Jocko Willink (7:08)

Is there something wrong with me?

Echo Charles (7:15)

The war was hard.

Seth Stone (7:18)

Seth Stone Stoner my faithful friend and lieutenant. He wrote this about the war.

Echo Charles (7:30)

Quote.

Seth Stone (7:33)

The guys with whom I served with in the platoon were stellar. They were quirky, personable, intelligent, courageous, athletic, and overall they were the kind of guys you always wanted to be your friends, from Mike Mansour to Andrew, Paul, JP Donnell and the rest who must remain unnamed. They would do anything, anything for our country, anything for each other, and anything to win. In many ways, I felt inadequate to be their leader, but I had to push that feeling aside and do my best work because I wanted to bring them all home to their moms and dads. It was hard work, draining. While we were on a sniper operation in Ramadi, I went to where my lead sniper, JP Dinell, had set up his sniper hide. I wanted to get some feedback from him on what he had been seeing and the atmospherics of the area from his point of view, especially to see if he believed that an attack was imminent. When I found J.P. he was on a break from the gun and another one of the guys was looking through his scope down the dusty street and jp, our lead sniper, point man, sometimes breacher and wielder of the hooligan tool. He was on the hard floor asleep, getting in a quick nap before the dusk attacks, which typically came immediately after the evening call to prayer and when the accompanying calls to fight the Americans from several of the minarets in town. I remember looking at JP and seeing how dirty he was, covered in grime. His combat uniform was greasy, blood and tar stained, caked with the dirt and fine sand of the streets and buildings. His hands were claw like as if he was grabbing something in a dream, but he was completely still and motionless. At that time I realized the great toll these operations were taking on these men, so I was glad to find JP sleeping A bit in between his watches, on the gun. He was my most capable sniper and I needed him to have a clear mind. It was a hard job, physically, mentally, spiritually. While life should be love and laughter and light. We were the prophets of doom, destruction, end quote. I think about that. We were the prophets of doom and destruction and Seth was light, life and laughter. I promise you that. What did the war do to us? Is there something wrong with us? Is there something wrong with me? I think that depends on which perspective we choose to take. It is a choice that we make what we decide to think. There's options. And yes, we can choose to take the negative perspective. That's one way to go. Pessimistic and dark. Arkady Babchenko, who was conscripted into the Russian army and served as a Russian soldier and fought the first and second Chechnyan wars in the 90s, he wrote a book called One Soldier's War. It hit me hard when I read it. This is what he wrote in that book, about coming home and what war did to him. No one returns from the war. Ever. Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons. Embittered, aggressive beasts, hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death. Yesterday's soldiers no longer belong to their parents. They belong to war. Only their body returns from war. Their soul stays there, but the body still comes home. And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale. Slowly, very slowly, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burned out soul into something like a human being. The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away. The aggression simmers down. The hatred passes, the loneliness abates. But it is the fear that lingers longest of all. An animal fear of death. But that too passes with time. And you start to learn to live in this life again. You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet from mines and tripwires, and step on manhole covers on the road without fear and stand at your full height open ground. And you go shopping, talk on the phone and sleep on a bed. You learn to take for granted the hot water and the taps, the electricity and the central heating. You no longer jump at loud noises. You start to live at first, because that's how it's worked out and you have stayed alive. You do it without gaining much joy from life. You look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate. You lived your life from COVID to cover in those hundred and eighty days you were there and the remaining fifty odd years can't anything to that time or detract from it. Then you start to get drawn into life. You get interested in this game, which isn't for real. You pass yourself off as a fully fledged member of society and the mask of a normal person grows onto you. No longer rejected by your body.

Jocko Willink (16:39)

And.

Seth Stone (16:39)

Those around you think you are just the same as everyone else. But no one knows your real face and no one knows that you are no longer a person. Happy, laughing people walk around you accepting you as one of their own. And no one knows where you have been. But that doesn't bother you anymore. You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you saw once. But you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters. You don't tell anyone the truth anymore. You can't explain what war really is to someone who has never been there. Just as you can't explain Green to a blind person or a man. Can't know what it's like to give birth. They simply don't have the necessary sensory organs. You can't explain or understand war. All you can do is experience it. You're still waiting for something all these years. God knows what, though. You simply can't believe that it ends just like that, without any consequences. You're probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all. For someone to come up to you and say, brother, I know where you've been. I know what war is. I know what you've been fighting for. That is very important to know why and what for. Why did the brothers the war gave me have to die? Why were people killed? Why did they fire on goodwill, justice, faith and love? Crushed children and bombed women? Why did the world need to lose that girl I saw back on the Runway with her smashed head and a little bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

Echo Charles (19:19)

Why?

Seth Stone (19:24)

But no one tells you. And then you, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain, you start to explain it to yourself. You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase. As you start to write, you still don't know what it will be. A short story, a poem or a song. The lines come with difficulty, each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound. You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so bad that you can't see the letters. You are back there again and death once more rules everything. The room fills with moaning and fear and once again you hear the big guns, the Screams of the wounded people being burned alive and the whistle of mortar shells falling toward your prone back. The dead rise up from their graves and form up, a great number of them, everyone who is dear to you and was killed. And you can already spot familiar faces. They lean toward you and their whispering fills the room. They tell you, go on, brother, tell them. Tell them how we burned in the carriers. Tell them how we cried in surrounded checkpoints. Tell them how we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to the ground with their feet and slit our throats. Tell them how boys bodies twitch when bullets hit them. You survived only because we died there. Go on. They should know all this. No one should die before they know what war is. And tinged with blood, the words appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the pint, while death and madness sit beside you, nudging you and correcting your pen. And there you are, yesterday's soldier, sergeant or captain, concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched up and reassembled, half crazed and stupefied. And you write and write and write with helplessness and sorrow. And tears pour down your face and stick in your stubble, and you realize that you should not have returned from the war. End quote. Is that what the war did to me? Is that what we become? Half Crazed and stupefied, concussed and ripped apart and reassembled.

