Jocko Podcast - 247: W.T.F. What it Takes to Beat The Odds, with John Stryker Meyer. Wiskey Tango Foxtrot, by Lynne Black.

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:05:14 - Lynne Black's "Wiskey Tango Foxtrot" with Tilt. 3:10:55 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:22:10 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:39:24 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 247 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Are you old enough to have a draft card? He says. Yes. Yes, I'm old enough. I'm 18.

We have to have one. Well, do you have one? Yeah, I say with a full mouth. Sorry about that, spitting hash browns across the table. Then you're old enough to enlist and get your duty out of the way. You sure you're old enough? You don't look 18. Kind of skinny, too.

I don't know if you'd make it through the most basic of training. He Riley smiles. I'm 18 and can prove it. Do you want to see the card? Testily reaching for my wallet, spitting a mouthful of eggs on the table. Hey, don't go sideways on me, boy. This is a friendly conversation, not a food fight. The sergeant laughs.

The only thing I want you to hand me is your bill for this meal. My treat. You're trying real hard to get me to enlist. Smiling, I hand him the bill. You a recruiter? Yes, I'm a recruiter. I'm Staff Sergeant King. What's your name?

Lynn. Lynn Black. Well, Lynn Black, if you volunteer, you get your choice of assignments and which country you want to serve in. How does that sound? And behind door number two, it's got to sound a hell of a lot better than wondering, than wondering where you're going to spend the night, King cracks a smile. My office is right down the street.

We eat. Afterwards, I enlist. And then spend the night at the YMCA paid for by the U.S. Army. The next morning, I'm on a Boeing 707 headed for a medical examination and basic training at Fort Ord, California. During Basic, I'm selected for the Advanced Leadership School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, before going on to the Armor School. Fort Knox, that's the place they keep all the gold. Staff Sergeant King has signed me for three years active duty in the 13th Armored Career Group, Europe, Germany,

where I'll have access to all the great European art museums and the artwork of the old masters. The army is going to pay me to tour Europe. What a deal. My driving passion and greatest ambition has always been to spend my life as a fine art painter. I've been working at the local Seattle television station art department all the way through high school. The art director, Robert C. Dinsmore is a decorated World War II veteran who has encouraged me to get my military duty out of the way. The world in 1963 is a peaceful place. Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy are on television.

So you might have caught that name, Lynn Black, and it might sound familiar to you. If it does, it's probably because you heard it here from John Stryker Meyer, aka Tilt on podcast 180, 181 or 182, or maybe you heard it from Doug the Frenchman Letterno on podcast 186. like John Stryker Meyer and like Doug Laterno, Lynn Black was an army soldier, a green beret.

And he fought in Vietnam as a member of SOG, the Studies and Observation Group, a highly classified group that conducted missions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. They suffered over 100% casualties. Meaning, if you, You are a SOG operator, you were going to get wounded or killed. That is how these men served and sacrificed.

And before you listen to this podcast, if you haven't listened to 180, 181, 182, 186, and additionally, 204, 205, and 206 with Dick Thompson, go listen to them. go listen to them and you'll see that the men of Saug are true heroes heroes that conducted completely insane missions missions that very few people ever knew about and lynn black codenamed blackjack wrote a book about his experiences and I just read from that book. The book is called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. WTF, which we are going to dig into today. Now, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Lynn could not make an appearance on the podcast today, but we were able to bring back tilt. John Stryker Meyer, one of my heroes who served with

Lynn on many operations to talk us through the book and provide some details that only someone who was there would know and understand. With that, Tilt, thanks for coming back on. Good evening, sir. Good to be back. Awesome to have you here. Indeed. You actually sent me this book. Do you remember sending me this book? Absolutely. Yeah, I got this book. Because we did the Frenchman. And I said, Lynn's book was out and Lynn Maurice Black Jr. is just the man that I always held in the highest

esteem ever since the first time we ran into each other. That would be one at Fuba in 1968. Just a character. Yeah, well and it's, I'm hoping that at some point we have the opportunity to get him on here. We'll see how that plays out. But hopefully this

will provide some encouragement, you know, just to do this section of the book. And, man, It's just like every single time I start reviewing what you guys did in Vietnam, I just, I cannot believe what you guys did. I can't believe the level of heroism and courage that you guys had on all these operations. They're crazy. They're freaking crazy operations.

I told you last time I said, hey, if I was in charge, I wouldn't have improved any of those operations. Right. I remember that. Yeah. Unbelievable. And believe me, I approved some pretty, some pretty sketchy operations in my time. But you guys took it to a whole new level.

And the success that you guys had on the battlefield was awesome. And yeah, every time I read through these books, it just blows my mind. And it's an honor to have you on and to pay some kind of tribute to what you guys did. And to have, you know, what you guys did was, you know, that's my heritage. You know, even though I'm in the Navy, you're in the Army. I mean, just the special operations, what you guys did over there was just laid the groundwork and set the bar so high for the rest of us forever. Oh, well, thank you.

Well, and, you know, and I'm glad you're reading WTF because Lynch is one of those characters. I mean, of all the stories for SAG for eight years, if you put down from the most harrow-ne stories, the top five for eight years, Lynn's got to be right near the top, if not the top one. That's why I'm never going to dig into it a little bit today, just to pay homage to the man that I respected from day one. And you guys did, and I don't think we're going to go into this part today, but you got, but when we covered across the fence and on the ground, you, you and Lynn worked together for how long, how long were you guys actually working together? He ran a, he came on our team for a few matches as a strap hanger. Right.

And then we went down to CCN in January of 69. Then he came on a team. Bubba sure left. Lynn came on. And then our little people loved him, plus they knew him from October. And so when I left, I just turned the team over to him. I just knew the team was in good hands. I never worried about it.

I came back. Lynn was the 1-0. That was his 1-1 for a while. And then we took turns, and then they finally just said, hey, you got too much experience here, black. And they yanked him and put it. have been some special projects that he went off and did and I took over Idaho and went back to run just simple recon where Lynn was doing some some classified stuff.

All right. Well, let's get a little bit, let's learn a little bit about Lynn Black and where he came from. I'm going to go to the book here and it says this. In the category of common things that go unnoticed in the world while Ho Chi Minh was working for the OSS saving allied lives, Lynn Maurice Black Jr. was born to Lynn Senior and Violet Black of Albany, Oregon. Lynn Jr., that's me.

This is where I come into the picture. I was immediately given the name Bosco when my mother found that by mixing a bit of the chocolate drink into my baby milk, I dozed right off. In Berlin. What is Bosco? What is it? Some kind of old school chocolate drink or something? Like Hershey's chocolate. Okay.

I never had Bosco. I don't know how that missed me because I'm a chocolate milk kind of fiend. He goes on here. In Berlin, Germany, on the date, an hour of my birth at 10 a.m. on April 22nd, Adolf Hitler declared to his general staff that Germany had lost the war and that he would commit suicide. And here's the caveat or here's the warning. I'm skipping through this book. I'm not going to read the whole thing.

So if it seems a little bit chopped up, that's why you've got to get the book. He fast forward here. In 1946, my mother was pregnant with my brother Hugh. We lived in Salem, Oregon, where my father worked for the post-war state employment office. The war machine was winding down and unemployment was high. I was one year old. April, 1947, on my second birthday, we moved to the corner of one, two, three, bomb, and 456 detonator, ordinance Oregon, which was a munitions depot. town for World War II war supplies.

My father managed the payroll office for the depot. That's just pretty much the coolest place, the coolest address ever. Is that great or what? That's perfect for Lynn. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No doubt about it. Blowing things up.

Oh, yeah. In 1950, I was five when the Korean War broke out. We had moved down the road to Hermiston, Oregon, and our father had taken a job. with the Guy F. Ackinson Construction Company as the head of their payroll office. Our mother had purchased a small roadhouse diner. After that, my brothers, Hugh, Bruce, and I were on her own. I was the little man, Bosco, the babysitter. In that same year, the Soviet Union recognized Ho Chi men's government.

Even though Vietnam was recognized internationally as part of French Indochina, Joseph Stalin convinced Ho that the Soviet Union would bankroll his fight against the French if he agreed to allow Chinese advisors to train 60,000 to 70,000 Vietnamese. Ho bit his lip and agreed to China's support, which enabled him to escalate his fight against France. In 1953, the Korean War ended. I was eight years old in the third grade and in love with the red-headed freckle-faced girl next door. On March 13th, 1954, with the monetary backing of the Soviets and Chinese advisors, the Vietnam engaged the French at Denbien. On March 23rd, the Vietnam captured the main airstrap resulting in partial isolation of French army units.

Inclimate weather closed in on the area preventing air drops of supplies, evacuation of the wounded or close combat air support as the French ran ever lower on supplies. and casualties mounted the Vietnam, took control of the countryside. When the French could no longer patrol, they were forced into purely defensive positions, which were shelled with big guns several times a day. On April 7, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his domino theory speech during a news conference declaring, finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle. You have a row of dominoes set up.

You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. Nine days later, Vice President Richard Nixon announced that the United States may be putting our own boys in Indochina regardless of allied support. it's always important to me to roll through kind of the way these things unfold and and pay attention to them history yeah and we're living it right now you know and and I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and it seems like maybe we're not always part of history maybe the 90s right what was going on the night so the Berlin Wall came down so that was kind of historical but then it was down and there was kind of some time where you feel like how much are we really a part of

history that people will be reading about and then things happen like what's going on right now and 9-11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and you start realizing no no we're we're unfortunately going to play we're going to we're going to have our own history as well and when you read things like this it it makes a connection for me that you better remember that what's happening this could this could always escalate Things could always go in a direction that you didn't anticipate. Little USA can lead to a mighty big trouble later down the road. Crazy.

Oh, yeah. On May 7th, the epic battle of Dienbentien, too, ended in a French defeat. The Vietmen shot the wounded and marched the ambulatory French to the coast where they were loaded on ships and sent packing back to France. The French government did not want their citizens to know the defeat and refuse to allow their brave soldiers to disembark from the ships. Many brave French soldier citizens died in the holes of those ships. Giam Bienfou was the first time a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages,

from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle. On April 22nd, 1957, I turned 12 and announced I was no longer to be called Bosco. My name is Lynn, and I wanted to be called by my real name. Besides, kids my age were teasing the hell out of me. When they found out my real name, things got worse. Lynn, what a sissy name. This began a boy named Sue era that never ended. Never.

So he thought he was, look, everyone's making fun of my nickname Bosco. That's mean. I'm just going to go with my real name. Lynn. Yeah. In June of 1963, I graduated from Rainier Beach High School in Seattle, Washington. I was sleeping late on Saturday morning. When, wake up, orders my father shaking my shoulder.

I'm awake. Barely, what's going on? Are you going back to work at the television station? Mom asks. Not today. It's Saturday. I give them my best 18-year-old smart-ass smile. I quit the station six months before graduation to pay attention to a sagging grade average.

I think I'm going to take the summer and just goof off. Do you plan on using either of your scholarships, my father needles me, knowing I have no intention of going to college? I went to college, he chides. Maybe art school, but no college. It would be a waste of my time and everybody's money. I thought we already had this conversation. I reply, yawning. Don't be a smart ass, prompts mom.

Do you have enough money saved up to pay rent, purchase your own food and transportation? I thought I'd live here during the summer and go back to work in the fall. Then I'll get a place in my own. How about that? If you live here, you'll pay rent. Not the kind of rent you pay now, but the kind of rent as if you had your own place. You'll be out of money pretty fast. You'll need a job, understand.

You heard what your mother said. father insists. I don't have the savings to pay that kind of rent, I grogly complain. I would really like to take a break after graduation. I take it what you really want is to get me out of the house. Growing up, both of my parents had worked, and I was responsible starting at the age of five for taking care of my two brothers. The little man, they called me better than my other name, Bosco.

I've been working and saved my money since I was 15. All I want to do is take the summer off, go back to work, and then get an apartment. Can't this one of them? wait the summer? Sounds to me like we aren't looking at the same roadmap, mom says firmly. Both your brothers are old enough to take care of themselves and your father is retired and at home. This evening is your last free meal here.

Understand? Yep, sure do. Start naked. I jump out of bed and boldly head for the shower. Boy, this pisses me off. Why the hell can't they wait until the fall? When I come out, they're gone. I dress, walk a mile to the bus stop, and head for the Seattle Pike Place Market to get something to eat and wander around the open air art galleries.

What am I going to do? So at that point, you know, this is when he goes and he actually meets that recruiter. So that's why that recruiter can tell that he's kind of got nowhere to go. And he starts his journey. Sergeant King gets him in. Yep, Sergeant King, man, scored at the diner. Yeah. Paid that bill and made his quota.

Yeah. He goes, continues on here. Wallet Armour School, an airborne recruiter dangles the possibility of an extra $55 a month in addition to my meager monthly $79 base pay. If I am only man enough to make three parachute jumps, sounds easy as falling out of an airplane. I volunteer a second time. This volunteering thing is getting to be a habit. 134 monthly for a PFC, close along with three hots and a cot. That's crazy that you guys got that much money for going to airborne school.

55. Yeah, it might not seem like a big deal, except for that. I think I got 110 in like 1990, where my base pay was probably $1,000. You know what I'm saying? So it was like one-tenth of my base pay where you guys were getting almost double your base pay. Oh, yeah, in my case, I was getting $50 a week because I'm not sure where Lynn got that inflated salary. because I was getting 50 and a jump school was $55. So he was like 100% plus.

I'm in. So he goes to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, which is where I was lucky enough to go. They don't send Navy guys there anymore. Where they send them? They go to Yuma? Yeah. They go somewhere else. Yeah, Yuma or actually might be here in San Diego.

But you basically go and learn a, it's more of a gentleman's course. And it's faster and you go, you get more experience really quick. Yeah, that three weeks can be consolidated. Oh, you think? But I had a great time at airport school, man. It was awesome. And then he goes to a heavy drop school, learning, I guess, how to get everything rigged up

to throw out of the back of airplanes. Oh, yeah. And then he says this. After several weeks of rigor training, I receive orders for Delta Company, 16th Armour, 173rd Airborne Brigade in Okinawa. Hey, Okinawa is not a city in Germany.

This is not what I signed up for. For an extra 55 bucks a month, I have blown away a European tour and art education, but I can rig heavy supply loads and vehicles for such snatchouts at high-level drops. Now there's something I can use in the civilian life. Black, you dumbass. The 173 had been activated in June, 1963, the same month I had graduated from Rainier Beach High School in Seattle. 173rd has assumed the assets of the second airborne battle group, then stationed on Okinawa, just south of Japan. The 173rd mission is to quickly close with and destroy the enemy forces using fire, maneuver, and shock action in coordination with other armed forces.

It was because of its many parachute exercises on Taiwan that the members of the 173rd earned the respect and admiration of the nationalist Chinese soldiers. So impressed with the paratroopers of the 173rd were the Chinese that they nicknamed the men of the brigade Tin Bing or Sky Soldiers. The name stuck. The Pentagon's public expectation of us is that we can be deployed within 24 hours to any hot spot in the Pacific Theater, engage with and deter an enemy for 72 hours. This delaying suicidal action would allow time to deploy real forces, such as the Marines. Thank God there aren't any hot spots to be deployed to. Thank God this is the peacetime army and having no enemy.

Tonight let's go to the Ville and get drunk. We'll watch the strip shows. Life's good on the rock. That's what the jarheads call Okinaw. And I'm fast forward and through some other stuff, but he's there. You know, he's there. He's kind of doing the peacetime army thing. living the dream

March 14th, 1965 is the 19th birthday of Hugh Robert Black, one of my younger brothers. That morning, he arrives on Okinawa with the future third platoon leader, First Lieutenant Richard H. Goldsmith.

PFC Hugh is assigned to the 173rd engineering company. I'm happy to see him. All the way through school, I admired Hugh's scholastic capability and am admittedly envious of his high grade point average and seemingly easy learning style. Both of us have enlisted voluntarily to do our duty

and then return to pursue life. Why the hell didn't I just go to art school? Because you're doing your duty, dim wit. Shut up, put your head down and just get it done and stop talking to yourself or they think you belong here permanently. Yeah, the way he's written this book, he's got all kinds of these italicized sections where he's kind of just given his own thoughts.

Oh, yeah. And they're awesome to read. The rich mind of Lynn Black. Yeah. It's just funny. I remember what you talk to him about, like that stuff there in particular, his self-examination,

and his commentary. It's just like... Yeah, and I'm not going to get too much into it, but the way this book is written, a lot of it is written, and I'll try and explain a lot of his written, as conversations that are debriefs, either debriefs, official debriefs,

or unofficial debriefs that you guys have in your team room with beers and playing dice. And in between stream of consciousness. Right. He gets a hot street going. You can just hear the keys going. They'll take a break for a beer and he comes back. Yeah, the atmosphere that he gives out of the team room

of you guys is pretty awesome. And you guys playing freaking liars dice all the time. And the little, those little debrief sessions, though, he mentions it. That's how you were learning. Oh, yeah. That's where you were figuring out what to do and what mistakes this group made and what these guys did right and what they did wrong. And those sessions where you're giving each other a bunch of shit, but you're also passing valuable information on. Oh, absolutely.

in our early time at F-O-B-1, that's what we learned was from the senior NCOs and any other team member that had been on the ground. We faithfully made a point of talking to them. Some wouldn't. Some couldn't. Too much trauma. But the ones who would talk, I mean, Pat Watkins, Spider-Parks,

John McGovern, they were all men that we just admired. And they took time to talk to us. We could ask them questions. And then when we got the flying cubby, we'd hear about the mission, what went wrong, always trying to improve the tactics to see what we could do to improve when we get in the field. Did you say when you got to flying Covey?

Well, Spider Parks became Covey. Pat Watkins, after time on the ground. Got it. They were our best Covey riders. Got it. And so, and the 68, particularly with the October 5th mission, they were both alternating on station. That day, it was so historic, part of that historic moment in time.

that missionary. And so before that, like during September and August, Pat had run several missions out of F-O-B-3 in the layoffs. And then we'd talk. You always learn stuff. We just sat there and just try to sponge it in, bring it in. Yeah, and we'll get to some of Lynn's Vietnam experience prior to being in SOG and prior to being in Special Forces.

But for someone like you, and we talked about this in across the fence, I mean, it's crazy that you were, how old were you on your first mission? 22. Yeah. Well, I was old by some students. I spent two years in college trying to flunk out there, you know. But by August of 68, that's when they finally, after that attack at the FOB4, they came up with the idea of putting together a one-zero school. So they were trained, but there was nothing in place.

So when we got the food by, May and June. man, you just talked to men who would talk to you. Anybody had any experience at all. Like John Walton came back from two or three really bad targets. We talked to him because we're both, well, he was a high-power D-4. I was just lowly private. But anybody who would talk, we talked. That's where it was.

You're right. That clubhouse was better than anything we could get in terms of really learning what was going on on the ground, air assets, weather, and the reality of the king bees. what we worked with at the time. It's one thing to talk about in training. Helicopter come pick you up. Well, you've got to have other conditions there. Man.

You know how that goes. Yeah. Crazy. So now we get to 1965. And Lynn says, somewhere in the middle of April, 1965, cryptic rumors begin to spread rampantly from company to company around the brigade. HQ directs all training to cease And practice mountouts be conducted

Which is them basically gearing up to go Oh yeah Shortly the company receives its basic load of live ammunition And begins to prepare all vehicles for a combat check Man these rounds are heavy complains one of the new loaders April 22nd, 1965 man he nails these dates in here It makes me wish I would have kept the journal which I never did did.

Me too. April 22nd, 1965, I celebrate my 20th birthday. May 2nd, rumors begin to fly as word spreads that key personnel have received advanced party orders to an unknown destination. May 3rd, company commander Joseph C. Jordan Jr. At last announces the destination. And he says, I have just come from General Williamson's morning briefing.

