434: War Crimes, Murder, and Leadership.

Jocko Willink

This is Jocko, podcast number 434 with Echo, Charles and me, Jocko Willinka. Good evening, echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave.

Echo Charles

Good evening. So there are two brutal conflicts going on in the world right now. Well, there's more than that, but there's two that are very prominent. One in Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia, and then obviously in Gaza and in and around Israel as well. And the term war crimes comes up quite a bit.

Jocko Willink

And we all now look at social media and the news, and there's a lot of speculation about war crimes that are going on or allegedly going on or possibly going on or they could be occurring on the ground in both these wars.

And I'm not on the ground in either of those wars, obviously, right now, haven't been on the ground in either of those places, but I have been on the ground in another war, and I heard speculations about war crimes in that war. And this is in Iraq. Dave, obviously, that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring you in today, because you are also on the ground in Iraq. And so looking at it now, when I hear all these, when I hear the term war crime get thrown around and used, it seems like a good thing to try and understand what that looks like on the ground. And I can understand, you know, where some of these, some of these speculations come about, some of these rumors come about.

And it's really clear when you look at social media and there's pictures, images that get put up that are 22 years old or 14 years old or seven years old from different locations, these things are happening, but they're really not happening at all. And then in other cases, there's clear that. It's clear that horrible things are happening. So again, I don't want to speculate about what's happening on the ground right now in either one of these wars. If I was going to come on here and talk about them, you know, what I'd do is actually, I would go there.

I would go there, but I haven't done that. But like I said, and Dave, same boat, is we've been on the ground in war and wanted to talk through some of those, some of those things. One thing that happens on me. So if you as a leader, fail to do a good job of communicating what the situation is on the ground, you leave a vacuum. You leave a vacuum of people that don't understand what's going on in the ground.

And when people don't understand what's happening, because I, as a leader, do a bad job of explaining to them and painting a clear picture. Just like any other situation. Rumors will start to fill the blanks in their own heads with ideas and with assumptions. Now, fortunately, what actually happened in the battle of Ramadi is very well documented. It is extremely well documented.

And it was documented real time, and it's been documented since then. There's situation reports, there are operations summaries, there's commander's briefs, there's investigations. So that on the inside the military, you got all those things. I mean, how many situate. How many sit reps did you write while you were over there, Dave?

Dave Berke

Literally one every day. Yeah. So, and that's just the Daily sit rep, not including all the sit reps. I wrote for all the actions. So for an individual action, you're writing a sit rep.

Jocko Willink

Every one. The op sums same thing every day. So we had to write. Every time we did an operation, we do an operational summary? Yes.

The sit reps, the commander's briefs, all these things are saved. You know, they're all. They're all. They all still exist. The commander's briefs, investigations that happened, they all get saved.

But then it's not just the military that's doing this, because guess what else is going on? You've got news reports, you've got journalists, you've got embedded journalists, you've got articles. Then you've got. Also what's interesting, and I kind of mentioned this, you've got academic journals now that have gone back and interviewed people and written books about exactly what happened. So there's all.

Luckily, there's all kinds of documentation about what it was actually like on the ground there. Now, of course, Dave, you have all this information in your head. You know what it's like. I have all this information. I know what it's like.

I made the mistake of thinking it was obvious what was going on on the ground in Ramadi. I made the mistake sometimes of assuming that other people understood the situation. And look, did you do one deployment on the ground in Iraq? One. It was just a Ramadi.

Just when you were in Ramadi, did you ever go to anywhere else? Did you go to Balaji? Did you go to Baghdad? Did you go to any other cities, any other towns? Yeah, I did Baghdad once or twice went to Al Assad, and that's about it.

Okay. So the time was. So, alice, how much time did you spend in al Assad? I took probably three or four trips out there. Okay.

Dave Berke

Not a ton of time, but I went out there a handful. Spend the night there? Yeah. Absolutely. So you were in Iraq.

Jocko Willink

You're in al Assad. You're in Iraq. You're in Ramadi. What was the difference between al Assad and Ramadi? Dude, night and day.

Dave Berke

It's night and day. It's hard to describe how different it might have been. Like two different planets. They're very different. Totally incomparable.

Jocko Willink

Totally, totally incomparable. So. And that was the way a lot of Iraq was. So much of Iraq. Now, look, you could go to Sauder city.

Terrible. There was certain little neighborhoods in certain cities that could be bad. But even, you know, for my first deployment, 2003 2004, we. It was very interesting because we went all over the place, man. I'd roll up on some fob somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and you could tell they were taking it, and it was pretty hot.

And then you'd go to another fob two days later, and just like the guys, there's nothing going on. Yeah. So what happens is people take their experience of Iraq, so even someone that was in Iraq, and they go, oh, I know what Iraq was like because they were in wherever. But everyone's experience is very different. And depending on where you are, things are a lot different on the ground.

So I never really thought through that as clearly as I should have so that people would understand what the actual situation was on the ground. It was not the same as everywhere else. News article, May 22, NBC News 2006. One recent coalition tally of significant acts, that's roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire, indicated that out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 occurred in Ramadi, according to a marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media. And that, he said, was a quiet day.

So you have all of Iraq. There's 43 reported incidents. And on that particular day, 27 of those incidents were in this tiny city of Ramadi, which is 4 miles across in one. Continuing on here in one neighborhood, Master Sergeant Tom Coffey, 38, of Underhill, Vermont, gestured to a paved road his forces would not drive on. They hit us so many times with ieds, roadside bombs.

We ceded it to them, he said, so think about that. There's a road, the enemy has hit us with so many bombs on it, we're not driving down it anymore. Look, I was in Baghdad for six months. We drove down route Irish. Do you ever drive down route Irish?

Route Irish and Baghdad, it got hit. There was never a chance that coalition forces were going to say, yeah, we're not going to drive down anymore.

Continuing on. Same article, after one neighborhood sweep developed into an hour long gun battle. Iraqi major Jabbar Maruf al Tamini returned to base and drew his finger across a satellite of the satellite map of the area. He just fled under fire. It's fallen under the command of insurgents, he said, shaking his head.

They control it now.

Again, there was no other part of Iraq that I'm aware of where iraqi forces said, yeah, that's under the control of the insurgents. There's no other area that I can think of that I've heard of where us forces said, yeah, we're not going to go there anymore because the enemy controls it.

Summer of 2006 in Ramadi, there was 30 to 50 enemy attacks a day. And by the way, what counts as an attack because is someone shooting a rifle, someone shooting a machine gun at a humvee, hitting the window, that's an attack. Guess what else is an attack? A complex or coordinated attack where there's multiple elements. Maneuvering it is the enemy was good in, like I said, in 2006, this was very different from other places in Iraq.

I'd been to a bunch of other places in Iraq. In my first deployment, I've been to Baghdad, been a fallujah, been at a job, been all over enemy contact in those other places. Now, look, I'm not talking about the assault on Fallujah. I'm not talking about solder city at certain times. I'm not talking about Tameem when they went, or al Qaeda, or was it al Qaed al Qaeda, al Qaeda.

I'm not talking about. I'm not talking about those. Those moments. But on a general, normal day, there's no. There's in those other places, enemy contact, it, you kind of had an anticipation that it could happen, but it was unlikely.

It was unlikely.

And in Ramadi, it was imminent. It was actually imminent. I would have bet every time we left the wire, every time coalition forces let the wire, the odds were they were getting enemy contact, period, end of story. And it's hard to understand that, like I said, especially if you've deployed to Iraq in a different time. Laif deployed back to Ramadi in 2000, I think it was 2009, not a shot fired during his six month deployment.

So the reason I'm bringing this up is cause if someone had been to Iraq and they went to a different place at a different time or even went to Ramadi at the same time, it's not gonna be the same thing. And again, this is something that I failed to recognize how different it was. You know, even going back to Vietnam, you know, when we came back from that deployment. I talked to Vietnam guys, and it was the same thing. There were some, some guys went to Vietnam, some seals went to Vietnam, and they were in significant contact regularly.

That was a smaller number of seals. Most of the seals that went to Vietnam, they did operations. They got three, four gunfights. I mean, I talked to one of my friends who was a machine gunner in Vietnam, seal machine gunner in Vietnam. And he was like, yeah, we got in four firefights.

I fired like 50 to 100 rounds in each firefight, and then we were out. Good. Like, awesome.

It's. It was very different. It was. It was a very different situation. When you were rolling in as going into Ramadi, like, where were other facts going to?

Yeah. So for Anglico, remember, I was in Anglico facts. So we had, I'm pretty close, I think, either 23 or 26 teams all over Iraq and all the cities you just mentioned, and we would roll up a summary every day of what everybody was doing everywhere. And the way you described it is exactly what I experienced, which was, and I'm generalizing a little bit because there was always an opportunity. There's always risk everywhere you went, there wasn't like, oh, there's nothing going on ever, but there was always risk everywhere.

Dave Berke

Just about everything that was happening was in Ramadi. And it was an interesting thing for me because you talked about some of the, almost like a leadership failure of what that perspective was in my mind. I failed to grasp that, too, because not only was Ramadi my first.

Echo Charles

It. Was my first deployment on the ground, and I'd never been to any of those other places in, like, non combat scenarios at all. So I didn't have any other perspective. So I'm in Ramadi for however long I'm there, you just think that's just how it is. And I had this first trip, we called it biop.

Dave Berke

We go to Baghdad International Airport, which we would do, like, a log run of supplies or something. And what I can't. What I realized very early on was. Would you guys do that on hilos or you guys driving out there? Driving.

Jocko Willink

Oh, check. And what that was was I figured out very early. I'm like, oh, this is a break. And again, this is not like, judgment of, oh, if you're in Baghdad, there's nothing going on. It's just in Baghdad, we're getting after it.

Dave Berke

Yeah, for getting after it. But the environment was such, there was much more control. The coalition forces controlled much more, and the environment was just very different. So if we had guys that needed a break, I could put them on a log run to buy up, which meant like, you're going to go out there for spend the night, you're going to get two days. And I say often quotes, but it's.

Jocko Willink

A little bit of a break from. The imminence of that. And I came to discover very early on my experience in Ramadi wasn't normal. It was Ramadi in 2006 is where I ended up and it wasn't like that everywhere else. And so the calculation I had to make of, oh, I need, I need to pay attention to how my guys are going to do throughout this deployment.

Because this isn't normal. Yeah. Again, anywhere you were in Iraq at that time, look, is there a possibility of insurgents? Absolutely. Guys did incredible things.

Guys were taking risks all the time. Ramadi, that was, that was intensified and amplified. There were insurgents everywhere and they were interwoven into the population and they used all kinds of weapons to attack and kill american and iraqi soldiers and they used the most sadistic methods of rape, torture, murder to control the population. So there was a situation where a local was skinned alive by the insurgents. There was a situation where heads, the heads were cut off and left in the yard of people in the local population.

The insurgents were, they were sadistic and evil and they were there and there were targets everywhere and we really hadn't been in an environment like this before. So the previous, when we got there, the previous task unit, great dudes, and they had been busting their ass, working hard, getting things set up, they were setting conditions, they were building relationships with the conventional forces, they had some iraqi forces that they were partnered with. They made all the introductions for us, they started training them. They were a little bit limited by what their iraqi forces were capable of, which, you know, it's just the reality of the situation on the ground. But they gave their Iraqis their jundies, I might use the term Dundee is just a term for iraqi soldier, but we kind of used it as a catch all for iraqi military person, Jundi soldier.

So they had done that and they'd conducted some good operations, but they were also controlled by the amount of the areas that they could get into. So as you heard in one of those quotes I read earlier, there's roads that were just. No one's going down those roads. And to say, oh, we'll just jump in our Humvees and drive down there and do a direct action mission was stupid. Well, it's just dumb.

And so they weren't going to do that. We weren't going to do that. There's massive ids, there's ambushes. But we show up there and we start doing a turnover with the, with the guys we were taken over for great dudes, Garvice, great turnover.

And that was the environment that we stepped into because there's all these. Usually the estimates are like four to 5000 enemy fighters there. That's, that's usually the estimate. Now the population is 400,000. But standing against these insurgents are these soldiers and marines that are putting their life on the line on a daily basis to protect the local populace while trying to hunt and kill the enemy.

And just look, the two to eight, which was the group that was on the ground when we got there, the iron soldiers. Outstanding. And then the 118 came in and took over. They were outstanding. And the, the daily life of those guys was heroic.

You know why? I just, you, I just asked you if you took helicopters, a bad guy. You're like, no, we drove that first seven minutes. Driving out of Ramadi sucked. Totally, man, sucked.

Michigan. Yep. Yeah. You're going down, down route Michigan to get out of there. Now.

Look, you could have snuck up. What's the road to the north african route? Mobile. Yeah. You could have gone to route mobile and pushed out.

And that's. I hope you did that. You're looking at me like maybe you did sometimes. I had done one of each at least when you just. I know I'm cutting you off the Michigan out of Ramadi to buy up.

Dave Berke

That was if you got through to the street sign that said, like, next exit, you know, you're leaving the town, you're heading towards Fallujah. You were good to go. Yeah, yeah, good to go. But the guys from the 228, the guys from the one one ad, these are soldiers and marines that are there. Everything single thing that they did, every single time they rolled out, it was them standing in the face of death.

Jocko Willink

And this is something that impact us. So as soon as we get. As soon as task unit bruiser shows up there, immediately we're going to memorial services for soldiers and marines. And standing there in the. It wasn't the chow hall, it was next.

It was a chapel. So it was a tent. It was a big tent. It was a big general purpose tent next to the chow hall. And we show up and, you know, I hear that they lost a soldier, lost a marine.

And so I'm like, hey, we'll go, you know, this is, these are our guys. So we show up and immediately know the seriousness. Now, I will tell you, I knew there was casualties happening. I did not know that the casualties were happening as often as they were. I did not.

I thought to myself, hey, if a soldier or marine gets killed, we will 100% go to the memorial service. That was not true. We went to them when we could, but almost every day, someone got wounded and people were getting killed a couple times a week. And it was an honor for us to be able to support them. Now, there's a little technical aspect when I use the word support.

So in the military, there's two different. You can either be the supporting unit or the supported unit. And what supported means is everyone is supported. Supporting what I'm doing. I'm the supported unit.

So I'm the one that's the main effort. And if you're a supporting unit, then you're the one that's helping the main effort. You're sort of like, oh, I know what? It's the costar. So there's the star and the co star.

The star is the supported unit, and everyone else is the supporting actors. Right. Well, quite frankly, oftentimes, special operations is the star of the movie. Like, hey, we're. We're gonna be the ones that actually hit the target.

So these other conventional forces are gonna support what we're doing. We're the. You're gonna be supporting role. We're gonna be the main role.

That makes sense. In oftentimes, what we had here was different. We were the supporting force, oftentimes meaning that the conventional army or the conventional Marine Corps was the main effort. They were the star of the show, and we were the supporting actors. The reason it's important to bring this up is some people didn't like that.

Some people in the special operations in community, in the special operations community did not like that. And there's a good reason why they didn't like that. There's actually a good reason why they didn't like that. There's a good reason why I was cautious. And if you read the book by Ben Milligan called by water beneath the walls, you'll understand why.

Because sometimes special operations, when they're the co star, when they're the supporting actor, they can get abused. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, read the book by water beneath the walls. There was times where the rangers, for instance, would get used to assault targets that they shouldn't be assaulting, didn't have the strength, didn't have the numbers. They were so highly trained. So there were times like that in the history of special operations.

Where falling into that supporting role has caused problems. Now, like I said, I was cautious, but it was not like that. We may have been, on paper, the supporting unit, just like you were the. You were the supporting unit on paper, Dave. So many, so many similarities.

Yeah, we were the supporting unit, but I can promise you that we got as much support as we gave and that was required, that that was really necessary. Now, listen, if we wouldn't have done that, we just wouldn't have. I mean, same thing with you. If you would have said, listen, I'm only going to go out if I'm the. The star of this movie.

You wouldn't have gone out, really. I know we wouldn't have. If the only way to go out, we could have done an alternate set of missions. This is true, but we wouldn't have been as involved as we were and. You would not have contributed.

Dave Berke

The impact you would have made would have been significantly less. I was forced face with the exact same, when I got there, maybe a little different, because I had an image in my mind which really wasn't based on anything because I had no previous ground combat experience. So I had a sense of what Anglico did. So I show up there thinking how it's going to be as soon as I get there. I realize if we're going to contribute, we are going to have to find a way to support the army.

And we are on the army side of things. So you're talking about the Marines? The army. We were covering both, but we were primarily on the south with the army units. I was going to have to.

Jocko Willink

Did you have another Anglico team that was up with three eight? No, because three, it's a Marine battalion. They have their own organic back, which I know this guys, three seven and three, I know those guys extremely well. We had another AngliCo team out of Kregner with you guys, which, you know, another Anglico team. But because the Marines up on the north side of the city had their own organic FAC and air shop, they didn't need me.

