Admiral William H. McRaven Commencement Speech Interview

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Told with great humility and optimism, this book provides wisdom, practical advice, and words of encouragement. I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of little guys — the munchkin crew we called them — no one was over about five-foot-five.

You had to climb the three tiered tower and once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end. Then one voice began to echo through the night. He has often cited his high school track coach, Jerry Turnbow, as a positive influence.

Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, Ret.) on Make Your Bed « The Hugh Hewitt Show

Date of Birth November 6, 1955 William H. McRaven was born in Pinehurst, North Carolina. His father, a career Air Force officer, was stationed at Pope Air Force Base, now known as Pope Field, part of Fort Bragg. The family — including his two older sisters — moved to Texas while William was in elementary school and settled in San Antonio. His mother was born in Texas, and McRaven identifies strongly with the Lone Star State. Young Bill McRaven was drawn to william mcraven commencement speech transcript sea at an early age and began scuba diving when he was 13. An enthusiastic athlete, he competed in as many sports as possible. He played football for the Theodore Roosevelt High School Rough Riders and particularly excelled at track. He has often cited his high school track coach, Jerry Turnbow, as a positive influence. After exploring pre-med and accounting courses, he found a congenial major in journalism. He enjoyed writing and found the training in concise communication extremely useful in his military career. He met Georgeann Brady in college. The couple married shortly after graduation and have raised three children. Their marriage has lasted through a 37-year military career requiring constant relocation and deployments around the world. William and Georgeann McRaven enjoy a visit to Napa Valley during the 2014 International Achievement Summit. Their leadership styles clashed and McRaven was relieved of his first command. McRaven succeeded in his new position and began his ascent through the ranks. In the mid-1980s, the administration of President Ronald Reagan supported a major buildup of U. Admiral McRaven attends the 2011 Medal of Honor ceremony for Sgt. During the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, McRaven served as a task unit commander in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Following the war, he was task group commander in the U. Central Command area of responsibility. He had entered as a student of the National Security Affairs program, but soon saw the need for a graduate level program in special operations limited warfare, not just for the Navy, but throughout the armed services. It has been reprinted numerous times, has been translated into several languages, and is studied around the world. An Army Ranger, Remsburg was severely wounded in a 2009 firefight with enemy forces in Afghanistan. As commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One, Captain McRaven was leading a 1,000-foot freefall exercise in the summer of 2001, when an accident occurred that could easily have cost him his life. While freefalling, the man ahead of him deployed his parachute too soon, and McRaven collided with the chute as it opened. Stunned, he opened his own chute as well, but the lines wrapped his legs separately, wrenching his legs in opposite directions. Immediate surgery was able to repair his broken back and pelvis, but McRaven faced many months of sedentary recuperation. He was lying on a hospital bed in his own home on September 11, 2001 when he saw the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. With that and the attack on the Pentagon on the same day, McRaven was immediately aware that the United States was entering a new era of armed conflict and that special operations would be needed as never before. An Afghanistan strike force trained by United States Special Operations completes a training session at Camp Morehead, Afghanistan. Admiral McRaven created a plan to replace thousands of U. The remaining ten years of his military career would focus almost entirely on counterterrorism operations and strategy. He is joined by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. As they watch a drone video of the secret compound, Admiral McRaven gives them a live briefing by secure video link from a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. In the william mcraven commencement speech transcript following the attacks on the United States, McRaven commanded hundreds of night raids on suspected terrorist targets. Director William mcraven commencement speech transcript asked McRaven to prepare plans for an attack on the compound. The effort was dubbed Operation Neptune Spear. While the Senate considered the appointment, McRaven quietly proceeded with plans for the operation to eliminate Bin Laden. Secrecy and surprise were paramount, and President Obama concluded that the Pakistan government and military could not maintain operational security. The president and his advisors considered and rejected the options of a Drone missile strike or of bombing the compound. One had limited chances of success, the other ran the risk of damaging neighboring houses and injuring the occupants. McRaven applied the principles he had outlined in his book Spec Ops and proposed the plan that would delay any chance of discovery until the last possible moment. McRaven at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in Napa Valley, California. On the night of May 1, 2011, helicopters carried Seal Team Six from their base in Afghanistan into Pakistani air space. Admiral McRaven, linked by secure video