Jocko Podcast 298: The Way of The Frogman. “By The Water Beneath The Walls” With Ben Milligan.

this is jocko podcast number 298 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening within weeks of their arrival the seals of debt golf were shaking off their initial jitters and even displaying some measure of proficiency signs of this were apparent in every aspect of their operations on ambush no one cleared his throat coughed spit sneezed or even sniffled on insert an extract the men stepped heel to toe to reduce the sucking explosion of mud walking and above all avoided the footprints of the man in front to keep from sinking even deeper to improve their infield support the seals befriended the pilots and crews of the navy’s helicopter squadron at na bay and overhauled the seal’s denuded landing craft into an up armored ironclad six heavy machine guns mounted to the gun well donald’s a 60 millimeter mortar bolted to the rusted deck plate and a bunker busting recoilless rifle pinion to the top of the sandbag pilot house it was so much armament that the men quickly recommissioned the lcm the mighty moe to it they added academy to block the sun and rain a two burner stove for meals then draped hammocks between everything that didn’t pivot or fire essentially turned it into a houseboat littered with empty hot sauce bottles coffee cups clothes lines all aids to reduce the number of trips back to nabe and increase the amount of time they could spend in a mission area to improve the quality of their encounters with the enemy they experimented with a variety of tactics false insertions that made the viet cong think the seals that landed where they hadn’t false extractions that made the vietcong think the seals had left and probably most important squad sized missions that half the seals punch but correspondingly increase their stealth and the amount of swamp land they could cover thus doubling their chances of viet cong contact no small challenge in an area as empty of the enemy as the rung sat and what did these innovations yield a handful of captured documents and north vietnamese currency some fresh water wells some rice caches one so monstrous that it merited an air strike then finally after more than a month of frustrations debt golf landed a jackpot ambush of two sandpans that killed seven suspected vietcong gorillas the seal’s reaction was the same as anyone who has just caught a hot streak a little more than a week after the first coup one squad pursued a tip from the crew of a hovering navy gunship that had spotted several camouflage sandpans not far from mighty moe’s anchorage despite having already blown their cover in that area from several days worth of patrolling the squad leader in full daylight the squad landed in full daylight and fell in behind point man billy macon a keen eyed 28 year old texan the father of a daughter and a five-week old boy he had never seen stepping alone into the middle of the sun drench clearing and spotting a viet cong bunker macon managed a single burst from his m16 before he was cut down by an eruption of machine gun fire that left him stranded hugging the ground to get under the rush of snapping bullets and splintering branches the seals fell back on their training and clawed themselves into a rough firing line but one that was not nearly stiff enough to break the wall of lead that blocked their way to the fallen comrade to tom truxell engaged in the untested platoon commander’s perennial two-front war the enemy and his own doubts it seemed that the only recourse might be to pull back to the river and to the mighty moe’s guns that is until one of his men fired a 40 millimeter grenade into the bunker’s mouth the shock forced a momentary flinch in the enemy’s ambush just long enough for the heavyweight moscone to bowl a mad dash from macon who is carried to safety just in time to whisper a final message to his wife while the corpsman ransacked his tiger stripes to find his wounds considering that macon’s death was considering that macon’s death in combat was not simply the first for the seal teams but that it was also nearly a two percent manpower loss for seal team one no one would have faulted wires if he had forced a pause to assess the operation that had led to the tragedy he didn’t the reason was no more complicated than the same one taught to anyone who has ever looked up to see the belly of the horse that just bucked them off wires ordered his men back to back into their saddles and back into the wrong sat this perseverance would have payoffs within a month the seals of debt golf were expanding their operational repertoire from planned patrol and ambush to unplanned quick reaction counter-attacks along the rungsat’s choke points in theory it was an operational expansion that finally fulfilled the buckley report’s recommendation for riverbank raiders in practice it was a resurrection of the navy’s grapple swinging boarding parties encounters now included the inland pursuit and cornering of black pajama wearing attackers firefights that varied from a few sharp rifle exchanges to 15 minute skirmishes one of these against an enemy packed haystack that did not stop firing until the seals launched 48 grenades into it before long the operational impact of debt golf’s aggressiveness was considered so substantial that admiral ward approved its increase from two platoons to three all but a guarantee of a corresponding increase in impact while this blossomed so too did the seal’s confidence best evidenced by their swagger around nabe but also by a wooden sign above the entrance to their tent scrawled yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i will fear no evil because i’m the meanest bastard in the valley though the helmets and flak jackets of the un of uncountable gi’s would soon boast the same thing by mid-autumn 1966 the seals claim to meanest in the valley was undisputed in the wrong sat no other unit was as lethal and that right there is an excerpt from a book and the book is called by the water beneath the walls the rise of the navy seals and it’s written by a guy benjamin milligan this book is a comprehensive history book about the origin of the seal teams now that passage hit me because i trained throughout my entire career at a place called camp billy macon out in the imperial valley of southern california and i knew the story of billy macon he was awarded the silver star and they have that citation out there at the desert training compound they also have pictures of his platoon and btf tony tony of freddie and i we used to inspect those pictures and we used to look at bm1 moscone and he was listed in that platoon picture we used to talk about him and he was this massive guy we stood out in the picture and we used to think what would what would bm1 moscone do right now in this situation but that really is about all the information we had about billy macon and his platoon and what they did in vietnam some word of mouth stories that we’d hear from some of the older vietnam guys but that’s about it but this book spells it out so much more and the book details the entire history of the seal teams from the scouts and raiders to the naval combat demolition units to the underwater demolition teams up to what we now know and where i served my adult life in the seal teams now i normally don’t cover history books on the podcast because i prefer to read first-person accounts of people that were actually there people that understand what it’s like to live through and experience things not just research it well this book is an exception because the author ben milligan was a seal which adds a level of understanding and connection that comes across on every page of this book it is also so thorough and extensive of the history of the seals that it leaves no stone unturned and connects really to the soul of the modern day seal connects us with our frog men forefathers and i think this book should be required reading for all all seals or anyone even remotely interested in the seal so they understand where we came from and the sacrifices that were made to get us where we are today and it just so happens that we have the honor of the author ben milligan here tonight to talk to us about his time in the teams and his amazing account of the history of the frogmen ben thanks for joining us thanks jacob uh let’s get a little start off by getting a little background on you and where you came from before we get into the background and where the seals came from let’s figure out about where ben milligan came from so so where’d you grow up indianapolis northeast side and and what was the uh situation you were both your mom and dad do my dad was an ear nose and throat surgeon worked in a small uh town in uh indiana uh called uh anderson uh it was a small uh uh a gm town uh i think he was the only it was him and uh one other uh ent in town so he was kind of like a minor celebrity status it wasn’t a restaurant that we would go to in town where you know somebody didn’t come up and say hey doc thanks for you know such and such hey doc i got a sore nose can you help me out yeah and at one point i think every uh single member in my family except for my younger brother worked uh in my dad’s office so we kind of grew up uh you know in the in the medical field welcome to welcome to doc milligans can you have a seat over there would you like a candy that kind of thing yeah i kind of i was probably the uh uh the worst of my dad’s employees but he was kind enough to keep me on the worst example of nepotism what um what about your mom did she did she work was she house my housewife yeah housewife she uh she looked after us she was three boys and uh one girl so a fair amount what number were you i was in the middle so i have an older brother a younger brother and then baby sister okay so you’re number two out of four right what about uh what sports were you were you playing growing up uh i played soccer uh badly uh i i think they kept me on the team because we are the the school that i went to was so small they uh they really had nobody else uh yeah but i i didn’t uh i didn’t get to the seal teams through any athletic ability i was a really good tryer so after uh at the end of every uh uh soccer season uh when they passed out awards they would always give me like the mr hustle or the most improved or some other you know just sort of uh you know under handle word what was the anything else going on in high school what kind of music did you like well i i ran track so i was i was a decent uh decent attract but as far as music uh that’s typical stuff nothing no nothing crazy nothing crazy nothing hip you’re looking at the like the lamest guy that ever got through but when you’re so you said you ran track or you ran cross-country or both i kind of did a little both i i did uh uh cross-country uh my freshman year what’s the longest race you run in cross-country in high school isn’t it and only like three miles or so yeah it’s nothing nothing overwhelming and i was pr i was good at it i probably could have done that uh i but after my how fast can you run a mile when you’re in high school oh uh i think the fastest i did it was something like 450 448 something like that but the only reason i i i think that was as good as i was ever going to get i didn’t when i when i raced uh after every race it was i mean i’d dry heaving everything else i couldn’t i would get so nervous before the race that i couldn’t i couldn’t eat i wouldn’t sleep the night before it was miserable what were you nervous about oh just brutal pain because i didn’t have the natural talent to do this so i just gutted it out so you were nervous about the suffering you’re going to experience yeah [Laughter] which made you suffer even more taco show is tougher and so what did you have any inkling about going in the military when you were in high school yeah i i knew that that was i was going to do that i uh i think i i announced to my parents that i wanted to be a seal when i was 12 they didn’t know what a seal was how did you know what a seal was i’d heard my older brother’s friends talking about it and uh uh prior to that my grandpa had been a marine in world war ii so growing up until i was about 12 i’d wanted to be a marine and then i found out what navy seals were and then i i also sort of found out right at the same time that after the battle of okinawa my grandpa had volunteered he was one of the few guys that could swim and they were so desperate for frogmen after okinawa for the invasion of japan that they had ransacked the ranks just looking for anybody that could swim and he had volunteered for the udt so he was one of the handful of uh non-navy guys that actually uh joined so he didn’t do any operations as a frog man but he uh he was uh attached to a udt so so you found that out but found that out and and i was like well you know uh impressionable age and like i i i’m gonna do that so what was your comfort level in the water high comfort level uh he was um my grandpa was uh um i think we we were at the pool every every weekend uh swimming was a big part of our our growing up and then so very comfortable but that never raced in the water never never swam competitively like i said before the school that i went to was so small i think i had 54 kids in my graduating class i mean i played soccer because there was no football team i ran track because we didn’t have a wrestling team or anything like that have we had those i probably would have done them but um i did what i could uh but when i got to buds i you know realized uh after hell week that i was easily the slowest swimmer that had made it through hoey i just didn’t know what the hell i was doing so when but you didn’t you go to college after you’re done with high school and where did you go to college purdue purdue studied history is that what you knew you wanted to do did you did you did you always have like an affinity for history always yeah uh starting uh you know my dad was always uh reading to us my grandpa was always reading to us uh we would as a family we would take trips and often we were hitting a battlefield along the way when i hit junior high though right at that you know uh consequential point in my life my grandpa uh every uh every fall every fall break he started taking me to a different uh cup for you know the long weekend he would take me to a different civil war battlefield or some other you know revolutionary war battlefield so it just kind of got uh i just got addicted so it was just i caught his enthusiasm i guess so when you were going to college were you actually learning and putting see when i went to college i was just doing what i was told to do i mean i went i was already in the navy when i went to college but i was just doing whatever i needed to do to get good grades i didn’t care about anything i just was doing what i needed to do get good grades i wasn’t like oh this is so interesting i don’t think i said that one single time i was just like do i need to memorize this cool give it to me that was my attitude but it seems like you might have had a different attitude no no i if you uh at least were trying to get good grades you’re better than me because i didn’t care about that either so i i mean i you’re just trying to pass well my so i had tried to enlist uh in in the navy my senior year of uh high school i hadn’t shown up after a soccer practice back home and i had gone directly from practice to the recruiter’s office and i was getting ready to sign on the dotted line because i didn’t want to go to college i wanted to go right into the navy and uh the recruiter to his credit he um uh stops me before i sign and he you know he points you know obviously behind me and he goes do you know that woman i turn around my mom has both hands on the window and she sobbed [Laughter] so i i took a pause we went out in the parking lot my mom and i had a conversation and she begged me not to join the military nobody joined the military and our family since you know world war ii so when i got out there i said i would go to one year of college uh and after if i did that one year of college i would have their blessing so when i signed up for classes my first year i had no i had no plan i just signed up for every class it looked interesting i signed up for the history of world war ii i signed up for uh i mean i i just i had no i just signed up for all these history classes and i went to the first one i was hooked and so you did kind of like your classes i liked my history classes those are the only uh classes that i paid any attention to but i loved them and i had i had great uh professors uh the history and political science classes so there’s really no military history classes or courses are left in the country there’s only a couple of institutions that do military history um so they’ve they’ve taken a lot of that military uh history curriculum and they’ve kind of farmed it out to different disciplines political science being one of them um and so i would you know just look for all these interesting classes all the stuff that you know i was interested in um i managed to carve out a degree and when i graduated in you know 2000 i i somehow i managed to graduate in four years [Music] then i i tried to go to ocs uh i had no idea what i was doing i had never met another seal my application to go to ocs and then get a buds contract afterwards was ridiculous i mean they asked you know on the application and now i know you know you need like an admiral or somebody to write a letter a recommendation my buddy fred i had my high school soccer coach my application was pathetic especially that was in 2000 oh yeah in 2000 the competition for the officer billets is insane insane it’s insane so i just enlisted and the freaking soccer coach just did cutting such a bummer it was a very nice letter so so then you just said cool i’m enlisting yeah and my parents did you know did your mom break down again you know my parents were on a trip uh when when this happened oh do you want to she’s gone yeah oh my yeah my parents were gone um they knew how important this was to me uh they knew that i really didn’t have a plan afterwards it’s not like i’d you know been in some sort of apprenticeship to you know go to law school or anything like that i wasn’t prepared for anything so uh when that when i hit that roadblock i called my parents they were you know like i said they weren’t there i talked to my dad and uh my dad to his credit just said this is something you have to do and so i went over and went to the uh enlisted recruiter and i signed that day in two weeks so two weeks later i was gone that’s freaking legit and what year was that two thousand so i i signed up in uh uh early august of 2000 i was gone by the end of the month that was 2 000 right okay so you show up in boot camp and you have that shock to your system did you say to yourself what did i do my mom was right oh yeah [Laughter] i was a college graduate what the hell am i doing here yeah but uh folding underwear yeah i i mean i i didn’t have the worst boot camp experience they uh um early on they had you know uh asked her if anybody here had uh college experience and i had raised my hand so i got made the the division yeoman so i was able to kind of leave from time to time carrying the mailbag and just carrying the mailbag for 45 minutes i would just march around the base yeah so you get to what was your uh like pre-training getting ready for buds did you do anything or you just hey whatever yeah i’ve been uh i’ve been following the uh the buds uh pre or the pre-buds training uh plan uh like you know a certain number of pull-ups setups uh push-ups everything and then running and swimming every day so you felt like you were pretty good shape no i i didn’t i i thought i was in okay shape uh and i’d been doing it for a year and uh um so about four months before i actually uh joined the navy i had uh linked up with the uh the purdue rotc guys uh that were all training to go to buds and when i linked up with them their training was on a completely other level these guys were serious they had you know they’d met seals before i’d never met one and so i did four months of uh uh training with them i i i mean these guys were all in rotc i had a ponytail i had a beard i just i was just a looked like a piece of [ __ ] so they showed up like who the hell is this guy you had a ponytail and a beard what year i don’t know yeah oh yeah 1999 uh but what was funny is uh a year later when i graduated buds uh two of these guys were sho we were checking into buzz the day i graduated that’s cool and i burst into their room uh to say hi and they had no idea who i was did they make it they all made it yeah that’s awesome do was any challenges in buds anything that gave you a struggle uh swimming uh yeah i had to uh um i i expected that uh swimming would would be just like it was uh like running was for me like you’d start like running for for me if i was going to do a long run go out at a moderate pace that moderate pace the further you go would get harder to to maintain and then by the end of the race uh you know you’re you’re physically taxed but you can you know gut through the the last bit of pain i swam like that i swam at a moderate pace and by the end of it i was i was pretty well gassed um and it wasn’t enough so i started going every weekend in buds i was uh linking up with uh master chief nepper who i didn’t know at the time i mean i just knew that he was you know a guy that would you know take pity on all the shitty bud swimmers and uh so when everybody else was relaxing and kind of uh you know licking their wounds from the previous week i was at the pool with master chief nepper and i would not be here uh or i would never have made it through if it wasn’t for his classes and i mean little did i know that you know he was uh i mean he’s you know one of the oracles of uh seal history today so so you gra when did you graduate from buds um see august of uh 2000 yeah august 10th my my 20th year was or 2001 2001 yeah so you graduated august 2001 and then where’d you get stationed uh i was supposed to go to seal team 10 but i went to seal team four east coast just some paperwork mix-up or something yeah the whole half of our class was going to seal team five and the other half was going to seal team 10 and for whatever reason seal team 10 hadn’t quite stood up yet so they switched us to team four so you so where are you in september so you graduate in august of 2001 where are you where where are you actually standing when when september 11th goes down i was home having just completed airborne so i i mean like everybody else in my class i’m i i immediately went uh went downstairs packed my bag and was ready to go and no call came i thought you were going to nom like i did we all did man i thought i was going to nom in 1990 i got we were going nowhere but disappointment so you’re at seal team four you you get into a platoon what job you what job are you in the platoon uh i was the a 60 gunner pig gunner pig yeah freaking new guy yep new guy no uh no responsibility um i was the uh i was the intel rep of the platoon oh yeah that’s right they were like oh you went to college yeah you can read right intel rep post right what kind of platoon so you’re at team four you’re getting over the tune how is it how’s the work up you’re having a good time that was all right i like you know the there were some leadership challenges but uh it was a good platoon i mean we had a good chief we had a good oic um we uh we didn’t have a great mission we were uh we were a marg so we got attached to a uh you know a marine um what was it an lpd or lha something like that and we were just sort of on call in the med um you know and at that point you know both uh afghanistan and iraq were going on it was just you know we were sitting sitting out in the in the med just floating around we didn’t do anything until we we got called to go do liberia as the uh the liberian civil war so we did some hydrographic reconnaissances and stuff like that you got your lead line and slayed out i did right on i did and i was uh so we had done uh probably half a dozen of these things um and then the the last one that we were doing was uh directly in front of the um uh the u s embassy in monrovia and um i was probably the closest swimmer to the beach which meant i was the closest swimmer to the cnn cameras they were out there and if anybody knew my my history with swimming it probably would have pushed me further back uh but so i’m you know paralleling the beach as we’re doing this and i know that you know the whole world is watching and at some point i got wrapped up in my lead line like oh my gosh and i’m tied up in this thing i can’t swim the it’s a really close shore break so i’m getting hammered with waves i bounce my head off a big rock like i’ve got to get out of this line so i pull out my knife and i start cutting this thing the wave is coming up on me and i’m getting ready to get slammed with this thing and i don’t want to stab myself while i’m doing this and so i look around i got no i i’m holding the uh the slate with one hand i got the knife in the other and i need something to swim with so i did the only thing i could do i put my knife in my mouth and i started and i swam through the stroke like how world war ii frogmen is oh that’s freaking awesome so you you get done with that deployment that was kind of the highlight of the deployment was doing hydrographic reconnaissance in liberia well i don’t want to brag but yeah it’s freaking legit uh hey i did two arg platoons out on the west coast and i’ve done so many hydrographic reconnaissances it’s ridiculous but i guess i’ve never done like a um i did real once but they weren’t in combat they were like in kuwait we it was real like someone was gonna land there i mean but didn’t get i never put my mouth in my my knife in my teeth and swam out but i think you could probably agree it’s not the reason you joined the seal teams not quite why i joined the seal teams and that must be so what did you do after that uh i had some you know sort of family challenges so i uh briefly got out until figured out where i was going to be living when i finally found out i was going to be living in san diego i put my ocs package back together i really wanted to go back to the teams and be an officer soccer coach write you another letter of recommendation i actually had a few decent letters and i was uh i just got into san diego i i contracted uh in my you know during that year off so blackwater triple canopy um uh but where’d you go iraq iraq yeah and what were you doing just psd basically psd yeah uh but once we got into san diego um i uh where where were you in uh where in iraq were you in what years uh well that was uh 2004 2004 2005 i mean i i was i guess it was 2005 i was back in the teams by 2006 so what’s psd personal security detail yeah it’s like doing security for somebody so that’s what a lot of the contractors were doing you’re doing security for other government workers those government workers could be people working on telephone lines they could be cia people they could be government people but it’s basically security gotcha so that’s what many of those contracting jobs were for guys that were in special operations just doing security um so you how long were you out for then uh a year then you come back in wait what happened with your ocs package so i my ocs package was uh i really just needed my last letter of recommendation so i was in the uh the group one commander’s office for my for my interview uh he was kind enough to give me an interview i had been getting ready for that interview for a while and uh the morning of the interview i was contacted by seal team 18 and said i was recalled so i was like well it’s not the end of the world but let’s see if i can get this you know uh ocs package signed off on so just so everyone knows seal team 18 is a reserve seal team correct where if you’re in the if you get out of this teams and you want to stay connected you can go in the reserves and that’s what that is so you got recalled how many teams are there like all together well there’s eight seal teams uh there were eight seal teams at the time four on each coast and then there’s dev group but then in addition to the uh uh eight active duty team plus dev group there’s there were two reserve seal teams it was sort of a new concept they they were trying so they got eight teams plus two reserve teams so 10 and then dev group 11 yeah i guess essentially yeah kind of there’s some other things but yeah yeah so because so when you say team that’s like a technical thing like yeah because you got sdv teams too right which are also teams gotcha but the numbers though because that’s well you got the sdv team won an sdv team too so you got another two teams all right this goes deep you can’t leave the sdv’s out i understand the boys are working hard they’re working um so i i’m in the office i’m i you know i i knew that you know i had found out that morning i was getting recalled but it was still hoping that you know the uh the captain could uh maybe figure something out so i do the interview interview goes great i think and uh he’s like do you have anything for me and i said well sir um not for nothing but i just got recalled this morning i was wondering if there’s anything you could do you know i’d really like to you know follow through on this ocs package and come back to the teams as an officer he just said no that sucks so i found myself back in the teams but you know it was the best thing that could have ever happened i went to seal team five and uh jumped on a great platoon with great leadership and you know we we followed you yeah you guys relieved us not my task unit but you guys went to hobby yeah yep so you rolled out to habaneria and you were a reservist that was activated yep and they put you in a platoon yep well that’s freaking awesome it was yeah it was great did you do any of the work up or anything yeah so you did the work up went on deployment but you’re a reservist but you’re in a platoon yeah what was your job uh rto our other radio telephone up i was the calm guy did a little bit of breaching but then you know kind of taught myself how to be a jtac but that’s an interesting thing to try and teach yourself while you’re on the ground in hobbies and not only that but you know they you know i knew that the platoon needed a calm guy i’ve been to comschool and never been a comm guy but they asked if i was a com guy and i said yes i’m the best company i just taught myself how to do it so it’s a good call yeah how was that deployment it was great what were you guys doing hobby in 0607 that was like the winner of 06 into 07 right correct what