- At this point,
she's not doing a very good job
because she's about to get killed.
She's not giving up any information.
What she should actually do is
try and craft some kind of a story
that stalls or prolongs her life.
Hey, this is Jocko Willink.
I'm sitting in my
podcast studio, remotely,
and this is The Breakdown.
[upbeat music]
First up is "Saving Private Ryan."
[waves crashing]
Obviously, this scene is D-Day.
The military really looked
to bring a lot of people
that didn't have combat experience
to do the invasion on D-Day
because they knew that needed
some fresh mindsets going in,
that weren't gonna be
absolutely horrified,
but even with that you can tell from this
that there's a lot of fear going on
because they're going into a
pretty hellacious situation.
[soldiers vomiting]
You can see a lot of the guys
are looking very nervous.
They're trying to capture
that on the camera.
You see some of the guys that
are actually throwing up,
and they could be throwing
up from being nervous,
that can happen, but my
guess is in this case
most of these guys are throwing up
because they're sea sick.
They're not used to being on the water,
and they're going through rough seas.
Your body starts to adapt
to the motion of the ocean
when you spend a lot of
time on the water in boats,
but even going from a large ship,
which these guys have been on,
into smaller boats, people
that aren't used to it,
they can definitely get sea sick.
And that's probably what's going on here.
- 30 seconds!
God be with you!
- Port side stick, starboard side stick,
move fast and clear those murder holes!
- In a Navy vessel, the starboard side is,
as you're looking forward in the vessel,
it's the right-hand side,
the port side is the left-hand side,
so he's saying the stick,
which is just a group of people,
that are on the starboard side,
he's just giving them instructions.
United States military is made up
of multiple different branches.
You have the Army, Navy,
Air Force, Marine Corps.
In this scene right
here, you see Navy boats
that are bringing US Army
soldiers to the shore.
As soon as they hit the shore,
they're gonna be doing what the Army does.
While they're in the water,
they're doing what the Navy does.
You have to have a good relationship
between the services in
order to get the job done,
and they certainly are showing that here.
- Want plenty of feet between men.
Five men, it's a juicy opportunity,
one man's a waste of ammo.
- What he's talking about
right there, he's saying,
keep your dispersion is what we call it,
it means space yourselves out,
don't bunch up in a group.
If you're all together in a tight group,
you become an easy target for the enemy
because they don't have
to shoot very accurately
and they'll hit one of you.
If you're in a group, they
shoot a burst of ammunition,
they can take out three,
four, or five guys
that are in that group.
What that sergeant is telling
them is to keep your distance
from each other so you make
yourselves harder targets.
[droplets pattering]
Most of the times, when you do some kind
of an amphibious operation
coming over the beach,
you're gonna get wet.
There's a chance that you
could possibly stay dry,
but it's a pretty small chance.
It's one of the things
that makes coming over the beach
an amphibious operations so hard.
Not only does it make you
cold, but it affects your gear,
your radios, your weapons,
everything gets affected,
especially by salt water.
It's a real challenge
and it's something you
have to contend with
'cause it's gonna happen.
[whistling]
[whistling]
[metallic scraping]
- [Shouting voice] There
is fire in the whole--.
[gun firing]
One of the things that
makes "Saving Private Ryan"
so realistic is that it doesn't shy away
from showing the horrific
graphic nature of war.
War is absolutely violence.
It's killing and it's
death, maiming human beings,
and it shows that really without any mercy
in this opening scene.
This is actually a nightmare scenario,
coming across an open area,
which starts with the water,
and then goes on to the beach,
and you're facing elevated
machine gun positions
from the enemy.
They're shooting down at you,
from a totally protected position.
So what do you do in
a situation like that,
how do you face that?
Well, what you have to do,
and it's very counter-intuitive,
is you have to move forward.
As a leader or as just one of these troops
that's out there trying
to survive the situation,
you might think, I just
wanna stay here and hide,
I don't wanna move,
but what you have to do is move.
And what that also means,
is if you are with one of
your friends and they get hit,
you might not be able to help them,
and the best thing you
can possibly do for them
is to continue to advance.
That's what makes this
scene so hard to watch.