from Jalalabad to the White House, briefed the president in real time as the operation progressed. Petraeus presents Admiral William McRaven with the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement at 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, California. Although most of these operations, by their nature, must remain confidential, in 2010 the command reported that special forces were deployed in 75 countries. Special forces conduct counterterrorist operations, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and counter-proliferation operations to arrest the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Make Your Bed by Admiral William H. On May 17, 2014, Admiral McRaven addressed the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin on their Commencement day. Building on the core tenets laid out in his speech, McRaven now recounts tales from his own life and from those of people he encountered during his military service who dealt with hardship and made tough decisions with determination, compassion, honor, and courage. Told with great humility and optimism, this book provides wisdom, practical advice, and words of encouragement. In 2014, Admiral McRaven announced his retirement from the United States Navy after 37 years of service. In May of that year he delivered a commencement address at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. When posted on the Internet, the address drew millions of viewers in a matter of weeks. McRaven was invited to apply for the position of chancellor of the entire University of Texas system. The Board of Regents announced his appointment in July 2014, and retired Admiral McRaven assumed his duties the following January. As chancellor, he presided over a system comprising nine university campuses and six medical centers, employing 87,000 faculty and staff, with an enrollment of 216,000 students. University of Texas Chancellor William McRaven at a 2015 press conference in Austin, Texas. Brazziell Chancellor McRaven expanded on the themes of his celebrated commencement address in his 2017 book, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World. In the closing days of 2017, McRaven announced his plans to retire from the University of Texas in 2018, having served four years as chancellor. Date of Birth November 6, 1955 On May 1, 2011, President Obama and his national security team gathered in the White House Situation Room to watch a commando raid taking place half a world away. As the mission unfolded, the president was in continuous video contact with the senior military officer directing the operation from a base in Afghanistan, Admiral William McRaven. To this task, Admiral McRaven brought three decades of experience in special operations. The success, that night in 2011, of the raid that eliminated Osama bin Laden without a single American casualty was due, in no small part, to the unique expertise of the man who organized and executed the plan, Admiral William McRaven. Since retiring from the United States Navy in 2014, Admiral McRaven has served as chancellor of the nine-campus University of Texas system. Our part of the mission was really pretty straightforward. We flew from Afghanistan into Pakistan and got Bin Laden and came back. And there was an attractiveness to that aspect of it. But that was a pretty straightforward mission for us. In fact, I would tell you that it was — I mean, it had a political aspect of it and an angst aspect of it that was higher than the rest of the missions we do william mcraven commencement speech transcript but from a standpoint of a pure military operation it was pretty straightforward. So the President made a decision to risk American lives and frankly to risk his political fortune, I think, to do the right thing for America. And I think those are the big takeaways that the American public ought to have is that the President and his National Security team did the right thing. Looking at some of the tenets you outlined in your book The Theory of Special Operations, a lot of it applies to Operation Neptune Spear, as the Bin Laden operation was called. I went right back to the book, because we had such tight security. I had to do the planning for the mission. But at the end of the day, I looked at the point of vulnerability, and I realized that if we did, if we attempted to do some of those other approaches, we were potentially going to be vulnerable hours out. Now we may not have been, but the potential for the Pakistanis to identify us hours away from the target was there. With the helicopters, I knew we could get in and we would probably only be vulnerable about two minutes out, and I felt that was good enough. So I absolutely looked at the point of vulnerability, relative superiority, keeping the plan simple. I mean, we kept the plan as simple as we could. Get onto some helicopters, go to the target, take care of the objective, get back on the helicopters and come back home. Now we came back short of one helicopter, but we had a backup plan for that. So it absolutely followed the model, and I made sure that I went back and looked at my own research. William McRaven: This is kind of what we did in Afghanistan. Helicopters going from a forward operating base to an objective, taking care of business on the target, getting back on the helicopters and coming back. Because it was important that they not know the details. Not just the American public and the enemy. William McRaven: We were trying to keep it as close to hold as possible, and fortunately we were successful in doing that. You were taking risks, but they were educated risks. William McRaven: We had, again, done the planning. I knew where all the risks were, and we had planned around those risks to mitigate the risks. So understanding that we wanted to fly in undetected, we