Is jocko podcast number 434 with echo Charles and me jocko willing good evening echo good He also joining us tonight is Dave Burke. Good evening Dave. Good evening so There are two Conflicts going on in the world right now. Well, there's more than that, but there's two that are very prominent one in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia and then obviously in Gaza and in in and around Israel as well and the term war crimes quite a bit and we all now look at social media and the news and there's a lot of speculation about war crimes that Are going on or allegedly going on or possibly going on or they could be occurring on the ground

these wars and I'm not on the ground in either of those wars obviously right now I haven't been on the ground in either of those places but I have been on the ground in another war and I heard speculations about war crimes in that war this is in Iraq Dave obviously that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring you in today because you are also on the ground in Iraq and so at it now when I hear all these when I hear the term war crime get thrown around and used it seems like a Thing to try and understand what that looks like on the ground and I can understand you know where some of these Some of these speculations come about some of these rumors come about and you it's really clear when you look at social media and There's there's pictures images that get put up

That are 22 years old or 14 years old or 7 years old from different locations. These things are happening, but they're really not happening at all. And then in other cases, there's clear It's clear that horrible things are happening so Again, I don't want to speculate about what's happening on the ground right now in either one of these wars. If I was going to come on here and talk about them, you know what I'd do is actually I would go there. But I haven't done that um but like I said and Dave same boat is we've been on the ground in war and I Want to talk through some of those? some of those things one thing that happens and You know on me

So if you as a leader fail to do a good job of communicating what the situation is on the ground You leave a vacuum You leave a vacuum of people that don't understand what's going on the ground and when people don't understand what's happening because I as a leader do a bad job of explaining to them and painting a clear picture, just like any other. Situation rumors will start to fill the blanks in their own heads with ideas and with assumptions now fortunately what actually happened In the Battle of Ramadi is very well documented It is extremely well documented and it was documented real time and it's been documented since then there's situation reports There are operations summaries, there's commander's briefs, there's investigations.

So that on the inside the military you got all those things. I mean how many situated how many sit reps? Did you write while you're over there Dave? Literally one every day. Yeah, so and that's just the daily sit rep not including all the Sit-Raps are up for all the actions. - So for an individual action, you're writing a Sit-Rap? - Everyone. - The Ops Soms? Same thing. - Every day. - So we had to write every time we did an operation, we do an operational summary, yes. The commander's briefs all these things are saved. You know, they're all they're all they all still exist the commander's briefs Investigations that happened they all get saved but then It's not just the military that's doing this because guess what else going on. You've got news reports. You've got journalists You've got embedded journalists. You've got

Articles then you've got also what's interesting and I kind of mentioned this you've got academic journals now that have gone back and interviewed people and written books About exactly what happened. So there's all luckily there's all kinds of documentation about What it was actually like on the ground there now, of course Dave you have All this information your head, you know what it's like I have all this information I know what it's like I can I made the mistake of thinking it was obvious What was going on on the ground in Ramadi? I I made the mistake sometimes of assuming that other people understood the situation and look Did you do one deployment on the ground in Iraq one and it was just a Ramadi just for when you were in Ramadi Did you ever go to anywhere else? Did you go to blog? Did you go to Baghdad? Did you go to any other cities any other towns? Yeah, I did Baghdad once or twice went to al-asad And that's about it. Okay, so time

So Alice how much time did you spend in Al-Assad? I Took probably three or four trips out there. Okay, not a ton of time, but I went out there a handful spend the night there Absolutely. Um, so you were in Iraq. You're an al-sad you in Iraq you in Ramadi. What was the difference? Between Al-Assad and Ramadi. - Night and day. It's night and day. It's hard to describe how different it was. It might've been like two different planets. They're very different. Totally totally incomparable. So and that was the way a lot of Iraq was so Much of Iraq, now look, you could go to Sadr City, terrible. There are certain little neighborhoods in certain cities that could be bad, but even from a city like that, first deployment 2003 2004 we it was very interesting because we went all over the place man I'd roll up on some Fob somewhere in the middle of nowhere and that you could tell they were taking it and it was pretty hot

Then you'd go to another fob two days later and just like the guys there's nothing going on. Yeah What happens is people take their experience of Iraq. So even someone that was in Iraq and they go oh I know what Iraq was like because they were in wherever but - Everyone's experience is very different. And depending on where you are, things are a lot different on the ground. So I never really thought through that as. As clearly as I should have, so that people would understand what the actual situation was on the ground. Name as everywhere else. News article, May 22nd. And I'll see you next time. NBC News 2006. One recent coalition tally of significant acts, that's roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire indicate. That out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 occurred in Ramadi.

According to a marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media and That he said was a quiet day so you have all of Iraq there's 43 reported incidents and in that 27 of those incidents were in this tiny city of Ramadi, which is four miles across. In what, continuing on here. In one neighborhood, Master Sergeant Tom Coffey, 38, of Underhill, Vermont, gestured to a. Haved road his forces would not drive on They hit us so many times with IEDs roadside bombs. We seeded it to them. He said so think about that that. There's a road. The enemy has hit us with so many bombs on it we're not driving down it anymore. Look out for it. I was in Baghdad for six months. We drove down Route Iris. Do you ever drive down Route Iris? Route Iris and Baghdad.

There was never a chance that coalition forces were gonna say, Yeah, we're not gonna drive down to the new mor. Continuing on, same article. After one neighborhood sweep developed into an hour long gun battle. Iraqi major Jabbar Marouf al-tamini returned to base and drew his finger across a satellite of the satellite of the area he just fled under fire. It's fallen under the command of insurgents, he said, shaking his head. They control it now. now. Again, there was no other part of Iraq that I'm aware of where Iraqi forces-- said, yeah, that's under the control of the insurgents. There's no other area that I can think of. That I've heard of where US forces said, Yeah, we're not gonna go there anymore because the enemy controls it. *sigh*

The summer of 2006 in Ramadi there was 30 to 50 enemy attacks a day and by the way What counts as an attack? Because is someone shooting a rifle? Someone shooting a machine gun at a Humvee hit in the window. That's an attack. Guess what else is an attack a complex or coordinated attack? Where there's multiple elements maneuvering it is that the enemy was good In Like I said in 2006 this was very different from other places in Iraq I'd been to a bunch of other places in Iraq in my first deployment I've been a bag that been a fluger been a day job and I've been it all over over. Enemy contact in those other places now look not talking about the assault on Felicia I'm not talking about South solder city at certain times. I'm not talking about to mean when they would or al-qaeda or al-qaeda, okay, okay

I'm not talking about a cane when the marine I'm not talking about those those moments but on a General normal day, there's no, there's, in those other places, enemy contact, it. You kind of had an anticipation that it could happen, but it was unlikely it was unlikely And in Ramadi it was Imminent It was actually imminent I would have bet Every time we left the wire, every time coalition forces left the wire, They were getting enemy contact period end of story and it's hard to understand that like I said Especially if you've deployed to Iraq in a different time Lafe deployed back to Ramadi in 2000. I think was 2009 Not a shot fired during his six-month deployment

So the reason I'm bringing this up is because if some... Someone had been to Iraq and they went to a different place at a different time or even went to Ramadi at the same time. It's not going to be the same thing. Again, this is something that I failed to recognize How different it was, you know even going back Vietnam You know when we came back from that deployment I talked to Vietnam guys and it was the same thing there was some V some guys went to Vietnam some seals went to Vietnam and They were in significant contact Regularly that was a smaller number of seals most of the seals that went to Vietnam. They did operations

Three four gunfights. I mean I talked to one of my friends who is a machine gunner in Vietnam Seal machine gunner Vietnam and he's like, yeah, we got in four firefights I fired like 50 to 100 rounds in each firefight and then we were out Good like awesome Um - Mm-hmm. It was very different. Different situation when you were rolling in what as going into Ramadi like where were other facts going to yeah, so for - Anglico, remember I was an Anglico fact, so we had, I'm pretty close, I think either 23 or 26 teams all over Iraq, in all the cities you just mentioned. And we would roll up a summary every day of what everybody was doing everywhere. And the way you described it is exactly what-- I experienced, which was, and I'm generalizing a little bit because there's always an opportunity.

- There was risk everywhere you went. There wasn't like, oh there's nothing going on ever, but there was always risk everywhere. Just about everything that was happening was in Ramadi. And it was an interesting thing for me, because you talked about some of the, almost like a leadership failure of what that perspective was in my mind. To grasp that too because not only was Ramadi my first, it was my first deployment on the ground. And I'd never been to any of those other places in like non-combat scenarios at all. So I didn't have any that are perspective. So I'm in Ramadi for however long I'm there. - You just think that's normal. - This is just how it is. This first trip we called it BiOp. We go to Baghdad International Airport, which we would do like a log run of supplies or something. Was very early on was-- - Would you guys do that on helos or were you guys driving out there? - Driving. - Oh, check. - And what that was was I figured out very early, I'm like, oh, this is a break. And again, this is not like judgment of oh if you're in Baghdad, there's nothing going on It just that guy we're getting after it after it, but the

The environment was such there was much more control, the coalition forces controlled much more, and the environment was just very different. So if we had guys that needed a break, I could put them on a log run to buy up, which meant like you're gonna go out there, spend the night, you're gonna get two days, and I say off in quotes. But it's a little bit of a break from the eminence of that. And I came to discover very early on, my experience in Ramadi wasn't normal. Ramadi in 2006 is where I ended up, and it wasn't like that everywhere else. And so the calculation I had to make of, oh, I need to pay attention to how my guys are going to do throughout this deployment, because this isn't normal. Yeah, again, anywhere you were in Iraq at that time, look, is there a possibility? Concerns absolutely guys did incredible things guys were taking risks all the time Ramadi that was a that was intensified and amplified there were insurgents everywhere that and they were interwoven into the population and they

Used all kinds of weapons to attack and kill American and Iraqi soldiers. And they used the most sadistic methods of rape, torture, murder to control the population. There was a situation where a local was skinned alive by the Urgence. There was a situation where heads, the heads were cut off and left in the yard of people. People in the local population. The insurgents were, they were sadistic and evil. And they were there and there were targets everywhere. We we really hadn't been in an environment like this before the so the previous So when we got there, the previous task unit, great dudes, and they had been busting their ass, working hard.

Getting things set up they were setting conditions. They were building relationships with the conventional forces They had some Iraqi forces that they were partnered with they made all the introductions for us. Yeah, they training them they were a little bit limited by what their Iraqi forces were capable of which It's just the reality the situation on the ground did but they gave their Iraqis their jaundice I might use the term John D. John D is just a term Iraqi soldier, but we kind of used it as a catch-all for Iraqi military person jandi soldier So they had done that and they conducted some good operations But they were also controlled by the amount of the errors they could get into You heard in one of those courts. I read earlier. There's roads that we're just no one's going down those roads and to say oh

We'll just jump in our Humvees and drive down there and do a direct action mission. Well, it's stupid. Well, it's just dumb. And so they weren't gonna do that. We weren't gonna do that. There's massive IDs there's I've ambushes but we show up there and we start doing it With the with the guys we're taking over for great dudes gives great turnover And that was the environment We stepped into because there's all these That usually the estimates are like four to five thousand enemy fighters there. That's that's Usually the estimate now the population is 400,000 but standing against these insurgents are these soldiers and marines that are their life on the line on a daily basis to protect the local populace while trying to hunt and kill the enemy and Look, the 228, which was the group that was on the ground when we got there, the Iron Soldiers, outstanding.

One AD came in and took over. They were outstanding and the daily life of those guys was horrific. Oh, look, you know, I just said you I just asked you if you took it. Did you take helicopters to Baghdad? You're like no we drove first seven minutes driving out of Ramadi sucked totally man sucked Michigan yep yeah you're Going down route Michigan to get out of there. Now look, you could have snuck up, what's the road to the North African-- - Mobile. - Yeah, you could have gone to route mobile and pushed out. I hope you did that. You're looking at, like maybe you did sometimes. - I had done one of each. When you just, I know I'm cutting you off. The Michigan out of Ramadi to buy up, that was, if you got through to-- the street sign that said like next exit, you know, you're leaving the town, you're heading towards Fallujah, you're good to go. - Yeah, yeah, you're good to go. But...

The guys from the 228, the guys from the 11 AD, these are soldiers and Marines that are there. Single thing that they did every single time they rolled out. It was them standing in the face of death path. And this is something that impact us so as soon as we get soon as tasking to bruiser shows up there immediately we're going to memorial services for soldiers and Marines. Bye. Standing there in the It wasn't the chow holes next it was a chapel So it was a tent it was a big tent. It was a big general-purpose tent to the chow hall and we show up and you know I hear that they'd lost Soldier lost a marine and something hey, we'll go you know, this is these are our guys so we show up and immediately know The seriousness, now I will tell you, I knew there was casualties happening, I did not know that the casualties were happening as often as they were, I did not. I thought to myself.

Hey, if a soldier or a Marine gets killed, we will 100% go to the memorial service. That was not true. We went to them when we could. But almost every day someone got wounded and people were getting killed a couple times a week week. And it was an honor for us to be able to support them now. There's a little technical aspect when I use the word support out. So, in the military there's two different, you can either be the supporting unit. Thank you. Or the supported unit. And what supported means is everyone is support. Supporting what I'm doing. I'm the supported unit. So I'm the one that's the main effort. And You're a supporting unit then you're the one that's helping the main effort. You're sort of like, Oh I know what it's the costar.

There's the star in the costar the star is the supported unit and everyone else is the supporting actors right well Oftentimes special operations is the star of the movie. Like hey we're we're gonna be the ones that actually hit the target so These other conventional forces are going to support what we're doing where the you're gonna be supporting role. We're gonna be the main role That makes sense in Oftentimes, what we had here was different. We were the supporting force, oftentimes, conventional army or the conventional Marine Corps Was the main effort they were the star of the show and we were Supporting actors The reason that's important to bring this up is some people didn't like that some people in the special

operations community did not like that. And there's a good reason why they didn't like that. Was actually a good reason why they didn't like that. There's a good reason why I was Cautious And if you read the book by Ben Milligan called by water beneath the walls, you'll understand why because sometimes Operations when they're the co-star, when they're the supporting actor, they can get abused. If you don't know what I'm talking about read the book by water beneath the walls there was times where the Rangers for instance Would get used to assault targets that they shouldn't be assaulting. They didn't have the strength, they didn't have the numbers. Highly trained. So there were times like that in the history. Of special operations where falling into that supporting role has caused problems. Now...

Like I said, I was cautious, but it was not like that we We may have been on paper the supporting unit, just like you are the supporting unit on paper, Dave. - So many similarities. - Yeah. We are the supporting unit, but I can promise you that we got as much support as we gave. And that was required that that was really necessary now listen if we wouldn't have done that We just wouldn't have I mean Same thing with you. If you would have said, Listen, I'm only going to go out if I'm the star of this movie, you wouldn't have gone out, really. I know we wouldn't have. If the only way to go out well, we could have done an alternate set of missions. This is true But we wouldn't have been as involved as we were and you would not have contributed The way you would the impact you would have made it would have been significantly less So I was forced with face with the exact same when I got there

a little different because I had an image in my mind which really wasn't based on anything 'cause I had no previous ground combat experience. So I had a sense of what Anglico did, so I show up there thinking how it's gonna be. I get that I realize if we are going to contribute We are gonna have to find a way to support the army and we are on the army side of things So you're talking about the museum right there's we're both but we're primarily on the south with the army units I was gonna have to did you have another Anglico team that was up with 3-8 no because Three it's a Marine Battalion they have their own organic found which I know this guys three seven and three and those guys extremely Well, we had another Anglico team out of Craig girl with you guys, which you know, another Anglico team but because the Marines up on the north side of the city, had their own organic fact and air shop. They didn't need me. I worked with them a little bit, actually did some missions with them, but mostly didn't have to. The army didn't have any, so I worked with them. To your point though, as soon as I got there, I realized,

First of all, there weren't enough of me to go around. They needed way more support than I could provide them, but the only way for me to really contribute is, it was exactly what I just said, I had to support them. Not do what I thought I wanted to do for me, it's what I needed to do for them. - Yeah, yeah, I got asked by. One of my senior officers that actually came to Ramadi. They're like, do you need anything? I was like, three more task units, or two more task units, or something like that, 'cause there was so much work to be done. The reason there was a lot of work to be done was this was going to be a very And one of the reasons it was gonna be not not just a tough fight But it was a different fight than what had happened in Fallujah in 2004. So in Fallujah It was a massive kinetic operation where Coalition forces pushed through they gave warning to the civilians to leave like it was a siege and assault of Fallujah Just that's what it was

And outstanding job by the soldiers and Marines that executed that, but it was very kinetic. Like I said, there was warnings infrastructure was devastated inside of Fallujah when that happened and so when Maliki gets elected he wants peace and He knew That a she led invasion let's call it because that's what it so most of the army so Made up primarily of Shias and The ruling class had been Sunnis. That's Saddam was a Sunni so the arm Once the army was formed up now in 2006 the army consisted of a lot of Shia there were some Sunni battalions but it was a majority was Shia So what Maliki knew is if he took his Shi army for the most part

And did a massive kinetic operation through Ramadi, that would look like Shia versus Sunni. And that would, you know, could obviously. Splinter into a massive civil war. So what he wanted to do was a less kinetic option. He also Wanted to preserve the infrastructure. So that's what was going on. This, this, that's what... Going on and so a few weeks into our deployment it was time for the 228 Iron soldiers out of Pennsylvania and they're actually out of all over the country because they were National Guard you to get guys from Utah Guys from Vermont guys from all over the place, Pennsylvania. Yes, and there was Also active duty, the three Marines was working for them at the time too. But it was time for them to go home, most of them to go home. And General Grotzky's been on this podcast, talked through what that looked like, talked through what his deployment was like. Uh... The now the group that came in to take their place is 1 1 ad they

They're led by Colonel, now General, Sean McFarland. He comes in to replace them. Power to so he has tanks he has Bradley's he has more people like it's a significant upgrade in combat power and That gives him capability of going into these enemy control territories and setting up combat outposts. So... When you got there about a month ahead of me. Yep. So what did that transition look strategically from what the 228 was doing to now you get. It one one AD rolls in, what'd you say? - Yeah, a lot of how you describe it. So I get there, I have I think a month ahead of you is about what it ended up being. I'm there a month ahead of you. I think I'll leave a month before you, give or take a couple of days. A lot of work when we first got.

In with the 228, a lot of that for me was figuring out what was going on. And I'm not a strategist, but really what we were, there was a lot of, maybe the best word I could think of is like a containment. Where we could go and where we couldn't go. We, and of course, we're there as a supporting unit. I am there to bring capability that they don't have. They didn't have helicopters. They didn't have jets. They didn't have ISR. They didn't have a bunch of things that I had. We also, quite frankly, like, had an extra truck and extra rifles and an extra turret gunner. We brought That did nothing but help them. But in the end, the operations were somewhat limited to making sure that the enemy didn't expand their reach and didn't go beyond what we knew they currently had. We had crystal clear maps of what we owned and what they owned. And a lot of it was operating inside those confines. And knowing what that was. Clearly the contrast when we swap out, we watched the swap out from 228 to 11, that operation, that the entire strategic mindset changed.

That month maybe a little bit of there I may have saw some things from an experience wise but you and I saw the transition very similarly from what was going on from A very similar perspective despite. I had a little extra time on the ground. Yeah, I do remember when I got there Because I got there maybe like I don't know a week or something before Like task unit bruiser, like all the boys showed up. And the rumor was... We're doing Fallujah we're gonna fallujah the place was the church. Did you get that exact same thing? So so I was when when my? As we're coming, I was thinking to myself, oh, it's on, like this is gonna be... We're gonna do another Fallujah and seals operate in Fallujah and that was a good Situation for them, you know to get in there. Yeah, and obviously it had worked As you looked at Fallujah and Fallujah was pretty pacified. I mean, at least from that perspective. Now, are there some negatives? Of course, you've got displaced citizens, that's a huge thing. Take 400,000 people and think about that.

Iraq the instructors already not great now you can send four hundred thousand civilians down to the hinterland to try and figure things out That doesn't work But that's what I was hearing when I showed up there, oh, we're gonna do another Fallujah. That's what we're gonna do. And it didn't take maybe a couple weeks before, oh, we're not doing a Fallujah. Part of that was the 11AD coming in. Oh, maybe you remember this, I just remembered it. There was a moment where what we're going to do is when the. 228 and the 11 ad are on the ground together will have twice the competition That's when we're gonna do the flooja thing. Did you hear that rumor? We've talked about this. We've never proved it but you and I were in the same meeting Partially because of our role in our organizations. We had similar roles in terms of our responsibility downstream and roles to the brigade. And so all these, you're repeating all the exact same conversations I observed to include, well if we do this, what's the risk, what's the drawback, the infrastructure.

It was always the largest one, it was like, rubbling the city might have long term impacts that we don't want, so all these conversations, but we had this window where we had all this, yeah, all this firepower available, so I think we were literally sitting in the same rooms having the same conversations. They're talking through these things. Yeah, the clincher was though Maliki smart, right? Maliki been elected He was smart enough to know dude. I don't want a civil war in this country. And if I invade Ramadi with a bunch of Shia army people and Go into a Sunni city we could have a we could have a freaking civil war on our hands and he didn't want that. So the New strategy was to go into these enemy controlled territories, enemy controlled neighborhoods, and set up combat outposts. All of this was to be done by, with, and through Iraqi forces, meaning everything needed.

To be led by Iraqis, I right they wanted everything to have and this is the term that was used an Iraqi face. Here's the problem with the term Iraqi face. The Iraqi face is just the face, right? And ultimately you needed to have more than just the face. You needed to actually have some capability. I wrote about this in the dichotomy of leadership. We were told when we got there and and the guys that turned over with us, like hey, they're gonna try and make you use Iraqi soldiers to do all your missions. You're gonna have to take them with you. And it was kinda like, and they were doing some of it. Challenging for them. It was challenging for us. But, and again, I think that's the point of this. And wrote about this in dichotomy, they were telling us we needed to have, I forget what the exact ratio was, it might have been six to one, it might have been seven to one, but for every one of-- And you had that six Iraqi soldiers with you. This was problematic, I pushed back against it.

Back against it. I didn't push back and say no we don't want to take any Iraqi soldiers. All I said was hey look the minimum number of seals I want to have is like four or five. Six, something like that, depending on where they're going. But we still. So 99% of the operations that we did were side by side with Iraqi soldiers. We didn't have to take them on reconnaissance missions. That's one that we were allowed to do unilaterally. And so we did a couple of those. We did wa- we- one that was waterborne and we were really nervous about taking the Iraqi soldiers with us in the boats because they didn't know how to swim and So we went took the time to get them we had Order life jackets, we got 'em life jackets eventually. And I remember I sent that one up the chain of command saying, Hey, listen.

We want to do this. We want to do these operations from the boats. I don't feel comfortable with the Iraqis Going with us. Can we do it unilaterally and the word came back down? Nope Take Iraqis and so what we did was we gave them like swim training and It was more like float testing than it was swim training training. But what we did is we got them to make sure that they would float if they fell in the water. And then we went and brought them with as a partner for. They like did basically security from the boats as we did the going ashore part, but that's the type of scrutiny was happening with trying to get these missions done. And that's the way it works. And the reason it was was because If no one is telling you you have to take Iraqi soldiers with you, you're gonna say yeah, okay then go

Then we want, it's just additional risk that you don't want to have to take. And here's another important piece to understand. Again, through my fault, not everyone understood this. Our mission from the Siege of Sotah, which is the combined joint. Special Operations Task Force. So this is all special operations in the country, both Iraqi and American. And whoever else. Our mission from them was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. So why is that important? Well, we weren't being told to train and fight special operations units of Iraqi soldiers.

To train and fight and by fight I don't know if you know this echo or I just want to make this clear Train and fight means we're gonna train them and we're gonna fight with them Like we're gonna we're gonna take them out and fight them like sail a boat Like we're gonna sail the boat that's what you fight the platoon you take them out so they can fight The... The people that we were training, that we were directed to train, were regular, conventional Iraqi soldiers, the jundis. We ended up scraping together and actually the guys that predated us they scraped together and put together a unit a special they call it a special Mission unit that was pretty close to like okay this is more of a special operations type direct action and again the guys that appreciate There from the SEAL teams they built that unit and did a good job And so we took them over but we also took over a bunch of working Side by side with regular Iraqi jundies. jondis and out of

Each time we try and carve out like a scout element. We called him scouts. They had their own little scout element We'd kind of work with them, but they were Just general purpose Iraqi soldiers which meant they were conscripts which meant they were untrained they were uneducated they were unmotivated sometimes they were un-loyal and we didn't Have any blue on green. We didn't have any of those types of attacks while we were there, but we were definitely suspect. Poster of Muktada al-Sadr in their barracks. You know, like the crazy Muktada al-Sadr looking poster and he has got lightning all around him. Like, the Jundis had-- That guy was a bad guy. I had targeted him my previous deployment, poster of him hanging in the barracks. So there was, it was tough.

That's what we were dealing with. It also means that they were poorly equipped. They didn't have night vision for sure. They certainly didn't have night vision. They didn't have, they didn't actually have flashlights. Like a flashlight for every three or four guys. But they certainly didn't have weapons mounted lights. They didn't have any helmet mounted lights. They just would have like a flashlight. And you know what we did? We, you know everyone, HCL probably has three or four flashlights and so guys were giving them flashlights so that they could see. One of the reasons why we conducted a lot of operations in the daytime because when the mission of the partner force that you've been tasked to train and fight doesn't-- Have night vision and operates in the day, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna say hey we trained you but now you go out by yourselves you can do that What kind of bond do you

With the forces that you're working with not a very good one. Does it give the enemy a tactical advantage? Yeah, here's the thing The enemy did not really go out at night in Ramadi very much. I'd say we probably killed less than 1% of the enemy that we killed were at night. They came out in the daytime. When they came out. That's their best form of camouflage. Their best form of camouflage was...wasn't the darkness. It was the civilian populace. So, you know, the idea that we own the night, which we certainly do, but the enemy knew that we own the night. And that's why... They were very inactive at night. They wouldn't do anything at night Yeah, very similar things and obviously coming from aviation, you know The massive advantage we typically had back then was we had the capability of conducting daytime Tactics at night because of our night capability night vision goggles all the systems that we had We loved operating at night because it gives us huge advantage

One of the other things that was a huge priority for us as we focused almost exclusively, we did a lot of stuff at night. I shouldn't say we didn't, we did plenty of things at night but typically the night missions that we did - We were in the intelligence driven raids where we knew where we were going and why, and we wanted to catch them by surprise because we expected them to be doing nothing, doing. So I don't mean to say we didn't operate at night, but the night missions had a different focus behind them. Daytime missions, one of the things we also got some strategic insight. You've talked about this a lot. And it's just something that that I had to reflect back on because I didn't quite keep up as much until after I was gone thinking about it was our presence there, our existence there was really designed to help the local populace that we decided not to fallujah, we were not going to try to level their city is we wanted them to see better alternative than the insurgents who were really bad, evil people. And one of the ways we had to do that is we had to be present. We literally called them presence patrols. They were there to show them, Hey, we're here for you.

We are going to stay here and we're going to align with you and I want you to see us doing that, which meant we were going to operate during the day. Would I rather operate at night from a tactical advantage? - Yes, all this great gear and all this great training and a lifetime of experience doing that, knowing the enemy couldn't, that did not help us with one of the main strategic objectives we had. Which was you are gonna see me there, which means we had to operate during the day and we had to make a big adjustment to do that because just at face value, we had a bigger advantage at night. But that wasn't gonna accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. - And yeah, that's exactly with, for instance, with that special mission unit. We're doing direct action rates, which we did. I don't know how many direct action, we did a lot of direct action rates. Of course we did those at night because we had that. Small group of Iraqi soldiers that we gave them all flashlights so we could help get

We'd have our guys on night vision we could kind of protect the patrol going on there once we hit the target Well now they're inside we can turn on lights. They can use the flashlights. Everything's cool. Yeah, we absolutely did that We did a lot of that but when you've got a conventional Iraqi force that needs to do a Troll or a clearance inside the city. They are absolutely gonna do that during the day Yep, I mean it would be mayhem if they did that at night. You couldn't yeah, you couldn't do it. So that's what We started doing with these Iraqi forces in the lead is again as much as we could get them to take the lead We started to clear the city now. The other thing is Am I gonna have to like push the guys like hey you guys gotta go out like dude I don't have to push I don't have to push Lafe Laith baben or seth stone or btf tony like hey you better Go out there and do this or JP or Mikey Montsor like no these guys are people I mean yeah.

Mikey Montsor is the guy that had got casa vac because he had a freaking ear infection comes back and is like Can you get me back to my guys? I won't there's not I want to go. I want to go like that's just That's just not happening. We had 30 plus Freaking bad-ass frogmen that want to go out. And so do I have to push them? No, actually what I have to do is hold them back. Actually would have to say like, hey. BTF Tony, I know that you want to go and do this, that, the other thing in broad daylight, you're not doing that, bro. It's not happening. He wanted to get. He had all kinds of ideas of things that PTF Tony wanted to do. Um So that's what we did and like Do we do direct action rates? Of course do those at night? Yes, of course. Do we do recon tonight? Yes, of course we did. Did we? Oftentimes for our overwatch positions insert at night. Yes, we did So we did those kind of things But this is what was what was different was we we had to go into a coin a counter-insurgency mode

we had to change the mode from just doing direct action to doing these counter-insurgency type of things. Which is a whole spectrum of operations. Why are we doing that? Cuz we were freaking losing at the time. Yeah, we were losing Not just in her body the whole country we were losing enemy attacks were up 300% it was Going in the wrong direction. I know that on my first deployment to Iraq we were targeting Bye. Insurgence we're targeting really like cell leaders. We weren't calling them insurgents yet. That's what they became once They got organized once they got led, but we were playing whack-a-mole. God grab a bad guy God someone to replace him God I could grab a different bad guy someone to replace him here's a Declassified study about the war that was released in 2007 about the insurgency in 2006. It says this is from the gamma corporation The capital of al-ambar was the only city in Iraq where gunfights were still routine in 2006 in late

In May 2004 AQI leaders fleeing the assault from Fallujah had poured into Ramadi, eventually laying siege to the government center in the heart of the city. A woefully undersized force of two American battalions undertook a spy house operation to hold a city of 400,000. In five visits to since 2004 I had watched The American casualties climb beyond those suffered in the Fallujah battle. A hundred and forty thousand troops in country and they produced three thousand patrols a day including close-in security. That's not a sufficient number And had become its own mission. Even our advisors have to take four hum-- these to make one patrol. The senior levels insist on it. We're too rich. Exverse we're not taking back the streets The commanders understand the principles of counterinsurgency the first is to make contact with the people and you don't

Establish that by staying inside the wire or driving in convoys convoys the first technique We'd push as instructors if given more freedom to suggest improvements, that's simple. We'd argue for more foot patrols with the jundies. This school is not in the business of operations. We're here to change attitudes. So this was the whole, one of the strategic changes. We saw is we got to get outside the wire We had coalition forces got to get outside the wire got to start doing like you said presence patrols But it's not just presence patrols. It goes beyond on that because what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up combat operations inside your city so yes we're gonna do And what are we doing on those presence patrols by the way we're going into meeting with the families We're saying oh your kids sick. What is oh we got a Corman here. Let's give them some medicine. Well. That's what we're doing Oh, you got a problem with your generator Oh guess what we got a CB that we can bring out here and help work on your generator for you

Doing you're figuring out what this you're doing census as well Who's out there? What's that human terrain look like? Like, it. Yes, I'm doing big clearance operations where you're literally going again we being Iraqi soldiers in the lead, you know on one of these clearance operations. We probably have 150 Iraqi Soldiers seven seals 100 army guys the Army guys are setting up cordons, the SEALs are setting up overwatch positions, and the Iraqis are moving building to building. - Yeah. Like as a broad kind of overview of what those clearance operations look like. - There was nothing like, like, there's no comparison to this. You couldn't look at Fallujah from the year prior where that, I know it worked for a particular outcome, but it would not, it was not a frame, not a model to use.

They looked at the Fallujah model and said, We can't do that, for that exact reason. It was nothing like '03, the march up. Nothing like Desert Storm. There was, what we were doing in that time, there was no other, oh, just, we're just gonna do that. Everything was different, everything was new for everybody. It was completely complex, and it was unlike, certainly historically, but also unlike-- what I was thinking or what people were thinking because the frame of reference you have is whatever your previous frame of reference is, if you're on the march up in '03, that's what you remember. Then you get there like, oh god, this is totally different. If you were in Fallujah, guys that came from Fallujah or had been in Fallujah, this is totally different. There was no comparison to the complexity and the range of things we were doing and the type of missions we were doing to anything that anybody had done. And I mean anybody, even the most experienced people that have been around for 15 years, There was no frame of reference that, oh, we did this, you know, back in Desert Storm.

We did this back in OIF. We were doing things that nobody had done in a generation. - And again, when you say we, you're talking about this broad coalition of. US Army soldiers and Marines special operations that would be us the seals that were there it was it was all new And again, this is all historically documented. This isn't like Dave sitting here saying oh he's saying what they did do we did something No, it's like it's it's just it's documented. Yes Hey, did it happen in Tal Afar? Yes, it did. So headed Dimi dump. Yes Actually, let me throw a correction at you up in Tal Afar which HR Master went up and did seize clear hold and build up in Tal Afar the Marines in Al Qasem I am, which I mentioned briefly, they did what they did that was outstanding, was they made friends with the... Populists who were pointing out where the bad guys were so actually now that I think about it people had done this before we work

We're capturing those lessons. We heard about the Marines in Al-Qa'im going door to door. It was a great story. Al-qaim going door-to-door trying to clear the city and someone would be like hey Why are you coming to my house? The bad guys are four buildings down. Oh Okay. Well do Want to help us and they would want to help and then McMaster did this up in Tal Afar and Guess who took McMaster's place? McFarland. So General McFarland, Colonel McFarland at the time rolls in and said, Oh, what'd you do here? Oh, I see what you did, okay, it worked. Oh yes, it worked. Let's go do it in Ramadi. Colonel Grodsky didn't have the combat power to get it done. He needed more people. Well. McFarland shows up and he's got tanks, which is gonna be a huge asset, and he's got more combat power. This idea of going in and building these combat outposts, so it wouldn't just be a presence patrol, it would be a permanent presence. That was another word that got thrown around a lot in those brigade meetings, permanent, established.

Permanent presence. - Yeah, the cops. - That's what the combat outposts were. And as we started to come up with a plan. Actual like mission planning for building the combat outpost. I realized one of the best things that we could do in tasking Abruzzo was support these operations be the Be the supporting actor. Provide Overwatch. And look, we did some Overwatchs out of the gate. Out of the gate, tasking a bruiser. And hey, I'm gonna correct you again, Dave. You said no one's ever done anything like this before. My first deployment, there was a unit that was getting hammered with mortars on the fringes of Baghdad. Real hostile area at the time. And we went out there and set up sniper positions. We went out there and set up these sniper positions. Positions we did at one time. We were ineffective. We were ineffective. We got mortared. You know we we took

some really close mortars, but we didn't do anything. We didn't engage anybody. But it gave me a little glimpse of a way to secretary would about there for a few days What if we would have put a cup? Other overwatch positions in other spots, you know, there's there's other things I figured out that we could do and as I saw this unfold as soon as we got there So we can put snipers out. Yeah And that's what we started doing immediately. And luckily, tasking a bruiser had 13 snipers in it. Which is a lot. It's a lot. Four snipers in a task unit would be sort of probably one. What the requirement is. Six is probably normal. Like, oh, we got six or seven snipers. We have 13 snipers. It's just luck, luck of the draw. Oh, you have a chief, you know, BTF Tony. Guess what, he'd been to sniper school. Not every chief goes this night, but he so that's that there's an additional one

We had guys that were new guys that had snuck in and gone to sniper school. And so we just ended up in a platoon with a lot of snipers in it. And so we had a huge tactical advantage. So very quickly, like I said, I got-- Our Snipers into the field. In with Iraqi soldiers. They're going in with our interpreters. On every sniper overwatch. So the Iraqi soldiers are with us. They're helping maintain security. They're up on the rooftops. They have machine guns in case we get attacked. They're helping us... Or manage the families that are in these buildings. Put these sniper teams out there and like I said, very quickly, these snipers are snipers. These steel snipers started killing bad guys. Within days we had these combined Iraqi SEAL sniper elements that are out there killing we probably killed I Don't know

Six seven eight bad guys within days and this was very shocking. This is very Shocking to the rest of the seal community, really, and special operations community at large. It was shocking to me as well. To the guys. Well look, we all knew Ramadi was bad, but we didn't understand how effective we could be. You don't want to be a fucking idiot. What's so surprised the enemy the enemy was shocked Because they hadn't had someone sneak into their backyard and kill them when they didn't expect it In these areas where people couldn't drive well guess what we could do we could walk we could sneak in there We could sneak in there at night could set up a position when they start in the daytime, start doing what they normally do, we could take. Out when they start digging holes in the road to put IEDs in guess who's gonna kill them we are There's a lot of them and it surprised, like I said, it surprised the enemy, it surprised me, it surprised everybody.

Was surprised I was surprised my boss's boss was surprised no one was used to this level of of enemy engagement. That's why I said Ramadi was different. Here's a quote. The one after the Fallujah offensive, the Americans tried to quell the insurgency in Ramadi with a combination of political maneuvers and cooperat-- of tribal leaders to root out foreign Islamist fighters. But that plan has spectacularly fallen apart. The men who dared to ally themselves with the Americans quickly learned that the US military couldn't protect them. Sturgence killed 70 of Ramadi's police recruits in January. Yeah, that's Glass Factory. And at least a half a dozen high-profile tribal leaders have been assassinated since then. This was a first

terror campaign Quote this whole thing's a quote. I'm injecting some little quotes like this thing is a freaking terror campaign. That was my interjection Book. My mortar attacks daily. that's from Megan K. Stack and Louis Rougu from an article called Fear of Big Battle Panics Iraqi City 11 June 2006. 2006 So yeah, go listen to the podcast about the glass factory If you want to know what happened there, and this is all fresh when we showed up that happened happened in January. Those tribal leaders, the shame...

Got assassinated. So the idea that Ramadi was somehow in good condition when Task Unit Bruiser arrived, and let me give you another quote here. In late 2005 the Sunni tribes around Ramadi attempted to expel al-qaeda in Iraq back. After growing weary of the terrorist groups heavy-handed, indiscriminate murder and intimidation campaign, a group calling itself the on- People's Council formed a from a coal formed from a coalition of local Sunni sheiks and Sunni nationalist groups the council intended to conduct organized resistance against Of coalition forces and Al Qaeda elements, but undermanned and hand strung by tribal vendettas, it lacks strength and cohesion. Series of tribal leader assassinations ultimately brought down the group which ceased to exist by February of 2006. This collab

Set the conditions that the brigade found when it arrived in late May. The assassinations created a vacuum, a leadership. Vacuum in Ramadi and by cutting tribal ties to outside tribal centers isolated the city. For their part, the tribes had adopted a plan to Did a passive posture, not wishing to antagonize the powerful al-Qaeda presence in and around Ramadi. As the Ready First prepared to move from Tal Afar, their new AO was essentially in enemy hands. So that's what was going on. The idea that Ramadi had been pacified was not true. Ramadi was a complete war zone when we showed up. Uh, here's from the same article in the summer of 2006 Ramadi by any measure was among the most dangerous cities in Iraq the area Operations averaged over three times more tax per capita than any other area in the country

With the exception of the embattled government center and nearby buildings held by a company of Marines, Al-Baghdadi and his team were also killed. Al-Qaeda-related insurgents had almost complete freedom of movement throughout the city. Nearly all of the city's key structures including the city hospital the largest in Anbar province their freedom of movement allowed them to emplace complex subsurface IED belts which rendered much of the city a no-go terrain for US and Iraqi army forces That's the summer of 2006 I'm just gonna use that as a better way to explain what I was saying You're all correct aside my whole point was like this was different than Anything when I say we that was my team and the teams were supporting what this was a there was nothing like this This was just different. Yep. This environment was different and listen If you were in habania or you were in Baghdad or you were in Eusephia and someone was

Shoot, that's you we get it man. Of course, of course the chances of them shooting you were three times greater if you were in Ramadi So that that's just the way it was That's why it was different and that's why I didn't do a good job of making sure people understood what we were getting into It was so different. Now, as we got there and... and Like I said, we started killing bad guys almost immediately. We immediately became the most scrutinized. In the country and I don't mean that in a bad way actually I actually mean it in a positive way my chain of And wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing and make sure that we had the support that we needed. So they... Increased their micromanagement and I was fine with it. How did they do that? Well, here's a question. Examples. Number one, they changed the level of authority required for operations to be conducted.

Example there was some basic operation that I was able to approve myself If we were gonna do a presence patrol. When I got there, I could say, yep. Lay if you want to take you guys out and do a presence patrol. Go ahead. I approve it within a week They said, Hey, Jocko, we have approval for that now. I said, Okay, cool, fine. I wasn't upset by this at all. I had a great relationship with my commanding officer. We could, I think the only-- The only thing that I was actually allowed to conduct by the end of the deployment, but no not by the end Within a couple weeks was like, hey if you need to do a logistics convoy, you can approve it Jocko. Everything else was. Over seen by my chain of command, which I was perfectly fine was why did he do that? It's because the operations were very risky and he knew it. My boss knew it. My commanding officer knew that.

He's the overall responsible if I'm going out there and killing a bunch of people he needs and he wants to know what's going on of course he's the one that's gonna have to answer for it yeah hey Jocko I'm gonna Put more control on you. Great! Thank you! No problem! And that's exactly what happened. And listen, he knew that operations were risky Like I said and and and I can tell you right now this might seem strange I don't know what it's like for you in the pilot world world. If you want to promote and you want to make rank the the... The surest way to do that is to avoid risk. Just don't take risk. Just don't take it. Even for me. Like I had a, up to this point in my career. It had been a an awesome career. I mean I'd had an incredibly blessed career in the SEAL teams

And if I wanted to continue on my trajectory The easiest thing to do is not do anything The easiest thing to do is yep, we're gonna train some Iraqi soldiers, that's our mission, we'll train our Iraqi soldiers, we'll stay... that is tempting. It was tempting for my boss too. But here's the thing. Thank you. Our fellow Americans were in a fight and needed our support. The US Army soldiers, the US Marines were in an incredibly tough fight and we have to Some capabilities that we could bring to the table to help them and I knew it and It's not one part of me that looks at a situation where there's Americans that are fighting and I say, Oh yeah, that's not me. I'm not doing that.

These guys are getting wounded and killed on a daily basis and we've got an opportunity to help protect them. That's what we're doing And guess what my boss agreed And guess what? His boss agreed. Agreed. These were risky operations. I had a conversation with my boss, my commanding officer. That we'd already done some operation, we already killed some bad guys, we'd already gotten some firefights, and he's like, Isn't this risky? And I was like, Sir, yes, it is. Risky to be out there with these Iraqi soldiers in the daytime clear doing clearances. Yes, it is, sir. It's very risky there's enemy all over. He says, what are you gonna do to mitigate the risk? I told him. Are gonna kill the enemy before they kill us. That's what we're gonna do for mitigation. That's where, that's one of the primary drivers of setting up these Overwatch positions. Because I had an element on the ground with 40.

Iraqi soldiers and I had six or seven seals with that element helping them do the clearance. How can I protect them? Oh, I can tell you I can protect them. My snipers in overwatch positions where they can protect them and see the enemy maneuvering on them. And that's exactly what we did. And again, my commanding officer was... I had a great relationship with him. And he, it's his job to make sure we're doing the right thing. You know before we even left on deployment I Was in his office we had changed we were supposed to go to Baghdad we changed now. We know we're gonna Ramadi I was in his office and he asked me something along the lines of or he told me Something along the lines of hey before every mission you need to ask yourself is Is this mission worth the lives of one of your guys?

I actually looked at my said hey, sir. I can ask I can answer you that question right now There's no mission that that there could be That's worth the life of one of my guys guys. There's no mission. I don't care if it's Osama Bin Laden, I don't care. That might be an extreme statement, but there's no mission that's worth it. Or the life of one of my guys, these are my bros. Were you kidding me? And I said, sir, that-- That being said, there will be risk on every mission that we do, and we're going to mitigate it as much as we can. But it is not... Possible to mitigate all risk. It's not possible. Or unless we just stay home. So we will mitigate risk to the utmost, to the utmost. And that's what we did. And END

Then again great relationship with my commanding officer. He approved all the missions He had to approve all the missions that we did except for maybe like I said logistics convoys Logistics convoy to bring Seth Stone and the guys out of Craig door some equipment or gear that they needed, we could do that. I could approve it. Everything else that we did had to be approved up the chain of command. And by the way, there was also a level of operations that had to get approved by his chain of command. And they were all being very micromanaging of us. Which was fine. Which was fine. So the idea that I was out. They're just running unchecked is like completely insane It's complete I had first of all I had my chain my chain of And so my seal team commander and then the siege of sotav commander above him. They're reading

These ops sons they know exactly what's going on. On top of that we have the conventional army chain of command. The Marine Corps chain of command which by the way the army reported into the Marine Corps at that time on top of that we had To get approval from the battle space owner. So if you're gonna go work in Tamim, which is a one. Section of Ramadi, if you're gonna go work in there, you need to get approved by the battle space owner. That mission to him you got to coordinate with him then you got to go talk to the company commander and say hey captain here's what i'm looking at doing then you got to talk to the platoon commander who's actually gonna be running the QRF for you or whatever. Oh and by the way on top of all that approval you gotta get approval from the Iraqi chain of command. Every move that we made, every operation that we conducted, every time we left the wire. Had to be approved and coordinated through all these different elements and then of course

On the ground like I said you got to coordinate with every everyone you took on the ground for sure it you're gonna talk to the Italian company platoon squad if you fail to coordinate with the battle space owners, it's freaking suicide It's suicide They owned the ground. And by they, I mean like a company commander owns a chunk of real estate out there. You gotta go talk to him. The intel by the way too. Like they're the ones that know, hey there was an IED in that street three days in a row. Don't go down it, thank you. They told us the safest route. Leif wrote about this. Leif wrote about asking a conventional battle space owner, hey, Speck off. Also wants to do an operation down here. What do you think? He's like, Do not drive down that road. You'll lose a vehicle. Okay, cool, we didn't go. Conventional battle space owners. They're the ones that conducted our QRF. They're the ones that

conducted our fire support. They're the ones that we relied upon to conduct our casualty evacuation. So if we got a guy wounded, it would be. Was the Army or the Marine Corps that was gonna come and rescue us. If we needed fire support, it was the Army or the Marine Corps that was gonna come and rescue us. That's what was happening. They're the ones that were gonna send troops. They're the ones that are gonna send armor. They're the ones that are gonna send Kazyvak vehicles to us. We didn't have the assets to do that. We didn't, we didn't. Zero times. Zero times, well I guess, let me not say zero times. Any time we did an operation in... The urban area of Ramadi zero times was task unit bruiser assets, the QRF or the Kazovac, zero times. If we did an operation in the Hinterland in a rural area, like up at MC1 or 1MC, what is it MC1? MC1?

