This is Jocco Podcast number 142 with Echo Charles and me,

Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

SLA Marshall could be a braggart of the first order.

I could write on toilet paper with a crann and sell it.

Was a routine boast, but his favorite claim to fame

was at first the most puzzling to me and years later the most significant

in terms of unraveling the hustler and the phony that he was,

and how he was nonetheless able to make such a mark on the US Army.

Slam regularly brought up the fact that the army had made him a general

despite his never having attended even one military school

and that he was the only general army to have this distinction.

He neglected to say and never would have had I not followed up

out of sheer curiosity that he'd gotten his star not in the regular army

but in the reserves.

Meanwhile, with no reason not to believe him,

I accepted Slam's story of World War I.

His experiences as an infantryman in all the major campaigns,

his battlefield commission to become the youngest second lieutenant in the US Army during the war,

the romantic tale he spawned of armistice day when he saw in the end of the war

sharing his canteens with his brigade commander in the trenches.

With no reason not to believe him, I accepted Slam's tales of World War II,

...