The Physical and Mental Strain of Battle – Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

i’m taking us back to the book they moved like mules by daylight they took sniper fire at night they were mortared but it was not battle it was just the endless march village to village without purpose nothing won or lost they marched for the sake of the march they plodded along slowly dumbly leaning forward against the heat unthinking all blood and bone simple grunts soldiering with their legs toiling up the hills and down into the patties and across the rivers and up and down again just humping one step and then the next and then another but no volition no will because it was automatic it was anatomy and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage the hump was everything a kind of inertia a kind of emptiness a dullness of desire and intellect and conscious and hope and human sensibility their principles were in their feet their calculations were biological they had no sense of strategy or mission they searched the villages without knowing what to look for not caring kicking over jars of rice frisking children and old men blowing tunnels sometimes setting fires and sometimes not then forming up and moving on to the next village then other villages where it would always be the same they carried their own lives the pressures were enormous in the heat of early afternoon they would remove their helmets and flak jackets walking bare which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain now that that section obviously paints something different than what we experienced because and and you can see what he’s talking about you know you’ve got soldiers that don’t know what the mission is that don’t understand what the strategy is and you know there’s all kinds of books about vietnam and and at the highest you know we talk about sometimes how maybe we didn’t do a good job of telling people what the strategy was and but at the highest levels in the vietnam war there’s confusion on what the strategy so there’s no way that some front-line grunt understands why he’s clear in this village and not that village or why it’s that village and not this village they just don’t know so what does it become it becomes like they’re just robots human robots moving forward and i think we were very fortunate to be in a situation where you know we had a better understanding and and again we talked about this in the book we could have done a better job and should have done a better job of making sure that everybody understood more but there was understanding there was at a minimum everybody understood at a minimum the evil that was there the evil that was there in ramadi in iraq that was torturing people raping people killing people trying to enslave people everybody understood that there was evil there and that’s what we were fighting against trying to help this local populist who was completely at the mercy of this insurgent group which by the way had no mercy so i think we had that benefit for us but one thing that is completely unchanged is this talk of this strain the strain that is put on the soldiers on the ground and when you think back to the strain that you felt that your men felt what do you think of what do you think of when you think of the strain i can absolutely relate to that i mean it’s it’s the it’s something you and i talked about right when we got home when we got home it was you called it the burden right when we got we got home and we i didn’t even recognize how powerful that was you know i remember talking to you about it we were like we all of a sudden we could relax like there weren’t we were people trying to kill us right there there were when we arrived back from that deployment to ramadi and we’re back in san diego and and you it and just the recognition that it’s not just from our personal like hey that people aren’t trying to kill me but like i no longer carrying the burden of the decisions that i make and people’s lives are on the line right like at this moment right now and i want to make sure that i’ve thought through all the contingencies you know are we ready you know for for the these worst case scenarios have we have we planned you know have we rehearsed these things have we trained have we thought that what the enemy might do how could they hit us where we hadn’t even foreseen it you know that that burden that he just carried all the time and and for me you know man after after mark got killed and ryan got wounded it was just um you know four months into our deployment it was just this recognition like man we’re that can happen at any time and i knew it could happen anytime prior to that you know it wasn’t that we got complacent or that but but it was we’ve gotten away with it so many times that you all you start kind of kind of see like maybe we can make it through this thing you know without losing people as as uh and just going out there and you know as you’ve talked about you can just only get lucky so many times like with all that evil and all that horribleness out there that uh that it can happen at any time and and that’s the strain that i think that i certainly i felt for other guys felt when you see that your your brothers killed or wounded uh when you’ve had close calls and you recognize like just how um how close we are to death at any time anytime we’re rolling out there that uh um that is a strain it is a strain on you and it’s something that wears on you um and i i think um for me it was just always always worried about like just the the and when you see the violence of it you know the vehicle graveyard that we rolled out through every time we’re driving out the gate and just the the twisted hulks of metal that used to be a vehicle that carried men or women in them uh you know and those were u s troops that were either killed or horribly wounded that were in that vehicle that were destroyed or if you you see an id go off and there’s a 100 foot fireball in the air and just frag you know the metal fragments raining down you know for hundreds of yards in all directions for something like that like just the power of that you know the the violence of machine gun fire that’s coming in close to you and i often describe as just the you know i wrote about in the book the the biggest strongest guy you can imagine just smashing the wall with a hammer next to you as hard as you can an inch from your head and it’s from your head just throwing concrete fragments everywhere and there’s um and and you know now it’s seven to eight hundred rounds per minute of that of that coming in at you with a belt-fed bell-fed machine gun maybe there’s multiple ones shooting at you rpg rock it’s just this rocking explosion this rings your bell you know even if it’s just on the wall outside you know if one of those things hits the window and and and detonates on the bars on the window it’s gonna just frag everybody in the room it’s going to be horribly wounded or killed so that that was a strain all the time and you know i think the difference for us though is is the you know in any you know there isn’t there were some certainly some guys uh and you talked about leadership that we learn right the guys carrying those heavy machine guns the the belt fed machine guns and all the gear that were them and they’re like man do i have to carry this thing you know as a leader we had to remind them why that was important you know they got that love hate relationship the machine gunners they love to shoot that machine gun and they’re awesome at it they hate to carry the machine gun right it’s a it’s that love-hate relationship and um so when they’re going in on a foot patrol that’s a you know a mile foot you know mile and a half full patrol into a tough area and they’re carrying all the