What I'm about to tell you is a chronology of. of events leading to a temporary offshore assignment. On April 24th, the general received a top secret message from General Westmoreland to meet him in Saigon, South Vietnam at Mack v. headquarters. It seems there's a guerrilla war being waged in that Southeast Asian country. The 173rd is to be a part of what is called rolling thunder being conducted by the U.S. Air Force out of bases in that country. What we heard this morning is that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,

known as the Arvins are having difficulty providing adequate security for the airbases and supporting rolling thunder raids. The Arvins are also having difficulty performing offensive operations against the guerrillas, known as Viet Cong or V.C. General Williamson also revealed that several U.S. divisions are scheduled to arrive in South Vietnam within months. The 173rd's mission is to clear the incoming units proposed base campsites of the VC. Our deployment will be a temporary one, probably not lasting more than 60 days. The advance party will leave for Bienhoa, Republic of South Vietnam, the 173rd is to conduct a security action. The CEO announces that he thinks we'll be back on Oki for sure by Christmas. Our first mission is to secure patrol and neutralize any threat to Benhoa Air Base, which is our base camp area.

You all now know about as much about this assignment as I do. So there you go. These guys go from not even knowing that there was anything going on in Vietnam. I was thinking how different that is now. Yeah. You know, because when there's some kind of action taking place in the world, everybody knows about it instantly.

You know, you know about it instantly because you look at your phone and there's the news. And whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or wherever, everybody knows when there's something happening in the world. And here are these guys, they're not they don't have any idea what's happening in Vietnam and they're on the rocks they're not getting to new york times or any other newspaper that by that time had carried stories for a few years and pissed off president Kennedy pissed off lbj but so they missed that and so here's lynn like oh you're going to go to benoit it'll only be a 60 days not He goes into this thing about how they had to dye their underwear green

On May 4th the company receives word We are to delete nine spats from our inventory and replace them with the M113 armored personnel carriers or APC So this is 1965 Yeah And you know what we used for Kazavak vehicles in the Battle of Vermont in 2006 and And 1-1-3s. M.113s. Which almost any bullet can still penetrate.

Yeah, my commanding officer of one time, you know, he was talking me through an operation that the guys were going out on. And he said, what's the Kazavak plan? I said, hey, the Kazavak plan is this. We'll contact this company. They have 1-1-3s. They'll come out. And he says, what if that 113 hits a subsurface ID?

So at the time, subsurface IED had it. everybody knew what that was and what it was was somebody the enemy would bury the the explosives you know underneath the ground and you couldn't see him so it wasn't like a something sitting on the side of the road it was under the ground and they would make them big and he says what what'll happen if that one one three hits a hits a subsurface iED and i said sir if the one one three hits a subsurface iED everyone in that one one three is going to be dead and that was the facts you know that was the facts it's going to be their casket.

The really weird thing is most in that time, including the 113, the Abrams, all these older vehicles, when you build those vehicles, you build them as low to the ground as you can. It's the lowest possible profile so that you can't be seen. It's like ducking, right? You build the, even a Humvee is built like that, right? A Humvee is wide, but it's low. Sure. And an Abrams is wide, but it's low.

And a 113 is low to the ground. They don't have much clearance because, you know, You know, you don't want to get shot at by another tank so you can hide behind, you know, a little ridge line or a little knoll or something like that. The problem is that's the worst possible vehicle to have when it comes to getting blown up from the ground. And so now when you see the mind-resistant vehicles now, they're massive, they're tall. You've got to get a lot. You get into them with a ladder. You literally, there's a ladder.

There's like four or five rungs on a ladder to get up into them because they're built really high. And you exit with a parachute. Yeah. They have a V-shaped hole. that deflects the blast as well. And a 113 has a complete flat bottom. It's super low to the ground. But they were just, they weren't,

this was not the problem that they were coming up against at that time. May 5th, the company begins feverishly working to prepare our vehicles for shipment the following day. May 6th, we drive to Okinawa, to the Okinawa port of Naha, where the vehicles are loaded under the direction of Lieutenant Gilmore, the Embarcation Officer. And again, I'm just jumping through this stuff.

You got, it's so great to read this. You've got to get this book because the details that he gives, I don't know how he's got a way better member than me, right? Dates are logged down, names it for everyone. I mean, who remembers the name of the damn embarkation officer? He must have written that down. It has to. But it's great.

It makes you feel like you're there. You're right there. Perfect. Absolutely. Yeah. The 173rd. Airborne Brigade is the first U.S. Army unit sent to Vietnam. Can you imagine?

So talking about history. Oh, yeah. May 12th, a 12-16 hours, Company D. 16th armor arrives in Saigon Harbor, the Paris of Southeast Asia. Company D's first combat assignment comes in the form of ambush patrols, where order to attach 12 enlisted personnel each day to the first of the 503rd for a three-day period. so much for riding on tracks. So they got all these vehicles, but now they're going on patrols. Needs of the Army.

Do they say needs of the Army? No. Okay, in the Navy, that's like a kind of a joke. Someone will say, well, what do you think your job's going to be? It's like, no, needs in the Navy. It's like whatever the Navy needs you to do, you're going to do. And even though they might not say that in the Army, that's the way it is, because we don't care if you've been trained on these tracks

to fight from armor. You're going to go out and you're going to be on foot patrol. May 18th, our vehicles arrive and the company turns to the task of prepping them. Thank God, now maybe we can stop doing patrols with the grunts. I'm an armor guy, not a ground pounder. One track crew member complains. And here's Lynn's thoughts. I disagree with that.

No one in the right mind wants to be walking this miserable place when you can be riding. Oh, sorry, I agree with that. No one in their right mind wants to be walking this miserable place when you can be riding. Who the hell wants to sleep on the stinking wet ground with bugs, snakes, and God knows what else? God damn it. I'm supposed to be in Europe. Well, it is the Paris or the Orient. May 19th, the first platoon is attached to the 3rd, 319th artillery for a security mission.

The remainder of the month is spent training in seemingly endless improvement of the defensive perimeter. Here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, there's, here's, there's, here's, there's, Dig endless trenches Trenches Fill sandbags Build bunkers String concertina wire Put up tents

Wind and rain flood the trenches And bunkers and flatten the tents Put up tents again Go out and patrol with ground pounders Pull KP Stand guard duty How in the hell can any of these Lifers do this for a living?

I'm so tired of pots and pans duty I could kill somebody There's a thought So that's how they psychologically Prepare us Pots and Pans on the last day of May, General Williamson initiated a four-day operation.

Three objectives were hit by our sky soldiers. Casualties were few against light resistance, though our guys experienced no heavy fighting. The operation, the first U.S. offensive action in South Vietnam, greatly contributed to the confidence of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The first operation of July is search and destroy in conjunction with elements of the first battalion

5003rd infantry. July 16th, the company in conjunction with Elm is the 1st, the 503rd, and the engineering company conduct a search and destroy operation. During that operation, my younger brother, Hugh, is critically wounded by an unseen enemy during a mortar attack, and several of his friends are killed. He's medevacked out of the AO and back to Conis. So, you know, I kind of drifted through that part where he's. His brother showed up on Okinawa.

Well, his brother, they're both at the same unit. They end up deploying to Vietnam, the first Americans in Vietnam. And his brother ends up getting wounded by a mortar. Pretty bad. And here's Lynn's thoughts on that. You fuckers, not my brother. Not my brother. Show yourselves, you cowards.

God damn it. Here we are driving up and down the roads while those bastards are hiding in the bushes. They can see us, but we can't see them. Where the hell are they? Somebody has to know where they are. I'm sorry, Hugh. I hope you can forgive me. I should have been there with you.

I'll find them. They'll pay. I promise. Welcome to the jungle, baby. That's one of the things that, you know, when I was in Ramadi, I would always read the book about face, you know, by David Hackworth.

And one of the things that was so similar was what just happened right there. This is the beginning of the war. And you're fighting against an enemy that you can't see, right? And it's so frustrating. especially for the conventional troops that are out there. And, you know, I was talking about this today with a client.

The mentality and what it does to your mentality of being on offense versus being on defense. And when you got on, you know, when the mission is go out and walk down this road, you might think you're being on offense, but if you think about it a little bit deeper, you're on defense. Because you're walking down that road and they can have booby traps and IEDs and snipers and mortars, they can have all that stuff.

And you are on defense. Even though you're moving, you're on defense. And that was definitely how I felt on my first deployment. Same thing. I would ask like young junior officers, I'd say, is this an offensive operation? I talk about a direct action mission in downtown Baghdad. I'd show them a profile of a mission.

And I'd say, is this an offensive operation? They go, absolutely. And I go, how long are you on offense for? because the whole mission takes an hour and a half, two hours, right? So you drive from Baghdad to some other part of Baghdad. It takes you half an hour to get there. And then you hit the target. It takes 15 minutes.

And then you drive back. It takes another half an hour. So you are out for an hour and 15 minutes. I would say, how much time were you on offense for? And then they'd start thinking about it. Sometimes they'd say the whole time, we're always on offense. And I'd say, well, that sounds good, but it's not true. It's not true.

When you're out on patrol, when you're moving through enemy territory, you are on defense. You're a target. You're a target. Now, once you get to that target and you set up, believe me, we go on offense for a good, solid three or four minutes. But then even once we hit the target, now all the bad guys know we're there. And now we're on defense again. So what that does to your mentality is it can be hard on people. It can be hard to be constantly paranoid and constantly on defense.

And it's the same thing in life, right? You know, somebody was asking me, what do you do? And you know, what do you do? And you've got all these things are happening and the market's changing. And I said, look, you can either be on defense and try and just keep it together,

which doesn't feel good, or you can look at the problem and go on offense and attack the problem. And that's exactly the mentality that Lynn's having right here. He wants to go on the attack. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Continuing on the 173rd,

along with other American units and Vietnamese troops work together to break the siege of special forces at Camp Duke Co. Am I saying that right? Duke Co? Captain Jordan, the Delta Company commander, leads his company on-foot patrols to exploit a suspected VC stronghold, as well as other armored patrols and security details. Sir, Captain Jordan, let me go with you on the patrols.

No, Black, you aren't in any shape to be going with us. I need soldiers, not a revenge squad. Yeah, so Black's getting left behind and he wants to go get after it and his boss is saying you just need to you need to slow your role black August 6th Company D ferries the Royal Australian Regiment Infantry to their area of operations August 17th The second and third platoons along with command track leave for extended operation September 9th 1965 Captain Joseph C Jordan relinquishes his command for a staff position with the great Brigade H. Captain John E. Dunlop Jr., formerly H.Q Company Commander, is recipient of the guide on. While on patrol, platoon sergeant, Trent, spec 5, Carrillo, PFC's Henry S. Baker and Robert L. Adams are all wounded when they come under heavy mortar fire by the still unseen enemy.

spec for Craig is credited with saving two lives and later receives the soldier's metal commendation. October 8th, 1965 Company D departs our Ben Hoa base for the Iron Triangle on a search and destroy operation. Not far down the road, around the first bend, a command detonated mine is set off by the VC completely destroying the APC, killing the driver, PFC, Michael Bronconc. and severely wounding staff sergeant St. Clair, Westerman, and Samson Moore. Son of bitches blew us up. Westerman later slurs through his wired jaws. He's trying to explain him to me what happened, blew the goddamn track off the PC and flipped it upside down. Killed Broncato. Good kid. God damn it. On and on it went. Warzone C and D, the Iron Triangle. Op plans, New Life and Smash in December, search and destroy and convoy security, along with

blocking force missions. That first tour of duty rolled on much the same way as it did the first sixth months until specialist fourth class Lynn M. Black Jr. got promoted. Then I went back to the world in July of 1966. Later that year, I appeared on a television morning show hosted by a guy named Preston Price at King TV, Seattle, Washington. So here he is, he's out of the army. Yeah.

With me was an army helicopter gunner who had become a war protester. The door gunner's mantra for the 30-minute show was that the United States had no business being in Southeast Asia. Why would communists on the other side of the world have any effect on our American freedom? He didn't believe that any young man of draft age

had any responsibility to fight an illegal war. We needed to question the use of illegal authority. This is more than I can take I accused the gunner of being a coward and a traitor to his country. I immediately launched into a duty honor country speech that would have shamed any man. It certainly did me. What I wanted to do was kick the unseen enemy's ass for whacking hue. It didn't make a dent in the door gunner's resolve.

And the two of us morning show guests began to talk over the top of one another as the lights were switched off in the studio. And the station went into a prolonged set of live beer and a podcast. dealers commercials in an adjacent studio the unseen enemy killed several of my fellow soldiers and had severely wounded many more my brother my best friend had been crippled for life or grotesquely wounded I can't say for sure I ever saw the face of the enemy during that tour of duty sitting in my apartment in Hawaii watching the evening news I felt guilty pissed off alone and completely consumed by feelings of revenge US planes began bombing, annoy.

We see you now, you sons of bitches. North Vietnam declares general mobilization. The Warsaw Pact promises to support North Vietnam. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, I'm re-enlisting. And if anyone hasn't figured out what. WTF, Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot stands for. It stands for what the fuck. Over?

So that's his first tour of duty. And it's crazy to think he's saying, hey, I don't even think I ever saw the enemy during that. And he's got his brother wounded. He's got other guys wounded and killed and never saw the enemy. Yeah, and they had a couple times. I forget how detailed he went in that first part, but when they were in the APCs, they got into the rubber plantations. We had rows and rows of trees.

You figure you go in there and, hey, man, we can figure it out. Well, they didn't, and they got hammered in there. I remember Lynn talking about that, in both tours of duty. At some point, when we got into a reflection thing, he would go back once in a while, but the rubber plantations. And they between the snipers and their controlled fire lanes, and obviously they set things up in practice before the 173 ever got there.

And then they had to be careful not to damage any rubber trees because they did the plantation owners, but they come back in the United States to pay for the damage rubber trees. Via Kong, well, you know, he can't deal with them. But politics, but that story, and the APC is that thin armor, he had some nightmares, though. I just can't imagine.

And that's a traditional unit early on. And they learn some lessons the hard way. Boy. Yeah, you know, when I did Lewis Puller Jr.'s book on here, Fortunate Son, and he's rotating between. three areas and you know like one of them was bridge security one of them was camp security and then one of them was called the Riviera I think or the Rivera but every time they'd go out there they'd get take take casualties and they'd never see the enemy and they would do a high five

with you know their platoon was heading out there's another platoon rotating back in yeah I forget if it was a platoon or company is I think it was a platoon size he'd be heading out he'd high five you know the other platoon commander and you know the guy'd say yeah we took two casualties or We Kazivac them out. Did you see the enemy? Nope. They're just going out there and taking hits and you don't see the enemy. And that's very similar to Iraq, you know, very similar to Iraq, where many, much of the time, guys be out there, they just get blown up by an IED, or you get hit by mortar fire, you get hit by sniper fire.

And that's the way the guerrillas fight against America. Absolutely. And then even with the snipers, they knew how to get back in the building. So they fired out to be no direct smoke or evidence of them where the rounds came from. You really had to have good ear detection or some kind of sensor. Yeah. Sixth Sense to figure out where the hell the rounds were coming from. I think it would have to be a six cents because you can't tell Fuss out where those rounds are coming from.

Not what that goes in. And you see in movies, you know, there's always a sniper in a window and his barrel stick and two feet out of the window. You're right the snipers are actually not even in that room. They're in a room deep one room deep Maybe even more down a hallway so their field of vision is tiny, but you there's no possible way that you're seeing them. Luckily some people learn to adapt and take the fight to the enemy indeed July 1968 and these are some thoughts during my first tour with the 173rd. I watched them Special forces and other recon men from the herd, which is a great nickname for the 173rd, the herd.

From the herd, Marine Force recon, the 82nd and the 101st airborne divisions. There's something different special about recon men. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I sure as hell want to be one. Intense yet always joking around. It was like they were fighting a different war than the rest of us. Everyone knew they were the best of the best.

We graduated from Company B Special Forces Training Group, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the beginning of the class had been 500 of the finest physically fit soldiers ever produced in the United States Army. That May, 1968, graduating class contained less than 70 men, standing at attention, proudly waiting to be awarded the coveted Green Beret. When did you graduate from Special Forces Training? December 67. So you're already done. and he's a new guy. Yeah.

I'm in camp. I'm an F-O-B-1, waiting for men to get there. We had earned the right to work with the best of the best. Hell, we were the best. And he kind of just runs through some of the special forces training back then.

In the beginning, phase one, we sat in the classroom for eight hours a day, listening to lectures and taking notes. We were given homework assignments, papers to write, and participated in small, in-class, and after-class working teams. Half the group was eliminated in phase one.

Every day we heard phrases like, if I wanted to sit on my ass all day in a classroom, I'd join the Air Force. This is college prep school. This is college prep school nonsense. A lot of what it took to get through phase one was attitude of willingness, being willing to adore the unexpected.

I don't think any of us expected the classroom. Did you spend that much time in the classroom? Oh, yeah. What were you guys learning about? Well, all the indoctrination stuff, history and then procedures. Then like our combo class, you sat down, you're in that class for eight to ten hours.

Just they're taking commo and land navigation, all kinds of different things like that. You had to take notes. I remember, well, I'm packing the move now. Going through finding some of my old notes back there's like, oh my God, I forgot about that. That's like I got it out of my mind. When you find those notes, just take a picture of them

and send them to me so we can talk about them at some point. That sounds freaking awesome. I got this book that I wrote when I was a E5 in the SEAL teams, and I was teaching, I was teaching communications. And I found it. It just says SEAL Team 1 communications. And it's basically on how to work to different radios, but then in the back I have a section called Lessons Learned.

I'm going to cover it on the podcast because it's legit. Is that right? Yeah. Maybe we have to go back and compare notes. Indeed. Got a little Morris Code training in there. Oh, I was one of the last guys that had to learn Morris Code. Yeah, did he done dumb, did he?

Yeah. The guy that was teaching us to it, because there was people that were pushing back, like, we don't need to learn Morris Code. You know, we have satellites now. And this guy says, in the event of, what was his phrase? He said, in the event of a nuclear war, the only thing that's going to be punching through the ionosphere is HF comms and Morris Code. So we got to learn it.

Of course, I'm 19 years old. totally down. I'm like, cool, if there's a nuclear war, I'm ready to make comms. Yeah, they don't teach you.

In basic seal training, there is no mental challenge whatsoever. I mean, there's no, you don't sit in a classroom, you don't sit in a classroom probably ever for more than like an hour

when they're trying to teach you dive physics or hydrographic reconnaissance. It's just totally They don't do that with us. That's why you get some knuckle draggers in the teams. Yeah. You know, the special forces guy just, you know, they got, they like that.

They like that kind of thing. They like that kind of thing, being a little bit smarter. During phase two, we were divided amongst our various specialty groups, such as operations, intelligence, medical weapons and so on. I was the hands-on portions. This was the hands-on portion training. In my case, I was being trained as a weapons specialist, which I imagine everybody. wants to be. Oh yeah.

Boy toys to the max. Yeah. And how do they pick what you're going to do? They gave you tests and then they're supposed to indicate what you're good at and then there's needs, what the army needs. The needs of the army. Yeah. And you ended up comms. Yeah. I ended up comms too

because I had this I stood watch at the SEAL Team one quarterdeck. Like a new guy, you're going to stay at watch. And so I'm standing watch. I'm standing with this officer, he's like a platoon commander, but he's, you know, more experienced than me. And he's talking to me, and we have to stay there the whole night. You know, we're like sleeping in the bunk beds or whatever to make sure no one attacks SEAL team one.

