Jocko Podcast - 196: Make Peace or Die. Service, Leadership, and Nightmares. W/ Charles Daly.

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:15 - Charles U. Daly 3:37:29 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 4:40:53 - How to stay on THE PATH. 4:00:19 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 196 with Echo Charles and me Jock Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. In November, MacArthur ordered a drive all the way up to the Yalu River, which divides North Korea and China. He made the infamous promise that his victorious troops would be home for Christmas. All the dailies were happy to hear this news. At this point, I was still at Quantico, and it looked as though the war would end.

before my classmates and I deployed. Then, on November 26th, the Chinese launched an immense surprise attack, routing all UN forces from coast to coast and trapping the U.S. Marines at the Chosen Reservoir, outnumbering them by upwards of four to one. The action that followed became known as the Frozen Chosen. The Marines held their positions with very little support,

totally cut off. from the unprotected supply lines that MacArthur had stretched thin behind them. They fought in near Arctic conditions. Their canned rations froze, their limbs froze, men froze to death. The enemy used artillery to soften the marine positions and then come at them with human wave attacks.

The strategy was to charge the Americans, usually at night, when they were without air support. In some instances, frozen enemy dead. were stacked in front of Marine fighting positions and used as sandbags. Needless to say, any Marine who survived chosen became legend. It borders on absurd to think that I, a 23-year-old lieutenant with a degree from Yale, would soon be giving orders to men who had fought their way out of that cold hell. One such man I would go on to command was Gunther Dose, a German immigrant who was one of just 16 men. men in a rifle company of 200 plus to walk out of Chosen. For his actions, including faking his own death, as Chinese soldiers disarmed him and probed the wound in his head, Dose was awarded the

Silver Star and Purple Heart. As summarized in the following excerpt from his Silver Star citation, Private First Class Dose held his fire to prevent a premature disclosure of his position, while the intense small arms, grenade, automatic weapons, and machine gun barrage continued. The fire continued with deadly accuracy, killing several and dispersing the others. With his weapon inoperative, as the foe persisted in the onslaught private first-class dose, hurled hand grenades to account for two more hostile soldiers, as the bullets from an automatic weapon sprayed his position, wounding him and killing a Marine rifleman nearby.

fighting unconsciousness as the enemy moved closer he feigned death as they felt the bullet hole in the top of his helmet examined his blood-stained face and hands and removed his weapon and cartridge belt after seven agonizing hours during which he remained perfectly still while the enemy still believing him to be dead occupied his foxhole he surveyed the situation and made contact with an adjacent marine unit after a friendly counterattack finally forced them to withdraw. After training, each Marine is assigned an MOS or military occupational specialty. The MOS for infantry officer is 0301. After chosen, we at the Marine Corps Basic School took to calling it 03. Oh shit. By years end, 1950, the situation in Korea was so grim that Truman was seriously considering removing all U.S. forces from the peninsula. By New Year's 1951, the second wave of the Chinese offensive had pushed the UN coalition south of the 38th parallel, forcing them to surrender Seoul for the second time.

The first Special Marine Corps basic class graduated around the time the division broke out at Chosen. It was one of the Corps' finest hours, but for us, it was a stark reminder that the war was just getting started. We had to fill out requests for next duty assignments. Most of us would be given orders to Korea, but most made their first choice something other than infantry. Only five lieutenants in my training company requested to lead a rifle platoon, and I was one of them. Only five lie lie a rifle platoon, and I was one of them.

Think about that for a minute. We're talking about a company of officers in the United States. It's Marine Corps. And that right there was an excerpt from a manuscript of a book, which is called Make Peace or Die, A Life of Service, Leadership, and Nightmares. The book is written by Charles You Daily, and it is a distinct honor to actually be sitting here with Mr. Daly today to discuss his book, his incredible life, and the amazing lessons he has from it all. Mr. Daly, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. I wear your own

record. And you, how long have you been working on this book for? In my heart a long time. I wanted to record, I'm not even sure why other than I thought that I'm now very old, and I want to leave something behind for my family, my sons, who ranged from 67 to 24, and I have an idea of what life was like and truthfully. set that down and they can read on it, use a toilet paper, where they want to do it, but I did not expect to make a commercial venture out of it. I felt that would have been trading on the bodies I left behind. Well, the truth certainly comes out in this book. It's super frank and straightforward, and it's a great read. And I appreciate your son, Charlie,

sending it to me and linking all this up. Yeah, it's good and it's it lays out your life and I'd like to go back to the book right now and go to the beginning The beginning of the book and the beginning of your story it starts off like this mine is not your typical Irish immigrant story For one thing my dad had use of a private airplane when I was growing up a bulky Ford trimotor with silver skin and loud engines that scared the hell out of me the plane plane and a private rail car were perks of my father's work as a top U.S. executive for Shell Oil. Our family came to America on a boat, but it was an ocean liner and we traveled first class. Definitely not your typical immigrant story, huh? No, I've screwed it up later on, but it was not the sort of person could be flunk out of Ellis Island.

Yeah. The very interesting story on your heritage. And going back to the book again, it says in 1892, my father was born in Ningpo, China, the son of Dr. Charles Cathrop de Berg daily. Did I say that right? We're close. Close enough. Probably as close as I could do it. Who set up a clinic in Ningpo following several years following several voyages to China as a ship's doctor. It seems he found the human suffering in that ancient kingdom too hard to ignore. And so he stayed and married an Irish nurse with similar ideals. Perhaps my grandfather's response to this cry for help explains something about my own life, my tendency to spring into action when someone is suffering a wrong, even on the other side of the world,

even if it's not my fight. This habit of leaping into action when the bugle blows has been a mixed blessing for me, as it well may have been for him. him. And there was all kinds of turmoil going on in China at the time. And so they actually sent your father back to be educated at the Turnbridge School. And then he went on to Cambridge, where he graduated in 1914. And anyone that knows anything about history knows that that's not a good year to be graduating from college in Britain. A large number of them at age 17 or thereabouts went off to war.

And at that time, they had little knowledge of war. There's a wonderful book, Diary of a Fox Hunting Man, followed by a diary of an infantry officer. And he was a gentleman, and he went to war with his groom for his horse. and his horse. And it was before they met machine gun on this. Yeah, we've covered multiple books, first pertinent person accounts on this podcast, talking about the absolute horror of World War I

and the horror of the machine gun versus the tactics that they had at the time. And it's actually unbelievable when you read the stories about World War I. It's unbelievable that it happened. It's unbelievable that it happened for a week, never mind a month, never mind years, where you'd say, okay, hey, your battalion just went over the top.

No one came back, and in 15 minutes our battalion's going to go. And 15 minutes after that, another battalion is going to go. It's crazy to think about that kind of human sacrifice and that. Well, the geniuses who did that, weren't the ones who went over the top and who walked up and walked ahead, they either fell or hung up on the barbed wire, and they had no concept. They'd know that little bit of experience in the Boer War and a few other souvenir hunts, and no concept of what they were doing to a generation on both sides of the trenches.

Going back to the book, I keep a photo of my father taken during the First World War. In it, my dad stands in his officer uniform with binoculars and a walking stick. Beside him, my mother's 19-year-old brother, Charlie, a lieutenant, leans on his rifle in a confident pose, half-smiling behind his pipe. They are flanked by a few others. One is wearing a German army helmet with a spike on top, a war trophy. What war does to men can be detected in the difference between their expressions? My dad has the proverbial thousand-yard stare. The corners of his eyes around his spectacles and his brows show resignation and an exhausted

readiness. The men under his command have a similar look. Charlie, on the other hand, has the fresh face of a replacement, a gentleman for whom war is still a great adventure. Charlie has only been on the front for less than a week. He would be blown to pieces shortly after this photo was taken. My dad handed this photo down to me and scribbled the names of the men under it with KIA or WIA beside each name marking them all killed or wound. I thought of cropping the photo to make it a family shot, and I'm glad I didn't.

Those other guys had already been cropped out. Shortly after my own war, I asked Dad, when do the bad memories fade? It will take a long time, he said, but finally they will fade. They don't. No, they don't. And we're going to get to your war in a bit. Your dad's war, staying with the book, Dad had gone to the front in the fourth battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers,

having applied for a commission on the day the war broke out. He was named a captain following a perfunctory officer's training course. While his sons went to war, my grandfather managed two hospitals in Ireland that handled the overflow of wounded. In 1917, he was awarded an order of the British Empire for this work. My uncle, Lieutenant Arthur Charles DeBerg Daly, another Charlie, was killed in action on the 9th of September 1916. After having seen action and survived in the Somme, he was 19 years old. In his last letter home, he wrote, we attacked Ginchi tomorrow.

In case of accidents, I played the game two days ago and will, please. God tomorrow. What does that mean played the game two days ago? That means he'd already probably seen some combat? Probably went out at least on a patrol or the attack, general attack, highly unlikely would have come back, but the night patrols were regular. And then they wanted some genius in the back said we wanted to probe the enemy line. how you probe the enemy line

cutting her way through barbed wire and they're just waiting that's a tough way to probe them yeah that's patrols I was very later on in my life patrols were difficult enough

without people waiting and with a certain knowledge that you're coming and as soon as you start messing around with the barbed wire they know exactly where you are. And then they don't waste a whole lot of ammunition, but it doesn't take much, running through a machine gun to clean

out of some probes. So then when they didn't come back, the genius figure, hey, there must be somebody in those trenches. It's not, I can't grasp it. How that mentality went and how pompous

there was fucking generals were. I'm not front of generals. The next morning he is said to have led his men over the top and was hit in the ear with a bit of shrapnel. He took cover in a shell crater to assess the wound and regain his

composure. According to the official report, he stood up made it four or five yards toward the enemy wire before being hit in the head with machine gunfire. Due to a cruel administrative error, my family would receive word that he had been wounded. Then they were told that the report

was an error and that he was fine and finally they learned the truth or at least a polite version of the truth. So there's two uncles right there, Charlie and Charlie, and they've both been killed. And now we get to your dad. Dad was wounded at Rich Borde LeVoe. I'm not even going to.

Your French is about as good as mine. On 9 May, 1915, in the left eye and the right hand. While convalescing in Dublin, he played a role in putting down the 1916 Easter Rising that I'm glad I don't know, much about. Shortly after his return to the front as a major in June 1916, he was sent home again with appendicitis and spent the rest of the war training bombers in the art of grenade throwing. For his wounds, he was given a lump son or some or blood money as he called it, which he spent on a motorcycle. He putted around Ireland on the bike for several months, visiting the family families of young officers who had been killed while serving under his command in the fusiliers.

He eased painful memories by describing deaths courageous and quick, even in cases where the truth was pathetic and grotesque. Thus, he didn't mean to, but he promoted the concept that war isn't what it is. I don't think he felt guilty about that. He felt more like trying to explain the unexplainable. to the families who they knew exactly what happened to their sons. So we lied. I did that once and you discussed it later on and we carry this with the right letter of condolence. And that letter returned said, you were his officer.

I'm just curious to know why you're alive. you lived and he didn't. I think there was that sort of feeling. He just can't convey the truth, but you want to, so you don't. Your dad's continuing to travel around and he ends up in one spot in Bandon where he met the parents and sister of Charles Seeley King,

the man beside him in the photo who, like his own brother, Charles, had been killed while attempting to lead an Irish platoon across barbed wire in the front on German lines. Lieutenant King's surviving sister, Violet, became my mother. Violet Sealy King

impressed my father with her independence. She reacted to her brother's death by leaving County Cork for the first time in her life to volunteer as a VAD. What's a VAD? Volunteer aid I don't know. But basically it's nurses going close to the front lines.

She didn't qualify to be a nurse. She just in a tent household as close you can, took care of someone with the gut wound, then you're gone. So you're going to bullshit them and clean out their guts and see a little bit of old parts of males. she probably never seen her.

So it wasn't, it was a shock, I'm sure, to her. On the other hand, the death of her brother was a greater shock. Yeah, you say in here, Violet left behind a life of lunches, lawn games, picnics, tennis, bridge, and ping pong. I assumed she'd never seen a nude male, let alone one with vital parts missing or maimed. Mum never spoke about her service, but when it came to my turn to go to war, She had no illusions about what her son would experience. Later, she told me she had very little hope of seeing me again. So, and I always have to make this disclaimer when I read through these books.

I'm obviously skipping giant chunks. I'm not just reading the whole book. Good. You're lucky. No, you're not. It was a powerful expression. And just reading these parts. make me happy to know that some people will know bits and pieces of the truth.

After the war, your dad ended up getting a job. And here we go to the book. Dad got a job at the offices of the Royal Dutch Shell, which is now just Shell today, where he found row on row of desks filled with other survivors of a decimated generation. Discussing this gloomy scene with a board interviewer, he learned there was one unwanted job open. peddling shell oil products in rural India. He seized it the chance.

And so he gets this opportunity to go to India and working for shell oil. He was based in a place called Malabar, and then there was this event that took place called the Mopla rise. Mopla rebellion. The Mopla Rebellion. And quick description of it here, Europeans were brutally murdered, and then the Moplas Moplas, how do you say it?

Moplas. The Moplas turned upon their Hindu neighbors. They burned villages, sacked temples, outraged women, massacred and attempted wholesale, forcible conversion of Hindus to Islam. Now, your dad at the time, although a civilian dad lent assistance to that military force, drawing upon his wartime experience to defend the British and Hindu lives and property from the Islamic rebels by organizing a little convoy of open cars and bicycles to rescue and even, smaller group under siege in the village. The local English language, the paper, the pioneer describes the battle in its September 19, 19, 21 edition, an ex-officer's gallantry, and this is talking about your dad, after a fierce assault on the part of some hundreds

of rebels, the troops withdrew. Lieutenant McGonial, having been wounded to command the next party sent forward, Captain McOnroy, called upon Mr. Daly, an ex-officer. Bailey went forward with a platoon carrying out the task in very gallant fashion. A platoon was, I think, four or five guys. Garrett owned it in and tried to maintain discipline with minimal force. Yeah. I mean, that's like, you couldn't make that up.

Here's your dad, former infantry guy, and this rebellion happens, and he steps up and leads this little team. And they basically, they survived the whole. horrible situation. They didn't want to die. And they had the automatic weapon. Yeah, that makes a big difference. You got in here.

One of the rebels got close enough to swing a handmade sword at my dad. He gave me that weapon to me and I used it as a fire poker and a garden tool until it broke on a stone one day in the 1960s. True. Amid all this stuff going on, he actually wrote and proposed to your mom, Violet. and she got on a boat and went down there and they were married on nine weeks and weeks and an un-air-conditioned vessel through the Red Sea and so on.

Oh yeah, you've got to point that out because not too many people know what it's like to be at sea these days. Yeah. Yeah. I've fortunately or unfortunately done multiple deployments around the world on ships and air conditioning even on a modern Navy ship

isn't always there. Right there. I took my space available. I took my young family on one and right after the election of 62 and I wanted to get away from the weaving spiders and so on. So I found a space, two cabins on a troop ship headed to Hamburg from Brooklyn. So I got on there and I thought,

and I just my late wife, I said, this is one hell of a deal. So let's go. to celebrate. We were just going under the Brawana Bridge might have been there, but she said, you can't get a drink on a troop ship. Oh, Jesus Christ, sir. 14 days later, I get to Hamburg, boy of I was really thirsty, but it was free, but anyway. Your dad, he, because he had behaved and performed in that manner, he kind of got some recognition for that and ended up getting taken care of. And then it was going back to the book,

thanks to Dad's well-known heroics in the uprising and an earthquake in Japan that killed a number of shell executives, he soon found himself fast-tracked to the highest levels of the company, first cleaning up the mess in Japan, and then on to a senior position in America that included a private plane and a rail car. That's crazy. A private plane and a rail car.

That's like, and you remember that? I remember the plane, geez, it was noisy, very, very, very, it's a tin airplane with big three engines, one up in the nose and the other. And I don't remember the rail car other than, I guess I assume that's the way people travel. That's the idiot I was. So you're now in, you guys are in St. Louis. And when you were saying, until the war in 1939, you guys used to call, back and forth to Ireland. Correct.

And you were, this is how you describe yourself. I was a brat with a run-the-first class at my own private steward. I do remember that. I can't imagine. So how old were you when that was going on? I was born in 27 and that was 36, up until the war started. The war, we call it, until 39. Yeah. And then no more.

Yeah, that's, I can't imagine, you know, I have four kids, three daughters and one son, and just how crazy they are. I can't imagine putting them in charge of any adult when they're seven years old would just be absolutely crazy. And this is interesting. For reasons unknown to me, the good times at Shell ended in the 1930s. So we left St. Louis for a modest life since Golden Parachutes were not known in those days. So something happened. You don't even really know what happened?

Well, the compression happened. Oh, okay. And then beyond that, though, it was, I'm not sure. I don't know. But you went from living this kind of first-class lifestyle to just be in a normal, the normal lifestyle. Well, to a substantial extent, he became, he was an invention from a guy,

and he started, became a wildcat for oil in Michigan. There ain't no oil in Michigan, but so we started a water stuff from the company and peddled out and so on and then when a war came out he wanted to go back to war and he was by that time was a little too old for that sort of thing so he got a job with the British in the U.S. in embassy there in Washington and charge of Lend-Lease which is a con job that FDR created because he wanted to get in the war he believed firmly had to stop Hitler and so on. And he, so the Len Lease part was some imaginary leases on some property in Bahamas or

somewhere. He gave them, he gave the English, I think 50 rusty old destroyers. But they were vital in fighting the U-Boats in the North Atlantic. So he felt he was doing something. Yeah, because he actually, as soon as the war kicked off in Europe, he tried to join the British Army. Yeah. And they wouldn't take him.

It's the same. In the British Army or Irish regiments or whatever you have, the Irish, unfortunately, were Paramount in the warfare, English. And you guys were living in Bethesda at this time, or around the D.C. Maryland area? Yeah, just in the edge of it. So now you say this. I will never forget one drive into Washington

on a particularly balmy winter Sunday. As we were cruising down Constitution Avenue in our old Ford, my father pointed out all the civil servants rushing, into the Navy Department building. And he says, look at the way the Americans work, even on a Sunday. We got back home, we turned on the radio when we learned out, we learned what all the commotion was about. It was Sunday, December 7th, 1941.

The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. And now, you know, we're in the war. You got your dad at this point. He goes to a doctor. He goes to the doctor because he's getting dizzy and, you know, having some spells. of dizziness and whatnot. So you say, listening outside a half-open door. Well, I got a hell of a deal.

It was in, he decided to go to a doctor, and Johns Hopkins is a good hospital in Baltimore. And so he asked me, you want to go for a drive. And I really worshipped him. He said everything was big and all that stuff. So then we went to the hospital. And I listened to this conversation between the doctor and my dad.

I could hear through the half-open door. And I could hear him say something to my dad about, you won't have any more, you've got a problem, we don't know much about it, but it's multiple cirrhosis. I'm not sure even remember the name or I didn't remember it. And you wouldn't be doing any much more golf or increasing trouble walking unless you, cut out

alcohol and the sense of I used to have evening cocktails with my mother and other limitations

they had to live on and so I remember my dad's words say would you like me live in a vacuum too

goodbye doctor and I came out and said Dad he just said to me let's go home yeah well you say it here

he says let's get home in time for me to have a martini with mom. Yeah, that's right. So he let the doctor know that his, what the doctor was saying, no alcohol, no smoking, no more golf and all this stuff. He said, okay, guess what, we're going to go have a martini with mom. Now in the spring of 1945, you joined the Navy. And you said for my parents, this is probably confirmation of our fall from gentility.

Their only son was going to war as an enlisted guy. the war is still going on when you joined 1945 yes but the the uh the japs gave up not necessarily because of me the Navy had already given him up on me

so you go to boot camp you go to uh firefighting school um you got this part in here which I have to read says to get out a compulsory Sunday church services, I said I was Jewish. For this, I was... I said I was a Jew. For this, I was assigned

punitive cleaning duties. Whether this was because of anti-Semitism in the Navy or because the Navy doesn't like liars or both, I will never know. So... I got to sleep, yeah. And then you had a...

It also says all recruits were compelled the box. My sparring partner was a brute who had had fun beating the living crap out of me. I was saved by Ira Cohn, a genuine Jew who offered to switch sparring partners with me and proceeded to Savagy beat the guy who'd been doing a job on me. And then you get this break, which is my big break was the V-5 program, which had been set up to train naval aviators. This included a full ride at university and commissioned as an officer because only gentlemen could fly for the Navy. So they have this program out there to become a pilot and you actually it's unbelievable that it felt it went advertised throughout the fleet by order and those who got through it were sent to get a degree

you had to learn to get a degree before you can fly an airplane to to america for America and you you end up getting selected for the program and and this is a thing This is classic. So here we go. I was college bound, but I didn't know which college, nor did I care. Those of us who had passed the test were assembled from our various East Coast stations. At muster, roll was called. Dady Davis, Loftus, and Monroe.

