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467: All It Takes Is All You Got. Risking it All For The People. With Chad Robichaux
02:33:12
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- [00:00]
Jocko Willink
This is Jocko, podcast number 467 with Echo, Charles, and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
- [00:05]
Echo Charles
Good evening.
- [00:06]
Jocko Willink
The previous day, we'd visited mass graves. Whole sections of forest cleared of trees with long, deep pits carved out of the soil and filled with bodies. As many as 1500 people in each. Nearly all that I saw were women and children with their hands bound behind their backs. They'd all been shot in the head. Some of the bodies had been burned, or at least someone had attempted to set fire to them, which is what people do when they want to cover up a mass execution. But bodies don't burn well. Crimes like that are hard to hide. Having seen those mass graves, I appreciated the few having a few moments to pause and think about and pray while we waited on in our Land Cruiser at the side of the country road. The quiet buzz around our little Internet cafe was interrupted when Seaspray's phone rang. In addition to gathering evidence about possible war crimes committed by Russian troops, we were looking for a wounded and captured U.S. marine. America wasn't in the war, not officially, at least, but my guess was that there was as many as 4,000 former US servicemen doing what they could do in Ukraine. Some, like the Marine who had been caught by the Russians, had come to fight. Others, like Seaspray and me, had just come to help. We carried no guns and rode around the country in our specially modified vehicle, rescuing people who couldn't rescue themselves and providing Ukrainian troops with whatever support we could. Sometimes that was as simple as free medical supplies, some of the fastest free WI fi on the planet, and a double strength espresso. Seaspray's call didn't last long. They lost comms, he said. Nobody knows where he is now. It was not the news either of us wanted to hear, and the Marines chances of rescue were now practically zero. But there wasn't time to discuss it. Almost immediately, we heard the familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery, followed by the devastating wolf as it exploded behind us, shaking the ground beneath our feet. Then, seconds later, another one, this time even closer. The troops scattered, and Seaspray and I took over, took cover next to the nearby building. Another round came in, then a third and a fourth. The indirect fire was getting near with every explosion. Soon it was close enough to our position for us to see clouds of dirt spraying out from the blast. It was heavy artillery, the kind where every impact sends a blast of pressure that rattles through your body, shakes your br, and takes air from your lungs. Neither Seaspray nor I spoke unarmed and Protected by only level 4 ballistic vests and Gator ballistic eyewear, we pinned our backs to the wall and watched carefully as the Ukrainian soldiers organized themselves to repel the attack. None of them appeared anxious. But the Russian gunfire got closer still so close that the Ukrainians engaged in small arms fire. And I could hear the sound of AK47's springs functioning as they fired. The Russians couldn't have been more than 100 yards away, maybe closer. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called A Mission Without Borders. Why a Father and Son Risked it all for the People of Ukraine. And it's written by Chad Robichaud. Chad was a Force Recon Marine who also served in Afghanistan as part of a Joint Special Operations Task force, jsoc. He's the founder of the Mighty Oaks Ranch foundation, which helps veterans and first responders overcome combat trauma. He's the co founder of Save Our Allies, a nonprofit that focuses on the evacuation of Americans and our allies and other vulnerable people from war torn countries or hostile environments. He helped coordinate the rescue of 17,000 people from Afghanistan, including his interpreter and friend, Aziz. He's written books, a book called Saving Aziz, a book called An Unfair Advantage, and another one Fight for Us. And he has a podcast called the Resilient Show. He is a black belt in Jiu jitsu. He's been on this podcast before, episode 375. If you hadn't listen to that, go have a listen to hear his background and his origin story. But he's back here with us tonight to share his experiences from his latest, latest lessons learned and his latest endeavors around the world. So, Chad, thanks for coming back, man.
- [05:02]
Chad Robichaux
Thanks, brother. Thanks.
- [05:03]
Jocko Willink
Glad you're here. Yeah, glad you avoided some of this, some of this incoming, heavy artillery coming your way.
- [05:10]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I did not expect that when we went into Ukraine, but I mean, obviously it wasn't a surprise. It's a, you know, it was a very hostile environment as soon as those 100,000 troops crossed into Ukraine. And we just felt really burdened to go and, and initially just to help Americans that were left behind. You know, when the, when this first started, Putin put 100,000 troops on the border and, and we flexed. One of the things that happened was the White House made the decision to remove our embassy, our consulate, and our US troops that were there only 160, but enough to be a threat to Article 5 violation and keep Putin at bay. And I believe the White House gave a green light for Russia to come through. And when we seen that happen, we knew that they were moving out our US Government officials before our civilians. And that's the fourth time we've seen that in the last couple of years. And so we knew we need to be there to help Americans. So originally, the effort was just to go and remove Americans off of what we knew would be a battlefield.
- [06:06]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And you talk about. In the book, you talk about. You basically like, hey, this isn't a book about the politics of Ukraine. And there's a bunch of different arguments in a bunch of different directions on that.
- [06:16]
Chad Robichaux
Sure.
- [06:17]
Jocko Willink
But, you know, from my perspective, what. What I get from you is, it's like, where there's war, there are people that are hurting, there are people that are suffering. And obviously, the Americans is who you focus on first. But then even after that, there's more people that are. Need help. There's more people that need food, water, transportation, life, medical treatment, all kinds of things. And that's what you guys, that's what you've seen, that's what you know, and that's what you go and try help out with.
- [06:43]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. When we first, you know, I made a real big point in the beginning of that book to. To make a point of the not being a geopolitical book, not sharing that side of the. Of the issue, because I'm a very strong conservative. I'm a Christian. So a lot of people from my world were writing me, like, what are you doing in Ukraine? Like, Zawinski is corrupt. There's. We're sending hundreds, billions of dollars there, and it's being put in this corrupt machine. Like, what are you even doing helping there? And I'm. And my point is Zawinski probably is corrupt, and so is every politician. Most politicians since beginning of time, like, read a history book. So we shouldn't be surprised by that. But if we ever let our politics get away of our compassion for people, then we should probably change our politics. Right. I mean, the people that are victims of the corruption that people are against, which I'm against it as well, are innocent human lives. And in Ukraine has been over 100 million. I mean, over. I'm sorry, over a million deaths at this point. And these are. These people are innocent. They're the victims of this corruption. And I believe this war could be ended in 24 hours. I believe that by the time this podcast releases, it maybe it may be over, it may be negotiated and be over. But look, I didn't go there for President Biden, President Zawinski, anyone else went there to help people that could help themselves, and so did Our team. And that was, we put all that aside. In fact, we worked with our, with our US Government to do a lot of this stuff as a surrogate, as a fourth option. One of the efforts I do this under is called fourth option. For those that don't know the US government has a protocol for people, Americans or people vulnerable people that are trapped in other countries. First option would be diplomacy. Second would be military action. Third option would be covert action. And a fourth option would be a surrogate outside the government in a non official capacity. And those things happen all the time by great patriots who have access and placement in different places around the world. Create that and work with the agency, the Central Intelligence Agency through the solo Special Operations liaison officers through the Pentagon to say, hey, we're in this area, we have this capability. We could either do what the government can't or won't do and we work in liaison with that. So it's very important for NGOs that work in that capacity to have those relationships in order to deconflict. Because the last thing an NGO non government organization and a humanitarian rescue effort wants to do is go into the front door while dev groups coming in the back door and create a conflict. So you want to be deconflicting those things. So we work very closely with our government and our government has been a strong partner with us in Afghanistan. There are evacuations in Ukraine and other areas around the world that we're, you know, we're working right now that I haven't written books about and talked about.
- [09:18]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it's another vote against bureaucracy because a lot of times what slows up the government is just government bureaucracy. They just can't make things happen fast enough. Whereas if you have a very nimble organization like yours, you can just flip and make things happen, which is, I.
- [09:32]
Chad Robichaux
Could do things faster and I could do things cheaper, a lot cheaper, but, and you know, much more effective. You know, we talk a lot in this book about, about. I mean we were in, we were in Krakow, Poland and the Special Mission Unit in Poland was, was Delta Force and they were, we knew a lot of the guys. So we were sitting down, hanging out with them, having dinner and they were just chomping at a bit, wanting to go across the border. So our guys want to go across the border into Ukraine, but the White House was not allowing them to. And, and so we were able to just an operation comes up, a rescue. We're able to just coordinate right with that solo, the special operations liaison officer, roll across the border and, and go get that done where, you know, it would take days, weeks to get approval for them to roll across. We were able to just hop in a car and go.
- [10:19]
Jocko Willink
It's the ultimate red tape avoidance.
- [10:21]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [10:21]
Jocko Willink
Especially because, you know, when you're in the military, you could do something like in five minutes, you're like, oh, I can go outside and grab this thing or do this thing right now. Take us five minutes to go do it. But once you start running that concept of operations up the chain of command, and it's like, oh, they're going to start asking questions that don't really matter and making requests that don't make any sense. So it can be really problematic. Just any, any big bureaucratic, bureaucratic system is going to be really hard to work and really hard to maneuver, and they're not going to be nimble and they're going to need permissions because they're not willing to take risks. And there is a huge. There is also a huge difference between, you know, some guys from the US army get rolled up or shot up. Yeah, that's a, that's an international incident, escalation of war. Whereas, no offense, bro. Yeah, some random, you know, American that's over there doing God's work gets blown up, it's like, yeah, that's too bad. But it doesn't really interfere with international politics.
- [11:17]
Chad Robichaux
Right. Yeah, he chose to be there. He's. It was his choice. And yeah, it's. And that's a very convenient thing when I say that fourth option. That's a very convenient thing for the government. There's no contractual relationship. There's no money exchange because as soon as money would be exchanged, a contract to the government, now it's not a fourth option anymore because now it comes with the restrictions, the red tapes to bureaucracy. So that also gives them a complete, like, disassociation with it. And they like that. The best example I could probably give out a whole book was the Rescue of Benjamin hall, which, you know, I'm not sure if you want to talk.
- [11:46]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, we'll get into it. Let's, let's, let's get into the book then, a little bit. So this whole thing kicks off and obviously there's a huge underlying theme in this book, which is you're going to war with your son, which is, yeah, you know, pretty, pretty crazy to read about. So go to the book here. On October 14, 2022, two days after the announcement of the withdrawal of US troops from Ukraine, Biden flinched for a second time. He announced the closure of the US Embassy in Kiev and evacuated the last of the American diplomats. After months of Putin's flexing on the border, it seemed inevitable that Russia would invade Ukraine. That's when I got the call. The moment I saw Sarah's name on my phone, I knew what she would be calling about. Sarah Verado was a co founder of Save Our Allies. This could only really be about one thing. You're going to Ukraine. She said, is that how she talks to you? You're going to Ukraine?
- [12:32]
Chad Robichaux
You know Sarah.
- [12:33]
Jocko Willink
I don't know her, but I know about her.
- [12:34]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, yeah, she's. That's how she talks.
- [12:37]
Jocko Willink
You say, I am. She said, yeah, Sea sprays there. He says, the invasion is going to happen any day. We want you to be there to prepare for when it happens, because when the invasion starts, we were going to want to be able to move people out. We talked about the details a little, and I told her I'd talk with Seaspray as soon as I could reach him. But there wasn't any need to say much more at this point. I could feel my heart burning with that old familiar feeling to take action and help to serve. What I need most of all was to get on my knees and pray. And you go on to say you also had to talk, talk to Kathy, your wife, about everything that you have going on. She's got to be getting at least a little bit tired of you just rogering up for this stuff all over the world.
- [13:15]
Chad Robichaux
I mean, we're just coming off Ukraine. I mean, we're just coming off Afghanistan. I was still, like. I was still, like, burnt out from Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a. The withdrawal is just.
- [13:24]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, just.
- [13:24]
Chad Robichaux
It's emotional. Physical. Emotional. Yeah, I was just. I was just burnt out. And so I was not expecting to want to do anything like this. And.
- [13:34]
Jocko Willink
And plus, you have stuff going on at home. You got the Mighty Oaks foundation, which is a awesome organization. You know, and actually it's, you know, I have called you. Yeah. Multiple times and said, hey, I got a situation going on with somebody. I need help. And you guys are sort of my fourth option. You know, I run out of my options of like, well, do you talk to the va? Did you talk? You know, of course I try and help people and talk to them, but I. I don't know what I'm doing. And then, you know, my fourth option is like, all right, I gotta call you guys. And you guys have done a great job of reaching out to people, going to get people, and taking care of people that are really not in a good Spot veterans that are not in a good spot. So I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. What you've done for some of my friends has been awesome. So. So you have that going on.
- [14:21]
Chad Robichaux
Yes.
- [14:21]
Jocko Willink
And the rest of your life going on, and meanwhile, you get a freaking random call that says, hey, you're going to Ukraine. How does your wife feel about this when this. When this happens? She know what she got into when she married your dumbass?
- [14:34]
Chad Robichaux
I think so. I mean, we. I was, you know, we met when we were 17, 18. So she's. She saw me go through, you know, BRC to become recon Marine, and she's been through all the deployments and all that stuff. So I think at the end of Afghanistan and I talked about this last time I was on the show, she was like, after the H K and Maza Sharif part, when I went to Tajikistan to do the river operation, she was like, you're pushing it too far. And as I talk about this in a book, like, I get just like you. I get asked to do a million different things. And what people read about is, like, me or me, you know, what I talk about is the things I do do. People don't see all the things I say no to. I say no to a lot of things. So I'm not opportunist. That's, you know, war kicks off and I'm, like, rushing over. I didn't go to Israel. I was asked probably 100 times, like, literally probably 100 times to go to Israel. I haven't went. So I don't just do things to just jump in, but I really feel my heart's burden and God's burden in my heart, and I have a process to go through. I pray about it. I talk to mentors and people I have around me in my life that this good accountability. I'll talk to Kathy. And if all those things check and I feel like God's opening doors, then I'll go. If the doors are closing, I don't force my way through it. That would be my ego, my desire to want to be involved in these things. And look, I don't have anything to prove. I've done my diplomas, Afghanistan. I've got. I got. I got to do all the things I want to do. So if I feel like I could be of help and it's not for me, then I'll do it. And with this, I really felt burdened to go. I. I really did. And Sea Spray is someone I'm very close to. I love the guy he's one of the most incredible human beings ever. And I knew he was out there days before, like the invasion in Ukraine. He was out there by himself. He wanted me to be there. And, you know, he's one of those guys, I'm sure you have brothers like that. They call and say, you go, yeah, I'm going to go. And. And that was the circumstances. And Cathy, Kathy, actually in this one, she didn't push back. She was pretty supportive. She was not so supportive when Hunter comes into the picture.
- [16:29]
Jocko Willink
So fast forward a little bit, you talked about sea spray. Sea sprays, you know, sounds like a. Sounds like a real character. I've never met him before, but he's a Green Beret. Yeah, he was. He did a bunch of stuff with the, with the paramilitary inside of our oga. So he's a real experience guy.
- [16:46]
Chad Robichaux
Grand Branch, Maritime Branch. I tell you to let you know who he is. As you hear these things, he, he. To get to ground Branch, a Maritime Branch, doesn't matter how qualified you are. It's like a lottery too, right? You gotta. Everything has to line up. Oxford educated, incredible human being, gets the dream job, you know, to be a precision rescue operator, a paramilitary officer at Maritime Branch. And then he goes to Afghanistan to help us with the withdrawal. He took vacation to say he was sailing. Gets caught there by the agency and they tell him, hey, you have to go home. Like, we love you, slap on a wrist. You gotta. You can't be here doing this humanitarian rescue. Like, you gotta go home. And the guy, he resigned. He resigned from this career that, like, most people would chop their hand off or him included, to help people that couldn't help themselves in a country not his own. I mean, the guy, in 10 days at HK, he lost 37 pounds because he wouldn't stop to drink water. Him and this guy named Sean, like, walked out the gate to get these little girls. Two Taliban shot two guys right in front of. They stepped right over them, kept going like, he's like one of the most selfless human beings I know. And so when he resigned from that job to do that, like, we've kept him employed ever since. And he's, he leads all the, all the stuff that I get to do and I get the credit for because I'm the kind of face of it. It's really him. Like, he's. He's the guy, he's the brains behind it. He's the, the workhorse. He lives in a hammock or at the back of a truck. You know, it's I don't even know where he's at right now. Every few days I have to check in where you're at, like, because he just. He's not a very good communicator, but he's just incredible. That's who the kind of people I get to, you know. It's such a blessing, man, to be around people like human beings like that.
- [18:28]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, that's awesome. You guys link up on the phone. Hey, brother, when are you getting here? He said when he was finally able to return my call. Russia's gonna cross. It's happening. What makes Special Operations special is you always look to. You always look to do something that no one else could do. It's not an ego thing. It's practical and pragmatic. If you're doing something that could easily be duplicated by someone else, what's the point? So any planning for any operation always starts with a clear question, which is exactly what I asked Seaspray. What's the unique need that nobody else can do, but we can? Seaspray paused a beat, then gave me his answer. It's not going to be a mass medevac like Afghanistan, where we're moving thousands of people. Anyone can drive a minivan or a bus over the border from Poland and haul a bunch of people out. It's those who can't get out that are going to need help. Injured, sick, incapacitated, trapped Americans. My brain was already firing. Yeah. So it's going to get bad real quick. He says when kinetic. When kinetic combat starts, there are going to be people who should have got out already but didn't. We've got to build a capacity and a capability to help. So that's how it kicks off. That's all you need to hear, apparently.
- [19:39]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Yeah, that was it. I went into two things. Operational planning and fundraising. These things cost a lot of money.
- [19:47]
Jocko Willink
And this is everything you do when you write about this stuff in the book. It's all just donations from people.
- [19:51]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I have incredible network. I think my superpower in all this is not my military experience, is my networking ability. I have built a network of relationships over time that when I call for something like this to support it, we're able to get the resource in place, permissions which are important for access and placement and in the financial resources, because this stuff costs money. And I've been speaking a lot of corporate events on this type. Type of thing. Networking and integrity. Like, how do you pull something like that off so quickly and raise that much money so quickly? You know, For Afghanistan, tens of millions of dollars in three days. We don't do it in three days. You do it over 15, 20, 30 years of demonstrating you have integrity, you can be trusted, you have the ability to execute and produce impact. So you do that over years. And then when it comes time, they really have the need. That's when you cash in on it.
- [20:50]
Jocko Willink
And so, yeah, at Echelon Front, we say you can't build relationships once the emergency starts. You know, you can't just be like, oh, you and I are friends now. You know, now that I need something from you, I want to be your friend. It's like, no, we had to have been friends. And now I need something. And of course you take care of me because, you know, I'll take care of you. That's awesome. So fast forward a little bit in the book. And by the way, everyone get the book once again, books called the Mission Without Borders. I'm going to read some highlights of it today, but get the book. There's all kinds of awesome details in here about. About life, about the war, about the path. So pick it up. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. March 4, 2022. You say Krakow. Did you say Krakow? I always said Krakow. Is that because I'm an American?
