Speaker 1: I found out this step, I have to say not me.
Speaker 2: All right, folks, here we are episode forty of the
Speaker 2: Team House. I can't believe we got the forty already.
Speaker 2: I'm Jack Murphy here. I think a few screens over,
Speaker 2: Depending on how your view is organized, you'll see co
Speaker 2: host Dave Park and you will also see our guest
Speaker 2: for tonight, Sergeant Major retired Mike Vining. Sergeant Major Vining
Speaker 2: is you know, honestly, you're one of my favorite veterans
Speaker 2: to interview. I've had the opportunity to twice before and
Speaker 2: it's always really a lot of fun. Sargeant Major Vining
Speaker 2: entered into US Army Basic training in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 2: and became an explosive ordnance disposal technician. He was deployed
Speaker 2: to Vietnam and received the Bronze Star in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 2: and in nineteen seventy eight he volunteered for a new
Speaker 2: unit that was being formed. He became one of the
Speaker 2: original members of Delta Force, and when the unit was
Speaker 2: validated and stood up in nineteen eighty, Sergeant Major Vining
Speaker 2: was one of the participants in Operation Eagle Claw. This
Speaker 2: is the operation we're going to talk about the most tonight,
Speaker 2: I think that the bulk of this stream will be
Speaker 2: talking about Eagle Claw, because just on the twenty fourth
Speaker 2: last week, we came up on the fortieth anniversary of
Speaker 2: Eagle Claw, and that was a Delta Force mission to
Speaker 2: attempt to rescue fifty two American hostages being held at
Speaker 2: the US Embassy in Tehran. Now, Sergeant Major Vining went
Speaker 2: on to do much more in his career. He was
Speaker 2: also an Operation Urgent Fury, the Invasion of Grenada. He
Speaker 2: went back to Delta Force where he served as the
Speaker 2: chief EOD Technician, the Research and Development Sergeant major, in
Speaker 2: the Breaching Sergeant Major, and then he rounded out his
Speaker 2: career at Jaysock as the Special Plans Sergeant Major. On
Speaker 2: top of that, as we were talking just before the
Speaker 2: stream started, Mike Vining is also an avid mountaineering and climbing,
Speaker 2: rock climbing enthusiasm and spelunker. Just really so many amazing
Speaker 2: things that that Mike has done in life, and we're
Speaker 2: really honored to have them here tonight. We can't possibly
Speaker 2: get to all of it, so we're really not going
Speaker 2: to try. We're going to try to focus on Eagle
Speaker 2: Class since it is the fortieth anniversary to hear about
Speaker 2: Mike's experience there and you know what the legacy is
Speaker 2: of that operation all these years later and the impact
Speaker 2: it had on special operations. And then we'll take some
Speaker 2: questions from the viewers. I think many of you will
Speaker 2: probably have questions for Sergeant Major Binding, so we'll try
Speaker 2: to get to as many of those as possible. So
Speaker 2: Sergeant Major, thank you again for joining us tonight.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks Jack, and thanks Dave. Well Eagle cost I
Speaker 1: guess it started on four November of nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 1: when the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over for
Speaker 1: the second time, and this time it was a more
Speaker 1: permanent takeover. I was with B Squadron and we were
Speaker 1: out in Breckenridge, Colorado during this time, and we were
Speaker 1: on a ski trip winter training and skiing at a
Speaker 1: Rapahoe Keystone Love One at the time, and when we
Speaker 1: got the word that we need to get back to
Speaker 1: the unit. So we didn't know what was going on,
Speaker 1: So we got in Colorado Springs, took a flight out,
Speaker 1: landed at McCall, got picked up at Camp McCall, and
Speaker 1: got into the unit. It was briefed that the US
Speaker 1: Embassy was taken over, and we started the planning immediately
Speaker 1: to retake the embassy. We went into isolation up at
Speaker 1: Camp Perry, Virginia, place called the Farm. It was also
Speaker 1: like the facilities that we stayed at was were some
Speaker 1: of the people that participated in the Bay of Pigs,
Speaker 1: the Cuban operation that didn't go so well either. So
Speaker 1: we did the training there. We got the embassy layouts.
Speaker 1: We had a three D model of the whole embassy compound,
Speaker 1: the buildings you could take apart. The Agency built this
Speaker 1: model for us. It was like ten foot by ten
Speaker 1: foot model of the facility. Then every day we would
Speaker 1: go and lay out and use an engineer tape the
Speaker 1: layout of the buildings and stuff like that, and go
Speaker 1: through the steps and then we'd have to take the
Speaker 1: engineer tape down because of any Russian Soviet satellites that
Speaker 1: would come over. And that was most of the thing.
Speaker 1: We would do all our training and sleep during the day,
Speaker 1: do our training at night, and so that was the start.
Speaker 1: Then we went out in December time frame. We went
Speaker 1: up to Ume approving grounds. They're out in the remote
Speaker 1: area where there's this hangar out there and then we
Speaker 1: started working with the helicopters out there. Now, these were
Speaker 1: the RH fifty three helicopters, and we had Navy crew
Speaker 1: that crew these. The RH fifty three D helicopter is
Speaker 1: Navy helicopter used for countermining, and what they normally do
Speaker 1: is fly during daylight hours. They do a grid pattern search.
Speaker 1: They have a some type of sensor that they dragged
Speaker 1: in water behind the helicopter to search for these mines,
Speaker 1: and so they just do grid patterns. And these are
Speaker 1: the crew and pilots that we had. They were not
Speaker 1: used to flying desert night time and with night vision goggles,
Speaker 1: and that was a totally new experience.
Speaker 2: Just to point out real quick, Mike, For some of
Speaker 2: our younger viewers, they're thinking, what about one sixtieth the
Speaker 2: night Stalkers, What about all those cool helicopters nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: That unit did not exist. Those helicopters literally did not exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point, Jack. In the US inventory,
Speaker 1: the fifty three was the only helicopter that had the
Speaker 1: lift capacity and the distance with an internal fuel to
Speaker 1: do the mission, to carry the number of people. We
Speaker 1: didn't have those CH forty sevens that we could do
Speaker 1: aerial refuel and you know, like the late model CH
Speaker 1: forty sevens, and so we were stuck with the fifty
Speaker 1: fifty threes. Well, we had problems with the Navy crew.
Speaker 1: They just couldn't learn fast enough to operate. So they
Speaker 1: we got Marine crews Navy helicopters, but this was a
Speaker 1: mixed group of airmen from the Marine Corps. These were
Speaker 1: not people that worked together. So it was just people
Speaker 1: from the various Marine Corps crew members pilots, and then
Speaker 1: they had to start to work together as a team.
Speaker 1: And we still always had problems with the fifty threes.
Speaker 1: They would I don't get lost, they wouldn't land where
Speaker 1: we wanted them to land, and just had difficulty with
Speaker 1: the fifty threes. And that was always been the issue
Speaker 1: we had. And a lot of times we'd be flying
Speaker 1: into fifty threes and it's just like while they were learning,
Speaker 1: and we just felt like sandbags. We didn't really need
Speaker 1: to be in those fifty threes while they were learning
Speaker 1: how to fly at night with night vision goggles, but
Speaker 1: we were. And so then we went out to Ford, Irwin.
Speaker 1: We did a rehearsal lot for Irwin with the aircraft.
Speaker 1: The the MC one thirties and the well we used
Speaker 1: the MC one thirty models. And we also did exercises
Speaker 1: out there at Nevada test site. We set up at
Speaker 1: Area twenty five. We set up a wall to assimulate
Speaker 1: the embassy wall and we would practice going over the wall.
Speaker 1: We would have ladders with ropes on them and we
Speaker 1: would put the ladders up, throw the ropes over, and
Speaker 1: then hand climb down the knotted ropes. And we did
Speaker 1: that every day. We'd put our kid on in practice
Speaker 1: going over, putting ladders up and going over the wall.
Speaker 1: We even had a wall built and still there in
Speaker 1: the old stockade on button A Road at Fort Bragg,
Speaker 1: and every day we'd have to go over that wall.
Speaker 2: Could you talk a little bit about the kit you
Speaker 2: were wearing and as far as rehearsals, your what the
Speaker 2: projection was, that, what your role would be, you know,
Speaker 2: what building you were going to, what the actions on were.
Speaker 2: Because also I think it's interesting that like a lot
Speaker 2: of the kit was kind of custom designed for this operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, our vests were each of us made our
Speaker 1: own vest. You know, I could sew and we had
Speaker 1: a lot of people it could sew and we would
Speaker 1: sew up our own vest, customize our vest to fit
Speaker 1: whatever kit we were carrying. We would have like a
Speaker 1: fourteen everybody carried a fourteen foot sling rope nylon sling rope.
Speaker 1: So we basically our uniform was blue jeans, civilian shirt,
Speaker 1: and then we all had a dyed green field jacket.
Speaker 1: We had American flag that we could expose put on
Speaker 1: with velcro on time came so that they would know
Speaker 1: that we were Americans. We had watch caps, we had
Speaker 1: we grew beards, let her hair grow long, and and
Speaker 1: and that's kind of our uniform. And we would have
Speaker 1: to practice crawling with on the floor so that we
Speaker 1: wouldn't make any noise. Everything had dummy cords tied to
Speaker 1: it so we wouldn't lose it. We had three elements.
Speaker 1: The delta had we had a white, red, and blue element.
Speaker 1: The red element was a squadron, The white element I
Speaker 1: was in was was B squadron. And we had a
Speaker 1: blue element which was the sniper observers support.
Speaker 3: Element, and and and then we divided up the different
Speaker 3: things for the For the white element, one of our
Speaker 3: areas was the ambassador residence, and so my team once.
Speaker 1: We went over the wall. We would approach the ambassador's residence,
Speaker 1: go through the kitchen door, and then there was a
Speaker 1: stairway since we entered the kitchen, we would stairway led
Speaker 1: up to the second floor and we would my team
Speaker 1: that I was a four man team. Bill Zumont was
Speaker 1: the team leader. We would clear the second floor of
Speaker 1: the ambassador's residence and once that we felt that there
Speaker 1: was hostages there. And then once that was cleared, Bill
Speaker 1: and I would go up to the roof of the
Speaker 1: Ambassador's residence and we had like one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: foot now on rope that we would throw over the
Speaker 1: the Bill and then Bucky Burriss, Lieutenant Colonel Burris, was
Speaker 1: down at the bottom and people that had seventy two's laws.
Speaker 1: We dropped those off there and we would then tie
Speaker 1: them to our rope and we'd pull them up on
Speaker 1: roof and we build and I would overwatch the main
Speaker 1: gate in case anybody came in through the main gate
Speaker 1: with the laws. The chancery was another area where hostages
Speaker 1: were that was the red element. There was a building
Speaker 1: called the warehouse called the mushroom. We believed there was
Speaker 1: hostages in those areas, so those are some of there.
Speaker 1: It was a big compound. Mike, how old? How old
Speaker 1: was Delta at this point in time? How old was Delta?
Speaker 1: We so we became activated just I would say just
Speaker 1: a few We were only a few months activated. Delta
Speaker 1: Form started going together in October of nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: I got there in February of seventy eight, So but
Speaker 1: we did not you know, we had There was another
Speaker 1: element with Fifth Special Forces. It was called Blue Light. Now,
Speaker 1: back then, the news media and a lot of people
Speaker 1: even today do not know the difference. They think blue
Speaker 1: Light and Delta is the same thing. But blue Light
Speaker 1: was set up with Fifth Group guys as an interim
Speaker 1: rescue force until we stood up, And then once we
Speaker 1: stood up, blue Light then went down. Some of the
Speaker 1: Blue Light people then went through our selection course and
Speaker 1: came into the unit. So we had several Blue Light members.
Speaker 1: But blue Light and Delta was two different or weren't they?
Speaker 1: Weren't they somewhat?
Speaker 4: I heard they were somewhat competitive at one point in
Speaker 4: time where it was a question of who who was
Speaker 4: going to stick around?
Speaker 1: Or is that accurate? Or no, Jack, you want me,
Speaker 1: you want to answer it?
Speaker 2: You want me I mean, I just based on my
Speaker 2: interviews with Blue Light members, Uh, they were a stop gap.
Speaker 2: They were never going to fill that role. So but
Speaker 2: the members, they did feel competitive, like it was a
Speaker 2: competition between this new these new upstarts in Delta Force
Speaker 2: and these Blue Light guys who and honestly many of
Speaker 2: those Blue Light guys were macbe soag Mike for SUTA Raiders.
Speaker 2: I mean they were real guys, they were the real deals.
Speaker 2: So they did feel like it was very competitive. But
Speaker 2: Blue Light was never going to be the permanent c
Speaker 2: T unit.
Speaker 1: Now, but I think they had visions that they may
Speaker 1: right there, and then a lot of them beckw went
Speaker 1: and talked to them about coming once they were standing
Speaker 1: down to come over it, and a lot didn't think
Speaker 1: they would have to go through the selection process that
Speaker 1: they should just be able to go into because of
Speaker 1: their background their history. But everybody had to go through selection.
Speaker 1: So was Blue Lights still around when when the whole
Speaker 1: Iran Iran hostage thing kicked off. Yeah, they were still
Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, I don't know exactly when they
Speaker 1: were deactivated, but I think they thought that they would
Speaker 1: have a part in the mission, right.
Speaker 4: But so so Delta was new, so it was all
Speaker 4: it was all very conceptual at that point in time.
Speaker 1: What was was this.
Speaker 4: Hostage rescue mission something that had sort of been not
Speaker 4: not obviously not in Iran, but but had this how.
Speaker 1: Do you how do you trained for this? Prior?
Speaker 4: Was this part of the concept of of what Delta
Speaker 4: would be when it stood up.
Speaker 1: Well, we had one uncle classified mission and that was
Speaker 1: that was POW rescue uh. And there was always felt
Speaker 1: that there were maybe people held in Laos, North Vietnam
Speaker 1: still from the Vietnam War. So our unofficial thing was
Speaker 1: like a Sante type mission. That was our unclassified mission.
Speaker 1: Other things, this is the all the terrace hijacking airliners
Speaker 1: and take buildings and stuff. And that's what we practice
Speaker 1: on was hostage rescue against terrorists in buildings, trains, buses,
Speaker 1: uh and that kind of stuff. We even brought it.
Speaker 1: We brought a train in and practice on trains there
Speaker 1: at Fort.
Speaker 5: Bragg For the younger viewers, like the seventies was was
Speaker 5: a hotspot of like when we thought of terrorism in
Speaker 5: the seventies, it was it was general like aircraft hijackings
Speaker 5: and things, you know, uh.
Speaker 1: You know train you know that.
