Speaker 1: The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 1: Good evening, everyone. This is episode one eighty six of
Speaker 1: The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. Dave's out at a
Speaker 1: cybersecurity conference tonight, and it'll just be me and Larry
Speaker 1: talking tonight. Our guest Larry Chambers is the author of
Speaker 1: Ricondo and Death in Ashaw Valley. He is a former
Speaker 1: WORP ranger served in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: One of his teammates was a former guest of the show,
Speaker 1: Ken Miller. I hope you guys will check that interview
Speaker 1: out after this one. Also served with Gary Linderer. You know,
Speaker 1: a kind of your peer group that wrote a lot
Speaker 1: about the WORPS after the war, and people like me
Speaker 1: read those books, you know, in the nineteen nineties as kids,
Speaker 1: and it was certainly found them inspirational. So I mean,
Speaker 1: this is really like a special moment for me, Larry,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate you coming on the show tonight.
Speaker 2: You're welcome, you know, it's exciting.
Speaker 1: So Larry, I'd like to start off talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: your origin story and sort of like how you grew
Speaker 1: up and what your pathway was that eventually took you
Speaker 1: towards the military.
Speaker 2: Well, I always I grew up in the military. I
Speaker 2: knew I was going to be in the military. Every
Speaker 2: childhood picture of me is in a uniform, my dad's
Speaker 2: little cut down officers uniform. And so we lived on
Speaker 2: an army base called Fort Barry. Fort Cronkite on the
Speaker 2: San Francisco coast was a missile battery and so that was,
Speaker 2: you know, in the mid fifties, and so I kind
Speaker 2: of remember the old brown boot Army because it wasn't
Speaker 2: that long after Korea. And my dad sertain degree served
Speaker 2: in World War Two and he got kind of a
Speaker 2: choice assignment after the war, and so all these so
Speaker 2: my friends growing up were privates and corporals that worked
Speaker 2: under my dad. He ran the radar site on the
Speaker 2: Bay on the Ford, and so, I mean, my dream
Speaker 2: was to be was to go to West Point. My
Speaker 2: dream was to then it became my dream was wanted
Speaker 2: to be a fighter pilot. And I took the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: I remember when I went down to take the Marine
Speaker 2: Corps flight test, influnked it. I got such a little score.
Speaker 2: They didn't even tell me what the score was. It
Speaker 2: was so bad. I was so nervous because I wanted
Speaker 2: it so bad. I literally would go blank. I would
Speaker 2: you know, I was one of those kids that I
Speaker 2: take a test and I'd have to read one question
Speaker 2: fifteen times. You know, does the plane take off in
Speaker 2: the air? I don't know. I mean, I was just
Speaker 2: it was terrible. So I was I was, let's say,
Speaker 2: for the last couple of years of high school. It
Speaker 2: was just so I thought, oh man, I'll never I'm
Speaker 2: never going to get my dream come true. And then
Speaker 2: I found out I could volunteer for the draft. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is opposite from all the stories of here about
Speaker 2: oh I was drafted. I got I was like, when
Speaker 2: I got my draft, I was were like, yeah, it
Speaker 2: was like, oh my god. You know, it was weird,
Speaker 2: but that I loved the Army. I loved being in
Speaker 2: the army. I was My friendships are still lifelong friendships
Speaker 2: with guys like Miller and Linder and Looney and Burford
Speaker 2: and all of these guys over the years, and well,
Speaker 2: you know, as soon as one guy dies, everybody no, no,
Speaker 2: you know, we're getting closer. But just lifelong friendships I'd
Speaker 2: never found, you know, I would use my ranger service
Speaker 2: in that when I was in business to shame people.
Speaker 2: Like if somebody stood me up or was late like
Speaker 2: twenty minutes, I said, great, you just got my whole
Speaker 2: team killed. What are you talking about? Me go, well,
Speaker 2: as far as I'm concern, if you're late, you're dead.
Speaker 2: If the chopper comes in and you're doing like, what
Speaker 2: are you talking about? Nobody had that kind of I
Speaker 2: was a stockbroker, I worked for you after I graduated
Speaker 2: from University of Utah, and and I sort of had
Speaker 2: to tone that down, you know, I've sort of kept
Speaker 2: the whole because they used to think if you went
Speaker 2: to Vietnam, you were crazy. And there was all these
Speaker 2: guys that had never gone to Vietnam that were crazy,
Speaker 2: and they were and they gave such a bad rap
Speaker 2: for the guys. But and I would hear these stories
Speaker 2: and I go like, that's not the story that I remember.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember guys tearing each other apart to
Speaker 2: get on the helicopter to go out to rescue people.
Speaker 2: And you know, our teams and we never left anybody behind.
Speaker 2: And guys, would you know, take a bullet for I mean,
Speaker 2: it was everything that you see and in the Avenger stories.
Speaker 2: But we're true. You know, these guys were heroes and
Speaker 2: and I was just lucky to be you know. I
Speaker 2: always felt like I was like the like the like
Speaker 2: the I just felt I was lucky to be there.
Speaker 2: I just, you know, I never put myself up to
Speaker 2: think I was anything at the time. I just I
Speaker 2: was really good at being alert. I was good being appointment.
Speaker 2: That's I used to say. I went from the I
Speaker 2: had dyslexia. I mean, I still have dyslexi, you know,
Speaker 2: which made school and I was a d D or
Speaker 2: still guess I am. So I made school really really
Speaker 2: difficult for me. And I I remember going into going
Speaker 2: in the Army. It was like I moved to the
Speaker 2: head of the class, you know. I just I mean,
Speaker 2: the training was it was like a piece of cake.
Speaker 2: I thought it was like, you know, somebody had sent
Speaker 2: me to camp. It was like fun. Like Cap and
Speaker 2: I get the Vietnam it was even more fun. And
Speaker 2: they had, you know, all the rounds, they gave you,
Speaker 2: all the ammunition and targets were everywhere. So it was like,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, what you know. But I couldn't tell this,
Speaker 2: you know. I come back and try to Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: tell people, you know, like, I don't know if you
Speaker 2: ever heard of a ranger named Cox, and he he
Speaker 2: was this guy and I just talked to his wife.
Speaker 2: He just died two years ago. When every time he
Speaker 2: seen me, he would like give me a he would
Speaker 2: punch me in the shoulder. It just he just loved
Speaker 2: to punch me. It was just like one of these
Speaker 2: big guys. And I got to where I just let
Speaker 2: him punch me. So one time, I mean, he was
Speaker 2: on that mission that you may remember that Gary Linda
Speaker 2: wrote about where the whole team got wiped out by
Speaker 2: the guys got huge or something a huge, yeah huge
Speaker 2: NBA Claymore. And I was on the other team, so
Speaker 2: I was out too, but we were close enough we
Speaker 2: could hear him arnucle we couldn't get to him. And
Speaker 2: Cox got his got blown his his arm like his
Speaker 2: hand was blown back and his stomach was blown open.
Speaker 2: He like set his own arm and taped it to
Speaker 2: his shotgun, taped himself up and was there for the
Speaker 2: next five hours shooting guys coming up the hill. And
Speaker 2: you're like, I told that was it a at a
Speaker 2: party at a college party in like nineteen seventy after
Speaker 2: I came back and there was a guy and he
Speaker 2: was holding court and he was talking about, you know,
Speaker 2: he plays rugby, and I'll tell you what, that's a
Speaker 2: goddamn tough sport, that rugby. I'll tell you I sprayed
Speaker 2: this ankle. I played the whole game with his spraying
Speaker 2: ankle and a tooth broken. And I went like, well,
Speaker 2: you know I had a friend that he got his
Speaker 2: spray ankle too, but he also got his stomach blown
Speaker 2: up and his hand was blown you know, I'd start
Speaker 2: telling his story and people would be like, uh in shock.
Speaker 2: You know, it was just a little bit too real,
Speaker 2: that Wold war, you know.
Speaker 1: But before Larry, before moving on, I just want to
Speaker 1: take a moment to ask you about your dad, because
Speaker 1: he was an Alamo Scout, which was like very unique
Speaker 1: unit that Rangers trace their lineage back to. I was
Speaker 1: wonder if you could tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: his experiences and kind of like what you grew up around.
Speaker 2: Well, he was also a functional alcoholic, so he was
Speaker 2: you know, he could handle the job, but you know,
Speaker 2: mostly he was an alcoholic. So he never ever talked
Speaker 2: to me about any of that stuff. But that's always.
Speaker 2: I'd heard that he was part of the he was
Speaker 2: in the Philippines, he was wounded in late day and
Speaker 2: you know, the he came back, I guess, I mean
Speaker 2: had me after he you know, was sent back home.
Speaker 2: But so I don't know a lot about well, I
Speaker 2: do know this one story, but this is speculation. But
Speaker 2: he's dead, so there's nothing he can do to me
Speaker 2: right now. He was a young lieutenant and I've got
Speaker 2: a picture of him in his He's a brand new
Speaker 2: second lieutenant out of high school and he's at a
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving dinner and it's nineteen forty one Thanksgiving, so it's
Speaker 2: like two weeks or something before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor,
Speaker 2: and I've got a picture of him. You know, these
Speaker 2: guys have no idea what's what's coming down the horn.
Speaker 2: So he goes, they go when they train in the
Speaker 2: Philippines and they did all of that, and i'd heard
Speaker 2: that he and like, nah, I shouldn't even tell it. Well,
Speaker 2: now I've started. I got to tell the story. But
Speaker 2: there was like a machine gun nest and he took us.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a platoon. He's a platoon leader, right,
Speaker 2: so he takes his platoon and a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: the guys get shot, and he came He finally came back,
Speaker 2: and a lot of his guys got shot and they
Speaker 2: busted him for it. Got he lost so many guys,
Speaker 2: and he sort of never got over. I mean, they
Speaker 2: never ever talked about that. I heard that from like
Speaker 2: a half brother of mine that told me that story.
Speaker 2: So I can't say it's true, but it sort of fit.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it makes sense why he wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about it too much.
Speaker 2: But I remember, you know, I remember him as a
Speaker 2: sergeant first class on this fort on Fort Barry, and
Speaker 2: how strike everything was, and how you know, his his
Speaker 2: his fatigues were like crackled, they were just crisp, and
Speaker 2: the boots were always shined and everything. And I just
Speaker 2: grew up with that, and I you know, so when
Speaker 2: I got to Vietnam, it was a shock. It was
Speaker 2: like I grew up in one army and then there
Speaker 2: was a gap, you know, from the fifties and then
Speaker 2: the sixties. I go in sixty eight and I'd go
Speaker 2: into a whole new army that I did not recognize.
Speaker 2: You know, they didn't A lot of the guys did
Speaker 2: not have the respect I mean not in our unit,
Speaker 2: but in other units, you know, didn't have respect for
Speaker 2: the the guys above him and all that stuff. It
Speaker 2: just did change. It was And of course that war
Speaker 2: was a lot different, you know, other than other wars.
Speaker 1: And if you were drafted, so you you happily accepted
Speaker 1: your drafting and joined the army and uh, your your
Speaker 1: infantry right yeah? Yeah? And and then uh, what's what's
Speaker 1: kind of like fast forward to the part where you
Speaker 1: arrive in Vietnam and how you get yourself on a
Speaker 1: WORP team.
Speaker 2: Okay, but I was infantry, but I went to jump
Speaker 2: school that after infantry, you know training, you know, so
Speaker 2: I've got the pop Pop eleven eleven Fox Pop whatever
Speaker 2: that is. And so when I arrived in Vietnam, is
Speaker 2: that what you Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you got there and volunteered to be a
Speaker 1: WORP I mean, could you walk us through some of that?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like I said, I wanted to do all
Speaker 2: these really cool things that I couldn't test out to do.
Speaker 2: So I get there and I, you know, to me
Speaker 2: special forces, I can't believe it. People don't equate this
Speaker 2: in Vietnam, but I should do. They were like gods,
Speaker 2: literally walking gods. If you were inn SF, you were
Speaker 2: the coolest thing on the planet Earth. And but it
Speaker 2: was a four year, six year commitment to do that.
Speaker 2: And I and what I I found out by volunteerfer Lips,
Speaker 2: I could see you, and you know, I could uh
Speaker 2: what ten forty nine or whatever that was into fob
Speaker 2: like into an fob one or something if you wanted to.
Speaker 2: So there's a way to get into SF and not
Speaker 2: you know, we didn't. I don't know if they had
Speaker 2: the Q course backed entery and that stuff. But I
Speaker 2: was a bunch of these paratroopers that had got there,
Speaker 2: and they sort of they didn't sort of they sort
Speaker 2: of well they were counting guys off and they counted off.
Speaker 2: And this was nineteen sixty eight, and this was we
Speaker 2: had lost a thousand guys and one hundred and first
Speaker 2: up in the north and and so one hundred first
Speaker 2: wasn't exactly like everybody's choice, you know when they get there.
Speaker 2: But they counted off, and I remember they drop like
Speaker 2: a couple in front of me and you guys are
Speaker 2: all hundred first, and I jumped up and yelled is
Speaker 2: excitement because that was my dream come true. I had
Speaker 2: it all mapped out in my mind. I'd be hunting
Speaker 2: first and I volunteer to do something really cool. So
Speaker 2: and I do that, and everybody was you know, a
Speaker 2: lot of these guys. I thought it was like nuts
Speaker 2: for that show of emotion. And then there would be
Speaker 2: a guy that would come by and they would this
Speaker 2: young sergeant I gave us a talk about being alert,
Speaker 2: what it meant to be alert, and he said something
Speaker 2: that I would never forget, and it was, look, when
Speaker 2: you're out, you got five six guys the good And
Speaker 2: I hate to use this word, but I got to
Speaker 2: say it goop because it's a word that hated me back.
Speaker 2: It was used at the time. It's very you know,
Speaker 2: I would never use it now, but being shoot that
Speaker 2: made me lose my trend of thought about oh so
Speaker 2: here's what. So he goes, you're out in it, in
Speaker 2: the in the jungle, and the gooks don't they can't
Speaker 2: see you. You can't see them. You're out there trying
Speaker 2: to find them. He says, Look, it's some of you
Speaker 2: guys are going to go north and you're going to
Speaker 2: be on a firebase. You're going to be an infantry company,
Speaker 2: and you can hear an infantry company all the way
Speaker 2: to hand noise that makes so much noise that lerps
Speaker 2: were silent. He told us. The whole story goes, it's
Speaker 2: safer behind the lines than it is in front of him,
Speaker 2: and we're like boom, my hand went up and volunteered,
Speaker 2: and people thought it was crazy when I did that,
Speaker 2: but I really think it's say that saved my life.
