over there. But I don’t care about that, but you didn’t tell me. Yeah. But I didn’t have time. Well, what if we have a blue on blue because of this? Oh, point. So, you know, you learned a little bit. I took a little bit of risk. Maybe a little bit outside the zone. So that’s what you do. Just a little bit of trust at a time. You build it over time.

But I have to trust you. And, actually, what’s funny is I thought where you’re going with that question is if my guys are telling me, like, we need to explosively breach this target, do I have to trust them? And the answer is yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, then you get a guy like me that works where we have to explosive breach every single f*ing time. How do you trust me?

JOCKO WILLINK: And then I go, hey, hey, Shawn. If we do another one of these explosive breaches, we’re probably not going to get approved for our next missions. And you go, what do you mean? I said, well, they’ve had a bunch of collateral damage. They’ve had a bunch of people in the Baghdad General Hospital that are wounded civilians from breaching charges, and we’re just going to get told no. So now what are you going to do?

I’m telling you, I trust you, but do you trust me? And okay. Well, that makes sense, Jocko. Okay. Can we mitigate it? How can we mitigate it? Well, we could do a callout. We could throw flash crashes through the windows. Like, there’s a bunch of ways. We could figure out ways to mitigate things.

But if I don’t talk to you and you don’t talk to me and I don’t explain to you what’s happening, how can we expect to be aligned? It’s just not going to happen. And so that open mindedness and having good relationships with people is what it’s all about.

And by the way, this extends to, like, the other units that you work with. Right? The other military, army, and Marine Corps units that you work with. You got to listen to what they’re saying about their AO, because that’s going to have an impact as well.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. Man, I can’t believe you guys were doing callouts back then. How would you do it?

Callout Procedures

JOCKO WILLINK: Set the vehicles in either usually an L type scenario, you know, so we’d be able to see the black side of the building, but we wouldn’t set ourselves up in an envelopment. And then we’d get on the radio and say, hey, you’re surrounded. You know? And our terp would do it. Hey, you’re surrounded. Come out.

SHAWN RYAN: How would that work? Would they come out?

JOCKO WILLINK: Usually. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: Occasionally, there would be no one there.

SHAWN RYAN: What was the ultimatum?

JOCKO WILLINK: I don’t know if we ever even reached an ultimatum. I think we had a couple where there was no one home, and we eventually breached, which again, which is good escalation. Right? I guess depending on how you look at it. But if they wouldn’t come out, and now when we explosively breach this thing, we’d explosively breach it, like, big.

So there were some very valuable lessons in the admiral’s aide slot. Yeah. And, again, even that first deployment to Iraq, these kind of conversations, you know, these kind of things, understanding what my boss was having to deal with.

Leading with More Experience Than Your Boss

SHAWN RYAN: Do you feel, I mean, it sounds like you had a great relationship with him, but what I want to ask is how is it, I’ve always expected my leadership to have more experience than myself. And so you’re showing up to the slot to be the aide for the admiral with more combat experience than the admiral has. That’s an assumption. Maybe he was a Vietnam guy. I don’t know.

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s a correct assumption. I mean, how, by the way, my commanding officer, remember I said I was the only platoon in Iraq for, like, a month or two. When my skipper showed up, he had no combat experience.

You remember what I was saying earlier about, like, I understand. You know, like, I don’t expect my boss who’s never been in combat before to be able to roll in and start telling me what’s what. And I understand he’s going to ask me some questions about some things that he doesn’t understand because he doesn’t understand, and that’s okay.

Like, oh, sir, let me explain to you. Why don’t you come on an op and you can see what this looks like? Like, that kind of attitude as opposed to, which is really easy from a judgmental perspective to say, why the hell are you in charge? Or, hey, I’m trying to run operations down here. You’re asking me a bunch of questions. Like, no. Actually, come on down. Let’s sit through our brief. Tell me what you think.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m, I mean, I’ve had both leaders do, and I think I’ve always paid a lot of attention to how my leadership approaches me with certain issues. And are they open to…

JOCKO WILLINK: That’s really it. I mean, when you have a leader that comes in with little to no experience, I mean, it’s once again, how are they going to project that? Are they going to project that and lean on us, or are they going to hide from their inexperience and present, like, an overinflated bullshit confidence?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. And what do, so how do you deal with that?

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s like, hey, boss. That sounds like a good suggestion. Let me bring that to the boys and see how we can make that work. You know? It’s like, what am I supposed to say? Boss, you haven’t been here as long as I have. You don’t know what you’re talking about? Where’s that going to get me?

So it’s like, hey, boss. Sounds like a good suggestion. Let me get with the guys, and let’s figure out how we can implement that. Hey, boss. I was talking to the guys, and I just want to go over a couple things. There’s a couple secondary and tertiary effects are going to happen if we do what it is you were saying. It’s going to cause this and it’s going to cause that. I’m good. We got to mitigate this one, but I just want to let you know that’s what’s going to happen. I didn’t know that. How do you recommend? Oh, here’s what I recommend, boss.

You see what I’m saying? So, again, if I don’t listen to him, he’s not going to listen to me. If I don’t put some trust in him, he’s not going to trust me.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. So how does Task Unit Bruiser come about?

Becoming Task Unit Commander

JOCKO WILLINK: So, yeah, I do that year at the admiral’s office, and then the next billet is to be a task unit commander. And a billet opened up at SEAL Team Three. And so SEAL Team Three, here I come.

SHAWN RYAN: Could you explain what a task unit is to the audience?

JOCKO WILLINK: Task unit is the old name. Now it’s called the troop, but it’s the old name for two platoons combined together with a little headquarters element above it. So it’s about thirty six guys, but it really can be anywhere between thirty and fifty or seventy. You know? It’s, I think people are always surprised that the variables inside the military, like, infantry company can be eighty guys or can be two hundred and eighty guys. You know? There’s a big variation.

But generally speaking, a task unit is two platoons or a troop is two platoons with between sixteen and twenty guys in each platoon. And so you are tasked with leading the task unit, two platoons.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, I just had so many friends slash, you know, BUD/S classmates that were in that. I mean, Cowie, Mark Lee, Leif Babin, Seth Stone, I think, I don’t want to mention his name. He might still be in there. Andrew Paul. There’s a f*ing ton of them, man. I think Melendez maybe. Was Mario Melendez with you guys?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of these guys. Plus a lot more enlisted, but I don’t want to say all their names because I don’t know who’s in and who’s not anymore. But and this is where, man, your guys just have all positive things to say about you. I’ve never heard anything negative about you from anybody that you’ve served with, and that is f*ing incredible. And you guys seem really tight, and that is cool to see too.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It was a great crew of guys, man. Great crew of guys. I mean, it’s almost like you took your task unit with you into your business career.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of those guys that are…

JOCKO WILLINK: We had a decent, you know, that are in there. But I don’t know where to start with this, so I’ll let you start.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. For me, it was, you know, I thought that this could be getting towards the end of my operational career. There were some couple other options that may play out or not. But at this point, you know, just for me, this is an awesome opportunity, you know, an awesome opportunity. I love the SEAL teams.

And to be a troop commander, task unit commander for me was just, it was awesome. I was, again, I guess I find myself struggling for words when it, for me to be able to describe the things that I’ve had in my life, like being a platoon commander in Iraq when there’s one platoon in Iraq. Like, this is just, this is like if you played football your whole life and you get to go to the Super Bowl, you know, or you are in a rock band and you get to play Madison Square Garden. That’s what it was for me.

This is the only thing I ever dreamed of doing. The only thing I wanted to do was be in the teams, and now I’m in the teams. And now I’m getting to be in charge of some team guys. And, yeah, it was awesome from the word go. You know? Showed up, and I stole a lot of stuff from Colonel David Hackworth.

Renaming the Unit

And one of the key components that I stole from David Hackworth was he would rename the units that he would take over. So when he was in Korea, he took over Fox Company. He changed it to Fighter Company. When he was in Vietnam, he was in charge of the four thirty ninth, which was called the Hard Luck Battalion, and he changed it to the Hardcore Battalion.

And he did that with each of his subordinate elements. He would change their name to something cool. And so when I took over Task Unit Bravo was the original alpha, bravo, charlie, and I took over Task Unit Bravo. And the first thing I did was change the name to Bruiser. And it’s totally unofficial, and I just went with it. And that’s what we got.

SHAWN RYAN: Where’d you come up with Bruiser?

JOCKO WILLINK: Had to begin with B, and there was an old band, friend of mine had called the Bruisers. And I was like, that’s too easy. So there we go.

Bruiser Task Unit

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Bruiser coming in hot. And, I mean, let’s face it. It’s a pretty good theme.

JOCKO WILLINK: It is a f*ing damn good theme. It’s a pretty good theme. And that’s, again fitting. Just something that I took from Colonel David Hackworth, and it does have—I’ve worked with all kinds of companies now, you know, at Echelon Front. And there’s so many companies that have told me that their sales team gave themselves this name or their concrete team gave themselves a name. Like, this happens all the time now, and people report back that, yeah, man. It has an impact. You’re not just team alpha or team bravo. You’re Task Unit Bruiser. Let’s go.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Right on. I mean, did you know you were going to Ramadi when you took it?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. We didn’t know where we were going at first.

SHAWN RYAN: Anywhere, like, or anywhere in Iraq?

JOCKO WILLINK: There was one task unit that was designated to go to Iraq, and that was Alpha. And Bruiser and Charlie, one of us, one of those task units was going to go to PACOM, meaning no war. And so my commanding officer and master chief, they brought us all back. They brought the head shed from each task unit back. And they said, “Hey. We, if you want, we can take and we can split up the task units so that whoever hasn’t been to Iraq, we can all put them in one task unit, and they can all go to Iraq. And then the other guys that already have been to Iraq can go to PACOM,” which is the fair fairy. Right? Like, when the fair fairy shows up to try and make everything fair.

SHAWN RYAN: The fair fairy.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I had my opinion, but I went back and asked the guys because we were just starting our land warfare. I said, “Hey. Here’s what they’re offering. They’re offering for us to split up and guys that haven’t been to Iraq can go, or we stay together, and they send whoever performs the best to Iraq.” And I kind of smiled, and they’re all like, “Hell yeah. Let’s go.”

So it was, you know, a little bit of a competition to see who goes to Iraq. And, you know, we were all very hardworking.

SHAWN RYAN: Sounds like it. I mean, f*, man. So many legends. Chris Kyle, Eli Crane’s in there. I mean—

JOCKO WILLINK: Eli wasn’t with us.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, he wasn’t?

JOCKO WILLINK: Mikey Monsoor. Yep. I mean, wow. Wow. Yeah. Bunch of—and, you know, a bunch of guys whose names people don’t know who are just awesome guys. And I think Tony Eafrati, he’s the—might be the one guy that I’d—we were E-5 mafia team one, me and Tony. I’m trying to think if I knew anyone else in there. I might have known the—I think I knew who the other platoon chief was, another good guy. I think, but we weren’t ever at the same team, but I knew him. But other than that, don’t think I knew one single person in there.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think your reputation was for them? What did they think they were walking into with you as their task unit commander?

JOCKO WILLINK: I mean, Tony knew me. I mean, he knew exactly who I was. So he got the word out. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, Tony, Tony, Tony’s as hard as they come. And Tony had a—has an outstanding reputation and had an outstanding reputation. And so, you know, he knew me. And so that was that.

And, you know, my platoon in Baghdad had done a lot of stuff. And so we, you know, had a lot of experience at that time. You know? At that time, it was a lot of experience. And, you know, like I said, I was an enlisted team guy for eight years. So at a minimum, you couldn’t lie to me about what the radio could or could not do. You couldn’t lie to me about, like, basic team guy stuff. You had to tell me what was what. Had to tell the truth about stuff.

Assignment to Ramadi

SHAWN RYAN: When did you find out you were going to Baghdad? Or not Baghdad. Excuse me. Ramadi.

JOCKO WILLINK: So I would say about halfway through the workup, they said, “Alright. You guys, Bruiser’s going.” And look. Bruiser’s going to—Bruiser’s going to Iraq. We’re like, “Yeah.” So we were planning to go to Baghdad and work with the ICTF, which is the Iraqi Counterterror Force. I went on ADVON, actually, as a matter of fact. And I went and did some ops with those guys and saw what they were doing and started the turnover with their task unit commander.

And that’s what—that was, like, kind of a—it looked like it was going to be an awesome deployment. Like, those guys had a good force that they were working with. They had a good op tempo. They just had good stuff going on. So it looked like that’s where we’re going.

And when I got home from that PDSS, they wanted to align all of—because the east and west coast were both in Iraq at the same time. And yet the west coast had western Iraq, except for they had an element in Baghdad. And then the East Coast had eastern Iraq, except for they had an element in Ramadi. And you can already see this doesn’t make much sense. Right?

So as the two commanding officers were getting ready to deploy, they talked about it. And they’re like, “Wait a second. Why do we have our forces kind of disjointed? West Coast, you take Western Iraq. That’s like Fallujah, Habaniya, Ramadi. East Coast, you take Baghdad, which includes the ICTF and then the other stations that they had.” And it makes sense. You know? Like, there’s no two ways about it.

And when I heard that, I was on—I wasn’t on leave, but my guys were on leave, pre-deployment leave. Like, we were that ready to go to Baghdad. And my skipper called me to the office and said, “Hey. What do you think about going to Ramadi?” And I was like, I knew exactly what was going on in Ramadi. I mean, the intel reports were very clear that Ramadi was a total war zone, total disaster, and it was the worst area in Iraq.

And I said, “Yeah, Roger that.” Nope. And I tried to—inside, I was like, “Oh, hell yeah.” Outside, I said, “Well, sir, you know, there’s a couple more things I need,” and I bargained to get, like, a few—I bargained to get a few more people. I bargained to get, like, some computer stuff that we needed for our, you know, for our communication stuff. And he was like, “Yeah. I can get you that. Can get you that. I can get you these other people.” And I said, “I’m in.” And that was it. Going to Ramadi.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you know this was going to be—this was it as far as kinetic deployments?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. Yep. And then there was sustained fighting every day. Like, there was soldiers and marines getting wounded and killed every day. And this isn’t a big area. Ramadi is not a big city. It’s small. IEDs were totally out of control.

SHAWN RYAN: So you had a pretty good idea what you’re walking into?

JOCKO WILLINK: A hundred percent. Yeah. Well, not a hundred percent because, you know, there’s still some things you’re going to learn, but I knew—I knew what was happening. I was, again, thankfully, I had done that deployment to Baghdad. I had, you know, experience as an enlisted SEAL working for the admiral. Like, these are all things that helped me understand because I got—because I was just a little bit ahead of the power curve. You know what I mean? Just enough ahead of the power curve. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: Did you ever get rolled back in BUD/S?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. I didn’t get rolled back in BUD/S, but you could tell the guys that got rolled back, they were like, “Okay.” Like, pool comp, they know what’s coming. They’re just a little bit ahead. And that’s how I felt like I was going into Ramadi. Was just ahead enough to know, like, “Okay. I know what’s coming.”

And I told, you know, once the task unit was on the ground, I’m like, “This is going to be a historical deployment.”

SHAWN RYAN: Which is a big statement. That’s not a small statement.

JOCKO WILLINK: I didn’t throw that word around, but I knew. I knew.

Preparing the Team

SHAWN RYAN: How many guys did you have that had experience? Like, actual experience.

JOCKO WILLINK: Every guy that wasn’t a new guy had been to Iraq.

SHAWN RYAN: You had a lot of new guys, I think.

JOCKO WILLINK: We had a decent amount of new guys. We had a decent—it wasn’t overwhelming, but we had a solid, probably normal average number of new guys.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Three, four guys per platoon, new guys, something like that.

JOCKO WILLINK: So not overwhelming and all great guys. I mean, if you know what you’re walking—

SHAWN RYAN: How many guys on your team or in your task unit had an idea of what they were walking into?

JOCKO WILLINK: I don’t know if anybody did. I don’t know if anybody did.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you prepare these guys for that?

JOCKO WILLINK: I mean, I’m just telling them what’s happening. You know, you put the SIG acts, the significant activities, which are basically enemy attacks, brief the SIG acts in the last twenty-four hours, and then you brief them the SIG acts in the last seven days, and then you brief them SIG acts in the last month.

And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist because in the last twenty-four hours, there was three guys wounded, one guy killed, you know, thirty-eight enemy attacks. And you think, “Well, that’s a rough day.” But then you realize it’s every day for seven days, and then you realize it’s every day for a month. And just before we showed up, like, the 3/8 Marines had had a terrible about a week where they had lost four or five guys in that week before we showed up. And they lost a couple more before that, but, you know, that’s what we’re getting into.

SHAWN RYAN: Who are your platoon commanders?

JOCKO WILLINK: Leif Babin and Seth Stone. Yeah. My brothers. Yeah. Two guys. You didn’t know them before?

Didn’t know them. Met them. And two guys from the Naval Academy, neither one of them got selected out of the Naval Academy. They both had fought their way back from the fleet to get to the SEAL teams, both of them from Texas, both of them surfed. Neither one of them had much experience at all, but they were—dude, they just wanted to be good. They wanted to be good team guys. And they wanted to fight for God and country. And they were tough. They listened. Yeah. Yeah. They were—couldn’t ask for better guys to work with, you know, for the two platoon commanders.

And, you know, it’s funny because Leif will tell the story about when I met those guys and how, A, I didn’t smile at him, and I wasn’t nice to him. And, B, Seth thought I was going to fire him, and I hated him. And it’s actually true.

SHAWN RYAN: Is it really?

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s actually true. Not that I hated them, but that I might fire them. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know what their attitudes were. I didn’t have high expectations that they were going to be, you know, successful or good. And so—and you know what? This is another thing I stole from Hackworth. This is exactly what Hackworth would do. Hackworth’s like, “Yeah, when I meet guys, don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I’m not going to become friends with them because if they’re not capable of doing the job, I’m going to get rid of them.”

