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Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. James Norman Mattis enlisted in the United States Marine Corp in 1969, that is half a century ago, Jim, at the age of 19. During a Marine Corp career of more than four decades, he commanded in combat in the first Gulf War in Afghanistan, and then once again in Iraq. He retired as Commander of the United States Central Command in 2013. Four years later, General Mattis became Secretary Mattis, serving from 2017 to 2019 as the nation's 26th Secretary of Defense. Now Secretary Mattis has coauthored a book with his old Marine Corp friend, Captain Bing West, "Call Sign Chaos: Leaning to Lead." I have here the galleys, not the final book, "Call Sign Chaos." Jim, welcome. May I call you Jim?
Jim Mattis: Absolutely.
Peter Robinson: Let's just establish, you and I know each other. You're Secretary Mattis. First two, three times I see you during the day, but by about now, you're Jim. Explain that title, Chaos.
Jim Mattis: Well, Peter, I'd spent over four decades in the Marines, in the Marine infantry. I'd learned a lot of lessons, traveling around the world, been in a lot of campaigns, obviously, and chaos had been part and parcel of my life on the battlefield, but also in our own organization, where you try to disrupt the organization a little bit to keep it at the top of its game. However on the battlefield you try to introduce chaos early, in the enemy's problem, so that you can dominate them on the battlefield. I thought I would write down the lessons I've learned over those 40 odd years, passing those lessons on to two young folks.
Peter Robinson: The book ends with a letter you sent to president Trump resigning a Secretary of Defense, "because you have a right," this is to the president, "because you have a right "to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned "with yours than mine, on certain issues that you specify, "I believe it is right for me to step down." And in almost 250 pages, you say not one additional word about your tenure as Secretary of Defense. How come?
Jim Mattis: Bing West and I began writing this book in September of 2013 shortly after I left active duty.
Peter Robinson: Four years before you became Secretary of Defense.
Jim Mattis: Absolutely, four years before, the book was virtually done by the end of 2017. But once I received the phone call about being nominated for Secretary of Defense, at that point the federal ethics rules went into effect and I could not publish the book. So basically the book was written it had nothing to do with my time as Secretary of Defense and these were the lessons I learned and wanted to pass on to young leaders in business, in the military, in communities, service, wherever that might be applied.
Peter Robinson: All right, let's begin at the beginning. I'm gonna ask in a moment why you decided to make a career of the Marines, but first how you ended up in the Marines in the first place. And I'm gonna tell you a story that you told me, that you were visiting your late mother when you were still active duty and you had four stars on your shoulder at this point, as I recall you're setting the scene, you were reading a newspaper a magazine and your mother was on the other side of the room and she kept glancing up at you and smiling. And finally you put down your newspaper and said mom what are you smiling about. And your mother said, to a four-star general in the United States Marine Corps, Oh Jim, I'm just so happy you're not in the penitentiary. Give us the context for that one.
Jim Mattis: My mother was always a very pragmatic lady. One of the greatest generation who was very proud of government service. And I think having seen some of my antics as a young person growing up, she'd grown increasingly concerned, I was on the wrong path. So against all odds she turned out to be quite proud of me and that I was not in fact getting in more trouble, I was getting paid to do things in defense of the country.
Peter Robinson: All right, so you grew up in Central Washington State in rough-and-tumble country and I don't want to press you for details here, but you were a rough-and-tumble young man yourself.
Jim Mattis: I enjoyed hitchhiking around, picking fruit in the summers, swimming in the rivers, to me it was a it was a great place to grow up, a great time to grow up and I thoroughly enjoyed growing up in the Pacific Northwest with all it had to offer. But rough-and-tumble we enjoyed sports, we enjoyed the outdoors and I was just out to get every bit of fun out of it that I could find.
Peter Robinson: And what took you from that fun to the Corps 50 years ago?
Jim Mattis: Well of course in 1969 when I was coming of age, I was in college but it was obvious that those of us who were physically okay, we're going to end up getting drafted. My brother was in the Marines and so I decided to follow in his footsteps. It wasn't real deep thought out long career plan. I assumed I'd go in for a few years and do my patriotic duty and then I would get out and return to the northwest and and be a sports coach and probably teach history or physics in high school. That was my plan.
