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Speaker 3: Coberts, Spiona, The Team House with your Hopes, Jack Murphy
Speaker 3: and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and ninety six
Speaker 2: of The Teamhouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight,
Speaker 2: Joe Muccia.
Speaker 1: Joe is the.
Speaker 2: Author of Cry Havoc, The Untold Story of Rangers at
Speaker 2: War with his co author Tom Greer. We're really excited
Speaker 2: to have him on the show. This is, as far
Speaker 2: as I know, the first time many of these stories
Speaker 2: have been told publicly. This really is from the Ranger
Speaker 2: perspective of first and Second Ranger Battalion guys who jumped
Speaker 2: into Grenada in nineteen eighty three, an operation that has
Speaker 2: kind of like slipped through the cracks of history in
Speaker 2: some ways. I feel like, but you accomplished, you know,
Speaker 2: telling these guys' stories through this book, cry Havoc. So
Speaker 2: thank you, Joe. I really appreciate you taking the time
Speaker 2: to write this book.
Speaker 4: Now it's a pleasure. I'm glad to come on and
Speaker 4: talk about it. These guys are in many cases they're
Speaker 4: my friends, so it's really easy to talk about them.
Speaker 2: That's great. So, Joe, I guess the first question I'd
Speaker 2: like to ask a little bit about you. Uh, tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit about your background, your military background,
Speaker 2: and and sort of what led that towards you becoming,
Speaker 2: you know, something of a historian at this point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm a retired marine, uh, and then I worked,
Speaker 4: uh work for the government. I started out as an
Speaker 4: intel analyst, and by nature intel analyst, if you're a
Speaker 4: smart one, you you pay quose attention to history. I
Speaker 4: did that quite a bit. And I remember as we
Speaker 4: were getting ready to go into Iraq and O three. UH,
Speaker 4: I ended up sitting down with a lot of guys
Speaker 4: who were in Desert Storm.
Speaker 1: UH. A lot of those guys were my mentors.
Speaker 4: When I first got in the Marine Corps UH and
Speaker 4: UH they kind of taught me and and so I
Speaker 4: kind of took it to heart in terms of, if
Speaker 4: you're going to understand a problem set, the best thing
Speaker 4: to do is get with the people who have experienced
Speaker 4: it before.
Speaker 1: UH.
Speaker 4: And that's kind of how it drove me when it
Speaker 4: came to research for the for the book. And when
Speaker 4: I got back from Iraq and O three, I left
Speaker 4: active duty in O four and I continued working on
Speaker 4: my degree and I focused on history. Every time I
Speaker 4: get asked, you know, why did you take history? You
Speaker 4: want to be a professor or something, I'm like, no,
Speaker 4: not really. I just picked it because that was the
Speaker 4: subject that I really liked. And one of the first
Speaker 4: projects I had started. I had taken some junior college
Speaker 4: classes while I was on active duty, and one of
Speaker 4: them was an American history one and there was a
Speaker 4: Latin America South America chapter to it, and one of
Speaker 4: my first squad leaders when I was in the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps was a Grenada marine. So I reached out to
Speaker 4: him and he provided me some good, good stuff for it.
Speaker 4: And I really wanted to make sure because at that
Speaker 4: time we knew it was a joint operation. Everybody, everybody
Speaker 4: who had seen the footage from from the operation that
Speaker 4: had leaked out saw the Rangers jumping at Points Salinas.
Speaker 4: So to me, the next best thing to do was
Speaker 4: to reach out to a ranger and get his his
Speaker 4: inputs to it. This led me to a gentleman by
Speaker 4: the name of Kip ryan Hart. Kip's a great friend.
Speaker 4: He was a B Company Ranger, first Battalion. He was
Speaker 4: one of the first sticks to drop at Points Alina's,
Speaker 4: his platoon, first platoon to B Company. He was one
Speaker 4: of the first Rangers on the ground actually, and he
Speaker 4: was a young PFC promotable. He had just gotten back
Speaker 4: from Ranger school. He had, in his own words, he
Speaker 4: was beat to shit from ranger school, but he still
Speaker 4: made mission and the insights I learned. But from Kip,
Speaker 4: I was like, my god, why isn't anybody talked about
Speaker 4: this stuff? I mean, it's so amazing what these guys accomplished,
Speaker 4: And especially when he started to dig in and I
Speaker 4: talked to his platoon sergeant Brian Stags and Stags he
Speaker 4: told me, yeah, we were on the ground I think
Speaker 4: for twenty five or thirty minutes before the next you know,
Speaker 4: chalk jumped. And I went, wait, wait, wait, there's just
Speaker 4: one platoon of rangers and he goes, oh yeah, and
Speaker 4: the battalion headquarters on the ground for twenty five thirty
Speaker 4: minutes before any other rangers jumped. Was Yeah, the Triple
Speaker 4: A was too too dense. We had to bring inspector
Speaker 4: to clear the hills off so we could start the
Speaker 4: rest of the air the air drop back up. And
Speaker 4: to me, that just opened up this this can of
Speaker 4: worms in a good way. And and digging into the
Speaker 4: into what happened there. And again, like you said in
Speaker 4: your in your preamble, there's a I think everybody kind
Speaker 4: of knows the story in broad terms about what happened,
Speaker 4: but it's the real nitty gritty details that that I
Speaker 4: don't think a lot of people are aware of. And yeah,
Speaker 4: that's what we tried to accomplish with cry Havoc.
Speaker 2: So as uh, that's how you got your start into
Speaker 2: researching this topic. Talk to us a little bit about
Speaker 2: coming together with Tom Greer and how this book starts
Speaker 2: to come together, because that's I have to imagine, that's
Speaker 2: an interesting story in of itself. And of course we
Speaker 2: have to mention the the late Tom Greer himself, a
Speaker 2: former Ranger, former Delta Force officer, who passed away a
Speaker 2: number of years ago. You carried the torch for him
Speaker 2: too with this book.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Luckily I got to bless off from Tom's family to
Speaker 4: continue to write the book and get it out there.
Speaker 4: I had been researching Grenada in general more to do
Speaker 4: a full length operation, a book about the operation. And
Speaker 4: it wasn't going to be just a peel off Ranger book.
Speaker 4: It was going to be the in totality, the entire operation.
Speaker 4: And Tom reached out to me about I want to
Speaker 4: say two thousand and eight or so. He had basically
Speaker 4: started interviewing some of the same rangers I had already interviewed,
Speaker 4: and they were like, listen, I don't want to do
Speaker 4: this all over again. Just contact Joe and get with
Speaker 4: him and tell him. I said, to share my interview
Speaker 4: with him, And so this is how the relationship began.
Speaker 4: And first I didn't know Tom. I didn't know at all.
Speaker 4: I didn't know any of his reputation, where he had been,
Speaker 4: the Tora Bora thing, none of it. Knew none of it.
Speaker 4: And then I had a friend say, oh, yeah, he's
Speaker 4: an operator.
Speaker 1: He was one of us. Was a ranger.
Speaker 4: For those who don't know, Tom was with Charlie Company,
Speaker 4: Hard Rock, Charlie First Battalion, and he was one of
Speaker 4: the rangers who got left behind it Hunter.
Speaker 1: There's supposed to be this mythical second wave that.
Speaker 4: Was supposed to come in and Tom was going to
Speaker 4: be part of it, but he ended up being stuck
Speaker 4: at Hunter the whole time during Grenada. So these guys
Speaker 4: they raised him as a young ranger. When they came back.
Speaker 4: You know, everything that the rangers had been doing at
Speaker 4: that point had been validated, So it was easy to
Speaker 4: learn from these guys that you already knew, who had
Speaker 4: already seen the elephant and then had come back and
Speaker 4: teaching you the lessons and reinforcing lessons that you already knew.
Speaker 4: But Tom, to his credit, kept at it like he
Speaker 4: kept reaching out and kept like finally did the digging
Speaker 4: in and I found out who he was and I said, okay,
Speaker 4: I'll talk to him, and he said listen, you don't
Speaker 4: have to share anything with me, but I'm going to
Speaker 4: share stuff with you because you're writing the broader campaign.
Speaker 4: I'm just writing a ranger book for rangers and ranger families.
Speaker 4: And I said, well, that's pretty dynamite. And I started
Speaker 4: sharing some of the stuff, putting guys in touch with
Speaker 4: him and him vice versa, and we started talking to
Speaker 4: a lot of the same people, and sometimes people wouldn't.
Speaker 4: It took a long time for me to be able
Speaker 4: to access that community. You know, I'm a marine, I'm
Speaker 4: an outsider, not a ranger, never went to ranger school.
Speaker 4: So I think the only thing that got me the
Speaker 4: inroads early on was I was a combat veteran, and
Speaker 4: I think that that was the only thing that these
Speaker 4: guys could associate with me, because you know, I'm a.
Speaker 1: Jar ahead, you know.
Speaker 4: And it took a long time to get those inroads,
Speaker 4: and to Kip's credit and to doctor Hero from Second Battalion,
Speaker 4: those guys really paved the wave to me for me
Speaker 4: to get to talk to more more rangers that were there.
Speaker 4: And Tom didn't need that, like he was already one
Speaker 4: of them, Like he was already one of you guys.
Speaker 4: He was a ranger, he had been an operator. He
Speaker 4: knew a lot of these guys who had went on
Speaker 4: to serve in the unit afterwards, Like, he knew a
Speaker 4: lot of so it was easier for him to make
Speaker 4: those inroads. But we had a lot of cross pollination
Speaker 4: and our research.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 4: The years went by and he kept focusing in on
Speaker 4: the range of book, but he was also writing his
Speaker 4: other books, his his fiction books about Colton Rayner and
Speaker 4: you know, the Delta Forest books that he wrote. And
Speaker 4: but he really had a passion for this story because
Speaker 4: it wasn't fiction, and it was people he knew and
Speaker 4: respected greatly. And and if those of you had the
Speaker 4: book and read the opening to it, you know that
Speaker 4: he reached out to me and he basically I was
Speaker 4: one of the few people outside of his close friends
Speaker 4: and his family that knew that he was terminal. And
Speaker 4: he basically said, look, I've done as much as I
Speaker 4: can do with this thing, and I can't get it
Speaker 4: any further because you know, as his brother Steve told me,
Speaker 4: you know, he was trying to write books. He's trying
Speaker 4: to write his books, he's trying to finish manuscripts and stuff. Well,
Speaker 4: while on morphine for the pain for threshold work, and
Speaker 4: you know, it was very tough on him, and he
Speaker 4: was really really hurting. And I knew that I I
Speaker 4: told him I would I would do it. I would
Speaker 4: do something with it, and I didn't. And and to my
Speaker 4: my failing, I didn't do anything with it right away.