- [21:29]
Chad Robichaux
Krakow, Krakow, Krakow. They have like. It's weird. Like, even Ukrainians will say it different. And you go look at different maps in a spell. Different. Okay, so.
- [21:37]
Jocko Willink
And. And I'm also very bad at pronouncing anything other than English. Yeah, and even English, I'm marginal. But any other language, I kind of suck.
- [21:46]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, same here.
- [21:48]
Jocko Willink
So it's been two weeks since he spread. Seussre and I had spoken. Russia had invaded Ukraine. Obviously, 2 million people had already fled. At the airport, I linked up with Roman, a Ukrainian Russian national who I had brought on board through a trusted NGO partner. He'd been heavily vetted and was fluent in Russian, Ukrainian and English. Together, we headed to the Sheraton, located in the center of Krakow, where Seaspray had based himself. So, again, this is the kind of stuff that doing this on such a rapid turnaround and having the money to start executing this stuff. Do you keep a fund of money that's ready for this, or do you have to raise.
- [22:23]
Chad Robichaux
I have a fund ready for the. For initial phase, emergency phase. Yeah, but. But you don't. I can't keep tens of millions of dollars in the bank. And sometimes, you know, some of these things cost that. And so. But a lot of the relationships I have could turn around really quick, so. And man, it's. There's, like, amazing, like, patriots that really. That have wealth, have capacity, that really, you know, want to do stuff like this. They just don't know how. And so give them the ability to be able to contribute to something like this, and they jump on board.
- [22:58]
Jocko Willink
That's awesome. You got another guy named Bo, another special operations guy that worked with Seaspray before. He's a medic professional. And you say he polishes up like Clark Kenton here, but you show up here, both were dirty. Their eyes look like they hadn't seen a decent night's sleep since you last spoke to Sea Spray. Fast forward a little bit. I figured it would take a day, at least a day for Sea Spray and Bo to recharge. So you go on the train station and you're going to go check things out for yourself. And you're starting to see the people at the train station that are fleeing Ukraine. This had to be pretty impactful. You talk about them, they're breathing, but they're scared. They're waking up to the fact that there's no next step for them going to the book here. I've been around refugee programs before in Africa as well as other parts of the world, and there's something instantly familiar about people gathered in the train station. I guess the trauma of being forced to leave your home and your homeland is so deep and fundamental that it makes people respond in similar ways. Parents hold their children tighter. Children let themselves be held. Both of them keep their eyes open, alert and possible to any danger. There is so much uncertainty and fear that you can not only see it, you can practically feel it with your soul. President Zelinsky had recently ordered that all males of fighting age were barred from leaving the country. So there were no men waiting on the concourse, at least no man be between the ages of 16 and 60. As I walked among the groups of girls, women and boys, I couldn't help but think of all the fathers, husbands and sons left behind. That had to be eerie.
- [24:22]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, it was just different than anything I've seen before, you know, and you've. You've been in all over the world and seen war zones, and it was just different. And there's always a transition that, at least for me, there's always been a transition. When I go to different war zones around the world, I go for one reason, right? Afghanistan, 9, 11, retaliate for the. For the attack on September. September of the 2001. And so I'll go there for. But immediately fell in Love with Afghan people and, and feeling the pain of their oppression and wanting to help liberate or bring stability to the Afghan people. That's kind of what happened here. I went there to help rescue Americans and walking that train station and seeing what was happening to these, these Ukrainian people and I'm like, these people are like not much different than us. I've been to lots of third world countries. Ukraine's not a third world country. I mean you drive around, you see pizza parlors and ice cream shops and shopping malls and people dressed like us and just very modernized people. And so that really caught me. And to see that and then to see they're them alone without their husbands and I'm like, what would I feel like if I was at my wife and children had to leave to another country? And I'm back behind fighting. We've, we've never been in that situation. We've, our wives and children are always safe at home while we went out and fought, but they're staying behind and fighting and they're sending their wives and children off with no communication. And it just really, it just really struck a chord in me.
- [25:45]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it was really wild to watch that stuff on the news and see, like you said, the, the, the visualization of the first world country in a full on war. And you're thinking, wow, we haven't progressed at all. You know, that was my thought. I'm like, really? This is what we're doing uniform on uniform.
- [26:04]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, this not terrorist groups like uniform or uniform, but ballistic missiles the size of telephone poles flying in the apartment buildings. This is an IDs or this is MiG fighter jets, you know, firing into neighborhoods where only women and children are left. Elderly communities. This is like, I mean the news has not captured it at the brutality that it really is.
- [26:32]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. Watching the crowd as they collected and ate their food, I was struck by another difference between these refugees and those I'd met before. Without their winter coats on, the people looked just like folks at home. This is my first time seeing refugees in a first world country. And they look just like the people from my neighborhood, just like the people I lived among. If it wasn't for the buzz of Ukrainian being spoken, I could have easily been in some church meeting attended by Kathy and her friends. You meet a person named Sasha. I asked Sasha if we could pray with the people. She agreed. And so Roman and I spent as long or as little with people as they wanted. I didn't have any magic words to say and didn't Expect a take away the pain or fear. Mostly I prayed that they would know that God loved them and that he was going to be with them every step of the way, especially in the middle of such hardship. A lifetime of being around people who are living in the shadow of war has taught me that's the best way to pray. She gave me a look and told me she understood perfectly what I had said, but that she also thought I was just plain wrong. When Russia, when Russia come, will America help? This is the question this woman asks you. I thought back to the previous summer, to Biden's decision to withdraw those 160 National Guard troops and shut the embassy in Kiev. If I was going to give her my honest answer, it wouldn't have eased her fear. So I chose to offer comfort instead. If that ever happened, if there's enough compassion and courage in America and among her allies to come here, to come in and drive Putin all the way back. But what I really want to say to you is that it's okay that you feel scared right now. It's normal to feel fear when war is close by. But look around, we're all here for each other. So they knew and they were questioning what we were going to do.
- [28:16]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I mean, they were questioning that, you know, if, if we allowed Russia to push all the way to the Eastern European border, because that's what we're talking about, pulling Eastern European border, you know, where would it end? You know, where would, if we wouldn't step in now, when will we step in? And you know, there's a lot that's, that's a very complex question because there's a lot of like, I mean, does America want to put troops in the ground in Ukraine? I'd say no, we don't. But there's, there's a way to stop it without doing that. And, and I felt that way now, and I felt that way from day one. We could have ended this without ever putting, you know, a U. S. Boot on the ground in Ukraine.
- [28:58]
Jocko Willink
I suppose we'll find out. Yeah. Coming months.
- [29:02]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that's one of the things that President Trump said and the debate that he would end this at present as President elect, that provoked a response from, from Putin and, and from Zelensky and just, just that, that statement from President Trump on the debate stage led to conversation. And now that he's President elect, he's had conversations with both. And I think he has, I think, I say, I think he has. I, I think any strong leader in The White House, as commander in chief of the United States military and leader of the free world, has the ability to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine. I don't think this is a very complex issue. I think it's been allowed to happen for several reasons. And, you know, a lot of people get rich, very rich, awful wars. Afghanistan was shut down. You know, conspiracy or not, the industrial military complex, United States is one most profit, is the most profitable, you know, line item in the United States government. And people make a lot of money off of war. And there's a lot of pressure, you know, for political figures to allow stuff like this to happen. And sadly it is. And that's what one of the things I hope to see in this new administration is that corruption to be ended because, you know, those kind of decisions lead to our military, our young men and women who put on uniforms, that kind of trust the commander in chief to lead them, the. To do being involved in just wars, to be involved in conflicts that are unjust for personal profit. And we've been part of some of those things, and we've lost friends through some of those things. And my sons, both my sons served, and my family served for 80 years. I don't want any family to be part of serving that way. And it also risks our national security when we deplete our surplus and spread our troops then, and that jeopardize our national security. And so I just hope and pray that we have people that will go into this new administration and make decisions that will keep America out of these, you know, these wars in a way that we don't need to be involved in through just good leadership.
- [31:06]
Jocko Willink
Well, that's real high hope you have, and I'm right there with you.
- [31:10]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [31:11]
Jocko Willink
And I mean, this is definitely. I would say that right now, you know, the way this, the Trump administration is shaping up with the people that he's bringing on board to his Cabinet, I'd say it's the most radical group to be coming in. And, you know, one thing that I think is, you know, you look at like, what. What we learned in the Vietnam War, and there were so many lessons to be learned and so many lessons that we did not learn.
- [31:40]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [31:40]
Jocko Willink
In the Vietnam War. And you can say now say the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan. And so hopefully this new, you know, the new administration will. Will pay attention to those lessons that we should have learned in Vietnam, lessons we should have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they'll make more prudent decisions and. And that's the best we can Hope for. Yeah, they are different.
- [32:04]
Chad Robichaux
They're different. They're not coming from the institution.
- [32:06]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [32:07]
Chad Robichaux
Most of these picks, including like Pete, I know a lot I just talked about this morning. Pete Hexaf, a lot of people, like, why did President Trump pick a Fox News host to be the Secretary of Defense? Well, he's not from an institution. You know, he doesn't have the strategic level, military leadership experience, you know, what you see in 06 and higher. But if I'm going to be hired to be a CEO of a construction company, I don't need to know how to swing a hammer. I don't know give vision. I need to know how to lead and you know, how to assemble the right team of subject matter experts, of construction guys and, and I need to be trusted by the investors. President Trump trusts Pete. He does have military experience. He did 20 years in the reserves and. Which is he never led at a strategic level as an infantry officer. He's led at a battalion level, but never let it at a strategic level. But he's not gonna be sitting in a situation room in a silo. He'd be sitting there shoulder, shoulder with the commander in Chief, the Joint Chiefs and the head of centcom and Sock south and all those people and they're going to make decisions together. And he recognizes the most, and I think President Trump recognizes this, the most crucial decision on national security right now or the most crucial factor in our national security right now. It's not our strategic ability in the battlefield, it's our morale, our recruitment and our retention. And so a guy from inside the institution of the military right now has proven not to be the best choice of that. And it burned President Trump last time. So I think he wants somebody from outside the institutions. And, and Pete's just an example, but that's kind of what he's done.
- [33:32]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah. And what Pete went to Harvard.
- [33:36]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Princeton.
- [33:37]
Jocko Willink
Princeton or Princeton and then Harvard or something like that. I mean, he's smart. Smart. He's well spoken. Yeah. And like you said, he's not part of the, he's not part of the institution right now.
- [33:47]
Chad Robichaux
And so he wrote that book, A War on warriors, which is about DEI and wokeness and our morale and recruitment, retention, which is I think is the biggest issue in our military right now. I mean, if you have a motivated military who could recruit the America's best and brightest and could retain them to stay in and keep that experience moving forward, especially war fighters who are leaving at rapid rates, you have a capable military and you could bring in subject matter experts and assistants to help with the strategic leadership stuff. And I think it was. I think it was a wise choice for what President Trump's doing right now. Yeah, and Pizza Patriot too.
- [34:25]
Jocko Willink
Oh, for sure. A while ago, when all this recruiting problems were happening, I was kept meaning to. To put some words together and write an article. And the title of the article was going to be called why I Didn't become a Ballerina. And Echo, Charles, you like that?
- [34:40]
Echo Charles
Yes, I do.
- [34:41]
Jocko Willink
You want to know why I didn't become a ballerina? Why? Because I wanted to carry a machine gun. You see what I'm saying?
- [34:46]
Echo Charles
I do.
- [34:47]
Jocko Willink
And that's what I never was like, never looked at a pair of ballet shoes and was like, hm, that seems like a good option. No, never had that thought. But as soon as I knew what a machine gun was, I was like, that's what I want to do. So there's a bunch of people that feel that way. A bunch of young men that want to carry a machine gun. And so when you tell them, hey, you want to carry a machine gun? We got the spot for you. Just come on over here, sign up, we'll pay you money to shoot that machine gun. And you go, oh, cool, I'm in. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was, want to be a commando. I want to. I want to put camouflage paint on my face and swim across the beach and go kill bad guys. That's what I want to do. That's. That's it. And so the recruiting at the time was like, pretty solid, you know. Oh, you want to be a commando? Cool. You can go in the army, you can be a special force guy, you can be a ranger, you can go in the Marine Corps. And the only the branch of the nation Navy only had. Didn't have the best recruiting, which was kind of good recruiting at the time, because if you knew about it, you're like, oh, that's kind of the deal. Right.
- [35:47]
Chad Robichaux
There was that video that, that was filmed under Strand.
- [35:50]
Jocko Willink
I didn't see that until I was already in the, in the Depth program.
- [35:56]
Chad Robichaux
Okay.
- [35:56]
Jocko Willink
In the. What's it? Delayed entry program. I didn't see the video until that. Yeah. Until I was already in.
- [36:01]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [36:01]
Jocko Willink
But yeah, there's a video Echo Charles. You can watch it on YouTube. It's called Be Someone Special.
- [36:05]
Chad Robichaux
Yes, that's it.
- [36:06]
Jocko Willink
And it's, it is not great. It's actually pretty funny because it's like, it's like a super low budget motivated video. So there's fake explosions and cheesy soundtrack and whatnot. And so when I. I'm kind of lucky, I guess, that I didn't see that before because maybe because the Marine Corps always does, like kind of the best job with recruiting. Yeah.
- [36:30]
Chad Robichaux
Like slaying a demon.
- [36:32]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [36:32]
Chad Robichaux
With a sword.
- [36:33]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Just slaying demons. So.
- [36:34]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I wouldn't do that.
- [36:36]
Jocko Willink
Like, exactly. So my point in saying all this was for a while. Do you remember these commercials that they were putting out? The military was putting out these recruiting commercials.
- [36:43]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [36:44]
Jocko Willink
And they recruiting commercials had nothing to do with carrying a machine gun and putting camouflage paint on your face and going across the beach and killing bad guys. The recruiting commercials were about, like, just really weird things that I was raised by two moms. Yeah. Those things were like, I don't understand what this is. I don't, I don't. That doesn't appeal to me. This whatever they're showing me, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't, I don't want to do that. Just like, if I would have seen a recruiting poster for the New York Ballet when I was 14, I would have been like, oh, that looks sick. I wouldn't, wouldn't have done that. If you showed me a freaking guy coming across the beach with a machine gun, I'd be like, that's what I want to do. Would I sign up for that? So we, the military started putting out these advertisements and recruiting posters. We're like, well, I don't. Any 18 year old dudes looking at the going, oh, I guess I don't want to do that. Yeah, that doesn't look like what I wanted to do. I want to carry a machine gun. That didn't even show a machine gun in that commercial. What's happening? So I don't, I'll go somewhere, do something else. And so that's my point in saying I didn't want to be a ballerina. And that's why I didn't become one. I wanted to become a commando. And all they had to do was show me. There's the commando place.
- [37:52]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [37:52]
Jocko Willink
Like go down there. The commando thing. You want to be one? Be commander, Go down there. Yeah, we got you. You get paid money where you get paid money to shoot machine guns, blow things up and jump out of airplanes. It's the best. And when you're 14 years old, if they show that to you, you're like, oh, you show me a picture of guys jumping out of airplanes, shooting machine guns and blowing things up. Okay, cool. Where do I sign up? If you show me some random weird things. You go, oh, that doesn't really look like my jam. Yeah. So there was actually a while Echo, where I was thinking you and I should just start make recruiting commercials. Yeah, I told you that, didn't I?
- [38:27]
Chad Robichaux
Yes, sir.
- [38:27]
Jocko Willink
We were just gonna go rogue.
- [38:29]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [38:29]
Jocko Willink
It was like the fourth option. It was gonna be the fourth option for getting people in the military. I was like, we'll make some sick freaking commercials. You know what, though? Here's the problem with that. I don't want to recruit people that don't want to do it.
- [38:39]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [38:39]
Jocko Willink
Because. Because. And listen, I've recruited a lot of people. I've recruited a lot of people.
- [38:43]
Chad Robichaux
You're influential. People are gonna listen, right?
- [38:45]
Jocko Willink
I meet them all the time. Like, I meet them all the time. Time. And it's awesome. I'm super stoked. But occasionally you're like, hey, this person. Their life didn't go the way they wanted it to. They didn't make it through the training or whatever. And so it. It doesn't make me feel good that somebody kind of went down a path that they maybe shouldn't have gone down. So I was a little. I'm a little nervous about making recruiting things because we'll get people that. It's too much brainwashing. You know what I mean?
- [39:08]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [39:09]
Jocko Willink
Where it should be. If you want to go in that door, you should be able to find it. But we need to at least tell them about the door. We need to at least tell people that it's there. Hey, go through door number two or door number three? Door number three. There's a machine gun. We should avoid it. So that's the way it works, man. Yeah. All right. You are at. You're at this place with all these refugees, and you end up going to a florist and getting a bunch of flowers and walking around just giving flowers to people, giving a little. Little light to their world.
- [39:43]
Chad Robichaux
Man, that was pretty moving. It was actually worried the. We passed us floor shop, and I'm like, hey, what do you think about, like, all these women going to get freaked. Their husbands aren't there. They're scared now. Two dudes come in with a bunch of flowers, like, is this going to be creepy? They think we had the bad intentions. And. And Roman was like, no, no, let's do it. And so I just started ordering these flowers, and the ladies are like, the. At the florist shop was like, what are you doing this for? And we told them they were just like, all in, throwing extra flowers in and, and we went in there and we were just giving these flowers to these ladies and they were like literally take it ball up and was crying like smelling these flowers. And so it's just. We had time and it just felt like opportunity to do something nice.
- [40:22]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And I imagine a lot of those, A lot of those women and children lost their husbands and son or husbands and fathers at this point.
- [40:29]
Chad Robichaux
For sure. For sure.
- [40:33]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. Next morning you drove out to the Ukrainian Polish border. You see a line of cars disappearing in the distance for people waiting to get into Poland. Some people were waiting five, up to five days to get in there.
- [40:44]
Chad Robichaux
That was days.
- [40:45]
Jocko Willink
Days on the go ahead.
- [40:47]
Chad Robichaux
I was. It was days. And it was cold and it was cold and wet. Kind of defying physics. You know when it's like cold enough and wet enough to where it like should be snowing, but it's like freezing temperatures, but which is worse, by the way, Right? Yeah.