Dave Berke

I worked with them a little bit. I actually did some missions with them, but mostly didn't have to. The army didn't have any, so I worked with them. To your point, though, as soon as. I got there, I realized, well, first of all, there weren't enough of me to go around.

They needed way more support than I could provide them. But the only way for me to. Really contribute is I was exactly what I just said. I had to support them, not do what I thought I wanted to do for me, it's what I needed to do for them. Yeah, yeah.

Jocko Willink

I got asked by one of my senior officers that actually came to Ramadi. They're like, do you need anything? I was like, three more task units or two more tasking or something like that, because we. There's so much work to be done. And one of the reasons there was a lot of work to be done was this was going to be a very tough fight.

And one of the reasons it was going to be not just a tough fight, but it was a different fight than what had happened in Fallujah in 2004. So in Fallujah, it was a massive kinetic operation where coalition forces pushed through. They gave warning to the civilians to leave like it was a siege and assault of Fallujah. Just that's what it was. And outstanding job by the soldiers and marines that executed that.

But it was very kinetic. Like I said, there was warnings. Infrastructure was devastated inside of Fallujah when that happened. And so when Maliki gets elected, he wants peace. And he knew that a Shia led invasion, let's call it, because that's what it is.

So most of the army. So Iraq is made up primarily of Shias, and the ruling class had been Sunnis. That's Saddam was a Sunni. So the army, once the army was formed up, now, in 2006, the army consisted of a lot of Shia. There were some sunni battalions, but it was a majority was Shia.

So what Maliki knew is if he took his Shia army for the most part, and did a massive kinetic operation through Ramadi, that would look like Shia versus Sunni, and that would, you know, could obviously splinter into a massive civil war. So what he wanted to do was a less kinetic option. He also wanted to preserve the infrastructure. Yeah. So that's what was going on.

This, this. That's what was going on. And so a few weeks into our deployment, it was time for the 228 iron soldiers out of Pennsylvania. And they're actually out of all over the country because they were national guard. You had to get guys from Utah, guys from Vermont, guys from all over the place.

Pennsylvania. Yes. And there was also active duty. The three, eight marines was working for them at the time, too, but it was time for them to go home, most of them to go home. And General Gronski has been on this podcast, talked through what that looked like, talked through what his deployment was like.

The. Now, the group that came in to take their place is one, one ad. They're led by colonel, now General Sean McFarlane. He comes in to replace them. He brought more combat power, too.

So he has tanks, he has Bradley's, he has more people. Like, it's a significant upgrade in combat power, and that gives him the capability of going into these enemy controlled territories and setting up combat outposts. So when you got there? About a month ahead of me. Yep.

So what did that transition look strategically from what the two to eight was doing to now? You get one, one ad rolls in. What did you say? Yeah, a lot of how you describe it. So I get there.

Dave Berke

I have. I think a month ahead of you is about what it ended up being. I'm there a month ahead of you. I think I leave a month before for you, give or take a couple of days. A lot of work.

When we first got in with the 228, a lot of that for me was figuring out what was going on. And I'm not a strategist, but really what we were there was a lot of. Maybe the best word I could think of is, like, containment. Like, we knew where we could go. And where we couldn't go.

Jocko Willink

We. And of course, we are there as a supporting unit. I am there to bring capability that they don't have. They didn't have helicopters, they didn't have jets, they didn't have ISR, they didn't have a bunch of things that I had. We also, quite frankly, had an extra chuck and extra rifles and an extra turret gunner.

Dave Berke

We brought things that just did nothing but help them. But in the end, the operations were somewhat limited to making sure that the enemy didn't expand their reach and didn't go beyond what we knew they currently had. We had crystal clear maps of what we owned and what they owned, and a lot of it was operating inside those confines and knowing what, that was clearly the contrast. When we swap out, we watched the swap out from two to eight to 1.1. That operation, the entire strategic mindset changed.

And that month, maybe a little bit, I may have saw some things from an experience wise, but you and I saw the transition very similarly from what was going on, from a very similar perspective, despite I had a little extra. Time on the ground. Yeah, I do remember when I got there, because I got there maybe, like, I don't know, a week or something before, like task unit bruiser, like, all the boys showed up. Yeah. And the rumor was, we're doing Fallujah.

We're gonna Fallujah. The place was the term. Did you get that exact same thing? So, so I was. When.

Jocko Willink

When my guys were coming, I was thinking to myself, oh, it's on. Like, this is gonna be. We're gonna do another Fallujah. And seals operated in Fallujah. And that was a good situation for them, you know, to get in there.

And obviously it had worked because you looked at Fallujah and Fallujah was pretty pacified, I mean, at least from that perspective right now. Are there some negatives? Of course, you know, you've got displaced citizens. That's a huge thing. You take 400,000 people and think about that.

You're in Iraq, the infrastructure is already not great. Now you're going to send 400,000 civilians out into the hinterland to try and figure things out. That doesn't work. But that's what I was hearing when I showed up there. Oh, we're going to do another fallujah.

That's what we're going to do. And it didn't take maybe a couple weeks before. Oh, we're not doing a fallujah. And part of that was the one. One ad coming in.

Oh, maybe you remember this. I just remembered it. There was a moment where what we're going to do is when the 228 and the eleven ad are on the ground together, we'll have twice the combat power. That's when we're going to do the Fallujah thing. Did you hear that rumor?

Dave Berke

We've talked about this. We've never proved it, but you and I were in the same meetings, partially because of our role in our organizations. We had similar roles in terms of our responsibility downstream and roles to the brigade. And so all these. You're repeating all the exact same conversations I observed to include, well, if we do this, what's the risk?

What's the drawback? The infrastructure piece was always the largest one. Was, like, rubbling. The city might have long term impacts that we don't want. So all these conversations.

But we had this window where we had all this. Two brigades. Yeah. All this firepower available. So I think we were literally sitting in the same rooms, having the same conversations as they're talking through these things.

Jocko Willink

Yep. The clincher was, though, Maliki. Smart, right? Maliki had been elected, and he was smart enough to know, dude, I don't want a civil war in this country. And if I invade Ramadi with a bunch of shia army people and they go into a sunni city, we could have a.

We could have a freaking civil war on our hands. And he didn't want that. So the new strategy was to go into these enemy controlled territories, enemy controlled neighborhoods, and set up combat outposts. All of this was to be done by, with and through iraqi forces, meaning everything needed to be led by Iraqis. They wanted everything to have.

And this is the term that was used, an iraqi face. Here's the problem with the term iraqi face. The iraqi face is just the face, right? And ultimately you needed to have more than just the face. You needed to actually have some capability.

And I wrote about this in the dichotomy of leadership. We were told when we got there, and the guys that turned over with us like, hey, they're going to try and make you use iraqi soldiers to do all your missions. You're going to have to take them with you. And we're kind of like. And they were doing some of it.

It was definitely challenging for them, it was challenging for us, but, and again, wrote about this in dichotomy. They were telling us we needed to have, and I forget what the exact ratio was. It might have been six to one, it might have been seven to one. But for every one American, you had that six Iraqis soldiers with you. This was problematic.

I pushed back against it. Even though I pushed back against it, I didn't push back and say, no, we don't want to take any iraqi soldiers. All I said was, hey, look, the minimum number of seals I want to have is like four, five, six, something like that, depending on where they're going. But we still, 99% of the operations that we did were side by side with iraqi soldiers. We didn't have to take them on reconnaissance missions.

That's one that we were allowed to do unilaterally. And so we did a couple of those. We did one, we did one that was waterborne. And we were really nervous about taking the iraqi soldiers with us in the boats because they didn't how to swim. And so we went, took the time to get them.

We had to order life jackets. We got them life jackets eventually. And I remember I sent that one up the chain of command saying, hey, listen, we want to do this. We want to do these operations from the boats. I don't feel comfortable with the Iraqis going with us.

Can we do it unilaterally? And the word came back down, nope, take Iraqis. And so what we did was we gave them, like, swim training and it was more like float testing than it was swimming training. But what we did is we got them to make sure that they would float if they fell in the water. And then we went and brought them with as a partner force.

And they like, did basically security from the boats as we did the going ashore part. But that's the type of scrutiny that was happening with trying to get these missions done, and that's the way it works. And the reason it was was because if no one is telling you you have to take iraqi soldiers with you, you're gonna say, yeah, okay, then we won't. It's just additional risk that you don't want to have to take. And here's another important piece to understand that, again, through my fault, not everyone understood this.

Our mission from the siege of which is the combined joint special operations task force. So this is all special operations in the country, both iraqi and american and whoever else. Our mission from them was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of iraqi soldiers. So why is that important? Well, we weren't being told to train and fight special operations units of iraqi soldiers.

We were being told to train and fight. And by fight, I don't know if you know this echo or I just want to make this clear. Train and fight means we're going to train them and we're going to fight with them. Like we're going to. We're going to take them out and fight them.

Like sail a boat. Like we're going to sail the boat. That's what you're going to fight the platoon. You take them out so they can fight. The people that we were training were that we were directed to train were regular, conventional iraqi soldiers.

The jundies we ended up scraping together. And actually, the guys that predated us, they scraped together and put together a unit, a special. They called it a special mission unit that was pretty close to like, okay, this is more of a special operations type direct action. And again, the guys that preceded us there from the SEAL teams, they built that unit and did a good job. And so we took them over, but we also took over a bunch of working side by side with regular iraqi jundies.

And out of each time, we try and carve out, like, a scout element. We called them scouts. They had their own little scout element. We kind of work with them, but they were mostly just general purpose iraqi soldiers, which meant they were conscripts, which meant they were untrained, they were uneducated, they were unmotivated. Sometimes they were unloyal.

And we didn't have any blue on green. We didn't have any of those types of attacks while we were there. But we were definitely suspecting they had a. They. The.

They had a poster of Muqtada al Sadr in their barracks, you know, like the crazy muqtad al Sauder looking poster, and he has got lightning all around him like the Dundees had. That. That guy was a, that guy was a bad guy. I had targeted him my previous deployment, and here he was, a poster of him hanging in the barracks. So there was, it was tough, but that's.

That's what we were dealing with. It also mean that they were poorly equipped, didn't have night vision for sure. They certainly didn't have night vision. They didn't have. They didn't actually have flashlights.

So they might have, like, a flashlight for every three or four guys, but they certainly didn't have weapons mounted lights. They didn't have any helmet mounted lights. They just have. Would have, like, a flashlight. And, you know, we did.

We, you know, everyone, every seal probably has three or four flashlights. And so guys were giving them flashlights so that they could see. But this is that. This is one of the reasons why we conducted a lot of operations in the daytime. Because when the mission of the partner force that you've been tasked to train and fight doesn't have night vision and operates in the day, what are you gonna do?

Are you gonna say, hey, we trained you, but now you go out by yourselves? You can do that. What kind of bond do you form with the forces that you're working with? Not a very good one. Does it give the enemy a tactical advantage?

Yeah. Here's the thing. The enemy did not really go out at night in Ramadi very much. I'd say we probably killed less than 1% of the enemy that we killed. Or at night.

They came out in the daytime. That's when they came out. That's their best form of camouflage. Their best form of camouflage wasn't the darkness. It was the civilian populace.

So, you know, the idea that we own the night, which we certainly do, but the enemy knew that we own the night, and that's why they were very inactive at night. They wouldn't do anything at night. Yeah, very similar things. And obviously, coming from aviation, you know, the massive advantage we typically had back then was we had the capability of conducting daytime tactics at night because of our night capability. Night vision goggles, all the systems that we had, we loved operating at night because it gives us a huge advantage.

Dave Berke

One of the other things that was a huge priority for us as we focused, almost exclude. We did a lot of stuff at night. I shouldn't say we didn't. We did plenty of things at night, but typically, the night missions that we did were all intelligence driven raids, where we knew where we were going and why and we wanted to catch them by surprise, because we expected them to be doing nothing, which is what they were typically doing. So I don't mean to say we didn't operate at night, but the night missions had a different focus behind them.

Our daytime missions. One of the things, we also got some strategic insight. You've talked about this a lot, and it's just something that I had to reflect back on because I didn't quite keep up as much until after I was gone. Thinking about it was our presence there. Our existence there was really designed to help the local populace that we decided not to Fallujah.

We were not going to try to level their city is. We wanted them to see us as a better alternative than the insurgents, who were really bad, evil people. And one of the ways we had to do that is we had to be present. We literally called them presence patrols. They were there to show them, hey, we are going to stay here, and we're going to align with you, and I want you to see us doing that.

Which meant we were going to operate during the day. Would I rather operate at night from a tactical advantage? Yes. I have all this great gear and all this great training and a lifetime of experience doing that. Knowing the enemy couldn't.

That did not help us with one of the main strategic objectives we had, which was, you are gonna see me there, which means we had to operate during the day, and we had to make a big adjustment to do that, because just at face value, we had a bigger advantage at night. But that wasn't gonna accomplish what we're trying to accomplish. And. Yeah, that's exactly. With, for instance, with that special minute mission unit.

Jocko Willink

Like, we're doing direct action rates, which we did. I don't know how many direct act. We did a lot of direct action raids. Of course, we did those at night because we had that small group of iraqi soldiers that we gave them all flashlights so we could help get to the target. You know, we'd have our guys on night vision.

We could kind of protect the patrol going on there. Once we hit the target. Well, now they're inside, we can turn on lights. They can use their flashlights. Everything's cool.

Yeah, we absolutely did that. We did a lot of that. But when you've got a conventional iraqi force that needs to do a patrol or a clearance inside the city, they are absolutely gonna do that during the day. Yep. I mean, it would be mayhem if they did that at night.

Dave Berke

You couldn't. Yeah, you couldn't do it. So that's what we started doing with these iraqi forces in lead again, as much as we could get them to take the lead, we started to clear the city. Now the other thing is, am I going to have to like push the guys? Like, hey, you guys got to go out, dude, I don't have to push.

Jocko Willink

I don't have to push Leif Babin or Seth Stone or BTF Tony, like, hey, you better go out there and do this. Or JP or Mikey monsoor. Like, no, these guys are people. I mean, yeah, Mikey Monsore is the guy that had got CASUV act because he had a freaking ear infection, comes back and is like, can you get me back to my guys? I won't, there's not, I want to go.

I want to go. Like, that's just, that's just not happening. We had 30 plus freaking badass frog men that want to go out and so do I have to push them? No, actually what I have to do is hold the back. Actually would have to say like a BTF Tony, I know that you want to go and do this, that the other thing in broad daylight.

You're not doing that, bro. It's not happening. He wanted to get, he had all kinds of ideas of things that PTF Tony wanted to do. So that's what we did. And like I said, do we do direct action rates?

Of course. Do we do those at night? Yes, of course. Do we do recons at night? Yes, of course we did.

Did we oftentimes for our overwatch positions insert at night? Yes, we did. So we did those kind of things. But this is what was, what was different was we had to go into a coin, a counter insurgency mode. We had to change the mode from just doing direct action to doing these counterinsurgency type operations, which is a whole spectrum of operations.

Why are we doing that? Because we were freaking losing at the time. We were losing, not just in her body, the whole country, we were losing. Enemy attacks were up 300%. It was going in the wrong direction.

I know that. On my first deployment to Iraq, we were targeting insurgents. We were targeting really like cell leaders. We weren't calling them insurgents yet. That's what they became once they got organized, once they got led.

But we were playing whack a mole. Go out, grab a bad guy, someone would replace him. Go out, grab a different bad guy, someone replace him. Here's a declassified study about the war that was released in 2007 about the insurgency in 2006. It says, this is from the gamma corporation Ramadi, the capital of al Anbar.

Was the only city in Iraq where gunfights were still routine in 2006. In late 2004, AQI leaders fleeing the assault from Fallujah had poured into Ramadi, eventually laying siege to the government center in the heart of the city. A woefully undersized force of two american battalions undertook a house by house operation to hold a city of 400,000. In five visits to since 2004, I had watched the american casualties climb beyond those suffered in the Fallujah battle. 140,000 troops in country, and they produced 3000 patrols a day, including close insecurity.

That's not a sufficient number. Force protection had become its own mission. Even our advisors have to take four humvees to make one patrol. The senior levels insist on it. We're too risk averse.

We're not taking back the streets. The commanders understand the principles of counterinsurgency. The first is to make contact with the people. And you don't establish that by staying inside the wire or driving in convoys. Convoys.

The first technique we'd push as instructors, if given more freedom, to suggest improvements. That's simple. We'd argue for more foot patrols with the jundies. But this school is not in the business of operations. We're here to change attitudes.

So this was the whole, one of the strategic changes that we saw is we got to get outside the wire. We coalition forces got to get outside the wire, got to start doing, like you said, presence patrols. But it's not just presence patrols. It goes beyond that because what we're going to do is we're going to set up combat operations inside your city. So yes, we're going to do presence patrol.