knew what the Pakistanis had in the way of defenses. We understood what the compound looked like in Abbottabad. So we knew all of that information. And so with that good intelligence you were able to figure out where the difficulties in the mission were going to lie, and then take the opportunity to, again, buy down that risk to the point where, when I had the opportunity to brief the President, I was very confident that we could do the mission william mcraven commencement speech transcript way we had outlined it. He took risks too, political risks. William McRaven: Absolutely, he did. I am very proud of what my guys did, but the real risk and the burden was borne almost solely by the President. In May 2011, President Barack Obama meets with Admiral William H. You were at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey when you wrote The Theory of Special Operations, a remarkable thesis that has been widely read. What was the thinking behind that. William McRaven: I had an opportunity at Naval Postgraduate School to do some thinking about special operations. Most of them were still alive. They were in their 70s — early 70s to early 80s — and the folks I interviewed were still very sharp and remembered the missions they went on as though they were yesterday. So having an opportunity to sit down with these phenomenal officers and enlisted who had been part of some of the great operations in special operations history was just incredibly educational for me. But I remember as I was interviewing Herr Witzig, who was a German officer, about the raid on Eben-Emael, which was a very famous German raid into Belgium that secured a very difficult fort with a small number of folks. You have to have a swagger, you have to be confident. But when you sit down to do a mission, you have got to do the detail planning. You have to do the detail rehearsals. You have to be physically fit and mentally prepared. That happens through very difficult training and appropriate preparation. But there is a creative component. The more pressure there is, and the more there is at stake, the more ingenious and creative you have to be. What is the creative solution to this problem, and how can I apply what skill set we have differently than the infantry battalion or the air strike. If you try to be too creative, the laws of war —the frictions of war — will bring you down just like they will in an infantry battalion. So again, you have to understand where your talents are, where your expertise is, and within that framework be as creative as you can possibly be. So for example, when I did the theory and the thesis, the Germans for example used gliders to get into Eben-Emael. They could put a lot of men in gliders and get on the target quickly. William McRaven: This was at the beginning of the war as the Germans came against the Belgians as part of the initial movement into Belgium and then into France. The Italians used little mini-submarines to go against the British shipping in Alexandria. You have to look at what tools are out there — mini-submarines, gliders, parachutes, whatever it is — to get you to the objective. And then you have to be right on target with the talented people you bring. In your book you talked about security, simplicity, repetition, speed, surprise, purpose. Perhaps surprise is the most creative part. So when I talk about, in the thesis, this point of vulnerability, when you look at an operation, you want to bring that point of vulnerability — the point where the enemy knows where you are and the enemy can stop you from getting to the target — you want to bring that as close to mission success as you can, as close to william mcraven commencement speech transcript target as you can. So you want to close that gap. You close that gap by surprise. You gain surprise through things like, again, gliders or mini-subs or ships that look like different ships, as the British did during the raid on St. So this is the creative piece. But you have to get there, because if the enemy spots you two minutes away, or three minutes away, their ability to engage you — and you not being able to william mcraven commencement speech transcript to target — changes the whole dynamics of the mission. Some people have an image of creativity as a sort of muse that alights on your shoulder. It seems that william mcraven commencement speech transcript this case perseverance and discipline are integrally wrapped up with creativity. William McRaven: I think this gets back to the military model: the details have got to be part of the framework of the mission. I will give you a case in point. There were three men in the mini-sub, and they were going after the German ship, the Tirpitz. Well, the problem was, in the william mcraven commencement speech transcript of the planning for the mission, they knew that they were going to have to tow these mini-subs across from Scotland over to Norway. So they only tested it for a couple of hours, because the guys in the back of the mini-sub would get so sick because it was kind of porpoising up and down underwater. They would have known that had they tested it for the full 24 hours. So back william mcraven commencement speech transcript the discipline and the detail point. And that is not what you want. We have the examples of Mozart and Beethoven, who were incredibly creative within a very, very clear structure. The world knows more about your training as a Navy Seal than they might have as a result of the commencement speech you gave at the University of Texas that went viral on the Internet. So there is a lot of demand placed on you physically, but there was also a lot of demand mentally. So they will, for example, they used to play a little bit of mind games. The finish line is another couple hundred yards down the beach. You were