And so, yeah, there’s a reason why I didn’t, like, bro out with them when I first met them because I will fire them if they’re not going to do their job correctly or if they’re more concerned about themselves than they are about the platoon. And if you’re more concerned about yourself than your platoon, you will not work for me. You will not work for me, and I will do everything I can to, like, get you out of the SEAL teams.

So luckily and thankfully, those guys didn’t have an ounce of that in them. You know? They wanted to take care of the platoons. They wanted to fight. They wanted—that’s what they wanted. And they did.

SHAWN RYAN: Who are your chiefs?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, the one chief is—was Seth’s chief, and he’s not in the public light. And the other chief was Tony Eafrati. And, you know, Seth’s chief was a great combination with Seth, hardworking guy, and a good complement to Seth. And then Tony Eafrati was Leif’s chief, who, again, he was E-5 mob with me at SEAL Team One. And, like, just a stud, dude. I mean, honestly, he’s on the platoon list that you form up for the apocalypse. Like, Tony’s—he’s on the top of the list, you know, because he’s not going to back down. And he’s great.

You know, there’s a situation when we were in—going through workup, and I was watching Tony and Leif. They were getting ready to do some training op. Just a real simple training op, you know, target like an iteration training on a target assault, something like that. And they’re sitting there in this, you know, in the sand, you know, with the freaking sticks. And Tony tells him, like, “Hey. Hey, sir. We should come in from here, set up a base over here, move through here, rally point over here. That’s what we should do.”

And Leif’s like, “Hey. That sounds really good. Why don’t you tell the guys?” And Tony goes, “I think it’d be good if it came from you.”

First Impressions of Ramadi

JOCKO WILLINK: I was like, damn, dude. That’s a professional. He’s trying to elevate the platoon commander. Instead of him being like, I want to show these guys that I’m the real guy in charge. Instead of doing that, he elevated Leif.

Just in that little moment, that’s one little moment in time where you see a guy that’s like a real true professional whose ego is totally out of it. He wants to have a good platoon. So, yeah, just epic. And, you know, since I was good friends with Tony, grew up with Tony, we had a great relationship.

SHAWN RYAN: Before we go to, I just want to ask if there was how did you address your team when you knew that’s where you were going? What was the well, how did you tell them?

JOCKO WILLINK: Stand by to get some, boys.

Yeah. It’s weird. There was a time earlier, because I knew that Ramadi was the worst place. And I had said, at some point, like, we’re going to end up in Ramadi. I had said that. Like, I kind of knew it. So the guys were tracking. The guys knew what was what.

And, bro, the idea you know, it’s like I had a guy named Dean Ladd on my podcast who is a Marine officer in World War II. And, like, he’s going into Tarawa, and their threat brief that they’re getting for Tarawa is like totally out of control. You can see it. The Japanese are dug in. They got mortars trained on the beach. They got machine gun pillboxes, whole nine yards, and Tarawa was tiny.

And I’ve asked him the same kind of probing questions that you’re asking me of, like, well, how did you feel? And I was like, well, were you nervous? Were you scared about getting wounded or killed? And he goes, “That always happens to the other guy.”

And that’s exactly you know, that’s how I felt. That’s how I can just about guarantee you every guy in Task Unit Bruiser when they heard we’re going to Ramadi was like, hell yeah. Every single one of them was like, hell yeah. Nothing bad is going to happen. We’re going to go and kick ass. That’s what we do, which is exactly what you want.

F*ing awesome. Yeah. We’re Frogmen, dude. This is what we do. This is an opportunity, you know, that the storied legacy that the guys in Vietnam built that we got to get to walk around in Coronado with a Trident. I mean, you’re not walking around, but guys know you’re a SEAL.

You’re going to a McP’s on a Thursday night, which I’m sorry you missed out on. But back in the day, you’re going to McP’s on a Thursday night. Like, you know, you’re a badass, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. Nothing. I got to live off the reputation of the guys that came before. So to have an opportunity, get some of that back, yeah, that’s a huge opportunity, and it’s a heavy weight. We got to hold the line.

Arrival in Ramadi

SHAWN RYAN: So you get to Iraq, you’re in Ramadi. Let’s talk about day one.

JOCKO WILLINK: So we were on the PDSS or no, the Advance. Right? So a few of us came over on the Advance. And, yeah, everything I had read about was going on there. It was going on there.

And, you know, what day it was, I don’t know, but we were going to a memorial service, like, almost out of the gate. And, again, what left a mark was I could tell in the memorial service that this was a routine. Like, it wasn’t an ad hoc thing. Like, I’m looking around, and I go, this is not an ad hoc thing.

I’ve been in the military for, at this point, fifteen years. I know what it looks like when you throw together a ceremony last minute and you get in there and you do something. This was not that. I’m looking at, like, the setup where they have the memorial crosses. Those things are used. I’m looking at where the preacher’s talking from. I’m like, oh, he’s delivering remarks again.

So that’s my first memory of Ramadi was that, was going, yeah. These guys, you know, we’re showing up here. These guys from the 228 under Colonel Gronski, they’ve been here for fourteen months. They’ve taken they’ve lost almost a hundred guys. They’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of casualties, and we need to do what we can to help them. That was my attitude. I was like, we need to help these guys as much as we possibly can.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. And I just want to remind the audience. I mean, your task unit, the most decorated SOF unit out of the entire Iraq war. That’s what we’re walking into.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. We had for some reason, we had thirteen snipers. And I say for some reason because that wasn’t normal. You know? Both the platoon chiefs were snipers. We just had we were overloaded with snipers, which was a real blessing.

And seeing remember I talked about being in Baghdad, and we did a couple operations where I kind of caught a glimpse of what we could do with snipers, like a little glimpse. And when I saw what was happening there, I thought to myself, oh, I think I have an idea of what we can do here.

And the turnover with the guys from Team Two, great bunch of dudes. It was like there were areas where and the same thing with what the coalition forces were telling us, the 228 was like, “Hey, this area you can’t go there. It’s not passable. There are too many IEDs to go down there, period.”

So we knew. I knew. I knew it was going to be a fight because it was all around us. Here you go. It’s another weird thing. It was like growing up watching war movies. It was usually like good guys are over here. Bad guys are over there. You go over to fight the bad guys. Like, okay. World War I was trench warfare. Even the trenches seem like they were a little bit far apart.

And Ramadi was like, oh, the other side of this wall right here, there’s bad guys. It’s like the other side of that wall, there’s bad guys. And when you go out the gate, you go out the gate, and there it is. You’re in it. You’re in Ramadi.

And, you know, there were people killed in Ramadi, you know, from mortars and rocket strikes and stuff like that. So it was all around you.

SHAWN RYAN: How big was Ramadi?

JOCKO WILLINK: I’ve never measured it. Probably, like, four miles across. That’s it.

SHAWN RYAN: Three hundred and fifty thousand people roughly speaking of civilians.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Camp Ramadi was a pretty big base because it was a former Iraqi army base. Those are pretty big bases, and we had our little annex to that base right on the Euphrates River as Frogmen should be.

And within once the whole task unit showed up, like, the night the task unit showed up, there was like a coordinated attack on various bases, ours being one of them. And, like, every guy in our task unit, the first night that they showed up in Ramadi was on the roof of our building just getting after it.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. So that was kind of a good welcome to Ramadi as well.

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re not in the middle of some big base. I mean, you go on the rooftop, and you can engage.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Wow. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And we did. Yeah. Day one.

And it’s funny too now that you mentioned it, the Commodore at the time, who was the detailer that I asked to send me back to a SEAL team ASAP, who was the commanding officer when I was in Europe. So this guy’s a friend of mine. And before we left, he gave a speech to the whole team, and I harass him about this to this day.

He’s like, “Hey. The chances are none of you are going to shoot your weapons. Like, this is a different time and all this stuff.”

And I think I sent him an email or a Webby thing. And I said, “Hey, sir. We’ve been here for forty-eight hours. Every single guy in my task unit and some of the techs have engaged.”

And he was like, “Yeah, Roger.” Great guy. Great guy.

The Mission Set

SHAWN RYAN: So what was the mission set? Was it very specific, or was it always something different?

JOCKO WILLINK: It ended up being pretty specific, and that is setting up sniper overwatch positions in support of the army elements on the ground. That’s kind of one. We did do direct action missions with our Iraqi counterparts. We did the overwatches with Iraqi counterparts, and we did, you know, clearance operations, patrols to contact, reconnaissance missions, demo raids. We kind of got full spectrum Frogman activities.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Wow.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. The 228 who is the brigade that was on the ground when we got there, they had pretty much secured the outskirts of the city. And so they were just starting to initiate the idea of pushing into the city.

And it seemed like and as a matter of fact, while my guys before my guys arrived, we were getting word that one of the courses of action was a Fallujah type clearance of Ramadi. And so now I’m like, oh, it’s completely on. Right? It is completely on.

But Maliki, who is the president, just been elected, he said, “I don’t want to do that type of assault on Fallujah because it’ll cause a separation between the Sunnis and the Shias, and this will be a civil war. Is there another way to do it?”

And so this is where when the 1-1 AD showed up, which is the First Brigade, First Armored Division, Ready First Brigade, when they showed up, they had a plan that had been used in Northern Iraq, in Tal Afar to clear the city like a small section at a time. And that’s what we ended up implementing.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that was the right call?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. Yes. I do. Because it would have caused so much destruction in the city that it would have caused mass civilian casualties, displacement of people. It would have been very problematic had we done a Fallujah type clearance of Ramadi.

And I think there actually would have probably been more casualties had we done it that way on the US side. Certainly, on the Iraqi civilian side, it would have been it would have been rough. So I thought it was a good plan.

First Operations

SHAWN RYAN: What was the first operation that you took your task unit on?

JOCKO WILLINK: We started doing some, like, almost immediately some small DAs and stuff like that. Like, I remember the first DA that Leif was going on. And this was we had when we first got there, the first couple weeks, we were still under command of SEAL Team One. So my skipper hadn’t taken over yet. So I had taken over the Ramadi task unit Ramadi space, but my SEAL wasn’t in charge yet.

And so my goal was to do as many missions as we could for the SEAL Team One CO so that my CO would be like, “Jocko knows what he’s doing.” And that’s what we did. And I had a good relationship. I had known the CO from SEAL Team One. And when he came out and I met with him and I kind of presented the case and explained to him what I saw and how we’re going to operate, he was we got along great.

And so when I started running up, you know, missions that we were going to do, he was approving. And that was very cool, and we got very aggressive out of the gate.

And, like, I remember Leif’s first direct action mission, and he may have never done a direct action mission before. And the task, the commander, this thing was pretty close to the front gate. And I’m like, he can go do this thing. And so he’s putting together the plan. And there’s, like, a lot of stuff to organize.

And he came to me, and he’s like, “Hey, bro. I don’t know if we’re going to be ready for this.”

And I’m like, “Bro, you’re going to be fine. You’re totally good to go. You got this.”

And he was like, you know, he trusted me, man. And I trusted him. That’s why I was going. But he looked at me, like, with that kind of, like, okay, if you say so type thing. And he went out and did it. You know? It was all good to go. So we ran some missions like that.

And then what happened was when I met the colonel, Colonel Gronski this is before the 1-1 AD showed up because you’re asking about the first missions that we did. So I had put Tony Eafrati had taken a little sniper element with some Marines and him and some SEALs and a couple Iraqi soldiers out to this area where the Marines had been IED’d and lost Marines in early April.

And so Tony went out there. They’re in overwatch for forty-eight hours or something like that, twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

I go to meet the brigade commander. And as I’m going to meet the brigade commander, I’m walking through his TOC. Like, this is out of a movie. I’m walking through his TOC, and they’re announcing, like, through the radios that the SEALs just engaged two IED emplacers at this location where that IED had taken place.

And I walk into his office, and he goes, “Are those your guys?”

And I’m like, “Yes, sir.”

And he said, “I need you over in Eastern Ramadi.”

And I said, “Roger that, sir. Let me get it fixed.”

The Malawai District Operation

JOCKO WILLINK: Let me get it together. And, you know, we chatted, and he explained to me what was going on. This area called the Malawai District run by the first of the five zero six. Band of Brothers, outstanding, outstanding army unit. I mean, just as awesome as it gets.

They were in control of this or working to get control over this place called Malawai District, and they were just getting annihilated with IEDs. I mean, it was absolutely horrible. And so went back, and I put together a crew to go over to Eastern Ramadi and conduct a massive clearance with them.

So we’re over there for a few days. We’re getting to know the Iraqi troops. We’re planning this big giant operation. And, again, bro, when we’re in the SEAL teams and we think of a big operation, we think of, like, a task unit. Right? Maybe a task unit plus a company of rangers or, you know, a company of maybe a platoon of infantry guys.

When I say big, bro, I’m talking, like, thousands. Whole—not thousands, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers. So we’re planning this operation, and it’s weird. So now we’re talking about what is the headshed doing? Like, so in Ramadi, the leadership had figured or made a decision that they didn’t want any battalion sized operations conducted in Ramadi.

But this clearance was going to take that whole battalion plus to get it done. And they run it up the chain of command. Hey, we want to do this battalion sweep of this area. And it comes back, hey, no battalion sized operations.

So they said, okay. So we took and broke up this battalion sized operation into, like, multiple smaller operations that were company plus sized operations. It’s a little bit of a shell game is what I’m getting at. But it was the mandate that had come down, and the commanding officer of the battalion said, okay, that’s the mandate we got to meet. Here’s how we can maneuver around that and still accomplish the mission. So that’s what we ended up doing.

Planning the First Major Operation

JOCKO WILLINK: And this is the, you know, you’re talking about the first major operation. So this is the first major operation that we’re doing. We’re planning to sweep a certain section of the city first thing in the morning, then we’re going to reset, do another section of the city, then do another section.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean by sweep? Clear. Talking about, like, ground reconnaissance, sniper game, watch?

JOCKO WILLINK: I’m talking the Iraqi soldiers with the U.S. Army, but primarily the Iraqi soldiers in the lead are going to enter every building—

SHAWN RYAN: Holy s*.

JOCKO WILLINK: —in that area. It’s a clearance operation.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JOCKO WILLINK: Meet with the people, see if they have weapons, talk to them about getting atmospherics, and then go to the next building. You go to the next building. You go to the next building. So as they do this, they know that they’re going to get attacked.

So in order to interdict the attacks, and they also know that once you clear a street of IEDs in a matter of hours, they come out and we called it reseeding the IEDs, which is it happens so much that they have a term for it. It’s reseeding the IEDs.

So they know that if we clear a road and get rid of the IEDs, the enemy will come back in and put IEDs. So when we put together this plan, I have a group of SEALs that are going to go with the Iraqi soldiers to help them and do C2 for their clearance operation.

And then I have two elements of SEALs that are going to go out, and one of them is going to overwatch one of these long axis roads, and the other one’s going to overwatch a shorter axis road, but also the Ramadi soccer stadium, which is a staging area for the enemy.

And then I am going to be with the company commander who’s an awesome guy, Joe Claiborne, crazy, crazy Joe Claiborne. I’m going to be with him because he’s helping C2 and the Iraqi soldiers with elements of his company. There’s a lot going on, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. No kidding.

Meeting Joe Claiborne

JOCKO WILLINK: So we launch predawn, and this is another thing. Predawn operation. And we had done—Stoner had taken guys out with Claiborne, with Joe Claiborne, like, few days earlier, and he had gotten a big gunfight. And when they came back, I was standing at the gate waiting for him when they came back, and I, you know, he’s, like, totally impressed.

And I walk with him to his battalion commander. And this guy, this company commander, Joe Claiborne, who’s been in Iraq for four or five months at this point, he’s lost two guys. I think he’s had a bunch of guys wounded. I think at that point, like, twenty percent of his guys have been wounded or killed.

And he goes to the battalion commander, and he says, “I want SEALs with me on every operation I do from here on out.” From one engagement with my guys, he was impressed. And we were—I mean, I was overwhelmingly impressed with him and his guys. They were outstanding.

But that’s how much we hit it off with these guys. And I’ve told him since that that was the best compliment I’ve ever got in my life was when an army company commander goes and tells his battalion commander, “I want SEALs with us on every operation we do from here on out” after just getting in a major engagement.

The Mission Begins

JOCKO WILLINK: So now you fast forward a few days, and we’re going on this mission. And as we’re driving in, it’s eerie. And what the mooj would do is they would light tires on fire. And so you’re rolling into town. It’s black smoke everywhere. There’s fires burning. Very, very eerie as we roll in.

And I already have my sniper elements had inserted at this point. And they were inserting on the mine clearance vehicles. So it’s a pretty sneaky little operation. You know? The mine clearance vehicle goes by. It stops to clear a mine, but then some SEALs get out of the back and go set up an overwatch position. Very cool.

So they’re in position. One by the soccer stadium is in position. The other group gets in their spot, and the building that they had selected was not the way it looked like it was going to look on paper or the way it looked on the overhead imagery. They didn’t have a good view of this long axis road that was going to be utilized for the clearance, which was bad because it was going to get cleared, and then it would be hours before the op started. And now we’d have possible IEDs getting reseeded. That’s a problem. Didn’t want that to happen.

So that element decided to move. And now there’s a lot of time compression. The sun’s starting to come up, and we’re like, as they realize the sun’s coming up, they’re like, oh, we don’t have good visibility of the road that we need. That’s their commander’s intent is to watch this road. They can’t see the road. They decide to move.

As they move, they go into a building that is just outside the limit of advance. And I’m sorry for civilians that I’m talking in military jargon, but there’s a point where the clearance operation was supposed to stop. And so they’re on the other side of—it’s a road. It’s like, okay, the clearance operation, they will not go past this road.