And what are we doing on those presence patrols, by the way? We're going into meeting with the families. We're saying, oh, your kid's sick. Oh, we got a corpsman here, let's give them some medicine. That's what we're doing.

Oh, you got a problem with your generator? Oh, guess what? We got a CB that we can bring out here and help work on your generator for you. You're doing, you're figuring out what this, you're doing census as well. Who's out there?

What's that human terrain look like? Yes, I'm doing big clearance operations where you're literally going, again, we being iraqi soldiers in the lead. You know, on one of these clearance operations, we probably have 150 iraqi soldiers, seven seals, 100 army guys. The army guys are setting up cordons, the seals are setting up Overwatch positions, and the Iraqis are moving building to building. Yeah, just just like, as a broad kind of overview of what those clearance.

Dave Berke

Operations look like, there was nothing like, there's no comparison to this. You couldn't look at Fallujah from the year prior where that. I know it worked for a particular outcome, but it was not a frame, not a model to use. In fact, they looked at the Fallujah model and said, we can't do that for that exact reason. It was nothing like zero three, the march up.

It was nothing like Desert Storm. What we were doing in that time, there was no other. Oh, just. We're just going to do this. Everything was different.

Everything was new for everybody. It was completely complex. And it was unlike, certainly historically, but also unlike what I was thinking or what people were thinking, because the frame of reference you have is whatever your previous frame of reference is, if you're on the march up in zero three, that's what you remember, and then you get there like, oh, God, this is totally different. If you were in Fallujah and guys that I knew came from Fallujah or had been in Fallujah, this is totally different. There was no comparison to the complexity and the range of things we were doing and the type of missions we were doing to anything that anybody had done.

And I mean anybody, even the most experienced people that have been around for 15 years. There was no frame of reference that, oh, we did this, you know, back in Desert Storm, or we did this back in OiF. We were doing things that nobody had done in a generation. And again, when you say we, you're talking about this broad coalition of us army, soldiers and marines, special operations. That would be us.

Jocko Willink

The SeaLs that were there, it was. It was all new. And again, this is all historically documented. This isn't like Dave sitting here saying, oh, he's saying what they did? We did something.

No, no. It's like, it's. It's just. It's documented. Yes.

Hey, did it happen in Tal afar? Yes, it did. So headed dim and dump. Yes. Actually, let me throw a correction at you.

Up in Tal Afar, which HR McMaster went up and did cease, clear, hold and build up in Tal Afar. The marines in al Qaeda, which I mentioned briefly, they did what they did that was outstanding, was they made friends with the local populace who were pointing out where the bad guys were. So, actually, now that I think about it, people had done this before. We were capturing those lessons. We heard about the marines in al Qaeda going door to door.

It was a great story. It's like marines are in al Qaeda going door to door trying to clear the city. And someone would be like, hey, why are you coming to my house? The bad guys are four buildings down. Oh, okay.

Well, do you want to help us? And they would want to help. And then McMaster did this up in Tal afar. And guess who took McMaster's place? McFarland.

Yeah. So General McFarland, Colonel McFarlane at the time rolls in and said, oh, what'd you do here? Oh, I see what you did. Okay. It worked.

Oh, yes, it worked. Okay, let's go. Let's go do it. Ramadi. Colonel Gronsky didn't have the combat power to get it done.

He needed more people. Well, McFarlane shows up and he's got tanks, which is going to be a huge asset, and he's got more combat power. So that's why this idea of going in and building these combat outposts. So it wouldn't just be a presence patrol, it would be a permanent presence. That was another word that got thrown around a lot in those brigade meetings.

Permanent, established, permanent presence. Yeah, the cops. That's what the combat outpost war. And as we started to come up with a plan, the actual, like, mission planning for building the combat outposts, I realized one of the best things that we could do in tasking a bruiser was support these operations. Be the.

Be the supporting actor, provide overwatch. And look, we did some overwatches out of the gate, out of the gate, tasking to bruiser. And, hey, I'm going to correct you again, Dave. You said no one's ever done anything like this before. My first deployment, there was a unit that was getting hammered with mortars on the fringes of Baghdad, real hostile area at the time.

And we went out there and set up sniper positions. We went out there and set up these sniper positions. We did it one time. We were ineffective. We were ineffective.

We got mortared. You know, we took some really close mortars, but we didn't do anything. We didn't engage anybody. But it gave me a little glimpse of, oh, wait a second. What if we would have been out there for a few days?

What if we would have put a couple other Overwatch positions in other spots? You know, there's other things I figured out that we could do. And as I saw this unfold, as soon as we got there, it's like, oh, we could put snipers out. And that's what we started doing immediately. And luckily, task unit bruiser had 13 snipers in it, which is a lot.

It's a lot. Four to four of snipers in a task unit would be, would be sort of probably what the requirement is. Six is probably normal. Like, oh, we got six or seven snipers. We had 13 snipers.

It's just luck. Luck of the draw. Look. Oh, you have a chief, you know, BTF, Tony, guess what? He'd been to sniper school.

Not every chief goes to sniper, but he. So that's, there's an additional one. We had guys that were new guys that had snuck in and gone to sniper school, and so we just ended up in a platoon with a lot of snipers in it. And so we had a huge tactical advantage. So very quickly, like I said, I got, I got our snipers into the field.

And guess what? When our snipers are going in the field, they're not going into the field solo. They're going in with iraqi soldiers. They're going in with our interpreters on every sniper overwatch. So the iraqi soldiers are with us.

They're helping maintain security. They're up on the rooftops. They're ha, they have machine guns in case we get attacked. They're helping us deal or manage the deal with or manage the families that are in these buildings. And so we put these sniper teams out there.

And like I said very quickly, these snipers are snipers. These seal snipers started killing bad guys within days. We had these combined iraqi seal sniper elements that are out there killing. We probably killed, I don't know, six, seven, eight bad guys within days. And this was very shocking.

This is very shocking to the rest of the seal community, really, and special operations community at large. It was shocking to me as well. It was talking to the guys. Well, look, we all knew Ramadi was bad, but we didn't understand how effective we could be. You know, what's, what surprised the enemy?

The enemy was shocked because they hadn't had someone sneak into their backyard and kill them when they didn't expect it. In these areas where people couldn't drive. Well, guess what we could do? We could walk. We could sneak in there.

We could sneak in there at night. We could set up a position when they start in the daytime, start doing what they normally do. We could take them out. When they start digging holes in the road to put ieds in, guess who's going to kill them. We are.

But there was a lot of them. And it surprised, like I said, it surprised the enemy, surprised me. It surprised everybody. My boss was surprised. I was surprised.

My boss's boss was surprised. No one was used to this level of enemy engagement. That's why I said Ramadi was different. Here's a, here's a quote. Another one.

After the Fallujah offensive, the Americans tried to quell the insurgency in Ramadi with a combination of political maneuvers and cooperation of tribal leaders to root out foreign islamist fighters. But that plan has spectacularly fallen apart. The men who dared to ally themselves with the Americans quickly learned that the US military couldn't protect them. Insurgents killed 70 of Ramadi's police recruits in January. Yeah, that's glass factory.

And at least a half a dozen high profile tribal leaders have been assassinated since then. This was a freaking terror campaign. Quote, this whole thing's a quote. I'm injecting some little quotes like, this thing is a freaking terror campaign. That was my interjection.

Back to the book. Ramadi has become a town where anti american guerrilla guerrillas operate openly and city bureaucrats are afraid to acknowledge their job titles for fear of being killed. The government center in downtown Ramadi comes under gunfire or more border attacks daily. That's from Megan K. Stack and Louis rug from an article called fear of big battle panics, iraqi city, 11 June 2006.

So, yeah, go listen to the podcast about the glass factory if you want to know what happened there. And this is all fresh when we showed up. That happened in January, those tribal leaders, the sheikhs, got assassinated.

So the idea that Ramadi was somehow in good condition when task unit Bruiser arrived. Let me give you another quote here.

In late 2005, the sunni tribes around Ramadi attempted to expel al Qaeda in Iraq. After growing weary of the terrorist group's heavy handed indiscriminate murder and intimidation campaign, a group calling itself the Anbars People's Council formed a from a coal formed from a coalition of local sunni sheikhs and sunni nationalist groups, the council intended to conduct organized resistance against both coalition forces and al Qaeda elements. But undermanned and hand strung by tribal vendettas, it lacks strength and cohesion. A series of tribal leader assassinations ultimately brought down the group, which ceased to exist by February of 2006. This collapse set the conditions that the brigade found when it arrived in late May.

The assassinations created a vacuum, a leadership vacuum in Ramadi and by cutting tribal ties to outside tribal centers, isolated the city. For their part, the tribes had adopted a passive posture, not wishing to antagonize the powerful al Qaeda presence in an in and around Ramadi. In short, as the ready first prepared to move from Tal afar, their new ayo was essentially in enemy hands.

So that that's what was going on. The idea that Ramadi had been pacified was not true. Ramadi was a complete war zone when we showed up.

Here's from the same article. In the summer of 2006, Ramadi, by any measure, was among the most dangerous cities in Iraq. The area of operations averaged over three times more attacks per capita than any other area in the country. With the exception of the embattled government center and nearby buildings held by a company of marines. Al Qaeda related insurgents had almost complete freedom of movement throughout the city.

They dominated nearly all of the city's key structures, including the city hospital, the largest in Anbar provinces province. Their freedom of movement allowed them to emplace complex subsurface IED belts, which rendered much of the city a no go terrain for us and iraqi army forces. That's the summer of 2006. I'm just gonna use that as a better way to explain what I was saying. All corrections aside, my whole point was like, this was different than anything when I say we.

Dave Berke

That was my team and the teams were sporting. This was a. There was nothing like this. This was just different. This environment was different.

Jocko Willink

And listen, if you were in Habanea or you were in Baghdad or you were in Yusufia and someone was shooting at you, we get it, man. Of course. Of course the chances of them shooting you were three times greater if you were in Ramadi. So that's just the way it was. And that's why it was different.

And that's why I didn't do a good job of making sure people understood what we were getting into because it was so different now, as we got there, and like I said, we started killing bad guys almost immediately. We immediately became the most scrutinized unit in the country. And I don't mean that in a bad way, actually. I actually mean it in a positive way. My chain of command wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing and make sure that we had the support that we needed.

So they increased their micromanagement, and I was fine with it. How did they do that? Well, here's a couple examples. Number one, they changed the level of authority required for operations to be conducted. So let me give you an example.

There was some basic operations that I was able to approve myself.

If we were gonna do a presence patrol when I got there, I could say, yep, leif, you wanna take your guys out and do a presence patrol? Go ahead. I approve it. Within a week, they said, hey, jocko, we want. We have approval for that now.

I said, okay, cool, fine. I wasn't upset by this at all. I had a great relationship with my commanding officer. We could, I think, the only. The only thing that I was actually allowed to conduct by the end of the deployment, but no, not by the end of.

Just within a couple of weeks, was like, hey, if you need to do a logistics convoy, you can approve it, Jocko. Everything else was overseen by my chain of command, which I was perfectly fine with. Why did he do that? It's because the operations were very risky and he knew it. My boss knew it.

My commanding officer knew that.

He's the overall responsible. If I'm going out there and killing a bunch of people, he needs to, and he wants to know what's going on. Of course, he's the one that's going to have to answer for it. Yeah. Hey, Jocko, I'm going to put more control on you.

Great, thank you. No problem. And that's exactly what happened. And listen, he knew the operations were risky, like I said, and I can tell you right now this might seem strange, and I don't know what it's like for you in the pilot world, if you want to promote and you want to make rank, the surest way to do that is to avoid risk. Just don't take risk.

Just don't take it. Even for me, like, I had, up till this point in my career, it had been an awesome career. I mean, I had had an incredibly blessed career in the SEAL teams. And if I wanted to continue on my trajectory, the easiest thing to do is not do anything. The easiest thing to do is, yep, we're going to train some iraqi soldiers.

That's. That's our mission. We'll train our iraqi soldiers. We'll stay. That.

That is tempting. I'm sure it was tempting for my boss, too. But here's the thing. Our fellow Americans were in a fight and needed our support. The US army soldiers, the US Marines were in an incredibly tough fight and we had some capabilities that we could bring to the table to help them.

And I knew it. And there's not one part of me that looks at a situation where there's Americans that are fighting and I say, oh, yeah, that's not me. I'm not doing that. These guys are getting wounded and killed on a daily basis and we've got an opportunity to help protect them. That's what we're doing.

And guess what? My boss agreed. And guess what? His boss agreed.

These were risky operations. I had a conversation with my boss, my commanding officer. He comes out, we'd already done some operation, we already killed some bad guys. We'd already gotten some firefights. And he's like, isn't this risky?

And I was like, sir, yes, it is.

Isn't it risky to be out there with these iraqi soldiers in the daytime, clear, doing clearances? Yes, it is, sir. It's very risky. There's enemy all over. He says, what are you going to do to mitigate the risk?

I told him, we are going to kill the enemy before they kill us. That's what we're going to do for mitigation. That's where, that's one of the primary drivers of setting up these overwatch positions. Because I had an element on the ground with 40 iraqi soldiers, and I had six or seven seals with that element helping them do the clearance. How can I protect them?

Oh, I can tell you I can protect them. I can put my snipers in Overwatch positions where they can protect them and see the enemy maneuvering on them. And that's exactly what we did.

And again, my commanding officer was, I had a great relationship with him, and it's his job to make sure we're doing the right thing.

You know, before we even left undeployment, I was in his office. We had changed. We were supposed to go to Baghdad. We had changed. Now we know we're going to Ramadi.

And he, I was in his office, and he asked me something along the lines of. Or he told me something along the lines of, hey, before every mission, you need to ask yourself, is this mission worth the lives of one of your guys? And I actually looked at him, I said, hey, sir, I can answer you that question right now. There's no mission that there could be that's worth the life of one of my guys. There's no mission.

I don't care if it's Osama bin Laden, I don't care. That might be an extreme statement, but there's no mission that's worth the life of one of my guys. These are my bros. Were you kidding me? And I said, sir, that being said, there will be risk on every mission that we do, and we're going to mitigate it as much as we can.

But it is not possible to mitigate all risk. It's not possible. Or unless we just stay home. So we will mitigate risk to the utmost. To the utmost.

And that. And that's what we did. And then again, great relationship with my commanding officer. He approved all the missions. He had to approve all the missions that we did, except for maybe, like I said, logistics convoys.

If we were running a logistics convoy to bring Seth Stone and the guys out at Corregidor, some equipment or gear that they needed, we could do that. I could approve it. Everything else that we did had to be approved up the chain of command. And by the way, there was also a level of operations that had to get approved by his chain of command. And they were all being very micro managing of us, which was fine.

Which was fine. So the idea that I was out there just running unchecked is, like, completely insane. It's complete. I had, first of all, I had my chain, my chain of command. So my SEAL team commander and then the siege of soda commander above him, they're reading all these ops ones.

They know exactly what's going on. On top of that, we have the conventional army chain of command and the Marine Corps chain of command, which, by the way, the army reported into the Marine Corps at that time. On top of that, we had to get approval from the battle space owner. So if you're gonna go work in Tamim, which is a one section of Vermont, if you're gonna go work in there, you need to get approved by the battle space owner. You've got to present that mission to them.

You got to coordinate with them. Then you got to go talk to the company commander and say, hey, captain, here's what I'm looking at doing. Then you got to talk to the platoon commander who's actually going to be running the QRF for you or whatever. Oh, and by the way, on top of all that approval, you got to get approval from the iraqi chain of command. So every move that we made, every operation that we conducted, every time we left the wire, it had to be approved and coordinated through all these different elements.

And then, of course, on the ground, like I said, you got to coordinate with every. Everyone on the ground, for sure. You got to talk to the battalion, company, platoon, squad. If you fail to coordinate with the battle space owners, it's freaking suicide.

It's suicide. They owned the ground. And by they, I mean, like, a company commander owns a chunk of real estate out there. You gotta go talk to him. They have the intel, by the way, too.

Like, they're the ones that know, hey, there's an id in that street three days in a row. Don't go down it. Thank you. They told us the safest route. Laif wrote about this.

Laf wrote about asking a conventional battle space owner, hey, Spec Ops wants to do an operation down here. What do you think? He's like, do not drive down that road. You'll lose a vehicle. Okay, cool.

We didn't go, by the way, the conventional battle space owners. They're the ones that conducted our QRF. They're the ones that conducted our fire support. They're the ones that we relied upon to conduct our casualty evacuation. So if we got a guy wounded, it was the army or the Marine Corps that was going to come and rescue us.

If we needed fire support, it was the army or the Marine Corps that was going to come and rescue us. That's what was happening. They're the ones that were going to send troops. They're the ones who are going to send armor. They're, they're the ones that are going to send kazakh vehicles to us.

We didn't have the assets to do that. We didn't. We did. Zero times.