cold, you were wet, you were miserable, and you still had to perform at a certain level. I have never been colder, I have never been more miserable, I have never been more tired. So that is really where the training, I think, helped. So any time you are tested I think you learn a lot about yourself, and I think I was all of 22 years old, so I learned it early. A couple of things came out in your commencement speech at the University of Texas. One is that small things we do can be very important. William William mcraven commencement speech transcript The one thing they teach you in the military is really the value of small things. As I mentioned in the commencement speech, I use the bed as an analogy, but it was a little bit of everything. So every morning you had a uniform inspection, and the military uniform that we wore, you had a brass buckle and you had to polish that brass buckle until the point where there were no smudges, that there were no corrosion, that the brass buckle was perfect. And you would spend hours every night polishing that brass buckle, and then, immediately after the inspection, they would have you go jump in the surf zone and now your buckle would be corroded. But the point they were trying to teach you, much like the bed, is the little details matter. Because the brass buckle and the bed later equated to your weapons system. So when we would go out on operations, your weapon — and in the case when I first started, we carried an M-16 — and you would go out and you would be on an operation all night long. You would come back at about 4:00, 5:00 in the morning. And you are really tired, again, you are cold, wet, and you are tired and all you want to do is take a shower and get in bed. So the point is, the little things matter. And that really does transcend into planning, for example. A lot of people ask me about special operations, and there is this belief that it is the bravado and kind of the cavalier approach. You had to do some dives in the dark waters and in cold waters. One of the training evolutions is to do what we call a ship attack. You can see it when you are underwater. But once you get close to the ship, the ship blocks out all the light, and the target for a ship is the keel, the center line of the ship. And as you get under there — one, ships have machinery, so there is a very deafening noise as well which can disorient you very quickly. So you have to maintain your composure, you have to be calm, you have to move to the center line. And you also know that under a ship there are suctions which could, in fact, pull your facemask off or do some things. So you have to be very calm, very composed as you are making your way to the objective, even in a training environment. Again, that is something that will weed a guy. A lot of guys could do the physical part, but when they got to this part that — while it was still physical — it was much more mental. Be calm, take care of business and then get out and then keep moving on. I could be doing something else. Ninety-nine percent of the people that come through training have played in some sort of sport. So we had, in my class I had a lot of swimmers and rugby players and water polo players and football players. And so you have a level of confidence, you have a level of a sense of adventure. I think it was, fortunately, being young. You come in probably a little bit overconfident, but you also come in physically strong. And you have gone through a process in high school or other places to really build up your, again, your skill set, your sense of adventure, your sense of character that allows you to get through training. I was very small in high school, but I did play football and I ran track in high school, which was really where I found my niche. But I played basketball, football, baseball. We played every sport imaginable. As I mentioned, my father was an incredible athlete, actually as was my mother. But my father taught me football, baseball, basketball, tennis, a little bit of everything. Dad was a big deer hunter and dove hunter, and we spent a fair amount of time together. I remember he would get home from work around 5:30 in the evening, and if it was during dove hunting season, fortunately we were in an area where it was a couple-mile drive to the dove field. So during dove season we spent a lot of good, quality time together. Or during deer season, he had leases every year and we would go out, sit in the blind and hunt deer. I was very fortunate to have terrific parents and terrific siblings. My sisters have been fabulous as well. We understand your father was also in the military. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1940. He had played professional football with the Cleveland Rams, and as he began to see kind of the storm clouds brewing, if you will, he and five guys left the football team and traveled out to Los Angeles, as I understand, signed up to join the Army Air Corps. He flew actually Spitfires — which was a British plane — flew Spitfires in supporting the bombers as they did the cross-channel operations. Then he was down in Sicily and Salerno. And then he had a 26-year career in the Air Force. So you grew up with the idea of military service. That must have been influential. So you had this Greatest Generation effect on, I think, both me and my sisters. He had 28 confirmed kills, both as a Navy fighter pilot and then he also was part of the legendary Flying Tigers. We had friends from all walks of life within the military that all retired kind of in the same area. So I was raised from this Greatest Generation. They had a tremendous impact on me. She was very gracious, a good Christian woman, but she also had the classic starched hair and she smoked and had william mcraven commencement speech transcript cocktails at 5:00. But she was