Speaker 4: It really took another Grenada Raider to give me a
Speaker 4: kick in the ass and get me going on, a
Speaker 4: guy named Todd Beard and whose dad, Milton, is a
Speaker 4: well known personality CIA personality. Todd Todd was like, dude,
Speaker 4: you got to get this thing going. You know, you
Speaker 4: can't let it just die on the vine.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. Yeah, we've had Milt on the show a
Speaker 2: couple of times.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Well, Tod Todd really was the one who
Speaker 4: got this thing that we energized, and between him and
Speaker 4: the and the Greer family, I put it put a
Speaker 4: lot of pressure on myself to get it done and
Speaker 4: get it done in advance for the fortieth anniversary last year,
Speaker 4: which thankfully I was able to. I literally got it
Speaker 4: out the door, I think within I don't know, three
Speaker 4: weeks of the anniversary. Four weeks of the anniversary, I
Speaker 4: had sold him out so fast. I had one box
Speaker 4: of books with me at the reunion down in Savannah,
Speaker 4: and the guys were pissed off. I didn't bring enough
Speaker 4: with me, but Tommy was. He sent me everything. He
Speaker 4: sent me all of his research. He sent me the
Speaker 4: shell of the manuscript he had written. I want to
Speaker 4: say about maybe fifty sixty percent of it, but it
Speaker 4: was rough and it needed a lot of work. There
Speaker 4: was some sequentially sequential issues with it in terms of
Speaker 4: where things were. I wrote in the note section. Bruce
Speaker 4: McGraw was another first Platoon B Company guy who was
Speaker 4: that first plane load over the on the airfield. Bruce
Speaker 4: had found the MC one thirty chalk listings and their
Speaker 4: time on target for the drops. Wow, and this was
Speaker 4: able to really solidify. I knew the planes were all
Speaker 4: out of order from my interviews, but I didn't know
Speaker 4: exactly where who was who in the zoo in terms
Speaker 4: of the stack. After that, the first stick jumped, which
Speaker 4: was actually Aircraft three, and then the other ones stacked.
Speaker 4: But with that in hand, I was really able to
Speaker 4: put a pin in it and finish that that portion up,
Speaker 4: and that's when everything started to really coalesce. Getting getting
Speaker 4: the manuscript finished, but there was a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of the tough sequences were still there that needed
Speaker 4: to be done, the Grand Dan's rescue, the firefight with
Speaker 4: Juliette six, the jeep team Calvini, and then then then
Speaker 4: wrapping it all up and putting a bow on it
Speaker 4: was was There was still a lot of work that
Speaker 4: needed to be done. But Tom did such great work,
Speaker 4: and he also had written it in a way. I'm
Speaker 4: actually working on a companion book called Old Scrolls right now.
Speaker 4: I'm interviewing a lot of old score rangers.
Speaker 1: It that book.
Speaker 4: The genesis of it was the stuff that went to
Speaker 4: the cutting room floor from cry Havoc. He had written
Speaker 4: this thing that we probably would have ended up being
Speaker 4: about five six hundred pages long if we would have
Speaker 4: just published it in total. But it needed some streamlining
Speaker 4: and it needed some stuff to get cut, and thankfully
Speaker 4: we'll be able to put that stuff in another book.
Speaker 4: But this way, I think it's much more economical, and
Speaker 4: it reads. The flow of the read is a lot
Speaker 4: better this way. But he did all the heavy legwork
Speaker 4: early on.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this was really a labor of love for
Speaker 2: both of you guys. You know, it shows So to
Speaker 2: start to get into the content of the book, could
Speaker 2: you start by giving us a sort of a little
Speaker 2: bit of a background about what was going on in
Speaker 2: Grenada in eighty three that leads up to first and
Speaker 2: second range of Battalion getting this Warnoh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the.
Speaker 4: Actually, as far back as I want to say, nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy nine, Grenada had been on the State Department watch
Speaker 4: lists in terms of, hey, we have Americans on the
Speaker 4: ground there, the medical school there. They've got some political
Speaker 4: consternation going on. They have a socialist government that is
Speaker 4: leaning heavily towards becoming full blown Marxists.
Speaker 1: They originally.
Speaker 4: The Maurice Bishop government had reached out to the United
Speaker 4: States and they were sort of rebuffed. I don't know
Speaker 4: the ins and outs of it, and I won't get
Speaker 4: into it in the book. I say it right right
Speaker 4: right away. I don't really I'm not a State Department guy.
Speaker 4: It's not my job to sit there and talk about
Speaker 4: all the political machinations behind the scene. Although he was
Speaker 4: rebuffed and that led him to lean towards Cuba and
Speaker 4: later Russia, and this obviously worries that when the Reagan
Speaker 4: administration comes into power after the in eighty one. It's
Speaker 4: in eighty one. Yeah, it was eighty one. Sorry, I'm old.
Speaker 4: I'm not that old. When Reagan, the Reagan administration comes
Speaker 4: on the power, they really start to put a focal,
Speaker 4: focal lens on on on Grenada, especially when the airfield
Speaker 4: starts to get built. You have the g Canadian saying
Speaker 4: it's for tourism, but the thing is long enough to
Speaker 4: with to handle any any of the larger Russian and
Speaker 4: Cuban bomber fleet airframes, and this worries the Reagan administration,
Speaker 4: although if they had any imagery analysis done worth its
Speaker 4: salt would have told them, hey, there's only the small
Speaker 4: parking apron. There's no way they can pivot multiple aircraft
Speaker 4: around at one time. And this has an effect on
Speaker 4: the actual operation Urgent Fury later on as well. But
Speaker 4: they become they become a focal point for the Reagan administration.
Speaker 1: And then into eighty two and eighty.
Speaker 4: Three there is political unrest there. The new Jewel Movement
Speaker 4: is formed. It is more extreme Marxist. They think that
Speaker 4: it's led by Bernard Cord. They don't think that Maurice
Speaker 4: Bishop is Marxist enough, and they decide to overthrow them.
Speaker 4: But there's a public outcry when Bishops has loved among
Speaker 4: the people of Grenada, and he's arrested but later freed,
Speaker 4: but then they seize him again, and then he's later assassinated.
Speaker 4: And this this at that point in time, the US
Speaker 4: government decides we've had enough. They originally the original plan,
Speaker 4: they had done a number of exercises at the Aegas
Speaker 4: that that simulated a Grenada operation where they were going
Speaker 4: to put a marine battalion landing team on the ground
Speaker 4: and a ranger battalion and they would basically be able
Speaker 4: to subdue the island and rescue, rescue political prisoners, and
Speaker 4: and that was it. And they do this a couple
Speaker 4: of times. But finally, after after Bishop's assassination, the wheels
Speaker 4: are set in motion for for the US intervention.
Speaker 2: There on on the fears that this could become some
Speaker 2: sort of communist stage and ground right, even though that
Speaker 2: maybe wasn't quite plausible at that moment.
Speaker 4: I think there was a there was a multi view
Speaker 4: opinion that one they didn't like the possibility that airfield
Speaker 4: becoming militarized. They didn't like that they had a Marxist
Speaker 4: communist government in their backyard. They already had one in Cuba,
Speaker 4: and on top of it, you had US medical students there,
Speaker 4: and you have the Iran hostage crisis fresh in everyone's memory.
Speaker 4: So I think all three of those pieces are upfront
Speaker 4: in the in the in how they're doing their calculus
Speaker 4: in terms of when I say they, I mean the
Speaker 4: Reagan administration, how they're their calculus is forming about how
Speaker 4: to deal with the situation. But once once bishop is
Speaker 4: assassinated and a curfew is put in place, a shoot
Speaker 4: on site curfew, that really is what starts everything in motion.
Speaker 2: So I mean it's your book is really the ranger perspective.
Speaker 2: So if you don't want to get into the top level,
Speaker 2: but I mean, can we at least talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about like how the Reagan administration arrived at that
Speaker 2: decision and then how that order makes its way down
Speaker 2: to the rangers who have to start preparing for them
Speaker 2: the operation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think they looked at it as like a
Speaker 4: coupe de main operation where they would just parachute, you know,
Speaker 4: a battalion at points alnas and they would roll north
Speaker 4: and and and you know, or or roll out to
Speaker 4: the east and secure the the the students and then
Speaker 4: they would backload them and be done. But there were
Speaker 4: a whole slow emissions laid on, especially for the special
Speaker 4: mission units, a number of them like the electrical power stations.
Speaker 1: The oil pumping.
Speaker 4: Station, radio transmitted mission, state station on the island. These
Speaker 4: the whole slow emissions that are there that are at
Speaker 4: least conceptually looked at the Rangers. First range of it
Speaker 4: had just come off ready Ranger ready Force one. They
Speaker 4: had just handed it off to second Battalion who had
Speaker 4: just assumed it.
Speaker 1: For the Rangers. You know.
Speaker 4: They Yeah, Jaysack had just you know been formed in
Speaker 4: you know again in the ashes of of the Iran rescue.
Speaker 4: General Schoulties, Dick Schulties was running the show there. He
Speaker 4: was a conventional guy, but he had had a very
Speaker 4: experienced special operations staff around him. Uh, And they were
Speaker 4: they were pushing early on to make it a Ranger
Speaker 4: battalion show. Later on the Marines get added. And there's
Speaker 4: a lot of the thing I I've learned about Urgent
Speaker 4: Fury and is that there is more urban legend and
Speaker 4: myth involved in this operation and I think any other
Speaker 4: military action in US military history. There are so much
Speaker 4: bullshit and stories that people think they know the truth
Speaker 4: about what happened or who is alerted or who did
Speaker 4: this or who did that. And the odd thing about
Speaker 4: it is typical D classification for papers dealing with stuff
Speaker 4: is about twenty five years. Well it's going forty and
Speaker 4: a lot of the stuff still hasn't been D classed.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: Thankfully the stuff that was relevant to the book was
Speaker 4: D classed so we could write about it.
Speaker 1: But for the.
Speaker 4: Rangers, it starts. It starts at Jaysock, right. It's Ken
Speaker 4: Bower and John Ritzell who are the j three alphas
Speaker 4: at Jaysock, and they are the ones who start the
Speaker 4: ball in motion. And the first thing they do is,
Speaker 4: according to John Ritzill, he informed first Bat first. And
Speaker 4: I talk about this in the book in the notes section,
Speaker 4: and I encourage everyone to read it. And I think
Speaker 4: the world of Colonel John, and I think he's a
Speaker 4: great guy and his my moory might be a little
Speaker 4: flawed because I ran down the timelines of all of it,
Speaker 4: and second Bat got alerted first, which was proper. They
Speaker 4: were our or ranger ready for us one. But the
Speaker 4: thing with them is they had to stage out of
Speaker 4: the ISB, which was gonna end up being hunter, they
Speaker 4: had to fly across country, so they immediately start recalling.
Speaker 4: They've got rangers up at a a Halo jump Master
Speaker 4: MTT at a Yakama, and for first bat they've got
Speaker 4: rangers that are flying all over the place because it's
Speaker 4: deer season and they're worried that guys will not be you know,
Speaker 4: back then had pagers. You know, you don't have cell
Speaker 4: phones and communications, global communications not there. So they were
Speaker 4: worried guys are flying to the four Winds to go
Speaker 4: hunting or whatever because they just came off and you
Speaker 4: figure they're going to be back in the barracks party
Speaker 4: and hard. So there was yeah, no, imagine that young
Speaker 4: rangers and the barracks party and hard.
Speaker 2: Not.
Speaker 4: That never happens, right, So the recall goes out and
Speaker 4: they start bringing guys back in, and for both battalions,
Speaker 4: both battalion commanders had done multi alert on consecutive weekends
Speaker 4: leading up to that. So the guys who were really
Speaker 4: sore about having to come back in, we're just gonna
Speaker 4: come in, accountability, draw weapons, rock march, come back, and
Speaker 4: then we're gonna lose half a day and we're gonna
Speaker 4: be pissed off and then they come in and the
Speaker 4: medics are pulling morphine. The war as they called them,
Speaker 4: the war guns are coming out. And I don't know
Speaker 4: if they did this in your time. There was a
Speaker 4: separate set of weapons.
Speaker 1: Back then.
Speaker 4: They had their take them to the field and beat
Speaker 4: the crap out of them weapons. And then they had
Speaker 4: their war guns which were specially sequestered and weren't taken
Speaker 4: out as often.
Speaker 2: Oh no, we didn't have that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I thought it was interesting in your book how you
Speaker 2: talk about, you know, how the guys get recalled for
Speaker 2: training purposes over and over again. So when the live
Speaker 2: thing happens, a lot of these guys think it's bullshit.
Speaker 2: There are actually, I think, as I recall a couple
Speaker 2: people in your book who are like sitting on the
Speaker 2: plane thirty minutes away from jumping into Grenada still like, ah,
Speaker 2: this is just an exercise. They're gonna call it. They're
Speaker 2: gonna call it all off.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the funny thing was it Jerry Perky said it best.
Speaker 4: He opened up his Ammo pouch and there's you know,
Speaker 4: there's full there's real real rounds in those magazines, and
Speaker 4: he goes, yeah, but it was an alert.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have these, you know.
Speaker 4: He points, yeah, points to his jump master buddy, right,
Speaker 4: He's like yeah, but yeah, for a lot of these guys,
Speaker 4: they were they they rolled into an eighteen hour sequence
Speaker 4: just like normal, like it was normal.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't normal. Obviously.
Speaker 4: As soon as the live AMMO came out and the
Speaker 4: guy's described it as this mortgage board, he just walked
Speaker 4: along the tables and picked what you want, Like I
Speaker 4: have friends who jumped into into Panama with the Ranger
Speaker 4: Regiment and they were like, no, we got cards that
Speaker 4: told us how much AMMO to take back.
Speaker 1: Then no.
Speaker 4: And there's a story about Bill Mayville, General Mayville, and
Speaker 4: he ends up jumping with a Claymore and a belt
Speaker 4: of seven six to two m sixty AMMO in his
Speaker 4: shirt because they were thinking how long are they going
Speaker 4: to be down there before I get resupplied. And so
Speaker 4: these guys told me these are the heaviest rucks they
Speaker 4: ever jumped, and all they had was water, food AMMO,
Speaker 4: no snivel gear, really a couple pairs of socks if
Speaker 4: they were lucky, maybe a poncho liner.
Speaker 2: So the sequences, first battalion gets alerted, then second battalion.
Speaker 1: The second battalion goes first.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, because they're they're on RF one yep, okay,
Speaker 2: So second battalion gets it first. They have to fly
Speaker 2: across the country to Hunter to co locate with first Battalion,
Speaker 2: who also gets alerted. What are that sort of the
Speaker 2: actions on at Hunter and like at what point do
Speaker 2: these guys get kind of like briefed on an actual
Speaker 2: upward like does that? Does that happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: The so, first off, the mission changes a little bit. Originally,
Speaker 4: Colonel Hagler flies out to Brag and they meet to
Speaker 4: Jaysock headquarters and they go into a planning session, initial
Speaker 4: planning session where they kind of do a divisional labor
Speaker 4: who's going to do what First Battalion's going to take
Speaker 4: Salina's Second Battalion's going to jump at Pearls Airport up
Speaker 4: on the eastern side of Grenada. So basically coup de
Speaker 4: main operations on both of the islands airports. Later on,
Speaker 4: the Marines get added and Pearls is taken away from
Speaker 4: second bat and they are given the mission to follow
Speaker 4: first in and then conduct a road march to Calvini,
Speaker 4: which is the main Cuban and Grenadian training facility on
Speaker 4: the island, and they're going to take that out. And
Speaker 4: in between there there are also both battalions are going
Speaker 4: to help to rescue all the medical students and evacuate
Speaker 4: them or secure them for evacuation. So at that point
Speaker 4: they start discussing like, Okay, here's specter is going to
Speaker 4: be in support.
Speaker 1: What's the jump altitude going to be?
Speaker 4: They get with the special operator, the special airman special
Speaker 4: operations airmen to discuss jump altitudes. Originally those guys wanted
Speaker 4: to go up like twelve hundred and sixteen hundred feet.
Speaker 4: The Rangers really wanted to jump at like three hundred
Speaker 4: to start. That was the first suggestion, no reserves. Then
Speaker 4: the two of them together. Now the funny thing is
Speaker 4: I interviewed both battalion commanders, and both battalion commanders told
Speaker 4: me they made the decision to go at five hundred.
Speaker 4: So I came to the conclusion that they got together
Speaker 4: and they said five hundred. I called that one because
Speaker 4: neither one of them seemed to want to back off
Speaker 4: of they were the ones who made the call, but
Speaker 4: the five hundred was the only one that they could
Speaker 4: get the space Special Operations aviators to guarantee them to
Speaker 4: be able to put them on the DZ without getting
Speaker 4: every plane blown out of the sky. So that's how
Speaker 4: they settled in the five hundred. And you also had
Speaker 4: your Air Liaison officers US Air Force a LOS that
Speaker 4: were to the battalions were there to help with the planning. Again,
Speaker 4: the specter guys, you had your night stalkers, you had
Speaker 4: your smooths. They were all in there doing their their
Speaker 4: going into their separate little rooms and doing their own
Speaker 4: their own coordination. And here's where a lot of the
Speaker 4: confusion for the operation starts to take place. They had
Speaker 4: very few maps, so they got copies of the maps,
Speaker 4: and then each one of those cells made their own
Speaker 4: grid lines, so none of them had corresponding grid lines.
Speaker 4: So it made it very difficult to coordinate things once
Speaker 4: they got on the ground.
Speaker 1: Later on, the.
Speaker 4: Defense Mapping Agency starts churning out maps left and right,
Speaker 4: but it's four or five days after the operations kicked off,
Speaker 4: so that's a real limitter for them right then and there,
Speaker 4: and it makes it very difficult unless it's an inter
Speaker 4: unit fire, like let's just say B company mortars are
Speaker 4: going to fire and support a B company and they're
Speaker 4: all shooting off the same map. Okay, it makes sense,
Speaker 4: but when you're trying to coordinate fires across the battalion,
Speaker 4: man and you got two battalions and two separate sets
Speaker 4: of grid system you know, two different grid systems. You
Speaker 4: got that's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 2: So what is this the final scheme of maneuver that
Speaker 2: they come up with for the infiltration phase? And how
Speaker 2: does that start to uh go and you know when
Speaker 2: h hour comes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the way they work it out is it's
Speaker 4: going to be a company. The first battalion is going
Speaker 4: to be your jump clearing team. They're going to jump
Speaker 4: to two aircraft loads of rangers are going to go
Speaker 4: down clear the airfield, and then it's going to be
Speaker 4: air land and Tebbie style where the rest of the
Speaker 4: first and then second following will pour out of the
Speaker 4: aircraft and go about securing their portions of the of
Speaker 4: the airfield. And the airfield originally is divided up with
Speaker 4: a company having the eastern portion of it the hills
Speaker 4: north of the airfield, and then the eastern portion of
Speaker 4: the airfield along with the True Blue Medical School campus.
Speaker 4: B company is to the left flank of the left
Speaker 4: flank of A Company First Battalion, so B Company First
Speaker 4: Battalions right next to them. And then you have if
Speaker 4: memory serves, A and B Company of second bat on
Speaker 4: the western side of the airfield's northern hills with I
Speaker 4: think their C Company.
Speaker 1: I'd have to pull my maps out.
Speaker 4: It's been a minute on the south side of the airfield,
Speaker 4: kind of acting as a quick reaction force. And then
Speaker 4: hard Rock Charlieer the first Battalion is attached to Delta
Speaker 4: for the Richmond Hill prison rescue mission. So that's the
Speaker 4: basic force laydown. And again the initial the initial entry
Speaker 4: method is going to be the jump clearing team in
Speaker 4: first and then AirLand the remainder of the force. But
Speaker 4: because Murphy gets a vote no pun intended, the parachute
Speaker 4: option is always on the table and all the parachutes
Speaker 4: are brought ends up working out.
Speaker 2: Joe. I got to do a quick ad read from
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Speaker 2: And then I'd just like to tell our viewers real
Speaker 2: quick about we Defy Special Forces History book I have
Speaker 2: coming out in December, the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History,
Speaker 2: with chapters about Blue Light, America's first counter terrorism team,
Speaker 2: green Light, the guys that trained to jump with backpack nukes,
Speaker 2: Detachment A in Berlin, Detachment Kay and Korea, and this
Speaker 2: commander's in extremist Force, the SITH. So I mean, I
Speaker 2: interviewed dozens and dozens of people for this book. I'm
Speaker 2: really happy with how it's coming out. It's up for
Speaker 2: pre order now on Amazon. Paperbacks will be available December
Speaker 2: ninth when the book is released. And of course we
Speaker 2: also want to tell people about Cry Havoc, Joe Muccia's
Speaker 2: book written with Tom Greer, the Untold Story of Rangers
Speaker 2: at War and the subject of this podcast. Obviously, Joe
Speaker 2: you're also doing a podcast. Do you want to tell
Speaker 2: people a little bit about what that's about and where
Speaker 2: they can find it?
Speaker 4: Sure, if you're interested in World War two history, I
Speaker 4: do a World War two podcast called the We're Not
Speaker 4: Lost Private Podcast. If you're a fan of Band of Brothers,
Speaker 4: you're I recognize the the title. In some capacity, we
Speaker 4: talked mostly Western Europe, but actually I just finished one
Speaker 4: with a fellow Long Islander about the Battle for Wake Island.
Speaker 4: So it's pretty broad ranging. If again, if you like
Speaker 4: World War Two especially, we have a focus for paratroopers,
Speaker 4: one hundred first Airborne, eighty second Airborne.
Speaker 1: A lot of that.
Speaker 4: We cover a lot of broad range of topics. But
Speaker 4: it's it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good.
Speaker 2: Will We will have links down the description for both
Speaker 2: Cry Havoc, the book as well as the podcast Joe's podcasts.
Speaker 2: So please take a look.
Speaker 1: Guys.
Speaker 2: The book is Cry Havoc is available right now, and
Speaker 2: give people your website so they can go and get
Speaker 2: the book directly from you. Get autographed copies.
Speaker 4: I got to read this off this stupid business card. Okay,
Speaker 4: go for It's https backslash backslash SSgt moot dot Wicksite
Speaker 4: dot com, forward Slash, Joe Dash Mucia, I'll have this.
Speaker 4: I'll send this to you Jack, so you could throw
Speaker 4: it on there. If you follow the drop down menu,
Speaker 4: you can find the menu for Cry Havoc. You can
Speaker 4: order it directly from me and then I'll sign it
Speaker 4: and I'll inscribe it if you like. And also, like
Speaker 4: I spoke about earlier in the pod, I'll have a
Speaker 4: companion book to Cry Have It coming out.
Speaker 1: Called Old Scrolls.
