#227 Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

36:00From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. Late night bites with friends? Already hard to beat. That first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly, the energy kicks back in. The night goes longer. And the laughs don't stop. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Well, I'd like to get into your story here. So we always start with, where did you grow up? Grew up in a little town called Walhalla, South Carolina, up in the northwestern tip of South Carolina, right up above Clemson University.

36:58and spent a lot of time outside. And, you know, my mother's family had four sons. And when World War II came along, all four of them were deployed, you know, in World War II. my father was deployed along with them. So there were five men, you know, from the family there. And three of the brothers, four brothers came back. And my father came back. And then when Korea came along, you know, my father was called back in. So served in Korea. and they talked about some army stuff mostly at my prodding and saying what does this mean what is a platoon what do you mean have a reserve what's a reserve what excuse me all kinds of questions you know I was just full of questions about army stuff and then I was about seven years old I decided I'm gonna have an army so I got with my cousin Carl and I said you're the first member of my army and I had heard about Rangers I'd heard them talk about what the Rangers did so I decided it was going to be you know Ranger Company.

38:38So I formed the 69th Ranger Company and it was commanded by General Thompson, of course, but we needed more than one other member. I needed command more than one person, so I started recruiting my other cousins that are about the same age. We got all the close ones in, the ones I liked. We got those guys in. Brought in one female cousin, Pat, which was actually cousin Carl's sister. We brought her in, so we had a whack in the Army. Then we started letting people outside the family in, so it grew bigger. And I still got the logbook for Thompson's Rangers at home, the actual logbook. Are you serious?

39:38And you can open it up, and it's getting pretty faded now, but you can see notes. You can see people's names. You can see the note. You can see information about the only court-martial that we had. there was one of the members of the company that gave me some lip and he ended up getting court-martialed and booted out of the ranger group but I still have that book I cut two pieces of cardboard for the covers and taped it together and put the paper inside and it's pretty cool But I still have it after all these years. So I really got into rangers. And the family did a lot of hunting. My father liked to hunt.

40:37So I was brought up with weapons and shooting and hunting and tracking. And every time my parents both worked as I was getting older. So every opportunity I got, I was in the woods by myself, hunting, tracking, tracking deer, tracking whatever animals I could find, and studying them. You know, what do they do? How do they move? And then I got this idea, I need to be invisible. How can I be invisible? so to be invisible what it's it's not just that you are not visually seen if i'm invisible you can't hear me you can't smell me you know i just don't exist i'm just i'm here but i i'm not here and how do you do that so i'd practice slipping up on deer or rabbits or whatever I could find out there.

41:43And then my cousin Carl started coming over and we'd take, we had a little army pup tent, we'd carry that thing a couple hundred meters up on the hill in the woods and put it up. It would go out and once I got a BB gun, we'd go out and shoot some birds, little birds and build us a fire, and we would roast them, and we would say, well, what else do rangers eat? You know, let's get us some ranger food. Let's go kill something else, and let's come eat it. And, you know, we'd camp out there and pretend we were rangers, and we'd go on missions and different things like that. You know, and we got older.

42:27and then when I was 13, my parents sabotaged me because I knew I was going to be a ranger. And Santa Claus came and brought me a chemistry set. You know, I used to watch Shock Theater at midnight on Saturday night. You know, they'd build Frankenstein and werewolves and change people's brains out. And I said, they can do that. Why can't I do it? So I started, you know, catching rats. I'd catch rats and bring them into my lab. And I'd knock them out. At that time, if you went into a pharmacy, we called them drug stores at that time. If you went in there, I mean, if you could get permission from your parents to buy a syringe, a real syringe, which was a big deal at that time because only drug users and medical people had access to syringes.

43:33But I talked the pharmacist into letting me buy one. So I had a syringe. And then I could shoot the rats or the birds or whatever up. knock them out and i could go in take their brains out and see if i could swap them and and bring them back swap swap their hearts things like that uh and try to you know from shock theater with frankenstein you know all the electricity from lightning went in him i would plug them into the outlet tended to fry their little hearts and stuff i never could get one to start back I could put them in there. I just couldn't get them to work again. The psych test must have been a lot different to get into the Green Berets back then.

44:23So I really got into chemistry. And then at some point I got into, well, let's build some rockets. You know, Thompson Rangers need some rockets to launch it to the bad guys. So I studied rockets and rocket fuel and the chemistry around it. And again, back to the pharmacy, I need some potassium nitrate, I need some charcoal, and I need some sulfur. What are you going to do with that? I said, oh, I'm building some bottle rockets. Okay. I had so much of those chemicals in a footlocker in the house. if my mother had realized what that was and what it could have done to our house. But anyway, you could build rocket fuel out of that, and then discovered later you could build bombs out of that too.

45:26So I built a launch pad. I built a lab in the barn and built an actual launch pad out behind it. I had a window so I could look out there and see it so I didn't get hit with shrapnel or stuff that exploded on the launch pad. And I'd launch them off of there. One day I built a big one. It was almost three feet high. Exploded on the launch pad. Actually broke windows in my neighbor's house. So I decided I needed to go back down to smaller ones so they didn't do so much damage as they didn't work. But, you know, so I played with explosives. I did all kind of chemistry stuff. I mean, when I was in high school, I took, you know, the advanced chemistry course.

46:23I didn't even have a book. I just basically showed up for class, took the exams, and maxed out the course. because I was going down to Clemson University to the library, reading all the articles, reading chemistry books. Wow. I found that if you got the older chemistry books, around the turn of the century, around 1900, they were like recipe books. They didn't just talk about theory and how, you know, if you mix these two components, then you get this. It was a recipe. This is how many grams of whatever it was that you were going to use and mix together, and this is how you mix it together. They don't do all this stuff.

47:11So I was learning that and really, really into chemistry. I got a scholarship to the University of South Carolina on chemistry. You had a pet, too. I'm sorry? You had a pet.

47:31I had several pets, but I had one when I was really young that was of particular interest. I was in third grade, and my parents came, got me out of school, and took me home and said, we've got a surprise for you. What is it? Well, you have to wait till we get home. So we got home, we got out, and there was a spider monkey. So it was a monkey. You know, he's on a little chain, a leaf, so he's running around doing things. And I thought, that's cool. I snatched that little joker up. I found out about monkey teeth really quickly. I mean, he about bit my finger off. So anyway, I kind of liked him, but I was careful with him because I knew he would bite.

48:26We ended up building a small house that was outside close to the barn, and he would sleep in that at night, and we put a light bulb in there for heat because it was wintertime. And I went out one morning and looked in the air, and I could see his tail. sticking out the little door. And I grabbed his tail, and I thought, wow, this is strange. He's not moving. And I pulled him out, and he was literally just straight out. He looked like a monkey on a stick. And he was frozen. A monkey on a stick, huh? He was frozen. And his little mouth was open, all his little teeth were showing. I was not happy.

49:14You know, I mean, I forgave him for all the biting, but, you know, I ran back in the house, and I gave him to my mother and said, you know, he's dead, he's dead. And she said, I don't know if he is or not. Let's try this. She wrapped him up in a little blanket and put him on top of a little oil heater that we had so the heat was coming up to try to warm him up, thaw him out a little bit. and then she heated up some milk and took an eyedropper and squirted that warm milk down his little mouth. And, I mean, she kept working with him, and after a while, you know, his little mouth started moving, and she thawed that jugger out.

49:54She thawed him out, and all of a sudden he came back to life. Now, I thought, this is really cool. If you can freeze somebody to death and then just thaw them back out, I mean, how cool is that? But anyway, they had the monkey in. But he caused so much trouble that we ended up swapping him for a dog. So he had to go away. You didn't take that and ask for volunteers from your army to freeze, did you? No. I'm not saying I didn't think about it. Maybe the guy that got court-martialed could have had an ultimatum. I did take college students. Oh, shit.

50:45I have to be careful how much I tell you about it, but I did take college students. And I was interested in what happens if I put you in a sleep deprivation? If I don't let you sleep for a while, what will happen? So I got permission to do some research, University of Georgia, using college students. And so I got a group of volunteers from the ROTC department. These guys were all in the ROTC Ranger Company to the University of Georgia. You know, of course they can do anything. And you know, so they volunteered to do it. So they had their full gear on, took them out in the National Forest, full gear, carrying a 40 pound rucksack and continuous movement.

51:54We stopped for a 10 minute break every once in a while, but continuous movement. no sleep every four hours they had to take a test one of the tests they had to take was a cognitive test you know it's basically addition and subtraction just a couple sheets of addition and subtraction and then they would rate after they finished it I would say well compared to when we first started and you were fresh before you'd lost any sleep compared to that how well you think you did this time and they would say it's pretty easy I did just as well this time just as accurate as I did on the first one I'm looking at the scores and thinking that didn't happen one of the things that I discovered was that after 24 hours with no sleep, that you lose about 25 % of your cognitive ability, particularly to be able to do things like math.

53:10The scary thing is you don't know it. You think you're still just as good as you were when you started out. And, you know, it doesn't stop at 24 hours. It keeps on going down. And you don't see things. Things happen in front of you, you don't see it. Things you see sometimes didn't happen. You know, you hallucinate, you do all kinds of things. And, you know, as a ranger instructor for a number of years, you know, with the ranger students, we didn't feed them much. We didn't let them sleep. We kept them running up and down mountains all the time. and, you know, they would hallucinate. You know, you'd lose them.

53:59You're going through the woods, and all of a sudden, you say, send up the count. They start sending the count up, and you realize you're missing about 10 or 12 people. You stop. You go back. You know, it's night. You go back, and here's a guy standing behind a tree just standing there thinking that tree in front of him is his buddy. He's supposed to be following. His buddy's not moving, so he's just standing there, and nobody behind him is moving. They're all waiting. Are they? And when I went through, my ranger buddy and I, you know, we were already SF qualified and everything. So we thought we're going to have some fun, you know.

54:36So if you're walking along, you had your little patrol cap on, you had the little ranger eyes in the back, the little fluorescent tabs in the back of their hat so the guy behind you could see you in the dark. you take your hat off and kind of put it over to the side and as you're walking along you just

55:07You just start getting yourself lower and lower, and you're lowering that hat around. And the guy behind you, he's following you up. Now he's fiddling around trying to, where's the drop off? Where's he going? We found that if we did stuff like that, it was hilarious to us. and it kept us motivated. We could do all kinds of things. We had fun in Ranger School. But anyway. Humor keeps it going. Yeah. It keeps you moving along. Especially in the darkest hour. Yeah. So anyway, with the sleep research, that was a major study that the military used because one of the things when I was put on the Air Land Battle 2000 team to figure out how are we going to go a hundred hours straight with the ground war when we move into the 21st century.

56:08How can we go a hundred hours straight, leaders be able to lead, soldiers be able to function, aviators be able to fly, you know, without a hundred hours of that sleep. So I did a lot of research around that. And then I started going to NATO nations and briefing the Army staffs. Here's what we found. Here's what you need to do to be able to function. And I remember very clearly when I briefed the commander of the UK forces. I gave the presentation and this is what special ops are going to have to do. And then what the soldiers and aviators would do. And I finished that presentation, and the general got up, and he said, Thompson, that was a good briefing.

57:03But I can tell you now, we're not doing any of that crap. These guys are just going to have to drive on. We're not doing that. Okay, it's a price to pay. And then shortly after that, Falkland Islands came along, and all of a sudden, they ran into problems because they didn't have enough pilots down there to meet the safety requirement, the sleep and rest requirement between missions. They tried different chemicals to help them be able to do that because when a pilot comes back from a mission, his eyes are like that. He's wired from all the stress and everything. He can't go to sleep to start with.

57:48When he finally does go to sleep, he can't wake up. And if you give him a chemical that knocks him out right away, then you can't get it out of his system, you know, six hours later or four hours later when you wake him up and say, you've got to go, you've got to fly another mission. He's still trying to figure out who he is. But there are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready. Because when the Gulf War, you know, the ground war started, The ground war went 100 hours. Now, my brother was an Apache pilot, and, you know, he was telling me all the time about it. I go fly a mission.

58:29I turn around. I come back. I land while I'm rearming and refueling. I'm sitting near the cockpit eating a sandwich, drinking a coffee, because as soon as they get me rearmed, I'm going back out. I've got to go fly another mission. and so you know that stuff was going on all the time and you're just not as effective and somewhere somewhere around five hours or five days without any sleep zero sleep people start to die and the university said you know we can't keep supporting your research if you have your students dying. So you got to stop keeping them up that long. They didn't actually die, but, you know, they were getting close enough that they were concerned about it.

59:26Wow. I hear people all the time. How long were you keeping these people up? Holy shit. We ended up stopping them after, I think it was 72 hours, as far as we would go. but I hear people tell me all the time man I can I can go five days without a problem young guy I tell you that you think you are I remember in English school sitting in the bleacher's and an instructor standing in front in front of us there's a creep there he's standing in front of us and he's talking and it seems like mid-sentence mid-sentence he says Thompson in the creek and I'd say what did I do? you were asleep and I'd say no I wasn't asleep in the creek do push ups until I get tired make sure your face goes under every time you know so I went up there in the creek trying to drown myself you know doing push ups and I was and my ranger buddy said yeah you were sitting here but you were asleep You were setting up, your eyes were open, but you were asleep.

1:00:45And I began to realize, yeah, you go to sleep and you don't realize it. In fact, some of the research shows that there are more people killed in traffic accidents with drivers falling asleep than there is with drunk drivers. Interesting. Almost everyone that drives or has been driving for a while can tell you. You've had experience late at night, and you're sleeping, your head's bouncing around, and all of a sudden, just before you hit the bridge abutment, you feel the car run off your shoulder and you jerk it back into the road because you were asleep. You didn't know it.

1:01:29If you're driving a drone, you're driving whatever, and you go to sleep, the drone's on its own now there's no telling where you're going to put that thing and if you're you know watching a radar screen you don't see the aircraft coming you don't see the blips you're looking at it your eyes are open but you don't see it there's a whole series of things like that that uh i did a lot of research on and particularly using it with special ops And still now I go out and do a lot of presentations with different groups, particularly high-stress groups, special ops groups, on sleep deprivation, things to help you get around it to be able to function better, longer, and what's going to happen if you don't.

