Jocko Podcast - 180: Covert Lessons Learned From "Across The Fence" in Vietnam, with John Stryker Meyer

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

0:00:00 – Opening 0:05:05 – Green Beret, John Stryker Meyer: Life, Lessons, and Vietnam 2:11:28 – Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:16:42 – Support: How to stay on THE PATH. 2:43:48 – Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 180 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. It was May 1968. We were triple volunteers. We had volunteered and graduated from the Army's Parachute Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia, made it through the qualification course at the Special Forces Training Group in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And after attending the fifth Special Forces Group airborne in-country training program,

We had volunteered to serve in MACV SOG's command and control. During Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, several of the Green Berets teaching various courses told us to avoid C&C because the duty was rough and the Special Forces casualties were high in the top secret unit. Despite all those warnings, Rick Howard, John McIntyre, Rick Estes, Tony Harrell, Mark Gentry, Bob Garcia, Bobby D. Leathers, myself, and a few others volunteered to serve in C&C. I'd been in training or in between training cycles since entering the Army on 1 December, 1966.

In May, 1968, we were finally shifting gears from being in a training mode to an operational mode. None of the rumors prepared us for what followed. You won't need those, the Sergeant Major said. Put away all pens, pencils, and notebooks. This is a top secret briefing. All of you have either obtained a top secret clearance or will do so in the near future, or you wouldn't be here. Welcome to the Command and Control Detachment

of the Fifth Special Forces Group, Airborne, First Special Forces, United States Army Special Operations, Augmentation, Study and Observations Group, or simply C&C. Gentlemen, before you is a confidentiality agreement. You can't tell your girlfriend, your mother, no one. We were prohibited from writing anything about the operation, forbidden from keeping diaries, taking photos, making drawings, or tape recordings, notes of any sort.

The Sergeant Major advised us that anyone who didn't want to sign that agreement could leave. Gentlemen, the Sergeant Major turned toward a generic map on the wall. The North Vietnamese Army controls these neutral countries and pointed to Cambodia and Laos, located to the west of the Republic of South Vietnam, and of course, North Vietnam. For several years, the North Vietnamese Army had moved soldiers, supplies, rockets, guns, and propaganda south into the eastern provinces of neutral Laos and Cambodia.

through an ever-increasing network of trails and roads called the Ho Chi Minh Trail Complex. Now listen up real close, the Sergeant Major said. When you go across the fence, you will carry no identification of any manner, shape, or form. That meant no identification papers, no dog tags, no diaries, no photos, no love letters, and certainly no green berets. Everyone would wear sterile fatigues with no company insignia, no name tags, no unit designators, no jump wings, or combat infantrymen badges. Why? Without giving anyone a chance to respond, he said that because Laos and Cambodia were neutral, the United States government could publicly proclaim that the U.S. repers respected that neutrality.

Thus, if we were killed in Laos, Cambodia, or North Vietnam, the U.S. government would deny having anything to do with us. The United States government would explain that no Americans were stationed in Laos or Cambodia, which was technically accurate. The U.S. government had plausible deniability if we were killed or captured. And if captured, we were to speak a foreign language. Don't tell them who you are, he ordered. Remember, technically, under the terms and conditions of the Geneva Accords,

your status is different than Air Force and Navy pilots shot down over North Vietnam. They're in uniform. They're identifiable as U.S. servicemen. CNC men don't fall into the category of prisoners of war. We were, in effect, spies, although the Sergeant Major never used that word. He also didn't tell us that spies had no protection under the Geneva Convention and that we could some will rarely be executed if captured and that right there that's some excerpts from the beginning of a book called across the fence which is written by a special forces soldier in

vietnam named john striker mire and in this particular case it is an absolute honor for me to say that we have him here with us tonight to teach us about his experiences as a member of Mac V. Sog, studies and observations, command, group, command, and control teams. Sir? Welcome. Welcome to the show. Glad to be here. That's quite a welcome you got to Vietnam, huh?

Yes, it was quite something. Absolutely. At the time, we had just watched the John Wayne movie, the Green Berets on top of it all. So we were all psyched. We've seen the movie. We're ready. That's all it takes And we've been forewarned You know

When you go there This is going to happen Little guy's going to come out And ask for people to volunteer So we said yeah right now When we were done It happened Before he shipped us out

Little guy comes out We're looking for volunteers And then Johnny Mac goes For what Sarge Can't tell you Either you're in or you're not So we raised their hands Next day we're up in Denang

For that briefing you covered Dang Before we jump into that How'd you end up in the military Where did you grow up? You grew up in Jersey Yeah, I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. Dad was a milkman, grew up in a milk truck,

and then mom was a piano teacher, choir organist. And after high school, it took me two years to flunk out of college. Upon flunking out in 1966, I was working up in Yosemite in National Park. Oh, nice. Yeah, it was a garbage man, fireman up there. And the book, The Green Berets came out, and my dad has sent me a letter saying, hey, that's it. You finally flunked out.

you're going to get drafted. We got the notification here from the draft board. So I read the book and I said, you know what, if I'm going to go, if I can get in with these guys, that would be a great challenge. And if I can do that, that's the way I want to go.

Because at that time, with the Army, eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced infantry, a month leave, and you're in Vietnam. You could be with any regular conventional unit. And by that time, there had been enough stories about some issues,

particularly when they were engaged in the regular North Vietnamese, Army that they were having some major issues and surprises how strong the enemy was. So give me some more training. I needed it. And when you were a kid, did you play sports or anything like that? Yeah. I was never that good at it, but I love baseball. It was a head game and football. And my dad wouldn't let me play football until my senior year of high school. So I had one year of football, but everything else was just like JV, Little League, just love baseball. Why didn't you want you to play football doing once you get hit in the head too much?

That could be. They didn't care back then, did they? You know what? I think it was more, well, in eighth grade, I hurt my knee playing soccer. So they were worried about follow-up injuries there and still have your body in one piece when you go to college or wherever you're going to go, you know. So they were very conservative. I mean, you know, my mom, she's an old farm girl from Central Jersey. And she was really unhappy when my granddad gave me a guy.

cap pistol. So that's the household we grew up in. But, you know, eventually we went out, learned about weapons a little bit along the way. And then, of course, when this came along, we got the real deal. And the, what was, so 1966, so public opinion wasn't completely against the war yet. Was it in 66? No, but it was beginning. It was starting. You had people doing their protests and letters to the editor and some of the fringe elements of society, like we see today. There's some of those parallels. But you going down, how did your parents,

your dad was on board, obviously, because he sent you the letter saying, all right, buddy. Yeah, well, it's like, what school did you flunk out of? Yeah. Try and stay college. Yeah. And then you just said,

I'm going to go to Yosemite to be a firefighter? Well, we had a couple of buddies of mine that I've been in college with helped me flunk out. And we did much, much serious drinking. Just the, you know, just stupid young and dumb. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah, I'm sure. And so they had a corrupt congressman that got us jobs in Yosemite at summer. It's a good old Frank Thompson came through for us. We drove across, and in fact, in Manhattan, Kansas, we got hit with a tornado, June 12th going across the Rocky Mountains. We had snow with the back window blown out of the car. So it was just fun. Yeah.

A nice experience. Again, we drank a little bit too much there. But the first time, real job, real money. And then the reality check is just like, these guys are amazing. I mean, if I can get even close to this, get the jump school, at least get a taste of this. So that was the plan. How was the culture shock when you rolled into Army boot camp? Well, by that time, I'd seen a couple dozen of the movies over time from the World War II movies.

So you kind of knew what was coming. So early on, I had a... A friend of mine, whose dad had been in the Army, he goes, look, when you go in, just remember, this is like a game. They want to see if they can break you or not, and you just got to have the right mindset. And that stuck with me. So through basic, particularly with jump school, they come in and shake you out of bed, 2 o'clock in the morning for bogus inspections, just to see if they could mess you up

or break you a little bit. It's kind of like, okay, we all know this is a game. We all know we're training here. And so that was the way we moved forward. And you guys could go right into the, you could go. go right into the Q course? Like you could just do that pipeline? It was open for you?

Well, because we lost so many people, they came out with what, at that time we called the baby SF course. So yes. And even to this day, some of the guys that went through training group with are still down a brag now training SF guys. And,

I mean, we're biased, but we feel that if you come through basic advanced jump school and go right into the Q course and qualify, now I have a pre-qualification, then your qualification, and then you get the break.

That there's no bad habits. Like a lot of the sergeants from the old days when they came in, you had to be an E5 above more time in grade, et cetera, et cetera, and before they'd be even considered you. But they needed bodies. Well, the guys, again, we're biased, so let me get the bias out front. There's the green kids that came in that went off and did the job. And eventually at SAG, by 68 and 69,

the majority of the one zero's team leaders were young guys. And there's a lot of us that either got bored, like in my case, flunked out, or just wanted something different. And it said, this is special forces, and then you get the rumors, and then you finally get to that briefing where you say, hey, there's a chance to volunteer.

Little did you realize there's the highest casualty operation in the entire war. Yeah. But they forgot to tell you that. tell you that part. So did you volunteer for C&C while you were still stateside or was that once you got overseas? No, at that time, the only way you could get into special forces of that program was to enlist for airborne on assigned. And then when you went through basic, then at the advanced infantry, you would be offered the opportunity to volunteer. So during one of the classes,

they would have, you know, like in my case, it was a rainy day. We're in a gym. there's like 600, 7 people sitting on the floor. And they had the stage up front with sidesteps. And a cook would come up and say, hey, the coolest MOS, you'll never go hungry with us. And they're all fat and sloppy, you know. Traditional cooks. And then other guys coming for Cammo, Intel, MPs, that kind of stuff.

And at the very end, this little banty rooster comes in, and it was raining. So everybody else had a rainjackets and stuff on. This bany rooster comes in with a beret, and his fatigues are wet. He came up and did a straight jump on the stage, turned around and said, we're looking for recruits for Special Forces. If you're interested, see me outside. In fact, anybody interested?

Well, hell, I read the book. I jumped up off the floor. Me and about three other guys. And the other 700 just sat there. I'm going like, WTF? You guys are going to the nom in a couple weeks. I'm going to get just a little bit more training here. It was just amazing.

So he jumped off the stage and that's it. So he ran us through the psychological test, had to show we could swim, run, all that stuff. Were you a calm guy initially? Did you get trained as a calm guy? Yes. Did they still call it 18 Echo back then or no? No, this is prehistoric.

05B, 4S. The 4S is the SF designator. Got it. And 05B is common Morse code. And then after a training group, they sent us down for 12 weeks before Gordon for RTT because they need a lot of the A camps and, of course, C and C,

needed some RTT operators, radio teletype. And so that was the extra training. And that's where I got busted. Me and Johnny McIntyre got busted down to private, E-Duce. So when we landed a non-Words... What you do to earn that? Well, we were just assholes, really. I mean, these are butter bars.

Two young lieutenants, they got this company, and here come these Green Berets. We just got done all our training. We're official Green Berets now, right? You're the baddest man on the planet. Andrew with your buddy. Yeah, yeah. So when I have my Article 15 hearing with the CEO, I go in and there's eight Article 15s on the tail.

He says, pick one. So I picked one, scrusted up and threw it out of me because you got nine now. And I got me and McIntyre got busted. So it was E-Duce. Landed in Noms and E-Duce. Oh, man. Yeah. So it wasn't until you got to Vietnam.

Correct. That you heard about CNC? Or no, you said some training instructors had told you like, hey, don't even trust. Well, you know, here, one of these little science. bars. When we go through Como, myself, McIntyre, and a few us got recycled because you had to get up to, I forget, 12 or 15. Groups for a minute or something. Yeah. WPMs. Yeah. I had to do that too with the SEAL team. I went through a course, like one of the last guys that were learning Morris Code and we had to get whatever it was. I think we had a lower standard than that because we, because it was just no one would have passed. You weren't even an officer then. We couldn't give you the officer out. True, true. So, no, but one of our guys who took us under his wing

was a guy named Paul Villarosa, SFC, been in on three times, had a little tattoo around his neck, cut here. But he helped us. He got us gone. So in our mind, he and we had Wagner and Rousseau, two other instructors for the 05B. And so when they got to know us near the end, it's like, hey, you guys go, don't do this volunteer stuff.

Get an A camp, learn about the people, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's what it came down to. So when we get that briefing, the top secret briefing, one of the first things we hear about from Scuttlebutt, Paul Villa Rosa was KIA, the first KIA out of FOB4 at the time, which was in January of 68. So here's one of our living legends who got us in the SF, trained us up as KIA. And that had a, you know, talk about Psiops.

It hit hard. But so that was in Vietnam when they now said to you, okay, do you want to be a part of this other program? Do you want to go one more volunteer route and end up here? Yes, sir. And, of course, you're like, yeah, let's bring it. Let's go. Young and dumb. And then, so then you immediately got assigned.

They said, do they have to test you, screen you anything else? Or they just said, okay, you're smart enough to volunteer? Yeah, but that time, all the vetting had been done. All of us either had the top secret or it was in process. And so from near, literally the next day, a plane to Danang up north, and then we had the briefing. And of course, you know, we had a safe house to Danang where there's House 22. That's our safe house.

And welcome to Special Forces, you know. And that was a safe house that was run by either us or the agency or both. And, you know, you go in and here's... old SF guys. In fact, there was one of the teams just got back from trying to rescue one of our hatchet forces. And they were just sitting there talking about the combat. And Mack and I are sitting there going, oh, shit, we're going to really die. It's a good thing we spent all our money because when we were going through the RT&T training, we had a weekend pass. We go up, we're in Washington when we see the Tet Offensive and the tanks are running over Langvei, the A-Camp at Langvei A-101.

And we go, we know we're going to die with a high degree of certainty. So we went home, took all our money out of the bank, all of our princely earnings of $1,000. We ate steak dinners until we went to Vietnam. So there we were at this House 22, and we're thinking about the same thing. It's going like, oh, shit, we're really into it now. And so we go upstairs, take showers. And in the showers, there's a couple of these hookers that are in there, douching out with Coke, Coca-Cola.

Yeah. And they're cleaning up just like, welcome. You hear a couple guys getting a load in the back there, and they're all pumping away. It's like, oh, this is really cool. They didn't tell us about this side of Vietnam. Here we go. Yeah.

So bring it on. We're ready. And then you talk about that flight up to, the first place you got assigned was Fob 1. Fobb 1. Yeah, we always called them Fobb where you guys call it Fob in your generation. I guess we're cutting corners over here. Okay, so you're going to FobB1.

Called anything you like, still getting you late for supper. Well, there's a whole, there's a whole, there's a whole offshoot of the word F-O-B, which we turned into Fobb. Have you ever heard the turn Fobbit before? Yes. Yeah. So someone that stays on the Fob and never goes out. Yeah. Yeah.

Also known as REMS. Yeah. Well, yes, the REMPs is what you guys called them. And I don't know if you, the name of my consulting company is Eschelon Front. And the reason we called the company Eschelon Front is because we wanted people to know that we were the guys that were like in the front. And not the rems, which is specifically taken from David Hackworth's book. Indeed, yes. Read a ton of times.

Yeah, me too. How was that? Yeah, awesome. And flying up into F-O-B-1. Right, with the King Bee. Yeah, how was that? Oh, God. It was, it's just another day in the Secret War, you know, because they had the old H-34s,

and so the pilots stood up high, and then you had the apartment in the back for the passengers. And there's a door gunner. So when McIntyre, me and John Hutchins get on the H-34s, the door is only on the right side. So we all get in, and I see the helicopter pilot going, I mean, the gunner going. Was the gunner Vietnamese? Yeah, this is all Vietnamese crews.