Speaker 4: It's basically stories of the Ranger battalions from their formation
Speaker 4: in seventy four to seventy five up through the early
Speaker 4: part of eighty four. It's gonna be pretty I am
Speaker 4: really enjoying writing this one. It really covers a lot
Speaker 4: of ground. There's a lot of legend in the Elden, Bargewell,
Speaker 4: Bob Howard, all these these legends and Ranger and Special
Speaker 4: Forces history. I think a lot of especially the Ranger community,
Speaker 4: will really get a kick out of it. It was
Speaker 4: originally gonna be like a forbidden tale of the Rangers,
Speaker 4: but there's there's a lot more to it than just telling,
Speaker 4: you know, telling some stories out of school. And I
Speaker 4: think everybody will get it, get a feel for you
Speaker 4: know how difficult it was for those for the First
Speaker 4: and second Range Battalions to reform after Vietnam and then
Speaker 4: change themselves from a light one of the premier light
Speaker 4: infantry battalions, battalions in the world, into almost a special
Speaker 4: mission force, you know, changing from light infantry to more
Speaker 4: of a Vietnam reconnaissance patrolling organization, and then into a
Speaker 4: special unit where they conduct airfield seizures and raids and
Speaker 4: things of that nature. So it goes through a lot
Speaker 4: of those growing pains to get to what we now
Speaker 4: have as the modern Ranger Force.
Speaker 2: I will definitely be reading the book when it comes out. Joe,
Speaker 2: hit us up. We'll have you back another time to
Speaker 2: talk about that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 2: Let's uh, let's get into the interesting part here, the
Speaker 2: jumping self. Reading your book gonna be completely honest. I
Speaker 2: hope I don't offend some of the Rangers out there.
Speaker 2: The jump sounds like it was a bit of a
Speaker 2: mess man, that it was just chaos and confusion in
Speaker 2: those aircraft.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're not, you're not. You're not downplaying it at all.
Speaker 4: I think I think the thing that most people don't
Speaker 4: really understand is one, the force inbound goes through several
Speaker 4: order changes that really throws things off. And then two
Speaker 4: again too, as we spoke about before, they don't get
Speaker 4: to pull off the jump clearing team and then the
Speaker 4: Entebbe style land and offload.
Speaker 1: They end up having to jump.
Speaker 4: And in some cases the word goes out throughout the
Speaker 4: force rig d D rig rig again, so guys are
Speaker 4: and not only that, sometimes during that d those parachutes
Speaker 4: are just getting thrown haphazardly into the somewhere some open
Speaker 4: space in the aircraft, and then when they get handed
Speaker 4: back out, you don't necessarily get to shoot back that
Speaker 4: you originally rigged.
Speaker 1: So in some.
Speaker 4: Cases we had guys who were five foot eight getting
Speaker 4: a rigged for somebody who was six foot two, or
Speaker 4: vice versa. So there was a lot of things that
Speaker 4: went on, and I think while we laugh about it
Speaker 4: and we talk about it being a bit of a mess,
Speaker 4: I think this is where we look at the professionalism
Speaker 4: of the ranger force at that time, that they're able
Speaker 4: to overcome that, get their rangers rigged, get their rucks rigged,
Speaker 4: and get themselves out of the aircraft and on the
Speaker 4: ground in fighting order so they can immediately go into
Speaker 4: and conduct operations.
Speaker 2: So I have to also acknowledge with that comment Joe,
Speaker 2: that it's not necessarily fair for me to reach back
Speaker 2: into the past and criticize too much because the things
Speaker 2: that I had the fortunate experience of having the TTPs,
Speaker 2: the SOPs, those are lessons learned from the past from
Speaker 2: these guys who developed that stuff for us. So I
Speaker 2: don't mean to be overly critical of of of the guys.
Speaker 2: I know they and they got the job done at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, regardless of all those problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't I don't think. I don't think any
Speaker 1: of them can take offense.
Speaker 4: We all understand is friction in combat, and it happens,
Speaker 4: and and and you know what, did Mike Tyson say,
Speaker 4: everybody's got a plan to get punched in the face.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, they get punched in the face
Speaker 4: early on, and not in a way where thankfully no
Speaker 4: nobody in the Ranger Force or the Air Force Special
Speaker 4: Air Crew are injured during the run ins. But what
Speaker 4: happens is the first two aircraft that have the jump
Speaker 4: clearing team on it have to wave off because of
Speaker 4: the intense anti aircraft fire that's coming up. But the
Speaker 4: third aircraft in line, which had the first Battalion headquarters
Speaker 4: on it and first first platoona B Company, First Battalion
Speaker 4: board in on the on the on the drop zone,
Speaker 4: and thankfully the Cubans and Grenadians had elevated the anti
Speaker 4: aircraft guns in the hills. They had sandbagged underneath them
Speaker 4: and they couldn't depress below five hundred feet. So literally
Speaker 4: his aircraft are coming in and there's this fire that's
Speaker 4: screaming right over them. This is not to say they
Speaker 4: didn't take any hits. There were plenty of twelve point
Speaker 4: seven positions and then small arms positions that were firing.
Speaker 4: But you could tell that they were undertrained because most
Speaker 4: of the hits are happening in the tail sections of
Speaker 4: the aircraft. They're not leading the aircraft enough. But what
Speaker 4: happens is the third aircraft bores in. After specter softens
Speaker 4: up everything again, third aircraft comes in and then the
Speaker 4: rest of the force waves off, and then for twenty
Speaker 4: five to thirty minutes, that lone ranger pull tune and
Speaker 4: that battalion headquarters that ATOK, that talk one is on
Speaker 4: the ground. Thankfully they have their a lo their senior
Speaker 4: al on the ground, Jim Roper.
Speaker 1: He begins to work.
Speaker 4: Calling in specter on his own and then meets up
Speaker 4: with the FIST, the Battalion Fist Ike Eisenbart, and two
Speaker 4: of them get together and they start working the hills
Speaker 4: based on Colonel Taylor's guidance.
Speaker 1: But all that is happening while.
Speaker 4: The rangers of first Platoon, Bee Company are assaulting up
Speaker 4: into the hills and clearing the runway. And this is
Speaker 4: a reduced force. It's not a full first platoon because
Speaker 4: they had crossloaded on the aircraft, so it's not even
Speaker 4: the entire first platoon a BEE Company, And so this
Speaker 4: force is down there clearing heavy light towers, rebar they're
Speaker 4: getting all this oil drums off the airfield so that
Speaker 4: the remainder of the force can come in. And it's
Speaker 4: pretty amazing that they were able to do this and
Speaker 4: not one of them get killed during that time. And
Speaker 4: a lot of them told me, you know, the biggest
Speaker 4: issue with what the Cubans and the Grenadians did wrong
Speaker 4: was they didn't come down from the hills and just
Speaker 4: sweep us off the airfield. They let us build up
Speaker 4: combat power, right and that's exactly what happens. So after
Speaker 4: they restaff, can I apologize, you're gonna have to read
Speaker 4: the book if you want to figure out where who
Speaker 4: was who in the zoo in terms of the airflow.
Speaker 4: But they don't go in number order. I will say that.
Speaker 4: But what's really interesting is when you get into the
Speaker 4: nitty gritty and you read about what's going on in
Speaker 4: each one of the aircraft, and I do that, I
Speaker 4: go Tom and I specifically wanted to make sure that
Speaker 4: ranger there was ranger representation for each aircraft in the
Speaker 4: Cereal coming in for one through seven, which was the
Speaker 4: first Battalion Cereal, and then eight through twelve, which was
Speaker 4: the second Battalion Serial. And if you go in there,
Speaker 4: you'll read and there's again as we talked about, there's
Speaker 4: a lot of well known ranger names in those And
Speaker 4: to me, yeah, it was a mess, but these guys
Speaker 4: just got the job done. They just didn't screw around.
Speaker 4: They re rigged guys, they got them ready to go.
Speaker 4: There's one instance where Gary Carpenter, the first Battalion Sergeant
Speaker 4: Major Gary Carpenter is a legend, made the made the
Speaker 4: jump in the Vietnam with the one hundred and seventy
Speaker 4: three Airborne. M blessed to have met him and spoken
Speaker 4: with him several times. And Gary Carpenterom's got sucked right
Speaker 4: out of the aircraft because one of the retaining straps
Speaker 4: on his ruck came off and the ruck was dangling
Speaker 4: when he went to do his door check and they
Speaker 4: had Bruce McGraw had had to.
Speaker 1: Haul him in. So there's some pretty amazing stories in there.
Speaker 2: Again, I mean, were there were a couple toad jumpers
Speaker 2: on this, wasn't there?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Bill, Bill Feedack was one of them, and Marlon Maynard?
Speaker 1: Was it Marlon Maynard?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I think it was Marlon Maynard because Marlon is later
Speaker 4: killed on on Jeap five Juliet five. Bill actually got
Speaker 4: credit for the jump even though he never exited. He
Speaker 4: exited the aircraft, but he they hauled him back in
Speaker 4: and he ended up air landing later on, But he
Speaker 4: got credit for the jump because he exited the aircraft
Speaker 4: under fire.
Speaker 2: True story. Yeah, he can't argue with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, Bill a good guy too.
Speaker 4: Again, I've been blessed to know a lot of these guys,
Speaker 4: and a lot of them I met on my own,
Speaker 4: but a lot of them I met through Tom, and
Speaker 4: without Tom's efforts, some of these stories would have never.
Speaker 1: Saw the light of day.
Speaker 2: So, how we have the one platoon that's on the
Speaker 2: ground for a prolonged period of time. How long is
Speaker 2: it until the next pass?
Speaker 1: Oh, you're gonna make me open the book?
Speaker 2: Now, I mean thereabouts. I mean, if you don't know, it's.
Speaker 4: About twenty five, it's about twenty five to thirty minutes
Speaker 4: before that next open chalk comes in. So these guys
Speaker 4: are on the ground there watching specter duel it out
Speaker 4: with these anti aircraft positions in the hills above above
Speaker 4: the airfield, and they really were worried that that they
Speaker 4: the enemy was gonna come out of the hills and
Speaker 4: just sweep them off into the sea. But once that
Speaker 4: starts happening, and those initial sticks, and I will say this,
Speaker 4: we all we always say, oh, it was a five
Speaker 4: hundred five hundred foot jump. So the first couple of
Speaker 4: sticks that went out were about four hundred if I
Speaker 4: remember correct, the aircrew wrote was four hundred and ninety
Speaker 4: two feet AGL. By the time the later second battalion
Speaker 4: sticks start coming, it's around seven hundred. Because the aircraft
Speaker 4: anti aircraft fire is completely is almost completely abated. At
Speaker 4: that point, Specter has really cleared the gun crews out.
Speaker 4: The rangers have assaulted up the hills. They've cleared those hills.
Speaker 4: They are holding them, and they're looking down on what
Speaker 4: was called Little Havana, which was the Cuban construction workers
Speaker 4: compound in a bowl on the northern side of north
Speaker 4: of the airfield. So the rangers are all in these
Speaker 4: positions now, and there's all these little fights, these little
Speaker 4: tactical level fights that I think a lot.
Speaker 2: Of your onesies and twosies, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the people you know that enjoy this
Speaker 4: kind of material and like this kind of of combat
Speaker 4: memoirs will will enjoy those real tactical level views of
Speaker 4: some very well known rangers doing ranger things.
Speaker 2: And I have to point out you write in the
Speaker 2: book about a few of them who brought their personally
Speaker 2: owned weapons with them. So there's like some guys pulling
Speaker 2: out three fifty seven magnums and shoo.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean there's one guy who I think he had.