1:02:21That's a long answer to whatever you're asking about a monkey or something like that. I want to get into that what you're doing nowadays towards the end but you went to school you dropped out of school correct? Yeah I was in school and at that time every night on the 5 o 'clock national news you know there'd always be a segment about what was happening in Vietnam and interestingly enough very different from what we have today. You know, the reporters would be saying, man, we're crushing those guys. I mean, we're just crushing the NBA. And we're doing this and we're doing that. And I started thinking, well, I wanted to go to Vietnam, you know, so I could, you know, do my patriotic duty like my uncles and father and everybody done.

1:03:22It's going to be over. If I wait until I finish school, it's going to be over. So I decided to take a break from school, go on a list for three years, go do my thing, come back, pick back up where I was in school, and, you know, continue on. No intent, no desire to really be a career person. and I wanted three years, and then I wanted to get back to chemistry and do my thing. And so I stopped. My mother was not happy. My father supported it. My mother kind of freaked out over it. I told her, I'll go back to school. She said, no, you won't. I said, yeah, I'll go back to school. I'll get a doctorate, but I need to go to do this first.

1:04:17And then, you know, I get to the recruiting station. And went down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And, you know, they put us in the barracks, went to sleep. About 3 o 'clock in the morning, all the lights come on. And there's some guy yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs to get up and get the attention in front of your bunk. and then I hear bunks being pushed over, double bunks pushed over, people falling out on the floor, and this guy's yelling and hollering. I got my buns up and got the attention in front of my bunk there, and I look, and I said, he's my size.

1:05:09He's got a big smokey bear hat on. he's my size and he sounds like a giant coming through here and what is that on his shoulder a ranger to have so i thought that's it you got to do that and then he took us uh took us on a run and we're singing all this stuff about i want to be an airborne ranger i want to live a life of danger all this kind of stuff and i thought this is cool. If I'm going to be in three years, I might sort of, you know, this is what I want. I get a chance to, you know, be a real ranger now, not just, you know, what I used to play at. So all of a sudden, you know, I still didn't have, I still didn't intend to stay in beyond the three years, but I wanted to be a ranger while I was in and, you know, go to Vietnam as a ranger, you know, why not?

1:06:07What was the sentiment of Vietnam at the beginning? of the war. Terrible. It was terrible. The country is divided now. In America, it was divided.

1:06:28You and I, for example, as soon as people looked at our heads, they could say, well, He doesn't have hair down to his shoulders. His hair's not parted in the middle. He's in this group over here. You and I are in this other group, and we're much more likely to be patriotic, support the war, go do it. These other guys, these long-haired hippie guys over on the other side, they're against it. They're all smoking marijuana, they're doing whatever. I'm kind of exaggerating, but it was divided. Those people anti-war, protest, do all this kind of stuff.

1:07:12So there were some people who were for it. Most people were against it, and they were out protesting.

1:07:21And, you know, I had some good friends that had moved on the other side. They were total anti-war. But some of the stuff you were hearing was, you know, we were killing babies. We were killing old women. We were doing all kinds of things like that, which wasn't necessarily true. But, you know, I got really excited about the Army and what we were doing and kept thinking, they're paying me to do this. Can you imagine what it would cost if you just wanted to go jump out of an airplane and have a thrill like that? They're paying me to go do that and all these other things. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.

1:08:12And when I finished AIT, they just said, hey, you're going to OCS. You went to OCS right away. Yeah. So you need to go to OCS.

1:08:25And they talked me into it. Said, you know, you can still get out in your three years. You'll be your your two-year requirement that you'll get from OCS will be over and you can still get out of the army You'll still get to go to Vietnam Then you can probably do some of these other neat things like airborne ranger stuff like that So I started volunteering and then OCS to to go to airborne school and to go to special forces so when I finished OCS then And I just went from there to airborne school. I was already at Benning. I went to airborne school. And then they sent me to Bragg and went through the officers Q course up there.

1:09:12And, you know, became SF. And then SF, I went to Rangers. And then went to a fifth group in Vietnam. And did what my buddy said. Or didn't really do what he said. I did the opposite. He said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for SOG. Why is that? And when I asked that question, he said, if you do, you're going to die. And if you don't die, you're going to come home with the crap shot out of you in a nutcase. That's if they find you. Do not volunteer for SOG. I said, what do they do? I said, nobody knows. you have to get there and volunteer and get there, and then you'll find out what you're going to do, but you're going to die or come back as a nutcase.

1:10:07I was 21 years old. At that time in history, we thought that your prefrontal cortex up here in the front of your brain, we thought that the only thing it really did was hold up your cranium so that your front end of your head didn't kind of cave in. And we thought it was fully developed. By the time, you know, you're 20 years old, you had all your prefrontal cortex abilities. Really, you've got to be about 30 before it's fully developed. So before it's developed, you tell somebody you're going to volunteer to go anywhere, do anything, anytime, and never say a word about it for 20 years, I can do that.

1:11:01I mean, that's a recruiting poster to a 21-year-old. And if you look at the SOG pictures of the Americans on those teams, almost all of them are old baby-faced guys. You look at John Schroeder Meyer. You look at his little baby face. You look at my little baby face. You look at Eldon Bardswell's little baby face. I mean, all three of us within two or three months of the same age, and we all look like little baby faces because we'll go charge that hill. We'll go to another country and do things. By the time you're 30, you're saying, let's let the younger guys do that. I don't need to have that kind of action anymore.

1:11:51If you stay, if you're still there at 30 and you're still doing missions like that, as you saw with some of the SEAL work you were doing, it was starting to have a bad effect on you. I mean, there's a limit to how much stress you can take and recover from it easily. So, we don't take good care of our special operators in particular. We keep throwing them back out there in the middle of all the stress with no break, with no opportunity to heal some. And then we put all these restrictions out there. Don't mention the word mental health. Don't say you're getting a little stressed. because we'll take you off the team.

1:12:49The Tier 1 guys, you know, like you, like the SOG guys. I mean, I had to pass, you know, the flight physical. I mean, just blow it out of the water every year. Or I couldn't be on a team like that. You can't be Tier 1. You can't be Halo. You know, you got to have perfect ears, perfect guys, perfect everything. or they'll take you off the team. And what do you do? Same thing in SOC. I mean, I used to come back and take forceps and pull pieces. I've got scars all over. Pull pieces of shrapnel out and not say anything about it, you know, because I didn't want to get taken off the team, you know. Civil guys do it all the time.

1:13:34Rangers guys still do it. You're not going to report anything. Yeah. But you don't have to. So did you go right into SOG from the Green Berets? Yeah. When I got there, when I got to Vietnam, I met a buddy of mine in the bar that first evening when I got there. And he's the one that told me, whatever you do, don't volunteer for SOG. Because he'd been there a month before me, so he knew all kinds of stuff, right? so the next day went the all-in process and then at the end end of the day then I ended up Colonel was lots of room and he said I'm looking through your folder here you volunteered for the army you volunteered for OCS you volunteered for airborne you volunteered for Ranger you volunteer for special forces you You volunteered for Vietnam.

1:14:34I've got the most important job that you will ever have an opportunity to do, but you have to volunteer for it." And I said, you're trying to get me to volunteer for SAG? He said, yes. I said, what do I do? What does SAG do? He said, I can't tell you. He couldn't tell you anything? I can't tell you what they do. I just tell you you're going to have to volunteer and sign the volunteer paper to go to SOG. You're going to have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, 20-year agreement, that you won't say the word SOG. You won't say anything about what you guys did for 20 years, or you're going to receive the full punishment of the law.

1:15:26but if you'll do that you can get into SOG and you can do things that nobody else can do

1:15:36so the next day I was supposed to be at the airfield they sent me down to the classified end of the airfield where the blackbirds the black c-130s and c-133s were all parked that nobody could go down there. So I went down there, got on an aircraft to go up to in a train,

1:16:06and there were no seats in the plane when it got there, just seat belts on the floor. So the crew chief came by and he said, sit on the floor and buckle in, and there were three or four of us. sit on the floor and buckle in because when we take off, we're going to climb as fast as this thing will climb so that we don't get hit on the way out. And then when we go to land up in the train, we're going to dive toward the ground like we're crashing so we don't get hit on the way down. And you guys just hold on. You're going to have a great ride. Got there, got off the plane, and they told us where to move to.

1:16:46and said, you know, there's a SOG bus there that's going to pick you up and drive you on up to Da Nang. So we went over where the bus was supposed to be, and there's a black school bus sitting there. All the windows are shot out of it. There must have been 200 bullet holes in the bus. The seats are all ripped apart where bullets have been hitting. And there's a driver there. went up to him and said, is this the bus up to Da Nang? He said, yeah. What happened? And he said, well, there's this one pass that we have to go through. And the NVA liked to ambush us up there on a fairly regular basis. So kind of shoot the bus up and the people were in it.

1:17:40We're going to pick up a SOG team in a few minutes. As soon as they get here, then we'll leave. All you have to do is just do what they tell you. Whatever they tell you to do, you do and you'll live. If you don't, you'll probably die before you get there. And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, here's a line of about seven or eight guys headed toward the bus. I mean, they just appeared. And I'm looking at them and say, I've never seen anybody like this before. I mean, I've been to Special Forces. I've been to Granger. I don't recognize the equipment they have. I don't recognize the uniforms they have on.

1:18:25And they're scary. I mean, if they had this little short, like a little short M-16, some of them had, you know, grenade launchers that had been cut down to that long. They're camouflaged. They had on bandanas around their heads. hand grenades all over them scary looking dudes they got on the bus and and said and in there immediately took up defensive positions on the bus the team just arrayed itself around the bus and they were all at the windows ready to shoot in whichever direction the fire came from and the guy who was the team leader he said if we run into trouble you get face down on the floor of the bus and don't move until we tell you copy that we didn't get ambushed but wow you know you start thinking what did I get into geez yeah I was talking I'm talking the old and bar 12 you know several years ago before he passed and he said oh yeah I still can see that bus in my mind all shot up like that and wondering what have I gotten into is that what you were wondering Yeah.

1:19:41I said, hmm, this is different than what I thought. But, you know, it's going to be exhilarating because I'll be on a team like that in a few days. Wow. Start becoming one of those guys. I mean, those guys made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And when they get around other people, you can see everybody just kind of backs away, gives them room. They don't get close to them. They don't make eye contact with them. If you look them in the eye, for the most part, you see death. I mean, they're just, they've seen things nobody else is seeing. And you can't not see it once you've seen it. So, you know, that part's probably pretty cool.

1:20:30So, it went on up, got to Da Nang. And the little guy that picked us up there said, I'm going to take you to your quarters where you'll stay tonight, tomorrow. You'll get your assignment. You'll get briefed. And you might want to, we have a movie theater set up coming out here. You know, we put a couple pieces of plywood together. We've got a movie projector, and we show John Wayne and other kind of movies out there. And we have some bleachers up. You might want to go out there and watch the movie. This will be the last chance you get to take a break and relax a little bit. Been in the bleachers about, it's dark, been in the bleachers about 15 minutes.

1:21:17Marble Mountain is behind us and all of a sudden it looked like the 4th of July. Red tracers, green tracers, flares, stuff going everywhere. Now I'm face down in the sand and the guy sitting in the bleachers said, oh I'm sorry sir I should have warned you this happens every night just watch the movies they won't shoot down here you know in a few minutes all those green tracers will be gone because they're dead the team's up there on top of the mountain we'll take them out everything will be fine just enjoy the movie I said wait you know my heart's pounding holy shit so you know the next day we did a briefing and and i you know you pick a code name so i picked the dynamite code name then i went to up to foobie where you know john myers already up there uh i went to foobie we got off it was about five or six i was one up there and uh the sergeant major came out and he had a little list he got us all together and he said all right he read the names off and he said all of you guys are gonna leave tomorrow to go back down toward the train to a 1-0 school to learn how to be a SOG team leader that's what you didn't read my name off Thompson oh no you're not going down there your SF qualified your Ranger qualified, I'm putting you on a team this afternoon.

1:22:59You don't need to go down there. What you don't know that's going to be taught down there, the team's going to teach you over the next few days before you go on your first mission." Wow. And then he said, you know, tomorrow morning I need you to report into the to the S-4. Sergeant Jones has a mission he'd like for you to help him with that I need an officer for. If you would help him for that and then we'll link you up with your team and you can do it started. Okay, they put me in quarters. Went to S4 the next morning and the sergeant said, we've had some casualties and we have their personal effects here.

1:23:50They've all been packed up in duffel bags. And before we can ship them back to their families, their personal effects back to their families, the effects need to be reviewed and signed off by an officer. So I need you to just go through each of these seven duffel bags. Make sure there's nothing in there that would be classified, no pictures, know anything that could be classified and pack them back up, sign the sheet and we can get them out of here. First duffel bag I picked up, a friend of mine from Fort Brae.

1:24:39He went, sorry. It's okay. He went about 30 days before me and just disappeared. Nobody knew where he went, what assignment he got, when he got there, he just went into a black hole. And, you know, so he's been there 30 days, and I'm inventorying his personal effects to send back to his family.

1:25:17Sog got real.

1:25:22So I did that, went and linked up with the team, and, you know, went to work. Started training with the team because we had a mission coming up in a few days. and trying to learn everything I could before we went out. But anyway, that was a long story of how I got to decide. What was in the bag? He had, you know, some civilian clothes, letters, you know, to his parents. I mean, you know, people's personal kinds of things like that. They were letters that, you know, that had come from their families. They were letters they had written that they hadn't mailed yet. Things they'd had in their hooch, personal kinds of things that they would put in there.

1:26:16So, I mean, probably half to two-thirds of it, you know, I took out. But I had to read the letters, you know, to their families. and yeah, that was brutal. Just brutal. You were close with him. Yeah. I just... Anyway. What was his name? Stacks. Lieutenant Stacks. Stan Stacks. And yeah. You know, we went through the officer SF course up there and you know hung out some after that but it was just a shock to my system all of the first bag you know the duffel bag with your name stencil on the side of it and I picked that up and it just holy cow man now I know where he went he went to SOG like my friend had told me you know a couple of days before don't volunteer for solid you're a dead man walking if you do and then you know here's your stacks all of a sudden i'm sorry so um i mean i got put right to work which you know i'd rather get to work let's go do it i learn fast if you show me i'll learn it

1:27:49I wasn't expecting to get ambushed the first time out. Let's take a quick break. Sure. When we come back, we'll get into your first mission. Okay.

1:28:01This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:28:36This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So, you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was. The bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:29:11This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:29:43All right, Dick, we're back from the break, and we're getting ready to get into your first mission with SOG. But, you know, something that I found interesting that you didn't mention is SOG did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention, correct? Right. Why is that? Well, we were not supposed to be in the countries we were going into. We didn't have permission to go into those countries.