- [40:59]
Jocko Willink
Rain is 33 degrees. Rain is worse than 10 degrees snow. As far as just being freaking cold.
- [41:07]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [41:07]
Jocko Willink
And this is coming from a place of experience. Echo trolls. You're over there in Hawaii, but you don't know nothing about this stuff.
- [41:12]
Chad Robichaux
And these aren't, these aren't jocko human beings. These are, these are women and little girls coming across, dragging her stuff, soaking wet and gray. The gray sky. It's just, it's just cold, man.
- [41:23]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And you say on the Polish side of the border, the expressions on the faces of those who just crossed told of their journey so far. Exhaustion, relief, sorrow, confusion, fear and hope. Many people displayed them all. Tens of thousands of refugees were there hundreds of volunteers, NGOs, kind hearted people who had turned up to help everything. Like people giving them rides, people giving them cell phones, people giving them SIM cards. And these are all NGO ngos?
- [41:53]
Chad Robichaux
No, not one government agency was represented on that board.
- [41:56]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, that's the point that you make is like. Is like. I recognize most of the names of the non profits who had shown up and many of them were from the Christian community, but not one single government was represented there. Not one.
- [42:08]
Chad Robichaux
No. Yeah, it was. I mean there was. There was a. One thing that stood out most. There was this group of guys from India and they just.
- [42:18]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [42:18]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, they were Sikhs and they just had a food truck out there and they were making a. They were making cauliflower curry and it was like people were lined up just having this bowl of hot. I mean, imagine being that cold for that long you've been there and having something warm go inside and Hit your internal parts of your body like they were delivering the goods, man. It was. It was really cool.
- [42:36]
Jocko Willink
I mean, the Sikhs is a warrior culture right there, big time. The. So these medical NGOs, you end up. There's a field hospital. This was pretty moving. You. There's someone in there. You. You go into this field hospital and there's. You can hear someone just like crying hysterically in the back. And you say. I introduced myself to one of the medics and was told to wait while the team leader finished up with someone. The sound of the person weeping gradually eased, and eventually the doctor I was waiting for emerged from the back. John Cooper was my age, American, and had the air of someone who'd been in places like this before. I knew a little of his bio. He was a former US Navy surgeon who had worked in the cash on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's combat sport hospitals. He had chosen to come to Poland to see if he could provide emergency medical care for those crossing. He'd been there only a few days, but he was clearly disturbed by what was going on. We're seeing a lot of people like that, John said quietly, nodding in the direction of the back cubicle where the woman was still crying. She was held captive by Russian soldiers who killed her husband and then raped her repeatedly over five days. She said the soldiers forced her to children to watch. We paused and both sat in silence. What gets me is their strength, he continued. They've been through such trauma, but they don't crumble. They keep. They keep it together long enough to reach the border and get their kids to safety. It's only when they get here and realize they're safe that they do let go like this.
- [44:01]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. It's amazing strength in these people, especially these women. And you gotta think like, these women aren't. They're not warriors and not fighters. They were. They were from first world country. They're housewives and moms and, you know, but in this moment, they just rose up and protect their children. Some of them got their children safely and went and went back across the border. They went back to help.
- [44:31]
Jocko Willink
You end up at a. You go back to your hotel and, well, this, where you talk about this is kind of a key crux of the story. You guys are going through, like a brief. And you said. I don't know who said it first. But as soon as the word communications was mentioned, everyone's focused intensified and the conversation became a tumble of ideas. If Russia takes out the phone grid or the power grid, those NGOs will be in trouble. They won't be effective and they'll all be vulnerable. They don't have sat phones? Not enough. Interesting. We could help with that. Set up an alternative communications grid. Exactly. Get them the right equipment and teach them how to use it. Satellite phones and HF and VHF radios. Needs to be encrypted. These are all just comments from your team?
- [45:02]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [45:02]
Jocko Willink
And with solar panel charging stations, it'd be complicated and expensive. The room paused. Since when his money have been a problem for God? I said if it's God will. If it's God's will, it's God's bill.
- [45:14]
Chad Robichaux
That's been my motto for quite some time.
- [45:16]
Jocko Willink
You'll find. You'll find the money. But the reason. Again, I'm skimming the book, but the communication thing is huge. Obviously in, in war you have to be able to communicate with other people. And if they're relying on their civilian network of communication and the Russians take that out, it's a disaster.
- [45:32]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, we had, we. It was one of the things in that moment we identified as a vulnerability point. We felt like, hey, this is something we could do that's being overlooked by others. We were watching how the NGOs were working so well with the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian military, but it was all based on their ability to communicate. If that goes down, then, you know, people are just going to be blind and, and not be able to continue this coordinating efforts that were successful. So we knew we needed to step in that role and build something.
- [45:58]
Jocko Willink
Shock. Fast forward a little bit. Our contracts, our contacts within the U.S. polish and Ukrainian governments were able to give us helpful information about the operational threat environments on the Ukrainian front lines. Most important, we learned that Russia had been sending its own special Forces teams into Ukraine to identify possible targets and call in airstrikes. These guys, mainly in their 30s and 40s, were rumored to be athletic looking and confident, had been given blue American passports and were wearing high end adventure gear and posing as humanitarian workers. In other words, they looked exactly like us. That's sketchy. Yeah, this was bad news, but it wasn't necessarily catastrophic. Sea Spray had already told us how nervous some of the Ukrainians were on their checkpoints. And at least now we had a little more understanding as to why most of the country's makeshift checkpoints were manned by everyday citizens armed with hunting rifles, shotguns and machetes. It was easy to imagine how nervous they would feel and how suspicious they would be if a bunch of middle aged humanitarian workers looked like us. So you guys double down on trying to look as lowkey and unthreatening as you possibly could. Yeah. Fast forward. In addition to buying high vis fluorescent yellow jackets and covering all our vehicles with prominent red crosses, we created official looking laminated ID cards with a QR code that linked to our NGOs website. We also added a little extra flourish by visiting a local stationary store and getting a rubber stamp made for an organization we'd made up the International association of Humanitarian Services.
- [47:21]
Chad Robichaux
Look, trade craft tip for everyone has had rubber stamps work everywhere in the world. You had a rubber stamp on something most places in the world you get by lamination. Lamination is good.
- [47:31]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. Finding the vehicles that would serve as ambulances was challenge. Building comms network packages was proven to be a big undertaking as well. You finally come up with a list of what each comms package should contain. Iridium's satellite telephone with year long subscriptions. A reliable extensive satellite network. Very high frequency radios for vehicle to vehicle communication. Gotena264 bit encrypted closed loop network allowing a group to create their own secure cellular mesh network and track each other's locations in real time. GPS units so we could track each package and be easily notified if any user got if they got in distress. Gold star solar panels and power banks to keep everything working if the power grid went down. So you put these kits together that you're thinking about, they're going to cost about ten grand. Fast forward. There's only one real solution to our problem and that was have someone buy the gear in the US and bring it over to Poland in person. And there's only one person I could think of who I trusted to tackle a task like that in such a short time frame. My oldest son, Hunter. So you talking here about Your family has 80 years of service. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, finally Afghanistan. Both your sons, Hunter and Hayden, both went in the Marine Corps. Hunter ends up in Anglico. So was he out by this time?
- [48:55]
Chad Robichaux
He was out. He was out. He did his diploma to Afghanistan. He did eight years and he was working with me at Mighty Oaks. He was part of the Afghanistan withdrawal. However, I kept him benched.
- [49:07]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, you kept him in Abu Dhabi and he didn't get to go forward and right dad taking care of his son, be a little overprotective. But it's like what are you gonna do?
- [49:17]
Chad Robichaux
Right? Right. Take him and swim them across the Panjay river in Afghanistan. Like I wasn't going to do that.
- [49:25]
Jocko Willink
So yeah, you talk about that. You talk about Some of the stuff that he did and being bench, you talk about him being bunched. So fast forward you give him a call. Hunter, I said when I called him from Krakow on Wednesday, March 9. It was 3am in Houston, but there was no time to waste. You still want to be a part of this? Sure. What do I have to do? I'm sending you a list of comms equipment and a $300,000 budget. I need you to buy everything on the list. You're going to have to search the whole country to pull it off because much of this stuff won't be in one place. Then you're going to have to get everything bagged up, fly it here and turn around and fly home. It's not super sexy or anything, but I'm telling you, this is super important. This is literally an opportunity to change the course of history and how we help stop World War three. Okay, he said, calm as ever. When do you need me to bring it to you? I paused for a moment. It was Wednesday already Saturday. Hunter didn't skip a beat. Okay, you said send me the list. So your boy's just ready to rock and roll.
- [50:13]
Chad Robichaux
He's like super stoic. He's like, he's real. He's not really easily like excitable. And he just like. That's just him. And he's very competent. You come out anglicos and all those kids in Anglico. I say kids, they're just calm nerds.
- [50:28]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And they're, they're comms guys. They're not just calm emotionally. They're calms guys because they have to talk to radios and stuff. I'll talk on the radio stuff. Aircraft and ships. So he knows. He's familiar with communications equipment and whatnot.
- [50:40]
Chad Robichaux
Yep.
- [50:41]
Jocko Willink
Which is beneficial.
- [50:42]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. And he's like, he just geeks out on all that stuff. And Annie's. He's kind of a gear head. Yeah, he just, he just like him buying that stuff and getting that stuff together. Like I trusted him to do it and man, he pulled it off. He pulled it off.
- [50:58]
Jocko Willink
You say we added a couple more members to the team? Sean Lee, who was a former 82nd Airborne, Airborne soldier who worked for Sarah, and Dr. Mike Simpson, who'd served over 30 years as a Green Beret, Airborne Ranger and a doctor on the premier special operations medical unit in the US Military. Mike had a couple other doctors with him, including Richard Jadick and Will Dutton. Am I saying that right? Jadic.
- [51:16]
Chad Robichaux
Jadak. Jadak, yeah.
- [51:18]
Jocko Willink
So you're getting more people on the team.
- [51:20]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, you know, subject matter experts in their different fields, and that's how you build a team like this. You. Everybody, when you're doing something like this, everyone wants to come on, and. And so I'm always so grateful and, like, flattered that everyone wants to come on board, but you got to pick the right people that you need, and you can't clutter their team and, you know, just subject matter experts in different areas you need.
- [51:40]
Jocko Willink
And does your phone just start blowing up when something goes down globally?
- [51:43]
Chad Robichaux
It does. I wouldn't even go into Israel. Whenever it's like, sign me up, I want to go. I want to go. I'm like, I'm not going. We. I had guys there, but I wasn't there.
- [51:54]
Jocko Willink
You talk about some of these other NGOs, seeing guys from. On the payroll of the World Health Organization and the World Food Program lounging around the Sheraton restaurant, feasting on steaks and red wine while I knew for a fact they were still doing nothing at the borders of Ukraine itself. Really boiled my blood.
- [52:12]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I think anyone that seems to piss anybody off. Yeah, it's disgusting.
- [52:17]
Jocko Willink
Then you had an encounter. One of your favorite NGOs, Samaritan sp. Purse. You. You link up with those guys. In this particular meeting, there was no talk about congregation numbers, building programs, or outreach events. Events here was all about the war and what the churches within the network were doing to help keep people or help people that were in need. So tell me a little bit about Samaritan's Purse.
- [52:38]
Chad Robichaux
I mean, a lot of. There's a lot of big organizations, right? Big in, like, Red Cross and Always. But Samaritan's Purse, I'll tell you firsthand, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, all the. They are legit, like, people that, I mean, I raise money from. But I'll tell you, like, if you ever want a good place to donate to Samaritan's Purse, they are absolutely incredible, what they do, their capabilities and their integrity and how they operate. They're always. They're always, like, right there in the. In the front of everything, every crisis around the world. And, you know, Edward Graham, who's. Who's an armor Ranger. He's. He's the son. The grandson of Billy Graham, son of Franklin Graham, just incredible human being. He actually wrote the forward to this book. And Ken Isaac. Ken Isaac's the guy at Smartest person no one knows about. He's the. He leads all their international operations. Incredible human being. One of the smartest human beings I know, and that's who we were Liaisoning with there. And. And they, they really like build networks really well. And so they had built a. Built a network with the local church in Ukraine. When I say local church in mean just like pastors. And that was the most trusted, reliable network because it was a liaison to communities. And so we needed to tap into that. And our partner to tap into that was Ken Isaac. And he brought us in to tap because we want to get these communication systems network to trustable, reliable people that were doing good work. And that was a local church and Smartest Purse was the one that liaison that for us.
- [54:01]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. You say the Ukrainian church had formed its own underground network and was playing a vital role in getting the aid that the NGOs were providing across the country to the troops themselves. So there you go. Yeah, they're getting after it. Meanwhile, fast forward a little bit. Hunter walked through customs at Krakow airport at 2pm on Saturday, March 12. He freaking kid pulled it off.
- [54:22]
Chad Robichaux
Pulled it off, yeah.
- [54:23]
Jocko Willink
Somehow managing to push three trolleys with a combined total of 14 bags in a little under 100 hours. He'd been able to locate, acquire, pack, and personally courier everything we'd asked him to bring. We hugged like, yeah. Now he's like, hey, you want me to set this stuff up? Of course, you guys don't know what the hell you're doing.
- [54:42]
Chad Robichaux
Exactly.
- [54:43]
Jocko Willink
And so for three days solid, he worked pretty much without sleep. I resisted the urge to play dad and tell him to go get some rest. So he's just making things happen.
- [54:49]
Chad Robichaux
I mean, we setting this stuff up. You're like, I mean, just setting up in reach like our, you know, GPS like any get and then getting it connected onto the flat screen. Because we're building like a talk now. So now we have flat screens around. You want to see where all these things are going to be distributed throughout Ukraine. Like he's building all of that. That's like, you know, stuff that I can't do.
- [55:10]
Jocko Willink
This is not stuff for the boomers.
- [55:13]
Chad Robichaux
Exactly.
- [55:16]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit late in the afternoon, March 15, the call came in. The moment Seaspray took it, he held up his hand for silence and crouched over a pad of paper. We knew it was on. What's the extent of their injuries? I asked. He asked in his voice, calm and clear. I could just about hear a woman's voice on the other end. What was their last loan known location, Anyone they spoke to recently? Cell phones. All have US passports. The call ended in Seaspray added final notes to the pad before turning to us all. There's an American journalist. Benjamin hall worked for Fox News. Appears the rest of his team were killed. He's severely wounded and with his injuries possibly only four, only has 48 hours to live. He won't get the care he needs in Ukraine and won't survive if he stays there. He paused. He's likely in Kiev which is currently under siege by the Russians. He's an American, he's got a wife and two little girls at home and no one's going to get him. If we don't go for him right now, he won't make it. Who wants to go? There were 11 people in the living room of our safe house that night. Without hesitation, every single man there, including Hunter, said yes. Yeah. And just to reiterate at this point, like Kiev is under siege.
- [56:26]
Chad Robichaux
It is, that's the, that's the moment that they're trying to take Kiev. That like it's about 80% encircled infantry, mechanized vehicles, MiGs, ballistic missiles. That's, that's why Benjamin hall was, was hit because he was hitting him middle of that and in, I mean we're on a phone, that phone call, we're on a phone with the Pentagon talking directly to Solo and the White House has said no, like they're not gonna go. They're not gonna go. So we were literally his only, his only option. And yeah, I mean it was, it was a God ordained thing too because we talk about have, you know, when you're doing things like this, access and placement is, is the most crucial. Like you could be the, you could be dev group or CAG and one of the most capable units in the world. But if you don't have access and placement scenario, you can't put those, those skills to solve the problem.
- [57:17]
Jocko Willink
Especially now here. You know, you got like, you guys are, you guys are actually the perfect solution because you're low vis, low profile. Like it's, it's the fourth option.
- [57:27]
Chad Robichaux
It's the fourth option. But like why I say it was God ordained is because to bell to have that access to placement. It happened about an hour before that phone call. We had got the ambulances, we had got all the jackets and you know, everything that we, we were, we were, we were equipped to be able to pull that off only for about the hour previous to that call. And, and you know, had we not been equipped, this was late at night. Of course everything happens like this late at night. You never get the call at like 9 in the morning. Right. You always get it at like you're about to go to Bed. And now you get the call. Right. So. So now we have to go, you know, 18 hours through Ukraine, through these checkpoints and stuff like that. Pass curfew and those ambulances and passes, you know, was what was able to get us through.
- [58:08]
Jocko Willink
But 1055, nine of us in three vehicles rolled out of the talk, leaving Hunter and Sean behind. We were gonna get Ben hall and bring him home to his family. So Hunter stayed, he gets radio watch. And you know, you talk about his attitude in here. Of course he wants to go like everybody else wants to go.
- [58:23]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [58:24]
Jocko Willink
And he realizes he's the guy with the best capability to be in the talk, making sure all the comms works. And so he does what the team needs him to do.
- [58:33]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. And he, he did it gratefully. I'm sure he was, it was eating him up. But. And then I think another really important note with that is the Solo actually came to our talk and worked shoulder to shoulder with us.
- [58:42]
Jocko Willink
Oh, really?
- [58:42]
Chad Robichaux
So that was kind of like shows that real true collaboration with our government. The fourth option. Yeah. He comes in there, our talk. Shoulder, shoulder. Sean Solo and Hunter kind of run the talk. And we're on with the Pentagon the whole time. We're, we're, we're working with the Pentagon and the Solo and liaisoning with the 82nd Airborne. So they're staged at the Polish border waiting to receive. To receive. Yeah. So the 82nd Airborne with a Blackhawk helicopter, the Aeromedical C130 on standby and launched to a Germany. He already knows he's coming, so they're standing by for us to do this. So it's kind of new when you talk about a fourth option, because we take it from a fourth option back to a second option. Right. We hand it off and now it's back. We hand it off to them.
- [59:24]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. There's just a sketchy zone.
- [59:27]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [59:27]
Jocko Willink
In the middle. I mean, like I said, if you can imagine if, if rescue, an American rescue force gets rolled up or gets shot up or even gets accidentally, you know, shot out of the sky. It's just there's a bunch of terrible things that can happen that are going to create global catastrophe.
- [59:42]
Chad Robichaux
Right.
- [59:42]
Jocko Willink
And that's why the government goes. They're risk averse and they go, yeah, you know, let's. A Fox News reporter. We don't really, you know, we're not doing anything. So it's. The fourth option is a real thing and it's necessary.
- [59:57]
Chad Robichaux
It is, yeah.
- [60:00]
Jocko Willink
Starting on this mission a little bit, I've been held at gunpoint at checkpoints. Many times in my life, I've never liked having a gun pointed at me. And it's not good to feel out of control in the situation where people are tense and armed. But checkpoints are a necessary part of the job if you're going to visit that kind of area where we work. Work. You have to learn how to talk your way out of situations like the one we were facing. So this is sort of a nightmare. You're going into these checkpoints and everyone's on edge, and you gotta. You gotta basically not provoke anybody. You gotta explain what's happening without explaining too much of what's happening. Like it's serious business.
- [60:33]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Civil war in America. And you're in Oklahoma, backwoods Oklahoma. And you pull up next to three dudes at mullets next to a barrel.
- [60:41]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [60:41]
Chad Robichaux
With a. With a machete and a shotgun and a. And you're trying to convince them that you're there for the right reasons.
- [60:46]
Jocko Willink
I haven't seen the whole movie, but there's a movie called Civil War, and I've seen a clip of it. There's some dude with, like, bleach blonde hair and pink glasses on, and the guy's like, we're American. He's like, what kind of Americans are you? And you go, oh, damn, this sucks. So that's what I was thinking of when I was thinking of these checkpoints that you're rolling through, because there's Russian special operations guys that are saying, hey, we're, you know, we're here to help. We're. We're Americans and we're here to help. And he's like, what kind of Americans are you? The Russian kind of Americans.
- [61:13]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. They're scared. And, you know, scared people hurt people.
- [61:16]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [61:16]
Chad Robichaux
And so you got to be smiles, hands up, you know, and totally cooperative.
- [61:23]
Jocko Willink
You.
- [61:23]
Chad Robichaux
You want to give them things, but you don't want to sound like you're. You're trying to bribe them, bribe them, because then you're, you know, so it's. Yeah, it's a. It's a balance. And you got to. And it's. It's like time consuming. They could take your bags out, dump everything out, maybe rob you. Like, it's. Yeah.
- [61:42]
Jocko Willink
You go into a lot of details. Get the books. You can get the details. I'm going to fast forward some through some of that stuff.
- [61:48]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, no, I'm good.
- [61:49]
Jocko Willink
Okay. It was light when we finally approached a small town on the outskirts of Kiev. It had taken us 15 hours to get there.
- [61:56]
Chad Robichaux
Yes.
- [61:57]
Jocko Willink
Dozens of checkpoints you finally end up in the safe house. Sea Spray Bow, Doc Jatic, Jadic, Doc Jattic and Roman were to go ahead to the military hospital where Ben hall was. Go ahead. Fast forward a little bit. Ben hall had lost his legs in the attack. His eye and hand injuries were serious and he had suffered significant burns, but the main problem was the shrapnel in his neck. Doc Jaduck said that there was a risk of it coming loose and severing an artery. That made driving potentially fatal given the bombed out state of the roads around Kiev. Not to mention the fact that Ben didn't have the 20 plus hours it had taken us to drive from the border in the first place. The only options were air or rail, and neither of those were actually feasible. Flying out, flying was out of the question unless you wanted to be immediately shot down. And the chances of trains running in the middle of a war zone was practically zero. All through the night, Seaspray, Sarah Riceko, Risco Risko and I had been contacting people to find a solution. After hours of getting nowhere, a possibility emerged. We learned that a secret meeting was taking place in Kiev between the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, who had come for a high level security talks with President Zelensky. They traveled by train, accompanied by the Polish. Gromit. Yes.
- [63:16]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [63:17]
Jocko Willink
Forces and equivalent. They're, they're equivalent to us, Delta Force. And we're due to leave that morning. As soon as we heard about the train, we got to work trying to secure permission for Ben and the team to be on it. It was kind of frantic and we relied on a bunch of things happening that were way beyond our control. We needed God to be in the director's chair. So there you go. You got the GROM coming in, Gromit, let's go. Grom.
- [63:43]
Echo Charles
Oh, yeah.
- [63:44]
Jocko Willink
Did you ever work with the grom?
- [63:45]
Chad Robichaux
No, except that, except in uk. And they're, they're solid, man.
- [63:48]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, they're freaking outstanding. I, I actually like worked a lot with the grom. Really, because my first deployment to Iraq, we, we, we were linked up with them and we lived with them and so we did ops with them all the time. I mean, I did, I don't even know how many ops I did with the grom. And you know, sometimes they would be, sometimes they would be like driving and we would be assault. Sometimes we would drive them and they'd be assault. Sometimes we'd both be assaulting. It was just, we just did all kinds of stuff with them, but. And then My friend Drago was the liaison with the GROM for like the. For like half the war or something crazy. And so, yeah, love the grom. Fast forward a little bit. Eventually, we had good news, kind of. Ben and his team had been granted permission to ride on the train, but they only had 30 minutes to get to the station. It was a high risk journey, requiring them not only to navigate checkpoints where soldiers were operating under the shoot on site order, but also avoiding the advancing Russians, all while keeping Ben hall alive. And they had to do it all in an ambulance that could still not go faster than 15 miles an hour.
- [64:50]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, it was breaking. Yeah, because it was dying.
- [64:55]
Jocko Willink
Again. Get the book. The story's so awesome to read. Somehow Seaspray and the others made it onto the train with Ben alive. Is an incredible achievement possible only by the grace of God and commitment of our team. Soon after, we heard from the talk with an update on the Russian assault on Kiev. They had to yet to gain complete control of the city, but their python grip had tightened in the hours since we'd left. They had captured more land to the south and west, including one significant building, a hospital in the same neighborhood as the facility Seaspray had found Ben in. The Russians were holding 500 patients and staff hostage. Yeah, the mission wasn't over. Four others have been killed in the attack. Pierre, Ben's cameraman, and Sasha, Fox's Ukrainian correspondent, as well as two Ukrainian soldiers who were their security. I've been thinking about all of them during the drive back. I guess we all had. Do we know anything about the other bodies? I asked. Are they recoverable? Seaspray shook his head. Not Sasha. All they could find of her was a piece of her arm. Pierre was hit by shrapnel that severed his femoral artery. So, yes, there's a body and Fox wants us to go out and get him. So the mission's not over.
- [66:06]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. My response was no. I mean, you know, Russia was making a second attempt to take care that, that by the time we got back and, and we were just like, I'm not going to risk the team to go recover a body. I mean, this guy, Fox loved this guy. He 25 years with Fox, Pierre Zachi. He's. He, he did Afghanistan. He was just amazing. Everybody, like, loves this guy. And so we had said no. And then they said, hey, we have someone on the phone. I want to talk to you. It was his wife, Michelle. And she said, guys, I want my husband. And we were like, yes, ma'am, change of plans. And and we made a decision to go back and get Pierce body.
- [66:43]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Yeah, that was. Is a powerful part that you write about in the book. Just get hearing her voice on the phone.
- [66:49]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. And then the part about the flag, like, I get really. I get really shaken up.
- [66:54]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [66:54]
Chad Robichaux
With you. With. With that flag, it just, like, really. Something about it just really rocked me.
- [66:59]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. No, so you. You guys go out. You have to. You have to. You meet with a hearse because you're going out to kind of get Pierre once you kind of located where he was, and then you have to check on the body to make sure it's him. Yeah.
- [67:15]
Chad Robichaux
Because moving a body out of a. Across the border is, like, a big deal. So we had to get all the paperwork, which was very complex. Seaspray had done this before, so he had. Knew exactly how to get all the paperwork. So we had. We had to pull a lot of strings through the agency to get the pace. So we had all the paperwork. But one of the things, you have to visually identify the body. So we opened the casket, identified the body, and. And he was. He was pretty. They had him really real dignified. He was clean. And. And then when I put the lid back on, I seen this Irish flag in the corner.
- [67:44]
Jocko Willink
He was.
- [67:44]
Chad Robichaux
He was Irish. And immediately my mind went back to our guys. You know, when we bring them back, like, when we bring them back, we put the. The. The stars over their head and the red and white stripes go down to their feet, and we, like, put that flag crisp on their casket to turn them home with dignity. And I'm like, we have to put this flag on. So I literally googled, because cell phone service works better in Ukraine than it does here in San Diego. It's a. I literally Googled, like, is it. Or is it green, white, orange? Is it orange, white, green? And to get it right, and. And I was putting it on, and. And I think I was shaking, and sea spray came, and he grabbed my arm, and he's like, you okay? And I'm like, actually, no, I'm not. And he's. Let me help you. And we put that flag on like. Like, super crisp. And. And then we. And I actually drove the hearse because the guy wanted. He wanted to drive out because he wanted to escape the war. And that was a long, you know, story of getting him, know, getting the hearse. But we.
- [68:36]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, you paid. You bought the hearse from him. Yeah.
- [68:38]
Chad Robichaux
It's like, hey, either. Either you make the deal of your life with Fox News right now and sell this Hearst or we're taking it. Like, we're stealing it from you. So here's the phone. Make the deal of your life. And. And he did. And. And so I drove the Hearst with Pierre. And, man, I was so tired. Like, I hadn't slept in days. I was like, driving his hearse was, like, having a hard time staying in the road. And we crossed. When we crossed the Ukrainian border, Fox News had a. They had like, two vehicles in front of us, and his wife was. Michelle was in it. But we didn't want to stop because we didn't want her to come out. So we just kept moving and they kind of jumped in. And so they're in front of me. I'm following them sea spray and bows behind me in the. In the. In the ambulance. And. And I'm like, trying to stay awake. I'm like, pierre, like, help me out, man. Like. And I'm like, just like, trying to stay awake this whole drive back to Krakow. And. And we get back to a. We meet her. We pull in at a morgue, and. And we take him out and deliver the body to Michelle. And she was really sweet and grateful, and we just spent a moment with. A few moments with her and with Pierce body. And yeah, it was. It felt like. It really felt like it was the right thing to do. Even the risk. It felt like the right thing to do. To do that.
- [69:45]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. No, it's the way you write about that. The whole transaction and the flag and everything in the book, it was. It's. I could Getting choked up reading it because you know what that's like with. For Americans. And the fact that you were, you know, wanting to do it the right way was just. It was powerful to read about, man. Fast forward a little bit. What will Russia do next? The answer was revealing itself before our eyes. We were contacted by a church leader about a large group of civilians who were leaving the city of. How do you say, the. Jim. Probably Dnipro.
- [70:20]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, Nepro.
- [70:21]
Jocko Willink
Dnipro.
- [70:22]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [70:22]
Jocko Willink
When the Russians blew out a bridge, the civilians were trapped on the eastern side of the river. And their leader sent pictures showing the crowd of 100 women and children hiding with nowhere to go. Seaspray was on a call with one of our senior military generals at the Pentagon. Bridges. He said when the call was over, that's what we need contingency for. If Russia starts taking them out or puts checkpoints on them, they'll have people trapped. That we need a way to manage evacs without bridges. So you guys start trying to figure out Contingency for that. The contingency you figure out is the F470 Zodiac, which is the boats that we used to. They don't actually use Zodiacs anymore. No, this is a different brand, but it's what you and I were raised on.
- [71:05]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [71:05]
Jocko Willink
The F470 Zodiac.
- [71:08]
Chad Robichaux
Yep. Combat. Combat Water Raider Craft.
- [71:11]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Com Combat. Rubber. Rubber craft.
- [71:14]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Crrc.
- [71:15]
Jocko Willink
Yep. So the crc, they. I've heard people call them cricks.
- [71:19]
Chad Robichaux
Crick. Oh, I never heard that Crick.
- [71:21]
Jocko Willink
Which is interesting. It's interesting how some things get. Get morph over time, like cricks. And then another funny one is the guys in Vietnam. Like when I. When I see like a fob. Fob, I call it a fob. They call it fob. They don't call it fob. Like tilt. Tilt was like, what's it? Fob? And I go fob.
- [71:40]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, so just like a CRC or.
- [71:43]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah. Like I never heard cr. We. We never called it. We called Zodiacs.
- [71:48]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [71:48]
Jocko Willink
Or Z birds for some reason.
- [71:51]
Chad Robichaux
But which was the brand?
- [71:52]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, which is the brand? But the, the crick. I think the first people I heard say that was marines.
- [71:58]
Chad Robichaux
Okay.
- [71:59]
Jocko Willink
Was like, we got our cricks ready. I was like, what, what, What's a crick?
- [72:02]
Chad Robichaux
Something new.
- [72:03]
Jocko Willink
So there you go.
- [72:05]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [72:07]
Jocko Willink
So you guys get this idea. You guys got to get the Cricks. Yeah, the Zodiacs, you guys got to get them ready. And once again, you have a great network of people and you need to get them bought back in America or where else you can buy them. And then you got to fly them. You figure out the best way to get them there is to fly them.
- [72:24]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [72:25]
Jocko Willink
And of course, in order to do that, you need a plane. So how'd you end up managing this with a freaking private plane?
- [72:32]
Chad Robichaux
Call someone that have a. You know, fortunately I have a lot of relationships that have people with private planes. And you need one big enough to put four cricks in and gas engines and the bladders and then electric engines and the batteries. And so we literally like this. My friend who's this plane. This is like a seventy million dollar plane and it's brand new and it's really first mother in law. And so we were like trying not to tear off the trim and keep this thing. This thing's so pristine. And the pilot's like loving the pilot's like, I'm used to flying a bunch of rich jerks around a golf and. And now I'm getting to do. This guy's a marine. Vietnam veteran. So he was like loving.
- [73:09]
Jocko Willink
He's all fired up.
- [73:10]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, he was all fired up to sneak these things into.
- [73:12]
Jocko Willink
But damn if I would let anyone get near my 70 million dollar plane with a bunch of freaking Zodiacs and engines and gas bladders.
- [73:21]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [73:22]
Jocko Willink
Oh man, that's.
- [73:23]
Chad Robichaux
We just let you know. And this plane's supposed to be comfortable. Right. But now we got all this stuff in there. So were like sleeping on the floor to get, you know, get there. And we had Tyler Merritt from nine line was he was going on a different trip. So we get.
- [73:33]
Jocko Willink
We.
- [73:33]
Chad Robichaux
He hitched a ride with us.
- [73:34]
Jocko Willink
He survived. Right on. No, that's awesome. Good for that dude put Corey Scott making that happen.
- [73:40]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, Corey's incredible human being. He's a Marine as well and yeah. But yeah, he put his mother in law's playing on the line for us. That's a big risk man you could get that could ruin your Christmases and Thanksgiving.
- [73:54]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. In spite of everything that was happening in Ukraine, the work of mighty Oaks at home continued. Before heading to Krakow, Corey and I took a trip to Camp Pendleton, California, the west coast base of the US Marine Corps, where I had the honor of addressing the graduating class of Basic Reconnaissance Course Class 2 Tac 22. This was my third time as a guest speaker at a BRC graduation. And while I felt the same burden to say something that these warriors would remember for a lifetime, with everything that I'd seen so far in the Ukraine fresh in my mind, my desire to encourage and inspire them was even greater. As reconnaissance Marines and as men, you will continually be given the choice to do what is right, to do what is wrong, or to do nothing. I said in closing, remember this. There is never a wrong time to do the right thing. I trust when the time comes, you will follow the giants who came before you and you will do what is right. I ended with a BRC saying, quote, all it takes is all you got. End quote. Is that like their.
- [74:57]
Chad Robichaux
Gave me chills, man.
- [74:59]
Jocko Willink
Is that their motto?
- [75:00]
Chad Robichaux
It is. That's the beer. That's the BRCA motto. That's all it takes is all you got. Damn. That's all they look for there. I mean it's not as.
- [75:09]
Jocko Willink
Yep, just give us everything. That's the way we roll.
- [75:12]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I've seen guys there that, you know, have more than others, but this. But they're not giving it their all and they want the guys that could give everything. You know that. Yeah, hell yeah.
- [75:21]
Jocko Willink
That's. I never heard that motto until I read this book.
- [75:23]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [75:24]
Jocko Willink
All it takes is all you got. I've fought that before. Like, hey, you just need to, like, get. Just want you to give everything. Like, that's it. Just give it everything you got.
- [75:34]
Chad Robichaux
That's what the instructors look for there. They don't look for the best athletes. They don't look for the. They look for the guys. Get. That's gonna leave it all on table and. Because, you know, then, you know, because recon's a small community, it's just like teams. Like, you know, that. That guy, once you give him that MOS and he becomes a reconnaissance Marine.
- [75:51]
Jocko Willink
He could be in your platoon.
- [75:52]
Chad Robichaux
He could be in your platoon, or he's gonna be in your friend's platoon and you gonna walk through a door with him one day. And you don't. You don't have to look over your shoulder and wonder if he's gonna be there. You know that he's gonna be there. Because when he, when he earned that mos, he. You know, he. He gave it all.
- [76:04]
Jocko Willink
Yep. Keep the standards high. Yes, Keep the freaking standards high. No slack.
- [76:10]
Chad Robichaux
You hear that, Pete? Pete's listening. Hold the line for us.
- [76:18]
Jocko Willink
Back to Krakow. There were signs of a Russian change in tactics. From the start, we've been aware of the rumors that Russian kill squads going into Ukraine posing as American humanitarian workers again. But as the war had entered its second month, whispers began that Russian special operations snipers were actively targeting genuine US Humanitarian workers in Ukraine. People just like us. None of us were surprised by this, but it was something we were factored into. Each mission undertook over the border. Dude, what are they thinking? They probably just don't want people coming and help and just kill. Kill a few aid workers, and it's like that problem is going to go away.
- [76:51]
Chad Robichaux
What's one of those most effect. It was one of the most effective things in the battlefield. Like, I mean, without the NGO community, the Ukrainian military would not have been equipped to resist the Russians. So, I mean, if you're. I mean, it's. If I was them, if I was the Russians, I'd. You're, You're. You're a combatant at that point. Like, we're providing. We're providing, you know, support, resources. Yeah. So you. I mean, you can't blame them for targeting. I mean, if they're, if you could blame them for being engaged in a war, but if they are going to be engaged in a war, you can't blame them for killing. Logistics, training, the NGOs were a threat to them. And so yeah, it's a. We're legitimate target in a battlefield now. I mean, it was horrifying too. I mean, it was a. I think I wrote about this. There was this. When I went to the border that first trip, there was this German bus. It was all German volunteer paramedics and, and EMTs. And they. And. And somebody sponsored this bus. And they went out there and they were cruising around. They showed us their bus because we were trying to build a medical vehicle and, and we had spent like day with them. They were just amazing people. They're doing the right thing. And they were going to the front line and Russian sent a rocket inside that thing and killed them all. I mean, were they.
- [78:03]
Jocko Willink
Were they. Were they fighters or were they like medical people?
- [78:07]
Chad Robichaux
They were just medical people. They were just providing medical aid in front. And look like, I'm sure if they would have found a wounded Russian, they would have treated him too. They were there just to help and. But they were into those resources, those NGOs, those. That's a threat to the Russians. It's improving the capability of the Ukrainian military.
- [78:27]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, you got this question in the book. Will I ever let Hunter go with me on a trip over the border into Ukraine? I didn't have to wait long before the question was reality. So there you go, it's coming.
- [78:42]
Chad Robichaux
I couldn't avoid it.
- [78:44]
Jocko Willink
Going to, how do you say, Lviv? Is that right?
- [78:46]
Chad Robichaux
Lviv, yeah, Lviv.
- [78:48]
Jocko Willink
Going to Lviv was a relative, relatively short distance on the map, but a slow journey in reality. Driving a few hours, you approach the city. Did I miss what this op was? What are you guys going to do here?
- [79:00]
Chad Robichaux
We're just going to deliver some. Some communication. One of those.
- [79:02]
Jocko Willink
Oh, that's right, packages. Right. There you go. So you. So you're going to do that. As you're approaching the column of black smoke up ahead, as we are approach, we saw that it was the aftermath of a Russian strike on a fuel depot. From the thickness of the smoke, I guess it happened the day before, maybe two. It was a brutal attack, one of the main ones to hit leave Lviv since the invasion had begun. By this stage in the war, the Russians use of ballistic cruise missiles had all had been well reported. But this is my first time seeing the aftermath of a strike with my own eyes. Two missiles, both roughly the size of a telegraph pole, had been used in this particular attack. There's nothing much left of the depot or the shopping mall or the grocery store or the rows of houses nearby. Nobody was searching for survivors. Hunter drove slowly as we passed by, part out of curiosity, mostly out of respect. He was doing great. I, on the other hand, could feel the first wave of doubt. What kind of a father takes his son on a road trip into a war zone? Was Hunter ready for this? Was I? All right, so how do you. How do you make that decision? Well, so how do you freaking explain that decision to your wife, Kathy? Because it's one thing for you to make that decision by getting on the phone like, hey, hey, babe, you know, your son that you birthed and raised, I'm gonna put him in harm's way.
- [80:18]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. That you trusted me to protect. Yeah. I mean, look, this. Hunters was raised by me.
- [80:24]
Jocko Willink
He's.
- [80:25]
Chad Robichaux
He's grew up around people like you. I mean, he's his friends. He's. He's an old soul, so. His friends were my friends. Like, he was around seals and recon Marines his whole life. MMA fighters. He started jitsu at threes. Never want to be anything other than Marine. He had been a Marine. He'd been that combat already. He. He's proven his worth in Afghan, the Afghanistan withdrawals, and in so far in this Ukraine operation. And so I was pushed in this corner to say, like, okay, as a father, I want to protect him. I want to control this situation. I always want to. I'm very controlling. Right. I want to control the situation. So as a father, I want to control and protect the situation. But I had to come to this realization that he's his own man. God burdens his heart just like he burns mine. He's a strong believer. He's very personally convicted as a Christian, and he's a. He has a real heart, compassion, humanitarian heart. So I had to do this dilemma like I, I and come to this conclusion. This is the conclusion I came to. I love Hunter, but I don't love him more than God loves him. As much as I love my son. God loves him more. I could protect Hunter, but God could protect him more. And while God's burden, his heart to do these things that he's burning my heart to do, I had to realize that there's probably no safer place for my son to be safer than being in a couch in Houston or in the front line of the Ukrainian war, the Russian Ukrainian war, there's probably no safer place for him to be than in the will of God. If God's burden, his heart to do that, who am I to keep him from doing those things? I could steward it and protect it, but I should not keep. Keep him from It. That's a real. That's really easy to say right here. It's a very difficult thing to say when you're. When I had already been to the front line, by that time, I'd already been to the front lines. I'd already seen the dead bodies in Ukraine and I've seen. I had already. I, by the way, eight diplomats, Afghanistan. I never seen more kinetic combat than my, my time in. You in, in Ukraine, me personally.
- [82:16]
Jocko Willink
You had both sides have the weapons. Like this is a next level type of war.
- [82:20]
Chad Robichaux
Yep. So I had never seen anything like that before. So I'm, I'm recently exposed to this and having to make this decision. So it's a very. Sounds easy to say that and, but it was a very difficult decision to make. But I just felt like I could take something from him that he was like ordained to do and be part of him and grow him into being, I think the person that got created to be. And I didn't want to get in the way of that. So I had to make this decision to relinquish my fear and control into a trust in him and a trust in God. And I did. And it was probably one of the hardest decisions ever made. However, on the other side of it, quickly, on the other side of it, it was probably one of the most incredible things. I got to witness this, witness some of the things that I got to see my son do in Ukraine and he, and you know, we go through some of them, but he just, he did some incredible things there that made me see him in a different way and have a tremendous amount of respect for him and just be proud. I'm so proud of him. Like, some of the things he did there was just incredible.
- [83:15]
Jocko Willink
Reminds me of that story of John McCain when he was over in prison camp and his dad was the admiral in overall in charge. And so he's in prison camp and the admiral has to make the decision, do we continue bombing like around Hanoi?
- [83:31]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, I didn't know.
- [83:32]
Jocko Willink
My own son is in a prison camp there and there's no time like.
- [83:35]
Chad Robichaux
You know, you don't know where he's at.
- [83:37]
Jocko Willink
There's this, this is, you know, back in the day, there's no GPS guided bombs. So you start dropping a lot of bombs, then there's a chance that you kill your kid. Yeah, and he dropped those bombs, man. And he never like treated his son any different than he did the rest of the people that were there that he was trying to help win the war, you know, broadly speaking. And taking A risk strategically with his. With the prisoners of war. But, yeah, that's a very similar scenario that you're in right here.
- [84:06]
Chad Robichaux
I did not know that story.
- [84:08]
Jocko Willink
And. And also John McCain, they were like, the. The Vietnamese, North Vietnamese were like, hey, you can go home. They wanted him to go home early because they wanted to be able to say, like, you see, the admirals wanted his son to come home, and they took care of his. He took care of his kid. Why isn't taking care of you? But John McCain did not leave. He was like, nope, I'm not going home. So credit to the McCain's freaking heroic behavior on all fronts. So you say this, too. This is like a little bit of a life review for a big. And some of this we talked about before. But for a big part of Hunter's childhood, I was not in a good place. By the time he was 13 years old, my life was unraveling fast. After eight special operations deployments to Afghanistan, I was deep in the pit of ptsd. And I brought my family along with me. Hunter's younger brother, Hayden, and their sister Haley. Am I saying that right?
- [85:01]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [85:02]
Jocko Willink
And Kathy, too. I pushed everyone away. As far as I could tell, the only option ahead of me was killing myself and becoming another veteran suicide statistic. It seems that some of the biggest changes in life happen only when we're pushed to our limits. That's how I was molded to become a Force Recon Marine. And now. And it's how I became a father and a husband again. I was ready to give up on myself. But there were a handful of people around me who weren't. They refused to be swayed by the man I'd become. And they still had faith in the man God had created me to be. It took a lot of prayer and a lot of tears, but six months after being suicidal, my life had been transformed. Not changed. Not improved. Transformed. I was a new creation, plain and simple. It was, though. It was through these new eyes that I saw my wife and my children clearly. For what felt like the first time ever, I saw their gifts, their character, their potential. Each of them blew me away. I decided to make up for lost time and threw myself at the task. I was obsessed, reading every book about parenting I could get my hands on. It was like I was planning for the most significant mission of my life. Which I guess is exactly what I was doing. I read Captivating by Satsi L Elridge to understand Kathy and Haley better as women after reading one book in particular, Raising a Modern Day Night by Robert Lewis. I got real deliberate about everything with my boys who are becoming young men. Over several weeks and months, I followed the program that taught them what it meant to be a man of God. The whole thing culminated in a ceremony in which I got to tell Hunter and Hayden exactly what I saw in them. And you go through that little ceremony type thing. Very, very cool to read about. In the 13 years since I hit my rock bottom, God has taught me so much. He surrounded me with people who love and care for me enough to fight for me. He's given me mentors who have disciplined me and taught me how to recalibrate my life. Most important of all has been the second chance and grace that God gives us all. It turns out that rock bottom is a pretty good foundation to rebuild your life on. So, yeah, there you go. Yeah, transformed. Not just changed, not just improved, but transformed your life.
- [87:06]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I was a mess. I mean, when I came home and I talked about a lot in your last episode, I was, I was complete train wreck. And I felt like I had, you know, completely lost identity, purpose and, you know, and, and there's a lot of things I tried in my, in my route to recovery. Medicine and VA programs, civilian programs and professional success, financial success. I've been. Success in that rock bottom moment I was in professionally. But my life was, you know, was dead. And you know that there's a lot of things that helped him a road to recovery. But probably nothing was more profound than restoration my faith and becoming a Christian and really kind of trying to identify, build my identity in something bigger than myself. And my life had really took a, Took a big turn to be burdened towards a service. Others different than I was in a uniform. And that, that's what led to the building of Mighty Oaks foundation and some of the work that I do now. And, and man, I loved my job as a forestry com. Marine like I never would like. I'm extremely proud of that and it's important thing, but my identity was tied to that job and not the cause of the service. It was a. My identity was tied to that. So the problem with these jobs, you know, being a police officer, being a school, whatever you're proud of, like, those jobs are noble and we should be proud of them. When your identity is tied to those, it's dangerous because at any moment those can be taken away from you. You get injured, you get sick, you're going to retire. And when you, when you lose those things, if your identity was tied to that, then you feel like you have no identity and purpose. Anymore that could be detrimental. And that's what had happened to me. So the. The transformation for me was really understand my identity was bigger than any job, as. As cool as those jobs may be, is bigger than any job. My identity relies on my eternal purpose to be a servant. And. And so that was really transformational to me.
- [88:54]
Jocko Willink
Well, you've been getting after it, so. Yeah, servant levels have been high. Going back to this mission, after several hours of driving, you guys go through some of these checkpoints. Again. You go through. It's good learning for anybody getting these, like how you guys handle these checkpoints. Really good information in there. And it's also a good read because it's freaking tense. Fast forward. A little late in the evening, we reached our destination on the outskirts of the Lviv. We're visiting our visiting friends of Pastor Bo Dawn. And this is a husband and wife. And you talked about Pastor Bodan. I didn't. I didn't cover it in the book. Get the book to read. But he's a pretty powerful figure.
- [89:31]
Chad Robichaux
He is. He is. He's incredible guy. And one of the Ukrainian. One of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians that went back, that chose to be back there.
- [89:39]
Jocko Willink
Everybody talks about living in America, right?
- [89:41]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, everyone talks about the Ukrainians leaving and fleeing, but there's hundreds of thousands, I think like 2 or 300,000 that have chosen to go back to participate in defending their country.
- [89:51]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [89:51]
Chad Robichaux
And he's one of them. That's. That's pretty. Pretty noteworthy.
- [89:54]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, very noteworthy. Yeah. It's a great part of the book. You. So you're visiting some of their friends. They're kind of using them. And are you using their. Their house like a safe house type thing? Staying for the night, getting some shelter. And then she lets you know about her son.
- [90:10]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [90:12]
Jocko Willink
You know her son. When the war started, he was sent to Car.
- [90:16]
Chad Robichaux
Carke, which is a very bad place in Frontline.
- [90:20]
Jocko Willink
Yep. He ended up getting hit was a missile. He gets strapped onto the femoral artery. His name was. What was his name? Andre. Andre. Is that how you say.
- [90:30]
Chad Robichaux
I think that was it, yeah. Andre.
- [90:32]
Jocko Willink
One of the men who was with Andre phoned me after his die. After he died, the man said that he'd called for a medic, but none of them was around. He said Ukrainian soldiers are not given any real medical training or equipment and that soldiers are not to do first aid on each other. Only doctors can treat a wounded man, man, even if he's dying. So even if he had a bandage or anything like that, he could not have used it to help Andrew without knowing how all he could do was hold him as he died. So this is this mom that's telling you this story that her. Her son got hit with shrapnel. Hits for moral artery, which is really bad. But if you know how to apply a tourniquet, you know how to stop the bleeding, like, you can absolutely save someone's life, you got to do it fast. Yeah, but in our war, you know that you and I fought in the global war on terror, you know, there was all kinds of guys that had femoral bleeds that were saved.
- [91:23]
Chad Robichaux
Sure. Yeah.
- [91:24]
Jocko Willink
And so you hear this story, like.
- [91:29]
Chad Robichaux
By the way, by a mom at a table in her house while she's making us breakfast. You know, she just cooked us breakfast, and she's telling us, you can't escape that you. You're sitting there face to face with her, and you're like, he could. You don't want to tell her, but, like, he could have easily been. He could have easily been saved where. By a tourniquet and ratcheted down and by some. You know.
- [91:49]
Jocko Willink
So as you say goodbye to them, you drive away. As you're driving away, finally, Hunter said exactly what. What I've been thinking. We have to do something, don't we? And that's how you guys sort of come up with your next. Next focus of your mission. Not the full focus, but it's definitely another line of operation that you get into, which is doing training for people.
- [92:05]
Chad Robichaux
This area. We could help.
- [92:06]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. It wasn't difficult to decide to pack up our operations center in Krakow and leave Poland entirely. The Ukrainian military hadn't just resisted the Russians advance on Kyiv. They'd push the invasion way back, which meant the city was now relatively safe and stable outside of rocket attacks. Made sense for us to be there. So, again, you go through a bunch of details in the book, but Kyiv had pretty much been held by the Ukrainians, which was amazing to watch from the outside. And it was weird, too. Like, they were living, like.
- [92:38]
Chad Robichaux
It's so weird. Like, you go to a restaurant and have dinner, you might hear a rocket every now and then. But, I mean, they just were like. They were so defiant and resilient. They were like, we're. We're not gonna live cowering in our basements. That's it. I think I write about in there. That was this moment that really just defined their resilience. This guy's like, his. His house is burnt down. There's smoke in the background, and there's a bright, fresh Ukrainian flag up on this building and he's mowing his lawn. It's like a big fu to the Russians. Like, yeah, you can do it. You could blow up my house, but I'm gonna mow my lawn. Like.
- [93:15]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, fast forward a little bit. As we drove into Bucha. Am I saying that right?
- [93:21]
Chad Robichaux
Bucha.
- [93:22]
Jocko Willink
Bucha. What I saw was much worse than I'd expected. Worse than the story the media had communicated. Parts of Bucha had been decimated. Whole streets were reduced to rubble from holes in several parked and burned out cars. I was pretty sure the Russians had been firing 25 millimeter or 30 millimeter rounds, most likely from tanks. If the attack on the previous house had been designed to instill fear, what I saw could have been planned with only one goal in mind. An evil intent to terrorize. So this is. Sounds like it's absolutely horrific. Worse than anything we were seeing on the news.
- [93:58]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, it was, it was, it was definitely terroristic to, to break the morale of the Ukrainian people. I mean it would be like a military complex here. And, and they were like ready to go toe to toe to fight the Russians. And the Russians to move over here and destroy elderly community. Because that's how they break them, right? They could, they could fight the troops and, and they're gonna, you know, they might take big losses, but they're, they're in to fight for their freedom in their homes. They're going to fight till the end. And so why fight the Ukrainian troops when they could totally break their will by killing their parents or their wives and children? And so, you know, we see apartment complexes that were no military target in sight. And you know, rock, like bombs dropped from the sky. Like three buildings is not indis. This is not like collateral damage. Like three apartment buildings with a bomb in the center of each of them. You know, where only women and children are. Or in Buka, that, that elderly community that we went in and was just leveled.
- [94:55]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. Between April and August, we were busy. We made a number of trips to rescue more people, distribute medical supplies, provide more resiliency training for frontline troops. At one point, I made a trip with Dennis Corey and Jeremy Stalnecker, a former Marine infantry commander and co founder of Mighty Oaks to Kiev to liaise with Samaritan's Purse, local chaplains and other NGOs and providing frontline medical care. It was an ambitious project. Working together, working together to turn our six wheeler into a mobile field hospital to treat troops injured on the front line. Meanwhile, you say, I was ready to let someone else take charge of the planning and preparation for the upcoming operation. Hunter stepped up and spent weeks putting together a detailed plan for a 14 day trip into the red zone front line of the battle air area in eastern Ukraine. So you're going to go on another. What would you consider this like a mission, an operation to go up there for 14 days?
- [95:49]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. This is more where Mighty Oaks steps in and does what Mighty Oaks does on our international side. Training, training them to do. It's where, that's where we're Hunter, you know, and his team really do just such a great job. I've got a lot of soft veterans that went through Mighty Oaks that found new purpose again and they want to go out to other countries that and ally partners and train them what we do at Mighty Oaks. And, and, and so we wanted to be able to, to bring that ministry type aspect to them but no one really cares about that. A lot of these commanders, like we don't want to be ministered to right now. What we need is this. So part of that's building relationships and what do they need most is they needed medical training and medical care. So we were bringing really good medical. All that's billions of dollars that we were sending there. But guys still didn't have tourniquets on the battlefield. So we were bringing tourniquets and first aid kits ifax, you know, individual first aid kits that we were the really good ones that slide inside your, that slide inside your body armor that you could just pull out with a tab off your and, and teaching them how to use that. So we're bringing guys that were like doctors from who had, who teach at 18 Delta School. So we're bringing high level instructors to be able to not just give them the equipment but teach them how to use it. And that would build rapport, allow our guys to share their stories and help build some spiritual resiliency on the battlefield for them. Offer things like some of our resources. We have Mighty Oaks audio Bible sticks to encourage and encourage them. So those are the kind of things that the Mighty Oaks set in to do. One of the things I was really proud of Hunter was they came up with a, a plan based on the void of chaplains in the Ukrainian military. They didn't have a chaplaincy and so they had all these pastors. Imagine a pastor going to church one Sunday he has half men, half women. The next Sunday it goes, it's all women.
- [97:26]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [97:26]
Chad Robichaux
The men have been conscripted or drafted and so these are small communities so the pastors would be like, hey, I've been knowing a little bit on since he was in, you know, Sunday school and I care about him. I want to go to the front lines, but I don't know how to be a chaplain. I don't know how to, how to sleep in the woods, poop in the woods, like provide a first aid or anything like that. I'm going to be a burden to them. And, and you know, being a pastor doesn't equip you to be a chaplain. The average lifespan on the front line of Ukraine war is four and a half days. So like how do you minister someone like that to someone that their, their buddies are dying? And so, so Mighty Oaks and Hunter led this effort. They trained 300 CH pastors, converted them to chaplains, equipped and deployed them to the front line and helped distributed them to the front lines. And so that was a really 300. Might not sound like a lot, but when you talk about like a 300 chaplains, yeah, that's, that's pretty impactful.
- [98:16]
Jocko Willink
So for this, for this mission, you got some of your guys from Mighty Oaks, like you were mentioning, Dennis Reed. Hasty. Hasty.
- [98:22]
Chad Robichaux
Hasty, yeah. Reed Hasty.
- [98:23]
Jocko Willink
He's a combat engineer and two former SEALs, Lou Rivera and Colin Fields.
- [98:30]
Chad Robichaux
You know Lou, right?
- [98:30]
Jocko Willink
Yep, Very well. Yep. All four Mighty Oaks instructors. In fact. We're supposed to have Lou on the podcast. I think I talked to you about that.
- [98:36]
Chad Robichaux
We gotta get. Really.
- [98:37]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [98:37]
Chad Robichaux
Did you, did you hear about, did you read in there about Lou do breakdancing?
- [98:40]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, I did, I did. I never saw. He kept that, you know, concealed. Oh man, his breakdown at least. I never knew his break.
- [98:48]
Chad Robichaux
We really had bombs going off and he's break the breakdancing competition with Ukrainians in the middle of the. We posted a video and people were saying that it's fake. Like guys don't do that in a war zone. That actually they do.
- [99:00]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, just shout out to field crafts revival and summit Point training. These you and you guys did tactical combat casualty care with them to get ready for this trip.
- [99:09]
Chad Robichaux
Just cool driving training, foreign weapons, familiar. Like they did a good job training our guys to get our guys up to speed.
- [99:17]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, fast forward a little bit. Kharkiv had been home to 1.5 million people. It was a major city built for modern living. Yet the Russian missiles had dragged it back decades. High rise apartment blocks have been decimated. Shopping malls turned into twisted piles of metal. Ice cream parlors reduced to broken signs and piles of rocks. Kids playground equipment. Charred, melted, dead bodies were Trapped beneath crushed homes, apartment complexes. Even if not one more bomb fell, it would take years to put Kharkiv back together again.
- [99:47]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, Kharkiv's like, is like apocalyptic. Like we're driving in and first of all at nighttime if you have a light, it's going to get hit. So you go lights out.
- [99:59]
Jocko Willink
Are you guys on nods?
- [100:01]
Chad Robichaux
No, no, we were just, I mean we had some nods, but we were, we had nods, but we didn't have everybody driving in odds. We were just. There's like that night that we drove in, that particular night we drove in, it was pretty, pretty ambient and but we were, we're driving in and just. I just remember how like everybody got quiet because it just looked like it was like you were driving through like downtown Houston or downtown San Diego and just like, just decimated. Like buildings knocked down, like high rise buildings broken in half. They're just like so apocalyptic. And one of the Ukrainians came over the radio and he said, welcome to Kharkiv. The only thing that lives here is Will Smith and his dog from the movie I Am Legend. And that's just. It was exactly right how I felt. It was crazy.
- [100:48]
Jocko Willink
And what you guys were going up there to train people? That was the, that was the goal.
- [100:52]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, we're going to provide, provide medical equipment and comic casual chair care.
- [100:57]
Jocko Willink
Training you say from time to time. Vitali, he's like one of your, one of your guides.
- [101:03]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, Vitali, he's like. He has former secret service for Zawinski's detail, but also a chaplain. He. So he ended up taking the role of a chaplain. It just a really like. I mean he had, he had a. Started a non profit to rebuild people's homes. He's just an amazing guy and so he's very networked and connected. Connected. So you end up being pretty vital to both to have access to different areas of Ukraine.
- [101:25]
Jocko Willink
Always well named then because his name is Vitali and he's very vital to the situation.
- [101:29]
Chad Robichaux
Yes.
- [101:30]
Jocko Willink
Take photos, he'd say. Show people what's happened here. We did as he said, walking slowly and quietly, staring at the carnage all around us. Eventually someone asked the question we'd all been thinking. Where is everyone? Vitaly stopped and turned around like he was convinced he'd seen people. If he only looked, if he only looked hard enough. Almost everyone is gone. Those who have stayed live among the ruins and know how to hide. Fast forward a little bit that evening I found myself talking with the woman who had been leading the worship earlier that day. She told Me. Her name was Anna, and she was around my age. She looked and sounded like a regular soccer mom, and I told her that I'd enjoyed the service. When she responded, her words were nothing like the typical conversation I'd have over coffee after church at home. There is evil in this world, she began. There is danger and violence and people who want to hurt and destroy you. And just because you put your trust in God for your children, your loved ones and everyone else that you care about, doesn't mean that they are going to be safe. You understand? I do. I started to share some of my experiences, but stopped myself. This was a moment to listen and not speak. People say they trust God, but what they actually say is, I trust that God will. They have a contract all grown up, all drawn up, and they expect God to come through for them exactly the way they want him to. But really trusting God means letting go of the outcome. It means giving up on getting results that you want. And when you do that, everything changes. That's what you saw Today, almost everyone here is learning what it means to truly put your faith in God. And when the Russians came, we all started from the same place, telling God that we trusted him to do what we wanted, to protect our children and loved ones. But everyone here has lost someone they loved. Some of the people you are worshiping alongside have seen their own children shot to death, blown up, or executed. But they're still here. They're still believing that God exists and is with us. And they're finding that God can take their rage and their sorrow and their pain. He can take it all. Every tear and every shout. He is enough. This was a lesson I desperately needed to learn. It was also one that I would soon be tested on.
- [103:57]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I walked away and wrote that down after her chocolate shows are so moved by it. That morning they had asked. We had got bombed that night, that night prior. And in that morning, they were having the church service. And this is like, people, like she said, lost everything. And they're having a church service and asked me to speak. And I'm like, what am I gonna say to these people that lost everything? Like. And the only thing I knew how to say is, like, I don't. I don't have the answers. Like, I can't explain what's happening here. I could just tell you that people care. And we're here. We're here because as it, if anything else, is a representative that people around the world do care. You're not alone. And if anything, God sent us here to let you know, you're not alone. And. And she. When she said that, I was just, like, so struck by it because of the moment that I was in dealing with Hunter and some other things I was dealing with at the time. It spoke directly to me, and I wrote that down.
- [104:50]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. It's kind of what you were talking about, making that decision with Hunter earlier. It's like this was the verbal. She kind of verbalized the thought process that you had. It was like, trusting God isn't like, oh, he's going to give me the outcome that I want.
- [105:04]
Chad Robichaux
Right.
- [105:04]
Jocko Willink
That's not. That's not what you get.
- [105:07]
Chad Robichaux
Right.
- [105:07]
Jocko Willink
You're going to get what's supposed to happen.
- [105:09]
Chad Robichaux
That's right. That's right.
- [105:18]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. We drove south. Vitaly had arranged for us to stay in an inn for the night. And then he explains that you're going to go work with this group of Ukrainians. He says they are called Safari. He explained to me when we stopped the next morning to buy a load of pizzas in the nearest town. And they are not like other units. They are special. The unit was created by Call a guy called Baton saying that, right?
- [105:43]
Chad Robichaux
Baton.
- [105:43]
Jocko Willink
Baton, which means concrete check. He's like the Dana White of Ukrainian MMA and former Ukrainian special forces from the 2014 war. When the invasion happened, Bataan was asked to create a special unit that would cause chaos among the Russians. Basically a hit squad. He used his influence and contacts to reach out to all the coaches for MMA fighters, boxers, wrestlers, and martial arts grapplers. He brought them and their athletes together, and the level of camaraderie that they have is hard to find. But Vitaly paused, like he wasn't sure whether what he was about to say was, okay, Safari is tough, but they need military training. That's why Baton and the men of Safari are so excited to meet you. You are a professional fighter from Strike Force and Bellator, and you were special operations who fought in Afghanistan. If they like you and the team, maybe we can come back and help them some more.
- [106:40]
Chad Robichaux
I don't. I think I'm most excited. I think I'm most excited about this interview right now, that you got to read this story.
- [106:46]
Jocko Willink
It's freaking epic, dude.
- [106:47]
Chad Robichaux
This is like a movie, man. When I'm like, are you being for real? Like, they put together. Could you imagine, like, Victory? MMA is a company.
- [106:55]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not just Victory mma. It's like every freaking badass MMA gym in America. Just like, all right, we send us your best five fighters, the coaches, and the Platoon sergeants. Yeah. That's freaking awesome, man. Very cool story. Fast forward the next two days. Our guys were spread among Baton's unit. All of us spent hours hanging out, talking, sharing gear, giving advice, training, demonstrating things that we picked up through the years of training in combat. Hunter spent a long time demonstrating how to use water filters we bought. And of course, Hunter and I got to do a little wrestling with some of the men, trading techniques and sharing old stories. There's a cool. I didn't read the story, but there's a story where you like, basically you guys have to earn your respect through a freaking sniper shot.
- [107:37]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, sniper shoot off.
- [107:39]
Jocko Willink
And you pulled it off. Freaking epic. Yeah, I imagine it was a little bit of that with the jiu jitsu as well.
- [107:46]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, yeah. They want. Right?
- [107:47]
Jocko Willink
They want to kill you.
- [107:48]
Chad Robichaux
All these guys are calling flaudier Jack, like jacked guys. And they, they want to. They want to scrap up. Hunter and I, we were right on the dirt and. And then. And then Dennis, Dennis Price did that shoot off with that Ukrainian sniper and freaking. It was. It was great.
- [108:03]
Jocko Willink
All throughout the time there, I could hear our Mighty Oaks guys, Dennis, Reed, Lewis and Colin and Hunter sharing parts of their own stories and talking about the importance of being spiritually strong. Just like I'd heard them all do countless times in our programs back home with the American veterans and service members. So you're really trying to not just give them military training, but give them some spiritual training as well.
- [108:25]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, it was really great. You know, Luis Lou, he just so he demands respect, like right away. I mean, I think in teams they called him Mamalu and we call him Mamalu at Mighty Oaks. But he immediately like, has this like kind of father figure and he just stepped in and rolled so well. Colin Fields is a team guy and He's A. He's 18 Delta. So he was providing medical training, all that Team Reed, Hasty, those guys just did such a good job on that trip and earned the respect of this unit safari and many other units. But that one particularly was one that I wanted to connect with. And they just did such a good job.
- [108:56]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it's freaking outstanding. Yeah, like, and you. Do you get the job done and you know those. There's a part, if I remember correctly, you had like a. The sticks with the Bible on.
- [109:08]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, the audio Bible sticks.
- [109:10]
Jocko Willink
And you didn't like say, like, hey, you didn't issue them?
- [109:13]
Chad Robichaux
No.
- [109:13]
Jocko Willink
You just left them out and the guys took them.
- [109:16]
Chad Robichaux
They took him in there. And Vitale has said they've been there before with those. And never took any. And there was like over a thousand between those. In between those two units we went to. They were all gone.
- [109:26]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [109:26]
Chad Robichaux
And they. They weren't able to give away any before. And it was just through that relationship.
- [109:31]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [109:31]
Chad Robichaux
It's not there. Just evangelizing, pushing, you know, pushing faith or pushing whatever on them. It's just like getting to know them on a personal level, connecting to them, building a relationship, building their rapport and trust and. And then sharing our personal stories, being vulnerable with them. And here's the things that we went through. We never. We never experienced this. I remember telling them, like, hey, I've never had someone invade my country. We had nine, 11. But then we left and went to Afghanistan. But the ones I didn't have to worry about my wife and kids at home. Like, I can't relate to you guys, but. But we're here and. And, yeah, you know, and we're going to be here for you.
- [110:06]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. You were, you say, back at home. For much of September, Ukraine launched a rapid counteroffensive in northeastern Kharkiv. So there's this fight and just. Just escalating. Keep going. You decide you're going back to Ukraine, it's going to be your last visit. You arrived to talk in Kiev. CSPE received a call that there was a US Marine who had been fighting for the Ukrainians. Reports suggest that he. He'd been shot in the abdomen and was captured. But there was credible intelligence to suggest there was potential for him to be rescued if we were willing to go in and get him. So you got that coming down the pipe. And then on top of that, within the hour, we received another call. There's a report of mass graves in Izium.
- [110:45]
Chad Robichaux
A Zoom.
- [110:45]
Jocko Willink
A Zoom. 1500 women and children. Rice Go wants to go get eyes on and verify. With billions of dollars flowing into Ukraine from the Biden White House, there was clearly an incentive for Ukraine to embellish or falsify reports of atrocities. So our government contacts wanted to verify, wanted independent verification. If it was true, we needed to know. The world needed to know. Both the rescue of the Marine and verification of mass graves felt exactly like the kind of thing we were there to do. But saying yes to both of them would mean leaving Hunter to carry out his mission without me. Do I leave Hunter lead the operation without being by his side? Or do I give into my desire to be a hovering dad and say no to sea spray? There's a question of trust, but not my trust of Hunter is about my own trust of God. Was I prepared to let go? Was I willing to put aside my own need to be there to protect my son and ensure his safety? Or was I okay with handing him over to God? Could I accept that the safest place Hunter could be was in the center of God's will, not under my own supervision? After all I'd seen in Ukraine, I knew what I had to do. It was time to let go. Deep down, deeper than the fear I was sensing, I knew that I trusted Hunter and I knew that I trusted God even more. As much as I love Hunter, God loves him more. As much as I want to protect Hunter, God can do it better. So, yes, it was time to risk it all. It was time to trust God. So you and Seaspray end up heading for the mass graves, and Hunter goes to try and recover the wounded Marine.
- [112:22]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, well. Well, the. The wounded. Actually, the wounded Marine in the mass graves were me and Sea Spray. The.
- [112:28]
Jocko Willink
Oh, did I get it backwards?
- [112:29]
Chad Robichaux
Well, and Hunter was doing the original mission, which was providing medical supplies.
- [112:33]
Jocko Willink
Oh, okay.
- [112:33]
Chad Robichaux
So he's bringing medical side to break off from that one to do Spray and I were doing that. That was both in a zoom, which. A zoom had been occupied for six months by the Russians. So that. That. That was part of the. That's why the mass graves were uncovered, because the Ukraine. To push them out. And that was this Risko as a pseudo name, by the way. As for the solo, the Special Operations liaison officer. So that was the agency asking us to validate those. Yeah, and that was a big decision. Right, dude. And, you know, they had some good guys in his team. He had a four street kind guy and a Marsaw guy. He had. Yeah, I can't remember the fourth person. Yeah, but he had some good guys in his team. But sending him off to do that without was. Was a. Was a big decision. And, you know, C. Spray and I, you know, we set off. We set off before them and we drove through the night and headed out to Zoom.
- [113:27]
Jocko Willink
Pick this up. We parked near one of the pits and followed Vadim. Is that right?
- [113:33]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, Vadim, he's. He was the chief of police for the entire country of Ukraine. Ukraine, which is like the. It's kind of a weird position. It'd be like almost like the SEC death. The. The Director of the FBI, the Attorney General, like, all rolled into one. One position. Yeah.
- [113:46]
Jocko Willink
He walked slowly toward it. A few soldiers were gathered around it, some working, some staring into space and taking a moment. Moment. Hardly anyone was speaking Someone had put hazard tape around the edge of the earth mound that surrounded the pit. But I didn't need the tape to tell me it was a crime scene. I could smell it in the air, the stench of decomposing bodies. I wanted to take a moment before walking in there. But no matter how much anger or sorrow I wanted to feel, I had a job to do. I needed to focus, to observe what the Russians had done and report back. We needed to bear witness to what we were seeing. The earth mounds were mass graves. As I watched, the Ukrainian soldiers were working through each pile, pulling out bodies, transferring them to a waiting open grave, then burying them in individual graves that were they were digging nearby. None of the bodies could be identified, but each was buried with a cross bearing the name of one of the missing people from the town. The Ukrainians had been working on the site for six days. In the mass grave I was standing by, they had found 475 bodies. In another grade, they had found 1100 bodies. Most of them had been burned, likely to try and hide the evidence. Many had their hands tied in front or behind a clear sign they had been executed. They were all civilians, all of them. Children, women, elderly. It was a war crime, an atrocity, an act of evil. And from everything I'd seen and heard, this wasn't the only mass grave in Ukraine. And it wasn't a rogue act by an individual commander going behind the backs of his superior officers. What had happened here? The invasion of a town, the six month occupation that ended when the civilian women and children were rounded up with their hands bound and brought here to be executed. This was a pattern. This was a strategy. This was a logical final step for an invading force that had targeted civilians from day one. I assured Vadim that I would tell the right people about what we witnessed. But it didn't feel like enough to simply file my report back with intelligence agencies who'd commissioned us in the first place. I wanted to bear witness to the rest of the world. So I recommend recorded a video and sent it to Fox News, who broke the story. Later, while we were driving away, one of the reporters called. I put her on speaker so Sea Spray could be part of the interview. When she was almost done, she said she had two final questions for us. Why are you guys out there helping these people? My answer was equally as simple. Because it's the right thing to do. Her final question was directed at Seaspray. His answer will stick with me for the rest of my life. Is it worth it? She asked. It doesn't have to be said Seaspray, not skipping a beat. Those five words summarize everything about our time in Ukraine. It doesn't have to be worth it to do the right thing. Sometimes we just do the right thing simply because it's just that the right thing to do. There doesn't always need to be an roi, and we don't have to calculate what we will get in return. If we choose to expend our time, money, energy, or resources, we don't need to worry about who gets the reward or who deserves credit. Forget whether it's safe. Forget about whether it's safe, popular, or dangerous. When it comes to helping people in need, the world needs fewer people who are calculating what they're going to get out of it and a whole lot more people who will simply do the right thing.
- [117:20]
Chad Robichaux
That's from a guy that says it doesn't have to be who gave up everything. Right. When you think about the context of who he is and what he gave up, is it worth it to a guy who gave up his whole career? Yeah. It doesn't have to be. Yeah.
- [117:36]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. These mass graves and everything is just freaking horrific.
- [117:43]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. You know, I could see why, you know, our government would want to. Eyes on validation. I mean, that's a great way to get, you know, more sympathy, more. But those, you know, I can say it's a firsthand, you know, firsthand testimony. Those real. And in the Ukrainian forces that came in to recapture a zoom that we were with in the beginning when we talked about that. That gunfight that we got into, those guys, that was their families, that was. They were unit. That unit was local to the area. So that was their wives, their children that were in that area. And so we were with them. We actually. One of the. I don't think I write in a book, but I'll show you the video later if you want to see. They captured some of them, and we got to get a video of them jailed and, you know, some of the ones, the Russians that they captured, that's.
- [118:27]
Jocko Willink
Not a. Gonna be a comfortable prison sentence.
- [118:30]
Chad Robichaux
No, no. Yeah.
- [118:35]
Jocko Willink
Fast forward a little bit. Seaspray took the call telling us the effort to rescue the Marine had hit a dead end. After a couple days with no updates, I wasn't surprised that they'd lost comms altogether, but I was troubled by it, and Seaspray was, too. We'd been a long shot, but. But still a shot. I doubted the Marine would have any more chances at rescue even if he was still alive. Then we heard the Familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery. Round after round was shaking the ground. Seaspray and I took cover as each explosion crept closer to our location. The Ukrainians had it under control and I felt calm. At least I didn't till the moment I phoned Hunter and heard the explosions going on around him too. We're taking indirect fire too, dad. Don't worry, I'm driving like a bat out of hell. We're good. I'll call you when we're clear. Hunter disconnected before I had the chance to respond.
- [119:25]
Chad Robichaux
That's. That was a crazy feeling that made me, in that moment, kind of question that decision, you know, didn't make the right decision. You know, I was totally fine with what was happening with us.
- [119:36]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, of course.
- [119:36]
Chad Robichaux
And then I wasn't fine when I got that call.
- [119:41]
Jocko Willink
And well, luckily, you know, Hunter did make it through that.
- [119:44]
Chad Robichaux
He did. And he's still with us. Yeah.
- [119:47]
Jocko Willink
And I'm going to fast forward to the epilogue here, which is actually written by your son Hunter, because he did survive that indirect fire attack. And he says this. When I was six years old, I had a dream. I didn't know what country I was in, but I knew it was overseas. My six year old brain recognized the dusty streets, the men wearing their long and flowing robes, the women in their blood black veils. But I wasn't there alone. My dad was with me. And in my dream, I knew that meant everything was going to be okay. We were doing some kind of work that I didn't fully understand. But I did know that wherever we were and whatever we were doing, we were helping rescue people who need it. I liked being there with my dad, working side by side like that. Suddenly there was chaos and we were running, heading toward a bunch of people who needed our help. Bad men were shooting at us and trying to stop us from rescuing the people. We were in the fight of our lives and had no weapons to defend ourselves. But we still continued to rescue anyone that we could. The dream ended soon after. And the thing is, my dream wasn't a nightmare. I didn't feel. Didn't even feel much fear knowing that those bad guys had the intention of killing me and my dad. All along I just felt like I was okay. I was where I was meant to be. Helping people who couldn't help themselves standing up to evil. That dream never left me. It was in my head when I enlisted the United States Marine Corps. And I thought about it often when I was deployed to Afghanistan too. But even though there were plenty of times when I could have helped when I could help people as a marine, it never felt like the fulfillment of my dream. I always had the sense that it's some point in my future I'd be doing exactly what I dreamed about when I was six, Helping rescue people with my dad while bad guys tried to stop us. I'll close it out with this. Says when God puts a burden on your heart, it's like a seed. It can take a long time before you see any signs of life up above the surface and even longer until it starts to bloom. But if you water it with faith, if you put your trust in God, that seed will grow. It might not look how you thought it would or sprout when you want it to, but when he is ready, it'll grow and eventually it'll produce fruit in the perfect season of life.
- [122:14]
Chad Robichaux
Am I right? When I read that, when he wrote that and sent it to me, like, I, I start. I just got teared up, start crying, man. It's like, like, yeah, that's, that's wild, that epilogue.
- [122:25]
Jocko Willink
And I mean, you got, you guys got it done. You're. You're able to serve together with your son.
- [122:31]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, he, he's went to Ukraine more times than me did, by the way. Now.
- [122:34]
Jocko Willink
Uhuh.
- [122:34]
Chad Robichaux
So I did 10 trips. He did 13 trips there. He's doing, he's doing a lot. He's doing a lot of this stuff in South America right now. He's. Yeah, he's. He really. This is kind of what his heart beats for.
- [122:46]
Jocko Willink
So you raised him, right? Outstanding. So he's on his 13th trip. You're on your 10th trip. You did 10 trips. So what else, what else you focused on right now? What do you got going on? You got. I know one thing you got going on is the Resilient podcast. The Resilient, Resilient show, which is your podcast.
- [123:03]
Chad Robichaux
That's right. Yeah.
- [123:04]
Jocko Willink
You're getting ready to record one with me here? I am in a little while. We're done with this. And what's that all about? What's the Resilient show all about?
- [123:10]
Chad Robichaux
You know, I just, just like you have access to some amazing human beings and, and I get to hear their stories and, and I just feel like you, the world needs to hear more stories like that. And, and a lot of my veterans have incredible stories of overcoming. Don't really have a platform to do that. And I so want to create, make sure that they had opportunity to share their stories and share stories of resilience and overcoming. And then I also feel like I Have access a lot to a lot of people to have a lot of information that could inform the listeners. And. And the mainstream media seems like they've lost the desire to share true journalistic stories and informed American public. And. And you know, watching guys like you, Sean Ryan especially has. Has really shared a lot of information with the public that's helped make people resilient because they're informed. I believe, you know, being resilient is part of being resilient is being informed. And so because of. Have. Have access to these people, I just wanted to create a platform to do that. And so we're. We're 30 right now, 34 episodes in. I've had incredible guests. Terry Crews, Sean Ryan having. Marcus Lottrello and Dr. Stephen Greer, the UFO guy. Like, that's some great guests. And just sharing stories that are. I'm interested in that I want to know more about. So I'm having fun with it and just hearing incredible stories that people never heard before. I just shared a story with a guy named Aaron Hall. Yeah, Never. Never been on a big podcast before or anything. He lost his. His total vision. Total hearing an I blast. And they interview him at that. He had a cochlear implant that barely. He could hear it through. You have to wear a microphone to talk to him. And he's just incredible human being Runs ultra marathon ever. Yeah, yeah. You know, this guy is. Yeah, yeah. Ultra marathons, Whitewater kayaking.
- [124:48]
Jocko Willink
But he makes. He makes like. He's a chocolatier.
- [124:51]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [124:51]
Jocko Willink
Like, makes for. What's his fudge company called? Oh, do you know.
- [124:54]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, wait, wait, wait. What is it? Yeah, COD. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. Is something delights or something. Yeah, not.
- [125:04]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, what an awesome.
- [125:06]
Chad Robichaux
Extraordinary delights. I think that's it.
- [125:08]
Jocko Willink
Extraordinary EOD Chocolate or EOD Fudge or something like that.
- [125:12]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [125:12]
Jocko Willink
All right, so that's awesome. And then. And then you. You also wrote a new book. Like a series of books. Right. But it's a fiction type scenario. Yeah.
- [125:20]
Chad Robichaux
I was. I was approached to by Tyndale that asked me if I'd be interested in doing fiction. And. And I always had interest in it. So it was just like right away I was like, yes, I'd love to. You know, a lot of my career I couldn't put. I mean, saving disease was like extremely redacted by the Pentagon. So a lot of stuff I can't write about. So I figured I could kind of mimic the character a little bit after my career. And. And it's called Silent Horizons. It's the program name. The SAP program that he's in is Silent. Silent Horizon Uncle Charles.
- [125:50]
Jocko Willink
You like that?
- [125:51]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [125:51]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. I can always tell when Reneko's nodding his head vigorously. That's. That's right up echo Charles. He likes some Silent Horizon activities over there.
- [126:01]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. So. So Foster Quinn is the character. He's a Foster Quinn. Yeah, that's the character.
- [126:06]
Jocko Willink
Come up with that.
- [126:07]
Chad Robichaux
Well, Foster was one of my best buddies. In fact I got his bracelet on right now.
- [126:10]
Jocko Willink
Foster.
- [126:10]
Chad Robichaux
Foster Harrington who was killed in. In. In 2004. And you know, he served him. A wedding was there and all three of my kids were born. We did 10 years together. So he was the first big loss I had. So a lot of the characters in the book are named after Seth Stone as a friend of yours. He's. So a lot of the characters in the book after KAA guys.
- [126:29]
Jocko Willink
But you have a straight up character named Seth Stone.
- [126:32]
Chad Robichaux
That's Seth Stone. We use first names.
- [126:34]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [126:34]
Chad Robichaux
But the book is dedicated to. Because my. With author that helped me write it. He was. He was at. He was. He served with him as a. Because Jack was a. Is a Top Gun pilot. Top Gun instructor. But his ground time he worked with Seth.
- [126:51]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [126:51]
Chad Robichaux
And. And so he had. So we had dedicated to two guys each and Seth was one of them.
- [126:56]
Jocko Willink
Freaking outstanding.
- [126:57]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. So yeah. But the book just really about a Force Recon Marine who goes to dev group as AFO Advanced Force operator doing clandestine logistics and yeah gee, interesting story. And you know not Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, Iran and. And he stays on as a contractor there and does some great stuff. He's. But he's really tall and handsome. So do you have to get.
- [127:24]
Jocko Willink
That's right. He's six three. Yeah. Do. Do you still have to get it Pentagon reviewed?
- [127:30]
Chad Robichaux
You know it's up to the publishers and the publisher chose not to. I know like guys like Jack Carr, they don't do that any anymore. You could. I had. I kind of picked the independent panel to read it and review it. I had some guys that are at you know the unit at CAG at Dev Guru ground Branch to kind of read it and tell me I got a guy as a former intel officer Marine Corps 06 Colonel and let me know if I'm passing you know crossing lines with ttps or means and Methods. And so I feel pretty good with it. But one of the things I did the book is even those fictions I want everything to be extremely accurate. It was so important to me. Like I do a chapter about half the chapters of Free Fall Jump and so I Use my experience to write it as a military free fall parachuters. However, I had like a guy at ground branch, a guy at the unit right now who's free fall jump masters read it and it's just dial. Damn. Perfect. Like the dive stuff, the dive equipment, everything's just dialed in perfect. And even if you're fc, who helped.
- [128:21]
Jocko Willink
You with the dive stuff?
- [128:22]
Chad Robichaux
Seaspray more time.
- [128:23]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [128:24]
Chad Robichaux
Maritime branch guy, because a lot of the stuff was using. And he's using the civilian gear, like some civilian rebreathers and stuff. So. Yeah, so if he's like. If he's like in Iran and I'm like this, you're in the street in Iran and there's a coffee shop here. That coffee shop's really there. Yeah. So that's. I wanted to have that accuracy.
- [128:41]
Jocko Willink
That's cool. Yeah, that's one thing. You know, Jack Carr goes into like a level 12 detail on stuff with weapon systems and belts and like watches and all this stuff. And it's funny because when we wrote Extreme Ownership with Leif, Leif was like adding all this details like, bro, no one cares about this stuff. I was like, no one cares what, you know, which rifle this guy's carrying or what scope this guy's using. Like, no one cares. And we literally legitimately, like pulled stuff out. Like, we just, it was just too much detail. Then of course, they're obviously different, but the fact that Jack Carr will tell you like what type of knife a dude has on his E kit, you're like, okay, but it's a thing. People love that stuff.
- [129:20]
Chad Robichaux
People like the detail in it. Yeah. Especially in those type of books. Right. Obviously Extreme Ownership is a different genre.
- [129:25]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [129:26]
Chad Robichaux
But.
- [129:26]
Jocko Willink
But it is pretty wild to, to see that people are so interested in that stuff.
- [129:31]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. So it's three book series. So book one comes out May 13th. It's actually for sale now, so people that want to support it can pre order it right now on Amazon.
- [129:38]
Jocko Willink
Silent Horizons.
- [129:39]
Chad Robichaux
Horizons. Yeah. And then every year, every year you want to come out for three, maybe more. But right now it's. We have a contractor for three books. I've already written the first two.
- [129:49]
Jocko Willink
And you like them.
- [129:50]
Chad Robichaux
It's really fun. It's been really fun writing. I mean, and Jack's amazing. Jack? Jack. Jack Stewart, the guy, right. With. He's, you know, he's brilliant. Obviously he's a. He was a Top Gun adversary instructor. He's just a really smart guy. And so. And it's difficult writing with you. You know, it's the Difficult writing sometimes with two people when you're trying to master one voice. But we've. We have a. SO system in place, and so we'll probably keep working together for a while.
- [130:13]
Jocko Willink
I mean, Leif and I actually didn't really do that because I wrote chapters and he wrote chapters, and they're. They're separate, like they say, like, who wrote it.
- [130:22]
Chad Robichaux
Okay.
- [130:22]
Jocko Willink
Although, you know, when we write like a forward or something like that, you know, if we do it, there's some of the parts of the books that we've written together is a little bit of that, you know, like I said, like the forward or something. So.
- [130:32]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, yeah, you get.
- [130:33]
Jocko Willink
You get a little system going.
- [130:35]
Chad Robichaux
So. Yeah, the resilient show, writing books, speaking. I'm still speaking a lot and definitely, you know, very involved with this international stuff, making sure that our teams are in place.
- [130:45]
Jocko Willink
This is save our allies.
- [130:47]
Chad Robichaux
No. 4. Fourth option is. Oh, so Tim and Sarah and they still running save at Save Our Allies.
- [130:53]
Jocko Willink
Got it.
- [130:54]
Chad Robichaux
And, you know, for not. Not any bad reasons, we just. We just did. We're doing different. There was different focuses.
- [131:01]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [131:01]
Chad Robichaux
And so I'm doing the fourth option is what we call it. So.
- [131:04]
Jocko Willink
Oh. So.
- [131:05]
Chad Robichaux
And then. And then Mighty Oaks. Mighty Oaks, of course.
- [131:08]
Jocko Willink
So is the fourth option now like a charity?
- [131:10]
Chad Robichaux
It is. It's a nonprofit.
- [131:11]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [131:12]
Chad Robichaux
We're really, like. I mean, I could say it here. It's not like us, but we don't, like, publicize it or advertise it out, soliciting support for it.
- [131:19]
Jocko Willink
Just a thing. It's a thing running in the background. Saving people's lives.
- [131:22]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, things happen. Yep. It's a 501C3. You know, people can donate it to it, but we just. We don't have to run, like, a charitable campaign for it, because when. When, you know, when we need something, people step up in a bigger significant.
- [131:35]
Jocko Willink
And Save Our Allies or. Sorry. Mighty Oaks is still going strong.
- [131:38]
Chad Robichaux
Mighty Oak's still going strong. Save Our Allies is too. I mean, Tim and Sarah are still running that. Nick. Nick Pachano. They're still running, running out, and they're still doing great. They just did some great stuff out in North Carolina and Florida.
- [131:49]
Jocko Willink
Oh, yeah, they're freaking awesome.
- [131:50]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. And, and, and, And I was talking to Tim right before I got here. He said to say hi, by the way.
- [131:55]
Jocko Willink
Awesome.
- [131:56]
Chad Robichaux
But, yeah, there's a lot of great heroes for humanity. Samaritan's Purse. So many great organizations out there doing great things. Fourth option. We specifically are focused internationally on, you know, rescuing Americans or People that are in war zones that the government either can't or won't get. And so it's very specific kind of area.
- [132:15]
Jocko Willink
And then Mighty Oaks. How many people are you running through Mighty Oaks year?
- [132:19]
Chad Robichaux
Well, Mighty Oaks, on the, on the resiliency side, that's speaking on bases, which primarily me doing that. I've spoken about half man troops now on bases, a lot of them right here next door at San Diego mcrd, speaking at boot camp. So I speak to the troops on resiliency, the, you know, the four pillars of resiliency. Mind, body, spirit, social. Speak at spiritual resiliency conferences, suicide prevention conferences, the recovery program. At our ranches, we're doing about 7, $8 million a year in programming there. We've had 6,000 graduates, but we're doing about a thousand per year now. We pay for everything for activity, service members, veterans, first responders, spouses, even pay for their travel. And so that's, that is an effort that people want to support financially, get behind. Donate to Body Oaks definitely needs support because the demand on it's so huge and everybody listening is like you said earlier, it needs help, no strings attached. We pay for everything, including travel. Go on the website, fill an application, someone will get back to you right away. You don't have to be a train wreck to go, by the way. Get. If you need some life course corrections, get on it early.
- [133:19]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [133:19]
Chad Robichaux
And just amazing program. Got great people to work there. Yeah, I've had the most incredible team.
- [133:24]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And like I said, I mean I've literally called you and sent you texts and I've sent loot access to. I've group text you guys and stuff. But you know, because sometimes people, by the time they're talking to me, they're pretty, they're pretty hurting and they really need some help. And you guys have been freaking amazing. So I really appreciate what you guys have done there. And it's a. Mightyoaksprogram.org Mighty Oaks programs.
- [133:44]
Chad Robichaux
With an S.org programs. Yeah.
- [133:46]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [133:47]
Chad Robichaux
And then we also do like, I'm in D.C. a lot, testifying before Congress, doing advocacy work. We got some great team guys in Congress. Derek Van Orden, Morgan Luttrell.
- [133:57]
Jocko Willink
I think there's more coming too.
- [133:58]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. I mean Corey Mills is. Is there. Eli Crane. Yes. All those guys, like I've been working with those guys a lot on policy and legislation for veterans care. And one of the things that I'm a big advocate for is alternative treatments, including faith based care that currently, right now, the current administration only allows the VA can only do programs that are approved by the fda, which is crazy. And so I've just got back from Congress testifying on that. So body yolks, because the successes we have in independent doctoral studies we've had on the success of faith based programs, it gives us a voice and credibility to testify before Congress. So Mighty Oaks is a strong voice in that I'll probably serve under this administration again as a, like, as a chairman of a coalition, which is not a huge task, but it's just kind of leading some efforts there.
- [134:44]
Jocko Willink
And once again, you're stepping up and serving.
- [134:47]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, we got to, man. Everybody, everybody has to contribute something right now as much as they can. And then the last thing we do at Mighty Oaks is the international stuff. Right. The Mighty Oaks really participates in a lot of international stuff. And Hunter and his team there do a great job. Aziz on a team there now.
- [134:59]
Jocko Willink
Oh, really?
- [135:00]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [135:00]
Jocko Willink
That's rad. It's freaking awesome. And like I said, people can find mighty oaks programs.org save our allies is just save ours.org people can find you if they want you to come talk. Chad Robichaux. It's R O B I C H a u x com.com, yep. That kind of links to all your different stuff. You're on Facebook at Shad Robo show on Twitter, Chad Robo on Instagram. Chad Robo official Underscore Official Instagram.
- [135:31]
Chad Robichaux
Instagram's our most active.
- [135:32]
Jocko Willink
Okay. And then you've got your. Your podcast, which is out now, which is also. It's got a YouTube.
- [135:38]
Chad Robichaux
Yes.
- [135:39]
Jocko Willink
YouTube place for it as well.
- [135:40]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Please subscribe to the podcast. We have incredible guests and conversation like. We got you coming up.
- [135:47]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, right off. Right on. We'll get that done.
- [135:49]
Chad Robichaux
Our new year, New Year's episode.
- [135:52]
Jocko Willink
Echo. Anything we missed?
- [135:53]
Echo Charles
No. How old is.
- [135:54]
Jocko Willink
No questions.
- [135:55]
Chad Robichaux
Hunter's 28. He has. He has two daughters and a son in a way. I have five. I have three adult kids, five grandchildren. And we just adopted our new baby girl last year, so we started all over again. So I was empty Destin for like six years and our niece got pregnant and. And we stepped in and it's got a brand new baby girl. She's. We've had her since she was. Since she was infant and now she's. She's up. She's 22 months.
- [136:24]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [136:26]
Echo Charles
Wait, how old are you?
- [136:27]
Chad Robichaux
I'm 49. Yeah.
- [136:28]
Echo Charles
So same generation, right? Yeah, I like the.
- [136:31]
Chad Robichaux
She's same age as my granddaughters.
- [136:33]
Echo Charles
Yeah, it's legit. I like the name Fourth option, by the way.
- [136:37]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, yeah, very good one.
- [136:39]
Jocko Willink
That's kind of like the third measure.
- [136:41]
Echo Charles
Third measure a little bit.
- [136:42]
Jocko Willink
Echo's got a little side project called Third Measure which is, you know, what is it? Faction. What is it?
- [136:48]
Echo Charles
Faction. See, it's a long story, but it's basically a repository of all my CGI projects that involve robots and stuff. So it's unrelated to your thing, but I like the name. You see what I'm saying?
- [136:58]
Chad Robichaux
Well, I'd say the name is exactly what it is. It's the Force option. It's the fourth option.
- [137:02]
Jocko Willink
When I was a young team guy, there was a guy that was like a awesome seal and no one wore seal anything back then.
- [137:13]
Chad Robichaux
Right.
- [137:14]
Jocko Willink
And. And actually in the SEAL teams, like, people don't. You don't wear SEAL team stuff if you're in the SEAL teams. But this guy was just legend. Legend guy. And he had a freaking hat. He had a hat with a trident on it. And then underneath the trident just said silent option. And I was always like. And I was a new guy, too. I was a new guy. So I was just like, yo, that's where it's at.
- [137:37]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, yeah. It was a bull shirts where everybody.
- [137:40]
Jocko Willink
Oh, yeah. Back in the day. Bullshirts. It closed down.
- [137:42]
Chad Robichaux
It closed. Really closed. All our class shirts for BRC and Buds. Yeah, Buds were there.
- [137:46]
Jocko Willink
Used to have a T shirt for your class. They don't. I don't think they. They don't do it anymore. They don't have class T shirts anymore. It was a store in Coronado that you'd go and get T shirts made for your class. And I don't think I even had one. I know our class had one because it had like a really dumb saying on it. And I can't remember what.
- [138:04]
Chad Robichaux
It was so stupid.
- [138:06]
Jocko Willink
It was like one of those things where they made like the class voted on our T shirt. And it was dumb. And I was like, you know, it's just when you get done with Hell Week. So I didn't have like any kind of voice or anything. I was like, well, that sounds dumb to me. In some other people thought it was cool. When we. We'll. We'll be able to find it, one of my friends will probably text me and be like, this was the same. What was it? It was freaking dumb.
- [138:29]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [138:31]
Jocko Willink
I wanted it to be. He who suffers remembers because one of the instructors, like, we were suffering at some point. Like, you guys are going to remember this. Yeah. But it was. It was like it. It rhymed. It rhymed it was like, once we were crushed and now we're super tough or something like that. I was like, yo, I'm gonna wear this thing. We could jackass reuse this, but that's.
- [139:00]
Echo Charles
Pretty normal, I think, right? Well, we had that for football too, where we'd have like a shirt if you. When we finish camp and then they give it. And I remember one of ours was, I survived camp. Get you better.
- [139:12]
Jocko Willink
Get you better.
- [139:13]
Chad Robichaux
For real.
- [139:14]
Echo Charles
That was really what it was. And everyone was laughing.
- [139:16]
Jocko Willink
My son went to this camp, the J. Robert Intensive Wrestling Camp. And if you. They have a whole, like, grading system and it's really strict. It's like boot camp. The guy was a Vietnam ranger. J. Rob. But they were doing it. You try and get this shirt that just said, I did it. Yeah. And they had a video and everyone was just freaking hyping up and they're like, I did it, I did it, I did. And you get this teeth. That's all. You're just doing it for this T shirt.
- [139:39]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [139:39]
Jocko Willink
My son had like a real bad ankle injury. And you have to do a 12 mile run to get the shirt. Like, you have to do all the things. Then the last thing you have to do is a 12 mile run. I think it was a sophomore in high school or in between his sophomore and junior year. And I talked to him on the phone. I'm like, hey, dude, you go get the run tomorrow. What? Like your ankle's jacked up. You know, you can barely walk. What are you gonna do? He's like, I'm gonna tape it up so it doesn't even move. And I'm gonna get that shirt. I was like, huh, I guess that's how we roll. Rolling.
- [140:04]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [140:05]
Jocko Willink
Awesome. What else did we miss? Anything that's going on right now, Chad?
- [140:09]
Chad Robichaux
No, man. I just appreciate being here, man. You know, you get to see you. I'm super proud of all the things you're doing. Good voice. Get awesome voice right now.
- [140:19]
Jocko Willink
Appreciate it, man. We're gonna go Jiu Jitsu after this. Yeah, we're going to do a little open mat activity at atos. Andre Galvao opened up the school. When you're doing Jiu Jitsu, by the way, you need fuel. It's true. I recommend Jocko fuel. That's what I recommend. So we got Jocko fuel. We got protein, we got hydrate, we got go drinks. We got joint warfare, we got super krill, we got greens, got creatine. You put creatine in your greens, it's a good way to be jacked and healthy.
- [140:53]
Chad Robichaux
I just stole echoes. So good.
- [140:57]
Jocko Willink
It's freaking tasty, right? You know, people going a little catabolic in here. Check out jockofuel.com if you need any of this stuff. You need to be stronger, faster, smarter, better. Also you can get it. Wawa Vitamin shop, gnc, military commissaries around the world. Around the world. By the way, I know people that are overseas right now. They're like, yo, we're getting it done. Hannaford Dash towards Maryland. Wake Fern, ShopRite. Heb down in Texas.
- [141:21]
Chad Robichaux
That's my neck of woods.
- [141:22]
Jocko Willink
That's where. Dude, HEB is active in Texas.
- [141:27]
Chad Robichaux
HEB is awesome. You gotta get in Bucky's.
- [141:30]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, Bucky's is an interesting. It's an interesting dynamic. We've, we've been talking to Bucky's. We'll see. We'll see where it lands. It's really hard in that, in that environment with Bucky's, there's so much competition and, you know, the people that we're going against are, yeah, are, you know, billion dollar companies.
- [141:48]
Chad Robichaux
Right.
- [141:48]
Jocko Willink
And so they will literally come in and just buy your space from a shelf just to keep you at bay. So it's all good, though. Well, we're winning.
- [141:57]
Chad Robichaux
I'll just pack. I'll just pack my mock on the road.
- [141:59]
Jocko Willink
There you go.
- [142:00]
Chad Robichaux
I stopped at Bucky's the other day and I was going on a hunt and for Smith and Wesson, and I packed it. I mean, I, I stopped at Bucky's and I looked for.
- [142:07]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it's unfortunate, man. I apologize for that. Next time, stop at heb. Yeah, that's what we'll do down in Tehas. Myers up in the mid, or Meyer up in the Midwest. Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. Shields too. Shields is a big freaking awesome store. And small gyms everywhere, you know, so jiu jitsu schools, CrossFit gyms, powerlifting gyms, wherever you're at. If you, if you're in one of those schools or you want. You're in one of those gyms. Yeah. Email jfsalesac.com and we can hook you up a little wholesale activity. You got your gym down in Houston still.
- [142:39]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Carlson, Gracie, Southern headquarters. In fact. Fact. In fact, I don't even know if I can announce it, but. But I will. Junior might get upset, but he's moving from Chicago to us, so he's gonna, he's taking over our school. And we got a guy named Juan Lopez who's a world champion like Produces tons of world champions out of Rio. He's learning English, but it's jiu jitsu. You could. You know what he's talking about, man, Jitsu is incredible. So Juan Lopez is there. Got like 20 black belts under me that are, that are out there. But. But we're gonna have junior out of school full time.
- [143:09]
Jocko Willink
Amazing.
- [143:10]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah.
- [143:11]
Jocko Willink
So check that out. Also, if you, if you're doing jiu jitsu, you need a GI and you an American made ghee. Don't buy a communist ghee. A communist. Gee, don't do that. Buy an American made geek. Go to originusa.com Get American Made. Gee. And while you're there, get American made jeans, American made boots, American made hunting gear. Joggers.
- [143:32]
Echo Charles
Sure.
- [143:32]
Jocko Willink
I was just out at Walmart, the 434 Tour, and I had to borrow a pair of joggers and Joe masks because it was a little, kind of cool. Yeah. A little chilly. Woo. As they like to say. But. And luckily, you know what? He had American made joggers from origin, usa. So look, don't buy stuff that supports slavery. You support slavery, Echo truck.
- [143:51]
Echo Charles
No, I don't.
- [143:52]
Jocko Willink
Chad, do you support slavery? I don't think anyone over here supporting slavery. Like we stand against it. Next level, Echo. You stand against. We stand against slavery. And yet people all over this country stand against slavery. And yet they'll just walk down and buy a pair of jeans literally made by slaves. Literally made by slaves. So don't do that. Go to originusa.com. get American Made Freedom pants. You see what I'm saying? You see what I'm getting? That's what we're doing.
- [144:20]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [144:20]
Jocko Willink
All right. What else?
- [144:21]
Echo Charles
Don't forget about Jekyll store. We represented on the path on our apparel, what we wear or whatever. Seems saying discipline equals freedom. It's true. By the way. Chad Roberts show.
- [144:29]
Chad Robichaux
Yes.
- [144:30]
Echo Charles
With more discipline comes more freedom. Also. Anyway, we got shirts, hats, hoodies on there. Also we have what we call the shirt locker. It's a subscription scenario. New design every month on a shirt.
- [144:41]
Jocko Willink
It's good.
- [144:41]
Echo Charles
People seem to like it a little bit outside the box as far as designs and ideas, but again, people seem to like it. Check that out.
- [144:47]
Jocko Willink
It's all@jockostar.com get there. Also we got some. You need steak. You like steak?
- [144:53]
Chad Robichaux
I love steak.
- [144:54]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [144:54]
Chad Robichaux
I'm Carnivore, so.
- [144:55]
Jocko Willink
Oh, oh, are you straight up Carnivore?
- [144:57]
Chad Robichaux
Straight up carnivore. Well, I, I say you just had a mo. I'm Carnivore Mocha's.
- [145:00]
Jocko Willink
Carnivore.
- [145:01]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah, I'm carnivore and berries.
- [145:03]
Jocko Willink
Carnivore and berries.
- [145:04]
Chad Robichaux
Yeah. Some kind of carnivore is.
- [145:06]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah, it's like carberry. So when you're eating steak, I recommend you check out coloradocraftbeef.com or primalbeef.com we got awesome people with awesome steak that can deliver it to your door. Colorado craftbeef.com primalbeef.com get the good stuff. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jocklanderground.com also the YouTube channel. Also flipside canvas.com Dakota Meyer. Making cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got books. Look, Chad has got four books. A Mission Without Borders. We talked about it today. Saving Ds. We talked about it last time. Fight for us. He's also got a book called on an Unfair Advantage. Check all those books out. They're all available wherever you buy books. And then I've written a bunch of books, too. You've heard too much about at this juncture, you're pretty much ready to just stop. Check out the warrior kid books. Get a little kid, like a neighbor across the street. Maybe it's, you know, a nephew that you got.
- [146:04]
Chad Robichaux
I hear more about your kids books than I do even about extreme ownership now.
- [146:08]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [146:09]
Chad Robichaux
Everywhere I go, maybe it's a circle. I'm in like a, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of very community or to get churches and stuff. Everyone.
- [146:16]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [146:16]
Chad Robichaux
Raves about your kids.
- [146:17]
Jocko Willink
There's a movie coming.
- [146:18]
Chad Robichaux
I know.
- [146:19]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And the movie's done filming at this juncture.
- [146:22]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, yep, yep.
- [146:23]
Jocko Willink
And it's gonna be a very powerful film. It's really, really, like, just. It's gonna be awesome.
- [146:30]
Chad Robichaux
It's so new. It's so due for that kind of message.
- [146:32]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. The world's waiting for it right now. Echo Charles has been up there. He's in it, by the way. Got a real significant, I mean, pivotal role. A lot of people say that's the. That's kind of the. The whole scene, like, the whole epic scene. Echo Charles just keeping it with his excellence and legitimacy.
- [146:52]
Echo Charles
I'm doing the best I can.
- [146:53]
Jocko Willink
Oh, this is great. So he was in the background of a scene, and there's an MMA going on. And he's in the back in a cage with his gi on, doing. Doing jiu jitsu in the background. And as he's filming, the Director, guy named McG.
- [147:11]
Echo Charles
Terminator Salvation.
- [147:12]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Who directed Terminator Salvation and Charlie's Angels. And we are Marshall. Just a bunch of really great movies. The O.C. great guy. And in the middle of this, while we're filming this scene, like, there's a bunch of stuff going on, he goes, hey, everyone, hold on. And he goes, hey, you too. And he didn't really know who Echo Charles was yet. He thought it just, you know, thought he was just another extra. He goes, hey, you two, in the cage, you're doing great up there. Providing us with excellence and legitimacy for this scene. And I heard that. You can see Echo, he just popped out. I was like, oh, dang. Okay. Excellence, legitimacy has arrived.
- [147:53]
Echo Charles
Completely correct.
- [147:54]
Jocko Willink
Yes, he was completely correct. Yeah. But the super stoked, obviously, Chris Pratt, he's. He's playing Uncle Jake and all that, so. Looking forward to that. Anyways, get those books for your neighbor, for your nephew, for whoever, your niece. Hook them up. Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. Next muster is going to be in Dallas or, sorry, in San Diego. The Dallas one's done. It's sold out. We got San Diego coming up February 23rd and 25th. We got San Antonio April 29th through May 1st. Just if you want to go to these things, go and register because everything sells out. And then these things sell out to where the fire marshall is. Like, no one else can come in. It's not like, hey, Jocko, last minute. And I'm like, oh, yeah, cool. Come on down. It's not like that. It's like, hey, last minute, Jocko. I'm like, no, you can't come. So don't do that to yourself. Don't make me do that to you. If you want to come to this stuff at Echelon Front, go to and come and get it. And Extreme Ownership Academy, we got a way to learn this information that we put out through an online platform. Go to extremeownership.com you can learn these lessons. You can apply them to every part of your life, family. Everything that you're doing, we can help you. So extremeownership.com go and check that out. Also, if you want to help out service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help gold star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org also, Micah Fink's got heroes and horses.org and then Jimmy May's organization, BeyondtheBrotherhood.org and then, of course, we talked about today. Mighty Oaks programs.org Chad's great organization. As I said, I personally. They have personally helped my friends, and they will help thousands and thousands of more. So if you want to help them, go to mightyoaksprograms.org and then if you want to connect with Chad, Chad Robichaux. And that's R O B I C H A U X dot com. He's on Facebook, he's on Twitter, and he's on the gram. The Instagram, YouTube. And the podcast is called the Resilient show for us. I'm@jocko.com I'm on social media, too, and I'm at Jocko Willink. Echoes at Echo. Charles, Just watch out, because there's an algorithm on there, and, you know, it'll. It'll destroy your life if you're not careful. Echo. Any. Anything else? You got any other questions? You got any questions for today?
- [150:23]
Echo Charles
No, that was it. Prima. I like, also, I like the last name Robishell.
- [150:27]
Jocko Willink
You. Oh, okay. He's getting credit just for his last name.
- [150:29]
Echo Charles
The whole aesthetic is really good. It's like, you want to, you know, because there's other words that end with the X, right? Like that. Right. And it's like, you know, what. What other word has like X? It's like. It's like a sophisticated. I don't know, it's a feel kind of thing. But anyway, I've always liked that. Meant to tell you never got an opportunity, but, you know, there we have it.
- [150:51]
Chad Robichaux
Louisiana. Strong, Louisiana name.
- [150:52]
Jocko Willink
Yes, sir.
- [150:53]
Echo Charles
Good to see you again.
- [150:54]
Chad Robichaux
Thanks, man. Yeah, great to see you.
- [150:55]
Jocko Willink
Right on, Chad. Anything else? Any closing thoughts for today?
- [150:58]
Chad Robichaux
No, man. I'm just, like I said, super thankful to be on. And. And, you know, this. This book to me is. I appreciate you kind of breaking it down like that. This book to me is like, there's a lot of special things got to be a part of and saving is ease in this book is, you know, a way for me to share some of the things I got to be a part of. It's awesome, especially with this one. So special with me and my son. So people want to. Father son book. That's. That's a good one. Father's Day coming up.
- [151:20]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it is. Well, no, not really. It's in June, so.
- [151:23]
Chad Robichaux
Oh, yeah.
- [151:24]
Jocko Willink
Swinging a miss on that one, Chad. You know, we'll work through. Every day is Father's Day. How about that? Yeah, Every day's Father's Day, Chad.
- [151:31]
Chad Robichaux
Christmas is coming.
- [151:32]
Jocko Willink
There you go. Awesome stuff. Thanks again for joining us, man. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service in the, in the Marine Corps and special Operations and, and thanks for what you're doing today with, with Mighty Oaks and, and everything that you do overseas now with Fourth Option. It's just outstanding. And thanks for, thanks for raising some warriors yourself, man. Really appreciate it. And thanks to all our military personnel out there around the world right now that step into the fray every day to protect our freedom and protect our way of life and to protect innocent people around the world. Thank you for what you do. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. Appreciate the hospitality this past weekend. Much appreciated. As well as all of our other first responders who step into the fray to protect us here at home and everyone else out there. I think an important message from Chad's book is that there's not always an immediate positive, short term return on investment for doing the right thing. You, you can't count on reward or praise or even reciprocation. You can't even count on reciprocation. If you do the right thing, it doesn't necessarily mean someone's going to do the right thing back to you, but you will know, you will know that you stepped up and you did the right things, the right reasons. And if you do that, in the end you will win. And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time. This is Chad and Echo and Jocko out.