Speaker 4: They would take over something and demand, you know, or
Speaker 4: take over a vehicle that political demands.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right, And then we had different scenarios that these
Speaker 1: missions would be in whether they be permissive, that we
Speaker 1: would have the permission from the government to go in
Speaker 1: and do that hostage rescue, they'd be semi permissive. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what you call semi permissive. But then
Speaker 1: there was non permissive and and you know, we really
Speaker 1: didn't think we would have a non permissive mission. And
Speaker 1: of course the hostage rescue in Tehran was a non
Speaker 1: permissive mission, and it was just difficult. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of people compare try to do comparisons between what
Speaker 1: the Israelis did it in in Tebbi Uganda, but we
Speaker 1: we had more. It was just much more difficult on
Speaker 1: a skill than the type mission. So how long did
Speaker 1: it take? How long did it take?
Speaker 4: Because you're right, because and Temmy, what was kind of
Speaker 4: a it was permission and I'm right where the Israelis
Speaker 4: went in there with the permission.
Speaker 1: On the No, they didn't, I'm sure they know. They
Speaker 1: they flew in landed. They they had uh some Lemo
Speaker 1: cars that like ed I mean, would you know, so
Speaker 1: they didn't know what was going on, whether it was
Speaker 1: ed I mean coming in there or what. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 2: It was much more streamlined in the sense that they
Speaker 2: flew like what like one or two C one thirties
Speaker 2: down the Red Sea, turned into Uganda, landed did the
Speaker 2: operation and the mission you guys planned, I mean maybe
Speaker 2: and talk about it like the scheme of maneuver developed
Speaker 2: throughout planning. Eagle Club was very complicated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because Yeah, so we picked out a desert one
Speaker 1: site that would be a refill site, and we'd looked
Speaker 1: at different scenarios in how to refill these helicopters. One
Speaker 1: was doing an aerial drop with fuel bladders that didn't
Speaker 1: we did test on that and like some of the
Speaker 1: parachutes didn't open and the bladders hit and exploded, and
Speaker 1: so it was that we decided to have three MC
Speaker 1: one thirties lead in, followed by three EC one thirties,
Speaker 1: which is a command electronics bird that has an electronics
Speaker 1: module in there, but we just took he took that
Speaker 1: out and then you put in a three thousand or
Speaker 1: three thousand and five thousand gallon JP five fuel bladder.
Speaker 1: So it was like a giant WATERBD inside of the
Speaker 1: EC one thirty, so we had those who come in there,
Speaker 1: and then we would have the eight helicopters come in
Speaker 1: from the aircraft, carry the nimics and fly into the
Speaker 1: Desert one site. We would refill the helicopters. The EC's
Speaker 1: and mcs would take off back. They go to Oman
Speaker 1: Masorea in Oman and wait for us, and then we
Speaker 1: would take After the helicopters are fueled off, we'd go
Speaker 1: to a Desert two site hide site. There was a
Speaker 1: warehouse that would they would put us up into. The
Speaker 1: helicopters would go someplace else and we just put camel
Speaker 1: net up there and we'd wait during the next day
Speaker 1: like hours there. Then the following night trucks would come
Speaker 1: in that had already been arranged. Dick Meadows and his
Speaker 1: group had trucks that were already in there. They would
Speaker 1: come and pick us up and we take these trucks
Speaker 1: to the embassy. While we're doing that, the rangers are
Speaker 1: coming in. Then they're taking an airfield and so then
Speaker 1: when we get the hospit, we take them over to
Speaker 1: the Stadium soccer stadium across the Roosevelt Road, and once
Speaker 1: we got on that we go to the Ranger airfield
Speaker 1: and then get onto the fixed wing aircraft and go
Speaker 1: on go on out with the hostages. So it was
Speaker 1: a two night operation inside of Iran.
Speaker 2: And could you speak a little bit to the to
Speaker 2: the intelligence piece and how that developed as this operation
Speaker 2: went on. I mean, I think wade Ishi Moto was
Speaker 2: the chief intel officer for the unit at the time.
Speaker 2: But as I think we've also talked about in the past,
Speaker 2: there was a problem with getting reliable information out of Teurin.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, the CIA people that were part of the
Speaker 1: embassy were trapped. We're now hostages. We really didn't have
Speaker 1: any country, any in country assets that we were getting
Speaker 1: intelligence from because they were now hostages. So there was
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, that was a big lack
Speaker 1: of intelligence. That was a big failure. Another thing was
Speaker 1: the weather conditions at this time of year. You know,
Speaker 1: I've experienced the dust storms, the haboos, and somehow I
Speaker 1: don't know, that piece of the puzzle got really the
Speaker 1: weather part got really explained to the weather conditions to
Speaker 1: the Marines and what to do if they run into
Speaker 1: a dust storm. So when we ran into the dust storm,
Speaker 1: I was on the lead MC one thirty when we
Speaker 1: ran into the dust doorm. The the fixed wings all
Speaker 1: flew on top of the dust storm. We were gonna
Speaker 1: fly low because there was Iran. Iran had some radar.
Speaker 1: We knew where their radar was. We was also worried
Speaker 1: about getting picked up by the Soviets the Russians uh,
Speaker 1: and that they would tip off Iran that we were coming.
Speaker 1: So we were going to plant. They were going to
Speaker 1: fly in low nap of the earth. But dust storms
Speaker 1: obscure radar and so you so, what the helicopters should
Speaker 1: have done when they encountered the dust storm is just
Speaker 1: try to get above the dust dorm and keep keep booking.
Speaker 1: But they just kept flying through that, and they flew
Speaker 1: through two dust storms and they that was pretty tough
Speaker 1: on them. And we did not have any communications with
Speaker 1: the helicopters because we were all, you know, radio silence,
Speaker 1: But we did have satcom radios and the helicopters had
Speaker 1: sacked secure satcom radios. But back then, in order for
Speaker 1: them to use the sackcom they would have had to
Speaker 1: land the helicopter, set the radio up and you get
Speaker 1: the antenna the right Asthmas and nang all that and
Speaker 1: then talk to us. They did not have it mobile
Speaker 1: on the aircraft, so they did carry I think a
Speaker 1: few of the helicopters did carry U Satcom Radio one.
Speaker 1: You want me to go when to desert one and
Speaker 1: when we land landed and seen all the headlights.
Speaker 2: I would But I would also like to ask, of course,
Speaker 2: if this is a loaded question, you know, Mike, was
Speaker 2: there ever a full mission rehearsal that brought all the
Speaker 2: elements together before you guys kicked off the mission in April.
Speaker 1: We never had a full mission rehearsal. One reason that
Speaker 1: was I heard was because of operational security. We just
Speaker 1: did pieces of the mission and and that was probably
Speaker 1: a big failure. But there was never a full rehearsal
Speaker 1: with everything. Yeah, that was that was somebody's judgment call.
Speaker 2: There Another little interesting sidebar that I don't think many
Speaker 2: people are aware of is that dead A had a
Speaker 2: small presence also on the mission.
Speaker 1: Right the Berlin detachment. Dead A beck With just wanted
Speaker 1: our group to focus on the embassy. Uh there was
Speaker 1: I mean was there three others that were held over
Speaker 1: there at the chancel the m f A. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so that was given to dead A people and
Speaker 1: they had. They were carrying MP fives and we were
Speaker 1: all carrying CAR fifteens, so that that piece was given
Speaker 1: to them and they had some suppressed MP five's two
Speaker 1: and so yeah, our mission was just focused on the embassy,
Speaker 1: so there was another those other guys that were over
Speaker 1: there at the other place.
Speaker 2: And so then what happened when the unit got spun
Speaker 2: up and they said this is going forward and you
Speaker 2: guys launched. I think the first location was Egypt, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we are. We flew into Watakenya, Egypt, which was an.
Speaker 1: Old Soviet base had had hangars for meg aircraft and
Speaker 1: it was in pretty bad shape the so but we
Speaker 1: took it over and so that was our staging area
Speaker 1: to get everybody flew into there. And then that'd because
Speaker 1: your is B intermit staging area and our forward staging
Speaker 1: by base was in mass Area, Oman and it's an
Speaker 1: island and the Brits had a base air base on
Speaker 1: there that we took over or shared with the Brits
Speaker 1: and then from there's where we launched. So we took
Speaker 1: CE one forty one to Mass Area and then from
Speaker 1: there we picked up our one thirties and so that
Speaker 1: was it. Then we launched.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: And when we got to Desert one, the Desert One site,
Speaker 1: there was headlights down on the road. This road was
Speaker 1: supposed to be a dirt road, that it was dirt
Speaker 1: road that very little travel on it, and but then
Speaker 1: we saw a head lights down below. So we actually
Speaker 1: had to circle a few times before we did land.
Speaker 1: As soon as we landed, opened up the ramp and everything.
Speaker 1: Here we see a pair of headlights coming down the
Speaker 1: road and beck With says stop. It was a bus
Speaker 1: and said it says stop that bus. So one of
Speaker 1: the somebody fired a forty milimeter in front of the
Speaker 1: bus and the bus stopped and the next thing you know,
Speaker 1: there's forty four Iranians on there. So we had forty
Speaker 1: four Iranian detainees. I just learned that they were everybody
Speaker 1: on that bus was actually related to each other they
Speaker 1: and I just learned this recently. Was that a family reunion? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what they were going to, is a family event.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: And they were traveled from one city to another city,
Speaker 1: and so they were all So once they stopped the bus,
Speaker 1: we got everybody off there had to go through their
Speaker 1: bag to make sure that nothing there was nothing that
Speaker 1: they carrying they could be a threat to us. And
Speaker 1: so for a while then our team and a couple
Speaker 1: of other teams, we were guarding these detainees because you know,
Speaker 1: as Americans, we do not take hostages. We we just
Speaker 1: detained people for a period of time. So they were detainees,
Speaker 1: not so we had forty four of our own, and
Speaker 1: I can they were just they were just scared. Aircraft
Speaker 1: were landing, people were walking by, and it just to them,
Speaker 1: I don't know what was going they thought was happening.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, well then down the road comes to
Speaker 1: this fuel truck, and so the ranger, the road ish
Speaker 1: and the ranger roadblock team went out there and they
Speaker 1: fired a couple few rounds in the radiator of the
Speaker 1: fuel truck and then one of the rangers shot along
Speaker 1: and that hit underneath the fuel truck and caught the
Speaker 1: fuel truck on fire. So that's the field truck sat
Speaker 1: there burning. The guy in the oil tanker truck he
Speaker 1: got out and ran into a vehicle that was behind him,
Speaker 1: and then they took off. So now we got a
Speaker 1: bus with forty four people, we got a fuel truck
Speaker 1: that's burning, and the final they then eventually the fueld
Speaker 1: truck explodes and it's a big, huge firebone in the dark,
Speaker 1: mid dark sky and just lights up the whole area.
Speaker 1: And then the other airs, some of the aircraft that
Speaker 1: were coming in when the fuel truck was burning, that
Speaker 1: was affecting their night vision goggles. And then finally the
Speaker 1: helicopters seeing a fuel truck on fire, so the helicopters
Speaker 1: started landing, and of course they were like forty least
Speaker 1: forty five minutes light landing there, and of the eight helicopters,
Speaker 1: we only got six on the ground, and the sixth
Speaker 1: is the minimum that we had determined to do the mission.
Speaker 1: One helicopter turned back to the mnemens. Another helicopter was
Speaker 1: a band It had a blade indicator light came on,
Speaker 1: so they abandoned that helicopter, and then another helicopter landed
Speaker 1: and that crew jumped down to that. So there was
Speaker 1: only six helicopters that arrived there. The one that turned
Speaker 1: back was having some kind of problems with heat overheat,
Speaker 1: something was overheating, so now we have six there, and
Speaker 1: then they find out that the one of the helicopters
Speaker 1: has a hydraulic some kind of hydraulic issue. Which is
Speaker 1: a that's it, you know, it's grounded. So it was made.
Speaker 1: The determination was made that now we only have five helicopters,
Speaker 1: which is not enough to do the mission is at
Speaker 1: that point, it was determined that because we said we
Speaker 1: needed six, and the thing is, we also estimated we
Speaker 1: could have lost another helicopter at the hide site, like
Speaker 1: the next night when they would start the helicopters up
Speaker 1: for some reason, one won't start up. Then we'd be
Speaker 1: down to four helicopters, so that we would have had
Speaker 1: to leave some of our rescue force behind to get
Speaker 1: the hostages out. And that was.
Speaker 2: Colonel Beckwith had to make a pretty difficult decision at
Speaker 2: that point.
Speaker 1: Right of course Carter went along with it. It was
Speaker 1: the criteria, you needed six and mission would be a
Speaker 1: boart at five, and that's what it was. So but
Speaker 1: now you know, trying to get all the stuff around
Speaker 1: the fix wing, now we're running very low on Phiel.
Speaker 1: They had the fixed wing aircraft needed to leave. The
Speaker 1: helicopters had all been refueled. So what so we got
Speaker 1: into one of these EC one thirties, I think it's
Speaker 1: EC one thirty number five, and and we get in
Speaker 1: there and we're we're heading back. We're gonna The plan
Speaker 1: was that maybe we could restart the mission in forty
Speaker 1: eight hours. We would take the we would take the
Speaker 1: Iranians that we have with us, and you know, later on,
Speaker 1: you know, get they get find their way back to Iran,
Speaker 1: but we would take up everybody with us and we
Speaker 1: would try to do the mission again. So what they
Speaker 1: needed to do was the two helicopters was behind our aircraft.
Speaker 1: They needed to move them. But the one helicopter that
Speaker 1: was to our left rear behind us. When it landed,
Speaker 1: it landed hard. It had flattenous, so it could not
Speaker 1: it could not move on its wheels, so it had
Speaker 1: so the CCT CCT guy had to tell it to
Speaker 1: because we were our prop wash was blowing dust on
Speaker 1: these two helicopters. We wanted to take off, so the
Speaker 1: CCT directed that helicopter to leave to reposition. Well, when
Speaker 1: it took off, it kicked up dust. The pilot got
Speaker 1: vertigo and he came around and he ran into our
Speaker 1: front left side and crashed into us. And we were
Speaker 1: inside the helicopter, I mean inside the aircraft. I was
Speaker 1: up near the front of the aircraft and some of
Speaker 1: the guys had took We had taken off all of
Speaker 1: our equipment. I had a besides, I was carrying a
Speaker 1: five gallon water can on my back. I had a
Speaker 1: rucksack frame with a five gallon and so I took
Speaker 1: my kavlar off and put it on top of the
Speaker 1: five gallon water can, and then we all carried We
Speaker 1: had everybody had E and E kits and sewed into
Speaker 1: our jackets with maps and everything. We had ten thousand
Speaker 1: everybody was carrying ten thousand dollars. I had five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars in Iranian money and five thousand dollars in US money.