Speaker 2: It just being in that lurt company though it was hard.
Speaker 2: I mean, it wasn't you know, cake walk, but.
Speaker 1: You're you're around motivated, competent people.
Speaker 2: Everybody there was. They were all volunteers twice when we
Speaker 2: were still on jump status. So you know, the Hunter
Speaker 2: first was on jumpstat just us and I think the
Speaker 2: you know, another group like the Pathliners, and that was
Speaker 2: all so we still got jump pay and so you
Speaker 2: you sort of self selected yourself into it, so you
Speaker 2: were around got like minded guys. And so that's why
Speaker 2: my experience of that war is completely different than a
Speaker 2: lot of the stories. I mean, I don't, you know,
Speaker 2: I feel bad for guys that I lost, but you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not. I don't dwell on that. I don't feel
Speaker 2: bad about, you know, things that I did. I feel
Speaker 2: proud of every single thing my team did. We did
Speaker 2: and they and my my unit, my ranger unit. I
Speaker 2: mean we were like we would get up sometimes in
Speaker 2: the morning and run. We still had to run, if
Speaker 2: you believe or not. And we would run through what
Speaker 2: we call legs, you know, even though they were one
Speaker 2: hunter first, they were still legs and we would run
Speaker 2: through their barracks at like five o'clock in the morning, which,
Speaker 2: you know, we just pissed everybody off. But we were
Speaker 2: so proud of, you know, that we could piss people off,
Speaker 2: not only in the back but out in the front.
Speaker 2: You know, whatever wherever we were at, we wanted to
Speaker 2: like cause trouble. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ken, Yes, guys were troublemakers.
Speaker 2: Ken was Ken. You know. Ken's not a big tall guy, right,
Speaker 2: whatever the minimum is to get in the army. He's
Speaker 2: like two inches lower than that. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Like one time some new guy came in to our
Speaker 2: unit and he wanted to fight guys. And we're sitting
Speaker 2: in our team you know, our team house, our team tents,
Speaker 2: and this guy came in. I was sitting there and
Speaker 2: it was you know, it pissed me on, pissed me off.
Speaker 2: Because he was kind of drunk and he was really
Speaker 2: mouthing off about how he could beat anybody. You know what.
Speaker 2: You guys are so tough, you know, So I went, no,
Speaker 2: come on, So we went around the back of the tent.
Speaker 2: Now this is a cheap shot, I'm sorry, but I
Speaker 2: coll cocked him. Mine came from the bottom and I
Speaker 2: hit him right in the face and knocked him clear
Speaker 2: down into the road and he rolled and Miller and
Speaker 2: I did high fives. We thought that was the greatest
Speaker 2: thing in the world until suddenly he shows back up
Speaker 2: with that platoon was like the first platoon, and they're
Speaker 2: all like, oh, what the chief joke and were going
Speaker 2: to fight these guys are this one guy that's my
Speaker 2: size is standing in front of me and he's good,
Speaker 2: you know, he's pointing his finger and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: and he touched Miller and it was a mistake. The
Speaker 2: guy took a swing at Miller and Miller caught the
Speaker 2: swing in his mouth, bit through his knuckle, you know,
Speaker 2: just almost bit his finger completely off, and then got
Speaker 2: on him on his ear and bit his ear off
Speaker 2: and spit it. So he did that way before you know,
Speaker 2: the boxer did spit the ear out. Blood was going everywhere,
Speaker 2: and all of us just stood back and shock and went,
Speaker 2: you fucked up. You know that you should never fight
Speaker 2: somebody that's shorter than you are. Because we couldn't get
Speaker 2: him off. He kept We were all trying to try
Speaker 2: him off, but he just kept beating this guy up.
Speaker 2: It was like tragic.
Speaker 1: Mill Miller neglected to tell me that story.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not going to tell that story, no, but
Speaker 2: I witnessed it.
Speaker 1: Tell Tell tell me then, what it was like when
Speaker 1: you first showed up at your unit at one hundred
Speaker 1: and first Corpse. What was it like getting there as
Speaker 1: a new guy.
Speaker 2: Well, here's okay, So I'll tell you what it was
Speaker 2: like because I was mister Odie Chlode like. I didn't smoke,
Speaker 2: didn't drink, didn't smoke dope, didn't even cuss, and believed
Speaker 2: in God even you know, how weird am I and
Speaker 2: I show up and so we're it was like the
Speaker 2: first or second day, and this guy named Marty Martinez,
Speaker 2: which was one of the point men who had a
Speaker 2: huge body count, and and he goes, yeah, the goddamn
Speaker 2: good And I said, excuse me, you really shouldn't use
Speaker 2: the Lord's name in vain. This guy flicking off. It
Speaker 2: just was so pissed off of me. And what had
Speaker 2: happened was in our unit, one of somebody got really
Speaker 2: pissed off at the company commander, which was the before
Speaker 2: I got there, and blew his foot off. So they
Speaker 2: lost the company banner and they got a new commander
Speaker 2: ab at the same time I came in. So I
Speaker 2: come in a little too clean, a little too like,
Speaker 2: I didn't cuss and everything like that. And now I
Speaker 2: got the guy who's got the biggest body count in
Speaker 2: our unit pissed off at me and like so he
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a few weeks later that I was
Speaker 2: I had to go. We had an AMMO bunker, we
Speaker 2: had to go. I'd go down to the AMMA bunker.
Speaker 2: I was told to go the AMMO bunker and and
Speaker 2: we had a machine gun nest thing that we would
Speaker 2: man all night long. And so I go to get
Speaker 2: all of the claym wars and all that, and you
Speaker 2: had to climb down into this bunker and it was
Speaker 2: dug in the ground. We had tons of C four
Speaker 2: and all kinds of shit inside this thing. And I
Speaker 2: get in there, and I and I find the claym wars.
Speaker 2: As I pull it, like a Thermo grenade starts cooking off.
Speaker 2: And I had no time. I had like just dropped
Speaker 2: everything and just made my way up. I had to
Speaker 2: go out through the sink and Dixie dog or on
Speaker 2: this dog, she came over to see why I was there.
Speaker 2: I wanted to get some food, and I grabbed a
Speaker 2: hold of her and I ran like fifteen feet. There
Speaker 2: was a bunker and I jumped in this bunker and
Speaker 2: then was like the whole earth blew up. That thing
Speaker 2: blew up and had PCP covering on top of the
Speaker 2: sand bags, and that shit was bouncing down and bouncing around,
Speaker 2: and hand grenades were cooking off, machine gun amma was flying.
Speaker 2: You know, everything was cooking off. And the commander of
Speaker 2: the AT Eagle called in to see. He thought the
Speaker 2: North VIETNAMESEID did an air strike because it was such
Speaker 2: a big explosion. You know. It was me so in
Speaker 2: through the clouds, I come walking. I finally I like
Speaker 2: make my way through. I still got Dixie had scrambled
Speaker 2: out of my arms, and I still have her dog tag.
Speaker 2: I still have it today. And I walked out and
Speaker 2: went like, uh, hello, it's okay. I mean, what do
Speaker 2: you say when you when you blew up all of
Speaker 2: our ambience?
Speaker 1: I think the correct answer was the NVA got us.
Speaker 1: We had sappers in the wire.
Speaker 2: I didn't think about that. I wanted to use, but
Speaker 2: I had no I just went eh. It was uh.
Speaker 2: That was a nightmare because I had to go down
Speaker 2: and explain what had happened to these these young second
Speaker 2: lieutenants that were in S two or something.
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Speaker 1: So yeah, thank you to our sponsors. Oh, Larry Uh.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify for people out there who have maybe
Speaker 1: have not read your book yet or don't know too
Speaker 1: much about you know, our military during the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: could you describe what the warps were and what their
Speaker 1: mission was?
Speaker 2: Lourps a long Range Reconnaistance Patrol, and even though we
Speaker 2: came seventy fifth Rangers, it was still the same the
Speaker 2: same tactics. But we would go five six man on
Speaker 2: a team and there would usually be two teams would
Speaker 2: go out into you know, into a grid square of
Speaker 2: several gridge squares that we had gotten intelligence on and
Speaker 2: we would go out sometimes thirty miles away, you know,
Speaker 2: are further away than the line units. So we would
Speaker 2: be the eyes and ears of the division. You know,
Speaker 2: there's different guys that call themselves lerps that were lurks
Speaker 2: in the division, but they were short, you know, a
Speaker 2: REP for infantry units. We were. We would we worked
Speaker 2: real close with FOB one, which was for Operations Base
Speaker 2: one Special Forces guys SOG, and so we shared intel
Speaker 2: and sometimes we did SOG missions. We didn't even know
Speaker 2: there were SOG missions, but that mission into the Ashaw
Speaker 2: Valley that first time was like a SOG mission, even
Speaker 2: though you know, we didn't get a T shirt, which
Speaker 2: I'd love to have, by the way, or the shorts
Speaker 2: for doing that, but that that was that was our mission.
Speaker 2: And sometimes it would be ambushes if we would see
Speaker 2: a unit that we could ambush we would do either
Speaker 2: a hasty ambush or literally go in and set up.
Speaker 2: Done that. We've done that before. We're we'll you know,
Speaker 2: ambush a unit that's been moving into the area and
Speaker 2: we're up. We were up in I Corps, which I Corps,
Speaker 2: which was way fu Bay out to the Ashaw Valley
Speaker 2: would have been west.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of did so tell us that about
Speaker 1: about your first insertion, your first mission, as I'll work.
Speaker 2: They my first you know, what I remember was the
Speaker 2: helicopter ride because even though I jumped out of planes,
Speaker 2: I'd never been in a helicopter and it was kind
Speaker 2: of unsettling to be sitting in the center of that
Speaker 2: thing and it just lifted up. It was just the
Speaker 2: strangest experience. That's what I remembered was well, actually not
Speaker 2: what I remember. What I remember was I forgot my rifle,
Speaker 2: which is like the most embarrassing you imagine your first mission.
Speaker 2: And I'm all excited and I go down to the
Speaker 2: to the pad, the launch pad where the helicopters were
Speaker 2: warming up, and I remember the team would going like, uh,
Speaker 2: where's your rifle, and We're like and I just turned
Speaker 2: and I spread it almost like tears are coming down.
Speaker 2: My eyes back to my to the hooch, and I grabbed,
Speaker 2: you know, grabbed my car fifteen and ran back down.
Speaker 2: But it was so embarrassing. So I was living through
Speaker 2: the shame and then the excitement of the helicopter ride.
Speaker 2: And the first mission was uneventful. The second mission was
Speaker 2: the mission where Linders guys got all shot up. So
Speaker 2: that was we found this huge bunker complex and I
Speaker 2: remember this deer was chasing these monkeys. It was weird,
Speaker 2: and that it sounded like the whole NVA fifth NBA
Speaker 2: Regiment was running down the hill towards us, and we
Speaker 2: were we had a twelve man we called a heavy team,
Speaker 2: and we were waiting to be you know, for all
Speaker 2: these NVA to run into us. And it was this deer.
Speaker 2: This deer came by, and then a monkey came by.
Speaker 2: It was like what so that? And then I was
Speaker 2: lucky because I was on. This was Sergeant Burnell, which
Speaker 2: is a kind of a famous ranger, eighty second Airborne
Speaker 2: Guy's know him there in for life. He led He
Speaker 2: led that mission because it was it was so it
Speaker 2: was a big deal as it actually turned out to be.
Speaker 2: And the other young sergeant got killed in his section.
Speaker 2: So we ended up staying out there till they got
Speaker 2: everybody out, And we ended up staying out there for
Speaker 2: like a couple of days. Like we didn't have enough backup.
Speaker 2: If we'd got into a big fight like that one
Speaker 2: team did, we'd have been in a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2: So they had a leagh dog and we just laid
Speaker 2: in the rain. It was raining, the hardest reign I've
Speaker 2: ever seen, and weren so hard to you know. I
Speaker 2: just would look up and I couldn't even see my
Speaker 2: play more minds that I couldn't. You couldn't see that
Speaker 2: far ahead of you, So we knew that the enemy
Speaker 2: couldn't see either, So we just sort of like kicked
Speaker 2: back and waited for a couple of days till they
Speaker 2: could get a helicopter in and get us.
Speaker 1: That was was this the operation where you were you
Speaker 1: were wrapped in your in your chow liner and the
Speaker 1: NBA walked within like six feet of the patrol.
Speaker 2: Oh that was like the second mission or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the the that that was a that really I got
Speaker 2: a lot of gravitas from that because I had set
Speaker 2: up at night and I set I was right on
Speaker 2: the edge of the trail and and I had a
Speaker 2: poncho liner, and so I kind of it was really cold,
Speaker 2: and I wrapped myself in the poncho liner and I
Speaker 2: actually had I'd set my rifle over here and my
Speaker 2: hands were inside, and I heard something. It was like
Speaker 2: about four in the morning or something like that, and
Speaker 2: I lifted up into a half set up and right
Speaker 2: there walking was an MVA soldier. Was like it came
Speaker 2: within just like a meter of of me, and so
Speaker 2: I just froze. And then the guys were behind me
Speaker 2: were all you know, they were obviously all frozen too.
Speaker 2: And we had something like twenty guys or they said twenty,
Speaker 2: I forget how many. It was a lot walk past.
Speaker 2: When I got through, I was so glad. I had
Speaker 2: done lots of sit ups earlier in my life, so
Speaker 2: I was really I had a strong core because I
Speaker 2: literally kept a half sit up for fifteen minutes without
Speaker 2: even a moving a hair. So that was that was
Speaker 2: like scary, but it also meant I could take being
Speaker 2: around enemy really close, which you know, the old guys went, okay,
Speaker 2: I want him on my team. So that was really
Speaker 2: that was. I moved up in.
Speaker 1: What do you call it stature.
