US NAVY SAID TO BE BACKING UP JERUSALEM. 4/4: To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision by Admiral James Stavridis USN (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Risk-All-Conflicts-Crucible-Decision/dp/0593297741/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
At the heart of Admiral James Stavridis’s training as a naval officer was the preparation to lead sailors in combat, to face the decisive moment in battle whenever it might arise. In To Risk it All, he offers up nine of the most useful and enthralling stories from the US Navy’s nearly 250-year history, and draws from them a set of insights that we can all put to use when confronted with fateful choices.
Conflict. Crisis. Risk. These words have a distinct meaning in a military context that we hope will never apply identically in our own lives. But at the same time, as Admiral Stavridis shows with great clarity, many lessons are universal.
To Risk it All is filled with thrilling and heroic exploits, but it is anything but a shallow exercise in myth burnishing. Every leader in this book has real flaws, as all humans do, and the stories of failure, or at least the decisions that have been defined as such, are as crucial as the stories of success. In the end, when this master class is concluded, we will be better armed for hard decisions both expected and not.
1943 USS YORKTOWN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:04.7 | This is CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Admiral Jim Stavridis. United States Navy retired. His new book is to risk at all All, Nine Conflicts in the Crucible of Decision. |
| 0:14.8 | It is December 7, 1941 on USS West Virginia, a battleship, a dreadnought, tied up in in Pearl Harbor and now being attacked by the wave |
| 0:25.6 | after wave of Japanese warplanes. This is the moment that begins the crisis for the |
| 0:32.0 | U.S US Navy. A Cook third-class, Doris-Dory Miller from Waco, Texas, African-American, |
| 0:39.8 | is spending that day a Sunday on, on board with his friends, and yet the attack comes |
| 0:46.2 | and they're told to go to General Quarters. |
| 0:48.9 | At that moment, Doris, Dory Miller, makes decisions that I, Jim, I don't understand how he came to this level |
| 0:56.2 | of heroism and he stayed there all day. |
| 0:58.4 | He must have known he wasn't going to survive. |
| 1:01.0 | Indeed, you can only look at this as an act of pure courage, pure heroism. |
| 1:08.7 | He literally charges to the sound of the guns. |
| 1:11.2 | He goes to the bridge of the ship where his captain has been mortally wounded, but he |
| 1:15.8 | helps evacuate the captain from the bridge. And then most famously, he goes down to a gun deck. |
| 1:21.2 | There's a crew served single anti aircraft gun. |
| 1:26.4 | He doesn't know how to operate it. |
| 1:28.0 | He hasn't been trained to do that. |
| 1:30.2 | He and a couple of his shipmates kind of figure it out. |
| 1:33.1 | He scraps himself into this gun and starts shooting down Japanese aircraft. |
| 1:37.8 | Despite the fact that the decks on fire, the bullets are whizzing by him, |
| 1:41.8 | Japanese torpedoes are hitting the ship, it's literally |
| 1:44.9 | sinking in the harbor. |
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