Speaker 1: And so but where I'm going to carry I put
Speaker 1: it between the my kavlar, the different parts of my cavlar.
Speaker 1: I had my money stuffed in there. But then when
Speaker 1: the helicopter crashed into us, the rotor blades cut into
Speaker 1: the top of the fuselage. But we didn't have a
Speaker 1: clue what was going on. What was that? And the
Speaker 1: next thing I knew, there was like this rocking motion
Speaker 1: as we rocked, and then there was an explosion and
Speaker 1: the left front cockpit door blows in, just boom and
Speaker 1: nothing but fire flames just come in what happened was
Speaker 1: the internal fuel tank on that RH fifty three D
Speaker 1: had ruptured, and the pilot and co pilot of the
Speaker 1: fifty three actually made it out of their helicopter through
Speaker 1: their cockpit windows, but they were burned pretty bad. They
Speaker 1: had up to third degree burns. They had inhaled this
Speaker 1: hot gas and fumes, and so they crawled out from
Speaker 1: their helicopters. But the three marine crewmen were trapped inside
Speaker 1: the back of the helicopter and they perished. And then
Speaker 1: in the front of our cockpit, the five crewmen up
Speaker 1: at the Air Force up in the front, they were
Speaker 1: trapped in there and they all were killed and saw
Speaker 1: this fire. Just flames came in. So one of the
Speaker 1: airmen crew members tried to open the left rear paratrooper door,
Speaker 1: that's the side that the helicopter crashed on. When he
Speaker 1: opened the door, cracked it a little bit. There was
Speaker 1: nothing but flames there. So he shuts the door and
Speaker 1: then they opened up the right rear paratrooper door, and
Speaker 1: the flames are intermediate. There's flames and then there's not flames.
Speaker 1: When they cracked. When that helicopter crashed into us, the
Speaker 1: observers on the ground that were watching this whole thing.
Speaker 1: That fireball completely engulfed our aircraft and they thought that
Speaker 1: everything was gone to the observers on the ground, and
Speaker 1: so we just started bailing out of that right rear
Speaker 1: paratrooper door. Somebody hollered, don't panic. I thought it was
Speaker 1: Dave Cheney, that Sergeant Major Cheney that hollered at, but
Speaker 1: maybe one of the air force LoadMasters said that. But anyway,
Speaker 1: just people were not no panic, just getting on out.
Speaker 1: And you're on this giant fuel bladder that you're bouncing
Speaker 1: up and down. I remember Chris Abel stood up and
Speaker 1: he says hall Assnick saying, I know he's flat on
Speaker 1: his face down, he's on the ground on the fuel bladder.
Speaker 1: And it just was difficult. And then you could hear
Speaker 1: small arms start cooking off, just popping off inside the aircraft.
Speaker 1: And then when I didn't think I would make the door,
Speaker 1: I thought it was impossible because the flames are still
Speaker 1: coming towards you. There's flames inside the aircraft and we
Speaker 1: were on the giant fuel bladder and I thought, I said,
Speaker 1: oh God, is this how it's going to end? You know,
Speaker 1: because I just thought that I only had seconds to
Speaker 1: live that I didn't make the door, and then when
Speaker 1: I got to the door, I just dove out and
Speaker 1: rolled there was some hot metal there, rolled on some
Speaker 1: hot metal and got onto my feet and uh just ran.
Speaker 1: I could hear hangarnads cooking off, the exploded hangernads and
Speaker 1: then not getting very far. We had six red Eye
Speaker 1: missiles on board that on board our aircraft, and the
Speaker 1: Red Eye missiles were our air defense if we were
Speaker 1: at Desert one and our Iranians came in and spotted
Speaker 1: us or whatever. We did have some red.
Speaker 2: Eye missiles, the predecessor to the Stinger missile.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Sweet, And then those started cooking off and going
Speaker 1: out into the desert. These red Eye missiles started shooting off.
Speaker 1: And then the first aircraft I tried to get on,
Speaker 1: they waved me away. They were all the aircraft were
Speaker 1: moved because there was stuff coming flying through the air
Speaker 1: so that all the aircraft were just trying to clear
Speaker 1: out away from the carnage here. And so eventually I
Speaker 1: got on another EASTC one thirty and then there was
Speaker 1: the pilot for the marine. Pilot was on the ramp
Speaker 1: of the somebody had helped carried him and put him
Speaker 1: on the aircraft and he he was having difficulty breathing.
Speaker 1: He had an eylon cord around his neck that was
Speaker 1: burnt into his neck. I took the cord off his
Speaker 1: neck and and so I stayed with the pilot and
Speaker 1: worked with him at the four hour flight back to Oman,
Speaker 1: just trying to comfort him. And we did not have
Speaker 1: each I don't know why we didn't have a medical
Speaker 1: pack on each aircraft. All they had was these little
Speaker 1: first aid things that the on the the one thirties
Speaker 1: that didn't have nothing but dressings and different other things.
Speaker 1: We needed a medical we needed IVS, we needed morphine,
Speaker 1: We needed all this stuff. And every aircraft should have
Speaker 1: had a medical package on it because we're trained to
Speaker 1: use it. I was. I had go already, I had
Speaker 1: prior to going to Delta. I had gone through EMT training,
Speaker 1: so I was nationally certified as an EMT. But we
Speaker 1: just didn't have any of this stuff. And then so
Speaker 1: when we did so, the dead A guys actually were
Speaker 1: carrying morphine. So we got morphine from the dead A
Speaker 1: guys and we started getting injecting the pilot and the
Speaker 1: copilot with morphine and give them water. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were burned they got there, one of the air force
Speaker 1: guys said, take off his gloves because his hands were burned.
Speaker 1: The pilot's hands were. I says, no, we're not taking
Speaker 1: off his gloves. Take off his gloves. His skins coming
Speaker 1: off too. And so we did get that, and when
Speaker 1: we took off. We never had accountability at desert one
Speaker 1: of who was there and who wasn't there. When we
Speaker 1: our aircraft and we took off, we ran into that
Speaker 1: next to the road was a dirt burnt bank burm.
Speaker 1: We hit that burm really hard, our aircraft did, and
Speaker 1: we learnted up into air and came down and then
Speaker 1: kept going. But then once we got airborne, they came
Speaker 1: over and said over the speaker saying that we may
Speaker 1: have damaged our landing gear and we may not have
Speaker 1: any good landing gear when we get ready to land
Speaker 1: and oman and then when we get to flying for
Speaker 1: and it's a four hour flight. We were flying for
Speaker 1: a little bit and they said, well, we may not
Speaker 1: have enough fuel to get back. We may have to
Speaker 1: ditch at sea. So and I wow, what a night.
Speaker 1: You know, no landing gear. Now we're have to make
Speaker 1: ditch to see but we made it back.
Speaker 2: The landing gear did come out of the aircraft.
Speaker 1: And they are landing gear did come back.
Speaker 4: Did the guys when obviously you guys didn't know what happened?
Speaker 4: When when everything started, did you did you think you
Speaker 4: were like did you think you were under attack?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 4: What what was going through your mind when all that
Speaker 4: started off?
Speaker 1: Initially thought we got hit by something, but didn't know what,
Speaker 1: you know that yeah, like we might have got attack
Speaker 1: at first, that being a helicopter running into us. That
Speaker 1: wasn't in their mind. Wasn't in my mind that we
Speaker 1: got hit by a helicopter at first, but it soon
Speaker 1: became apparent that that's what happened.
Speaker 4: And how many how many uh one thirties which are
Speaker 4: the planes for those of our viewers who don't know
Speaker 4: there there you know, cargo planes or TRANCSPT planes. How
Speaker 4: many of those were on the ground at the time
Speaker 4: at Desert one Because you said you have six.
Speaker 1: We had six. We had six aircraft. We had three
Speaker 1: MC one thirty E models and we had three EC
Speaker 1: one thirty E models, So we had six aircraft on
Speaker 1: the ground and roughly how many personnel I think our
Speaker 1: assault force was around one hundred and twenty some people
Speaker 1: are totals. I don't know the numbers. All of Bee
Speaker 1: Squadron was on that helicopter, on that EC one thirty
Speaker 1: that the helicopter ran into and so we all made
Speaker 1: it out of there. The loadmaster made it. The loadmaster
Speaker 1: was burke, pretty bad air Force load master. A couple
Speaker 1: guys helped him out. He was kind of on fire,
Speaker 1: and Paul Lawrence was one of the people that helped
Speaker 1: him out of the aircraft. And I think he was
Speaker 1: the last person out of the aircraft, was the loadmaster.
Speaker 1: So so now we have, you know, five fixed wing
Speaker 1: on the ground and immediately, I don't know why, but
Speaker 1: the the helicopter crews abandoned their helicopters and their rots
Speaker 1: are running everything. They abandoned them first thing and jumped
Speaker 1: in on the on the fixed wing.
Speaker 4: So all the helicopter crews got out of the helicopters,
Speaker 4: left and running and got on the fixed wings.
Speaker 1: True, yeah, I don't know why they did that. They
Speaker 1: had they had been refilled, they could have flew back
Speaker 1: to the aircraft carrier. Also, we provided each aircraft with
Speaker 1: a destruct charges that we had an animal can. They
Speaker 1: had C four thermicronades. We had time time fuse in there.
Speaker 1: So if helicopter had to be abandoned, it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be destroyed, and none of those were destroyed. Those helicopters.
Speaker 1: Now the thought was that they might call some fixed
Speaker 1: wing off the mnemens to come in there and destroy
Speaker 1: those helicopters, but they decided against bringing in the fixed wings.
Speaker 1: And then they had the helicopter crews. They had documents
Speaker 1: that they shouldn't have had on those helicopters. There was
Speaker 1: and I've seen some of these documents with Iranian markings
Speaker 1: on them explaining in farcie of what these documents are for.
Speaker 1: But they had all the routes and everything, and which
Speaker 1: would have revealed Desert two as well. I imagine. Yeah, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it had all had our hide sight. It had they
Speaker 1: had there where they were going to go, had the
Speaker 1: approached to the embassy, how to leave the embassy, where
Speaker 1: we were, the arranger airfield. They had all that information
Speaker 1: that they had left behind. It was a treasure trove
Speaker 1: of documents and information. So of course, you know we
Speaker 1: had the Dick Meadows and his crew, Uh they're in
Speaker 1: Tehran that was supporting us. So they you know, they
Speaker 1: had to get out of Tehran because they know that
Speaker 1: they had inside, you know, inside help that inside in
Speaker 1: the country. So I don't know why all that stuff
Speaker 1: was there, why it wasn't destroyed or taken with them,
Speaker 1: or why even some of that stuff was even present
Speaker 1: on those helicopters.
Speaker 4: But yeah, and this is probably before like Group a ARS,
Speaker 4: we were a thing where where these were these helicopter
Speaker 4: pilots or crews would stand up in front of the
Speaker 4: group and say, yeah, well we let the helicopters because right,
Speaker 4: I mean they there was nobody. I mean, you never
Speaker 4: found out why no.
Speaker 1: They I can tell you I saw the helicopter crews
Speaker 1: when they came in there, the pilots and co pilots,
Speaker 1: they were they were wiped out. That I can tell
Speaker 1: you that that those dust storms took a lot out
Speaker 1: of them. They struggled through that, they were mentally I
Speaker 1: think whipped uh when they got to Desert one and
Speaker 1: the thought of getting back in a helicopter and flying
Speaker 1: back to the aircraft carrier, they they didn't want no
Speaker 1: part of that. So I can't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: who gave them permission, yeah, to abandon us when and
Speaker 1: why they weren't destroyed. Our guys were considering going there
Speaker 1: to destroy those helicopters, but they were told to just
Speaker 1: we need to get out of here, uh because like
Speaker 1: I say, the air the fixed wing, we're running low
Speaker 1: on fuel. And of course this even the accident delayed
Speaker 1: the aircraft there longer. So it was.
Speaker 2: There's one story that you had shared with me that
Speaker 2: is not in colonel Colonel Beckwith's book, which would be
Speaker 2: kind of funny except you know, for the loss of
Speaker 2: life on the mission where Colonel Colonel Beckwith is ordering
Speaker 2: people onto the back of the sea one thirty and
Speaker 2: then the crew chief and the plane or ordering them out.
Speaker 2: So they're all going in like a circle up the
Speaker 2: ramp and then out the side door and around and
Speaker 2: around as they get yelled at by two people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was in Oman when we got to Omar.
Speaker 1: When we got to Oman and they had one of
Speaker 1: the was set up as a metavac and so we
Speaker 1: were told so we got to o'mon, that's when we
Speaker 1: did the head count who was here, who was there?
Speaker 1: We determined that we left eight people behind, you know,
Speaker 1: the five Air Force, three Marines and so and like
Speaker 1: my team got split up during the accident, and so
Speaker 1: I didn't know who Bill's, Eric Haney and Bill Zoomwalt
Speaker 1: where they were. Chris, Abel and I were together on
Speaker 1: our aircraft. So not until we got to Aman did
Speaker 1: I see Bill Zoomwant and Eric Haney to know that
Speaker 1: they made it out okay. And so then we had
Speaker 1: to get on and so they told us, you know,
Speaker 1: we only had few medical casualties, the air Force loadmaster
Speaker 1: and the two marines pilot copilot Marines, but they had
Speaker 1: the whole with stretchers and stuff. We were told to
Speaker 1: get on that aircraft. Somebody on the ground told us
Speaker 1: to get that's the aircraft were taken back to Egypt.
Speaker 1: So as we get on had aircraft, they're screaming at
Speaker 1: us and telling us to get out. So we go.
Speaker 1: We go in the aircraft and up the ramp and
Speaker 1: then we're leaving out the front door, and then they
Speaker 1: were told to get back in line. So there's a
Speaker 1: continuous circle of people getting the aircraft and getting out.
Speaker 1: And also beck With I was with it, standing next
Speaker 1: to beck With with Don Feeney, and beck was says
Speaker 1: looks at Don and me and says, where's your weapon.
Speaker 1: I said, my weapon is on at EC one thirty.
Speaker 1: You know everything I I just this is all I
Speaker 1: got out with. You know, I didn't grab my weapon
Speaker 1: or anything. Uh And he said, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people just bend and if you had had your weapon
Speaker 1: physically in your hand, then you might have got out
Speaker 1: with it. But he said that, Well, you're you're stupid.
Speaker 1: Was called Don Feenie and I stud and we're like,
Speaker 1: well we may be stupid, but we're alive, you know.
Speaker 1: And he had heard that somebody had gone back into
Speaker 1: that aircraft and got their weapon out. He had heard
Speaker 1: that nobody that left had aircraft went back in that aircraft.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's just that's back with He's a character.