Peter Robinson: All right, didn't work out that way. 44 years in the Corps, why did you stay?
Jim Mattis: That's an interesting question. Because there were jobs I had in the Marines; from recruiting duty to finding our way through minefields that I didn't like a whole lot. But I grew to love the kind of young men who would crawl into minefields looking for something they didn't want to find, in order to make certain their buddy didn't get hurt. And it was the bravery, it was the rambunctious high-spirited nature, it was the selflessness of the Marines and the sailors I served alongside. And years later looking back I realized that I'd stumbled into a decision Peter, that said I'd rather have crummy jobs at times and work with great people, than have a great job and not work with people as good as I experienced in the in the naval service.
Peter Robinson: I'd like to take a couple of incidents here that you describe. The book takes your career step by step by step. So there's a lot to this book. You just mentioned that you've written it for young leaders who may find the lessons of use. It occurred to me reading the book, that it's abuse for any citizen, who's going to have to vote. And I'll explain that as if I may going through a couple of specific incidents that you treat almost as case studies. Here's one. Tora Bora, this is during the Afghanistan war, by December 2001, Osama bin Laden and about 2000 of his best fighters have retreated to the Tora Bora cave complex which is in eastern Afghanistan, right on the border with Pakistan. You were in command of task force 58 you had established a base deep inside Afghanistan from which you were operating. "Call Sign Chaos." "I stated my concern," this is to your superiors, "I stated my concern that bin Laden could escape "if we didn't quickly seal the valley exits." Now can you from the military point of view, what what could you have done to seal off those exits. What were you thinking needed to happen?
Jim Mattis: Well first of all, our intelligence appeared to be quite accurate. We had good reason to believe he was in one of two valleys both of which were right there on the border of Tora Bora and the border of Pakistan So we knew which way he was going to go as well. So if you know where someone's at which way they're going to go, then you compose a campaign to make certain that he can't get away. Having read about General Crooks campaign on the Arizona border, against Geronimo and General Miles campaign, we knew how to put in the locations that would block those kind of replicating the Geronimo campaign. Basically, go ahead,
Peter Robinson: Stop there. You're in Afghanistan dealing with a 21st, with a 20th century terrorist. And you're thinking back to having read about a campaign against Geronimo in the late 19th century in the American West. Just explain how your mind works and how you bring to bear your wide reading in military history on problems like this.
Jim Mattis: Well, I think a Marine Corps philosophy perhaps unstated is that if you don't read you can't lead. Specifically at each rank in the Marine Corps, you're given a new set of books that you're supposed to master, you're supposed to study. Sergeants get a new set when they make sergeant, majors get a new reading list when they make, Major Generals get a new set of books they have to read and so as you go through your career, you're always learning from other people's mistakes, other people's successes. In this case along the Arizona border, they'd put in heliographs station. Stations where from one mountaintop to another, that could signal with mirrors where the the renegade Indians, as they call them, were located. So in this case, we did a computerized study of where we would have to be on the mountaintops in order to seal off the border, a visibility diagram and then we had the helicopters that could lift the troops in and we had the right kind of troops that could also push up the valleys. And that's trapped Osama bin Laden.
Peter Robinson: Once again I'm quoting Call Sign Chaos, "Instead General Franks," this is army general Tommy Franks who was in command of the overall effort in Afghanistan, "Instead General Franks sent in Afghan tribal fighters loyal "to warlords from the north. "They were out of their tribal element in Tora Bora, "poorly equipped and strangers among the locals. "Many of the enemy leaders fled unscathed to Pakistan. We let bin Laden get away.
Jim Mattis: Well, I'm not sure that my plan got all the way to General Frank. It was his headquarters that basically decided to determine to employ the tribesmen in that area. They were not from the area. They were not familiar with the area any more than we were, but I thought we had a better plan. And so, I proposed my plan. Sometimes in life things don't work out the way you want it. You just have to deal with it.
Peter Robinson: All right, you quote an article in The New York Times. This is you you quoting The Times. "In his desire to let the military call the shots, "President George W Bush missed the best opportunity "of his entire presidency to catch America's top enemy." And then you add, this is your own voice, "my view was a bit different. "We in the military missed the opportunity, "not the president." Explain that.
Jim Mattis: I'm quite certain the president was not giving that kind of tactical direction. He would have been quite satisfied if we had a plan to stop Osama bin Laden from leaving. What I learned from this so, the lesson I learned from this Peter was, that you have to spend time when you have a good idea persuading those above you. They may have very little time to address your point. They may not see the same opportunity that's fleeting, so I learned something from this and that was to spend the time to inform and cooperate with others in a way that they would embrace your solution. You had to show them that you had a solution for the problem they faced. And I'm not certain I did a sufficient job on that.
Peter Robinson: You also said, one more question on Tora Bora, that'll come up again and in the next case study if I may bring it up, you also said in "Call Sign Chaos" President Bush was quite rightly deferring to his military commanders. And that stopped me for a moment, because if Lincoln had deferred to McClellan, the South would have won. Franklin Roosevelt advanced George Marshall over others and then George Marshall in turn reached fairly far down in the officer corps to pull up Eisenhower at Franklin Roosevelt's prodding. So we have examples of chief executives, of commanders in chief, who don't always defer to the General Staff, who are pushing and prodding and asking questions and reaching down to advanced officers. It's confusing because we think one of the lessons of Vietnam, as I understand it, I'm a layman you're the warrior here, but one of the lessons of Vietnam is that the civilians failed to defer to the officers and yet one of the lessons of the Civil War and the lessons of the Second World War that the commander-in-chief needed to push his officer corps around. How do you sort that through.
Jim Mattis: This is why leadership and learning to lead is critical because each situation is different. And what works right in one situation is not right for another. In this case the commander in chief, the elected commander chief, the President Bush had made very clear we were to go after Osama bin Laden. He has done his job at that point. He's given very clear guidance. Then he is monitoring what's going on. There was a push on us all the time to get into Afghanistan following 9/11. I mean here it is Thanksgiving time and I've got a 1000 Marines and we're building up higher than that inside Afghanistan. The CIA, the special force has been operating there since late September. We were on the hunt, we were going after them and this was a tactical decision. This was not a strategic decision. That strategic decision the president had been clear on. He expected us to carry it out. I thought that the failure was in the military realm, not at the political level.
Peter Robinson: All right, thank you. Second case study, different conflict. Now we're in Iraq. The first early part of the of the Iraq war, Fallujah. This is a more complicated story. March 2004 insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy of four American private military contractors who were conducting a delivery for food caterers. They killed the men, they burned their bodies, they dragged the bodies through the streets and then they hang the bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates and this being the 21st century it's on media all around the world. Instead of invading Fallujah you yourself commanding, decided better not do it. I'm quoting you in "Call Sign Chaos", I didn't want to provoke an already aroused population further. So before we go into what happened when you were given different orders, what were you thinking about not going in to Fallujah? What was your rationale?
Jim Mattis: Fallujah was a tribal city. We knew there were tribes in the city that disagreed strongly with the tribe that had attacked these people. I had no doubt that we could find the culprits, the way the ones who had done this. We could get the bodies of the slain civilians back and to return them home. And then we would hunt down those who had done this and kill them. I had no doubt that we had tribal elements inside the city who would help us. And this is a city remember Peter of 350000 people. Most of those people.
Peter Robinson: Snack in the middle of Iraq, so it's got strategic in ports.
Jim Mattis: It is. It is in the Sunni triangle as well. So you've got to look at this and remember that every battlefield in a war like this is also a humanitarian field. You have innocent people caught up in the midst of all this. And so we had a different way to approach it where I thought that we could take out those who had conducted, the terrorists who had conducted the attack, but I did not want to go in a full-fledged attack on the city, assault on the city.
Peter Robinson: And by April you're overruled. President Bush gives the order to attack and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says in public the United States "had to send a message." Call Sign Chaos, I believed we had a more effective sustainable approach, which you just explained, but that was the order: attack. I made one strong statement up the chain of command. "Once we assault don't stop us." You've made your argument, you've been overruled, you say yes in we go, but can you explain how that how does that work. You have discretion as a commander to say, I'm gonna do this but,
Jim Mattis: No that's why it's called orders--
Peter Robinson: To explain yours thinking.
