Welcome to Citizen, we have a very special guest today, John Warren.

You are the author of I Lost It, lead like a Marine, run towards a challenge, assemble

your fire team and win your next battle.

And that comes out yesterday, so that's good.

Good timing.

Yeah, perfect timing.

Before we get into the book and everything like that, tell me about your upbringing and

your service in the military, how you got there, why you decided to join all that stuff.

Yeah, I grew up a very normal life in South Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina in the

upstate, very patriotic family, both my grandfather served in World War II in the Pacific.

You know, it's been Sunday afternoons watching, you know, war movie re-runs on TVS and TNT and

played a lot of basketball and was recruited for all the military academies and ironically

told them all know I wasn't interested in going into the military and then went to school

and 9-11 happened and that's when I really felt called to go into the Marine Corps

or wanted infantry and got that.

And you enlisted?

I went OCS, so I came to an officer, a green lieutenant that knew nothing who was supposed

to lead a platoon of Marines, who just got back from Fallujah.

Yeah, that's always been kind of an interesting dynamic in the military to me.

I don't really understand the way that we do that, frankly.

It's definitely interesting, I think the lieutenants that keep their mouth shut the longest

end up doing the best.

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