Contact with the Enemy

JOCKO WILLINK: So now as things start to develop, I’ve got my guys, my sniper element over by the soccer stadium. They’re starting to engage enemy. The SEALs that are pushing through, they’re starting to experience resistance, and they’re starting to engage with my little element starting to engage. So there’s a lot of enemy fighters out there.

And at some point, one of the Iraqi elements, which I don’t know why they did this or no one knew that they were going to do this. They had decided that they were going to set their own cordon around the area that was being cleared. So by themselves, they ran from where the clearance was taking place all the way to the limit of advance road, and they went across it to enter the building and set up an overwatch position for themselves. That’s where my guys were.

So one of my guys and, again, there’s so many little details that go into this, but we had seen—they give us intel pictures, and intel pictures have body armor and helmets and AK forty sevens and chocolate chip cammies that the enemy has. So we know that the enemy can be wearing body armor, chocolate chip cammies, helmets, and we know they carry AK forty sevens.

So one of my guys is in that overwatch, and they’re looking out the bottom floor, and they see a guy with an AK forty seven. Again, it’s like not quite NODs time. It’s the worst time of day, dude. And the guy sees a guy with an AK forty seven maneuvering through the courtyard, which they had zip tied the courtyard shut. So this guy had actively entered the courtyard and was now maneuvering, and my guy shot him.

Obviously, looking back, this was one of those Iraqi soldiers that had run up there.

The Blue on Blue

JOCKO WILLINK: So now him and his Iraqi soldiers, and there was a small Marine element that had gone with us, an ANGLICO element, had gone with these guys because the job of the ANGLICO is to keep track of the frontline trace of where friendly forces are. So they see these Iraqi soldiers are off, and they followed them because they’re freaking awesome Marines, and they’re doing their job.

So now they get up to where this guy is, where this small element is, and they’re like, what’s going on? They’re like, hey, you know, broken English. The whole thing is, one of our guys went in that compound. He got shot. And so then what do they do? They all start shooting.

So what we end up with now—we’re now entering the blue on blue. This is a blue on blue happening. And as my guys in the overwatch position are now returning fire at the Iraqis that are dumping down rounds trying to get their guy out of the courtyard, the Iraqis call for the QRF.

So now a QRF launches to go down, and it gets to that corner. Fifty caliber machine gun puts it on the overwatch, my overwatch position. And, again, this overwatch position is Iraqi soldiers and SEALs and starts engaging with fifty cal into this overwatch position.

As this is happening, now my guys call the heavy QRF, which is tanks. And as this happens, I look at the company commander, Joe Claiborne. I’m like, hey, those are my guys calling QRF. Let’s go. Like, follow these tanks down there. Roger that.

So we kind of break contact over here, and we pull out onto that main road. Farouq Way is what it was called. And as we’re driving down this road, I’m looking, and I see the tank, and I see red smoke, which is what we use for emergencies. And I see the tank, and I just as soon as I looked around, I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I knew something. My gut instinct was telling me there’s something—something is wrong.

Discovering the Truth

JOCKO WILLINK: So I get out of the Humvee, and I’m with my SEAL. He’s a great dude. And I look, and I see the gunny sergeant from ANGLICO. And I’m like, well, what’s happening? And he goes, “There’s mooj in that building right there.” He goes, “We’re—he’s like, we’re going to call for fire. Like, we got to take him out.”

I’m like, okay, stand by. Because I didn’t feel comfortable. And looked at my SEAL, gave him, like, the head nod, and he, like, got on my—gave me the squeeze. And I started walking up. And as I’m walking up to this compound, I see a white on the ground and on the door, I see a white zip tie. And I’m like, my guys are in here.

And I kicked the door open. And when I kicked the door open, I saw platoon chief, Tony Eafrati standing there. And he’s, like, stoked to see me because they called the QRF. He’s thinking I’m the QRF. And I go, “What happened?”

And he said, “Hey, guy was coming—guy was coming through the courtyard. We engaged him, and then they brought it.” And I looked at him. I said, “It was a blue on blue.” And he looked at me, like, totally confused. And he said, “Can we get the guys out of here?”

I said, “Yeah.” And we had a one one three was down there as a CASEVAC already. So got the SEALs and the Iraqi soldiers that were in there, put them in the one one three to get them out of there. And Tony stayed with me because Tony’s like—there’s a reason why I said Tony’s, like, top of the list because Tony just got a hundred and fifty rounds shot at him through a fifty cal.

By the way, one of my other guys, Matt Hasby, he got fragged in the face. I don’t—he was so had so accepted his death. It was wild. But Tony, through all that, was just like, “Hey, I’m staying with you, boss.” I’m like, “Check. No factor.”

Those guys go back. And I went up then to the company commander. And same thing. I looked at him and said, “Hey, that was blue on blue.” And he’s same look. Like, what? And I said, “It was a blue on blue.” And he radioed it in.

So and by as soon as I saw that white zip tie, I had figured out what had happened. You know? I like, oh, and I saw the building from the map where my guys were supposed to be, where they were originally planning to be. I knew that while I was at the limit of advance, like, I knew what had happened. And then talking to that ANGLICO guy was like, yeah, the Iraqis pushed down here.

The Aftermath of Blue-on-Blue

JOCKO WILLINK: And I was like, oh. So we finished the clearance, you know, because that’s what you do. Like, there’s still a mission going on. We finished the clearance. And as we finished the clearance, we then we’re now, like, some elements stay out there, but the bulk of the clearance force is now going back to base.

I go back to base, and myself and the company commander go to the same battalion commander that he had just totally won the SEALs with us on all of his operations. And this battalion commander is one of the best guys. But seriously, one of the best leaders I’ve ever met. And he looked at me, and he looked at Joe, and he’s like, “What happened out there?”

And there was a giant battle map, like, literally wallpaper. And I just walked through with him.

I was like, “Hey, sir. I had an element here. I had an element here. My element moved to here. This Iraqi element pushed down. They went past the limited advance. My guys didn’t know who they were, engaged them. They called the QRF. My guys got engaged by the QRF. My guys called the heavy QRF. I came down and made the connection.”

And he was like, and this guy was, you know, he’d been in Ramadi for six months as a battalion commander or five months or whatever it was at that time. I guess they got there in December. Yes. It would’ve been, like, four or five months. He was just awesome. And he was like, “Okay. We learned from that. Don’t let it happen again. We got another mission to do.”

And I was like, “Roger that, sir.”

And so we went, we jocked, went out again, did a whole another operation, got done with that clearance sector. And, again, now everything’s, you know, we didn’t have any more of these things happen. And then we came back, did it again. Boom. Rolled out.

So we end up doing clearances the whole day, engaging all kinds of enemy fighters, the whole nine yards. And then I get back once the last mission is done because these were daytime operations, you know, other than us inserting at night. Once the sun was setting, the Iraqi soldiers can’t clear it at night. So it’s a daytime operation. That’s why.

So I get back, and I open up my field computer. And needless to say, I had some emails and some texts, you know, the webby texts to explain that, “Hey, stand down. Investigation is commencing as to what happened.” I’m like, “Yeah, roger that.”

So we consolidate, and we go back over to Western Ramadi, Camp Ramadi, Camp Mark what we end up calling Camp Mark Lee. And now I’m getting ready to debrief, and my skipper sends me an email like, “Hey. We’ll be out there tomorrow. Be ready to debrief.”

And now I’m trying so now one Iraqi soldier’s dead, multiple Iraqi soldiers wounded, and one of my guys wounded, blue on blue. Dude, it’s a freaking nightmare. It’s a nightmare.

Searching for Who to Blame

JOCKO WILLINK: So I spend the next however many hours trying to figure out who is to blame for this. My assumption is someone’s getting fired. Right? Because you can’t have a blue on blue, and no one gets fired. My assumption is someone’s getting fired. So that’s kind of the question is who’s getting fired.

So I go down the list of, like, the element leader that was in charge of the Iraqi soldiers. Guess what he didn’t do? He didn’t keep control of those soldiers and let them go down and leave the limited advance. The radio man that was in charge of that element that moved positions didn’t tell me or anyone else where he’s going. He just did it. Shooter, shot a guy without doing a good PID. Like, I went down the list and was figuring out who was to blame.

And there was something in my gut that felt so disgusted by my thoughts. And I was probably, you know, a half an hour away from when the CL arrived, and I couldn’t figure out why I felt so disgusted in this debrief.

And it occurred to me like a giant slap upside my head that the reason I felt disgusted is because I was trying to blame people for things that were my fault. Because this operation, like every operation, when you are the senior leader on the battlefield, you’re in charge of everything. And every one of those mistakes that happened are because of me. They’re because of me, because I failed as a leader to convey how important it was to pass your location. I failed to convey as a leader how important the limit of advance was. I failed to convey how important it was to keep control of those Iraqi soldiers. Those things are my fault that that’s happened. Not any one of those guys.

And so when this commanding officer showed up and then the command master chief and the investigating officer, and they’re sitting there in the room with my wounded guy who’s got his head bandaged up it’s Matt Hasby. You know Matt. Right? Matt was my swim buddy in second phase.

So I’m looking at Matt in the back. I mean, it’s only a miracle that he’s alive. Right? He had fifty cal punching through the roof. He’s laying there. He drew out his pistol so he could, like, fend for himself as he got overrun. F*.

So and I will say with that moment when I realized why I felt disgusted, I felt so relieved. Like, oh, you’re an idiot. This is you. And I felt, okay. This is you. This is what you did. You’re in charge. You’re responsible. And this is what the leader does.

Taking Extreme Ownership

JOCKO WILLINK: And so I went in the room and, you know, I asked that question. “Whose fault was this?” And there was a pretty good moment of silence. And then some, you know, someone chimed in. “Well, hey. It was my fault I did this.” And I was like, “No. It wasn’t your fault.” And then the radio said, “No. It my fault.” I said, “No. It wasn’t your fault.”

And whole team was in there.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Everyone in task unit bruiser was in there and the command master chief and the skipper and the investigating officer. And I went around the room and asked, you know, “Whose fault is this?” And everybody, you know, whether it was they wanted to blame the Iraqis, whether they want to take ownership themselves. Everybody was chiming in on whose fault it wasn’t. And I said, “No. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. There’s only one person to blame, and that person’s me.”

And that is the truth. That is the truth. When you are in charge of a team and something goes wrong, it is your fault.

And then I said, “And here’s some things that we’re going to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.” And I started talking about time and space deconfliction. I started talking about how we were going to overly signal. We went through some protocols, but that was it.

And, you know, my boss, who I already had a great relationship with, and the master chief, who’s a great, you know, legendary master chief, those guys, my relationship and trust with them went up in both directions because they understood what they understood what had happened. They understood that I understood.

And I think, you know, if they would’ve they would they would’ve been in their rights to say, “Hey, Jocko. You’re done.” Or they could’ve fired anyone in that long chain of command. I would’ve I would have protested with my own job if they would have tried to fire someone else besides me, but, you know, I had a good relationship with them. They understood how complicated it was. They saw all these little things.

There’s a million other little elements I can tell you about. Like, the fact that Matt Hasby, who was getting shot at with a fifty caliber machine gun, which you’d think, “Hey, dude. You’re getting shot at with a fifty cal. That’s an American weapon. Like, that’s not common.” Well, twelve hours prior to this, he was in a sniper tower, and he got engaged with a DSHCA twelve point seven machine gun by the enemy. And he was he told me he’s literally up there thinking, “I can’t believe these guys of the DSHCA found me again.”

Because otherwise, if you think you’re getting shot at with a fifty cal, you call cease fire, you throw a red smoke, you do something to stop it. He had no idea.

And so that that’s, you know, to the credit of my command master chief and my commanding officer, they listened to me. I listened to them, and we carried on. And that was a very rough way to begin the deployment.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you have any idea how much credibility was boosted within you with your team that day?

JOCKO WILLINK: I don’t know, but I can tell you that you and I have both sat in rooms where some officer blamed someone else other than themselves. And you and I both know that that is disgusting. And that’s what disgusted me. The fact that I was even having those thoughts.

And, you know, part of it was me trying to truly figure out what happened, but part of it was like, oh, yeah. This is you trying to look for someone to blame. There’s no one to blame. You’re in charge.

So, you know, the guys in the troop, the guys in the task unit, like, these guys I’m not a hard person to figure out. I’m not maneuvering in some way. I am who I am, and those guys knew that. And so I think I would have lost a lot of respect. I think I did what they probably expected I was going to do. You know? Maybe some of them were pleasantly surprised, but I think most of them knew me. I think I would have been it would have been very out of character if I had gone in there and blamed someone else. That’s not how it works.

You know, again, this goes back to that platoon commander I had. You know? That guy, he was responsible for everything. When we screwed something up, even when we screwed something up, even when one time one of my friends got in trouble, like, on Liberty, and he wasn’t even there. He wasn’t even there. And he’s like, “Yeah. You know, I should have seen this coming.” I was like, check.

So when things go wrong, you better take ownership of it. And they certainly went wrong in that scenario.

The Reality of Fratricide in Combat

JOCKO WILLINK: And, you know, there’s another the Commodore of group two at the time who was a guy that was a legendary legendary leader in the SEAL teams. And he had been a marine in Vietnam, and he had come in at the tail end of Hue City. And I don’t I can’t remember if I talked to him or if he emailed me. But he said something along the lines of, “Hey, Jocko. I don’t know if you know about me.” Yes. I know about you, sir.

“I was in the tail end of Hue City in Vietnam. I saw” he you know, he was one of those guys that made it very clear that he was not in the battle of Hue City, but he showed up there afterwards or he’s at the tail end of it. And he said, he rattled off the percentage, like a third of the casualties in Hue City were fratricide. That’s just one battle. It’s like this complicated stuff.

And it was the first he was he let me know, like, okay. This stuff, this is war. And by the way, the army, like, battalion commander, blue on blue was a part of Ramadi. You know, we think of in the SEAL teams, and we think of blue on blue, it’s like you’re getting kicked out of the SEAL teams. Like, if you and I are running around with Sam and I shoot you, there’s a decent chance I’m getting get kicked out of the SEAL teams. Like, that’s how much of a mortal sin it is.

And the army and the Marine Corps, they’re like, it’s just, like, we have to mitigate it as much as we can. But if you can’t it can happen. This is part of it. It’s part of it. And it’s a horrible part of it.

And look. We had other blue on blues that potentially could happen. We had shots fired, but we never had it escalate like that one did. And that’s because we learned a lot of lessons from that one. And we prevented all kinds that never escalated at all, that never happened.

But, you know, it’s one of those it’s funny. We in extreme ownership, Leif and I were writing our kind of chapters independently. And it ends up there’s three chapters in there that are about blue on blue. One of them was Chris Kyle with a PID on a guy with a scope weapon. And he’s telling Leif, like, “Hey. I got a guy with a scope weapon in this building. Is there any friendlies in that building?”

And Leif’s calling the company commander, “Hey. Do you got any friendlies in this building?” The guy’s like, “No.” He said, “We got a guy with scope weapon.” He’s like, “Kill him.” Because there’s snipers that are killing Americans.

And Chris, like, didn’t quite feel comfortable. And Leif was like, “Hey. He’s saying we’re cleared” and goes back and forth. And finally, Leif’s like, “Hey. We don’t feel comfortable taking the shot.”

And the guy’s kind of pissed. And this is a great company commander. Guy’s kind of pissed. And he’s like, “Okay. We’ll go clear it.”

Working with Chris Kyle

JOCKO WILLINK: And Leif’s like, “Roger, we got you know, we’ll tell you what we see.” And a few minutes later, the army goes to assault that building, but they come out of the building that they were going to assault. There was a, they didn’t know we miscounted the buildings or they miscounted the building. I forgot what it was, but that right there, man, if Chris could’ve shot one of friendlies, but we had to be so careful about these engagements.

Damn. And then there was another one that I wrote about where we had an element sniper element on a rooftop, and there’s a Bradley fighting vehicle on an intersection. And he calls back like, “Hey, we got, we see bad guys on the building of building forty-eight J or whatever the building was.” And the company commander’s like, “You got any guys on that building?”

I’m like, “Hold on.” I’m like, because it’s, you know, multiple guys with scope weapons on top of a building. I’m like, “Do me a favor. Have the Bradley count the number of buildings he sees till he gets to that target.” And he’s like, “What?”

And I go, “Please.” And he’s like, “Okay.” Says, “Alright. Hey, whatever dash one, count the number of buildings you see before you get to that target building.”

Guy’s like, “What?” He said, “Count the number of buildings.” Counts the number of buildings. Come back. He said, “Hey, we mis-ID’d the number of the building. It’s actually building thirty-two.” Like, “Yeah, we got friendlies on that building. Do not engage.”

So that’s what we were dealing with a lot. And there was cases in Ramadi of people engaging Humvees. Like, there’s probably no vehicle in the world with a more distinct silhouette than a Humvee. And we had guys in, we, there was soldiers and marines that engaged Humvees because of the confusion and chaos of the battlefield. So that’s how we started off with a massive lesson learned.

Taking Ownership and Moving Forward

SHAWN RYAN: With a lesson learned like that and you took ownership of that, I mean, and this is advice for future leaders in war. I mean, how do you brush that off and get your head back in the game?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, what are we going to do to prevent it? You know, like, we got lessons learned. And, you know, I think when you’re shooting head plates and you miss one, if you start thinking about the one that you just missed, you’re going to miss two more. And I think that’s a really important thing to be able to do with other factors in your life of, “Hey, look. This happened. It went bad. We need to fix it.”

We need to fix it, and we need to move on. If you live in the past on stuff, without, you know, you learn from it, but you can’t, you know, it’s like I say about when you, with losing people. You lose someone like your friend, your parents, your brother, your sister, whoever, someone close to you dies, you gotta remember them, but you can’t dwell in the past. You can’t just be there forever because then you’re not moving forward.

So I think it’s the similar activity here from my standpoint is like, “Okay, this is what we did wrong. These are the lessons that we learned, and here’s how we move forward.”