I can remember very well. I don't have to read it. Daily Davis, Laughness, and Monroe to New Haven, Connecticut, going to Yale University. We didn't know. We were going to Haven, but anyway. And then the others with the last name, last name's N through Z, were sent to Schenectady, New York. into Union College. Right.

So by your alphabetical order, you get sent to Yale. A brilliant man. That's called Planned Burthood. Planned Parenthood, I guess. I don't know. And then you get to Yale, and it was pretty challenging. And you talk about that. We had to wear uniforms at all times

and guard college gates with empty rifles, but just it's clear that we weren't, the normal quality of Yale men who wore white shoes and ties and so on. And I remember the high school girls at Navy High School used to go by a stand, not at attention, but the best could. While, you know, the war had ended. And then you say after my freshman year at Yale, the aviation cadet program was dissolved. I could stay on at Yale, but I had to sign a seven-year-old.

enlistment no way I wouldn't sign so I was sent to Norfolk still a seamen second class to guard a gangplank fortunately it's my career fortunately the peacetime Navy didn't need me for long I received an honorable discharge on August 21st 1946 to my stunned delight I found that I still had that I still had some more American generosity coming my way thanks to the GI Bill I was entitled to a year for having enlisted and one day of college for every day I had served including my time in uniform at Yale this was just enough time to compete complete my studies and earn a college degree to top off this bananza of

good fortune Yale welcomed me back in September as a regular student in regular clothes free to study it whatever I wanted I chose in national relations so there you go that's a class that's classic no airplanes you can't make that up well I would have it if it was necessary I didn't have to The summer of 1947, I took a road trip at my elder sister at my elder sister Jones

suggestion. I dropped in on her in-laws in Chicago. They took me to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for a weekend at their cottage. We went to the Belfry Summer Playhouse Belfry Summer Playhouse

to see another part of the forest, the name of the play. I was stunned by one of the performances and stayed, by one of the performers and stayed at the lake for three days trying without success to bed the star by the name of Mary Larmouth. So you see this girl, and then you go back to Yale.

You say I was bored despite good friends and touch football games, and you couldn't get Mary out of your mind. Mary ended up moving to New York, and you'd go visit her from New Haven. And then here we go. At some point I got to thinking that all this was one hell of a deal for an immigrant.

I couldn't get over the idea that I owed my country. country everything and I was possessed by restless and romantic feeling that I ought to pay my country back through further service. What a dope. I heard of a Marine Corps program which would make me a commissioned officer if I spent the summer between my junior and senior years getting paid to train in a platoon leaders class in Quantico, Virginia.

My sister Jones husband John had been a World War II Marine in the Pacific. He was like an older brother to me and I had a lot of respect for the Marines in general because of the qualities I saw in John that were almost non-existent among my classmates. Marines know what I'm talking about. That is the few, the proud stuff that has led many good men to early deaths and others to disillusionment and boredom

in a branch of service affectionately nicknamed the suck. A brotherhood in any case. And then after a six-week summer camp, you were a Marine officer. I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the peacetime Marine Corps. Dad didn't have much to say about my commission. mission because he didn't have a crystal ball.

As a Marine reservist, my standby orders read something like only to be called upon in case of national emergency. So you become a Marine. Instead of attending graduation, Mary and I got married. On a Saturday and both went to work on Monday. Mary worked at a department store and I got a job unloading millions of gallons of industrial molasses from deep water tankers at a pier in Baltimore for a British company. Mary and I were earning enough to buy a little Ford

and rent a little house on the bay with a pump well for drinking water and an oil heater. Eventually, the oil leaked into the well, which was okay because it floated as long as the water level didn't get too low. When it did, we started getting greasy showers. We were so unbelievably happy. So you kind of scrounge together,

a nice little life at this point. Very good. Very good. I was just, I felt good. the, I don't know if they get in there that the job was like, but it was a, it was running a one-man, a two-man terminal in the industrial glass, the collective from around the country, and then collected there and then pumped onto on the ships, and there were just two of us. And so the other guy had retired, the head guy, and left,

one my one-man staff so I went saw the one-man staff big fat black guy and we worked a lot he's smarter than I was about this business by far he would have been except he's got the skin problem so he worked for some years and then he used to we got along fine I know I noticed after the first week or so I noticed he took a break once or twice a day and I didn't even damn what he did but he's used He was an easy job and unloading railroad cars, one thing, another, but he just disappeared. So, you know, Cedrum or Nelson's done my business, I don't care what to do. But I'm kind of, I'm just curious.

He said, I have to have to have to run the toilet. And it was a big combination of a big industrial pump and off on the side was the toilet. I said, Chris. I said, Chris. Now, so we got a toilet here. He said, that's for white folks. He said, he'd be sitting me. He said, no.

He said, that's been that way all the years that you've been here? Yeah. I said, well, let's just play. Well, say, just forget that. Okay? And so he said, all right. But I noticed when tank trucks came in

to load, to unload the glasses and so on, that he was never near that. that toilet. This is Baltimore, Maryland, in 1945, 1949. It's ridiculous. It was ridiculous. It is ridiculous now with some of the things we do, but that really bit. So you're living that life. Like I said, you're pretty happy at that point. And then

going to the book on June 25th, 1950, we got our national emergency. At dawn that morning, the Korean People's Army surged over the 38th parallel into the South. This action was immediately condemned by an emergency session of the UN Security Council a vote from which the Soviets abstained.

On June 30th, five days after the North's invasion of the South began Truman sent American troops to support the South Koreans. On July 7th, the UN passed Resolution 84, requesting member nations to join a police action on the Korean peninsula. Sixteen nations joined in, including ones with modest armies like Ethiopia and Turkey. General MacArthur, who had been serving as the de facto emperor of Japan since the war's end, was given command of UN forces. Unfortunately for South Koreans, MacArthur's army of occupation were not the same men who won the Second World War.

Many were drunk and fat from half a decade of soft living as occupiers. They were beaten back almost off the peninsula by Kim Il-sung's peasant fighters making their last stand outside the port of Pusan. The outcome looked bleak. On the 15th of September, MacArthur executed an act of military genius when he ordered the Marines under his command to make an amphibious landing at the port of Incheon near Seoul. Mary and I knew little of Korean history. Neither of us knew or cared about America's blundered diplomacy and intelligence failures that it was. left Korea in a national security blind spot. But Mary's attention skyrocketed when I reminded her of my standby orders and speculated that

this skirmish seemed to qualify as a national emergency. My call to duty came shortly after Truman decided to commit troops to the UN's response to North Korea's assault. I went down to our local post office where Navy Corman was giving the Marine physicals. I've always had low blood pressure. When the doc double-checked it, he wanted to turn me away. I had already taken leave from guarding millions of gallons of molasses and had gotten excited about going to war.

I told my rewrite back, went and ran up and down a few flights of stairs, and returned to somewhat breathless for a re-exam. McCormon said something to the effect of, Hey, pal, if you're dumb enough to go, I'm dumb enough to send you. Up until that point, my military training consisted of PLC, which is the platoon leader's course, that summer camp at Quantico in 1948. Before deploying to Korea, I would receive additional training. The PLC, the Pertunitius class, the rest of the Marine Corps could see the little bars of silver

bar, the mistaken captain, and sometimes they salute us that really bit. So they said the Portunity of the class, PLC, Pricks' Last Chance. And that stuck with us. The Pricks' last chance graduated. Uh, before deploying to Korea, I would receive additional training in the first ever class of the special basic school. Now today it's called the basic school. Is it special base school

because it was shortened for Korea? We were the first one, and it was a creation. I think it had a much more extensive process prior to the souvenir hunt, and so that they, but I won't say it in any way of meat grinder, but it was fast,

and it was created it as for special base class. Today, the basic class goes to, well, a basic class would say six months another year or whatever before your commission. But they needed the lieutenants needed them right now. Back to the book, we had just 11 weeks at the basic school. Obviously, we came away woefully underprepared for what lay ahead.

On chilly autumn nights, when training didn't have me fumbling around that land navigation courses in the dark woods, I would sit by the fire or lie in bed with Mary and talk dreams about the arrival of our baby. Unspoken was the constellation that I was leaving her with child in the event that my absence became permanent. Those weeks at the basic school were consumed by seasoned Marines vainly trying to teach second lieutenant daily to read maps and lead riflemen. Not that I was going to need any of the skills I was learning.

It looked as though the war would be over before we got our platoons. Then on Thanksgiving 1950, the Chinese launched their surprise attack at Chosen, and our brother Marines found themselves doomed. And that's where I started this whole podcast off, But then you get my orders, were to report to Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California, before shipping out across the Pacific.

I said goodbye to my parents in Bethesda. My dad gave me a 45 caliber Smith and Weston revolver, recalling that he had found a personal weapon, recalling that he had found a personal weapon to be of comfort. Years later, my son Charlie was reading Tim O'Brien's Vietnam stories of the things they carried. He asked me if there was anything I carried in the war for good luck. I told him, yeah, a pistol.

I still keep that pistol on my desk unloaded. Dad kissed me goodbye and hugged me. I can't recall him doing that, doing either ever before. The family's war history must have been on his mind as it was on mine. All through my deployment, my mother would garden nervously and dig holes in the yard like graves. I don't know what the motive was, but she'd just come digging. I don't, maybe that's what's in her mind.

I don't know, but she did do a lot of digging. I'm sure she was trying to keep her brain occupied. It could be. Mary and I plan to drive West in our 1949 forward, but Mary was having trouble riding while pregnant, so she followed by train. After moving what would have been a dream house in any other circumstance, just off the beach in Carlsbad,

Angus and I, it's one of your buddies, Angus and I drove north to Camp Pendleton to check in. I explained to the weathered sergeant on duty, that we had just arrived and gave the young wives a bit and asked for an added week's leave. And then he tells you, the boat leaves Diego on Wednesday. Angus and I decided to break news separately and gently to our beauties. The moment I walked in the door, Mary looked at my face and started to cry. Angus's bride heard the news through the bathroom door, seated on the toilet.

She screamed. So you think you're going to get, yeah, can we get an extra week's leave? And they're like, no. the boat leaves on Wednesday. Yeah, right. We'd rented that nice little house, too. Man. At muster on Monday, I was given responsibility for 30 or so Marines in the fifth replacement draft.

The draft's mission was to bring the depleted Marine forces on the Korean Peninsula back up to strength for a counteroffensive. As I inspected their weapons in gear, the platoon sergeant advised me that many of these boys were virgins and suggested we rectified that before heading out. That night, we crossed the U.S. Mexico. border and found a brothel called El Serrape where I negotiated a group rate using my best college Spanish and some gestures to explain to the ladies it wouldn't take these lads long not only was I the officer in charge of these guys at but at 23 I was older than most than almost all of them this was not lost on our host who called the Marines ninos boys on our

way out the ladies gathered to bid us farewell offering streamers and feigned tears years later i was at a hotel bar in vera cruz mexico i kept getting looks from one of the barmen finally he shouted out el sarrape they're the opposite side of mexico i've been vera cruz an elegant hotel and on the harbor rebuilding a that shipping port and my wife was with me in this hotel and then the long bar and I can't remember what a lot of things people look like and so on and I had been now in Mexico and not down there so the guy is mixing a drink or whatever the bartenders do and he just snouted him, Bill Serrape he'd been in the other establishment

and Mary said what's that about I don't know what the hell he's talking about it Of course you know nothing about that. Dockside Wednesday morning I bought $10,000 worth of short-term life insurance from an enterprising Etna life salesman supplementing the government's policy of the same amount. I would be taking over a platoon where most, if not all of my predecessors, had been killed or wounded. If I thought about it, I was fucked, but I didn't think about it. So now you get on a ship. We made a stop in Yusuka, jukasuka.

Yeah. Yokosuka, Japan for two days picking up supplies and ammunition. We had a chance to call home. There was a long line to use phones. It was crowded, and I couldn't hear well. In a room full of Marines, I shouted into the receiver to marry. You bet your sweet ass, I love you. The Marines off the ship had managed to get drunk and in trouble

before the rest of us could even get down in the game. Before she met me, she was a daughter of a Canadian minister. It was kind of a slow learning process for both of us. So the first Marines off the ship managed to get drunk and in trouble before the rest of us could even get down the gangplank. We were ordered to remain on the base, officers included. Eager to experience the finer points of Japanese culture, I assembled a squad of like-minded Marines, lined them up in formation, and marched them to the main gate, sternly bringing the ranks to a halt. I advised the century that we were under orders to move into town and round up our misbehaving comrades. outside the gate

I told the men to scatter have fun fuck their brains out drink themselves stupid but don't get arrested and do not miss the ship I was showered with words of gratitude and promises

to return on time it did Pete McCloskey and this is the first introduction of Pete McCloskey am I saying that name right that's right Pete McCloskey and I met on the troop ship

and had made it ashore earlier I founded him in a geisha house infested with officers based in Japan. At one point, a Navy officer came from another... Just correcting it. He had made it.

He admitted the air earlier. Oh, so he was already there? And then you showed up. At one point, a Navy officer came from another room and pompously ordered us to quiet down. It's the Gisha House. When he returned to his party...

Paper walls. Yeah. I threw an empty bottle through the paper screen wall, apparently striking someone. We heard a yell, then sirens. Pete and I clambered through the skylight

and spent the night bivouac on the roof. Two gentlemen, two officers of the United States Marines. The finer points of Japan. In the morning, everyone made it back to the ship somehow. However, just before departure, six officers were ordered to stay in Japan.

One was the future evangelist and presidential candidate, Pat Robertson. Pat got his daddy, then United States Senator Willie, or A. Willie Robertson to have him pulled off the ship because Pat was probably having second thoughts about dying for his country. The other

five lieutenants were beards pulled to cover for bat for pat's preferential treatment disgusting yeah and we i don't go into it too much but that comes back to uh yeah to to to bite him well he did come back to bite him later on the book we yeah discussed the virtuous guy now a wonderful preacher presidential candidate and so on just how uh the virtuous guy who said was a combat marine he he wasn't just how he got gonorrhea but it was some miracle they're called an unspecified drip is that something like the immaculate conception did get gonorrhea without any contact i don't know what the first case but robinson's it was he was truly i mean any faint idea that had uh had entered his head that it that he had some duty to those Marines and so on who just escaped him.

As I say in the book, we called him out exactly what he was. And when he was running for president, and he sued McCloskey and said, I'll break you. And we just had what do you call those things when they had testimony about, whatever, court reports, of course, the suit in every state, and will break you. So it goes on quite a bit in the book about that, and the depth of the rot inside that guy. Well, you guys proceed. You land at Pohang, a port on the east coast of Korea. From Pohang, we were driven up into the hills on the back of trucks. The road was rough. The bench is hard and cold. Nobody spoke.

I thought about Marion felt alone. It could be that this was the most frightening, one of my most frightening memories of the war, because the men to my left and my right were still strangers, and we had not yet encountered the action that would bond us, then give us the courage to get through much darker nights. At one piss stop, we heard that we had already lost some guys from another convoy, not slain in some glorious fight, but squashed by their vehicle when it skidded off the rutted road and rolled down the steep hillside.

We reached First Division's fifth Marine regiment at the, the front. Not a line of trenches, just some high hills, narrow valleys, and a small river with enemy lurking in the long night. Pete McCloskey and I were assigned to Charlie Company First Battalion, 5th Battalion, the motto of First Battalion Fifth Marines is make peace or die. For those of us who had just arrived in Korea, the latter seemed much more likely. The latter seemed much more likely. It was February 16, 1951. Before the Corps could give me a rifle platoon to command, I was designated the battalion supply officer. A lieutenant would have to be killed, wounded, or least likely of all, rotated home before I got to a platoon. And so you're working as a

supply officer for a while, and you go through some stories. You're a little bit brash, I would say, and a little bit rebellious. You know, there's some of the chigi bears who are these, these Koreans that worked basically hauling gear. And you befriended some of them. I was there commanding also because they, this playoffs had 50 chigabird, and they carried supplies up and it helped carry wounded down. They were, because they're small. They were ill-fed because they weren't given the right.

They were promised. They had homemade shoes in many cases. They were very brave, and I felt, I want to say responsible for them. I suppose I felt that, but I felt recognized these people could kill for us, and, you know, they just, they pay them and want. You pay them by the barrel, because the money was totally worthless.

So you could, you could, you could, could, I mean, our rations in those days used to include it when they're dropped to us or they're carried up or whatever in a ration. You get, say, three lucky strike cigarettes, something like that. I don't happen to smoke. She's, I thought they're in heaven. But they weren't, and I got the corpsman to look at them. And that very, I'm not pragmatic, but Machiavellian to keep in good condition, we're going to carry

the bodies. so it might as well help my feet. And I felt very close to him. I used to, I can do it now my knees on, so I could squat for an hour or two easily, just as they do, and just find out what the co-winter do. Most of the time, didn't have an interpreter,

but I felt more more close. And then the fucking colonel said, you can't just squat down with a bunch of gooks. And he was not my favorite guy. And I just ignored that. And I felt that they were part of me, but certainly they were part of the Charlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines when I got there, or the whole battalion. And so they didn't wear a helmet, so I didn't wear helmet.

So then another officer came from regiment, and he picked a major he lisps. And he said, I think I'd have had it in there or not. said, Mr. Daly, you don't stop wearing your helmet. I won't transfer you out of the battalion. Oh, shit, you're going to send me home. You're fucking terrified me. But anyway, it was a... It was a...

It was a job exposed a lot of disgust to the performance of the battalion commander who did not eat last. The lack of effort in trying to... get decent supplies. I got a trailer and a Jeep and stole something in the Army, but it's not stealing something. They're sitting in the fat asses. These are reserved places.

I'm not in the Army, but anyway. So it was okay. It wasn't what I wanted to do. And then I had a chance to, to, in a volleyball game. A volleyball game? the colonel organized the headquarters group with the the attunities in McClossy had been to the

attunee by then so he put him on the side of the line officers and so and this colonel was much worse I don't know how I was in there much worse than you can imagine if I was calling on fire to protect the headquarters rather than worry about who's on the ridge or happen to be Marines so I just uh we played volleyball and and I in theory missed the ball and hit in his heart of the could right in his face through the net and so then pretty soon I got a patrol like I said you were brash well that was that was if there was a duty call that was I really

I really, really wanted to hurt him, but I really, so it's definitely important that he get out of there. Well, you say in here, my misbehavior and contempt for pointless rules and petty authority figures was indicative of an age-old fact of war. Quote, good soldiers who excel at shirt-starching and personal grooming are seldom the guys you want in combat. Marines have a slur for these scrubbed, disciplined rear echelon types. We call them pogs, persons other than grunts.

One early morning I saw this distinction boil over and nearly turned deadly. Four of my chiggies, including the widower, were carrying a gut-shot North Korean who had been hit during a minor skirmish the night before and had been found aimlessly crawling on the hill. The bearers set the stretcher down beside the road waiting for someone to collect the prisoner for interrogation if he didn't die first. A clean-shaven truck driver who just finished hauling supplies up from the rear and noticed that the wounded man had used what little strength he had left to strike. on to his side to take a piss. The truck driver waited for the trickle to start, then put a toe of his boot on the guy's shoulder to make him roll back and piss on himself.

He laughed as the urine went all over the wounded man and seeped into his gut wound. Behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being racked. A Marine, possibly on the edge of reason from his last hill, aimed his weapon at the sadistic driver. No, I shouted. I shared the rifle.

disgust but I couldn't let him throw his life away by committing murder and just thought but one of the one of the cheegey bears you touched on there um you touched what a the widower yeah so what he had um he had come to me and with an interpreter and uh so you wanted to get a pass to go back to a sea of deaf and his family and And I happened to have noticed him before because he was a little older than some carrying a full loads and so on. And so I say, boy, in a group that size, there have to be line crossers. We're just watching what we were doing and so on. So nobody, once they came to us, the only way they die is if they're dead.

I mean, you get out of if they're dead. At least the time, they don't, nobody goes anywhere else, no matter what. Wait, these are the Chiggy Bears? No one goes anywhere else? Well, I can't. Because there's been a X number of them, say one, play none, play two, were no, were spying on us, really. Or so we're told, and probably rightly.

