Jocko Podcast 69 with David Berke: The Real Top Gun. Battle, Work, & Life are Identical.

2017-04-06T18:14:26Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @davidrberke @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening. 0:09:45 - Intro to Dave Berke. 0:21:11 - Officer Candidate School. 0:27:39 - Southern Watch. 0:31:01 - Top Gun selection. 0:38:49 - September 11th 0:45:08 - Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda. 0:47:33 - Training Officer at Top Gun. 1:08:27 - Forward Air Controller (FAC) Tour. 1:26:43 - Ramadi. 2:14:41 - Home Coming. Relationship. Pentagon. F-22 and F-35. 2:40:56 - Echelon Front transition. 2:52:54 - Green M&Ms, Support, Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid, and The Muster002 3:09:28 - Closing Thoughts and Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

life was the first guy that I met actually life in Tony all right show up together um so we had seen you guys you know we had turned over and we were just kind of getting up to speed we probably been there maybe a month or so before you guys had so you know quick learning curve we're just kind of getting comfortable with what's going on we also know there's a new brigade of platoon coming in I'm sorry a new um uh uh armor division coming in the we know that the unit that we're there the two to eight that brigade combat team is leaving we knew new brigade combat team is coming in and we were actually in just a relative a short period of time we were kind of the continuity because all the old guys are leaving we had we had the overlap so we had a kind of a prominent role with a new battalion and the new battalion commander he's retired now um awesome dude from uh one three seven armor guy named Tedesco just an awesome dude just an awesome dude awesome um he would have been there as part of his turnover it had come out a couple months prior maybe a month prior and saw us and we had my favorite thing about Tedesco is like he said awesome guy we we were getting ready to do a big operation with them and I said you know what I'm going to bring you a professional professional with that specific information so Dave will be talking obviously life is going to be there J.P. is going to be there clearly as well J.P. is going to be doing a little presentation as well from his perspective on some things echo Charles you know echo Charles is going to be there will he be doing a presentation I don't know time will tell I don't know what he would present on maybe just present on you know we can bring all the intensity make it do a presentation on cruising you know that things up a little bit back it through a little balance it do that dichotomy right there May we started taking I mean not started we continue to take casualties and I'm starting to go to memorials and we're starting to see guys that we knew and worked with and were friends with and built relations with and they're they're they're getting killed or really gravely wounded and those memorials started to become every couple of days we're going to a memorial and that sort of ways on you I thought about this a lot and how it affected me you know it's a pilot being out of my comfort zone in this environment and what that was like but without trying to diminish any of that loss there's a there's a disconnect when it's not your person it's not your guy and on June 20th so Chris Leon who was my radio operator we were in a building that we had been in let me back up I was not there I had left that building that morning gone back to the CUC Adam's team with Chris had replaced us and we're basically just going back and forth operations and this this combat outpost because it gave us a really good view of the north part of the city and we had to be there basically 24 seven and and Chris and and Adam's team had gone back out there and they were supposed to go from like 12 to 4 something like that I don't know what it was we gave him like a six-hour shift or something There was two F-18 D's I remember from an East Coast squadron and you know a TBS they teach you hey everyone Marines arrive on man and they say they tell you these stories is that one day you're going to be in a position where you're going to be in a firefight and there's going to be an airplane overhead and it's going to be a buddy of yours from TBS going to be your old buddy and you're going to be like hey Jaco it's day to help me out and Dave's going to roll in on his white horse and come over this hornet and blast these things out and your infantry buddy is going to thank you one day. So I worked hard to try to be successful in that, and you know, you got to get your Marines to buy off on your program, you know, because you're going to go down town with those guys, you know, and every relationship with anyone with those guys was different as you know, you know, and you got to build those relationships and demonstrate that, you know, this is going to work. it's going to be a New York city by the way Dave will be there he's going to do a little presentation because you know what he's going to do a presentation he's going to probably do about the utalope I can a lot of questions about the utalope he's going to do a presentation about the utalope it's going to be 14 hours now he's going to talk you know he's going to talk about his his perspective all a lot of the stuff and an utalope a lot of times people ask me about the utalope because I do talk about it is I Adam I watched the trucks pull up they all get out you know four guys and everybody else had heard you know all the angle code teams that were there and we shared a facility with EOD and working with everybody you know where did it was passed something had happened and I you know a corphing on corphing on stead you know we do something called a hero flight and a hero flight is going to be like 1600 I got the information like 10 minutes the process of them bringing a casualty that casualty not surviving and then moving they had that thing wired And like you said, so you know, you're, you're a student, you know, you're not going to be as good as the instructors, but what you don't know is that you're not just going to lose, you're going to get, you're not just going to lose or get annihilated, you're not even going to know what happened. and I actually went back last night to look at my journal entry for that day because I ended up running down Charlie Medigan because that's where everybody came in and I remember seeing Lave there you know Lave was a guy I don't work with the ton and there he is he's got a wound I'm looking at him over I'm saying over as I told her they kind of shirt off they're they're they're attending to Lave who was Lave was a larger than life you know for guy like me who always kind of fell to a little bit like what the hell am I doing her man without my doing with the seals like this isn't sane these guys are just they're just larger than life and to see the exposure of that it bothered me I mean not retire from the ring you've got to know the Marine Corps so I can not do all these other things that I'm not set up this future that I told you all about and so do you on totally so to say that my wife and and everybody's got those stories the laundry list of reasons why she should have just sort of cut bait and be like no this is not happening is a lot longer than the list of reasons why she shouldn't have and props were good she's here and my marriage with her you know for all the ups and downs it goes on get everybody's marriage the one thing I don't worry about even even when we're at our worst at our absolute worst which our worst is whatever it is we have our worst moments at our absolute worst I don't have a shred and have a brain cell of thought of I wonder if our marriage is going to survive this you know this throat animal having over god knows what you know anyway I'm as well make the best of it we started to do a couple of missions and everyone of those missions was your teams and my teams uh and I would say probably in the first week or so you know I'm guessing a little bit of dates but relatively quick in the first couple of missions we are doing the similar things we were bringing support and Overwatch and helping these guys through their job which is the exact same thing you guys were doing you know totally different ways but ultimately we were supporting these guys I meant my my little building there or one day whatever just sitting around prepping for something and in walks lay in Tony you know they they drove over from your base which is kind of you know a little bit of a haul around around their job yeah man so then you you do come back I mean obviously like you said it ramped up it ramped up all the time and the guys were just you know everybody like I'm not just talking about our guys I'm talking about everybody it ramped up hardcore it got hotter outside the the the combat got more intense the enemy started fighting harder they got more square away and like you said you and the rest of the guys there did the mission day after day night after night and then one day you fly home but the moment when you get those little spikes and those is what kind of comes up and get you those little spikes was a sort of unforeseen kind of reactions he could see that in me and I could see that in him we had actually been really we're really good for each other when I see him kind of get a little shaky a little break like I'm not you know he's not digging his environment a little bit or he'd see that of me you had that other person I kind of bring you back to helping you helping you deal with that which is good the flip side of that while it was really helpful for him to be there I think it was really tough on Whitney because she was not my outlet for that I wasn't kind of got cut out totally and not I didn't certainly not by design so the back left of his truck entered door and the right front of my truck door we always had a fight space for each other you know Chris was a standard perfect Marine like he could be 90% of the way through if he saw me walking up he'd get out of the way close the door to let me in on my cockman dude like just he was a great Marine just I walked past that kid without even really talking him you know a thousand times just every single day a couple of times a day and it demystifies as a Marine you just live a slightly bit for me I shouldn't say you how it felt for me as I just felt with all that was going on and all the destruction and the death and the violence and all the things that I'd sort of become accustomed to at that point there's just an aspect of it that's just a tiny bit insulated in your life to a really small degree that no problem and during that time it was not uncommon to take fire and from that in that OP and there was some sniper fire and the first shot there was a younger marina lands corporal who was up there and Chris ran up from the other side and kind of put him down you know say hey once you get down take cover go go over the other side of the building and Chris got up to start to he was doing his observation to try to figure out what was going on and Chris was shot by sniper and I get a call kind of very closely after that from Adam you know I'm kind of man in the radio's all the time anyway even our home will base there like we're we had a radio I got, I just got interviewed the other day and it was a, the guy, you know, he sent me a blue question, you know, hey, what do you do when you're in a situation where you've got, you know, you want to go to the gym or you're, you're supposed to do some hard task for workers to some, trying to do something to improve yourself and you, you know, the, the mindset comes in where you just, you just don't want to do it. and you walk back you literally walk away from the medical facility where the helicopter just takes off and you walk back on to your original you just go back to your room only Chris has gone and it's like that whole deployment kind of re I don't know what the right word is it's like I had to start the deployment again because all the things that I was dealing with and all things that I was managing and leading is as it's a leader would know whatever you want to say was my job it all is sort of change in terms of what I thought really well the guys that I was working with everything was different now because it was their brother that was gone not somebody else and I was shocked and kind of overwhelmed at how professional your organ at your team was and that was the biggest thing for me was what are these guys going to be like I just sort of picture day kind of a pickup game hit us go there and just you know kill some bad guys and come on back and high five each other and dude it was one of the most professional organized mission briefs I totally understood what your plan was I knew exactly what I was going to fit in we went and did it and that hurt a lot that hurt in ways that I did not understand how it was gonna hurt I just didn't I just didn't know what that was gonna be like and the the all those next steps and you I know you know this because you you saw it he's on a helicopter and he's gone flying away in that 46 in what feels like about a minute it's ours and our even rehearsed the movement onto the to carry him onto the hell I knew something was a on this because on the drive home from the airport I find a San Diego international just down the road my wife and my my mom who lives in San Diego both of them came to pick me up from the airport you've already met my mom great lady my wife and my mom picked me up from the airport I got pictures of them meeting me there getting the car drive from San Diego international to our house in Pacific Beach and as we're pulling like on to Chelsea any up to the house I like screamed at them told them stop talking or something like that I said something like I don't even I don't know what it was well this is a whole thing I was opening up with that's sort of where that came from it's just this attitude that everybody there was on the same team straight up on the same team and so then that turned into big missions you know big missions pushing into Ramadi putting in the combat outpost you know night after night after night day after day doing those those big operations and that relationship just got just got stronger and stronger you know lay obviously with you and and just turned into something really we not just not just cool How do we determine, you know, when we were talking, kind of trying to talk through that and the idea that an airliner filled with civilians, and we knew, you know, at that point that those other airliners are regular commercial airplanes that just took off, they're going their flight and they crash, we knew everybody on board, you know, nobody's going to survive that. so I I knew Adam and the rest of team were trying to get back and they're going to have a slower road back because they're not going to get the support it's just going to take a little more time going to get their gear and all the things go along with that Chris just got loaded in the humbian and racing back and Bradley they're kind of loaded up their humbians and it's just going to take some time and you know I think that's one of the things that that we felt you know that little bit of insulation that you're talking about we felt that we felt I would say I would say actually more insulated because you know my guys were out there taking massive risks getting in crazy gun fights getting after it to a degree that no one had ever thought they would and we were doing all right we had a couple guys get wounded here and and you gotta deal with them we all deal with it differently I had maybe talk myself into out 33 as fairly experienced guy I was surrounded by very young marines who maybe in my mind didn't have maybe the emotional maturity maybe the life skills to maybe manage some of these same chaotic things you know guys at saw Chris get shot you know I maybe kind of built myself up a little bit as a little better equipped and I was better equipped in my mind where and you're going to have to just deal with it so there was a I think the thing that bothered me the most and was part of just kind of getting back to day to day life was it I would get when things didn't go well when I had my moments my irrational is just I just get pissed off it was that feeling of so you I have this like some event would happen something stupid would catch my attention and kind of height my you know my response and because it happened I'd be annoyed myself that I let it that I let it bother me there but they were okay and honestly that guys getting wounded you know it's not a devastating wound I mean I had you know one of my guys got wounded early on and he almost lost his leg but guess what he didn't and that that didn't make us feel more vulnerable in my mind it made us feel stronger and like hey we might get wounded but what we're gonna be good and I'm not like doing this calculation if I don't want my head she's not I'm not going to use her as a resource you know for that and to be honest with you too there's also a little part of you know what the corner of Michigan sunset is like so totally man you know we had done a big movement in earlier in June and we were really starting to lay into the city but the real you know the crazy jay block you know that kind of stuff all that stuff was all out in front of us and so for me it was you know my entire career so I was worried like I got to find something and that's part of the reason why that first gig with you guys in the back was like holy cow man you you've got to be kidding me it's all those things you just discussed all those things I spent on a whole life living and breathing and learning and and and then it's with people like late in jocco from where my work we're gonna do this yeah we looked at it as if okay we that gives us one more shooter and it gives us a whole new level of expertise now of course there's jaytah and the seal teams that they are a lot more experience and they are awesome and of course but in our group you to bring you guys was just a huge level up for us to get a lot better and give us more people to maneuver as seals on assaults or on Overwatch or whatever so it turned out to be a real good little little relationship that I got going there it was a classic win win when when a seal says hey would you control the air so I can go shoot people you know and what I'm doing back from that deployment in January I think it is of the following year and it it turns out that the Marine Corps wants to send a guy to go fly F-22s for the with the year force for three years and they're accepting applications for the F-22 Raptor Exchange which had never been happened before never happened since there was a one time thing and the guy got it they picked you know it was going to go to non-deploying in NLS and fly the F-22 Raptor should properly apply I guess it seems like a reasonable thing to do because if they say no I'm they're something missing and I can't I can't stay in Marine because there's something missing well you leave the Marine Corps like how in the hell am I gonna recreate that thing that I'm looking for not in the military it's all I know is that's the place and that was my biggest my biggest fear was I'm not gonna go like go to work you know go do something that I you know I mean like hey they check at this ridiculous of own vulnerability that I have right now that I'm going to carry with me for God that was how long that's going to come up I didn't know by the beat I think and an auto body shop is running the the air drill to pull some tires off I can root you know that kind of sound and as we're walking I think my left arm is over her her shoulder we're walking like this I hear that sound and my first reaction is I've pushed her down to the ground and in the time that it takes to do that and catch that it's happening is maybe a third of a second you know what I mean so I hear it but I was certainly interested in what because my fear was that you guys are going to go do your own thing and my guys are kind of just either not be able to keep up not know what you're doing and not fit in very well and be able to help out and just kind of put ourselves at risk and and look I'll I'll say this very bluntly I have a very high bar when you leave Top Gunna what to expect from a mission brief and mission execution a mission debrief because that's what we're all about and I was pretty sure that there's no chance that you're going to do anything anywhere near that and so I continued my education jobs options and started working towards my MBA because I needed something or wanted something else and once you kind of catch in your mind that the Marine Corps and what they're asking you to do I was going to go back to a training squadron I wanted to go to be an operational commander with operational units that are preparing to go something I wasn't going to get to do that I was going to go back to a training environment I caught myself losing the thing that was the most passionate about the Marine Corps and seeing it's more of like okay three years here this will get me to this retirement and this amount of money and it was just starting to become a little too professional and not enough a passion

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocco podcast number 69.
[00:00:04] With echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink.
[00:00:08] Good evening, echo.
[00:00:10] Good evening.
[00:00:14] The president of the United States takes pride
[00:00:17] in presenting the Medal of Honor,
[00:00:19] posthumously, to Captain Henry T. L. Rodd,
[00:00:24] United States Marine Corps.
[00:00:27] For service as set forth in the following citation.
[00:00:32] For conspicuous gallantry and intrapetity
[00:00:37] at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty
[00:00:41] while attached to Marine of fighting squadron 211
[00:00:45] during action against the Japanese land, surface,
[00:00:49] and early units at Wake Island.
[00:00:52] From 8 to 23 December 1941.
[00:00:58] Engaging vastly superior forces of enemy bombers
[00:01:02] and warships on 9 and 12 December,
[00:01:05] Captain L. Rodd shot down two of a flight of 22 hostile planes
[00:01:11] and executing repeated bombing and strafing runs
[00:01:15] at extremely low altitude and close range,
[00:01:18] succeeded in flicking deadly damage
[00:01:20] upon a large Japanese vessel
[00:01:23] thereby sinking the first major warship
[00:01:25] to be destroyed by small caliber bombs delivered
[00:01:28] from a fighter type aircraft.
[00:01:32] When his plane was disabled by hostile fire
[00:01:35] and no other ships were operative,
[00:01:37] Captain L. Rodd assumed command of one flank of the line,
[00:01:41] set up in defiance of the enemy landing
[00:01:44] and conducting a brilliant defense,
[00:01:47] enabled his men to hold their positions
[00:01:49] and repulse determined enemy attacks repeatedly,
[00:01:53] proceeding through intense hostile fuselage
[00:01:57] to provide covering fire for unarmed ammunition carriers.
[00:02:04] Capturing an automatic weapon during one enemy rushing force,
[00:02:09] he gave his own firearm to one of his men
[00:02:11] and fought on vigorously against the Japanese.
[00:02:14] Responsible in a large measure of the strength of his sectors,
[00:02:20] gallons resistance.
[00:02:22] On 23 December, Captain L. Rodd led his men
[00:02:26] with bold, aggressiveness until he fell, mortally wounded.
[00:02:33] His superb skill as a pilot, daring leadership,
[00:02:37] an unswerving devotion to duty
[00:02:40] to distinguish him among the defenders of Wakeland.
[00:02:45] And his valiant conduct reflects the highest credit
[00:02:48] upon himself and the United States Naval Service.
[00:02:54] He gallantly gave his life for his country.
[00:03:01] signed Harry S. Truman.
[00:03:03] And that is the Medal of Honor citation
[00:03:11] for Henry Talmage, L. Rodd, the first aviator
[00:03:15] in World War II to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
[00:03:19] In the first man to sink a warship from a fighter plane
[00:03:24] during the Battle of Wakeland.
[00:03:25] And if you don't know anything about the Battle of Wakeland,
[00:03:28] it began simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor
[00:03:33] when that started.
[00:03:34] And it ended on 23 December 1941
[00:03:39] when American forces were forced to surrender.
[00:03:45] And that was, with around 500 American servicemen,
[00:03:50] and they had a handful of coastal artillery pieces
[00:03:54] and a handful of anti-aircraft guns,
[00:03:57] and they had 12 aircraft.
[00:04:00] And what they were facing was 2,500 Japanese infantry
[00:04:05] supported by three light cruisers, eight destroyers,
[00:04:09] two patrol boats, two troop transports,
[00:04:12] two aircraft carriers with all their planes
[00:04:14] and two heavy cruisers.
[00:04:18] They were completely outnumbered
[00:04:20] and completely and utterly outgunned.
[00:04:23] But they held out for 15 days
[00:04:27] and while they were under that siege,
[00:04:30] on the 20th of December,
[00:04:33] while the Japanese were preparing for their final attack,
[00:04:37] major L-Rodd got out one last letter to his wife.
[00:04:44] And I'm gonna read that to you.
[00:04:53] Saturday, 20 December 1941,
[00:04:56] my dearest darling sweetheart.
[00:05:01] I never suspected this afternoon
[00:05:03] when I wrote my other short note
[00:05:06] that I would be sitting down writing another tonight.
[00:05:09] But here we are.
[00:05:11] I just got in a few minutes ago
[00:05:13] and have just learned that Walt Baylor is returning
[00:05:16] and he has kindly consented to deliver to this personally.
[00:05:20] So I am very thankful for the moment.
[00:05:24] Of course, there isn't a lot of news
[00:05:26] that I can write about it.
[00:05:28] And you probably know more real news than I do anyhow.
[00:05:34] I am missing you terribly
[00:05:35] and I am undergoing a few new experiences
[00:05:39] but also is everyone else.
[00:05:44] We've had considerable rain today
[00:05:46] and you're still cloudy.
[00:05:48] The wind has been very low, however.
[00:05:52] The weather on the whole is nothing to complain about.
[00:05:57] But I would like to see a good old fashioned,
[00:05:59] ties, food, sweep this entire area.
[00:06:04] I imagine there is an awful lot of white washing
[00:06:06] going on now in high places.
[00:06:08] It certainly will be a criminal shame
[00:06:10] if they succeed in covering over everything.
[00:06:17] I am writing this in something of a hurry
[00:06:19] and under somewhat difficult circumstances.
[00:06:24] I'll think of a million things
[00:06:26] that I should have said after I had gone to bed tonight.
[00:06:31] But now I'm going to say that I love you
[00:06:34] and you alone always and always
[00:06:37] and repeated a million times or so.
[00:06:42] Give my love to Mary also
[00:06:45] between the two of you, you have it all.
[00:06:51] There isn't any for anyone else.
[00:06:56] I know that you are praying for me
[00:06:58] and I have nothing more to ask
[00:07:01] than that your prayers be answered.
[00:07:02] You're as devotedly and loving,
[00:07:10] tell much.
[00:07:24] And so I think it's important that
[00:07:29] when you hear that letter,
[00:07:31] you recognize the fact that this is a man.
[00:07:38] And of course, we always remember
[00:07:40] that these men, we call them heroes,
[00:07:49] deserve it be so.
[00:07:51] We do that to honor them.
[00:07:53] But I think it's important to always remember
[00:07:57] that these heroes,
[00:08:02] their people, their people.
[00:08:12] And these men, these heroes, these Marines, these people
[00:08:18] that held the line.
[00:08:21] They held the line for 15 days
[00:08:23] before they were forced to surrender
[00:08:25] after losing 49 Marines killed,
[00:08:28] two missing in action, three Navy personnel killed,
[00:08:32] 70 US civilians killed.
[00:08:34] And by the way, the Japanese losses were recorded
[00:08:37] about 820 killed with over 300 wounded.
[00:08:42] Two destroyers lost
[00:08:44] and almost 30 Japanese aircraft shot down her damaged.
[00:08:55] But the odds and the ratio of force
[00:09:03] was just stacked against the US forces on Wake Island
[00:09:08] and when you get into a situation like that,
[00:09:10] a dire situation, violent situation,
[00:09:14] a situation where you are facing a determined enemy.
[00:09:21] There is a bond that forms between people.
[00:09:28] Regardless of where they're from
[00:09:30] or what their background is
[00:09:32] or what their socioeconomic class is
[00:09:36] or what service they were in,
[00:09:38] none of that matters.
[00:09:39] There's a bond that forms that cannot be broken.
[00:09:52] And we certainly had that in the Battle of Ramadi.
[00:09:57] The US Army soldiers, United States Marines,
[00:10:03] C.B.S.R. Seals of Task Unit,
[00:10:09] Bruser, all of us that were in that fight,
[00:10:15] had that bond.
[00:10:22] We were brothers.
[00:10:27] And tonight, I am honored to have one of those brothers
[00:10:35] here with me.
[00:10:36] And he's a Marine Corps Aviator, fighter pilot
[00:10:44] who also did time as a forward air controller on the ground.
[00:10:49] And we've talked about that in many of the books
[00:10:52] that we've reviewed on the podcast
[00:10:53] where you have a Marine Corps pilot
[00:10:56] who's now on the ground with the troops.
[00:11:00] Usually in one of the most forward positions
[00:11:02] because they have to know where the troops are, out of that
[00:11:08] air conditioned cockpit and into the sweat and mud
[00:11:14] on the ground and this pilot as an Anglico team leader
[00:11:20] who with his team conducted dozens and dozens
[00:11:23] of missions with Tasmania Bruser in Ramadi
[00:11:26] and I've talked about bringing them on the show.
[00:11:28] And so here he is tonight, Lieutenant Colonel,
[00:11:34] almost retired, David Burke.
[00:11:39] Dave, welcome to the podcast and thank you for coming on.
[00:11:46] Thanks for having me, man.
[00:11:47] It's good to be here.
[00:11:50] So we have to, before we talk about what we went through
[00:11:55] together, we have to learn a little bit about you
[00:11:58] where you came from, what you did
[00:12:00] and how you went from being,
[00:12:04] from being a pilot, but not just a pilot,
[00:12:08] a top gun pilot, but not just a top gun pilot,
[00:12:10] but a top gun instructor
[00:12:14] which is just incredibly selective.
[00:12:18] That's gonna be one of the most selective things
[00:12:20] in the whole world.
[00:12:22] Right?
[00:12:23] How many top gun pilots are there?
[00:12:25] So you've got 25 at a time every three years that kind of rotate
[00:12:27] through a small group.
[00:12:29] Yeah, so that's ridiculous.
[00:12:32] And, but then you thought maybe I you need to get after
[00:12:36] a little bit more, so you're gonna go do an A,
[00:12:37] because so we'll get into that, but let's start off with
[00:12:40] where you came from, just a little bit about your background
[00:12:44] and how you ended up saying, you know what I think I wanna do?
[00:12:47] Being the Marine Corps, go.
[00:12:49] Right on.
[00:12:51] So I actually grew up around here.
[00:12:52] My parents moved out here,
[00:12:53] San Diego and I was probably a year and a half years old.
[00:12:55] I wanted half years old.
[00:12:57] In between, here in Orange County, I grew up
[00:12:59] in Silicon Valley, California, kid.
[00:13:02] Not all that exciting with childhood.
[00:13:04] I don't have, you know, a ton of crazy memories.
[00:13:06] I was pretty quiet kid as a good kid in school.
[00:13:08] Got a long with most folks.
[00:13:11] Moved up Orange County, my parents got divorced.
[00:13:13] It was basically just me and my mom and my sister for a while.
[00:13:16] And I lived in a town called El Toro
[00:13:19] and what happened to be very close to where I grew up
[00:13:21] was a Marine Base, it was a fighter base.
[00:13:24] And so as a kid, I posed there in late 70s
[00:13:27] and early 80s they had F4 fanomes and A4s and A6s
[00:13:32] and just the cool jets at the time.
[00:13:34] And so I went to the air show every year,
[00:13:37] grew up out there and I think it was no joke.
[00:13:39] It was overhead, I could see it every day.
[00:13:41] And I think that just got my blood a little bit.
[00:13:45] Went to El Toro high school, went to the air show,
[00:13:47] probably every year from my six years old till the time
[00:13:50] the base closed down, no joke.
[00:13:51] I mean it was just part of my life.
[00:13:53] And I met some people along the way too.
[00:13:55] There was a lot of Marines living there.
[00:13:56] So I had some real powerful influences
[00:13:58] that kind of got him towards that.
[00:14:01] I'm sure we're gonna get into this
[00:14:02] because it's come up already in the pre-conversation.
[00:14:04] Put it around 14, let's say.
[00:14:06] Watch this obscure movie called Top Gun.
[00:14:09] Straight up, top Gun.
[00:14:11] Straight up man.
[00:14:12] Watch the movie is a kid.
[00:14:14] Saw dudes flying airplanes, off carriers,
[00:14:18] shooting down mags and I'm like,
[00:14:19] I wanna do that.
[00:14:21] And probably by 14, I had a pretty good idea
[00:14:25] that's what I wanted to do.
[00:14:27] Did you make the connection between school and grades
[00:14:30] and all that stuff?
[00:14:31] Because a lot of people saw that movie and said,
[00:14:33] I wanna be a top Gun pilot,
[00:14:34] but I'm still gonna slack off and do whatever I want
[00:14:36] and not play hooky and all that.
[00:14:38] Somehow you made that connection.
[00:14:40] It's not shown in the movie, right?
[00:14:41] They didn't show people studying hard in school
[00:14:44] because that would have not sold a lot of tickets.
[00:14:46] Oh no.
[00:14:47] I did eventually.
[00:14:49] I mean, when I watched that movie,
[00:14:51] I think there was just something,
[00:14:52] I'd always been interested in aviation.
[00:14:53] It's kind of captivating when you see planes flying around
[00:14:55] and to get to see the air shows, see the blue angels,
[00:14:57] I kind of said,
[00:14:57] if you can't help it look up and watch that stuff,
[00:14:59] it's cool.
[00:15:01] I would say that my performance in the academic arena
[00:15:05] was slightly less than stellar.
[00:15:07] I did find, but I had no real motivation to do anything.
[00:15:11] I wasn't a little driven kid to work really hard.
[00:15:15] I kind of discovered that if I put in very,
[00:15:17] little effort, I was okay.
[00:15:18] And if I wanted to do really well,
[00:15:19] I had to put in a lot of effort
[00:15:20] and I had made a much of a connection.
[00:15:22] But as I got a little older,
[00:15:25] you know, watch the movie,
[00:15:25] I think that was a part of a lot of different things.
[00:15:27] But about the time I was 16,
[00:15:29] it kind of junior year in high school.
[00:15:32] As I got some other influences in my life,
[00:15:34] I found big as one was a guy named Aaron Irvin.
[00:15:35] I started working at Target around the corner
[00:15:37] from my house and he was a Marine there.
[00:15:38] And like I said, my parents got divorced.
[00:15:41] I had a step dad that was there
[00:15:43] and kind of coming going,
[00:15:44] he ended up being a really big father figure in my life.
[00:15:46] And a real positive influence and a Marine,
[00:15:48] which was great.
[00:15:49] And he explains some more things about what it's like
[00:15:52] to be in Marine.
[00:15:52] He's the one that made the connection for me
[00:15:54] that all that stuff you saw in the movie
[00:15:56] is you can actually do that for real.
[00:15:57] The Marine Corps, you can do that as a Marine.
[00:15:59] You know, it's not just a movie.
[00:16:00] That's a real life.
[00:16:01] Somebody's living that life right now.
[00:16:03] And you can do that.
[00:16:04] And I remember coming home and kind of telling my mom,
[00:16:06] like, hey, I'm 16, I'm a junior high school.
[00:16:09] I'm thinking about being a Marine Corps fighter pilot,
[00:16:11] which I had no military in my back
[00:16:13] or nobody had ever done anything like that.
[00:16:16] And her answer was,
[00:16:17] that sounds awesome.
[00:16:18] You should do that.
[00:16:19] I mean, just 100% and she had a very similar approach.
[00:16:23] You know, everything, I have a,
[00:16:24] every idea I ever had in my life that I run by my mom,
[00:16:27] she's like, well, somebody's gonna do it.
[00:16:29] Mine's all be you.
[00:16:29] That was kind of a approach to everything.
[00:16:31] I want to be a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps.
[00:16:32] So I'm just gonna be it.
[00:16:33] Mine's all be you.
[00:16:34] And that's about the time I kind of started
[00:16:36] getting my stuff together.
[00:16:37] I mean, I wasn't a mess by any stretch,
[00:16:39] but I was a little bit just kind of,
[00:16:41] run through my thing, being a kid.
[00:16:43] And I certainly think I was lucky
[00:16:46] because I knew with great detail
[00:16:51] at about 16 and change what I wanted to do.
[00:16:54] I mean, I knew I wanted to be a Marine Corps
[00:16:56] at 18 pilot based in Southern California
[00:16:58] and for life carriers.
[00:17:00] And that's exactly what ended up doing.
[00:17:01] So at that time, everything I started to do
[00:17:04] from there was with that kind of singular focus
[00:17:07] of circling back to do that.
[00:17:09] I even knew I wanted to be stationed at Altorra.
[00:17:11] I mean, I had a real specific plan.
[00:17:13] And so all the things I started doing from there,
[00:17:15] school, you know, into college as well,
[00:17:18] go into the Marine Corps,
[00:17:19] and recruit her to say I wanted to join the Marine Corps,
[00:17:21] be an officer in the Marine Corps.
[00:17:22] All those things were geared very specifically
[00:17:24] towards that goal.
[00:17:25] Now there's a ton of hurdles
[00:17:26] between time you're 16 and time.
[00:17:27] I got my commission at 21.
[00:17:29] But everything else that I did in my life
[00:17:32] was either a distraction that just got rid of,
[00:17:34] or it was a means to that end.
[00:17:37] I worked full time,
[00:17:39] I was in school, put myself through the nearest college,
[00:17:42] the local state school that I lived,
[00:17:45] close to as a drove up to school,
[00:17:47] didn't have like a real big exciting college life.
[00:17:49] Wasn't in the fraternity, didn't go away to school.
[00:17:52] I paid my way through a school.
[00:17:54] I got a good education.
[00:17:54] I worked really hard to do well,
[00:17:56] but it was all specifically designed to,
[00:17:59] you want to be in the Marine Corps and be an officer,
[00:18:00] you need to college graduate, you need to be a college graduate.
[00:18:03] Right on, I can do that.
[00:18:04] I can do that here.
[00:18:05] Where's the closest college?
[00:18:05] Yeah, where's the closest college?
[00:18:06] How much does it cost?
[00:18:07] How much do I need to work?
[00:18:08] Did the math.
[00:18:09] It was my life from about that time.
[00:18:11] I started working, like I said, I worked at Target as a kid.
[00:18:14] I worked at Target from the time I was 15 and a half
[00:18:17] and got to work permit from school to the time
[00:18:20] that I got my commission in the Marine Corps.
[00:18:22] And I went to school and Casay Fullerton,
[00:18:24] Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
[00:18:25] My mom was a guidance counselor in a teacher,
[00:18:27] so she helped me build a schedule
[00:18:28] that I could graduate this fast as possible,
[00:18:30] which is exactly in four years.
[00:18:32] It was all day Monday, all day Wednesday,
[00:18:33] and half a day Friday.
[00:18:35] And I worked Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
[00:18:38] The money I paid, I got paid, I went to my tuition,
[00:18:41] my tuition went to my education, my education,
[00:18:43] got me a commission in the Marine Corps.
[00:18:45] I mean, that was kind of it.
[00:18:46] I mean, in some ways you look back,
[00:18:47] I'm probably could have diversified a little bit.
[00:18:49] But at the time, I wasn't unhappy.
[00:18:51] I was stoked, man.
[00:18:52] I was exactly what I wanted to be doing.
[00:18:54] There was no man I wish I could be doing this.
[00:18:56] It wasn't a chore by any stretch.
[00:18:58] Like I said, in retrospect, I probably could have done things
[00:19:00] a little bit differently, but 17-year-old day-birth,
[00:19:03] 18-year-old day-birth, new exactly what
[00:19:05] he wanted to do.
[00:19:06] And I had sort of talked myself into it.
[00:19:07] Like, hey, any detour, that's going to throw you off your path, man.
[00:19:10] And you're going to look back with it regretting go,
[00:19:12] you know why you didn't have been what you wanted to be?
[00:19:14] You just took us at this or that.
[00:19:15] And I wasn't going to let that happen.
[00:19:16] So I kind of just got a little intense about being
[00:19:20] a pound in the Marine Corps and sharing it up.
[00:19:21] And there's still luck involved, because when you go to TBS,
[00:19:24] which is the basic school, which all marine officers go through,
[00:19:27] you have to still win or get that billet that you wanted.
[00:19:33] And you got that.
[00:19:35] But I mean, that could have gone totally mad.
[00:19:38] Sideways.
[00:19:38] There's a lot of luck involved.
[00:19:41] I think everybody in the military, and everybody that's
[00:19:43] been successful in the military knows you're looking back
[00:19:45] in your career, it's a confluence of a lot of different things.
[00:19:48] But timing, circumstance, and luck, or they're a part of it
[00:19:51] without a doubt.
[00:19:51] Nobody can take credit for everything they've done.
[00:19:53] And if I went back to do it again, the odds of it
[00:19:56] work out the way they did are pretty slim.
[00:19:57] There's just a lot of things that worked out on my favor.
[00:20:01] But I went to OCS.
[00:20:02] I went to the Marine Corps recruit,
[00:20:04] started my freshman year at Cal State Fullerton,
[00:20:06] as a 17-1er sort of college, went right to their crew
[00:20:09] around day one, or they called an OCS officer selection officer.
[00:20:12] So it's basically a recruiter for officers.
[00:20:13] I want to be in Marine.
[00:20:14] It's like right on, start filling up the spade work.
[00:20:16] But at the payboard, I said, I want to be a pilot,
[00:20:18] as a piece of cake, no problem.
[00:20:20] We can make that happen.
[00:20:22] Sign this ground contract, and we'll just make it
[00:20:24] part of the standpoint of the future.
[00:20:25] So for those of you that don't know, that's a big lie.
[00:20:29] It ain't that easy.
[00:20:30] So when he says ground contract, of course,
[00:20:32] the Marine Corps needs pilots and guys to infantry.
[00:20:36] And so, but they need more infantry than they need pilots.
[00:20:39] And so they say, hey, don't worry about it.
[00:20:40] You just sign up for ground right now.
[00:20:41] We'll take care of that other pilot.
[00:20:43] You want to be a pie?
[00:20:43] Yeah, of course, we'll take care of that later.
[00:20:45] Yeah, we'll just transition over.
[00:20:46] It should have made a big deal.
[00:20:46] No factor.
[00:20:47] And at 17, I mean, I was signing paperwork
[00:20:50] to be a Marine officer.
[00:20:51] That was a big step for me.
[00:20:53] And I probably would have signed anything.
[00:20:55] Happily signed that after my freshman year in college,
[00:20:58] I went to OCS or Canada School.
[00:21:01] And to be honest with you, and I had all these big-grand ideas
[00:21:04] for the last two, three years, I knew what I wanted to do.
[00:21:06] But when I went to OCS, I was a first real hurdle.
[00:21:10] I mean, everything else was either an idea, a plan, some paperwork.
[00:21:14] I get to the off-circuit of the school.
[00:21:15] And it's like, OK, it was a real Marine drill,
[00:21:17] and Chuck or Scrimm and Atcha, you're really doing the deed there.
[00:21:20] And getting through OCS was a big thing for me,
[00:21:23] because it was a first real test of,
[00:21:25] and I knew what I wanted to do.
[00:21:26] But I had no real sense of I had what was required
[00:21:29] to be a Marine.
[00:21:30] And I think as a kid, you build up what that is in your mind.
[00:21:34] It's a larger than life thing.
[00:21:36] How could anybody possibly do this?
[00:21:38] You turned it into something more than it is.
[00:21:39] When I went to boot camp, there was a Navy seal there.
[00:21:43] And I swear, when I saw him, I was like, God, look,
[00:21:47] I need huge, huge, big giant farms.
[00:21:52] And big, just a big massive guy.
[00:21:55] It just looked like a destroyer of human life.
[00:21:58] Oh my God.
[00:21:59] So fast forward four years on the teams.
[00:22:04] And I meet this guy.
[00:22:05] And he's not at all man.
[00:22:07] He was completely in my head.
[00:22:09] It was completely in my head.
[00:22:10] But this guy was such a destroyer.
[00:22:11] But I just thought, hey, he's a seal.
[00:22:14] He must be a destroyer.
[00:22:16] And I actually saw it that way.
[00:22:18] Yeah.
[00:22:19] You can't help it.
[00:22:19] And it certainly at that age.
[00:22:20] I mean, those things are real powerful influences.
[00:22:23] When you get out to OCS and all of a sudden,
[00:22:25] you're like, oh, man, I need to, I didn't make this happen.
[00:22:28] That was a big achievement in my life.
[00:22:30] I said, hey, I can do this.
[00:22:31] OK, I started to realize I'm not the biggest guy in the Marine Corps.
[00:22:35] Nobody's going to mistake me for a destroyer.
[00:22:37] But what I discovered as I got there,
[00:22:39] I knew mentally what I wanted to do.
[00:22:42] It wasn't a real question mark about my intentions,
[00:22:44] or my desires.
[00:22:45] And I was surrounded by tough, strong kids.
[00:22:47] Young kids, my age that are trying to bring marine officers.
[00:22:49] And that's a physical and a mental challenge.
[00:22:52] So there's no doubt about it.
[00:22:53] And I was seeing guys kind of left and right of me
[00:22:56] that looked at least bigger, faster, stronger, tougher.
[00:23:01] And more capable than they looked like that.
[00:23:03] That same image I had in your mind.
[00:23:04] And I'm watching these things kind of fall out of stuff.
[00:23:06] We're not finished stuff fast enough.
[00:23:07] We're just straight up quit.
[00:23:10] Guys would deal or drop on requests at OCS.
[00:23:13] And I was kind of looking around thinking, what's going on?
[00:23:18] Why are you here if your plan wasn't to get through it?
[00:23:21] So that was a really good thing for me, psychologically,
[00:23:26] to realize that it wasn't just a fantasy or a dream.
[00:23:28] I had the potential to be able to do this.
[00:23:31] So I got through a C.S.
[00:23:33] That's kind of a painful process.
[00:23:35] As you know, it's 84 days.
[00:23:36] It can be slogging.
[00:23:37] You lose a lot of folks doing it for all those
[00:23:39] who are just different reasons.
[00:23:40] Some people get hurt.
[00:23:41] Some people quit.
[00:23:41] Some people just can't do it.
[00:23:44] And when you get on the backside of that,
[00:23:45] like I can make this happen, let's get that air contract.
[00:23:49] Well, we'll get to that air contract.
[00:23:50] At the basics school.
[00:23:51] So when you get your commission, you finish school,
[00:23:54] you get your degree, finish officer,
[00:23:56] candid school, and so basically it's a head you've done everything
[00:23:58] that you need.
[00:23:59] Your commission officer became a second-of-the-end
[00:24:01] in the Marine Corps in June of 1994.
[00:24:03] And the first thing you do is on active duty as a Marine
[00:24:05] is you go to something called the basis school.
[00:24:06] And you've talked about it a few times.
[00:24:08] It's basically a school for the Marine Corps
[00:24:10] teaches officers a little bit of everything.
[00:24:12] Doesn't teach you everything of anything,
[00:24:14] but you get a little exposure to infantry,
[00:24:16] you expose your tanks, artillery, call for fire,
[00:24:19] you get a little exposure aviation, patrol, and defense off.
[00:24:22] And so you kind of get a whole way in the land
[00:24:24] and the whole point of that for the Marine Corps,
[00:24:26] you go there with 250 people.
[00:24:28] And they got to give you one of those people in assignment.
[00:24:30] A particular job and MLS, a specialty.
[00:24:34] And they rank you.
[00:24:35] I mean, you are ranked from one to 250.
[00:24:39] And for aviation when I got there,
[00:24:41] I remember getting in the first week.
[00:24:42] They kind of announced what billets
[00:24:44] are going to be available.
[00:24:45] I were going to have 40 infantry slots and 20.
[00:24:48] They just tell you kind of what we expect to have
[00:24:50] breakdown.
[00:24:51] And from there, you're supposed to go back and think
[00:24:52] about what you want to do.
[00:24:54] They had two pilot slots.
[00:24:57] And like, man, that is some rough math,
[00:24:59] 250 folks.
[00:25:00] Now, not all 250 wanted to be a pilot.
[00:25:02] Obviously, not all 250 people were qualified with their eyes
[00:25:06] and whatnot.
[00:25:07] So it wasn't competing with 250 people.
[00:25:10] But there's a lot of people that wanted to be a pilot.
[00:25:12] So the math was certainly not in my favor.
[00:25:14] And that was another challenge of, yeah, you got to do well.
[00:25:17] I mean, you get ranked and graded on everything.
[00:25:19] Physical fitness, your leadership ability, your academics.
[00:25:22] You get peer reviewed, your peers rate you,
[00:25:25] and you know, anonymously, and what they think of you.
[00:25:26] So you got basically six months to get after it.
[00:25:29] And at the end, they line you up, 250 people,
[00:25:32] in a line, this is a real line.
[00:25:35] And you walk into a room and on the room,
[00:25:37] there's a board.
[00:25:38] And whatever job is available, you can pick.
[00:25:41] Now, the Marine Corps does the same called quality spread
[00:25:45] where they basically cut the class in third,
[00:25:47] so at a 250 folks, 80, 80, 80, or something around there,
[00:25:51] the number one guy picks, and then number 81 guy picks,
[00:25:53] and then the number 161 guy picks, whatever it is.
[00:25:56] And then the number two guy picks.
[00:25:59] The only job in the Marine Corps that they did not
[00:26:00] quality spread was that the basics school was pilot.
[00:26:03] So it was going to be the first two guys out of the gate
[00:26:07] that wanted it, that we're qualified, we're going to get it.
[00:26:09] And I got the number two spot.
[00:26:12] So again, it was one of those things that I was starting
[00:26:16] to in my mind realize, well, this I can do this.
[00:26:20] I built this thing up when I wanted to do.
[00:26:22] I'm 21 now, 22, I think actually.
[00:26:24] So it's six years of my life that I've been sort of
[00:26:27] singularly dedicated to.
[00:26:28] And it's so that day where my platoon commander,
[00:26:31] guy named John Marion, I'll never forget it.
[00:26:32] He was an F-18 pilot.
[00:26:34] Bring to me, it was office.
[00:26:35] It's like Dave, you're going to be a pilot.
[00:26:38] And I think you're going to fly America's airplane.
[00:26:40] You're going to fly the F-18 Hornet.
[00:26:43] It was an awesome day, man.
[00:26:44] And I want, I want to ever forget it.
[00:26:47] And that was it.
[00:26:49] I got my ticket.
[00:26:51] When I was selected for a pilot, I was ranked, I think,
[00:26:55] like number eight and a 250 in my company.
[00:26:57] And by the time I graduated like three weeks later,
[00:27:00] I was like 25 and a 250.
[00:27:02] So my performance might have declined a little bit after I had achieved
[00:27:06] that.
[00:27:07] So in the theory of no slack.
[00:27:08] Yeah, there was a little slack in that line.
[00:27:10] The line was pretty tight for a lot of years.
[00:27:12] For six years.
[00:27:13] Yeah.
[00:27:14] Got it.
[00:27:14] So a little bit of slack there at the end.
[00:27:16] But I did finish well enough to get that pilot.
[00:27:20] Which is what I always wanted.
[00:27:21] It was kind of my dream.
[00:27:22] What year was that?
[00:27:23] That was April of 1995.
[00:27:25] So I started the basic school in October of 1994.
[00:27:28] Right after I got a graduate in college in June,
[00:27:30] little delay to get down to Quantico for the basic school.
[00:27:33] That's six months long.
[00:27:34] I graduated sometime in mid-April.
[00:27:35] Well, well, about this time in 1995.
[00:27:38] So.
[00:27:40] And then you had a flight school.
[00:27:41] Yeah.
[00:27:42] You'd do the rag.
[00:27:43] You'd do all that stuff to get out to a squad.
[00:27:45] And then the first kind of work you were doing was
[00:27:47] Southern Watch, right?
[00:27:49] Yeah.
[00:27:49] So I get through a flight school and pick an F-A-Teen.
[00:27:51] I get stationed at El Toro.
[00:27:53] So I am literally living the dream.
[00:27:55] I'm back to my hometown.
[00:27:59] I think I went to like my tenure high school reunion.
[00:28:02] And I had told all my buddies, you know,
[00:28:03] I wanted to do a run into some people I hadn't seen
[00:28:06] in the whiles.
[00:28:07] It was good.
[00:28:08] And shortly after I got there, I actually flew the last flight
[00:28:12] at El Toro.
[00:28:12] They closed the base and all the Marines moved down
[00:28:14] to Miramar.
[00:28:14] So the Navy, where Topkin was filmed and all that stuff
[00:28:17] back in the day, the Navy left San Diego.
[00:28:20] Move back east and the Marine Corps happily took over
[00:28:22] that base.
[00:28:22] And so I moved down to Miramar and it up in an F-A-Teen squadron.
[00:28:26] Station to Miramar, flying, Hornets off carriers.
[00:28:29] Straight up, living in June.
[00:28:31] I mean, actual dream you are now living in this time.
[00:28:33] That's exactly right.
[00:28:36] I'm living in San Diego.
[00:28:38] I was living in PB off and in Kappa.
[00:28:41] And Station to Miramar, flying Hornets.
[00:28:44] And the carrier that I was assigned to,
[00:28:47] my first deployment, we did Operation Southern Watch.
[00:28:49] So, you know, I watched Desert Storm in 91 on TV.
[00:28:53] I was in freshman in college.
[00:28:55] And we hadn't done much in the military since then,
[00:28:58] but we had flown every single day
[00:29:00] since that war ended.
[00:29:01] And I think it was March of 91.
[00:29:04] Every single day since then, we flew patrols over Iraq
[00:29:07] to make sure that the skies were clear.
[00:29:09] And we were enforcing the no-fly zone.
[00:29:11] And here it was, you know, 10 years later, 2000 on a carrier
[00:29:15] in the Persian Gulf, flying combat operations over Southern Iraq.
[00:29:21] Did you guys ever drop me bombs, huh?
[00:29:23] I did.
[00:29:24] Yeah, a few of us did.
[00:29:24] Not a ton.
[00:29:25] There wasn't a ton going on, but what we would do,
[00:29:26] these things called response options.
[00:29:27] So if that Iraq is we'd do something, I think, in my case,
[00:29:29] they set up a surface air missile, south of a line
[00:29:32] that they weren't supposed to be.
[00:29:33] And we had surveillance at told us what was out there.
[00:29:35] And I launched an omission on Blupper, a SAMHSAite,
[00:29:39] with something called a J-Dam at the time.
[00:29:40] It was a bomb guided by GPS, which at the time was this brand new
[00:29:44] operation.
[00:29:45] Yeah, it was crazy technology.
[00:29:46] I think we were on the only planes in the entire carrier
[00:29:48] that could do it, because we had this thing called a GPS,
[00:29:50] super fancy back then.
[00:29:53] But at the time, J-Dam, that was combat.
[00:29:55] That was, there was no other show in town.
[00:29:58] And so then I dropped a bomb on a SAMHSAite in Iraq,
[00:30:03] off a carrier in an F-18.
[00:30:06] You could have just retired there.
[00:30:08] We're done here to go.
[00:30:09] I could have come back to that.
[00:30:11] It could have flown me off the ship.
[00:30:13] And I probably would have died a happy man at that point.
[00:30:15] That's it.
[00:30:16] I have reached critical mass.
[00:30:17] That's all I ever wanted to do.
[00:30:18] So it was, again, a lot of it was just things
[00:30:23] worked out of my favor, but I did exactly what I wanted to do
[00:30:26] when that event was kind of at the time, sort of the pinnacle.
[00:30:28] That was what I thought I was going to achieve.
[00:30:30] Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing in the dry years
[00:30:31] for the seal teams.
[00:30:32] Like if you did some kind of mission, you were just super stoked.
[00:30:37] We were over in the Persian Gulf.
[00:30:39] Actually, at the same time, 1999, 2000, I was there.
[00:30:43] I was in the Persian Gulf when we were doing, you know, meal operations, stop
[00:30:47] and smugglers coming out of Iraq.
[00:30:48] So we were taking down vessels and getting control of them.
[00:30:51] And again, at the time, super stoked.
[00:30:55] Yes, the big mission was taking out these vessels.
[00:30:57] And it thought it was pretty cool.
[00:30:58] And it was cool.
[00:30:59] But you just didn't have anything to compare it to at all.
[00:31:03] Yeah.
[00:31:04] So what happened?
[00:31:06] So I get back from that deployment.
[00:31:08] That's the summer of 2000.
[00:31:11] And shortly after that, I got selected by my commanding officer to go to Top Gun.
[00:31:16] So that was my first exposure to kind of advancing inside the squadron.
[00:31:20] So as a young guy, I've done almost two years in the squadron.
[00:31:22] I've been there for a little while and got some qualifications and grew and developed
[00:31:25] in the squadron.
[00:31:26] And they pick one or two guys every couple years from me,
[00:31:29] every squadron to go to the school and the whole point of going there is a U-Learn kind
[00:31:33] of this advanced, you know, it's like a master's degree basically in being a fighter pilot
[00:31:37] with the intent that you can bring back to the squadron and be one of the kind of key trainers
[00:31:41] a key leaders in the squadron.
[00:31:42] So I went to Top Gun early the next year, summer of, actually about a year later.
[00:31:47] So summer 2001, I got to Top Gun and I came back and we were just in a work outside.
[00:31:53] You showed up to Top Gun just sort of really knows.
[00:31:56] Yeah.
[00:31:57] I mean, especially because you were the big combat vet with bombs dropped and you feel
[00:32:02] like you're pretty much a complete stud.
[00:32:05] Yeah.
[00:32:06] And then you show up at Top Gun and the instructors just can completely annihilate.
[00:32:10] And just, first of all, as you don't know, it's, it's, you're learning how to dog fight
[00:32:13] mono, e mono against another guy and another plane like stock car racing because the
[00:32:20] planes are equal and it's you against the other guy and it was actually cool.
[00:32:24] You were explaining some of the rules and how you'd set it up and they have, you know,
[00:32:28] and you did, you know, you, you, you, you, okay, you know, you start standing, you know,
[00:32:32] you shake hands, bomb fist, I can now it's on.
[00:32:33] Well, with the Top Gun, they started a certain distance.
[00:32:36] They, they go towards each other at a certain altitude, certain distance away from each
[00:32:39] other.
[00:32:40] They go, they pass it a thousand feet, you know, left, left wing to left wing.
[00:32:44] And then once they pass, they say, what do you say?
[00:32:46] Game on fights on fights on fights on and then boom, now it's go.
[00:32:50] So that's how they start in their neutral position.
[00:32:53] And of course, when you show up there, it's just like you did to, in the fact that it's
[00:32:58] like a guy that did a little bit of training somewhere and then they show up at a G.
[00:33:02] G. G. G. G. G. G. and they're going to get totally destroyed.
[00:33:04] So he shows up, you show up at this thing.
[00:33:06] Yeah.
[00:33:07] And, and you think you're, again, big combat that you just get annihilated.
[00:33:11] Totally.
[00:33:12] So yeah, I get that I had dropped a bomb, that's singular.
[00:33:14] I had dropped a bomb and bomb.
[00:33:16] And I was, I was, I was a big deal.
[00:33:19] I do that dropped a bomb, you know, and so at the time I was, I, I thought,
[00:33:22] some of the instructors had never done that before, right?
[00:33:24] Most of them, like you said, there's the drier.
[00:33:26] So it just wasn't a ton going on.
[00:33:27] You had a story here and there, but I think more than anything in my own mind, you
[00:33:31] kind of build up like I got some game here, man.
[00:33:33] I'm going to watch this.
[00:33:35] You know, I'm going to do some good work here.
[00:33:37] And, you know, I done well enough of my squadron.
[00:33:39] And I was one of the guys that got picked to go to school, so you,
[00:33:41] which is another little confidence boost.
[00:33:43] Yeah, it is.
[00:33:44] So your egos getting fed.
[00:33:45] It's getting forced fed.
[00:33:47] Maybe.
[00:33:48] Yeah, a little bit.
[00:33:49] Yeah, you're feeling pretty good about yourself.
[00:33:51] And so you go up there.
[00:33:53] And like you said, so you know, you're, you're a student, you know,
[00:33:58] you're not going to be as good as the instructors, but what you don't know is that
[00:34:01] you're not just going to lose, you're going to get, you're not just going to lose
[00:34:05] or get annihilated, you're not even going to know what happened.
[00:34:06] It's going to be over and you're going to kind of be flying back and before you,
[00:34:09] you're going to land and you're not going to be able to explain what just occurred.
[00:34:12] I mean, it occurs in a way that it's so, it's hard to explain.
[00:34:16] It's like you weren't there.
[00:34:18] It's really, it's humbling.
[00:34:21] I mean, Jacob, we're talking the very first flight on the very first day.
[00:34:26] My very first event, the very first flight of the first flight.
[00:34:29] It was over in like 20 seconds in the instructor was saying, okay, let's call it and say,
[00:34:34] knock it off when we're done.
[00:34:35] We're going to start and set it up again.
[00:34:36] And any right then, I was totally in over my head.
[00:34:38] The very first one.
[00:34:40] And it was so my first flight was, it was so bad that when I landed, we're walking back
[00:34:46] in to, you go to maintenance and you basically go back and turn the airplane back in and
[00:34:50] so they can fix it and then what you're supposed to just walk across through to the squadron
[00:34:54] hanger and talk about it.
[00:34:56] And I'm in my gear and you're supposed to get on dress out of your flight gear and go
[00:34:58] and he's like, hey, don't get on dress.
[00:35:01] And we're going, right?
[00:35:02] Right?
[00:35:03] Right?
[00:35:04] He's like, why don't we just go do that again?
[00:35:05] It was bad enough that we didn't even need to talk about it.
[00:35:07] We just needed to just, hey, and he's like, hey, why don't you just take a deep breath, man?
[00:35:12] And we went and did that flight without even talking about the first one.
[00:35:18] So I kind of knew I had some work to do.
[00:35:22] So top gun is really good about not just humbling you, but obviously it teaches you a
[00:35:27] ton.
[00:35:28] It's a six at the time.
[00:35:29] It was only six weeks for the Marines because we didn't do some of the syllabus that
[00:35:33] the Navy did because we got it elsewhere.
[00:35:36] And it's six weeks where you start with literally just you against another guy, one against
[00:35:39] one and you end up building up to where it's, you know, six to eight of you on the front,
[00:35:44] on the blue side, the friendly side against, you know, 15, 20 simulated adversary.
[00:35:49] So it's a, it's a, a lot in a short period of time.
[00:35:52] And that idea of being like really bad when you start happens over and over again in the
[00:35:57] course.
[00:35:58] So you get through the one V1 phase and at the end, like, oh, finally I got this one V1 thing.
[00:36:00] I got this thing wired.
[00:36:01] I can do this.
[00:36:02] Like, all right, cool.
[00:36:03] And I'm going to go two against whatever and you just get rolled again.
[00:36:06] And you're like, I'm back to square one.
[00:36:08] So it builds you up and breaks you down and builds you up, standard military, you know,
[00:36:12] just breaks you down to your pieces.
[00:36:14] And then the guys there that instructors are so, they're obviously really good.
[00:36:18] I mean, that part is sort of speaks for yourself.
[00:36:20] They're really good on the airplane.
[00:36:21] But what makes them unique is that they're exceptional teachers.
[00:36:24] So you learn a ton.
[00:36:25] So by the time, a lot of the time you finished up gun, that, that image in the mirror, we
[00:36:29] know like, man, that dude was awesome.
[00:36:30] They get shattered.
[00:36:31] It's actually all back together by the time you leave.
[00:36:33] And as you leave there, like, you got that patch in your shoulder.
[00:36:36] You fly back, you get the patch in the last day, you get up in your airplane, F-18 with
[00:36:40] my name, Pan on the side with the top gun patch and I flew back to Merrimar.
[00:36:42] See, you dream is getting better.
[00:36:47] But there's been enough reminders.
[00:36:49] Like, yeah, I should probably maybe cool out a little bit.
[00:36:53] You start to just learn that there's always guys out there that are significantly better
[00:36:56] than you.
[00:36:57] And you keep climbing up the hill.
[00:36:59] But finishing top gun as a student, you feel like you've hit the top of the mountain,
[00:37:02] but you realize, because the guys you've been working with, there's an awful long
[00:37:06] way to go.
[00:37:07] You at least know what you don't know.
[00:37:08] Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
[00:37:09] You know what you don't know.
[00:37:11] And you're there's a lot that you don't know.
[00:37:12] And so it kind of dispels all those feeling.
[00:37:14] You know, we went through flight school.
[00:37:15] Like, wow, I'm a finished flight school.
[00:37:17] I got to F-18s.
[00:37:18] I've really got this flying thing nail.
[00:37:20] And you're barely functional in your plane compared to these other guys.
[00:37:24] And when you get to a place like top gun, it's just such a concentration of talent.
[00:37:29] You, it's good as it feels.
[00:37:31] You actually, the thing you get the most out of the humility, because you just got crushed
[00:37:34] for six weeks.
[00:37:35] And hopefully you learned something out of it.
[00:37:37] And you're supposed to take that back and teach the guys in your squadron all those
[00:37:41] same lessons.
[00:37:42] And so my expectation was I was going to go back from top gun.
[00:37:44] I was going to spend another two years, 18 months in the squadron as a kind of the senior
[00:37:49] instructors.
[00:37:50] And then go on to something else.
[00:37:52] And I didn't know exactly what that was at the time.
[00:37:56] But as I'm leaving, no joke.
[00:37:57] My last day, I remember the guy who asked me, is actually the same guy that's going
[00:38:01] to do my retirement here in a couple months.
[00:38:02] I came out of you, thought about coming back to being instructor top gun after this
[00:38:07] tour in your squadron's over.
[00:38:09] And I try to play a cool, like, oh, let me go home and think about that.
[00:38:12] But clearly, there wasn't a lot to think about there.
[00:38:16] So I left there with kind of an inclination that I might get asked back.
[00:38:19] And I was pretty stoked about that.
[00:38:21] They didn't formalize it.
[00:38:22] But he was a senior IP on the staff, the senior Marine there as well.
[00:38:27] A real respected guy in Marine aviation.
[00:38:29] And he had given me a sit down.
[00:38:30] So I was hoping that that was going to happen.
[00:38:32] But I also thought I had time.
[00:38:33] I thought I was, this is July 2001.
[00:38:36] And obviously six weeks later, 9-11 hits.
[00:38:40] And so all that calculus kind of changed.
[00:38:42] And very quickly, my squadron, which was on this regular cycle of preparing to go to,
[00:38:47] what was going to be another Southern Watch deployment, just like we did, that whole thing
[00:38:51] had changed.
[00:38:53] Because of September 11th.
[00:38:55] So what happens on September 11th for you?
[00:38:58] Yeah, you were active in a squadron getting ready for work in the morning.
[00:39:03] Totally.
[00:39:04] I'm stationed right up the road here.
[00:39:06] Five miles north of the air is a ringer station, Miramar.
[00:39:08] I'm on my second half of my first tour as a pilot and a 182-ajron.
[00:39:13] I'd already done that one deployment.
[00:39:15] And I had a routine down.
[00:39:17] I was getting up.
[00:39:18] I was probably, I guess it was probably five in the morning.
[00:39:20] I'm sitting at the foot of my bed, listening to my boots.
[00:39:22] I could did every day to just get in the car and drive into work and click on the TV.
[00:39:25] And I see, we've stayed at a clock back east around that time and I see what's going on.
[00:39:31] And I think, you know, same story for all this kind of piece of together very quickly.
[00:39:34] Hey, this is an accident.
[00:39:35] This is something's really happening.
[00:39:36] You can see the second building.
[00:39:37] And it, very quickly, kind of, clicks in like, this is the real thing.
[00:39:42] And I knew, I knew we were going to go to war.
[00:39:45] I didn't know what, I obviously didn't know the details, but I knew things were going
[00:39:48] to change really dramatically.
[00:39:49] As a matter of fact, my drive to work, which normally would have taken me 10 minutes or
[00:39:53] never 15 minutes, something short drive to get up into the base.
[00:39:57] It was like three hours to get on the base, you know, they're inspecting it, reviical, you know,
[00:40:01] every car getting pulled over, dodgers, you know, the whole nine yards that just the security.
[00:40:05] It was pretty chaotic.
[00:40:07] He was kind of mayhem.
[00:40:09] And I drive into my squadron and half of my squadron had already not half, but a good number
[00:40:14] of guys that already been up to Fallen, which was where we're going to go for training.
[00:40:17] The same place the top one is, it was just part of a normal training cycle.
[00:40:21] My squadron commander at the time, an awesome guy called me because he'd gone up there.
[00:40:26] And I was supposed to bring the, you know, be part of the second half of that went up there.
[00:40:29] He's like, hey man, you need to go brief.
[00:40:32] You're going to be the lead of a foreship of aircraft.
[00:40:35] We don't know all the details yet, but we're going to, they're going to call you, they're
[00:40:38] going to find live ordinance.
[00:40:39] And you're going to have to fly an air patrol, a common air patrol mission called
[00:40:44] of the cap, because there are still a bunch of airliners that were still airborne coming
[00:40:48] in from places like Japan and Korea these long haul, you know, 12, 13, 14, our flights.
[00:40:52] There's a whole bunch of airplanes airborne.
[00:40:54] And we didn't know if those, there's potential issue with those airplanes.
[00:40:58] You know, if they're going to try to do the same thing back east of the day, that west, total
[00:41:01] chaos.
[00:41:02] And I had just recently graduated from Topkins, so I was like, hey, you're the lead.
[00:41:06] And we didn't have a good, we didn't know what the mission was.
[00:41:08] I mean, it was basically one of those things where we're supposed to get airborne and somehow
[00:41:13] between us and some other control, we're going to kind of determine if a particular aircraft
[00:41:16] might have been a threat.
[00:41:17] And now has happened all over the country.
[00:41:19] People were in their aircraft Air Force Navy Marine pilots who were just launching to do
[00:41:23] these protection missions of what ended becoming something called Operation Noble Eagle,
[00:41:28] which started on September 11th.
[00:41:30] And it was this aviation overwatch of key cities and key locations.
[00:41:35] And we were totally clueless on what that was.
[00:41:37] Now, I ended up not launching, but it didn't happen.
[00:41:40] You know, but we did the brief, we were getting ready to go.
[00:41:43] It was just kind of that moment of chaos of we were on our heels and talking didn't prepare
[00:41:49] me for that.
[00:41:50] I didn't have a sense of what it was to do with an airliner, you know, filled with civilians
[00:41:55] on some route coming from Japan and trying to figure out what I would do.
[00:41:58] If somebody said, hey, that aircraft, we've figured out that aircraft is going to try
[00:42:01] to fly into a building or crash into an airport or something like that.
[00:42:05] It was just, you know, just kind of mayhem and it was, you know, it's tough to start off.
[00:42:09] The idea being that if that is suspected of happening or they can somehow confirm that's
[00:42:15] going to happen, then you or one of your mates is going to have to shoot down a civilian
[00:42:21] aircraft.
[00:42:22] That's what they're thinking.
[00:42:23] Yeah, exactly.
[00:42:24] And that was something I never considered.
[00:42:27] Um, you know, there's anybody to consider that at that point.
[00:42:30] And I've read there's some, you know, there's some pilots that actually ended up launching
[00:42:33] out in the East Coast.
[00:42:34] I've read a couple articles of pilots that took off in their F-16s here in DC, because
[00:42:38] obviously it was with the Pentagon up in DC in the New York City that actually did get airborne
[00:42:44] and they had missions to do exactly that.
[00:42:47] Um, so in some sense, I was pretty lucky that I didn't have to go through that calculus,
[00:42:50] but I still can picture where I'm sitting, given that brief with three other pilots, kind
[00:42:53] of like we're sitting today.
[00:42:56] And we're even asking ourselves, like, well, how do you, I mean, how do you shoot down an
[00:43:00] airline?
[00:43:01] You know, what, what would we actually go through to do?
[00:43:03] How do we determine, you know, when we were talking, kind of trying to talk through that
[00:43:07] and the idea that an airliner filled with civilians, and we knew, you know, at that
[00:43:12] point that those other airliners are regular commercial airplanes that just took off,
[00:43:15] they're going their flight and they crash, we knew everybody on board, you know, nobody's
[00:43:19] going to survive that.
[00:43:20] And so it was just a very strange way to start what ended up being kind of a cycle of war
[00:43:25] that, you know, we've all been through for years now, that morning of getting that call
[00:43:29] from the CO, hey, this is what you're doing.
[00:43:30] And, you know, that was the beginning.
[00:43:33] Shortly, very shortly that route within a day or two, no, actually, I think probably that
[00:43:37] late afternoon, and certainly by the next day, my squadron was one of the several squadrons
[00:43:42] that was tasked to go back out on the carrier.
[00:43:43] So we split the squadron in half.
[00:43:45] That same CO that called me, he took guys from Fallon flew onto the ship onto the carrier,
[00:43:50] right off the coast of LAX.
[00:43:52] And I still, we, we talked about this.
[00:43:54] I can picture to this day.
[00:43:55] I took off at San Diego and flying overhead, Los Angeles International Airport, and we had guys
[00:44:00] that taken off in the carrier that had life missiles, and they were doing a cap, and I'm
[00:44:04] flying, you know, kind of opposite direction overhead, LAX looking down, and, you know,
[00:44:08] I grew up in San Diego, where LAX, like one of the busiest airports in the world, planes
[00:44:12] all over the tarmac on the runways, on the taxiways, because there's, everybody landed,
[00:44:16] nobody took off.
[00:44:17] There's no controllers.
[00:44:18] And they're doing this cap mission, where they're just flying overhead, LAX, kind
[00:44:22] of largely unknown what's going on, and just that moment of seriality of, I'm airborne.
[00:44:27] And there's nobody else flying.
[00:44:29] And we're just sort of just waiting for something to happen, and, you know, it's kind
[00:44:33] of one of those, hey, you'll get more specific instructions as we figure it out.
[00:44:37] You know, the leadership was, was scrambling, everybody's much as we were, and kind of
[00:44:40] looking down, thinking this is, this is a whole new world.
[00:44:44] You know, this is not Southern Watch, you know, that mission we've been doing.
[00:44:48] And within, maybe six weeks, we, we steamed out.
[00:44:53] We, we, we loaded the carrier a couple months early, put the squadron, the whole air wing,
[00:44:57] got on board the, the carrier and steamed out towards the North of the Rivian Gulf to go
[00:45:02] do what we call it as Operation during Freedom.
[00:45:05] So late 2001, I think it was maybe November of 2001.
[00:45:09] We were going to war.
[00:45:11] And our Afghanistan was where the war was.
[00:45:13] You remember at the time, that was it.
[00:45:15] There was nothing else going on.
[00:45:16] We went to Afghanistan.
[00:45:17] So I did a seven month cruise on a carrier from November of 2001.
[00:45:24] I think we came back April May of 2002 and did combat operations over Afghanistan.
[00:45:30] And, you know, a lot more rewarding.
[00:45:32] And so a lot of this year, we did a mission at the time.
[00:45:34] It was called Operation Anaconda.
[00:45:35] I think I'm going to ask you about that.
[00:45:36] That was like the largest ground offensive.
[00:45:38] Yeah.
[00:45:39] We had supported this desert storm.
[00:45:41] And when we came back in April, April, May of 2002, we thought we'd sort of largely
[00:45:48] won the war.
[00:45:49] We, we thought we'd accomplished most of our mission.
[00:45:50] We left thinking, hey, this thing is winding down. We're feeling pretty good about it.
[00:45:54] And when I got back in May of 2002, I kind of distinctly remember, like, I just had my
[00:45:59] work experience.
[00:46:00] You know, as a pilot in combat, and you know, I'd done so to watch, but obviously, you
[00:46:03] know, nothing like this.
[00:46:04] And, but I'd done a combat deployment off of carrier.
[00:46:07] You're supported troops on the ground and Afghanistan dropping bombs and flying off
[00:46:11] cars.
[00:46:12] I kind of thought that was it.
[00:46:13] I think a lot of us did.
[00:46:14] Yeah, a lot of us did.
[00:46:16] I know I thought that might come back from my first deployment to Iraq.
[00:46:19] I was kind of, you know, I'm thankful that I got to do this deployment.
[00:46:24] And I thought they can't go on that much longer.
[00:46:26] But I mean, really quickly, after we got back, it spiraled and I said, oh, this is going
[00:46:30] to be a while.
[00:46:31] Yeah, big time.
[00:46:33] You know, while I was on that deployment, I had gotten email from Top Gun.
[00:46:38] I was saying, hey, I want to come up here next summer, being a structure.
[00:46:42] So I came back in May of that deployment, knowing that my next step was going to go back
[00:46:47] up to Fallen.
[00:46:49] I was feeling pretty good about that.
[00:46:50] I was pretty pumped to know what was next.
[00:46:52] And, you know, in that period of time, it came back, you know, I'm packing up that summer
[00:46:58] and moving out in the fall and already the gears are starting to turn for what end to
[00:47:02] be an operation Iraqi freedom.
[00:47:04] You know, it's the writing is on the wall that this is, we're not done.
[00:47:07] I mean, we're really just getting started.
[00:47:08] And it was several months before that I'll kick off.
[00:47:11] I think everybody in the military certainly knew this is which way it's going to happen.
[00:47:15] And I think there are some things along the way that we're supposed to occur.
[00:47:18] But we all knew this was coming.
[00:47:20] Certainly, you know, it kicked off in March of the fall of the year.
[00:47:23] It wasn't a big surprise to any of us.
[00:47:25] And I was up at Fallen.
[00:47:26] Kind of watching that whole thing roll and I realized that that deployment that I just
[00:47:30] finished was not the end of what we were doing as a country and trying to deal with this
[00:47:34] problem.
[00:47:35] And then you show up at Top Gun to be an instructor, which is, you know, you said the
[00:47:40] going to Top Gun was like a masters.
[00:47:42] And so now it's beyond a doctorate, right?
[00:47:45] I mean, it's.
[00:47:46] Yeah, and we say it's the PhD.
[00:47:48] I mean, in our business, certainly is a for a Marine or naval aviator of fighter pilot.
[00:47:52] That's it.
[00:47:53] Top Gun kind of represents the schoolhouse.
[00:47:56] It's the place where you want to be.
[00:47:58] And as an instructor, you have a huge amount of responsibility.
[00:48:01] It's a bunch of sort of mid career guys.
[00:48:04] It's Navy Lieutenant.
[00:48:05] It's Marine Corps captains.
[00:48:06] Maybe a junior major or a junior lieutenant commander.
[00:48:09] But it's run by relatively young guys.
[00:48:13] As a head maybe a full deployment under the belt, you know, quickly guys were coming
[00:48:16] and having done Afghanistan, combat operations.
[00:48:18] Guys coming having done Iraq, combat operations.
[00:48:21] So in the time that I was there from O2 to O5, the combat experience on the staff went
[00:48:26] from basically none to everybody.
[00:48:29] Everybody.
[00:48:30] Every single dude had been in combat.
[00:48:31] It was coming off a long deployment where they had done back to back to POMISI, Iraq
[00:48:35] and Afghanistan.
[00:48:36] Guys that I knew had done 10 month deployments to Iraq on a carrier.
[00:48:39] I mean, really seasoned guys where just one generation to three years prior, not a single
[00:48:45] person on the staff had seen any combat like that.
[00:48:48] So these acts same thing in the sealed teams we experienced, exact same thing.
[00:48:52] Going from zero or close to zero combat experiencing that it's an odd guy that had done
[00:48:57] little operation here there to every single guy except for the new guys.
[00:49:03] And then, but you're learning curve.
[00:49:06] When you show back up there, it was just as steep as the first time.
[00:49:09] Yeah, without a doubt.
[00:49:10] So when you're there as a student and you don't understand a lot of what's going on
[00:49:15] as a student, at least on the instructor side, you know, they're not trying to keep anything
[00:49:17] from me, but you're just, you were so busy just trying to keep your head above water.
[00:49:22] You're not spending a lot of time wondering what the instructors are doing at the free time.
[00:49:25] You're just prepping for every brief, the flight may take an hour, but you've put in
[00:49:31] 10 hours of work ahead of time and you've debrief for six hours and when you're done,
[00:49:35] you need to go start the next prep process again for you.
[00:49:37] So you are just all day, every day thinking about your next flight and getting ready for
[00:49:43] that and the thing is going on.
[00:49:44] So in your learning curve as steep as a student, when you get there as an instructor
[00:49:48] and I didn't know this at the time, you get there.
[00:49:51] When you're there as an instructor, you have certainly been selected to a pretty elite
[00:49:55] group of folks, but you don't teach a student at Topkin when you're an instructor for a year.
[00:50:02] They spend an entire year with you as an instructor.
[00:50:05] There's only 25 guys on the staff.
[00:50:07] So a third of you basically, if you kind of do the math or sequester for an entire year,
[00:50:10] just going through what's called, we call it the IUT, the instructor under training.
[00:50:14] And they're just teaching you how to teach students.
[00:50:18] And in that year, you're now flying all these different training missions with the instructors
[00:50:23] that are training you to be instructor and you're getting annihilated again.
[00:50:27] So that whole continuum of, well, I'm pretty good.
[00:50:31] You were reminded very quickly.
[00:50:32] And so it takes an entire year.
[00:50:34] And now the good news about that is that by the time you're finishing your initial instructor
[00:50:37] qualification, you can go teach students.
[00:50:40] You have been flying more than you've ever flown in your territory.
[00:50:44] I mean, I'm flying two, three times a day sometimes for a year.
[00:50:48] And so you're just getting reps and reps and reps.
[00:50:50] And you have got more reps, I think, than anybody in aviation.
[00:50:54] So when the time you get your first student is sitting down, you're very first student brief.
[00:50:57] Your A game has been elevated, you know, quite a bit.
[00:51:00] And you're able to fly with the students and teach them way more effective week as,
[00:51:05] when I finished top gun, I went to Afghanistan.
[00:51:07] I didn't do a single air to air mission for almost a year.
[00:51:10] I was dropping bombs.
[00:51:11] I was doing cast and, oh, those are other type of missions.
[00:51:14] So when I got there, I was, I was pretty rusty on the skill sets.
[00:51:18] A year of flying with instructors will resolve that.
[00:51:21] Pretty much.
[00:51:22] Just the amount of flying that you get, you know, in just a week called Matt time.
[00:51:27] But for a normal pilot, you're not even getting a fraction of that, right?
[00:51:32] A fraction.
[00:51:33] Not only you're not getting a fraction of it, a lot of the time that you're flying is when
[00:51:38] you're not a top gun is, you know, sometimes you do an admin flying just flying two
[00:51:41] and from different places.
[00:51:42] Sometimes you're just prepping for a very particular mission.
[00:51:45] You know, it takes a skill to, you know, the missions are getting ready to drop bombs or do
[00:51:49] armor, condits, and so different types of flying.
[00:51:52] You don't get to see all of it.
[00:51:53] You get to see a pretty narrow amount of top gun.
[00:51:56] You get exposed to everything repeatedly.
[00:51:59] And so that one against one that we talked about, that we call BFM, basic fighter maneuvers,
[00:52:02] which is just you and another guy fighting two airplanes.
[00:52:06] You do that a ton, but you do all the other things just as much.
[00:52:10] So you get exposed to the PhD part of it isn't just the reps.
[00:52:15] I think that's critical.
[00:52:17] But it's that you get exposed to this nuanced part of aviation that you just didn't even
[00:52:21] really know existed.
[00:52:22] So you get all the science, all the math, all the things that drive us to say this, why
[00:52:26] would do the things we do, then just get to practice it over and over and then you go back
[00:52:31] to the science and go, hey, I think there's some flaws here.
[00:52:33] Maybe some differences here.
[00:52:34] And the guys at top, kind of the one writing the manual.
[00:52:37] We literally write a manual for inches thick of all these different chapters of how to fly
[00:52:43] the airplane.
[00:52:44] Everything from doing the one against one to dropping a bomb to mission planning, top
[00:52:47] gun owns that.
[00:52:48] Even a chapter in a book and a lecture that I was responsible for and the thing that was
[00:52:53] pretty amazing for me is when I got there, the mission set that I was responsible for
[00:52:58] my, my smear area, my subject matter, X-ray area was surface air threat and counter tactics.
[00:53:02] So I was the guy as a captain in the Marine Corps that was responsible for writing the
[00:53:06] chapter teaching the lecture and establishing our tactics for how to defeat threat surface
[00:53:11] air missiles in AAA.
[00:53:14] This was from September of 2002 to March 2003 that I was the guy that established the
[00:53:22] Navy Marine Corps's procedures and techniques and how we did that and taught that.
[00:53:25] So you know, I'm sorry, oh, I have kicks off.
[00:53:29] You know, guys that I'm, I had fun with and trained with or out there on deployments
[00:53:32] or write me letters.
[00:53:33] Hey, we're seeing this threat.
[00:53:35] What should we do here?
[00:53:36] You know, buddies of mine that I've grown up in aviation, I'm saying, hey, this is what
[00:53:39] we should do.
[00:53:40] This is how you should do with this particular case.
[00:53:42] So the responsibility as an IP, I think why is such a PhD type program is that your
[00:53:47] level responsibility grows, you have to be more than just a good pilot.
[00:53:50] You can teach anybody a good pilot, but if you can't teach and explain to other guys what
[00:53:54] they're doing and how to get better and how to keep themselves alive, you're kind of useless
[00:53:57] in combat.
[00:53:59] So it was a, it was, it was the best way or some of my life, man.
[00:54:03] It was, it was ridiculous.
[00:54:05] And we just flew every day, two, three times a day.
[00:54:08] I got qualified in the F-16.
[00:54:10] I got to fly a totally different airplane.
[00:54:11] So I was dual-qualled in an F-18 and an NF-16 as a Marine on a Navy base at a Navy command
[00:54:17] after having done two deployments on carriers.
[00:54:19] I mean, you cannot.
[00:54:21] It'd be like if I said, I need you to do jujitsu three days, two times a day, every day
[00:54:25] for three years.
[00:54:27] And you need, and that's all I need you to do.
[00:54:28] I don't need you to do anything else.
[00:54:30] Yeah.
[00:54:31] You know, I've actually done a Baxy ride in F-18 at Fowl and as a matter of fact.
[00:54:35] And one of the things that I think is important to understand, or at least from my perspective,
[00:54:39] one of the things that made it really cool was when you get an F-18, if you've never been
[00:54:44] in one, most people, you're not going to get the chance to get an F-18.
[00:54:46] And fly with it, right?
[00:54:47] So I'll give a little description of what I thought was one of the coolest parts about it.
[00:54:51] Is that if you look at the structure of an F-18, the, the, the pod that you sit in, the cockpit,
[00:54:57] is really far forward and the wings and the engine and our stuff are behind you.
[00:55:02] And it looks that way when you look at it, but when you get in it, you, those, those wings
[00:55:07] are so far behind you that you feel like you're in a superhero pod.
[00:55:11] You need to turn, you need to turn hard.
[00:55:15] You can't just look back to see the wings and it's a glass canopy that surrounds you.
[00:55:20] So you feel like you're just in a little pod that is moving at whatever, 800 miles an hour.
[00:55:27] And it's, it's, it's a, it's a crazy feeling.
[00:55:29] It's a crazy feeling because, because you're, it's deceiving because you just feel like you're
[00:55:35] in this little space pod.
[00:55:37] Somehow Star Wars powering through the air.
[00:55:39] You don't realize it behind you is, you know, tons of metal and machinery that's making
[00:55:43] this happen.
[00:55:44] And the G-force isn't all that stuff.
[00:55:47] It's, it's, it's, it's a very cool, very cool thing to experience.
[00:55:51] For me, I, I thought, yeah, that was awesome.
[00:55:53] I didn't think to myself, man, I should have been a pilot.
[00:55:56] There's some, there's some, I know you, we were talking about it yesterday.
[00:56:00] For you, the connection between man and machine is a really cool thing that you enjoy.
[00:56:06] For me, I don't like it.
[00:56:08] I don't like to rely on a machine.
[00:56:11] Yeah.
[00:56:12] I don't even, even get in Bradley's and stuff and Romadi, I always think, you know, I mean,
[00:56:15] I always was apprehensive about a big machine that I had to rely on.
[00:56:17] I don't want to rely on me.
[00:56:19] And what I could do, and that's why I had that little disconnect, I always, I still have
[00:56:24] it today, you know, that's why I'm waiting for the robot works.
[00:56:27] I want, I want to fight those things.
[00:56:30] So I just have a little disconnect with the machines, but I can see where people that
[00:56:36] are, I have that type of mindset.
[00:56:38] It's just, you know, it's just a complete equalizer as you were telling me last night.
[00:56:41] You're just like, it's a stock car race.
[00:56:44] It's you in the same plane as me and who is better is going to win.
[00:56:50] Period.
[00:56:51] That's it.
[00:56:52] There's really no excuses you can make.
[00:56:53] Yeah, that's one of my favorite things.
[00:56:55] It's always been one of my favorite things about flying fighters is that it's an equalizer.
[00:56:59] You don't get, you don't bring any advantage to that airplane.
[00:57:03] Now if we're going to train something, you made, there's guys that are bigger, the guys
[00:57:07] that are better aren't right.
[00:57:08] They got whatever.
[00:57:09] There's a whole bunch of ways that maybe you can bring an advantage.
[00:57:14] You lose all that.
[00:57:15] They've been used to it on that airplane.
[00:57:16] Because you're only going to go as fast as the airplane goes.
[00:57:18] You don't even pull as many jeezes.
[00:57:19] The airplane pulls.
[00:57:20] That's what you get.
[00:57:21] Now, you get a lot of all that stuff.
[00:57:23] I mean, it's awesome.
[00:57:24] But your success or your failure is 100% about how well you interact with that machine
[00:57:30] and compare to that other guy.
[00:57:32] And if you lose, you know, my engine, no.
[00:57:35] Well, I didn't have negative, you lost because you were worse than me today.
[00:57:39] Period.
[00:57:40] And look, you're going to find reasons why.
[00:57:41] We record every flight.
[00:57:43] We record our radar as we record our information, our display.
[00:57:46] So we can go back and dissect.
[00:57:49] And what you end up being able to do as an instructor is right there.
[00:57:52] That's why you lost.
[00:57:53] This decision you made here, this move you went.
[00:57:55] You went this direction or you went up or down.
[00:57:57] You decided to go this speed or whatnot.
[00:57:59] You can dissect every single flight.
[00:58:01] And the great instructors are the ones that can tell you, this is why I did this to you
[00:58:06] in 45 seconds.
[00:58:07] Because here, you made a decision.
[00:58:09] And it took me this long to capitalize it.
[00:58:11] But right now is where I took advantage of a mistake that you made.
[00:58:15] And you freeze that mistake and you put on a TV and they see it and they look at it and
[00:58:18] they burn it in their brain.
[00:58:20] And they make that mistake over and over and over and over and until eventually they don't
[00:58:24] make that mistake.
[00:58:25] And then you start to make your money as an instructor.
[00:58:26] But being an airplane, I brought every bit of capability that airplane had.
[00:58:34] And I never had it.
[00:58:35] There's no, you don't start at a disadvantage.
[00:58:37] And if you beat somebody, they have nobody to look at.
[00:58:40] No excuse.
[00:58:41] Nothing to blame except for their own performance.
[00:58:43] And I loved that.
[00:58:44] And I will always love that about being a fighter pilot.
[00:58:49] And then when you're flying to the left 16, now you have a different airplane.
[00:58:51] So hey, one of the planes faster than the other.
[00:58:54] One airplane actually turns better.
[00:58:55] And so now instead of it just being two totally equal platforms, it's one has particular
[00:59:00] strengths and weaknesses that are different than the other ones.
[00:59:03] So you better be really good about avoiding his strengths and getting, you know, and
[00:59:06] plan to his weaknesses and vice versa.
[00:59:08] And if you lose, guess what?
[00:59:10] It's still your fault.
[00:59:12] 100% because instead of you having two similar airplanes, you couldn't identify what he was
[00:59:17] able to do better than you in his regime that he has, you know, you're strong with me
[00:59:21] fine.
[00:59:22] And then I'm going to try to be more agile than you.
[00:59:24] You know, you're quicker than me.
[00:59:25] Okay, well, I'm going to maybe try to outpower you those type of things and those games
[00:59:28] that you play kind of back and forth.
[00:59:31] There is no question at the end of a flight at Top Gun that you're fighting another
[00:59:34] dude who won.
[00:59:35] Nobody comes back and I wonder how I did on that one.
[00:59:37] It's all very evident.
[00:59:38] If you're looking over your shoulder and the guy is telling to these gunning you with his
[00:59:42] airplane, you don't go back to the debrief and think, I wonder how that, I wonder how this
[00:59:45] is going to play out.
[00:59:47] So it's all right there, laid out the cards are always in the table.
[00:59:50] There's a reason for everything while you succeeded in while you failed.
[00:59:53] And I just thrived in that environment because you couldn't hide from anything.
[00:59:58] Everybody saw everything and it was all right there.
[01:00:00] Who good student, a really good talented student coming up to Top Gun has what percentage
[01:00:06] chance of winning.
[01:00:07] So if the best, let's say the high-peter to the best student that I ever saw that came to
[01:00:13] Top Gun as a student from a squadron, the best student that ever came to Top Gun to fight
[01:00:18] a qualified Top Gun instructor stands 0% chance of winning.
[01:00:23] The best student at Top Gun has zero chance.
[01:00:27] I could fall asleep in an airplane as an IP and a student is not going to be me.
[01:00:31] There is just such a huge, and it doesn't even mean that we're better.
[01:00:35] I don't mean to imply that we were better pilots, but you're just, you're a hat time.
[01:00:39] Yep, it's just time.
[01:00:40] And it's not even me that critical.
[01:00:44] It's just not even close.
[01:00:45] And nor would they expect it.
[01:00:47] Some students, every now and then a student thinks he's going to do some good work and I
[01:00:50] watch this, I'm awesome.
[01:00:52] But most guys show up realizing that disparity, I understood that when I got there as a student,
[01:00:57] these guys are just in a different world.
[01:00:58] You want to get to that world.
[01:01:00] But as an IP, if I instructor, if I flew my best jet on day one against the best
[01:01:09] student, it would be over so fast that he almost wouldn't even learn as much as he should.
[01:01:16] So you, you still fly your best airplane, but you make sure that there's a learning process.
[01:01:21] There, if you want to just annihilate somebody at Top Gun, as you can do that, the students
[01:01:26] that come there, even on their last day aren't on your same level.
[01:01:33] They just aren't.
[01:01:34] They've gotten a lot better than learning curve as steep.
[01:01:36] But when you're in your third year as an IP at Top Gun, you've just had so many reps,
[01:01:40] so many laps doing the exact same thing.
[01:01:42] You've seen everything that it's almost like, we talked about this yesterday, it's almost
[01:01:47] like things are happening in the slow motion for you.
[01:01:48] You're in the matrix and that guy is just working as hard as he possibly can and doing
[01:01:51] his thing.
[01:01:52] And you're just kind of sitting there, kind of watching it at like one third speed.
[01:01:56] So you're ability to decide and do something to him or do something to that airplane or make
[01:02:00] a decision.
[01:02:02] You're just operating in a faster pace than him.
[01:02:04] And that reaction is just impossible to keep up with.
[01:02:06] I can't wait to start training Jiu Jitsu because you're just going to the analogies or just
[01:02:11] everywhere.
[01:02:12] And that's one thing I said, Jiu Jitsu, you can see the future.
[01:02:15] You can actually see the future when you're training Jiu Jitsu with someone that doesn't
[01:02:18] know as much as you, you know what is going to happen.
[01:02:22] You know what they are going to do.
[01:02:24] Just like when you're in the cockpit and you do something and you know what that person
[01:02:27] you know what they're going to do.
[01:02:28] You just know it totally.
[01:02:30] And don't forget too as an instructor, you've been on the receiving end of that for years
[01:02:34] as well.
[01:02:35] You're standing kind of both sides of that coin and you know you fly with someone and
[01:02:39] you'll think you're so like, oh, I can't believe you just did that.
[01:02:42] And then you know three turns later is when you get to take advantage of that because
[01:02:46] you know some time we'll have to play out for his mistake to really reveal itself like
[01:02:50] man, I can't believe you just did that.
[01:02:52] This is going to cost you over time.
[01:02:54] And you can go back on the tape like I said and say, hey, you know, you're worried about
[01:02:58] what happened at the end, run behind you.
[01:03:00] But what really, what let me do that was 30 seconds ago you did this.
[01:03:05] And when this was the environment or the circumstances and you see that stuff and that's
[01:03:09] when you talk about seeing the future, I mean, if you really want to be a jerk about it,
[01:03:12] you know, if guys of your buddies, you know, I'll get in the radio like a buddy of mine.
[01:03:15] I'll, students that came through but guys in my squash and like, oh, that's going to hurt.
[01:03:18] And they're like, what am I, I'm like, stand by.
[01:03:21] You know, in 30 seconds later you'll be gone in the guy because you see the mistakes
[01:03:25] that they make and you know how that's going to play out.
[01:03:29] So you are on your own playing field there as an instructor and like I said, man, it's
[01:03:33] not about being better or worse.
[01:03:36] It's just the time and you get so much of the time there and you get exposed to all the
[01:03:41] the why you get the why at top gun.
[01:03:45] We teach the why a lot but when you're writing the manual, when you're doing that and you
[01:03:50] have all the testing equipment available and you're running a thousand computer generator
[01:03:55] reps to see what the results are, the level of what you know about the why is just so much
[01:04:00] more.
[01:04:01] You just, there's a whole world available to you to and and the guys at top can too want
[01:04:06] to be there.
[01:04:07] The most that IPs are killing to get to a place like that.
[01:04:10] So there's not a lot of slackers there.
[01:04:12] Not a lot of dudes are trying to motivate or kind of prod along like, hey, buddy, let's
[01:04:16] get go, you know, dudes are getting after it from startup to shut down every single day.
[01:04:20] And so you're also getting pulled along because you want to keep up with your peers.
[01:04:23] You know, you don't want to be the worst top gun instructor there.
[01:04:27] You know, every time you think you've made it, you realize all you did is just getting
[01:04:30] more selective pool and your goal is the same as to be the best that you can be and hopefully
[01:04:34] the best you can be is one of the best guys there.
[01:04:35] You know, you don't want to be last at top gun because then you're just last and when we
[01:04:39] last and anything who does and so that's a real kind of a type of a real aggressive
[01:04:43] group of dudes and they pull you and you you got to keep up and sometimes you know, a couple
[01:04:48] guys here and they're done for for the most part the selection process works pretty well.
[01:04:52] You know, what's cool just to bring this back for a second to, you know, talking about
[01:04:57] leadership and interacting with other people.
[01:04:59] The same exact thing happens when you start to pay attention to the tactics, techniques,
[01:05:06] procedures of leadership.
[01:05:09] You start to see the moves that people are making.
[01:05:12] You know, you start to see the moves that your subordinate is making because his ego is
[01:05:15] flaring up or because he's getting, taking too much ownership of something that he doesn't
[01:05:21] want to let go and he's getting emotional about it.
[01:05:22] You start seeing the same type of things at one third speed.
[01:05:29] You know, that was great for me when I was running the West Coast Seal Team training.
[01:05:34] That's all we take a platoon.
[01:05:35] We had these scenarios and we put up a tune through, we put another platoon through, we put
[01:05:41] another platoon through, we just over to the same scenario.
[01:05:44] Guy here, shoot her over here, person on this hilltop, hostage in this room.
[01:05:48] We put all these guys through the same scenario and so as soon as you approach, as soon
[01:05:52] as you watch him approach and you say, oh, the platoon commander's too far in the rear.
[01:05:56] So what's going to happen?
[01:05:59] He's not going to see what's coming up front up.
[01:05:59] Yep, there it is.
[01:06:00] And so you just know what's going to happen.
[01:06:01] And it's the same thing when you start dealing with their personalities.
[01:06:03] You get a guy with a big ego that comes in and he wants to run everything his way and he thinks
[01:06:06] he's going to be able to control everything and you're like, no, he's not going to be able
[01:06:08] to do this.
[01:06:09] So you can end up and I see that in the business world, obviously now too, where you get the
[01:06:13] same exact problems of a guy that's too emotional about his plan or has too big of an ego
[01:06:19] about something or he's not passing the word well enough for the, he's trying to control
[01:06:22] everyone and not using decentralized commitment.
[01:06:24] It's so obvious because you have the reps.
[01:06:28] We have the reps now in this arena to be to look at a situation and say, okay, let me
[01:06:35] watch this.
[01:06:36] Oh, oh, okay, I see what's about to happen.
[01:06:38] Here's what's going on.
[01:06:39] We can break it down.
[01:06:40] So it's the same thing across the board.
[01:06:41] You get that level of just experience and repetitions and repetitions.
[01:06:47] And now you can kind of see the future and you can predict what's going to happen.
[01:06:51] And then the good thing is in the business world, when you can predict what's going to happen,
[01:06:54] you can stop it.
[01:06:55] You can get the people on the right track, pull them back in and get them arranged.
[01:06:58] Well, I think the thing that a lot of people don't realize because sometimes they think
[01:07:02] it's just different in the military.
[01:07:04] The reasons why people are successful in the military and the reasons why people fail are
[01:07:09] exactly the same as why you succeed in business and why you succeed as a person or why
[01:07:13] you fail.
[01:07:14] Now look, I know, you know, being an airplane is different.
[01:07:16] I get that.
[01:07:17] The environment might be a little bit different being combat certainly.
[01:07:19] So the setting changes in all these things, the setting is different.
[01:07:22] But the reasons are exactly the same.
[01:07:25] And so to dispel whatever myth, you know, it's different in the military.
[01:07:28] It's identical in the military.
[01:07:29] No, no, no.
[01:07:30] It comes out in an airplane or it comes out on a ship or whatever it comes out in downtown
[01:07:34] Ramadhi.
[01:07:35] The setting?
[01:07:36] Yeah, it's different.
[01:07:38] But what's going on?
[01:07:39] It's identical.
[01:07:41] And when you get to, when you get to being a place where you get to devote 100% of your time
[01:07:45] to that and you're not distracted by just the distracts of military bureaucracy and life
[01:07:51] of training schedules and did everybody do their annual survey.
[01:07:56] When you're away from that and you're living in a world who's being tactical and doing nothing
[01:08:00] but learning about how to be the best part you can be in the best teacher.
[01:08:04] Everything, not just being a fighter about everything in the world slows down.
[01:08:08] Everything slows down.
[01:08:10] And I think it just gives you a perspective on life that, top God, I will carry those
[01:08:15] lessons.
[01:08:16] I mean, obviously, I care that with me and everything that I do and I will forever.
[01:08:20] You know, what was honed at a place like that and in some ways in the military, it's just
[01:08:24] a luxury because it's just not that common to have someone say for three years, you're
[01:08:27] just going to do nothing but this.
[01:08:29] What, dude?
[01:08:30] Are you kidding me?
[01:08:31] So, so speaking of decision making and good and or bad decision making.
[01:08:36] So you're living the dream, you're up in Fallon, you actually have a house up in the mountains,
[01:08:41] you're skiing, flying, everything's good.
[01:08:45] And then somehow you make a decision that's a little bit off the track a little bit.
[01:08:49] What was that all about?
[01:08:50] I don't know.
[01:08:51] I'm going to talk about it.
[01:08:53] So yeah, I am, I'm in my third year at Top Gun, 2005.
[01:08:57] I was selected be the training officer.
[01:08:58] So I am running Top Gun as the senior IP there, which is just, it's awesome.
[01:09:05] It's a, it is literally, as a Marine, it's a dream job.
[01:09:08] You could not ask for anything better.
[01:09:10] I was dating what ended becoming my wife.
[01:09:14] So my wife Whitney at the time we're dating, so it lives out there.
[01:09:17] We had a place in Tahoe, drove a Corvette, my life was pretty good, man.
[01:09:22] And I'm actually coming up on my end of service obligation.
[01:09:26] I can leave the Marine Corps in 2005.
[01:09:28] And I sort of sold my relationship to Whitney on that idea.
[01:09:33] Like, hey, come put up with this, live in a Tahoe, but I'm going to get out of the Marine
[01:09:37] Corps and don't worry about this.
[01:09:38] None of this is all, it's all come, don't worry about that.
[01:09:41] Defondments war, it's over.
[01:09:42] You don't need to worry about that.
[01:09:44] So I think I oversold that to her a little bit, got her to move out to Tahoe.
[01:09:50] And so there was just a part of me that didn't feel done with the Marine Corps.
[01:09:57] And ironically, in this amazing experience that I had built up in my mind since I was 16 years
[01:10:03] old, I'm now a Top Gun instructor.
[01:10:05] I joined the Marine Corps knowing, as a fortunately, Top Gun was this big influence.
[01:10:10] I'm going to leave the Marine Corps as a Top Gun instructor.
[01:10:11] But I had spent four years flying F-18s off carriers, basically in the Navy for the
[01:10:19] Frol and Tenset purposes.
[01:10:20] And I was a Marine in the Marine Squadron, but we deployed with Navy carriers.
[01:10:22] And I spent three years in Fallon on a Navy base with a Navy command.
[01:10:27] It was one of three pilots on the Staff at Top Gun.
[01:10:32] And there was just a part of me that I knew I was going to be done.
[01:10:35] I was ready to leave the Marine Corps, but I wanted to leave the Marine Corps having
[01:10:38] fulfilled.
[01:10:39] That part of being a Marine, a real Marine, is kind of how I felt.
[01:10:44] And so, again, I had kind of contemplated what I was going to do.
[01:10:51] You talked to somebody called your monitor.
[01:10:52] He's the guy that gives you orders.
[01:10:53] Hey, this is what's next in your career.
[01:10:54] This is where you're going to go for how long we think you should do this because it's
[01:10:58] helpful for whatever.
[01:10:59] The kind of explains it to you as a guy that basically is responsible for your career progression.
[01:11:03] And I was kind of going back and forth with what do I do?
[01:11:05] Do I stay into I get out?
[01:11:06] And I kind of was struggling with that decision.
[01:11:10] And he's like, look, we're going to, as a top instructor, you've got a lot of skill,
[01:11:13] we've got a lot of experience, and then want you to use that and bring it back to the
[01:11:17] Marine Corps and go to a squadron and teach these guys.
[01:11:20] So, he gave me orders.
[01:11:22] It says your order is going to be to go into Japan.
[01:11:24] You're going to fly a f-a-tines back to the regular fleet squadron and you'll go from there.
[01:11:29] And I even, I think I even got the point right out, orders given to me.
[01:11:32] Would you be in like a squadron commander?
[01:11:33] Or else?
[01:11:34] No, I would have been.
[01:11:35] The officer of Maine, it's officer.
[01:11:36] I was too junior.
[01:11:37] I'd only been in, I was like 10 years old.
[01:11:39] You know, 11 years more.
[01:11:40] So, I'm kind of what's called, we call it a department head, where I'm going to run a major
[01:11:43] department in the squadron.
[01:11:44] It was operations or Maine.
[01:11:45] It took kind of the two big ones.
[01:11:48] And I just didn't, it's not what I wanted to do.
[01:11:54] I had, like I said, some long-term plans to do another stuff.
[01:11:56] I was thinking, long-term I was going to get out and go do something else.
[01:11:59] And so, I called them on her.
[01:12:01] I said, hey, I want to do a factor.
[01:12:04] A factor is that four-dark controllers, like you described earlier on the podcast.
[01:12:08] And we had this little list on the internet that was called a hot fill list.
[01:12:11] It was basically all the jobs that nobody wanted.
[01:12:13] And if you called, it was a first come first serve.
[01:12:15] You called and volunteer for anything.
[01:12:16] You were automatically going to get it.
[01:12:18] And because it was just a list of jobs that they couldn't, like, force on guys or whatever
[01:12:21] reason I'm trying not to explain it all that well.
[01:12:22] But the bottom line is the hot fill bill it is.
[01:12:25] You call it yours for any reason.
[01:12:27] And I'm like, hey, man, I see this a hot fill to be a four-dark controller in Japan.
[01:12:31] Because I was going to go to Japan, we kind of cross that bridge of, okay, we're going to move overseas.
[01:12:35] We didn't have any kids.
[01:12:36] This is with Whitney.
[01:12:37] This is with Whitney.
[01:12:38] She's a little bit not super cool with it, but we found it will go to Japan.
[01:12:41] We'll fly.
[01:12:42] It'll be fine.
[01:12:43] And he's like, you're not going to be a four-dark controller in Japan.
[01:12:47] You're going to go fly and when I said dude, it's right there in black and white man.
[01:12:50] It says hot fill.
[01:12:51] I'm your guy.
[01:12:53] And he was like, okay, yeah, I mean, he and so he gave me these orders.
[01:12:56] And I wanted to be a factor.
[01:13:00] Because I wanted to leave the Marine Corps having fulfilled all the parts about being a Marine.
[01:13:04] And in my mind, it's funny because it's like we're opposite on that.
[01:13:07] The real challenge or the thing I didn't really want to do, but I knew I should was getting
[01:13:11] out of the airplane and doing something really hard in the ground.
[01:13:14] Like, my natural state in the Marine Corps is in an airplane.
[01:13:19] And for some people, they're miserable and I don't want to do it for me.
[01:13:21] That was, so to do that was to be a four-dark controller was.
[01:13:25] And it's strange to hear myself say it.
[01:13:27] I didn't want to go be a four-dark controller, but I knew I needed to go do that.
[01:13:31] There's no, I needed to leave the Marine Corps and say, yeah, I did that too.
[01:13:36] And it was just a matter of a fulfillment of kind of an exclamation point on the career that
[01:13:40] I always kind of fantasize him as I learned more about the Marine Corps.
[01:13:42] There was more to it than just being a pilot.
[01:13:44] Right.
[01:13:45] So, so in your mind, were you thinking four-dark controller in Japan, met you're going to go
[01:13:49] over there, you know, have a little team of Marines.
[01:13:51] You'd go out to the different training ranges, call for some bombs, all good.
[01:13:56] You know, go home at night, be with your wife.
[01:13:58] Might even go.
[01:13:59] Just in Japan.
[01:14:00] Just in just nice little, sort of like a long vacation, working a little bit of time
[01:14:04] on the ground.
[01:14:05] I get to go to the field.
[01:14:06] I spend the night in the woods.
[01:14:07] Yeah, something like that.
[01:14:08] You know, yeah.
[01:14:09] It's really cool camping.
[01:14:10] And they pay for it.
[01:14:11] Yeah.
[01:14:12] So, yeah, that's what it was.
[01:14:13] I was going to go to Japan.
[01:14:14] There's a bunch of really cool, it was going to be in Okinawa actually.
[01:14:16] So, not mainland Japan.
[01:14:17] Okinawa's got great scuba diving.
[01:14:19] It's kind of neat.
[01:14:20] And, you know, I could bring my wife with me.
[01:14:22] It was going to be a lot of fun.
[01:14:24] And I was going to teach guys how to use airplanes or drop bombs.
[01:14:28] I knew how to do that.
[01:14:29] I was going to be a really cool thing.
[01:14:31] So, I get these orders.
[01:14:32] And my wife and I moved out to Japan.
[01:14:35] We got there.
[01:14:36] And to Okinawa, I placed called Camp Pants in a little base up there in the middle of the island.
[01:14:40] And I'm there probably.
[01:14:45] Dude, I'm probably there a week.
[01:14:47] And my boss, the brigade, the two commander, is like, hey, we're going to send a brigade
[01:14:52] of platoon, which is probably 50 guys.
[01:14:54] I'm guessing at the numbers.
[01:14:56] To Camp Pants Jun.
[01:14:57] Because that angle just came back from seven months in Iraq.
[01:15:01] And they need to go right back and turn to very quick turn around.
[01:15:03] They don't have enough qualified guys.
[01:15:06] And so, I mean, I'm there a week and I'm coming home to tell Whitney like, hey, here's
[01:15:10] the deal.
[01:15:12] They need guys to go out to the Jun to do this deployment to Iraq.
[01:15:15] And I'm going to be one of those guys.
[01:15:17] So we were there instead of a year we were there for maybe.
[01:15:20] She was like, is there snorkeling in Iraq?
[01:15:23] Because you were telling me about scuba diving.
[01:15:27] So we crammed a year's worth of stuff in about six weeks.
[01:15:31] Because we had, so it was probably maybe early November when we kind of came down.
[01:15:36] And we had to the end of the counter year.
[01:15:38] So we shoved a year's worth of living in Japan in about six weeks.
[01:15:43] And we did Korea, we did Thailand, we did mainland, Tokyo, we did got her dog call.
[01:15:47] I mean, we did it all only December 22nd or whatever it was, you know, we flew home.
[01:15:53] And I went straight to the Jun from there to start training with second Anglico, which was the
[01:15:59] team that had just come back from Iraq after there's seven months appointment.
[01:16:01] And I'm on a very quick turn.
[01:16:03] They're probably four months into their turn on.
[01:16:04] So you get just real quick for people that don't know what Anglico is.
[01:16:07] Yeah, please.
[01:16:09] The Anglico stands for Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company.
[01:16:14] And really what it is, it's a group of small teams, four or five man teams called Fire
[01:16:20] Power Control teams.
[01:16:21] And what those teams were all supposed to be able to do is control airplanes, tell airplanes
[01:16:26] what to do with their bombs.
[01:16:28] We could control artillery, so how to fire artillery ordinance.
[01:16:31] And even we didn't do it there on Iraq, but we could use Naval Gunfire.
[01:16:35] So guns off ships, we were training all three of those skill sets.
[01:16:38] And the whole point of an Anglico and a place like Iraq is you had different units, you
[01:16:43] had Navy units, Army units, Marine Corps units, and as an Anglico, you're really a zone.
[01:16:47] So that's what the L and Anglico is.
[01:16:48] So I was trying to go to an Army unit and know how Army does people may not know this.
[01:16:54] All the surface is actually do the same job differently.
[01:16:56] So the Army and the Marine Corps will get the same mission and have a totally different way
[01:16:59] of doing it because their doctrine they're training is different.
[01:17:01] Now it's similar, but there's a bunch of pretty critical differences in there.
[01:17:05] And so what we were training to do is we had all marine airplanes in where we were on Iraq
[01:17:09] and all Army land forces.
[01:17:11] So the Army doesn't have any training, how to use Marine Corps airplanes.
[01:17:14] Marine Corps does have a lot of training to use Army ground forces.
[01:17:17] So when those two people connect, there's a problem with how they communicate and what they
[01:17:21] want from each other.
[01:17:22] Insert Anglico, where the liaison between the Army ground units and in this case the Marine
[01:17:27] Corps air units.
[01:17:28] So my job was to control Marine airplanes to support the Army on the ground.
[01:17:32] And that was all over Iraq and what the Anglico team would take this whole group and break
[01:17:37] it into maybe 25 four-man teams and went all over the country to go do this same mission
[01:17:43] with a whole bunch of different units.
[01:17:45] So that was our mission as a four-dayer controller.
[01:17:47] And I was qualified as a four-dayer controller because I had flown airplanes, job bombs
[01:17:51] and combat understood how F-A teams were supposed to support ground maneuver and I went
[01:17:54] to school with four-dayer controller school.
[01:17:56] So let's go to Japan.
[01:17:57] It'll be fun for pretend to do that for a year.
[01:18:00] And then we had up in Camp Lajoon training to go to Iraq.
[01:18:06] And now it's your first time doing grunt work.
[01:18:10] So last time I had a held a rifle, shot a rifle, and worn a pair of combat boots was
[01:18:17] the basic school.
[01:18:19] So I had, you know, I got my air slotted at TBS.
[01:18:23] That was a big day for me.
[01:18:25] You know, I had done six months of that.
[01:18:26] I had that check in the block.
[01:18:27] I was feeling pretty good about that.
[01:18:29] And I had never, I don't think I put on my camey, my camey-mathalized uniform.
[01:18:33] I think I wore a flight suit.
[01:18:35] Honestly, I think every day for seven years.
[01:18:38] I could probably count on one hand.
[01:18:40] Well, even longer than that, I was even counting flight school.
[01:18:41] I could probably count on one hand the number of days that I didn't wear a flight
[01:18:46] suit from the time that I selected to go to flight school to the time that I ended up in
[01:18:50] Anglico.
[01:18:51] Days.
[01:18:52] I mean, so this was a foreign.
[01:18:54] Now, I had, I was in Marine.
[01:18:57] I went through the basic schools all back there somewhere.
[01:19:01] But I think there is this, and I've mentioned this, I think, to you, I think it's just
[01:19:06] sort of this habit of self-sabotage.
[01:19:08] Like, well, I can't leave the Marine Corps that being a real Marine.
[01:19:12] So I'm going to literally sabotage myself by volunteering for a job that I don't know if
[01:19:15] I really want to do, but now I'm stuck doing it.
[01:19:18] So I'm going to have to do that.
[01:19:19] So I won't ever have to say, I didn't do that.
[01:19:22] So this kind of cycle of breaking promises to my wife volunteering for stuff.
[01:19:27] I didn't really want to do but knew that I should.
[01:19:29] And next thing I know, it all blew up in my face because I was going to Japan.
[01:19:33] That Japan's awesome.
[01:19:34] Good sushi and great experience there and it's going to be awesome and I will be a
[01:19:38] fact and I can, for the rest of my life, say, oh, I was a rumor.
[01:19:40] I was a fact and I did all that.
[01:19:43] And, you know, it's January and campus.
[01:19:45] It's really what it is for.
[01:19:46] Yeah, it's for.
[01:19:47] Holy man.
[01:19:48] So, yeah, make no mistake.
[01:19:50] I mean, I did that, I volunteered, but I did not at the time when I was trading in my flying
[01:19:56] orders for these fact orders.
[01:19:57] I didn't expect to be in a body.
[01:20:01] But as, hey, we need to send an uppercatable tune to campus unit prep those guys to
[01:20:06] course.
[01:20:07] Yep, I'm going.
[01:20:08] I'm not going to not go.
[01:20:09] That's what we need to do.
[01:20:10] We're going to go do that.
[01:20:11] When I got to campus unit, I ended up being the senior, just by rank, the senior
[01:20:15] four-year control room in the unit.
[01:20:17] I was kind of a middle-level major, I, you know, come from top going.
[01:20:21] I came straight from top going to that and I was an experienced guy in the community
[01:20:23] officer, no joke.
[01:20:24] I picked her the day, walks in one day and he hands me a piece of paper and it's got like
[01:20:28] 26 lines on it, one for every team.
[01:20:31] And on the other sheet was all the locations that we were going to go to.
[01:20:35] And he's like fill out, we're all the teams are going because we got to cover these
[01:20:38] 15 different locations, you know, one to two teams per location and just write the number
[01:20:42] of the team on there and get this back and move up close to business.
[01:20:44] Like Roger, that's her.
[01:20:45] I think her.
[01:20:47] And again, my wife loves the story and I didn't tell her at the time, but my best friend
[01:20:53] who I grew up with was in Ramadi at the time.
[01:20:55] He was in third-time, seventh-marine, so we replaced when we got out there or did a turnover
[01:21:00] with.
[01:21:02] And that's where the war was, man.
[01:21:04] I mean, in late 2005 and in early 2006, the war was in Ramadi.
[01:21:09] And so I took the then, I wrote Lightning 6 and so 6162 and 6-3, we're all going
[01:21:14] in Ramadi and I handed it off to every field of that, gave it to the CO.
[01:21:17] So if you're going to go do something you don't necessarily want to do, but you're going
[01:21:24] to go do it, you might as well do it.
[01:21:25] And that's where the war was.
[01:21:27] I could have gone to a whole host of other places where there's not much going on, it
[01:21:30] would have been relatively chill.
[01:21:32] I would have gotten that check in the block for sure.
[01:21:34] I would have said, yeah, I went to a hero there and no hit on the guys in a different
[01:21:39] place is just more going on there.
[01:21:42] And if I wasn't going to go, then somebody else is going to go do that.
[01:21:44] So it was Neil Neil was telling you what was up he said, hey, it's on.
[01:21:47] Big time.
[01:21:48] No, he and I were tight and we talked as regular as we could as much as we can say.
[01:21:51] Oh, you're listening to you telling you like, oh, yeah, I was putting rounds on shooting
[01:21:54] yesterday and you said, well, what were you shooting at?
[01:21:56] And he's like, people.
[01:21:58] Yeah, I was just, it was such a foreign thing to me as a pilot, certainly coming from
[01:22:02] top.
[01:22:03] And this is my best friend too.
[01:22:04] And our whole life, we both wanted to be in Ramadi.
[01:22:06] We never, we were in the same unit together.
[01:22:08] We just couldn't get aligned with that.
[01:22:10] It never occurred to me when we were kids dreaming about being in Ramadi or Firepotset.
[01:22:13] The only time we'd ever served together was in Ramadi as Fort Controlers.
[01:22:17] I healed with some of this podcast.
[01:22:19] He'll get a good chuckle out of this.
[01:22:20] But so he was there for the seven months prior.
[01:22:22] So I think the, you know, maybe June or July of that year when I was getting ready to get
[01:22:27] orders, he was on his factory.
[01:22:30] And he was just a baton, a baton, a baton, three seven.
[01:22:32] You know, OP293 OP, he would be here with you guys.
[01:22:34] It's just doing the deed man.
[01:22:36] I'm getting out of big time and struggling, this a lot going on there.
[01:22:41] And when he would tell me this story is even someone who had been a Marine for that long,
[01:22:46] he's like, yeah, we're in a firefight.
[01:22:47] I'm like, are you shooting your rifle?
[01:22:49] Is that yeah, man?
[01:22:50] I get what?
[01:22:51] The people that are shooting in me, it's just, it's, it's, it's, you're disconnected.
[01:22:55] And you have this, you don't have this sense of what that means.
[01:22:58] And so even as I was processing what he was saying and trying to understand and then
[01:23:02] saying, I, this is where the, this is what I'm going to go do and kind of volunteering
[01:23:06] to go do that.
[01:23:07] I'll be honest with you.
[01:23:08] I mean, there's still a part in retrospect that just didn't really quite fully grasp
[01:23:12] what that meant.
[01:23:13] I don't know how anybody on the first deployment to a place like a Romadi goes
[01:23:17] into that.
[01:23:18] You know, I dabble to aviation, like you said, I'm up in the sky.
[01:23:21] I mean, it's relatively safe.
[01:23:23] And I'm sure even the first deployment you did, there's just, there's an element of
[01:23:26] just not being able to fully understand it.
[01:23:28] And that didn't even become clear to me until right when we're getting ready to leave
[01:23:32] from a body and the new units coming in and I was explaining what they're about to get
[01:23:35] into.
[01:23:36] They hit me and I just rewind myself a year earlier.
[01:23:39] I'm like, I'm that dude that really doesn't know what the hell's about to happen to
[01:23:42] him and what's about to go on.
[01:23:44] But it was like I said, man, I don't even want to make it sound like that big of a deal.
[01:23:50] But I've all in here for a fact to her.
[01:23:52] They need to guys to go to the gym to go to Iraq.
[01:23:54] That's where Romadi was where the fight was.
[01:23:56] My best friend was there.
[01:23:57] I'm going to Romadi.
[01:23:58] Yeah.
[01:23:59] And that was about it.
[01:24:00] It was just, that's where I thought I should do.
[01:24:00] So I went to Romadi.
[01:24:03] And now you're leading Marines too.
[01:24:04] Yeah.
[01:24:05] And yes, so I explained just a minute ago about those things that may be successful and
[01:24:14] things that lead to failure are identical.
[01:24:16] They are the exact same things in an airplane or the same on the ground.
[01:24:19] But the environment is different.
[01:24:23] It is different.
[01:24:24] There's no way around it.
[01:24:26] And I also would say too that and for good reason, I think the ground Marines, you know,
[01:24:30] I worked a lot of infantry in artillery.
[01:24:33] Most of Anglican was made up of artillery and cemetery, not, and you know, obviously there's
[01:24:36] pilots that are controllers.
[01:24:38] There's a decent bit of skepticism of pilots coming in to lead these teams.
[01:24:43] And I think for a good reason, you know, because a lot of these guys when I talk about
[01:24:47] combat experience, they're on their third fourth floor in the Iraq.
[01:24:50] Totally man.
[01:24:51] You're coming in.
[01:24:52] Yep.
[01:24:53] They're on their, they've already done.
[01:24:54] You're wearing your top gun patch on your shoulder of your can.
[01:24:57] Well, what's worse is I'm not wearing my top gun patch.
[01:25:00] I'm wearing my camis.
[01:25:01] And they're like, have you ever washed those camis?
[01:25:03] I'm like, as a matter of fact, I haven't.
[01:25:05] They're fresh, you know, brand new.
[01:25:08] And they're wearing their camis from, they did the march up to Baghdad.
[01:25:11] They went home for four months and psycha right back around and did OIF2.
[01:25:15] Guys, it did fullusion.
[01:25:16] They're back.
[01:25:17] And they're on the third deployment in three years.
[01:25:18] And they're legit deployments.
[01:25:20] And, you know, Dave Burke, Mr. Topkin, shows up, and was like, where's this brigade
[01:25:24] platoon?
[01:25:25] You know, where's my salt team?
[01:25:26] You know, and I think that skepticism of, for good reason, is who is the
[01:25:31] best guy?
[01:25:32] And that's a real, that was a real leadership challenge for me, is to apply those things
[01:25:36] that I knew were effective, but in an environment that I'm totally out of my comfort zone,
[01:25:41] man.
[01:25:42] I'm totally out of my comfort zone.
[01:25:43] And I have to apply a skill set of things that I just haven't, I haven't shot a rifle
[01:25:48] since 1994.
[01:25:50] I got to the basic school in October, 1994, the first thing you do is go to the rifle
[01:25:53] range.
[01:25:54] That's the last time my school is a trigger on a rifle was October of 1994.
[01:25:58] The here it is is, you know, January of 2006, prepping to go to Ramadi, and I got to
[01:26:02] sit in my M4.
[01:26:04] So they should be skeptical a little bit.
[01:26:07] And it was a challenge for me, a real leadership challenge of to be successful in a place
[01:26:12] that I'm not comfortable with.
[01:26:13] To be honest with you, if you told me I was going to lead a squadron in combat, I'd feel
[01:26:18] pretty comfortable doing that.
[01:26:20] I know it would be a challenge, it'd be hard, but I wouldn't feel like, I don't know
[01:26:24] about this, I would be all over it.
[01:26:25] I don't mean to say easy, but right in my wheelhouse, not true for that.
[01:26:30] So I worked hard to try to be successful in that, and you know, you got to get your Marines
[01:26:35] to buy off on your program, you know, because you're going to go down town with those
[01:26:39] guys, you know, and every relationship with anyone with those guys was different as you
[01:26:43] know, you know, and you got to build those relationships and demonstrate that, you know,
[01:26:47] this is going to work.
[01:26:49] And then, you know, just talk a little bit about, you know, people have heard about what
[01:26:53] you bruiser was doing over in Ramadi, and we'll get to how we interacted, but overall,
[01:26:59] all you guys doing, when you first got there, you just kind of jumped into it, we could
[01:27:04] feed as they say.
[01:27:06] We did, man.
[01:27:08] So I get there.
[01:27:10] I've got a salt team that stands for supporting arms liaison team.
[01:27:13] Really what it meant was three of those little four man teams, grouped together in a
[01:27:17] one 13-man team, because we had an additional corpsman, little medic with us.
[01:27:23] So I had three of those teams that I was responsible for, and I kind of knew what I expected
[01:27:29] was going to happen.
[01:27:30] I got there that I would be in what's called the talk, the tactical operations center,
[01:27:33] which was I kind of run things from the desk and farm out my teams and units to support
[01:27:39] the guys that needed our help.
[01:27:40] These army units are going to go to missions.
[01:27:42] They needed someone to help them control the air.
[01:27:44] I had those teams.
[01:27:45] I would give them those teams.
[01:27:46] Well, it took basically no time to get there and realize that the demand signal for our support
[01:27:53] was higher than we could have ever responded to.
[01:27:56] They needed 20 of our teams, not three.
[01:28:00] And so that idea that I would kind of be a COC guy, a talk guy, was over in the first day,
[01:28:06] because as I get there and we're going to turn over the other angle of team getting
[01:28:09] ready to leave, he's introducing me to all the people he's been working with.
[01:28:13] It's like 15 different teams.
[01:28:17] They're not running operations like three battalions.
[01:28:20] It's 40 squads.
[01:28:23] These guys are going out in 12, 13, and they all need you.
[01:28:27] And there's operations.
[01:28:28] I mean, just so everyone is there's 5,600 people in the 1, 180 or you showed up in the
[01:28:33] 2, 2, 2, 2, 6,000 people or whatever.
[01:28:36] And there's operations going on all over Ramadi, every single night, there's people patrol
[01:28:40] and there's people getting in fire fights, every single night, there's constant gun
[01:28:43] fire.
[01:28:44] And so there's no way with three teams you're going to cover all that.
[01:28:47] You can't do it.
[01:28:48] Yeah.
[01:28:49] And that was sort of the immediate awareness for me is not only was I not going to be able
[01:28:54] to support everything.
[01:28:56] I know how to prioritize and tell folks, hey, we can do this and not that.
[01:29:00] I can help you here or there.
[01:29:02] And so very quickly, it was a matter of how am I going to break down my team and support
[01:29:06] these guys.
[01:29:09] I did have an advantage that I was as an F-18 pilot, that was the primary aircraft, F-18's
[01:29:15] and herers of the primary aircraft that was doing the support.
[01:29:17] And I knew those airplanes really well.
[01:29:19] And I was able to very quickly when I saw what the army, hey, we're doing this patrol
[01:29:23] today.
[01:29:24] And we're going to take our humbys from the camp Ramadi to go to this location.
[01:29:28] And it would be really difficult just to get there, just navigating at night in your
[01:29:31] humbys on the night vision goggles and the roads can be kind of confusing and you know what
[01:29:35] it's like down there and some days you're operating in downtown Ramadi and it's straight
[01:29:39] up urban combat like just buildings.
[01:29:42] And five miles away you can be in a place we called it my Charlie one that it looks
[01:29:47] like a Vietnam.
[01:29:48] I mean it's the contrast if we're being so close together was so incredible how different
[01:29:53] those places were.
[01:29:54] And so every environment was different.
[01:29:56] I was able to understand how what airplanes could do well and not well in those environments.
[01:30:00] And so as they ask for support on my head, I can't really do that but what I can do is this.
[01:30:05] And maybe this would be more helpful for you.
[01:30:06] And I could very quickly build a relationship with the army which is really who you needed
[01:30:10] to be the best support for the Marines.
[01:30:13] They were going to get on board.
[01:30:14] We were good.
[01:30:15] We had a relationship.
[01:30:16] I wasn't worried about my Marines and us building our team.
[01:30:19] What I was worried about was us as a team being effective for the folks we were supporting.
[01:30:25] And showing that we could do good work for those guys.
[01:30:27] And we took a very different approach.
[01:30:29] I immediately broke our team into three separate teams, 6162 and 630.
[01:30:33] I actually sent the 613 team, a guy named Alan to another base, Blue Diamond.
[01:30:38] And you remember that base right across the river because there was a company base out of
[01:30:41] Blue Diamond that we're doing operations independently and they never had any angle
[01:30:45] to support.
[01:30:46] So I do, you got to go move, they literally moved there and lived with those guys and then
[01:30:50] my other team 6162 Adam.
[01:30:53] And I just, we took a whiteboard and all the requests for support.
[01:30:59] We just started plugging in our names in.
[01:31:00] And so it was just, I had five guys, he had 48 is on Humby at my own Humby.
[01:31:04] We had all the weapons, all the radios and just started to just go do operations.
[01:31:09] Two to eight would do everything for just a little vehicle patrol where they would just
[01:31:12] do a presence patrol.
[01:31:13] They're two Humby is driving around the city.
[01:31:14] We would just jump in on that and just bring a third truck, which was a ton of firepower
[01:31:17] and awareness.
[01:31:19] Sometimes we were just doing foot patrols and we would just go walk around and do moving
[01:31:22] to contact or do room clearing stuff like that.
[01:31:26] I found myself way, way out of my comfort zone very early.
[01:31:31] I think my second mission there was a raid where I was ended up clearing a room.
[01:31:39] I was in a stack of dudes clearing a room.
[01:31:43] Well I was trying to talk to airplanes overhead and it was just basically a manpower
[01:31:49] shortage.
[01:31:50] Yeah, we'd get in, you need to, you need to go, guys go clear the room and rush that.
[01:31:56] Now, in I was a senior mid-grade major.
[01:31:58] I was always kind of one of the senior guys, but I wasn't in charge of this.
[01:32:00] So I would be working for a first lieutenant, which was perfectly fine.
[01:32:03] It was his platoon.
[01:32:04] He was doing this mission.
[01:32:05] He knew what he was doing.
[01:32:06] I was there to support his best as I could.
[01:32:08] That image of like, y'all just get up on the roof and control there.
[01:32:10] It'll be awesome.
[01:32:11] You need me to blow up negative.
[01:32:13] I mean, it was, hey, get in line and start getting out here.
[01:32:17] Now, I think that I remember that second mission.
[01:32:20] We're with the two to eight and the lieutenant was, I think he was like, I think he worked
[01:32:23] at Home Depot.
[01:32:24] No joke.
[01:32:25] I mean, National Guard units.
[01:32:26] Yeah, National Guard units, these dudes were awesome.
[01:32:28] They'd been there for probably 10 or 11 months by the time I got there.
[01:32:31] They're maybe even longer.
[01:32:32] They've been there almost a year.
[01:32:33] Hardened dudes that had lost a lot of guys and sacrificed a ton, but I was learning everything
[01:32:39] I could from them because they were veterans and I was brand new.
[01:32:41] I was supposed to bring the great capability, but the reality was I was just soaking up from
[01:32:45] them as much as I could.
[01:32:47] And I'm, I'm clear in a room with this guy, you know.
[01:32:51] So, the phrase, what am I doing here?
[01:32:55] Went through my head a lot while I was there.
[01:32:59] And it was just kind of, remind you, was it type of place that the deal was is when you got
[01:33:03] there, it was just a bullet train and you just jumped on the train.
[01:33:08] You had to.
[01:33:09] You couldn't slow things down.
[01:33:10] You certainly couldn't ask those other guys, hey, can we dial it back a little bit
[01:33:13] we need to get up to speed?
[01:33:15] They were just doing their thing and if you were going to be anything other than a hindrance
[01:33:18] you need to get on board immediately.
[01:33:21] And so that's what we did as best we could.
[01:33:24] And I have a lot to thank for those guys at T2A because no matter how hard we tried those
[01:33:29] first couple of times we're just getting up to speed.
[01:33:31] We're not, you know, bringing our A game, we're trying to figure out what's going on around
[01:33:35] us and there's no doubt that without those guys, their leadership, their willingness
[01:33:39] to kind of bring us on board and get us up to speed.
[01:33:42] That played a big part.
[01:33:43] We got up to speed quickly, but they won.
[01:33:46] I'm sure, you know, we were struggling to tell us.
[01:33:47] It's just like we were talking about with flying and jiu-jitsu and fighting and everything
[01:33:51] else.
[01:33:52] You show up there and things are going.
[01:33:54] They're not slowed down a third.
[01:33:55] They're going five times faster and you're just seeing, you know, you're getting told
[01:33:59] to clear a room.
[01:34:00] That's the only thing in the world you can see is now this room and you're not aware of
[01:34:03] all this other stuff that's going on and it definitely takes some ops to get your, get
[01:34:07] your senses about you of what's happening.
[01:34:09] Yeah.
[01:34:10] And the ops were, there were so many different kinds of operations like I said, you
[01:34:13] need to go from doing just, you know, a three humvy presence patrol and downtown
[01:34:18] or body is not cool. It's not. It's just you're just waiting for something to go wrong,
[01:34:24] you know, whether it's getting lit up, you know, in a firefight, RPG's getting shot. I mean,
[01:34:27] you were literally just driving around waiting for somebody to do something to you, you
[01:34:31] know, these presence patrols.
[01:34:32] And then you go right from that to you get some intelligence that somebody needed to
[01:34:37] grab was in, you know, a house somewhere in a totally different environment and you'd be
[01:34:40] off doing a raid.
[01:34:42] We help stand up the QRF. You talked about that in the past.
[01:34:44] The quick reaction force where you literally just waited right outside the gate
[01:34:48] to the main base for somebody to call for help. Okay, something's gone wrong. It's here,
[01:34:53] come help us. And so we just started doing all these missions. And I, I just was on board
[01:35:00] with all of them. And they vary. They were very different from day to day. And you got
[01:35:04] to call for fire, too. Do you legit?
[01:35:06] We did. We, we between me, I did a lot and my teams, we, I controlled the release of every
[01:35:13] single piece of ordinance in the Marine Corps imagery, Marine Corps inventory. So every piece
[01:35:19] of ordinance that the, the air, the hornets and the carriers dropped and everything from
[01:35:23] the huge in the cobras and our, we called our teller as well. They had a, you know,
[01:35:28] a, a field of artillery battalion out there that we did controls from as I think, if I did
[01:35:33] myself. So, you know, that store, you know, you get to TBS. There's an old saying in the
[01:35:38] Marine Corps, we all subscribed to it. Every Marine's a rifleman. And we are a top
[01:35:42] unit instructor that could not be further from the truth. Because the last thing you are
[01:35:47] as a top gun, as the training officer at Top Gun, skiing in Lake Tahoe on the Saturday afternoon
[01:35:52] is a rifleman. But I will, I will say this for the Marine Corps. Yeah, I'm biased. I'm a little
[01:35:57] proctor of the Marine Corps. Dude, it's all in there. The OCS, TBS, all that exposure, all
[01:36:03] that doctrine, everything that you learn, it's there. Now it took a while to dig down and
[01:36:06] find it. And those same things that when I went to OCS and I was a skiniest guy there and
[01:36:10] I was scared I couldn't get through it on my way to second. Bigger tougher, stronger
[01:36:14] dudes are doing this or not doing this and I am. It's all in there. And so I just had to
[01:36:19] figure out a tap that stuff again and bring it back up and just go do it. So, great decision.
[01:36:27] Nira, I am in Ramadi, get an after it. And then you guys showed up. Yeah, there was one story
[01:36:32] you were telling me that you were calling for fire up in MC1 and it was your buddy. Yeah.
[01:36:39] Yeah, we are doing what's called movement to contact my favorite mission as a pilot. Nothing
[01:36:45] better than movement to contact. And the movement to contact mission is you literally drive your
[01:36:49] humbys, take all your your folks out and you set up a staging area in the north side of this
[01:36:54] this big area is big, kind of wooded dirt has like little ravines and trees and stuff like that.
[01:36:59] And we would just we would walk up a troll. And you know, if 10 15 guys would just go from north
[01:37:05] to south and the mission was called movement to contact. So you walked until you got in contact.
[01:37:09] Which went you got into a firefight. And I remember not the same day but my first day going there.
[01:37:14] I think it was a Bravo Company at 2 to 8. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure it was and I met
[01:37:18] the platoon commander for the first time. And I kind of get out of my humbys. I walk up and I'm looking
[01:37:22] for the platoon commander. I'm there as a supporting asset. I'm a helpful guy because I bring
[01:37:25] airplanes. It's going to be good for them. And he walks up and he's got a shotgun hanging on his
[01:37:30] kid. And you know I was a brand new guy but I was I'm like hey what's with the shotgun?
[01:37:36] You know I have a rifle. He was like hey the bounce with the I found that this is the best weapon
[01:37:41] for these type of missions. And it turns out he actually was right on that patrol. It's like
[01:37:47] dude what am I doing here man? You know I'm going to do a foot patrol with a guy with shotgun.
[01:37:52] So I knew that I was in there's a lot in store for that. And we would do these patrols
[01:37:58] these these movement contacts and you'd end up in a building. And my job as a fact was hey get out
[01:38:02] in the building get up on top of the roof right away and I would do Overwatch. You know similar
[01:38:07] different assets I had airplanes I had radios seals would do Overwatch all the time and there's
[01:38:11] just a matter of cover and moves. I would get up in the roof and I'd go hey this is what I see.
[01:38:14] This is what the airplane sees. Okay you guys jump to that next building. Sometimes the next building
[01:38:18] would be 20 yards away sometimes it would be 200 yards away. So you would you would just do these
[01:38:23] bounding movements building to building and then when they get to the next building my other guy would
[01:38:27] be up in the roof. It's a good way to run down and go to the next building.
[01:38:34] And so we get into this building and as soon as they get up on top of the roof of the building
[01:38:40] so if you can picture it half of us are in the roof of the building half of the other guys are
[01:38:44] trying to move to the other building so they're out in the open. And from that other building as I
[01:38:48] get up in the roof that I look up in the first one happens is like three RPGs hit the building
[01:38:53] that I'm in directly underneath me. Probably my team by like 15 feet below us so above their heads
[01:38:59] and below us that's the first thing that happens and there was a vehicle like a truck and I was a
[01:39:04] car was like just some car in between on a look kind of a dirt road behind some trees where this
[01:39:10] fire came from and we had airplanes overhead. There was two F-18 D's I remember from an East Coast
[01:39:16] squadron and you know a TBS they teach you hey everyone Marines arrive on man and they say
[01:39:21] they tell you these stories is that one day you're going to be in a position where you're going to
[01:39:27] be in a firefight and there's going to be an airplane overhead and it's going to be a buddy
[01:39:30] of yours from TBS going to be your old buddy and you're going to be like hey Jaco it's day to
[01:39:34] help me out and Dave's going to roll in on his white horse and come over this hornet and blast
[01:39:38] these things out and your infantry buddy is going to thank you one day. I'm going to write on.
[01:39:43] The only problem was that I was on the ground and the guy I find the airplane was one of my closest
[01:39:49] friends again and Boo Frieden was an opso of the squash and I just left and no joke I'm like
[01:39:57] hey we're in a troops in contact you know we're taking fire from wherever and on the radio
[01:40:02] he says hey chip it's Boo what do you need and it took me to wrap back to TBS on the problem was I was supposed
[01:40:07] to be in an airplane when that happened and I'm like I said I said South to North call wings level
[01:40:15] and that's what happened and I got four passes from these FATs did these strafing runs on this car
[01:40:21] and I remember looking at the army guys with his first lieutenant and I looked at him I go
[01:40:26] you're going to be fine like super cool like very chill hey this just happened I see what's going on
[01:40:31] there's hornets over head out I saw everything what do you need I need this we're in and you
[01:40:36] the X call is wings level hey you're cleared hot and you know the hair and arms stand up
[01:40:41] telling us sorry just one of those stories where the Marine Corps for whatever insane reason
[01:40:47] will take FATs and train them millions of dollars and ten years of training them and they'll stick
[01:40:51] them on the ground and it's for that exact reason that that exact event was I could bring an asset
[01:40:58] that the army would never have an environment that they would never be able to use and through
[01:41:03] two buddies just talking pointing was to each other on the radio make it happen in like that and
[01:41:12] I was supposed to be in that airplane jacco that's how it was supposed to work out but in that
[01:41:16] particular day of man it was the roles of reverse but it was it was an awesome it was kind of a
[01:41:20] culmination of a lot of things like that the Marine Corps it's a legit that thing they'd read
[01:41:24] nuts it's a real thing and it was pretty satisfying to be awesome you see that carburetor in the ground
[01:41:29] and then eventually yeah I don't know maybe a month or so goes by and we show up and who's the
[01:41:36] first who do you meet first life yep life was the first guy that I met actually life in Tony
[01:41:44] all right show up together um so we had seen you guys you know we had turned over and we were just
[01:41:51] kind of getting up to speed we probably been there maybe a month or so before you guys had so you
[01:41:55] know quick learning curve we're just kind of getting comfortable with what's going on we also
[01:41:59] know there's a new brigade of platoon coming in I'm sorry a new um uh uh armor division coming in
[01:42:05] the we know that the unit that we're there the two to eight that brigade combat team is leaving
[01:42:09] we knew new brigade combat team is coming in and we were actually in just a relative a short
[01:42:14] period of time we were kind of the continuity because all the old guys are leaving we had we had the
[01:42:17] overlap so we had a kind of a prominent role with a new battalion and the new battalion commander
[01:42:21] he's retired now um awesome dude from uh one three seven armor guy named Tedesco just
[01:42:28] an awesome dude just an awesome dude awesome um he would have been there as part of his
[01:42:33] turnover it had come out a couple months prior maybe a month prior and saw us and we had my favorite
[01:42:37] thing about Tedesco is like he said awesome guy we we were getting ready to do a big operation
[01:42:44] with them I think it was the first time we were pushing the south center of our body and we were in his
[01:42:48] briefing and he's quoting pat but he's quoting pat in the movie he's just kidding yeah I was like
[01:42:55] yes yes thank you thank you for bringing me here this day he was awesome and he had seen me
[01:43:01] he just so happened when he was doing his initial turnover before the the the battalion came out
[01:43:06] I had done I had controlled uh um a release I controlled a hellfire and blew up a car and he got
[01:43:14] to see it and it was kind of a cool thing is he comes and he's like who you know who these guys
[01:43:17] uh I'm in the middle of doing a real control happening being the COC that day
[01:43:21] blew up a car it's all in the video get this big TV screens to show the whole thing this card
[01:43:25] detonates and cool pictures and everything and he he comes over to me after we're done I'm kind of
[01:43:30] sitting there and he said Lieutenant Colonel and the major in the hicer he's like can you do that
[01:43:33] when we get here my absolutely man he's like we're gonna get along great that was my
[01:43:38] initial inter-inter-actual with him so it was awesome and so we knew when they were coming back we
[01:43:42] had already just to virtually that experience built some pretty good inroads of them and we
[01:43:46] are gonna do some good work he was also the type of guy look there's this is a whole brigade
[01:43:51] combat team came in that's 5000 guys but his battalion that group of you know several hundred
[01:43:55] was really the core group that I initially did most of my work with and his approach was if you
[01:44:00] can help us you're on the team they're um same exact attitude he had with us yeah for sure for
[01:44:06] all the enablers so uh they were called the bandits and they had a little bandit pin kind of a
[01:44:10] skull and crosspone's kind of thing you were if you you were I was a bandit teacher just totally
[01:44:16] onboard the team and he treated us like his own guys and that was awesome and so um all the enablers
[01:44:23] we had military we had working dogs we had explosive ordinance disposal we had the angle go
[01:44:27] folks we had the seals in all these different groups from different places that none of them were
[01:44:31] assigned to him but his approach was if you can help my soldiers out you're on your bandit you're on
[01:44:36] the team and everybody's like right on let's do this because that's you need to work with them
[01:44:40] anyway I'm as well make the best of it we started to do a couple of missions and everyone of
[01:44:46] those missions was your teams and my teams uh and I would say probably in the first week or so you
[01:44:51] know I'm guessing a little bit of dates but relatively quick in the first couple of missions
[01:44:55] we are doing the similar things we were bringing support and Overwatch and helping these guys
[01:45:00] through their job which is the exact same thing you guys were doing you know totally different
[01:45:03] ways but ultimately we were supporting these guys I meant my my little building there or one day
[01:45:09] whatever just sitting around prepping for something and in walks lay in Tony you know they
[01:45:14] they drove over from your base which is kind of you know a little bit of a haul around around
[01:45:18] their job and it goes hey man um love to work as you more we find a way that we can work together
[01:45:24] in some of these missions and we got this big mission coming up you want to come down and
[01:45:28] and breathe with us oh yeah absolutely I'd love to go breathe with the seals and be awesome
[01:45:34] thought it would just be the kind of cool one time thing I could see how seals do the business um and
[01:45:39] that was it that was his introduction had lathe and Tony I'll be really candid I'd like to think
[01:45:43] I would have done that I doubt I would have gone to shark base and knocked on your door and said hey
[01:45:48] lathe jacca let's do some work together he made that initial contact and him and Tony were
[01:45:53] definitely equal opportunity employers exactly and we the same thing as you know Colonel Tadesco
[01:45:58] if we thought someone could do something to help us out or we could complement each other in any
[01:46:02] way man we were knocking on doors to to try and make that happen for sure yeah and that was his
[01:46:07] approach um I didn't I'd never done any work on the ground I didn't know much about the seals
[01:46:12] I'll be very blunt I had my own opinion of what I assumed you guys would be like and it was
[01:46:19] probably something out of the movies expected like long beards and do's just running around doing
[01:46:23] their own thing uh and so I was actually a little surprised that that lathe came and asked to do
[01:46:28] some work with us and so I I went to that first night mission uh that first brief I don't want
[01:46:33] to say I was skeptical but I was certainly interested in what because my fear was that you guys
[01:46:38] are going to go do your own thing and my guys are kind of just either not be able to keep up
[01:46:42] not know what you're doing and not fit in very well and be able to help out and just kind of put
[01:46:45] ourselves at risk and and look I'll I'll say this very bluntly I have a very high bar when you
[01:46:53] leave Top Gunna what to expect from a mission brief and mission execution a mission debrief because that's
[01:46:58] what we're all about and I was pretty sure that there's no chance that you're going to do anything
[01:47:02] anywhere near that and I was shocked and kind of overwhelmed at how professional your
[01:47:11] organ at your team was and that was the biggest thing for me was what are these guys going to be like
[01:47:15] I just sort of picture day kind of a pickup game hit us go there and just you know kill some
[01:47:19] bad guys and come on back and high five each other and dude it was one of the most professional
[01:47:23] organized mission briefs I totally understood what your plan was I knew exactly what I was going to fit in
[01:47:28] we went and did it and then you guys debriefed after we came back after this it was a relative
[01:47:32] on event nothing really happened that night in terms of in the grand scheme of things that we saw
[01:47:36] over there and then you debriefed it you guys came back and you mission debriefed user there
[01:47:41] kind of clean a weapons and going through and analyzing what happened and that was it man I was totally
[01:47:47] on board I was I was I was I was sold that we could work together like pretty effectively
[01:47:52] and that was kind of the beginning it just sort of started out of the blue and you guys
[01:47:56] came down and asked to do some good work and we did a lot of work you're team did a lot of work with us
[01:48:03] because we we started to think because for our from our perspective and I know there's one
[01:48:08] junior officer out there who's now probably a lieutenant commander or maybe even a commander at this
[01:48:12] point but at that time you know he was on his first deployment and he was a jaytah what we call
[01:48:17] in the seal teams are air controllers are called a jaytah and so here he is and some of those
[01:48:22] missions instead of being a seal he's being a jaytah so he's one of those guys that looked over it
[01:48:28] you guys and said hey wait a second can you take this radio for me and do that thing so I can go
[01:48:32] do my frogman stuff over here and that at and plus again to be blunt you guys could do it a lot
[01:48:40] better than we could period you know we you know you were an F-18 pilot for crying out loud
[01:48:45] and we had a new guy junior officer on the radio trying to call for five you guys are just
[01:48:49] imminently better qualified to do it and so yeah we looked at it as if okay we that gives us one
[01:48:56] more shooter and it gives us a whole new level of expertise now of course there's jaytah
[01:49:01] and the seal teams that they are a lot more experience and they are awesome and of course but in our
[01:49:06] group you to bring you guys was just a huge level up for us to get a lot better and give us more
[01:49:12] people to maneuver as seals on assaults or on Overwatch or whatever so it turned out to be a
[01:49:19] real good little little relationship that I got going there it was a classic win win when when a
[01:49:25] seal says hey would you control the air so I can go shoot people you know and that means I'm no I don't
[01:49:32] have to clear that room and being a position where I might have to do something like that I'm all over
[01:49:36] and I yeah I know you're talking about we had a he and I had a great relationship someone that I
[01:49:40] really loved working with who wanted to go be a frogman like you said I wanted to go control
[01:49:46] their plants and we found a way to make that stuff work now it was it was a big deal for me though
[01:49:54] man to to for me and my guys to work with you guys because you've said this on the podcast and I know
[01:50:02] I know how organizations can we're not necessarily perocule that we don't trust other people
[01:50:07] but we get really comfortable how we do business and to just bring in another group of dudes I think
[01:50:12] this also speaks volumes to the desk and all those guys you're gonna just you want to make sure
[01:50:17] those guys can keep up you know and everybody knows that you guys are legit man and to keep up you
[01:50:23] got you're not to keep up you're not to carry your own weight and you're gonna have to make it happen
[01:50:26] you're gonna have to provide something because the minute you become a drain on the on the team
[01:50:31] you know you're gonna get cut loose and we we couldn't afford to be a drain on you and we couldn't
[01:50:36] afford to have other people be a drain on us so I think there's a lot of kind of at the beginning of
[01:50:41] there's there are a lot of reasons why it wouldn't have worked there's a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn't have
[01:50:45] worked and the only reason it did work is that everybody was committed to building a relationship to support
[01:50:50] the battalion that was it we all have the same end state in mind it wasn't about what can the seals do to be
[01:50:55] seals and be great that you know what can we do to support those guys yeah well this is a whole thing I was
[01:50:58] opening up with that's sort of where that came from it's just this attitude that everybody there was on the same
[01:51:04] team straight up on the same team and so then that turned into big missions you know big missions
[01:51:10] pushing into Ramadi putting in the combat outpost you know night after night after night
[01:51:16] day after day doing those those big operations and that relationship just got just got stronger and stronger
[01:51:23] you know lay obviously with you and and just turned into something really
[01:51:30] we not just not just cool but man effective yeah effective it was I mean in that deployment I
[01:51:40] kept along journal like I took a lot of notes on my experience there and I've gone back and
[01:51:45] we read it a few times and I've somewhat recently throughout that whole thing one of the common
[01:51:50] themes is how the the lathe and I did this today are we did stuff with you all the time and it
[01:51:59] kind of became in that middle that kind of June July August I mean that was all we were really doing
[01:52:05] because we were so busy and the big up was kicking off and we were starting to get into downtown
[01:52:10] but you know you never been all these clearing all this stuff and so the need for us to support
[01:52:16] the army the need for you to support the army again we could have had ten times many of folks and
[01:52:20] we've probably still could have done more work um everything in that journal it's just about what we're
[01:52:26] doing together I think at the time I just kind of lost track of it because we were just every day
[01:52:30] get up and go do something I mean there's no down days there was hardly ever any time we weren't doing
[01:52:34] anything and it was almost always with you guys and it was a huge highlight for me to to to be with
[01:52:43] a group of guys that were so on board with just making things happen you guys had an incredible
[01:52:50] Mac of this is in the way or this process keeps it yeah we got that sort of down hey I need to get air
[01:52:56] points uh that what yeah did to do this and this you had no no we get we get this sort of out so
[01:53:02] you guys had kind of had cornered the market on what do you need will make we'll get it will make it happen
[01:53:07] and for me to be able to get that asset sort of delivered that I could and you did all the work
[01:53:12] to get it but I can control the hell out of it right on man I didn't have do any of the work to
[01:53:16] explain why I needed this because you guys did all that work and you had a valid reason for it they
[01:53:21] were laughing at me if I said I wanted an AC 130 gunship like who are you I'm Dave Burke man and
[01:53:26] like negative lathe and jocca need an AC 130 gunship not every time you know obviously there's a
[01:53:31] thin asset but that thing should have over head and then you get the guy we were talking about
[01:53:34] like you want to control this I'm like yes I do I want to control this thing so there's a lot of
[01:53:39] mutual benefit there and I think we also proved is I think for the battalion and the brigade they
[01:53:44] figured out that we were really helpful in helping those guys accomplish what they wanted to accomplish
[01:53:48] and that was just I'm not putting very good words to it right now but as obviously real rewarding
[01:53:52] and it was a highlight of that deployment is our ability to work together through like I said
[01:53:58] there's a whole laundry list of reasons why we shouldn't have been able to do this a bunch you didn't
[01:54:01] work for me I didn't have rank you you're guy there's just a whole bunch institutional roadblocks
[01:54:06] that we could just stay in our own corners and our own thing and you and I could have never met
[01:54:09] and that wouldn't have really been all that uncommon you would have just been optimal
[01:54:15] it worked out man yeah a lot of awesome highlights all that deployment and obviously
[01:54:24] some of the worst days of our lives are over there June 20th
[01:54:30] talking about that yeah man so obviously I know we're gonna talk about this
[01:54:43] so we had been there quite a bit and I remember kind of the shock when we first got there talking
[01:54:48] to the two to eight I had my first am there I go to Alfa company and they've got them a memorial outside
[01:54:54] of their compound of all the soldiers that had been killed I can picture it's just kind of like a
[01:54:58] names are on a little placard and it's kind of a tall little pyramid looking thing with the
[01:55:03] names on there and you see it you understand it hey people have died here you get it it's not hard
[01:55:11] to to understand that those things have happened but there's this a level of disconnect when you
[01:55:16] first get there like people are dying but you know you haven't seen it and then you know very
[01:55:21] quick I think probably my second mission out there was kind of a QRF from a vehicle ID so basically
[01:55:26] I'm in a surgeon with a bunch of bombs in his vehicles got on between American Compo and
[01:55:32] blew himself up so I see my first dead body you know I see this real combat people are dying
[01:55:38] here it was an enemy wasn't the same and then you know March April May we started taking I mean
[01:55:47] not started we continue to take casualties and I'm starting to go to memorials and we're starting to
[01:55:51] see guys that we knew and worked with and were friends with and built relations with and
[01:55:56] they're they're they're getting killed or really gravely wounded and those memorials started to
[01:56:01] become every couple of days we're going to a memorial and that sort of ways on you I thought about
[01:56:06] this a lot and how it affected me you know it's a pilot being out of my comfort zone in this environment
[01:56:10] and what that was like but without trying to diminish any of that loss
[01:56:18] there's a there's a disconnect when it's not your person it's not your guy and on June 20th
[01:56:28] so Chris Leon who was my radio operator we were in a building that we had been in let me back up I was
[01:56:34] not there I had left that building that morning gone back to the CUC Adam's team with Chris had
[01:56:39] replaced us and we're basically just going back and forth operations and this this combat outpost
[01:56:43] because it gave us a really good view of the north part of the city and we had to be there basically
[01:56:48] 24 seven and and Chris and and Adam's team had gone back out there and they were supposed to go
[01:56:54] from like 12 to 4 something like that I don't know what it was we gave him like a six-hour shift or
[01:56:58] something and then we were going to kind of figure out if we replace or start over we just sort of
[01:57:04] sent him out there and we're going to come back a little bit and I got to call on the radio
[01:57:08] from the battalion saying hey can you extend your angle go team out here for four hours we're going to
[01:57:12] go do another movement to do some clearing again rush of that hey Adam can you guys stay out
[01:57:17] for another couple hours you know support we're going to get you what not you know standard answer
[01:57:21] yeah Roger that no problem and during that time it was not uncommon to take fire and from that
[01:57:30] in that OP and there was some sniper fire and the first shot there was a younger marina lands
[01:57:39] corporal who was up there and Chris ran up from the other side and kind of put him down you know
[01:57:44] say hey once you get down take cover go go over the other side of the building and Chris got up
[01:57:50] to start to he was doing his observation to try to figure out what was going on and Chris was shot by
[01:57:56] sniper and I get a call kind of very closely after that from Adam you know I'm kind of man in
[01:58:04] the radio's all the time anyway even our home will base there like we're we had a radio right there
[01:58:09] so I was never really not there I was just on the radio say hey corporal landsman hit we're on a
[01:58:14] way back and I was about it I didn't have any real good sense of anything was going on and um
[01:58:23] a little panic sets in like okay and I don't want to press for too much information I get a call
[01:58:29] from alpha company who would who'd manned all the observation posts between where he was and where
[01:58:34] we were that they were clearing make sure the roads were clear they're using their tanks and
[01:58:37] their radlies so they could pick him up and bring a straight shot because that was a pretty busy
[01:58:41] dangerous road you always had to look out for ideas and stuff like that and so everybody's kind of
[01:58:46] picking up the pace to clear out that road and he's coming back and I get a call hey he's breathing
[01:58:52] we're heading straight to Charlie Med and I'm like all right okay I kind of had this sense of this
[01:58:58] is going to be okay Charlie Med is this medical facility on the the camp that we were stationed at
[01:59:06] there and was literally a hundred yards from where I slept and I just ran down to Charlie Med
[01:59:11] to meet the humbill I was there and I'm sorry it wasn't humbill it was a Bradley about the fighting
[01:59:16] vehicle Bradley pulls up myself and my my corpsman dock are there the the the Bradley has a door
[01:59:24] on the back of the body that comes down like a ramp and the ramp comes down he's on a stretcher
[01:59:30] dock goes up to get the front piece of the stretcher I'm at the bottom and he comes down
[01:59:34] carrying the stretcher and Chris is laying on the stretcher and I he went right by my look
[01:59:39] at a minute immediately that he was gone I mean it was gone it was I could see the entrance
[01:59:46] who ended the whole thing was all kind of they had stabilized and they had done their best to kind of
[01:59:49] manage the wood but there was no question that the outcome had already played itself out and Chris was
[01:59:54] gone they take a man to the medical facility which I'd been in and you've been in a dozen times
[02:00:00] for a whole host of different reasons but it always been somebody else I mean I may have known
[02:00:05] that person and been close to that person but it was always somebody else and dock goes in with
[02:00:10] him he's carrying the stretcher and he comes out and probably jack was quite 10 seconds and he just
[02:00:14] comes out with the head shaken and I knew I wasn't holding my breath or I knew but he kind of came
[02:00:21] out and and just sort of I guess confirmed if that's the word I'm looking forward to sort of
[02:00:25] made it official that that Chris had been killed and it sort of initiated just a very strange kind
[02:00:36] of very sequence of events so I I knew Adam and the rest of team were trying to get back and
[02:00:42] they're going to have a slower road back because they're not going to get the support it's just
[02:00:45] going to take a little more time going to get their gear and all the things go along with
[02:00:48] that Chris just got loaded in the humbian and racing back and Bradley they're kind of loaded up
[02:00:53] their humbians and it's just going to take some time and I know like I need to get back to the vehicle
[02:00:57] we parked our trucks because I want to meet them there and I walk back like I said it was maybe
[02:01:02] 100 yards from my hooch to Charlie Man and I get about halfway there and I had this thought that
[02:01:08] that I maybe didn't confirm that Chris was killed and so I actually walked all the way back
[02:01:15] to go find there's a senior medical officer we called him the smoke really awesome guy that dealt
[02:01:19] with all the casualties there who I knew because I had done control I had controlled helicopter
[02:01:24] cast of acts on wounded folks I've been there a lot we did we get blood I mean we were in that facility
[02:01:29] all the time and I I don't know why I needed to do it but I was I I'm just I had a talk
[02:01:39] I'm gonna say is is is is is is is he is he killed is like yeah I'm sorry man you know
[02:01:46] it was kind of an odd conversation I could tell the why he was looking like why I ask him
[02:01:50] this question like it just was one of those things and I was in sort of I think it's a stage
[02:01:55] of disbelief that as I walked back and I was going to deliver the news I had sort of told
[02:01:59] myself like I can't tell them in case what if I'm wrong because I never really went through that
[02:02:04] I saw him I saw Doc but there were no words or exchange and I had this very odd like walking
[02:02:09] back and forth a couple of times and kind of sorting it out and then you know my job was
[02:02:15] next thing I had to do is I Adam I watched the trucks pull up they all get out you know four
[02:02:20] guys and everybody else had heard you know all the angle code teams that were there and we shared
[02:02:24] a facility with EOD and working with everybody you know where did it was passed something had
[02:02:29] happened and I you know a corphing on corphing on stead you know we do something called
[02:02:39] a hero flight and a hero flight is going to be like 1600 I got the information like 10 minutes
[02:02:46] the process of them bringing a casualty that casualty not surviving and then moving they had
[02:02:52] that thing wired and I'd seen it done a bunch of times but it just it was Chris it was my guy
[02:02:58] he was a guy that I just knew differently than everybody else I just saw him differently
[02:03:02] when we entered our trucks he was the back left and I was the front right and our trucks are always
[02:03:07] parked back into their spots so they're always side by side so the back left of his truck
[02:03:11] entered door and the right front of my truck door we always had a fight space for each other
[02:03:17] you know Chris was a standard perfect Marine like he could be 90% of the way through if he
[02:03:22] saw me walking up he'd get out of the way close the door to let me in on my cockman dude like just
[02:03:25] he was a great Marine just I walked past that kid without even really talking him you know a thousand
[02:03:31] times just every single day a couple of times a day and it demystifies as a Marine
[02:03:44] you just live a slightly bit for me I shouldn't say you how it felt for me as I just felt
[02:03:50] with all that was going on and all the destruction and the death and the violence and all the
[02:03:54] things that I'd sort of become accustomed to at that point there's just an aspect of it that's just
[02:03:58] a tiny bit insulated in your life to a really small degree but it's enough to just keep you
[02:04:04] sort of preserved and when Chris was killed it just sort of exposed that it broke down one of my
[02:04:14] last little boundary of I'm I'm okay here because I can do this because I'm gonna get through this I'm
[02:04:21] gonna go home and everything's gonna be okay and that hurt a lot that hurt in ways that I did not
[02:04:32] understand how it was gonna hurt I just didn't I just didn't know what that was gonna be like
[02:04:39] and the the all those next steps and you I know you know this because you you saw it
[02:04:44] he's on a helicopter and he's gone flying away in that 46 in what feels like about a minute
[02:04:51] it's ours and our even rehearsed the movement onto the to carry him onto the hell but
[02:04:58] you go from Chris's city is on his way into watching the helicopter fly away and it feels like
[02:05:02] it takes about that long and then you're just sort of left and you walk back you literally walk away
[02:05:07] from the medical facility where the helicopter just takes off and you walk back on to your original
[02:05:11] you just go back to your room only Chris has gone and it's like that whole deployment kind of
[02:05:17] re I don't know what the right word is it's like I had to start the deployment again because
[02:05:22] all the things that I was dealing with and all things that I was managing and leading is as
[02:05:25] it's a leader would know whatever you want to say was my job it all is sort of change in terms of
[02:05:32] what I thought really well the guys that I was working with everything was different now because it was
[02:05:40] their brother that was gone not somebody else and it's just sort of changed the calculus and
[02:05:45] it really redefined the rest of that deployment and I'll be really really blunt it was hard for me
[02:05:53] to not fold and there was a lot of instinct of like I do not want to do this anymore I do not want
[02:05:58] to be here this is more than I had bargained for and this we can laugh about volunteering and
[02:06:04] being a Marie you know it was a little more than I bargained for and look man we had done some crazy
[02:06:11] stuff at that point and I'd seen some bad things happen I was a participant in some bad things
[02:06:16] and I was okay I was doing okay and I was gonna be okay with that and this one just sort of
[02:06:23] I just it's I struggled with it a little bit so it was a tough day man
[02:06:28] yeah and obviously you know for for us it was you know what a month and a half later
[02:06:38] on August 2nd when Mark got killed and you know I think that's one of the things that
[02:06:44] that we felt you know that little bit of insulation that you're talking about
[02:06:50] we felt that we felt I would say I would say actually more insulated because
[02:06:57] you know my guys were out there taking massive risks getting in crazy gun fights
[02:07:03] getting after it to a degree that no one had ever thought they would and we were doing all right we
[02:07:09] had a couple guys get wounded here and there but they were okay and honestly that guys getting wounded
[02:07:14] you know it's not a devastating wound I mean I had you know one of my guys got wounded early on and
[02:07:20] he almost lost his leg but guess what he didn't and that that didn't make us feel more vulnerable
[02:07:25] in my mind it made us feel stronger and like hey we might get wounded but what we're gonna be good
[02:07:32] and so yeah when Mark got killed and especially Mark who was you know such a
[02:07:36] gargarius and such a guy so full of life that you don't think he can be killed you don't think
[02:07:43] he can be killed and same thing you know that insulation was just completely shattered and I think
[02:07:49] what was also it was it was recognizable it was recognizable to me was that other people outside of
[02:08:00] task munibrusor they fought the same thing they fought hey the seals are here they're gonna they're
[02:08:07] they're gonna they're gonna push through this they're gonna they're gonna win and there nothing's
[02:08:12] gonna happen to them and we saw it you know at the memorial service you could see in guys faces that
[02:08:18] they were they were also their insulation about us was was kind of shattered too and then it
[02:08:27] turns into damn if the seals can get killed where am I at I think that was another thing that
[02:08:34] that really you know that was another thing that really just made Mark get and killed such a
[02:08:38] such an impact to all of us there there's no doubt that what you just said is exactly how
[02:08:44] it played out you were the first guy to talk to me when Chris's helicopter flies away it's
[02:08:51] literally dusty and you know the helicopter's loud and it kicks up dust there and it was dark it was
[02:08:56] nighttime and you came up to me and I don't remember the exact words but we were just turning around
[02:09:02] and walking back and you said something like we're gonna get after this guys and we're gonna
[02:09:07] go find the cybersitter doing this something to those wars and it was basically like we're
[02:09:11] gonna take care of this and I remember feeling really comforted by that like yeah man yeah go do
[02:09:19] that that's awesome and feeling good about that that we weren't helpless and we're just gonna
[02:09:25] suck it up and deal with this just this terrible loss that we're gonna get something from this
[02:09:30] we're gonna go find some guys and go get after it and we're gonna go kill these guys and you
[02:09:36] guys we're gonna you guys are gonna make that happen and I remember feeling I remember how that
[02:09:41] felt and look June 20th August 2nd just like everything else was a blur man it was like
[02:09:47] it might as well just been the next day because things happened so fast there and I was
[02:09:53] you know I wasn't on the patrol on the on August 2nd but I was on the radio I was
[02:09:58] got to run in the air I was doing all the same stuff we always did you know and I was back in
[02:10:02] the CUC with you working that mission all that stuff that happened and before you know it we're
[02:10:08] watching that helicopter fly away you know or he's gone you know and you and you're seeing
[02:10:16] the the the aftermath of that and I actually went back last night to look at my journal entry
[02:10:21] for that day because I ended up running down Charlie Medigan because that's where everybody came in
[02:10:26] and I remember seeing Lave there you know Lave was a guy I don't work with the ton and
[02:10:29] there he is he's got a wound I'm looking at him over I'm saying over as I told her they kind of
[02:10:32] shirt off they're they're they're attending to Lave who was Lave was a larger than life
[02:10:40] you know for guy like me who always kind of fell to a little bit like what the hell am I doing
[02:10:44] her man without my doing with the seals like this isn't sane these guys are just they're just
[02:10:50] larger than life and to see the exposure of that it bothered me and I knew I had the feeling of
[02:10:59] holy cow if this can happen to these guys you know can happen any of us and it's not a good
[02:11:05] feeling and when you saw the guys from the team who it was just it was just everything was
[02:11:08] scrambling and it was just that sense of and I don't want to make a sound like it wasn't
[02:11:12] a pain nobody's panicking or freaking out it was not like that but it was just a tiny bit
[02:11:18] chaotic that makes sense on a small degree but enough when you were so used to just being
[02:11:23] completely not like that that feeling like when Chris loss was it what I felt was like
[02:11:31] oh man I'm not really in good chill any of this I am not in control all that stuff that I've told
[02:11:36] myself all that comfort and confidence and we're getting better and I'm gonna be more effective
[02:11:42] and do more good work until the thing is over it was like no negative that could be you that could
[02:11:49] happen today and then it and between Chris and Mark the army suffered oh I'm God bless we
[02:12:00] are going to memorials like every couple of days people are getting killed all the time and
[02:12:04] everyone of those you wrote that that confidence a little bit and when it happened to Mark and
[02:12:10] Dave that was hard to see that and it that was the feeling that I had it was like yeah
[02:12:23] maybe I'm just lucky you know maybe I maybe this whole thing is just luck
[02:12:29] now look we we regrouped I mean June 20th was a bad day you know we did all the things
[02:12:39] we did the morning we paid our our we ordered him the right way you guys can't we did it the right way and we
[02:12:44] acknowledged Chris but if you kind of think what's gone in the middle of June man there was no
[02:12:52] taken a knee there was no like let's hold off for a second catcher breath the bullet chain was just
[02:12:57] running and as a matter of fact it was just gonna it was actually just gonna get a ton worse you remember
[02:13:00] July and August were just they were insane they were insane so we we lost Chris really at the
[02:13:06] big ramp up you know we had done a big movement in earlier in June and we were really starting
[02:13:11] to lay into the city but the real you know the crazy jay block you know that kind of stuff all
[02:13:16] that stuff was all out in front of us and so for me it was you know my entire career I've done a
[02:13:22] whole bunch of really great stuff in my career and nothing is even nothing is even it's not anymore talking
[02:13:27] about what anything else in my career has meant compared to that deployment and then that day I mean
[02:13:33] it's just light years different and it was like you gotta get up and go do it the very next
[02:13:40] day and it's a remember going that first patrol that first mission and trying to that feeling of
[02:13:46] okay yeah it's different and you got I think you've got one of two ways to go with that it's either
[02:13:50] gonna get inside your heading kind of mess with you and break you a little bit and and I could feel
[02:13:54] that happening or you just you just you just don't you just shut it down and just go do it
[02:14:00] and I found how to compartmentalize you know I'd come back I'd have moments when I was back
[02:14:07] on my whoochup and the roof by myself I have my moments man no I don't want anybody to think
[02:14:10] that I didn't I had plenty of those moments this is matter fact I I still do to be honest with you
[02:14:15] I still have my moments I go visit Chris her allington on his birthday I go visit Chris and
[02:14:19] that day he was killed I go to visit Chris Memorial Day his mom comes out I see cat she and I
[02:14:25] were very close I have my moments without a doubt but the rest of the three months in Ramadi
[02:14:33] there was just not there wasn't a ton of time to do that so I guess I kind of just saved it
[02:14:38] maybe for for when I came back and it it was there I mean it it's not good but yeah man
[02:14:46] so then you you do come back I mean obviously like you said it ramped up it ramped up all the time
[02:14:57] and the guys were just you know everybody like I'm not just talking about our guys I'm talking
[02:15:02] about everybody it ramped up hardcore it got hotter outside the the the combat got more intense
[02:15:09] the enemy started fighting harder they got more square away and like you said you and the rest of
[02:15:20] the guys there did the mission day after day night after night and then one day you fly home
[02:15:30] yeah and how was that transition for you getting back to the states
[02:15:43] interesting it was an interesting transition so from the time that I left Ramadi
[02:15:50] so you would pack up our stuff we left Ramadi I think we weren't to co-8 for day or two
[02:15:54] went to Lujoon went to Japan because I had to check out both places Jack I think it was six days
[02:16:02] on the calendar from the day I left Ramadi to the day I landed on a plane in San Diego
[02:16:08] which at the time was all I wanted I was the and I've been fairly good about this right my
[02:16:12] career is when I want things to happen administratively I can make those things happen
[02:16:18] but if I catch one that there's a flight from Japan to San Diego and I can get on that flight
[02:16:23] I'm gonna get on that flight even if my CEO is the young me like how did you get out of here so fast
[02:16:26] like I have the same in the guy in the paper and I got to go and I'm out I wanted to get out quickly
[02:16:31] so I found myself in San Diego executing my next orders which the Marine Corps said you go to
[02:16:37] Ramadi you do the fact you're gonna do the fact you're gonna go back to San Diego from there
[02:16:42] which will be your next at order so I knew while I was in Iraq that San Diego was in my future my wife had
[02:16:47] already moved down there I told you she was living with my best friend Neil who was on that
[02:16:51] fact tour before me so I go in Ramadi his battalion comes home we show up my wife and my best friend
[02:16:57] and living together in San Diego which was really good for her because he was able to kind of
[02:17:03] keep her aware of what's going on but knew exactly how to explain it in a way that wasn't
[02:17:08] gonna freak her out and he also took it out so he knew how to downplay hey I would call hey we're
[02:17:13] doing this no big deal I mean I didn't I wasn't telling him half of what the hell was going on I
[02:17:17] wouldn't you not gonna share those stories so he was a really great resource for her I paid very
[02:17:22] little time worrying about it to be honest with you I was comfortable that she had a good
[02:17:27] support structure which she really didn't we we got married I deployed four months later to Ramadi
[02:17:34] she she started dating a dude who was driving a Corvette and living in Tahoe as a top
[02:17:37] owner structure and and four months after we got married I was in Ramadi so there was no like
[02:17:44] easing so I knew there was just I didn't know at the time didn't think of it but it was
[02:17:49] obvious that looking back that she was just thrown into an environment that she was totally unprepared for
[02:17:56] now forget about just me being gone but just the fact that I was in Ramadi and it's all over
[02:17:59] the news everybody knew it was going on I think one of my Marines is killing me a lot of crazy
[02:18:02] stuff going on and next thing you know I'm home September 28 I'm back in San Diego like
[02:18:07] three hundred sixty five days to the day I'm home and I checked into an F-18 squadron like the
[02:18:13] day after I got home before October 1st I was back into an F-18 squadron San Diego which is insane
[02:18:23] and I to be really blunt I was you know all those guys in Anglican went back to Anglican
[02:18:30] and can't push you in can't handsome in in Japan I was like later bros you know like
[02:18:35] no longer buys you know high five great deployment you know I'm out I was just on other things
[02:18:41] and I kind of extricated myself it's you know I fall the rules I do whatever supposed to do and
[02:18:45] before I know it I'm back there and I honestly I think also kind of kidding myself like that was
[02:18:51] the best thing for me let's get home I knew something was a on this because on the drive home
[02:18:58] from the airport I find a San Diego international just down the road my wife and my my mom who lives in
[02:19:04] San Diego both of them came to pick me up from the airport you've already met my mom great lady
[02:19:08] my wife and my mom picked me up from the airport I got pictures of them meeting me there
[02:19:11] getting the car drive from San Diego international to our house in Pacific Beach and as we're
[02:19:17] pulling like on to Chelsea any up to the house I like screamed at them told them stop talking
[02:19:27] or something like that I said something like I don't even I don't know what it was but I
[02:19:31] think I just remember sitting in the passenger seat and some the gears just start I'm in a truck
[02:19:36] or a car I like whenever I don't know what it was but something's going on and I think just
[02:19:40] the pressure is building and I'm and I have no sense of what's going on I know out of for it
[02:19:44] and they're like having a perfectly normal adult conversation that might have been an octave above
[02:19:51] when I was willing to accept her tolerate maybe and I completely freaked out on my wife and my
[02:19:56] mom let's see in the year and you know they were like oh sorry you know they were super cool no push back
[02:20:02] and it was an indicator like yeah you recognize that immediately like oh god yeah immediately
[02:20:10] and it was that combination recognition of that's not good and clearly I have I have things I
[02:20:18] need to deal with that I wasn't quite aware of so I knew no question right away and I think
[02:20:23] about this a lot with other marines and the things you experience in combat you've talked about
[02:20:28] PTSD a lot look that's the subject you could spend hours on the bottom lines everybody deals with
[02:20:33] things differently doesn't mean you're broken or messed it just it just means you have some
[02:20:37] process you gotta go through and you gotta deal with them we all deal with it differently I had
[02:20:41] maybe talk myself into out 33 as fairly experienced guy I was surrounded by very young marines
[02:20:47] who maybe in my mind didn't have maybe the emotional maturity maybe the life skills to maybe
[02:20:55] manage some of these same chaotic things you know guys at saw Chris get shot you know I maybe kind
[02:21:01] of built myself up a little bit as a little better equipped and I was better equipped in my mind
[02:21:05] and I was I in a matter of 45 minutes from the airport to the house I'm flying off the handle
[02:21:11] on something so it just all it was man it was it was those two things like that's not good
[02:21:20] and this is gonna probably happen again I'm gonna need to I'm gonna need to think about this I
[02:21:24] can't pretend like I'm not gonna just have some sort of residual you can't leave Ramadi
[02:21:29] being San Diego six days later and not bring some baggage home with you and I was bringing some
[02:21:32] baggage home and there's some baggage there a little bit so that transition was was it started
[02:21:43] is there anything that like anything that helped you yeah dude I'll tell you what helped the most
[02:21:48] is my best friend who had been in Ramadi and endured all of that loss the look our story you know
[02:21:54] the the guys that we replaced the guys that replaced us it's a very similar story a lot they understand
[02:21:59] that you know I think having an outlet having one other dude it happened to be my best friend
[02:22:04] super 14 so it was you want to talk about just hitting the jackpot and being the best equipped
[02:22:10] sort of just deal and power through it and and and accept what's going on and and embrace it and
[02:22:14] all those things that go on with it I had an outlet man I had my best friend who I mean he knew
[02:22:19] every place we were I mean it wasn't even like oh he was here now it was the same place yeah
[02:22:24] because Ramadi's not that big it's just not that big man and so we say I was on the corner
[02:22:28] of sunset mission is like yeah there are 500 times yeah and and he was struggling a little bit
[02:22:35] too you know again I it's all relative I mean we're handled it relatively okay you know I'm going
[02:22:41] back to kind of dealing in normal life and but the moment when you get those little spikes and those
[02:22:45] is what kind of comes up and get you those little spikes was a sort of unforeseen kind of reactions
[02:22:50] he could see that in me and I could see that in him we had actually been really we're really good
[02:22:53] for each other when I see him kind of get a little shaky a little break like I'm not you know he's
[02:22:58] not digging his environment a little bit or he'd see that of me you had that other person I kind
[02:23:02] of bring you back to helping you helping you deal with that which is good the flip side of that
[02:23:09] while it was really helpful for him to be there I think it was really tough on Whitney because she
[02:23:15] was not my outlet for that I wasn't kind of got cut out totally and not I didn't certainly not
[02:23:21] by design I'm not like doing this calculation if I don't want my head she's not I'm not going to
[02:23:25] use her as a resource you know for that and to be honest with you too there's also a little part
[02:23:28] of you know what the corner of Michigan sunset is like so totally man and I'll I'll be really
[02:23:34] candid you know I I think I would have been almost embarrassed is maybe not the right word but I
[02:23:41] I wasn't I don't know if I wanted to see that part of it you know I mean like hey they check
[02:23:46] at this ridiculous of own vulnerability that I have right now that I'm going to carry with me
[02:23:49] for God that was how long that's going to come up I didn't know where and you're going to have
[02:23:53] to just deal with it so there was a I think the thing that bothered me the most and was part of
[02:23:58] just kind of getting back to day to day life was it I would get when things didn't go well when
[02:24:03] I had my moments my irrational is just I just get pissed off it was that feeling of so you I have this
[02:24:09] like some event would happen something stupid would catch my attention and kind of height my
[02:24:14] you know my response and because it happened I'd be annoyed myself that I let it that I let it
[02:24:19] bother me and then I'd be pissed off of myself because I let it bother me you know me like this ridiculous
[02:24:24] cycle of I told you the story the other day my wife and I shoot I guarantee you she remembers
[02:24:29] this tour we're walking across the street downtown no no by the beat I think and an auto body
[02:24:35] shop is running the the air drill to pull some tires off I can root you know that kind of sound
[02:24:41] and as we're walking I think my left arm is over her her shoulder we're walking like this
[02:24:47] I hear that sound and my first reaction is I've pushed her down to the ground and in the time that it
[02:24:51] takes to do that and catch that it's happening is maybe a third of a second you know what I mean
[02:24:58] so I hear it I do the I'm I'm reacting and pushing her to the ground I'm kind of getting on top of
[02:25:04] her to do look what up to oh that's the car it's not a thing there's no reason for you to do this
[02:25:10] is about a third of a second and what bothered me the most about it is that I did it not that I
[02:25:15] felt like that is it I reacted to it and I was like embarrassed like what's wrong with me to
[02:25:20] to go through that and she's like what the you know and I it sounded like you know and kind
[02:25:26] of going through the whole thing and I think just the the fact that I had responses pissed me off
[02:25:31] and I would just kind of honestly I have a temper about it and that was she got to see me just
[02:25:36] get pissed off itself for no real good reason which you never really get pissed off like I mean
[02:25:42] I have tempered some pictures stuff that just I would get mad about stuff that just didn't make sense
[02:25:47] I mean I have a temper about things that my computer pisses me off just like it pisses you off
[02:25:52] man that's totally normal right I would get I would have reactions to stuff that just there was
[02:25:57] no way for her to say oh that makes sense I understand it would just be this totally odd ball
[02:26:03] somebody would say something wrong just it would just trigger in ways that she would look at me
[02:26:07] and kind of be like who are you she knew all my flaws she knew everything right along with me and
[02:26:12] all of a sudden now I'm doing all of those stuff for another little thing in the mix so I got my
[02:26:17] wife who we get married I leave a go on this diploma and I come back I'm home for maybe seven
[02:26:21] months before I deploy again in that seven months you know welcome to marriage to Dave Burke you
[02:26:29] know that involves a year long deployment seven months and I rack you know
[02:26:33] God oh knows what the hell I was you know I'm back to work so I'm back at a squadron as the
[02:26:37] exo you know work in ridiculous exo hours in a fighter squadron prepping to go into deployment
[02:26:43] I I voluntarily extend my time to make the deployment which is exactly what you should do at the
[02:26:49] beginning of your marriage is volunteer to extend on a deployment I got accepted into grad school
[02:26:54] I was going to go to Dartmouth I was getting out of the Marine Corps I was going to go to get my MBA
[02:26:59] and I remember the conversation of hey I'm going to extend ask me to extend and you know
[02:27:06] as explaining why I was going to do what I was going to do and she's like why why would you do that
[02:27:10] and I said so I can deploy and you hear those words like god did I just say that to my wife like
[02:27:19] which is so I cannot be with you so I can be apart from you so I can hang out the boys and go do that
[02:27:24] you know I mean not retire from the ring you've got to know the Marine Corps so I can not do all these
[02:27:28] other things that I'm not set up this future that I told you all about and so do you on totally
[02:27:32] so to say that my wife and and everybody's got those stories the laundry list of reasons why she
[02:27:38] should have just sort of cut bait and be like no this is not happening is a lot longer than
[02:27:43] the list of reasons why she shouldn't have and props were good she's here and my marriage with her
[02:27:51] you know for all the ups and downs it goes on get everybody's marriage the one thing I don't worry
[02:27:55] about even even when we're at our worst at our absolute worst which our worst is whatever it is we have
[02:28:01] our worst moments at our absolute worst I don't have a shred and have a brain cell of thought of
[02:28:06] I wonder if our marriage is going to survive this you know this throat animal having over god knows
[02:28:10] what you know so we hit kind of went through the fire there and she she got forged yeah big time
[02:28:17] she's a stud she deserves mad props for going through that because I'm not really sure why she did
[02:28:22] to be honest with you she said you know what I can't come up with a good reason to go she had a lot of
[02:28:30] options on the table I'm not sure yeah so it was that transition was tough man you so now you're
[02:28:36] in another squadron you go on to point me again which is another what what are you doing on that
[02:28:40] deployment just more so I'm back in an F-18 squadron on the exo and the opposite I actually did
[02:28:44] both jobs on this deployment we just go to Japan it's a Westtime okay Western Pacific we're back
[02:28:48] in Iwakuni and and Ocanala just doing yeah exercise exercise training I kind of stuff
[02:28:54] get done with that and so now maybe it's time to get out of the Marine Corps before I left
[02:28:58] on that deployment I had told my commander the group commander and the squadron commander hey
[02:29:02] this is it for me I'm hanging it up it's been awesome I happily to extend for this deployment
[02:29:07] that they need to me to go on I was great experience I got to train a bunch of young guys
[02:29:10] life was good but they knew before I left that I was going to be out of the Marine Corps
[02:29:14] at the end of that I deferred at Dartmouth for a year paid my non-refundable deposit which I
[02:29:19] have never gotten back it wasn't that's why they call it non-refundable right absolutely
[02:29:24] there oh my point I wasn't kicking around the idea of getting out I was in full execution we had
[02:29:29] looked at houses like we were in execution this was merely a detour to get to that end state
[02:29:35] and what I'm doing back from that deployment in January I think it is of the following year
[02:29:39] and it it turns out that the Marine Corps wants to send a guy to go fly F-22s for the
[02:29:48] with the year force for three years and they're accepting applications for the F-22 Raptor
[02:29:54] Exchange which had never been happened before never happened since there was a one time thing
[02:29:58] and the guy got it they picked you know it was going to go to non-deploying in NLS and fly the F-22
[02:30:04] Raptor should properly apply I guess it seems like a reasonable thing to do because if they say no then
[02:30:11] yeah I'll just go to play I'll go get my MBA it's all good and Lone Behold at the end of December
[02:30:18] I get the word that I got picked up for this Raptor Exchange and I remember calling it
[02:30:25] in my head and I did the standard day work over sell hey no deploying we're going to go to you know
[02:30:36] it's all there's all the goodness there's no downside you know and she's like shut up you know
[02:30:41] she's and she was good with it you know it was it was it was just another one of those things like
[02:30:46] I can't say no to this this is just something that doesn't happen and you just don't get to
[02:30:50] nobody gets to fly the F-22 in the Marine Corps because the Marine Corps is a fly of 22
[02:30:55] same thing I said when I flew F-16's in Top Gun and all this sort of stuff so it was just
[02:30:59] another thing that I just couldn't believe was happening and I couldn't leave the Marine Corps
[02:31:04] saying I walked away from that I just couldn't and she was totally unbored and okay moment
[02:31:10] didn't get back my non-refundable deposit and uh move the Vegas and start to fly in the F-22 Raptor
[02:31:16] three years up there and then at some point that roll this door oh yeah and that rolls into the F-35
[02:31:22] at some point so I'm fine we're F-22's how many people were flying the F-22 at this point
[02:31:29] so we probably had I knew at the time what number I was I think I might have been
[02:31:37] in the 100 something you know we had two squadrons that were stood up you know and it was
[02:31:43] starting to pick up the pace was early 2008 so the Raptor was just starting to get its legs
[02:31:47] underneath it was starting to building more and it was starting to become a thing and the Marine
[02:31:51] Corps had this idea that they're gonna they're gonna build this new stealth airplane called the F-35
[02:31:54] and they're gonna get it and they wanted somebody to go to the Air Force to learn all the
[02:31:59] airplanes are really similar there's a goal still all their experience and all the pain that they've
[02:32:03] gone through to stand up this thing and then you're gonna bring it back to the Marine Corps so the
[02:32:07] deal was this F-22 gig was it was really high probability I was gonna go right from the F-22 to the F-35
[02:32:12] and command the first operational squadron and the lone-boiled man that's exactly what happened we
[02:32:17] went to Tindall we lived in Tindall for three months when I went through training and
[02:32:23] that was awesome we were living on the beach in Florida for three months it get trained in the
[02:32:26] Raptor we moved out to Vegas lived there for three plus years started a family to my first two kids
[02:32:32] were born in Las Vegas we were we're killing it man I mean it was awesome and as I'm getting
[02:32:38] ready to leave Vegas I get selected to command the first operational there was a guy there before
[02:32:44] they didn't have airplanes they had a guy there was another seal before me but I was gonna go out
[02:32:48] there and accept and start flying the first F-35's the Marine Corps I show up and this poor guy
[02:32:53] was selected to do the same thing the two years prior great dude but you know we'd stayed in touch
[02:32:58] and we were always in contact and helping them stand up with everything and and I get there
[02:33:03] Jacob I'm there I think two days and the first airplane showed up and I'm like what's the
[02:33:09] what's the big deal he spent two years in CSing airplane working I'm there all this paper work
[02:33:14] grinding doing all this has been a straight stuff to prep he gets nowhere plans use you up two days
[02:33:18] that are boom did the amount of work that him and his guys went through to stand up the squadron
[02:33:22] I literally showed up at the work in the next day the first airplane landed yeah that's my new
[02:33:27] nickname for you like this really isn't that hard man what's the big deal and and he and I did a turn
[02:33:33] over and he left and sort of flying up 35's and you know that's a whole part of my career we
[02:33:41] could spend hours on that but I flew the rapture which was an amazing airplane and I flew the
[02:33:46] 35 which was an amazing airplane and I got to totally be relevant in aviation I had sort of exhausted
[02:33:53] I did all the things I wanted to do in the Hornet I loved that airplane I did top
[02:33:57] and I kind of had reached all the things and we talked about this too when when you leave top gun
[02:34:03] you're never going to be that good ever again so it's just a matter of how slow you can make the
[02:34:08] process of getting worse it's just how can you slow it down to be as good as you can knowing
[02:34:14] that you will never be as good as you were there because you're just you're never going to get the
[02:34:17] reps again ever you're just never going to get it and so it's just a matter of kind of slowing
[02:34:22] down that process and at some point in your mind like I don't want to be in this business if I'm not
[02:34:27] at the top of my game when I flew the I have 22 I didn't have a job I didn't I wasn't I wasn't the
[02:34:34] absolute of a squadron which is what I just showed up in the food place I just showed up in
[02:34:37] food the plan I had some leadership responsibility in in the organization so grab the keys from
[02:34:41] someone take it out of spin yeah run into the ground right a little report and be like bring
[02:34:46] a back and get the keys back to the maintenance guys and yeah hey this thing is broken give me another one
[02:34:50] it was it was awesome yeah so I did that totally great for for my marriage my I was able to
[02:34:58] combine all these professional interests with great which you don't get to do in the Marine Corps
[02:35:03] when there's a war going on you just don't get to do that and here I am and do I had no more friends
[02:35:08] in the Marine Corps man nobody liked me they're all doing back to back to back to Poem
[02:35:13] it's an airplanes are breaking and I'm living in Vegas flying the raptor all my bros were like
[02:35:18] we're done with you man we got nothing for you so you know I was just I was felt guilty I
[02:35:23] did not feel guilty but I almost did yeah almost did and then I go out we moved to
[02:35:29] Destin Florida you know or or Fort Altman Beach and we lived in Niceville and this awesome house
[02:35:33] in this great community and I was the first pilot to ever fly the 35th be operationally in the
[02:35:38] world ridiculous did that probably two and a half years and it was awesome and then you what brought
[02:35:45] you up to DC so what brought me up to DC so I was I was so sure that I was going to leave the
[02:35:52] Marine Corps after that command tour they have 35 that I reapplyed a Dartmouth got back in again
[02:35:57] got accepted to do you have to give another deposit no I was I was smart enough not to pay the deposit
[02:36:03] because there's a tiny little possibility that was going to work out anyway I did get into Dartmouth
[02:36:06] again and it's like babe I'm going to go to get my MBA I was wanted to get my MBA and I got selected
[02:36:13] for an academic fellowship where I basically got to go to grad school for a year I went to
[02:36:19] say the semi-dejons Hopkins University to give my masters and I basically went to DC it was a
[02:36:25] civilian for a year and between those two things is another terrible deal like the Marine
[02:36:31] Corps like to pay you to go be a full-time student at Johns Hopkins which which they did
[02:36:37] so we moved up to DC and I went to Johns Hopkins to get my masters and then the next thing
[02:36:42] they offered you is to go back and yeah so from there the the payback of that good deal was
[02:36:49] to go to the Pentagon which was totally reasonable thing I'd post command I'd been to school
[02:36:54] I mean it certainly couldn't complain about how tough my life was in the Marine Corps since
[02:36:58] you know the last eight years or whatever it was and I just went basically did a desk job in the
[02:37:03] Pentagon and I worked for and the joint staff and the chairman joined Chiefs of Staff just working
[02:37:08] some project it wasn't all that exciting it was I learned a bunch but it was just kind of a
[02:37:12] kind of a med job I was you know very nine to five strict hours don't take work on we know black
[02:37:17] Barry no real responsibility pretty chill life life was pretty good I selected I picked up Colonel while I was there
[02:37:27] the end of 2015 I was selected for Colonel and in the summer of 2016 I selected for a command
[02:37:34] again as a Colonel this time to command and have 35 squadron but I didn't want to do that
[02:37:44] I don't know how this is going to come across so the people listening and what a terrible deal
[02:37:48] was the Marine Corps asked if it would be a Colonel and go fly up 35 again and I'm not I'm not
[02:37:53] I don't want this to come across that I was complaining but what I the one thing that I
[02:37:59] in all those great deals and dude they were great deals the thing that I was missing the most
[02:38:05] was that I always kind of felt like I had one foot in a one foot out they were these non-deploying jobs the Air Force
[02:38:10] exchange the the F 35 job was kind of standing up a squadron we weren't prepping for anything and I
[02:38:19] loved it but I could feel sort of underneath the surface I got a lack of investment I could tell I
[02:38:29] just wasn't I didn't have to be 100 set pot committed because there was no we're going to go to
[02:38:34] deploy or we're going to go to there was no thing that was going to happen and I think one of the
[02:38:39] healthiest things about being in the Marine Corps is always prepping for something so even the
[02:38:42] crappy stuff you don't want to do you know hey we got to do this because the end state is this
[02:38:47] and I was missing that and it sort of over time started to erode a little bit that I did I was
[02:38:52] catching myself on a little slack in the line to be honest with you I to be really blunt I didn't
[02:38:59] have to bring my a game every day I just didn't I could do the things that I was doing certainly
[02:39:03] in airplane because there was just an element that there was no outcome to what I was preparing for
[02:39:09] and I started to kind of find other interests like school became really interesting to me I did that
[02:39:14] year and so I continued my education jobs options and started working towards my MBA because I needed
[02:39:19] something or wanted something else and once you kind of catch in your mind that the Marine Corps
[02:39:26] and what they're asking you to do I was going to go back to a training squadron I wanted to go to
[02:39:29] be an operational commander with operational units that are preparing to go something I wasn't
[02:39:33] going to get to do that I was going to go back to a training environment I caught myself
[02:39:39] losing the thing that was the most passionate about the Marine Corps and seeing it's more of like
[02:39:44] okay three years here this will get me to this retirement and this amount of money and it was just
[02:39:48] starting to become a little too professional and not enough a passion and I don't mean to say I was
[02:39:54] going to need to feel like a 21 year old again I you don't need to recreate it like that but my
[02:39:59] life actually sat me down with her talking and she just kind of looked at me as like dude you're
[02:40:03] not going to be happy doing this it was really clear to her I think even more clear than it was
[02:40:08] for me it's hard to come across as ungrateful but I I could I was not going to be good at that job
[02:40:17] because there was something that was missing it was something that I didn't there was nothing
[02:40:21] that I about it that it made me feel passionate about doing it so no joke man last year August I
[02:40:29] basically told that I declined command I declined promotion and I put it for her time and all the same
[02:40:33] day and that was a big move man the big move that created a little splash out there in the world
[02:40:41] yeah maybe it was it didn't it surprised everybody but my wife obviously she was totally
[02:40:49] got it and I knew it was the right thing in my closest buddy so I mean I talked to my
[02:40:52] bros my tight my bros those guys understood but yeah it was a big move and I was turning
[02:40:57] down what by a whole right by all rights was a really good great deal another great deal down
[02:41:03] about it and then at some point you show up at a different kind of event in Virginia with
[02:41:12] Lafen Eye working with a company for our company Ashland front we're doing a leadership training
[02:41:19] for a company and you decided to come down and check it out Lafen said come on down check this out
[02:41:25] see what you think of this yeah so Lafen talked to me a couple years ago when I was leaving
[02:41:31] that F-35 job before I went up to DC and he's like hey man joc on our doing this thing it's going to be
[02:41:36] awesome um we'd love to you know talk about it and I'm like hey man I'm I'm I'm all in this other
[02:41:42] gig I'm going to school I'm going to the Marine Corps we in state and touch I mean Lafen's
[02:41:48] buddy I mean is a guy that that I appreciate it you know the times that we reconnected here and
[02:41:51] there and I certainly appreciate it the call but it just really wasn't in the calculator and I wasn't
[02:41:55] really I wasn't there so I when I told him like hey man I dropped my letter I'm getting out
[02:42:04] and like I said Lafen isn't always the easiest guy to get a hold of right away to talk sometimes
[02:42:08] he's he's got a lot on his place a busy guy and he texted me back right then I'm on the bus
[02:42:13] leaving the Pentagon is I hid you up time to talk right now so he calls me and we talk for I mean
[02:42:19] probably a solid 45 minutes to an hour and he's like hey joc on our going to be up in Vienna here
[02:42:24] in a couple weeks once you come out for the day I'm like okay right on and he gave me you know
[02:42:31] I like I was following you guys I knew it was going on I was seeing what you're doing things were blowing up
[02:42:35] I was something bragging on my buddy's life in jocot anybody there was listening to me about it
[02:42:40] and I watched you know you and Lafen give this presentation up there in Vienna to this group and
[02:42:48] dude
[02:42:50] you were it was awesome man you were the smile on your face we you know we got done and
[02:42:57] that first day and we sat down with you you were in big time like I am in I want to do this
[02:43:04] this is all you were pumped and yeah and I think that was you know and then and then actually
[02:43:09] we did I brought you up and we did an event with another company yeah and that you're now involved
[02:43:16] with for a long term and and even then you know because then for us you know I wanted to see what
[02:43:22] you were going to do and see how you were going to do it and man I was like I don't know you gave
[02:43:27] your first two paragraphs of talking you know your first two minutes of of explaining something
[02:43:32] I was like okay cool I'm good and I was you know just everything that we talk about all the time
[02:43:39] you know that's in the book and hearing you describe things from the book but with your view on
[02:43:46] it and your angle and it's it's refreshing to me and also I'm just I'm even learning right so
[02:43:52] I'm here in a different angle and like I talk about with with everything it was like we just talked
[02:43:57] about with with flying at top gun or like it isn't your jitter or like it isn't the battlefield
[02:44:01] the more different angles you can see something from the better you're going to get at it and so
[02:44:05] here I am listening to you going oh there's another angle yep here we go so that was awesome and it was
[02:44:10] also the first time you know with J.P. same thing you know I I listened to J. but it's like the
[02:44:16] first time J.P. you came with me and he was just sitting in the back like what you did the first time
[02:44:19] he was sitting in the back and and I say man come come on you know when when I do this Q&A answer some
[02:44:24] questions and you know I'm thinking hey if something goes sideways I'll just be able to cover for
[02:44:29] him no big deal you know somebody asked a question and J.P. kind of gives me a look like hey
[02:44:34] well I'll answer this and I was like okay you know go ahead I'll just cover for you just
[02:44:38] just give us an awesome answer I'm like okay I'll sit down now and it's the same thing with you I was
[02:44:43] like you know you're thinking okay where's he gonna go with this with this is a tough question or
[02:44:47] whatever and boom here you go you know fire for a fact and both those two events happened really close
[02:44:53] together for me and for for me it was and I call actually called life I think it was the next day
[02:45:00] or is I might have been that evening and I said hey life you know we're good to go like we are not
[02:45:06] gonna have to do all of this ourselves because Dave and J.P. can do this they get it they can they
[02:45:13] can do it and which was you know everybody in their own I don't want to think it's arrogance
[02:45:19] but it's it's just you don't see it and so you kind of think how is any you know it's like when
[02:45:25] you're in command of something that's one of the really hard things to do is let go you know and
[02:45:27] and life's talked about this all the time you know when I'd be watching him roll out on out the gate
[02:45:32] for his first mission I done all kinds of missions like that and here he's going out of his first one
[02:45:37] that he's in charge of and you're thinking man I should just go I want to go and I want to go and
[02:45:41] and then you know two hours it comes back and you're like high five you and then you go cool I
[02:45:45] don't have to be the guy that goes every time and so when when I saw you when I saw J.P. you know it's like
[02:45:50] this is awesome and I called life and said we are gonna be good to go other guys they can do this
[02:45:56] they can bring the same message they can bring the same passion and power and knowledge and that was
[02:46:00] very very you know refreshing to me and bottom line is the experiences are the same I mean they're
[02:46:08] not exactly the same but the the experience and the body is the same and then the experience that we
[02:46:13] had throughout our military career and now you get to see what it's like interacting with businesses
[02:46:18] and you see all those similarities so that was a that was a big day and so in case I haven't made this
[02:46:23] clear yet Dave now is with us part of the echelon front team and doing what we do helping businesses
[02:46:32] with their leadership in their companies so it's awesome it's awesome having you on
[02:46:39] it's huge for me I told you I love you know I love the Marine Corps I'm they're something missing
[02:46:43] and I can't I can't stay in Marine because there's something missing well you leave the Marine Corps
[02:46:46] like how in the hell am I gonna recreate that thing that I'm looking for not in the military it's
[02:46:53] all I know is that's the place and that was my biggest my biggest fear was I'm not gonna go like
[02:46:59] go to work you know go do something that I so I was worried like I got to find something and
[02:47:07] that's part of the reason why that first gig with you guys in the back was like holy cow man
[02:47:11] you you've got to be kidding me it's all those things you just discussed all those things I spent
[02:47:17] on a whole life living and breathing and learning and and and then it's with people like
[02:47:23] late in jocco from where my work we're gonna do this together yeah so good deal Dave
[02:47:30] you kidding me yeah dude I wasn't on monster dot com searching for employment opportunities
[02:47:37] late call me he's at come to Vienna my dad okay my head was a million miles away man
[02:47:42] I'm just working through paperwork to drop my letter out to leave the Marine Corps like very
[02:47:46] hastily with no no plan B there was no I'm leaving to do this you can ask when you like there was
[02:47:52] zero conversation about what I'm gonna do and I came back from them like obviously here's the plan
[02:48:00] and dude he was instantaneous for me it was instantaneous and then to be able to share that
[02:48:07] message and believe it and have all those feelings and in a totally different way and to work with you
[02:48:12] guys yeah and it's cool too because you get that kind of for you top gun for me working in the training
[02:48:19] command where it's like like what I already talked about you you have this experience and when I
[02:48:25] was getting out I'm saying what am I gonna do with this thing what am I gonna do that I got all this
[02:48:28] knowledge and I thought okay well I guess I'll put it in a cruise box over here lock it up and it'll
[02:48:32] you know it'll fade away and turn in dust but when you realize that you can take what you learned
[02:48:39] and you can apply it to all these you know civilian civilians and civilian companies it's it's
[02:48:45] pretty it's a pretty damn good feeling to have and to be able to go go out and do it on a regular basis
[02:48:51] and one of the best things about it is you get to see the improvement you get to see teams and again
[02:49:00] it's kind of like when you show up and you see the leadership issues you're having it's like
[02:49:04] you're seeing you know what the future is you know how to fix it and you just go this is going to be fun
[02:49:09] and you get to see these people grow and learn and improve and get better and if they're already good
[02:49:14] you get to see them become awesome if they're not doing great you get to see them improve their
[02:49:17] position and then moving that direction so it's definitely rewarding from that aspect I know you've
[02:49:22] already seen that yeah without it out and you know that book and the lessons and you talked to
[02:49:26] you know the title of the book is how US Navy SEALS LEADN WIN you know I'm top my life is what I learned
[02:49:32] from from top gun in the Marine Corps it just so happens like we said it's exactly the same I have my
[02:49:39] own long list of my personal experiences with those things but I was telling you the day like the
[02:49:44] concepts it's identical and so there's no like big leap in my mind how am I going to get there from
[02:49:50] how am I going to embrace this it's oh yeah oh my god that's exactly what I've been doing for the
[02:49:55] last 23 years only my stories this this and this and this is my view of that so again man it was just
[02:50:00] it was so easy to just see it and go this is this is legit I am I'm I want to I want to I want
[02:50:07] in right now like a slow down like no 100% I don't want I don't want to go look for like this is still
[02:50:12] happening right now yeah it's happening so trying to oversell it a little bit but it was I was all in
[02:50:18] five minutes in a day one yeah it's been been awesome so far and speaking of Ashland front
[02:50:24] if you want to have us come work with your company or with your team or whatever you can you can email
[02:50:31] info at echelon front dot com if you want us to speak for an event don't contact a speaker's bureau
[02:50:42] contact info at echelon front dot com you'll find us there also we have the monster coming up speaking of
[02:50:50] echelon front the monster number zero zero two it's going to be a New York city by the way
[02:50:57] Dave will be there he's going to do a little presentation because you know what he's going to do a
[02:51:03] presentation he's going to probably do about the utalope I can a lot of questions about the utalope
[02:51:11] he's going to do a presentation about the utalope it's going to be 14 hours now he's going to talk
[02:51:18] you know he's going to talk about his his perspective all a lot of the stuff and an utalope
[02:51:25] a lot of times people ask me about the utalope because I do talk about it and I've said if you
[02:51:29] you know a month ago or something somebody asked me about and I said you know what I'm going to
[02:51:33] bring you a professional professional with that specific information so Dave will be talking
[02:51:39] obviously life is going to be there J.P. is going to be there clearly as well J.P. is going to be doing
[02:51:45] a little presentation as well from his perspective on some things echo Charles you know echo Charles is
[02:51:52] going to be there will he be doing a presentation I don't know time will tell I don't know what he would
[02:52:01] present on maybe just present on you know we can bring all the intensity make it do a presentation
[02:52:07] on cruising you know that things up a little bit back it through a little balance it
[02:52:12] do that dichotomy right there and yeah so master May 4th and 5th New York City Marriott
[02:52:20] Grand Marquis it's an event about leadership it's tools for leadership it's about understanding
[02:52:29] understanding leadership and getting those reps in and hearing all the different angles that's
[02:52:33] what makes you good at it of course it's live of course there's no backstage there's no
[02:52:40] diva green room that will be hiding in saying bring me some green M&M's for my next set no that's
[02:52:47] not happening we won't be hiding it's going to be all of us together will be learning be
[02:52:53] becoming better leaders we will see you there now as far as this podcast goes echo Charles
[02:53:02] maybe you could present us at this time with some information on sure if anybody does want to
[02:53:08] support this podcast how they could do it yeah small presentation yeah small presentation who is
[02:53:12] that with the green M&M's that thing he said with the green that was somebody right
[02:53:16] somebody be rough it's David Lee Roth and I actually know the story behind this
[02:53:21] there's a reason why he did that they would have a it's called a I forget what it's called
[02:53:26] but when you go to somewhere oh it's called a writer right so you get a contract and the
[02:53:31] contract comes with a writer and says this is the things that we need so what David Lee Roth from
[02:53:36] Van Hayle would do is he would say hey I want you know seven bowls of M&M's with no brown M&M's
[02:53:44] in them or green or whatever I think it was brown but he said no brown M&M's and this sounds
[02:53:51] like a ridiculous request right I mean who would possibly want that blah blah blah blah well
[02:53:55] David Lee Roth did it for reason why do you think he did it can you guess no can you guess
[02:54:01] because check it out think of how simple this is he's doing a concert one night he's doing a
[02:54:05] concert two light later to concert three nights after that so he's on the road hitting these
[02:54:09] concert venues and there's all this stuff that has to be set up and all the stuff that
[02:54:12] lights and sound and sound boards and special effects and ramps and all this stuff's got to be
[02:54:17] set up and it's got to be set up right when he would show up if the seven bowls of M&M's were
[02:54:25] laid out and there's no brown M&M's in him he wouldn't have to go and inspect everything because
[02:54:29] he knew that they were paying attention and if he got there and it wasn't that way he knew
[02:54:36] that these people had an issue with attention detail and so now he had to be go and scrutinize
[02:54:40] and make sure everything wasn't placed the way it was supposed to be. Little lesson learned from
[02:54:44] Bayvenley Roth. This was like a little test. Yeah really. Yeah really.
[02:54:47] Yeah really. A little test M&M's test. Interesting. And by the way that story that I just told
[02:54:54] that may be a hundred percent urban myth but I I know I heard it somebody. I thought I think it's true.
[02:55:02] I'm sure somebody I'm sure our listeners will tell us where that can be referenced. Yeah for some
[02:55:07] reason I thought I thought I thought of somebody else and that's just how they were. Where they're OCD or
[02:55:11] something. I don't know either way. Hey you're so you think about like the reason you were such
[02:55:20] an important asset given your skill set as a forward air control. That's what's called is
[02:55:28] because essentially you have all this expertise while you're in the air and you can bring all that
[02:55:33] brain in eyes to the ground. Yeah that's why you're better than your, yeah. I mean in a
[02:55:39] yes. Absolutely. I didn't really pick up on that till kind of later. I was like dang that's pretty
[02:55:44] advanced. If you think about any aspect I mean it's like if you that's why in the corner of a
[02:55:51] mixed martial arts match oftentimes they'll be a striking coach. They'll be a due to due to coach
[02:55:58] and they'll be a wrestling coach. You know they'll have those specific guys in there and sometimes they'll
[02:56:02] bring a specific guy in to corner like like Dean. Dean has been brought in to corner guys
[02:56:08] that are going against a specific due to two person because they want to get a little
[02:56:12] of that expertise. Same fundamental concept here. Hey when we start with this podcast I need
[02:56:20] it somebody that knew how to press record. Boom. See same thing identical. Yeah. I did it all those
[02:56:29] years of pressing record and then stop and then record again. Yeah. So I'm kind of like good deal echo
[02:56:35] in a way. Yeah. Same thing. Doing the same thing is Dave really. When it comes down to it
[02:56:40] speaking of doing good things. So that was a big like breath like you better say something.
[02:56:51] I'm gonna say a lot. Actually I'm not gonna say a lot actually. Yeah. You know last one I felt like
[02:56:56] I really went deep into the krill oil analogy the night club Omega 3's. Oh tell me that. Yeah.
[02:57:02] You know love of God. I feel like the mess. That was a good analogy. That was a perfect analogy.
[02:57:09] That was excellent. In fact it was so good I wouldn't touch it. That's what I'm saying. You know that
[02:57:14] you can do this too much of a good thing. Anyway if you get a no acrylic oil is it's a little like
[02:57:18] what shrimp things. Baby shrimp. You extract the oil and it's getting good for your joints. The
[02:57:25] Omega 3's and that. The good for your joints. Anyway, in regards to supplementation which
[02:57:30] I'm down for now by the way. I'm a supplement person. Not all supplements. Just the key ones.
[02:57:36] Doing maintenance whatnot. Anyway, getting from on it that's the best ones. Everyone knows that factually.
[02:57:43] So if you want a 10% discount on that go to on it.com slash.com.
[02:57:50] I want to talk about the sodium in the water situation. I got to feel that we're just gonna hear it over here.
[02:57:56] Yeah. So. So while they even I are talking through the podcast are you just over here just
[02:58:03] dreaming up just somewhere you're going with that. When you say echo how can you support? I'm thinking
[02:58:10] dang you days been controlling all this stuff and going to talk to you been doing your stuff and
[02:58:15] I'm watching like sodium in the lake videos. You ever watch those? You're doing what you have to.
[02:58:20] Doing what I'm doing. Yeah. So.
[02:58:26] Anyway, the more I watch those the better analogy I realize it is. You know with the Amazon
[02:58:31] click through things so people want to support the spotcast in an easy way. Click through the website
[02:58:36] jockelpodcast.com. There's a little support tab. Click on it. Do your Amazon shopping.
[02:58:42] Some people are smart when they do this. They cleverly figured up which I mean I think I mentioned
[02:58:48] or I know I mentioned it long time ago but what they do is they click on it and they save that
[02:58:53] URL into their bookmarks. Some people are smart like that. Yeah. Like you just says Amazon.
[02:58:59] So on the right on my bookmarks, Martin just says Amazon and that's what I did. Right. Not even smart.
[02:59:05] I did that. Yeah. Amen. That's a smart thing to do. Good way to support. Yeah. Good way to support.
[02:59:11] Before you do your Amazon shopping, click through there and you know that's a really solid
[02:59:17] solid way to support. Small action with the click through. Big reaction, big support.
[02:59:23] There it is. Also, subscribe to YouTube. If you're into videos you like the video version of
[02:59:28] this podcast or little excerpts that I'll put on there if you don't want to watch necessarily
[02:59:35] the whole podcast at any given moment. The little excerpt can take a some value from that.
[02:59:41] Also. Sherable. Sherable. Yeah. Yeah. You want to share with your buddy.
[02:59:46] Hey, I heard you got this situation going on. Just watch this two hour or 48 minute podcast
[02:59:51] and it'll make no people don't have that kind of patience. No unfortunately.
[02:59:55] Or at the time. The time. Yeah. It's before they're going to work that day. You know,
[02:59:59] they're going to listen to four or five minutes. They're like, I got this guy that's really
[03:00:05] you know, treat me bad at work. What should I do? Cool. What you do? Ignore now. Perform.
[03:00:11] Next. Exactly. Yeah. As opposed to, hey, listen to this in episode number, you know,
[03:00:18] whatever. Yeah. It's in the team hours long. Yeah. Can do it. It's not too realistic. Also,
[03:00:25] Jocquoise a store. It's called Jocquoise store. We got a new design. That's all I'm going to say about it.
[03:00:32] So yeah, go on there. Jocquoise store.com. That's a, you know, a new,
[03:00:35] new, new new shirt, new T shirt. Yeah. A new T shirt is out at this time. It is currently. Yeah.
[03:00:42] Dang. This was kind of like a bullshit crowd get after it. Yeah. Yeah. This is like a crowd.
[03:00:51] I wouldn't consider it crowdsourced idea, but, you know, how crowd demanded. Yeah, you know, I was like,
[03:00:58] hey, that you put this on the shirt, put this on the shirt, make sense, make sense. So we're kind of extrapolated
[03:01:02] all the ideas that I thought were good. Master more of the ideas that I heard from you. You thought were good.
[03:01:09] And boom, there it is. New design. Currently legit. Yeah. Jocquoise store.com. Anyway,
[03:01:17] some cool stuff. Good for, uh, there's stuff for women and rash cards. There's stuff for rash
[03:01:26] cards. No. Hey, that was the interruption of thought. But so like rash cards. We have to
[03:01:32] do some more for Brady after this one. Yeah, no, it's okay. Good. You know how you think of like
[03:01:37] five things at once and they're all like jocking to see which ones are going to come to the next.
[03:01:41] Yeah, that's what happened right there. The rash, the rash card thought came in in one.
[03:01:46] Anyway, I think I'm going to put a new rash card one design out as well. But anyway,
[03:01:52] rash cards, if you want 19% improvement in performance. All aspects of performance. All. Yeah.
[03:01:59] That's mental physical emotional as well. Double blind tested, by the way. Yeah. I think like
[03:02:06] quadruple blind. Yeah. And not blind tested. All that stuff. Psychological warfare. If you're
[03:02:12] having weakness in maintaining unmitigated daily discipline in all things,
[03:02:22] listen to psychological warfare. Yeah. I got, I just got interviewed the other day and it was a,
[03:02:28] the guy, you know, he sent me a blue question, you know, hey, what do you do when you're in a
[03:02:33] situation where you've got, you know, you want to go to the gym or you're, you're supposed to do
[03:02:38] some hard task for workers to some, trying to do something to improve yourself and you, you know,
[03:02:43] the, the mindset comes in where you just, you just don't want to do it. You know, what should
[03:02:48] you think people should do then? Yeah. And I said, do it anyway. Right. And then it was all quiet.
[03:02:56] Because he thinks I'm going to give this big explanation. But there's no big explanation. Yeah.
[03:03:00] The explanation is, oh, the stuff is hard. Yeah. I can't make that thing easier for you. I cannot
[03:03:06] make 20 reps squats any easier for you. I can't do it. They're going to be hard. In fact,
[03:03:12] they're going to suck. And I can't make nothing. I can do is going to make it easier for you.
[03:03:16] You know what you have to do to do it anyways. It's kind of like, I told this to Jade that exact
[03:03:23] situation or that thing that you just said where it's, even if you don't feel like doing it,
[03:03:29] you still want to do it and all this stuff. But your body is like, oh, it's kind of running on
[03:03:33] auto. Like, okay, compare it to like a video camera, right? Where you put the settings on auto and it'll
[03:03:39] it'll adjust with how it's feeling. And that's how it's going to handle any situation. The
[03:03:43] light kind of goes down. It kind of adjusts how it feels, you know, that to deal with this situation.
[03:03:49] So if you're running on auto and you don't feel like dealing head on with this workout, these squats
[03:03:54] you're going to maneuver around it. Just kind of automatically, no, you got to turn it to manual
[03:03:58] manual. You'll be like, I don't care if they're hard squats, easy squats, how what I feel.
[03:04:02] I'm going to do them. This is what we're doing. Yes, exactly. So it's like a manual control.
[03:04:06] Yeah. Just control your own mind. Yes. You've talked about that before. Don't do it on like the
[03:04:09] automate because your body wants to rest. Really? It wants to rest week. Your body wants to rest
[03:04:15] every single day actually. You got to turn it from auto to manual. And you can get information like this
[03:04:21] in psychological warfare on iTunes. The artist's name is Jockel Willing. The artist,
[03:04:29] I never thought that I would be. I thought you had to paint something or sculpt something to be an artist.
[03:04:35] Yeah, I thought that. I think it's. But now I put something on iTunes, then they just know
[03:04:39] you're an artist now. Yeah. Jockel the heart if and I that. Well, I'm going to say they're
[03:04:44] really stretching the words on that. But yeah, man, if you're, you know, if you're
[03:04:48] slipping on the diet, waking up in the morning and you want to hit snooze, maybe postville in the
[03:04:54] workout. And you want how should I say like a spot to switch the dial from automatic to manual?
[03:05:03] That's what it is. So search psychological warfare on iTunes, Jockel Willing. Get after it.
[03:05:09] It's a war on weakness. Yeah, big time. You know, when you're clicking through Amazon,
[03:05:14] by the way, you can get Jockel White Tea there on Amazon. And, you know, when you get it,
[03:05:24] I'm just going to say this, when you get it, you will see. And I'm going to give you one word just
[03:05:31] to kind of what do what you anticipate. Just just think about this deadlift. That's what you're
[03:05:37] going to be. So it's going to come to mind with the Jockel White Tea. It's going to be going up a lot.
[03:05:42] So, and that's by the way, again, quadruple blind double tested that you're going to bring your,
[03:05:49] you know, minimum, what's the lightest? I think the minimum that you're going to get deadlifting
[03:05:53] is 8,000, 8,000 pounds. So get on that. You can also pre-order way the warrior kid. It comes out
[03:05:59] May 2nd. By the way, it just came out on iTunes as one of the most anticipated books of the spring.
[03:06:09] Oh, dang. It got listed. Right. How do you imagine that? Right. Kids book. Now all of a sudden we're
[03:06:16] talking most anticipated book of the spring, which means people are waiting for it and they've ordered
[03:06:21] it. So if you want it, order it now. Now I'm going to tell you, there's some people that are not
[03:06:27] looking forward to this book coming out. They are not anticipating. You know those people are
[03:06:31] bullies. Oh, yeah. Bullies are looking forward to it. I'll tell you who else isn't looking forward to this
[03:06:36] coming out. Donut makers. People that make donuts. You know the gig is up. Weakness. You know
[03:06:44] weakness is like a creature like a creature. Like a creature. Yeah. He's not looking forward to this
[03:06:51] book come out because all those things are going down. All those things are trembling. Make those
[03:06:56] things tremble harder, order, way the warrior kid. For your kid, for your neighbor's kid, and for
[03:07:04] yourself, you will dig it. Also, discipline equals freedom. The field manual is coming out
[03:07:12] October 17th. I know it seems like a long time away, but I'm telling you you should pre-order it now.
[03:07:18] Why? Because when you pre-order it, you will then know that it is coming.
[03:07:26] And when you know it is coming, you will begin to prepare for it mentally and physically for this
[03:07:33] book to arrive on your doorstep. You want to be ready mentally and physically because when you get this
[03:07:39] book, you will have to do certain things. Namely, get after it. Yeah, that one.
[03:07:47] Extreme ownership. Of course, the book, you can get it right now. You know if the weight at all.
[03:07:52] Not just for you, but for your team, your spouse, your boss, your baby, center, your mother-in-law.
[03:07:59] You know she needs a copy of that. She needs it. It takes ownership. So,
[03:08:04] forever, copy, just be gentle with it. You don't have to throw it at her, but maybe just you
[03:08:08] know place it on her desk. So, she can read it because the more people you get in the game and
[03:08:16] start taking ownership of things, the better your life's going to be straight up. Now,
[03:08:20] if that isn't enough of us, you can find us active on the interwebs, Twitter, Instagram,
[03:08:35] and if you're going to look at that Facebook key, we're going to be there as well. Dave is at
[03:08:41] David Burke. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocca Willick. Echo Charles, any closing words?
[03:08:53] I feel like we should talk about the movie top gun a little bit.
[03:08:56] Right? No. Actually, one question, one question. You know how like when you watch top gun, right?
[03:09:01] You of course, Maverick, that's your guy or goose, that's your guy. Did you like iceman?
[03:09:06] Yeah, because he was pretty dope. You know what I'm talking about, all right? Absolutely. Who
[03:09:12] doesn't like iceman? Absolutely. There it is. Yeah. Simple as that. That's your wrong question.
[03:09:19] I'll find a question. Or did you ever buzz the tower? You don't see that never happen. Is that fake?
[03:09:25] Is that like you can't really do that? You can't really do that. You can be in a ton of trouble.
[03:09:29] As they said, you can do anything once. You can do that once and then what you're out. You're out.
[03:09:33] But not if you're maverick. Awesome. Dave, man. Obviously thanks to Tom for coming on. You got
[03:09:42] me up. You got me closing remarks and I'm sure we'll do this again and when you listen to this,
[03:09:46] you'll think of a bunch of stuff that we should have said on this one. But anything else you
[03:09:50] want to wrap it up with for today? Yeah, man. First, thanks. This was awesome. I've been thinking
[03:09:55] about this for a couple of weeks. And we've been talking about it. I was super fired up to be here.
[03:09:59] And this was awesome. You know, we were talking about it just briefly. And I mentioned it.
[03:10:05] You know, my life obviously, I talked about the things that they went through.
[03:10:11] So my life and my mom, you know, this is my family and those are folks that endure to whatever
[03:10:15] degree that when you're removed, I think when you're on deployment, you do this stuff. It's hard.
[03:10:19] But it's actually in some ways, harder for the people that you leave behind because they don't
[03:10:23] know what's going on. They're just waiting and wondering and dealing with it and they're kind of
[03:10:27] holding their breath. I remember a story that Whitney told me when I was deployed, I didn't think
[03:10:32] about any of this stuff. A buddy of Niels had come to the house. He was gone. And he couldn't get
[03:10:38] in the house. And he was knocking on the window, which was by the front of the house and kind of
[03:10:43] ringing the doorbell. And it was a late night, like not a time that somebody should be at the door.
[03:10:49] And she didn't want to answer the door. And she's telling me, and this stuff, you don't think
[03:10:52] about that stuff. And you get back in here, the stories because you don't really think about what
[03:10:56] your family's going through because you're busy and you're doing your thing. And she talked about
[03:11:01] the thing that she hated the most was people knocking on the door because she was always just
[03:11:04] sort of a tiny bit paranoid that it was going to be somebody coming to tell her about me.
[03:11:12] You know, Chris's mom Kathy Leon who's someone I don't even have the words to describe how much I
[03:11:18] love her and admire her. And it's not just about her loss. She obviously, she had to answer that call.
[03:11:24] Well, you know, she had to take that call on June 20th, 2006. She took that phone call. But
[03:11:30] that woman has endured the loss of a million who sacrificed herself on behalf of the entire
[03:11:36] country. And my relationship, the irony in all this is that I would not, I would not have a relationship
[03:11:42] with Kathy. And Chris wasn't killed. And I would give anything to take that day back and bring her
[03:11:48] him home. I would trade any of it. But the goodness that comes out of that, there's always, there
[03:11:55] is always some goodness. If you look for hard enough that comes out of all this stuff and the loss
[03:12:01] and the things that you sacrifice. And I know Kathy is certainly listening and I never anticipated
[03:12:07] having a relationship with someone like that based on those circumstances. But my relationship whether
[03:12:12] it is really important. And what she is done for the country is really important. And if you look
[03:12:17] hard enough in the worst situations, you find something that's good. And my relationship with her
[03:12:22] is really good. And I would really, it would be wrong for me to go through this whole podcast and
[03:12:27] talking to all those things without acknowledging that goodness with her. So I wanted to mention that.
[03:12:36] Well, Dave, obviously, thanks for coming on. I know we've been talking about this for a while.
[03:12:44] And it's great to have you on. And thanks for sharing your story with us, the story of you,
[03:12:53] a marine fighter pilot, a forwarder controller, but also a son, a brother, a father, a person.
[03:13:12] And yeah, thanks for sharing the story of Corporal Chris Leon, a marine no doubt.
[03:13:26] A hero without question. But let us remember, let us always remember that these men,
[03:13:44] these men, we call warriors, these men we call soldiers, these men we call marines,
[03:13:55] these men we call heroes. But us never forget that they're people.
[03:14:06] Suns and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, let us not forget that they're,
[03:14:21] they're not only courageous, vigilant and bold and aggressive and inspiring,
[03:14:29] but they're also funny and outrageous and flawed like any of us,
[03:14:43] then that they're loving and loved, then that they're people,
[03:14:54] people who left behind people, and those that are left behind, never forget,
[03:15:07] like Chris Leon's mom Kathy Leon, who wrote, but note on his memorial page back in 2008.
[03:15:24] And she said, hi baby, another difficult day to face without you here.
[03:15:38] I never thought that memorial day would be in memory of you,
[03:15:44] my dear sweet, beautiful sun. It's been one year, 11 months and five days,
[03:15:59] so close to two years, then I cannot bear the thought.
[03:16:04] We honor you by flying the flag every day and we will place
[03:16:15] your American heroes tribute banner for all to see tomorrow.
[03:16:19] Of course, we will cry more tears and maybe find a smile or laugh as we remember your deep voice,
[03:16:34] great smile, joking sense of humor and the love you showed to us.
[03:16:48] Our hearts are forever empty and broken without you.
[03:16:57] Miss you so much and love you more.
[03:17:00] All our love, moment had.
[03:17:07] Remember, remember, major Henry L. Rodden,
[03:17:29] remember, corporal Christopher Leon, remember those like them who have fallen.
[03:17:42] Remember them as warriors, remember them as heroes, but always, always remember them,
[03:18:03] as people. Remember them.
[03:18:14] Until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jockel out.