Jocko Podcast - 186: Taking A Secret War to The Enemy in Vietnam, w/ The Frenchman Doug Letourneau

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:06:32 - The Frenchman, Doug Letourneau 2:05:05 - Closing thoughts and take-aways. 2:10:15 - SUPPORT: How to stay on THE PATH. 2:19:59 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at ��� https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 186. With me, Jocker Willink. Among the newly minted Special Forces soldiers were Douglas L. Laterno, a skinny 135-pound California cowboy, John Shore, a blonde-haired, slightly overweight, baby-faced kid from Georgia, and Frank McCloskey, a tough, combat-hardened veteran of the 101st Airborne Division. McCloskey arrived sporting seepage from a wound in the back of his head. This trio of Green Berets had completed their Special Forces in-country training program in Natrang, the 5th Special Forces Group headquarters.

When a Sergeant in Natrang asked for Special Forces soldiers to volunteer for a secret project, they raised their hands. In short order, they were flown to FOB4 in the northern sector of South Vietnam, iCore upon reporting in they were told camp commander colonel jack warren would brief them in the morning on the CNC mission in southeast Asia finally after more than a year of training for Leterno the game was on how much better could this get it seems all his life he'd been preparing for this moment from riding rodeo Bronx and breaking nearly every bone in his body to wrangling animals

for television shows like Daktari and Cowboy in Africa starring Chuck Connors. Leturno knew a little bit about taking a calculated risk. And after he had gotten his hands on Robin Moore's book of the Green Berets, he knew this was for him. Guerrilla warfare, check. Counterinsurgency training? Check. Unconventional warfare?

Check. Leturno couldn't wait to write his own story that he could someday share with with his dad, a World War II B-17 pilot and former POW. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for the sight that greeted him as he entered the transient barracks. There, etched onto the concrete floor and forever in his memory, was the charred outline of a man's body, a grisly reminder of the 23 August 1968 attack on Fob4.

That fateful evening, North Vietnamese sappers and Viet Cong operatives It's killed 18 green berets in a carefully executed sneak attack. The deadly side of guerrilla warfare was brought home to him right there. He was in a war zone. The enemy didn't play by any set rules. It was an unsettling event. The next morning, after breakfast, the trio walked over to S3 and chose their code names. LaTerno, McCloskey, and Shore now became the Frenchman, Namu, and Bubba.

that would stick with them far beyond their tours of duty in Vietnam. Because S3 was temporarily located in the headquarters section of FOB 4 since the attack, it was a quick shuffle into the briefing room with everyone else. An intense short, an intense short black-haired man wearing pajamas, slippers, and a bathrobe walked in smoking a cigarette. Before a word was spoken, Colonel Warren abruptly pulled a white sheet off a large map with a flourish and tossed it aside. and announced welcome to cnc man turning to the large map that had black tape boxed

target dead designators on in Laos the DMZ and north vietnam he continued this is what you volunteered for this is why this is a top secret project if anybody asks the president can say we have no men stationed in the a.o that is why you'll wear sterile fatigues and carry no form of identification of any kind on your missions That's why you agreed not to talk to anyone about this operation for at least 20 years. Our intel reports land in the White House. Any questions? Not waiting for a response.

Warren continued to explain the difference between spike teams and hatchet force elements where the different FOBs were located, how FOB3 at KSON was closed after the siege earlier in the year, and how Major Clyde Sincere Jr. had opened a site. at my lock now designated F.O.B.3. Following an update on intelligence reports in the respective areas of operations, Colonel Warren asked if anyone had any questions. LeTurno raised his hand. Where do you need help, sir?

We need men at Fob1. We lost a 1-0 on October 5th, and some of the First Special Forces TDY troops from Okinaw are returning back to the island. Laterno turned to Shore and McCloskey and asked, How about it? F-O-B-1. Shore nodded in the affirmative. McCloskey said, no, I think I'll stay here.

Laterno turned back to Warren and said, We'll go, nodding towards Shore, surprised at McCloskey's response. Without missing a beat, Warren told the remainder of the SF troops in the room that he'd be right back. He turned to Laterno and Shore and said, follow me as he headed out of the briefing room

and into the S-3 operation center. He told the center staff to get a King B to F-O-B-4 in an hour to transport Letterno and shore to Fob1 ASAP. Next, he headed to S-1 and told the clerk that the newbies were to be processed and cleared to go to Fubi. An hour later, PFC, Leterno and Speck-Fore were in a kingby heading north to F-O-B-1. And that right there is an excerpt from the book across the fence, which was written by John Stryker Meyer Nicknamed Tilt Who's a special forces soldier

And Saug Recon leader in Vietnam And we went deep with Tilt on Podcast 180, 181 and 182 And if you haven't listened to those podcasts Then stop this one right now And go back and listen to those first But if you have already listened to those podcasts

Then you heard a little bit About Doug Laterno Codename, the Frenchman And you know that he was also a special force of soldier, a Green Beret, and was also a SOG team member in Vietnam. And it is an absolute honor to have not only tilt back again on this podcast, but he brought with him the Frenchman himself, Doug Laterno.

The one in the only gentlemen. Thank you for coming on. Good to see you again. Good evening, sir. Good evening. Thank you for having us. Yeah, great to meet you. Great to have you both here.

and yeah let's talk a little bit about how you ended up there I mean we you glaze over in the book we're riding rodeo broncos we're working in Hollywood taming animals what was your upbringing that got you to they got you there believe it or not I was born in east L.A. in the barrio well that makes sense not yeah I know so living in the city I got fortunate enough when I got into high school I got into a program called the Future Farmers of America, and it gave me a whole different way of looking at life, and I ended up becoming a president of the chapter, but I had several Spanish speaking and Spanish people in our chapter, one of the largest in all of Southern California, as it turned out. Well, with these people, I could, became such good friends

and their way of life, and still working the fields of the San Fernando. Valley, which was still open, I tended to lean towards the country way of life, even though I was born and raised in the city. And I do nothing about anything at all but city life. But I tried to break away from that through the organization and the western end of the San Fernando Valley. Well, one thing led to another, and I learned about you could go rodeo. And there was a place that I could go ride in practice. We could do bull riding and bronch riding and bearback riding and all the three. Where was this?

Was this in San Fernando Valley? This was actually out in Thousand Oaks. Okay. At the Paramount Studios. Okay. Yeah, they had a ranch right there. And Dee Cooper's is what it was called in those days. And we could go out on Wednesday night and Saturday and Sunday and ride and have jackpots.

and I got into it, and then one thing led to another, I got into college, and I got on the college intercollegiate team, and we traveled and rodeoed. And as I went through college, I became adept to it, and I got into roping with roping horses and own my own rope horse, and it's just the way a life changed from being a city slicker to a cowboy. Where'd you go to college? I started out at Pierce Junior College. in Woodland Hills, in Chaffronauta Valley.

And then ended up with Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo, a Mustang. Yeah. So it threw courses there. But basically, we just kept on going. And then with the TV series that were popular, were a lot of animals, there was an opening to be a wild animal trainer.

at Africa, USA in San Canyon, Newhall. So I jumped up there. How old are you at this point? I'm 20. Yeah, okay. Wild animal trainer sounds like, you know, where's that job? Just another day in college. There you go.

So I jumped up there, and before I knew it, I was handling Clarence the cross-eyed line and Judy the Chimp. And then they had a rope horse there that they used. And they wanted me, it called Dakota Duke. And they wanted me to go out and capture all these animals by roping them. and they knew I could rope. There's an actual picture of me on the front of the pig and string that was produced out of Lancaster, Adelope Valley, of me on the front cover, roping a tiger off of this horse.

Off this horse. And that's what I did. And I roped elephants and I wrote, you know, healed them. And I healed giraffes and I headed a white rhino for him that was coming at us and I turned them back. And, you know, they would do all these, what they call a veil. A veil would be open land. It's an African term. And we just would turn these animals loose, but somebody had to go get them.

So I actually got to work on the TV series that was very popular called a Doctari. And people would see the trucks. They were zebra trucks. I went on YouTube and checked out some Doctari old footage. It's like a classic show. Really? But it was shot in like Africa, but actually it was all done right there in Newhall, Saugas, you know, at the compound.

And so from there, we ran into a series called Cowboy in Africa, and we brought Chuck Connors in it. And he was the star. And Hugh O'Brien had actually done the original movie of Cowboy in Africa. And they shot it in Africa. But here they were going to show it. shoot it here in the United States. And so I got to work with ostriches and all kinds of different animals that they had to have

around the compound of the house that he was working out of in the series. But one thing left to another, but as it turned out, one night, somebody handed me an old ragged book. It was called The Green Beret by Robin Moore. And I looked at it, and I read it, and I couldn't put it down. and I said, this has got to be something that this Vietnam War has been going on for quite a while. I grew up almost listening to it every day. There's got to be something going on that I need to contribute.

And I think this is what I want to do. I went down the next day, very next day, and signed up. So what year was that and how old were you? I was 20, and this was like September, just before, it was like, Well, I'd say, because I went in September 1st, so it was the day before, so, so, you know, August, you know, August 30th. Of what year, though? 1968. 1968.

I mean, 67. 67, yes. And I actually entered the service in September 1st, 1967. Yeah, and by that time, he had obtained a college degree by attending classes at night. So instead of going through the four-year program, the college was three years. Well, I graduated when I was 17. Okay. From high school.

From high school. Guy was early. And with the classes at night. Yeah. And the, like, the attitude towards the Vietnam War in 1967, you know, from the, I mean, especially when we think of Hollywood now, we think of people that just are, you know, just detest everything that has to do with the military most of the time. and you were kind of in that Hollywood scene hanging around with all these people, but that didn't rub off on you at all?

It didn't happen that way. In 67, 68, it wasn't like that. Wasn't like that back then. I was shocked when I got back and I actually visited Bubba on Peach Street in Atlanta, Georgia, and there was a anti-Rally, Vietnam rally, going down the street.

And I looked out the window and I said, Bubba, what in the world is that? He says, those are anti-war protesters. I'd never seen it, never heard of it. But in 67, everybody was still pretty patriotic. Got it. And didn't have that situation. And now, what about your old man who was, you know,

he was, you were raised as a son of a guy that was a B-17 pilot? Yes. A war hero in his self. he ran 13 missions. He was actually the first two missions were over Berlin. He was on the first two missions to bomb Berlin itself. But he flew 13 missions on his 13th mission. They gave him a brand new airplane because his airplane had been shot up so bad

with his crew that he brought from the United States and flew it over to England that they had to give him a brand new airplane that morning. And he took off and he had 999 planes behind him. He was point that day. And he went over a target called Schweinfurt. As it turned out, Schweinfurt in 44 had lost 56 airplanes. And this day, his entire squadron of 22 out of 23 were to be shot down that day. And he was the first one down.

and they were using new tactics the Nazis were. They would line up of misersmiths and 109s and in a row and go right through them. Instead of coming around or going on top, they'd just go right through them. They didn't care if they lost the planes or not. And then they had Falkworth 190s behind them.

And they took out all these planes in the very lead just to start the battle. But no one could ever figure out why Schweinfurt was so protected and so many losses every time that was tried to be bombed. And Garrick, during the Nuremberg trials, he admitted that it was the only ball-bearing factory the Germans owned without ball-bearings. The war would have been over with in a matter of a few months.

And this whole war went on and on and on because neither the British or the U.S. could figure that out. And they should have bobbed it every day, as what he said. And if the war would have been over with, they would have had to surrender. But just the quirk in the whole situation. But my dad ended up being my first airborne person in our family. Involuntarily. And halo.

And he taught himself. What altitude were they flying at? 10,000 feet when he jumped. because his plane caught on fire and they couldn't extinguish it. His engines were on fire and he couldn't open the Bombay doors. The hydraulic system had been shot up. His radio operator had a 20 millimeter right through his stomach and they had to put a parachute on him and just shove him out the bottom door. And it was pretty hectic.

The plane blew up in mid-air, but those that could got out and made the free fall. to the ground and out pulled their shoots. And anyway, my dad was attacked by farmers with pitchforks. And thank God the Gestapo and the SS were there to retrieve him and push the farmers back. He thought he was going to die right there in the hole. He sprained his ankle and he was kind of out of it. But anyway, they hauled him off and strung him up and tried to make him talk. and, you know, the usual serial number, name, and rank.

And then they put him in Stahlog 1, which was an all-o-o-officer camp, and had 15,000 officers that had been shot down in that camp. All the enlisted men went to enlisted Stalogs. And he served 13 months in the P-O-W camp, and then one morning they woke up, and the Russians were there. The Russians liberated him. He was taken home, and that's the story. And he became well known in our town for what he did.

Plus, he had two brothers. And my uncle Armin was given a silver star by Patton, General Patton himself in France, pinned on his chest. And my uncle Eddie flew corsairs. So the Luterno brothers were quite active. Yes, they were. So I had a lot to follow. Yeah, you did.

Jeez. So I ran... That's a lineage there. But I ran 13 missions. How ironic, right? That is. I ran 13 missions and one bright light. When your dad came home, what did he do?

Did he get out of the Army? Did he... Well, it was Army Air Corps in those days. It wasn't the Air Force. And so he tried doing a little bartending and a little this, a little this, a little of that, but he had been in construction. He actually was partnered up with his, my grandfather, my grandpa, and it was Leterno and Laterno Construction Company. And he filtered back into the construction and started building because they needed homes, all these soldiers coming home.

And he built most of Burbank Glendale at the time. And they always did quite well and got into commercial buildings and I sort of followed into those footsteps eventually after I got back from the service. So when you when you enlisted what did your how did your dad feel about that? Well he was not happy about it because he only gave him a day's notice. I said I'm going I'm going into the service and I'm going to go to Vietnam and I'm going to be a green beret. But of course when we and I enlisted they couldn't give me that. It was the only MOS that they could not give because it wasn't guaranteed. They could guarantee me anything else. They wanted me to be an officer because I had a degree. And I said, no, I'm not going to go to

OCS. I want to go and be whatever it takes to be in special forces. As it turned out in the long run, whether you really want to hear the whole story, it's up to you. But I did end up being a green beret and going through all the processes and going through all the volunteer and being accepted and going into it and I passed it. But during that time, you have to realize I'm just an E2.

I went in as an E1. I'm an E2. I'm the lowest ranking there is. And the MOS that I actually graduated with was a prized MOS that only a few would maintain and that was heavy weapons. They go, you can't be heavy weapons unless you're an E5 or above. But when my turn came up to go in front of the panel, my name being L, that's made it documented.

That's why I can say this. I was the first E2 ever to be accepted for weapons MOS training. Because I told them exactly what I had in mind. I said come Monday morning, we've already gone. gone through our phase one and I've got my green beret and I said we need to go into MOS and this Monday I can start. I said when that MOS is done it so happens phase two of graduation exercise when you go out in the field for two weeks in survival mode I said it will start immediately the following Monday and I said and I can be in Vietnam in the next three months.

And they looked at me and said, you got it. So if you look at the orders, everything from L to Z, there was E2, E3, E4, was in my weapons class. Wow. Because I started something that couldn't be turned back. The tide had been turned. So when I got to Vietnam and my first assignment to FOB1, I'm now a PFC, E3. and Pat Watkins, who has the DSC, Distinguished Service Cross, from his time on August 23rd when the FOP4 was attacked, he told everybody, there must be one bad son of a bitch coming up here because he's a PFC, he's 11 Charlie S.F.

He said, he's been busted down so far. He's got to be the baddest soldier working on the land. And when I showed up and he looked at me, he goes, you are a PFC. As high as green as grass and knew nothing. Just been trained hard. Oh, that's a good way to kick it off. Man. Yeah, welcome F will be one.

Yeah. Yeah. When you were going through the, how long was the block of training that you, so you go through boot camp, how long was the SF training? What was that total? Well, I had to go through boot camp, and that's where I had to volunteer. to even go through the acceptance of trying to be assigned to SF training. Then I went into advanced AIT, which is advanced infantry training. You had to go through that.

And you also had to sign up for airborne training. So you had to go through all the basics and come out as an 11B, which was small infantry arms. So anyway. Then jump school. Yeah, jump school. But I went through the nomination part of it, taking tests and physical tests and swimming, everything.

And then interviews with the SF guys that were there that were in charge of selecting who was going to go. We started out with 350 men volunteering to go through this acceptance. They only took 35. In the end of the deal, that was one of the 35. And I went on to airborne school the next day. and went through jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. They put us after our last jump, which was out of the old box car of 119s,

and then they came in with the new jets. And so I'm kind of proud of that. And we went on a bus that night all the way to Fort Bragg and got there in the early morning hours of Saturday, Saturday morning. And then Monday morning we were in formation. for our very first day of training in special forces. And that block there was two weeks out in survival, phase one, and then eight weeks of training after that,

and then another two weeks of our graduation exercises where we're trained to overtake a government. That's what Special Forces does, is actually take over governments and train guerrillas to do so. And so then 30 days later, I was in Vietnam. Was the, I'm sure the focus must have been like 100% on, hey, you're going to Vietnam. We know you're going to Vietnam. This is what it's going to be like.

This is what you're dealing with. When I graduated, the colonel stood in front of us, the head of all of trading group, and said, I don't want a one of you to volunteer for fifth group, Vietnam. We spent too much money on you. You're just going to go there and die. you stay here pick any other group I'm going to go down the line

with the command sergeant major and he's going to tell me what group you want to go to I had 23 graduates in my class all but three volunteered for Vietnam he was not happy

what yeah you think like why is someone during the Vietnam War going to join special forces unless they want to go to Vietnam I mean exactly But in my mind, there was something wrong.

It had been going on for years. And Special Forces had been there before it was a war, advising. And I just could not figure that out. And I said, I've got to go. I've got to see why it's taken so long. It's taking longer than the World War II. And that was five years. So why is it taken so dang long?

So I said, I've got to get there and do something about it. That's how my attitude was. Frenchman's coming, he's going to handle this thing. P-S-C, O-I-C. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm going to go to the book here. This is going back to Across the Fence, and obviously I told everyone to buy this

because I've been reading chunks of it, and if you haven't bought it yet, just buy it right now, written by John Striker-Myer. So this is a section where he, He's writing about the Frenchmen. So here we go. Within 24 hours, Laterno and Shore were on recon teams at Fob1,

and they immediately began training. Immediate reaction drills, weapons and explosives training, reviewing team SOPs, practicing helicopter extractions on strings, and practicing wiretaps. As October yielded to November, many of the members of the two recon teams began to build a rapport because they were doing so much training together on the Foubi range.

In addition, Laterno and Shore also quickly learned that the veteran indigenous personnel on their teams were highly skilled and fearless warriors. One night while Leterno was recording a verbal message for his parents on his portable cassette player, Lap, the young point man on ST, Virginia, came into his room and spoke into the recorder. I want to tell you parents of Private Leterno, not to worry about him. We respect him and I'll keep an eye out for him. And don't worry, if an enemy shoots at him, I'll catch the bullets with my body. I'll protect your son.

thank you for sending him to Vietnam. He's a good soldier. That he was. The kid was like 16 years old. And he was our point man. Who knows how many kills he had. He was fearless. His parents had been both killed.

He was an adoptee in the song. He was raised and lived and fought in song. Wow. And he prided himself on trying to learn how to speak English because he wanted to be number one interpreter. Yeah, how'd your parents like that? Did they ever get the tape? They got the tape, yeah.

I wish I knew where they were. They passed away and we couldn't find them. But, yeah, it was amazing. And my dad knew right then and there I wasn't coming home. He knew I wasn't coming home. And he didn't. He had to try to keep my mother for figuring that out. But he knew that I would not be let come home because of the secret missions.

He figured they would, the government would take me out before they would let me come home with what I knew. And Lap is the kind of Vietnamese, South Vietnamese ally that you never heard about. That we worked with every day and we're alive today thanks to them. We owe our lives to them. Oh, yeah? We do. and a couple of Kingby pilots. Yeah, it's true.

Extractions. I have 13 string extractions. 13 for 13? Yes. Lucky 13, I know. That's what my dad said. He had 1,300 bombing hours, flight hours. But he also had 13 months in a POW,

and he was also shot down on Friday the 13th. April 13th. April 13th. April 13th. No superstition here, huh? No. Geez. All right.

Continuing on. A few days before Thanksgiving, ST Virginia's 1-0 Childress announced that an operation order had come down from the S3. The team had a mission in the western section of the DMZ. And then I'm going to fast forward a little bit here to a guy named McGovern. Quiet spoken, McGovern.

McGovern gave him a wry half-smile and said we can't have that you need to have a car 15 for your first mission follow me the duo walked over to McGovern's room he opened his locker and pulled out a clean car 15 and handed it to Leturno this is a special car 15 he said according to official army records this car 15 was written off as a combat loss at Fob 3 in Kaysan meaning as far as the army's concerned this weapon doesn't exist someday after a successful tour of duty in Vietnam if you're so You can take this baby home with you because it doesn't exist. But as you can see, it does and it's a sweet weapon. It never failed me and I know that since you're a weapons man, you'll take good care of it

Up to this point, Laterno had used an M-16 for all of his training now with his car 15. He was ready to take on the world. True. It was a mean weapon. You see it in that picture. Yeah, yeah. The book has the picture of it. Yeah, the and just rocking those 20 round mags every time I see those pictures of you guys with those 20 round mags I just I carry I carried 25 of them

stuffed into the canteen covers we didn't carry food per se all my food I had zippers sewed into my sleeves up on my shoulders

left and right and I would roll up dehydrated rice with electrical tape, instead of one full ration, I took one full ration of food and cut it into five different days for maximum output. And we only ate once a day and we just put, we only had four quarts of water because we didn't want to carry any more weight or anything else but ammunition. We carried all ammunition, grenades, M79 shells because we carried sawed off M79s. And so that's all we carried was ammunition because when we go in, that's our supply. There's no resupply.

It's all up to us. And many a time we came back with nothing and had to resupply ourselves because we got down to the last bullet many times. 25. What was your load? Do you know how much you load out, Wade? Yes. My web gear with all the clips and everything. in it and all the water

all that weighed 75 pounds my rutsack because I carried the radio the PRC 25 C4 Claymore blasting caps everything that you needed an extra antenna all that stuff

inside was another 75 pounds I weighed 135 I carried 150 pounds into the field yeah that's crazy that's that's crazy But that was everybody's load. The indige, our mercenaries, they carried probably 130 pounds.

And they probably didn't weigh more than 120. 115. Jeez. Continuing on. The opportunity arrived on Thanksgiving Day, 1968. After the weather cleared at the Kwah Tri launch site, Quang Tri.

Is that right? Quang Tree. Quang Tree. launch site, ST Virginia boarded the King Bees and headed west to the target area with three American and four South Vietnamese team members. Lap, the 17-year-old hardcore point man who had run many missions. Hone? Is that right? Yes. Hone, the interpreter, Cho, the M-79 operator, and Khan Cowboy Done, who had fought valiantly

besides Lynn M. Black Jr. with ST. Alabama. as the second Sikorsky churned westward, the 135-pound Luterno went through a mental checklist of everything he was carrying. McGovern's car 15, the PRC-25 FM radio, an extra battery for it, a sought-off M-79 grenade launcher, a 22-caliber high-standard pistol with a silencer, ammunition for all weapons, hand grenades, gas masks, smoke grenades, a camera, and five special bags of dehydrated rice. he quickly realized he was carrying more than 100 pounds of gear. His inner thoughts were jarred when the door gunner test fired his 30-caliber machine gun without announcing his intention to anyone. Within a matter of seconds, the King B cut power and began a tight downward spiral into the LZ where Childress, the lieutenant, Hone, and Lapp were already waiting.

The dizzying downward spiral ended as the pilot reved the engine and landed on the LZ. Cho exited the H-34 with Lterno and cowboy following him into the wood. Woodbine connecting with the remaining members of the team. The Kingby lifted off and the LZ quickly cleared the target area. And then there was absolute silence. So there's your first mission insert right there. My first insert. You talk about it.

Having Tucker time. And I'm not knowing what the heck we're doing, but we just dropped out of the sky nowhere. And I mean, it was adrenaline rush. But, you know, I'd been roping tigers and, you know, rhinos. And I've been riding bulls and Bronx. And, you know, it just came to me, you know. But it was, I mean, I'm here. All my training, all that time, over a year, and I'm here.

This is it. This is the day. Yeah. Now you question whether, you. you're going to stand up to it because you know the enemy's there. We didn't go there because it wasn't. We went there because there was a trail that needed to be followed and find out who's running that trail.

The doorgunner test firing that 30-cow just is a good wake-up call. It was. It was. Because I'm sitting in the door. It is right over my head. And not only that, our kingbies were so stripped that they were so long. compared to the regular H-34 marine ships, they could outfly them in height. And we could get up and over into those mountains and those high ranges and stuff.

But they dripped oil, and they had oil going down your neck all the time. And then when he shot that 30-cowl over the top of me, the hot brass has hit me in the neck. And I'm going, holy crime of it, you know, scared a crap out of you. I almost jumped out. And I hadn't landed yet. Back to the book. The audio contrast was startling. As Lterno's senses adjusted to the quiet, he scoped out the LZ, which was in a deep valley

between three jungled covered mountains. Gradually, sounds of the jungle resurfaced. Birds chirping, bugs humming. After 10 minutes, Childress signaled Terno to Radio Covey with the team okay. The insertion was successful. No enemy activity evident. Childress moved the team toward the first mountain. Movement was slowed by tall elephant grass and the only communication between the team members was hand signals.

The team moved in 10 minute intervals, stopping every 10 minutes to listen to what was going on around it. After more than an hour, the team finally emerged from the elephant grass as it continued to climb the first mountain. Laterno was on hyper alert, his heart pounding hard, whether sitting in a long rest period or moving up the mountain. Near the top of the mountain, Lapp pointed out an observation platform that had been cut to the jungle high off the ground. From that platform, anyone could observe the LZ and the valley where the team was inserted, as well as the other open areas that could be used for landing helicopters. Had a trail watcher been sitting on the platform when ST Virginia flew into the LZ? If so, where was he headed and when would the NVA hit the team?

Late in the day, the team finally reached the top of the mountain and found a wide, well-used trail. Leterno's first thought was, how could anyone be out here in the middle of the in the middle of nowhere in this thick jungle. Regardless, the team set up its night perimeter, far above the trail where it could see anyone moving while remaining camouflaged and out of sight. At last light, Childress made the final commo check with Covey as the team settled in for its first night in the jungle.

It was an uneventful night. Childress did a midnight commo check with Hillsboro, the Knight Command aircraft that flew high above the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the DMZ and checked in with Covey in the early morning. after the team ate breakfast and shifts Childress directed Lap to move parallel to the trail with cowboy as a tail gunner in the line of March and Laterno walking in front of cowboy.

The team moved slowly in less than 10 minute intervals before taking breaks to listen to the surrounding sounds. They did this because moving next to the trail was fraught with inherent risks. So there's your first night out in the jungle. Yeah. Relatively mellow. It was.

But the mosquitoes were huge. And we wore cravats around our heads. We actually used those for tourniquets. It's more as we could pull them down over our ears and face. Got it. And pick the mosquitoes out the next day because they were like cranes. And I mean, then you have to realize, too, that's the first meal for an entire day with,

100 degree weather and only one quart of water. A sip in the morning, a sip at noon, a little bit for the dehydrated rice at night, and a sip to wash it down with, and there's one quart gone for the day. You couldn't allow yourself to drink ever except on those intervals. And you didn't, you didn't, did you guys plan to resupply water? Like, did you guys look at the maps and see rivers or anything? No. Streams?

No, nothing. So you planned one quarter a day? One quarter a day. That is not healthy. I know you're a trainer, but that's what we had to allow ourselves because of the weight. You know, a gallon of water is 7.5. It is. So we had to judge our weight versus ammunition.

and that's what we trained ourselves to do. And not only that, we also took pills so that we wouldn't go to the bathroom either. Because they could smell you. I'm smelling American. That's why we had to eat rice and eat everything they ate. Otherwise, they'd smell you. You know, MRIs and can't sea rations, all that stuff. They could smell that for miles.

And they had trackers out there. And you had to watch for those, which I think you. you'll get to. But just that water ration is what you have. I trained myself for a year to do that. I did that all the time because we figured we'd be out in the sixth day. We'd come out in the six day so we'd have no water on the last day, but we could survive the five days. Do you ever take any heat casualties, guys that went down from lack of water? Actually, never did. That's amazing. Never did. In the desert, we would, even in training guys, we'd have guys go down, like on a, On a two-day operation, I'd have guys go down from lack of water.

I've had guys go down in training in the state side, but I never had any. Our guys were, I'm just going to say we were tough. Well, the jungle is a little different than the desert, too. Yeah. Yeah. Because you've got shade. Yeah. You're your triple canopy, so you actually are got shade over the top of you.

You're not in open areas. You're never going in an open area. You always follow the canopy, but you have to move slowly because it's so darn thick, so it takes time. And the tail gunner's job is to cover the trail. Everybody walks in everybody's footprint if you try. That's what you're supposed to do. Everybody has an area to cover. One guy turns to the right and the other guy turns to the left.

The point man covers the 180 in front. Tail gunner causes the 180 in back. And we train like that. We don't turn our backs and look at what the other guy's doing. We only concentrate on our area and keep that area clean. Unless we have to move in that direction, then we all turn that way and move. It's a precision movement that we practice. We train like that.

Every time we were back in camp, we trained how to move. That's why RT Virginia and RT Idaho were surviving. achievable teams besides having the luck of the gods with us you know sometimes you got to make your own luck a little bit through you know we we talk about that all the time like we would train all the time we'd patrol around in the compound rehearse rehearse we'd rehearse get this is always shocks people to rehearse getting in and out of the trucks like you know we'd have a big a big giant truck to transport troops in but we'd do raids with those things and we'd practice getting out you know, like, okay, because if this takes you seven seconds, if you're in a firefight,

I mean, seven seconds is a long time to be trying to get out of a truck that people are launching grenades at, you know, and so we'd practice, so we could do it quickly, do it at night, do it in the dark, do it with your gear on, you know, reverse order, do it again, and that's what we do so that we'd be, you know, ready for those situations. We did the same thing. We actually, working out of FOB4, we had an island called Monkey Mountain, and we'd go over there, and we set up a course to walk from one side to the other. And that's how we would train

so that we could continually upgrade how we walked. And you guys didn't, I've talked to Tilt about this. You guys didn't bring mosquito nets in the field to wear over your head? Never. That would be, what we had was what they called, believe it or not, they had mosquito repellent that was U.S. Army issue. But we also had Max Factor that did the makeup. Okay, what's that all about?

The grease paint. Camouflage paint. Oh, okay. Caramplage paint. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what we would do is take the repellent and mix it in our palms, squirt into our palms and put the grease paint in our palms, and then put the paint over our face to cover our highlights,

so there's no reflections. And besides that, I used electrical tape and wrapped up my trousers at the bottom around my boots. So to keep the leeches out, but also that closed off. And then I also did that around the wrists of my arms. And then we wore, our car 15s were so hot that we had to wear gloves with a few fingers cut out of them. We looked like Michael Jackson way before he is. time. I wish you had told me about that grease paint idea.

I like that. You didn't know that? No, I didn't know. See, I learned something today. There you go. It's a little late. A little late. Thanks on the knowledge.

The mosquito repellent and the grease paint mixed together made a very gooey mess, but it would keep them off of your face, you know. And when you were at night, when they were at their worst, you could pull that cravet down and then, you know, keep them out of your ears. And they would stay off your face. because they didn't want anything to do with it. And we always carry just a little extra with us to keep it going, you know, because being out there for five days, you know.

The most, I mean, most of the time we get shot out in a day, two days, three days. But I had the luck of having several five-and-seven-day missions. I was able to stay out a long time as our teams progressed further and deeper. They didn't think we'd go that far. but we went deeper than anybody could ever go. We got down to some of our missions in Laos with one minute on time with the Kingby. There was no bringing us out

once they dropped us on the ground. It was over with. They had to go back and get fuel. So no 10 minute station time. They just dropped you and left. Had to. Had to. But they weren't expecting us that far.

We could get right into them, catch them off guard. Going back to the book, as ST Virginia moved up the second, Mountain, Cowboy and Laterno began to hear women's voices off the trail. Cowboy urged Laterno to go explore the sounds. Laterno shook his head no, indicating they had to stay with the team. Cowboy who spoke broken English repeated the suggestion, adding it could be a small

NVA village. We could kill everyone and make the NVA Boku angry. We want to let them know we can hurt them the same way they attack our camps and villages. Letterno again declined and gave him the hand signal to plant some M-14 anti-personnel mines on the trail behind them, in case the NBA soldiers were trailing them. As the team moved on, Laterno planted a few more tow-poppers and marked their locations on his map after covering them expertly. He laid down some powdered mustard gas on the ground for any tracker dogs that might follow their trail. The mustard gas was left over from World War I. How it landed at Fubai remained a mystery to Laterno.

The good news was that it still worked. The fact that it was confirmed during the next break when the team heard a dog howl and anguish after snorting some of the old mustard gas. Maybe it didn't work that well because a few minutes later, the dog was back on the team's trail. Cowboy told the Terno to use his pistol to kill the dog. Laterno's mind flashed back to Special Forces Training Group when instructors had said the same thing.

Laterno pulled out the 22, quietly moved. back down the trail, took off his rucksack, and moved a few more feet before lying down on the ground facing the trail. The dog never realized Laterno was there. When the dog was about 10 feet away, Laterno fired one shot. It struck the dog between the eyes, killing him instantly. The canine dropped in his tracks out of Laterno's view. Unaware of what had happened, the dog's handler moved up the trail. He got near the dead dog.

When he got near the dead dog, he stepped on a toe popper. Letterno and Cowboy heard the NVA screaming in pain and anguish. They left him behind, figuring he would die shortly. The team moved further up the mountain with Leterno and Cowboy providing rear security. Again, LeTerno and Cowboy heard women's voices below them. Again, Cowboy urged Laterno to go downhill and attack the encampment. And again, Laterno declined. So these guys are on you, obviously at this point.

When you are you guys are still heading up the mountain? But do you think you can get away from them? What is your point? What is your, what are you trying to accomplish at this point? At this point, we're trying to get away from the tracker. But I managed to take care of the tractor, but we don't know how many people are there. We keep hearing the voices of women's voices below us.

Cowboy keeps wanting me to go down there with him, trying to confuse the whole situation, because he wants to kill him, because he says it'll make them mad, then they'll come after us. And we can really get into it. Well, Cowboy just got off a mission on October 5th, which is in the book where they decimated a 10,000 man division of all things. Eight and a half hours, they took down 85% of them with an eight-man team.

Incredible, but it's true. Yeah. And they stacked bodies up for sandbags. That's how many they were killing so fast. but he was insistent, but I told him we can't do that because I can't split the team. I have to do what my 1-0 says. I'm just a 1-2.

I'm low man on the totem pole here, you know? And there's even a lieutenant with us, but he's the 1-1. He's actually below my sergeant because there's no rank in SOG. That was one of the things that always took me back was there was no rank in SOG. We didn't carry rank.

We didn't wear rank. It was whoever was there the longest that lived the longest was the head man. He's the 1-0. Whoever lived the longest was the 1-0. And that's how it went down. And when that 1-0 was killed, the 1-1 took over. And he usually took over the team from there on until he was killed. And then the next one, the 1-2, would take over because he'd stepped up to the 1-1 position.

And that's how we progressed with our teams. Because everybody was killed as we went along. We were just lucky. But I did lose my 1-0, Gunther Wald. And, of course, Children's went home, and he was lost to an automobile accident. And so it's just, you know, but that's how it progressed.

And at this point, this is your first mission. You got, it's like... I'm trying to do everything right. Yeah, and you're getting the full benefit on your first mission. You've got the dog tracking you. You've got the NVA encampment down below. You got the women's voices. You've got the tracker coming up behind the dog.

I mean, he's hitting the toe popper. This is like, you're getting everything you were hoping for. Here it is. Here it is. And we know the NVA is there. Welcome to the jungle, baby. Because the families are there. So we know, of course, we're thinking too, maybe they're the trackers families too, you know.

Because they would hire trackers, they tell the trackers you either track for us, we'll kill you. And so they have no choices because they're just indige out there living, trying to survive. So you're trying to get up the mountain, get away from the tracker. Was it possible to shake the trackers? Was it possible to, like, actually lose them? Sometimes. Sometimes. Or did you feel like once the trackers were on you, you were pretty much heading to your extract?

Exactly. Exactly, because they were communicating in some way of fashion and let the NVA know. We fought regular troops. We never fought the Viet Cong that they call the VC. We actually fought uniformed NVA and the regular army that North Vietnamese had. But we needed to keep off the trail and keep going, because we needed to find out where this trail was going. This was our mission to try to figure out where this trail went. We did accomplish it in the end because I went on a second mission,

which is later in the book. And I found, actually went into North Vietnam and was inserted on Christmas of 68 in North Vietnam on the same trail, but higher up. And that's a whole different story there. Well, going back to this story. Here we go. By the time Letterno completed his last radio called to Covey, the team was enveloped in darkness,

and team members began to set up a perimeter for the night. Dawn broke without any enemy activity. When Covey flew over the team in the morning, he warned Childress that a team was being extracted under heavy fire and another was being inserted into a top priority target. Sit tight was the last instruction from Covey. St. Virginia didn't move from its quiet spot alongside the mountain. During lunch hour, each member ate in shifts and Letcherno went out to inspect the Claymore mines.

The team had deployed to ensure the NVA hadn't turned the deadly explosive devices around to face toward them. When he completed his inspection, Laterno found a log to sit behind. The NVA would actually do that. They'd crawl up to your perimeter and turn your Claymore. Triple canopy. You could pass them up within two feet of you. They could be two feet away from you, and you wouldn't know it. That's how thick the jungle is.

And you would see a foot. You know, you'd say combat, you might see a foot and you shoot the foot. As long as you shot the foot, you know he was down. And he wouldn't go to survive. They had no hospitals, you know. See, you could count that as a kill. But, you know, but you can see.

You just had to mow down the jungle, open it up. Guess where they're at. The green tracers coming out gave you a clue. Yeah. Yeah, it's just shocking to me that they would crawl up and try and turn around your claymore minds so that when they attacked you, then you clack off your claymores and boom, you're actually claymoring yourself. Later on, the CIA gave us a piece of equipment that I carried that had a little thread out of a box. And you could wrap that whole thread around your encampment where your A.O. is right at the moment.

and put it in your ear. And if that thread was broke, it would sound a buzzing noise in your ear, and you knew somebody came through you. It could have been an animal, but you knew somebody came through your perimeter. And you just had to put it in front of all your claymores. And then to stop it, you just lit a batch and burnt it.

And then you used it the next day, the next time. But once I had that, my perimeters were always covered after that. Going back to the book, later in the afternoon, Childers signaled the team to pull in their Claymore Mines and prepare to move out. Due to the combined weight of his rucksack and webgear, Laterno moved to his knees and slung his rucksack on his back. Just as it landed on his back, AK-47's opened fire. Laterno was slammed to the ground face first. The impact so severe he thought he had broken his nose. Startled, Laterno jumped up with his car 15, pointing toward the AK-47 gunfire that was near the front of the front of the ground.

the team. Surprised that there was no NVA near him. Letterno removed the rucksack to discover that four AK-47 rounds had ripped through the 23-pound PRC-25. He reached into an especially tailored pocket on his fatigue shirt, which was sewn with vertical zippers, one on the left side of the shirt and one on the right side between the top and bottom of the pockets of the shirt. and pulled out his URC 10 emergency radio and broadcast a general alert for any aircraft in the area. ST, Virginia was declaring a prairie fire emergency. So this is like your first fire from the enemy

and you could shot in the radio, four rounds in the radio, knock you down. Yeah, I didn't know nothing. All I knew in my butt-nose was busted. I thought it was anyway. And then I'm going, and I'm having to think, what am I supposed to? to do and I was my first reaction. Meanwhile my one zero children was mad as hell at me because he

says bring me that damn radio. He said that hurt 10 ain't going to do crap for us. He said I said it ain't working. I think it's shot up and I said it don't work there's no signal and so I brought it to him well needless to say I was standing up what I brought it to him and he's laying on the ground and he grabs me. He says can't you just get down? The AK-47 rounds are hitting all over us. We're in the middle of a firefight. We're returning fire. Me, I'm still standing there in shock.

And he pulls me to the ground, saves my life. And he says, he looks at the radio real quick, and he goes, the antenna's been shot off. That was the fifth round that went through it. A breach between my rutsack and my web gear and pulled out my spare antenna and screwed it on, and we had commo. That radio was good to go. Air conditioned.

Just then, Pat Watkins is flying over our Covey Rider. And he assessed what was going on, and he could see it from where his location was in the air. And he could see we were taking massive amounts of fire. And he called for an extraction from Kwong Tree. And they brought the kingbies in to get us. We had to, you know, you can read the stuff. Yeah, yeah, the, uh, once he got that, once he got, once he got the radio back for you and it started working, Childress screams into the radio, we need an X-Fill now. I'm declaring prairie fire emergency.

Is anyone out there? Within a second or two, there was a response. Calm down, Childress. I realize you're under fire, said a Covey Rider. Just at that moment, several AK-47s opened up from the woodline near the log where Laterno had been unceremoniously slammed onto his face. Lap and Cowboy returned fire. Covey Rider continued We heard your team declare a prairie fire emergency

On the guard frequency And I've rallied the cavalry What's your mark? Do you have an LZ in sight? Before Childress said a word of the radio He turned to Laterno and said, See, it works Suppose we had left it for the NBA.

Never. I say never, ever leave a radio behind. As if to emphasize that point, the NBA opened fire again As Lap took, as that began looking for an LZ while moving the team down the hill away from the most concentrated NBA gunfire. Cutting Leterno no slack, Childress Roared, Tell Covey will give him a fix in five minutes. We'll probably need strings to get out of here.

I doubt we can make it into the valley where a king bee can pick us up. Without missing a beat, Leterno, who for the first time felt four burning stings in his back, repeated those words to Covey while he and Cowboy began providing cover fire as the tail element of the team. Then, Letterno nodded a cowboy who ignited several Claymore mines that the team had set out on his perimeter. Those mines only slowed the NVA for a few seconds. Before the dust and debris from the blast settled, the NVA soldiers were moving through it toward Cowboy and Laterno. Without saying a word, the two men took turns,

firing at the enemy while moving down the hill, rotating around each other. Cowboy would fire several bursts from his car 15 and then reload. As he reloaded, Laterno would open fire providing covering fire for the team. The classic cover and move scenario. Yes. Just the way we drill it. That's right.

Oh, yeah. And it just came natural. Believe it or not, it just came natural. What part of it just came natural? Loading fire, loading fire. Move, load and fire, move, load and fire. And it just, we had to get, and the team came together. Our firepower, you can only imagine what a full team of firepower

with all car 15s and M79s and Claymore Mine's going on. They knew they had a battle, but they were overpowering us. Yeah. And it's, I talked about this with tilt as well, like the determination of, of them, where you think of the insurgents, insurgent army, you know, their rule is like, hey, we don't, we don't need to fight. We don't need to win this firefight. We don't need to win this battle because we're going to be here for a long time. We can wait. We'll fight when we want to fight. And it's the way that they attacked you guys and law took so many losses but continued to press and continue to press like their their fighting spirit was high well let me give you a backdrop on that maybe tilt hasn't even got to that after the war is over with

in history starts evolving in the books and people start asking questions we find out that they've got 40,000 troops hunting us down hunting saugers down and there's a huge bounty on us we heard $100,000, $200,000 to kill an American on a SONG team. And they had to kill an American award. They killed somebody. They got the award and the bonus. And they were instant heroes in Honoi forever. It meant everything to them to kill us. And they put 40,000 troops designated that we had tied up because they wanted to kill us. Because we did so much damage. tool go ahead yeah speaking of damage during one short lull cowboy again planned a claim more mine in the direction of the

advancing nva and leturno dug out another claymore from his rucksack and placed a 10 second delay fuse in it when the nva again advanced cowboy ignited his claymore mind when the nvae moved again toward the team leturno ignited his fuse and ran down the hill with cowboy to catch up to their team before they reached the team two B-40 anti-personnel rockets slammed into the trees above them, showering them with shrapnel. A few more exploded as Laterno and Cowboy moved down the hill. Then the 10-second fuse ignited another Claymore.

It bought precious time for the gun and run team of Laterno and Cowboy to cover ground and catch up with the remainder of ST, Virginia. Would you guys drill pulling out those claymores with the 10-second fuse and hooking them up and setting them up? I mean, you know, it takes like a little bit of time to do that. Did you guys have them pre-rigged where you could just stick them in the ground? How did you guys do that? We did.

We had them pre-rigged. Everybody says, well, you can't have your blasting caps with you. You're just, if they hit the blast guys, it's going to blow you to smithereens. Yeah, but those precious seconds would be. And I had mine in my rutsack pre-rigged. There you go. Yeah, and with us with Baba had his pre-cut. So we had the five-second, ten-second, and then longer.

And then you had the actual clacker itself With the full standard cord That you could blow it would give you more distance How long was that cord? 50 feet 50 feet So you could put the Claymore down on the tree Pull back and then you hit it handheld

Yeah Or as we did in that one mission We were using the five seconds that Bubba put in Yeah But they were pre-cut and we had them ready to go So you just put the fuse in, pull it And then stick it in the ground Yeah the little stakes

The standard Claymore steaks Yeah boom jamming in the ground and you're good Yeah. So you're setting those things up in like 10 seconds. Of course, you always had to make sure they were pointed the right way. Yes, indeed. Point towards the enemy. Front towards enemy.

Yeah. Read the back. Continue on us. Child just called an airstrikes, Laternal reflected on how surreal this firefight had been. It wasn't like anything he'd witnessed on television or in any movie. Instead of men charging each other and killing each other in plain sight, here in triple canopy jungle,

He observed green tracers from AK-47's first or at the most an enemy hand or foot and somehow the NVA found firing lanes where they could launch shoulder-held B-40 anti-personnel rockets that slammed above and around them as they race down the hill for their lives Again, the voices of the special forces instructors echoed in his mind they had told the young aspiring green berets at Fort Bragg that the NBA was a tough resilient opponent many had fought against the Japanese during World War II and against the French driving them from Vietnam in 1954 after the Battle of Denbien Pugh in North Vietnam. The sounds of King Bees in the distance and the crashing thunder of B-40 rockets slamming into trees above his head shook Leterno out of his moment of introspection and turned his undivided attention to a crescendo of AK-47 fire from the enemy. ST Virginia responded with volley after volley of full and semi-automatic gunfire while Leterno and Cho for. fired several M79 rounds toward the densest section of the jungle where the AK-47 gunfire was emanating. Through the gunfire, someone popped a smoke grenade, which brought the king bees closer to RT Virginia's location in the jungle. Over the din of gunfire, Childerson Cowboy told everyone to put their Swiss seats on and prepare for an extraction.

In short order, a king bee was hovering over ST Virginia more than 125 feet above the jungle floor. Letterno, Cowboy, Cho, and Hone hooked their D-rings into the old McGuire rig that hung from the end of the ropes and shortly were being lifted out of the jungle. As the quartet of recon men was being lifted into the air, the NVA unleashed another salvo of AK-47 gunfire and several B-40 rockets. Shrapnel from the rockets hit them with varying degrees of size and velocity. All of them were wounded. It was during those explosions that Leterno realized his car 15 had somehow been caught in a rope above him Just far enough away that he couldn't reach it He pulled out his M79 and launched a 40 millimeter grenade toward the NVA positions

Now all he could see of the enemy were hundreds of muzzle blasts from AK-47s and green tracers Green tracer rounds eerily climbing toward the quartet of ST Virginia men Before he could reload his M79 the King B began to move away from the target area, surprising him because the men had not yet cleared the jungle. Instead of continuing to climb out of the target, moving straight up until the men cleared the jungle's triple canopy of trees and vegetation, the King Bee was moving away from the target area due to heavy enemy ground fire. In recent months, at least two King Bee's were shot down during string extractions from hot targets, but these facts were unknown to Leterno at the time. Shrapnel

from the B-40 rockets exploded around ST Virginia men, stinging them with bits of hot metal, further spooking the King Bee crew. Letterno began to violently collide with tall jungle trees, feeling like a metal ball and a pinball machine. Leterno caroed off several more trees as at least one more B-40 exploded in the treetops, again showering him with shrapnel. A tree branch hit Leturno from the side

and turned him upside down in his rope Swiss seat. As the rope began to slip down from his hips, Laterno remembered spider telling him how a one-zero from another team had recently been shot out of his Swiss seat during a rope extraction. Another tree struck Laterno before he was able to muster a surge of strength and momentum to reach up and grab the rope above him

as his body finally cleared the treetop. The only thing between him and certain death below on the jungle floor 200 feet down was the single piece of rope tied into the king bee. Jeez. Just another day in sog. Just another day in sog, huh? And I had 13 of those like that.

How did you guys, when you're getting hit with all that and you're shooting back, hanging from a string, I mean, that's just like completely insane that no one died on that rope, on that extraction.

And you're also spinning. Just the rotation from an al-a-locopton, you're getting knocked around. And the strings just spinning and the air is flowing past you. And you're having, you know, you're just,

trying everything you do to stick with it. But that was my first mission. Later on, I finally realized that I didn't have an extra D-ring on my webgear to strap in. That's why I was falling over backwards. I did that twice. Then I finally found out from my good buddy here, Tilt, that I was doing it wrong. Because after my second mission, Childress had left, but he had not given me that information out of all of our training,

had not thought about it. He was extracted on another chopper, so he didn't see that happen. It's just unbelievable. When I read these things, I just can't, it's just hard to even fathom the mayhem. When you're talking about just all these B40 rockets, is basically like an RPG, an older RPG.

It's crazy. Going back to the book, with one final urgent pull, Laterno was able to move himself upright in the Swiss seat as the King Bee continued to climb higher into the sky, distancing itself from the fury of exploding B-40 and AK-47 gunfire while gaining airspeed. As the King B ascended,

the heavily sweating Laterno clung to the rope as another sensation overwhelmed his body, chattering teeth. Within a matter of minutes, the king bee had climbed to an altitude of more than 5,000 feet, where the air is thinner and much, much colder than on the jungle floor, so much colder that Laterno's body began shaking violently from the dipping temperatures as the king bee continued to climb into the safety of higher altitude. In ordinary circumstances, few people would ever think about freezing to death over Southeast Asia,

but for the men in C&C, it was just another hurdle they had to clear. As the king B headed east, Laterno looked down on the spots in the jungle that it appeared to be good LZ's thinking, why don't you land there? But ST Virginia's collective agony continued until the King Bees finally landed in South Vietnam. By that time, every member of ST Virginia had their circulation cut off to their legs. They couldn't stand or walk. All they could do is unhook from their Swiss seat, grab their stuff, and try and get the

circulation going again in their legs while the door gunner helped them to get back to the King Bee. When the team returned to Kwong Trot, Kwongtree. Longtree. Launch site before heading south to Fubai, Childress pulled Laterno aside and told him, take good care of that radio. You're going to take it on the next mission,

whether you like it or not. Was he going to make you bring the shot-up radio? Yeah, he did. We did. It saved his life, Tilt's life in the end. How's that? That Christmas Day mission. Oh, okay.

We had the intel report. Was that the same radio? Yeah. You brought a shot-up radio in the field? He did. Not me. I got a hundred miles skip out of it. Oh, that's ridiculous.

As darkness fell, the king bees lifted off from quang tree for Foubi. When the old war boards landed on Fob1 landing zone, ST Virginia was greeted by one man. Former ST Virginia 1-0 John McGovern. He greeted each of the team members as they exited the king bees asking each one, are you okay? After the King Bees departed, bathing them in sand, dust, and LZ debris kicked up by the prop wash, McGovern asked Childress, did you hear about Bader? Aetal.

Childers shook his head, no, what happened? November 13th, we lost a King Bee with seven SF troops on it. We lost the entire King Bee crew. They were a bunch of strap hangers who volunteered to pull an Elder Sun mission on the trail, but an anti-aircraft round hit the King Bee en route to the target. exploded in midair they never had a chance in silence McGovern drove the tired dirty and hungry team back to the team room as the Vietnamese team members climbed off the truck McGovern turned to Leterno and said you know what was really scary about that

mission the day before they got shot down me Lynn Black Rick Howard John Peters Tim Schaff and a few others had volunteered and were actually on the King Bees suited up ready to go only to be canceled last minute by back Whiskey X-ray which is weather in the a.O that was too close for comfort. After a long pars, pause, he asked Laterno, how did it go out there? I heard you were good on the radio. You didn't get rattled. You ain't a cheery no more. You've joined a small unique club of SF men, C&C recon men who went across the fence. It was nothing like I ever could have imagined. Laterno responded looking toward the Vietnamese team members. He added, let me get some chow for the indage. You will write about them. They have ice in their veins. I'm beat. I'll see you in the morning. Leterno walked through the white sand to the mess hall, picked up some fresh sandwiches and

cold sodas for the team. After lingering with the Vietnamese team members, Leterno returned to his room, finally taking off his rucksack and web gear. As he started to undress, Laterno became aware of pain in his back, from where the four AK-47 rounds had slammed him face first into the ground. First he peeled off his jungle fatigue shirt and was amazed to find four bullet holes in it Then he took off his undershirt Ditto four bullet holes were in it Letterno picked up his rucksack four bullet holes were in it both in the front and the back Something he hadn't realized during the firefight then he looked in the mirror and saw four large welts and broken skin up his spine where the AK 47 rounds had hit his body after punching through his rucksack and the PRC 25 only then did Laterno begin to comprehend just how lucky he had been hours earlier in the day when the

NVA shot him in the back four times? Laterno began to cut away the black electrical tape around his socks, which he pulled up over his pant legs to keep out leeches and bugs. Then he made a startling discovery. When he pulled his pant leg from the sock and pulled off his right boot, four AK-47 bullets fell on the ground. In the heat of the battle, the Frenchman didn't realize that. after he was shot in the back, the four 7.62 millimeter NVA rounds had fallen through his pants

and his socks into his right boot. He stood in utter amazement, staring at the four rounds on the floor before picking them up and throwing them in the sand outside his room. Exhausted, Laterno walked over to the shower room. The water stung the wounds in his back. Amazingly, the four bullets had enough energy to penetrate his skin, wounding him, but not a lot of the water. enough to get under his skin. Too tired to treat the four bullet wounds in his back and shrapnel wounds in his arm. Leterno finished his shower and went to bed.

So that, that was mission number one. One. There's a saying that we came to realize later on, everybody just look at you and say, well, that's just another day in song. my first mission I had to run 12 more before it was done and when you got done with it

I mean were you talking to the other guys and they were telling you hey yeah that's how it is yes that's how it is so he couldn't go into the bar and go yeah this is what I did he just said yeah I got back well and don't forget the footnote on that because like about what four or five days later

the medics Yeah. Tell about the wounds from the shrapnel. Of course, I had to ignore everything because otherwise they'd all think I was, you know, just a whooper, you know. So I just had to suck it up and not say nothing. But all of a sudden, I started getting these boils on me. They were huge. So I went to the medic and what's his name again?

Magiote. Lou Maggio. Yeah. Maggio says, well, he says, you got shrapnel in you, buddy. That's all swollen. It's infecting you. He says, you're going to have that for quite a while until we can get every piece out of you. He says, I don't know how many holes you got, but this one here needs attention right now, and it's huge. And it was my arm, forearm, actually. And he looked at the other medic shipping and said, hold him down.

And he looked at me and said, Don't you look at what I'm doing, don't you turn your head. He said, because otherwise you're going to pass out on me when you see what I'm going to do. He said, so don't you look. Good words of encouragement. Hold him down and don't look or you're going to pass out. Well, what he was doing was taking a big stick swab in hydrogen peroxide and burning a hole right through the boil. And then he took forceps and he pulled the strings out with the shrapnel on the end from the B40 rock.

because they're all made, you know, in China. They're chikoms, you know. And so they had a lot of string. That's how they wrapped them. They didn't mold them in the metal like we did. And so anyway, I kept having to go. And then another day I had to go in. And he had to do the back of my head.

And I had a couple in my head. And then I had a couple in my back and another under my arm. And I walked around with bandages until I went out on my next mission. I got to tell you, I witnessed one of those getting pulled out. And it was gross. What were you doing? Just wanted to, you know, spectate. Well, he had pulled several hours.

He kept hearing about these things. Let me show you. Oh, thanks. Talk about TMI. Talk about Puss. Pimple breaker. But hey, you're going to go back in the field anyways. Yeah.

It was like, hey, it doesn't matter. We'll do what we can right now. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Because we had another mission lined out for Christmas of 68. So what was the op tempo like, meaning how often? and would you, when you did, you did your 13 missions, how long did that take?

What time span was that over? Was that a one year tour? One year tour. I had 13 missions and one bright light. And someday we'll talk about the bright light, I guess. Why not today? You know, it's a, it's not written in the books because of what it ended up being. But a bright light in SOG, it's, it's a, it's not written in the books because of what it ended up being.

But a bright light in SOG is a volunteer situation where a team will volunteer to go in and get another team out that can't get out. And we had a lot of those. Or to try to find a team that disappeared. We had a lot of teams disappear. RT Idaho, Lain and Owens completely disappeared. They've never been found to this day. No trace. Just completely off the bat.

People have gone into this day and hunt. The government hunts today and can't find them. under good circumstances. Are these the guys that you took over for? Yes. Yeah. And so when I got on to Idaho and transferred from Virginia to Idaho because Tilt went home and I became Lynn Black's 1-1, one day he had been gone for a while up at headquarters

and I always protected him because I'm the 1-1. I protected my 1-0s. I had to know where they were doing all the time. Because you just never knew. Because we had Nungs, we had cambodes, we had mountain yards, and we had Vietnamese in our camp. They all fought amongst themselves, let alone wondering if they're the enemy. And we also had an entire team of NVA Chuhoy's, Chouhuis, meaning they gave up. And that was Team Cobra.

And they were there for a very special mission that they went on. and to get U.S. prisoners out of a camp that was located. But we got a call. Lynn went up to the headquarters, and it had been a little while, so I went up there to see what was going on. He's walking back down and says, can we go on a bright light? I said, we're ready, we're packed,

because that's just what you did. If you were asked, you went. He said, we got two pilots down. and we think they're alive and we got to go in they brought a jolly green giant in for us which is very unusual Air Force

I don't know where they really took us at this point in time in my life we still don't know they have all kinds of records but it's very confusing of where we went but we came in and that jolly when we circled over the top of the plane

it was all intact. It was just sitting there in elephant grass. No one could figure out why. So they brought us down, and I jumped out. But when I jumped out, there was a slight lift in the plane in the jolly green, and it just came back down on me, about crushed me.

And then it came back up, and then Lynn jumped out, and our guys jumped out, And it was an O-2, it was a push-pulled Cessna, an engine in the front and an engine in the back. That's what had been shot down? Yeah. We think it was shot down. We don't.

Or crashed however. Cashed however. We just don't know how it happened. But what the real deal was is the plane, whatever happened to it was making an emergency landing. And it saw this opening like an LZ and thought this would be a good place to at least start the landing. even if it went into the jungle, it would slow it down. The problem was,

as soon as they hit the ground, there was a bowl, and they hit the front of the bowl with the front engine and stopped dead. Like a berm? It was a burm, yeah. And it stopped it dead, but it bent the engine around to the right,

and the man in the right seat was sucked up into the carburetors, into the Lycombe engine. And he was in the fins, and he just had his, head and his arm sticking out. When I got there on that side, it said 10 minutes after 10 in the morning. His Rolex watch was cracked.

The bezel was cracked. And it stopped the watch at 10 after 10. And we didn't get there until about 2.30. And don't forget when the chopper's going down, you're under fire. Yeah. And we're getting some small arms fire. And Lynn goes to the pilot side on the left side. and he looked fine, but we realized the yoke had crushed his chest and killed him in place,

but it also had him trapped. And we couldn't get either one out. But at that point in time, that was a trap. They had set. The Jolly Green had backed off, and we started taking tremendous amount of fire. And I looked across the inside of the cabin at Lynn. And then looked back at me, and I said, I love you, brother. We're not getting out of this.

And he said, no, we're not. This is it. Finally got us. And I looked up and radioed the Jolly Green to come back in, and he shook his head. I could see him playing his day. And he shook his head. I don't think I can come back. I said, you better, because I got an M79 pointed at you.

I'll take you down with us. He moved up forward. By that time, there was 200 MVA surrounding us, giving it everything they got. And we managed to crawl into that chopper because we got up on the wings, and he scooped us up. And I had already called in TAC Air because they already had TAC Air ready. And as we lifted off and got up about 50 feet, an A1 Spad flew right underneath us between the plane and the chopper.

And he looked up at me like this, and was smiling, and he dropped the WP right on top of him. And there was crispy critters running everywhere. And we got out of there and got back. And we walked down, landed us back at FOB4, and we walked down the road back to our hooch. and we just looked at each other and said another day in saw.

And all the time they're on the ground. They're under fire going in. They put a perimeter around the aircraft while Lynn and Doug went in to try to establish what the status of the pilots were. And the firefight was intense. Because I remember when I got back, Doug had just left, and I came back to now at the end of October of 69. So that bright light was fresh on Lynn's mind.

We talked about it, and I talked to HEP later about that brightly, and they were going, this was crazy, because HEP's salary winning with four in Ditch from R.T. Idaho on that team. And Lynn was like, man, I don't even know how we got out of there. So it was one of those real, another, just a really tight one, but like Doug says, in a way, when you, now in retrospect, it's like, just another day in Saug. But that one really stuck. Yeah. I just thought, out of all my missions,

and if you read the book and where Tilt honors me with a few missions in his books between across the fence and on the ground, that one there was as tense as it got, and we thought it was over physically and mentally. We gave up. We thought it was over. That we just weren't going to get up out of that mess

and get into that chopper. Then B40 rockets were hitting that plate underneath. that Jolly Green, we were going up in the air faster than the chopper could get us up in the air from the pounding we were taken. There hadn't been for that Spad, we might not have. To this day, we can't find the Spad Pilot. We have reunions we go to, the Spad Reunions, but we still haven't been able to find that spad pilot that did that day. Because what he's saying is like when the Jolly Green is pulling out the B-40 pounded underneath

and the armor playing could sustain it, but it would give the chopper a jolt like Lynn Black Hat on October 5th, and that's what they were experiencing again. One October, a year later, same thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm surprised that they take those B-40 strikes like that. I mean, one lucky shot that hits the tail rotor or something, and it's just game over.

Sure. You know, when we get back on missions, we would walk around our king bees and count how many bullet holes and how many were in the blades. There's clean shots through the blades, and then we'd count 40, 50s, 50, 80 rounds in our king bees when we come back.

And pieces of metal gone that they had to put tin over. They use beer cans. Yeah. A loon of beer cans. And what about the, what about that operation where you had to go and get the 55-gallon drum of, and pull that one over? Okay. We'll go through that. Somebody would probably like to read it in the book, but we'll kind of go through that.

We were trained. We had a CIA agent come in and train us for a brand new explosive detonator that was a time device that was shaped on the top end of a bung of a 55-gallon drum. It has curls. You put a wrench on it and unscrew it. You've seen them. And this is, by the way, this is a seal-type mission. so you really appreciate this.

No, this is absolutely. Yeah, when I read about it, I was like, hmm, this is a good seal mission. Oh, yeah. But oh, well. Well, they didn't let the seals do that in those days. No. They were busy on the coast.

Yeah, they were busy on the coast. They really were. Well, yeah, I mean, everything up to that is in the jungle. I'll see you get to the river. Exactly. But we actually went into secret lockup, couldn't talk to anybody. Nobody could come in and talk to us and we went through these exercises and training. We actually loaded up for it and they took us out to it and took us to Kongtree and we

launched out of there and went into Laos into this huge river that they had. But we had to stay away from it. We had to actually hike in for two days to get to it. And when we got there and down the hill and to the river, it was night on the second end of the second day. And then Gunther was my one zero, and I was his one-one. There was no one-two. And he was an ex-marine. And he was an E-6, and he was my one-zero. He'd been around a while.

And he says, okay. go in and get that drum and I says, well, you're the Marine. You're Navy. Why should I go in again? Because you're the one. You're the one-one. You're a PFC. And I'm an E-6.

So that's how it's going down. And don't forget, before you get there, they hike through jungle for two days and two nights. Right. To meet the CIA agent. Oh, yeah, I forgot that. Who gave them specialized charge. So where'd he come from? from. He had Chinese with him and he said, I will meet you out there to give you this device because

I can't trust anybody to have this device in case you're caught between now and then. I said, there's no way we're going to find you out there. This is impossible. He says, don't you worry about it. You get to this coordinate and I will find you. That's impressive. And he did. We got that coordinate and we waited and we waited and next thing he went no he'd come right out of the jungle and there he was. We were going to kill him. We thought it was NBA. Yeah of course. Chinese with him, you know. So, Zolanoculus was his name. If you pronounce it right, I probably, I can't pronounce it right. Common spelling. It was, he actually was a renegade CIA agent. He was a desk jockey that wanted to prove that he could be an infield agent

as the story finally went, that we didn't learn about this until what, about 12 years ago. Yeah. And we had... Did you meet him later? No, no. No one knows where he went, what happened to him. We met another CIA guy.

We made it that was actually a counterpart to a Russian KGB agent that when they Russia finally admitted and declassified the Vietnam War and admitted they had 3,000 Russians helping the NBA and they had a reunion

and they did an actual video of the reunion admitting that they had worked with the NBA and the Chinese and helping the NBA go up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Well, This Zolonoculus had figured this out and got a hold of this device.

And how we learned about it was this CIA agent had gone there and helped declassify all the records of special ops stuff that was they were, they had located. And here they found my name in the KGB files in Moscow. twice. My code name and my real name. And the missions that I ran, they did that twice. And Lynn, because we bumped into what I thought was a Mexican, Spanish speaking person, speaking broken English, and I'm from California, right? And I go back to my old days. And I told Lynn, I said, this guy's a Mexican got to be. What the hell's he doing out here? And he's talking to us on the radio.

He's got our frequency. And Glenn says, give me that. So he goes back and forth with him. And he says, you've got to move out of the area. And he says, I'm not going to move out of the area. I'm here to stay. Here's my coordinates. He'd give him a five-digit coordinate.

Now, what are you going to do? He says, well, nothing, but you need to move out of it. He was trying to save our butts because he was from Angola. He was a Cuban. stationed in Angola and had been shipped to Laos and then turned around and he hated the Vietnamese so much he was trying to help us. But we could see him on the other side of the river where we were at on this particular mission. And so that mission was in the KGB files that we had spoke to him and they knew it was RT Idaho and that knew it was Len and me. and so they had as much because we had spies in Saigon giving all this information out

that we had a spy that they finally caught an American that was giving all this information out but for two missions I'm in the KGB files so on this oil drum mission we get down there after we've been given the device at night and I go in and I grab a hold of a drum and of a drum and of course they have those little lips on there and I can pull that drum and they're full of about three quarters because they've got to be buoyant and I bring that fuel drum right to the side

and I'm holding it there and Gunther unscrews it the bung off and puts the new one in screws it up tight now I've got to get that drum back out into the flow well the flow is NVA walking it down with bamboo poles

pushing them around. So I get it out there, but I can't get back because here they come. So I had to go under and hold my breath, but I can't hold my breath that long. And this water's ice cold, right? But fortunately, I was a great swimmer in my youth, and I could handle this, but I could get my nose just above the surface, blow out, and take a breath and go back under. Because it's dark. And they went on by me finally.

But I thought for sure they'd stick me with one of the poles. But they pushed that drum on down and the few drums that were around me. And I came back to the edge and crawled out. But I was so cold, I could hardly move. I'm soaking wet, of course. And Gunther says, come on, we've got to go. And I finally put my gear back on, my rutsack and the radio and my web gear and everything else. back on and up the hill we go, but I'm still just barely making it, just barely making it.

I'm so stiff. And we crawled out of there, took two days to get out, but that device was set for two days. But it hadn't gone off yet, but we finally got extraction orders in, and they came and got us and strung us out. And when we were on strings, it went off. The Covey Rider was there, and it was like an atom bomb. It was a miniature mushroom. And the shock wave, even though we were miles away, came through us on strings and the choppers and just like this.

And we're going like this back and forth. And the chopper and the covey plane is shaking like this. And I mean, it was like an atomic bomb just went through us. What you picture when you see. And then everything became calm and mission completed. that's a good one. That's a real good one. That's a good one.

And they never knew. Never knew. Well, they didn't know until the Russians knew. Yeah. But other than that. They never knew who it was. And we weren't allowed to talk or tell anybody in camp when we got back. They just, what were you doing?

Ah, just another day in song. And that was what we said. Because we weren't even allowed to tell anybody what we did because of the CIA mission that we ran. But we, everybody had certain things that they did like that. But it was the first time it had ever been accomplished. What did you notice about the one zeroes that you had from a leadership perspective that you remember as like, yeah, this is some of the qualities that they had from a leadership perspective that you would follow them? I was most fortunate, I think. I had great one zeros.

some of them not as great as others but when you my first one he was my idol because my first two missions and Thanksgiving of 68 and Christmas of 68 and you can't ever forget those you know and so in fact the mission of 68 is where I They got the skip from the blowed-up radio that let him know he was walking into an letting Tilt know that he was walking into an ambush. And I'm laying on a trail with the radio on and heard this. My interpreter comes up and interprets what's going on. I managed to get a hold of Spider-Parks.

He just happened to be going by for a radio check, and I told him what's going on. He radios to tilt, to turn around and go back that he had intel, and tilt's going, what? Yeah, it was the first time I've ever had, like, a direct intel report. Do not go through the Northeast. This is the Christmas Day mission. We're on top of that knoll. And Lynn and I had talked about that was the one quiet area. Probably there's a problem, but we're talking.

Then Spider goes, do not go through the Northeast. We have an intel report. Do not go there. I'm going to like, Intel report. That never happened before. after on a live mission we're on the ground and we didn't know what the hell it was but they were right we did and you know the story we get extracted and we're back in base a few days later him and bubba connect and it's going like yeah what were you on the ground on Christmas and we found

out that he had that intel report that was confirmed the one place we could have gone we shouldn't have our instincts were right but we had the confirmation from the intel report and it was just amazing. You know, it's just like, to this day. They got out of it. And due to other factors, they got out of it. But just that it saved, the team was walking into an L-shaped ambush and they'd been slaughtered. And they were pushing them that way with trackers, gunfire and everything else.

And so they just, like you say, the gods were always with us sometimes. But at that very next day, I'm still on the trail. We were signed. That was the trail for my very first mission. We got into North Vietnam into it called Nickel Steel. And I've been laying there for four days through this process. And Gunther was, I mean, Childress was my one-zero. And we were taking turns.

And it had been defoliated with Agent Orange. And so we had a pretty good view. And all of a sudden, I saw six point men coming up, MBA. I'm up there at the trail behind a log. They're down below. I give them the signal. I give them the signal. I got six, and I can see him, and Chilers right away knows what's going on.

So he's preparing the team to fight. And Exville, out of the situation, But he can't with me up above. But here comes one of the NVA. He comes right up to the log and steps over and steps right on me. I put my car 15 into his belly and I pull the trigger, all 20 rounds, made a gaping hole all the way through him, threw him over the log, and I'm on the run.

And I've got the radio. And down the hill we go. And here comes 200 NVA. and their point chasing us. And we're bringing, I'm trying to get tack air on the line. I finally do. We're putting tack air between them and us. And I'm throwing smoke over my shoulder.

Anything in the smoke, kill it. And finally they bring some slicks in and pull us out and get us out of there. On strings. Yeah, on strings, again, and on the run. And so the side note to the whole mission is, I don't know how many we killed, but it was not a good day for them. But that Agent Orange was the only time I was ever near it. And right now I've got stage four cancer from Agent Orange with a limited amount of time left. So that's why I'm glad I'm here to tell a few stories.

I'm glad you're here too. Airborne. So how many tours did you do? Is that one tour? I signed up for one. I volunteered to go into special forces. I was regular Army. I volunteered regular Army, went through, got special forces,

volunteered for Vietnam, volunteered for CCN and SOG, and I did one tour, and I went back home and became a weapons instructor for special forces training group. and got out. So how many years was the total? Three. Three years. Three years.

That was it. And then what'd you do when you got out? I kind of went back to rodeoing and training horses and things like that. And then I sort of got calm. Got your pilot's license. Yeah, I got my pilot's license. swing and rotary. Where you got home, how long did it take to kind of adapt to the civilian life?

It took about a year that because I slept with my car 15. And then when I was in training group, I always had all the weapons around me. I felt safe. But, you know, Fourth of July, it was always a hard one with stuff going on. You don't know. And it took me a while to calm down and not because I had a lot of kills. And you just have to work through all that all the time. And I was pretty good because not after that period of time, you know, we never talked to each other.

We weren't allowed to talk about it for 20 years is what I was told. So I never ever talked to anybody. I never met anybody until 2000. Did you guys, I mean, when you guys didn't keep in touch, you guys didn't write each other or figure out which other? Telt and I wrote each other, but his family moved. I only had his mother and father's address, and I lost contact for 25 years. I moved, he moved, my parents moved,

and so the comma would drop, but we were down. And there was no books, no, nobody could say anything. What about other team members, other guys? Was there anyone that you kept in touch with over the next 20 years? No. So when you were done, you were done. I was done. You didn't, it was over.

Yeah, because I couldn't find anybody. I didn't know anybody to talk to. So I was just done. And I just let, in my life just, I never thought about it anymore. You know, I knew I did stuff, but I couldn't talk about it. And I had gotten married and I told my wife about it. But we just thought that we didn't know where anybody went. I didn't know where anybody went to.

And then all of a sudden the Internet came about. I typed in SF one time and a couple of them. emails came up, old ones. I typed in and McCluskey got, he was working as a Medevac pilot and he called me and he said he was on shift and he saw it and he called me. He gave me Tilt's phone number and I called Tilt the next day was Easter Sunday. What year was that? 2000. Yeah. We're going to get ready to go to church. I haven't seen him since 1968 or 69. And where were you living at the time?

I lived up by Yosemite National Park in the town called Mariposa. Beautiful. And you were just down in Oceanside? Yeah, working at the paper, the fish wrapper. So I said, well, shoot, you know, so I got the phone number, and I called him on Easter Sunday. He was going out the door to go to church. I said, you better sit down. This is the Frenchman.

I did. And then we've been, we talk every day now because we can. What did you, what did you do for a job? So you, you had to kind of continue to kind of get it out of your system, or breaking horses or whatever, rodeo for another year after you got out. Breaking more bones. And then you went into construction business? I went in the construction business that my father had gone into a private construction

for a particular person. And so it left the license open. So I just continued the license, and he handed it over to me. And I built for almost 45 years. I'm retired now. Where did you guys overlap? Did you guys overlap in RT, Idaho? Is that when you guys overlapped?

Well, we are at Fuban. When he came in, he came in with Bubba. Okay. And so McGovern got him first before I ever talked to him, and I got Bubba. So we were in camp, we're training together at the firing range. Then Bob and I were doing our targets. They're doing theirs. And then when we moved, he closed out, F-O-B-1.

He's the last SF troop there, his recon team, closed it, locked the gate. By that time, Lynn and I were down in Denang already. So we were running missions. He went down with RT Virginia, with Gunther Wald. And so they went down and ran their mission, including the famous oil drum one. And Lynn and I were doing our job. thing, and then by April, my time in country was getting close. So Lynn had agreed to be to come to 1-0. We had a special mission. We were supposed to go up to the Mugia Pass. We brought Doug in,

Max Fortenberry, and an officer to go with us on that mission. We trained for the mission, trained right up to it, went to the launch site, on the choppers, took off, and they called us back because two aircraft were shot down over the target area that day. And so I was about four or five days from de-roasting. We went back to camp. They put up the Marble Mountain. So we're up there. We had some pictures from that time there.

And then I walked off a Marble Mountain and went back up. My gear and went home. So Doug stayed with Idaho. Got it. So from April, at the end of April, all the way through to October, 69, he's with Idaho with Lynn. And they ran a load of missions. And when I come back,

He had just left base. Got it. But Lynn's there. So the Lynn was the 1-0. So he and I took turns. And then finally, Sergeant Major goes, there's too much experience here, Black, you're out of here. And then I went back to being a 1-0 for another five months.

And by that time, he had come home, but he was in training group. So technically he got out of the Army after I did. I got out in April and you got out in June and July? September 1st. September 1st. And so I went back to the Garden State, and then he went back to California, and separate ways.

And we did. We had the cards and some notes. I don't think many phone calls. No. And it just led us back before we had a couple of guys. I had other people I stayed in contact with, and then I just figured he got a job with the CIA or did something somewhere else, you know.

And then finally got the phone call on 2000, and the rest is history. And then how often do you guys link up now? every day. It's all the phone. It's like you and the Echle Charles, you know. We talk almost every day, because we can. We're alive.

And we try now to spread the story since we've been declassified, like you're helping tremendously, to spread this story to let people know that we actually, there was a secret war going on, and we were actually taking the war to the end. because our country had signed a treaty saying that we would not go into North Vietnam, Laos, in Cambodia, or the DMZ, which we operated in every day. Right, we weren't stationed there. We just flew in by helicopters.

People always ask me, well, how long did you fight in South Vietnam? I said, I never fought a day in South Vietnam. Oh, you didn't do anything? No. That's true. Yeah, right. So what was your reaction as stuff started to kind of come to the surface and people started talking about it? It was a slow, it's been a slow process. I've got to hold a tilt and then we saw each other for the very first time after all those years. He was standing on a corner when I drove by and picked him up. Yeah, and we went to an air show and we started talking.

We had our photo albums that we weren't supposed to have because no pictures were supposed to be taken. Look at all the pictures that are out there. Good recon men always do whatever they want, right? So, but it's been a slow. He says, well, we have a reunion now. Really? We have it in Vegas every October now.

And it's been going on, what, 45 years? I think 43, 44, yeah. 44 years worth. I've been there about 18 years now. Special Operations Association. Yeah. And so we go there and see each other and sit around and drink. Of course, I don't drink, but, you know, everybody drinks and it's a free bar and tell old war stories to each other.

A couple lies. A couple lies and the stories get more exaggerated. But we have the opportunity. But the problem is we're dying faster than you can. We were losing about 10 or 12 tops, 6, 7. In the very beginning, now we're losing over 50 a year. There weren't that many of us to start with. But this is combined all the support troops, actual recon troops.

There's probably not but 45 or 50 there at all. Because we only had, what, 450 reconers. That's who you talked to, yeah. And so we have this great reunion every year, and I just never miss it because I don't know who's going to die. It's like yesterday was our interpreter, Hep's, two-year anniversary of his death. And most everybody's going down with Agent Orange of some kind of cancer and stuff. Eldon Bargewell just went down from an accident.

He was our two-star general, very proud of him. But at the time, we were both... Jocko had time with him in Germany, was it? Well, I didn't. My boss worked directly for him, so I was under his command, but my boss at the time just, you know, just absolutely loved him and, you know, tried to tell me, tried to give me quotes when he'd come back from a meeting with Bargewell. He said, old man said this and old man said that, you know. He was just at my house not too long before that. And in my train room, I've got trains, Lionel. And he was there and had a great time. But they were roommates for a few months. Oh, okay.

Yeah, we went on R&R together. I met his first son when he was two months old. Wow. Yeah. It was right, because you know, remember the story with Eldon getting shot in the chest? Yeah. So two days later, Eldon and Doug went to Hawaii with their respective wives for R&R. They were there for five days, and Eldon met his son for the first time.

His eldest son, Brandt? Yeah, Brant was there. So you guys must have watched him because he was, you know, a general in the army. I mean, he was in the limelight for sure for a military guy. Oh, yeah. And you guys knew the whole time

you're looking at him thinking, hey, he... We was calling him Special's fourth class. Yeah. Because that's the way we knew him. I could never call him General. I could never call him Bargera. I called him Eldon.

You know, spent four Elden. And he was the same Eldon that we met in 68. It was the same Alden that went to reunion with this last year. He was there, and we spend the glory, and that's the way we respected me. Like when my son got wounded in Iraq, he went and saw him,

this care at the hospital picked up for him right away. They couldn't believe a two-star general walk in for some little grunt. Yeah, some little special. He's a scout, and he got banged up with a Humvee really bad, but Elton was there. What year was that? August 20th, 2005, a couple weeks later. You were in country then.

No, I was in there, 0304 and the 06. Okay. Do you know where it was in Iraq? Yeah, he was southeast of the green zone. Okay. Yeah, small world. What's he doing now? He's up at doing heavy equipment training.

Okay. Up in Long Beach, him and Bruno, his faithful companion, are there. They're doing it. And just kicking ass, taking numbers. So pretty soon have all the licenses in place. And if you need any heavy equipment work, give him a call. Right on. And a freshman will, you know,

build a house for you. Adenin, what about, so you got, you got married when you got done? Is that, or along the way? Along the way, yeah. And did you have any kids? I have a son and I have a daughter. I've got a grandson and two granddaughters. Very proud of them.

I'm really proud of my son. He has his own company in the oil business doing really well. He repairs all the big fracking machines. Okay. Yeah. Right now I'm in Texas. I was in Tennessee, but I'm in Texas. Now that I've found out what my medical health is,

I want to try to get my grandson to know me before I go. Well, that's awesome. He's going to be as proud of you as you are of him. That's for damn sure. Well, they made an action figure of me, so I've left that action figure for him. And that's the famous picture. Yes.

The famous Saug, the Frenchman. Yes. I've seen it. There's a good revoke. view of it on on uh youtube i watched yeah that you can go to youtube and and look up frenchman action figure and it's done really well by ryan peters yeah he he's did a really excellent job even made the box and everything for it yeah no it looks it's pretty awesome well i'll definitely i'll definitely post that uh that picture when when this goes up when this goes out onto the uh under the interwebs as

they say. And you got your Frenchman challenge coin. I got my Frenchman challenge coin. Yeah, it's right here. The lowest ranking challenge coin out there makes the general's envious. It's a PFC challenge coin. It doesn't get much better than that. Yeah. For sure. You got anything else? I think this is a good place. I mean, and if you listen to this and you think of more things you want to say, but, you know, I think this is a good, good spot to wrap up this one. So if you got anything, tell you got anything else first?

No, these stories, you know, it's funny because even we were in base, we never knew a lot of the details. And so when I put the books together, talk to other people, like the oil drum story, we learned about 40 years later

that Lynn Black had done the similar thing with R.T. Idaho after I left, right in between these guys. And it's just like, a lot of histories. that comes out slowly, like Doug has said. Was anyone tracking, was anyone writing down the history as it was happening?

Was anyone taking the operational summaries and compiling them somewhere? They were all destroyed. That was, when I left Fubai, one of my jobs was to go through and make sure that all the drums had been, the ashes, they had burnt all the, after-action reports were all burnt. and then as we pulled out of every FOB and closed down CCN and CCS and CCCC we closed them all down.

Everything was destroyed. There's very few after-action reports. What there are is just minuscule reports. People try to put them out on eBay, but they're fake. There just isn't any. There are out there. There are reports of archives that we're even now begin to look into.

But at a recent reunion, a guy came up to me and said, hey, you know, if you've done your books, I'd like to talk to you because my job when we closed Contum was to destroy all the records. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of valor. Yeah, we, that's just. That's why I didn't even receive my Purple Heart for that first mission until 1111. Really? Yeah, had to go back to do the paperwork on it.

It took six years and a lot of people. And a lot of affidavits and a lot of this and a lot of that. And it took six years until Diane Black, my congresswoman, called me one day. I was coming back from Arlington from Barry and Gunther Walsh. And my Virginia team, Donny Shue and Bill Brown, William Brown. And she calls me on the phone. I don't even know who she is. She says, are you Doug Materno, the Frenchman?

I said, yes. And she says, I'm Diane Black, congressman for Tennessee. For your district. For your district. And I'm in my limousine right now. And I'm holding a purple heart in my hand. How do you want it presented? I said, I want you to pin it on in front of our memorial.

in Gallatin, Tennessee. And she did on 11-11-11. Wow. Yep. Oh, yeah. And my guys came and watched. I had seven of my saugers come to that and watched. Tilt came.

Everybody flew in. We were there. They were there for witness. And even there, we found one of the medics that had pulled that the string out from the shrapnel. Uh-huh. As an eyewitness, that was a key thing. We got the CEO to do a left. but took a while to track it down and put it together, but we did.

Because all the records have been destroyed, you know. Well, this record won't be destroyed right here. Indeed. Podcast 186. 186. There you go. But I would like to say, as a closing thing, my mom and dad are both gone. My dad was a hero.

He gave me everything he had to give. He was the best father ever. my mother was the best mother. I'm proud of my kids, my daughter, my son, what they've accomplished in their lives. I'm proud of my grandkids and what they do. And I'm glad that I have something to leave behind. And his mom, when she learned that my mother died,

I got a phone call the next day. Tell your mom's dead, but I'm your mom. Yep. My mom loved every one of them. Bubba. Bubba came to L.A. And said, I need to bunk up for a couple days. Six and a half months later.

And he'd gone through the LAPD. And six and a half months later, he even got married and brought his wife into the house. My mom and dad finally said, enough's enough. Bubba, for your wedding present, we're giving you an apartment. But any saga was welcomed in my mom and dad's house.

Oh, yeah. Well, that is awesome. And as you both should know, any saga is welcome to come here at any time and share their story. This door to this podcast is open. This could just become the SOG podcast as far as I'm concerned at this point. We'll work on it. We thank you. We appreciate it.

Tim, thanks for coming back. Yeah, you've opened up a lot of doors. the people that will hear this history. Absolutely. I'm sure you're hearing from them until, I know you, Ben, you've been transferring some of the messages to me. What's the Twitter that you're actually looking at right now?

Because you have a couple. You have John Sog, you have Sog Chronicles. Do you know which one it is? My daughter's out. There's one that J. Striker Meyer, initial J. And the Stryker Meyer. I haven't, I've fallen out of the Twitter thing. You've admonished me to do so.

So Instagram. Instagram is what you're doing? A little bit, yes. I'm trying to catch up to you. I might be slow, but I'm slow. We've been so busy the last few weeks between work and, yes, responding to a lot of the feedback from folks off of the last podcast. People want to reach out to you.

Should they go through John, Frenchman? Yeah, they can go right out through John. Or they could catch me on train 1, 53, the word train 1, the numbers 53 at hotmail.com. That's my email. That's his email. And then my website is saug chronicles.com. And my email's here, and I'll connect anybody with Doug. That's the old-fashioned way.

And Instagram's, we're still working on that. Yeah, yeah. But my daughter's got to give me another. She went to Tennessee, so she's out of town. I'm struggling. But maybe you can give me a briefing when we hang out of. up here. I don't know if I'm the guy for that, but all good. Hey, it's such an honor to talk to you guys. Frenchman, it's an honor to meet you and you're welcome back anytime. I was glad that I could

come and meet you and I told you what happened on the airplane. I'm sitting next to somebody and he goes, what are you doing? Oh, I'm going to go doing a podcast with a guy named Jocko. Jock. Oh my God. I got him on my, he whips out his phone and there you are. And he says, I got Twitter with him. I got everything but he's my buddy. Yeah. I mean, why would I even expect that somebody would have, it's such a small world, it really is. Well, in regards to our service, we're all parted out 1% or less of our country

that served the country. Yeah. And in combat. And I'll tell you the amount of feedback I've gotten from when you came on, I mean, it's been overwhelming the number of people that just, you know, thank you for your service. They're going to pass the same thing onto you. You know, you guys should know that America loves you guys for what you did for this country.

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. You too. Airborne. Airborne. All the way. All the way. And with that, SOG has left the building.

The Frenchmen and Tilt have departed. Awesome. What an honor to have those guys on. And I got to say this right after we got done. Of course, we did some more talking. And the Frenchman was explaining the fact that when he would go out on a mission, every mission he would go out on, he would square away his foot walker, make sure everything was ready to be shipped home because every time he went out, he figured he would not be coming back. So, real heroes. and it's awesome to be able to sit here and talk to those guys and what an honor that is.

And anyways, you know, actually one of the reasons that I can sit here and talk to guys like Tilt and the Frenchmen is because of all the support that comes in from all of you. So appreciate, you know, that. because as you know I don't have any like regular whatever they're called advertisements on here because I'm not going to interrupt someone like Tilt

or someone like the Frenchman or someone like BTF Tony or someone like Dakota Meyer I'm not going to interrupt them so I can say you know hey buy this or buy that or whatever and I'm not going to stop reading colder than hell or I'm not going to stop reading the forgotten Highlander. I'm not going to stop reading one soldier's war so that I can you know mention a product or something like that.

So to me that's not what this podcast is about. The information and yeah the information in this podcast is what is it paramount to me and getting it to all of you uninterrupting. is what matters because I will tell you that I wish that I could have listened to this podcast when I was growing up even when I was a kid when I was in the teams just to just to have this information would have been really helpful to me so I'm not keeping it from anyone So that's what we're doing here. So if you do want to help out, which like I said, that's That's what allows us to be able to do this. That's what allows me to be able to fly the Frenchmen out here to sit down and And talk and tell his story. And so it's because of you all out there supporting my companies or my books or whatever. So it's appreciated. So if you want to if you do want to help out

you want to support the podcast then you can check on origin main dot com where we have geese for jiu juts we have rash guards we have clothing of all whatever sorts including jeans and we got supplements up there people used to ask me what supplements I take I take the supplements that I make so joint warfare krill oil discipline discipline go and I drink mulk because it's awesome and delicious. And of course, Jocko White Tea. So you can get some of that. That's all at origin, main.com.

We also have jocco store.com where you can get rash guards, t-shirts, hats, hoodies, all that stuff. If you like the podcast, subscribe to it. And don't forget that I also have a kids podcast, called the Warrior Kid podcast, so your kids can get in the game too.

That's called the Warrior Kid Podcast. Check out Warrior Kid soap from young Aiden who's making soap on his farm up in Central California. That's at Irishoaks Ranch.com. There's a YouTube channel. That's called Jocko Podcast. And that's where we have the videos of this. So if you want to see what the Frenchman looks like

or you want to see what Tilt looks like, you can check out the YouTube channel. There's also little. shortened excerpts of this podcast. I got an album called Psychological Warfare that's on iTunes Google Play other MP3 platforms. It's me talking about how to overcome little interruptions in your game that you're trying to win. So you can check that. We also have flipside canvas.com. My brother Dakota Meyer has that company and he's making visual artwork for your walls that you can hang up we also have on it on it dot com slash joker you can get

all kinds of cool stuff on there kettlebells jump ropes sandbags things that you can get stronger with i've also written a bunch of books if you want to support you can get some of the books Way the Warrior Kid is a series of books I wrote. There's three of them. The most recent one is called Where There's a Will. And that book is available right now. And so is Way the Warrior Kid 1 and Way the Warrior Kid 2, which is subtitled Mark's Mission.

Mikey and the Dragons is a book for younger kids that I wrote so your kids can learn how to overcome fear. The Discipline Equal Freedom Field Manual, which is a manual about how to get after it. All the little questions that you have are answered. If you want the audio version of that, it's on iTunes, Amazon music, Google Play, other MP3 platforms. And of course, there's extreme ownership, which is the first book I wrote with my brother Laif Babin. And then we have a follow-on book to that called The Dicotomy of Leadership.

And those books are both about leadership and how to lead people. I have a leadership consultancy called Eschelon Front. And what we do is solve problems through leadership. if you have problems in your company, it is because you have problems with your leadership. So go to echelonfront.com if you want us to come and help you solve those problems. EF online,

this is leadership training online, it's interactive, and I always say that leadership is not an inoculation. You can't get one shot of it and then you know everything. It's like going to one jiu-jit-to class and thinking you know how to choke people out now. No, you have to train continually.

That's what EF online is for. It's online. interactive training eFonline.com. We got the muster events. These are leadership conferences, musters, gatherings, where we deep dive and get granular on the pragmatic tools

we have for leading people. The next one we're doing is in September, September 19th and 20th. It is in Denver. It is going to sell out. In fact, it's getting close, I think, right now. Yeah, they've all sold out. That one will sell out as well.

And then December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. Who knows when we're going back to Sydney? But we're going this time. So if you want to come to the muster, check out Extreme Ownership.com. And then EF. Overwatch. EFoverwatch.com, what we're doing there is taking proven spec ops leaders, proven combat aviation leaders, and placing them into companies in the civilian sector that need leadership.

So if you need leadership in your organization, go to eFoverwatch.com. And if you want to give me some feedback on this podcast, or you have a question or you have an answer or whatever for me, I'm on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Jocko Willink. And then once again, just the deepest thanks I can give to John Stryker Meyer Tilt and Doug Latterno, the Frenchman. for doing everything that they did to fight against the dark tyranny of communism

as it tried to spread through the world, they held the line. And it's incredible, the operations that they did, and it's incredible the sacrifices that those operators made in that time, especially and obviously, the ones that did not come home. And to the rest of you that have served or you are serving,

thank you for keeping us safe from today's threats, which are vast and equally evil. It is you that keeps us secure and keeps our way of life secure. And to our police and law enforcement, to the firefighters out there, to the paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all other first responders,

you are on call every day. You are waiting. When we need help, you are there. So thank you for keeping us safe. And to everyone else out there, remember what the Frenchman Remember what the Frenchman said After his colonel got done explaining the treacherous situation that they were set to go into

When that colonel asked if anyone had any questions the Frenchman replied Where do you need help? Where do you need help? It's a simple question, but it's a powerful one There's people around you that need help and Ask them what it is they need. Ask them where it is that they need help and then get up and lock and load your sawed-off M-79 or whatever tool it is that you need to unleash to give them the help that they need. And until next time, this is Jocko. Out.