SHAWN RYAN: Did you feel any type of reluctancy to address your men as their leader again after that? Immediately after that?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. No. I was really close with these guys, you know, up and down the chain of command. These guys had, we did a workup together. They’ve seen me in every different type of scenario. These are my brothers. We had great relationships. You know?

So I wasn’t, if I would have blamed one of these guys, I would have been ashamed to show my face. You know what I mean? But they were more like, “Hey, this wasn’t your fault.” Like, “Yes, it was.” Like, they’ve tried to re-explain to me. You know?

Well, the other thing is they’re all thinking he’s got our fing back. That’s really definitely one of the most important attributes of a good leader is knowing that your guy, your boss, has your fing back.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

Having Your Team’s Back

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes, it is absolutely. And you gotta know that they have your back. And this is, you know, this is one of those things where it turns into, or you have to watch out. Because if you work for me and your impression of me that I give you is that no matter what you do, I’ll cover for you, now we get into a bad zone.

Because you have to know that if you do something that’s immoral, illegal, or unethical, I’m not going to have your back. Now if you explain to me what happened and what went wrong and you had a what we learned from the army, which is a good shot, bad result, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.

But if you are doing things that are illegal, immoral, unethical, you need to know that I will not have your back. And even something, even this isn’t that extreme, but I would tell guys, “Hey, you get a DUI. It doesn’t matter what I do to your back because it’s going to be in the system, and you’re going to get in trouble, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Like, there’s nothing I can do.”

Like, I can go and be a character witness and tell the Commodore how great you are, but the Commodore’s going to go, “Oh, yeah. You had a DUI. You’re getting busted down, and you were pulling up from your platoon.” And I have, it doesn’t matter how much I have your back. That’s what’s happening.

So, yes, you’re right. But as a leader, you’ve gotta put those parameters up to make sure that guys understand what the left and right lateral limits are. And they can be big, but they’re not infinite. And that’s why I need to know that you have my back. Because if you’re out doing something that you shouldn’t be doing, what are you doing to me, man?

Because I am going to, you’ll, I’m going to get take the fall as well. It’s not like I’m just going to be like, “Oh, no. He did it.” Because I am responsible. You do something stupid or you do something illegal and you get rolled up, I’m going down too as I should because I let it happen.

So, yes, hundred percent. And these guys knew that. These guys knew that. That is how we have to operate. And luckily for me, like I said, I did that tour as the admiral’s aide. I understood what those left and right lateral limits were. I understood that very well. And that was a real blessing because there were no, there wasn’t really any ambiguity about that.

If you do something that’s outside the box, I will not have your back. Anything you do inside the box and like I said, it’s a big box. A big box. I got you. But you better be doing good things, at least with the best intent.

And are mistakes going to happen? Yeah, man. They are going to happen, especially in a combat zone. Like, are civilians going to get killed in the combat zone? Yes. They are. Are the wrong breaches going to happen to the wrong building? Yep. They’re going to happen.

These, there are things that are going to happen, and I will have your back as long as your intent was good, as long as you were doing the right thing for the right reasons all day. And, yeah, my guys knew that for sure. And I knew that with them.

Chris Kyle’s Character

SHAWN RYAN: How was it working with Chris Kyle?

JOCKO WILLINK: Great. Yeah. It’s great. He was a very dedicated sniper. He was a wise ass. He was funny as hell. He was a shit talker in, like, a good team guy way, and he was just a great guy to having a platoon. Yeah, man.

Like, you’d see him and Tony looking at imagery for hours trying to figure out what building would be best, looking at the angles, looking at the distances, looking at the long axis. Like, that’s what they did. And, you know, he was good, man. He was good.

He would spend, you know, a long time on his gun in sniper overwatch positions. And he would set himself up for some good positions. You know what I mean? Like, he would set himself up on some long axis positions where he can see four or five blocks. And meanwhile, like, new guy sniper might see half of an alley.

So but he earned that position. You know? He earned it with his patience and his discrepancy. Like, he was very, very good. He was good as it gets.

SHAWN RYAN: Was he good at passing on wisdom?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. You know, I’d say I was a little bit out of the line of fire of him passing on wisdom because I wasn’t a sniper. But, you know, he pass on some hassling to these new guys. I can tell you that.

The funny thing is, you know, they, he liked to do this is weird, but he liked to do, like, pranks, like a grade school kid. Like, he would prank people, do funny stuff. Like, that’s what he’s like. So he wasn’t that, you know, in the movie, they make him out to be, like, super serious all the time and all this stuff. And he was actually just a funny, great guy to be around that brought a lot of entertainment with him. You know? A lot of entertainment.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

SEAL Platoon Brotherhood

JOCKO WILLINK: And we had, you know, and we had a good crew of guys that was, you know, that’s a SEAL platoon, man. It’s a SEAL platoon. I guess they’re SEAL platoons where they’re not, like, having fun and ribbing each other and, you know, being brothers. But I was never in a platoon like that. I was always in a platoon that was freaking awesome to hang around.

And, you know, when I was a young SEAL, what I do on the weekends? I went to the team. You went to the team on the weekends. Went to team on Saturday and worked on your gear. Worked to, went to the team on Sunday and worked out with your buddies. That’s all we did. That’s what we did because there wasn’t anything else.

And once I had a family, I had to, like, at least take a little bit of time. But even then, I was, my family was second to my platoon, to my task unit, to the teams. I would love to tell you that I’m embarrassed to admit that or that that’s not the right thing. But when you’re in the SEAL teams, I think that is the thing.

SHAWN RYAN: That is f*ing way it is, man.

JOCKO WILLINK: That’s the way it is. And, you know, god bless my wife who was just like a saint, but she handled the family stuff, and I handled the war stuff.

Balancing Family and Service

SHAWN RYAN: Were you married at this time?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. So going to Ramadi, I had three kids at that time.

SHAWN RYAN: You had three kids?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: How are you handling the, I mean, how was, how long, how many deployments had you done married with kids and or with kids?

JOCKO WILLINK: Two. Well, no. One. Three. Three. So my daughter was born, my oldest daughter was born the day before I went on to strike deployment at team two. She was born and I left. Never changed a diaper.

And then while I was in college, I had two more kids because I was home. And then, and yeah. I mean, I was in the SEAL teams, man. Like, we go on deployment. We go to war. And you want to be with your kids, but you’re not going to be with your kids in the SEAL teams. It’s not a good, it’s not a good family environment.

Now if you have a strong family, you know, men have been going, you know, on some form of deployment since the beginning of time. You said this at breakfast, and I f*ing love this. I mean because I hear sometimes people like, “Oh, you know, the father’s gotta be around.” Like, I wasn’t around. You know? And a lot of dads weren’t around, and they raised some awesome kids.

And so, yeah, guys have been going on the hunt, on the sea voyage, on the crusade. Whatever you’re going on, men have been going on that stuff for a long time. And the kids understand that, and the moms understand it, and they raise warriors.

The Secret to a Successful Marriage

SHAWN RYAN: How long have you been married?

JOCKO WILLINK: I think twenty-eight years.

SHAWN RYAN: What is the secret to a successful marriage?

JOCKO WILLINK: There’s a couple, but number one is marry, like, a pretty awesome woman. And then, you know, just apply the principles of leadership to your marriage. You know? It’s the same principles that you want your wife to listen to you, you better listen to her. You want your wife to trust you, you better trust her. You want your wife to respect you, you better treat her with respect. You want your wife to care about you, you better care about her. You do, if something goes wrong, you better take ownership.

So that’s worked out great for me. And my wife’s a saint. My wife’s a saint.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sure she is.

The Reality of Combat in Ramadi

JOCKO WILLINK: You know, when you were asking me about the pressure on my first deployment to Iraq, and I told you that I didn’t really feel this wasn’t the idea of someone getting wounded or killed was kind of a little bit of a distant thing in the back of my mind. And in Ramadi, it was front of mind.

And when you see that many casualties happening, like, on a daily basis, there is the odds are going to catch you. And, of course, do you hope am I fatalistic? Because that was my thought process. Maybe. But it was also just numbers, man. It was just the numbers. You just look at the numbers.

And every day, every time you leave the wire, there is a chance. And so it’s a daily basis. And listen, the Army and the Marine Corps are just making the most incredible sacrifices. You see it. You go to their memorials. You hear it on the radio.

That’s one thing that was, you know, you’d hear it on the radios. You’d hear, “Hey, there’s one KIA heading back to Camp Ramadi,” heading to or “three wounded heading to Charlie Med.” Like, you would hear these things. It’s just constant. This is daily. Daily.

So and, you know, I try and give as much admiration to the Army and the Marine Corps who fought so hard in such terrible conditions. And that’s what they were facing every day, and that’s what we were facing.

Early Casualties

JOCKO WILLINK: And we had the blue on blue happen. Almost pretty quickly thereafter, got wounded bad. And, you know, Cowie is just a stud. And he’s in Charlie Med. He’s all doped up on morphine. The doc pulls me aside, and he’s like, “Hey, I don’t know if his leg’s going to make it.”

Roger. And Cowie, like, I, you know, bend over to, like, hold his hand, and he’s like, the first thing’s out of his mouth, “Let me stay.”

Damn. So that’s the kind of guys you got. You know? “Let me stay.”

Combat Outposts as Strategic Bait

JOCKO WILLINK: So, you know, this is once the 1-1 AD shows up with Colonel McFarland, later General McFarland, you know, that’s when we start pressing in to the city. That’s when we start supporting these combat overwatch or the, yeah, these combat outposts being built in the city, which is a huge construction project.

And there’s a time period when they’re building these combat outposts in the city that they’re extremely vulnerable because they’re doing a construction project in the middle of a war zone. And so what can we do to help that is we can set up sniper overwatch positions. And when the enemy would maneuver in to attack them, we would kill them.

And it was actually General McFarland. He wrote it in an article. It’s like those combat outposts being built were bait. You know? He didn’t put them out there as bait. He put them out there on the grand strategy of taking over the city, but he’s like a salt lick. Mhmm.

You know, you start building this construction project in the middle of downtown Ramadi. The insurgents are absolutely going to attack you. And when they do, my guys would be in an offset position two hundred meters away, three hundred meters away, four hundred meters away, looking down a long axis avenue of approach where the insurgents would come, and they’d kill them. And it was, you know, an ideal setup for us.

Scrutiny from Command

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. And it was when we started doing this, like, this the amount of the amount of scrutiny for the 1-1 AD, for General McFarland, you know, he was getting scrutinized on the amount of combat that his guys were getting, the amount of casualties, and the amount of killing that he was doing. He was getting that scrutiny from his from the from the MEF.

And I was feeling the same thing. And it was always like, “Please come see. Come and see. Come and see what’s happening here.” You’ll it doesn’t take long to figure out. And, thankfully, you know, they did.

You know? I had the SEAL assault force commander, who’s a great guy at the time, you know, came down, visited. The, you know, the Commodore visited. The SOCOM commander visited. You know, General Brown, SOCOM commander. He came to see us in Ramadi.

We got thirty-five SEALs, bro. He’s in charge of all of the world of special operations. He came to Ramadi to see what we were doing to talk to the conventionals, make sure that they were getting what we needed. So there was a lot of eyes on what we were doing. And part of that was because of the amount of people we were killing. And part of it was because they were very risky operations.

SHAWN RYAN: Can I I’m going to ask a question?

JOCKO WILLINK: Mhmm.

SHAWN RYAN: You’d been studying this. You’ve been studying Ramadi since before you got there. You know, SEALs have, what, year and a half workup? You started studying sounds like I think you would have did you say maybe you maybe found out six months in the workup that you were going to Ramadi?

JOCKO WILLINK: No. We didn’t know we were going to Ramadi until, like, a couple weeks before.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Yep. Well, you’re talking about doing dailies, weeklies, monthlies of troops in contact, casualties. You’ve studied you’ve you’ve studied this fing battle space. It’s very obvious. It’s hot. Why are you why would anybody be under scrutiny for the amount of combat that they’re seeing when they want you to incrementally take over a fing city? That makes zero sense to me.

Understanding the Scrutiny

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yep. And, again, it wasn’t just me in special operations. General McFarland was feeling the same thing. Mhmm. And, again, just like General McFarland had a great relationship with the MEF commander, I had a great relationship with my commanding officer.

And so when I explained to him what was happening, you know, we started probably a few weeks, like, three weeks into these sniper overwatches that we were doing. This is early in deployment. And we killed, I don’t know, how many probably, I don’t know, ten, fifteen something, mostly IED emplacers.

And I talked to my headquarters, and they’re like, “Hey, you know, you’re killing these IED emplacers, but the IEDs haven’t gone down yet.”

And I said, “Hey, sir. The average insurgency, according to the counterinsurgency manual, lasts seven years. It’s been three weeks. Can I get some more time to work?”

And he’s like, “Yeah. Check.”

But, yeah, I mean, it it well, you know what it’s like. You know what it was like for a SEAL rotation at the time. You know, you you went to Iraq. Right? There’s not a lot of direct enemy contact. Mhmm. And there’s not a lot of killing most of the time. You’re doing DAs. They don’t want to fight.

Do they get killed sometimes? Yes. But most of the time, they don’t really want to fight. So they surrender, and you capture them. The capture-kill part is mostly capture. For me and my first one, it was almost all capture. Killed very few.

Well, now you’re in this zone where there’s enemy that are, like I said, like us going to a salt lick. They are maneuvering through the streets, and we’re in locations with tactical advantage that we selected with long axis down multiple roads, you’re going to start killing a lot of enemy fighters. And it was abnormal. It was abnormal.

And so, you know, the scrutiny came, but I welcomed it. It’s no factor. Hey, you know, we had this we had to have guys sign a shooter statement for everybody that we killed. There was, like, a sworn shooter statement.

And at first guys, like, “Well, you know, why we got to do this?”

It’s like, “Hey, because in five years or ten years or fifteen years or twenty years, someone’s going to come back and say, this person died here. Who did it? And we’ll say either, oh, yeah. That was us because this is why, or no. That wasn’t us.”

So I again, luckily for me that I had seen the officer side of things, I understood that. Mhmm. And I was able to explain it to the guys. Explain it to the guys like, “Hey, there’s a reason we’re seeing this scrutiny. It’s because we’re killing a lot of bad guys, and they the chain of command needs to make sure that we’re doing the right thing for the right reasons. We are. And they see that.”

And we got, man, we got such great support from the SEAL assault force, from my chain of command, from the special operations chain of command, for sure. Like I said, General Brown came out. And and by the way, the Army and the Marine Corps was, like, epic.

You know, I’ve had the colonel that was in charge, General Sean McFarland had him on my podcast. And, you know, like, you can tell it was as good as it gets.

Daytime Operations

JOCKO WILLINK: And so, yeah, there’s there’s scrutiny because you’re killing a lot of bad guys, and there’s also scrutiny because these are risky freaking operations. And, you know, a big one was going out in the daytime. Why would you give up the tactical advantage of going out at night, which we have? Because we got night vision. We got lasers, whole nine yards. Why would we make that mistake?

Well, there’s a bunch of reasons. You know? There’s a bunch of reasons. Number one, our mission from the SEAL assault force was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. So that means we are supposed to train them and go and fight with them.

Company and platoon sized elements, not special mission units, not DA units, company and platoon sized elements of infantry soldiers. That’s what we’re supposed that’s what our task was. We put together some scouts. We put together some special mission units, but that was our task.

They don’t have night vision. They didn’t even have flashlights. We used to give, like, a fire team of Iraqis a flashlight. So for them to do a clearance operation at night was, like, just a nonstarter. So that means they’re going to go out in the day. Well, since we’re training and fighting them, guess who’s out in the day? We are.

So now since I got my guys out in the field during the day, I want to protect them. So what am I doing? Overwatch positions. What time is it? Daytime.

And by the way, we killed ninety-nine percent of the enemy was during the daytime. Because at nighttime, the enemy came out a lot less.

So that and, again, one of the one of the big mistakes that I made was I never really explained that outside of my chain of command. Like so to the teams at large, most of the guys go, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, here’s what we’re doing.”

“Think, oh, cool. Cool.”

Occasionally, you get a guy, like, that doesn’t know what was happening, doesn’t know how bad it was, couldn’t conceive a reason to go out in the daytime, or couldn’t conceive how it’s possible to kill that many enemy fighters, bro. They are everywhere.

And so I should have done a better job of communicating that aspect of things, but I didn’t really recognize it because my chain of command, I they knew. And most of the, you know, the people that were around me that were actually talking to me, they they would be like, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense. We get it.”

Include like I said, including the chain of command on both special operations side and the conventional side.

The Wounding of Ryan Job

JOCKO WILLINK: But you’re going into these areas, and the Army’s taking casualties, the Marine Corps taking casualties. And I know that at some point, we’re going to take casualties. And the we, you know, we like I said, we had a couple guys wounded. Cowie was wounded bad.

But on August second, that’s when Ryan Job got got wounded severely. And, you know, he was shot in the face. And I know when you had when you had Leif on the podcast, Leif gave you a pretty detailed description.

But you had, you know, a guy like Ryan Job who I had his parents on my podcast. Just man, you can’t you can’t even describe just what a being of light. You know, just tough, funny. Like, we’ll literally do anything for you. Just as good as they come.

And he gets shot. Thankfully, he was had his weapon right up in his cheek well where he’s supposed to have it, you know, three hours into a clearance operation on a rooftop, and he still is a disciplined machine gunner. He has his weapon up in his cheek well, and he single shot hits his rifle hits his machine gun and hits him in the face and just devastating damage to his face.

And Leif, you know, they they CASEVAC him. And this kind of initiates one of the larger battles in the battle of Ramadi was was on August second.

And Leif and his guys go back to COP Falcon, which is a combat outpost. And we have a great relationship with the 1-37 in place great friends with their company commander Mike Bayema, and I’m great friends with Colonel Tedesco.

