Speaker 1: The Team House with your hopes. Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, my name's Jack Murphy. This is the team House.
Speaker 1: I'm here tonight with our guest, Tim Sheer. He served
Speaker 1: as an Army Counterintelligence Section chief, amongst other positions that
Speaker 1: he held service in Desert Storm and elsewhere. He's also
Speaker 1: the author of Spycatchers, Interrogators and Analysts, Tactical US Army
Speaker 1: Military Intelligence in World War Two. I was just looking
Speaker 1: through this the other day while he's here in the office.
Speaker 1: It's super cool. If I mean, if you're interested in
Speaker 1: World War two era military intelligence, you're definitely gonna want
Speaker 1: to have this book on your shelf. Tim, thank you
Speaker 1: for joining us tonight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm very humbled to be here.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I was. I had a variety of jobs
Speaker 2: when I was in Again, I was an Army Reserve
Speaker 2: counter sky and I was mobed for Desert Storm Stateside
Speaker 2: and also nine to eleven. So I don't want people
Speaker 2: to think I'm trying to oversell myself.
Speaker 1: Well, tell us a little bit about that, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the process that you took towards joining the Army.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I grew up in Quincy, Illinois. So if
Speaker 2: you're not familiar with where Quincy is, if Illinois was
Speaker 2: a pregnant woman, Quincy would be the belly button. So
Speaker 2: we're just right across the Missouri are the Mississippi River
Speaker 2: from Missouri. So I basically grew up in the same home,
Speaker 2: came into that home as a baby until I graduated.
Speaker 2: So I was always interested in the military, and my
Speaker 2: mom would take us to the library and they had
Speaker 2: these CB Colby books like Equipment of the Cold War,
Speaker 2: Weapons of World War Two, things like that, you know.
Speaker 2: And I remember opening that book and seeing that Davy
Speaker 2: Crockett on the back of that jeep, thinking that was
Speaker 2: the coolest thing ever. So, and I was always definitely
Speaker 2: interested in World War Two. And there was one point
Speaker 2: when I was super young, I was maybe five or six,
Speaker 2: like the movie The Battle of the Bulge was on,
Speaker 2: and the parents were trying to get me to go
Speaker 2: to bed, and I didn't want to go to bed
Speaker 2: because I want to know how the war was going
Speaker 2: to turn out. I mean, the Germans had patent tanks,
Speaker 2: I mean, how could they not lose? But so my
Speaker 2: dad said go to bed, you'll be fighting World War
Speaker 2: two for the rest of your life. And that's kind
Speaker 2: of kind of how it's been. I think. So my
Speaker 2: dad served in the military. I had some uncles that
Speaker 2: served Moms and Paton's Army. I have one that's a
Speaker 2: little bit of a mystery. He was a aviator who
Speaker 2: received a Silver Star during the Japanese attack at Clark
Speaker 2: Field on the eighth of December forty one, and he
Speaker 2: survived the Baton Death March and died afterwards. And also,
Speaker 2: I mean that my brother served in the Air Force.
Speaker 2: My niece just got back from a deployment as the
Speaker 2: chief of staff for the Air Force Base and the UAE.
Speaker 2: She just got back like a week ago.
Speaker 1: So you know, you had some family background, And did
Speaker 1: you know as far as becoming an officer, did you
Speaker 1: go through ROTC or how did that work for you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was really thinking I was going to go
Speaker 2: more of like a radio broadcasting route. I think that
Speaker 2: was where my interest was in high school. And then
Speaker 2: I realized it was kind of a suck job. So
Speaker 2: I think, well, if I'm going to go to college,
Speaker 2: I might as well go for four years and I
Speaker 2: might as well study history. And then RTC presented itself
Speaker 2: so yeah, I started participating in RTC as a freshman,
Speaker 2: and then I ended up getting to three and a
Speaker 2: half year scholarship, which because I got it at the
Speaker 2: end of that semester, that gave me the money to
Speaker 2: buy my seventy three Volkswagen Beetle, which was my college car.
Speaker 2: So drove that all the way through school. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm a first gen college and so my dad basically said,
Speaker 2: this is a waste of money. Why are you doing this?
Speaker 2: When I moved into the doors, my parents learn just said, hey,
Speaker 2: just go put your stuff up there and drive back
Speaker 2: the next day and then we'll drop you off. Like
Speaker 2: there was no big moving day, Like we didn't know
Speaker 2: how to do any of this. So and I was again,
Speaker 2: I was a band kid to the nth degree. I mean,
Speaker 2: Quincy Public Schools had bought a child sized tuba and
Speaker 2: I was the guinea pig for the child size tuba,
Speaker 2: and so I started playing it in fourth grade. And
Speaker 2: I remember having to march in like, you know, three
Speaker 2: mile parades with like a full sized fiberglass susophone that's
Speaker 2: almost like dragging on the ground and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Although I was a pretty good, pretty good tuba player
Speaker 2: in that I think I only set second cheer one
Speaker 2: time in my life. Ended up being All state actually
Speaker 2: my senior year, and then I really walked away from it.
Speaker 2: I just decided, you know, there's not going to be
Speaker 2: any big resurgence in polka music, and I think so
Speaker 2: far i've called that one right. I could have bought
Speaker 2: a tuba with my scholarship money, but I thought the
Speaker 2: car would do me a little more good. So and
Speaker 2: again I was a skinny kid. I was one hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty pounds and I really worked hard during my
Speaker 2: freshman year my sophomore year to build up and get strong.
Speaker 2: I've got these ridiculously skinny arms, so like push ups
Speaker 2: are just like the mechanics for push ups for me
Speaker 2: are just not pretty. And so the second semester of
Speaker 2: my sophomore year in college, I got mono and I
Speaker 2: went from like one sixty to one thirty and I
Speaker 2: lost everything and I had to completely start over. So,
Speaker 2: you know, went through my junior year, became went through
Speaker 2: RTC Advance Camp Fort Riley. I would have been summer
Speaker 2: of eighty six, and then I was a pretty mediocre cadet. Again,
Speaker 2: I just wasn't that physical. I mean, I was just
Speaker 2: a skinny kid that was you know, just had monol
Speaker 2: like a year before. And but I did the best
Speaker 2: I could. And you know, I never I never struggled
Speaker 2: with anything, but it was just always a bit of
Speaker 2: a bit of a challenge for me. So they they
Speaker 2: do like an internship for cadets and I got it's
Speaker 2: called Cadet Troop Leader Training. So I got a CTL
Speaker 2: the assignment and it was like the worst CTLT assignment
Speaker 2: in the world. I got assigned to the jail commander
Speaker 2: at Fort Gordon, Georgia. So I'm like, I show up
Speaker 2: in like day one, Hey we're feeding them. Hey we're
Speaker 2: they're getting showers. Hey they're doing this. And then like
Speaker 2: day two, hey we're feeding them. Hey we're doing so
Speaker 2: actually I we went and kind of farmed out and
Speaker 2: rode along with the MPs, busting up fights at the
Speaker 2: Enlistic Club. I stood gate one time, caught a drunk driver,
Speaker 2: you know, all these sort of fun things that I
Speaker 2: got to do. So when it came time to commission again,
Speaker 2: you submit your dream sheet, and mine didn't come back
Speaker 2: the way I'd hoped. I mean, I ranked as a
Speaker 2: Distinguished Military Graduate but then I got put in the
Speaker 2: reserve component and I got the branch I wanted, But
Speaker 2: no one could seem to quite understand how that happened.
Speaker 2: And everyone's like, well, you're a DMG and you got
Speaker 2: in the reserve. So I'm like, yeah, I have no
Speaker 2: idea how that happened. So I didn't really have a
Speaker 2: plan B, so I had to had to move pretty
Speaker 2: quick and figure things out. So I had to. And
Speaker 2: when you're in the Army Reserve as an officer, there's
Speaker 2: no career manager for you, like you are your own
Speaker 2: career manager. There's no one you call and say, hey,
Speaker 2: what jobs are open. You have to figure it out yourself.
Speaker 2: So I figured out there were two am I detachments
Speaker 2: in Saint Louis. One was the four eighty fifth am
Speaker 2: I Detachment, which was a infantry brigade support unit, and
Speaker 2: the other one was the two to eighty third in
Speaker 2: my debt, which was a UKM theater level CI counter
Speaker 2: intelligence unit. And so to me, the the forty fifth
Speaker 2: seemed like the place to go, so I went ahead
Speaker 2: and signed on there. I was really kind of an
Speaker 2: extra officer until I went to my basic course, which
Speaker 2: was not until October. But so I show up from
Speaker 2: my first drill. I have no idea, never been to
Speaker 2: a drill in my life, and I'm just kind of
Speaker 2: sitting there and it's a warm June day and all
Speaker 2: these guys are taking off their blouses because it's warm,
Speaker 2: and they all got guns. I'm like, do I get
Speaker 2: a gun? Like? I don't? Is this normal? They were
Speaker 2: all Saint Louis City cops, so they were they were
Speaker 2: packing guns with them all the time because you never know,
Speaker 2: they might walk out of the Reserve center and see
Speaker 2: somebody that they knew. But so we ended up doing
Speaker 2: our very first annual training that summer and we were
Speaker 2: going to Gagetown, Canadian Forces Base. Now the forty fifth
Speaker 2: mission was US Army Forces Republic of Iceland. So there's
Speaker 2: the Icelandic Defense Force and then they're the different service
Speaker 2: components NAVICE which was active duty, at ICE which was
Speaker 2: active duty, and then the reserve component had had the
Speaker 2: Army Headquarters was a reserve unit out of a oh
Speaker 2: gosh An Air Force Base out of Massachusetts, and the
Speaker 2: one eighty seventh sib Army Reserve. This was before the
Speaker 2: off Side Agreement and the Army Reserve lost all the
Speaker 2: combat units they were out of Massachusetts, and so because
Speaker 2: I didn't have a job, didn't have really anything to do,
Speaker 2: I got put on advanced party. So we went up
Speaker 2: there and we had all kinds of problems that Sato
Speaker 2: screwed up our tickets, like our connecting flights were booked
Speaker 2: for the second day. Ended up sleeping in the Bangor
Speaker 2: main airport with my RTC colleague, and then it came
Speaker 2: time for us to pick up our vehicles. So we
Speaker 2: had this blue Bonneville station wagon with like wood grain
Speaker 2: on the site, so they rented at the airport to
Speaker 2: kind of run around until we got all of our equipment.
Speaker 2: So our equipment had been railroaded out of Saint Louis
Speaker 2: and shipped up to like New Hampshire and then put
Speaker 2: on flatbeds to haul up to gain each town Canadian
Speaker 2: Forces base, which is New Brunswick. And so we go
Speaker 2: up to pick up our vehicles and we quickly discover
Speaker 2: that we only have one of our vehicles. We only
Speaker 2: have our two and a half ton truck, and fortunately
Speaker 2: that's got all of our tents and everything else in it.