1:30:13So all missions were conducted without ID cards, which you can't do, and be covered with the Geneva Convention. No dog tags. Nothing, in the beginning, nothing that said U.S. on it. Now, later on, M16s and Kar 15s and those types of weapons became so ubiquitous in that area that anybody could be carrying something, a weapon that said U.S. on it. So they took the restriction of that. In the beginning, you carried a Sten gun or a Swedish K or something like that rather than American guns. So they took that off. But because we had no identification of any type on us, then we were considered spies if we were caught.

1:31:12And it also gave the U.S. government plausible deniability that they didn't have anything to do with us. That's what prompted the different uniforms and different gear and everything. Wow. Now, like I said, later we went to the regular jungle fatigues or tiger stripes or whatever. Very interesting. Let's get into your first mission. Okay. We had kind of started it before where they assigned me right off the bat. um so even the SOG rule was even if you come in as an officer like I I did when you went to a team you could not go as the team leader you had to go out as an assistant team leader or a certain number of missions until the team leader that was vetting you said, you know, this guy's ready to lead a team.

1:32:20So I went out with team RT Alabama to start with to get to learn really what it was like and get vetted because it's just a river. but they were something about when you crossed that river into that other country, everything was different. I mean, you didn't make contact with 20 or 30 guys and have a gun battle. You made contact with 500. It's like kicking the top off of an anthill. I mean, they would just swarm. Once they figured out where you were, they were coming from everywhere to try to get you. And the other thing that was kind of reminds me of jiu-jitsu in that with jiu-jitsu, you and your opponent kind of lay down on the floor, and you get your best hold on each other, and then they say go, and you try to fight your way out of it.

1:33:26But with us, they would take us into Laos or wherever, set us down, put the NVA all around, just hundreds and hundreds of them all around us with us in the middle. And then they'd say, go. Go accomplish your mission and then see if you can get out. So you started off surrounded with every mission. and just there are just so many of them when you did and then I worked mostly up north with Laos, you know, North Vietnam the terrain up there is very mountainous and double, triple canopy jungle thick vegetation I mean, most of the time when I made contact you were, you know, this close to me 10 meters maybe, 15 meters.

1:34:26That's when we made contact and I probably couldn't see the other 20 people who were with you because they were standing a couple meters farther back in the vegetation. I could hear the gunshots. I could see the bushes moving as the blast came and things like that. So a lot of times I was shooting at just movement, shooting at sound, shooting at the one or two that I could see, and bullets were just coming from everywhere. You were never shooting at one person. You might think you're shooting at one person, but there's 30 or 40 shooting back at you. And it was when you made contact in Vietnam, which we'd go do a lot just for practice so you can have a live shoot back target.

1:35:15You know, you run up on five or 10 guys and have gunfight. But when 5 or 10 turns into 100, 200, and there are more coming, it becomes difficult. So the hardest or the easiest thing is to get inserted. And sometimes that's a real problem, but still getting inserted seems to be the easiest part. Accomplishing the mission becomes really difficult. Getting out becomes almost impossible. And, you know, it's like that almost every mission. And you get in trying to accomplish the mission with everything going on, but then how do you get out? I mean, it can go on for hours and hours and hours trying to get out because you can't get the fire suppressed enough to get a helicopter in.

1:36:16And I mentioned Prairie Fire Emergency earlier.

1:36:22If we were about to be overrun, if I call on the radio and declare Prairie Fire Emergency, everything within range that has an ordinance is getting diverted to me to try to help get me out. So all of a sudden, I mean, there were times when I'd have 14 gunships in orbit waiting their turn to come in, you know, five or six F-4 Phantom in orbit ready to come in. Some, you know, other types of aircraft all in orbit just waiting their turn to come in and expend their ordnance on the bad guys so I could try to get out. So anyway. What was it like when you, I mean, you show up as an officer to the most elite unit at the time, and they want you to lead one.

1:37:19How are you received by those guys? young guy 21 years old only been to the schools qualified SF, qualified Ranger but even in today that doesn't mean much when you show up to the team I can't imagine what the reception's like for a junior officer to show up at a team like that of those type of men to be led John Meyer might have told you what the perception was he did Yeah. He told me one time that he said, you were one of the few officers that actually wanted to go out and was not afraid to go out and could perform when you were out there. and he said, you know, that made you different than most of the officers.

1:38:17And most officers, they went out a few times and they didn't go back out again. You know, they found another job. But, you know, enlisted, NCOs did that too. I'm telling you, when you go over there and experience what it's like, You have to think long and hard before you say, I'm ready to go back. Because it was just so different when you went out there.

1:38:51I was given a fair chance, Sergeant Gentry Deck. He didn't seem to have any qualms. He just said, we'll see what you can do. it's my team and you know I'll tell you what I want you to do you do it and you know I was okay with that and you know the guys in when you when you went into the lounge the club you know you could sit with more senior guys there people with more experience and you know they would chat with you and they I think The first and second day I was there, this E7 was talking to me. He came over and met me, and we started talking. At one point he said, let me tell you something, Lieutenant.

1:39:55Never, ever shoot an NVA less than three or four times. every time you shoot one. You shoot them three or four times. If they twitch, you shoot them three or four more times. Don't ever assume that you shot somebody and they're dead because we've had a lot of SOG people kill, shot in the back because they walked past the NVA that they had shot and thought was dead. Damn. And he said, you make sure you do the job the first time. and you know that was that was a rule i adopted there's no single shots there's no double tap if i shoot you i'm going to shoot you i'm gonna you're gonna get held a lot of times and most of the time i shot short bursts on automatic i'd shoot you know three or four round burst because i want to make sure i hit you i want to make sure you're going down and you know if you don't go down fast enough I'm going to hit you with three or four more rounds and you know that was one of the reasons I carried a lot of ammunition so um the deck was very open to having me on there particularly um after you know we had the first mission we go out we're doing a last light insertion and we're going to go do a wire tap once we get on the ground.

1:41:33So we go out, it's starting to get dark. We circle around and we come in on our run toward the LZ. Deck gave a thumbs up. That means get out on the skids, 30 seconds out. I climbed out on the skids. The other American climbed out on my side with me and the door gunners right next to me. We were on a Huey and we're coming in really low and we're just going across the tree. I mean the skids are almost dragging in the top of the canopy and we're going slow and I was thinking an An NVA could knock me off of the skid with a rock. I mean, we were just barely moving. I'm exposed to the world standing out here.

1:42:27And wow, there's a little village over there. It looks like six or seven hoochies in a little village. That wasn't in our briefing. There was nothing said about a village being that close to where we were going in. So we come on up and they had blown a hole in the canopy and it was just barely big enough for the topper to just set straight down in. So we're settling down in there and I'm scanning the tree line and still thinking, I'm a setting duck out here. and we get down, it looks like as far as we're going to be able to go. We're still about six feet from the bottom of the bomb crater. I'm thinking, I've got to jump off the skid down in this thing with 80 pounds of gear on.

1:43:30I'm going to break both legs. They don't want to hit down there. And while I'm having that thought, you know, it's time to suck it up and just jump, So, you know, I bent my knees so I could, you know, kind of hop off. And as I bent down, this guy, NVA, pops up right there 10 feet away from me, you know, in the bomb crater, AK-47. Holy cow. So instead of jumping in, I straighten my legs up and hop back up on the edge of the floor of the aircraft. As I do that, he pulls the trigger on the AK. my legs moved just in time they went right across in front of me and hit the American that was on the other side of me they hit his legs and took them out from under him he started to fall I grabbed the back of his harness with my left hand I put a half a magazine into that guy I drug him back up into the aircraft he's yelling and hollering about his legs blood's going everywhere where the two indiged behind me both open fire, out going out of the helicopter, one on each side of me.

1:44:50And I'm getting powder burns from their muzzle flashes, going death as that's happening. And the door gunners opened up, and it's just unbelievable the number of bullets that all of a sudden are coming, crisscrossing inside the aircraft, hitting the aircraft. You can hear the metal clangs as they hit. I see another one. Now I finish off my magazine on him. Now I've got to reload. And that's when I discovered what stress does to your fine motor coordination. So I reached to try to get a magazine out of my pouch. My hand is just soaked with the blood that's squirting out of his leg. trying to get the magazine out.

1:45:39I couldn't get it and it was stuck in there. My hand was slick. I finally got it out but when I went to put it in my hand was shaking so much I couldn't get it in the magazine well at first. I finally got it in there so I could start returning fire. The next one you know came right out of the pouch. It wasn't that big of a deal but it went in a lot easier. but I had never experienced that level of fear before I mean I just you know it's hard to believe today that that many bullets could come at you that fast and none of them hit you

1:46:24so start returning fire knock some guys that who were in the trees knock them out at the same time that's happening you know we had two cobra gunships that were coming in you know right beside us they opened up with their mini guns and so you have you know four thousand rounds a minute coming down from from the cobras uh hitting right next to us ricochets going everywhere you know there's tracers all over the place they're firing the next two cobras right behind them we're firing 40 millimeter you know and that's exploding all around us um everybody in the aircraft on both sides are shooting them you can see the crasers crisscrossing on the inside and you know the pilot i think i think that's the first time he's been ambushed like that with people that close and it seemed like he just froze or stopped or something because we were just sitting there I always think we need to be going up, getting out of this hole.

1:47:30And finally we started moving. The aircraft's shaking, trembling all over and going up. The bad guys are all shifting their fire up. The Cobras are coming in. They're just circling around and coming in. And then we had some Sky Raiders, A-1 Sky Raiders coming in, flying across in front of us and dropping 250-pound bombs, not right there, but off to the side. I found out later those hoochies in the village over there were not hoochies. They were tanks with thatch put around them to make them look like, you know, they were thatched houses over there. They were actually tanks, and they started moving when all this started happening.

1:48:19You know, so the A1s went after them and started putting the bombs. So with all the other stuff that's going on, when those things start, the bombs start going off, now you're getting these blast waves coming across that's trying to knock the helicopter into the trees, you know, and we're getting hit with the blast. But finally, you know, we got up and we're able to start moving and flying away from it, and we're still getting.51 calibers and things coming up at us. And I looked over, you know, at Sergeant Deck, and he looked around at me, and he's grinning like a horse eating Saul Briars and giving me a thumbs up.

1:49:06Oh, my God. He thinks that's the coolest thing he's done lately. He enjoyed that, and he did. And I thought, wow. You know, he's done this, you know, quite a few times, so it's not his first radio, but he enjoyed that. He scared the crap out of me. Then we get back and we have the conversation of, you know, Lieutenant, if you don't learn to change magazines faster, you're going to die. But every time, except for the last time, every time we went on a mission, as we would be extracted when I'd look over at him I see that big grin and thumb up he was so excited about that so yeah that got my attention I bet it did unfortunately before before the mission the camp commander up there had called me over wanted to talk and he said I just I know this is your first mission I want you to understand we're not gonna put you out there where we can't get you back if we put you in there we're gonna bring you back okay so when I got back from that mission and got to the hooch and spent some time with Jack Daniels I decided to go talk to the camp commander learning experience you know to go to the camp commander and tell him his baby is ugly there's some problems with the process

1:50:44but you know he didn't fire me that was good he he recognized uh you know it had a you know significant experience there and then compounded it with a little jack daniels and so i didn't do that again i learned definitely learned from that but what did you think the problems were I thought part of it was it flew by we we had a range we had a big open air a huge open area that we would go to to do immediate action drills to you know test fire different weapons and things and there were nothing you could shoot in any direction out there and I mean he could practice but it's not the jungle the jungle is very different you know when I'm out where I can I can see a thousand meters out in front of me, that's different.

1:51:37When we are, you know, 10 meters, 15 meters out, it's about the range of my vision. And then after that mission, you know, the next one we got on the ground and just moving through the jungle and particularly moving once contact is made. It's very different. So when we got down to Da Nang, we had a jungle we could go practice in, Monkey Mountain. We could go over there, and you were in a rural jungle, so you could practice moving, falling over logs, stepping in holes, and all that kind of stuff. But I learned a lot from that. One of the things was I want more ammunition. And I've got to be able to get the magazines out.

1:52:28So I had the magazine stuffed in the canteen pouch. So what I did was I took a piece of parachute cord and some duct tape, and I made a loop, taped it on the side of the magazine, so there was a loop sticking up on that center magazine. I could just stick my finger in, and I could jerk that magazine out. And once it was out, the rest of them were loose. They were easy to get out. You came up with that yourself? I had heard somebody talk about putting a loop on it or a string on it or something. And I thought, that makes sense. So I tried that. When I was practicing, that first one would come right out.

1:53:12So I started doing them all like that. But just that was part of it, was learning that, making sure I had them in the right place, Just making sure, since I was right-handed, the grenades were in the pouch on the right-hand side. Magalines on the left-hand side, so you could go with them. Water was in the back. And then after a couple of times on the ground, I started to flatten out what was on my waist. To me, it seemed like the closer you could get to the ground, the better your chances. of surviving because I'd be laying on the ground and my rucksack's getting hit. So I thought if I could get a little bit closer, that gets me a little ways farther.

1:54:05I mean, I'd come back and I'm a rucksack shot up on just about every mission. I'm laying down, but the bullets are coming that close. Better sight picture, too. Yeah. So I started making little changes like that. And then once I became team leader, then I implemented those changes to the whole team. But some of them along the way, I would make suggestions to deck and say, what if? What if as soon as we get in, we get into our remain overnight position, quick meeting before everybody goes down. This is the direction. we're going to go if we get hit. This is our avenue of escape. Here's where we think they're coming.

1:54:58The claymores are out there. So we started having that little quick debrief like that and then started the after-action reviews where we did kind of a formal after-action review with the team. I implemented a talk deck and implementing a running password. If we got scattered and you're running and you're coming up on somebody, we would have a running password.

1:55:38Example, bug fuzz. You think, that makes sense. Well, not only does it not necessarily make sense, it was hard for them to say. So if I don't speak the language and I hear you say something, bug fuzz, I can't understand what you're saying, I don't know what it means, so it's hard for me as the NVA to use that same word to come running into you. So every time we were compromised and had to use a running password, the next time we went out, we had a different one. So I kept changing those.

1:56:24So just putting things in like that. And Dec was pretty good about going along with that. And then Christmas went out, and it was going to be the last mission that this team ran out of Fubai. They were going to close Fubai down. And we got in really heavy contact. And when we finally got on the helicopter and they were just really pummeling the helicopter, and we got on it and we started lifting off, I looked over at Dick expecting, you know, the big grin and the thumb up, and he just looked up at me and he looked back down. I said, oh, crap. You know, he must have gotten hit. I mean, he's never done that before.