Zero times. Well, I guess, let me not say zero times. Anytime we did an operation in the urban area of Ramadi, zero times was task unit bruiser assets, the QRF or the Casa vac, zero times. If we did, if we did an operation in the, in the hinterland, in a rural area, like up at MC one or one? MC one.

MC one. MC one. My curly one. Yeah. If we did an operation up there, it's a rural area, we might stage our vehicles and leave an element with vehicles that could actually do the Kazakh.

But even there, most of the time, I don't want to say zero because I think a couple, couple times, we did act as our own potential QRF or act as our own Kazakh. But 99% of the time, it was the conventionals that were doing that for us. And so they had to approve what the hell we were going to do. They had to agree to support it. I had to put in my concept of operations, what my casvec platform was, who it was, what frequencies we were going to be on, and if we couldn't get the approval and support from the conventional forces, we could not conduct the mission.

Period, end of story.

We couldn't conduct operations without them. That's why this was such a team effort. And we called in these assets, QRF, fire support, and Casavac. You combine all those three together. We called those in.

I can't count how many times. And God bless the US army and God bless the US Marine Corps for coming to help us and coming to save us and coming to evacuate our wounded guys.

And you might think to yourself, why did they agree to do that? I can tell you why they agreed to do it, because they knew that we took significant risk to go into their areas, go into their battle spaces, and kill the insurgents that were trying to kill them. And they were thankful and grateful, just like we were thankful and grateful for them when they came and pulled our ass out of terrible situations.

This was a team effort.

The army called US Army Seals. The the Marine Corps gave us Marines. I had Marines that worked in my tactical operations center for the entire deployment to coordinate communication.

There's two outstanding marines that were there 24 hours a day. We used Marine Corps cirque boats on many occasions at great risk to those Marines and their boats because we had a great relationship. The Marines didn't have to do that. They did it because we were all part of the same team. That's what's going on.

Here's an overview of how things unfolded. This is once again from Colonel Sean McFarland, the brigade commander. He says it was clear that to win over the sheiks and their people, our BCT, that's brigade combat team, would have to move into the city and its contested areas. Thus we decided to employ a tactic we had borrowed from third Armored cavalry regiment and used successful intellifar, the combat outpost or cop. This is what I was just talking about.

That's what McMaster did. General McMaster. No disrespect, sir. General McMaster, Colonel McMaster at the time, that's what he did up at Tal Afar with the proud soldiers of the third armored calf. Legendary guys.

Legendary deployment. Did an outstanding job. Continuing on back to the book, our cops normally consisted of a tank or infantry company team based in a defensible local structure in a disputed area. Eventually, the cops included an iraqi army company wherever possible as they became emboldened by our presence. Later, we began to establish iraqi police substations at or near the cops as well.

At this early stage, the outpost provided lily pads for mechanized quick reaction forces, safe houses for special operations units, that's us. And security for civil military operations centers. In rural centers, the cops sometimes doubled as firebases with mortars and counterfire radars. That's out like at MC one. Because we now maintained a constant presence in disputed neighborhoods, the insurgents could no longer accurately trace and predict our actions.

Frequently and random patrols out of combat outposts presented prevented al Qaeda from effectively moving and operating within the local populace. At the same time, the cops enhanced our ability to conduct civil military operations. CMo, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance and information operations.

I'm going to continue on. Here's something that no one wants to hear. These outposts also acted as fly bait, especially in the period immediately after a new cop was established. Experience in Tal Afar taught us that insurgents would attack a newly established outpost using all systems at their disposal, including suicide car bombs. These attacks usually did not end well for the insurgents, who often suffered heavy casualties.

During the establishment of the first outpost in July 2006, the enemy mounted multiple platoon assaults. The frenzy of attacks on the new outposts culminated in a citywide battle on July 24, 2006, in which al Qaeda in Iraq forces were severely beaten and sustained heavy casualties. By October, the attacks were far less, with elements consisting of a handful of men conducting hit and run type operations. These noticeable decreases in their strength indicated our plan to decimate their ranks was clearly working. Constant coalition presence, insurgent attrition, and loss of insurgent mobility freed the people from constant intimidation and sapped any support for al Qaeda in Iraq.

So what that meant was what I just read the fly bait. This is what people don't want to hear you. When the conventional forces were building this massive construction project to establish a combat outpost, we knew that the enemy was going to attack. That's what we knew was gonna happen. And so what we did in task unit bruiser is we pushed out from those combat outposts as they were being built and set up sniper overwatch positions with iraqi soldiers, along with us, with interpreters, along with us with seal elements, and would set up these sniper overwatch positions.

And when the enemy maneuvered into attack, we would interdict and kill them. And they did it often.

That's what was happening.

Continuing on, the cops also allowed us to control the infrastructure in Ramadi and use it to support the population again. During a heavily publicized operation in July 2006, we established a combat outpost manned with newly recruited iraqi army troops and us forces. We set it up just outside the Ramadi General hospital walls. While the iraqi army secured the hospital. Within days, the hospital providing medical care for was providing medical care for the city.

The effect devastated and embarrassed al Qaeda in Iraq. Insurgents, wounded fighters brought to the hospital were detained, while the general populace received quality medical attention for the first time in a year.

And, yes, Seals supported that operation. As a matter of fact, Seals went in first to that operation. Seals went into first. Seals were the first people on the ground in almost all of these combat outposts. Why is that?

Because the army wanted us there. Because the Marine Corps wanted us there. Because they knew and we knew they were going to get attacked. They knew and we knew that as soon as we cleared these roads, as soon as EOD and the engineers cleared these roads from roadside bombs, insurgents would come out and put. They have a name for.

It's called reseeding. Ieds. So an insurgent would go and put a hole in the ground and put a bomb in there. The engineers would clear that bomb, it would leave a hole. The insurgents would come back out and reseed, meaning put a new bomb inside the hole.

That's one of their tactics, techniques and procedures. So that was very easy for my snipers to get up on a long axis road where a mine clearance vehicle goes by, digs out a mine, disposes of it, there's a hole there, the vehicle drives away. 2 hours later, insurgent comes out to reseed. This is one of their tactics.

Continuing on from the same article, the brigade staff believed that by offering convincing incentives, we could create a tribal alliance that could produce lasting security in Ramadi. To persuade the tribes to cooperate, we first needed to understand the human terrain in our. And that task fell to an outstanding and talented junior officer, Captain Travis Patrick Quinn, an Arabic speaking former special forces soldier and an infantry officer. Assigned as the ready brigades s nine engagements, officer patrick coordinated brigade level local meetings and discussions. He quickly gained the sheik's confidence through his language and interpersonal skills and developed strong personal bonds with their families.

He strengthened these bonds during meetings between the brigade commander or deputy commanding officer and the sheiks. Battalion and company commanders also worked on improving relations with the townspeople on a daily basis. Thus the sheik's growing trust of the brigade officers led them to support our efforts to reinvigorate police recruiting.

So there was interaction on a daily basis almost with the tribal leaders there. And much of that was because of a heroic human being named Captain Travis Patrick Grin, who was at all the meetings Dave was just talking about, who is an arabic speaker? Who was, he was a special forces guy, freaking just an outstanding human, big ass smile on his face. By the way, nice, super nice guy, understood the culture.

Now, does this mean that every single marine and every single soldier saw this incredible level of coordination and cooperation? Of course not. Can there be someone that might have a different perspective or harbored some kind of animosity or didn't understand how the team worked together? Of course. Look, there's 5600 people there.

There's people in silos, there's people that see one event and judge, you know, what if some marine didn't get word on seals using their op or getting fuel from their fuel farm? What, what if an army officer didn't know we had coordinated with headquarters on a resupply of some ammo? What might, what might one of those individuals get angry and hold a grudge? Sure, that's possible. Could there be someone that didn't get the coordination that was missed the meeting, and seals roll in there and they didn't know about it?

Could that. Yes, absolutely. Is that possible? In fact, it's not just possible. It's guaranteed.

You got such a complex environment, not everyone's going to see it the same way. But those people are in a small, very, extremely small minority. The vast majority of people on the ground understood with great pride the communication, the coordination, the camaraderie that was everywhere on the battlefield, everywhere.

Now, again, if you're on the outside and you don't know this, I can see how you, you know, someone could get the impression that Jocko's just out there just doing everything on his own, that you could. You could end up with that. It's just so clearly ludicrous to think that everything was checked, everything was scrutinized, everything was approved through multiple lines of chains of command, and that's the way it was. And so I got into this whole diatribe. Cause I was talking about the scrutiny that we fell under.

Here's another scrutiny that we fell under. So, yeah, we had scrutiny from getting our missions approved. Another piece of scrutiny that we fell under almost immediately was we had to begin filling out two sworn shooter statements for every person that we killed.

This was not a normal procedure. And as you know, within probably a week, this. Hey, from now on, we want two sworn shooter statements for everyone that you kill. I was like, okay, roger that. What was.

What did Leif and Seth and the boys say? What? Are you kidding me? We got to fill out more paperwork. Of course they're mad, but I knew and I understood why.

I had conversation with my JAG officer about it. He's like, listen, these multiple forms of documentation of what happens, this is going to means when people make claims in the future, if they do, we will be able to explain exactly what was going on. And that made sense to me. War is complex, and people remember things differently, and it's best to document what happens. And that's exactly what we did.

That's exactly what we did. For every single enemy fighter that we killed, we have an explanation of what happened, why they were engaged, any pertinent information around the incident, and how the rules of engagement were implied, and those documents were then reviewed, and they were corroborated with other reports.

And what do I. So what do I mean by corroborated with other. What other reports? In order to do that, I have to explain the. The human terrain.

And you heard Colonel McFarlane, mention the word human. Human terrain. Human terrain, inner body. First of all, the enemy, the insurgents. There's really three components of insurgents there.

You had al Qaeda, straight up, al Qaeda in Iraq. Aqiz is what we called it. Al Qaeda in Iraq. You had sunni extremists. These sunni extremists were not al Qaeda.

They were fighting for themselves, for their own control. And then you had criminal elements. And there's crossover in all three of these, because sometimes they all had a common enemy, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes their enemy was each other. In fact, often it was.

So. But you had this. This element of enemy, these insurgents. Okay, so then you. So you have that.

Then you have american forces. Well, anything. What I miss on on. We could talk the whole day, I guess, about al Qaeda. Sunni extremists and criminal elements.

And these are the three main. There's little fractions within those, because the sunni extremists, sometimes different tribes, had different elements of extremism in their own tribe. So they would sometimes fight each other 100%. So it wasn't just a warm. It was like a three, four way.

War kind of going. So check this out. The sunni extremists, the sunni sheikhs, at one point fought al Qaeda. Al Qaeda assassinated the sheikhs. This.

I think it was six or eight. I think I just read it was six. Six sunni sheikhs got murdered by al Qaeda. That actually put the. The Sunnis in check.

They were like, all right, dude, this is. We're not. We're just gonna have to go along with them. That's freaking terror. Terror is supposed to have a purpose in a situation like this, where we're trying to control the populace.

The al Qaeda was trying to control the populace. What they did was torture, rape, murder. One of the key people or one of the key murders that they can do is murder the leaders of the tribes. And that's exactly what they did. They did that bomb at the glass factory.

Who was at the glass factory? Police recruits. Who were the police recruits? They were local Sunnis. And then you just had straight criminal elements.

And there's a lot of talk about a guy named Sheikh Satar who we formed a relationship with. It was actually the conventional forces we included formed a relationship with this guy named Sheikh Satar. And Sheikh Satar had been targeted in the previous six months as a bad guy. And as a matter of fact, the brigade commander, Colonel McFarland, went to the Marine Corps and said, hey, we're going to form a relationship with this guy. And they're like, no, that guy's a target.

He's like, he was a target six months ago. Now he was on our side.

So, so that, that's what was going on. So that's what you had from the, from the enemy, but on the friendly side. So we had american forces obviously there. We have almost 6000 soldiers and marines. By the way, not all these soldiers and marines are in combat roles.

Look, you got logistics and support, but you also have military transition teams. What are those military transition teams are doing? They're embedded with the iraqi military. They're friends with the iraqi military. They're working with the iraqi military.

They live with the iraqi military. We have police transition teams. What are they doing? Oh, they live with the iraqi police. They work with the iraqi police.

They have a relationship with the iraqi police. You also have civil affairs groups that are going out there and, and building infrastructure, working with the sheikhs, trying to get projects done for them. Paving roads, digging wells, all those things. Medcap, doing medical civil affairs. Oh, there's a breakout of some kind of disease or there's a situation going on where kids need better water.

Okay, let's get that medical civil affairs element going. So you have the US military, but the US military isn't all people with rifles. There's people that are there. Specifically their job is to rebuild the infrastructure from day one.

Then you have the iraqi army. I don't know the exact number. Maybe 3000 iraqi soldiers out there. They were out on operations with american forces with all of us. Like I said, 99% of the operations that we did other than recons and logistics runs, there were iraqi soldiers with tasking a bruiser.

I don't want to deviate too much. From the timeline here and all that, but like when you say criminal elements, generally speaking, do you know what their goal is? Make money. Oh, that's it. Straight up.

Echo Charles

So they're essentially fighting a different war than, I mean, everyone's kind of fighting their own different. And by the way, if the, if the opportunity comes to make money by putting a road in the bomb, I'm putting a bomb in the road for al Qaeda. They'll make money that way. If money comes from helping an american find out where a bad guy is, they'll help, they'll make money that way. They're just criminal elements.

Yeah. So you have like human intel sources. Do you know what that is? Yeah, yeah. It's basically like someone that's gonna tell you what's going on.

Jocko Willink

Some of those people, like six months ago they were planting bombs in the roads. Now, al Qaeda is running out of money to pay me. Oh, but you'll pay me to tell where al Qaeda is. I'm in. Let's go.

It's crazy, man. Makes sense. The iraqi army is there with us. They're out on all these operations, and they're obviously gonna bond and they're gonna take care and protect the friendly iraqi civilians. Also, we have interpreters.

The interpreters come from a bunch of different backgrounds to speak Arabic, but they're going to look out and see what's happening. Then, on top of all this, you actually have the interim government of Ramadi. There's a government in this city. They have a mayor. They have staff.

They're trying to run a city. They're trying to build infrastructure. They're trying to provide services. They're trying to build up their political capital. Right, and how do you build up political capital?

By protecting and supporting the civilian populace. So when someone runs a tank through a freaking wall, what happens? They go to the government officials and say, hey, the freaking Americans drove a tank through my wall. What is it? What does the mayor say?

Oh, let me get the Americans out here to give you some money, or let me get their engineers out here to rebuild your wall. There's a direct conduit for these civilians to run their grievances and complaints up. The chain of command is going to go right to the coalition forces.

And so you have that official government of Ramadi. Then you also have this entire sheikh, all the tribal sheikhs, and they've got all their elements, and they're trying to keep their political power. And that means the coalition forces are conducting what we call tribal engagement. Te engaging with the local tribes. These are the people of the power.

It's a tribal culture. These are the people with the power. And there's multiple tribes, powerful tribes in the region. And the tribal leaders, they're going to have power. And the Americans, what we had to do, the marines, the army, the Seals, we had to build relationships with those tribal leaders, and we had to help the tribal leaders protect their neighborhoods.

We had to help them fix damaged buildings, help them with their power issues. Like, that's what's happening. And guess what else? Civilian casualties. If there is a civilian casualty in Ramadi, it's immediately known to everyone in Ramadi, up, down, and across the chain of command.

That's what's happening. That's what's happening. That's why it's so important to mitigate collateral damage. That's why it's so important to protect the civilians. But when I say collateral damage just now, I just meant, like, the walls, the buildings, the infrastructure, but you've got to protect, obviously, the people, the human beings.

I think Laif's platoon, like, cut down date palms because they wanted to improve their field of vision. Like, we had to go pay for these freaking date palms. That's the level of, like, grievances that would get filed. So the idea that seals or any american or any iraqi force was out there indiscriminately killing civilians is. It's, like, implausible.

It could not happen. It could not happen. Every single civilian death, which did occur, by the way, were there civilians deaths? Yes, there were. And every one of them was reported, was investigated, and it was resolved with the local populace.

It had to be. You could not just go out and think that you could go and kill civilians. Let me give you an example. This. This.

Let me give you an example of what happens. This is from Al Jazeera. The 25 June 2006 specialist Nathan Lin was charged with voluntary manslaughter for allegedly shooting an unarmed man. On February 15, Lin and a second soldier, Sergeant Milton Ortiz, junior, were charged with obstructing justice for allegedly conspiring with another soldier who reportedly put an AK 47 near the body in an attempt to make it look as though the dead man was a fighter. Ortiz was also charged with assault and communicating a threat.

