This is Jocko podcast number 534 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening.

Good evening.

365 dawns carved us a hollow until we became strangers wearing familiar faces to the families we left behind.

Dawn by dawn until the ground we held lived within us as much as we lived within it a different kind of becoming

Survival evolved instinct into intelligence

We learned to hear threat in the absence of children's laughter to taste a menace in a sea of glances We felt danger in the absence of children's laughter to taste menace in a sea of glances.

We felt danger in the wrongness of an afternoon shadow.

We were students of each other's breaking points.

We had trust.

When everything went sideways, we could remain steady.

Our faithful judgment, the last thing standing, when solutions failed.

By the end, we carried the city with us.

Every building, a reminder of families caught between our

mission and our enemy every intersection the memory of a friend gone every smell a

moment shared with death the terrible alchemy of the experience making us unbreakable but sending us home as strangers to ourselves

and that right there is a poem called familiar faces which is written by j Altieri, who was a soldier, a team and squad leader with team Catamount during the Battle of Ramadian.

He was there with the 2nd Brigade, 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard.

And those are soldiers that did a valiant job

Taking the fight to the enemy and setting conditions for victory in that city

And we've heard from well, we've heard from the commander of that brigade

General John Gronsky we also heard from General Greg Knight, who is a task force

battle captain during that deployment. And tonight we have Jason Pellateer, who served as a company

...