- 4 days ago
Dave Berke served for over 23 years as a USMC fighter pilot, Top Gun graduate and instructor, and combat veteran.
Berke became the first operational pilot qualified in the F-35B Lightning II. He flew the F/A-18 Hornet, as well as several other fighter jets, served as a forward air controller on the ground in Iraq, and later became an instructor at Top Gun.
Berke speaks with Business Insider about the realities of operating as a pilot aboard an aircraft carrier, including the demands of carrier life and combat deployments following 9/11.
In 2026 alone, US aircraft carriers participated in combat missions in Venezuela, Iran, and Yemen.
Since retiring as lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps in 2017, Berke has worked as an instructor and executive at Echelon Front, where he teaches leadership, accountability, and decision-making under pressure.
For more:
https://echelonfront.com/
Berke became the first operational pilot qualified in the F-35B Lightning II. He flew the F/A-18 Hornet, as well as several other fighter jets, served as a forward air controller on the ground in Iraq, and later became an instructor at Top Gun.
Berke speaks with Business Insider about the realities of operating as a pilot aboard an aircraft carrier, including the demands of carrier life and combat deployments following 9/11.
In 2026 alone, US aircraft carriers participated in combat missions in Venezuela, Iran, and Yemen.
Since retiring as lieutenant colonel from the Marine Corps in 2017, Berke has worked as an instructor and executive at Echelon Front, where he teaches leadership, accountability, and decision-making under pressure.
For more:
https://echelonfront.com/
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TechTranscript
00:00My name's Dave Burke, call sign CHIP.
00:02I was a Marine Corps fighter pilot for 23 years, flying F-18s, F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s.
00:09And this is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:12I spent my entire life fantasizing and dreaming and working towards being a fighter pilot
00:17to fly off carriers, and the day I leave Top Gun, I blink my eyes and I'm in Ramadi, Iraq.
00:22Leading ground marines in the most violent city in the world is something I never, ever
00:29thought of, I never expected, and I never considered, and I never pursued.
00:38There is no comparison between launching and recovering, taking off and landing from an
00:42aircraft carrier than from a regular runway.
00:45It's almost impossible to even try to compare the two.
00:49Landing on a carrier, you're kind of like smashing into the flight deck at about 800 or 900 feet
00:54per minute.
00:54So it is what they call a controlled crash.
00:56But also, we have a very small landing area.
00:59An aircraft carrier is about 1,100 feet long, but the runway is only about 300 feet long.
01:04More importantly, there are wires that a hook on your jet have to catch to slow you down.
01:10Those wires only take up about 100 feet, so you have to be really, really precise.
01:15Every carrier landing that you attempt, you expect to not land, meaning you prepare to miss.
01:22And it's not because you think you're going to miss, but the runway is so short that the
01:25second you touch down, you go to full throttle to take back off.
01:29Now, if you catch a wire, the wire will stop you.
01:32It doesn't matter how fast you're going or how much power you have on the jet.
01:34But if you don't, you'll be at the end of the runway in about a second.
01:38So you need to be getting back airborne right away.
01:40If you're coming in at about 140 knots, maybe 170 miles an hour, you'll slow to a stop in maybe
01:46two seconds.
01:47So these things are violent.
01:49They're tons of fun, at least during the day, but they're nothing like regular airports.
01:54Carrier landings at night in bad weather are always the scariest experiences that most pilots
01:59have.
01:59We were in the Sea of Japan.
02:02It was probably 2 o'clock in the morning.
02:04I'm coming back to land, and the ship had essentially steamed into a snowstorm.
02:09And I remember being up in the catapult, getting ready to launch, thinking, this is dumb.
02:13They're probably not going to launch.
02:14Boom.
02:15Off I go.
02:16I'm like, oh, wow.
02:18And it was bad, but it also deteriorated while I was airborne.
02:22And so throughout the evening, we started seeing like the clouds coming down.
02:26Things were getting worse.
02:27We all knew coming back this was not going to be a good night.
02:29I'm going to conduct a landing where I'm not going to be able to see the ship.
02:31We call it a zero-zero landing.
02:33I've only had two of these in my whole career.
02:35Any naval aviator hearing this knows what that means.
02:37It is going to be terrifying.
02:39And I'm going to have to rely on the ship's radar and eventually the LSOs to talk me
02:44into landing on the carrier because I'm not going to be able to see it myself.
02:48I was panic-stricken.
02:50Tons of fear.
02:50And so I'm up in what we call holding.
02:53I'm like probably 10 miles behind the ship, maybe 15 miles behind the ship.
02:58I'm up at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet and I'm just circling waiting for my turn to come
03:02down
03:03to land knowing I'm going to fly into essentially a storm.
03:06And I am totally freaking out.
03:09I am having to go through this mental exercise of calm down, relax, shake out your hands, shake
03:13out your neck.
03:14That's the worst part of the landing because you're not doing anything.
03:17You're just waiting for your turn.
03:18In retrospect, I'll always scratch my head like why did I even do this?
03:22But once you're airborne, there are no alternatives in carrier aviation.
03:26You've got to get back aboard the ship.
03:27There's snow on the jet.
03:28There's snow on the aircraft carrier.
03:29The LSOs talk me into the wires and I land.
03:31People were congratulating me, telling me what an amazing job it was.
03:35They're watching it on camera and people are telling me I did an awesome job.
03:38And I felt, I felt so good.
03:40I felt like I had accomplished something.
03:43And I remember going back to my room that night after this unbelievable career defining
03:47event and I went to bed and I had this nagging feeling.
03:50I felt like I was a passenger in my own plane.
03:53It was an odd thing because looking back, I didn't really felt like I did anything.
03:57I kind of, I followed some instructions.
03:59I did what other people told me to do.
04:00But if I was doing it by myself, it wouldn't have happened.
04:02And that changed my trajectory of my perspective and experience about being a carrier pilot.
04:08There's an old saying in aviation that said, it's better to be on the ground wishing you
04:13were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground.
04:16And I never understood what that meant, even though I heard it a hundred times.
04:20And it was like, ah, come on.
04:21That was the first time like, now I know why people say that.
04:29Top Gun is just a fancy name for what it's called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons
04:34School.
04:34I would absolutely be lying if I didn't tell you that the movie Top Gun completely changed
04:39the trajectory of my life.
04:40So the movie comes out in 1986.
04:43I'm 13, almost 14 years old when it comes out.
04:46And on the full screen of this movie, you are seeing the F-14 Tomcat, jets off carriers,
04:51dog fights, missiles.
04:53I owe a lot of my career to being captivated by that movie.
04:56The original also, and the sequel, also didn't get everything right.
05:00When you get to Top Gun, there's always a little sense of competition between you and
05:05your counterparts.
05:05There's no trophy at Top Gun, they don't rank you.
05:08The goal of Top Gun is to train you as a student so you can go on to be an
05:13instructor of a high
05:14caliber to prepare other students and other pilots to go to war.
05:18The chance to go to Top Gun as a student is a pretty rare event.
05:21It's very coveted.
05:22It's what most of the pilots want.
05:23It just doesn't happen for most pilots.
05:25Every squadron sends on average one pilot per year.
05:29Squadron has somewhere between 17 to 20 pilots.
05:32I think we had 19 when I was there, me and another pilot got brought into our commanding
05:36officer's office.
05:37We sat down and he just said, hey, you two are going to Top Gun, you're going to represent
05:42the squadron.
05:42He was a pretty demanding guy, really good believer in training his pilots.
05:47He was happy to send them to schools.
05:49Everybody in fighter aviation knows what Top Gun is.
05:52They also know, aside from the movie, what it truly represents is the pinnacle of your craft.
05:58Top Gun is located at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada.
06:01It's kind of in the middle of nowhere.
06:03It's not an ideal place to be stationed, but it's a really good place to fly and train
06:08an aircraft.
06:09You can fly supersonic.
06:10You can drop bombs.
06:11You can simulate a lot of threats.
06:13Fallon is in the middle of nowhere because it gives you the best opportunity to do the
06:16most training without really impacting a local population.
06:19Typical day at Top Gun is a long day.
06:22You spent hours the day before and hours the morning of planning, preparing, rehearsing, coordinating.
06:28You'll do training missions that last less than 30 minutes.
06:31You are burning gas in full afterburner, doing one against one dog fighting, and you are burning
06:36through gas like it's crazy.
06:38Come back and you're going to debrief sometimes five hours, sometimes even longer, but a very
06:44long debrief.
06:45Every flight, every evolution, there's instructors that are evaluating you.
06:49The only way to do that is to set an obscenely high bar of expectation and then demonstrate
06:56that you can actually identify all the errors, all the shortcomings, all the failures, no
07:02matter how small they are, and that takes time.
07:05If you take four or six people on a mission, you got to go through every single one of those
07:10pilots' mission, how they flew, their radar, their communication, their formation, their
07:15flow.
07:16And so you can see things start to really stack up.
07:18Everything about being at Top Gun is humbling, everything.
07:21My first mission at Top Gun, the first flight was a dog fighting mission where I was flying
07:26against another instructor, just one against one.
07:28I did such a bad job.
07:29When we landed, he's like, don't get out of your flight gear.
07:32We're just going to go fly again, and we called it an immediate refly, which meant I was so
07:37out of the parameters that debriefing wasn't even going to be a good use of the time.
07:41I was totally in over my head at the beginning.
07:43The instructors fly airplanes to such a degree of precision that my mistakes got magnified
07:48to a point where he's like, hey, we just need to do this again.
07:51Just take it easy.
07:52And it was a little embarrassing, but Top Gun is not a place where you're expecting to outperform
07:57anybody on the instructor side.
07:59You just want to learn and do a really good job and show that you're receptive and open-minded
08:02to it.
08:03You get humbled the day you walk in there, and you stay humbled from the time that you
08:06leave without doubt.
08:07So the word mastery does not enter your mind at Top Gun as a student.
08:11I literally, you finish Top Gun, you graduate, you get your Top Gun patch.
08:14I climbed back into my same airplane that was my jet, and I flew home and landed at Miramar
08:19back to my squadron as the most recent Top Gun graduate of the Marine Corps.
08:24It was really cool.
08:25We had a tradition in our squadron that Top Gun graduates didn't wear their patch.
08:29Our squadron didn't want to differentiate that Top Gun graduate, so we didn't wear patches.
08:34And so I knew that I wasn't going to be wearing my Top Gun patch.
08:37So on this flight home, I'm like, I'm wearing it.
08:39I'm going to come back in, go back into the squadron with my Top Gun patch.
08:42I'm going to get my one day wearing that patch, and I got a lot of ribbing for it.
08:45But honestly, guys are pretty happy for me.
08:47It's a really cool qualification.
08:49It's a highlight of my career for sure.
08:55Saying your rank, your last name is pretty formal for aviation.
08:58So everybody gets a nickname.
09:00We call it a call sign.
09:01In the Marine Corps especially, there's a tradition that call signs are not very flattering.
09:06We're not going to try to call you something that's really cool.
09:08So most of the nicknames and call signs in the Marine Corps typically come from you doing
09:13something dumb, something embarrassing.
09:15I am no exception to that.
09:17It's in 1996.
09:18I'm flying the advanced jet trainer called the T-45.
09:21I am getting dressed to go for a flight, and I'm wearing something called a G-suit.
09:25And all a G-suit is, it's kind of like a pair of pants that you plug in.
09:28It has a little hose on the end of it that connects to the jet to fill up.
09:32In case you pull high Gs, it helps you stay awake.
09:34It's a really important piece of gear.
09:35The very end of the G-suit that plugs into the airplane is like a garden hose buckle.
09:40It's a big round metal buckle.
09:41I was having a conversation with someone as I'm getting dressed, and I'm moving my arms
09:44around, and as I'm moving my arms around, I hit my helmet off the table, and the helmet
09:48started to fall over the table.
09:50And I reached down to grab the helmet, and as I reached down, my hand hit the hose.
09:54The hose flew up and hit me in the face, and it knocked out my two front teeth.
09:58Holding them in my hand, I can literally see a pool of blood and two chipped teeth.
10:02My instructor walks around the corner, looks at me, and says, you're not flying.
10:06You've got to go to medical.
10:07The student I was talking to I was supposed to go flying with looked at me in horror,
10:10and I got on dressed with my flight gear and went to the doctor's office.
10:14If you've ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber, and you've seen Jim Carrey's character
10:17with these two giant chips in his teeth, he had one.
10:20I had two.
10:21It could have been a lot worse, but they settled on Chip, and it was because I had two big
10:25giant
10:26chips in my teeth.
10:27Again, it's not flattering.
10:29I'm not excited to tell that story, but that's how I got chipped, and it stuck.
10:38I remember vividly my very first combat mission.
10:41I put combat in quotes because it wasn't necessarily the most harrowing mission.
10:45It was actually before September 11th.
10:47It was a mission in 2000 that we called Operation Southern Watch.
10:50We were patrolling the southern portion of Iraq to make sure that they weren't flying in that
10:55area, and they had actually moved in a surface-to-air missile, an SA-3 missile system,
11:01into an area that we said you couldn't.
11:02We got assigned what we called a response option, which meant we were going to go out and
11:06take out this surface-to-air missile system.
11:08I had in my squadron the newest jets in the fleet.
11:12These highly capable, we call them lot 18 F-18s with GPS, and this new, at the time,
11:17bomb called a JDAM, which is a Joint Direct Attack Munition, which is a GPS-guided bomb,
11:22something that was really new at the time.
11:25Hours before we launched on this mission, we knew it was going to happen.
11:28A lot of the preparation was, we called it mission planning, is knowing where the target is,
11:32making sure the information is correct into the jet, into the weapon.
11:35This is about a two-hour flight from launching off the carrier, getting gas to make sure we have
11:40enough gas to get there, and flying deep into territory the entire time knowing what I'm going
11:45to be doing.
11:45Obviously, I was nervous.
11:46It was night.
11:47It was dark.
11:48I was definitely amped up.
11:50When you get close enough to drop the bomb, you're only maybe five, ten miles away.
11:54It's really not that far, so you're really going a long way for a relatively short window
11:59to release this.
12:00Quite frankly, it's pretty straightforward.
12:02It's pretty mechanical.
12:03You get good feedback that all the systems are working correctly.
12:06There's a switch on the left side called the master arm switch.
12:09You turn that thing on.
12:10Everything comes alive.
12:11You get this indication that everything is working correctly and it's ready to go.
12:15You get a little cue that says to release.
12:17You hold down something called the pickle button, which is a red button on the control
12:20stick, and then about a second later, a 2,000-pound bomb drops off your jet.
12:25It's a big drop.
12:26It's a big clunk.
12:27The jet makes a lot of noise, and then the bomb goes and does its thing.
12:31I had what's called an infrared pod, which is basically just kind of like a camera that
12:35watches this, and I held that thing on the target until the bomb hit it.
12:39It went exactly where it was supposed to go.
12:41Huge explosion on the camera on the pod, and then a two-hour flight home.
12:46So it was probably a four-hour mission for about 30 seconds of excitement.
12:51It was worth every second though.
12:52I came back.
12:53I was like a celebrity on the boat for a little while because dropping bombs was pretty uncommon.
12:57And for someone that junior in their career for the opportunity, at the time, it was a huge deal.
13:02I remember being excited.
13:04I was honored.
13:05I felt lucky to be able to do it, but I was also just really pumped that I had the
13:09chance to do that.
13:09On my first deployment, you know, before September 11th, our carrier probably dropped
13:14maybe total 10 or 15 bombs.
13:16Really relatively small amount of bombs.
13:18That's over a course of about six months.
13:25I won't lie, pilots on a carrier do kind of enjoy, status is the wrong word,
13:31but there's definitely a uniqueness to being a pilot.
13:34And it kind of cuts both ways.
13:36It's a bit of a double-edged sword.
13:37You've got to be careful.
13:38It's really hard not to think you're the center of the universe when you're a fighter pilot.
13:42Our egos get out of control sometimes.
13:44Carriers are billion-dollar machines that are manned by thousands, four or five thousand
13:52people on a carrier to make this carrier function, all with the sole purpose of launching and
13:58recovering aircraft to go to war.
14:00And on the boat, there's maybe only 150 pilots total on the entire carrier.
14:07And when you are the one in the cockpit doing that, sometimes your ego tells you like,
14:11this whole thing is about me. That's not even remotely true.
14:14I literally could not do anything on that carrier without anybody else's help.
14:20Forget taking off and landing.
14:21I couldn't even move the aircraft carrier without 10, 15, 20 other people supporting and helping me.
14:26You've got to learn to keep that ego in check.
14:27Fighter pilots are often pretty type A.
14:30They're pretty strong-willed.
14:32They're pretty disciplined, meaning they're willing to do the work.
14:36Becoming a fighter pilot is not all just flying around,
14:39doing dogfighting training missions at Top Gun.
14:41In fact, it's mostly just a lot of discipline, effort to study and learn,
14:45even the things that might not seem all that fun.
14:47You know, how the fuel system works and engine systems work.
14:49But to be good in a jet, you have to build some aggression.
14:52And I don't mean just like kind of wild, uncontrolled aggression.
14:54I mean the ability and willingness to put your jet into very extreme scenarios and extreme environments.
15:01That's the type of aggression I'm talking about.
15:03You can't be passive.
15:05You can't be slow.
15:06You can't be hesitant.
15:07You have to learn that aggression when controlled is probably one of your best assets.
15:13I am not a big risk taker in my private life, in my personal life.
15:18If I look back on things I did in an airplane, it is startling some of the things I chose
15:24to do
15:24and some of the dumb things I did in an airplane.
15:26I am not like that in my private life.
15:32Let me just think for a second.
15:34Because the ones I would think about, I definitely would not want on camera.
15:37I think there's no statute of limits and some of the dumb things.
15:39What kind of people marry fighter pilots?
15:41I got to be careful with this answer because my wife, my wife may watch this.
15:45I'm not crazy people, but people that absolutely understand that there is a uniqueness to what we're doing.
15:56You know, I have an incredible wife.
15:57I met my wife when I was at Top Gun, when I was an instructor there.
16:01She got to see kind of the full range of combat and life experience.
16:06And it's very sad to say this, but at certain intervals, there are going to be accidents, mishaps and fatalities.
16:12It's going to happen.
16:14I never really thought about that.
16:15I mean, I knew it was a possibility.
16:17I understood that objectively.
16:18I saw it happen.
16:19I've been to a lot of funerals.
16:23I don't and didn't at the time, certainly never really understood the burden that a spouse would carry knowing that
16:30your spouse is going to go do something that might produce that outcome.
16:33And I think that weight is much heavier for the spouses, for the people that marry fighter pilots than for
16:38the pilots themselves.
16:45I flew four different airplanes.
16:47I started an aircraft called the F-18 Hornet.
16:49I first started flying the F-18 in 1998, all the way till 2002, when I went to Top Gun
16:55as an instructor and started flying the F-18 and the F-16.
16:58So I had dual qualification in both of those aircraft.
17:01As soon as I got up to Top Gun to be an instructor, I was in the very first class
17:05of Marine Top Gun instructors to fly the F-16 because it had just arrived up at Top Gun.
17:09And then transitioned to what we call the fifth generation fighters.
17:12I started flying the F-22 Raptor, flew that for almost four years and completed my career flying the F
17:17-35B for three years.
17:19The exchange with the Air Force to fly the F-22, it just turned out that right at the time
17:24that I was available for that exchange,
17:26they were looking for a former Top Gun instructor with F-16 time to fly the F-22 Raptor.
17:31And then ultimately, my time flying the Raptor coincided with the Marine Corps buying the F-35B and I was
17:37a natural fit to be the first operational pilot to fly that airplane as well.
17:40I can't promise you this, but I'm pretty sure no one else has flown those four jets.
17:44If they have, it's a very recent advent, but during my time in my career, I was definitely the luckiest
17:50guy.
17:50I was the only guy to fly those four jets.
17:51The reason I got to fly so many different aircraft, I have to admit, is a real combination of luck,
17:58timing, circumstance, and of course, some preparation.
18:01So the F-18 is really the Marine Corps' primary backbone for conducting operations in the full spectrum of capability.
18:07On the Air Force side, the F-16 is pretty similar.
18:11The F-16, like the F-18, is a really capable multi-mission, multi-role aircraft that does kind of
18:18everything.
18:19When you start talking about fifth generation aircraft like the F-22, the origins of that jet really were just
18:26what we call air dominance.
18:28They wanted the Raptor to be this highly capable stealth fighter to control the skies.
18:32But that aircraft has also, it's evolved into a multi-mission, multi-role capability aircraft that does a pretty wide
18:40range of things.
18:41The F-22, that's unlike anything else that's out there, is it has what we call thrust vectoring.
18:47So it's an incredibly powerful airplane, 35,000 pounds of thrust per engine, so you've got 70,000 pounds of
18:53thrust.
18:54And you can do things like cartwheels and pedal turns and these unbelievable things.
18:59You just can't do that in a 4-Gen airplane.
19:01We have something called a pedal turn, where you're essentially spinning around like a top.
19:04You'll watch it do things that just seem to defy the laws of physics.
19:08It's nothing but just, it's just pure fun.
19:10It is just the most ridiculous thing.
19:12And then you lead into the F-35, the newest fighter in the world.
19:16By far the most capable when it comes to the range of missions.
19:19It's also a stealth aircraft, really hard to find.
19:23The F-35 pretty much does everything.
19:25The attributes you need to be successful in warfare.
19:29There is no airplane better than the F-35 that represent that.
19:32You need to know what's going on, where it's happening, when it's happening, who's doing it,
19:37who are they doing it to, in a sensor-fused, network-centric communication with all sorts of
19:43resources, space, cyberspace, surface, subsurface, land, sea, air, radio frequency, infrared,
19:51laser, electro-optical.
19:53They all conduct a whole wide range of missions, really to make themselves available to do whatever
19:58is necessary, really as warfare evolves.
20:00These aircraft are not cheap.
20:02You know, the F-18, you know, started as probably a 30, 40 million dollar jet.
20:06Now, the modern versions of the Hornet, probably 70, 80 million dollars.
20:10Same thing with the F-16.
20:11When the F-16 was designed in the 70s and the Air Force bought that in the late 70s,
20:15it was intended to be a low-cost, pretty simple, single-seat fighter.
20:20That thing has evolved.
20:21Our newest block aircraft are pretty expensive jets.
20:24The F-22 and F-35, at its origin, were well over a hundred million dollars each.
20:29To the American taxpayer who spent a hundred million dollars on this airplane,
20:32the first thing I wouldn't say is this thing's untouchable and unbeatable.
20:35I would say war is war and war is deadly and war can be dangerous.
20:38What I would tell you is that airplane is worth every penny.
20:43Because everything that has preceded that thing, every other fighter that we have,
20:47the threat, if they so choose, depending on where we operate, has the potential to make them irrelevant.
20:59I'm home from Top Gun maybe a month at the most when September 11th happened
21:04and our squadron went off to war.
21:06The expectation is right away you become one of the key tactical leaders to start training
21:10other pilots and prepare them.
21:12I had this routine.
21:13I'd get up, I'd exercise and I'd get ready for the day and I would lace up my boots and
21:17my flight
21:17gear, or my flight suit, I'd lace my boots up and I'd turn on the TV in the morning.
21:21And you know, I'm probably, it's probably five, I'm in West Coast time, so maybe 5.30,
21:25something around that time.
21:27And I'm watching the news and, and like, holy cow, what's going on here?
21:31I only lived a little, a little ways from the base.
21:33It took me hours to get on the base.
21:36They're inspecting every vehicle.
21:37They got the dogs.
21:38I mean, clearly the world had been upended.
21:41By the time I get on to the base, you know, it took me, like I said, a couple hours.
21:45I am briefing as the flight lead of four F-18s of the potential of launching with live missiles.
21:51Because we had a whole bunch of aircraft, long haul jets flying from like Asia Pacific,
21:55Japan into San Diego, LA to the West Coast.
21:58The idea of civilian airliner being a threat, totally foreign to all of us.
22:04And a lot of that is very much a blur.
22:06Four of us on a live, a live missile mission, the potentially thinking about
22:11what airliners might be doing.
22:12Obviously, thank God it didn't happen, but the world turned upside down that day
22:17and everything changed after that.
22:18And I think in retrospect, there's a lot of expectation that we really didn't know
22:22exactly what to do or what we were doing, and we were doing our absolute best.
22:26And within a matter of days, our squadron embarked aboard an aircraft carrier parked
22:30off the West Coast.
22:31I went back to Afghanistan in October of 2001.
22:35My second deployment was much more robust, much busier.
22:38But ultimately, the carrier, even though you might not be flying a combat mission every day,
22:45the minute the carrier pulls off the pier and the aircraft come aboard, it's all business.
22:49One of the most memorable missions that stands out to me was a mission where I didn't even drop
22:54any bombs.
22:54I was on a mission with a relatively young guy in the squadron, and we were flying essentially
22:59over a town in Afghanistan.
23:01A team had gone in, a ground team had gone in and found some folks to get them and get
23:05out of
23:05there, and they're essentially in a difficult situation on the ground.
23:10There's a lot of civilians involved.
23:11It was in a small city, and what they were looking for was some help from us.
23:16They didn't want us dropping bombs.
23:17They were looking for some support, and we were flying around at really low level,
23:20I'm talking hundreds of feet, doing a circular pattern, trying to find their location.
23:24And it was really tough to find them, and it was incumbent on us to find them
23:29and fly over the top of them as a kind of a show of force.
23:32A hundred percent, you're nervous.
23:33You're totally aware of it.
23:35It's a foreign environment.
23:37You're close to the ground.
23:38You're trying to pick things out.
23:39You're trying to find the other aircraft.
23:40There's a lot going on down at low altitude.
23:43There's a huge difference between hundreds of feet and thousands of feet.
23:47I don't want to be flippant when I say this, but thousands of feet off the ground is very easy.
23:50It's very low risk, relatively to what you're doing.
23:53When you start talking 500 feet, sometimes lower 300 feet, which is pretty uncommon,
24:00those are very, very risky missions.
24:03You have to be uniquely qualified to do that.
24:05The margin for error is very small, and the time to hit the ground is second.
24:09So you got to be on your game when you start talking hundreds of feet, not the same for thousands.
24:14That one is the most close and personal.
24:15I think the most risky to the people on the ground, and our contribution wasn't dropping bombs.
24:20It was doing a show of force over the top of them.
24:23That one surprisingly stuck out, and I think it was because of how difficult the situation they were in.
24:33Top Gun is kind of a three-year billet.
24:36I was a Top Gun instructor from August 2002 until August of 2005.
24:40Getting selected to be a Top Gun instructor is kind of like the ultimate full circle moment,
24:46like a fantasy, basically.
24:47You still don't ever think it's going to happen.
24:50You know you got there through performance.
24:52You've earned the opportunity to be there, and there's some part of you thinking,
24:55like, hey, you must be pretty good at this, right?
24:57When I got there as an instructor in the beginning, some of my very, very earliest flights are with
25:04the commanding officer at Top Gun, really senior guys, and they're just out there doing things in
25:08an airplane that even at that stage, I'm like, I didn't know you could do this.
25:11I'm just at the very bottom of this mountain.
25:14The bottom of the bell curve of Top Gun instructors are better than almost any other pilot in the world.
25:20Being good in the airplane is not enough.
25:22You have to be able to teach.
25:24Every instructor there has what's called a subject matter expertise area,
25:28but across the board, we all teach all the phases of flight.
25:31I taught about surface-to-air missiles and counter tactics,
25:34how to defeat SAMs and getting shot at from the ground.
25:36We're teaching one against one, two against two, two against many, four, eight.
25:41So we're teaching all the different phases of instruction,
25:44air-to-air, air-to-ground, reactions, things like that.
25:47So the instructor's job isn't really just his subject area.
25:50It's teaching the skill of flying and teaching.
25:53I showed up to Top Gun as an instructor with a lot of experience in the F-18.
25:57I thought that was the only fighter I was ever going to fly.
26:00The day I show up to Top Gun, they start receiving brand new F-16s
26:04as training aircraft to replicate threat.
26:08The F-16 was there essentially to pretend to be a bad guy aircraft.
26:11And right away, they started sending guys to get qualified and trained on the F-16.
26:16I didn't even have to volunteer for it. It just happened.
26:18In a lot of ways, it's similar to the F-18, but it's much more powerful.
26:22It pulls more Gs. It's a faster jet.
26:24The training officer job at Top Gun is kind of like, it's like the job.
26:28When I was told by the commander of Top Gun that I was going to be the training officer,
26:33meaning I was going to be the senior instructor and I was going to run Top Gun
26:36as the senior instructor as a Marine, which is a pretty rare opportunity.
26:40Oh my God. I am going to run Top Gun as the training officer.
26:45That's a really coveted position. It's a lot of fun. It's very humbling.
26:51My CO at the time was a legendary instructor that had this incredible reputation.
26:55I knew I was going to work directly for him.
26:57I went through, I think, 13 classes and I was a training officer,
27:03I think for the last three, so probably about nine months of being a training officer.
27:07How often did you hear the theme song from Top Gun as an instructor at Top Gun?
27:11You do not play the theme of Top Gun as an instructor at the real Top Gun.
27:16Anything that references the movie at the actual Top Gun, the Navy's Fighter Weapons School,
27:21it's a $5 fine. So we're not playing the music. We're not quoting the lines at the real Top Gun.
27:30I left Top Gun. I had this nagging sense that I wanted to do something uniquely Marine Corps.
27:37I was going to lead the cockpit and I was going to now lead Marines on the ground in a
27:41totally
27:41different role. So I volunteered to be a FAC. A forward air controller is just someone who's
27:46qualified and certified and specially trained to communicate with aircraft, helicopters and jets,
27:53to call in air strikes, to drop bombs, and to use the aircraft in close proximity to ground troops.
27:59The Marine Corps trains pilots to be forward air controllers. And I had a pretty good sense of those
28:04things because I had done combat from the air in an F-18. The Marine Corps believes,
28:09rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, that pilots have unique perspective on how to use
28:14aircraft, which I totally subscribe to and I understand that. The Marine Corps is the only
28:19service that does this. The other services have what's called a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack
28:23Controller, which is essentially the same qualification, but it's not a pilot. It's a pilot
28:28FAC school, which is called TACP school, Terminal Air Control Party School, the school that teaches
28:34people how to use airplanes to drop bombs. It wasn't that hard for me because probably 90 percent of
28:39what they were teaching, I knew because I'd done it from the sky. So I was learning a little bit
28:44different perspectives, but ultimately a pilot going through that school, it's just not that hard.
28:49It's pretty straightforward. I was going to go to Japan for a year and stand up a new unit that
28:55was
28:55being built. It's going to be a year. I go right back to San Diego, back to the F-18.
29:00That's not how it worked out. Within days of getting there, mid-September,
29:06there were other units of the same type. They call them Anglico units, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison
29:13Company. It just meant a team of forward air controllers and Joint Terminal Attack controllers
29:18that were supporting combat operations in Iraq, and they were shorthanded. When they asked for
29:22volunteers, I was a highly qualified F-18 pilot, qualified foreign air controller.
29:27I had to volunteer for that, so I put my hand up and said, I will go, and they selected
29:32me as one of
29:32the pilots to go be a FAC for this other unit. I deployed to Iraq from February of 2006 to
29:39September
29:39of 2006. The commanding officer of my unit essentially brought in a piece of paper to me as the senior
29:46FAC
29:46in Iraq with all the different locations we're going to send little teams to. And he goes,
29:50you need to get this filled out. We have 25 teams or something like that. There's 25 locations. Fill
29:55this thing out by the end of the day. I had the sense of knowing that I should. I volunteered
30:01myself
30:01to go to Ramadi. I was going to replace my best friend that was there. And Ramadi in all the
30:06cities
30:06in Iraq was the most violent city. It was the epicenter of all the fighting. I could have put my
30:11name on
30:12anywhere on that list. I did it because I thought I should. I did it because I was a well
30:17-trained
30:18pilot. The Marine Corps invested a lot in me. I understood how these machines worked. I also knew
30:23that if there was one place that was the most violent and the most deadly place, it just doesn't
30:29make sense to ask someone else to take that risk. It doesn't make sense to do that. Plus, my best
30:34friend
30:34was there. And I just, in good conscience, I could not imagine asking someone else to do it and not
30:40asking myself. And listen, I was volunteering me and my entire team. It wasn't just me. I had a 13
30:45person team I was responsible for. So I think eight of them were on their very first deployment.
30:50We had heavy weapons. We had Humvees. And the most important thing we had was
30:55the ability to control aircraft and use those resources. So we had F-18s, Harriers, Cobras,
31:02and Hueys that were the Marine Corps aviation were all right there just on the outskirts of Ramadi.
31:07I could also control Air Force aircraft. I controlled A-10s. I controlled F-15s, F-16s.
31:11One of the drawbacks to that is you've made this massive investment in time and money to teach
31:16them to fly airplanes. That is a huge expense that the military absorbs. And there's some question
31:22like, why would you want to put that person in the middle of ground combat? Well, the Marine Corps'
31:26belief is they're the best person for it. And one of the things that I remember learning at the very
31:31beginning of my career at the basic school, when I was trying to become a pilot, is they say,
31:36hey, look around. These are the people that you're going to go to war with. And one day,
31:40these who are your closest friends and your counterparts, your buddies, are people you're
31:43going to rely on for each other. And they kind of paint this picture that's kind of ethereal. It's
31:47hard to imagine, but it sounds really cool. And it resonates. And you think, oh, that'd be kind of
31:52neat. We're going towards this position. And as we're moving, and I picture it, we're moving south
31:58into a two-story building. And as my team is going to enter the building, we get lit by machine
32:04gun
32:04fire. It goes directly over the top of our heads. It probably missed me and a couple guys by a
32:09foot.
32:10I mean, we are so lucky to not get hit. It goes right on the top of us. I'm like,
32:14oh my god.
32:14By the time we run into the building, and my job as a fact was always to get up to
32:18the roof as best we
32:19could, because that's where I could see the airplanes. I could use my radio. That was a good vantage point
32:24to be.
32:25Up on the roof, as we're getting up to the roof, we start taking what's called RPG fire,
32:29rocket propelled grenades, that's hitting the wall outside of this roof. And I'm like,
32:35man, this is crazy. It was a crazy situation. And I'm with my army patrol leader. The guy in charge
32:40was an army lieutenant, and I'm there supporting him. And you can kind of see out in front of us,
32:45we're taking fire from a position. It's really like a vehicle. And they kind of staged themselves
32:49between two buildings, kind of cut us off, and they're hitting us. And I had an aircraft overhead
32:54that was supporting us. I hadn't checked in with them. I didn't know who they were,
32:58but I knew aircraft were assigned to us. There's these very specific procedures. You check in using
33:02the exact phraseology, the right terms. It's all sequence. It's like almost like a list,
33:06and it's almost like robotic how you check in. Well, this guy didn't check in using any of those
33:10procedures. He said, he said, Chip, this is Boo. What do you need? This guy, Boo,
33:16I'd been in the squadron with him in VMFA 314 before. I had deployed with him. This is one of
33:21my closest
33:22friends. This is somebody I had been flying with hundreds of times. He was a Top Gun graduate as
33:27well. This is an unbelievably amazing guy that I knew personally. And so we didn't have to follow
33:32the procedures. And I looked over to the lieutenant and I go, we're going to be fine. When you tell
33:37an
33:37aircraft to follow the checklist to drop bombs or shoot the gun, you follow what's called a nine line,
33:43which is nine lines in order that you're supposed to go through to make sure the communication is
33:47perfect, that all the risk has been mitigated. I needed Boo in his F-18. And I go, hey, Boo,
33:54south to north call wings level. We got multiple, we call them type one gun runs, like close enough
33:59that you can see that are right there in front of you. And Boo strafed this vehicle. They hit it,
34:04it burned to the ground. It was awesome. He ran down to like the absolute minimum fuel that he could
34:10get.
34:10He kind of barely made it home on fumes. And it was like this unbelievable culminating event of like,
34:16oh, this is why the Marine Corps does this. This is why they train pilots to be facts. This is
34:20why
34:20relationships matter. This is why you got to take care of your teammates and your counterparts.
34:24Because at one point you're going to find yourself in combat and someone's going to save your life.
34:28And if it was a stranger, it would have taken a lot more time to figure out what's going on.
34:38Ramadi was the hardest seven months of my life. Ground combat is different. And the intimacy,
34:43the closeness of it is really hard to capture. The missions I did in an airplane, there's an arm's
34:50length to that, a separation from that. There's a comfort of the confines of a cockpit. It's a place
34:57you're very comfortable. I asked myself repeatedly during those seven months from Ramadi, what am I
35:03doing here? Why did I volunteer for this? How did I get myself into this mess? I certainly never thought
35:08that I was going to be facing like near death experiences. One of the missions they would do
35:12is called movement to contact, which is exactly how it sounds. We would move in a patrol and the
35:17patrol is about 20 army soldiers and three or four of us from my Anglico team. And we'd move until
35:22we
35:22made contact with the enemy. Our job and our goal was to draw the enemy out so we could fight
35:26them.
35:26So the enemy had set up on the perimeter of our patrol, uh, two heavy machine gun positions. And
35:33they kind of baited us into this through some mortar fire. And I had been mortared a lot in Iraq.
35:37It's a
35:38very common thing. They shoot these high lob, very inaccurate, uh, essentially little miniature bombs
35:42that get launched out of a little tube and they detonate. They kind of get your attention. And when
35:46the mortars were going off, they were originally pretty far away and they got pretty close. I was like,
35:50man, this is, this is closer than normal. We get lit up by two heavy machine gun positions on our
35:55perimeter pointed right. And I am in the absolute dead center of this, uh, ambush. And the bullets are
36:04coming in from my left and right. I kind of lean in one direction and I'm forced to kind of
36:07lay down
36:08on my stomach. I call it the prone position. I have to have to essentially lay down. And the reason
36:12I
36:12have to lay down is the bullets are essentially going on the top of our heads. I'm there with, uh,
36:16uh,
36:17two other guys from my team. One of them is my radio operator who's with me all the time. He's
36:20probably 10 feet away. And he and I are essentially laying on the ground, staring at each other with
36:24eyes as big as saucers. You're, you're trying to run through scenarios of what you should do.
36:29How should I handle this? How should I react to this? Um, you know, what you want to do
36:33was we want to get up and run to a safer place. And about 30 feet in front of me
36:36was like a,
36:37essentially a drainage ditch, like a little canal. And a lot of guys had positioned themselves
36:41and then they were safe and they were kind of gesturing over, come over here, you know, yelling.
36:45But I knew that if I'd gotten up, it stood up, I would have gotten hit. It was so bad
36:49that if I had
36:49reached out my arm, my arm would have gotten hit because the dirt between me and my radio operator
36:53was getting hit by these bullets and kicking up and kind of hitting me in the face. You can feel
36:58the heat and the movement and the sensation of the bullets. And I could see and feel the trajectory
37:04shifting towards me, uh, which was an awful feeling. And as you know, these micro thoughts,
37:10I probably had 20 thoughts in, in, in milliseconds and everything was, you can't do that. You're going to
37:14get hit. You can't get up. You can't crawl. You can't move. You can't roll. You have to just
37:16stay right there. It's the only place you can be is I, I, I accepted that I was going to
37:26get killed
37:26and I knew it. I had gotten married a couple months earlier. Last words out of her mouth,
37:30her mouth were don't be brave. And that was her way of telling me, don't do anything stupid.
37:38Just please come back. You got to come back. It was about two o'clock in the morning back home
37:41in San
37:42Diego. And I had this image of like someone knocking on her door, waking her up at two
37:48o'clock in the morning, telling her that I was dead. And as the bullets got within maybe an arm's
37:52length, they shifted up and over. And you know, I kind of described it like almost like the hand
37:58of God. And you can picture someone on the gun, on the heavy machine gun, kind of leaning back a
38:01little bit and kind of tilting up and over. And the bullets go over the top of my head and
38:05start
38:06impacting the dirt to my right and shifting off a little bit to the right just by a matter of
38:10feet.
38:10And that gave me a very small window for me and Mo, my radio operator, to run to that ditch.
38:16I'd
38:16never been that close to that outcome before. And it was a reminder of what war is, what combat is,
38:25and what I was doing, and some recognition that I probably should have been better prepared. I was
38:32really good at an airplane. I was really good in that portion of my leadership life as a Marine.
38:37Ground combat was different for me. I was, I was working really hard just to keep up.
38:46I finished Ramadi in September of 2006. Undeniably, the worst thing that ever happened to me was
38:52losing a Marine in combat. And my radio operator, a young Marine named Chris Leon, June 20th, 2006,
38:59was killed in Ramadi. And you don't think about losing a Marine in combat when you're at Top Gun.
39:08I come home to San Diego and I come home to, you know, the best weather in the world. I
39:15come home
39:16back to the amazing beaches. I come back home to an F-18 squadron. I come back home to my
39:21wife,
39:21my favorite person in the whole wide world that I'd just gotten married to. I hadn't seen for almost a
39:25year. And I come back home to my life in San Diego, but I don't bring home Chris with me.
39:32That was hard, the heavy realization that I didn't bring home all my Marines.
39:35I fly into San Diego International and I get picked up by my mom and my wife, my two favorite
39:40people.
39:41You know, my mom kind of, Whitney comes in to meet me. My mom kind of like is outside at
39:46the curb,
39:46you know, waiting for me. So I had this amazing reunion with my wife. We walk out to the car
39:51and
39:51like, it's kind of a blink. Before I know it, I'm in my car driving home. You know,
39:57it's probably a 15 minute drive from San Diego International to my house in Pacific Beach.
40:01And my wife is sitting next to me and my mom's in the back seat. I kind of lose track
40:05of what's going
40:05on. And I, I mean, I'm realizing like I'm looking in like the gutters and stuff for IEDs. And I'm
40:13kind
40:13of having this very odd moment of like, I'm looking around and scanning, like I'd been doing
40:18in a Humvee for seven months, looking for potential threats, looking at people. I'm in the side streets
40:21of my community and I'm looking for things that stand out as a problem. And the, like the din of
40:27my wife and my mom talking to me is an, is an annoyance, is a frustration. And I scream at
40:32them.
40:33I tell them to shut up. And I'm like, I said like, stop talking, which was kind of my way
40:38of like,
40:39you shouldn't be talking. You should be scanning for threats, which is how I operated with my Marines.
40:43And it was a very, um, startling thing for all of us. Certainly a startle for them
40:48because I'm screaming at them. And I kind of startled myself out of whatever mindset that I
40:52was in. Super embarrassing, super, um, insecure for having done that. And I don't even know why
40:59it happened. I just, I just, I just lost my place in the world. First night I'm home, uh, I'm
41:07with my
41:08wife and remember we got married, uh, in May and I left in September, but we really hadn't ever
41:13really lived together, you know, like that. The future is ours to how are we going to become
41:18a couple and grow as a family. Um, and I woke up the first night at home, um,
41:26with what became like a recurring nightmare. I'm, I'm on a patrol and I can, I can see it very
41:31vividly and I don't know the environment around it. It's just kind of a weird thing, but if I'm on
41:36the ground, there's a grenade rolling around. By the way, this never happened to me. This is a
41:39totally made up scenario. It's not a real thing. And I'm kind of using my rifle, the, the, the,
41:44the barrel of my rifle, I'm trying to knock it away almost like a hockey stick. And the grenade
41:47goes off and blows up and I wake up. I mean, I'm not reliving an experience, but I'm having this
41:51crazy nightmare that is, um, becomes like a daily thing. And I got to a place, got pretty corrosive,
41:58because every time I go to bed, I knew this was going to happen. It was a really rough start
42:02to my life
42:03post combat in Ramadi with my new wife who would wake up and see me just, you know, cold sweat.
42:09I had learned in my career to, to talk. When you're a flight lead, you talk all the time. You're
42:15telling everybody what to do. I was one of the challenges and the problems and like things had
42:18to be my way. I had this very rigid, narrow sense of, of trying to deal with my frustration. And
42:24what
42:24I didn't want is a bunch of people around me talking to me, which is not a good way to
42:27have a
42:27relationship. My wife kind of knew she had to defer to me. I was one of the challenges and the
42:31problems.
42:32And like, I got to a place probably three or four, maybe five months after getting home was like,
42:36Hey, this is not going to work. This is, this is not, you can't have a relationship like this is
42:40not a marriage, but also isn't healthy for me. And I know how ironic and how simple it sounds,
42:47but I was able to solve my own problem by just changing that approach, which is,
42:51I shouldn't talk. I should listen. Other people should talk. Who am I to be the,
42:56how come I get to be the primary talker and all these things as if somehow I should control the
43:00environment. These nightmares were a reflection of something that was bothering me, a frustration,
43:05an anxiety, a fear, a memory, something that was bad. And what I was doing was ignoring it.
43:12Something wants to happen to me that sets you off, that's triggering this. And it's in my head
43:16somewhere. And what I need to do is find it and just listen to it. And, and I, I am
43:21aware of how
43:22simple this solution sounds to other people. Just listen. But what I literally did, I literally just
43:30started listening to my own thoughts, my own brain, my own feelings. And shockingly, shockingly,
43:35it helped. I won't say that I'm completely over it every, but the glide path went from getting worse
43:41to getting better to a place where I am so much better now. And the intervals gotten wider and wider,
43:45but things will trigger. And I'll, I'll kind of revert back to that a little bit. It's very rare now,
43:49but it's not zero. You've got the playbook, you know what to do here. It's okay. I think veterans
43:54come home and they don't want to reveal those flaws and shortcomings. And I think embarrassment
43:59and shame are two of the bigger ones that I struggled with. And you just want to sequester
44:03those. You want to, you want to hide them. And I think that makes them even worse. There's a lot
44:08of
44:08embarrassment that, that you feel and some shame that you feel when you, when I told them to,
44:17when I yelled at them to stop talking, or if I get startled by a loud noise, or if I
44:22watch something
44:22and I start crying, what you feel more than anything is you feel embarrassed. When you're
44:27the training officer at Top Gun, you'll get embarrassed very often. You feel like you really
44:30know what's going on. You have a lot of control over your life. I never sought professional help.
44:34I'm not judging people that do it. I want those resources, the Marine Corps and the military,
44:37they should provide those. I love that they do that. For me, it wasn't easy, but it was very simple.
44:49When I came back, I started flying F-18s. Very quickly, I got the opportunity to transition
44:54to fifth-gen airplanes and I start flying the F-22 Raptor. And the F-22 is what made me
44:59realize
45:00the world and warfare was changing. I love flying the F-22. The most fun you could ever have in
45:05an
45:05airplane is that jet. I very quickly ended up as the very first operational commander and the very
45:12first operational pilot to fly the F-35B. The F-35B is what exposed me to the reality that the
45:19world,
45:20aviation, warfare, and the future were changing. And many of the things that I was doing
45:28were going to become irrelevant very quickly. Now, I don't mean the ethos of fighting and using
45:34aircraft as part of a tool for future warfare, but certainly the tactics, techniques, and procedures,
45:38the world was going to change. And the F-35 is what told me that because it gave me the
45:44insight for
45:44the first time is that the commodity that guarantees dominance on the battlefield is information and
45:51awareness. Not how many bombs you carry, not how much fuel you have, not how fast you can go, and
45:57not
45:57how many Gs you pull. And so even today in the modern era, if I look back at what I
46:02knew at Top Gun,
46:03it doesn't work today. The lessons that I learned, how to teach, how to fly, how to train, all that
46:10is
46:10exactly the same and extremely relevant. But the world of how airplanes support warfare is totally
46:18different and it's changing dramatically before our eyes. The future of warfare and how aviation is
46:25central to that is so different from when I grew up in fighter aviation. And the future of fifth and
46:32sixth
46:32generation fighters, think about just the world with AI and information and all that. That's the world
46:38we're operating in. This is a very dramatically different world than it was in the one I grew up
46:43in. We've already moved in this direction, major shifts, brand new wingmen that are just learning to
46:50fly these airplanes are going to have massively more responsibility than we had. When I first learned
46:54to fly the F-18, they told me to join up and shut up. That meant just fly formation, be
47:00next to the
47:00airplane, don't say anything, don't lose sight of your lead, do what he does. Now we're flying in
47:05formations that are fluid and you might have 10, 15 airplanes out there and you can't control who's
47:09where and what. So your most junior person has to have the skills of a seasoned flight lead. So the
47:16burden of responsibility has shifted. It's much more heavier for a younger, less experienced pilot than
47:21it ever was, which means they have to be a masters of their systems, their capabilities,
47:25their equipment, and understanding what's going on. The mentality, the mindset, and the skill set
47:32that's required for that and how we train to that is very, very different than how I grew up.
47:44I retired from the Marine Corps in 2017. I was about three months away from promoting to Colonel
47:48and I'd been selected to go back to Command and fly the F-35 again. So on paper, it looked
47:55like an
47:55unbelievable life experience, another opportunity, flying modern fighters for the Marine Corps. And
48:01there was a little nagging voice inside me that was saying like, this kind of seems stale. It seems a
48:07little familiar and a little routine. And you can imagine throughout my career, everything I did was
48:13different. And this is the first time I had a sense of, of kind of recycling some things to be
48:18a
48:18really good fighter pilot. When you stand at the ladder of the jet to climb up, you want to be
48:23excited and you want to be passionate and you want to be invested in that. And there's a little part
48:28of
48:28me that I had lost some of that a little bit. And even a little bit to me was enough
48:32to say, there's
48:33no way I can imagine for the next three years. And if I took the promotion to Colonel, I was
48:37going to owe
48:38three more years of doing something that felt more like a chore than a passion, which for someone who
48:44spent his entire life fantasizing about flying fighters, even one degree of that was not okay. The day I
48:50submitted for all those things, I get a call from my old friend. His name was Leif Babin as a
48:55forward air
48:55control with my team. A group of SEALs came from SEAL Team 3. They were called Task Unit Bruiser. The
49:02leader of
49:02Task Unit Bruiser is a man named Jocko Willink. I essentially worked with Jocko and his SEALs in my entire
49:07deployment. Embedded is probably a strong word, but it's kind of how it worked. As every major
49:12operation Leif and his platoon of SEALs from Jocko's Task Unit went on, I was with them. I had
49:17done countless of operations with him in Iraq. I held him in the highest of regard. He and Jocko had
49:23wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. That book had led them to have a leadership consultancy of teaching
49:30the lessons from their experiences that I was with them to companies and businesses. And it was starting to
49:35take off and grow. Leif said, hey, handshake deal. I can't promise you anything. I don't know where
49:39this is going to go, but there's a chance this company might take off. We'd love to have you be
49:43part of it again. I'm at Echelon Front. I've been with them since it was just the two of them.
49:47We're
49:47now probably the world's premier leadership consulting company. We are all over the world taking the
49:54lessons that they captured in the book Extreme Ownership. They wrote a follow-on copy, a follow-on book
49:59called Dichotomy of Leadership. And they were kind of have to let me write the third book in that series
50:04of Extreme Ownership called The Need to Lead, which took my lessons from aviation, from Iraq,
50:09and some other personal stuff. And I'm out there teaching leadership to companies to help their
50:13leaders get better, which is the coolest thing ever. Hi, I'm a producer on Authorized Account.
50:19If you liked this episode, then you should check out our new podcast
50:22and comment below with the names of people you'd love to hear us interview.
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