Speaker 4: It was Dale Killinger from Second bat. He was a
Speaker 4: company guy. I think he went with three personal handguns
Speaker 4: and he ended up giving out like two of them
Speaker 4: to two of his ranger buddies. He didn't have, you know,
Speaker 4: like there wasn't much restriction on that stuff back then.
Speaker 4: It was in the barracks, but he you know, like
Speaker 4: stuff was kind of you know, unlike nowadays. Like when
Speaker 4: I was in the Marines, if you had a personally
Speaker 4: owned weapon, you could check it into your unit armory
Speaker 4: and check it out when you wanted to. But back then,
Speaker 4: I think, you know, they the hollowed out ceilings in
Speaker 4: the in the cutouts in the wall lockers that you
Speaker 4: could hide stuff in. And I think I think the
Speaker 4: guys took took full advantage of that.
Speaker 2: And so how long is it before we get all
Speaker 2: the rangers on the ground.
Speaker 4: I believe the last the first air landing sea when
Speaker 4: thirty comes in at zero seven thirty six, so the
Speaker 4: jump kicks off. That was it five these six if
Speaker 4: I remember ish.
Speaker 2: So some of them are jumping during daylight, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's pretty light out by the time, you know.
Speaker 4: A couple of the guys told me it was very
Speaker 4: light out, and a couple of guys told me it
Speaker 4: was getting light out when they approached. But pretty much
Speaker 4: it was daylight and that was a lot of the
Speaker 4: Rangers were pissed off about that, and they blamed the
Speaker 4: Marines because the rumor was that the Marines couldn't land
Speaker 4: in the dark and they had to hold up the
Speaker 4: Ranger operation to accommodate the Marines going in simultaneously, which
Speaker 4: was a bunch of bullshit, because I've interviewed a lot
Speaker 4: of the Marines, especially the Marine pilots from two six
Speaker 4: to one who flew those missions. All the lead pilots
Speaker 4: were MVG qualified before they left the States. In fact,
Speaker 4: when they took off their first seials to make their
Speaker 4: assault into Pearl's Airport, they took off at zero three
Speaker 4: thirty in the dark in a rain squall. It Actually,
Speaker 4: the reason why the Ranger jump got pushed back was
Speaker 4: because they had pushed forward, was because they had to
Speaker 4: accommodate some of the smooth units that needed a stage
Speaker 4: in Barbados. They were late leaving, and then there was
Speaker 4: some load out and loading issues, specifically with some TF
Speaker 4: one sixty aircraft once they got to Barbados, and.
Speaker 2: They would have gotten on the ground a little bit
Speaker 2: sooner if some of those air initial aircraft didn't have
Speaker 2: to peel off because of the anti aircraft fire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4: And they put in AC one thirty went in and
Speaker 4: did a re mission rekis flight before the jump. The
Speaker 4: main body arrived and they were picked up right away.
Speaker 4: In fact, there was a spotlight that was running that
Speaker 4: picked up not only the AC one thirty, but it
Speaker 4: ended up picking up Jim Hobson's aircraft. He's the one
Speaker 4: who jumped first Platoon, B Company in the battalion quarters
Speaker 4: for first Battalion. So they knew early on that there
Speaker 4: was something coming, and I don't you know, and there
Speaker 4: was other actions that took part. You know, there's some
Speaker 4: Navy Seal action to reconnoiter points alinas that didn't didn't
Speaker 4: end up coming going off because of a number of
Speaker 4: different issues. So there were a lot of things going
Speaker 4: on at one time, a lot of elements going in
Speaker 4: at one time. You know, I think lant Com at
Speaker 4: the time, it was lant Com. It's not lant Com anymore.
Speaker 4: They don't exist. But lant Com at the time wanted
Speaker 4: to synchronize all of the actions at once, which was ridiculous.
Speaker 4: They didn't need to do that. Once the first unit
Speaker 4: goes on the gig is up. I mean, everybody knows
Speaker 4: what's going on, right, So trying to synchronize the Marines,
Speaker 4: the Rangers, and the special mission units all at one
Speaker 4: time was to me just a stupid thing to do.
Speaker 4: Not to mention, they weren't using Greenwich meantime, they were
Speaker 4: using local time versus I mean, there was a whole
Speaker 4: host of issues that plagued the operation. But again, I
Speaker 4: hate to sound like a cheerleader, but the guy has
Speaker 4: got the job done, Yeah, regardless of all the obstacles,
Speaker 4: the shitty intelligence about where the positions were, all of
Speaker 4: that stuff, where the students were. That was another one
Speaker 4: that comes into play later on with the Grand As Mission,
Speaker 4: the rescue mission, because I like to call it the
Speaker 4: twenty six minute Rescue.
Speaker 2: One of the things I really enjoyed about the book
Speaker 2: was that it really does take you inside the perspective
Speaker 2: of like the tabspec for ranger on the ground, and
Speaker 2: like you're experiencing the chaos as he experiences it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's one thing for like you and I years later
Speaker 2: to pick apart the operation and we understand all of
Speaker 2: these things, but those soldiers in that moment don't have
Speaker 2: that information, and so there's like some great moments where
Speaker 2: like a dev grew guy shows up out of nowhere
Speaker 2: with long hair, like oh hey, guys, and the Rangers
Speaker 2: are like what who are you? Or another time where
Speaker 2: a Jasock officer like order some of the Rangers to
Speaker 2: go do some crazy mission and the guys like who
Speaker 2: are you? Not unless my battalion commander says, so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't work for you, buddy. Yeah, yeah it does.
Speaker 4: There's the the tab spec for you know, you're talking
Speaker 4: about that guy, that guy. It's up front and and
Speaker 4: and prevalent throughout the story. But I also want to
Speaker 4: point out that the key leadership moments occur, like there's
Speaker 4: a lot of those, like especially in the aircraft before
Speaker 4: the jump, like guys Dale Kennedy making some really great
Speaker 4: decisions there alongside Doc Donovan. If your first first ranger
Speaker 4: battalion alum, then you know who Doc Donovan.
Speaker 2: He's a legend. Yeah, lots of people, no Doc.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I mean these guys get together at this critical
Speaker 4: point in time in the Jump and they're like, no,
Speaker 4: don't d rig just keep your rigs on. I mean
Speaker 4: those are sprinkled in there too, But you're right, I
Speaker 4: mean we wrote it that way. We wrote it to
Speaker 4: be sort of a love letter to this that tab
Speaker 4: spec spec for who's you know, it has to be
Speaker 4: the point that this strategic corporal at times, right, he's
Speaker 4: got to he's got to lead an assault because I
Speaker 4: don't know where my sergeant is or I've got to securities.
Speaker 4: I've got to secure these students because that's our mission.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I'd love to go shoot out the armored
Speaker 4: vehicle that just showed up, but my job is to
Speaker 4: protect these students. You know, Like this, there's all these
Speaker 4: little vignettes baked into it that I think that rangers
Speaker 4: especially will get a lot out of.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about the actual rescue of
Speaker 2: the True Blue medical students because it's like a little
Speaker 2: bit of almost a comical scene that takes place amongst
Speaker 2: all of this mayhem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you can.
Speaker 4: You know, the True Blue is on the eastern side
Speaker 4: of the campus, and I think a lot of the
Speaker 4: Rangers that were part of the platoon that had to
Speaker 4: secure them, they knew where the campus was, but they
Speaker 4: they the approach was through enemy territory essentially, so as
Speaker 4: they clear up that eastern side of the runway, it
Speaker 4: rises up a little bit into true Blue and then
Speaker 4: drops down and I think a lot of the Rangers
Speaker 4: as they got to that hill and they kind of
Speaker 4: lay it up to get a lay of the land,
Speaker 4: and you're kind of doing that little bit of leader's rereki
Speaker 4: before you go charging into the objective right, and they're
Speaker 4: looking and they see all these little faces sticking out
Speaker 4: from between curtains, like what the hell is going on?
Speaker 4: Because these students know what's going on. They've been watching
Speaker 4: aircraft fly over the airfield for for hours now, or
Speaker 4: a couple of hours at least, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: you know, they kind of they bounce in there and
Speaker 4: they start pulling all these these students together and they
Speaker 4: secure them in the library, which ends up turning into
Speaker 4: an operating room, especially when the Jamus shows up.
Speaker 1: But it's funny.
Speaker 4: Because they're like, Okay, we've got you. Don't worry, we're
Speaker 4: gonna get you out of here. And they're like, what
Speaker 4: about the.
Speaker 1: Rest of us?
Speaker 4: And the Rangers are like, what do you mean the
Speaker 4: rest of us? They're like, there's a whole nother campus
Speaker 4: above the airfield at Grand Ends, and the Rangers are like,
Speaker 4: what are you kidding me. No, We'll get on the phone,
Speaker 4: hold on, and they call up the other campus and they're, yeah,
Speaker 4: we're over here.
Speaker 1: We got one hundred and.
Speaker 4: Thirty something people and if you give us some time,
Speaker 4: we'll call the rest in so we can get everybody here.
Speaker 1: And so the Rangers are.
Speaker 4: Like okay, and it gets passed up the chain and
Speaker 4: it gets handed off the second Ranger battalion and this
Speaker 4: happens on the twenty sixth. It's the second day the
Speaker 4: operation where they go into too Grand Ants. And the
Speaker 4: funny thing was it was originally going to be a
Speaker 4: Marine Corps mission, but all the Marine Corps rifle companies
Speaker 4: had been tasked out to different missions north of the
Speaker 4: boundary line for the two tfs, so there were no
Speaker 4: Marine rifle units to assist in the recovery of the
Speaker 4: students from Grand Ants. But they had the aircraft and
Speaker 4: that's what the Rangers needed. And so there was a
Speaker 4: bit of a we'll call it a discussion on the
Speaker 4: bridge of the Guam about who was going to go
Speaker 4: on the aircraft and rescue the students. The marine The
Speaker 4: mal commander wanted to be Marines, and he's like, I
Speaker 4: need you know, twelve hours to get my marines together,
Speaker 4: and Schwartzkov looks at him and goes, no, that's not
Speaker 4: gonna happen. We're gonna put rangers on those aircraft. They're
Speaker 4: going to go in and they're going to rescue those students,
Speaker 4: and that's going to be it. And Schwartzkov was a
Speaker 4: two star at the time, the commander was a full
Speaker 4: bird colonel. It was a little bit of posturing and
Speaker 4: a little bit of words thrown around, and then all
Speaker 4: of a sudden it was you have your orders, I'll
Speaker 4: be there, I'll fire you, and I'll find somebody who
Speaker 4: will execute what I want storm and Norman was not
Speaker 4: going to be dissuaded. So thankfully Granny Amos, who is
Speaker 4: the commander officer of six one one, had gone to
Speaker 4: VMI with Colonel Hagler, the second Italian commander. They got
Speaker 4: together over at Selinas and they whipped together a plan,
Speaker 4: fragoed it out to the companies, and basically, in twenty
Speaker 4: six minutes, they put multiple flights of Helo on the ground.
Speaker 4: The rangers went in first on ch forty six's up
Speaker 4: along this beach strand now interestingly the beach when they
Speaker 4: first looked at it. The tide had not started coming
Speaker 4: back in, but by the time they started flying in,
Speaker 4: the tide was in. So they had a very thin
Speaker 4: strip of land to put the hels in and Co
Speaker 4: Marine don't care. We'll land our hels and water.
Speaker 2: And I mean, you're they're very exposed too out there
Speaker 2: on the beach.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they started taking fire the moment they started coming in.
Speaker 4: They brought in a seven's, they brought an AC one thirty,
Speaker 4: they had the eighty second was on the island by then,
Speaker 4: including batteries of their artillery. They were firing one oh
Speaker 4: five's at the what they thought with Cuban positions. So
Speaker 4: all the supporting fire goes in, but they're still taking fire,
Speaker 4: and a number of the aircraft take hits going in,
Speaker 4: but the most damage gets done to the aircraft by
Speaker 4: palm trees. And there's a couple of there's famous pictures
Speaker 4: of a H forty six sitting on a beach. Everybody
Speaker 4: thinks that that's their aircraft that got hit and didn't
Speaker 4: take off, and it wasn't. Sea Company and my buddy
Speaker 4: Kurt Star went in on air aircraft and air aircraft
Speaker 4: basically what happened was the palm tree got hit by
Speaker 4: the roderwash, forcing it to go back, and then when
Speaker 4: it came forward, it hit the aircraft. And to say it,
Speaker 4: they thought it was going to disable it. But the
Speaker 4: crew chief under fire the aircraft. The crew comes off
Speaker 4: the aircraft, the crew chief climbs up there, it checks
Speaker 4: it out. He goes, I think we can make it
Speaker 4: back out to the flotilla. They get back on the
Speaker 4: aircraft and they fly it out. Once the rangers secure
Speaker 4: all of the students. And the interesting part was again
Speaker 4: they had phone communication between the campuses. So what they
Speaker 4: did was they told the students, hey, tie white strips
Speaker 4: of cloth on both arms, so we know your students,
Speaker 4: mattresses up against the windows, and one small bag per
Speaker 4: and that's it. And even then, some of those aircraft
Speaker 4: went out pretty heavy. Now, the rangers went in in
Speaker 4: forty six is, but they brought fifty threes in to
Speaker 4: pull the students out. And some of these were coming
Speaker 4: out with sixty packs on board, including the flight crew.
Speaker 4: I mean, they were way overloaded. Some of them were
Speaker 4: doing this dip build up, air speed rise, dip rise,
Speaker 4: dip out to the flotilla.
Speaker 1: That's how heavy they were coming out.
Speaker 4: The forty sixes came back in and then one of
Speaker 4: them did the same thing the other one did. It
Speaker 4: hit a palm tree, but it destroyed the aft rotor
Speaker 4: system and that one was totaled as a result. A
Speaker 4: ranger squad gets left on the beach after everybody's eve act.
Speaker 4: Now they call back.
Speaker 1: Thankfully they had a radio. They called back.
Speaker 4: At first they were going to e and e them
Speaker 4: back through the lines, but the eighty second was up
Speaker 4: there and they didn't have running passwords to work with
Speaker 4: the eighty second, and they were worried about getting lit up.
Speaker 4: So basically, the guys in that squad decide to go
Speaker 4: check out the ch forty six and they pull out
Speaker 4: all of the life rafts out of it, and one
Speaker 4: of them shot the pieces and they get two of them.
Speaker 4: They put it together and then they they make their
Speaker 4: way out. Well, one of them starts to sink, so
Speaker 4: they basically put all the non swimmers in the in
Speaker 4: the uh in the life raft with all the equipment
Speaker 4: and weapons, and the rest of the guys just hold
Speaker 4: on the side and paddle and they finally get out
Speaker 4: and they get a small patrol boat from the USS.
Speaker 4: Karen finds them and then brings them on board. They
Speaker 4: get their clothes, they get their uniforms laundered, the grenades
Speaker 4: get thrown overboard because they're worried about salt water contamination.
Speaker 4: They get fresh AMMO and that's when that jaysock officer
Speaker 4: talks to the to the platoon leader at the time,
Speaker 4: and he tells them that I don't think so, I
Speaker 4: gotta wait to talk to my Theatian commander. But the
Speaker 4: next day they come back, they get flown back out
Speaker 4: and they're in pipe this brand clean, spanking new uniforms
Speaker 4: that looks like everybody else is dirty.
Speaker 2: Has got like two three days worth the.
Speaker 4: Grime and crap on their uniforms, and these guys are all,
Speaker 4: you know, looking spiffy, and you know, it was it
Speaker 4: was pretty pretty. I don't think it was funny for them, obviously,
Speaker 4: you know, there's a lot of unknown there. But again,
Speaker 4: they make it work. They make it out, They figure
Speaker 4: it out, they work the problem out, they find a
Speaker 4: way out, and they make they make it out without
Speaker 4: getting themselves killed, which.
Speaker 2: Is there's all one more big mission that happens uh
Speaker 2: during this battle, during this operation. But there's a couple
Speaker 2: of interesting vignettes that I'd like to ask you about.
Speaker 2: The first one being the jeep that unfortunately runs into
Speaker 2: an ambush on the side of the airfield, and the
Speaker 2: second I had no idea that this had happened. You
Speaker 2: write about the Rangers engaging basically an armored column like
Speaker 2: armored vehicles with recoil ass rifles.
Speaker 4: I was like, yho, yeah, So on the first day,
Speaker 4: they really understanding of the battle space was very very thin,
Speaker 4: and they had worked out scheme of maneuver back at
Speaker 4: at Hunter before they had taken off. So Alpha Company
Speaker 4: First Bat had its jeeps. They were gonna use their
Speaker 4: jeeps like pickets, right, they were gonna they were gonna
Speaker 4: form a picket line around the airfield along the major
Speaker 4: major avenues of approach, and basically, you know, they were
Speaker 4: the jeeps back then were.
Speaker 1: Equipped with recoill it.
Speaker 4: They well, they did never recall this rifle on that
Speaker 4: on that one in particular, but they did have flash launcher.
Speaker 4: The old I think they're M two oh two's basically
Speaker 4: like four laws in a block that you could fire.
Speaker 4: I think if you remember the old Schwarzenegger movie, Commander
Speaker 4: uses one of them in that they had flash launchers
Speaker 4: they had. They had a man pad on the back
Speaker 4: of the and then they crew mout. They had an
Speaker 4: M sixty mounted on top. And you know, they had
Speaker 4: five rangers assigned to the jeep. They had the gunner,
Speaker 4: the jeep commander, the assistant jeep commander, and then they
Speaker 4: had two other rangers assigned to it. And so it's
Speaker 4: a Randy Klein and Mark Rademacher, two sergeants, two well
Speaker 4: respected sergeants Marlon Maynard, Russell Robinson, and Tim Bromick on
Speaker 4: the gun. They roll out to where they think they're
Speaker 4: blocking position is and they're actually being trailed by a
Speaker 4: ranger named Frank Moore in another jeep behind them, although
Speaker 4: Frank doesn't have any other rangers on his jeep. But
Speaker 4: they move to an intersection and they stop and Mark
Speaker 4: and Randy break out the map and they're taking a
Speaker 4: look at the map and they're doing a little terrain appreciation.
Speaker 4: They're trying to figure out if there where their blocking
Speaker 4: position is. And Frank runs out of his jeep and
Speaker 4: he says, hey, Sergeant, I think we've gone too far.
Speaker 4: Frank's is speed four. He's like, I think we've gone too.
Speaker 1: Far far.
Speaker 4: And Mark's like, hey, look, we got it. You can
Speaker 4: head back. If we go out too far, we'll turn
Speaker 4: around and we'll come back. And so the guys they
Speaker 4: Frank turns around heads back to the airfield because they
Speaker 4: need the jeeps back at the airfield as well. The
Speaker 4: spars and Mark and Randy and crew take off towards
Speaker 4: what they believe is their blocking position. The intersection where
Speaker 4: they stopped at was actually where their blocking position was
Speaker 4: supposed to be, but they keep going out because they
Speaker 4: think it's further out. Again, the maps aren't very good,
Speaker 4: and they're trying to do terrain appreciation. They drive past
Speaker 4: a drive in movie theater, which up until the last
Speaker 4: major hurricane to hit the island was still there, but
Speaker 4: it's not anymore. They drove past that, and then they
Speaker 4: realized they had gone too far, And when they had
Speaker 4: done that, a squad of Grenadians had saw them drive
Speaker 4: by and basically took up line almost like an L
Speaker 4: shape shaped ambush along the roadway, including an RPG, And
Speaker 4: when they drove back, they fired fired at the jeep
Speaker 4: and they hit it with an RPG, immobilizing it. A
Speaker 4: couple of the rangers are killed outright Russell and Marlin
Speaker 4: are killed outright. Tim is hit by a burst of fire.
Speaker 4: Hits him in the helmet and the leg, and he's
Speaker 4: also hit one other place. He gets knocked off the
Speaker 4: gun mount, but he's alive. Randy is killed outright as well.
Speaker 4: Mark is able to get out of the jeep with
Speaker 4: his two oh three. They take up position behind the
Speaker 4: jeep and Mark knows they're in dire streets. Tim has
Speaker 4: his forty five, but he doesn't the M sixty didn't fire.
Speaker 4: It was I'd have to talk to my buddy jose
Speaker 4: Gordon again because he described to me what he thinks
Speaker 4: was wrong with the gun at the time. I think
Speaker 4: I have it in the book. I describe what happened
Speaker 4: to it from what he told me. But anyway, Mark
Speaker 4: basically tells Tim go back and get help. Go run
Speaker 4: right back to the airfield and get help. And Tim
Speaker 4: didn't want to leave him. He's like, Sergeant, I'm not
Speaker 4: leaving you, and he basically makes it an order. And
Speaker 4: when you're a ranger I think he was a specialist
Speaker 4: at a time, No, he's a PFC. When you're a ranger,
Speaker 4: PFC and a ranger sergeant gives you an order you're
Speaker 4: going to execute it. And he just as he goes
Speaker 4: to take off, Mark far as his forty millimeter and
Speaker 4: he kills one of the Grenadians. And then he charged
Speaker 4: across the road and he's he's shot down as he
Speaker 4: assaults the other side of the road. Tim makes it
Speaker 4: all the way back down, but he's bleeding heavily. They
Speaker 4: secure him and he basically starts raging, they're killing my team.
Speaker 4: You got to go back. They pull him in the hole,
Speaker 4: they start treating him. Doc Donovan shows up. They pack
Speaker 4: him out to the to the aid station, but they
Speaker 4: end up mounting a patrol led by Sid ferrar, Jose Gordon,
Speaker 4: Max Dello. A lot of these guys are in in
Speaker 4: the book. You can read about it, Tony Nunneley. It's
Speaker 4: a lot of well known rangers names that are part
Speaker 4: of this patrol. They try and make it out to
Speaker 4: the out to where the jeep is, but they can't.
Speaker 4: They get ambushed. Sid Ferrara is shot. They packed Kelly
Speaker 4: Vendon packs him out. He's a Word of the Bronze
Speaker 4: Star for evaking him out. Him and Johnny Welton get
Speaker 4: finally gets Sid who's a big guy up the hill
Speaker 4: and then a jeep comes up in his and is
Speaker 4: able to evac him. But as they're up there maintaining overwatch,
Speaker 4: they see this is before Sid gets shot. They see
Speaker 4: these BTR sixties coming down the roadway, and they basically
Speaker 4: set up a law ambush and they miss, and and
Speaker 4: the BTR sixties keep going and they hit this top
Speaker 4: of this slight rise at the end of the airfield
Speaker 4: and all hell breaks loose, like every ranger within range
Speaker 4: starts engaging these things. And the weird thing about it is,
Speaker 4: if they would have kept charging down into the airfield
Speaker 4: with their main guns going, they could have wiped out
Speaker 4: the better part of.
Speaker 1: Two battalions and rangers. But they don't.
Speaker 4: They hesitate, and that allows the rangers to get laws
Speaker 4: and M sixty seven ninety mills rifles in action, and
Speaker 4: guys legends like Jimmy Pickering, Right, these guys end up
Speaker 4: blasting the crap out of these these BTRs. The first
Speaker 4: one backs up into the second one and it stops,
Speaker 4: and that gives them all the time they need to
Speaker 4: blast these these things. And the third BTR backs out
Speaker 4: and then they start calling inspector and specter knocks it out.
Speaker 4: But guy guys were telling me, I'm sitting behind the
Speaker 4: side to my weapon, like I'm on a range, and
Speaker 4: these guys are trying to pour out of these BTR
Speaker 4: sixties and he's like, we're just knocking them up. They're
Speaker 4: they're they're racking up and knocking them down. They're just
Speaker 4: buying bang bang. These guys are coming out of the
Speaker 4: out of the out of the BTRs and then they
Speaker 4: and they take them out pretty quickly. And then sid
Speaker 4: Farar gets hit and they that that squad has to
Speaker 4: pull him back, and they're they're under fire for for
Speaker 4: a pretty good amount and they actually have to call
Speaker 4: in some air strikes and the only thing available are
Speaker 4: a six IS and they're firing rock eyes. They're dropping
Speaker 4: rock eyes cluster bomb munitions, which are not really the
Speaker 4: optimal type of munition to be dropping here. But really
Speaker 4: what they need to do is break contact. So it
Speaker 4: allows them to break contact and maintain their overwatch position.
Speaker 4: So but that that's that's emblematic of all these small
Speaker 4: little fights up in the hills above the airfield that
Speaker 4: that take place. But it's all interconnected, all those actions.
Speaker 4: The cheap the BTR sixties, the small hill fight there.
Speaker 4: They're all interconnected that that action.
Speaker 2: And so there's one more one more big mission, that
Speaker 2: Calvigny mission. But in the meantime, I also have to
Speaker 2: mention eighty second is coming in. Marines are coming in Jaysck,
Speaker 2: the prima donnas that they are. We're going home. It's
Speaker 2: been forty eight hours. If that time for us to go,
Speaker 2: that's enough for us.
Speaker 4: Well, once they were once the once they were shot
Speaker 4: off of of of Richmond Hill Prison, and then the
Speaker 4: seal teams were pulled out of the radio transmission where
Speaker 4: they they eeed out to see uh. After the radio
Speaker 4: transmission station mission, there really wasn't much left for them
Speaker 4: to do. But this is again, this is in the
Speaker 4: embryonic stages of Jaysck. They're really their command and control
Speaker 4: of the ranger battalions is a little tenuous. They belong
Speaker 4: to Jaysck. But Jaysak was like, Okay, the eighty second
Speaker 4: Airborne commanders kind of wishy wash and he might need
Speaker 4: some more forces. We'll get them back loaded. But maybe
Speaker 4: if they're there is like a quick action, quick reaction
Speaker 4: force on the airfield. But with all of the battalions
Speaker 4: that are flowing in from the eighty second. They're used
Speaker 4: to expand the airhead, but they're not moving out as
Speaker 4: fast as, oh, say, a lot of people in the
Speaker 4: government and the military hierarchy would want.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 4: General Trobaugh, who's the commanding generally eighty second, basically asks
Speaker 4: for ranger support for the Calvini mission. He basically tells him, look,
Speaker 4: I'll give you all the artillery you can handle. I'll
Speaker 4: give you the some aviation assets. Well, you know, we'll
Speaker 4: take care of all that stuff. And even then Colonel
Speaker 4: Hagler is like, he's not the idea of flying into
Speaker 4: a place where they don't have a lot of intelligence about.
Speaker 4: I mean, the rumors were flying around. It was anywhere
Speaker 4: from five hundred to twelve hundred Cuban and Grenadians on
Speaker 4: site and air.
Speaker 2: It was a weird, unexpected mission to write. I think
Speaker 2: you write about how the Rangers were like turning in
Speaker 2: their ammunition and like getting ready to roll out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And this is where Doctor ho really explained it
Speaker 4: to me. He goes, this is where the real I
Speaker 4: we're not restricted on language usage. Doc said, this is
Speaker 4: the big mind fuck right here. We're on the airfield,
Speaker 4: we're turning in our AMMO, we're expecting to be bored.
Speaker 4: And you know, we've done our missions right, We've jumped in,
Speaker 4: we've secured the airfield, we've rescued the students, we've we've
Speaker 4: done all of our missions that we're supposed to do.
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's time for us to go home.
Speaker 4: And then all of a sudden, this these these these
Speaker 4: squad leaders and platoon sergeants that show up and after
Speaker 4: getting the initial frago and they're going, we got another mission.
Speaker 4: And these guys are like, you know, Doc's a real
Speaker 4: cerebral guy.
Speaker 1: He wrote his own book.
Speaker 4: He really explains it better than I do in the book.
Speaker 4: But he talks about how your your mentality shifts. You
Speaker 4: feel like you're you know, you're running against the law
Speaker 4: of averages. At that point, you've rolled the dice a
Speaker 4: bunch of times, you've managed to work make it out
Speaker 4: of it, and and you feel like if there's one
Speaker 4: more roll of the dice, snake eyes coming up and
Speaker 4: you're done. And you know, he he felt like he
Speaker 4: had death premonitions while he was on the island a
Speaker 4: couple of times. So I mean, again, very cerebral guy.
Speaker 4: The way he explained it, but you know, he he's
Speaker 4: he's like he said, I just was. I resigned myself
Speaker 4: to the mission. I went back to this eighty second
Speaker 4: Airborne guy and got my grenades back, and he was
Speaker 4: looking at me like you're a medic, and he goes,
Speaker 4: I'm a ranger. And the guy just said he didn't
Speaker 4: get it. The eighty second guy just didn't get it, like,
Speaker 4: you know, he's CSMLG and I know a lot of
Speaker 4: people know Lean Guerrero.
Speaker 1: He he used to say.
Speaker 4: Killers and healers. I think Doc used to say. He
Speaker 4: quoted him. He said, where's my heelers and where's my killers?
Speaker 4: And then I think he said to Doc, well, you're
Speaker 4: a heeler and a killer, Doc, you know, And I
Speaker 4: don't think the under eighty second kind of understood that mentality,
Speaker 4: because a medic's a medic right in an eighty second,
Speaker 4: whereas a ranger every gun counts. Yeah, you're a combat medic, right.
Speaker 4: So Doc's like collecting up his grenades. Guys are reloading mags.
Speaker 4: They're getting clay more minds back from these guys. They're
Speaker 4: you know, getting you know, links of seven to sixty
Speaker 4: two for the sixties. They've got resigned themselves to the
Speaker 4: mission because they're going in in flights of eight, two
Speaker 4: flights of it's a it's two flights of four, and
Speaker 4: you can only fit what fifteen sixteen rangers. Maybe if
Speaker 4: you squeeze everybody in fifteen rangers on a black Hawk,
Speaker 4: and that's really tight with everybody scrunched in there and
Speaker 4: holding on to each other. I think I think that's
Speaker 4: what he told me was about fifteen per flight for
Speaker 4: per aircraft.
Speaker 1: It doesn't take a genius to do the math.
Speaker 4: Sixty in the first four and sixty in the second
Speaker 4: four against what, at the minimum five hundred was the estimate.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's death man's dead man's odds, right. And
Speaker 4: these guys they lift off, and a couple of the
Speaker 4: guys told me they had never traveled in a black
Speaker 4: Hawk as fast as they did that morning. And they
Speaker 4: were flying just at sea level until they hit the coast.
Speaker 4: They hit where the cliff line was for Calvini, and
Speaker 4: when they did, they crested. They basically popped up and
Speaker 4: popped down to hit the l Z quick. But what
Speaker 4: happened was they were coming in too hard and too fast,
Speaker 4: and a lot of those guys that didn't have a
Speaker 4: lot of hours in the black Hawk, and one of
Speaker 4: the pilots who went on there to be a one
Speaker 4: sixty sore pilot who flew in Somalia, told me, he goes, yeah,
Speaker 4: there was a there's an automatic setting with the stabilizer
Speaker 4: in the black Hawk. Then if you didn't know it
Speaker 4: was coming, it could really throw you off, and it
Speaker 4: would self adjust in those early models, at least I
Speaker 4: think I'm describing it properly. Anyway, when they popped up,
Speaker 4: they had too much air speed and they tried to
Speaker 4: dump it really hard and they came up on their
Speaker 4: tails basically when they hit the LZ and that first
Speaker 4: aircraft in I know you tagged General Thomas on one
Speaker 4: of your Twitter posts about this thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Actually I worked in the Pentagon when he was at
Speaker 4: the J three for Special Operations, talked with him a
Speaker 4: few times and exchanged a few notes with him back
Speaker 4: and forth over the years. But General Thomas straight up
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago said, I don't remember seeing
Speaker 4: any fire, but the guys in that first aircraft did,
Speaker 4: and one of them was w I A and the
Speaker 4: other one took a round in the flash suppressure of
Speaker 4: them sixteen, and somebody said the pilot was hit.
Speaker 1: I've never seen the pilot.
Speaker 4: The pilots of that initial craft listed on any w
Speaker 4: i A listings, so I can't say if they were
Speaker 4: they weren't. But that aircraft was the only one out
Speaker 4: of that first four to get out of the zone
Speaker 4: because the rest of them was demolition Derby. They came
Speaker 4: in too hard and too fast. They broke one of
Speaker 4: them broke their back, pirouetted on its nose. It hit
Speaker 4: Bill Sears, who was the fist guy n c O
Speaker 4: I C for a company second bat, and it basically
Speaker 4: danced on Bill's chest like three times.
Speaker 1: And those of you know Bill Sears. I was lucky
Speaker 1: enough to know Bill for a number of years and
Speaker 1: talk with him.
Speaker 4: He was a paraplegic as a result of his injuries.
Speaker 4: A lot of guys got really screwed up, and we
Speaker 4: lost three damn good Rangers too, Doc Lannon and Steve
Speaker 4: Slater and Phil Grenere. And some of those aircraft hit
Speaker 4: the other aircraft, and then some of them hit There
Speaker 4: was a fence line that was adjacent to the l
Speaker 4: Z that one of them struck its rotors on and
Speaker 4: then bashed its tail. In landing, there was a ditch
Speaker 4: that had actually landed in the ditch which lowered the
Speaker 4: silhouette of the aircraft, which drove the rotors into the
Speaker 4: fence line. So all this stuff happens is this shower
Speaker 4: of rotors and you know that's squealing. If you've been
Speaker 4: in an aircraft that's had an emergency, you know what
Speaker 4: that sound is. And there's probably a bunch of people
Speaker 4: watching this of air on the back of their next
Speaker 4: stand and up when you think about that sound, that's
Speaker 4: what you could hear. And then it was clouds of
Speaker 4: dust because of the rotor strikes. And piecing that whole
Speaker 4: sequence together was really difficult because a lot of the
Speaker 4: guys only have fragments of memory from that, whether whether
Speaker 4: they're purged it from their memory consciously or subconsciously picking
Speaker 4: up they could pick up bits and pieces of it,
Speaker 4: you know, things that would flash across their field of vision.