just a fabulous mother. My father was kind of the historian and the math guy, and my mother was very much about the arts. She taught me poetry and taught me my love of reading and writing. It was a good balance between my mom and dad. Do you remember particular books that meant a lot to you as a kid. William McRaven: I was raised more on poetry than I was on books. My mother gave me the classic 101 Famous Poems and I can remember, on at least a weekly basis, we would go through it and read one of the poems. It was this kind of confluence of poetry and biographies that I was raised on. Your sister once said that it was possible that James Bond had an influence on you. I was absolutely a huge James Bond fan. I watched every John Wayne film and every James Bond film. I love Thunderball because I actually wanted to be a marine biologist initially, but I think Thunderball got me a little bit off track because I liked the action scenes in Thunderball. I started scuba diving when I was 13 years old, so Thunderball to me was very exciting because of all the underwater scenes. I think that kind of helped propel me in a different direction than being a marine biologist. William McRaven: I did, but probably for not the right reasons. I started off in pre-med, did not do so well in pre-med. And then I went to accounting, did even worse in accounting. I went to journalism because I knew there were good-looking women in journalism, so that was something I figured would be a good pursuit. As it turned out, I could write. Writing came fairly naturally to me. And while I struggled in pre-med, and I struggled in accounting, I got into journalism and we were writing ten-page papers three or four times a week and I loved it. It was, again, a skill that came relatively easy to me. So the courses were easier than the ones I had been in, and I had a phenomenal time over the next two years, my last two years at the University of Texas. I was actually in news reporting so I learned how to do what I think is the best writing, in terms of it had to be clear, it had to be concise, you had to check your facts. And all of those things served me well when I later joined the military. Going both up and down the chain of command. William McRaven: Journalism to me was really, I hate to say this, but it was kind of a means to an end. I was trying to get commissioned, and you had to have a certain grade point average to get commissioned. Once I got into journalism, I actually did pretty well. I never really thought I would use my degree in journalism, although it turned out to be very, very helpful. But my sister was getting ready, the doorbell rang and I think I was 16 or 17 years old I guess at the time, and he came to the door and he was wearing his Class As with his green beret. Of course, I had seen the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, and I was enamored with the Green Berets. So he came in and we began talking. Why do you think he said that instead of the Green Berets. William mcraven commencement speech transcript had come up in discussion. So I was heading down the Navy path, rather than the Army path. I think if I had been heading down the Army path, he probably would have convinced me to go be a Green Beret. Were your parents supportive of your taking the military career so seriously. I think they were very pleased. Actually, my mother kind of moved me towards the military. She was looking for a way to get me through college. I think my dad would probably rather have had me go in the Air Force, because he was an Air Force officer, but I chose the Navy path and they were pretty pleased with that. Because in the Air Force back then, the special services officers were those that took care of the golf course and the gymnasiums and did those sorts of things on an Air Force base. And I think she would have appreciated it if I would have stayed in special services rather than special operations. Your mom probably did prefer the other scenario. She really never understood what I was doing, I think. We were a very small community. So your mom might have preferred you to be looking after golf courses, but did your dad live to see your future career. And in fact, when I became a Navy captain, which was equivalent to an Air Force colonel, which he had been, we did the promotion ceremony down in Tampa, Florida, and my father was able to come down. The insignia are the same, they are eagles, so my father was able to pin his eagles on my collar. Unfortunately, a year or so later he had a stroke and was never the same again, but it was a terrific moment for both of us. The commanding officer and I had a disagreement about how things would be run and he was the commanding officer. I was confident enough in my own skill set that I thought I was good enough to do this job. Can you tell us more about that. Was it a personality conflict. This officer has described himself as something of a loose cannon. William McRaven: He was a very flamboyant officer. He had served in Vietnam as an enlisted man — became a mustang, as we say — he was later commissioned. And he was brilliant in his own way and I harbor absolutely no ill-will against Dick Marcinko. And I came in with probably a little bit more of a conservative belief in how we should run operations. It made a difference in the morale of the men, it made a difference in the professionalism of the men, it made a difference in the operations. But again, he was the commanding officer. So in a military organization, at the end of the day the commanding officer makes the decisions. I could have gotten up and left. I wanted to make sure in my own mind and in my own heart that I was capable of doing what needed to get done. It allowed me, as I became more senior, when other officers that worked for me had those problems, I had an