Jocko Willink

And when we came back,

it was kind of, once it got out, it was kind of the beginning or one of the triggering points of the true insurgency in Iraq.

Like I woke up that morning and there was like, you could look down from our base and you could see like fires from the highways, vehicles were being ID'd and stuff.

And it was the beginning of the real formation of the insurgency, which I wasn't really quite 100% sure on,

But you could see something was changed.

Something just changed, and you could feel it.

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.