This is Jocco podcast number 16 with Echo Charles and me Jocco Willink. Good

evening Echo. Good evening.

We we couldn't have been more excited. It was a real mission. None of us had been

on a real mission before except for our LPO, our leading oozes, our leading

petty officer who is in the first Gulf War and our platoon commander who was in

on the Grenada invasion and fought at the radio tower. Those guys had this

small amount of combat experience but at the time for us that was a world apart

from what we had because the rest of us had zero. This was the 90s. There was no

war going on. And so now here we were with a real mission on deck. 1994 I think I

was about 23 years old. I'm in my second seal platoon and at the time being in a

seal platoon was literally the sole purpose and focus of my life. It was my whole

world and that's what most of my platoon mates were like as well. That's

that's what we were and this was an awesome platoon, a great platoon, the

Arg Alpha platoon. And as far as having tight friends and a brotherhood inside

of a platoon, this was definitely one of the best that I was ever in. If not the

best. And all of us were just a hundred percent about being in a seal platoon

and it was the world to us. And we didn't care about anything else really. Not

politics, domestic politics or international politics. We weren't sitting

around and reading newspapers and we barely even watched the news at this time.

We were deployed on a ship. There was no internet. We were we were troopers. You

know, we were Aaron boys as Colonel Kurt says in Apocalypse Now. We didn't know

about the policy, but we sure as hell would enforce it. And so we had this

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