So I gave him a, I think I wrote it the book, I paraphrase that him, I said that he's been good and so on. He's going between where we are now and Juan Ju. And then if he's presented this after, I gave him a week or whatever, after such a date, or out of the direct line between the two, kill him. And I signed it with labor officer, Charlie, I come, first battalion, fifth Marines, and send him on his way. Yeah, here's the note that you wrote.

So this guy wants to go and leave, and you send him with this note. This man is a stretcher bearer for Charlie Compe. 1st Battalion Fifth Marines. He has saved Marine lives. He is returning to Wanju on emergency leave. If he is found anywhere off the line between Inji and Wanju, or if he presents this pass after the date on the reverse side, kill him. Signed second lieutenant Charles U. Daly, CEO, Korean Labor Battalion, Fifth Marines.

Now, how did you translate this to him so that he knew that he had this, so that he understood what that meant? I didn't, I just gave him the pass and he hadn't wanted to be worrying about it, but I didn't want to. Yeah. I was responsible for doing it. I was somebody to get killed because, and whatever. So he, fortunately, we didn't change our position around Ingey because he had no place to go then, but that's what he showed up. So I felt good about it.

And if I hadn't, if I hadn't, felt good about it. I guess I'm good about it because someone killed the prick because he was, in fact, a Lioncrosser. But I don't think he was. Going back to the book, in mid-March, I was up for promotion. That meant I had orders to report to the rear for a physical fitness test. I was excited for my first shower in a month, but mostly I wanted to know how second lieutenant Kerry Cowart was doing. Am I saying that right, Coward? Yes, C-O-W-R-T.

Yep. About a week earlier trying to do the right thing leading from the front, he had run ahead of his mortar section to observe where their rounds were landing. He was spotted by an enemy patrol and was sprayed with bullets from a burp gun, a toy-sized submachine gun so named for spitting out bullets so fast they slur together into a burping sound. Considering how badly he was hit, I couldn't understand why our doctors would keep him in a tent hospital instead of sending him rearward to more sophisticated facilities. As soon as I reached headquarters, I asked about him and orderly checked a list. Lieutenant Coward died last night. Fuck. Coward was dead. And I got to take a shower.

I felt sick. Continuing on, I got under the hot, hot shower. Another naked guy, an older, wizened little fellow, entered and began his shower. He must have noticed my grimy gear. It's quiet up there these days, he said. I tensed up muttering something like, is that right? All I could think about was coward. I added that it was so nice to be back here in the rear with all the deep thinking big picture geniuses.

Unperturbed, he gave me his forecast. Gooks will be pouring down any night now. About then, a man came in whom I recognized as Colonel Seeley, a regiment Biggie who had visited the battalion and whose name I remembered as it was the same as my mother's maiden name. He nodded to the man I had just mouthed off to and said, hello, sir, in honest reverence for the man. as much the rank, even in a state of undress. I realized the runt was none other than General Chesty, was none other than General Lewis B. Chesty Puller, recepean of more real medals than a dozen other generals,

a veteran of World War I, the Banana Wars, and World War II, hero of Guadalcanal and the Chosen Reservoir. I left that tent so fast, I was still lathered up with soap while scrambling into my new uniform. I grabbed my weapons and made myself scarce. after passing my physical, I returned to the battalion, a first lieutenant.

And there you go. You had a little conversation with Chesty Puller in the shower. Later on, he came by to respect the lines. That kind of a general, he made some comment about I think, Christ, he's not going to recognize me.

And he said, pretty good line or something like that. And I knew he had me by the balls, but I did it to squeeze. But what he referred to there, it might be for a minute to discuss that he was right about that assault he was wrong about the magnitude of it and unbeknownst to marine intelligence or or these useless generals almond and MacArthur and so on because it's gone by then but never going to do it but anyway

it was a massive massive accumulation of forces were about 700,000 or there about far more than before and they moved at night and they They had, this is the whole, I don't, I can tell you why we got some, and it assembled that force. And they had later on and quite recently, even the Marine Corps histories didn't have it, there's a professor of Korea and North American, speaking American, Korean professor in Virginia, who somehow got hold of the post-divorce along with the post-divorce along, but the post-battle thing, quite recently got hold of them. And they were the conversations

between Mao and his generals. And he had decided that the only way to stop this or bring a stalemot about or whatever was a massive, massive attack. And so he accumulated these troops so the problems were this, and he knew it. That they needed some additional training there.

They were taken from China and so on, and they were exhausted, and semi-trained, but it could be done. And they had not accumulated enough, could not carry enough. They had to carry it because of U.S. Air, carry much of the equipment. So they had very small amounts of the ammunition,

like 20 rounds per pan or something like that, but a lot of them. And it had a limited amount of food. So they had, from the time they launched that, to the time they'd be out of ammunition food was seven days. So, and this is that the Chinese knew that, and they said, if we did it with enough force and could swamp the UN, at least we'd get a stalemate and end this thing.

And so that was unbeknownst to the U.S., but the generals also said they were so afraid of another amphibious landing that they sped their attack up from, it should have been late May to the end of April. And so, and I knew obviously none of that, and the second, kind of first, they kind of run around loose. But just later on, I was intrigued by that, and by the ferocity of this. And, you know, as usual, we did our little circle around ourselves, and defended ourselves. and the Second Army Division disappeared and the Republican Army

R. O.K. Division and the other side had disappeared, so there we were. That would sound serious, but not impossible. So that was a background thing. I think that we did stick that in the manuscript belatedly. But anyway, that's just back for your own information. And the casualties were far higher

than the Marine casualties than they were the chosen. By the time we finished waiting through this mess. Anyway, that's that. And that's cool on. I'm sorry to interrupt that. No, that's, that's, that's, that's all good. It's, it's always interesting to hear the, the enemy's, the enemy's thoughts. And, you know, that one of the quotes that you've got in here is their, their, their strategy was to divide in circle and annihilate.

That's what they were trying to do. That's what I was trying to do. And, you know, that's obviously very aggressive. No, I got to sit down, relax. I should, I got to listen instead of talking. I would rather you talk and I'll listen. How's that sound? Not good.

Once the Chinese had routed our allies and surrounded us, they plan to get so close to us that we'd be unable to call for air support or artillery without hitting our own men, thus negating our biggest technological advantage. And that's something that, you know, if you're going against a force that has air control and artillery, you get as close to you can. We call it hugging, hugging the enemy. They want to get so close to us that we can't call for fire. That's where I'm put.

Sometimes our pilots would drop ordinance on friendlies by accident with terrifying and horrible results. To lessen the chance of this, the Marines would put one of their pilots on the ground with each Marine infantry battalion. We called our guy. We always called our guy as ace. They're unhappy. And the Marine Corps still does that.

That's good. We had Marine Corps pilot with us on the Battle of Ramadi, you know, and he's running little team of Marines and that's what they did. I'm glad to go. It's outstanding that they do that. If I would have known, I would have called a mace, but I didn't know that. If I had had known that you guys always called the mace, we would have called a good deal Dave Brick.

I would have called a mace. Pilots must have hated it when it was their turn, but we like to know that at least they had personal stake in not fire bombing Marines. Pilots could strafe the hill with wing-mounted machine guns and bless the men they hit with a quick death, but their most effective weapon was napalm. the famous jellied gasoline designed in a lab at Harvard University in 1942 that sticks to human skin and burns up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Napalm kills by burning as well as hypothermia and asphyxiation as it sucks up all the breathable air around its flames. This makes it particularly effective against caves, foxholes, and bunkers.

Anyone who isn't barbecued dies from lack of oxygen. It flows downhill into trenches and holes so that, nowhere to take cover. I don't have words to describe the screams and the stench except to say that I've never heard or smelled anything so awful. Napalm is stuck to my memory and is still burning after all these years. My dreams are disfigured by it. One day in the last week of April, we went through some ground that had been held by the North Koreans. Due to the prior use of napalm, we encountered no resistance. The dead were burned black. One Marine put an unspoke cigarette in a charred mouth with still white teeth of a corpse suspended in the agony of immolation.

This gag was good for morale. As the hardened platoon passed by, they cracked jokes. You want a light, buddy? Be careful with those cigarettes. They'll make you cough. That last puff must have been a ballbuster. Is that filtered or unfiltered? I laugh too.

Might as well. The war provided no shortage of grim reality checks to one's patriotic pretensions. During the retreat, my friend Jim Abels was accidentally shot in the back by one of his own men who failed to put his weapon on safe. The trigger snagged on something while they climbed into a tank, onto a tank for a ride. Jim fell off the tank and onto the road. I ran over to him just in time to hear him gasp a final word,

a cliche of war movies and novels that happens to be something dying men really say. Shit. Abels had loved his... home state of Texas, leading patrols. His first three checkpoints would be Tango Echo X-ray, followed by Alpha Sierra. I would learn that Ables had worked for O.C. Fisher, a useless congressman from Texas 21st District.

A dozen years later, while I was working in Kennedy's West Wing, I paid a visit to Fisher's office. No sooner could I mention Abel's, than this blowhard sounded off in a loud drawl about how he knew Abels died gloriously, keeping us safe from the communists. He assembled his staff and said that. He assembled his entire staff in his office

and prompted me to regale them about Abel's patriotic and heroic end. By then I had lied to Gold Star mothers and wives about the circumstances of their beloved's deaths. I had let them think that it had been great or purposeful or that their boys hadn't suffered or gone out screaming. But I told this group, that's not what happened.

Jim died because another Marine safety was off, and it was fucking tragic and awful and his last words were shit looking back I know I shouldn't have used those bitter words but I love Jim and I didn't know how to handle the way this slob was talking about him I know how to handle it I didn't do it I know why I did it certainly didn't do Jim any good anyway Eventually you get transferred out of Charlie Company's supply to become the mortar section leader of Charlie Company supporting the rifle platoons with 60 millimeter rounds lobbed

with limited accuracy and effectiveness from portable mortar tubes. In his history of the Korean War, the late David Halberstam describes the situation that spring 1951. The war had settled into an unbearable, unwinnable battle. It had reached the point where

there were no more victories, only death. It may have seemed unbearable, but both sides bore it. Right. War is all about bearing the unbearable. Oftentimes discomfort, whether from the cold or rain or lack of hot food, is what breaks a man when heaped upon with the many other stresses and fears of combat. One reason they stopped executing men who broke down on the line after World War I was that psychologists came to understand that given enough time in the shit, the psychiatric casualty rate will reach 100% in any unit.

Do you believe that? Yep. Yeah, I do too. I mean, there's a limitation to what people can take. I guess, you know why I would say I wouldn't believe it? It's because the only way you wouldn't believe is there's some people will die before they reach that point. Right. But that's the only thing that will keep it from reaching 100%.

They wanted or get a no longer part, no longer statistic of that thing. That's true. Our company commander, Spike. Schenning was a very careful man who always insisted on neatly packed knapsacks, clean, dry shaves, the burial of every rationed can or cigarette butt. He never shouted, but a look from Spike was enough. A grimace from him was like a form of corporal punishment. His only non-regulation gear was a carved walking stick that underscored his walk in the park

attitude toward danger. Spike was a Mustang Marine who had started as a boot and worked or rather fought his way to become a commissioned officer. A veteran of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, he was a badass if there ever was one. Normally Spike was not reckless, but he had one unfortunate habit. He would not bend under actual or potential fire.

There is a combat photographer's photo taken on that beautiful spring morning showing Spike standing upright, leaning casualty against the remains of a small tree that had been stunted by previous exchange of fire. He set an unfortunate, example for those around to do likewise, breaking two of the most basic rules of movement in a war zone. Don't stand on a ridge line. Don't silhouette yourself. My mortar section was dug in nearby.

I got up from my hold to join the group on the ridge. Spike had just ordered the platoon leader who'd been relieved to take over my mortar platoon section and gave me and give me command of the platoon, trying to make the change without hurting a good man. So I didn't cover this part, but he was basically firing this platoon commander. He's going to put you into that platoon. And he's trying to make the change without hurting a good man or flattering me. Spike said this switch was not a big deal, merely in exchange that would give each of us civilians a chance to learn yet another Marine job. As ordered, I left the group and headed towards second platoon's position in relative safety below the crest of the ridge. I had moved no more than 15 or 20 yards when a shell

exploded on the ridge line. An enemy spotter must have found it an irresistible target. Everyone on the ridge had been hit. Half of my predecessor's clothes had been blown off. He was riddled with shrapnel and destined to wake up in a hospital to begin a long stay. Spike was still on his feet, but he had no helmet and had a nasty wound with lots of bloods but no brain showing. Years later, Spike would get hit again. This time in Vietnam, I asked him what happened. The same fucking thing. I was standing on a hill out and he opened and they blew me up. He was something. Others were stunned, but less seriously wounded.

When a Marine in charge goes down, the maps are passed on to the next in line. Spike looked at his executive officer and mumbled, you know where the maps are. Then he went down, dazed, and drifting in and out. Our company got a new commander, and I got a rifle platoon. So that's how you, that's how you, that's your taking over your rifle platoon. And that's the scenario right there. Right. We're talking a little bit about...

We have a memory. I have my on my desk now. I have a hammering that someone threw at me a while ago, and I disarmed it. And also a railroad spike that was silver-plated. It looked to be silver-plated, full-side. And that's Spike shenning. They were called Spike. And some of the men who is serving at some reunion, someone came up with that.

I like that he called you guys civilians. He said, I didn't like it at all. He said, he said, you university boys, you civilians are ruining my profession. And he just felt somehow it could mold us to be of something, have some sort of value compared with those Marines he had really grown up with. Yeah, the old breed. He didn't get to be old, but he did. And he ended up his days going to disaster parts in the world on behalf of the Red Cross.

He's a good guy. Amazing. You're talking to... And we weren't as bad as he thought we were. I'm sure he still thought it. Really set in the high standard, you know? Very, that's the idea. Well, Steve experienced that sort of thing.

You were going back to the book, night was a tender time. The enemy moved on hills around us using bugles to communicate relay messages and drive the point home that we were awful and totally surrounded. The enemy were very good at moving silently, sometimes able to enter a fighting hole undetected. One night they snatched a guy from Pete's platoon right out of his two-man hole. His partner awoke to find him gone, never to be heard from or accounted for. I just insert that on that text just said the pistol I had I wore that my dad gave me. But after that incident,

I cut away the leather part between that and the trigger. So I figured if I got awakened at night, at least I could fire it through the holster. I didn't really want to be hauled off of somebody's gifts. Yeah. And here you talk about something else.

Other than dark, I had one great fear, landmines. More specifically, I feared one in particular wound they tend to inflict. There's an anti-personnel mind known as a bouncing beddy, which shoots a light charge up from the ground around a waist height before detonating. It's designed to wound and maim not to kill. From a tactical point of view, it's as brilliant as it is evil because a wounded man takes a whole fire team out of action while they work to stabilize and move him. Walking through my first mine field, I kept one hand deep in my pocket

it suddenly clutching my brains. Sometimes when a guy loses his hand in combat, it's because it was using it to cover something of even more value to him. You continue on. Sometimes the enemy flowed around us chasing bits and pieces of retreating U.S. and Korean Army units. When they did attack our positions directly, they suffered tremendous losses. In the morning after an assault, there were piles of bodies in front of our lines,

which were counted for the sake of those in the rear who equated body counts with winning. 152 one morning, 170 something than other. Our losses were few during such attacks, but so were our numbers. I had some photographs of that one morning of that nature, taken by some attached combat photographer,

whatever, and it's unbelievable numbers of them. I thought people would lie about numbers so that the colonel or the generals that think, well, what are heroic guys, they are. But when you see several hundred in front of you, really from the advent of the machine gun, and our ability to make these interlocking bands of fire, and you see the result of it, it really is true, it's a slaughter. It didn't bother me one tiny bit, not nearly as much as an individual dead North Korea or Chinese. There's such a mass that you can't quite grasp what that's like.

So what sticks in my head much more than that is an individual who I go as far away as you and kill. And that didn't make a fucking bit of difference to the two or three hundred, except it does. Your mind isn't capable of my mind anyway, you're not capable of grasping. that's sort of a thing you don't even see in a cattle slaughterhouse where individually what can you do but you know better than that but the same thing it's just and I hope that that's a human trait that at least somehow something reaches into and sticks with you what you've done

I believe it is you continue on here around May 15th we received replacements newcomers usually didn't last long and their losses were less painful if we didn't get to know them. Before going out on one patrol, I noticed that one of the greenest replacements was nervous, was so nervous that he was shaking. Against standard operating procedures and the obvious wishes of my platoon sergeant and squad leaders,

I ordered that the kid, who looked about 12, stay behind to guard the packs. The patrol went out and it was without incident. However, when we returned from our walk, the new kid was gone. McCloskey came over to tell me what happened. After we left, the kid had gone down to shoot the shit with a fellow replacement from Pete's platoon. The kid sat on a landmine.

We sent the dead lads back pack to the rear where sensitive articles such as condoms would be removed before whatever personal items it may have contained were sent home to his next of kin. He was so new that not one of us could recall his name. Pete and his platoon sergeant profusely thanked me. The boy had cleared a mind for us

without even nicking anyone else. Later that month, when a fresh batch of replacements hiked past our position on their way to the company command post, I turned my back to avoid even looking at them. But one in particular noticed my averted eyes. It's a fine thing to travel thousands of miles to find someone who won't even say hello. Douglas Dacey. Is that right?

Dacey. Dacely. Douglas Dacey, a buddy from PLC stepped out of their ranks. I recognized his Texas drawl. Dacey was a veteran of World War II, the son of a Lebanese immigrant who had sent all his boys to war by way of thanking America for its generosity. Dacey was also the heir to a small fortune, and it used his privilege to get into the fighting rather than avoid it. His place in the infantry was secured as a favor to his father by another other than Lyndon Baines Johnson.

During his first week in Korea, Dacey was lightly wounded by shrapnel. He didn't report the wound because he was afraid he'd get a purple heart, and if he got another after that, he might be sent home. While D.C. was still at Quantico, he looked after Mary in D.C. when he got to play. He told her I'm going to look after Chuck Dacey's men came to call him the undertaker because more than once he crawled forward under fire To drag a dead Marine back to our lines I would name my second son after Douglas he went on to serve our government secret ways became a economics professor and eventually retire To a ranch in Kyle Texas where he and his twin brother raised cows

They can't bring themselves to slaughter them an old age an old age home for cows you can't kill them once once you've named them dacy told me i was i say about him just he we know very well it's not uncommon i suppose that he finished his marine career by signing over to the CIA and there's just waves an economic professor didn't go the place where he went so when the things got worse he's a little guy and i was with uh he looks like a fucking lebanese immigrant whatever they look like. But anyway, we said, Jesus nowadays,

we know what you're doing. But now you get the ultimate way to serve your country. We're just, you know, you look like a fucking error. We'll dress you in a bed sheet,

drop you, and you get in a lung and really do a great job for your pals at the CIA. He said, what makes you think things like? He didn't have a droly had a shit kid in an accent,

not real. You don't make you think things like that about me. I'm a professor. Anyway. He was a beauty. He's in a nut house now and not that. He's the last days of what do you call it, Alzheimer's.

But he doesn't know about it. And he was a good guy. He's a good guy right now. So that same group of replacements, and this happens, a runner followed Dacey in the replacements up a hill with a telegram for me. Please pass to Lieutenant Charles U. Daly, 050418. son Michael weighing five pounds, 12 and 3 quarters ounces born Saturday, 19 May at 2.06 p.m. A black-haired Mick. Mary and Michael both fine. Love Mary.

I folded up the telegram and put it in my wallet and thought it'd be nice to have if I make it. Now that note belongs to Michael's first daughter, my first grandchild, Shadam. So that's how you get notified that you had your first first son. kid. I know you have three daughters, so I should be careful, but I didn't put it in there, but the McLaughers had the other platoon, first platoon. And I didn't know. You said, you know, one of my guys said, we had a son, because his daughter. It's his daughter. And she said, that's terrible. Yeah, I have three daughters and a son, yes. I knew that when you said that. I can take my life in my hands and I'm sure as hell like I can talk to your wife about it.

Yeah, we'll leave it at that. Right. And this is good. Every year on my birthday, so now we're going into another section of the book. Every year on my birthday, May 29th, Pete gives me a call and tells me, you should have died today. Sometimes he adds, you miserable son of a bitch. I dredge up some old comeback, and we reminisce about what happened that day in 1951.

My citation puts it like this. The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the silver star, to First Lieutenant Charles U. Daly, United States Marine Corps, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity as a, as leader of a rifle platoon of Company C. First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division in action against enemy aggressor forces in Korea on 29 May, 1951. Assigned the mission of driving a strong enemy force from well-maintained, from well-entrenched positions on a high knob north of Inge.

In-G, First Lieutenant Daly, boldly led as men up a narrow spine, completely devoid of cover and concealment, and carried out a successful assault against the hostile strong points in the face of fierce automatic weapons and small arms fire, killing many of the enemy and forcing the remainder to retreat in disorder. Quickly reorganizing his unit, he pursued fleeting hostile troops and overran an enemy regimental command post capturing many valuable documents and prisoners. by his marked courage, skilled leadership, and unswerving devotion to duty, First Lieutenant Daly served to inspire all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the United States

Naval Service. And that's your citation. But you add, those words omit the part of the day that I would go on reliving. The guilt over what I did and what I didn't do. And the feeling that the bravest thing I did that all of us did was just keep. moving uphill toward gunfire. My citation leaves out two war crimes I committed, crimes for which I was only punished with horrible memories. There's no mention of the men on both sides who died or sustained awful wounds for my red and white and blue

ribbon with a star dangling from it. And the words leave out just how hard it is to to get young men to fire accurately or at all so that they kill other young men. May 29th was a beautiful morning after a chilly tense night. I turned 24, probably my last birthday. Possibly. It was, my platoons turned to lead the company

into what we had been told was an area held by a formidable North Korean regiment. Our objective was to take an exceptionally rugged hill. There was a cliff just west of the top and a steep exposed, slope to the east. Our only way up was a narrow spine with all cover and concealment long

since blasted away. General Thomas concluded that enemy resistance in these hills, such as this one, around what was called the Kansas line, would be broken not by air power, but by the Marine rifleman. To which you respond in the book, Roger

that. Oh, that's so corny. Can you take that out of that? I said, no shit or something like that. I thought it was one of the Roger that's interesting girls I thought it was one of the Roger that's with that's that's that's a sarcastic Roger like Roger that yeah that's all right maybe that's what I don't be serious about it reads it like a boy scout which I got thrown out of the fucking Boy Scouts that's another subject at first light I can remember thinking that we were facing a great defensive position several the platoon must have had the same thought and knew it was going to be a long day because I had company when I stepped off the trail to take a piss after we dropped packs and we're getting ready to move up and out. The air was tense. Even the chatiest Marines were silent.

The smokers silently smoked up a storm. I wondered if the North Koreans could smell Lucky Strikes on our men as we could sometimes smell garlic on theirs. With two words, you don't hear very often in modern combat, I gave the order, fix bayonets. I mean, that's a serious statement if you're making going up. with machine guns and you're still fixing bayonets. We weren't sure anywhere is up there. But if just in case, and I don't, I did it aside, anyway, I don't, I did it for some of the purpose really is. Um, it goes on, it explains the wild. That didn't help anyone's peace

in mind. But I liked bayonets for the scare factor. I knew that frightening the enemy was a good way to keep young men from getting killed on both sides. Fear is tactically. useful. Warner, the new company commander, who is even greener than me, offered a call in an air strike if we got into trouble. I declined pointing out that strikes had recently been put under Army command and we were running late and with the habit of, and we're running late and with the habit of hastily dumping their loads on friends and foe alike. Any delay in air or artillery would leave us exposed under fire. The only course of action was to get in and among the enemy so their support mortars, guns, and heavy weapons would have to be lifted.

I just want to insert into that text that people maybe read was that delay was caused by a general armand, I think, who commanded the UN forces at that time. And he was an army general, and he just thought that the marine system conducted by the Marines the Navy of close air support and directly on an ad hoc basis the ace on the ground could see what's going on and whether or we could endure what's going on and we had to be able to order right away no way he used it in order that all of all requests for close air goes through the army headquarters it's a built-in certain delay yeah that's centralized command and doesn't work well I think that's precisely the right to say because it was an immensely effective life-saving,

to our selfish point of view, tactic that he destroyed. He didn't delay it. He destroyed it. It's impossible to do this. Anyway. Well, going back, so now you go back and you say, my duty is to keep the men moving and firing. I talked with my platoon sergeant whose advice was essential because we're a major firefight take place. It would be my first. We agreed that if we came under fire, the lead squad would

charge directly up the spine. Second squad would fire everything they had at the ridge to the west of the hill, and third squad would continue the charge led by the first squad. The machine gun section attached to the platoon would follow and set up on the hilltop as soon as it was secure to fend off any counterattack. We just received reports that elsewhere a North Korean had played dead just like DOS at Chosen. Dosy at Chosen. And it shot a couple Marines in the back after they walked past. I wanted to make sure that if it didn't happen to, that didn't happen to any of us.

So I passed the word. If they don't stink, stick them. At 0,800, we began slowly climbing up the ridge, single file, on a narrow trail. There were small pines and some saplings blown leafless by the earlier shelling. To delay our advance, limbs were piled on the path, forming poor man's barrens. wire. No birds sang. I was walking close behind the first squad when we came to a small knoll at the base of a much larger hill that loomed above. Billy Bell, an experienced rifleman from Arizona, got ready to toss a grenade over the crest of the knoll just in case there was an ambush

waiting there. Not wanting to alert the enemy to our advance and afraid of seeming trigger-happy in a situation where there might be no enemy, I knocked my wedding ring against the stock of my carbine to get Bell's attention and signaled no hand grenade. He put the grenade back in his pocket and resumed leading our first team over the crest of the hill in a crouched walk. In an instant, Bell and two other Marines went down under a shower of enemy grenades and bullets. The rest of the squad rolled off the rise and those of us who weren't shocked into inaction began shooting. Fire, fire, fire, shoot, God damn it, fire, bell is down. Grenade, shit, I'm hit.

Corman, help. Keep going. Fire, fire, fire, fire. Kill those cock suckers. They're bailing out. I'm out of ammo. Use your fucking bayonet. Keep going.

Stick them. Fire. God damn it. Fire. I figured the louder we were, the more we'd give the impression that we were a huge force ready to kill anyone standing between us in the Yalu River. The sound of two dozen or so riflemen firing all at once is impressive. Dacey would recall it sounded like World War II up there.

I let loose all the rounds in my car being aiming uphill at no particular time. target. I reversed my magazine and loaded a second that I taped to it for faster reloading and resumed firing, adding to the din. An unlucky North Korean popped up in front of me from a hole. His throat and jaw blew apart with the squeeze of my trigger finger. A shout from my radio man. The captain wants you. He's telling us to drop back and wait for artillery. Tell him to go fuck himself. There were so many grenades being tossed down the hill at us that I thought we were under mortar fire. We reached the top of the main hill. there were many enemy dead, wounded, and surrendering.

I was wild with frustration because my caution on the knoll had been costly. With a few riflemen, I kept running over to the far side of the hill in pursuit of some fleeing enemy. We were astounded to find our charge had put us among a bunch of North Korean officers with maps still in their hands as though they'd been in a routine review of their position. Unbelievable. Another unarmed enemy officer crawled out of a command bunker and started berating his comrades, apparently upset,

that they were surrendering to this handful of exhausted Marines. One version of what happened next appears in a chapter about me in Pete's book, The Taking of Hill 610, Daly personally pushed the captured and surly Korean commander off a thousand-foot cliff. That's a crime. That's the legend. And a prime example of how the truth gets warped by memory and the intense emotions of combat.

and its aftermath. Here's the facts. I knew we had to shut this guy up before he got his men to realize that we were overextended, low-on ammo, outnumbered, and vulnerable. My carbine was empty, so I couldn't have shot him

even if I wanted to, which I did not. I figured he'd be less noisy with his clothes off, so I threatened the officer with my band-nat and motioned for him and his men to strip, which some of them proceeded to do.

I have a picture of the three of them, hands up, raised, two clad and under shirts, and one and longer underwear, held together by a string that came undone revealing his limp dick. You can see their ribs. They look dazed and frightened. All prisoners except the loud officer were tense but silent. Without warning, their leader turned, dashed over the cliff's edge,

and may have been shot in the back. That's the problem. By an alert rifleman who still had some rounds in his weapon. In any case, the major could run, but he could not fly. That's a smart ass remark. that I regret it I don't know he didn't have to get killed anyway he didn't have what

he didn't have to get killed it sounds like it sounds it sounds like he killed himself no it didn't anyway that's just that's mostly the truth but

anyway was he running was he making a move yeah making a move and and I would

be so separately We were outnumbered. We had these goddamn genuces on their side there. And it's just, I don't think my cabin was empty. Anyway, it's just a mess. So Pete tried to protect me. Got it. Yeah.

I don't know what I got. So. It just you guys need the end of me. At this point, all other firing had stopped, except for picking up the pieces, fight was over. The pieces included Billy Bell's right arm blown off

at the shoulder. He was leaning against a tree holding a compress, calm and pale. I hope you're left-handed, I said, not knowing what else to express not knowing how else to express my concern without upsetting him. He responded, I am

now, Lieutenant. Elsewhere on the hill, we lost Lieutenant Buckman, who on numerous occasions on board the troop ship had said, I'm going dying Korea. There were screams coming from a badly wounded North Korean laying close by. His dying was getting louder and louder.

He's dying if it was that. Yeah, it seems so. And I could see how much that sound was bugging the platoon. A young corporal bought, brought it up, brought up the decent thing to do. Lieutenant Daly, you want me to do him a favor?

Do it. A shot, then silence. I knew then and I know now that shooting a prisoner or ordering such a killing is a war crime regardless of the victim's condition. My only punishment has been the unending knowledge of my guilt. I know that I shouldn't have ordered it. I know that if it had to be done, I should have done it with my own revolver and protected my fellow Marine from that memory. I hear that shot right now.

Continue on. After the murder came the next grim task. Searching the pockets. of enemy corpses for papers to send back to intelligence officers. One enemy had half of his head missing. Daisy came up to see how I was doing. I pointed to the corpse and said, that guy's lucky his head wasn't blown off completely.

Yeah, that might have killed him. In one pocket, I found a picture of what must have been a man's wife and the newborn baby he'd never see. Hey, Lieutenant, don't feel so bad, said David Ivins. A talented machine gunner who could see. I was upset. At least he got to see a picture of his baby. I wondered if I would be so lucky. I pocketed the three-striped shoulder board of an officer I killed in the first

moments of the battle. Dacey kept an unexploded hand grenade that must have been thrown by a North Korean too frantic to pull the pin. Douglas disarmed it and when we met again back in the States he gave it to me. I've used it as a paperweight ever since. The chiggy bearers arrived with ammunition, water, rations, and our packs from the bottom of the hill. We sat and hydrated among the dead and wounded.

Those who could eat ate cold-tinned rations for lunch. Everyone's favorite was the canned fruit cocktail. Some men would eat the fruit cocktail first in case they got wounded or otherwise they or otherwise had their meal interrupted.

They would have at least enjoyed the best course. I wrote a page or two about the day to my dad. I wanted him to know I had fought well. before I was going. So it's the same fucking thing that didn't rule one.

This is a fun game we'd play. I mean, these are obviously you're going through these situations over there and you're 23 years old at this time, maybe 24? That day.

Oh, you turned 24 that day? I was probably talking about you. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. You know, I don't know if I've covered it well enough but it seemed like with a lot of the things that you wrote, you didn't really think you were going to make it through this situation.

Not really. I didn't, on the other hand, in the midst of the situation, that you can't stand around on this halfway up a hill to phone your ass. And so I already committed myself to that. It is not easy to have, it sounds true, to have the, these guys fire. They're firing, they're firing in the firing range and just qualifying to be a rifleman

or something like that. They're flattened to kill and get through all this stuff. And the only way to do it is keep going and keep firing. And as Daisy said, it's not like World War II, but I think that there wouldn't much choice in that. And just later on, when

I see these guys, them executives come out of their holes, it got me cranked up as far as not stopping. And I don't know what I thought. Yeah, I mean, even beyond this one day, when you read the whole section, again, obviously I'm jumping through huge pieces of this, but I don't think I...

I mean, it doesn't seem like you thought you were going to live through this war. You know, it seemed like... I mean, that situation, you were doing what you had to do, I mean, you know, you're not thinking, you're not thinking like long-term thoughts when you're charging up a hill towards machine gun. You're just doing what you've got to do to survive. But the other parts of it where you're, many times you say, look, I didn't think I was going to see my kid. I didn't think I was.

And even when you say you wrote a page or two to your dad about what you did that day, because you wanted your dad to know, hey, you know, I did my duty. You know, awful. That's what in World War I, one of the Charlie said, you know, I played the game yesterday. I made the fucking game, but it was a different expression. But somehow he wanted, I mean, I love my dad,

and I wanted to be proud of me, and I had no illusions about what sort of shape the body might come back in it, and that was just what, I don't know, it's crazy, that I'm, out of respect for him, I'm killing some people. It's what ridiculous.

Going back to the book, there was another hill a couple days later that we occupied with no resistance. David, David Ivins. You say Ivan's, Ivan's, IV, E-N-S. David Ivins was setting up his machine gun a couple feet above where I was sitting safely below the crest of the hill. We laughed about how easy the hill had been taken compared to May 29th. Easy except. He was cleaning, actually, in the book that he was just cleaning parts of his machine. It was just messing around. There was nothing going on. Easy except a faulty radio left me out of touch. McCloskey had sensed my problem

and dispatched his own radio men, Rocky Brooder, up the hill to establish comms. Rocky paused to catch his breath just short of my position, winded and sweaty from his radio-laden climb. Get up here, I said. I've got to check in with the CP right now. Rocky grunted, moved the last few feet, and started to hand me the mic connected by a short wire to the radio on his back.

Somewhere from behind, a burst of machine gun fire smacked into us. First one blast, then the distant gunner adjusted his aim, one click over, then one up, before firing a second burst. The first volley to my right hit Rocky in the back. The next, high into my left, made Ivan's head explode. Ivan's head explode. Rocky mumbled Corman in his last instant of life. I could hear the call, gunner down, second gunner up, keeping the whole war moving smoothly.

I believe then and I believe now that that lethal fire had come from our own distant guns. I should have known that might happen. I'd been so anxious to reestablish radio contact because of how quickly we had taken the hill. I didn't want our gunners to mistake our movement near the crest of the hill for enemy defenders, not realizing there weren't any defenders. Brain matter and blood were splattered all over me. In the coming days, every time I encountered water in streams. and rain and canteens,

I would try and wash the stains off. I drank the water in a canteen, so that's inaccurate. This is something that when I wrote my first book called Extreme Ownership, it opens up the first chapter is about a fratricide, a blue-on-blue situation that I was in charge of. And there was a friendly Iraqi soldier

that was killed. One of my guys was wounded. There were several other friendly Iraqi soldiers that were wounded. It was a total nightmare. And when that happened to me, I mean, that was very early on in my second deployment to Iraq. And the fighting in Ramadi was such that there was mayhem and confusion. And when you get in these situations, these fracturesides, these what we called blue-on-blue, they can happen. And I made it my mission to try and teach the next generation of SEALs how to prevent these things from happening.

But when it happened, it was so, you know, we hadn't been in combat for a really long time in America. And so we didn't have guys that understood the battlefield and understood how easily these things could happen. Now, luckily for me, or I don't know if it's, yeah, luckily for me, there was, there was a guy that was in the SEAL teams who had been to a, platoon commander in Way City in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. And he came and visited us right after this had happened. And he said, hey, I think he told me, you know, a third of the casualties in Way City were friendly fire. He's like, this is what happens. He goes, it's horrible. Here's, you know, and I looked at it like, okay, here's the things that we're going to do to prevent it from happening. But it's one of those things that it's very hard, I think, for civilians to understand

how easily these things can unfold. And this is a classic example. You got supporting fire elements that are looking at this hill that you guys are taking and you guys take it so quickly that by the time you get to the top, these guys that are whatever, 800 meters away or 1,000 meters away,

they see movement on this hilltop. They think they're helping you, but they're actually engaging your met. That's right. That's right. I think that they're, in one of those, recent battles in the New East that there was an NFL football player

who was killed and right away they gave him a silver star and everything the garden was wonderful and it would have been okay to leave that alone but the fact came out that he was shot by his own men totally by error yeah it was a and the fact remains that he wanted to go and do something to his country put the football down put the other helmet on and

his own kill them. But you start telling the people at home who knew him and others who knew of him or others who didn't know it at all that it was heroic really better off and give him the fucking Silver Star and let it go. Yeah, I mean, it's Pat Tillman. And again, this is the horrible situation.

You know, it's a horrible situation. As dark, you're maneuvering through enemy territory, you're expecting to get contacted. And, you know, if you're not paying attention, this is why there's such a heavy burden on leadership. Because it's a leadership that has to try and track these things and make sense of what's going on in the battlefield. And if a millisecond goes by and you lose that control, which happens, you've got to set yourselves up so you prevent this sort of situations. And it's a nightmare. and this is one of the, in my opinion, this is one of the worst things in war

is friendly fire because there's absolutely, you know, trying to explain this is so hard because people don't understand how confusing and complex these things are as they unfold. As they unfold or fall apart or whatever,

it's not a systematic thing. It's not a new teen to the Quantical. When, going back to the book, When Pete came up the hill and saw me splattered with blood and brains, he tried to call me beautiful day, isn't it? Right. On the day I got my solar star elsewhere on the slope,

Pete and his platoon approached an enemy position and were pelted with grenades. PFC Whit L. Moorhead kicked the grenades off the ridge one by one. Attempting to dispose of one grenade in this way, he slipped. Rather than take cover, Morland shouted for his buddies to get down and then rolled on the grenade, absorbing the blast with his body,

and probably saving the lives of Pete and others nearby. For his courage and selflessness, Mullen was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. But the recognition of Mourland's action goes beyond the authority of the Congress and the President. In John 1513, it has written that greater love hath no man than this, that a man laid down his life for his friends.

I recall those words because they are etched on a plaque beside a stained glass window in the Church of Ireland and abandoned honoring those from the town who were lost in the Great War. My uncle Charlie, for whom I'm named, appears on the list of the dead, and my mother's name is honored among the list of survivors for her services as a nurse's aide. If Pete and I have a hard time talking about the facts of war to anyone but each other, it's not just because we share indelibly graphic memories like the image of what a grenade does to a human body, but because we have experienced that kind of love. I don't know if the gospel's author had ever been in combat zone, but I've heard these words put a similar way by people who have. You continue on with sort of exposing some of the dark humor that comes out and what it does to people. Going back to the book here, war changes the meaning of normal in ways big and small.

There's a joke about a Marine who comes home to his parents and says, pass the fucking cake butter at the dinner table. One June day, having rotated off the line, we watched an American tank approach a shallow river. You could sense the driver trying to decide whether to take the muddy bypass or stay on the road. Either could have been mined. We speculated and made mock bets. The tank took a detour.

Caboom. A man flew out of the open hatch, now legless. One of our riflemen yelled with excitement, I win. My career as a platoon leader ended early on the morning of June 12th, 1951. I spent the night of June 11th, my second winning anniversary with my platoon manning, a lonely outpost ahead of our lines just north of the town of InJ. Why am I saying that wrong? Ingy.

Inge. I don't know. That's the way we pronounce it. God knows how they pronounce it. Sergeant Murphy and I, laid up in an abandoned enemy bunker. An attack on our position could have doomed us, but it didn't come. I felt good.

Even though I still had little hope of living to hold my son, a picture of him Mary had sent, had arrived in a letter enclosed with a melted heath bar. That made me feel lucky. What happened next was lucky, depending on how you look at it. It's how I got home to Michael and Mary. Having seen his face suddenly gave me more to lose. Dying was going to be hard.

At first light, I told Sergeant Murphy, I was going out of the bunker to check our perimeter. He advised me not to go, saying he'd already done it a couple hours before. But I was restless and anxious about the strain of a 50% watch with no sergeants. All but Murphy had been killed, wounded, or rotated. I was going to tell the guys that they could get some rest. I was getting up from my hands and knees after crawling out of the bunker when I sensed that I had company.

I rose up just as a bullet ripped across to the front of my jacket and whacked into my left arm. Corman, lieutenants down. I grabbed my arm above the bottom. the wound and waited for the corpsman. There was no sign of a real attack. An unseen sniper had spotted an easy target. The corpsman cut away my sleeve, revealing bones sticking through a red and pink mess. The arm was dangling below the elbow. I told him just to cut it off. Not me, he said, tightening down the tourniquet. I got on the radio to tell company H.Q what had happened. It was then that I learned the whole morning it was a mess. Third platoon's leader had been hit with

shrapnel from a mortar round. The battalion's new executive officer, Jack Jones, the real leader who kept the colonel somewhat in check, had a chunk of his right hand blown off by a booby trap hidden in a poor man's barbed wire. Pete had been hit in the leg while helping out one of his wounded. So Charlie Company had no platoon leaders and the battalion had an unfettered idiot in command. Meaning your battalion commander. By now I was getting sore because the numbing impact of the bullet and the subsequent surge of adrenaline had worn off. Because of our isolated position I decided to make my own way back to our lines rather than rob our platoon of riflemen carrying me off. I couldn't do that if I was stoned on morphine,

so there would be no pain relief until I made it to our lines. I started to hike from the outpost to the battalion. That sounds very pious, but I had no idea that mortuary didn't do any good or not. I just knew I'd get my ass out of there and not take four Marines or even one walker with me. I started to hike down from the outpost to the battalion H.Q. Where I would be flown to a field hospital. In Korea, hospitals were just coming into use. Helicopters were just coming into use and were too tiny and fragile to risk ahead of the lines

to pick up those who got hit on outpost or patrol. In every war since, improvements in helicopter capabilities translate to save lives and limbs. Now they can land much closer to the action and deliver wounded men to advance medical care within minutes. on my way to the little bird had to walk through a shallow creek I wasn't feeling great but I felt worse

when two rounds from a distant rifleman struck the water near me. I turned toward the ridge where the shots had come from and gave the shooter the finger with my good arm. I don't know what, if anything, that means in Korea but the shooting stopped and he let me go. At the shelter of the command post I saw a stretcher with

McCloskey on it. He was all set to go farther to the rear and have his fairly minor wound treated, get laid, and returned to duty. He took one look at me, rolled off the stretcher, stood up, said it quick goodbye, and limped back up the valley to take over one of the remaining platoons.

His own wound could wait. I sat down and got my first morphine shot of the day. A tiny helicopter whirled in the kind with a bubble canopy you may know from the opening credits of the TV show MASH, the Bell 47. As I was being helped into the passenger

seat, I noticed a bumper sticker on the cockpit's windshield. Join the Marines. It's funny guy. Got to keep that sense of humor, I guess. He's got the guys strapped in those baskets and some died in some way, but a guy scoot along in 1,500 feet and you can't hear him yell because the thing is so noisy, but he's to land and the guys of this side had some job.

We took off in a cloud of dust which must have been tough on the men in the baskets. We were about 10 or 15 minutes, we sat down near one of the ones. we sat down near one end of a big brown tent. This was a battalion aid station, a field hospital staffed with Navy doctors. The Corps' answer to an Army mash. Unlike MASH, the TV show, which fictionalized this aspects of the Korean War, there was no laughter in this tent, no cute nurses, no fun, just young men suffering in silence,

each waiting for his stretcher to be lifted up and placed on a pair of wooden saw horses of the sort used by carpenters to bring wood up to a convenient height for cutting. Each bloody stretcher became its own operating table. Between each set of stretchers stood dungary clad surgeons working under gas lamps dangling from the ceiling, besides bottles of blood, plasma, and IV fluid. General anesthesia was rarely used. Speed was vital. The mission was to stabilize patients who had the best chances for more advanced treatment elsewhere

and comfort the ones who weren't going to make it. Aid station doctors referred to their duty as meatball surgery. outside the tent I waited to be seen I heard one Marine next to me die he didn't groan just gasped and stopped breathing the worst sound I heard that day was the clang of shrapnel being dropped onto the stainless steel table beside the unlucky lieutenant stretcher who had been shot in the family jewels the shrapnel had been removed from his groin keep that for me he said I'll give it to my wife and we'll push it around in a

baby carriage I've heard his eel man. He was bow and all. He was very proud of the way he looked. He had a strap there and a holster here. He'd gone to a lot of movies, but he was good. He handled this as well as you can. But you know, I have a photograph from the military, I don't know, Charlie has it, I think, of the military inside of that tent. And there were half a dozen of these, the stretcher, and then between every two, there was the doctors out of the military, I think, of the military, on the metal tables. And it's an amazing picture because it's just,

you don't really comprehend just how it went through and the conditions in which they operated. Meatball surgery, probably not a bad expression, but they were really, it was in and out and it seemed to me just, it was mechanical, fast it was, so I was quite nervous at that time, by that time, I didn't want to go home, my wife, the Canadian pacifist and so on.

And I tried not to go home the left side. I'm pretty greedy. I was happy to be alive. So I really kept saying, I'd leave it and so on. Anyway, so it went on. Yeah, the dead marine, this is you going back to the book, the dead marine was still uncovered when two corpsmen carried my stretcher inside and placed it on the saw horses.

At some of the stations a corpsman or nurse would work on a foot or leg, while a surgeon tended to a chest or head wound on the same man. I didn't notice much in the way of surgical gloves or hand washing between jobs. I noticed no stench perhaps because I stunk. How are you doing a surgeon asked. He loosened the field dressing resulting in what seemed like a gush of blood. Doc, I can't go home lopsided. You're not going to cut it off, are you?

By now I was hoping to keep the arm. Not right now. We can wait for it to fall off. Then he surprised me by gently touching my face with his bloody finger. That touch made my eyes water. So I turned to my head. Tears returned to my eyes remembering that touch in that moment of tenderness. It was amazing.

It was a meatball surgery and so on. He was a human being doing those things. Pretty good. Fright good. I know that pretty. I woke aboard the USS Haven in the late afternoon of what had been a very long day. That same night on the ship after being washed, I was wheeled into a cabin where I rested in a bed

between white sheets for the first time since February. I had been bleeding continuously all day, so I felt weak. Like a figment of my morphine injections, Jack Jones appeared in my cabin. The doctors had just finished clipping away, shredded bits of his hand, the final wound of five he had received since he had enlisted at age 17 in the last war.

The next morning, June 13th, we were flown to a former Japanese military hospital in Yokosuka for further patching up. We took a short walk outside. the gate where we found a little bar. Jack was a Mormon and didn't drink, but he watched me put back a few. The barman recognized us as Marines. He spoke English and told us he was on Iwo Jima. You were on Iwo, Jack said. How come I didn't kill you, matter of fact, without a hint of resentment or prejudice? What's that? He's remarkable. He must have been on leave or something.

Yeah, no doubt to survive Ewo. Meanwhile, at home, my father had been listed as my next of kin because I I didn't want to shock Mary in the event I was killed in action or wounded. That turned out to be a terrible idea. My mother went to Mary's apartment waving the telegram. Good news. Chuck's been wounded. Mum must have been thinking of her dead brother and brother-in-law, along with so many others in the meat grinder of Flanders in the Psalm.

In the Great War, survivable wounds were good news to families back in Blighty in Ireland. But my pacifist wife didn't see it that way. was horrified, angry, and terribly worried. Yeah, that's actually the name of this chapter is good news. Chuck's been wounded. And you've got to have a certain mentality to see your, you know, your, you know, your, but Mary never understood that. And it just, I really did it.

From Japan, where I received slightly smaller cast, we were flown from Guam and then to Hawaii. So you guys get to Hawaii and they had done a, they had done a, uh, they would take, take your pants from you to make sure you don't go out on Liberty. Yeah, well, we're on the hospital, I mean on the hospital plane, they have their tears and bunks and they put, they take your pants and then they put a blanket on and double folded over you because they had experience before with Marines getting as far as Hawaii.

Well, you guys, you guys were made, managed to get a whole whole. some pants well we bullshitted the nurse on board because Jack had been through this before and he said he said you know that we're not going to do any harm this look at us but he said he just get us and he even knew the gate that he could get through is he been through there another wall so that's how you get downtown so you guys get get you do your thing now you get back on base and now you get this, you know, hot-headed officer, and we're going back to the book,

a red-faced army officer gave us a lecture, and this is him basically yelling at you for leaving base. This base is no different from the front line. You are AWOL, and there will be consequences. I will personally see to it that you are kept in this hospital until you rot. That's exactly what you're saying. The next day a Marine General visited to pin purple hearts

to our hospital gowns and deliver a few words about valor. All of us admire your courage. You must be looking forward to getting home. Oh, no, sir, one of the group spoke up. We've been promised to stay here until we rot. What? You tell that to a Marine, Jeff. Whoa.

He made sure we were out on the next flight. From Hawaii, we were flown to Hospital and Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for several days. From there to another hospital in San Antonio where we underwent more repairs and celebrated the Fourth of July in hospital beds. Distant fireworks were terrifying for a blinded Marine who awoke back in Korea, but without his sight, his rifle or his buddies. Finally, we thumped down at Andrews Air Force Base a few miles from the Naval Hospital and my parents home in Bethesda, loaded in stretchers, stacked three high. My wound was still seeping and my latest cast stank. The plane's big side hatch opened into the bright sunshine. As I was helped through my turn at the top of the steep stairs, I could see a little crowd standing on the tarmac.

There was Mary cradling a tidal bundle, a tiny bundle, Michael. cladded my bright shirt like I had been on vacation. I eased my way down the stairs and gave her the best hug I could manage with my cast pressed against Michael in her arms. Be careful, warned the Navy nurse who walked me down the stairs. There's plenty more where he came from, I replied. We laughed. We cried. I had orders to report for surgery, maybe even amputation.

None of that mattered. I only needed one arm to hold my baby boy. My joy in that moment was tempered by the sight of my brothers. being unloaded on stretchers without families to hold. One of my fellow Marines from the troop ship, of my fellow Marines from the troop ship, Lieutenant Ables, Baumgart, Buckman, Cowart, Finch, Goudlock, McVeigh, Monday, Musser, Ohansian, to get that one right?

Monday, M-U-N-D-A-W-W-N-D-A-W-W-W-M-D-A-W. why? And then Muser, O'Hansian, and Smith were killed in action. Many left wives and babies. Each widow got $10,000 life insurance payoff plus a small pension. Not much,

but a lot more than was received by the Chinese and North Korean widows we created. Jack Jones and Billy Bell became teachers, as did several others. After spending years in hospitals, battling a near-fatal wound, another of our group

Dick McGue became a priest After his wounding in Vietnam, Spike Shenning joined the Red Cross supervising disaster relief efforts in sort of difficult places where he always felt at home. Besides the grenade on my desk, I have a silver spiked rail, a silver plate of railroad spike to remember him by.

The other amateur lieutenants under his tutelage, I'll have one. 29,272 of fighting in Korea, all part of the American total of 103,284 casualties. Big percentage. These numbers are minor when compared with the death, wounding and disappearance of 3 million North and South Korean civilians, 1.5 million North Koreans and Chinese soldiers and 845,000 South Korean military casualties.

You say this. People talk about the forgotten war as if future generations of students and textbook authors didn't do their job. But the fact is no one was thinking about Korea even when we were in it. 1951 is the year I Love Lucy premiered and the catcher in the rye was published. There was a new Chevy on the market. You go into this story here. Mary and I went to state at the Tidewater Inn in beautiful Southern Virginia in the bar at the end. Some locals noticed my sling and cast and assumed I was the local gentleman who they'd heard about who had a boating accident recently. I had to asked them to repeat the question because I couldn't imagine pleasure boating mishaps any more

than they could picture the circumstances of my wound. Before dinner, the house played Dixie and everybody stood for it. I sat and breathed hard. Despite Mary holding my trembling right hand, I felt completely alone. I thought about coward and Abel's, Rocky, and Ivan's, and longed to be with them, if not joining their ranks in death, at least to be back in the dirt, cracking sick jokes and feeling like my work mattered. I didn't want to die. Too often that feeling would return for a very long time. It's only recently looking back with perspective

that comes from a lifetime on dwelling on the personal cost of the game, as my uncle called it, that I would no longer wish to be back there with them, but wish they could be here with me instead. I'm beginning to grow up. You start doing your therapy on your arm. the Navy doctors were able to fuse two bones in my forearms, the radius in the ulna, into one, resulting in an arm that can no longer pronate. Progress was slow.

Finger exercises were frustrating. For a while I was motivated by relief knowing that I could keep the limb. The bullet damage, the ulnar nerve, leaving me with a permanent funny bone feeling and an arm that's sensitive and somewhat painful from the elbow down since then I've worn my watch on my right wrist, protecting the arm and holding it close in front of me like it's in a sling, has twisted my spine over time. but today I use a walking stick when I feel like I'm listing too far over. One brilliant thing the Navy hospitals do is put you in contact in close quarters with your fellow wounded, many of whom are maimed in ways that make you thankful for your own condition. The one thing the doctors blew in fixing my arm was once it was going to stay attached. I blew it, I guess.

They explained to me the situation, you just described it there, but they said that you'll always have to the arm will prominently be as you're shaking hands like this or turn it over so the palm is up now I could have gotten rich if I just let up like a goddamn thing that way and right now I talk to you

you can give me what a chicken shit from Hawaii wouldn't give me a nickel and I worked my ass off the rest of my life and I had it right there in my hand So they gave you a choice you could either be either one or the other you can't do it because you've got to merge the bones they have one bone and they can't go flopping around.

Huh, that's... There's a blown chance. Yeah. Now I'm $892 and I'm paying tuition to a kid going to law school. You've been busy trying to make money to give it out. Well, I would add plenty. I would like to stand the gate of a Penn State law like this and say, for my son, somebody puts a quarter,

I'm waiting for real money. I blew it. On May 31st, 1952, Lieutenant Charzou Daily was discharged from the United States, was retired from the United States Marine Corps, as confirmed by these excerpts from the Commandant's letter. Your disability is permanently related at 40%. I regret that the physical conditions necessitate your separation

from the active list and wish you many years of happiness and prosperity. And then Pacific molasses. Yeah, we're sure. Made good on their promise. They kept their job for you? That's where I wrote about Nelson, I think, and Nelson Parker. Yeah, and that was one of the things that made you, well, they took care of him too in the end. Well, they did because they, first of all, they're a very decent company.

And so I kept on end, but he told me that when he first got the job, he didn't tell him. He lied about his age. He was young. He wasn't young. But no one's going to hire a fat old black man, so he, he didn't hire a fat old black man. So he said he was much younger than the fact he was. So then when the end of the line came, that came against Social Security no way

because he's 10 years or 15 years younger than he said he was. And this is after I left. But the company went to bat for him and got to slayed around. So it's an element of corporate decency I haven't forgotten. But he had to do that to get a goddamn job, you know. and he still didn't get the rights to use the toilet, but he got the job. He surprised. So you get stationed in California for a while, then you go to Mexico.

You get stationed down in Veracruz, Mexico. Hill set up, I met down there. What's that? Hill set up and returned to the fold. Oh, yeah, there you go. And then at the end of the day, Pacific molasses was a corporate job, and it started getting boring. Mary tried to join me, but she didn't like life. south of the border, the water made her sick.

In Mexico City, she had a miscarriage. By the time you were approaching 30, I had gotten, by the time I was approaching 30, I had more or less gotten over the astonishment that I hadn't died at 23 in Korea. I sensed it was time to do something with this second chance at life and selling syrup wasn't it.

When I tendered my resignation, my bosses in England were certain I was going over to the competition. I told Ferguson, I would never do that after all. He and the company had done for me for Nelson Parker and for others, not content to take me at my word the higher ups at Pacific Instructed Jim

to pay me $1,000 a month for a year to simply stay out of Mexico. I told Ferguson that that was generous but unnecessary. He insisted saying if I didn't take the money, it would confirm London's fear that I would defect to a competitor. That they're perfect.

So there you go. Now I had two boys, one good arm, a marine disability pension, and my stay out of money, stay out of Mexico money. I had a variety of experience for my age and no financial worries. So like many young men in such a position, I decided to become a writer. You end up going to Columbia School.

You're a writer. Don't be laughing at me. Yeah, I guess so. That's what they say. And then, so you go to Columbia School of Journalism, and then you start this American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship. Is that how you ended up getting kind of involved in politics? Well, yeah, what happened was I go there to, I exchange some of that in that book, but I decided to go to journalism school, right? Big deal, so it was a big deal, but so I had drove to Columbia Journalism School, which is on 116th in Broadway in New York. And so I parked and went in, and I didn't know anything about the place other than the top school. And for nine months, you get a master's degree as a ticket for me to get a newspaper job or something so I wanted to get it so then I go to Ian and I ask him but I'd like to go what to tell me about how to do it he said where you said classes start in September but but you show you this is August or late August early September but he said you could apply for the for the year

not not possible getting this one you'd do it in the next year So let me explain something to you. I'm double parked on Broadway, in the car, my wife and two babies. I got to get into the fucking school. So the guy actually, he was laughing at York, but he let me in. So it was a hell of a deal. So then I had enough of a ticket there. So he said yes?

Yes. You got a real con artist, you know. I didn't have to do that even. So let me in. And Lauren Short, I got out of that after nine months. and had done built some I worked at nights in newspaper in white friends New York and they had this fellowship for American Political Science Association fellowship and a guy Eddie Williams I knew was in previous class a black guy but he said I can get

I think I can get you in that it's a good deal you paid out I know the fellowship is but you they pay you to spend half of the next congressional term with a member of the house and half of it on a member of the Senate. And he told me it helps him and helped me too. So if I got it. So I got it.

And all I knew about Kennedy was his father thought Hitler was going to win the war. So fuck him. I don't know these young senator at all. But anyway, the first one to choose is

on the on the house side, and the young guy, Stu Yule from Arizona, said they were paid 21,000 years themselves, so the idea of having some free talent, but in theory, you know, the newspaper is good. So he said that he'd give me a desk in his office, and he explained to me everything we ran on,

let me share, everything we wanted to do, and so I grabbed it. And then he was, he talked about Kennedy, he said, why don't you go over there? young guy and he's going to run for president, going to run for president. And I said, I told him what I thought, family. And he said, I thought too, but this guy is special. So you ought to think about that one. So then I went over there and worked on the outside.

That's how I got in the policy. So that's how it started. Yeah. And how long were you with Kennedy before the, was that while he was running for president? Yeah. Okay. So when you showed up, he was already running for president. That's right.

but he still had room to have another semi-salented player. And so then I got involved when that fellowship ran out, I went involved something called the Democratic Study Group because the Democrats are so conservative, they really run by a lot of the Southern Democrats. So there's a little separate group, the UN's UN-funded, telling you more than you need to know, but he got me into politics and knowing those particular members.

So then I did that until the election. Election day I looked around and people were trying to put other people's names on memos so they look brilliant and so on. So I said the hell of that. So that's when I got off, got on a troop ship and went away. So after the election, you said, all right, I'm done with this. Goodbye. Yeah. You said you were in the book, you said I was a Johnny come lately and a Protestant. You're right. I'm talking about the political job. But so anyway, that I go about. back and I got stayed six months out there with writing and then went to California

started working on with the University of Stanford University there I'm writing pretty colds and proposed grant proposals and the phone rings and so and who was this is Larry how what was your connection to Larry O'Brien he ran the he was the top aid on the political side for running congressional relations. So he's the president's in the white elf. But how did you know him? I knew him only vaguely, vaguely because I just knew when I was around there as an intern. Okay. But that was well above my thing. So anyway. But he, he somehow decided that he was, because he's the guy that called you and said, hey, we need you out here? Yeah. He just remembered you? You seemed like a good guy? He didn't really remember me, but the,

I can tell it it, it's like, I'll try tight as I can. But so the phone call rings, the phone rings, and I'm in the shower in Stanford, in Palo Alto, California. And Mary says, some guy says the White House was calling. I said, that'll be McCloskey, hang up on the prick with you. So she got the number, and so I went to finish my shower and so on, and I took care of that.

She said, do you here, this says, would you please call 202-456-1414. That's a white awesome number. So, geez, some real con or something's going on. So I returned the call, and they said they'd work there. So I decided to take a chance, and I got a free flight, there's space available from Palo Alto to Tennessee, Memphis, and took a bus up and rented a room,

and timing it up behind. And I got down to the Northwest Gate of the White House where all the offices are. I'm not expected. I said, if I got him across the name, and kill him. But he said, no, try the Northwest thing. That's a gate right into the White House. Yeah, we're expecting this as a guy. So they throw me up to the, I go with her, up to Larry O'Brien.

I hadn't known him at all well. And he's in a big office with four other guys. They're his staff. I mean, this is his office. And he's smoking a cigar, what the hell he's doing? And he said, we need someone to work the liberals and house members on the side, south side, on the house side of the Congress. And you know them because of the fellowship and so on.

And then he said, let me introduce you to him. So he said, here's what they're doing. Here's Claude Sotelli's inside guy taking mechanics of how well Bill is doing. and Mike Matathos who is my contact, the president's contact with the Senate and Henry Hall Wilson you call him Lasoth Mouth because he's involved

with the Southern members and Dick Dunney who worries about the bosses daily and Green, big city bosses and then Dick interrupts and says and that leaves all those intellectual cock suckers

they're yours so pretty fast start but that's what they thought of liberal Democrats. They hired me, and I got to know, I knew some of them slightly to the fellowships,

but then I got to know them close. And that's how it started. That's, right. I like this one section in here. You're working there, and you say this, my young ego would get another challenge

when I ran into General David M. Shoup, 22nd Command of the Marine Corps on his way to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I introduced myself as the only Marine on Kennedy's staff. Good, he said,

and what have you done for your country lately? Yeah, here's a tough eye of, blue-eyed Iowa, tough, tough guy, beautiful guy. Yeah, that's a pretty, that's a pretty aggressive statement right there. Here's another kind of interesting section. One morning I dropped into Donahue's office when he was finishing up a phone call. Here's what I heard on his, on his end. I don't care who told you that.

That's bullshit. Hey, do what you want. End a conversation. Dick cradled the phone, turned to me and said, Just because he's the president doesn't mean everyone around him is supposed to kiss his ass. Well, he'd work as a volunteer for his small town lawyer in Stockton, California. He'd worked around Kennedy for since 1996, never took a dime. But then he came down to a white house.

Speaking of Bay of Pigs and Cuba, here we go. Back to the book. Meanwhile, there have been rumors of a Soviet buildup in Cuba, but these had been dismissed as GOP scare tactics. unbeknownst to me in a dark room at the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center, located in a nondescript building at 5th and K in Washington, my brother-in-law, John Hicks, the man who had inspired me to join the Marines, and had gone from the Corps to the CIA, was analyzing film from an American spy plane that clearly showed missiles 90 miles from our coast. The photos indicated that at least six canvas-covered missile trailers,

75 vehicles, eight small tents and buildings under construction, In other words, a launch site at or near operational stage. Another image showed several more missiles. John later told me that upon realizing what he was looking at, he proceeded to smoke half a dozen cigarettes before the analysis was sent to the White House. My sister Joan never knew any of this. She preferred not to ask her husband about his work,

fearful she'd talk after a couple martinis. So we got the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding. On the 22nd, I listened to the present speech on the eve of a possible nuclear Holocaust. Like every parent in America, I thought of my family. Looking back, it's comforting to know that the man with his finger on the button had the same worries as the president's many hours

of secretly recorded tapes indicate. Unlike some of the hawks advising him or their peace at any price counterparts, Kennedy had a personal experience of war that put military intervention in human terms. In a wartime letter, to his father people get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of dead sounds like drops in a bucket but if those

thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw on PT 109 they should measure their words with great great care by contrast General Curtis LeMay who advised the president and his ex-com in those tense days in October had only known war from that great distance that of that the president's spoke of. As a commander of bombers, LeMay had been removed by altitude from the realities of violence. LaMay told the president, we don't have any choice but military action, and that he wanted to do more than take out missiles, saying that the success of an airstrike was a guarantee. In my war, I was grateful for the air support that protected Marines on the ground, but I never

forgot that those pilots and generals who sent them would never have to see or smell the bodies they barbecued it on the ground as we did. The South Koreans had a nickname for U.S. infantrymen, for U.S. Marine Infantry. They called us ghost thieves because we were so fearsome that we stole the ghosts of the men we killed. They couldn't know how true this is. Those ghosts are still inside me. They will never leave me. Bombs away, LeMay, as he was known, was perverse about his antiseptic brand of killing. He bragged about firebombing civilians in Japan during World War II. During the Korean War, he spoke of deleting cities.

and later complained to all who would listen that the war could have been won cleanly and quickly if he'd been allowed to firebomb the major cities in China. He spoke of war in terms of cost-benefit analysis and embrace nukes as the next big thing in killing, something like a microwave oven of murder, the newest quickest and oh-so space-age way of getting it done. There's no bottom to my content for men for this man and those like him. When I draw my last breath, the woman and the child in the photograph belonging to the North Korean I killed, will be right there with the faces of my own children and the women I married. It can't possibly be the same

for a bombardier for whom taking life means traveling to a set of coordinates while seating in a cockpit, pushing a button and turning for home. Or nowadays, from a computer screen in Colorado guiding a drone strike. I had an occasion later on when McClash in the Congress

and the war was, that particular war was ended. McClash gave my urging, put in a bill to forgive those persons who, for peaceful reasons, including going to Canada, opposed the Vietnam War. So Pete finally was against that, but then we argued back and forth, and I'm his friend, he's a congressman. So he said, all right, I'm going to put in a bill to forgive them, provided they do a year's public service in penance. What do you think of that?

And he's very proud. I said, what I think of that is great. As long as you put in the bill, every B-52 pilot has to also serve a year of penance. So he said, you son of a bitch. So he filed a bill without the restriction on the first front, so he didn't have to face the second one. Oh, and I have a frame copy of the bill and said, from McClough said,

you win, you son of a bitch, and he filed the bill in the past. Well, we're talking about Kennedy, and I'm sure everyone knows where this is going. Friday, November 22nd, 1963 was slow for President Kennedy's Congressional Relations staff. Most members have completed their Tuesday to Thursday work week, and when they were in their districts chasing little white balls or engaged in other vertical and horizontal endeavors. My boss, Larry O'Brien, was in Texas with President Kennedy, unlikely to call our four-man team for head counsel reports on congressional request demands, threats, and promises. Ahead of me was a weekend with my wife, Mary's sons, Michael, and Douglas, and one spaniel, chugging along the chilly shores of the Chesapeake in our seven-horsepower wooden outboard.

Lunch in the White House mess was quiet. As I took my seat, a Filipino steward set down my oblong, silver napkin ring engraved with my name, two anchors in the words, White House. mess. This was Washington's most exclusive eatery for privacy and tradition is run by the Navy. The mess was reserved for select members of the President's senior White House staff, and there are no guest permitted at the round table in the corner where I was seated. Just after 1.30 p.m., Jack McNally strode in. My first thought was that he must be delighted to be carrying some message from the executive office building that would gain him entry to the mess and perhaps wrecked the weekend with tasks for one or other or another of us. His usual smile was absent. The president's been

shot, he whispered to us. What? No. How bad? I don't know. I ran up two flights of stairs to my office, two flights of stairs to my office and turned on the TV. One of the millions of sets turned to the news from Dallas. I called Mary. She just heard the first news bulletin. They've killed them, she said. No, they haven't. I got shot. I'm not dead. I hung up the phone and went down to the press office. Paul Southwick had stepped into the press slot. He didn't know any more than the AP's first bulletin. Bulletin, Dallas, November 22, AP.

President Kenny was shot just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Spiratic updates followed. Then the clacking of the newswire delivered the end of our world. Bulletin, Dallas. November 22nd, AP, two pre-stepped out of Parkland Hospital's emergency ward today and said that President Kennedy died of his bullet wounds. Went back upstairs and sat until dark, calling home, ignoring messages, half watching the television chronicling the president's final flight to the Capitol. Not the new president.

Not LBJ, the president. On the Sunday after the assassination, 300,000 people lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch six white horses pull a Cassion bearing the president's flagdraped casket from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda where he would lie in state. It was the same Cassian. that it carried FDR and the unknown soldier. There's a haunting photograph of the first family following the casket up the Capitol steps.

In the photo, the widow Jacqueline is looking directly at the camera. A black mantilla on her head, a wisp of hair between her eyes. She is shouldering the despair of the whole country with the same poise that defined her public image as First Lady. Beside her, JFK Jr. is bounding up the stairs with his tongue out. young to fathom what has happened, you hope. Caroline's white-gloved hand is holding her mother's in black, a little girl facing the unimaginable and an unfair duty of publicly mourning her dad. In the foreground of this tableau of grief is the back of Kenny O'Donnell's head.

He's looking off to the side out of the frame at the box containing our president. Kenny had been in the car behind Kennedy's in Dallas and blessed himself. and when he saw a chunk of the president's brain blown out of his skull. Opposite Kenny, I am standing on a step, facing the camera just over Jackie's shoulder with my hand over my heart, watching the first family climbing the stairs. Just a few feet from the family of the slain president I had observed

a job that started with what I had assumed was a prank phone call less than 2,000, less than 1,000 days earlier. A closer look at the man on the step with his hand. on his heart will reveal some clues to where I came from. In an age of slick side parts, my hair is cropped short, the mark of a Marine who didn't know what to do with the freedom to grow it out. I wear a tiny lapel pin, the red, white, and blue vertical stripes of the silver star, which I had received 12 years earlier for my actions as a rifle platoon leader on the other side of the world.

Behind the sad eyes taking in the first family, I am carrying my persistent anguish over the things I did to earn that medal. I remain baffled that I'm even alive in my 30s. It seems as unlikely as our president being dead at 46. In the coming months, I stayed on staff with President Johnson. I tried to console Mary and the boys. I pushed papers around my desk in an office that had lost its former feeling of purpose. I remembered what it had been like not wanting my time in the White House to end.

As I planned what I was going to do next, I would watch the clock every afternoon, something I had never done while the president was alive. My last day couldn't come soon enough. In his inaugural address, President Kennedy had challenged my generation to ask, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Walking away from the White House, I asked myself the hardest question yet, what can I do for my country now?

So, I mean, obviously, this is just a radical change in the work environment, to say the least, and you make that pretty clear. Yeah. I think that Johnson, unlike the situation when FDR died, he, FDR fired everybody in the staff right away. But that's understandable. I mean, Truman did. Truman had never been allowed in the White House when his vice president. Never, not once. So he was treated as a contempt in Missouri, Paul,

so on it turned out to be quite a good man. But he didn't need that staff anymore and didn't want any of them. Johnson, on the other hand, to his credit, realized he walked into a tragic situation and some degree of stability was important. And what his own personal views were, I don't know, but I think they were genuine, that he felt retaining the staff, particularly people like the congressional staff,

was very important to try to ease into whoever the future lives. And I think that was important. Now, he did it his way, which was embrace us, but still treated the rest of his staff as he had always treated him. He would curse him and they were devoted to him. They realized he was very, been a wonderfully effective Senate leader and so on,

but they were what they were in his mind. And so that he paid extraordinary efforts to keep the staff intact and with the exception to Kenny O'Donnell who was, he can't handle it. But he very soon, well, he just was his own man there. He stayed there and, you know,

the president called a meeting with the whole staff right after he got the job within a week after that. And someone, so we assembled as required, requested or whatever. Someone said, oh, sure, he said, where's Kenny? He said, he said, another meeting. I mean, it's the way

he should have his ass fired, but that's, you know, Kenny was Kenny. He went tough cookies. So anyway. You know, I should have asked you this before, because everyone, you know, you hear about JFK and a sort of mythical

level of leadership and charisma. I mean, what was it like being around him? Someone who's a great leader with charisma. I mean, that's that's a shallow way to put it, but also I can recite instances where he was intensely human, where, uh, as evidenced by his handling of LeMay, LeMay's thing to him in that meeting about the Cuban Missile thing,

LeMay was saying, you know, you can't be a coward. You can't even really, it was a grossly insulting thing and he just managed that. Didn't let his ego get involved at all, wouldn't play with this guy's games, LeMay. I mean, I could see a guy like LeMay, the way you describe him, okay, I'm going to make JFK. Like, you can't be weak here, you know, trying to hit him from that angle. He's almost telling him exactly saying you. Yeah. And that, you know, you can't live with this.

I mean, the next thing to an open threat, and the records of that now indicate Kennedy said exactly what that amounted to. And he said, what did you say? And so Obama-Lameh said it somewhat differently. Got it. Yeah, that's in the book. I didn't quite capture that. We may need to clean that one up a little bit.

But yeah, yeah, that's... And I think that there are instances of very human things. When he put it to him, a guy member of Congress died in a plane crash and the usual trend of campaign, foggy weather, the guy had held a... seat in the Congress that had been Republicans in 1928. It was the one of the Golden Gate Bridge runs up to Oregon. And he wanted to seat in the Congress because he just devoted to the coastline there

and protecting the coast and et cetera, et cetera, so he got in. So then he'd been campaigning and bang. So then the only way you could hold that seat would be if his wife held it, ran and held it. And the problem was that it had been turned. down she it meant that clam always felt very poorly automatically some passing out of the widow she was against it and and she was very much aware of that she had very young children etc so i tried to peddle her the idea is the only way we hold that seat as we run so then due course i uh

was talking with with kenny or larry i forget which kenny i think but said the only way is going to work if at all is that the president calls her and he said once you go in tell him so i recited to the president exactly the situation that he did a wonderfully wonderful man he got a he was given a house in rock creek park a humble stone house because he loved rock creek park so much and it's such a huge decent guy but he just doesn't want to do it so i went and recited all that to the president including other peas and major, and he's the only one. And I said, there was their little kids and so on. He said, there goes that seat.

He would not make a call. He just couldn't do it. And there wasn't fear of failure. Just he wouldn't do it. There's a lot inside him. It's a damn good. Well, you eventually have had enough of working for LBJ. again, you know, I'm just jumping through huge swathes of this.

Yeah, Christine found a few, I started making notes about Johnson because I thought he was really cuckoo. And that's the wrong word, but he was so upset by never having served in the military. And he used to drive me bullshit, and I didn't wear that Silver Star in those days very often. We were just trusting some bill and he was being these bully boy stuff. I knew I was in the scene that day. So I wore more mine

and you could tell he knew. He was a fake metal. Really a fake metal. It's in the book. We got it. But that one, all of it, it was just, I started to keep him tracking and I never made any notes

when I worked in a lighthouse before. But I had done, so I was doing that. And then I put that away And I used to write four but six cards to myself each day, most days, not each day, about individuals attending meetings. It's a very sensitive stuff. So I decided to help with it. So then I started scribbling this thing.

And then one day, this nosy Christine comes in and she's got a box. She said, you know what I found in the basement? I had put those away, I thought it had thrown away. She found him and she started reading to Charlie and myself. She said, Jesus. So that's where we are on that project. Your next move, so your next move after LBJ is in the mystic figuring out where I'll go next. I got an unexpected visit from Edward H. Levi Provost of the University of Chicago.

Lydia. Who is one of those intellectual cock suckers I'd been assigned to as a new hire in the West Wing lifetime ago. He said, he's a gentle. He never used the word shit if he had a mouthful. And they say he's just a terrific leader, and he really, during the times of scandal, he was so good in balance handling student uprising, so on, without getting to Chicago police and a vital difference to what alternatives might have been. And so he offers you a job, though, at the university, at the university.

Yeah, the vice president of the university. And then I just threw that, he became Attorney General because he just handled the whole thing so well. Yeah, this is what, like 19, 1960. 1964, the campuses are starting to get riled up and all that. That's what you're dealing with? Yeah, but this one was, he didn't hire me for that. A little before that, it was right after the death and so on,

or if I'm soon as I'd get out of there. But he handled the Chicago police very well, He did it out of stuff of that nature, and I started a political science thing. His problem was that the Inver Chicago was view as a bed of communism and so on. So I started bringing congressman in, like Rostankowski or these other rough guys

who weren't involved with the university, but that changed a lot there, and it was interesting, exciting. And eventually, you end up working for Bobby Kennedy's campaign. Yeah, well, the deal was with Levy. He's a pretty Machiavellian guy, and he wanted me. Yeah, this is going back to the book on the, on the Kennedy,

on the Bobby Kennedy campaign. When I flew to Los Angeles early June, 1968, I was full of hope. Bobby made us all hopeful again. By June, Pierre was working on Bobby's campaign after having already lost his own race. He invited us out for what we hope would be a victory prime. party following a California primary. We checked it into the ambassador hotel.

We wandered around the sprawled the hotel, napped a while in the room and watched the early projections, which looked encouraging. The polls closed. I called Bobby's room. It looks like you're a winner. You should give the mayor a call. The mayor being daily.

Yeah. It's getting late in Chicago. Tell him and tell Rottenkowski. Rastinkowski. Rastinkowski that California is Herbert's. Huberts. Huberts. You're not having a sir. Kenny's at the Mayflower.

I'll give him a call. It's very close. What if I don't win? Without California, you're dead anyways. So why not make the call? Okay, see you later. Mary and I went downstairs to wait outside the crowded ballroom where Bobby delivered his speech. Maybe he decided not to place the call because he didn't have time before his speech.

Maybe he was unsure. Maybe he wanted Kenny to first push Rostenkowski, the mayor's main man in Chicago for support. Maybe he wanted to call the mayor himself in the morning. How many maybe's that night? Maybe if not through the kitchen. He closed his speech with a rallying cry. So my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago, and let's win there. The senator from New York ducked the crowd by exiting through the kitchen.

The night split open with rapid and unmistakable pop, pop, pop of a small caliber weapon. I ran towards the shots. I would learn later that Mary had gone upstairs and sat with the TV switched off. She knew. Paul Shraid Shraid Shraid Bobby's pal from the United Auto Workers was on the floor

bleeding from a head wound eyes open looking dead just beyond Bobby was on his back with a crowd surging around him some of us tried to make a protective ring to give him air I looked down at Bobby lying on his back he was motionless

his mouth slightly open there was almost no blood except on the back of one hand no visible entry or exit wounds His eyes had that stare that I'd seen before, but never from anyone who survived. I saw Jim Ables. I saw Rocky. Rocky had mumbled Corman.

Ables had said, oh, shit. I shouted to Fred Dutton, who was inside the barrier. Somebody loosened his tie. I remember hoping for a miracle, but I knew head wounds and miracles don't mix. And here you are on the funeral train. It was hot on board the funeral. train. We ran out of ice somewhere in New Jersey on the way to the capital by way of Delaware and Maryland so we drank our whiskeys meat. As we passed through New Jersey, I don't know if it's

in there or not. The crowd, in fact one person was killed right along both sides of the track and eventually stopped other trains and we were doing a very slow pace and they looked across the crowd really narrow crowd, not mobs at all, but right along the track. And off in the distance I saw some people playing golf and forced them playing golf I said to Kenny we were in New Jersey I said to Kenny

look at those sons of bitches still playing golf Kenny said don't worry about it this New Jersey you said whether they know it or not they all voted for Kennedy so took some heart there and went back to the whiskey

you continue on describing this we moved through backyards dirty embankments discarded railroad ties bottles and trash and a corridor of humanity beside the tracks on porches, balconies, and rooftops. They made signs of prayer. They saluted, they waved. The economist John Kenneth Gelbreath remembers,

if you were burying Ronald Reagan, you would obviously want to do it with an airplane. But if you're going to bury Robert Kennedy, his people live along the railway tracks. In the last car, with the family, friends, and coffin, I heard Ethel say to her son, wave back, Joe. In that book I had to pay.

piece of Frank Mankowitz, the press secretary to Bobby. And he described the funeral train. And he said the crowd in the train, he analyzed it. He said the, I can't believe verbatim, roughly it says, the Protestants, Ferdeglumi, the Jews, rending their clothes apart. The Irish drank a lot of whiskey until the ice ran out and then drank

a continue drinking without ice. And it was a good little piece of, and he above all, he was one or later on announced Bobby's death into the crowd. He was in a hospital, wherever. But for him to write that and analyze that crowd, it was terrific. And he got on that half-ass train.

This is another good political story that you got in here. In 1967, Pete ran for Congress against former child actress Shirley Temple in the Republican primary for special election following the death of Arthur J. Younger. By then, the Vietnam War was on, and Pete aimed to be the first Republican congressman to oppose the war. Between this unpopular stance and his opponent's celebrity, everyone assumed his was a lost cause. Things weren't looking good, so I was recruited to fly out from Chicago to deliver word to Pete that he was going to lose and should stop

wasting his contributors donations for a certain loss. Pete's Pete, and this is you talking. Pete, they're saying 85% the people in this district know who temple is. Not even 85% of them knew who Jesus Christ is. He said, Burger,

and that was his nickname for you from your middle name. If 85% of the people know anything about her, that bitch is dead. That's true. Things started to look up when his opponent, Little Miss Miracle, the Star of the Depression, accused him of being soft on communism. That got the attention of a few old Marines. She was talking about the recipient of a Navy Cross.

I brought this issue to the attention of David Shoup, the former commandant of the Marine Corps, whom I knew from the West Wing where he had asked me, what have you done for your country lately? He was appalled by the child actress's accusation. At my suggestion, he sent a telegram endorsing Pete, saying that, when I'm a woman, elected, Pete would serve the people of the 11th District of California with the same grace encouraged that he had served his country in Korea. That letter appeared the day before the election. That last minute piece was printed in the Palo Alto paper.

Pete won his election, a victory that became known as the sinking of the good ship lollipop. There was a heartbreaker. And Pete had stayed the Marine reserved through the 1950s and early 60s. He would make Lieutenant Colonel by the time Vietnam was on, but they didn't need any aged reserve lieutenant colonels, much less one who was anti-war, so he was out. But Pete wasn't one to stay away from war, especially one he wanted to shut down for a change. He put together a privately funded trip, so he's going to go to Vietnam. And then I told Pete I had a strong hunch.

There'd be an accident over there. A Jeep would roll over, a chopper would go down, something taking the peace nick Republican from California permanently out of the debate. So I told him, I'm coming with you. Pete went to Vietnam in 1968 between Christmas and his swearing in as a congressman. I tagged along on a second trip in 1971. By then, anti-war sentiment had grown following Nixon's bombing in the invasion of neutral Cambodia. Yet the Republican Party line was still pro-war. And then so you guys go to Vietnam.

It was a disturbing trip to put it mildly. We were lied to constantly. When Pete met with the American ambassador, Sullivan, he got a chance to tell him, I think you're a liar. We went to Mi Lai, where Lieutenant Callie had carried out his infamous massacre three years prior. The survivors were less than welcoming. I was nervous and became acutely so when I noticed that Dominus, who's Dominus? He's a life photographer.

He had wandered off. That was a real no-no because the area was unsafe and it just didn't feel right. I found him behind a hut where the man who had covered numerous wars and had privately gone to weep, overcome by all. all his eyes had seen. Wandering around one of our bases, I went into a big tent, housing a bar of sorts.

The place was full of Marines and had an atmosphere of tension. I knew well. I started chatting with a pilot. I told him I was a busted out platoon leader traveling with a fellow Korean War vet and trying to see what was going on over here. He shouted to no one in particular,

hey, watch out. This is one of those guys they warned us about. Well, fuck you, I said. No, hey, relax, pal. You want to. to know what I do, I fly the Arvin, which is the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, our allies, officers

home overnight and fly them back in the morning. You leave the enlisted guys? I asked him. I tried to imagine a world in which Pete and I got to chopper off the battlefield every night with other gentlemen officers, leaving the enlisted swine to fend for themselves and hope they're still there when we punch in and again

in the morning. What the fuck? That's all right. That's right, he said. Anyone who think we can win this war is out of his fucking mind. That pilot and the other pilots there wore arms and legs, quick release tourniquets, and they sat on a piece of armor plate, so that if they were shot down and lost a limb or one or another,

they could just yank that tourniquet and it would apply. So that was a kind of explaining their way. conduct here on that squad tent and you look at them and you don't you know very well that they're those turnicits are there for you have to have to how disgusted they must have felt doing their own thing which is not fun but to bail out on uh say you did that to your crew uh playing on that it's it's absurd and we we ate that shit for all those years and wasted all those bodies man not bodies Marines

not just Marines it's crazy yeah you move forward good since Korea your wife Mary the peaceful your wife Mary the peaceful Canadian had lost whatever enthusiasm

she had for husband's violent adoptive home JFK's murder confirmed her low opinion and Bobby was the last straw Chicago wasn't the place to be in the doldrums that followed and so we sought refuge in Ireland we found Bantry a year

round market town on the shores of an immense gorgeous bay open to the gales and waves of the north Atlantic so you guys find a house for sale you end up buying that house out there and um kind of ended up spending a decent amount of time over in ireland three months a year with during the uh academic season i didn't take any jobs without that three months from that point on And then the University of Chicago, you kind of wrap up your job there. Five years. Yeah. And then you get another phone call.

You get a lot of interesting phone calls. Here this phone call comes, and Chuck Daly, this is Derek Bach. You may have heard that I was recently made president at Harvard. I'm calling you, I'm calling to ask, have you ever thought of working here? Not in my sickest fucking moment is your response. Really, why not? Because I don't think Harvard cares about anything but Harvard. Well, he was looking to hire you,

and because of your boredom and restlessness, it made you an easy mark, is what you say. So you end up going to work there. I don't know if I do it for five years, five to the day, I quit. He said, what do you want to be at the other five years? I said, I know exactly when I'm going to be five years. What I am the day? my own fucking man, but five years

that I'm gone, and I was going to the day. Once at a tailgate for a Harvard Yale football game, I was asked about my allegiance as a Yale graduate working for Harvard. I was quoted saying something like this. You'd have more fun getting a girl in a hotel room and watching Ohio State on television.

That's true. Unfortunately, Harvard and Crimson ran that. You said, unfortunately, they ran it? Yeah. No, that's awesome. When I left Harvard after my fifth year, I was given a rocking chair embossed with a Harvard logo, my name and title, and the years of my service, and an inscription in Irish, which translates to, he left as he came, his own man. In 1977, I've been living in Key West and Ireland, taking some time off.

I was invited by Jack Anderson to go to Chicago to discuss a job opening as president of the Joyce Foundation, a fully funded grant-making chair. charitable organization. So this is your next gig. You say this, at the Joyce Foundation, I broke my own rule about not staying in any job longer than five years. I once told a non-profit trade publication, any foundation president who stays longer than 10 years ought to be shot. The interviewer called me on this.

What about you? And you responded, I have been shot. Yeah, I saw that limb off the same time. Uh, continuing on. Through the 1980s, I was dividing my time between the Joyce Foundation and the American Ireland Fund. It was as close to retirement as I was comfortable

with, and my schedule made it possible to spend more time in Bantry. By then, Michael and Betsy Claffy bought a home house in... Kilcaran. Kilcaran over a treacherous mountain road from us. We had dinners and

long sunlit summer nights looking out on the water. Then our world changed. Mary found a lump in her breast. Cancer. She had it treated. It came back and spread. By 1987,

it was clear that further treatment was hopeless. We celebrated my 60th birthday at our Cape House where a local builder Scott Svensensigson, who knew the situation had built a deck for her to watch

the sunset from working quickly, ignoring the local building laws. Mary wanted to die in Ireland. We went to Bantry while she was still well enough to travel. I did my best with cooking and cleaning, but I couldn't carry her because of my arm. A local doctor made house calls and confirmed what we already knew. No hope. We spent our last moments together in bed.

She was thirsty but couldn't swallow. I wet her lips to ease the dryness. Can I have a patty? She asked, slaying for whiskey. I went to the kitchen, poured the whiskey, and brought the glass. glasses to bed, drank some, and bent over to let the last few drops dribble from my kiss into her mouth. June 16, 1987, early light glinted off the water. Hungry hill across the bay was purple in the calm pallet of dawn.

Our little inboard cabin cruiser that Titanic 2 tugged at its mooring. In the bedroom Mary was asleep and breathing very slowly. I lay beside her Her breathing got slower and slower Her breathing stopped I kissed her I didn't want to leave her The doctor came

The nurse came And then the hearse Then I was alone Toward the evening the tide was out I went down to the beach My pistol was an ocean away Fuck it I beg God to finish the job

that I was still here was the only thing crueler than her being gone. I knelt in the wet sand and prayed as hard as I ever prayed for Mary's life, one of the few times I've ever prayed. Please, God, give me cancer. You never listened to me, my God. How long had you two been together for? 30 years. A few months after the funeral, Dick called me and asked me what my plan was.

He told me that he had a job opening for me, in the event I was interested in doing something, besides looking after donkeys, killing rats, and feeling sorry for myself. He told me it was a federal government job at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library. A nod from an old pal wouldn't suffice, but my service and medals and prior federal employment,

including my time in Kennedy's own West Wing, would make me well qualified. I got the job, flew to Boston, and at age 60, started a whole new career. Seems like a good, who's that, that was Dick Who? Don't You. Oh, okay. It's like a good friend to call you out and get you on a new mission.

Yeah, he was good. He came to the funeral. So he's got 11 kids. He's one I worked with in the White House. They called his wife a careless Protestant. But anyway, he was there. He said, and we had it, I didn't go to church, but at Protestant Church who had the funeral,

had a congregation of probably 20 or out of how many, but it was so poor in a beautiful little building downtown. The roof needed repairs. So Dick observed that when he came up for the funeral. And the Catholic Church is up from the top of the hill, and in those days still a huge number of persons go to church or the Catholic Church. So Dick,

Daddy said you're pretty separate. Dick, you won't believe me, but the Catholic Church takes, you know, church gate collections for worthy causes. They had a special church gate collection for money to send down the hill to repair the Catholic,

the Protestant church. Dick says, no way. I said, yeah, they did. And not long after the criminal letter came, the preacher down below called me and said, I've got a letter I want to show you. Got the letter from Donahue. And he said, here's a check for $1,500 to help fix the product, help fix your roof, but not for what goes on underneath it.

And it's vintage Donahue. Anyway, it's... Once you're back. Now you're doing the library thing, and this is... Now, you had met Christine before in the past. Tip-O-Neil's a friend of mine. She worked 12 years for the appointment secretary to Tip, a speaker of the house and so on.

She's in charge of the Title IX, which is a woman's issues thing, and she was extraordinary. She's a very, very difficult person because, I don't know who you were, you couldn't get to see her unless... You know, I've listened to ones that had at his Uly funeral. She's probably the usually sort of filmed for her out.

Wasn't that a lot of a news story, the Italian ambassador or whoever that was wanted to see Tip? She said, let me check. And by the time, he found out he used to get an appointment to two years from next Wednesday or something like that. She was impossible. Well, since Mary had died and now you were back, You got Christine, and I'm going back to the book.

Around New Year's, I took Christine to dinner at a French restaurant on the Cape to say goodbye. I didn't know how to get over losing Mary. She needed to move on. For a couple of months, we didn't talk. That was devastating to both of us. She loved me for a decade knowing it would never be possible to be together. Now that it was possible, I was too broken. Finally, I realized I couldn't live without Christine.

On the dock of my Cape Cod house, I asked her to marry me. We went for a seafood lunch to celebrate. We set a date for Columbus Day in the fall. there was just one issue she was a catholic and i'm at least in theory a protestant the first hurdle was visiting her parents on presentation road in brighton 16 16 presentation road she told me that i would be the first protestant to stead foot on their porch the house their mother was born in not even the mailman i asked you think a protestant could get a job as a mailman in this neighborhood she responded with her parents a very warm blessing.

We just had the church to worry about. Per Catholic law, I had to sign some papers saying I'd raise our children in the church. That was okay. But on top of that, the priest wanted me to go to an adult version of Sunday school. That wasn't going to happen. Fortunately, I had an answer. I knew Father Richard McHugh in Korea, where he had been a Marine lieutenant. He had been blown up by a landmine.

We saw each other again as guests of Bethesda Naval Hospital. When I left the hospital, he was still undergoing treatment. After the Navy put him back together, McHugh had a spiritual awakening, and had become a Navy chaplain and went on to serve in Vietnam. I knew he had retired. He was a Navy chaplain, yeah. I knew he had retired and was living in North Carolina. I called him to explain my situation.

And he said, I look forward to seeing you on your knees in front of a Catholic altar. Father slash Lieutenant McHugh married us at Our Lady of the Presentation in Brighton, in front of our many friends and from the many chapters in our lives. And then a week after my 62nd birthday, Christine, was due to give birth to our first son. I thought about giving him, naming him Ullick. Is that how you say it, Ullick or Ullick? Uelik. Uelik.

Uelik, after my father, something our friends had talked to me about over a drink. We would name him Charlie, not just after me, but for the two uncles I never met who had been killed leading platoons in France. The one thing I were back in him when Christine first came down to Key West after Mary had died, there's a wonderful piano player there who played around the world and crews and all that stuff but he and his partner live in Key West. The day that Christine walked in, he played Love Walked in and drove the shadows away. Jesus, that's great.

But the trouble is she's the most wonderful person I've ever met and the best wife I've ever had and I don't have to have any more but she can be really difficult because the guy played that in a place up in Ireland played that in her. I love that song.

She goes over. Next thing I hear is love is better the second time around I said to that prick, you play that again. He said, hey, I'm afraid of Mr. Daly more than I am of you. It was better. But the internet would be difficult.

Christ, he was your son. You continued over some of this. You got involved with other things. And one of the things you, I mentioned it really briefly, but the Ireland Fund, Here we go through our work together in the Ireland front. Tony O'Reilly and I built a lasting and trusting friendship. His rugby interested me just as much as the Marine Corps interested him.

He was a famous rugby player. And in 1999, Tony invited me to join him in Cape Town, where he was meeting with his South African advisory board. He was the richest guy in Ireland at that time. Went bust later, but he had like 75 newspapers around the world. and based in Ireland and you got me on that general board but he got part of the because he went down to play 100,000 people all white

at age 18 in Lugby in South Africa and everybody felt in love of the place so he asked me to come down the board would have an annual lunch with Nelson Mandela when I met him he remembered his visit to the Kennedy Library shortly after being given his freedom. At my first meeting with him in South Africa,

he noticed my PT-109 tie clip, a souvenir from the Kennedy White House. He asked if he could have it. Here it is, I said, but what are you going to do with it? You don't wear a tie. He clamped the miniature brass boat to his tunic. Mandela's presence can best be described as a staggering and powerful gentleness.

What's truly remarkable about this man is the way his example inspired others to actualize courage and patience in the face of a system that told them they had no dignity and honor to preserve. I think the one thing I hope that you consider putting in this thing is why I got interested in South Africa other than the idea of being invited to the most beautiful city in Africa and the richest city in Africa, Cape Town. And I did that because O'Reilly was sensitive to

Heidi and Bobby had gone down there and so on. He knew I was interested in that. And so he asked us to come down on a holiday just to come see I'd never been to South Africa. So we flew down first class of course and on his nickel. And they flew into the airport, we noticed this big sea of, it looked like a bunch of shacks. And so then we landed and drove back into Cape Town.

I looked at the shacks, and they were really shacks. and no windows, anything like that, and some tin roof bits and pieces they found by the street or whatever. There were hundreds of thousands of people, unbelievable, lived there. So we got into the city before I met with O'Reilly to sit down for a while.

He said, just mess around a while, and let's have a lunch and so on. So I went back out there. And it was unbelievable. I mean, they just, it was, I went out and was one of his drivers, and obviously an armed white policeman. And so I dropped me off,

and there was a little clinic there. And I walked in and this, Eric Gomer was, I asked you the guy is and told me this. Eric Gomer, that's the doctor that worked there. So he said, I'd like to walk around there. I said, to have someone from the clinic coming, we won't have any problem.

So I went around and looked at it. There was just unbelievable we talked about that, and I found this situation specific to such charming things is the Minister of Health believed that if it took lemon juice, and I forget the exact formula, and garlic and something else, you need to worry about AIDS. And she's the surgeon general of this, that the idea of bringing medicine in was illegal.

You could lose your license. It was absurd. So this is 1998 when this is happening. And, you know, I know you, you win to that little village. Obviously, you saw the suffering that was going on there. The little village had 850,000 people in it. Yeah, I should have said, giant village. Well, it's unbelievable.

And then you start, you get put in charge of the AIDS reports. Well, I said to Tony, this dream. I mean, there's this beautiful, beautiful place, forgetting Robin Island, the prison out in the middle. But, and I just described to him exactly how beautiful I acknowledge all that. But it's also during apartheid, they had all the blacks out, I mean out,

so it's all white there now. But the thing was murderous, and we've done nothing about it. So, when I described in some detail, and he later said he went to places he would never go and never did go. But nor did anyone else in the South African employee. But anyway, you know, you end up giving these reports to this board. And here you say, in my reports, I would follow up with statistics about South Africa's AIDS orphans, $850,000 in number as of 2006, and urge anyone who finds boner jokes.

offensive to consider the obscenity of that number. I swore a lot during board meetings, even by my standards. Some members of the board didn't appreciate my obscene language. I tell them it's an obscene fucking world. Real obscenity is drinking mineral water and vintage wines in a palatial hotel guarded by armed security, just 30-minute drive

from a city of tin shacks where little girls are afraid to use the toilet. I explained to them that The legend was you can cure AIDS if you have sex with a virgin. And they were widespread practice of raping very young girls, in some cases killing them. But one was defended by someone who said that wasn't a crime because she wasn't a virgin, age five.

And I said that this is a shit that we're putting up Since we met yesterday afternoon now, 600, some of the other than children have died of AIDS, and we don't do shit about it. And I described some of the deaths, including one who had described in a previous session, brave and smart and young and so on. And she was raped the previous week by turning out 15. young guys, one year, 15 years of age, and when she screamed out that stopped, that she had AIDS, they killed her. And that's the one, the other volunteers kept going. And so he made

me that advisor, and we funded what we could do. We changed our editorial boards, employees, included blacks. We had condoms in our workplaces. One priest had said to me, our pope would tell you that the contra are evil. And he talked as if rain coats caused rain, but I mean, they're fucking nuts everybody. So as bluntly as I possibly could, as vividly as possibly could. We did. We helped that change and Gomeres was in almost the main city Johannesburg they pulled their guy's license for that and they threatened and three times ordered the medical practice of his clinic in Kalachia pulled and it wouldn't do it and he said to me you know it just it takes nothing to buy

a bullet to put in a man's head. And somehow, because the instinct spread, what a great thing he was doing. I mean, it had a white Supreme Court justice of South Africa. And an extraordinary liberal guy, he got AIDS, probably from homosexual.

I don't know. But I knew him. And he, so he came out and said, I have AIDS. And he said, I'm alive, because I have the 400 Rans or whatever it was. a month to buy AIDS you can get them overseas to delay or not cure, I guess more or less cure something called heart and he said I know people who die because I have

money and they don't and he said I'm alive but he said I'm ashamed that I'm alive and it's a fucking mess and I thought the more you can spell that out and the more you can shame these guys they goddamn president of the country and Becky said he did have sex of the woman and alleged rape or not but he didn't have any problem because he'd taken a shower afterwards it's a president of the fucking country and they get the times later was that looking a pack on his on his years in service when he was in office and if he had just permitted treatment and so on three hundred

150,000 South Africans would still be alive. And that's in New York Times and editorial. And that brings us for sitting there. Anyway, that's what motivated me there. This is how you described it in the book. It was hard to comprehend the magnitude of the suffering there. It's hard to imagine a place where going to the toilet can be fatal, a place where there's roughly one flush toilet for every 17,000 people.

A place that is largely ignored by those with the power to improve those conditions. In the absence of government leadership on the AIDS issue, rumor and superstition has taken over. One rumor said that condoms had worms in them. A sitting president of South Africa endorsed the rumor that post-coital shower could prevent AIDS. The Minister of Health went to the World's Aid Conference promoting the rumor that garlic and lemon juice were effective treatments. and that heart, which is highly active anti-retroviral treatment, was more dangerous than AIDS. But the worst rumor of all, the one that once again made me pause to choke back tears at the podium, delivering another report, was the rumor that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS. This had sparked an epidemic of infant rape.

Researching my report, I sat down with a member of one family whose baby was essentially brain dead following a gang rape. there were instances of four and five-year-olds who'd already been raped many times in at least one case the rapist of a five-year-old was let off on the grounds that his victim was not a virgin see that's an illustration where I get carried away like we just did

that you're looking at that analyzing it and reading it's better than my getting so disturbed I think I'm almost incoherent So I appreciate very much. I'm not kidding you that you've taken the time to read that, and I wish I'd listen to your questions and try to respond more rationally.

Well, it's the kind of thing that can make you think irrationally. And here's what you're saying here. I don't think anything can prepare someone to understand that kind of suffering. I don't think that kind of suffering can be understood. Some of my family and friends saw a straight line between war and my field work in South Africa. Perhaps I was continuing my story.

search for a sense of purpose and mission, seeking once again the company of people who live heroically. Maybe. But AIDS in South Africa was death, pointless agony and cruelty like nothing I'd ever seen. These people weren't combatants. They were simply victims of an unlucky birth, even more unlucky than the civilians than the civilian victims of war. I found their pain to be overwhelming. War may have prepared me to witness such pain without looking away, but nothing could have prepared me to understand it. I was 72 years old when I started going to South Africa and I turned 80 shortly after my final trip.

More than once I was asked, what were you thinking? Why did I take up field work and reporting in a dangerous place when I could have been golfing and napping? Maybe I had one more battle in me. Maybe I just don't know how to stay out of it when I see suffering. On a personal level, I knew that it felt better to observe, to be somewhere I could work with brave and dedicated whom I admired the way I had admired Gunner Dosie

and Kenny O'Donnell and finally Dr. Eric Gomer and these are the Dr. Eric Omerer is that one that you were describing and then we get here in the middle of delivering one of my final AIDS reports I started mumbling that was nothing new I mumble all the time

and we may get some confirmations of that as my fellow board member Lady Margaret J remembers I'd have liked to have understood more of what he said because it all seemed interesting. The problem was that day, I don't remember mumbling. I don't remember halting my report mid-sentence. I don't remember returning to my seat at the board table. After several minutes I can't account for, I asked David Dinkins, who was sitting next to me, what had happened.

You just stopped, he said. Are you okay? I think so, I told him. After the meeting, I contacted Margaret J.'s husband, Dr. Michael Al Adler. He surmised that I had a minor stroke, the good kind of stroke if there is such a thing. He told me to get to a hospital right away. I found all this more than a little upsetting. I wanted to get back to Christine and the boys at once, so I did what was apparently one of the worst things imaginable for a stroke survivor to do.

I hopped on a series of flights lasting 24 hours. The doctor in the state scolded me for flying and told me I was lucky to be alive. He ran tests, wrote prescriptions, and advised me to stay away from the great pleasures, the three great pleasures of my old age, tennis, red wine, and Viagra. Hearing the doctor's advice, I was transported back to 1942. I remembered sitting in a waiting room at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. I could hear my father's voice through the door to the doctor's office after you'd just been told that the best he could live with

to live with multiple sclerosis was to cut out martini's golf and his pipe. I will never forget his response. Do you expect me to live in a vacuum tube, he said? I looked at the doctor. Have a nice day. And I walked out the door and into Christine's arms. Thank you. I'd shut up and let's listen to you.

It would have been better. That's... Well, thank you. Well, that's, you know, that's how this manuscript of the book ends. Obviously, that's not what the story ends. And right now, what are you doing day to day right now? What damage am I doing? Well, I mean, I hope you're doing tennis and red wine and viands.

Niagara. Tennis is a little not too great. The other stuff works. I think also that it's, I guess as much as I can do damage to Trump, I would do it, because I think that he really destroyed much or is, but there's a lot of good in this country. I mean, you look at almost every aspect of it. And when you see him throwing away, the life breath of a lot of people in the world and other stuff he believes or says he believes. I try to do some things there, and Christine tries. I'll see. I'll settle for what I got. And do you have any other closing thoughts

that you want to give? Thank you. That's my fault. Thank you. Well, you definitely don't have to thank me. Yes, I do. Well, one person I want to thank is I want to thank your son, Charlie, for setting this up. And, you know, for sending me the manuscript. But thank you, obviously, for coming on the podcast and more important.

You know, thanks for your service to our great country. Thanks for my citizenship. Jack, that's right, the Irishman. And thanks for what you did after the military. Thanks for your service and government, and thank you for what you did, not just for this country, but for countries around the world like what you did in South Africa to try and help there and to try and do your best in your life to end suffering in the world. It's been an honor to sit down and talk with you, and I thank you for coming on.

You too. I think also incidentally, I'm very not so incidentally. I'm very grateful to mention Charlie. The accuracy, which I really strove for in there, immense help from two other persons Charlie on the research and editing and much of the writing and then Christine because she reads back to me

some that I've written and if it rings false I can tell her she looks at me the way you look at me but it was really important to hear it this is important but earlier to hear Christine And to listen, as I listened to you, really was very helpful. I didn't understand what a podcast, what podcast was.

And I understand now, I understand the value of it also. I mean, how many books are you going to get bitten, but how many persons might be hooked on listening to some of this thing, and care of some of the things which you put on, not just this program, but the bulk of those. And for me, a deep, deep satisfaction. to, I get your regimental order or whatever, and you read all that stuff, Jesus Christ,

every time I get near it, you ever makes me nervous. But when I found out that salvation is my power naps, it was a hell of a deal. And I do. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on. You too. I'm sorry to keep you so long.

It's been forever. It's been an honor. Thank you. Thanks very much. And Charles Daly has left the building. And that, just to FYI, that we were reading off of a manuscript for a book. So it's out there, not sure what Charlie, which is Charles's son, Chuck's son, and they got that manuscript out there, but they have, it's a, well, obviously we covered

a little part of it. It's a lot bigger, lots of stuff in there. It sort of felt like a forest gump scenario. You know, like just wild things happen. Oh, yeah. And just a crazy life. Yeah. But, you know, Charles Daly out there trying to make the world a better place.

And I'm thinking, if you want to make the world a better place, which I think we do, might as well start with yourself. Yourself in your own backyard? Yes. Front porch? Yes. What's the deal? Your own AO, area of operations.

Make your own AO better. You might have some ideas on how to do that. I do. Share. All right. Well, we are in, well, currently we're in Boston. Mm-hmm. Soon to be in Maine.

Maine. Yes. For the Jiu-Jitsu immersion camp. Yes. With origin. Okay. So, Jiu-Jitsu, that's one of the ways we can keep our A-O intact. Yes.

To learn J-J-ZU. Yeah. Multiple levels, multiple facets of improvement. The thing that's good about the thing that's good is, Jiu Jitsu will not just help you with your Jiu Jitsu. Correct. Jiu Jitsu will help you with all aspects. All aspects.

People on a daily basis start Jiu Jitsu and let us know. Let me know, let you know that they started Jiu Jitsu. 97% of the time they say I started and it's awesome. Three percent of the time, maybe even less than that. I've only had, I can only think of two people that actually, they're like, I just don't like it.

It's just not for me. Two people out of thousands. Think about that. Two people that said, I'm just not going to do it. Yeah. And there's the whole one that I said, there was one that said,

what if you just don't want to fight? Right. And I said, if you don't want to fight, the best thing you can do is no jiu-jitsu. So what we're getting at is, yes, train jihitsu. Oh, yeah. And if you're going to train jihitsu,

you're going to need a ghee? Yep, because we do recommend gie and no-gi-jit-jitsu. There's two different. different thing i think as time goes on they become more and more like different from each other which in my opinion is more of a reason to do both okay come on back in the day no no no no i said okay bro why i was about to just reinforce the whole no situation we have people that are wrapping geese behind the neck leg whatever oh yeah yeah some worm guard worm guard keene kheny cornelius yeah yeah and that's it that's a system yeah yeah and that's a system

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do that no ghee. I don't even know if any of that applies to no ghee. And try thinking, oh, well, how would you do that? Oh, that's how you do it? You know what I'm saying? Because remember when you got arm locked for the first time? And you're like, well, I'll just stop him from doing that.

But then you realize you can't really stop it. Right. Goes deep. Yeah. And then it's the same thing. People say, well, how would you actually get someone's ghee over there? Yeah. There's a whole system, man.

Yeah. And that system does not exist in no ghee, certain ones. Some do, some kind of. do so. So I'm saying this like a big, you know, it's just very vast is what I'm saying. So when you get your ghee, you're going to get an origin geese. Yeah. 100%. Like you don't even have to ask anymore. No. Everyone knows already. Get origin geese. It's a monopoly, really. Yeah. It's a monopoly on the market. Because really what you're, you're not going to get a different key. Is the monopoly and cornering the market the same thing? I guess. I guess you're, I see your distinction. You're implying and I accept it. The market is cornered is what you're saying. Yes. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. Monopoly. Monopoly is like no choice. Like consumers no choice, right?

Monopoly. I'm kind of saying no choice though. I don't know, man. You have, look, there's... It's like the choice between steak and baloney. That's not really a choice. Well, there's like obvious choice, not to split hairs, but there's like obvious choice versus like kind of ridiculous choice.

You know, it's like that kind. It's like, oh, that's an obviously good choice versus an obviously good choice versus the obvious. So the obvious good choice is get yourself an origin glee, get yourself an origin rash guard, Get yourself some origin t-shirts And you know what you can do right now? Yes You can get yourself some origin jeans

Which I am wearing at this time You look good by the way They're so legit Very fashionable Hey back off I look functional Very functional Very functional

Very functional BISTac Business tactical Isn't that way Did you guys make that up? Yes I like it man It applies

Unless they look business tactical Any kind of clothing Yeah Check origin We've got boots coming other way. Yeah. Boots are coming.

Those look good. I mean, I already have them. I don't think you do yet because you're not quite on that inner circle. No, I'm an intermediary circle. I got jeans though, so boom.

Anyway, go to origin main.com. That's where you can get this stuff. Also supplements. These are important supplements, though. They're not the kind that like the guy at the local gym is trying to pedal to you. It's made like 90% of chalk.

It's not that. It's like the for real one that not only do they actually work, but they kind of help your life. You see what I'm saying? So you got the joint warfare for your joints, cruel oil for your joints and general health. Joint warfare is for that too. Also, discipline.

It's for your mind. Guy at the airport, guy working at the airport straight up, asking about it. There you go. Straight up. Ask about discipline. Out of the blue.

Ask good deal, Dave Burke, about discipline. Ask JP about discipline. See, what do you think of that stuff? I'll tell you all about it. he's addicted I feel bad yep so yeah there it is it wasn't considerably just honing their performance in all aspects I'd feel bad but I'm not because their performance is honed yeah but gp sniper Dave Burke fighter pilot on the discipline gun on the discipline gun all right cool also don't

forget about mok because you're going to need extra protein when you track big steel or you're training hard or whatever you're going to need some extra protein you might as well drink protein that tastes like a dessert. So there's that. Get some milk, all different flavors. They're all awesome and get yourself some jocco white tea. In the summertime, drink it cold. In the winter time, you can drink it warm.

If your throat is sore, you can have some warm joccal white tea. If your deadlift is weak, you can have some joccal white tea. Yeah, that'll help it big time. So there you go. All that stuff that we just talked about, origin, maine.com. Also, don't forget to wear your kid, mulk. Because, you know, when your kids... Back to school.

Kids are back in school. They come home from school. They're starving. Yeah. And they could eat some sugar-filled diabetes treat. Chocolate chip cookies. Yeah. Or they could have a mulk and get stronger.

Yeah. Hit all avenues of, what do you call, desire? Yeah. Is that the word? Nonetheless, yes, very good kid approved. Which is a good thing. of course. So yeah,

all at origin main.com. Also, Jocko is the store. It's called Jocco store. And this is where we all get our shirts to represent the path. DefCorp, discipline equals freedom.

The shirts that we're wearing at this time. Currently wearing them. Yeah. It's actually, at the end of the day, I mean, there's a few origin ones. I have a Jody Middick one that I always wear.

This is pretty much all I'm wearing. Approved. Yeah. Rash cards. rash cards on there big time truckers hats you know beanies dry fit dry fit these are they're being produced okay we'll talk about that they're coming they're coming be on the look out for that hoodies lightweight and I wear the lightweight what do you think it looked good okay next you didn't care that it looked good but you thought it

looked I didn't think it all right you thought it looked good they're like a t-shirt that had long sleeves in the hood that's what it looked like yeah you liked it Anyway, yeah, a lot of cool stuff on there. Jocco store.com. Good way to support you. Yeah, and support yourself and represent while you're on the path. It's good to represent. I think.

We saw the person representing on the UFC. Oh, yeah, big time. It felt good. Yeah, there he was. It kind of felt like we were all at the UFC. Yeah, we were. A little bit. Little bit.

All right. Subscribe to the podcast if you don't already. iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, wherever. Leave reviews if you want us to read them and get a good laugh out of your awesome review. also don't forget about the warrior kid podcast which is also available and good for kids parents teachers adults human beings and there's some warrior kid soap you can get from irish oaks ranch dot com which is a young warrior kid making soap that you allows you to stay clean oh yeah that's a good one yeah two flavors on that one by the way not flavors sorry two separate kinds of so trooper

so jaco so that's what aden's making up there also we have a YouTube channel official YouTube channel Jocko podcast you can see the video version of this podcast of every podcast you can see what Charles Daily looks like oh yeah watch his reactions yeah there's some emotional moments during that podcast

some heavy moments yeah it's yeah it's yeah you could tell man he his like every step of his journey you could tell he was caring about stuff yeah you know like he was yeah you could tell a lot of it was was a from the beginning. We're good.

You've also been making little excerpts. Some of them are just a straight excerpt. Occasionally you enhance the excerpt with things like cello music. Sometimes. Explosions. Sometimes. Yeah. Fire. Smoke.

Sometimes. Reflections. Sure. Pauses in my facial expressions. Why would you do that? You're just like, I'm going to freeze your facial expression at this time. Oh, it wasn't frozen. The voice is still going on, but you're just sitting there.

It wasn't frozen. It's kind of interesting. No, if you look close, which I. I encourage you to do. Okay, this is what it is. When you're, okay, me and Deen, you're talking about the one that you're saying, you know, what, the Trump card, right?

Yeah, the Trump card. Yeah, if you want to go drink, rather than train, then I don't want you anymore. I'm a team. Okay, so when you were saying that, me and Dave Burke, good deal, Dave.

We were listening. You just good deal, Dave to yourself. That's a foul. Got included, man. So we're watching you. So I'm like, okay, like this is different, right? I'm kind of. You were watching him watch me a little bit.

I looked over at him. Oh, yeah. So. What was the expression, like, on his face? Did you guys look at each other? Did you guys make eye contact? Not that I can remember. You were just watching him watch me.

Okay. We're both kind of captivated in a way. Okay. So. You were detached enough to take a look and say, like, is this hitting Dave Burke the way it's hitting me? Yes. Okay.

Fair enough. Fair enough. So the reason I did that, or we, the reason we put your, did your face like that or whatever is because when you're saying that like you give off a certain feeling you know like even when you say a bunch of stuff you give off a certain feeling so like as a person listening to it it's like what feeling am i getting i see what you're saying and i even see here how you say i dig it man but it gives you a certain feeling as a result so i took that feeling and it was kind of a psychotic feeling so took that psychotic feeling the best they could translate it graphically

into the video. That's what it came out is. All right. So if you want to see graphic feelings expressed or not expressed subtly or maybe not so subtly, then you can check out the YouTube channel called Jocko podcast. Also, we have psychological warfare, which is

little audio clips that can help you through challenging moments of weakness that threaten your very existence every single day. You can go to iTunes, Google Play, or other MP3 platforms to download these fire support for your ears.

That was good. You know what? You know what? It's just go off script, bro. That's what it is. Just go off script sometimes. But sometimes if you go through, like you go off script and you'll get too esoteric,

then I'll be like, hey, what if they never heard a psychological warfare, they don't know what that is. Still, sounded cool. Still don't know what it is. You know what I'm saying? So you've got to find the, what do you call the dichotomy, medium balance thing. Also, don't forget about flipside canvas.com where you have,

Dakota Meyer who is making graphic representations that will get inside your brain and keep you honed and on the path of discipline and will Flipside canvas.com nothing else needs to be said on that one. That's good and true by the way also don't forget about on it on it.com slash jocco this is where you can get your kettlebells your rings your clubs maces, battle ropes, all kinds of fitness equipment. Typical stuff and atypical. You like that atypical? I said it. Also there's this immune one shroom tech immune.

I'm just saying I brought that because, you know, when you get on the plane and stuff. You got to get the immune system going because you don't want to get sick on the plane. All those germs, none less. Onet.com slash jocco. Go there. Good stuff. There's also a bunch of books. I wrote a new book.

It's called the Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. This is the absolute frontline pragmatic information of how to lead. You got a little problem. Here's how you actually solve that problem by following these actions. That's called Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. It is available for pre-order right now. And if you want to get that first a dish, you better do it quick because you got guys like Andrew Paul who ordered 20 copies.

Guaranteed Sarah Armstrong's ordering 20 copies. JP ordered eight copies. He's probably going to step it up to 20, though, as soon as he hears this. JP's competitive. He doesn't want to lose. Yeah. So first a dish, leadership strategy and tactics field manual.

Pre-order it now. Also, Way of the Warrior Kid, three, where there's a will. That's available. Also, two and one are available. Mikey and the Dragons. Best Children's Book, voted Best Children's Book ever. Damn. In the world.

Yep. Well in my house. Yeah, well, by me and my wife. Actually, weigh the worry kid gets more reps in my house. Yeah. Yeah, really? Gets more reps, yes. I'm not saying it's better.

Yeah. I'm surprised because your kids are a little bit younger. Yeah. Well, they like the mowing the lawn part. Cool. So those books are available for kids. Mikey and the Dragons. Way the Warrior Kid, Mark's Mission,

and Way the Warrior Kid 3, Where There's a Will. Also got Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual, which, by the way, Charles Day, has read and approved. He called it something. He called it your manual. No, he said you're something. He called it something like it sounded pretty official too.

I liked what he called it. I was kind of laughing because I knew exactly what he was talking about. And he was like, you know, I don't go near a gym or whatever. But nonetheless, yeah, he read it. Yeah. And he talked about the power naps because I listed in there how to take a power nap. And he was like, that's what I do. I said, that's awesome.

So that's available. It's also available. Not on Audible, but it is available audio through iTunes, Amazon Music, Google Play, other MP3s. We also got extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership, the two books that I wrote with my brother Lafabin about leadership and how to take leadership from the battlefield and apply it to your business that you're running right now. We got Eschelonfront, our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do, echelonfront.com for details on that. EF Online.

This is online leadership training so that you can get consistent, repetitive, and get the reps in. Like you just talked about getting the reps and get the reps in. You have to make leadership decisions during that training, by the way. I don't know if you know that. I do, yeah. Yeah. You got to make leadership decisions in that training, military and business. There's scenarios set up.

Choose your own adventure. Yeah. Make a call. It could be wrong. If it's wrong, go back, start again. Yeah. And that's good about the reps too because. You know how like, because a big part of what you kind of can't teach even any, like you can't teach this part of it.

Even like, I guess in jih T's just you kind of can. But like you can't teach being in the actual scenario because you're emotional. You know. So like it's like, hey, you know, you got to, you know, there's this situation. What are you going to do? You're going to. And I'm oversimplifying the scenario for sure. Are you going to blame someone?

You're going to take blame or are you going to take blame with an excuse kind of kind of options, right? But and it's like, okay, cool. I know it. I know it. That's a good scenario. But then we see people blaming other people all the time. Oh, yeah, when it comes down to it, because when you're making, when you're in that training, whatever, you're making the decision, you don't feel threatened.

You don't feel defensive. You don't feel that. You feel like, okay, I'm going to get this answer right kind of thing. So you know the information, but now when it's time to execute, you got to, you know, you got to contend with your emotions. But when you get the reps and those scenarios are kind of readily available in your head, even though you're kind of feel defensive, you're like, oh, I don't. I know this scenario.

In fact, I'm used to this scenario in my head. You know what I'm saying? So it's more embedded in there. Also, the more times you see a scenario. Even if you watch the same scenario 20 times. Like, let's say you watch a movie scenario unfold 20 times. It's, and then you see something close to it. You're going to be more apt to recognize it in the real world than if you just saw it in a movie scenario one time.

Yes. Right? Correct. 100%. That's totally true. Also, we got the muster. Chicago done it sold out Denver coming up next but guess what it's sold out after that December 4th and 5th in Sydney Australia that is the next muster that we're doing

Extremeownership.com for details if you want to come please register now don't wait until it sold out and then send me a Twitter that says didn't know you were coming sorry can you still get me in because guess what I can't the fire marshal won't allow it also we have EF. Overwatch, where we're taking proven leaders from spec ops and combat aviation and placing them into companies that need leadership in the civilian sector, go to EFoverwatch.com. If you're on either end of that calculus, whether you need a leader or whether you are a leader, go to EFoverwatch.com so we can connect you together. And if you want to communicate more with us, it's actually not that hard. You can find us on the interwebs. We're on Twitter. We're on Instagram.

Don Fajn Wukin. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Charles Daly, to his son, Charlie, to his wife, Christine, that was here. Thanks, Chuck, for your service in the Marine Corps and in so many other marina arenas out there. And as a veteran of the forgotten war, the so-called forgotten war, I assure you that you and your comrades are not forgotten and the rest of the troops out there in uniform thanks to you all as well for putting on that uniform and for protecting us from evil around the world and to all the police and the law enforcement and the firefighters and the paramedics and the EMTs and the dispatchers

and the correctional officers and the border patrol and secret service and all the first responders out there thank you for protecting us from evil here at home and to everyone else that's listening, we've got to hear a story of a amazing life, the life of Charles daily, a life that's still being lived from a book that is literally still being written just like life. And think about that. Think about that life with so many stories and so much life. So don't hesitate.

Don't hold back, go and live your life. go and write that story by going out every single day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.