Echo Charles (23:27)

Helpless and filled with sorrow?

Seth Stone (23:33)

Is that what we become? In some cases, yes. But is that what we have to become? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think we actually have a choice. Like many things in life, we get to decide. What did the war do to me? It made me better. What did the war do to most of my friends? It made them better. When we choose to look at it from a positive perspective now, does war leave a mark? Of course it does. It does leave a mark.

Echo Charles (25:03)

That section of that book in One Soldier's War where he's talking about people being burned alive in carriers, armored personnel carriers. We were probably a few weeks into deployment in Ramadi, and I was in my tactical operations center, and a radio call came across that there was a mass casualty out in the city and when there were mass casualties out in the city, if we had spare people on our little SEAL compound, what we would do is send a bunch of guys up to go give blood in the medical center because we knew that they would be short on blood during a mass casualty. So that's exactly what I did. The mass casualty call comes in. We don't really know what it is yet. We don't know what had happened. But I send a bunch of guys up to go give blood. Some time goes by, I start getting reports of what had happened. I heard a report that it was a big roadside bomb, had hit a Humvee. Didn't get much more information than that. Another hour goes by and the guys that had gone up to give blood come back to our little SEAL base. And when they get back, I learn what had happened. They didn't give any blood. No blood was needed. What had happened was the Humvee hit a roadside bomb. It blew the Humvee over. The turret gunner who was in the top of the Humvee was thrown out of the vehicle. The vehicle landed upside down because of the blast. It deformed all the doors, and none of the doors could be opened. No one could get out of the Humvee. The Humvee burned with the men inside it. And so the seals that I sent up there to give blood, all they did was help transfer the bodies, the charred bodies, into the morgue. Does that leave a mark? Yeah, it does. I could see it on the looks of my guys when they came back from that duty. It's a nightmare to see what you're up against and see what can happen to you. Those roadside bombs were horrific. They were horrific. They destroyed these vehicles, tanks, Bradley Fighting vehicles, Humvees would get decimated by these giant roadside bombs. And I don't know why they did this, but when they would recover those vehicles from the city of Ramadi, when they would drag these twisted vehicles, burned out vehicles, back to Camp Ramadi, they would put them in this area that was called the vehicle graveyard. This vehicle graveyard was just a big parking lot, basically a dirt parking lot where all These vehicles, probably 75 or 100 vehicles, destroyed, twisted wreckage of vehicles. And when you drive past that, you know that every single one of those vehicles represents one or two or three or four American casualties. And for some unknown reason, they put that vehicle graveyard right on the main road that you would drive past. As you were getting ready to leave Camp Ramadi, you would know what the possibilities were. Crystal clear. Now, that turret gunner position that I talked about, this is the guy. When you see a picture of a Humvee, there's a bunch of guys that are inside the Humvee. They're sitting in behind the ballistic protection of the Humvee. And then there's the guy that's the turret gunner that's sitting up outside the Humvee that's exposed and this guy is the first person that's going to be wounded, especially if they're in the lead vehicle. If they're in the front vehicle in the convoy, it's that lead vehicle, lead turret gunner that's standing up exposed to the enemy. He's running the biggest risk. If they hit a roadside bomb, he's the one that's going to take it. If they get ambushed by machine gun fire, he's the one that's going to get hit. Rpg, he's the one that's going to take it. It's kind of like in Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War, they were doing a lot of foot patrol. So it was the point man that was out in front of the patrol, and if they walked into an ambush, it was him that was going to get hit in the ambush. If there was a booby trap to trip over and detonate, it was that point man that was going to get wounded or killed. Well, for us, the most exposed person was that lead turret gunner. And in Vietnam, what they would do was, well, if I was point man for a little while, they'd give me like an hour, and the fear was so strong that they would rotate me out, let me go to the back, and they'd put someone else up on point, and then that person would walk point for an hour and be exposed to that danger. And then they'd rotate him back and another guy would step up to that point man position. It's overwhelming fear, it's overwhelming stress. So you think that when you have the lead turret gunner that's going to be highly exposed, you're going to want to rotate him out. In fact, you might think that he would demand to be rotated out. Our lead turret gunner was a guy named Mark Lee. And night after night, he would get up into that lead turret position. Night after night, he would drive by those destroyed vehicles and know what the possibilities were when we left the wire. And day after day and night after night, he would go into that position. And Mark Lee never asked to be rotated out, never asked for someone to take his place, never asked for someone else to share his burden of risk. He chose to be brave. He knew that there were some things he could control and some things he couldn't control. And he chose not to be afraid. That's the decision he made. And what an example. What an example for all of us. The amount of control we have over the way we interact with what happens to us or what we're facing in the world. We can choose. We can Decide. And I actually saw this lesson and learned this lesson with exquisite clarity. Exquisite clarity. Later on, it was. Later on, it was years later, while I was recording some podcasts, I did a podcast about Chesty Puller. Chesty Puller, the most iconic Marine of all time. Hey, do we have any Marines here? I figured we might have a few Marines here. Chesty Puller is the most iconic Marine of all time. No one even questions this. Received five Navy Crosses, Distinguished Service Cross. Just incredible leader. Respected without question, held in the highest regard inside the Marine Corps. As a matter of fact, the Marine Corps has a mascot. It's a dog. It's a bulldog. Yeah, the dog's name is Chesty. It's been called Chesty since they had the mascot. I think they're on chesty number 17 right now. When you're in Marine Corps boot camp at night, you sing good night, Chesty. So Chesty Puller is the most iconic Marine of all time. And I did a podcast about Chesty Puller and talked about him and his leadership and his heroism, and it was an honor to be able to do that. That was podcast number 121. Podcast number 122 was about his son. Chesty Puller had a son, Lewis Puller Jr. And Lewis Puller Jr. The son of Chesty Puller, was. Well, he was kind of cut from a different cloth, right. He wasn't quite the same as his old man. And this happens, you know, I don't know how the genetic mixing happens when that formula gets made. Some. Sometimes you end up like your dad, sometimes you end up like your mom. Sometimes you end up a little bit of both. Well, Chesty wasn't quite the image of his dad. He was a kind of a slight guy. His eyesight wasn't very good. In fact, his eyesight was bad. So he wore thick glasses, and he was a little bit more of a cerebral guy. And he went, you know, grew up, and he loved his dad. His dad loved him. But he kind of took a different path in the beginning and went to college. Went to college and studied English and had the goal of becoming an English teacher. But at some juncture, he decided, hey, I'm Chesty Puller's son. I'm going to go in the Marine Corps. And that's what he did. After he got done with college, he went down to the recruiters. He had to get a waiver for his eyesight because his eyesight wasn't that good, luckily. Seems like he knew some people and they got him into the Marine Corps. So trustee Puller goes into the Marine Corps. He goes to officer candidate school, he goes to the basic school, and then he reports for duty as a platoon commander. It's 1968. He goes to Vietnam. Before he goes to Vietnam, he gets married. He's got a kid coming. Three months into his deployment, he is on a big operation. There's an enemy encounter. He engages the enemy. He turns around. He starts to run to a different location to inform people of what's happening, and he trips a booby trap with a giant explosive. He sees a big flash and a pink mist around him, and those were his legs. He ended up being gravely wounded. He lost one leg at the hip, the other leg just below the hip. His hand was mangled. Just about the only part of him that wasn't messed up was his face. But everything else was a disaster. And by some miracle, they got him off the battlefield. They were able to get that bleeding under control enough. They got him into a casualty evacuation, and he was able to make it back to America. Now, when he makes it back to America, this was not what he anticipated. This was not what his father anticipated. He later wrote a book, and in the book, he describes waking up from a coma for the first time. And next to him, next to his bed, is his father, Chesty Puller, the most badass Marine of all time. And his dad can't say anything to him because he's sobbing. And so Louis tries to make this.