Guys are having to at that
moment make a decision
between staying with their
friend and dying together,
or moving forward to try
and accomplish the mission.
It's a horrible situation to be in.
[shouting]
- Navy beach battalion, sir.
I gonna clear these obstacles,
great halt for the tank.
- The Navy had units that
would go in to the beach
and clear out obstacles.
They'd also go and try
and clear out obstacles
that were in the water or on the beach
before the invasion even starts.
The predecessors to the
SEAL Teams were those guys,
the underwater demolition units,
and if you really wanna
get specific about it,
in the Battle of Tarawa,
over in the Pacific,
there was a operation that took place
where the Marine Corps
was taking that island,
and they hit a bunch of
underwater reefs with the boats,
and the boats got held up on those reefs.
And so the Marines had to get out
and had to go across
about 600 yards of water
before they got to the beach,
and they took massive casualties.
It was a horrendous scene.
And the US military, the
Navy and the Marine Corps,
realized that we needed to have someone
that could figure out
what was under the water
as they got closer to the beach,
and if there was obstacles there,
then they'd get rid of them.
And so they formed up the
Navy combat demolition units,
and those were the guys
that eventually became the
underwater demolition teams,
and those were the guys
that eventually became the SEAL Teams.
- All the fortress boundary is a channel.
- Order sir, you go spend the
last out there in this line.
- Come on blitz.
- One of the most important
things about the US military,
and any good military organization,
is that they use something
called decentralized command.
There's not some senior person,
at the top of the rank structure
making every single decision,
for the people on the front lines.
The people on the front lines,
understand what it is that
they're supposed to get done,
and then they go and do it by
any means that they see fit.
So sometimes there might
be a little conflict,
but as you can see Tom Hanks' character,
they have a little bit of a discussion,
but it last two sentences,
and then they move on,
and go and try and achieve the objective,
that's decentralized command
and you see it in action there.
[guns firing]
This scene depicts the incredible bravery,
that these soldiers had to storm forward,
facing a high percentage chance,
of them being killed or gravely wounded.
This is one of those epic
battle scenes that again,
reflects the courage of
the frontline soldiers.
Next up, we have "Apocalypse Now".
[upbeat music]
- [mumbles] Men this is
better than Disneyland.
- The premise of this movie is that
there's a guy Colonel Kurtz
that has gone native, gone rogue
and the US military decides
that he needs to be taken out,
and so they send a special forces soldier
along with a bunch of Navy
patrol boat personnel up
to go and kill him.
This is a movie.
Having someone go completely rogue
like that is pretty unrealistic,
it would get picked up on
and they'd be taken out of that situation
and put into someplace
where they could recover
and get a grip on reality again.
One of the things that
was unique about Vietnam
was the river system that
flowed throughout the country
in the Mekong Delta in other areas.
You know, they had what we
call the Brown Water Navy,
the predecessor to the special
boat teams which we now have
was guys driving small boats
that could push up into
these enemy controlled areas
and conduct operations,
and that's pretty much what
is taking place in "Apocalypse Now".
- Purple haze, look [mumbles],
[crosstalk]
- They've got a chief petty officer
in charge of this vessel,
a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy
is a very proud rank.
They say in the Navy
that chiefs run the Navy.
Navy chiefs are very
experienced tactically,
they understand what the job is,
and they do what they need
to do to get the job done.
- People can't picture me in Vietnam.
Chief picture me at home
having a beer watching TV.
[laughs]
[crosstalk]
- You might be wondering, well,
these guys are out on patrol.
They seem to be joking around.
They seem to be carefree.
You gotta remember that
anyone in the military
SEALS included,
we're just people and people have lives,
and they've got girlfriends back home
and they've got other things going on
and they wanna laugh and have a good time.
You know, this would be
obviously tactically unsound
to light off of purple smoke
and give your position away to the enemy,
and actually obscure
the vision of the people
that are on the boat,
that's a little bit unrealistic,
but for the fact that
they are sort of relaxed
because there's no actual
combat taking place.
That can happen,
now depending on where you are,
you need to use caution
and it certainly seems
that in this scene,
they've allowed a little
bit too much slack
and they're about to get a rude awakening.