Speaker 2: I mean, we only had like five vehicles to begin with,
Speaker 2: so our our other vehicles were involved with the fatal
Speaker 2: traffic accident, I'm sure, and the state police impounded them.
Speaker 2: So like, we didn't know when we're going to get
Speaker 2: our stuff, and so we decided to keep the Bottomville
Speaker 2: wagon for a while. And so we you know, fortunately
Speaker 2: we had our tents. We got our tents and everything
Speaker 2: set up, and the Brigade commanding General showed up and
Speaker 2: there's you know, this kind of like strach e five.
Speaker 2: He sees I've got a different patch. He goes, hey,
Speaker 2: where are you from? I seven forty fifth of miles Saints?
Speaker 2: Where you and my guys? And he says, okay, so
Speaker 2: what's going on. How's it going. I'm like, well, not well,
Speaker 2: we don't have any of our vehicles because of this
Speaker 2: thing happened. And he said, oh okay, well thanks for
Speaker 2: letting me know. And so he told the general and
Speaker 2: next thing, you know, like that, the Brigade S four
Speaker 2: came looking for us. He's like, hey, you guys, don't
Speaker 2: you got your vehicles? Are gone? Like okay, we can
Speaker 2: loan you get two in one five one jeeps. We're like, hey,
Speaker 2: that's awesome, thank you. And so we got the two
Speaker 2: M one five one jeeps and then so in the
Speaker 2: motor pool, you know, it was like Humby Humby kuk
Speaker 2: v kuk V Bonneville with wood grain Humby Humby humby uh.
Speaker 2: And they they wanted the jeeps back after like two days.
Speaker 2: So we started hiding the jeeps. So we found a
Speaker 2: place where we could park them where no one could
Speaker 2: see them. And so then the you know, the S
Speaker 2: four would come back, Hey, I need my jeeps back,
Speaker 2: and we're like, oh, you know, they were just here
Speaker 2: five minutes ago here, why don't you come back in
Speaker 2: about two hours? And we think they'll be here. So
Speaker 2: we finally got our vehicles like well into the second week.
Speaker 2: But I remember we did a jump talk for the
Speaker 2: brigade and so it was an artep exercise. So the
Speaker 2: aviation unit Kyro Warriors is flying overhead. I can see
Speaker 2: the CAVS squadron screening us on the flanks and then
Speaker 2: on one threes and and I'm in the Bonnaville in
Speaker 2: the middle of this convoy. So that that was an
Speaker 2: interesting experience. So from there I went to IOBC Class
Speaker 2: eighty eight dash too. It's about a half active half
Speaker 2: reserve start in October and it was a really good experience.
Speaker 2: I did pretty well there, and there was a guy
Speaker 2: in there which I've never quite figured out who he
Speaker 2: was to this point. I think his name was his
Speaker 2: last name was Mackenzie, and I want to say Bob Mackenzie,
Speaker 2: but that may be like a that may be like
Speaker 2: a Great White North mix up in my brain. But
Speaker 2: Bob had a really curious intel background and he had
Speaker 2: some stories about how he had been in Granada. He
Speaker 2: had been in the evasion of Lebanon in an Israeli uniform,
Speaker 2: and he had just come from Infantry Officer Basic course
Speaker 2: and then he was going through am I Officer Basic course.
Speaker 2: I'm like, who does that? So we've and he was
Speaker 2: going to brag, So we're kind of curious. So if
Speaker 2: anyone knows Bob, let me know kind of who he was.
Speaker 2: But so he actually ended up getting hurt in Ranger school,
Speaker 2: which he went to right after then I think he
Speaker 2: got out processed. But so then I had another opportunity
Speaker 2: to go for active duty that had what was called
Speaker 2: the Commandants program, and so I ranked sixth out of
Speaker 2: my forty five members in my class. But my buddy,
Speaker 2: good friend of mine he ranked fourth out of forty five.
Speaker 2: So I h he ended up getting it and he
Speaker 2: was clearly the better man. But so then I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I got to go back and find a job, and
Speaker 2: that's what I did.
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Speaker 1: Is that how it works in the reserves, They're not
Speaker 1: just assigning you somewhere.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I was already. I was in the
Speaker 2: for eighty fifth that was my unit, but I had
Speaker 2: to go find it like a civilian job.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, I'm the outside, gotcha right.
Speaker 2: And it's hard when you're in the reserves, especially when
Speaker 2: you're young, because you might get called up or ever.
Speaker 2: And so I ended up working for a trucking company
Speaker 2: for a while. It was actually my mom's competiting company.
Speaker 2: So I did that for like about a month and
Speaker 2: a half and it was kind of a job and
Speaker 2: so they I had put in orders for the Intelligence
Speaker 2: and Terrorism Counteraction course at Fort Watchuka two weeks of school,
Speaker 2: and I went to my boss on Friday and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 2: I've got these orders. I can get them canceled if
Speaker 2: need be. I kind of like to go came into
Speaker 2: work Monday, and he fired me. So it all actually
Speaker 2: kind of worked out in that the next day I
Speaker 2: actually got a much better job offer for where I
Speaker 2: worked for twelve years, so it turned out to be
Speaker 2: pretty well. So my job was I worked at Northeast
Speaker 2: Missouri State and I maintained fourteen hundred and ninety two
Speaker 2: apartments and dorm rooms. I had twenty six staff and
Speaker 2: just basically kept all those kids warmed ry and did
Speaker 2: that for twelve years. And that was never a dull
Speaker 2: moment for sure.
Speaker 1: But yeah, So what was going on with your military
Speaker 1: service throughout that time frame?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I was formally assigned to the CI
Speaker 2: Section as the CI Section Chief, and the forty fifth
Speaker 2: was a pretty cool unit in that it was a
Speaker 2: very capable unit. Even though like we had steel pots,
Speaker 2: we had gamma goats, we had just you know, we
Speaker 2: had an M sixteen, not even an A one in
Speaker 2: eighty eight I think it was. But the unit was
Speaker 2: really capable in that. Like my c I Section chief
Speaker 2: was me. I had a warrant officer who was a
Speaker 2: school teacher librarian, but he spent all summer going to
Speaker 2: army schools and teaching in army schools, so he you know,
Speaker 2: he was an interrogator. He was a a CI agent.
Speaker 2: He had taught at the school house, all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. And then I had a deputy sheriff from
Speaker 2: Madison County, Illinois, so he was a full time cop.
Speaker 2: And then I had a guy who was a Saint
Speaker 2: Louis City cop, former prior service sergeant, York crewman, if
Speaker 2: that says anything. And then I had a guy who
Speaker 2: was a private investigator. So I had a pretty stacked
Speaker 2: little team of guys who did stuff on their outside
Speaker 2: work from the unit. The interrogator section had a bunch
Speaker 2: of Saint Loss City cops, a postal inspector, our photo interpreter.
Speaker 2: Warrant worked at defense mapping, the order of battle warrant
Speaker 2: worked at defense mapping. I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: very good crossover inside of that unit, despite the Army
Speaker 2: not giving this a whole lot of anything.
Speaker 1: About what yours was this that you were there.
Speaker 2: I commissioned and it came back in eighty eight, and
Speaker 2: then I was there until Desert Storm spun up. So
Speaker 2: we did go to Northern Viking eighty nine. We took
Speaker 2: our took the c I section up there, and they
Speaker 2: took the the Rice headquarters, brigade head quarters in one battalion,
Speaker 2: and we were kind of an attachment, so we actually
Speaker 2: got to run around on our ground and we liaised
Speaker 2: with an ISS and was able to give them a
Speaker 2: few leads on a few different things. But that was
Speaker 2: super cool. If you've ever read Red Storm Rising, that's
Speaker 2: that's the scenario right there. That's that's what was going
Speaker 2: to go down in Iceland. And we, like I remember,
Speaker 2: we were next to the flight line and like an
Speaker 2: F fifteen would go screaming off the runway and you
Speaker 2: could follow it because the sky was so clear. You know,
Speaker 2: it's going up to intercept a bear bomber in the sky.
Speaker 2: There were anti submarine aircraft lying all the time, things
Speaker 2: like that, so it was it was pretty fascinating. It
Speaker 2: was also during summer, so it really didn't get dark
Speaker 2: the whole time we were there. So when we came back,
Speaker 2: we're like eating dinner in Connecticut and we're like, it's dark.
Speaker 2: You see that it's dark outside, Yeah, it's dark. So
Speaker 2: that was a that was an interesting experience.
Speaker 1: What kinds of things did you do there as a
Speaker 1: CI guy. We're just interviewing another person earlier who's telling
Speaker 1: us he was a CI guy. Also he's telling us
Speaker 1: about how he had to put the kai bosh on
Speaker 1: the young soldiers going to the strip club in a
Speaker 1: foreign country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a real challenge when we went to
Speaker 2: Iceland because the Icelanders are xenophobic, very xenophobic. They don't
Speaker 2: like outsiders very well. They didn't like us. In fact,
Speaker 2: when we went out of town, me and my guys,
Speaker 2: we found these like Icelandic Canadian pins that we would
Speaker 2: wear so people would be nice to us. But the
Speaker 2: biggest problem we had off post, which are our soldiers.
Speaker 2: Didn't go off post a whole lot for that exercise,
Speaker 2: but these are intersitdery Boston kids, and that's like the
Speaker 2: flavor flav era. So I remember one guy walking around
Speaker 2: with the big clock and all this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: and so that was a bit of a challenge. And
Speaker 2: also we were just doing standard tactical ci making sure
Speaker 2: that they had good operational security practices, make sure they
Speaker 2: weren't throwing op orders and dumpsters and you know, listening
Speaker 2: to radio nets and visiting sites for camouflage and all
Speaker 2: those sorts of things. We actually the year before we did,
Speaker 2: we were with the separate Infantry Brigade out of Oklahoma,
Speaker 2: and we decided that we were talking to the battalion commander.
Speaker 2: He's like, oh, yeah, you guys can collect on my boys.
Speaker 2: They're good. I'm like, okay, that sounds like fun. So
Speaker 2: we snuck some guys in and they used a lighter
Speaker 2: and burned burned off the insulation on their WD one wires,
Speaker 2: and we tapped them and ran a line off of
Speaker 2: that flew around and got aerial imagery of it. We
Speaker 2: took We had a interrogator female, so she put on
Speaker 2: a pair of shorts and a tank top and went
Speaker 2: for a ride on the roach coach and started asking
Speaker 2: questions to see what kind of information she could get.
