#276 Nick Brokhausen - The Deadliest Stories From Vietnam with MACV-SOG

14:17Nick Brokhausen:But I think it just gets rid of the competition. And when I mean competition, I don't mean, you know, green berated seal. I mean competition as in the salesmanship that goes into who's going to get what specific operation. I would think that that all goes away because it will be put on some type of cycle.

14:39Shawn Ryan:It won't all go away, but it'll make it a lot cleaner, a lot more transparent.

14:43Nick Brokhausen:Yeah. And then the other thing is, you know, after World War II, we had all these bases all over the world, you know, Germany, everywhere. Right. And those become the commands themselves, you know, UCOM, CENTCOM, AFRICOM, PACOM. and so you know those those whoever's in charge of UCOM for example has two SEAL platoons and two SF units and you know what I mean they have that allocated to UCOM and those leaders never want to they never want to give up an asset no matter what's going on in the rest of the world so that creates a shortage because you have to send a fucking task unit of SEALs to Germany when there's two wars going on in the Middle East.

15:29Nick Brokhausen:And if you had something like that, then it rips everything. It rips all the assets from these people that are fucking hoarding it for no reason. And they all get allocated into the actual war zone, the conflict that is happening right now.

15:45Shawn Ryan:A good example of that waste of talent and energy was I was in Detachment A in Berlin for six years. And Dead A reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the commanding general of UCOM didn't like that. He didn't like the fact that we were opcom to the Chiefs of Staff and not under his TONE. And eventually he got his way and got a hatchet man in there and basically made the excuse that the cover that we were using was too transparent and they should reorganize it. They made it into an MP outfit and gave them the added tent. Dead A had a counterterrorism mission and their primary mission, which was a stay-behind mission, in case the Russians got drunk and decided to invade.

16:44Shawn Ryan:And they would invade and we'd disappear into the population and started blowing up their rail yards and telecommunications and that. And then we picked up the counterterrorism mission because nobody else was ready. Blue Light was in the process of forming, and Charlie and Delta were in their infancy. So we were the designee if something happened in Europe or the Middle East for about, I think, four years before they got totally spun up. But he kept that mission and kept the primary mission and then added a mission after he got control over it of doing security for all the diplomats overseas. Checking their houses, checking the embassies, checking their toilet, whatever.

17:34Shawn Ryan:And the guys did a—that unit did a superlative job, but it was unnecessary. Yeah, it was a misallocation of— made a separate unit to do that, you know, because the DIP security guys were the State Department, mostly SF anyway. And, you know, they've got that job. Yeah. Redundancy, yeah.

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19:17Nick Brokhausen:I genuinely feel better having it as part of my day. Ready to reclaim your extraordinary? Well, now you can because we've worked out a special offer for my audience. Receive 30 % off your first subscription order. Go to armora.com slash SRS or enter SRS to get 30 % off your first subscription order. That's A-R-M-R-A dot com slash SRS. Let's get into your story real quick. Well, not real quick. It's going to be a long interview, but everybody starts off with an introduction. Nick Brockhausen, a Green Beret with a 17-year career in the U.S. Special Forces, including multiple combat tours in Vietnam.

20:04Nick Brokhausen:A veteran of the highly classified MACV SOG, running covert recon missions deep into enemy territory in Laos and Vietnam as part of Recon Team Habu in Command and Control North. The author of We Few, U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam, and its sequel, Whispers in the Tall Grass. You've since had adventures around the world and now run a tech company and an armory. And this is a quote that I love. I'm cured for life of ever dating redheaded women or even making eye contact with them. I never make eye contact. It isn't that I'm bonkers over them. They find me as some sort of training aid. I just don't have the deranged state in body fluids for that exercise anymore.

20:55Shawn Ryan:I don't really. I run from them.

20:59Nick Brokhausen:Oh, shit. I love that. well nick before we get started i got a couple of things here so everybody that comes on the show gets a bag of these those are vigilance league gummy bears oh good for the trip back that's right that's right thank you you're welcome made here in the usa and i got have you ever heard of uscca no well uscca is a soft spot in their heart for for vietnam vets just like i do and so they wanted me to give this to you oh thank you this is so basically that is an insurance policy for life and if you ever have to defend yourself your family your friends whatever happens these These guys will provide you the legal advice, the legal funding.

21:55Well, I'm old school.

21:57Shawn Ryan:And help you. I really don't need the insurance policy if you don't leave any witnesses. Well, if you do leave a witness, USCCA will be there to help you.

22:08Nick Brokhausen:Thank you. As long as it's legitimate self-defense.

22:14Shawn Ryan:Legitimate self-defense. Isn't that an oxymoron? I don't know. I don't know. Well, thank you. You're welcome. Thank them. You're welcome.

22:22Nick Brokhausen:All right, Nick. So I want to do a life story on you starting at childhood. So where did you grow up?

22:32Shawn Ryan:My life started in 1969 when I was accepted into Special Forces Selection Corps. Roger that. Is that where you want to start? Well, I grew up poor, relatively poor. My parents were, my dad was a former Army Air Corps, my stepdad. And my mom was a waitress, a cook. It's like from Clockwork Orange, what are you? Well, my father was Russian, my mother was a waitress. But they raised four kids on a waitress salary and a bartender. We actually lived in North Dakota and my dad had a farm. We had 640 acres or something like that. We raised cattle, hogs, chickens, and grain. you know we we sold all of the above and uh two years of drought and uh another two years of floods put us out of the farming business so my dad was able to keep the farm and he took the money from the sale of the machinery and everything and we moved to minnesota to a little town called glenwood and he opened a bar, hotel, and restaurant all in one building.

24:06And that's where I spent my formative

24:12Shawn Ryan:from the time I was pre-teen until I was old enough to be drafted or whatever. And it was a great life. I mean, I hunted, I fished, I skipped school to go squirrel hunting, You know, hid the guns in a hollow tree outside where they had, what do they call it, shop class. And we'd skitter out over the roof of the building and go squirrel hunting all afternoon. So I was very adept in the woods. You know, my brother and I had ran a trap line for a number of years to make money to buy school clothes. No kidding. Yeah. The Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney's. You know, you'd order your school clothes and that.

24:58Shawn Ryan:And your school clothes, the year before, became your work and play clothes. What would you sell the fish? Huh? The trout line. Oh, the trap line. Yeah. Outside of Glenwood. It was all woods. Woods and farmland. We'd trap mink. There was a big swamp area that, uh, a number of them. and that muskrat, mink, martins, fisher cats, all of which brought good money, and porcupines. No kidding. Yeah. Now, I got caught. My brother and I, we killed these four porcupines, and there was a bounty for porcupines that you had to take the nose, right? and then you pickle it and you take it down to the game warden and he'd send it in, you know, and you get, I think it was like 25 bucks for a porcupine.

25:57Shawn Ryan:So we're skinning the porcupines and that, and I skinned the pads off their paws and dropped it in the pickling. It's a nose. So instead of one nose, we now have five noses per porcupine. So we didn't dump kids, you know, we turned them all in. And that game warden was a drinking buddy of my father. He called my father up and he goes, well, either your two boys have cleaned out every porcupine between here and the Canadian border, or they're up to something. So he sent it in to the University of Minnesota. Of course, he comes back, these are paws and these are noses and that. And they took us down and scared the shit out of us by locking us in a jail cell.

26:43Shawn Ryan:I think I was like 12 or 13 at the time. Yeah, a lot of fun. I learned how to exist in the woods. Learned how to track. Learned animals, learned their habits. Had a lot of fun with my brother and my little brother, who was built like a crash dummy, because that's the only way he survived childhood. And then eventually, I went into the military and eventually evolved into, I learned the ground rules for the military and then applied for special forces and was accepted in 1968 or 69. And I went to jump school, went to SF selection course, came out of the selection course and went to Vietnam for my second tour.

27:44Shawn Ryan:What was your first tour? The Marines. The Marines? You were a Marine. Did I mumble that? Why are you mumbling? I didn't. I didn't. I have a lot of respect for the Marine Corps. Me too. Taught me my craft, taught me that I actually could work under pressure.

28:04Shawn Ryan:When I first transferred services, You know, you got to go through the basic training, AIT, and then you're in a casual status for a certain amount of time. Before I went to Special Forces Selection Course, I went to Korea, and I was with the 2nd Division up there on the DMZ.

28:28Shawn Ryan:During the Pueblo incident. I'm not familiar with that. There was a spy ship that the North Koreans captured. And at the same time, they sent a 40-man commando outfit down to Seoul to try and assassinate the president of South Korea. And the 2nd Division was in the sector. Everybody in the country was hunting for these guys. They got recognized at the front gate of the Blue Palace because the guard recognized their accent wasn't from the south. And a run-and-gun battle started there. and they uh i was um my company was assigned as a backup unit to the koreans the white horse division that eventually went to vietnam from the koreans and they tracked down the last 15 survivors and we were part of the sweep that drove them up on top this mountain and they committed suicide at the last minute.

29:29Shawn Ryan:Shit. And then I got transferred from there and then back to Fort Benning to go through jump school and then eventually into Special Forces.

29:36Nick Brokhausen:Why did you join the Marine Corps first? I got drafted. You got drafted? Yeah. How did the... Okay. What was that like? It's like the Marines. To get drafted. I mean, how did the letter come? I was going to a list. You know,

29:54Shawn Ryan:just time and events caught up with me before I could enlist. In those days, you couldn't step out of the line and move over and enlist and take a three-year in the Army. Once you were designated, you went, you know? And it was interesting.

30:13Nick Brokhausen:What was your first tour like? What? What was your first tour in Vietnam like?

30:23Shawn Ryan:A line company. You never knew where you were going, just know that you were going to get in a fight. And eventually, you know, you'd get mauled or you'd maul them and then come back to it. The same thing was in Korea with the 2nd Division. We were up on the DMZ, and that's all we did, was we either were in the towers or we were over in the DMZ doing hunter-killer patrols. Same exact thing, just more intense in Vietnam than it was in Korea. No shit. Yeah.

30:55Nick Brokhausen:How was South, how was Korea? What? How was Korea?

30:59Shawn Ryan:Cold. Cold? Cold, wet, nasty. Everything smelled like human shit. Well, the demilitarized zone, there was nobody over there. They basically cleared all the Koreans out of there in the southern part of the DMZ. Once you crossed the Imgium River, you were in the demilitarized zone. And that extended up to the actual border. And then, well, you had the line of towers and wire, which they were just putting in during that time. They didn't have them. Originally, there was just foxholes. You went out and you set up machine gun positions and in the foxholes, like a line outfit does. And then, gradually, they started replacing that with a fence system.

31:46Shawn Ryan:and 25-foot wooden towers with machine guns in them. And then they had gates, and there was a minefield this side and a death strip that was raked and cleaned so you could see tracks. And then on the north side of the border, there were some minefields, but there was a lot of old minefields left over from the war. So you had to really be, a lot of them were marked and a lot of them weren't. You had to be really careful where you were moving about. I liked the hunter-killer patrols better than I liked the static, just sitting there all night, getting eaten by mosquitoes in the summertime and freezing their balls off in the winter.

32:34Shawn Ryan:A lot of interesting things. That's where I first discovered kimchi. Kimchi. Kimchi. You know what kimchi is? No. Pickled cabbages. Oh, I do know what that is. Wow. There was, they make kimchi. I make my own now. Nice. And you store it in porcelain jars. And in the old days, they used to put like a straw stopper in the top of it. And it was about that big around enough. I stepped through one of them out in the DMZ and pulled my foot out. I go, what is that? And the Koreans I was with went nuts. Ah, kimchi. And they started dipping it out with their canteen cups and that. But a lot of destroyed villages, really kind of ghostly moving around in.

33:21A lot of fog,

33:25Shawn Ryan:a lot of activity some months, and a lot of months with no activity. You know, they were always trying to probe the wire and get through and slip infiltrators in. There was a funny story. There was a—our sister unit was the 3rd Battalion of the 38th. And they had—there's two bridges that crossed the Mjim, one down by Pamunjun and one up north by Nuala Rhee. And the one up north was called Freedom Bridge. and they had machine gun posts along the bridge looking down into the Mjem River, which at that point is probably a couple hundred meters wide. And during the monsoon season, it's flooded. It's moving fast.

34:16This was kind of in between.

34:19Shawn Ryan:And one of the machine gun posts opened up, just blasted away and said, I got a submarine in the water. and of course that sergeant of the guard lieutenant ran out there and they looked they don't see shit right so they the guy was a spec four they took him back and they had him down to the the the sykes to make sure he wasn't didn't crack up in that and then he's going no i saw a submarine i saw a submarine bullshit right two weeks later a mini sled washed up on a sandbar are you serious Between that bridge and the next bridge with the crewman still in it. He had shot the conning tower, and the one guy got stuck in the escape hatch, and they all drowned.

35:04Shawn Ryan:Well, he died. They made him a staff sergeant and sent him back to the States.

35:10Nick Brokhausen:Wow.

35:11Shawn Ryan:There was all kinds of little incidents like that. They tried many subs off the coast, many subs up the MGM. them, a lot of times trying to come across in rafts, you know, either rubber rafts or rafts they made out of vegetation and try and just float across and make their way, strip down and come across. Of course, in those days we had the mighty PRC-6 walkie-talkie at squad level and I think it was the PRC-10, which you had to calibrate all the time to keep it on frequency. You spit. There was too much humidity in the air for it to stay on frequency. A lot of, yeah, the weapon was M14s, and I think when I first got over there, we still had BARs for the squad automatic weapon rather than the M14E2 because all that shit was going south.

36:14Shawn Ryan:But interesting tour. I remember when it took from the DMZ to Seoul was a grueling, bouncing, jarring ride in the back of a deuce and aft. It took three and a half hours. On the Audubon now, the freeway, takes 15 minutes to get from Seoul to the DMZ. Jeez. So how long were you there? 11 months. And where did you go from there? I went to jump school. You went to jump school? Right, and from jump school into selection.

36:52Nick Brokhausen:Where was the Vietnam? Before that. Okay. Yeah. Do you want to talk about that?

36:59Shawn Ryan:Yeah, same as Korea, being a grunt.

37:06Shawn Ryan:I have an undying love for the Corps. If they'd have spent all that money on the Corps, they would have had a true UW capability. Like I said, I made the suggestion once that the Marines should be in charge of the Navy, and it wasn't well taken in that.

37:31Shawn Ryan:I learned discipline, and I learned that I could operate under pressure, and I learned that I could take a lot of suffering and still keep going. And that helped me a lot when I decided to transfer over. First of all, I went in the Army and in Special Forces because you could get promoted. You didn't have to wait for somebody to die up the chain of command for a slot to open. So it was, you know, and, you know, at that time, Special Forces was vogue. and go into the Green Berets, you know, it's the, you know, be all the man you can be or whatever the slogan was. And I found it interesting. I found it really interesting.

38:18Shawn Ryan:I read a lot when I was in high school, like I said, about the OSS and about the commandos and the Rangers and, you know, the Raiders, you know, all those specialized outfits. And it seemed like the thing that I could fit well in.

38:37Nick Brokhausen:How did you—did you see any MAV—any SOG guys when you were in the Marine Corps? No. No. No. No. You know, when I—even when I was at CCN, we worked with Tong Dushan, the SEALs over at Tong Dushan.

38:55Shawn Ryan:How was that? It was fun. I mean, they had a warrant officer named Mr. Johnson, a funny guy. Funny guy. Whip cruel, too, if he had to be. and we used to change you know equipment you know you need this well i got some extra of that rpd links yeah we got some of those you know rpds yeah we got four of those extra in that back and forth and we did a couple of missions where they supported us with a one time with with a full seat SEAL team on an amphibious landing to blow up a bridge.

39:37Shawn Ryan:And a typhoon or some sort of storm came up. They got washed way down the coast and didn't make the rendezvous. And we came in from the land and we found their boats. They washed up down the coast and that, and they managed to infiltrate in and get picked up by a helicopter in that. But they didn't make the target. No, we didn't make the target, consequently, too. Bad storm. Yeah. They had some Marines with the SEALs that were working with the nasty boats. You know what the nasty boats are? I don't. They... It gets kind of convoluted. The CIA ran some of the projects, and the military was gradually taking over from them.

40:26Shawn Ryan:The nasty boats were Norwegian PT boats. Okay. Real fast, you know, armed to the teeth and that. And what they were doing, they were going up into North Vietnam and taking agents and putting them ashore with those boats. And same thing, doing raids and coming back out. And there were forced recon marines that were with the SEALs working on that project.

40:57Shawn Ryan:It's like now you see all these guys that claim that their unit was Max Aug. Force recon was Max Aug. I don't know if it was ever on the TONE. I never saw force recon running recon missions for Max Aug. They might have. I was in one project. There were two others, three others. That's possible. But, you know, Max Saug originally was the SEALs and Special Forces. The SEALs were down south, you know, where you guys, you know, with places flooded, it's your natural habitat. Keep your skin wet all the time, you know, go into hyperventilation. And anything north into the highlands and up to North Vietnam was, you know, our kind of terrain.

41:44Shawn Ryan:So it was those two units that basically made up the core of it. I did a study on my own when I was writing my first two books. The original T-O-N-E for MACV-SOG was 1 ,174 Americans assigned to it. That included all the officers, all the support units, all the radio relay sites, all the people that were at the launch sites, and the two sections of it that actually ran ground combat operations. So you take all that support stuff and shove it over here. You have, all right, we had 18 teams that were recon, and usually each team had two Americans assigned to it. So sometimes three, but two normally.

42:43That's 36 people in recon company.

42:46Shawn Ryan:The hatchet force, they had two guys per platoon or whatever. got three platoons so you had six guys in each company and they had three companies so 18 there 36 uh it's what 48 people that are on the ground running operations on the ground and i've met 18 000 of them since i left the war because everybody i was in metric yeah sure yeah yeah it's a very small group and uh i think there During its entire time, if you took those numbers and translated into nine years and that, that's about 4 ,000 plus people. And only half of us survived the war. A little less than half of us survived the war. So it's a small, small fraternity.

43:40Shawn Ryan:Yeah, yeah. Very elite. And I go to the SOA every year because there's 30 guys I like to drink with that are like brothers. And the rest of that hoopla with the politicians and that. I've never been to a business meeting yet. They've tried a number of times to shut the bar down during the business meeting. One time we got physical with the sergeant at arms and they've given up on that idea. We don't go there for that.

44:12Nick Brokhausen:Yeah.

44:14Shawn Ryan:And these days, well, when we first started the SOA, it was for recon. And then we went, well, that's not fair. The guys in the Hatchet Force should be in it, too. So we let the guys from the Hatchet Force in. Then we let the guys that were at the launch sites in, and the cubby riders and people like that. And then when we were out doing things, I went to Africa for a while doing that. I wasn't going all the time. The colonels got in charge. And then they started, they needed members, so they said, well, if you served in a unit that supported Max Sox, that's how we got all the rotor heads in there.

44:58Shawn Ryan:Well, I didn't disagree with the helicopter crews that flew us in, and they were dumb enough to come back and pick us up. But I didn't want their basketball control officer and their H &R guy, whatever they call them. So you ended up with a lot of people that were remps that got blessed into the organization. I got you. But there are fewer and fewer of us left every year. The ranks are really, really thinning. Yeah, yeah. So what did you actually... Pussies dying off early.

45:40Nick Brokhausen:Did you get out of service and then re-enlist in the Army? No, no.

45:48Shawn Ryan:Straight across the board, transferred. Well, yeah. I had left that one and had to join the other, basically. That's how it worked in those days. And you joined the Army to go MACVSAG? No, no. I joined the Army to go Special Forces. Okay. And I was in casual status, so they sent me to Korea while I was waiting to get a slot. Gotcha. We'll just put you over here. You'll be comfortable.

46:14Nick Brokhausen:Gotcha.

46:15Shawn Ryan:You already know what mosquitoes are like.

46:18Nick Brokhausen:Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into selection. Selection?

46:26Shawn Ryan:Well, I don't know if I want to go into that.

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49:35Nick Brokhausen:All right, Nick, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into selection.

49:41Shawn Ryan:Ah, well, selection. Well, in those days, It was phase one, phase two, and phase three. Phase one was at Camp McCall. I can't remember how long it was. I think it was like a month. You went out and you learned basic patrolling, you learned survival, you learned target recognition, all the things that, you know, woodcraft and that. And you jumped in, and you lived in, in those days we lived in tents, GP mediums. And the only structures at Camp McCall were tar paper shacks for the headquarters and the medic shack, and the classrooms were open air or sometimes under canvas and that. Interesting four weeks, really intensive training with guys that...

50:35Shawn Ryan:Funny story. The guy who taught survival was an E7 named Rodney. Rodney, I think was his first name. Naio. And Naio had a black eye patch because he'd gotten shot by an AK through his eye, not one side. And he was a typical crusty old redneck, right? And he taught you how to, you know, they'd kill snakes and, you know, rabbits and other animals and teach you how to cook things, you know, take chickens and wrap them in mud and then put them in the coals of a fire and go do patrolling all day. When you came back, you just peel the mud off and it's roast chicken, right? Stuff like that. So we were getting ready to finish up phase one, and I was with a guy named Tony Anderson.

51:28Shawn Ryan:Tony got a DSC when RT Kansas got wiped out. And he was a pool shark before he'd come in the Army in that. real cool guy, his nickname was Fast Eddie. And Nail is sitting there, we were getting ready to go back to Fort Bragg and go into our MOS training. And Nail was telling us, well, you know, we ain't got no booze here, but you can get high if you take the mortar charges from the Ford Deuce, because they looked like little cheese packets. So just bite off a little bit. It was nitroglycerin. So what he didn't tell us was that all your capillaries explode. So Tony and I ate a little bit too large of a chunk, and we ended up in Womack Army Hospital, and they thought we had meningitis.

52:28Shawn Ryan:We're laying in the hospital ward, and the doctor comes in, and he goes, he had his clipboard, and he goes, let me ask you something. Do either one of you two gentlemen know Sergeant Nail? Yes, sir. I said, well, he usually gets one or two of the students in every class. Holy shit. You don't have meningitis, but you do have some damage to your capillaries and that. But it was a good training, a lot of good guys that I went through a training group with. Then later went over to become part of SOG. At that time, they were still filling up the A-teams over there. They were still active, and the Mike Force was active still.

53:13Shawn Ryan:Then I went from there to weapons training, and I was 11 Charlie. Now I think it's an 18 Charlie. I think they're all 18 BBs now. But you went through small arms, pistols first, then submachine guns and carbines, and then rifles and machine guns. And then the next phase of that training was heavy weapons training. and you train, and it was both foreign and US. So we shot, you know, the Bren gun, we shot the, you know, the RPD, we shot, you know, the Madsen, the Swedish K, all of those were in the curriculum and that. Both classes, assembly, disassembly, so you could do it in the dark. And then finally range, got to the range and, you know, combat course, and regular marksmanship training and that with each weapon.

54:10Shawn Ryan:And then you transferred to mortars, and we trained on the 4-deuce, the 81, the 60, both the Russian 82 and the Russian equivalent of the 60, and then recoilist rifles, the 57mm, the 106, the Russian equivalent and German equivalents and that. And then the Ford Euse. We did the Ford Euse and then the 105 Howitzer. So we learned up to the 105. Wow. Doing both. And you'd train both in the gun crew and then the fire direction control and then the forward reservists. Live fire on the ranges, calling in fire. while the rest of you know we some of you were right manning the gun some of you were the fdc and some of you were out there as forward observers and that very intensive course very

55:11Shawn Ryan:very compacted so a lot of a lot of practical exercise combined with teaching in the classroom And then when you finish that, meanwhile, those others from your Phase 1 who decided that they were going to be sparkies went to combo training. And they did Morse code day after day after day after day after day. And they learned how to operate both our radios and the Soviet radios and that. And the engineers went off and learned how to build things, you know, framing barracks, doing shit like that, and also blowing things up. Very intensive course in demolitions and that. And then the radio engineers, oh, yeah, the medics.

56:05Shawn Ryan:You know how medics are, right? Sick. I think. If there's a strange, really goofy religion anywhere in the world, you can bet both your medics are practicing. Highly intelligent with the bedside manner of Dr. Mengele. They go for a real long course. In those days, it was over a year.

56:36they'd go to the 300 F1 course, and then they would come back and do dog lab.

56:42Shawn Ryan:And dog lab was, they used to shoot dogs. And then their job was to treat the wound, manage the wound, heal the wound, bring the dog back, right?

56:52Nick Brokhausen:Yeah, live tissue training.

56:54Shawn Ryan:And all the cruelty, the animal people got on their case, and they changed over to doing goats. And the only step different is removing the Arab from the back of the goat. But very intense, of course. To this day, I would rather have a special forces medic treat me than any doctor.

57:18Nick Brokhausen:No kidding.

57:19Shawn Ryan:Yeah. In fact, there's a guy that teaches the SEAL teams combat medicine, a guy named Ron Broughton, who was in Berlin with me. He originally was in Project 404 in Laos. And he came to Dede, and he was a medic there. And eventually, he runs like 20 emergency rooms in Florida and teaches up at the, what is it, Little Creek? Mm-hmm. You know, combat medicine there. Yeah. Muscled up, really dyed almost white blonde hair. And we call him Doc Savage. Nice. And he does have the bedside banner of Dr. Manula. It doesn't hurt that bad. But Special Forces medics, 18, what do they call them, deltas? Mm-hmm.

58:12Shawn Ryan:Is that the same in the SEALs, 18 deltas? Yeah.

58:16Nick Brokhausen:Well, they're going through the Army's delta course.

58:19Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Absolutely wonderful course. You know, Special Forces medics in the old days could get licensed as a practicing physician in over 20 countries.

58:31Nick Brokhausen:No kidding, I didn't know that.

58:32Shawn Ryan:The training was that good and that well-respected. And to this day, it's one of the best courses that the military offers. Yeah. Don't leave them alone with your girlfriends or household pets.

58:48Shawn Ryan:And then when you finish with your MOS training, you went to phase three, and they brought everybody back together and formed up teams, regular 12-man team. There'd be two officers assigned to it. They had gone through their own course over here, which taught them not to scratch their nuts with the salad fork or whatever. And they would join the team and then they'd jump you into Gobbler Woods exercise and you would actually operate as an A-team in an unconventional warfare scenario. And phase three also had a real intensive class in the beginning of it, which was called Methods of Instruction, where they taught you how to teach, taught you how to teach the military way, how to compress all that knowledge of four hours of data into one hour and make it stick.

59:45Shawn Ryan:so the dumbest guy in the class could get it. And then you moved on from there and then. And they taught you things like stage presence. Don't walk around with Air Force gloves on, hands in your pockets. Don't be a sword fighter with the stick. And how to tell jokes to lighten things up. Some of the jokes I heard were really lame too. But that was a good part of that. And they taught you the Special Forces operations as an A-team, what each MOS's responsibility were, how to tie each other together with a team sergeant and with the officers and that. And once you graduated from that, in those days you didn't get a flash on the back of your beret behind a crest until you graduated from the Q course, as they call it.

1:00:43Shawn Ryan:Before that, you had a candy flash. No, you didn't have a flash at all. It was support troops that had the candy flash, the little ribbon, the same colors as the group patches and that. Okay. Yeah. And then once you were three qualified, that was the beginning. You went to a group and you were actively assigned to a team and you started operating in a special forces team, you know, in whatever their missions were. Where did you go? I went to the sixth group. Like I said, it was a holding area for people that, and I was in the sixth group, I think, for like six months, seven months, something like that.

1:01:25Shawn Ryan:We did a real interesting, in those days, the Red Empire bling didn't have South America. It was the eighth group, which was stationed out of Panama. And we did an MTT with the sixth group. we went down with them, and we went to Bolivia. And at that time, they were tracking down bandits in the mountains and that with the Bolivian Rinche, the Rangers, which were strange. All of them were Indians, big barrel-chested. You know, they all operate above 6 ,000 feet. So in the flatlands, they can run forever. Yeah. But they were tracking them down, and we were providing radio operators.

1:02:19Shawn Ryan:I went down there as a mortar instructor, and that was a 2-inch or 60-millimeter. It was easy to pack around in the mountains and get it in the battery real quick. And they were just starting to use indirect fire when they caught these bandit groups, which eventually became the Sindero Luminosa, were... We had 30, 60, 100-man groups in that, and they lived off raiding villages. They'd move into a village, they'd kill all the men, they'd rape the women until they used them up and throw all the bodies in the well and move on to the next village. And the rangers were right behind them, trying to close them up.

1:03:03Shawn Ryan:And we tracked this one group, and the time I was there, for about 60 kilometers over the mountains, and finally caught them in makeshift bait camp, and raided them and killed all of them, except about maybe 10 or 15 that escaped out of the net. You were on that? Yeah. How many of them were there? A little over 100 when they started.

1:03:31Nick Brokhausen:Holy shit, so you guys killed... 85, 90 people.

1:03:35Shawn Ryan:They were no match for the Bolivian Rangers. They were terrorizing the countryside because the militias really didn't have the firepower to stand up to them, and they were vicious. Vicious, absolutely. They'd kill the children and throw them down the well, and then got done raping the women and kill them and throw them down the well. Poison the water and move on to the next target. What was the point of that? Why were they doing that? They were bandits. They were just... They were just bandits. And eventually, the communists came in and kind of moved them around, cadre-ed them, and changed them into an insurgent force against the government.

1:04:25Shawn Ryan:It was interesting. How do I put this? While we were up there, we found an Inca grave. And I removed a couple of terracotta figures that were inside that grave and stuck them in my rucksack to bring them back because they were really, one of them was a corn god and the other one was like their Loki. And I had them in my rucksack. and when we were in the mountains they came around they came around the sergeant would pull out what looked like a bar of soap kind of a brown colored bar of soap take a pen knife cut a sliver off give it to you and say chew this and it helps you assimilate oxygen in the high altitudes well it was coke it was cocaine based material in that So normally they would give one bar to every three or five men and that.

1:05:31Shawn Ryan:And they ended up, he was giving me one bar by myself. So I wouldn't use it. After a while, I didn't need it. And I was just chucking it in my rucksack. So we flew back to Bragg. They'd line us up and customs comes. They're going to search everybody's bag. And they dumped my bag out. And I was really worried they'd find the two little terracotta thing. They weren't even interested in that. Because it says on the outside of the cardboard box, you know, product de coca, right? So as soon as that fell out, they were interested in only that. So they got me standing there, and I had like five or six bars in my rucksack.

1:06:12Shawn Ryan:And he goes, what's this? I said, well, it's the stuff they gave us to assimilate oxygen at high altitudes and that. And they're like, really? So they called for my Sergeant Major, who was Sergeant Major Louie Brown, a little short guy. It looked like a fire plug they painted a face on. And he comes out there and he goes, what the fuck have you done now? I don't know. And he's standing there with me and the two customs guys are standing there. And we're like acting like, what's the problem here? And the older guy, the younger guy turns to the older guy and goes, you know, I don't think they know what we're talking about.

1:06:52Shawn Ryan:And he goes, I'm pretty sure they don't. They ended up confiscating them, and I got through with my two little terracotta figures and that.

1:07:02Nick Brokhausen:Congratulations. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We'll have to add drug smuggler to your introduction. Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah. Yeah.

1:07:11Shawn Ryan:Yeah. It was, I thoroughly enjoyed Special Forces training, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process by which I finally, finally got on an A-team. And then started, I came back from Bolivia, and about a month later I got my order to go to Vietnam. And I was supposed to go to the Mike Force. And when we got to Vietnam, I sent this guy, Bernie O 'Connell, never have the Irish involved with anything you're doing, because they hear loud noises, they think it's awake, right? So when we got to Nha Trang, I sent them with our orders. I said, go over and make sure we don't get policed up by one of those press gangs, because Because we were at the regular repo depot in Saigon, the Tonsonuta or wherever.

1:08:06Shawn Ryan:And I sent him over with the paperwork for the—we were supposed to go to the Mike Force. And he comes—because the press gangs from the regular Army divisions were looking for NCOs, and they'd pay somebody off in admin, and they'd take four or five out of the lift and assign them as platoon sergeants or squad leaders to the division. he comes back and uh i had uh he brought back some bummy bob beer in a net and i i had stolen a co2 fire extinguisher we were busy lowering its body temperature in the room and he goes oh good thing you sent me over there because they we were on a list to go to the big where'd one?" And I'm going, oh, yeah, but obviously it's not all bad news because he's back here and he's gritting.

1:08:58He goes, I ran into a guy. Now, Bernie was mid to late 40s,

1:09:05Shawn Ryan:was a buck sergeant. He had been a master sergeant. He got out of the Army and got into high-tech field of air conditioning. But he didn't have the accounting skills, so he went bankrupt. So he rejoined the Army. Bulbous nose, Irish face, looked like an oversized leprechaun. So he's going, hey, I got us a good deal. This guy I know, he was in the Davy Crockett platoon with me in Germany. You know what the Davy Crockett was? It was a weapon that was deployed down to the battalion level. And what it was was an oversized mortar that shot a one-kiloton atomic shell. Holy shit. And the instructions were, get in the battery, get the gun ready, fire the cannon, and try and get a ridgeline between you and the target before it goes off.

1:10:07Shawn Ryan:You know, it was T-U-N-E and all the Army divisions at that time. I think Bernie might have been slapping leather to the guy's wife for a while. He comes back and he goes, I got us assigned to the Special Forces Unit. There's a waiting line to get in. Bernie, the only waiting line in this country is at the airport to get out. So, no, no, no, no. It's a special unit. It's all voluntary and that. And that's when my heart fell to my asshole. And he goes, it's CCN. Well, I knew some people that had been in projects, CCC, CCN, whatsoever. And all of them were nuttier than a squirrel. So I go, oh, this can't be good.

1:10:52Shawn Ryan:But it is voluntary. So we left Natrang. We went up to Da Nang. And when we were met at the airport, the most decrepit deuce and a half I've ever seen in my life was our transportation from the airport to CCN FOB4. And driving it was another friend of Bernie's that he'd known in the regimental combat teams in Korea, who had a plate in his head. He also had instructions from the Army. He was never to have pharmaceuticals and alcohol on his bloodstream, and he had both when he picked us up. Stevie Comerford got a DSC, and he's driving like a madman. When we pulled into the compound, they were launching, and one of the launch sites was shut down.

1:11:46Shawn Ryan:They were using Da Nang as a launch site. When we pulled into the compound, there was a cobra on fire on the PSP. And Bernie would be going, oh, this is probably like one of those show camps, you know, with the crest on everything, everything cemented, colored stones and that. You know, Bernie, this doesn't look like one of those show camps. This might be a little different. And that was my introduction to CCN. Wow. Sorry to travel so fast. No. So far. Yeah. So you get there.

1:12:21Shawn Ryan:Do you know what MACSOG is yet? I knew what MACSOG was because I knew some guys that were there before. And I was proud to be there. It was also in the back of my mind once, this is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer unit. But, you know, peer pressure, you're never going to say. I don't think I can cut it. How many of you guys went? I arrived with a, I think there were nine of us. Nine of you. That got assigned there. And a year later, three of us were still running Raycon. Shit. The rest were either wounded or dead. But we had a real high attrition rate. So anyway, we process in.

1:13:09Shawn Ryan:We pull in the front gate, get off the deuce and a half, and I see these really ragged-looking fucking gypsies sitting on this. And they had a, you know what a mule is? The vehicle? Marines had them. They had a 106 mounted on it. Oh, God. It's a flat, looks like a coffee table on wheels. Open seat with a steering wheel and that. Anyway, there's five or six of them hanging around on it with cut-off jungle fatigues and wearing, you know, various parts of uniforms and that drinking wine. And when we got off the truck, the cat call started, ah, new meat, this is great. Yeah, whatsoever. And the guy, they came out and they took us in, they processed us in.

1:14:01Shawn Ryan:And I think two guys went to the hatchet force and the rest of us got assigned to recon. So we got our briefing from the sergeant major. This is a voluntary unit. This is what we do. We're a strategic recon outfit. You're going to be assigned to a recon team. When you get down to recon company, the recon company commander will brief you and assign you to your teams. Fine dandy. We get down to recon company. And my first introduction to Larry T. Maness was a recon company commander. Former E-7 looked like a heavy gravity planet inhabitant, thick neck, square face, crew cut, blonde. And we were standing outside the orderly room, and the door bursts open, and a body comes flying out and lands in the sand.

1:14:57Shawn Ryan:And the guy kind of shakes his head, gets up, stumbles out down into the company in that, and the door swings open and there's Manus. I'm the recon company commander and this is your briefing, your orientation, and spoiling my drinking time. You can call me sir, you can call me motherfucker sir, or you can just hide when I'm looking for you. First man. First of all, I recognize that this is a retread. You know, I mean, that kind of squat bread is immediately identifiable. So I said, sir, you know, worst thing I could have done is this is a voluntary unit. Yeah, it is, peckerhead. You a barracks lawyer or what?

1:15:52I said, well, what did that guy do?

1:15:55Shawn Ryan:He wanted to quit. And I hate quitters. I said, since you're so astute in that, I'm going to sign you without even interviewing, and I'm going to sign you to R.T. Habu. And you can go over there and make that hooch a collective IQ of three. And that's how I got assigned to Habu. Right on. I love Larry. He's in a hospice at home now. Oh, man. Just absolutely the best officer I ever served under. And Larry had been in projects in the very beginning. We were still wearing box hats, yellow name tapes it should have. And he protected us from all the bullshit and took the flack for all our shenanigans and that.

1:16:45Shawn Ryan:Sounds like a good man. Yeah, well, when I stole the half track, he confiscated it. Not because he wanted it for any other purpose than it had two big whip antennas on it with little guidelines and no radios. Just so it would slap back and forth when he slammed on the brakes. You don't need this here, I'm confiscating it. I think it ended up in a security company somewhere else.

1:17:16Nick Brokhausen:So how did it go when you checked into Habu? When what? When you checked into Habu. How did it go?

1:17:23Shawn Ryan:Yeah, well, they had just come back from Quantry, and they were on standout. And they, do you need to throw up? Nope. Oh, I'm doing that. I'm just reading my notes. I'm just reading my notes. Jumie Johnson and Minnie Mac were in the hooch. um snake was up at headquarters he was the one zero and and danzer danzer and mac and jimmy johnson so they're sitting there they're cleaning weapons mac was cleaning a 22 with a silencer and i walked in i said and he goes before you say anything you're obviously the new guy and you've obviously run into Daiwi Menas. Did you question him? Did you make a comment?

1:18:22Shawn Ryan:What did you do to get assigned here? And I go, well, I asked him about it being a volunteer. He says, well, he sent you here just to annoy us because you're obviously a Yankee. About that time, Castillo, the Cuban, I think he was on Bolton's team at that time, walks in, oily little shit that he is, and he goes over to the refrigerator, opens it up, takes a beer out of it, and starts to hold it up like that. And Mac pings it with the.22, and it starts peeing all over the floor. Holy shit. And he never misses the beat. He goes, just as a cautionary, don't have anything you value around these two, or they'll bubbify it.

1:19:07Shawn Ryan:And he drank the beer and went out. That was my introduction to Habu. Right on, man. And it was, we clicked right from the beginning. And Mac, Mac and I stayed together, I think, the longest. I stayed on Habu until like two months before I left, and I took over as a 1-0 crusader. And then, of course, there was some chicanery in there. We had convinced Manus that I stuttered when I got excited. So it was absolutely no good on the radio. And the 1-0 in those days normally carried the radio and that. Until Boudreaux caught us chuckling about it and then threatened us. He said, I'm going to tell Manus what you two have been doing.

1:19:58Shawn Ryan:But we ran together solid for 11 months and did some interesting stuff. And we got Cookie. Cookie was a bonus. Robert Cook from Vidalia, Georgia. Olive skin, had the mannerisms of a Mississippi riverboat gambler. Had a complete solid eyebrow all across here. And he called everybody Stretch. Well, Stretch, yeah. He was a, first time I saw him, and he was a ranger. So he had ranger strings on everything. Ranger string to his compass, Ranger string to his camouflage stick, Ranger string to his peanut radio, you know. All packed. I used to tell Mac, we just throw him down in front of the NBA. They'll get all tangled up in all those strings, and we'll be able to escape.

1:20:55Shawn Ryan:But really intense professional guy. On the team, Mac was a 1-0. He was a buck sergeant. He was actually, I outranked him. when Manus finally did interview me he goes I'm assigning you to R.T. Habu and the 1-0 now is McLaughlin he's a buck sergeant you got any grief with that? I said does he come back with the same number of people he went out with? What does that got to do with it? Well if he does I'm only going to change his diapers if that's necessary so he was a 1-0 really, really cool, calm, under fire. Never got flustered. Alabama, well, I guess we're going to have to move because it's getting kind of hot here.

1:21:49And Danzer actually was the 1-0.

1:21:56Shawn Ryan:But they had just come back from, or right after that, I went to, I think I went to 1-0 school, because you couldn't run Laos unless you went to 1-0 school down in Longton. And they ran the bright light on Doc Watson and baby Jesus Lloyd, both of whom had been lost on a mission up in the DL, or in the Asho. The bright light went in. Danzer was a 1-0 because Snake had gone home on emergency leave. And they got on the ground. The Asho Valley is built in a series of steps. It goes up, levels off, goes up, levels off, got real sheer. And they got inserted on the top of the plateau. And they started working their way down.

1:22:55Shawn Ryan:because what had happened is that they pulled Sammy Hernandez out. They got in a hellacious firefight, and they pulled Sammy Hernandez out on strings, and Doc Watson and Baby Jesus were on another set of strings, and the helicopter lost power, and they were on the strings underneath it, and that slammed into the cliff face. Oh, man. When they found both of them, they were both dead. they were hanging in the trees Max said they looked like they were asleep just hanging there in their harness but they were they could see them but they couldn't reach them they were out about they were up at the level where they could stand and see out to them but they couldn't reach them they were trying to get long branches and that try and pull them back in and recover the bodies and they decided it got dark and they decided to spend the night on the top of the plateau.

1:23:54So they, it wasn't as far, it was like maybe 100 meters to the top.

1:23:59Shawn Ryan:They got back up on the top, set up in a RON, in a half horseshoe thing. And five o 'clock in the morning, thereabouts, they heard trucks pulling up the trail on the top and troops dismounting. And they unloaded about three companies, the nba and started sweeping they knew the team was in there somewhere they started sweeping down the plateau and they they opened opened up on them with a rpg rpg two two rpgs two rounds hit and uh one of them horton was with them too one one of some of the shrapnel blew his lower leg off and it was partially attached but it was it was off in that and uh they started dialing everybody in fighting throwing and they were throwing stick grenades at them in that and eventually there was nowhere to go so they started going down the cliff just stepped off and went uh i heard different stories mac tried to throw horton to a tree for him to grab on he didn't make it went all the way down and mac tried to jump out to the same tree and didn't make it landed on top of him everybody got down to the bottom danzer got blown off the top of the cliff damn he was behind his rucksack and the radio was in the rucksack and he had a handset and either a grenade or an rpg hit nearby and blew him off he ended up at the pace of the cliff with nothing but the handset in his hand.

1:25:43Shawn Ryan:And he was shocked. You know, he wasn't functioning totally. Cliff Newman, who was also a 1-0, had been strap hanging with him, he took over command of the team. And they had one of the chase medics, was also with a Duck Woody. And he was patching up Horton's leg and dealing with the other wounded that were there. And Mack was covering the ridge. There was like a cut in it. And the MVA were trying to come down, hopping from rock to rock. And he was like at the carnival, picking them off between the rocks and that. And they, Newman just performed outstanding. He got the, you know, the 9mm pistol and I think a Silver Star for that.

1:26:39Shawn Ryan:and eventually went and ran a recon club for us after that. He was basically responsible for getting everybody out that was still living and breathing. And they extracted him with a CH-53, and they worked over the top of that ridge line and turned it into a killing ground with air support and got a heavy hook in there and pulled him out of there. He was just recently, they're trying to get his Silver Star changed to a Medal of Honor, which he really deserves for his actions that day. It went all the way through the Chief of Staff of the Army, all the way through the Secretary of Defense, and then it was approved under the Biden administration.

1:27:26And then when the new administration came in, they just killed it out of politics. They killed it?

1:27:34Shawn Ryan:They killed it. Why? Hex, that no. Are you serious? And we think it's because the guys who approved it were all Biden appointees. But Newman earned that medal seven times over that day. You know, this thing with approval, higher awards from a lesser award. when Paris Davis got, do you know him? I don't. Paris Davis, read his Silver Star and his Medal of Honor, which he eventually got. He was a colonel. He was a young captain at the time. He did stuff on a mission that they make movies out of. Went out from the, you know, saved people that were wounded, dragged them back into the perimeter, went back out, captured prisoners brought him back and basically got everybody out of it.

1:28:33Shawn Ryan:And I think he got a silver star for it. The Army didn't like him because he was black. And in those days, the Armor Corps is what ran the Army. And there was a lot of racial prejudice. They thought he was just uppity and they weren't going to give him a medal of honor. He got out retired as a colonel he was my commander at devins for a while best group commander ever had you know and then he eventually the guys got together and they they went back and redid it and got his medal of honor here last year finally was right he was at the convention last year uh i i love paris yeah he was a special yeah he uh I had to go to race relations classes.

1:29:25Shawn Ryan:In those days, you had race relations. Equal opportunity race relations. They picked two NCOs. So they picked me and a guy named Johnny King, who was a full-blooded Chakaria Apache, to go to the classes. And there's guys from my battalion. And there's two guys from 3rd Battalion, whatever, two guys from headquarters. And we're supposed to learn how to be correct, politically correct, and be able to hold classes to train the rest of the chimpanzees in the techniques of being politically correct. So we're in this classroom, and they've got a guy. He's an associate professor or something like that from Boston College, complete with the Revolution knitted Black Power cap on and the dreadlocks and all that.

1:30:24Shawn Ryan:And he's talking about, well, we've got to be careful about how we call each other. These things have been done bad to Black people in the past. And when I walked into the room, I turned the thermostat up to 94. So King is sitting in the front row. He's unbuttoned his field jacket and was nodding off. Everybody was nodding off except me. I'm watching to see all of them fall asleep. And the instructor came over and kicked King's foot. He said, wake up. and he uncoiled out of that seat and pulled a cruiser bowie out of somewhere and had it against this guy's throat and he's going they used to kill my people for sport and i still like them better than i like you that's it out of here we got sent back to group i got sent back because i was with him i hadn't done anything well i turned the thermostat up but nobody knew it at the time Yeah.

1:31:28Shawn Ryan:Yeah, Paris. You had one job, and that was to keep an eye on that blanket-ass savage, and you failed.

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1:33:46Nick Brokhausen:What was your first mission with MACVSOG? It was, we went to the, what was it, the Ash-O?

1:33:56Shawn Ryan:I think it was the Ash-O. Lower end of the Ash-O. And it was a recon mission, linear recon. We were supposed to follow this trail and see if we could find commaware. so another team could come in and put a wiretap on it. And we landed, and this particular target was in an old caldera, and the trail ran up to the center of it. And it was reported there was a North Vietnamese regiment in that caldera somewhere. and we were going to go in and do linear recon and partial area recon inside that six by six no bomb buck and when they when they put us in we came under fire immediately as soon as the choppers lifted off everybody in the world started shooting at us and uh i remember i I came here, that wasn't a mission.

1:35:04Shawn Ryan:Anyway, my job on the team was to fight the team as a unit, mine and Cook's. And Mac handled the radio, made sure, you know, Covey got air into us when we needed it, did all that stuff, kept in communications with Covey. So I'm fighting my portion of the team, laying them in down below and that. I saw these NBA break out of this ravine, like, we're down here like this. and over here is this ravine and there's a ravine that runs up, follows up that way. I saw him break cover and run up in that ravine and I started moving up to tell Mac and I saw a bunch of three or four stick grenades come up out of that ravine and land right where he was.

1:35:51Shawn Ryan:So I run up there, fuck, they got the radio and they got the midget at the same time. This is bad. So I get up there and he starts yelling at me, Will you please get down your draw and fire? And he's got his pants down. And I look, and he's checking to see if his junk is still there because he's got a shrapnel wound on the inside of his leg. And I'm thinking to myself, this is the coolest son of a bitch in the world. He's masturbating. He's got the radio hook like that. He goes down and grabs a cub. He was on the line. And I go, you'll have to wait a minute. The one zero is masturbating. You said that?

1:36:35Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah. And Dave Chaney, big Paiute Indian, was that cubby writer. He goes, well, besides that, what else you got? And then we called in airstrikes and eventually pulled out. I remember we got back and I had my basic load normally when I was carrying a car 15 was one, two, three, four canteen covers with six magazines, one of which was a 30-round magazine, and six 30-round magazines and an AK vest. Two canteen covers with mini grenades, two M67 baseball grenades, and a WP grenade, and plus extra stuff for you know we carried a machine gun we carried a belt of ammo and a thing and when when i got back on back to the launch site i had two magazines left holy and my pistol ammunition that everything else i'd shot i would have blown up a nuke and told them it was kids playing with fire if it would have helped yeah but it was just it was that intense and i'm telling I said, God damn, that was intense.

1:37:51Shawn Ryan:He goes, that was a training mission. So you're kidding me. I said, no, and the yard's like you, by the way, because you've got dialogue when you're hyperventilating. That was my first mission. Sheesh.

1:38:09Shawn Ryan:It just went on from there. I mean, you got into the rhythm. You know, you might go back to the launch site. You'd either pull a bright light for a team that was going in, or you were done and you went back to Da Nang, and you get three or four days off, and then you went back into that process again, go into isolation, get your target, go to the launch site. How did that compare to your Marine Corps deployment? Oh, a world of difference. World of difference. What was the major differences? The intensity of combat. Really? You have no idea, well, you do probably, how loud combat is and the smell and the deuterus, the dust, the explosions, the blood.

1:39:04Shawn Ryan:You're many times fighting at very close range. with these, we were heavy enough that we could give a company a black eye. You hit us and we were going to hit you so fucking hard that you'd want to back off. And that's how we survived. We'd pick the point and we would go for that point to break through and break out and get some running room and then find our terrain that we could defend. than that. And it was in that short time period, like I said, you'd use up five, six, seven magazines just doing that breakout. Wow. And grenades and anything else you could throw out there. Claymores on coat hangers.

1:39:50Shawn Ryan:Claymores on coat hangers. Hey, cap them and have them everywhere and ready to go, and you put a coat hanger on it. And you've got the clacker in the bag. You pull the claymore out, and you throw it up in the tree, and then run to the end of the wire, and fire it off, break contact, and make sure it's facing the right way. Yeah. And then run off, and then it just clears a path. Or throw it in front of you and blow it off, so you've got a clear path in that. And a lot of mini-grenades. A lot of mini grenades. How many guys were you rolling out with? Normally, it was the three of us, or sometimes just Mack and I.

1:40:33Shawn Ryan:But the three of us, after a while, that was the three Americans and from six to eight Montagnards. Sometimes we'd take 10 Montagnards with us up to lunch in case we got tasked with a bright light. We'd have extra guns on the team. because remember they got to have enough helicopters get you in and get you out so you can't overload them in that yeah but normally six to eight yards and two or three of us how often are you guys going out oh well every night everyone how often are you guys going out well the rotation was you'd go to the launch site i the only only two times they gave us a target after we ran a target while we were up there.

1:41:22Shawn Ryan:And we did the isolation thing in the hooch at the time, and it was an ambush. We were trying to get a prisoner. But most of the time, you'd go to a launch site, you'd launch, do your thing, be back in five days, get two or three days off, go back in the system, I'd go back up to the launch site three or five days back, sometimes one day. After a while, I was telling him what's his name, didn't it? I had one target. I can't remember whether it was Hotel 6 or—I think it was DM10, Demilitarized Zone 10. It was that caldera thing again. I ran it four times, and my cumulative time on the ground was a little over an hour.

1:42:16Shawn Ryan:and four times. Wow. That, you know, like I said, it was intense. If you got caught or they thought they could catch you with your pants down, they put everything they could to kill you and capture you because they knew if you got on the radio and got the air power, they had to grab you by the belt buckle before that. So it was right at the first edge, full push trying to get on top of you. And once you can break contact, kill enough of them to make them back off, then you can start doing an IA drone, getting a path to where you could grab some terrain. When we looked at the target areas, we specifically picked terrain that was in the neighborhood of where the LZ was, or along our path.

1:43:02Shawn Ryan:If we got hit, we're going to go here, because that's defensible. We can't defend it here or over here, but we can there if we get air power in. Shit.

1:43:17Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories.

1:43:22Shawn Ryan:I'll bet it does. Yeah. Sometimes I can smell it. Are you doing all right? Yeah. No brains, no headaches. Watch that. Yeah, I don't normally get weepy. I get weepy over the little people.

1:43:50Shawn Ryan:Yeah, we, our Tihabu was a brew war party, plain and simple. Just like dog soldiers, you know, from the Crow. When we hit the ground, the last people in the world you wanted to run into was us. Just the finest, finest troops I ever worked with were the yards. No kidding. Yeah. How long were you there? Huh?

1:44:18Nick Brokhausen:How long were you there? How long? How long were you with that specific unit?

1:44:23Shawn Ryan:Oh, for 11 months straight with Habu. And when I took over Crusader, they were also a brew team. So, you know, we had Sedang, Bru, Rade, all different tribes. The Bru looked like Bushmen, real short, you know, very, you know, sometimes almost African features in some of them. The Sedang, lighter skinned, and they filed their teeth. So they looked, when they grinned at you, they looked like wolves. No shit. They had tattoos. and Rade looked like Polynesians. Very good looking people, beautiful. All of them are beautiful people, but the Rade women are stunning. And then we had some Gerai and some of the teams were Vietnamese and some of the teams were, shit, Vietnamese and Nungs, big fucking Chinese.

1:45:25Shawn Ryan:Rick Hendricks had all Nungs He couldn't remember their names, so he named them after Donald Duck's nephews. Huey, Dewey, Louie, whatever. And Huey spoke English like he was from Southern California. Funny story. My team's going to Quantry, the launch site. And Hendricks' team is coming back. Or no, we're coming back. We're at Quantry. We're getting ready to go back to Da Nang. And Henrik's team comes up there. He's got seven noons, Huey, Dewey, Louie, whatever. And they're on, I don't know who thought this up. They came in on a caribou, and there was two donut dollies on board. As we're laying in the shade waiting for the caribou to turn around and get on it and go back to Da Nang.

1:46:21Shawn Ryan:And Henrik's and his team start filing off, you know, with all their man jewelry and that clink clink, you know. And they're coming down, and preceding them are the two donut dollies. And they're going, well, I can't believe this. I can't believe that those gooks were on the plane with us. One of them had this face, I swear, it looked like a horse. It was long. And the other was kind of portly. And they were all outraged, going whatever. They go over towards flight control over there and that. And Hendricks comes out. and Hendricks is going, he's kind of chuckling to himself. Here's what happened.

1:47:02Shawn Ryan:They're on the plane and they're in orbit getting ready to land and that. And Horseface starts going, well, what are these gooks doing on the plane with us? Why are we here with these gooks and everything? And Hendricks is, Huey started in by, well, actually, are you official Army prostitutes? Is that what that uniform is? And that blaked her eyes wide open. She says, I think it's a great idea, but I actually own a whorehouse in the Trang, and I don't think I could get five bucks a trick for both of you unless there was a werewolf involved. Yeah, all in perfect English, right? And Hendrix tries to throw water on the fire, and he goes, well, you know, I know you have to understand they're going on a dangerous mission.

1:47:49Shawn Ryan:They may not say the best of things in that. And he says, I understand your mission being Red Cross and all that, where you put up the maps with the name, the state. Some lucky guy gets an extra donut and that. And he says, look here. He sticks his finger out through his fly and he goes, looks like the state of Florida. Everything ended there. And we ended up, the guy from the flight line comes out. You need to get on that caribou and get it on now. they've contacted the provost marshal and they're on their way here right now yeah Hendricks him and his noons his star English by pupil man you know I was

1:48:34Nick Brokhausen:talking to our mutual friend John Stryker Meyer before you got here tilt tilt hides a lot of his sins he had a he had a couple questions for he wanted to know about the pet monkey at CCN? Fucking monkey.

1:48:50Shawn Ryan:Mac had a pet monkey. I don't know where he acquired it. A spider monkey. No, it was actually, I think it might have been a gibbon. And it was a nasty little piece of shit. We had a pole with a perch on it outside our hooch. And of course, Sergeant Major's like, Billy Wah's going, get rid of that fucking monkey. I don't want to see that fucking monkey. and Mac kept it just to aggravate the sergeant major. All the dogs in Recon Company hated this thing because it would sit on its perch, scream at him, roll up its shit and throw at him. And all of them wanted, most of all, UGMO. UGMO was a mixed breed, two of which weren't from this planet.

1:49:35Shawn Ryan:It kind of looked like a Sharpay that had cancer. and Cook and I were secretly feeding at screwdrivers with Garbott. So I hated the thing. Cook hated it more because the monkey would break into our hooch and find anything that belonged to him and either chew it, shit on it, or do something else with it. It wouldn't bother my stuff or Mac's. Always went after Cook's stuff. So one night we got sick of it. Get rid of this goddamn monkey once and for all. Mac went downtown, and we were in the hooch. We didn't want to go downtown. We'd been at the club, and we'd been drinking. So we started feeding the monkey Darbon and screwdrivers at an accelerated pace until finally we started to have storm, right?

1:50:24Shawn Ryan:And we were sitting in the doorway watching the monkey,

1:50:26Nick Brokhausen:and he's out there, meh, meh, meh, rolling up shit,

1:50:31Shawn Ryan:throwing it at the dogs and ogre were down here. and finally it just went and fell over backwards and hit the ground and they ripped it to fur and bones in about five minutes. The dogs did? The dogs did, right? And so before that, we had thrown the monkey on Lamar when he came back from the club and he tried to shoot it and he hit Ugmo instead. So Ugmo was out of the pack at that point. So we decided to cover it. It was lightning, right? So we go, wow, we can cover up this crime. So we set fire to the pole and the remains on the ground. So when Mack came, stumbled back in there later on the night, he found the monkey and woke us up and went, oh, it must have been a lightning that hit it.

1:51:23Shawn Ryan:And he goes... Actually, we thought we got away with it. And as we were getting ready to go breakfast, he goes, by the way, I think it was Pulley. Pulley told me all about how my monkey died. So that's what happened to the monkey. He used to, the monkey would sit on his head, and he'd like some kind of weird hat, and he'd go, how do I look? Well, it looks like that monkey's got an ugly growth on its ass. I hated that thing. Sounds like. We offered to buy him another one. He goes, nah, you two as pets are enough.

1:52:01Nick Brokhausen:What is with the World War II helmet?

1:52:07Shawn Ryan:Well, family heirloom. I wanted my Luger. I had a Luger. So I told my mom, send my Luger over to me, and she sent the helmet too. The day I got it and packed in the helmet was a fruitcake. Even the yards won't eat fruitcake. Really. Whoosh, number 10. So I get that. She'd put my Luger in a family-sized box of Cheerios. The only dry cereal we got at the mess hall was grape nuts, little hard, crunchy rocks. So Cheerios was like a special thing. So I run over to the mess hall, and I'm sitting there with Mac and Cookie. We all got our little bowls and the milk and everything, and we're having Cheerios and that.

1:52:56Shawn Ryan:As I'm pouring it out, the barrel of the Luger falls out into my bowl, just as Manus walks up to the table. And then came the handle and the receiver and the magazines, and he goes, well, how did he say, how did he put it? And he goes, what are those? That doesn't look like a box of Cracker Jacks, my man. But the helmet was fun. I wore it on bright lights, where you're going in, you know you're going to shoot. And I figured, you know, the NBA would go, who's side are the Germans on? Yeah. And other people borrowed it. Eldon borrowed it one time. Bardswell. Mm-hmm. And who else was it? I wouldn't let Jimmy Johnson wear it because he looked like something really grotesque.

1:53:44Shawn Ryan:Big ears hanging out from underneath it. But yeah, I brought it back. When I came back, I had it in my luggage, my bags, and the MPs tried to confiscate it. And everybody that was there ganged up on it. I said, no, no, no, no, no. That was sent by his mom to him. And they just, OK. So I managed to get it back to the States. A pissed off girlfriend got rid of it. Uh-oh. I was offered$10 ,000 for that helmet. I'll bet. But with my name and pictures of me with it and that it was worth$10 ,000, which I bring up to her once in a while. And you missed out on that one.

1:54:32Nick Brokhausen:What is with the sawed-off RPD?

1:54:36Shawn Ryan:A lot of guys had them. Well, not just me. Before I got mine, I had one of the Philippine armors up at S4 would saw them off, make sure that it was just the right length that you didn't fuck up the rate of fire too much. We had sawed-off M60s, too. The sawed-off M60 had a tendency for the fucking barrel to fall out in mid-stroke. The RPD did not have that problem. And it slightly slowed the cyclic rate of fire, but it sounded like a.50 caliber. Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. And some of us, like Casio, I did it on mine, too. I put an oil funnel on the front of it. And when that thing went off, it really sounded like a.50, and it would shoot a gout of blue-green plasma out about six feet in front of it.

1:55:33Shawn Ryan:At night, it was horrifying. But lighter, easier to move around in the bush with. you'd carry a lot more ammo with it because it's.39 instead of.51, so the extra weight there in the shells and that. And I got so I can make it sing, and it was real effective on bright lights. You need a lot of firepower. You need it down. You need something that can chop through brush to get to them. Your RPD is your weapon. Nice. We're excellent for that. I taught myself how to load the, you lift the cover just like you do on an M60 and that, but it's got a feeder strip that comes out of the drum that you have to put through and pull out and then slam the lid.

1:56:27Shawn Ryan:And then you're back in, but if it's in the drum, if it's in a belt, it still has a feeder clip, but you got to feed it through, hold it, pull it through to get it out. I taught myself how to do that by reaching over and doing that and being able to then slam the lid down. But I wanted something that I could protect myself with. You know, I had the pistol, the high power that I carried, or the Silas 22, if I was carrying it, we might stumble upon somebody that we could capture. But I had the armorers make me a sawed-off 12-gauge coach gun that long with the little pistol handle on that, two barrels.

1:57:13Shawn Ryan:And I carried 25 rounds for it in my 1-0 vest and one up here either in loops or in the pockets if I had a vest on. Otherwise, I kept them in a canteen cup cover. and I added in a slide holster in the small of my back. So when I had to reload the gun, I'd be reloading it with this hand and I'd pull that 12-gauge out so I could cover myself. And I started, I was using double-aught buck and slug and then I came up with a bright idea that slug just wasn't doing the job that it should. So I started, I took the double-aught buck out. I left the bottom four, and then I was putting nickels in there to start with.

1:58:03Shawn Ryan:And I started counting up how much that was going to cost me, and I went, hmm. So I started using the five dong piece. It's a brass coin the same size as a nickel, and it's brass. So I could put four of those in on top of the buckshot at the base of it, and then three rounds of buck, you know, the balls on top of that, and then close it up, seal it. That, at close range, both barrels will blow a man in half. I know that for a fact.

1:58:39Nick Brokhausen:You've seen you've blown a man in half.

1:58:41Shawn Ryan:That guy came up on me in the elephant grass, and I let loose at about eight feet. And his legs were there, and the top of his body went there. Shit. Yeah, because the brass doesn't deform, and it comes out like little saw blades in that, or flat. And it just cut them in half. I was surprised myself how bad it was. And after that, that was the load for the shotgun. What were the slugs doing? Why do you say they weren't doing the job? There wasn't enough of them to really get a pattern. They either... too many of them went out to the side rather than hitting the center of mass. The flat coins worked better because it held together as a mass.

1:59:33Shawn Ryan:And it was devastating. It would cut down brush too. Shit. But you learn and you adapt.

1:59:46Shawn Ryan:You did all kinds of crazy shit with guns. How many times were guys sneaking up on you? I think three times that I actually had to use the shotgun. Because I was quick reloading that gun. I could drop the old drum, put a new drum in, and get it in a matter of seconds. I was always nervous about somebody coming up on me when I'm crouched down or bent over the gun. I didn't want to get shot. And having the shotgun handy was, you know, Max only complained, quit waving that thing around. Yeah. I'm only going to shoot you on intent. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good weapon. Good weapon.

2:00:35Nick Brokhausen:Did the killing bother you? Did the killing bother you? Did it get to you?

2:00:42Shawn Ryan:No, um, hmm.

2:00:47Shawn Ryan:Most of them were jumbled together. Every, you know, years afterwards, some of them, oh, I had a, it's in the book, I had a ghost that haunted me for a long time. What? A ghost. I would come back when I was, you know, I'd have, I had a malarial relapse, and he'd be visiting. And when I'd get tired or, you know, didn't take care of my drinking and that, I'd wake up in nightmares. It was a 16-year-old, 15, 16-year-old kid, MBA.

2:01:24Shawn Ryan:He had...

2:01:36Shawn Ryan:he came up on me real quick well actually I fell on top of him I got blown we were trying to dig in on this little incline and that and they were pushing us and a grenade went off and blew me and one of the other yards down in a little gully that was behind us, and they were coming up. And I landed in amongst about five or six of them. And the only thing I had was an entrenching tool. And I killed them with the entrenching tool. And I remember him.

2:02:17Shawn Ryan:Like I say, I don't think about him often. But I remember he was the same age as my little brother. Fuck, man.

2:02:31Shawn Ryan:The others, I remember them screaming, yelling, teeth bared, coming at us. Or they came up with us real quick, and I dropped them. They didn't really get to look in their eyes or see their face. You hear them kicking around and screaming after they were on the ground. But most of that's a jumble. every once in a while one will pop up you know because it's something that we did or you see a piece of terrain that looks just like we were in you know you'll come back and they'll pop up you know that they didn't have ptsd before that they called it battle fatigue and we never thought we were battle fatigued at that you You know, it was years afterwards we realized that, you know, we had drinking and anger problems and why.

2:03:24Shawn Ryan:And the military finally accepted the fact of what it was and started, the VA started treating it. But, you know, in the early days, we just managed to push it aside. A lot of drinking, you know. I know a lot of guys that got into the bottle and then welded the cap on after them. Yeah.

2:03:49Nick Brokhausen:How would the ghost appear to you? How would the what? The ghost. What about him?

2:03:55Shawn Ryan:How would he appear to you?

2:03:59It'd be a nightmare, and he'd be like I last saw him with half his head caved open and one eye falling out, and he would wake me up.

2:04:11Shawn Ryan:and he'd just be in the book I described one of his visits I'm on the lake in Minnesota and I'm fishing with my little brother and he's got this old yellow rain jacket on that my mom hated in that and he's bent over. He's not facing me. He's facing out the back of the boat and he's fishing. He's got a line in the water and that and he's sobbing.

2:04:58Nick Brokhausen:Sorry. It's okay, Nick.

2:05:04Shawn Ryan:Shit. Pussy. It's okay. Anyway, I reach over to touch his shoulder to find out why he's crying, and he turns around, and it's the kid, not him. and he grabs my hand and I stand up and he steps off the back of the boat with me and I'm going down under the water and he's holding onto my hand and I can't get him to let go. And then I wake up.

2:05:42Shawn Ryan:Shit. It's okay. Yeah, well, I don't want to be a pussy. I don't want to go there.

2:05:49Nick Brokhausen:You know, I have a really good friend of mine. His name's Chris Fedus. He was a sniper for a dev group. And I had him on.

2:06:03Nick Brokhausen:And he had to kill two kids on a hostage rescue mission. And he has nightmares similar to that.

2:06:12Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah.

2:06:13Nick Brokhausen:And he had sons. Some of them never leave you. They're at that age. And his nightmares, his sons look up at him.

2:06:21Shawn Ryan:I haven't had a visit from him in 10 years. Five, maybe. And it's always when I'm worn down, then it comes back. Or like today.

2:06:40Shawn Ryan:How do you deal with it? I push them back. Push them back. Don't let them in. And I try not to think about things like that. Try not to think about some of the guys that I know that got blown to pieces. But, you know, one minute they were there, and the next minute there's some kind of hamburger meat with bones sticking out of it.

2:07:06Shawn Ryan:You just deal with it. First of all, the psychiatric industry. It's a bunch of hooey. All those therapists that try and talk you through it. I did a little bit of that when I was in Germany. And the problem is that they put a jacket on you, and now you're barred from enlistment and all that shit because you're loopy inside. So nobody goes to them. And two sessions I went to was, yeah, listen, bozo, you don't even know what you're talking about. you're trying to you're condescending and that's an insult you know it's you know I got problems I'll deal with them thanks sign my slip so I can get out of here

2:07:58Shawn Ryan:my generation we just dealt with it we dealt with it I see some of these guys now with a traumatic brain injury from bombs and that and severe PTSD first of all a Navy SEAL God bless his soul found that psychedelic mushrooms can be used to treat PTSD. Psychedelic mushrooms, there's a friend of mine, Al Mullins, another medic, who understands this completely, how it's done and all that. And the VA is just now starting to accept it as a treatment protocol. It's psychedelic mushrooms, some kind of bark from a tree. It's ibogaine. And crystallized secretions from some African frog. It's a U.S.

2:08:44Nick Brokhausen:toad.

2:08:45Shawn Ryan:Is it a U.S. toad?

2:08:46Nick Brokhausen:The Sonoran toad. You're talking about 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine. Oh, cool. I've done it. Have you done this? No.

2:08:55Shawn Ryan:Why not? I got too much shit to do right now. Nick. But the other thing that they found out about it, the other thing they found out about it, it cures drug addiction. Yep. It cures. Your meth, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, whatever. It takes away the total desire to have those substances in your body. That is the method they should use for cleaning up the drug addiction and the homelessness in this country. Just grab them off the street, stick them in a re-education compound, micro-dose their food until they finally realize that they don't want to be on it, and then put them through the treatment.

2:09:36but no i haven't done it or haven't even approached it i did it did it help fuck yeah it helped i

2:09:44Nick Brokhausen:haven't had a drop of booze in almost four years really and it was effortless yeah that's why all these fucking bottles are still here otherwise they'd all be gone oh yeah but it nick i'm not to bullshit you it changed it changed my life well maybe i'll get around to it someday

2:10:07Shawn Ryan:i don't drink that much anyway anymore you know my my normal consumption is probably a glass of

2:10:14Nick Brokhausen:wine with dinner this helps a lot more than just taking the booze away what this stuff helps a lot

2:10:20Shawn Ryan:more than just taking the booze away yeah well i'll talk to al i'm sure he'd like to watch while I go through it. And I would trust them to watch while I go through it. Is it offered to the VA? No. You have to go to Mexico. Well, I go to Mexico all the time.

2:10:41Nick Brokhausen:Well, not all the time. Maybe I can... Where is it? Mexico City? I can't say exactly where it is because... Well, you arrived in a laundry bag and they dropped you off That's right. At a clinic?

2:10:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

2:10:57Nick Brokhausen:I will tell you off camera where it is. Yeah, okay. And if you want, I will connect you with the people. Like I say, I might think about it.

2:11:07Shawn Ryan:I hope you do. I'm not usually this weepy or loopy. That's okay. Happens a lot in here. I get like that when I think about the yards laying on top of me to keep me from getting hit again. Yeah. That's another one that brings the tears. Yeah.

2:11:33Probably because I owed them money more than like, or they thought that I owed them money.

2:11:43Do you want to talk about the prisoner capture attempts? The what?

2:11:49Nick Brokhausen:The prisoner capture attempts. The prisoner? Capturing prisoners.

2:11:55Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah, well, that didn't turn out all that well. We really, Hobbes only had, well, when I was there, only had one real prisoner snatch. And we went there to do a prisoner snatch. The area was high concentrations, and it was laced with trails, couriers and et cetera. If they knew that you were wiretapping or that they had moonbeam overhead trying to listen for radio signals and locate things on the ground, they would use couriers on trails going back and forth between the different units. We set it up to do a snatch. It was fairly simple. we we found a trail high speed trail knew that they would use it if they got pressed and that and they we started using air support to bomb them and make them get up and start moving around and that and uh they they knew if we were bombing them they'd have something up there listening for radios at the same time so they anyway we're set up on this trail kind of cool it was a really large tree, but from over there where the wall is.

2:13:22Shawn Ryan:And Mack was behind that. And I was over here behind some slightly smaller trees than that. And I had a Silence.22. Was it.22? Yeah. And Mack had a Silence gun in that. and uh anyway the the yards are spread out to kill anybody behind the ones we want we're gonna let a couple of them go through yards are on the other side of mac a couple of them and three or four of them behind me over here down stretched out on this trail so they start bombing making them get up move around and that we hear that pitter patter their little feet coming down the trail. And it's three guys, actually four.

2:14:20One guy slightly ahead.

2:14:25Shawn Ryan:The next guy was an officer. We knew he was an officer because it's, you know, collar tabs, and he had a map case. and the guy behind him and then a third guy. Yeah, a third guy behind him. And I waited for him to get by. And Mac stepped out, shot the first one in the leg and pistol whipped him and then shot the second guy. and I got the third and fourth guy. I killed them. And the one guy, when I shot him, he said, brother, in Vietnamese. And it turned out later that the guy in the front was his brother. Shit. And he was calling out to him. And the guy that we shot and captured, shoot him in the leg so they can't run off.

2:15:31Shawn Ryan:put a tourniquet on them, grab them, cuff them up, start carrying them, start dealing them out to get to an LZ to get pulled out. We did all that in a matter of minutes, and we're gone. Well, we stripped the bodies, went through their pockets and everything, threw it into a sack, or I think we used an A7A bag, so all their equipment except for the guns, and pulled the bodies and took the guns apart threw it out under the underbrush and hid the bodies in that. Sometimes we'd take the bodies back with us, too, so they could do an autopsy and see what they were eating, see if they had any kind of parasites, that sort of shit.

2:16:14Shawn Ryan:You know how doctors get involved. But we grabbed the guy. We went to the extraction LZ. They dropped the strings. and we decided to put Koeman, the 101, and I think Sampat on there with the prisoner. And then Mac and I and the other yards got on the second chopper that came in, and we lift up, and away we go into the blue yonder. We're watching the one in the front, and suddenly it looked like somebody dropped a rucksack. Those are three yards with the prisoner on the first one. And we thought somebody dropped a rucksack. It was a prisoner. What had happened, they had him trussed up and they didn't get to snap and link him in tight enough to him.

2:17:10Shawn Ryan:And he started swinging around down underneath the aircraft and he came back in and he bit Koeman in the face and held onto them like that. And Koeman just pulled out a knife and just sayonara. There you go. Holy shit. All the way to the ground. We were already counting the bonus money. Let's see. That's$300 for you and$300 for you. And yards all get a month's pay. We get to go to Natran, get laid. And we watched them go all the way to the ground. We got to the refuel point. It was an old fire base. and they land everybody's rolling up the strings and that we go see Koeman's bleeding all over his face and Matt goes what happened and he explained it to us well you know why did you kill him he bit me in the face number 10 VC I said well we're not going to get paid money for it don't need money need to kill VC that was end of the conversation That's how Boudreaux threatened us, because when we got back to the launch site, we were sitting in that little mess hall portion that we drank beer in, and we were joking about what we were going to tell Manus, how we lost a prisoner.

2:18:31Shawn Ryan:We were going to tell him that I tied him in with some knot I learned in the Sea Scouts, or I forgot the rope, and I packed it because I had too many candy bars in my rucksack, and I used a piece of rope we found out there. And Boudreau was listening over in the shadows. He goes, you know, you're lucky. I just don't tell Manus what you two are really up to. But it's a good mission. Just things went bad at the last minute.

2:19:03Nick Brokhausen:I have here that you were interrogating captives in the field. No. No? No.

2:19:12Shawn Ryan:Never had time for that. Okay. Oh, you might do impact interrogation on me. How many more are with you? You know, where are they? And the yards handle that. But you don't have time to do that. You snatch them and you run. Because getting them back is everything. And turning them over to people that can really, and like I said, impact stuff. How many guys were with you? That sort of thing. Slap, slap. Yeah, let's go. You know, the most valuable POW that I heard of that CCN got was Eldon Bargewell. What do you think that POW did for a living? He was the battalion mess sergeant. No shit. So we know who he had to feed, what their names were, what units they were, where they were at, all their rations.

2:20:09Shawn Ryan:He had all this wealth of information because he was a mess sergeant. Yeah. The guy we grabbed, the only thing, he was a senior lieutenant, and we're acting in some sort of S2 capacity because the map case had, just like we used, clear plastic covers, and he had units marked on it and all that, and it was a tactical map. so he wasn't a line officer and we pulled a bunch of shit out of his pockets that you know gave the guys in Saigon said well he was an intelligence officer yeah I remember Eldon told me he said the one time they found carved into a tree born in the north to die in the south yeah

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2:23:30Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I mean, you got to remember, these guys are G.I.s, just like us. Just wearing a different uniform. Yeah. Hardcore little sons of bitches. I'll give them that. Sounds like it. I had a lot of respect for them. I didn't have any respect for the VC, because they were ash and trash, you know, militia. But the Pavan, they would come through bombs to get at you and keep coming, you know, take casualties. Damn.

2:23:59Nick Brokhausen:Were you on an operation, too, that did you retrieve downed pilots?

2:24:06Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah, we did a couple times on Pritleys. you're doing a bright light choppers go in, you're the one you gotta go get them

2:24:21Shawn Ryan:I remember I think the chapter's called Blue Eyes we went in on a chopper that had gone down on an insert and we

2:24:34Shawn Ryan:the one one and a door gunner had not gone in with the helicopter. They had leaped free from the wreckage, or when they hit the water, they got thrown free. Everybody else was dead, and it burned afterwards, which is bad. I did another one. One of them I had the guy delivered to me. another bright light one of the choppers was going past got shot to shit took an RPG right in the transmission and fell out of the sky and the door gunner got blown up the slope he landed like that far away from me he still had the M60 in his hand except the barrel was cut in half from shrapnel and that and the other guys the chopper rolled down the hill we were going to go down to it and see if anybody survived and uh no that was a another one we went in and uh later on the afternoon on the wreckage and we got there and we got up on we could see the chopper in the brush below us and we could see movement around it but according to the cubby everybody had gotten pulled out so we thought it was nba going over the wreckage not pulling shit out and that so cook threw a grenade down there and it landed up the chopper was laying on the side like that grenade landed here went off threw another grenade it landed on the other side of the chopper and it went off And we heard this voice, please don't throw another grenade down here.

2:26:25Shawn Ryan:And it was American. Oh, boy. So we'd go down. It was one of the door gunners. And his leg was pinned under the underside of the aircraft. And that, he had almost gotten out and the aircraft rolled over on him. So we managed to break him out of the wreckage and got him back. And the funny story. They take him to the evac hospital, and he's in one bed, and the co-pilot is in another bed. The middle of the night, the staff hears a ruckus, and he's in there trying to strangle the co-pilot. And what had happened was when they unasked the aircraft, they just left him and took his M60 and reported that he was dead.

2:27:18Shawn Ryan:So they took his gun and left the aircraft, and he was trying to kill that warrant off it.

2:27:25Nick Brokhausen:Yeah,

2:27:27Shawn Ryan:a number of times we went in. I went in on an F-4.

2:27:36Shawn Ryan:One pilot had either failed to eject or partially ejected. He was still in the aircraft. He was dead. And we found that we kind of jammed up against the injection seat, went out about halfway before something folded in it and stopped it. And the rockets in the injection seat burned them to death. He was toast from, let the waist down. Everything was burned off. Damn. Yeah. Not a nice way to go. No kidding.

2:28:12Shawn Ryan:I don't have nightmares about him because he's there for us.

2:28:21Shawn Ryan:Yeah, that was the worst part, when they burn. I can understand getting blown to pieces and shot up, but I don't want to ever see another burned body again. Yeah. How was it leaving? leaving was happy sad yeah i hated to leave you i actually thought about just going off in the bush with the yards i i loved them that much and i really had no ties to the my family of course but i really had no ties to the civilized world at that point. I'd been with them so long, I was Brew. A lot of guys were like that, thought about, you know, because they closed the, when they closed off the, when they started moving American troops out, we knew that they were going to close and abandon the yards.

2:29:25Shawn Ryan:The South Vietnamese went for sure, and the American command weren't all that reliable to take care of them. We were. They were our family. So we were stealing shit for them. Ammunition, mortars, machine guns, rifles, flamethrowers, anything. Because when that big American units like AmeriCal and the mechanized, what was the name of it? Tent mechanized or something like that. And when they left Quan Tri, the PTO yard was full of stuff. Floor fans, big piles of wrenches and sockets, you know, anything you could make. Connex containers with mortar ammunition, actual mortars, machine guns and all that.

2:30:10Shawn Ryan:And just fucking left it for the Vietnamese. So we were going up there raiding it. And every time we went to Mylock, we were taking fling loads. The pilots were in on it. They knew what we were doing. Every time we went up there, we filled up the helicopters, either with ourselves or with equipment and ammunition, and then a slingload of stuff underneath it, and we'd fly it up to Mylock, and it would disappear. At least give them a chance to fight when the thing happened. But very, very sad to leave them, and sad to leave the guys. The allies. The guys, these are your brothers, you know.

2:30:50Nick Brokhausen:Sounds a lot like Afghanistan.

2:30:52Shawn Ryan:Huh?

2:30:52Nick Brokhausen:It sounds a lot like how we left Afghanistan.

2:30:56Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah. I'm sure. We just abandoned those people. I'm sure. We just, you know, betrayal. You know, not you, but the dipshits in charge. I had a lot of anger about that for a long time. When I went back, I found two of my yards. You went back? I went back twice. How was that? In lightning. No shit. I had a friend that papered me, so I wasn't traveling on my passport. And Canadian. So I actually went back. The first time I did a project, I was working in environmental. And we came up with a system where we were treating waste, shit, with anaerobic microbes, which increase the— anaerobic means it doesn't need oxygen.

2:31:55Shawn Ryan:And what it does is those microbes eat the shit and the pathogens, and they produce methane. And we built these silos in the ground. We lined them with clay, and on top of it was a cement plug with a shaft on it with an agitator. And that was run from the top, and it would stir the shit. You make it real liquid. You put some straw organic material in there, but it's mostly shit and water. And then you cook it in the microbes, and it makes methane. It comes out to the top, goes over here. You dehumidify it. You can run a reciprocating engine on it, just like natural gas, because that's what natural gas is, methane.

2:32:43Shawn Ryan:So I had a contact in Canada that got a contract to try and use the system we had in Vietnam with four of these big pig collectives. They brought all the pigs in from the surrounding villages, put them in one big building, and they had a lot of pig shit. fine we'd create electricity with it and when the silo got done cooking down at the bottom of the silo was this thick really black material that was kind of part of it was a slurry and part of it was kind of grainy pure nitrogen so they would take that out you'd empty the silo and you take it out, lay it out on iron sheets, dry it out. You've got 90 % nitrogen fertilizer.

2:33:39Shawn Ryan:In fact, they were taking the fertilizer and actually bagging it and selling it to the farmers, right, to replace using human shit in the benjo holes, which stops a whole bunch of other diseases by using them. It was so rich, they had to hit it with potash in order to reestablish a livable ph in it so i went back for that and you know i had a good time for about three months and i went back one more time that uh just had a curious i i i had the first time i heard rumors about the uh re-education camps and how some of the yards had survived and uh i had a i I made a contact there in Da Nang. And he told me that he knew some Montagnards that had gotten out of the education camps that were kind of living like street beggars.

2:34:41Shawn Ryan:And I went back and I found two of the guys from CCN. One of them was on my team.

2:34:46Nick Brokhausen:No shit.

2:34:48Shawn Ryan:And I managed to get them enough money to get them out of Da Nang and back up in the Highlands. Both of them were missing an arm. The little people had SCU tattooed on their special commando unit, tattooed on their arms. And if the North Vietnamese found it, they chopped their arm off. So both of them had their arm chopped off from here down.

2:35:17Shawn Ryan:But yeah, it was a really great reunion. Yeah, I found out about how their families had gone back up in the hills, how they actually had fought a running battle back into the mountains and a trail of tears, so to speak. Damn, man. Hell, yeah. I think I got a star on my map for that one. Fuck.

2:35:51Shawn Ryan:I have an affinity for primitive cultures. You know, the yards were basically semi-Iron Age tribes when we came along with all our man toys and war, and they adapted to it like ducks to a water. And they are the finest natural warriors I've ever seen. And I've worked with other groups in other countries. all of them pretty much share the same kind of culture you're a warrior and you're a member of the tribe and the first duty is to protect the tribe above everything else protect the tribe

2:36:38Nick Brokhausen:well nick let's take a quick break and uh when we come back we'll talk about what it was like coming home. Think back to a first date that actually mattered, one where there was chemistry right out of the gate. You didn't just sit there making small talk. You asked the real questions early. What do you want? What are your non-negotiables? Where is this actually going? You do that because you're trying to figure out fast whether this is someone worth investing more time in or if you should move on. Well, the same goes if you're hiring. You definitely want to address key questions first to see if someone could be right for your role.

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2:38:03Nick Brokhausen:Ask key questions and hire faster with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Want more from The Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content like our extra Intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions.

2:38:45Nick Brokhausen:Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. All right, Nick, we're back from the break. We're kind of wrapping up Vietnam. We have wrapped up Vietnam. What was it like coming home for you?

2:39:23Shawn Ryan:Total decompression. And shock. I mean, the height of the anti-war thing in that. I was only spit on once, and that was in Oakland, and they were a bunch of Buddhists or something. I remember punching them really hard, and all kinds of roves flying around. But coming back to the States, you have nothing in common with your high school friends. You have very little in common with the outskirts of your family. Your mom, your dad, your brothers and sisters, you know, all there for you. Yeah, I was fortunate.

2:40:16Shawn Ryan:And that, you know, I had a support mechanism there. But once again, after about two weeks of being home, I really started getting itchy feet. I wanted to go around people that I knew. So I got in my car and went back to the cries of my mother saying that I abandoned her after she carried me for nine months, nurtured me for years.

2:40:51Shawn Ryan:But I went right to, I stopped on the way from Fort Bragg to visit a friend of mine that I knew from the Mike Force. And I spent about, I don't know, visitors and fish have the same three-day limit, especially with wives. So after about the fourth day, She started getting the skunk eye look when she looked at me. And she knew she was going to have to retrain them after I'd been there for a while. So on the fourth day, I told them I was going to take off for Bragg. And she made me chocolate chip cookies for the trip. I suspected that they might have had X-lax in them. But they didn't. But I drove to Fort Bragg.

2:41:40Shawn Ryan:I checked into the sixth group again, and it was a wild time. I was on the team. We did a lot of stuff. We were always training. We were always going someplace, and it helped.

2:41:59Shawn Ryan:Didn't have a lot of personal relationships.

2:42:05Shawn Ryan:I just couldn't get into that. I got laid, but I didn't get into personal relationships. And gradually the— Why not? Just weren't ready? I didn't want to let myself go. I didn't want to trust somebody that hadn't gone through what I went through. And I saw all my friends that were having problems with their marriages and their girlfriends, the same thing. We drank a lot. A lot. You know, I managed to control myself so I didn't get in a lot of trouble. But like I said, once you've been on that kind of an adrenaline high, it's hard to give it up for ice cream cones and cognac, you know? Yeah. So it took a long while to totally decompress to the level where I was socially acceptable.

2:43:08Shawn Ryan:And you'd be looking at people going, they'd say something and you'd go, you stupid fuck, and then go at it.

2:43:20But I think what really saved me was I got married.

2:43:30Shawn Ryan:And I'm really sorry for her because she was 19. And I was 27. And I had a baby daughter.

2:43:47Shawn Ryan:And I got orders to go to Berlin, which in those days was like grabbing a brass ring and hitting the top. And I was getting ready to go to Berlin. She knows she was going to have to. She was a 19-year-old from what's the name of that town up in San Francisco Bay. Monterey? Not Monterey. I can't think of the name. Palo Alto? No, further north. Right to shit. The big electronics center now. Silicon Valley? I'll think of it later after we get off this thing now. but her parents were from there. Her sister had married a guy from the 5th Special Forces Group, and their marriage was already on the rocks when I met her.

2:44:45Shawn Ryan:I got married in Monterey, full military wedding, of which Spider Parks and two other guys tried to stab me with the sabers when I walked down through it. We'd been drinking, yeah. But got married. She got pregnant. We drove to Fort Devens, my next assignment. And I was at Fort Devens for about two years with her, and things just fell apart. I was working as a bouncer at a place in Lemister for extra money, and we didn't get paid all that much. I told somebody the other day, the E7, asked me, he says, how much do you make as an E7? So my pay was$1 ,250 a month. And he went, what? And when he told me what they had paid now, I wanted to rob him right there on the spot.

2:45:41Shawn Ryan:But money was tight. I was gone a lot. The first year I was at Fort Devens, I saw her 112 days out of that year. The rest of the time I was either on exercises, flintlock, mobile training team, wherever. And it just fell apart. And I went to West Point to, you know, every year the cadets, the sophomore cadets get patrolling, mountaineering, rubber wraps, all that training and that. And everything's new. They get everything new. New jeeps, new weapons, new fatigues, new poncho liners, you name it. And when I came back from that training, I had a week to clear post before I went to— or no, I had a month's leave and a week to clear post.

2:46:40Shawn Ryan:And when I got back to Fort Devens, I walked into my government housing, and there was nothing in it. All my clothes were piled in the middle of the living room. and all the furniture was gone. There was a container of sour milk in the refrigerator and a beer. And I sat there on the floor and had that beer and I called up Jay Graves and told him what happened. He said, don't say anything, I'll be there in 30 minutes. And he came down, picked me up, took me up to his place and dropped me off with a well-known gangster, a real criminal. And I stayed with him for a week. And I made the mistake of trying to go back to California and patch things up, which didn't work out at all.

2:47:36Shawn Ryan:I got back there. I tracked her down to a nightclub. And she was sitting on her ex-boyfriend's lap when I jumped him and bit a dollar-sized hole out of the top of his head. And the fight was on. And the bouncers decided they didn't want anything to do with me after I broke one of them's arm. And I escaped and got outside, realized how badly I'd fucked up, and still tried to go back and talk to her. And when I got there, her father stormed out the front door and shoved me, and I hit him, and he had a heart attack.

2:48:21Shawn Ryan:So from there, it was a mad flight to get somewhere. I hired a private plane to fly me to another city, and then caught commercial air. When I got back to Boston, I stopped in Cincinnati or someplace, and I called Jay. I said, hey, I got into some trouble. And he goes, we know. I said, what do you mean you know? He said, don't go to Boston Airport. The state police are waiting for you with a warrant. And I said, well, okay. So I flew into New York City, and Chester, God, I loved him. He died here two years ago. former Marine from the late 50s, Fleet Marine, who became a criminal. He was—the FBI always suspected he was involved in this or that.

2:49:25Shawn Ryan:He was a one-man crime wave, boosting trucks, selling the stuff, you know. Great guy, just full of life. I had travel orders and a ticket on the contracted airlines and had to leave from Boston and go to Frankfurt and then on to Berlin. He bought me a first-class ticket on British Airways out of Connecticut and into Frankfurt, and that's how I escaped the net. And the group actually covered my ass. They told them that I was on classified orders and that I had already left and that they no longer were responsible for me. They'd have to talk to my receiving unit, but unfortunately that was classified and they couldn't tell them with the group commander involved in that loop.

2:50:23Shawn Ryan:And so I went from there to Berlin and Berlin really was the healing process. You know, it was exciting. It was demanding. It kept me occupied. It was, you know, I was in an environment that I absolutely loved. Berlin is still one of my favorite cities. They're in Munich. You know, those two hit the top of the charts. And, you know, I was speaking German almost all the time, either in my job or I was living out on the economy. I had a really nice flat over in Selendorf that was just magic. I had two motorcycles and a Volvo. So I had plenty of stuff, mental health stuff. I'd get on a Harley and put something exciting between your legs and take a drive.

2:51:25Shawn Ryan:And I met a woman there that was in ASA, Army Security Agency. She was an oral comprehension specialist, listening and being able to translate. She couldn't speak Russian, but she could listen to it and understand the dialects and all that, named Claire. And Claire, wow. She was something. I lived with her for almost four years before I dumped out of the Army. And she just recently surfaced. And our relationship eventually fell apart because I didn't want to get married. I decided I was never getting married again. And she wanted to get married, and I didn't. So she went off and married a real nice guy, a warrant officer, and built a life out of that.

2:52:27Shawn Ryan:But the time in Berlin was really healing because there was just so much going on. We were doing stuff like, you know, in Dead A, we did a lot of work with the Sonderneinsatzkommando, S-E-K, which is their counter-terrorist, counter-intelligence police. and they were great guys. I mean, every one of them were just really talented. They were like special forces. Same attitude, same skills. I mean, just wonderful guys. I managed to, about halfway through there, there were six of them going on vacation to the United States, so I lined them up with all my friends and contacts that were in California, Arizona, places like that.

2:53:16every one of them came back with a saddle that they were going to put in their bar downstairs and use that as their stool to sit on and they a lot of interaction with them we did a

2:53:30Shawn Ryan:lot of counter surveillance and surveillance of their targets what better way to learn you know we'd follow soviet agents east german agents criminals whatever they had on the ticket list or we'd do counter surveillance, you know, with their guys trying to follow us. You know, we'd play the rabbit, the hare. So you really got good at people watching you and being able to sense it and that and all the little tips of the trade and that. And then, funny story, I had the Volvo and I wanted to get another car and get it registered as a German vehicle. So I wanted to get a Volkswagen, but I knew this guy, German guy, he owned a bar up in the Turkish sector, Gunther.

2:54:28Shawn Ryan:Gunther was afraid of his girlfriend, right? And Gunther was aggravating, but he was fun sometimes. He had a Messerschmitt. You know what that is? No. Okay, after the war, Mezerschmidt, the actual Mezerschmidt factory, designed a car that was powered by a motorcycle engine. It had two wheels in the front, one wheel in the back. And it actually looked like the fuselage of a Mezerschmidt 109. You had to get in it, you had to pull the canopy back, climb in the front seat, and had a passenger seat behind you in that. and that I had, I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. Shit, I got to have this, right?

2:55:14Shawn Ryan:So I make a deal with Gunter for$2 ,500 cash and I bought that thing from him and he's fussing about the paperwork. Wow, you know, what if you get in an accident when you're going back to your house and that? I'd prefer if I drove with you and that, you know, so come up and pick up the car. I said, okay, the date when I went up to pick it up, I wore the leather jacket. a leather flying helmet and a white scarf and goggles. And he goes, oh, no. I said, hop in the back. Come on, we'll get down there. Don't worry. He said, have you been drinking? No, not at all. I had a flask underneath the seat already, and I was fairly well lit.

2:55:55Shawn Ryan:We took off down to Havel, which is like in the center of Berlin, there's a freeway. Before we got a quarter away out of the Turkey sector, I already had two police escorts trying to catch me. And I'm weaving in and out of traffic. I've got the canopy pulled back and the skirts out the window, and I'm cackling as I'm going along. And I got far enough ahead of them, and I was using the shoulders, everything I could to avoid them in that. We came up on the Grunewald exit, which if you turn left, you go over to Clay Alley where the consulate is and Berlin headquarters. And my BEQ was over there too, but my apartment was further down over in Selendorf, which is next to the big Bonsai, the lake there.

2:56:44Shawn Ryan:So I see the cutoff. And if you turn left, you go over to the American side. If you turn right, you're on the horse trails that go around. The Grunewald is a 12-mile long, 3-mile wide park. all forests and hiking trails, horse trails, all that. And that Messerschmitt could scoot in there, and the cop cars couldn't. Nice. So I'm fucking throwing mud, going around corners, because I know the whole area, we go out there and do exercises and that. I finally lose all of them except one, and he's right on my fucking tail. I'm thinking, son of a bitch, he's got to be a dirt track driver and that. So I got down towards Salendorf, and there's an alley that cuts off to the right off the horse trails and that and gets to the end, and there's just enough space to get that Messerschmitt through, and it goes on a long, gentle slope down to the Hobble River where it's paved walkways and that, and it's like a block and a half up to where my apartment is, which is an old mansion.

2:57:57Shawn Ryan:I got to second floor. So I get down there, and the guy's right behind me, and I'm looking around him. He doesn't look familiar in that. And I see the hedge. I said, well, just cut through the hedge. It's a gentle slope. See if this baby can take some damage. Turn to the right. There was a moment of weightlessness, and then we hit the water. It was the wrong alley. went through the hedge out about 20-30 feet and straight down into the river when I surfaced I came to the surface and I'm looking around for Gunter and he surfaced he bubbled up to the top a couple seconds later first thing out of his mouth was I hate you so I said well yeah we got more problems we need to get out of the water for one thing and then And we got to shore, and there was a taxi stand not far from there that was a lighted telephone pole.

2:59:01Shawn Ryan:You could pick it up and call a taxi. And I called my flat, and a clerk was there, and I said, you need to come pick me up at such a location. There was a little guest house that was closed, but the place we used to go and have a wine or cheese plate, whatever. I said, come down here and pick me up. What was the name of that? something for us. And she shows up about 10 minutes later with the Volkswagen that I had bought her. And we packed Gunter into the back of it and we drive all the way back up to bedding. And by that time, the whole park's full of fucking police cars going up and down the streets, driving around, you know, looking for us.

2:59:44Shawn Ryan:And then we get back up there and all the way up there and tell her, look, it's simple. I've already signed the pink slip, right? Just tell them, don't even show them the pink slip. Tell them it was in the car and that somebody stole the car. You'll get it, your insurance will pay for the car, no problem. Everything's handled, right? But three days later, I go into the detachment and I walk in the team room. And one of the guys from the scuba team comes in and throws the license plate. from the Messerschmitt. He says, you might want to keep this. And a little after that, I walked back in, and my team sergeant was a wonderful guy named Kraychuk.

3:00:31Shawn Ryan:He was sitting at his desk, and my leather flying helmet was on his desk, all sodding and everything, and he's tapping it with a pencil. He says, you might want to put this in with that plate. So evidently, the scuba team had been called out by the German police diving team because they were trying to recover two drunks that had gone into the Hobble River, and they were dragging the river for their bodies. Holy shit. It was a healing process. Sounds like quite the healing process. Yeah. A great group of guys, great mission. Saw a lot of really, you know, a lot of guys from Project went to Dede.

3:01:12Shawn Ryan:there was probably, when I was there, there was probably 20 of us that had been in projects. It's like all your friends that you don't want as a character would show up. But the only sour point about it was I was there when the general that wanted to get control of the attachment sent his hatchet man down there. And he hated me with a passion. And the feeling was fucking mutual. He made sure he wasn't in front of me on any jumps, just in case his static line got disconnected. I've met a couple of those. Yeah, you know, they're a sour taste, but they are there. There's no denying it. They're little martinettes that think their shit doesn't stick.

3:02:09Shawn Ryan:Nick, where's your daughter now?

3:02:14Shawn Ryan:I tracked her down. One of the guys that I used as an instructor was the head of the SWAT team in Costa Mesa and a homicide detective. And when he got out, he became a private eye. And he tracked her down to San Jose. and she was living in San Jose about two miles from where her grandparents were.

3:02:44Shawn Ryan:And I found her on the internet and sent her a note, said, you know, I really hate to break it to you this way, but I might be your natural father. And she took her sight down the next day. And that was the last I heard of her, except about five or six years ago. My phone rang, and a young man was on it, somebody post-teenager but that young. And he goes, are you Nick Brockhaus? And I said, yes, I am. He says, I'm your eldest grandson. And I heard a bunch of yelling in the background, a woman's voice, and he never called back. as far as they know she's in San Jose married my ex-wife married a Cajun so that all wrapped together probably wasn't a good idea to go back and try and establish filial ties so I still think about her what would you say to her?

3:03:58Shawn Ryan:I'm sorry

3:04:03Shawn Ryan:Do you think you'll get that opportunity? Who knows? Winning the lottery. That soothes a lot of hard feelings. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe she'll see what I'm doing now and try and make contact herself. I wouldn't put money on it, but, you know.

3:04:22Nick Brokhausen:Have you done any interviews before? What? Have you done many interviews before?

3:04:27Shawn Ryan:Yeah, a couple of them. I did one with the captain from SF. That was a good one. I just did one last night with two LA cops. It's called War Stories. They were fun. One of them was a former Marine. I kept telling them, I know there's some dark shit in your past. Don't lie to me.

3:04:54Nick Brokhausen:I hope you meet her again. And I hope you get to say that to her.

3:04:59Shawn Ryan:I do, too. I do, too. You know, I don't have any real regrets in my life.

3:05:10Shawn Ryan:I'm not a perfect man. I've got a lot of flaws. At least I admit my flaws, you know, and I live with them.

3:05:18Nick Brokhausen:There's no such thing as a perfect man.

3:05:21Shawn Ryan:Yeah, according to my partner, he's close to it.

3:05:28Yeah. Wow.

3:05:34Shawn Ryan:We covered a lot of ground. We did. How are you feeling? Well, I'm fine. I wrote three books. The first two were about projects. And without my trying, they became cult books. I've had many, many people. And I didn't write it for the public. I wrote it for the guys I bled with. And I'm happy as hell when one of them walks up to me and goes, way to go, Nick. But the public seemed to have taken them well. And I'm still getting paid royalty, so I guess they're doing all right. I wrote this book, Vagabonds, because I had a contract to supply a West African nation with six 737 300s. on a lease. And I happen to know a wonderful man in London that I'd been in the freight business with in Africa that had all these airline, how to get airplanes and run an airline and that.

3:06:38Shawn Ryan:And we set up a lease contract with him for six years. Contract was signed. Money was being transferred into escrow. I moved from Palm Desert to Tucson because they were going to paint all the planes and put delivery on them and that and do the sea check and that before they send them to Africa. I got there, and a month later, COVID came ashore. Oh, shit. And everything. I was set to make$35 ,000 a month on a six-year contract. So I got there, and that's when I moved in. I signed a lease for two years with my business partner. as a co-tenant. And everything dropped out. So we were locked up for COVID.

3:07:29Shawn Ryan:We're sitting there. We watched everything on Netflix. I said, what are we going to do? I said, well, let's write a book about what we did after we got out of the military. So we wrote the book, 67 days, start to finish. Nice. Pushed it through. I had a wonderful editor in London, Oxford, a woman named Ruth Shepherd. Been really good to me. The owner of the company, I would gladly run over with a pickup truck.

3:07:57Shawn Ryan:She's wonderful, and her staff is wonderful. She got it approved, got it published, and that. And it doesn't do as well as the other two books. And it was all about what he and I did after we got out of the military. We rescued kidnapped children in Algeria, Guatemala. rescued people in Mexico from kidnapped, real kidnapped gangs. And one in Chechnya, which I'll never do again. Why not? I didn't actually run that thing. That was a friend of mine that had the contract in that. I came up with a way of tracking the victim. And I used the Russian. Jeff and I had gone to Russia, oh, God, Back as one of the things we did, we went to Kazakhstan with an asphalt company that was trying to get a contract to build four-lane highways connecting Kazakhstan with the rest of Russia and that.

3:09:05Shawn Ryan:And they used cold-mixed asphalt, which you can use in arctic conditions. That's what they built an Alcan highway out of, because no frost thieves, all that stuff. So we had met, my friend in London introduced us to the KGB at a very high level. And we went to Moscow and met the head of directorate nine, who was a lieutenant general in the KGB, had a beautiful baritone voice, Spoke fluent English and fluent German. And where was I going with that? So anyway, we went to Kazakhstan. It's in the book. The adventures of going over there and doing that. And were we on the airplanes or on the? I lost my track there for a moment.

3:10:06Shawn Ryan:You were going to Russia. Yeah, we went to Russia for this deal with the asphalt company and that that was one of the things and while I was there I made really good contacts with the with the KGB and after communism fell you understand the KGB did not belong to the central government it belonged to the Communist Party so when the Communist Party fell out they no longer had a mandate to operate so they were going through all this writing about how they were going to build a new Russia and that and that's how they came up with the FSB which is what they have currently in that but the KGB also owned all kinds of things they owned cities where they had research going on they had no roads going in or out everything came in by air scientific facilities they owned gold mines they owned oil fields they they and they were funding themselves, but they were looking for cash.

3:11:14Shawn Ryan:And on the thing in Chetia, we actually rented a Spetsnaz outfit. We had come up with a way to track them. And actually, the Russians came up with it. And it was a friendly isotope. and the victim was an industrialist from the West. Tried to make an oil deal with the Chechens. The Chechens grabbed him and demanded money. Basically, they outwitted. The first group that went in to try and pay the ransom, they just killed him and took the money. The second group went in were SAS guys and they shot their way out of it. And my friend who was an SAS guy actually picked up the third and came up with this plan that if we could locate them, we also could put enough force to actually grab them.

3:12:10Shawn Ryan:So the Russians came up with two tricks. One was a way to track them, and that was a friendly isotope. There were only two places in the region where you could buy the medicine that he needed to stay alive. So they broke in there and dosed all the medication with that friendly isotope. If he peed on the ground, they could detect it from the air. So they did the nest team flying back and forth doing the grids, and they located them in a mountain village. And they came up with a substance they could treat the money with. If you touch the money, within 24 hours you were dead. So they dosed the ransom.

3:12:51Shawn Ryan:They picked it up. They had already located the village, and about 2 o 'clock in the morning they went in and rescued him. There was about 8 of them that were still kicking, and everybody else was dead. No old people and no children. Damn. All young people in the billy. So, you know, it was, the Russians are, they've got finesse sometimes, and sometimes they're bull in the court. Damn. But they're, you know, my trip over there, my association with them, you know, I knew who they were, and I knew what the communists were, and, you know, they were my sworn enemies at one time. But I watched them rebuild after a total collapse in the system.

3:13:33Shawn Ryan:I asked Vladimir, the general, I said, what kind of government do you think you're going to have? He goes, well, Nick, it won't be communist because that's the law. And it won't be Western either. But one thing it will be is Russian, totally Russian. And that's what he came up with, a free market society still with the vestiges of one strong man and one strong party. And I admire him for being able to pull through without totally collapsing.

3:14:10Shawn Ryan:It's interesting to watch the events and watch Trump working with them and trying to— But he realized that the Europeans were raping them after the communism fell. They went and made deals with all the steel plants and the shipyards in Poland and all that and basically fed the U.S. this thing about how crooked the communists are and they're still in control while they were buying everything and making joint ventures. Oddly enough, the Kazakhs, you know the one group of people they would rather do business with? Germans. Because the Germans keep meticulous records. So it was really interesting.

3:14:57Shawn Ryan:We did a lot of things with a lot of different people. And eventually we trained SWAT teams. We trained personal bodyguards in Mexico. So I ended up supplying my clients with armored cars that were produced in my partner's plant in Mexico City. Damn. Tried to stay away from working with the government. You can get on a lot of kimchi without too much effort with that crowd. Yeah. Well, as you know. You have lived a lot of lives. You get painted, say you know something, and you feel it's in your, because the person you are, it's your best interest to tell federal law enforcement. The minute that you do that, they start building a jacket on you.

3:15:50Shawn Ryan:If you're hanging out with these people, obviously you're a bad guy. So I did that once and regretted it in the end, and I swore never again. You know, if it meant somebody's life, yeah, but I just don't have a lot of trust in their ethics. Yeah. So anyway, to the present time, we come back to Jeff Miller, my partner, came out here and met a studio, a production company called Show Dog Studio, run by a really great guy, John Attard. He was a former NCO in the Royal Fusiliers way back when. And he made an offer to love the book, said, we can turn this into a Netflix series. So that was the offer that he gave us.

3:16:48Shawn Ryan:What they're currently planning is to turn it into a streamer. Using the book as the basis. Basically, every chapter can become an episode. Congratulations. Well, I'm happy about it when the check clears the bank. Well, that's pretty funny. You know, the thing's going to be called American Ronin. Not my choice, but it'll work. Sounds pretty badass to me. They can keep Hollywood out of it, you know, stick to the story. When do you think it will go? I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here. Me, personally, I think they will actually start writing sometime this spring and filming maybe fall and release in late 26.

3:17:42Shawn Ryan:Actually, if everything works. Man, well, that will be awesome. Yeah, we'll see. I can't wait to see it. I'm pleased with it because it's interesting. He's pleased with it because he wants his grandkids to go, that's grandpa. I am doing everything I can to ruin that scene.

3:18:04Shawn Ryan:Anyway, that's what I'm doing now. And I'm still writing every once in a while. I wrote a fiction book years ago that I may get published. It's about Gaius Casca Langenis, who was a centurion that stabbed Christ in the side. No shit. on the hill. And as the myth goes, when he stabbed him in the side, a clear liquid, he hung on a cross, what happens is your pleural cavity fills up with liquid, and you suffocate. You know, between the bleeding and the trauma, you suffocate in your own juices. When he pushed the lance to his side, that clear liquid splashed out on his hands, his shoulders, and he had a milky eye that was from a slingstone.

3:18:58Shawn Ryan:And his sight returned, his arthritis and that was all gone. And as Christ looked at him, the myth is that he says, as you are centurion, so you shall remain until we meet again. And Robin Moore wrote a series of books called Casca, the Eternal Soldier. And I met Robin at the SOA. And I said, you know, I'd really like to do an update on that. How do I get to use the copyright on the character? And he goes, Casca's not copyrighted. Casca was a real person. He was a Spaniard, Iberian, and he actually was the, how do they call it, the head spear, the most senior centurion ever legion in that. He was actually the centurion that had the guard mount in the center of the city, and that's how he came to be there.

3:20:05Shawn Ryan:No kidding. And if you go to South America, that myth pops up every once in a while. The Roman, you know, the Romans around. So I wrote a fiction book based around the Banana Wars in El Salvador, and that brought it up to date. And I just never published it.

3:20:23Nick Brokhausen:Well, I hope you do.

3:20:24Shawn Ryan:I'm fiddling around with it still. Anyway, I don't want to keep you too late. No, Nick, it's been an honor. It's been an honor for me, really. Me too. I've watched you on TV, and I go, there's something about that guy.

3:20:40Nick Brokhausen:Well, seriously, it's been an honor to get your story out. You're going to make me blush. Come on. You've been one you've been through. You've lived a lot of lives. I've lived a long and eventful life.

3:20:58Shawn Ryan:And I've met a lot of good people. I've met some that weren't. some of them passed not by my hand but I think the thing I learned is I love being human every aspect the agony and the ecstasy good stay away from redheads alright I will oh wait Oh, thank you. You too. Cheers.

3:21:48Nick Brokhausen:No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

3:22:12Shawn Ryan:If you're a podcast host, listen up, this one's for you. My name is Allie Jackson. I'm the host of Finding Mr. Height, a dating and relationship podcast that I've been doing for four years now,

3:22:21Nick Brokhausen:sharing my positive and practical approach to dating that's built on my own life experience. And I wanted to share another experience that I've had, my secret behind monetizing my show. It's called Red Circle. And I was just telling my colleague about how much I love their platform. With Red Circle, not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience, but I also love the support I receive in ad sales. It's not just typical ad sales either. It's targeted opportunities based on my show and my life. And the platform is super simple. You just set your preferences and Red Circle matches you with sponsors

3:22:49Shawn Ryan:that align with your show. You can vet every opportunity and their platform gives you great analytics. More recently too, my Red Circle team has brought me opportunities outside of my podcast on social media to really augment the podcast partnerships, bring them full circle. I just can't recommend them enough. If you want to give it a try, go to redcircle.com to get your free trial.

3:23:07Nick Brokhausen:That's redcircle.com for a free trial.