In a separate incident on March 8, he allegedly put an unloaded weapon to the head of an iraqi man and threatened to send him to prison. The soldier who allegedly placed the weapon near the body was redeployed and left the army before criminal proceedings began. Both soldiers from the first battalion, 109th infantry of the Pennsylvania National Guard, are being held and Baghdad while awaiting hearings.

So you want to know what happens when you kill a civilian? Everybody knows about it. And again, who reported these things? The locals report them. The iraqi soldiers report them.

The Americans report them. The sheikhs report them. The turfs report them. Everyone is watching. You can't get away with things.

And if you try and get away with things, you're going to hurt the freaking war effort. This is how, through all these different sources, this is how they found out and investigated and followed up on every engagement in Ramadi. It was reported through a citizen network to the government officials and back to the military.

And like I said, I don't care if it was a broken door, a smashed window, a breached wall, we're gonna hear about it. And any careless or overly aggressive unit that behaved in this manner would have been shut down immediately would have been shut down immediately.

Any unit that didn't coordinate with battlespace owners, well, they would have been there for one day. One day. We wrote about one of those elements in the book, extreme ownership, special operations element came in. They thought they were going to do their own thing. They were gone in two weeks.

I think they did two or three missions. They were gone. They weren't coordinating. And certainly any individual who's intentionally or repeatedly behaving in a way that's against the rules of engagement or against the law or against the strategy that we were conducting, they would have been arrested, imprisoned, court martialed, sent to jail, period, end of story. So, so if you hear, when you hear about war crimes, if you hear about someone wantonly killing civilians, it's just a lie from someone that has no idea of what it was like on the ground.

It was not possible.

And so despite the level of violence in Ramadi, engagements were highly visible, highly tracked, and in task unit Bruiser, we did get investigated, and when we did, I was thankful. This is actually a great lesson I learned very early, which was from the army. If something questionable happens, immediately get investigation. You should invite investigation. Did you, did you have this attitude?

Dave Berke

Dude, I am literally sitting here and it's like you're describing my experience there. All these things you're saying are the same exact things. I have so many stories in my head. I was thinking of a story ten minutes ago as you're walking through this. I was on a patrol, and listen, we worked together a bunch.

Most of my operations were not with. You because we were doing so many. Operations with so many other units. I was on a patrol where, and I was supporting an army squad or a platoon or something. We shot a cow.

We shot a cow. A local civilian cow got shot twice, and they did an investigation. I was interviewed because I observed it. And in the end, like, we, we conducted an investigation and then went back to that family. I could show it on a map and paid them, bought the cow, apologized, and fixed that problem over a cow.

The level of scrutiny was so insanely high, and I don't want to make it sound like it was debilitating where you were fearful of doing something wrong. You just understood that every single thing you did was being watched and observed, scrutinized and assessed and reported from all sorts of people. So even if I was like, hey. Don'T tell anybody we shot the cow, which is ridiculous anyway, 20 other people who I'm not coordinating on that are going to report it to include the owner of the cow. The owner of the cow who's gonna go meet with his sheikh on Thursday night, and he's gonna be like, hey, your freaking Americans shot my cow.

That's right. And so the best thing we learned we could do is if anything went wrong and things went wrong, we made mistakes. Cows got shot is we didn't wait for someone to tell up the chain across. We came home and immediately reported those things. And if it wasn't you, somebody else was going to do it.

It was just the life that we were living there. So as I'm listening here quietly, I am living in my head, what went on. It's exactly the same thing across all places that we operated there with every single unit. You couldn't. You just.

You simply could not do anything out of what was appropriate. And by the way, if you did, you were actually putting your own life at risk, too. It would have been dumb even if. You could, but you couldn't. It's just how it was.

Jocko Willink

And that's what the thing about investigating, that's what I learned, you know, invested. The word investigation has a negative connotation, right? Like, oh, you're getting investigated. And so what happened was, I was working with an army unit. I was probably two weeks there, and he.

We were planning or something. He's like, oh, I gotta go talk to whatever legals here. Do the jab or the CID. CiD's here from Baghdad. I'm like, oh, what for?

He's like, oh, we're getting investigated. I was like, oh. He goes, oh, no, it's good. He goes, that's my attitude. Come investigate us.

You want to know what we're doing here? Come investigate. And I was like, that is beautiful. And that's the attitude I had. So you should want to get investigated.

You should want to have everyone interviewed. You should want to have the truth be there. The classic example that looked like the blue on blue. We had a blue on blue, obviously. What about extreme ownership?

I came back, I was like, hey, we just had a blue on blue. Let's investigate and find out what the hell went wrong. Every Kia gets investigated. If you enter a mosque, they're gonna investigate that. If an unarmed personnel, unarmed person gets engaged or gets killed, it's gonna be investigated.

And here's the good thing. Once everyone on the team knows that. Like, everyone knows. Everyone knows. Oh, any action that you take is gonna be investigated.

So that's what we did. And listen, we're there for six months. We engaged hundreds of enemy. Did we have a small number of engagements where military aged males were maneuvering or behaving in a manner that was congruent with enemy tactics. And they got shot.

Yes, that absolutely happened. Guys digging holes, guys maneuvering in a tactical manner toward friendly forces, guys driving past clearly marked checkpoints like there was a. There were some cases where this type of behavior was identified by snipers, and the snipers deemed that military age males were displaying hostile intent. Meaning this sniper is looking at someone maneuvering, running, digging a hole, driving, and decided, hey, this person needs to be killed. They're a threat.

They're. They have hostile intent. Sometimes there's a warning shot, if possible. Sometimes there wasn't.

And then once neutralized, those individuals that were shot were inspected. And if it became clear once the target was neutralized that they ultimately were not a threat. Then we initiated the investigation. Yep. Here's what happened.

Bring someone in from the outside to investigate, whether it's the army, whether it's the Navy, whether it's the Marine Corps. Bring their legal teams in to interview everybody and to review the pertinent information and debrief with the. All the different elements that are out there and then make some kind of a legal recommendation.

That happened. And in each of these small number of individual cases, the shots that our snipers took were ruled clearly within the rules of engagement.

And look, does that help the conscience of a freaking sniper? Maybe a little, but not really. We still gotta go out, find the family, pay the family.

But this is a tiny number of situations where this took place. And like I said, all investigated and reviewed and cleared. What you have to do is you have to investigate. You have to get the truth out there. There's another term that I learned from the army, which is good shot, bad result.

And it's a. It's. It's a terrible thing. Means a sniper or a rifleman saw something, they identified what they thought was hostile intent, they took a shot, and it ends up having a bad result.

And that did happen, and it did happen with my guys on a couple of occasions. Now, look, I can tell you, no women or children were ever engaged by anyone in tasking a bruiser, ever. And the reason is because they weren't a threat. They seldom would even come out. If there was shooting going on, they wouldn't come out.

When they did come out, it's like they were doing things that were not even remotely hostile. There were times that the enemy used women and children as human shields, but even in those circumstances, no one ever shot a woman or a kid. There's a one instance where enemy fighter was transporting weapons and ammo and was hiding behind a child.

And that military age male was shot and killed by a sniper from tasking a bruiser documented. Now you might think, well, how is this happening? Were there, were task unit bruiser the only snipers in Ramadi that were having success? Absolutely not. There were many successful snipers and sharpshooters in the battle of Ramadi.

Here's, here's an example. You probably never heard of this. This is from an article called Marine Sniper makes his mark with swift death. This is from AP Press writer Antonio Castaneda. Battle of Ramadi, July 30, 2006, when he was, when he was five, when he first fired an M 16, his father holding him to brace against the recoil.

At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Spurred by the memory of September 11. Now 21 year old gallon Wilson has 20 confirmed kills in four months in Iraq and another 40 shots that probably killed insured insurgents. One afternoon, the Lance corporal downed a man hauling a grenade launcher five and a half football fields away. Wilson is the designated marksman in a company of marines based in downtown Ramadi, watching over what Marines call the worst mo, what Marines call the most dangerous neighborhood in the most dangerous city in the world.

Here, sunni Arab insurgents are intent on toppling the local government. Protected by the Marines, Wilson, five foot six with a soft face, is married and has two children and speaks in a deep, steady monotone. After two tours in Iraq, his commanders in the third battalion, 8th Regiment, called him a particularly mature marine, always collected and given to an occasional rye grin. His composure is regularly tested. Swaths of central and southern Ramadi, 70 miles away west of Baghdad, are dominated by insurgents who regularly attack the provincial government headquarters that marines protect.

During a large scale attack on Easter Sunday, Wilson says he spotted six gunmen on a rooftop about 400 yards away. In about 8 seconds, he squeezed off five rounds, hitting five gunmen in the head. The 6th man dived off a three story building just as Wilson got him in his sights and counts as a probable death. Wilson says his skill helps save american troops and iraqi civilians. It doesn't bother me, obviously, me being a devout Catholic, it's a conflict of interest.

Then again, God supported David when he killed Goliath, Wilson said. I believe God supports what we do, and I've never killed anyone who wasn't carrying a weapon. He was raised in a desolate part of the Rocky Mountains outside Colorado Springs, surrounded by national parks on three sides. He says he regularly hunted before moving to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As a teenager his brother also serves in the military.

Technically, Wilson is not a sniper. He's an infantryman who also patrols through the span of destroyed buildings that make up downtown Ramadi. But as his units designated marksman, he has a sniper rifle. In the heat of the day or after midnight, he spends hours on rooftop posts, peering out onto rows of abandoned houses from behind piles of sandbags and bulletproof glass cracked by gunfire. Insurgents have killed good marines.

I've served with. That's how I sleep at night, though. I've killed over 20 people. How many lives would those 20 people have taken?

So that's an example of a one marine, outstanding marine, by the way, in an infantry supporting his infantry unit, and. And look at what he's doing. So, by the way, the three eight marines and the snipers from three eight marines gave us so much information, we we modeled their operations in many ways, the way they were doing things. Tony, BTF Tony, Chris went and talked to them to figure out, hey, what's the best way to get this done? But that, so there you have a Marine sharpshooter.

Imagine what happens to the number of enemy killed when tasking. A bruiser goes into areas. It goes into areas that have bait out, which is a combat outpost that's being built and sets up between one and 13 snipers in mutually supporting overwatch positions with interlocking fields of fire.

You're gonna kill a lot of bad guys. And we did kill a lot of bad guys. We killed hundreds of enemy fighters. So did the army, so did the Marine Corps.

But we clearly had to stick to the rules of engagement.

The rules of engagement were so perfectly clear, I'm gonna read them to you. Here's the rules of engagement. This is what dave your seals, your marines had to follow. The soldiers had to follow the Marines. Everyone there.

Rules of engagement. Nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to defend yourself. One, you may engage the following individuals based on their conduct. Persons who are committing hostile acts against coalition forces. Persons who are exhibiting hostile intent towards coalition forces forces.

So if someone looks like they're in ten, that's a target. These persons may be engaged subject to the following instructions. Positive identification is required to prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target. If no PID, conduct your next higher commander, commander, for decision b, use graduated force when time and circumstance permit.

Use the following degrees of graduated force from responding to a hostile act or intent. One, shout verbal warnings to halt. Two, show your weapon and demonstrate intent to use it. Three, block access or detain. Four, fire a warning shot.

Five, shoot to eliminate threat. C. Do not target or strike anyone who has surrendered or who is out of combat due to sickness or wounds. D. Do not target or strike hospitals, mosques, churches, shrines, schools, museums, national monuments, and other any other historical and cultural sites, civilian populated areas or buildings, unless the enemy is using them for military purposes or if it is necessary for your self defense.

E. Do not strike. Do not target or strike iraqi infrastructure, lines of communication, or economic objects unless necessary for self defense or if ordered by your commander. If you must fire on these objects, fire to disable and disrupt rather than destroy. F.

Always minimize incidental injury, loss of life, and collateral damage. Three, the use of force, including deadly force, is authorized to protect the yourself, your unit, and other friendly forces, detainees, civilians, from crimes that are likely to cause death or serious bodily harm, such as murder or rape, personnel or property designated by the on scene commander when such actions are necessary to restore order and security. Four. In general, warning shots are authorized only when the use of deadly force would be authorized in that particular situation. Five, treat all civilians on their property with respect and dignity.

Do not seize civilian property, including vehicles, unless the property presents a security threat. When possible, give a receipt to the property's owner. You may detain civilians based upon reasonable belief that the person one must be detained for purposes of self defense two, is interfering with coalition forces mission accomplishment three is on a list of persons wanted for questioning, arrest or detention four is or was engaged in criminal activity or five must be detained for imperative reasons of security. Anyone you detain must be protected force up to including deadly forces authorized to protect detainees in your custody. You must fill out a detainee apprehension card for every person you detain.

MNC TAc one, general order number one is in effect. Looting and the taking of war trophies are prohibited. All personnel must report any suspected violations of the law of war committed by any us friendly or enemy force. Notify your chain of command. Judge adequate, CID, IG, or chaplain.

So those are the rules of engagement. They didn't change. We didn't have, you didn't have Dave didn't have one set of rules and I'd had another set of rules that didn't happen. All the rules of engagement are the same and they were fault. And here's another thing that was an undercurrent at the time.

The Haditha dam investigation had started. So there was a bunch of civilians killed at the Haditha dam. The story had not broken yet, but the Marine investigation started February 14, 2006. So right before we arrived in Ramadi, the marines knew that there was an investigation taking place, charging, charging marines with killing iraqi civilians. And it definitely sent a shockwave through the Marine Corps.

And that shockwave leaked over to, you know, everybody else, myself included. So the three, eight marines were highly focused, very professional with this atmosphere, but so was everybody else that it was like the first time everyone's thinking to themselves, oh, wait a second. Oh, this, this. We gotta make sure that these things are done correctly. And by the way, just FYI, these.

These charges were dropped eventually in the Haditha dam.

The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse thing. Freakin terrible. Terrible strategic impact on the war. Nobody benefited more than al Qaeda from what happened at Abu Ghraib with the prisoner abuse. And look, I just come from being the admiral's aide, and so I got to see all the.

I got to see the way this stuff hit. SEAL team five on their deployment, they had some drama with photos. They had taken photos of prisoners and whatnot, and these got posted in a public forum. It was a disaster. That's why I was like, no more photos.

You're not allowed to have photos anymore. When I got home, SEAL team seven, 2004, I get home from deployment and, you know, we put our gear away, and then they're like, okay, go spend the weekend or whatever. Go spend two days with your family. I come back every single one of our computers, and we have a lot of computers because our whole system is running off computers. All of our computers, both classified and unclassified computers, were all confiscated by NCIS.

All of them. Every email, every image that was on there, every briefing that was on there, it was all in there. So even though I had had an. A great deployment and led scores of operations and got, you know, great marks on my evaluation, my foot wrap received combat awards for that deployment. It didn't matter.

Even though I selected to go serve for the admiral. Didn't matter. Guess what? Despite an eminently successful career in deployment, it didn't matter. It's like you're getting investigated.

And this was stemmed from at SEAL team seven, in my sister platoon, there was a report of prisoner abuse from someone that had been fired in the platoon. Someone. Someone stole something. They got fired, they got sent home, and then they reacted to that and made a bunch of claims. And this, this is, this.

These types of things happen where someone gets disgruntled, they get. Yeah, they're mad about something that happened, and then they go out and make some wild claims, and that's triggered an investigation. Here, you. And this is the thing that I learned. You got to be ready for that.

You got to be ready. Who knows what might motivate someone to fabricate claims against you or your troops? You got to be ready for that.

You got to be ready for that. You got to even be ready for your own freaking guys telling stupid stories, right? This happens, too. Guys exaggerate. Guys are emotional.

Guys let their ego get out of control.

I always like to talk about getting mortared because if I'm sitting here and I'm telling you guys a story and I'm like, okay, let's say I got, I'd say the closest mortar ever hit to me. I got one getting really close in Ramadi, but I was on the other side of a wall, so it wasn't that bad. I got, there was, we were in Baghdad, in the outskirts of Baghdad, and we were set up, and a mortar probably hit, probably hit 50ft away from me, right? And it was a little mortar too. Little 60 millimeter mortar or I guess 62 or whatever it is the Russians use.

If I'm telling you guys that story, what am I gonna say? You know, I'm probably not gonna say a number, but I'm like, this thing hit right next to me. Right next what, echo? If I say something's right next to me, how far away is that? Right next to you?

It's 3ft, 1ft, 2ft. Yeah. So that's what happens, guys. Tell Echo, have you ever gone home to your wife and be like, you know, come, we train jujitsu. You ever get home and tell your wife, like, taco beat the shit out of me?

Yes, sir. Now, your wife understands jujitsu. She knows what that means. She's not picturing me pummeling your head in, right? She knows what that means.

They caught leif on a video. I saw it the other day. Leif saying Jaco choked us all the time. You know what I mean? What's he talking about?

Oh, it's like Jocko's a bully. No, Jocko trains jiu jitsu. Leif's laughing as he says it, but if you hear that secondhand, Jocko choked us all time, what do you got? Uh, here's one. Dude, I was surfing.