And now they’re they’re starting to take heavies out there in the field. It’s a big gunfight, and Leif gets Brian CASEVACed, and it didn’t look good. Although he did stabilize, but, you know, Leif did not think he was going to make it for a bit.

And these guys are back there, and the Army, our brothers in the Army said, “Hey, we we’re taking contact from some of these buildings. We think this is where these insurgents are. Can you help us?”

And, you know, Leif called me on the on the radio, and he’s like, “Hey, here’s what’s happening. The Army needs our help. They want us to go hit some buildings.”

And I’m like, “You good?”

He said, “I’m good. Mike, execute.”

The Battle Continues

And they went out to hit those buildings. And, you know, it’s already, like I said, one of the biggest battles. And, you know, Leif and Tony and, you know, Tony was the platoon chief down there and there’s no hesitation for any of boys roll out. They softened up the target with the Brads, you know, twenty-five millimeter chain gun. And I think they went in the first building and cleared it.

The second building they go into, and they take fire from an adjacent building. And Mark Lee, who’s another guy that’s just all good, like, in his whole being, in his soul, he’s good. Then he gets shot and killed.

And I was actually in the TOC, and I’m watching this happen. Watching this happen, and I see them carrying on ISR. I see them carrying a guy out. And one of the guys in the TOC is like, “Maybe it’s an Iraqi.” And I actually knew that it wasn’t because I knew that Leif didn’t have any Iraqis with him, so I knew it was one of our guys.

And Leif gets back to COP Falcon. He calls me up, and he told me what happened. He said, “We have one KIA.” And I said, “Who?” And he said, “Charlie one four.” I’m sorry, man. So they got their guys together, you know, and came back to base.

The Angel Flight

And General Brown had come to visit. He came to visit on August 2nd. That was just when the scheduled visit was. He came to the flight line for the angel flight.

And earlier that morning, you know, one of the Marine elements that we work with from three-eight, there was a fourth platoon. I think it was Lima Company. And Tony and Leif and those guys had done a bunch of operations with them and gotten to know them and their assistant platoon commander or their platoon commander. You know, he was kind of growing out friends with Tony because Tony’s Tony. You know?

And, you know, it’s weird. I heard this story from both guys at a later time, but when Tony gets up there and he sees the platoon commander from fourth platoon, and he’s like, “Dang, they must have heard about Mark.”

And the platoon commander told me later that he saw Tony, and he said, “Dang, they must have heard about Joe.” Because that morning, Joe Tompsey from three-eight, he was killed.

Wow.

So SEALs, Marine, and Army, we stood there on that flight line and loaded those boys up to go home.

The War Doesn’t Stop

And the war doesn’t stop. And that was a shortfall for the SEAL teams out of the nineties. You know, you think you do an operation and when, you know, when the operation’s over, it’s over. And if you lose a guy, well, it doesn’t really, I mean, it matters, but the operation’s over. But we never really thought about that. And guess what? The army and the Marine Corps, they understood that. We had to learn that immediately.

SHAWN RYAN: How are you holding it together?

JOCKO WILLINK: I had to focus on the job. You know, I had to focus on work. We did the memorial service. Told some stories about Mark at the memorial service.

We were in Vegas, and he was like a maniac dude. Just hilarious. He’s gambling. And he would like, I’d walk through the casino, and I’d see him gambling. He’d be like, “Hey, sir. When are the new Cadillacs coming out? I’m winning big over here.” Like, he was just that guy.

And or if you’re playing blackjack with him and the dealer would bust, you know, he’d yell out, “Everybody’s the winner,” and he’d get the whole casino saying that stuff. So we got to tell some stories about Mark.

Back to Work

And then I also remember that day, Seth, he had an operation planned on Eastern Ramadi. And this was like the day Mark got killed before the memorial service, and he sent me like a text message. Sends me a message like, “Hey, we’re not going to do this operation tonight.”

And I was like, “Hey, you’re good to go, man. Like, I understand that, like, chain of command. Don’t worry. I got it. Like, you’re clear to go.”

And he’s like, “No. No. We’re not going to do it.”

And I said, “No. No. You’re cleared. Like, you can do it.”

And he called me on the field phone. He’s like, “Hey, bro. Like, I don’t want to take the guys out right now.”

I was like, “Oh, got it.”

He’s like, “Guys aren’t in the mental state. We need twenty-four hours.”

But, again, for Seth Stone to be so in tune with his guys, recognizing, like, they’re not in a good psychological position to go out. So he calls me up and tells me, like, it’s a no go. Like, that’s leadership.

And, you know, it’s just devastating, man. It’s devastating because, again, Mark, you know, we didn’t, we seemed like Ryan was going to live, you know, and we didn’t really know he was going to be blind yet, but it seemed like he would live. And but, Mark, you know, this is, again, just a terrible, indescribable loss.

And when you talk to the Army guys too, it hit all them. Because we were getting after it. You know? And like I told you earlier, when something happened there on the radio, like, everyone would kind of hear it. You might not hear it directly, but if you’re in my platoon and you hear reports, and if I’m an Army guy and you’re my platoon sergeant and I hear, “Oh, we just got mortared an hour ago,” and then I hear on my radio, “Hey. SEALs just took out,” or it’s like, “TQ Ramadi engaged three mortar men with mortar tubes with three rounds of seven-three hundred Win Mag resulting in three EKIA.” Bro, I’m going right over you. I’m like, “Hey. The SEALs just whacked those dudes,” and that happened a lot.

And, you know, we had been very lucky, and we had been very lucky for months. And so talking to the Army guys, you know, when Mark got killed, it was like the invincibility was shattered.

But the war does continue. And so we stood down for, like, a day, did the memorial service the next day. And then we got her back on.

SHAWN RYAN: F*, man. As a leader, what do you say to your men for them to keep it together?

JOCKO WILLINK: I told them the truth, and that was that I did not know what to do except for one thing: work. And I knew that every day that we weren’t doing our job, there was going to be soldiers and Marines that were going to pay the price for it.

And I knew a hundred percent that what Mark would want us to do would be go. Go. Go and fight.

And by the way, Mark’s brother’s a Marine. And by the way, Ryan Job’s brother’s a Marine. Like, you don’t think that they want us to go out there and do everything we can? Seth Stone’s brother’s in the Army. Like, this is, we, there was only one thing to do.

Do I know, did I know how to mourn? Did I know how to say the right thing about loss and death and life and all those things? No. I’ll tell you what. I told them exactly, “I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is what I know how to do, and that’s work. We’re going to go back to work, and we’re going to take the fight to these mooj. I want to kill as many of them as we can.”

SHAWN RYAN: With as much loss as you’ve experienced up to this day, would you have changed anything? Would you have told them anything different?

JOCKO WILLINK: Maybe. But I don’t know that there’s anything else to do in a situation like that. I could tell them what we were talking about earlier, like, remember don’t dwell and that kind of stuff, but these are, you know, we’re all very focused at this time on what’s happening. Very, very focused on what’s happening.

And so I don’t know what the broader, you know, life impact of that, you know, could I say some philosophical thing? I don’t think so, man. I think I actually said the philosophical thing. We’re going to get back to work. We get our gear on. We’re going to lock and load our weapons, and we go do what we’re supposed to do because we’re frogmen.

I can’t think of anything better to say, to be honest with you.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. We’re frogmen.

JOCKO WILLINK: This is what we do. This is who we are. This is what every one of us signed up for. This is it.

Marc Lee’s Legacy

SHAWN RYAN: Do you want to talk about Cowie?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, Cowie, he was home, man. Cowie, you know, like I said earlier, he said, “Let me stay.” And I was like, “Bro, go heal up.” And, you know, he wasn’t going to heal up, not in four more months or five more months. His, dude, he took a freaking armor-piercing round to the femur. There was chunks of leg gone.

Like, it’s a miracle he kept his leg. Props to the Charlie Med, the docs that worked on him, and all the people at Walter Reed or wherever else, Bethesda. Like, they kept his leg, man.

But, you know, it’s terrible for Cowie because he didn’t, Cowie wasn’t there. You know? And, dude, he wanted to be there. You know? He wanted to be there. He would’ve given anything to be there. Yeah.

The Burden of Command

And then, you know, you get Leif. Leif, just the same responsibility that I talked about when it comes to taking ownership of things. Well, there’s Leif, man. And Leif is taking ownership of having one of his guys severely wounded and having one of them killed.

And me too. Like, this is us. I approved all these operations. I came up with this whole damn idea. And Leif called me, “Can we go?” And I said, “Yes.” Leif came up with this idea, and I said, “Yes.” And this is on us. That’s the way it is, man. That’s the burden of command. That’s the way it is.

And Leif was devastated, of course. Leif was completely devastated. And, you know, when he talked to me about it, you know, he said something along the lines of, like, “I don’t know, I don’t know if I made the right decision in going back out there.”

And I told him there was no decision to make. That’s not a decision. There are Army brothers that have gone out over and over again to pull us out of bad situations, and these fellow Americans are asking for our help. That is not a decision. That is what we do. That is what we do, and we do it every time.

You ever talk to Vietnam guys? Vietnam guys, if it was a platoon in trouble or a downed pilot, they were going. Same thing with the Seawolf pilots, by the way. SEAL platoon in trouble, they’re going. That’s what they’re doing.

And when our Army brothers are asking us for help, we go. That’s not a decision. That is duty. That is being a frogman.

And I also told him if we had a crystal ball and we could tell when something bad was going to happen, of course, we wouldn’t do that thing, whatever that thing was, but we don’t have a crystal ball. And combat is inherently freaking dangerous.

And Leif understood that. Leif understood that. It didn’t make it any easier for his soul, for his heart that was broken, but he understood. He understood that that’s what Mark, you know what? I was talking to Mark’s mom the other day.

And Mark has had a huge impact now. America’s Mighty Warriors, like, is incredible organization that’s helped out so many, not just SEALs, but other people. And she’s, you know, she said, you know, “If I could talk to Mark and Mark had a chance to go back and not sacrifice his life on that day, but none of this other stuff would have happened, he wouldn’t come back.”

I’m like, “I know.” So this is what we do. This is what we sign up for, and that’s part of being a frogman.

And, look, we had some, you know, we had the eighties and the nineties. And, man, like, there was nothing going on. And Mark was the first, you know, Mark was the first SEAL killed in Iraq.

And, again, you’d like, why? Well, look at the battle space, man. Look at the battle space. It was a complete war zone. Why did the one-one AD lose that many guys? Why did the first of the five-zero-six lose that many guys? Why did the one-three-seven? Why did the three-eight Marines, like, just losses? Why? Well, it was a freaking war zone, man.

Continuing the Mission

And the war didn’t stop. So it was back to operations. And that’s what we did. Got our gear back on, locked and loaded our weapons, and back to the field. Back to conducting these operations. You know?

And as far as what did we change, we were, we honestly, there was after that one, it was like, we were so used to the city. You know? My first deployment to Iraq, we went all over the place. We went all the way from Najaf down south all the way to Haditha up north. We went east of Baghdad, west of Baghdad. We went out to Ramadi. I was all over the place.

This whole deployment, I only left Ramadi one time to, like, go to Balad for one meeting the first three days, four days of deployment, and I was back in the whole time. So we knew what was going on. And so we continued to push.

And, you know, the guys, every one of those guys, night after night, day after day, jocked up, getting in a Humvee, driving past the damn vehicle graveyard that had seventy-five or a hundred destroyed vehicles in it from IEDs. Out again. Out again. Out again. The Army, the Marine Corps, and us. It’s the way it was.

SHAWN RYAN: F*, man. Jocko, what were you awarded the Silver Star for?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, just this deployment.

SHAWN RYAN: The whole deployment?

The End of Deployment and the Anbar Awakening

JOCKO WILLINK: Basically, this deployment. Yeah. How did the deployment end? Well, we continued to push operations. We continued to eliminate enemy fighters.

We saw the beginning of the Anbar Awakening, which was an incredible process that took place. And, again, as General McFarland and I talked about it for a long time on the podcast I did with him. But the local populace began to turn against the insurgents, which was the goal.

And as this happened, we started seeing, you know, intel would come in that there’s enemy fighters in this area or there’s an enemy fighter in this area or there’s a group of IED makers over here. So we started pushing. When I say we, like coalition forces, we started really pushing and taking it to the enemy. We had started really pushing some good operations and eliminating a lot of bad guys.

And we were getting towards the end of deployment. And, you know, man, I’m talking about my guys, but there are so many stories. You know? There was so much loss there and so much heroism there. You’re hearing one person. I’ve had a bunch of guys on my podcast that were everybody from brigade commander, company commanders, battalion commanders, and gunners and medics to tell their little tiny part of the story. Their little tiny part of the story. You know?

The brigade reconnaissance element. Dan Pinion, he was like the sergeant major. And, like, they had the heaviest casualties of any group, any company-sized element. He had a guy named Marquis Quick that jumped on a grenade to save some of his other teammates. And, like, it kind of just happened and almost got overlooked. And they’re trying to get him the Medal of Honor now.

But that’s one and I didn’t know about that. I didn’t know about that until he came on my podcast and told me about it. And I didn’t know about it. So my point in saying all this, man, is I’m giving you, like, a little fraction of my view, and I had forty SEALs in Ramadi.

And I just want you and everybody to know that there were companies and platoons from the Army and the Marine Corps that were out there all day every day, and they were taking the fight to the enemy. And they did an outstanding job, and they suffered insane casualties over and over and over again.

And I’ve tried to tell as many people as I can about that. There’s a reunion coming in Texas, January 16th, 2026, the twenty-year reunion of Ramadi. January 16th and 17th. But I hope that as many people that were there can go to that.

SHAWN RYAN: That is f*ing cool.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. And it’s General McFarland is leading it. And there was just so much heroism in that city. And to be able to witness some of it with my guys and with other groups. It was just it was it was it’s amazing to look back on. So much sacrifice and such, you know, such incredible Americans.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. It’s humbling to think about.

The Final Operations

JOCKO WILLINK: And so as this deployment for us is now starting, we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And one of the things that I did on my last deployment, I always figured I never would tell someone like, “Hey, this is the last op,” because I think that’s, like, bad luck. I didn’t want them to freak out. I didn’t mind bad luck, but I didn’t want everyone else to feel bad luck.

So we were getting kind of towards the end of deployment. And Seth, who, you know, is just incredible. And he’s out there, and he’s in Corregidor, and his guys. And they do an operation in support of the 1st of 506, who, again, can’t say enough good stuff. Can’t say enough good things about the 1st of 506, the battalion commander, their company commanders, their company sergeants, their E-dogs. I mean, just awesome.

And I think part of this is when you get into, like, a real fight like this, dude, everyone is just, like, wants to help out. And if you can help out, I’m thankful. And Seth and his guys had been out there with the 1st of 506 for pretty much the entire deployment for them.

And they plan an operation, set up two overwatch positions, mutually supporting overwatch positions down in the Malaab district, South Malaab district. And Seth was in one overwatch position, and the other overwatch position got attacked. It got attacked. They were getting attacked through the morning, you know, like RPGs, small arms fire. Things are starting to escalate.

And somebody through dead space, like, got close enough to throw a grenade and threw a grenade. And Mikey Monsoor, who, again, just as solid as they come, man. As solid as they come. He saw the grenade, yelled out “grenade.” The way he was positioned on that rooftop, he was the one that could have gotten away from it. He could have left his guys exposed, but instead, he jumped on it.

Mikey Monsoor’s Sacrifice

JOCKO WILLINK: The other guys were wounded bad, though, and called over to Seth, and Seth assembled his guys, left his Iraqis there, left their gear there, just brought their, you know, their primary kit, rolled over, fought their way to that position, and then, you know, got that under control, organized, and got them out and got back to base Camp Corregidor.

And then Seth had to take some of his guys that could still function mentally back to get the Iraqis and back to get the gear. So, you know, Seth just stepping up, and it was the battalion commander. He called me up and told me, hey. He told because I could hear what was happening over the radio. But once they were out of the field, he called me and he said, gave me a sit rep on the guys.

One guy was, like, pretty good to go. Two guys were wounded. They’re going to get medevaced. He said he didn’t think Mikey was going to make it. He said they were doing CPR on him. He didn’t think he was going to make it. And he was right.

So it was I mean, immediately I immediately knew that he jumped on the grenade. And I talked to the guys once they got to Germany, the guys that had been Casevaced. And they told me, you know, and they were, like, sending me sketches of what happened immediately. And so it was like not as clear of a Medal of Honor action that you could think of.

And luckily, like I said for Dan Pinion and his guy, Marquis Quick, they were in the middle of deployment. You know, for me, we were almost done. So started putting that award together.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you write that award?

JOCKO WILLINK: Seth did. And he got the input from Mike and Doug who were like and Benny who were the guys that were saved. And, yeah, he started writing, and then I I mean, I chopped it, edited it, or whatever. But, yeah, it was do you know? And talking to Mikey’s sister, he’s like, I mean, many conversations over the years, but one of the things that always stuck with me was she was just like, it was not a surprise.

Meaning, like, that’s Mikey. Someone a surprise. I think he’s gonna what do you think he’s going to do? Save his teammates or save himself? We weren’t surprised by it.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s f*ing incredible, man.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. I mean, the families of those guys are just all just amazing people. And, you know, that maybe a day later, Seth had to come he needed to just come talk to me about something. And, like, I remember they it is to get down to get to from Camp Corregidor to Camp Ramadi was down Route Michigan, which was, like, not a good place to drive down. And he came to see me.

And when he did, the battalion commander sent him in a section of tanks to make sure it’d be alright. You know? And that’s, you know, that’s why that bond with those guys is so strong. You know? The just being in that battle space with those guys that what they would do for us was just so, like, you could just tell that they cared about us as much as we cared about them.