Speaker 2: I'm stature, Yeah, that was the word. I was searching
Speaker 2: for a stature sometimes, like they would, you know, you
Speaker 2: never know how somebody's going to react in combat. And
Speaker 2: like everybody thinks, because if you know, they can bench
Speaker 2: press hundreds of pounds and they're all in great shape,
Speaker 2: it means zero means absolutely nothing. The scrowniest looking guys
Speaker 2: there are sometimes are the best lurps and the best
Speaker 2: rangers that can be Hey, they'll never give up. They're
Speaker 2: just hard as nails and they're afraid of nothing. But
Speaker 2: one time we took out a young guy who was
Speaker 2: smarter than all of us. He was really smart kid,
Speaker 2: and he freaked out. He ended up shooting up. He
Speaker 2: got surrounded. They were surrounded, but we're always surrounded, I
Speaker 2: mean that's part of the drill. And he got so
Speaker 2: freaked out he just started firing his M sixteen and
Speaker 2: actually shot one of our guys. And I always remember,
Speaker 2: it's like, you've got to test these guys. You got
Speaker 2: to test somebody before you really get on a team.
Speaker 2: So all of our guys were had been through the
Speaker 2: the you know, a test so to speak, you know,
Speaker 2: going out on a mission, where you're going to be
Speaker 2: surrounded and you are there is no infantry coming to
Speaker 2: your rescue, except we'd have air rifles that would come,
Speaker 2: you know, once you got into a firefight, but you
Speaker 2: know that still might be thirty minutes away.
Speaker 1: Your sector that you talk about, your that your unit
Speaker 1: covered in the book was pretty interesting because it encompassed
Speaker 1: like some pretty historical areas like the like Hamburger Hill,
Speaker 1: Ashaw Valley, a few other notable places. It was a
Speaker 1: pretty am I right to say, it was a pretty
Speaker 1: hot area.
Speaker 2: If you didn't get wounded, we used to say you
Speaker 2: were gay. I mean, I know that's not probably the
Speaker 2: right thing to say in today's world, but that was
Speaker 2: the way we joked around. It was like with the ship,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, this was it was. It was teeming.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you look at the at the Hocheimen Trail,
Speaker 2: the way it came in, it dropped in from Laos
Speaker 2: right in the Ashaw Valley right over and then they
Speaker 2: could go into into Waifu Bai on on the rest
Speaker 2: of the din.
Speaker 1: And Waye City was in that area also.
Speaker 2: Yeah, way City was That's where that's where our we
Speaker 2: were close to that, that's where our Camp Eagle was
Speaker 2: was was about five miles from there or something like that,
Speaker 2: real close, but yeah, it was a hot could you
Speaker 2: tell then there was the run Rung Valley. That was
Speaker 2: another one. You we every almost after the first couple
Speaker 2: of minutes, I mean almost every mission I went on,
Speaker 2: we get contact, some form of contact, either we would
Speaker 2: see enemy or we got in a firefight and got
Speaker 2: shot out one or the other.
Speaker 1: Could you tell us about the mission. This is kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting one with the black boxes that they
Speaker 1: wanted you to impoint or in place, I should say,
Speaker 1: mm hmm.
Speaker 2: When the helicopter got shot down.
Speaker 1: Or was that was that on? Was that on the
Speaker 1: way back? Yeah, if he would just tell us about
Speaker 1: that mission? And I thought that was Miller.
Speaker 2: Miller was on that with me, and so Miller was
Speaker 2: Miller was the sergeant in charge. I was still expected
Speaker 2: forward then, and we were planting black boxes and they
Speaker 2: were just these black boxes, a little aerial and we
Speaker 2: would you know, they hadn't marked and where they were
Speaker 2: going to be. And supposedly if any tanks or heavy
Speaker 2: stuff went by there, you know the vibrations, they would
Speaker 2: call in air strikes. So we'd been doing that for
Speaker 2: a couple of days, and the last day we were
Speaker 2: leaving and the helicopter takes off and hit a tree
Speaker 2: and it lobbed off about three foot of the blade,
Speaker 2: so this thing and we were way in the hell
Speaker 2: up and he couldn't land back down because he was
Speaker 2: out over this big canyon, so he just dove dove
Speaker 2: the helicopter and it was I don't know if you
Speaker 2: ever been in a helicopter that lost four foot of the
Speaker 2: rotor blade. It only has that one rotor. It's like
Speaker 2: you're in a washing machine. And luckily the guy got
Speaker 2: or you know, auto rotated the last little bit. But
Speaker 2: we had really hard, you know, so hard that everybody
Speaker 2: banged up against the up and then banged back down
Speaker 2: and then you know, we had It was weird when
Speaker 2: that's when something crap, when you crash like that, because
Speaker 2: you don't have a map for that, you don't know
Speaker 2: where you're at, or you don't have your map lined up,
Speaker 2: so you're on your own, you know. And so we
Speaker 2: had to set up a perimeter around the helicopter and
Speaker 2: took forever before they could you know, get a big
Speaker 2: another chopper in to pull that one out and Miller
Speaker 2: and I were the last two. We stayed to the
Speaker 2: very end. But there's this one more story about that
Speaker 2: that crash. So we come back and and Miller had
Speaker 2: brought that had picked up a big bone, like a
Speaker 2: water bison's bone. And I remember we always sort of
Speaker 2: had this competition, and I said, I could knock with
Speaker 2: that bone that canteen cup off Miller's head. So he
Speaker 2: stood there and I was back at the end of
Speaker 2: the hooch, and I threw it really hard and it missed.
Speaker 2: Of course, it hit him in the head, split his
Speaker 2: head open, and now he's got blood all running down,
Speaker 2: so he's making himself like an Indian and he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, now I know I'm going to catch it
Speaker 2: because I have to take the punishment from what I
Speaker 2: just did. And you know, I just stand there and
Speaker 2: Miller threw that thing as hard as he could, and
Speaker 2: I put my hand up and it hit my hand
Speaker 2: and broke my fingers. So now you know we're actually
Speaker 2: this would have been an article fifteen if if you know,
Speaker 2: we'd have been found out. But we go down to
Speaker 2: the age station. Luckily we crashed in the helicopter, so
Speaker 2: I went, yeah, we were in a terrible helicopter. Helicopter crashed.
Speaker 2: Miller's all bleeding and stuff, and I'm, you know, my
Speaker 2: finger's broken and so I put on They put me
Speaker 2: in a like a cast and I cut it down
Speaker 2: and I still trained. And I actually I've got pictures
Speaker 2: of me and a McGuire rig and I've got this
Speaker 2: cast on my hand. You know, that's how gun ho
Speaker 2: we were. I mean, we didn't. You didn't go. You
Speaker 2: get to the hospital and you come back to your unit.
Speaker 2: We wanted to go back out and you know, get going,
Speaker 2: which is not again what you normally hear, you know
Speaker 2: people people say.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and was this about the time that your
Speaker 1: unit started going into Ashaw Valley or was that later?
Speaker 2: It was later. We didn't go into the Ashall Valley
Speaker 2: till after I got back from your condo. School. Was March? Okay,
Speaker 2: what March nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Let's uh, let's cover that first. I mean, before we
Speaker 1: get there, was there any other like notable missions before
Speaker 1: Racondo's school that you think are important to bring up.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know there was a lot of them.
Speaker 2: I mean I sort of felt like I had a
Speaker 2: sixth sense. We were talking about this earlier, and I
Speaker 2: was and I'd walk point and I would like know
Speaker 2: when something was going to happen, I would just know it.
Speaker 2: And one time stopped and we got off the trail
Speaker 2: and I walked. Burford was the team leader at the time,
Speaker 2: and so he's he was behind me. And I left
Speaker 2: and I went into the I just had the speeling.
Speaker 2: I went into the jungle and I went around the
Speaker 2: trail was was going down this way and I went.
Speaker 2: So I go around in the jungle and I come
Speaker 2: out behind and I was stepping over this log and
Speaker 2: I looked down and I started counting. You know, NVA
Speaker 2: was like I just froze and just stopped breathing. Stop.
Speaker 2: I mean, I had my car fifteen, but I couldn't.
Speaker 2: I couldn't. I lost count of the number of guys
Speaker 2: that were sitting on the ground. They were talking to
Speaker 2: each other, and one guy sort of heard me and
Speaker 2: he even turned around and he looked for right at me.
Speaker 2: But you know, we had total camouflage on. We had
Speaker 2: tiger fatigues on. So I had blended in. And you know,
Speaker 2: you just don't think some white Americans going to show up,
Speaker 2: you know, in the jungle when they didn't even hear us,
Speaker 2: but we would have walked into an ambush. But I
Speaker 2: walked around behind him, and so I literally I made
Speaker 2: the decision not to fire them up because I was
Speaker 2: too close. I literally could reach down and go, excuse me,
Speaker 2: you guys are now going to shoot you. So you know,
Speaker 2: I just held my fire and backed up. And Burford
Speaker 2: remembered looking. He said he counted the number of of
Speaker 2: cooks on the ground in my eyes. He could tell
Speaker 2: that I saw something because my eyes were like gigantically big.
Speaker 2: I'd never seen any you know, a thing like this.
Speaker 2: So we go back and we we set up, and
Speaker 2: Looney called in an extraction. Helicopter called in for an extraction.
Speaker 2: And I was sitting at this bush and I started thinking,
Speaker 2: did I imagine it? Did I imagine? I mean, that
Speaker 2: couldn't have been true. And then sudden, then suddenly a
Speaker 2: guy pops up and he was about fifteen meters away,
Speaker 2: which is not that far, And he popped up and
Speaker 2: he had glasses and he was like looking around, looking
Speaker 2: at the trail that I had left. As I ran
Speaker 2: like a little girl out of there, and he like tracked,
Speaker 2: and I remember he was like looking right at me,
Speaker 2: and I was like, perfont was over talking, Okay, what
Speaker 2: we're gonna do with Barbara Book, and I'm going they're
Speaker 2: looking at me. So Berba came over and said, and
Speaker 2: I saw the one, the guy with the glasses took
Speaker 2: his glasses down and I saw him talking to one
Speaker 2: of his guys and he go he goes like that
Speaker 2: which meant to flank us. And this guy took he
Speaker 2: had a like an American parachute, which is a camouflage parachute,
Speaker 2: and he flicked it once and put it over his
Speaker 2: head and he disappeared, and I went like, my heart
Speaker 2: is like now I can't see him, but I know
Speaker 2: this guy is coming around, you know, going to flank us.
Speaker 2: And so you know, Burford goes, okay, here's what we're
Speaker 2: gonna do. And we had six guys. Uh, Chambers now
Speaker 2: going to stay behind on the count of three. Your
Speaker 2: guys are going to take up running. And I remember
Speaker 2: saying like, what if Chambers doesn't get to stay behind
Speaker 2: what we had to count and I get to go
Speaker 2: shut up? And so he goes. I don't know, I
Speaker 2: had a weird sense of humor and circumstances. He was
Speaker 2: one two three, and we literally had to stand up
Speaker 2: because it was a brush right there and like fired
Speaker 2: up the guys that were in that that were before
Speaker 2: they shot at us. And so that that was I
Speaker 2: never forgot that mission.
Speaker 1: And then you guys, I think it broke contact to
Speaker 1: the to the l C and got out of there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we got out of there. And then then they
Speaker 2: bring in what's called what was our reactionary.
Speaker 1: Force the yes, I skedf it would have been like
Speaker 1: the mic force or a like.
Speaker 2: Same same yeah, yeah, same same type thing.
Speaker 1: Uh all right, let's uh, let's talk about Recondo School
Speaker 1: because that's you know, the title of your book, Racondo,
Speaker 1: and in a couple of chapters in the book are
Speaker 1: all about it. I mean, that was a very unique
Speaker 1: course that was held in Vietnam. Could you tell us,
Speaker 1: you know, why did why did you go? Why did
Speaker 1: you get sent? What was the what was the school
Speaker 1: all about?
Speaker 2: Well, the school was actually called MAC the fifth Special
Speaker 2: Forces Recondo School, and the it was actually Westmoreland's uh
Speaker 2: Pride and Joeyce School in the in the Army. That's
Speaker 2: me right there. That came from that was that tape
Speaker 2: I told you that they'd found. Yeah, that's me back
Speaker 2: then my hat's a little bit too small. Then you
Speaker 2: get kicked out of school. Well, what made it really
Speaker 2: interesting is that we ran through. There's my guide that
Speaker 2: got the Vimmese guy right there on the bottom left.
Speaker 2: He's a great guy. If you ever go to Vietnam,
Speaker 2: I'll give you his name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and check out check out Wharry's He has a
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. Just type in Larry Chambers and it'll come up,
Speaker 1: and he has a bunch of cool videos on there
Speaker 1: that you guys can check out. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: There's also Yeah, there's also a website called Larry and
Speaker 2: that's dash Chambers dot com and I have a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff. So so the first week they try
Speaker 2: to weed out the guys that aren't physically strong and
Speaker 2: you're tired. I mean, you've been in. You you took
Speaker 2: First of all, it was an invitation only you got
Speaker 2: it invited, but you were and you were sent by
Speaker 2: your unit. So it was a kind of a big
Speaker 2: deal to get sent there because that meant you were
Speaker 2: going to be a team leader when you came back,
Speaker 2: and so it was real honor to go. But everybody
Speaker 2: was nervous because of the swim, the dreaded swim. There
Speaker 2: was the run. The run was so you get through
Speaker 2: the run, but on the second week they had the
Speaker 2: swim and there was a lot of stuff that you
Speaker 2: were doing. It was NonStop. I mean you're up till
Speaker 2: late at night and you know, all training all day long.
Speaker 2: You know, jump, you know, practicing McGuire rigs and repelling
Speaker 2: and you know everything that any good you know, combat
Speaker 2: unit would train you for first aid, you know where
Speaker 2: you'd have to give yourself serving album or at least
Speaker 2: know how to give yourself. But they had big needles
Speaker 2: back then, so there was lots of blood everywhere when
Speaker 2: we went through that part of the course. But the
Speaker 2: swim you'd have to swim out two hundred meters and
Speaker 2: at the time I was like a lousy swimmer and
Speaker 2: I didn't know really how to swim, and I just
Speaker 2: sort of side thing. But if you touch there was
Speaker 2: this two Special Forces sergeants out in this pontoon boat
Speaker 2: out in the ocean, and you had to swim around
Speaker 2: it and swim all the way back. And that eliminated
Speaker 2: a lot of guys if they couldn't make the swim.
Speaker 2: I just remember how exhausting. It was because you also
Speaker 2: ran that day and you do a lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: and so go through all of that and then we
Speaker 2: come to the last day. And this is what gives
Speaker 2: it the distinction of the only School of the Armies
Speaker 2: ever had where you could get killed in it. A
Speaker 2: lot of the buildings were named after, you know, guys
Speaker 2: that were killed in the school. You know. They because
Speaker 2: we did a live alert mission and you would rotate
Speaker 2: at each point. So they wanted you to, you know,
Speaker 2: be a team leader. They wanted you to be a
Speaker 2: slack man. They wanted you to be a point man.
Speaker 2: They wanted you to be very secure, you know, you
Speaker 2: go through the whole thing. So the first two days
Speaker 2: were out there and it's like just a normal alert mission.
Speaker 2: And this mission was pulled near La Trange and on
Speaker 2: the train and suddenly I'm walking along and I walk
Speaker 2: into you know, four or five guys sitting in the middle.
Speaker 2: There was probably it was way more than that, because
Speaker 2: we found like ten or fifteen backpacks. But I so
Speaker 2: I fired them up and I turned around and the
Speaker 2: guy that behind me took off running. He broke the protocol.
Speaker 2: The protocol you know, is I sit down the line fire,
Speaker 2: the next guy does and he took off and it
Speaker 2: got the other guy where. You know, we didn't know
Speaker 2: who these guys were that were in our school, and
Speaker 2: so I watched these two guys running back of the
Speaker 2: juggle and I'm still out there. So I hit the
Speaker 2: ground and I just you know, kept putting fire down
Speaker 2: until suddenly on the school we'd have two instructors that
Speaker 2: would go out with us, and Louis La Page. I
Speaker 2: could still just remember he was just like he was
Speaker 2: like God, he was like the toughest guy I'd ever
Speaker 2: seen in my life. And he comes running through the jung,
Speaker 2: doesn't care about bullets. Screw a bullet. He's got a
Speaker 2: he's got his. He's he carried a thumper, you know
Speaker 2: in m seventy nine, and he shoots the shoots at
Speaker 2: it and it hit the tree and I remember going
Speaker 2: like over my head like it didn't go off because
Speaker 2: it didn't go far enough to arm. And he's he's
Speaker 2: So he comes out where I'm and we both fire
Speaker 2: and maneuver back. And so he was furious at the
Speaker 2: guys that ran. He was so pissed off, and he
Speaker 2: goes chambers. You and and my slack man, you're gonna
Speaker 2: walk us back there? Oh my god, why do I
Speaker 2: keep getting myself where I'm gonna get? Do good? Now
Speaker 2: I have to go back in there, and so I was,
Speaker 2: so I so we went back later that same day
Speaker 2: and I'm walking along and suddenly this North vietn East
Speaker 2: guy walked right out in front of me and just
Speaker 2: like that, and he looked at me, and I looked
Speaker 2: at him, and he started to run, and I took
Speaker 2: off running and I ran after him, and I tackled
Speaker 2: him like a football tackle, and I got him down
Speaker 2: on the ground. And matter of fact, Lapage was a
Speaker 2: little pissed off at me, because that's not what you're
Speaker 2: supposed to do. You're supposed to fire him up. But
Speaker 2: I could see the guy didn't have a weapon. I
Speaker 2: was gonna shoot an unarmed guy, so I figured I
Speaker 2: could tackle him. And he turned out to be this
Speaker 2: young lieutenant. I've still got his I have it right here.
Speaker 2: I brought it to show. But this was the belt
Speaker 2: buckle that he was wearing.
Speaker 1: To see if you can see that, an NVA belt buckle.
Speaker 2: NVA bell puckal. So he was and I've actually tried
Speaker 2: to find that guy in my trips back to Vietnam.
Speaker 2: But that so we captured this I captured this NBA
Speaker 2: officer like I thought, I was the hero of the day.
Speaker 2: And we get back and it was like, no, we
Speaker 2: give it, you know, it was like, you know, business
Speaker 2: as usual. Well he captured. It was like no, this
Speaker 2: is special Forces. This isn't like Tinker toys, you know.
Speaker 2: And I but but Lapage ended up getting me a
Speaker 2: r an art of why I got seven D eight,
Speaker 2: you know, for doing that, So I was all happy
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I think Ken Miller and I think
Speaker 1: yourself both you know, killed enemy in Racondo school, but
Speaker 1: I mean you actually captured an enemy, which is like
Speaker 1: exceedingly rare. I mean everyone was try to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this was just totally an accident. Actually, when
Speaker 2: I've written back to try to find this guy, because
Speaker 2: I always hoped he turned out to be you know,
Speaker 2: would do good, you know something. And I even went
Speaker 2: to Condal, which is an island where they sent all
Speaker 2: the prisoners to try to I know, this delusion of
Speaker 2: grandeur that I could try to find this guy. But
Speaker 2: we the you know, they brought in the MIC force,
Speaker 2: like you said, they brought all that she did. So
Speaker 2: suddenly was around like three hundred guys and you know,
Speaker 2: we're all surrounded by all these guys and they were
Speaker 2: they would they were interviewing my prisoner, and the southeam
Speaker 2: knees were you know, they would just step on his ball,
Speaker 2: you know, like I would see these movies where they
Speaker 2: they're you know, you've got how do you torture somebody
Speaker 2: to you know, use that waterboarding on? They just stepped
Speaker 2: on the guy's nuts with their boots and the guy
Speaker 2: was going like, oh, he was telling everything. So that
Speaker 2: pissed me off. This guy was being tortured. So me
Speaker 2: and my slack guy Duty, that was his name, Duty,
Speaker 2: we go over and we I don't know if Duty
Speaker 2: pushed the arvind guy away, but we kind of protected
Speaker 2: the guy all night. He was ours. We risked our
Speaker 2: life to captures. We're gonna let the southeat and he's
Speaker 2: kill him because they were just butcherers. They were, you know, terrible.
Speaker 2: And then they took him back. They actually took him
Speaker 2: up in a McGuire rigg or yah McGuire rig out
Speaker 2: and then I So that was my three weeks in
Speaker 2: Ricondo school which was it was hard. It was really
Speaker 2: and I thought a lot of guys. I thought everybody
Speaker 2: that went there graduated, and I'd find out later the
Speaker 2: guys that a lot of them that went there and
Speaker 2: they didn't graduate. But nobody tells you that just they
Speaker 2: didn't get the Ricondo patch.
Speaker 1: Uh, we have some questions and I'm actually struggling to
Speaker 1: pull it up. You have them to Sorry, we have
Speaker 1: we have some audience questions for you as well, Warry.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: I didn't mean to at these from nor are they
Speaker 2: North Viamanes.
Speaker 1: Possibly possibly so U has one.
Speaker 3: I still have your book Death in the Asha Valley
Speaker 3: from sand Hill p X from O.
Speaker 2: S U. T At Benning.
Speaker 3: As Jack said, a lot of us going into BAT
Speaker 3: always strive to be better, wanted to live up to
Speaker 3: the legacies you guys created. Thank you for coming on,
Speaker 3: Sua Sponte.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, Salandra, we have.
Speaker 1: A few more, Okay, you want to get him at
Speaker 1: the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so yeah, there's no questions there, that's just.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we'll we'll, we'll get We'll get to a
Speaker 1: few more towards the end of the interview. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you kept the guy's belt and his belt buckle and
Speaker 1: ward after that, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, well I stripped him immediately of his
Speaker 2: belt buckle because that I got offered five hundred dollars
Speaker 2: for that by a leg officer and Saigon, you know,
Speaker 2: but I wouldn't give it up.
Speaker 1: And when you did finally graduate from Ricondo school, you
Speaker 1: go get back to your unit and now you're a
Speaker 1: team leader.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you go back and you're you're a team leader,
Speaker 2: and I well, I wasn't well, I was a team leader,
Speaker 2: but that came later. That lightning mission happened shortly and
Speaker 2: they made me a sergeant and I was on r
Speaker 2: So some time went by and then suddenly they brought
Speaker 2: It was like they wanted to get and it sounds egotistical,
Speaker 2: but the best of the best. So they got a
Speaker 2: bunch of us guys. We're all sergeants and we're going
Speaker 2: to go on the first alert mission back in the
Speaker 2: Ashaw Valley. The last time anybody had been in there
Speaker 2: was the one seventy third and they lost thirty seven
Speaker 2: helicopters in so many minutes. So it was a bad
Speaker 2: place to go. And you know, we were just starting
Speaker 2: to build all of the different firebases on the way
Speaker 2: out to the Ashaw Valley, and so they wanted us
Speaker 2: to They wanted ice and years out there. So we
Speaker 2: spent five days on the border and hearing at night.
Speaker 2: We would in the daytime we would see hundreds of
Speaker 2: North Vietnese in the valley, and then at night we
Speaker 2: would hear cutting wood. And I showed you, you know,
Speaker 2: from going back what I brought back. I guess I
Speaker 2: could show it now. Yeah, so I'd gone back to
Speaker 2: Amburger Hiller, close to where we where we were. We
Speaker 2: got struck by lightning, believe it or not, on our
Speaker 2: last day of the mission, and we're all like paralyzed.
Speaker 2: And luckily, I mean we lost Calma. We had one
Speaker 2: radio that Colmo finally and the you know they they
Speaker 2: we got out in penetrators. That was what they sent down.
Speaker 2: It was a basket for Lender and then the penetrators
Speaker 2: for the rest of us.
Speaker 1: That struck like blew up your grenades and claym wars
Speaker 1: and everything.
Speaker 2: Oh it blew. Yeah, we had all of our claim luckily.
Speaker 2: Just before that happened. I remember reading the back of
Speaker 2: my claim more mind thinking like that's a little too
Speaker 2: close and reading the back of it, so I went
Speaker 2: down and I moved it out further. When this lightning hit.
Speaker 2: I just remember this white light and there was like
Speaker 2: no sound for like a multi exilient of a second
Speaker 2: a flash, and then I remember going up in the
Speaker 2: air and blowing blown into a thousand pieces, this deathening sound,
Speaker 2: and then hitting the ground, which seemed like later like
Speaker 2: I always thought I was blown in pieces. And then
Speaker 2: God went like, ah, not ready yet, and then put
Speaker 2: me back together, threw me back down on the ground.
Speaker 2: So I land like down this hill, and I can
Speaker 2: remember I could move and I looked down at my
Speaker 2: legs and smoke was coming off my clothes and it
Speaker 2: was like I couldn't move, but I could move my arms,
Speaker 2: and I finally kind of got my senses back. I
Speaker 2: had no rifle, I didn't know where I was, and
Speaker 2: I crawled. This is the scaredest I'd ever been in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: I never really got that scared, but this scared me.
Speaker 2: I crawled back up the hill and I look around
Speaker 2: and where we were was all a burnt out circle,
Speaker 2: and no one was there. They were all also blown away.
Speaker 2: But I for a few minutes it seemed like an eternity.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god, I am alone here.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm going to get my throat cut. Where's
Speaker 2: my rifle? And I so I start started looking around
Speaker 2: and I found my clacker. Clacker is what you used
Speaker 2: to blow hard plastic. I don't know if you use
Speaker 2: those for play wars, but it's a hard plastic was melted.
Speaker 2: So we figured the lightning came down through the antenna.
Speaker 2: The radio man and put this antenna up in a thunderstorm,
Speaker 2: questionable for that, and sent we had to send a
Speaker 2: sit rep. And when he did, the lightning went down
Speaker 2: and it didn't hit us directly or what it killed us,
Speaker 2: but we got not only the explosion. Gary Linder's backpack
Speaker 2: had a percussion grade and then that blew up, so
Speaker 2: we got that and then the backblast from all of
Speaker 2: the claim wars that were around us. So we got
Speaker 2: the backblast and that's probably why we were all in
Speaker 2: some form of paralysis for some of us for a day.
Speaker 1: You know, d you write that when the radio man
Speaker 1: clicked the hand mike to set up the sit rep,
Speaker 1: that was when the lightning struck.
Speaker 2: That's when the lightning hit. Yeah, And I just remember
Speaker 2: just this white light, which is kind of scary when
Speaker 2: you think about it. I am dead, and I kind
Speaker 2: of was. I kind of just remember the last thing
Speaker 2: I said was fuck. I mean, it was pissed me off.
Speaker 2: I mean why, you know, like the last day of
Speaker 2: the mission or something. I just didn't want to get
Speaker 2: blown up. I mean. Anyway, So long story short, in
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen, I go back and hire a guide and
Speaker 2: go back to the Hamburger Hill and I climb up
Speaker 2: to the top and I'm looking all around and they've
Speaker 2: got it really laid out cool. They've built steps up,
Speaker 2: there's a like a little shack down below, or tells
Speaker 2: the history of it, and of course the North throw
Speaker 2: you know, first liar wins or second liar. But they
Speaker 2: tell how they defeated the enemy, you know, they defeated us,
Speaker 2: and which was bullshit. You know, it didn't ever happen.
Speaker 2: And so at the top of the hill there's a
Speaker 2: topa and you know, dedicated to their guys that died
Speaker 2: up there, because they lost a lot of guys and
Speaker 2: we you know, you know, we had the third of
Speaker 2: the one eighty seventh was that went up there and
Speaker 2: they lost like eighty seven. I mean, it was a
Speaker 2: hundred guys wound. I mean it was. It was so bad.
Speaker 2: We didn't get paid for our pay skipped a month
Speaker 2: because you know, the guys that did pay and graves registration,
Speaker 2: graves registration were the same guys, so they were backed
Speaker 2: up from that one, you know, from Hamburger Hill. So
Speaker 2: I wanted to go up and look around. I'm digging
Speaker 2: around and I find this, which is a log that
Speaker 2: was in a bunker, and I and I just I
Speaker 2: stuck at my backpack and I thought, wow, I wonder,
Speaker 2: I'll bet I heard those guys cutting that log. You know,
Speaker 2: back then we could have heard them because that's where
Speaker 2: we think we were hit was on that was somewhere
Speaker 2: on that hill. I mean, it's a kind of a
Speaker 2: long hill. And it's it's fun to go back to
Speaker 2: those places because you you would never know, you know,
Speaker 2: because the jungle covers everything up. Fires are all covered over.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find Camp Eagle. I found the graveyards that
Speaker 2: we used to that were close biased, but so much
Speaker 2: except except the Hamburger Hill. They the enemy is preserved.
Speaker 2: The enemy. They're not our enemy. The Vietnamese have preserved that,
Speaker 2: you know as a site, you know, like they did
Speaker 2: Dinbin Foo. You go to all these cool places. The
Speaker 2: museums are just amazing. But that was that was that.
