This is Jocco Podcast number 162 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

On the 22nd of April 2008, two marine battalions, the first battalion 9th Marines, the walking dead from Vietnam fame, and the second battalion 8th Marines were switching out in Ramadi, Iraq.

One battalion going home in a few days, and the other just starting its seven-month tour.

Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan Herder, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one from each battalion.

They were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate to an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines.

The same broken down ram shackled building was also home to a hundred Iraqi police.

They were my men in this fight against the terrorists in Ramadi.

Yale was a dirt poor mixed race kid from Virginia, with a wife and a daughter and a mother and a sister who lived with them, and he supported them as well on $13,000 a year.

Herder was a middle-class white kid from Long Island.

The two of them were from two completely different worlds in our country.

Not good, not bad, just different.

Had they not joined the Marine Corps, they would never have known each other.

They would never have even understood that multiple Americas exist simultaneously, depending on your education level, your family's income status maybe.

But they were Marines.

They were combat Marines.

And because of this bond, they were brothers, as close as if they were born to the same woman.

The mission orders they received from the sergeant, their squad leader, I am sure went something like this.

Okay, you two clowns, stand this post and let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.

You clear on that?

I'm also sure that Yale and Herder then rolled their eyes and said in unison something like, yes, sergeant, we got it.

We know what we're doing.

We just enough attitude that made the point without saying the words, no kidding sweetheart, we know what we're doing.

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