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- [00:00]
Jocko Willink
This is Jocko, podcast number 476 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
- [00:05]
Echo Charles
Good evening.
- [00:06]
Jocko Willink
I was a new guy in a SEAL platoon, which means keep your mouth shut, keep your ears open. I did that to the best of my ability. Wasn't always the best at it, but I did my best. And you get. When you're in your first SEAL platoon, you get a lot of your DNA in your first SEAL platoon, you're kind of watching what's going on. You're watching what the old guys. And by the way, the old guys are like 22 or 23, maybe. For me, I was 19, you know, so an old guy is 24, 25, maybe your platoon chief might be 33, something like that. But you're watching them, how they're acting, what they're saying, what they're doing, and you're modeling your behavior off them. And when I was in my first platoon, we had a. The corpsman of our platoon. You know, corpsman is. And Echo Charles. Is that a medic? Medic, yeah, it's a medic. So the medic was a guy. He was one of the old guys, and he was a Southern man from North Carolina. Call it North Kakalacki. You ever heard that before?
- [01:07]
Harold Underdown
Yes, sir.
- [01:08]
Jocko Willink
North Kakalaki. All right, so his name was Harold Underdown. And in SEAL teams, you're going to get a nickname at some point, and I believe Harold Underdown, because your last name is Underdown. Now, did you ever hear of a TV show called Underdog?
- [01:22]
Echo Charles
Yes, of course.
- [01:23]
Jocko Willink
So that got, I believe, morphed into Underdog, and then eventually that just came became Dog or Doggy. So he was an old guy at the time. He was probably, I don't know, like maybe around 30, maybe. He had old school mentality and became very clear what his attitude was like when someone needed medical attention. Because as our platoon corpsman, if someone got sick or someone got dinged up or someone needed some kind of medical help, Dog would take a look at the individual. You know, look at the sprained, the sprained ankle or the cut hand or the. The sick belly or whatever. And he'd do an assessment, and then he'd say, doggy ain't got nothing for you. You know, and that. That was his way of saying, if you got a problem, you know, suck it up. And if you got a problem, you got to get that problem solved yourself. Doggy ain't got nothing for you. I'm not over here to fix you. I'm not even. You Know to baby, you, you got to take care of yourself. You got to make sure you're good to go. You got to solve your own problems. And that was a great attitude for me to see as a young guy. And I definitely carried that attitude throughout my time in the teams, as did Doggy, who went on to have a incredible career with deployments all over the place, all over the world. Spent time at the Navy's JSOC Special Mission Unit. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was the master chief of the command of SEAL Team 4. He carried on to do other things in the SEAL teams, and it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share some of his experiences and lessons learned. Here he is. Doggy. Thanks for joining us, man.
- [03:09]
Harold Underdown
Wow. What a pleasure being here with you, Jocko. And, you know, let's have some fun, right, as we talk through this, you know, it was a heck of a ride.
- [03:19]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, right.
- [03:20]
Harold Underdown
You know, I ended up with 30 years in one month after they took the, you know, they do the arithmetic of how many active duty days you had. And I had eight years of National Guard right when I came in. So I was 25, right. I was one of the older guys at that first know, first Platoon. But they took, they took the eight years National Guard, and they couldn't calculate that before I retired officially. And I call the lady and I go, hey, can you tell me kind of a ballpark where that would be? And she goes, no, Master Chief. She said, we'll do the, we'll do the calculation at your retirement date, right? So once the retirement papers got put in, it came back. I had 28 years, 11 days active duty Navy at the time. At the time, they wanted me to leave the east coast and go to the west coast, right? Like the Group 1 Master Chief. And I just told the force Master Chief at the time, I can't do that because I'm going to lose about $300,000 of equity in my house and it's just not worth it at this time and point. So I'm going to bow. I'm going to bow out, right? Because at the E9 level, we only have so many master chief billets. And that's the thing to do, right? You need to move aside and let these other, eh, come up to, you know, promote the master chief. But the lady called me back and I remember I was sitting at my desk on a Friday. She goes, master Chief, she said, I got good news. I go, what's that? And she goes, your final calculation for retirement is 30 years and one month. And I went, roger that. That was great, right? Because, you know, that's a full. That's a full career, right? So it was awesome. So let's get back.
- [04:56]
Jocko Willink
Let's get to how it started. So you. You were born down, like I said, down in North Kakalacki. And what was. Grow. Like, what'd your. What'd your mom and dad do?
- [05:04]
Harold Underdown
Oh, mom and dad were, you know, they were. They were great supporters of my brother and I, Mike. And basically we lived in a little town there called, you know, Mount Holly, right beside Belmont, which is about 30 miles or, you know, 30 minutes south of Charlotte, North Carolina. And so I grew up in a little small neighborhood, you know, running around. And we had this road that cut up through the neighborhood called Hickory Grove Road. And on Hickory Grove Road is where I met all my buddies, right? You know, we would play. We would play all kinds of crazy stuff out in the woods, and we would. We would play basketball, football, you know, tackle football back then in the backyard, right? Especially when it was muddy. We had a lot of fun with that. But growing up, my mom and dad were awesome. My mom worked in a mill, like a cotton mill for eons. And my dad was a. Basically, dad had an eighth grade education, but he could. He could do anything. Mechanic, carpenter, plumbing. You name it, he could do it. But he worked for a utilities plant, you know, like a water utilities plant down in McAdonville, a little town south of us. And. But, you know, it was just work, work, work. And, you know, I think they paid $15,000 for the house that me and, you know, me and Mike grew up in one bedroom, right? So, you know, we had a lot of wrestling going on. But. But, yeah, I mean, very modest, right? Very modest. Both. Both parents worked and then supported Mike and I as we came up through school and got into sports and played Little league baseball. Had lots of friends that would come over to the house, would have barbecues in the back, and it was very simple life, but. But very satisfying, right? As far as growing up under a high. And then, you know, they made us go to church right, back when we were young. But at a certain point in life, you know, my mom said, hey, you don't have to get up Sunday morning and go to church anymore. So basically she just turned the tables on us, right, and said, I'm not making you go to church, so you make up your mind. And we did. And I've been going to church ever since, right? Because, you know, hey, if it's a part of your life. You're a believer. You. You jock up and show up, right? So I jock up on Sundays and go to church and. But mom and dad, they worked their whole, their whole adult lives, right? My dad passed about two years ago and my mom's still with us and she still lives in that. That little small house there off Hickory Grove Road. Good thing is, my brother Mike lives about. Probably about four miles away, so Mike's always checking on her. And Mike just retired. He was with Freightliner built trucks. So he had a great career with them. About 42 years. He just retired. And he's enjoying it, right? He's enjoying his transition, right. But yeah, for North Carolina. I have great memories of growing up, going to high school, playing football do. I had wrestled for one year and understand the wrestling mentality, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's a long two minutes, right? Or two or three, right?
- [08:24]
Jocko Willink
Three, yeah, three.
- [08:25]
Harold Underdown
I mean, it's just long, right? It seems like hours when you're going toe to toe with somebody your own weight class. But, you know, it was awesome. We had a great being kids coming up. You know, it's not like it was is today. We'd basically leave the house and we wouldn't come home until dark. And of course mom always had food on the table. And then just repeat, right?
- [08:54]
Jocko Willink
When you got to high school, how good were you at football? Were you playing like varsity, your freshman year, anything crazy like that?
- [09:01]
Harold Underdown
The first. First year, I mean, I did really well, you know, as a pee wee ball and a midget ball played. I was a running back, so I was running back and then I switched over to defense, kind of a defensive back. So high school I went straight defensive back. We had some really hardcore running backs and really fast, but I was fast enough to play defensive back. And they would move me up in a hawk position, they call it, right? So the hawk position was good and bad because the hawk means you had to go in and if they run in a stampede, run. I was the first one, right? I'm the first one to try to break up that stampede coming around the end and a lot of collisions, right? So. And then back then, we didn't really have the technology as far as concussions go. I mean, I remember a couple times I could hear the birds tweeting and I was on the kicking team and kickoff received, I was receiving the kick. So you get your bell rung, you know, when you're doing those type deals, you know, at that high speed. But. But I remember, you know, I thought, I thought I was pretty good, right? But it pretty much ended. After high school, I played a couple teams who had picked up, remember usfl? Oh yeah, New Jersey Generals and all of that. They had Herschel Walker. We actually did a called Lincolnton Bandits. And I was on it. I was a defensive back again, but I was tackling these running backs. And these guys were 220, they look like Herschel Walker. And I was getting my bell rung like probably every other contact. And I'm like. Because nobody was making a tackle up on the line, right? Remember they were saying, I remember our coach when I played high school, he goes, guys, if a lineman misses a tackle or a linebacker is six yards. If you miss a tackle, it's six points. So he really taught us to face in, you know, make sure you get the guy down, right? Whatever you got to do. So just get him to the ground. So it was a lot of fun. But I think football, the team mentality of football and basically any sport in high schools and college, it prepares you to go into something like Navy SEAL program, right?
- [11:01]
Jocko Willink
Because now what was your point? What was your plan? When you're getting, when you're going through high school, were you planning on going the military? What was the plan?
- [11:07]
Harold Underdown
Well, I have an interesting story with that. I was, when I was probably 8, 9th grade, we were standing at the end of the road, right? Hickory Grove, Hickory Grove Road. And we had some firecrackers and was doing stupid stuff, right, kids? And we're throwing. My buddy said, I double dare you to light this little blackjack, you know, firecracker and throw it at a car coming by. And I'm like, well, you know, that doesn't seem to, because we're behind hedges, they ain't gonna see us. So sure enough, lit the firecracker, threw it on a car. Uh oh, that car was a black and silver state trooper. Oh, not good, right? Bad timing, right? So guess what? The trooper goes down a block, turns, and he's triangulating the position, right? I go running down the road and go into the woods. Next thing I know, I'm standing and all of a sudden I hear whoop, whoop. And there's a state trooper sitting right on the road. And he was stepped. He stepped outside of his car and he's staring into the woods, looking right at me. I go, man, that was quick. How did that happen? So I had a couple options, right? I could either bag it, right, and run through the woods and double back around my house. Or I could walk out there and face music. Face the music. Well, I chose to go face to music. And I walk out, I came out, and he goes, did you? And I go, yes, sir. And, you know, because there's another guy with me, I could have said, no, it wasn't me. It was Bobby. It wasn't Bobby that threw the. You know, the crash on the patrol car. It was me. So I stood there, and he goes, you know what? That's very dangerous. And he says, you just happened to choose the wrong vehicle. But in a way, it was a good vehicle, because I'm telling you, this is very dangerous. I could put you in a car and I could take you to your house, and we could talk to your parents, or you can take this as a learning experience and have a great day. And I looked at him, I said, I choose to have an experience. But he taught me one, right? I mean, this guy was squared away. It was a black. It was a black individual freaking squared away. Had a Smokey Bear hat on, uniform was freaking, you know, decked out. So ever since that day, that stupid move, I wanted to be a highway patrol state trooper because he was such a professional. It could have went really sideways, but he was. He taught me a lesson and moved on. Right. And I still. I still think about that. But growing up through high school, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be a North Carolina Highway Patrol.
- [13:38]
Jocko Willink
And so what was the path to that, to make that happen?
- [13:41]
Harold Underdown
Well, you had to take a. Take a test, a written test. And then they. They. I remember going up to Lincolnton, I think it was, and I had to go through their. Their physical part of it, Physical exam, you know, eye test, all that stuff. And then you had to do the written exam. And then right after that, we'd go outside in a parking lot, and they had a highway patrol car sitting there, and we had. They had a dummy, you know, one of these crash dummies that was behind a wheel, and it was seat belted in. So one of the drills where you had to start about 50ft behind the car, and they had you on a clock, and they would say, go. You would run down to the side of the vehicle, open the door, reach across the dummy as it was a passenger, you know, in distress or whatever at a wreck, undo the seatbelt, get your arms underneath the armpits of the. Of the dummy, and you had to drag that dummy back to that. About 50 to 60ft behind the car. Right?
- [14:34]
Jocko Willink
That's a freaking good, realistic test.
- [14:36]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. And that that dummy was about, you know, I'd say about 180 to 190 pounds. So it wasn't, wasn't anything small or light. So you did that and then you had to push a patrol car and then a couple other agility, I think you had to run like a half a mile, push up, set up stuff, and then that was it. So I'm just waiting then, you know, once you finish all of the tests, they either give you a thumbs up or thumbs down. And I got thumbs up. And they said the academy will be reaching out to you when, when it's ready for you to go to Raleigh, North Carolina and go through the Highway Patrol Academy. But for whatever reason, they, they had a hiring freeze. They had some administrative issues or something. They needed to hire people. But at the same time, the state was looking at it. And from the state standpoint, they were like, look, we don't have, you know, diversity or whatever was an issue. And they had promotions. People were quitting, so they were trying to figure out what was going on. So. But that was, that took about a year. So here I am as. I'm waiting on this.
- [15:37]
Jocko Willink
And you'd already graduated high school, so.
- [15:39]
Harold Underdown
Now graduated high school. I'm in a National Guard. Right. So you're already.
- [15:43]
Jocko Willink
When did you join the National Guard?
- [15:45]
Harold Underdown
Join the national guard. And in 79, it was the army guard out of Charlotte, North Carolina.
- [15:51]
Jocko Willink
Do that in between your junior and senior year of high school.
- [15:53]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [15:54]
Jocko Willink
That's such a good program.
- [15:55]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, it is, it is. It's a great program. You had all of the, you know, the GI Bill that you could use for college. So what I did was since I'm rolling down this highway patrol path, I go to a local college, Gaston College, Community College. And I went after my criminal justice degree in the same time I was doing night courses to be a medic. Right. To get my medical. It was. I forget the actual name of the course, but it was, you know, damn, you first day you were squared away.
- [16:26]
Jocko Willink
Other than hucking some firecrackers at the car.
- [16:29]
Harold Underdown
Other than a bad decision doing that.
- [16:31]
Jocko Willink
That day, that junior year going to the army boot camp, that that's got to square you away as a young.
- [16:38]
Harold Underdown
That was. I went through that in Oklahoma for seal. Oklahoma. And we were, we were kind of artillery. We were forward observers. So we would be out there in the front and we'd call in fire from 155 howitzer.
- [16:50]
Jocko Willink
So you're like 17 years old.
- [16:52]
Harold Underdown
17.
- [16:52]
Jocko Willink
Damn.
- [16:53]
Harold Underdown
And me and three of my buddies and we're still good friends today because we lived through all of that. And then about four years after that I joined the Air Guard. Basically walked across the street and got into a C130 outfit that had medics flight. Medics, okay. So I was on flying status and I was a medic.
- [17:08]
Jocko Willink
Just wait. You're going to college and you're waiting.
- [17:10]
Harold Underdown
Waiting for the, for the call, right? Waiting on the letter to say, hey, come and join us at the academy. But like I said, it just kept going and kept going. And then what's your civil.
- [17:21]
Jocko Willink
Do you have a civilian job at this time?
- [17:22]
Harold Underdown
Oh yeah, I was working from 4 in the morning till 8 at UPS. You know, doing what?
- [17:27]
Jocko Willink
Driving sort. And what.
- [17:28]
Harold Underdown
I started out unloading, unloading trucks. Then I started loading trucks. And then I was a sorter. Okay, Sorter is a job you want, right? Because basically you stand there, they unload the truck, you read the zip codes and I'm still. I got zip codes in my head today, right? Colorado, 8, 0. North Carolina's 2, 2, 8 0. Just a state, you say Florida, 3, 3, 2, 5. I mean I got that stuff in my head and it will not leave, right? So anytime I see a male, I look at the zip tab, I go, I know where that's at. But it, but it just, it, you know, working and then trying to go to school. I sleep in half the classes, right?
- [18:00]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [18:01]
Harold Underdown
So basically what I did was instead of the guard GI bill, I said, the heck with that. I'm not disciplined enough that I'm not spending their money like this. This is ridiculous. So I stopped and then I started paying myself for my classes and I finally made it. But it took me six years, right? And remember the saying for that, right? Six years in college for a two year degree. Must be a doctor. Well, no, I'm not a doctor. I am a doctor. On a corpsman, right? On the corpsman side of it, I'm a doc. But yeah, I mean, so that was some being very patient waiting on the highway patrol thing, the academy up in Raleigh. And then one Sunday, I remember this like it was yesterday. There was a Parade magazine inside the Sunday paper. You know, the Sunday papers were really thick and I pulled that little parade magazine out and on the front cover of that magazine it had one of the candidates and buds was climbing underneath the barbed wire. And what, I don't remember that. I don't even know what the name of that obstacle was.
- [19:00]
Jocko Willink
I think it was just called the barbed wire.
- [19:01]
Harold Underdown
You had to get down on your Face, right? And I saw the name was stenciled on his chest. He had a nice haircut, right? High and tight. And I go, you know what in the caption on the front of that man said, are the Navy SEALS the toughest man alive? So at the time, I had a girlfriend, you know, she wanted to get married. And all I had seen was North Carolina and Oklahoma and we. And the Air Guard. I got to go to Germany. So I kind of got the bug. I'm like, man, I like this traveling, you know, Air Guard, you know, flying on C130s and, you know, back in the day, 141s when we'd go over across the pond. But I really liked that. And I go. And then when I read that article, I'm like, that's it. I'm done. I'm going to. I'm joining the Navy because I had two choices at the recruiters, right? I talked to the army guys about flying Apaches helicopters. Well, they were going, hey, that's great. We'll get you at Rucker flight school. But before you go to Rucker, we want you to go to Army Ranger school. So I had a Ranger buddy of mine I played football with in high school, and I called him and I go, hey, you know, Jeff, what's the deal with the. They want me to go to Ranger school before they'll sign me for a flight spot. And he goes, don't do it. He says, they get you in a Ranger tag, you're not leaving. You're not going to leave for about four years or a couple tours. And at the time, I was 24, 25, right? And I'm like, nope, I'm not doing that. Went straight into the Navy and said, hey, I want to. I want to be a seal. They look at me kind of funny and go, can you swim? And I go, yes. And they went, all right, let's do this. But back then, right, we didn't have contracts, right? There was no guarantee. So what you had to do is join the Navy, get a rate, right? I think I was a boats and mate at the time when I went in, because I just is a, you know, one of those deals where you just get in, they'll sign your rate. So I was a boats of mate when I went through a boot camp and then comes to the point where you raise your hand, do you want to go seal, eod, you know, diver, you know, all of those communities. And I went, well, I'm signing up for seal. Went through the process, and then the Next thing you know, you get orders.
- [21:04]
Jocko Willink
Did you train, like, once you made that decision, did you train any extra? You just freaking was gonna be dog.
- [21:10]
Harold Underdown
You know what I just figured, you know, I played football, I was lifting weights a lot, so I was probably a little more muscle than I needed to be. If I knew what was coming, if I knew that being a sugar cookie was gonna be on a daily basis. Salt water is gonna be part of you in pool too, right? Because I've been in some pool situations where, you know, it just. It rips your heart out, doesn't it? I mean, when they. When they put towels in your hands and say, do the butterfly, and I go, wait a minute, I can't do the butterfly without towels. Right? Well, do. Do the best. You can. Shut up and jump in the pool, right, and get the towels going. But that. That was. That was something that was. You can't train for that.
- [21:51]
Jocko Willink
You know, what. What year was it? So what year did you join the Navy?
- [21:54]
Harold Underdown
87. May of 87. So that point in time, I got a letter in the mail. Once I shipped out to boot camp, I got a letter from the highway patrol, but it was a month late, right? That's right. No. No turning back at this point. Right. So as I look back on that, you know, I could have been a highway patrolman and then, you know, done a long career, but what would I have seen? I'd have saw North Carolina. I'd have probably moved around to different counties. They got. You got 100 counties and North Carolina. So I'd have probably bounced around 3, 4, 10 counties and, you know, in a patrol car and whatever. Right. And. And I look back on my Navy career, and as you well know, we're global, right? I mean, so, you know, out of North Carolina, you know, North Kakalaki is in the rear view, right?
- [22:44]
Jocko Willink
So.
- [22:45]
Harold Underdown
But, you know, back then, though, Jocko wasn't a lot of talk about Navy seals. You know, we didn't have any. Like it is now, you know, with the movies and all of these series that are out about Navy SEALs, the UBL mission, all of that. And then now it's all like, you know, hey, what'd you do you. As a seal? And so people have a certain, you know, perspective of Navy SEALs when you talk about it today. But when I went in, you could say Navy seal. You know, when I met Lisa over in Guam, we said seal, and. And she's like, what is that in a water? The seals are in the water. So they, you know, the public awareness at that time was like zero. So, you know, Echo. I mean, you know, I know. How old are you?
- [23:35]
Echo Charles
47.
- [23:36]
Harold Underdown
47. So, you know, and now it's. It's all over the place. Right. Good or bad.
- [23:42]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [23:43]
Harold Underdown
The good is that, you know, we still need people, we need young men to step up and take on this ultimate challenge. And the bad side of it is, is we don't want to be looked at as people that. That are not silent professionals. Right. Because, you know, when I was at Seal Team 1, it was all about being a silent professional, not about beating your chest when you go down to the bars or in Coronado, go, hey, I'm a Navy. You. You know, just. You didn't say that, right?
- [24:10]
Jocko Willink
No. So Team one was definitely tight on that stuff.
- [24:14]
Harold Underdown
That was a tight command. Right?
- [24:16]
Jocko Willink
That's a tight command.
- [24:17]
Harold Underdown
I think that's what basically broke me from haircutting, because I love haircuts.
- [24:21]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Harold Underdown
And I started loving them when I was at SEAL Team Warren. So if you didn't have a haircut, you were going to be doing some push ups.
- [24:32]
Jocko Willink
When you. When you went to boot, when you went to Navy boot camp, how was the contrast? Like, because you already had been through army boot camp, you must have been in Navy boot camp, just going, oh, it was.
- [24:42]
Harold Underdown
It was a cakewalk. And then I got, you know, since I was 25 when I went through, or 24 at the time, I believe I was RPOC. Okay. So I don't. I'm not sure what our POC stands for now.
- [24:54]
Jocko Willink
Stands for Recruit Chief Petty Officer. And it's still a thing.
- [24:57]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, well, that's what I was. And. And I had two. Two of the, you know, the boot. Boot camp instructors that were great guys, and they just basically, hey, you got it, rpoc. I'm leaving. So, you know, it's basically about, hey, just making sure people are squaring away their gear, keeping a place clean, and then if we go anywhere, make sure we're accountable and we check out every day.
- [25:18]
Jocko Willink
Right. And then you see when you show up to buds, finally. What was your first impression of buds?
- [25:24]
Harold Underdown
Oh, it's a rude awakening. Right. And you cross that quarter deck. Because as soon as you cross the quarter deck, somebody's got. Somebody's got you. Right? They. They got eyes on you. It's like this place got cameras all over the place. But them is instructors. You know, we had old Master Chief that was, you know, he was welcome aboard. You know, he says, you know, who are you? Where are you from? Good. Right. Go sweep this hallway or go do something menial. So it was a awakening, right? And then of course, you walk out on a grinder and you see all those helmets, the classes are in front of you. And I was like thinking, what is that? Are those winners? Are there a reason that those helmets are laying on the ground and all lined up perfectly? Nope. Those are not winners.
- [26:07]
Jocko Willink
Those are quitters.
- [26:08]
Harold Underdown
They go home. They decided to go home.
- [26:11]
Jocko Willink
Did you. Did you have any major issues at buds?
- [26:15]
Harold Underdown
I don't think so. Physically, I held up pretty good. Because, you know, you. You have to. You have to know when to go and know when to hoe, right? And you had to be clandestine when you're hoeing, right? Because you get an instructor saying you hoeing, and then he's going to turn you into a go go, right? You're going to go to the surf, right? So. But. But I did have a one thing that drown proofing. I know you remember drown proofing. I got rolled back on that, okay? And it was a nightmare, right? They tie your feet together, they tie your hands behind your back, and then they introduce you to the pool, which was about, what, 20ft deep on that deep end, maybe?
- [26:53]
Jocko Willink
I think it's 15ft, 9ft and 4ft.
- [26:55]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. So there's no standing on your table.
- [26:58]
Jocko Willink
Be a hundred.
- [27:00]
Harold Underdown
Might as well be the abyss, right? So doing that, I mean, I did it. I mean, I would come on undone, I would. I would get out of the ropes behind my back somehow, I don't know how did it.
- [27:11]
Jocko Willink
You mean like panic? Like panicking scenario? Like you were freaking out?
- [27:14]
Harold Underdown
Anxiety, bad anxiety. And I did that like three times in a row. I came out of those ropes and that one instructor said, you will never come out of this knot. He said, this is a. He said, get your ass in. Back in the water. So I go back in the water and I get halfway down the pool, you know, we're doing the dolphin, dolphin kick. And I came out of them again and go full Incredible Hulk.
- [27:35]
Jocko Willink
So panic mode.
- [27:36]
Harold Underdown
Panic mode. So after drinking, felt like half of the swimming pool. I got out and they rolled me back, right? So here I am now, I'm sitting in a barracks across the street on the amphib side waiting to get classed up with class 152, right? So. And you're talking about some, you know, you're thinking about, hey, I want to be a Navy seal now. Now it's all about.
- [27:57]
Jocko Willink
It's all in.
- [27:58]
Harold Underdown
Got to be comfortable in the water. And drown proofing is one of those evolutions that has been proven to. It seems like torture, but it's not torture. It's just to get you to relax in the water and trust yourself with, with filling up your lungs. Lungs being that buoy for you and doing that dolphin kick because you did it. And then I think there were two or three of us that failed. I was, I think I was the only one that actually got rolled. But that whole time, that six weeks I was waiting on class 152, I would go over on the weekends and I'd tie myself up and I'd jump in the pool. Well, when I was doing this, there was this older gentleman working at the pool at the time, retired seal. And he goes, hey, underdown, you can't do that. You're gonna get me fired. And I go, hey, Charlie, you know, Charlie. I go, I gotta do it. I said, I'm getting ready to go through this again. And I said, I'm not failing this, you know. So I'd get in there and I said, hey, just get your little, you know, he had a little hook on the end of a pole. If needed, if needed, he could pull my drowning ass out of the water, right? But we didn't need it. I just kept doing it, kept doing it. Charlie kept telling me, no, no, you can't do this, you know, you gonna get me fired. And I just worked through it. And I remember the, the evening that we did drownproofing when I was in 152 and I was like, man, I was leading up to this, right? I said, I've gotta, I've gotta do this. I gotta get through this. Passed it the first time because I was totally relaxed and had the confidence to do that evolution, which is you start at the deep end, you, dolphin kick all the way down to the shallow side of the pool. This is a 50 meter, right? 50 meter pool. And then you turn around and you come all the way back down. And then you had to do amount of little ups and downs, right? Ups and downs. And then, and then once the instructors are confident that you finished doing what you needed to do, boom, you're out of the pool. You passed. So I passed and I got out. And I remember we were doing an evolution and we were down on the steel pier over amphibious side, right? And we're on our backs, we're doing flutter kicks. And of course, then again, you got your name stems from.
- [30:01]
Jocko Willink
Was this hell week going on?
- [30:02]
Harold Underdown
This. I think it was Hell week.
- [30:03]
Jocko Willink
Steel pier. Steel pier is definitely, I mean, that's like Part of Hell Week.
- [30:07]
Harold Underdown
It was a part of Hell Week, right? And I remember, you may remember this. We had a lieutenant thinks he's Thompson, but he had these glasses, mirror glasses, right? He looked like. He looked like somebody off of the movie. Of what? Steve McQueen. What's that movie? Oh, Shaking the Tree Boss. Remember what I'm talking about? Where you eat all those eggs?
- [30:28]
Jocko Willink
Classic movie.
- [30:28]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [30:29]
Jocko Willink
What is it?
- [30:29]
Harold Underdown
Well, he looked like that guy, one.
- [30:31]
Jocko Willink
Of the failure to communicate.
- [30:33]
Harold Underdown
Failure. Yeah. Well, we have here the failure to communicate. Well, that guy looked like him, right? He looked like that prison guard. And he says, underdown. And he's looking right down at me with them glasses. And I look up at him, I go, oh, here's, you know, lt. He says, get up. So I stand up and he goes, come up here. He says, put the blanket on. I don't need a blanket, you know. He said, here, have some hot chocolate. I don't need any hot chocolate, you know. And he says, he said, let me tell you something. Let me tell you a story. And he starts to talk and he's looking off into the distance, looking across the bay. He's looking down at me and he goes, I'm disgusted. And I'm like thinking, you know, what the heck's he disgusted about, right? I ain't done anything, you know, I done anything wrong. He goes, I have this neighbor, my neighbor's name's Charlie. And I go, oh, here we go. He says, Mr. Charlie told me we had an individual, a candidate who was going over to the pool on the weekends and tying himself up and jumping in. That's totally illegal. You cannot do that. You're put. Charlie, Charlie may lose his job. He says, do you know what I'm talking about? And I look up at him, I go, yes, sir. And he goes, he says, guess what? I go, what? He goes, I like it. It shows that you got a little bit of fire. He says, you may, may make it. He says, you may get through this. And he said, now get your ass back down on the pier enjoying your class. And I went, hoo ya, hoo ya.
- [31:58]
Jocko Willink
Good times.
- [31:59]
Harold Underdown
But that was scary, right? And they would always do that, right, where they're blowing smoke, they're smoking cigars and blowing smoke in your face and telling you in the unlikely of event.
- [32:07]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, until the day you make it. Like when you're getting ready to graduate, when you're lining up, they're like, well, hey, in the unlikely event that you graduate today, you're gonna have to have this admin stuff. By, done by the afternoon. I'm like, what else are these people do to me?
- [32:20]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:21]
Jocko Willink
It's scary, though. Like, I failed pool comp, and when I failed pool comp, like, all of a sudden, because you're on track, you're like, you think you're gonna make it. You know, you get. And it's like, oh, my entire life, everything that I want in my life is. Is, like, at Jeopardy. It's a nightmare. It's a lot of pressure, like, the crazy pressure.
- [32:45]
Harold Underdown
And you put it on yourself, too, right? 100%, you know, because once you fail something and, you know, you. I talked to young, young, young men today that want to be a seal. You can't really prepare them for what they're going to go through. You know, it's like a buzz saw, right? You just, you just really. They just got to. They just got to face it, right? They got to face the deal.
- [33:05]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, Jack. But so you graduate and you. So you get. You go to orders to Team One. Did you pick West Coast?
- [33:13]
Harold Underdown
I did.
- [33:14]
Jocko Willink
How come you pick West Coast? Being most guy. I mean, generally speaking, when guys are from the east coast, they pick East Coast. When guys are from the west coast, they pick West Coast.
- [33:22]
Harold Underdown
Well, growing up in North Carolina and then being out here in San Diego, Coronado, yet you're looking at these beautiful palm trees. I mean, it's beautiful, right? So I'm just. I'm just like, you know what? I want to be somewhere that I haven't lived my whole life. Right. So I chose West Coast.
- [33:39]
Jocko Willink
Right on.
- [33:39]
Harold Underdown
And got. Got. Got picked, you know.
- [33:42]
Jocko Willink
Now, did you know anything about, like, Team One? Did you know. Did you know the reputation or anything like that? You just.
- [33:49]
Harold Underdown
No, no, I just knew they were one of the originals. Right. Now, them and Seal Team 2 were OGs, right. As far as Seal Team 1, Seal Team 2, I don't. I think Seal Team 2 may have got commissioned before.
- [33:59]
Jocko Willink
I guess it's real close coast time or something like that.
- [34:01]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, East Coast, West Coast. But, yeah, I mean, I'm walking in, walking across quarter deck, I had no idea that SEAL Team 1 was. They were very strict.
- [34:12]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. We used to call it Stalag Team.
- [34:14]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [34:15]
Jocko Willink
And it was one other good name for it, anyways. Yeah. So, actually, I think you're the person that originally told me, Team One, it's not just a number, it's an attitude. You.
- [34:34]
Harold Underdown
And I, I really enjoy looking back on my career, Seal Team 1, I had a lot of great mentors there. Great. A lot of hardcore Operators that I learned a whole lot from. And, you know, like you said earlier, you got two years for a reason. Right? So. And that's the way it was at Seal Team 1. It's like, shut up. Shut up. And just, you know, listen and do what we say to, you know, and train. So.
- [35:00]
Jocko Willink
So do you roll right into a platoon when you got there, or did you have to do stt?
- [35:04]
Harold Underdown
Had to do. I had to do stt. Right. Back then they call it SEAL Tactical training, but it was kind of like sqt, but it's still the same. It was. You're basically. Your trident is put in a box. You know, Command Master Chief's got the box, or the platoon. Right. Has the box with your trident inside, and you have to prove yourself basically for six months. And you do the workup, you know, from cold weather training to combat swimmer to jumping land warfare, and you go through all of those evolutions of training, and then when you finish that six months, then they give you your. They have a celebration, a little. Little ceremony and give you your trident.
- [35:45]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, there's controversy because now when you get done with sqt, you get your Trident. And so then when those new guys started showing up at the team with their trident, the team guys were like, oh, no, we didn't, you know, get your trident. So they took them off of them. And that still happened, depending on the team. But then, you know, you can see the commands are like, wait, you're. You're undermining, you know, the authority of the 5326 system.
- [36:10]
Harold Underdown
They already got.
- [36:11]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, they've been awarded this. They've been approved by the SQT instructors. Those are, you know, master chiefs and. And. And senior NCOs that are awarding them. They're trying to. Now you're saying that they don't. So there's a little bit of controversy around that about the way it goes down. You know, I was the same way as you, like, when I showed up. No bird. You didn't get your bird. When you graduated, do you. You went to your team, you went through sqt, you got in a platoon, then you did a board where you had to program radios and assemble weapons and get asked a bunch of questions and put tourniquets on and all this stuff. And then. And then you got your trident.
- [36:46]
Harold Underdown
Exactly.
- [36:46]
Jocko Willink
And you got your trident, like, punched into your chest, which you punched my trident into my chest with the entire SEAL team. The whole SEAL team lines up.
- [36:56]
Harold Underdown
Yes. Freaky.
- [36:57]
Jocko Willink
It was freaking awesome.
- [36:58]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, it was. It was. I remember that the old blood. Blood bird.
- [37:01]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, right.
- [37:02]
Harold Underdown
Bloodbird. So, but, but you know, now the young guys, now, they think the platoons take them and they put them in a birdcage. So they've got this bird cage in their space and they got all these tried. It's hanging in these bird cages.
- [37:14]
Jocko Willink
I've seen bird cages. I've seen aquariums. Like, there are all kinds of little things that they got. I've seen them painted blue because it's inert. So you don't, you know, you get a blue trident. It's not real. It's like a, like, you know, blue gun. A gun that's not real. They paint it blue for training.
- [37:30]
Harold Underdown
They.
- [37:30]
Jocko Willink
I've seen the tridents painted boot because it's inert. You barely have it.
- [37:33]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [37:33]
Jocko Willink
So they got all kinds of little tricks they do to them. So when you showed up, you get into your first platoon. What, what year is it now? Is it like it's still 87?
- [37:42]
Harold Underdown
It's 88.
- [37:43]
Jocko Willink
88.
- [37:43]
Harold Underdown
I think it was August of 88 when I checked in Seal Team 1.
- [37:47]
Jocko Willink
And how's it, how's being a new guy at Seal Team 1?
- [37:50]
Harold Underdown
You know, it's basically, you know, these older guys, right, SEAL Team 1 members basically say, you know, just keep your mouth shut and pay attention, right? And then we're gonna, we're gonna train you, we're gonna mentor you. I don't know if they actually said mentor at the time. They just said, you just, you just do what you do, right? You got, you show up for work, get a haircut, check to watch Bill SEAL Team One, right?
- [38:14]
Jocko Willink
What was your job?
- [38:16]
Harold Underdown
I, you know, I came in and I was still bosun mate at the time, right, which was, you know, back, back then, you had to have a rate to be assigned to you, a job title, right? To be a Navy seal. So I was a seaman. I think I was just a.
- [38:32]
Jocko Willink
Did they make you a pig gunner in a platoon?
- [38:34]
Harold Underdown
I was, I was a 60 gunner. But what happened? Early on, I had a senior chief who had some time in Millington. And you. A lot of people in the detail shop and stuff. He says, dog, the best thing for you since you was a flight medic in the Air Force Air Guard. Yeah. He said, you already got all the medical training. Because I had to go to Shepherd Air Force Base and get, go through the medical training, right, for the Air Guard. So I already had the medical stuff, plus I was an emt. And he goes, we're going to send you to corpsman school in Balboa and you graduate corpsman. I think it was six to eight weeks. And when you graduate, we're going to reinstate you to E5.
- [39:09]
Jocko Willink
That's awesome.
- [39:10]
Harold Underdown
And I'm thinking, Gee, I'm an E3 now. That'd be great. So I did it. And you know what? He kept his word. I graduated corpsman school and I was automatically promoted to HM2.
- [39:21]
Jocko Willink
Damn. Dude.
- [39:22]
Harold Underdown
That was like. That was a blessing, right? That was a blessing as far as being able to get promoted because, you know, in the teams back then, your rate was your fate.
- [39:32]
Jocko Willink
Yes, right.
- [39:33]
Harold Underdown
If you're a certain rate, you may not promote as easily as a corpsman. Right. Hm. And I was blessed with that rate. And I had that all the way up to master chief. Took me a while to make E6. Had to do some crazy stuff for that. Had to go to Florida and set through a. A week long course with this old retired master chief that was basically teaching. Teaching.
- [39:54]
Jocko Willink
Teach you how to pass.
- [39:54]
Harold Underdown
How to pass the test. Right. And how to do it effective. And I actually scored like a 77 out of 80. Damn. It worked. Right. So I got. I got promoted to. But I had to do that, right? And. And damn, that paid. That. They paid me to go down to Florida and sat down with this guy. He had a classroom.
- [40:11]
Jocko Willink
So. So where'd you go, Where'd you go on deployment? Like your first, your first climb?
- [40:17]
Harold Underdown
Philippines. Went over to. Went over to PI.
- [40:21]
Jocko Willink
Was that the volcano or anything like that?
- [40:23]
Harold Underdown
You know what? No, I think we were either before or right after that, but it was still. It was fine. You know, we would go outside the gate a lot. Did a lot of training on the beat. Green Beach, Red beach, all of those beaches that would go shoot live fire and then do a lot of water work as well over. Over in Subic. But that was a great, great base. But that was right after, you know, we shut that down. Right. Not too long after that.
- [40:48]
Jocko Willink
So you did. Was that when you got done with that deployment? And then you did another one. Where was your next deployment?
- [40:54]
Harold Underdown
My next deployment was Guam.
- [40:56]
Jocko Willink
With me, right?
- [40:57]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, with you. That was my second, you know, second deployment.
- [41:00]
Jocko Willink
That was your third deployment.
- [41:01]
Harold Underdown
And then I did one more.
- [41:03]
Jocko Willink
You were just a one cruise.
- [41:04]
Harold Underdown
One. Oh, you know what? Hold on. No. Two. That, that was. Right. The third. That was my third deployment because we did. I did an arg.
- [41:11]
Jocko Willink
Got it right.
- [41:12]
Harold Underdown
So they needed a corpsman. So I joined the. The ARC platoon and. And basically I did back to backs. Right. And then that's when I met You. When we did that third deployment over to Guam, right, Because I screened for Damn Went back to Virginia.
- [41:28]
Jocko Willink
So when one thing I was thinking about when you were talking about that police officer that, like, basically taught you a lesson was cool to you. I was thinking about when you were, you know, when I was a new guy. And look, I was about as, you know, a new guy, as a new guy could get. Dude, I was freaking 20 years old. And. And, you know, young, dumb, and full of motivation, as they say.
- [41:51]
Harold Underdown
Oh, yeah.
- [41:51]
Jocko Willink
And what I remember about you, though, is like, you would. You wouldn't. You weren't like, you. You were trying to, like, help. Help us new guys be better. You weren't just like, shut. You know, you said, hey, let me show you how to do this. Hey, here's something to think about. You. You were. You were truly, like. Again, you didn't use the word mentor, but you were actually trying to get us good at being frogman. Not. You weren't just hammer beating the out of us and being an asshole. And there's plenty of guys like that, too, you know. But, yeah, you were. You were always, like, trying to help us, and I think that makes a big difference. I think it took me a while to find that for myself because I know I. I was a little bit of an. By the time I was in my second and third platoon, you know, myself and my running mates and a bunch of guys that were in that platoon with us, you know, we. We were definitely hard, probably too hard on some of the guys. But, you know, as I got a little bit older, I realized, oh, yeah, if you want these guys to be good seals, you should be helping them, and you want to have a good relationship with the dudes.
- [42:57]
Harold Underdown
You know, you don't want them to.
- [42:58]
Jocko Willink
Be mad about coming to work, and you don't want them to not be able to come to you and say, hey, how do I do this? Because they're scared they're going to get beat down. Matter of fact, I remember one time. I forget. Well, no, we were doing. We were doing shipboarding, just training, and one of the other older guys started making a scene about some shit. He's yelling, and you were just like, shut the up, man. You don't know what you're talking about. And you. It was funny because you defended. It was actually me. It was. You were actually literally defending me to another guy because, you know, I had done something, and you know what? I did what I thought was right, and you thought what I did was right, too. And this other Guy didn't think it was right, and he was having to go with me. And what am I gonna say? Well, I'm not gonna say shit. I'll say, roger that. But then you stepped in, and I was like, duh, doggy. Just put. Put out the word right there. He's looking out for his boy over here.
- [43:47]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, well, that's part of being a platoon, right? We take care of each other. But if we see somebody, you know, they always said, what we're. We're only as fast as our slowest man. Right? So we always had to work to make sure that slowest man understood. No, he had to perform. Right. You got to get up here, right, because you're slowing down this whole train, right?
- [44:06]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, that's. That's wild. Just how. How that. How platoons come together and how you just so. Damn. You're so. You're so engaged in being in a platoon, you know, it's just such an awesome place to be and you're trying to do a good job. It doesn't matter where you are. I mean, I went every. Everything from the new guy to the platoon commander to tasking commander. Doesn't matter. Like, you're still trying to do the best you can possibly do that whole freaking time, which is.
- [44:35]
Harold Underdown
And, you know, we were talking here before the show about your reputation, and I think there's no place like the SEAL teams when it comes to. You are graded on your reputation, right? Especially when, you know, when you come. When it comes time for you to get orders and you go to another SEAL team, all those people at that SEAL team want to know, yep, can he pull. Yep. Can he pull his weight? Right? And they get plenty of. They get plenty of intel, right? It's just word of mouth, right? Your reputation is going to proceed. You and you. You know, it's just very important. And it's the same in business, right? It's the same in business life. As we transition out of the military, your reputation speaks for itself, right? So, yeah, you know.
- [45:20]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And we had, like, that platoon that we were in, dude. I mean, it was a pretty wild platoon that. We had some wild dudes in there. I mean, I was wild as hell. I'm actually. I would say I got wild as hell because I wasn't old enough to drink when I got in there. I was a kid. And then went. You know, we went on deployment. It was interesting because you mentioned that the Philippines had shut down, so we were the first platoon to deploy straight to Guam. Like, we didn't. Because I think the platoons before us deployed to the Philippines, and then they left and went to Guam. We deployed straight to Guam, and there was a lot of people. Look, the Philippines was, like, a great place for guys to go, and a lot of guys love the Philippines, and guys would get stationed there, and they do multiple deployments over there. And we got sent straight to Guam, and there was a lot of people that were pissed, you know, like, they didn't want to be in Guam. They wanted to go to the Philippines. I didn't know any better. And some of the other old guys, like, from other platoons or other teams, you know, they're so mad. Like, they were literally mad. Like, I can't believe we're here. This sucks. Meanwhile, Guam is like a tropical paradise island. They're surfing. There's a sick gym. There's. You're getting per diem. There's like, you know, we're young. There's bars to go, and there's women there. It's, like, kind of an awesome place then. And so I'm like. Some of the older guys from. Some of the other guys were mad. I'd be like, walking out with my roommate. We'd be, like, walking out to go out, and they'd be like, you know, where are you guys going? Going out. They're like, oh, this place sucks. And I'm like, okay, yeah, if you're.
- [46:53]
Harold Underdown
Sitting in the barracks, right? You sitting in the barracks? It does. Yeah. Remember, they got the blue hole there, too. Diving.
- [47:00]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [47:01]
Harold Underdown
Blue hole at place. That's unbelievable.
- [47:03]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, this blue hole, like, you. You can swim down to it. It's 65ft. I remember we had a. One of the officers that worked there was like a. Like a swim guy from the naval academy. And so we all went out to the blue hole, and he swam down to the top of the blue hole, which was 65ft, and he just, like, sat on the edge of it and looked up and waved and then came back up, you know, all chill. So I was like, of course. I go, okay, now I got to do this, right. It brought deep. I tried to try as hard as I could to look how.
- [47:33]
Harold Underdown
Well, you know, you look down that hole, and it looks like something that is like a laser cut a circle. I mean, it looked like a drum, Right. And it had that arch on the front of it.
- [47:43]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [47:43]
Harold Underdown
Then it opened up to the ocean. But on the other, when you got down to that bottom is 150, I think about 150ft down. We did the bounce dive down there. You can climb over the edge and look down, and that's all you had time to do because you have to go back up right on your stops, going back up to atmosphere 66 and 33. But when we were down there, I climbed out over the edge of that cliff and looked down.
- [48:03]
Jocko Willink
That's Mariana stretch, like 30,000.
- [48:07]
Harold Underdown
That water went Navy blue to black.
- [48:09]
Jocko Willink
Yep.
- [48:10]
Harold Underdown
That was just. That was scary. That was a little scary.
- [48:13]
Jocko Willink
So that's Guam. Like, you got all this cool stuff going on. And. And we did. We did like one trip as a platoon, and then we didn't do any more trips. And that was very early in our deployment. And so then we were just in Guam. So, like, we'd go shooting, but you can only, like, there's only so much stuff that you can do. Just you run through all your ammo. Now what are you going to do? Okay, we'll go jumping. Cool. There's no helicopters. Like, at a certain point, there's only so much you can do. And then what are you going to do? Well, you're a bunch of. Bunch of freaking frog men hanging out at 2 Mom Bay.
- [48:46]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. There's beaches. They bars on the beach, which is, you know, that's not a good ingredients for it's seals.
- [48:53]
Jocko Willink
When it's either not a good ingredients or it's the best ingredients when you're 21 years old or 20 years old. And so that's what we were doing. And that's where. That's where you met your wife.
- [49:04]
Harold Underdown
I met Lisa on the beach down at our. You know, the beach would always go to. Right. And you know, she was down here throwing football, you know, with this, with this other girl. I think she was, she was stationed on the, the submarine tender. So her and Lisa hanging. That's when Lisa goes, well, whose seals? You know, what in the girl goes, well, the seals are here. And Lisa's like looking around going, where are they at? I don't see any in the water, right? She goes, no, no, no. I'm talking about the Navy SEALs. These guys, they always, you know, would take over, right. As soon as we hit the beach, you would plant a flag and go, this is it.
- [49:43]
Jocko Willink
And I remember when you met Lisa, just how do you were. You were hook, line and sinker. You were done training, bro. Yeah, it was game over for you. And she was. Because she was a knockout and she was a, you know, we all knew immediately she was a Seattle Seahawks cheerleader and she was a badass chick. And all of a sudden doggy's Just. He's just freaking hook lighting.
- [50:07]
Harold Underdown
Doggone.
- [50:10]
Jocko Willink
Oh, classic stuff.
- [50:11]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. Yeah, that was something else. Met Lisa and I remember I ended up. As we left, of course, Lisa went back to Seattle after our deployment finished. I think it was in July. I remember having the July 4th twice, right? And then, of course, Lisa was pregnant, so she went home off the work site there she was working with her two brothers who were doing stucco work in Guam. They had contracts on both the commercial side, and then they're looking at getting some Navy housing contracts. So they were full on busy. And so Lisa went back. I ended up flying back from. From Guam as we went back to SEAL Team One. And I remember it was crazy because we. We flew across the date line, right? So we celebrated the 4th of July in Guam. I went back to San Diego and did it again.
- [51:02]
Jocko Willink
Let's do it again.
- [51:02]
Harold Underdown
Do 4th of July one more time. And. But we. We got married shortly after that. And then that's when I got orders to go to Dev Group. So Lisa and Lisa's dad and I drove. Drove our 4Runner. And we had a Nissan Pathfinder. Lisa had that over there. So we drove that bad boy across country in a U Haul, you know, and then we were pulling one vehicle and we'd drive the, you know, the 4Runner.
- [51:29]
Jocko Willink
And so what now it's like 1993, 94.
- [51:32]
Harold Underdown
94. I checked in at Dev Group, January of 94.
- [51:37]
Jocko Willink
And. And you. You had already screened for that, I guess, prior to us going on deployment. So now you're out there going through selection in 94. And how was selection?
- [51:49]
Harold Underdown
Oh, it was another. There's another kick in a jimmy, right? Just like anything else, right? As soon as you think you got to a point, you know, I was a HM2 at the time. Check in the damn neck. Same thing. You know, shut your mouth. You know, you're. You guys are. We're supposed to be door kickers, right? They brought in, I think there's 22 of us, 21. And we all check in. And when Master Chief came up in the classroom, he says, guys, I got good news and bad news. And we're like, what's that? And he goes, good news is you're. You're at this command, you know, tier one command, he goes, bad news is, is you're not going to be door kickers. You're going to boats. So we went. We were the first time that they pushed that many seals in a gray team right into the gray team. When we have the 40 foot, you know, eight sacks, go fast boats. And they asked a question at the, at the screen, you know, at the interview they said, you like boats? I went, I love boats. I mean, you know, what are you going to tell them? I don't like boats? Because you don't like boats. Guess what? You're not, you're not going to get ordered, you know, you're not going to get orders. So I just, but I really did. I really liked boats and I had a great time in those boat. And then they, they sent us all to Florida for a two week course. U.S. u.S. Coast Guard Captain license.
- [52:58]
Jocko Willink
That's awesome.
- [52:59]
Harold Underdown
So we were all US Coast Guard, 100 ton near coastal captain license. Which is pretty awesome to, you know, it's a great, that's a great certificate to have. But, but yeah, that was it. You know, we, I left the west coast and went out there and I ended up finishing my whole career, you know, on the east coast And in.
- [53:17]
Jocko Willink
The 90s again, it's like pre, pre 9 11. What was the, like what, what were you guys doing? Were you, you guys were doing. Didn't you guys do stuff for Bush up in, up in Maine, up in Kennemunk?
- [53:30]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, we did the, I did that three times when I was at trade at. We would go up there for. Basically we were the water protection for the President as he fished, right? They were fishing off the coast up there in Kenny Butport, Maine. And his dad, 41, had a house on Walker's Point. And we would go over to the house every day. They had these Segways. They just came out, these Segways. And they were riding these Segways around. And I remember the president, you know, 41, he came out, George Ace. And he goes, guys, he said, he said, I want you to ride these segues. I just got this as my birthday gift. And he says, you guys can ride them around. He said, just don't hit the beast. And I'm thinking, what's that? The beast? He goes, yeah, that armored the armored Cadillac, right? President's car. And we're like, roger that, sir. We won't, we won't hit the beast. So we were doing that, but we were mainly up there just to be protection as he was fishing with his dad, right? So we had two presidents, we had 4,143. And we, we would jock up in the boats. We had pelican cases, we had rifles and boats. We had 60 guns in the, in the Zodiacs. And I remember we're having a discussion, right? So I'm, I'm up There as a master chief and I'm, we got, we got these two way walkie talkie just talking back and forth. And I'm on the, the Secret Services, they had a RIB boat out there. It's about a 45 foot boat, but it was, it couldn't keep up with the, with the Bush's fishing boat because they had a, they had a fountain boat. So that fountain boat was about a 36 footer and he had like three big time engines on the back of it, right? And they would take off and I'd be in the, the rib. And I told the guy so doesn't make any sense, you guys need to, he said well we, you know, we'd like to have the hard boats up here, you know, but damn, we're not bringing hard boats up to run around with the President, he's fishing. But so we did the best we could. And I remember they had a wedding on the peninsula. So everybody was driving from Walker's Point over to this peninsula for the wedding rehearsal. And we're all, we had the peninsula basically surrounded 180 security ring about a mile off the coast. And we're just out there, we had our weapons with us and we're just watching for any, anybody that would possibly break through the perimeter and get onto the rocks and climb up to interrupt or, you know, harm anybody. So we were on the radio and remember the, the, this was 43, George W. Was in the car with his, with his primary guy, right? He's got the, the guy, this is pocket man. And he was listening there, listen our chatter too as we were talking around, you know, the perimeter and one of the guys in the Zodiac who was up against the rocks, who was, you know, near, near shore, he basically said, hey, hey dog, if, if one of the high speed boat comes, what, what do you want me to do? And I go, well you got a weapon? I go smoke it. And when I said smoke it, of course I didn't realize this, but they picked it up in the, in the, in the beast right inside the, the President's car. And George W. Looked over at the Secret Service guy and he goes, you hear that? Those seals are going to smoke something, you know. He said that's why the seals are up here, right? He said, I feel safe. But it was, it was funny, you know, but he asked me later, he said, who, which one of you said smoke them? And I went, that was me. He said that was a good answer by the way. The President really loved that.
- [56:43]
Jocko Willink
That's good. Commander's intent right there, dude. When I was a kid, so my dad worked in a. In. I'm from New England, and my dad worked in a. In a camp, a summer camp in Kennebunk. And so when I was a little kid, Vice President Bush was. You know, he'd be the same thing. Like, we'd see the Secret Service up there. And he gave a speech in, you know, the little town of Kenny Bunk. Little Kenny Monkport, right?
- [57:07]
Harold Underdown
Yep.
- [57:07]
Jocko Willink
He gave a speech in that little square. And my dad took me, and we had one of those little disposable cameras. And my dad says, hey, you know, get. You know, get a picture of him. And there's a real big crowd. And I said, okay. And I said, well, I really can't see him. And I climbed up on this windowsill. And so now I'm probably like. I don't know what the math is, But I'm probably 8, 9 years old, something like that. I had some kind of camera. Anyways, I get up on this windowsill, so now I can see above the crowd, and I have a really good view. And Vice President Bush is up there.
- [57:43]
Harold Underdown
And I'm a punk ass kid.
- [57:44]
Jocko Willink
And so I go. And it's. Everyone's quiet listening to him. And I go, hey, George. And I you not. He like stops, looks over at me, and I took a picture of him and my dad's freaking ganking me down. You freaking disrespectful little idiot. What the hell's wrong with you? So, yeah, there you go. That's my.
- [58:02]
Harold Underdown
That's my George Bush senior silence.
- [58:04]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Yeah, I. I'm surprised the Secret Service didn't freaking smoke me.
- [58:09]
Harold Underdown
Oh, yeah, you probably had a red dot on your chest and didn't know it. Yeah.
- [58:15]
Jocko Willink
And so you spend these years, it's like, so where are you when. When September 11th happens?
- [58:21]
Harold Underdown
September 11th. We were at the command and we're in a classroom. I can remember it like it's yesterday, right? Like the space shuttle blowing up. You know exactly where you were at and what you were doing when that tragic hit. Well, 9, 11 hit. I was in a classroom. We're doing public speaking with an outside contractor. And the guys flew into the room and said, hey, you guys gotta watch the tv. So we went into the operational side where they had the big screens up and we could actually see the airplanes flying into the second tower, I believe, at that point. And it was like looking at something like, what. What is this? Is this a movie? I mean, what, you know, doctored movie? What's going on. And then we, you know, sadly come to the realization that it was real and that both of those buildings were struck by airplanes. And then the other one that went after the Pentagon, I think hit the Pentagon. And then they say the one that went down in the field in PA was targeted for the White House. Right? It was going to hit. I mean, it was just really bad. And of course we went straight through the ceiling as far as spin up goes. And we kicked all of the contractors, had to leave and all of that. And we got went on lockdown and then we started getting briefs right away. And I think we had boots on the ground within probably two weeks. You know, in Afghanistan, when that went.
- [59:41]
Jocko Willink
Down, where were you in New Hawaiis?
- [59:42]
Harold Underdown
Well, I was still gold, right? I was gold team. So we were second. We were standby, right? So they sent, I think it was blue team initially one out the door for that mission to hunt these guys down. And we were just on standby to standby, right. We already had everything back. All of our bags were packed with flyaway package. Right. So we, we could go anywhere at any time. But yeah, that's, that's where, that's where it was at. And yeah.
- [60:11]
Jocko Willink
And then how long until you rolled.
- [60:13]
Harold Underdown
Out after, after blue came back, then they sent red. And then of course I, you know, I was gold, but the feather that I had in my hat was. I was a corpsman, right. I was a medic or. And at the time, you know, because I went through independent duty corpsman school, which is a year long school over in Portsmouth, the master chief at damnac said, hey, all of you guys, because they shut down the goat lab down at Fort Bragg. They rebuilt it so it was shut down for a year. So during that year, he looked at us and you guys are all going independent duty corpsman school over in Portsmouth. And you're going to thank me later. And we're like looking at him going, because, you know, you have to wear uniforms every day. And we had fleet instructors and they were hammering us. Uh, so that was one year long school, right? So it was. But it, but it. Like the master chief said, I made, I made chief first time, senior chief first time. But not, not just because I was a independent duty corpsman, had combat experience. It was because. Because of the, the. The way it went was, you know, you go to promotion boards, right? And they, they rank in rack and stack your, you know, as far as score. But a part of that being promoted too is you need to be in a position of leadership, right? You know, I was in the positions of leadership every time. So it just worked out for me to get that chief's job and then to get the senior chief job and then for master chief. That's when I went over to training command, you know, debt east coast, you know, trade at. And that's when I made picked up master chief, you know, the first time. But as I look back at the career, it was because I was in those positions of leadership that that helped me to get promoted. And also been to three promotion boards, right? As a master chief setting on a promotion board, you really appreciate the process that we go through. Reading records. I mean, we show up at 7:30 in the morning and we don't stop until 5. I mean this all day long looking at a computer screen reading people's records, right? Because if I'm grading out jocko, I'm looking five years behind you. And then it brings me all the way to the point where you're up for promotion and we have to make the decision. And we rack and stack it and the computer does it for us. After we grade you paper, you have five master chiefs and an officer on the board and probably seven of us total. And then once we rack and stack you, the computer does the math for us and it builds a ladder. It builds a ladder and you get to the final part. Say we got 80 chiefs to promote. We get down to 79, 80, 81. Then they start asking questions like, well, why isn't candidate 81 not 80 and why are you going to stop at 80 and promote 80 chiefs or promote 40 senior chiefs? Or the numbers go down right? As you go up and why is, you know, you're promoting 20 master chiefs. How do you do that? And then we have to stop what we're doing. After we build a ladder out, we've got our top 20 now they start asking questions. How about number 18? Is 18 better than 20? Is 20 better? You know, so it just goes back and forth. But as we build a ladder, that ladder stands on its own, right? We've already did the work, we did the hard work of ranking them, racking and stacking them, and then it's all that. But that's just another education. As you move into the leadership side of your career, you get opportunities to do that. And we call that doing big Navy work. Because it is right? Because we have to go down and we get to meet, meet a lot of good people, you know, good master chiefs and officers who, who has basically taken, I think it's about a two Week process. But I mean, two weeks and you're in that. You're in that office every day. Just, just in my pencils, I got number two pencils, actually kept them as trophies. Now I've got them about 2 inches long with a little eraser on them. I go, that right there. That's the pain. That's administrative pain, doing that job. Right?
- [63:59]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [64:00]
Harold Underdown
So it was, it was quite the experience.
- [64:04]
Jocko Willink
So I was, you know, you, you were mentioning. You go on this deployment. I always tell people, like, I was in the seagull teams for 13 years before I actually shot my weapon at the enemy. Because I came in in 1990 and wasn't until 2003. So for you, it's even longer. And you, you, you. What was it like? Like, okay, now you're going to Afghanistan for the first time. And by the way, the other interesting thing is, and I've thought about this a lot, like, no one had combat experience at this time. Like, very, very. There were some people that did some, some. Some snatches in Bosnia. There's a couple people that did some stuff in Somalia, maybe some leftover guys from either Panama or Grenada. But broadly speaking, you could be in a SEAL platoon that had no one that had ever been in combat before. And it was. That's not. Well, we all pray for peace maybe, but it's not great to have a unit where people don't have combat and they're supposed to be combat warriors. So how. What was that like for you?
- [65:05]
Harold Underdown
Well, you know, I did grow up, you know, at SEAL Team One. We. We didn't have anything going on as far as, you know, being in the arena. Right. Being in a gladiator or being shot at or engaging the enemy. So when I went to Dev Group, I was there for about six months, and then we got spun up for Haiti. Remember the Haiti mission? It went down, and we were going to go down, and it was going to be heavy. Right, because they had us on board the USS America aircraft carrier at the time, and that was the first time ever in Navy history that they had an aircraft carrier solely dedicated for special ops. They had, they had. Gold team was on there. We had Red team and Blue team. I mean, this thing was loaded down with tier one operators. We had our Humvee, our mobility package on there. We had the boats on there. We had TF160 aircrafts on there. We had Army Ranger battalion on there. I mean, this whole thing, you couldn't look anywhere.
- [66:07]
Jocko Willink
That's what happens when you don't have war. For freaking 20 years.
- [66:10]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. Everybody had paint on, right. And we moved all the way to the part where we were test firing our weapons on the elevator of this aircraft carrier. We had to Humvees, we're going to sling them with 47s side by side. I remember we had boat. We had boat fenders in between the vehicles and they were going to hoist them up with these Kevlar straps and drop us off. And the mission was fairly clear, right. Hit the deck, assimilate ourselves. Little birds come over. We had a gunship up and then we had Black Hawks coming in with guns, right. Guns on. And we were going to roll straight from the pad that we're going to be dropped off on straight to the. The President's palace, and we're going to kill anybody that give us any resistance. They had a weapon, basically drop them, right. So we were going to do that, but right at the last minute after we'd already test fired and everybody looked at each other, when we're ready and we're going up the elevator actually to come up and link up with the helicopter chalk. And all of a sudden we got the call to stand down. And we're all looking at each other like, what, what's going on? And come find out it was President Carter and Colin Powell who called the Haitian government at the time and says, I want you to look outside your window. You see that aircraft carrier sitting out there? And they went, yes, sir. Well, and he says, these 13 or 16 aircraft, C130s, just left Fort Bragg with 82nd Airborne. And he said, in about two hours time, you're going to have 82nd Airborne dropping in, and then you're going to have tier one forces on your back door. And we're not coming down there to eat MREs. Right. So that was the deal. But they shut it. They shut it down. We immediately reconsolidated. We held out there for about a week. I believe they sent us back to the beach to stand up the package. Right. Our blowout package. But the rest of it, one of the teams stayed on that carrier and they rode the carrier home because it still could have went sideways. Right. And we'd had to go back in anyway, but it didn't. The government kept it a word. But, you know, Haiti's just a. It's a. It's a bad place.
- [68:14]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And then.
- [68:16]
Harold Underdown
But.
- [68:17]
Jocko Willink
So that's really the closest you got prior to 9?
- [68:20]
Harold Underdown
No. Yep. Other than test firing our weapons, we didn't see anything with that. And then when 9, 11 hit. That's when we rolled over and, and took blue teams spot. And it was, it was 100 days. I think we did 100 days in the theater, but it was busy. So, you know, I got on. I remember sending back a high side email to my buddies back at gold team and I said, hey, life is good on two way rifle range. Because really that was the first time I'd been shot at, you know, doing these missions, you know, because they would, they would hear the helicopters coming in and they would run. So we would have to chase the squirters. And we were on the outside, you know, great team. They used us for outside security. Assault force would blow the walls, the adobe walls, and then they would go inside and looking for this deck of cards of people. We were looking for the bomb makers and the bad guys. So the outside, we got busy outside, right? We had some, we had some squirters run around contact trying to contact us. So we would light them up. Then we had a gunship above us with a predator. I mean, the sky was stacked up, right? Fast movers up top. But that kind of opens your eyes to all of the training that we do in a SEAL team. It's really amazing because we. When I hit the ground, when I rolled out of the back of the helicopter, I picked up a position on my knee and there was two guys, I mean, fairly close, right, running away from me. And I could tell one of them had a weapon. But I had an opportunity there to shoot somebody. But I'm like, I'm not going to shoot a man in the back, right? He could be a farmer, he could be a doctor, who knows, right, who he is. It ended up being two bad guys because as we pulled back, the security and perimeter around the house, that was a target. These two knuckleheads that I think I saw running away from us. So we had nods. And I'm looking at them and they're. All of a sudden I hear this snapping sound. And I look up at one of my guys were standing up and I went, hey, you might want to take. Hey, you may, you may want to take a knee or take, you know, get some dirt on your chest because we've got, we've got incoming. And he looked over at me. We're wearing peltors, right? Headsets. I could hear it clear as day and I go, hit, hit the deck, knucklehead. So he gets down and we back in. I get into a ravine and. And I start engaging the target. That was. I knew exactly where they Went to. So I start lighting him up. And then I call Cass, I call our CCT guy, and he goes. He said, what you got, dog? And I went, hey, we got incoming over here. These guys ran a ravine. They must have went through their cachet, and they're shooting back on the target. And he goes, standby. And he had Hammer, you know, the gunship upstairs. And all of a sudden you saw this, all this heavy. I think they were 105 rounds. Damn. Coming down to 105. They're coming down in that ravine.
- [71:03]
Jocko Willink
And early in the war, bro, we get that chance to clear hot those 105s. It's coming in hot, boy.
- [71:08]
Harold Underdown
105S and 40 Mike Mike. Oh, hell yeah. They were doing. Then you could hear the minigun, too. It would wind up. But that. That we never had anymore. Those. Those gentlemen were out of business. They were out. They closed. They closed their gun shop up. But it. But what I think the point was I was trying to make is, is all the training that we do through our careers. You know, you don't want to ever, you know, pray for war or run to war, because when you get there, you know, you have the training to be as calm. And I mean, I felt totally calm. Our technology, with our weapon systems, our lasers, our nods, and the way we communicate with each other, it's just unbelievable, the type of lethality that we bring to the battlefield when we're fighting. These guys who may be farmers, they don't know how to shoot that well. And it's just. It's a smoke show for us, right, because we don't miss much. You know, we. If we do miss, we miss small. But it's just. It's just good to feel, though, right, all the training that you've done, it's like these football players that train and train and train and never get to the Super Bowl. But when they step on that super bowl field, you don't want them to totally clam up on you, right? You want them to be able to do their job. And we did our job right, and every mission was different. And I know you know this, but you just have confidence in yourself. And, you know, they say the professionals or, you know, the tier one guys or, you know, where you were at in your career, we see things slow. It slows down for us. Even though it may be chaotic as shit, people shooting RPGs and shit blowing up all over the place, it just seems like you can just, you know.
- [72:46]
Jocko Willink
We can take a wrap off, take a step back, look at what's going on. Make a call.
- [72:51]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [72:53]
Jocko Willink
And it is because, I mean, even something going all the way back to like hell week, there's freaking total chaos going on. And like, you have to learn to process what's going on and what to block out and get that little portion of the job that you got to do, which is, you know, moving chem lights or, you know, moving the boat over here. You got to learn how to focus and get that thing done. And then you just get fast forwarded. That gets expanded on as you go through training, you go through workup. You know, it's the same thing that's going on in workup. You know, you got freaking explosions. The trade at guys are putting gas bombs all over the place. There's artillery sims going off and they're down men, and it's, it's total chaos. And you learn to. Okay, cool. What I got to do.
- [73:35]
Harold Underdown
Well, well, you know, getting back. And I want to say this real quick before we get going and, and, and you know, we mentioned our wives, I just want to put a thank you out to my wife Lisa, who stuck by my side during all these deployments, you know, and I remember like it was yesterday when I got the call that I was going to go with red team, right? You know, when the master chief said, hey, you know, dog, go, I want you to be an E5. And I'm like, hey, that's a good, that's good. I like that. I like being a good E5 because that means the leadership is taken away from me. I just need to be a 60 gunner or a sniper or a medic. A medic all the time, of course. But I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna do it well. But, but my wife took me to the gates at the command before we were flying over to Afghanistan. And she, she just kind of looked up at me, she goes, I'm proud of you. And I kind of looked at her and I'm like, proud of me for. And she says, no, I'm proud because you're volunteer, you're volunteering to go do this. Cause you think you need to go validate yourself or whatever. But she says, I'm very proud of you. She's. Don't worry about anything back here. I've got this, right? She's got the compound right, the home. And I call her. She's in my phone. Homeland, Admiral. So when I call my wife, that's her. Her basically in my, in my, you Know my phone. She's a Homeland admiral.
- [74:55]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [74:56]
Harold Underdown
And she's really been a good one, you know, for that.
- [74:58]
Jocko Willink
But yeah, it's, that's definitely you. You know, when, when I would be on deployment, you know, whatever was happening at home, broken water heater, flat tires, kids getting in trouble, kids sick, what you just, you know, any problem that was going on, my wife never told me about it. Like, it was just, how's everything? She know, I'd ask her. Everything's voice, everything's great. You know, there ain't no way you got three freaking toddlers in a house, in a 900 square foot house, whatever, built a 194440 and everything's great. Like that ain't happening. Like it's just zero chance.
- [75:32]
Harold Underdown
But it's, but you know, Bravo Zulu, good job for them to be able to allow us to step away and not have to worry because you don't need to worry about that stuff. I mean, I've had that, I've had that situation happen with over in the Philippines on a deployment. And I was walking home from being outside the gate and I came up to the backside stairwell and I walk up and I hear somebody chattering. This is like two in the morning, right? And I hear somebody chowing off. So I walk into the laundry room that we had there at the barracks and here was one of our sailors, SEAL Team 1 sailor underneath a blanket talking on a phone and he was crying, oh, I won't do that again. I just want to be with you, blah, blah. And he was going on and on and on and I'm like, dude, can't, you can't do this. You can't do this. And he, he ran up like a $4,000 phone bill that was back in the day that our command had to engage, we had to engage in that and pay that. Of course he ended up having to pay, right? He paid, he paid his piece, four thousand dollar phone bill from talking from Philippines back to San Diego to his girlfriend or his wife. And I'm like, dude, you can't do that. You need to be locked in what we're doing over here. You can't just tell her you love her, we'll be home in five months or whatever it was. You can't, you can't get rolled into that.
- [76:45]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [76:45]
Harold Underdown
And think he learned a lesson with that.
- [76:47]
Jocko Willink
But yeah, I think it's real important that like you're, you know, your wife doesn't get jealous of the team, of the platoon because, you know, it, it's hard. You Know, like, here you are. You marry a girl, and then you go, yeah, by the way, I'm married to you, but I'm going to spend all my time with these dudes over here.
- [77:04]
Harold Underdown
Exactly.
- [77:05]
Jocko Willink
And when you call, I might answer. When they call, I will answer. Like, when your work calls, you're. You answer the phone. If your wife. If you're at work and your wife calls, you may not be able to answer it. So they got to have a certain level of emotional independence. And also just like, being a stable person, confident person that knows, okay, well, you know, you do what you got to do, and I'll be over here doing. I got. I got the home front on lockdown.
- [77:30]
Harold Underdown
Exactly. And that just gives us the ability to just totally focus on what our mission is, because, you know, any given night, Right. We still step out the door. We don't know if we're. But, you know, that never crossed. I wouldn't let that doubt in my mind at all. I'd just like, hey, let's go kick ass on target, and let's come home and repeat, right? Get the intel, go back out, find it, fix it, finish. Right? And we're the finishers, so we got to get back out there. So.
- [77:57]
Jocko Willink
And then what'd you do after. After you got back from that deployment?
- [78:01]
Harold Underdown
I got back after that deployment. Basically, I already strapped in with orders. Right. So I ended up having to execute those orders to trade at.
- [78:08]
Jocko Willink
Okay, so you went to trade.
- [78:09]
Harold Underdown
Because back then, it was like, look, we've got to get these tier one guys to come out of the tier one, because I was already there for eight years. So it's time to start rolling some of this subject matter expertise that we have. And fortunately for me, I got that 100 days on the ground running operations and combat experience to go now. Teach the young seals. And I was the senior chief in charge of assaults. Perfect. So assaults was CQC and military operations, urban terrain. We did a little VBSs, but that wasn't VBSs, wasn't my deal.
- [78:43]
Jocko Willink
And we weren't focused on it too much at the time. No, because then once. Once that kicked off, it was like.
- [78:48]
Harold Underdown
It was boots on the ground.
- [78:50]
Jocko Willink
And would you. You know, I always found I was real lucky because I was at Team one. I got to work in training, so. So. And I found that I learned so much when I was in training. Cell number one, because you're teaching it, and number two, because you're watching it, and you're getting to see, like, what a bad leader does, what A good leader does what a bad chief does, what a good chief does, and you start going, okay, I don't want to do what that guy just did, because that didn't work out too well, but I see that this guy over here is doing it. Well, did you find that, like being in that instructor mode, running those trips, you just get better and better?
- [79:21]
Harold Underdown
You do. I mean, I think you just kind of hit the nail on the head, you know, when you're an instructor, you're teaching, right? And they sent us through. I went through Navy instructor school, right? And then I was a master. Master trainer.
- [79:33]
Jocko Willink
Oh, yeah. Training MT specialist.
- [79:35]
Harold Underdown
Yep. MTs, right.
- [79:36]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [79:37]
Harold Underdown
So I got that. But. But you're right. When you're teaching something, I was, I was, you know, I went through sniper school, then I went through. I was a sniper instructor. But when you're a sniper instructor, you really get to take. Because you know what the stresses are? The stresses with the crawls you have to do the stalking, the shooting aspect of it, and you're there to help people, right? You're, you know, watching people. And, you know, lots of times we have these civilian shooters come in and teach us, and we're just passing that information on, right? But, you know, from, from our standpoint, we're just trying to make sure, looking into a person, go, hey, does he have the field crafts? This now? He's a good shooter, but now can he take that being a good shooter and move into the stalking side of the house? Which means you gotta learn how you can basically crawl to a target within 300, you know, yards or meters and then be able to make the shot. Right. Without getting caught. And we're looking at you through a spotting scope. So even with the ghillie suits on and stuff, you get rolled out on a pool table. We used to call it pool table because you'd get out on a piece of ground that was. You didn't have any vegetation. So you, you look like a polar bear, basically climbing across a, a flat deck with a ghillie suit on, right? We're going to catch you, right? We see you. So we get to walkers over there, pat you on the head and go, hey, you got to do better than that. So we'd send them back to restart, but it's all time too, right? You only have like three hours to make the shot. So. Yeah, that was fun.
- [81:02]
Jocko Willink
That SEAL sniper school is no joke. That's. That's a freaking great school.
- [81:06]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [81:07]
Jocko Willink
And then as you're running, as you're running trade at what's going on with your career? Did you make Master Chief when you got there?
- [81:12]
Harold Underdown
You said I did. I made. Once I checked in at Trade Ed, I was a senior chief in charge of assault sales. So I had a warrant officer that was working with me and we got another chief from DAMNAC to come over and help. But. Yeah, but, you know, checking that block, being that senior chief for that training command, you know, being a trainer is another, you know, avenue that you need to really come off the SEAL team, right? Quit being an E5 shooter and go do some of these, these jobs that we need you to go do. Right? And then when you do those jobs, though, you get rewarded for it. And that's when, you know, I made Master chief then, Then, you know, then I got selected to go to the Command Master Chief Cobb training course up in Rhode Island.
- [81:56]
Jocko Willink
How long is that?
- [81:57]
Harold Underdown
That's about. I don't know whether it's two to six weeks, but it's, that's where you learn all the resources that the big Navy has for you to be a command Master chief. You know, you have to be able to deal with these young sailors and their families. You got to get them resources, like through the Navy College, they got all these grants out there that you can help people with. All the plethora of reasons why a sailor would come offline, you know, whether it's self generated or what, they give us the resources to help with that, you know, and then of course, for us, we're very fortunate because we got the Navy SEAL foundation, who also has a whole lot of resources that they can throw at problems.
- [82:42]
Jocko Willink
And so you go to that school and then you go to Seal Team 4. And now you're the, the command Master chief, which for anybody that doesn't know what that is at a SEAL team, that's basically the free. That's basically God, like when you're a young SEAL and that command Master chief, that's the senior enlisted guy, he's the guy that has all the clout, has all the experience, and he's the, he's the senior advisor to the commanding officer and he's, and he's really driving the enlisted troops. He's making sure that the right enlisted guys are platoon chiefs. He's making sure the right enlisted guys are leading petty officers when there's problems. He's the guy that sorts the freaking problems out. He's the guy that's getting the phone call from the police. He's the guy that's getting the phone call from the girlfriends from the wives just. He's the guy that's making things happen. And you had a. That's got to be pretty heavy weight when you're rolling into that position.
- [83:33]
Harold Underdown
It is, you know, because you're selected by the other master chiefs that, you know, at the group level and warcom, of course, you know, our top. Our force Master chief. So they take that very seriously. When they assign a master chief to be a command master chief, that means you have to go to the. The command Master chief, Cobb. Cobb is. Stands for chief of the boat. So that's the Cobb. These, those guys go to be cobs of submarines, right? So that's, that's where you get to CMC Cobb. But this is a great COB on, on a submarine.
- [84:04]
Jocko Willink
Same thing like that. Dude's a God when you go on a freaking sub.
- [84:07]
Harold Underdown
He's got a lot of experience. And, but, but yeah, as you, as you step into that position, and I stepped into it a little bit earlier because I actually went downrange with Seal Team 4 when they were in Iraq, and we were doing that psd got it mission right. So I was kind of a backup. I was incoming. I was the incoming CMC, and they already had a CMC at 4, of course. And then all I did on that deployment was I had another master chief with me and an officer who was a Force Protection officer. We were going around all of these ministers houses where they put their heads down, but we have protection on them 24 7.
- [84:44]
Jocko Willink
And by ministers, you mean, you mean the Iraq. So this is the time where the building charge of protecting the senior political class, the senior political appointees and officials of Iraq at the time, I think we had eight of them.
- [85:00]
Harold Underdown
Yes.
- [85:01]
Jocko Willink
And these guys had to go to bed at night. And so you were, at that point when you went over there, you were, you were checking out where they were living and sleeping and getting their area secured.
- [85:11]
Harold Underdown
You know, back in back earlier on, they, they, they tasked that with the State Department. The State Department did a quick assessment and turned around and kicked it back to the DOD and said, hey, we can't do this mission. We don't have the skill sets. We have armored cars, we got a lot of resources, but we don't have the, the people that can do this mission.
- [85:29]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, I heard that. I don't know if this is true or not, but I also heard they like, put it out for contract and Blackwater came back and said like, oh, it's going to be $12 billion or something like that. And the, the State Department said, We got a cheaper solution. And someone said, how about the freaking SEAL teams? You know, they've been doing so, so much with so little for so long. They can probably figure this shit out. And that's what we did.
- [85:49]
Harold Underdown
We fit right in. And I remember the day that. That I went back over as far as being the master chief of SEAL Team 4. We still had that mission. And we got a Blackhawk inbound. And it was McChrystal, you know, General, with his sergeant major, Jody. So he walks up to me and he goes. He goes, hey, Dog, how you doing? And I go, good, good, Sergeant Major. And he goes, tell you guys to lose the sunglasses. And I turn around, look behind me, you know, and here's all the SEAL platoon standing out there, and they all wearing Oakley sunglasses, right? So I walk over to him firsthand, all right, guys, lose the glasses. And I had one guy go, why? And I go, this is not a good time to ask me why. I said, this shit can of glasses right now. So that's when McChrystal came into our little talk area there and briefed us on this. And he said, basically, this is. We can't afford to have one scratch on any of these eight individuals who have been selected as the cabinet of this new Iraqi government. He says, you guys have the toughest mission in the country. Just do it. He said, you got it for a reason. He says, take care of these people. I'm going to give you the resources to make it happen. So we had a full platoon of MPs, military police with up armored Humvees. We had, you know, they had all the weapons on the top deterrence. We also had. Two of the helicopters were flying Cobras and Apaches. So the army and the Marine Corps would rotate week to week on who was covering us when we moved, especially with the President, because the president, at the point at the time, he lived outside of the Green Zone down by the Tigris River. So we'd have to take him through a gauntlet. We ended up cutting trees down, down that. That lane. They. We got a lot of pushback on that, of course, environmentally speaking, right, because you don't. But the trees were bad, right? For us. I mean, we had to drive too close to them. They're in the middle of the median. So we took those things down. So we didn't have, you know, a person with. Up in a tree with an RPG or whatever he wants to take up with him. So that mission was so, so stressful because every three days I would go into the platoons and say, hey, I want three of your guys to come out. So I'd bring three of them out and I'd rotate it right. Every. Every three or four days I'd pull three out, bring them back to just.
- [88:05]
Jocko Willink
To like, let them breathe, let them.
- [88:07]
Harold Underdown
Have a beer and get some sleep and get out a kit. Right. Because they're wearing kit every day, you know, so get out of your kit, get in PT gear, have a beer, relax. And then they'd relax for about 48 hours. Then I'd bring them back in and bring them back out. So I was mainly just dealing with that. Right. Just trying to keep the morale up because it was such a taxing. You think about it, you know, you got to wake these guys up and you got to put them to bed.
- [88:31]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah. And plus you're on defense, which being on defense sucks, you know.
- [88:36]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, it does.
- [88:37]
Jocko Willink
The frogman wants to be on offense, wants to go out and do the kill and not waiting to get killed, which is what that job was.
- [88:44]
Harold Underdown
That's right. And you know, for them, they. They got to be right once, right?
- [88:47]
Jocko Willink
Yep.
- [88:47]
Harold Underdown
We have to be right 100% of the time, which is stressful, right? I mean. Yeah, it wears you out.
- [88:52]
Jocko Willink
And it was amazing looking back that no, none of those Iraqi officials got killed. And because they got killed before we took over, some. Several of them were killed. Everybody wanted to kill them. The freaking Sunnis wanted to kill them. The Shia wanted to kill them. Like there's, they were just like. It was a. It was a disaster. Wait, happen. They never happened.
- [89:12]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, they had a target on their backs for sure.
- [89:14]
Jocko Willink
And did you guys take over for team one? Is that who you guys took over?
- [89:18]
Harold Underdown
It may have been three okay. In there, but. But yeah, but the second time I went back for the master chief job. We're. We're at bioprice and we're at Baghdad International Airport. And we were doing a lot of anti. Because the skipper, my skipper had a lot of connections and the, the outside organizations who were tracking the influence from Iran in Iraq. Right. They would come in with their proxies and create havoc and then jump back across. So we were trying to mitigate that. And that was kind of a. It was a crazy thing that we were doing, but lots of intel driven heavy. So I would stay down at the camp. It back, you know, back there where the SEAL team was, was, was that. And then the, the skipper had to go up to. Up north and run that Iranian influence thing.
- [90:08]
Jocko Willink
What year was that?
- [90:11]
Harold Underdown
That was probably 2005, 2006.
- [90:16]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [90:17]
Harold Underdown
That was my tour for, from being a command manager. I was there from 05 to 07.
- [90:21]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [90:22]
Harold Underdown
So right. That was right in that window, you.
- [90:24]
Jocko Willink
Guys, I'm trying to think of. Because I was, I was in, in 03 and 04, I was in Baghdad, and then in 06, I was in Ramadi. And I'm just trying to think of when you guys rotated through, because we were there with 10. When we were, when we were in Ramadi, we were 10. When we were at, when I was at Team 7, there was no one else there.
- [90:42]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [90:43]
Jocko Willink
And eventually the east coast guys started rolling in. But what was. When you're the master chief, any, you know, you got, you got, you know, you're handling the operational side. What about just when guys do dumb shit? What's that look like?
- [90:57]
Harold Underdown
Well, I got a good dumb shit story. When I was, before I was actually in the command Master chief job at Seal Team 4, I was over Knocko sound. I was over early, right. I was doing half a deployment. Then I would come back and take Seal Team 4 and I'd have to rebuild the manning of the platoons. But as I was at Baghdad, you know, over in Iraq, we had some young seals that were living in a house that was outside the Green Zone, which means, you know, it's not really all that protected. Right. They had some issues where they took a Suburban, a white Suburban out for a joyride and they blew through a army checkpoint and they got lit up. So that's not good, right? That's blue on blue, basically. But the question was, why was one of our vehicles being driven outside of the Green Zone and was contacted? It doesn't make any sense, right? So I got assigned to be the investigator along, had an officer with me, and I believe we had that force protection officer that was with us too. So three of us, we drove out to the, to the house. And before we, we got to the house, we stopped at the gate where we had Tennessee National Guard guys protecting that Green Zone gate that was in and out for that one cabinet member's house. And I stopped, I got out of the vehicle and I looked at these Tennessee National Guards. I go, hey, guys, did anything weird happen last night between 12 and 3 o'clock in the morning? And they went, yes, Master Chief. We had a white Suburban come through here last night. But it was looked like it had been contacted, it was shot, had some bullet holes in the back of the vehicle. And this was an armored, you know, Suburban. So we drive through the gate. We go down to the house, and I get all three of these young seals. There was. I think it was two from SEAL teams, West Coast. And then one of our guys, SEAL team, poor guy, was there. And I noticed we were walking around in the house, just kind of observing, right, and see what kind of lifestyle they're. They're living. And went over to the trash can and looked down, and we had Red Bull cans all over the place and vodka bottles. So I'm thinking, I guess this new generation likes to drink Red Bull with vodka. So that looked like what. What was going on? And when I set them down, I said, okay, guys, this is your. Your one chance to tell the truth. I want to know was this vehicle that's sitting outside right now with bullet holes in it, was you guys driving outside the Green Zone last night and was contacted by anybody? So what happened? And they're like, well, I would think we heard some shots last night. Maybe somebody shot our vehicle. I go, so somebody shot your vehicle as it parked outside? That's just what I'm hearing. So they stuck with their guns. They stuck with her story. And I went, okay, guys, I'm getting ready to leave, and I want you to make sure that you understand this is your one chance to tell the truth. And they all kind of shook her. Yep. Yes. Yes, Master Chief. Yes, Master Chief. I was. Okay. Have a good day. So I was already building the story, right? And it didn't look like it was lit up by local. Somebody out there shooting, you know, celebrating a wedding. So I go back. I'm driving back through the gate, and I get a phone call. Hey, Master Chief, we want. You need to come back. We want to tell you something.
- [94:11]
Jocko Willink
We want a second.
- [94:12]
Harold Underdown
We want to. We want to second.
- [94:13]
Jocko Willink
Give us one chance. Can we get a. One more.
- [94:15]
Harold Underdown
Can we do a rerun? So I go back to the house, and I walk in, and we. We. We sat there with them, and I go, okay, so what's the story? And they go, we were. We were driving last night. We were a little antsy. We were getting bored. And I'm like, no, this is not sounding good. And we went out and drove. We went down this one road called Michigan Road, and we turned left, and we went back to a gate. And we didn't know it was a gate. We had some army guys jump up, and they shot. They shot at the vehicle, and we kept going. So I said, you didn't try to deconflict as you pulled up on these people that were basically guarding the gate? No, no, no, Master Chief. We didn't. We didn't do that. So of course we wrap up the investigation, and sure enough, they did that. And we're thinking, man, that was stupid. So we ended up doing a DRB in Iraq, right? So a DRB is a dis. Disciplinary Review Board. Right? So I was in charge of the board, and we had a guy, Seal Team 5, CMC was on the phone with me, and we basically said you guys were done. Right? We're. You can't operate like this. This is. This is. You're. You're lucky to be alive. Or, you know, this is blue on blue, right? This is unsat. So we process our seal team 4 guy, we process him out and get him out of country as soon as we can. Within the next 24 hours, he goes back to Virginia Beach. He had temporary orders over to a ship. It was setting in Norfolk. It was a LPD out ship, Right? Yeah. And I don't like doing that.
- [95:41]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, but. No, but, I mean, dude, you can't look.
- [95:43]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, so we. We pushed him over to this ship. And. And I. And I don't. You know, me and you talked about earlier, Jocko. I don't like passing trash. Usually if somebody messes up and if I have to get medieval with them and pull their Trident off their chest, I'm ad Stepping them. Right. I'm administratively separating you from the Navy. We can do that very quickly. What happens? I'll pull your Trident off the admin shop. Basically does the paperwork to shut down all your special pays. So basically, you're. That's a. That's a shot to the heart, right? Career ender. And you're out of the community, right? You're out of the Navy seals. So this guy went over to the ship. I finished out my three or four months with the SEAL Team 4 that was downrange. I come back to take my duties as a command Master Chief. And I'm sitting at my desk, I think it was a Friday. I get a phone call, and it's the Master Chief on the ship. And he called me and he said, master Chief, he said, I've got one of your boys over here. He's done great things for me. He went on for about two minutes telling me how good this person was doing and how squared away he was. He was teaching force protection on the ship, teaching them small arms, shotguns, all this stuff. And I go, well, that's good to hear. You know, I said, let me come over and have a cup of coffee with you. And we can talk through this. So I get over there to the ship and I'm sitting down at the mess deck. We go into chief's mess and we were having a. Having lunch. And right as we were finishing up with lunch, he says, I'm bringing Jared down. And I go, yeah, please do. I'd like to. Like to see him. So Jared comes down, you know, and he's got his dungarees on. And you know how, you know, you know how that, how bad that.
- [97:19]
Jocko Willink
Trident or no. Did you pull his trident?
- [97:21]
Harold Underdown
No. You know what? He didn't have his trident on. So he, he stood there and he, he said, hey, you know, master Chief, it's good to see you. Very sorry, you know, for what happened. I just wish I could redo it and blah, blah, blah. So I just kind of thought and looked, I was looking at him up and down, right? Had nice, nice looking, clean, pressed uniform on. Conducted himself really well, spoke really well of what he's done to help the ship, you know, the sailors on the ship, you know, with their training and stuff for force protection. And I go, okay. I looked at the master chief and I go, I really appreciate you giving me a phone call. And that's part of being a master chief, right? We have to make decisions. Sometimes they're not good outcomes, but sometimes you got to see somebody and look them in the eyes and understand where they're at in their life. So I decided, when I got back, I told Jared, I go, stand by. And the reason I told him to stand by was because the master chief had shared with me that he was getting ready to detail the boat. So when he says detail the boat, that means everybody on that vessel was going bye bye. And when they do that, they getting, they're getting detailed to the knees of the Navy.
- [98:38]
Jocko Willink
So the big Navy don't care about young.
- [98:40]
Harold Underdown
They don't. They ain't got nothing. They're going to send you to whatever billet they need you to feel. It doesn't matter whether it's in Japan or Italy, it doesn't matter, right? So. So I understood the gravity of that. So I went back to Seal Team 4. I got on the phone with their detailer, I go, look, I need this individual back detailed back to for asap. So when you say ASAP and I'm talking to the guy that's got his fingers on a computer, they make it happen, right? So I said, he belongs to me now, so bring him to seal Team 4 as soon as you can. So detailer did, did their jobs I had him back the next week. I had him in my office. I said, hey, this is the reason I made this decision. I said, now I really feel that you've learned your lesson, so go be a good seal. And I said, my door's always open to you. Right? So that's awesome. Go be a good seal.
- [99:33]
Jocko Willink
What would you pull a guy's bird for?
- [99:36]
Harold Underdown
When we pull a bird, the guy was either mixing it up with law, you know, police officers, or had a domestic dispute where he punched his wife and actually shot himself in the hand with his. With his pistol. Said he was having a dream he was back in Vietnam. And I'm like, well, you're not old enough to be back in Vietnam. But I can tell you one thing. You're stupid. You're dumb. Right. So what I'm going to do for you is we don't need you.
- [100:03]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [100:03]
Harold Underdown
This is a $1.5 million asset that I'm getting ready to pull his bird. Right. Because when you pull a bird, you're done. Right.
- [100:11]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [100:11]
Harold Underdown
Administratively, we take it, You're. You're done. I'm sorry. It hurts. You know, it hurts. But guess what? You did it. Sometimes I give them three chances.
- [100:20]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Once you punch your wife and shoot yourself in the hand and talk about nam, when you're 24 years old. Yeah.
- [100:25]
Harold Underdown
You got some issues. Well. And, you know, you feel for them, too. Right. Because you don't want to totally derail this person. Right. Because, you know, it's. It's. It's bad. Always have the analogy when you have to clean somebody up, right. Like if they. They've had something bad in their. Their. Their lives or their relationships with their, you know, being married goes. Go sideways. It's hard work, right. Because you're dealing with people and you're dealing with. With things that you don't really see. Right. You don't know what's going on behind the curtain. It's like a train. When a train runs off the railroad tracks, it's takes a lot of work to get those trains back on that railroad track. Right. Same when people do. When people run through the briar patches. That's the way I refer to when people have squirrels in her sea bags. Right. You're supposed to be squared away. Right. We're taught in boot camp how to fold our underwear or skivvies in your T shirts. But sometimes I open up a seat bag and I got a damn squirrel in there. Right. You got a squirrel in a sea bag. Cause this guy's such a Shit show. Yeah, so. And that happens in the military, and it happens in civilian life as well.
- [101:31]
Jocko Willink
And it's weird, too, because, you know, people. People think about seals, and they think, oh, they've gone through all this training and they've been weeded out, and, you know, this person, they got it. You know, they've been academically tested and physically tested. They've been through some kind of psych eval, and they think that that's because a guy's a seal, like, he's good to go. And. No, no, they. Never mind. But squirrels, they might have raccoons and freaking bobcats in that sea bag sometimes. Freaking disaster dot com.
- [102:00]
Harold Underdown
Oh, it is. It is. And you just have to clean it up, right? You got to clean it up because we're all responsible. And I remember when I took that job at Seal Team 4, I had them all in the classroom. We had all of our new guys in from buds. We had everybody in the classroom. I told him, I go, look, I said, I want you to look yourself in a mirror because be accountable for your individual actions. Because if you're not, that's when I get involved, right? So be responsible for your individual actions when you make decisions. And I go, when I say this, I'm looking at you, and I'm looking in a mirror to myself. I said, I can go out and get a DUI with the best of them, but I'm choosing not to do that, because as soon as I do that, my command master chief job is gone. Right? You're done. Right? So there's decisions that you can. You can skirt around and be okay, but there are some decisions that when you. When you make those bad decisions, your career is stopped.
- [102:55]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, I know when I was in leadership positions, you know, sometimes I'd say, hey, listen, you guys know, like, I'll take care of you guys if in these events over here, you give me some. Something. I don't mind being the senior guy with a secret. I don't mean saying, oh, yep, yep, hey, you did. That was stupid. You know, here's. Here's. Here's your little punishment I'm gonna give you. You're gonna stand extra watch out at Nyland or you're gonna. I got that. I go, you do some of these things over here, you're. There's nothing I can do for you. Doesn't matter whether I like you or not. Doesn't matter whether you're my. My number one guy. If you do some of these things over here, there's nothing I can do for you. And I'm not gonna do anything for you. And I think it was very important that people understood what, hey, I got your back, Doggy, I got your back. You work for me. If I'm the. If I'm the skipper and you work for me, I got your back. If you make a mistake, I got your back. You do something, you, you know, okay, that wasn't the best move. I got your back. Now, if you do something that is like, illegal, immoral, or unethical, there's nothing. Doggy ain't got nothing for you. You're not going to hear. Nothing for you.
- [103:53]
Harold Underdown
That's right.
- [103:53]
Jocko Willink
There's nothing I can do for you. And I remember I had a guy who. I'll abbreviate the story, but he got into a fight and left his wallet at the scene and came to me, you know, with his chief and said, hey, boss, here's what's going on. Guy got in a fight, you know, in a public place and left his wallet at the scene. And I said, all right, well, here's what we're gonna do. And I had my master chief in the room with me. I said, here's what we're gonna do. I said, if you're lucky. And no one pulls up this wallet, no one pulls up security cam and comes back and says, you know, oh, we have this guy. Here's who did it. If we don't hear about this again. No, no factor. I said, if the police are knocking on my door, coming looking for you, we never had this conversation. Isn't that right, master chief? My master chief said, roger that, sir. And so I didn't mind saying, hey, look, I. You made a mistake. But, you know, it wasn't like some grievous thing, got into a little scrap outside of whatever bar, you know, like, okay, but he knew. And also him and his chief knew, oh, this. This could come back because idiot dropped his wallet. So they gave me the heads up of saying, hey, look, boss, this may come at you. Now, if it had been something like, oh, you got arrested, cool, that I already know what's gonna happen. I'm calling the commodore. Hey, there's not. That's coming back 100%. And I'm not gonna let my boss get blindsided by this group. So you gotta make sure. And I think that's another important thing when I talk to the younger guys today. You gotta have the damn courage if people are doing dumb to say, we shouldn't be doing this dumb shit. Stop what you're Doing. I'm not going to do that. You shouldn't do it. We shouldn't be doing this. You have to have that kind of courage to do that, because otherwise what you get is you get a little mob mentality, right? Like, oh, we're doing some dumb. Like, okay, hey, my, you know, I'm a new guy. My LPO is doing something that's. I know is stupid, but I'm not going to say anything because I'm just, you know, I lack the. The courage. And I look back at my own career where I had that happen to me. You know, I was telling you earlier, I was in a situation, I was a new guy when in our platoon, and one of the guys was going to drink, was going to drive drunk, and I hadn't drank at all. And I said, hey, you know, boss. Like, it wasn't my. It wasn't the officer, but it was like a senior guy. I said, hey, dude, I can drive. You know, I haven't been drinking at all. He's like, no, I'm driving. And instead of me having the courage to go, hey, negative, like, give me the keys. Instead, I was a new guy. I was like, roger that. And here I am letting a guy drive drunk with me in the vehicle. This total. A total idiot. Like, a total idiot never should have done that. And, But I did. And that's the kind of thing I look back and it was just, you know, being a new guy, not having the. Not having the courage to stand up and say, hey, dude, no, you can't drive. You've been drinking for eight hours. You're. You're drunk by any measure. Give me the keys. I'm gonna drive. And instead I was more, well, you know, don't want to make a ruckus here. I'm a new guy. Get in line. Because that's what you get told. Yeah, you're a new guy. Keep your mouth shut, okay? And that's what I did. And so little situations like that, if when you're in a. In a subordinate position, you still gotta have the courage to go, hey, no, this is stupid. We're not doing it. And what was interesting is, even as I became more senior, like, there was. There was issues that would come up where I know that me saying something was. I was the only person that was going to say something, you know, like, I was the only person that would be able to say, hey, we're not doing that thing right there. Stop. If anyone else, you know, because it's because I was the boss and, and not only the boss, but I was like a prior enlisted guy and I trained jiu jitsu. I was like, oh, wrap your ass up. Exactly. And, and so that does make. Make an impact. And so yeah, when you, when you get with your. When you know, when you. That's just makes me think when you take over as the command master chief and you're like, hey, you better be doing the right things. And if you're not, there's going to be hell to pay. And that's all there is to it. And listen, you make a mistake, cool, I got you. You do some dumb, illegal, immoral, unethical. I ain't got nothing for you. Not going to be able to help you. And I don't want to help you. So good, good leadership lessons there.
- [107:59]
Harold Underdown
And you know, I think with whether you're in a Seal team or whether you're Tier 1 or regular Seal team or in a business environment, there's times when we have to, you know, we have to set back our. Our course, right? Our course of direction, which is a professional course, right. So I refer to that as snapping a blue line, right? Yo, Carpenters use that, right? Snap the blue line. So I said, it's time to snap the down blue line, right? And I'll also refer to the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard rules. Rules of the road, right? You take that test. Rules of road. You have to know the buoys. You have to know everything out there at sea that you navigate off of. And you have to make an 80 some point. You know, you miss like one or two questions, you failed the test. So that's how much you need to know that, right? So the Coast Guard says, when entering a harbor, you shall instead of may, right? You shall pass port to port, right? Port to port. Port and starboard, right? Port, port. So when I have a situation going on in a SEAL team, I said, I look at my XO or my skipper and goes, time to snap the damn blue line. And they just look at me and go, oh, yeah, I'm with you because it is time to snap the blue line. And let's make it clear, guys. You cross this freaking line right here and your ass is mine. Right. Or you shall be responsible for your individual actions. You shall. This is. This is Coast Guard. I'm going Coast Guard rules on your ass, right? Because that's how. That's what keeps people safe, right. It's what keeps people in the. In the deal.
- [109:33]
Jocko Willink
Yep. Get rid of the gray zone.
- [109:34]
Harold Underdown
I remember I got a story for you. And this was this is, this was a good one setting in a jump masters brief, right? You, you said in these jump master briefs. And this was a double stack boat drop in Guam. I think you may been been on that. So this is a twilight drop, right? It's almost dark. You know, we try to get out of the bird before it's totally black. You know, we got a little bit of sun simmering on the, on the horizon, a little bit of visibility. And this night was a double stack boat drop. We had two of them, right? So we had two C130s, you know, drops. Or. Or we have. We may have had both boats, you know, all. You know, both boats rigged up inside the 130. So it's a platoon drop, right? Four boats. But I remember sitting in a jump brief and they were talking about if you unlike and you know, unlucky, a counter. If you go face to face with a paratroop paratrooper, both of you turn right, right? And that way you miss each other, right? And then another one was if you find yourself entangled in a parachute, if a jumper comes right at you and goes below you, but your feet hit the parachute, you, bicycle kick across that parachute. And I remember listening to that and I go, that shit ain't happening. That don't happen. Well, guess what? That night drop, I left that aircraft and I got about, you know, Cause we're following the duck. We got chem lights on top of our boats and the parachutes are all up, you know, the G11 or whatever we had on there. And no shit, I look up and all I saw the. The sky was night, a little bit of sun, you know. You know, the daylight or coming light was coming from the stars. And I saw a canopy. I mean, it was right. I mean, right at my freaking face. And I'm going, oh, here comes this jump master brief. I've got a canopy on my freaking face. And I'm. And I start bicycle kicking. And I know I walk all the way across this parachute. I went across the apex and I couldn't believe it. I saw the apex on my feet and I go, holy shit. I'm actually running across a parachute and I got to the other side and boom, My parachute inflated. And we hit the deck and you know, hit the water and we went over and we're de rigging a boat and I go, boy, was that something. So you just never know, right? You never know. So that's why you have to pay attention.
- [111:51]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. Follow those basic rules, man.
- [111:53]
Harold Underdown
I know that's that blue Line. Right. There are certain things that, you know, you got to pay attention to and you got to be able to react when something happens, you know, when something goes sideways.
- [112:01]
Jocko Willink
So, and when you, so you get out on that deployment, now you're the command master chief SEAL team for. And did you guys do. Was, was it PSD for that whole deployment?
- [112:14]
Harold Underdown
No, this one, this was more of a regular operational deal where we were running missions to try to find these bomb makers. Oh, that's right.
- [112:22]
Jocko Willink
You guys started doing the counter Iranian.
- [112:24]
Harold Underdown
And then the counter Iranian thing was a little more high speed. Right. Because they had tier one units were taking care of some of that. Right. Because it was so intel driven. And back where I was at with the, with the SEAL team platoons, that was at Baghdad International Airport, we were pretty much executing most of the, the bombers. Right. The people that were building the bombs, IEDs.
- [112:46]
Jocko Willink
So did you guys have an Iraqi partner force at the time? Yes. Okay.
- [112:49]
Harold Underdown
Yes. And that was comical too, trying to teach those guys how to shoot. And they were, it was unbelievable. Like teaching third graders how to, how to shoot. Right. As soon as you thought you could, they could hit something, they, they were still in bullets. And I'm like going, why are you still in bullets? They said, well, we can sell them. And I don't do that. Right.
- [113:08]
Jocko Willink
Did you guys have the Iraqi force that had like M4s and U.s weapons or did you guys have. Did you were with straight. Just Iraqi jundies with AK47?
- [113:19]
Harold Underdown
You know what, I think they just had the AK47s, which are dangerous.
- [113:23]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [113:24]
Harold Underdown
Some of them were China, you know, built in China and they were pieces.
- [113:27]
Jocko Willink
Of dunk and they're just rusted like sights. Just. They're not going to hit anything.
- [113:32]
Harold Underdown
No, no, but that's a, that's a powerful round, those, you know. Right. That's 762 by. What was it, 69 or 39? 39, yeah.
- [113:41]
Jocko Willink
And, and how was the op? Tempo was good for those guys that were out there getting after it.
- [113:45]
Harold Underdown
It was, it was, they stayed fairly busy. You know, I was having to try to keep the Seabees alive because the seals wanted to kick them off the island. Right. And I'm had a meeting with them and I'm like, what are you talking about? Those guys don't do their job, master chief. You know, we go out on these operations at night and we come back and I go, do you do a post op or your vehicle before you turn it over to the two Seabees that are here? Working through tonight to try to. Whether it's a half shaft that's broke. You know, this is freaking serious work, right? And these two Seabees are putting out because. Why do I know that? Because I stay up when these, when these seals are finished with their missions, they take their, you know, they cleaner gear first, right? It's always team gear, personal gear, and then you finally get to take a shower and go to go to bed. So they're in the bed, these two Seabees are cranking in this little, you know, shanty garage they've built and they're replacing half shafts. I mean, this is a major operation, right? So, so they didn't know that. So when I'm in the tent talking to him, the senior chief's got them pumped up, right? And he, I was into his backside too, because I go, don't ever get your platoon fired up. And I said, this is horseshit. I said, you're, you should be focused on operating. And your guys, when they finish a mission, should come in and, and turn over a good post op to these CBs so they know what's going on with their vehicles. And you're part, you know, that's part of it, right? That's part of the responsibility of being a mobility. You know, when you use these vehicles to go hit targets, you know, you're not in a helicopter, you're in a, you're in a fricking Humvee. So I just had to tell the senior shooters, look, you're making my job difficult. So when you make my job difficult, I'm going to put some pressure on, on you being a leader, right? Because I don't need to hear this shit, right? You're telling me I need to fire the two Seabees that are with us. What you want me to do? Me, pour some water in a bowl and generate two more? I said, because they don't have anybody to send, you know, the battalion or, you know, back at Log Sioux, I called them. They go, matt, Chief, I don't have anybody. And, and by the way, the two guys we had were doing great. It was just the seals getting on a, you know, little tantrum. And I told them to shut the hell up. I go, the next time you bring this to me, I said, I'm gonna have all of you in a garage. You're gonna be fixing your own shit.
- [115:57]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, right, Yeah. I mean, my CBs, dude, we had, I think we had 17 generators. Just, just generators, something like 22 air conditioners, 30 something, plus vehicles, like. And I had six CBs, you know, I mean, these guys were working.
- [116:15]
Harold Underdown
They're, they're badass.
- [116:16]
Jocko Willink
The maintenance schedule alone is not. You can't, you can't do it. They have to work 24 hours. They were just busting their ass the whole time. And my guys knew it. I mean, it's just like that. You rely on, I mean, you, those vehicles are a life saving piece of equipment. You know, that thing goes down in the street, you're. You're screwed. So those CBs were freaking awesome. I'm glad you took care of your seat.
- [116:39]
Harold Underdown
Yes. I'll tell you what, man, CBs, I've always, you know, I've always took care of them. And because they just work. They do work. They come in, they build our fobs. They build anything and they fix anything. Like you said, whether it's a generator or a Humvee or, you know, whatever.
- [116:55]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, they get it.
- [116:56]
Harold Underdown
They're bad. They're badasses.
- [116:58]
Jocko Willink
As you get done with that SEAL team for what's next for you, what was next?
- [117:03]
Harold Underdown
I get, I get moved over to Log Sue. So that's when I really had a liking to the CBs, because I had a lot of CBs working for me. Log sue is a logistical command that supports the SEAL teams. And I got to work with sailors, right? Regular sailors. And it really brings out the Master Chief training that I got when I was up at the academy, because, you know, you have to. And we had some issues with those guys too, right? We had this one Seabee, he hadn't been coming to work, so I had the Master Chief come over. The Master Chief Seabee that we had, you know, running the shop over there at the mechanic shop, comes over and sits down with me, says, master Chief, I want to kick this guy out of the Navy. I go, what you got? He goes, well, he's not coming to work. His uniform looks like slept in it, blah, blah, blah. Just, just went down a whole list. And I go, well, let's bring him in. Let's do a drb. Let's find out where his headspace is, right? Because that's what you need to know, right? And I wasn't trying to step on the Master Chief. The Master Chief Sebi is, you know, he's very capable Master Chief. So I knew if he's got an issue, there's, there's, there's problems there, right? So he brings him over. We get in the conference room, we have the front table set up and there's about seven of us, you know. So I was a Master Chief that was chairing this. I had the CB Master Chief sitting right beside me, had a Senior Chief Seabee right here on this side of me, had another chief pair rigger from the Pear shop and had another Chief down here that was with me. And, and I was only seal. I was only still on the, on the panel. So the Master at arms at the time, who is the popo police of the military escorts, this guy in. So when Master Arms escort him in, I was kind of, yeah, that's, you know, I kind of sat back in my chair like going what we got here?
- [118:49]
Jocko Willink
That's an indicator, you know, is this.
- [118:50]
Harold Underdown
A, what we got going on here? You know, if he has to have an escort by, by Master at arms. So he sits down in his seat and all of a sudden these, the Senior Chief beside me started, they started going off. They said, you know, you look like you slept in uniform. You look like you haven't shaved your frickin uniforms A mess. Is wearing Cracker Jacks, you know, the old white sailor uniform. But it looked like it was almost beige, wasn't white. So I'm looking at him and I start, you know, after they, they've been firing off some salvos on him, you know, calling him a dirtbag and, and all this stuff. And I, and I kind of like said okay, okay. I said let's stop, stop this a second. I said I need a cup of coffee. And I told him, I said master Arms, I said take, take the sailor, you know, to my office and I go stand by. I said just take him to my office and stand by. So he gets him up, parades him, you know, he's walking right beside him like he's a prisoner. Takes him to my office and I'm sitting there with the panel and I told, I told the guys, I go guys, I appreciate your, your motivations, you know, I appreciate you being, I said, but you, we've been really hard on this individual. And I said, what I want to know is what, what he's, what's he got going on? What's going on, you know, behind the uniform as, you know, speaking. So I told these guys, hey, just take the, take the day off this thing, this thing's done. I said, this guy's got problems that probably go a little bit far. Then we sit here and chew his ass all day long, but he ain't gonna make a bit of dick. He didn't have one impression on his face the whole time. We were going at it, right? These guys were basically attacking his integrity and his uniform and him not being at work. You know, he's got problems. So I get in the office, and I'm sitting there and the master arms there. I said, you can leave. I said, just. I said, just be outside. I said, you know, I want you to escort him back over to the cb, the garage area right when we're done. But I started. I said, hey, I said, talk to me, man. I said, talk to me. I said, you got some shit going on. You got squirrels in your sea bags or raccoons or something in the bag. I need to know what I'm. What I'm dealing with here. And he started. Had a couple tears, started crying, and I said, calm down. I go. I said, everything okay at home? You know? He said, yeah, everything's. Everything's okay. He said, my. My marriage is not going all that well. And he said, I got five cars. And when he said, he's got five cars, I go, why? Why do you have five cars? He goes, well, I like them. I like cars. He said, I rebuild them. So he said, I'm kind of in debt. In debt with the cars and the people at work. He says, I'm not getting any sleep. You know, my wife, we're having some issues with our youngest kid, and it just went on and on and on, right? As far as he's got problems at home, he's got financial issues because he has five cars. And, you know, you can't support five vehicles, right? I mean, I. I know how expensive vehicles are, paying insurance and all that. So I said, what can we do to help you? And I said, you know. You know, I said, your uniform. I said, you want me to. I said, I can. I can get those uniform cleaned up for you. I said, what? So what? How can we help you? He just said, you know, I need some help financially. I need to consolidate these vehicles. I need to be a better dad. I need to be a better, you know, husband. You know, I need this. I need that. So I'm like, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna do that. We're gonna take care of that. I said, I want you to go back over to your garage and talk to the master chief, and I want you to take a couple days off because, you know, we're not fighting. You know, we're not. We don't have people shooting at us back at the beach, right? And I go, take a couple days off, and I go, let me find somebody that can Help you with the vehicles. And I've got some resources that. Navy resources here on base that we can help you with your finances. We get a. We get you a financial advisor and try to get you get this squared away, because right now you just can't. You can't deal with these vehicles. And I don't know what kind of problems you're having with your wife and all, but we got people that can help you with that. So basically, give him a couple days off. And then I told him, I said, next week, I want you to come back in for the drb, but I want you to understand the gravity of this. I said, you need to be squared away. I said, you need to have the right command rocker on your uniform. Your uniform needs to be cleaned, like in dry cleaned. Your. Your shoes need to have a. Some kiwi, you know, polish on them. Give us some effort, and let me see that you're doing what you're going to do. And I said, I'll give you everything we have. We'll throw resources at you and we'll get this cleaned up. That takes work, right? So I talked with the master chief, Seabee, who was a great guy. I still run into him date, you know, sometimes back at the beat. He's. He's a great guy. And I told him, I said, it's going to be hard work, but this is going to be a little. Little project, little pet project to see if we can get this train, you know, out of the woods, out of the briar patches and get it back on the railroad tracks and see if we can save this sailor. I said, we may not be able to, but I said, the big. A big part of this is going to be how he presents himself next week if he comes in and he looks good. I said, I don't want to turn into shouting. I just want him to open up to us and tell him what he needs so we can set some resources up to help him out. So he came back in that next Monday, totally different dialed in squared away. Dialed in, dialed in. I think he even bought a new set of Cracker Jacks, had the right rocker sewn on. His ribbons were a quarter inch. You know, I know all that about uniforms, right? So I just looked at him. Had a brand new T shirt on, had a brand new white hat. I mean, shoes, had kiwi. Effort was made, right, to bring a different presence. So we sat there, and instead of yelling at him, we listened to his story and he taught us something, right? We don't know what's going on with our employees or our sailors or our marines or army soldiers and all of this. Right. But it takes leadership. If you do it right, it's a little work, you know, other than chewing somebody's ass out and kicking them out to the curb and say, you know, you messed up. Go, go square your away and then never engage again. So we engaged with him on that. That second time that he came in, he looked, he looked a lot better. And then we continued to follow up with the finances, dealing with the vehicles and stuff. So I think we have a success there.
- [125:25]
Jocko Willink
Hopefully that guy figured out what auto trader was. Well, he dumped in some of those vehicles.
- [125:31]
Harold Underdown
I mean, he had all muscle cars. These cars were 20 to 50,000. You know, one of them, I think he said he paid a hundred thousand dollars. I'm thinking, damn, how are you paying a hundred thousand dollars for Chevelle? Yeah. E5.
- [125:43]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, he wasn't paying $150,000. He was. He was running up credit card. He was with his old lady for sure.
- [125:50]
Harold Underdown
He was.
- [125:50]
Jocko Willink
That's chaos.
- [125:51]
Harold Underdown
But that was a success story.
- [125:53]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it's always in. Yeah, it's always what's good. What's this other person got going on, you know, what's going on in their world that's making them do this? And that's why it's important you got to know your people too, so that you can go, oh, there's something going on. Hopefully you can pick it up on the second or third car and not the fifth. You know, once it's in the fifth car zone, you're like, you're done. Yeah, we got issues.
- [126:11]
Harold Underdown
You're done.
- [126:13]
Jocko Willink
So. So you, you didn't. You end up. You did some time as an ops master chief at. @ group.
- [126:19]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, well, I. When I left Log Sioux, I got a phone call from the force master chief and he goes, dog, I need you to go to Sock South. Okay, so when he said down Florida, well, that's what I said, right? I said, where's that at? He goes, homestead, Florida, which is right on top of the Keys. Right. Homestead is right below. It's home. Homestead is called Harb, right. It's Homestead Air Reserve Base. But T sock sets there, right? So what a T sock is, is a theater special operations command, who is run by a one star. This was, you know, Hector Pagan, one star general, army triple tabber. Right. Special forces guy. So he was the, you know, the commanding officer or general. And then we had. It's a joint command. Right. So you have Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps. And we had some Coast Guard people that, that we were helping train with them down in Miami area for vbss. But I went down screaming and kicking, right? I'm, you know, I'm like Force Majesty said I'm not, this is not a, you know, I'm not, this is, this is orders, right? Orders or orders are not imitations. So I took them. Within two weeks I was down in home.
- [127:24]
Jocko Willink
Do you move the family down there?
- [127:25]
Harold Underdown
This was a GEO batch. So Lisa stepped up to the plate once again and said I got this, I got the home, you know, the compound. You go do what you have, you know, you need to do. So I went down there screaming and you know, this, this sucks, you know, blah blah, blah. I just got back so I go down, I meet a group of sergeant majors. First time I've ever really worked that close with special Forces guys, squared away guys. We had three or four different SEAL officers down there working in the J3 shop. I was the J3 master chief.
- [127:56]
Jocko Willink
Nice.
- [127:56]
Harold Underdown
Which is a very important job. Right. We haven't filled that job within probably 10 to 20 years. So when I got to a call from Force Mary Chief, he said we got to get senior enlisted people like yourself outside of NSW Navy Special Warfare and go down and do these T sock jobs because I need people setting in those seats to help me understand how we can deploy our seals better. Right. And the Special Forces guys, it's a good call. So what the TSOC does is basically we, we in brief all of the teams that are going south in Southcom, right into the Southcom theater, whether it's Panama, Colombia, Chile or any Honduras, any of those places down south. And so we had SEAL teams roll through and we would brief them. These are your rules of the road as far as what you shall do and what you shouldn't do. And then, and then when they go do their deployment, Whether it's a 30 day deployment or a two week deployment, they come back to the TSOC at Homestead and debrief us, you know, give us actions, you know, after actions so we can build, we build these folders up so we understand who we training down and we, is it the Panamanians? What is that? Is that security around the Panama Canal or you know, what are we dealing with? The same with Bogota, you know Bogota, you have all the drugs and all that stuff to be concerned about and you know, kind of stabilizing their government and working with their military personnel. The same with Chile, Argentina. But it was really a good job for me. Because I would set every Friday, would have a call with the generals, three, four stars at socom. SOCOM would talk directly to us, since we're a tsoc, you know, we're down here doing. Doing special operations in the southern. What is it, operational theater. Theater, right. So it was very educational at the high level. Right. Clay, I'm sitting right there with a one star general. And I remember we were at a meeting and we had a three star. General Keane was talking army, another army triple tabber, Special Forces. He said, hey, Master Chief, good to see you. Good see Colonel, you know, I work for Full Bird Colonel J. He was a J3, I was the J3, you know, master Chief. He goes, why are you two guys sitting here? And I, you know, we're always sitting there, right? So I look at the screen at the end of the table, and I'm looking at General King, and I look over to Colonel and I go, you want to answer that or should I answer that? And he goes, he says. He says, you got this dog. So I look at the screen and I tell the General, I go, general, we're always here at this meeting for situational awareness. And he goes, no, no, no. He says, not what I'm talking about. He said, I just sent a C130 down to pick you and Colonel up. You're going to Haiti. This was after the earthquake in 2010.
- [130:52]
Jocko Willink
Damn. Okay.
- [130:53]
Harold Underdown
So I'm just looking at Colonel, like, going. And I look over at the one star sitting at the table with us, and I didn't know we were going to Haiti. And he goes, I didn't either. So here. He said, you guys can leave. You know, General King said, you guys can leave. Go pack your stuff. I want you on the ground within 24 hours. We're going to bring in assets. He says, we already got a hospital ship down there. The country just suffered a huge earthquake. We got tons of bodies. How many Richter was that earthquake you remember was seven. I think it was a seven, three. Initial, right? Because you had to seven three, then follow on aftershocks. So here we go. We're. We're loading C130. We already had one seal officer in the field down there. So we fly down into 130, and it was a complete shit show, right? We show up on the tarmac, we got the. The. The air traffic control was down. We got a CCT Air Force guy calling air traffic control down there. You got Jimmy Buffett on his seaplane. You got Bill Clinton landed in a. In a seven. Seven or Seven, five, seven. So we got all of this shit going on. Everybody's been over backwards.
- [131:58]
Jocko Willink
What did Jimmy Buffett come down there for?
- [132:00]
Harold Underdown
Just help. He just wants to hand out some T shirts and some flip. Flip flops. So, so we're down there and we're seeing this shit show at the. At the airport. So we get out of the airport, we go up to. To link up with our SEAL, who had. Who had set a flag in the ground for us at a Christian school. A bunch of missionaries up there and had doctors from around the world, right? The docs that travel all over the world, they were in. They had all these medications, they had these tents. So here comes the seabees again, right? So the seabees came down from Virginia beach and they built these temper tents because they had to have the medication and attempt control environment, right? Because it was hot. You know, even. Even in January, it was hot down in Haiti. So we were looking around. They had, you know, like I said, they pretty much cleaned up most of the bodies that were. That were crushed, you know, with these parking decks were like, you know, 10 stories high. They were just pancaked. Damn right. So the stuff that you saw was just unbelievable. And the education I took away from that was. And me and Colonel would go to a meeting every day in this big tent with General King running the show. And we had usaid, World Food Organization, the World Health Organization. I mean, all these three letter acronyms, you know, other than. Right. The ong's of the world were all there. And it was just crazy. So we'd go meetings after meetings after meetings. And our job from us, from a Navy SEAL and Special Forces deal was we had helicopters. We had 53s off of one of the LHAs that was down there. We were moving food and water and bunks to these field hospitals that they already tried to establish. And it was interesting, right, because we had Sean Penn down there. Sean Penn was running around. And I remember we was getting on a 53 to fly up to one of these hospitals. But you know what? God bless him, he was working. He had his little entourage with him, but he was working. I remember one day we were loading up a 53 helicopter to fly up to one of these field hospitals. He was smoking a cigarette. And I walk up to him and I go, hey, hey, Sean. And he looked at me, you know, and I go, you need to can that cigarette. I said, you're standing way too close to this. I mean, we're right outside a rotor wash, right? And I go, see all that slick shit on the back of that ramp of that 53. He goes, yeah. And I said, that's either hydraulic fluid or fucking go gas or whatever, right? And, you know, I said, you don't want to smoke anywhere near this thing. So he, he put it, put it out on his boot. But we were doing that. But, but, but the, the experience you take from a national disaster, right? I mean, it's just, it's crazy, right, because I learned so much. And we're, we're having a meeting with the world food guy. And I said, hey, I noticed we've been on the deck for about three days. And he sat down at a table with us and he came across from Dominican Republic, right? Don Rep, he came over the mountain, come down and you can see Haiti because they definitely forested their mountain, right? They don't have any trees, it's mud, it's a freaking show. So he comes over, they fly them down, seven group guys, they land in Dom Rep. They had five humvees, they brought them over to pass and they came down to link up with us. And they were going to be a part of the deal where we were. We're looking for displaced people up in the hinterlands of the upper. The epicenter was down at Port au Prince, down by the port. And the earthquake, it was devastation. So we go up and we're looking for people who need medical help, our medicines, and we're having meetings with all these local mayors that were around these little towns. And so when the guys showed up, I met them at the gate at midnight one night. And they come in and they get out and a major gets out, Major Special forces, Major gag. It kind of remind me of, you know, he's. He was, he's freaking hyped up. He was. He had Copenhagen in drinking a Red Bull and he was smoking a cigarette. And I go, can you get anything else going on, man? I said, you got caffeine, you got nicotine going? I go. I said. He said, dog. So I got one question. I go, what's that, sir? And he goes, why is a damn special forces and Navy seals sitting in freaking Hades? Ain't nobody down here to kill. He said, this is not our mission. And I went, well, I said, it is now. I said, you need to go talk to colonel Stoltz because, you know, you, you know, you got to go do that. I said, you know, but he was a, he was a hard hitting dude. And we got the mission done, right? I mean, that's. We stayed down there for about 50 some days.
- [136:26]
Jocko Willink
Damn.
- [136:26]
Harold Underdown
Before we. We got relieved. And it was. It was educational, but, man, it was.
- [136:32]
Jocko Willink
It was something.
- [136:34]
Harold Underdown
Oh, yeah.
- [136:35]
Jocko Willink
And then what was after that? Where'd you go next?
- [136:38]
Harold Underdown
After the tsoc, I did that for about two years. And I got a call from Master Chief at group Group two at a time, Brit. So Brit said, hey, dog, I need you to come home. And he said, I'm bringing you home a month early. And I go, I don't have any problem with that. Right. So. So we were pretty much calm, you know, after we finished the Haiti mission, it really, you know, we were just doing normal debriefing and in briefing to the. To the guys going down south. So I'm like, okay, I'll come back to group two. So I was a group two master Master chief. So I did that for two years. And then after that job, and then that's when they wanted me to come to the west coast. And I was like, negatory. So I went. I did the senior enlisted job at atc.
- [137:24]
Jocko Willink
Got it.
- [137:24]
Harold Underdown
Advanced Training Command. And we moved to command from Little Creek to Fort Story. Oh, yeah, that was me and John.
- [137:31]
Jocko Willink
Oh, awesome.
- [137:32]
Harold Underdown
Me and John did that. You know, John was coming off of his deployments and stuff over Dev Group, and basically it was our. Our. You know, that was it for us, right? We're. We're Twilight Tour as Twilight Tour for us. And. But it. It was a great job. You know, back into the training side again. Right. So it was good.
- [137:51]
Jocko Willink
And so then you retire. What was. What was your first. What'd you do when you retired?
- [137:55]
Harold Underdown
Well, when I retired, I was. I made connections with people from the Navy SEAL Foundation. I met these basically five guys and. And I call them high. Very high. They're just very talented people, and they're very, you know, successful. I had a little acronym for them, but it's highly successful individuals. So. But they were good, right? But they. They plugged me into some positions. So I got my first job when I got out was I went to work for a security company out of Roswell, Georgia. And we had about 50,000 security officers who would watch, watch, let you know. They were. They were in the corporate 500 companies, right? Coca Cola, Hollywood Squares. We had a 911 museum. We had the Empire State Building. So I'd go all over the United States. And they hired me as the senior vice president to run the professionalism, you know, professional training and leadership with the security officers.
- [138:55]
Jocko Willink
Got it.
- [138:56]
Harold Underdown
So, you know, the difficulty of that is, you know, we pay these security Officers who watch front doors and lobbies and man the desk at these big businesses about 10 to $15 an hour. So how do you motivate somebody like that to increase your retention and decrease your turnover? So that's big money in between those two things, right? So I worked with our training academy, which was in Roswell. We pushed out a lot of courses. Active shooter, first aid, just security courses, right? And we. We built a library up and had some very talented people working down in Roswell at this little academy we had. So what I come up with was, I go, look, you know, security officers, they have a uniform. I'm just gonna give them a medal. So I come up with this metal. It's about the size of jump wings that. That went right over top of their pocket, right? I could put it right on the top of a pocket.
- [139:55]
Jocko Willink
Quarter inch, quarter quarter inch, pocket, quarter.
- [139:59]
Harold Underdown
Inch above the pocket. And we had five stars. You could earn a star, right? You had that little silver plate, and it was red, white and blue, had security stars on it. And then above that we put stars. So if you finish your five courses, initial five courses, which are active shooter, hazardous waste, you know, medical courses, you would get, you'd earn your first star. And then we'd just up the ante. Would have, you know, active shooter number two, a little more in depth about what you do other than run, fight, fight and height, right? Or, you know, run, hide, fight. So we did that, and we would get it up. So I got to about two stars in that program. And we really saw retention go up and our turnover rate was going down, which is where you find a margin of money.
- [140:46]
Jocko Willink
Did they get anything besides the metal?
- [140:49]
Harold Underdown
They've got the metal, but we dialed in.
- [140:51]
Jocko Willink
Did you get them a raise or anything like that?
- [140:52]
Harold Underdown
We did, yeah. Once you had the two stars, you got a raise. So there you go, right? So there you go. That's what it all boiled down to, right? And I would travel all over the country and I'd do these pinning ceremonies. So when I would show up, all.
- [141:04]
Jocko Willink
Of them get their blood wings.
- [141:06]
Harold Underdown
They would get their blood wings. But, you know, it was working because they would see me on social media out in the field, whether it was Coca Cola headquarters in Atlanta or I was in, you know, Sunoco Fuel out in Texas, or I'm at Star Walk of Stars out in Hollywood. They would see these ceremonies going on, and all these other people, all these other managers of all around the United States were saying, I want dog. We need dog. We need dog to come in and Put the pins on my people. So I was doing that and I was running ragged, man, because I'll tell you, I'd wake up in hotel, but you know where I was at, I'm like, I have no idea where the heck I'm at. I had to look out the window and go, oh yeah, this is New York City. But it was a great job. We, we did meet the goal to doing that. So about three years into that we had, we, we got acquired, but we set the company up for success, right? And we got acquired. We sold to Allied Universal, which is a huge security company. And a part of that was my contract was you either keep the senior vice presidents on board or you severance them out. One year, one year pay severance, right? So they kept me on board for about eight months. And they didn't adopt the Security Stars program because they didn't see the value in it. I really thought it would, it would work, but they just didn't see the value. So they said, hey, you know dog, we're paying you this amount of money. We can hire three people to do that. You know, we're going to give you your severance. And I went, thank you. Bye, bye, bye. So I was making, you know, making good money and then I got that and I got to go home, plus my master chief pay, right? So I, you know, I don't. Doggy was eating good. I could have probably bought five cars if I wanted to, but I wasn't, I'm not, I'm not into buying that many cars. But so that happened. I'm sitting at home relaxing. The mailbox is full of money, right? So I don't, I don't need to do a whole lot, but you got to have a purpose. So I get a phone call from one of our captain. I'm sure, you know, Captain Bam Bam. Captain Bam Bam calls me and goes, dog, I got an opportunity for you down in the Bahamas. And I go, hmm. I said, what you got? He goes, well, we have a resort down there. It's a high end resort. It got hit by a Cat 5 hurricane. This happened in 2019, September 1, 2019. It sat on top of this Abacos region of the Bahamas for about 36 hours, about 200 mile an hour sustained winds, tornadoes race through. Just d. Just took pine trees and just in houses and roofs and just shattered. I mean just blew it out. It looked like a JDAM hit. Just some houses were somewhat intact. Some houses got totally blown up because the, you know, either, you know, these trees flew through or wood from another house, you know, broke the windows. And once that happened, it over pressured and just blew up. So they, they said, hey, we want you to fly down, take a look at it. And if you want, they want to bring you down and you can run the workforce for the restoration project to rebuild this island. And that's going to take, that's job security, right? That's about a two to three year dealio, right? So I went, okay, I'll fly down. So I go down to Fort Lauderdale, meet one of the partners of the company that builds these resorts around, around the globe, right? They're, it's a beautiful place called Baker's Bay Golf and Ocean Club down in Abacos. So I go down, take a look at it and it was jacked. I mean, you know, we had, we had debris all over the place. We had houses that were totally blown up. Some houses that were, okay, had water damage, a lot of tarps on roofs and all that stuff. So they brought in a vessel that it was, it was in a barrack, it was a barracks. It used to be an old machine, machine shop vessel, right? So that was the barracks. And then we brought in 130 Hispanic workers come from Cabo St. Lucas, Mexico, because we have a property down there. They brought these guys in to expedite the work being done. And these guys were like, these were, these were top. I mean these guys were master carpenters, you know, they can do it all right. They build a house from the ground up. So they brought these guys in and we worked them. They, they stayed on this boat, right? This, this little boat. We had them isolated over there, but they were great people. I actually speaking some Spanish, not a whole lot, but I was, I was kind of saying, I'm gonna take advantage of this, right? And I'm gonna try to learn some span. I'm gonna talk to these guys and befriend them and help them, you know, because I know they, they're, they're getting, they're doing most of the work here. So we, we did that, I did that for about two years. We ran into Covid.
- [145:49]
Jocko Willink
That's right.
- [145:50]
Harold Underdown
Boy, that was a, that was an interesting time because four of those supervisors on that boat were sick. So I got Jay, Jay was the golf superintendent. He spoke, he's spent a lot of his time in Costa Rica, so he speaks really well Spanish. So he came with me. I said, Jay asked this guy, why does he have a fever? How does he feel? And he said, I feel like shit. Well, that guy's probably got Covid, right? So we shook down the whole boat, but we stopped it. We actually had to have a fire line, right. We're saying, okay, these supervisors are up on the front bow, up high in their living quarters. We took up. We took down all of those rooms. We quarantined those guys in RVs and put up yellow tape. I mean, we'd bring them meals every day, but we had to do that. Then we had to go in there and spray all those rooms down and basically sanitize all of those rooms on the forward part of that boat. And then. But we saved that ship. That ship would have lit up.
- [146:45]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [146:46]
Harold Underdown
Would have lost that workforce for a month or two before we could recover and get back, you know, get back to rebuilding the property. But we pulled through that. I took a. You know, my dad passed away, so I came home to take. Take a knee for about a year. And I got bored and my wife looked at me, said, you need to do something. So I called back down. Didn't burn any bridges, right? I called back down. I said, we got. He said, we, we got a great job for you. Come down here and be the logistics guy on our pier when we. They get all these 40 foot containers, 20 foot containers, flat racks, palm trees. They get. They get 20 foot mill vans full of food, reefers, you know, refrigerators. So I went down and learned how to move freight. And I had to open the boxes up to inspect them because they were losing money. They lost $300,000 for like people taking high end wines, you know, tomahawk steaks, just disappearing.
- [147:44]
Jocko Willink
I might be disappearing.
- [147:46]
Harold Underdown
Well, I know, I know. So they put me down there. I went down and I put up a camera. The camera didn't work right. I didn't have any feet. They didn't know that. So I put up a camera. I got some lights on up here, and I'm. I was on there. Every time a boat pulled in, I was on that pier.
- [148:00]
Jocko Willink
Check.
- [148:01]
Harold Underdown
And I was asking, what's in that box? What's in that box? Check this box. And then when a box leaves a pier, I open the box. So as soon as I started that, the theft shit stopped because they knew that they got somebody paying attention. Yeah, don't. Don't get the chops, right? Don't get the, you know, those tomahawks.
- [148:19]
Jocko Willink
Leave those tomahawks for me.
- [148:21]
Harold Underdown
That's right. Home. Those things were awesome about this, about that thick, you know? You know?
- [148:26]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. All right, so then this, this bourbon comes into play. Four branches Bourbon. How did you, how did you get, how this whole thing get initiated?
- [148:38]
Harold Underdown
Well, this is, this all started back at Bahamas, right down at Bakers Bay where I met Rick Franco. Rick's a VMI graduate, Marine Corps officer. And then he transitioned over to the CIA GRS contract world. And now Rick is a security head of security for Troubadour Club, which is another one of these beautiful resorts that they, you know, Discovery Land Company has them all over the world. But during my time down there, I got to spend, you know, me and Rick both lived in a house that was, was affected by the hurricane back in September 1st of 2019. So the owner of the home, the member of the club there said, hey, I want, I want security to stay in my house to make sure, you know, that it's taken care of. And it's, of course you have security people living in your house. So you feel pretty safe that nobody's coming in and doing anything to your house.
- [149:32]
Jocko Willink
Because dog, you'll smoke them.
- [149:34]
Harold Underdown
That's right, we'll smoke you from a ways off. But I met Rick, we, you know, Rick was doing like a 60 day rotation that another person would come in for 60 days and you know, just contractors back and forth. And during that time, you know, after about two years, you know, Rick came to me after having a conversation with Mike. Mike Trott is the Air Force guy. He's the Air Force founder. And Mike is really our managing principal of the business. And he's, he's very hardworking, attention to detail, Mike and his wife Cheryl. And so Rick, Rick came to Mike and I and said, hey, I want to do a barrel of bourbon and pay tribute and honoring our men and women that we've all worked with. And it's in the shadows. Hadn't got the accolades that some, some of the people do, the operators and stuff. And I go that sounds good. And he says, yeah, I want to do a, you know, do a barrel. Buy a bottle, simple bottle, slap a sticker on it, you know, a label and sell it on Facebook. So Mike and I are looking at each other and going, well, Rick, you know, I don't, you know, there's lots of regulations with spirits, you know, brown water and each state is different. So I said that's, that's, you can't do that, right? Probably can't sell it on Facebook, number one. And number two is kind of a half ass approach of, you know, buy just any bottle. So we kind of put our heads together and said, let's, let's create a brand so this was when it got very interesting. And it was. A lot of homework was done, a lot of being on fire hose. So we reached out, Rick reached out to us. Several distilleries around our country. We got about 300 distilleries that produced bourbon in the United States. So he started calling and nobody would pick the phone up. So we were thinking, you know, this is. This is kind of tough right off the get go, right? We're trying to communicate with people and they're not answering our phones or they're not getting back to us. So Rick finally made a phone call and this person called him back. And this was Barstown Bourbon Company in Barstown, Kentucky. Barstown, Kentucky is considered the capital of bourbon, the creation, you know, where it started. So. So we took that, took that phone call, and then we made a trip out to Louisville, Kentucky, because we were meeting with Savor Glass, which is the company that we purchase our bottles from. This particular bottle here is called a diamond bottle. It's a premium bottle, which means, see how thick it is at the bottom? So it's pretty. It's a. It's a really nice, sturdy bottle. Premium bottle, because it's got four sides to it, right? Four sides aligned with four branches, right? Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.
- [152:26]
Jocko Willink
You didn't mention R.J. he's the army guy.
- [152:28]
Harold Underdown
R.J. casey is Army Navy.
- [152:32]
Jocko Willink
R.J. casey is army. Mike Trott is Air Force, and then Rick Franco. That's Marine Corps. You got four branches of the service.
- [152:38]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, four branches of the service. And we're reaching out to Coast Guard and also Space Force because we don't want them to think that, you know, we're just about four branches. It just so happens that the four of us, as friends who've worked together and our boots have crossed the same paths over in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the Asia Pacific. It's four branches because that was the brand that we started to build, right? So with the walk on, this was find a bottle. We found a bottle. Then you go, okay, what's the label going to look like? We started out with a tree with four branches coming out of the tree, kind of coming together like a spear, almost like a SOCOM spear. We kind of. We shit. Can that. And we're like, you know, that's, That's. That doesn't. We didn't want to. We didn't want to have an eagle, you know, on the bottle. We don't want it to scream, you know, military, right? Because we look at it as we want to cast A larger net for customer base. We want to. We're reaching out to all patriots of the United States, which is everybody that's got a, you know, that's in the United States is a patriot as far as I'm concerned. So with the label, we went to another artist and we got. We said, hey, we want a four. The number four on here. But we want that four to represent each one of the branches. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. And what we did with it here, you can see at the bottom, we drew this line here. It looks kind of like a hill or a ridge line on a map grid. Lines. That's the U.S. army. And that's the foundation of this for. Because U.S. army was the first founded DOD service right back in 1775. The centerpiece coming up in the middle here kind of looks like a Navy mast of a ship from a shoreline or a submarine con coming out of the water.
- [154:32]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, it does.
- [154:33]
Harold Underdown
U.S. navy. U.S. navy was the second founded. Coming across horizontally, you got this horizontal piece that looks like a bayonet knife or a sword. That's U.S. marine Corps because they're the leanest. And me, I tell Rick, I said, I'm gonna say this anyway, but Marine Corps are leanest and meanest.
- [154:51]
Jocko Willink
And then support the Marine Corps.
- [154:53]
Harold Underdown
Oh, you got to support the Marine. Once the Marine, always Marine, right? So then the swoop up into the sky here with this four is Air Force, because Air Force provides air power for air cover for all of us, right? Cover. And then you see it's got a black spear comes down in the middle to create the opening inside the four. And what that spear is, is half of it, you can see. The piece that you can see is honoring our men and women are still fighting for our freedom around the globe today. The piece that's missing is for our fallen. So after all, the thought that went into this, each piece of this. This bottle, whether it's a label or whether it's the colors and moving up to the neck here, a lot of thought in this, right? Because we're thinking, you know, we've got to put a bottle on the shelf that not only is going to catch the eye of someone, but also looks very clean, right? And doesn't scream military because lots of people see four branches. Think what four branches of a river, four branches of a creek, a tree. So they don't really tie it in until they see some of it. And. And this is like our necktag on here. That kind of shows, you know, this is. And we're the, we're the first company in the spirit world, really, to have all four founders be four branches of the military. Right. There are a lot of bourbons out there that are, you know, created by veterans. But it's a one service type of deal, right? It's not all four branches like we are. And then the top, you see our label at the top, it's got four branches on it. And then below it's got this ring here that has serve honorably and drink honorably. And we use that, you know, we've all served honorably. Everybody serves a community or whatever it is. We want you to serve honorably, we want bartenders to serve it honorably. And more importantly, we got, you know, drink honorably, not to replace drink responsibly. Because that's been around for, you know, decades, right? So. But we still have issues with military personnel, veterans, suicide, 22 a day or up or down, whatever that, that number fluctuates around from time to time. Still, concern of ours, we don't want to say, hey, you know, we want you to buy our great bourbon, it tastes great, but we, we don't want you to drink it down to the bottom as fast as you can. We want, you know, instead of, instead of drinking to forget. The ethos of our company is we don't want you to drink to forget. We want to start sm sipping to remember. And we always are going to remember our fallen. Not a day goes by that I don't remember one of my friends, one of my comrades that didn't come home. It's just there, right? It's with us. But on the other hand, there's lots of victories in life that we should sip to remember our promotions, weddings, babies, victories, right? We can't let the, you know, the negative stuff that's happened to us, you know, drag us down a certain path. We've got to stay positive. And, you know, when I do this with a cigar or just having a bourbon, I try to understand the process that it took to get this liquid in this bottle. And it's a long process and it's a beautiful. And you always hear, you know, trust your process, right? Whether you're shooting sporting clays or whatever it is, jiu jitsu, trust a process, right? Because if you don't, you're gonna start getting out of bounds and it's just not gonna go well. So with this, with this bourbon, this juice, what we've done, instead of building a distillery, because for us to build a distillery, it would cost 40 to 200 some million dollars. There's already 300 out there. So for us, we acquire, right? We resource, we. We go out for sources. We've got. We've got people in the, in the bourbon business, whether they're. We got it. We got a. A really good friend of ours now that we built a relationship with for the last couple of years. His name's Jeff. Jeff is out of Nashville, Tennessee. He. He happens to be a bourbon broker. So what that means is that Jeff has acquired hundreds, thousands of barrels and he's setting on them just like gold, right? Liquid gold. Every year when this juice ages, the price goes up on that barrel just like. All right, a commodity.
- [159:01]
Jocko Willink
So does that happen indefinitely? Like if it's sitting in a barrel 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it.
- [159:07]
Harold Underdown
Goes up every year it goes up. It goes up a little bit.
- [159:10]
Jocko Willink
Does it ever go bad?
- [159:12]
Harold Underdown
Well, there's. I'm. Probably not. I think it does. I think after 20, 25 years, people, people who. And of course, you know, you're going to have angels cut, right? Because the, the evaporation of that liquid after years and years and years, you may only have a quarter of that barrel left after setting it for 25 years. Because that wood, that juice is going in and out of those American white oak saves, right? The saves in the barrel. And it's getting that color from the wood, it's taking it out of the wood, right? And I'll talk about the charring of barrels and stuff and what that does, but this juice here is the age statement on our juice is about six years old. Six years is really good, really good juice. We purchased about 50 some barrels from MGP. MGP is a distillery out of Indiana. We brought those 50 barrels down to Barstown Bourbon Company and then we purchased some wheated barrels that was about 7 years old. And we got that from Wilderness Trail Distillery or Green river out of Kentucky. And we bring those two together at Barstown Blend. Now, we were very blessed by being at Barstown when we started putting our mash bill together. Your mash bill is basically your ingredients of what you're putting into the cook, right? Because you bring in the elements of. You bring in your grains, you got corn. Corn is where you get your sweetness from. And then you have rye. Rye is spicy spiciness, right? From. From cinnamon to peppers. And then you have your malted barley. Malted barley is like oatmeal. You can put it in your mouth and chew on it and it flavorings like oatmeal. Smells really good aroma. And then we brought in wheat because we were talking with Steve Nally, who's a master distiller at Barstown Bourbon Company. He used to work with Maker's Mart for 30 some years. So Steve's a hall of famer. So while we were in this room, this looks like a chemist's lab, and we were working with Dan, who's the master blender at Barstown, and Steve walked in, we thought he was just coming in just to shake our hands and meet us. He heard that there was four veterans there starting a business, a brand, so he just wanted to come up and say hello. We figured he'd come in a room, shake our hands and leave. He's busy. But he didn't. He stayed with us. He goes, guys, so I heard your story. I want to help you with this. I want to help you, you know, with the, with the mash bill. And he was the one who really said a. Four branches, four branches, military. Why don't you guys have four grains? Let's go with four grains. So we're looking at each other like.
- [161:50]
Jocko Willink
Wow, why didn't we think.
- [161:51]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, why didn't we think of that one, right? So, so basically he said, let's. He was talking to Dan. Dan's. He's the blender. He's over there having these little. He's got these little cups and he's blending this stuff up. He says, put 5% wheat in. Put 5% that 7 year old wheat we got. Put that in there. He put that in there. We taste it. When I. Oh boy, that's really good, right? So the guys were beating me up and they, they probably should because they mixed this thing. Took them about 30 minutes or so to mix this. 5% weeded that we were tasting and I looked at it and they handed it to me and he said, and before that happened, he said, this is for all of you, but I want you to. And give it to me, right? So, Harold, try this. So I look at this little. It looks like about an ounce and a half or something, right? One even two ounces, I don't think. So I took it and went, well, I dumped it back, right? And all the guys are looking at me going, what are you doing? You know, Damn it. You know, Harold, what, what? You just took the, you took the sample that we wanted to taste. And I'm like, I'm sorry, man, you know, it wasn't that much, you know, but anyway, they still give me a hard time about that. But we, we ended up staying in that room with Steve for about two hours. And, and Steve, Steve said, hey, let's go 10% on a wheat, aged wheat, right? So we put the 10% in there. We're like, man, that's really good. It's got, it's got the sweetie notes to it. It's got vanilla, it's got caramel, it's got the spiciness of cinnamon and some peppers. It's got that oatmeal aroma, you know, of oatmeal. The barley and the wheat really kind of rounds it off, right? So it kind of rounds it off and softens it. It's like butter, right? And that's what I refer to this juice. It is kind of like butter. But that's dangerous though, right, because it's 96 proof. And we, we toyed with that, right? We're working on that 80%. We started with in a range of 80% proof or 120 some proof, right. And by the time we hit about 95, we're thinking, oh boy. That's about right because, you know, if you get up into the higher, higher deal, it starts tasting like race car fuel. You know, it'll, it'll kick you in the. But, but it depends on if you can tolerate, if you can tolerate the higher alcohol proof. You know, some of us really good juice. But this is 96. The reason we landed on 96 was, is in the military. You have 96 weekends, right? 96 hour. So when you get a third or Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, that's a 96.
- [164:09]
Jocko Willink
There you go.
- [164:09]
Harold Underdown
We like 96, right. We get to go home and relax. But so, so that's how it, that's how it all came about. We got some, a little more of our story on the back of the bottle. Talks about the age of the, of the juice and stuff, but boy, what a process. This has been about three years, three, three and a half years into the making from the marketing standpoint. We got a great marketing team down in Nashville, Tennessee. Double diamond. They, they're really family. And we got, we got the, the brokers to help us to acquire the right barrels. Not just any barrel, but the right barrel to meet our standards here with this four grain, six year blend age and being 96 proof. And I think they're running today, I think they're running a batch today to back it up. Right. Because you got to have inventory.
- [165:00]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. When did you, when did you start really getting into bourbon?
- [165:05]
Harold Underdown
Well, you know, I had a bad experience with, with brown, brown liquid when I was in high school. I drank about A fifth of it. It's not good. It took me about three days to pull out of that, and I couldn't even smell it. It made me sick to smell it. But as I got older, and especially my tour down in the Bahamas, working down there at the resort, we'll have scotch. We do do scotch and cigars. And then we started migrating over to bourbons. And we were drinking some bourbons, Woodford Reserve and. And Basil Hayden, some of the other bourbons we'd get our hands on down there. And most of the guys had them on their yachts. So we'd go to sit on the back of a yacht with one of the members and we'd have. Have whatever they had, right? Angel Zambia or whatever, so. And then I started learning the process of what it takes to make a barrel bourbon and what it, you know, what you're tasting when you pull this bourbon from a thief. You know, you stick the thief down in the hole, you know, the porthole, boom. Pull it out and then taste that. And it's probably 120 proof, right? Because it's barrel strength. But understanding that the corn goes in for the sweetness, the rye is for the spice. Malted barley is like that oatmeal rum I was talking about. And then the wheat kind of rounds everything off. And then when you drink it, you can taste those notes. Some palates are different, you know, some people say, I didn't taste. And then some people kind of shoot it, you know, you don't shoot that, right? You don't shoot bourbon just like you don't really shoot tequila, you know, because, you know, we did, right? You just shoot tequila.
- [166:42]
Jocko Willink
You're trying to get everything, bro, come on, doggy.
- [166:46]
Harold Underdown
You're trying to get it to the bloodstream asap. You're not waiting on it. You're not. We ought to be an IB in that stuff. But. But now the process is really interesting, you know, in bourbon. Bourbon has rules to it, right? So to be a bourbon, you have to be at least 51% corn in your mash bill in the ingredients. 51%. It has to be laid down, rested in American white oak barrels. You have to have a certain char and chars go by numbers, you know, that is when they. They stick the flames inside the barrel and they turn the barrel and they burn. They burn the barrel, right? They burn those oak saves. And what that does is, is I was thinking that that burned part of those saves inside the barrel when they to. They toast it or either they char it. So if you. This is about a three char in this. But. But you would think that you would have a smoky taste or something like that, right? Like, you know, like scotches, you'd smoke like peat, but you don't. All that, all of that charcoal does that black. When you burn those, that first layer or so of that quarter inch into the wood or whatever, that acts as a filter, a natural filter to filter the impurities out of the juice out of the bourbon. And as it sits there for two, three, four years, five years, six years, whatever it is, the more that fluid moves in and out of those wood saves. And that's where you get your caramel, your vanilla, your color. See, this has got really good color to it, right? So it's six year juice, so it should have a good color. You get a little bit lighter than that. You get two year stuff and it's lighter. It's just not. It doesn't have the darker tones to it when you, when you look at the juice. But a lot goes into it, you know, from marketing to finding investors to then getting, we call liquid to lips. And that's when you go out into the stores. You go and you call it on premise. Off premise, right? On premise is where you can actually drink the juice. Where you're at restaurants, bars, hotels, right? That's on premise accounts, they call it. And sales off premise is where you go to the liquor store. Whether it's a liquor store, mom and pop shop or a chain liquor store in certain states or in controlled states like Virginia, it's all ABC stores. So that's off premise for us, right? And we're in Virginia, ABC store, about 205 stores. And you go to the liquor store, you pick up the bottle, you take it and you're moving off premise. You can't drink it at the store. But unless I'm in there doing a tasting, then you can have liquid ellipse.
- [169:20]
Jocko Willink
With me right there in the store.
- [169:22]
Harold Underdown
And I tell the story, right? I tell the story. So I probably told this story I don't know how many times, right? But the more you tell it, just like being an instructor, right? You're teaching. I just did one Friday before I came out here and I had a special agent DEA agent came in and he said, tell me your story. And I told him the story, right? And he goes, he said, boy, he's really. He said, you. He says, you own this? And I said, yes, sir. He said, you talk like you do. He said, because I didn't figure somebody they hired to do a tasting would Know as much as you do. And I went, well, thank you for that. But that's what it takes, right? Attention to detail. And we chose purple on the top for joint, since we're joint, you know, joint colors.
- [170:04]
Jocko Willink
Purple, yeah.
- [170:05]
Harold Underdown
Right. So we chose the purple up there. And plus, you don't see purple on many American spirit bottles. You do see them Crown Royal Yao. You know, Crown Royal has purple, but you don't see it. So that's just another factor. We weighed in saying it's an eye catcher, you know, something. Something different. Right.
- [170:26]
Jocko Willink
And what's your. What's your experience been with, like? Because this is. As I'm sitting here thinking about. This is your first business, right?
- [170:33]
Harold Underdown
This is your first business. This is my first business as far as being a founder.
- [170:38]
Jocko Willink
A lot of stuff going on in there.
- [170:39]
Harold Underdown
Being responsible for your investment monies. Yeah. Understanding the, you know, profits and, you know, how much money does it take for marketing? How much money do we spend for meta ads? You know, we pay a PR firm out of Phoenix, Arizona. But you know what? They're been. They've been hitting home runs for us. They got us on Today show this past Veterans Day ourselves went, you know, ballistic, Right. So we were on a nice little level, and all of a sudden, boom. Straight up. So we've been very blessed with the people we have around us. We have in our dugout, our panel. We got Nick in Kentucky. We got Johnny who lives in Dallas. Tim is. I think Tim's in Florida. And you know, Jeff, of course, he's in Nashville. We got Angela, who does our marketing, and Claire is our PR person. But, you know, it's just a team, you know, and we communicate. We try to over communicate because you need to in this business. Because if you're not out there, you know, creating new customers, it ain't gonna sell itself. Right. The distributors will put it on a shelf for you. They're not telling a doggy story. Right. They're not talking about four branches. They'll say four branches of veteran on. And that'll get you for a little bit. Yeah. You know, people really appreciate it. I think people in our country love veterans. But if it's, if it's, if it don't taste good, if this tasted like swamp water, we. We wouldn't see the cells that we have right now because we're putting quality juice in a bottle. And like I was saying earlier, it's like butter. It's really. It's really good. It's good. Birdman. We'll continue to do that. We had a LTO we released shortly ago. It's Black Ops. Black Ops was a book written by Rick Parrado. Rick Parrado was a 10 year old little boy down in Cuba when Castro started taking over. So basically Castro took his, his family's businesses, took his dad's coffee shop, his grocery store, his little, his little hardware store. And he said, now these belong to me. You work for me now. So they saw the writing on the wall, they got Rick out of country, flew, flew him to Miami on America. America was doing flights to get the kids out. So Rick went to Miami. Then he was moved to Denver, Colorado at an orphanage. And he lived in an orphanage out in Denver about a year. And then his mom and dad made it to Miami and bought a home, got jobs and that first thing they did was sent for Rick brought him home. Rick was growing up in Miami, figured he's gonna get in trouble on the streets. He joined the Air Force and became a para jumper. Pararescueman.
- [173:19]
Jocko Willink
Right on.
- [173:19]
Harold Underdown
He spent about 10 years as a pararescue guy. Then he was recruited by the CIA. He ran a lot of operations down in Honduras and Nicaragua and he just retired, I think it was last year after 32 years of service. And we, we did the bottle for, you know, to pay tribute to him and his career and the book. And we sold the book in the bottle of Black Ops and the Black Ops was 100 proof and it was nine year old, nine year juice. It was awesome. It was, it was really awesome.
- [173:50]
Jocko Willink
How many bottles did you run of that?
- [173:51]
Harold Underdown
We ran 183 cases, I believe. Oh, we sold. So it's, it's pretty much gone.
- [173:57]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, supposed to, you know, he was supposed to come on the podcast at some point. Rick Prado was just, you know, this like. Oh, it's all scheduling, unfortunately. This. Well, unfortunately, unfortunately, this isn't my like job. You know what I mean? I have a lot of other jobs and so sometimes just getting synced up with somebody, but I'm sure we'll get it done at some point.
- [174:15]
Harold Underdown
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [174:16]
Jocko Willink
Because he's got a great story.
- [174:18]
Harold Underdown
Well, like I said earlier, I really appreciate this opportunity to be on here with it because it took us a while.
- [174:23]
Jocko Willink
Oh yeah, no, that's a great case in point. You and I. Yeah, you and I linked up at the freaking SEAL foundation thing back in.
- [174:31]
Harold Underdown
I couldn't tell you.
- [174:32]
Jocko Willink
Probably over a year ago.
- [174:33]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [174:33]
Jocko Willink
And we, we swapped numbers and then it was like, oh yeah, let's do it. And then here we are a Year or something.
- [174:38]
Harold Underdown
That's right. Then I saw you. I saw you at the Army Navy game.
- [174:41]
Jocko Willink
Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
- [174:43]
Harold Underdown
That was my first ever Army Navy game.
- [174:45]
Jocko Willink
It was my second moment.
- [174:46]
Harold Underdown
That was. That was a bucket. That was a bucket list. Freaking check off. What a. What a experience. I mean, that. That was just beautiful.
- [174:54]
Jocko Willink
You know what's funny? I was in a car because I was out there with the Travis Manion foundation, and dude's walking down the sidewalk, and I'm sitting there, and someone. You. I hear like, hey, Jocko. And I didn't know who it was, and it was because you had sunglasses on, a hat, I couldn't really see you.
- [175:07]
Harold Underdown
And that was Rick. I think Rick Franco said, hey, that's Jocko. And I go, you kidding me?
- [175:11]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. And. And then I didn't know who you were. I go, hey, how you doing, man? Good. Good to see you. And you go, what's up, Jocko? And I say, as soon as I heard your voice, I was like, dog.
- [175:22]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, it's. It was kind of pretty cool. And then. Then I just call. I'm calling you, trying to get this thing set up. And it's just, you know, we're busy, right? Everybody's busy trying to get stuff done. But. But, you know, the Bourbon thing is, you know, the business is another reason, you know, for me to be engaged, right? To have a purpose. It's in. Our purpose is to build a. Build a badass brand and put good juice in the bottle. And then hopefully one day somebody will go, hey, I like this. I like the story. I like what you guys are doing. They come in and help us, right? Whether it's. It's just big investors that want to see us be successful, and they. And they help us. They help us with the monies, of course, you know, that's on us, right? To. To build this brand where it's attractive enough for somebody to be interested in partnering with us so we can blow it up a little bit. Because right now it costs so much money to go into a market, right? We're in seven markets now. We're Tennessee, Kentucky, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. And we really only started to scratch the surface, right? So what our subject matter experts, our panel people tell us, with all these years of. Of brown. Brown spirits experience, are saying, hey, be careful not to. You know, you don't want to be an inch deep and a mile wide. Let's just take it easy. Let's be methodical about what we want to grow. Florida, we got a We just went into 50 some stores ABC. So Florida is kind of a hybrid. They're controlled ABC stores, but they also have a lot of liquor stores that are privately owned. Virginia is just abc. You don't move brown liquid. You got to go through abc. Right. But Florida is a multi pronged type of deal and we're into the Nexus and we, we're going into APS down there. So it's mainly monies to put boots on the ground to help us with the liquid ellipse, you know, the tastings, telling our story and just, just re, you know, wash and redo, right? And just go, go, go. But it requires a lot of, a lot of traveling, a lot of thought because when we all afford to get together, we want to go do bottle signings and you know, and then we, we give back to, I mean our give back was over $400,000. I mean unbelievable. For a company starting, you know, back in May of 23 until the end of calendar year 2024, we have raised over $400,000 and given back to 16 or so non profits organizations. Right. We're trying to, to balance that because we're getting a lot of people reaching in now wanting to, they want to, they want to ride, ride with us and that's fine. But we have to figure out, we want to go four pillars. You know, let's give to four of our primary pillars, right? Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps. And then we find out these other organizations that are out there doing some incredible work like Samaritan's Purse and Red Cross that are taking care of the, the flood victims up in Western Carolina and the fire out here in California. We want to get, and we gave money to some organization, I think they were firefighting organizations for that. Right. So we're trying to really give back to our, our veteran communities and our other, you know, organizations that are helping our communities and you know, to give, give to them.
- [178:49]
Jocko Willink
We sent a truckload of Jocko fuel up to the firefighters up in, up in LA and Sweet. Yeah, that's pretty awesome, Joe. They said we sent them hydrate and we sent them energy go and pretty, pretty awesome that we were able to pull that off. And a bunch of people like actually it was the got a guys I'm making a movie with so Chris Pratt and Mick G and Ben Everard and they live up there, right? They live up in the LA area. And so they hit me up like hey, because when we were making this movie, everyone's drinking this stuff, you know, so they're like, hey, we should get some of the stuff for the firefighters. So I talked to my team at Jocko Fuel and they jumped on it and then our logistics partner sent it all out there for free. Whole, you know, big giant was 21 pallets worth of stuff.
- [179:35]
Harold Underdown
That's a lot of stuff.
- [179:36]
Jocko Willink
It was gone, but it was great. Ben was up there filming like they're. They're firefighters just walking out with the stuff on their shoulders to take it out to the front lines. It was awesome.
- [179:45]
Harold Underdown
That is awesome. When you can help, right? When you're 100%, when you're successful and you can help, it really, it really matters. And it goes beyond us, right? And that's what we say with our give back. It's beyond the branches. And I was part of a. I went up to Boston to do a. We had a bottle that we donated and a case. We had this beautiful wooden case built. I sent my trident up there. They put my trident in the box that we had a rip stop cami shirt that was placed. You know, we cut it, of course, and it was the backdrop. And we had is John Connors officer that was killed in Panama. So a close friend of his, Tom. Tom is doing a fundraiser for John to erect a life size statue up in his hometown.
- [180:29]
Jocko Willink
That's awesome.
- [180:30]
Harold Underdown
And we were a little part of that. But that bottle sold for $15,000. That bottle and that box went for $15,000. And I sold. I was down in Florida. We had 15 bottles and we had all the veterans there. We had these chefs from in town in Stuart, Florida, we had four chefs that came in for restaurants. And with each one of the chefs, they placed a military cook with them. A military chef. Now because, you know, I think the military is trying to transition over to civilian sector jobs titles, right? Help them transition. So we had all those military chefs come over, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard. And they signed the bottles that were being auctioned off as a package. It was a $5,000 purchase, but your $5,000, you'll get a bottle of signed 4 branches bourbon by all those veterans that was there, plus a handmade knife that was beautiful. And it went to children's scholarships.
- [181:26]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [181:26]
Harold Underdown
And that was $75,000 just for that one evening. So, you know, people. People are getting behind it. And you know, is it. Is it difficult? Because, you know, you think the. If you go out to a liquor store, you see all the many bottles of bourbon. So we're in a crowded space, right. But you know, how do we stand out? How do we continue to be loyal, you know and, and well, what it.
- [181:57]
Jocko Willink
Sounds like to me is doggies finally got something for you. Finally these doggies got something for you. Four branches bourbon.
- [182:06]
Harold Underdown
If you have some aches and pains and you know you just got knocked down, just, just go out and sit down and you know, have you a cigar, be with a great friend or two or three, your wives or who, whoever it is and, and enjoy some of this bourbon. I would enjoy it neat which is just in a glass. I use a small rock sometimes because you don't want to water down too much. But the water, the cold water and ice cube helps pop some of the flavors. That's good. It'd be good.
- [182:34]
Jocko Willink
Check.
- [182:35]
Harold Underdown
But now.
- [182:36]
Jocko Willink
And people. Can people get it online or is that not possible?
- [182:39]
Harold Underdown
Yes sir. They can get it online through our DTC which is stands for direct to consumer. We shipped about 32 states. So all you have to do is go to 4branches.com which is f o u r branches.com and you'll see a little drop down window. You can say purchase near me or purchase and it'll take you right through what you need to and they'll ship you a bottle right to your porch.
- [183:03]
Jocko Willink
And there it is. Doggy's got something for you. Right on.
- [183:08]
Harold Underdown
After, after all those years, I finally do have something for you.
- [183:13]
Jocko Willink
Does is that get us up to speed? Is that where we're at?
- [183:16]
Harold Underdown
We're good? I think so, man. We're.
- [183:18]
Jocko Willink
And just, just so people can find you. So it's, it's. You got4branches.com, you're on Facebook, 4branches Bourbon. You're on Instagram. Four branches at 4branches Bourbon. You got a YouTube channel which I checked out some of these YouTube videos. Good. Real, real good. Behind the scenes of how you guys put it together. That's the YouTube is at four branches bourbon. And then you have your own Instagram.
- [183:45]
Harold Underdown
I do.
- [183:45]
Jocko Willink
And your own Facebook.
- [183:47]
Harold Underdown
That's amazing. In it.
- [183:48]
Jocko Willink
Which is@harold.underdown. so that's where people can find you.
- [183:54]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [183:54]
Jocko Willink
Echo Charles, you got any. You got any questions?
- [183:56]
Echo Charles
Quick question.
- [183:57]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [183:57]
Echo Charles
So I know you had the special edition for this. Do you plan on, you know how there's like different ages? You know, you got the 18 year and you know.
- [184:06]
Harold Underdown
Yeah. The.
- [184:08]
Echo Charles
What's your thoughts on that?
- [184:09]
Harold Underdown
Well, looking, looking forward. We just had our, our two day meeting in Nashville, Tennessee where we talked about those. Off the bow. Right off the bow. Looking forward. You know, where are we headed? We're going to continue to drill down with this founders plan, this is our, our one skew that we have right now that are in the seven markets and in online sales. The LTOs will continue. That's the limited time offerings. We did the black ops. Now we're thinking this coming year we have something for you. We got a little surprise for you. We're working on that project right now. We're looking at doing some barrel picks, doing a single barrel delivery and we're working all that through dtc, our direct to consumer vendor. And also we're looking at a different sku. We're looking to bring the price down a little bit. The price on this founders blend of this six year old juice, it's about 89.99. You can get $10 off sometimes in an Nex and AP's about 78.49. But this is really great juice. We're looking at maybe coming out with another SKU that's going to bring the price down. So we're going to have it like enlistment or something. Entry. So we're going to get you on.
- [185:20]
Jocko Willink
The entry level, the E1 beverage, E2 beverage.
- [185:23]
Harold Underdown
That's right. We're going to get you on the entry level recruit and we want you to come on up to founder. So I'll have something for you no.
- [185:32]
Jocko Willink
Matter what, no matter what pay grade you are.
- [185:34]
Harold Underdown
That's right.
- [185:34]
Jocko Willink
We got you covered. So you have to come out with the Admiral's blend. That's going to be 230, so maybe that's 14 years old over here.
- [185:42]
Harold Underdown
Did I, did I answer your question?
- [185:43]
Echo Charles
Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah, very much so.
- [185:45]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [185:45]
Echo Charles
A lot of times those, when those numbers get higher, that's this more special edition.
- [185:49]
Harold Underdown
Oh well it really is depending on the age statement of course. And then you know, if it's a Pappy or something like that, it can get, it can get really crazy expensive. But people, people don't, you know, people that like bourbon and they're hunting for, and I didn't realize this but there are so many collectors out there. I mean people that don't drink, they don't drink at all but they collect, they collect these special bottles and special bourbons. If they like it, they'll continue to do that.
- [186:18]
Jocko Willink
Good to know.
- [186:19]
Harold Underdown
It is good to know.
- [186:20]
Jocko Willink
Did you have any football questions? Normally he's got any football related, I.
- [186:24]
Echo Charles
Think, you know, respectfully, I think like we have, we have different generations. Because you were talking about like the Hawk and all this stuff. I was like bro, I never heard of the Hawk.
- [186:32]
Harold Underdown
Yeah, Hawk position. Yeah. Well, the Hawk position was for me when I played kind of like an outside linebacker.
- [186:38]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [186:38]
Harold Underdown
So what I had to do is I had to break whatever they ran at us. I was basically going straight to the ball, freaking hard. I was strong safety. Kind of strong safety.
- [186:49]
Echo Charles
Okay.
- [186:50]
Harold Underdown
Right. So they wanted me to. And I would float, right.
- [186:52]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [186:53]
Harold Underdown
I would read the formation. Wherever their split out would go, I would usually go to the split outside.
- [186:57]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [186:58]
Harold Underdown
More than likely they come that way. Right. With the runs. And I was supposed to be the, you know, kind of like the breaker, the icebreaker.
- [187:04]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [187:05]
Harold Underdown
And I felt it a lot, too, because I had a lot of birds twerping in my head. Sometimes I'm like, boy, that wasn't smart.
- [187:11]
Echo Charles
Yeah. So it's probably just different terminology because. Yeah, strong safety is kind of. I mean, you're describing a strong safety, essentially. Yeah. It's like, could be an outside linebacker, but could be a straight up safety, you know, so. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. Right on.
- [187:25]
Jocko Willink
Cool.
- [187:25]
Harold Underdown
Yeah.
- [187:25]
Echo Charles
No, no, that's the only thing I was wondering football wise, but.
- [187:28]
Harold Underdown
Right. I was floating around a little bit, so that was. That was good. Stopped to run.
- [187:33]
Jocko Willink
Anything else, Echo?
- [187:34]
Echo Charles
That's it. Good to meet you.
- [187:35]
Jocko Willink
Right on.
- [187:35]
Harold Underdown
Nice to meet you, Echo.
- [187:36]
Jocko Willink
Closing thoughts, brother.
- [187:38]
Harold Underdown
Well, closing thoughts. As my prayers go out and to the people in North Carolina and to California for the devastation, the loss of homes and stuff. Prayers are definitely be. Continue to go up with that. I pray for our government. You know, we just had a change in administration. I just hope that people can be adults. They know that we have a great country, but we have a lot of big decisions to make, you know, moving forward. We gotta square away our borders. We gotta make sure our economy can get on track. What does that look like? You know, because American people are. I think we're getting fatigued a little bit with the people pointing fingers at each other. We just need you to do your jobs, you know, before we have to come up and do it for you. You know, get some seals and firefighters and police officers will come up and run a place. Right. But I don't want to do that. I trust these men and women that we have in office. They love our country. They just need to quit the pointing fingers and let's just get, you know, take care of business. Right?
- [188:43]
Jocko Willink
Take care of business. So doggy can drink some.
- [188:46]
Harold Underdown
So I can. So I can have some. So I can have something for you. But I really appreciate the time. Choco. Yeah, man.
- [188:52]
Jocko Willink
It's awesome to see you, brother.
- [188:53]
Harold Underdown
And Echo, really appreciate it.
- [188:54]
Jocko Willink
And yeah, thanks for coming down. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to Lisa, man. It's. Oh, yeah, so cool, because when I saw you guys at that New York thing, I probably hadn't seen Lisa in 25 something years, and it was just like. It was like we were all on the beach in Guam again, just having a good time, hanging out. She's such a great, great woman. It's awesome to see that you guys stuck it out for all those years and that she stuck by your side. It's awesome. And, you know, thanks for your service to the country, to the Navy, to the teams. Thanks for pushing me in the right direction as a young new guy. Appreciate it. And thanks for continuing to represent the teams in a positive. In a positive light, man, and setting a great example for America and for Americans.
- [189:33]
Harold Underdown
And thanks to all of our service men and women out there today that are protecting us. We really appreciate you.
- [189:38]
Jocko Willink
No doubt about it.
- [189:40]
Harold Underdown
Awesome.
- [189:41]
Jocko Willink
Awesome. Thanks, doggy man.
- [189:42]
Harold Underdown
Thank you.
- [189:44]
Jocko Willink
And with that, Harold, doggy underdown has left the building. Now I'm not gonna be able to judge things because I just. I just don't really like the taste of alcohol.
- [189:57]
Harold Underdown
Sure.
- [189:58]
Jocko Willink
You tasted the four branches.
- [189:59]
Echo Charles
Four branches, right? Yep.
- [190:01]
Jocko Willink
What's this? What's the assessment?
- [190:02]
Echo Charles
Yeah, it was all. Yeah, it was. It was all that he explained it to be. Here's the thing. I don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing. Both. I don't know. Two things could be true at the same time, by the way. Just be careful, is what I'm saying. You could get yourself in trouble because. Yes. So, like, how. Okay, so there. There are weaker bourbons out there, many.
- [190:22]
Jocko Willink
That taste weaker in terms of alcohol.
- [190:25]
Echo Charles
Content, that have way more of, like, a burning edge to it, which is a bad thing, by the way, for tasting. And they're weaker and they have more of a burning edge to it. This has less of a burning edge to it, and it's stronger. So you see how that can be a problem if you don't watch out. So I would say watch out. But, yes, it does taste very good.
- [190:43]
Jocko Willink
And I'm like, can you taste like, the notes? You can taste them?
- [190:47]
Echo Charles
Yeah, yeah, fully.
- [190:48]
Jocko Willink
I think I'm one of those people that just doesn't have a good palette for tasting things.
- [190:51]
Echo Charles
Okay, so did you know there's a technique to tasting?
- [190:55]
Jocko Willink
No.
- [190:56]
Echo Charles
Yeah, there's a technique.
- [190:57]
Jocko Willink
Well, okay, here's my technique. Open my mouth, put it in. That's what I do.
- [191:01]
Echo Charles
Exactly. Right? Yeah, fully. And, you know, not to go too deep into It. It's like you can't just pound. It sounds like you're about to, but you can't just pound. You gotta take a little bit. You gotta. You can do like certain thing. I don't explain, but you can do a certain thing with it, like in your mouth and then you swallow and then you kind of breathe out with it. It's like a technique or whatever, and then that's when you can taste the most. But yes, certain people's palates are more refined than others, for sure. But yes, I could taste.
- [191:24]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. I mean, to me, this would. There's no sense in me tasting it.
- [191:28]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [191:29]
Jocko Willink
Just because I won't be able to judge it. Number one, I can't even judge anything when it comes to taste. Or at least I'm not that great at it.
- [191:34]
Echo Charles
Yeah, but you smelled it, like.
- [191:37]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, yeah, part of it does. It does smell. Even when I smelled it, I was like, oh, this smells. Smells pretty good. Little something, you know, Smells pretty good.
- [191:44]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [191:45]
Jocko Willink
So there you go.
- [191:46]
Echo Charles
Good work.
- [191:47]
Jocko Willink
Four branches bourbon. If you want to get in on that. And you know what's another thing you're going to need to get in on? Getting after it, you know, look, you're gonna drink some bourbon, you better be working out to make up for it. You also better get some clean fuel in your system. Yeah, I recommend jockey fuel. Hey, go to jockerfuel.com check out what we got going on there. We got. We got energy drinks, we got hydration, we got protein, we got time war, we got joint warfare, super. We got everything that you need to make you feel better, make you healthier, make you stronger, make you faster, make you smarter. We got it. So go to jockofuel.com, check it all out. We're also in Walmart. We are in Wawa. We're in vitamin shop, GNCs, military commissaries, AP Hannafords, Dash stores down in Maryland, Wakefurn, Shoprite, HB down in Texas. Yeah. Meyer up in the Midwest, Wegmans out on the east coast. Harris Teeter on these guys, Publix. You know what Publix is? Publix is like the big. The big one down in the Southeast. So we just got into public. It's crushing it in public. So if you're down there, we appreciate it. Crushing it, just crushing it, making the good clean fuel. And y'all are utilizing it. So thank you, Lifetime Fitness. We're in there wearing shields and we're in a bunch of small gyms. No matter what kind you got, you Got a Jiu Jitsu academy. We're in there. We got a powerlifting gym. We're in there. No matter what you got, we're there. So if you were not there, you can email JF salesacofuel.com and get it in there. Also, originusa.com. that's what we got going on. We got American made boots, jeans, hoodies, T shirts, shorts, hunt gear, Jiu Jitsu gear, belts. Did you get your black belt yet?
- [193:40]
Echo Charles
Well, yeah, No, I saw him, though. I saw an email. You know, the emails come through and I see them all. I'm like, oh, bro, I need one of those.
- [193:49]
Jocko Willink
What should I do? Give me some advice. Because, you know, I got. I have one black belt that I've had since I got my black belt. Yeah, I know it's all ratty and old.
- [193:57]
Echo Charles
I got you.
- [193:58]
Jocko Willink
But now I have a nice, beautiful new origin made in the usa. Made by origin belt made by Jiu Jitsu people. Yeah, it's a big difference.
- [194:08]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [194:09]
Jocko Willink
Like, the people that made my original black belt, they weren't Jiu Jitsu. Wasn't a Jiu Jitsu person. It wasn't a Jiu Jitsu company.
- [194:16]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [194:16]
Jocko Willink
It was like, oh, we're a martial arts company. You know, who knows? Yeah, let me know where it's from. Yeah, but how do I make the transition?
- [194:24]
Echo Charles
I got you.
- [194:24]
Jocko Willink
What do I do? What's your recommendation?
- [194:26]
Echo Charles
One is the functional belt and one is the media belt. So one is like, it's. It's built for use. That's this whole purpose of its existence. So when you're rolling ghee, you use the used one because it's for you.
- [194:38]
Jocko Willink
I was gonna go opposite.
- [194:39]
Echo Charles
Well, you could, but here's the only reason why. And at the end of the day, it's probably not a good idea. This is why. Because that's what that one is originally for. It's the. The original one. If it gets more worn out and ugly, it's kind of like, boom. That's part of the gig in it. That's part of its purpose. See, I'm saying, then this new one, the origin one, bro, let's face it, it looks good. Looks way better. It has the leather on the end. The other end, it has the origin. It's like, cool. You can use that 100, probably use it. But that's not comparatively or if you want to differentiate, like, its purposes.
- [195:05]
Jocko Willink
It's not what it's for. This out there. I don't. I think you're wrong. Now that you've Presented your case and the facts of your case. I'm gonna think you're wrong because I don't want a wall hanger.
- [195:16]
Echo Charles
Okay.
- [195:16]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [195:16]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [195:17]
Jocko Willink
Have you. Have you ever seen me. Hold on, let me get my media T shirt out? Has that ever happened? Have you ever seen me. Hold on, let me get my media flip flops out for a picture?
- [195:26]
Echo Charles
No.
- [195:26]
Jocko Willink
Have you ever seen that from me?
- [195:27]
Echo Charles
No.
- [195:27]
Jocko Willink
Have I ever said, hold on, let me get my. Let me get the haircut going? Does that ever happen?
- [195:32]
Echo Charles
No. No.
- [195:33]
Jocko Willink
Okay.
- [195:33]
Echo Charles
But there's a lot of things that I've never seen you do say, you know, until you did them and set them and, you know, showed them.
- [195:41]
Jocko Willink
Okay, well, I don't think I got a Jiu Jitsu belt that's made to wear around the gi, so I can hang it on my wall or only wear it during media shoots.
- [195:50]
Echo Charles
That's up to you, bro. That's up to you.
- [195:52]
Jocko Willink
You know you're wrong now. You know, as soon as I finish that last sentence, you're like, I'm wrong. You know you're wrong.
- [195:57]
Echo Charles
So you're saying you should never do it because you've never done it? Is that what you're saying?
- [195:59]
Jocko Willink
I'm saying I have a Jiu Jitsu belt.
- [196:03]
Echo Charles
Yes.
- [196:03]
Jocko Willink
That is made to wear on a Jiu Jitsu ghee.
- [196:07]
Echo Charles
Sure.
- [196:08]
Jocko Willink
That is made to do Jiu Jitsu in. And what you're telling me is I should take pictures only with that thing? You see it wrong.
- [196:14]
Harold Underdown
Okay?
- [196:16]
Echo Charles
There's more to it.
- [196:16]
Harold Underdown
Credit.
- [196:17]
Jocko Willink
You helped me through the case.
- [196:18]
Echo Charles
Okay?
- [196:18]
Jocko Willink
You helped me through the case. You helped me see the light by presenting an adverse scenario, which would be me going, hold on. Photo shoot.
- [196:25]
Echo Charles
It's not adverse.
- [196:26]
Jocko Willink
Let's do a media photo shoot.
- [196:28]
Echo Charles
Okay, look here. Okay, you're correct. In that little like. But the bigger picture, I'm correct. Look, at the end of the day, that's the choice that only you can make. Not meet for you. That doesn't make sense. See, I'm saying. Yeah, look, you probably. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. I don't know. Maybe you're different. Maybe you're the same as all of us. But a lot of us have more than one gi, maybe more than two. Maybe more than one gi. Yes.
- [196:49]
Jocko Willink
Guess what? You know how many of them are not being used for Jiu Jitsu?
- [196:51]
Echo Charles
How many?
- [196:52]
Jocko Willink
None of them.
- [196:52]
Echo Charles
Okay, well, some of us have a GI that's like, you know what? This is a good gi, right? This is a good gi. It looks better when it's like sparkling new and it looks better in pictures. See, I'm saying. So it'll be like the media gi, not freaking. What do you call? Not now.
- [197:07]
Jocko Willink
Now the truth comes out. Echo has a freaking media game.
- [197:10]
Echo Charles
I'm not saying I do. I'm saying some of us do. When I say us, I mean us. The people seem saying may or may not refer to me. Yeah, see, I'm saying, I'm just saying.
- [197:18]
Jocko Willink
That you're not like a four time world jiu jitsu champion with GI and you have a media. I question your scenario.
- [197:27]
Echo Charles
First off, I'm not saying I have a media gi. I'm not saying I don't. But I'm just saying, I'm saying as a principle, you see what I'm saying? Like it's not.
- [197:33]
Jocko Willink
I'm anti media ghee. I'm anti media ghee belt. Yeah, anti.
- [197:38]
Echo Charles
So I guess at the end of the question is why is that? You see what I'm saying? But hey, look, like I said, that's not my question. Y.
- [197:44]
Jocko Willink
What about a media kettlebell? You got like a nice clean kettle for the media.
- [197:48]
Echo Charles
It's different.
- [197:49]
Jocko Willink
Huh?
- [197:50]
Echo Charles
That's different. Okay, but either way, hey, look, like I said, look, at the end of the day, here's my answer to your question. Thank you for asking, by the way. That's only a question you can answer.
- [198:00]
Jocko Willink
Yes, I just did. OriginUSA.com get yourself a jujitsu belt, get yourself a GI. Get yourself whatever you need. Don't use it for media, don't use it for photo shoots. Use it to train, use it to hunt, use it to work. That's what we're doing.
- [198:17]
Echo Charles
USA.com I say use them for both. You want to work, whatever. But bro, when the camera comes out, bruh, represent. You see what I'm saying?
- [198:25]
Jocko Willink
Dude, that's totally, that's totally different. That's all.
- [198:27]
Echo Charles
Yeah, that's all I'm saying.
- [198:28]
Jocko Willink
You're changing your team. Just went.
- [198:31]
Harold Underdown
That's all I'm saying.
- [198:31]
Jocko Willink
Country western to heavy metal, like that.
- [198:33]
Echo Charles
That's all I'm saying. Anyway, also, Jocko's store called Jocko store. Jocastore.com say look, whether the camera's on, off, you're out in the wild, you're at home by yourself. You're in your home gym or commercial gym, you want to represent when you're on the path, this is where you get your stuff. Chocolatestore.com Discipline equals freedom. Good. Stand by to get some. By the way, we just restocked that a Lot of people were hitting me up to stand by to get some, you know, sizes off. Hey, boom, we're back. Also, we have these hoodies.
- [199:04]
Jocko Willink
Look at you. Just right on top of stuff. We got these hoodies.
- [199:09]
Echo Charles
They're quick flip hoodies. They turn magically into a drawstring backpack. Yes, exactly right. We're out of a lot of those sizes.
- [199:16]
Harold Underdown
Boom.
- [199:16]
Echo Charles
We're back.
- [199:16]
Jocko Willink
We're back.
- [199:17]
Echo Charles
We're back in the game.
- [199:17]
Jocko Willink
What do they say on those ones?
- [199:19]
Echo Charles
Discipline equals freedom. Of course.
- [199:20]
Jocko Willink
All day, Jack.
- [199:21]
Echo Charles
Yeah, yeah.
- [199:22]
Jocko Willink
So anyway, what about those little, like, wind jackets?
- [199:24]
Echo Charles
Oh, yeah, the windbreaker ones. Those are those. We're getting more of those in too. Some sizes are sold out, you know. Hey, look, we love them. We love them. But yeah, we're getting them back in. A lot of stuff on there. All right, go to Jocko store dot com.
- [199:38]
Jocko Willink
What about. Don't. If only you had a subscription thing.
- [199:42]
Echo Charles
Yeah, yeah. Different designs.
- [199:43]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [199:44]
Echo Charles
Like every month or something. Okay, okay, good.
- [199:46]
Jocko Willink
Good news.
- [199:46]
Echo Charles
There's something called the shirt locker. Same thing. Jocastore.com there's another top right shirt locker.
- [199:51]
Jocko Willink
Boom.
- [199:51]
Echo Charles
Check it out. It's a subscription scenario. New designs every month. A little bit different from. From some of the main designs. But yeah, people seem to like them. So check that out as well.
- [200:03]
Jocko Willink
Right on. Also primalbeef.com coloradocraftbeef.com you need steak in your life. You need steak. You need some beef jerky from Primal beef. You need some meat sticks from Colorado craft beef. You need beef bacon. Steak. Bacon. That's Colorado craft beef right there.com primalbeef.com that's what you need. Go check those out. Great companies, great steaks, great people. Check those out. Get yourself the steak that you need. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also Jocko underground.com also YouTube channels. There's one for Jocko podcast. There's one for Jocko podcast clips. Yeah, of course there's Jocko Fuel and there's Origin usa. So check those out. Psychological warfare. You can get in on that. We got a bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. So check them out. Leadership strategy and tactics. Final Spin. Weigh the warrior kid. Check out the kids books. You don't have to wait for the movie to come out. There's a movie coming out, by the way, it's already been filmed. It's. It's wrapped.
- [201:05]
Echo Charles
Yeah, right.
- [201:05]
Jocko Willink
The whole thing's wrapped, which is a big deal because when you're making a movie, anything can go wrong. And now all of a sudden you don't get it wrapped.
- [201:11]
Echo Charles
Yep.
- [201:11]
Jocko Willink
You see what I'm saying? Like, oh, you're making a movie. The funding gets cut. Oh, you're making a movie. Your. Your star breaks his leg. Oh, you're making a movie. Like the. There's fires in the set. And like. You see what I'm saying?
- [201:22]
Echo Charles
Yes, I do.
- [201:23]
Jocko Willink
And these things are severe problems. And maybe you never get that movie made. Yeah, well, when you. The day you get it done, you're like, all right, we're done. This thing is gonna. Is done. It's a huge. It's a huge step. So you don't have to wait for it, though. We don't know when it's coming out. But until then, we got a bunch of books. Kids, books. Way of the Warrior Kid. One, two and three and four and five. Check those out. Also Mikey and the Dragons. Also Echelon front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. We do have some seats left in San Diego for the muster February 23rd through the 25th. If you want to go get there quickly, go and register. We got some seats left. Go get in there. FTX Council, a bunch of events. If you want to come to one of our events, go to echelonfront.com or if you need help in your organization from a leadership perspective, go to ashonfront.com and we will handle it. We will help you handle it. We will teach you how to handle it. That's what we're doing. Also we have onlinetraining, extreme ownership dot com. That is where we provide these skills through an online training program. So go to extreme ownership.com and check that out. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families. Want help? Gold star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, mom Alish. Got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org also check out heroes and horses.org, micah Fink up there in the mountains. And then Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org check all those out. And if you want to connect with Four Branches and you want to connect with Doggy, the interwebs4branches.com, Facebook, Four Branches. Bourbon. Instagram @4branches. Bourbon. YouTube @4branches, Bourbon. And then doggy. He's also there on Instagram and on the Facebook, Harold Underdown. And for us, you can check out jocko.com. you can also find me on social media. I'M at Jocko Willink and echoes at Echo. Charles, just be careful because there's an algorithm there. It'll try and ruin your life. Thanks once again to Harold Underdown Doggy for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your experiences, your lessons learned. Thanks for your service to the country and to the teams and thanks to all our military personnel out there right now keeping us safe, protecting our way of life. We are grateful for all of you. Also the same for our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here on the home front and everyone else out there. Doggy ain't got nothing for you. No one does. Hey, listen, if you got a problem, you're gonna have to fix it yourself. You have to solve your own problems. And in order to do that, what you got to do is go out there and get after it. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.
- [204:57]
Harold Underdown
SA sa SA SA.