Jocko Willink

And I don't think America was ready for that.

We weren't.

You know, we'd already made all kinds of mistakes, you know, standing down the Ba'ath soldiers and the army, standing down the Iraqi army.

Like, we made all kinds of mistakes out of arrogance as a country.

But I really don't think that we saw, like, oh, damn.

this is about to get really, really bad.

And that was in the spring of 2004.

And that is truly when things started to spiral.

Not quite.

Because as I'm finishing my deployment with SEAL Team 7,

My commanding officer, again, who is my ops officer in Unit 2, my executive officer at SEAL Team 2, now he's my commanding officer.

And he says, the last thing I do as a commanding officer is I'm going to make sure that you become the Admiral's aide.

No one wants to be the Admiral's aide, of course, because, you know, it's an administrative job.

But there's a reason why he wanted me to go be the Admiral's aide.

And it is because at that point in time, at that moment, I was going to come straight off the battlefield.

You know, this is 2003, 2004.

There hadn't been that many platoons gone over there.

I'm going to go straight off the battlefield and work directly for the Admiral.

And that's what they want.

They want somebody that has fresh combat experience that can tell him what is happening.