[indistinct chattering]
[fireworks fizzling]
- It's, it's an ambush.
What you see kind of looks like fireworks
and I think in fact, they
probably are fireworks.
I think what they're trying
to simulate is tracer fire,
bullets that leave glowing red
or glowing green in the
air when they shoot,
it's a little unrealistic,
'cause you can tell that they
don't have a lot of velocity,
when tracer rounds are coming at you,
they're moving a lot faster than these.
But I think that's just the limitations
of special effects for this scene.
- Hey, over there.
[gun firing]
[machine gun firing]
- And then what you see is
the reaction from the boat,
which is a pretty standard reaction,
what they do is as quickly as possible,
return a heavy volume of fire
from their machine guns and try
and move the boat out of the kill zone,
which is the area of the ambush,
where if you stay there, you're gonna die.
As far as the weapons that they're using.
They're pretty standard
Vietnam era weapons.
They've got some M60 machine guns.
They've got a dual mounted
50 caliber machine gun,
and they've got M16.
That's what they use in Vietnam, for sure.
The Vietnam War from the
SEAL Team perspective,
is those are the guys that
really establish the reputation
of the SEAL Teams
by the operations that they conducted.
They just did an outstanding job
taking the fight to the enemy.
You know very unconventional way,
the SEALs that raised
me in the SEAL Teams,
some of them were the old Vietnam guys,
and I was an honor to be
able to learn from them.
Next, "G.I. Jane".
[tense music]
[water splashes]
[screams]
[tense music]
- The premise of this movie is that
there is a female that is
going through SEAL training
that has not happened before.
It looks like what they
are attempting to portray
is some kind of SERE training,
which is survival, evasion,
resistance and escape,
and it's training in
case you're ever captured
by the enemy in a time of war.
They start with being woken up
with water in thrown on her.
When you go to SERE school,
you're definitely gonna
experience all kinds of
little minor aggravations,
just being in a SERE Platoon,
you're going to get
woken up by your buddies,
with water being thrown onto you.
So that's something that
everyone's going to experience.
They're trying to torment
you mentally for two reasons.
One, to make sure that you can kind of
deal with the mental frustration
of people bothering you,
and two, because it's funny.
- What is your father's name?
It's Simple question, Lieutenant,
no reason not to answer
unless you wanna bleed.
What is your father's name?
- Dad.
- They are showing her
in a situation where she's being tied up
as if she was a prisoner of war.
That's what they're trying to simulate.
And then you know,
they're gonna try and mimic
what they think the prisoner
of war might experience.
You know, in SERE school,
you're gonna be hungry,
you're gonna get slapped around,
you're gonna ask a bunch of questions
in order to try and prepare
you for those situations,
should they unfold.
- Letting you carry out
your wounded Lieutenant,
was he too heavy?
- You are not getting anything out of me.
- It looks like the Master Chief
is really being pretty
brutal with a beat down
to the young lieutenant.
And I think it's just
in a lot of Hollywood activities going on.
There are limitations to
what they can do to the students
that are going through it,
but it's best For the training,
if people don't know what to
expect when they get there,
so I actually don't wanna talk
too much in detail about it,
because it's an experience that
hits people different ways.
The training is based on
lessons learned from guys
that were captured in Korea and Vietnam,
and what they learned from
those horrible environments.
I'll just say that this movie
doesn't seem very realistic.
[moans]
- Think we should go
easy on women lieutenant?
- Fuck you.
- Am So glad we're [mumbles]
[screams]
- At this point it seems they
have gotten little crazy.
Sometimes they portray
things in different way,
but you know the SEAL team
is a rough place to be.
Being in a SERE Platoon
or out of SEAL Team
or in the mild Military in general,
it's a harsh environment,
harsh things happen.
[water splash]
- [Soldier] Two fire
teams are still in the--
- You might think that there's a technique
to get through something
like waterboarding,
but the bottom line is,
there's no technique for
not being able to breathe,
you can breath hold for a little while,
maybe two minutes, maybe three minutes,
but eventually you're gonna need air
and you're gonna pass out,
it's just another method
of making you uncomfortable
and trying to get you used
to being uncomfortable.