Speaker 1: He'd fire you in a minute and then hire you back.
Speaker 4: Did did you leave your kevlar with the ten thousand
Speaker 4: dollars on the air I did my cavelar. When everybody
Speaker 4: else heard that story, did they all leave their ten
Speaker 4: thousand dollars on theraf to?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I had to sign a statement that's what happened.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it truly it got burned up. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Was there an anecdotal story of somebody who had fallen
Speaker 4: asleep and thought that the plane was airborn.
Speaker 1: Frank mckinna, Well, see, as we got in the aircraft,
Speaker 1: it August was dark and the props running, and when
Speaker 1: that helicopter, it almost felt like the brakes were being
Speaker 1: released when the helicopter ran into us. At first I
Speaker 1: thought that that's the we're releasing the brakes, that we're
Speaker 1: going to start to move. But yeah, people were whipped
Speaker 1: and stuff. And Frank mckinna he since pat Frank since
Speaker 1: passed away with cancer. But Frank woke up and then
Speaker 1: saw the commotion. He saw the fire, and he saw
Speaker 1: the people running out, and he said to himself, what
Speaker 1: are these fools doing, because he thought we were actually
Speaker 1: in the air and we were jumping out. We didn't
Speaker 1: have parachutes, and but he got in line with the
Speaker 1: rest of us and he just thought, you know, he's
Speaker 1: gonna worry about getting out of this aircraft and he'll
Speaker 1: worry about landing Nicks one thing at a time. So
Speaker 1: when he jumped out, he went out and he got
Speaker 1: flat and stable. Well, he hit the ground and it
Speaker 1: knocked the wind out of him, and of course people
Speaker 1: were walking over the top of him. He had rolled
Speaker 1: out of the way but yeah, he actually thought we
Speaker 1: were in the air but he jumped out with us
Speaker 1: because it wasn't no fun, you know, staying in that airplane.
Speaker 1: So that was Frank. And then then another funny incident
Speaker 1: whence we we got in with the you know, with
Speaker 1: the pilot and co pilot, and we're looking for something
Speaker 1: to give them. The only thing that we had that
Speaker 1: they gave us in our survival kit was percocet or
Speaker 1: perkadan and so so I think it was Glenn Nicol
Speaker 1: hollered out and said, uh, somebody checked their E and
Speaker 1: E kit for any perkadan, you know, and uh, Bruno,
Speaker 1: your baniac turns to forget who he turns to, turns
Speaker 1: to oh, Jim Sweeters, I think, and says Nick. Nick
Speaker 1: says we need to E and need to Perkadan and
Speaker 1: uh and Jim says, well, I'm not leaving this aircraft.
Speaker 1: So luckily Bruno you know, didn't get off the airplane
Speaker 1: and head to Perkadan wherever that was. But anyway, we
Speaker 1: got the morphine and that's what we needed instead of pills.
Speaker 2: So after after you know what blew up in the
Speaker 2: press and was called the Debacle at Desert one. You
Speaker 2: guys almost immediately went into planning a second attempt to
Speaker 2: go in and rescue the hostages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we did this. I think it's called Honey Badger. Well,
Speaker 1: let me get these. We had different operational names. For example,
Speaker 1: the planning for the Iran hostage rescue mission was called
Speaker 1: Rice Bowl in the beginning. And there's a confusion with
Speaker 1: all these different names. But the reason we called it
Speaker 1: Rice Bowl was that if anybody picked up on what
Speaker 1: we're doing, they might associate it was submission in Southeast Asia.
Speaker 1: So so initially the planning phase was Operation Rice Bull,
Speaker 1: and then the the operational phase was Eagle Claw, and
Speaker 1: then we had the Honey Badger, which was the follow up.
Speaker 1: And there was another code name to Snowbird Baby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: snow Bird, Yeah, And I think Snowbird was the part
Speaker 1: with the putting the rocket motors on UH one thirty.
Speaker 1: That was Snowbird. And of course that that plane they
Speaker 1: put these rocket motors on, I think, and tried to
Speaker 1: lift off with it, and not all their rocket career. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not all the rocket motors fired, and they just completely
Speaker 1: destroyed that C one thirty. They had all the rocket
Speaker 1: motors on. That was they were going to land ad
Speaker 1: in there and take it off with this. That was
Speaker 1: one plan. But they took the hostages and took them
Speaker 1: and moved them out to different areas, different prisons, and
Speaker 1: we never had intelligence to you to do a second mission.
Speaker 1: How did the press find out to call it the
Speaker 1: debacle Desert one one? They had to know of the
Speaker 1: mission and two they had to know Desert one. How
Speaker 1: did they find out? Well, of course the Iranian press
Speaker 1: was the first group of people there at the Desert
Speaker 1: one site. Today it's a very popular tourist site. There's
Speaker 1: a building there, there's commemorative in this time on April
Speaker 1: twenty fourth every year they have a big celebration there.
Speaker 1: It's a big deal. And you can see the wreckage
Speaker 1: of still there, the helicopter and this EC one thirty,
Speaker 1: and so the press were there, and of course in
Speaker 1: initial press reports they said that the C one thirty
Speaker 1: ran into the helicopter. When you when you first news recovered,
Speaker 1: they were trying to figure out what took place here,
Speaker 1: trying to put the pieces together, and in the beginning
Speaker 1: they had it really all messed up when they were
Speaker 1: first reporting what was what took actually took place there?
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know again, how you know, Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter came on and explained to the American people that
Speaker 1: he gave the order to do the mission, and the
Speaker 1: mission there was casualties and eight servicemen died, and of
Speaker 1: course Jimmy Carter took full responsibility. I know. One of
Speaker 1: the things is we we went there to get fifty
Speaker 1: three hostages, not fifty two hostages. And I always hear
Speaker 1: fifty two, fifty fifty two, because US fifty two was
Speaker 1: the end number that was released forty four days later.
Speaker 1: What in this mission took place in April twenty fourth
Speaker 1: night of the twenty fourth morning of the twenty fifth.
Speaker 1: In July, one of the hostages, and his last name
Speaker 1: was Queen, got really really sick and they released him.
Speaker 1: He had MS. I think he was later diagnosed with MS.
Speaker 1: So he was released in July. And then now there
Speaker 1: was fifty two hostages. So on the inauguration day when
Speaker 1: forty four days there was fifty two hostages that were
Speaker 1: released at that point, but Queen was there when we
Speaker 1: were doing it. We were after fifty three of them.
Speaker 2: And just for viewers who were interested, it might also
Speaker 2: be worth pointing out that this is when the whole
Speaker 2: Argo incident happened as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, because some of the embassy employees were not
Speaker 1: in the embassy at the time of the takeover, and
Speaker 1: so they went they had some safe houses and eventually
Speaker 1: they seeked help with the Canadian Embassy and the and
Speaker 1: then the Canadian Embassy assisted in getting these others that Americans,
Speaker 1: what was nine of them, nine of them eight or nine?
Speaker 2: It was a Tony Mendez that went and got them out,
Speaker 2: I believe, right, And it's yeah, the movie Argo is
Speaker 2: very accurate and at that part of the mission.
Speaker 4: Was so at this time, Delta is a kind of
Speaker 4: a fledgling organization and and I think that will probably
Speaker 4: go into like how this affected the whole Jaysack idea
Speaker 4: and things like that. But obviously this was a pilot
Speaker 4: error that caused it. But were there any repercussion, I mean,
Speaker 4: did did any of this fall on Delta immediately?
Speaker 1: Like? Okay? So there was a Holloway commission was formed
Speaker 1: up to investigate what happened, and they made a bunch
Speaker 1: of determination. It was mostly command and control, inner operability,
Speaker 1: be able to communicate with different forces and to have
Speaker 1: a unified joint force that's trained together. So they made
Speaker 1: so they came up with all these what some of
Speaker 1: the stuff that went wrong, you know, by putting all
Speaker 1: these different organizations together, and so that was the genesis
Speaker 1: for the Joint Special Operations Command. So Jaysocks stood up
Speaker 1: on Pope Air Force Base, which adjoint Sport Bragg, and
Speaker 1: that's where JAYSAK formed up. And then nineteen ninety two
Speaker 1: I went over to I served in Jaysock from ninety
Speaker 1: two to ninety nine. I was still signed to Delta,
Speaker 1: but I was duty at Jaysack. And so because of
Speaker 1: the mission JAYSAK stood up to that was the Joint
Speaker 1: Counter Terrorist Organization and JAYSAK one of the things they
Speaker 1: did was they did quarterly exercises, the Joint re Training
Speaker 1: Readiness exercises, and they did IDRIS emergency exercises. And so
Speaker 1: we put all these pieces together and had one headquarters,
Speaker 1: you know, Air Force, Marine, Navy, and Army in Jaysack.
Speaker 1: And so in ninety two I went over and I
Speaker 1: was a sergeant major from ninety two to ninety six
Speaker 1: in Jaysck. The exercise sergeant major. My job was to
Speaker 1: go out and find training sites, to exercise sites, to
Speaker 1: do these joint quarterly exercises involved everybody, Rangers, Air Force,
Speaker 1: all the players, the Navy Seals, Seal Team six, UH,
Speaker 1: Navy Dev Group, and then I was always going to
Speaker 1: when I was there, I was always the controller on
Speaker 1: the Ranger target, so I was the safety controller for
Speaker 1: the Rangers, which I had. That was always a pleasure
Speaker 1: for me to work with the Rangers and it was
Speaker 1: a really great bunch of guys, So I really liked that.
Speaker 2: How did I was just gonna ask Mike, how did
Speaker 2: your experience from eagle Claw, your lessons learned? How did
Speaker 2: that impact how you ran the training exercises and He's
Speaker 2: readiness exercises down the line.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish we would have. I would always wanted
Speaker 1: to do a joint training exercise that was eagle Claw,
Speaker 1: the whole, to redo eagle Claw all over again. That
Speaker 1: was I would have liked that to have been done.
Speaker 1: We never did that when I was there. I would
Speaker 1: have liked to see how, say, ten fifteen years later,
Speaker 1: how we would do eagle Claw today at that time,
Speaker 1: and I think that would have been a great experiment
Speaker 1: to do, but we never did that. Most of our
Speaker 1: joint exercises was you know, the Rangers always did the
Speaker 1: airfield seizure. That was always there's piece of pie. And
Speaker 1: we always had a seal target, an adulta target, and
Speaker 1: seal targets could be a ship that was underway. We
Speaker 1: did a lot of you know, improvised nuclear devices type exercise.
Speaker 1: A terrorist group has a improvised nuclear device, or they've
Speaker 1: they've captured a real nuclear device, uh and fixed it
Speaker 1: up to make it and improvised nuclear device. So we
Speaker 1: would have to go in there and we take that.
Speaker 1: And of course NEST and the NEST the Department of
Speaker 1: Energy Nuclear Emergency Search Teams would be involved in those
Speaker 1: type of exercises. We did several like SunDog was one
Speaker 1: of a Mighty Derringer was another NEST with a new
Speaker 1: type scenario and we do you know a biological you know,
Speaker 1: we might be a chemical biological facility that we have
Speaker 1: to take and destroy. Uh. So those were some of
Speaker 1: our j r x's.
Speaker 4: And this is one sixtieth the Specialation wing got was
Speaker 4: stood up around after after Claw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, the one six sixty Special Operation Special Operations Regument.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it just stood up and was that. I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't know how because you are airwing. But was
Speaker 4: was that a competitive thing for the Army to get
Speaker 4: what I mean? Did I mean obviously the Navy, the Marine,
Speaker 4: you know, the marine pilots on a Navy bird didn't
Speaker 4: didn't work out, and they were in experience, and it's
Speaker 4: not it's not really their fault because they didn't have
Speaker 4: that training at that point.
Speaker 1: That's true, because maybe fifty threes are different than Marine
Speaker 1: fifty threes, and they were. And when you have a
Speaker 1: if you're in a Marine fifty three and you have
Speaker 1: a blade indicator malfunction, like, come on, what they have
Speaker 1: nitrogen in the rotors and the blades, and if there's
Speaker 1: a crack, the nitrogen leaks out. I guess it's a
Speaker 1: radioactive nitrogen. A sensor goes off saying, you got to
Speaker 1: crack rotor blade Marine helicopters, you got you got a
Speaker 1: land that immediately land that helicopter to the blade indicate
Speaker 1: not So I guess with the Navy ones you could
Speaker 1: still fly the Navy ones with a blade indicated. That's
Speaker 1: what I've been told.
Speaker 4: So how how did the arm I mean, was it
Speaker 4: ever competitive or do you know how the Army got
Speaker 4: the gig or was it just because it was the
Speaker 4: Army working with a primarily army. You have the seals,
Speaker 4: but but it's primarily Delta and rangers.
Speaker 1: I think they looked at the CH forty sevens and
Speaker 1: figured that they could modify the CH forty sevens, make
Speaker 1: them air refuelable, make them so that they have a
Speaker 1: larger carrying capacity, cover a greater distance. So you know,
Speaker 1: only the Army was flying H forty seven, so I
Speaker 1: think they it was mainly I would think it was
Speaker 1: aircraft driven. And then, of course, and after that, Blackhawks
Speaker 1: came online after and so we had we used black
Speaker 1: Hawks for the first time in Grenada, and that's another story.
Speaker 1: We went in with six helic Blackhawk helicopters there at
Speaker 1: Richmond Hill Prison, and I tell you we lost one
Speaker 1: of our helicopter, Number four was shot down. But had
Speaker 1: those been six Huey helicopters there in Grenada, all six
Speaker 1: of those helicopters would have we would have crashed all
Speaker 1: six helicopters because they shot us up pretty bad. They
Speaker 1: had ZSU twenty threes that they were shooting at us
Speaker 1: twelve point sevens and seven point six to two. We
Speaker 1: were hitting from both from the Fort Frederick that was
Speaker 1: shooting to us at Richmond Hill Prison and then that
Speaker 1: people came out from the prison and were shooting up
Speaker 1: at the bottom of our helicopters, and bullets were going
Speaker 1: through our helicopters. But we had self sealing fuel tanks
Speaker 1: in those black Hawks and that was amazing those hell
Speaker 1: I really liked the Blackhawk helicopters compared to the Hugheys.
Speaker 1: That was our first use with those. And of course
Speaker 1: after Grenada, you know, we had still had interoperability problems
Speaker 1: with Grenada talking to the Marines, talking to the Navy. So,
Speaker 1: and that's where US so COM was. They did another
Speaker 1: investigation and formed the US Special Operations Command formed after that.
Speaker 1: So what is the difference for for our viewers? What
Speaker 1: is the difference?
Speaker 4: So Joint Special Operations Command stood up after Eagle Claw
Speaker 4: and then Grenada.