Speaker 4: Once things settled and the dust settled, and they they
Speaker 4: did what rangers do. They assaulted through the objective and
Speaker 4: in the book you'll read about all the subsequent flights
Speaker 4: and it really the one of the hardest descriptions was
Speaker 4: Dave Cummings who's another ranger legend from second Bat who
Speaker 4: would was a ranger in one of the letter companies
Speaker 4: in Vietnam as well, and he was in the second
Speaker 4: flight of four in the lead aircraft and watched it
Speaker 4: all go down. And Dave's description of it is really heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: And as far as like the expectations of the enemy
Speaker 2: for us on that target, like it sounded if I
Speaker 2: recall correctly that the target was actually like relatively empty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 4: It was pretty much a dry hole after those initial rounds.
Speaker 4: It was a dry hole. I mean, a couple of
Speaker 4: the guys said that there were corpses in the ground
Speaker 4: around there, but I don't think that they were there
Speaker 4: from the initial bombardment or or the ranger actions after
Speaker 4: landing at Calvini. So I don't know what the sourcing
Speaker 4: is for those those those bodies there. But once those
Speaker 4: a few initial rounds, I think it was a stay
Speaker 4: behind force, maybe fired off a bunch of rounds at
Speaker 4: the aircraft they were coming in, and then beat feet
Speaker 4: because they knew they were gonna be in a hurt
Speaker 4: locker quick if they stuck around. So to me, there
Speaker 4: was I think there was a minimal force there a
Speaker 4: handful of guys. At most they've peppered the lead aircraft
Speaker 4: and took off running, because that was the mo for
Speaker 4: a lot of the Grenadians.
Speaker 1: The UH.
Speaker 2: As far as the ranger perspective in your book, I mean,
Speaker 2: that's sort of the last combat operation that they participated
Speaker 2: in before heading home. I would like to kind of
Speaker 2: ask you like concluding thoughts. I mean, you interviewed a
Speaker 2: ton of these guys, got a lot of different perspectives.
Speaker 2: I think there's maybe a couple different ways to think
Speaker 2: about Grenada. One of it was special operations, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of getting the wind under their wings. One of
Speaker 2: it was, you know, the so called Vietnam syndrome that
Speaker 2: America was afraid to engage in military action after the
Speaker 2: Vietnam conflict and Grenada acting as sort of a test bed. No, actually,
Speaker 2: we can do operations shown again in eighty nine and Panama.
Speaker 2: I'd like to throw it to you and here you
Speaker 2: know your conclusions, your observations from all the research that
Speaker 2: you did for this book.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, first off, I'll start at the tactical level, and
Speaker 4: let's say ranger training works. Right, It's been proven over
Speaker 4: and over and over and again, and no matter how
Speaker 4: bad the situation is, whether pre mission or during mission
Speaker 4: or post mission, the Ranger methodology, the Ranger training model
Speaker 4: works and this validated again and they were the Ranger
Speaker 4: Force took this. And when I say the Ranger Force
Speaker 4: because later on, obviously you know in eighty four there's
Speaker 4: a third battalion and then a regimental headquarters and they
Speaker 4: really start to That was the thing with the with
Speaker 4: the battalions at the time, they were kind of their
Speaker 4: own little entities. They didn't answer to a regimental headquarters.
Speaker 4: They were basically.
Speaker 2: So calm didn't come around until what eighty seven, Yeah, So.
Speaker 4: These guys were kind of operating in their own little bubble.
Speaker 4: And while there was a lot of cross pollination in
Speaker 4: terms of TTPs at the time, I think that they
Speaker 4: still operated a little bit in their own world. But
Speaker 4: the model, the overarching model was there for both battalions
Speaker 4: and it worked. Like the training, the individual training of
Speaker 4: a Ranger, the Ranger squad, the Ranger sections, the Ranger platoons, company,
Speaker 4: battalion level, etc.
Speaker 1: It worked. It needed refinement, it.
Speaker 4: Wasn't perfect, but when push comes to shove and the
Speaker 4: bullets started flying, the Ranger model worked again and it
Speaker 4: has ever since, and I think they were able to
Speaker 4: build on that. And like you said, without Desert One,
Speaker 4: without Grenada, we don't have the success in eighty nine
Speaker 4: and Panama that integrated command structure and the battalions a
Speaker 4: ranger regiment proved it again in Panama, and they proved
Speaker 4: it again ever since that that that ranger model works.
Speaker 4: But I think again we had to go through the
Speaker 4: stand up of the battalions and then go through to
Speaker 4: Grenada to show the evolution of the force, right, and
Speaker 4: the force continues to evolve at this point, but I
Speaker 4: think that for Grenada was a vital component to showing, Hey,
Speaker 4: we moved away from light infantry, we moved away from
Speaker 4: the Vietnam recon, we moved into the special operations world.
Speaker 4: We now do raids, we now do airfield seizures, we
Speaker 4: do you know, And then you have Somalia where they're
Speaker 4: doing direct support for smooth this. Without Grenada, we don't
Speaker 4: get there, or at least we don't get there as fast,
Speaker 4: and we also don't get Jaysacken later on SOCOM exercising
Speaker 4: better command and control of their organization and not leaving
Speaker 4: a ranger battalion at the hands of a conventional commander
Speaker 4: who doesn't know how to use them properly. But I
Speaker 4: would I would I would point to at the back
Speaker 4: of the book there is a lessons learned portion of it.
Speaker 4: A guy who started out as a ranger, Private Mike
Speaker 4: Frank was in second Battalion. He was a B company,
Speaker 4: and then rose through the ranks and then made the
Speaker 4: jump as an officer in eighty nine. So he saw
Speaker 4: the evolution and he brought out a lot of those
Speaker 4: points and he's like, he's like, are you going to
Speaker 4: do it after act? You know, like a lessons learned thing,
Speaker 4: And I was like, I kind of thought the book
Speaker 4: itself was a lessons learned when you think about it,
Speaker 4: and he goes, yeah, but we could pull those out
Speaker 4: and really make them precise and really make them succinct.
Speaker 4: So I would say Mike's did a really good job
Speaker 4: of pulling those things together, and I'm indebted to him
Speaker 4: for putting those in there. And he later went onto
Speaker 4: Special Forces as well, so he brought a lot of
Speaker 4: institutional knowledge all the way from private to when he
Speaker 4: retired as a full wird colonel. So I would recommend
Speaker 4: folks going back and looking at that. But we again,
Speaker 4: without Grenada, we don't get to where we are as fast,
Speaker 4: and who knows what kind of mistakes we make in
Speaker 4: the run up and the execution of just causing eighty
Speaker 4: nine without the Grenada mission. But yes, it also proves
Speaker 4: to the world we're not gun shy about putting our
Speaker 4: folks in the field and and rescuing student rescuing Americans,
Speaker 4: and fighting communism in our own hemisphere, although they tried
Speaker 4: to downplay that a bit at the time.
Speaker 1: So to me, it's all those things.
Speaker 4: But to me, it's, uh, you know, basically, it's a
Speaker 4: tribute to to the guys who executed the mission, and
Speaker 4: and to Tom and his family, and uh, you know,
Speaker 4: I feel really good that it got out and it's
Speaker 4: been been well received by the Rangers, so that I'm
Speaker 4: happy if other people like it. But to me, they're
Speaker 4: the they're the litmus test when it comes to the
Speaker 4: audience I'm shooting for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's the hardest audience to convince, right. You
Speaker 2: can't get anything by them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if they would have come up to me and
Speaker 4: told me I was shit, I would have been upset.
Speaker 4: But you know, you do the best you can with it.
Speaker 4: A couple of them told me, not bad for a marine.
Speaker 2: So the book is Cry Havoc, The Untold Story of
Speaker 2: Rangers that were by Tom Greer and Joe Muccia. You
Speaker 2: guys can find it now Joe's website. There'll be a
Speaker 2: link down the description. You can go and get an
Speaker 2: autographed copy directly from him. It's a preferred method. You
Speaker 2: said that the next book is called Old Scrolls.
Speaker 4: Old Scrolls, that's the working title, but I think I
Speaker 4: like it a lot. It's going to be called Old Scrolls,
Speaker 4: A Decade of Change.
Speaker 1: I like it.
Speaker 4: It goes from basically the formation of the Ranger Battalion's
Speaker 4: seventy four to seventy five time frame up until early
Speaker 4: eighty four, but before the formation of the Regiment and
Speaker 4: the third Battalion, So it's going to cover a lot
Speaker 4: of those missions that the lessons learned from those those
Speaker 4: training exercises in those years of growth that lead up
Speaker 4: to Cry Havoc essentially.
Speaker 2: Joe, thank you so much for writing this book, for
Speaker 2: finishing Tom's work as well, and telling the Rangers story.
Speaker 2: So many things I didn't know that I learned from
Speaker 2: reading this book. I really hope that other people will
Speaker 2: go and.
Speaker 1: Pick it up. Thanks, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: We got one question for you from m Corbin.
Speaker 5: What do you think General Crighton Abrams would have to
Speaker 5: say about the regiment's evolution of capabilities during the gwatt
Speaker 5: have they become the finest direct action force in the world.
Speaker 4: I think Abrams probably would have been pleased to see
Speaker 4: where they evolved into. Obviously, he came from a place
Speaker 4: in Vietnam where he was not trust full of special forces,
Speaker 4: and the reason he wanted the Ranger battalions formed was
Speaker 4: because in his mind, if he lived long enough, he
Speaker 4: was going to disband special Forces and the Rangers would
Speaker 4: be the piece would be that special operations force that
Speaker 4: would would take the missions. I mean, so to me,
Speaker 4: I think he'd be pleased to see where they've evolved to.
Speaker 4: He wanted them to be the finest light infantry force
Speaker 4: in the world, and I think they've got a few
Speaker 4: peers out there.
Speaker 2: Joe, before we take off, any final thoughts or anything
Speaker 2: else that you want to plug before we get going
Speaker 2: here tonight.
Speaker 4: No, No, I appreciate everybody coming on and watching. I'm
Speaker 4: hoping there's a few of the guys that were in
Speaker 4: this book listening and watching. So if you are, hey guys,
Speaker 4: good to glad to promote you guys. I know you
Speaker 4: don't like it. You're a very insular community. Don't like
Speaker 4: people speak in your names. But it's okay. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of love for you guys these days. Absolutely, but
Speaker 4: thanks for having me on. I appreciate you guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, stay in touch. Let me know when the
Speaker 2: next book comes out. We'll have you back on again
Speaker 2: to talk about that. And we will be back on
Speaker 2: Monday with FBI retired FBI agent who served in a
Speaker 2: counterintelligence role, so it should be fun to talk to
Speaker 2: him Joe again. Thank you, and we will see all
Speaker 2: of you guys on Monday.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Yes,