Jim Mattis: This is why it's called orders Peter, it's not called likes. It's not you have to like something. In this case the political consideration was to send the message. My concern was great nations don't get angry. Don't get angry make cool hard strategic choices. And if the choices that we were going in, then once we're committed to that don't stop us going in. In other words, you don't want to get wobbly to put it in Prime Minister Thatcher's words. Once you make a commitment to a course of action like this.
Peter Robinson: April 4th, your forces move in. The fighting is bloody and your forces are destroying one group after another. You described in Call Sign Chaos, I have to say it's absolutely fascinating reading the way disorganized groups of tribal terrorists I suppose, make one run after another but they're disorganized, they're not supporting each other in Fallujah and you just knock them down and the next group comes and your side knocks them down again. By April 7th the insurgents are starting to run out of ammunition, but news reports on the destruction, your forces are causing inside Fallujah are raising concern around the world. Call Sign Chaos, the coalition had no effective response to the propaganda, although damage and death in the city were real, that damage was not difficult for policymakers to anticipate when ordering us to attack. I was reporting our increasing progress but that truth was submerged. And on April 9th, when you're convinced you're only a couple of days single digit number of days away from getting the job done you're ordered to halt. Call Sign Chaos, "you don't order your men to risk death "and then go wobbly." And that's as close as you've come in this book to a real display of anger. How that must have been more than frustrating what are you thinking at that stage, you didn't wanna go in, you get orders to go in, you say okay, but bear this in mind once, we start don't stop us and then they stopped you. This is just as I said for a civilian, it's just an ordinary citizen reading that you're saying, wow there is just a disconnect between the commander on the ground and the the guys up the chain including the civilians .
Jim Mattis: Well it's frustrating. Because at this time, the news media was full of unfortunately false reporting. Some of it as a result of stringers who were using photography that was taken in other cities. For example showing artillery strikes going into Fallujah. I'd have used artillery if I needed it, but we never fired one artillery round into Fallujah during the First Battle of Fallujah. We didn't need it. And yet there was repeatedly shown on international news media both here and in Europe, the impact of artillery rounds allegedly in Fallujah was not the case. So there was a fair amount of political uproar over this. Talking about the innocent people are being killed, most of whom hundreds of thousand of whom had evacuated the town.
Peter Robinson: You had already given them plenty of time leave.
Jim Mattis: We expedited them out of the city. We did everything we could to make certain they were taken care of when they were turned forced into refugee status by the battle. But the bottom line is, that deep inside the city or we were ordered to halt and I would just tell you that one of the things you learn as a leader, as a young leader and as you go up you have to practice, you're not put in a leadership position to express your exasperation. You have got to figure out how to deal effectively because there's a lot of 18, 19, 20-year old sailors and Marines, who are counting on you to deal with this in a very pragmatic and as wise a way as you can. So we brought in a lot of snipers. I think every SEAL sniper who heard about battle came down to join us and we in close contact of the enemy, we went on basically a stationary or static position and we began negotiating with them at that point.
Peter Robinson: You describe a chilling scene in which you drive into the city uncertain of your own security to negotiate in person. So a stalemate takes shape that lasts for weeks. You write in Call Sign Chaos, every day our position was becoming increasingly untenable. By late April you develop a plan to resume the offensive. Once again you're ordered to hold off on the attack and a few days later, news breaks of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. Call Sign Chaos, "the imposed halt in Fallujah "and the rogue guards at Abu Ghraib had cost "us the moral high ground." May 1st, American forces withdraw from Fallujah. Call Sign Chaos, "I had been raised by Vietnam-era Marines "who drummed into me the importance of making sure "the policymakers grasp the nature of the war. "Don't get trapped into using halfway measures. "I had never before left a job unfinished, "yet I was leaving my troops playing defense." It's just, you read that and think of course, these were the lessons of Vietnam. And we hadn't learned them.
Jim Mattis: Well you know, you look at--
Peter Robinson: Is that what Fallujah, is that the correct conclusion from Fallujah, was it so specific that it doesn't really represent anything larger than itself.
Jim Mattis: I am concerned more broadly that we don't really learn from history. That were not teaching history of what happened when powerful armies meet or what powerful forces there are in the world that you have to deal with. We're more and more teaching history into niche components which I'm not against at all, but we'd better remember there are a larger currents that work in the world. And if we do not master those currents, if we cannot understand those currents, if we cannot figure a way to deal with complex situations at times looking at how others in history of dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with those situations, then we will make the same mistakes again. In this case, I believed it was a mistake and that was proven because some months after I left command, of course the Marines and soldiers the sailors had to go back into Fallujah and we lost hundreds more killed and wounded because the enemy now had time to restore their ammunition stocks, build bunkers inside homes it was a very very tough fight.
Peter Robinson: All right, your final posting. I'm jumping toward the end of the book here. Your final posting commander of CENTCOM, the United States Central Command with responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia including Afghanistan and Iraq. Just listen to a few items. A little litany from the book your description of your period as commander of CENTCOM. Iraq, you become convinced that Prime Minister Maliki is too secretary in a figure to rebuild the country and that the United States would have to leave troops on the ground to ensure the safety of ordinary Iraqis. Calls Sign Chaos, "in October 2011, Prime Minister Maliki "and President Obama agreed that all U.S. forces "would leave Iraq at the end of the year." Afghanistan, Call Sign Chaos "in repeated situation-room meetings, "I propose that at least 10,000 American troops "remain in Afghanistan without "any specified timeline for withdrawal." Instead the Obama administration insists on troop levels far below the number you specified and insists on imposing rigid timelines for withdrawal. Last item: Iran, the Obama administration makes a deal if Iran agrees to restrictions that will stretch out the time it will require to acquire nuclear weapons to 10 years then the United States and Europe will lift economic sanctions. Call Sign Chaos, "in my military judgment, "America had undertaken "a poorly calculated long-shot gamble." Summing up your time as commander of CENTCOM, "during my three years at CENTCOM, "American policy errors compounded the turmoil." The greatest democracy on earth and the most powerful and sophisticated military forces in all of human history and we made things worse. This is infuriating, heartbreaking, baffling and where were the lessons of Vietnam? We get toward the end of your book and it's just, I mean here's, sorry, let me back up for a moment. If this is the right way to put it, at the tactical level, this book is thrilling and heartening. The story of you as a young man becoming a leader, the story of the courage and valor and discipline of ordinary troops. That is tremendously heartening. The idea that the United States can still feel troops like that in the 21st century is staggering. Against that on the strategic side, what are we doing in the world with these brilliant troops and all of this marvelous equipment and the leaders as thoroughly versed as you. And here we have what we think are the lessons of Vietnam and in Tora Bora half-measures, in Fallujah the it appears that the civilian leaders call it wrong again and again and then at the strategic level when you're at CENTCOM, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, screwing up every single one of them. So there are aspects of Call Sign Chaos that are heartwarming, but aspects that are heartbreaking. Talk me out of it.
Jim Mattis: The Western democracies including America have a strategic deficit right now. We don't teach enough military history in our universities. Strategy I don't believe is taught well at all. I would just point out that there is this draw of young patriots into our armed forces. Young people who look beyond the hot political rhetoric and rally to the flag in the infantry case, infantry is named for a young soldier, infant soldier. They're 18, 19, 20-year olds, under 22 year old, 24-year old sergeants and lieutenants. And they're willing to put it all on the line and we owe them a good strategy. We owe them a strong policy that defends America and then a strategy to carry it out. I think at the higher levels what we have in today's Information Age, is a sense that they really know what's going on the front lines because they see these pictures on the news or they can immediately pick up the phone and listen to conversations down below, but there needs to be a division of labor, where once the strategy is determined, then there's a feedback loop to keep the political leaders fully informed. There should be no surprises. But you take your hands off the steering wheel and you turn that over to the young officers on the battlefield that have been trained and educated to carry out those responsibilities. Another point is though that you bring up is the lessons learned. Why are we making the same mistakes? Part of it is the human condition. War is a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon and at times you just can't predict what can go wrong once you start out in this in this direction. One of the mentors, and again remember that in this book, I'm really passing on a lot of lessons I learned.
Peter Robinson: Yes you are.
Jim Mattis: But one of the mentors, one of the wisest mentors I had has written don't ever tell your adversary what you will not do. And that is a guiding principle for me. In other words, if we are going to pull out of a fight, don't tell the enemy you're going to do that because then they know when you're not going to fight any longer. Don't put yourself in a position where the enemy can simply wait you out. Force the enemy onto the horns of a dilemma and create chaos in the enemy's camp. Don't reassure them, even if you're not going to do something. Don't reassure them in advance. In this case we were reassuring the adversary that by telling the enemy in Iraq, we're going to pull out. Our intelligence community called it exactly right, when they warned us, if you pull all your troops out, if you have no more influence over helping the Iraqi army defeat this enemy, then they are going to come back stronger than ever and you and I know now that ISIS did exactly that. We had to reintroduce the troops once again. But the thousands killed, the tens of thousands wounded, the hundreds of thousands millions forced into refugee status, we've seen the heartbreak of what happens when you make a bad strategic decision. So you have to come to grips with reality. You cannot deny reality or reality will feed you a very very tough dose.
Peter Robinson: Few closing questions here. You write in Call Sign... When you're appointed NATO commander for transformation in 2007, you went on a kind of listening tour. And you write in Call Sign Chaos, it struck me as odd that the generals and state statesmen whom I asked for advice were all retired in a country that no longer teaches military history, it should come as no surprise. And you put you include in the book in the appendix, you include in Call Sign Chaos, a list of the books that you have found most helpful in your career. That list must run to 50 or more books. It's a long list and it goes from the ancient world. You've got Marcus Aurelius there, through standard histories of the Second World War and so forth. And I thought looking at that list, very few of those books, very few of those books show up in the history curriculum in any college or university in America today with the exceptions of the military academies. And does that concern you the civilian life seems to be drifting away from even considering military, war is a fact of, I mean just state the obvious, it's trivial to state it. But that the civilian universities and colleges don't even consider that a fit subject for study any longer.
Jim Mattis: Yeah, it's perplexing when you realize the gravity of a decision in a democracy to go to war to put our young men and women into that situation. You would want people who are very studied in the history of it. You can't simply grasp current events and fully understand them if you don't have a historical understanding. It's almost like we go to the medical school and say you know cancer is such an ugly thing, we're not going to study cancer. It's just an ugly thing. Well, reality is there are ugly things in this world and you've got to study them especially if you want to try to prevent them, deter them or end them as early as possible. So it is frustrating. It is frustrating sometimes to realize that the persons in oversight roles do not have the most basic understanding. We wouldn't have a reporter for example reporting on football, that didn't understand the game and yet it's not unusual to have reporters show up on the battlefield who this is the first time they've ever been around a military organization. I've seen that. So yeah, it's frustrating hmm but at the same time it's something that can be solved. It's something that we simply have to roll up our sleeves and say we're going to solve this. That's one of the reasons I put the books in there, one of the reasons I wrote the book is so that we can look at these problems and say what's a better way to lead a country and perhaps prevent wars that don't need to be fought or end them quickly on our turns when they do need to be fought.
Peter Robinson: Jim, Mr. secretary as far as I can tell President Bush, the elder President George H.W. Bush is the last chief executive well, whom you treat in Call Sign Chaos is strategically sound. "President George HW Bush knew "how to end a war on our terms. "When he said we would take action we did. "He approved of deploying overwhelming forces. "He avoided sophomoric decisions like imposing "a ceiling on the number of troops or setting a date "when we would stop fighting." George HW Bush was also the last chief executive who saw action himself. So this gets to this deep question, I saw statistic, I don't know how you measured things, but I started a statistic the other day that 1% of the population has either been in combat of the American population today, has been in combat itself or knows someone personally who has. 99% have no clue of your business. Is that just fundamentally bad for democracy and if it is what on earth do we do about it?
Jim Mattis: Well, I don't think it's necessarily bad for democracy. I'm rather proud of the fact that the majority of American people are not intimately aware of what war is because it's a pretty ugly thing.
Peter Robinson: You're happy with a volunteer military forces for example, you don't want to all state a draft.
Jim Mattis: I would caveat out that by saying, I think it's a good idea that we look at a country a little bit like a bank. If you want to get something out of it you need to put something into it. I don't think the military is right for everybody. We don't need that many people in the military as if we're going to put a draft in that would bring every all young men and women in, but I think you have to do something whether it's support the Peace Corps, serve in the Peace Corps or the military being the you know, help out on teaching and inner-city schools.
Peter Robinson: Teachers for America for example.
Jim Mattis: Teachers for America, exactly volunteers and support of the communities, there should be something you do for more than just yourself, because as a World War II Marine put it, you know if a country is worth living in, it's worth fighting for, it's worth supporting. So I think we need to do that. But I mean you take a look at one of the best presidents we ever had was President Lincoln and he was quite fond of saying the only military experience he had was fighting mosquitos when he was called up for for an Indian war. So I think it has to do with the degree of humility, the degree of study of history and the degree of team-building and the willingness to listen to people who may have good ideas military and civilian because what we want is our diplomat solving most problems and with a strong military that's properly organized, trained and equipped and used appropriately, our diplomat stay in the lead of our foreign policy as they should. We're not turning to the military every time there's something that we disagree with in the world.
Peter Robinson: Two less questions, Call Sign Chaos, "my command challenge was to convey to my troops, "a seemingly contradictory message. "Be polite, be professional, "but have a plan to kill everyone you meet." And that gets it something that has always puzzled me about you. We've known each other five six years now. It was your business to see and do and think about terrible things. And yet Jim Mattis is one of the most cheerful men I've ever known. How do you pull that off?
Jim Mattis: Well, I think too there's there's some ancient books, some some books from history that tell you the only thing you control in this world is how you react to what goes on around you. And I've lived around grim things for a long time and combat itself will take the veneer of civilization right off you. But I've seen the very best of America. The most selfless young people, they're in their teens by and large, the ones you do the close combat, the close quarters fighting, I've seen them keep their spirits up under the most difficult of circumstances and you just develop an attitude of gratitude as you are around people like this. I remember and it's in the book, I'm sure you recall this where a marine and a sailor are walking back dripping wet having bathed in a dirty irrigation ditch. The only thing clean on them is their weapons really and I said how you doing there young men and the marine said, "living the dream general, living the dream," and the sailor chimed in with "no Maserati, no problem." There was there's a kind of a devil-may-care attitude for the young people who go into these very very rugged circumstances and to be around them was probably the greatest honor you could ever come up with. People say thank you for your service, believe me the country's worth it, but I had what I contribute the greatest honor possible to serve alongside these young people. And as far as I was concerned even when I was a four-star general, those privates and lance corporals were my equal because they were just as equally committed to carrying out the mission and I was. I had a different role, but we were comrades in arms and there was a sense I think when you come back to the United States just a gratitude for all that we have here that keeps you cheerful. You remember those young men and it just inspires you.
Peter Robinson: Last question. It's related to what you just said, but a little bit different. You joined the Marines again in 1969, it's half a century. Half a century, let's suppose that listening to this interview right now, there's a young Jim Mattis and maybe he's a little bit of a Hellraiser the way young Jim Mattis sounds as though he was or maybe he's just looking for something to believe in, something to do with himself, something to give himself to. There's a lot in this book about how this country can't get lessons of war through its head. There's a lot in this book about how our understanding of strategy has degraded over the last generation or two and how in some ways despite the advances in weaponry and Intel we have less sense of what we're doing with this country and with those forces than we had 50 years ago. What do you say to a 19-year old kid who's listening to this interview, what would you tell that kid about whether joining up today half a century after you did the Armed Forces of the united states still represent a worthy or a noble way of leading your life.
Jim Mattis: Well, you used the right words. I would tell them absolutely sign up you'll never regret it. It'll be have some of the best days of your life and some of the worst days of your life, but this experiment we call America is worth defending. And on its worst day it does learn from its mistakes. It does develop better ways to do things. We were born with the birth defect in our country and every year we've gotten better and we keep getting better. It's not a racial society, it's not a selfish society, it's not a out for me society and it's worth defending. If you watch the news all day and that's the stuff that hits the news of course, because it's pretty ugly so that sells I guess advertising but this is still the most generous country on earth. It is still the country that's the greatest hope and it's worth fighting for is the bottom line. It's worth fighting for and you'll never regret it if you sign up.
Peter Robinson: Jim Mattis author of "Call Sign Chaos" thank you for 44 years of service, two years as a Secretary of Defense and a pretty impressive life.
Jim Mattis: You're worth it Peter.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Thanks. I'm Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge, The Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, thank you.