If we did an operation up there, it's a rural area We might stage our vehicles and leave an element with vehicles that could actually do the casvac But even there most of the time I don't want to say zero because I think a couple times we did actors our own QRF or act as our own casvac but 99% of the time it was the conventionals that were doing that for us and so They had to approve what the hell we were gonna do. They had to agree to support it. I had to put in my Concept of operations, what my Kazovac platform was, who it was, what frequencies we were going to be on. And if we couldn't get the Approval and support from the conventional forces. We could not conduct the mission period in store We We couldn't conduct operations without them. That's why this was such a team effort. And we called in these assets, QRF, Fire Support and Kazovac.

You combine all those three together we called those in I can't count how many times And God bless the US Army and God bless the US Marine Corps for coming to help us Coming to save us and coming to evacuate our wounded guys. And you might think yourself why did they agree to do that? I? Can tell you why they agreed to do it because they knew that we took significant risk to go into their areas Into their battle spaces and kill the insurgents that were trying to kill them. And they were thankful and grateful. Just like we were thankful and grateful for them when they came and Pulled our ass out of terrible situations. This was a team effort. The army called us army seals.

The Marine Corps gave us Marines. I had Marines that worked in my tactical operations center for the entire deployment to coordinate communication. There's two outstanding Marines that were there 24 hours a day. We used Marine Corps Cirque boats on many occasions at great risk to those Marines and their boats. We had a great relationship. The Marines didn't have to do that. They did it because we were all part of the same team. That's what's going on. Here's an overview of how things unfolded. This is once again from Colonel Sean McFarland, the Brigade Commander. He says it was clear that to win over the sheiks and their people are being CT, that's brigade combat team, would have to move into the city and its contested areas.

To employ a tactic we had borrowed from 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and used successfully in Tal Afar, the combat outpost or COP. This is what I was just talking about. That's what McMaster did. General McMaster. No disrespect sir. Master, Colonel McMaster at the time, that's what he did up at Tal Afar with the proud soldiers of the Third Armored Cav. Legendary guys legendary deployment did an outstanding job Continuing on back to the book our cops normally consisted of a tank or infantry company team based in the defensible local structure in a disputed area eventually the COPS included an Iraqi army company wherever possible as they became emboldened by our presence. Later we began to establish Iraqi police substations at or near the cops as well. At this early stage, the outpost provided lily pads for mechanized quick reaction forces, safe houses for special operations units. That's us. and

Security for civil military operation centers in rural centers the cops sometimes doubled as fire bases with mortars and counterfire radars That's out like at MC one Because we now maintained a constant presence in disputed neighborhoods, the insurgents could no longer accurately trace and predict our actions. And random patrols out of combat outposts presented prevented al-qaeda from effectively moving and operating within the local populace. At the same time, the COPs enhanced our ability to conduct civil-military operations, CMO, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, and information operations. I'm gonna continue on. Here's something that no one wants to hear. These outposts also acted as fly bait, especially. In the period immediately after a new cop was established. Explain.

systems at their disposal, including suicide car bombs. These attacks usually did not end well for the insurgents, who often suffered heavy casualties. During the establishment of the first outpost in July 2006, the enemy mounted multiple platoon assaults. The frenzy of attacks on the new outpost culminated in a city-wide battle on July 24th, 2006, in which Al Qaeda and Iraq forces were severely beaten and sustained heavy casualties. October the attacks were far less with elements consisting of a handful of men conducting hit-and-run type operations. These noticeable decreases in their strength indicated our plan to decimate their ranks was clearly working coalition presence insurgent attrition and loss of the insurgent mobility freed the people from constant intimidation and Sacked any support for al-qaeda in iraq, so Oh. What that meant was what I just read, the fly bait, this is what people don't wanna hear, you, when the.

Conventional forces were building this massive construction project to Establish a combat outpost, we knew that the enemy was going to attack. That's what we knew was going to happen. And so what we did in Task Unit Bruiser is we pushed out from those combat Outposts as they were being built and set up sniper overwatch positions with Iraqi soldiers along with us, with interpreters along with us, with seal elements. Would set up these sniper overwatch positions and when the enemy maneuvered into attack we would interdict and kill them and They did it often That's what was happening.

Continuing on, the COPs also allowed us to control the infrastructure in Ramadi and use it to support the populace again. During a he- We publicized operation in July 2006. We established a combat outpost man-wearing With newly recruited Iraqi army troops and US forces. We set it up just outside the Ramadi General Hospital walls while the Iraqi army secured the hospital. Within days the hospital providing medical care for the was providing medical care for the city the effect death Devastated and embarrassed al-qaeda and iraq insurgents Wounded fighters brought to the hospital were detained while the general populace received quality medical attention for the first time in a year And Seals supported that operation. As a matter of fact, seals went in first to that operation. Seals went into first, seals were. First people on the ground in almost all of these combat outposts. Why is that?

Because the army wanted us there because the Marine Corps wanted us there Because they knew and we knew they were gonna get attacked They knew and we knew that as soon as we cleared these rows, as soon as EOD And the engineers cleared these roads from roadside bombs Insurgents would come out and put they have a name It's called reseeding IEDs. So, on... An insurgent would go and put a hole in the ground and put a bomb in there. Would clear that bomb it would leave a hole the insurgents would come back out and reseed meaning put a new bomb inside the hole. That's one of their tactics, techniques, and procedures. It's very easy for my snipers to get up on a long axis road where a mine... Vehicle goes by, digs out a mine, disposes of it, there's a hole there. The vehicle drives away.

Two hours later, insurgent comes out to reseed. This is one of their tactics. Thank you for watching! Please subscribe to my channel and share this video! The tribes to cooperate we first needed to understand the human terrain in our ale and that task fell to an outstanding and talented junior officer. Captain Travis. Atraquin an Arabic speaking former Special Forces soldier And an infantry officer signed as the ready brigade s9 engagements officer Patrick

Coordinated brigade level local meetings and discussions He quickly gained the sheik's confidence through his language and interpersonal skills and developed strong personal bonds With their families he strengthened these bonds during meetings between the brigade commander or deputy commanding officer and the shakes battalion Company commanders also worked on improving relations with the townspeople on a daily basis thus the Jake's growing trust of the brigade officers led them to support our efforts to reach them. Invigorate police recruiting. Interaction on a daily basis almost with the tribal leaders there And much of that was because of a heroic human being named captain Travis Patrick run who is at all the

meetings Dave was just talking about, who is an Arabic speaker, who was. He was a special forces guy freaking just an outstanding human big-ass smile on his face by the way Bye. Nice, super nice guy. Understood the culture. Now does this mean that every single Marine and every single soldier saw this incredible level of coordination and cooperation? Of course not Can there be someone that might have a different perspective or harbored some kind of animosity or did? Understand how the team worked together. Of course. Look there's 5,600 people there. There's people in silos there's people that see one event and judge, you know, what if submarine didn't get word? On seals using their OP or getting fuel from their fuel farm.

What if an army officer didn't know we had coordinated with headquarters on a resupply of some ammo? What might what? Might one of those individuals get angry and hold a grudge? Sure. That's possible. Could there be someone that didn't get the coordination, that missed the meeting and see. Roll in there and they didn't know about it. Could that yes. Absolutely. Is that possible? In fact, it's not just possible. It's guaranteed You got such a compliment Environment not everyone's gonna see it the same way, but the those people are in a small We are extremely small minority the vast majority of people on the ground understood with Great pride, the communication, the coordination, the camaraderie that was everywhere on the battlefield. Everywhere. Now,

Again it if you're on the outside and You don't know this I can see how You you know someone could get the impression that Jock was just out there just doing everything on this that you could you could end up It's just so clearly ludicrous to think that Everything was checked. Everything was scrutinized. Everything was approved through multiple lines of chains of command and The way it was and so I got into this whole diatribe because I was talking about the scrutiny that we fell under here's another scrutiny that we fell under We had scrutiny from getting our missions approved another piece of scrutiny that we fell under almost immediately was we had to Begin filling out two sworn shooter statements for every person that we killed. This was not a normal procedure. And as you know, within a. Within probably a week this hey from now on we want two sworn shooter statements for everyone that you kill

Like, okay, Roger that. What did Leif and Seth and the boys say? What are you kidding me? We gotta fill out more paperwork? Of course they're mad. I knew and I understood why I had conversation with my JAG officer about it He's like listen these multiple forms of document documentation of what happens. This is gonna means When people make claims in the future, if they do, we will be able to explain exactly what was going on and that made sense to me. Complex and people remember things differently and it's best to document what happens and that's exactly what we did that's exactly what we did We did for every single enemy fighter that we killed We have an explanation of what happened Why they were engaged any pertinent information around? The incident and how the rules of engagement were implied. And those documents... Were then reviewed and they were corroborated with other reports. *burps*

What do I so what do I mean by corroborated with other what other reports? in order to do I have to explain the the human terrain and you heard McFarland mentioned the word human human terrain human terrain in Ramadi First of all the enemy the insurgents there's really three components of an of insurgents there you had Al Qaeda, straight up Al Qaeda in Iraq. AQIZ is what we called it. You had Sunni extremists. These Sunni extremists were not al Qaeda. Fighting for Themselves for their own control and then you had criminal elements and there's crossover in all three of these because sometimes they all had a common enemy sometimes they didn't Sometimes their enemy was each other. In fact, often it was. So, but you had this element of enemy, these insurgents. enemy, these insurgents.

Okay, so then you have that. Then you have American forces. Anything, what'd I miss on... uh... we... You could talk the whole day, I guess, about Al-Qaeda, Sunni extremists, and criminal elements. They're... These are the three main there's little fractions with it within those because because the Sunni extremists sometimes different tribes had different elements of is a lie. Fight each other 100 so it wasn't just a war it was like a three four way war kind of going so check this out the suny Extremists the Sunni shakes at one point fought al-qaeda. Hmm

Al Qaeda assassinated the shakes this I think it was six or eight I think I've just read it was six six Sunni shades got murdered by al Qaeda That actually put the the Sunnis in check. They were like, alright, dude, this is we're not we're just gonna have to go along with them. That's freaking terror. Terror is supposed to have a purpose in a situation like this where we're trying to control. Populous this the Al Qaeda was trying to control the populace what they did was torture rape murder one of the key people or one of the key murders that they can do is murder the leaders of the tribes. What they did. They did that bomb at the glass factory. Who was at the glass factory? Police recruits. Who were the police recruits? They were local Sunnis and then you just had straight chrome criminal elements and there's a lot of talk about

About a guy named Sheikh Sattar, who we formed a relationship with. It was actually the conventional forces. We included formed a relationship with this guy named Sheikh Sattar. And Sheikh Sattar... Had been targeted in the previous six months as a bad guy. And as a matter of fact, the brigade commander, went to the Marine Corps and said, Hey, we're gonna form a relationship with this guy. And they're like, No, that guy's a target. And he's like, He was a target six months ago. Now he was on our side. So that's what was going on. That's what you had from the from the enemy front but on the Friendly side so we had American forces obviously there. We have almost 6,000 soldiers Marines By the way, not all these soldiers and Marines are in combat roles. Look, you got logistics and support, but you also have military transition teams. What are those military transition teams are doing?

Iraqi military, they're friends with the Iraqi military, they're working with the Iraqi military. They live with the Iraqi military. Transition teams. What are they doing? Oh, they live with the Iraqi police. They work Quit the Iraqi police, they have a relationship with the Iraqi police. You also have civil affairs groups that are going out there and building infrastructure. Working with the shakes trying to get projects done for them paving roads digging wells all those things MedCap doing medical civil affairs. Oh, there's a breakout of some kind of disease, or there's a situation going on where kids need better water. OK, let's get that medical. Of civil affairs element going. So you have the US military, but the US military is all people with rifles. There's people that are there, specifically their job is to rebuild the infrastructure from day one. Then you have the Iraqi army I don't know the exact number number maybe 3,000 Iraqi soldiers out there they were

On operations with American forces, with all of us. Like I said 99 of the operations that we did other than recons and logistics runs Iraqi soldiers with Tascuna Bruiser. - I don't want to deviate too much from the timeline here and all that, but like when you say criminal elements. Generally speaking, do you know what their goal is? - Make money. - That's it, straight up. They're essentially fighting a different war than it. I mean, everyone's kind of fighting their own different. - And by the way, if the opportunity comes. To make money by putting a road in the bomb. I've been putting a bomb in the road for al-qaeda. They'll make money that way if Comes from helping an American find out where a bad guy is, they'll make money that way. They're just criminal elements. So you have like human intel sources. Do you know what that is? Yeah, it's basically like someone that's gonna tell you what's going on. Some of those people, like six--

Months ago they were playing bombs in the roads now all kind of running out of money to pay me You'll pay me to tell where Al-Qaeda is, I'm in. Let's go. - This is crazy, man. Makes sense. The Iraqi army is there with us. They're out on all these operations and they're obviously gonna bond and they're gonna take care and protect the friendly Iraqi civilians. Also, we have interpreters the interpreters come from a bunch of different backgrounds to speak Arabic, but they're Going to look out and see what's happening Then on top of all this, you actually have the interim government of Ramadi. There's a government in this city. They have a mayor, of staff. They're trying to run a city. They're trying to build infrastructure. They're trying to provide services. They're trying to build up their political capital. Right? And how do you build up political capital? By participating. And supporting the civilian populace. So when someone runs a tank

through a freaking wall what happens they go to the government officials and say hey the freaking Americans drove a tank through my wall what is it what is The mayor say, oh, let me get the Americans out here to give you some money, or let me get their engineers out here to rebuild your wall. There's a direct conduit for. For watching. Coalition forces And and so you have that official government of Ramadi then you also have this entire shake all the the tribal sheiks and they've got all their elements and they're trying to keep their political power and that means the the So, coalition forces are conducting what we call tribal engagement, TE. With the local tribes. These are the people of the power. It's tribal culture. These are the people of the power.

Tribes, powerful tribes in the region and the tribal leaders they're going to have power and the American So what we had to do the Marines the army the seals we had to build relationships with those tribal leaders and We had to help the tribal leaders protect their neighborhoods We had to help Them fix damaged buildings, help them with their power issues, like that's what's happening. And guess what else? Civilian casualties. If there is a civilian casualty in Ramadi, it's immediately known to everyone in Ramadi up, down, and across the chain of command. That's what's happening. Is happening. That's why it's so important to mitigate collateral damage. That's why it's so important to protect the civilians, but when I say collaboration

Damage just now I just meant like the walls the buildings the infrastructure, but you've got protect obviously the people the human beings I think Lafe's platoon like cut down date palms Because they wanted to improve their field of vision like way to go pay for these freaking date palms, that's the I've always like grievances that would get filed. So the idea that the seals. Or any American or any Iraqi force was out there indiscriminately killing civilians is, it's like implausible. Could not happen it could not happen every single civilian death which did That were their civilians deaths. Yes, there were and every one of them was reported was investigated And it was resolved with the local populace. It had to be.

Not just go out and think that you could go and kill civilians. Let me give you an example. Example of what happens this is from Al Jazeera 25 June 2006 specialist Nathan Lin was charged with voluntary manslaughter for allegedly shooting an unarmed man on February 15th Lin and a second soldier sergeant Milton Ortiz Jr. were charged with obstructing justice for allegedly conspiring with another soldier who reportedly put an AK-47 near the body in an attempt to make it look as though the dead man was a fighter. Ortiz was also charged with assault and communicating a threat in a separate incident on March 8th. Allegedly put an unloaded weapon to the head of an Iraqi man and threatened to send him to prison. The soldier who allegedly placed the weapon near the body was redeployed and left the army before criminal proceedings began. Both soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the Army were killed. 109th Infantry of the Pennsylvania National Guard are being held in Baghdad while awaiting hearings.

So you want to know what happens when you kill a civilian? Everybody knows about it. Bye. Again who reported these things the locals report them the Iraqi soldiers report them the Americans report them the sheikhs report them the terps report Them everyone is watching you can't get away with things Thanks. If you try and get away with things you're gonna hurt the freaking war effort This is how through all these different sources this is how they found out and investigated and followed up on every engagement in Ramadi it was reported through a Citizen network to the government officials and back to the military. Care for it was a broken door, a smashed window, a breached wall? We're gonna hear about it. And any careless or overly aggressive unit that behaved in this manner would have been shut down immediately. Would have been shut down immediately.

Any unit that didn't coordinate with battlespace owners? Well, they would have been there for one day, one day. We wrote about one of those elements in the book extreme ownership a special operations element came in they thought they were gonna do their own thing, they were gone in two weeks. I think they did two or three missions, they were gone. They weren't coordinating. And certainly any individual who's intentionally or repeatedly behaving in a way That's against the rules of engagement or against the law or against the strategy that we were conducting, they would have been... Arrested imprisoned court-martialed sent to jail period in the story So so if you hear when you hear about war crimes If you hear about someone wantonly killing civilians, it's just a lie from someone that has no idea of what it was like on the ground.

It was not possible. So despite the level of violence in Ramadi, engagements were highly visible, highly tracked, and in Task Unit Bruiser, we did get investigated, and when we did, I was thankful. I this is actually a great lesson. I learned very early which was from the army if Questionable happens immediately get investigation. You should invite investigation. Did you guys did you have this attitude? Did I move? Literally sitting here and you, it's like you're describing my experience there. All these things you're saying are the same exact things. I have so many stories in my head. I was thinking of a story 10 minutes ago as you're walking through this, I was on a patrol and listen, we worked together a bunch. Most of my operations were not with you because we--

We're doing so many operations with so many other units. I was on a patrol where, and I was supporting an army squad or platoon or something, we shot a cow. We shot a cow, a local civilian cow got shot twice. And they did an investigation. Deserved it, and in the end, we conducted an investigation and then went back to that family, I could show it on a map, and paid them, bought the cow, apologized, and fixed that problem over a cow. The level of scrutiny was so insanely high, and I don't want to make it sound like it was debilitating where you were fearful of doing something wrong. You just understood that every single thing you did And observed, scrutinized, and assessed, and reported from all sorts of people. Don't tell anybody we shot the cow, which is ridiculous anyway. Twenty other people who I'm not...

Coordinating on that are gonna report it to include the owner of the cow the owner of the cow who's who's who's gonna go meet? With his shake on Thursday night and he's gonna be like hey you're freaking American - American shot my cow. - That's right. And so the best thing we learned we could do is if anything went wrong, and things went wrong, we made mistakes, cows got shot, is we didn't wait for. Someone to tell up the chain across. We came home and immediately reported those things. And if it wasn't you somebody else is going to do it. It was just the life that we were living there So as I'm listening here quietly, I am living in my life Head what went on, it's exactly the same thing. Across all places that we operated there with every single unit. You couldn't, you just, you simply could not do anything out of what was appropriate. And by the way, if you did, you were actually putting your own life at risk too. It would have been dumb even if you--

You could, but you couldn't. That's just how it was. - And that's what the thing about investigating, that's what I learned. The word investigation has a negative connotation, right? Oh, you're getting investigated. And so what happened was I was working with an army unit, I was probably two weeks there, and he-- we were planning or something he's like oh i gotta go talk to whatever legal's here to the jet or the n uh cid CID's here from Baghdad. I'm like, oh what for he's like, oh we're getting investigated. I was like, oh he goes. Oh, no, it's good He goes, that's my attitude come investigate us. You want to know what we're doing here come investigate and I was like that is beautiful And that's the attitude I had. So you should want to get investigated. You should want to have everyone interviewed. You should want to have the truth be there. The classic example that looked like... Blue on blue we had a blue on blue obviously what about extreme ownership i came back i was like hey

Just had a blue on blue. Let's investigate and find out what the hell went wrong. Every gets investigated if you enter a mosque they're gonna investigate that if an Personnel on our person gets engaged or gets killed that it's gonna be investigated and the Here's the good thing, once everyone on the team knows that, like everyone knows. Oh any action that you take is gonna be investigated So that's what we did and and listen we're there for six months we engage is hundreds of enemy. Did we have a small number of engagements where military-aged males were? Maneuvering or behaving in a manner that was congruent with enemy tactics and they got shot? Yes.

That absolutely happened. Guys digging holes. Guys maneuvering in a tactical manner. Toward friendly forces guys driving past clearly marked checkpoints like there was a There were some cases where this type of behavior was identified by snipers and the snipers deemed That military-aged males were displaying hostile intent meaning this snipers looking at someone maneuvering running digging a hole driving and decided hey This person needs to be killed. They're a threat there. They have hostile intent Bye. Sometimes there is a warning shot if possible, sometimes there wasn't. Thank you. And then once neutralized, those individuals that were shot were inspected. And if it became. In the next video.

Initiated the investigation. Yup, here's what happened. Bring someone in from the outside to investigate. Whether it's the army, whether it's the navy, whether it's the marine corps, bring their legal teams in. To interview everybody and to review the pertinent information and debrief with all the different elements that are out there and then make some kind of a legal recommendation. That happened and in each of these small number of individual cases the shots that our snipers took Ruled clearly within the rules of engagement. And look, does that help the... Conscience of a freaking sniper. Maybe a little, but not really. We still gotta go out, find the family, pay the family.

Is a tiny number of situations where this took place and like I said all investigated and reviewed and cleared what you have to do is you have to investigate you have to get the truth out there There's a another term that I learned from the army Which is good shop bad result and it's a it's it's a terrible thing means a sniper or a rifleman Saw something they identified what they thought was hostile intent they took a shot and it ends up having a bad result and That did happen and it did happen with my guys on a couple of occasions Now look, I can tell you no women or children were ever engaged by anyone in Tasking a Bruiser ever.

And the reason is because they weren't a threat. They seldom would even come out. If there was shooting going on, they wouldn't come out. Wait. When they did come out, it's like they were doing things that were not even remotely hostile. There were times that the enemy used women and children as human shields. But even in those circumstances, no one ever shot a woman or kid. There's a one instance where a enemy fighter. Was transporting weapons and ammo, and was hiding behind a child. That military-aged male was shot and killed by a sniper from tasking a bruiser. Documented. You might think, well, how is this happening? Were Task Unit Bruiser the only snipers in Ramadi? that were having success? Absolutely not. There were many successful snipers and sharpshooters in the battle.

Here's here's a an example you probably never heard of this. This is a good one. This is from an article called Marine Sniper Makes His Mark with Swift Death. This is from AP Press writer Antonio Castaneda. Battle of Ramadi, July 30th, 2006. When he was five when he first fired an m16 his They're holding him to brace against the recoil at 17. He enlisted in the Marine Corps spurred by the memory of September 11th now 21 year old Wilson Has 20 confirmed kills in four months in Iraq and another 40 shots that probably killed in sure insurgents one afternoon the lance corporal downed a man hauling a grenade launcher five and a half football Fields away Wilson is the designated marksman in a company of Marines based in downtown Ramadi watching over what Marines call the worst mode.

What Marines call the most dangerous neighborhood in the most dangerous city in the world. Here, Sunni Arab insurgents are intent on toppling the local government protected by the Marines. Wilson, five-- Foot six with a soft face is married and has two children and speaks in a deep steady monotone after towards nirak his commanders in the third battalion 8th regiment called him a particularly Mature marine always collected and given to an occasional rye grin. Composure is regularly tested swaths of central and southern Ramadi 70 miles west of Baghdad are dominated by insurgents who regularly attack the provincial government headquarters that Marines protect During a large-scale attack on Easter Sunday Wilson says he spotted six gunmen on a rooftop about 400 yards away in about eight seconds seconds he squeezed off five rounds hitting five gunmen in the head the sixth man dived off a three-story building just as Wilson got Him in his sights and counts as a probable death

Wilson says his skill helps save American troops and Iraqi civilians. Bother me. Obviously me being a devout Catholic, it's a conflict of interest. Then again, God Supported David when he killed Goliath Wilson said I believe God supports what we do and I've never killed anyone who wasn't carrying a weapon in a desolate part of the Rocky Mountains outside Colorado Springs surrounded by national parks on three sides, he says. He regularly hunted before moving to Fort Lauderdale, Florida as a teenager. The brother also serves in the military. Technically Wilson is not a sniper. He's an infantry man who also patrols through the span of destroyed buildings that make up downtown Ramadi. Its designated marksman, he has a sniper rifle. In the heat of the day or after midnight, he spends hours on rooftop posts peering out onto rows of abandoned houses from behind piles of sandbags and bulletproof glass cracked by gunfire.

Insurgents have killed good Marines I've served with. That's how I sleep at night. I've killed over 20 people how many lives with those 20 people have taken So That's an example of a one marine outstanding marine by the way In an infantry supporting his infantry unit and and look at what he's doing So By the way, the three Marines and the snipers from three Marines gave us so much information we we modeled Their operations in many ways the way they were doing things Tony BTF Tony Chris Went and talked to them

To figure out, hey, what's the best way to get this done? So there you have a marine sharpshooter. Imagine what happens to the number of enemy killed when tasking a bruiser goes in the Into areas, it goes into areas that have bait out, which is a combat outpost that's being built. That's up between one and thirteen snipers in mutually supporting Overwatch positions with interlocking fields of fire. You're gonna kill a lot of bad guys and we did kill a lot of bad guys. Hundreds of enemy fighters. So did the Army, so did the Marine Corps. But what about the Marine Corps? But... He clearly had to stick to the rules of engagement.

The rules of engagement were so perfectly clear. - Thank you. Here's the rules of the game. This is what Dave, your SEALs, your Marines had to follow, the soldiers had to follow. Marines, everyone there. Rules of engagement. Nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to defend yourself. You may engage the following individuals based on their conduct. Persons who are committing hostile acts against coalition forces. Persons who are exhibiting hostile intent. Towards coalition for cells forces. So if someone looks like they're intend that's a Are going to be in the next video. Is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target. ID, contact your next hire commander, commander for decision.

Use graduated force. When time and circumstance permit, use the following degrees of graduated force when responding to a hostile act or intent. Verbal warnings to hold to show your weapon demonstrate intent to use it three block access or detain four Fire a warning shot. Five, shoot to eliminate threat. C, do not target or strike anyone who has surrendered or who is out of combat due to sickness or wounds. Target or strike hospitals mosques churches shrines schools museums national monuments and other any other historical cultural sites civilian populated areas or buildings unless the enemy is using them for military purposes or if it is necessary for Your self-defense II do not strike do not target Or strike Iraqi infrastructure, lines of communication, or economic objects unless necessary for self-defense or if ordered by your commander.

Fire on these objects, fire to disable and disrupt rather than destroy. F always minimize incidental injury while Of life and collateral damage. Three, the use of force including deadly force is authorized to protect the following yourself your unit and other friendly forces, detainees, civilians from crimes that are likely to cause death or serious bodily harm, such as murder or rape, personnel. Property designated by the on-scene commander when such actions are necessary to restore order and security for In general warning shots are authorized only when the use of deadly force would be authorized in that particular situation situation. I've treated all civilians on their property with respect and dignity do not seize civilian property including vehicles unless the property presents a security threat when possible give a receipt to the property's owner. You may detain civilians based upon reasonable belief that the person

And one must be detained for purposes of self-defense two is interfering with coalition forces missions accomplishment three is on a list of persons wanted for questioning a tent arrest or detention for. Is or was engaged in criminal activity or five must be detained for imperative reasons of security anyone Detain must be protected force up to including deadly forces authorized to protect detainees in your custody. You must fill out a detainee apprehension card for every person you detain. And see tack one general order number one is in effect looting and the taking of war trophies are prohibited personnel must report any suspected violations of the law of war committed by any US friendly or enemy force notify your chain of command judge adequate CID IG or chaplain so Those are the rules of engagement. They didn't change. We didn't have diff- Dave didn't have one set of rules and I'd had another set of rules, that didn't happen. All the rules of engagement are the same.

And here's another thing that was an undercurrent at the time the Haditha dam Investigation had started so there was a bunch of civilians killed at the Haditha Dam The story had not broken yet, but the Marine investigation started February 14th 2006 So right before we arrived in Ramadi the Marines knew that there was an investigation taking place charging YE- charging Marines with killing Iraqi civilians and it definitely sent a shockwave through. Through the Marine Corps and that shockwave leaked over to everybody else, myself included. So the three eight Marines were highly focused, very professional with this atmosphere, but so was everybody else. The first time everyone's thinking themselves oh wait a second oh this this we got

Make sure that these things are done correctly and by the way just FYI these these charges were dropped eventually in the Haditha Dam them. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse thing freaking terrible terrible strategic impact on the war. Nobody benefited more than Al Qaeda from what happened at Abu Ghraib with the prisoner abuse. And look I just come from being the Admirals aid and so I got to see all that I got to see the way this stuff it SEAL Team 5 on their deployment They had some drama with photos. They had taken photos of prisoners and whatnot and these got posted in a public forum. It was a disaster. I was like, no more photos. You're not allowed to have photos anymore. When I got home, SEAL Team 7, 2004, I get. Home from deployment and you know we put our gear away and then they're like

Okay, go spend the weekend or whatever, go spend two days with your family. I come back every single one of our computers, and we have a lot of computers, 'cause our whole-- Is running off computers all of our computers both classified and unclassified computers were all obfuscated by NCIS all of them every email Every image that was on there every briefing that was on there was all in there So even though I'd had a great deployment and led scores of operations and got, you know. Great marks on my evaluation, my FITRAP, received combat awards for that deployment. It didn't matter. To go serve for the animal didn't matter guess what despite an end an eminently successful career and deployment, it didn't matter, it's like you're getting investigated. This was stemmed from, at SEAL Team 7, in my sister platoon, there was a report of prisoner abuse from someone.

That had been fired in the platoon. Someone stole something, they got fired, they got sent home. And then they reacted to that and made a bunch of claims. And these types of things happen where someone gets disgruntled. They get Yeah, they're mad about something that happened and then they go out and make some wild claims and that's triggered an investigation here And this is the thing that I learned, you gotta be ready for that. You gotta be ready. Who knows what might motivate someone to fabricate claims against you or your troops. You gotta be ready for that. You gotta be ready for that. You gotta even be ready for your own freaking guys telling stupid stories, right? This happens too. Guys exaggerate. Guys are emotional. Guys let their ego get out of control. Um...

Always like to talk about getting mortared because if I'm sitting here and I'm telling you guys a story and I'm like Okay, let's say I got Say the closest mortar ever hit to me. I got one getting really close in Ramadi, but I was on the other side of a wall. So it wasn't that bad. I got, there was, we were in Baghdad. In the outskirts of Baghdad and we were set up and I a mortar probably hit it. Probably hit 50 feet away from me, right? And it was a little more to just little 60 millimeter mortar. I got 62 whatever it is the rock use. If I'm telling you guys that story, what am I going to say? You know? I'm probably not going to say a number, but I'm like this thing hit right next to me. Say something's right next to me. How far away is that right next to you? It's three foot one foot two feet Yeah, so that's what happens guys tell

Echo have you ever gone home to your wife and be like, you know, come we change you did too Mmm, you ever get home and tell your wife like talk. We'll beat the shit out of me. Yes, sir now Your wife understands jiu-jitsu. She knows what that means. She's not picturing me pummeling your head in right? She knows What that means. They caught Leif on a video I saw the other day, Leif saying, Jocko choked us all the time. You know what I mean? What's he talking about? Oh it's like Jocko is a bully. No Jocko trained Jiu Jitsu. Lace laughing as he says it but if you hear that second hand Jocko choked us all the time what do you got? Here's one. Dude, I was surfing, I caught every wave. Dude, I caught every wave. What does that mean? Dude I want you to know that I'll call it a lot of waves, but what if you're not a surfer? Mmm, what does that mean if you're not a surfer that means Oh jocko said claim he called Every wave. Now you meet someone else that's that's is a surfer.

And you say, well, Jocko's out there. He says he catches every wave. And the surfer's like, dude, that doesn't sound, that's not, that's impossible. No, he said it, he said he caught every wave. - Mm-hmm. So can you get someone from tasking a bruiser? That's like do we killed everybody? Yeah hundred percent hundred percent Oh, yeah, we shot this dude. Yeah, you're gonna get people that do that. You got to protect yourself from that you got a per you You're gonna develop that stuff. I hear stories about me, like my friends would tell stories about me that are totally exaggerated. I'm like dude, come on man. Like really? Jocko do whatever he wanted. It's like bro. There's an entire I know it might have seemed that way and you probably felt like that but Do you want to review all the free concept of operations that got set up the chain of command so you gotta be

For that you got it. You got to be prepared for other people to come at you You got to be prepared for your own people to Tell stories That aren't true Get caught by someone that us doesn't understand and next thing you know, you've got Stories that are out of control What and what that means is you got to take the high road? You've got it. You've got to take the high ground. You got to take the high road at all times you know, it goes back to that story of of Delta Charlie, one of my platoon commanders, when we were doing a hydrographic reconnaissance and had that opportunity to not do it. And him looking at me and looking at the platoon and saying, We don't have to do this, but would that be the right thing to do? And it's like, Yep, that's not the right thing to do. I learned from that that was when I was 22 years old. It's like yeah, you better do the right thing And so yeah good Oh came home from from Coelac.

Team 7 deployment, they take every computer that we have, they scrub it all and guess what? We're cleared. Wrongdoing. Had another investigation after that. Multiple interviews. And again, it's just people They're hearing things. Once you sit down and do the investigation, thankfully, it's like, oh, good, got it. So investigations should be conducted and they are conducted and and but I saw what this negative behavior could do to the community and Strategically in the war effort. So you got to do the right things for the right reasons and if you Thank you. Don't follow the rules. You're gonna be held accountable and and you know, Laith and I did a whole podcast on rules of engagements podcast 385 Go listen to it If you want more detail But going back to what we were talking about earlier Dave, did the

violence escalate when we were there? Did the violence escalate? Oh, it absolutely escalated. Mean I kind of covered that from these other sources. It's like the 228 iron soldiers from Pennsylvania had a road rotate back to America, 1/1 AD came, took over, they brought in a new strategy, new strategy was seize, clear, hold, and build. Go into these enemy controlled neighborhoods. Aggressive strategy building these combat outposts it was taking the fight to the enemy that's what it was doing and we did it the entire city. An intensive and aggressive strategy. And you know what? It increased the casualties. Yes, it did. And the brigade commander, sitting in those meetings that you and I were at, Dave, he would tell us, yeah, I had to explain this up the chain of command. Going oh my gosh you're taking more casualties down there he's like yes sir this is what we're doing this is why Here's the efforts that we're making. This is why the casualties are happening. This is why casualties are increasing. When you...

When you take the fight to the enemy, there's gonna be more casualties. When you go into the lion's den, you're gonna find lions in there. And there's going to be casualties and it was... It was heartbreaking. It was horrible. But the American Marines and soldiers did their duty day in, day out, and got the job done. on. And it was an honor to fight alongside them and it was it was also incredible to see the progress progress. There's incredibly see the progress and that's one thing that I'll always remember I'll always remember seeing the progress and look Obviously I didn't go out in the field on every operation, you know, cuz I'm the overall commander of the seals in Ramadi. And we had, we divided up into five different, how many elements did you have? - We created three elements out of my single element.

Created five, from Tasking a Bruiser, we created five elements and they were partnered with. We did it originally to partner with the five different Iraqi conventional forces and the one special mission unit. We did it to partner with them. And built those elements. So everyone of those elements had an officer in it and had an NCO and of course I-- trusted them and trained them and knew they understood the mission and the commander's intent the end state the rules of engagement all that stuff and so Sometimes there'd be two, three, four of these elements at the same time going out on operations. And you... Those were usually those were smaller operations and most the time if I'm sending a platoon chief a chief and Lieutenant junior grade out in the field to conduct an operation with 17 Iraq. I'm not going on that operation

Plus there's three of them going on at the same time. So there's a lot of work that the guys did on their own obviously. There were plenty of situations that I had to go in the field. And usually, like if we're conducting a larger operation, like a big court in search in the city, I'm going. We're doing a direct action. I mean. I don't know how many days times you and I Dave were sitting in the field together but like Doing that that big area south of yeah, I'm going on that we're going into build a cop. Oh, I'm definitely going on that We got all these different we're going on a complex direct action mission multiple. Yeah, I'm going on that We're supporting construction. Yeah, I'm doing that But in those situations, it's if you can provide better command and control from the field you have to see what's going on Now, um. And sometimes of course I just go. Cause you. Have to understand what the guys are doing. You have to go out and see what's happening with your own eyes.

And also the guys have to know that that I'm not asking them to do anything that I wouldn't do myself, of course So you got to roll out? Going out over and over and over again on that deployment. I got See I might have gotten to see you know when someone's losing weight echo Charles sure if you see him every day You don't notice as much. Yeah, so like Lafe or Tony or or something. Seth or JP who's going out on every op, they look, they don't see that drastic difference, but if I'm going out once a week, it's like, oh, it's a little bit, oh. One of the first missions I went on We were an enemy contact took 32 minutes. I Was like damn. Okay. Wait, it took 32 minutes to get contacted. Yep. Yep. It's like The reason I know this is because the company commander was like start your stopwatch He's like we got a half an hour and I was like, okay 32 minutes. It's go time That was in the beginning of it in the middle deployment

There was another operation and again these stand out to me because of this time thing One of the one of lafe's assistant platoon commanders going out and I was like you're gonna get contacted And this is leaving from cop falcon. I'm like you're gonna get contacted He's like you think I was like you're gonna get contacted and he walked out the wire I set my stopwatch 12 minutes later. He's in a gunfight so Enemy contact coming even faster, but then I compare that from a progression To one of the last combat outposts that we put in. And I actually did like the clearance. I was the guy that seized. A few army guys seized this thing in central Ramadi the platoon pushed right past it to set up an overwatch position and We didn't get seals didn't gauge anybody From this immediate contact thing or within half an hour 15 minutes, you're going to get contacted to this last combat

That we put in, no contact. And that's when I knew that a change was taking place. But I knew that we were winning. Did you notice that kind of reduction? You also, you left a month earlier than me, right? - I did. The timing of my departure was pretty interesting. I mean, pick go back, I left mid to late September. Think about what was going on with you guys in mid to late September. I mean, it was still just, it was right at that apex. And I left, and even like the basic sit reps for the next month were-- Different. And that last cop I think went in like right after I left. I completely noticed it too when I got, I mean it was busy when I got there. Things were going on with the 228 and oftentimes like early I would judge how busy it was based on what my teams were doing. I had two, became three

teams. There was a lot of times where something would happen and would frustrate me because I wasn't at where the engagement was because what It wasn't that I wasn't part of the engagement, it's that I couldn't help. It got to a point that by the middle of the summer, and that's a comparison between the 35 and the 12 minutes, was... My teams were engaged all the time. And it wasn't that we were just in the right place. At the right time, it's just that the engagements, it got so much more just like that. So again, all the things you're talking about, I'm listening in parallel to my experiences, exactly the same. - Yeah. Putting in that last combat outpost. I was really surprised because we had the enemy surrounded I thought to myself there. He's gonna fight hard caged in

We're a cornered animal and it was really surprising. I have a picture of myself and and chronic farmland It's one of the I think my exact it's the only picture I have But and I forget who took it, but we were in that combat outpost, like me and him. And there's no security set yet. Like just the actual security of the element that took it. Right, so there's probably like 20 guys there or something. And we're standing up there. But it was weird to be, I looked at that picture, Why we took a picture because there was like no shooting going on it you know because he'd come to cop he'd come to all these different where I was out there and it's like oh why do we oh okay that's right because nothing was happening and again I that's when I kind of recognized that a change was taking place and again this change wasn't because the the place.

Positive change was not just because of Tascani Bruiser. Obviously, it was, we had a tiny role. Negative change of what you know the escalating violence. That was the strategy and That's what was planned. We knew that that was happened but the change wasn't from us it was from it was from the entire team and it was a bond a bond that we had with that entire team and we still have it we still I mean, I've gone and talked to... I've gone and talked to units that were commanded by guys that we were on the ground with You know, I've talked to these Air Force Academy, we talked about West Point. Naval Academy. Um...

That's to me when these guys invite me to talk it's like yeah, what do you need? The they gave they gave some of the guys in tasking bruiser got valorous awards from the army That's not normal look Has it happened? Of course it happens Joint awards is a little different like you get joint awards good. It's a joint group, but the amount of of administration, administrative effort you've gotta take to get a Navy guy an award, a Valorous award? Valorous Award? That's that that show that to me was such a huge gesture of of the... The bond that we had that these guys were actually taking their time to put in. and

I'll tell you like Stoner, dude, he had an R-Com with a V. Army Commendation Medal with a V for Valor. That was his... He also had two silver stars, by the way. He didn't care about those. He liked that R column with a V. That was the bond. And... The brigade commander, Colonel Sean McFarlane, now General Sean McFarlane. But when we were leaving, 'cause when we left, they still had a lot of fighting to go. And when we left, You know shook my hand. He said you and your guys kept hundreds of my men alive hundreds of them and That always stuck with me

Because look we look back at the war now what you know, was it right or wrong? What was our reasons? WMD all these things we could tear ourselves up thinking about that, but what I know That we did Was we Helped keep hundred hundreds of Americans And Iraqi soldiers alive. And on top of that, we liberated that city. from those those Suffering civilians that are living in Ramadi in a torturous environment environment. Under the reign of brutal extremist insurgents. and we were... We're able to liberate them and protect our fellow servicemen and women.

And it's not just my opinion that things got a lot better. Again, this is so well documented. Here's an example. Here's an article on point by Andrew Lubin October 2007 quote While Al Qaeda has been driven from the city, it has not been driven from Anbar province, nor from Iraq, but Ramadi. Which the Marines thought in August 2006 was fully under control of the insurgents is the example of irony. American cooperation. There is an economic boom taking place. There are building projects, the porcelain factory is reopening next month, shops are reopening, Quality food and goods are for sale in the markets and salaries have risen 20% in the last six months or as Mayor Latif Obeid said to me in April when I attended his third economic development conference.

He is open for business. Come visit us. So when I hear people talk about, Oh, we made it worse. No. Ramadi was a... Open for business. It was awesome. There was a Green Beret in charge of. Teaching counterinsurgency to junior SEALs. And the... Example that he used was a battle of Ramadi. That's the model for that type of warfare That was a very meaningful, right? You got a green Beret That's teaching seals and he's teaching not about what green Berets did but he's teach about what the seals did because it's an outstanding example Another article explaining the success by Ulrich Thichner. thickener.

The article is called Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq from August 2007. This is news the world doesn't hear. Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious Sunni triangle, is now telling the story of the A different story a story of Americans who came here as Liberty liberators became hated occupiers and are now all the protectors of the Iraqi reconstruction. Again, just an incredible victory, incredible victory for coalition forces. And Colonel Sean McFarland and his major Neil Smith said this about the reason success. Here's why the success happened. Clearly a combination of factors, some of which we may not fully yet understand. Contributed to this pivotal success as mentioned before the enemy overplayed its hand and the people were tired of al-qaeda

A series of assassinations had elevated younger, more aggressive tribal leaders to positions of influence. In the next video. These younger leaders open to our overtures. Our willingness to adapt our plans based on the advice of the sheiks. Our staunch timely support for them in times of times of danger and need and our ability to deliver on our promises convince them That they could do Business with us. Our forward presence kept them reassured. We operated aggressively across all lines of operation, kinetic and non-kinetic, to bring every weapon and asset at our disposal to bear against the enemy.

Detailed intelligence fusion and targeting meetings, and operated seamlessly with special operations forces, aviation, close air support, and riverine units. We have now seen this model followed by other brigade combat teams in other parts of Iraq, and it has proved effective. Indeed, the level of sophistication has only improved since the ReadyFirst departed in in February 2007. Although perhaps groundbreaking at the time, most of our tactics-- And procedures are now familiar to any unit operating in Iraq today. yeah this was It was a pivotal pivotal moment and I find another article I was gonna quite didn't bring it, but there's another article that called Called Ramadi the Gettysburg of the war. The turning point, this was the turning point.

In that same article by Colonel McFarland, they share some of the important lessons from the battlefield. And they say this the most enduring lessons of Ramadi are Ones that are most easily lost in technical and tactical discussions the least tangible ones the most Most important lessons we learned were, accept risk in order to achieve results. Once you gain the initiative never give the enemy respite or refuge stop looking for another way to attack the enemy. The tribes represent the people of Iraq and the populace represents the key terrain of the conflict. The force that supports the people of Iraq and the populace represents the key terrain of the conflict.

Population by taking the moral high ground has as sure of an advantage in counterinsurgency as a maneuver commander who occupies dominant terrain in a conventional battlefield. I think it's important to mention Never stop looking for another way to attack the enemy. He's not just talking about Combat he's talking about attacking in in air quotes attacking the shakes by building relationships with them. Attacking the economic situation by putting money into the economy. Tacking on all fronts on all lines of operations and finding another way, I guarantee some of those projects. That cost $230,000 that propped up a shake had much more negative--

Of impact on Al-Qaeda than some of the operations where we're doing clearances. But both of those were important. But the most important thing that he talks about. Is the moral high ground. Having the moral high ground was critical. We knew that we all knew that and we kept it And anyone that was on the ground there knows this For people that weren't there They might not understand it and that's my fault. It's my fault. I obviously have done a bad job of explaining all this Obviously if When I when I hear things I think it's crazy talk but it's my fault people that were on the ground understood what was happening and that's my job and and I

I did have the opportunity to explain the Battle of Ramadi to the families of The fallen and they They know, they know and understand the efforts and the risks that their sons and we as. And all coalition forces in the Battle of Ramadi took in order to protect the local populace. And I hope that the families of the fallen Marines and soldiers know the same thing that these Brave warriors were part of an incredible band of brothers who fought and sacrificed valiantly To do their duty

Who took massive risk and sacrificed immensely to accomplish the mission and ultimately liberate the city of Ramadi. You know, he probably I was getting a little choked off choked up earlier talking about Travis Patrick wind He ended up being killed By an ID after we left in December traveling with Meghan mcclung marine another I just an outstanding woman just outstanding Squared away again Dave you and I sat in all those meetings with those those individuals. They're just outstanding

And there was such a huge price paid and and listen a lot of that price was adjustments to make sure we could take care of the civilian populace Doing a massive kinetic. How many bombs did you guys drop? I? Mean between me and the other Ramadi Anglico team the two and in Anglico in Ramada of the 24 units out there dozens But 23, yeah like 42 probably between bombs Hellfires guns the all the different quote Drops probably 25. That's just amongst the two Ramadi emojis. - That's six months of heavy fighting and you guys only did 25 drops.

Thousand-pounders Yeah, I think I have I think I've got what got one GB, you know heavy J damn And I don't I can wait if you want to complete Your thought, but there's some context here that I can't help but mention because it's not just your failure. Because when you hear about... An accusation or a story or a perspective that's so outlandish, not just because it didn't happen, but because it couldn't happen. It's not just levied against you. It's anybody that got there, and my team had the same exact experience as we got there with a certain set of expectations of how things were gonna be, and very quickly they changed out of necessity.

And what my team ended up doing is even that number seems like a small number, that is a huge number of drops, more than anybody had done before we got there. Way more. There are teams before us that never dropped a bomb. Partially because, and this leads into what I've been feeling listening to you during this podcast is, do you know how much attention it draws? When you drop a bomb from a plane from a 45 million dollar fighter overhead a city and you drop a bomb you want to About the scrutiny that you get when you decide, I need to employ this piece of ordinance off this aircraft, whether it's a Hellfire missile into the building adjacent to Mark Lee, or a gun in a Type 1 casting area that hasn't been conducted in years. And we were scrutinized, every one of those drops between the two Anglo teams, in a level that had never been.

It never happened that much scrutiny 'cause nobody had done that much. And the firefights, when a Ford Air Controller is shooting his personal rifle, you're gonna get scrutiny. And of course, obviously the most scrutiny comes is... I lost the first Anglico Marine in Iraq. My radio operator, I lost that first Marine. Nobody else, me. And you were talking about investigation and the connotation that most people have is this negative connotation when? Actually what it is is, when done correctly, which it almost always is, is they're there to help. It's not that much different from like an-- They're making sure that you're smart and safe and protected so your Marines are. And so all that scrutiny was welcomed and I think reflecting on this. The biggest mistake that I made, and I can feel this now looking back because... I don't want to put myself on the same scale of what you did. I worked with you guys a lot. I did a lot of my own without you with other teams. So not just with Tascune and Bruiser.

But I feel all those same things that you're talking about, all those same experiences I had is I took for granted the understanding of the world. That everybody would have about what we were doing because I spent all my time with people doing it. Meaning, I didn't think about what. People on the outside were thinking about what we were doing. I just didn't spend any time and I needed to. I needed to think about their perspective, their misunderstanding, their ego, their point of view, Which is totally incongruent from my experience, because if you did anything like we did... It is nothing like anybody else had done. It was different. And if you don't understand that context, you could very easily draw conclusions. And make accusations and say things that aren't true, and that's because I never explained it. It's because I took that for granted.

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

It wasn't just a call in airstrikes or train my guys or shoot, that was my job. And no Anglico unit had endured the ups and downs that my SALT did because we had a ton of drops, a ton of engagements. I lost a marine So whose other job should it have been to explain what was going on? And why did I talk to Kathy Leon? Yes, all the time. She knows everything everything But I didn't share or explain or even consider how important it would be to have people outside of that understand in the community and beyond. Um... So the failure you're talking about or the fault that you have it's really hard for me to listen to you and Agree with that without at least making it clear that I was in a very very similar position very parallel

or the adjacent entering the exact same things, recognizing the same obligation that I had and my same mistake. - Yeah, the... You know you lost Chris and so Mark was the first he'll kill my rack you know what what Happens to the community when you lose a seal the first seal in Iraq. I mean, it's yeah everyone mourns But there's there's guys wait. Wait, what are you doing? Yep. Wait, why are you doing that and I Heard a little bit of that But I also heard a lot of support. Yeah Like Massive support. What do you need? How can we help you're doing great, you know again chain of command which is the army chain of command the special operations that's what what I'm getting is you know hey good job so I I again

Failed to see oh and you know I'd hear I'd hear someone say what are you guys even doing I'd be like hey man you know like I literally I got an email from one of my buddies was like dude, what are you guys doing going out in the day and It's one of my friends You know it's a little bit longer that was basically was hey, what are you guys doing going out in the day? You know and I wrote back like hey, man this fight is Taking place during the day. We're working with the Iraqi units. They don't have my vision. They don't have a he's kind of like, okay He's I got it. Yeah, what I didn't think was What about the person that doesn't know me? What about the? The person that can't ask that question. What about the person that has it? know has a negative attitude and then sits in the platoon space saying I can't Leave these guys are going out during the day. Yep. These guys are taking too many risks. That's not a special operation. I should have

done a better job of explaining the situation on the ground. You know, and we took a lot of casualties as well, wounded guys. So we have wounded guys, we have the first seal. Killed in Iraq. And Job severely wounded ends up dying from those wounds. And unfortunately. I should have noticed oh and someone has a quite if one of my friends is asking this question that means People that aren't my friend are thinking this. And I should have done a better job of explaining what was happening. And it goes beyond the opsums because my friends...

When I got back I didn't really think about this when I was overseas when I got back my friend said They would read the op sums allowed in In quarters in the morning. So like at trade at At the team areas they would stand up and say, you know last night Night task unit bruiser conducted an overwatch and killed 14 enemy fighters and guess what my friends were they were pumped and they were stoked And when we had guys get wounded when we had guys get killed they were heartbroken broken. But my friends who know me knew New? I was doing the right things for the right reasons But what I miscalculated Was there's going to be people that don't like you there's going to be people that hold a grudge There's gonna be people that look at your success and basically accuse you of cheating.

The case may be and that's what I failed to realize and it and it's a blind spot so Hopefully This type and I'll you know, we can bring on I can bring on late JP everyone's got their perspective Hopefully this paints a clearer picture of what we did and how we did it. And how we were able to maintain the moral high ground in Ramadi. The risks that were taken and the sacrifices that were made to maintain that high route. That's originally why I asked you how many bombs we dropped because you know how many bombs you could I dropped on Ramadi all of them. Yeah, all of them. Yep You dropped 30 maybe 40 whatever the number is every every one of those buildings at one point or another could have had a bomb dropped on it because

It was housing insurgents, but we didn't do that. May the Lord bless you. And women by the way and I call that out specifically because I'll never forget a seeing a casualty evacuation rolling out to go support Iraqi soldiers that were wounded and there's a girl, a woman, in the turret. So men and women took incredible risk. Instead of dropping a bomb on that building to go out and clear that building and kill it. Keep the local populace safe. And there's a huge amount of risk to do that. But that's what you have to do. And I hope that in these ongoing wars The same approach is taken and that

What we have to do in every aspect of life you really have to do this in every aspect of your life You've got to do The right thing you've got to take the moral high ground. You can't surrender it. You got to do the right Things for the right reasons if you make a mistake you own it If people try and tear you down Try and understand what their perspective is And try and lift them up by showing them yours and For business for life for combat in tactics and in morals Take the high ground or the high ground will take you And that's what I got

So Like I said, I think we'll probably get questions about this we we got late we got JP I you know people that were there with us in other units so many awesome people So we can continue to get this the real picture of what was going on so that these people are remembered in the right way Heckle Charles yes um Speaking of doing the right thing. I have a question. Oh, let's go we got how do you dispose of a mind? Bunch of different ways. Yeah, okay

What are the ways you can you can blow it in place so you can put another bomb on top of it? That's actually that's what you're probably gonna do. That's the main Yeah, getting in there with like a pair of pliers and clipping the detonator you can be done and guys do it but The preferred method is to simple that thing in place. Is there like any scenario where you'd somehow transport it somewhere? else and blow it or yeah yeah you could funny story we put in cop Falcon and the Mine sweeper was coming down the road and it was like digging and lafe and somewhere else was like looking over the side of the building watching this thing dig up a freaking bomb yeah and At some point he's like dude this might not be a good idea The same thing happened to me in my first one was to look over the getting at it looking over the building and I think It's about to blow up. It's not a good movie in your face I had that I had the same thing happening on my first opponent. I'm like my EOD

We were hitting a target, we found an IED. And in this particular case, just to case in point, my EOD guy disarmed the bomb. - Yeah, so, but I was standing there as he's manipulating it. Like right by like watching him and he looks over his shoulder and goes you don't have To stand here. - That's what I was thinking. - And there's two things going on. Number one, he was looking out for my safety, but number two, like, that's probably. Not the most comforting feeling having someone standing looking over your shoulder and you're gonna get him and you killed if you screw this up. So those are the, yeah, you're either gonna disarm that thing or you're gonna blow it in place and the guys will do. Depending on what it calls for And they're pretty like common ways of making a my I mean because you

You said sometimes you say IDs sometimes you say mines and obviously there are two different things because IDs improvised or whatever Yes, a key component is improvised but you can take up An artillery shell. Do you know what that is? It looks like a big giant bullet. Yeah, and it's filled with explosives So sometimes they just take old artillery shells and they bury they turn those into the bomb. - Well they like rig the, what do you call it, the trigger. - They make a trigger generally speaking. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - 'Cause the trigger that it comes with is not gonna work for what they need it for. So they'll... Basically the way explosives work. There's the explosive itself the thing that's gonna make the explosion and Cause the problem is generally pretty stable Yeah. But then you have to have something that's not stable, that's less stable. That's generally speaking a blasting cap. This is something that...

Is going to explode very violently very quickly. So blasting cap and detonator or what? Yeah the same thing okay, and there's different types of detonators there's different kind of types of blasting caps but But generally like the the material Like in a Claymore landmine. Have you ever heard of a Claymore? - Yeah, yeah, Front Toward Enemy. - The stuff inside of that, you can play with it like Play-Doh. Yeah, you can set it on fire and it'll burn like there's there's that's what you can do. Oh, yeah, but if you said And hit it with a hammer like you have a problem, but I understand but there's the blasting cap that you put in there Yeah, it explodes Very fast, very violent, it's a lot more volatile. So when our breachers are carrying. They're breach, they don't have the blasting cap in the explosive charge itself. So if it blows up it'll hurt it might even take a couple fingers off or like, you know

But if you have it connected, now you're gonna like lose an arm and possibly your life. So that's kind of the deal. - Yeah, crazy. Cool any other questions? That's an example of me, bro. I don't know how this kind stuff works all the time You know, I mean all I see is What's on like MacGyver or whatever when you read undoes the Bahama whatever that's all I know. That's my education So thank you for that. Yeah. Yeah, you can you can kind of tell you know, you'll see But what you gotta watch out for is there might be wires going into the bomb, and then you clip the wires, and then you lift up the bomb. Bomb but there was a pressure plate so now it still blows up oh like we can have multiple different ways of the charge blowing up oh yeah I was gonna say maybe like a distraction, you know, like, you know, they'll be like, hey, it's this but it's really Totally that's just like MacGyver, bro. Yeah, that's oh I'd go into that part, but I know I know we're off that cool right now. Thank you Yes, we're doing the right thing. We need fuel by the way. I don't know if you knew that or not

Coming off the UFC fights, by the way. - Did you have a good time? - Good fights. Good card. Some good people hanging around which was cool. It was kind of epic honestly. Yeah, I would say that say that as well I didn't I didn't Talk to Tim Kennedy about how he feels about being at the UFC, you know, like I - What would he say? - Basically in a nutshell I said, do you miss fighting? And he said no. Like oh interesting, like what do you mean whatever, he was like, he's like hey let me explain this to you, he's like I like violence, but like. And we're eating dinner or whatever. And he was like, see, if a fight broke out over there-- And they needed me I would love nothing more than to jump in that fight, but If you said, Hey, go fight that guy over there, I'd be like, No. He said, Go eff yourself. So he doesn't like-- Like hey you fight for this or you fight for that you know kind of thing but if the fight is going down he's down kind of a thing so that's why

So he didn't really you know, he said that he wasn't that much into it being there He was very much into hanging out with everybody. That's what he said straight up. - What about Andy? - Andy Stump? - Yeah. That specifically but you know we caught up though which was very cool you know he had the operation yeah for his scenario he went through that that was kind of kind of scary because he said it was random it wasn't like something you know he ate the wrong thing or freaking ran into this he said hey it was just sort of bad luck kind of scenario but he's back in the game for sure I mean and Leo was there as well I felt bad because yeah I saw you know I've won I did text Andy, I was like, I didn't even say hi to Leah. Just like, mayhem going on. I'm going on Another thing I felt bad about so we had a contest in the jocko fuel Yeah, and I barely like I didn't get the word out good enough in the

- The contest was sick. - Fuck yeah, it was sick. - It was sick, like it was the best contest ever. And what you won was, and this dude, Cory, freaking great, he, so. The contest was, if you won the contest, it was, is it called a sweepstakes? - It was technically not a sweepstakes. That's different. - What was it? - That's technically different. Was it called just so freaking I don't know contest. Okay. Well you got like a vote for it Every time you bought something from jocko fuel and then there was like a drawing You could also there's another way to enter because you have to give another way to enter because there's all these legal rules and whatnot You gotta follow the rules so We did it. Anyways, the winner was this dude, Corey, and what he won was, and he got to bring his buddy out, Fabry, Fabry. They came Came out from North Carolina and so what they did was they got there.

Friday they arrived happenstance by the way the same like maybe five minutes after I arrived Oh, yeah, like I was gonna leave in there or the jocko fuel guy It's you know, Liam and them. Yeah, they're already there with the sign and I was like, oh they got the sign for me Well, I'll hang around and see what up dude epic so those guys got That dinner that night, we had dinner the next night. We all hung out for good food at the steak restaurant in Vegas. Then we went to the fights. Like the ufc suite hanging out andy stump tim kennedy like Chris Pratt. - It was really awesome. - It's legitimate. - And then, watch Bo Nickle fight, and then went to Bo Nickle's after party, which you didn't go to by the way. - I, yeah.