Speaker 2: So it was all over. We gave this guy like
Speaker 2: a I actually sat and listened to the radio nets
Speaker 2: into traffic analysis on it and stuff like that. So
Speaker 2: we presented, you know, okay, here's your battalion, this is
Speaker 2: what we know about him. So that that was good.
Speaker 2: That was that was actually good training.
Speaker 1: Did they ship bricks when you give a brief on that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were a little humbled by everything we were
Speaker 2: able to get. And we really were not that capable either.
Speaker 2: I mean we were We're pretty old school. I think
Speaker 2: we stole a we got the frequency off one of
Speaker 2: their vehicles, and that's how then we were able to
Speaker 2: then start building their radio net through traffic analysis like
Speaker 2: S three. He's the angry guy, you know, things like
Speaker 2: that when he's on the radio. So yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 2: So in the summer of nineteen ninety, we didn't have
Speaker 2: a name training, like people were just going to schools.
Speaker 2: So I actually got sent to kind of a crap
Speaker 2: job I got to. I got sent to Fort Leonard
Speaker 2: Wood to the Special Security Office. Although it turned out
Speaker 2: to be interesting because that was July of nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: and I was producing the Black Books for the Engineer
Speaker 2: School and that was the entire build up of Saddam
Speaker 2: on the Kuwait border. So I'm reading all of this
Speaker 2: intel before. Of course, you know, it ended and I
Speaker 2: went home, But little did I know a few months
Speaker 2: later I would get roped into it.
Speaker 1: Well, tell us about that spinning up for the Gulf War,
Speaker 1: how did that come about?
Speaker 2: Well, it's pretty clear the four eighty fifth wasn't wasn't
Speaker 2: going to get mobilized unless like the Russians were crossing
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River. So the two eighty third did get
Speaker 2: called up and they went to they went to Germany,
Speaker 2: and by the time they got spun up and trained, like,
Speaker 2: the whole thing was over and they came back like
Speaker 2: a couple of months later. So they actually pulled two
Speaker 2: officers out of the unit, myself and another guy who
Speaker 2: worked at McDonald Douglass which is now Bowing in Saint Louis,
Speaker 2: and they sent us to US Transcom j the J
Speaker 2: two of Transcomb, which is at Scott Air Force Base,
Speaker 2: Joint Force Headquarters, four Star Headquarters. And at that point
Speaker 2: Transcomb was really only two years old, as Goldwater Nichols
Speaker 2: had just happened, and the J two was really just
Speaker 2: the Military Airlift Command I in shop and then they
Speaker 2: had like a little space with about a dozen people
Speaker 2: in it. A Navy guy there was like an Army
Speaker 2: imagery guy and a few others, and I was either
Speaker 2: the second or third Army guy assigned to the J
Speaker 2: two there at Transcom, And so then I got thrown
Speaker 2: over to be the briefer on the Crisis Action Team.
Speaker 2: And so I was brief in the four star general
Speaker 2: like within two days of again there, and I was like,
Speaker 2: I was not a good briefer. I had to figure
Speaker 2: it out quick, and it actually worked out okay. But
Speaker 2: so I did that for like forty five days, and
Speaker 2: then the other lieutenant swapped with me. He came over
Speaker 2: to the Crisis Action Team and we were working four
Speaker 2: days on, two days off, and then we have flipped
Speaker 2: the nights, and then we do four days on and
Speaker 2: then two days off and then flip back to days.
Speaker 2: So every six days we were flipping days and nights.
Speaker 2: They just have enough people to do days and nights.
Speaker 2: So I was working in the Crisis Action Team among
Speaker 2: all the operations folks, the logistics team, the airteam, Navy team,
Speaker 2: all those guys that are making all of this high
Speaker 2: level logistics working, and so we would give them our
Speaker 2: J two update. So I got swapped out and I
Speaker 2: actually went over to write a trucking study on the
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabian Peninsula. So that was my job for like
Speaker 2: forty five days. You got to write this trucking study
Speaker 2: on Saudi Arabia. I like, okay, so I'm researching. I'm
Speaker 2: trying to find everything. I asked for a couple of
Speaker 2: days of like a permi of TD why. I went
Speaker 2: back to my college library, spent two days, and all
Speaker 2: I found was a reference in Smithsonian magazine that said,
Speaker 2: no self respecting Bedouin truck driver would drive anything less
Speaker 2: than a Mercedes. I'm like, I went to my box.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I am floundering on this. So another guy
Speaker 2: came in and he's like, why don't we call a
Speaker 2: why don't we call like a auto company. They called
Speaker 2: the Ford Motor Company, and like you know, four days
Speaker 2: later we had a print out like this thick of
Speaker 2: every vehicle that has ever been sold to Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 2: So so I've got a citation for that, but I
Speaker 2: also didn't do much on it. So the other guy
Speaker 2: decided he wanted to go back to Boeing or McDonald douglas.
Speaker 2: So I was left there and then I got joined
Speaker 2: by an army guy who transferred end by the name
Speaker 2: of Brock ears A. Brock actually had grown up in
Speaker 2: that area. He's a captain as a lieutenant, and I
Speaker 2: was a brand new first lieutenant at that point, and
Speaker 2: he had just come out of the White House situation room.
Speaker 2: In fact, he was the Southcomb briefer for just cause,
Speaker 2: so and he had some really good stories about, you know,
Speaker 2: how all that went down, but so how he briefed
Speaker 2: on the Oval office and now he went and briefed
Speaker 2: Quail separately and things like that. So he was a
Speaker 2: really great mentor for me. And we were working together
Speaker 2: these kind of day and night shifts, so there were
Speaker 2: a few moments when we didn't actually know what to
Speaker 2: make of anything. So Brock's like, hey, let me call
Speaker 2: my buddies, you know, and you get on the stew
Speaker 2: three and call and pop up White House. Hey, Bob,
Speaker 2: tell me what's going on, that kind of thing. So
Speaker 2: it was it was really interesting to be there. But
Speaker 2: so the J two desk was actually right next to
Speaker 2: the snack bar and the J three. General Cross wall
Speaker 2: Cross was kind of a junk food junkie, and so
Speaker 2: he would always come over and looking for something to eat,
Speaker 2: and he would just strike up conversations, and we had
Speaker 2: complete access to all the geos there there was there
Speaker 2: were no there were no people we had to go through.
Speaker 2: We need to talk to anybody, we could just go
Speaker 2: talk to them. And I remember one day I was
Speaker 2: reading Bodyguard of Lies and he's like, Lieutenant, I'm so
Speaker 2: proud of you for that. So it was, it was,
Speaker 2: it was pretty pretty, pretty busy. I actually did make
Speaker 2: an attempt to try and to play went over to
Speaker 2: the Helicopter Unit, Army Reserve Helicopter Unit, which is part
Speaker 2: of our command. I said, hey, I mean, am I
Speaker 2: a guy, I'm trained up, I'm already working the problem.
Speaker 2: I like to go with you guys. And they're like, no,
Speaker 2: I think I probably worked it wrong. But they were
Speaker 2: actually the unit. They were a super cool unit. They
Speaker 2: were a lot of the guys worked at Aviation Systems Command,
Speaker 2: which is at that point was in Saint Louis, Missouri,
Speaker 2: and all the warrants were Vietnam guys, and they actually
Speaker 2: ended up being like the Distinguished Visitor Helo Unit or Sentcom,
Speaker 2: so they flew shortz cough to the peace talks with
Speaker 2: the Iraqis things like that. So that was a kind
Speaker 2: of a missed opportunity for me. But so, yeah, there
Speaker 2: was there's a lot going on, and when Israel started
Speaker 2: receiving scuds from Iraq, we got like a warning and
Speaker 2: execution order like that, like we got to do this
Speaker 2: right now. We had to get patriots down to Israel.
Speaker 2: So my colleagues worked that that evening. I didn't really
Speaker 2: have much of a play in it other than, you know,
Speaker 2: making sure that the apods and spods were okay in Germany.
Speaker 2: And then the next night they were set up in
Speaker 2: Israel and we watched them like knock missiles out of
Speaker 2: the sky and saved lives. That was super cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I for a documentary project. I was
Speaker 1: watching some of the news footage from back then of
Speaker 1: the scuds coming into Israel and hitting residential areas and
Speaker 1: I'm I mean, it looks so terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a I had kind of a funny
Speaker 2: experience with those. So we we we didn't have any
Speaker 2: connectivity where the the Crisis Action Team was actually in
Speaker 2: the old Commissary. The post Commissary, they built a new
Speaker 2: one as a big open building, so they just chopped
Speaker 2: it up into a bunch of offices and so the
Speaker 2: cat team was in there, and so to read intel
Speaker 2: traffic or pick up intel traffic, they would print it.
Speaker 2: We put in a suitcase carried over to us about
Speaker 2: two block walk and then we'd read it over there.
Speaker 2: And so I was in the watch center and I
Speaker 2: heard the beep, beep beep, and and then listened ANSD like,
Speaker 2: we got a critic, we got a critic, Like, okay,
Speaker 2: we got a critic. Okay, let's see what happens, and beppepeep, Okay,
Speaker 2: we got a scud. It's coming out of a rack.
Speaker 2: It's going to Turkey, It's going into Turkey. I'm like, Turkey.
Speaker 2: Turkey is a NATO country, So if they shoot a
Speaker 2: missile at Turkey, that means that's an attack on a
Speaker 2: NATO country, which means NATO is probably going to join
Speaker 2: the GOUF. I was like, oh shit, this is this
Speaker 2: is a pretty big deal. And then peep peep, another
Speaker 2: one comes in. We got the asthmuth wrong. It's going
Speaker 2: to Israel, like geez Louise. So you know, the war
Speaker 2: kind of drew down, and so there's a little bit
Speaker 2: of an insurgency that popped up there and I ended
Speaker 2: up I was briefing the general, and the General really
Speaker 2: kind of took a shining to me, a hands for T.
Speaker 2: Johnson Air Force four star guy, and like all the
Speaker 2: geos kind of took a shining to me because I was,
Speaker 2: you know, a younger version of them. And so there
Speaker 2: was one moment in a briefing where the four star
Speaker 2: at that point they were called sins like, I'm briefing
Speaker 2: something about Iraqi a surgency, and he's like, well, why
Speaker 2: don't they just fade into the woodwork and like Vietnam.
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, sir, there and I just shot right
Speaker 2: back and I'm sure there is no woodwork in Iraq.
Speaker 2: And there was this like pregnant moment. I'm like, I
Speaker 2: am so screwed, like I'm about to get fired, and
Speaker 2: then he started laughing. And so from then on I
Speaker 2: became Lieutenant Woodwork. So as things spun down, we worked
Speaker 2: on like Northern Watch. I remember I had to hand
Speaker 2: draw a map for the four star to brief him.