heavy weight they get focused on that so you got to help them recognize like this this is why you’re such a critical part of the team and why we got to have these machine guns um so you got to do you know as a leader something we had to do all the time but i think for these guys in vietnam they’re you know they’re they’re driving or flying into an area but trolling into an air that’s the it seems like they’re seeing they’re seeing new terrain all the time you know for us in ramadi it was this tiny city that was it’s like what three by three miles you know across you’re talking about just the the central central romani piece of it very small and we’re going into the same areas all the time you know j street the j block you know papa 10 um you know these areas that uh going down baseline road and you know to 20th street these areas that we we got to know and we understood you know where the the the the bad guys were operating out of and we’d been in so many of these buildings and we so then we had to have the we had to mix it up and not patrol down the same streets every time and try to come in and do some misdirection stuff uh but we got to know these areas and you know even though it was a small area you know these tanks might be less than a mile away from you maybe they’re even a half mile down the road you know in that environment if there’s if there’s you know 35 ieds that could destroy any one of which could destroy the the tank between you and them half a mile away they might as well be a hundred miles away doesn’t matter so you know we had to plan for those contingents we had to be ready but that was a strain that i certainly remember well and i remember that conversation as i’m sure you do coming back and and recognizing like wow i didn’t even realize how heavy that strain was until we got back and it was it was it was lifted yeah it didn’t happen right away it happened like we were at least i feel like we were conditioned it would be it would be like going to a planet where there was much much higher gravity and you’re you don’t even realize how much more weight you’re carrying and then when we came home it wasn’t like it instantly the gravity changed it was like it slowly and one day for me it was about a month that i i all of a sudden i woke up and instead of the first thought i had when i woke up of like what’s gonna happen today what bad thing can happen today it was like i think the waves look good and i’m going surfing and did go from that thought process from like you said it’s the horror of the of the imminent danger because like like you said you can only get lucky so many times and you go out day after day after day and you got i’m watching guys all over my guys all over ramadi there’s no possible way that they can make it through today without taking a casualty and then they and then they make it through that day i got five elements three elements five elements two elements all out on the battlefield at the same time there’s no way they’re gonna make it through today without a casualty they make it through today and guess what you wake up the next day and now you’re carrying that day and today so you make it through that day now you’re carrying three days and that just built and built and built and every once in a while obviously we would take a casualty and maybe you get a little reset but you don’t it’s just there and they’re heavy all the time and what’s really interesting about this is you might be thinking as leif explained as you explain you know those feelings and as i’m talking about right now you might think that we were sullen and worried and sweat and and panicking or but but i’m sitting here thinking about it we would and everybody in the in the task unit we were having fun we were laughing we would have conversations we’d make fun of each other we’d make fun of our friends we’d make fun of our boss we’d make fun of everybody we’d laugh we’d have a great time and the the the strain even though there’s there’s you know fun and good times on top of it that strain is absolutely there and it stays there the whole time and it just builds i think the big illustration for that to me was when an operation was going on right and vehicles were lined up like get the vehicles are lined up out on the we had this that main street you know outside of uh the the uh the talk tactical operations center and you know where your office was and uh i remember that that bond that we had in task unit bruiser you know so often you get well the seals are doing their thing and you got the support personnel that are running the radios and the seabees that run the camp and they they just do different stuff and they don’t you know what was so awesome about asking a bruiser was that we line those trucks up and we know we’re going out you know we’re going out at operation and and if you were weren’t if you weren’t coming on the op i know you would you would always be out there you know out there shaking everybody’s hands and talking to them and not in a way of like you know not in a way that was morbid right but in a way of like just the respect and and knowledge that any time we’re going out like at any one time there may be there may be uh any of these guys that roll out may not be coming back from this they may be coming back in a body bag and uh and that we had to be ready for that at all the time because it was almost a daily daily thing and i just not only you know for for you and the the support person of the comms guys you know our our radio when we’re out there these aren’t seals and they’re but they’re out there getting the radios ready and helping us out people just come you know uh you know uh our our operations specialist you know chief coming out there i remember all those guys just lined up shaking hands talking to people it was just that and for the few opposite you know that i didn’t go on another another uh uh if we had something else going on and another unit’s going out with our guys on a different operation i’m not a part of the same thing like going out there talking those guys shaking their hands and knowing that like they may not be coming back from that and i think that was the biggest that was the biggest to me like illustration of like that strain and again we laughed we joked it wasn’t there was nothing morbid we were telling jokes and laughing and kidding each other um but uh but that was really there and i remember we got relieved you know by the next seal team still team five that came in um and you know good good bros of mine that i’d serve with because i’d come from steel team five um and uh i knew those guys when they were going out to you know i knew what they were going out into you know and i just remember uh going out there for that goodbye to them and shaking their hands and talking about because we knew exactly what they were going into and they’re gonna keep keep getting effort yeah it was one of the i remember when those guys came and i was doing like the turnover brief to their whole troop and i i was you know i had a sign i put a slide up and i was going through this and that the other thing and i’m like okay you guys are going to take casualties and and like i never thought in a million years that somebody would be briefing me hey you guys are going to take casualties i’m like oh you guys might hey it’s dangerous it was like you guys are going to take casualties that is what is going to happen and that might sound negative but that was the facts that it was a hundred percent true that they were going to take casualties and we knew it we knew it and that’s what was so hard to shake their hand and tell them goodbye and good luck and and watch them roll out for the first time alone without us and know that could be tonight and could be tonight