Seth Stone (39:48)

Work, and it's a problem.

Echo Charles (39:50)

He's got his new kid. He's got his wife. He's in this terrible situation. And you look at, like, the old prosthetics that they would build for guys back then, they looked archaic compared to what guys get now. And because of his wounds, because they were so severe, they didn't really even have. They could do barely anything for him. He was confined to a wheelchair almost immediately. Started drinking, started taking painkillers. Really went on a bad downward spiral, a terrible downward spiral. Addicted to alcohol. He eventually is able to pull out of that. He eventually is able to pull out of that, and he's able to get off the painkillers, and he's able to put the bottle down. And what really helped him do this was he started to write about it. He started to write about what he'd been through. He poured his emotions out on the page, and he ended up writing this incredible book, which is the book that I covered on the podcast. It's called Fortunate Son. And it's. It's really uplifting. As you get through this book. And he makes it through these struggles. And eventually, kind of the climax of the book is he helps with the selection and the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial Wall. And he's there when they dedicate that memorial wall. And it's an amazing scene that he writes about. They go to the dedication. It's so powerful being at that wall and seeing it dedicated, surrounded by other Marines that were in Vietnam. And when they get done with the. With the ceremony, they go back to a little party that they're having, or it's actually a pretty big party, and there's a bunch of Marines there. And for the first time in years, when he goes in there on his wheelchair, people aren't asking, oh, what happened to you? Because everybody knew. And instead of asking him what happened, what they said to him was, welcome home, brother. And that book came out, and the book won a Pulitzer Prize, and it was a best seller. And it's, like I said, such an uplifting story in that book. But the story doesn't end with that book, because after that book was published, Lewis Puller actually fell down out of his wheelchair. He got injured. He went to the hospital. When he went to the hospital, they didn't really check in on his record and see that he had been addicted to alcohol and painkillers, and they gave him a bunch of painkillers, and it started that downward spiral. And after all that, Lewis Puller.

Seth Stone (43:29)

Killed himself.

Echo Charles (43:38)

So what does this have to do with making a choice? Well, after I recorded that podcast a year later, maybe two years later, I had another individual on my podcast, a guy named Jim Serlsley, and he was also in Vietnam, and he was also severely wounded in Vietnam. The same thing happened. He stepped on a landmine. He lost both of his legs below the hip. Just below the hip. And he also lost one of his arms. But when he came home, what he did was went to the hospital, went to the rehab facility, and he's telling this story on his podcast. He went to the rehab, went to his. He said, okay, how long do I have to be here? They're like, well, you got to be here a minimum of six months. He says, okay, that's fine. I'll be here for six months. Then six months in one day, I'm ready to go. He learned how to work his wheelchair. He figured out how to get upstairs, figured out how to do stuff with one hand, and then he left the rehab facility, and he carried on with his life. He started a roofing company that was the first thing he did, here's a guy with one arm goes out, oh, I'm gonna start a roofing company. Started doing real estate stuff. Ends up having a family, multiple kids, a dozen grandkids. An incredible story. And he told this story on the podcast. It was incredible. And we got done recording, and when we got done recording, we were just sitting around talking. And when we were talking, I said, how? How did you do this? And he looked at me and he said, have you ever heard of a guy named Lewis Puller? And I said, yes, sir, I have. Absolutely. I said, I did a podcast about his father, and I did a podcast where I covered his whole book and talked about it. And he said, I was in rehab with Lewis Puller.

Seth Stone (46:15)

We were friends.

Echo Charles (46:18)

And I'll tell you, there was a difference between his attitude and my attitude. My attitude was that what had happened had happened. There was nothing I could do to change it. There was no woe is me. There was no taking it back. It wasn't going to go away. This is the cards I've been dealt, and I'm going to do something with them. I 100% accepted what was happening, and I chose to do something positive with it. And when he talked about Lewis Poehler's attitude, he said, look, Lewis Poehler tried. He tried. And yet there was always a but. He said he accepted his fate. 98%. He accepted what had happened. 98%. That other 2% was always there saying, why me? Why did this happen? Couldn't this have happened to someone else?

Seth Stone (47:34)

Woe is me.

Echo Charles (47:38)

And that was the difference. That's the difference between someone that went downward and ended up taking their own life, killing themselves, and someone who lived an absolutely incredible life because he chose to do so. He made that decision that he was going to make this as good as he possibly could. And that reminds me of another lesson that I learned early in the SEAL teams. Early in the SEAL teams, I was a new guy. In the SEAL teams, you don't know anything. But in order to educate us, they would sometimes let us go into platoon briefings where a platoon was getting ready to go out on a training mission in. And they would let us listen to the briefing so we could hear what mission they were going to do and how they were going to execute that mission. And so I'm sitting in this room listening to this brief. I don't know anything. And I'm just listening and paying attention, and they get done with the brief. And it was some kind of a taking boats in from the ocean. Going across the beach and then going and hitting a target and coming back to the boats and leaving pretty basic SEAL mission training mission. So the platoon gets done with the brief, and now the young lieutenant platoon commander stands up and says to the commanding officer, sir, do you have any questions? And the commanding officer says, yeah, I got a question for you. What if one of your boats breaks down while you're driving towards the beach? What are you going to do? And the young SEAL officer says, well, you know, sir, situation dictates if that happens. We'll look at the situation and we'll make a decision. Commanding officer said, okay, what happens if when you get to the beach, the enemy compromises you and sees you? What are you going to do? And the young officer says, well, if that happens, sir, situation dictates. We'll look at situation. We'll figure out what we gonna do next. He says, what about as you're patrolling to the target? What if you get compromised as you're patrolling to the target? What are you gonna do? And the young officer says, well, sir, what we're gonna do is situation dictates. And this happened four, five, six times. And finally one of the times, the young officer says, you know, sir, situation dictates. There was a Vietnam master chief in the back of the room, and he said, hold on. And of course, all of our ears perked up, and he said, listen to me, Lieutenant. This is the SEAL teams. The situation does not dictate to us. We dictate the situation. That's what we do. That's how we operate. We put ourselves in a scenario where we are in control. And that always stuck with me, how often we in life have the ability to dictate the situation instead of allowing it to dictate to us what we're going to do. Now, look, do some things come up in life that hit you out of nowhere? Yes. And then guess what you do. You decide how you're going to respond to it. That's what we're doing. And this applies to everything. I was just out in Washington, D.C. and I was talking to some senior military leadership, and I was actually talking to them about leadership. It was an outstanding day. It was great to be out there. And we got done with me briefing them about leadership and the principles of leadership that I learned on the battlefield. And then we had a little Q and A session. And during that Q and A session, one of these senior Navy leaders raised his hand and said, hey, Jocko, what about mental health? What about suicide? What should we be talking to our service members about when it comes to mental health and suicide. And when he asked me that question, a thought crystallized in my head that had been gelling for a long time. It brought me back to a moment once again during one of my podcasts. I had a guy on my podcast named Colonel Tom Fife. Colonel Tom Fife had been in World War II. He'd been in Korea, and he'd been in Vietnam, and he was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II in Korea and in Vietnam. And so I'm sitting down talking with him, and we talked about what he did during World War II and the actions that he took and the lessons that he learned. And we talked about Vietnam, where he was now like a tank platoon commander, and the lessons that he learned and the actions that he took and the missions that they conducted. And then we started talking about Vietnam, where he was a battalion commander. He's in charge of five or six or 700 soldiers. And we're once again talking about the missions that they conducted and the leadership lessons that he had learned. And then I asked him about the casualties, the casualties that he had taken as a battalion commander. I said, sir, how many casualties did you take when you were a battalion commander? And when I asked him that question, he started to get choked up. He started to get choked up thinking about the men he had lost 50 plus years ago. 50 plus years ago, he had taken casualties as a battalion commander, and he was getting choked up thinking about it. And what I realized at that moment was that was okay. That's normal. I think about my guys that I lost, I get choked up. And here's this guy after 50 years and he's still getting choked up. Guess what? That's okay. That's okay. That's normal. That's what happens. You lose your friends, you lose your men. You go through hard times. It's okay. Do I tear up sometimes when I hear the national anthem? Yes. Yes. That's okay. And so, as these Navy leaders or these military leaders started asking me about mental health, what I wanted to talk to them about is the message that we send. And the message that we send. The vast majority of people, the vast majority of people that are going through hard times, that are struggling, that are sad, that are depressed about something, the vast majority of people, you know what they need? They need to get told, yeah, that's a hard time. You're going to be okay. Oh, oh, you feel sad about something. Yep. That makes sense. You're a human being. That's okay. You're going to Be alright. That's the vast majority of people. And you know what? Listen, there is a small percentage of people out there, a small percentage of people that there's something that overwhelms them. They get caught in some loop, some negative feedback loop and things go bad. And when that happens, we got to get them other kinds of help. We got to get them inpatient care or outpatient care. They got to see and talk to somebody that can counsel them back to health. But a lot of people, what they actually need to be told is, you're going to be all right, it's okay. And then a few weeks later, a few weeks later, I was at a restaurant with my family. I got done eating and when I got done eating, I was standing up and going to get the car and a couple guys approached me. And one of them, I could see by the look on his face that there was some issues, that he was something wrong. I could see that sadness, I could see that kind of dejected look in his face. And he said to me, I need your help. Okay, man, what's going on? Well, it turns out this individual is a police officer. It turns out that he had been in an incident a couple months prior. It was an incident where there was a hostage taken, actually two hostages taken. One hostage was killed, one hostage was wounded, the police officer was wounded, and the perpetrator was wounded and captured. And he's telling me this story and he looks, he looks horrified about it. And he said, you know, they took my badge and they took my gun and they put me on one year administrative leave. That's what I'm going through right now. And I need you to help me. Like I need to be better. And I looked at him and I said, okay, so let me ask you this. Are you having some bad dreams? He's like, yeah. You having some nightmares? He said, yeah. Are you having some considerations about what you woulda, shoulda and coulda done? He said, yep, yep, absolutely. I said, do you have some guilt knowing that there's an innocent person that's dead and you're still here? And he said, yeah, that's what's going on, man. And I said, hey, buddy, that's all normal. You're going to be okay. And when I told him that, when I told him it was normal, his feelings, face changed in front of my eyes. I said, yeah, that's normal. You were in a chaotic situation. You got shot, a hostage died. This is a nightmare. Of course you're going to have bad dreams about it. That's normal. Of course you're going to look back and wish you would have done things different. That's normal. And as soon as I said that to him, his face changed. And five minutes later, he. He was smiling, and I was telling him, hey, dude, sounds like you got a year of paid leave. That sounds pretty cool. Let's take advantage of it, you know? He's like, yeah, actually, that's kind of true. I said, listen, don't go wild. Get on a pattern, you know, make sure you get up same time every day. Make sure you work out every day. Start training jiu jitsu. Start playing guitar. Start getting after it. Yeah. Get on a schedule. He's like, yeah. And I said, you know what? In 30 days, you call your department and say, hey, can you screen me again? Because I feel good. Yeah, I got some regrets. Yeah, I got a little bit of survivor's guilt, but I feel okay. Those are normal things to feel. Those are normal things to feel. So this is what we have to help each other with, and this is what we as leaders need to pay attention to. We as leaders need to pay attention to the currents of the world and which way they are flowing. We need to pay attention as leaders to the mob that we're in charge of. That's what we need to do. We need to pay attention to the mob that we're in charge of. Because. Because when you're in a leadership position, you're in charge of a mob. You're in charge of a gang of people, and they act like a mob. Sometimes that's what happens, and that's actually a positive thing. If you bring a team together, they start acting like a gang, they start acting like a mob. They're going to stick together. They start to have group think. But we as leaders cannot participate in that mob. We have to take a step back from it. We have to detach and assess if the mob is going in the right direction. I mean, it's literally like a mob during a riot. People start doing the same things. One person like, oh, maybe we should start flipping over cars and setting them on fire. And then everyone starts flipping over cars and setting them on fire. That's what mobs do. When you're in a leadership position, if you're part of that mob, you'll be flipping over cars. So what you have to do is detach and stay back from that mob a little bit so you can make sure they're going in the right direction. You can spot what's happening. You can see what's happening. You can see if the mob starts going in a arrogant direction, right? You're in charge of a business, you're in charge of a team, and you have some big wins. You execute some good projects, you do some missions and you're successful and you crush it. And now what happens to the mob? The mob starts thinking they're awesome, and maybe we don't need to train and maybe we don't need to prepare. And you as a leader, need to be outside that mob, going, hey, guys, yep, we did do a good job, but here's some things that we could have done better. Here's some adjustments we can make. Don't you think? So you, as a leader, got to pull those reins in a little bit. Same thing when the gang or the team or the mob is making some mistakes, or maybe they fail a mission, or maybe they don't score a new client that they thought they would, and maybe they're starting to go down with their morale. And that's when you, as a leader need to be outside that mob and say, hey, team, guess what? We didn't get that client we wanted, but guess what we learned, and now we can make sure that doesn't happen again. Or, oh, we made a mistake on this mission. We didn't execute it properly. Guess what? Here's a new standard operating procedure we're going to implement so it doesn't happen again, and we're going to go knock the next one out of the park. So you, as the leader, have to sometimes pull in the reins. Sometimes you got to push them forward, but you got to detach, and you can't be part of that mob. And this is. This is actually counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive to step away from the mob. We human animals, when we see a mob doing something, we want to join the mob, it's counterintuitive to step back, back. And actually, a lot of the leadership principles that I talk about are. They're actually counterintuitive. They're against your natural instincts. Even the. The idea of Extreme ownership, the first book that we wrote about leadership. Take ownership of anything, of everything that happens. Don't make any excuses. Don't blame anyone else. That's counterintuitive. That's against our natural instincts. Even as kids, little kids, they have the instinct to blame other people or blame other things. Like when you walk into the kitchen and the milk is spilled, and you look at your kid and you say, what happened? And your kid says, the milk spilled. The inanimate object on Its own fell over. So we start making excuses and blaming other people and blaming other things at birth. So what I'm asking you to do is actually counterintuitive. Even the four laws of combat leadership that I started teaching when I was in the SEAL teams, they're all counterintuitive. The first one is cover move, which means is teamwork. We support each other. We look out for our teammates. That's counterintuitive. We are born as human beings with the instinct to take care of ourselves. So it's counterintuitive to put our teammate first. But that's what good leaders do. They put the team first. They put each other. They put the other people on their team first. That's what good leaders do. Keeping things simple. Obviously, you have to keep things simple, but that's counterintuitive. There's a reason that we have to teach people to keep things simple, because their natural instinct is to make it crazy and complicated. The third law of combat leadership, prioritize and execute. Don't try and do 30 different things at the same time. You won't be able to do any of them. And yet that's our instinct, is to try and handle all of our problems at once. It's counterintuitive to prioritize what's the biggest problem and execute on that one. It's counterintuitive. Decentralized command. The idea of letting your subordinate leaders lead, that's absolutely counterintuitive. What we all want to do as human beings is we want to control everything ourselves. I'm glad you laughed. He's like, yo, that's me. Yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to control everything. It's counterintuitive to say, hey, you know what? Why don't you take lead on this and run? That's counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive to keep your ego in check and be humble. It's counterintuitive to open up your mind instead of close it. It's counterintuitive. It's much easier and much more natural to say, oh, I don't like your ideas. I don't like you. That's much more natural for us. I don't want to deal with your ideas. I don't want to hear from what you have to say. It's counterintuitive to actually open up your mind. It's counterintuitive to focus and try and understand other people's perspectives instead of trying to ram your perspective down their throat, which is what we all seem to do. It's counterintuitive to say, oh, no, wait, first I want to understand what you're thinking. That's counterintuitive. And yes, as I mentioned, it is counterintuitive to detach, to take a step back from your emotions, to take a step back from chaos and mayhem, and to look around and see what's actually happening. I had a funny situation with Seth once again. When we got back from deployment in task unit Bruiser. I took over the training for the west coast seals, and Seth took over as a task unit commander. And when he took over as task unit commander, now he was going through training to prepare to go on deployment. And in one of the blocks of training, shipboarding, he was climbing up a ladder, and a guy above him on this ladder who was trying. They were trying to climb onto a ship from a little small boat. As Seth was about to start climbing this ladder, the guy at the top of the ladder fell and landed square on the top of Seth's head and broke his neck. It broke his vertebrae. His spinal cord was okay, but he was injured for sure. He had numbness in his arm. He had to put on one of those big neck braces, which was pretty funny, especially because I choked him so much. And now all of a sudden, I wasn't allowed to for a few months. So he's in this big neck brace, but his task unit was still going through their training box, but he wasn't allowed to bear any weight, and he had to kind of take it easy a little bit. But when his task unit went out to the desert to go through their desert warfare training, I said, hey, listen, man, you got to at least go out there and watch what they're doing and see how they're doing and see what their leadership is doing and see how they're executing. So let's go out there. So we drove out to the desert where his task unit was going through their training. And the first training mission that we went on with his task unit, about halfway through this training mission, everything was completely falling apart. And what happened was there was a big ravine, and in this big ravine, his guys had been trying to leave, and they got ambushed by some opposing forces, which are actually other seals, but some bad guys up on the high ground, and they're shooting them with this high speed laser tag that we have. And so these guys are. The bad guys are in the high ground, and Seth's platoon is down in this ravine, and we're actually down in the ravine with his platoons. He's got two platoons there. We're down there in the ravine with him, and we're looking around, and no one in his task unit is making any decisions. They're all just frozen. They're shooting, they're yelling, I need you guys. I'm hit. Help me. They're just yelling and screaming. Nothing's happening. And Seth looks at me and he goes, can I tell him what to do? And I was like, no, not yet. Let's see if they figure it out. So another 30 seconds go by. No one's making any decisions. No one's doing anything positive. It's just chaos. And as this is happening, Seth looks at me and goes, let me tell him what to do. And I said, give him another 30 seconds. So another 30 seconds go by, still there's no calls being made. He says, can I tell him what to do? I said, yeah, go ahead. And he gets down next to one of the guys and he says, hey, Peel, right? Which is just a basic tactical call, which means we're going to move down this ravine and we're going to get out of the line of fire of these enemy soldiers. And as soon as he told that young SEAL to do it, that young SEAL said, peel right? And they all passed the word and they grabbed their wounded and they peeled to the right, and they were out of there. And Seth looked at me and he goes, man, it's so easy when you're way up here. Now, mind you, we were literally in the ravine where his guys were, and we were maybe standing or kneeling, one foot above them. And yet from that detached position of one foot, he was able to see clearly what to do. And I said to him, I said, hey, Seth, you remember when you and I went through this training two years ago? And he said, yeah. And I said, this is what it was like for me all the time. I never got wrapped up in my gun, never got wrapped up in shooting. I would always step back and look around, and that's how I was able to make calls. It was easy. It's easy if you take a step back and detach. That's what you need to do. So I tried to help him see that. And when you're in a leadership position, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to lead people to see things. You're not trying to force things onto people. You can't impose things on people. As a matter of fact, Seth wrote something about this as well. So this is Seth Stone writing. He said, when I met Jocko. For the first time, I was sure he hated me on a deep and personal level. Jocko approached me with aggression and looked me in the eyes. He came up to about half my face because I am a few inches taller than him. But he stood there, indifferent to my life or death, to me at all, but seemingly only assessing to himself if I should stay or go based on this first encounter. And I felt it. And in those few seconds, it seemed like he was leaning toward deciding that I should go, that I should not be part of his team. And I felt nervous and scared because I did not want to be fired. I had worked for other SEAL officers, but I could sense this man. Jocko was not like them. I was not his kind of naval officer. I was a surfer with longer hair. I was too lax with my men, too jovial, too unprofessional. The thing is, all those things were both true, yet at the same time untrue. The existence of opposing truths working themselves out in me as I tried to find myself and establish who I was. I wanted to be liked, to fit.

Seth Stone (75:23)

In, but I needed to lead.

Echo Charles (75:27)

So the things that Jocko did not like were things that needed to die anyways. Some of my men told me after the wars, you are just not the same as you used to be. You are different now.

Seth Stone (75:43)

And they were right.

Echo Charles (75:46)

I lost myself, but in doing so, I found myself. Jocko helped me on that path, but I had to figure it out, because it is a path, it is a struggle. You have to work it out on your own. It was actually Leif who reassured me about Jocko, saying, jocko is good to go, man. Give him a chance. If you want to keep your spot as platoon commander, come train jiu Jitsu in the mornings. That's what Leif told me, and so I did. Jocko had us lined up religiously in the mornings to fight each other. It was his way of determining platoon fault lines and strengths and leadership qualities and who had a will to win. He pitted us against one another, and he did not care who won. What he wanted to see was fighting. And we fought him, too. And that was most horrible because most of us, because most of us never heard of Jiu jitsu, and we didn't know any of the tactics or techniques from this grappling art. But we wanted to learn. Leif and I fought often, our necks so strained from choke holds that we could not even look to the left or to the right. And everybody in the morning officers meeting knew we had been fighting from the way we held our heads. We had bruises and scuffs and scrapes on our skin. We wore the right uniforms and we had shaved heads. I shaved my head after Jocko set in my mind that discipline is not worth risking over long hair or trying to look cool. And having a shaved head was the storm trooper way. Months later, in the evenings in Ramadi, when I plucked off the helmet from my head wearily in the thickness of the night air and felt the stickiness of the dust filled mud mixed with my sweat, I was glad I had no hair. Jocko had been right through those types of lessons. He had molded us into storm troopers and soldiers. But it is important to note that I did not shave my head right away and Jocko never required it. He just put it out there as a good idea. As a mentor, he did not seek to immediately and totally change the mentee. Even the best protege required patience as thousands of lessons, both big and small, were processed in the complex human mind. So when we are leading, we are not imposing things on people. That is not what's happening. At least it shouldn't be happening. When we're leading, what we're doing is caring about people. When I used to debrief a SEAL platoon after a training evolution and I would point out all the things that they did wrong, I would point out all the mistakes that they made, I would point about, point out, I would point out all the idiotic things that they had done and I was as harsh as you could possibly imagine. I'd look at that young platoon commander and be like, what were you even thinking bringing your platoon into that exposed position? You're going to get everyone killed. What's wrong with you? I was as harsh as I could possibly be. And as I thought about that, and I thought about this the other day, that I used to debrief platoons and guys would record it, audio record what I was saying so they could play it back later. Well, a while ago, one of my friends sent me a bunch of recordings of me debriefing a bunch of different SEAL platoons. And they are harsh. And yet I'm sitting here telling you that what a leadership position is, is you care about people. So how can I possibly go out and be so harsh in my debriefs? And how does the team not reject me and think I'm imposing things on them? And the answer is, the answer is that those guys in those platoons knew that, that more than anything else in the world, I did care about them. And my harshness was not out of Disgust or anger. My harshness was out of love because I wanted them to be able to do their job and I wanted them to be able to bring their guys home. That's what leadership is, caring about your people. And when you care about your people, your people will care about you. We have a saying in the SEAL teams very similar to that. We have a saying in the SEAL teams. If you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you. So if you're going to jump a parachute, you maintain that parachute. You pack it correctly, so when you pull the rip cord, it takes care of you. If you have a dive rig, you take care of that dive rig. You do the proper maintenance. You set it up correctly so when you're underwater, you can breathe, you take care of your weapons, so when you pull the trigger, they shoot. If you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you. But this applies absolutely. It applies absolutely with people. And if you take care of your people, they will take care of you. They will absolutely take care of you. The first guy to get wounded badly in task unit bruiser, a guy named Cowie. Awesome guy, terrific guy. Very early in deployment, he gets lit up by a machine gun and he catches a round just above his knee. It exes up by exits. His leg up by his groin, his leg is wrecked. It's an armor piercing round. It's wrecked. And he gets pulled off the battlefield and taken to the medical center, the field medical center that we have. And that's when I get there to go and see him and check on him, how he's doing. And by now the. The mission is over and the platoon's back there and guys are checking on him. And I walk into the room where he is, and this is after the doc looked at me and I asked him about his leg, and he kind of gave me the we're not sure look. So I'm thinking that this young, athletic stud of a human being, he may never walk again. He may lose his leg. I don't know what's going to happen. And I walk into the room and I look at Cowie and he sees me. And, you know, he's on morphine, so he's a little messed up, but he sees me and he locks eyes with me and I walk over to him and he puts his hand up and I put my hand in his hand, and he pulls me in close to him and he says, sir, let me stay. Let me stay. I'll sweep up. It doesn't matter. Just please don't send me home Let me stay. Same thing happened with Ryan Job. Ryan Jobe shot in the face. This is the same day that Mark Lee got killed. Ryan Jobe got shot in the face. And luckily, because he was a disciplined machine gunner, he had his weapon up in his cheek, well, where it's supposed to be. And so the round that was aimed at his head actually hit his weapon first. And it slowed down the round enough, but it blew a bunch of frag into Ryan's face, into his head. But luckily, he made it out of there, and he was evacuated. Casualty evacuated. He was put into a medically induced coma. And when he woke up from that coma, he couldn't see anymore. He's blind. And the first time I talked to him on the phone, the first thing he said to me was, let me come back, sir. Mikey Mansour, same thing. Mikey Mansour. One time, Seth called me. He called on the radio and said, we've had a casualty evacuation. Mikey's being casualty evacuated. And I wasn't there to receive the message. I go down the. The Tactical Operations center hands me this message, says, michael Monsour has been evacuated. Casualty evacuation. What happened? What happened? I don't know how bad he is. I don't know what kind of wound he got. I call up Seth on the field radio, hey, what happened? Well, how bad is Mikey? Wounded. And Seth goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Mikey's okay. He has an ear infection. It's a bad one. He's going to Balad to get some medicine. Okay, might want to clarify that next time. So Mikey goes and gets some medicine. He comes back, and now he's on my camp, and Seth's over on the other side of Murmur. And Mikey gets there, and as soon as he comes back from getting his treatment on his ear and his medicine for his ear, he comes back to my camp. He says, what are the guys doing tonight? I said, well, they're going on a mission. You're not going to be able to make it. And Mikey just looked at me and said, sir, please get me back before they leave. And we found the convoy for Mikey, and he went back so he could roll out with his platoon mates, so he could take care of his friends. If you take care of your people, your people will take care of you. After Seth died, I was talking to his brother, and his brother was telling me this story. Seth's neck healed up, and he was a task unit commander, and he deployed back to Iraq. And this was in 2008. And at this time in early 2008 didn't look like there was going to be a lot going on during deployment. And Seth talked to me about it. You know, what am I going to do? There's nothing going on. I said, hey, man, go over there, work out, get in good shape, train jiu jitsu, do what you can and come back home. I'll see you in a few months. Cool. So Seth goes on deployment with his troop, and everyone's expecting kind of a mellow deployment. Well, shortly after he got there, it turns out that the army was conducting a significant operation in a part of Baghdad called Sadr City, which had been controlled by the enemy for five years straight. And so the army finally realized they need to go in there and stop this. And they were. They went in there and they were building this giant wall to kind of cut off Solder City from being able to be resupplied. And they were taking heavy casualties as they built this giant wall. And they heard that SEALS were back there, and they requested support from the seals. And the commanding SEAL grabbed Seth and said, all right, you're going to take some troops and you're going to go into Solder City and help the army build this wall. And of course, I was tracking this. There's a classified phone that you can talk on. And I knew what Seth was doing. I knew how things were going. And I was reading the after actions reports and I could see. And Seth was telling me how horrible it was in Solder City. The enemy was determined. They had a lot of enemy. They had freedom of movement. They were extremely well armed. They had developed weapon systems and acquired weapon systems that were very difficult to deal with. I knew all this was happening. Well, I talked to Alex after Seth died, and Alex told me he was tracking it too. Seth had been sending emails in the beginning of the deployments. Oh, deployment's fine. There's nothing going on. And all of a sudden, they took a sharp turn. We're conducting some very hazardous missions. There's a lot of army casualties. These attacks are incredibly intense. And I got an email that showed me exactly how hard the fighting was there. Seth sent me an email that had his last will and testament that he wanted me to execute if he died. And his brother Alex was sensing the same things in the emails. Not quite as clear, but he could tell by Seth's tone when they talked and when he got emails that this was a grave situation. And finally Alex wrote in an email and said, hey, brother, it sounds like it's bad. Is there anything you need from Me, Is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything that you want me to help with? And Seth wrote back one sentence. He just said, pray for my men. He didn't care about himself. He didn't ask for anything for himself. All he cared about was his troops.

Seth Stone (93:07)

And that's what leadership is.

Echo Charles (93:11)

You take care of your people. That's leadership. I want to close this out now, but before I close it out, I want to say thank you to a very special guest that is here tonight. Up there in the balcony seat where she belongs, that's Seth Stone's mom, Debbie. Thank you for coming, Mom. I've been talking tonight about the choices that we make, the way we decide to look at things. And I got two last things I want to talk about that I think capture that. 2018, there was a ceremony for the commissioning of the USS Michael Mansour. Michael Mansour was in Task Unit Bruiser during one of the last operations that he would be going on. He jumped on a grenade and smothered it in order to save three of our other teammates. And he was killed by the wounds that he suffered. And he received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions. And they made a ship and named it after him. And in 2018, they had a commissioning ceremony for this ship. And many of the members of Task Unit Bruiser were together again for the first time. Most of us were there, not all of them. When we were together, we went to SEAL Team three, the old SEAL team. There's a new SEAL compound now, but the SEAL Team 3 building that we had been in was still there. And when you go to a military unit, oftentimes they will memorialize the fallen members of that military unit on the walls of their building. And what you might not know About Seal Team 3 is Seal Team 3 was formed in 1983. It's not that old. And when Task Unit Bruiser was at Seal Team 3 and I was at Seal Team 3, it was 2005, and those walls were empty because there had been no members of SEAL Team 3 killed in combat. And as I walked through those halls now in 2018, there was pictures on those walls. There were memorials on those walls. Memorials for Mark, memorials for Mikey, memorials for Ryan, for Chris, Kyle, and for Seth. And as I saw those pictures, I started to get angry. I started to get mad. I started to get frustrated. I started to think that maybe.

Seth Stone (98:11)

Maybe we were cursed.

Echo Charles (98:15)

We were being followed by death. We made it home. We lost Mark and we lost Mikey, but we made it home. And then we lost Ryan. Who died of his wounds. And then Chris, Kyle, and finally Seth. And I'm thinking, what is going wrong? Why is this happening? Maybe we're cursed. And then I thought about it and I realized and I chose and I decided that that was absolutely not the case. I saw that that was absolutely not the case. We were not cursed at all. We were blessed. We were blessed. We were blessed to have known these guys. We were blessed to have spent time with them. We were blessed to have served alongside them. We were blessed to be able to call them brothers. We were blessed to have their memories. We were blessed, not cursed at all. And knowing them and serving with them, that wasn't a curse. It was a blessing. And it made us better. War made us better. But that's a choice. You have to see it that way. You have to decide to. To see it in the most positive way. And that's the correct way. It's the truth. So when you're going through hard times, think about that. Think about the choice you're going to make on how you're going to look at it and how you're going to allow these bad things in your life to impact you. You have a choice to make. Make the right choice. And it's the same thing when it comes to facing challenges. And there's another story that stuck with me. I had John Stryker Meyer Tilt on my podcast many times now. He was a Green Beret, Special Forces during Vietnam. He was a sog Green Beret. And through him I learned many stories about what those guys went through. And one story that stuck with me was August 23, 1968. There's a forward operating base, Forward Operating Base 4. And the enemy spent months preparing and planning. And on that day, they executed a horrific attack and a well coordinated attack to overrun that forward operating base. And they did a very good job in their execution. They made it through the wire, they got inside the compound, they were throwing explosives and grenades. And they had trained specifically for this operation for months. And they caught the Green Berets off guard and they kind of started to get the upper hand. But the Green Berets were able to get a foothold back. And they held on long enough until the next morning when reinforcements arrived and they were able to take that base back over. But these enemy soldiers, their bodies were laying around. And the Green Berets started to go around and try and gather intelligence from what these enemy soldiers had with them. And they didn't have much. They had some grenades, they had machine guns. They didn't have Maps. They didn't have any written documents. They had weapons, but they also had something else they were wearing. Many of them were wearing headbands. And on their headbands they had the words written, we came to die. We came to die. Think about that. Think about that choice. Think about fighting against people that made that choice. And when I heard that story, it made me think to myself, wait a second. How do you fight against somebody that's made that choice to. That's chosen to die? And then I thought, you know what? We've been doing this. We did it against the Japanese, the kamikazes. They chose to die. We fight against the suicidal jihadists. They chose to die. How do you fight an enemy that's choosing to die? And how do we defeat them? And I realized how. I realized how. Because we have our own mantra. We have our own battle cry, and it's the opposite of theirs. They say they came to die. We. We came to live. We came to build. We came to help. We came to grow. That's what we're here for. And that's a decision that we can all make. Not a decision of destruction, not a decision of death, but to choose to live and to relish every second of this life and do everything we can with it. And that's what I would ask every single one of you to do. Go out into the world and build and grow and help and go out.

Seth Stone (105:03)

And live.

Echo Charles (105:09)

And that's what I've got, everybody. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Go live. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much.