Speaker 2: So then I neils to say I was kind of
Speaker 2: nervous about going out after that mission. I was, and
Speaker 2: I went out a couple of times and I started
Speaker 2: overseeing things because I was waiting for the next shooting round.
Speaker 2: I'd never been in an well, it was the second
Speaker 2: explosion i'd been in, but I'd never been in anything
Speaker 2: like that before, and so I was probably a little
Speaker 2: bit freaked out. So I thought I would do something safe.
Speaker 2: So I started flying belly and you know, which turned
Speaker 2: out to be not as so safe because we were
Speaker 2: taking fire all the time.
Speaker 1: And that's where what does that mean for folks out there?
Speaker 1: What does it mean to be okay?
Speaker 2: Every ranger team LERP team has to have one of
Speaker 2: their own guys in the helicopter to you know, to
Speaker 2: help them get in and out of the helicopter. So
Speaker 2: you got all this backpack on and your your AMMO
Speaker 2: and your guns, and you've got one guy that like you.
Speaker 2: You had to be Ricondo trained, so you know, I qualified.
Speaker 2: You had to be able to put the ropes together,
Speaker 2: rope ladders, wire rigs, everything, and that's your job. You're
Speaker 2: in the back, the two pilots in the front, and
Speaker 2: the two door grunners on the side. And so that's
Speaker 2: when Miller's team was in a They were in the
Speaker 2: second helicopter that they went out to pick up Miller's team,
Speaker 2: and I guess they got shot down and they help.
Speaker 2: The blade went through one of the guys in Miller's
Speaker 2: team's head killed him, and so then we fly over
Speaker 2: and we get shot at. So we I still remember
Speaker 2: tracers going up, you know, the open window, every door
Speaker 2: is open. The treasure will go by like that, and
Speaker 2: the chopper goes around and all this stuff. And so
Speaker 2: we came back in and we had to make four
Speaker 2: separate extractions trips, and so I would throw the as
Speaker 2: we were coming in because the helicopter had crashed and
Speaker 2: the guys had to climb up on the crash helicopter
Speaker 2: to get in. So I sort of helped him back
Speaker 2: the helicopter in. I don't know if you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, like sort of like I got out on
Speaker 2: I threw the rope ladder out and then I climbed
Speaker 2: down on the skid. I climbed out on the skid
Speaker 2: and I would I could see the pilot and I could,
Speaker 2: you know, hear him and talk to him all that,
Speaker 2: and I would say, okay, we're all you know. I
Speaker 2: was talking to him while the door gunners were watching
Speaker 2: out to the side. And so when I came in,
Speaker 2: we took some fire and I didn't have my rifle
Speaker 2: because I'm standing outside the helicopter. So I flipped the
Speaker 2: to this North VIETNSE guy that was shooting Atison, which
Speaker 2: Miller remembers that everybody on the ground was cheering and
Speaker 2: they thought it was so cool. They wanted to seem
Speaker 2: to get shot off of the off of the skid
Speaker 2: would have been really that would have that would have
Speaker 2: made their day. But he missed and I went in
Speaker 2: and I'm joking worse, you know, And I helped the
Speaker 2: guys in and I got my I got an air
Speaker 2: Medal with a V for valor for that mission and
Speaker 2: that means my proudest medal.
Speaker 1: It sounded pretty dicey, I mean, like you was it.
Speaker 1: You and Miller were like the last two guys out. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been your How and how long were you guys?
Speaker 1: On the ground, you tube by yourselves, waiting for the well.
Speaker 2: Miller was on the ground with another with one with
Speaker 2: his radio guy, and I was still in the helicopter.
Speaker 2: I would take everybody back and then I would come
Speaker 2: back in the helicopter. But Miller stayed on the ground
Speaker 2: for like thirty wid to refuel, which was scary because
Speaker 2: all they had was kobra Is flying above them they
Speaker 2: could talk to. But you know, and then we finally
Speaker 2: we got out there, and I we couldn't wait to
Speaker 2: get out. I couldn't wait to get it over with.
Speaker 2: And I was I had so much adrenaline pumpin and
Speaker 2: Miller is so light. I was on that ladder and
Speaker 2: I get down and you know the old Yuwie's from
Speaker 2: the from the from the skids to up inside. It's
Speaker 2: it's a jump. I mean it's a hike. I mean
Speaker 2: it's a I don't know how many feet, it's a
Speaker 2: couple of feet. And I was so pumped. I grabbed
Speaker 2: Miller by the back of his web here and brewing
Speaker 2: almost out. He landed and almost flew out the other
Speaker 2: side of the helicopter. It was like so stoked to
Speaker 2: you know, not that I was so strong, but I
Speaker 2: was just you know, like all hot, hyped up.
Speaker 1: And that by this point you're starting to get kind
Speaker 1: of short too, right as far as time.
Speaker 2: In the war exactly. So what I did was I
Speaker 2: started taking radio relay missions and I would do like
Speaker 2: I was on ripcord when they got hit, and and
Speaker 2: that was an amazing thing. I'd never been around the infantry,
Speaker 2: and it never want to be around infantry. And again
Speaker 2: scare because you're sort of trapped on a hill. You know.
Speaker 2: I'm used to hiding in the bushes or something or
Speaker 2: flying away, but they had to stay there and fight, like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, when's this night going to get over with?
Speaker 2: You know, it was like freaky. But anyway, I then
Speaker 2: at the end they asked me to go and recruit guys,
Speaker 2: which is they usually do for the actually the better
Speaker 2: looking guys. They asked to go do it. So I
Speaker 2: don't think Miller got asked or Linda, I know, didn't
Speaker 2: get asked to go do that, you know, because they
Speaker 2: wanted you to represents the Rangers.
Speaker 1: Could could you tell us a little bit about how
Speaker 1: like your unit and how the war changed during your
Speaker 1: time there, because I remember you writing your book about
Speaker 1: how your sector, your AO like drastically expanded as time
Speaker 1: went on, and they started like you guys were getting
Speaker 1: teams were getting inserted sometimes twice a day, making Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounded like insanity.
Speaker 2: Well this was to our wonderful President Richard Nixon, just
Speaker 2: the nicest guy you'd ever wanted meet. I still I'm
Speaker 2: not a group might. I remember having a dream one
Speaker 2: time that I got to go dig up his body
Speaker 2: and I was going to drag it back anyway. That
Speaker 2: was another story. But you know, he had said he
Speaker 2: had ran in the sixty eight election on to say
Speaker 2: pull the troops out, which he did. But when he
Speaker 2: it was a trick for us. It was a trick
Speaker 2: because all they pulled out all of these companies and
Speaker 2: they expanded RAO, so we ended up halving Rio like
Speaker 2: quadrupled in size. I mean, they were flying all by
Speaker 2: the time we'd left in seventy you know, they were
Speaker 2: they were flying you know, from oh all over the
Speaker 2: place in the in I Corps. But they just it
Speaker 2: the reason why I didn't volunteer to go back because
Speaker 2: as you can see in my I'm sort of gone.
Speaker 2: I was sort of gunn home. But we got this
Speaker 2: young second lieutenant and he you know, just out of
Speaker 2: jump school and officers school and all kinds of school things.
Speaker 2: And he goes and so he takes me out on
Speaker 2: We go on a reconnt in helicopter. We go out
Speaker 2: looking for a DZ and I said, you mean an
Speaker 2: l Z, sir, And he goes, no, he drops the
Speaker 2: DZ and I go why. He goes, well, you're a paratrooper, right,
Speaker 2: you go. I am like, I didn't jump out of
Speaker 2: a plane in two years, Like, we have to jump.
Speaker 2: You want us to jump out of the help jump
Speaker 2: out a plane? And he goes, yeah, he had this
Speaker 2: idea where he was gonna it was in the Ashaw
Speaker 2: Valley and he was gonna they were going to pin
Speaker 2: these guys in and then we were going to jump
Speaker 2: in and then we would catch. And I went like,
Speaker 2: you know, I am getting really short here. I think
Speaker 2: I need to like find another profession, you know. And
Speaker 2: I don't know what happened that guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody's hunting for metals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was looking. You know. What he wanted was
Speaker 2: to jump with a star. You know, he wanted to
Speaker 2: combat blast because no and nobody have a Special Forces jump.
Speaker 2: I mean you can go down to Tryang and jump
Speaker 2: with them and get your jump your Arvin I mean
Speaker 2: your yeah, your Arvan jump wings, but to the combat
Speaker 2: blast hadn't been since Korea, so.
Speaker 1: Well you don't you a WORP. No reason is it?
Speaker 1: Is it a mass They're not going to do a
Speaker 1: mass tack infantry assault. I mean that doesn't mean it's stupid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't make it. And that's what I mean.
Speaker 2: I thought, where are they getting these guys? Because this
Speaker 2: guy was cuckoo. You know, it's like this is not
Speaker 2: our t O and E, not our our our our mission,
Speaker 2: you know, our mission is to go out with five
Speaker 2: six guys and find enemy and tell the other guys,
Speaker 2: tell the good guys where the bad guys are, end
Speaker 2: of the compon not you know, it's not Normandy, We're
Speaker 2: not jump you know.
Speaker 1: So they they sent you on the Berry Saddler recruitment
Speaker 1: drive for a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I went back and recruited guys and I
Speaker 2: would At first, I couldn't get anybody to go because
Speaker 2: I thought I was trying to you know, I was
Speaker 2: what's called being profile and I was like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: was mister Mann. You know, had all the double one
Speaker 2: hundred and first patches on my shoulders and Recondo school
Speaker 2: and had my body count rope and my NVA belt buckle,
Speaker 2: and I thought, surely these guys will see me and
Speaker 2: immediately go, well, I want to be just like you. Instead,
Speaker 2: it was like they couldn't wait to get out of
Speaker 2: that tent. You know. I'd say what we're doing, and
Speaker 2: then finally I would start telling this story about I
Speaker 2: got a map of I Corps and I said, look,
Speaker 2: you know you guys are infantry. I'm gonna tell you
Speaker 2: a story was told to me. You know you're going.
Speaker 2: You're gonna be out either an infantry company and you'll
Speaker 2: be out, could be for a month at a time,
Speaker 2: could be six weeks, whatever it is. Or you might
Speaker 2: get lucky and be on a firebase. You think you're lucky.
Speaker 2: But let me see this map. And I'd hold up
Speaker 2: the map and I go, I could buy this map
Speaker 2: on the black market. So every NVA command has the
Speaker 2: same map. And so I said, look, what the lurps
Speaker 2: do is we go out where the enemies we think are.
Speaker 2: They don't know where we are, they don't know where
Speaker 2: we're coming, so they don't see us and we're trying
Speaker 2: to find them. So think about it this way. It's
Speaker 2: safer behind the lines than it is in front of them.
Speaker 2: And three hands went up, and then the next time
Speaker 2: I got and then four hands went up. I got
Speaker 2: twenty six guys and refilled, you know, because it had
Speaker 2: to be all volunteer in our in our ranger unit,
Speaker 2: and I refilled it before I left. I was real
Speaker 2: proud of that that I got. You know, figured I
Speaker 2: could sell then I could be a salesman later in
Speaker 2: life or something.
Speaker 1: So tell us about when when you finally finish your
Speaker 1: tour in Vietnam and you know, getting on your freedom bird.
Speaker 2: The fight? Did I talk about the fight I got in? No?
Speaker 1: No, the fight with the guy on the plane?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I seem to always get into or start fight. Yeah, fight, Okay,
Speaker 2: So I got in a fight anyway. So we're getting
Speaker 2: ready to go, and this guy was bragging about killing
Speaker 2: killing the googs, and he was talking about he was
Speaker 2: a bus driver. He ran him over. He was bragging
Speaker 2: about how many people he ran over. And so I'm
Speaker 2: sitting on this plane and I could hear the guy talk.
Speaker 2: And there's always somebody who's gonna listen because if you
Speaker 2: got you know, two hundred guys on the plane coming
Speaker 2: back from Vietnam, one hundred and fifty of them had
Speaker 2: never been in the jungle, and you know a small
Speaker 2: number had been in the infantry, and three guys were
Speaker 2: special for it. I mean, there was like nobody, you know,
Speaker 2: not a lot of guys. You know, there's always somebody
Speaker 2: would listen to some bullshit guy like that. So I
Speaker 2: had had enough. And the guy sitting next to me
Speaker 2: was one seventy third and I said, do you want
Speaker 2: to go kill him? Or will you let me? And
Speaker 2: he goes, you go kill him first, and I'll kill
Speaker 2: him second. So I got and well here's what he did.
Speaker 2: He's at the back of the seven oh seven quick
Speaker 2: and back then the seats where the bathroom was wouldn't
Speaker 2: wouldn't recline, and he was like the Stewart Stewarts, my
Speaker 2: seat won't go back, My seat won't go back. So
Speaker 2: I went back there, and I was so fucking mad.
Speaker 2: I'd never been so mad in my life. Probably every
Speaker 2: single thing that had happened and boiled up. And then
Speaker 2: and I reached around and I grabbed this guy and
Speaker 2: I went inside of his shirt where I could grab
Speaker 2: his neck. It was kind of a heavy set guy,
Speaker 2: and I pulled him up right in my face and
Speaker 2: I said, you shut up, that fucker. I'm going to
Speaker 2: cut your throat. I mean, just pushed him down as
Speaker 2: hard as I could. And then I come back and
Speaker 2: I remember walking back in the plane, it were all applauding,
Speaker 2: you know it was. I kind of marched back with
Speaker 2: one hundred first patches on and sat back down in
Speaker 2: my seat. And that guy never said a word the
Speaker 2: rest of the we need to hear him. I don't
Speaker 2: even even was on the plane after that. But yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: so when I came back, I wasn't I didn't go, oh,
Speaker 2: the hippies are make me so sad, I feel so
Speaker 2: what I did, I was like bullshit, I had none.
Speaker 2: I just I would I never had that stuff happen
Speaker 2: to me, just maybe because they wouldn't do it or something,
Speaker 2: but I just didn't. I went back to college and
Speaker 2: University of Utah because I was a non Mormon, but
Speaker 2: I could get I heard, I could get laid there.
Speaker 2: So that was like the most important thing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: you remember that store. That was another story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the PostScript of your book is the stewardess on
Speaker 1: that airplane on the ride.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I should probably say that story because I
Speaker 2: get back and my friend Dave Granning was also he'd
Speaker 2: been wound. He'd been shot up so bad he had
Speaker 2: a battlefield amputation. On the battle they thought he was
Speaker 2: going to die. He'd got machine gun through the chest,
Speaker 2: his fingers were blown off. He was really in bad,
Speaker 2: bed in shape. He came back and he had a
Speaker 2: brand new GTO and he let me use it to
Speaker 2: go down. And my last girlfriend before I left was
Speaker 2: two hawkstrusts her and she was hot and she became
Speaker 2: a stewardess and I and so I was going to
Speaker 2: drive down and I called her and she was, you know,
Speaker 2: going to meet me. And I thought, oh my god,
Speaker 2: this is going to be great. I'm going to get laid.
Speaker 2: I'm driving at one hundred and ten miles an hour,
Speaker 2: you know, down from down it's from Sacramento. It's called
Speaker 2: the Winter's cut Off. And I'm going one hundred and
Speaker 2: ten miles and I remember looking up in my rear
Speaker 2: view mirror and I saw this way in the back,
Speaker 2: like you know, just lights flashing like that, and back
Speaker 2: then in nineteen sixty nine or seventy, I guess it
Speaker 2: used to be. It was. This was during the summertime,
Speaker 2: and I had on flip flops, you know, flip flop,
Speaker 2: and I'd taken him off. So I was driving barefoot
Speaker 2: and I heard and I remember it against a lot
Speaker 2: to drive barefoot. So I was reaching underneath as he
Speaker 2: pulled up behind me, and I'm stopped. I'm reaching under
Speaker 2: pulling on my shoes like that. So when he came
Speaker 2: up to the he asked me to open the door,
Speaker 2: and as I opened the door, I was met with
Speaker 2: a three fifty seven right in my face and he
Speaker 2: was just like holding it. He pulled me out onto
Speaker 2: the ground. I'm laying it around like back Vietnam. I
Speaker 2: was like, you know, it was like in a mouse boys.
Speaker 2: You know. I never had a thrill. I thought I
Speaker 2: was going to get executed right there. What I didn't
Speaker 2: know was this was nineteen sixty nine and the the something.
Speaker 1: The Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 2: Zodiac Killer had killed people on this same area, and
Speaker 2: so these cops were not taking any chances, and you know,
Speaker 2: and then I had a military ID, but I didn't
Speaker 2: have a driver's license, and the car wasn't registered to me.
Speaker 2: I was like, and what I did one hundred and ten?
Speaker 2: He was, you know, you're doing a hundred ten and
Speaker 2: went like, I'm trying to go get laid. I told
Speaker 2: him the truth, and so we sat in there and
Speaker 2: he had a brother that was a Vietnam He let
Speaker 2: me go. He said, just slow it down, learn the
Speaker 2: new rules, you know. So I always thought like, wow,
Speaker 2: it was great. But I ended up going to University
Speaker 2: of Utah, and by then I got smarter. It was
Speaker 2: really funny. I guess my brain had a chance to
Speaker 2: matur but suddenly, you know, I could go to college
Speaker 2: and then it was you know, I could pass tests
Speaker 2: and all that sort of stuff, except in the really
Speaker 2: hard test. I did alert mission one time, and to
Speaker 2: get the to get a final that I crawled into
Speaker 2: this guy's office one night, which everybody in the department
Speaker 2: thought that was the coolest thing that ever had happened,
Speaker 2: because I got all the answers the old fashioned way.
Speaker 2: But what are you gonna do? Send me back to Vietnam?
Speaker 2: Who gives a shit? But I got through that, and
Speaker 2: I always had. I always found a place. I'm like
Speaker 2: the guy that always finds the perfect parking place and
Speaker 2: the perfect place to live. As I drive around and
Speaker 2: I know I'm going to find it sixth sense, whatever
Speaker 2: it is, and I drove past this. I had graduated
Speaker 2: in the only degree I could get, which was in
Speaker 2: the Department of Recreation because they didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of reading. I mean, there was an English attached to it.
Speaker 2: So I had this degree and I went down to
Speaker 2: take a test and there was I went California in
Speaker 2: manhatt Beach and there must have been twelve hundred people
Speaker 2: and taken for two positions. So I knew this wasn't
Speaker 2: going to happen. So I was driving around and what
Speaker 2: am I going to do for a living? I went
Speaker 2: past a brokerage firm and I saw a brand new
Speaker 2: portion of brand new Cities Bends and We're like, I
Speaker 2: could do that whatever that is, and went in and
Speaker 2: the guy said, this is nineteen seventy four and the
Speaker 2: market had crashed and everybody lost a lot of money,
Speaker 2: and they hired me. I ended up going to went
Speaker 2: back to New York, went to work for Hutton, and
Speaker 2: every move, everything I did went up, because from nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five on the market just steadily went up and
Speaker 2: up and up and up. But I would get in
Speaker 2: arguments with people using common sense logic. Like back then,
Speaker 2: you could get bonds. They were called Big Max. They
Speaker 2: were the municipal bonster for New York City and they
Speaker 2: were ten percent with a ten percent yield tax double
Speaker 2: tax free. And I got a buck a bond, which
Speaker 2: is unheard of. And the old brokers will say, don't
Speaker 2: you realize you're screwing these people? And I go, look,
Speaker 2: I was just in New York. I looked around. Everybody
Speaker 2: had jobs, they just built, they had just completed the towers,
Speaker 2: the twin towers. This place is humming. How could it's
Speaker 2: not going to happen? And I was right, And those bonds,
Speaker 2: everybody made a ton of money. So I started thinking,
Speaker 2: this is a piece of k. Everything I did was
Speaker 2: making money. I thought, I'm now going to become a
Speaker 2: real estate developer. So I started building condos in Park City, Utah.
Speaker 2: And at one time I was the biggest I had
Speaker 2: the biggest contractor in Summit County. We built like one
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty units down south and blah blah blah
Speaker 2: blah blah, and I hit the snag where I ended
Speaker 2: up losing, like because it like twenty seven million dollars
Speaker 2: or something like that, and it was really sad. But
Speaker 2: I decided I moved back to California after that big loss,
Speaker 2: paid everybody back that I would money to, and I
Speaker 2: came back and I went like, what can I do?
Speaker 2: You know? And I had all this experience and I
Speaker 2: thought I'd written in an article. I started writing articles
Speaker 2: and the very first article I wrote became a cover
Speaker 2: story on Pinching World magazine. I had this knack for writing,
Speaker 2: and I started doing that, and you know, fifty books later.
Speaker 1: When I know, when one when a lot of Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans came back, I mean, it wasn't popular to talk
Speaker 1: about the war, and so I'm wondering, like, when did
Speaker 1: when did the idea get into your mind? I mean
Speaker 1: you and Gary and Ken and all of you wrote
Speaker 1: about the war. I mean, how did that come about
Speaker 1: for you guys?
Speaker 2: Ken Miller? Because of Ken Miller, it was about twenty
Speaker 2: years later, you know. And if you'll see every war,
Speaker 2: the books come out ten or fifteen or twenty years
Speaker 2: later because people are there's been a gap and they
Speaker 2: want to read about it. And Miller had written Tiger
Speaker 2: the lipdog, which is our dog. Great and he was
Speaker 2: and that's how he knew. The editor at Random House
Speaker 2: and Milton Linder asked me to write about you know,
Speaker 2: I told you about Ricondo School and capturing the NBA officer,
Speaker 2: So excuse me. So I wrote about thirty pages. There
Speaker 2: were it was single space, there was no paragraph breaks
Speaker 2: or nothing. And I sent it back to Linder, who had,
Speaker 2: you know, grown up with nuns beating his hand so
Speaker 2: he could spell and write everything perfect, you know, and
Speaker 2: he goes, it's great, but paragraphs don't go on for
Speaker 2: twenty pages. One paragraph, okay. So I sort of had
Speaker 2: to learn that on the job too. And I remember,
Speaker 2: he goes, you know, you ought to send this to
Speaker 2: my publisher. So I put thirty pages, and I hired
Speaker 2: an editor to edit for me. I sent it to him.
Speaker 2: I sent a FedEx, you know, on Wednesday and Friday,
Speaker 2: I get a phone call and I'm my name is
Speaker 2: ohen Locke. I'm with Random House. I want to buy
Speaker 2: your book. No negotiation, no agent, nothing, and bang.
Speaker 1: So awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. It was amazing. And that's why I,
Speaker 2: you know, we're sort of clumped together. It's because of Miller, Miller's.
Speaker 1: Contact, you know, and now people were ready to start
Speaker 1: talking about the war and talking about the experience.
Speaker 2: Well they're still I mean, I remember the last uh
Speaker 2: I did a tour. Rand and sent me on a
Speaker 2: tour and I went around and I spoke at B.
Speaker 2: Daltons and I remember this one B. Dalton, and this guy,
Speaker 2: this young guy, goes, so are you crazy? Are you
Speaker 2: really crazy? I mean he was asking all these stupid,
Speaker 2: ridiculous questions and no, and so I have. As you
Speaker 2: can see, my sense of humor isn't necessarily for everybody.
Speaker 2: It's good for combat vets, but the average civilian is
Speaker 2: going to get pissed off of me really quick. So
Speaker 2: I'm talking about No, I'm telling some story and I
Speaker 2: and I'm talking about these marines. This is a true story.
Speaker 2: We were out at out at this dump where we
Speaker 2: would test by our weapons or shoot rats or whatever
Speaker 2: the hell we were doing. And these marines walk by
Speaker 2: and they were set up and they were shooting, and
Speaker 2: I made something of it. I said, like, yeah, that
Speaker 2: these jar hit I said, jar hits. This woman gets
Speaker 2: up in the front and she's got my book and
Speaker 2: throws it at me and goes my husband was a
Speaker 2: marine and he died in Vietnam, and she turned around
Speaker 2: and marched out, and the only thing I could think
Speaker 2: was to say was I didn't kill him. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: you know, this is just what happened. This with combat vets,
Speaker 2: I can make fun of Navy seals. I can make
Speaker 2: fun of Air Force pair of commandos because if I'm
Speaker 2: in that group, it's okay. But if you're not in
Speaker 2: the group, you better watch out. You're gonna have a
Speaker 2: mouthful of fists. So it's it's like we, you know,
Speaker 2: we get to joke around about I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm making light of a lot of stuff because that's
Speaker 2: probably how I bury things. But you know, I feel
Speaker 2: like I feel like my sense of humor kept me
Speaker 2: saying in nom and I would be very inappropriate. Like
Speaker 2: on one mission, it might have been the Ashaut Valley mission,
Speaker 2: and we were going out and there they were, they
Speaker 2: with the talk and they had big maps set up,
Speaker 2: and this guy from S two, this captain was showing, well,
Speaker 2: there's a we think there's fifteen thousand of the fifth
Speaker 2: NBA Regiment up here. In the fourth there was a
Speaker 2: recon of three thousand North Vin's coming down here and
Speaker 2: we're going to insert you. And I remember raising my
Speaker 2: hand and this thing is packed. We've got helicopter pilots,
Speaker 2: the two, the teams, everybody's there, and I raised my
Speaker 2: hand and he goes yes, Sergeant Chambers and go like,
Speaker 2: should we even bring any food or anything or just
Speaker 2: like a lot of extra ammo? And he's Chambers shut up.
Speaker 2: You would get so pissed off because I would say
Speaker 2: these goofy comments. But the way they painted it, we
Speaker 2: weren't coming back. So I figured why I'd bring a
Speaker 2: bunch of extra stuff if we're only going to go
Speaker 2: out and get you know, shot. I don't know.
Speaker 1: And you've made I mean you mentioned that a little bit,
Speaker 1: but you've also went and like spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time in Cambodia and made numerous trips back to Vietnam.
Speaker 1: What was that sort of like I mean retracing your
Speaker 1: old patrols in some instances.
Speaker 2: Well, I spent a lot of times ten years in Cambodia,
Speaker 2: so you know I was you know, guys will say,
Speaker 2: yeah I did, I did three tours, and no, I
Speaker 2: go like I did ten years in Cambodia. So his
Speaker 2: career no. I went back to Vietnam basically on a dare.
Speaker 2: I took my son to Thailand and he wanted to
Speaker 2: go surfing and stuff like that. So anyway, he was
Speaker 2: there and he was going back to school, and I
Speaker 2: stayed and I met these women, and I was up
Speaker 2: in Ching Mai. I don't know if you know Thailand,
Speaker 2: but Ching MAI's way north. It's a beautiful little city,
Speaker 2: and I was thinking I was going to live there.
Speaker 2: This is great. I like this, and I had no
Speaker 2: thoughts of ever going back to Vietnam, even though it
Speaker 2: wasn't that far away. And I got in this argument
Speaker 2: with this real super liberal woman who was Canadian, and
Speaker 2: she told me how wrong the war was and how
Speaker 2: certain things didn't happen. And I was like, rather than
Speaker 2: argue with her, you know, she goes, I didn't, and
Speaker 2: she goes, we're so close, why don't you go find
Speaker 2: out for yourself? And I went, I will. So I
Speaker 2: got a ticket and I flew. I flew to Laos,
Speaker 2: and then from Laos, I flew into Hanoi. And I
Speaker 2: remember that first night. I felt like, this is twenty
Speaker 2: twelve or eleven or something like that, and I felt
Speaker 2: like wow, I'm here. I'm just no no backup, no ammo,
Speaker 2: no gun, no anything. What if they're going to recognize me?
Speaker 2: It was just thinking like what if some oh I
Speaker 2: remember him, I shoot him, get him. You know, there's
Speaker 2: all these weird things go through your mind. And drive
Speaker 2: into into Hanoi and on a beautiful, brand new four
Speaker 2: lane highway. And I stayed at the at the Hanoi Hilton,
Speaker 2: not the one that's famous, but the real Hilton where
Speaker 2: Bush and State or when he went, when he visited there,
Speaker 2: and they were so nice to me, and I got
Speaker 2: the last room and I'm watching I'm watching television. Was
Speaker 2: the HBO special when mac namara said like six times
Speaker 2: how I was of a state that we went into
Speaker 2: Vietnam and this didn't happen. That didn't happen, and this
Speaker 2: was wrong. And I remember throwing the remote control at
Speaker 2: the television and breaking and I was so pissed off.
Speaker 2: And that sort of started my quest to find out.
Speaker 2: I started what's called the Hidden History Project, and I
Speaker 2: would go to the archives in u in Hanoid where
Speaker 2: there's there's no Internet connection to them. There there's just
Speaker 2: raw stuff. And like I showed you this, this one picture,
Speaker 2: which is of Poa Chi Minh is really the thin
Speaker 2: guy in the center to in the rest of all Americans.
Speaker 2: And then General Jap is the guy in the white
Speaker 2: suit right there. He was working with the OSS. So
Speaker 2: there's all of these things in Ho Chi Men's archives
Speaker 2: that he wrote about, and that all of the letters
Speaker 2: I saw that was addressed to Truman that Truman never read.
Speaker 2: They were going to open up. They wanted to, you know,
Speaker 2: give us access to you know, High Fong. See, the
Speaker 2: problem was with the French, that they had been enslaved
Speaker 2: by the French. And if Roosevelt would have lived just
Speaker 2: a few more months and Truman wouldn't have been president,
Speaker 2: there would have been Vietnam would have been put in
Speaker 2: a Conservatives like a trusteeship like Hong Kong was for
Speaker 2: thirty years, and then go back to Vietnam. That's what
Speaker 2: Roosevelt wanted to do. He hated the French. That's why,
Speaker 2: you know, people forget the VC French. I mean the
Speaker 2: French rolled over like incapitulated in about was it a
Speaker 2: week when they rolled into France. Well, what people don't
Speaker 2: realize that that Hitler now had access to the second
Speaker 2: largest navy in the world, which was the French Navy,
Speaker 2: and they were everywhere, which meant also Vietnam, Vietnam was
Speaker 2: called Indo China, so people don't realize into China is Vietnam, Laos,
Speaker 2: Cambodia and it's and it was all under the VC
Speaker 2: French and they just opened the doors for the Japanese
Speaker 2: Imperial Army to come in. And what the Japanese had
Speaker 2: to deal with the French they said, look, you keep
Speaker 2: your jobs and that will free up more men, so
Speaker 2: we go kill Americans. So basically the VC French we're
Speaker 2: doing all the support stuff in the airports and everything
Speaker 2: for the Japanese people. Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor December seventh,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty, they don't know about December eighth. Two hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty thousand people were killed on December eighth. When
Speaker 2: the next when the fleets, you know, went through the
Speaker 2: whole rest of Asia, killing you know, Singapore and Indonesia
Speaker 2: and you know, the Philippine all all through there on
Speaker 2: the eighth and that that that that that fleet came
Speaker 2: out of Vietnam, that that's where it sailed from, and
Speaker 2: those airplanes and I you know, and I started reading
Speaker 2: how Ho Chi Minh had that the Viet min had
Speaker 2: rescued American pilots and he he walked one all the
Speaker 2: way back. You know, it took a month to get
Speaker 2: to Coonan, China. And what's great if you get older
Speaker 2: and you can travel, which I love to do. I
Speaker 2: would go and trace these places. I would trace where
Speaker 2: Ho Chi Minh went, and I would trace where uh
Speaker 2: the oss we're in in China and in coon and Kuhman, China.
Speaker 2: And there's a great big thing and says, you know,
Speaker 2: thanks America. You know, he saved China. You never hear that.
Speaker 2: Now that's all been like it gets it gets covered
Speaker 2: over with the new communist government doesn't want to hear
Speaker 2: a lot about that stuff. But it's all out there,
Speaker 2: you know if you visit these museums. And so I
Speaker 2: started finding out more and more stuff and find finding
Speaker 2: out this history that was sort of hidden from us
Speaker 2: young guys, that that it wasn't that we were fighting
Speaker 2: the communists. We had inherited this thing because the French said,
Speaker 2: the French name. There's no such thing as a Viet Cong.
Speaker 2: You know, by the way, that's a bullshit term. That
Speaker 2: was made up by the French Vietmese communism. But there's
Speaker 2: no Viet Kong that you know, they know, you know,
Speaker 2: that's that's the front. When you go to Vietnam and
Speaker 2: you start looking around, you could look at the memorials.
Speaker 2: There's a memorial to the America. They call it the
Speaker 2: Americans War, and so that was Tenure War, and it's
Speaker 2: a it's a topa like a you know, shrine, little shrine,
Speaker 2: blah blah. And then we go to the French monument
Speaker 2: and it's this big, great, big trick because they fought
Speaker 2: him for two hundred years. And of course then you go.
Speaker 2: Then my guy goes, oh, yeah, but that's nothing, and
Speaker 2: he takes me to the Monument of the War with China,
Speaker 2: which is up on a hill, which is this massive, great,
Speaker 2: big thing. You know, they've been fighting him for two
Speaker 2: thousand years. They hated the Chinese. They still hate the Chinese.
Speaker 2: You know, if they tolerate them, they would get ups
Speaker 2: from But if like I remember reading in the State
Speaker 2: Department in the forties, there was a fifties sixties there
Speaker 2: was zero Vietnamese or anybody of Asian descent that was
Speaker 2: in the State Department. If somebody would have came over
Speaker 2: and just counted the number of cannons that were I
Speaker 2: saw in this one museum for every you know, every
Speaker 2: one hundred years that they fought with the Chinese, they
Speaker 2: would know that we were never going to there wasn't
Speaker 2: back by China. You know, all of our intel, all
Speaker 2: of our information was skewed by the French, you know,
Speaker 2: and you can read all about that. I want to
Speaker 2: go off onto that topic, but that just got me
Speaker 2: deeper and deeper into I wanted to help, and so
Speaker 2: I sort of had. It was sort of my giving back.
Speaker 2: I went into Cambodia and found I showed you that
Speaker 2: picture earlier I'd found of all of the B fifty
Speaker 2: two strikes. I mean, this is the photograph showed that.
Speaker 2: So that see is that again? It's like that, So
Speaker 2: that's anyway, it's hard to show that, but that's Cambodia.
Speaker 2: We just we dropped more tonnage on Cambodia than any
Speaker 2: country even during World War Two, more tonnage wise, and
Speaker 2: you can and all of this I got this from
Speaker 2: Yale University. But the Air Force keeps accurate records, and
Speaker 2: so all of those are bomb sorties and of the
Speaker 2: I think of the eight eighty five hundred sorties, three
Speaker 2: thousand of them didn't even have a mission. They just
Speaker 2: went out and dropped bombs. And so, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: in Cambodia and I've met a lot of people that
Speaker 2: lost their grandparents that you know, fifty two flives so
Speaker 2: fricking high. You don't know it's there until the bomb
Speaker 2: blows up, So you know, we and that just pushed
Speaker 2: all of these young people into Pulpot's arms. Pullpop was
Speaker 2: the crazy guy that thought Mao was the greatest thing
Speaker 2: in safe ice bread. But he was going to take
Speaker 2: it to the next level, take Cambodia back to year zero.
Speaker 2: So he executed you if you wore glasses, if you
Speaker 2: had an education, you know, they would if you didn't,
Speaker 2: if you broke a needle and stitching, if you you
Speaker 2: couldn't have a family picture. I mean, they literally just
Speaker 2: just destroyed that culture. And of the seven million people
Speaker 2: probably killed three million either forced labor, you know, because
Speaker 2: they dumped the people out of banam Pen and marched
Speaker 2: them out into the bill, out into the farmland, and
Speaker 2: they became farmers and they would do ridiculous things like
Speaker 2: I saw this one place where they were trying to
Speaker 2: build a reservoir uphill, but they were stupid. The people
Speaker 2: that were running that had no education. Even now today
Speaker 2: and hopefully this doesn't hunting doesn't, he won't carry He's
Speaker 2: the Prime Minister of Cambodia. Here's a third grade education.
Speaker 2: You know, people don't They did have a lot of
Speaker 2: education back then. And he fought with Polpot and then
Speaker 2: he went over on the n east side and came
Speaker 2: back in and kicked the camerouge out, and then he
Speaker 2: became the prime minister. That's thirty years ago and he's
Speaker 2: still the prime minister today. But I decided I'm living here.
Speaker 2: I'm going to help these people. I've joined the rotary
Speaker 2: Club the VFW. It's really neat when you're the VFW
Speaker 2: and your VFW is the guys. The name of it
Speaker 2: is the guys that were on that Merchant Marine ship
Speaker 2: that got lasted after at the end of the war.
Speaker 2: You know. So we get to go to the embassy
Speaker 2: and hang out with all these cool young you know,
Speaker 2: soldiers and Marines that are stationed in Panampen and also
Speaker 2: the finding missing soldiers. I got to work with our
Speaker 2: guy's called stone is the code name for it. But
Speaker 2: the main guy for the finding the missing soldiers is
Speaker 2: even the Vietnam A station PanAm Pen. So I got
Speaker 2: to know him, and what I would do is I'd say, look,
Speaker 2: you know, I know the way these people think, Let's
Speaker 2: give him something. So let's give them. I did this
Speaker 2: big painting of the Vietnamese when they land, when they
Speaker 2: went through the the gates and at the end of
Speaker 2: the war, and I thought, just give this to them,
Speaker 2: because they give us intel on our missing guys. We
Speaker 2: still have twelve hundred and fifty guys missing. And I
Speaker 2: found out all of the rigorole that goes through it
Speaker 2: to try to find It's amazing. The North Vietinese have
Speaker 2: four hundred thousand and all it says on their bursts
Speaker 2: on the death certificate location South, so they had nothing.
Speaker 2: So I even't found these They're called corp they're psychics,
Speaker 2: their corporate their corpse finders, and they have this psychic
Speaker 2: thing and some of it works and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: but it's like so bizarre. So I've helped this woman
Speaker 2: who has an organization to find their missing soldiers, and
Speaker 2: I found two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: graves in Panampan just by talking like this. And one
Speaker 2: of my friends said, I know where there's this grave
Speaker 2: site that's Chinese but it looks like Vietnamese. And we
Speaker 2: went there and it was all these vietmanse graves because
Speaker 2: the Vietnamese lost, they lost eighty six thousand men fighting
Speaker 2: the Camerooge. After we were gone, we know nothing about
Speaker 2: all these wars that went on. And when you go there,
Speaker 2: I mean, if I'm there, I'll take you around. I'll
Speaker 2: take you to see a rip And there's a museum,
Speaker 2: the best museum there you've ever seen, because all the
Speaker 2: tanks and the artillery pieces were left where the last
Speaker 2: battle was aimed at each other. They're still there. It's
Speaker 2: just it's amazing, you know, to find that that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: Ever going on.
Speaker 1: No, No, this is all like fascinating to hear about.
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could all so tell us
Speaker 1: about you know, some of your art. You know that
Speaker 1: some of it you can see behind you. If you
Speaker 1: could tell us how you got into painting, and you
Speaker 1: know some of your work is also Vietnam themed.
Speaker 2: Well, it was a lot of it was actually I
Speaker 2: did I did this. This was this brochure that I made,
Speaker 2: and these are all I can't hold that can I
Speaker 2: can't hold it straight? Well, these are all paintings that
Speaker 2: I did. This one, see which one is it? This one?
Speaker 2: This one one first place in the VA's Art contest
Speaker 2: of like forty five hundred different vas across the country.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't even one of my favorites. But I
Speaker 2: guess what it is was the it captured you know
Speaker 2: what that guy was going through a moment. Yeah, yeah, moment.
Speaker 2: And this is me and the one this is me
Speaker 2: and Tubby Claus and where there was these would be
Speaker 2: photographs and then I would paint him. So that was that,
Speaker 2: and then I started painting like my girls like this.
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard to do this when you're at reversed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything's reversed. But let's see. I saw some other
Speaker 2: ones that are I just did this one the other
Speaker 2: day or a week, a few weeks ago. I like
Speaker 2: to copy stuff, and so that's a picasso. And then
Speaker 2: there's another one of my I saw her in downtown
Speaker 2: ho chi Min City, which is Saigone for those of
Speaker 2: you that won't call it Ochiman City, and I and
Speaker 2: we talked about this earlier, but that's always been one
Speaker 2: of my reliefs. You know, probably read your Way before
Speaker 2: I wrote anything about Vietnam, but I would paint well.
Speaker 2: It was funny when I finished writing that story or
Speaker 2: the death in the Ashell Valley, I stopped talking about it.
Speaker 2: There was nothing else to talk about. It was really weird.
Speaker 2: It was like I got it out of my head
Speaker 2: and down on paper where it belongs. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: the way I faced my PTSD was like they say, bite,
Speaker 2: bite the dog, the bit you you know, bite the
Speaker 2: hair and the dog. Whatever that saying is going back
Speaker 2: there did more to help my than a thousand therapists
Speaker 2: because I got to see the Vietnamese as loving, real
Speaker 2: people with loving families. And these people treat By the way,
Speaker 2: if you're a veteran of Vietnam War and you go
Speaker 2: to Vietnam, you're you're a class higher than any of
Speaker 2: the tourists. They love Americans that come back. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've seen Ho Chi Men's body. I waited in line
Speaker 2: and I had me and another veteran were there and
Speaker 2: this little old guy, old he's my age, come up
Speaker 2: to and he had his NVA uniform on, and all
Speaker 2: he wanted to do was shake my hand for coming
Speaker 2: coming here. It was just so moving to it's still
Speaker 2: it's still real for a lot of these people. You know,
Speaker 2: it'd be like, I'm sure the way the Civil War
Speaker 2: must have been. You know, in America it went on
Speaker 2: for a long time. There was just pain. There's still
Speaker 2: going on. Well, that's still raw there. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: still guys are I mean, when I first moved to Cambodia,
Speaker 2: we were averaging at least one young kid would get
Speaker 2: killed a week with a bomb, you know, picking up
Speaker 2: a bomb, you know something. You know, it was one
Speaker 2: a week, and now it's I don't hear that much
Speaker 2: about it. So that's dropped down a lot. But you know,
Speaker 2: it in a country where that's just scattered, not only
Speaker 2: with bombs at the that ther bullpots guys left, but
Speaker 2: every time, you know, I don't know if you've ever
Speaker 2: seen what comes out of B fifty two, those.
Speaker 1: Little cluster munitions.
Speaker 2: Cluster munitions, they look like balls to play with, and
Speaker 2: they just go everywhere I've got you know, you go
Speaker 2: into Laois and you can go and I went into
Speaker 2: this museum where actually President Obama i'd have gone into
Speaker 2: and there's all of these. It's it's sad because there's
Speaker 2: all of these makeshift like they cut their own foot,
Speaker 2: like they cut the wood thing for their foot. If
Speaker 2: they've got their foot blown off, they build their own
Speaker 2: prosthetic foot or hand or arm. You know. Still, I
Speaker 2: mean that still goes on, and you know there's Loos especially,
Speaker 2: it's still got a lot of I've got a friend
Speaker 2: over there i'd get every day. I get stuff from
Speaker 2: him on Facebook and he we drive motorcycles over there
Speaker 2: and drive motorcycle. I mean, if you want to go
Speaker 2: down the Ho Chiumn trail, I've got the guy. We
Speaker 2: could go do a tour and it'll blow your mind,
Speaker 2: you'll see, because everything's left the way. It was like
Speaker 2: they only a couple of years ago they found a
Speaker 2: giant Chinese tank that that that the Vietnamese were using
Speaker 2: in Laos and it got covered over like the tour
Speaker 2: it was blown off and then somehow got covered up
Speaker 2: with dirt and then they were doing a bridge and
Speaker 2: they covered this complete tank you know, with the with
Speaker 2: the rounds in it and everything still ready to fire.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's still you find amazing, you know, that's
Speaker 2: going to be gone soon, you know, for the scrap guys.
Speaker 2: We'll get it, but it's still there.
Speaker 1: D uh. Do we have any viewer questions that we
Speaker 1: can hit up? I think we have some.
Speaker 3: Some viewers got some questions here, Give me one second,
Speaker 3: Alejandra again, not to fanboy too much. Uh, but would
Speaker 3: it be okay if I reach out to you to
Speaker 3: send me to send my book to you and get
Speaker 3: it autographed?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, But what I will request is that you
Speaker 2: send a return envelope paid for that. People do that
Speaker 2: and I end up spending you know, six dollars to
Speaker 2: send a book that I made thirty cents on. But
Speaker 2: here's my My address is one two five Surfway, Unit
Speaker 2: three three nine, Monterey, California, nine three hold.
Speaker 4: On ninety three something ninety three nine four.
Speaker 2: Oh and my email is Larry at el Chambers dot com.
Speaker 1: That's really nice if you Larry.
Speaker 2: Sure Scott G. Thank you.
Speaker 3: I wore ten thousands tactical pants doing it job interview
Speaker 3: and I ended up getting the job.
Speaker 2: There you go. Good for you.
Speaker 3: Ringing endorsement. Alejandro again, thank you. Can you tell a
Speaker 3: story about the lightning strike?
Speaker 2: He did? Joe's by the way, I got a purple
Speaker 2: heart for that lightning strike. And Miller was the one
Speaker 2: that pointed out. He said, did you ever read your
Speaker 2: purple heart? It's for enemies against America? So God is
Speaker 2: like your enemy. I mean Miller would always you know,
Speaker 2: he was the most educated of all of us, and
Speaker 2: he would somehow turned something on us with it. Jose
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 3: Was radio direction finding every capability you guys used to
Speaker 3: locate the enemy?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, Ralph, think that might have been later.
Speaker 3: Have you used your recon skills in the finance securities industry?
Speaker 3: If so, what techniques were useful and what and was
Speaker 3: it in an urban environment.
Speaker 2: Urban environment? Well, I was a stockbroker in Salt Lake City,
Speaker 2: But yeah, I definitely. I actually to brag, I opened
Speaker 2: up more accounts for E. F. Hutton in one year.
Speaker 2: I've set the record. I opened up three hundred accounts.
Speaker 2: And what I would do, and this is when my
Speaker 2: partner that started at the same time, he opened up
Speaker 2: twenty four. But I opened up so many accounts because
Speaker 2: what I would do is like I'd walk outside and
Speaker 2: I looked around and I went like, wow, there's the
Speaker 2: there's this golden in Salt Lake City. There's the temple,
Speaker 2: you know, the Mormon Temple. But then there's also the well,
Speaker 2: not the White House, but the governor you know, the
Speaker 2: Governor's mansion or something. Well, yeah, for the you know,
Speaker 2: it looks like the White House. And I'd look up
Speaker 2: there and they had a gold It was the top
Speaker 2: of the buildings gold. And I want like gold money.
Speaker 2: So I called up the Treasure of the State of
Speaker 2: Utah and I opened up the account. My first order
Speaker 2: was like eight million. There was no eight eight hundred
Speaker 2: thousand dollars bonds that I and I wasn't even sure
Speaker 2: how to buy them. But I would like run into
Speaker 2: my management, like I just got this guy in the
Speaker 2: Phonian wants to invest eight you know, he's going to
Speaker 2: roll over his mortgage money and we put together old
Speaker 2: bond portfolio. But so I would I would do that.
Speaker 2: I would. I would make sure because we were and
Speaker 2: there was Merrill Lynch and we'd start at like start
Speaker 2: at five o'clock in the morning. I would start at
Speaker 2: four o'clock in the morning. I made sure that nobody
Speaker 2: was earlier than me. This is in my early years
Speaker 2: when I was starting, because I had more time to
Speaker 2: get on the phone and call people. So I would
Speaker 2: go in at four, just as an ego thing. I
Speaker 2: found out that my I found out that the president
Speaker 2: of this school, I found out. I'd find out what
Speaker 2: people would make and then I would like, oh, somebody
Speaker 2: had fired me once and it was another brokerage firm
Speaker 2: when I early on when I started, and it was
Speaker 2: because I couldn't pass that test, that first test. I'd
Speaker 2: never never taken a business class, so I didn't know.
Speaker 2: So I used to every month, I would send him
Speaker 2: my run. And I was at one time, I was
Speaker 2: averaging twenty thousand a month, but one month they made
Speaker 2: forty thousand dollars, just like nineteen seventy eight, when that
Speaker 2: was a lot of money for a month, and I
Speaker 2: would I would send him my run and just like
Speaker 2: just to so, I guess I used my e my
Speaker 2: ego to to make to make myself be the best
Speaker 2: me I could be. I never did anything illegal or
Speaker 2: wrong or anything like that, but I just would push myself,
Speaker 2: push myself because I knew I could take it. You know.
Speaker 2: Like one time I gave a talk to this was
Speaker 2: at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. The last time they
Speaker 2: ever invited me. I went and I talked to all
Speaker 2: of these women that wanted to write memoirs. And I'd
Speaker 2: written that recondo thing, and and I was writing every
Speaker 2: day because I had two kids defeed and I got
Speaker 2: up and I said, look, it's unfair because you can't
Speaker 2: compete against me. I've got to make a living. I'm
Speaker 2: not doing this because I've got some extra time and
Speaker 2: I want to like write something. You know, I'm doing
Speaker 2: this because I got two kids to feed, an ex
Speaker 2: wife and probably soon to be another ex wife. I've
Speaker 2: got to pay it. I got a lot to do.
Speaker 2: And that's the attitude you've got to take with writing.
Speaker 2: And I just would send stuff out to anybody, and
Speaker 2: there's well, you're not supposed to send it to the editor.
Speaker 2: I'd call the guy up. He's just a guy or
Speaker 2: a woman. Hi, Larry Chambers. I got an article, and
Speaker 2: I figured out I would I would give them the
Speaker 2: article free, and I'd have some corporate like you have
Speaker 2: a sponsors. I had sponsors that would pay me, so
Speaker 2: I didn't need money from the magazine. So pretty soon
Speaker 2: I'm writing. I was writing three h three columns a
Speaker 2: month and two books a year, three sometimes three books
Speaker 2: a year, and I did that for years, So you know,
Speaker 2: I guess that's how I used it. I just use
Speaker 2: my tenacity. And you know what I always would remember
Speaker 2: is standing there getting that that that that that air
Speaker 2: metal pinned on my chest. I was so proud of that.
Speaker 2: And when I do that, I would like get into
Speaker 2: a stance and I could just go all day long.
Speaker 2: I don't need drugs, I don't need anything, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't need to drink. I just would just I'm pure,
Speaker 2: like pride or I don't know the way explain it,
Speaker 2: but I didn't use I didn't sneak around and steal stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, to get if that was what the guy
Speaker 2: was wondering, I didn't do that. I just used tenacity.
Speaker 2: Tenacity would be the word I would say.
Speaker 3: One more Scotchy. When you were attending University of Utah,
Speaker 3: what was your opinion of the economics classes slash professors
Speaker 3: and any Marxist economics they taught you? Since you planned, I.
Speaker 2: Didn't take any economic classes I took. I was a
Speaker 2: ski instructor back then. I'd graduated from I went I
Speaker 2: became a ski instructor, and I taught it Alta and
Speaker 2: I got certified at alf Ingens, which is the hardest
Speaker 2: ski school in Utah. I mean there's the best of
Speaker 2: the best. And so I taught for the University of Utah,
Speaker 2: and I combined that I sort of made after I
Speaker 2: got my first my bachelor's because I already graduated from
Speaker 2: junior college before I went in the Army. Then I
Speaker 2: came up to bachelor's and then I got a master's degree,
Speaker 2: and I used the skiing as a part of a
Speaker 2: part of that. Remember I told you I was dyslexic
Speaker 2: and add so I avoided anything. Now, now, what's to
Speaker 2: tell something on myself. The first book I read, I
Speaker 2: probably wasn't It was Catcher in the Rye and I
Speaker 2: was probably thirty years old when I read a whole book,
Speaker 2: a whole novel all the way through. Was the first
Speaker 2: book I'd ever read because I just avoided reading. I
Speaker 2: was so bad at it, so dyslexic, I couldn't read.
Speaker 2: And you know, so I like cheated most of my
Speaker 2: way through grammar school. You know how they were going
Speaker 2: to put me back in the third grade. But I
Speaker 2: learned how to forge my mother's signature, and I took
Speaker 2: the note home and said, no, Heed, He's going to
Speaker 2: go on, you know, and then I just would cheat.
Speaker 2: But nobody knew I was undiagnosed. Nobody knew what that
Speaker 2: stuff was. Yeah, yeah, or to how to deal with
Speaker 2: it all right?
Speaker 3: Last one, Mike, thank you, Thank you gentlemen for hosting
Speaker 3: another another extraordinary man who did extraordinary things for our country.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Mike, and thank you for the kind words. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, I feel the same boy, Larry. I mean, thank
Speaker 1: you again for doing this. And I really hope that
Speaker 1: folks out there will read his Uh. I mean, you have,
Speaker 1: as you said, lots of books out there. Some of
Speaker 1: them are about finance. Tonight we were talking about Racondo
Speaker 1: and the other book Larry wrote, Death and a Shaw
Speaker 1: Valley are definitely going to be of interest to our viewers.
Speaker 1: I plaid through this book in a couple of days.
Speaker 1: I really hope you guys will check it out. Larry
Speaker 1: his his YouTube, his website. You'll be able to find
Speaker 1: it just down below in the description to this video
Speaker 1: or podcast if that's how you're listening to it. Larry,
Speaker 1: any final thoughts, anything else that I failed to cover
Speaker 1: that you want to get out there.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, this is this is for like like for vets.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things that I've done is
Speaker 2: I went in Cambodia. I found a woman that had
Speaker 2: five young daughters, and I supported she. She did understand.
Speaker 2: I remember telling her, You're not going to understand. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't want anything from you. I want to help
Speaker 2: your family, and I've sent them through school. I pay
Speaker 2: for food lodge where they live, for meals, for their clothes.
Speaker 2: I've done that for ten years and I've had some
Speaker 2: people help me excuse me along the way, but I
Speaker 2: sort of it indirect or directly adopted this to my family.
Speaker 2: And I have to tell you, for a veteran, I
Speaker 2: have so much meaning in my life because that's what
Speaker 2: they say. You know, what what makes you for? You know,
Speaker 2: I'm seventy five years old, I'm happy is shit, and
Speaker 2: I've got two great kids that are adult children, Logan
Speaker 2: and Kristen in America. But I've got all of these
Speaker 2: people that I've helped in Cambodia, and I just feel
Speaker 2: proud of that, you know, not like I owe the
Speaker 2: Vietnam what Vietnam did to me. It's so I suggest,
Speaker 2: you know, going and taking on a mission something like
Speaker 2: in our motto in rotary service above self, and that's
Speaker 2: what I get so much more out of helping somebody
Speaker 2: else than my dumb shit stuff.
Speaker 1: It's it's been really interesting to see a lot of
Speaker 1: the Afghanistan veterans helping out Afghan immigrants in the aftermath
Speaker 1: of the war and helping them come here and settle down.
Speaker 1: And it's been interesting to see all of that.
Speaker 2: Like the guy that wrote about this early on was, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the real it was he was in a
Speaker 2: concentration camp and he saw that the two there was
Speaker 2: two groups of people that made it. The ones that
Speaker 2: were super religious so they held on their religion, which
Speaker 2: I'm not in that group, but the other one was
Speaker 2: they created a sense of meaning. That's why you always
Speaker 2: hear you know, they're animant about the Holocaust and about
Speaker 2: what happened. They will you they're not going to ever
Speaker 2: let that die because that gives them purpose and meaning
Speaker 2: in their life. And that's what those guys helping the
Speaker 2: Afghanist and trying to get somebody all that stuff that
Speaker 2: just gives you like a goal, of tangible goal to
Speaker 2: reach and do. That's good and you know you feel
Speaker 2: good about you. I mean, what a great feeling, you know.
Speaker 1: Larry, thank you against so much man. And next coming
Speaker 1: up this week, we're going to have two shows. Actually,
Speaker 1: we're going to have on the twenty fourth Alex Hollings.
Speaker 1: He's a former marine and he writes for a lot
Speaker 1: of aviation stuff, a lot of aerospace news. And then
Speaker 1: on Friday, episode eighty eight, Mark Denbaugh, who is a
Speaker 1: warrior who represents one of the inmates down in Guantanamo Bay.
Speaker 1: So we're going to have him in studio. It's going
Speaker 1: to be an interesting episode, different perspective than what we
Speaker 1: usually get around here. So yeah, Larry, I mean, this
Speaker 1: has been amazing, Thank you so much, man, and you know,
Speaker 1: please stay in touch, let us know if we can
Speaker 1: help it anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you bet, well, thank you, it's been fun.
Speaker 1: Absolutely all right. We will see all of you guys
Speaker 1: next Friday.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: Actually here more that we'll see you with Alex first
Speaker 1: and then on Friday.
Speaker 2: Okay,