And they're also trying to show you that,
you have limitations,
eventually what you have to do is
give some information so you can survive
and that's acceptable,
and you do your best to resist,
and not give away information
that could cost the lives
of fellow service members,
but you also wanna survive,
and so that's a tough bridge to gap.
One of the things that
happened in previous Wars
is people felt like if they had broken,
that they were less of a man for breaking.
Everyone has a breaking point,
and you need to understand how to contend
with that psychologically.
- Yeah, you got some Toby.
- Don't do it,
don't do it.
[mumbles]
- At this point she's
not doing a very good job
because she's about to get killed,
she's not giving up any information,
what she should actually do
is try and craft some kind of a story
that stalls or prolongs her life.
The goal is to give enough information
that you survive,
but not enough information that
the enemy can actually act,
and if you're giving a
little bit of information,
they think they can get more out of you,
then you can stay alive
a little bit longer
and hopefully make it out.
- That's a cheap.
- Seek life elsewhere.
- Suck my [beep]
[applause]
- In the SEAL Teams you go through
a lot of different schools
and you pass a lot of different tests.
When you get done with one test,
what you do is you go on to the next one,
you finish that achievement
and you move on there's no big celebration
of making it through
some block of training.
You just carry on and do your job.
"NAVY SEALS"
- Describe your method of entry.
- Came through a skylight.
- And you had contact on the hallway.
- One confirmed.
- When you get done with a mission,
you wanna review how the mission went,
from a tactical perspective
and see if there are any lessons learned.
No one's gonna remember every
little thing that they did,
but hopefully when you
take all the information
from all the different individuals,
you can paint a pretty good
picture of what happened.
And once you get done with that,
then you do a intelligence debrief,
to make sure you've
gathered good information,
and that information will then
get disseminated through
the intelligence community,
so that they can put all the
pieces of intelligence together
to get broader knowledge of the enemy.
- What was your active
center of interjectory?
- I entered the room in the third position
swept left to right.
- When you go into a room obviously,
you all can't go into the
room at the exact same moment,
so the first person goes in
that's the number one person,
the second person that goes
in is the number two person,
the third person that goes in
is the number three person,
and it goes right on down the line.
So that's all it is,
there's no rocket science there,
And then he did a normal room entry
and swept from left to right.
- Copilot had serious internal injuries,
I stabilized him,
prepared to move,
that's [beep] with the fan.
- The primary LZ was aborted,
I covered their movement to the secondary.
- The primary LZ,
is the primary landing zone,
if you're taking down a target
or you're conducting an operation
when you leave you're gonna
go get picked up somewhere,
the first place you
plan to go get picked up
by helicopters is called
the primary landing zone
and if that one is fouled
for whatever reason,
there's enemy there or
there's some problem with it,
then you'll move on to the secondary,
and then if that one's got a problem
you'll move on to the tertiary.
So in this particular scene,
they tried to go to the
primary landing zone, LZ
and there was a problem with it,
so they apparently moved to the secondary.
- Did you engage hostiles?
- I vaporized hostiles.
- When you're in the military,
you follow the rules of engagement
and rules of engagement do shift
depending on the situation.
The rules of engagement
definitely allow you
to defend yourself and the mission.
If you shoot your weapon at somebody
that's acting in a hostile manner,
it's really no factor.
- Oh, by the way thanks for the hot tip
on 100 assholes we encountered
in you're soft targets,
make sure wonder why they
call it intelligence.
- [Interviewer] That would be enough--.
- When he's describing a soft target,
that's generally a description of a target
that you think is gonna be
pretty easy to take down,
meaning there's not gonna
be a lot of resistance,
whereas a hard target you'd
be expecting resistance
and maybe some fortified positions.
Regardless soft target or hard target
you gotta prepare for some
kind of a worst-case scenario,
you gotta have contingencies
to handle at any target,
even if you go in thinking
it's gonna be soft,
it could go hard, you have
to anticipate that it could.
That was just the breakdown from GQ.
Thanks for watching.
[upbeat music]