1:57:21Must have gotten hit. So I kind of crawled over there to him and grabbed him by the shoulder and said, are you okay? And, you know, he said, no. I'll talk to you when we land.

1:57:38So when we got on the ground, I grabbed him up, and I, what's going on? And he said, I'm done. I said, I'm done. When we get to Da Nang, I'm going to have a different job. Don't tell the team. I'll tell the team, but I don't want to tell them right now. But I won't be on the team after this, after we get to Da Nang. And you know, I thought that was good. he had recognized it was time to do something different.

1:58:22And I found some people couldn't or wouldn't recognize that. You've gotta know, you've gotten up to the edge where you're now dangerous. Dangerous to yourself, dangerous to the rest of the team. And you need to take yourself out. Because even though you had to sign up for six missions or six months, after the first mission, if you went to your team leader and said, I'm done, I can't do this anymore, I want out, that was fine. You know, you would be taken out and either put somewhere else in Da Nang or where we were, or back to Special Forces. Go to, you know, a regular Special Forces unit or something.

1:59:17Because you didn't need to be going out there if, you know, once you had decided that you couldn't do that. Because the volume of fire was so heavy. so intense when you were out there. All decisions had to be made quickly and you had to continue to adapt because those suckers were coming at you.

1:59:47With me, it was now I'm going to be the leader. I need to be learning more. I started watching the NVA. I said, what did they do when we make contacts? Is there a pattern to how they behave when we make contact? And I started to see a pattern. And just a simple example, if you're an NVA and we make contact and you go down behind a tree 95 % of the time when you decide to return fire back at me you will come around the right side of the tree from your perspective the right side of the tree your muzzle or the aka will come around your forehead will be right behind it if I know that so I'm out here from my perspective I I watch the left side of the tree, and I'll see you start to come around it.

2:00:52And I've already zeroed in on it, and I'm ready. When I see that muzzle come around, and your forehead's right behind it, and I'm ready to launch three or four rounds at you. And I told my team, I implemented it with the next team, and I said, they'll do that every time. I said, watch. Just watch. They'll do that. and you can take them out. And we came back and we debriefed it and they said, wow. They do. They shoot around that side of the tree or rock or whatever it is. I said, okay, here's the big thing you've got to realize. We do that too. We're humans. We're going to shoot around that right side of the tree every time unless we train it out of ourselves.

2:01:44Or you're left-handed. or you're left-handed. So we've got to practice doing that. But we know where they are. When they go down, almost without fail, they will shoot from where they went down. When we go down, we've got to roll one way or the other. Don't shoot from where you went down because they're going to shoot right where they saw you go down last time. You've got to move before they start shooting. And there's a whole series of things like that that I call the human reaction to combat that humans do instinctively. And they don't even realize they're doing it most of the time. But if you know how they're going to react, you know which way they're going to run and what they're going to do, that gives you the advantage.

2:02:34It gives you the advantage with close quarters in combat. You know, when I watch people, you know, from the catwalk, I watch people go through the rooms, clearing them and everything, and I think, holy cow. You know, if that joker was in there with live ammo shooting at you, he's going to take you out. And, you know, they're just, in the U.S., for example, if you come into this building, and I know you're coming in as a SWAT team, for example, or as a stack with the military, you're coming in. I can take you out, but just by shooting a row across the wall there, I'll get half your team because you're all leaning up against that drywall and that bullet's going to go right through it.

2:03:29So I can take out a bunch of you right there. There's a whole series of things. Don't stand close to the wall. If I shoot at the wall and I hit the wall, even drywall, a lot of times you can get a ricochet that's going to come off that wall just a little ways. And if you're standing a couple feet from it, it's going to hit you. How you hold your weapon when you go in there. I won't go into all that right now, but I really started working with them on what was called quick kill when I went through the training. how to shoot from the waist and hit your target every time. You don't have to aim. We went through a whole course at Bragg on that with BB guns and then graduated the M-16s.

2:04:20And some of the work I do with active shooters and stuff like that and showing the police. You and I both turn into the hall at the same time. I'll hit you three times before you can get your weapon ready to fire because I'm already ready to fire. I just need to see a target, and I can hit you without moving my weapon at all. You've still got yours at a down port, and you've got to try to bring it up. And what will happen in that situation is as you're bringing it up, you'll be able to spend the rest of your life Thinking about why you did it that way. Of course, the rest of your life is going to be about a half a second.

2:05:07But I know they're lawyers, I know they're safety things, but you got to think about your opponent and about how to take them out. But anyway, we did all kind of practice on the range. Pictures in the books out on the range of us shooting from there, putting the silhouettes out and practicing hitting those things if you're 20 meters or closer i'll hit you every time without aiming i used to put five silhouettes out there and you know let one of the team members say go and as i was falling to the ground i'd hit all five targets before i hit the ground And you can do that. But you've got to practice.

2:05:56And they loved it. You gave them techniques they could use that would work. They loved it. How did it feel to take over the team? I was excited. I really was. A little nervous because I didn't know this team. I took over the team when we moved to Da Nang. they actually split up Alabama and kind of sent them to different places and Coach Deck was going to a different job and I took over RT Michigan the 1-0 had been wounded and he was gone there was a guy spec four on the team Elvin Bardswell. Hard dude, good dude, you know, SOG, legend, Delta, Force Commander, forever. I mean, just you name it, special ops-wise, he did it.

2:06:55But at that time, he was my assistant team leader. So working with him was good. We got another American in for a while. and it was a mountain yard team, good team. And Eldon and I worked together really well. What was your first mission as team leader? The first one, oh, it was one where we were going to try a new insertion technique. There was a company in the 101st that had moved up right up next to the border, Laotian border. So the plan was they were going to insert us into that 101st company. So on one of their resupply missions and where they were bringing in some additional new recruits in there, we were going to put the team on those helicopters, dressed like the 101st, still pot, all that kind of stuff.

2:08:06We were going to fly in, get off, just like we were new people coming in. And then we would spend the night there in their perimeter. And at first light, we would go down to the stream, big stream that was down there with the water supply. So we would go down with some 101st guys dressed like them to get water, except when we got down there, we would change into our Superman suit, stuff the 101st stuff in a bag. Those guys would get the water and go back to the perimeter, and we would move out across the river into the jungle. So we would make clandestine insertion. First time and really the only time that I ever had a chance to have, to be within range of level artillery.

2:09:08Siren First had set up a fire base that they would support them. So once we got inserted and had a conversation with the company first sergeant coming over and saying, all right, I want you guys to dig in around here. And my interpreter looked at me and said, we know dig. I said, tonight we do. We know dig. I said, look, they're probably going to get hit really hard tonight. Bullets are going to be coming from everywhere. And you guys look like the guys who are shooting at them. you need to be down in a hole or you're going to get shot from inside the perimeter. We did. So, okay. So they dug in.

2:10:00Sure enough, we got pounded that night. And, you know, the hole saved us. But that was cool. But I had, you know, that evening I had met with the company commander and a fire support officer and a couple of lieutenants. And I kind of laid out for them, this is what we're going to do. and here's what I need. I want artillery targets plotted in these areas right here, these coordinates, and I want them named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I want to be able to just call up and say from Monday, you know, right 200, down 100, fire for effect. And it was funny, you know, he was company commander and he looked at me like, wow, that sounds, I never heard of that before.

2:10:59That sounds cool. I said, when I need it, I need it.

2:11:06So we went in, crossed over, and we were doing, there was a hatchet force that was across the road on the other side. and we were supposed to make sure no one approached them from the side of the road we were on. So we had the targets plotted out there and we heard some mortars that first night firing you know at the hatchet force. I could tell they were close to one of our targets so I just called it in and they dropped you know some 105 rounds over there and that shut the mortars up from that position so we started doing that but after about three days the launch commander decided we needed to be resupplied ammunition and water and I could be said they were coming I said no I didn't we don't want to respond don't well he needs your grid coordinates so they can just they can hover and drop supplies down to the camp yet no I'm not gonna tell him where I am so a few minutes Covey came back and he said if you're not going to tell him where you are he's gonna drop them at the last set of coordinates we had on you guys.

2:12:32I said, no. When you do that, they're going to know right where we are. It was too late. I can see them coming. So sure enough, they dropped all that stuff down. So we ran down and grabbed most of it and hid it, took the water with us and moved out quickly. But boy, they were on us shortly after that. And things didn't go well. Our artillery worked pretty good but there were just too many of them and now they knew where we were. We um, before I got that big insight about if you stop moving they're going to surround you. We got into those rocks and I stopped us. I thought we could defend from there.

2:13:20Big mistake. They just circled us. It's like a big amoeba when we were their supper. The only way we could get out was go up. So eventually got the fire suppressed enough they could drop the McGuire rigs down for us and pull us out. So I sent Bardswell and the other Americana and a couple of Indige out on the first aircraft. I stayed there with the other two Indige and, you know, just kind of battled it out so we We could fight in place and die. We could try to run and escape someplace and get away, or we could go up those ropes. I decided we'll go up the ropes, but we had nobody to go as far as support from the ground.

2:14:12So man, they were just shooting away at us as we were going up. I got a couple rounds in the radio, killed my radio, a big chunk of shrapnel went into my survival radio that I was wearing right over my heart. It buried itself in there, killed that radio.

2:14:38and both the Indige got wounded as we were going up and we were flying along 7 ,000 feet, 100 miles an hour, oscillating back and forth. I could see my rope fraying on the edge of the floor of the helicopter, no radio, no way to call and say, I'm developing a little problem up there. I couldn't tell him that the other guys were wanting, but we made it to a fire support base. And in the book, there's a picture in there of a helicopter coming in to a fire support base and you can see three guys hanging on the end of the ropes down below him. The guy that's the lowest on the rope is me and the other two are hanging right above me.

2:15:38So what had happened is Bargewell and his little group came in first. These guys on the fire support, but they never seen anybody coming from that side of the border or hanging under a helicopter like that. So there was a guy there who had bought a brand-new mini Polaroid camera before he came over to Vietnam. He brought it with him. So he saw Bardswell and his group, you know, come. He ran and got his camera, came back out in time to see me and my two guys coming in and took a picture of it. So they set us down, they got us in the helicopter, and just as they started to lift off the ground, this guy comes running over, holding his arm up in the air with something in it.

2:16:29I reached down and took it as we lifted off, and it was a picture that he took as we were coming in. I had no clue who he was, but he took an actual picture of us, live, coming in, hanging on those ropes. that's pretty cool yeah still have it, put it in the book this episode is brought to you by Facebook so you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was the bike you'd been searching for you sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty kind of funny and an avid cyclist the next thing you know you're in a cycling crew well a community cycling group the thing about Facebook you might find more than what you're looking for.

2:17:18From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it, okay. Try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. But anyway, we got back good. good debriefing one of the things that i had figured out by then was doing an after action review is not just to figure out what went well what didn't go so well what you might want to change but it's psychologically it gives me an opportunity if i'm upset about something you did I think you left me hanging out.

2:18:14You didn't have my six or whatever. It gives me a chance to bring that up and let's get it settled right here, get it off the chest. It gave me a chance to, you know, I could facilitate what was going on so you guys didn't go duke it out after a while. But we could get that resolved and get your stress level back down and, you know, we could move forward. And then we also did, and these are the post-training things we're going to do based on what we did out there. One of them in this case was, why did we not have those stupid harnesses on to start with?

2:18:56I mean, you could wear a Swiss seat. You could have it on. You could have it, you know, just wear it a little loose if you wanted to and all you have to do is tighten the knot up and you could snap onto that joker and go. but to try to put on a swift seat when you got bullets coming at you from every direction then you're trying you're flat down on your back trying to get that thing on and you're trying to you know return fire I mean that's not easy why not put it on beforehand I mean you know it's just little things like that that you can think of now let's go practice that let's implement that as a SOP.

2:19:40So we started doing things like that and it was pretty good until Dick Meadows came in and said, can Bardswell take over the team? I said sure. No problem. He knows exactly what he's doing so anyway where did you go up from there that's when I did the run on the beach with dick met us the next morning and and did the let's review all the people and then he put me on a this other super top secret mission to go into the Maigea Pass and actually John Meyer had also been given that mission and they counseled it at the last minute. They gave it to me. I told the people in Saigon when I went down for a briefing, I said, this is not going to work.

2:20:46I said, I know you think there's no one up on that ridge that's going to be protecting those convores going through there. I said, I guarantee you there are people up there. Why do you think they're not up there? Well, we fly over there all the time and nobody shoots at us. I said, of course they're not going to shoot at you. They don't want you to know they're up there. But when you put a team up there, they're going to walk right into them.

2:21:13Here's my recommendation.

2:21:17plan a target a thousand meters away on that ridgeline let's hit that target about you know the l4 is about two o 'clock in the morning while that's being hit let's fly a huey at about 300 feet lights out full blast coming across this little clearing that's uh on that ridge I'll slide out of the helicopter. No reserve because won't need it. Too low. I'll just ease out. I'll be on the ground within a minute or so, pack it up, hide it. I'll move up there to the ridge. They'll never know I'm there. I'm one person. They're not going to find me. And worst case is they do find me. And what do you lose?

2:22:09you lose one crazy SF guy not a whole team not some helicopters trying to get him out you know I can go do that it'll be a lot more secure and easier to do if you just let me go do it myself holy cow I mean they just went bananas I was crazy there's no way they were going to let me go out by myself so But that mission ended up getting canceled anyway. You volunteered for a singleton mission in Vietnam. Yeah. I mean, it just looked to me like there were a lot of SOG missions where the mission was to go sit on a ridgeline or go find a location of a battalion, just go do something. Nothing kinetic about it.

2:23:03Just sneak and peek and find out and get the information, get it back in, get out, that I could just go do. I mean, drop me out there in the middle of the night. Nobody's going to be expecting it. Helicopter comes across that low. Nobody's going to think you're going to parachute in. It just screams across through there. They don't see it. It's dark. They hear it. They just don't know what happened. They know it didn't stop. And, you know, I just carried a survival radio. I don't even carry the PRC-25, all that garbage. I don't need all that weight. I just need to get in there. I need to send you a signal when I'm ready to come out.

2:23:47And, you know, if things are too hot or too bad around that area, I'll start walking. You can pick me up somewhere else. And if you can't find me, you know I'm walking toward the border. might take me a while, but eventually I'll get there. And Metta said, no, you're crazy. I'm not putting you out there by yourself. He said no. Camp commander said no. SOG chief said no. Can't do that. And then, fate said, I'm going to activate RT Dynamite. Everybody else has said no, but fate is about to say yes. You are about to be activated, dude. So that's when I did the R &R mission. Holy shit. Let's go into it.

2:25:01So, yeah, I mean, I felt, I was convinced I could just, I could move quieter, farther, more effectively. And with some missions, you know, it was just me. I didn't need a team with me because I wasn't going out there to make contact or to fight anybody. I was to be silent, hidden, collect the information I needed, and get out.

2:25:38So when I did go out, it wasn't all that silent, but still worked.

2:25:48How many times did you do that? I only got to do it the one time. But, you know, it ended up, I had to go, there were a bunch of people in trouble and somebody needed to go get them and lead them out, so I did that. Can you be a little more descriptive?

2:26:14I had just come back from a mission, a rough mission, and they were going to give me two days um let your team have two days take a break before we give you your next mission so i decided i was going to leave camp go downtown for a couple days because if i stayed in camp somebody's going to find me give me something to do i was heading for the gate heard a helicopter coming helicopter landed on our pad a lot of activity going on around it

2:26:52and one of the people there fumbling around with the helicopter saw me walking toward the gate. He started yelling. I couldn't understand him, so I moved closer to him and he ran over to me and he said, do you know how to rig McGuire rigs to the floor of a helicopter so that we can use them? We've got an emergency going on. I said, sure. Done that lots of times. I can rig that up. So I ran over. I had my car 15 and a bandolier with me. Set that against the contents container. Jumped in the helicopter. Started making all the appropriate ties and fastening it down, getting them rigged and ready to go.

2:27:43And then the helicopter started to move. told a crew chief I'd say I'm still on here and he said sorry about that um we got to go we're in trouble so he said you just have to go with us so okay I mean I don't know what you're going to do or anything but yeah I guess I'll go with you I sat back and I just kind of started thinking about what was going on and I had this one vision just started playing over and over in my mind and it was that the helicopter in front of us got shot down. When we got there the only way to get to the helicopter was to go down the the Meguiar rig. I dropped the Meguiar rig and go down the rope.

2:28:40But it was like I was looking into a black hole. I couldn't see what was really going on. Anyway, I pulled the crew chief over and said, you know, I had this crazy vision. You know, the helicopter in front of us had shot down and now we're there. And I think I might have to go down and do something. And he said, you're crazy. I said, yep. and about 10 minutes later he pulled me over and he said you're not going to believe this they just shot down the mother back helicopter in front of us I said okay that's interesting in my mind I started thinking I think RT dynamite might have just been activated

2:29:26somebody's going to have to go down there so when we got there the first helicopter that they shot down and crashed and burned.

2:29:38Three survivors, the pilot, the co-pilot, and the NCO that was on there with them. The medevac got there, dropped a jungle penetrator down. They put the co-pilot and the sergeant on the jungle penetrator. medevac started pulling it up it got hit lost power it went forward and the jungle penetrator is just like a big grappling hook that you're sitting on so it was they were about 100 feet in the air and it got caught on a big limb the cable snapped and it was just like you know the medevac had been shot out of a slingshot or something it just fired it right through the canopy into a ravine. So when we got there, we circled around.

2:30:35I could see the helicopter was face down into a ravine, and the crew was still in it. You could see the fuel spilling out over them. I could see, you know, 40, 50 NVA coming up the ridge toward that. It was going to take them out, plus any, you know, a tracer. anything ignite that fuel they were all gonna burn and they were so banged up and everything they couldn't get out of the ship so I told the pilot circle around hover you know close to that hole and I was gonna drop a McGuire rig and go down there. So I borrowed the crew chief's M16 and stepped out on the skid. We were about 400 feet high in receiving fire.

2:31:33And the McGuire rig went down. It was 150 feet long, but it It was still up above the canopy that was 150 feet high. But I told a crew chief, get him to lower it some because I'm going to go down. I didn't have any gloves or anything. It turned out to be a brand new nylon rope. And I thought, you know, if I squeeze really hard and I wrap my feet around it, I can slow it down enough. it's not gonna burn that much. About 30 feet down now I realized the flaw in my plan. I couldn't squeeze it that hard. The rope had already turned red. It was just taking everything off both ends. I was bleeding, blood running off my elbows, people shooting at me.

2:32:28I ran on down. When I got to the McGuire rig, I was able to, you know, because it was pretty big, I was able to stop. but you know I was 20 or more feet up above the canopy at that point and he was taking enough fire he was gonna leave so I knew I needed to go ahead and just drop into the canopy before he carried me off and I'd be too high to do that so you know I dropped went into the canopy and I just got it's really hard even in a jungle canopy to be able to grab a hold of something and hold on to it when you're falling through. So it took me about a hundred feet or so bouncing off limbs and things before I finally managed to hit with my stomach and kind of wrapped around a big limb.

2:33:25Got my breath and broke a couple ribs and things as I was falling through, no meat on my hands. Climbed down, as soon as I got to the ground, two NVA's standing there, so terminated them. How'd you do that? The technique I was talking to you before where I'd put five silhouettes out and I'd just go full auto as I went down to the ground, because I still had the M16 that I took from the crew chief. I'd lost one of the magazines, but I put another one in it. He'd given me a bandolier with five magazines. So I took those two out and then started moving toward the crew that was still trapped in the helicopter.

2:34:13The pilot started shooting at me because he didn't know anybody else was down there, you know, where I was coming from. I could hear that little.38 popping as he was shooting at me. So I'm yelling at him and telling him, hey, I'm the rescue team. And finally he had to reload and when he reloaded I charged him and once he saw me, he was kind of in shock because he was looking at me and thinking, you're the one that needs to be rescued. You know, you're all bloody from head to toe and torn up and everything. But anyway, I managed to get all of them out of the aircraft and move them to a safe space.

2:35:00So if it exploded, you know, it wasn't going to get them. So then I had to go. There was a SOG team that the initial helicopter went out to try to pick some of the members up. So I went to where they were and I heard an American voice speaking kind of loud. So at that point I thought, well, they must not be captured. I mean, there's an American talking. And I got a little closer and I could see the 1-0, the team leader. So I yelled at him and told him I was coming in not to shoot, tell his people not to shoot. He said, come on in.

2:35:48And I kept with them, if I back up a minute, I kept telling the pilot of the other crew, I said, I'm going to get you out. You just need to do what I tell you. I will come back and get you. Don't move from where you are right now. And I go up to the team. So I go in, and there's an Air Force lieutenant colonel standing there talking to the team leader, telling the team leader that he's in charge of the operation now. He's the senior man on the ground, and he's in charge. So I got there and heard him saying that. I said, you're not in charge. You're on the ground now. I'm the senior ground commander and I'm in charge.

2:36:37He said, you're a lieutenant and you are not in charge. And I said, you need to look around. Because all of a sudden, all the indige had turned their weapons toward him. They had figured out what was going on. And I said, they are about to make you disappear. and your body's never going to be found you need to be quiet and do what i tell you so he quietened down i went down and got the the two guys off the jungle penetrator and brought them up um used the radio call for for help um and told them i needed uh explosives so a marine ch-46 came out dropped 50 pound blocks of c4 and some fuses and fuse lighters blasting caps so i blew a big several trees down to create a hole in the canopy got some gunships out started working the gunships and eventually i got everybody up the jungle penetrator into the CH-46, I got up, went up last, and we flew away.

2:38:04Holy shit. You had a premonition. Yeah. And that was a long day. I get back to camp, and the camp commander is in there with some aviation colonel, and they're upset about something. I said, I'm back, and he's an aviation guy. I said, you didn't get everybody. I said, I got everybody that was there. You didn't get the crew chief from the CH-34. What crew chief? I got everybody that the pilot said was his. I said, you didn't get the crew chief. You got to go back out and get him. the pilot didn't tell me that the crew chief on his helicopter was missing the air force guys didn't tell me oh my god you know I'm still I'm bleeding like a stuck pig and I said you need to go back out and get him I need to get my hands treated first and then you know I'll go back out there But we decided to wait and, you know, let me take some of my new team and go out there the next morning and get him.

2:39:34But came a storm that night. It was two days before I could go back out there. But I took my new team and went back out, went to the helicopter where the body was supposed to be. And sure enough, with all the rain, you could see his femur sticking up out of the wreckage on the ground, plus all the flies and the smell and everything. We got him. I was also supposed to blow up the Huey medevac. So I got the rest of the C-4 that I had left out there inside the aircraft, packing the C-4 in it. and here come the NVA again. Now I'm inside, and bullets are starting to come in because I realized I was in the helicopter doing something, and, you know, it's hitting the C4, but, you know, it's not going to bother the C4.

2:40:34I'm safe until I put the blasting cap in, you know, so I got everything ready, and decided, okay, this is it. Stick the blasting caps in, set the two fuse igniters on, jumped out and managed to climb up the ridge. I had put the team up on the ridge up above the helicopter. And as I was going up the bank, the NVA assaulted the helicopter. They thought I was still in there. I got up on top and looking down. And they're standing next to the helicopter with the time fuse for them. I told my guys to get down. Forty pounds of C4. Fortunately, it was down in that ridge, so most of the blast went linearly down the ravine, and then the rest of it went straight up, but it still hurt, the blast.

2:41:37And then the rest of the NVA attacks. We had a big firefight for an hour or so. And finally we managed to withdraw using the gunships and stuff. Then it started pouring rain. We stayed out there another two days and we came back in. And then the aviation guy flipped out because I blew the helicopter. I said, you told me to do it. I told you to destroy it. I didn't tell you to blow it up. I said, well, it's in a million little pieces along with body parts right now. Anyway. Wow. I know that was a long story, but I did get to go out that one time initially by myself and do some things. Holy shit.

2:42:29When I first told the medevac pilot, he said, where's the rest of you in? And I said, it's me. I'm your rescue team. Yeah, but where are your rescue? I said, it's just me.

2:42:45Just do what I tell you. I'll get you out of here. We can do this. And they were just really disappointed. There's one guy came in here to get us.

2:43:00Jeez. So anyway, I could have done, you know, some other missions where I didn't have to fight out there, you know, if I'd gone in alone. Did you like the fighting? I mean, it was exciting. But I didn't have a problem with going in and not fighting if I could accomplish the mission. I thought we had missions on a fairly regular basis that came up. I just didn't need a team. We just needed somebody to sneak around out there and gather information we needed and come out. Shit. Did the killing bother you? No. And I think what happened was on the very first mission, you know, I kept saying to myself, it's okay.

2:43:55I mean, this is war. They're bad guys. they're gonna kill me if I don't kill them and it's okay to kill them it's okay to shoot at them you know I gotta remember that and I kept saying that over and over is I have to do this it's okay and when that first one jumped up and shot at me and then you know I didn't think about that anymore I just started you know, defending and shooting back.

2:44:31Did the killing ever affect you as time went on? Yeah. How so? You know, just the fact that you had to do it. And if you're over there at the wall and you're shooting at me, that doesn't bother me. I can, you know, shooting back at you doesn't bother me. if you're standing there and you're not shooting at me, to just take you out without you realizing it, like some of the trackers that I did with the.22, that I had to think more about, particularly afterwards, that I would just do that. There are also some times where I had to take people out really up close. That K-Bar that you have over there, I found I started carrying that and I found really close quarters stuff.

2:45:45That was quick and easy. It's about as close and personal as you can get. How would you do that? Into the side of the neck. If you go in straight in right there and go out, you'll get the juggler you'll get the carotid and it's over it's over in a minute I mean it's it's unreal how fast you bleed out like that and you can do that quietly and I think I mentioned to you before that those are some of the things that I I talk to special ops guys about, not talk to law enforcement about that, but with the special ops guys, if you have to do things quietly, you don't have night vision, you don't have all your electronics, there are ways to get right up next to someone if you need to do it quietly.

2:46:58How many times do you think you have to do that?

2:47:04four or five and just yeah and you know sometimes it's quiet sometimes it's not first time I did it you know I was just you know fighting for my life and I was about to lose but I needed to. How are you about to lose? Because a friend of his showed up I mean I'm on the ground with this guy and his friend showed up and saw us down there and realized that you know what was going on that I was a bad guy and had his friend. So I had to deal with his friend and then take care of him. I had to shoot him. But just there were a few times where I just got caught up in a, I'm going to take a prisoner, I'm going to get this guy and take him back in and for whatever reason wasn't able to do it.

2:48:29I changed to the K-bor, I don't know, about midways, I guess. I tried the sog knife. For me, it just felt too small. Because I wanted something that if I wanted to cut down a limb for a pole or to do something with, I wanted to have enough weight that I could hack through it or a piece of cane. But I also wanted something big and strong enough that if I pushed it hard, it was going to go, particularly when you get around the soft tissue in the neck and it goes fast. And a K-bar is a big enough blade that when it goes in, it's hard to miss one of the arteries in there. You could get in quickly.

2:49:27But I am a nice guy. But sometimes you have to do things.

2:49:37Does that stick with you? Yes. Yeah. There are some things that you just, you can't unsee, you can't undo, you can't get rid of. You can start to deal with it. But it's, so far, it's always been there. and it's not where I like to spend a lot of time.

2:50:09When we were talking to John about you, before the interview he had mentioned that your only regret was not closing your mouth when you killed people up close.

2:50:20Well, I think what happens or happened was I became so focused on what I was doing. I mean, it's life or death. It's a fraction of a second here. You've got to do something. And I was so focused on doing the termination thing

2:50:49that for some reason my mouth would be open. I don't know if I was talking about their ancestors or what, but if you're using a KBOR and you're up that close, you're going to get hit with a rush of blood. And if you've got your mouth open, you're going to get a mouth full of blood. There are at least two or three occasions where I put a five or six round burst into somebody's face right up close to them when I'm right there with them and you know their head just explode brain matter tissue bone everything's gonna hit you know you're gonna be covered with it and the blood if you got your mouth open it's going into your mouth too and I've had you know that happen on a few occasions because i didn't have my mouth closed but there are not a lot of people out there that have that experience most people probably smarter than me they didn't get themselves into that situation yeah when you're looking at taking somebody out that close and you're thinking about it i mean how the hell do you get that close to him

2:52:27and think about it exactly what you're going to do yeah well the opportunity you know presents itself it's it's not in most cases it's not that that's what i start out to do unless unless it's dark and I'm sneaking up on you because I need to take you out without making any noise, then I'm thinking mostly about how do I get from where I am to where you are without you knowing I'm coming and knowing that I'm there. And, you know, what I'm trying to do is get from here over there, and now I'm next to you you don't know I'm next to you and you're gonna feel a sting on the side of your neck you're gonna feel warm blood go out and everything is gonna fade to black and your knees are gonna start to crumple it and I'll catch you as you're going down so you don't make noise but it's over very quickly but I'm spending most of my energy and thought process about how do I get to you I've got to get over there without you knowing that I'm there if I'm gonna do something like that and be quiet and not discovered so there are things that I'm gonna do depending on the terrain I may do a distraction I may toss something over in another direction for you to hear just to redirect your attention for a second while I can get closer to you.

2:54:14Depends on how much I know about what the terrain's like. Is it raining? Has it been raining? I mean, if it's raining, I'm going to be all over you. I don't have to work hard to get close to you.

2:54:32If it's not raining and everything's really quiet, I have to be very careful because I can't see the ground and I'm going to step on something, twigs going to break or something and you're going to hear it. One thing is if I've got a pebble, if I've got something that if I do break a twig here, I can launch that little pebble off to the other side of you over there so you hear that louder than you heard this. And now you will turn that way. And that gives me a chance to get closer. Did you come up with that? You are a fucking master. Nutcase, right? That's what my friends said. How can I argue that?

2:55:18But, you know, it's just...

2:55:24This is still really going on topic, but how you walk. Typically we put our heels down first, and then the rest of the foot comes down. but what I had read about decades ago was that American Indians slipping up on their prey whether it was another Indian tribe or animal whatever is that they went toe first if I go this way and I step on a trig twig it's like there's a little amplifier there and it's throwing the sound out in that direction if i step on it and break it with my toe the sound's coming back this way so you don't hear it as much so i used to have my my little guys toe down toe first toe first Let's practice that.

2:56:25Toe first and you'll be quieter.

2:56:31I had a thing that I call invisibility. I used that hand signal. If I did that, go invisible. Be invisible right now. Be invisible. Nobody can hear you. Nobody can smell you. Nobody can know anything about where you are. Change how you walk. and we started changing how we moved through the woods. I don't know if you hunt deer or not, but if you watch a deer, he's the hardest to see when he's coming directly at you until he stops. And when he stops, what he screws up with is he starts looking right and left. And when he starts moving his head, you'll see it because the different color in the skin and there any movement like that you'll see horizontal movement is much easier to see than vertical movement so instead of the point man walking through the jungle you know moving his weapon and twisting his body back and forth so he thinks he's going to be ready to fire you know if he encounters somebody that's just giving him away don't move the weapon scan your eyes you won't see the eyes move keep your weapon here because you don't know if he's going to be over there or over here so if you do it like this now he's actually over there by the time you can get back around to him you did so teaching them how not only for the front man to do that move the whole team straight you start zigzagging you're easy to see as you're coming so I started teaching them all kinds of invisibility no soap nothing that you can smell for the last three days before we go out I don't want them to smell us when we're out they'll smell the soap because they're not used to soap and soap just stands out when you go out there In fact, they even got to the point where I started making them eat North Vietnamese type food because I told them, if we're out there and we're out there four or five days, eventually you're going to have to poop.

2:59:01When you poop, I want it to smell like NVA poop. If they find it, I want them to say, oh, that's one of us. sweat.

2:59:18My father told me when I was a little kid one time a dog, a strange dog and the dog was growling at me. And you know my father went over and petted him. And I said now I was just a little kid. I said why is he growling at me and he's not growling at you? And my father said he knows you're afraid of him. How does he know that? He just does. He knows you're afraid of him and he's intimidating you. He knows I'm not afraid of him. It took me, you know, a couple of decades to figure out what was going on. When you, all sweat is not the same. You go out and do some exercise or it's hot in here and you sweat.

3:00:08Yeah. sweat smells if you sweat because of fear fear spent sweat smells very different it's much stronger and it smells different so if you're laying in an ambush site waiting to ambush me and you know when you ambush a sog team those jokers are coming after you you're laying there sweating with fear fear sweat, I'll smell you. On more than one occasion, I've just stopped the team, stopped, you know, they're there. I can smell them laying up there in the woods. I can smell the sweat. Dogs can smell the difference between fear sweat and normal sweat. So it's easy for them to tell that you're afraid of them.

3:01:00So, they want you to relax. I want your poop to smell like NBA poop. I don't want any soap or anything like that on you that the NBA can smell. So that's all part of being invisible. Jump up and down. Nothing should make a sound on you when you jump up and down. You should have nothing on you that's bright. All the buckles and metal things on your harness need to be painted black or wrapped in black friction tape so they don't shine. You need to be camouflaged. All the stuff counts. Take pictures of them and say, look, what does this look like? That looks like Ben laying on the ground because you can see all the buckles on him.

3:01:53Or you can see he's got two yellow smokes on him. The bottom of the yellow smoke is what you call it. It's yellow.

3:02:03It's thing. You can't have that. It makes you show up. And how you walk, how you approach people, it's all part of being invisible human in the daylight and ways to do that.

3:02:23Maybe giving you more than you want to know but...

3:02:30You know, something I didn't say at the beginning is the Vietnam generation is what inspired me to go into the SEAL teams. And hearing you talk, I'm just realizing so many of our TTPs and SOPs and all that kind of stuff came from you guys. It's pretty surreal for you. And I think a lot of it did. Came, you know, from SOG guys. Because of the intensity of the missions and where we were going, if you were going to survive, there were things you had to do. And we learned things. You know, I felt stupid when I realized that some of the people who came after me in 70 started using the earplugs that we use on the range when they'd get on the helicopter.

3:03:33Because you ride on the helicopter, unprotected ears, it'll be two hours plus when you get off of that thing before you get your full hearing back. So you do a security stop and you're out there trying to listen and see if you hear anybody move. You can't hear yet. And I discovered that for me when I saw a headset hanging in the helicopter. We were on our way out. I saw a headset, and I asked the crew chief, can I use that? And he said, yeah. So I got the headset, and I put it on, and then discovered— I used to watch the door gunners. They're sitting there, and we're going out, and their heads bouncing up and down.

3:04:19and I thought, wow, it's rough riding on the outside where the door gunners are. I put that headset on, and I thought, he's listening to Credence Clearwater Revival, you know? The head's moving with the beat of the stupid, the pilots have got the radio station on. I mean, I didn't know that. And then I realized that when I got off the helicopter, I could still hear. But later on, some guys realized, just pop the earplugs in before you get on the aircraft. When you get off, pop them out, put them in your pocket, you can hear. So there are a lot of things like that that people discover. kind of irritated me that I didn't think of something that simple, that obvious.

3:05:17But there are a lot of things you can do. Did you have any personal pre-mission rituals or anything that you would do before you go out on an op? Some guys pray, some guys write a letter, some guys listen to music. some guys I used to watch this video of

3:05:41terrorists stripping gear out of the guys from Red Wings they would video it they would video stripping our KIA of their rifles, their helmet, their night vision their IDs, their magazines, everything I used to watch that before every op Did you do anything? Some of mine was mental.

3:06:12I'll just start with once I got on the aircraft while we were waiting to take off, I'd always say a prayer.

3:06:25Let me preface this with I can't carry a tune in a bucket. You know, singing, you would not, you'd think it was a dying calf in a hell storm or something if I tried to sing. But mentally, you know, I can't. You know, so I would always do Amazing Grace. And then, you know, I may mix some other little things in with it as then I transition over to the mission focus. What do I have to do? When the countdown starts, what do I have to do? What am I looking for? What's the plan? Who's going first? Which way are you going? What do I need to do with the team? I'm reviewing the plan. Then I might throw a little more amazing grace in there just before we get there.

3:07:22And then it's back to box breathing.

3:07:31so by the time i'm by the time i get out on the skid uh i've already been doing it for a while but doing the box breathing um because that will relax your arteries it has an impact on you vagus nerve that calms you down because I know that when we get there if we if we engage right away all of that stuff's coming at me and I'm standing out on the skid because I'm getting ready to jump along and I've got to think about the other things that we're going to do not those bullets coming at me but the bullets at least to me bullets can be a real distractor notice you hear those things cracking by you it can distract you from what you're supposed to do and you i had to find a way to turn loose of the bullets and see what's going on see the battle space know what i needed to change make sure i was going to tell you guys what the difference was i was going to give you the signals um and same you know on the ground once you make contact The disadvantage we had was then you couldn't hear.

3:08:48CAR-15's so loud, AK-47s are so loud, and you're so close to each other, and you're there and I'm trying to tell you go left. You can't hear what I'm saying. Not even this close with all the CAR-15s and everything, firing, grenades going off, rockets coming at you. And I'm warning, I'm having to do hand signals and stuff to get people to move. And then once you drop down out of sight, then I'm trying to remember you went there, he went there, he went over there, and telling all my people, if you get hit, and I'd make them practice, if you get hit, start yelling, hit. I need to know someone's hit.

3:09:44I need to know a general direction of where they are. If you're hit, I will come get you, but I need to know the vicinity to look for when I come over there. So start yelling, hit. I know you're alive, and I can eventually find where you are, and I will get you. But if you don't yell, I don't know where you went down. I don't know that you've even been hit. So there are things like that, just making them yell, hit, hit, hit, because they could say that close enough that I could understand it in loud. And just practicing those things. It made them more confident that if something happened to them, that I would get them.

3:10:35And they saw it. on different occasions where I snatched somebody up and I made sure we got him on the helicopter. And the word spreads. Thompson might be a nutcase, but he'll put you on the helicopter. Anyway. How many friends did you lose over there? I have a list of 34. 34.

3:11:13And I didn't lose, you know, Bargewell over there, but I put him on my list when he passed away a few years ago, seven years ago.

3:11:28You know, the reason I'm asking is there's a lot of people that struggle with lost friends in combat. And that's not how many people were killed. That was just the guys I knew. And we were either on the same team together or we knew, like Tilt. Tilt would have been on my list because I knew him well. Len Black would have been on my list. It's not a list you want to be on, obviously, but it was, there were a lot of other people who were killed. I just didn't know them. How did you compartmentalize that in the middle of it? Difficult.

3:12:15Trying to realize that I couldn't do anything about it. They were gone. I could remember them. I couldn't make sure they weren't forgotten. I couldn't bring them back. In some cases I could contact their family later.

3:12:39It's just very difficult.

3:12:46I think at times, in some cases, it probably influenced my thinking of just let me go. by myself.

3:13:04That way I don't have to worry about losing you. Makes sense. In fact, if you read the book when you get in there, you'll see that I would keep having that discussion with Meadows where I wanted to go alone you know I would use when he would just deny that I'd finally come back and say well at least I'll just be the only American on the team I'll take the little guys I'll be the only American don't put another American on the team with me you know so he would do that most of the time and I think some of that was influenced by you know I don't I don't want to lose you so there's just so many and John and I've had this conversation recently.

3:14:16It's almost like now, today, it's almost like being back in SOC. How so? Every day.

3:14:32Every day, there's a list that comes out on the phone. We have a lady, Bonnie Cooper, who has worked for the Special Ops Association in various ways, particularly their website, but she monitors SF and particularly SOD people obituaries.

3:15:02And I've told her before, Bonnie, take a break. Like, you know, try not to let so many people go away like that. I mean, it's like every few days you're seeing somebody's name, you know, because we're in that age group now. I mean, I can relate. With us, it's suicide. Yeah. And, you know, then, you know, it's, I can, I think I can understand why they do it, what they, what's going on. I mean, I've got people I talk to every day. And, you know, what I'm trying to do is prevent that. I mean, you have a PhD in psychology. Everybody's trying to get to the bottom of this. I've had so many friends that have killed themselves.

3:16:02I can't even count them all. I quit counting. You know, I think you know about the struggles with addictions and booze and opiates and everything. you know and I think it just takes one second it does you know and there's there you know there's there's some decisions that you can't take back I think about it sometimes and share sometimes you know when I was standing on the hill the scale of the helicopter holding on that that rope once I stepped off, that decision was made, and there's no change in it. I was on the rope and on my way down. You know, there was no opportunity to say, well, I don't think I want to do this.

3:16:59And that decision to pull the trigger, to do whatever it is that you're going to do, once you make it, And you can make it very fast. I mean, I talked to a guy who had decided, this is it. I'm going to hang myself. And he went into his bedroom and tied a rope up, climbed up on a stool, and was getting ready to put the noose around his neck. And his little daughter walked in. What are you doing, Dad?

3:17:44And, you know, he came back down. If she'd have been a few seconds later.

3:17:54And it's hard to tell sometimes where people are. They can change into that mode and make that decision so quickly.

3:18:07How do you honor your friends that have been killed or taken their own life? Well, for 50 years or so, I run in their memory. Well, when I was active doing Ironman, And I would, you know, today's swim is for these people, the runs for this, the bikes for that. And still do that on what I call the angelversary of their death. So on that day, you know, we do the names of all the people. and then I let that person, whoever's Angel Bursa is, I let them lead the run.

3:19:07And I post it. I put it out on social media so that people remember.

3:19:23I've been doing that, and you'll see in the back of the book, in the book, you'll see every month there's a section in there. Here are the guys, of those 34, here are the ones that died this month. You know, my friends, and even though there are a lot of other people that died, I've got them in there. at the end. Well, every day when I post, I've got the list of the 34. So I post all of them, post the pictures, and then highlight the one that died that day. And some, it would sob people. Sometimes it's three or four that died that day. Maybe the whole team got wiped out. And, you know, their parents are gone.

3:20:18Your parents would be over 100 years old, so they're not there, but they still have brothers, sisters, wives, whatever, some of them. I get a message every once in a while. But I also have a group of, you know, Afghan and, you know, that whole group of people. I've got about 35 of those. So I interact with their families. But, you know, I post them on the days that they died. I mean, as a SOG operator who's been through this a long time ago and have navigated your way through it up to this point, what advice do you have for my generation who's dealing with this? How do you move past it? Some of it is I tried to put some principles, solid principles in the book, the moving forward.

3:21:30I mean, in the book, it's related initially to combat, but it's still combat when you're not in combat. Things happen. You've got to keep moving forward. You've got to do it. And once you stop, all kind of things happen. And moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically. And like old guys like John, you know, he's an old guy. We have to kind of watch each other and take care of each other and contact. I was talking to a teammate of mine earlier this week and he was telling me he's afraid to call people now. You know, our SOB guys, he said, I'm afraid to call them. I'm afraid they won't answer.

3:22:31I'm afraid I'm going to get a family member or something and they're going to tell me he's gone. but you got to keep you got to keep checking you keep keep moving forward and keep remembering in the book it talks about you know people die people die twice the first time they dies when their Their heart sucks. The second time they die is when people stop saying their name.

3:23:10So, that's why I use the list. Go down that list and say it. Their families, and then particularly, you know, your group, their families are still alive. Their parents are still around. And, you know, I get emails from them all the time saying thank you, you know.

3:23:39So it's not easy to find some of those principles like that and just you can't bring them back. You got to keep moving forward. and sometimes you think about like Bardswell, for example.

3:24:02Remembering that all of God's angels don't sing in the choir. Some of them are warriors. I figure Bardswell worked himself up pretty high into the warrior group. So some of us are going to end up there, I think. And that's good.

3:24:32And at some point, most of us will see each other again, hopefully in the right place. I'm with you. If we haven't talked about it yet, What mission in SOG sticks out more than all the rest of them? For me, a mission I went on?

3:25:03The real contender for that would be the one where I had the woman on the radio.

3:25:14the the gunfight went on solo almost 24 hours and just one thing after another I mean in in that mission after you know it's all the lights coming the weather had socked us in couldn't get air support in. We had to use something called combat sky spots. You know, an F-4 is coming by and he's going to drop a bomb just based on the radar saying you're in the right place. So working with that, the first one he dropped was like 3 ,000 meters long. So we had to work through all of that and then you know we were in contact daylight and we're in contact and I I saw in the book I just call it the Grim Reaper coming in you know I think the devil showed up and said I'm coming for you so some discussion back and forth like that and got to the point where we were being overrun and you know why I called a CBU in right on top of our position I just said if you guys are gonna overrun us I'm gonna take as many of you with it with us as I can.

3:26:56So I had Covey find a plane that had CBU and so we're in this little circle this size. You know a canister of CBU's has like 250 you know grenades in it with explosives in it that come raining down. So out of the 250, 15 of them landed either inside this perimeter or just outside, 15 of them. And explosions everywhere, people screaming, all this kind of stuff. And I saw some of them hit and I thought it hit but I didn't hear it explode. I must be dead. I'm still seeing itself, but I must be dead. And then I realized, yeah, I'm not dead. They didn't go off. Wow.

3:28:08I honestly got some help from above. You can't have 15 deads all been in the same place at the same time. Holy shit. And not go off. You just can't do that. That's not going to happen without some divine intervention.

3:28:33So the whole image came back again and he's just shaking his head and walking off into the vegetation. It was like, I thought I would get you, but I didn't. We go, we're trying to fight our way down. We get ambushed, trying to go toward the LZ. We managed to survive that and get through it. We got down to the extraction LZ and my portman stopped us. I went up to see why he stopped us and he looked at me and he said, bomb. I said, what? Bomb. And I looked out at the LZ over on the left side of it, sticking up out of the mud, it's a 500-pound bomb, unexploded. That's the one that we didn't hear explode last night when we were trying to adjust them.

3:29:39it went into our landing zone. Now there's a 500-pound bomb sitting there. That's the only place we can get out. The NVA don't know it's there, and we're going to be in a firefight with them, and if somebody hits it, it's going to take all of us out and whatever aircraft we're coming in to get us. So we've got a real problem here to deal with that. So I got, you know, a whole cubby and had him put the word out, Don't put any ordinance on that side of the LZ when you're trying to help us. And so finally we're bringing the aircraft in. I'm out. I'm having to stand up with the VS-17 panel, bringing the aircraft in, trying to get them to where I wanted.

3:30:28I got down to the last aircraft, and I'm trying to throw the last people up there. And that's where I hear the loud drop. Everything went silent. Then there's, you know, booming voice that says drop. I just dropped to my knees. And when I did, a stream of machine gun bullets, RPG bullets, came across and cut a hole that big side of the helicopter. You know, where I was. Another premonition. So I said, yep, I'm getting a lot of help to try to get me out of this. And so finally, got the last, through the last guy up on the helicopter and off we went. I thought, man, that was a long mission. Is a team leader, when you're calling air power in on yourself to take you and as many of them as you possibly can, Is that a team decision or is that a personal decision?

3:31:36In my case, you know, I told Bruce, who was acting as my assistant, I told him and the other American, this is what I'm doing, because, I mean, they're coming across us. I mean, we've got a few seconds to make a decision. Get down. Get all the team members down because it's coming. And I told Cubby, you have them make one pass. and put the CBU on top of us. If I don't come right back up on the radio, then have him make the second pass. But listen for me, because if I come back up saying, I'm still here, don't let him put another one on us. We didn't have to use the second one. Did you support Hamburger Hill?

3:32:34No. No. Oh, I'm thinking support in another way. Yes. There was an NVA division that was being moved around that they were going to bring up there and just crush the 101st. I was assigned a mission to go find them and stop them. so I figure with six people how hard can it be to find 10 ,000 people in a group so surely I can find them but they didn't cooperate well that's when they shot the helicopter down I was in and broke my back, some ribs. And one of my guys got in my helicopter shot through the thigh. I got them and finally got them into a bomb crater and spent most of the day there fighting and putting in airstrikes.

3:33:45and eventually got out and they said, you've got to go back tomorrow morning. We don't have the division, what's left of the division, which we figure was down to about 7 ,000. We don't have them pinpointed enough for the B-52 strike. We need you to go back in and get some more data.

3:34:11they put pistol belts around me with a piece of wood behind it, a little pad. I didn't carry my rucksack because I couldn't lift any weight like that and went back out there. but I got the coordinates gave it to the B-52s that even then they came in and wiped the rest of them out and they dropped 660 500 pound bombs in that little rectangle I gave them

3:34:53Oh, and we mentioned my grandson-in-law at lunch. His father's—no, his mother's father flew B-52s in Vietnam. interesting guy to talk to. And at one point, we thought we had pinpointed the date that he might have actually flown that mission that came in and took these guys out, but he was flying a different mission. But that would have been cool. Wow.

3:35:41What was the final op?

3:35:47The final one, it came right after, shortly after that one we were talking about.

3:36:05There was a little one. We went and knocked out an underwater bridge.

3:36:13you couldn't figure out how they kept getting the trucks on down the trail they were going off the trail under the canopy and they had built a bridge that was just below the water so you you couldn't see it and they were driving across it and coming back on the road you know and they still work on this bridge as you can see but we keep bombing that but somehow they were still getting across, so we went out. I took that out, dropped the bridge on a different mission right in there.

3:36:53The one where we were going to drop the big bridge, I had to crawl on my hands and knees across an open field to get to where I could really see the supports and things on the bridge. There was a bush out in the center of the field. about that high. So if I peeked my head up a little bit in the grass, I could see the bush, so I used that to navigate, crawled under it, went about 10 meters, and then caught on fire. That bush was covered with big fire ants, and they got all of them. I had to strip out there in the middle of the field, thinking, how many NVA are on that bridge or going to go across that bridge when I'm laying out here almost naked?

3:37:43And my team, they don't know what's going on. They're back there in the edge of the wood line thinking, what is he doing? He's taking his clothes off out there in the middle of the field. I mean, I almost died from that. Okay. I mean, because we didn't carry antihistamine with us. I was so loaded with all their venom.

3:38:07There were two or three short ones like that toward the end, and then the commander plucked me out. They plucked you out? Pulled me off the team and said, I'm going to move you into operations here for a while.

3:38:28Did you want to do that? No. And I didn't want to work for him either. So, because my plan was to extend for six months. But after working for him for a while, I decided, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'll go ahead, rotate back to the States,

3:38:52give him six months or so to go away, and then I'll come back and have a new commander, polish my skills up for six or eight months, and then come back and be better. But then I didn't get a chance to come back either. Did you get addicted to the adrenaline, the killing, the combat? Yes. How did you feel that? I mean, that's a real issue because that happens to special ops guys. You get so addicted to the adrenaline. finding something else that'll give you the adrenaline rush that's not maybe not quite as dangerous um in my case one of the things was um you know freefall halo particularly if you can burn it on down a little closer than what you're supposed to do and I was in a situation where you know I put the Halo team together I was the leader of the Halo team and you know I could do just about anything I wanted to so I could look at the terrain and see this little tiny opening on a ridgeline there in the mountains and say, hmm, I wonder if I could hit that at 2 o 'clock in the morning and land right in that little opening, put ranger students out there on their back holding the flashlight slide up with a red filter on it in the shape of a T or whatever letter I wanted and see if I can get in there.

3:40:46So I was doing a lot of different things like that that would give you a rush. And I was also very fortunate that when I came back from SOG, I went to the Rangers and everybody had to have a combat experience to be there as one of the instructors. So, you know, I had 40 guys in the area that were all talking with each other and helping each other. Everybody kind of understood about combat. They didn't know I'd been with SOG, but still people were shooting at them too. So we had a support group there, and we were doing things that could give you an adrenaline rush. So that helped. Well, let's take a quick break.

3:41:46When we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home. Okay.

3:42:05All right, Dick, we're back from the break. And, you know, I'd like to document what it was like for you, not in the military, but what was it like for you coming home from Vietnam, seeing how Americans were acting towards veterans, and I want to cover this. I was not happy. You know, it started as I was coming through the airport and seeing that, you know, people in general were not reacting favorably toward, you know, the soldiers coming home.

3:42:50I think in my case, just coming through the airport, you know, I had my beret on. So that was kind of like a force factor that was just people were getting out of the way. They just let me through. They didn't want to get close to me. and the ones that yell something were always, you know, at a distance. But it was there. And like I mentioned earlier, I think I had friends that had been friends at one point but kind of went away because of the war and some of them never came back in terms of coming back and being a friend. I mean, they just, once they separated from me, they just stayed that way, you know, because I stayed in the military.

3:43:54So I was disappointed with that. I think staying in the military helped me. It did. because I was around obviously people who believed in being in the military. Military went through a lot of changes, you know, going forward. Because once you stopped the draft, then getting people in, it really changed the people who were coming in.

3:44:25But the general attitude, I mean, still out there. When I got out of the military and started the consulting company, I didn't tell people I'd been in the military. Clients. I never mentioned the military. Really? What the hell did they think you were doing for the last 20 years? Being a consultant, going to school, doing whatever. but you know it the military just had a bad name and if I mentioned I'd been in the military it's interesting one of the client that I had for years and started out with they flew me out to meet with the executive team so before they hired me. So I'm talking to them and the CEO looked up at me and he said, what are you going to tell me about how to be a CEO and run this?

3:45:38What do you know? And he knew that I had been in the Army because he had hired somebody that knew me that had been in the Army. And he said, all you know how to do is tell people what to do, to yell at them, and, you know, I don't know how you're going to help me out at all. And I said, well, you have people in the organization, and when you have people in the organization, there are certain difficulties and problems that will come up just because you have people doesn't matter who the people are or what they are and I know how to help with those types of problems and it's not yelling at people it's not doing anything like that not being a dictator that's not my philosophy I don't believe that that's the way to be a leader and I'm going to be working with you to see what's going on and help you find solutions that will work with your people.

3:46:54So we talked like that a little bit and he met with his team for about 20 minutes and called me back in and said, okay, let's get started. And I worked for him for years until somebody else bought the company. but I just didn't tell people but once 9-11 happened yeah tell people you're in the military that's a good thing oh yeah appreciate your service I mean you didn't get that all the way until after 9-11 I'm sorry you didn't experience that until I mean there there were people who I knew or had known or grown up around older people who would say, you know, thank you for your service and things like that.

3:47:52But people who hadn't known me before find out I was in the military. It wasn't necessarily, you know, congratulations or thank you or anything for a long time it's just we had a we had a bad reputation because you know because of Vietnam but then you know because of going to the all-volunteer army you know that was a disaster do you want to go to jail or you want to join the army. I'll join the army. You know, I can put you in jail with drugs use or you can join the army. I'll go in the army. And, you know, it was just different. But 9-11, all of a sudden, maybe we were okay. It became a punishment instead of an act of service.

3:48:50Yeah. And everybody wasn't like that, but a lot of the people I ran into were. And you may have already asked John about that, but I would just see what most vets say, the Vietnam vets say. When did it change? And there are Vietnam vets out there right now that are still angry, very angry. And if you try to tell them, you know, thank you for your service, I mean, it'll bite your head off because they're so angry about, you know, why didn't you tell me that 50 years ago?

3:49:38But, you know, it's worked out, you know, for me, I think. I've been very fortunate, so. Do you carry any animosity from that? I hate that it happened. I think we screwed up Vietnam royally. I think there are a lot of things we could have done to make it better. I don't think we, as soldiers, I don't think we went over and did the kinds of things that most people thought we were doing. I don't think we were running around killing women and babies and doing things like that. I'm sure some got killed. It's war. And shrapnel and bombs and bullets, they don't care. If somebody gets in the way of it, it's going to hit them.

3:50:33And it's hard to have a war and not have someone killed or wounded. That's innocent. Yeah. What prompted you to get your PhD in psychology? Psychology came about because as I watched what was happening on the battlefield and trying to understand, like, with my indigenous team leaders. They'd been going out on SOG missions, you know, for two years or so. And now they're going out with me for a year. And when I leave, they're going to go out with the next team leader for a year. Why would they do that? I mean, some of these guys were 50 % scar tissue. you why would they keep going out and getting shot up or killed uh on a regular we paid them but it wasn't enough money uh to make it you know worth getting killed for or or mangled like a lot of them did um and then why would the americans go out the operators why would they go out and do this why not go to a regular unit or why not come to SOG and and go to a staff job and not go across the fence the addiction and it was dangerous to do that yeah once once you got out there and survived it a time or two yeah you could start to get addicted to it and you know there are cases that I talk about in the book where I could see they were addicted to it how What could you tell?

3:52:19Well, my roommates. We were, for the most part, put in rooms with two people to a room in the recon company. And my roommate came back from a mission, and he told me that, wow, they thought they were going to get me this time. They thought they were going to get me this time. those guys and you know so they they're not as good as they think they are I said Dennis they are good you know and if they almost got you you you need to be careful you need to think about it and then he came came back to me a couple missions well before he came back a couple missions later i woke up you know in the middle of the night because i just i could feel somebody looking at me and i woke up and dennis is standing right there lights out looking down at me my car 15 hanging on the wall right next to me i grabbed that, you know, and I was ready to shoot him, and I realized it was him.

3:53:48Dennis, what are you doing? Said nothing. I was just thinking. And he wouldn't talk about it. He got back to bed, went to bed, and then he wanted to talk because he was getting ready to go on another mission. And he said, I don't have a good feeling about this one. I said I thought you felt like you were doing pretty well he said there's something about this one I don't know what it is I can't shake it I just feel like I'm not coming back from this one and we chatted about that feeling and I told him just my thought talking to you it's not over till it's over and I don't know where that's coming from I'm just telling you if I were you first of all I wouldn't go on the mission I would go turn it down I know you're not going to do that but that's what you should do but if you go just keep in mind it's not over until it's over you know, be very careful, you know, very careful, not realizing that his assistant team leader was talking, you know, to my buddy the same thing.

3:55:25He said, you know, I think the captain is really good. He's a really good operator and team leader. But I'm scared. There's something about this mission, I'm scared." So we were having these two separate conversations and Bruce didn't know that I was talking to Dennis. I didn't know he was talking to the other guy. and they went out and got to, they came back to finish the mission, supposedly got back to the extraction LZ undetected. They were waiting on the helicopter to come get them and all of a sudden, you know, you heard that call on the radio, Prairie Fire Emergency, Prairie Fire Emergency.

3:56:22You know, we're overrun, and then it goes off. Cubby can't make contact with them. You just radio silence on their part. So we realized we're going to have to send a bright light team out there. And this was one where I was already at the launch site, so they changed my mission to bright light to go out there. But about 30 minutes after the message that we heard that was where they were overrun, then on the emergency radio, on the guard frequency, there was a voice that came on and saying, God, help me, please, somebody help me. An American voice on the guard frequency. The Covey that was out there didn't know these two guys personally, so he couldn't tell if that was one of their voices or somebody else.

3:57:27He couldn't tell which one of them it might have been on the radio.

3:57:35But he sent a team out. They recovered two survivors of the indigenous. They got them back in, and I was on standby to go back out there to try to find Dennis and the one-on-one. And listening to these two guys tell what happened and what they did after it happened, Bruce was there with me, and we were talking. Something's not right. something just doesn't sound right the way they're telling it.

3:58:20So when we did go in, it didn't take long until I told Bruce. I mean, we were in contact, continuous contact. We had to fight our way in, continuous contact. The whole time we were there, didn't get back out until the next day, continuous contact and I told Bruce I said nothing where we are looks like what they described I mean this just this is just not the place where it happened I think they were wounded they were scared and how far they ran which way they ran was just not correct not that they were intentionally you know doing it but I think they were so stressed out they just they didn't know where they had started from and how far they went I said I think we're you know 2 ,000 meters probably away from where it actually happened but we were in such heavy contact we were in the middle of a bunker complex we couldn't really stop and do anything about it you know then never found them fuck

3:59:40They were eventually declared, presumed dead, so their families could get some closure. Have you ever gone back to Vietnam? No.

3:59:59I've been invited a few times by people.

4:00:06I probably—and Bardswell went back. I probably should have went when he went.

4:00:16He actually went back and he found the interpreter that we had on the team that we were on together, actually tracked him down and found him.

4:00:31Terrible story. I mean, the guy's just living in poverty. His family's in poverty. You know, the NVA put him in, you know, re-education camp. All those guys, they killed him, put him in re-education camps for years, took everything they had. You know, like a lot of the stuff in Afghanistan. Sounds almost identical. If you're supporting the Americans and the Americans pull out and leave you, you know, it's not going to be a good thing for you. I mean, yeah. Afghanistan was just a repeat of what we've already done. We did the same thing, you know, in Vietnam.

4:01:23What did you learn in your studies for psychology when it comes to war? well I think it helped me to have a framework for looking at how people respond in combat how they can get addicted to different things get addicted to the adrenaline rush those kinds of things it helped me to understand I think, you know, the impact of fatigue, sleep loss, getting wounded, stress, the different changes. It just, it's interesting. We take soldiers and we train them and we train them and we train them on the range. Here's what the sight picture's got to look like. Here's how you do all this stuff. Front sight focus on and on and on.

4:02:29And then we put you out there and have those targets start shooting back at you. Stress level skyrockets. And now you discover you can't see the sights. Your vision changes. You don't have up-close vision anymore. Everything is blurry. Within the range of your weapon sights, everything's blurry. You can't get that sight picture when your stress skyrockets. so now you're trying to hit something and don't realize that you can't focus you know like you've been trained so there are a lot of things like that that I had to framework to go back and look at think about and then you know go test out see what works and what doesn't and so that's one side of it the other side That is, how do you help people start moving forward again?

4:03:28What is it that you can do for them? And everybody's a little different. And you have to understand that. They're starting at different places. They're a little different. Your approach needs to be different. And I found that, you know, when I'm talking to vets who are struggling, particularly if it's combat related that one thing that they seem to be looking for is I want someone that I can talk to who understands what I'm saying. I don't care how much book knowledge you have. I don't care how many books you've read or stories you've heard. You just don't know what it's like. and you can't understand me, and I tell you, and you say, yeah, that's the way war is, I'm awful.

4:04:30I said, you're not hearing me.

4:04:34And John and I were having a discussion a number of years back, and I said, you know, one of the things that's different about you and I and the rest of most of the other world out there is when you and I read one of these SOG books and we're reading about the gunfights that's going on, it's not nice and quiet like it is here. And we're just reading the words and hearing it, you know, seeing what's going on. We hear it. You know, we see that L4 coming. it's silent it's not making a sound until it passes us and once it goes past us and that sonic boom hits us and that bomb comes in or the napalm comes in and the heat and and the smell and everything is i mean it's so loud right now we we can't read that book and not hear it you know other people can read it now they don't hear that stuff they don't smell the napalm you know people who have been there do and when they're talking to somebody who hasn't been there they realize it and I always I did a podcast with Mike Glover and a few minutes into it you know I realized he knows what I'm saying He's been there, he's done it, and we're communicating.

4:06:23We're on the same wavelength here as we talk about what's going on. It's like you and I. You've done it, you've seen it, and we can talk about it, and we're connecting while we're doing it. But if you're some doctor in a VA hospital somewhere or therapist and you haven't experienced it, it's hard to connect because the vet realizes it right away. It doesn't take him or her but a few minutes to realize you got some book knowledge, but you don't know what I'm talking about. You can't really empathize with me. You can sympathize, but you can't empathize.

4:07:12Anyway. Did you feel a lot of resentment towards regular everyday Americans that had not served who were calling you baby killer, woman killer, whatever? I didn't. I don't. I resent that they haven't served. I'm okay with that. I mean, serving, I don't think it's necessarily good for everyone. I don't resent that. If they haven't served and they want to call me a baby killer, then I'm not happy with that. If he wasn't there, don't tell me what I did. I think a lot of vets in different generations feel that type of resentment. What advice do you have for them? There are different generations, except that we're not going to send everybody.

4:08:28Everyone is not going off to serve. That's not the way we're set up. And even if we were, I think because of the different generations that we have and the outlook and philosophy of the different generations, it would be difficult. You know, when we were doing the all-volunteer army and we were just dragging people in right and left and putting them in the army whether they wanted to be there or not, it created so many problems. You know, to go in the service and do what needs to be done, and I'm not talking about war, just to serve, to be a good soldier or seal or whatever, it takes the right attitude.

4:09:21You've got to want to do it. You have to believe in it, at least to some degree. and I think it's good that we have a program where you can get out you know you go sign up I mean you don't have to stay 20 years you can get out before then and I think that's good um a lot of people I I had a basic training company one time and and I had a guy that just, at first he said he really wanted to be in the Army. And then he got, he just kept getting into trouble. And he'd go talk to the chaplains. And the chaplains would call me up and say, you know, George, not his name, but George, George is a good soldier.

4:10:21You got to give him a chance. I mean, he's a good soldier. And we had several conversations about George, and I was just misunderstanding him. He was a good guy. And then I got a call from the chaplain saying, is George there? You know where George is? I said, I'm sure he's here in the company area somewhere. Why? That lowlife stole my boombox while he was up here talking to me yesterday. and he, oh man, he flipped an arm. So anyway, went to the barracks, and sure enough, there was a chaplain boom box and took it back to him. And then finally, I decided to go ahead and process the paperwork to let him go, get him out of the Army.

4:11:10So the day of the company graduating, he was still in, but he wasn't going to be able to graduate. And he came to me and he said, I know you're going to have a graduation ceremony this morning. I'm not going to be there. But I stayed up most of the night last night. And I wrote a poem. And, you know, I'd be honored if you would read this poem at graduation today. He said, let me see it. and I said this is the poem you wrote last night yes sir okay so it's the title is I am the emphasis infantry I said yes sir he's standing here I'm looking on the wall right behind him and I'm not reading what he wrote I'm just reading off the the picture that's hanging on the wall back there with this form on it.

4:12:15I am the infantry. Yes, sir, I wrote that. I'm the queen of battle. Follow me. Word for word, off of that, he copied on this piece of paper and he gave it to me. He told me he wrote it and he wanted me to read it. Some people don't need to be in the service. Even if they want to, some of them don't need to be.

4:12:44I don't know. I've looked at Korean Army, mandatory two years. When you hit a certain age, you've got to go into the Army for two years. When I was in Korea I had 32 Katoosas, 32 Koreans who for whatever reason they were able to get to serve their two-year obligation in the US Army. As long as they they did well they could do their two years with the U.S. Army and then move on because the ROC Army is hard and they're hard on the young guys. So I had 32 of them and all I had to do was mention, I think you're going to have to go back over to the ROC Army. What do you want me to do? I'd do anything.

4:13:49In fact, I actually sent one back. back. They came guiding, yelling, screaming, drug him into the Jeep, and he was yelling out the back, I'll do anything, I'll do anything, just don't send me back. So they do it two years, the North Korean Army I think is seven years. So it might be that we have some kind of service program, whether it be military or something else that people do. I don't know. Everybody's just not cut out for it, I think. How did you meet your wife?

4:14:30I was stationed at Dahlonega, Georgia, in the ranger camp up there, now called the 5th Ranger Battalion, as an instructor. and a friend of mine had set up a date with her, my wife's roommate, but she told my friend that she wouldn't date him unless it was a double date. So he needed to get someone to go out with her. So it would have been a blind date. And so he got one of our other friends that said he would go, but something came up, and the last minute he wasn't going to be able to go. So my friend came to me and said, would you fill in for him? I really want to take this girl out, and she won't go unless I have somebody for her roommate.

4:15:33So I volunteered to go, and we got it approved that it was going to be a different person. It was going to be me showing up. But when I got out of the car to go in with my friends to pick them up, somebody on her hall looked at the window, saw me coming across to the parking lot, and I was on crutches. I had a really bad landing and I screwed my knee up, parachute jump. and somebody on the hall yelled that he's got a wooden leg and word spread fast that I had a wooden leg and she wasn't going to go but convinced her that I didn't have a wooden leg. I had a real leg.

4:16:35We went out and we had a really good time except for she did have to sit on parachutes that we had in the back of my friend's car that you know the trunk was full we had a bunch of other parachutes there you know if you got a bunch of parachutes and and you got a helicopter that you can use for you know short period of time you don't want to have to stop and repack you have several parachutes you go jump you hit the ground you put on a new one you go jump but anyway um so we kind of we kind of hit it off from there. Once I didn't go back to Vietnam, then we decided to get married and 51 years we're still here.

4:17:20Congratulations. What's the secret to a successful marriage? She's always right.

4:17:30and I would I would do well to remember that whether I think so at the time or not that she's going to end up being right I mean because she really is right so I need to I need to listen more and

4:17:52and you know she went to graduated from college at the North Georgia Military College. So she understood about the military and the ranger camp was right there. She knew about rangers. And just one quick thing, her family, for the most part, there was one section of road and land around it that her grandparents, I guess, had owned at one time. and started giving it to the kids. So most of the family lived in that one spot. And I told her when I went over there to pick her up, I said, one hand grenade, take out most of your family. They're all right here together. But anyway, they would have this big Christmas party.

4:18:41You know, family would all come in and get together every, you know, a few days before Christmas. So this year I got invited. We're not married yet, but I got invited to it. And the house is full. But like that time, most of the men are gathered in one room. And so I went in to kind of meet them. and one of her uncles said,

4:19:19Grenet says you're a ranger. No, but four. He asked me a question about invasive species. He said, you know, the pine needles are just killing the pine trees out here. What do you think about that? I said, that's not good, having an invasive species like that. And a little bit later, He asked me another question about trees. And I said, when did you keep asking me questions about trees? He said, well, you know, Grenay said you were a ranger.

4:19:59I said, I am a ranger.

4:20:06I'm an army ranger. you could have heard a pin drop in that whole room you're in the army you're an army ranger they did not have a good reputation in that area but and it was like holy cow she's dating an army ranger and then then somebody in there just I didn't get to see exactly which one it was I said, how many people you kill? And it was just silence. But then they decided, you know, they would let me in the family. But, you know, I said, why am I getting all those questions about trees? I don't know.

4:20:57Oh, man. What are you doing to keep busy today? Today, I'm really enjoying spending time with you. This has been great from start to finish. Very impressed with what you've done, what you're doing, with your new facility that you've got set up, having the opportunity to come up and spend some time to get to know you better. I mean this has been awesome Well Dick it's been a real a real honor to interview you and I would love to get you and John out there here pretty soon and we'll have a range day break that new sig in tell some stories have a fire I'm all for it me too but man I'll tell you

4:21:58I couldn't think of a better person to close the studio down with than having you here. And it just means the world to me. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this and be the last person. But even if I wasn't the last person, just to get to come in and spend the day with you and chat about all these different things and meet you. and be able to put you on a friend list and say, I know this guy. So I really appreciate that. And there was some discussion this morning when we ate breakfast. So John, I tell you, I got your back. I'm here. You need me.

4:22:48You call me. And I appreciate it. Appreciate everything you've done. Well, I'd say that same to you. Thank you so much. Seriously. Thank you. It's been an honor. Good night. God bless. Good night. Good night. From Geico Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts. Tonight, you just left for work and had a non-specific feeling that something was happening to your place and it wasn't good. Dan? Exactly, Tammy. It could be smoke damage, theft, or just too much caffeine, but you can't stop thinking about it. But with renter's insurance through GEICO, your stuff is covered, so you don't have to worry.

4:23:34And that's great, because the weekend is coming up and it's chock full of social obligations that are ready to fill that void. Oh boy, will they, Dan? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO.