437: Special Ops, Intelligence, Sacrifice, and War. with Joe Kent and the Story of Shannon Kent.

Jocko Willink

This is Jocko, podcast number 437 with Echo, Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The strike force commander spoke up. Let's go, boys.

War ain't gonna be around forever. Might as well go give the taxpayers their money's worth. The night's grgs, or grid reference guides had already been printed out. Everyone took one and slid it into their forearm quarterback pad for easy reference. Each sailor on the manifest checked their night vision devices, completed radio checks, and slid a magazine into their rifle as they walked out the door.

The flight line. At this point, it was always assumed Shannon would accompany them on target. She was too valuable to leave behind. Not much later, three Blackhawk helicopters lifted off with the strike force on board and raced towards the objective. Tonight would be fun.

Tonight. They were landing on the x. About 20 minutes later, the crew chief inside Shannon's bird shouted 30 seconds over the roar of the rotors while holding up his two fingers in a pinching motion in case someone couldn't hear his warning. 30 seconds out. Find your safety line, make sure your nods are adjusted, and get ready to rock.

Moments later, the helicopter flared and landed about 50 meters from the target building. The seals sprinted toward the objective. Speed, surprise, and violence of action are the keys to success on these types of missions. Shannon ran behind them, keeping close. Infrared lasers bounced on the front door.

A light flicked on inside the building. The occupants knew they had company. The seals mechanically breached the door with a donker, a portable battering ram, and flowed in, moving through the target building with a fluidity that comes with hundreds of hours of practice as a team. As one seal button hooked into the prayer room, a teammate right behind him ran into a military aged male. Without hesitation, he took him to the ground and put a knee on his back.

The other team guy in the room was doing the same with another. The radio call went out moments later. Objective secure. Shannon was already making her way through the breach point, anxious to see if her analysis was correct. Hey, Shannon, back here in the prayer room.

Pretty sure we got jackpots one and two. Shannon rounded the corner and saw two of her friends standing there with two zip tied detainees. She didn't need to take more than a quick glance at both to know they got both of their targets. Hell, yeah, she thought it was a good night, but not as good as a few nights prior, when they'd hit 13 objectives in one night. That was going to be a hard night to top.

And that right there is an excerpt from a book that has just been released, and the book is called send the true story of a mother at war. And this book is the story of Shannon Kent, a US Navy senior chief who spent her life and sacrificed her life working and fighting in the special operations and intelligence community.

And she actually wasn't the only one in her direct family unit to serve. Her husband, Joe Kent, who co authored this book, spent over 20 years in the army and in joint special operations, as well as with other government agencies conducting missions around the world fighting terrorists and insurgents. And it's an honor to have Joe Kent here with us tonight to share the story of his amazing wife, as well as his own experiences and lessons learned from life, war, combat and of course, leadership. Joe, thanks for joining us, man. Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Kent

I appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to meet you. And it was really awesome to read the book and get, get the details around Shannon's life and what she did. And really, of course, you know, from my background in the SEAL teams, I have worked with people in Shannon's role a lot over the years, but there really hasn't been anyone that painted such a good picture of that side of special operations. So you did a great job bringing that to light.

Jocko Willink

And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of that and start to understand what it takes to put an x on a map and send an assault force out there. There's a lot, a lot of things have to happen to get there. But, um, before we get into the book, let's talk about you a little bit. So where were you born? So I was born in Oregon, sweet home Oregon, just to the south of the Eugene area.

Joe Kent

So kind of out in the middle. Of nowhere and growing up in the woods scenario type thing. Well, kind of. My dad got a job at the forest service, so that's how we kind of ended up there. But then shortly thereafter, both my folks got into law school, so moved to Eugene, and then spent most of my life growing up in Portland, Oregon, believe it or not.

So it was kind of a good mix, I think, between growing up in a city, Portland at the time, eighties and nineties, was kind of a medium sized. There was none of the craziness that we have now with Portland, but I was really involved in Boy scouts, so spent a lot of time out in the woods. So what did your mom and dad were both lawyers? Yeah, my folks are both lawyers. Yeah, my mom ended up, she stopped practicing once we started.

I'm the oldest of five, so once I had a bunch of little brothers and sisters, she kind of pulled away from that. But then my dad, he's still a practicing lawyer. A practicing lawyer of what kind? Civil law. Okay.

Yeah. And as you're growing up, was your dad in the military? No. So both grandparents were, you know, like, they both did their time in world War Two, but not a family of, you know, military service or military traditions. What.

Jocko Willink

What were you into when you were growing up? Like, in school? Were you studying? Did you do work? Did you do, like.

I didn't do homework. I know kids. I have four kids now, and homework is, well, they're out of that grade, but we're out of that age. But, you know, when I was a kid, like, we didn't do homework. I didn't do homework.

Echo Charles

Echo from time to time. Okay, Joe. I did not. No, no. I think I usually copied off somebody, like, right before it was due, maybe.

Joe Kent

I was a pretty bad student. I did not like school. I mean, basically from the time I was, I don't know, like, probably five or six, I knew I wanted to be Gi Joe of some sort, you know, and like, that. That kind of, like, matured as I watched, like, the A Team. And then once I got old enough to, you know, pre Internet, you gotta go read books and stuff.

So once I got a library card, I realized actually, like, I liked to read. And so I read all the Vietnam books, and I had my mindset I was gonna go be some flavor of commando. But really, what solidified it for me was 93, was the Blackhawk down. Just seeing that on tv, just piped right into people's houses. I think that was the first time Americans had really seen brutal, graphic combat.

And I was 13, and I was like, man just entered high school, and I was thinking, there's 18 year old kids who got killed there in a couple years. That could be me. Who are those guys? Like, how come they're over there fighting but nobody else is? Like, I want to go.

Whoever those guys are, I want to go be one of them. Yeah. Did you, were you able to kind of disseminate that there was rangers and that there was special forces and that there was Delta? Did you figure all that out from the Blackhawk down scenario? Shortly thereafter?

You know, I started reading as much as I could, and I think there was a couple books that came out after that. It took a while, I think, for the actual Black hawk down book to come out. But really, the mission of the Green Beret is really grabbing me because they seem like they are always constantly deployed, even at times we weren't in war. And I figured, you know, actually, especially post Blackhawk down, that we weren't going to be involved in any kind of, you know, long enduring conflict. Kind of funny to say that now.

Jocko Willink

It's. Everyone thought that that's what I thought. You know, in the nineties. And so I was like, okay, being a green bray sounds pretty cool. And then, of course, the recruiters were like, well, you can't go do that right away, but you can go be a ranger.

Joe Kent

Which to me was like, okay, that's pretty badass. I'm going to try that. But I got to say, I did read, I think I was in high school, like, right before I joined the army, I read rogue warrior, and I was like, holy crap. Because I like the water and going to a dive team in SF, but I was like, man, maybe I should try and be a Seal. But I went and I talked to the recruiter, and the Navy recruiter was just like, yeah, you know, you gotta pick a navy job first.

And here's all the Navy jobs. And I was like, man, those all sound really terrible. I'm like, but how do I. He's like, but then maybe after boot camp, you can try. And luckily, I had one friend who had one of my dad's friends who had been in the military was like, whatever you want to do, get it in writing.

Which was like, actually the best advice ever because I told him that. And he was like, do not do that. If they put it in writing and it's what you want, well, go ahead. He's like, but don't. Don't go down that rabbit hole.

So the army was like, well, if you want to arrange your contract, it's right here, and we'll spell it out for you. Yeah. It is weird that in the nineties, we didn't think that there would ever be a long range or a long term war again. I mean, the Gulf war happened. It was over in 72 hours.

Jocko Willink

And then even when Blackhawk down. Went down, I was in the. I was in the teams already. But I remember following that deployment, I was over off the coast of Somalia and Rwanda happened, and there was. There was 800,000 people that were about to get slaughtered.

Was it? Yeah, 800,000 in 100 days. And we were there and they were spinning us up like, hey, we're gonna go and at least provide humanitarian. We didn't go anywhere. We didn't do it.

Yeah, because they did not want to have anyone else, any other Americans have any kind of incident over in Africa that just wasn't gonna happen. So the idea. Yeah, we used to be training for, like, what we called the big mission. Yeah, exactly. You get one big mission.

That's what you would think. One big mission and that'll be that. And you had to keep your. Your fingers and toes crossed that you were gonna be on that mission. Exactly.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Even. Yeah. When I came in, I mean, even going right to Ranger regiment 275 wasn't in the Blackhawk down incident, but we had a couple guys who had come over from third Ranger battalion. My squad leader had jumped into Panama, but it was like these guys who had gotten one chance, you know?

But then there was a whole bunch of other guys who had been in even longer than them who were just like, yeah, we were there, we were close, but it didn't end up happening. And so I thought that the combat was like this fleeting thing that you might get a shot at in a 20 year career. 100%. There was guys I know guys that did 30 years from, like, 1971 to 1990, 119 or two until 2001. And they never fired their weapon in combat.

Yeah. And great guys, but, yeah, it just didn't happen. Yeah. And so would you go right out of high school then? Yeah, yeah.

Jocko Willink

What'd you do to prepare for Rangers goal? Did you, like, get ready for it? Yeah, I wrestled in high school, played football. Wasn't very good at either one of them, but, like, you wrestle all four years? I wrestled all four years, yeah.

How'd you do? Not Washington state. Washington's got some good wrestling going. Really good wrestling. So come being, like, in the city, in Portland, you could do okay, but if you get outside the city, people take their wrestling really seriously.

Joe Kent

You're in Oregon, but it's right on the border. So, I mean, we were wrestling against guys from Washington and Oregon, but if you get against any of the country kids, like, they just kick the crap out of us. So I got beat a lot, but I got in really good shape. And I think mentally it really prepared me. Did lots of running and all that stuff.

Jocko Willink

Did you wrestle prior to your freshman year in high school? I didn't. There was no real wrestling programs before high school. The mental. The mental toughness that when you show up as a freshman, you've never wrestled before that you're about to get.

Because your first match in your freshman year can be against a kid that's been wrestling since he was five years old, and he's gonna murder you and pin you and rub your face in the mat in about 45 seconds, and it's definitely gonna hook you up with something. I think I felt like I was in pretty good shape as whatever, 13 year old. But then I definitely had that exact same experience where there was kids who had been wrestling just cause their dad was really into it, or they were just freakishly strong, and I got a lot of humble pie. How did your parents feel about you when you started looking at the army? You're like, I'm going to the army.

And your parents are lawyers. Yeah. So they're highly educated people, and they're looking at you thinking, what are you doing? Or were they down? I think they hoped that I was going to outgrow it, but by the time I was old enough to start talking to recruiters, it had been all I've been talking about since I was, like, five.

Joe Kent

And the mentality in Portland, and I think in a lot of schools, especially at the time, was like, you either go to college and get a four year degree, or you're going to be homeless on the streets. Like, there's like, no, there's like, don't go to trade school. Don't join the military. That stuff just doesn't even get talked about. It's like, you know, you go to college or else.

And I was like, the last thing I'm doing is going to college. You know, this optional four years of more school. Like that is not for me. So they were actually pretty supportive of it. You know, they've always been pretty supportive.

So they're like, hey, as long as you have a plan. And I think they figured I was going to get free college and kind of be bored, you know, in a couple years and just sort of come back and figure out something else. So what year was it when you enlisted? 98. Did you leave in the summer, like, right after.

Like, right? Yeah. Like, right after graduation? Yeah. Did you.

Jocko Willink

I kind of asked you this. Did you prepare for ranger school? Like, were you rucking? Were you getting ready for it? Yeah, you know, I don't know if I rucked.

Joe Kent

We backpacked a lot in boy scouts, so I felt, like, pretty comfortable with all that. But, you know, I knew all the army, like, two mile standards and all that stuff, so was running. Was running, like, 5 miles and all that, and, you know, made sure I could do pull ups and push ups, and I was, you know, lifting weights and stuff, so I felt physically ready. So you're in boy scouts, you're going to school. You're not great at school.

Jocko Willink

You're not putting a lot of effort. Are you just kind of a clean cut kid? Were you getting any trouble? Were you, like, a problem child? Were you listening to rock and roll music for any other?

I was sinful activities, was definitely listening. To heavy metal and all that type of stuff, and thought I was pretty badass. I was really lucky, though. My boy scout troop was badass. We had a former green beret, Vietnam era guy who was the scoutmaster, and basically his whole philosophy was, we take the boys out in the woods, and we kind of let them go.

Joe Kent

Lord of the flies. And, like, the older ones that are good leaders will take care of the younger ones and, like, it'll all kind of buff out. So I think a lot of the stuff they were letting us do at the time, like, I think if I were to go try to do that now, I might end up in jail, you know? So it was just a great experience, man. It was just such a good outlet that, like, all the trouble we got into was out in the woods, screwing around, you know, rappelling off stuff, whitewater rafting.

Just a great outlet for all that young male energy. So I didn't get in a ton of trouble in high school because I think, I mean, really, too. Like, it was hard. It was hard to get in trouble in those days, as long as you used a little bit of tradecraft, like, you weren't super blatant about it, and it was kind of like the nineties. People would say, hey, don't do that again.

But there wasn't any recording of you on a phone and the parents getting called, posted to social media. I feel for kids that are growing up nowadays. It's so hard to actually just let kids be kids, and there's, like, no forgiveness or tolerance. Yeah. So you go to your recruiter, you see the ranger opportunity, and you roll out to boot camp.

Jocko Willink

Boot camp is boot camp. Anything special about boot camp? I really liked it. I mean, I was just stoked to be there. I was like that goober who was like, oh, my God, this is so cool.

Joe Kent

They gave us bdus. Like, they're gonna give us m 16s, you know? So I was really just happy to be there. The same thing. Airborne school is like, oh, man, they're gonna let us jump out of air.

Yeah. So you go to airborne school, and then did you. So, did you have orders to go to regiment? Yeah. So you get the opportunity.

It's like a ranger variable contract. So you at least get to go try out to go to regiment. So the month, the month long process of, you know, getting smoked and dogged out to make sure you can then go to regiment. Is that rasp then? It was called rip at the time, but it's rasp now.

Yeah. And it's a month long. Yeah, it was about a month. I think now it's a little bit longer because they actually teach the guys some. Some basic tactics in case they get deployed right away to war.

When I went, I think we just got the crap smoked out of us. I know. I know we did some land nav in there somewhere, but I just know everything was like, time rucks, time runs, and then just beat down sessions. And rangers is, from what I can tell, kind of the most spartan of the military units, period. Or you agree with me?

I would agree with you. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Like, there's no. You're in a ranger regiment.

Jocko Willink

You are. You are going in the field. You are. You're still getting, like, dropped down. Yes.

Made to do push ups by people that are, like, one rank above you. Very common. Yeah, it's. It's almost like an. It would.

It is almost like an a boot camp environment kind of continues. It is, yeah. Except for we're, like, with no, you know, guardrails. So, I mean, your nCO's, I mean, for better or worse, I mean, they can really, really mess with you if they want to. But I was.

Joe Kent

I mean, I think, especially in the late nineties, going to rage. Your regiment was really fortunate because I don't think the rest of the army, like, the traditional infantry units, the conventional guys at the time, I don't think they had money to really train. But I got there, and it was like, hey, you know, it's spartan, like you said, but it's also like, your job is to be physically fit. Your job is to know your weapon system into no basic tactics. And so it was a really good foundation of just basic soldiering.

Jocko Willink

And when you're at Ranger regiment in the nineties, you're not going on deployment. You're not going on, like, a six month deployment. You're just always ready, always training, always. It's the cycle. So you do your big workup so you can do an airfield seizure, which means you're like a human lawn dart, you know, doing like the.

Joe Kent

Doing the low altitude, like, mass tactical with all your crap on onto an airfield to seize it. So you get to land on concrete. You know, if you're. If you're really lucky, and then you do the same thing. Thing with the rotary wing assets, a lot of live fire, and then you do individual training.

And so it's. Yeah, it's just that that cycle. If you've been there back then, if you had been there for a year, you just kind of rinse, repeat that year and hope your number comes up. For the Panama. The grenade.

Yeah, for the big mesh. How many times did you do an airfield seizure and jump out and land on concrete? Oh, too many to count, like, a bunch. If you'd been there for. Especially in those days, because that was like core bread and butter.

Nowadays I think they're probably more laser focused on, you know, strategic strike. But then that was the big mission because that was what they did in Grenada, in Panama. So we were just kind of practicing that you eventually get a little bit better about steering your parachute, like, to some grass or something. How much did you weigh when you were a young ranger? Probably 100, 9200 ish.

So I was hitting. And then if you're over 6ft tall, you can jump the machine gun or the Gustav. And so I always had one of those stupid things strapped onto me. They'd be like, congratulations, you're a 240 gunner, or you're a Gustav gunner. And see if this big, awkward, like the goose style wasn't too bad.

But, like, the 240 just. Did you lower it down before you hit with your ruck or you land? I'd lower the ruck, but I wouldn't lower my weapon system. Cause I was like, man, if I. If that thing's gone, then I'm gonna be the biggest jackass in the world.

So I'm just gonna ride this sucker in. And you're living in the barracks? Yeah, so you're living in the barracks. You talk me through like a week at. In ranger regiment, man.

So every day is pretty much like you're doing PT at whatever, like 536. And at the time, this is before, I think, like, you know, crossfit and people lifting. So we were just running or rucking. That was the two. The two forms of PT.

You're either running, like, really long or really fast or some combination of both, or you're putting a backpack on and going for a long stroll. But then we'd be at the range quite a bit. I mean, especially now that I understand, like, how much it costs to send it. As I matured in my soldiering, I could actually appreciate what I was given as a younger guy. We were at the range quite a bit, you know, shooting.

We'd usually, after our PT session, you know, put on our military gear for the day and then we'd walk to the Ranges. That was always. I was like, why'd we just. We just ran and now. Okay, all right, whatever.

You know, like, sometimes. Although sometimes we would throw everything we needed in our backpacks and take off for a couple days and just live out of your backpack and shoot at the range. Combatives were getting pretty big then, too, so there was a lot of. A lot of rolling, a lot of scrapping, I think, for the. On the army side, Ranger regiment picked up jiu jitsu before the rest of the army did.

So we were, you know, arm barring each other and choking each other. And you had that wrestling background, too. Yeah, yeah. So we were fighting quite a bit, and so that was usually a big afternoon thing, was lift and fight. So, I mean, really, in a week as a young guy.

And this is why I think I loved it, I mean, you could basically get paid to work out, get paid to go shoot and then go beat up, you know, beat each other up with your buddies, you know, living the dream, man. I mean, it wears on you after a while. Of course, you get tired and all that type of stuff, and there was all. There's always all the admin nonsense you got to do here and there, but I think a lot of that is really, really minimized in ranger battalion. Yeah, yeah.

Jocko Willink

Rangers are just outstanding when you work with them. They are just. You know what you got, man? You got a professional soldier ready to get after it. And so then at some point, pretty common.

Joe Kent

You. You see the Green Berets. Now, you already had that idea coming in. I did. I did, yeah.

Jocko Willink

And the x ray, like, the 18 x ray program wasn't available yet. It wasn't. It just. It had just started. Once I was in the cue chord, we had the first, like, five test x rays that were in.

Joe Kent

In the pipeline with us, but that was not a thing at all. You had to be an e four for a while. You'd be an e five. But then when they started taking e four s, this is right before 911. I'd been in battalion for about three years, coming up on three years, and I was like, you know, I think now's a good time to do it.

You know, there's never a good time to say you want to leave Ranger regiment. Like, that's. That's just not something that you do unless you die in the mentality while you're there in the MO. But the funny thing is, like, there's only so far that you can advance as an NCO in Ranger battalion before you kind of have to leave. So, like, you'll never hear Rangers admit this while they're you know, wearing a tambourine.

But a lot of them end up going to SF eventually. So on Fort Lewis, where we were there, was also first special forces group, so we could kind of see the SF guys from a distance. And this is when Rangers had to have high end tights and the SF guys all had long hair. And I was like, that's pretty sweet, man. This guy's get to have long hair, you know.

But yeah, I had decided I was going to need try out and I actually ended up in special forces selection on September 11. That was like the first, that was like our start day was like 911. So selection is how long. Selection is in about a month. And that's just, they're just weeding people out to see if they really want to send you to the Q course, right?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. The Q course is about, I mean, the easiest way to get out there, the shortest way to get out of the Q course, you're still there for well over a year. But, yeah, selections a month, it's, it's a, there's some traditional beat down log pt type of stuff, but a lot of it is individual to see if you can make decisions on your own, how you do without getting feedback and guidance, those types of things. Land nav being the big vehicle for all that.

Jocko Willink

Good times. Yeah, really good times. How many people start in your selection? How many people get selected? My class, we had around a little bit over 300 that showed up on day one.

Joe Kent

Now showing up on day one means you're just going to take the PT test. And so there's a lot of jokes that, like, I don't know, like on a whim were like, I'm gonna go take the PT test. Like, so that 300 number or that over 300 number, I think by the time they actually put us on the trucks to take us out to the actual camp, camp McCall or selection happens, I think we'd probably lost about 100 guys or so that just didn't pass the PT test. And then eventually at the end of the. What about at the end of the month long selection at the end?

I don't know the exact number in my class, but I think we were below 50 at the end of it. Okay. Yeah. And then any, then you roll into Q course. Yeah, yeah.

Jocko Willink

What, what's your specialty? So I. Weapons. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Kent

Went from eleven Bravo to 18 Bravo. So I wanted to get out of the Q course as quick as possible and I was like, oh, play of guns. Like, cool. Any, any challenges going through selection or cue course? Sorry, I mean, the interesting thing about selection, especially coming from a unit like Ranger regiment.

Like in Ranger regiment, you're never alone. You're always in a big group. All the vehicles and assessment tools they use to see if you're going to be a good Ranger leader, it's, you're having to lead other troops. And so everything arduous that you do, it's with other people. SFAS is pretty unique in the fact that it's, like, one of the few places in the military where they take you and they isolate you from everybody else, and they're like, well, here's your list of tasks to do.

It's on that board out there, and you're going to do them or you're not going to do them. And that's it. Which at first I was like, oh, actually, this is really challenging. This is very different than what I've done. But then after a while, it's like, okay, I actually kind of like this.

This is cool. I'm much more in charge of my own desk than I had been any other time in my military career. Did you go to Ranger school already? So did you actually get to go to Ranger school? Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. So that. That's a big advantage, I think, going into the Q course, because you already understand tactics, you've already been dogged out and tired, and you.

Joe Kent

You've kind of seen that movie a little bit before. So you sort of, you're like, this is gonna get ugly in about 24 hours. You know, like, you kind of know that's coming. So that helped out, especially with the first part of the cue course is like a mini ranger school, just to get everybody on the same sheet of music with small unit tactics. But I'd say the hardest part of the Q course is just kind of how long it is.

Like, you're there for a really long time. So there's a lot of guys who will just mentally get it in their head that like, oh, I failed this gate or that gate. Now I'm screwed. Did you say a year? The Q course is a year long.

Jocko Willink

Does that include language training? That? Yeah. Well, for me, that included language training. Yeah.

What language would you go for? I got posh, too, so. Right. Because it was like, right after 911 and they just started sending guys into Afghanistan, they're like, all right, we got to get more pashto speakers. And the funny thing is, like, if you're like Shannon and you're an actual linguist, they test your aptitude.

Joe Kent

If you're an SF guy, and they've already invested that much in you, you're going to go to a group, and that group's got x amount of languages, and if it's a really hard one, like, too bad, you're not leaving here until you figure it out. So we went to take the. At the end of the end of the actual Q course itself, before language school, they have you go take the language aptitude test, and the instructor that administered it to us was like, hey, I don't care if you max this thing. It's the best score ever. Or if you spell your name wrong on it.

If I give you Russian or Arabic, you're not leaving here until you get a one. One. I don't really care. So I don't care how the military says. Whether the military says you can learn a language or not, you're going to learn it or you're not going to leave, which was a pretty good motivator.

Jocko Willink

Do they take that dlab score, though, and assign you the level of language that's appropriate? Because I remember I took that test. I never had, thankfully, never had to take, which I shouldn't say that, I guess. I wish I would have learned a language, but I didn't. But you had to get a certain score, and if you got a really good score, you could learn Chinese or Arabic, and if you got a bad score, then you were gonna, like, get Spanish or French or whatever.

And the spanish and french schools are, like, six months long, and the arabic schools are a year or whatever. Were you in that kind of, like, selection pipeline? So I had taken that test before, and I had done okay on it. Like, I think I qualified to learn, like, Arabic or whatever, but at the Q course, like, they don't care. Like, if you're assigned to fifth group, like, you're gonna get Arabic, Farsi, or posh to.

Joe Kent

At the time, I think we had some russian speakers, too. If you went to 7th group, well, you're lucky. You were gonna get to learn Spanish, and you're gonna be out of there in, like, four months, you know, but so it was. That was really the point. They're just like, we don't really care what this thing says.

Like, you're gonna learn whatever language your group needs to learn. And the standards. One. One. So sorry, bud.

Jocko Willink

So you from 18 years old to how old do you now when you get done with the Q course? 23. So you've been in for five years, man. You got a good grip of what's happening in the military, and how does that you know, you and I were talking about the big mish and nothing going on, and now September 11, and how did that attitude, like, sweep through the team? I think all of us still thought, especially my Q course class, we still thought that we were going to miss it.

Joe Kent

So even when I got back from SFAS, there's a little bit of a gap there because you have to go back to your old unit and then leave. Right when I got back from selection, this is right before third Ranger battalion jumps into Kandahar in Afghanistan. And so it still wasn't. We weren't sure which battalion was gonna get that mission. And so every battalion, I think, got read the op order.

So we got read the op order. My team, my battalions already forward deployed there. They were already in Germany. And so me and a couple other guys were like, hey, we're gonna get on this bird. It's taking gear.

We're gonna go. We're gonna jump into Kandahar. And, like, within, I think the next morning, we're, like, watching the news. It's like, the Rangers secure Kandahar. I was like, well, I might as well go to the cue course now, because.

Because in my mind, I was like, Afghanistan's over. It's done. They're gonna get bin Laden, whatever, but we're not. They're not gonna send more guys over there. That's crazy.

And then while I'm in language school, the ground war, the Iraq invasion starts, and I'm like, dude, I missed everything. Cause you thought that was gonna be over. So I got the fifth group in the summer of zero three. And luckily, when I walked in at fifth group, they were like, I don't know what they knew, but they were like, this is not gonna be over anytime soon. We're deploying in August.

Like, you know, get ready to get it on. Yeah. It was really weird to watch that whole mentality. I had the exact same. I was going to college, so I was.

Jocko Willink

I was an enlisted guy. I got picked up for an officer program, and I was in college, and I called my detailer, who is a friend of mine that I knew. He's like, the guy assigning officers. And I was like, please, I'll go to college when I'm 50. Like, just send me back to team.

And this was early. This was, like, September 13. Yeah, or something. He goes, hey, this is going to last a really long time. Yeah.

And I didn't believe him at all, you know, it was the same mentality as you. Like, all this thing I'm gonna miss it, yeah, be a loser. And, yeah, so some people had a better vision of how long this thing was gonna last. And I guess you, we underestimated the, underestimated the stupidity of decisions that are getting made. The military industrial complex, all these factors that come into play, the, I mean, some of the way we handled those missions, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right.

This is 100% gonna last forever. Yeah. Or at least for 20 years. So that's kind of, that's kind of the origin story of you. But, you know, I want to go to this book here and talk about Shannon a little bit here she's.

And talk about her story, which I'm sure. And so again, the book is called send me. You know, I read it, got done reading it three days ago or whatever. It's just like I said, it's a great book. It gives insight to things that people have not really talked that much about, and especially at this level of detail from that ground level and people that were right there with her.

So get the book, and here we go. This is Pine Plains, New York. 1990. Shannon Smith, five years old, watched as other kids swung from rung to rung on the playground monkey bars. She had just started her tenure as a kindergartener at Seymour Smith Elementary School in Pine Plains, New York, about 80 miles north of New York City.

The notorious horizontal ladder featured on both schoolyard playgrounds and military obstacle courses requires a bit of technique, grip, and upper body strength to move from one end of the bars to the other, two things most five year old children are in short supply of. I bet you can't do it, a young boy taunted Shannon. Yeah. Huh? Yeah, that's what the little kid says.

Yeah. Yes, I can, Shannon replied, not to be shouted down. No, you're too little, the boy sneered. Shannon confidently stomped over to the bars, determined to show this bully up. She didn't start the fight, but she'd finish it by gracefully swinging from bar to bar.

Or so she thought. Shannon grabbed the bars, her feet dangling below. She missed as she tried to swing her hand to the next one, falling off to the p rock below. The boy laughed. She got up, furious, and mounted the bars again.

She swung and failed again. It took everything in her to hold back the tears. She wouldn't give that boy the satisfaction of knowing she was upset. I told you you couldn't do it. The boy pointed at her, laughing.

It's the kind of taunting that haunts a child for years to come. The playground bully is a common scourge among children but that doesn't make the experience less painful. Shannon came home that day and told her mom about it. She was upset specifically because it was a boy who told her she couldn't do it. And Marion could see Shannon wasn't defeated.

If anything, she was more determined than ever. The next day, Shannon snuck over to the monkey bars. She tried to make it across again, but failed. She kept getting back up on the bars over and over and over again, gritting her teeth with fire in her eyes. I'll show him, she thought.

This went on for days, maybe weeks. The metal bars tore up Shannon's palms, blooding them from her repeated attempts. Slowly, day by day, she made it from 1 bar to the next, then the next, and then the next. Eventually, the momentum carried all the way through, and she made it to the end, landing back on her feet, triumphant. She earned the kind of confidence that kids get from conqueringly see, conquering the seemingly unconquerable.

It was the beginning of a lifelong trend. When somebody said, no, you can't do this. Shannon's response was always, oh, yes, I can. So, I mean, great little anecdotal story that I'm sure you can see clearly. It was so well reflected in the book that that's kind of her attitude about stuff that is like, oh, you don't think I can do this?

Joe Kent

Yeah. Stand by. Yep. Watch me. So she.

Jocko Willink

And you talk about, you know, she had this ability and a gift for languages. Right? And so she ends up working at a polo club, which is interesting. And at this polo club, she's learns to speak Spanish. Yeah.

Which is, again, kind of crazy for a young kid. And she was on horses. She's a horseback kid. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Kent

So, Pine Plains, New York, really rural New York, not the New York City that most people think of. Yeah. There's a big polo club there. I think a lot of wealthier folks from the city keep their horses up there, and so there's a whole industry around that. So she loved horses.

And then a lot of the ranch hands, I guess some of the best. I don't know anything about polo, but from Shannon, I do. But some of the best polo players in the world come from Argentina, and so there was a lot of these professional polo hands and professional polo riders that would go up there for the summers. So Shannon got a job up there, and she's like, well, everybody speaks Spanish. Like, so I'm gonna learn Spanish.

Like, that was just her mentality, you know, because she had that. She had that mindset where she could, like, see patterns especially linguistically, like, the way people talk and just kind of repeat it in a way that I don't think most mortal people have. So that was her. I think her entry into learning that if there was a language out there, she could. She could figure it out.

She could crack that code. Dang, that must be nice. Yeah, exactly. So she's doing that. She's working there, going to the book here.

Jocko Willink

Although the stable and its horses were where her heart was, Shannon also held a summer job at the local pharmacy, was a scholar and an athlete at school. She participated year round sports, excelling in volleyball, basketball, cross country, country, and track and field. She sang in the chorus, played flute in the school band, and was involved with school theater. Was there anything she couldn't do? So she's.

She's just getting after it in all aspects. Yeah. She would find that 25th hour that exists in a day that most people just can't ever unlock. So that was. I mean, that was her.

That's just. I mean, every aspect of her life. I mean, she was very talented and incredibly smart, but also an incredibly hard worker, you know, and I think when those two things intersect, you just find incredible people. Yeah. We'd be lucky enough to have one of those, too.

But when someone has both, that's what you get. A woman like Shannon, she graduated. And again, there's such great stories and background stories and her family. So get the book. I'm going to fast forward a little bit right now.

Shannon graduated from Stissing Mountain junior senior high school in spring of 2001. She ends up going to college for a little while. And then September 11, 2001, Shannon's father. And, you know, this is in the book, but he's a, he's New York state police. Her father, Steve, and her uncle, who's a firefighter in New York, responded to the worst attack on american soil since Pearl harbor just down the Hudson river in New York City.

That infamous day, which also included an attack on the Pentagon and the downing of United Air flight. United Airlines Flight 93 in western Pennsylvania, resulted in thousands of Americans dead at the hands of terrorists and millions more fighting a campaign against international terror organizations for more than two decades. Shannon's younger brother joined the Marines shortly after the terror attacks. And to no one's surprise, Shannon stint in college didn't last long. America was now at war.

That changed everything. During her sophomore year of college, she talked to a Navy recruiter about how she could best leverage her talent for language in the service. Emerging from the ocean at midnight with a green face on a top secret mission like Shannon had seen in the brochures was still out of reach due to a bar on women in combat positions. But they did have a job that seemed like a perfect fit. Cryptologic technician interpretive by.

By the time Shannon left for recruit training in late 2003, the US had lost lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both wars. Wars were still in their infancy. Rear Admiral John Paul Jones, famously known as the father of the US Navy, once said, I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go into harm's way. Shannon Smith wanted to go into harm's way.

It is amazing how I know Tim Kennedy told the story when he went to enlist in the army after 911, and there was like a damn line around the block, and that's out here in California. And just the. The amount of people that stepped up, I mean, Shannon's brother going in the Marine Corps, her going, talk to the Navy recruiter, the amount of people that stepped up in, in that moment to serve is still. It still moves me every time I think about it. Yeah, that was a pretty awesome moment.

Joe Kent

And I think in our history, especially for the, the guys that were in, just to see the outpouring of people that, that wanted to serve. And then, I mean, one of the first times I talk about in the book, one of the first times I met Shannon, I asked her, like, what made you want to join the military? And she was like, well, I'm from a new. I'm from New York. They hit my towers, and my dad and my uncle were down there, and so I wasn't gonna just sit back and let somebody else go take care of it.

I wanted to do my part.

Jocko Willink

Of details that are in the book about. And it's very interesting to learn about. You know, we touched upon kind of the language aspect of things, but what that school looks like up in Monterey, there's the defense language. You guys don't go to the defense language? No, that's like the.

I think it might be the best place in the world to learn a language. It's got to be. I mean, because they take kids from all over the United States of America who've never heard one foreign word, and they teach them everything from Chinese to Arabic, you know, to Russian in 18 months. And when those guys get out, they can speak, they can read, they can listen. Like, it's.

Joe Kent

I think it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. So this is up in Monterey. It's a DLI defense language institute. So Shannon goes to boot camp, she goes to language school.

Jocko Willink

And I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here. It says, Shannon was a phenomenal linguist, and everybody knew it. She picked up the nuances of opinion, and modern standard Arabic came to her rapidly. By the time she graduated from DLI, she attained a language rating of 332, which meant she was rated as superior in listening and reading and advanced in speaking. Rare for a brand new linguist straight out of basic training.

In addition to her language rating, she earned an associate's degree in modern standard Arabic, which is awarded in October 2005, a month after she finished ElI. But there's more to cryptologic warfare than language. Shannon's chosen field would require her to master highly technical disciplines like signals intelligence, SIGINT, cyberspace operations, and electronic warfare. For some sailors, those skills are a one way ticket to a dark office, sitting behind a desk, pouring over classified documents. Although Shannon was perfectly capable of performing that aspect of the job, she wanted her work to be more hands on.

Her younger brother was a marine fighting in Iraq, and although she was worried about him and hoped he would make it home, she. She couldn't wait to get in on the war herself. So, yeah, it's very normal in the Navy, and I don't know too much about the air force, although I'm pretty sure it's probably something similar. But in the Navy, a lot of times if you're a linguist, you'll be sitting in a room listening to radio waves that are being received, you know, cell phone calls that are getting made, and you'll sit in a room or on a ship, and you'll just interpret what's coming in. And so it's very common for, you know, a linguist to have a bunch of flight hours because they're flying around over some country listening on the, listening to radios and interpreting things.

And so that's a very normal career path for someone with Shannon. Skill set. But as she mentions, like, she wasn't. Really, she wasn't really looking into that. Yeah.

Um, so at the time, so this is what now? 2005. So at the time, they're doing something. The Navy was doing something called individual augmentees. Yeah.

And what it meant was there's certain skill sets that the army needed, the Marine Corps needed, and, or special operations needed. And you could leave. Well, not leave the Navy, but you could augment these, the Marine Corps, the Army special operations, through this individual augmentation. Look, you might be a lawyer, you might be a cook. I mean, we literally had individual augmentees that were cooks and radio men.

And sometimes it would be a linguist. So it's something that people volunteered to do most of the time. Some people did get volunteered to do it, but she ends up volunteering for this individual augment and getting assigned to Baghdad. And she's going to go to Baghdad and work with. There was a, there was a joint special operations element there that was made up of seals and, and special forces guys working with something called the ICTF, which was the iraqi counter terror force.

And these were the ICTF was. They were, they were as good as the Iraqis? Well, they were some of the best iraqi soldiers that there were. They had been, they'd been well trained. They were well equipped.

Like, they had all of our weapons, they had all of our gear. They had our night vision, they had all of our gear. So this was a very capable partner for us. Did you ever do ICTF time? It was with the isoff.

Joe Kent

So the commandos, they were like the Rangers to the ICTF, like Delta or tier one. So, yeah, I've worked, worked with those guys quite a bit. It's interesting because the ICTF and the ISOF itself, I would say, are probably SAF's like best enduring legacy in Iraq. Because when ISIS came and the vast majority of the iraqi security forces that we spent trillions training threw their guns in the dirt and surrendered to ISIS, ISOF didn't. They refused to like their commander, who we trained, he passed away a couple years ago.

But General Fadl, he held those guys and they got abandoned by the iraqi military and they fought like hell in Anbar to hold those provinces and then to recapture them eventually. So they actually stayed, held their ground and fought and did what they were trained to do. So something we could be proud of. Yeah, no doubt. I know that the Mosul guys, the iraqi special operations groups that went up into Mosul, they took massive casualties.

Jocko Willink

Massive casualties. And you compare that to, I was in Ramadi in 2006, and there was a whole battalion of iraqi soldiers that just left. Their commander got IED and they all just left. Yeah, we're not doing this. And that happened with companies on, on a regular basis.

I mean, there was companies that got overrun and they, you know, they'd lose five, six, 7810 guys and then all of them would just leave. So, yeah, there wasn't, it didn't paint the best picture for the future. But like you said, that enduring relationship and the, the amount of effort that went into training the ICTF and the commandos obviously left a mark because for those guys to do what they did, and I only know about Mosul. Oh, I know the most about Mosul. I know they went into Ramadi as well because, and Ramadi was, and I saw pictures after they got ISIs out of Ramadi.

It was just completely destroyed. But my point is, and your point is that the Iraqis, the iraqi special operations group actually was well trained and was committed and lasted from this time. Now we're in. 20 00, 20 06 20 07 all the way up till 2016, 1718 and they fought hard and they were able to achieve their missions there.