This is like 1991. And the guy after talking to me, he says, you know what? You know, and he's asking me, well, what do you join the SEAL teams for? I want to be an operator. I want to go on missions, right? And he's in the morning, he says, hey, you know what? what you should do is you should go to the radio room tomorrow or when we get off and go tell me you want to be a radio man because the radio man always goes on operations as though

is the only guy that's going on in every operation I mean the medic kind of but the radio man for sure have to and so I went up got off a watch went right up banged on the radio I want to be a radio man why I want to go on every operation cool right on sign up here I was probably the only person in the history of the seal team wanted to do that because what does everyone else want to do do they want to be a machine gunner and a sniper oh yeah want to be a weapons guy so fast forward a little bit he's home in seattle on leave he's got some of this sf buddies with him uh named bob and steve and here they are kind of hanging out with hugh and here we go hugh one of my two younger brothers has joined us during our last afternoon out on our sister Carla's back deck.

This is our last day in the civilian world. This is before they go on appointment. He's wearing a tank top and t-shirt and a pair of shorts, which shows off the scar running from one knee up the length of his leg to his hip. After a couple beers, he tells the story about the mortar attack. His leg wound, broken ribs, arm and shrapnel-filled face and torso. He recounts the months spent reconnaissance. covering at Madigan Army Hospital.

Bob and Steve are visibly shaken by the sight of wounds and more so by the story of inadequate medical treatment and disdain from the hospital staff for anyone dumb enough to get suckered into volunteering for Nam. The mood of the afternoon darkens and alcohol consumption increases. Last day, Galette softly drones. Yep, give me a beer.

How do you say this? Engelke? How do he say his name? Do you know? Engelke. Engelke. Steve Engelke and Bob Gillette. Those are his two buddies.

Oh, yeah. Oh, Gillette? Okay. Engelke. Engelke. Engelke. Angle key. Man, I'm going to keep messing that one.

Engel key. Stick with Steve. Carla serves up in early dinner. We eat our last supper and Hugh bluntly asks, what the hell are you going to do back in that shit hole? For a moment I sit there, surprised, staring at him, dumbfounded. It's payback time, I quietly reply. Payback for what?

He looks surprised. Then it dawns on him. You dumbass. You aren't my babysitter, my big brother anymore. I don't need you to fight any battles on my behalf. I did my duty, took my hits, and now I'm going to college. It's time for me to build my life. The government got there three years, and you can bet you're bippy that there's no one in this country who gives a shit

except those who went there and did it. Sometimes I'm not sure most of them care either. Time to move on, brother. Time to move on. Grab me one of those beers out of the cooler, will you? You stupid idiot. And here's Lund's thoughts on that. Now that announcement certainly shoots the shit out of my public reason for going back.

I've been telling everyone who asked that I'm going to extract a little hide from the Charlie's who nailed my little brother. Now he's telling me he's not my little brother and to grow up. Well, crap. Why the hell didn't he make that speech before I re-enlisted? Laughing to myself. I'm a green beret. I'm going to be a recon man. That's why I'm going back.

I want to find out what it's like to be the best at something. Fast forward, denang Safe House 22. The three of us anxiously await a top secret briefing in a small, secured out building that once was a carriage house. A sergeant first class, E7 is standing behind a long, wide, thick plank table. Behind him, a captain wearing the green beret in a starched uniform sits quietly watching with an offhanded relaxed gesture so typical of SF men. The E7 motions to us to sit. Rising from his chair, the captain says, during your training at Bragg, you men were selected

as potential candidates for military assistance command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group. Studies and observations. What the hell is that? God damn it, I came back to be a recon man. Sounds like they're going to make us into a bunch of clerks. I will give you a series of briefings, the first of which requires you to make a decision as to whether you want to go on with the second. Before we continued, what you are about to hear is classified top secret, requiring you to sign the non-disclosure form in front of you.

Read the form. If you choose not to sign, get up and leave the room. No questions ask. Read the form. Okay. Sign the form and give it to the E7. This better not be a clerk's job. Top secret clerk.

I read the form and scribble my signature at the bottom, handing it to the E7 as he circulates among us. I know this is a lot of it. And he goes through some history. That's what part of the briefing is. He says this. Four years ago, April, 1964, the government of South Vietnam created the special exploitation service or SES to replace the VN special forces command. Concurrently, the CIA transferred.

its advisory role to the newly formed military assistance command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, or MAC v. SAUG, which is run by the U.S. military joint services. Last year, the South Vietnamese renamed the SES, the Strategic Technical Directorate. Clearing his throat, the captain picks up a glass of water taking a long drink. And why do I need to know all this? Questions? No. Okay, to the point. You men will be assigned to an FOB. Forward Operations Base or F-O-Bs have been in existence since 1964.

They are located in Fubai, Kaysan, Kamduk, and Danang. F-O-Bs conduct classified operations outside South Vietnam. Classified operations doesn't sound like a clerk's job to me. This is getting interesting. Operations in Laos commenced September 1965 as part of Operation Shining Brass, and recently have been renamed Prairie Fire. Out-of-country operations are conducted by recon teams called spike teams, hatchet forces, and slam companies.

Break those down for us real quick. Spike teams, hatchet forces, and there's also like RT, which is recon team. Well, in the early days, up until the end of 68, it was Spike Team because it was top secret code for a recon team. Got it. And then you had the hatchet force, which could be anything from a platoon up to a company-sized operation, like Operation Tailwind. And then the slam operations, that would be one or two hatchet force components, depending on the size.

They would go in and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, back it up, and then the Air Force would have air power. So anything that backed up on the trail, they would hit it, hit it hard. And, of course, the NVA responded very quickly, and the elements that were on the ground, ground got hammered. So slam got slammed with those operations. That's why by the time you get the tailwind in 70, they changed the ammo a little bit. But that's the breakdown. Got it. Yeah. This this captain continues on. Mac Vsav. Mac Vsag is a joint service high command unconventional warfare task force whose charters to conduct top secret sabotage, psychological, and special operations in north and south Vietnam Laos, Cambodia, and southern China. It has been given the title

Studies and Observation Group as a cover. The joint staff is allegedly performing an analysis of the lessons learned up to this point in the war. It's obviously a special operations group. Mac v. Sog is organized into two field commands. Command and Control South and North also called CCS and CCN. I know this is a lot of material. And I'm jumping. head. I know this is a lot of material, but we want you to know what you're volunteering for to continue. And he keeps the throughout this and Lynn doesn't actually Lynn says this. I volunteered to be here. I volunteered for recon. Sounds like I'm getting exactly what I asked for. How old is Lynn at this point? It's nice. 75. No, at this point. Oh, there. Um,

he must be young because he didn't do. Oh, no, he did a deployment with the, oh, yeah. No, he's He's older actually. Yeah. He's actually probably older than you. Probably. I was 22. I think Lynn would have been, he's a year ahead of me. Okay.

Yeah. Like he's 75 now. I'm four. There you go. But still, damn, that's young. But you know why? The reason I ask you that is because when I think about what a young American male mind is like, it's like this. You're sitting here and you there's nothing more that anyone wants to hear than

a Joint Service High Command Unconventional Warfare Task Force whose charters to conduct top secret sabotage, psychological, and special operations. Sign me up. There we go. Airborne. Continuing on, MacVee's mission is twofold. Support South Vietnam against communist aggression, assist in the development of the Southern Republic. The United States and our allies will succeed by winning the people, depriving the enemy of safe havens, rests and supplies, depriving the enemy.

And this is where Mack v. Saug comes into the picture. Sogue has five primary responsibilities and the capability to undertake additional special missions as required. Listen up. Sog's primary responsibilities include first cross-border operations conducted to disrupt Khmer Rouge, pathos. Pathet Lao and NVA in their own territories. So that's Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Secondly, keep track of all the imprisoned and missing Americans and conducting raids to assist and free them

as part of the escape and evasion mission for all captured U.S. ground personnel and downed airmen. Mission three is training and dispatching agents into North Vietnam to run resistance operations called black psychological operations, such as establishing false national NVA broadcasting stations inside North Vietnam and yellow psychological operations as typified by the Way Citadel propaganda transmitter mentioned earlier. Four, the captain holds up four fingers waving them at us. Mac V. Sogg is also entrusted with specific tasks such as kidnapping, assassination,

and insertion of rigged mortar rounds into enemy ammunition supply system, which are set to explode and destroy their crews upon use. He pauses to study our faces, again clearing his throat. Five, he coughs again, is the retrieval of sensitive documents and equipment, if lost or captured through enemy action. He pauses. Any questions? Silence in the room.

Lynn thinks to himself, this is a hell of a lot more than just recon. Wow. The next level of information reveals daily operational details. I will show you out of the country areas of operations, talk in detail about the team makeup, and the commitment we hope you will volunteer to make. Any of you who want to bail out, now is the time. He pauses looking around the room.

Looks like we're all in. This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Reaching to his left, the captain rolls back a black cloth covering a map of Southeast Asia. Mac V. Sog is a top secret organization operating the width and breadth of the DMZ, west and the Laos and south down through Cambodia. The shaded areas you see delineate the AO, our area of operations. You will enter the AO with no personal identification. Your weapons will not contain serial numbers.

You and your gear will be what we call sterile. You will carry nothing that identifies you as an American. You will not carry pictures of your loved ones or anything else that doesn't directly pertain to your mission. occasionally you will use enemy weapons as well and dress like them he pauses are there any questions he picks up a glass of water are there any questions the captain asked the second times the second time receiving no response other than stunned faces he continues accepting this assignment accepting this assignment means you will be expected to run a minimum of three cross-border missions to complete your tour of duty with SOG

after those missions you can request a change of assignment to finish out your year in country if you wish to leave sog we will honor that request if you wish to leave special forces we will send you to another unit or you can stay and continue running missions now are there any questions yes sir are we spies asked one of our party without hesitation by international law Yes, this is a covert operation, as I said, top secret. Our job is to trail watch, POW snatch, wiretap, ambush, and just plain old enemy interdiction. You will be assigned to recon teams, RTs. Those teams are led by three Americans who are supported by nine mercenary commandos, which make up a full 12-man team.

The American leader is designated a 1-0. The assistant team leader is a 1-1, and finally the radio operator has a desist. designation of one, two. The mercenaries are paid by us to work in the AO you see on this map. Additionally, there might be an Arvin Special Forces team member whose job it is to handle the mercenaries while you do your intelligence work. E7. Next form, please. Please read this carefully before accepting or rejecting it. If you sign, you will become members of the most elite fighting force the United States has ever put in the field against an enemy. We are fighting a secret war.

As I said earlier, you can never divulge your participation, recognize, or give credence to any second or third party knowledge of our existence. The captain and E7 move into a shadowed corner quietly talking. I read carefully through the non-disclosure statements, threats of imprisonment, disgrace, loss of rights and freedoms. I sign. Talk about getting what you ask for. the E7 distributes another set of papers to each of us. Gentlemen, welcome to Mac V. Sog, smiles the captain. We now need to address this last little consideration.

If you're unlucky enough to be captured and wind up as a POW, we have a cover story along with an individual recognition procedure. Don't share what you are about to write with anyone. There are questions on this form. They are the same questions for each of you. However, your response will be individual and will be coming. the key to recognizing you and obtaining your release as a POW. Please fill in the answers, make them simple and conversational, put the form into the attached

manila envelope and seal it. Hand the envelope to me and no one else in this room. Do not look at each other's answers. Collecting the envelopes and stuffing them into a canvas attache, the captain says, men, thank you for volunteering. Good luck and goodbye. Yeah, I forgot that part about the last, the second document. You put your individual information down.

I forgot about that limb, being sharper as he is. He must have taken notes. He's got some incredible information. Man. Welcome to the Secret War. Welcome to Sog. Yes, indeed. Did you, when you were going through that moment,

did you have any like hesitation or were you just so all in it? It was ridiculous. Ridiculous. Yeah, absolutely. Just like Lynn. I mean, you know, in my case, we had been going through our training for all those months. And it's like, this is the war. And like, you know, the Green Beret movie had been out.

What would the Duke do? Yeah. And what's crazy is you were told, you were told, don't volunteer for SOG. Oh, yeah, we went through training group. They're like, hey, listen. Yeah. Don't volunteer for SOG. Whatever you do, don't volunteer for SOG.

Well, even there, it wasn't like direct. would be like, you know, when you go, get to an A camp, learn about the country to people, and there's projects, don't volunteer. Because those people are dying. And this is 68. We had so many teams who've been wiped out by that point. The briefer didn't tell Lynn anything about that. The Cassie rate by that point.

Oh, yeah. Gearing up. Each individual will wear or carry sterile fatigues or tiger suit, flop brim hat with a portion of panel sewn inside the top jungle boots pistol belt harness first aid packet pill kit heavy and sharp canteens with water purification tablets smoke grenades compass survival kit individual pistol submachine gun and sawed off m79 weapons signal mirror panel strobe light pen flare with

flares ammo pouches rucksack with reinforced straps rations weapons cleaning kit maps maps Pancho and liner, can opener, P-38 or knife with can opener, waterproof matches, insect and leach repellent, jungle sweater, RT10 survival radio penlight, six foot of nylon cord, parachute suspension cord, Swiss seat, two snap links, notebook and pencil, two plastic bags, fragmentation white phosphorus and gas grenades, two cravat bandages, gloves, Claymore, serum. The team will need to carry a camera and film binoculars, ANPRC-25 radio, or as you call it, a prick 25, with extra battery, M-14 tow-popper mines and booby traps, anti-intrusion device, wire taps, and equipment for prisoner snatches.

That's all. What exactly is a wire tap? It's like, go ahead, tilt. You have the telephone lines, so that's the wire, and you tap into it. And then in our case, you go up the telephone pole, put the wire. R wires onto their wire, tape it, then come down the pole, cover with mud, so if anybody walked by they wouldn't see it. And we'd have it tied into a, at that time, Stadi-Arts cassette recording.

And we would record, even if there was nobody talking, the CIA had us do the actual recordings so that they could hear it, they would amplify the tapes. They could, they said they amplified it a hundred times, they could hear things in the background because the NVA phones, when they're in the cradle, they're live. Like our phones, they shut off. Those were still alive, and the CIA, we give them all our tapes, and they would amplify it. They said they got intel off those things. Yeah, so you hear people talking in the background about stuff.

And, of course, CIA, we give, they take, and they're done, you never hear anything back at all. So when you say your wiretops is part of the list of stuff that you guys have, what is it, like a little apparatus or something? It was the actual cassette recorder, then the wire, and then at the end of the wire, it would be two little things. that you tape onto it or do or go through sometimes the wire you have like a double area yeah yeah it in between yeah and then you tape it huh how big was the cassette recorder shoebox I'm picturing shoebox was as big as a shoebox no no not that big it'd be like this side like this side like that size of a book like a double oh yeah like the old school very old Like the, yeah, the handle.

Was there tape cassettes in there? Or was it like some kind of reel-to-reel scenario? No, no kidding. You guys were high-speed. Oh, I'll tell you. This is 1960. None of the real stuff in the field. Oh, yeah.

And the cassettes, you know, I think we had to, by then they had the two-hour cassette so you could do an hour on each one side. As opposed to a 60 with 30 on each side. And someone's sitting down there freaking flipping those damn cassettes over a you're out in Laos in Cambodia. Hey, it keeps you something to divert your attention. Watching the trail. Swat and mosquitoes.

So I mentioned that the way he sets this book up as you're reading, and it makes it very conversational in a way, but he sets a lot of it up as debriefing. Yeah. And he also wrote this, and this is one of his thoughts. Have you ever seen yourself through the eyes of someone you've become? No, this isn't an existential question, really. Have you?

And what that made me think about is when you're debriefing, you're kind of, you're kind of forcing yourself to detach and explain what you did. And it's almost like you're seeing yourself in a third person situation. So in this particular set to set this up, they're in there. And this isn't, we talked a little bit about you guys playing Liars Dice and sitting around the bar and having some drinks and debriefing amongst yourself. Right. Well, this one is set up not like that.

This is an official debriefing. Oh, yeah. And did you guys always do official debriefings? Because it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like this was an operation that was so significant that it required a, like an on-site special debriefing. Oh, yeah, always. We went right to S2. Okay, so you guys always did this.

AAR as a, that's an SOP. Got it. Absolutely. And it was really hot. They would get the initial word. down by radio transmission on RTT and then come back with a FOIA through action report. Yeah, it sounds like this one is pretty significant. So, and I'm going to fast forward just a little bit, and here we go.

Specialist Black, please begin, which again, this is crazy. He's an E4. Yeah. Freaking crazy. Specialist Black, please begin. Apprehensively, I mentally moved back in time. The monthly Saigon target list arrived, and as usual, the team leaders gathered in the Tactical Operation Center

to pick or be assigned their missions. Some have to be assigned because no one wants to run those targets. Why is that? They're known to be one-way trips. I see, responds the sergeant. Oscar 8. which is known to be one of those one-way trips is always assigned on a lottery system.

My understanding is that the last 12 teams attempting to run that mission have never been heard from again. Or were so shot up that they've been disbanded. So this one particular mission set was called Oscar 8. And this Oscar 8, there's been 12 teams that have gone to execute this operation

and they've either totally disappeared or they've been so so messed up that they disbanded the teams. Oh, yeah. It's just a nasty target is where major roads came together. I forget the exact highways, like 92. There's a couple other that all came into northern part of South Vietnam. And we later learned they had a major headquarters area there. And that's what like on the ground, the first book with Pat, first chapter with Pat Watkins,

they were in Oscar 8. When the NBA came up and said, it's your turn for guard duty. That's what Lynn's talking about. He says One of them One of the analysts Specialist Black We're interested in the

Intel gathered During the VR We know the history of the target Chies the lieutenant analyst So the guy's basically going Look we know it's a bad target We want to know about your visual reconnaissance

Sir That's and he's showing a lot of restraint right now Sir That's precisely the point I'm getting at Please bear with me as I step through this process So I don't forget any of the details Keep calm, man. He doesn't have a clue of the edge I'm teetering on.

Calm down. Got to get calm down. How long's it take to get over the after mission jitters? Be quick about it, specialist, replies the lieutenant impatiently. Yeah, a ramp at that. Yes, sir. Alabama won the lottery. R1-1.

I point to Angelki. God, angle key. Angle key. I point to angle key. Volunteered to lead us through a map study, picking primary, secondary, and alternate landing zones, landing and extraction zones. We studied every bit of intelligence. We could lay our hands on about the weather patterns in the AO, area of operation, the known enemy, and how they maneuver. Sometimes you can pick up more information in the club than in the reports, not in this case.

there are no surviving old hands to talk about the lottery. There was no intel in the target folder. That's the point, sir. So they're going in blind, no turnover. And then fast forward a little bit. The analyst says, you were provided no target intelligence. We were told none was available,

armed with maps and a camera Bulldog scheduled a VR two days before mission launch offers one-one. Bulldog, whose code name is that? It was the code name of Sergeant Stride, the Alabama team leader, R10. As you know, he was greased, killed in action. Like 1-1 said. The same person sitting next to you, the same 1-1? Are you referring to specialist Anglekey?

Yes, sir, recon team Alabama's 1-1, the assistant team leader. Like he said, he was sick, so I ran the VR with Bulldog. We needed the intel to be as fresh as possible for the mission. It takes one day to develop film and study the pictures. So it was then or never if we were going to launch on October 5th. 1-1 wasn't feeling well. That made me the photographer. Bulldog and I squeezed side by side into the narrow rear seat of a Vietnamese Air Force U-17.

The weather was clear. We took off from Fu Bai Airfield circling out over the China Sea. We came in high, taking pictures of the entire A.O. yelling at each other over the engine noise in order to discuss what we could see and attempting to orient what we saw to the maps. With those windows, and this is a thought, with those windows open and the maps were blowing all over the damn place until Bulldog got them under control. We flew under clouds and over rivers of mist, filled ridges, plateaus, and valleys

picking a primary and two alternate LZs. Bulldog ordered the pilot to make a photo pass over the primary LZ at 100 feet. The pilot objected and told us he wanted to stay high and leave the area soon. Good thinking, replies the sergeant. Bulldog slapped the pilot on the back of his head. So this is him. I'm not doing this very well, but this is Lynn Black kind of explaining, hey, Bulldog ordered the pilots to make another pass.