entirely different approach about how I dealt with it than how I was dealt with during my time there with Dick Marcinko. And you did get another chance. William McRaven: I did get another chance. After that, I never looked back. What was the state of Naval special operations back there in the 1980s. William McRaven: When I started, I think we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 officers and about 500 enlisted men. So back to when I joined, it was a very small community. You kind of, at one point in time if you were on the West Coast you knew every officer on the West Coast. If you were on the East Coast, you knew every officer on the East William mcraven commencement speech transcript and every enlisted man. And then in the mid-1980s everything changed. We had the Reagan buildup, we had the establishment of the U. Special Operations Command, and with that came more money and we began to train more. William McRaven: When I came in, in 1977, there were two Navy captains, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast. You never had any belief that you would be a Navy captain. But I aspired to be a Navy lieutenant. And then, at one point in time I remember, about 15 years into my career, I got a call from the person that moves us around called a detailer. How am I going to do that as well as I can. So when I came in, nobody aspired to be an admiral. So I have been very fortunate. I believe it was July 18, 2001. You led a jump exercise that did not go as planned. William McRaven: We were doing a freefall so a static line parachute is where you hook up inside the aircraft, the freefall you jump out with a parachute on your back. So I was doing a freefall operation out in Southern California outside San Diego. And as I was descending, I noticed that there was a jumper below me on my right side and two jumpers below me on my left side. And the jumper below has got — in terms of freefall they always have the right of way. So I was watching this guy over here, and before I knew it this guy here slid underneath me, so he was probably about 500, 600 feet below me and he opened his parachute. So in relative terms, he was coming up while I was going down. So as he opened his parachute, I kind of hit his parachute. I rolled off his parachute and was a little stunned. So I pulled my ripcord knowing that I was getting to the altitude where you needed to pull it. And the pilot chute which comes out of the back of the parachute wrapped around one leg and then the risers, the webbing that is part of the parachute wrapped around the other leg and I was falling kind of head down towards the ground. The good news was that it opened; the bad news was when it opened it essentially broke me in two. So it broke my pelvis, it broke my back, it ripped a lot of muscles out. But the good news was I did get to the ground, and they came and picked me up in an ambulance and took me to the hospital and plated me and pinned me and got me back together again. William McRaven: I think it was just an instinctive reaction. Frankly, the smart thing to do would probably have been to wait and get stable again. I was not stable as I was tumbling because I am not a great freefaller. I was a journeyman freefaller. The right thing to do would probably have been to get stable again and make sure I knew what was going on before I william mcraven commencement speech transcript. It worked out good in some respects and not so good in others. So the doctors were able to put you back together again. William McRaven: Yeah, a little bit. When I look at the injuries that the young kids are sustaining today, mine was like a scratch. It was nothing compared to what these young kids are having to encounter or sustain today. So you were laid up for a while. Could you tell us where you were on September 11, 2001, and how you perceived the events of that day. William McRaven: We had moved a hospital bed into my house in base quarters in San Diego. I knew right then and there that the world was about to change. It took me a long time to heal, but I healed enough to be able to get to the White House. Then General Wayne Downing had been selected by the President of the United States to run the Office of Combating Terrorism. So I jumped at the chance and spent two years there and had an opportunity while I was there to kind of heal. And then after that I went back to an operational unit and kept moving. Go back for a moment to September 11. What went through your mind at that point. How did you receive what was happening. William McRaven: Just like every other American, I was stunned, watching the people of New York and later the Pentagon. How were they going to deal with this. To see the people of New York, in particular, as I watched them deal with this incredible tragedy and hold their heads high and do the right thing. Are we going to keep having to deal with extremism, do you think. This is a generational problem. And it requires decisive action, it requires early action. While the American people william mcraven commencement speech transcript not want to have to deal with this, what I would tell them is whether we want to or not, it is going to be out there and it is going to affect the global population and thereby affect us. So we can either deal with it now or we can deal with it later, but we are going to have to deal with it. A lot has come out in recent years about problems at home with regard to the treatment of veterans, medically for example. Do you see breakthroughs coming in the future. William McRaven: Within the special operations community, for the last three or four years we have worked very hard on dealing with the issues of our returning soft operators and their families. The families are a big piece of this. Even though intuitively we knew these guys had been