Speaker 1: Special Operations, Colbert, Oh, SPI and I The Team House
Speaker 1: with your host Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Everybody, Welcome to episode three sixty six of The Teamhouse.
Speaker 3: I'm Dave Park.
Speaker 2: You're with Jack Murphy, and tonight our guest is Dick Thompson,
Speaker 2: retired Lieutenant Carl who wrote a couple of books on
Speaker 2: MacB Soag. The first one is Soag code named Dynamite.
Speaker 2: The one, Oh, the team Leader's story basically reads like
Speaker 2: a journal. I'm amazed, Like, I'm amazed at how detailed
Speaker 2: it is. It reads like an action novel too. It's
Speaker 2: a lot of great stuff. And one of the things
Speaker 2: I really appreciated was like at the end of each
Speaker 2: chapter you have kind of a less and learned and
Speaker 2: everything like that.
Speaker 3: So, thank you so much for joining us to night.
Speaker 4: Did thank you honored to be here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, you know, like the books on back, the book
Speaker 2: focused on macbe Sag and you know, obviously that was
Speaker 2: one of the highlights of your career, but you had
Speaker 2: a twenty one year career. But before that, when you
Speaker 2: were knee high little Dickey Toms and running around the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Tell us your origin story, how did you grow up
Speaker 2: and what led you to the military.
Speaker 5: I grew up in basically a military family. My mother's
Speaker 5: five brothers were all deployed to in World War Two
Speaker 5: at the same time, and my father was also deployed,
Speaker 5: so they had everybody over there in World War Two.
Speaker 5: After that was over, my father was also called back
Speaker 5: in to go to Korea. So I had a lot
Speaker 5: of exposure as a small kid growing up and hearing
Speaker 5: the family talk about war, and I became very curious,
Speaker 5: so I asked a lot of questions.
Speaker 4: You know, what is the squad, what is the platoon?
Speaker 5: What do they do? How did they work? So I
Speaker 5: was always asking questions about it. I spent a lot
Speaker 5: of time living at my grandparents' house on my mother's
Speaker 5: side while my father was gone, So I grew up
Speaker 5: kind of on a farm, but you know, a lot
Speaker 5: of woods. I had an opportunity to go out and
Speaker 5: spend a lot of time, you know, in an environment
Speaker 5: like that. When my father got back and we moved
Speaker 5: to a small farm, and I was spend hours and
Speaker 5: hours in the woods alone as well. You know, I
Speaker 5: have a six year old, seven year old kid watching animals,
Speaker 5: tracking animals, trying to figure out how can I be invisible?
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Speaker 5: How can I walk up on a deer? How close
Speaker 5: can I get to them? What do their tracks look like?
Speaker 5: How do they behave? So I was learning the field
Speaker 5: craft like that. So I got a little older. I
Speaker 5: had a cousin, Carl, who would my age, who would
Speaker 5: come over and we'd go out in the woods and
Speaker 5: play army camp in the woods at night. Eventually we
Speaker 5: got to the point where I had a bb gun.
Speaker 5: We would shoot birds, cook them over or fire and
Speaker 5: do the kinds of things. Because we've heard about rangers.
Speaker 5: We'd do the kinds of things that we thought rangers did.
Speaker 5: And so I formed a ranger company. And I formed
Speaker 5: a ranger company, started out with myself and cousin Carl,
Speaker 5: brought in some other cousins, and expanded out beyond that
Speaker 5: a little, and then eventually brought in some people who
Speaker 5: were not related. But you know, I became General Thompson,
Speaker 5: uh and we had had our arranger company. I still
Speaker 5: have that log book today. You know, a lot of
Speaker 5: the writing has faded, but I had people's names in it.
Speaker 5: It had the one court martial that we conducted. I
Speaker 5: was a non family member, and we had we had
Speaker 5: to let.
Speaker 4: Him go, so we court martialed him and he left.
Speaker 5: But we saw Darby's Rangers, the movie that got us
Speaker 5: all fired up even more so. And I used to
Speaker 5: to hunt and fish. I grew up, you know, firing weapons,
Speaker 5: so I was pretty good at shooting and hunting, and
Speaker 5: you know, just kind of got into that. And then
Speaker 5: when I was thirteen, I was sabotaged by Santa Claus.
Speaker 5: He brought me a chemistry set and I used to
Speaker 5: watch Shock Theater and these other monster movies and things.
Speaker 5: So when I got the chemistry set, I started doing
Speaker 5: things like trying to swap brains between a bird and
Speaker 5: a frog. And at that time, if you if your
Speaker 5: parents or mother would go with you to the drug
Speaker 5: store the pharmacy, it was amazing what they were sell
Speaker 5: you know. So I had syringes, I had all kinds
Speaker 5: of things that I got from the drug store, and
Speaker 5: kind of grew up with a laboratory out of the barn.
Speaker 5: But I hadn't forgotten the Rangers, and I got to
Speaker 5: ended up with a scholarship to the University of South Carolina.
Speaker 2: Take real quick, I want to stop you, because there
Speaker 2: was something in your book you talked about your very
Speaker 2: first macbe sag instructor in the in the barn there.
Speaker 3: Do you do you want to tell us about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, when I was you know, I was was you know,
Speaker 5: about six, I guess or seven, somewhere around that age.
Speaker 4: And and the way our house was was set up.
Speaker 5: There was a road, a dirt road that came from
Speaker 5: the highway, came right through the middle of our property,
Speaker 5: uh and separated our house from the barn. And you know,
Speaker 5: we didn't have running water, so we got water out
Speaker 5: of a well. We didn't have indoor toilets or bathrooms.
Speaker 5: We had an outhouse, but it was on the other
Speaker 5: side of the road where the barn was, and my
Speaker 5: father bought a big turkey. In fact, when we were
Speaker 5: standing face to face, we were pretty well looking at
Speaker 5: each other's eyes, and he was very aggressive. He didn't
Speaker 5: want anybody on what he called his side of the road.
Speaker 5: So when I needed to go to the bathroom, I
Speaker 5: had to try to get into the outhouse before he
Speaker 5: could attack me. As he would see me, come running
Speaker 5: at me, jump up on me, knock me down, and
Speaker 5: you know, so I complained to my father about that,
Speaker 5: and he told me he said, you know, he knows
Speaker 5: you're afraid of him. You've got to let him know
Speaker 5: you're not afraid. I said, well, I am afraid of
Speaker 5: the joker. Knocked me down, affected me. And he said,
Speaker 5: you got to let him know you on that side
Speaker 5: of the road too. And I said, he's bigger and
Speaker 5: stronger and faster than me. He said, but you're smarter.
Speaker 5: Figure out how to out smarting. So that was kind
Speaker 5: of the beginning of my special Operations train. How can
Speaker 5: I navigate and get to the outhouse and then make
Speaker 5: it back across the road without him knocking me down?
Speaker 5: And I finally decided I could throw rocks at him,
Speaker 5: as you know, hold him back with rocks. I ended
Speaker 5: up with a sling shot, shoot him with a sling shot,
Speaker 5: but all kinds.
Speaker 4: Of E and E trying to get him around him.
Speaker 5: Then pay all finally came at Thanksgiving, he was invited
Speaker 5: for Thanksgiving dinner. Didn't have to worry about him anymore.
Speaker 5: But it really taught me a lot about how do
Speaker 5: you how do you hide? How do you go from
Speaker 5: cover and conceilment from one place to another and you know,
Speaker 5: get to the house and then get back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot so, yeah, thanks, So I'm sorry for
Speaker 2: interrupting you. So you go to college, and you're going
Speaker 2: to college for chemical engineering.
Speaker 4: Correct, well, for chemistry.
Speaker 3: Chemistry.
Speaker 5: Intent was to be a guilt a doctor in chemistry,
Speaker 5: be a research chemist. And at that time, every day,
Speaker 5: at five o'clock in the evening, the national news would
Speaker 5: come on and there'd always be a segment about what
Speaker 5: was going on in Vietnam that that day, and you know,
Speaker 5: they they kind of made it sound like we were
Speaker 5: really winning and it probably wasn't going to last much longer.
Speaker 5: And I, in my mind, I thought it's going to
Speaker 5: end before I have a chance to get there. So
Speaker 5: I told my parents I was going to take a
Speaker 5: break in school, uh, enlist in the army and go
Speaker 5: in go to Vietnam, come back, and then finish school.
Speaker 5: My mother was not happy with that. My father thought
Speaker 5: it was pretty cool. But so I took a break
Speaker 5: and enlisted in the army.
Speaker 3: And you very quick.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, but when you so, when you went to
Speaker 2: go enlist, you actually went to the You were headed
Speaker 2: to the marine though right.
Speaker 5: The Marine's office, the recruiting office, and army they were
Speaker 5: side by side a building there in town but yeah,
Speaker 5: because you saw the Marines on TV all the time.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's that's all you heard about. The Army
Speaker 5: was there and they were doing something, you know. But
Speaker 5: the Marines, it's like every other Marine's got a camera
Speaker 5: or something, and you know, they publish everything, excuse me.
Speaker 5: And so I sounded like they were the ones who
Speaker 5: were getting something done.
Speaker 4: So I thought about them. But after I talked to them,
Speaker 4: I went in the.
Speaker 5: Army recruiters and said, you know, what do you got
Speaker 5: and they talked me into going into the Army rather
Speaker 5: than the Marines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you originally thought that you might be a chemical,
Speaker 2: especially a chemical.
Speaker 5: Well, they had said, the Army recruiters had said, you know,
Speaker 5: you scored really high on all these tests and we
Speaker 5: can get you in the Army Chemical Corps. And I said, well,
Speaker 5: I mean that might be cool to make all these
Speaker 5: chemical weapons and different things, you know.
Speaker 4: So I went into Army and thinking about that.
Speaker 5: And then my first night I dant at Fort Faxon,
Speaker 5: went to sleep in bunk bed and you know, fifty
Speaker 5: other guys in the air and about three point thirty
Speaker 5: in the morning, all the lights come on.
Speaker 4: There's somebody yelling.
Speaker 5: Screaming and hollering, get out, get out in front of
Speaker 5: your bunk. And I guess the people at the other
Speaker 5: end of the room we're not moving fast enough. And
Speaker 5: I heard the double you know, the bunk beds starting
Speaker 5: to fall over on the floor because whoever this guy was,
Speaker 5: he was just turning to.
Speaker 4: Bunks over the people in him.
Speaker 5: I got out and I was sending in front of
Speaker 5: mine as he got where we were, and I noticed
Speaker 5: he was I mean, he was my size, and I thought, wow,
Speaker 5: he's not nearly as big as he sounds, but he's
Speaker 5: a bad dude. And then I noticed, you know, that
Speaker 5: black and gold Ranger tab on his shoulder, and I said, wow,
Speaker 5: that's a Ranger.
Speaker 4: That's what these guys are like. I mean, that's cool.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 5: And then you know, he took us to the mess
Speaker 5: hall and we had to double time going over there,
Speaker 5: and we start with a Jodie call about you know,
Speaker 5: I want to be an airborne ranger. I want a
Speaker 5: little life at danger, and I mean I was hooked
Speaker 5: by the time I got to the messhall. I said,
Speaker 5: I'm only going to be here three years. I might
Speaker 5: as well be a ranger for three years. And you know,
Speaker 5: turn some blunks over and have some you know, have
Speaker 5: a good time. So I started thinking that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you you your Basic, you do a leadership
Speaker 2: prep course which is like a like it was. They
Speaker 2: don't have it now, but when they identify you as
Speaker 2: somebody who's going to be a leader at ai T,
Speaker 2: right the Advanced Infantry Training, you go to a leader
Speaker 2: prep course and then you do your Infantry a T.
Speaker 2: Now here's my question, because this is this isn't something
Speaker 2: that happens really anymore. You did Basic and then ai T,
Speaker 2: and then you rolled right into OCS, the Officer Candidate School.
Speaker 3: How did that happen?
Speaker 5: Well, the drill sergeant I had in Basic, you know,
Speaker 5: he made me a platoon guide fairly quickly because I was,
Speaker 5: you know, very fit. I learned quickly. And then I
Speaker 5: discovered and one night that there was actually a manual
Speaker 5: twenty two days five that had all the commands that
Speaker 5: they were using as we marched around.
Speaker 4: So I need didn't take me long.
Speaker 5: At all to go through there and see what the
Speaker 5: commands were, you know, the preparatory commands, the execution command
Speaker 5: which put to give them on till the next morning
Speaker 5: I started correcting the drill sergeants for a short period
Speaker 5: of time. Then I did a lot of push outs
Speaker 5: because I could see when they were doing it wrong.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you give me the materials, I can
Speaker 5: learn it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So anyway, you made me the platoon guide.
Speaker 5: And then you know, I had taken all kinds of
Speaker 5: tests when I first came in and my drill sergeant
Speaker 5: I said, you really need to think about going to OCS,
Speaker 5: And so I A'm going to start putting in your
Speaker 5: file and pushing you in that direction. And then you
Speaker 5: know that followed up when I was at AI T
Speaker 5: and then I got orders to go to OCS at
Speaker 5: Fort Benning.
Speaker 3: Were you happy about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I was ready yeah by then. And
Speaker 5: then when I got o CS and uh, you know,
Speaker 5: you got exposed to a lot of things there. Airborne
Speaker 5: was wine Ranger was one. You know, all this different
Speaker 5: stuff you were doing. And you know, the the O
Speaker 5: C S company I was in was right next to
Speaker 5: the jump towers, you know, so every day I was
Speaker 5: watching people come down and parachutes out there.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: So I requested to go to jump school, requested to
Speaker 5: go to Special Forces, and and I got orders for
Speaker 5: both of those. So as soon as I finished OCS,
Speaker 5: I went to Jump School. Finished that, I went to
Speaker 5: Fort Bragg, went through the Q course up there, you know,
Speaker 5: became SS qualified and you know, went on a team
Speaker 5: was prepping to go on a mission to Africa because
Speaker 5: at that time, the Third Group was targeted toward Africa.