And, you know, they put Mikey Monsoor on the 1st of 506 on their memorial wall. The guys that they lost, he’s one of them.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

Finishing the Deployment

JOCKO WILLINK: And now at this point in the platoon in the deployment, we know we were that was September 29th, and we were kind of running low on guys, man. But we kept doing whatever we could do. The guys from Team 5 showed up, and, man, they were fired up, man.

And I remember telling those guys, like, to their task unit, their whole task unit, “You will take casualties,” which is a horrible thing to say. And I’m looking at them, and it’s like as you’re looking at them, you’re like, I don’t know if they really believe me. Then those guys, God bless them, man. They went to Mikey Monsoor’s funeral. They went to Marc Lee’s funeral. But they had just gone to Mikey’s funeral. They were showing up maybe a week or two later, like, their ad fund. And yeah. But they were man, they were they were fired up.

And we turned over the best we possibly could with those guys, and you know so much. And you keep just can’t, like, download enough information. I remember I was, like, I don’t know, maybe this before Mikey got killed, but we were doing some big clearance operation. And I’m like, ended up in some rear security while we’re doing clearance, but we had done the clearance. Now we’re moving back.

And I’m in this, you know, just like a nug because I’m out there, but I’m out there kind of just to be out there. You know, Leif and Tony have got it, but I’m watching as the platoon is, like, moving through the streets. And you think these freaking guys are good right now. Like, it’s has a very awesome thing to be witnessed to.

And the reputation, you know, that we had earned was like, I could see it. I could feel it the way the Army treated us, the way the Marine Corps treated us. It was, like, it was awesome.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s fing incredible, man. Like, I’m I have to say it is fing incredible. I mean, the deployment that you had, the losses that you took, the action that you saw, the lives that you guys took, I mean, it’s a f*ing hard deployment. And I just want to commend you and all of you guys, man.

I mean, I you know, from from an outsider looking in, you know, you see especially nowadays, I mean, we’re kind of talking about this this morning. I mean, you see a lot of you just see so much of fing animosity within the veteran community. It’s a real fing shame.

And, man, like, the Task Unit Bruiser guys, man, you guys are fing tight. I mean, I’m not aware of any you guys just seem really tight. And, you know, to have a deployment like that with that that kinetic it’s the loss that you guys have experienced and the respect, you know, that your guys have for you and that you have for them is truly fing unmatched.

The Highlight of a Life

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It was an honor, and it was the boys. You know? I’ve never seen anything like it. When you asked me if I kind of knew what was happening in my first deployment, like, was in I was in Baghdad. We were doing DAs, and I was like, yeah, I knew.

And on this deployment, I really knew. Like, every day I knew that every day this was this was going to be this was the highlight of my life. This was the most thing this is the most this was the highlight of my life. I knew it every single day. I knew every every time I went out, every time I saw the boys off, I knew that this was the most important thing I would do in my life was this.

And, you know, one thing that I leaned on because it you know, you there’s the whole political aspect of this thing of, like, oh, why were we there? What was it worth? All that kind of thing. And one of the things that the brigade commander said to me as I was leaving, and, you know, he we had a four-minute brigade meeting of a thirty-minute brigade meeting. He spent three minutes talking to me and and, you know, kind of saying, “Hey, this group of SEALs is leaving us. The Task Unit Bruiser guys are gone.”

And, you know, he presented me with this, like, wooden tank that they had made, like, little cool little sculpture of a wooden tank, which, by the way, the guy that was in charge of getting those tanks made was one of the brigade staff who was killed in combat.

But he said, he said, “Your guys kept hundreds of my soldiers and Marines alive.” And when I got home and I talked to Marc’s mom, and I talked to Mikey’s mom, and talked to Ryan’s mom. That’s the one thing that I felt I could indisputably tell them about their sons.

Politics, Iraq, Al Qaeda, whatever, your sons made sure that hundreds of American soldiers and Marines were able to go home with their families. And by the way, those soldiers and Marines made sure that my SEALs were able to come home to their families because the Casevacs and the QRFs and the fire support was all them every single time.

And tanks, they lost nine main battle tanks. So you think you’re doing okay? Like, I’m happy they sent Seth Stone down to see me in a section of tanks, but we lost nine tanks when we were there.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

Repaying the Debt

And those guys sent those tanks out and those Bradleys out and those soldiers and marines over and over again to support my guys, Kazevac my guys, extract my guys, fire support for my guys over and over and over again. And the fact that we were able to repay that in some way, killing IED and placers, killing mortarman, killing RPG and machine gunners enemy, it’s at least I know that that’s meaningful. I know it’s meaningful.

SHAWN RYAN: Thanks for sticking with me on that, man. You want to take a break?

JOCKO WILLINK: Sure. Let’s take a break. It’s not that impressive. I live here.

SHAWN RYAN: Alright, Jocko. We’re back from the break. Nice shooting, man.

JOCKO WILLINK: Oh, right on.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice shooting. But so we’re wrapping up tasking a bruiser’s deployment. And, you know, one thing that I wanted to ask is and I think, you know, throughout the four or five hours I’ve been interviewing you, I think I know, but I’m curious what your perspective is. Why do you think that your men have such a deep respect for you as a leader?

Leadership Through Respect

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It’s what I said earlier. You know? I treated them with respect. I listened to what they had to say. I put my trust in them. And when you give those things to people, they give them back.

No. It’s not a guarantee. They could be a nefarious bad person. You know? And that happens. But those guys, they were just, you know, it’s what the teams for me was always supposed to be and what it was. You know, that was that is the teams to me.

When I think about the teams, best job ever, best guys ever, and all my platoons. I had, like, just great people. And, yeah, I think, you know, kind of everything for me was kind of a bonus. Like, you know, I enlisted in the Navy when I was eighteen years old. You know? And now I’m an officer. I hadn’t even been to college. Like, that’s a pretty cool bonus.

And now I get to lead troops in combat. That’s pretty cool bonus. Now I’m in Iraq. That’s a bonus. And tasking a bruiser in an incredible war zone, it’s just all a bonus. Point in saying all that was it wasn’t like I was going to be admiral. You know what I mean? Like, it wasn’t I wasn’t going to be admiral.

Well, I mean, I guess I could have been admiral, but I wasn’t that wasn’t my goal. That was never really something I thought too much about. My career was really about just being with the platoons.

SHAWN RYAN: About the f*ing job.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. And the same reason you joined.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

JOCKO WILLINK: And I get it. You know, it’s another thing when I was when I was the admiral’s aide, I saw what the admiral did. You know? And it was he had a great attitude about it. You know? On September eleventh, I think he started his job in the Pentagon as an acquisitions officer.

And one thing he told me, he said when September eleventh happened, “I checked into my job as the acquisitions officer. Last job in the world I wanted to do,” you know, because he joined he’d probably gotten the teams in 1976 or something. No Vietnam. I don’t think no Gulf War. And now this big war starts, and he’s in the Pentagon doing acquisitions.

And he said, “You know what, Jocko? I said, this is my foxhole, and I’m going to fight.” And that’s what he did. And I think that attitude, regardless of where you are, you know, sometimes I get people that were in the military, and they didn’t deploy to combat. And they’re, like, borderline ashamed about it. And I’m like, hey, man. You signed that dotted line, and you did what your country needed you to do. So, you know, thank you for your service.

But, yeah, for me, I think that I really just love the teams. And the teams, man, every day was awesome.

The Decision to Separate

SHAWN RYAN: Why did you decide to separate? I mean, I think you kinda just said it, but the reason I’m asking, Jocko, is, you know, to have and I mean this in the best, most respectable way. It is a real f*ing shame for the SEAL teams, for the Navy, for the United States to lose a leader like you.

And so and, you know, there’s a lot of frustrations. As I think you know, there’s a lot of there’s always has been. There always will be. Right? There’s a lot of frustrations. But especially in the last eight years, you know, there’s a lot of frustration within, you know, the military ranks. I hear it. I’m sure you f*ing hear it all the time too. And, you know, it seems like the best leaders, in my opinion, always wind up leaving early.

JOCKO WILLINK: It can definitely happen. I mean, we do have some amazing leaders in the SEAL teams. But, you know, for me personally, so I get done with that task unit. I come back. The admiral who, you know, I had worked for was still in charge. And, you know, he met me on the plane when we landed.

And he told me later that he’s like, when he got on the plane, because he got on the plane, like, the plane lands, he got on the plane’s family are outside. And he said when he saw me on the plane, he was like, “Oh, like, uh-oh.” Because, bro, we were, you know, we were in the game. And, you know, at a certain point, you don’t care about anything else. You know what I mean?

And I was definitely at that point by a long shot. And, you know, of course, respectful to the admiral, said hi, and thanks for coming. And I got off and I saw my family. And he said, “When I saw your family, I was like, oh, he’s going to be fine.”

And so he also said, “What do you want to do?” Like, it was awesome. You know, when Mark died, I talked to him. When Ryan was wounded, like, he was just awesome supporting. And, again, my whole chain of command. You know, the commodore, the admiral, my commanding officer, like, the senior enlisted guys, because I knew all the senior enlisted master chiefs as well. And everyone was just very, very supportive.

And so when I got done with that deployment, he said, “Where do you want to go?” And I knew where I wanted to go because Ramadi was not over yet. And we saw, like, a glimpse of change, but they did some of the heaviest fighting after we left.

Training the Next Generation

And so I knew because I was in training cell at SEAL team one. And when I was in training cell at SEAL team one, I learned so much, and it was so important. I realized how important it was to train. And then having my guys, Leif and Seth and the rest of the JOs and the EDAGS, like, bringing them up in the teams, I knew that I needed to do that for more guys.

And so I knew that the one place that I could do that was going to trade it. And so I said to the boss, the admiral, I said, you know, “I want to go to the trade it.” And he said, “Cool.” And he gave me orders to trade it.

And when I got there, it was exactly, you know, what I and what I knew it was. You know, I knew that we had guys and we got home October twenty first. Or when we left Ramadi October twenty first, the guys from team five that are depicted in the movie warfare, that happened November nineteenth.

So, you know, we had just left, and those guys got blown up. And yeah, Elliot and Joe, you know, got severely wounded, which was horrible. But I knew that that’s what I need to prepare guys for, and I knew that there was no better place to do that than trade at. And so that’s what I did.

I went to trade at, and, you know, it really turned out to be even better than I thought it was going to be. Because now I have so much context in my head about leadership, about combat leadership, about the big army, the marine corps, the navy, the battle space, everything from CQC to recons. Just every type of operation that we could do, I kinda I felt pretty good about.

And so I went in there and started teaching, you know, started teaching leadership and started running training, and it was awesome. It was awesome to be a part of. It was awesome to yeah. Awesome to be a part of.

And it was a little weird too. Like, we’d be doing mount training, urban training, and I’d be watching, and I’d see, like, some new guy standing in the middle of the street. And I would get, like, a sick, like, knot in my stomach. And I would, like, go over to him and, like, “Bro, get out of the street, man. You’re going to get shot out here.” And, like, I really—

SHAWN RYAN: F*, man.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It was definitely, you know, it was it was perfect place for me to be because I cared about the guys more than anything, and I just had a bunch of experience with this exact thing that everyone was going to do. So, you know, that’s what I did.

And when you asked me about why I ended up retiring, so I showed up there, and I was probably out, like, seventeen years or something like that. And, you know, I was just, okay. This is what we’re doing next. Do this for a while.

And then I started there’s one thing that I didn’t like when I came home from deployment. When I was gone on that deployment to Ramadi, when I left on my first sorry, my first deployment to Iraq, when I left, my son couldn’t crawl. When I got home, he could crawl and he could walk. So I was like, that sucks.

In Ramadi, which was and I also, you know, of course, you miss all the holidays, whatever. But then when I got home from Ramadi, he could swim. I remember asking my wife, like, “Who taught him how to swim?” And she’s like, “Oh, it was, you know, one of the lifeguards down at the base.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’m a frogman, and someone else taught my son how to swim.” That sucks.

So that was, like, a little deposit in the back of my head. And, you know, I was at trade it and just, you know, we’re gone all the time at trade it. And as I started to and I got, you know, I had the luckiest career ever. I got deep selected o four. Like, I very, you know, everything had always gone well for me in my Navy career from, you know, being selected for the semen admiral program in the first place, which was probably because I was sailor of the year or SEAL team one where I was an e five. Like, I’d been doing I was on a very good trajectory.

But I also looked at it, I was like, okay. What’s my next billet? And he started looking at the billets and, like, there weren’t jobs that I was super excited to go do. And then I was thinking, well, okay. What’s after that job? And it turned out when I measured it out, I was about seven years at that time from being a, like, a SEAL team CO.

And now fast forward a little bit because I’d come home from Remodi the War, but now it had started to, like, draw down. And I’m like, man, I could hold on for seven more years. By that time, it was, like, five more years. And then what will I be doing? Okay. But I love the teams. But what about these people that live in your house? You know? Who are these people that live in your house? And why don’t they really know you?

Choosing Family

So I just did the ran the numbers mentally on what that was, and I just decided I’d done twenty years. I’m going to go focus on my family. I did not focus on my family when I was in the SEAL teams at all. The teams was I was married to the teams. I was married to the teams, and my wife and family came second, and that’s not I think I needed to give something to them.

Maybe if I’d been more balanced, you know, maybe I could’ve sorted it out, but I wasn’t very balanced. I was in the teams, and I love the teams. And I felt like it yeah. If I can’t give the teams everything, then it’s probably not going to be the best thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you still battle with that decision?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. I do. I yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit. Oh, yeah. When did you retire?

JOCKO WILLINK: 2010.

SHAWN RYAN: F*. Fifteen years.

JOCKO WILLINK: Fifteen years. Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Still battling that decision.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

JOCKO WILLINK: The teams gave me everything.

SHAWN RYAN: You gave the teams everything?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. There’s nothing better than going to work in the teams. You know? You and I just got all giddy going out to dump some rounds out there. You know what I mean? You and me were kinda, like, in a different like, we were, like, a couple kids out there, and you and I used to do that all day every day until we were sick of it. Yeah. You know? So yeah.

And it was hard because I, you know, I had to go tell my chain of command. And it was hard for me to go tell the admiral. Go tell the Commodore. Then and then tell my teammates. You know? That that sucked because you’re a quitter. You know? And I was not a quitter, and now I’m going to quit.

Leaving the Teams and Becoming an Officer

JOCKO WILLINK: When I left Team One, you know, I used to say if you got out of the teams, you’re a quitter. Right? And I said when I left Team One, I said because I was an enlisted guy, I was going to become an officer. I said, “Hey, the only thing worse than a quitter is a traitor.” And I’m now going to the dark side. You know?

But, yeah, quitting the teams was bad. But at the same time, I, you know, I remember cleaned out my cage the last day and had a great, you know, I had a great time at TRADET. And, you know, that was when Ryan Job, who had been wounded so bad, he died from complications from his medical stuff.

You know, that was while I was at TRADET. And, you know, again, that was one of those things where it was really, it almost hooked me back in. You know? Because just knowing that Ryan, you know, he’s another guy. Like, he was blind, bro. And I talked to him on the phone. He’s like, “Can I come back?” He wants to come back to Ramadi. He can’t see. He wants to come back to Ramadi.

Like, this is the kind of guy that I’m going to abandon right now to get out of the Navy and do some other whatever. Like, nothing else matters. So that was, you know, another thing that kind of almost hooked me. But, again, I’d go home and see my kids, see my son. You know? You have a, you know, three daughters and, or yeah, I have three daughters and one son at this point. Go home and see them, and they’re like, “What’s your name again?” Or “Who are you again?” Like, that is an equal thing that’s starting to pull.

SHAWN RYAN: How old was your oldest?

JOCKO WILLINK: She was born in 1999. So she was eleven.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. And my youngest doesn’t even, like, no. My son can remember because I would, like, he was on training trips as a young kid. That’s like a little kid. He was hucking grenades and shooting machine guns and paintballs and all that stuff. So he remembers all that stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you have a tough time integrating with your family?

JOCKO WILLINK: Not really.

SHAWN RYAN: Did they have a tough time integrating with you?

JOCKO WILLINK: Not really.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s good. You don’t hear that very often.

Keeping Work and Home Separate

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I always left my work at work. You know? I always tell, like, police officers and military people, like, take your uniform off when you go home. Don’t leave it on. Take it off and put on a pair of, you know, for me, it’s flip flops, surf shorts, and a t-shirt and be in that mode as opposed to keeping your uniform on. So I felt like it was pretty, yeah.

Another weird thing that always freaked out, like, Leif and Seth is I never swore in front of my family. Yeah. I would and, you know, meanwhile in the teams, you know, every third word was an f-bomb, and I’d come home and just never swear. Because it’s all, it’s almost like I had a, you know, like a mental deviation when I went home, and I was that guy. And then at work, I was the team guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, I wish I could do that. Maybe I can. Just try harder. But, I mean, what did you, did you struggle with, did you struggle with the transition? I mean, we both know a lot of guys struggle with the transition. Did you have any plan when you got out?

JOCKO WILLINK: I didn’t really have. My plan was to surf, train jiu-jitsu, and hang out with my wife and kids. That was my plan.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a good plan.

JOCKO WILLINK: And, you know, and then I opened a jiu-jitsu gym. So I figured I’d be able to teach jiu-jitsu and hang out, surf with my kids, surf. And that’s what my plan was.

The Beginning of the Leadership Business

Probably about six months before I retired, I had a friend that owned a big company, and he asked me to come and talk to his executive team about leadership. And I knew him from jiu-jitsu. I was like, “Yeah, cool.” And I went up, and I gave, like, the kind of leadership brief that I gave to the SEAL platoons.

And I think in his mind, I was going to get up and be like, “You need to do push-ups” or whatever. And all of a sudden, I’m talking about decentralized command and taking ownership and prioritize and executing all these things. And then they start Q and A, and they start asking me about leadership, and I’m answering all these questions. And by the time I got done, he’s like, “I want you to talk to every division I have in my company.”

And I was like, “Well, I’m retiring and,” you know, and he’s like, “I will pay you.” And I was like, “Well,” he’s like, “Oh, let’s make a deal.” I said, “Okay.”

So I started going around talking to all of his divisions, and at one of those divisional meetings, the CEO of the parent company was there. And the guy came up to me afterwards, and “I want you to come talk to all my CEOs.” And he owned, like, forty-five or fifty companies at the time. And I went and did that, and then it just started happening. And I eventually was getting, like, business. You know?

And Leif had gotten out of the Navy, and he was, like, kind of considering going to law school, I think, at the time. And his wife was, you know, gainfully employed at Fox News. And, you know, I was like, “Hey, man. I need some fire support over here.” And he’s like, “We want to do a leadership company.”

And I kind of talked about it with him before because when I started talking to these civilian companies, I realized that everything I had learned about leadership applied to all leadership. It wasn’t unique to combat. It was leadership was leadership. And once I realized that, I realized that I had something that would be useful for a lot of people. And so then, like I said, it just grew word of mouth.

Writing Extreme Ownership

And from there, this kind of how all this stuff eventually happened because as Leif and I would talk to different companies, and they would come up afterwards and be like, “Hey, do you have this stuff written down anywhere? Do you have a pamphlet you can give us?” And so we wrote it down. And then I want to, I think one of Leif’s wife’s friends or something was a literary agent. It was like, “This could be a book” type thing.

And so we wrote a book proposal and yeah. The book agent shopped it around, and one of the people, I think, the third, fourth, or fifth person at St. Martin’s Press was like, “We’ll take it.” And so we wrote the book and, you know, the book came out, and it really did well. So…

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. It did.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It did really f*ing well. Yeah. Yeah. Man.

SHAWN RYAN: And then, I mean, you’ve created, I mean, I think I counted seven businesses. I’m probably off. But am I off? You got the podcast, Extreme Ownership, the kids book, which is going to be a movie, Origin, Jocko Fuel. F*. What am I missing?

JOCKO WILLINK: Jocko Publishing.

SHAWN RYAN: Jocko Publishing. Yeah. The soccer club.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. The jiu-jitsu gym. Yeah. There’s a…

SHAWN RYAN: That’s true. Yep. So get some stuff…

JOCKO WILLINK: You lost count. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting the Podcast

I look at it and people ask me about this. So the podcast thing, you know, I went on, I went on Tim Ferriss’ podcast. And when we got done, he said, “Hey, dude. You should start a podcast.” And then I went on Joe Rogan, heard that podcast and was like, invited me on his podcast. And this was 2015. Like, podcasts weren’t really a thing yet.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You are an OG podcaster.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I mean, way before anybody even knew what the hell it was.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOCKO WILLINK: I think the numbers at the time was about fifteen percent of the population of America was listening to podcasts. I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent now, but it’s pretty much everybody. But I went on Rogan in the middle of Rogan show. He’s like, “You should start a podcast.” Of course, Rogan tells that to everybody, but he told me that. And I said, “Alright.”

So I got Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, like, two massive podcasts are telling me I should start a podcast. So I talked to my buddy, Echo Charles, and I said, “Do you know how to do this?” And he said, “I’ll figure it out.” And then next day, he came back. He’s like, “Alright. I know how to do this.” And I said, “Cool.” He said, “Can I be on it?” And I said, “What are you going to do?” And he said, “You be Jocko, and I’ll be normal.” And I was like, “Okay. Cool.” And so that’s how the podcast started.

Building the Business Empire

And then once the podcast started, it was just, you know, people would ask me about, like, what kind of supplements I used. And I was like, “Well, here’s what I would like to use,” you know, “and why don’t I make what I like?” And then people would ask me about jiu-jitsu gis and there was a company up in Maine, you know, New England where I’m from. And this guy Pete was up there making jiu-jitsu gis a hundred percent American. I was getting those kind of gis because those are American made. And I ended up linking up with him and the Origin kind of took off and Jocko Fuel kind of took off and it was just, yeah. And then the kids books were somewhere in there. You know?

The Warrior Kid Books

I went, I was trying to get my son, my son was not like a reader. Right? When he’s a little kid. So I went to try and find him, like, something that he might be interested in. Right? And I picked up this book, and it was like a pirate book. And I was like, “Cool.” You know? Pirates. What young boy isn’t going to be into pirates? And I read this book, and it was the lamest, weakest, most pathetic pirates ever. And I’m like, “Yeah. I’m not going to read this to my son.”

And I just decided I’ll write my own books for kids. And so, and the idea of the first Warrior Kid book was just, like, immediately in my mind. The whole thing, like, to finish. I had the whole thing in my mind almost immediately. And it’s a real, it seems obvious. Right? Like, there’s a kid, like all kids, who can’t do any pull-ups, doesn’t know his times tables, doesn’t know how to swim, and he’s getting picked on by the school bully. Right?

That’s, you go to anyone, any kid in the world, they’ve got one of those problems or a problem like those problems. And so I put those problems in the book, and then I brought in a character, Uncle Jake, who’s a SEAL, who is going to come stay with, you know, the family for the summer. And he’s going to teach this kid how to fight, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to study, and how to swim. And that’s the first book.

And it, you know, the feedback of all, you know, of all the things that I’m currently doing, getting feedback from, like, a ten-year-old kid that writes me a letter and says, “I did my first pull-up,” or “I got an A on this math test,” or “I started training jiu-jitsu and I did my first competition.” Those are the most epic things to receive. I love that, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. There’s that’s awesome.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. There’s not a lot of, oh, there I shouldn’t say that. There is a lot of guidance out there in the world right now. Not a lot of it is good guidance. You know? And so the values that kids should be receiving, in many cases, they’re not receiving. So I tried to give it to them in a fun way. They’re funny books, but they’re powerful too.

SHAWN RYAN: When did the first one come out?

JOCKO WILLINK: I think it was 2017 because I was almost done writing it as Extreme Ownership was coming out.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. That’s pretty cool, man. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen, you’re touching a lot of people. I know you know that. I would venture to guess that it’s hard to, it’s hard to, it’s hard to grasp that. And, but you’re a huge motivation for me, and I hear about you all the time. It’s fing cool what you’re doing. You’re pumping a lot of good into the world. You’re pumping a lot of what people need into the world, whether that’s adults or children. And, and, man, there’s just, there’s just, there’s just that many great role models for young people to look up to these days, and you’re one of them, and that’s fing cool.

Honoring Fallen Brothers

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, like I said, I had some great role models in the teams, and left me with some, you know, especially the guys that I lost. You know? Those guys were just great, great role models. And, you know, sometimes people ask, like, if having kids made you more nervous about going to war. And for me, it didn’t. Like, I felt, like, happy that I had kids.

And Mikey and Mark, you know, they didn’t have kids, man. And it’s, you know, it breaks my heart. And luckily, Ryan, you know, Ryan before he died, his wife got pregnant and that’s just awesome to see. But, you know, passing on what example those guys were. And, you know, the character in this book right here, the Warrior Kid book, the main character is named Mark. And there’s another book I wrote for kids called “Mikey and the Dragons.”

The Warrior Kid Movie

And clearly, the main character in that book is named Mikey. And so those guys, doing my best to make sure that people remember them and learn some of those things that represent their values of what they were like as people. So it’s an honor to be able to share their memories and make sure that their names are never forgotten.

And this is turning into a movie.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yes. It is. Yes. The movie has been filmed, and it will be coming out next year.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s awesome. Congratulations.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It’s the series was pretty interesting experience to see and a pretty awesome experience.

SHAWN RYAN: Is it an animation?

JOCKO WILLINK: Nope. It’s real people.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding. Are you in it?

JOCKO WILLINK: I am in it. Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: F*. Yeah, man. That’s awesome.

Meeting Chris Pratt

JOCKO WILLINK: I’m in it, but I don’t play Uncle Jake. Uncle Jake is played by Chris Pratt. And, you know, Uncle Jake and Chris Pratt, Chris Pratt’s just such a great guy. Such, oh, he’s an unbelievable guy. Just the first time I met him, I was going to UFC with Jack Carr and some of the other actors from The Terminal List. It was like the promotion for The Terminal List, and I didn’t know Chris Pratt at all, but I’m kind of like going and, you know, I’m like, oh, you know, we’re meeting this Hollywood guy or whatever.

And just super humble, super nice, super cool, self-deprecating humor, and super charismatic. Like, there’s a reason why that guy is who he is. You know? Funny, charismatic, just cool. And so I was really, really stoked.

And what happened was he had, we were kind of connected through Jared who was training him to get him in shape for Terminal List. And while he was training him, he was giving him Jocko Fuel. And so he really liked the taste of Jocko Fuel and how it impacted him, got him in shape for that movie.

And then he also was wearing Origin clothes because he’s a patriotic guy. He wanted American made because now Origin makes jeans and T-shirts and hoodies and boots, and we make everything. And he wanted to support America.

The Partnership Deal

And then he had a little break in between work, movies. And he was talking to his business people, and they’re like, “Hey. You know, you need to find some more sponsors and this kind of thing.” And he goes, “You know, why am I out looking for sponsors when I like Jocko Fuel, and I like Origin. Why don’t I connect with Jocko? Because I met that guy. He seemed nice enough or whatever.”

So he called me, and he said, “Hey, man.” And I was in the mountains. And he said, “Hey. Do you want to do something with Jocko Fuel and Origin?” I’m like, “Sure.” You know? It’s pretty awesome. And so we ended up connecting on that.

And as our business teams were working through the business deal to kind of figure out what that looked like, I had been starting down the process of making the movie with a guy from Hollywood who had walked into his kid’s bedroom, and his kids were doing push-ups. And he’s like, “What are you guys doing?” They’re like, “We want to be warriors. We want to be warrior kids.” He’s like, “What are you talking about?”

Gave the kids, gave their dad, this guy, Ben Everard, the book and said, “We want to be warrior kids like this guy.” So he reads the book, and he’s like, “Oh, I got to get this turned into a movie.”

Making the Movie Happen

And so he, friend of a friend of a friend, searched me out, came to my gym, and I had been offered to buy the movie rights to Warrior Kid, I don’t know, like, maybe four or five times, but that’s a real weird thing anyways. But he came down to my gym and set up a meeting with me and said, “I want to talk to you about this.” And he got the vision, saw the vision.

So he and I had been, we’d gotten the screenplay written from a screenplay writer named Will Staples. So we kind of started moving. Meanwhile, I’m talking to Chris Pratt about Origin and Jocko Fuel. Right? And Ben is like, “You got to get Chris this script.” And I’m like, “Dude, I am not giving Chris the script.” I’m like, “I’m not being,” because he was like a friend. You know? I’m not like a, I mean, I at the time, I didn’t know him that well, but he was a friend.

SHAWN RYAN: And I just, you didn’t want to ask him for shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: Bro, I don’t want to ask him. You know how many people, these Hollywood people. “Could you just, could you?” Yeah. “Hey. Can I get?” So I just didn’t. I’m like, “I’m not giving it to him.”

Well, my business team had told his business team, “Yeah. Well, you know, Jocko’s making this movie.” They’re like, “Well, what movie is he making? Why don’t we know about that? And was he making a kids movie?” Blah blah blah blah. And they’re like, “Well, where’s it at?” “Well, he’s got the screenplay.”

So they give, my business team gives his business team the screenplay, and they read it. And they’re like, “Okay. This is good.” And they gave it to Chris’s film manager, and it’s a woman named Julie. And I found this out later, they called Julie “Doctor No” because she says no to everything.

Doctor No Says Yes

And so but she got this script, and she read it. And when I met her for the first time, the first time we, the first big meeting we had about trying to make this happen, she was in the room, and she met me. She was super cool. She’s like, “My dad listens to you, or my husband listens to your podcast. My kid listens to your podcast.” Like, she knew kind of the background.

And she said, “I got done reading this script. I wiped the tears from my eyes, I sent it to Chris and said, ‘You better make this movie.'”

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: And then Chris said he said, “Yeah. I read the script, and I was like, okay. We’re going to do this.”

And then I wish it was as easy as I just said it because then, you know, the cool thing is Chris and I shook hands. We’re going to do this. And that handshake encompassed Origin, encompassed Jocko Fuel, and it encompassed the movie. Yeah. And two guys, we shook hands, and that handshake held the whole thing together because, bro, you get into this Hollywood and lawyers and ownership, and it was crazy.

But that handshake and, you know, him being a good person and a man of his word and me being my man of my word. And despite all the chaos, we got through. And now Chris is a part owner of Jocko Fuel, a part owner of Origin USA, and he plays Uncle Jake in the movie, Way of the Warrior Kid.

SHAWN RYAN: That is awesome, man. Yeah. That’s a hell of a story.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It’s, I can’t wait for it to come out.

SHAWN RYAN: When does it come out?

JOCKO WILLINK: Sometime next year. You know, it’s weird, but the way they make movies and the time it takes for them to then edit and assemble it and then the advertisement of it, the marketing of it takes months and months. And so, you know, they want it to be released in a big season, you know, because they think it’s going to be a big movie because it’s, I’ve seen it, you know, not a fully edited version, but I’ve seen it, and it’s awesome. It is awesome.

SHAWN RYAN: Congratulations. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll make you cry.

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s really powerful.

SHAWN RYAN: Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that’s what I’m talking about, man. I mean, everybody I don’t talk to anybody that’s happy about what’s going on in Hollywood, what’s being pumped into the theaters, what’s on Netflix. Nobody. And so to see something like that, you know what I mean, come out, that’s like, I mean, that’s a feat in itself. You know? And so and then, you know, congratulations.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. It was, you know, Skydance eventually came in. It’s Skydance and Apple. And you’re right. It’s a movie that we haven’t seen this type of movie in a long time. You know? The kind of movie that’s going to, you know, leave that impact on, and it’s, I’m telling you, everyone in the family, the parents will love it. The kids will love it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes. Old school family, good entertainment.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. That you’re probably going to learn something from.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes. Indeed. So yeah. Kudos to you. Yeah. Let’s talk about Origin. What’s, that’s a f*ing awesome company.

Origin USA: Manufacturing in America

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. It really is, man. It really is. And, you know, growing up in New England in the seventies and eighties, and this is when everything was being sold overseas. All the big corporations just took and gutted all the American factories, literally took the machines out of them and sold them overseas and started making stuff overseas so that they could make more money for the corporate headquarters.

And it just gutted a lot of New England. It gutted a lot of the southeast. You know? The big textile mills just got annihilated.

And I mentioned this earlier, but when I had the podcast and I was talking to people about jujitsu a lot and people were asking, “Where should I get a jujitsu gi?” And I had seen this company Origin. This guy, Pete Roberts, was up there, and he was making these gis in America, hundred percent in America. And so I started telling everyone, “Hey. If you got to get a gi, get an Origin gi.”

And started trying to reach out to him to see if I could meet him or find out what’s going on. And I had never heard back from him. And finally, was on a Facebook Live one day. And somebody asked me, “Hey. What kind of gi should I get?” And I said, “Yeah. Get an Origin gi. Go to Origin,” I think it was Origin Maine at the time. “Origin Maine dot com, and that guy makes stuff in America.”

I said, “And by the way, if anyone here can find that guy, I think his,” as I said, “his name is Pete. Tell him I want to talk to him.”

And a woman that was on that who I since got to know named Sarah used her contacts and got in touch with them and said, “Hey. There’s this guy, Jocko. He wants to talk to you. He’s got a huge podcast.” And Pete says, “What’s a podcast?” Because he’s up in Maine.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s awesome.

Building Origin Together

JOCKO WILLINK: So eventually, we link up, and we have a conversation. And I could see, you know, he’s just a patriotic guy that’s trying to rebuild manufacturing in America. I flew up to Maine. We, same thing. As a matter of fact, we had a steak, and we had a handshake. And we teamed up.

And, basically, he had this ability to manufacture, and I had an ability to talk to people. And so those two things together were like a perfect storm. When we joined forces, I want to say there was like six employees at Origin making, it was something like a hundred garments a week. And right now, we’ve got almost five hundred employees, and we make like fifteen thousand to twenty thousand garments a week. Yeah. Yeah.

So it’s a totally different ballgame, and it’s awesome because, you know, we had lost the ability to manufacture in America, and the corporations just lied because they say, “We can’t do this in America.” They would literally say, “We can’t make this in America. We can’t do that.”

This is America. He’s telling me we can’t make things in America. This is how we won wars. This is how we won World War Two. We made stuff in America. So don’t tell me we can’t make a pair of jeans in America. Just like they’ve been saying for the past ten years that we can’t make any of these electronic components in America. Well, look who’s coming back now. Right?

The Standard of American Made

So it’s an awesome company. Got, you know, we’re going to continue to grow. It’s hard. It’s very hard, especially because we’re so strict about American made. So, you know, you got to get the cotton. Where’s the cotton coming from? Where’s…

SHAWN RYAN: It’s literally everything.

JOCKO WILLINK: Literally everything. The zipper, the boots, these rivets, everything that, with the sole, everything, the thread is a hundred percent made in America. And if we can’t find a component that’s made in America, we either make it ourselves, or we’ll find someone that we can convince to make it.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. You have to, do you have to hold the standard. And it’s good to see. Other people are coming back to America now. Good. Good. Bring it back. This is what we should be doing. This is how we rebuild our country. This is how we rebuild America. And if we don’t have the ability to make things, to be self-sufficient, we will lose. So it’s a huge part of, it’s a huge part of me, of how I feel I can give back to what this country’s given me.

You definitely lead by example. That’s for damn sure. You put your f*ing mouth where your money is, and that’s awesome. It’s hard to find these days.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s literally what you just said. We put all of our money back into these businesses. All of it. You know? And now we have four factories. Like, we put all of it back in there. And we bet on it. You know? This is where we put our soul is into these companies because we believe in them, and we’re patriotic. We love America. We love the people we work with, and this is what we have to do.

SHAWN RYAN: Once again, congratulations.

The Birth of Jocko Fuel

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. And then out of that spawned Jocko Fuel because, you know, one of the guys at Origin, Brian, he had worked in the supplement industry, and he was like, “Hey, you know, we can make supplements. We do jiu-jitsu, and they have made some supplements before. How would you feel about making supplements?”

And I said, “If we can make them good and healthy, yes.” Look, I’ve been overseas drinking Red Bull and Rip It and whatever freaking tiger’s blood they were giving us over there. And that stuff’s just not healthy. You know?

And so I didn’t, and, you know, we talk about people, we talk about veterans. You know, you mentioned veterans that are, you know, I know you had some friends that had some bad experiences with drug addiction, alcohol addiction. Bro, I have friends that were drinking five, six, seven, eight Monsters a day. That’s horrible.

And so we started the Jocko Fuel and, you know, we just kept things as clean as we possibly could. And, you know, believe it or not, there’s a market for it. Believe it or not, Americans want to be healthy. And we probably timed it very well because as COVID came out and people got more concerned about their health, people were paying attention.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that the latest flavor?

JOCKO WILLINK: That’s one of the latest flavors. Yeah. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Can I try it?

JOCKO WILLINK: Dude, I got, yeah. Yeah. There you go, man. It’s a little iced tea lemonade.

SHAWN RYAN: Iced tea lemonade. It’s pretty damn good.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s no artificial sweeteners. We had to, this is the extent that we go. So when you make a drink like this, you’ve got to put preservatives in it so that it has shelf life. Well, those preservatives, as you might imagine, might not be too good for you, and I wanted to figure out a different way.

And so Brian figured out a way to pasteurize it. In other words, you basically cook it. So anything that could be in there that would interfere with its shelf life won’t be in there anymore. It’ll be dead.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

JOCKO WILLINK: And so we had to find a line. We had to wait nine months to get a company that, you know, bottles these or cans these to put a line in to pasteurize them so that we could make them as healthy as possible. That’s what we’re doing across the board. And, yeah, that’s what we’re doing, man.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s awesome, dude.

The Land Grab and Braxton McCoy

SHAWN RYAN: You know, we’re kind of wrapping up the interview here, Jocko. But, you know, originally, I’d reached out to you several months ago, and I had saw a tweet that you put out on X about our mutual friend now, Braxton McCoy, about the land grab. And, you know, like I had mentioned, we’d never met, but I’ve always been watching you from afar.

And that tweet, basically, all you said, I think, is “pay attention to this guy.” So looked him up, paid attention to him, saw the sale of public land, and I was like, “F* it. Let’s bring him in here. Maybe we can have an impact on this.” And, you know, collaboratively, we did. They got pulled.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep. It’s a huge deal, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Thanks for doing that.

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s my pleasure. Yeah. And thanks to Braxton. What a guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. What I did. Yep. But, you know, I do, I just, especially ever since COVID, you know, I think whatever. Everybody knows. You know? Things aren’t, things aren’t going great.

And you’ve, you’re just always a voice of reason, a stoic voice of reason that makes a lot of sense. And so I just want to ask you, what are some of the top things on your mind on what’s going on in our country, and what are we doing wrong? What do we need to get back to?

Understanding Perspectives and Finding Common Ground

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of amplification of emotions and ego that happens through online platforms. So through social media. Right? And when that happens, when you’re not interacting with another human being, but you’re interacting with a fake human being or a bot or someone that you can actually see or talk to and someone that it’s very easy for you to say, “Oh, this person’s bad,” or you just ignore what their perspective is, which is what I’ve talked about however many hours ago we started this thing, is understanding other people’s perspectives and knowing that people see the world differently, man.

And there’s a reason that someone sees it that way. And instead of just saying the way that they see the world is bad and the way I see the world is good or the way they see the world is wrong and the way I see the world is right, saying, “Oh, it’s interesting that they see the world that way. I wonder why.”

And as I’ve said this whole podcast, if you listen to what other people have to say, they’re going to listen to you more. If you say, “Shut up. You’re wrong,” they’re never going to listen to a word that you have to say. But if you say, “Hey, what makes you think like that?” And they explain it to you. And instead of you trying to figure out where they’re wrong, try and figure out where they’re right.

And in most cases, in most cases, there’ll be some kind of common ground in most cases. Hey, are there some people that are just evil? Yeah. If you’re ISIS or you’re a communist, it’s probably going to be hard to find some common ground. But if you’re in between those and, I mean, I’ve, I mean, I guess you can say ISIS. But most people, you say, “Oh, you got family? Do you want your kids to have a nice place to live?” Almost all people will say, “Yeah.” Almost all people will say, “Yeah. Well, I want them to be healthy.”

So at least we have that common ground. Now, so if we look for that as opposed to looking for all the reasons why I should hate you and you should hate me, I just, that’s not beneficial. So and I think social media amplifies a lot of that. And, also, social media is not real. Right?

And so people will say, “Our country’s so divided.” Yeah. On Twitter, it is. But I talk to people. I travel all over the country. I have a leadership consulting business. I work with companies of every description. Energy companies, with people out on oil rigs, construction companies, with people pouring concrete, finance companies in New York where they’re doing deals for billions of dollars, every and everyone in between.

And the vast majority of people that I meet are like, what are they focused on? Oh, yeah. They want to take care of their family. They want to do a little bit better. They want to make some more money. They want to be healthy. That’s what people are doing. And it’s very strange that we forget about that.

And as I travel around the country and I meet all these different people, I see people that they have common goals. They have common goals. And if they have the same common goal as me, how we get there, you know, we’ll try and figure out the best solution. And I don’t see a lot of that. You know? If you say something that I disagree with, I hate you. And that doesn’t bode well.

But like I said, I think for the most part, that’s online. Now look, you can go show me, we can go look at riots in the streets of people that are actively trying to hurt other people. Okay. Yep. You’re right. There are people that are out there on the fringes for sure. But that’s a small group. There’s 350 million people in America. You want to show me a riot that has 3,000 people in it? Yeah. That’s bad. But it’s not America.

And so I would say, open your eyes, open your ears, listen more, try and understand other people’s perspectives, try and figure out where you can agree with them, which can be difficult. But usually you can. And if you can listen to what they have to say and ask earnest questions about what they believe, a lot of times you can figure out, “Oh, yeah. There’s some common ground. I understand them a little bit better now, and maybe I can move a little bit.”

And maybe I can help them see something that I see because they actually want to hear my perspective now. Barking at people and trying to shove your perspective down their throat might feel good at the time, but it doesn’t change any minds.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a great perspective. Do you think this is happening because of the absence of the human connection because of social media?

The Algorithm and Amplification of Anger

JOCKO WILLINK: Social media certainly amplifies it, but, also, it’s the way the algorithm is constructed. The algorithm is constructed, when I see something that makes me emotional, I share it. So your goal is to post something that makes me feel emotional. What’s the easiest emotion to trigger in me? Anger.

It’s definitely anger because it’s hard to pull up my heartstrings. You don’t really know me. You don’t know what, maybe if I had a dog that I lost, but you don’t know that. Or maybe I had, you know, whatever something happened to me in my past and, “Oh, thank you for sending me that. It’s good. Makes me connect with these emotions.” That’s hard to do.

But how hard is it to make me mad? It’s not hard at all. You know? I’m a military guy. You can figure out twenty things out of the gate. Right? Figure twenty things out of the gate that can make me mad if I’m a normal person. If I’m a normal military person. Or if you’re, what is it, you can tell me fifteen things right now that will make a conservative mad, and you can tell me fifteen things that will make a liberal mad.

And so if you want to get reactions, make people mad. And so that’s what the algorithm is set up for. And when you make me mad, I share it. If I have a strong opinion about it, I share it. And so that’s what the algorithm does. It just amplifies strong emotions.

And strong emotions aren’t a good way to make decisions, and the strong emotions become polarizing. And so when people are polarized, they’re not listening anymore, and everything I just talked about goes out the window.

Politics and the Future

SHAWN RYAN: There’s been a lot of talk about, but I see it all over your comment section. There’s something, there’s f*ing hashtags about it. Jocko for president. I mean, do you see yourself ever getting involved in US politics?

JOCKO WILLINK: I certainly hope not. I don’t really have any desire to do that. And I don’t, I think that, I mean, I think that, I guess it just depends. You know, because every time you think that things will settle down, the pendulum will go swinging back in the other direction and back in the other direction. So I certainly hope not, man. I don’t, but I don’t like politics. I don’t think I would like to do that. I don’t think you would like to do that either. You know?

SHAWN RYAN: But I think that’s the problem.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Just everybody that’s in there, that there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing than sitting on their f*ing ass in the floor of Congress or the Senate or higher.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. Well, hopefully, we get some of these term limits and things like that because career politicians are definitely problematic. And but, you know, who knows? That means they have to vote themselves out of a job. What are the chances of that?

SHAWN RYAN: Slim to none.

JOCKO WILLINK: Slim to none.

Advice for the Next Generation

SHAWN RYAN: But, you know, you get the Warrior Kid series movie coming out. The upcoming generation is Generation Z. They get a lot of shit. You know, what are your thoughts on Gen Z? What do they need to be looking out for? What’s your advice to them?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. I think when I look at it, and I forget, it’s actually, I think Gen A, Gen Alpha is now, I want to say those are teenagers right now.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s Gen Alpha, and then Gen Z is sort of above them. Maybe twenties? You think that’s right? I think Gen Z is they’re entering the workforce and are already in the workforce.

Yeah, man. This is America. And you can do, you can, you do anything you want? Nope. No. You can’t do anything you want, but you have a lot of opportunity in this country. I was talking to a kid the other day, and I was just like, man, he’s in the fire department. And, you know, there’s a salary cap in the fire department. Right?

And I said, “Hey, man. Save your money. Figure out something else you can do. You in the fire department, you got time to do other things. What do you do in your spare time?” Right there. I already know you’re not doing much. So what can you do?

And I kind of said, you know, we’re at my gym, I said, “Look. You see all this?” I go, “All this was just an idea at some point. Just a little tiny idea with no true value whatsoever. Nothing. And here you are in a gym.” And that’s the same for everything that I have in my life. Everything was just nothing. But if you apply it and you execute on it, now all of a sudden, they start to grow value.

And so, you know, it’s always surprising to me that the opportunity that we have in this country. So are you going to get it given to you? No. Is it going to take hard work? Yes. Will you have setbacks? Yes. You will. Yes. You will. Enjoy it. Enjoy it.

Creating Lore Through Life’s Challenges

JOCKO WILLINK: This is what, here’s a Gen Alpha term, lore. You heard this lore?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOCKO WILLINK: So creating lore. If you look at when you have problems, those problems are how you create lore about what you did with your life, the kind of thing you can tell your grandkids, the kind of things you can tell your kids. Hey, this is what happened. Oh yeah, I remember when I had my wife and my four kids in a 934 square foot house. That’s lore, man.

My kids are kind of fired up for that. There was two girls sharing a bedroom. I took the converted garage and split it in half, one for my son and one for my youngest daughter. That’s what we’re doing. That’s cool.

At the time, would I rather had some mansion? Sure. But that wouldn’t have got me no lore. So we go through challenges. You face things in life. Look at it as an opportunity to make some lore for your existence. It’s going to be a struggle. But with America, if you work hard, you will be rewarded.

Playing the Right Game

JOCKO WILLINK: It’s not a guarantee, but if you work hard, you have to make sure you’re playing the right game too. So I had this conversation with a guy, actually two guys consecutively a few years ago. And they were both hard workers in two totally separate industries. Two hard workers working very hard and not able to get to where they wanted to go. And they’re putting in fifty hour weeks, sixty hour weeks, seventy hour weeks, really getting after it.

And I said, “Hey, listen. If that’s what’s happening, you got to check what game you’re playing.” Because if you put a lot of effort, the example I used was soccer and basketball. If you put a lot of effort into basketball, how many points can you score in a game? Thirty, forty, fifty? You get fifty points in one game as an individual player. If you’re playing soccer, how many points can you get in a game? Maybe one or two.

So if you realize that you’re not getting the points that you want to get, you might have to say, “I need to get into a different game.” So you have to be smart. Hard work isn’t rewarded solo. You have to also detach, look around, and say, “Okay, is this game that I’m playing the right game to get where I want to go?” So you have to keep that in mind too.

But this is America. If you play the game and you play the right game and you play it hard, you’re going to end up in a good spot, which is all we could ever ask for.

SHAWN RYAN: Another great point. Another great point.

Guest Recommendations

SHAWN RYAN: Last question. If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would they be?

JOCKO WILLINK: I would say, first, I’ll give you the easy shot, JP Dinnell. Next, I’ll go Debbie Lee, and then I’ll go Johnny Clark. Johnny Clark, who was a Marine in Vietnam, and he was a grunt.

You know, our special operations guys get a lot of credit, well deserved. But sometimes, oftentimes, and I tried to give as much credit as I could today to our conventional Army and Marine Corps brothers and sisters that fought. But they don’t often get the credit that they deserve.

And Johnny Clark wrote a book called “Guns Up” when he got back from Vietnam. And he got wounded three times. The third time he got wounded, when he finally got pulled out, he had lost thirty-five or forty pounds patrolling in the jungle for fourteen days, seventeen days, twenty days at a time. And he’s an incredible guy. It’s a legendary book in the Marine Corps.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I got to shout out “Guns Up.” I did that event for the Marine Corps birthday up in Camp Pendleton, and I was able to get a “Guns Up.” Semper Fi, happy birthday.

JOCKO WILLINK: Semper Fi. Guns up.

Honoring the Grunts

JOCKO WILLINK: But Johnny Clark, just an amazing guy and has had a really incredible voyage in his life that I think everyone would be blessed to be able to hear his story. And I think that it would give a lot of people credit. You know, I had the honor of bringing a lot of the SOG guys into the forefront for the things that they did in Vietnam. And most certainly, the most epic guys. But I always want to remember these grunts, the angry men.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you for saying that. And by the way, you did a fantastic job giving those guys credit. I talk about the exact same thing on here a lot about those guys never get the credit they deserve. Talk a lot about special operations nonprofits, and it’s like, yeah, great, we got another one. We don’t f*ing need anymore. These guys need them.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And so it’s pretty fing cool you’re doing that. And that actually is a segment that I’ve planned on covering, but it slipped my mind, is the SOG guys. I mean, I started interviewing this year, couple of Vietnam guys and got inspired from what you and John Stryker Meyer are doing over there. And for me, I mean, those guys, that is the generation that motivated me, that made me want to serve the country, go to war, and ultimately become a SEAL. And man, those guys are fing something, aren’t they?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah. As I’ve told John Stryker Meyer, and I’ve told the rest of them, as a task unit commander, I wouldn’t have approved any of those missions. I was like, “Yo, you’re going out where? Wait. Across enemy lines, you got three Americans and four Vietnamese, and you’re going out there into wherever with no ground support? You sure about that?”

But those guys were a different breed.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, they are.

JOCKO WILLINK: God bless them all, man. They were just epic. And like I said, the infantry grunts in Vietnam, what they suffered through. And you know, it’s a small percentage of them, right? Just like any of these wars, there’s a small percentage of people that fight them. There’s a lot of people in the military. There’s a small percentage of people that fight those wars, and the grunts in Vietnam.

You know, even Hackworth, Hackworth who was in, he was at the end of World War II. He didn’t really fight in World War II, but he was there for the end of it. Korea, full on in Korea and Vietnam. And he said that the Vietnam soldiers had the worst conditions, which is coming from a guy that was speaking from a place where he could make a statement like that. So the grunts from Vietnam, Johnny Clark, “Guns Up.”

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. If you could, I’m sure he’d be honored to come on here and share his story of his life, which is, like I said, it’s an epic story.

JOCKO WILLINK: Right on. We’ll reach out.

Closing Reflections

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Jocko, thank you again for being here, man. And like I said, man, thank you for taking that trip with me today. I know that was really f*ing tough. But you know, at the beginning of this, we prayed that this would reach the right people and that this interview would touch a lot of people, and it’s going to, man. And you’re just a hell of a guy.

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, super thankful that we connected. It’s an honor to get to be able to share these guys’ stories, you know, again, not just my guys, but the whole team that was there. And you know, again, I talked about me talking about these little fractions of guys, small group in Ramadi. That was my guys, and there was all kinds of those guys.

But man, you talk about there was guys all over Iraq. There was guys all over Afghanistan that were in terrible situations, suffered through so much, and they sacrificed for what we have and what we have the opportunity. And that opportunity is based on the sacrifices that these men and women have made.

It’s Okay to Feel

JOCKO WILLINK: And you know, you asked me right before a break or right as we took a break, you were like, “You okay?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I did a podcast with a guy named Tom Fife. And Tom Fife was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And he got a Purple Heart in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

And I was talking to him, and we talked about World War II, and he got commissioned for Korea. And by the time he was in Vietnam, he was a battalion commander. And we were talking through the different types of missions and all good. And I just was curious about what the operations were like. And I ended up saying, “Well, how many casualties did you take as battalion commander?”

And he got choked up. And I was sitting there watching him get choked up, and I was like, “Oh, this is fifty years ago, and he’s getting choked up thinking about his guys.” And that was a moment for me that I realized that’s okay.

And I think we’ve been told that there’s something wrong with us, but there’s not. You get sad when you think about your friends. It’s okay. You get a tear in your eye when you hear the national anthem. It’s alright, man. And you sometimes spend a little too much time thinking about something that you went through. It’s okay.

And I think it’s important for us, our generation of veterans, to recognize you went through some tough stuff. Think about it sometimes. It’s hard, and that’s okay, man. That’s okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

JOCKO WILLINK: God bless you, man. Back at you. Happy Thanksgiving.

SHAWN RYAN: Appreciate it.

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