The lowdown on Bo Nichols after party. - Yeah, yeah, please. - They had like 10 bags of In-N-Out Burger. - In-N-Out, yeah. - And a bunch of Jocko Go. - Yeah, okay. Solid. - And some Hulk. And so we went there and those guys came, yeah. Just really cool, but here's the thing that I felt bad about was, I didn't really, like we didn't promote it enough to like, Cool it was yes, and it was UFC 300 and that's a big deal bro. Yeah UFC 300 UFC 200 UFC 100 Those are big. It's a big deal Yeah, monumental a moment in time even the way I felt about it when you're like, oh, yeah We got this contest or whatever and I'm like, alright cool. Like yeah, I guess you get tickets And UFC and sounds fun or whatever but I never didn't really think about it but when it went down I hung out with him like kind of a lot like I mean you know sometimes we'd be a part or whatever but you know just some of it kind of by

happenstance as well. And when I looked around and I was like, Bro, this is kinda, for me this is fun, and I'm just me. You know, I didn't win nothing. I was just there, Bro, for me this is like a kickass time. I was like, If I won this, and got a, bro, this would be a really good fun time. Then I compare that being actually in the experience like the freaking like level 10 fun going on Versus what I thought it was when you know before everything happened. I was like, yeah, there's a total mismatch with like how kind of We promoted it if you will versus how it really went down because it was freaking it was epic So I was I had like really good seats Yeah, so I may or may not have had the second best seats in the entire arena. So I'm literally sitting three feet behind Dana white And here's what's awesome Dana White is so fired up that Like when something would happen He would turn around and and like give comments just to like me

the two guys, three guys I'm sitting with. - Yeah, yeah. - You know, I'm just, he was so amped. - I'll give you an example, so Gaethje broke his nose with like a second left and like. In the first round the first round and as that like happens like for example Dana turns around He said I just heard Geiichi. He said they broke my nose. He broke his nose right there. He just had surgery on that thing Dude, this is great - Turns back around. - Right, right. - So when you wonder about the success of the UFC, man. - You've gotta have someone that is that passionate and into it that he sits there and is totally engaged in every fight and turn around and say, That kick was-- Like did you see how hard they were so like that's what he's saying. And again, it's just I mean I'm sitting there like feeling it, you know just in it. He's that Freaking pumped. Yeah, so

Oh, yeah, it's pretty cool to see in the way you didn't make the Wayans though, right? Cuz you Even the Wayans were freaking legit like yeah in that like, you know, okay, and so last UFC I went was Dominic Cruz, Uriah Faber back in the day for the championship. Yes. Hey, you remember? Yeah And And I remember thinking, oh, like they were really, when I was at the event, they do a really good job on the height during the event. On TV because when you're at the event, you know, it's kind of like oh wait, there's no music I mean there's music but it's different. It's like okay cool It's a way better live because you're seeing the actual fight but the height Contested on TV it's way more As far as like the production hype is what I'm saying. Not the fight hype, production hype. Something like that. You know, yeah, that's cool, that's interesting. You know, from a production standpoint, but bro, no. Now?

Every little moment is like you're just on this rollercoaster of freaking UFC way For free limbs freaking make out the whole deal the whole deal was really good Yeah, and those wins were legit to just to experience the whole deal I'm fortunately I've been to a lot of them. I've been a lot of UFC But most of the time I was quite frankly I was working. Yeah. Yeah, it's different I was working at 95% of the UFC. I probably been to 40 some I don't know. I don't know maybe not for But I've been to a lot of UFC's here. I was working at most of them. Yeah, meaning I had a fighter on the card I'm warming up. I'm getting punched backstage You know, like I'm sweating. It's not yeah, it's a different kind of fun this Attention is like not even on the show really your gig your job. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually

Wasn't fun by the way also this is back in the day Like we're all like the fighter you get two rooms the fighters in one room Then other nine of us are in the other room piled up on the floor sleeping on towels You know, he's cutting weight. So we're cutting weight, you know, you can't eat in front of them or whatever Then we're all poor, you know So it's not like, oh, let's go to the steakhouse. No, it's hey, let's go to the buffet and sit here for two hours and just fill up so we don't have to eat again. Dave, Super Bowl. - You went to the Super Bowl this year. - I did. - How was the hype? - It was hype. - In that scenario. That must have been crazy. It was also in Vegas. So this is insane. Yeah, it was insanity. My son was Overwhelmed did you have good seats? We had good seats. Where were your seats? 45 yard line

- Perfect seats. - Perfect seats. They're in the upper level, but like first row. So like for him to be able to see everything, you know, with nobody blocking his young. Little kid, like it was pretty normal. - And isn't he a fan? - He's like all in on the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes. So it was like, all right, I'm gonna take him, this may never happen again, he's gonna go to a good age where it's gonna be like a life. Memory locked in forever. 10 years old, Patrick Mahomes, and then of course they win in overtime. It was, it was, and it's Vegas, it was crazy. - Dude, he's never gonna forget that. - He's never gonna forget that. - That's freaking epic. Football on TV with him when he wants to how does the hype transfer dude - Not even close. - It's not, I can't even, yeah, there's no, it's not worth explaining. And in fact, he likes watching football, kind of, but you know, take it or leave it. He likes to play, but to see it live is so different.

It was a life event man for sure without a doubt. Oh, yeah Super Bowl Super Bowl Vegas That's kind of a UFC 300 in Vegas. Yeah, this is freaking height out of control. Hype City big time Taco fuel good presents Yeah, yeah, I've seen some jock with fuel scenarios crack. Yeah, and again, you know, this was fired. Uh, zakar Sitting next to Dana the whole arena and like they're they're talking shop the whole time too and Zuckerberg's talking shop, you know, he's turning around like, ah, you know, yeah He's training as you get to Yeah, what's good? Did you two can bring everybody together fighting again can bring people together so yes - And obviously Chris Pratt was there, he was getting after it. - Yep. - Jocko Fuel. - Undid over his Hawaii story. - Oh, that's right, that's right. - At Bubble Gum Shrimp, by the way, which I'm very, very familiar. He was a Maui though. - Oh, okay.

- Maui, all day? - All good, yeah, for sure, 100% Maui. - 100%, but yeah, all good. Yeah, it was good to see you. I talk of fuel talk of you want some jocko fuel we do you can get some jocko fuel calm you can get hydrate You can get greens you can get you can get whatever you need man. And let's face it the mulk. Yeah It's just a key component of life. That's what it's that's what it's that's what it is. Yeah a key component of life. Where can you get 30 grams of clean outstanding protein in like moments? Like zero to, I'm good. - Yeah, that tastes like that too, by the way. - Yeah. - And also, you know, on the surface it seems secondary, but bro, in real life, it's a huge deal. - No, it's a huge deal. Check it out. Jocko feel calm. You can get it online at Jocko feel calm You can also get it vitamin shop. Voila the mulk people have been asking about this. So the the protein

Drink ready to drink is in Wawa right now. If you recall a little while ago. They pulled our are. G drinks out of there. We got, our slots got bought by some of the big corporations and, but there was a high demand signal for-- Drink and so it's in there. It's crushing So if you're around a wah-wah go get yourself and if it's in the morning time get yourself a sweet cream coffee moch 95 milligrams of calf. Are you drinking that Dave? No, you're not in your head. My wife is in there It's like out of control now Yeah, it's like she is like the least critical person in the world if we run out of sweet cream or coach We have now one time - Coming at you. - She's like coming at me hard. It's not like, oh I did Jamod the Lawn, where's my mole? So it's kinda cool that she's so super stoked about that. - Yeah, the thing that's cool about that is it. Literally two birds with one stone. It's like here's two birds, here's one stone. They're both getting killed. You're gonna get 30 grams of--

Awesome protein and you're gonna get your 95 milligrams of caffeine. This thing is epic and people are down for it. Check that out, you can get that at Wawa, you can get this stuff at Vitamin Shop, you can get it at GNC Military Commissaries, A-Feast, Hannaford, Dashdoors in Maryland. Wake Fern, ShopRite. H-E-B, Meyer, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere, jiu-jitsu. Cross if you got a jujitsu gym if you got a CrossFit gym if you got a powerlift Gym, well if you had a gym, what kind of gym would you have echo Charles probably like victory MMA and fitness Yeah honest with you. Okay Perfect. Yeah, it's kind of got everything we got CrossFit. We got bodybuilding I would have the bigger weightlifting gym though, like general weightlifting bodybuilding fitness. Yeah - Yeah. You'd have a couple you want cable crossovers in this little something little try more tricep pull like If there, uh, and not to get too deep into it, but I would, I would expand it into, you know, the old Muay Thai room. Yeah.

Boxing scenario is already huge over there so I'd expand into that that room for some more weights you don't want - With a glass? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. - That's me though. But either way, you know, borderline perfect. - Well if you have a gym or if you go to a gym where you want them to have Jocko Fuel, have your gym owner or you, email jfsales@jockofuel.com. Also, Origin USA. We're making stuff in America. We're making training gear, we're making jiu-jitsu gear, geez. We're making jeans. We're making t-shirts, joggers, making boots. Dude. I'll just bring it up. So, the team took a hide, Hide. From an elk that Joe Rogan shot. I saw that and made boots From the hide

And the way they did it there's an entry in an exit wound they made it so the and the exit wound, they used that part of the leather so you can see, and then they put red leather behind it on one boot, so the... - Entry wound, it's going in on one side, there's like a slit and you can see red leather and then on the other side where the exit wound is, - And red leather behind that. - Yep, so it's like the boots have the wound in it. - The wound is-- - It's the best thing I've ever seen. - It might be the most squared away pair of boots that's ever been made. - Ever, yep. Well, if you were Joe Rogan, what would you do with those boots? I know do you wear do you wear them or do you put them on the wall? Yeah, it might be a special occasion kind of scenario. I think it's a special occasion kind of scenario. I got some boards, surfboards. Look we don't like wall hangers. Anti wall hangers. We wanna surf those boards. But I do have some boards that are like, hey, there's gotta be some condition, some epic condition.

Other than that, they're looking beautiful. Yeah, I got some of stoners old boards Yeah, stoner didn't leave me his boards so I could freaking hang him on a wall. Yeah Right. Yeah, so I feel that way about those boots. Yes certain moment in time Got to break out those elk boots. I didn't feel me. Apparently they're super super soft Yeah, so you're? Like you're describing the whole thing like sounds pretty sick to see him. It's slightly more sick in real life It's very weird. Did you actually hold them? You see them? Well, yeah, I mean Pete opened them and we looked at them But yeah, I didn't like try them on or not No, but you was the leather super soft actually to be honest. I didn't feel the leather. Okay Touch them not really in the games look. Oh, hey, we can't get you those boots the Joe Rogan boots Hey, we got plenty boots. Hey check it out Originusa.com this stuff's all made 100% in America 100% in America that's what we're doing

Here by myself cam hands. Yeah, you know, it's so fired up and if if you if you're if your test Human is cam Hanes. Bro, you're good. You know what I mean? Yeah, like cams a freaking maniac. Mm-hmm The dude is just hunt hunt hunt. That's what he's thinking about. You know, he's thinking about right now. Probably hunting. Yeah. Oh, he's Thought about his bow for a second now. He's back to thinking about killing an elk So check it out. He's in it Joe Rogan's in it Actually, Chris Pratt's in it too. We're all in the game. That's what we're doing. OriginUSA.com, check it out. - It's true. - Get yourself some American-made stuff. That's what I want to say. The reason, Cam is on board the reason that Joe is on board the reason that Chris is on board

because it's american-made yeah these are patriotic people that understand how impactful this is to the country these are the people that are the people that are the people that are the people that are These are all people from working class backgrounds, by the way. Like these are people that understand what it means to make stuff in America and that's why. They're on board. That's why they're partners. So origin usa.com America check it out Also, jock is store called jocko store Discipline equals freedom. This is where you can get your stuff to represent that idea, which is true, by the way. um Also, there's a thing called the shirt locker Subscription scenario new design every month people seem to like down check it out But yeah, it's all on jocko store calm if you like something get something there - Absolutely. Okay, also if you need steak Which you definitely do and look this is kind of a bummer Five years ago eight years ago

I was fired up to go out for steak. 'Cause I was gonna get a really good steak that I liked, that was better than anything I could have at home. That situation is flipped now. - Yeah, it's different now. We got Colorado craft breed beef and we got primal beef Be safe. You will get a steak that tastes better than any steak that you can get in a restaurant. I know that's a bull Statement but I'm gonna tell you right now if you have Colorado craft beef or you have primal beef you'll have steak that tastes better Then whatever steak you're getting in whatever restaurant you're going to you go to one of them super fancy steak houses We got you. Yeah so Check out Colorado craft beef comm check out primal beef comm and get some American made beef. I took those beef sticks. Yeah All there there there the new Snickers bar Yeah, they're the new Snickers bar. Yeah, are you down in those things dude? I'm getting screwed on those things I got I get the nine-pack shift in my and I'll open up the pantry and I'll like

I'll have to go hunt. The kids will, like the rappers will be in their bedrooms. My kids are just straight up stealing hoarding. So the beef sticks are so good. At least the meat, like it's in my freezer, you can't really, you can't steal the steaks. Dude, those things are like immediately, if they catch wind that they've shown up on the auto ship, they're gone, they're gone. Which deep down, like secretly, that's actually the one. What I want them eating, but there's a part of me where I'm like, can I get one, maybe? - Can you at least carve out some for the old man here? - They're awesome. - Check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also jockounderground.com. Also YouTube. We got a YouTube channel. Jocko podcast, right? Jocko podcast official then there's also the Jocko fuel. Yeah. Also we origin USA Yeah origin you say for sure. Um, but Jocko podcast we're coming out the clips channel too. - Oh. - 'Cause sometimes people just like the clips, you know. - Look at you on that one. - Just saying, you know, it's effective.

Oh, it's effective. Hey bro, how long have we had this podcast for? Anyway, like I was trying to say Sometimes we just want the clips, you know, we're on the go all this other stuff, you know, we may win my but not be Sitting through three hours necessarily on that day. That's not what we're doing. So you know, the clips that might be beneficial. - Yeah. - We'll see that. Thank you though for inquiring. - Right on, right on. Also... Psychological warfare also flipside canvas Dakota Meyer. He's made awesome stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books Strategy and tactics field manual final span The code the evaluation the protocols wrote that with Dave Burke right there. Could you discipline equals freedom field manual? We're the warrior kid one two three four five check those out, please get those For the kids that you know, just give them to them. Just give them to them. Give the nine year old across the street one of these books right now or all of them and that way in--

in seven years They're not freaking cranking the music up and throwing toilet paper into your trees because they're out there living a life of discipline structure He's over there, you know what he's gonna be doing? Coming over like, hey, can I mow your lawn? I'll do it this time for free, and we can talk about some kind of a contractual agreement. Right, when he's nine or 12. Just do it. The kids on the right path, Mikey and the Dragons about faced by Hackworth, extreme ownership, dichotomy leadership. Front we have a leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership And if you want to check it out go to echelonfront.com We have an event called the muster. The next one is in Nashville I think we just rearranged the dang seats so we can get a few more people in there. It's okay 2-04 May so that's coming up real quick. Check it out

After that is in Dallas 16 to 18 October. We just got back from Gettysburg battlefield amazing We have another event called the council all the Things are focused on making you a better leader which is gonna give you a better life. Also the women's assembly September 11 through the 13th in San Antonio, Texas for the female leaders out there check that out and If you want to get good at this stuff off. You need to practice it. You need to continually study it and that's why we have the extreme ownership Academy This is gonna help you with business. It's gonna help you with life. It's gonna help you dealing with your kids It's gonna help you dealing with your wife or your husband So check that out extreme ownership.com

So if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families Gold Star families Check out mark Lee's mom mama Lee She got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved go to America's mighty warriors org Also Micah Fink He's got heroes and horses org for all those individuals that need some help readjusting getting back in the game He takes vets up into the mountains of Montana So they can find themselves and Jimmy may he's got an organization called beyond the Brotherhood org helping bring guys into The civilian sector and if you want to connect with us Dave is that David are Burke? I'm a jocko And I'm on social @JockoWillink echoes @EchoCharles. Just watch out for the algorithm.

In the in the mayhem that's going on there The comments the response gotta be careful gotta be careful that way But get emotional about things you shouldn't get emotional about it's a bot Also, thank you to all of our men and women out there on the front lines put into very dynamic situations situations where decisions have to be made in seconds, where lives are at stake and they do the right things for the right reasons. Thank you for what you do. And also to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers Border Patrol Secret Service as well All other first responders thank you all for doing the right things for the right reasons here at home and keeping us safe and everyone else out there

There's decisions to make there's the high road and the mud The right thing to do and there's everything else And it's not always easy, but if you do the right things for the right reasons And you do not surrender the high ground in the end you will win And that's what we've got until next time this is Dave and echo and jocko out out