And the pilot said, no, I'm not going to do it. And then the sergeant says, good thinking. And he says well Bulldog slapped the pile of the back of his helmet barking the order again We drop down to teard draw to tree top level and I managed one picture before the nose the ship rose and we began banking for another pass as we climbed Our plane was stitched with machine gun fire rounds ripped through the floor exited the ceiling the cabin was sprayed and flecked with blood as the co-pilot was struck under the chin his helmet slammed against the ceiling ricocheting into my lap still containing part of his head that picture was will be imprinted in my mind forever. Forever.

And he says, he thinks it's a pain. I guess I'm sad. Sadness that grips the soul of my very being. I like that co-pilot. Before we took off from Fubai, he was trying to tell me a joke in really bad English. I didn't get it, but laughed anyways. You're okay, Specialist Black.

Sorry, you okay, Specialist Black? Asked Chief Sogg glancing at his medical team. Yes, sir. I was telling you about the incident, the image of the helmet and partial head popped into my mind. I'd never seen anything like that before. I was fighting a thousand emotions all at once, all flooding through me, forcing my eyes to glisten. Those kind of images have a way of staying with us for the reminder of our lives. Each of us has to find a way to deal with them in order to go on. Continue with your story, orders the chief patiently.

Yes, sir. I collect my thoughts. The pilot dropped the Cessna. back down to tree top level we got the hell out of Dodge and the wild west yeah you know you You mentioned rems you know you said that this lieutenant analyst is a ramp and for those people that don't know Remp is stands for rear echelon motherfucker and that's the person that's these are the people that are Not on the front lines not doing the fighting it's actually the genesis of the name of my consulting company Echelon front which is not rear echelon. Hey, I'm in the rear with a

gear but hey front line leadership and and this whole scene you know for whatever Hollywood director is listening to this right now or whatever producer who who makes movies echo Charles oh all of those people whoever's gonna make this into a movie this is the iconic scene oh of the rear echelon motherfuckers trying to debrief this guy and we're gonna get into the mission and once you once you realize what what he just went through, you can see why this is such an intense scene. Because he's sitting there just having barely survived, lost guys, and they're asking him these questions,

and it's just your classic iconic scene of a disconnect between the people on the front lines and the rear echelon motherfuckers. And that's October 3rd, two days before the actual mission doing a VR. Oh, yeah, that's right. So the debrief is after the mission, but the part that he's talking about, they haven't even done the mission yet. Yeah.

This is they're getting shot at as they're doing a visual reconnaissance. They lose a pilot while they're doing the visual reconnaissance. Can you imagine? This is why this is tilt. If you did this VR and you came back to me and said, hey, Jocko, we did the visual reconnaissance. By the way, we had a pilot shot.

The plane got shot up. I got a used helmet if you want to use it. Yeah. I'd say, hey, guess what? We're not going into there. I'd say, well, it's not happening. Okay, let's not we're not go. It's a no go. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

You guys had freaking balls. We didn't have you. God. Yeah. Crazy. The insertion Covey was Captain Greg Hartness. Covey 265 with his call sign. His rider was Sergeant First Class Patrick Watkins code name Mandolin. The second Covey pilot was current. Don Bourne Castle and his rider was Staff Sergeant Bob Parks.

His code name is Spider. Lieutenant George Miller, Scarface 56, was the lead gunship pilot who escorted the King B's into the insertion. So now we're actually getting into the operation. And they do, you know, I'm skipping forward, you know, and look, as I said before, to get the rest of the details, just buy the book and read it. And it's, it's an incredible, the details. that he captures are awesome. So, but I'm going to fast forward a little bit.

So, um, the, he covers the insertions and then the lieutenant says, the, the analyst lieutenant says, we expect you to take as long as you need on this portion of the debrief. When you're finished, I'm sure your one, one will fill any missing details. Gather your thoughts and begin when ready. One one, fill in the details. Never mind that back across the fence we're moving through dense foliage a ridge rising to a right Okay, here goes

RT Alabama was ambushed at approximately 0,800 hours on October 5th 1968 at coordinates Yankee Charlie 561-69 or two Our point man, Hoa was hit multiple times in his chest and lower body in that same instant three rounds penetrated our one zero team leader's head. Cowboy, the interpreter, was behind stride and took an RPD round below his left shoulder. I was behind Cowboy when he went down. The assistant team leader, the 1-1, went down at the same time. I thought he was hit as well.

Are you hit? I yell at the 1-1, receiving no response. Damn, he's dead too. Only six of us left standing. Bring out the bodies. engage the enemy Lakua the 0-1 Vietnamese team leader orders the recon team Alabama

to fire a full magazine just off the ground level to suppress enemy fire at our right on a slight rise there's a line of NVA firing down into our position they're above us to the right over there I yell over the din of the ambush thumbing the selector of my car 15 to single shot I began picking them off one at a time 20 rounds expended I pushed the magazine extraction

button on the receiver, shredding vegetation royals in the air punctuated by green NVA tracers searching out their targets. Fumbling for another magazine in a canteen pouch on my web gear, I peer through the raging flora storm in the direction of the tracer source. An NVA I shot a moment ago as getting up and pointing in my direction. Okay, second magazine snaps into place, slapping the left side of the receiver of the car 15 bolt slams home as I raised the weapon firing twice. Stay down, damn it. We got to break contact, I yell at the team. Continuing down the line, emptying magazine to the NBA fall like targets in a shooting gallery.

Another line moves in behind them, taking their place. We're in a low spot. We have to get out of this hole, I yell. Cowboy interprets to the team. Who's cowboy? Is he an American interpreter? Queries the puzzle lieutenant analyst as he searches through his notes. Huh?

What did you ask, sir? Cowboy. Who's cowboy? Cowboys are Vietnamese interpreter. Don Van Khan. one one inserts quick quickly continue order orders lieutenant crouching i reload surveying our situation then grab the radio handset off my web harness covey blackjack we have three killed and two wounded over who's down covey rider patrick watkins calmly demands point bulldog and one one over blackjack

you're not a doctor nor for that fact a medic you can't determine who's dead or alive you must attempt to bring out all the bodies for verification of death. A fresh swarm of automatic weapon fire up another foliage hurricane drowning out Covey communication. Finally it settles down. Mandolin, Blackjack, we're taking heavy automatic fire. We'll be lucky to get the living out. They have us surrounded on three sides and are firing down into our position. I'm moving the team out of this hole. Over? Chewoy, translated means surrender. Yels one of the the NVA in a short lull of the ambush. I don't think so.

I yell back, firing in his general direction. Alabama's weapons on full auto drown out further Chuhoy requests. 1-1 is alive and praying. In the middle of a fire, in the middle of a gunfight, this is no time to pray. Get up off your sorry ass and return fire. I yell. 1-1 looks at me with doe eyes, shifting his body and attempt to make him, make his form smaller. I kneeled down next to him and find he has a Catholic rosary pressed to his lips and is quietly chanting a prayer.

I need you to take tactical command while I do my job directing airstrikes and get us a ride home. I don't know what to do. I can't think. I can't. Engelke slips into himself. Well, whiskey tango foxtrot over. Leaves and twigs rain down on Alabama as the ground erupts around us from automatic weapons fire. So his 1-1 is locked up mentally at this point.

Yeah, gone. Body there, but no mind, no courage. And he actually thought he was dead. When everyone got shot in that opening ambush, Lynn, which, by the way, his nickname, his codename is Blackjack, so that's who it is. Blackjack thinks he's dead, but then he finally gets to him and looks at him,

and he's not even shot, but he's having a meltdown. He's on his rosaries. Back on the radio. Mandolin. So Mandolin is the call sign of the covey. Mandolin, Blackjack, you're right. We don't have three dead. We only have two. One-one is alive. The NVA are now on all sides with snipers climbing into trees. I have to take action quickly or die. Blackjack, put your one-one on the horn over.

So here's the covey rider saying, hey, put the guy in charge on the radio. I attempt to push the radio handset into one-one's hands, but he wraps both hands around his rosary, chanting. He drops his head, drawing his form further inward. Cowboy tell the team, I'm the 1-0 and Lokes in charge of B-Team. As if I had to tell them, Lokes already doing the job. Mandolin, Blackjack, 1-1 is unable to talk right at the moment. I'm the 1-0 of Alabama. Stand by.

He's just freaking taken over. Blackjack's ready. Oh, yeah. No hesitation whatsoever. None. Roger replies Mandolin. Cowboy, I have two men strip the bodies, get all weapons, ammunition, maps, anything the NBA can use. Distribute their gear to the team quickly.

Now, Cowboy interprets as the two immediately go to work on the bodies while the rest of the rest continue returning fire. Cowboy, come with me. Tell Loki's in command until we get back. I give Loka thumbs up as the two of us slowly crawl, advancing on hands and needs towards a cluster of bushes, flicking aside a large black beetle as to not crush it. Isn't that funny? We're able to move close enough to the NBA

that cowboy hears their commander yelled as troops prepare to charge their position. At the periphery of my vision sits a small bird, staring, sitting below the normal human level of observation. In an instant, in a flicker of wings, it vanishes into the undergrowth. I wish I could do that. Must have been after the beetle.

Everybody seems to be after somebody. A kind-hearted reverence for life pushes its way into my thoughts. Get the Claymore out of Cowboys rock, blasting cap from the survival vest. That's it. Cowboy finishes out a hand grenade and wire spool. Hastily, we rig the Claymore in the direction of those willing men from the north. The loving husband and the son-in-law who likes to grow his own vegetables. Fuck them all.

A cloud of shredded foliage rains down on Cowboy and me as we work our way back towards Alabama, laying the detonation wires. Get out of the line of fire, my little friend, I whisper after the bird. The insistent husbands, brothers, and son-in-laws stampede towards our indefensible position with weapons blazing, with their bulging veins, frothing at the mouth, the whites of their eyes wide. Cowboy detonates the Claymore. The air is filled with animal-like howls, gunfire, the smell of cordite, rotting vegetation, and death. We have blown a bloody path right down through the middle of them.

Claymore smokes clearing I yell Alabama up follow me The team moves through the path of carnage with our weapons on full auto as we assist the wounded online This is what you get for screwing one of the with one of the black brothers What's left of their ragged lines sporadically fires into our small band Cowboy stumbles and falls having taken another round in his left side He comes haltingly to his feet gives the giving the okay signal once seemingly through the past NBA battle line once seemingly through and passed the NBA battle line loak collapse collapses our our online formation to inline and orders the team to go in on single shot the left of cowboy shirt is soaked

with blood blocked by impassable terrain on one side and NBA forces on the other we work our way through the dense undergrowth back toward our point of insertion to our rear and in parallel on both flanks we can hear the NBA regrouping gathering their strength random enemy shooting subsides as they begin firing signal shots to indicate the path of our travel. Flanking teams of two trackers for each enemy squad intermittently push us along. As they reveal themselves, we cut them down with single shots. Fire discipline is good. Got to find a place where we can stop to patch up our wounded.

Don't fire randomly. Kill the enemy, Loke orders. We continue maneuvering on our way through the high, thick underbrushed toward the primary LZ, leaving behind the strike. the stripped bodies of our point man, HOA, and our one zero Jim Stride. Oh, I know. Can you imagine?

I mean, just how any of them lived. Yeah. It's amazing to see, too. I mean, just the, just to see someone step up both, both Blackjack and Cowboy. Cowboy who's getting shot, he's wounded, and he's just leading. And Lynn's,

stepping up and leading when all this mayhem is taking. And, and, you know, I always say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, right? If these guys didn't step up and lead, everyone's dead. 100%.

It's a guarantee. These guys step up, they take action, they lead, and at this point, they're going to, it looks like they're going to get some progress. Yeah, his 0-1 was sharp and fearless

because he rallied them, took care of the other details while Lynn and Cowboy going on. And poor cowboy, and hit the second time like that. Oh my God. He was a big Vietnamese. He was tall. Who is the 0-1?

Cowboy. He was the interpreter. The 0-1, I forget his name. You mentioned it there. I just covered the 0-1. That's our V-A-N-Eat-Mese counterpoint. The 1-0 is the American, the 0-1. He's had the experience because Alabama,

four months earlier, the entire team was wiped out, except for the 1-0. And he escaped and did a personal E&A. back to the Ashaw Valley, and they picked them up. So 68 was a bad year for Alabama. But the 0-1 did not go on that faithful mission, so they had his experience for October the 5th between him and cowboy. Oh, yeah, Loke.

That's who we're talking about. Loke is the 0-1. And then the other guy on there is Doty Kwong, who later became to Idaho. I stole him from Alabama a couple years later. He was great. but just a fearless, absolute warrior. Badasses.

Oh, yeah, true and true. Yeah. I mean, what's crazy is, you know, the bombers in Europe, the bombers in Europe, the American bombers that bombed Europe in World War II, I think they had to do 25 missions. If they did 25 missions, they were done.

And sometimes they'd push them a little further. But, yeah, that was what the rule in place was. And the rule that they gave you guys was, three. I mean, those bombers, those guys were taking mass casualties, mass casualties. Oh, absolutely. Profound casualties.

And yet they said, hey, you guys are going to do 25 missions. And you guys, they're saying, hey, listen, can we get three out of you? Yeah. See, now, we never, I don't remember that part of the debrief if we ever had it. See, Lynn remembers those details. That's why his stuff is just so great. It's vivid. Yeah, and don't forget,

They taught the bombers. They remember the Frenchman. His dad was the lead on that one squadron. 23, only one comes back out of a thousand airplanes. So, yeah, same catastrophic effects by the enemy. Continuing on October 5th, Blackjack, Mandolin. We're returning with the King Bees to Fubai for fuel. No extraction is possible for at least two, maybe three hours over.

Another covey is on station. You'll be talking to Spider. As fast as possible, Mandolin, we're about to find out how much longer we can hold out. Don't panic, Blackjack, find the path. Don't let them pin you down. Spider, Spider, Bob Parks, X10 of RT, Idaho, just like Mandolin.

Spider, Blackjack, over? Blackjack, Spider. Keeping your cool, buddy. Keeping your cool, buddy? He's there. We're not alone. Man, having you guys with that direct relationship with your covies and they sat in the briefs and they knew what you were going to do,

that's a powerful thing. That was a key. Having that rider and that's the epitome of it, that moment in time right there because Lynn's like, uh-oh, Wackens is gone, the Kingbies are gone, nobody's going to come back for two or three hours. You be cool? There's spider talking to him.

The night before he's beating his ass on liars dice at the clubhouse. God. I don't know if you've ever heard this story, but Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave. Yeah. He was in Ramadi, and he's Anglico. I think he's supporting an army unit. And it's the first real close air support that he's actually calling.

And, you know, he's a former F, or he's an F-18 pilot. And it just so happens by coincidence and miracle and other coincidence that he keys up the mic and says, this is Lightning 6. And the guy that answers, the guy that's in the air about to. So give ordinance for him is like one of his buddies. No. And he says something like, hey, Chip, it's, you know, hey, Chip, it's Maverick. I'm ready to rock and roll.

He goes, oh, it's like this. So having that relationship that you guys had with these covies, man. Critical. Absolutely critical. So he says, keeping your cool, buddy. Stand by Spider, they're pushing us from all sides. We're moving back towards the LZ perimeter and we'll be ready for extraction over. Grabbing a claymore from one of the rucksacks.

I set up a 10 second fuse pointing at it to our rear while Loak covers me. We can hear them screaming in agony as we move through the bush back towards our insertion. And you know what? Before we go on, I just want to go back to this because it's a little bit of a point of contention in the book. If you remember, I read this part where he says, we continue maneuvering our way through the high, thick underbrush, toward the primary LZ, leaving behind the stripped bodies of our point man, HOA, and our one zero Jim Stride.

So he had to make a decision, the hardest possible decision that a person could have to make, which is, hey, these guys are dead, we're going to strip their bodies and we're going to leave them. Because if we try and look, anybody that hasn't ever carried a freaking another human being through rough terrain, you have no idea. You have no idea, look.

And you can say, oh, I'll pick up my, I'll pick up Echo right now and I'll run, you know, across the parking lot or whatever, run 100 yards. Yeah, it might not seem like that big of a deal. If you make Echo actual dead weight where he's not helping in any way, not adjusting his weight on you, not holding on to your neck or holding on to your shoulders, none of that. If it's just true dead weight, 205 pounds or 210 pounds or whatever, what are you 220? 220?

Bro, 220. Okay. 220 pounds of dead weight. you're 185 it's not that big of a deal to do it it's not when you pick up a buddy and you carry them across the field the football field or the parking lot it's not that big of a deal

when they're dead weight it's totally different when you're in terrain it's even more different and then when you're getting freaking shot at and assaulted by a massive number of NBA you got to make a decision what are we going to do are we going to survive or are we going to perish to save our friend's body?

What would I want, what would, what would, if I was shot, if I was dead, what would I want you to do? All die to bring my body out? Hell no. You get your ass out of there. And so Lynn had to make this decision and he made it quick and, you know, that's how you survive. Oh, yeah.

It wasn't easy, but he did the right thing. Yeah. That's what you got to do. And by the way, when you leave that body, you're not. saying now we're never gonna do anything no I you go do a bright light you could do what you got to do to once you get your forces assembled and you can get more guys and you can get the right air cover and all that stuff you're not abandoning them but at that moment in time you got to make a decision to for the survivability of the

team it just that's what you have to do here's his thoughts wait a minute we just marked our location how stupid was that this is after they blow after they blow up the Claymore they're like oh that was a bad move we just marked our location Evade stay out of contact as long as possible. Yeah, right. The NVA know we're heading toward the LZ and are trying to push us onto it to where we'll be easier targets. They intend to use us as bait so they can shoot down more helicopters. Once we're dead and the helicopters are down, the lion wait for the bright light rescue choppers. Screw that. Today it's not going to, today it's going to end with us. Dead or alive, these bastards aren't going to use me as bait. bait. Maybe we can bait. them out onto the LZ where our gunships can get at them hunt the hunters so those are just these are Lynn's thoughts those were Lynn's thoughts quickly working through cowboy loke and I decide to turn back against the NVA we employ fire and maneuver a team firing while B team is maneuvering searching destroying and clearing a path old

school cover move we turn we turn moving back through the Claymore swath until we encounter a larger enemy force online searching us out down wait ready fire red and green red and green tracers fill the air moving like rush hour traffic lights we are able to grease a couple of platoon size forces up on me Alabama forms up as I point southwest towards the LZ a new NVA line is flooding in this behind searching us out they are using grenades to clear the jungle as they move whistles are sounding on two sides indicating we are moving into a possible ambush they're attempting to hurt us together on the edge of the LZ where there's a 2,000 foot sheer drop on the southern edge

Alabama online yells Loak pointing to pointing our direction of travel boldly we charge pushing them back mowing them down like weeds bold move we close to the perimeter to the LZ perimeter don't let them force us out into the open a fast moving object enters my peripheral vision. Wack. My head is snapped back by a wooden handled grenade. Instantly, I'm looking into the jungle canopy, seeing a muddled light stream through a haze of cordite. It's over. You saw it coming and couldn't get out of the way. Lower below me, the concussion lifts me from the ground, pushing me through the air. My feet are over my head. Green tracers crack around me like lady finger firecrackers. That tree is upside down and moving fast. This is

all wrong focus or you'll miss the moment of your death I hear myself say I can't breathe I feel like I'm drowning the team they are frantically beating me back to consciousness pouring water over my head okay okay I'm back I try to get up my legs don't work from the knees down my fatigue pants are shredded and I'm bleeding one of the men quang starts smearing gelatinized rice on my legs arms face and chest web gear and what is left of my survival Vest are lying on the ground and a bloody tatters along with the car 15. It's bent where the barrel meets the receiver and the bolt can't be pulled back. Loke orders a scout to bury the car. Cowboy hands me strides weapon. Cowboy, what's wrong with your hand? Grenade shrapnel. He winses. Handing me the weapon. You have now officially pissed me off. I scream at the NBA. So at this point, they're they're doing fire and men. maneuver, they get to the edge of the LZ, he gets hit in the head with a freaking grenade, and then it detonates, blows him up in the air.

Destroyed his car 15. Destroyed his car 15. Yeah, this is after they charge through the NBA rank, they go through them. It's like, even in my best day, I don't think I would have thought of that. It had to be somebody like Lynn. It's such a distinct, courageous move. It is, and it's one of those things where that's the last thing that the enemy's thinks you're going to do and they probably just it was the last thing they would think yeah and then

when it happens they're not ready for it they're like wait a second what's happening there's a brilliant just a brilliant move so he says you have now officially pissed me off i scream at the nvaa god damn my head hurts when i do that scrabbling around my position i finally find the radio handset spider blackjack i'm declaring a prairie fire emergency a prairie fire emergency should drop enough may palm on you suckers to ruin your day laughing blackjack says laughing the reply comes blackjack no kidding brother keep your cool above all else keep your cool so that's awesome I mean um spider had already said hey this he's already moving assets into place he can tell that this is a shit sandwich down here and and then he gives this advice you know this is advice we could all use keep your cool above all else

keep your cool oh yeah and that means so much because it's from Spider who's a who's a one zero himself yeah it's been on the ground that knows what's happening and he's saying above all else keep you cool and so then he says to himself calm the hell down blackjack be cool so that actually worked he actually listened spider blackjack so what's our asset status over all assets have been diverted to your location covey will coordinate them as they arrive and let you know what armament is available You make the decision what you want when and where you want it any questions who's up first I attempt to rise but fall flat on my face god damn it six gunships will prep the LZ with gun

and rocket runs amongst them will one will attempt to land if that's not possible it will trail a ladder improvised brother roger spider I roll over hugging the radio receiver to my ear trying to get to my feet The gunships fire rockets and then make gun runs near our position. The rescue ship attempts to land twice. Twice we make our move. Too much lead in the air. Ground fire is much too intense. They're hammering our pickup to pieces.

Get it out of here. Spider, do you copy? Over? The rescue ship limps off while Marine Scarface ships expend their ordinance and covering fire. Blackjack, Spider. Fubai is mounting a bright light rescue to assist. you in the fight. That's kind of crazy because bright,

I mean, bright light is as bad as it gets, right? That means we either had people overrun or had people captured, and they're already launching this. We're getting ready. They talked about it. That's where, because we were scheduled for the next day,

and we were the bright light. Oh, so you guys were the freaking bright light. Yeah. And they're telling, so what is that like? What are you hearing? It's like, this is not going to be a good day. and you just don't know Can you hear what the aircraft

Because I know you can't hear what the guys on the ground are saying Because they're on the ground and it's not line of sight So you wouldn't be able Could you guys hear what the aircraft are saying back to the guys on the ground When you guys were We could pick up some of Spiders transmission And Pat Watkins You could hear some of it

Could depend on where they were How low they were and up So we picked up some We just knew it was a shit show Because the whole camp This is Saturday Everybody just came to a pause and started praying for them.

And so what are you guys? So are you the one zero? No. Don Wilk was the one zero. Back then I was the one-one for Idaho. And they talked about the bright light. Don had gone in for the brief. And they said, we might be the bright light.

What are you doing when you might be the bright light? Do you already have all your mags are all loaded? Yeah, we're ready for the next day. You just, well, you just take anything out. Then it's just all bullets and grenades and extra bandages, maybe a couple body bags. and then we never even got to the launch site. They canceled it because it's between the enemy, the anti-aircraft,

and then the weather because they started to cloud over, and then all the gun smoke, the cordite, and then the clouds. They figured one more team went out. We've been more casualties and the king be like what Lynn just described, the first attempt to get him out, just like get out of here. you if you want to live themselves. Yeah. Which you think about the mindset of Lynn Black.

Yeah. Your savior is coming down to rescue you and you say, nope, get out of here. Yeah. What an honorable move. Beyond. Yeah, yeah. He says, so he says, so Spider says, hey, we're getting a bright light ready for you. And then Blackjack, Spider, Blackjack, how would they?

get in here. We don't need more people on the ground or helicopters shot down. Don't let the NBA use us as bait. We need to get off the ground and out of the line of fire. In the meantime, what I really need is a resupply of ammo. Over. Blackjack, you okay? I got nailed with a grenade. Nothing serious. Over. Just can't walk. Ammo's on the way and I agree with your assessment of the bright light. Over. Spider. Tel-Fu Bai Alabama is not a sacrificial lamb. No bright light. Over. So not only the call off the helicopters from coming in, he's calling off the rescue mission himself. He's saying, hey, don't send a bright light. I'm glad he said that.

He says, Roger, Blackjack. By the way, the assets are beginning to have difficulty with the weather and smoke hanging over the LZ. You're difficult to spot, which makes accurate air strikes increasingly difficult over. Cowboys working on my legs while he's telling me Boku NVA on LZ. We can hear gunships overhead and witness NVA trade. Riddling the lead ship the NVA move across the grassy plane of the LZ like a work party of ants Trampling down the two-foot razor grass which is the only concealment we have Suddenly one-one panics shouting skyward God save us

The NVA swarm migrates in our direction So the one-one who's been freaked out this whole time and hasn't done his job now yells out God save us us and the NBA hear it Vietnamese team members speaking through Cowboys say we're going to kill one one if he doesn't shut up I'll pull the trigger on him myself I agree tearfully one one whispers whimpers God forgive you sounds of an approaching King be King be and our diversion as the carrots of survival are dangled in front of us again each King be King be can hold four so we got to get everyone out on two sure hope they brought a dozen to this party we've made meant we've got to get to the center of the LV.

Help the wounded. Move, I scream in one one's face. Fearfully confused, one one takes hold of Loak, who is in the, who brushes him off with disdain. Blackjack, Spider, first King be inbound.

Gunships begin prepping the LZ with rack, rockets, 40 Mike, Mike, and M60s. Blackjack, Spider. I've got a fast mover on track. Key your handset so he can get a lock. Put your heads in the dirt. Over. Roger, Spider.

Hansek-Keed, heads down. We look into the Hayes Street Sun as a full-flapped phantom. His glide path ratio-critical ignites the tree line across the LZ into sheets of white, yellow, and orange flames. The ship banks sharply after burners crank on and he powers into the valley below. NVA small arms open up on three sides. Lazy, wagging tongues of green tracer fire, sweep the... Sky for miles. Heavy AAA fire chase the F4. Jesus. Some of those guns aren't far from our location.

How many of these bastards are there? What the hell are we in the middle of keying my handset? Spider Blackjack. Did you see that anti-aircraft fire on the fast mover? Over. Roger Blackjack marking map coordinates now. This is Mandolin back on station. Over. So they've gone from Spider as the Covey, well, from from Mandolin to Spider. Now we're back to Mandolin. And by the way, props to that, the F4 Phantom. You know, we've had a couple F4 Phantom Vietnam pilots on here. Those guys were doing a freaking doing God's work up there, especially in a case like this,

dropping napalm to save these guys. Among those shooting are several NVA about 20 feet from our perimeter. Napalm torches the jungle, forcing dozens of the enemy to scurry onto the LZ, escaping the inferno engulfing their comrades just as another F4 rolls in for a gun run. The NVA move in close to us, making every possible attempt to avoid the firestorm. Firing on single shot, we begin to pick them off as they stream out of the fire-drenched jungle. Those close to us endeavor to suppress our fire attempting to protect their comrades. friends, fathers, brothers, uncles, that onion-eating son-in-law. As they pop up, we put them down.

Phantoms return with two cannon and gun runs along our perimeter. And I haven't really gone into this, but you can hear a couple times that Lynn has referred to the enemy as fathers and sons and brothers and uncles. And so he just does that to kind of let you know what he's thinking about and he's thinking like yeah these are these are other men and we're about to kill him that's the way it goes oh yeah he yells out ammo check and then two nine cylinder radial engine king bees come chugging up the valley toward us we ignite green smoke marking our position the nva ignite identical smoke markers at several locations confusing the pilots god oh yes it gets worse we rise moving toward the approaching ships, killing everyone in our path. Ammo's getting critical. Each of the team

has less than a full magazine, and those are 20-round mags. God. Whoever invented the 20-round mag, instead of a 30-round mag. The M-79 men are down to their last bandoliers. I'm stumbling along working with my browning. It's cord peeling the skin off the back of my burned neck. We watch in disbelief as this first King Bee touches down right over an NVA smoke marker, taking multiple RPG rocket round hits on the flight deck. So just to clarify that so everyone can understand, when you're marking for location to get, first of all, you've got to understand that when you're in a, when you're in the sky, when you're in a helicopter and you're looking down at the ground,

it's freaking huge. It's massive. And I've, I had a time where I was in a training operation. and there was a helicopter coming to pick us up. And I was standing there, and this was in the desert. With your panel. And I was standing there with my panel. And I'm waving it.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm right here. And he goes, where are you? And I said, I'm right here. And he says, where are you? And I said, I'm right freaking here. And I'm on the hilltop or whatever stupid thing I said, because I was a younger guy. Yeah. I'm on the hilltop.

Well, I learned a lesson. You know how many hilltops he can see from his helicopter? He can see 500 of them. So I don't narrow it down at all. So what we do is we mark our position with something that's very obvious, like green smoke. So in this situation, Blackjack gets the green smoke out, hey, come land on this green smoke. The NVAC see that. And they go, oh, yep, we know what that is.

They're marked with green smoke. Hey, pull out the green smoke. Boom. So they start throwing green smoke. So now what does it look like? There's green smoke everywhere. Additionally, they were monitoring the radio. Oh, yeah.

So they had RDF as well as the monitoring capabilities. And so when they heard, I don't think Lynn would have said green, he probably was going to pop a smoke. The NBA either guessed, it was a good guess, and you got the results coming. So here we go. We watch and disbelief as the first King Bee touches down right over an NBA smoke marker, taking multiple RPG rocket rounds, round hits on its flight deck.

The force of the blast is so great, the ship teeters and finally topples to its side, Each subsequent rotor blade smashing into the ground, whoop, whooping in our direction, narrowly missing Alabama as we approach. We grab up NVA weapons, turning them on the enemy. They're everywhere.

Why didn't we see them until now? Without hesitation, we charge the rocket position, killing several NVA before a hail of fire drives us back to our starting point. These AKs have a slower rate of cyclic fire. Cyclic fire. The ammunition will last longer. We don't need a resupply.

We can keep doing this until hell freezes over. The second, so they ran out of ammo, basically. Now they're picking up the enemy AK-47s, and they're shooting. And the AK is definitely slower shooting than a car 15. The second shift hits an outcropping of rock on the western side of the knoll after taking heavy gunfire and falls onto the valley floor below. Blackjack, Mandolin. Nice try over. Screw you, Mandolin.

I no longer want to be. extracted. I'm going to kill every one of these sons of mothers before this day ends. So there you go. I'm going to read that again. I no longer want to be extracted. I'm going to kill every one of these sons and mothers before this day ends. Oh, yeah.

Lynn Black. You don't want to piss off Lynn Black. No, no, no, no. Even on a good day. Then Cowboy says to that in response. to that. Cowboy, who's, again, this is the interpreter, right? He's the interpreter. Yes. He says 1-1. This is the one-one of the guy that's been praying the whole time. He says, 1-1, please pray for the team, except Blackjack. He's on the devil's side now.

Blackjack, Mandolin, fast-movers have expended their ordinance and are returning for resupply. Your ammo is on that second Kingby assets in 20 minutes. Good luck, brother. Mandolin, Blackjack. We don't need. Forget it. Over. Blackjack, Mandolin. Blackjack, Mandolin. What's your status?

Over? Damn it, Blackjack? Bugles are sounding. Wave upon wave of NVA troops carrying rifles with fixed bayonets is advancing online. When they are feet away, we open fire using weapons we have taken from their dead. After the first burst of full automatic, the team fumbles with AK-47 selector switches to single shot, pushing them back. We move from body to body using their weapons and their cadavers as shields. Crawling, kneeling, knee walking, standing, scrambling, online, in line, we defend each other and ourselves.

Without a word, a look, a plan, acting on training, pure survival instinct. All of us except one one are scampering around, dragging, lugging bodies, placing them in a circle around Alabama. Stacking them high. We construct a cadaver garrison. Cowboy is bleeding from a grazing wound to the back. of his neck tiny army green leeches in inch out of the trampled razor grass following the blood trails we've created dragging the dead focusing on details directly in front of me i notice the vampire mosquitoes and ravenous cannibalistic horseflies competing with the leeches

to feed on the dead and the wounded and on the living one of the Vietnamese flips me a plastic mosquito repellent bottle hey that stings what the hell are we doing worrying about mosquitoes when people are trying to kill us. Snag us as much animal as possible, I order. Back and forth. And again, it's important to remember that this is, this is Lynn telling the story. He's debriefing. And the way it's laid out, you can tell that he's debriefing in the book.

I'm probably not doing a great job. But this is during the debrief. And what's interesting, all these things that he's saying about the 1-1, the 1-1 is in the debrief with him. He's saying like, oh, he's not doing anything. and one one's in there. And he just kind of is, and he goes into it a little bit,

but he's just kind of averting his eye. He's keeping his head down. Like, you know, he knows he didn't do a good job. Back and forth between the NBA and recon team, Alabama continues, the back and forth between the NBA and the recon team, Alabama continues on and on and on. They just keep coming.

I don't know how much longer we can keep this up. Keep them off us. The matted grass is saturated with slimy, slippery blood and human, innards smoke cordite and the stench of death choke us as foul weather closes in mosquitoes horse flies and the enemy are all conspiring to nibble us to death to swallow us whole soon air support will be possible slowly I come to the realization that I have no physical strength left and I can barely move I can't let my team down one of the team slips and slides on his stomachs over the

cadaver garrison to retrieve ammo while other members of the team provide covering fire so these guys are in a freaking small little fort that they've constructed with enemy bodies and when someone goes outside of that perimeter they've constructed a little perimeter

when someone goes outside that perimeter from the team to go gather ammo the other guys are laying down fire to protect that guy. Yeah. You know here's another thing too with that team. They had another one zero

they had another one zero on the team prior to stride being assigned to it And they worked really hard on their team emergency reaction drills. And what they're doing there, I think some of that goes back to the training. That one zero is Tim Schoff. He really worked the team hard, and it's a good one zero, but stride for reasons known only to the command. They pulled Tim off and put stride and tard because he had more rank.

But that team, right there, that moment in time when the team's doing all that together, that's all that training that they had prior an experience. Cowboy with his year lock and of course Lynn from the hurt. Blackjack, Mandolin, Jolly Greens, 10 minutes out. Get ready to go home over? That announcement lifts a thousand pound sandbag off my shoulders. We're going home. Mandolin, Blackjack, do you have any idea what size of the force is over?

Blackjack, Mandolin, what you're up against is the regiment you are. sent to track over. Is that all? Only 3,000 of the bastards? Well, I think we made a dent in them. Don't you? Just barely, brother. Bugle sound.

The sky is filled with grenades. We are hugging the ground as if as they explode around us. And it's, Till, tell us a little bit about the fact that the enemy, they don't have radios. So what they use is whistles and bugles to coordinate their attacks. Yeah, the command levels have some radio. and the command gets to their commandant,

like if we break it down from a platoon to squad leaders, and then with the bugles and the commands, they're trained how they are on attack, with withdrawal, and that's what Lynn came up against, over and over again. Yeah, in the Korean War, all those times when, that's like the most horrifying thing,

is all those times when they were to get these human assaults, human wave assaults towards their positions. It was all whistles. They'd hear the whistles and they'd hear the bugles and they would know what was about to happen. Sometimes it's for sciops just to make the noise. Every time you heard it, you know they're coming. Bugle sound.

The sky is filled with grenades. We're hugging the ground as they explode around us. Hey, these aren't fragmentation. They're concussion, just a bunch of noise. Not sending out much shrapnel. Concussion stuff like the ones they used on me earlier. You're mine now, you bastards. We stand back up, catching some, and begin throwing them immediately back.

You should have seen the look on their faces. Oh, crap. Here they come. Wooden grenade shrapnel severs the Prick 25 radio antenna. I begin to rig an impromptu long wire aerial with the intention of laying it over the cliff behind us out of harm's way. Relentless, the NVA continue their advance alongside the leeches, mosquitoes, and horseflies, inch by bloody inch. Chewoy, surrender. I yell at no one in particular.

Mandolin Blackjack, a large force is now yards away from our perimeter. We need help. Two Huey Hogg attack helicopters rotor chopped their way into the LZ. First with the M60 chatter, followed up by the wush of rockets placed into the NVA ranks. Blackjack, Judge, over? Go, Judge.

And the judge is one of the call signs for the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps. Oh, this is the muskets. Oh, okay. The judge and the executioner. Okay. Yeah. So these are army units that came out of Ameri-Cal.

Oh, yes. Scarface is Marine Corps. Scarface is Marine Corps, yes. So what kind of aircraft are, is Judge and Executioner? Same thing. Oh, so they're also Cobras. No, no Cobras at this time. All the gunships were old UIs that could barely put off the ground.

Got it. In fact, they're so weighted down with ammo. Yeah. And they didn't have the power that the later models had. In fact, a lot of times when they took off the door gunners, we'd get out to try to lift the helicopter and get it moving. And once they got a little forward momentum, they jump back in the helicopter.

Dang. And the muskis even put little wheels on the front of the skids so that when they're on asphalt, they would be able to move better without having a skid bind. They figured the wheel would roll better, and the guns would be out there pushing these things. That's like Fred Flintstone situation trying to get that thing moving. Right, so here's a sidebar on one of these.

on the muskets, there was a guy, his name is Berg, and Berg, this was his very first mission with the muskets on prairie fire for a Saug mission. Welcome to Saab. Welcome to Saug. His first mission is a door gunner. Yeah, these are some epic call signs, though, judge and executioner.

Oh, yeah. So Judge checks in on the radio, and this is just such a, you know, I was a calm guy. So when you get that aircraft checking it, it's like the best feel of the world. And he comes up, Blackjack, Judge, over. And the pilots are always a little bit more,

you know, just sort of really smooth on the radio. And so he's coming in this totally hot situation, Black Jack, Judge, over? And he says, go, Judge. Anyone in particular? Or just kill them all. He's laughing. Yeah.

Grease them all, I say, with malevolent, bloodied grimace. You're just in time for the party. judges doorgunners are working their M-60s in long burst my guns are gone meltdown executioner is right behind me the NBA back off a few moments briefly licking their wounds far from discouraged new assault lines form before they can open fire on us executioner confronts them head on both doorgunners blazing away he is hovering inches off the LZ skipping rockets off the ground into their ranks executioner lifts up his rotors chopping loudly at the mist filled air they make it over the treeline ducking down to the basin below remaining below anti-aircraft capability regaining airspeed as they come up the executioner and his crew returning for

another pass to protect our perimeter the nva charge before we can celebrate fire fire we add more we add more of them to the cadaver garrison along with the weapons and much needed ammo silence no birds chirping no voices mosquitoes flies no sounds none even the aircraft have flown for enough away that their absence amplifies the quiet after an almost continuous melee of gunfire grenades and Claymore explosions, air ordinance expenditures including cluster bomb units napalm and gun runs and 20 millimeter cannons silence have I gone deaf complete silence you've been there yeah that's freaking crazy yeah in dead rest each of us lays motionless and by the way when you say I've been there no

Tilt. I have not been in a freaking cadaver. Everybody's changing magazine. Yeah, there's a little mag change going on. Each of us rests. In dead rest, each of us lays motionless, barely breathing.

My mind is focused inward. Unaware of its physical surrounding. Mind and body are not one. One one continues to quietly chant his prayer. Cowboy has taken another hit during the last skirmish along with two of the others. Come back.

Think. Move. summoning energy from where I don't know. I fumble around in my medical gear. I'm giving you a morphine and will apply a compress to that wound. We're going to run out of bandages if you keep getting shot.

Knock it off, okay? So Cowboys been hit a couple times. Oh, more than that. Yeah, it's like four or five. I lost count. And so Lynn tells him, Lynn tells him you're going to run out of bandages so quick getting shot.

And then Cowboy says, where's John Wayne when you need him? Alabama last. says the N. NVA boisterously yells Chewoy, do ma. Another NVA orders us to chew hoy in English. I flip him the bird as a sniper shoots

Kuang our tail gunner in the crotch. I flip my borrowed AK on full auto and unloaded into a tree about 100 yards away resulting in the sniper falling through its limbs and brush below to the ground with a thud. If I could rip your heart out needed, I would. Kong, quong. What have we done?

Last week you got arrested by national police in a way-in-a-way hor house for carrying a pistol. The entire Alabama team put on their gear and went down and broke you out of jail so you could go on this mission. God damn and I wish we'd left you in that place where you'd be safe right now. Loke, I was calling him Loke. Sorry, Locke. Locke is applying direct pressure to Kwong the tail gunner's wound. Seconds later, an A1E Sky Rader lumbers into the A-O. flown by a pilot codenamed Snoopy.

It roars in from the west, brushing tree tops, full flaps, working the throttle. The aircraft is so close to the team we can hear the distinctive metallic click-click of the napalm canister being released from the Second World War era plane. The Sky Rader appears to be falling, but actually it slips down into the valley

to escape gunfire as helicopters and fast-movers have maneuvered earlier. His wingman roils through the clouds and cordite. We can hear nuts, bolts, and God knows what, creaking, groaning as he salvos his ship's rockets. Three NVA mortars open fire. Doop, dupe, boom, boom. They're long. The rounds fall into the valley at our rear.

There's no way in hell any of us can catch mortars and throw them back. Time to go back to work, I order. Lock and I slide over the cadaver wall. Crouching, crawling, knee walking. We move towards the mortars, cautiously picking our way through the, charred bodies from previous airborne assaults quietly yeah right we travel into the jungle within a few yards of the first mortar tube lock stops me to draw a plan in the dirt he will hit one tube tube tube i will take tube three and we will combine on tube two damn suicide mission i say under my breath

lock nods at me keith roy he replies we die after the mortar after the mortar men launched the next set of three salvos lock open He opens fire on his target while I attack Tube 3 discovering several nearby infantry. God, so he's in the middle of all this freaking crap. And then they're going out and assaulting these three mortar positions. Yeah. Which, God knows. I mean, how far?

They had to be at least, what, 100 yards away? At least. We're talking to football field. And there's just a spare infantry trying to kill them in between. And those are some motivational words. We die. And that's sort of like, fuck it. Let's go.

Let's do this. He was a tiger. Oh crap. There are more of these bastards than I thought. I begin moving low and fast as the survivors chase me heading toward tube one where Locke is pinned down, yelling as loud as possible, drawing their attention, allowing Locke to move out of the kill zone. I roll our last fragmentation grenade into their midst, killing several, wounding the rest.

Locke and I attack the second tube before returning to the team, picking ammo from the dead. Snipers dog us all the way back to our cadaver garrison. The two of us press our bloody bodies against the jungle floor as green tracers search the air around us. One one, take a look at this, I say, while rolling over. The blood and dirt on me are forming a second skin. Leaves and grasses have begun to stick to my bare skin. Ants and beetles seem to be making a home on my new crust. I'm building my own camouflage.

It looks like I'm becoming part of this place. If I lay down, I bet you they won't tell me from the dead. Oh, God, please don't go crazy. you gotta get us out of here. I want to go home, he pleads. We'll all be dead long before I go crazy. Through the clouds and haze of battle, we glimpse a jolly green.

JG28, starting its descent into the LZ. As it approaches, the radio crackles. Blackjack, this is 28 on short final, looking for an orange panel on the southeast side of the LZ. Over? 28, blackjack panel is on the ground. We'll attempt to suppress enemy fire for your landing. Orange panel in sight, adjusting approach, preparing for touchdown.

Blackjack, get your people on board. Over. Negative, negative, negative. Not southeast. We're southwest. You're in the wrong place. Get out of there. The NVA raise up all around JG28, firing everything they have.

The pilot keys is radio to answer back. I hear a crew member in the background, calm, yelling. We have fuel leak. It's everywhere. Get us out of here. We watch as the glass in the cockpit on the co-pilot side disappears. with successive rocket explosions. The pilot struggles to lift off

while maintaining control of his ship. 28 is up. 28 is up. Our ride home is slipping sideways across the LZ, passing within touching distance above us over the lip of the plateau down into the valley

to escape the relentless enemy barrage. Alabama goes insane on full auto burning up the majority of our ammo on anything that moves. One one praise. Snoopy in his wingman, move into the next. Next, move in next to the crippled JG 28.

Through the haze and darkening storm clouds, Covey is attempting to direct gunships across the LZ to pick off targets of opportunity. Their rotors are moving smoke and clouds down across our cadaver-strewn landscape, obscuring everyone's view. 28, Blackjack. 28, Blackjack, are you guys okay? Over? Blackjack, we have a severed fuel line.

The stuff sloshing all over the deck. Fuel fumes are blinding my crew. We can't fire our guns without going up in flames. Snoopy will escort us out of here. Good luck, Blackjack. Out. Green tracers shift from horizontal grazing fire across the LZ to vertical as jolly green giant 10 approaches.

The green furies playing a deafening tune through its skin. JG 10, Blackjack, the enemy is under you right now. Over. From our position, we can see an NVA rocket crew rise up in the grass taking. and fired directly into the underbelly of JG 10. We're hit. We have a six inch hole through the floor. Both engine warning lights just came on.

We can't make the pickup. Oh my God, look at that. Both engines are on fire. The pilot performs a 180-degree turn, moving the damaged aircraft away from enemy fire, away from Alabama. We can see him struggling to keep his bird airborne as his crew continues firing.

Time has run out. traveling several hundred yards the pilot comes up on his survival frequency brace for crash landing they continue firing while the burning ship settles into the jungle blackjack mandolin over go mandolin first you won the lottery then you maneuvered your way into a prairie fire and now for the bonus round sagon has ordered an arc light over bonus round what do they think this is the price is right there's no way we can survive an arc light tell it to the nvaa Maybe they'll run like hell and leave us B. What altitude will they be bombing from?

They'll be cruising at 25,000 feet for a standard carpet bombing mission. Not exactly accurate from that altitude. Saigon is assuming you won't be there or be alive by the time the B-52s get here. Over. Damn straight. I have to get back to camp for Recon Company football game this evening. How long do we have? Over?

One of the indiges outside the garrison stealing it. AK-47 magazines from the dead. He's tossing them into our garrison as the rest of us return fire. Blackjack, mandolin. The arc light is off the runway and heading your way over. So tell us about an arc light.

B-52. And what the load is like over 20,000 pounds of bombs. And they usually come more than one. And you don't hear them. As you know, you don't hear anything until the first round impacts. and that was the code for an arc light and amazing firepower.

And they're going to basically carpet bomb this area. Right. That's the plan. What is carpet bomb? Bombs everywhere. Everything. Yeah, just lay down. I mean, I don't know how many aircraft

there are in this particular mission, but it's probably multiple aircraft with all those bombs and they get over the location and they just open their bombardier doors and out come the, or their bay doors and out come the bombs. You know when you see pictures or videos

where there's just all these airplanes flying, there's just bombs falling out? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Leaking out. Yep, just leaking out. That's what they say. As I suppose the direct support would come in one or two bombs around the team.

This is like every, like Jock was saying, you may have four or five planes and they fly over and everything's, all bombs are dropped. Carpet. Over 100. At least, yeah. There'd be anywhere to 250, 500,000 pounders.

Blackjack. mandolin I don't think I want to be here or sorry mandolin blackjack I don't think I want to be here when they arrive over blackjack mandolin well you have one last option over what is it over unexpectedly our radio frequency is flooded with fast talking Vietnamese god yeah yeah can't get a break so the Vietnamese figure out what radio frequency they are on they start using that unexpectedly our radio frequency is flooded with fast talking Vietnamese cowboy listens for a few seconds it says NVA find I switch to an alternate frequency as it is jammed and it is jammed as well. I throw the PRC radio over the cliff and switch to the URC 10 survival radio.

Mandolin blackjack over Mandolin blackjack over blackjack. JG 32 over go JG 32 You're on an Air Force survival guard frequency 243 Covey 265 is busy on other channels. We'll get his attention for you I I'm hovering in a draw to your west. We have 20 minutes of fuel left before I leave. The first person we see better be an American. Hurry. We're taking heavy ground fire.

Our armor is not holding up this close to the source. JG32. Can you hook me up with Covey? Blackjack, Mandolin. Over? Mandolin, can you lay down covering fire between us and JG32? Give me two minutes to line up assets, then move out. We're getting empty.

The next voice you hear will be spiders. Over. Roger Spider. Blackjack. Over. I turn and yell at the team. Alabama, discard everything we don't need. Over the side.

Get ready to move out. Cowboy and I move to the edge of the cliff while Locke demands, commands the garrison. The two of us cautiously peep over the edge. 15 feet below us is a ledge that moves in the direction we want to travel. Move the team to this location, I order. Cowboy crawls back to the cadavered garrison while I make a number. another attempt at contacting spider one at a time Alabama comes crawling over to me I begin lowering each of them to the ledge below one one scales the rock face making his

own way out making his own way immediately beginning to move along the ledge in the direction of the of JG 32 cowboy stop him from the ledge we look up the face of the cliff we can see tracers dancing across the lip of the rim Covey's directing Daisy chain air strikes between Alabama and JG 32. Blackjack, Spider, we're dropping cluster bomb unit CBU on the path between you and JG 32.

It will kill some and should temporarily drive the rest out of the zone. Man. So they want to get to where this helicopter is located, flying in this little draw. And in order to get there, they drop cluster bombs on their path. Yeah, for good luck. And then that Jolly Green settled into the jungle,

chopping down smaller trees. to settle so that way it's brilliant move on his part. Some are protected. Yeah, so that way they're not visible and not completely exposed. They're going to shoot out and they go

to shoot through the jungle to get to him. Yeah, it's counterintuitive when you're in the air in a helicopter. Yeah, in a helicopter, but I guess on fast movers or aircraft as well, you'd think the closer you get to the ground, the more danger you're in. But the opposite is actually true.

Because when you get down low enough, people can't shoot at you because they don't have an angle to shoot at you. Whether it's in the city or whether it's in a jungle like this, people just, they can't see you anymore because you're low. Right. So here are the helicopters in the jungle. And then like you said, with the A1 Sky Raiders,

the key to their success was how low they made their gun runs. They would just come screaming across the path, drop their ordinance, and be on their way. Dang. Oh, yeah. So anybody's in the jungle, you can hear him coming. You can't see him until it's too late. even for a slow mover like that

but oh we love them continuing on thick choking smoke moves across the LZ roiling over the ledge above obscuring our escape from the plane from the plane of death we inch our way toward the last chance

arc lights coming blackjack the CBO strike has created negative visibility we're unable to provide support until we get a window over you're looking for a window and I'm looking for a door Spider, Blackjack. The good news is it is also decreased visibility for the NVA. Gunfire is noticeably subside.

Keep up the smoke and we'll move by ear. Hugging the face of the cliff, making our way across the rubble of the ledge, we come to a dead end. Crap, we're going to have to climb back up to the plateau. Wait here while I take a look. If it's okay, I'll signal. Easily climbing with the aid of vines trailing over the ledge, I crawl over one side and slide under the low vegetation. Seconds later, one Wads head appears. Spotting me, he crawls to my location up under a large, broad leaf plant.

Where's your weapon, I ask? I don't know, he sheepishly replies. Take this AK and cover us while I get the rest of the team up here. Over. Can you do that? Uh-huh. Lock the 0-1 is the last person to go over the rim, joining the remainder of the team in the undergrowth, giving me two thumbs up.

As quickly as the underbrush will allow, we move up a small incline under the protection of enormous broadleaf undergrowth. Shortly, we come to the periphery of a short ledge where we stop. Before us is a conneverous half-lit clearing under jungle canopy. Look at this. Hundreds of large huts built up on stilts stretch back into the low light. Everywhere there are trails, campfires, and cooking areas. To our left is a latrine in a shower facility.

Smoke from cooking fires. Spiral upward, gently mingling with the battle haze ceiling, drifting just below the canopy clothes are hung over low plants and ropes strung between towering hardwood trees this must be their main camp this is amazing it's an entire town under the trees no one seems to be home from the sounds of it they must all be over there i say pointing at the direction of jg 32 look over there who's that who's that looks like an american hey you he turns pointing a 45 caliber pistol in our direction i stand up motioning him to us he raises a 45 pistol to his lips signaling us to be quiet we consciously move to his location who are you i'm the jg 10

p jay dan casbier rotor head is over there under that hut talking to the 30 talking with 32 who's rotorhead i ask our pilot colonel sam grenier i think he has a broken back but he can still walk the other members of your crew did they make it 10 was burning there was only time to get out Grenier before it exploded our flight engineer Greg Lawrence and co-pilot Dwayne Wester were trapped inside I didn't have time the PJ pauses JG 10 exploded before I could get back to them we've been waiting for you guys here hoping we would you would make it before we had to E&E grab rotorhead and fall in with a seven of us now so so these guys have now just miraculously ran into the pilot and the pararescue guy that had that was inside

that helicopter that got shot down and then exploded. Yeah, and the pilot's got a broken back. He's still mobile. Yes, sir. The NVA are focused on JG32, easing pressure on us. We need to move there as quickly as possible. 32 doesn't have much time left on station. We have to go now, orders Sam Grenier.

None of us have much time left. Form up, we're going home, I demand. Casimir, help your colonel. We can hear them moving through the jungle all around us. They seem to be traveling to the ship. Paralleling us. Blackjack, Spider. Times against you, buddy.

32 can't wait much longer, and the arc light is closing fast. The B-52s have begun their countdown. They're on long final. Yeah, you can't make this up. No. The arc lights coming into drop bombs all over everything in the area.

The aircraft that they're trying to get to that could possibly get them home that's hidden in the jungle is almost out of fuel. And they can hear, as they're moving towards the helicopter, They can hear they're being paralleled by the NBA. On the move, Spider, arc lights on the way. We intersect a trail running down the middle of the ravine.

I stop the team. Helicopter gunships and Sky Raiders are making blind gun runs up and down the narrow ravine and around JG 32. Smoke from airstrikes hangs over the plateau, threading its way down the ravines into the depths of the murky chasm. Blackjack, Spider, air strikes to clear the way as impossible. We can no longer see the jungle, let alone your ride home. Get a move on, over? I feel as though we are moving past mad dogs guarding the gates of hell itself. NVA are pouring small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades into the hovering chopper,

while door gunners and pilots intermittently fire the Gatling gun in M-60s. Desperate, I move the team onto the trail toward the hovering ship. Don't move on a trail, you dumbass. Well, this is one of those times when jungle rules don't apply. Amen. So they can see the helicopter. They can see that it's taken fire. There's a trail.

And you guys and anyone in Vietnam is constantly avoiding the trails because that's where ambushes and booby traps get set. But in this situation, there's no choice. No choice. We progress hastily. Tailgunner begins violently shaking and has turned a pasty white. Two of the Vietnamese assistant hiding him in thick bushes. So Tailgunner is your rear security guy.

And he's the one of shot in a groin. He's losing blood. He's pale white. To the Vietnamese assist, hiding him in the thick bushes. Then they flee to the chopper. I stopped them taking lead. At the crest, we see JG32 taking hits and dealing out death. Its M60 is red hot.

Someone is firing an M16 out a rear port. As we move to JG 32, the intensity of gunfire seems to multiply a hundredfold. Jesus, the air is so full of lead I can see it. I report to myself loudly. Fuel and bits of metal skin are following. from the aircraft as we approach on one side of the turbine cowling is lying on the jungle floor blackjack spider who are you talking to over god buddha anyone that'll listen spider blackjack sorry i didn't realize i held the the radio keyed over the jungle penetrator

from j g's winch smashes into the ground and then raises a couple feet p j dan caspier scrambles to put three team members on the first load when you get in the chopper gun and return fire protect us I yell after them rotorhead and the PJ along with quang a wounded Alabama Vietnamese are on the second lift quang becomes entangled in jungle vines while being hoisted the operator has to stop the hoist lower it to give him time to untangle himself when the hoist moves up toward the aircraft quang is not sitting in the seat but hanging on with assistance from casbier quang I return tracing I return I turn retracing our path back down the trail to the thicket where we had left our tail gunner halfway back I realize I'm alone

with no weapon for the first time paralyzing fear sweeps through me I stop what am I doing you couldn't help Hugh when he was hit but you can quong face the boogeyman do your job asshole move quong is covered with bloated black leeches mosquitoes and giant flies feeding off the last of his ebbing life mumbling he wobbles his Colt 45 at advancing N. VA. Toy Keat. I die. The tail gunner motions to me to return to the jolly green. I turn and Kwong shoots himself. You sons of bitches, my cry is lost in the sounds of battle. Tears obscure my vision as I scramble like a raving lunatic back in the direction of the waiting ship, rushing smack into two screaming NVA. Their AKs pointed at me. Chew Hoy. I

Surrender, surrendering, stretching out my arms, continuing to move quickly in their direction. Within arms reach, I yell in their faces, chew hoi yourself, motherfucker. The young soldiers are taken by surprise. Before they can respond, I grab a searing hot AK-47 barrel jerking the weapon from one of them. Blistered skin rolls off my hand. I backhand the one on my right and smash the soldier on my left in the face with his own weapon. Hot, hot, hot. I scrambled to the penetrator finding a praying 1-1 on the ground.

The rest of the team have abandoned him and are on board, firing any weapon they can get their hands on. As the penetrator lifts in what seems like slow motion, 1-1 and I look upward, wondering what the hell is taking so long. We are showered with hot, spent M-60 and other weapon shell casing. Hot brass is sticking to my bare skin, creating long water blisters similar to ones on my hand from the the AK I'd grabbed. The air is filled with smoke, jet fuel, and green tracers moving past us in slow motion like mad hornets, never-ending shell casings, raining down along with metal debris and a tornado of jungle vegetation. The penetrator cable is vibrating violently as JG 32 takes hit after hit. It's all coming apart, I yell at 1-1. J.G. 32 piloted by Lieutenant

Colonel Jim Grady begins. lifting out of the jungle ravine with the two of us hanging on below like a couple of crippled puppets on a quarter inch steel wire. There are several great trees on both sides of the ship, all of them large enough to severely damage the five 62 foot rotors causing it to crash. Ascending out of the jungle, we can feel the heat of B40 rocket motors as they pass by on their way to slamming into JG32's plated underside. The ship is being boosted upward with each explosion. slump on the penetrator and begin sliding off as my backside is sprayed with shrapnel. Hey, that hurts.

One one grabs hold wrapping his arms around me, saving my life. Hope what's left of the armor holds. I weakly yell, grasping at the penetrator cable for balance. The JG flight mechanic reaches out, pulling me off the penetrator into the ship, dumping me on red hot shell-cover deck with one-one on my heels. Parrarescue specialist Alan Avery leaves his gun position and begins tending to Alabama's wounds. Once clear of the jungle hole, the ship begins its ascent out of the valley. The flight mechanic, Sergeant John Nussbaum, removes his helmet and places it on my head.

Co-pilot Major Don Olson tells me, we're on our way out of here, partner. I'm cold. Lieutenant analyst breaks the silence. 1-1. Do you have anything to add to Blackjack's story? No, sir, he softly mumbles with his head down. How many NVA do you think we're in the area? And how many do you think were killed or wounded?

Asked Sergeant Analysis. I believe the question was directed to 1-1, but before he can muster with an answer, I jump in. The answer to both of those questions is more than we had time to count. However, I'll estimate somewhere between 3,000 NVA. How many did we kill before we round out of our ammo? We killed hundreds. When we started using their weapons, we killed hundreds more.

Between us and air support, maybe 2,000 or 3,000. The arc light followed that after we left. I hope they finished off the rest of them. Crazy. Oh, yeah. And then that jolly green giant couldn't fly too far. They only went over two more mountaintops. It lands, another one comes in, picks up some of the guys.

Then Lynn and the 1-1 had to go back on the Cobra gunship. Because the cobra, the weapon doors come down, and they have seatbelts on them. Oh, my God. So all the way from Laos, back to Denang, they're with the, yeah, just to top everything off for them. And they froze their balls off, of course, because they're dangling out there 5,000 feet on that. take it up to 5,000 feet to get away from any enemy fire. And of course, the model of the Jollygreens that others may live. That day they put them right on the line.

Amazing. Going in after you see multiple birds shot down, like, oh, one bird goes and gets shot out, the next bird goes and gets shot out, the next bird goes and gets shot down. Yeah. And you're still coming in. Yep, we're here. And one got shot up so bad, limped back to base. It barely got back.

They continue on with this debrief, and one of the analysts says, tell us about the terrain again. 1-1, you were closer to the terrain than I was. Why don't you answer that question? 1-1 breaks down. A medical aid gives him a sedative to quiet his nerves. He's been through a lot. I sigh.

Do you also need a sedative? Ask the medic. No, thanks. I don't handle any kind of drug. very well if I take that I'll be asleep in 10 minutes give me an understanding of where you are physically and psychologically ask one of the medics physically today I'm less than 50% I took some hard hits and I'm still trying to recover psychologically who the heck knows anyone doing this kind of work is probably

crazy from the get-go you know what I mean a combat soldier focuses on what they feel physically what they see here and smell feelings of fear sadness boredom and joy are suppressed as much as possible so we can focus on the mission our team and staying alive the psychological stuff has to come later or we won't make it does that make sense to you so there you go this is a classic thing we're putting off all this stuff like not worrying about it right now we got a job to do the medic looks up from taking notes it will do for now please continue with your train of thought as soon as my wounds fully close and the stitches come out i'll begin training again. I heal fast and definitely have some ideas on needed training for Alabama to be

an effective team. Don't you think that's up to the one zero to determine what training is needed for his team? One one perks up. I jump in ahead of him. Yes sir. No sir. I mean it's up to all of us to conduct training as Americans. The welfare of a special forces team is the responsibility of every man on that team. If the designated leader can't lead, then it's incumbent on any one of us to step forward and provide that leadership. That's what I did, and that's what I'll do again, if needed. So there you go. Oh, yeah. Real leadership. Pure leadership. Fearless. Peerless. So you're ready to go do it again? And he thinks to himself, I've heard that several guys have hung it up after the first mission.

I think I know why. It's these damn debriefs. Yeah. They were a pain in the ass, that's for sure. The analyst continues. Our best intelligence indicates there's probably, or I think this is, yeah, this is the chief song.

Our best intelligence indicates that there's approximately 2,000 miles of trail and between 12 to 15 Bin Tram and those are like Bin Tram is like these organizations what are they like a battalion sized it was a bit along the trail there would be a command and control element

as well as a hospital overnight rest facilities and then from near they run people out to keep the trails open work with the local indigenous people the conscripts because they were constantly bombing the trail so these these are organizations

along the trail they're called bin trams, then thousands of anti-aircraft guns, 20,000, 30,000 support soldiers all defended by 40 to 60,000 security troops. That's what we need intel on. Are you ready to take another whack at it? Chief Sog asks, half grinning at the two of us. Whiskey, tango, fox trot. I'm not sure I really wanted to know that.

I will be once the wounds have healed. When I'm in better physical condition and we get the training that I talked about. after I have a couple more beers tell me about what you thought about out there asked a tall slender gray-haired medical officer on the other side of the table behind him sits two obvious assistants taking notes when thinks didn't I just answer the question a few minutes ago these guys are not going to let up and then he says do you mean me personally yes you personally what went through your mind what emotions did you feel how much detail are you asking for God I hate that I hate

And he thinks to himself, God, I hate this. How did you feel shit? Didn't I answer that question a few minutes ago? We've heard excellent tour guide level detail from the point of the initial ambush to your team's extraction. Tell us about the period of time from the point of insertion to the ambush. Take your time. Give me a tour of your thoughts. What were you thinking?

I lean back in my chair, pausing, thinking. I'm a guy, not some woman who wants to do nothing but talk about. our feelings guys don't think about their feelings this is just his thoughts we're either happy sad thirsty horny or hungry okay calm the hell down and give him an answer and then he says I was on the second Kingby we watched Bulldog and the others disembarked from the first ship just before our spiral began our door gun are announced we go down now chuckles around the room we assumed the get ready position with me sitting

in the door, the lottery LZ corks screwed up to meet us. Several feet off touchdown, I spotted an NVA flag posted near the edge. I remember thinking, oh, crap. Several of them laugh or quietly chuckle. You spotted freaking NVA flag on the landing zone? Yeah, I think he goes into a little bit more detail. Jeez. Specialist Black, I've heard about the mission. I want to know about your feelings, what you felt emotionally.

Do you understand? Well, sir, oh crap to me is a pretty strong feeling. However, when a soldier's in that situation, that causes thoughts like, oh, crap, or others, we usually don't have time to stop and consider our feelings. As soon as our Kingby tires bounced down, tracers punched to the side of our ship. We got the hell out of there. I remember thinking what a mistake that was. Actually, sir, it was more like we are screwed. Blackjack, the Sergeant Major objects.

Yes, Sergeant Major. In mid-lift-off, the green swarm engulfed the ship like a disturbed nest of hornets. The king bee hung in mid-air, laboring, slipping to its left, the pilot wrestling with a stick. His co-pilot was slumped in a seat. Down it went in a ball of flames. The two Scarface ships provided covering fire as I moved my portion of Alabama to link up with the 1-0. I yelled a bulldog that we needed to get off the LZ.

He ordered us to form up. We quickly moved in a low crouch through the knee-high razor grass to a log where Bulldog and the others were. We were knee-deep in Kim Shi, and I knew it. And there's a little bit of a, of a, a little bit of a tension between, um, between, uh, Bulldog. Yeah, between Bulldog and, and Blackjack.

And with that tension, and I'm fast forward a little bit, he said, uh, did it make, the one of the analysts says, did it make you anger? Angry. How did it make you feel? I didn't care. I came back here to do a job. Why did you come?

come back, the medical officer and sis, because they nailed my brother and best friend and several of the guys in my 173rd unit. I came back here to get even. Is that what you want to know? Am I mad? No. When I got out of the first, when I got out the first time and went home, it bugged me that so many of us had been killed or wounded and I couldn't really say I had seen the enemy. I felt like a failure. I'm going to fight in a war. If I'm going to fight in a war, I want to see the enemy. I want to look on their face when I pulled the trigger or I have them roasted with Napalm. Are you getting what you need with this answer? And then he thinks to himself, don't ask me this shit again. I'm here doing a job that most of the guys back home don't want to do. Just be

satisfied. You can get people like me who want to be up here and are qualified. Yes, thank you. The medical officer, deadpans. Black, continue on with the narration, instructs Lieutenant Analyst. And with feeling, he snorts. Again, this whole scene is just straight out of a freaking holly. would movie of, you know, the combat soldier fresh off the battlefield getting interrogated by these rems. Yeah, and even there, like the whole thing with the flag, an experience one zero would have gone, but said, no, we're out of here. They had a green one zero.

And Lynn tried to, I don't know, I forget if he goes into detail. Yeah, he goes into it a little bit. But he wouldn't listen. There was just a couple, like that little bit of disagreement, you know, why didn't Sergeant Stride make you the radio operator one two and black the one one won he goes through this you know um yeah so he continues here um yes sir covey asked for a sit rep at which time i reported that the second kingby was shot down and we were waiting for bulldog to make a go no go decision mandolin asked to talk with bulldog who said he was going to continue with the mission he

in motion to our point man to move over to a well-traveled trail across the LZ into the jungle. Cowboy Point, the Vietnamese team leader, Locke, and I vigorously argued against walking a trail, especially when we had already made contact. To be honest, I thought the order was stupid. There, I said it. And he's thinking to himself there, I said it. You want to know how I feel? That's it.

So this is when you're, the tension that we were talking about. Oh, yeah. Lieutenant analyst, his face red, eyes narrowed. You argued with your one zero in the middle of making contact with the enemy. And then Lynn thinks to himself, your ass is in trouble now. Keep calm. He's never been in a combat situation except maybe fighting with his older sister. The first rule of recon is never used trails, especially well-traveled trails.

That trail, I said to stride, definitely fits that category. He told me he was in command and that I would follow his orders without questions. Did you? Yes, sir. into really deep Kimshi. Continue the chief orders impatiently. Bulldog angrily motioned to the team to move up on the trail. Point leading the way with Bulldog pushing from behind on his rucksack.

The trail wound into dense jungle foliage bending to the left. Point tried to move cautiously paralleling a small team, a small 10 to 20 foot rise to our right. Bulldog hurried him along, pushing him to his death. Is that statement necessary? The lieutenant analyst sarcastically cracks. I was instructed to tell you what I was personally thinking. I was the only American on the team with Vietnam experience, with combat experience.

I was the fourth person in line right behind Cowboy. I think Sergeant Stride's experience went back to an A team in Korea. And 1-1 had never seen combat. Is that statement necessary? I think so. Yes. Rank and combat experience are not necessarily synonymous. Don't you agree?

And he says, So he's tell, stay calm, stay calm. Point taken. How did you feel when taking fire on insertion? asks the doc. When we took fire going in, I felt anxious. He thinks to himself, that's an understatement, scared the shit out of me. That anxiety turned to disbelief when Bulldog made the decision to continue the mission.

And then again, when the decision was made to walk a trail, I remained on the state of high alert, high alert right up to the ambush. An interesting thing happened. They all laughed. We can imagine people were killing your teammates and you were pinned down. How much more interesting could it get? Observes Sergeant Analyst. They all nervously laugh again.

I sit silent, expressionless, looking into each of their eyes. The medical officer is quietly observing me. After what seems like a long time, I turn and look at the one-one. His head is down. His hands folded in his lap. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over, I think to myself. Turning back to the debrief panel, you ever been ambushed? I asked flatly.

Chief Sogg and the Command Sergeant Major both shift uncomfortably in their chair. None of them have. My impatience with this process is giving away to temper. I'm tired. Remember what Covey said. Keep your cool. All these questions have been covered in our initial debrief and documented in the AAR. What are these guys after?

Give them what they want and then get the hell out of here. Then he starts speaking again. When the NBA triggered the ambush, all that anxiety disappeared. I went to work. Previous experience and training kicked in. I returned fire with the intent of suppressing the NBA attack and being able to maneuver out of the spot we were in. Bulldog and one one was down. Like I said before, I thought he was hit and took charge.

I've learned the best defense is an aggressive offense. As long as we had ammunition and could move, I took charge of our not so little, not no name battle, moving at will, causing as much confusion for the enemy as possible, preventing them from forming up a large force to overrun us. That tactic worked until we ran out of ammo.

The anxiety returned. No, sir. Fear. One one turns to face me with local disbelief. How did you deal with it? prompts the doctor. Our situation seemed impossible. The fact is, I was completely overcome with fear.

For an instant, I couldn't move. And he thinks to himself, I haven't thought about this until now. I don't know if I can express that feeling. He continues. Oddly, it seemed to be unconnected to the physical danger. The fear? Yes. there were three things going on all at once.

It was as if I had stepped outside myself, seeing all things, feeling all emotions, all at the same time, in that instant, I became completely demoralized. And he thinks to himself, every person in this room is fixed on what I am saying. I wish I knew what I was saying or how to say it. I'm talking like a woman or like the shrink.

Demoralized the doc gently urges what made the emotion so overpowering was the realization that I had violated every moral precept of my upbringing My childhood focused sharply blending into the present I couldn't wrap my mind around our deeds I was alive we were alive hundreds of others were dead fathers sons husbands you know more would die maybe thousands I raised my hand to hold off further questions as I stared down at the table to focus my thoughts and emotions. Emotions. Here they are. That, he continues, that entire thought process lasted a fraction of a second.

Then the usual, if I can call it that, the reemergence of our deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden assault and total annihilation was welcome and composing, reality. Passified me our reality emerged in my mind like a clap of thunder my emotions were out prioritized by mortality you might want to talk with this about with what he might want to talk with one of our medical staff offers the chief Sog and he thinks I just did there's nothing they can do for me ignoring his comment It's interesting to watch the changes in people who are on the spot for instance In that fraction of a second, when the concussion grenade hit me, I became interesting to myself. What does that mean?

Interested in yourself, the medical officer is surprised. Not interested in myself, but interesting to myself. An object of interest outside myself. It's difficult to describe. However, all that serves no purpose in the moment. Distractions of that kind prevent us from witnessing our own death, from dealing with the present someone on the team mentioned surrendering we all knew they would kill us good thinking offers the command sergeant major anyway that led to a conversation about breaking the team into two-man

groups to escape and evade at that point in the battle we felt the terrain and enemy activity prevented us from e and d that's when we decided to fight it out using our using their weapons during daylight hours and then try to get some of the people out under the cover of darkness. We now had options and resolve. The fear was diminished and a new purpose and mission had gripped every man on the team. Explain, orders the lieutenant analyst. I thought I just did. Blackjack, chides the sergeant major. Okay, okay. I hesitate looking for the words. During daylight hours we decided to fight them as hard as we could using their weapons and tactics I know from experience that when you use the enemy's tactics against them there

they quickly become confused have you ever considered countermeasures against your own tactics of course not no one ever does you're not going to fight yourself right that's why it's so important for us to study their tactics and tactics and use those tactics against them in the field the report Saigon send each month are the basis for that knowledge along with what we learn directly in the field practical experience you all are here making a major contribution to us staying alive and being successful what you have told me about being trams today adds to that knowledge they're smiling shooting approval glances at one another and then he thinks to himself blackjack you're being a

kiss ass knock it off thank you specialist black for the performance review view of my staff replies the chief's sog with a straight face please continue instantly they all get serious all we had to do is hold out until dark what about the b 52 strike that was on the way mocks the lieutenant analyst minor consideration if thousands of enemy couldn't kill us 20 feet from 20 feet away we could certainly live through b 52's bombing from 20 or 30 000 feet the lt gives me his narrowed eyed narrowed eyed I don't believe you look as the medical officer and others suppress their laughter. We begin to pair up as the curtain of death fell around us, even though we were still acting as a team.

Curtain of death, asks the medical officer quizzically. I remember that when the decision was made, I felt as if a black curtain were being lowered around me. It was something I could see in my mind. We made every attempt to maneuver ourselves into an E&E launch position, which turned out, to be the route we took to the last jelly green giant. We figured because we were small and they were so large at night we would have they would have to set up blocking positions and not move on us. The reasoning was that if they tried to move they would wind up shooting each other. In large blocking groups they would make noise revealing themselves and their positions. This would give us

the opportunity to try and move out between those positions and get out. It's a good thing we didn't have to E&E at night using that route. It would have led us directly into the heart of their camp. My job became getting as many of my team off the battlefield and out of the AO to safety as possible. Black, your Alabama team is very lucky you didn't have to E&E. Because the B-52 strikes, even if you survived them, the NVA would have taken to widely dispersing its units. For instance, a 2,000-man NVA regiment might be spread across a five-mile stretch of trail dug in into each bend in the road and hilltop. This is by the way of explaining why some SOG teams just vanish. Unwittingly landing amid such an overlapping concentration of NVA forces.

My guess is that no matter which way you would have turned every half mile or so, you would have bumped into enemy platoons or companies, even 500-man battalions. Looking directly at Chief SOG, did you know they were all there? at that place we chose as an LZ. Without hesitation, he responds. So you got Lynn saying, wait a second, bro. You knew that there was all these people on the freaking ground that we were going to put in an LZ,

and the chief SOG says, no, not specifically. The 12 teams before Alabama were tracking a regiment down the trail. That tracking mission, as you know, became known as the lottery. We believe you found that regiment and Bintram, Those are these organizations that protect the Hoheman Trail. Bintram 611 at that same location. Our intelligence led us to believe that your LZ was approximately five miles from that base and that Alabama might have a chance at gathering very important intel along the network of trails so prevalent in that area.

The fact is we now know exactly where Bimtran 611 was located and you have confirmed the type and number of personnel on site. Rarely as such a small team engaged such a large, forced with so few casualties and live to tell about it the bin trams six eleven you all encountered has been destroyed for now along with the regiment that took 12 sog teams we here are all all very proud to work with men like you and your alabama team blackjack is there anything else you want to say asks sergeant analyst anything at all yes the jolly green giants the motto painted on the sides of their ships so that others may live emotion wells up give me a minute please the thought of the jg's the Vietnamese king

bees and all the others who have committed their lives to saving Alabama emotionally in date my senses overpowering my ability to stuff emotions back down my my eyes flood with tears. We're alive today due to all of you. Thank you. Amen. Yeah. And and and by the way, so that right there is page 60. That that just got us to page 60 of this book, of this 300 page book. That's one mission. One historic SOG mission. One one mission, one historic mission, but a mission that represents another day in SOG, which is the saying that you guys. had. Yeah. Many like that. That was in a special category. Yeah. Yeah. But the, I mean, the setup, that's what you guys did. You know, like the setup, hey, like we're going to go in there. We're

going to find out where the bad guys are. We're taking the King B's in. We're calling for fire support if we get in trouble. That was your, that was your model. That was your, that was what you guys did. Oh, yeah. Although if we saw a flag, we would definitely try to get out of there if we could post-haste. How about when you're taking massive fire on insert? What about that one? Is that another thing that makes you think maybe this is a good idea? Or one of your insert craft gets shot down? You say we're going to continue the mission?

Can you imagine? No. Yeah. Well, there's a ton of other missions to discuss. This book, it's called Whiskey, Tango, Fox Trot, is written by Lynn Black, Jr. Just get the book. And a bunch of the other missions there, I want to save some of it. them so hopefully we can get we can get the man himself on here to talk through some of

these give us his experiences and it's also cool because we'll get both you guys on here because you know he writes about some of the same missions you guys were on together and you guys both wrote about these missions so to get both you in here to kind of go through those I'll do my job shut up and just let you guys talk which would be freaking awesome awesome to do but yeah hopefully we can get him on at some point and if not then we'll if he can't make it on then we'll go through some of these other stories and and share them well it's an honor to pay homage to him he's just a great guy fearless warrior and some of the things he did that mission oh my god when you think about

these times was it seemed like does it seem like a long time ago does it seem like yesterday or and i'm going to ask you this does it seem like both because for me sometimes my experience seems like it was a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like it was yesterday. What does it seem like to you? Oh, clearly both. Yeah. Absolutely, because I can just remember us standing there

outside the S3 shop waiting for the go, for the bright light, because Don already told us. And we were switching everything out. That's nothing but ammo, hand grenades, and bandages, and some body bags. And I'm quite glad that they changed their mind. Lynn, you know, again, he had this. right tactical decision on the ground.

And he called it right because if we had tried to go in, just like his. The other helicopter shot down and there's more people on the ground, more casually possibly. And so, yeah, so that day comes back every October 5th. You know, we have our little email loop, Spider, Pat Watkins. And we always go, hey, Lynn, this is your day, brother. We don't know how you did it.

but they were glad you did. Yeah, and the fact that, you know, he's saying in the beginning when they inserted, like they should have left immediately, meaning he's kind of looking to save his own ass, right? Yeah, sure. God bless him. But then you fast forward, whatever it is, a few hours,

and now he's saying, nope, I'm saving everyone else's ass. Don't come and get me. I mean, that's, hey, don't land your bird. He calls off Kingbees. Get out of here. Don't take off. Leave us here. Bright light, no, don't send them.

We're not going to be bait. Yeah. And, you know, when he finally came back to base, like a day or two later, because they had to go patch them up, and then they had a little ceremony with the Air Force guys, where they swapped berets. Because the PJs had their berets, and I think Lynn and Steve swapped out theirs.

And when he came back to base, he never talked about it. We'd heard about what Spider, mandolin are all saying about the mission but you know Lynn wouldn't talk about it so even when I did the book

I had to go back and physically go come on Lynn I want to get this story into the books I flew up to the 1980 90

finally interview that's where I learned stuff that I never knew about the mission already some of the little details about the finding the PJ

cooking the broken back and oh my God so he's just an amazing amazing a warrior, great guy, an artist on top of it. And when he was talking about the Chief Sog, that was Steve Kavanaugh,

who was a highly decorated World War II vet. And then when Korea, he was in Germany. But then he was Chief Sog. He came in right after Jack Singlob. And his welcome to Sog was August 23rd, 68, F-O-B-4. Yeah. So he was a really good Chief Sog. He really cared about the men.

but... What was his rank as the chief SOG? Bird, 06. So he was a full bird colonel. Yeah. And he was in charge of... And he's in charge of all SOC. Correct.

CCN, CCS and CCCC. Yeah, all of our operations. And then, um, see, this is again, the regular army. Instead of having a general that could go do battle with other generals, they had a colonel. Mm-hmm. Part of the in-house fighting with the boys down in Saigon. And so that's why I love the book because Lin gets into this little exchange, it's back and forth. And then he has little his editorials on my comments with these answers.

Oh, yeah. It's so freaking classic. It's precious. It's crazy because I know you. And so I'm reading Tilt said this and Tilt said that. And Tilt was throwing this. It's so awesome to read. Yeah, it's freaking awesome. He also, you know, he also breaks into the whole.

You get a better, you get a very good feeling. of the whole kind of deployment when he's going into town and there's all kinds of shady kind of CIA stuff going on and there that he's wrapped up in. Oh, yeah. It's like, it's legit. Well, and even in the first 60 pages,

there are segments there for what he did under fire that could be cut out and used in any leadership school for the military anywhere's. It's just incredible. stuff. Yeah, not to mention anything that he did multiple times over could be used to write an award citation. What did he receive for this? Well, he wound up with a silver star. Okay. Which should have been, in my opinion, at least a medal of honor. And because in the book, he goes into it, Spider and Mandolin are talking a little bit a few days later. And the

S3 officer, a major, who will remain nameless, was saying he, he was saying, he, he was, He didn't bring back stride. So you'd be glad we're putting him in for a silver star. And, you know, Pat Walker said, Spider, were pretty emphatic. It should have been a lot higher than that. And we could think about Medal of Honors that had been awarded where nothing like what Lynn was up against.

Getting knocked out all that time on a drought, patching up his own people, and then leading them out. And then, oh, we'll just charge right through the NBA ranks. They're not used to that. Oh, my God. It's weird because he's definitely a cerebral guy, as you could hear from that last section. Oh, yeah.

But damn, he would get aggressive. I mean, he's his whole, he's pissed off. That's kind of one of the reasons he reenlisted because he's pissed off that they wounded his brother and wounded people from the 173rd and killed people from the 173rd. So he's got this like pent-up aggression. But then he's an artist. Oh, yeah. Right?

Sure. He worked at this TV station during high school. He's so good. but I'm one you know we just read it so and then years later I mean

he just comes back in his own way and he goes gets a job at Boeing rises through the ranks this is an incredible work there that nobody could talk about oh yeah

one of our sod legends to the max and humble and modest he just like pulling teeth to get him to talk about it yeah that's why I love the book every couple years so I pulled it out and reread it again.

Do you know what inspired him to write this book? That's a good question. I don't know. These last 15 years or so between the reunions and being so far apart, everybody was talking to, come on, Lynn, got to do the book. And at one point he told him he threw away four to 500 pages. I said, Lynn, please tell me, you just put him in a little folder. or somewhere, give them to me

or give them to somebody. And they said, no, it's done. So he worked on it for a while. He really did. And we had chatted back and forth, back when I stole it the newspaper back in the day. Well, it's a phenomenal book. I hope everybody goes to pick it up.

Hopefully you can come on here and talk through some of these stories. And if not that, then hopefully I can just go shake his hand one day because it'd be an honor. Indeed. Next time you go up to Seattle area for one of your shows. Yeah, yeah.

With that, look, we've been going for three and a half hours or something like that. Really? Yeah, yeah, I know. This must be a Jocko podcast. Quit harassing me. Yeah, and we're going to come back. We're going to do some SOG Chronicles next. Yeah.

Until then I'm a little bit speechless But it's obviously it's an honor to share these stories These SOG stories It's an honor always to have you until An honor to know you And it's an honor for me to help get the word about Get the word out about you and your brothers in SOG

Your books That you've written that we've covered on the podcast Across the Fence That's the first one On the ground And then SOG Chronicles, Volume 1. You're also out there just getting after the social media.

A little bit now. When I get to Tennessee, we're going to be moving there real soon. Then we're going to get really serious. I'll be calling up Echo for some skill sets here, little hints. You're on Twitter, but you don't do much on Twitter. Minimal on Twitter. On Twitter, you're at Sog John. Does that one and then there's at Sog Chronicles?

There's Jay Stryker. Okay. Meyer. That's the other handle. But say this is Twitter, and do you think I should really be on it? You have to give me more advice here. I don't echo Charles.

Depends on what you do, I guess. Yeah, Instagram has been amazing. Yeah, no. That's, I was going to say, Jay Stryker Meyer on Instagram. That's where you're at. You also have Facebook, John Stryker Meyer, and you have, on the internet,

on the inner webs, you're at, or it's just sog chronicles.com. Correct. and we're going to be get my 20th century website's going to be upgraded here in the next month of two. It looked like you designed that one on a tape recorder. It wasn't that advanced, jacob. My daughters are on me and is on me too. So we're lining up a gentleman now.

We're interviewing them to come back and redesign. Absolutely. Well, like I said, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. And always an honor. Appreciate it. And it's just every time you send me a text message that says airborne, it gives me enough motivation to get through like six weeks of mayhem.

Thanks. All right. Until next time, airborne. Indeed. And with that, John Stryker Meyer, Tilt has, you know, echo. You know, we're sitting here. And sometimes we feel like maybe we're getting after it. And then you sit down with someone like Tilt and you hear the story of Lynn Black.

and the guys from Sog, and it makes me realize that we can do more and we actually should do more with our lives to get after it more. So what recommendations do you have to keep us in the mode of getting after it as we pursue? As we pursue improvement. Yeah, improvement. I just wanted to say. As we improve, as we pursue an unattainable standard. Yes.

It's an unattainable standard. I'm not ever, I mean, something would have to go completely haywire for me to get after it to the level of a John Stryker Meyer or of a Lynn Black or of a Dick Thompson. There'd have to be, there's, something's got to go majorly wrong. So, and I don't, you know, look, we hope that doesn't happen in the world. So what we are in the pursuit of that level, we're not going to get there, but we're trying. Yes. Because we're not just going to sit back and say, oh, they got after it more than me. I'm just going to sit on the couch.

No. No. We're not doing that. No. We are going to get after it appropriate at the appropriate level to our world. Anyway. Okay. We do.

I like the fact that you finally came to a self-realization of what you just said made no sense. You don't do that. You don't get that self-realization very often. It makes sense. You just got to think. Think about it. That's all. I just got to think about it more. Anyway, so yes, we're working out. Our bodies, degeneration, regeneration.

As you said, wise man, Jocko. Wise man. I'm saying it. Okay, there you go. Boom. The beatings are the darkness. The gains are the light. So, Jocko Fuel. This will help you.

These things will help you. Jocco, fuel. We've got stuff for your joints, stuff for your muscles, stuff for your brain, stuff for your immunity. All this stuff. Some bases, you got some bases covered. Yes, sir.

Yes, we do. Anyway, joint warfare and krill oil. These are your joints. There's antioxidants in there, too, by the way. Also, discipline, multiple forms, deployment methods. Powder, mixable in water, recommended. Maybe throw some juice in there. No.

All right, well, hey, I was just seeing it. You don't need to throw juice in there. I know that. I mixed one up. other day because it's been it's been hot here in the California a.O. Area of operations. And I did you see what I posted it? I mixed up. I took just you know well I don't know if you know this when it's hot out iced tea. Yes Arnold Palmer scenarios. Yeah. Are very nice to have. So you know those you ever seen one of those big basically this is a big pitcher. You know what

a pitcher is? Yes. It's a clear plastic pitcher. Yeah. And there's only one true purpose for that thing, and that is to mix up ice tea or Arnold Palmer on a hot, hot day. So I did it, emptied my ice thing into there, put in the Jocko Palmer, discipline, go. What, they can? No, no, no. The powder. That's not discipline go.

Put in the discipline, powder. You. It was so good. It was nice. It was so good. Yeah, so you got the Arnold Palmer, Jocco Palmer. You got the Arnold Palmer feel with the Jocco Palmer feel. You see what I'm saying.

Look at it. I dig it, man. See, that did make sense. Even though it didn't make any sense, it made sense. See, that's what I'm talking about. All I had to do is think about it. Hey, look, I'm not this one-up guy. You know, you know what a one-up guy is?

I'm not that. And I'm not a grammar Nazi and I'm not a corrector. Okay. I'll correct you if you want. You just corrected me on discipline. Oh, okay, whatever. You have your weird self-image. That's kind of why I kind of said it,

because I might have came off like a, corrector and I might come off like a little bit of a corrector right now but technically you have a pitcher hot summertime California heat wave weekend that's kind of what it was you want a glass picture on that one not a plastic yeah ideally

from an ideal standpoint I don't know yeah no I agree with you I don't purchase the pictures in my house there you go other people run that part of the machine yeah no worries we'll get some people on the phone will sort it out all good either way good luck with that Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. Either way, again, things for immunity, vitamin D, and Cold War. These are two things, different methodologies, but immune support. Yeah, I get on that for sure. Because, you know, in these times, immunity is always a good thing. It's never a bad thing. Immunity. Yeah.

You know what else is a good thing? Dessert. Yeah. Dessert. Being able to drink, you know, you eat a nice rib eye or a nice piece of elk and you're like, oh, that was so good. But there's still a little something in your weird brain. Yeah, that wants dessert.

Yeah, you want to sweet. Which is why we make milk. Yes. We make dessert for you. Yep. And you can just have a dessert. Short game. You could have ice cream.

You could have carrot cake. You could have chocolate pudding. Or you could have milk. It all tastes the same genre of food. Except for all those things are bad for you, except milk, which is literally good for you. Literally good for you. And I'll supply you with additional protein. You think a cake is going to give you more protein, a regular cake.

We will go toe to toe cake versus milk. Tate protein all day. Taste and protein levels. Yeah, all day. So yeah, get that one now and your kid's going to like it too, whether it's that one or the warrior kid milk, which there is. The kid's going to like both of those. I know from experience kids like this, this stuff. I know from experience kids love this stuff.

Yes, sir. It's true. It's all too. Also, jocco white tea. Yes. You know, a little refreshing tea scenario. Anyway, you can get all the stuff at the vitamin shop. If you want to go out and get some.

Also, if you don't want to go out and get some, just go online. OriginMane.com. That's where you get it. Also at origin, main. Dot com can get American-made products straight up. American-made hard goods. Hard goods. Durable goods.

All that. All that stuff. And it's all made in America. You can get Gisgis for those Jujits. You can get rash guards. also for the jiu-jits or other forms of working out or surfing, although we are moving into the winter months. You might need a wetsuit, but that's up to you.

We do not make wetsuits yet yet. T-shirts, jeans, boots. Basically, you need clothes to wear. I mean, look, here's the deal. We need clothes to wear. If you're going to get clothes to wear, get them from origin, Maine. They're made in America. We got a bunch of awesome people up there.

rebuilding rebuilding a whole industry in Maine support America and get the best possible clothing you can. That's what we're talking about. Yeah,

it's true. And they have some shorts that for whatever reason, I don't know why they don't talk about the shorts because it's literally aside from board shorts, like when I swim and work out

or whatever, these are the only shorts I wear. The shark fan. You like the shark fin. Yeah. That's Pete. Yeah. That's naming

things. It's a very creative namer. And I, to be honest, I like, what do you think came first? Because the shark fin shorts has like a pocket on it that kind of looks like a shark fin.

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah. Cool. So I don't know if he started to design it that way and then named it the shark fin and then made it look more like a shark fin. Right.

It's functional. There's a reason for it, but I'm just saying, Pete, where are you at? Yeah. Where are you at? Well, either way. To me, shark fin, sounds cool straight up

So I was like hell yeah Shark fin shirts Shorts yeah Anyway very good Good stuff or jamaidtcom all made in America Speaking of shorts Speaking of shorts we is speaking of board shorts We have board shorts

Defcore to the core Discipline equals freedom board shorts At jocco store.com And jocco store.com If you didn't know it is the store It's the store where you can get stuff While you want to if you want to represent

on the path is where you you can get your shirts you just link with freedom shirts hoodies board shorts like I said what do you call it digic camel digicami did you camy did you camy digamy oh I don't know

I don't know how I've said it digital camo I think I call it digicam digicam no digicam is a camera either way camouflage digital you know that one anyway go to joccal story dot com like I said if you whatever shorts you want the camouflage one or the regular straight up black one whichever one you want, boom, available.

Also some girl stuff on there, some tank tops. Look at the hoodies, hats, all this stuff. If you like something, hey man, get something. Yeah, and don't forget about the Warrior Kid. Soap. Well, there's Warrior Kid soap, actually. Yes. And then there is a bunch of other soap

that is made by a Warrior Kid. Yes. Young Aiden. We sell it on Jocko Store. There's Warrior Kid Soap. There's Jocko soap. There's Trooper soap. and there's killer soap.

All good, legitimate soaps. But for the month of September, Irish Oaks Ranch will be donating $1 per bar of soap to the CureSearch Foundation. It's called CureSore. It's a cancer research center. See what I'm saying? So yeah, because cancer awareness month, September.

So we're donating $1 per bar of soap sold. That's Young Aiden. That's Young Aiden up there. Making that happen. So there's a kid. I think he might be 14 now. But started this company. Started this company.

Warrior kid out there getting after. And he wants to help out kids that have cancer. So good for him. Appreciate the support for that one. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. Don't forget that we have some other podcast. The Jock Unravelling podcast, which used to be called The Thread. We got quite a few episodes coming out of that.

We have The Debrief podcast. Which is on this thread on the Jocko podcast What is it called feed for right now? We have the grounded podcast We have the Warrior Kid podcast we also have a YouTube channel Which which echo makes YouTube videos for Jocko podcast YouTube channel also psychological warfare It's an album with tracks Jock tracks helping you through moments of weakness as they may arise Maybe not every day, but they arise sometimes.

I think you might have just reached your breaking point. That's the first time that you've said that and you've repeated that thing that you didn't have any enthusiasm. You had some enthusiasm, but it was lower. Well, you know. So all the times, because just by the way, my enthusiasm for you saying that ended after about four times. So now we're on, where are we on 200 something podcast? Are you saying that? Jocko album with track bubble, right?

Yeah. So maybe we'll, you'll. We'll think of something else to say that. The world hopes. The world is hoping. I'm searching my brain to connect the dots there. Like I don't feel like I'm at any breaking point in any capacity. But I just broke right here.

Apparently I am. But so maybe I'm going to assume that you're right. Yeah. I assume. Maybe it's because recently I haven't needed psychological warfare help. Okay. So it's not like fresh on my mind. Okay, you know, so maybe came off like a broke or less enthusiastic.

Well, why don't you go and listen to the track that's about doing things that you might not want to do? Okay? Because apparently you think you can just come in here and kind of slough off on your execution. Yeah, on the psychological warfare part. Dang, that's kind of, what do you call that ironic? It's ironic. Very ironic. All right.

So you can get that if you want it. There's also flipsidecanvice.com. My brother Dakota Myers. my brother my brother Dakota Myers company where he sells visual representation did you hear that I've said that a bunch of times but you still hear some spirit in my voice because I'm fired up when I'm talking about Dakota Meyer and flipsidecampus.com for visual representation that you want to see something if you're if you feel like maybe you've broken like echo has you can hang one of these things up go to flipside canvas.com for that we also got a bunch of books

Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot by Lynn Black. That's what we went over today. Also, John Stryker-Meyer books across the fence on the ground. Those are two different books. And then Sog Chronicles. We also have the code, the evaluation of protocols, leadership, strategy, and tactics, field manual. Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three.

Mikey and the Dragons, discipline equals freedom, field manual. And then extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. So there's a bunch of books. If you want to support, you can go on to joccopodcast.com And any of the books that have been on this podcast, you can get them from there. And if you're wondering, hey, people always ask, what's the, give me the top seven books that you've read. Or they always ask these questions, right? Reading list.

Yeah. Hey, do you have a reading list? Can you publish reading this? Yes, I can't. I already did. It's called joccopodcast.com books from the podcast. You can go on there. And if you want to, if you want to, you can click through there and you can go to Amazon and

can actually buy that book. And then you can read it and make yourself smarter and better. We also have an leadership consultancy called Echelon Front where what we do is solve problems through leadership. If you want to hear me talk to you, if you want me to come and talk or present to your team, you don't have to go to, you don't have to Google jaco speaking. You can just go to Echelonfront.com. If you want to have myself or any of the echelon front instructors come and help you,

come and consult with you about your leadership, get you all aligned, get you on the right path, we can do it. Go to echelonfront.com. We also have EF Online, which, listen, if you're wondering, hey, how can I really do like to know this thing from Jocko. You want to ask me a question? Go to EF Online. Come on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. And chances are I will be there.

And if I'm not there, someone else from the Escalam front team is, but usually I'm there, I will be there to answer your questions. Whatever you want to ask me. There's also a bunch of in-depth, granular studies of all the principles from extreme ownership, the dichotomy of leadership and leadership strategy and tactics. So go to eFonline.com. Also, we have the muster. We had one in Orlando canceled.

We had one in Phoenix canceled. The next one is going to be in Dallas, Texas on December 3rd and 4th. Go to Extreme Ownership.com if you want to come. And of course we have EF. Overwatch. If you need executive leadership, you can get experienced military leaders that understand the principles that we talk about. Go to EFoverwatch.com. And then America's mighty warrior. That is Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom.

And what she does is she helps. She helps service members, service members that are downrange. She helps service members families. She helps retired service members. And she helps gold star families around the world. So if you want to help out with that, you can go to America's mighty warriors.org to donate or to get involved. And if you need to contact us or you have any questions or you have any answers, you can find us on the innerwebs. Once again, for tilt for John Stryker Meyer.

He's on Twitter at at SOG John. He's on Instagram at J-Stryker, S-T-R-Y-K-E-R-M-E-Y-E-R. And Facebook, John Stryker-M-R and on the interwebs at SOG Chronicles. And, of course, for us two knuckleheads. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink and to all of the military personnel out there that swore the oath to put country above self thank you and to tilt and to Lynn Black and the rest of the Saug forces in Vietnam we can't say thank you enough for doing what you did so that others may live

And to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all other first responders. Thanks to you as well for swearing your oath to take care of us here on the home front. And everyone else out there, think of the incredible odds that these SOG soldiers went up against. And they did it time and time and time again in those forgotten jungles. on those forgotten hills in that forgotten world. They sacrificed so much. And we must never forget. And until next time,

this is Echo and Jocko. Out.