I caught every wave, dude. I caught every wave. Yeah. What does that mean? Dude, I want you to know that I caught a lot of wave, but what if you're not a surfer?

What does that mean? If you're not a surfer? That means, oh, Jaco said, claimed he caught every wave. Now, you meet someone else. That's.

That's. Is a surfer. And you say, well, Jocko's out there. He says he catches every wave, and the surfer's like, dude, that doesn't sound. That's not.

That's impossible. No, he said it. He said he caught every wave. Mm hmm. So can you get someone from tasking a bruiser that's like, dude, we killed everybody.

Yeah. 100%. 100%. Oh, yeah. We shot this dude.

Shot, yeah. You're gonna get people to do that. You gotta protect yourself from that. You gotta. You're gonna develop that stuff.

Yeah. I hear stories about me. Like, my friends would tell stories about me that are totally exaggerated. I'm like, dude, come on, man. Like, really?

Truffle chocolate. Do whatever he wanted. It's like, bro, there's an entire. I know it might have seemed that way, and you probably felt like that, but do you want to review all the free concept of operations that got set up, the chain of command? So you got to be prepared for that.

You got it. You got to be prepared for other people to come at you. You got to be prepared for your own people to tell stories that aren't true, that get caught by someone that us doesn't understand, and next thing you know, you've got stories that are out of control. And what. And what that means is, you got to take the high road.

You've got it. You've got to take the high ground. You got to take the high road at all times. You know, it goes back to that story of Delta Charlie, one of my platoon commanders, when we were doing a hydrographic reconnaissance and had that opportunity to not do it. And him looking at me and looking at the platoon and said, we.

We don't have to do this, but would that be the right thing to do? And it's like, yep, that's not the right thing to do. And I learned from that. That was when I was 22 years old. It's like, yeah, you better do the right thing.

And so, yeah, good. Oh. Came home from SEAL team seven deployment. They take every computer that we have, they scrub it all. And guess what?

We're cleared. Cleared from any wrongdoing. Had another investigation after that, multiple interviews. And, again, it's just people are talking, they're hearing things. Once you sit down and do the investigation, thankfully, it's like, oh, good.

Got it. You're clear. So, investigations should be conducted, and they are conducted, and. But I saw what this negative behavior could do to the community and do strategically in the war effort. So you got to do the right things for the right reasons.

And if you don't follow the rules, you're going to be held accountable. And, you know, Leif and I did a whole podcast on rules of Engagements podcast 385 and go listen to it if you want more detail. But going back to what we were talking about earlier, Dave, did the violence escalate when we were there? Did the violence escalate? Oh, it absolutely escalated.

And, I mean, I kind of covered that from these other sources. It's like the 228 iron soldiers from Pennsylvania had to rotate back to America. One, one ad came, took over. They brought in a new strategy. New strategy was seized.

Clear, hold and build, go into these enemy controlled neighborhoods. Very aggressive strategy, building these combat outposts. It was taking the fight to the enemy. That's what it was doing. And we did it in the entire city.

An intensive and aggressive strategy. And you know what, did it increase the casualties? Yes, it did. And the brigade commander sitting in those meetings that you and I were at, Dave, he would tell us, yeah, I had to explain this up the chain of command because the chain of command's going, oh, my gosh, you're taking more casualties down there. He's like, yes, sir.

This is what we're doing. This is why, here's the efforts that we're making. This is why the casualties are happening. This is why casualties are increasing. When you, when you take the fight to the enemy, there's going to be more casualties.

When you go into the lion's den, you're going to find lions in there and there's going to be casualties. And it was, it was heartbreaking. It was horrible.

But the american marines and soldiers did their duty day in, day out and got the job done.

And it was an honor to fight alongside them. And it was, it was also incredible to see the progress. It was incredible to see the progress. And that's one thing that I'll, I always remember that. I'll always remember seeing the progress.

And look, obviously, I didn't go out in the field in every operation, you know, because I'm the overall commander of the seals in Ramadi. And we had, we divided up into five different. How many elements did you have? We created three elements out of my single element. Yeah.

So we created five. From tasking a bruiser, we created five elements. And they were partnered with, we did it originally to partner with the five different iraqi conventional forces. And the one special mission unit, we did it to partner with them and built those elements, you know, so everyone, everyone of those elements had an officer in it and had an NCO. And, of course, I trusted them and trained them and knew they understood the mission and the commander's intent, the end state and the rules of engagement, all that stuff.

And so sometimes there'd be two, three, four of these elements at the same time going out on operations. And usually those were. Usually those were smaller operations. And most of the time, if I'm sending a platoon chief, a chief, and a lieutenant junior grade out in the field to conduct an operation with 17 Iraqis, I'm not going on that operation. You know, like, plus, there's three of them going on at the same time.

So there's a lot of work that the guys did on their own, obviously. But there's also plenty of situations that I had to go in the field. And usually, like, if we're conducting a larger operation, like a big cord and search in the city, I'm going, we're doing a direct action. I mean, I don't know how many days times you and I, Dave, were sitting in the field together, but, like, doing that big area south of, you know, I'm going on that. We're going into build a cop.

Oh, I'm definitely going on that. We got all these different. We're going on a complex, direct action mission. Multiple. Yeah, I'm going on that.

We're supporting construction. Yeah, I'm doing that. In those situations, it's. If you can provide better command and control from the field, you have to see what's going on.

And sometimes, of course, I just go. Cause you have to understand what the guys are doing. You have to go out and see what's happening with your own eyes. And also, the guys have to know that I'm not asking them to do anything that I wouldn't do myself, of course. So you got to roll out.

But going out over and over and over again on that deployment, I got to see. I might have gotten to see, you know, when someone's losing weight. Echo, Charles. Sure. If you see him every day, you don't notice as much.

Yeah. So, like, Leif or Tony or Seth or JP, who's going out on every op, they look. They don't see that drastic difference. But if I'm going out once a week, it's like, oh, it's a little bit. Oh.

So, one of the first missions I went on, we were in enemy contact. Took 32 minutes. I was like, damn. Okay, wait. It took 32 minutes to get contacted?

Yep. Yep. It's like. And the reason I know this is because the company commander was like, start your stopwatch. He's like, we got a half an hour.

And I was like, okay, 32 minutes. It's go time. That was in the beginning of one. In the middle of deployment, there was another operation. And again, these stand out to me because of this time thing.

One of the. One of Laif's assistant platoon commanders going out, and I was like, you're gonna get contacted. And this was leaving from cop Falcon. I'm like, you're gonna get contacted. And he's like, you think?

I was like, you're gonna get contacted. And he walked out the wire. I set my stopwatch. Twelve minutes later, he's in a gunfight, so enemy contact coming even faster. But then I compare that from a progression to one of the last combat outposts that we put in.

And I actually did like the clearance. I was the guy that seized with a few army guys, seized this thing in central Ramadi. The platoon pushed right past it to set up an overwatch position, and we didn't get seals, didn't engage anybody. So it went from this immediate contact thing, or within half an hour, 15 minutes, you're gonna get contacted to this last combat outpost that we put in. No contact.

And that's when I knew that a change was taking place. That's what I knew, that we were winning. Did you notice that kind of reduction? You also. You left a month earlier than me, right, I did.

Dave Berke

The timing of my departure was pretty interesting. I mean, pick, go back. I left mid to late September. Think about what was going on with you guys. A minute, mid, late September.

I mean, it was still just. It was right at that apex, and I left. And even, like, the basic sit reps for the next month were already different. And that last cop, I think, went in, like, right. Right after I left.

I completely noticed it, too. When I got. I mean, it was busy when I got there, things were going on with the two, two, eight. And oftentimes, like, early, I would judge how busy it was, was based on what my teams were doing. I had two, became three teams.

There was a lot of times where something would happen, and it would frustrate me. Cause I wasn't at where the engagement was, because what frustrated me about it wasn't that I wasn't part of the engagement, is that I couldn't help it. Got to a point that by the middle of the summer, and that's a comparison between the 35 and the twelve minutes, was my teams were engaged all the time. And it wasn't that we were just in the right place at the right time. It's just that the engagements, it got so much more just like that.

So again, all the things you're talking about, I'm listening. In parallel to my experience is exactly the same. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Putting in that last combat outpost, I was really surprised because we had the enemy surrounded. I thought to myself, the enemy's gonna. Fight a hard caged animal or a corner. Yeah, cornered animal. And it was really surprising.

I have a picture of myself and Colonel McFarland. It's one of the. I think actually it's the only picture I have, but I forget who took it. But we were in that combat outpost like me and him. And there's no security set yet.

Like just this, just the actual security of the element that took it. Right. So it's probably like 20 guys there or something and we're standing up there. But it was weird to be. I looked at that picture, I was like, oh, I know why we took a picture.

Because there was like no shooting going on, you know, cuz he'd come to cop, he'd come to all these different. Where I was out there and it's like, oh, why do we. Okay, that's right. Because nothing was happening. And again, that's when I kind of recognized that a change was taking place.

And again, this change wasn't because the positive change was not just because of tasking. A bruiser obviously was. We had a tiny roll. The negative change of what? You know, the escalating violence.

That was the strategy and that's what was planned. We knew that that was going to happen. But the change wasn't from us, it was from. It was from the entire team. And it was a bond, a bond that we had with that entire team.

And we still have it. We still have it. I mean, I've gone and talked to, I've gone and talked to units that were commanded by guys that we were on the ground with. You know, I've talked to the Air Force Academy, talked to West Point Naval Academy.

That's to me, when these guys invite me to talk, it's like, yeah, what do you need?

They gave, they gave. Some of the guys in tasking, Bruiser got valorous awards from the army.

That's not normal. Look, has it happened? Of course it happens. Joint awards is a little different. Like, you get joint awards, good, it's a joint group.

But the amount of administration, administrative effort you've got to take to get a Navy guy an award of a valorous award, that's that, that show that to me was such a huge gesture of the bond that we had that these guys were actually taking their time to put in. And I'll tell you, like, stoner dude, he had an arcom with a V. Army commendation medal with a V for Valorant. That was his, you know, he also had two silver stars, by the way. He didn't care about those.

He liked that archon with a V.

That was the bond.

And the brigade commander, Colonel Sean McFarland. Now General Sean McFarland. But when we were leaving, because when we left, they still had a lot of fighting to go. And when we left, you know, shook my hand, he said, you and your guys kept hundreds of my men alive. Hundreds of them.

And that always stuck with me because, look, we look back at the war now, what, you know, was it right or wrong? What was our reasons WMD, all these things? We could tear ourselves up thinking about that. But what I know that we did was we helped keep hundreds of american and iraqi soldiers alive. And on top of that, we liberated that city from those, those suffering civilians that are living in Ramadi in a torturous environment under the reign of brutal extremist insurgents.

And we were able to liberate them and protect our fellow servicemen and women. And it's not just my opinion that, like, things got a lot better. Again, this is so well documented. Here's a, here's an example of that. Here's an article on point by Andrew Lubin, October 2007 quote, while al Qaeda has been driven from the city, it has not been driven from Anbar province nor from Iraq.

But Ramadi, which the marines thought in August 2006 was fully under control of the insurgents, is the example of iraqi american cooperation. There is an economic boom taking place. There are rebuilding projects. The porcelain factory is reopening next month. Shops are reopening, and better quality food and goods are for sale in the markets.

And salaries have risen 20% in the last six months. For, as Mayor Lateef Obaid said to me in April when I attended his third economic development conference, Ramadi is open for business. Come visit us.

So when I hear people talk about, oh, we made it worse. No, Ramadi was open for business. It was awesome. There was a green beret in charge of teaching counterinsurgency to junior seals. And the example that he used was a battle of Ramadi.

That's the model for that type of warfare that was very meaningful, right? You got a green beret that's teaching seals, and he's teaching not about what Green Berets did, but he's teaching about what seals did because it's an outstanding example. Here's another article explaining the success by Ulrich Fichner. The article is called hope and despair and divided Iraq from August 2007. This is news the world doesn't hear.

Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious sunni triangle, is now telling a different story. A story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers, and are now the protectors of the iraqi reconstruction. Again, just an incredible victory, incredible victory for coalition forces. And Colonel Sean McFarland and his major Neil Smith said this about the reason for success. Here's why the success happened.

Clearly, a combination of factors, some of which we may not fully yet understand, contributed to this pivotal success. As mentioned before, the enemy overplayed its hand and the people were tired of al Qaeda. A series of assassinations had elevated younger, more aggressive tribal leaders to positions of influence. A growing concern that the US would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against al Qaeda and iranian supported militias made these younger leaders open to our overtures. Our willingness to adapt our plans based on the advice of the sheikhs, our staunch and timely support for them in times of danger and need, and our ability to deliver on our promises convinced them that they could do business with us.

Our forward presence kept them reassured. We operated aggressively across all lines of operation, kinetic and non kinetic, to bring every weapon and asset at our disposal. Proposal to bear against the enemy we conducted detailed intelligence, fusion and targeting meetings and operated seamlessly with special operations forces, aviation, close air support and riverine units. We have now seen this model followed by other brigade combat teams in other parts of Iraq, and it has proved effective. Indeed, the level of sophistication has only improved since the ready first departed in February 2007.

Although perhaps groundbreaking at the time, most of our tactics, techniques and procedures are now familiar to any unit operating in Iraq today.

Yeah, this was, it was a pivotal, pivotal moment. As a matter of fact, another article I was going to quote, I didn't bring it, but there's another article that called Ramadi the Gettysburg of the war, the turning point. This was the turning point.

In that same article by Colonel McFarlane, they share some of the important lessons from the battlefield.

And they say this the most enduring lessons of Ramadi are ones that are most easily lost in technical and tactical discussions, the least tangible ones. The most important lessons we learned war were accept risk in order to achieve results. Once you gain the initiative, never give the enemy respite or refuge never stop looking for another way to attack the enemy.

And finally, the tribes represent the people of Iraq, and the populace represents the key to terrain of the conflict. The force that supports the population by taking the moral high ground has as sure of an advantage in counterinsurgency as a maneuver commander who occupies dominant terrain in a conventional battlefield.

So I think it's important to mention never stop looking for another way to attack the enemy. He's not just talking about combat, he's talking about attacking in air quotes, attacking the sheikhs by building relationships with them, attacking the economic situation by putting money into the economy like it's attacking on all fronts, on all lines of operations, and finding another way. I guarantee some of those projects that cost $230,000, that propped up a sheikh, had much more negative impact on al Qaeda than some of the operations. We were doing clearances, but both those were important. But the most important thing that he talks about is the moral high ground.

Having the moral high ground was critical, and we knew that. We all knew that, and we kept it. And anyone that was on the ground there knows this.

For people that weren't there, they might not understand it. And that's my fault. It's my fault. I obviously have done a bad job of explaining all this. Obviously, if, when I hear things, I think it's crazy talk, but it's my fault.

People that were on the ground understood what was happening, and that's my job. And I can say, thankfully, I did have the opportunity to explain the battle of Vermont to the families of the fallen. And they know. They know and understand the efforts and the risks that their sons and we, as seals and all coalition forces in the battle of Ramadi took in order to protect the local populace.

And I hope that the families of the fallen marines and soldiers, know the same thing, that these brave warriors were part of an incredible band of brothers who fought and sacrificed valiantly to do their duty, who took massive risk and sacrificed immensely to accomplish the mission and ultimately liberate the city of Vermont.

And, you know, you probably, I was getting a little choked up earlier talking about Travis Patrick. He ended up being killed by an id after we left in December, traveling with Megan McClung, Marine, another. Just an outstanding woman. Just outstanding. Squared away again.

Dave, you and I sat in all those meetings with those, those individuals. They're just outstanding. And there was such a huge price paid. And listen, a lot of that price was making adjustments to make sure we could take care of the civilian populace. Doing a massive kinetic.

How many bombs did you guys drop. I mean, between me and the other Ramadi Anglico team, the two in Anglico, in Ramadi, of the 24 units out there, dozens. Like 23. Yeah, like 42, probably between bombs, hellfires, guns, all the different drops. Probably 25.

Dave Berke

That's just amongst the two Ramadi rangos. That's six months of heavy fighting and you guys only did 25 drops. Do you drop any 2000 pounders? Yeah, I think I have. I think I've got what?

I've got one gb, you know, heavy JDM, and I don't. I can wait if you want to complete your thought, but there's some context here go. That I can't help but mention. Because it's not just your failure. Because when you hear about an accusation or a story or a perspective that's so outlandish, not just because it didn't happen, but because it couldn't happen, it's not just levied against you.

It's anybody that got there. And my team had the same exact experience as we got there with a certain set of expectations of how things. Were going to be. And very quickly they changed out of necessity. And what my team ended up doing is even that.