Speaker 5: And I had also volunteered to go to Ranger School
Speaker 5: and Vietnam, so that came through. They sent me the
Speaker 5: Rangers School. Shortly after that, the orders for Vietnam came
Speaker 5: down and to Field Special Forces Group and I went
Speaker 5: there and yeah, on discovered there was something about special
Speaker 5: lots that I really didn't know about.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the things you talk about, which is something
Speaker 2: they used to do but they don't aymore, was the
Speaker 2: quick kill course. You know, they used to use the
Speaker 2: Daisy rifle for sort of the point shooting. Can you
Speaker 2: tell us about that? Because that I don't know. That
Speaker 2: school went away. They don't do it anymore, but it
Speaker 2: was a very valuable school, right.
Speaker 5: Yes, uh, you know they told us, you know, we're
Speaker 5: going to go out and do some training to do
Speaker 5: about two weeks of focusing on on something that was
Speaker 5: called quick cool. So we we went out to the
Speaker 5: training site, you know, myself and a group of other
Speaker 5: young SF guys, and you know, the instructor came out
Speaker 5: and he had a BB gun TB rifle and he
Speaker 5: threw a about a three or four inch aluminum disc
Speaker 5: up in the air and he just shot from his
Speaker 5: waist with the BB gun and hit it. He said,
Speaker 5: you know, you're going to start with a disc like that,
Speaker 5: and then we're going to go down to this size,
Speaker 5: then this size, and he kept getting smaller and smaller,
Speaker 5: and he's he's hitting him out of the air every time. Uh,
Speaker 5: you know, without aiming hitting that's pretty cool. So we
Speaker 5: all got our BB guns and started shooting at the disc.
Speaker 4: Then they changed.
Speaker 5: This over with two by fours that had a little
Speaker 5: three inch silhouettes on it, and you know, you would
Speaker 5: shoot at the little silhouettes like that, and we got
Speaker 5: good at that. And then we changed over to M
Speaker 5: sixteen and we'd actually go through a go down a
Speaker 5: trail on the range, that target would pop up and
Speaker 5: you would use a quick kill. Sometimes people now still
Speaker 5: talk about it as point shooting. It's you know, you're
Speaker 5: not coming all the way up here, you're shooting from
Speaker 5: down at the waist or chest level at the most.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's very fast.
Speaker 5: If you're within twenty twenty five meters of a target,
Speaker 5: you're not going to miss it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it didn't take you long at all.
Speaker 5: And I mean I still put on demonstrations now with
Speaker 5: you swat teams law enforcement. I still go back to
Speaker 5: Bragg and Campbell, the special obscurus, and as home, I
Speaker 5: can still hit from there. In fact, if you're carrying
Speaker 5: at downport like most people do, with the stock leaning
Speaker 5: up there, I said, I'll hit you three times before
Speaker 5: you can even start to move your weapon up. Yeah,
Speaker 5: too slow the way you're carrying your weapon. You pick
Speaker 5: a door open and go in a room and there's
Speaker 5: a guy they are already polling a weapon.
Speaker 3: Eight.
Speaker 4: You can die.
Speaker 5: You know, he will get you if you're not ready
Speaker 5: to pull the trigger and hit the target.
Speaker 2: How hard, I'm sorry. How hard was it to transition
Speaker 2: from BB gun to the M sixteen.
Speaker 5: It really wasn't hard in terms of hitting the target.
Speaker 5: I mean we had shot the six I mean, we'd
Speaker 5: done work with the M sixteen, just we hadn't tried
Speaker 5: to do the quick kill and you know, and to
Speaker 5: jump way ahead. One of the things that happens with
Speaker 5: it all the services is with your marksmanship training. You know,
Speaker 5: whether it's a pistol or rifle, you spend all kinds
Speaker 5: of time on side alignment, getting the right site picture
Speaker 5: and all of that. And that's great until your target
Speaker 5: starts shooting back at you, and then your stress level
Speaker 5: of skyrockets. And when it does, one of the changes
Speaker 5: that happens is your vision changes. You can't see the
Speaker 5: sites anymore. So you're you're looking trying to aim, but
Speaker 5: the sites are just blurred because your your vision changes,
Speaker 5: So you can't really focus on anything until it's out
Speaker 5: beyond where your weapon is, you know. But with the
Speaker 5: point shooting, you don't have to worry about that, Yeah,
Speaker 5: because your point, you know, you're not using a site
Speaker 5: picture like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you get assigned a third group, you're prep for Africa.
Speaker 2: You're disappointed because you want to go to Vietnam. You
Speaker 2: go to ranger school, you get back and you find
Speaker 2: out that you are going to Vietnam.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: What when you get to Vietnam? What was your first impression.
Speaker 4: I had?
Speaker 5: I had grown up in a world here in the US,
Speaker 5: and we have laws and rules and rules of engagement
Speaker 5: and things that you can do. And you know, I
Speaker 5: get on a plane and twenty and twenty five hours later,
Speaker 5: I step off the plane in Vietnam, and as soon
Speaker 5: as I exit the plane, the smell hits me.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is.
Speaker 5: I mean, the smell is just very different. And I
Speaker 5: rollize I'm in a different world. Yeah, a very different world.
Speaker 5: All the noise, the chaos, vehicles running around, planes landing,
Speaker 5: taking off. And I also noticed that the people, the Vietnamese,
Speaker 5: were people where I could actually see the tops of
Speaker 5: their heads. You know, I'm not very tall. I don't
Speaker 5: see the top of somebody's head very often talking to them. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but I could see theirs, and I thought, well, this
Speaker 5: is pretty cool. You know, I am at least as
Speaker 5: tall or taller than they are. A lot of activity
Speaker 5: going on, just a real adjustment. And the pilot had
Speaker 5: told us as we were getting close to landing, and
Speaker 5: he said, this is this is what's going to happen.
Speaker 5: I don't want to scare you, but when we get
Speaker 5: close to the airfil I'm going to put us into
Speaker 5: a nose dive and we're going to dive down toward
Speaker 5: the air airfield. I'm going to pull us out at
Speaker 5: the last minute, flare out, will land, and when we
Speaker 5: hit the ground, don't unfasten your seatbelt because I'm going
Speaker 5: to taxi really fast around to the area where we're
Speaker 5: going to unload. You need to be fastened until we
Speaker 5: get there. And then when we say go, we want
Speaker 5: you to get up and you guys move out the
Speaker 5: front exit doors because the guys who are leaving are
Speaker 5: going to be coming in through the rear doors. So
Speaker 5: you're going out the front. They're coming in the rear
Speaker 5: because we're not going to be on the ground but
Speaker 5: just a few minutes, because we are a prime target
Speaker 5: when we were setting there for rockets and mortars to
Speaker 5: come in on us. So just the landing and take
Speaker 5: offs were really different than what I was used to.
Speaker 2: So you get there and you get some really solid advice, right,
Speaker 2: somebody tells you they give you good advice.
Speaker 3: And what was that advice?
Speaker 5: A friend of mine, I had left for Vietnam about
Speaker 5: a month before I did, so he had been near
Speaker 5: He's already a signil mic force, but he got word
Speaker 5: that I was coming and he linked up with me.
Speaker 5: We went to a bar and you know, he was
Speaker 5: telling me all about what's going on and how things
Speaker 5: work there, and he said, you know, tomorrow you have
Speaker 5: to go in and filled out all kinds of paperwork
Speaker 5: and forms and things like that, and at the end
Speaker 5: of the day they're going to take you into a
Speaker 5: room and they're going to ask you if you want
Speaker 5: to volunteer for sock. And he said, whatever you do,
Speaker 5: do not volunteer for sock. I don't even know what
Speaker 5: it is. Why would I not volunteer? He said, if
Speaker 5: you volunteer, you're going to die. Just hear what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: You're going to die.
Speaker 5: If you don't die, you're going to get the crap
Speaker 5: shot out of you and you're going to go back
Speaker 5: to the States as a nutcase.
Speaker 4: That's what they find your body. Do not volunteer for salt.
Speaker 5: Yeah, any we hung out there for a while and
Speaker 5: he said, I'll see you back here.
Speaker 4: It's more.
Speaker 5: And so when I came walking in, he looked at
Speaker 5: me and he said, you.
Speaker 4: Did it, didn't you. I can't tell what I look
Speaker 4: on your face.
Speaker 3: You did it.
Speaker 4: I mean, you are a dead man walking.
Speaker 2: So when you when you go into that room, how
Speaker 2: do they pitch?
Speaker 3: How did they pitch you like, what was their big uh?
Speaker 2: Did they show you like a motivational video with guys
Speaker 2: coming out of the water.
Speaker 4: Now I'm I'm twenty one years old.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And you know, back at that time, we used to
Speaker 5: think that the front part of your brain, the preformal
Speaker 5: cortex up here, that its primary function in life was
Speaker 5: to hold your cranium up so that the front of
Speaker 5: your head didn't cave in. We found out later that
Speaker 5: this is really where risk assessment, decision making, all of
Speaker 5: those kinds of things take place. This is where the
Speaker 5: CEO of your brain lives. So when he looked at
Speaker 5: my folder and he's flipping to it, and he said,
Speaker 5: you know, you've volunteered to join the Army. You volunteered
Speaker 5: for Airborne School, you volunteered for you know, Special Forces,
Speaker 5: you volunteered for Ranger, you volunteered to go to Vietnam.
Speaker 5: I'm about to give you an opportunity to volunteer for
Speaker 5: the most important thing you will ever volunteer for. I said,
Speaker 5: you're about to ask me if I want to volunteer
Speaker 5: for SOG. He said, yes, said I like what I
Speaker 5: see here with you. You're perfect for this job. And
Speaker 5: I said, what do they do?
Speaker 3: And he said, I.
Speaker 4: Can't tell you.
Speaker 5: The only way you can find out what they do
Speaker 5: is you have to go there. But I can tell
Speaker 5: you this that if you volunteer for SOG, you're volunteering
Speaker 5: to go anywhere, anytime, do anything, and not talk about
Speaker 5: it for twenty years. I'm twenty one years old. My
Speaker 5: prefunnel cortex has not developed yet. I mean he might
Speaker 5: as well be holding up a recruiting poster. Go anywhere,
Speaker 5: do anything, and not tell anybody for twenty I can
Speaker 5: do that. I don't know what it is you want
Speaker 5: me to do, but I think I can handle that.
Speaker 5: I volunteered for it.
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Speaker 3: Now, can you give us, you know, a rundown on?
Speaker 2: You know all these guys were coming from SF or
Speaker 2: they're all SF, they're all Special Forces. Why is the
Speaker 2: studies an observation group. Why is that different than the
Speaker 2: guys in the A camps and and things like that,
Speaker 2: like what's different?
Speaker 3: What do they do or what did they do?
Speaker 4: Yeah, one big difference is big difference is that.
Speaker 5: Our targets in our area of operation, they were in
Speaker 5: different countries.
Speaker 4: I mean, for the.
Speaker 5: Most part, Vietnam. South Vietnam was just a training site
Speaker 5: for US. We could go out and rehearse missions. We
Speaker 5: could go get some you know, Vietcong and North Vietnamese
Speaker 5: soldiers to come out and train with us and shoot
Speaker 5: at us, you know, so we could get used to
Speaker 5: being shot at and we could shoot some people. But
Speaker 5: when when you went across the border you went Sterle,
Speaker 5: first of all, nothing said us. No dog tags, no
Speaker 5: ID card, nothing that said that you were from from
Speaker 5: the US. It provided plausible deniability for the President since
Speaker 5: he was on TV on a regular basis saying we're
Speaker 5: not in any other countries, We're just in South Vietnam.
Speaker 5: But all of our SAG missions where Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam,
Speaker 5: the DMZ, Thailand, places like that where we were not
Speaker 5: supposed to be. So if we were caught, then we
Speaker 5: could be executed on the spot.
Speaker 4: As a spy.
Speaker 5: We were not covered by the Geneva Convention, you know,
Speaker 5: so it was different for us. And then the number
Speaker 5: of enemy that you would be engaged with was pretty
Speaker 5: much insane. I mean, when they tell you, I want
Speaker 5: you to take six guys and go out and find
Speaker 5: this battalion of North Vietnamese and attacker. Okay, they should
Speaker 5: be easy to find. That's a lot of people. I'm
Speaker 5: not sure how to get away from them, but I
Speaker 5: thought it'd be pretty cool to learn.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so you you get assigned to RT Alabama right
Speaker 2: and Fubai.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: So when I you went to d NAG first, and
Speaker 5: that's where you found out what SAG was found out.
Speaker 4: Everything was top secret.
Speaker 5: You couldn't say anything after you walked out of that room.
Speaker 5: And when they were there were three camps like the
Speaker 5: one that d NAG and then there were some smaller ones.
Speaker 5: You got a code name so that you know you
Speaker 5: if you were captured, you could kind of prove or
Speaker 5: let the US know it was you and where you
Speaker 5: And then you know, I was sent up to Fubai,
Speaker 5: uh that had some of the teams up there. I
Speaker 5: put a closer uh uh to the Lallish and border
Speaker 5: in North Vietnam. So they were about five or six
Speaker 5: of us that went up there at the same time,
Speaker 5: and everybody's name was called off by the sergeant major
Speaker 5: except mine, and they were told that they were going
Speaker 5: to go to a two week course to teach them
Speaker 5: how to be team leaders and sold And.
Speaker 4: So I said, you know what about me?
Speaker 5: You didn't call my name and he said, hey, your
Speaker 5: Ranger Special Forces. You got all this extra training, I'm
Speaker 5: putting you to work. You're going to be assigned to
Speaker 5: a team tomorrow, uh, and we're going to get you
Speaker 5: out doing your thing. I thought, well, that's cool. Get
Speaker 5: started pretty fast.
Speaker 3: And so you get to your team And what was
Speaker 3: that like when you first got there?
Speaker 5: When I got were to your team? Well, on a
Speaker 5: SOG team, it doesn't matter what your rank is. So
Speaker 5: I came into the team as an officer, and you know,
Speaker 5: I was the only officer on the team. But I
Speaker 5: had to go out with the team uh several times
Speaker 5: and prove you know, my ability to lead in combat
Speaker 5: and work with the SOG teams and learn all the
Speaker 5: little special techniques that they use before I could have
Speaker 5: my own teams. I went out as a second in
Speaker 5: command with a with an E seven, and you know,
Speaker 5: he was teaching me, you know, some of the things
Speaker 5: about being a leadership of being a leader. He was
Speaker 5: also evaluating me and vetting me to be able to
Speaker 5: be a leader. So with Alabama, I went out you know,
Speaker 5: four times with them. Yeah, then I was clear to
Speaker 5: be a leader.
Speaker 2: So you know, you're you have this kind of like
Speaker 2: SAGA had a wide range of operations and like your
Speaker 2: first mission was wire tapping, right, So so do they
Speaker 2: like do they have courses for you guys back at
Speaker 2: the camp, Like how do you you know if you're
Speaker 2: doing a pipeline hit or wire tapping or a rendition
Speaker 2: or you know, a snatch and grab, Like, how do
Speaker 2: you know, learn these these different skills.
Speaker 5: For the most part from operators who have done it
Speaker 5: before and know it. And sometimes if it's something really special,
Speaker 5: they may be bringing in a CIA GA or somebody
Speaker 5: else who has the expertise. But the RT Alabama and
Speaker 5: then while the wire taps before, so they knew how
Speaker 5: to do it, and I learned, you know, as we
Speaker 5: went out and did it. It's not that complex once
Speaker 5: you see how it's done. The execution, you know, actually
Speaker 5: getting it done without getting caught is the issue. And
Speaker 5: you know, in that particular case, first mission, we went
Speaker 5: out and we were also testing is it better to
Speaker 5: go in at last light just before it gets dark,
Speaker 5: so once you get on to the helicopters and get
Speaker 5: into the jungle, that.
Speaker 4: Be very difficult to track you.
Speaker 5: Or do you go in first light so you have
Speaker 5: daylight to try to, you know, get some space between
Speaker 5: you and where you go in. But we're going in
Speaker 5: at last light, and we're gonna go down until a
Speaker 5: bomb crater. They dropped a very large bomb and blew
Speaker 5: a hole into jungle canopy, just barely big enough for
Speaker 5: the helicopter to set down in. So we're approaching it
Speaker 5: and you know, the skids are almost dragging on the
Speaker 5: top of the canopy. The team leaders over on one
Speaker 5: side with a couple of people. They're standing on the
Speaker 5: skid of the helicopter there. I'm on the other side
Speaker 5: with another American and a couple of indig and we're
Speaker 5: standing out and we're just barely moving. And I was thinking,
Speaker 5: if the NBA is down there, he could take a
Speaker 5: rock and knock me off the skid. I mean, we're
Speaker 5: wide open and we're just barely moving. So we get
Speaker 5: to them to the hole in the canopy, and the
Speaker 5: helicopter starts to settle down in toward the crater, and
Speaker 5: we get about we're probably still six feet from the
Speaker 5: ground and he can't get any lower. And I'm wearing
Speaker 5: seventy five maybe eighty pounds of gear and thinking if
Speaker 5: when I jump off the skid and go down six
Speaker 5: feet and hit, I'm probably going to break both legs.
Speaker 4: But you know that's what sog people do. So I
Speaker 4: get ready.
Speaker 5: I bent my knees to jump in, and just as
Speaker 5: I got ready to jump, I saw some movement on
Speaker 5: my right. About ten fifteen feet away was a NVA
Speaker 5: soldier with AK forty seven pointed up at me, and
Speaker 5: I thought, well, man, So instead of jumping into the crater,
Speaker 5: I jumped back up on the edge of the floor
Speaker 5: of the helicopter. Just as he pulled the trigger, stream
Speaker 5: around came by. They missed me because I had jumped back,
Speaker 5: but they hit the American next to me, took his
Speaker 5: legs out from under him, so I grabbed him by
Speaker 5: the back of the harness as he was falling I
Speaker 5: managed to pull him up, and you know, I took
Speaker 5: my right hand and hose down the guy that had
Speaker 5: just shot at us. I'll put about a half a
Speaker 5: magazine into him, got the other guy up.
Speaker 4: Blood's going everywhere.
Speaker 5: Now everybody's shooting, and the whole bomb crater comes alive
Speaker 5: because they had an ambush set up around it. So
Speaker 5: there's a tracers criss crossing inside the cargo compartment, somehow
Speaker 5: missing us. And you know, I was just amazed that
Speaker 5: that many bullets could come be coming and not be
Speaker 5: getting hit. I went ahead and emptied the rest of
Speaker 5: the magazine into a tree in front of me where
Speaker 5: I could see muscle flashers and saw a guy fall out.
Speaker 5: But when I reached to get another magazine to reload,
Speaker 5: I had you know, my hand was just covered in
Speaker 5: blood and that made it slick. The magazines were really
Speaker 5: packed tight into the the.
Speaker 4: Canteen cover that I was using.
Speaker 5: I couldn't get the magazine out, And eventually I did
Speaker 5: get it out, but then my fine muscle control had
Speaker 5: deteriorated so much from the stress.
Speaker 4: I couldn't get it in the magazine.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, bullets are coming at me and I'm
Speaker 5: trying to get the magazine in. Finally got it in
Speaker 5: so I could start returning fire. After I got the
Speaker 5: first one out of the pals and I could get
Speaker 5: the others without any problem. But you know, I had
Speaker 5: just never experienced that level of fear. I had tried
Speaker 5: to imagine, you know, what it would be like to
Speaker 5: have a bunch of people shooting at you, and you
Speaker 5: know they're they're fifteen twenty meters away at most. Yeah,
Speaker 5: nothing but air between me and them, and you know it's.
Speaker 4: Coming at us.
Speaker 5: You can hear hear the rounds hitting in the helicopter,
Speaker 5: and you know, the the door gunners right next to me.
Speaker 5: He's got the sixty going. Two of my little guys
Speaker 5: are behind me, one on each side of my head.
Speaker 5: With the car fifteen firing on automatic. I can feel,
Speaker 5: you know, the powder burns hitting my face. You know,
Speaker 5: it's all that's going on. I'm trying to shoot.
Speaker 4: And it was.
Speaker 5: Probably lasted two or three minutes. It seemed like, you know, all.
Speaker 3: Day, but.
Speaker 4: Because stuff was hitting everywhere.
Speaker 5: Anyway, we got it out of that and eventually we've
Speaker 5: got back. And on the way back, I looked over
Speaker 5: at the team leader sitting on the other side of
Speaker 5: the helicopter and he looked around at me, and when
Speaker 5: he saw me, I mean, he grinned like a horse
Speaker 5: eat and saw bryar and started giving me the thumbs up,
Speaker 5: and I thought he thought that was cool.
Speaker 4: Really in George, what we just did.
Speaker 5: I don't know if I'm going to get to that
Speaker 5: point or not based on how I felt back there,
Speaker 5: but he's pretty excited about this. Then when we got
Speaker 5: back and we got off the helicopter and he came
Speaker 5: over to me and he said, I'm going to tell
Speaker 5: you something, lutt If you don't learn to change magazines
Speaker 5: baster when people are shooting at.
Speaker 4: You, you're going to die. And I said copy that.
Speaker 5: I was pretty fast, but I didn't realize the impact
Speaker 5: of someone shooting at me how much slower it.
Speaker 3: Was going to be. Yeah, I will start practicing.
Speaker 5: So one of the things I tried to do with
Speaker 5: the books is I wanted to show the reader this
Speaker 5: is what I saw. You're looking through my eyes. You're
Speaker 5: figuring my fear, You're seeing what I'm seeing. You see
Speaker 5: the mistakes that I make, You see the changes that
Speaker 5: I start making Across time, as I learned more and
Speaker 5: more how I'm changing the tactics that I'm using with
Speaker 5: the team, teaching them how to do things differently. And
Speaker 5: you can see a big change as you go across
Speaker 5: those two books in terms of how I led teams
Speaker 5: and how we fall.
Speaker 2: For people who are familiar with SOG and I've watched
Speaker 2: our shows or other shows, you probably know why there
Speaker 2: was an ambush set up. But for people who don't know,
Speaker 2: SG was top secret for everybody except for the North Vietnamese, who,
Speaker 2: due to the political climate in Vietnam, the South fields
Speaker 2: had to be informed of everything that you guys did,
Speaker 2: and that basically was sent up to the North Vietnamese,
Speaker 2: so there was always, you know, at least a company
Speaker 2: of not a battalion waiting.
Speaker 3: For you guys. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I see a lot of people practicing jiu jitsu, and
Speaker 5: the way people do that is that you and I
Speaker 5: are going going to have a match, So we get
Speaker 5: down on the floor. I get my best hole around you,
Speaker 5: you get your best hold on me, and then they
Speaker 5: say go and you know, then we start rolling around
Speaker 5: fighting when I was trying to beat the other. And
Speaker 5: that's that's like a SOG mission. You get a whole bunch,
Speaker 5: you know, five hundred thousand, uh, and you put him
Speaker 5: out there in the jungle. Then you take this little
Speaker 5: six or eight man SOG team and you set them
Speaker 5: right in the middle of them. And once they're in there,
Speaker 5: and then somebody says go. So now you've got to
Speaker 5: try to, you know, accomplish the mission that you went
Speaker 5: there for.
Speaker 4: And then you have to try to get out.
Speaker 5: And the most difficult thing of the whole process is
Speaker 5: getting out because now they all know where you are. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and you know, I used to liking it too. It's
Speaker 5: like kicking the top off of an ant hill. They
Speaker 5: just swarm out of the ant hill. Once they find
Speaker 5: out where you are, they just swarm on you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know you talked about how this book was through
Speaker 2: your eyes and the opening, the opening of the book
Speaker 2: has a really.
Speaker 3: Intense scene with you grappling with North. Do you want
Speaker 3: to tell us that story?
Speaker 4: The on on one of the missions, And I'm going to.
Speaker 5: Go ahead and add a lot, add a little bit
Speaker 5: more to what's in the front. The helicopter I was
Speaker 5: in was shot down, so we crashed on the l Z.
Speaker 5: They broke my back, practured my spine, some vertebrae, some
Speaker 5: ribs and.
Speaker 4: Things like that.
Speaker 5: You know, when we crashed, one of my guys had
Speaker 5: gotten shot through the thigh as the helicopter was coming
Speaker 5: down anyway, where the three of us were all thrown out.
Speaker 4: My interpreter was with me.
Speaker 5: We were thrown out onto the ground and all three
Speaker 5: knocked out. When I came to, I wasn't sure if
Speaker 5: I was dead or alive. But as I my hearing
Speaker 5: started to come back, I could hear the rounds cracking
Speaker 5: bines and digging up the ground. So I figured I
Speaker 5: must be alive because they're trying to kill me. So
Speaker 5: I started moving, and because there was a small bomb
Speaker 5: crater there, I started moving toward that. And then my
Speaker 5: guy that was shot in the leg, he couldn't go anywhere,
Speaker 5: so I had to go back and I had to
Speaker 5: get him, drag him to the bomb crater, thank his
Speaker 5: rucksack hall push him into the crater. I had to
Speaker 5: go back and get my interpreter, drag him to the
Speaker 5: bomb crater, push him in, and you know, there's steadily
Speaker 5: just coming after us and shooting. But the three of
Speaker 5: us got in the bomb crater and then uh what
Speaker 5: we call the cubby writer. The guy's in the plane
Speaker 5: up above us, he called the helicopter was sitting there
Speaker 5: kind of leaning sideways. The blade was almost hitting the
Speaker 5: ground when it would turn. The wheels were flattened down.
Speaker 5: But he talked to the pilot and told him he
Speaker 5: wanted him and the co pilot to get out and
Speaker 5: let me get him in the bomb crater. The pilot said, no, uh,
Speaker 5: we fix and and this is a very famous Vietnamese
Speaker 5: you know, saw the helicopter pilot. I mean he was
Speaker 5: shot down four times. I think this was the third
Speaker 5: time he was shot down. But the king he used
Speaker 5: to get out. So uh so we had we were
Speaker 5: in the bomb crater, and they're coming across this little
Speaker 5: grassy area trying to get us or get close enough
Speaker 5: to throw a hand garnade, and we're stacking them up
Speaker 5: like cord you know, like cord wood, all around the
Speaker 5: bomb crater.
Speaker 4: And I don't know.
Speaker 5: At one point, the idea popped into my head that
Speaker 5: what I should do is crawl out there and the
Speaker 5: grass with them, because they're all through the grass trying
Speaker 5: to get to us. I should just go out there
Speaker 5: with him and snatch one of them up and drag
Speaker 5: him back into the bomb crater, and again my prefhone
Speaker 5: quartex wasn't working very well. It sounded like a good idea.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've just got a broken back, it's not
Speaker 5: a big deal. But I crawled out there and I
Speaker 5: could hear one crawling kind of toward me. I reached out,
Speaker 5: I grabbed him by the shoulder, scared him half to death.
Speaker 5: But he had an AK, so he tries to shoot me.
Speaker 5: I got his ak, and then he got the muzzle
Speaker 5: of my car fifteen and we're fighting and rolling around.
Speaker 5: I eventually shot him in the shoulder, but he was
Speaker 5: overpowering me.
Speaker 4: I just didn't have any strength left.
Speaker 5: And then for some reason, he turned loose the barrel
Speaker 5: of my car fifteen and just hit me as hard
Speaker 5: as he could.
Speaker 4: Right in the nose.
Speaker 5: Just flattened my nose out, blood went everywhere. My ball
Speaker 5: was spinning around. But when he turned loose to the
Speaker 5: car fifteen, that gave me a second or so to
Speaker 5: reorient it. And then he realized. I could see the
Speaker 5: look in his eyes that he knew he was dead
Speaker 5: because the muzzle of the car fifteen was maybe six
Speaker 5: inches away from his cheek and he just closed his
Speaker 5: eyes because he knew it was over, and I put
Speaker 5: a five or six round burst into his head and
Speaker 5: it just exploded. So I went went back to the
Speaker 5: bomb crater, decided I tried to get a prisoner a
Speaker 5: different day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's so well.
Speaker 2: And then how do they you know, you have multiple
Speaker 2: wounded around it, how do they extract you guys?
Speaker 4: Well, eventually.
Speaker 5: Using tactical air support and got the fire suppressed enough
Speaker 5: that they came in and dropped ropes from the helicopter
Speaker 5: that we fastened on, and they pulled us out. Captain
Speaker 5: on in the helicopter, we were sitting on a pretty
Speaker 5: steep ridge. He got up enough rotor speed to pick
Speaker 5: it up about a foot or so off the ground
Speaker 5: and just went over the side of the ridge and
Speaker 5: right on down to the bottom of the ridge and
Speaker 5: hit down there, and another aircraft came in and picked
Speaker 5: him and his co pilowed up down there. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it was We came out a lot of times hanging
Speaker 5: on ropes.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Those those Vietnamese pilots for something, weren't they.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean they were they were fearless and
Speaker 4: they were good.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were flying the you know, h thirty four helicopters,
Speaker 5: the big, big fat ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're very powerful.
Speaker 2: Now, when you got to RT Alabama, you also were
Speaker 2: put on a hatchet for us.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they assigned me so I had the double assignment there.
Speaker 5: They assigned me to you know, a hatchet platoon. So
Speaker 5: I had fifty guys and you know, so I was
Speaker 5: the platoon leader.
Speaker 4: For the Hatchet Force.
Speaker 5: But it ended up the only thing I did with
Speaker 5: him was trained. I never got to take them on
Speaker 5: a mission because they kept kept me so busy with
Speaker 5: the teams going out. So Alabama kept kept me busy,
Speaker 5: and then they shut food By down and sent teams
Speaker 5: all over.
Speaker 4: I was sent down to Danang.
Speaker 5: To c CN and that's where I picked up RT Michigan.
Speaker 3: What what what was the mission of the Hatchet Force.
Speaker 4: It was to have.
Speaker 5: It's kind of kind of like a Ranger force, kinetic,
Speaker 5: you know, hard hitting impact to go in and you know,
Speaker 5: really you know, kick some booty with.
Speaker 4: The with the enemy.
Speaker 5: I mean you you had patams, but you had companies too,
Speaker 5: so you could put a whole company in there.
Speaker 4: And that was a lot of firepower.
Speaker 2: So so they shut down Subai, so you had to
Speaker 2: fop forward RT Michigan And then, uh, can you tell
Speaker 2: us about a couple of the ops there. Some of
Speaker 2: them were, I mean all of them, I'm sure are
Speaker 2: standouts and they're in the book, but can some of
Speaker 2: the couple that stand.
Speaker 5: Out in your memory? Yeah. When I when I first
Speaker 5: got there, the previous team leader one zero had been
Speaker 5: wounded badly and so he was he was, you know,
Speaker 5: meta BacT So I took over as a as the
Speaker 5: team leader. And there was one other American there, specialist
Speaker 5: fourth class, by the name of Bargewell, and.
Speaker 4: He was a sharp guy.
Speaker 5: I thought, Wow, I mean this this kid is really sharp.
Speaker 5: And I'm saying kid, you know, I was three months
Speaker 5: older than him. But anyway, he had been with the
Speaker 5: team for a while, a lot of combat experience, really good.
Speaker 5: He and I got along really well.
Speaker 4: We had.
Speaker 5: Had a mission to go in and actually port a
Speaker 5: hatchet force that was being put on the ground. We
Speaker 5: were going to be on the other side of the
Speaker 5: highway to make sure no one came from that side
Speaker 5: and attack the hatchet force. But we were going to
Speaker 5: do it in a unique way. The one hundred and
Speaker 5: first had a company right on the border.
Speaker 4: With Loos Oh.
Speaker 5: The plan was we were going to fly in with
Speaker 5: the resupplies for the one hundred first for that company.
Speaker 5: Drafts like one hundred and first guys get off the
Speaker 5: helicopter that way, and then the next morning we would
Speaker 5: go down with the water team down to the river.
Speaker 4: To bring water back.
Speaker 5: Except when we got there, all of our clothes and
Speaker 5: things is going duffel bags. They would bring our clothes back,
Speaker 5: we would move off across the river, go into loos
Speaker 5: Were over to where we needed to be. So that
Speaker 5: was a fairly unique way at that point to do
Speaker 5: an insertion. We also had artillery support. Only time I
Speaker 5: had artillery support because one hundred first was close to
Speaker 5: the water, they could reach us. So I planned all
Speaker 5: these artillery targets and things out there, and we went
Speaker 5: in eventually made some contact.
Speaker 4: And got in some big battles.
Speaker 5: And that's when I I realized that if you stop
Speaker 5: when they when they're coming after you, if you stop,
Speaker 5: what they tend to do.
Speaker 4: The NBA.
Speaker 5: What they tend to do is they're just like an
Speaker 5: amiba and your dinner, and they just kind of move
Speaker 5: out and us enveloped. You all around you. Now you're
Speaker 5: you're in the center and they just come in and
Speaker 5: get you. So because they were chasing us, we got
Speaker 5: into a rocky area and I thought, this is a
Speaker 5: this is an area not only has some concealment, but
Speaker 5: it has cover. And we stopped and they just salted
Speaker 5: and salted. Eventually we were we were pulled out by
Speaker 5: you know, ropes. I sent barswell and the other American
Speaker 5: that was with us and a couple of team members
Speaker 5: they went out, sent them out first. I stayed with
Speaker 5: uh the other three team members that we had, and
Speaker 5: we came out last. Both of them were wounded coming out.
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 4: I was hit in the back with.
Speaker 5: It in the the radio, and I was also hit
Speaker 5: with a big piece of shrapnel.
Speaker 3: That hit.
Speaker 4: My survival radio.
Speaker 5: I know, if you're listening to this on the podcast,
Speaker 5: you can't see it, but the survival radio was mounted
Speaker 5: right here my pocket, right over my heart. So huge
Speaker 5: piece of strapnel buried itself into the radio that stopped
Speaker 5: it from bearing itself into my heart.
Speaker 4: Got out and all of a sudden, we're.
Speaker 5: Hanging at seven thousand feet on the end of a rope,
Speaker 5: flying at one hundred plus miles an hour, freezing to death,
Speaker 5: you know, because we're soaking wet from all the sweat
Speaker 5: and now we're seven thousand feet up and you know,
Speaker 5: it's cold.
Speaker 4: And my ropes rubbing back and.
Speaker 5: Forth on the edge of the floor of the helicopter
Speaker 5: and I can see it starting to pray, and my
Speaker 5: radio is dead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, radio is dead. I can't radio the pilot and
Speaker 4: say it.
Speaker 5: I a said if we could sit down somewhere pretty
Speaker 5: soon because my rope's about gone.
Speaker 4: But we made it back anyway.
Speaker 3: So this is a very nerdy question, but I have
Speaker 3: to ask.
Speaker 2: You're part of this, you know, uh covert unit doing
Speaker 2: things that our country denies.
Speaker 3: You go to a conventional.
Speaker 2: Outpost where the hundred and first is how do you
Speaker 2: coordinate fires with them and tell they're already people. Hey,
Speaker 2: you can't ask who we are, but we might call
Speaker 2: you and we want you to fire into laus.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you have the same You have the same
Speaker 5: issue with the helicopter crews. Okay, the pilots get briefed
Speaker 5: on the mission. They know they're going to cross the river.
Speaker 5: But the crew, you know, the gunner crew to you
Speaker 5: from the gunner that know. But you can see the
Speaker 5: expression on their face when they see that river coming
Speaker 5: up and they're still flying toward it, and you know,
Speaker 5: and and they're looking down and thinking, oh, geez, we
Speaker 5: just crossed into Laos or Cambodie or wherever it is.
Speaker 5: And then then they get all their briefings. They can't
Speaker 5: say anything about it. But with the artillery, you know,
Speaker 5: they they're they're there, and I'm briefing them and saying,
Speaker 5: I'm plotting these targets on the other side of the river,
Speaker 5: but you won't be able to talk about this.
Speaker 4: I used them.
Speaker 5: And then when we had to get pulled out, you know,
Speaker 5: I sent Bar aswell, and and you know, the other
Speaker 5: half of the team out first, and they flew back
Speaker 5: to the fire support base. So those guys are out
Speaker 5: there seeing this helicopter come from way over on the
Speaker 5: other side of the border flying right toward them, right and.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 5: So they got pretty excited and they all came out
Speaker 5: to see what was going on. And then my helicopter's coming,
Speaker 5: you know, with myself and two of my guys hanging
Speaker 5: under it, and we're flying to it. So they knew
Speaker 5: now there's somebody else coming from over there too.
Speaker 4: And they set us down.
Speaker 5: The medics did a quick fix on my two guys
Speaker 5: and put us in a helicopter, and we were just
Speaker 5: getting ready to lift off. I sawid guy running towards
Speaker 5: the helicopter. This guy's hand went up in the air
Speaker 5: and he's got something in his hand, and we're lifting
Speaker 5: off the ground. Just as he gets Timmy, you know,
Speaker 5: reached down and I took what he had in his hand,
Speaker 5: and then I realized it was a picture. Polaroid had
Speaker 5: just come out with this small version of the Polaroid camera,
Speaker 5: and this guy bought one just before he came to Vietnam.
Speaker 5: He saw the first helicopter come in, and he ran
Speaker 5: ran back to his bunker and he got his camera
Speaker 5: and came back out. So he was ready when mine
Speaker 5: came in. So I got the actual picture that he
Speaker 5: took of coming in hanging under the helicopter.
Speaker 4: There no clue he was.
Speaker 2: Picture handy, by the by any chance, I'm sorry, do
Speaker 2: you have that picture handy?
Speaker 3: Is it still?
Speaker 5: It's it's in the book, Oh is it? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Uh? I don't remember.
Speaker 2: That's okay, hey, no, it gives people one more reason
Speaker 2: to uh to buy the book.
Speaker 4: I mean, the book is loaded with pictures.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I know you're going to ask me that
Speaker 5: same question if these were all classified, how did you
Speaker 5: get those pictures?
Speaker 2: Well, oh, I wasn't going to ask that. There are
Speaker 2: always pictures on classified missions these days.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm just gonna look right here for just a second.
Speaker 5: I might be able to give you a page number.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just curious how the talk.
Speaker 7: Goes on page I'm just curious how the discussion goes
Speaker 7: with like the base commander and the fire support officer saying, hey,
Speaker 7: we want you to turn your guns around.
Speaker 2: Uh, and and we're like, we're we're authorizing you to
Speaker 2: fire and a louse if we call you.
Speaker 5: I wasn't privileged to what they were told time. I
Speaker 5: know the company commander kind of freaked out when I
Speaker 5: told him what we were going.
Speaker 4: To do the next morning.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the fire support lieutenant that he had there freaked
Speaker 5: out when you said, you're you're plotting targets on the
Speaker 5: other side of the river, on the other side of
Speaker 5: the order.
Speaker 4: I said, you're right, because.
Speaker 5: When when I need you to fire on those targets,
Speaker 5: I need you to have already computed everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I.
Speaker 5: You know, you know, fire target Monday, you know, write
Speaker 5: two hundred, drop three hundred. I need grounds coming in
Speaker 5: on the target right then because we're in big trouble.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, they just they just thought, wow, this is
Speaker 5: we've never seen anybody at all these targets and name
Speaker 5: them like days of the week so they all make sense,
Speaker 5: and line them up ahead of time.
Speaker 4: I mean that's what rangers did, you know.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, I did that all the time, you know,
Speaker 5: when the training and stuff. So and used them once
Speaker 5: we got out there because it could come in quick
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: We talked about sort of the expanse of operations that
Speaker 2: actually start did and like and then you know, like
Speaker 2: you had your wire taps or search and destroy all
Speaker 2: this son. Even though this was Alabama, all this son
Speaker 2: was a very interesting project, right.
Speaker 3: You want to talk.
Speaker 5: About one of the one of the psyops kinds of
Speaker 5: things that we did Black ops is we would go
Speaker 5: into North Vietnamese ammunition cache is and add some additional
Speaker 5: ammunition to it. So we would we would go in
Speaker 5: and put uh, you know the seven six two rounds
Speaker 5: for the aks, we'd put to you know, fifty one
Speaker 5: calibers for the machine guns. We'd put Watar rounds, but
Speaker 5: these rounds would explode. So in a you know, if
Speaker 5: we might put out a Maga AK magazine, we have
Speaker 5: contact and we run, and we leave an AK forty
Speaker 5: seven magazine lay in there, fully loaded. But one of
Speaker 5: those rounds when it gets to it, and the guy
Speaker 5: shoots the whole weapon and his head's going to go away.
Speaker 5: So if I see that happen to you, now I'm
Speaker 5: afraid to fire my weapon, right, And they would only
Speaker 5: be one in there. So even if you find what's
Speaker 5: left of the magazine and start pulling the bullets out
Speaker 5: and checking them, the rest of the bullets are all fine, Right,
Speaker 5: it's just one that exploded. Yeah, but that has a.
Speaker 4: Big impact on whether or not you want to pull
Speaker 4: the trigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we were told that. Well, I mean Jack
Speaker 2: has some first ten experience with that. But we're told
Speaker 2: that they rebooted that for the Global War on Terror
Speaker 2: only since it's a kinder, gentler military, or that they
Speaker 2: only fused the weapons, didn't you.
Speaker 8: Yeah there, I mean there were also programs like in
Speaker 8: Afghanistan where the tag, track and locate stuff became like
Speaker 8: a really big deal.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the ammunition wasn't designed to explode anymore, but
Speaker 2: just to fuse the barrel because we didn't want to
Speaker 2: hurt the enemy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And you know, if you think even more recently with
Speaker 5: with what what happened, you know with the Israelis and
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, cell phones are exploding, pagers, pagers exploding,
Speaker 5: it's the same kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: You rig it.
Speaker 5: So man, nobody wants to touch one of those pages
Speaker 5: after they explode. Set Now they were afraid of cell phones.
Speaker 5: They don't want to touch a cellphone. And you know
Speaker 5: they planned and and put those things out there way
Speaker 5: in advance and when you know they were going to
Speaker 5: use them. But it has a major psychological impact on
Speaker 5: something like that blows your buddy's head on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then you had like uh, prisoner war snatches.
Speaker 5: We'd go in prisoner snatches and statch up a prisoner
Speaker 5: to bring out, so you had those, you had the
Speaker 5: ambushes we have. We'd go watch like the whole ho
Speaker 5: Chi Minh trail, uh set up where we could observe that.
Speaker 5: And when the trucks would start down the trail, you know,
Speaker 5: we could call the L four's to come in and
Speaker 5: bomb them. So we do those kinds of missions. Sometimes
Speaker 5: it was a raid. We'd go in and rate a
Speaker 5: particular place. I went into a training site on the
Speaker 5: mission and we crawled up on top on top of
Speaker 5: the mountain and hall it in because they're not gonna chance.
Speaker 4: It's putting that stuff, so holting that stuff.
Speaker 5: So they were teaching them, you know, how to come
Speaker 5: after us, how to find us.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When when when you guys, would you like ep w
Speaker 2: r uh like snatches? Were those justly targeted for a
Speaker 2: specific personality or was it just hey, go get somebody
Speaker 2: the highest ranked person you can find.
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 5: Sometimes it was, you know, to get a high ranking person.
Speaker 5: Most of the time it just get somebody, get somebody, so.
Speaker 9: You know what.
Speaker 4: In fact, one of the one of the missions with.
Speaker 5: Michigan, I set up an ambush, uh, and I I used.
Speaker 4: C four right in the middle of it.
Speaker 5: So we had to claymores and interlocking fire and everything
Speaker 5: everywhere except for this one hole where maybe two people
Speaker 5: could be in and what they would get is just
Speaker 5: a concussion coming from the C four to stun them.
Speaker 5: We kill everybody else and then jump out on the
Speaker 5: trail and grab those two guys up handcuff them, bag them,
Speaker 5: you know, and drag them off. But you know, they
Speaker 5: psychologically they had been told, you know that if Americans
Speaker 5: catch you, they're going to mutilate you. They're going to
Speaker 5: kill you, but they're going to mutilate you first and
Speaker 5: torture you and do all this stuff. And they were
Speaker 5: so afraid of being caught they killed themselves sometimes or
Speaker 5: their buddies would kill them, Like the one mission there
Speaker 5: with with Michigan. I mean, we had a guy that
Speaker 5: he's he's bagged, hands handcuffed behind him, and he got
Speaker 5: loose in the helicopter twenty six hundred feet he went
Speaker 5: head first out of the helicopter and when last scene,
Speaker 5: you know, he's traveling about one hundred and eighty miles
Speaker 5: headfirst into the jungle. Yeah, so he'd go out of
Speaker 5: the helicopter, killed himself rather than let us take him
Speaker 5: back yeah where you know, you wouldn't have been torture
Speaker 5: or anything. Yeah, but based on what he'd been told
Speaker 5: was he was not going back.
Speaker 2: With So you know, you cover about not I don't know,
Speaker 2: eight nine missions, and I don't want to talk about
Speaker 2: all of them because people should buy this book, they
Speaker 2: should read the book. And then what's the second book
Speaker 2: called which you said is more intense.
Speaker 3: It's this book too, okay, book two.
Speaker 2: So the book is a SOG code named Dynamite Link
Speaker 2: is going to be in the description below, but buy
Speaker 2: it at your favorite bookseller. It's a fantastic, fantastic like book.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's very, very detailed. But you know, you
Speaker 2: I'm sure was one of the highlights of your career,
Speaker 2: but you also you had a very stellar career. Is
Speaker 2: there anything from SOG that you want to talk about
Speaker 2: that we missed, because I'd like to talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about your career after that too.
Speaker 5: I would just say that, I mean, at the time,
Speaker 5: SAG was that was the tier one, most elite, you know,
Speaker 5: organization out there, and sometimes people read about those missions.
Speaker 5: Hear about the missions now and they just say, you
Speaker 5: can't do that. In fact, my father in law watched
Speaker 5: the podcast that I was along with Jocko Willick, and
Speaker 5: he watched it and when he's.
Speaker 4: A iPad, he's very sharp World War two guy.
Speaker 5: And my wife said, well, so what do you think
Speaker 5: and he said, he didn't do that. If you'd done
Speaker 5: all that stuff, he'd be dead. There's no way he
Speaker 5: did that. And you know when you read those stories
Speaker 5: and you hear what the hot guys did, that's the
Speaker 5: typical reaction is you can't do that. Yeah, And I
Speaker 5: have people tell me you couldn't carry that much weight.
Speaker 4: Well we did. I used to carry.
Speaker 5: Fifty magazine fifty twenty round magazines. And I had somebody
Speaker 5: just recently say there's no way you couldn't carry that
Speaker 5: much weight and ammunition, much less all the other stuff
Speaker 5: you put with it, said, well we do.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, there was nobody coming to bring you a resupply.
Speaker 5: You had to survive. And in one of the missions
Speaker 5: and books, who there? I mean it we were in contact,
Speaker 5: was helping like twenty twenty one hours, twenty two hours
Speaker 5: before we got out. And you've got to have a
Speaker 5: lot of ammunition, and in a lot of cases you
Speaker 5: end up having to go out and take AK forty
Speaker 5: seven's off of dead bodies and use their weapons and
Speaker 5: ammunition against them because you've already used up all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, for kind of the nerds out there who
Speaker 2: want to know this kind of stuff, what was your
Speaker 2: standard like weapon load out? And I'm sure it depended
Speaker 2: on the operation, But you guys were carrying cars, did
Speaker 2: everybody carry a car generally, I mean, do you guys
Speaker 2: have shotguns?
Speaker 3: Were there any like?
Speaker 5: For the for the most part, well in the beginning
Speaker 5: of SOG because you couldn't have anything it said US.
Speaker 5: Usually it was a stun, a stand gun or sweetish
Speaker 5: kad you know, was a non American weapon. And you know,
Speaker 5: by the by the mid sixties, in the late sixties,
Speaker 5: US weapons were so ubiquitous all over that part of
Speaker 5: the world. You know, to have a weapon that had
Speaker 5: US stamped on it somewhere, it wasn't that big of
Speaker 5: a deal. So I started carrying car fifteens, you know,
Speaker 5: so they were relatively short. They have the sliding stock
Speaker 5: and you know, twenty round magazines to start with. But
Speaker 5: you know, the Northfield to me, he's had thirty round magazines.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's a big difference. When you engage another
Speaker 5: another group and they've got ten more rounds in their
Speaker 5: magazines than you do, right, I mean, very quickly, you know,
Speaker 5: they can gain fire superiority of you because you've got
Speaker 5: to change out magazines at some point.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: So with my team, once I I took over Michigan,
Speaker 5: pretty much the standard load out for fragmentation grenades was
Speaker 5: was five per person. She carried those in a canteen
Speaker 5: pouch or maybe a couple hanging on you. So five
Speaker 5: fragmentation grenades. I changed it to ten. So if I
Speaker 5: took a seven man team out, we had a total
Speaker 5: of seventy frag grenades.
Speaker 4: You know, but you can go through.
Speaker 5: Seventy frag grenades fairly quickly when there's that many people
Speaker 5: coming after you. Most most teams carried thirty five magazines.
Speaker 4: I carried fifty. And one reason for that is.
Speaker 5: I don't like to get shot at, so if you
Speaker 5: shoot at me, I'm going to shoot back, right, you know.
Speaker 5: So I probably shot a little more than the average
Speaker 5: team leader. Plus you know, it gave me some rounds
Speaker 5: I could. I could distribute some magazines if I needed to,
Speaker 5: if the other guys had run out. So we had
Speaker 5: you had that, you'd have a knife of some type.
Speaker 5: I usually carried my kebar. And again if you listen
Speaker 5: to the audio, you don't see what I had. This
Speaker 5: is my actual original k bar that I carried on missions.
Speaker 5: And there are places in there where you will where
Speaker 5: I talk about using this and how I used it,
Speaker 5: and this is the one actually one I was I'm
Speaker 5: talking about in the book. So you had a knife
Speaker 5: you and most people carrid a pistol or some type.
Speaker 5: I got to the point where I carried a high
Speaker 5: standard twenty two long rifle pistol with an integrated silencer
Speaker 5: so I could take out dogs, out trackers and people
Speaker 5: without making too much noise.
Speaker 4: But my load bearing equipment, you know.
Speaker 5: Averaged about thirty five pounds plus my rucksack because I
Speaker 5: also carried the radio because I wanted to be able
Speaker 5: to talk. You know, my rucksack was like seventy pounds
Speaker 5: or more.
Speaker 3: How much water were you taken in there? Because I
Speaker 3: mean some of those.
Speaker 5: Visions usually we started out with if it was a rainy,
Speaker 5: rainy season season, you didn't have to take as much, but.
Speaker 4: Average was like four quarts. Wow, the water you know
Speaker 4: on your load beering gear, you.
Speaker 5: Know, compass map, the survival radio I talked about. I mean,
Speaker 5: this thing's almost five pounds. Yeah, just the radio. Well
Speaker 5: the water alone, isn't it. What is two and a
Speaker 5: half five pounds per quart? I can't er down something
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it adds up very quickly. The book Geer.
Speaker 5: In book one, there's a table in there where I've
Speaker 5: got listed. I broke gear down into the three levels.
Speaker 5: You know, your survival level that you had to lance resort,
Speaker 5: I've got to have this, and then the tactical level,
Speaker 5: mostly your ammunition and stuff like that, and then you
Speaker 5: mission stuff in the rucksack where you might have.
Speaker 4: The wire tap or.
Speaker 5: Long range camera lenses or you know, special equipment if
Speaker 5: you're going to blow something up, you have a lot
Speaker 5: of extra C four and stuff. But I had it
Speaker 5: so I could drop your rucksack. I could still fight
Speaker 5: if I lost my load bearing gear. I could still
Speaker 5: survive because I had a knife, I had extra I
Speaker 5: have a banditlier around my waist of the magazines that
Speaker 5: would still go with me if I dropped everything out
Speaker 5: Compass it was all me, so map was all in
Speaker 5: my pocket. So I had these different levels and it's
Speaker 5: all broken out in there. And it also talks about
Speaker 5: I might say way yes to give you some idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now, I.
Speaker 2: You know, you had this twenty one year career, and
Speaker 2: I want to ask you. You know you're in this
Speaker 2: very secret program that's you know, people are in secret
Speaker 2: programs now, but you know, because of social media, because
Speaker 2: things like that, people are more aware of what's out
Speaker 2: there these days that you have this career, do they
Speaker 2: give you a cover story of Like, people obviously know
Speaker 2: you're in Vietnam, and you're up until nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: so you're there when a lot of people there are
Speaker 2: very few I assume Vietnam vets left in the military
Speaker 2: near the end of your career. What like when people say,
Speaker 2: what did you do in Vietnam? What can you say?
Speaker 5: Well, I when I when I left SAG and I
Speaker 5: came back to the States, I went to I'm excuse me,
Speaker 5: I went to the Rangers.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: So I had forty other instructors that I was with
Speaker 5: that all had combat experience, that's all been Vietnam, and
Speaker 5: that helped us support each other. But when they would
Speaker 5: ask me, you know, I was I went to Vietnam
Speaker 5: and I was in the.
Speaker 4: Special Forces Group, you know, Okay, I had.
Speaker 5: An SF combat patch on, and I just I was
Speaker 5: in Special Forces. And yeah, we did a lot of raids,
Speaker 5: ambushes and different things. But you couldn't mention the word soog.
Speaker 5: You couldn't say we did those things over in other countries.
Speaker 5: And you know, after a while, people were just you know,
Speaker 5: stop asking you things like that they just see a
Speaker 5: combat patch and assume you know, you were just in
Speaker 5: a self group.
Speaker 2: Now did did the army ever like tell you, okay,
Speaker 2: this is officially declassified and give you an official like
Speaker 2: read off and roll back or did you just kind
Speaker 2: of have to figure it out when you could actually
Speaker 2: start talking.
Speaker 4: About it mostly kind of figure it out?
Speaker 5: I mean I had to sign a non disclosure agreement,
Speaker 5: you know when when I volunteered or SAG I had.
Speaker 5: I had to sign a volunteer statement that I was
Speaker 5: volunteering to go anywhere do anything for six months or
Speaker 5: six missions, whichever came first, and then I had to
Speaker 5: sign a separate agreement, a non disclosure agreement that I
Speaker 5: wouldn't say anything about SOG, anything about going into other
Speaker 5: countries or you know, anything with SOG for twenty years.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So you know, once SOG shut down, it was twenty
Speaker 5: years before you're supposed to be able to say anything
Speaker 5: about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, like you said, after you leave Vietnam, you
Speaker 2: go to Ranger School to Jolanaga, right, And what was
Speaker 2: that like for you?
Speaker 3: And I'm sure Ranger School was very different back then
Speaker 3: than it is now.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Back then, we only had to feed you one
Speaker 5: meal a day. Yeah, and that's if when you were
Speaker 5: out on patrol, if whoever the patrol leader was when
Speaker 5: we requested recent lie, if he remembered to request food.
Speaker 5: So if he got carried away on ammunition and smoke
Speaker 5: and all that kind of stuff and forgot to ask
Speaker 5: for food, there wouldn't be any food, even the resupply.
Speaker 4: That day or when the.
Speaker 5: Team went down to pick up the supplies from the
Speaker 5: friendly partisan, if they forgot to ask for the food,
Speaker 5: because it would always be separate from the ammunition, you know,
Speaker 5: so they would very quickly hand you all this ammunition
Speaker 5: to carry back to the to the patrol. But if
Speaker 5: you didn't ask for food, they didn't take oh it's
Speaker 5: over here, so you would go back to the patrol
Speaker 5: and with no food, so you didn't get anything to
Speaker 5: eat that day.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine that their pure evaluations were that good.
Speaker 2: But it was also like you know, now it's it's
Speaker 2: a leadership school, it's under trade OC, but back then
Speaker 2: it was still very like combat focused, right.
Speaker 5: Very preparing combat and the leadership. But one of the
Speaker 5: things back then, you know, they wanted you to be
Speaker 5: an E five or or hire you know, to come.
Speaker 5: They wanted you to have a certain amount of time
Speaker 5: in the military before you came to Rangers School. They
Speaker 5: wanted you they wanted you basically to show up there
Speaker 5: and demonstrate that you could do all this stuff and
Speaker 5: that you could tough it out and make it through everything.
Speaker 4: And then.
Speaker 5: They started backing away on you know, at least when
Speaker 5: you were not out in the woods on patrol, they
Speaker 5: had to give you three meals a day, couldn't drop
Speaker 5: you for more than fifty push ups at the time,
Speaker 5: It couldn't make you low crawl from the classroom down
Speaker 5: to the mess hall, down the asphalt as a company.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are a lot of you know, things
Speaker 5: like that that were just hardship things that they started
Speaker 5: taking out.
Speaker 4: And you know, it was still still tough to go out.
Speaker 5: There for that long sure, And now now you go
Speaker 5: you actually go through a pre ranger course before you
Speaker 5: go to Ranger School, and if you're in the seventy fifth,
Speaker 5: you know, you you have to go through the selection
Speaker 5: thing to get into the seventy fifth and then once
Speaker 5: you're in, you you know, have an opportunity to volunteer
Speaker 5: to go to a Ranger school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and back then also one of the things you
Speaker 2: mentioned was that all the instructors had to be combat that.
Speaker 4: Right, everybody was a combat vet.
Speaker 5: And you know when when I was when I went
Speaker 5: up there, and actually the Delanaga is now is now
Speaker 5: the fifth Ranger Battalion, right right, So when I went
Speaker 5: up the here, I created and stood up the Halo Team, trained,
Speaker 5: the Halo team, led the Halo Team. I did demonstrations
Speaker 5: all around you know Halo. I actually started the parachute
Speaker 5: club at the North Georgia what was then North Georgia
Speaker 5: Military College that's there in Delanaga, started their parachute club
Speaker 5: back up train the students, threw them out in a way,
Speaker 5: I put in, you know, Halo missions into the not
Speaker 5: the training that the students got to do, but that
Speaker 5: they would be out and get a message. They had
Speaker 5: to pick up a pilot that had been shot down,
Speaker 5: and I would parachute in. They'd see my parachute coming down,
Speaker 5: they'd have to come find me.
Speaker 4: So we did a lot of things like that.
Speaker 5: We worked on tactical use of Halo and more advanced
Speaker 5: tactical procedures and techniques like we used in Saga just
Speaker 5: didn't say that's where it came from. We actually went
Speaker 5: out and set up desert training train the eighty second
Speaker 5: and some other units in desert warfare before they made
Speaker 5: their first trip to the Middle East.
Speaker 4: We set up I wrote a lot of the.
Speaker 5: Training and things for the desert phase of ranger school.
Speaker 5: So for a period of time there was a fourth
Speaker 5: phase of ranger training that was actually in the desert,
Speaker 5: and it was desert training, and they eventually took that out, but.
Speaker 4: That was in there for a while.
Speaker 5: So I did a lot of things there in addition
Speaker 5: to just you know, train the rangers.
Speaker 3: And then when you left, when you left there, you
Speaker 3: went to.
Speaker 2: The second idea in Korea, and they didn't have a
Speaker 2: ranger company there at the time, so that was kind
Speaker 2: of your initiative.
Speaker 4: Kicked that off, right, I had.
Speaker 5: I talked to General Emerson, the second Division Commander, before
Speaker 5: I went in route to Korea. I went through the
Speaker 5: Inmstry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning, and so when
Speaker 5: I got the orders going to Korea, I sent him
Speaker 5: a letter and said, you know, here's my background, this
Speaker 5: is what I want to do. When I get there.
Speaker 5: I can give you a ranger company of your own
Speaker 5: that you can use, that can do anything that a
Speaker 5: ranger company can do. He was Special Forces. He got
Speaker 5: all excited about it, so gave me a company. When
Speaker 5: I first got there, I started training them everything from
Speaker 5: being picked up on ropes, you know, helicopter assaults, things
Speaker 5: like that. And also, you know, we became the quick
Speaker 5: reaction force for the nuclear sites. Any any threat developed
Speaker 5: around the nuclear site we were. There were periods of
Speaker 5: time when we were on a thirty minute alert to
Speaker 5: launch and go there.
Speaker 4: But when I first went down to.
Speaker 5: Where our launch site was, when I saw the foot
Speaker 5: lockers that had the live AMMO story in it, I
Speaker 5: told my first arts and I said, you know, I
Speaker 5: don't feel good about our ammunition at all. I'm looking
Speaker 5: at those foot lockers. It looks to me like based
Speaker 5: on those steel bands that are around them and how
Speaker 5: rusty they are, no one's looked at those magazines in
Speaker 5: there in a long time. You know, get get some cutters,
Speaker 5: open one up and the court martials. You're going to
Speaker 5: get court martial if you open one of those lights.
Speaker 5: You can't get get the cutters. Yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 5: open these. I'll open one. We'll see what that one
Speaker 5: looks like, and based on that, we'll decide about the others.
Speaker 5: The magazines were so corroded. I mean you could barely
Speaker 5: get the rounds out of the magazines with like a
Speaker 5: screwdriver and prime out.
Speaker 4: I mean we couldn't. Nobody's weapon would have powered.
Speaker 5: I mean we'd have been standing near, you know, with
Speaker 5: the blades turning waiting on us, you know, on the helicopters,
Speaker 5: with no ammunition to go.
Speaker 4: So anyway, I got that.
Speaker 5: Resolved, and then, uh, you know, based on my training,
Speaker 5: it was you got to rehearse, you got to practice.
Speaker 5: So really go out and make an assault into you know,
Speaker 5: one of the sights and see how that goes. It
Speaker 5: didn't go well at all because when we got to
Speaker 5: the landing zone, it was trees. For twenty years, they
Speaker 5: hadn't done anything till the landings off. Trees had grown
Speaker 5: up and so we couldn't land and all the sites
Speaker 5: so like that so.
Speaker 4: Created pretty big mess. I mean, it wasn't my fault.
Speaker 5: I just happened to be the one that said I
Speaker 5: want to test this stuff out.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I had a good time in Korea.
Speaker 5: It was I mean there were all kinds of competitions.
Speaker 4: There are something that.
Speaker 5: The division commander had put together called Combat Football Ferocious Game,
Speaker 5: and my company won it both times.
Speaker 4: While we were there.
Speaker 5: We won the division championship, we won the taekwondo you
Speaker 5: know championship, we won the Infantry platoons and stuff championships.
Speaker 5: So we were selected to put on the demonstration when
Speaker 5: the President came over, we put on the Ranger capabilities demonstration,
Speaker 5: you know, for him that you know, it was pretty
Speaker 5: impressive and he really liked so we did a lot
Speaker 5: of things. I had a great time with it, and
Speaker 5: then I came from there back to Fort Bragg and
Speaker 5: ended up in G three and eventually withou the Emergency
Speaker 5: Rette and its department team where we would test out
Speaker 5: the Ranger battalions and the Special Forces battalions. We would
Speaker 5: go in and to them at one o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 5: hand them a set of orders. You are now activated,
Speaker 5: you know, two hours of wheels up. We'll give you
Speaker 5: the briefing on you know, on the plane, is what
Speaker 5: your mission is, where you're going, and then evaluate their
Speaker 5: capability to actually do it.
Speaker 3: And how was that for you?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: I love it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean because I was back, you know, and
Speaker 5: the way I felt I was back when my my people, right, rangers,
Speaker 5: those are my people. Yeah, I got a chance to
Speaker 5: be willing to go out on these All of these
Speaker 5: things were classified, you know, when they were going to happen,
Speaker 5: where it was going to take place, and and what
Speaker 5: happened when you got there and that we went to
Speaker 5: some cool places and you know, and I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2: And then in seventy nine you, uh wait, am I
Speaker 2: getting ahead here? You you you became a teacher and
Speaker 2: assistant professor, right and and uh r o TC no.
Speaker 4: Well sort of yes, Okay.
Speaker 5: My assignments officer called while I was at BRAG and said,
Speaker 5: how would you like to you go to degree completion
Speaker 5: to complete a master's degree? Said, well, that sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 5: So as I thought about that, I decided, if I
Speaker 5: was going to go to school and work on a master's.
Speaker 4: Why not just get a doctorate?
Speaker 5: If I could find the right school that would give
Speaker 5: me credit for residency time while I was working on
Speaker 5: the masters And it was a school that had an
Speaker 5: ROTC department that I could you know, when I finished
Speaker 5: the master's degree, i'd be assigned to the ROALTC department.
Speaker 5: That would give me enough time to finish the doctorate?
Speaker 3: What was it?
Speaker 5: So I did that at the University of Georgia. Oh,
Speaker 5: I got the master's degree, started working for the ROALTC department,
Speaker 5: finished my doctorate, you know, while I was there, and
Speaker 5: started working on some special op step what happens if
Speaker 5: you have to go for a long period of time
Speaker 5: without sleep.
Speaker 4: So that then they sent me to.
Speaker 5: The Commanding General Staff College out at Leavenworth, and from
Speaker 5: there they assigned me to the Airline Battle two thousand team,
Speaker 5: which was figuring out how we're going to fight war
Speaker 5: in the twenty first century. So I had done a
Speaker 5: lot of research on sleep and high performing leadership, so
Speaker 5: they put me on that and eventually I started going
Speaker 5: around briefing the NATO countries on this is how we're
Speaker 5: going to do special ops in twenty first century and
Speaker 5: so that you know, that was fun.
Speaker 2: Can can I ask you what was it like? Because
Speaker 2: this is seventy nine, so the I'm assuming like morale
Speaker 2: is getting a little bit better post Vietnam, but it's
Speaker 2: still not super high.
Speaker 3: So what is it like being part of an r
Speaker 3: OTC at that time?
Speaker 5: At that time particularly University of Georgia. I mean it
Speaker 5: was it was fine. Yeah, people people liked the military there.
Speaker 5: The I mean Georgia was a land grant college. So
Speaker 5: I mean, at one point in its history, if you
Speaker 5: if you were a male and you went to Georgia,
Speaker 5: you had to be in ROTC. The first two years,
Speaker 5: oh interesting, but that went away, you know a number
Speaker 5: of years back. But so it was volunteer you could join,
Speaker 5: had a strong, strong program. We had a ranger company
Speaker 5: within the program there, and I was the advisor trainer
Speaker 5: for the ranger company, and you know, we got along
Speaker 5: well with people on campus, with the exception of the
Speaker 5: Air Force r lt C. I had a little friction there.
Speaker 5: I had to be careful because my guys would get
Speaker 5: so fired up they'd want to go over and steal
Speaker 5: their little airplanes and things and you know, create an issue.
Speaker 4: But uh, that was that was good.
Speaker 5: And then you know, I went to Leavenworth and worked
Speaker 5: out there, and then eventually I got a call from
Speaker 5: an assignments officer again and said, how would you like
Speaker 5: to go back to Georgia and be you know, we
Speaker 5: called we call these RLTC departments battalions now, so you
Speaker 5: would go back there and be the battalion commander. And
Speaker 5: I said, you know why why, I mean, why do
Speaker 5: you offer me this? I said, well, it's always been
Speaker 5: an six position, but the Army's changed it to now
Speaker 5: it's an O five position. And Georgia says they're not
Speaker 5: going to accept.
Speaker 4: An O five.
Speaker 5: And every O five's name that we sent down there
Speaker 5: gets rejected for some reason. And then we remembered you, uh,
Speaker 5: you already been there once for an assignment. You got
Speaker 5: a master's and a pH d from their university. You
Speaker 5: meet all the education you know requirements, the experience requirements.
Speaker 4: They can't say no to you. I said, try it
Speaker 4: and see. So they took me and I ended up
Speaker 4: having that as my uh, you know, final assignment in
Speaker 4: the military.
Speaker 2: That's great, I mean it's kind of a nice way
Speaker 2: to ease out, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then post military, like what did you do twenty
Speaker 2: one years? And then you're out and then go fishing
Speaker 2: or like what did you do after that?
Speaker 5: Well, I'd always thought the training and things that we
Speaker 5: did in the military were pretty cool. Before I got out,
Speaker 5: I started using some leave and going to some civilian
Speaker 5: corporate type organizations and saying, you know, let me come
Speaker 5: in and do some leadership training, team building, whatever. And
Speaker 5: you know, so I was doing a little bit of
Speaker 5: that before I actually got out, and the you know,
Speaker 5: the civilians loved it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I started a company, my Performing Systems, where it was
Speaker 5: executive leadership and strategic planning and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: Team building, and in the nineties, outdoor training was big.
Speaker 5: You know, you take a corporate group out into the
Speaker 5: woods and you have them move across ropes, bridges and stuff,
Speaker 5: and the treetops, you have them rerepeled off a cliff whatever.
Speaker 5: I mean, what better job could I have given my background.
Speaker 5: So they would take them out and but we would
Speaker 5: they would have that kind of training.
Speaker 4: But then I would.
Speaker 5: Pick obstacles, design obstacles that mirrored some problem they were
Speaker 5: having with their team, and so they'd have to take
Speaker 5: them out. They'd have to engage you know, that obstacle.
Speaker 5: And at some point somebody would say, you know, we're
Speaker 5: doing the same thing, the same issues that we have
Speaker 5: every day at work, and we just we we overcame
Speaker 5: it here and we got through this obstacle. Why can't
Speaker 5: we do that at work? So then you know, I
Speaker 5: work with them all, Okay, this is how you do that.
Speaker 5: And in the process of doing all that, we would
Speaker 5: be putting their strategic plan together or building their executive
Speaker 5: team or you know, things like that. And they loved it.
Speaker 5: But you know, by the time, you know, the two
Speaker 5: thousands came along, everybody said, you know, been there, done that,
Speaker 5: got the T shirt? What else you got? I don't
Speaker 5: want to, you know, jump off a cliff or whatever,
Speaker 5: but right, you know, then more of my work became
Speaker 5: focused around stress, decision making under stress. So working with
Speaker 5: law enforcement, working with continuing to work with you know,
Speaker 5: special ops, working with nuclear facilities. It's very stressful in
Speaker 5: the control room and those guys in there need to
Speaker 5: need training and doing a lot more with vets because
Speaker 5: vets need some help. You know, you need somebody you
Speaker 5: can talk to, uh that that knows what you're talking about,
Speaker 5: you because I vets tell me all the time. You
Speaker 5: know what, I'm there in the VA. I go talk
Speaker 5: to doctor whatever his or her name is, And when
Speaker 5: I'm trying to explain to them what I'm experiencing, I
Speaker 5: can see it's going right over their head. They no
Speaker 5: clue what I'm talking about. They've read some stuff in
Speaker 5: a book. They've never experienced it, so they don't know
Speaker 5: what I'm talking about. So, you know, I do a
Speaker 5: lot of counseling and stuff with vets, do different programs
Speaker 5: for them. So it's been a big part of our
Speaker 5: organization over the years too.
Speaker 2: You know, one of the things that's really been highlighted
Speaker 2: after the Global War on Terror is you know, veteran issues,
Speaker 2: post traumatic stress, things like that. After Vietnam, there was
Speaker 2: this big public scare about post traumatic stress, right the
Speaker 2: movie that you know, made for TV movies about a
Speaker 2: VET like having flashbacks and killing people in the office,
Speaker 2: stuff like that. What kind of like resources were there.
Speaker 3: Resources for you guys back then? How were guys dealing
Speaker 3: with it?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, obviously it's become a lot more
Speaker 2: acceptable to talk about now, things like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was difficult. I mean if you wanted to
Speaker 5: end your career, you know, get diagnosed as I am
Speaker 5: in PTSD, huh, particularly if you want to be in
Speaker 5: special ops. I mean special ops. I mean you have
Speaker 5: to be physically feel across the board. So like hearing,
Speaker 5: for example, if you have significant hearing loss, and back
Speaker 5: in those days, we didn't have the headsets. You didn't
Speaker 5: have anything except hair, so trying to maintain you know,
Speaker 5: excellent hearing it was very difficult because car fifteens are
Speaker 5: very loud, frag grenades are very loud, explosions, all that
Speaker 5: kind of stuff. But if you were diagnosed with hearing loss,
Speaker 5: you couldn't be in Halo anymore, you couldn't jump, you
Speaker 5: couldn't be special lots. So there were all kinds of
Speaker 5: things like that is not even PTSD. You know, I
Speaker 5: used to pull shrapnel out if I could get it out.
Speaker 5: I didn't say anything about it, and a lot of
Speaker 5: people did that because you don't you don't want to
Speaker 5: have to go and not be special ops anymore. And
Speaker 5: then we kind of moved to a phase where we've
Speaker 5: talked about PTSD, but it was still you know, once
Speaker 5: it got on your record, you know, regardless of what
Speaker 5: they were telling you, you were kind of at the
Speaker 5: end of the road. They trying to do a better
Speaker 5: job now, But I don't think the people who are
Speaker 5: working with the military quite understand we all have a limit.
Speaker 5: And I mentioned to you earlier that when you signed
Speaker 5: up for a SOOG, you signed a statement that said
Speaker 5: six missions or six months whichever comes first. So there
Speaker 5: was a recognition that these things are going to be
Speaker 5: very stressful. But in reality, you could go out on
Speaker 5: the first mission and come back and say, I can't
Speaker 5: do that anymore. I had no clue that's what I
Speaker 5: was going to be like. And you could get off
Speaker 5: the team and get on a get another job within
Speaker 5: SOG where you are not an operator anymore, and still
Speaker 5: you know, can continue to work. You just went going
Speaker 5: outside the wire and doing things or across the border.
Speaker 5: So you know, I do, like I said, do things
Speaker 5: with groups of vets. I created an assessment that I
Speaker 5: call the Arsenal seven Best Backed Practices of Stress Resilience.
Speaker 5: And nowhere, nowhere in that questionnaire does it ask you
Speaker 5: have you cons that are arming yourself in the last
Speaker 5: two weeks? Have you considered arming someone else in the
Speaker 5: last two weeks? I mean, if you go to VA
Speaker 5: and you take a question here, it's going to ask
Speaker 5: you that you know what Arsenal goes through. And you
Speaker 5: never see that kind of question in there, but it
Speaker 5: can still give you an indication of where you are,
Speaker 5: give you a snapshot of this is where you are
Speaker 5: right now, and here's a list of things you need
Speaker 5: to go do that's specific to you based on how
Speaker 5: you answered the questions.
Speaker 4: And the Navy is using it more and more. I
Speaker 4: just had a Marine group.
Speaker 5: Order a bunch bunch of them this past week and
Speaker 5: it's spreading because they see it's a way to let
Speaker 5: people help themselves and get them help without them restoring
Speaker 5: their career.
Speaker 3: Where can people find that if they're interested.
Speaker 5: In It's on my website, but I can what's your website?
Speaker 2: We'll send Okay, we'll have it. We'll have your website
Speaker 2: in link below. But for the people who are listening,
Speaker 2: do you want to give them your website?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just the h P s y S dot
Speaker 5: com w w W h P s y s dot
Speaker 5: com Hotel Poppy. You'll see the arsenal or how you
Speaker 5: can get to the arsenal. But yeah, we can put fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Before we get to question, is is there anything.
Speaker 2: That we've left out tonight and anything that we didn't
Speaker 2: cover that you feel like we should have.
Speaker 4: I mean, we're getting into some things now that you know.
Speaker 5: I have a lot of passion around I have a
Speaker 5: lot of passion around special ot stuff, but also around uh,
Speaker 5: the operators who you have to go out and do
Speaker 5: that and then live with it afterwards. I mean, it
Speaker 5: sounds cool to go out and do it, but you know,
Speaker 5: you pay a price short more times you go out there.
Speaker 5: You guys, you guys know it. You can only kick
Speaker 5: so many doors down.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: You know, before you uh you get blown away, or
Speaker 5: before you mentally uh you know can't do it or
Speaker 5: or have difficulty going forward.
Speaker 4: But there are ways to approached that.
Speaker 5: There are ways that you and I can work together
Speaker 5: when we're working with uh, with other groups, we put
Speaker 5: a lot of emphasis on buddies. You know, in ranger school,
Speaker 5: you have a ranger buddy, and you and your ranger
Speaker 5: buddy have to take care of these other I watch you,
Speaker 5: you watch me, and I take care of you, and
Speaker 5: you take care of me, and I do the same things.
Speaker 5: Even in corporate America, I put them in buddy teams.
Speaker 5: Every day when you come into work, you check out
Speaker 5: your buddy. And if you're you're having an issue, like
Speaker 5: you stayed up watching the football game last night and
Speaker 5: maybe you drink a lot of beer and you're not
Speaker 5: at the top of your game this morning, you tell
Speaker 5: you what you tell your buddy.
Speaker 4: Keep an eye on.
Speaker 5: You know, there's some decisions and things I have to
Speaker 5: make today kind of you know, watch me if you
Speaker 5: see see me, you know, getting a little whacky or whatever.
Speaker 5: You know, take me on to the side. Let's talk.
Speaker 2: Are there are there things that you would say and
Speaker 2: you know that are basic or common knowledge in the
Speaker 2: military and military leadership that the civilian world just straight
Speaker 2: up misses.
Speaker 5: When when I got out of the army and started
Speaker 5: doing the corporate work, I never said I was in
Speaker 5: the military. Because if you said you were in the
Speaker 5: military and you recently retired, all of a sudden in
Speaker 5: corporate America, that meant you had your Your philosophy of
Speaker 5: leadership was to be a dictator.
Speaker 4: You boss people around, you jerk them around.
Speaker 5: When I tell you to do something, you say, if
Speaker 5: I tell you to jump, you say how high? And
Speaker 5: that was people general view of what the military was
Speaker 5: like and what military leadership was like. So I didn't
Speaker 5: mention military until nine to eleven. Once not eleven happened
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, If you were you were a
Speaker 5: military person, that was great. I think you appreciate your service.
Speaker 5: But but before that, they just had a different philosophy
Speaker 5: and you know later there'd be times when people would
Speaker 5: find out that I'd been in the military, and then
Speaker 5: they'd say, wow, you're just You're not what I expect.
Speaker 5: I'm just surprised that you were in the military because
Speaker 5: your leadership style is so different.
Speaker 2: They probably see full metal jacket and think every day
Speaker 2: is basically like boot camp or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but but are there But would.
Speaker 2: You say that there are things that the military does
Speaker 2: well that civilians, you know, like a civilian organization when
Speaker 2: it comes to like leadership and team building just often does.
Speaker 2: Don't get that, like you're applying very simple principles. Principles
Speaker 2: are very simple to you, that seemed magical to them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think in the military we understand about teams
Speaker 5: and teamwork and working together, particularly as you move you know,
Speaker 5: towards special ops, but not just special ops, in other
Speaker 5: parts of the military too, But understanding we function as
Speaker 5: a team, and we can do things quickly. Just think
Speaker 5: about you know, we in the army, we can pick
Speaker 5: up a brigade sized unit, take them to the other
Speaker 5: side of the world and have them operating, you know,
Speaker 5: within a few days. I mean, it's unbelievable the size
Speaker 5: unit we can move in such a short period of
Speaker 5: time and they hit the ground running, and you talk
Speaker 5: to to a corporate group about moving that much stuff.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just beyond their comprehension.
Speaker 5: We know how the organized, we know how to plan,
Speaker 5: we know how to you know, actually carry things out
Speaker 5: and make them happen. And you know, to be honest,
Speaker 5: one of the things when I'm talking to vets on
Speaker 5: counseling and they say, you know, I know how to
Speaker 5: do army stuff, I said, that's right. And what you
Speaker 5: don't realize is you have this tremendous skill set that
Speaker 5: can happen. Well, I know they don't want me to
Speaker 5: go shooting, but I'm not talking about shooting, right. You
Speaker 5: know how to plan, you know how to organize, you
Speaker 5: know how to execute, you know how to lead, you know.
Speaker 4: How to take care of people.
Speaker 5: All of those things are extremely valuable out in the
Speaker 5: civilian world.
Speaker 4: And you have all of that.
Speaker 5: You just have to take off the od uniform and
Speaker 5: and you know, put on your civilian clothes and go
Speaker 5: do that. It works, and that's that skills that you have,
Speaker 5: and you can go out and get a job and
Speaker 5: you you might have to rephrase you know what the
Speaker 5: skill is that you have, so you know, civilians understand
Speaker 5: what you're talking about. But you know, you didn't waste
Speaker 5: all that time in the military. You learned even from
Speaker 5: the things that were stressful to you. You learned how
Speaker 5: to operate under stress, and you also learn things not
Speaker 5: to do. You learned that you know, if you put
Speaker 5: your hand on a hot stove and it burns, you
Speaker 5: don't have to put your hand back on that stove,
Speaker 5: begin to know that it's going to burn. You know,
Speaker 5: you learn fast from things like that, and that's needed
Speaker 5: out in the in the civilian world, particularly now, because
Speaker 5: most people don't want to work.
Speaker 4: They don't even want to go into work.
Speaker 5: They want you to pay them, but they don't want
Speaker 5: to have to go to the office or wherever it
Speaker 5: is that they're supposed to work. That's a real issue,
Speaker 5: particularly for the younger ones.
Speaker 3: Uh, did you say we have some questions? We do?
Speaker 3: Maybe one moment.
Speaker 6: From Matt Gevin. Thanks for sharing your experiences tonight, sir.
Speaker 6: What was the most selfless heroic act you saw.
Speaker 9: During your time in the army? Thanks, gentlemen, always a
Speaker 9: good time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the most selfless act? Well, I think I think
Speaker 5: there were things, particularly in combat. You see it all
Speaker 5: the time. I mean, you know with the assistant team leader.
Speaker 5: I had Bargewell that I mentioned earlier. What I didn't
Speaker 5: mention at the time was Bargewell was respect for when
Speaker 5: he was started working for me. He retired as a
Speaker 5: two star general. He commanded you know, Delta, every special
Speaker 5: ops thing out there. He commanded before he got out.
Speaker 8: And in just the last interview we did with Dave Grange,
Speaker 8: he talked about Bargewell being a squadron commander in Desert Storm, right.
Speaker 5: I mean, he was awesome, but he was fearless and
Speaker 5: smart and everything, but he was selfle I mean, he
Speaker 5: got a Distinguished Service Cross because he didn't like being
Speaker 5: shot at either. And when a group of NVA fired
Speaker 5: a B forty rocket right into the middle of the
Speaker 5: team after I had left, wounded everybody, big piece of
Speaker 5: shrapman went through the cheek on this side, lodged behind
Speaker 5: his eye, on the other side, an artery inside of
Speaker 5: his nose, and then they assaulted. He stood up with
Speaker 5: an RPD machine gun and took out twenty zero and
Speaker 5: just stood there and just hosed them down as they
Speaker 5: tried to assault and then they tried it again, and
Speaker 5: he took out just about that many again to protect
Speaker 5: his team and got the team out. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: the way he was. If you're my team, I'm not
Speaker 5: leaving you behind. I'm going to take care of you.
Speaker 5: And I mean I could go on and on just
Speaker 5: talking about him and things that he did like that, but.
Speaker 4: Just seeing other people. You know, I had people who.
Speaker 5: Violated an order to come in and try to save
Speaker 5: my team. I mean they were told, don't dare go
Speaker 5: over there, there's too many of them, and they came
Speaker 5: in anyway, got shot down, and two of them.
Speaker 4: Still missing in action.
Speaker 5: I mean, just but there were things like that going
Speaker 5: on all over Vietnam every day where people were just
Speaker 5: you know, putting their life out there on the line
Speaker 5: to say people take care of them. So just amazing
Speaker 5: what people do.
Speaker 6: See anything else, We have a few more from Rick Redo.
Speaker 6: It sounds like Dick was there around the time. My
Speaker 6: father was also in McVie sag. Would you happen to
Speaker 6: remember a tall mustache man named Tyra Dou might have
Speaker 6: gone by Tolby at the time.
Speaker 5: I almost remembered the name, but I'm not sure. One
Speaker 5: of the things that happened in SOG is even if
Speaker 5: you were at the same camp like you were at
Speaker 5: the NAG at CCN, the teams were coming and going
Speaker 5: so much, and there's a lot of compartmentalization going on.
Speaker 5: I don't want to know what your team is doing.
Speaker 5: I don't want you to know mine, because if one
Speaker 5: of us gets captured, we don't want to be able
Speaker 5: to compromise the other team. So there there's thirty thirty
Speaker 5: four people who were killed that were I considered friends
Speaker 5: or teammates that I knew during that twelve months, but
Speaker 5: there were seventy something people actually killed. I just didn't
Speaker 5: know the other I just didn't get a chance to
Speaker 5: see him or be around him much. I might have
Speaker 5: seen him in passing, but I'm sorry, I don't remember
Speaker 5: that particular person.
Speaker 4: But if he was at SOD, my feeling is he's
Speaker 4: an American hero.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just a bit more.
Speaker 6: He added, he was taken from us last last April,
Speaker 6: and he was a wonderful father and man.
Speaker 9: So thanks Rick.
Speaker 3: A couple more.
Speaker 6: Uh, was there any thought at the time that mac
Speaker 6: VISAG would become something bigger or a unit unto itself
Speaker 6: after the war, Any discussions about that. Obviously, no one
Speaker 6: could have foreseen it was a forerunner to Delta and Jaysack,
Speaker 6: et cetera. Just curious if anyone was talking about mac
Speaker 6: visag serving in the theaters besides Vietnam and becoming an
Speaker 6: MS in the army. And that's from Bill Gage.
Speaker 5: They didn't discuss it with me, but I was I
Speaker 5: was a little too low in a total bowl. But
Speaker 5: I wouldn't be surprised if that was discussed. But I
Speaker 5: didn't hear it, and my my focus was just mission,
Speaker 5: go out, do the mission, make sure he came back.
Speaker 5: And but that wouldn't surprise me if at some point
Speaker 5: they were they were talking that way, because you're right they.
Speaker 4: They did did put together, you know, Delta Force.
Speaker 5: When I was at Brag as I mentioned before, when
Speaker 5: I was up there, uh, I had a chance. Dick
Speaker 5: Meadows came he had been my boss and a good friend,
Speaker 5: and he came to me when they wanted me to
Speaker 5: be part of Delta Force. H helped with the selection
Speaker 5: process and be part of the part of Delta. So
Speaker 5: I had an opportunity there. But a lot of the
Speaker 5: you know sad guys ended up over there, and he
Speaker 5: was one of them.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: He also uh contacted me right after I got to
Speaker 5: the lot of the Ranger Department. I told me I
Speaker 5: was getting orders the next day and I'd be gone
Speaker 5: for a while. The orders were canceled because of some
Speaker 5: things that were happening at Fort Benning. And but that
Speaker 5: was I had been chosen to be on the SANTE
Speaker 5: team that didn't get to go because of some flap
Speaker 5: that happened down at Benning, not about me, just because
Speaker 5: there were several of us all of a sudden being
Speaker 5: jerked out with no notice, no reason for why we
Speaker 5: were being pulled out or what we were going to
Speaker 5: go to do.
Speaker 3: So all right, one last one from Corbin.
Speaker 6: Was there any kind of tactical fingerprinting attributed to l
Speaker 6: Z ambushes?
Speaker 4: You could, you could see the change.
Speaker 5: Across time in the knowledge of the NBA.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: They became smart enough fairly soon to recognize that if
Speaker 5: a if a helicopter came out of nowhere and landed
Speaker 5: in a clearing out in Laos or Cambodia or North
Speaker 5: Vietnam and then took off, they probably put a SOG
Speaker 5: team out there. And then they eventually started putting towers
Speaker 5: on mountaintops where they could see a valley and see
Speaker 5: where if a helicopter came and landed, see where it was.
Speaker 5: They started putting people would call trail watchers out in
Speaker 5: different places where they expected that somebody might come in
Speaker 5: to watch. They started doing a lot more efficient work
Speaker 5: with triangulation radio signals to locate where you were to
Speaker 5: be able to come. They started doing a lot better
Speaker 5: job of having spies in the camps and getting that
Speaker 5: kind of information sent out to the field. So they
Speaker 5: became more and more sophisticated, and we were trying to
Speaker 5: become more sophisticated. So we might have three LZ's picked,
Speaker 5: and we would go to the first one and set down,
Speaker 5: and we might or might not get off the helicopter
Speaker 5: that one, and we'd go to the other two, but
Speaker 5: one of those three we'd get off. On things like that,
Speaker 5: just to try to confuse them.
Speaker 2: One of the things you mentioned in your book, and
Speaker 2: you know, like so the Americans were totally in the
Speaker 2: dark about MacFee. But you mentioned like when Matt doc
Speaker 2: Schreiber got killed, that there was an announcement in North
Speaker 2: Vietnam that he had been killed, and it was like
Speaker 2: a celebration, Like, how did it you know, he's he's
Speaker 2: somebody who nobody in America knew who he was obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, how did it feel for you guys to
Speaker 2: know that? Like, they knew who he was and you
Speaker 2: know it was public knowledge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they they knew who most of the one zeros
Speaker 5: the team leaders were, and most of them had most
Speaker 5: of us had a dossier, so they had a lot
Speaker 5: of information. When you get into the book two, I
Speaker 5: don't want to give it away, but there's a place
Speaker 5: in book two that that will give you chills when
Speaker 5: you read it because of what they.
Speaker 4: Knew and.
Speaker 5: Who talked to me, who all me on the radio
Speaker 5: and talk to me? And what they said, Yeah.
Speaker 8: That was that was you Like, I've read that story
Speaker 8: in other books, didn't John tell John? I think John
Speaker 8: Plaster wrote about it in his book.
Speaker 2: John schucker Meyer also mentioned that they would call out
Speaker 2: people's names on the radio at times.
Speaker 5: You know, yeah, they read they read the whole list
Speaker 5: of names. Oh man, Yeah, one name they they should
Speaker 5: not have been able to know and and they knew it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's it's it's crazy.
Speaker 3: It's crazy how.
Speaker 2: Absolutely effective you guys were considering the the the intelligence
Speaker 2: you know, the intelligence leak that they had headquarters. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, the Partner Nation leak. But well, we'll probably
Speaker 2: have to have you back for book two.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, book two. Book two is loaded.
Speaker 5: I got some really powerful stuff, but you need book
Speaker 5: one to set the stage and understand everything so you
Speaker 5: can really see the changes in tactics and techniques and
Speaker 5: things like that. Yeah, a lot more than your own stress.
Speaker 5: And you know, I had started out in chemistry, but
Speaker 5: shortly into SOG I started changing the psychology, trying to
Speaker 5: understand how to lead mercenaries in combat, how to engage
Speaker 5: the North Vietnamese, how do you engage people in general?
Speaker 4: And there's a.
Speaker 5: Section in book two where I talk about the the
Speaker 5: human reaction to combat. They are things that humans do,
Speaker 5: regardless of where you're from, and combat that give you away.
Speaker 5: And once you start to learn what those are, it
Speaker 5: gives you an advantage going against the force.
Speaker 4: You know things they're going to do.
Speaker 5: They it's just instinct and people do it unless you
Speaker 5: spend a lot of time trying to train it out
Speaker 5: of you.
Speaker 4: So that stuff is in there pretty heavy in book too.
Speaker 3: Is that it Ty Dick thank you so much. We
Speaker 3: really appreciate it. Thank you.
Speaker 5: I really appreciate the opportunity just to share some things
Speaker 5: like this, to be able to talk to someone that understands,
Speaker 5: you know, what I'm talking about, and being you know,
Speaker 5: given a platform, people vets can be helped, they can
Speaker 5: do a lot better. And some of the things that
Speaker 5: help you get better or not complex. You just need
Speaker 5: somebody to share it with you and try this. What's
Speaker 5: the here's some things. Keep moving forward, don't stop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one foot in front of the other, right, that's.
Speaker 4: Right, and keep going and practice.
Speaker 5: You know, there's a whole set of principles in the book,
Speaker 5: and one of them is keep moving forward. One of
Speaker 5: them is practice, practice, practice, Because it didn't matter how
Speaker 5: good your plan is, you're going to have to adapt.
Speaker 5: So you have to adapt and adapt. I used to know.
Speaker 5: I knew when I was standing on the skid of
Speaker 5: the helicopter coming into that landing zone, whether it was
Speaker 5: a hot insertion or not, I knew as soon as
Speaker 5: I stepped off on the ground, the plan was going
Speaker 5: to change, and I was going to have to start
Speaker 5: adapting to where we were going, how we were going
Speaker 5: to do it. Where I was going to put the
Speaker 5: air strikes whatever. So that more you practice and the
Speaker 5: practice adapting and doing it under stress, the easier it
Speaker 5: is to do. When you know, when you get out
Speaker 5: there and trying to get to the point where you
Speaker 5: don't let the bullets become a distraction.
Speaker 4: They're going to hit you. They're not going to hit you.
Speaker 4: You know other thing.
Speaker 5: If you're the leader, I mean you, you just have
Speaker 5: to assume you're going to get hit. If you're doing
Speaker 5: your job, you're going to be exposed and you're probably
Speaker 5: going to get hit, but you got to do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, thanks again, Thank you everybody.
Speaker 2: For Patreon subscribers, we're going to do a quick uh
Speaker 2: team house after dark after this, so if you're not
Speaker 2: a subscriber on our patreon, you should be.
Speaker 3: You get a.
Speaker 2: Special bonus episodes and you know, some cool stuff.
Speaker 3: Anyway, thank you everybody.
Speaker 9: Hey guys, it's Jack.
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