Speaker 1: Happens was that eighty four eighty three, eighty October eighty three,
Speaker 1: three October twenty third.
Speaker 4: So that happens in October eighty three, and then what
Speaker 4: and then so then they come up with, uh, so,
Speaker 4: what's the difference between the two organizations? Why why the
Speaker 4: need for the two of them?
Speaker 1: Well, USL comes as a is a JAYSK is basically
Speaker 1: a black unit. Okay, it's it's primarily assets are what
Speaker 1: we call black cod that black units what black sauce.
Speaker 1: Us SO COM is both black and white. It's a
Speaker 1: broader spectrum. And JAYSK you really have the like Seal
Speaker 1: Teams X, you got Delta, you got the Rangers. Whereas
Speaker 1: with us SO COM you've got the US Army Special
Speaker 1: Operations Command, You've got all of the seals. It's and
Speaker 1: it's a four star position. Uh, Jaysack, I believe now
Speaker 1: is a two star position? Is that I think today?
Speaker 1: I believe yes, it's a two star Whereas us SO
Speaker 1: comes the four star.
Speaker 4: So so Jason is a smaller it's a smaller element.
Speaker 4: Do the out did the units in Jasock do they
Speaker 4: also fall under so calm or are they two separate things?
Speaker 1: Yeah? We fall under us SO come, Uh JAYSK does.
Speaker 1: JAYSK is more of an operational organization. It controls whatever
Speaker 1: missions are going on on the ground, whereas us SO
Speaker 1: COM is the larger four star Uh sink command and
Speaker 1: you know it it it lets like Jaysack run the missions. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a real good book out about Jaysuck. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of the title of the book, but I
Speaker 1: read it and it's an excellent Are you talking about
Speaker 1: Relentless Strike? Relentless Strike as an excellent book? Have you
Speaker 1: read it? Yeah, yeah, that's Sean Nilard's book. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: great book. If so, I recommend if you want to
Speaker 1: know more about Jaysack, that's the book to read.
Speaker 2: And you also mentioned that there's a new book out
Speaker 2: about Eagle Claw that really fleshes out the operation in
Speaker 2: a way that's never really been done before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have we go and get a copy of right.
Speaker 2: Sure, guys, thank you for watching the Live with Sergeant
Speaker 2: Major Mike Vining. We're going to get right back to him.
Speaker 2: But again thanks for joining us live, and please remember
Speaker 2: to subscribe.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is it. That's that's the book right there,
Speaker 1: and it is a by Osprey. It's part of the
Speaker 1: Raid series, which excellent Raid series and Justin Williamson put
Speaker 1: this together. It's got a lot of photographs in it, illustrations,
Speaker 1: you know. So this is this book came out for
Speaker 1: the fortieth anniversary of Eagle Claw and Colonel Nightingale. Do
Speaker 1: you you know Ningale? Huh? Keith Nightingale. He's got a
Speaker 1: brand new book I think comes out in August. Really yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's on Amazon. You can pre order. I can't.
Speaker 1: I got it on my want list because I knew
Speaker 1: him working with the Rangers and he's got Eagle Claw
Speaker 1: and all the other you know, Green Aida and and
Speaker 1: and and books. And I think that one comes out
Speaker 1: in August.
Speaker 7: All right, his name's going on my list for potential guests,
Speaker 7: August guest. But we have some questions that we should
Speaker 7: probably get to because I haven't been. Uh So, Alex,
Speaker 7: thank you Alex. First off, thank you everybody for joining us.
Speaker 7: Please subscribe to the channel for you have already and
Speaker 7: hit the little belfer in your notifications. Alex, thank you,
Speaker 7: uh Alex Uh. Alex wants to know what is it
Speaker 7: like being the ultimate life form.
Speaker 1: Life for I'm just an average guy, but you know,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to do something different. When I was
Speaker 1: in the Army and I had spent ten years in
Speaker 1: e O D. I wanted to go into Special Forces.
Speaker 1: I had put in for Special Forces as a medic.
Speaker 1: I had a school day to be a Special Forces medic.
Speaker 1: But then I got the phone call that they formed
Speaker 1: up the unit in the Fort Bragg, a new unit.
Speaker 1: They wanted six EO D people as part of the
Speaker 1: unit to be operate or qualified. So I put, you know,
Speaker 1: being a Special Forces medic and I went to Fort
Speaker 1: Bragg for the interview, and two weeks later I was
Speaker 1: in starting OTC.
Speaker 4: Course And I mean, how did they sell the unit
Speaker 4: to you? I mean were you aware of blue Light
Speaker 4: at the time, Like, how how did they differentiate themselves
Speaker 4: between you know, Delta and uh Special Forces.
Speaker 1: Well, I called up and talked to somebody there at
Speaker 1: the stockade, and I just knew that they were forming
Speaker 1: a special unit, and they wanted six e O D
Speaker 1: people And you know peacetime, you know, I've been Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and this is post Vietnam EO D. We're doing ring
Speaker 1: you know, you know, dud grenades at the grenade range
Speaker 1: at Fort Leonard Wood. I wanted something different, and so
Speaker 1: I went for the interview, flew there, and then they
Speaker 1: talked to me about what they were trying to do.
Speaker 1: And so two weeks later I got PCs orders to
Speaker 1: Fort Brag. It sounded really interesting. We had in OTC one,
Speaker 1: we had six EO D guys try out only two.
Speaker 1: Two of us made it through OTC one, and then
Speaker 1: in OTC two we had another six E O D
Speaker 1: guys and only two made it through that part, and
Speaker 1: of course we went to We got there late. They
Speaker 1: had already run the selection Assessment course and we were
Speaker 1: going into the operator training course. But under the thing
Speaker 1: we had to go through the selection assessment. We had
Speaker 1: to pass that. So in the fall of seventy eight
Speaker 1: we all went through the Selection Asessment course and only
Speaker 1: three of us passed the selection.
Speaker 4: So you went to OTC before you went to the
Speaker 4: Operated Trainer course.
Speaker 1: Before that, we did it backwards. We went to OTC
Speaker 1: first five months of OTC, then I. Then I went
Speaker 1: to the fall of seventy eight went to select I did.
Speaker 1: We had two back to back selection courses in fall
Speaker 1: seventy eight. I got polled on the first selection course
Speaker 1: after about five days because my times were slow, so
Speaker 1: I got pulled. I had to go in and talk
Speaker 1: to Colonel Backcourt. Colonel Beckwith says do you want to
Speaker 1: stay here? And I says yes I do. He says, well,
Speaker 1: you're going to have to go through selection again. So
Speaker 1: we then the next selection course I went through and
Speaker 1: I passed it. Wow. And then I went to Airborne
Speaker 1: School because we were all legs. So and then so
Speaker 1: in the spring of seventy nine, I went to seventh
Speaker 1: Group at Fort Bragg was actually running an airborne course.
Speaker 1: So I went through air Warn School at Fort Bragg
Speaker 1: with seventh Group. That's amazing. We did things a little backwards. Uh,
Speaker 1: David Maynor, Thank you, David. Uh.
Speaker 4: When the Chuck Norris movie came out, I'm assuming you
Speaker 4: means delth Force. When Chuck Norris movie came out, did
Speaker 4: you guys know about it and did you get a
Speaker 4: group together to see it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we we knew about it. Uh. Chuck Norris, you know,
Speaker 1: John Wayne was an iconic figure and Martha Ray were
Speaker 1: kind for Special Forces, right Uh. Uh. Chuck Norris wanted
Speaker 1: to be our special movie star and Beckworth had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris tried to contact us,
Speaker 1: and beckw just didn't want anything to do. Of course.
Speaker 1: You also, Uh, after Eagle Claw, we got a lot
Speaker 1: of letters actually came to the unit, people writing and
Speaker 1: thanking us. So when you we had staff duty, we
Speaker 1: would go through all the letters and read them. There's
Speaker 1: people that wanted back with autograph. Uh, but he did
Speaker 1: not do any autographs.
Speaker 4: Now, you were a top secret unit and people were
Speaker 4: sending you letters, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know how they addressed him.
Speaker 1: But you know that we had the regular post office
Speaker 1: box there at Fort Bragg and so we, yeah, we
Speaker 1: get all these letters and we read them when we
Speaker 1: had staff duty at night. That's pretty So you.
Speaker 4: Had John Wayne as the iconic SF guy, then Chuck
Speaker 4: Norris wanted to be the Delta guy, and then we
Speaker 4: had what Nicholas Cage as the ranger and Aaron or
Speaker 4: not Aaron America but con AerR uh huh.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we Chuck Norris never got through the door. Now,
Speaker 1: so was the movie not well received? It's pretty hokey. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it had nothing to do with Eagle Claw.
Speaker 1: It had more like, you know, there was some hostage
Speaker 1: Plaine Hijen backing some hostages. But yeah, it was it
Speaker 1: was entertaining.
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, Matt, thank you very much, Dak, thank you
Speaker 4: very much. They just donated with no questions, I don't think.
Speaker 4: And then Jonathan w did Mike know Ronnie Strahan s
Speaker 4: t R A H A N.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the name sounds familiar. He told me he's a
Speaker 1: Jonathan's cousin. Yeah, the the name sounds very familiar, but
Speaker 1: I can't say how I can place him. Uh. DJ
Speaker 1: thank you very much for a twenty dollars donation at stort. UH.
Speaker 4: Thank you for sharing your experience. Is there anything you
Speaker 4: can share about the rumors about a possible Louise mission
Speaker 4: for m I as in the early nineteen eighties, UH
Speaker 4: Commander Major Hani mentioned in his book as after concurrent
Speaker 4: with Desert one. Yeah, that was always uh. We always
Speaker 4: had that mission.
Speaker 1: Uh. We had a a planning cell for the pow
Speaker 1: if we ever found in Southeast Asia any of our
Speaker 1: POWs were still being held for whatever reason, because they
Speaker 1: may not have been We felt that they may not
Speaker 1: have been considered POWs. If they had committed a crime,
Speaker 1: then they would be charged. You say, they killed the
Speaker 1: guard or something like that, then you lose your POW
Speaker 1: status and you're a criminal and or whatever for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: So we always had a cell that was looking into
Speaker 1: I was never part of that planning cell, but we
Speaker 1: had several of these planning cells for different all different kinds,
Speaker 1: and our unit, only a small number of people would
Speaker 1: be privy to these any of these operations, they would
Speaker 1: be read into the program and then when you left
Speaker 1: the program, you have to be read out. So yeah,
Speaker 1: but I as far as you know, because who was
Speaker 1: that the ex Special Forces guy when yeah, Bo Grits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think we ever got anywhere. None of that
Speaker 1: stuff ever panned out. We had a lot of missions
Speaker 1: that we would spin up for uh, you know, like
Speaker 1: that lost pilot during uh the first desert storm with
Speaker 1: whether or not he was being held prisoner. Yes, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to remember his name. And we would always plan
Speaker 1: on that. We were even planning on going to the
Speaker 1: his aircraft crash site and searching that in Iraq, uh,
Speaker 1: but we never we never did do that. But that
Speaker 1: was but he was determined that he was killed in
Speaker 1: that plane crash.
Speaker 4: Did did Did you have many Sane raiders either in
Speaker 4: the unit or or that were part of that had
Speaker 4: the input or we had two?
Speaker 1: Jack Joplin was our medic, a chief medic and he
Speaker 1: was a SANTE on SANTE mission and we also had
Speaker 1: dig meadows, uh. And those were the two Sante people
Speaker 1: that we had.
Speaker 4: And for I mean, for those who don't know on
Speaker 4: the what's the book on Sante is No, that's Sentenctic,
Speaker 4: but it is Sante, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a good operation Ivory Coast, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds right. Yeah, so yeah, about the Sante raid.
Speaker 2: And there's also uh, there's also a book out that
Speaker 2: I just became aware of about Jaysk planning a potential
Speaker 2: p O W rescue mission and laws for you know,
Speaker 2: POWs from the Vietnam.
Speaker 1: War, and I ordered it. I haven't read it.
Speaker 2: Yet, but I guess i'll. Uh, I'll get back to
Speaker 2: you with if there's anything out there that's useful.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, thanks so much starting me here
Speaker 4: for sharing your experience with us.
Speaker 1: We truly appreciate it. Hopefully understand.
Speaker 4: G Watt humor here goes, could you beat Chuck Norris
Speaker 4: in a fight, because.
Speaker 1: Yes, no, I don't think so. I think he's got
Speaker 1: more moves than I got. I'm a I'm a demo guy.
Speaker 1: You know. If it has to do with explosives, that's
Speaker 1: that's it. I could out demo Chuck Norris with explosives,
Speaker 1: I know. So there you go.
Speaker 4: Chester Brown, thank you very much, and he just said,
Speaker 4: thank you guys for your service. Gordon Bradberry, thank you. Uh,
Speaker 4: good day. It's an Australian it's an Australian donation. So
Speaker 4: he starts out with good day.
Speaker 1: Who can do? Good day? Good day mate, good day mate? Right,
Speaker 1: I just know. Uh, look at the site of that guana.
Speaker 1: Any Atlanta. Did you get any TV?
Speaker 4: Did you get any tdy trips to Hereford, UK or
Speaker 4: down to Perth, Australia for some decent aussy beer.
Speaker 1: Uh, yeah, Herford. I've been to Hereford several times working
Speaker 1: with the SAS. I did a lot of stuff. The
Speaker 1: first time I climbed Mount Danale Mount McKinley at the
Speaker 1: time Dnale today was with nine guys from the SAS.
Speaker 1: They invited a couple of US got Americans to go
Speaker 1: with them from Delta. I was the only one. So
Speaker 1: so the first time I climbed it in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: was with nine Aussies, I mean nine Brits from the
Speaker 1: essay to t SAS. I've worked with the New Zealand SAS,
Speaker 1: been to New Zealand twice working with them. When I
Speaker 1: was in Uh it used to have an exercise every
Speaker 1: other year called gone from On. So it's a joint
Speaker 1: exercise between the Malaysian Scouts, the Australian s A S,
Speaker 1: the New Zealand s A S, the British s A S.
Speaker 1: They had British sbs UH and then we had the CC,
Speaker 1: the Air Force c CT guys and we had the
Speaker 1: Seals and Special Forces Delta and every so we used
Speaker 1: to have those exercises and so I went on one
Speaker 1: of those in New Zealand and worked with the New
Speaker 1: Zealand s A S and did some climbing with the
Speaker 1: New Zealand SA S down in the South Island, did
Speaker 1: mountain training. When I was in B Squadron, we had
Speaker 1: different troops, different teams. In B Squadron, I was an
Speaker 1: Assault troop, but we had like Mobility troop, Air troop,
Speaker 1: water troop, mountain troop, and so I was on a
Speaker 1: mountain team in in Delta and so we did mountain
Speaker 1: training all the time. So we were doing skiing when
Speaker 1: Eagle Claw happened. I was out when Grenada happened. I
Speaker 1: was out rock climbing at Leavenworth, Washington, doing rock climbing
Speaker 1: when we got called back for Grenada. So did you
Speaker 1: UH for.
Speaker 4: What were the similarities and differences between Delta, the Australian
Speaker 4: S s and the British SAS.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, Uh, I really don't know too much with the
Speaker 1: difference between the two Australian and UH British s A S.
Speaker 1: They all have their selection in sessment things in the
Speaker 1: but the New Zealand UH SAS guys, a lot of them,
Speaker 1: great majority of were of Maori descent. They did really
Speaker 1: well for selection assessment and they did you know, of course,
Speaker 1: the British SAS does it in the Beacon Hills. They
Speaker 1: and we copied, We copied everything from the britge Delta
Speaker 1: did from the SBS. During OTC one we had instructors
Speaker 1: from the the SAS teaching us how to shoot and
Speaker 1: a lot of things. And so our selection assessment was
Speaker 1: modeled under THEIRS. The New Zealand SAS they do it
Speaker 1: more in the North Island and the more of the
Speaker 1: tropic swampy areas and stuff like that. But I was
Speaker 1: really impressed with the New Zealand SAS guys that I
Speaker 1: worked with. Fascinating.
Speaker 4: Oh and since you have been to Hereford, can you
Speaker 4: answer the universe question of what color is the boat house?
Speaker 1: What color is the what the boat house? I don't know,
Speaker 1: never mind Rod of God thank you for the donation
Speaker 1: and that.
Speaker 4: The oh no and Alex thank you. What was it
Speaker 4: like to work with Kate McBriar and Larry Vickers? What
Speaker 4: does Delta do better than other spec OP units in
Speaker 4: the US or other or any other military Yeah.
Speaker 1: I knew, I knew Larry Vickers. And who's the other one, Katy?
Speaker 1: Katy was in blue Light, So I don't think, Okay,
Speaker 1: I know Larry Vickers. What we do different? You know,
Speaker 1: we work closely with the Sealed Team six in two areas.
Speaker 1: We work closely with our sniper observers across train with
Speaker 1: both units and our breachers. And so I was a breacher,
Speaker 1: I was e O D. But I was also a
Speaker 1: master breacher in Delta, and I was for a while
Speaker 1: for many years, I was in charge of the breaching
Speaker 1: R and D research. And when we did a breaching
Speaker 1: trip research trip, whether it was Seal Team six was
Speaker 1: doing it, Delta was doing it, or the FBI Hostage
Speaker 1: Rescue Team was doing it, all three of us worked together.
Speaker 1: So if I did a breaching R and D trip
Speaker 1: of how to get through, I'm looking at getting through
Speaker 1: some concrete walls with reebar and stuff like that. Coming
Speaker 1: ways to defeat that, then the Seal Teams six breachers
Speaker 1: and the HRT breachers would be on the same trip.
Speaker 1: So we cross trained in those areas really well, you know,
Speaker 1: Seal Team six guys, you know, their forte is you know,
Speaker 1: all water ops and look up right and close to
Speaker 1: the shore and you know, and and of course we
Speaker 1: you know, our our stuff is more inland stuff. But
Speaker 1: we you know, we did have water teams and we
Speaker 1: did a little bit of water stuff, but we you know,
Speaker 1: we just have our own niche Uh do you.
Speaker 4: How how I mean when when Jaysock was being formed
Speaker 4: or maybe later on, because there's a lot of mission
Speaker 4: creep now, but was it still was Was there a
Speaker 4: lot of mission creep then? Were people competing for the
Speaker 4: same job, you know, different units?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was some of that, you know, whether they
Speaker 1: felt that, you know, Delta was being favorite or you know,
Speaker 1: Seal Team six might have felt that Delta was being
Speaker 1: favored for certain missions over them. Uh, but you know,
Speaker 1: we all had our special thing and so you know,
Speaker 1: it's you put the right unit to do the mission.
Speaker 1: And if it was more of what how we were training,
Speaker 1: we would never think of trying to do a maritime mission.
Speaker 1: We're trying to board some cruise ship that was cruising.
Speaker 1: You know, it's fourteen to fifteen knots and try to
Speaker 1: board on a cruise ship. And you know, so we
Speaker 1: all had our different specialties, but certain things that we
Speaker 1: cross changed. Like I said, with the snipers observers and
Speaker 1: with the breachers, those two we we we trained together,
Speaker 1: and we did a lot of training.
Speaker 2: So Mike, uh, you know, before we move on, and
Speaker 2: I don't know if there'll be a few more questions,
Speaker 2: but I definitely wanted to get in there. Going back
Speaker 2: to Eagle Claw on you know, now that we've come
Speaker 2: up on forty years, what do you think the legacy
Speaker 2: of that mission is all these years later, you know,
Speaker 2: both for special operations and maybe for you and you
Speaker 2: know your fellow operators personally when you look back on it.
Speaker 1: Well, you know it was you know, we felt confident
Speaker 1: in Eagle Claw are part of the mission. We knew
Speaker 1: if we could get to the embassy, we would be successful.
Speaker 1: We trained so hard in that I even would dream
Speaker 1: about it at night when I was asleep, you know,
Speaker 1: going through and up that stairs and you know, on
Speaker 1: the second floor and searching the rooms. So it was
Speaker 1: real disappointing when we knew we could be successful and
Speaker 1: we never got a chance to do what we were
Speaker 1: trained to do. And but the legacy, of course was
Speaker 1: there was a lot of pro We had a lot
Speaker 1: of issues, a lot of problems, and of course you
Speaker 1: we already talked about Jaysok being formed to solve some
Speaker 1: of those joint issues that we had interoperability issues. And
Speaker 1: then of course after Grenada we had USO com and
Speaker 1: so you know, when Desert Storm came out, you know,
Speaker 1: we were given the scud hunting mission in western Iraq
Speaker 1: along with the with the British sas. So they divided,
Speaker 1: we divided to pie up between them and us to
Speaker 1: do the scud hunting. Uh what you know, we were
Speaker 1: not very successful in finding the scuds and having them
Speaker 1: taken out, but just our presence there on the ground
Speaker 1: really prevented them from exposing those scud launchers. We were afraid.
Speaker 1: We wanted to keep Israel out of the conflict, and
Speaker 1: if they would have launched a couple of scuds and
Speaker 1: hit Israel, then Israel got in and that would have
Speaker 1: made things messy. But I think we did pretty good.
Speaker 1: We had an accident. The helicopter. Helicopter crashed into it
Speaker 1: just outside the airfield. We were at place called in
Speaker 1: Saudi Araba called our Ur had a small hill about
Speaker 1: the only hill round and it was really visibility was
Speaker 1: really poor. The helicopter came in, it was metavacing. One
Speaker 1: of our guys, Sergeant Major Pat Hurley, had injured his
Speaker 1: back and so we had two Delta medics on that flight,
Speaker 1: at Otto Clark and Rodriguez, and the the helicopter ran
Speaker 1: into the mountain and everybody on that mission and that
Speaker 1: helicopter died. Uh Yeah, I had to go in and
Speaker 1: clean up that all the animal they had on that
Speaker 1: helicopter and destroy it. But you know then now you
Speaker 1: know after that, probably the next mission we had was Haiti,
Speaker 1: and we operated off the aircraft carrier USS America CV
Speaker 1: sixty six I, so that was the Joint Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 1: We had two star General Peter Peter Shoemaker. Schoomaker was
Speaker 1: the commander of the thing, and we were going to
Speaker 1: invade Haiti and put the re established the government in Haiti.
Speaker 1: So we had had uh two teams of Seal Team
Speaker 1: six on board that held on the aircraft carrier. We had.
Speaker 1: We had a whole battalion of rangers from one battalion
Speaker 1: on board, a company from another battalion, and a platoon
Speaker 1: I think from a third battalion on that aircraft carrier,
Speaker 1: and we had course Task Force once sixty one sixtieth
Speaker 1: on there. And so I was the senior enlisted advisor.
Speaker 1: I was a senior ranking person enlisted on the aircraft
Speaker 1: carrier for the Joint Task Force. And that was interesting.
Speaker 1: We spent forty four days on aircraft carrier operating off that.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know that we did not have to
Speaker 1: do a forceful seizure of Haiti. Former President Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think who else was involved. Was a
Speaker 1: colon Powell was involved. Anyway, they convinced the government that
Speaker 1: for a peaceful, peaceful they would go to exile someplace
Speaker 1: and reinstate the government. And so that went pretty well.
Speaker 1: That was the first time we operated on a float
Speaker 1: forward support base on USA, and when that was a
Speaker 1: lot lot of lessons learned to operate on an aircraft carrier,
Speaker 1: and that was in nineteen ninety four four. You know,
Speaker 1: my opinion we should have been operating on an aircraft
Speaker 1: carrier during Somalia in eighty ninety three. We should not
Speaker 1: have been at that air base in Somalia, and that
Speaker 1: was a big mistake because every movement we made operating
Speaker 1: off that was we were watched and we should have
Speaker 1: been offshore and been flying missions in from offshore. But
Speaker 1: that's a lesson learned. Well.
Speaker 4: When you said there were a lot of lessons learned
Speaker 4: working off an aircraft carr or floating for an operating base, like,
Speaker 4: what are some examples of those lessons learned?
Speaker 1: Well, we were like the air wing, the air component
Speaker 1: on the aircraft carrier. So when you we had to
Speaker 1: you know, we had to provide I had to provide
Speaker 1: twenty four KPIs for the for the for the galleys
Speaker 1: there on. The ship had at twenty four hours ship,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty four hours, seven days a week. I
Speaker 1: had to have twenty four of our guys. So the
Speaker 1: rangers came to me and every day I'd have two meetings.
Speaker 1: I take all the senior enlisted from all of the
Speaker 1: Jaysak elements and all the ship's chiefs from the different
Speaker 1: compartments on the chief and twice a day we would
Speaker 1: have a meeting and we would iron out all the
Speaker 1: problems we would have. And so the Rangers said that
Speaker 1: they would provide the KPS if I didn't as sign
Speaker 1: them any other details on the ship. So the rangers
Speaker 1: took over that we had to do underway unreps on
Speaker 1: the ship. So the Seals said that they would do
Speaker 1: all the unreps. They we'd have to move the cargo
Speaker 1: from the hangar bays to where they needed to go
Speaker 1: into store, and so I had the Seals do that.
Speaker 1: So everybody stepped up their part. But you know, we
Speaker 1: had to work out laundry issues because we've spent forty
Speaker 1: four days on the ship, so we had and forty
Speaker 1: so we had laundry issues, we had library issues, we
Speaker 1: had the weight room. You know the gym. Our guys
Speaker 1: were actually breaking the JIM equipment. And you know the
Speaker 1: only difference between a prison gym and an aircraft carrier
Speaker 1: JIM is the prison gym is the better gym than
Speaker 1: the aircraft carrier JIM. Because our guys kept breaking all
Speaker 1: the JIM equipment. So I told this guy, I says,
Speaker 1: you give me a list of all broken equipment, what
Speaker 1: parts you need, and I'll get them to you. The
Speaker 1: library guys wanted our guys to leave their ID cards
Speaker 1: when they've checked out a book, to leave the ID cards.
Speaker 1: Any minute we could be calling people up on deck
Speaker 1: and we can't be going around. I said, I guarantee
Speaker 1: that if a guy checks out the book, you're going
Speaker 1: to get that book back. I guarante. And then I
Speaker 1: told all the ranger sergeant majors that book. If you
Speaker 1: get your guys check out a book, it's going back.
Speaker 1: Uh and and so that kind of stuff. The ship
Speaker 1: has no tobacco policy ship. Well, the rangers are dipping
Speaker 1: and chewing and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: what they were doing when they were on the flight deck,
Speaker 1: the rangers were, and this is in the beginning, they
Speaker 1: have what you call pad eyes on a flight deck.
Speaker 1: A pad eye is where you lock down secure aircraft machinery.
Speaker 1: A couple they got a crossbar thing with a whole,
Speaker 1: and that's where you connect to Well, the rangers were
Speaker 1: spitting in the pad eyes with their tobacco stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: before any air operations, you have to do a FOD
Speaker 1: walk for an object damage walk. So anybody up on
Speaker 1: the flight deck when you all when they call a fodwalk,
Speaker 1: everybody gets online and you walk the flight deck to
Speaker 1: look for washers, nuts, screws, anything and every pad I
Speaker 1: has got to be searched in case there's a nut
Speaker 1: or screw because you know that could during air operations.
Speaker 1: That could be the world or wash or a jet
Speaker 1: could take that and that could kill somebody or damage equipment.
Speaker 1: So you do a fidwalk. Well in the beginning, Uh,
Speaker 1: when they called a fodwalk, everybody would head down below deck.
Speaker 1: Cannot do it. You're on deck when a fodwalk calls. Uh,
Speaker 1: you got to do a fodwalk. You got to walk
Speaker 1: the deck. Well, it's when you're searching those padiyes with
Speaker 1: tobacco juice. Was a so I said to it, said
Speaker 1: that we cannot stop the rangers from chewing and dipping
Speaker 1: at this time. You do not want to have a
Speaker 1: bunch of rangers on board the ship without you know,
Speaker 1: going through nicotine withdraws. So we set up a special
Speaker 1: area on the ship up Sponsor six at the back
Speaker 1: of the ship. Or the rangers could chew and dip
Speaker 1: all they wanted. We had events on it. We had
Speaker 1: like a little Olympic, had to set Olympic up. We
Speaker 1: had to keep the rangers. Rangers, you have to keep
Speaker 1: busy just into trouble. So we had different things to
Speaker 1: keep rangers busy, you know, different things like like a
Speaker 1: scavenger hunt type thing. Also where they can learn how
Speaker 1: to get around and move in the ship from one
Speaker 1: location to another, because the aircraft carrier can be quite confusing.
Speaker 1: You got all the different markings that you have in
Speaker 1: the ship because you where you are. And so it
Speaker 1: was a learning curve. So some of our one sixtieth
Speaker 1: guys were putting decals on some of the Navy equipment,
Speaker 1: some of the stickers on Navy equipment. So then so
Speaker 1: then the Navy started putting stickers on the helicopters, and
Speaker 1: I said, you got to cut that stuff out. Nobody's
Speaker 1: putting stickers on anything. And yeah, so whenever my telephone
Speaker 1: would ring, I always got bad news. I never got
Speaker 1: good news. I had. I had fights in the kitchens,
Speaker 1: some some cookie too telling the range spec for ranger
Speaker 1: to do something and that ranger wasn't going to do it,
Speaker 1: and next thing you know, they go, they start fighting.
Speaker 4: How did how did the the army, the especially rangers
Speaker 4: and young privates.
Speaker 1: How did they adjust to maybe culture.
Speaker 4: Because it's very it's very different, you know, like the
Speaker 4: officers and the army and the officers in the navy.
Speaker 1: On board a ship, it's a different culture. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It was problems, but we got a lot of them
Speaker 1: sorted out. It was a big learning curve.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And we had to figure out laundry. You know. We'd
Speaker 1: sign people to go down to the ship's laundry and
Speaker 1: do do the laundry for your group and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I did. I did. I did every detail on the ship.
Speaker 1: I personally, I did, went down did laundry, so I
Speaker 1: knew how the process went so that I could be
Speaker 1: to say, okay, you know, I did it, so you
Speaker 1: guys can do it. Yeah. The rangers were good. You
Speaker 1: just got to keep you know, keep them busy.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's the biggest thing. Uh. You know, it's all
Speaker 1: about rank on a ship. Like you know, if you
Speaker 1: were like the ship store, for example, there's only so
Speaker 1: many people allowed in a ship store. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe three people can go in a ship store, and
Speaker 1: everybody waits outside the ship store in the line. Except
Speaker 1: if you're a chief, if you're you know, East seven
Speaker 1: or above, you don't have to wait in line, you
Speaker 1: if you can go and up there. So we were
Speaker 1: all standing out there. I mean, this is Seal Team,
Speaker 1: this is myself, a bunch of Seal Team, six guys.
Speaker 1: Everybody standing out there is E seven or above. And
Speaker 1: this navy chief tries to cut in front of us,
Speaker 1: and he said, hey, hey, hey, you know, get in
Speaker 1: the back of the line. And the guy says, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not wearing rank. And the guy says, chiefs, chiefs
Speaker 1: can cut in front of the line. We're all chiefs here,
Speaker 1: get in the back of the line.
Speaker 4: Well, because not only are they wearing their rank, but
Speaker 4: they're wearing a different uniform. Yeah, and everybody else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was, it was. It was interesting. I spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time with the ship's captain. We would
Speaker 1: actually him and I would then would get out when
Speaker 1: there's no air ops going on. We'd walk the flight
Speaker 1: deck and just talk with the ship's captain. I had
Speaker 1: I dined with the ship's captain several times, got to
Speaker 1: really know him. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: when this thing was done, so what we did was
Speaker 1: we you know, we we left it parted Norfolk, Virginia
Speaker 1: on aircraft carrier without the air any air component. So
Speaker 1: then we flew down the Georgia coast and then then
Speaker 1: one sixtieth flew onto the aircraft carrier off the Georgia coast,
Speaker 1: and then we steamed down to Haiti and then we
Speaker 1: did different drills. We had to do like man overboard
Speaker 1: drills where you had to count for everybody, had to
Speaker 1: do battle stations, we had to go through all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So it was really different. And so
Speaker 1: I was like the senior enlisted advisor for the Joint
Speaker 1: Task Force, but I was also safety during air operations.
Speaker 1: I put on a white jersey, had a helmet on,
Speaker 1: had my ears, and I would be up monitoring safety
Speaker 1: on the floor for any operations for our guys, because
Speaker 1: you know, we have a bunch of army guys now
Speaker 1: flying helicopters on and off, and I make sure everybody's
Speaker 1: got the right equipment on there. And and uh so
Speaker 1: I've got a picture hanging up on the wall with
Speaker 1: with the USS America and all of our army helicopters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mike, we got a couple more questions here, Jonathan.
Speaker 2: He said he wanted to add a little bit more
Speaker 2: context about Ronnie Strahan he was a retired CSM out
Speaker 2: of Socom. Yeah and uh and he said, uh, he
Speaker 2: was a son. He was also a Suntay raider. So
Speaker 2: he figured you guys knew each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did. I knew the name. I heard of him,
Speaker 1: but we never met. I don't think we've met.
Speaker 2: David Asks. Did you learn to breach with a Knight
Speaker 2: Armaments master?
Speaker 1: Key?
Speaker 2: Do you know where the idea of putting a shotgun
Speaker 2: under the barrel of a rifle came from?
Speaker 3: Shock?
Speaker 1: Well, we we had we did. We carried we carried
Speaker 1: twelve gage shotguns and we had some ten gage shotguns
Speaker 1: that we would do for breaching, shooting locks and set
Speaker 1: forth like that. We used, you know, we came up
Speaker 1: with different explosive breaching charges using linear of shape charge
Speaker 1: FLEXI linear of shaped charges. We used. One of the
Speaker 1: things we use is cavetor belt material good Year three
Speaker 1: point thirty B rubber cavetor belt material to absorb the
Speaker 1: using that to we put the explosives on top of that.
Speaker 1: The explosives then compresses the rubber. It distributes the force
Speaker 1: evenly out. Uh and so, and we would do different
Speaker 1: charges a planner charge, well, yeah, like a stript charge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but using conveyor belt rubber. Yeah, and it is did
Speaker 1: you call it with that, because like just applying the the.
Speaker 4: Whatever it was for two whatever you guys using would
Speaker 4: blow through the door. So so you came up with
Speaker 4: the idea of using the lubber stript charge.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's more of a kinetic thing. It distributes the
Speaker 1: force out evenly. You know, sometimes there's like maybe metal
Speaker 1: and reinforcing underneath that metal. Well, otherwise you put explosives
Speaker 1: on top, it's just going to punch through that, right,
Speaker 1: using a medium such as the carvertor belt rubber. And
Speaker 1: we found out that was the best kind of rubbers
Speaker 1: the Good Year three p. Thirty B. It had three
Speaker 1: layers of nylon cord through it, and sometimes we'd make
Speaker 1: fancy stuff. We would cut through certain areas, add more
Speaker 1: explosives to different parts of it. We'd make a sandwich
Speaker 1: type thing with it, and so that worked really well.
Speaker 1: We've so we hostage rescue. The FBI. They like to
Speaker 1: do a lot of water impulse charges using explosives in water.
Speaker 1: But you know that's in a permissive environment where you've
Speaker 1: got water and you're right next to your structure and
Speaker 1: you can just take your bunch of water and fill
Speaker 1: it up. But if you're in a non permissive environment,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be carrying extra water around. You're
Speaker 1: going to be drinking it to so we we our
Speaker 1: stuff is more designed for non permissive environments. So different
Speaker 1: thinking between the FBI.
Speaker 4: Well, like using like an IV bag, I mean it's heavier, right,
Speaker 4: It's heavier than just using the like a good year
Speaker 4: strip charge or something like that, which is just a
Speaker 4: really flexible charge. That's fascinating because you guys probably developed
Speaker 4: so many of the charges that are just like standard.
Speaker 1: Now. Yeah, it was, it was, I you know, initially
Speaker 1: Beckwith did not want us to write anything down during
Speaker 1: his tenure as commander. He did not want I don't know,
Speaker 1: he didn't want us to document anything, Mike.
Speaker 2: If you read in his memoir, he got that from
Speaker 2: the SAS because when he was over there, they believed
Speaker 2: you had to have it all up here and if
Speaker 2: you couldn't hold it in your brain, then you didn't
Speaker 2: need to be in the unit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that doesn't good when you start losing people.
Speaker 1: People are leaving. No, Yeah, you don't have the knowledge.
Speaker 2: The institutional knowledge gets lost.
Speaker 1: Right, so I actually put together the first breaching book
Speaker 1: in Delta, actually assembled it, and every every team breacher
Speaker 1: had a copy of the breaching book. Because our charges
Speaker 1: became so sophisticated. You know, we had different levels. We
Speaker 1: had four different levels of breaching charges. We had what
Speaker 1: level one breaching charge is a charge that's open source thing,
Speaker 1: you know at the law enforcement doesn't every You can
Speaker 1: find level one breaching charges on the Internet and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and so, you know, so that was our
Speaker 1: level one. Level two stuff was starting to get more
Speaker 1: specialized where you know, some of our wall charges and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Then we had level three charges where
Speaker 1: they were more complicated. We had we have stuff that
Speaker 1: we can use two open doors on passenger aircraft for example,
Speaker 1: if the doors are denied, if they tie down the doors,
Speaker 1: like one aircraft they took the neck ties. The Egyptian
Speaker 1: aircraft they took nick ties off the passengers and the
Speaker 1: exit overwing exits they used the neck ties and tied
Speaker 1: them up. But we had charges that you could put
Speaker 1: on there and if they had them tied up, it
Speaker 1: would just snap the handle and the door would go in.
Speaker 1: So you know, that was kind of like our level
Speaker 1: three stuff. Then we had level four stuff, which is
Speaker 1: limited to know stuff. Only a few people in the
Speaker 1: unit were privy to our breaching charges that we considered
Speaker 1: level four information charge. And that's I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1: Were you were you doing?
Speaker 4: Obviously you were exchanging techniques with like the FBI's HRT
Speaker 4: and the SAS, yes, and then experimenting. But then were
Speaker 4: you also consulting I don't know, professor, Like, how were
Speaker 4: you gaining all this knowledge?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I also I belonged to the I also
Speaker 1: became a member of the Society of Explosive Engineers when
Speaker 1: I was in the unit, and we had access to
Speaker 1: all the scientists like it, Lawrence liver More, Sanda uh
Speaker 1: and uh. So we had all these enginees, you know,
Speaker 1: doctor Cooper, uh, all these experts. We did a lot
Speaker 1: of testing out at Nevada test site. We'd do a
Speaker 1: little testing out there. We did testing at sequorl New Mexico,
Speaker 1: out at New Mexico Tech. Uh And so we worked
Speaker 1: with different people, and of course we got to the
Speaker 1: point where all of our stuff was instrumented. We would
Speaker 1: have a high speed cameras, we'd have pressure sensors and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So we hired the Army Corps of
Speaker 1: Engineers Waterways Experiment Station out of Vicksburg, Mississippi. And so
Speaker 1: when we did any breaching R and D things, the
Speaker 1: Corps of Engineers instrumented all of our tests. Fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and science. My budget was several million dollars. I had
Speaker 1: seven to eight million dollar breaching budget.
Speaker 2: Well, you must have been like a kid in a
Speaker 2: candy store. Yeah, like, because I mean, this is your
Speaker 2: this is your thing, this is your passion.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it was. It's really neat to be able
Speaker 1: to come up with this stuff. I mean we had
Speaker 1: one of our things was in Libya. Have you guys
Speaker 1: heard of Tarhunah? In Libya? Kadaffi had these head and
Speaker 1: in the mountains, the Tarhunah Mountains. He had bought two
Speaker 1: Swiss tunnel boring machines, you know like they did the
Speaker 1: channel under the English Channel. Kadaffi bought two of them
Speaker 1: and he dug two parallel tunnels in this Tarhunah with
Speaker 1: his tunnel boring machine. And what he was going to
Speaker 1: do is set up a chemical production underground chemical production facility.
Speaker 1: One cut out. Kadaffie was there. He had one set
Speaker 1: up at rafta Rafta was a small scale chemical. He
Speaker 1: made some mustard and different other things, but it was
Speaker 1: small scale. It was open. But he wanted to take
Speaker 1: this big, big production chemical agents underground. And we knew
Speaker 1: all this was going on. We could see the construction
Speaker 1: at Tarhoona and stuff like that. Now he told the
Speaker 1: world that this was the great man made water project.
Speaker 1: He told the reason he bought these two tunnel boring
Speaker 1: machines was going to make water reservoirs for the town,
Speaker 1: you know, for Tripoli and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: But we knew that he was going to do these
Speaker 1: two things. He's going to make side channels in there
Speaker 1: and put it under So the plan was when I
Speaker 1: was in jaysck J three Special Plan Stars at Major
Speaker 1: I was in charge of target the feet of hardened targets.
Speaker 1: Our goal was before he would set up a chemical
Speaker 1: production facility, we were going to go in and destroy
Speaker 1: his tunnels. We were. And so you know, tunnel boring
Speaker 1: machines are huge and as they go in, they do
Speaker 1: the concrete, the reinforcing steel and stuff as they go
Speaker 1: in to the tunnel, and there wouldn't be nothing to
Speaker 1: destroy except for the tunnel itself. We would have to
Speaker 1: implode the tunnels. So we found the right and this
Speaker 1: was all sandstone. So we found the right sandstone out
Speaker 1: at New Mexico Tech at SoCoRo. I went all over
Speaker 1: the country looking at sandstone with the Corps of engineers
Speaker 1: and we picked the sandstone there. So we set up
Speaker 1: concrete just exactly like the tunnel boring machines, and we'd
Speaker 1: go in with drilling machines and drill parallel holes outside
Speaker 1: of the concrete between the concrete and the sandstone with
Speaker 1: these drilling rigs, and then we would pump in bulk
Speaker 1: explosives and actually implode these tunnels. It'd be a big operation.
Speaker 1: We would have had to gone in with hovercraft. We
Speaker 1: would we planned on having garbage trucks full of slurry explosives,
Speaker 1: we would have drilling rigs, so we would go and
Speaker 1: so this was we were planning on doing all this
Speaker 1: and then actually going in and taking all the tunnels
Speaker 1: and imploding them. But anyway, somebody decided that better to
Speaker 1: tell the world what Kadaffi's up to, and so it
Speaker 1: was announced to the world what he was doing, and
Speaker 1: Kadaffi ceased operations because of the publicity and and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, but that was going to be a major operation.
Speaker 1: I was going into Libya and imploding, So we were
Speaker 1: trained on how to do. Now you know today now
Speaker 1: we have what we call a heavy breaching cell in
Speaker 1: the in the unit and people because it started getting
Speaker 1: preaching started to be a big thing.
Speaker 2: On that note, actually, someone asks if you have any
Speaker 2: experiences in Africa that you might be able to speak of.
Speaker 2: I guess aside from Libya.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the only thing I did, I did a couple
Speaker 1: of tours in Sudan when I was in the unit
Speaker 1: in the early eighties. The president of Sudan was a
Speaker 1: guy named Namari at the time, and his vice president
Speaker 1: came over and talked to the United States and stuff.
Speaker 1: He wanted somebody to go a team to go over
Speaker 1: and evaluate the presidential security of Sudan. So there's two
Speaker 1: of us from the unit that were part of that detail,
Speaker 1: Bud Morgan and myself. So we went with team and
Speaker 1: the other guys were from a unit called ISAT. This
Speaker 1: is a is an intelligence security agency. It's the It
Speaker 1: was a intell military intelligence cell that was set up
Speaker 1: at the time, and so we went in and we
Speaker 1: evalue weighted his security, all of his his looked at
Speaker 1: his palace and his you know, all this stuff. And
Speaker 1: then when I was there, they realized my background. And
Speaker 1: so I went and I looked at all the storage facilities.