Speaker 2: I literally hand drew a map and laid it on
Speaker 2: the table for him and kind of explained it to
Speaker 2: him and he's like, LT, what's this, I go, sir,
Speaker 2: that's an Infantry Company, you know, things like that. That
Speaker 2: was a little crazy. One of the weirder things we
Speaker 2: did was as Desert Storm was the desert desert sorte
Speaker 2: was starting to pick up, which is the return, we
Speaker 2: got like a warning order that there'd been some sort
Speaker 2: of Yanna humanitarian disaster in Iran and and there were there.
Speaker 2: They wanted us to start looking at the possibilities of
Speaker 2: taking humanitarian supplies into Iran. We're like, oh, jeez, that's
Speaker 2: a weird one. So I got with the Middle East
Speaker 2: Analyst and we started looking at road networks and train
Speaker 2: network and roads and all that kind of stuff. We
Speaker 2: got like a day into it, and then the Iran
Speaker 2: put out a message that they didn't want any AIDS
Speaker 2: infected blankets from the US. So that pretty much shut
Speaker 2: that whole thing down immediately. So I kind of like,
Speaker 2: I guess smallpox blankets, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So.
Speaker 2: Really from there I went back. Uh so I got DMO,
Speaker 2: went back to the forty fifth for a couple months,
Speaker 2: and then when they created the Joint Transportation Reserve Unit,
Speaker 2: which was the first reserve unit stood up on a
Speaker 2: joint Manning document. There were some different units that maybe
Speaker 2: drilled together, but we were actually under a unified command,
Speaker 2: joint joint document, everything else. But when they stood up
Speaker 2: the Army Element in October of ninety one, they made
Speaker 2: us a drilling im a detachment, which basically just means
Speaker 2: you're not going to get paid. I figured that out.
Speaker 2: So I actually went eight or nine months without getting
Speaker 2: any of my droll pay, which was not cool. And
Speaker 2: I ended up having to work through a my congressman
Speaker 2: like every single month so I could actually get my drolly.
Speaker 2: It was so screwed up. So then when we went
Speaker 2: into Somalia restore Hope, I believe is that name an exercise?
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I was down there for a weekend and
Speaker 2: then they're like, okay, we're going to call you up.
Speaker 2: We're going to put you on ninety day orders and
Speaker 2: you know, you guys are going to run the situation
Speaker 2: shop or the J two for this particular exercise. We're like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's that's good, super cool. And that there was the
Speaker 2: Intel system where I, you know, you could chat with people.
Speaker 2: I remember I was chatting with an amphib and hey,
Speaker 2: I need some pictures of the doc, and you get
Speaker 2: me pictures of the dock and you know, some guy
Speaker 2: and he's like, ah, sure, sure, I'll tee, I get
Speaker 2: it right for you. You know, two hours later these
Speaker 2: JPEGs show up. I'm like, this is so cool, Like
Speaker 2: this thing, this internet thing's pretty interesting. But when I
Speaker 2: actually reported. The day I report, I remember I was
Speaker 2: checking into the scot d and I saw the seals
Speaker 2: coming over the beach on CNN and the lobby of
Speaker 2: the I'm like, okay, well this is going to be different.
Speaker 2: And then that that pay issue continued. I was going
Speaker 2: towards my second month of active duty and still had
Speaker 2: not been paid, which was ridiculous. So I would work
Speaker 2: a night shift and Army Reserve Personnel Centers ninety seven
Speaker 2: hundred Page in Saint Lewis, So I would come off
Speaker 2: a full night shift and I drove over there. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to leave until this is resolved. I
Speaker 2: ended up having to go back three times to get
Speaker 2: it resolved. And yeah, yeah, and like, well, in the
Speaker 2: first month wasn't so bad because I was still getting
Speaker 2: my civilian salary. But and when I was in there,
Speaker 2: I just completely understood how the Army can get screwed up.
Speaker 2: There'd be like a pallette of two OHO one files
Speaker 2: sitting in the hallway, and like one of them would
Speaker 2: fall off the top and get on the floor and
Speaker 2: people would start walking on it, and next thing, you know,
Speaker 2: the whole files all over the place, all over the place,
Speaker 2: and somebody kind of scoops it back up, but it's
Speaker 2: probably missing a few pages and stuff like that. So
Speaker 2: I demobed around March, I think, And that was well
Speaker 2: before black Hawk Down happened. I did brief the weekend
Speaker 2: of black Hawk Down, but we had no idea what
Speaker 2: was going on over there, you know, typical operations in
Speaker 2: Somalia at this point. We heard about it later later on.
Speaker 1: And when was it that you started coming up on
Speaker 1: company commander time?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a few more, a few more things.
Speaker 2: A company command came up in like nineteen ninety five
Speaker 2: or nineteen ninety six. You know, I'd been at the
Speaker 2: J two too long. I was feeling like I needed
Speaker 2: to get green. I was. I've been a lieutenant, I
Speaker 2: was now a captain. We did have one other kind
Speaker 2: of interesting thing happen, and that was one week and
Speaker 2: I walked in and on a Friday, because you go
Speaker 2: on a friday if you're going to brief. And I
Speaker 2: walked into the conference and there's a VTC going on
Speaker 2: and it's the uh, the briefing the air drop plan
Speaker 2: for the Brigade of eighty second to go into Haiti. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so the air at that point, I think it
Speaker 2: might have been Air Mobility Command versus MAC and so
Speaker 2: we got that whole plan and I got a phone
Speaker 2: call before I had left. They said, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: we may send you down to Homestead to be an
Speaker 2: l ando down there. I'm like, okay, you know, I'll
Speaker 2: just I'll pack up some extra clothes and you know,
Speaker 2: I'll show up and just tell me, tell me where
Speaker 2: to go. And then on Saturday they're like, no, we
Speaker 2: think we got all this covered, so we don't need
Speaker 2: us to just go home. So I worked this plan
Speaker 2: for like two days. I'm like, go home and watch
Speaker 2: it on CNN. My roommate was like, hey, let's watch
Speaker 2: something else. I'm like, no, we're going to watch CNN tonight.
Speaker 2: Why because we're going to watch see itn in tonight.
Speaker 2: So but yeah, I ended up going on to becoming
Speaker 2: a company commander. And again there's by that point them
Speaker 2: I debts had completely folded in Saint Louis. They were gone.
Speaker 2: There were no slots there. So there's the only way
Speaker 2: I was going to get a company command and was
Speaker 2: get like a zero one alpha branch and material. So
Speaker 2: there was the second the three three fourth Infantry Regiment,
Speaker 2: which is an Army reserve basic training company and they
Speaker 2: and they were located in my hometown. They had they
Speaker 2: had a debt up in my hometown of Quincy, and
Speaker 2: the main unit was in Granite City, which is right
Speaker 2: across from Saint Louis. So I talked to the Battalian community.
Speaker 2: He goes, you know, I need someone to be an
Speaker 2: S one and we got to merged three giants into
Speaker 2: one and then when you finish that, I'll give you
Speaker 2: a company command. I'm like, okay, that's good. So did that.
Speaker 2: We didn't do like a two week annual training. We
Speaker 2: busted it all up into two weekends. So generally we
Speaker 2: were working two weekends a month, which was getting kind
Speaker 2: of old by the end of it. But so yeah,
Speaker 2: I took this basic Training Company command D Company three
Speaker 2: three fourth Infantry Regiment. So and I had a little
Speaker 2: bit of street cred, like I'm the mi G coming
Speaker 2: out of nowhere, like like who is this guy? But
Speaker 2: I was all so from Quincy, so I got a
Speaker 2: little bit of street cred there, and so I did
Speaker 2: that for three years. We did multiple you know, annual
Speaker 2: training cycles. I uh, we did two at Knox and
Speaker 2: we did one at Benning. The Benning one was kind
Speaker 2: of just kind of weird because the Basic Combat Training
Speaker 2: Brigade was standing up at that point, and it only
Speaker 2: been the ITB at that point. So they stood up
Speaker 2: this other brigade to do basic training, and some of
Speaker 2: the drill sergeants came from Ibing and a bunch of
Speaker 2: them were brand new, and they kind of dumped us
Speaker 2: on us on top of them to help them out,
Speaker 2: because I mean, we had drill sergeants that have been
Speaker 2: on the trail for twenty years doing that. So but
Speaker 2: they were just doing really just dumb stuff. I'm just
Speaker 2: looking at this like what are you people doing. So
Speaker 2: one of the things when we were at Fort Knox,
Speaker 2: we were always we were always to be in the
Speaker 2: exact same uniform as the private like the privates are
Speaker 2: wearing helmets, were wearing helmets, were in LB. They were
Speaker 2: an LB. And these these drill starts didn't want to
Speaker 2: do that, and so they were trying to figure out
Speaker 2: ways to carry water and they're doing like gatorade bottles
Speaker 2: and camelbacks and all this kind of stuff, and I'm like, dude,
Speaker 2: the Army has a thing that has canteens on it
Speaker 2: that carries water if you just want to wear it.
Speaker 2: So that was also gosh. So the unit that relieved
Speaker 2: me was out of Chicago, and we tried to do
Speaker 2: a good handover to them, and I remember the company
Speaker 2: commander came in. I'm like, where are your guys. They're
Speaker 2: supposed to write seat ride left seat ride, and she's like, well,
Speaker 2: my NCOs had a meeting today and they decided they
Speaker 2: didn't want to come in this early. I was like,
Speaker 2: excuse me, your NCOs had a meeting and decided they
Speaker 2: didn't want to come in this morning. Okay, So that
Speaker 2: was that was curious. But so then I finished out
Speaker 2: of I finished my company command, and then there was
Speaker 2: an opportunity to go back to Transcom and it was
Speaker 2: a major slot, which is good because I needed that. Again,
Speaker 2: you got to manage your own career. So I actually
Speaker 2: went to the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center, which is
Speaker 2: a super cool course that the Air Force runs out
Speaker 2: of Rosecrans Air Base in Saint Joe, Missouri. So it's
Speaker 2: really to teach airlifters how to do defensive tactics besides
Speaker 2: just to curl up the ball and die, so protect
Speaker 2: themselves from triple A missiles, aircraft things like that. So
Speaker 2: its a two weeks school. We went to Rosecrans for
Speaker 2: like four or five days and then we flew to
Speaker 2: Wachuka and which you know, I'm familiar with Wachuka. And
Speaker 2: then we did the flying phase and like they would
Speaker 2: literally teach them to fly over a mountain, drop a
Speaker 2: wing and fly down the other side like in a
Speaker 2: C one thirty. Also we had a C seventeen and
Speaker 2: we had a G triple three there as well, and
Speaker 2: one of the guys, one of the pilots, overbanked a
Speaker 2: C one thirty doing this training, so they had to
Speaker 2: ground that. I did win the Biggest Puker Award, although
Speaker 2: in my own defense, like they had to give it
Speaker 2: to the Army guy. They just had to. But in
Speaker 2: my own defense, I was the third person to puke
Speaker 2: on that aircraft. The Hope air crew had been out
Speaker 2: drinking all night and they were definitely not eight hours
Speaker 2: throttle the bottle, so they were hungover. So we're taking
Speaker 2: off and I look over and the nave is on oxygen.