at war at that point in time for ten, 11 years and the strain on the families and the soldiers was huge. As we began to dig into it more, we found it was a lot deeper and a lot more troubling than we thought. So we in the special operations community have put a lot of effort into a number of things. The physical aspect of this, we find, and the research is very strong, that if a guy is physically healthy, if he works out every day, if his nutrition is good, if he is getting enough sleep at night, he is less likely to have domestic abuse issues, alcohol problems, he is less likely to commit suicide or she is less likely to commit suicide. And we have had, unfortunately, our suicide rate has been a lot higher than we would have liked. So we know there is a physical component to this. There is a mental health component to this as well. Sit down and talk to the psychologist, talk to the chaplain, talk to a friend. And then finally the family piece of this. We need to figure out how you can get better sleep so you can deal with these problems. Do some of the skills that you learned in the military pertain to the rather challenging political job in front of you. William McRaven: I absolutely think they do. The role of the chancellor, unlike the role of the president, is really about establishing a vision. I mean, a lot of people think that the military is: the commander gives an order and everybody moves out. Like any other large organization you have to lead people. You have stakeholders, even within the military. So in my last three years, having worked on Capitol Hill and working with the White House and working with the State Department, I understand how to build this coalition of the willing within the stakeholders and get them to move in the right direction. And that really requires leadership and management, and I have had an opportunity to do that quite a bit over the last couple of years. What does being a Texan mean to you. William McRaven: No, I was actually born — my father was stationed at Pope Air Force Base and I was born in North Carolina. But we moved to Texas in 1963, I believe, so I went to elementary school, junior high school, high school and then I was at the University of Texas. But my father, who was also a transplanted Texan — my mother was born william mcraven commencement speech transcript Texas, born and raised in Texas — my father was a transplanted Texan, but he loved Texas, as did my mother. And so I believe that is true of America in general, but Texans take great pride in that. They take great pride in big ideas. They take pride in doing big and grand things. And so I am happy that the opportunity to be the chancellor at the University of Texas hopefully will give me the opportunity to do big things for the people of Texas. What started in Bedford Falls kind of changed the lives of those 500 people. So as I began to think about that. So tell me what it would take to get to them affecting 800 million people. It takes a measure of self-trust. William McRaven: It is, william mcraven commencement speech transcript. Part of my discussion the other day was there are some things in life you control. I have listened to a lot of the speakers here at william mcraven commencement speech transcript Academy this weekend. Someone or something that moved them in a different direction. But I said that the things that you do control are the little acts of kindness, the little acts of compassion, the little acts of courage that you can do every day. So you can control that and so take the opportunity — every opportunity you can — to be kind, be generous, because you have no idea what that can do for people. The importance of the small things. William McRaven: Absolutely, getting back to the details in the little things. What does the American Dream mean to you. William McRaven: I am living the American Dream. I was raised in a great household with two wonderful parents and two great sisters. Earlier this week, I think it was Wolf Blitzer talking about being in the right place at the right time and then doing the right thing. To william mcraven commencement speech transcript, the American Dream is the opportunity for me to be able to be in the right place at the right time and then do the right thing. Not once, not twice, but a lot of times that kind of moved me along this path to be where I am today. But there was nothing that stopped me. And for me the American Dream is, I look at it today — and this is one of the exciting things about being the chancellor — is I look at the changing demographics, and the changing kind of social fabric we have. And I think the human capital that we have in the Hispanics, in the Asians, in the African Americans, and in the women that are out there — give them an opportunity to get an education and it will change everything. And I have seen this firsthand in Iraq, and Afghanistan in particular, where the female population that we spent a lot of time in Afghanistan trying to get them into schools and were very successful at doing that. I guarantee you that will change everything about Southwest Asia. If we can educate our young kids coming out of high school, we will buy down fear, we will buy down bigotry, we will buy down all of the bad things if we just do a good job of educating.

The Board of Regents announced his appointment in July 2014, and retired Admiral McRaven assumed his duties the following January. Those students didn't understand the purpose of the drill. So it absolutely followed the model, and I made sure that I went back and looked at my own research. But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat, or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle— it just wasn't good enough. But as I have told other folks, we had 11 other missions going on that night in Afghanistan.