Jocko Willink

I mean, I was completely fluent.

I was E-Dog mafia.

If you go talk to anybody that was at SEAL Team 1 in between 1991 and 1998, I was a made man in the SEAL Team 1 E-5 mafia, 100%.

There's no one that would ever deny that.

And so I spoke fluent.

E5 mafia language.

And then as I started to learn the officer language, what I think I was able to do was translate what was happening with the officers to the E-Dogs, which I think a lot of times gets missed, to this day gets missed.

Because it really is two different perspectives that are happening.

And there's a lot of things that happen at the officer level that don't ever get told to the E-dogs.

And that does create frustration and angst amongst the troops because they don't understand what the hell is going on.

And when that happens, man, they get pissed.

And I got pissed.

When I was an E-dog and we weren't being told what was happening, we're freaking pissed.

I tell this one story where...

We were on the ship, this is my third platoon, and we got told, hey, you guys are gonna launch your Zodiacs off the ship.

We go, cool.

So we drag all the stuff upstairs.

It takes an hour and a half.

Gotta bring the fuel up, which means you gotta notify the fire party and they gotta set up all their stuff so you can bring the fuel up to the top deck so you can launch the boats inside the ribs.

And two or three hours into this, they're like, actually, you're gonna launch off of the well deck.