So Shannon ends up, she's now with this, with the SEals and the SF in Baghdad. That was actually a very cool kind of joint mission. And I was supposed to go there in 2006. I was going to take my, I was in a task in SEAL team three and we were going to go to Baghdad. And so I did my advon was to Baghdad and went out with those guys and, you know, got to know them a little bit and got the turnover.

And then when I went home, it changed. Yeah, you know, things changed around. We end up going to Ramadi. But so I got to at least see them spend a few like probably there for, I don't know, five, six days seeing how they're operating. And you could see it was like I said, very well equipped.

And the Seals and the green berets were kind of doing port and starboard like, you know, you got them tonight, we got them tomorrow night. And they were just kind of going back and forth. At least that's what I remember. And doing a lot of targeted raids. Yeah, that's, that's what was happening.

So now I think this is, what is this, 2007? Where are you in 2007? So seven, I'm in Baghdad as well. So we had done, but I, that was my fourth deployment. So I was back actually in Baghdad and I was working, working with the iraqi special operations intel guys.

Joe Kent

So we had guys that we trained up to go out there and do recons for us. We'd go out every now and again low profile with them either to snatch guys or just to do the advanced recon to make sure our guys were gonna get ied on the way out there. But their, their biggest role in the fight for us was the human intelligence. So we had a bunch of them that we had trained up to run sources. So that was specifically what I was doing over there, was just working with the ice off recce guys.

Jocko Willink

And you and I were both in Iraq at the same time, too in zero three. I got there in like fall of zero three and left in spring of zero four. And you were there that whole time? We were, yeah, yeah. I think you guys took it.

Joe Kent

Cause we were doing the unilateral direct action, us and the grom, the polo. And then we went to go train up the. The initial iraqi special forces guys in the middle of Baghdad. And then. Yeah.

You guys stayed there and kept kicking indoors. Yeah. And then. So you went to Baghdad, downtown Baghdad. You were in the green zone.

So this trip, I was 0607, and then the next trip, zero eight, I was in the green zone before that. When we were training the commandos, we were up at FOB justice in caught. Amia. Got it. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, that's pretty. You know, I forget we were talking about before we pressed record. But one thing that made me a little suspect of everything in the world was there was this road that went around buy app and it had these big giant potholes in it. Yeah. And it sucked to drive on, you know, and then they filled in all the potholes and then put tank treads across as speed bumps so you couldn't drive real fast.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And I said to myself, well, this is. This is almost like a catch 22 type scenario. Yeah. The military doing things where you say, this makes no sense whatsoever.

And then after a while, there's mp's out there giving out speeding tickets and. Yeah, it was. That was. That was a cool thing about being over there that early in. In 2003, because it was still.

Yeah, yeah. You know, everyone uses the term wild west. It was pretty wild west in 2003. It was. Yeah, we were kind of like pirates then.

Jocko Willink

I mean, it was. It was pretty wild then. There was. There wasn't a lot of rules. Yeah.

Joe Kent

As the years drug on and we were there for way too long, that's when, like, the garrison mentality broke, unfortunately. Yeah. That was my first indication that, oh, yep, I can see where this might be going, was when they. They filled in the potholes and then put. So a tank tread.

Jocko Willink

Echo Charles is just basically like a big, thick piece of tank tread, but it. It's a speed bump. It's a ready made speed bump. And so they filled in the potholes, put these things out there, and I'm like, oh, I can see where this is going. And then, yes, I do remember some of my guys coming back.

Like, we got pulled over, we got a speedy ticket. What do I do with this? What does this even mean? So now fast forward from 2004 2005 or 2003 2004, when you and I were there together. Now we're going 2007, and Shannon is with this group in Baghdad.

And we'll go here. She took every opportunity to talk to the iraqi commandos in their native tongue. She could walk up to any of them confidently converse with such ease that it actually threw many of the iraqi commandos off. They became enamored with her because it was so rare to see a beautiful white american woman and even more rare to hear them speak perfect iraqi dialect. Her excellence was obvious to anyone who's watching.

She was the only one who could do this because the ICTF was completely mixed unit, which created a unique language environment. There were Shia and sunni operators working side by side with Kurdish and Christians, resulting in a mix of dialects and accents being used in any given conversation. The Green berets and seals were beside themselves the first few times they witnessed Shannon at work, as they are typically the ones trained and responsible for rapport building through learning of a language. But language proficiency had taken a backseat for many in Sof as the war in Iraq escalated and seals have no, like, focus on language whatsoever. Yeah, that's very interesting that you got all the.

Joe Kent

We know. We don't think about that, but there's all these different dialects, just like, you know, in America, we got someone from Long island, and you got someone from, like, deep Alabama, and you've got some girl from the valley out here. They're almost mutually unintelligible languages, and it's the same thing that happens in Iraq. I know that one thing that we loved about our. Our iraqi soldiers and our interpreters was we go into a building in Ramadan, they talk for two minutes with people like, this guy's not from here.

Yeah, exactly. And it'd be the equivalent of, you know, you're walking in New York and somebody breaks out some deep Alabama accent. You're like, hold on a second. One of these people is not like the other. And so they would just sort that out so fast.

Jocko Willink

And it sounds like Shannon was able to do that. Yeah, she had a thing for the dialects, too, because modern standard Arabic is so. It's universal because of the Quran, but it's not commonly spoken. In places like Saudi Arabia, they still speak pretty traditional, modern standard Arabic, but Iraq and the Gulf, they speak completely different. It's actually very, very different.

Joe Kent

It's very frustrating if you spent any time studying modern standard than to go to a place like Iraq, and you're like, wait a second. You guys don't actually speak this Arabic? But she loved it. And so she just grasped onto it really, really quick. And that was like a huge rapport builder for her was just being able to speak like a native.

So there was a bunch of Iraqis that I met later on who insisted that Shannon had either an iraqi father or mother. They're like, yeah, we get it. She's redheaded. But there's some redheaded Iraqis out there, too. So they were like, what's the deal?

You know, where's the Iraqi? In her. In her blood. But it was just her passion for languages. Even when you knew her, would she, like, listen to recordings and be, like, practicing on her own?

Yeah, yeah. She was a true lover and student of Arabic, especially. So she would. We listened. We listened to a crazy amount of arabic music, like arabic hip hop, like, and then when she.

Because they get tested on listening, reading, and then also speaking. And so to get good at reading, this is a. This is a Shannon trick. She would watch Bollywood movies with arabic subtitles. So there's, like, this Bollywood stuff going on with the crazy Hindi music, and.

But then arabic subtitles, and I'm like, what are you doing? Like, what beautiful mind nonsense is this? She's like, no, that's how you get to know the. Because you have to read the subtitles. You.

You pick a language that you don't speak, so then you have to read the one language that you do speak. And I was like, okay, that's not how most humans learn things, but okay, whatever works. But, yeah, she would immerse our entire house and everything in Arabic. Did you ever pick up any Arabic from it? So I actually.

I never went to Afghanistan. I went to Iraq on repeat, I couldn't buy an afghan trip, so I went to Iraq, Yemen. So I eventually just picked up Arabic. And then, because we have to test every year on language, I just switched over my language to Arabic. So I did, like, a three month course, and, like, kind of figured I was.

I was good enough. And we don't have to pass the. The DLPT. We don't have to pass the listening. And this in the reading, we can just get by for an oral interview.

So I could kind of b's in Arabic. But I was nothing like her. I mean, as I was studying Arabic, I was. I'd asked her, I'd be like, hey, so what's your. What's your secret?

And she's like, okay. So you listen to the word, and then you imitate it, and you don't forget it. I was like, thanks. That does not help me whatsoever. I'm going to go back to writing it down 100 times so I don't forget it.

Jocko Willink

Jack, fast forward a little bit. In the book. Although her deployment began behind a desk as an analyst, the Navy SEAL lieutenant commander that she reported to recognized that she was capable of war and wanted her to start going out on target. It may seem like people in the military, especially those deployed to a war zone, would just intuitively know how to be ready for a real world combat mission, but that's rarely the case. They need to be shown how to arrange ammunition pouches on their plate carriers, where the bleeder kit or medical pouch goes.

So anyone responding to an injury knows where to find it, and even the not to use to tie down sensitive items, items like lasers and optics and assigned rifle. Shannon was no exception, but had not received any formal special operations combat training at that point. Roe, and this is another guy that you mentioned, or is mentioned in the book. Roe had already gone on some 60 or 70 combat missions, which made him the perfect mentor. The task force operational tempo was so high that during that deployment, it was not uncommon to go on a mission, then immediately be sent on a follow on mission, then of another follow on mission.

Under Rose tutelage, Shannon learned to not only set up her kit properly, but also to narrow down the timeframe she needed to get ready. When alerted for a time sensitive target, Shannon and Ro were tied at the hip and often alternated as the intel asset on combat missions. Sometimes Roe would go out on missions resulting from information Shannon analyzed, and other times Shannon would go out based on Roe's analysis. It became so obvious. It became obvious to everyone around her that she was never going back to Fort Gordon.

The trajectory of her career had been permanently altered. She had been baptized into the world of special operations.

Fast forward a little bit. The word that Shannon had a knack for finding bad guys spread fast. And halfway through her deployment, it was not uncommon for other operators to ask, hey, can you do that for us? What's your training? Can you work with these guys?

Can you talk to the Iraqis for us? Can we bring you out on target to deal with the females? She was eventually pulled to another side of special operations world in Iraq. At that time, it's not clear who found her or some, or how high up they had to be to have enough power to pull Shannon from her position. Like most of Shannon's career, much of her work with this group was, was, and is classified and likely won't see the light of day for at least another decade.

The citation for the joint service Commendation Medal she received for that deployment is the only unclassified documentation of her contributions. It describes how her efforts led, quote, directly to the capture of hundreds of enemy insurgents and severely degraded enemy combat capability. So she got noticed, you know, and that's one thing that's cool about war, is that you, you do, when it gets. When it, when it gets tough enough and when it's intense enough, all of a sudden, people just want to know what's going to work. You know, people ask me about the rivalry between, like, different units and between the army and the Marine Corps in Ramadi.

It's like, no rivalry. You know, it's like, hey, will you help us? Yes, we will. We'll help you. That's kind of how it's going down.

Joe Kent

Who could do the job? Yep. And she got, you know, noticed for doing her job well, pulled to another, another unit doing more work, and, you know, ends up as she, as you write in the book, you know, baptized special operations. And it can be very difficult to go back to. Well, depending on your attitude, there's some people that would look what she's doing and say, oh, get me out of here.

Yeah. She obviously liked it and carried on with it. Now, this is 2007, and we already talked about. So you're, you're in Baghdad as well? I am, yeah.

Jocko Willink

You're working and what. So you're training commandos. So working with our intel guys. So we're trying to run down targets for the ICTF to go out after. But specifically, we had a pretty unique job.

Joe Kent

This is right when the EFP thing is kicking off. So we actually sliced off a handful of the Iraqi special operations recon guys who had access to the Shia side to really start tracking down those networks that were bringing over the EFPs from Iran. So we were doing a lot of pretty high level targets, but we had to do a lot of intel work to get to that level. So that was, like, my single minded focus for that trip was the, the EFPS. But then we also had another group of sunni Iraqis who were working heavily on the foreign fighter flow, and that was a big thing, too.

So we were working that mission. I actually briefly met Shannon then for like, ten minutes. Yeah. The EFPS explosively formed projectile. This is now 2000.

Jocko Willink

What the, what they realized is you can, you can make a shape charge, a flying shape charge, basically, that's gonna go. And it rips through pretty much any armor, and they're very devastating against vehicles and just horror. It's a horror show. And so, and the Iranians were kind of bringing that in through the Shia, and they were using it in a devastating manner. So that's what you guys were focused on.

And then, like you said, you also had the foreign fighters coming in on the sunni side. Yeah. So we had guys trying to look, because the day to day battle rhythm of just trying to basically take bad guys off the battlefield that weren't going to kill us there, that was a full time job. But we wanted to actually have people that were starting to look exterior like, hey, we've got the Iranians playing here. We got the foreign fighter flow.

Joe Kent

Let's start taking a bigger picture. Can we interdict these things before they hit the major urban centers? That was kind of our charter at the time. So I had kind of made that jump from being a regular team guy. Like, hey, I want to be more on the ops intel side because I figured after our, like, zero three and zero four deployment, I figured like, hey, that the problem here in Iraq isn't like, can we go kill the bad guys?

Like, if we find the bad guys, we kill them. I mean, whether it's Green Berets, seals, Delta Force, or the Kentucky National Guard, if we know where they are, they're going to die. Like, that's not the issue. The issue is trying to figure out, like, what's causing the insurgency, you know, who's supporting the insurgency, and, like, where the high value bad dudes actually are. So that was, that kind of became my, my little lane I carved out in special operations and ultimately how I ended up meeting Shannon.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, so you're doing that very job. You're kind of putting together a mission, consolidating info, and you're, you're walking around trying to get this stuff sorted out, and it says this in the book. As Joe rounded a corner, he heard a woman's voice discussing locations for Abu Abbas, the leader of a Shia terrorist cell he was trying to hunt to run down. His eyes quickly honed in on the woman the voice belonged to. She was a gorgeous, slender, young redhead wearing faded New York Yankees ball baseball hat with piercing blue eyes and a welcoming face.

Almost instantly, nothing else mattered. Wow. Joe thought. He guessed the Yankees ball cap was part of an effort to play down her natural beauty. But it wasnt working.

Her reddish blonde hair and ponytail protruding from the back of her ball cap was somehow both elegant and casual. She wore a light red and white flannel button down shirt with her sleeves pushed up and a pair of blue jeans with leather work boots. The Sig Sauer p 226 nine mm pistol in a black Kydex holster was on her right hip contrasted her beauty. It snapped Joe out of his reverie and reminded him where they were and how serious this business was. She stood with a map of Baghdad behind her while her computer monitor displayed arabic text and map coordinates.

Addressing a few analysts from Joe's unit, he changed head. He exchanged head nods with them and then stood to the side to listen to what the beauty in the Yankees cap had to say. Based on the pattern of life we assess, he still lives in this neighborhood, in this area, she said, pointing at a map of Baghdad. She glanced up. She made eye contact with Joe and held it.

His heart skipped a beat as she smiled at him like they were old friends. Joe caught himself staring into her eyes for a little too long, grinning as if he was relieved to see her. Sure, there was a spark of instant attraction, but there was also something new and profound. Her gaze gave him a feeling of instant peace. She held eye contact with him for a moment longer before turning her head back to the group analyst, her face all business again.

So there you go. Yeah, it's the first time we meet. Yeah, that's, I imagine, from your perspective at that point in time, seeing a beautiful red haired woman with a freaking 226 on her belt. Yeah, you're ready to rock and roll. Yeah, exactly.

Will you marry me? I should have asked the question because it took me a while to. I didn't see her again after that day for quite a while, but, yeah, that was an interesting way to meet your wife, for sure.

When you're out on that deployment. So now it's 2007.

What was the atmosphere of the war that you're thinking during that time? Chaos and frustration, I think. I mean, because I had been over. That was my fourth trip. We had been there for, you know, a minute.

Joe Kent

We kicked this thing off in zero three. We had already caught Saddam a long time ago. We killed Zarqawi, and things were not slowing down whatsoever. I mean, there was Americans that were coming back in, body bags, were mangled pretty much every day. I mean, this is right as the surge is kicking off and guys are fighting block by block every day.

I felt like we were just trying to stop the bleeding at that point. I mean, especially me, as a guy who had had some time over there and watched the evolution, I felt like, hey, I actually have a responsibility here to try to bring some sort of order to this, because I understand Iraq at this point, and I think a lot of us felt that way. Like fixing Iraq almost became like a religion, I think, in the military at that point in time. So it just seemed like we never had enough time. It always seemed like we were a day late and dollars short.

So just a lot of frustration. I was pretty skeptical that adding a ton of troops into the mix was going to do anything but get more guys killed. But, yeah, it was just a. It's a. I mean, it's hard to explain nowadays because I think, like, the.

Just the frustration and the angst and the chaos of that era was just so palpable then. It's hard to replicate now. I mean, I think as things drug on in Afghanistan, people felt the same way, but especially with the body count being as high as it was. And when the EFPS came up, we had barely just started to control some of the Sunni insurgency, but then there was the Shia insurgency and there was the EFPS, and it was like, man, now we've got Iran planning this whole thing. It was just, how do we sort this out?

So it definitely seemed like a. There was no, not enough time in every single day to do everything we needed to do. Yeah. I always think back to world War two, when you left for world War two. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

You would come home when it was done. When it was done. Right. And the nature of doing, you know, either it's a six month deployment, some cases a four month deployment, some cases a year long deployment. But there's.

There's an end in sight, and it doesn't really matter. You know, I'm gonna turn over to you and, hey, man, good luck. Like, I did what I could do, and you're gonna do what you can do, but there's. There's a lack of continuity, and there's also a lack of. Well, there's a lack of continuity for sure, but there's also, I guess, you.

I guess you were just talking about. There's a frustration because you're gonna go and you don't get to stick with it. And what's gonna happen in the next, okay, I'll be back in a year and a half or a year. What. Did anyone make any real progress?

And it's like every new unit that shows up, when you show up there, it takes a little while to figure things out. And, yeah, it just doesn't seem like the smartest way to run a war, as much as I hate to say that, because it sucks to deploy for long periods of time, right. That's why you need to, before you go into war, you need to decide, okay, is this really what we want to do? Exactly. And what the instate is, too.

Joe Kent

I think that's another big problem that we had especially at this time frame. It was like, what was the goal? Like, we came in here because, like, Saddam was a bad guy, and he had. We took out Saddam. So now are we really going to stay here until there's no more violence?

And then us being here creates more violence. So it's like, this does seem like a big, big loop that we're in, you know? And then when you step back and you look like, well, there were people that were benefiting from this. That's where a lot of my frustration comes from nowadays. But at the time, it was just like, man, we were beating our head against the walls, and we just couldn't figure out how to actually solve this problem.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, Shannon wraps up that diploma to go back to Shannon here. Shannon crashed onto the special operations scene head first and didn't slow down once getting in. After Shannon returned from her first deployment, she made a quick stop in Germany for language training and a little snowboarding in the austrian Alps before volunteering for the new naval special warfare direct support course, which would allow her to serve in combat alongside Navy SeaLs. She was the first female to attend, but she wouldn't be the last. So this is, you know, we read that her first deployment, she was not.

She knew how to put her gear together, so she. All these people that were doing, these individual augmentees that were going to come and work with seals, we needed something to do to get them trained up, and so that's what they started doing, this direct support course. Fast forward a little bit. She was permanently assigned to naval special warfare support activity two in Norfolk, Virginia, where she. She worked side by side with east coast based Navy SeALs.

The seals were initially hesitant, not because she was a female, but because non seal support in general was a new concept at the time. Yep, this is. All of us were thinking that. One of my bosses laid something great out to me, which was, I was getting ready to deploy to Iraq, and we were taking these EOD augments, and I said, hey, why don't we just send seals to EOD school? Like, then we don't have to worry about having someone else.

And he said, because seals will be thinking about seal things even when they're EOD, and EOD guys will think about Eod things. And that was so smart. Yeah. And I ended up having the best Eod guys. The EOd guys end up going through.

They. They now go through you, like, your entire workup with the seals. So they're basically, if you're one of those EOd guys that comes to the Seal teams, you're gonna be basically qualified as a seal, and they'll. They did everything with us. Yeah.

So. But there was definitely resistance across the board. Hey, we just want seals. Yep. Which probably especially sensitive in the SEal teams because, you know, we are so.

We don't have the idea, like, in. In special forces, you guys have the idea of, like, oh, we're gonna train up these local nationals, and we're gonna put our trust in these other people, and we didn't do a lot of that. That's not part of our nature, you know, and that's why even the guys that the ICTF, that was kind of a new mission for us. And, look, we did. Look, I did it in the.

In the nineties. I went overseas and trained people from the Philippines and trained people from Thailand and trained. You know, we did all that stuff, but it was not. I don't know, we just didn't view it the same way. We didn't view that as our mission.

As your mission. Right. Even though it completely is our mission. I mean, it's in our doctrine that that is our mission. Yeah.

Foreign internal defense. The same thing as you guys. But we don't. We don't. We.

We used to not really think about it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you I 100% as a young seal. And look, was I the smartest dude in the world when I was.

Am I the smartest dude in the world now? No. Was I that. Was I even dumber when I was, you know, 22 years old in the seal platoon? And they're like, this is foreign internal defense, building relationships with the host nation.

I was like, what? Tell me what door to kick. Yeah. Freaking seal with a machine gun. So it's.

It's no surprise that, you know, someone like Shannon showing up, though. Everyone. It was. There is pushback. Yeah.

That being said, you once you realize the skill set that you don't have as a seal, then you go, oh, yeah, yeah, this is 100% needed. That's the interesting thing. People ask me all the time, like, was there a. You know, how did. Did Shannon get put on one of those specialized teams that just brought women in?

Joe Kent

And I'm like, no. There was this whole period of the initial war on terror where, technically, women weren't allowed on the front lines, but there was a lot of women who found their way onto the front lines either because of circumstance or just because they were the best person for the job. I mean, like you said before, there was no, like, do you have this qualification? That qualification, like, if you were willing to go there and you could perform, you got to slot up the team, and that was it. Maybe it wasn't codified, you know, in military doctrine, that was going to be your full time job job when he redeployed.

But there was a lot of folks like Shannon who had that ability. They went and they proved themselves, and they were out there operating at the highest levels. Yep. And I'll tell you another one. Oh, you can't be in combat arms.

Jocko Willink

Okay, so you're in logistics in the army. Yeah. And guess what you end up doing in logistics in the army in Iraq? Logistics. Convoys.

Joe Kent

Right. One of the most dangerous things that you can do. Probably more dangerous than the vast majority of what we did. Yes. Because I would rather go kick in the door with a bad guy behind it than go just.

Just run the gauntlet of rude Irish over and over again. Yeah. So that, that was an interesting dynamic, was these logisticians. So someone comes in to be a logistics person in the army or the Marine Corps, and you end up out there running convoys. And same thing in Intermadi.

Jocko Willink

I remember I was watching a casualty evacuation go. I had an element out of Seals with iraqi soldiers, and one of the two of the iraqi soldiers got hit. And there goes the casualty evacuation. And the person in the turret was a woman out there in the turret of a 113. And I was like, yep, check.

She's rolling down. Complete exposure. Ieds everywhere. There's active gunfights going on. And like, yep, salute.

Go get some. Yeah, exactly.

So now she again, she details, or, you guys detail some of that training in here and what she's going through. Fast forward a little bit. Bagged. At Iraq 2009, Shannon was with AJ and his platoon, a small group of Navy SeaLs and iraqi special operations assigned to a strike force in Task Task Force 17, charged with hunting iranian thugs in the back alleys of a Baghdad neighborhood. It was her second deployment to Iraq, so the hot summer air that smelled like trash and human and expired humans was familiar, as well as the not so gentle reminder of what their fate entailed should they fail on any given night.

These raids were so regular that they took that it would be easy to become complacent. But Shannon took her work too seriously to allow that to happen. She was tasked with producing some of the most valuable intelligence in the war, usually at great risk. This mission was no different, especially for Shannon. She was the lone female on the manifest, with nothing but her wits and language, ability to see her through the night.

No other Americans had her talent with the local dialect, and the iraqi operators were impressed with the way she was able to draw information out of people on target. So what a huge capability. So you go, and a lot of times, like the females, they're not going to talk to a male, even an iraqi soldier or an iraqi interpreter, they're not going to talk to them. And sometimes the iraqi soldiers didn't want to talk to the women either, and they don't see any value in it. So having someone that could speak Arabic to the women and pull them aside and all of a sudden you have a whole nother story to confuse compare to the story that you're being told.

Joe Kent

Yeah. So it's tough, especially in the Middle East. I mean, just women aren't going to talk to just some guy, you know? And so we really, I think for the first couple years before we actually started deploying a lot of women on the intel side, we had half the population that we got nothing from, you know, which is crazy to think about how much of an intel fight it was. It was just like half the population who's seeing everything and in general, ignored.

You know, once we started really tapping into a lot of the women by, you know, training up Iraq women or getting american women over there, then I think we finally saw, like, man, these chicks are everywhere. Like. And. And the men ignore them like they're like a piece of furniture, but they can tell you everything that's going on.

Jocko Willink

To that point. Having a female on target for a high level HVT raid was almost unheard of at the time. But she played a pivotal role by conducting on target interrogations that led to follow on targets. It's not an understatement to say that the secretive task for 17 was more effective and deadly because of her efforts. And her performance directly led to initiatives that resulted in a broader implementation of females in soft for years to come.

Although their deployment was off to a busy start with frequent night raids, the task force was stood down for 97 consecutive days after Ranger made a controversial kill on target. After waiting for over half their deployment to start working again, it became clear that the Rangers were on indefinite hold. AJ's platoon knew a change was needed. So that's one of those things. You go out on target and, you know, I don't know the particular situation here, but a controversial kill, maybe the person was unarmed, maybe, you know, who knows?

But something like that, you kill an unarmed civilian or a controversial situation, they get stood down for 97 days. Like, that's what happens. And I thought it was interesting that they put that in there because now, you know, everybody knows that on a team you're like, hey, if something bad happens, we're not working anymore. Yeah. Especially that phase of the war.

Oh, yeah. Heavily adjudicated. That phase of the war was heavily adjudicated. And it's like, well, so what are we gonna do? We gotta be careful about what we're doing.

Joe Kent

Yeah. So that's what they have to do. That's what they have to contend with. They work through it. Fast forward a little bit.

Jocko Willink

In my opinion, you are the gold standard for females entering special operations. The gold standard, AJ told her. Indeed, on only her second combat deployment, Shannon was responsible for and credited with, quote, executing human intelligence operations in a very complex environment in support of a joint task force, and, quote, expertly led an indigenous network producing many information, intelligence reports which were of national significance according to her post deployment awards. Shannon returned home from Iraq. So just real quick on that.

I mean, I kind of mentioned this early on, what it takes to put an x on a map to get an assault force to go in there is so complicated, takes so much work, effort, so many meetings and reports and the, the way it appears in the movies, you know, like, oh, bad guy's gonna be here tomorrow night. Oh, great, cool, let's go hit that target. That's just not what happens. It takes, it takes so much effort to make these things happen. I mean, one of my lieutenants was like, we had to beat our heads against the wall to get an operation to happen.

You have to, like, you have to be so determined. Yeah. If you don't have determination, you're not going to execute a single mission. Like, if you don't have a few people on the intel side that are completely determined to make things happen, you're not going to execute anything. Yeah, I mean, it's really the ultimate form of hunting.

Joe Kent

Like, you're hunting humans. And it's hard. I mean, especially when you have a complex network of insurgents that know what they're doing and they've got a couple years under their belt and they're constantly switching up their tactics. And that's another way that Shannon was able to become value added for the task force, because not only did she speak the language, she was a certified signals intelligence collector. So she could do all the sigint stuff, she could do the analysis that went with that, which is almost in itself, that's three different jobs.

And then she got humit qualified so she could actually go out and run sources on her own. So she was kind of a one stop shop. So even just as, like, I did, human collection, but I would have to double check stuff from our second analyst. She could do all of it all on her own. I had to take a terp with me.

Like, she could literally do all of it. So her flash to band on intel, I mean, that's just like, you're trying to get the customer what they want. She could get it in a shorter time, and so she made herself very valuable that way. And she was obsessed. I mean, that was her.

That was her thing. No, that's. That's literally amazing. So the three things that you just mentioned, you have signal intelligence. You've got some type of electronic information coming in through various capabilities, and then you have the language itself, and then you have the human side of things.

Jocko Willink

And those things, three things are normally three different people, three different departments. It's very hard to get, but here you have one person, Shannon, that can do all those things. Yeah.

Outstanding. Back to the book here. Shannon returned home from Iraq at the end of 2009, back to a role at support activity. Two more women were being assigned to the teams at this point, and Shannon was not only expected to assume more leadership responsibilities as someone who had been there, done that, but also to be a mentor as it pertained to women serving in soft. Britney Burris was one of the women who arrived at the unit while Shannon was deployed.

The first time they met was in a locker room on base. At best, it was a lukewarm exchange. Her first impression of Shannon was that she didn't like her and didn't want to mess with her. But after they talked a few times, Brittany realized their personalities were very similar. Shannon and Britney became quick friends over the course of the next year, before their next deployment, leaning on each other as one of the few females in the unit.

But while they were training and preparing for the next trip overseas, major events were happening that would change the course of our war in Iraq.

So now we get to Iraq 2011. Where are you in 2011? So I'm right back in Iraq. You're back there again? Yeah.

Joe Kent

We were gluttons for punishment in fifth group, so, yeah, that was my. I was there from the, like, late spring up until we was Drew. Right. Thanksgiving. Eleven fifth groups assigned.

Jocko Willink

AO is the Middle east. How long did it take for them to invite someone else in to support them? So us in 10th group. So 10th is supposed to have, like, Europe, but they actually did a lot with the Kurds up in northern Iraq and Turkey, because that was kind of their ao as well. So us in 10th were switching out back and forth.

Joe Kent

7th and third got in the mix a little bit like third groups in Extremis force, they're direct action guys. They came and did quite a bit with the. The ICTF throughout the war. But really, at any given time of the Iraq war proper, it was either fifth group or 10th group that was running the show. Yeah, yeah, I worked for there.

Jocko Willink

There was fifth group the first time I was there. And then it was 10th group in 2006, at least in Al Anbar province. That's who was. Who's running the show. But, yeah, you know, the.

The SEAL teams used to be geographically assigned. I guess, broadly speaking they are. But they used to be more specifically like, SEAL Team one was Southeast Southeast Asia and SEAL team three was Southwest Asia, and SEAL team five was like North Asia, and SEAL team two was Europe and SEAL team four was South America. So it was more specific than it is now. And if we would have kept it that way, would have been just SEAL team three, you know, the whole time.

Joe Kent

Good deal for them. Yeah, good deal for everyone else doing whatever they're doing in whatever other part of the world. But obviously, once the war kicked off, it's like, oh, yeah, we need to get everybody. Yeah. So now we're in Iraq, 2011.

Jocko Willink

What was your job at this time? Were you just back over there with. Back over there on team? I had actually just gotten warrant to extend my team time. Okay.

Joe Kent

So, yeah, so I was over there as a warrant. We were trying to wrap up the whole mess as we got the. As the sofa fell apart and we realized we have to withdraw. So I was actually doing advisory work with two of the different iraqi intel services. And so we were actually establishing a lot of our long term intel relationships at the time.

But I was actually right back in RPC as we shut that thing down, it actually ended up getting condemned. It's like a structural issue. Like, it's going to kind of, like, implode on itself eventually. But, yeah, we were living based out of there and just trying to wind things down. So RPC, yeah.

Jocko Willink

What did that stand for? Rodwania palace complex. That's what it was. It was really easy to find on a map because it had that spiral, big old spiral. Yeah.

Joe Kent

Cuse's like, Zoo had been there. So, like, in zero three, there was all the rumors of, like, there's still tigers out here running. I think there were, but yeah, yeah. That was disturbing, going those, like, torture chambers and stuff like this. Super creepy.

Jocko Willink

But now it's 2011. Going back to the book, we have a high confidence grid verified by both Sigin and human. Shannon delivered her findings to her peers, Platoon of Navy Seals who were already jocked up and ready to roll prior to the concept of operations or conops planning briefing. Shannon was deployed to Iraq for a third time in 2011 during a period of transition, with us forces drawing down and leaving the country in the hands of american military contractors and iraqi government, while the Islamic State or ISIS, gained momentum. As an intelligence professional, Shannon was skeptical of the path the US had chosen in Iraq and was more, and it was more than news on the television to her.

She had friends across the country who would be impacted, many of them negatively. But the war. But with the war in Iraq ending, where else could Shannon go to contribute to the fight against terrorism that, that now defined her in so many ways, or her fighting days over? So you're there at this time. Is the, is everyone just thinking, bro, why are we pulling?

Like, this is going to be going to completely fall apart? Pretty much. I mean, it was a mixed bag. There's a lot of people were like, well, it kind of ran its course. Like, let's.

Joe Kent

Let's just pull stakes and go. And I could understand that mentality. But at the same time, I remember sitting in a meeting at the embassy with the State Department and the CIA and all the players are there. And at the end of it, I just asked one of the CIA analysts and one of the state analysts, I said, hey, so what's the actual goal here now that we've left? What's the US's long term goal here?

And they said, well, we want to make sure that al Qaeda and Iraq never resurfaces and this doesn't become a hotbed for terror. And I was like, man, do you guys realize we handed this entire government over to the Iranians who have been using all the power that we gave them for the last couple of years to systematically run down and kill and torture and just really oppress the Sunnis? And you've got the Sunnis pressed between basically Baghdad and Damascus in this pressure cooker and now we're going to leave. I was like, I mean, none of us really predicted exactly how ISIS was going to come back, but we all could see the direction that it was heading because people were like, oh, the surge worked. Therefore, there'll never be another al Qaeda again.

We killed all those Abu what's his names, guys, like, they'll never pop back up. And I'm like, well, these people have no other means of recourse. Like, I don't condone the fact they've chosen radical Islam, but I kind of understand it, especially since we've handed this entire government over to the Iranians. But then the negotiations fell apart for the sofa, and it was just sort of like, everybody kind of got tired, and it was like, well, I guess we'll just leave. And we just left.

And she. And we were back, right, right back there a couple years later. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

The Shia oppression of the Sunnis. I mean, what are the Sunnis going to do? They're looking around and here comes al Qaeda and ISIS. It's like, oh, you're going to help us get rid of these guys, or at least punish them for the way they've treated us. Okay.

Joe Kent

Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit. For Shannon, it would be a good last deployment to the country, which she had spent so much of her adult life living and fighting. It was the best troop she was ever a part of. She was recognized for her, quote, understanding of insurgent networks. Coupled with her impressive leadership.

She deftly managed several networks and extensive sub networks, producing numerous high level intelligence reports, providing critical information to special operations commanders targeting militia groups. Her dedication resulted in several operations that captured high value individuals and disrupted well known insurgent networks. This wouldn't be her last adventure, though. She recently volunteered for an assessment and selection course, which she would attend later that year. If she was successful, she would join the ranks of an organization that was regarded as the pinnacle of clandestine intelligence operations in the special operations community.

The selection would not be easy. There are no published standards and no real way to prepare for it. Both males and females can attend, and there's only one standard, the standard to pass and be selected for further training. Shannon had seen seals try out and come back empty handed. This was a no joke program, but she was confident that she could, would crush whatever they threw at her.

Shannon was also recognized as the Department of Defense's linguist of the year. It was a prestigious honor and a meaningfully meaningful validation of her skill. Proof that she was playing at a different level than most others in the intelligence community. Yeah, that's to be the defense Department's linguist of the year. That is some very serious recognition.

And she realized that there was another. Another group, another rung up the ladder I think you guys referred it to in the book, but it's an organization that combines special operations and intelligence gathering at a very high level. And she realizes, oh, I could go and volunteer for that and carry on this trajectory. That she obviously liked.

Going back to the book here. Afghanistan 2012. Shannon deployed once more with naval special warfare. In 2012, for her first trip to Afghanistan. She was assigned to NSW special reconnaissance team two and tasked with supporting an east coast seal platoon at a village stability operations site.

Vsos were the afghan application of counterinsurgency doctrine. Soft troops supported by conventional forces embedded with afghan tribal elements, and afghan security forces at the village level, in an effort to deny the Taliban the ability to exploit locals. Much like the Iraq iraqi coin surge in coins counterinsurgency, these operations brought the US into daily close contact with the local populace. The VSO portion of the afghan coin strategy sent us soft out to live in small village outposts, living side by side with Afghans, and training the village security forces at the local level. The VSO program, in conjunction with the afghan surge, brought the subject of women in combat, in particular, women in special operations, to public eye.

Afghan culture segregated women from men in a more drastic way than us forces had experienced in Iraq. It was too. It was culturally taboo for male service members fighting in Afghanistan to interact with local women. So the need for women in combat roles shifted from luxury to necessity. But Shannon's mission was not just interacting with local afghan females.

She had mastered the ability to blend her human and sigint knowledge to become a more virtual one stop shop for painting an axe on the enemy. That was a huge advantage for Shannon with all her experience. She was assigned to a VSO site in Zabul and tasked with collecting actionable human and accompanying seals on operation. The team guys understood how unique her skill set was. They needed her to do what she did best, hunt the enemy.

So she just rolls out on another deployment. She did, yeah, she got picked up for. She passed selection for the unit, but then that was right when the SEAL team that she was assigned to got orders to go to Afghanistan. And so she could have said, no, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna carry on my career.

Joe Kent

But she was like, well, if they're going to combat, I'm going to. I'm not going to set it out or go.

Jocko Willink

Fast forward a little bit here. So she's in Afghanistan. On this deployment, Shannon worked closely with Commander Job Price, a 42 year old Navy SeAL from Pennsylvania and respected leader of SEAL team four. He'd been dealing with a lot on that deployment. Their task force had just lost 32 year old petty officer first class Kevin Ebert on a few weeks prior.

On November 24, he was a Navy SEAL corpsman assigned to SEAL team four and was killed in action on his second combat deployment during a firefight. At the time of his death, he was preparing to leave the navy and pursue his medical degree and become a physician. Shortly after his death, the Taliban killed. Shortly after his death, the Taliban killed a young girl. She was around the same age as Price's daughter.

Many in the task force felt like they were essentially losing the war at that point, but continued to work around the clock to the point of exhaustion. It was all they could do to feel like they were making a difference. Shannon and most of her soft and conventional counterparts were multiple deployments into the seemingly endless, certainly doomed war on terror that was over a decade old with no end in sight. The loss of teammates and the daily grinding stress of being in danger while cycling through never ending deployments was one more thing for everyone to deal with, to suffer in silence, as the mantra goes. On December 22, 2012, all outside communication was suddenly shut down.

No one knew why their comms had been cut, but typically that only happened when a family back home needed to be notified of a death. Commander Price was found in his room with a pool of blood on the floor, still holding his assigned pistol. A picture of his daughter was missing from his desk. His death came as a shock to everyone.

So this was just a absolutely terrible situation. And Joe Price was in my sister platoon when I was at SEAL team two. And this seemed really. This was crazy to hear about, terrible to hear about, because he was just like a squared away guy. It was.

He had gone to Ranger school as a SEal. Oh, really? So he had a lot of. He had a lot of Rangers tendencies. You know, we call him Ranger Price and stuff like that.

But, you know, just. This was a shockwaves right through the community. To have the commanding officer on deployment of a SeAL team, this was just shocking. And in here, Shannon called Brittany, which is one of her friends. They talk about it and it says commanders Price.

Death was the final straw and what they saw as a series of unaddressed issues, they constantly dealt with the challenges of being women. A women in NSW. Out of the approximately 400 seals and enablers assigned to their team, there were only seven women, and Shannon and Britney were two of them. Britney had already been sexually harassed and assaulted during that deployment, and Shannon had faced her share of harassment. It wasn't all bad, but they were often treated very poorly.

Shannon carried that weight with her. They considered themselves tough role models and Shannon was fierce in that regard. We need to make a pact to help people like us, Shannon said. I want to help people like us who are in this community, but feel like they need to be tough because they're scared of losing their security clearance and scared of retribution, scared of people thinking differently of you, thinking that you're weak. So you bury those feelings.

Then people commit suicide. Why? Because we're too scared to tell people. They cried together and swore to help.

And, you know, the reason, you know, that that comes into play is because in the future, she's gonna, like, have this opportunity, become a psychologist where she thought she could truly help out in that regard.

Joe Kent

Yeah, she saw the mental health crisis that I think gets talked about a lot now, but she saw it from this incident. She saw it really, I think, before it was commonly being discussed. She saw what was bubbling up under the surface. I mean, something that she always talked to me about was, like, how isolating it can be to be in leadership. And that's, you know, when she stood back and really thought of, like, why would our commander kill himself?

And, you know, a lot of people were like, well, why did this even happen? This guy was so strong. You know, he was such a great leader. How could this happen? And she said, hey, when I stood back, I thought about it was like, because who's the commander going to talk to?

He's the boss. Like, he's not going to go complain to, what, the XO, to the senior enlisted guys. He doesn't have that. He can't even, you know, reach out and touch his group of peers. So he was completely isolated dealing with all of that on his own.

And then she saw it, you know, a lot of her other counterparts, a lot of the intel enablers who, like, the last thing they wanted to do was look weak in front of the guys. And then, you know, she had been around for a while, too. She's like, you know, know, seals, green berets, right? Like, nobody's immune to this stuff, but nobody's asking for help because of the way our culture is. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

And. And different people are different. And some people can just do 1012 combat deployments, and they're. They're okay, and some people do two, and it really messes them up. Yeah.

And so you've got everyone. If some people do one, and. And it messes them up. Some people are one bad situation, and it messes them up. Some people go through bad situation after bad situation, lose a bunch of friends, and they're okay.

But you have this whole spectrum, and you can't just kind of cookie cutter. Yeah. Hey, okay. After three deployments, you need this much downtime. It doesn't work like that.

Joe Kent

Yeah. There's no formula for it. If you've seen x, you get why. Yeah. It's a very human thing.

Jocko Willink

It's a very human. And it varies so much, and that's probably one of the huge things that causes it to be such a problem. And people. And. Absolutely, like, oh, going and telling everyone, hey, I need a break.

Like, in the seal platoon, that doesn't happen. It's not happening. Hey, I need a break right now. Like, it's not happening, and guys won't say it. And if they do need a break, especially because if you're one of those guys that's messed up after two deployments and you're looking at your buddy who's done six and.

And he's still going strong, you're definitely. Not gonna say anything. Yeah. What are you gonna do? Hey, I'm.

I'm burnt out. I'm tired. It's like, no, you're not gonna say anything, and you're just gonna bury it. And clearly. And I, you know, after I was with job in, like, 1998 to 2000, so, I mean, I, you know, lose track of his career.

I don't even know what his career looked like, but I can tell you what it looked like. I don't know exactly what it was, but I'll tell you what it was. It was deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment. Yeah. And so, yeah.

Terrible thing. Great guy.

So I'm gonna fast forward now to this next chapter, which. Look, am I trying to sell books here for you? Maybe, but maybe we reach to a whole new audience right now, because the name of this chapter is secret love.

Echo Charles

Hell, yeah. So, the name of the chapter. Secret of love. I've never covered a secret love chapter here. I'm glad to be Jocko's first love.

Jocko Willink

Story, first romance novel we're getting into, man. But as I get into it, we see where the title comes from. Undisclosed location, 2014. Anticipation and fear of the unknown was hung as thick as Virginia's humidity. In July, about 20 service members met at an obscure parking lot.

08:00 a.m. But they didn't know anything about what was in store. What little information they did have came from a short email they'd received the night before, telling them where to be and to wear business casual attire. Everyone present had already been through a 40 day selection course for this murky unit and knew to expect the unexpected. But this didn't ease anyone's nerves.

It was only the first day of a course that would last about a year, and that exact duration wasn't even clear. Joe Kent was terrified of failing, but was was terrified of failing, of not making the cut. For a veteran Green beret, that was the most potent form of fear he was capable of feeling. There was no time to dwell on that, though. Time to fake it till you make it, he told himself while attempting to make small talk with the classmates.

Suddenly, the sound of metal on metal broke the silence. Joe turned to see a blue Nissan pickup truck strike a car. His eyes focused on the driver, a gorgeous, athletic strawberry blonde that was in the driver's seat. A flash of familiarity washed over him. I know her.

Maybe 2007, Shannon a Shannon said without missing a beat. She looked right at Joe with coal, with cool blue eyes, grinned, shrugged, and then quickly corrected her parking. She jumped out of the truck and walked to another group of students. Like any other day at the office. Damn, she's cool, Joe thought.

He had thought about Shannon on and off over the years and returned to Iraq several times, hoping he might run into her again. He promised himself that he wouldn't let her get away. Go talk to her now, Joe thought as he approached, their eyes met, triggering the same spark of familiar comfort he felt in Baghdad all those years before. This was going to this was the woman who gave him a brief reprieve from the angst of the war in his 2007 deployment to Iraq. As she approached Shannon and looked at Joe like she was almost expecting to see him.

She was the one who got away, Joe thought. But now here she is, six years later, competing for a slot in the same unit I'm trying to get into. He wasn't surprised she found a way into the qualification course for this outfit, considering her skill sets. But he but it still felt serendipitous. I can't believe that parked car jumped out and bit your bumper like that, Joe said.

That shit will buff out, she replied. Joe let himself laugh out out loud, maybe a little too loud. Her cool devil may care demeanor confirmed he was talking to the right girl. I'm Joe. Were you in Baghdad?

Were you in Baghdad 2007? He extended his hand, which grasped with a firm handshake in return. I remember. So there we start. The secret love.

You know, you go into some details about the course and some, as you two are actually, there's less detail, details about the courses, you know, classified stuff and that you guys are doing and, but in the midst of that, this, this romance is taking place. Secret love. Secret love is, is happening, man. The secret love strong.

I'm gonna fast forward now and again. That's why you get the book. Get the book to get those details. You know, the stuff that's not classified. You talk about the way the relationships developed.

It's really interesting to see that from the outside, but to get kind of an insider's look at what it's like for two military people that are both entering the murky world of intelligence and paramilitary operations. And how does that, you know, what does that look like in real life? Because there's movies about that echo, Charles. Yes, some movies like that, right? Where it's, you know, the husband and wife team.

Right? It's a thing. Yeah, but what does it look like in real life? It could be a real thing. And here we go.

So get the book. Fast forward a little bit. You guys are done with training and selection, and you both get selected for this organization. I'm gonna go to the book here. I need a beer.

It had been a long day, most of which had been spent driving in a new city. He could feel it in his back as he got out of a rental car at his hotel. He had been looking at locations a terrorist leader was using to plan attacks while determining if he was being followed. Now it's time to write a report. That's the part they don't show you in the Jason Bourne movies.

Speaking of movies, he thought, fortunately, there was a pub across the street where he could grab dinner and a beer and knock out his report before catching a few hours of sleep. As he walked over, he turned his cell phone back on to catch up on his life. This was just a training mission, after all. Hey, hon, call me when you can. I love you.

The text message ready. I wonder what she wants to talk about, Joe thought as he hit the callback button. Shannon rarely called Joe while he was working. She knew firsthand how important it was not to have distractions in this profession. Hey, she answered, ecstatic.

Hey, what's the good news? He said, figuring her tone might mean something good happened. Well, she had his hesitated a moment. I was going to wait to tell you, but I can't. You're going to be a dad, and I'm going to be a mom.

Holy shit. A baby. Joe is ecstatic. He never had an interest in kids or raising a family family. But Shannon had changed how he viewed the world, and he wanted that out of life.

The idea of bringing a child into the world with her genuinely, genuinely excited him. So let's get married soon, Joe said without thinking. Oh, yeah, way ahead of you. You're good with Lake Placid, right? She said.

Her. Her. In her all business voice, of course. Hey, I just asked you to marry me. Joe laughed.

You've had my heart from day one. Joe, Kentucky, we are getting married ASAP, so. Right on. So you guys get done with this course, and you find out she's pregnant. Time to get married.

You have a small wedding in Lake Placid, New York, just as directed by Shannon. Exactly like she always wanted. You end up with your first kid. She's got a while. She's giving birth.

She has a. She has a playlist that she's playing. It's called. It's called Colt infill. This.

The boy's name is Colt. So when he's shown up to this. This. This playlist. Colton Kent was born August 11, and then you leave on your 10th deployment.

How was it. How much different was it going on deployment when you had a baby? Night and day, night and day difference? I mean, when I was younger, my first, I don't know, nine deployments, I just wanted to go, go, go, and I felt like I could, you know, just put everything on hold because there was really nothing to put on hold. I could just go and deploy and, you know, figure out life later on, and my life was deploying, and then when I got married and had a kid, had obligations, and had, you know, things that I wanted to be there for back at home, it was a completely different ballgame.

Joe Kent

I actually ended up going back and having to apologize to some friends of mine. I was like, man, I actually did not really realize how hard this was because, you know, as a young. Oh, your married friends? My married friends, yeah. Cause, like, as a young team guy, I'm like, hell, yeah, we want to deploy.

Like, you want to give us a year off? I'd be like, I'd be furious. Like, we can't take a year off. There's a war going on, you know? But then, you know, seeing that on the flip side, like, hey, man, this is hard.

It's hard to walk away from your wife and kids and get on an airplane and say, hey, I'll see you in six months. Yeah. My buddy Leif, who didn't have any kids when he was in the teams, and, you know, now we work together. He. We had, you know, like, a four day trip, and he has three young kids.

Yeah. And he was just like, bro, I don't know how you did, because I had, like, all my kids. Yeah. And, you know, you're leaving unemployment. It's, like, terrible.

Yeah. And I know I, you know, you just miss so much of all the. All those highlights of growing up, you just miss them. You just miss them all. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

You know, learning to walk, learning to crawl, learning to swim. First this, first that. It's like you're not there for any of them. If you're lucky, you get a text or a picture, and other than that, it's like you're not there. Did you.

So that was your 10th deployment. Did you. Did you start reconsidering your, your job? I didn't. I didn't.

Joe Kent

I just. That was what I was born to do in my mind. I honestly didn't even look at any other options, you know, after, you know, being in SF and then going to the unit and, you know, eventually transitioned over to CIA, I was just. That was what I did, you know, I figured Shannon would, you know, stay in the intel world, too, and kind of, we'd be able to make our careers and make our families around that, but that was just kind of me justifying it in my own head. But, yeah, I definitely had that initial, like, hey, maybe I shouldn't be doing this.

But then I immediately, you know, pushed that off into a, into a corner of my mind and said, no, your role here is to go fight our wars. Yeah. And I've had that conversation as well with many people, which is guys have been deploying, like, whether it was in the ancient days, where a sailor is leaving on a ship for four years or six years. Yeah. And then coming back, and that's.

Jocko Willink

That's what you're doing, or you're going on some war for three years, five years, you know, traveling around the world. So this is what men have been doing for a really long time. And, you know, the world, the kids. The kids carry on, the kids can, can push through it. It's definitely hardwired into our DNA.

Joe Kent

I think it's. It's not something that's common nowadays just because of modern society. But I do think that warrior trait of this is, this is what I do. I go and I fight, and we'll sort the rest out later. I think that's hardwired into our DNA.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. I can tell you that. When I was going on a planet, like, it sucked, but I wasn't even factor. Yeah. You know, it wasn't like a fault.

Like, well, what am I gonna do? That's the same way. It's like, well, I'm gonna do my job. This is what I. This is what I do.

Everyone knows what to do. The dates on the calendar, we get an airplane. So you want to see it. Yeah, that's what's happening.

Fast forward a little bit. Actually, fast forward a pretty good chunk here. Shannon is with some doctors. All right, Shannon, thanks for making the time to see us today. We have some answers explaining why you felt so awful.

Shannon nodded her head, anxious for him to go on. We confirmed you have thyroid cancer, which isn't surprising since your diagnosis put you at a higher risk, the doctor said, getting right to the point. Shannon couldn't help but show emotion. Tears ran down her cheeks. There are a few different treatment options, but the most direct way to deal with this is to conduct a biopsy and cut it right out.

Shannon composed herself and straightened her posture. Well, let's cut it out. Shouldn't be a big deal, right? I have stuff to do. She mentioned the upcoming biopsy to Joe in a text message on her way home, but didn't elaborate.

She didn't want him to think it was anything other than a routine medical procedure. Joe was caught up in what he was doing in Iraq and figured it must not be a big deal if she was texting him. The surgeon removed the cancer in one surgery, and Shannon was back to work within a day without missing a beat. On top of being a special operations combat veteran, a mother and a wife, Shannon now added cancer survivor to her list of titles. She sent Joe another text message, this time with a photo of a noticeable laceration across her throat.

Freshly stitched, got a touch of cancer cutout. She typed in a blunt follow up text. Joe was instantly worried. He had no idea was that bad. He asked if he should go home, but Shannon insisted it wasn't a big deal and she could take care of it.

It. Dude. Yeah, that was her. I mean, just no factor. She said something about, like, a doctor's appointment, maybe a biopsy, and then, like the next day or two, she sends me that picture and it's like this fresh.

Joe Kent

I mean, because cancer, thyroid, like, they cut right into your throat, so it looks like somebody tried to slit your throat. And she's like, got the cancer cut out. I was like, wait, what I missed? Do I need to come home? Like cancer?

And she's like, no, we're fine. Like, yeah, just no factor. No big deal. What year is this? This is 2016.

Jocko Willink

And you're just still doing these deployments? Yeah, I'm right back in Iraq because the counter ISIS fights going on. So we're right back over there, basically as we predicted in 2011. And this is before we decided we were actually going to drop the hammer and go into Mosul. So we were in that weird period where there was like the trench warfare going on.

Joe Kent

There was. The Iranians were playing there as well. ISIS was still sending suicide bombers in. So I was kind of working between Baghdad and Kirk hook, but just. Yeah, from.

For me, it felt. Felt like what I've been doing for most my twenties and thirties at that point was there. What was the gap between 2016 in Iraq? What was the longest time you spent out of Iraq? It was that gap right there because I left thanksgiving of 2011 when we properly withdrew.

Jocko Willink

So you show up five years later, five years later, and you're just like. Same shit, same shit, man. Except for they. Well, now ISIS holds entire towns, which al Qaeda and Iraq never did. It was like, oh, so we actually made things even worse.

Joe Kent

And all the guys that we trained, with the exception of the isoff, like the trillions of dollars we spent there, the nearly 5000 dead Americans, these guys surrendered. And now we have to reconstitute and rebuild an iraqi army. I was just like, man, this is ridiculous. We've got to do things different. But no.

And then at the time, it was just so absurd because ISIS had captured most of the equipment that we had given the iraqi army. So they've got, like, us stuff. And so we were occasionally doing bombing missions, like, to bomb the US stuff. Like, it was just absolutely ridiculous. This is like the military industrial complex self licking ice cream cone.

But it's obviously a real threat because ISIS has now taken over large swaths of multiple countries. There's terrorist threats in America and in Europe. So it's like, well, we're back here and we have to deal with it. At the time, Obama basically had no tolerance for us going really hot and going kinetic. So it was just like, we're here, we're collecting intel, we're kind of doing some ops, but there was no will from hire for us to actually just take care of it and cut the cancer out.

Jocko Willink

All right, so after four months, Shannon's declared permanently cancer free. Awesome. And you're coming up on your 20 year mark. And look at just getting some highlights here. Shannon's pregnant again.

So. So you got a lot of stuff going on. As the arrival of your second son is getting closer, you get asked if you can deploy again for your 11th deployment. Of course. And this is where it kind of sucked that Shannon was, like, familiar with the whole deal because she knew that you didn't really have to go, like, you're at the end of your career.

You can be like, yep, I'm gonna get my medical stuff taken care of, and I'm gonna. You know, I need a little twilight time. I need to ramp down. She knew all that. Yep.

You couldn't be like, hey, you know, I gotta go. Yeah. She knew you were full of shit. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And she didn't like it. Yeah, usually it helps. I could be fourth right with her, you know? But this was a case where it did not help me at all because there was another deployment that.

That came up, and they did need some of my skill sets, but at the end of the day, they could have picked somebody else. But, like, my commander asked me if I could go, and I couldn't say no. Right. I'm really important, so I got to go over. And she was just like, you are so full of shit.

Like, you just got home, like, I'm pregnant again. Like, so, this. This deployment did not go over very well with Shannon. Yeah. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Shannon did not take the news well. She worked in the same community, so there's no bullshitting her. She didn't need to. She knew I didn't need to go and didn't. Was unhappy with this decision.

I get it. This is you. This is one of the reasons I love you, but I'm not happy about it. You have to. You'll have to figure out how to be you without this someday.

It felt like he just returned from his last deployment. So. So, this. You going on deployment again? She.

And we had mentioned, you know, when. When Joe Price killed himself, how. That she recognized this. Yeah. This.

This problem psychologically with so many guys, and. And so there's a. There's a PhD program that she hears about. Yeah. And she decides she's gonna go try and get this PhD, get her PhD in psychology, and, like, help out the community.

And. And in that manner. Fast forward a little bit. Says Joe's final deployment came and went. He did not save the world or win the war on terror.

Maybe they didn't need him so bad after all. That was. That was like, I have a big star next to that, because that is something to keep in mind, you know, like. And this happens in the Seal teams, and it's like, you think that the machine needs you. Yes.

Joe Kent

Yeah. But the machine doesn't need you, and the machine is gonna carry on, and you do your duty, and then you get done with your duty. Carry on. Yeah. I had a friend that was Ozzy, and he was, like, sas for a very long, like, over 30 years, and, you know, he was getting to that point where he's gonna get out.

Jocko Willink

And I could see, you know, and I said, hey, bro, I'm gonna tell you right now, the SAS is gonna still be the SAS, right? If it doesn't matter if you go to work tomorrow or not. Yep. And that's a rough truth, you know? Cause we all think it's, you know, like, I'm so important.

I have these skills no one else looks like. Nope. Yeah. So you did not save the world. You did not.

June 21, 2017. Baby Josh was born, and Joe had been promoted to chief warrant officer three the year before. So his number. So his number for some sort of bureaucratic staff purgatory assignment would be inevitably called. He had plenty of vacation to burn, decided to quit while he's ahead, concluding what most in the military would characterize as a legendary career, the kind almost anyone who had served would envy.

That's affirmative. He figured he could fit, find some kind of work in special operations or intelligence community when he retired and could continue to contribute to the fight. With a plan in place, Chief Joe Kent requested to retire from the US army and move on to the next chapter with Shannon and their two boys. So you make the call. All right.

I'm going to get out now. Did you think about going to the OGA with paramilitary at that time? Yeah. Yeah. So you had a plan?

Joe Kent

I had a hundred percent. So I had already, like, changing shit. I already spent all my, like, SF team time, and then I bought more team time by going warrant. And then about the time I was getting looked at to do admin at Special Forces Group, I went to the special operations unit Shannon and I met at, and then I had a good run there, and I was a CW three. And so at some point, they were gonna make me do actual officer stuff, and I was like, well, my 20 year markets just hit, and so I'm gonna go.

But I had already worked with those guys a good deal over in ground branch. And it's. I mean, for people who are outside the world, it sounds like super murky and secret squirrel, but it's pretty common. I mean, ground branch recruits heavily out of the special operations community. And so if you've been there for 20 years, you know, guys that were over there, I knew our mutual friend Brian Hoek and some other guys, some of my other former teammates already over there.

So I had it all planned out. And, you know, as we. You'll get into in the book, or if you. If you buy the book. Shannon knew exactly what I was planning.

It wasn't.

Jocko Willink

So you had all that going on meanwhile, the uniformed services University of the health sciences department of Medical and Clinical Psychology runs an American Psychological association accredited doctoral program that produces certified clinical psychologists for service in the US Army, Navy and Air Force. The Navy provides funding for only two doctoral students per year to attend this prestigious program, and those slots are highly competitive as they are open to anyone who has at least a bachelor's degree, including civilians and enlisted Navy personnel alike, and are fully paid for passing. The admissions board is crucial for acceptance into this program, but applicants must also be eligible for and meet the standard standards of a commissioned naval officer. This is required even if you are already serving in the Navy as a sessions. Standards for commissioning as a.

An officer are different from retention standards and the military regulations, the former being significantly more stringent than the latter. So she's going to apply for this program. I mean, taking two people out of the Navy, that's. That's ridiculous. Obviously astringent program to get your doctorate.

She goes through a whole series of interviews and this big application. Progress. Fast forward a little bit. Joe was getting ready for work when he heard Shannon shout, holy shit. She popped out of the bathroom and handed Joe her phone.

Read that email and make sure I'm not hallucinating, Shannon said. Congratulations on your acceptance to the Uniformed Services Health Service clinical psychology program, Joe said as he hugged her. This is life changing, Joe, Shannon said, wiping away a tear. I can stay with the boys and have a job that matters. This is everything so awesome.

I mean, just so awesome. And that's one of those things where when you're applying for a program like that. Like, I applied for the officer program and the one I did, they took 50 out of the Navy. And, like, the first year I applied for it, I didn't get it. And there's like, there's nothing you can do.

It's just the big bureaucratic machine. Yeah. So when you. When I got picked up the next year, it's like, again, you. You're very happy because it's something you have very little control over.

Like, so for her to get picked up, like, I bet, I guarantee 30 totally awesome qualified applicants, at least probably, if not 300 totally awesome qualified applicants that, for whatever reason. Now, look, she must have had a hell of a record at this point with her experience and everything. And actually, it's in the book, some of the things that she wrote about why she wanted to do it. She talks about commander Price and, like, it's. It's.

It's a. It's awesome. And I'm sure she was a front runner, but nonetheless, it's a bureau. It's a bureaucratic machine. Oh, big time.

Joe Kent

Yeah. And you don't have. It's not going to be fair. Let me just say. It's not like a selection process where you can, like, make sure you're the fastest runner and you've got the mentality.

It's like at some point you put your packet together and you hand it to a bunch of dudes and, yeah, you know, they. They make the call, you know. Now, as she's all stoked, you're all stoked. And then it turns out that in her medical record, they didn't screen it closely enough the first time. And because she had cancer, even though it was completely gone, she's not eligible for the program.

Right. It's that. It's like the old. It's literally a catch 22, which is insane when you think about it, because you have people in the Navy who the Navy says, hey, you guys are good enough for us to keep, for us to send to combat, for us to do whatever we want to do with you, but if you want to move a rung up, we're going to hold you to the standards. We'd hold somebody coming off the streets.

So technically, she wasn't able to qualify to be assessed into the military, but she was good enough for retention standards. So literally, at McCatch 22, incredibly frustrating.

Jocko Willink

So she's, you know, she's fighting it. She's writing letters, she's trying to get these things changed. You know, there's. They always say there's a waiver for everything in the military. Like, you got some kind of an issue, you can find a waiver, you can find a way around it.

So she's trying to find a way around it, but she's literally being told, this is not possible. So it's a tough fight. Meanwhile, back to the book here. Her unit's next rotation to Iraq and Syria approached, and Shannon knew she was fit for combat. Since the clinical psychology program wasn't happening anytime soon, she had a choice to make.

She was in an all volunteer special operations unit, and no one forced her to do anything. If she didn't want to go, all she needed to do was say the word and transfer to a different unit. It wasn't lost on her that if her commission had been approved, she wouldn't even need to consider going to combat again. Shannon's sense of duty was ultimately overwhelming. Her unwavering commitment as a leader to both her comrades and the nation was something she couldn't shake.

No matter how conflicted she felt, she came to the resolution that with the psychology program off the table for now, she would deploy and do her job, whether that was part. Whether that was a part of her and Joe's life plan or not. I just don't see any way I can avoid this deployment and still look myself in the mirror. Shannon told Joe after dinner one night. Shannon and Joe weren't so different from each other.

They would always go if asked, no matter what, no matter the consequence. They lived by Isaiah six eight, whom shall I send and who will go for us? And I said, here I am. Send me. It was that simple for both of them, but also represented their most significant marital conflict.

So the tables got flipped. Yeah. Just directly flipped. Yeah. And now you're looking at her, and she's getting called to go back again, and same thing.

She knows she can walk away from the unit and say, I'm not deploying anymore. Yeah, I got a. I mean, how old is your youngest at this time, Josh? One. Yeah.

So she could easily say, yep, I'm done. And how many years did she have in it this time? Like 1514? Yeah. 15 years.

Joe Kent

Yeah. I mean, she. She easily could have, but we. We had that very discussion right there, you know? And I.

As much as I didn't want to support her on it, I couldn't argue with the logic, because she was like, look, I've been going to war, you know, my entire adult life, and every time I've deployed, half the guys have had fathers and she have had kids. They've been fathers, and they've gone over there. And so what am I going to say? I might say, well, no, it's different because I'm woman, you know? And she's like, that.

That logic doesn't make any sense. And I was like, well, actually, I agree with that logic. I think it is different because you're a mom. And she was like, I understand where you're coming from, but, you know, that just doesn't make it. I can't justify that to myself, you know?

And if you were me, you'd be saying the exact same thing. And I couldn't argue with that logic, you know? And also, I mean, it was. I had deployed so much, and she had deployed so much, you. It was pretty easy for us to talk ourselves into, like, hey, this is just.

It's just another deployment. Like, what's the big deal? It's not that big. We'll be fine. You know, six months on the other side of this, it'll all be everything.

Be back to normal, just like it was the last couple times I deployed. Just like it was for all of our adult lives up to that point. So there was definitely a lot of anxiety and tension initially, but once we accepted it, we were both like, well, this isn't our first rodeo, you know? Like, we can. We can handle this.

Jocko Willink

And the atmospherics in the world at this time. This is now 2018. Late 2018, yeah. And in the meantime, you retire. Yeah.

From the army, and you go to OgA, CIA, paramilitary. You. You pick up that job, and so now you're going on deployments. Who's. Who's with the kids?

Is it. So the only. The only time that we were both gone was right before Shannon was killed. She deployed after Thanksgiving in 2018, was killed in January. I deployed in early January, right before she was killed.

Joe Kent

So I was supposed to be gone for about 40 days or so on a shorter trip, but she was killed within about a week or so. Me getting there. Where were the kids? With my parents. Did they.

Jocko Willink

Did they. Did your parents come down to live at your house? Did you send the parents up? My mom would come and my dad would come as well.

So you're on deployment. Like you just said, she's on deployment, and she ends up with a cross functional team in Manbij. Manbij, which is in Syria, just to give kind of an explanation around that. Captain John Turnbull, a civil affairs officer in charge of the cross functional team in Manbij. Cross functional teams were somewhat of a Hod pod hodgepodge of special operations and conventional soldiers, combining the unique skill sets of civil affairs, psychological operations and special forces soldiers with the security that local partner forces and american infantry units provided.

John's small team operated out of a cluster of grain silos on the edge of Manbij proper. Their only backup was a small unit of soldiers from US army third armored cavalry regiment at a small camp to their west. It was outlaw country, and his team had broad authority to stabilize and rejuvenate the small northern city of approximately 300,000 that would eventually be cited as the model for what Syria could look like post ISIS. They weren't technically qualified to perform intelligence gathering activities, but they did have access and influence in the community and collected information accordingly. This is where Shannon came into play.

CFT man badge was an excellent source of leads for her, so she planned to make man badge a regular stop during this deployment to keep tabs on what they had in development. So this is just, you know, a. It's almost like you get to piggyback on with this, with this cross functional team, and she sees that they have access and they go into this place and they know the routes. And, and she also has a guy named Scotty Wertz with her, who's a guy from SEAL team five. He's now at this time, he was with the DIA.

So he's out there like a security type role, and that's what they're doing. And this is common stuff to be happening, to merge, especially, you know, this is the kind of thing that would never have happened pre 911, but post 911, like, people working together and trying to make good outcomes and bad situations, trying to reinforce each other and. And synergize. Synergize the. The various teams together so you can make progress.

So that's what she's doing.

So again, there's. There's so many good stories in this book. Obviously, I'm not doing the whole thing, but so many, so much good information, how things are being done, the risks that are being taken, the how to overcome and mitigate those risks. Some of the. Some really powerful breakdowns of intel gathering.

I mean, there's a whole breakdown of. Of trying to get Baghdadi, like, just how those are looking. I mean, it's very interesting to read. Get the book. I'm going to fast forward.

January 16, 2019 cft Manbij report departed from the silos at approximately 11:00 a.m. Local time. There were two american vehicles in the convoy, Shannon and John in the lead vehicle, while Clark drove the other with Scotty and chief farmer Jasmine. Two more american green Berets and 16 SDF soldiers. Those are syrian defense forces soldiers following in gun trucks rounded out the rest of the manifest.

Their convoy. Convoy tried parking at the school as planned, but the situation on the ground dictated a move to their alternate location outside the palace of Prince restaurant. And this is, you know, it's interesting is when I was a kid in the teams, and they would talk about this idea of a semi permissive environment. Yeah. Right.

And it's where. But it never made a lot of sense to me until the war started. And then you realize there's different parts of the world, there's different things happening. And this is kind of a classic semi permissive environment where they're going into town. Of course, they have to have security, but the threat is not visible.

It's certainly present, and that's this environment that they're in. Again, it's hard to, to define to someone that doesn't understand it because are they at war? Well, yeah, kind of. But are they at war where there's an enemy that's clearly visible, that's who they're fighting against. Yeah, not.

Not really. So you end up in this weird. In this weird situation that actually is more difficult. Yeah, the semi. Yeah, it's more difficult because.

And actually, when you were talking about ISIS earlier, man, I was so happy to see those ISIS flags on trucks in big convoys. Yeah. I was like, oh, this? Yeah, we're actually good at this. Yeah.

Joe Kent

Like, the counterinsurgency thing. Like, we're not so hot at, but, like, if you are willing to hoist your flag and say, the enemy are over here. Yeah. We will remove you. That we can do that.

Jocko Willink

Yep. I was so stoked to see that. I was thinking to myself, oh, this. This is not gonna go well for them. No.

As opposed to being in a environment where you've got insurgents mixed in with the civilian populace, local populace, using them as human shields, maneuvering in ways that are. That are difficult to detect. So that's the situation that they're in here. This semi permissive leaning towards. Not permissive, but a semi permissive environment.

And they're going into. And the mission is to go in and gather some intelligence. They have a meet set up. Back to the book. After parking their vehicles to deliberately make it difficult for anyone to walk up unnoticed and slip an IED under their trucks, Clark moved to the restaurants top floor and established overwatch for most of the market.

On the sidewalk below, Shannon and Scotty synced watches and reaffirmed the exact time everyone was required to be back. All right, John, we'll be back no later than 1100. Zoo. You know what to do if we're not back by then, Shannon said, confirming an abbreviated five point contingency plan commonly used throughout the military. Roger.

We know the plan. Good luck, guys, John replied. Clark watched as the routine patrol departed, with Shannon and Scotty breaking off to move toward their destination. He didn't know exactly where they were going or who they were meeting, but such was life on a Shannon Kent mission.

Fast forward a little bit. Pulling security during the daytime in a bustling city market is nerve wracking. They are. They were surrounded by two and three story buildings, all with their own windows and doors that could open at any time. You never know what's truly going on or who might be watching you from afar.

Clark felt uncomfortable, but couldn't fit his. Put his finger on what it was. Then he noticed something outside the window. Four or five guys were literally staring him down, not talking. They didn't seem very friendly, but they weren't doing anything that could be considered hostile either.

Little did he know, ISIS had started planning an assassination in December of 2018. They wanted to use a suicide bomber to hit the american soldiers in Manbij, who had been causing so many problems. So they imported operatives from Aleppo who linked up with local contacts that were already patrolling the city, looking for a chance to attack. They finally saw an opportunity. On the 16 January, Clark moved back down to the street so that one of the Green berets could go inside and use the bathroom.

As the Green beret came out to relieve Clark, they saw Shannon and Scotty on their way back to the restaurant, along with the rest of the element that had been out on foot patrol. They regrouped out front as the vehicles were prepared for movement. Clark was standing next to his truck, ready to go, talking to one of the Green berets and an SDF soldier.

At 1238 local time, just as the team was about to get back in their trucks and drive back to the grain silos, a man approached their position from south of the market. He walked right past Clark toward the restaurant entrance, where the rest of the group stood. Without warning, he detonated a hidden suicide vest within feet of Shannon, Scotty, and the rest of their group.

Senior chief petty officer Shannon Kent, loving wife, daughter, sister, friend, and mother of two, was killed in action alongside special forces chief warrant officer to Jonathan R. Farmer, loving husband and father of four, former Navy SEAL Scott a. Wurtz and Gahid Ghadir Tahir, an american working as a civilian interpreter. Eleven syrian nationals also died in the attack, with another 18 wounded.

Yeah, that's the difficulty in these environments is that you have to be right all the time, and they only have to be right once. That's right.

They only have to be right one time. And they don't care about human life, so it doesn't matter. You know, you kill some of them, they don't care, but they kill some of you. And of course, meanwhile, while this is happening, you're on deployment, you're working your new job, and we'll go to the book. This is how you find out.

Joe left the States in early January for his first deployment as a CIA paramilitary officer and was fortunate to work for one of his best friends, Rocco. They were on an ODA in fifth group together and had remained close since 2005. Later that evening, Joe returned to the office after a mission to check in with Rocco. As he walked in, he noticed Rocco looked somber. Hey, guys, why don't you give Joe and I.

Joe and me a minute, Rocco said, indicating he wanted everyone to leave the room. They obliged. Shit, what did I screw up? Joe thought. Hey, man, there's been an attack in man beach on the task force.

Two females are Kia. That's all we know right now. We're trying to get names. Do you know where Shannon is? Fuck, man bitch.

She's in man bitch. Joe replied. She was not the only female in the task force, so he could not be entirely certain it was her. He ran back to his room to get his phone, hoping for a text saying she was safe. No text.

Joe ran back to the office. He had another number in Syria and her work. Email. No answer on the phone and no email either. There was nothing to do but wait.

At one point, Rocco looked up at Joe from his computer screen. He stood up and walked over. I just got an email, brother. Rocco didn't want to say the next part. He had tears in his eyes.

It was Shannon. She was killed. I'm sorry, man.

So the immediate numbness and disbelief and all that. Yeah. Do you get all those? I did. But being overseas, I knew I had to get home.

Joe Kent

And I also knew that there was going to be people who were tasked with notifying Shannon's parents. So I had to. I had to call her chain of command and say, hey, I've been notified. What's the timeline for notifying her family? Because I never had to actually do the duties of casualty affairs, but I had to do the training.

And so I knew what, I knew the machinery that was taking place in the States, and I didn't want her parents to just get a random knock on the door. So I pretty quickly made the decision, I'm just gonna call her mom and tell her. So I had to stay relatively focused, you know, kind of compartmentalize a lot just to get through that phone call, get through the phone call back to my parents. And then, you know, luckily the agency got me out of there pretty quick. But, yeah, it was a whirlwind, getting out of.

Out of theater back home and then just waiting to receive Shannon's remains and all that. But, yeah, it was a lot of numbness, you know, obviously a lot of regret and then. But a lot of clarity, too. I mean, I was overseas. My wife got killed.

My kids are at home with grandparents. I was out in a non permissive, semi permissive environment doing something very similar to what Shannon was doing in a different part of the world. I could have gotten killed that day, too. I mean, really? You can roll the dice so many times and your numbers going to come up.

And so I felt incredibly selfish and pretty guilty for being there. I was like, hey, my kids have no idea. They just lost their mom, and I could have made them orphans today. So I was, you know, flying back and I was like, I gotta step away from this life that I've lived for my entire adult life. That was the only bit of clarity and all the, you know, sorrow that I had then.

Jocko Willink

How old were the boys at this point? There were one in three.

Yeah. In the book, you go through some of this stuff in detail and talk about, you know, some of that. Some of that emotions that you're going through and. Very powerful. Very powerful and, yeah, very moving.

One thing that I, you know, you get to the point where you're talking about the funeral, and it says this. A thousand sailors, hundreds of other service members, dozens of New York state police officers, and many family and friends filled the pews at the Naval Academy's chapel in Annapolis in memory of senior chief petty officer Shannon Kent. Having her memorial service at the academy's chapel was a big deal. She was the first enlisted sailor in the year in US Navy history to be given the honor.

Yeah, like I said, there's the get the book because there's just so much, so many details of her life, and it paints such a. Such an awesome picture, so much heroism, such a. Such a look inside spec ops intel. But on top of that, you know, I often try to explain to people that the people you read out about in books, they're people. Yeah.

And you, in writing this book, you do a great job of painting the picture not just of. Not just of another soldier, another sailor, another marine, but a person. And it's just. It's very moving. And just to close out the book, you say this.

A month after her death, us backed kurdish forces arrested five members of ISIS. They were believed to be involved in the January 16 attack that resulted in Shannon's death. In a series of raids, Shannon's fellow warriors took out target after targeting, target killing, or capturing those responsible, methodically striking them down from the shadows. The violence America's warrior elite is capable of knows no bounds. If you take one of theirs, they will take ten of yours.

And so it was the death of the man ultimately responsible for the suicide attack wouldn't bring Shannon back. But knowing a price was paid for her and her teammates deaths was reassuring. The world is a better place without such evil in it. The world is a better place because Shannon Kent made her mark.

So you're. You know, you obviously, like you said, probably with the most crystal clarity you needed to leave the life behind. What did that transition look like? It's pretty rapid. Got back and, you know, we did Shannon's funeral and all that.

Joe Kent

And the CIA said, hey, take as much time as you need. Tell us what you want to do. They're very supportive. A bunch of other jobs I could have done there, but I know myself well enough to know that, like, I can't be halfway in that world, that if you give me enough time, I'd find a way. I'd find a justification in my head.

So I knew I needed a hard break, and I needed to get my kids closer to the family. But then also a big part of moving back to. Back home, back to the west coast, was just really to remove myself from the DC area in the intelligence world, because I knew if I stayed there and halfway in, I'd get back into. Into it somehow. So it happened pretty quick.

You know, I decided within a couple months was gonna move back home and, you know, bought a house, you know, back. Back in the northwest, and, you know, just decided to carry on from there, you know, to give my kids as much stability as we could get them closer to my family. And then what about work? Yeah. So right away, I resigned from the agency, and then I did some contract stuff for a while, teaching stuff based out of Fort Lauderdale.

Lewis. But then I got a job, just a regular job, as a program manager for a technology company. Work from home, you know, so flexible hours. Was this. What was COVID yet?

Was it like, this is right before I got it. Right before COVID So, 2019. So how did you like working from home at a computer managing project in the civilian sector? You know, seems like a rough transition. It was a rough transition.

Yeah, it was a rough transition. I mean, honestly, if I hadn't had a good, supportive network of my family and, you know, my own ways of, you know, making sure I worked out in the morning and stayed sane and, you know, still hanging out with some of my friends, I probably would have gone a little crazy. But, no, it's a hard transition, especially if you don't plan it. Like, I did not plan on getting out. My transition plan was to go be a paramilitary guy.

I mean, that's. I never thought through. I'd hear people talk about transition, this and that. And I was just like, you know, I'm never gonna. I'm never gonna do that.

I'm never gonna go be a real nine to five guy. And then I found myself in that world pretty quick. So really, I mean, I think had I not had the kids to keep me grounded, probably would have been a lot messier. I want to see a copy of your first resume that you sent in. You have literally zero civilian experience doing anything.

Jocko Willink

They're like, can you do project management? You're like, I can run and I can assault targets and I can blow things up. What? You know, how does that help? Can that work?

Joe Kent

Definitely found, though, that a lot of our skills, especially if management, I think, from the military, definitely immediately apply. I mean, I read your book right away, actually. It was heavily recommended by a couple people. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, we can do this. This stuff actually applies.

Managing, whether it's managing people who are assaulting targets or whether it's managing guys that are, you know, doing tech projects, at the end of the day, you're still just managing people. One's probably more appealing to me than the other, but at the end of the day, you're still dealing with people. You're still working your way through problems. So it wasn't obviously my preferred line of work. Yeah, I didn't know either, because, you know, I did.

Jocko Willink

The last couple years I was in, I was running the West coast training, and so I was teaching leadership and. But I didn't think that what we were leading in the SEAL teams had anything to do with what, how you'd lead on the outside. And it wasn't until I went and talked to a company and talked about this principles. I talked. It wasn't really because, you know, I'm standing up there talking about these principles that we use, but I didn't know how they were landing until people started asking me questions and I started solving them the same way I would solve an assault and a target that had gone a little bit sideways, like, what are we going to do?

And that literally, the first question I got asked, I thought to myself, oh, everything that we know from the teams and from the military, when done correctly, applies to any leadership situation. So. So you're doing that for a while, and then in 2022, you decide you're gonna run for Congress. Yeah, so. So you're glutton for punishment.

Joe Kent

I'm a glutton for punishment, man. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I mean, I started running and it was basically, I got involved in politics, really. Meeting Trump at Dover.

Shannon was killed a month after our troops were supposed to be out of Syria. So Trump gave the order to get our troops out just before Christmas in 18 because we had taken away all the ground that ISIS controlled. So Trump did what no other president in the war on terror had done. He had actually said, like, when we get rid of all the ground ISIS controls, then we're leaving. We're not going to stay here and chase these guys around the desert for 20 plus years.

Like, we've seen that we're not going to do it again. So when we took out that last little stronghold they had, Trump said, all right, let's get the troops out. So I had a front row ticket to see how the mid to senior level bureaucrats in the intelligence community, Department of State, Department of Defense, basically said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to leave these guys here. And Shannon was there in the midst of all that friction.

So there was the chaos of Mattis resigning, and then he had a bunch of downward pressure on the task force. And I could see this because I'm talking to her, we can talk on classified systems. I'm reading all the sit reps. I'm seeing the drama, too, at the CIA. And all the downward pressure for the guys on the ground was, hey, the boss thinks we need to leave.

We need to find reasons to be here. And so there was a big pressure on those guys to go out there and, like, make ops happen. And so for me, I, when she got killed, I was surprised, but I wasn't that surprised when I thought about it analytically, because I was like, look, man, if you're out here just fishing around for missions, like you're doubling and tripling your opportunity for the enemy to kill you. And one of our last conversations we had, I was like, look, do not be the last person to die in a war that most of the country's already forgotten about. Like, this is, this is a bad situation.

And she knew it was, too, because they had all kinds of, like, crazy guidance. Like they were gonna be pulled out Christmas eve of 18, they were gonna fly to Erbil because they were gonna pull everybody out of Syria. And then that got Frago'd because there was pressure coming down from CEntCOM for them to stay there. So I was watching all this friction unfold, and I had been pretty pissed off about the way the wars were conducted up to that point, through multiple administrations as well. So I was a pretty early supporter of Trump when he went after Bush on the debate stage and said, like, we never should have gone into Iraq.

We screwed the whole thing up. And so I really liked his kind of common sense approach to foreign policy. But then watching all of this unfold, when I met Trump at Dover, I was like, screw it. I'm going to resign from the agency anyways. I'm just going to tell him how I feel.

And basically, I was just like, look, you're getting it right. Like, your gut instincts are right. All the so called experts, like, they're not, keep doing what you're doing. And I thought nothing else would come from it. I thought he was just kind of humoring me.

But I got a call a couple weeks later, and I got a chance to go meet with Jared Kushner and some other guys in the administration. They said, look, we want to hear more from guys that are on the ground. Like, we've gotten nothing but screwed over by, you know, the adults in the room, the experts, the guys who couldn't win the war for 20 plus years. We want to hear from guys like you. And so started working a little bit on the Trump campaign, did some advisory work there.

And then being in the northwest during COVID and during the riots was a big eye opener for me. I was like, man, this country's changed a lot in the time that I've been overseas deploying, watching Portland burn down because of what antifa was doing. Huge eye opener for me. But then ultimately, my congresswoman, she voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6. And so to me, that was a real, real call.

I was like, well, you know, if we're ever going to get involved in politics, now's the time to do it because the woman that I voted for is not representing, you know, my needs. She had also voted to keep our troops in Syria. She had a pretty bad voting record up to that point. But that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And really, I didn't even intend to run for Congress.

I started going to, like, republican meetings, and everybody was mad that she had done this and that she had voted this way, but nobody was doing anything. And so I was looking around. I was like, is there somebody that's already, like, an established politician that's going to run against this lady that we can back? You know, we're stepping forward. And so to me, it was like, well, you know, if you're looking around trying to figure out who the leader is, congratulations.

Like, that's supposed to be you. So I said, hey, I don't know how to run for Congress, but what the hell, I'll try. So, you know, I googled how do you run for Congress? So I could file all the right documents. And you know, offer the races from there.

So ran. That was like, a two year campaign. So I was running against an incumbent Republican. So taking down an incumbent is pretty challenging to do so for. So you had to primary.

Jocko Willink

You had to get through the primary. Primary. And she's incumbent. She's an incumbent. Yep.

So she has the money machine in the back. Yeah, she's got the cash. There's a couple other candidates running against her as well. So we had a five way republican primary. How did you make yourself kind of.

Joe Kent

Stand out, really getting out and talking to people? A lot of our politicians, because of the way money is involved in politics, they can win elections by just bombarding the airwaves with millions of dollars of ads, and that can work in a lot of cases. But if you. If you got somebody who's kind of sideways with their voters and you're willing to get out there and do town halls and go talk to people and actually build a grassroots campaign, then you can take them down. How many days a week would you be out doing that?

Like, seven days. Seven days. Because we didn't have any more money or any reach. So basically anywhere where somebody would give me a room of a captive audience where I could just talk to them for a minute or two, I would show up. So we did, like, over 300 in person town halls in that time period, and then, you know, any kind of media we could get, where I was out there, you know, spreading the message.

So it was a very much an insurgent campaign. Ultimately, we ended up beating the incumbent. Had 14 million spent against me, spent all of our money. How much money did you bring us? We brought in about three and a half million, which was good.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. But they said they. 14 million in the primary, and so. Yeah. And so then.

Well, that's gonna leave you without enough money or exactly where you need more money to actually run the race. Yeah. We have really late primaries in Washington, so our primary wasn't resolved. We vote first Tuesday in August. That's the primary.

Joe Kent

But in Washington, for some reason, it takes us, like, two weeks to count the ballots. Whole different story. But it took him two weeks to sort out the primary that I was the winner. And so by the time I was the actual republican nominee, we were flat out of money. My campaign staff had all worked for, like, over a month.

A couple of the vendors who really believed in me had credited me a bunch of money for ads. So we were in the whole, like, 200 grand going into the general. We raised another almost million dollars just in that small period. But the Democrats were smart and they sat back and they watched the Republicans just beat the crap out of each other all summer because we did, it was bloody primary. And so they hit me with $6 million, basically, on day one of the general.

So we still ended up only losing by less than a percentage point. Had to do a recount, all that type of stuff. So once the recount was over, because I'm too dumb to quit, I was like, well, we're going to run again. So here we are, groundhog day of running for office. And how's it look?

Jocko Willink

What are the atmospherics now on this run? I think they're much better. We don't have a really contested republican primary. Last time we had that, a lot of people felt passionately about their candidates, and we couldn't really just bring the party together going into the general. But I think we've got a lot more unity this time.

Joe Kent

I'm endorsed by the state party, endorsed by all the county parties. So, like, quite a few. Quite a few years there of hard work's really paid off. When is the primary take place? August.

Yeah, it's in August. And then the general's in November. Presidential years, too. My district swings about five points more republican. This is kind of a weakness of the Republicans.

We've got a lot that only vote once every four years. There's a lot of people out there who only vote when the president's at the top. So 2022, we had 60,000 Republicans who voted for Trump in 20, voted for Trump in 16. They just didn't turn out at all. So we anticipate most of them will come back out.

We're also working heavily, too, on legal ballot harvesting. Washington's all mail out voting, so it's completely legal in Washington. And for any person to go and collect ballots and then turn them in for people. So I don't like that. I wish we didn't do it, but those are the rules.

And Republicans, for a very long time, because we don't like that, have said that we will not ballot harvest. Like it's a point of pride. And the Democrats are like, oh, okay, we're gonna go ahead and ballot harvest once the ballots drop. And that gives them about a month head start on collecting ballots. And so we're finally getting.

Jocko Willink

So talk me through ballot harvesting. Yeah. So you wanna go to areas where you've got the most, most of your voters. So Democrats do this really effectively in heavily urban areas. They'll hit apartment complexes, they'll hit retirement homes.

Joe Kent

Republicans, it's a little bit different for us. So we're looking at ballot boxes in churches, ballot boxes in gun stores. Gun shows is another key place, but a big thing is just activation, getting our activists out to knock on people's doors and say, hey, you have a ballot. It's in the mail. If you'd like, you can vote right now, and I'll take the ballot in for you, or I'm going to keep coming back and knocking on your door until I see that you've actually turned your ballot in.

So you can request, any person can do this in Washington. You can get lists from the secretary of state that say, once the voting period has started, it will say who's turned their ballot, and already it won't say how they voted, it'll just say whether or not they've turned their ballot. So basically, every day, we can start knocking people off the list that have already voted that we know are Republicans, and then we can go chase the other people who haven't turned in their ballot yet. So data drives a ton of this. So obviously costs money to get good data, costs money to get people out there in front of the doors.

But we're doing pretty well with raising funds right now and getting activists trained up to chase those ballots. It's weird how this does not sound like a democracy, does it? No, it's not. It sounds like just crazy. I really wish we could vote in one day in person.

You show an id card that says that you're an eligible legal voter, and you vote right there, and we're count it in front of everybody on paper ballots, no machines. I wish that were the system. But right now, it's money immobilization. Big time drives politics. Where does your money come from?

Small dollar donors. So I don't take any big corporate pack money. I get all my money from individuals. So last time we raised three and a half million, our average donation was dollar 51. When we broke that down even further, people weren't giving me dollar 51 shot.

It was a lot of people who, like, over the course of three different donations, you know, that equaled $51, got some people who give more, which is always greatly appreciated. But, you know, people will ask me, like, oh, I can only give you $10, can only give you $15. Like, that's how grassroots candidates run. I mean, so we're doing national level fundraising. So we're sending out, you know, mailers and text messages to people throughout the country.

And then when I go on media shows and stuff like that, that helps as well. But small dollar donors. I think that's how we actually beat the corporate capture of Washington, DC. So when people hear that and they go, oh, go to Joe, Joe Kent for Congress.com, and they can donate right there. Exactly.

Jocko Willink

Whether it's $5, $10, or five, what's the max they can donate max, you can donate 21,000. So you can donate a lot. If you want to donate a lot, please, please do. We greatly appreciate that. But even if it's only $5, man, that helps out a lot.

Joe Kent

Because if enough people do $5 or just, or even folks, you could do like $5 a month, you know, just like one. What a coffee costs nowadays. If you can donate that, you can actually really help fuel a campaign that's going to make a difference. And then what are you looking at as your concerns for America and your goals for America right now? I mean, we're in such a crisis.

The border, I think, is a massive crisis. I was just here in February, went down to San Yoshido, went out to Yakuba hot springs and just watched that, see a humanity. It's crazy, right? I mean, it's an invasion. I mean, there's no other way to put it.

I mean, the Iraq Syria border was more orderly when I was serving there. I went to Yuma in 2021 when Biden first said the border was open. And then it was kind of what you would expect. There was a lot of hispanic folks coming across. Most of them, I think, genuinely seemed like they were seeking economic opportunity.

When I was here in February, I think I can count on one hand the number of hispanic people that might be our neighbors that I saw. The vast majority were military age men, chinese nationals. Ton of guys from the Middle east. They would say that they were turkish or they're from Indonesia, but I'd go and talk to some of them. They're all speaking Arabic.

The chinese nationals, to me, all looked like SF guys that were invading a country. Low profile. I mean, like, none of them looked like they had just walked through the desert to get here. They were all in basically like rei, tactical, casual, you know, clean cut, physically fit, you know, what are these guys doing here? You know?

And so we've had, we think, about 12 million illegals coming into the country with that. There's also been enough fentanyl to kill every american multiple times over. It's like 113,000 Americans have gotten killed by fentanyl. We know the fentanyl. The precursors come from China.

The cartels are pushing it across the border. We can stop this like, it's not like a force of nature. Doesn't have to happen. If we shut down the border, we, we can save lives here in America. Pretty much every event I do up in my district, somebody will come up to me and they'll tell me that they lost a loved one because of fentanyl.

And the vast majority of people right now that are dying from fentanyl, they're not like career drug addicts. It's people that like think they're buying an oxycontin because their health insurance won't cover it. We're seeing it with, it's getting put into the vapes and stuff now and now a lot of it. I was just doing a ride along the other night. It's not even coming in pill form, it's coming in powder form, which means some of the stuff that's more lethal if you, if you touch it and it gets on your fingers, like you can od that way.

I mean this is biological warfare that's being waged against us. So I think the border is the number one issue. Number two issue is just our out of control spending. I mean we're 35 trillion in debt right now because of what we've done. By weaponizing the dollar with these sanctioned regimes throughout the entire world, we could lose our status as a reserve currency holder.

If that's, even if that's even eroded, our entire world can change really, really quickly. I mean America's always been able just to print money, right? Even when our economy doesn't necessarily produce anything because we shipped our manufacturing overseas, Biden's killed off our natural energy, our natural resources. We can still print more money, but that's not a luxury we're always going to have, especially what China's doing, what the BRICS countries are doing. So if we don't get that under control, that debt is going to get leveraged against our country.

And so I just think we cannot continue to like be the world's police, provide security guarantees for the entire world. I'm not saying we completely withdraw from everything, but Washington DC has got to get its budget under control. It's very basic. Like we take in just shy of 5 trillion per year, but we're spending seven, seven and a half trillion dollars per year. Like we've got to get realistic and Washington DC refuses to do that.

So I think those are some of the biggest issues. There's a bunch of other ones, but I think right now we're in such a bad way between the invasion on our border and the fact that DC is deliberately trying to kill the dollar and saddle us with debt and that's what's driving the inflation. That's why people can barely survive right now. I think those are probably two of the most pressing issues. Is it why if you're in Washington DC, you're a part of a government right now.

Jocko Willink

It's insane to just sit there and keep writing these checks. And yet no one seems to care. No, there's a handful of guys that are fighting really hard there in Washington DC and they get called every name in the book all the time. But the vast majority of people in DC just think, well, we can just keep printing money. Like, hey, if all my special interests and a couple projects here in my district are going to get funded, what do I care that we just blew the budget out by 2.5 trillion?

Joe Kent

And that's just the attitude in Washington. And I think that there's definitely some nefarious factor there. There's people that are making money and they don't care. But I do also think that there's this bias that people have towards normalcy. If things have always been a certain way in your head, you think they could never change.

Basically everyone who's alive right now, America has been the top dog. I mean, the people that were alive before World War two, they're all gone. And so all of us that are alive right now, we're like, nah, you know, America's always been on top. We've always been the prime reserve currency holder. Actually, no, we haven't.

I mean, right now, this period of like peace and relative stability and success that we're having, it's actually kind of an aberration when you look at the broad scope of history. And so I do think there's a lot of people there that are just complacent. They just think, well, people have always been complaining about the debt. Ross Perot way back in the day was complaining about the debt. We can just keep doing this.

And then China is making very, very big moves right now to make it so that we can't keep doing this. So your primary is in August and then it's to the polls in November.

Jocko Willink

All right. You're glutton for punishment, man. I'm a glutton for punishment? Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Kent

If anybody's thinking about getting into politics, I would say it's really important that more veterans do get involved in politics. But it's also a pretty quick way to destroy your entire life. I think it's worth it. I mean, the country's worth it. I mean, I really got two young kids.

Two young kids. And, you know, look, I mean, for a long time, I think that our generation of warriors thought that our fight was overseas. And now we can kind of step back and see what those wars were all about, how we were allied to how the blood and treasure of our country were squandered. I very much think the fight is here right now. Like, we cannot let this class of politicians continue to run our country.

Like, the warrior class has got to step up and really just start asserting ourselves and saying, hey, we've seen what war is. We're not going to lead our country down that path anymore. But also, we fought, bled, and invested for this country. And so we are going to make sure that that is not just absolutely ground into the dirt going forward. Amen, man.

Jocko Willink

So people can find you. Joekentforcongress.com. Go there. Also, you're on Twitter okent one six Jan 19. You're on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, all at Jo Kent for Congress.

That's where people can find you and help you, support you, and get you to where you need to be so you can. So you can go lead echo. Charles, you got any questions? Yes. Yeah, back.

The real interview starts back in the. Day, what, 2003 when you guys talking about the tank treads. Yeah. And the speed bumps. You mentioned the MP's were giving out tickets.

Yeah. Who's paying the tickets? See, that was the thing. Like, I think they could eventually take away, like your on base driver's license. Just so the individual.

Joe Kent

Yeah. Go to you like your boss. It wasn't like pay. You didn't have to pay, but it was like, you've been cited. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Cite you again, you'll be under some co, sort of uniform code of military justice. Yeah. Like. Like a write up. The equivalent little write up, little verbal and write up.

Joe Kent

I did have a buddy of mine who actually got a speeding ticket, and he got kind of mouthy with the MP's and he got detained. But this is on the way back from a target. And he actually had detainees. He had like one of the. We had come back from target.

We were back in the wire. We cross loaded the detainees onto like some admin pickup truck. And he was driving them to like the actual. And he gets pulled over and he's just off a target, he's tired, so he gets mouthy with the MP's. The MP's detain him and detain the team detainees.

So, like our commander had to go down there. It ended up being, you know, commander had a good sense of humor about it. So you got detained taking the detainees? Yeah, yeah. It's like one of those other moments where it's like, man, I think we've been here for a little bit too long.

Echo Charles

They pulled the old switcheroo on them. They did. Good for the goose. Yeah. See what I'm saying?

That's my. That's my question. That was your stump the chump right there. Yeah. Good to meet you.

Jocko Willink

Nice to meet you, too, Joe. Any. Any final thoughts, man? No, man. We covered a lot.

Joe Kent

I really appreciate you having me on, man. Appreciate you providing a platform for so many of us guys from, you know, our. Our generation's war to tell our story, man. I think it's really important. So appreciate what you're doing.

Jocko Willink

Right on, man. Well, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your. Your lessons learned, and, of course, thanks for your sacrifice, you know, not only as a soldier, not only as a special operation, as a warrior, but also as the husband of Shannon Kent, who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, for our security, and we can never repay the debt owed to you and your boys.

The only thing we can do is try and live good lives. Absolutely. And honor our sacrifice, man. Amen. Thank you.

And with that, Joe Kent has left the building. Echo, pretty. Pretty awesome insight at the intel side and the sacrifices that get made over there, the hard work that gets done. Book definitely represents that very well. So did we.

This is stuff that you kind of wouldn't know stuff about, correct. You know, other than, like, what you see in a movie. Yeah, and there is some. You know, there's obviously. There's similarities, right.

Just like there's similarities between Top Gun the movie and Top Gun Dave Burke out there doing it. Just like there's similarities between terminal lists, which is a show about seals, and actually being a seal, but there are obviously things that are different. And with the intel side, that's, you know, you see in movies, you know, they'll show like this. The meeting. Yeah.

Echo Charles

With the source. And so they show that kind of stuff, but it's very hollywooded up, and it actually doesn't show the amount of work that it takes, man. It's hard, hard, hard and dangerous work, clearly. Yeah. So I thought it was awesome to meet Joe and hear these stories.

Jocko Willink

And the book's great. So get the book and send me the true story of a mother at war.

Meanwhile, back over here, you know, we're trying to. We're trying to live good lives, trying to be the best we can. We have this opportunity. We get to do this. So let's be better.

Let's make sure we are training, reading, thinking, being smart. Good fuel. Check out jockofuel.com. Get yourself some greens. Get yourself some protein powder.

Get yourself some ready to drink protein. Get yourself an energy drink. I have one right here. These things are good and good for. You across the board.

Chocolate fuel.com. Check it out. Everything that you need. Also, you got Dom's today? Yep.

Echo Charles

Full body doms. Okay, so, what was it caused by? Well, the, uh. In a nutshell. Short, short answer.

Um, a congregation, if you will, of consecutive workouts involving Gi jujitsu, which I haven't done for a few months. Gi. There's all been no gee and squats. So I did squats and then drank a moat straight to jiu jitsu. Yeah, that'll do it.

Jocko Willink

The other day, I did ten rounds with, like, kind of the heavy hitters. Yeah. You know? Yes. I was definitely feeling that one.

Echo Charles

Oh, yeah. Ten rounds. Even, like, yeah, you guys, you're crazy for always going ten rounds. So what's the. Generally speaking, I'm not saying to fulfill your deal.

Whatever. Like, what, to me, I'm gonna say mine. You tell me if this is acceptable. So, five rounds, to me is kind of like the minimum standard. So, if you go five rounds, you go home, and you're like, cool.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. You go four rounds, you're like, I could have done at least one. And then you kind of really wish you did maybe two more, right? If you're at four, you do six rounds, you're like, oh, shit. I'm kind of feeling that.

Echo Charles

You do eight rounds. That's a full day to me. Six to eight, you're. You're in the zone for sure. Yeah, you go ten now, you're just like, hey, this is like an extra credit.

Jocko Willink

That's all I feel. But let's. Let's face it. There's a whole nother variable that we're not talking about. That's who you're rolling with.

Echo Charles

Yes. Because let's face it, you know, if you're going with the heavy hitters. Yeah. You know, and that even that is different, because if you go with a heavy hitter, like, you go with someone that's big and slow, you're not moving a bunch. You maintain you got to fight something.

Jocko Willink

Get a little. Little burn in your arm because you're trying to keep your. You go someone that's moving the whole time. Yeah. Now you're getting it.

So you know who you roll with. That's a big, big piece, bro. I'll go do a hundred rounds. Yeah. Donna mean, do you know what I mean?

And not even get a workout. Meanwhile, do two rounds with someone that's getting after it a little bit different. Well, oddly, maybe ironically, I don't know the terminology, but the times that I do do 8910, let's face it, I've only done all ten. Probably a handful of times total, by the way. But every single time where it's like, 8910 rounds or whatever, it's always been with that, you know, the fucking.

Echo Charles

What do you call the heavy hitter one that you organize. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, bro, who's going ten round, text. Comes out exactly right. But think about it.

When you go to the regular class, who's doing ten rounds? Kind of not any. Not everybody, you know? Well, in a normal class, usually I'll do five. Yeah, exactly right.

Jocko Willink

That's about a half an hour of work, you know, then people got to get back to their job, their kids there, all this other stuff going on. Right, because you already spent some time doing the training, doing the drills, doing the. Learning the techniques. Yeah, it's true. So, yeah, full body doms from squats, then straight to jiu jits.

Now, you were telling me something about protein the other day, like, getting it in the system. Yeah. What was the bro science behind that? What do you mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Echo Charles

So, okay, this is from Thomas DeLauer, by the way, one of his things. We're gonna do something with him, but nonetheless, very well accomplished guy in the fitness industry. So he knows a lot more than me, so. And I listened to him. So he went over this idea, your.

Jocko Willink

Bro science, but it came from a legit. Legit source. Exactly. Right. So, basically, in a nutshell, because he goes deep into it, like, the mechanisms, all this stuff.

Echo Charles

But after you work out and you're trying to get in your protein, if you ingest a high dose of protein after the workout, it'll send a bigger signal for protein synthesis, meaning you absorb the protein more. Like, the signal that tells your body to absorb the protein physiologically, is bigger. It's a bigger signal if you take in more. So the milk. The milk train is kind of trying to leave the building, and you got to get on the milk train.

Jocko Willink

Oh, Dave, is 30 grams where we're at? No, it's actually, like, more than that. More. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm not mistaken.

Echo Charles

I could be wrong, but I think. He was, like, at least 60 so two monks. If you go to monks at 60. Yeah. Boom, boom.

And then he talks. He says other stuff in there. One. One was with. With, like, the different types of protein.

So there's like fast digesting, slow digesting. So if you do the fast digesting first, then you get the slow digesting, then you can have the fast boom. And it's like this onslaught of just protein synthesis over time. See what I'm saying? So the way I said it, that's totally bro science.

You gotta listen to him. He's gonna say it way more eloquently than me, but we get the message. See what I'm saying? All you need is, okay, what are we doing then? We take it in.

Plenty of protein after workout. How about that? Do you feel like eating when you get done working out? Yeah, but there's like a window, you know? So like three minutes after your last set or three minutes after your last round.

No, I don't feel like eating at all. But you take a shower, you sit down, then, yeah. Oh, yeah. You feel like eating, drinking, the whole deal. Hundred percent.

Jocko Willink

Oh, yeah, the doms. So you need the protein for the doms. But don't forget about the joey. Warfare. Joint warfare.

Yeah, some of that super krill. Oh, by the way, some people were asking, super krill versus fish oil. Yeah. Because we brought out fish oil and people like, we. I thought the krill oil is better.

Hey, if you can. Some people can't have krill because it's shellfish, so they can't. They're allergic to it. We actually. We actually created the fish oil to make up for that.

And some people just prefer fish oil. So. Personal preference? My recommendation is, if you can take krill oil, take krill oil. If you can't, for whatever reason, that's okay.

That's where we made the fish oil. And some people just. What they're looking for is fish oil. So. And they're asking for fish oil.

So we made fish oil because not everyone translates directly to, I want fish oil. And you say, well, I got krill oil for you. And they go, no, I don't want fish oil. Like, you went to a. You went to a restaurant.

Echo Charles

Yeah. And you say, I want pizza. And the person says, no, I have cake tacos. Yeah. You're like, well, I don't want tacos.

Jocko Willink

I don't want cake. So that's what we did. But if you can handle the krill oil, then get the krill oil. But if you have a shellfish or you want you for whatever reason you prefer fish oil, we got you. It's all good.

So wanted to mention that. Hey, anyways, you heard the deal. Jockofuel.com, you need fuel, go get some. Also, wawa, we got the, we got the mulk ready to drink protein at Wawa vitamin shop, GNC, military commissaries a fees, Hannaford dash stores in Maryland, wake firm, Shoprite Hev down in Tejas. Dude, they're building like walls of jocko fuel.

So everyone in Texas, thank you for getting after it. Same thing with Meyer up in the midwest. Thank you for getting after it. Same thing with Harris Teeter, lifetime fitness. Don't forget about Wegmans up in the Pennsylvania area.

They've got pallets on the floor. So go get some of that shields and look small gyms. If you got a little gym, you got a crossfit gym, you got a jiu jitsu gym, you got a powerlifting gym. And you want them to sell jocko fuel there or you want to sell jockey fuel there because it's yours. Good.

Email jfsaleshockofuel.com dot. So there we go. Also, originusa.com dot. You heard Joe Kent mention the fact that we gave up a lot of manufacturing. We let it go overseas.

Well, at Origin USA, we are bringing it back to America. That's what we're doing. We are bringing manufacturing back. We brought the, we brought the freaking equipment back on ships. That's what we did.

And now we got it. Americans are being trained to use it. It, they've been trained to use it. We had the people that had the knowledge that passed it on. So if you don't want communism in the world, if you don't like slave labor in the world, if you want America's economy to be strong, if you want the world to have a clean environment, because do you think they care one iota about the environment in China?

They don't care at all. They don't care. Doesn't matter to them. And in many countries overseas, that's the, those are the facts. They don't have the EPA.

They don't have any rules and regulations about what they can dump into the water or blow out their smokestack into the atmosphere. They don't have any rules. So we have rules here. There's a reason for those rules. Because we care about the environment.

We care about our workers. Originusa.com comma, get the best gear you can buy the way. Best gear by far. Just FYI. Best gear.

So. And we got new gear coming out all the time we're getting better and better. We got new, like, workout gear. Awesome. So, anyways, check it out.

Originusa calm. Go get your boots. Go get your jeans. Wouldn't it suck to wear an american pair of jeans that aren't made in America? Bro, you're.

You don't want to do that. Origin USA calm. Go get it. Hey, one more thing. We have law enforcement jiu jitsu training August 27 through the 31st up in Maine.

So if you're in law enforcement, you got some people on your crew. You want to go to train jitsu. We got a bunch of experienced jiu jitsu law enforcement officers that are gonna be up there helping teach going through the mechanics of combatives. So please come and check that out. That was also@originusa.com dot.

Echo Charles

Do you know the schedule for that? Like, is that, like, a few times a day? Is that. Is it kind of like the camp? It's kind of like immersion camp.

Jocko Willink

Also, JP Danelle is going to be up there. He's gonna be talking through leadership inside law enforcement. We got. So it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be an awesome camp.

Okay, so check that out. That'd be good. Also, jocko store, called Jocko store, where you can represent discipline equals freedom on our apparel. You know, got some cool shirts, some hats, some hoodies on there. Summer's coming up.

Echo Charles

Maybe less, less need for a hoodie, but we got some good stuff on there. My daughter, Rana. Yeah. We were talking the other day. Oh, yeah.

Jocko Willink

And she. She said something. She said, discipline equals freedom. Or I said, discipline, freedom. But what she said was, she was.

It's so true. Yeah. I was like, okay, guess it landed. Yep. You know, it landed.

Echo Charles

It did land. And you get on the mats of justice, you realize it's truth. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

You're not kind of. You don't feel like you're scrambling all the time for something if you've been disciplined in that little something. And that goes for anything. So big one, though, any song is true. Because, you know, I grew up.

We grew up working out. Well, I grew up, like, working out pretty much when it was time to start working out. Yes. Hell, yeah. So, you know, every once in a while, and this is just.

This is gonna seem obvious, but I think if you pause and think about it, just like Hannah did, because she'd been hearing discipline equals freedom. Since when? Since a long time. 2015. Like, what?

Since she was a child. Yeah. And even at age, whatever, 20. Whatever, 23. 23.

Even at 23, she's saying, that out loud. It's true. Yeah. But I would say this the way she said it, it was almost like as if the full recognition, the full understanding came to fruition in her head. So there's.

Jocko Willink

Imagine you're looking through a scope, and there's, like, fog, and there's blurriness, and then all of a sudden, it just comes in a perfect vision. Boom. Yeah. Or, like, you're using your red camera. Sure.

And, you know, how has those little lines around whatever's in focus. Focus assist. Yeah. Do you use focus assist? Is that considered weak to use focus assistant?

Echo Charles

No, no, no. You lose his spect from the people out there. I don't think so. And if I do. Hey, that's.

That's true. So I put it this way. If people deep in the industry said, hey, it is weak. It's. It's weak to use focus assist, I would.

That would make sense to me, but I'm still gonna use focus assist. Well, as focus assist on the red camera. Do other cameras have that? Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Jocko Willink

Well, it came into focus like that for. Yeah, just the way she said it. She goes, it's so true. And I was like, yeah, it is. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And that you don't want to say that you don't want to give your dad props. Right. You know what I mean? It's hard after 23 years, you want to be like, you know what?

You're kind of right about this stuff. You know what I mean? Did you ever. Did you ever give your dad props about something? No, not.

See? Yeah, actually, yeah. Like, 30 years later, what was it? Do it, and it'll be done. Doing to be done.

He made it. He made it. He got us. He got an approval, actually. Yeah.

Yeah. I gave him the props and. But I give him indirect props by using a lot of his old stuff, but I never really gave him the props, which, actually, I might. Yeah. BC legend.

Is there one more example you can give? Um. One never know, do one. He. So we say that, one never know, do one.

Echo Charles

And what that. What that is is like some poetic way of saying, like, you don't know. You just don't know, do you? Right. One never know, do one.

And then I remember thinking about, you sound dumb saying that. So freaking whatever. And then I say that I say that stuff to my kids all the time. Like, you just never know. One never know.

One never know, do one. That's a good idea. You know what? That's kind of. That kind of reminds me of the iterative decision making process yeah.

Jocko Willink

Okay. You don't really know. Yeah. Take a little step and let's see. Yeah.

Echo Charles

And he would use it a lot of times when something would happen that, like, you were expecting something else to happen, and then, you know, so it just. Shit doesn't go all the way that you think it's gonna go every single time. That was his whole point. And then it's like, it was his point after something would happen. Or when you're going into a situation, he'll just be like, one.

Never know. Do one nonetheless. Yes, but you're correct, and Hannah is correct, too, because. And when I say the working out thing, it's like, that's where you can kind of remind yourself how true that is. Cause, like, if you're working out all the time, you're in freaking great shape, and then you go out and have dessert on Valentine's Day or, you know, whatever, you're free to do that.

Cause, right. Your body's just gonna burn through that whole thing. Like, even in and of itself is gonna burn through the whole thing. Because all the working out you been doing and then not to mention, when you go work out tomorrow's gonna burn through even. You know?

So it's like, literally no factor. You're free, completely free from that. The effects of that dessert. But if you're not disciplined, it's like, Brad, that's just one more freaking stack upon stack upon stack of just terribleness onto your health. You see?

I'm saying. I see what you're saying. So understand freedom. Yeah. So if you want to represent, you.

Know, we got some cool new. We got a new design. It's out discipline equals eat freedom version four. That's all. And I got to admit, I liked it squared away.

Jocko Willink

Cuz, let's face it. I'm not gonna say you're off base in the early version, the earliest version, yeah. But let's face it, my immediate modification. Yeah. Was a big step improvement.

It was like, going from. It wasn't like iPhone, you know, 1.1 to iPhone 1.2. It was like BlackBerry. Like Motorola razor to iPhone nine. Okay.

Echo Charles

All right. Hey, look, I can't refute that. But this new one that you made, step up legit, a good one, old school. The original OG has some, like, you know how you have the rough draft of something and you always have a little special place in your heart for the rough draft, you know, it's not the first classic. Exactly.

Right. Same thing. Nonetheless, hey, they're all available. They're all available. Get anyone you want.

But yes, there is a new one out there also, the short locker. It's a subscription scenario. If you don't know, you know, it's like you get a new design every month. Some good designs there because I saw, I saw that people, or I noticed other people noticing the sugar coated lies, one that's from two months ago, but. That seems to have landed very well.

Yeah. So I'm considering maybe releasing that one just to the general public, you know, so people can represent, you know. Okay, lies, lies. Sugar coated lies, lies. It says lies twice.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, just kind of a, it's kind of a big deal. Sure, there's other ways you could have done it, right? Yeah, but you didn't put it twice. Thank you for that confirmation, nonetheless. It's called the shirt locker, but it's on jocastore.com, so boom, you can see the deal.

Echo Charles

You want to check that out. There's some examples of some of the designs on there, too, so you can kind of see what up. But yeah, go in there like something. Get some. Also check out primalbeef.com and or coloradocraftbeef.com dot.

Jocko Willink

These are two steak companies right here in America, primal beef out there in the Shenandoah Valley and Colorado craft beef, obviously up there in Colorado making the tastiest steaks. And by the way, ground beef. And by the way, hot dog like and by the way, meat sticks and jerky. So check them out. Primalbeef.com comma Colorado, craftbeef.com.

Great companies, great people, great steaks. Go get some. Also subscribe to the podcast. And don't forget about Jocko underground. And don't forget about the YouTube channels.

And don't forget about psychological warfare and flipside canvas, Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Plus books obviously today we covered send me the true story of a mother at war. Just, just check that book out written by Marty Scoville. And I haven't given you much, much love there, Marty Scoveland. And he was, he co authored it with Joe Kent.

But fantastic book. Check it out. Also, I've written a bunch of books, so if you want to check out the books that I've written, you can check those out. Especially you might want to check out those, those warrior kid books. Just, just, and actually, I should have talked about it with Joe.

His kids love them. So check out way of the warrior kid, 1234 and five. Check out Mikey and the dragons. And then the books that I've written. You can check those out as well.

Also, we have a leadership consultancy just got back from the muster in Nashville, Tennessee. How was it? Outstanding. Yeah, it's really, um, the, the event is always good, but just how smooth it is and how everyone's so, so much more refined. Yeah, the experience, great.

Echo Charles

Tilt was there, too. Representing Tilt came out, man. How awesome was that? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

He was fired up to be there. He was signing books, taking pictures. The next muster that we have is in Dallas. It's 16 to 18 October. So look, these events all always sell out.

Jocko Willink

This will sell out, too. So if you want to go, go register now. Also, we have something called the council, and these are up in Washington state. They are very isolated. It's very detached.

It's a very small group of people. And if you. We've got council four is sold out, and then that's gonna be followed by council five. We have a few seats left, 26 to 29th June. So if you want to come check that out, go register quick.

Also, we have the women's assembly down in San Antonio, Texas, September 11 through the 13th. So again, if you want to come to one of our events, check that out. But also, if you just have, if you just need leadership help inside your organization, go to ashlandfront.com dot. That's what we do there. Also, we have online training at the extreme ownership academy.

Go to extreme ownership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, want to help gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org dot. Also, heroesandhorses.org.

That's Micah Finks charity organization up in Montana taking, taking our veterans up into the mountains so they can get lost and get found. Jimmy May has also got his organization beyond the brotherhood.org. Check that one out. And if you want to connect with us once again, Joe Kent. Joe Kent for Congress.com.

He's on Twitter at jo Kent, 16 Jan 19. And he's also on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Jo Kent for Congress. I'm at jocko.com. I'm on social media at jockowillink. Echoes at Echo Charles.

Just be careful of the algorithm. Don't let it get you. And thanks once again to Joe Kent for joining us tonight. And a solemn salute to a true warrior, senior Chief Shannon Kent. Thank you, senior chief, for your leadership, your courage, your service, and your sacrifice.

We will follow your example. And thanks to all the men and women around the world right now, especially tonight. To those from the intel community that work so hard in the shadows and take great risks to gather the information needed to protect our great nation, thank you for what you do every day. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, emts, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for risking your lives to keep us safe here at home and everyone else out there.

Just remember, remember that what you do, what you get to do, what we get to do. We have that opportunity. We have that freedom because other men and women for over 200 years have gone out and put their lives at risk for our freedom. And remember that they're people. They're real people.

People like senior Chief Shannon Kent. A wife, a mother, a daughter, a warrior who sacrificed her life for us. Remember all those brave warriors and live accordingly.

And that's all we've got tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.

437: Special Ops, Intelligence, Sacrifice, and War. with Joe Kent and the Story of Shannon Kent.

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Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: Shannon Kent's Legacy

3: Personal Stories from the Front Lines

4: Reflections on Loss and Legacy

Actionable Advice

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People

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Transcript