Jocko Willink

I do.

Because it would have caused so much destruction in the city

that it would have caused mass civilian casualties displacement of people it would have been very problematic had we done a fallujah type clearance of ramadi so and i think there actually would have probably been more casualties had we done it that way on the u.s side certainly on the iraqi civilian side it would have been it would have been rough so i thought it was a good plan what was the first operation that you took your task unit on

we started doing some, like almost immediately, some small DAs and stuff like that.

Like I remember the first DA that Leif was going on.

And this was, we had a, when we first got there, the first couple weeks, we were still under command of SEAL Team One.

So my skipper hadn't taken over yet.

So I had taken over the Ramadi, task unit Ramadi space, but my SEAL wasn't in charge yet.

And so my goal was to do as many missions as we could for the SEAL Team 1 CO so that my CO would be like, Jocko knows what he's doing.

And that's what we did.

And I had a good relationship.

I had known the CO from SEAL Team 1.

And when he came out and I met with him and I kind of presented the case and explained to him what I saw and how we were going to operate, he was just...

We got along great.

And so when I started running up missions that we were going to do, he was approving them.

And that was very cool.

And we got very aggressive out of the gate.

But I remember Leif's first direct action mission.

And he may have never done a direct action mission before.

I'm the task unit commander, but this thing was pretty close to the front gate.