Speaker 1: They had a plant there in Cartoon that made nine
Speaker 1: millimeters and shotgun twelve gate shotgun shells. So I went
Speaker 1: there and looked at the production safety, look at safety
Speaker 1: and all that, and they had two ammunition storage areas there,
Speaker 1: and I tell you that was a mess. You know,
Speaker 1: they you know, nothing, everything was. I went into this
Speaker 1: powder magazine and I go in there. There's no lightning protection,
Speaker 1: there's I go in there and there's palettes, wooden pallettes
Speaker 1: with nails on it. There's there's powder on the floor,
Speaker 1: loose powder on the floor, there's no static no static
Speaker 1: electricity precautions where you have to ground yourself and wear
Speaker 1: non sparking shoes and all this kind of stuff. And
Speaker 1: I go. I walked in there, and I'm like, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, just one spark, this whole thing would go
Speaker 1: go off in Sudan. And so I made in the
Speaker 1: head and then they showed me some Russian blasting caps
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Well, they the Russians don't shunt
Speaker 1: their blasting electric blasting caps. Well, whatever reason these were,
Speaker 1: these were electric blasting caps, all unshunned, unshunted, and it's
Speaker 1: just so I made a lot of safety recommendations and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So we did this thing, and I
Speaker 1: set up a I propose that they have a vip
Speaker 1: ied search team that does presidential security suites looking for
Speaker 1: improvise explosives. And I sent all this stuff up and
Speaker 1: told them what they needed. So when we left there,
Speaker 1: and normally the the the agency goes in and would
Speaker 1: do the next phases, go in there and train take
Speaker 1: these people, whether they bring him back here to the
Speaker 1: States in a secure location or go there. They would train.
Speaker 1: They would agencies responsible for training that. But the agency
Speaker 1: was busy. So I was asked to go back into
Speaker 1: Sudan and train an army team to search for IEDs
Speaker 1: and to be able to dispose of IEDs. And so
Speaker 1: I went back into Sudan and at this time in
Speaker 1: Khartom they were having terrorist attacks. There were problems, that
Speaker 1: civil war was going on in Chad, and there they
Speaker 1: was electronic timers, sophisticated electronic timer devices going off in
Speaker 1: the city of Khartoon at this time. So I worked
Speaker 1: with the Army EO D team there in Sudan. We
Speaker 1: had a call. They had a great intel network. I
Speaker 1: don't know if anything, the Sudanese had a good intel
Speaker 1: got a call where there's two suitcases of explosives coming
Speaker 1: into the airport. So we go over to the airport
Speaker 1: and they find these two suitcases their international airport and
Speaker 1: they take them into this room and big suitcases. They
Speaker 1: go click click, and they open up the suitcases and
Speaker 1: they're full of Semtex explosives, just packed full, nothing but
Speaker 1: Semtics explosives, these two suitcases. And I'm standing watching them
Speaker 1: do this, and I'm saying, you know, you intercept very
Speaker 1: many of these. Next time you go click, click and open,
Speaker 1: it's going to go boom, you know. So I, you know,
Speaker 1: we had to bring in X ray. They didn't have
Speaker 1: X ray machines. We brought in X ray machines, and
Speaker 1: I told him how to remotely open suitcases like these.
Speaker 1: I told him how to remotely open to search cars,
Speaker 1: and how to remotely open and search cars, and how
Speaker 1: to do all this kind of stuff. So I taught
Speaker 1: them all that stuff. And then of course as soon
Speaker 1: as Numari went to Egypt, they had a coup and
Speaker 1: he was out.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna I mean, you've been very generous with your time, Mike.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna get try to get through just a couple
Speaker 2: more questions here real quick, and then we still have
Speaker 2: the bonus segment to do, so thank you for being
Speaker 2: patient with us. One guy here is asking is it
Speaker 2: accurate to say that the Brits trained Delta.
Speaker 1: I would say that would be good because we had
Speaker 1: instructors come in here. We had one guy named Ginger Flynn.
Speaker 1: He was a shooting instructor. They taught us how to shoot,
Speaker 1: how to double tap. That was a big thing that
Speaker 1: every when we every target, we would have to put
Speaker 1: two rounds into every target before we transition to the
Speaker 1: next target to ensure that we had to kill. That
Speaker 1: came from the the sas One of the things we
Speaker 1: had to shoot is instinctive. We had to learn to
Speaker 1: They took off our sites on our weapons, so like
Speaker 1: we had. Our first weapon was an M three sub
Speaker 1: machine gun forty five. That was our first assault weapons,
Speaker 1: and they took our sites off that and with an
Speaker 1: M three you can trigger control two rounds really easy,
Speaker 1: go to two rounds, two rounds, two rounds. It's really
Speaker 1: easy to trigger once you learn to shoot at M
Speaker 1: three and so that was our first assault weapon. And
Speaker 1: we had to shoot three by five inch cards, so
Speaker 1: they would have instinctively shoot three by fives. Wow, at
Speaker 1: what range? It's close. It was all instinctive like your
Speaker 1: room clearing. So it was all close quarter battle type
Speaker 1: instinctive shooting. But our targets were three by five inch cards.
Speaker 2: Max asks search at Major Vining. Do you have any
Speaker 2: advice for someone who plans on enlisting in the army.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, it depends on your passion. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: you know what you know. I have a grandson in
Speaker 1: the Army right now. He's with fifth Group. He's in
Speaker 1: a supports, he's in a one of the fifth Group battalions,
Speaker 1: but he's a ninety one B. He's a wheel vehicle
Speaker 1: mechanic with fifth Group at four AM. So I have
Speaker 1: a grandson there. He wanted to His passion was to
Speaker 1: work on vehicles, learn the trade so that when he
Speaker 1: gets out of the army. He had a scholarship to
Speaker 1: go to a tech school as a mechanic, but he
Speaker 1: choose to learn want to the school at Fort Lee
Speaker 1: and Strange. He's a ninety one B vehicle wheel mechanic.
Speaker 1: When I was in a ninety one B was a medic.
Speaker 6: Yeah, uh al, I'm sorry, go ahead, Michael, but but
Speaker 6: what you can make that I made the army whatever
Speaker 6: you want to make and I think you go in
Speaker 6: with the right attitude, you can make it whatever you
Speaker 6: want to make it.
Speaker 1: And it's a great learning experience.
Speaker 2: Alex asks, what's your favorite thing that goes boom?
Speaker 1: Large stuff? Big stuff? The biggest thing I blew up
Speaker 1: was in uh it was about fifty years ago, coming
Speaker 1: up to fifty years ago today. Was the largest enemy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the largest enemy ammunition weapons cash found in
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War in Cambodia during May and June of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. Nixson authorized us to go into Cambodia and
Speaker 1: so that so we went in there and of course
Speaker 1: they had all their staging areas, their stockpiles and stuff.
Speaker 1: And this one cash was found by the first calf
Speaker 1: second of the twelfth was well, it was a it
Speaker 1: was the first of the ninth Pink team actually found
Speaker 1: the cash site from a from an oh WASH six
Speaker 1: helicopter and they found the stacks of ammunition in the jungle,
Speaker 1: and the second of the twelfth captured. The thing became
Speaker 1: known as Rock Island East, you know, named after the
Speaker 1: famous artsen on Iowa Rock Island. There was over three
Speaker 1: hundred tons three hundred and twenty tons of weapons and
Speaker 1: ammunition in these caches. There was a several stacks of site.
Speaker 1: I think there was twenty eight stacks in the jungle
Speaker 1: on a court trail that was a quarter mile long.
Speaker 1: And then we had to set up a perimeter and
Speaker 1: we had to set it up and blow. I was
Speaker 1: part of a seven man EOD team that flew in
Speaker 1: and we blew that up. It took us about six
Speaker 1: days to set put explosives on it and set it
Speaker 1: up to blow. And now some of the ammunition and
Speaker 1: weapons were back called out. But yeah, that we used
Speaker 1: three three hundred cases of C four and we used
Speaker 1: twelve cases of detonating court. There's three thousand feet and
Speaker 1: each case. And so we had we buried the detonating
Speaker 1: chord lines underground and then and then when we would withdraw,
Speaker 1: we had a two ship HLZ and we set up
Speaker 1: charges around the perimeter to go off at interval times
Speaker 1: to keep the enemy because the enemy was out there
Speaker 1: wanting to retake back the rock the cash site. So
Speaker 1: we had these charges to go off, and then when
Speaker 1: the last two helicopters came down, then we had ten
Speaker 1: priming systems of fifteen minutes each to make sure this
Speaker 1: whole thing go. And if they came in and cut
Speaker 1: one of our detonating chord lines, we had another detonating
Speaker 1: cord line to go. So we pull our our fifteen
Speaker 1: minute fuses. The eaight and myself we run to the
Speaker 1: helicopter and as we get to the helicopter, the captain
Speaker 1: and the helicopter says, cut the fuse. Cut the fuse,
Speaker 1: cut the fuse. We run back out and we just
Speaker 1: cut fuses. So cut all our lines. We don't know
Speaker 1: what's going on. Go back to the helicopter and they
Speaker 1: says light it, light it, you know, and that we
Speaker 1: didn't have no more fusing nighters, you know, so we
Speaker 1: had to go back over. Now our fifteen minute lines
Speaker 1: are cut. We don't know what kind of time we got,
Speaker 1: so we're splitting. We're splitting time. Fuse are putting a
Speaker 1: match head in and lighting lighting it and when you
Speaker 1: get a spit back, you can light a second one quickly.
Speaker 1: Office So we light a bunch of them, and then
Speaker 1: we get on the helicopter and while we're lighting this stuff,
Speaker 1: are now our primitive charges are going off, and so
Speaker 1: there's an explosion. Well, these helicopter people have don't have
Speaker 1: no idea what's going on. They think we're being mortared,
Speaker 1: and you can see they're bouncing. They're ready to leave,
Speaker 1: you know, and because they think we're taking incoming. So
Speaker 1: we light the things, we get on the helicopters, and
Speaker 1: then the helicopter can't lift off that we're too overloaded
Speaker 1: and and stuff. So the door guy taps me on
Speaker 1: the shoulder says, you you you get off. You have
Speaker 1: to get on the helicopter behind me. Well, we get
Speaker 1: off on the ground and and they have the same problem.
Speaker 1: They drop off a couple of people and then these
Speaker 1: two helicopters take off. There's like five of us on
Speaker 1: the ground, and you know, I'm the only U D
Speaker 1: guy on the ground. The rest of the guys are
Speaker 1: infantry echo recon guys. On the ground. We got the
Speaker 1: charges of burning and no other than their helicopters just
Speaker 1: took off. So I was getting ready to go back
Speaker 1: and cut fuses again because I don't want to be
Speaker 1: on the ground when this thing's off. And this other
Speaker 1: helicopter comes in and I don't he was in orbit
Speaker 1: out there, comes in and picks us up and takes
Speaker 1: us out and we're not very far away when it
Speaker 1: goes off, and it was pretty impressive. Uh. We did
Speaker 1: take some ground fire on taking off and then it
Speaker 1: blew up. I have slides of this too, and they
Speaker 1: could see our mushroom cloud from fifty miles away and
Speaker 1: that was rocking on the east largest amy up from.
Speaker 2: The last question, then we get we uh, we should
Speaker 2: probably start wrapping this up. Do you have any funny
Speaker 2: stories about inexperienced officers?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's see. It sounds like you just told one. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a funny teammate, this guy. I'm gonna mention
Speaker 1: his name, these great guy and stuff like that. His
Speaker 1: name is Don Dreer. He reminds me so much of
Speaker 1: Wily Coyote, you know the character in Wily Coyote. When
Speaker 1: we were in New Zealand we had to go. I
Speaker 1: was working with him. He was a sniper observer and
Speaker 1: we were doing recount on targets. We're dressed in civilian clothes,
Speaker 1: are cover was. We were two school teachers from the
Speaker 1: United States. We were on bicycles and we were recounting
Speaker 1: different military sites and stuff like that. And down one
Speaker 1: of the things we had to cut across. There's this
Speaker 1: creek or river with this big clay bank, and we
Speaker 1: had to cut sneak, had to traverse across this thing
Speaker 1: to get to our target site, you know, without it
Speaker 1: being exposed, to stay concealed. So Down starts going across
Speaker 1: this clay bank and it was just like Wally coyote.
Speaker 1: You could see him climb and as he starts to slide,
Speaker 1: his fingers were digging in and his toes were digging in,
Speaker 1: and he was climbing and sliding, and eventually he just
Speaker 1: went down into the waters. Flash. And just I tell you,
Speaker 1: I was laughing so hard up on the hill, I
Speaker 1: was my stomach was hurting. It was the funniest thing.
Speaker 1: It reminded me so much of while it with something
Speaker 1: while a coyote would do, and there were some other
Speaker 1: things like that that it was. It had a blast
Speaker 1: with him. Mike, Thank you. We also want you so much.
Speaker 1: DJ Real quick dj DJ left a comment thank you.
Speaker 4: My father spent time in Sudan in the eighties as
Speaker 4: well as a member of the African Nations Peacekeeper mission
Speaker 4: as well as the Congo and he has similar stories
Speaker 4: about the craziness there too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Thanks so much for joining
Speaker 2: us tonight, Mike. It's always a pleasure and really a
Speaker 2: lot of fun to speak with you, and and he
Speaker 2: hears some of these stories. Especially it has especial importance
Speaker 2: because of the fortieth anniversary and Eagle Claw. I'm really
Speaker 2: glad we got to have you here and talk about that.
Speaker 2: We kind of blew right through what I wanted to
Speaker 2: talk about for the bonus segment, so maybe like for that,
Speaker 2: if you don't mind, Mike, we could talk about the
Speaker 2: Joy to Prison riot and Operation Pocket Planner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was really interesting.
Speaker 2: Well we'll start that in the after we finish here.
Speaker 2: If that's okay and you want to.
Speaker 4: See that, join us on Patreon one dollar a month,
Speaker 4: one dollar a month.
Speaker 1: It's there.
Speaker 2: So yeah, thank you everyone who joined us live. Thanks Dave,
Speaker 2: Thanks again, Mike. If you like what we're doing here,
Speaker 2: please subscribe to the channel. The little subscriptions right down
Speaker 2: there and you give us a little thumbs up and
Speaker 2: hit the belt icons so you get notified when we
Speaker 2: go live next time next week. And on that note,
Speaker 2: our guest next week is a veteran of third Special
Speaker 2: Forces Group, served a lot of time in Afghanistan. Has
Speaker 2: some really hairy stories. Guy, I know, really good dude,
Speaker 2: and I'm excited to have him here next Friday. And
Speaker 2: just the very last thing I have to say is,
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