This is Jocco Podcast number 112 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening,

Echo. Good evening. I had a friend and someday when I can, I will tell you all about him.

But until then, for now, I will say that I could not have asked for a better friend. Did

he have faults? Sure. Don't we all? Now, most of his faults weren't really that big of a

deal, but they were raw, raw because he admitted to them all openly and directly and naively,

to be honest, in a sort of pointed and heavy handed self critique, he would bear his weaknesses

to the world and to me and to himself. And he would speak to me as if I had no faults.

And I would try to explain otherwise, but he wouldn't listen. He would only judge himself.

I'm too emotional, he would say. Not really, I'd tell him. I don't know how to talk to people

right. Sure you do, I'd say. I make the same mistakes over and over and over again, he

would say, we all do. I would tell him. I was better than him at some things. We both

knew that. There were other things he was better at than me. But he always downplayed those

things and we both knew that too. When we were overseas in a bad place, in a wretched place,

he never complained. And I gave him every reason too. I put him in the worst locations with

the greatest possible chances for failure and the highest probability for fire and theory

and blood and death. But despite the enemy and the heat and the living conditions and

the fear and the wounded men and the screams and the misery that was all around, he did

not complain. It seemed at times that God himself was trying to test the limits of my

friend. And it seemed like sooner or later, the bullets or the bombs would find him. But

through some incomprehensible miracle, he survived through that deployment. Now, I make

no claim whatsoever to understand why things in life unfold the way they do. In fact, I

must say that many of the things I've seen in the world make no sense to me at all. Sometimes

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