was your missions were you guys doing we were doing a lot of uh you know sniper over watches and then uh just doing it going house after house you know doing little uh little house to house raids looking for al qaeda just like you guys were yeah so you’re kind of living the dream i was living i was doing exactly what i thought i would be doing and when i enlisted in 2000 yeah yeah that’s good i i always felt that way when i was in iraq i felt like i was so lucky to be where i was and then i will say in ramadi it was a little next level because you know when you’re a kid you you kind of look i i was thinking nam you know my whole life i was thinking nam right but even there was something even a little bit more seemed like a little bit extra was straight up world war ii right you’re thinking world war two you’re thinking tanks and stuff so in ramadi there was times where tanks were rolling down the street rolling in in through buildings over walls it was wwii and man it was freaking awesome um yeah yeah but you’re right i mean it was i mean i i had that nom expectation too and when we got there it was uh it was a it was a ground war the only thing that made it sort of nom-like is the euphrates river oh yeah for sure and we would use those stock r’s uh to insert and you know there’s only so many boat guys on on the sock ours and sometimes they’re alternating between right or port and starboard side guns so if they didn’t have anybody on you know a gun you’d just stand up and you’d grab one and uh yeah you’re in a t-shirt and rolling up the euphrates river and it was pretty there was an area a whole ao called 1mc or mc1 i can’t remember but it was up north kind of kind of northeast of the town of ramadi and it was on the on the north side of the river and it looked like nam i mean it was ridiculous plus we had the marine corps huey’s flying around we called it viet ram because it looked like it was ramadi but it looked like vietnam and it was freaking crazy uh right on and so you get done with that deployment and then what what do you do when you get home uh at that point i uh i started um thinking about uh grad school okay i was so you were a reservist so when you got home were you released from active duty kind of yeah i went to uh but i managed to uh parlay that into going over to warcom so i worked for a couple years over orcom uh and i uh my platoon chief from seal team five was going over there to run the jtac program and you know i kind of taught myself how to do all that so he uh he said if you want you can come over work with me while you’re going to grad school and so we just uh we just did jtac stuff for the next two years while i went through i got my degree where did you go to school usd oh i i went to uh undergrad there did you have usd gorgeous it’s a nice place um and and then were you thinking hey were you still thinking about trying to put that ocs package in or i was i mean i had it was on the sort of the back burner i was trying to decide whether or not i was going to go uh put the ocs package to go back active or do like an fts package and uh get a commission in the reserves oh check so i had my first kid and once i had the first kid i was like i don’t want to leave this guy so i uh i went with the reserves so i got a commission so the day i left active duty i uh i got a commission in the reserves oh so you did end up getting a commission reserved i did you still have it right now well i’m out of the reserves now okay i left uh left the reserves four years ago or maybe a little more so you you get done and now you realize you want to stay home with the kid and so then what you you’re you’re trying to put your life together on the outside how’s that go no great like any uh guy who leaves the you know their dream job uh and you know suddenly finds themselves doing something they never expected to do uh it didn’t go great jaco i was you know like everybody trying to figure out what my next uh my next big thing was looking for relevance in any any area that i could find it and i quickly realized that in my business life i was not going to be successful what businesses did you try well i first off i started at a textile manufacturer in philly we were trying to get back to family uh because we had you know a new new kid and probably another one on the way so my wife at the time lived in south jersey so we we went there so i got a job at a textile manufacturer in philly and they were great people and i really liked the company and i was just terrible at it you know they wanted to start like a tactical product line and um i thought i’d try you know business and uh yeah i didn’t do well i didn’t do terrible but i just like i i don’t i don’t know what i’m doing so i started thinking about this uh right about then i was like there’s only two things that i’m i can do and you know uh i don’t want to leave the kid uh and uh all right you know at that time it was you know one kid had become two um so i started thinking about this what was the catalyst that made you actually get out your computer open the word processor and start typing uh that was um probably extortion one seven so uh like everybody i went uh to you know you know quite a few of the funerals uh after that and uh uh i went to uh jt’s funeral john thompson he was uh um he was from rockford iowa so i went to his funeral and uh totally unexpected but when i was there i met uh jim hornfisher or james d hornfisher that’s his author name but he is uh he was a literary agent he was but he was also a probably the you know the greatest you know naval historian in the country um he had written last stand of the tin can sailors neptune’s inferno so when i got to jt’s funeral everybody’s there everybody’s drinking i see this guy who’s totally out of place he’s six foot five you know wears glasses he’s just kind of not a team guy clearly and one of my friends uh quickly you know realizes that you know he is he has the two biggest nerds at the event and he introduces us and uh within 30 seconds i knew that uh um this was a guy that was going to change my life so we started talking naval history we got uh uh got pretty lit up uh kept his business card in my pocket for the next year uh was kind of you know secretly uh working on a on an idea for a book and uh after a year i uh sent him a cold email and just you know here’s a chapter uh one take a look at it and uh he sent an email back and he said this is fantastic and i spent the next six months putting a an outline together for what the rest of the book would look like and he took that to new york and got a got a contract so they gave me a two-year contract to spend you know the next eight years working on it so they gave you a two-year contract yeah and you just kept saying i just kept thinking and going i just got it yeah no it wasn’t that it was like i i just you know they they wanted they wanted a product uh that i quickly realized i couldn’t give them so i i knew that what did they want they wanted they wanted a history of the of the teams um but they wanted it done quickly like everybody i mean you can um so i knew that if i did that then the history that i was going to write was going to be like every other history that had been written on the teams sort of just wave tops and i knew that it wasn’t going to be written with any sort of intent beyond you know just my own interest in each of the events i knew i that i knew the teams deserved something like this i just didn’t know how to do this so i just kind of broke the whole thing down i found a bunch of i found two or three books that i really liked i read each of them three or four times one of them i went through and i literally outlined it you know not page by page but like chapter by chapter it’s like this chapter is doing this this chapter is doing this and i just sort of broke it down how does this author you know when i found another author how’s this author uh introduce characters um how do they you know how do they just you know structure or how do they you know weave multiple storylines together um and i just kind of taught myself how to do this did you but i knew i knew that they that you know uh this was gonna take me a lot longer than two years so when they gave you two years what did you did you just signed the contract and just i signed the contract knowing that you would yeah i did the same thing i did at seal team five you know i said yeah i’m a calm guy you said yeah i’ll write this in two years yeah how pissed were they when you kept missing the deadline by five years they learned you know to their credit they didn’t bother me uh they would check in and the only thing that they really did was um they uh they wanted to see the first chapter so once the first chapter was finished i sent that off and they said okay this is and it took me between six and seven months to write that first chapter on the raiders how long how many hours a day would you work uh i would start at 4 30 and i would work uh until about eight and then i would uh you know do the rest of my day and then i’d come home i’d get my kids to bed uh and then once i once i put them into bed i’d work as long as i could until i was just kind of smoked so you’re probably getting like five six hours a day on the book yeah for yeah yeah i mean i’ll tell you what we will get into the book now but before we do the book is freaking it’s it’s an incredible book and the detail you go into it’s over 500 pages long i’ll read a fraction of that today um i i it was so hard for me to figure out what to what what parts to read um you i i guess i could have talked to you about it maybe we could have discussed it but i just kind of like there’s every page has got really important stuff on it um the writing’s terrific clearly and unmistakably you sourced it from a lot of first-person accounts you know captured documents or information captured from documents from official traffic from interviews from other sources it reads like an action novel in many parts except for the fact that it’s all true which makes it even better to read so this book i can’t recommend this book enough uh just a fantastic history and it’s not it’s not just about the seals because one of the premises of the book is that seals wouldn’t exist if either really the marine corps or the army would have stuck to and committed committed to the idea of having these kind of direct action raiders which is what the seal teams ends up being and everybody’s got it kind of got it now you could say but for many years there was many attempts at doing this and they they wouldn’t work out for various reasons um maybe a mission would go bad or a war would end or a combination of those two things or you know when you’re in the army and you’re a general and you got some some cowboy looking guy running around and you’re a senior to that cowboy looking guy you think i don’t want this guy running around i’m going to disband his whole organization or you’re in the marine corps you do the same thing hey you know i was in the marine corps marine corps is right and tight you know and now who’s this guy running around with freaking long hair no i’m going to disband that whole organization and and that seems to happen a lot there’s one group the navy where you’re in the navy so you’re sort of you know if you’re an admiral in the navy you kind of want to have some of these hitters running around that can make something happen and that’s i think part of the part of the genesis of the seal teams so book is fantastic um let’s get into some of this so here we go on august 8th at 0-900 both submarines departed sub-base pearl harbor and made it for the open ocean it was in the lead was the nautilus with carlson and 87 raiders of b company following almost a day behind was the larger and slower argonaut with roosevelt and the remaining 134 men the majority belonging to a company for eight sweltering days the raiders lived crammed alongside each other anywhere they could stretch each man a prisoner to to the heat sweat and stink of the one next to him after two thousand miles of the pacific’s omnipotence slightly farther than new york city to san diego the nautilus finally arrived at its target on august 16th so these are marine raiders group that have been put together to go out they’re conducting freaking sub operations in world war ii um fast forward and that’s you know obviously i’m only reading chunks of the book so it seems a little bit stilted or or you don’t recognize some of the names believe me every person that’s in this book is described you give an incredible background on people where they came from how they got in the situation they’re in so when you hear me jumping you haven’t heard of a character it’s just because i haven’t read i’m not reading you the entire book fast forward a little bit sensing his momentum eroding like the ground beneath him carlson sloth through the soft sand hastening to gather his men before the sun rose obviously they’ve been inserted at this point if he could find the un find and untangle his two reduced companies and point them in the direction of their targets he might still have a chance because there had been no reconnaissance however no one knew for sure where or where where they were or where to go with four miles of beach to the left and another six miles to the right with targets their targets could be anywhere if their targets were there at all worse still one whole boat crew was missing without target locations or knowledge of enemy strength the 13 men with 13 men unaccounted for and possibly drowned carlson was blind and groping for answers in an ever brightening world his men becoming ridiculously conspicuous along the white beaches in their uniforms of dyed black so this is already off to a bad start with these guys yeah they yeah i don’t know what to say i mean i uh the um i didn’t write organizing the book i knew where i knew i knew where i needed the book to end i knew that the book would end in vietnam because in vietnam it’s in vietnam that the seal teams become what they are today land focus go anywhere commandos what he didn’t know was how it happened and i didn’t have like you know uh in order to you know decide what a book is going to be you gotta have a you know not just an end point you can have a beginning point so i needed to find that first instance where the navy um wanted or the navy had that uh that desire to create some sort of raiding unit now we all know that you know the marine corps is a department of the navy so the navy has its own army and so logically the marine corps should have been able to field that first commando unit that worked directly for the navy the reason that they don’t do that ultimately uh happens you know in the opening days of world war ii and all happens because of this make an island raid the marine corps doesn’t want the raiders the marine corps wants what it’s always wanted or not what it’s always wanted they want what they’ve wanted since world war one in world war one the marine corps becomes every bit as consequential as the us army so the leaders of the marine corps who all fought on the battlefield in the first world war they feel like when world war ii happens they can finally achieve the status that their service has long uh deserved so they’re not interested in uh being the navy’s anything they’re they they’re interested in being their own branch of service completely uh you know subservient to themselves so when the navy says they want to uh spread the japanese uh attention away from the solomons or away from the south pacific and do this raid marine corps thinks well it’s you know it’s not really what we should be doing but we’ll do it just because the navy wants it so when it predictably when they send these raiders up there with a commander that the marine corps really didn’t wanted they really didn’t like carlson it goes predictably bad and then the marine corps justifies the reason that they never wanted them in the first place it’s it’s interesting um even and i don’t know if you’ll remember this because it might be a little bit you didn’t come in until 2000 yeah when i came in the the marine corps attitude was well we don’t need a special operations group inside the marine corps because all marines are special yeah and that’s the attitude 100 their attitude and they kept that like to the t when i was in that was that was just how they rolled was was through that um yeah i mean they they have had that attitude since the first well since world war ii but it’s in the first world war they they realize what they can be yeah which is a parallel army you the the the work that you did to research these these battles and you go into so much detail with them i mean here we’re going back to the book real quick for the next 30 minutes a company fought a suicidal enemy armed with four machine guns two grenade throwers automatic rifles and a flamethrower each time the raiders managed to silence a machine gun nest another japanese gunner would step over the piled body surrounding it and bring it to life worst of all unseen and inescapable where the snipers lashed to the tops of the palms not blinded by the sun and rewarded for their patience each sniper sought out movement and took aim we pleaded with thompson to stay down one man remembered years laters there were snipers within 50 yards of us he did not compelled instead to shuttle between his men pointing out targets as he went his medal of honor was awarded posthumously we had japs in front of us above us alongside us to our left and behind us remembered corporal young exposed at the tip of the cul-de-sac even when they managed to fight free of the japanese around them their good sense kept them nailed to the ground i lay as fat as flat as i could and tried to shrink myself as narrow as possible said private glenn lincoln playing possum under the palm trees and the scrutiny of two separate machine gun positions in 30 minutes nine raiders from second platoon were dead so was thompson so was lieutenant jerry holtem the battalion intelligence officer a child of missionaries and the one raider who could speak japanese also killed were four radio telephone operators each one singled out by the antenna waggling above his shoulder which was connected to a waterlogged radio that either lacked the power to reach carlson’s command post or did not work at all so like you said this is just a a disaster this this situation it’s a disaster but it you know it highlights you know even though each branch of service has uh leaders that have uh their own purposes for creating these units at various times for various reasons in each instance whether it’s raiders or rangers or lerps or whatever the guys on the ground these are i mean every bit is heroic and deserving of uh you know our respect uh as the the seals that their legacies ultimately funnel into so um it’s just i mean the branches of service don’t support their efforts for one you know various reasons and it you know takes a long time to get there but you’re right you said it uh you know in your opening remarks i mean this this history or this institution the seal teams could not have uh would not have come uh to be it would not have come to be a land focused commando unit had it not been for the gap uh that the army and the marine corps and the cia or the oss continually provide over this 30-year period of history so that kind of as you mentioned that kind of that first raid that make and raid kind of put a put a damper on the enthusiasm of the marine corps to to go out and make one of these units um fast forward a little bit you say this in the book in may 1942 in anticipation of the army’s need the navy issued a narrow call for volunteers to join something called the amphibious commandos what made the call narrow was that it seemed to be directed at a single group that group was in the words of one reported the 600 or so quote educated muscle men who had signed on as assistant instructors to the navy’s physical fitness program these were led by the most educated muscle man of his day lieutenant commander james joseph green tooney am i saying that right toonie tiny tiny six feet tall equipped with a heavy fist shaped chin and handsome smile that every man woman and child in the country recognized tawny was known wait did i get that right tony or toonie tony tony tony was known as the great war machine turned heavyweight boxing champ who had not once but twice defeated jack dempsey unlike many boxers of his day whose training consisted of in the words of one competitor a haircut and a shave tony had managed this feat by relentlessly conditioning his body during the day and by reading shakespeare every night after winning his secret second fight tony had fought only once more then quit the ring forever to follow what to follow that irresistible pull as one contemporary reported note reporter noted to do something big in other fields this had included lecturing on richard iii at yale and inventing the gene tunney exerciser a long board equipment a long board equipped with ropes and pulleys that would raise the feet and condition the abdomens it sold for three dollars [Laughter] uh biggest of all he had swapped his old globe and anchor for the bronze oak leaves of a naval officer in order to rid his new service of what he considered its gravest threat the pot belly i dare say that fifty percent of the officers enlisted men cannot properly stand at attention said the newly commissioned tony in 1941 partly blaming their ill-fitting dungarees which stretched too much and induced the wearer to stick out his belly and hold them up tony reasoned that the problem was actually a threat to national security and would eventually lead in his words to moral collapse believing like all marines that a strong physique undergirded a strong character tony’s initial efforts in the navy had met with only moderate success because sailors were not marines and as such had never cared much for either fitness or character yeah your dry humor comes through a lot in this book i had to cut i don’t know probably five six pages of tony out i i mean the one the one problem that you you face when you’re writing a book like this is that you research is really seductive you can go down rabbit hole after rabbit keep going you keep going you find article after article after article and you want to you want to cram all this information into that into that paragraph and it doesn’t take you anywhere so you constantly have to be asking yourself what is this first of all what’s the book i kept a note card on my desk uh when i started working on the book and the note card had three questions on it was pinned to the wall it said what’s the purpose of the book what’s the purpose of the chapter what’s the purpose of this paragraph and if the paragraph is not in support of the chapter and if the chapter is not in support of the the book then you’re not you’re doing it wrong so um i mean you every character that you come across you you want to give them some sort of uh sort of introduction tony’s uh consequential and that he uh attracts all of these um studs yeah he brings all freaking studs uh but he doesn’t have the program that’s going to be able to contain these guys uh so he attracts all these you know you know pro football players uh to his program um that have you know they all want to you know serve their country uh you know in the most aggressive way possible and they find out that they’re going to be calisthenics instructors so of course you know what’s going to happen so tony collects all these guys um and then you know i think the anyway go ahead yeah it’s it’s the you know i’ve done a lot of reading about sog and every basically i would say every sog mission in vietnam could be its own book you just want every single song mission and that’s the feeling i get when when reading your book every one of these characters that you introduce could be their own book yeah just about every single character could be their own book you just have to stop you you’ve got to you’ve got to draw the line at some point and be like yes there’s a book here clearly but we’re you know we’re we’re going on to you know this objective i never wanted to write a book with a thesis that was never my objective i didn’t want to prove anything but what i did find was that with the thesis uh with the thesis i was able to connect all these disparate stories i never would have uh formed a you know a comprehensive story but with that thesis by asking the question how did the navy come to create a land focus go anywhere commando unit i was able to stitch all these other you know rangers and raiders and all the other stories of you know the non-seal units into a book about the seals so here’s another character that you introduce um that we all in the seal teams know when 28 year old phil bucklew a football star from columbus ohio had presented himself at an army recruitment office immediately after pearl harbor to volunteer for the paratroopers the recruiter had taken one look at a six foot two 235 pound frame and said i could i could take two instead of you considering that the smallest soldier the army could accept was a shadow heavier than 105 pounds the recruiter is absolutely right disappointed to be passed up for the paratroopers and thus lose his chance to be dropped into a foreign land buckley had settled for the navy then settled again for tu for the tunney program ostensibly the best place in the military for someone with his background after playing for xavier university in cincinnati and then the rant for the rams in cleveland buckley had since gone on to raise money and recruit players for his own professional football team accomplishments that had demonstrated not only intelligence and toughness that tony sought but also leadership and the risk-taking of an entrepreneur he was not the only footballer with hidden potential big john tripson a six foot five bushy-haired all-american from mississippi from mississippi state had already seen more of the country than most americans ever would having traded his life on the south texas plains to play all-pro tackle for the detroit lions and robert herrick a mountain of muscle from the mountains of colorado who stacked every bit as high as his texas colleague had enlisted in the navy not only as a graduate of colorado state but as its head football coach essentially it was a roster with more potential than tony’s program could tame [Laughter] just a bunch of freaking beasts got it got to read this part too so at the call for amphibious commandos buckley and nine other titan athletes raised their hands when they reported to their next assignment a chief petty officer with a knowledge of angling and the tiny regime took one look at the oversized arrivals and dubbed them the tuna fish the name stuck um you get another guy named halperin in here who plays a huge role in all this yeah he’s uh indispensable i mean i everybody you know the the um the temptation when you’re writing about these guys is to introduce them as they come you know you you come to buckle you want to introduce baklu because buckle is you know one of the most important people in the history of nsw you come to him you want to give him a good you want to give them him the introduction that he deserves but he doesn’t become he doesn’t become phil bucklow the consequential phil buckley until vietnam so you’ve got to hold your fire and you’ve got to you know sort of convince the reader that if you just hold on we’re going to get there so because the most consequential person a person of this period is the guy you just mentioned which is buck halpern yeah you get this guy buck halpern at a mere six feet 225 pounds these guys were monsters this is back in the day too this is freaking like world war ii guys are not jacked like they are now like if you’re six foot six feet 225 back in the day you are jacked 100 percent echo can you confirm from the bro science perspective yes sir okay just making sure at a mere six feet 225 pounds robert buck halperin was easily the smallest of the group but stood out from his fellow footballers for a string of peculiarities not the least of which a face not unlike that of hollywood’s robert taylor besides this he was half a decade older than the rest and had a personality that was not only as dry as cabernet but also incomparably unflappable most peculiar of all he had been raised and educated in the exclusive chicago suburb of oak park the second son of prominent jewish immigrants at the time not exactly features that encourage friendships with working-class white footballers but try telling that to halperin unlike the son of jewish immigrants unlike many sons of jewish immigrants halperin had been raised to speak no yiddish to practice no faith a boy so adrift from any spiritual anchor that he adopted two regional substitutes as his sanctuaries the first had been lake michigan in which he swam so often and so well that he once caught the admiration of awaiting al capone and upon which he had learned to sail eventually reading the windy city’s win so well that he had taken up competitive racing the other sanctuary a high holy place if there ever was one had been the notre dame football stadium asked why a jew would submit himself to such a christian university halperin had flatly replied because it was the best so this is another guy um yeah uh he just a character and he start i mean he starts like you know from nothing he doesn’t he has no expectation he’s so old uh when world war ii starts he’s 34 years old when he enlists as a seaman in the uh in the navy but his brother had been a uh a radiologist um uh at pearl harbor and so yeah you know after you see your brother you know you know performing such service what else you gonna do you’ve got to do the same so he uh he pulls every string he can uh gets himself into the navy and uh i don’t know i don’t want to uh give anything away but he i mean he goes from the tony program all the way to china i mean he becomes you know nsw’s first ground force commander it’s freaking nuts um last week of 19 august 1942 buck halperin and the rest of the tuna fish plus 36 enlisted sailors left the solomon islands where they were trucked more than 100 miles to a point where the lower lip of the chesapeake bay met the atlantic ocean here the virginia coast gave way to an isolated tidewater inlet called little creek and a dirt road based with dirt floor housing that made the solomon’s look like san francisco upon arrival they were greeted by an army officer lieutenant lloyd pedicore jr 29 year old former commander of the observer group who now wore knee-high leather boots of a horse soldier and in spite of his small stature when standing at attention looked like a nail waiting to be driven into a rail tie his personality wasn’t far off as one of the few soldiers who had participated in the marine corps flex exercises he knew all too well the challenges awaiting the men he now welcomed to the intensely difficult course he had just created a course of soft sand runs rubber boat races and endless team calisthenics known as the joint army navy amphibious scouts and raider school at last the navy’s volunteers for amphibious commandos were about to come them that’s sort of the beginning and there’s something you know what’s interesting i don’t know i think if you do those uh like psychological games where or psychological tests where somebody says something and it makes you think of whatever you know you have to say with it but when you hear amphibious commando who’s not 100 in on that like when i think i knew what an amphibious commando is when i was five years old and wanted in you know i had the i had i collected these little uh air fix soldiers the little 1 32nd size little army men when i was a kid my mom eventually threw him all the way by the way brutal just a savage i had hundreds of them and i used to you know dream and talk and play with those things but my favorite was the british commandos they had little zodiacs and kayaks and little uh beanie caps like that was the deal and you see that that was when i was a little kid that was like amphibious commandos ah so again i can’t read this whole book but yeah uh pedicore like he’s a uh each of the people that i focus on in the book um i i tried to drill down as as close as i could uh you know you there’s you know the general rule of thumb is you start big and you go small so you read whatever is available the existing literature that’s out there uh and there have been there have been a couple of books that have been published in paddy chords of characters so you kind of trace those down uh you know pedicore halper and buckley whatever you’re you’re trying to get as close as you can to the person that you want to write about or the the person that becomes the consequential person of the moment so you’re trying to learn about them in such a way that you can find out the traits in that person that made them consequential um and whether the the traits that made you know somebody like carlson uh a failure or the traits that made pedicore or buckley or halpern a success so uh oftentimes you’d hit a wall there’s no place you know you’re there’s no more information that’s available in existing literature so you’ve got to start digging into you know archival material so uh i had learned pretty quickly you know what archives around the country usually had the most stuff so i would go to those archives and i would dig like where is this is the place you got to go to like yeah so libraries or something yeah so the archive that i generally used about five different archives uh the most the best one was probably uh the national archives in maryland um they uh they have the most stuff uh and they have the it’s accessible um when you start getting to the military archives that’s the army so much the army archives is actually really a world-class institution i loved uh going there that’s in carlisle the marine corps uh archive in quantico another uh another great archive the navy yard uh it uh or the uh the uh naval heritage and history command archive at the navy yard that was a bit trickier uh they had uh for whatever reason i think a lot of it had to do with the fact that they had an active shooter there a few years before so security on the on the base was tight but they would really it’s a very close held institution so when you went there uh you know digging through their stuff uh could be a little complicated you had to plan around it um but you’d find stuff you’d find you know i found uh letters the pedicore had written and you’ve gotta really you’ve gotta look at the letter you’ve gotta read it once you gotta you know highlight what’s important and you’ve gotta read it again and again and figure out you know what you can learn about him from the letter the way he talks the way he writes the way he thinks when you run into that when you can’t you know squeeze any more information out of that uh then you’re you’re left with finding the family and you know in this case i found pedochords family uh i tried to find you know at least a family member for every you know person that i uh you know focused on in the book um had dinner with uh buck halperin’s uh son last night still close friends with him uh but pedigree’s family you know some of these people they don’t realize like how important their dad or their grandfather was in this history and they have no idea why you’re calling them and they you know they you know they would provide photos they’d provide letters sometimes they would let you come to their house and dig through their stuff but yeah pedicore was one of those that uh i didn’t expect to find as much as i did but talking to them i mean you can get little details out of them i found one photo of pedicord wearing those boots and i i knew that they were uh you know the boots that uh army cavalry soldiers wore uh and i i didn’t anticipate that there were boots that he wore you know through the rest of his career until i ran into an old scout and raider i was a 96 year old guy old jim barnes is what they called him i was like you know i i sat down to interview jim barnes and i you know what do you remember about pedicore and the first thing that he remembered were those boots damn little detail uh um after this here you you detail you go through some of the details of operation torch which is up in north africa the cebu river um it’s it’s a success you know it’s a tough operation um five of the ten original tuna fish get the navy cross from that operation and again i’m skipping through some of that right now get the book get the book and read about that freaking operation because it’s epic um the origination and you know we’ve said this a couple times but the origination of everything that goes on here is is um you you have to tell talk about the raiders you have to talk about the rangers you have to talk about why why why what happened to them and why they didn’t become seals or at least the seal type thing this is a section here where you start talking about um well the rangers right so the premise is you know that the navy should never have had this capability when i started trying to come up with a title for the book i one my options for subtitles were like something like the origin story the navy seals a unit that should not exist something like that something is you know provocative like like that and the reason they shouldn’t exist uh is because of the army in the marine corps and the and the cia all of these uh institutions were better suited for this mission than the navy was uh so in order to you know explain the question that i you know ask at the beginning how the navy you know come to field this you know land focus go anywhere commando force the way that’s phrased is you have to understand why these other institutions didn’t uh become that first why they didn’t block the navy from becoming that and only in understanding why they didn’t become that can you understand really understand why the navy did it why the navy felt like it had to do it that includes the rangers going to the book the officer selected to command the rangers 31 year old major william orlando darby born in fort smith arkansas in 1911 the same gorilla studded year as lord lovat and russell volkman darby grew up believing that he was destined for greatness of average size and looks his greatness lay below the surface as it as it is so often with tragic men a war would be required to uncover it black-haired blue-eyed wide-mouthed as a duck darby had a ruddy face divided into equal parts forehead and chin his left cheek bore a mysterious brilliant red scar not particularly muscular he nevertheless affected chest out shoulders back posture in which his arms seemed always cocked to the rear as if never more than a moment away from snapping to attention son of a printer and a musician the second child between two sisters he grew up scouting the arkansas woods and playing the saxophone while in high school his older sister died in texas he married then divorced in spite of disappointment and tragedy his attitude remained as it ever had been good humored and irrepressible in personality just like his posture he was direct forceful and never vacillating had the military gene not dominated and given and driven him to a life of soldiering he would have made a born salesman he is the ideal commando leader wrote colonel vaughn at the end of the course he possesses the energy keenness and personality which produces the best out of those under his command graduated from west point in 1933 at the apex of the bell curve ranked 177 out of 346 he was originally assigned as a field artillery officer fast forward a little bit if the ideal army officer was equal parts confidence bravery energy and obedience darby was all these things but perhaps too much the last more than anything he believed his men could and should perform any mission assigned to them from the most audacious lightning raids to the most ignominious rear echelon duties to the most spectacular seized season hold operations because of this no one would be more responsible for proving the value of the rangers or for their downfall so you go into talking about their first experience the rangers first combat experience which was in yep am i saying that right yeah yep that’s i think i said france 1942 yeah and that that one sentence that i give dip that represents 20 pages of book that i had to cut out like i spent like i said the research is really seductive and when you find something that is so you know what you think is meaningful or what you think um you know sort of shows you the direction that this whole thing is going in you i mean the the temptation is to really really focus on it and drag your reader through this but you have to remember that you know you’re trying to get the reader someplace and you don’t want to front load a chapter with 20 pages of battle and introduce characters in this battle or of this battle they’re really not going to take you anywhere god they’re all so epic uh speaking of british commandos jocko’s perhaps inspiration for being a commando himself you got this quoted i’m just going to read one quote this is what the rangers said about the about the commandos that they went into dieppe with my god those commandos can fight remember one ranger after the battle they’d kneel down or lie down and fire then stand up grab an apple off a tree and start firing again freaking brits um so you go through that raid you go through another raid was even more dramatic victim of a winch that broke while lowering his landing craft dumping him his radios and equipment back into the ocean darby nevertheless scrambled back aboard his boat then led four companies plus one chaplain ashore there despite squelching wet boots he and his rangers marched uphill for three miles every man carrying a full load out of ammunition plus fighting knives bayonets climbing ropes one stick of dynamite and two mortar rounds the two unluckiest also pushed a mule cart bulging with still more mortar rounds when the rangers arrived at fort de nord they found it was surrounded by concentric circles of barbed wire as high as eight feet and as deep as 14 with every snip each man’s nerves nerves cinched tighter just as they were about to reach the last ring a machine gun barked and drove them to the ground darby ever the artillery man wasted no time roy pull up your pull your company back a few yards then hit him when the barrage stops lieutenant murray had got had hardly gotten his men untangled from the wire when the first rounds thumped into the battlements thus persuaded the french defenders abandoned their machine guns and retreated chased by murray and his rangers shouting hi-ho silver away that’s fighting against the um the french the vichy french yeah fast forward a little go ahead no i mean the when you read that and when you uh when you think about the rangers it just reinforces everything i said before the seals should not exist yeah when you have you know what is clearly a naval commando force a go anywhere commando force as capable as the rangers were in 1942 this is a capability the army had they created it they were smart enough to create it and then they lost sight of the reasons that they created it and or actually didn’t lose sight of the reasons the the reasons that they created it are the reason that they had the downfall they didn’t care about you know the rangers commando capability they were more preoccupied with using the rangers as a way to teach the rest of the army how to fight we want to integrate our rangers with british commandos because the british commandos were really the only english-speaking troops on the planet that knew how to fight they wanted to you know george marshall wants to take that experience and pass it along to the rest of the u s infantry or the the army infantry and so by the time that the infantry starts to you know elevate itself to the uh the capabilities of the rangers then divisional commanders start using the rangers more not uh commandos to go you know raid a uh an artillery position or a command post they just start pushing them ahead of the infantry uh almost sort of sort of like suicidal spearheaders and when you know when the chapter ends i mean it’s it’s just it’s so depressing but so predictable let’s get there this is a massive mission this is in uh cisterna you go through i mean i’m gonna i’m gonna catch the last little bit of it you go through the battle you go through it unfolds i mean there’s so many leadership lessons to learn in here obviously i talk about leadership all the time the amount of leadership lessons that are in this book is incredible um kind of wrapping this up since he’d been blown off the top of a smoking tank dobson had somehow made it back to his men near the caliph calacaprini house there while organizing another defensive perimeter he had taken more shrapnel’s right thigh now lying in a ditch next to a burning self-propelled gun whose artillery rounds continued to cook off around him he passed his command to captain charles schumstrom a ranger since the akaneri days and darby’s tank killing comparison compa and darby’s tank killing companion at gala upon taking command shunstrom an aggressive as aggressive a soldier as the us army had ever produced shored up his position with several companies of the third battalion and even attempted a flanking movement to either break free of the encirclement or believe it or not take the town none of it worked at 10 45 solid communications were finally established between darby and shunstrom’s radio the care of which was now in the hands of captain edwards edward kitchens kitsch to everyone who knew him who was set up in the first battalion’s makeshift aid station and whose feet were gradually becoming more and more encumbered by wounded rangers at 11 15 darby told kitsch to hold on and that the 4th battalion was making slow but steady progress 30 minutes later darby reiterated his encouragements and even asked kitsch to put together a rescue party for third division’s reconnaissance company that reportedly had been captured in his vicinity maybe you can break up the thing and rescue them darby said his suggestion is tone deaf as his original expectations operationally employed like infantry darby’s rangers were now dying like them too at the calla caprini house alone lay some 16 dead rangers another 22 wounded and only five men still fighting barely three loaded weapons among them at 12 15 kitsch became so over what overwrought and weeping that he could no longer make himself understood darby asked for another voice and kitch quit the house altogether preferring to die outside in battle rather than trapped inside manning the radio grasping the receiver now was a hulking ranger master sergeant robert e holt from brooklyn new york one of darby’s originals some of the fellas are giving up colonel said he halt his voice scratching out of the speaker box we’re awfully sorry they can’t help it because we’re running out of ammunition but i ain’t surrendering in his farmhouse command post darby became frantic don’t let the boys give up he pleaded get the old men together and lamb for it how many men are still with you they’re coming into the building now e halt replied gunfire snapping in the background we’re out of ammo but they won’t get us cheap so long colonel maybe when it’s all over i’ll see you again with a violent wham wham e halt’s transmission will cut out darby squeezed the handset and steadied himself use your head and do what is best you’re there and i’m here unfortunately i can’t help you it’s stung to say the words into the deadline his fourth battalion still a mile from cisterna but whatever happens god bless you god bless all of you with the mention of god darby’s voice choked his eyes watered e halt i leave everything in your hands tell the men i am with them to the end after a moment he set down the handset bracing himself he wrapped his hands around a telephone receiver and called general truscott it apparently was too much for them he said muffling his emotions replacing the receiver in its cradle darby asked his staff to leave the room as enemy shells beat a steady tattoo around the house he crumpled into a chair dropped his head into his arms and sobbed several minutes later darby appeared outside his shoulders straight and his chin thrust forward defiantly he was still in command but in command of what no one quite knew i hate hearing that i uh this uh this whole episode is based off of a couple of sources one of them being shunstrom’s report that he wrote i want to say three days after the battle after surviving this thing he was one of the few uh that escapes and on a series on the the radio uh transcription that they were keeping uh at darby’s headquarters so you you can actually see everything that was said on that radio and you can read it and it’s it’s horrible and you know you know i mean no you know going into it you know where you know what is going to happen and where um it doesn’t make it easier though so despite these um these legendary heroics like you said i mean the heroics of the troops are just undeniable just after world war ii all six army ranger battalions were disbanned and um you say here specif superficially modeled on churchill’s butcher and bolt commandos the us army rangers by the time of their disbandment looked nothing like them this was in the end the predictable result of different parents preoccupied with the readiness of his front-line soldiers george marshall had created the rangers not to perfect the art of churchill’s coastal raids but to serve his infantry first by gaining battlefield experience that could be transferred to the rest of his troops second by handing them off to infantry commanders who committed the rangers to missions with impossible odds and then either blame them for their failures or diminish their uniqueness by using them no differently than regular infantry though no one could have guessed the consequences it was prior it was a prioritization that produced a lasting gap in the us military’s order of battle for a unit that specialized in raiding one that could best be filled by a branch of service less preoccupied less preoccupied with this infantry and there was only one branch that didn’t have infantry so there you are setting up um setting up that one branch that doesn’t have any infantry yeah at the time i mean there’s only three branches the air force doesn’t exist yet it’s the army air corps so of all three the army uh navy and the marine corps navy’s it and you can i mean you can see where this is going before you even get out of world war ii you can see the cycle that’s going to it’s going to continue all the way until vietnam commanders are going to identify a gap they’re going to create commandos to fill that gap they’re going to commit them to action often to disastrous results and then they’re going to renege on their idea they’re going to pull the rug out from under these guys and every gap every time that happens it’s often going to leave uh you know they’re the that unit’s commando partners in the lurch and always that commando partner is the u s navy and the navy is just going to get more frustrated more frustrated they’re going to continue pushing their uh their units their special units into that gap yeah the next the next uh part of the book is called the opportunity chapter four subtitled draper kaufman and the course that cracked the atlantic wall then laid the first bricks of the legend of naval special warfare um here we go he’s the weirdest guy in the book by far but tall and thin lanky even with dark hair a narrow face and a chin that stretched down like a teardrop draper lawrence kaufman also possessed poor teeth and spectacles as thick as sun marine glass given to bouts of indolence he was absent-minded a failure in any subject did not capture his interest and alarmingly progressive on the issue of race at least so fought his mother a shrew on the topic as a young man kaufman had wanted nothing more than to attend the naval academy and command a destroyer as his father had when poor eyesight threatened to torpedo his dream he submitted himself to the doc to doctors orders however medieval and for one hour a day held a palm over each open eye this when his appointing congressman suddenly died leaving his academy application in limbo he told no one of his plan escaped from his connecticut boarding school got a bunk at the washington dc ymca and then walked the halls of congress slipping past secretaries and performing a rehearsed sob story until someone anyone gave him an appointment once finally accepted he rode crew acted in school dramas and in cruel foreshadowing spent 30 days on a prison ship for sneaking off campus when he graduated in 1933 a year when navy pinschers stalked the ranks looking for any excess ballast to pitch over the side he was given his diploma and a physical disqualification from the navy a steep four-year price to pay for to achieve the rank of civilian thus betrayed his childhood dream kaufman packed his pride shelved any ideas of glory and settled for an onshore operations job in the shipping industry his life suddenly devoted to endless manifests for onloading and offloading of cargo so there’s your introduction to an introduction of draper kaufman i mean just so many characters and this guy’s definitely one of them gets put on a six-month assignment to europe while he’s doing that that shipping job while he’s in germany he witnesses adolf hitler giving speeches he realizes that this guy’s what he realizes what’s coming yeah um so fast forward a little bit he decides he wants to go and serve in the american voluntary ambulance corps to be accepted in the american voluntary ambulance corps a adjunct unit of the french army one was first required to submit a down payment of 3 500 to cover living expenses in the cost of one ambulance in 1940 that was almost the price of a house even more than alarming volunteers were bound to follow orders the french military to a man with purpose in his boots and adventure in his guts just the sort of hemingway hemingway’s the french cause had attracted in the last war no price was too high you say actually it was too high it wasn’t he had to beg borrow and steal to get this money imagine you you have to come up with the price of a house to go and serve in a freaking ambulance corps where you’re gonna get bombed and blown up working for the french yeah i mean we all know the you know draper kaufman’s sort of biography i mean every not everybody but we get um you know if you go to buzz you’re going to get the the buds history class or the the seal history class at some point somebody’s going to mention draper kaufman there was no there was no buds history there was no seal history class when i went through bots just saying i’m saying there wasn’t i mean it was 1990 so yeah i know and that’s just gonna make me mad if we talk about it yeah no but uh if you come across any sort of any history book that’s been written draper kaufman’s a character uh and they’re gonna hit you know like i said they’re gonna hit the wave tops of his uh of his biography um you know before he becomes uh you know the um a indispensable uh character in the uh in the udt’s central pacific campaigns what they’re not going to do is they’re not going to put that biography in context and when you really dig into it like you know yes we know he was an ambulance driver on the western front in 1940 we don’t know what sacrifice it actually cost him to put himself in that position and the reality is so much more like me i mean you’re right i mean he you know he cashed in everything he had you know to go do something that he believed in like how many people do you know i don’t know anybody like that today that would you know give away your house yeah like and it was all because he was just trying to um trying to do what he thought was right he was trying to you know serve his country even though his country wouldn’t take him at the time because he couldn’t see anything [Music] it’s just you know every character in this book they have um you know everybody wants to do something in the book and most of them don’t get to do the thing that they want uh but all of us we don’t know you know what legacy we’re going to have and we don’t know like what thing that we don’t want to do that we have to do is going to be the most important part of our lives and that’s what happens with raper kaufman he doesn’t want to do any of this he doesn’t want to be an ambulance driver he doesn’t want to be a bomb disposal guy in the blitz he wants to be a naval officer he wants to be on a destroyer they won’t let him so he does all these other things to try and live up to what his dad has done and he ends up being you know he becomes a legend yeah because of it so just to dive into a little bit of kaufman what he did on may 10 1940 kaufman arrived at his post six miles beyond the protection of the maginot forts in the tsar river value valley in the northeast shoulder of france where where the borders come to a point and ju like a salient into the ravenous mouth of germany the same day hitler launched 100 divisions through the ardennes forest as he as he had known it would the second war second world war had begun and again and again for two unrelenting weeks draper drove to the front picked up survivors and returned the inside of his ambulance slippery with blood the whole while he sustained himself on bits of food and the horror of french cigarettes the only sleep to be had was taken in snatches never in a bed and never with his boots off responding to the deliberate fire of german mcgunner’s bosch barbarians he called them he and his fellow ambulance drivers began draping dark blankets over the side of their vehicles to cover the giant red cross emblems by the end of his third week in combat two ambulances had been shot out from under him and he had lost 10 pounds this is what he gave his a house worth of money to go do on the afternoon of september 7th 1940 a thousand german planes attacked london’s and surrounding areas killing 400 men women and children and wounding 1200 more the next day 412 were killed wounding nearly double that number for 57 consecutive days days london was hit had he arrived any earlier who knows what the royal navy’s reaction would have been to his request as it happened as it always happened when opportunity meets courage draper arrived at exactly the right moment the day draper kaufman volunteered for the royal navy he presented himself to the admiralty at nine o’clock in the morning so he goes and volunteers to join the navy um but because of his eyes by five that afternoon young draper kaufman was a sub sub-lieutenant in his majesty’s navy the only one hitch once again he was barred from duty at sea several weeks into his new career a german bomb landed just outside the hotel in which kaufman was bulleted had it detonated upon impact kaufman’s story would have been buried along with the hotel another footnote in military history nothing more as it happened the bomb hit did not but did not detonate its only damage being a 30-foot tunnel gouged into the earth before long an army bomb disposal team arrived cordoned off the area and set to work with hand tools alone the squad pain tank painstakingly dug a path to the bomb enlarge the hole and short up the sides in case of collapse the objective reach the bomb without disturbing it gently unscrew the fuse which the inert remains from the dirt and accompanied by police and accompanied by police or sirens by police car sirens and loudspeakers unexploded bomb coming through transport the carcass to a nearby cemetery this usually this method worked in case it did not the entire bomb disposal team was killed the next day kaufman volunteered for bomb disposal for eight months from september 1940 to may 1941 hitler waged a war on the british people more than 40 000 civilians were killed more than a hundred thousand were injured the instrument of all this destruction was the bomb many of these weapons were defective or or deranged as in they failed to detonate upon impact or were timed to detonate after a bomb disposal team had arrived so that’s what he ends up doing he ends up doing this bomb disposal duty um after a while of doing that he decides he’s going to go back to the states once he’s back in the states the japanese attack after two years of waiting the united states was finally at war in a few days the message a message found kaufman ordering him to get out to pearl harbor right now imagine that japanese trickery extended beyond strategy and into engineering draper prepared for the worst when shown the 500 pound bomb at schofield barracks he sent everyone else to cover then examined it sketched it and telephoned each nail-biting step back to his controller it had been dropped too low he determined landing on its side instead of its nose what he had visualized visualized as an old-fashioned oriental puzzle turned out to be the easiest job he’d ever had i couldn’t have set that bomb off it if i had a sledgehammer he said later to those who witnessed his the bespeckled master pushed past the line of gawkers to single-handedly disarm the bomb there were few actions as deserving of praise couple headlines dc man takes live [ __ ] balm apart gets navy cross ran the headline in the washington post all florida will rejoice with rear admiral james l kaufman on being the father of so worthy of son so there you go that’s where draper kaufman comes from um yeah draper is uh there’s some folks in the um that uh have spent their lives looking at uh uh the history of naval special warfare um and they know more about this history than than even i do i mean they you know i specialized over the you know like i said the period from world war ii to the period of vietnam they have a a even fuller account uh than i do um and one of the things that annoys them is that draper kaufman has risen to this uh sort of you know like i said legendary status he’s you know considered by many the uh the the father of america’s frogman he’s not he doesn’t uh um he doesn’t create the udt he doesn’t create the frogmen uh he um he happens to be uh the pivotal person at multiple uh points in that history um but he he’s not the uh he’s not the godfather like uh everybody or not like many people have suggested that he is including his sister who wrote a you know pretty decent biography of him um but like i said he is uh he’s a consequential person what’s also interesting about him is that he is like everybody else in this book is he is he’s making decisions um or he he’s uh he’s deciding to do everything he does he’s not a um he’s not a victim of history he’s not riding a wave like like a lot of people you know would suggest we’re all sort of doing like the uh there’s a there’s a metaphor that people use to describe the the transformation of the seal teams and that’s the evolution we’ve all seen that uh sort of uh painting at peas where you’ve got the you know the the naked warrior crawling out of the surf and then you’ve got the sort of vietnam guy sort of crouched and uh you know wearing his tiger stripe fatigues you know all and and next to the uh the the seal in iraq or afghanistan wearing the body arm and everything that they call that transformation the evolution the evolution sort of suggests though that this uh that this transformation was one inevitable uh and that uh it didn’t uh require uh the um uh the intent uh that all of these uh folks who have uh this consequential role in our history had and they they clearly had intent i mean when draper’s going through his history or his biography he’s deciding uh that he’s going to go serve in the french army and when the the germans send him home after he’s released from the pow camp uh and they you know make him sign this document that he’s going to go back to the states and he’ll never take up arms against the german empire again he intentionally decides that he’s not going to do that he’s going to go join the british navy and he’s going to continue he continually does this and just like everybody in the book they are they’re not victims they’re each of these characters they all have agency and they all decide uh that they’re going to do these things for whatever reason mostly it’s uh the decision that they arrive at is to satisfy what they um have decided is uh their version of relevance there’s a spot where you say basically um draper kaufman is not really the godfather that people some people give him credit for of the frog man but such a consequential guy he is a consequential guy and you’re right he’s not the he’s not the the father of america’s frogman kelly turner is that kelly turner creates the udts nobody would have done it if it wasn’t for kelly turner he wants the udts because the marine corps uh at every step they uh they frustrate his plans to use reconnaissance troops and kelly turner he’s um uh kelly turner wants to control everything in his orbit and so he creates the udts to do just that he doesn’t the the demolition is sort of secondary he wants a reconnaissance force that he owns uh and draper just happens to be the vehicle for for kelly turner’s um uh you know once we pick we do pick up with um with draper kaufman though you say as such who better to start the navy’s underwater demolition course in the second world war than the men who’d seen the most of it the man who’d seen the most of it a sailor for whom no barrier ever held and who was about to squeeze his biography into a syllabus like none that had ever existed to create the type of amphibious engineer that he envisioned envisioned kaufman needed elbow room like pedicore before him he found his elbows had ample space in fort pierce florida to create such a unit he would require students with in his words both temperamental stability and individual initiative to that end kaufman insisted that candidates be subjected to very heavy physical training very heavy he emphasized again as he knew from his own career first in france then in the blitz this type of experience would show students that they could push beyond their physical limits doing without sleep and food and warmth and still function without their arms falling off more important training of such intensity would create its in its students a sense of purpose and unity like nothing except actual war fast forward a little bit short on time eager to screen out the obvious people that would not make it physically and long on his desire to simulate an experience that was as close to war as possible kaufman decided that all three problems could be solved by the same solution one week of misery never reluctant to ask for help he walked south along tent row until he came to the section reserved for the scouts and raiders there still six months away from being transferred pedicured listened to kaufman’s proposal he had never been asked to compress the scouts and raiders eight week physical train conditioning course into one block of uninterrupted training certainly men could be pushed indeed nearly broken but what kaufman had asked to do was another matter in the end pedicore agreed what else could he do this was kaufman the seas parted at his arrival what pedicore did not know no one did was that he was about to help create the set the sacramental cup from which from which nearly all future naval commandos would drink you were wet chaffed with sand just completely miserable remembered frank kane years later in the daytime men melted under the sun at night they shook so hard from the wet and cold that their hip flexors swelled and cramped their teeth chattered like jackhammers shouldering boats sloshing with water they marched for miles and sand and dunes that collapsed beneath every step sodden fatigues adhered to the grit and sand turning armpits thighs and scrotums into raw meat if any instructor detected a student on the stealth and concealment problem as he wormed his his chafed and dripping body to the plantation house the man was punished by being sent to sit inside where swarms of mosquitoes feasted on his misery in addition to simple surf drills rubber boat training included hours of paddling while harassed by the nearby air squadrons f4 pilots who would try to nail the floating rafts with sacks of flower bombs jetty landings and night portages were attuned by based ambulances and performed over boulders as broad as dinner tables the endless serve smashing the panels and men against the rocks intended to simulate the long drain of campaign march before battle this seemingly endless harassment ultimately culminated in a day-long mock skirmish known as the extended order problem or to the students so solid day beginning before dawn students raced off the ramps of their landing craft just as the beach erupted in thundering sheets of flame for a whole day instructors armed with charges unleashed a torrent of exploding columns of water and showers of mud and debris the student’s belly crawled on throbbing knees and elbows into hip deep mud swamps and surf as the explosions chased them from cover and foxholes until kaufman’s regime no navy unit had been subjected to training course whose essence so closely resembled that of real war the frantic harassment the inescapable cold the relentless exhaustion not only did it prepare men for what was to come it set them apart from everyone else in the navy even in the early classes as many as half the men who started did not complete the week that was entirely the point modeling his project on the culture of the core franc kauffman had set out to forge both an esprit de corps and the reputation that always accompanies it exclusivity if you haven’t been through it he would later say you’re not a demolitioneer in august 1943 kaufman volunteered for his own program at 32 years old with eyesight not good enough to qualify for his own demolition standards he was hardly an ideal candidate i think i have never seen a man struggle so desperately warnock said after witnessing kaufman’s performance the moment he finished his 10 mile beach run he passed out during the ocean swim warnock thought he would drown we all knew he wasn’t a great athlete said frank kane and we thought hell if he can make it we can too throughout the training kaufman listed but never sank alternately encouraging and bullying his boat crew from start to finish as one remembered with his bloody battle cry of core frank when men showed signs of cracking during another bone trilling dip in the ocean kaufman turned it into a joke annoyingly repeating the same mocking phrase the water he boomed in his strong mid-atlantic accent is never cold the monday after kaufman completed this week he was ordered to report to captain clarence goldbergson the base commander of fort pierce swollen from head to foot with fingers like sausages ready to burst he crawled out of bed and staggered into the commander’s office what’s this i hear about 40 percent of your classes either being in the sick bay or quitting the captain bark i don’t think you have any idea what you’re putting these men through draper i do kaufman responded it was hell when kaufman’s trainees completed hell week the name his week of miserably misery inevitably took on their demolitions training program progressed to its next phase two weeks of explosives two week of reconnaissance and three weeks of practical exercises so there you go freaking hell week yeah created by i mean we we look around i mean how many team guys do you know that would fit his bill today i mean we kind of think that we sort of created ourselves i mean we have a lot of people that sort of came together to create this program and they’re not they don’t look like us i mean they were sailors uh ship fleet sailors i mean that put this thing together and somebody who’s you know the most unlikely uh person i mean draper kaufman is not what you would think of as a modern day seal or modern day frogman in fact you don’t want to be he just i mean he’s he sort of continues to do the thing that he doesn’t really want to do because that’s the right thing that he you know the it’s the thing that’s going to accomplish the mission that he’s been given which is to demolish hitler’s atlantic wall he doesn’t know how else to do it so he you know he squeezes every drop of his biography into this curriculum uh fast forward a little bit actually fast forward a pretty good chunk going into d-day and again your your your detail and the the research that you did to get here is just it’s unbelievable to read with terrified soldiers frozen in place neither advancing or retreating freeman and kaylee kihely sprinted between posts yelling obscenities and kicking the infantry men away once clear freeman gave the signal tossed a purple smoke grenade and petty officer bass pulled the fuse fire in the hole at 6 55 only 22 minutes after the landing the whole area exploded in a roar that drowned out the battle’s den shooting skyward a mixture of water smoke wood sand and steel high into the air the defender’s response was vicious as soon as the smoke and debris settled the fire from the hills became unbearable as mingled or if the georgian with a hole in his leg crawled hand over hand to the sea wall and safety around slammed through his helmet into his forehead killing him instantly with the obstacles blown and the beach cover gone petty officer bass a former seabee from durham north carolina resisted the urge to run and instead found seaman farrell alone still writhing from the hole in his knee and with a fresh wound to his right eye bass bent down to cradle the boy to cover him and as he did a bullet tore through his back entering just to the right of his spine and blowing a hole out his right shoulder sergeant murphy one of the army’s naval augmentees found them both and dragged them to the sea wall wounded himself and with nearly everyone in his crew either shot or dead freeman was unstoppable blasting obstacles clearing out infantrymen before his charges blew helping his wounded to cover though they had been cut to shreds gap assault team one had completed its mission their 50-yard gap was clear and that’s just one little uh chunk of the detail that you give on all these heroic acts that are going on by fast forward by morning by morning’s ed with the help of hall’s destroyers the gap assault teams had partially cleared five of their 16 target sections along omaha beach by nightfall the total was 10 for the ncdus an accomplishment that came at a cost prematurely estimated at two dozen dead at least that many wounded and 15 more missing these last had either been blown clear of their landing vessels and drowned or in the words of one rider had run off to fight with the army in fact some had done just that or at least abandoned their section of beach as a handful of planters had expected the most difficult aspect of rommel’s atlantic wall had been the beach and the underwater obstacles a problem that had been overcome only because of the navy’s commitment first in identifying the issue next in commissioning kaufman to solve it then in sharing those lessons with the army’s combat engineers ultimately however the navy’s greatest contribution had come from the ncdus themselves in addition to the presidential unit citation admiral hall had gone on to recognize the demolitioners by recommending them a trunk full of individual awards individual awards including six navy crosses one of which went to chief petty officer bill freeman i kicked myself ever since that i had didn’t recommend him for a medal of honor hall said later i never heard of anybody who did a greater job than that fellow did responsible for getting the army past the underwater obstacles on omaha beach the ncdu’s achievement was in the end made possible only by their training at fort pierce there they had learned not only the technical skills of underwater demolition the explosives the pole fuses the minimum safe distances but also as kaufman had insisted the ability to push past the limits of normal human endurance to withstand cold hunger raw skin exhaustion even the chaos of combat the kind of fortitude that made winning wars possible only our vigorous training held us together one survivor said afterward but what about but what about after that with the collapse of the atlantic wall the mission of the ncdus had been accomplished and therefore no unit in the u s military was in greater threat of disbandment or at least would have been had it not been for one final hang-up the navy’s planners were loath to disband a unit that had just performed so effectively after all the war was far from over and there was no shortage of needs for sailors so conditioned to the combat that lay ahead boom yeah it’s uh i mean i don’t know about you but nobody ever connected uh hell week or the reason for hell week to omaha beach but i don’t think that we would have that crucible today if it wasn’t for that it justified everything that kaufman did um i mean we later in the war you see lots of people get pulled over to the udt whether they’re seabees or marines or even soldiers in some instances uh and those you know they do they don’t necessarily go through hell week if it had not been for that experience uh it’s likely that we would not have this uh like that that crucible and without that crucible what would the seal teams be i mean there’d be another commando for us but would they be uh everything that we are today i mean that’s the defining moment of training right yeah yeah well you called it the sacramental cup it is the sacrament i mean yeah we all have these uh i mean uh there’s institutions all around us whether the institutions are the us constitution or they’re uh whatever uh your catholicism i mean that your faith has these little institutions built into it and you know if you’re going to take the catechism uh there’s all these sacraments that you’ve got to do and what’s more uh what’s a bigger sacrament and you know the becoming of a seal than uh than hell week yeah not one um you get into next uh tarawa and what happens at tarawa which is a total nightmare um i don’t know if you had the chance we we had a guy um dean lad that was on this podcast and he was a marine corps wow i think he was a i think it was a first lieutenant by that time wow uh that did a bunch of islands including tarawa got gut shot tarawa 800 yarders from the beach two marines disobeyed orders to leave him and move forward and dragged him back to a boat he survived ended up going back but um yeah you detail what happened there how bad it was and basically if you don’t know anyone that doesn’t know the the marine corps hit reefs on the way in and the boats got hung up and so the guys had to get out and walk with no protection whatsoever through the ocean 800 it was around 800 yards to get to the beach where there was it wasn’t once they got to the beach it was hell as well so and we’ve always known that tarawa is the moment that you know the the need for udts is identified we don’t exactly know the reason though i mean because the marine corps they come up with the the solution or what they perceive to be the solution before the taro battle even commences and that like i described is the the landing vehicle tractor the lvt it’s a technical problem they have a technical solution for it the problem with that is turner doesn’t like their solution uh kelly turner uh sees the cancer or sees the the coral as a cancer it it’s gonna complicate everything uh as far as all the the rest of the campaigns ahead of him he doesn’t want to deal with us he wants to he he wants that coral out so he can get his higgins boats to the beach and the only way to do that is to find him yeah and what’s interesting too is after tarawa the marine corps solution was you know like you said it was just more yeah more yeah just okay so we’re going to lose x percentage of boats on the way and cool more we’re going to lose this many ltvs on the land cool more bring us more that was their answer and turner was saying hey actually not a good answer let’s let’s figure out how to solve this problem yeah churchill’s quote you know we’ve we’ve run out of money now it’s time to think i mean it you could just you could say you know just as uh just as much when it comes to logistics there i mean there’s nothing that compares with the us military’s logistics and manufacturing might going into this but we still have limits you can’t these lvts they take up a ton of space on all the ships that the navy’s going to use to transport them the the higgins boats they they’re easier to carry they’re faster in the water you can time everything from naval gunfire support to aircraft coming in to support the landings if you have a faster vehicle to get them from the ships to the shores and that’s what turner wants he wants to be able to get his ships as quickly to the beach as possible it’s the safest way uh it’s the easiest to get everything there and the only way to do that is to find the coral and get rid of it we start training now but under turner’s direction we start training we’re training in hawaii now in may a fresh batch of ncdu recruits arrived in maui per the direction of kohler and kaufman the men were told to abandon the bulk of their gear their green fatigues their boots their maywest life jackets even their helmets and sidearms and slip into a pair of black maui swim trunks and dive masks their rough rubber edges sanded down to prevent them from biting into their face what followed were nine seemingly endless days of training on how to systematically map an underwater landscape and blow it up rocks coral night swimming blast no rest no sleep suicide stuff one trainee remembered for fewer for no fewer than six hours a day recruits lived in the water perfecting their strokes until they could swim a mile before breakfast their only day off was monday when possible seeing that this was the first time many of them had handled explosive fused or tied prime recorded into a trunk line accidents were routine fingers blown clear off or hanging by bloody shreds of skin asked how long he could swim underwater with a hundred pounds of powder recruit kenorik replied with a hundred pounds of powder i could probably stay under forever so this is i highlighted that port because this is a point now where we’re starting to see you know the id of the naked warrior they’re getting rid of all their gear they’re just wearing trunks um saipan is where we get this recon [Music] like a like a legit recon going on the closer his swimmers got to the beach the more nervous kaufman became at 100 yards he tried to turn them around but most of them kept going at 50 yards some began to pivot back but some didn’t closing to within 30 yards of the shore and 40 yards of the guns so close that they ceased swimming and dug their toes of their sneakers into the sand pulling themselves along with their gloved hands when that last line finally did run out of water each man backed off slightly turned left then sidestroked along the beach for 25 yards edging his mask out of the water with every breath breath careful to remember the locations of any gun positions under circumstances not an easy thing to forget on the swim back each man ignored his exhaustion and worsening leg cramps and stayed as close as possible to the bottom when the they neared the reef kaufman re-boarded his mattress and offered a nearby swimmer a toe get that damn thing out of here this is you go over this earlier all the the little rafts that they had were getting shot up on the other side of the now surf slammed reef each swimmer waited for pickup when the landing craft arrived the coxswains took turns motoring each man and either drop drop them a jacob’s ladder or reversed engines until he could grab hold and pull himself up throughout this cumbersome boarding a period packed with vociferous cursing said one survivor every man aboard fully expected a mortar round to drop square into the boat as soon as the last man was loaded kaufman tallied his numbers and realized that in addition to the officer killed on the air mattress two of his swimmers were still missing pulled in separate directions by his instinct to rescue his and his orders to rush back to the fleet kaufman looked around at his blue tinge to black striped men and chose the more painful option with the fleet waiting for his information kaufman ordered his boats back to the apd’s when the men of udt7 arrived back at the humphreys they discovered something remarkable though several men had been wounded some with serious internal injuries from the mortar blast not a single one of their swimmers had been lost in fact the only men that had been killed have been the ones who had remained on the lcpr’s as they had waited for swimmers to return kaufman’s udt5 swimmers had been slightly left less fortunate with one killed several more wounded and two still missing but it was nothing compared to the bloodbath that occurred just one week before at normandy so this is another methodology of executing these things and it’s sort of a metaphor for you know what actually happened the entire history so the you know the navy uh intentionally creates all of these units they create ncdus they create udts that create the scouts and readers all these units are created for a specific purpose they’re committed to action for a specific reason but once the navy creates these things the navy can’t necessarily predict how far the individuals that are that belong to these institutions are going to push them they’re going to push those envelopes so kaufman you know when he’s driving his men toward the beach or he’s pushing his men to swim he also is trying to stop them he’s trying to stop them 50 yards from sure they won’t they keep going 25 yards so you know the the seal teams are created by the navy they’re created by the navy for the navy but the you know you can sort of see it just in that moment um the seal teams become so much more because of the seals themselves so the seals don’t create it we don’t we’re not responsible for our own institutions we think we are but we’re not but we are responsible for what that institution ultimately became yeah you know there’s an interesting time that you make in the book and i don’t remember if it’s in my notes to carrots i’ll just mention it now um the navy the navy just by nature of being disaggregated and being spread apart especially back in the day there was decentralized command unlike really unlike any other organization absolutely and that that spirit of decentralized command of like hey you go and you make you take the fight to the enemy you get in this ship or you get in this submarine you go overseas and you take the fight to the enemy that’s you have mission type orders right and that’s that’s the way the navy has had to exist back in the day and that vein and that that dna remains and that’s why you get these guys that are very proactive and will will will be default aggressive out there on the battlefield that’s that’s exactly right default aggressive latitude only works if your default uh orientation or uh default setting is aggression and if you read any uh like naval history book during like uh you know the napoleonic wars or if you read you know the patrick o’brien master and commander series like you’re you’re never you know connected to your chain of command whereas the army uh always is always this yeah so that uh you know as technology has improved or as technology has gotten better to connect commanders to their troops in the field that chain of command has only thickened whereas in the navy i mean we have all this history behind us or the navy has all this history behind it of latitude of mission type orders of relying on the aggressiveness of the individual commander you just have to trust your guys but you have to be specific about what you want oh for sure so otherwise you get rogue exactly uh you do talk about what the udts brought back from that and what they brought back was good information good intel that they could then form and to uh make a better battle plan the invasion of sidepan goes smoother um fast forward a little bit by the fall of 1944 the navy’s underwater demolition teams were the most indispensable of all u s military’s special operations units a facet directly attributed to the central pacific planners who would no longer go anywhere without their reconnaissance reports the udts were an essential part of our amphibious organization for the remainder of the war wrote turner on the last day of combat on tinian it is it is questionable if we could have made our landings except after the great losses except after great losses if we had not had these teams to prepare the way this assessment was immediately echoed by admiral connolly who concluded his invasion in guam by declaring that without udt’s discovery and demolition of some 640 obstacles along 3 000 yards of beaches including the nearly car sized coconut log cribs filled with loose coral the landings quote would could not have been made there in spite of orders forbidding them to do so three demolition swimmers including gunner’s first mate gunner’s first mate gunners mate first class henry l green had grown so convinced of the udt’s worth that they had planted a white butcher block-sized sign at the water’s edge with the following message u s marine welcome to the uso greetings from udt4 hearing this admiral connolly had summoned the team’s commander to his state room in order to hand him a starch counseling but instead had neutralized his own admonitions by stopping the young officer at the door declaring wait till i tell turnell turner he’ll have those marine generals eating crow um it’s so childish but yeah it’s so childish but that’s i mean that’s what it is i mean how many times have you in your service you you know interacted with you know you know a sister service and i mean the rivalry exists yeah like it’s a you know it’s a brotherhood you know on the battlefield but still we’re you know always chasing our institutional prerogatives or trying to you know push the boundaries of uh uh you know our institutional authority yeah and what’s interesting is when you get into the senior ranks there becomes real there’s a real tension between the services and the and the amount of money that they get right and and it becomes a real thing um but yeah you say here to recognize their contribution for taking of the marion marianas turner showered the udts with awards more than 60 silver stars 300 bronze stars reported the largest mass recommendation for sailors and marines in the war up to that point given the importance of the job connolly would have pinned navy crosses on on the commanding officers of udt 3 and 4 but ended in the end settled for silver stars each of them presented by none other than admiral kaufman drape draper’s father as for draper himself rumors circulated about his nomination for the medal of honor an accolade his father chairman of the awards board in the pacific lobbied against for fear of the medals association with recklessness in the end draper received a navy cross his second pinned on by his father with a comment that allowed the photographer to catch the serious young man in a laugh thank the lord you found a clean short yeah that’s a relationship i could have spent a lot more time on yeah i mean he’s you know draper’s dad is out there you know in the fleet he’s he’s a commodore himself and uh you know he knows exactly the risks that his son is taking and he does nothing uh during the entire war uh to either uh convince turner uh you know to have the udt take less risk he just he’s as uh you know i i i don’t know uh as a father and i know you’re a father too like i don’t know that i’d be able to to keep myself uh disciplined enough to to not interfere you’d give him orders to uh the washington dc uh admin spot yeah i just don’t know how whatever that impulse uh you know that those guys had i i don’t know that it exists today but either that you’d make him a freaking boat crew leader in beauty for just freaking ready to get something uh this is just you you jump into this next part chapter six the contest for the guerrilla war in china and the organization that had no damn business fighting in it the us navy’s army of sailors this is just freaking buck wild this whole section i mean you get this guy born milton e roberts in 1900 in jerome arizona miles spent his first years in a mountainside mining hub called by the new york sun in 1903 the wickedest town in the west he was only a child he was the only child of a lumber cutter who was nearly 30 years older than his mother before miles was even eight his father was dead which was something of a blessing as it had given given his mother an opportunity to move and remarry then in seattle his stepfather miles had received from his stepfather miles had received the last name he would live with but not much else at 14 miles ran away from home and you just set up this background with this guy he enlists in the navy he ends up doing taking some tests to get into the in ireland to get into the naval academy he gets in goes to the naval academy um gets and then he gets deployed to china for a five-year tour ends up um you know doing operations in the yangtze river this is the warlord period he learns about leadership diplomacy geography small boat handling how to shoot his way out of a hold up unlike most westerners picks up various coastal dialects so this dude speaking freaking chinese or mandarin or whatever um he’s brilliant i mean i there’s nobody i mean like i say you know i mean we got our history not just from you know frogmen we got it from you know just fleet sailors and this is i mean it’s crazy do you ever see the movie sand pebbles yeah this is sand pebbles yeah this is santa so sam bubbles go watch it if you haven’t seen it i know you haven’t seen it echo charles because it’s a classic it’s an actual good movie there’s no there’s not many like cgi explosions in it but yeah this is sam pebbles all day we had the movie sand pebbles on one of my ark deployments this is back before internet or anything so we just had videotapes we would watch sand pebbles over and over again um and that’s what this guy is doing he’s in so he ends up running these freaking gorillas in china yeah which is nuts um he’s i mean nobody knows about him today like he’s he’s completely forgotten to history but i mean he’s every bit as consequential at least as far as uh the navy’s uh journey from uh you know the ocean to to the land as you know say somebody like lawrence of arabia he doesn’t have the the style of somebody like that which is probably you know part of the reason that he’s forgotten and you know his book a different kind of war is you know it’s it’s not you know seven pillars of wisdom but um you know he he wrote that thing when he had been diagnosed with uh with prostate cancer so he was racing against the clock to to try and get this recorded and he was you know he knew he only had maybe a year uh to live and he’s you know drafting this thing he’s typing up little sections of it uh his wife um is is uh cutting these sections out to reorder them and he’s she’s putting these things together with scotch tape i actually found that record in the the national archives it still exists so he talks about his his wife wrote a the forward to the book to say you know how this was done how it was cut re-taped together and everything like that and then to see that to find that in the national archives to hold you know these re-taped together pages was pretty incredible but you know like i said this guy he is the navy’s version of lawrence of arabia he’s the it’s freaking crazy yeah insane um and he’s a flag officer yeah and he’s involving himself the entire war in these little mini skirmishes and ambushes it’s i mean he he’s almost uh killed three times just by assassins yeah it’s nuts it’s a freaking crazy story and he loses his mind in the process yeah yeah oh you say this along with his promotion admiral king elevated uh seiko which is the sino-american cooperation organization this is this group that they got running all over china to naval group china an act that likewise elevated each camp to a formal and they got all these camps they got these camps set up he’s running this network of camps um uh an act that likewise elevated each camp to a formal naval unit and invested miles with the authority of a group commander increasing his roles to 600 officers and two 2 400 enlisted men about 300 more than allotted to a world war ii battleship and a commitment by the navy that was further augmented by various numbers of marines coast guardsmen and radio operators to supply all these men’s miles received two planes their engines rarely idle to which ferry loads from chung king to the various camps the gas alone for these planes gobbled up as much as half of miles monthly tonnage allotment over the hump but for the first time in the war sacko camps began began receiving at least a portion of what they deserved so this guy is running a freaking crazy guerrilla war he’s running an army he’s a he’s a naval commander who’s running an army like uh like we talked about earlier he’s running he has no communication with these units for the most part so he’s he’s he’s getting these commanders mostly marines uh that are that are coming to him he’s giving them a spine of sailors to go work with and then this marine commander and these navy sailors are trucking sometimes three months at a time to get to their station in china they set up a camp they start training chinese gorillas and then they commit them to action and because he has no communication with him he has to rely on the aggressiveness of each of these uh leaders in some cases it works out in some cases it doesn’t so really all he’s doing at this point is just managing his his talent pool and assessing whether or not they’re sending back you know aggressive enough reports about the operations that they’re undertaking uh anyway yeah you you cover it i mean it’s just it’s incred it’s an incredible story again there’s some books in its own right ten books like and and the thing that like was i was blown away with and i i focus my uh attention of this chapter on camp six because camp six is really the only unit uh in saco that is run by a member of naval special warfare every every other camp except in rare instances is run by a marine so the the legacy of those camps is you know uh you know understandably you know a feather in the marine corps cap they should be nothing but you know impressed with the legacy of the the marine corps led units but uh admiral king towards the uh towards the tail end of this period you know they’re running out of marine’s descent and not only that but the scouts and raider program is going away admiral king doesn’t want to go away he wants to send uh you know sort of quasi-marine sailors to backfill the marine commitment to saco so he repurposes the scouts in raiders school turns it into the amphibious router school and is trying to get as many uh marine type sailors into saco as possible to justify this course so we don’t have to get rid of this course after the end of world war ii uh and camp six uh becomes sort of the repository of all of that experience buck halperin who you mentioned at the beginning of the book the uh the jewish uh uh notre dame quarterback he gets sent there uh phil buckley comes comes west and starts reading leading reconnaissance and raiding operations but yeah camp six is the um camp six is the first uh instance of naval special warfare really going ashore and they do everything they do raids they do ship attacks by the end of the war halpern is literally leading from the saddle on a horse and pushing his gorillas into action it’s incredible yeah yeah it’s it’s freaking it’s just a great story and again it it you know um i’ve often said that you know when i got in the teams i don’t know when you got this still so was there was no doctrine when you got in the teams there was no doctrine when i got in the teams you couldn’t if you wanted to know how to do uh uh an assault on a target you you couldn’t look it up someone had to tell you your platoon chief or your lpo was going to teach you how to do it it wasn’t written down anywhere whereas the army and the marine corps you can look at exactly how to do a target assault it tells you step by step what to do so we don’t have any doctrine we have more now but that’s one of one of our biggest weaknesses is that we don’t have any doctrine one of our biggest strengths is that we don’t have any doctrine and and that’s why you get a freaking guy that’s like oh cool what we’re going to do we’re getting under horseback raids that’s what’s happening cool let’s figure out how to do it and and again that decentralized command the default aggressive attitude that’s that’s in that’s got to be that’s the dna of the seal teams and it’s rooted back to camp six camp six nothing like it fast forward the end of the war should have been the happiest day of my life wrote miles afterward tasked with an impossible mission and yoked to impossible partners he had nevertheless achieved something greater than ever been asked of him a navy run gorilla army and intelligence infrastructure that had stretched from indochina to the gobi desert assisted by marines his sailors had trained as many as a hundred thousand chinese guerrillas rescued airmen and missionaries blasted open japanese tanks blown up some 158 bridges derailed some 66 japanese trains sunk 35 japanese ships raided uncountable japanese camps and led at least one cavalry charge on camels best estimates at the time placed the number of sacko inflicted casualties at around 2 26 717 killed 8 702 wounded 600 346 captured of the roughly 2 500 americans who served in seiko five were killed that’s amazing that’s amazing that’s amazing and this isn’t even con considering the strategic impact of soccer because you know they’re tying down a million japanese troops the entire time yeah troops that could be fighting on all those islands right the marines for sure but they can’t a million i mean there’s you know when you think there’s 30 or 40 000 japanese on these islands when most of these islands somewhere around that number you know if you have an extra million soldiers to throw into that mix as was true of every successful general in history mile’s success had come at the price of his sleep his health his family’s happiness and even his sanity for his sacrifices he had been keep not with praise and press releases but with troubles bureaucracy and overweening scrutiny in the end seiko along with the navy’s guerrilla warfare effort received a reward as glamorous as an obituary as miles bitterly concluded the month that followed the surrender of japan was the worst through which i lived um yeah after hosting a dinner for many of his seiko officers this is after the war this is right after the war miles began a rambling seemingly endless lecture on what the atomic bomb would mean for the u s navy’s future as men awkwardly drifted out of the room miles continued unaware when every man had left and when the lights had been turned off after the camp doctor confined him to a stateroom miles jumped from the window and took off sprinting through a rice paddy chased by a group of american advisers and chinese guerrillas he escaped passed them all and stole a jeep as he rattled past his pursuers he was heard muttering over and over i must get to the drill field block the road god damn it that’s an order he shouted shouted the camp’s doctor to the driver of a 6×6 truck when the jeep reached the roadblock miles jumped out and ordered the truck driver to move the doctor countermanded the order and told miles to return to his quarters whereupon miles accused everyone of lying to him you’re on the sick list the doctor finally managed what are you saying doctor i’m all right i don’t think you are admiral the doctor replied nervously and and have to officially inform you that you are on the sick list and have been relieved of your command as the words drilled into miles delusion the doctor could feel him shaking like a leaf finally miles relented aye aye doctor he hopped back into the jeep returned to his quarters next morning is placed under house arrest and his razor confiscated in washington metzel met mrs billy miles and infirmed her that her husband had a complete mental breakdown and that they could only hope he had not suffered permanent brain damage no it broke him i mean he you know he he literally left everything in china uh when he comes back it takes months and months before he regains his sanity but he uh uh and you know this whole theater of warfare was i mean but and it’s uh the just dealing with the chinese on a daily basis i mean so many uh other people have tried uh joe stillwell tries to deal with chiang kai-shek he i mean he’s frustrated his entire war he leaves not in disgrace but at least in in massive frustration uh wedemeyer has the same uh headaches with the chinese but what stillwell and wedomir don’t have to deal with is an oppressive the oppressive army scrutiny that when the army gets there i mean they see china as clearly you know their area of operations and it is i mean there you can’t argue with it i mean it’s it’s the land i mean just like if the army decided that they were going to uh seize control the south china sea the navy would certainly have something to say about it but when they get there you know the navy has this infrastructure in place and they don’t know what to do with it so they try to you know progressively take control of miles organization and in the end miles loses out the army takes control of it uh and the only thing that stops them from really seizing control is all of the trouble that miles has had which is geography they can’t see control of this thing miles maintains his command over his organization for the remainder of the war so the problem is the solution yeah yeah yeah that’s that’s it um i got to mention this this section here at the time of the japanese surrender rudy bosch a 17 year old volunteer with the amphibious rogers looked up from the middle of the training exercise in the swamps near lake okeechobee to hear the class instructor now stop what you’re doing the war is over told to return to fort pierce bosh and his classmates were then given a single final order tear it down what followed was the sacking of three years worth of construction mess halls classrooms offices ranges towers before a backdrop of flaming white tents tents that had once proudly lined the roads sheltering the nearly every that nearly every special group in the u s military from the rangers to the udts the rogers who had not gotten a crack at china took out their frustrations by demolishing everything with their bare hands by the end of the week the only thing that suggested the past experience of a naval base was the pool last to go were the men themselves that’s it war is over and with the the rogers too and uh yeah we didn’t even talk give us a quick brief on the rogers well the rogers are the uh the sort of the natural uh culmination of the scouts and raider program so the scouts and raiders uh they’re the uh the name sort of doesn’t make sense i mean the the scouts and raiders seemed like they would be you know reconnaissance troops and commandos they really weren’t scouts and raiders are a joint unit created at the very beginning of the war it’s an army navy unit the the idea is we need army scout boat officers to take army beach marking troops ashore so the army can you know signal the landing fleet signal the landing craft so troops can get into the right beaches this is what they do in north africa uh the problem is after north africa the army starts to lose interest in this and and they’re they they they stop creating uh their portion of the scouts and raiders because there’s they have they have enough you know beach marking troops for the remainder of the war so they basically leave the uh the entire schoolhouse in the hands of the navy which you know now the navy has all this curriculum and they have no prohibition on what the navy’s portion of the scouts and raider program can do so naturally the navy starts you know taking not just the the transportation side of the mission but they take the the entire beach marking side of the mission so uh they have troops that are quasi you know commandos that are trained to do beach marking uh but you know at this point in the war um or in 1945 uh when sacco has been created they realize that they can use these troops not just for beach marking anymore but for straight-up commando operations they have the army’s curriculum they have all the experience of working with army commandos so they train their sailors and everything that the army commanders have been trained with and they the plan is to send these uh send these units to china and that’s the amphibious rogers so the scouts and raiders uh naturally they i have a picture i think in the book of uh there’s a sign you know it says scouts and raiders and then underneath it the amphibious rogers within months there’s no more scouts in raiders sign it’s the amphibious rogers so not the best name for a commando unit but the idea was that uh you know the these were the the navy’s pirates you know the rogers the jolly roger these guys are supposed to be the swaggering you know bushwackers of the pacific uh chapter seven the u s navy’s post-war plight and the sailor raiders who led her back to significance in korea um again there’s just so much detail that you put into this it’s f absolutely fascinating to read you end up highlighting now we’re in i’ll fast forward to where in korea um target baker this time the scouts were accompanied by a boatload of marines who upon landing established a hasty perimeter then flashed seaward the signal for all clear when the remaining boats hit the shore the marines secured a beach head then scouted inland for the tunnel entrance as they did two trains appeared and did the job for them revealing the location of the two rail tunnels to the southernmost the scouts put to flight one century armed with nothing but a wooden rifle in a bayonet after securing the southern tunnel the udt swimmers slogged some 2 thousand pounds of explosives 300 yards past the beach where they stacked pack after pack into the tunnel’s mouth and under a bridge at 0-305 the udt swimmers pulled their fuses initiating a hasty six-minute retreat to the beach and the boats followed by a concert of oars through the surf at 3 30 noted the task force diary charges exploded 20 minutes later the men of sog climbed back into the bat into the bass which was the ship and into history as the navy’s first successful raiders of the modern area era for joy and for many of the navy planners it was just a start yeah that was a tough chapter sorry that was a tough chapter to sort of figure out what where the center of gravity of this thing is like what because the i mean just the the number of raider organizations that the navy sponsors during this period they sponsor uh the marine corps udt group which is uh the special operations group at the time the saag they spawn they sponsor uh udt led british commandos they sponsor uh army uh raiders they i mean everybody is trying to figure out how to uh you know do sort of what the koreans were doing to the us military at that point which is bottled up in the busan perimeter there’s it’s it’s like uh you know we’ve been watching a busan perimeter moment in afghanistan the their uh lack of leadership lack of planning lack of resourcing uh you know forces uh the army or the u s forces back into this this small pocket and they’re doing everything they can to sort of not necessarily break out of it but at least uh you know not do nothing and the not doing nothing is trying to uh you know cut the north koreans uh supply lines and and the one advantage that they have when with the korean peninsula is all of these arteries all these roads because of the the spine of the the north korean geography as they push everything to the to the edges of the peninsula so this is the first time the navy really sees it you know this huge opportunity to start you know sponsoring raids ashore that’s the first time that the the udt which is the only special operations uh unit that survives disbandment in world war ii uh that’s the that’s the moment that they cease to be just beach marking or just reconnaissance troops and demolition troops and they start going ashore but they you know like every other instance they are going sure not alone they’re going ashore with the marines with british commandos cia operatives partisans and they’re slowly uh learning uh this trade you go into uh chapter eight here tells another story of the rangers and the army resurrection of the army rangers and the gorilla raid that failed to forestall their second death um just just another one of these uh you got a guy named john hugh mcgee these characters all of them they’re freaking epic i i mean what this guy did um is just incredible um his career you look at these guys career um and some and i mean at least in john mcgee’s case i mean he he’s a totally uh i mean he he maybe has the worst world war ii experience of anybody let me just jump into that real quick um a year later mcgee was at the epicenter of history hopelessly commanding moro troops in the philippines against japanese bombers in the snake choked malarial hills around del monte field del monte airfield at kilometer 117 of the sare highway becoming the only american of the 11 who fought to there to survive the war after six months of resistance on may 10 1942 mcgee swallowed his pride obeyed his superior and with a humiliating blindfolded salute surrendered himself and his american and filipino troops to imperious japanese officer wearing a kimono many of the filipinos were tied to stake shot and buried in pits the japanese soldiers never bothering to confirm they were dead at 33 mcgee’s dark brown hair had already faded into an iron gray for the next 25 months mcgee survived beatings trench foot dysentery malaria mosquitoes cages and slavery for nourishment he and his fellow prisoners were fed a meager diet of rice and a few vegetables that occasionally included yams dog meat wafer thing candy bars and cigarettes the last two purchased with a monthly allotment of 40 pesos that the japanese could turn into a lever to pry prisoners submission so sensitive did the men become to their hunger that when fearful of transfer they gorged themselves on every scrap they had hidden one man even devouring a litter of puppies born the same day along with his catholic faith to which he cleaved mcgee sustained his mind on a series of escape plans into the philippine jungle even making use of a urinary tract infection that kept him up at night to memorize the guideposts of the constellations to each plan was attached in obvious cholera colorary obvious to him anyways once escaped he would raise and lead an army of filipino guerrillas against the japanese for two years he plotted mentally choosing men for work details not for strength but for their knowledge and gunnery and logistics men around whom he could build the guerrilla army in his mind on the night of june 12th two years one month and two days after his capture he finally got his chance while anchored off the east coast of zamboanga peninsula on a prison transfer ship mcgee palmed off his rosary beads to a friend dropped every stitch of his ragged clothing to the deck then tiptoed over his sleeping comrades placed a naked foot on top of the railing and dove into the racing current through an initial volley of the through an initial volley of bullets and past two other prison ships mcgee drifted for miles until rescued by a native by a native in an outrigger who paddled him to land gave him a t-shirt which mcgee turned into a loincloth ashore two native boys eventually found fed and clothed him tied undersized sneakers to the bottom of his feet like heel-less slippers then pushed and pulled his emaciated frame over jungle trails lit by nothing more than a torch as bright as a cigar tip and you go on from there but just you have to kind of realize what’s happening with this guy and where this guy came from and what he wants yeah he he spends the entire war you know essentially just neutralized yeah well it’s so he’s in prison camp for two years when he finally escapes he wants to go run a run a freaking an army a guerrilla army well there’s other people that had already been running a guerrilla army and they and now they outrank him they have the experiences so he kind of gets sidelined the whole time his war is just a series of disappointments yeah so he and and when he gets back home you know to he finally meets the daughter uh that his wife uh he meets he meets his daughter who’s never met before and uh his reaction is immediately to volunteer for service back in the uh in the pacific theater and the day he gets back the day he takes command of his his troops uh they drop the they drop the bomb and the entire time i mean that he’s been you know neutralized this entire time facing these series of disbandments his little brother has been one of merrell’s meryl’s marauders uh most effective uh battalion commanders which is a really frustrating thing for this poor guy the psychology behind that yeah so when he finally gets to korea uh and you know he has this new opportunity to prove himself all he wants to do is create the you know the the army that he had built in his mind and he gets there and or anyway you have the there’s a there’s a so they go they end up he ends up putting together kind of a group mcgee’s rangers he’s the uh um he’s the indispensable person when it comes to army special operations in korea everything sort of flows out of him uh he has all these ideas at the beginning of the war and he puts them all in writing and so everything from the the army rangers are reconstituted based off of his recommendations uh the partisan command is created based off of his recommendations uh and he wants to sort of uh combine these these units together he’s got this idea it’s sort of unformed it’s not uh it’s not exactly what it’s not a mature idea uh um at the beginning of the war it becomes you know you you see when you when you look through the structure of the institution that he had uh sort of created you see like uh like a siege of soda yeah like the components yeah like they’re there like you can see and and every time that he constitutes this thing he the navy is a critical part of his ideas you can’t do any of the types of things that he wants to do unless you have significant navy support navy transports uh anyway so the problem is you know the the army uh has moved pia moved past all of his ideas they you know they uh they entertain him they entertain these ideas for a period uh and uh as you see throughout uh uh his service the army plucks these things off the table one at a time leaving him uh to go back to you know the states not in disgrace but not not to fulfill the thing that he wants he got these he’s got these ranger groups together again and here’s a here’s a section where the rangers are his some of his mcgee’s rangers are going out they’re on an operation i’m going to jump into the middle of this operation after a moment of intense argument watson ordered back one of the koreans they had left their radio watson ordered back one of the koreans to get the radio who not surprisingly refused until watson threatened to beat the man himself scrambling to the clearing the korean soldier seized the radio by the backstrap then dragged it behind him bouncing rolling smashing over rocks and leaving a trail of broken knobs handles and antennae bastards got his brains in his ass seethed watson as he watched when the runner reached the trees and presented the radio everyone could see that it was destroyed with their only hope for survival buoyed upon the ability to communicate their position to the navy’s fighters and helicopters the radio’s destruction meant virginia that’s the name of the team virginia’s was not far behind had watson wanted to repay this cruelty and kind his rage was instantly short-circuited by the shredding sound of a machine gun fire and the terror of communist soldiers lunging across the body strewn clearing without a word as thornton recalled the virginia survivors plunged into the trees and careened down the hill in a wild melee stumbling rising running and falling again hoping with every bruise to break through to the valley floor before the enemy cinched the noose around their necks after running for what seemed like a half a mile the men collapsed into the relative protection and shadow of a ravine as their lungs pumped miniature fog banks into the cold air their ears caught the growing but unmistakable hum of hum and chop of two helicopters echoing through the valley when the first helicopter made it back to the clearing its pilot aged into a hover kicked out a bundle of supplies then leaned out his window coming face to face with a volley of muzzle flashes banking hard the pilot escaped and ambushed the ambush only barely with the clearing obviously overrun both pilots rode rolled their helicopters into an anxious racetrack search around the mountains flying solo that thornton could easily make out each pilot’s face without a radio even without even marking panels the vagina virginia survivors waved frantic arms but betrayed not a sound since any noise would only alert their hunters not the engine deafened pilots for 30 or so minutes the pilots searched then ascended and retraced their path to the ocean virginia was alone except for the blowing wind and the rustle of the leafless trees remembered thornton there was silence lonely empty silence [Music] they go on the run you you highlight you you go through some of that and then finally fast forward a little bit on april 10th 10 hallucinatory days since the mountaintop battle in just two to three miles from un lines the last remaining members of virginia mission were cornered in a cave captured and ransacked then beaten and bound with wire so tightly that watson’s arms soon swelled to twice their normal size for the second time in his life this veteran of the darby’s rangers was a prisoner of war as fate would have it captured while escaping from a disaster as consequential for the rangers as cisterna had been and this guy watson you you um you you introduce him later and you have to get the book to see what this guy’s about but let me give you a little something so this guy get gets captured in the 29 months since his capture corporal martin r watson a soldier no guard or prisoner believed was actually a corporal had set an example for captivity that to this day was has never been exceeded 30 days after he was captured for 18 of which he had been starved in a cave to make his 240 pound size somewhat easier to handle watson and a south korean comrade had knocked out a guard with a rock and made for the surrounding mountains where they had survived for five days until their pursuers had disabled them by rolling a grenade into their hideout never medically treated except with some shreds of brown paper to cover his wound wounds watson had nevertheless escaped again this time by wriggling out of his rope restraints and jumping free of a moving truck as it slowed around a bend this time he survived a week before inadvertently walking right past a wide-eyed north korean patrol for these attempts and one other plus an attempt at suicide with a piece of broken glass he had been relentlessly beaten with rifle butts and boot heels and periodically starved and always almost always isolated once in an unsheltered hole for 72 days with rations described by the record as sparse rightly suspected as an oss spy and saboteur watson had also been subjected to almost daily interrogation by north koreans chinese and even russians who had drilled him up on his exposure to the gestapo in world war ii but especially on the organization’s methods and tactics of the paratroop unit to which they knew he belonged watson’s response to these and other questions had been a mixture of stony silence or intentional contradiction responses that had invariably earned him a switch across the eyes a pistol barrel across the face or hours of kneeling with his nose pressed against a wall and then a stone on his head throughout these deprivations watson had never lost his bearing or conviction once standing during a packed camp lecture by a british speaker from the london daily worker to say that he didn’t know what communism was and he didn’t care to find out nor did he and his fellow pows want to listen to this traitor commie son of a [ __ ] for this affront and as his example to other prisoners he was eventually frog marched before a military tribunal informed of the armistice then sentenced to death by firing squad he still didn’t talk in the end after having been starved from 240 pounds to 120 his was an example that earned him the final distinction as the second to last u n p o w to be released across the freedom bridge on the other side he learned that the rangers he had so steadfastly protected from exposure no longer existed as far removed now from the army’s interest as was the man who had resurrected them from the grave a man whose accomplishments had disappointingly matched those of his past about the same time that operation spitfire had been unraveling colonel john hugh mcgee the korean war author of the army rangers and korean partisans had presented himself for the third time to the quonsen hut maze of the 8th army’s headquarters in busan intent on securing a date for a partisan advance into north korea a date for which he had long been waiting the reply from his superior had been simple never after a year-long tour mcgee left korea as dejected as he had left the philippines never again to have a chance to lead a partisan army on a campaign of liberation on top of everything else he was branded the scapegoat for the failure of virginia and spitfire failures with consequences beyond a battered reputation yeah i mean the the way that the army is treating special operations in this period is um similar to the way that they dealt with them in in world war ii they created the rangers they attached them to divisions for control in each instance the divisional commanders they don’t see much distinction between the rangers in their own infantry so they treat them like infantry and usually they use them as their front line infantry and predictably they get mauled and then the commanders justify their own belief that they were just like infantry so the only thing that really could have kept the rangers of the army from disbanding them would have been the sort of raid that mcgee sends watson and his team to complete which is a a penetration rate at a deep uh you know a deep penetration rate um behind enemy lines to destroy a tunnel for lots of reasons uh the the rug gets pulled out from under the this team before they even go uh and their chances of success before they even launch are diminished and almost nothing they still go and like you read that passage that you read i mean the survival the lengths that they go just to survive are incredible um and this mission is almost completely lost to history i mean when i started researching that mission and researching watson i didn’t have a lot to go on there’s really only a couple of accounts about it uh and i had you know based off of what i had done uh the research i’d done from for my world war ii chapters i sort of knew or i sort of suspected that there would be like some uh post pow report about watson couldn’t find it well the first time i went to the archives but uh i knew that these reports were roughly you know two pages whenever anybody was recovered from a pow camp the military would interview them they would put the the circumstances their capture uh and the circumstances of of their captivity in these reports and you know they’d you know lock it away in a an archive someplace so i knew that this report probably existed so i contacted the archives they confirmed that the report did exist and i you know being in illinois at the time it wasn’t super convenient for me to go back i expected that you know you know the the two pages wouldn’t provide a ton of detail anyway but i asked them could you take a look at it uh and then send me the pages that uh you know his of his report they the the archivist was kind enough to do it she went she looked at the the account she said yeah the the accounts in a you know file you know labeled such and such is the uh the record of american uh pows in the korean war but it’s 750 pages so i can’t scan it and copy it and send it to you it’s like well can you just find his section and then send me those pages and she said no it’s 750 pages it’s not been cleared you’d have to put a foia request in just to go through it to make sure that there’s no you know classified information so i put the foia request in they go through but they still won’t send me the two pages anyway i sort of forget about it i’ve sort of moved on to another chapter i figure if i’m going to find anything on the virginia one raid and it’s going to be the you know the center of gravity of that chapter i’ll find it eventually but i it’s sort of like i said i put it on the back burner i’ve already moved on so i i come to the archive uh several months later and i remember i put this foia request in so you know i do a double check on it at the end of a long day my back is aching because of all the pictures that i’ve taken you have to stand over these uh these tables and you know take picture after picture and when i leave these you know the archive after a day of research i’ve got like three thousand images you know it’s it’s it’s a you know it’s not fun but at the end of the day i think i’ve got about 30 minutes left i find the archives i’m like hey can you find this report for me i’d like to take a look at it and see what it is she comes back with the 750 pages i open it up it’s not 750 pages of american pows in the korean war it’s 750 pages on martin watson and no one has ever gone through it not since the day that they took the reports and put it in the archive and it is it’s a gold mine i mean it had everything from his police reports uh the circumstances of his captivity in cisterna uh because he was part of darby’s rangers crazy and then the fact that this person he’s present not just for you know the the consequential moment of the rangers in world war ii but the consequential moment of the rangers in the korean war um and it’s amazing account after account of all the people that you know it’s not just his interview it’s not his just his post captivity interview that’s in the 750 pages it’s interview after interview by his fellow captives and they all have the same story about this guy he is incomparable and he gets a bronze star actress you know after his captivity uh and he gets a promotion to sergeant i mean i couldn’t i mean maybe freeman in some instances maybe halperin a couple of others i mean nobody that i come across in the in the writing of that book is more deserving of the medal of honor i mean the the length that he went to for his own uh uh for his own men uh on that hilltop in the virginia one mission and then the lengths that he goes to just to survive uh in the pow camps and and to escape numerous escapes i mean but yeah he’s i mean i do have your next book identified yet i got a good idea the problem with the the the um uh the record is there’s that there’s no dates uh and i’ve thought you know you could write a book about martin watson i think you would have to make it fiction though you’d have enough uh material to write that that book but you couldn’t write it with the same level uh of specificity that i wrote this because you need the chronology to tell that story and the chronology don’t you think you could piece together the chronology from the other of the events that he’s actually in and you could have thought about it and you would have to find you’d have to uh go through each of the reports uh and and track down you know the you know the 100 150 guys and see who’s still alive to see if they can put you know some chronology to it you it would i don’t know i have i’ve thought about it um what happened to him after the war after he got out of the army after he was meritoriously promoted to sergeants right he is uh it doesn’t have the it’s it’s not the best uh uh epitaph he’s um he ends up having some trouble i mean like like i write in the book uh his inter-war period between uh his uh release from um uh the german pow camp in world war ii and the uh his entrance back into the army it’s punctuated by some 76 arrests by the the connecticut police and yeah ranging from fighting to drunkenness back to fighting to resisting arrest i mean he has no uh i mean he clearly has you know post-traumatic stress but he’s also you know that’s just who he was just he’s grown up in this sort of like rough and tumble gang type environment um and you know he’s he’s you know he would be a nightmare to command but you know also you know incomparable in combat but after the war uh he he marries uh it doesn’t doesn’t go well um he’s you know completely you know uh broken from the war he ends up having a couple of kids um uh and then moving to alaska to work on a pipeline uh his son who i uh have become you know friends with uh is every bit as big as his old man was i mean he’s uh he’s just a you know some equally a monster uh but the nicest guy he’d ever meet um but he think he met his dad you know maybe two dozen times in the course of his life and then his he passes away i believe from lung cancer he smoked his entire entire life and the password that his son would have to use to get into his hospital room was courage so [Music] korean war ends um uh your next section is arleigh burke the bay of pigs and the launching of the navy’s limited war seals you talk about early here during the period of the cia’s preparations for the covert evasion invasion of cuba the u s navy was led by admiral arlee burke the 58 year old cno whose most conspicuous feature were a tight shock of curly bleached hair a fist of a chin that fell into a loose and swollen neck and a sizable bulk that had long since settled into his hips a trait that gave said one witness a sea roll to his stride and to join his shape the impression of an upright base or a freighter so there you go arleigh burke um not an attractive man yeah and here’s an important part and this is one of the one of the parts where we start connecting this dna of the seal teams to the the dna of the of the us navy in 1943 when burke finally arrived in the south pacific to take command of disc destroyer squadron 23 desron 23 the little beavers he pinned himself to a drop leaf desk in a sweltering belly of his command ship and crammed into his head a year’s worth of combat reports every battle from coral sea to savo island appalled at the micromanagement of destroyers in which the permission to launch torpedoes against an already discovered enemy fleet was denied four for four immutable minutes burke crafted an entirely new doctrine of employment instead of spreading his destroyers around the fleet’s larger ships as nighttime submarine submarine pickets all dependent on permission from above to break guard duty to engage the enemy burke proposed to concentrate his ships at the head of the fleet and to govern his skipper’s skippers under what has since been called the doctrine of faith an unprecedented delegation of authority in which an enemy sighting would be immediately followed by a coordinated torpedo attack without orders the use of all caps was berks to convey this attitude to his sailors burke issued them a 12-page mimeographed memo whose very first lines read if it will help kill japs it’s important if it would not help kill japs it’s not important keep your ship trained for battle burke’s list of non-battle related orders was succinct there were none corrections to this section will not be permitted it took less than a month to make his point so that’s burke you you go through this thing and burke is running the navy and you know clearly he’s an aggressive guy and believes in decentralized command um you do a great job of covering what happened at the bay of pigs how that ties into our history and the seal teams um really pretty interesting story the way that unfolds and and you know it ends up with well it’s a horrible situation but we do gain some experience that we then take we work with some of these some of these cuban nationalists that helped us out as well yeah and this is the toughest chapter well that’s not the toughest chapter each of the chapters presented you know various challenges when it came to researching and trying to like you know craft the narrative or trying to figure out like like i said before what’s the what’s the point of this chapter and how does this uh how does how does this serve the story or how did this push us forward and you know what aspects of of you know burke’s personality or burke’s own history uh how is that relevant and absolutely you’re you know you hit the nail right on the head when it comes to you know burke’s uh you know emphasis on latitude and decentralized command but the other thing about burke that’s really important or it’s that’s essential about him is that he uh refuses to allow the other branches of service to define what the navy is and you know in the revolt of the admirals during that period um during uh the uh you know the the inner war period between world war ii and the korean war you know the the other branches of the service are trying to tell the navy that you know we need to really de-arm ourselves and become sort of just a you know more of a you know a merchant marine which to burke is anathema he has no interest in uh commanding a navy that’s just a support or a transport unit to burke the navy is nothing if it’s not an uh an instrument of offensive warfare uh and so he’s constantly when he becomes the cno and he becomes a cno for a period long two years longer than even the the closest his closest competitor it’s normally a two-year job he’s the cno for six years no one has the influence on the us navy that arleigh burke does so when he becomes a cno he’s constantly the entire time he’s constantly looking for opportunities to push the navy uh into you know a more offensive role so he champions this uh this limited war capability you know he sees enemies all over the the globe and he’s trying to figure out how the navy can you know can either bring forces to bear launch marines launch missiles launch you know naval gunfire and and that you know uh orientation uh ultimately uh creates creates this unit um but like i said writing the book creates you know you know presents uh you know structuring and research challenges uh you know every chapter is hard to write um this chapter though this was probably the easiest chapter when it came to write the first draft because there’s been so much uh produced about arleigh burke numerous books a couple of them are pretty good with you know lots and lots of corroborative detail in them and then you know just finding you know his fingerprints all over those uh those documents that create the seal teams they’re all over i mean everything all the all the documents that his office is creating but then you can see his little scratches and his pen scratches and all these documents because he he writes with i think it’s a green pen and you can see him still on the documents when you go to the the navy yard today the problem with this chapter particularly the bay of pig’s part is just finding the material because it’s you know the cia is still involved and you know i can’t tell you how many times i tried to get documents out of the cia it’s a black hole you just can’t get them so i finally was able to track down the actual cuban frogmen that participated in the raid and all of them were just you know totally generous with their time so you know the book is written almost sequentially there’s a couple of chapters that i wrote out of order but this chapter in particular is the one that just sort of kept me up at night until the end so like i i know there’s more material out there and i’ve got to get it into the book and i mean short of going down to miami uh and and meeting with the the actual or because they closed the museum they closed the bay a big museum but i managed to find them and their accounts are in there yeah it’s a it’s an epic epic retelling of that um again that’s why you got to get this book to read these sections because i’m not covering it all today uh but we do get kennedy we get kennedy who now is really focused on this idea the small war idea the counter insurgency idea the guerrilla warfare idea he’s all over it he starts pushing people in that direction he needs someone to run the the special warfare center at fort bragg which is where the green berets come from where they get it’s like their school house um he ends up talking to one of his friends his one of his military aides who who recommends a guy to run it this guy named colonel bill yarbrough who’s another character in the story at the change of command ceremony his his soldiers observed him as he was average size chest out shoulders back a rooster of a man his narrowed eyes and pursed lips locked into a stoic gaze as revealing as a roman bust son of an army colonel married to an army brat with a son on his way to an army commission and two daughters on their way to army husbands yarborough was a the very picture of army tradition 48 years old now in press slacks and blouse boots with no prior special no prior experience in special forces nothing on the surface seemed to indicate anything besides a conventional background and a preference for more of the same but that was just the surface beneath his obvious soldierly bearing was hidden an ambition for a military organization as unconventional as had ever existed born into a military family and predictably funneled into a west point education where his only step out of formation seems to have been as a cartoonist on the school newspaper yarborough’s early army career was in fact a litany of non-conformities four years with the philippine scouts one of the most unconventional assignments in the us army two years as a parachute test officer during which his creativity had burst open as wide as the thing he was testing this had manifested in everything from redesigning the paratroopers pants to boots to promoting his untested unit by acting as a stunt double for a hollywood movie for which he was afterwards afterward nicknamed showbiz and in creating a silver badge that looked like an ice cream cone-shaped parachute flexed with winged angels that was ultimately adopted as the symbol for the entire airborne in world war two yarborough survived incomparable five combat jumps five com campaigns two combat commands one of which had fought alongside darby’s rangers at cisterna and later earned a unit presidential unit citation and one crash landing and except for a brief sidelining resulting from an outburst against his division commander matthew ridgway it was an almost unblemished record of direct action with a record a record with honor so compelling that any normal soldier would have coveted its repetition yarborough wasn’t normal what was the outburst about ridgeway remember yeah i’m trying to think it was uh it was a it was an errant drop i believe in italy uh an errand drop of the parachute troopers or an air drop of a bomb friendly fire situation no of paratroopers okay yeah they they landed them uh in a place that they shouldn’t have landed them and he returns from that and he uh he does something that you just can’t do in the army he he you know lets his boss have it and matthew ridgeway is not matthew ridgeway is another you know hero of the story but you know maybe not a hero of the story he’s a hero he’s an american hero but he’s an executioner of the rangers in korea but he’s also the executioner of yarbrough’s sort of rise to infantry or paratrooper greatness he uh he short-circuits his career sends him back to the states i think the only way that yarbrough gets back into command is through mark clark um but yeah it was um uh yeah yarbrough yarbrough yarbo he is uh probably next to kauffman i don’t think i met anybody uh who was as tough as just sort of pinned down like what does he want because i mean his whole background seems to imply that he’s you know just this conventional you know soldier but he has no interest in it and i you know that i i couldn’t find uh you know the letter the document uh to you know suggest you know why he um was sort of turning his back on that and why he you know bought in so you know full-heartedly to this uh idea of counter-insurgency but nevertheless it’s there he becomes the biggest uh disciple or apostle or whatever you want to call him of counter insurgency of you know winning uh you know the the the hearts and minds of the people uh and then turning them or at least denying them to the enemy and the way that you did that is not through combat it’s through all the stuff that nobody likes to do it’s digging well yeah digging in it becomes real obvious is you saying here yarborough’s first action is commander of the naval special warfare center and top train of special forces was to initiate a top to bottom review of training curriculum and effort to match his men with their mission so here we go into fast forward a little bit before long the special warfare center began to feel less like a commando course and more like a college campus complete with courses in bridge building sanitation animal husbandry blacksmithing crop raising pig pen construction swine inoculation leaflet creation field irrigation seed planting and rice cultivation not all of yarbrough and and of course there’s resistance not all of yarbrough’s staff are proved to the changes particularly said yarbrough the old jockstrap commandos the ranger types gallant bloodletters and fighting machines to be sure but men who were anything but diplomats and rejected any suggestion that they ought to be they were he continued men devoid of the more humane qualities compassion pity and mercy men who bristled at the idea of lying on their bellies to teach an illiterate tribesman on how to aim a rifle so he’s got a totally different idea of really what the green berets should be and he’s got another little he’s got another little different opinion too here fast forward a little bit to convert his men to his new philosophy as warfare my religion he would one day call it in which battles the battle’s objective was not the destruction of the enemy of an enemy’s army but the winning of indigenous minds and sympathies that must be the precursor to hearts and minds yarborough enjoined every one of his officers above the rank of captain to accompany him into the pine barrens for what he called his talk in the woods as long as i am charged with special forces he would say there will be no womanizing no drunkenness no wild parties no adultery there’ll be no troublemakers no wild men that stuff is out there will be moral stand standards disciplinary standards appearance standards the rules are going to change he would promise there will be a new start so he’s coming hard he’s coming hard and uh this that chapter in particular so i’ve talked about some of the challenges of other chapters and you know either you know finding material or figuring out what the chapter is about and how that chapter served the the larger story the the story of the special forces uh presented a problem but i was not prepared for um every chapter took about you know between six around six seven months to write uh when i got to and and and they all followed a similar pattern you know whether the uh whether the the uh the unit was um a navy unit that we’re talking about where it’s uh being created uh committed to action and then it’s retained in the order of battle or whether it’s an army or marine corps unit that is uh created and then disbanded uh there was there was this pattern uh that was sort of predictable you know navy unit created army unit disbanded or marine corps whatever when you get to uh and it fit with you know my understanding of my thesis which was um the navy’s continuing to fill this gap in in the order of battle and um that held until the special forces when i get to the special forces like my thesis sort of like started to crumble and i had this moment of like panic where i was like i mean the only thing i can do is just ignore the entire existence of the special forces because it’s i mean it doesn’t fit with what i’ve been doing for the past you know seven years um and when i you know obviously that’s not what i did i think because it’s not the right thing to do because you’re telling a history you have to you know understand the relationship you can’t just change history to figure the story i mean you i mean there’s so many times if you’re writing history that you know the temptation is there you want to you know make the facts fit your narrative it’s not that’s not honest and it’s not what you’re supposed to do so i ended up having to take an entire year and did nothing but you know really learn the history of the army special forces which is a fascinating history but it also you know revealed within you know three or four months that it wasn’t the fact that the special forces was you know created committed to action and disbanded it was that they were completely reoriented to a non-commando type mission and no one was more uh consequential in that um uh shift than yarborough yeah they they end up the gap that all these other raider units would fill and then get disbanded he didn’t go into that gap he went into this other gap he went to this other gap and then there was a gap that was created uh by president kennedy and uh and trying to connect those two people i couldn’t figure it out until i found that article about spartacus about kennedy watching this movie and he gets oh yeah tell that story i i’m not going to cover it but tell that story in the in the months leading up to um his inauguration he’s uh um he’s been elected but he hasn’t yet uh become president uh he gets uh his his brother tells him how great uh the movie of the kirk douglas movie spartacus is and he you know uh his you know uh incoming secretary of the navy uh happens to be going as an extra ticket you know mr president like would you like to go so he goes and uh the movie’s already started the theater owner sees cat you know kennedy come in stops everything brings them upstairs they have a cup of coffee together everybody all the other theater goers are just waiting for them to start so it goes down with a cup of coffee uh restarts the movie and he watches this thing and he comes out and he’s i mean it’s a if you’ve ever seen you know spartacus it’s a you know it’s the epic i mean when i was a kid i saw it it was i mean i’ve never seen anything like it in um and it makes an impression on him and where you know it’s a it’s a slave army um that you know is fighting across uh italy and they’re liberating other slaves and they’re turning them into gladiators and that’s what kennedy wants to do yeah and he sees in this movie he sees an answer to his problem you know we’re going to turn these you know legions of uh you know third world you know uh um people into you know our army of freedom and yarbo brought into that bought into it oh yeah meanwhile fast forward a little bit um chapter 11 one o’clock on january 1st 1962 on monday seal team one was without fanfare of any kind unceremoniously commissioned on naval amphibious base coronado right where the neck of san diego’s palm tree resort island met the flat seven mile long sandy isthmus called the silver strand located on this base a peninsula of military-grade right angles that jutted out into the sparkling waters of san diego bay the team’s physical footprint was little more than a single world war ii era quonset hut the team’s authorized strength was for 10 officers and 50 enlisted men most of whom had not yet been pulled from their west coast underwater demolition teams the man most responsible for recruiting equipping and training these men was their 29 year old commanding officer lieutenant david del giudice just outside of newark new jersey by italian speaking working-class parents del judas was of average height and athletic build and like nearly every other frog man well tanned as an officer except for you as an officer at udt12 he had been selected to lead a 10-man detachment to vietnam on a two-week trip up the mekong river to deliver landing craft to laotian troops troops that the army special forces were already training for combat briefed on the insurgents and the menu of reptiles that he and his men were sure to encounter they had seen neither just a hundred miles of mud browned river now del judas was in charge of a unit that had been created in no small part to return to that river but to what end no one quite knew so there you go seal teams get commissioned and and this is when all the history finally you know starts to collide it collides yeah it culminates in this and and you know the the the the individual it collides in is uh phil buckley who is um who’s been there uh at the literally from the beginning of naval special warfare and he you know i’m there’s there’s a reason that you know the naval special warfare center is named after this person the phil h buckley center for naval special awards yeah i mean it wouldn’t i mean he uh he doesn’t create you know the the scouts and raiders doesn’t create the udts he doesn’t create the seal teams but he’s there for these critical moments to help the seal teams along and his his ability to form relationships his ability to write because he was obviously and he’s super humble and and is able to get his conveyor’s message apart yeah convey his message in such a way that really there’s only one answer but he never gives the answer it’s like he allows people to discover the truth for themselves which is the best way to get people to discover the truths better than i could have said it yes i wish i had that in there yeah he writes these uh we’ll we’ll get to it phil h buckley when he had left his house on december 7th 1941 phil hinkle buckley was a six foot two inch 235 pound former fullback for the cleveland rams whose major concern that morning had been to choose one of the four football contracts burning a hole in his pocket with thinning hair and a heavy jaw a curled lip and down turned eyes not to mention a torso as thick as a tree trunk buckle at 26 looked 10 years older than he was and was 10 times as mean while intimidating from a distance buckle up close actually possessed a purchase personality that accomplished the opposite he had never attracted to his orbit enough players to found and coach his own football team the or sorry he had even attracted enough players to his orbit to found and coach his own football team the columbus bullies a team on its way to another league championship had the japanese not exploded the afternoon as they did if i would have known about the columbus bullies my task in attacking a bruiser might have been the task unit bullies instead but one of those things um in the sicily campaign he had checked it checked the beach himself and fast forward a little bit then signaled the fleet from the bobbing shell of a blackened kayak while screaming balls of fire skipped off the water around him in the weeks before normandy invasion he skimmed to the coast and collected density testing bottom samples to up to 20 yards from the shore then evaded a flotilla of six enemy trawlers and a crash of bullet snaps from mg-42 machine gun by escaping into the knight and fog on the smoke grey dawn of d-day buckley and his lct scout boat crew led the first wave of floating tanks to omaha beach fired ear splitting rockets and twin 50 cal machine guns to silence an enemy pillbox then spent the day throttling through red clouded water and mine topped obstacles to pluck drowning soldiers from burning landing craft fast forward for a service in world war ii buckled received an unheard of number of commendations a bronze star for north africa a silver star for salerno and then then a brace of navy crosses one for sicily another for omaha beach not even his friend and fellow footballer buck halperin had been awarded as many naturally such a record had opened doors to more unconventional opportunities including two and a half years in korea more than twice the length of a standard war tour where buckley had doubled as the navy’s representative to the cia and led the beach jumpers a navy unit created to collect and jam the enemy’s electronic communications or periodically mimic them to sow chaos in their transmissions so there’s just some of the stuff that you talk about that that buckles got going on and that’s a that’s another one of those units too the beach jumpers right another one of these random units that the navy puts together freaking just get some um so he’s got to write this report talk about why he had to write the support report uh he had to write the report because uh the original commander got sent home and the reason that the original commander of the uh the commission or the survey team uh we don’t know if he was sent home for a health problem or uh as one person said for a closet drunkenness um but they i mean the the the point of this report that they’re sent to to create is to figure out what the hell the navy’s supposed to do in vietnam it’s not uh it’s not a theater that any naval commander is eager to you know insert himself into um there’s no arleigh burke uh at the helm of the navy at this point so uh the the character of uh you know naval leadership is slightly different maybe not as aggressive um but they still want to you know see what the navy can do so they send the survey team but the the people that they select for this survey team are almost um you know they’re sort of uh um uh they’re way they’re waiting the scales a little bit i mean they send uh david deljudis who is uh you know he’s the commanding officer of seal team one uh they send uh phil kaler who’s a former uh udt guy from uh the pacific theater a silver star winner and they said phil bucklow is the second in command who is you know nobody has had a more inland uh naval experience uh in outside of the seal teams than this guy and make him the number two uh the commanding officer gets sent home putting phil buckler in charge of this report they spend the next uh six weeks two months uh you know hopscotching the country trying to figure out what to do and um the report that he creates is entirely his i mean uh he lets no one else take the responsibility for this report he drafts it himself uh he types it himself even he doesn’t have a yeoman to do it he did you see original copies of this thing yeah freaking lunch and it took a surprisingly long time to find it i couldn’t find it anywhere and you have images of these things right you take pictures of all these things yeah i have images of that and i um yeah i don’t uh i don’t have any of the original documents there’s um left everything with the archive which where it should be but you didn’t smuggle any out not saying that the temptation wasn’t there because some of the archives that i you know went to um you know they’re uh some of their record-keeping you know has a little bit uh to be desired and you want to protect you know this history you know uh but no i never know that it’s all there but yes found the report and um uh yeah holding it is a little weird holding a lot of these documents because you you know you haven’t touched or most likely no one’s touched some of this stuff yeah since they were printed off or typed off or whatever you have here according to buckley this is the report according to buckley the battle required something not unlike the riverine force used in the american civil war in which said abraham lincoln uncle sam’s webbed feet had fought not only in the deep sea and the broad bay but also up the narrow muddy bayou and wherever the ground was a little damp what a great i mean he quotes freaking abraham lincoln this report this guy’s crafty for an unconventional example in a modified amphibious environment buckley could have drawn attention to his own legacy he didn’t he never did so humility lincoln’s fleet was example enough in practical terms his solution for the navy heretofore failure was a comprehensive overhaul of the entire counter-infiltration effort and you talk about this idea of counter-infiltration as opposed to as opposed to counter insurgency they want to keep the the infiltrators the communists from pushing into south vietnam it’s a blockade i mean that’s it’s a traditional navy mission maybe he doesn’t understand counter insurgency maybe much more comfortable with with a blockade right and and so therefore according therefore more navy boats more navy boarding teams more riverine checkpoints submarine nets navigation lights a system for checking cargo manifests and enforcing enforcing curfews and in exchange for all this more navy representation in four core planning on the question of whether the navy was missing the boat on counter insurgency the winning of the locals loyalty through civic action and leading the indigenous troops buckley’s report was comparatively silent especially given the date just 86 days since kennedy’s assassination though he recommended increased boat supports to special forces camps he already judged the green beret’s efforts as slow and time consuming and therefore ineffective fast forward a little bit in its 46 pages the report used the term counter insurgency only two times or sorry only three times a somewhat nebulous field buckley would one day call it four fewer mentions than the term counter infiltration the report’s preferred mission appearing a total of ten times was a variant of the term raiding a tactic that could said the report engender more fight back spirit amongst the rag sailors though those were the south vietnamese trained riverine sailors but would require companies of pursuit raiders preferably marines or rangers and who would accompany such and who would command such raids on this question the former scout raider turned seiko gorilla did not blink the over water transport of raiding and landing forces should be a navy responsibility um yeah that i mean that that part alone i mean the fact that he doesn’t even mention seals in that i mean clearly the navy thinks like i mean if there’s not like a little you know uh you know that when the teacher you know pounds on the chalkboard and says hey you might want to remember this for the test like that’s what he’s saying like hey don’t you guys think that you want to be doing this mission and the army in the marine corps is like nah crazy uh nine days later on february 25th 1964 the buckley report the name by which even mcnamara would refer to it was officially distributed to leaders across the navy mack v and the joint chiefs of staff eventually rising to the office of secretary of defense it was handled said buckley like a hot potato actually was more like a gauntlet a challenge to the navy’s leaders to not only directly fight an inland river war but to fight it in a way that mostly deviated from the consensus strategy of counter insurgency over the next two years this challenge would propel the navy toward the development of new vessels new organizations and most importantly new missions including the report’s most recommended rating beyond the riverbanks so there it is from there the seals start creeping inland that’s what starts happening um and and here’s the intro that i started this this podcast out with um that one seal team one deck golf billy macon that’s what’s happening um from there they start they start making adjustments to training um right this is the navy has set up the seal teams they haven’t created i mean they’ve created the seal teams but they haven’t uh determined what the seal teams are going to be they’ve raised them like any parent was going to raise a child they like planted a seed right but the child is ultimately going to be the one who decides what his future is going to be like and they you know all of this has come together into this last you know last two chapters like here we are uh and and you know they they have trouble in the beginning they’re almost sent home the seals almost completely missed the war anyway they you uh some so that the guys start coming back from those vietnam deployments and like i said they start making adjustments because they’re they’re creeping more and more inland um i i like this some of these things some of these things just warm my heart because because i’m so connected to them right so here we go back to the book frustrated with the enemy’s retreat from the wrong sats riverbanks that golf had already started pushing further inland so far in fact that seal team one’s replacement platoons were now anticipating almost nothing but helicopter insertions so we’re we might not even be in the water at all not even next to a river to better prepare for this inland land warfare seal team one’s anderson had ordered guy stone a former korean war soldier and forward observer who had left the army to become an enlisted seal to create a six-week long pre-deployment course in basic infantry tactics with a training camp carved into the chocolate mountains some 100 miles east of the pacific ocean stone had trained his team one comrades in every skill of soldiering that he knew everything from contour navigating to mortars every skill a step closer to navy infantrymen to the commanders now convened in coronado such developments seemed to justify an official revision to the navy’s to the seals navy imposed operational boundaries in other words what delgeudus anderson and earley were describing as direct missions outside of a purely naval or maritime environment as they already knew there was only one other available area that could present a navy unit with that kind of opportunity an area contemporary descri contemporary a contemporary described as the war’s true bastion of iron the mekong delta yeah i i’ve had some uh some vietnam seals on here but that connection to our west coast desert training facility that’s it man like that’s you go out there and you know i had roger hayden on here was a vietnam i know roger yeah just uh well that’s right you worked at warcom but he was you know he’d start talking about being out there at the desert training facility and like uh they set up the point man course where they put booby traps and targets and all that like that’s what i did when i got still team one you went out there and you did the point man course everybody did the appointment course that came directly from these guys in vietnam so these things are um you can still you can still still have that thread yeah [Applause] gonna push forward a little bit get into some um some of these stories that you you you get from the fighting that the seals start doing as they push in and this is the this is where the reputation really starts to stand strong i’m going to jump into the middle of a mission here realizing that the enemy was already moving to cut them off gallagher decided the only thing left to do was fight this decision made he directed his men to make for the only cover around a lone peasant’s house but 20 just 20 uncomfortable yards away from the nearest tree line when they reached it their first job was to calm the family inside not an easy task for any home invader and one in which the squad was only partially successful as two children quickly escaped sure to eventually tell the viet cong their position next most important was to check the wounded yaw’s entire entire left side was starting to freeze up and fix whatever was wrong with the radio the same troubleshooting checklist of cleaning connectors swapping out handsets changing batteries plus a healthy amount of cursing and praying this troubleshooting however was only partially successful when ture finally got the radio back online the only other person who could hear him was jack rowell the radio man for 7a and they had problems of their own at a little before 3am peterson and squad 7a considered themselves in a very difficult position everywhere they looked in the surrounding tree line there was movement at one point peterson had even seen torches what seemed like hundreds of them moving toward their south but as they were now finding out over the radio it could have been even worse once gallagher and seven b’s situation was learned peterson was quick to count his blessing first he had none of gal gallagher’s casualties except for the lerp who had shot the man peterson had meant to interrogate every one of his men still had a full load load out of ammunition next was his position clear fields of fire in every direction and the cemeteries berm for cover even concrete vaults if the enemy brought in his mortars most important of all raoul’s radio is now working as it should putting the squad in reach of army slicks and navy sea wolves who were at that moment on their way to seven a’s rescue or at least they had been recognizing 7b’s overwhelming need peterson quickly made two decisions first he ordered raul to relay seven b’s position to the helicopters effectively putting his own squad at the back of the line second and this decision was made by default of the first 7a would now fight the encircling enemy alone just as peterson’s decision was made and the helicopters began diverting south a group of some 30 viet cong fighters as if sensing 7a’s sudden vulnerability stepped clear of the eastern wood line spread themselves into a scream screen of skirmishers and started forward the first wave was coming and no one knew what was coming behind it having been forced to fend the spend the first few minutes at the farmhouse calming peasants dressing wounds and fixing the radio gallagher despite shards of metal in his legs was now checking each man’s field of fire and telling him to hold that fire until he gave the order as men organized their positions with easily accessible stacks of ammunition and grenades they scanned their sectors for any sign of movement they didn’t have to scan line scan long soon between the rice bales there was movement everywhere look at them all said boynton it looks like hundreds of them but as best he could tell hundreds who by their milling around still had no idea where the americans were right about the time that boynton was making that assessment hook tour received what they had been quietly desperate for the check-in procedures from lieutenant commander myers of the navy sea wolves who rattled off the loadout for his flight of two helicopters wings racked with 2 75 inch rockets and machine guns then gave his altitude and vicinity a racetrack in the sky far enough away so as to not reveal 7b’s position in response tear gave a physical description of the rice paddy and seven bees location in it along with the rapidly deteriorating situation multiple wounded and enemy everywhere the next call was the lead pilot of the army’s flight of slicks who upon hearing of 7b’s situation replied he would not be able to help as it was a quote violation of squadron policy to land in a hot lz end quote what happened next is a matter of some dispute one account suggests that the sea wolf pilots may have shamed their army peers by offering to pick up the seals themselves or at least the wounded the navy fuselages could only handle one or two men another explicitly claims that the sea wolf commander told the army pilot you’re going to go down or i’m going to shoot you down whatever the truth within a few minutes the matter was resolved and gallagher told ture to tell the helicopters what he wanted at a little before 3 15 a m the moon behind him two seawolves started their attack run across the rice paddy as they closed with the tree line someone in the squad there is some dispute as to who stepped out of the farmhouse ripped the pole ring on a mark 13 signal flare and tossed it in the grass within a second the flare ignited a bonfire size glow that told the pilots exactly where the seals were but also drew the bullet snaps of every muzzle now blazing from the tree line as the seals flinched beneath the fire and responded with their own the world above them exploded with the womp womp of the two gunships strafing the enemy’s muzzle flashes with their rockets and four machine guns with the landing skids directly above them the combination of rotor blades and rocket exhaust nearly ripped the roof off roof off the farmhouse as the sea wolves unleashed this chaos several seals got online and followed suit launching grenades and shredding through belts of stoner rounds they had so as so linked the noise was unbelievable wrote one man afterward and it looked like something not of this world behind this cover the army pilot reluctantly landed his slick and gallagher directed the firing line of seals to begin bounding back toward it while the firing line covered mike boynton transformed himself into an ambulance cradling men from the hooch to the helicopter then helping to shoulder yaw to a seat crammed between the pilot and co-pilot finding gallagher limping away from the firing line his rifle still in hand and compressing a fresh gunshot wound and leaning into the rotor wash like it was a driving rain boynton picked him up and heaved him so hard into the helicopter’s open door that he flew right out the other side that accident forced boynton to run all the way around the helicopter and repeat the effort finally stashing gallagher all the way in the back once everyone was finally loaded the pilot eagerly applied his collective pitch control lever until several knocks on the helmet forced him to look back hey we’ve still got men on the ground boynton yelled above the the noise at this the pilot depressed his collective just in time for roy matthews the barrel of his stoner glowing hot red to dash from the hooch and clamber aboard round’s now clanking against the fuselage this time the pilot’s liftoff sent a shutter throughout the entire helicopter prompting yaw to crane his head toward the dash where he saw an rpm indicator flashing red while gaining the next hundred feet of elevation the helicopter shook like it would suddenly drop out of the sky a feeling that only intensified when every gun still connected to a living communist finger started firing and surrounding the slick with green tracers it was a barrage that had resulted from the near simultaneous liftoff of the sea wolves because they had somewhere else to be [Music] yeah i mean then you you go in to um talk about how how they go now and take care of peterson and and seven alpha um i mean the the uh if i had written any slower this would not have been written because the uh you know a lot of the guys that gave me the stories from this thing are no longer here ron yaw just passed away a couple of months ago men just died bob gallagher died i mean all this history is you know very very slowly but it’s happening i mean um one of the last things that uh um uh pete peterson well one of the last interactions i had with pete because pete was more than generous with his time to do interviews with us but one of the last things that he did was um i sent him a galley copy of the book before it published to get it in bob gallagher’s hands so he could see this i wanted you know um every you know all the folks that i interviewed for from seven platoon the one person that would not be interviewed as bob gallagher he um that said i still was anxious for him to know you know the legacy and the contribution that he had you know not just to the seal teams but to you know establishing you know what ultimately the seal teams became the mission that the seal teams have um so sent the copy of the book to pete uh pete drove it over to bob’s house um and pete you know didn’t get any information on whether or not he actually read it but um after bob passed they found the the copy of the book in his house with a note inside that said to uh pass this book on to his best friend so hopefully very hopefully he uh he was able to at least see this yeah well then that’s a good indication um you say here when this was done he submitted awards as peterson submitted awards up through ctf 116’s chain of command bronze stars for just about every one of every member of seven bravo a silver star for boynton and for gallagher a navy cross an award that he had to justify to an awards officer with multiple statements but who responded by saying that the evidence could actually support a medal of honor i i hope it does i mean i i think they’re that would be that would be really great if uh this could act as something of a record for maybe an adjustment of some of these awards we’ll see yeah i mean right now i think we got gallagher and watson um but uh yeah and you know one of the you know great things uh or one of the most interesting things about that episode is that peterson submits himself for nothing i mean how many uh how many officers or how many people do we work with you know over the you know course of our careers that you know their preoccupation was you know what awards they’re going to get out of this awards are um are one of those funny things that you know they don’t always necessarily uh you know say what the person you know deserves they often say you know how good their chain of command was and recognizing you know what they you know what they got 100 awards are crazy awards say just as they say as much about the person that submits them for it as it does about the person himself i mean i had i had a guy saw a guy on here dick thompson um got got into a helo to to like set up the spy rig or something during a bright light operation ends up the tilo just takes off he’s getting ready to go and leave he’s getting ready to go on liberty so he doesn’t even have his weapon he doesn’t have a gear with him and the helo takes off to go on this bright light to go and rescue downed guys they can’t get in he ends up throwing a rope out rappelling down grabs the crew chief’s gun repels down no gloves burns his hand gets in there rescues people recovers body from two different helicopters completely it’s complete oh by the way he he dropped down the rope ended and he drops into 150 foot canopy and just drops just lets go and just falls through the freaking jungle canopy to get in there it’s it’s totally insane he gets done with that i mean there’s no possible way he should live number one and no no way should he have actually rescued guys he lives he rescues he gets like a bronze star it’s freaking totally insane and you know here’s the other thing um about and what’s what and you you you lay this out very clearly um a very important thing about this seal team two seventh platoon what really they were doing great operations but what really made it important was that they were doing these intel driven raids then they were gathering intelligence they were exploiting that intelligence and they were doing follow-on raids so this set like a a standard um it creates our cycle of operations and what’s important about that is you know we didn’t i try and tell everybody that i meet that the seal teams we didn’t invent ourselves we didn’t everything good about us we took from somebody else if anything the seal teams are just an aggregate of all the best pieces of all these other units that have come before us and not just navy units either we took the best parts of the rangers we took the best parts of the raiders and we combined all that and when we didn’t know how to do something we found the best person to teach us how to do it and they taught us how to do it and we took it um and same thing when it comes to this cat the cycle of capture kill i mean we i mean we sort of stumbled upon it and i think um uh you know with guys like pete peterson and bob gallagher who are really um you know leveraging the information that they can get from other units and then aggregating that to to drive their own operations i mean the guy like bob wagner who’s you know he is creating essentially single-handedly creates the prus and the the pru is the best part about that is it’s this cycle of operations that they get and that the seal teams sort of notice like we can do that too so yeah the use of interpreters the use of the locals that the use of the locals not to build a guerrilla force but to just to gather intelligence and go do hits and it’s just i mean it’s like you know it’s no different than what you know the police do in every major city across the country you arrest somebody you shake them down for information and then you go get the next person it’s a cycle of operations that just keep perpetuating itself so um you got incredible sections in here and again this whole book we we barely even touch the surface of what you’ve got in this book but i want to finish off with this section here it says this last section i’m going to read in march of 1969 the rand corporation a semi-private think tank that specialized in research and analysis for the department of defense published published a report titled the navy seal commandos a case study of military decision making and organizational change as far as i know the first academic level study of the seal teams the report’s author was frances j bing west a former force recon marine and vietnam war veteran whose investigation had begun a year earlier and by the way you can read a bunch of his books right now he wrote a bunch of other books wrote books about iraq his investigation had begun a year earlier and whose research had produced a raft of documents dozens of interviews and the first-hand observation of several seal missions into the rung sat and the mekong delta so he went and observed what seals were doing and this guy is a force recon marine himself from this research west had produced an 18-page report whose introduction provided a brief description of seal training training he estimated at a cost of around 14 000 per man plus an overview of the seal’s commitment to vietnam at its height a commitment that never exceeded 150 seals or roughly 100 1 150 fewer than the in-country height of the green beret’s total compliment it was a commitment that stood out in even starker relief when placed next to the author’s obvious admiration for the seal’s progression from lackluster coastal raiders to the war’s most aggressive direct action commandos admittedly commandos who had no had had no business becoming such and had thus drawn the interest of the same preeminent think tank that created the us military’s nuclear defense strategy intended as a study on organizational change the report’s true purpose had been to discover how the navy could have possibly succeeded in creating a land-focused commando force a force that even the viet cong had reportedly dubbed the men with green faces a color not normally associated with the navy’s traditional medium it was a puzzle of personal importance to the officer to the author as the marine corps the far more likely branch of service had never succeeded in creating anything similar quote how the concept was shepherded through the joint chiefs of staff and congress i am still trying to determine the author wrote for the mission of the seals exceeded the charter of the us navy as best as he could tell the legality of this infringement had been tolerated because of its negligible size but later had been allowed to widen because of a series of factors none of which at this point should be should come as a surprise the first of these now here you start talking about how we ended up with this with the seal teams the first of these at least in the mekong delta submitted the author had been the neglect of the us army in general and the ninth infantry division in particular to push their commando type units to the same to quote develop the same aggressive attitude towards ambushing that the seals had end quote it might further be added that neither entity had adequately prepared those commando type units to make such a transition in the delta environment a claim best evidenced by one attempt to conceal the river insertion of five lerp soldiers by having them copy the seal method of jumping from the back of a moving boat but that ultimately resulted in the drowning of all five men the second factor that accounted for this infringement the report continued had been the navy’s senior officers whose tours by comparison were mostly dreary affairs a condition made more noticeable when quote in the presence of generals end quote to compensate for this the navy’s leaders had allowed the seals more latitude than they had their other units a black market trade-off that it produced a steady supply of anecdotes for the navy and thereby quote saved the pride of the admirals end quote that’s an interesting concept like the the the admirals wanted something to talk about ultimately the author decided the most important factors factor in the seals infringement was owing to the seals themselves and the culture that weighed upon them drawn from a notorious selective training program that produced few qualified candidates the seals naturally had had to find a mission that kept casualties low a circumstance that might have pushed them like the lerps or forced recon marines into a reconnaissance role that they had anyone to pass had they had anyone to pass intelligence onto so you’re saying there look if you got a small number of people probably one of the safest missions you can do is hey we’re gonna go into reconnaissance where we’re not supposed to be seen we’re not supposed to come in contact with the enemy and and his and bing west is saying here like they could have gone in that direction they could have gone into this reconnaissance role had they had anyone to pass the intelligence to they hadn’t nor had there been any great pressure from the riverine force to engage in any sort of green beret style advisory duty or civic action so they didn’t go in that direction either they didn’t go where yarbro went hey let’s go raise a bunch of of uh local guerrillas to fight organizational orphans with no larger force to support or control them and possessing quote no love or administ or admiration for the vietnamese end quote the seals had set out into the swamps not to prove themselves their training had already done that said the author but quote because not to go not to go would have been inexcusable to the others they had developed a collective value system which emphasized physical hardiness and courage and they liked to fight that’s just a beautiful thing so so so the seals seals didn’t have this um you know you might talk to an army green beret talking about hey i like my little people you know the sod guys call them little people they’re they’re forming relationships with the locals this is a quote the seals had quote no love or admiration for the vietnamese end quote that’s crazy right and then and then just to do that one more to say that one more time they weren’t doing anything to prove themselves they were doing it because but quote because not to go would have been inexcusable to the others they talk about the others like it’s an excuse if you don’t go you’re not a seal you’re not a seal it’s inexcusable to the other seals they had developed a collective value system which emphasized physical hardness and courage and they liked to fight end quote so when the tactics of patrolling and ambush had proved unproductive nobody not a seal meaning no blue water superior officer had ordered them to try something else they had just done it it was an exceptional adaptation the marine veteran author made a special note to point out that his fellow marines had failed to mimic and by following the previous logic for reasons that blamed them for this a sequence of attribution and blame that if the preceding pages approved anything was not a sufficient explanation quote what strikes me as most remarkable about the seal story the author concluded is their performance and their ability to learn and adapt in a decentralized sub-optimizing environment end quote though all true and commendable it was also an explanation that it considered only the record that came after 1966 missing was any analysis that probed deeper than that top layer of history whose soil had fertilized this inland evolution the armies and marine corps preceding 30 years of whipsawing interest in raids and raiders and the navy’s perennial preoccupation with justifying its worth in offensive combat a preoccupation that it combined with this navy’s traditional latitude and the udd’s traditional adaptability to create what several unidentified seals soon described to a documentary filmmaker as the war’s unsung soldier and quote what we consider without question the best troops that the country has end quote both descriptions notable because they didn’t use the word sailors and just short of the reader’s digest appraisal that had dubbed them the war’s quote super commandos by the end these would be assessments that were next to impossible to dispute here you’re kind to uh end on uh bing west’s report that was one of the first uh things i found i found that at the udtco museums archives when i started this book it was one of the first places i went to do research and the archives at the udtco museum are a little disorganized and some cases that’s provides opportunities that you didn’t expect and one of those was bing west report and i had found it uh i read it uh when i got it but i hadn’t thought about it i it had you know it provided enough um kind of food for thought that it just kind of stuck in the back of my head stuck in the back of my head for at least eight years and so when i was you know nearing the end of the book and i was trying to find a way to you know kind of summarize everything that had happened um you know it suddenly dawned on me you know i’ll go back to that report and i knew that it had been written by francis j west i didn’t know it was bing west it was like oh my gosh it’s bing west like and i’ve read you know books by bing west and not only that but in a way that you know it made this thing even more like uh just strange that it happened but uh on one of the last ops that we did in al-anbar province we had uh gotten uh my uh platoon had been ambushed on a rooftop uh sniper overwatch and uh one of our one of our seals mark robbins had been shot through the through the head he took a bullet a 762 round from a pkm through his right eye and exited the back of his head and we were cut off from support we couldn’t get any i was trying to get aircraft down to support us they wouldn’t come they wouldn’t come because there were so much uh you know machine gun fire uh and we were trying to uh uh get the other seal uh element to fight to our position and they were they just were they were on foot and trying to get there as quickly as possible so at one point i asked for a you know a marine qrf and the marine qrf was separated from us at the fob by this road that we we called ied alley we’d never known a vehicle to drive on this road and had not gotten ied’ed and one officer who was there a major he jumps in a humvee grabs another humvee and they start trucking down the road to to get to our position they get to us they provide cover for the helicopter to get in uh and we mark actually you know it walks himself to the helicopter uh remarkably he’s still around he’s a lake county cop now and yeah um but what makes this you know story even more remarkable is that the marine major who came to our rescue was owen west west son as soon as you started telling i knew exactly where the story was going i was like this has to be old west this has to be a big second i mean it’s just incredible i think the the uh and and bing was you know the the fact that bing wrote this report bing had this uh interaction with the seal teams in 1960 68 and then writes this report in 1969 super humble report too incredibly super generous and i mean you have so many opportunities to you know draw attention to other things and he doesn’t i mean he’s he’s he’s truly impressed by this organization what you know we you know as a as a server as an institution have not done which i think we should do at every opportunity is recognize the uh the influence that all of these other units had on our creation soldiers marines rangers uh recon everybody they’ve all contributed to who we are in some sense our history i think it’s i mean and especially if you frame it in this way it’s not our history it is our history but it’s a lens that you can use to to look at the entire history of american special operations from world war ii to vietnam we wouldn’t be here without them and in some ways they would not have changed into the unit so they wouldn’t have permanently created these units had we not set an example for them to also follow yeah i mean it’s um and you know the the thing with bing west and just that humble report that you can you can i mean the marine corps is just so professional in so many ways it reminds me of dave burke who was a top gun pilot f-18 pilot marine corps fighter pilot um ended up being the senior instructor at top gun um f-35 pilot f-22 this is a total stud um and he worked with us he was a fact with us on the ground in the battle or mahdi what’s really interesting is you know he came from top gun he was the senior instructor at top gun i mean you you’re not you’re not going to get any more professional of a human being as a marine that is the senior instruction instructor at top gun and i was talking to him about when he came to one of our briefs for the first time this is we’re in the battle of maudi we’re doing a brief some kind of an operation and he was just telling me right away he was just so impressed with what what just how the brief was just how the brief was you know this is young lieutenant leif babin and and chief tony of fratty getting up there and talking about what we’re gonna do me giving the commander’s intent and like i remember him telling me that this was ten years later he probably told me that and just that humility to think oh these guys are doing something that is that is squared away and and for being to be able to recognize that and write that while the war is still going on um that’s pretty impressive and and you know you say that he he didn’t really probe deeper than the layer of history that’s prior to 1966 but um i’ll tell you what that left plenty of room for you to do just that with this book and and this book which provides so much history so much information um thank you and you know you know one thing that is awesome about the marine corps and i’ve talked about this on this podcast before i actually talk a lot about it with clients because the marine corps has an incredibly powerful culture uh i think it might be the strongest culture in the world absolutely i couldn’t agree more i yeah i i’ve said it you know time and time again like pound for pound there is no institution like the us marine corps their uh their ability to um they they require um much more from everybody from from their uh their troops than every other branch of service the trade-off though with with that by requiring as much is a level of responsibility that nobody else gets in the military and the result is it’s initiative and courage and that initiative and courage is part of it’s part of their culture and if you you know i i thought about this for years as i was doing this podcast and interviewing people and what the marine corps has is this culture that is rooted in the stories of their history and i think that what you’ve done with this book will strengthen the history of the frogman and the seal teams and it’ll anchor our culture to a past that is filled with these qualities that we want these qualities of bravery and heroism and and adaptation and evolution and pride from our successes and humility from our failures and i think this book connects us with the individuals [Music] who pave the way for us that we are lucky enough to be associated with and lucky enough really to call our brothers and make this incredible group of individuals that we call the teams and it’s an outstanding book and i think you’ve done a real service to the community by writing this book and anybody if you’re in the seal teams absolutely just order this book immediately there’s an audiobook version which is outstanding as well get this book anybody that has any interest in any military history in the history of all special operations just get this book there’s so much information in it it’s it’s immaculately researched and i just i couldn’t be i couldn’t be more impressed with it man and i’m look i feel i feel somewhat bad because i write books basically from my own head and it feels like i i have a much easier task than you do i don’t have to read anything i just write what i already know or what i live through and uh for you to dive so deep into this it’s just outstanding and i think it’s it’s um a huge a huge a huge service to the teams man thank you so thanks ben echo charles you got anything well i think we covered it you know it’s good to see you thank you nice to see you again hey ben um where can we find you i know you gotta you got a twitter right is that is that pretty much your your social media extent uh i have a twitter and an instagram i probably should create uh facebook because i think there’s you know a few older people that would yeah like that side what’s your what’s your i know your twitter is ben h milligan right what’s your what’s your gram i’m new to this so please bear with me i’m getting better uh b milligan three b milligan three yeah b milligan and then i’ve got three i’ve got three little boys so that’s uh okay yeah and um do you have a website or anything i love no i don’t find anything i mean i’m not i’m just like the um i’m the most incapable person when it comes to social media and promotion what i always say is the same personality traits that make it possible to write this book are the same personality traits that make it hard to promote it so i um i’m doing the best i can i appreciate you bringing me on here uh the uh yeah i couldn’t have done this with without lots of people helping out and including everybody that you know came together to you know get this to admiral mcraven um you know to to get that uh that blur from him and then um you know i couldn’t have written it without just uh uh my you know the support of all the people around me including the three little guys that i wrote this for so well hey man once again thanks for your thanks for your service and the navy great thanks for your service to the teams thanks for doing what you did um and and really truly honestly man i can’t thank you enough for writing this book and it’s it’s just it’s just an outstanding document i hope everybody gets it so much to learn and so much respect to be paid to the forefathers that brought us to where we are today thanks for shining a light on them for us thank you and with that ben milligan has left the building uh echo charles yes sir need to uphold the legacy of the teams by getting better what do you got for us all right first off side note me and ben have history one of the first people that i met in san diego when i moved here yep because of the connection between cake machines yep through uh my hawaii people you know that came to me to eventually become seals he was one of the first he didn’t remember you though well here’s the thing we both zero we both no no no no no no no no no zero was inaccurate zero is inaccurate he was like looking at me i was like i was like maybe a little something then later on the break yeah we reconnected yeah once you described exactly the situation because he didn’t remember you either way we’re all trying to get better which is weird you know when someone’s got such an eye for detail and he doesn’t remember you at all that’s got to hurt a little bit yeah especially all the all the research he’s done and like all the stuff that his brain is like capable of you don’t even make mustard disney mustard thing bro either way we’re connected now we’re pretty much boys again so it’s all good and you know we are trying to get better as you mentioned yeah so boom we’re over here we’re working out we’re working out we’re reading not as much as ben but we well most of us not as much of that but we’re trying gotta stay cognitively and physically in the game and improving ourselves slowly quickly whatever i’m saying through this journey we need supplementation good news chocolate supplements called jacqueline fuel first one to talk about is the energy drink new paradigm i said it paradigm new era of energy drinks no longer are we burdened burdened with the poisons and the aftermath and the price of bad energy drinks it’s all good all good tastes good gives you the little boost we need and healthy for you has electrolytes too by the way which is is that ever a thing electrolytes sometimes you need them yeah well no no to have them is a thing yes i didn’t i don’t know if other energy drinks have electric things they don’t fit because there’s too much poison in the other ones yeah yeah here’s the interesting thing you look at the way the seal teams came to fruition right there was a gap there’s gaps and some people enter the gap but then they leave it right they do that but the seal teams are just there the udts are just there we’re staying with it yeah that’s sort of like the this whole situation we’re finding ourselves in because there is little gap oh no everyone wants to make poison because it sells put a bunch of sugar in it put a bunch of caffeine in it and just give people poison and don’t care that’s the gap the gap is like hey people might actually want something that’s healthy yeah and so i’ve seen now that we win in the gap there’s other people that are trying to get in there but they don’t believe in it so as soon as they realize how expensive it is how hard it is produced as soon as they realize that they just leave the gap so we’re just there solo operations cruising standing tall like the damn seal teams this is the freaking seal teams of of drinks right here jacob discipline go that’s what’s happening oh yeah delivering and that’s the thing and you know what i’m accomplishing the mission at all costs i’m not telling anyone to be offended i’m not saying that in fact i would never say that i’m not telling people to be angry i’ll never say that i can’t i can’t impose outrage on somebody that being said those other entities that created these old-school old era energy drinks they’re kind of playing on your weekend they’re they’re taking us for fools they’re taking advantage they’re like humans they’re like hey hey this is this tastes real good you know the guy in the alley you know with the red eyes or whatever yeah yeah hey hey take the bruh it tastes good tastes good skinny you’re gonna really nice nice little boost meanwhile you’re like cool you buy it you drink it you enjoy the whatever you enjoy and then later on when that guy’s long gone you’re over here paying the price yeah and it’s not even like monetary cocaine addicted less healthy all this stuff let’s see and here comes jocko that’s good good finally finally here we go all right we’re on discipline go in the can boom uh yeah so display and also discipline the supplement itself there’s powder yep there’s capsules as well just you know you’re on the go whatever different different deployment methods you know also joint warfare oil krill oil these are for your joints vitamin d3 and cold water that’s for immunity milk additional protein in the form of a dessert yeah so good this will never change it was so good the only thing that was it hits the lips evolved with this is new flavors i hear about new flavors maybe some cookies i said it but i said it i’m not saying i’m just saying i said it um also chocolate white tea if you know about that that’s the ogt that jocko drinks is in and it was and still is into yeah it’s good probably if you like deadlifting eight thousand pounds you like that tea yeah yeah they go hand in hand 100 and you can get all these things at the energy drinks wah-wah everything else including without limited to the energy drinks jackalful com yup if you subscribe to him if you want just to come to your house like like as reliable as a udt frogman getting to the beach that’s how you want your supplements to show up just subscribe jackalfuel com it’ll come and be free shipping by the way because we’re up against some some competitors we’re up against the imperial japanese army and the nazis sure so we’re gonna we’re gonna have to sneak in under the radar here yep that’s what we’re doing i understand fully also vitamin shop you get the stuff at vitamin shop so yeah you just appreciate it grab something easy money vitamin chop also origin origin usa this is where you can get your american-made stuff look not it’s not just printed in america it is printed in america but not just printed in america same same we go all the way back oh gee to the roots the seeds the seeds of the plant that made the seeds all all made and planted grown sown in america everything american-made denim there’s some leather in there there’s a lot of a lot of awesome materials but you got boots you got jeans you got um jiu jitsu stuff yeah you got a lot of stuff on there to stuff i there’s a couple places where they mentioned that’s kind of training was going on back in the day back there like can you just imagine these guys like hey we’re gonna train you with demolitions blowing things up underwater swimming small boat handling jiu jitsu they’re doing it all yeah so get some of that origin usa tested out some boots at camp yeah hey look i’m not gonna go into it but those are some yeah yeah impressive i don’t even really wear that many boots on that many occasions but that one was like that could coerce me into wearing boots look at you as far as coordination goes check origin originusa com com also jacqueline’s a store it’s called jacques store and this is where you can get your discipline equals freedom stuff hats hoodies shirts also good also other stuff there’s good stuff on there little developments going on over there anyway jacquelinestore com over here look at you it’s it’s top secret until you go there then it’s like boom secret it is revealed real secret but you can go to the website yes sir yes sir available to everybody um but reveal your new uh shirt oh yeah your shirt locker sure you like them because we’re making the shirt locker on youtube the sherlocker if you want a cool t-shirt that and this is this is what i’ve leaned toward the whole time is shirts that are kind of tied to the podcast and this is one of them right here the sea wolves 1966 to 1972 by the way commissioned in combat decommissioned in combat that’s the sea wolves you heard about them today if they will go and get the seals out of the worst possible situations gunfire don’t care that’s true so how do you get that shirt sherlocker yes what’s up the the one of the homages to the sea wolves very much though oh you can get this at the shirt locker on jocko’s store oh so yeah you sign up for the shirt locker you get a cool shirt cool it’s hard for me to explain how cool it is varying levels of creativity either wear a school shirt you get one every month free shipping on that one as well this is just one of them i got a new feature that we’re working on it should be done should be done within the next i don’t know but if you remember the shirt locker hey look you missed a shirt last month five months ago whatever you’ll have the option to get it if you remember oh yeah we’re working on that one nonetheless yes very nicely this is the shirt i’m glad you like it jocko uh seems you know people seem to like the designs overall well you know this is just one of them so yeah i bet people like that one a lot because i like that one a lot well because i’m a supporter of the sea wolves hey subscribe also to this podcast we also have some other podcasts unraveling that i do with my brother dc daryl cooper we got the grounded podcast we got the warrior kid podcast we also have jacounderground com which we release a little uh what’s it called a little alternative podcast a little complimentary podcast where we talk about some other adjacent items and we do some q a and the reason we have that is in case these platforms which we do not control which we don’t like we want to be in control so that we can deliver and if people start inserting advertisements into this podcast we we know you don’t want that we don’t want it we’d rather have you listen to a 74-minute advertisement at the end where echo charles is talking hey eight dollars and eighteen cents a month if you want to help us out with the jocko underground go to jockowunderground com if you can’t afford it no factor we’re we we’re in this together email assistants jockleunderground com we also have a youtube channel subscribe to that we make awesome videos where i am the assistant director and really the driving sort of creative force beside the awesomeness of most of the videos and then echo does some editing for it you’re doing great work thank you orange usa also origin usa cool uh uh channel youtube channel oh yeah fully yeah that’s a good one if you’re interested in an american company their ups and downs challenges successes yeah that’s a really good one also psychological warfare what that is is an album with jocko tracks on it tracks on the album draco talking getting us through our moments of weakness which we may or may not have you know either way you can get that uh anywhere where you can get mp3’s psychological warfare good one if you want something to hang on your wall which you probably do you don’t just want to have walls that are just plain and black you do well i guess i do but if i didn’t then i would go to flipsidecanvas com and i would get some cool stuff from my brother dakota meyer who makes awesome stuff to hang on your wall got a bunch of books look this book today by water beneath the walls by ben milligan this is an outstanding book it is an outstanding book i i can’t i don’t know what else to tell you get this book it’s so good so much information so much history if you have any interest if you listen this podcast let me put it this way if you listen this podcast you will freaking love this book i love this book it is awesome get it the it’s just an outstanding um also have final spin coming out this is a novel apparently allegedly possibly a novel written by me it’s a story it’s available now for pre-order you want to get that first a dish i have people coming up to me now they’re they’re apologetic because they’re bringing me second a dish of discipline equals freedom during second the dish of leadership strategic attackers don’t you don’t want to be that person you don’t have that that that sort of sunken look on your face you want to say i’m in the game hey we have a little connection you got that first edition we have a little connection i’m not i’m not saying don’t talk to me if you have a second edition a third edition it’s okay look i have an open mind but if you wanna if you wanna have that immediate connection let’s get that going leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols this one was freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons about face by hackworth almost brought that up today i almost brought that up today but you know once you open that door who knows when you’re stopping because he’s got now that i think about it he i didn’t even mention this he’s got it in here what hackworth hackworth was running the tiger force i can’t believe i didn’t bring that up i’m sorry ben i missed there’s so much think about how much information is in there that i didn’t bring up hackworth that’s crazy that’s crazy so he’s got hackworth tiger force what happened to them why did they come about how did they do why did they get turned off there’s a whole story behind it once again that’s that’s by water beneath the walls by ben milligan about face i wrote the forward to the newest version of that we got extreme ownership in the dichotomy of leadership i have a leadership consulting company called echelon front we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront com for details on that that’s where you can find out about the muster the field training exercises ef battlefield we have a an event coming up in las vegas october 28th and 29th it’s called the muster come and get it we also have the ftx field training exercise that’s happening next one is in st louis september 20th and 21st probably closest sold out i think we had a group of people that couldn’t make it so there might be some openings check it out go to go to ashlandfront com we also have online training an online leadership training academy you need to go to the gym to stay in shape you need to go to extremeownership com to keep your leadership in shape come and check it out if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization she does all kinds of incredible things for veterans and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america’s mighty mightywarriors org and if you want any more of my monotonous monotony monotone or you need more of ekko’s mystified murmurs you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram and on facebook echo is at echo charles and i am at jocko wheeling and ben milligan is on twitter at ben h milligan and his instagram is was it ben mill three i don’t know listen rewind it it’s b milligan three b milligan three there you go m i l l i l-i-g-a-n again thanks once again to ben for your service in the navy your service and the teams and now your incredible service to the teams by writing this incredible book that will solidify our roots our culture and our history can’t thank you enough and to all the military personnel out there on the front lines right now thank you for defending our freedom and our way of life and to police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics and emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thanks for keeping us safe here at home and everyone else out there how about we all take a little lesson from these frogmen how about we develop and embrace a collective value system that emphasizes physical hardiness and courage an attitude that can press on through pain and suffering a humble intellect that can adapt and overcome a discipline that’s unbreakable and an unwavering commitment to accomplish the mission that is the way of the frogmen that is an ideal example to follow and the one that i wake up and face every day to hold the line and until next time this is echo and jocko out