Were you ready for that mentally? Not at all. Okay. It's like, yeah, there's one more novelty. Important note to make to everyone so that the aircraft is being flown by a Vietnamese pilot with a VAT. Vietnamese co-pilot and the Vietnamese gunner. Yeah.

It was the 219th Special Operations Squadron for the South Vietnamese Air Force and all pilots. And so, you know, our training was we're going to work with the people there, the indigenous people. But when you literally climb into their helicopter and your life is now in their hands, that's like, you know, we didn't, I'll bet you mentioned that. I didn't really think about it much, but it was. taking those couple steps, jumping in and going like, that WTF2? What's going on here now? I thought we'd have, you know, like we've seen in the movie with John Wayne.

They all had Ui. It's not this old H-304 Sikorsky thing. And the engine in that was a B-17 rotary engine. And we're going to get into the fact of how those guys prove themselves over and over and over and over again to be just incredibly brave and not just incredibly good pilots, but just brave beyond comprehension. When you were flying up there, was it a mellow flight up there?

It was cool. Yeah, it was a beautiful day. You know, it's warm. It's always hot. But once you get air, you get the flow. You know how it is when you're flying through. And we're going over to cemeteries and everything. And we're going down Highway 1,

which is heading north from Danang up to Fubai. And we went past the Fubai airport. And so we're flying north on the west side of the Highway 1. And you see the airport, and then there's this big compound, which was the second Armin Division training company. And then all of a sudden, it's like you're flying north and then you're on your side,

looking straight down at the road. You did a 90-degree flip as he begins his turn. So I seen the guy talking, the door gun, are like doing a scrunchy thing, you know, because we all had a new fatigue, and you can just tell we're newbies. Disgusting noobes, green-ass green berets.

This guy's going to have his kick. So I was kind of, thinking something's going to happen well this is it well macketard goes geez and hutchins goes the same way and i'm watching the guy he so we did that you know you look down there's the road and it's the first time we had a helicopter with that kind of a radical ride and so he did a 180 and then came back and did a 360 and land it we get off well we get off and then a recont team gets on disappears Was that, was that Spike Team Idaho that got on? Correct, yes, sir.

So, so that happens. The 1-0, that's the bracelet right there. And that does, you got off that bird that brought you into FOB1. Yeah. And it was Spike Team Idaho that got on board. Yep. Glen Lane was the 1-0 and Robert Owen was the 1-1 with four indigenous troops or five indigenous troops. And so you start your check-in and whatever and then whatever, however me, however me,

the hours goes by. Yeah. And all of a sudden, what's happening on camp when you start to realize that something's gone sideways? Well, you know, I was very fortunate.

When with the training group, I was a catcher and played center field for our eight company softball team. And we went on to feed that summer. And the reason why, Spider Parks,

Robert J. Spider Parks was our pitcher. And that little skinny-ass texting could bring it. And we still played fast pitch. None of this wimpy, slow-pitched shit. And so we won all our games.

And so I come in, we land Macinty and I And we're like literally walking in front of the S3 office. Just, you had a long road that went from Highway 1 east into the compound. The training centers on the right. It's all new. We hear the Vietnamese and we hear Cambodians on the left. If we go down and we get in and take our stuff out, we're just standing looking stupid.

And then here comes Spider Parks. And it's like, whoa, am I glad to see you? Because we were both in A company together. Spent many months there training up before we came. came. And now he, but he wasn't the one that told you what was going on with, uh, no, because right at that point, it was like, hey, you know, I got a spare bunk. If he goes in, talks to the sergeant major, says, I know this asshole. I'm going to bring him in with me for a couple days and we'll see what's going to happen. Because at that point, uh, spider had been on Idaho, run four or five

missions with the Sergeant Lane. And then Lane said, you're ready for your own team. So he promotes them off. They appoint him as a one zero. And so he was in that interim time, which, he was, for the transition to come where he's going to get assigned a team. And so he's in base. The team goes out. So he's got a high degree of interest in what their status is. So they missed the first combo check. They gave a team okay, which in our case,

once you're on the ground, you usually wait about 10 minutes to see what's going on around you, gave a team okay. Then the assets leave because they can't stay that long anyway, at least the helicopters. Do they head back? Which the team okay was breaking squel. on the radio?

Right. Generally. Generally speaking, yeah. So for those you that don't know what that is, when you squeeze the handset on the radio, you can tell on the other end, okay, they just purposefully squeeze that microphone three times. We know that that's the signal for okay.

Right. And sometimes, like, early on, the guys may say, team okay, but yeah, later on, that's all it was. Just break, break. And then they say, okay, then Covey would leave. so they were in and then Spider came back

later he goes hey we haven't heard from Idaho so by dinner time hey we haven't heard about Idaho we haven't heard from them we're really concerned

about what's going on here and then by the morning there's still at that point not a word and at what point did you guys get word I know what

I'm hazy on how many what the day or time frame was but eventually another they decided that has been too long, no commo. They put in what they call a bright light,

which is a team that goes into either find the other team, if there's casualties or down pilots. That's what the bright light missions were. Down pilots, bring relief, or just bring casualties out or help people get the team out, the wounded team. So they went in, a team that went in. Everybody was wounded.

One guy was killed. This is from the team that went in? Went in for the bright light. This is Oregon. Correct. Yeah. With Mike Tucker. and George the troll Sternberg.

They went in, and at one point, they were thrown in a bomb crater. And so the NBA were hitting them with our weapons, Car 15 fire, they had our M26 fragonades, one of which blew off George's jungle boot. So all these guys were really banged up pretty bad when they came out. But they got out.

But they didn't find anybody from Idaho. Correct. I'm going to take it back to the book here. This is sort of the this is this is the reaction back at F-O-B-1 When Oregon comes back back at base there was a collective sigh of relief that ST Oregon had survived the short-lived but furious but ferocious bright light mission the loss of ST Idaho however hung over the camp like an invisible fog Spider was the first person I spoke to after that bright light he went straight to the

Bar unable to believe that ST Idaho had vanished the complete lack of clues added to the mystery Were they killed were they wounded captured and now prisoners of the NVA? McIntyre voiced everyone's next thought Before he'd be captured by the NVA he said he'd kill himself with a round from his car 15 or pretend to be dead and blow up as many NVA as possible with one final hand grenade There was no doubt in my mind I'd never be taken alive from that day forward, I always carried an M-26 fragonade on the upper hook of my web gear. It was the last one I'd used, I would use. Welcome to C&C. McIntyre muttered. We had heard about ST Asp from F.O.B.4, vanishing in Laos, presumed KIA on 28 March, 1968. But there were others.

Sergeant First Class Robert L. Taylor killed four April. ST. Bear from FOB3, KIA, Laos, Major George Cuomo, U-17 crash, died 14 April. FOB 5-based spike team members, Sergeant First Class Leroy N. Wright, and staff sergeant Lloyd F. Musau, KIA, Fish Hook Area of Cambodia, 2 May. F.O.B.2-based Lieutenant Joseph C. Shreve, KIA, Hatchet Force Operation. 1 May. F.O.B. 1 based, ST. Alabama, team members specialist fifth class, Kenneth M. Crian, and private first class, Paul Chester King, KIA, A shall target 4 May. F.O.B. 1 hatchet for Sergeant First Class Ronald J. Miller, KIA 12 May. F.O.B.1 based Master Sergeant Robert D. Plato and Sergeant First Class John Hartley Robertson. KIA, King B, helicopter, crash, Laos, 20 May.

Additionally, five SF troops were killed at FOB3 from mortar and artillery shrapnel between 15 and 21 April, 1968. Specialist 5th class Charles M. Corey, specialist 5th class Daniel F. Sandoval, Sergeant Dennis Thorpe, Sergeant First Class Stephan Mazak, and Specialist 5th Class Samuel F. Sandoval. Sergeant Dennis Thorpe, Sergeant First Class Stefan Mazak, and Specialist Fifth Class Samuel R. Hughes. McIntyre and I didn't personally know any of the KIAs, but the sheer number in that short period of time was sobering.

Most of them were veteran Special Forces soldiers. Being as green as we were made us all the more nervous, but not scared enough to quit. That's quite the welcome aboard. Oh, yeah, and then one little side note on Spider Parks, on that bright light, when the team came out, they were so shot up because one of the team members got additionally wounded on the extraction that they never gave a team okay. Spider went down with a King Bee, separate King Bee, got out looking to make sure everybody was out. and they took intense fire that kingby got fired up and on extraction the door gunner was

KIA on that so spider was um quite a mess when he got back yeah that's that was such a short period of time to be losing all those guys that's a matter of months oh yeah and we left several out um so these uh these spike teams going in explain a little bit about what the spike teams were like what it consisted of? The spike teams was a code name for our recon teams. They had two

basic elements with CNC. The hatchet force which could be a company platoon or a company size operation and then

the recon teams which we had would be two or three Americans with the corresponding number of indigenous troops.

So initially we ran three Americans with three South Vietnamese. And the South Vietnamese in our team were really good. And then later, they were so good that I just ran myself in a one-one with Ford

a Ditch. And we trained up heavily, particularly after that, and then learned who the best ones were. And we had a couple of the guys that had been like Hep or interpreter, Sal, who had been there. They've been running missions for over two years by 68. So they were highly respected. In fact, only about like grace of God, they weren't on the team that disappeared because we were able to build around them. You have this other part in the book here. This is another sort of welcome to F.O.B.1. During the first few weeks in F.O.B.1, I attended at least three memorial services for fallen S.F. comrades. Services were held in the mess hall. The last one I attended was for Lane and Owens. During the service, the chaplain hesitated on Lane's name.

This was the last official function honoring Spike Team Idaho's members, and the chaplain couldn't remember Lane's name. I didn't care if he had attended a dozen memorial services for other branches of the military that day. I was so angry I never attended another memorial service that FOB won. The services soon stopped anyway because there were so many casualties. No official announcement. They just stopped. Yeah. You and I were talking a little bit about Ramadi when we were in Ramadi,

and the one thing that we started doing immediately was going to the memorial services of the soldiers and Marines that were getting killed. And that was a big wake-up call for everybody. I can tell you, I don't think probably anyone in my task unit had ever been to a, yeah, had ever been to a memorial service overseas for guys that had been killed. I mean, and here we were, they were happening every day. You never think about it. Until you're there.

No. And you guys were having so many casualties that they just said, okay, well, we're not even going to have them anymore. Here's talking about some of your first few operations that you went on. And I don't think I've talked about this, but. So these little teams that you had. Yeah. These little teams were getting into helicopters and flying over the fence, which means over the border, into Laos and Cambodia to do reconnaissance pretty much in the middle of nowhere by yourselves.

Correct. This type of operation in present day is not very likely to happen. The amount of risk that you guys were taken, it's crazy to read about. Like my personal contingency that I'm running through my head, you know, what if this happened? What if that happens? I'm looking at these saying, yeah, if I was the commander in charge, I'd say, well, you need to come up with a better plan. You need to come up with something where we have better backup, especially when the situation is, because you guys can get air support and you guys used it heavily. But as soon as the weather rolled in, it was like you guys are out there on your own.

And, I mean, we'll get into some stories where we're out there on your own. For sure. And, you know, and that element of it is an extraage contingency. We had no artillery, no traditional army or Marine Corps support. And, of course, no seal teams. They were busy doing this stuff on the coast. And so it was quite something to go across the fence. And in a way, we were flying into the 18th century

because everything was so old, the way of working. And they used to do slash and burn agriculture. So you come in with a helicopter. Everybody here, you're coming. And the local people had to cooperate with the NVA because their model was, work with us or we're going to kill your dumbass. So the game was on. And the purpose of most of these was to figure out where the trails were, what was being

transported, where the location of enemy personnel were. It was your basic reconnaissance missions, right? Well, in addition, yes, that was the first part. So you always had general missions. Either a point mission, because by the end of 68, They were building fuel lines from the north. They were coming down, and they were going across the DMZ River in Laos. And so we heard reports about that.

So that could be a point mission or a general recon to see where the movement's gone, what the supplies are. And then wiretaps, PLW snatch, and those were the other missions. And so our South Vietnamese were trained. We trained them up. So back then we had a stadia artist player, right? And Sal could climb up a telephone pole, hook it up, and cover the wire all the way up with mud, so if anybody walked past, they would never see that wire.

And we would record, because the CIA told us, if you record, even though you don't hear anything, keep it on. Because when you get those tapes back to us, we're going to amplify it 100 times. Because the North Vietnamese phones, even though we're in the cradle, they were still on. And we could record it.

They'd amplify, and they could hear people talking in the background. get intel off of that. So those are some of the other missions. So you start going on your first few operations here. And by the next morning, back to the book, by the next morning the weather had broken and we were inserted smack dab in the middle of the biggest road running north to south

through the A-Shao Valley. Am I saying that right? Ashaw. Ashaw Valley. There was no jungle. There were, however, hundreds of bomb craters of various sizes. But what surprised me the most was the number of pungy pits that we passed,

Some were huge, large enough for animals. And you go through this mission, this is one of your first missions, and there's like no enemy contact. And one of the guys who were with Walkin and I looked at each other in complete disbelief. We had just walked down into the valley of the shadow of death without seeing one NVA soldier. Spider joked with me saying that I was one of the few people in the history of C&C to have a run a practice mission and two missions and still have not gotten the combat infantryman's badge. the award given to soldiers who had seen combat with the enemy or were under direct hostile fire. I kept telling myself that this was a fluke, and I remembered what the Special Forces trainers told us at Fort Bragg. The NBA and the Viet Cong guerrillas will fight when they want to no sooner.

So your first couple of operations, you got pretty lucky. Oh yeah, we're a slipper snail snout. We went into could we put in those Air Force sensors. And then we had all this attack air stacked up. Because we just figured it's going to be a shit show. Nothing happened. So we left out some poor NBA gunner opens up with a 50 caliber. They killed him several times, man.

Napalm, bombs, because they wanted to use something on this big mission, right? Were you, the other interesting that you talk about in the book, I don't think it was one of yours, but even when you guys would do training missions over there, there was like a potential for enemy contact on your training missions. Absolutely. Yeah, Lynn Black and his team. they ran the heavy contact. In fact, it was the Navy that saved their dumb ass

of that one training mission because they just happened to have the frequency. The Kingsbees couldn't get in and they called the Navy and they came in a big boat. Yeah, yeah. Some kind of boat.

That's what we want. But they came in and pulled their ass out because the Via-Conn had mustered a couple hundred people that were coming after. And they were just out trying to do like a shakeout patrol,

just a little training operation. Yeah, just a little in-country thing. You know, just go train get a couple days, get out of camp, eat some lurps, have some fun. Well, your luck didn't hold up, I guess. Going back to the book. And is this guy's name Sal?

Am I saying that right? Perfect. Okay. By now, Sal's eyes were bigger than sauces. So you've been inserted, and now you're starting to have a situation unfold. If you raise Spider-Walk and said, tell him I'm declaring prairie fire emergency.

If he says anything about not hearing any gunshots, Tell him to fuck off. I'll explain later. Sal's never been wrong. Look at him as we spoke Sal looked at us Boku VC Boku VC. Call King Bees now he whispered and then you get on the horn. I have a Prairie fire emergency team in distress. I have a prairie fire emergency can anyone hear me? I spoke in a hushed tone with my hand cupped over the mouth of the radio. I looked at my watch we still had more than a hundred minutes before our next scheduled commo check with Spider at 1600. No one responded. So the deal with com windows are back in the day when we had batteries that would run out, you couldn't just sit there and monitor the radio all the time. On either side,

people that were waiting for you to call, they'd be waiting and they didn't want to, they wouldn't monitor the whole time so they would come up at certain pre-designated communication windows. So that's what's going on here. You have this bad situation unfolding and you go to call, but they're not particularly listening at that moment, which is why no one's responding. Right. Yeah,

I'm just explaining that to some folks that because nowadays we have, well, first of all, we have cell phones. We call anyone whatever we want. It makes a nice ringtone and you talk to whoever you want to. But even when I got in, we had comm windows. Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we set up, I was a calm guy too.

Sure, yeah. We set up calm windows and we'll call you, you know, whatever it was every two hours or whatever. And that's the situation that's unfolding right here. You guys still hadn't been contacted yet. So back to the book, I sat down with my back against the PRC 25 and opened a can of apricots. I was facing south and just starting to sip the sweet apricot nectar

when all hell broke loose. The green jungle around us erupted with deafening full automatic blast from NVA AK-47s and R-Car-15s. Because my back was to them, I hadn't seen Sal's warning gestures or watched him get the jump on the approaching NVA. I remember spilling apricot nectar on the stock of my car 15 as I turned to my left where the majority of the NVA gunfire was coming from. Foolishly, my first thoughts were that I'd have to clean off the nectar

off my weapon and not spill the entire can of apricotts because I had waited so damn long to eat them. They were always a treat in the jungle. But the initial seconds of the firefight, I remember, And how do I say his name? Fook. What? Oh, Fook.

Fook yelling profanities at the NVA as they fired on full automatic. The crack of AK-47 rounds had never sounded louder or closer. All I could see from our perimeter was gun smoke. The red and orange blasts coming from the darker than ever green jungle and the green AK-47 tracers flying over our heads. In an odd sort of way, there was an eerie beauty to the scene. The thunderous fury of dozens of men blasting away at each other on full automatic within 10 feet of each other killed all other sounds the eardrums were numb adrenaline

it slammed into our bloodstreams and was now screaming through our systems it heightened all senses it extended time for example a car 15 fires 20 rounds of 556 high velocity ammunition in less than one and a half seconds yet those first opening moments of combat with the NVA seemed much longer than a half a second than a second and a half ordinarily when firing on full automatic the weapon expended rounds quickly and we trained ourselves to try and gauge when that last round in the magazine was slamming into the receiver some men placed a trace a round in the magazine as a visual cue during that firefight it seemed as though I counted the rounds leaving the car 15 and knew exactly when the 18th and

last round was exiting the weapon also during that first exchange fuk was slightly behind me to my right and since I was on the ground he was firing over my shoulder that exposed my right ear to almost a full blast from his car 15 the explosions were painful but fuck saved my life I had aimed the car 15 down the hill toward the largest number of AK 47 muzzle flashes that I could see to my left what I hadn't seen were a handful of a handful of NVA soldiers who broke out of the jungle to the right and had opened fire on us Fok realized I hadn't seen the NVA troops coming up the hill so he got to my right and blasted them back into the jungle I was so focused on the first muzzle flashes

that I had completely missed the others. If those NVA soldiers had advanced a few more feet, we would have been history, and the remainder of the team, which was on my left, would have been at risk. That time warp continued when everybody ran out of bullets simultaneously. The only sounds audible were the metal clicks of cold magazines being slammed into hot machine guns

and bolts slamming shut to resume the firefight. A key element in any firefight is the race to reload after the initial contact. On 7 October 1968, ST Idaho won the race. No one was faster than Sao, Heap, Hep, Hep, Fok at getting the first magazine out,

the second one in, and returning full automatic gunfire on the enemy. Within seconds, we had gained fire superiority. The months and months of training on the range under the tutelage of Spider-Spider and Wolken, all of the live-fire drills, all the live fire races to see who finished reloading first paid off. All other games in life were frivolous and irrelevant.

In this deadly game, if you missed hitting the target, you died. So that was your first big contact, huh? That was it. That's a doozy. It was, absolutely. And it still sticks with us, you know. Never forget it. And fuck, I mean, later on we're back in base.

I was complaining. Because I didn't realize what had happened. And so talking through Hep, the interpreter, he said, you dumb fucker. I just saved your ass. These guys were coming up the hill and you're too stupid to realize it. Oh, so you were mad at him for shooting too close to your ear? Oh, yeah, because my ear was just fucked. I couldn't hear it for days.

It's like, so thanks for saving my life. I'm complaining, right? Oh, classic. Oh, yeah. You continue on with this a little bit. As we gained complete fire superiority, I turned on the U.R.C. 10 beeper Started screaming into the PRC 25. I have a fucking prairie fire emergency.

That bitter fear-laced plea was greeted with complete silence. Woken was less than subtle. Keep yelling until you get someone. A key factor in ST Idaho's favor that day was the small knoll that Woken has driven us to. The jungle is so thick and the knoll is so small that only a score of NVA could rush at once. They weren't fast-moving, fear-inspiring charges that the NVA were known for successfully executing either here the jungle worked against them but the NVA kept coming at one point Wolken pulled me over pointed into the jungle and said look they're stacking up dead bodies to get to us

hip showed me can you believe it and they keep coming hell if we kill enough of them the body stack will be as high as we are because the jungle area was so dark at first I couldn't tell exactly what I was looking at but woken was right the NVA were stacking bodies and firing at us from behind their dead comrades. A lot of NVA soldiers died in those first few minutes of hell on earth. That's a determined enemy. Oh, yeah. And we heard about, you know, it's one thing to hear about it, basic,

and special forces training, how determined the enemy was. And to see it firsthand, dying like that, I mean, literally just kept coming. And we had high ground. You know, thank God for high ground, thick jungle, and the fact that it wasn't a big area where they could mass more. You guys didn't bring a, you guys didn't have an automatic weapon with you? You guys didn't have an A-dub like a belt-fed machine gun?

You guys wouldn't carry those? No, we had a six-man team. And the team, some of the teams began carrying the M-60 a little later. And then the RPG, because they cut the barrel off and it had the magazine, the circular magazine that holds, I think it's 200, 250 rounds. Got it. But they would, someone did it.

But in our case, because we carried the M79 also, it was sold off M79. Because that gave you a lot of extra firepower. Did you use the Fleschette rounds with that, or just the H.E? The first round would be Fleschette. So if anything was close, that would be the first round. And then if we needed the HEs, we had the H.E rounds. But no AWs, man.

That's it. This, I, I, when I hear that story right there, I would do anything to have an M-60 machine on that situation. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

But just the weight, the rounds and everything else, you know, like in my case, I carried the radio, always carried the radio. Yeah. And so between the radio, the battery,

and we always had 600 plus rounds. We were, I was on my first deployment to Iraq. I was on like one of my first controls in a Humvees, and we were out. And we, We ended up, we hit a little, I don't know what you call them, a steel hedgehog.

Do you know what that is? Yeah. It's like a little obstacle, right? Right. That Americans had put out, Americans had put it out a steel hedgehog, a little, it's like a little obstacle for those that you don't know. It's to prevent cars from going by. Well, we were, we made a wrong term somewhere, and we went down the road we weren't supposed to go to. And we hit one of those little steel hedgehogs.

We didn't know what it was. So we're driving. It's actually my Humvee, too. and it made a loud noise and sparked. And I actually thought, in my mind, I thought we just got hit with a low order IED, like a low order booby trap that didn't fully explode. So we come to a stop and we all get out of the vehicles.

And now we're in the middle of Baghdad. And we're just surrounded by threats. And in our mind, we're about to be attacked because we didn't know that we just ran over our own American thing, but we're too stupid to know that. We don't know that. So everyone's out there. And we're all out there with our with our M4s, our little basically car 15s.

And like I felt, I think I felt completely naked. I was saying to myself, God, you know, like we need better weapons. Now we had 50 cows mounted in the Humvees, but, you know, once we were mobile, I'm thinking we do. Why don't we have, you know, belt fed machine guns? When I got, when we got back that night, it wasn't just me that felt like because that night, all my guys, they went in every Humvee, everyone put belt fed machine guns. We mounted them.

We staged them. So anytime we got out of those vehicles, we were ready to go to war. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Particularly in a situation like that, because you can have unlimited people come after you. It's nuts. But you have that naked feeling, yeah, because an AW in a situation like this, that'd be nice. Going back to the book for more than an hour.

My cries and screams into the radio and the URC 10 beeper went unanswered as the NVA mounted more attacks. There was no need for radio secure procedures now. The hide-and-seek portion of the game was over now it was simply a matter of survival My respect for the NVA's tenacity grew that day but the hill the jungle in our car 15s worked against them as they continue to pile up or drag away more bodies With no help around conserving ammo while keeping the enemy back became a top priority There were no more full automatic blast from us although we had been in contact less than two hours It felt like we've been fighting for several as the team anxiously awaited for help from above

of the few team members pitted against the enemy NBA seemed ludicrous in terms of survival. The enormity of the jungle hit home. Yeah, so you got, how many rounds did you say you would bring? Well, he always carried 600 plus. Per man. Oh, no. The Vietnamese would carry a lighter load because they could, they only were like 98 pounds. Uh-huh.

So I forget what their load was. And you guys had 20 round magazines at this point, right? Correct. No, 30 were just a dream we thought about. And a couple guys were smart enough to write the col, order them, and they had a mail to them later. We weren't that smart. So we had the 20 rounds, because of the spring, you only put 18 there. Yeah.

And so you're taking at some point, probably how long into this, are you starting to take point shots instead of? Oh, yeah. You just wait until things come out. You see it, and then just one to two. Finally, I heard the Texas drawl of Spider on the radio. An F4 Phantom Jet returning from a bombing run in northern Laos had heard the beach. and called him. I told Spider we had a prairie fire emergency. Spider said that he had also called the judge and the executioner. Who were the judge and the executioner? They were pilots for the 176

out of the Maricale Division and they were to muskets. Okay. And they had been assigned permanently to CNC earlier in the year and they had been up to Camduck and then they had been assigned And when Camp Duck was closed down, they came to Fubai. And they actually built a barracks that the helicopter pods could stand. They were one of the crews. Them and the Marine Corps, Scarface, were gunships that regularly hung out with us and saved our bacon. So the judge, they had these old gunships that could barely get off the ground. But he had the rocket pods.

And then the executioner was a cook. And he had the mini gun. Those are some awesome call signs. Oh, yeah. Going back to the book, thankfully, we had made mirror contact with Spider earlier, and he was able to pinpoint our location in a matter of minutes. Soon Spider was over us. He told me to pop smoke. Our SOP was not to say what color smoke grenade we would use, assuming the NVA were monitoring our FM frequency.

I popped a yellow smoke. He said he saw two yellows, which meant the NVA were monitoring our frequency and had guessed which color we would use. We changed frequencies, and I popped a viability. A few minutes later the first A1E Sky Raider arrived on target and made a gun run on our eastern perimeter His wingman made the first napalm run on the south side put your heads down. I'm gonna make you sweat he said He brought it so close we could feel the heat from the deadly jelly a few seconds later. We smelled burning flesh He dived toward us a third time the pilot drawed its crispy critter time The napalm

Run was so close we could feel the air being sucked away from us by the exploding material if the jelly had landed on a person's skin it would continue to burn either until it burned itself out or was deprived of air by mud or some other substance the spad's arrival changed the tempo the firefight when the NBA heard the old World War II plane making another run they charged us in in a desperate attempt to get as close as they could in order to avoid the Sky Raiders deadly ordinance the NBA were getting close to the belt that's horrifying so for those that don't understand the tactics of that situation. You got aircraft overhead. They're dropping napalm. So what do you think, oh, cool, that'll make the NVA run away. No. No. Actually, what they want to do is get close enough to Americans that they can't get

napalm dropped on them. By 68, they had the tactic down really tight. They knew when the aircraft were there, that they were safer, closer to us. And so they get closer, hopefully to wipe us out and to save their own ass. That's like, there's, I guess there's no higher motivation than that napalm coming at you if you stay where you're at. Nasty.

And so therefore, even at that stage of the game, we had to go back to full automatic a couple times. Because they're charging hard. Oh, yeah. What numbers are we talking about? Never knew. We just stacked them up so high. We'd never had, you know, no time to go do a body count.

You know how that is. You're just busy killing them. Yeah. I don't want to throw that out. That's all nonchalant. Like, yeah, I know how that is. No, actually, we never stacked up body so high that we lost count. Going back to the book, then an Air Force pilot, an F4 Phantom arrived on station.

Tell your people the ordinance will arrive on target before you hear me or the rounds, the pilot said. I told the team to put their heads down. The phenomenon of having bullets tearing into a target before anyone could hear the aircraft, which delivered them, was unbelievable. The jungle in front of us was shredded by the F4's gun run. Within a minute or two, his wingman dropped two 500-pound bombs. The change in aircraft staggered the NVA for a few moments. Right then and there, I thank the Lord for Uncle Sam's Air Force. The judge and the executioner rolled in right behind the fast mover.

The judge's mini gun was real close to our perimeter. Seconds later, the executioner followed behind him, firing several 2.75 millimeter rockets while his doorgunners blasted away with their M60 machine guns. Because we hadn't expended any ordinance to our west, We ran the gunships over the western edge of our perimeter. They drew no enemy fire either. About a half an hour before dusk, Spider told us that King Bees were on their way. By that time, the judge and the executioner had refueled, reloaded, and were returning a few minutes in front of them.

Everyone in ST, Idaho was dangerously low on ammo, grenades, and M79 rounds. So now you've got the extract platforms are coming back. The King Bees are coming to get you. before the King B's moved in an attempt to pick us up. Spider had the judge and the executioner make gun runs so close to our perimeter that we could hear the expended shell casings from the gunships M60 and mini guns falling to earth. Through all the excitement, I told walking that spider had spotted an area west of our perimeter where King B might be able to settle into some elephant grass for us.

Walking and hip passed the word to the team and we started moving toward the area. from our location, we couldn't see the elephant grass, and I had assumed we were locked into double or triple canopy jungle. Again, the judge and executioner hammered our eastern flank as we moved toward the tentative LZ. So I got to, or if you could explain spiders position a little bit, because that's pretty, I think that's pretty unique to Vietnam of how those guys could be up overhead sort of watching and directing. Yeah, we called them Covey. The code name was C-O-V-E-Y, but they would afford air controllers, basically. And in the C-N-C mission,

you have an Air Force pilot. At that time, most of the Cubbies were O-2, SESNA-O-2. They had a push-pool, double engine. But they always would have a prior one-zero, somebody with experience who had been on the ground who would be with the Air Force pilot. So the pilot would fly,

then he would turn the radios over to Spider, or whoever the Covey rider was. So that was a slot. So sometimes the guys would be wounded, they couldn't go to the field, but they could fly Covey. Got it. So that when we're on the ground, we have a situation that we're dealing with,

then he's able to understand as opposed to talking to an Air Force pilot who's just used to getting a bomb and drop it somewhere. and talk about all the contingent liabilities that spent off of a firefight. And so that was a spider's job. He was the cubby rider. And he and Pat Walker that day were the two cubby riders that came in, and they covered us until they got us out.

Going back to the book, Sal and Hip were covered our frantic, desperate drive to the chopper. After taking 10 minutes to cover those last 10 yards, we reached the hovering King Bee, which is about eight feet above the ground. Fox set up an impromptu security watch on the western side of the rotor wash. A quick check of my ammunition revealed I was down to one frag grenade, one white phosphorus grenade, and two magazines of car 15 rounds. If I didn't get extracted, that last frag grenade would be mine. There was no way in hell I was going to be a POW, especially after all the NVA, ST, Idaho, and TAC Air had killed. If I had to use it, I'd take as many NVA with me as I could.

That's a bold statement. Oh, yeah. But by that time, we knew about POWS what they'd go on through. And we had lost a couple of guys, and one of them had escaped. And by now we're hearing the POWS stories. So it's bad enough in country, but for our mission, no, it wasn't going to happen. I figured if this is it, I'm going to try to take as many as we can, make it a final contact. Check.

Now, you guys eventually get to where you're loading the Kingbe's, which again, these are Vietnamese pilots. They're old aircrafts. Probably look like they were held together with duct tape. Well, they always had oil and fluids inside. And sometimes if you sat in too deep, you get the fluid on your head. But we liked them better than the Ui because. they could take more hits.

And they had those old B-17 engines up front, the nine rotary heads, and they could take more hits, that's why we liked them. And this Captain Thin, is that how you say it? Captain Tin. Tin. At some point during the craziness,

I looked up at the pilot of the King Bee, Captain Tin. He was above all the madness on the ground, completely calm and collected, while his aircraft took numerous hits from enemy rounds. What made his demeanor all the more extraordinary was how it contrasted with our adrenaline hype, frantic behavior on the ground. We had been fighting for hours. We were dirty.

We were sweaty. And there sat Captain Tin, cool as a rocky mountain breeze, giving the impression that it was just another milk run. It was as though he said, no sweat, boys. I got all day. You just take your time. The stewardesses will break out the beverages after you've secured your seats. Looking at Captain Tin for a brief moment,

generated a mental image I'd carried with me forever. Frankly, I never understood how one man could be so steady under so much enemy fire and keep the chopper hovering. Can you imagine? To this day, I can't. Yeah, and you go into a little bit further here. A day or two after the extraction, Captain Tin and his crew came into F.O.B.1's Green Beret lounge. I went in and thanked him again and ordered a couple rounds of drink for all the King Bee pilots and crew members. Speaking through an interpreter, Captain T said that King Bee, he flew to extract.

us from echo four had 48 holes in it from an enemy ordinance sitting at the bar captain appeared to be just as cool and above the fray of daily life as he had on seven october tin said that an enemy round had torn a baseball-sized hole through one of the rotor blades I asked him how he could hover so long he told me that when he piloted a helicopter he thought only about flying nothing else no enemy bullets weather or anything only flying. If it's my turn to die, I die. That day wasn't my turn to die. Amazing man. He's a he lives in Arizona today. Really? He's still alive. Yeah. Oh, we'll be having him on the podcast. Hopefully he wants to come on here. That's awesome. And then you had one of your guys, and this is a, this is like

the other end of the spectrum. Like, it's hard to maintain one of your guys, Davidson had to talk to you. when he came up and he said, Tilt. I haven't mentioned that your nickname was Tilt yet. Where'd you get that nickname? Pinballs. See, when you play a pinball machine, you lose and walk away pissed off. When I lose, I shake the shit out of it.

Get to see my nickname, neon. Then I leave. How did the SF guys know about that? How did they learn about it from? Oh, it goes way back. Yeah, as a kid, we used to play pinballs all the time. Little anger management issues. Oh, indeed.

Yeah. Yeah. So Davidson he comes up tilt I have to tell you something brother I don't think I can do this I survived Dact two brother but I ain't seen it I never seen shit like that before in my life We were really lucky to survive that mission I don't think I can go on I hate to desert you brother, but I think I want off the team Now I understood that look on his face from the previous day. I told Davidson that I respected his decision and I appreciate his frankness. I thought it took more courage to be honest in camp than to

not say anything and go in the field. A man unsure in the field could get other team members hurt. I reiterated that he'd performed well under fire and echo four. He hadn't run. He hadn't quit. And he had demonstrated exemplary courage during the entire mission. As we walked and talked, I put my hand on his shoulder. James, you and I and walking did something. something few men in America will ever do. We survived Echo 4 and all the NVA could throw at us. There were six of us against hundreds of North Vietnamese finest. We will always have a special bond,

something no one can ever take away from us. Thanks again for your honesty. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to the Sergeant Major or did he want to do it. Because he'd only been in campus short while, he asked me if I wouldn't mind speaking to the Sergeant Major first. I agreed and asked him what sort of assignment he preferred. I don't know, brother.

I'll need some time to get my head straight. And you have a note in here 32 years later, I talked to James Davidson in New Orleans on a telephone. One of the things he said was, brother, I've never been the same since those two days in Laos. Oh, yeah. And getting back to Captain 10 for a moment, the, uh, after he pulled us out and we landed Fubai,

I'd climb up and thank him and say, come on and I'll get you a drink. He goes, no, my family's waiting for me. They're holding dinner. No, and even on that extraction that night, because it was right at sunset. And so when we pulled out, it's one of those beautiful scenes where it's a dark, green, evergreen of the jungle. And all these little sparkling lights that are red with the green tracers coming up. If it hadn't been traced, it was just a beautiful scene.

But then you realize, hey, that's the NVA. still trying to shoot our dumb ass down. But then we flew, he headed south directly for a few minutes. We had the sunset. It was that sweet sunset. And it was at that point that Sal looked at me and gave me that look. That's all it was. So we cut the mustard.

So, you know, because when I first got into camp, he looked at me when I came into, but the spider introduced me. And he goes, he's too tall, his feet are too big, and he looked stupid. It took me five months to get on his good side, but we finally got there in Echo 4. All you had to do was just fend off a few hundred NVA.

Together. Yeah, that's all it took. And so Davidson, so this was a volunteer to get into the program, and you could at any point say, hey, I'm done. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And no dishonor to it. Yeah. We always preferred because, like, with Lynn Black in Chapter 6,

when they came up against 10,000, one of his Americans, who was the son of a general, who was just there to try to get some medals for himself, never fired one round in anger and prayed during the entire day with his face on the ground. The Vietnamese were ready to kill him.

So that's the kind of thing that you don't want. No, no, that's horrible. Yeah, these contacts that you're getting in, I just, it's hard for me to get my head around. You don't have to be it out there, like, alone, like that with just really limited support, you know? Oh yeah, there are days, but we had Uncle Sam's Air Force and those doorgunners that were great. Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. And we had Scarface, you know, from the Marine Corps, and we had different units that were attached to us, and we were just really lucky. Whenever we called, they always came. And in fact, we won Scarface, it was Lieutenant Colonel Robinson. He pulled us out several times. Anthony pulled us out that one time. He got his plexiglass shot out, the bird shot up. We get us back to food, but he chewed my ass.

Every time we come to get you, he chewed my ass out. We go into the club. He still chewed my ass out. I bought him drinks. Got him so drunk, he couldn't walk. He had to fly. He still chewing my ass out. I said, Colonel, are you saying you're not going to come the next time?

I didn't say that. Every time you rang the bell, they came. But, oh, my God. They could barely, the doorgunners, we get out of the helicopter. like the B or D models was really early Uies. And this is true with the muskets. The doorguns have to get out and kind of lift the helicopter

as they tried to get enough power to get off the ground because they're just so loaded with ordinance. Then they jump in once they got moving. Quite a sight. But they always came. And the other thing is that's weird is they didn't really have nighttime capability.

None of it. Like anyone. So, well, it seems like Like nowadays, night is no factor for America. Oh, I know. We would have run over our mother for one of those nags. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

But for you guys, once the sun went down, it was hard to get picked up. It was hard to call for fire. It seemed that way. Oh, yeah. No doubt. So you were racing the sun. Mother Nature always. Yeah, she's a key player between the weather and the sunset.

Yeah, that's the other scary thing is. I mean, you, you know, this is, you know, this is. something I usually say early on, but I haven't said yet. I'm reading tiny excerpts of this book. So if you're listening to the podcast, these are tiny excerpts. This is less than five, less than three percent of this book. This book is filled with this kind of mayhem. So you have to get the book to appreciate it all. I'm just kind of hitting some of the highlights. But yeah, the fact that you guys were racing against the sun going down and how, oh, the sun goes down. Okay, cool. What does that mean?

In modern day seal teams for me, that means we use a night strobe, an infrared strobe that the enemy can't see instead of a marking panel. What does it mean for you? It means another 12 hours out in the bush because you're not getting picked up. I just hope that the lions leave you alone, you know?

I mean, the tigers. You had this one idea, or the group had an idea. of dropping like a big giant daisy cutter but a big bomb like a 2,000 pound bomb right in order in areas that were so packed with with vegetation that you couldn't get in a helicopter in there say oh we got an idea we'll just drop a big bomb and then let's go land in there yeah get dropped off in there and so this this one operation where you're doing that you're you're heading into the jungle you're going to one of these things where you dropped a 2,000 pound daisy cutter bomb you're repelling You're the number one man heading down. Right. And you decide that like, hey, this is an abort situation. I think you saw some enemy.

Oh, yeah. And so you decide, okay, let's abort this thing. And here we're going to the book. As I looked up, I was glad to see King, who's one of your team members, climbing back into the King Bee. I got on the radio and told Covey to abort the mission as we had been compromised again. For a few fleeting moments, I'd consider trying to get the team on the ground. Frankly, I was sick and tired of getting shot out of LZs,

and I wanted to run a mission instead of going through the gut-wrenching, Firefight on the LZs, which is, you know, again, I'm skipping around this book, but you would do mission after mission where you guys would try and land, you'd get shot off the LZ. Oh, yeah. That would be the primary, secondary, and then the alternate LCs. So you try three insertions. You know, I'm just going to, I'm just going to, for the record, if I go one insertion and I get shot off, I'm coming home.

I'm coming home. We're going to go reload. We weren't smart enough to do that. I'm not going to go to the secondary. And if I get shot, you. off the secondary, I'm damn sure not going to the tertiary and think I'm going to get away with it. I'm going to go back and come up with a new plan. Well, by then, the king be running out of the gas had to go back.

So you're there. Then I saw the helmet of an NVA soldier heading toward the bombed area. He was approaching from the area where I heard the first voice from the jungle area in front of the helicopter, which was up the hill from where I was on the ground. As soon as I saw my open fire with my car 15, suddenly the king bee swerved away, leaving me on the ground. Suddenly it was eerily quiet Then it hit me

I was standing in the middle of a smoking LZ in the middle of Laos And I was alone All of a sudden I felt small very small The trees that had survived the bomb blasts were tall The jungle surrounding the LZ was both impressive and formidable And not somewhere I wanted to travel by myself I tried to raise Covey on the radio There was no answer from Watkins

Even though I was the American team leader on ST Idaho I insisted on carrying the radio because I wanted to be the person calling air strikes around my team. The Vietnamese kept us alive in the field and I felt my end of surviving the jungle warfare was to direct tactical air strikes and helicopter gunships to the enemy. So the King B comes back. So you're there. The King B comes back.

Captain Tuan. Drops a rope down to you for you to clip into because it's, I guess, too tight for it to land or it doesn't want to land because it's going to take a bunch of time and energy. So they just throw you a rope. Yeah, they can't land because there are too many tree stumps. The daisy cutter didn't cut everything down. And then at that time, we were just refining the tactic of using rope extractions. So for anyone that's listening right now, when you're refining tactics, try and do it on training operations.

Well, we did. We trained first. We had the 150 foot rope with a sandbag to it. And then it had a D-ring on the end and be 150-foot rope. and so they had to have a standback so we'd get through the jungle to get to the ground to you and we hadn't developed other tactics but you had a D ring on your chest well you're going to get to that yeah yeah but so yeah here we go I saw no NVA but the weapon that was being fired at the unmistakable bark of an AK-47 I fired another M79 round in that direction

that round's explosion must have startled captain Twong because he jerked the kingby upward yanking me off the ground before I could slip the D ring on my left shoulder around the rope That shoulder D-ring was critical for staying in the Swiss seat. We had heard horror stories about the body desecrations and the NVA had performed on Sogmen, and I didn't want that happening to me. As Tewong lifted me into the air, I opened fire with my car 15 on what appeared to be a muzzle flash

coming from the hilltop area. So you're getting hoisted up by the helicopter while you're returning fire and slipping out of your D-ring. It didn't quite get hooked in. Because at that, as we got a little higher up, I was ricocheting off the trees. I was a human pinball for a few minutes there. Tilt. There we go.

Then I became scared. So then you decide to become scared. Okay. That's fine. I still hadn't hooked my shoulder D-ring and someone fired a few green tracers at us. Captain Tuan started to pull out of the target area. As he started gaining speed, I ricocheted off a few trees before I cleared the jungle. Having sat in the King Bee's co-pilot seat, I understood why he.

He pulled away from the LZ before I had cleared the trees. If the chopper gets shot down, the mission turns into an operational nightmare while potentially injuring or killing the crew and the recon team members aboard the ship. I wasn't angry with him. Hell, he came back for me. I would have been stranded down here for at least two more hours before other choppers with ropes could have been able to extract me if he hadn't. But being dragged through the trees hurt.

I was angry at myself for not getting the damn D-ring hooked before I lifted off the ground. My arms were getting very sore. I went to switch arms. I was struck by some sort of air pocket and suddenly I was upside down at 5,000 feet. My only physical link to life was the D-ring hooked into my rope seat and the 150-foot piece of rope hanging from the helicopter. I twisted my body to look up at King again. Thank God he was still hanging out the door. I signaled to get the chopper to land.

As I was giving King signs, I felt the rope slipping down my thighs to my knees. At the same time, my web gear was sliding from my hips over my stomach toward my knee. neck in a matter of moments the Swiss seat was at my knees the only way I stopped it from moving further was by spreading my legs I felt really stupid after all the training this was gonna be a dumb way to die as the rope slid across my feet I knew I was moments away from passing out there was no way I could keep my leg spread just before the end several brief scenes from my life flashed through my mind Dolores my kindergarten sweetheart why did she move to California I saw my dad's new

Nineteen 49 Chevrolet milk truck with its dark evergreen paint with the white side panels and rich gold leaf letters My red wagon from childhood high school football games and to add insult to injury I saw the front page article in my hometown Part paper about my death the story was below the fold because stories about local boys dying in nom were now Commonplace that angered me because my family would never know where I really died On the other hand I didn't want them to know how I really died Just as I started to pass out I felt the rope slip off my feet

My body went limp I vaguely remember hitting the elephant grass Before landing hard on my back on the ground I had fallen only 10 or 20 feet The elephant grass cushioned the fall I hadn't realized that Captain Twong had the aircraft descending during those last frantic moments Oh yeah

Had those legs spread like a New York City hooker Yeah Yeah That's a That's a nightmare Yeah King came out and picked me up And threw me in the chopper

Left all my gear there So my car 15 And my sod knife Which now would be a highly treasured item Still in layoffs Oh you lost it A lot of somewhere Oh yeah

He just pulled open the web gear and I had to get the thing off my neck, the rucksack, the web gear, it all just choked me out. He pulled it off and just picked me up and it threw me in the helicopter. I was really happy to feel my head bounce off that metal floor. It hurt, but it's a happy hurt. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, again, if you have to get this book, because that's, I'm trying to pick like some good stories, but these are just the kind of ridiculous things that are going on. Just another day in sog. Just another day in sog.

Yeah. Getting hung upside down, 5,000 feet above enemy territory by a D-ring. Another one here. You guys got some bad weather. You got no support overhead. That's another thing people need to understand is because of where you guys were located at a pretty good distance away from the bases,

if there was no aircraft overhead, then you wouldn't, be able to communicate with anyone because you'd lose line of sight. Did you guys ever carry HF radios to try and make long distance? We had VHF or UHF. Yeah, the ERC 10 was at. And, but at nights, during the day, there was a, there was always an airborne command aircraft up. So at the daytime was Hillsborough code. At night, it was moonbeam. So they would check in with us on our frequency. So you would, no matter what, you'd have some level of comps. Okay, that's good to And so because of the, we knew the NVA RDF radio direction finder was really good. They were sharp on that.

So when they would check in with us, again, it would be just a click, click. No discussion. And for those you who don't know, that's radio direction finding. So if you sit there and talk on the radio for a long period of time, the enemy can actually capture those transmissions. They triangulate. And they use multiple stations and they can tell what direction they're coming from and they can triangulate where you're at. and they can come and get you. So for this particular one,

you guys are, the weather's bad, so you don't have any, you don't have any actual direct support overhead. The NVA had been chased. This is the one where you got, you tried to set up an ambush, and then they told you don't do it. Well, no, we had the ambush set up.

We'd been in it. But then they told you don't execute the ambush, right? Don't execute it, because we had visions of, we get the POW. Because in that day, if we captured a live POW, five-day R&R,

anywhere in the world, $100, bonus. I was like, man, we're talking about. We're the plank and plans, Hawaii or Australia. We hadn't quite decided. And then spider came back over and I gave them the code. We got a P.O.W. We'll be back at the primary LZ in one hour. And that's what he said, don't move. Yeah, but you hadn't initiated. You didn't have the POW yet. You were waiting. Oh yeah, they're walking up and down at jail. Yeah. It was just a matter of time before you were going to spring your ambush. And this is one of those deals where we violated all the rules of recon. Normally we go 10 and

10. Walk 10 minutes, pause 10 to hear the jungle, let the jungle see how it's gone. Well, in this one, because we had so much trouble trying to get in, they had slashing burn areas that were underneath the jungle canopy. I divided the team. We had an eight-man team this time. But four on each side, and I said, we're going to go up this hill until we get to an area, to a trail or whatever. And we didn't stop. We went really hard, maybe 20, 30, 40 minutes, I forget now. We came up to a big trail. We crossed it one at a time.

Covered our tracks. Got things set up. South put up the wiretap. Had a perfect ambush. You know, we had trained. Lynn Black had developed the ambush kill zone so that we have

claymores that would go across, but in the center there would be a six-foot area that there'd be no Shrapnel. But we had, he practiced on himself with C4. So he finally figured out

at this certain length what a stick of C4 was where you'd knock yourself out. He did, literally. Yeah. I know this is another entertaining thing. So anyway, that's our input. But we had it all set up.

So we had the C4 to knock out one person, Claymore's to kill everybody else with sides, perimeters, and one in the rear just in case they came down the mountain on us. And there ditty bopping up and down the trail. We could have had all

They're walking down the trail. Nobody's upset because we had gone so far, so fast, violating all of our rules that the people up the hill didn't know what was going on down the hill. And then spider says, don't move. It's like, that's when things got really ugly. And what was the reason why he told you guys don't do it? Because the weather was moving in? Oh, yeah. They inserted.

We had only been on the ground two or three hours. And the weather socked in. He's at 10,000 feet. I can't even see the mountain. let alone CNLZ. So he's saying, look, we're not going to be able to get you out of there right now. Just don't do whatever you're going to do and break contact, get away. Yeah.

So you guys are kind of on the run. You guys start moving out of there. Right. And so about that time up the hill, we hear the tanks and other trucks starting up their engines. And all of a sudden, the activity on the trail goes from casual to frantic. Now everybody's, two or three guys, they all got their AKs. What do you think clued him in that you were there? Well, they heard us come in.

And by then we could hear the dogs. They had some dogs that were back on the LZ. So they had started looking for us officially. So when you hear dogs, tanks, trucks, and a bunch of people with AK-47s, yeah. How do you feel about that? The Pucker factor is minus zero. It really is.

It's like, oh, my God. And you know that you've got no form of extraction. Correct. The weird thing is, I guess, and having worked in the jungle a little bit, you know, I've spent some time in the jungle in South America and the Southeast Asia. Like, I will say this, the jungle's huge, right? And you could see where, okay, I can get, I can make myself scarce at least. Oh, yeah. Until you remember they got trackers, right?

And they got dogs. Lots of them. So you're in that situation here. Yeah. Another Thursday night for John. But we did get the wiretap, though. Sal had run the wiretap. for over an hour.

So once you, you guys had to take the tape recorder with you, though, right? Oh yeah, we carried the little, you know, you think about

a traditional early old cassette recorder. So it had like two or four the chip of a D batteries in it. And then we had the microphone

that had a little plugging in and then Sal would run up the tree or fly up the telephone pole. In this case, he'd gone up when he came back down

and put mud on the whole thing. so anybody going by on the trail looked at the pole they wouldn't see it and so we ran it for over an hour we had run that wire

tab and flipped the cassette over because that was state of the art at the time the sets we did that so you break that stuff down now you guys are moving pull back all the clay mores

the C4 which direction did you head did you go away from where you inserted or did you go back to where you inserted we went No, we went away from it. If I'm facing the LZ, we went to our left.

Got it. And we had to go re-cross that big trail again, but this time we had to cross it in between enemy coming up and down. The truck had went past us. And so it took us a while to get back across the big trail. Because this trail, again, this is layoffs. Yeah. By the way, this is the Hotee Men Trail.

The Hocci Men Trail. Spiders that, even when he could see the jungle, he couldn't see that road. And the road was big enough. You could drive tanks down it's side by side. It's huge. It would be the equivalent of Highway 78 or 52, two lanes. So tanks side by side.

But it's completely covered by the vegetation. So it took us a while to get across the road. Then we went to the left. Then we finally came to a little stream bed and went up that stream bed because now it's dark. But now we hear more dogs. The activity on the trail. Another couple trucks go by. and all this noise, we know they're looking.

And eventually you're hold up and you're, you stop. Right. And on the way up that stream, we put out pepper, we put out mace. To throw off the dogs. Go off the dogs. And we had our team go up and down these little, because it's about 10 foot tall bank, we're in this little creek or stream,

it had water in it. And so we were trying to lose the dogs. We knew they're coming at night. And now it's dark. And we continue to up that stream for a while. I wanted to get as far away from them as we could because Sal had climbed a tree and said they're coming. He pointed out, he told Hep, there were hundreds of them coming with lights.

They all had lanterns, and the dogs were getting closer. So we could tune up that stream for another hour or two at night, doing, still going out, putting down the mace, and we finally went up to the bank on the right, set up our RON for the night, rest overnight, and I'm facing the bank, and the other seven guys are around. and so

again we hear the dogs the people so we're there in the RON for maybe two or three hours two guys come up up the stream with a lantern burning brightly and they go past us

lantern goes out and they come back as they come back hep coughs and then they stopped and I think that's where you're going next well yeah that's here it is one of the NVA and the creek

started crawling up the embankment toward me I was still facing the creek the NVA soldier was good he only moved when the wind stirred the trees For a moment my thoughts drifted to summer camp in New Hampshire years earlier when we played Capture the flag on those clear summer nights my favorite trick was to use the woods to get as close to the flag as possible Now my mind was racing a hundred miles per hour and I realized I was the flag and he was closing in He was too close for me to tell anyone on my team The jungle that night seemed deadly quiet, except of course when the wind stirred. As the NBA soldier crawled closer, I remembered thinking that my heart was beating so damn loud that Ho Chi Minh could hear it in Hanoi.

I flashed back to my childhood when we used to play hide-and-go-seek on West Paul Avenue in Trent, New Jersey. One of my favorite hiding places was behind the hedges in Mrs. Amico's front yard. I remember worrying that Teddy Zabrowski or John Wayne, Austin or worse Barbara Pointen would find me because they could hear my heart beating so loud I tried to comfort myself by thinking that because I had not been running in recent hours my heartbeat shouldn't be too loud yet my heart sounded like a kettle drum during Beethoven's ninth no matter the NBA soldier kept moving up the embankment I was very impressed with his stealth I could barely hear him then it happened during one windy moment I heard movement

very close to me. It was only a slight sound, but a sound nonetheless. Before the wind stopped, the NVA soldier touched the soul of my size 10R army issue jungle boot. I heard a slight gasp surprise from him. At that moment, I had a death grip on my car 15. I had it on single shot. A car 15 on full automatic sounds much different from the bark of an AK-47 on full automatic. If I had to shoot, it would be single shots. For a millisecond. And I wondered if my left foot was far enough to the left so that when I fired it, I wouldn't shoot myself Times stood still my pucker factor was minus zero After a few of the longest seconds of my life the wind stirred, but there was no movement. He remained still

After what seemed like an eternity the wind stirred again and I heard the NVA move backward just slightly He was so cool I knew he was facing me. I wondered why I couldn't hear his heart the jungle around us and remained pitch black. That's my Twilight Zone moment. Yeah. Yeah, that's craziness. And you think he was,

you think he just decided, like, this guy's probably got the drop on me and I want to live? What do you think he decided? I believe so, because if there had been any other movement at all, then he would have been on the receiving end of the 556.

So he made a tactical decision to live. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah. Because then obviously once you started shooting the gig, gigs up and you would have been people on your trail close. And had it happened, I mean, I thought was if I just did one single shot because the muzzle flash would light up where he was.

And then I was hoping it would take no more than a second shot to finish him off. So that the jungle, they would hear gunshots, but they wouldn't be quite sure where. Was this, and people that haven't spent time out in the woods or out in the jungle, it can get completely pitch black in the jungle. Is that what this was? Was this just like completely? Like he's, you could barely even,

could you see his face at all? Nothing. I mean, he just knew he was there. You sit there, you could feel your hand in front of your nose when you shake, move it back and forth. You can feel the breeze from your hand,

but you can't see it. Yeah, so for those of you that haven't been in this, it's when you get at nighttime and then it's a cloudy night and then you're in triple canopy jungle. There is no light. You can't see anything. And,

that's what this situation is. Absolutely. Well, luckily, you got out of that and then you guys continue on. Going back to the book, by 9 o'clock, we had located the LZ and secured it. The clear area had several feet of grass on it, and the ground was at an angle

because it was on the side of the mountain. Again, we heard dogs. Our tactical scenario stunk. We were in a relatively open area on a hillside with minimal cover, and the NVA had the high ground. Times seemed to be. our worst enemy, although having limited air resources didn't improve our mood.

Finally, the other team was extracted without taking further casualties, and Spider was overhead, taking ground fire from the north of the LZ. He told the trustee and reliable Marine Corps UH1B gunships with the radio call sign Scarface were seconds away. As we heard the choppers approaching us, one of the tow poppers that Sal and Sun had planted exploded. So you guys were doing that too you guys would set booby traps on them on the enemy you'd set claymore's on them right which would really piss them off oh yeah try to ruin their parade yeah we knew the nvae we're going to be hopping mad now that's a gentle way of putting it spider was able to vector the scarface gunship to our location quickly there was no time for orientations we pop smoke and

seconds later the first scarface chopper roared in the jungle north of us erupted with small arms fire the second Scarface chopper roared in so close that I could see the facial expressions on the door gunners he blasted the area north of our LZ with his M60 machine gun both Scarface both Scarface aircraft took several hits when the Sky Raiders made their passes they also took hits from small arm fire that sounded like AK 47s during the second gun run Sal blew a Claymore in the face of an NVA scout Sal then blew his second Claymore and returned to the LZ reporting more NVA troops right behind him and you guys this is another

interesting SOP and we would do this too carry claymores I didn't do that I will let me rephrase that we would we got trained to do this you know in a jungle situation right you guys would make claymores with like five second and ten second fuses on right boom put them down pull the fuse so you're run yeah and run I never used one of those and I'm very thankful that I did not yeah yeah apparently the combination of Air assets and our 40 millimeter barrage has slowed the NVA troops long enough for the extraction ships to come to the LZ. Spider told me that the 101st Airborne Division was going to extract us. The Marine Corps gunships would make one more gun run and for the first time, ST Idaho, Slicks from the 101st Airborne Division would follow right behind them and get as close to the LZ as possible.

We were used to the King Bees and knew most of the pilots on a first name basis. The 101st pilots were good too, but because this was our first time with 101st Airborne Division Slicks, I told Shorney, King that they had to be the first people to approach the ship and that they had to alert the young doorgunners that five of our men were Vietnamese. That's a crazy thing to think about. Oh, absolutely. So you got the head. We had horrible results when they weren't careful. And again, you know, young doorgunners for sure come in the country. And if they're not briefed properly, because our guys dressed their regularly, not that they would look like NVA, but they weren't Americans. And we've had team members that lost Vietnamese.

that way. Yeah. Tragically. We, when Roger Hayden was on, he told a story of the same thing. He had,

they had, they had, uh, Vietnamese scouts and they were doing a hammer and an anvil operation with a platoon they hadn't worked with before. That was new in country. And there was some mix-ups on the insertion and, you know,

just some mistakes that compounded. And anyways, these guys, the, the anvil portion was waiting. And the first guys that came out of the tree line were their Vietnamese scouts. Yeah. And they got,

they got lit up. Um, you know, we were in, in, when I was in Ramadi, we, I, you know, you see like pictures of seals with like beards and all that. Oh yeah. And look at all cool. Like, everyone shaved and everyone, we wore regular uniforms, what the army and what the Marine Corps wore. Why?

Because that exact reason. You know, you swing around a corner and you've got a 19 year old on a 50 cow and he sees some guy with a beard and a gun, there's a chance you're getting shot. Whereas an American. America, you know, because the jihadists would have beards, right? And in Ramadi, we just didn't, everything we could do to identify ourselves as good guys, we did. And your jihadists could have everything from M16s, to car beans, to A-Ks. You didn't know what they'd be carrying. Yeah, and they also wore. At least we knew our guys had AKs or SKS's. Yeah. The other thing was they wore, they wore paramilitary

outfits. Right. So they wore camis. They wore body armor sometime. They wore helmets sometimes. They wore helmets but sometimes. So, yeah, that's amazing that you guys, and also you had the, you had the cognizance to say, hey, wait a second, we've never worked with these helicopters before. Get out there and tell them we got some Vietnamese folks

coming their way with AK-47s. Yeah, they were pissed because when King went down through their first chopper, nobody else followed. And I said, you make sure you tell them, then you give me the Greenlight, then we'll send some little people. And then Bub and I got on the second extract.

And there's two other things on that mission. Yeah. King had experimental pump M79, which he carried. It held five rounds. And we thought we tried it once, but he carried it for five days. Well, the whole five days we were on the ground. And so at that LZ, it worked. And imagine five M79 rounds gone off to 40 millimeters.

Then also one night was the night that the Russians flew over us and did a resupply. And we were begging for Moonbeam to show up to get somebody on a Russian ass. but the whole side of the mountain lit up is the weirdest damn thing we ever saw So that was like a signaling device for That was signaling devices that the Vietnamese were using to have the Russians drop the resupply in there?

They were doing resupplies to the Vietnamese What language did you speak? My foreign language is English So they pushed this through and they waived the language requirement because by 68 they knew we had a SF had a strong interpreter corps Got it. Like HEP?

He spoke four languages. He had been educated in France, and he cracked up my English. And he was a smart ass on top of it. A little fucker. But he was our little guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

Going back to the book, the extraction was slick and quick. When as we pulled out of the LZ, the slick took several hits. Three of us returned full automatic fire from our car 15s. I threw a white phosphorus grenade. As the area north of the LZ lit up with dozens of muzzle flashes from AK-47s and SKS's. The green tracers from the AK-47s appeared as though they were coming between my legs. I was told later that as our slick pulled out of the LZ, the Scarface Gunshipships laid down a full fuselage, fuselot of suppressing fire.

The lead marine aircraft piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Robinson had the plexiglass windshield blown out of the aircraft. in addition his chopper and the second gunship had taken more than a dozen hits and yeah and that's that's the that's the uh colonel that you were saying he was he was riding you and riding you and finally the way you tell it in the book colonel does this mean the next time we're in trouble

and we call for scarface you won't respond to the bell hell no robinson responded i never said that it just pisses me off when my aircraft gets shot up parts are hard to come by and i'd rather be fly Fearless And you know You continue on here I went back to my room

So this is after that crazy operation You barely make it out for the hundredth time that you You dance in death's face I went back to my room and picked up a news magazine with a picture on the front page about the biggest latest anti-war Protest say side Insane Whose side were they on They hadn't seen Charlie like ST Idaho had

They never They never asked Sow, hip, and other Vietnamese men on my team what they felt about the war. What a day. S3 refused to pull us out when we were ready for extraction. Then S3 questioned my integrity, despite the fact that we were only minutes away from fighting NVA in close quarters. Battle had not scarface. The A.E.1E.s and the 101st airborne slicks defended us from the sky. And there are people back in the States protesting this war.

I shook my head, dropped my rucksack and webgear, picked up a small ammo belt holding several magazines of 556 ammo, and went to the S3 to get a Jeep. The dentist was only a short drive up the road, but I kept my trusty car 15 nearby anyway. I went to the dentist, got my tooth pulled, and drew new rations and PRC 25 batteries. And the reason I read all that is to read this line right here. The next day, the next day, ST Idaho got shot out of five L. LZs. Yeah, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And by that time, when we got inserted on that mission there,

we had gone on a couple days of the same thing in the morning, get shot out. And on one of those missions on the primary LZ, when the king B was going in, Sal saw a wire across the LZ. Now, how does Sal even see a wire in a helicopter when we're going in? He saw it. He told the doorkner. Fortunately, the Vietnamese thing was quick, and they were able to swerve away.

And the A1 came in and hit that. There was a 500-pound bomb. They knew we were coming, and we had been compromised. We never realized how seriously we'd been compromised. And that was proof, hard proof. And our guys are so tired. I switched a lot of the Vietnamese around. So your guys were, some of your Vietnamese were getting burned out?

Oh, sure. Because, you know, you do that long flight, go out to the LZ, then you go in and get shot out, shot out, shot out, fly back, get lunch, get a new target. Sometimes they just say, here's your next target. Cubby would know where it would be. We wouldn't even have any kind of background or anything on it, just they wanted to get a team on the ground. Go back, and then we did it again, bam, bam, bam. And so you're Vietnamese sometimes say, I had enough of this.

Who's your main other guy? Sal was my counterpart. He was the assistant team leader. He was the Vietnamese team leader. Who was the other American that would be with you? At that point in time was Bubba, John Schoor. He came on the team in November when I became the 1-0 at the end of October. And these guys were all freaked out too because you were like young.

Oh, yeah. And what were you? What was your rank at that time? Well, by then I'd been promoted to an E4. Because I remember I left. Back promoted, yeah. I'm an E-duce in camp with a billet for E-8 or E-9 on the recon team. So Spider probably got me promoted back to PFC.

He said, now, roll up your sleeve so people think you're a sergeant. We don't want them knowing you're just a dumb-ass PFC. Instead of by October, we were able to, I expect four, and then when Jim went off the team, which we respected, and to this day I respect it. I'll never say a word against them on that. Then Bubba came on. So in November, that's when Bubba, he was the,

one one and then on that one mission, King came along. I just felt funny about it. I wanted a little extra firepower and he wanted to try that pump M79. Yeah, why not just go on a mission to test out that thing? We had that, they sent us some thermobaric grenades for the M79. Ooh, really? Yeah. And then they called a week later and said, hey, did you guys get a chance?

It was actually Laif. I think Laif dumped like an entire load out of them on one operation. And anyways, they call back, they say, hey, did you guys, were wondering if you got a chance to use those thermomic grenades yet? I'm like, we used them all. Send more. There's the feedback. Do not wait.

Oh, yeah, and also, speaking of that, as one of our side missions, we always carried eldest son or Italian green, which would be enemy ordents, doctored to explode in their face. So when we would go along a trail, like with that big trail, we crossed it, we'd go down and dump a little of the ammo. So if anybody would see the ammo, they'd pick it up. And then if we ever came across a cachet, which only happened a few times, we would put the bad ammo in their cache. So they'd use it for siops, then it would blow up in their face. Yeah.

It was a good sciops thing when there was another mission where you talk about where they killed the Americans, but they let the Vietnamese. ago that was their January 1st 69 all right speaking of holiday season here's Christmas Day 1968 you're inserted into like some really tall elephant grass there's NVA around you going back to the book due to the elephant grass both in terms of the noise we were making and how muffled how it muffled our other sounds we couldn't tell exactly how many NVA were moving or if they were even NVA black said I Smell smoke either our hand grenades or the NVA have started fires Things are really heating up on the LZ literally I radioed spider I told him we were surrounded and had fires on two sides of our perimeter

I told him that if the king bees didn't get in here ASAP ST Idaho would be engaged in fighting fires as well as firefights Were you really making these punny jokes in the middle of these situations? Sometimes you have to laugh to keep them crying They're starting more fires Bubba said by now the noise from the fire forces to raise our voices when we were talking to each other the smoke was getting thicker I began to sweat we threw a few more hand grenades down the hill to force the NVA to keep their heads down The southern fire so just so everyone understands this is what's actually happening you're in elephant grass Dry elephant grass and it's burning on multiple sides of your position which is 12 to 15 feet tall

the elephant grass so you're visiting visibility is like five feet three feet yeah minimal and it's filled with smoke yeah and getting worse or we wish you a merry Christmas yeah the southern fires intensity grew by the second and continued to move up the slope towards us and around to the east there was fire or fires to the north and northeast but they weren't heading toward ST Idaho with the speed of the southern flames by now the smoke was so thick I had my green cravat over my face and pulled up over my nose burning embers from the south kicked up and flew over our small jagged perimeter dumping ashes soot and small burning sparks on the elephant grass and on us only

hip and twan wore hats several of us soaked our hair black told me that the NBA weren't far behind the flames Tuan had reported seeing images a short distance behind the flames to the south and southeast captain twang knew exactly where we were as he brought the H-34 down the canyon toward us Seconds became ours my vision was clearer than ever and I was acutely aware of the smoke fire Popping sounds and enemy gunfire I stood on the western edge of the perimeter waving a colored panel skyward trying to catch the pilot's eye The H-34 continued its slow motion descent all I saw was the bottom of the chopper with the front of the struts sticking out to the right and left coming down like a giant praying mantis The rotor washed from the King B began to hit us finally the

Chopper's nose turned slightly to the left and I could see Captain Twong seeing his face, seeing him sitting in there so calmly in the pilot seat made my confidence surge. We would survive. And then you guys, you know, get, get around, get it under control, well, under control as you can and you start boarding the chopper. Chopper as the last man boarded the chopper, I signal to the door gunner to exit the area. As I sat in the door, I sat in the door as Twong lifted the king be straight up for several feet before heading south. As we pulled away, from the knoll fire swept up the hill and engulfed the area where we had been standing moments earlier oh yeah every christmas i pause captain twang roared down the canyon we had chugged only a short while ago i

radioed spider and gave him a team okay once again s t idaho entered that magical post-mission moment the adrenaline was still flowing we had survived another target every breath of was sweeter. There was no thought of Christmas, mom, or holiday presents. Our gift was to be alive. That Christmas 1968 would haunt me sporadically for more than 25 years. After a while, I was able to stop sitting upright, sweating with fear when the nightmares hit. It's been almost 10 years since I had that dream, but every Christmas, nightmares or not, I always take a moment to think of Captain Wong's courage. No sweat. King Bees never rest. Yeah.

So that was, that's, that's just a crazy situation. Oh yeah. Close. And then this is like on Thanksgiving was when we had the mission down south where our six-man recant team,

the Colonel tells us you have to find three missing NVA divisions. The first, the third, and the seven. We found him How'd that work out for you? It was pretty intense We used more than one of those

Five Second Fuses to hold them back Yeah Yeah Again that's why you need to buy this book And read this book If you want to hear about The eight-man spike team Versus a division

On that day was three Three divisions For those you that don't know what that means That's 30,000 men roughly And yeah that's where those Those five second fuses. Just so everybody understands what that means. You're trying to escape the enemy.

You have a little thing called a Claymore Mine. It's like the size of a book, maybe a little bit bigger. And it's got a bunch of ball bearings on one side. 550. 550 ball bearings on one side that are, that spray out when this thing explodes. And those are so they wound people. How many of those things did you guys carry? Um, every, everybody had one on the team.

And then a one, one, or always carried two or three. So you guys have a long as C4? Yeah, at least. And so what these guys would do, so you can use them for a bunch of different reasons. And one of the, one of the things that you guys did a lot with them. And this is, again, these are things that I was trained in when I was first got the seal team. They did, okay, when you set up a, when you're going to sleep at night or you're going to set up a rest overnight position, you're going to put out Claymore's. And that way, if you get attacked in the middle of night, boom, you can light off the claim.

You can get some fire superiority or at least shock the enemy or do some damage to them. So you guys did that all the time. But then you made these little five second fuses knowing that if you're running away, you can just put this thing up, you know, put it in the ground real quick or put it up against a tree. Well, yeah, you always want to have it up against a tree or something to take the back blast. Because even when you put it in and you got the last four seconds before it explode, you're running, you can still, you want to make sure that you got a little protection on the black blast. blast. We used to detonate those things out a completely unsafe distance behind him.

I look back now and I'm thinking, what were we doing? WTF times two. Yeah. Yeah. It's like let we play the game, let's find out. Are you relayed to Lynn Black somehow on this thing? Yeah. Yeah. So you started to tell that story a little bit. For those that you didn't catch the whole story, the story was Lynn Black was trying to figure out what it would take to knock somebody out with C-Foss So C4. A six feet. Yeah. C4 just explodes.

There's no shrapnel in it. You can put shrapnel in it, but you don't have to. So it's just a big concussion. So Lynn Black was trying to figure out how much C4 it would take so we can stun a guy so we can grab them so we can get a P.O.W. So that we can get a five-day liberty anywhere in the world and $100 cash. And so the way he experimented with this was by doing it to himself. Yeah. Just standing around at the range and blasting himself with heavier and heavier weight until he got knocked out.

And when he finally succeeded, his hearing was bad for a few days. Yeah. His hair was all. See, now in the SEAL teams, that would have been, we would have used a new guy for that. We would have used a new guy. Like, okay, let's see if this works. I'll do. When the stun guns, the tasers first came in, it wasn't fun to be a new guy.

Because we had to see how those things worked, right? So we used to experiment that. Indeed. Yeah, that story is just crazy. And you looking down and seeing the fire engulf the place that you just got picked out. Oh, yeah. Instantly. For sure, it's just like one of those moments in time.

It was the same thing like on Thanksgiving Day. We got extracted. They were coming out of the jungle running at Port Arms. And so they would try to come down. So me and the door gunner would just literally stop them in the track. Like one of those cartoons. you see on the TV where the guy's running and stops and gets jank they would just push him right back in the jungle before they even fell down and that was just uh yeah you just you don't forget

those things they stick with you the next chapter is called happy new year oh um the day after christmas the s3 brass asked st idaho to run another m a target in louse i respect for fleet declined citing fatigue and general weariness i didn't tell the brownie I had a funny feeling about the target. I felt apprehensive for some reason. Back at FOB1, around 1,200 hours, someone from the commo shack came into the club and said a Vietnamese team member from R.T. Asp was on the radio

talking to Spider. That was very bad news. Several of the recon team members in FOB1 headed toward the commo shack before we got there. Tony Harrell, a veteran recon man, came around the corner with some more bad news. they were hit by sappers it doesn't look good

it appeared the Americans had been slow to react in a matter of seconds the sappers killed the three SF troops and chose to leave the South Vietnamese team members alive the news about the sappers was a triple dose of bad news first

we had three dead green berets second reports one zeros had received for months about NVA sappers being a lethal force were now confirmed. Third, by killing only the Americans, the NVA pulled off a major psychological coup.

By leaving the Vietnamese team members alive, their survival would plant seeds of doubt and dissension between SF troops and our little people. And then you guys were heading north. The 101st Airborne Division choppers carried the six men south. When the choppers landed on the helicopter pad, Colonel Jack Warren had ordered every man in FOB4 out to the site. He was held in high regard by SF troops because he genuinely cared about his men.

It had been said that because of his dedication to the SF mission and the men of SF, he would never advance beyond the rank of colonel. He had remained in SF too long, a career decision that the traditional army hierarchy despised and punished. Asp was from FOB 4. F-O-B-4, which Warren commanded. After the three corpses were unloaded from the helicopter, Warren gave a terse, teary-eyed speech to his captive audience. Warren warned everyone that if they were careless in the field,

death was the result of that carelessness. Then he bent down, opened a body bag, and picked up a portion of a body of one of the dead Americans. He was now crying and screaming at his mother. men to never be careless in the field. Warren was never the same after that. Neither was C&C. What was it that changed from your perspective?

Well, we, from our early briefings, probably in October, we heard about the NVA Sapper teams. They were highly trained, and they would just wear a loin cloth, carry a weapon and they were really just highly trained in tracking so that when they came to the attack part they had minimal clothing

and they knew what they were looking for and the NVA at that point had a medal kill American medal so if they killed us they got their medal and a bonus and they would be heroes for the rest of their lives within the Communist Party so we heard about them

this confirmed it And it just kicked up everybody's concerned a notch. And that being New Year's Eve, the team had, the Americas had taken a bottle of scotch with them. So they had had a little hit of the scotch. We don't know how much. And that's what Jack Warren had going the extra distance on, saying about being careless. We don't know. But those sappers were good.

And that proved it. And it just gave us, in our case, you know, as you know, if you do your R&N, ran that night, without the dogs, he would do your perimeter, and our people always checked. I mean, we always rotated who would be sleeping, who wouldn't. And we never, ever had a problem with that. No matter how tired you are, it would be somebody awake just so something like that happened, somebody would be there on full or automatic ready to respond. A new level of terror.

Yeah. And those guys were so, it's like they're just traveling super light and super select the sappers. Sure. You know, just could move quickly and, yeah, that's a scary, yeah, because, you know, the, we knew that the NVA had all our sources set up. I mean, besides being compromised in headquarters, they also had people that alerted when the choppers left the launch site. They have border watchers so that when we came in, they would report where we were heading to a higher command, and they would try to rally their troops. So we were up against that at all times, just a question of who. would be there how many.

And a lot of times, just getting on the ground, it was the first part, but then you hope to get into the mission. And it was just really a challenge. Speaking of a challenge, here we're going back to the book, The Daily Grind of Running Missions Across the Fence was wearing on me physically and mentally.

As 69 dawned, I began a mental examination of life in SOG. Being in an elite unit within America's finest special operations was where I wanted to be. The adrenaline enhanced high of deadly firefights against a relentless enemy under extremely lopsided odds was intoxicating.

I had never experienced such exhilaration or sheer terror. Yet there was a little voice in the back of my head which spoke of survival. Surviving not only a vigorous enemy campaign directed against to SOG members, but merely surviving the odds of going home in one piece.

My mind also began the mental debate between rising to the new challenges inherent in a secret war and returning to a safer assignment. My one-year tour of duty was scheduled to end at the end of April. Under the general rules of SOG, after running targets across the fence for six months, I could request a cushy assignment. I had already spent seven months with the team. I was alive. However, thanks to hip, sow, fuck, Twan, and the other men of ST Idaho.

I couldn't just walk away. And that's where you wrap up this book. Now, you're going to some cool, you go into some cool, one more really interesting story. And then you also have a very cool thing in there about what you guys carried. And what we didn't carry. Yeah, and what you didn't carry. How much longer? So now it's January of 69.

You'd been there for seven months. How much longer did you stay with the C&C teams? I'll stay right there to the end. We closed FWB1 in January. They shipped us down to Danang, and that's where I picked up with the second book. And they needed help down there. So we hit the ground, continue to run.

Bubba asked to be taken off the team. So he left, Lynn Black came on, so was Linanai for my last couple of months. And at the very end, they had a mission up at the Mugia Pass, which was north of the DMZ River in Laos, which was a major channel point. And the plan was for us to go in, set up on a mountaintop, taking a lot of claymores, mortars, and calling airstrikes for two or three days on that, just the race held with the NVA there because they never had a recon team

go that far north. And we did an inspection, which is that inspection prior to that mission, which was about April 20th, 69. And then we finally went up to the launch site, and we were up there, I guess maybe about the 24th or 25th. I just forget the exact date now,

but we went up to the launch site. Got on the choppers, we're getting ready to launch. choppers take off and they turn around and went back. That target had just had two aircraft shot down over it. They figured they just shot down a phantom jet and a Sky Raider. Choppers are going to be easy to knock out of the sky. So the sidebar to that, I met a reunion two years ago.

One of the guys that ran Recon says, remember those pictures you got on your second book on the ground there? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, what was that mission? Wasn't that something, like that's a suicide mission, right? And he says, well, I don't know about suicide. It was going to be high odds, but, you know, we were going in. We had two extra Americans.

We had M60s. We got Buku bullets, hand grenades. We were going to give the shot. The guy goes, do you realize they asked me to do that? And I told him to fuck off. I go, really? I says, you saw us taking pictures. You didn't tell me that.

He says, I didn't know what your mission was. So here's a top secret. good operation, the recon guys, another recon man, had been given that target. Said hell now. It was too far north, and he just felt that it would just be a suicide mission. And once you get in, you'd never get out other than a casket or a body bag. But there's no talking between teams much because everything is like you got a mission, you do your mission, they do theirs.

Yeah, well, I already gave you a fair warning before we started this that we're probably going to have to have you come back on here because I mean I got just uh I mean this these books are they're just awesome the the detail that you go on to and just the experience that you've had which are just it's a miracle that you're sitting here talking and able to tell us what you went through when as far as I can tell there's no way in hell you should be sitting here right now I agree I mean there are times when uh in talking to friends that are people that have read the book, you know, particularly on page 202 when the guy touches your boot. I mean, I've talked to people. It's just like it feels surreal even today. It's like, thank God

everybody at home is praying, you know? And, yeah. The last thing I want to read from the book is just this section right here, the dedication. It says this book is dedicated to all Saug reconnaissance team members, both U.S. Special Forces and Indigenous troops. as well as to every man in every air support unit, especially the King B pilots of the 219th South Vietnamese Air Force's Special Operations Squadron, who worked daily with SOG teams on the ground across the fence in America's Secret War. This book is also for every man in SOG and their support units who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Yeah, because today as we sit here, there are still 1,589 Americans missing in action in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War. That includes CIA, SF, regular Army. In Laos alone, 50 green berets are amongst those MIAs. Over 140 aviation Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, MIAs died supporting our missions here. Just how deadly it was. You guys had a over 100% casualty rate. Yeah, several of our guys had multiple Purple Hearts. Bob Howard received eight.

He had been put in for 11. He was a recipient of the Medal of Honor in December 68 for a mission out of contum. And yeah, the casualty rate did exceed 100%. The, and I didn't, I couldn't find any numbers on the numbers that were actually killed, but that was a massive number percentage-wise of guys in SOG that were killed. Right. Yeah, the numbers are hard to track. And I'm working with a gal now who's a real, she's a retired master sergeant from 101st,

and she's beginning to do some research to try to put that number together because during a war, 3.2 million Americans served in Vietnam. That includes the 500,000 sailors that were off the coast, and your seals that were going up north and out of that 20,000, approximately 20,000 were SF. Out of the SF, approximately 2,000 went to SOG. Out of that, it depends on which author you talk to. There's no hard stats anywhere because

SF was not as good as the seals and keeping records. And it would be between 500 to 7, maybe 800 greenberries actually went across the fence. with recon missions out of the 3.2 million. Those are our numbers. Yeah, amazing. Well, I hope you don't mind coming back here. I'd be honored to come back.

I've heard some of your stories, pal. Believe me, my stories are a big joke. I conversed with one of the guys that was in Ramadi with me, a guy by the name of Dave Burke. He was a Marine Corps Anglico guy on the ground with us. and, you know, we always joke about our, about our experiences. You know, he had a friend, and we had him on the podcast who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Really?

He was a Purple Heart recipient in every war, in every one of those wars. And, you know, that's the way I feel standing here talking to you. Like, I'm in a totally different and much lower category of experience, but that's why it's such an honor to sit here and talk with you. Well, that's mutual. If you have any other closing thoughts to... Well, the only thing about this book, I just want to mention that I couldn't have done it without my wife. Awesome.

My dear wife, Anna. At the time, we had four teenagers and one newborn in the house. And if you can imagine that turmoil, and I'm working at a fish wrapper up in North County. And so between the fish wrapper and the kids, she goes, go write the book. Awesome. She supported me all the way.

That is one thing real quick. When you got home from, so you got out shortly there after, when you got it done with Vietnam, is that, that's when you were done, right? You got out of the Army shortly thereafter? Yeah, I went back to C&C for a second tour, and then I got out of the Army in April 25th. So what book two is about going back. One tour wasn't enough at C&C. Well, you know what, to be honest with you, I came back in, by the time I landed in the States,

like May 1, May 2nd of 69, the anti-war movement was going on strong. there was Woodstock our men walked on the moon but I hated it and I was supposed to go to Fort Bragg with the regular SF but they put us in 10th Special Forces Group which is up in Massachusetts

and they had five companies ABCD and E E was a signal company which was Rinky Dink they had new lieutenants, butter bars running this thing and they treated like basic camp not SF

and to top it off they had old career sergeants that are all overweight, all an embarrassment to the beret they wore. And they came in and put me a platoon sergeant. And I'm in this environment that was not a good chemistry. So I heard that the MPs were coming, basically. And I went down to the Pentagon. We had a woman, Billy Alexander, who handled our orders. And I was told what kind of wine and what flowers she liked. So before I went down there, I had her wine, her flowers. And then Thursday morning, I get to the Pentagon at 7 o'clock, give her the flowers, no wine, went back to sleep in the parking lot, came back at 4, she gave me the orders to Nam. I cleared on Friday. The MPs came

on Monday, and I was back on my team a week later. What were the MPs coming for? There's some bar fights, some property destruction. They have reports of a 4-42, which I had at the time, 4-42 W-30. Which is what? Oh, it's an ozumobile. Oh, okay. Oh, I got, oh, that 4-42. Cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 69, which was the coolest car. at the time. You hear me talk. For sure. The reports about that car

are going through the entrance gate on the sideways drift. I'm sorry, it entered the base on the exit gate. That's what it was. The MPs weren't happy about that. They couldn't catch me. I was able to hide within our calm equipment,

but they were trying to begin to figure things out. But anyways, they were coming. Sounds like the next podcast. That's the warm up for the next podcast. We'll take it for there next time. Like a bad dream. I'll be back if you ask.

Thank you. No, that's awesome. These books, Across the Fence, which one do you think people should read first? Across the Fence is the first. That's my book about my getting involved and et cetera. And the stories of other people, which, by the way, we have a Green Beret medic,

John Walton, who was the son of Sam Walton. You heard of a store called Walmart. Son. One of the best medics there was at the time, Chapter 4, where a fellow Green Beret gets his leg blown off. And when the Vietnamese got shot. four times, John brought them all back, and Tom Cunningham's alive today and has two children,

thanks to John. That's awesome. These books are available on Amazon, right? Amazon. Just go to Amazon. They're available with e-books or paperbacks. And then my website is Sog Chronicles.com. Sog Chronicles.com.

That's the name of Volume 1. That's another book. Right. And then on the ground, The Secret War in Vietnam. That's the second book. The second book. If it's in here, there are some stories I missed because of deadlines. Right.

And the first story we have, our recon team, is that our worst target, Oscar 8, and the NBA come up and tap them on the shoulder and say it's your turn for guard duty. That's pretty close to the enemy. All right, we will cover these books in the future. Everyone go buy these books so you're ready. Thank you.

Really, a true honor to have you on. Appreciate it. Honor to be here. And I can't wait to have you back. I'll be turned. Outstanding. Thank you. And with that, Mr. John, Stryker Meyer has left the building.

And what an honor it was to talk to him. And I can absolutely promise we're having that guy back on. And thanks to you, John, for your service and your sacrifice and the sacrifices of your teammates. It is men like you that have allowed us, we live. He has left the building. and Echo, speaking of living, living the way we should live, what do you got for us?

Well, as we have been doing, talking about Jiu-Jitsu first, Jiu-Jitsu, martial arts, capability is what it is. That's really what it is. You want to generalize the whole thing into one big nugget, capability, just improve your capability.

We want to improve our capabilities. Oh, yeah. A sure way to do that. not just in the martial fields, but in life, is to train some of that jiu-jitsu. Yeah, I was talking,

there's a girl named Kara who trains here. You know, I see her every once in a while, I'll see her, whatever. And she said basically the stuff we were saying,

where she was like, but I only see her sort of in the men's class. I said, hey, have you tried the women's class? Is our women's class? Good now.

Developed. And then she was like, not yet. I want to, whatever. And I was like, yeah, I think a lot of the times will offer more benefits to be hanging on who you are as a girl will offer benefits because you can get like the moves you can kind of do, you know, on a body that's more similar to yours.

So you can go through the moves a little bit like more thoroughly, I think, in a way for lack of better way of putting it. She was like, yeah, that's good. That's true. She's like, you know what, though? I really like, there's a lot of value here in the guys in the men's class. And she said straight for self-defense. For sure. And I was like, yeah, she's like, yeah, because like when you get used to guys, and meanwhile, there's like two guys rolling, like, hard though.

You know the kind where they're rolling and they're grunting it right in front of us, like sweating and splice. They're splashing on us. She's like, when you get with her and we kind of laugh because she like motions to them. And I'm thinking like, yeah, any girl to come in and see that or anyone even, anyone even never. To participate in that. Yeah, I'm thinking, I got to do that. No way, man. I'm not ready for that.

A lot of girls are not ready for that. Oh, yeah. And what if you just all of a sudden, like one day you go to the grocery store and now you got to deal with that. Man, that's tough. There's a big psychological gap you need to make up. Oh, yeah. Which if you train jihitsu, the gap is made up. She was like, I'm used to it.

And she's not a big girl either. She's just like a pretty small girl. She's like, yeah. And she's real nice, you know, nice to go. She's like, yeah, I'm cut. And I'm really used to that. And I've been training for like almost a year or now. I'm like, a big difference.

That's good that you can come in here as often as you do. and have that mindset. That's good. That's going to get you places. 100%. So we're talking about jiu-jitsu. Oh, yeah. And then you need to start talking about

the gear that is needed for jih Tzu. Some of it, yes. Some of the gear that you need for jih Tzu is a ghee. Yes. If you're going to train ghee, jih Tjitsu, which we recommend. Strong. Strong we recommend.

We also recommend you train no ghee. You train all kinds of jihitsu. That's what you train. If you need a ghee, which you do, get one from Origin Maine. Yep. Origin. So you go to Origen,

OriginMain.com is where you can get all these things. Also jeans, American denim. Again, we all know this, but I'm going to say it again. It's all made in America. All of it. Every little piece of it. The little seeds that they plant to eventually grow cotton to eventually go into the loom to eventually formulate. Weave.

Yes. Formulate both. The fabric that gets sewn and stitched into geese, jeans, rash guards, all this stuff, shorts. Best shorts in the world, too, by the way, factually. Anyway, all of it is done in America. So, boom, there's that huge deal, by the way. So, yeah, American denim. We have some new jeans.

Good ones. You know, sweatpants, sweat, athletic gear. Boom. Origin, Maine. There, supplements. Big deal. Pretty much all the essential supplements that you're going to need as you go through this kind of hectic path.

At times, the path is hectic. It should be. Yeah, it kind of is easy. That's not the path we want to be on. That's that path leads down. Yeah. It's going to be easy if it's a downhill situation because all you got to do is sit there and slide. Don't take the path down.

So, yes, the supplements are joint warfare for your joints. Joint warfare is more for like if you get abuse on your joints. You're running a lot. You're doing jiu-jitsu where you're twisting a lot and you're going every day or something like this. Or you're just lifting every day. Lifting every day. Oh, yeah. So basically if you're doing physical activity.

Yeah, that's kind of like hard. I mean, I guess you could break it down. Like, oh, if you're doing some weak physical activity. Then you might not need it. But I think not that's so much the joint warfare. You made a good point, though, at the muster. Remember, because your knee is like kind of on the final stages of healing. Yeah.

And you were like, I was like, yeah, how's your knee or whatever? And you're like, would you say, oh, it was good. But like, since I've been standing up on it for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, all the muster. Yeah, at the muster, yes. It actually swelled up again. Yes.

Surprisingly. So here's the thing. It made me think when I was a bouncer, he used to stand up all the time. Like, for the whole thing, you're standing at the front door and not the, you know, the practice of tactic.

And the struggle is real. It was real, man. But I have dress shoes on. I don't have the new balance or the, you know, the deal. It's like dress shoes. So it's like, it was, man, joint warfare would have came in really handy.

Well, you know. varying levels of hard core So get some joint warfare For your joints get some krill oil for your joints That's general maintenance And general maintenance of life Yes Life support

Yes And then discipline and discipline go Which is sort of like Gives you a little bit of that Little Yeah Little edge Mentally

Should discipline be illegal Negative If you are going to confront someone in an intellectual battle. Is it legal for you to take discipline go and they don't? Should not be illegal because it's not any legal drug. It's not even drugs.

It's actually good for you. It's an advantage, right? Yeah, good. Lifting weights is an advantage. Or the results from lifting weights is an advantage. The results from eating salads. That's an advantage. So boom, same thing.

But discipline just tastes really good. And have that advantage. over your enemy, whoever they may be. Yes. Then we also got mulk, which is milk. Delicious, delicious, delicious protein. I had a milk shake last night. I had meatloaf, no potatoes.

Meatloaf, carrots, milk shake. That's a good meal right there. Chocolate, dark, the darkness, and I put peanut butter in it. Boom, there it is. Literally my late dinner last night. I was tending. Yeah.

That's the mok. And you can give it to your kids too. You can get the warrior kid milk for your kids. Yeah. So your kids instead of turning out to be like an obese, out of shape kid that you were like trying to, no, don't even put them on that path. Put them on the milk tray. Let me ask you this. When you were young.

Yes. And you went to whatever, elementary school, junior high, whatever. Did you bring home lunch? Sometimes. Yeah. So. Not very often. Okay.

So do you as far as you can remember did you did you have a healthy home lunch? Did you do with your you know nothing we didn't even know what healthy was okay That wasn't that wasn't even a thing yes so that's it was just like oh what do you like to eat And what do you like to eat and what's cheap yes right because we're gonna get you We're not getting you cold cuts right because those cost money guess what doesn't cost a lot of money Pologna jam Peebee and jam right peanut butter and jelly yeah go to all day long Yeah, that's too bad.

Oh, white bread, that's okay. On white bread. And then you know what? You get the little party mix of potato chips, Frito Lays, Doritos, which I never liked or use. I still don't like Doritos. Interesting. But then you get some of that.

And then like some chocolate chips, some chips-ahoy cookies. You know what those are? Yes, they do. Yeah. Get the little mini sleeve of chips a hoi. Yeah, that's a... And so there's nothing nutritional, right? The nutritional value of this lunch is zero.

Yeah. You had nothing. Yeah. Best case scenario, I used to get the chocolate milk from the, it costs, it cost five cents for a chocolate, for a white milk, seven cents for a chocolate milk at my school. School lunch. Yeah. So I used to get that. That would probably be what I actually lived off of because everything else was just, was just poison in a wrapper, basically.

Yeah. So is that answer your question? Well, I mean, the reason I was asking is because, okay, so, my. My family is or my mom more than my dad, I guess, but you know, my mom took care of the home lunches in the event of us bringing a home lunch. She's health conscious. She was like a hippie, you know? So we had like the whole meat bread. Okay.

You know what, though? How old are you? I will be 42 this year. Yeah. So you're like five years younger than me. There's a difference there in terms of what people were even thinking. Yeah, yeah. Well, keep in mind, everyone wasn't like that.

I'm saying my mom was. My mom was like a hippie. She was different than everyone. And here's my point with that where when we'd come to school and I'd bring home lunch, we'd get sort of teased because it's like you don't get the cool snacks, the cool Frito would like lays chips and cookies and like the cool fun stuff. Oh, no. Dipping that up in the milk.

Negative. No, you got, we got the whole wheat sandwich with like turkey from a real turkey. With, with sprouted grains on or something. Whole wheat bread. So we're talking about the sprouted. grains. That's the next level right there. It is.

It is. Nonetheless, we got laughed at that. Mama Echo was coming in hard with the sprouting grain bread. With the health. And that was making fun of you because it tastes like cardboard. I don't even know because they don't know how it tastes. It's not that it's more of a social thing. Everyone knows that cookies are yummy. Everyone knows that like chips are delicious for snack and all this stuff.

We didn't have that. We had like the snacks that they knew that weren't that good. Carrots. Tasting carrots. And like. Carrots are. pretty tasty though. I think so now. Yeah. The thing that's good about carrots, if you're not eating sugar and you eat a carrot, it tastes sweet. Yeah, it is. You're like, oh, this is super

sweet. It tastes good. You can eat too many carrots because your body can't digest them fully if you eat too many of them, just FYI. I've made that mistake before. Pounding bags of carrots. You're like one of those bags of carrots. Your gut is going to tell you. All right. Noted. Good. Noted. Bro, where are you going with all this? I'm making a good point. Unless you want to talk about carrots a little bit more. I can't. We can't. But unless I'm making a point. So these kids would make fun of us because they got the cookies and we had like tomatoes and sprouts in our sandwiches. Yeah. But growing up when you come early adulthood, adulthood, that health consciousness paid off big time, huge time. So to make the switch from non-health consciousness to health consciousness, it's like it can be a grind.

That can be harder. Yeah. But just maintain the path. maintain the path and it's already instilled as being a young person. So there's that. So, Mulk. So my daughter comes home from school literally yesterday say they were teasing me because I had carrots. And she wasn't very happy about it.

That's why she knows Jiu-T-T-Sor. Start choking fools out. Well, I started to say that, but it was no time for jokes at this point because she'd been like, are you serious or not? I was like, you don't want to choke anyone for teasing you for your carrots. But is what I said. One of the things I said, I said, don't worry about them teet. There's no, first off, nothing.

funny about carrots like it's not I'm not saying it's like oh it's so serious I'm just saying what's funny about I don't get it kind of thing and she was like yeah that's kind of true and I was like and guess what carrots are good for you just like your lunch is good for you and as you grow up you're going to see the result of that and you're going to see the results of them not eating not healthy food yeah and you're going to see you need to do better than that as a father why because you need to be like yeah no she needs to be like they say oh what are you eating pee you eating some you eating some carrots yeah and And she says, what are you eating there?

Some type 2 diabetes, you're going to die at age 32. Loser. Get out of my face before I put you to sleep. I'll implement, you know, that direction. That's not part of the way of the Warrior Kid Code right there. Negative. No, that's all. We are having fun.

Fun is part of, you know, life. But I saw her wheels turning when she was like, like, yeah, you know, like I will all see the results, you know? And then, you know, then my wife's there and she's like, yeah, look at dad, how big his muscle, all this stuff, right? So it kind of. Oh, so your wife is kind of like just making stuff up. Unless it worked.

But go back to Moke, Warrior Kid Moke. This is what you achieved with that. One of the many things is you actually made it like kind of cool to have a healthy thing, have a healthy snack. That's where we're going. We're going to sway a lot of people with these books and this stuff. That's what's going to happen. I mean, I see that. It's not even going to happen.

It is happening. It's awesome to see. All right. Dude, we got a rock and roll. Come on it. Bro, that was an important story. That was 12 minutes deep. Anyway,

12 minutes deep, we're on line three. All right, we got Jocko White tea. How about that? Jock white tea. Tell me about it. Get it, drink it, taste good, deadlift, 8,000 pounds. Certified organic, by the way. Yeah, certified organic and all that good stuff.

And it tastes delicious and it looks cool. So you're good. Sure. And we have a store. It's called Jocco Store. So you go to jocco store.com. This is where you can get. You can get rash cards.

you can get t-shirts you can get truckers hats and if you're if you're not into truckers hats because whatever you can get flex fit hats yeah bro flex fit hats are good though

you don't get to judge hats you don't wear hats well they look cool stand down no stand down stand down anyway you want to represent the pad this is what it's for It's quality stuff.

It's not ballpark giveaway shirts, the one you never wear or you use for like, you know, wiping your hands in the kitchen or whatever. It's not that. You're not going to wipe your hands in the kitchen with these shirts. You're talking about quality. Quality. Quality. Yes.

Quality. And representation. So yeah, some women's stuff on there. Yeah, a lot of good stuff. I'm going to have two more new shirts coming out. Nice. New. I don't want to necessarily say just shirts, but two more new items.

Things. Sure. Coming out. So stand by for that. Also subscribe, right? Yes. Subscribe to what, the podcast. We're not talking about subscribe to a magazine because no one gets magazines anymore.

Magazines are dead. Sure. Right? Are you going to buy a magazine now? You're going to have somebody bring a random bunch of papers to your house with an advertisement? You're not going to do that. No one does that. Good point.

We're not talking about subscribing to a magazine. Subscribe to this podcast if you want to. Sure. If you get value out of it. And don't forget about the Warrior Kid podcast. I just, I got here. I got hit today. I got a hit.

Kind of hard. Somebody said, is the Warrior Kid podcast dead? And I was like, oh, that stinks. Good question. That stinks. Warrior podcast is not dead. But the Warrior Kid podcast, I need to put more out. So I need a little bit of time, which I'm making, but I need to get it done.

So, yes, Warrior Kid Podcast, subscribe to that. I'll get some new ones in there. Also Irishoaks ranch.com is where Aiden, Warrior Kid, up in Central Cal, has his own business. 13 years old running a business, no big deal. That's what Warrior Kids do. He makes soap from goat milk so that everyone in the world can stay clean. And don't forget about YouTube. We have a YouTube channel.

Did you know that? Yes, sir, I did. And it's called Jocko Podcast. And it's on YouTube. So podcast is not just a podcast where it's audio only on the video version you can see us If you want to know what John Stryker Meyer looks like You can watch this on YouTube this is gonna get a lot of views on YouTube Yeah listening to John Stryker Meyer and hearing his stories

Yeah so check that out also echo Charles makes what he calls enhanced videos Some people might call them distracting from the message Sure might some people like them mm-hmm they have millions of views some of your videos that you've made you know yeah I did a lot of views well like I said or like you said yeah you can call them distractions on the message which I I actually won't even argue with it thank you but some people look at it or see it as enhanced oh that's where you use the word enhanced you put it enhances

the message it's kind of like kind of Like you know when you have a dog and you got to feed them the heartworm pills you know where the pills the heartworm pills is good for them. It's good that message is good but sometimes you got to put it in the food, you know so like taste good. It's like the message gets to deliver it. So my message is so hard to swallow that you have to put like videos around it is what I'm hearing music around it. Yes. Sometimes. Yeah. Hey so that's the YouTube channel. Check them out. And then we also got psychological warfare which is on iTunes Google play other MP3 platforms and if you want an alarm clock That's me talking Then you go to psychological warfare and that's what you get And you'll see that you can use it as an alarm clock or you can use it as an emergency As an emergency air cover Yes fire support

You're like I'm not sure if I should work out right now press play Yeah on the on the psychological warfare track that's about not working out Yeah, and you will get up and you will go to the gym Yeah, and if you're about to ease you some donuts. Yes. Or some chocolate chip cookies. Right?

Sure, chips a hoi, whatever. Chips a hoy. The one you said. You find a sleeve of random chips ahoy hanging around somewhere. You know, you use that term for the first time when I, it was James Nielsen. What? James Nielsen would talk about eating a sleeve of Oreos. Just getting after it.

James Nielsen, world's toughest accountant. Agree, yes. Black Belt and Jiu-Jitsu for a long time. One of the OG American Jiu-Jitsu practitioners teaches on Saturdays here at Victory MMA and Fitness, which, by the way, is our gym in San Diego, California. Do you want to train some? You know what's funny about that, too, where, you know,

how you say, oh, yeah, the world's tough as accountant, right? And he teaches jiu-jitsu, too. So teaching jiu-jitsu, that's a job. Like, that's a career, like you're a jiu-jitsu instructor. True. But he's like, he's an accountant, but he just teaches his jiu-suit. It's not like an accountant is like some, you know, scraping by sort of gig.

No, no, no, no. It's like, and there's a few people like that. You know why? Because teaching jiu-jitsu is fun. Yes. And it makes you better at jiu-s-s. It does make you better. That's just how it is, man, the nature of the game.

That's on psychological warfare. Also, you can get it, if you want some visual representation of the path to keep you there, you can go to flipside canvas.com, run by my brother, Dakota Meyer. He makes art. With layers. With layers. The layers are free. They're not free.

They come with the cost of the art. Right, right. Layers included. Layers included. There you go. Yes. We've designed some of the items there. Yeah.

You know, let them know, like, hey, this would be kind of cool over here. And if you want something, just request to code on Twitter, I think, is the best place. Yeah. And that's cool. Flipsidecanvus.com if you want to get some cool stuff to hang up in your house. Back to Psychological Warfare. If you use that whole thing as a playlist, psychological warfare,

even if it doesn't apply to it, you know, you're not eating donuts a playlist why you work out, by the way, even if you're not eating donuts why you work out, which most of us do not. It still, like,

it puts you in this mindset of like, you know, working and reaping results of work. Yeah, it goes back to the podcast machete season when they talk about how the power of the audio into your ear.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's happening with psychological warfare. It's going right in your ear. You're like, you walk, you get done, listen to that. You're not even thinking

about the fact that you're thinking about the fact. Yeah. You hear what I just said? Yes, I did. You're not even thinking about the fact that you are thinking about the fact that you don't even want. Donuts. That you want to get in the gym, that you want to attack your project.

Oh, yeah. That's what's happening. Oh, yeah. It's true. 100% true. Also, if you're lifting at home, if we're doing the lifting at home, which I do, which you do, which a lot of us do, actually. People hit me up, show me their home setup. Awesome.

You should have kettle bells, in my opinion. Cattlebells is one of the, pretty much the biggest, as far as changes to my workout, the most valuable change that I changed my workout. Functionality. Functionality. Like my hands are stronger. One time I was doing, you know how you got to introduce to you have risk control, you know, and varying levels of risk control depending on the position. I was rolling with a guy literally like he's like trying to release my grip from his wrist or whatever. And like he's visibly angry because he couldn't.

So I just sort of sat there and just let them like do it whatever That was his technique because technically he should be able to get out of that Should but I've been doing those kettlebells so my risk control is a lot We'll say the effectiveness is a lot higher unless my original point kettlebells this is where I get my kettlebells from on it So you go to on it.com slash jocko there you can get these kettlebells and they're all the cool ones too by the way like always said Darth Vader my most recent one stormtrooper kettle bell, my second most recent one, and not to mention all the other primal bells and legend bills that I have from there. Also, at on it, is the electrolyte mineral mix.

That's part of my daily meg mix with Jocco's discipline. Like I said, the mineral electrolyte mix, water, maybe a little gatorade if I'm feeling a little feisty. Oh, and that's how you take joint warfare and krill oil. Don't drink a dairy to everyone. Don't listen to it. Hey, we got some books too. We got Way of the Warrior Kid 3, where there's a will. It's out right now.

And for everyone that's gotten it so far, awesome. Appreciate it. Write some reviews. So I know what you think of it. That is cool. If you have the Warrior Kid 3, where there's a will, that means you should also have Way of the Warrior Kid 1 and 2. Number two is called Mark's Mission.

Also, we got Mikey and the Dragons. Best children's book ever written according to a lot of people. Sure. A lot. A lot of people. I dig it. A lot of people been telling me that. I understand.

Tons of people. No, seriously, check out Mikey and the Dragons, help your kids overcome fear. Fear of all kinds. Also got the Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual. If you need to know how to get after it, if you want the audio version of that, it's on iTunes, Amazon Music and Google Play. Also, we got extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership written by myself and my brother Lafabbin extreme ownership number one the selling business book since it got released

the whole time we just got that little stat dang it's got a big stat yeah yeah impressive some people tell me that dichotomy of leadership is better it's a good combo I'll leave it at that a astronaut front that is my leadership consultancy what we do is problems through leadership. It is me. Laf Bavin, J.P. Danel, Dave Burke, Flynn, Cochran, Mike Sorrelli, Mike Baima, and Jason Gardner. If you need help in your organization with your leadership, which will help everything that you do in your business and in your life, go to ashlonfront.com for details. If you want to come to the muster, you already missed Chicago. It was sold out. Your next opportunity is Denver, December, or sorry, September 19th and 20th. That is going to sell

out in the December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. If you want to come to it, sign up as quick as you can so that you can actually go and you don't get all mad. You'll be mad at me outwardly, but deep inside, you'll know that you hesitated and you procrastinated and you just didn't get your game on. And that's why you're not at the muster. So if you want to come to that, check extreme ownership.com. EF. Online. Leadership training is not an inoculation. It doesn't take one shot and now we're good to go. You want to follow up with it. And that's what you can do with EF online.

Or if you can't make it to the monster for whatever reason, go to EF online. Online interactive leadership training. Check that out. EFonline.com. And of course we have EF Overwatch. If you have a company and you want to get some good leaders

that understand the principles of extreme ownership and they're going to apply them inside your organization, go to EFoverwatch. We will deliver you a leader from the special operations community or the combat aviation community that is ready to step into a role and lead your company to victory Also if you want to hear more About important things like Hawaii 5-0 or other highly intense shows From echo Charles or if you want to hear about leadership and war in human needs

nature from me between the two of us we are on Twitter we are on Instagram and we are on the fashbore echo is at echo Charles and I am at joccoe Willinkin thanks to all the veterans out there especially those like John Stryker Meyer who volunteered and volunteered and volunteered again to do the hardest missions in the worst areas for zero recognition by the way Not even from your own friends and family. Those are true heroes and we are forever indebted to them. We are also indebted to police and law enforcement firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first respondents.

Thanks for keeping us safe here at home and to everyone else. I know that life Can be stressful But chances are you aren't surrounded by Elephant grass that is 12 feet tall And burning and closing it on you Chances are you aren't being assaulted by NVA soldiers Chances are you aren't facing death

Actually you are facing death We are all facing death So remember like John John Stryker Meyer said, every breath of air is sweet, and our gift is to beat. Next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.