Speaker 2: I'm like, this is not a good sign. And we
Speaker 2: take off and that was the word they were doing,
Speaker 2: the terrain train flying and falling down the other side
Speaker 2: of a mountain. Yeah, in big trash haulers and so
Speaker 2: the so he started puking, the light engineers start puking,
Speaker 2: and then I start puking, and then so apparently I
Speaker 2: was like the biggest puker, even though I was the
Speaker 2: third one to puke on the aircraft. But we had
Speaker 2: to see seventeen. They brought in a third pilot to
Speaker 2: clear the wings to make sure they didn't hit anything
Speaker 2: with the wings of the aircraft. So that was that
Speaker 2: was pretty interesting to do all that. So from there
Speaker 2: I left my job at Truman in n MSU, which
Speaker 2: became Truman State and Army RTC was doing contractor jobs
Speaker 2: to teach RTC and they were hiring Guard, reserve and
Speaker 2: active duty officers and at that point they didn't want
Speaker 2: anyone to know our status. They didn't want to want
Speaker 2: anyone to know our contractors. So we were we were
Speaker 2: our BDUs just like everyone else. So I had BDUs
Speaker 2: with the cadet command patch and I had you know,
Speaker 2: stuff for my unit, and I just kind of swapped
Speaker 2: the blouses depending upon where I was at and I
Speaker 2: had opportunities. I was a captain straight up company command,
Speaker 2: and I had an opportunity to go to Missou Illinois
Speaker 2: State and soon ELOI University at Edwardsville. But I also
Speaker 2: had a class three MP forty Schmeiser and I couldn't
Speaker 2: take that to Illinois, So that kind of made my
Speaker 2: decision to go to Missou. So I went to Missoo
Speaker 2: and I started some history classes I taught the freshman.
Speaker 2: I was a platoon TAC officer that summer. Greg Hammer,
Speaker 2: Panama Ranger, was my pack and CEO. Great guy. We
Speaker 2: had a blast. We had so much fun together and
Speaker 2: when I was at Missoo, we had some interesting hits
Speaker 2: go through there. Some of the some are just people
Speaker 2: in general. Andrew Bailey, who's now the Deputy Director of
Speaker 2: the FBI, he was a cadet there at that time.
Speaker 2: Will Eatens, who it was a KIA in about two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, he was there, and then Sar Major
Speaker 2: Kevin Griffith was my my, uh my, he was the
Speaker 2: senior NCO there for a couple of years and he actually,
Speaker 2: uh he was one of the four that got killed
Speaker 2: in that suicide attack that flowed Goberg shoved the guy
Speaker 2: away and received the Medal of Honor. So it was
Speaker 2: kind of wild to see those people pop up here
Speaker 2: and there. Yeah, take a drink. Sure. So then nine
Speaker 2: to eleven happens and I'm at Missoo. I'm teaching Miszoo,
Speaker 2: I was doing PT. I was leading like incentive PT
Speaker 2: that morning, and I come back and like, the first
Speaker 2: plane hits the tower. I'm kind of like, you know,
Speaker 2: B twenty five hit the Empire State Building World War two.
Speaker 2: The second the second plane hit the tier, I'm like,
Speaker 2: damn it, this is al Kaeda and I just lost
Speaker 2: next year. So by ten o'clock I had an email said, hey,
Speaker 2: we need people to come in at the at Transcom,
Speaker 2: which is my reserve and assignment at that point. And
Speaker 2: so I actually went down there on the Friday after
Speaker 2: nine to eleven and checked in and got on my
Speaker 2: jaywix terminal, watched Bush on the mound for my Jaywix terminal,
Speaker 2: and my shift changeover was a guy who was you know,
Speaker 2: had been working on nine to eleven. He's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we have fighters on strip alert at Lambert Field in
Speaker 2: Saint Louis, so if you see any threats, let us know.
Speaker 2: We can, you know, send some fighters after him. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, damn, I am like one hundred miles from
Speaker 2: where I grew up and this is insane. So went
Speaker 2: back to Miszoo and like, they kept telling us, we're
Speaker 2: going to get called up, We're going to get called up,
Speaker 2: We're going to get called up. Finally they called us
Speaker 2: up on the first of October. My boss was the
Speaker 2: PMS was starting to be kind of a jerk about it.
Speaker 2: And so when I finally did get called out, like
Speaker 2: two days in, he shoots me an email, Hey, since
Speaker 2: you were mobilized, you can't come back to work here.
Speaker 2: And I had I had just had an excellent performance evaluation.
Speaker 2: There were no issues up to that point. I'm like really,
Speaker 2: So I printed it, sent it to US Department of Labor,
Speaker 2: filed a case one that got my job back. So
Speaker 2: in the beginning, we augmented the night team and so
Speaker 2: we would do this terrorism VTC in the middle of
Speaker 2: the night, and there were so all the different agency CIA, DA,
Speaker 2: Joined Terrorism Task Force and there was a Special Ops
Speaker 2: Task Force. I think this was around the Rhino era
Speaker 2: when we were in Rhino and so like Joined Task
Speaker 2: Force whatever twenty or whatever they were would pop on
Speaker 2: and they were clearly in a tent. So we were
Speaker 2: sitting there one night and we're doing the roll call
Speaker 2: to make sure everyone's on and Task Force whatever it was,
Speaker 2: twenty pops in and there's gunfire or like, damn, what's
Speaker 2: going on there? Are they getting overrun or whatever? And
Speaker 2: it gets muted and we hear it. Sorry, we were
Speaker 2: watching a movie, so that was a little nutty. But
Speaker 2: another funny thing that kind of happened is we are
Speaker 2: getting ready to put all those C seventeens into Rhino.
Speaker 2: I think they were moving in the hundred and first
Speaker 2: and maybe some Marines in there. And in the middle
Speaker 2: of the briefing, you know, the C seventeen can land
Speaker 2: on a dirt strip, like it has that capability. But
Speaker 2: the middle of the briefing that J three is like,
Speaker 2: have we done any studies about the long term effects
Speaker 2: of landing C seventeens on dirt runways? The room went quiet.
Speaker 2: Everyone's just looking at each other, and he's like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess we're about to find out. So so my
Speaker 2: job eventually became the asymmetric threat she So we produced
Speaker 2: the disomid. The briefing team had a group of briefers
Speaker 2: that would then do the J two and the J
Speaker 2: three briefs in the morning. So they would come in
Speaker 2: at like midnight. I would come in at like three
Speaker 2: or four, kind of read the intel, read their products.
Speaker 2: We'd brief it to the deputy or the current intelllogience chief,
Speaker 2: and then we'd brief it in the J two and
Speaker 2: then we go and we brief it in the J
Speaker 2: three later in the morning. So one of the weirder
Speaker 2: days is we walked in on a Monday and anaconda
Speaker 2: had just happened, and like the J three is like
Speaker 2: hair on fire, Like okay, we're air refueling direct apaches
Speaker 2: from or Campbell and we're rounding up all this ac
Speaker 2: one thirty AMO from all the world air refuel direct
Speaker 2: getting it over there. I know the briefing that the
Speaker 2: J three is like, two, how come you didn't tell
Speaker 2: us about this? And we're like that's because we're the
Speaker 2: two Like we don't know what the J three is doing,
Speaker 2: what the two is going is doing, So they actually
Speaker 2: had to assign an officer to keep track of that
Speaker 2: and keep them up to data what the three was
Speaker 2: doing because we've really had no idea. We were just
Speaker 2: reading intel traffic. So I did get to go to
Speaker 2: the OH. I did get a information war briefing that
Speaker 2: was super fascinating. I had a guy who kind of
Speaker 2: worked information war. So we had this arm come in
Speaker 2: and it was a contractor contracting company and they were
Speaker 2: running the information war campaign for that war, and they
Speaker 2: gave us, you know, how they do things, how they
Speaker 2: do information bracketing, like they would put stories out there
Speaker 2: in advance to get picked up by the media and
Speaker 2: to drive their briefings. And it really changed my view
Speaker 2: on everything. These were just a political company that was
Speaker 2: hired and they were doing that and they were on
Speaker 2: like a joint VTC every morning to get the messaging right.
Speaker 2: Just things that you don't really get to see a
Speaker 2: whole lot of. But I went to the Dynamics of
Speaker 2: International Terrorism course which was at Joint Special Ops you,
Speaker 2: which was pretty amazing. Course, our speakers were General Doser,
Speaker 2: who had gotten kidnapped by the Red Brigades. We had
Speaker 2: the real guy who was kidnapped by the farc and
Speaker 2: proof of life we had the force protection guy from
Speaker 2: Cobar Towers. So it was a legit course. It was
Speaker 2: really really good. So yeah, I got released after a year.
Speaker 2: And in the middle of that, I got another issue
Speaker 2: with my job in that the contract went from one
Speaker 2: company from MPRI to Contact and I got an email
Speaker 2: from and They're like, you've never worked for us, so
Speaker 2: you don't have any reemployment rights with us. So I
Speaker 2: went to my Department of Labor rep and I'm like, dude,
Speaker 2: what's going on here? Like, I don't know what to
Speaker 2: make of this? Think goes, no problem, got it, It's
Speaker 2: a continuation of interest. So they ended up having to
Speaker 2: hire like a dozen people back that they tried to
Speaker 2: screw over. So so then I went back to Missoo
Speaker 2: that reserve unit and oh yeah, another thing is I
Speaker 2: did do is I did brief at the ten oh
Speaker 2: three Tipfit Briefing or Iraqi Freedom And that was in
Speaker 2: February of two. So I went into the bulk, got
Speaker 2: right into the plan and then presented my briefing before
Speaker 2: the assembled crew and the tipfit meeting is like a
Speaker 2: big food fight for everyone wants to get their folks
Speaker 2: in early, Like do you take the loggies in early?
Speaker 2: Do you take the infantry in early? Do you do
Speaker 2: those kinds of things, like what's the right flo for
Speaker 2: all this where everything works the best? So that was
Speaker 2: pretty interesting. So I went back to Missou and then
Speaker 2: I was back at RTC. Everything's going great, and then
Speaker 2: I get another email, Hey from my company. Hey, we
Speaker 2: are overstaffed at your position and you're the junior employee,
Speaker 2: so you have to go. I'm like, are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: I'm the original guy, Like I'm the first guy, Like
Speaker 2: none of this happened without me getting called up a
Speaker 2: year ago or a year and a half ago. So
Speaker 2: again I called him Dennis McElroy a US Department of Labor.
Speaker 2: He's like like, what are these people thinking? So again
Speaker 2: I got reinstated again. Third time I had to get
Speaker 2: my job back. Now I felt awful though, because the
Speaker 2: guy who had taken my position, buddy of mine named
Speaker 2: Terry Heisler, he Signal Corps guy, so he was losing
Speaker 2: his job. But I actually called trans Comm and got
Speaker 2: him hooked up with the j six because he was
Speaker 2: a Signal Corps dude, and so he got orders to
Speaker 2: go to go to Transcom J six for like a year,
Speaker 2: and it actually worked out for him because the daughter
Speaker 2: got really sick with cancer and needed that medical attention
Speaker 2: that would be paid for, so so that actually worked
Speaker 2: out for him. He now owns a beer garden in Washington, Missouri,
Speaker 2: so John G's if you ever go there. So so really,
Speaker 2: I mean from there, just continued to teach RTC. Summer
Speaker 2: of seven, I walked, I walked stick Slanes, and I
Speaker 2: was doing pretty well. I felt pretty good about all that.
Speaker 2: So I was at the Van's camp up in Lewis
Speaker 2: walk in I don't know, five seven miles a day
Speaker 2: with gear. I got back and I was at a
Speaker 2: World War two division reunion to connect with some vetsite
Speaker 2: in New and I had this massive chest pain. I
Speaker 2: was like, oh shit, what is this? And I went
Speaker 2: white and then I recovered. I went and saw the
Speaker 2: doctor and they didn't know what it was. So then
Speaker 2: I went to cup Weeks later, I was at Kansas
Speaker 2: City for drill and I had another one of those
Speaker 2: in the heart in a hotel room. I was by myself,
Speaker 2: so I called nine one one ended up in the hospital,
Speaker 2: and really that started like a year long ordeal for me.
Speaker 2: My spleen was destroying my red blood cells and my
Speaker 2: hemo globan count was like four point eight where it's
Speaker 2: supposed to be like fifteen to eighteen. So it was
Speaker 2: really my spleen that was causing that. So I went
Speaker 2: through that for a period of time, and then it
Speaker 2: was really kind of time for me to get out
Speaker 2: of Missoo. Like Missoo, I was just kind of done
Speaker 2: with it, and so I went ahead and got a
Speaker 2: job at Missouri Military Academy. Although the last year we
Speaker 2: were there, we got the MacArthur Award for best RTC
Speaker 2: program Western Mississippi, and we had failed an inspection like
Speaker 2: four years before horribly. I mean I thought my boss
Speaker 2: was going to jump over a table at our personnel person.
Speaker 2: But so I also changed reserve units. I got out
Speaker 2: of the JTAU. I just felt like I had done
Speaker 2: everything I could there, and again it's your free agent,
Speaker 2: you got to go find another job. So I actually
Speaker 2: found the Command in General Staff College, which I had
Speaker 2: a background in education, that seemed to be like a
Speaker 2: good fit. So they put me in as the S
Speaker 2: three and then I could become a student after that,
Speaker 2: which was perfect because I do wasn't have to do
Speaker 2: like two weekends. So my first job as the S
Speaker 2: three was to give a PT test to eighty lieutenant
Speaker 2: colonels and that was a good time. And so I
Speaker 2: ended up finishing the course and became a instructor, and
Speaker 2: then I eventually became a lead instructor and then I
Speaker 2: became a head of school for that unit. On the
Speaker 2: civilian side, I went to Missouri Military Academy as a
Speaker 2: director of College Placement Counseling, So it was again another
Speaker 2: uniform job I did testing college placement toss history military history.
Speaker 2: One of the kids that was there some people may
Speaker 2: know Ian Ives. He was a combat cameraman that got
Speaker 2: blown up in Afghanistan in twenty nineteen. So he was
Speaker 2: one of my kids there and he's doing okay. I
Speaker 2: think he lost an eye and jacked up his arm
Speaker 2: pretty good. But so I was there for six years.
Speaker 2: It was pretty toxic. So then I ended up looking
Speaker 2: for another job. And my final job in the Army
Speaker 2: Reserve was that I had to set up a schoolhouse
Speaker 2: at Camp Parks, California, which is where the MythBusters blow
Speaker 2: everything up. So it's right across the mountains from Oakland, California,
Speaker 2: and so as a new side I had to go
Speaker 2: out there, had to figure out however was going to
Speaker 2: get there, messing classrooms, all that kind of stuff. And
Speaker 2: then when we did our first iteration out there, it
Speaker 2: was March of twenty fifteen, and I had four classrooms,
Speaker 2: maybe eight instructors, and at one point I had like
Speaker 2: twelve inspectors there on the ground. And these are all
Speaker 2: people that got orders to come out to California in
Speaker 2: the winter, and then they would check in with us
Speaker 2: for like an hour or two hours and say everything's
Speaker 2: going great, and then we wouldn't see him for four days.
Speaker 2: So but yeah, I ended up retiring from there, and
Speaker 2: then I ended up at the Catholic school that I'm
Speaker 2: at right now because I was friends with the principal
Speaker 2: and she wanted the program placement program that I built
Speaker 2: at the Military Academy. I kind of turned around that program,
Speaker 2: and so I ended up getting hired in twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: and jumped in there and basically start doing a lot
Speaker 2: of the same things I was doing at the Military Academy,
Speaker 2: except this time I got to work with girls, so
Speaker 2: working with you know, working well with boys before and
Speaker 2: now there are boys and girls. Although our kids are
Speaker 2: so sweet, they're great kids. So yeah, I'm in my
Speaker 2: twelfth year there. Fourth principal went through COVID school. We
Speaker 2: stayed open where the public schools closed. So I do
Speaker 2: the master Schedule Career Center, which is like our votech center.
Speaker 2: Coordinate with that. I'm like the I'll know for that.
Speaker 2: Mobley Area Community College were the largest earner of dual
Speaker 2: credits for Mobley Area Community College, although we were one
Speaker 2: of the smaller schools testing. Just drop a few names
Speaker 2: of some kids we've had through the school. This guy
Speaker 2: in Brooklyn, you might know a boy the name of
Speaker 2: Michael Porter Junior plays for the Mets, and I.
Speaker 1: Don't know anything about baseball, I'm afraid.
Speaker 2: From Mets.
Speaker 1: The only person from Brooklyn that people seem to be
Speaker 1: talking about this week, it's Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 2: Imagine that. Imagine that. Well, anyway, they're talking about trading
Speaker 2: him from Brooklyn to Detroit. But so, he was a
Speaker 2: kid at our school for a couple of years. His
Speaker 2: brother John Tay a really good kid, but he got
Speaker 2: caught up in that whole gambling thing up with the
Speaker 2: Toronto Raptors. Oh yeah, so, and he got banned for
Speaker 2: a livefe from that. And then cam Lee is a
Speaker 2: kid that just got picked up by the Baltimore Orioles.
Speaker 2: And then there's another kid who was just kind of
Speaker 2: floating around by the name of Sophie Cunningham, who you
Speaker 2: might know of her as a player on the Indiana Beaver.
Speaker 2: She's a she's like the enforcer for Kaitlin Clark. So
Speaker 2: she didn't go to my school, but she she was
Speaker 2: the same age and went through eighth grade with the
Speaker 2: kids at my school, and so she was always around
Speaker 2: and I actually knew her grandma. So those are kind
Speaker 2: of all my brushes with Christmas. Yeah. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 2: it's been interesting. We've had a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of kind of known people that I brushed up against
Speaker 2: here and there. So it's been it's been a good run.
Speaker 1: And how did the writing come into the picture? How
Speaker 1: did that start for you? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Really it was again, I got a BAMA in history,
Speaker 2: and uh, that's what you do, you write, and so
Speaker 2: when it came time to write my master's thesis, I
Speaker 2: discouraged to write anything military that like, you can get
Speaker 2: a job if you write something military. So I was
Speaker 2: a little bit desperate for a topic. So I was
Speaker 2: watching the movie Convoy with based upon the song the C. W.
Speaker 2: McCall song Chris Christofferson. I'm watching this movie, I'm like,
Speaker 2: this is an amazing expression of American culture. So I
Speaker 2: actually wrote my master's thesis as a cultural history of
Speaker 2: CB Radios, which is actually my first book. In fact,
Speaker 2: I argue that it's that it's really America's first social
Speaker 2: media platform. So there's that. The second book was a
Speaker 2: just a paper I turned into about a doctor who
Speaker 2: gets some self arrested down in southern Moon County and
Speaker 2: gets some stuff for released by the president. And then
Speaker 2: third book was a series of articles I said together
Speaker 2: about army chaplain's like what they what were their qualifications,
Speaker 2: what equipment did they have, and what were like the
Speaker 2: basic soldier religious items. And then the third book, a
Speaker 2: fourth book involves this guy right here, Yeah, I wrote.
Speaker 2: I wrote the book War Pigeons, which is about the
Speaker 2: pigeon corep and how the Signal Pigeon Corps operated and
Speaker 2: how a signal pigeon company operated in the army and
Speaker 2: all the different equipment and things like that. So that
Speaker 2: was a lot of fun to write, and I get
Speaker 2: to speak about that one in Missouri. And then my
Speaker 2: fifth book was about a small town in Missouri that
Speaker 2: burned in ninety minutes in October twenty second, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: combine spin a wall of flame at them at the town.
Speaker 2: Eight minutes later, the first home caught on fire, and
Speaker 2: ninety minutes later, half of this town of twenty eight
Speaker 2: people's gone. Is cool?
Speaker 1: What led up to that? Just out of curiosity, like
Speaker 1: how did it burn so quickly? That's like kind kind
Speaker 1: of unheard of in this day and age, right.
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly unheard of in the Midwest, like California,
Speaker 2: you know, still big Jing.
Speaker 1: I wrote a book about wildfire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I read a book about wildfires
Speaker 2: before wildfires were cool in Hawaii and California. But it
Speaker 2: was a it was a red flag warning average twenty
Speaker 2: mile prior winds. There was a defect in the in
Speaker 2: the combine and he was going basically east to west.
Speaker 2: The winds were coming from the south, and it just
Speaker 2: put out this wall of flame quarter mile wall of flame,
Speaker 2: and those winds just pushed it into the first homes
Speaker 2: and you know people people looked out their doors and
Speaker 2: there's a wall of flame coming at their house. So
Speaker 2: it was a little crazy. And the first responder. I
Speaker 2: have all the audio recordings for it. I have the
Speaker 2: nine one one call and I have the uh the
Speaker 2: like the first responder. And so there's like a twenty
Speaker 2: two year old firefighter. He lives in the fire station
Speaker 2: Volunteer Fire Department, you know, five acre brush Fire, Woldridge, Missouri.
Speaker 2: He rolls down there, he shows up in the whole
Speaker 2: town's catching on fire, and he's by himself. Wow, And
Speaker 2: you can hear it in his voice. He's like he's stressed,
Speaker 2: but he's like immediately called for second tone and then
Speaker 2: third tones to get backups. He started evacuating the town.
Speaker 2: He got on the speaker on his brush truck and
Speaker 2: told people to get out of there and called for backup.
Speaker 2: And he's really a he's a little bit of a hero.
Speaker 2: Well he did everything right, let's just say that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but the people in that town, only one family had insurance.
Speaker 2: Everyone else lost everything. They didn't get anything from FEMA.
Speaker 2: It's just kind of a really really sad story about
Speaker 2: what happened there. But It was the largest mutual eight
Speaker 2: fire response in the history of the state of Missouri.
Speaker 2: One hundred and sixty three firefighters from sixty six departments
Speaker 2: showed up to that. So that was And I only
Speaker 2: got into that story because we were I'd heard about it.
Speaker 2: I was out of town when it happened, and I
Speaker 2: heard about it. We had some families that lived in
Speaker 2: that area from the school, and I just I called
Speaker 2: the family contact. I'm like, you guys need help. We've
Speaker 2: got like a day off coming up here. We can
Speaker 2: get some kids to come down and help them. Like
Speaker 2: made some calls. Yeah, sure. We had forty four kids
Speaker 2: show up in parents and we didn't have to tell
Speaker 2: them to do a damn thing. Like they saw what
Speaker 2: they had to do. And the only thing that was
Speaker 2: left was like doorknobs and appliances, and you know, some
Speaker 2: kids were digging around and found some rings and a
Speaker 2: few other personal artifacts, but it was it was not good.
Speaker 2: And then they called us and wanted us to come back,
Speaker 2: and so we went back over Christmas and New Year's
Speaker 2: and a couple of weeks later had this brilliant idea
Speaker 2: to write a book about it, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: Hunter page book, you know, firefighters being helpful and safety
Speaker 2: and all that kind of stuff, And then I got
Speaker 2: into it and got pretty dark different points. But it
Speaker 2: came out on the anniversary of the fire. Wow.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's it's great that you were able
Speaker 1: to chronicle that piece of local history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's really a crazy story when you
Speaker 2: get into it, and just and I'm and the problem
Speaker 2: with writing that book is, like twenty things are happening
Speaker 2: literally at the sasire, so you have to kind of
Speaker 2: interweave and introduce characters and things like that. So my fifth,
Speaker 2: my sixth book was on the US military hand cart,
Speaker 2: which I know people are super excited about that, but
Speaker 2: so the US military used hand carts from World War One,
Speaker 2: really untiled Korea, so the whole purpose of them were
Speaker 2: to carry heavy weapons. And so before half tracks existed,
Speaker 2: the plan for mechanized infantry was to use ten and
Speaker 2: a half trucks. And this is in the mid nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: So the and a half trucks would go up to
Speaker 2: a couple of miles short or maybe like a mile
Speaker 2: short of the front lines as the tanks rolled forward,
Speaker 2: and then these guys would dismount and they would take
Speaker 2: their weapons on these carts, and so the army perfected
Speaker 2: that design. But then by World War Two starting, they
Speaker 2: had half tracks, they had jeeps, they had things that
Speaker 2: they can mount weapons. So they ended up they ended
Speaker 2: up giving them to airborne units and assault units that
Speaker 2: may not have their equipment. So a lot of people
Speaker 2: refer to them as airborne carts, but they really predate
Speaker 2: airborne by like five years. So that was my sixth
Speaker 2: and now my seventh Spy Catchers, interrogators, and analysts, and
Speaker 2: that's why we're here today. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So tell us about this book. What this one's about.
Speaker 2: Well, most most history about intelligence and World War two
Speaker 2: focuses on really two things, the oss and glorious bastards
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff in Bletchley Park, like the whole
Speaker 2: imitation game and things like that, And so I knew
Speaker 2: that there were a lot of other folks on the ground,
Speaker 2: so I went through to kind of document all of
Speaker 2: these other moss which are really the foundation for what
Speaker 2: we have in am I today. And I started off
Speaker 2: with doctrine and looked at it and it's really not
Speaker 2: that different than what I learned in the eighties. Late
Speaker 2: eighties intelligence for the commander. They have a decision support template.
Speaker 2: That's part of that. It's a little slightly different. They
Speaker 2: have essential elements of information, which is really like their
Speaker 2: pirs at that point. But so I documented that and
Speaker 2: then I went through the pipelines of where these soldiers
Speaker 2: came from. Now, the US didn't have really any serious
Speaker 2: capability before World War Two. They had like sixteen counter
Speaker 2: intelligence police. There were some sick Ginners and that was
Speaker 2: about it. But so they went to the Britz. They said,
Speaker 2: how do you guys do this? And they gave him
Speaker 2: a template and that's what they ended up using. So
Speaker 2: they stood up a schoolhouse at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and
Speaker 2: the schoolhouse trained the photo interpreters and order battle teams,
Speaker 2: and then they also trained the ETO based linguists and
Speaker 2: a lot of those were expat German Jews. Again, they're
Speaker 2: called the Richie Boys because.
Speaker 1: They had Henry Kissingers in the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Kissinger is a little bit different. A Kissinger was
Speaker 2: actually never a school trained in my guy, and the
Speaker 2: guy that he wrote on the Coattails with was also
Speaker 2: not a school trained guy. In fact, Fritz Kramer, the
Speaker 2: other guy, was trying to get into the OSS and
Speaker 2: they didn't take him, so he got drafted as an
Speaker 2: infantryman and he was up on a platform yelling during
Speaker 2: a training exercise. I mean, he's like an infantry private
Speaker 2: yelling at them in German to try and make the
Speaker 2: training seem better, and the division commanders there, he's like,
Speaker 2: who's that guy? Who's that guy there? So they actually
Speaker 2: actually moved him into the G two shop and he
Speaker 2: became friends with Kissinger, and our Kissinger was a high
Speaker 2: IQ guy. He was going to Brooklyn College maybe or
Speaker 2: somewhere like City College of New York to become an accountant.
Speaker 2: And he gets drafted and he gets he's a high
Speaker 2: AQ guy. So he gets put in this army specialized
Speaker 2: training program which took high AQ guys, and they sent
Speaker 2: him to college to try and have them get degrees
Speaker 2: and operate the more high tech equipment. In nineteen forty five,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six, nineteen forty seven, as the war goes on,
Speaker 2: so you know, Kissinger goes to a college in Pennsylvania
Speaker 2: and you know, doing well, and the Army in the
Speaker 2: spring of nineteen forty four discovers they have a personnel shortage.
Speaker 2: They have an infantrymen shortage, and where can we get
Speaker 2: more infantrymen. There's three hundred thousand college boys. So they
Speaker 2: knocked the as from three hundred thousand to thirty thousand
Speaker 2: and sent all those guys on orders to the infantry divisions.
Speaker 2: So Kissinger shows up to g Company of the three
Speaker 2: three fifth Infantry, just a normal infantry company, and he
Speaker 2: madily gets poison ivy and is in the hospital for
Speaker 2: forty five days. And then they did some sort of
Speaker 2: a psychological test with him and they found that he
Speaker 2: wasn't really suited to be an infantryman, so they made
Speaker 2: him like a driver. And then eventually his connections with Kramer,
Speaker 2: who talks to the division commander, gets him assigned to
Speaker 2: the counter Intelligence Corps and he ends up working in
Speaker 2: the counter intelligence Corps. And Kramer gets a German garrison
Speaker 2: to surrender of like fifty guys by himself in like
Speaker 2: November December of forty four. He literally just walks into
Speaker 2: this town and talks to him and gets them to surrender.
Speaker 2: So he gets a field promotion, and then Kissinger is
Speaker 2: given this assignment to stand up like civil affairs operations
Speaker 2: in this one German village and he gets everything going
Speaker 2: in a period of like two weeks, and he gets
Speaker 2: promoted to sergeant. They tried to get him constructive credit
Speaker 2: to be a CIC agent, and the Army said no,
Speaker 2: and he did actually get his He actually did become
Speaker 2: a certified agent, but that was not until like in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty seven. So Kramer and Kissinger actually became long
Speaker 2: term friends. And the book actually has a picture of
Speaker 2: Kramer and Kissinger in the office with Nixon. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And so what has the reception been like to the
Speaker 1: book so far.
Speaker 2: It's been pretty good. It's pretty good. I was just
Speaker 2: a show of shows in Louisville and it was you know,
Speaker 2: people are like, oh, this is really interesting, sold quite
Speaker 2: a few copies of it, and just starting to get
Speaker 2: the promotion for it out there. That's why we're talking today. Sure,
Speaker 2: but but it's it's just a completely different angle and
Speaker 2: really a lot of this information is already out there,
Speaker 2: you know, like the NISSI interpreters, interrogators, that whole school
Speaker 2: that they set up in Minnesota, the singing operations at
Speaker 2: vent Hill Farms. The CIIC got itself into a little
Speaker 2: bit of trouble early on. They tried to make them
Speaker 2: into They tried to make them into like gmen. So
Speaker 2: their schoolhouse was in Chicago at the Tower Town Club
Speaker 2: on Michigan Avenue. So they would go out and they'd
Speaker 2: do their practice surveillance exercises and stuff on Michigan Avenue,
Speaker 2: and they would they would go to Underwriters Laboratory to
Speaker 2: get some like scientific training. In the Chicago Police Lab.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty three, they got themselves in a little
Speaker 2: bit of hot water. So they were they were following
Speaker 2: a guy who was involved with the youth Labor movement
Speaker 2: who they thought was a communist. I feel pretty sure
Speaker 2: he was a communist in fact, and he was friends
Speaker 2: with Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt introduced him to
Speaker 2: his future spouse, and so the CIIC recorded a meeting
Speaker 2: between him and Eleanor Roosevelt, and then later on they
Speaker 2: recorded an encounter between him and his future wife in
Speaker 2: the same hotel room. That's one version of the story.
Speaker 2: The other story is a little bit different, just some
Speaker 2: of the details are a little different. If you read
Speaker 2: the guy who is involves account. But word gets back
Speaker 2: to the White House that the CIC may have intercepted
Speaker 2: an encounter with the first lady and that did not
Speaker 2: play well. So they ended up shit rolled down hill
Speaker 2: to the CIC and they got and from Washington. The
Speaker 2: school house got shut down for like a year. Eventually
Speaker 2: it was re established at Richie and they focused on
Speaker 2: tactical counterintelligence, but it was kind of a not a
Speaker 2: good situation for them to be in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I can imagine. Well, I think it's great
Speaker 1: that you captured this unit history and this is the
Speaker 1: type of book that you know, people in your career
Speaker 1: field are going to want to read. And as you said,
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of it is already out there.
Speaker 1: A lot of this stuff is declassified, but it's incumbent
Speaker 1: on folks like you to kind of bring it all together.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah. I've got one story I want to
Speaker 2: talk about though, from my school, if you will indulge me.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: So a few years ago we had and I have
Speaker 2: permission from the parent to do this, but we had
Speaker 2: an international kid that had come to our school, very
Speaker 2: very talented kid from a country that had just been invaded.
Speaker 2: You can figure out which one it is, and you know,
Speaker 2: a six foot ten target's not a good thing. A
Speaker 2: junior Olympic level player, and he showed up on our
Speaker 2: doorstep and so we gave him nigh twenty. He was
Speaker 2: there for about five days and we lost him. He disappeared.
Speaker 2: We didn't know where he went. We're trying to find him.
Speaker 2: He was with this like post high school basketball team
Speaker 2: thing that turned out to be a little sketchy. So
Speaker 2: but we couldn't find this kid, and we called the cops.
Speaker 2: We did everything we could do, and we were getting
Speaker 2: into a situation where we were in the I twenty fraud.
Speaker 2: And so I saw him on Valentine's Day in the
Speaker 2: grocery store, but I lost track of him. And then
Speaker 2: like about a week later, my phone rang and it
Speaker 2: was a sports agent from somewhere in Virginia, and he
Speaker 2: calls me and he's the guy that put the kid
Speaker 2: into this particular school. And so it turns out what
Speaker 2: had happened is the sports program had the prior year.
Speaker 2: There's going to be a connection, hearing, just let me
Speaker 2: get to it. This particular sports program the year before
Speaker 2: had lived in some student housing and not paid the
Speaker 2: entire year, and they got fined seventy four thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: So this was the second year. So he actually the
Speaker 2: guy who ran it rented a dorm from a local
Speaker 2: university and then he didn't pay them either, so they
Speaker 2: kicked him out because there was vandalism and drug use
Speaker 2: and things like that. And then they bounced from hotel
Speaker 2: to hotel to hotel with as soon as you know,
Speaker 2: like a week no payment, they would move, another week,
Speaker 2: no payment they would move. And this is like twenty people.
Speaker 2: This is not a small group. And so this this
Speaker 2: coach calls me says, you know, this kid, I put
Speaker 2: him here. I feel bad. He's in a bad situation.
Speaker 2: We got to go get him, like like, so we
Speaker 2: got to do something here. This is not a good
Speaker 2: situation that particular team had ended. So this kid was
Speaker 2: living in an apartment with a mattress and nothing else.
Speaker 2: The dudes he was living with were like charging him
Speaker 2: to go to the grocery store. Not not a cool situation.
Speaker 2: So we're like, okay, we'll have him get to school.
Speaker 2: So he gets to school and we figure out what's
Speaker 2: going on all these different threads about you know, what's
Speaker 2: really going on with this situation. We called a guy
Speaker 2: from an organization called City of Refuge. He found like
Speaker 2: an older couple who's gonna who are willing to take him?
Speaker 2: We're like, oh, thank god, And so they called her
Speaker 2: doctor to get advice. And the doctor was a school
Speaker 2: mom from my high school, and she's like, well, hey,
Speaker 2: we'll take him. So so okay, we got a good
Speaker 2: place for this guy, but we got to go get
Speaker 2: this kid. And so the City of Refuge guy thought
Speaker 2: that this might be a little bit shady, like this
Speaker 2: may this may break bad for us, so, you know,
Speaker 2: rather than a pickup, it could become an distraction. So
Speaker 2: he called a lady named Nannette who's with the Stop
Speaker 2: Human Trafficking Coalition, and she agreed and she gave us
Speaker 2: a security guy. So we met at the fire station
Speaker 2: and this security dude rolls up, and this dude is
Speaker 2: fricking John Wick. He's driving a five series BMW. He
Speaker 2: looks like he just stepped out of a out of
Speaker 2: a structure store. And we kind of developed a plan
Speaker 2: and then we went knocked on the door. It turned
Speaker 2: out to be a non event and that John Wick
Speaker 2: dude disappeared, So I finally figured out who John Wick was.
Speaker 2: That was a guy by the name of Ryan Burke.
Speaker 2: Is it ring? A bell. No, Andrew Milbourne would know
Speaker 2: who he is. He's the guy that sued Andrew Milbourne, oh,
Speaker 2: for definite defamation.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that was so he just got shot and killed.
Speaker 2: Actually that guy really? Yeah? Yeah, and that that's kind
Speaker 2: of where I was going with this. Yeah, he got
Speaker 2: about two weeks ago, Saturday night of our Sunday night
Speaker 2: before before Martin Luther King Day. He was doing a
Speaker 2: Facebook marketplace deal and these four kids showed up, the
Speaker 2: oldest being eighteen. One was a juvenile. The deal went
Speaker 2: bad and they shot and killed him.
Speaker 1: I think I saw this. Yeah, the yes, I didn't
Speaker 1: know it was the guy that tried to sue Milburn. Wow,
Speaker 1: holy shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the same guy. And actually I found out
Speaker 2: later on that he almost became my coworker in that
Speaker 2: he was he was in the running for like a
Speaker 2: campus ministry job to work with me, and the lady
Speaker 2: that we ended up hiring ended up actually becoming really
Speaker 2: good friends with him. And actually he was so distraught
Speaker 2: she couldn't come into work the day after this happened.
Speaker 2: But so I would suggest everyone look at his Facebook
Speaker 2: profile and just see who he is and what he is.
Speaker 2: The allegation that came out from Andrew. I think Andrew
Speaker 2: was coming from an honorable place. I think that he
Speaker 2: you know, again, he won the lawsuit, the defamation suit,
Speaker 2: although that may not necessarily that may just speak to
Speaker 2: his motivations and sourcing, but not necessarily what occurred in
Speaker 2: the end. Only two people in the world know what
Speaker 2: happened in that situation. And I know people who went
Speaker 2: to who grew up with him here in Columbia. I
Speaker 2: knew people who knew him when he was at Missoo.
Speaker 2: I was at Missoo at the same time. This was
Speaker 2: the dude that showed up from the human trafficking coalition
Speaker 2: to go get that kid on a Sunday morning that
Speaker 2: he didn't know. And I don't know what happened in Ukraine,
Speaker 2: but I can say. What I will say is it's
Speaker 2: completely out of character with who he is, absolutely out
Speaker 2: of character with who he is. And I'm actually very nice.
Speaker 2: There are many of my friends who are like, this
Speaker 2: is absolute bullshit. So but again, I'm not accusing Andrew
Speaker 2: of anything. I think he was probably coming He's an
Speaker 2: officer and a gentleman. I'm assuming he's coming from a
Speaker 2: good place. But you know, stuff can happen with alcohol.
Speaker 2: I get that, but in the end, this is completely
Speaker 2: out of character with the rest of this man's life.
Speaker 2: And I'm just trying to set the record straight because
Speaker 2: I met him, I looked him in the eye, and
Speaker 2: he helped me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, people are multifaceted. They're not all good
Speaker 1: or all bad as we often want to believe.
Speaker 2: Sorry, sorry to drop that on you at the end,
Speaker 2: but you know, I say, the people that I knew
Speaker 2: that knew him were just amazing, twenty of the best
Speaker 2: people I've ever met in my life. And you know,
Speaker 2: people are still upset about it. So of course, so
Speaker 2: I don't know what happened in Ukraine, but I can
Speaker 2: tell you everyone in his hometown and in the town
Speaker 2: where he died thinks it's it's not true.
Speaker 1: I mean, whatever, the case is kind of irrelevant, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I mean, the guy got murdered by, you know, trying
Speaker 1: to sell something on Facebook, Facebook marketplace. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's sort of the bigger issue here.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I think so. But this is like the
Speaker 2: day after this happened, a local media company put out
Speaker 2: a story saying that he may have been murdered because
Speaker 2: of what happened in Ukraine, and I'm like, oh, I don't,
Speaker 2: I don't think so, Yeah, I don't. I know, I
Speaker 2: don't think so. I think this guy was just trying
Speaker 2: to grab a headline and things like that. But it
Speaker 2: really kind of brought it back to the forefront and
Speaker 2: really really solid this guy's reputation. So I would encourage
Speaker 2: anyone to just go look at his Facebook profile and
Speaker 2: see who he was. It's very curated, it's very millennial,
Speaker 2: but like there's like one of the last videos he
Speaker 2: posted was him playing his guitar for a bunch of
Speaker 2: school children in Uganda, and that was a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Damn, that's terrible. Yeah, So, Tim, uh, anything else you
Speaker 1: want to talk about before we get going tonight.
Speaker 2: I think that's basically it. I you know, I appreciate,
Speaker 2: appreciate the time coming on here. If you're interested in
Speaker 2: the book, go to lulu dot com and search for
Speaker 2: my name Tim Shear s e H E R R
Speaker 2: E R and should come up with my page. It's
Speaker 2: not on Amazon yet and might not for a while,
Speaker 2: but I think it's I think it's a solid book.
Speaker 2: I had a lot of fun writing it, and I
Speaker 2: think people are going to enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's great. And your other books can be found
Speaker 1: there too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything's on there. Actually there's a cat calendar on
Speaker 2: there too, although I made that for my mom. So
Speaker 2: and in fact your my mom loved loved your book,
Speaker 2: your book.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I'm happy to hear that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I gave it to her for Chris last
Speaker 2: year and it was a big hit in the eighty
Speaker 2: five year old booking home demo.
Speaker 1: That's great, it's right in their wheelhouse. Everyone, thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us tonight. Really appreciate Tim sheher joining us on
Speaker 1: the show. The book is Spycatchers, Interrogators and Analysts. I
Speaker 1: hope you guys will go check it out at lulu
Speaker 1: dot com and we will see all of you next time. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I want to tell all of you today about a
Speaker 1: new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast,
Speaker 1: the eyes On podcast, and the high Side News outlet,
Speaker 1: which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going
Speaker 1: to be once a week. It's going to come into
Speaker 1: your inbox and you're going to get the most current
Speaker 1: podcasts on eyes On and the teamhouse and whatever's topical
Speaker 1: or current on the high side. So it's another way
Speaker 1: for us to get the information out to you as
Speaker 1: social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really
Speaker 1: know what you're gonna get. So this is a once
Speaker 1: a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it
Speaker 1: will have you know the greatest hits of that week.
Speaker 1: It's really good man checking it out. The website for
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Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: You go there and you enter into your email lists
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Speaker 2: Where's the link.
Speaker 1: The link will also be down in the description if
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