That number seems like a small number. That is a huge number of drops. More than anybody had done before we got there. Way more. There are teams before us that never dropped a bomb, partially because, and this leads into what I've been feeling listening to you during this podcast is, do you know how much attention it draws when you drop a bomb from a plane, from a $45 million fighter overhead, a city, and you drop a bomb?

You want to talk about the scrutiny that you get when you decide, I need to employ this piece of ordinance off this aircraft, whether it's a hellfire missile into the building adjacent to Mark Lee or a gun in a type one cast scenario that hasn't been conducted in years. And we were scrutinized every one of those drops between the two Anglico teams in a level that had never been, never happened, that much scrutiny because nobody had done that much. And the firefights, when a Ford air controller is shooting his personal rifle, you're going to get scrutiny. And of course, obviously, the most scrutiny comes is I lost the first Anglico Marine in Iraq, my radio operator. I lost that first Marine.

Nobody else. Me. And you were talking about investigation. And the connotation that most people have is this negative connotation when actually what it is when done correctly, which it almost always is, they are there to help. It's not that much different from, like, an inspection.

They're making sure that you're smart and safe and protected, so your marines are. And so all that scrutiny was welcomed. And I think, reflecting on this, the biggest mistake that I made, and I can feel this now, looking back, because. And I don't want to put myself on the same scale of what you did. I worked with you guys a lot.

I did a lot of my own without you, with other teams. So not just with task unit bruiser, but I feel all those same things that you're talking about. All those same experiences I had is I took for granted the understanding that everybody would have about what we were doing, because I spent all my time with people doing it, meaning I didn't think about what people on the outside were thinking about what we were doing. I just didn't spend any time. And I needed to.

I needed to think about their perspective, their misunderstanding, their ego, their point of view, their experience, which is totally incongruent from my experience, because if you did anything like we did, it is nothing like anybody else had done. It was different. And if you don't understand that context, you could very easily draw conclusions and make accusations and say things that aren't true. And that's because I never explained it. It's because I took that for granted when I arrived there and we started doing what we're doing up to the point that Chris was killed and beyond.

What I took for granted was people understanding what we were doing, how we were doing it, and probably most importantly, why. And so the idea that this is just a perspective levied on, on your unit or particular unit, it's all of us that were there that had the obligation to make it understood what we were doing. The idea that you could do something misaligned with the rules of engagement and get away with it, the only thing more outlandish than that accusation or that thought is the realizing you would never do that anyway, because he would undermine what you were trying to get accomplished, the belief in what we were doing. And it's hard right now, a little bit of a hard pill for me to swallow, was the failure for me to not take into account everybody else on the outside of that world and the assumptions they were making. That was my job.

It wasn't just to call in airstrikes or train my guys or shoot. That was my job. And no Anglico unit had endured the ups and downs that my salt did because we had a ton of drops, a ton of engagements, and I lost a marine. So whose other job should it have been to explain what was going on and why. Did I talk to Kathy Leon?

Jocko Willink

Yes. All the time. She knows everything. Everything. But I didn't share or explain or even consider how important it would be to have people outside of that understand in the community and beyond.

Dave Berke

And so the failure you're talking about or the fault that you have, it's really hard for me to listen to you and agree with that without at least making it clear that I was in a very, very similar position, very parallel, very adjacent, and during the exact same things, recognizing the same obligation that I had in my same mistake.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, you lost, Chris. And so Mark was the first seal killed in Iraq. You know, what. What happens to the community when you lose a seal? The first seal in Iraq.

I mean, it's. Yeah, everyone mourns, but there's. There's guys. Wait, what are you doing? Yep.

Wait, why are you doing that? And I heard a little bit of that, but I also heard a lot of support, like, massive support. What do you need? How can we help? You're doing great.

Again, my chain of command, which is the army chain of command, the special operations. What I'm getting is, hey, good job. So I, again, failed to see. Oh. And I'd hear someone say, well, what are you guys even doing?

I'd be like, hey, man. You know, like, I literally, I got an email from one of my buddies, was like, dude, what are you guys doing going out in the day? And it's one of my friends, you know, it was a little bit longer. That was basically was, hey, what are you guys doing going out in the day? You know?

And I wrote back like, hey, man, this fight is taking place during the day. We're working with the iraqi units. They don't have night vision. They don't have a. He's kind of like, okay.

He's like, got it. Yeah. What I didn't think was, what about the person that doesn't know me? What about the person that can't ask that question? Yeah.

What about the person that has, you know, has a negative attitude and then sits in the platoon space saying, I can't believe these guys are going out during the day. These guys are taking too many risks. That's not a special operation. I should have done a better job of explaining the situation on the ground because you, you know, and we took a lot of casualties as well. Wounded guys.

So we have wounded guys. We have the first seal killed in Iraq, Mark Lee. We have the second seal killed in Iraq, Mikey Mansoor Ryan. Job, severely wounded ends up dying from those wounds. And unfortunately, I should have noticed, oh, when someone has a.

If one of my friends is asking this question, that means people that aren't my friend are thinking this. And I should have done a better job of explaining what was happening. And it goes beyond the opsums, because my friends, when I got back, I didn't really think about this when I was overseas. When I got back, my friend said they would read the op sums aloud in quarters in the morning. So, like at trade, at.

At the team areas, they would stand up and say, you know, last night, task unit bruiser conducted an overwatch and killed 14 enemy fighters. And guess what? My friends were. They were pumped and they were stoked. And when we had guys get wounded, when we had guys get killed, they were heartbroken.

But my friends who know me knew that I was doing the right things for the right reasons. But what I miscalculated was, there's gonna be people that don't like you. There's gonna be people that hold a grudge. There's gonna be people that look at your success and basically accuse you of cheating or whatever the case may be. And that's what I failed to realize.

And it's a blind spot. So hopefully this type, and I'll, you know, we can bring on, I can bring on Leif, JP, everyone's got their perspective, but hopefully this paints a clearer picture of what we did and how we did it and how we were able to maintain the moral high ground in Ramadi. And like I said, the risks that were taken and the sacrifices that were made to maintain that high ground. That's originally why I asked you, how many bombs did we drop? Because, you know, how many drums, you, bombs you could have dropped on Ramadi?

All of them. Yeah, all of them. Yep. You dropped 30, maybe 40, whatever the number is, every, every one of those buildings at one point or another could have had a bomb dropped on it because it was housing insurgents. But we didn't do that.

Men and women, by the way, and I call that out specifically because I'll never forget seeing a casualty evacuation rolling out to go support iraqi soldiers that were wounded. And there's a girl up, a woman in the turret. So men and women took incredible risk instead of dropping a bomb on that building to go out and clear that building and keep the local populace safe. And there's a huge amount of risk to do that, but that's what you have to do.

And I hope that in these ongoing wars, the same approach is taken, and that is what we have to do in every aspect of life, you really have to do this in every aspect of your life. You've got to do the right thing. You've got to take the moral high ground. You can't surrender it. You got to do the right things for the right reasons.

If you make a mistake, you own it. If people try and tear you down, try and understand what their perspective is and try and lift them up by showing them yours. And for business, for life, for combat, in tactics, and in morals, take the high ground, or the high ground will take you.

And that's what I got.

So, like I said, I think we'll probably get questions about this. We got Leif, we got JP, people that were there with us in other units, so many awesome people.

So we can continue to get this, the real picture of what was going on so that these people are remembered in the right way.

Echo, Charles. Yes.

Speaking of doing the right thing, I have a question. Oh, let's go. How do you dispose of a mine? A bunch of different ways? Yeah.

Echo Charles

Okay. That's what I thought. What are the ways you can. You can blow it in place so you can put another bomb on top of it? That's actually.

Jocko Willink

That's what you're probably gonna do. That's the main one. Yeah. Getting in there with, like, a pair of pliers and clipping the detonator, you can be done and guys do it, but the preferred method is just to blow that thing in place. Is there, like, any scenario where you'd somehow transport it somewhere else and blow it or.

Yeah. Yeah, you could. Funny story. We put in cop Falcon, and the minesweeper was coming down the road, and it was, like, digging, and Leif and someone else was, like, looking over the side of the building, watching this thing dig up a freaking bomb. And at some point, he's like, dude, this might not be a good idea.

And the same thing happened to me on my first deployment. Oh. To look over the building, at it. Looking over the building, and I think it's about to blow up. It's not a good.

Echo Charles

In your face. I had that. I had the same thing happening on my first appointment. I'm like, my EOD. We were hitting a target.

Jocko Willink

We found an IED. And in this particular case, my. I just to case in point, my Eod guy, like, disarmed the bomb. Yeah. So.

But I was standing there as he's manipulating it, like, compiling, like, right by him, like, watching him, and he looks over his shoulder, and he goes, you don't have to stand here. That's what I was doing. There's two things going on. Number one, he was looking out for my safety. But number two, like, that's probably not the most comforting feeling, having someone standing, looking over your shoulder, and you're gonna get him and you killed if you screw this up.

So those are the. Yeah, you're either gonna disarm that thing or you're gonna blow it in place. And the guys will do both, depending on what it calls for. Damn. It's crazy.

Echo Charles

And they're pretty, like, common ways of making a mine. Or. I mean. Cause you said. Sometimes you say ids, sometimes you say mines.

And obviously they're two different things. Cause id is improvised or whatever. Yeah. That's a key component is improvised. But you can take an artillery shell.

Jocko Willink

Do you know what that is? It looks like a big, giant bullet. Yeah. Yeah. And it's filled with explosives.

So sometimes they just take old artillery shells and they bury. They. They turn those into the bomb. So they, like, rig that. What do you call the trigger?

They make a trigger, generally speaking, because the trigger that it comes with is not gonna work for what they need it for. So they'll. They'll basically, the way explosives work, there's the explosive itself. The thing that's gonna make the explosion and. Cause the problem is generally pretty stable.

Echo Charles

Yeah. But then you have to have something that's not stable, that's less stable. That's, generally speaking, a blasting cap. This is something that is going to explode very violently, very quickly. So blasting cap and detonator or what?

Jocko Willink

Yeah, same thing. Okay. And there's different types of detonators. There's different kind types of blasting caps. But.

But generally, like, the. The material. Like in a. In a claymore landmine. Have you ever heard of a claymore?

Yeah. Front toward. Front toward enemy. The stuff inside of that. Like, it.

You can play with it. Like, play doh. Yeah. Was that c four? Yeah.

You can set it on fire and it'll burn. Like, there's. There's. That's what you can do. Oh, damn.

But if you set it on fire and hit it with a hammer, like, you have a problem. But. But they're the blasting cap that you put in there. It explodes very fast, very violent. It's a lot.

A lot more volatile. So when our breachers are carrying their breach, they don't have the blasting cap in the explosive charge itself. Yeah. So if it blows up, it'll hurt. It might even take a couple fingers off or, like, you know, but if you have it connected.

Now you're gonna, like, lose an arm and possibly your life. So that's kind of the deal, yeah. Hmm. Crazy. Any other questions?

Echo Charles

That's an example of me, bro. I don't know how this kind of stuff works all the time. I mean, all I see is what's on, like, MacGyver or whatever, you know, when he rig, undoes the bomb or whatever. That's all I know. That's my education, so thank you for that.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, yeah, you can. You can kind of tell, you know. You'll see. But what you got to watch out for is there might be wires going into the bomb, and then you clip the wires, and then you lift up the bomb, but there was a pressure plate, so now it still blows up. Oh, like, you have multiple different ways of the charge blowing up?

Echo Charles

Oh, yeah. I was gonna say maybe like a disturbance. You know, like, you know, they'll be like, hey, it's this, but it's really this. Just like MacGyver, bro. Yeah, that's how I'd go into that part.

But. I know, I know. We're off that. Cool. Right on.

Jocko Willink

Thank you. Yes. We're doing the right thing. We need fuel, by the way. I don't know if you knew that or not.

Mm hmm. Just coming off the UFC fights, by. The way, do you have a good time? Good fights, good card? Yeah, we're not mad at that.

Echo Charles

Some good people hanging around, which we cool. It was kind of epic, honestly. Yeah, I would say that. Say that as well. I didn't.

Jocko Willink

I didn't talk to Tim Kennedy about how he feels about being at the UFC, you know, like, I actually did. What he said, basically, in a nutshell. I said, do you miss fighting? And he. And he said, no.

Echo Charles

And I was like, oh, interesting. Like what? Like, what do you mean? Whatever. He was like, he's like, hey, let me explain this to you.

He's like, I like violence, but, like. And we're at. We're eating dinner or whatever, and he was like, see, if a fight broke out over there and they needed me, I would love nothing more than to jump in that fight. But if you said, hey, go fight that guy over there, I'd be like, no. He said, go f yourself.

So he doesn't like, like, hey, you fight for this, or you fight for that, you know, kind of thing. But if the fight is going down, he's down kind of a thing. So that's why he. So he didn't really, you know, he said that he wasn't that much into it being there, but he was very much into hanging out with everybody. That's what he said.

Straight up. Well, what about Andy? Andy Stone? Yeah. I didn't talk to him about that specifically.

But, you know, we caught up, though, which was very cool. You know, he had the operation. Yeah. For his scenario. He went through that.

That was kind of. Kind of scary because he said was random. It wasn't like something, you know, he ate the wrong thing or freaking ran into this. He's. You said, hey, it was just sort of bad luck kind of scenario.

But he's back in the game for sure. Him. And Leo was there as well. I felt bad because. Yeah, I saw.

Jocko Willink

You know, I did text Andy. I was like, I didn't even say hi to Leah. Just like, mayhem going on. It was mayhem going on. Another thing I felt bad about.

So we had a contest at Jocko fuel. Yeah. Yeah. And I barely, like, I didn't get the word out good enough. And the contest was sick.

Fuck, yeah. We sick. Like, it was the best contest ever. And what you won was. And this dude, Corey, freaking great.

He. So the contest was, if you won the contest, it was called a sweepstakes. It was technically not a sweepstakes. That's technically different. What was it called?

Echo Charles

Just a freaking, I don't know, contest. Okay, well, you got, like, a vote for every time you bought something from Jocko fuel. And then there was, like, a drawing. And you could also. There's another way to enter.

Jocko Willink

Cause you have to give another way to enter because there's all these legal rules and whatnot. You gotta follow the rules. So we did it anyways. The winner was this dude Corey. And what he won was.

And he got to bring his buddy out, Fabry. Fabry. They came out from North Carolina. And so what they did was they got there. They showed up.

They got there Friday. They arrived. Happenstance, by the way. Like, maybe five minutes after I arrived, too. Like, I was gonna leave.

Echo Charles

And they were the jockey fuel guys, you know, Liam and them. They're already there with the sign. And I was like, oh, they got. The sign for me. And they were like, no, man, not for you.

It's really winners. I was like, all right, we'll have. To hang around and see. What up, dude? Epic.

Jocko Willink

So those guys got that dinner that night. We had dinner the next night. We all hung out. Good food at the steak restaurant in Vegas. Then we went to the fights.

Had, like, the UFC. Sweet. Hanging out. Andy Stumpf, Tim Kennedy, like, Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt.

Like, it was really awesome. And then watched Bo Nickel fight and then went to Bo Nickels afterparty. Would. You didn't go to, by the way. Yeah.

When we give you the lowdown on Bo Nickels after party. Yeah, yeah, please. They had, like, ten bags of in n out burger. Yeah. And a bunch of jocko go, yeah, okay, solid.

And some hulk. And so we went there, and those guys came. Yeah. Just really cool. But here's the thing that I felt bad about, was I didn't really, like.

We didn't promote it enough to, like, as how cool it was. Yes. And it was UFC 300. And that's a big deal, bro. UFC 300, UFC 200, UFC 100.

Those are big. It's a big deal. Yeah. Monumental moment in time. Even the way I felt about it when you're like, oh, yeah, we got this contest or whatever, and I'm like, all right, cool.

Echo Charles

Like, yeah, I guess you get tickets and UFC and. Sounds fun, whatever. But I never didn't really think about it, but when it went down, I hung out with them, like, kind of a lot. Like, you know, sometimes we'd be apart or whatever, but, you know, just some of it kind of by happenstance as well. When I looked around and I was like, bro, this is kind of.

For me, this is fun. And I'm just me, you know, I didn't win nothing. I was just there, bro. For me, this is, like, a kick ass time. I was like, if I won this and got to bruh, this would be a really good fun, good fun time.

But then I compare that being actually in the experience, like, the freaking, like, level ten fun going on versus what I thought it was before everything happened. I was like, yeah, there's a total mismatch with, like, how kind of we promoted it, if you will, versus how someone really went. Cause it was freaking. It was epic. I was so.

Jocko Willink

I was. I had, like, really good seats. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. I may or may not have had the second best seats in the entire arena.

So I'm literally sitting 3ft behind Dana White. And here's what's awesome. Dana White is so fired up that, like, when something would happen, he would turn around and. And, like, give commentary just to, like, me and the two guys. Three guys I'm sitting with.

Yeah, no, I'm just. He was so amped. I'll give an example. So Gaethje broke his nose with, like, a second left. And, like, as, like, in the first round.

In the first round. And as that, like, happens, like, for example, Dana turns around, he's like, I just heard Gaethje. He said, they broke my nose. He broke his nose right there. He just had surgery on that thing.

Dude, this is crazy. And then turns back around. So when you wonder about the success of the UFC, man, you got to have someone that is that passionate and into it that he sits there and is totally engaged in every fight and turn around and saying, that kick was ridiculous. Did you see how hard they were? That's what he's saying.

And again, it's just. I mean, I'm sitting there, like, you know, just in it, and he's that freaking pumped. Yeah. So, yeah, it's pretty cool to see in the way. You didn't make the way ins, though, right?

Echo Charles

Because you had a thing. Even the way ins were freaking legit, like. Yeah. In that, like, you know how. Okay.

And so last UFC I went was Dominic Cruz, Uriah Faber, back in the day for the championship. Yes. Remember? Yeah. And I remember thinking, oh, like, they do.

Really? When I was at the event, they do it a really good job on the hype during the event on tv. Cause when you're at the event, you know, it's kind of like, oh, wait, there's no music. I mean, there's music, but it's different. It's like, okay, cool.

Jocko Willink

It's way better live. Cause you're seeing the actual fight. But the hype. All the hype. The hype can be contested.

Yeah, it's different. No contest on tv. It's way more as far as, like, the production hype is what I'm saying. Not the fight hype. Production hype.

Echo Charles

So I'm thinking, oh, yeah, that's cool. That's interesting, you know, from a production stage standpoint. But, bruh, no. Now, Brad, every little moment is like, you're just on this roller coaster of freaking UFC weigh ins, prelims, freaking main card, the whole deal. The whole deal was really good.

Yeah. And those wins were legit, too, just to experience the whole deal. I've. Fortunately, I've been to a lot of them. I've been a lot of ufcs.

Jocko Willink

But most of the time, I was. Quite frankly, I was working. Yeah, yeah, it's different. I was working at 95% of the UFC. I've probably been to 40 something.

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe not 40, but I've been to a lot of UFC's. Yeah, I was working at most of them. Yeah.

Meaning I had a fighter on the card. I'm warming up. I'm getting punched. We're backstage, I'm, you know, like, I'm sweating. It's not.

Yeah, it's a different kind of fun. The attention is like not even on the show really. You're gig, your job. Yeah, yeah. It's actually wasn't fun, by the way, also, this is back in the day, like we're all like the fighter.

You get two rooms, the fighters in one room, the other nine of us are in the other room, piled up on the floor, sleeping on towels, you know, he's cutting weight, so we're cutting weight. You know, you can't eat in front of them or whatever. And then on top of that, then we're all poor, you know, so it's not like, oh, let's go to the steakhouse. No, it's, hey, let's go to the buffet and sit here for 2 hours and just fill up so we don't have to eat again. Yeah.

Dave, super bowl. You went to the Super bowl this year? I did. How was the hype? It was hype in that scenario.

It was pretty crazy. That must have been crazy. It was also in Vegas, so this insane? Yeah, it was insanity. My son was overwhelmed.

Did you have good seats? We had good seats. Where were your seats? Um, 45 yard line. Yeah, perfect seats.

Perfect seats. They're up. Yeah, they're in the upper level. But like first row. So, like, for him to be able to see everything, you know, with nobody in blocking is young.

Dave Berke

A little like, it was pretty. And his knee a fan. He was all, he's like all in on the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes. So it was like, all right, this, I'm gonna take him. This may never happen again.

He's gonna go at a good age where it's gonna be like a life memory locked in forever. Ten years old, Patrick Mahomes. And then, of course, they like, win in overtime. It was, it was in Vegas. It was crazy, dude.

Jocko Willink

He's never, he's never gonna forget that. That's freaking epic. Do you watch football on tv with him? When he wants to. How does the hype transfer, dude?

It's not even close. It's not. I can't even. Yeah, there's no. It's not worth explaining.

Dave Berke

And in fact, like, he's like, likes watching football kind of, but, you know, take her. Leave it. He likes to play, but to see it live is, is so different. He was pumped. It was a, it was a life event, man.

Jocko Willink

For sure. Without a doubt. Yeah. Super Bowl. Super Bowl, Vegas.

Kind of a UFC 300 in Vegas. Yeah. Just freaking hype. Hype city, big ten. Chocolate fuel.

Echo Charles

Good presence. Yeah, yeah. I've seen some jock with fuel scenarios cracking. Yeah. And origin, you know, else was fire Zuckerberg sitting next to Dana the whole time.

Right on. And, like, they're. They're talking shop the whole time, too. And Zuckerberg's talking shop. You know, he's turning around like, ah, you know.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, well, you know, he's training as jiu jitsu. Yeah, was good. Did you can bring everybody together. Fighting again. Can bring people together.

So. Yes, and obviously Chris Pratt was there. He was getting after it. Yeah. Jaco fuel.

Echo Charles

Yeah. We bonded over his Hawaii store story. Bubble gum shrimp, by the way, which I'm very, very familiar. He's a Maui, though. Okay.

Which, you know, we love Maui. Hey, man. Yeah, for sure. Hundred percent maui, 100%. But, yeah, all good.

Jocko Willink

It was good to see you. All right. Jocko fuel. Taco fuel. You want some jocko fuel?

We do. You can get some jaco fuel. Calm. You can get hydrate, you can get greens. You can get.

You can get whatever you need, man. And let's face it, the mock, it's just a key component of life. That's what it's. That's what it's. That's what it is.

A key component of life. Where can you get 30 grams of clean, outstanding protein in, like, moments? Yeah, like zero to. I'm good. Yeah, that tastes like that, too, by the way.

Yeah. You know, on the surface, it seems secondary, but, bro, in real life, it's a huge deal. No, it's a huge deal. So check it out. Jockofuel.com.

You can get it online@jacofuel.com. Dot. You can also get it vitamin shop, wawa. The mulk people have been asking about this. So the protein drink ready to drink is in wawa right now.

If you recall, a little while ago, they pulled our energy drinks out of there. We got our slots, got bought by some of the big corporations. But there was a high demand signal for protein drink, and so it's in there. It's crushing. So if you're around a wawa, go get yourself.

And if it's in the morning time, get yourself a sweet cream coffee, mulk, 95 milligrams of caffeine. Are you drinking that, Dave? No. You're nodding your head. My wife.

Your wife is in the game. It's, like, out of control now. Yeah. It's like she is, like, the least critical person in the world. If we run out of sweet cream mocha, which we have now.

Dave Berke

One time she's, like, coming at me hard. Like, it's not like, you know, like. Oh, did you mow the lawn? Like, where's my mole? So it's kind of cool that she's.

So super stoked about that. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that's cool about that is it literally two birds with 1 st. It's like, here's two birds.

Jocko Willink

Here's 1 st. They're both getting killed. You're gonna get 30 grams of awesome protein, and you're gonna get your 95 milligrams of caffeine. This thing is epic, and people are down for it. So check that out.

You can get that at wawa. You can get the stuff at vitamin shop. You can get at GNC, military commissaries, a fees, Hannaford dash doors in Maryland, wake Fern shoprite, Heb Meyer Harris Teeter, lifetime fitness shields. Small gyms everywhere. Jiu jitsu, crossfit.

If you got a jiu jitsu gym, if you got a crossfit gym, if you got a powerlifting gym, if you had a gym, what kind of gym would you have? Echo Charles. Probably like victory mma and fitness, to be honest with you. Okay, that's perfect. Yeah, it's kind of got everything.

We got crossfit, we got bodybuilding. I would have the bigger, weightlifting gym, though. Like general weightlifting bodybuilding fitness type. I would have a bigger one. You'd have a couple.

You wanted cable crossovers in this, a. Little something, a little more tricep, like if they're. And not to get too deep into it, but I would expand it into, you know, the old Muay Thai room. Yeah. Because the muay thai kickboxing scenario is.

Already huge over there. So I'd expand into that room for some more weights. The one with the glass. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Echo Charles

That's me, though. But either way, you know, borderline purposes. Well, if you have a gym or if you go to a gym where you want them to have jocko fuel, have your gym owner, or you email jfsalesfuel.com dot. Also origin USA. We're making stuff in America.

Jocko Willink

We're making training gear, we're making Jujitsu gear, geese, we're making jeans, we're making t shirts, joggers. Making boots, dude.

I'll just bring it up. So the team took a hide from an elk that Joe Rogan shot. I saw that. And made boots from the hide. And the way they did it, there's an entry in an exit wound.

They made it. So the entry in the exit wound, they used that part of the leather so you can see, and then they put red leather behind it on one boot. So the. The entry wound, it's going in on one side, there's like a slit, and you can see red leather. And then on the other side, where the exit wound is, there's a slit and red leather behind that.

Yeah. So it's like the boots have the wound in it. It's the best thing I ever seen. It might be the most squared away pair of boots that's ever been made ever. Yeah.

Well, if you were Joe Rogan, what would you do with those boots? You know, do you wear. Do you wear them, or do you put them on the wall? It might be a special occasion kind of a scenario. Special, occasional kind of scenario.

I got some boards, surfboards. Look, we don't like wall hangers. We're anti wall hangers. We want to surf the. Those boards.

But I do have some boards that are like, hey, there's got to be some kanish, some epic condish. Other than that, they're up there looking beautiful. Yeah, I got some of Stoner's old boards. Stoner didn't leave me his boards so I could freaking hang them on a wall. Got a ride.

So I feel that way about those boots. Certain moment in time, got to break out those elk boots. I didn't feel. Apparently, they're super, super soft. Yeah.

Echo Charles

So you're, like, you're describing the whole thing, like, sounds pretty sick to see them look slightly more sick in real life. It was very important. Did you actually hold them? You've seen them? Well, yeah.

I mean, Pete opened them, and we looked at them, but, yeah, I didn't, like, try them on or nothing. No, but you, was the leather super soft? Actually, to be honest, I didn't feel the leather. Didn't touch them. Not really in the game.

Look. Cool. Hey, we can't get you those boots, the Joe Rogan boots. But, hey, we do got plenty boots. Hey, check it out.

Jocko Willink

Originusa.com dot. This stuff's all made. 100% America. 100% in America. That's what we're doing.

Hunt gear, by the way, saw cam hands. Yeah. You know, it's so fired up, and if you. If you're, if your test human is cam hains, bro, you're good. You know what I mean?

Cam's a freaking maniac. The dude is just hunt, hunt, hunt. That's what he's thinking about. You know what he's thinking about right now? Probably hunting.

Echo Charles

Yeah. Oh, he just thought about his bow for a second. Now he's back to thinking about killing an elk. So check it out. He's in it.

Jocko Willink

Joe Rogan's in it. Actually, Chris pratt's in it, too. We're all in the game. That's what we're doing. Originusa.com, check it out.

Echo Charles

True. Get yourself some american made stuff. That's what I want to say. The reason. The reason that Cam is on board, the reason that Joe is on board, the reason that Chris is on board is because it's american made.

Jocko Willink

These are patriotic people that understand how impactful this is to the country. These are all people from working class backgrounds, by the way. Like, these are people that understand what it means to make stuff in America. And that's why they're on board. That's why they're partners.

So originusa.com, America, check it out. Also, Jacob store called Jocko store. Discipline equals freedom. This is where you can get your stuff to represent that idea, which is true, by the way. Also, this thing called the shirt locker subscription scenario.

Echo Charles

New design every month. People seem to, like, down, check it out. But, yeah, it's all on jocastore.com if you like so something, get something there. Okay. Also, if you need steak, which you definitely do.

Jocko Willink

And look, this is kind of a bummer. Five years ago, eight years ago, bro, I was fired up to go out for steak. Cause I was gonna get a really good steak that I liked that it was better than anything I could have at home. That situation is flipped now. Yeah, it's different because we got Colorado craft beef and we got primal beef.

You will get a steak that tastes better than any steak that you can get in a restaurant. I know that's a bold statement, but I'm gonna tell you right now, if you have Colorado craft beef or you have primal beef, you will have steak that tastes better than whatever steak you're getting in whatever restaurant you're going to. You go to one of them super fancy steakhouses we got you. Yeah. So check out coloradocraftbeef.com.

Check out primalbeef.com, and get some american made beef. Also, those beef sticks. Yeah.

They'Re the new Snickers bar. They're the new Snickers bar. Are you down on those things? Dude, I'm getting screwed on those things. I get the nine pack shift, and I'll open up the pantry, and I'll.

Have to go hunt. The kids, like, the rappers will be in their bedrooms. My kids are just straight up stealing, hoarding. So the beef sticks are so good. At least the meat, like it's in my freezer.

Dave Berke

You can't really. You can't steal the steak. Those things are like immediately if they catch wind that they've shown up on the auto ship, they're gone. Yeah, they're gone. Which deep down like secret.

Jocko Willink

That's actually. That's what I want them eating. But there's a part of me like. Can I get one? Maybe.

Can you bout some for the old man here? They're awesome. Check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also Jocko underground calm.

Also YouTube. We got a YouTube channel. Jocko podcast, right? Official jocko podcast. Official.

Then there's also the Jaco fuel. Yeah. Also we. Origin USA. Yeah, Origin USA for sure.

Echo Charles

But Jocko podcast, we're coming out with a clips channel too. Sometimes people just like the clips, you know, it's effective. Oh, trying to provide. Hey bro, how long have we had this podcast for anyway? Like I was trying to say, sometimes we just want the clips, you know, we're on the go.

All this other stuff, you know, we may not be sitting through, you know, 3 hours necessarily on that day. That's not what we're doing. So, you know, the clips. That might be beneficial. Say that.

Thank you though for. For inquiring. Right on, right on. Also psychological warfare. Also flipside canvas.

Jocko Willink

Dakota Meyer. He's made awesome stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books. Leadership strategy and tactics. Field manual, final spin.

The code, the evaluation, the protocols. Wrote that with Dave Burke right there. Good deal. Discipline equals freedom. Field manual.

Way of the warrior kid 12345. Check those out please. Get those for the kids that, you know. Just give them to them. Just give them to them.

Give the. Give the nine year old across the street one of these books right now or all of of them these. And that way in, in seven years, they're not freaking cranking the music up and throwing toilet paper into your trees because they're out there living a life of discipline, structure. He's over there. You know what he's gonna be doing?

Coming over like, hey, can I mow your lawn? I'll do it this time for free. And we can talk about some kind of a contractual agreement, right when he's nine or twelve. Just do it. Get the kids on the right path.

Mike and the dragons about faced by hackworth extreme ownership dichotomy. Leadership echelon front. We have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. And if you want to check it out, go to echelonfront.com.

We have an event called the muster. The next one is in Nashville. I think we just rearranged the dang seats so we can get a few more people in there. It's zero two to zero 4 May. So that's coming up real quick.

Check it out. Next one after that is in Dallas, 16 to 18 October. We just got back from Gettysburg Battlefield. Amazing. We have another event called the council.

All these things are focused on making you a better leader, which is going to give you a better life. Also, the women's assembly September 11 through the 13th in San Antonio, Texas. For the female leaders out there, check that out. And if you want to get good at this stuff, you need to practice it, you need to continually study it. And that's why we have the extreme ownership academy.

This is going to help you with business. It's going to help you with life. It's going to help you dealing with your kids. It's going to help you deal with your wife or your husband. So check that out.

Extreme ownership.com. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, gold star families, check out mark Lee's mom, mama Lee. She got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. Also, Micah Fink, he's got heroesandhorses.org for all those individuals that need some help readjusting, getting back in the game.

He takes vets up into the mountains of Montana so they can find themselves. And Jimmy May, he's got an organization called beyond the, the brotherhood.org helping bring guys into the civilian sector. And if you want to connect with us, Dave is avidr Burke. I'm at jocko.com and I'm on social willink echoes at Echo. Charles.

Just watch out for the algorithm and don't get caught up in the, in the, in the mayhem that's going on there. The comments, the response, gotta be careful. Gotta be careful. That one. Getting emotional about things you shouldn't get emotional about.

It's a bot. Mm hmm.

Also, thank you to all of our men and women out there on the front lines, put into very dynamic situations where decisions have to be made in seconds, where lives are at stake and they do the right thing for the right reasons. Thank you for what you do. And also to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, emTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you all for doing the right things for the right reasons. Here at home and keeping us safe.

And to everyone else out there, there's decisions to make. There's the high road and the mud, the right thing to do and there's everything else. And it's not always easy. But if you do the right things for the right reasons and you do not surrender the high ground, in the end you will win. And that's what we've got.

Until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko out.

434: War Crimes, Murder, and Leadership.

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to War Crimes

2. Leadership and Misinformation

3. The Importance of Documentation

4. Historical Misunderstandings

5. Concluding Thoughts on Military Leadership

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript